{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund security for places of worship?<|ARGUMENT|>Police forces need to improve upon the \u2018flagging\u2019 of data because there may be crimes that are operationally treated as a hate crime, but are not recorded as a hate crime on their crime recording system p. 11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are still some improvements that are needed while recording religious hate crimes to accurately determine their occurrence, because crimes are still unreported Thus, these figures do not accurately reflect the incidents of these crimes.\n","id":"23565c37-6819-4fc0-99f3-f8959bb45a6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>In democracies, voters should be able to change their mind if new information comes to light.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polls indicate that public opinion now supports remaining in the EU.\n","id":"a5a48f6b-f1d4-4296-b0be-717edddf406b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realize there are some cases where this may not be quite right say if the death penalty is involved but in principal I think this is justice. If someone accuses someone of rape for example, you're not only destroying there rep and sentencing them to prison, but exacerbating the problem of rape not being reported for fear of not being believed sort of a triple whammy . One argument my friend made is that lying isn't as bad as rape and while it didn't alter my view, I did have a hard time arguing with that. Edit To be clear, I used rape as an example because of the triple effect. I'm not just referring to it. I get it though any sort of negative impact on victims of rape cannot and absolutely should not be discounted. Edit My view has been changed Given the option between punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent, you have to side with the latter was what I needed to hear. Thank you all<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People that falsely accuse people of crimes and are proven wrong should serve the punishment the accused would have.\n","id":"bbc0ff2b-d8be-4e3f-aed8-efacb8236403"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>A person can choose not to climb a ladder. Others can do nothing about someone carrying a concealed firearm, so the two are not analogous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person's fear of ladders does not have the potential to harm others, a person carrying a concealed firearm does.\n","id":"d86022ee-0963-4477-9a48-9bf93b72dbe2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>The gospel describes Peter's three denials of Christ This is an embarrassing account that would likely not be written unless it was true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The gospels contain accounts embarrassing to the early church founders and are therefore likely not outright fabrications.\n","id":"dd3bd383-f6c6-4c07-ae24-c0dba5a7f2cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify, businesses started banning talking about politics at work to reduce drama between employees and help increase revenue by a customer not passing up a business due to an employee's political beliefs. My issue is that your coworkers are some of the best people to talk to about politics. They are your neighbors, likely in the same economic bracket, working in the same industry and other factors that make your political interests align. Other than your family and often including your family these are the people you spend the most time with Not to mention, discussing politics with fellow citizens in person helps calm extremism on all sides. It's hard to think all liberals are lazy and want everything for free when you work beside a liberal and see his work ethic. It's hard to think all conservatives are racist when you have lunch with a conservative and meet his family. Right now with those rules in place it has reduced the amount people are able to even discuss politics, and moved most of these discussions online, where it makes us ripe for abuse by trolls, adds extra power to groups that want to control citizens' discussions, including groups that will pretend to be a certain political party and become a caricature of the political ideology they are pretending to represent. Shareblue and Russian botnets lose a lot of power if citizens are talking more face to face than they are online. These No politics allowed spread further than just the workplace, with many venues making it against proper etiquette to discuss politics, further reducing the amount of face to face political discussions. Bars, where historically many important political revolutions and movements were started have started pushing back against political discussion. There are few places left you can comfortably discuss politics without being shamed or it implied you are being unprofessional doing so. People not having their beliefs checked by real life colleagues and associates has allowed them to believe extreme things about their political opponents and handed more power over our discussion to the government and special interest groups that have the power and technology to control online speech. Your average citizen cannot afford to have a warehouse full of paid people to push a certain ideology, but corporations, antagonistic countries, and political representatives do. Removing these rules might cause an increase in drama, but the costs of removing avenues for voters to talk to each other has led to an increase in extremist ideology, and an increase in extremist politicians being elected by making pushing fake profiles of the opposing parties that citizens cannot prove wrong by talking to their colleagues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The company rule of \"Not discussing politics at work\" has contributed to the current extreme political climate\n","id":"bc33e950-966d-4587-8af0-6ea3692d893e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Sam Faddis headed the Counter Terrorism Center CTC\u2019s Weapons of Mass Destruction unit charged with pursuing terrorist weapons of mass destruction programs worldwide in 2003, specifically in Iraq. That did not turn out too well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Part of that is written by Sam Faddis who happens to be running as a pro-Trump Republican senate candidate for Maryland, and hence hardly constitutes as an impartial source.\n","id":"221d1308-66d3-4a51-84f9-c683ab6d0f11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people like to sneer or laugh at them, use them as an example of the degeneracy of modern art and culture etc. But honestly, I think some of these criticisms are a little ignorant. When you see a all white painting on a computer screen or a sheet of paper, it completely fails to convey one of the most interesting and appreciable things about these works, which is the texture and extremely fine detail much of which exists due to purposeful intent by the artist. The little details can make one painting very different from another. Monochrome paintings don't exist in a cultural vacuum. They encode social upheavals, collective values, ideas, emotions, etc. While the painting itself may be simple, everything around its creation is not. Keep in mind that most of these paintings are created by very skilled artists who made an active choice not to paint something more complex. These paintings can evoke a wide range of emotions, like power, helplessness, insignificance, dreaminess, etc. And of course, they also make people really mad, which ironically makes these works even more significant. So I think these paintings are hardly worthless. I wouldn't pay 20 million for one but I can see why a rich person would appreciate such works enough to make such a purchase for himself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people are too harsh on all-white paintings\n","id":"23f9b941-bc6c-4287-9158-f6045deb99ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, a company focused on Black hair care products wouldn't need to diversify in order to be successful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are organisations that serve one specific cultural niche or ethnic group. These organisations can thrive without diversity.\n","id":"d65f932e-4f37-4463-9c9d-2bef65ad61b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm opened to changing my mind about drugs that can make people hurt other people i.e. Amphetamines, PCP . But apart of these, ALL drugs including heroin, cocaine, LSD, etc. should be 100 legal to buy and use, and with strong regulation on production and sell i.e. the government can choose to not give out licences to produce and or sell specific drugs, but is refrained from prosecuting users in anyway, unless they harmed someone else . Two main reasons for my opinion on the matter Humans should have complete freedom in regards to THEIR OWN body. If someone wants to use any substance, it's their right, and their responsibility if they fuck their lives in the process. It's a basic principal for me. But hey, we as a society will have to bear the costs of those dangerous choices well, yeah, same as we have to do it for people who chose to do extreme sports, and nobody suggests to prohibit those. We should put emphasis on education and open up to using drugs as a way to improve mental health self understanding self exploration etc. It doesn't matter how much drugs are illegal, one constant in human psychology is that a lot of us WILL TRY TO MESS WITH OUR STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. It's so deeply rotted in us, that there are strong evidences to my understanding that agriculture started together with the production of alcoholic beverages. PEOPLE LIKE GETTING HIGH, and they will keep on doing that if it's ain't legal, they will do it illegally. And without at least somewhat taxed and regulated products these things are prone to be low quality with all sort of shit in them, and enrich criminals while endangering the safety of many more people. It is just unavoidable there are simply two options and two options alone either people take drugs legally, or people take drugs illegally. Never will the problem disappear just because you can get punished for that. Never will people stop getting in different states of consciousness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ALL drugs should be legalized. x-post from r\/unpopularopinion\n","id":"cbc168f5-f65e-4e86-86dc-77c98a9d2762"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>\"Qualified immunity\" is a horrible legal doctrine which needs to be ended.<|ARGUMENT|>In the absence of invoking qualified immunity as a legal defense, law enforcement officials would have to spend prolonged periods of time in court while their case is argued and decided, which would take away the time they can utilize in carrying out their duty of protecting citizens p. 61<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without \"qualified immunity\", law enforcement would be deterred from doing their jobs effectively.\n","id":"8e976eef-33d4-45cf-b6a9-b15bddd4421d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now, to begin, i am personally not rooting for this future, in fact, it is a very scary prospect to me, but i can't really see it not happening. Another thing to state This has nothing to do with Trump. I do not think the above because Trump got elected. Here's the thing I think by now we all know about the declining birthrates. It is happening all over western society and Japan, but for different reasons , and it doesn't show any sign of stopping. Kids are our future. The kids from today will be the leaders of tomorrow. And how a kid is brought up will more often than not shape his or her entire perspective. So lots of people just don't wanna have children what's the problem with that? you ask. The problem is thus Do you know which demographic DOES have a lot of children? Especially now that they think there is a culture war going on and they're disillusioned with society? Racist, sexist, homophobe ultra right wingers. Traditional Family Unit types. Look at the growing right wing sentiment in our society. And this is in a society that i fully believe has only a small minority of actual aware and proud racists and sexists. So imagine how this country is going to look when these people are actually in the majority? So what can we do against that? Nothing, thats what. We can't force non crazy people to have kids. And we can't just take children away from radicals even though we should, both left and right ones, but that's another debate ^ ^ . And once America succumbs, then we Europeans will either be next to follow suit, or will start pushing even harder against it. But seeing as the right is slowly gaining more and more influence everywhere in the west, including over here, i can't help but see nothing but dark days ahead for society. So, Change My View. I am begging you. I really really want it to be changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In 2 to 4 generations American values will degrade significantly and it will become an ultra-right wing racist sexist haven, possibly even the beginning of an ethnostate.\n","id":"c7da2652-d29d-41d2-a615-d72be29fd698"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Budyko's Blanket a system outlined by Intellectual Ventures to act as a sort of artificial volcano, pumping Sulfur Dioxide high into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, much like a volcanic eruption does, but regulated. Since the carbon output is so massive and countries like India and China would take decades to get on board any Carbon reduction program, would it not be a good idea to reverse the course of global warming? It is also cost effective as well, see link. Since we know volcanic eruptions have an effect on climate change, with sulfur dioxide being the main cause, it was once used as a refrigerant gas and such a device is completely controllable. Possible problems Sulfur Dioxide may be dangerous, but we already pump out billions of tons worth of carbon monoxide every year, and the design of Budyko's blanket prevents most of the problems. Only a few countries would need to do this due to the wind. if you read SuperFreakonomics this idea would be known to you, as the idea is explained so much better by the authors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Budyko's blanket should be implemented\n","id":"f9448344-49d8-45c6-8f22-b6abeb2be1d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Climate change has contributed up to three degrees Celsius to the 2019 record heatwave that swept through Europe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A climate with higher CO2 will increase the threat of heat waves tsunamis and more intense hurricanes\n","id":"280efcd2-a396-4b29-8e76-65e49399203d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently saw an illustration that suggested a business's purpose is to solve a problem. But I don't think that can be possible unless the business makes a profit. Therefore, I think the purpose of a business is to make profit first, and then after that, it can think about how to solve problems. Without profits, how is a business supposed to have the money to solve problems? Therefore a business and all of its employees should be focused on making profits first, and solving problems after that, once they have the profits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The purpose of a business is to make profits.\n","id":"6d7aafec-836c-47a8-8d4a-44e828bb96f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I am no expert in any aspect of gaming. I know very little about development and I don\u2019t consider myself a \u201chardcore gamer\u201d though I do play a fair amount of the games I enjoy. Second, I am not defending all micro transactions in video games. I know they have been implemented extremely poorly in the past and will be done so in the future. I am saying that in some cases the developers shouldn\u2019t be hated for implementing micro transactions. Specifically, I think they are perfectly fine when they do not require the player to spend money for the full experience of the game. My two examples are Destiny 2 and Shadow of War. First, Destiny 2, which is a multiplayer game, has microtransactions for cosmetic gear and some very minor gear mods that do affect gameplay. However, it is also possible to earn all of these items through playing the game. In fact, someone who plays the game consistently will earn 1 3 drops a week, with each drop containing 2 4 items sold from the store. Furthermore, gear mods can be earned a second way by ranking up an NPC with materials earned through dismantling useless gear which there is a fair amount of or by finding them in one of the five weekly chests a player can open. I see no issue here because the majority of the items don\u2019t affect gameplay and the gear mods can be easily earned through multiple ways and do not have a major effect on gameplay. Second, Shadow of War is a mostly single player game and has the option to buy loot boxes that drop weapons and armor for your character. There are also options to buy war chests which drop controllable orcs for your army. These are bought through in game currency which you can earn or buy with money. Once again, since the currency is able to be earned in game, I don\u2019t have a problem with there being an option to purchase it. Even though the items you can buy have a strong effect on the gameplay experience, you can play the game as though the purchase option isn\u2019t there and thoroughly enjoy the game. Essentially it seems to me that we buy video games to progress a character into someone something better through the addition of better stats, gear, or visuals. The traditional way this has been done is to play through the game, spending our time completing activities and gaining better items. However, now developers have given the option to allow players to spend money rather than time to get some of the content. Personally, I don\u2019t see the big draw as I would rather progress my character through completion of activities, but I don\u2019t think it is an issue if that option doesn\u2019t affect my experience in the game.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Microtransactions in video games aren\u2019t necessarily evil\n","id":"06a62344-f28f-4d87-a8df-2b08648e9ccc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In light of Elizabeth Warren coming out in favor of a massive student debt relief project, I thought it may be good to share my perspective. A lot of takes on this issue have been about fairness for those that worked their way through college, saved money, joined the military, etc. I'm not going to argue on those terms because I don't think that's a good reason to oppose this plan at all mostly, I think that making others suffer through something just because you had to is selfish . Instead, my argument is going to be from the perspective of an environmentalist. Specifically, I believe that cancelling student debt would cause an uptick in consumption and thus contribute to a growing global warming crisis, which I think should be a higher priority. Although some current estimates suggest that student loan debt doesn't cause too much of a drag on consumption 1 , I think this doesn't properly examine the effect that student loans have on consumption in the long term. The costs of higher education and the associated burden of debt has been linked to moving back home with one's parents 2 . If these borrowers were to have their loans forgiven, that may lead to an increased rate of moving out and purchasing a home. This would probably lead to an increase in new home construction, which increases one's carbon footprint 3 . Additionally, student loan debt is often cited as a reason why women are delaying having children 4 . Given that US citizens are, per capita, among the greatest contributors of CO2 emissions 5 , keeping the birth rate low in the US could be greatly beneficial in trying to curb global warming. I've been paying 600 a month for several years, so I know the exorbitant cost of tuition and the associated student loan burden is ridiculous. I've definitely had to forego opportunities and live more frugally because of this issue, but I think dealing with the climate crisis is a higher priority. It's very possible that climate change associated with global warming could threaten crop yields and contribute to societal unrest just like it did in Syria 6 . Unrest can easily lead to war, and that's something that should be avoided at all costs especially in a nuclear age . In that sense, I believe that curbing consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions is of highest priority, and relieving student loan debt conflicts with that goal. x200B 1 2 3 4 5 6<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cancelling US Student Debt May Be a Very Bad Idea\n","id":"587d1442-4c0a-489e-a3a1-7ac4d4c722f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems that most of the people here on reddit think that absolutely ALL drugs should be legal. I disagree. I don't think such dangerous drugs like heroin should be legal, because lots of people would try those drugs if it was legal and end up being junkies who would have normal lives otherwise. I kinda understand the point that people should be allowed to do anything with their bodies as long as they don't harm others, but the problem is that there are too many idiots probably me included and I don't think idiots should die just because they are idiots<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think all drugs should be legal.\n","id":"0f02dc83-e370-4270-bcfa-8f196b75bb23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Australian republic vs. monarchy<|ARGUMENT|>The monarchy is a direct reflection of Australia's past as a British colony and continues to symbolize Australia's subservience to the British crown. Such symbolism has a powerfully negative effect on Australians' sense of independence and identity. Ending the monarchy and establishing a republic would constitute a substantial stride in the direction of creating a greater sense of independence and national pride and identity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ending the monarchy would foster an independent identity in Australia\n","id":"8bc58552-b65b-4269-8874-b03d9bbf7acc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently watched a news segment about how it is taking veterans longer and longer to get their health benefits when returning from war. I have read some stories about veterans getting treated poorly when they get back by their peers. I think that it is not only acceptable to be hateful and vile towards veterans but it is our patriotic duty. Going to war is only noble when it is in defense of our country. All modern day wars have been created by war contractors so that a handful of billionaires can maintain the their oppressive strangle hold on the world OPEC and the petrodollar. Since you cannot change the minds of the billionaires reaping more and more power from the destruction and exploitation of societies overseas we can change the minds of the working class men and women that volunteer to fight even though they don't know exactly what they are fighting for. These people are joining the service to get a better economic opportunity because economic opportunities are on a decline in this country and they are tricked into thinking that being corporate henchmen and doing the dirty work of war contractors is going to give them a chance at a better status in life. We as a society striving for peace need to push that status to the very bottom. They deserve to be yelled at, spit on and ridiculed for being a traitor to peace and evolution. They deserve to be skimped on their benefits by the very same criminals that they offered their life for. You can't perform immoral acts for immoral people and then expect to be treated like a hero afterwards. Edit A video for context. All Wars Are Bankers Wars<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should be unsympathetic and unwelcoming to returning veterans and we should not care that it is taking them longer and longer to get their health benefits.\n","id":"013dc8ba-48de-4391-802c-ab380346236c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Demographic trends are bound to change this situation in favor of the Arab population: within a decade, Jews are expected to make up less than half the population in Israel and Palestine, whereas the Arab share will grow to more than half.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are 6.1 million Jews and 5.8 million Arabs living in the Israel\/Palestine geographic area. This near-parity in population sizes means that constant Jewish political control would be highly unlikely.\n","id":"ce2d7028-bb68-49ba-a391-5a648c46a09c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start this up with me saying that I love the whole trilogy, and overall enjoy every game in it. I just believe ME3 is the best one most say its ME2 and that the ending's badness is over exaggerated. I don't think anyone will deny that ME3 is best graphically and gameplay wise. Mass effect 1 had a lot of variety of weapons and armor and boosts to them , but it was pretty clunky and glitchy. Mass effect 2 improved the animations, the cover, the AI, etc. However it was pretty bare bones overall especially in customization . Mass effect 3 brought us more customization, variety, and dept in gameplay than ME2 while still having the smoothest shooting and combat. Lets look at the story now. ME1 had a tight plot with a good villan, but the characters weren't much to ride home about and this is someone who likes Ashley more than most . Ash and Kaidan were okay, Tali was just a codex, and Garrus was just a typical renegade cop. Wrex and Liara I liked. The plot was tight though, and Saren was a very good villain. ME2 did add a whole new bunch of awesome characters and substantially improved characters from ME1. But the main plot was weak, even by the standards of a middle entry. I know the story naturally lends itself to being more character focused it being about building a team and all , but the reason for building the team never really engaged me. A good reason for this was probably a lack of a villain. TIM wasn't a villain until ME3, all he did was a few underhanded things which ultimately helped you anyways . He was an interesting character, but they didn't use him as the antagonist. Instead we just got Harbinger to pop up and spew some cornball one liners. You only fight the collectors 3 times, and even the twist where they ended up being protheans just didn't affect me. I felt more interested in the collectors when I got to hear about them from the Alliance perspective in ME3 James and Cortez than in ME2. ME3 manages to strike a happy medium. You get to finally face the fucking reapers head on even do a Mexican stand off with one and TIM was a complex indoctrinated villain like Saren though I will grant that the game focuses on Cerberus a little too much . You were motivated to go through the main story, earth and all life in the galaxy was on the line here and you felt it now more than ever. You get less companions than in ME2, but everyone gets at least a cameo. I cared more about Miranda's family arch in ME3 than in ME2, Thane got to go out with a bang, Legion's story ends powerfully regardless of the ending you chose . There is just tons of cool moments with characters, moments that outdo their loyalty missions. If you have the Citadel DLC then its no contest. Nothing before in the series is as touching as Mordin sacrificing himself to correct his mistakes by curing the genophage. Nothing is as crushing as killing Mordin, then later killing Wrex one of the best scenes in the series . Seeing Tali kill herself is rough, killing Legion almost made me cry Does this unit have a soul? , and seeing the Quarian and Geth make peace is very fulfilling. This brings me to another thing, ME3 is the only one where pure renegade is close to reasonable. Pure renegade has always resulted in a very inconsistent character compared to pure paragon, but ME3 is the only game where there is good reason to do so. In ME1, being pure renegade is excruciating Are you contagious? . In ME2, its not always reasonable, but they made it fun at least You talk too much . With ME3, there is actually some pressure to be pragmatic. You may betray your friends Mordin and Wrex, but is it not worth the value of the salarian fleet? It has the best character moments, arguably the best main plot ME3 was more engaging then ME1, but the missions didn't flow as naturally from one to the other . The main problem everyone and their grandma has with the game, the ending. I only think the ending is half bad. The idea of control vs destroy has been what the series has been buildings towards, it makes sense thematically synthesis is kinda the odd duck I'll grant you that . The philosophy of Anderson vs TIM the mentor figure in each previous game fighting at the end of the reapers. The problems come with presentation. They should have shown you how the choice you made affected the galaxy instead of assblasting the galaxy with colors and leaving it up to your imagination. They should have shown how ALL your choices affected the galaxy, kinda like how Fallout reflects on you, your choices, the characters you interact with, and the result of it all Many will criticize how you choose what you say less frequently, I just think they went quality over quantity. They only gave you an option to speak when your decision would significantly change how the conversation would go. This is compensated by the increase in interrupts, companions interacting more, and making conversations more dynamic In ME1 and ME2, conversations with companions would almost always take place with them each sitting standing in the same position especially ME1 . In ME3 you get to have a contest with garrus, dance with Vega, etc. Also in the first two games you would scarcely see two characters interact, now you can see them talk often and occasionally give support to change the course of their conversation .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mass effect 3 is the best game in the series despite the ending which gets too much hate.\n","id":"10fcc5ee-e1cb-4440-a23e-865aef921b9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously the Soviet Union did horrible things and killed millions of people over the decades but so did America, countries in western Europe, Japan, Germany and other capitalist countries and Red China did and continues to do horrible things, but this was more as a result of being overly punitive and stubbornly autarkic than any fault of socialism itself. While I do think the farms were collectivized way too fast, for the most part the crimes the communist states committed had more to do with their authoritarian and ideological rigidity than with people starving because they ran out of other people's money as conservatives like to quip. There's nothing inherent about socialism that means you have to kill off your opponents or commit genocide, or censor the media and throw dissidents in prison. This is a result of the largest communist states being one party ruled, and an overly vengeful culture and government. Capitalist dictatorships of the 20th century like Pinochet's Chile and Suharto's Indonesia were the exact same way in this regard. One can have both communism and democracy Mongolia, Nepal and Albania all democratically elected communist parties in the 90s. I just don't see anything wrong with distributing the wealth, especially when you consider the positive track record of such attempts in mixed economics like the Nordic countries, Australia and Canada. I'd even argue that for all of the bad things Soviet Russia and Red China did, they were still much better than the monarchies that came beforehand. They also did see a lot of economic growth and development. Before the Communists Russia and China were backwaters, practically medieval societies. By the 80s they were very well developed and the majority of the population lived relatively modern lifestyles with radios, electricity, healthcare not necessarily the best, but given non discriminately and vastly better than what was available in the 19th century , television sets even if they were mostly B W , universal education and running water. It's hard to deny that communism was a success in the sense of material prosperity growing. So I fail to see why communism is inferior to capitalism, aside from the fact that nationalist movements ultimately destroyed the Soviet Union. You could also argue that Japan and America's unending economic stagnation represents a failure of capitalism, and it would make just as much sense. I think the best system is one that mixes capitalism and communism together that allows innovation and makes it easy for people to start enterprises, but also has a strong publicly owned backbone and distributes wealth so that the poor do not starve or end up homeless, and the rich and middle class live in a more stable and safe society, which is the case when you have fewer people who are desperate and irrational due to poverty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Done correctly, I don't see anything wrong with Socialism. Quite the contrary, it seems more fair and sustainable than free market purism.\n","id":"7d94281f-4d86-4014-b801-5ab0c0c07d6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>Men's toilets and women's urine have different odours due to hormone differences in each biological sex. As a result, the urine of one sex may smell much worse to the other sex and vice versa, meaning that it is logical to keep their toilet facilities separate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men and women, because of their different biological characteristics, each need a different type of bathroom. Gender-segregated bathrooms reflect and honour these differences.\n","id":"8c1ff900-dfb8-40a3-8b8d-dd1d52a5953c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most people are excited about the prospect of more work being done by machines and by now we're familiar with the reasons why. The issue is I don't think too many people have stopped to consider what the short term implications of automation will mean. Many low or partially skilled jobs being lost to machines means many people out of work who can't otherwise earn a living. The common refrain is that they can retrain to do other work but I question if there's enough other work and if there are enough resources to retrain the population that will have no job. You'll have large segments of the population that are effectively out of the job market and when you have this, social unrest tends to grow out of such circumstances. The bottom line is that there are three facts General progression of technology has been to do more work with less human labor. The basis for providing for one's human needs in the overwhelming majority of the world are exchanging one's labor for money. Human population is growing whereas the number of people required to produce the same amount of stuff is decreasing. Putting those three facts together means, at some point, there's going to be a time when these come into conflict with each other. I'd prefer this not be the case but barring an out of context problem I don't see the road unfolding any other way. . EDIT Because I've posted this about ten times now. This has happened before and people all found new jobs, why is now different? Previously in history when automation or technological development has caused an industry to shed workers those workers have had other industries that they could transition into. Currently, we don't really have that as most of the jobs that could absorb the losses are steadily being automated, require a relatively high skill level to do, or are not plentiful enough.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Automation and the resulting job loss will be the precursor to significant social unrest in the coming decades.\n","id":"1b4cc57b-1a8f-4260-87bc-920208b6ebeb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>13th amendment: Involuntary servitude example: coerced gestation is only allowed as a punishment for a crime. The pregnant person has done no crime to impose this unwanted involuntary servitude.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Outlawing abortion goes against the 13th and 14th Amendments of the US constitution.\n","id":"64ae4b60-f933-4f21-bc8c-41a678006c7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TL DR Anti imperialism is an impossible ideology, not all nations are equal and thus not all nations deserve power, territory and resources, and imperialism is the only way for a country to grow, prosper and dominate effectively . Now of course, I take a slightly more broader definition of imperialism , as I define it as basically synonymous with hegemony and one country controlling another country by force or through threat of force rather than simply the acquisition of territory . I've heard a lot recently about left leaning people and even right leaning people being fiercely anti war, anti imperial, anti interventionist, pro self deterimination and so on. My personal opinion is that imperialism is inevitable, if not desirable. For the first part, I'll explain why I think it is inevitable I believe that a world without countries violently coercing each other is impossible, as different countries have different cultures, ideologies and ideas. Countries are also inherently unequal, and some are more powerful than others. Most countries also have a sense of self preservation. Thus, you will always have one country violently coercing another and forcing it to adopt certain ideas in order to survive. The relationships between States are completely anarchistic, as there is no world government to enforce international rules. There are international agreements, but they aren't the same thing. There is also the simple fact that imperialism has had massive positive benefits that obviously can't be ignored, as coercing other countries to do what is good for your own country, yet bad for theirs, is still good for yours, regardless. Even today, among supposedly anti imperialistic countries such as the US, China, Russia etc, they are imperialistic in every single way imaginable even communist China, ironically . They have to be, otherwise they themselves would become weaker and taken advantage of by another State that was imperialistic. There is no third option . They must continue to puppet, coerce, sanction and expand in order to survive. As to why it is desirable I personally don't believe in self determination , as it is an ideology that assumes that all nations deserve equal power, resources and territory, which I strongly disagree with. In order to preserve and expand the best cultures, ideologies and ideas, you have to get them to compete, and the ultimate competition is war. Thus in this winner takes all world, the country with the most effective culture, ideology, government etc can conquer territory and resources so as to keep expanding that ideology and allow humanity to develop. Treating all nations equally is a mistake and a waste of limited resources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Imperialism is completely inevitable, if not desirable.\n","id":"c97b6fda-5dee-42f0-8265-975180adb2b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>When people pray, they are talking to their own subconscious and that may be helpful in the long run.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if there is not a superior force or God, prayer and meditation can have beneficial outcomes.\n","id":"80c2e4c5-6ea2-479e-9e0e-421cf30e0cfa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>People assume a certain street or route may be less dangerous or assume someone may intend harm and avoid that person or place, even if those beliefs are not founded or verified.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Much of what we use to navigate the world is based on unfounded assumptions, belief is in no way unique.\n","id":"6a2546eb-d8a2-4655-a760-5ec18a5b877b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>Widespread effective behavioral weight loss programs foster an atmosphere that regards obesity as an urgent problem. This can induce policy initiatives to do the same.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society-wide shaming is one path to getting these policies, but there are also other less destructive ones.\n","id":"d56e94a9-86d8-4673-b3ae-ddbf14cdca89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Religion could be explained in terms of 'universal obsessional neurosis'<|ARGUMENT|>Religious behaviour always resembles mental illness. Close resemblance between the activities of religious people and the behaviour of neurotic patients.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion could be explained in terms of 'universal obsessional neurosis'\n","id":"3d2e6bf9-eb01-4872-8de0-6da5711441b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>If impeaching Trump leads to his eventual removal, Pence would become President. There is little difference in the policy preferences of Trump and Pence, so impeachment would accomplish little.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump's hardline approach has posed significant danger to the rest of the world. Impeaching him would stop him from taking it too far.\n","id":"4fc8b16b-9c50-48c7-963c-84194fe4b7e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should breastfeeding be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>For allergy and asthma, after exclusion of six sites three experimental and three control with suspiciously high rates of positive skin prick tests, risks were significantly increased in the experimental group for four of the five antigens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The PROBIT study referenced found no reduction in measures of allergy and asthma adiposity, stature, blood pressure and tooth decay at age 6.5 years.\n","id":"60530c65-e179-4172-b5b1-e2fa6a0604cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The only true US heroes were the ones that served on WW2, they served a purpose. A noble one. Nowadays US troops are deployed as killing machines, they are usually young and don't know much about US foreign policy or just need the money ok I get it. So why are they treated like heroes if the wars they are fighting are not even popular and the goal is to bring the troops home? When I see a veteran on a video for whatever reason I just think You shouldn't have gone there and kill others for no good reason, I bet the stories of your enemies mostly the civilian casualties are far more terrorizing than yours. EDIT phrasing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm really tired of US veteran \"touching\" stories like they are heroes, after all they are overseas delivering death for oil and strategic geo-political conquers. The only true US heroes were the ones that served on WW2.\n","id":"2e6bafd2-efe4-4ab2-beec-af5952a1e065"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I haven't watched any of the debates so far this year as they seem absolutely useless in picking a candidate. Soundbites and answers that avoid providing any real information don't help to determine who will actually be able to lead the nation. I'd rather see candidates write a brief or essay regarding the main issues facing the nation world and then have them draft responses to the other candidates briefs to get a real idea of what they would and would not do and how they would do it. Debating is a skill, but it is not a skill that is needed to be President and the overemphasis on debates is likely to favor bad candidates then good candidates, which harms the country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political Debates are Useless for choosing a president\n","id":"a4438cbd-dccd-40fa-9210-40141524d7c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>When The Economist criticized Baptist's book because \"all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains\", it had to apologize and withdraw its book review. It clarified that \"the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Historian Edward Baptist has argued that not only Americans in the South profited from slavery but that \"all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people\".\n","id":"d62a51d1-ae3f-4e55-9590-905c0dc64196"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically, currencies are a method to exchange and store wealth. Most if not all currencies operate with a central bank that tries to maintain a target rate of inflation. Since the 80s, US inflation has hovered around 2 , depending on the needs of the economy. It is now seen as one of the most stable places to store ones wealth, in the world. As world markets shook, everyone bought US dollars. While bitcoin may be able to send money anywhere in the world, it has no central authority to guide its inflation. It's price most recently has been trending upward, but even when it hits what may be considered a stable level, it will inevitably have major price variations that I don't believe anyone looking to protect their wealth will be able to stomach. If you disagree, please show me a publicly traded asset that has maintained a more stable growth rate than the USD. And like all publicly traded commodities, bitcoin will be subject to the same speculative bubbles as the rest. If there's something I'm not seeing, change my view. But I bet I'd be safer burying my money in a bunch of black barrels in the deserts of New Mexico. Edit for clarity, I'm equating currency inflation with market price. I am aware there are a set number of bitcoins.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bitcoin for better or worse can never operate as a real currency, by its own very design.\n","id":"47adefbb-da2c-4552-ab54-5fa6eee6fb31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Marriage is the disease of modern world. Humans weren't meant to be monogamous creatures and marriage and all the sacristy surrounding it was designed by the society to make this happen. Today, I find it odd that people haven't pushed away this dated tradition. In some countries, even premarital and extramarital sex is banned or shunned upon. Marriage creates intensive surrounding for the off springs, and a boring routine life for the couple. In order to get rid of this practice, state needs to ban marriage altogether. Do you find anything wrong with my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marriage is wrong and should be banned by state,\n","id":"e7bff34f-6bd2-47e1-8313-6a831dabfa87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Somebody breaking a street sign would either be caught during the act or later on when some person annoyed by the street sign having been broken would access the database and search who it was.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Basically all crimes have victims, either as in individuals, institutions or society as a whole. Victims would certainly report and highlight crimes against them.\n","id":"83f36d30-c90c-421a-baee-08932ece4337"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>Malteasers created ads that dealt with the \"taboo\" topics of menopause and lesbian dating in an attempt to help combat perceived stereotypes. They were made in consultation with advocacy groups Age UK and Stonewall.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Advertising culture changes our perception on issues by giving a voice to those outside the mainstream.\n","id":"05539cc6-d8ee-4bfd-a958-deebaf211370"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I work as a mental health counselor and feel like this is a no brainer. However, it\u2019s not even considered best practices, as far as I know. When I\u2019ve worked in agencies, there is more communication, but even then they would inform me after the shift, rather than speaking with em first. Now that I am in private practice, prescribers make psychotropic medication changes without consulting me for clients that I see. I\u2019m not a prescriber, but I am very familiar with medications. Prescribers have a lot more training than I do on the medical front, most of them have gone to medical school, or at least have specialized on how to best handle medications. However, a lot of the assessment as to what constitutes an appropriate treatment seems like it would be deeply informed as to suit needs. To alter this medication which does can have potentially dangerous side effects without consulting the professional who works most closely with the patient seems totally short sighted to me. Not all of therapists are as well informed as I am, perhaps, but it\u2019s worth a call. Am I missing something?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think prescribers should as general principle consult with a patients' therapist before starting, ending or otherwise changing psychopharmaceutical medication\n","id":"0dde55e5-ba92-413b-bb69-813abcd1be5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is there a social media bias?<|ARGUMENT|>Infowars has been banned permanently by Facebook, Apple and Google YouTube in few hours time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That Alex Jones was banned illustrates how social media sites target conservative users.\n","id":"e2ca0a69-2591-4488-aa5b-001b9424d488"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While physical appearance, IQ etc are the heated issues that usually boil over when the possibility of embryo selection or \u2018designer babies\u2019 is broached, I think this detracts from a much more important topic for discussion, namely the very real possibility of genomic precision medicine. It\u2019s a fact that most human diseases have at least a partial genetic basis \u2013 the diseases based on a few mutations or chromosomal abnormalities are well known but what\u2019s less known is that susceptibility to most diseases out there is influenced by many genes, each having a small effect this is known as polygenic inheritance . In the practice of medicine a standard when taking a patient\u2019s history is the \u2018family history\u2019 which involves asking questions about patient family medical histories and this is because in clinical care it\u2019s often observed that many, if not most, disease conditions run in families. Recently, for example, it became possible to identify people at very high risk for a number of disease conditions looking only at their genomes, these include hypothyroidism, type 2 diabetes, breast cancer, atrial fibrillation and heart attack to name a few. Now I admit that I have an emotional investment in this topic for personal reasons. Back pain related problems run in both sides of my family and recently my brother was diagnosed with symptomatic degenerative disc disease despite being in his 20s. Ironically he had just graduated medical school but now has to consider that his career as a physician will be very short lived if he develops chronic pain and considering that \u00be of our grandparents and mother developed chronic pain things don\u2019t seem to bode well for either of us especially considering that the relevant people in the family don\u2019t even have the big risk factors being overweight, manual labour etc and chronic pain conditions are significantly heritable. If embryo selection to minimize the risk of chronic pain conditions became possible in the near future I would personally seek it out if I ever have children \u2013 even if I had to do so outside the western world should it not be possible here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"there is nothing wrong with 'designer babies' at least in a limited sense\n","id":"4f928938-852d-4983-b5b4-65f77dc4bc92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it ethical to save a child over an adult?<|ARGUMENT|>If the ultimate choice is in the hands of someone not invested personally no connection to neither the child nor the adult and with scarce knowledge about both of them, the most ethical thing to do would be to flip a coin.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Age isn't a relevant argument in this debate. You can't choose either the adult or the child.\n","id":"9c995648-f606-4cd0-a31d-d83f5f63ced6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>The principal legacy of Confederate statues is white supremacy and slavery. Since this fundamentally conflicts with American values and ideas, they should be removed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regardless of the historical context at the time, these monuments are now inextricably linked to slavery.\n","id":"9a469487-475d-4ed7-a2f1-7380425690b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am going to American in a couple months and as such am trying to work how tipping works and how best to do e.g. Do I need cash to tip? How much should I give? Do I tip for bad service? Do I tip at a bar? My solution for the traveler is to practise Tip kle down tipping, based on trickle down economics instead of tipping everyone and having to do the maths everytime and carry cash on you. Simply take out 200 on the 1st day and tip the 1st service worker you interact with all the money. This person will then have more cash which they can use to tip spend in the future and eventually my tip will work its way back into the economy the same way it would if I tip everyone a little bit. This system is alot more efficient for me, and the USA as a whole is not missing out on anything. I am I missing any good reason to not try it?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tip-kle down tipping is the solution for the traveler in USA\n","id":"5e88ab33-8137-4260-a3af-eedababc64f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm 25 years old, and for most of my life pretty much ever since Bush got elected the global economy has been in the shitter, and my country has been embroiled in pointless wars. It's been hard to get a meaningful job, to live up to the meaningful purpose that was promised to us by our parents all in all, things have been pretty damn dark for a long time. These things happen for a reason, and they're all spelled out for anybody who cares to do a little research or educate themselves. But why educate yourself, when you can blame the Illuminati, or lizard people? Why make sense of the world around you, when you can spend that valuable time learning about how rocks will give you energy and how taking psychedelic drugs will get you in touch with your past life? I've seen a massive cultural shift in the people that I've grown up with, and in strangers in the area I've grown up in, leaning towards conspiracy theories and new ageism. It comes across as gullible and na\u00efve as if these people have all accepted to believe everything they read on the internet that is contrary to what they've been told their whole lives . I think it's because people have become bored with how boring the negative aspects of life are, and are turning to fantastical explanations because they're more interesting, facts be damned. They are choosing to believe in what is essentially fan fiction of real life, and that seems ignorant and pointless to me. And the conspiracy theories and new ageism definitely go hand in hand. I think these people are culture tourists who cherry pick ideas from religion without having a full understanding of them. I think that sun gazing and earthing is fucking stupid. I think that people's moon ceremonies are just remnants of hipsterism. Honestly, nobody pushes their religious views in my face harder than people who claim to be spiritual now, and they're the least educated people I know when it comes to things like religion, or even just basic shit like how politics and economics work. It's too much work for them, so they flock to easily digestible bullshit that holds their interest, because it's fantasy fiction. It's so goddamn pointless, and it distracts people from the real problems in the world , and it's damaging because it's a distraction . Change my view, if you can.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The recent resurgence of New Age philosophy and conspiracy theories is a result of people being incapable of understanding or accepting the mundane and difficult reasons why the economy is failing and why the standard of living hasn't lived up to their expectations. They're bored with life.\n","id":"82631894-db31-4c26-a4f6-0c81ca0ea73e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If 100 of california votes democrat and all electors are faithless and vote republican the republicans win california. I get this would never happen, but why have a system set up where it CAN happen? I feel like whoever wins more votes in a winner take all state should win the vote and not have to risk some appointed dickbag voting against the will of that state. Even if the candidate is total ass what makes the elector a better judge of that than the entirety of that state's population? Ideally these dudes wouldn't exist and whoever wins the state now actually just wins the state instead of having to appoint dudes who are probably but not definitely going to vote for the guy they are supposed to . It seems to just be opening a can of worms in terms of possible corruption of the electors. Edit In only 9 out of 50 states have the legal ability to cancel change a faithless vote despite other states having consequences . Though it would never happen, it's possible 100 of the U.S. could vote for candidate A and Candidate B could win the election from faithless electors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Faithless electors shouldn't be legally allowed to vote against their pledge\n","id":"14ebeeac-20c5-47a6-b0de-5777d04fe3fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not someone who wants to have a gun, this doesn't mean I think people shouldn't be able to have firearms. However, with the rise of 3D printing, which will most likely be widely available to most people in a matter of years, and people printing gun parts with this technology, I suddenly become scared of what the future could become if 3D printed firearms become a thing . Again, I'm not against people owning guns, but I'm against the trivialization of guns, I think that the rules and procedures to acquire a gun should be decently strict, at least enough so that people aren't able to create freaking guns in their homes The main problems I see are Making guns available to kids, teenagers, crazy people, basically anyone who has access to the technology. Making it virtually impossible to monitor the number of existing guns and their respective owners. which even today is very hard to do in many places Maybe, in a worst case scenario, the 3D printing technology being abandoned or made very difficult to make use of because of the rise of crap like this. Creating a new way for criminals to get weaponry. Even today it must be quite easy for them to get this kind of equipment, 3D printing would make it even easier. The whole scheme of production of guns is, in my opinion, already pretty good AND pretty flawed. People who do need guns for certain, like the army, navy, etc. are nowhere near a shortage of equipment. People who shouldn't have access to guns, like criminals, teenagers, etc. already find a way to get guns anyway. I'm simply a teenager really concerned about the what the future he is going to live in might become, and it would be great if someone could convince me that the thing I just talked about is not possibly an issue we might run into in the near future. Thanks for the attention and sorry for the possibly bad English. not my native language Edit I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear, but I need to point out that what bothers me is what this would mean in the future where we will possibly and in my opinion probably have high quality 3D printing widely available. I'm aware that with today's commercially available printers it isn't possible to do much. Edit2 I'm from Brazil and was quite impressed when I found out it was so easy to get guns mainly ammo actually in the US. I think the problem I'm talking about means even more in places where getting a gun is hard such as the place I live in<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm scared of the possibility of 3D printed guns becoming something big.\n","id":"fd5c56d1-011e-4d0a-816c-79a7fa55d879"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>In a passage allegedly authored by a prophet in the 20s BCE, the Book of Mormon uses the Christan era see John 10 term \"good shepherd\" in a context that presumes, without explanation, the audience knows it refers to their god. Helaman 7:18<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon uses the term \"good shepherd\" to refer to Jesus, allegedly written at a time before Jesus' \"good shepherd\" parable came into existence.\n","id":"b7581a17-8fde-46cc-998e-e424c39df35b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Parley Chase, who knew the Smith family in Manchester, New York, \"not one of the male members of the Smith family were entitled to any credit, whatsoever. They were lazy, intemperate and worthless men, much addicted to lying. In this they frequently boasted of their skill.\" Howe 1834, p. 248<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith and his family had a reputation for dishonesty among many of his neighbors in New York.\n","id":"0b33be2b-091d-41b1-bcd5-d363ccb28601"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are two main parts to my argument here. The first one is that those who say you can't be racist against white people, say this because they define racism as the systematic oppression of a race, or something similar. By this definition, they would be completely correct however I will later explain why this doesn't even matter . However, the dictionaries I looked at define it as predjudice or discrimination based on race, or something similar. We're essentially arguing about the definition of the word racism, so you'd think that a simple Google search could end the whole thing, however many still swear by the definition previously mentioned. If the argument over the definition of a word can't be settled by a dictionary, how can it be settled? My second point is that regardless of how you define the word, it doesn't make predjudice against white people any more acceptable, and saying that you cant be racist against white people just diverts the conversation. Here's a comparison. I choke someone to death. You say to me, Hey You just suffocated that man And I respond with, I didn't suffocate him, I strangled him Suffocation is defined as 'to deprive someone of air'. Now, instead of talking about how I just murdered someone, now we're talking about how your accusation is technically false. For those of you who will say, We're not saying its acceptable, were just saying that it technically isnt defined as racism, I say to you that's why the whole argument is pointless. And for those who will say You're a cracker I say to you I think you're racist. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The argument of whether or not you can be racist toward white people is completely pointless.\n","id":"a862ec1e-d3a7-45be-a737-58dc0ef04391"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>The US Army\u2019s Future Combat Systems program, was cancelled in 2009, with $16 billion already spent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Programs in the past were very expensive and resulted in failure.\n","id":"4011e86a-e5f4-47d4-8f4d-347bfc5241cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>A study by researchers at Oxford and the University of Amsterdam found that cultured meat was \"potentially much more efficient and environmentally-friendly\", generating only 4% greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the energy needs of meat generation by up to 45%, and requiring only 2% of the land that the global meat\/livestock industry does.\" newyorker.com phys.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is cultured meat that does not come with the negative side effects of conventional meat, for example, by stopping cruelty to animals being better for the environment, and even healthier.\n","id":"120477aa-84a7-4c47-b6fb-969939ab0af0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m talking here about the principle of the death penalty and not it\u2019s implementation. I believe that, even if we could painlessly and seamlessly execute criminals, society still has no right to dole out the death penalty. It just doesn\u2019t feel right to me that humans should legally and officially\u2014righteously, if you will\u2014that another human has no more right to exist. However, I am pro choice. I believe if a fetus is dependent on another body to survive that body\u2019s owner should decide if it stays, but nonetheless it\u2019s sort of the same principle, and I\u2019ve always been quite uncomfortable with this contradiction in my beliefs. Help. Lmk your thoughts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society has no right to condemn a criminal to death.\n","id":"c1fc05b4-094d-409a-89fb-d5e5d803b46b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was making a beef stew yesterday, and I had to cut up a ton of vegetables. While I was doing the cutting, I had a bit of a shower thought after I grazed my finger with the knife that I was using. I've constantly been told that dull knives are more dangerous to use when cooking than sharp knives. I suppose the theory is that when you are using a dull knife you have to use more force, and have less control over the blade leading to more accidents. While this superficially sounds plausible, if I was using a really sharp knife I would have a pretty good gash in my finger right now. As it is, I have a slight red mark and the knife did not penetrate my skin. As I continued cooking, I took note of at least two other times where the blade can into contact with my hand, and did no damage at all. With a sharp knife, I would likely have had several injuries. Now, technically my knife isn't dull . It cuts the food perfectly fine. It just isn't as razor sharp as people seem to recommend.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sharp knives are more dangerous than dull knives.\n","id":"14cfe1d1-5542-4451-aa34-9b0416e74395"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Admittedly I don't know the details of the case very well which is why I used the word may , but it seems to me that if Zimmerman's story is true, then he should not be on the hook for murder. Zimmerman's story, as I understand it, is as follows He saw Martin, felt suspicious, and called the cops. The cops told him not to follow him. He got out of his car and followed him anyway. Martin got angry about this and confronted Zimmerman, eventually punching him. In the ensuing struggle, Zimmerman pulled his gun and fired. If this story is true, it suggests a few things to me Firstly, Zimmerman is racist and an asshole. The trouble is that it isn't illegal to be a racist asshole. Nor is it illegal to follow somebody down the sidewalk. And once Martin began physically attacking Zimmerman, he was within his rights to defend himself. The question for me, then, becomes whether or not the story is indeed true. To my mind, that's not for me but for the jury to decide. Important here is whether Zimmerman's story could reasonably be presumed to be true if it is then there is reasonable doubt. Given that the jury has a great deal more information about the case than I do, I feel like I should trust their decision that Zimmerman's story is plausible, and therefore that he should not be punished for committing a murder. I feel like I'm on the wrong side of a very sensitive racial issue here, Reddit. So change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the Zimmerman verdict may have been justified.\n","id":"de7d7db0-be1e-49fd-8edd-bdfb50e4f330"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Thus, people should not be offended if we say, for example, that a biological male is fundamentally different than a trasgender one, that they're not the same thing. It's an opinion I have, trying to put together the pieces I find reasonable in the two sides of the argument. It's a question of coherence more than one of consecuential value, meaning I'd like the idea could be refuted using just arguments about it's internal conherence and not by the mention of possible consecuences reaching it as conclusion may bring.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"though people with gender dysphoria are perfectly sane people in the sense that they can and should be granted all the rights and freedoms other people have in every sense, that does not mean we should pretend that G.D. is not a mental disorder.\n","id":"293e0934-37b7-4bbd-a30e-7368f73520ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Even in countries with sound legal systems, licensing systems aren't working as well as they should be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A parenting license will be difficult to incorporate into every country's legal systems.\n","id":"6adcd959-c5c9-41b3-86f7-e686e07dc7a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>While the Rebels have fighters, Federation capital chips are far more manoeuvrable then their Rebellion counterparts, able to make extreme course corrections and evasive manoeuvres Rebel ships could only dream and wish for. This is a key issue and has many implications, both in terms of attack and defence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Federation's ships are technologically superior to those of the Rebel Alliance.\n","id":"49d09033-3135-42d7-bf86-61d718110918"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that you are either straight, bisexual, or gay and that being poly pan mono sexual is a recent invention that came because people wanted to be special. Basically there are 3 sexual orientations For those who do not knowHeterosexual, or Straight An attraction to the opposite sex. Bisexual Attraction to both sexes. Homosexual or Gay Attraction to the same sex. Pansexual, or Omnisexual Liking someone no matter what their gender is. Asexual Having no attraction to either sex. Polysexual Liking more than one sex but not identified as bisexual because that implies there are only two genders or sexes. Please try to refrain from posting your own life stories. EDIT I do believe that you can also be asexual My View has been changed<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that a person can only be straight, bi, or gay three sexual orientaions and that any person who is otherwise wants to be considered \"special\"\n","id":"404bdcfc-76e9-44a7-88e8-6307b2e92360"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Part 1 evidence is circumstantial. The fact that the nerve agent was invented in the Soviet Union does not constitute solid proof of Russian government's involvement. Especially considering that one of the inventors of the agent now lives in the US and that the invention took place in the 70s. Part 2 the response is unwarranted. Johnson and May have claimed Russian government's involvement to be highly likely . A number of countries have applied sanctions on Russia as a response to the poisoning. I see this as a breach of presumption of innocence. Edit I do accept that Russian involvement in the matter is likely. I am only arguing it is not proven beyond reasonable doubt.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In my opinion evidence for Russian government being the culprit in the Skripal case is circumstantial and UK's response is unwarranted\n","id":"1120831e-abe4-4723-9001-3c50a40982c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>The lack of empirical studies mean that the longer-term impact is not yet fully realised; for example, it is possible that repeated exposure to a fictional-real test situation ie: ability to 'rape' robots might actually increase the prevalence of abuse extrapolated into society. Bendel, p. 22<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex robots can have a \"frigid\" setting, allowing men to rape them.\n","id":"9beb6f99-c7f1-4196-b687-5a9ddf987751"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Don't get me wrong here, gang. Even though I quite certainly may be wrong. I'm a big supporter of what Snowden did a few years back, but ASFAIK, regardless of whatever inisider insight he may have as a result of working for organizations such as the NSA, not a single word of substance has come out of this dude's mouth in a very long time. Even so, his name still seems to make the news at least once or twice a month. And the headline is almost always some empty, half assed, meaningless quote, basking under the guise of prophetic enlightenment. For instance, take this gem from a little while back \u200eSnowden FBI's claim it can't unlock the San Bernardino iPhone is 'bullshit' Thanks Captain No Crap. Nearly all the articles featuring Snowden follow the same lazy formula first you have the typical thinking man's portrait photo of Snowden's face then we learn that communication with him was received via a private satelite link presumably from under a rock somewhere in Russia, the quote itself followed by needless elaboration, then a quick refresher on who Edward Snowden is. Just yesterday he made headlines, expressing the following sentiment gt Edward Snowden warns CIA \u2018never destroys something by mistake\u2019 Holy shit, is he insinuating that the CIA would lie about mistakenly losing a 7000 page document with evidence that implicates them in egregious human rights violations? Anyone even slightly familiar with this story must have already assumed that shit was getting lost way before it happened. So what, am I supposed to eat my hat every time Snowden points out the obvious? I understand why the media outlets are still putting this crap out, because people eat the shit up, I just can't understand why after years of drivel, anyone still buys into it. And yes I read the whole article, it was equally useless. Not to mention, looking at the position he's in, I just doubt he will ever be able to do anything that actually matters ever again. The feds will be all over his ass until he's either behind bars or dead. I know he's done online chats and given talks in other undisclosed locations to certain priveleged revolutionaries about privacy and stuff. I dont know. I've never actually listened to any of it, I assume its mostly boiler plate crap. How about one more for good measure? gt Edward Snowden defends Apple in fight against FBI Not technically a quote I know, but sweet mercy, imagine that Edward Snowden, the man himself, is concerned with a government organization overstepping its boundaries in regard to violating personal privacy. Tl dr Edward Snowden's opinions don't matter, and he has a stupid face. Edit One thing  never fails to leave me wondering is whether everyone gets downvoted on this sub as often as I do, or if I just suck at debating this way. EDIT2 Alright, enough with the 15 minutes of fame technicalities, I'm really wishing I picked a different cliche now. The purpose of this  was not for me to have the same argument with ten different people about what the true definition 15 minutes of fame is. It was fun arguing it at first but now its just getting annoying. That being said, I am seriously considering doing another  about what 15 minutes of fame really means Edit3 Why did I think that commenting on downvotes could lead to anything other than more downvotes. God I suck at .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\u200eEdward Snowden's 15 minutes are up, and his opinions don't matter.\n","id":"f05aa491-7906-494d-85f4-a5cbd87d7963"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should traffic finally be redesigned with this simple new hitchhiking law?<|ARGUMENT|>People generally feel uncomfortable with a stranger around them. You don't really know a stranger and you don't want to constantly be but in a situation like this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some private car owners will not understand why this measure is necessary and will not implement it.\n","id":"0bee017a-6cf1-4359-b43c-68a68e77ad33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Aristotle takes magnanimity the greatness of the soul, as one of the greatest virtues. It is the moderate position between overconfidence and timidness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Only some virtues depend upon evil. Eliminating evil would still allow for other virtues and thus a greater net good.\n","id":"a97417ec-e7b7-48e9-a964-0f03754415cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>NOTE I am not an expert. Feel free to correct me on any facts I get wrong. In the UK, Television content is mostly provided by the BBC British Broadcasting Corporation which is essentially funded using British taxpayer money. In other words, it's socialized. The BBC is effective at being a TV channel. It produces shows that people enjoy like Doctor Who and Sherlock. It also doesn't have to run advertising because it is socialized, meaning it's a more effective TV network than those in the US. If socialism works for TV in Britain, then it can surely work for other industries in other countries. The Pharmaceutical industry in the US is more likely to provide cures for diseases that are making the news, rather than diseases that more people are actually experiencing. If it were socialized, then the Government, in the interest of happier and more productive citizens rather than the interest of money, would attempt to make cures for diseases that more people are experiencing. Socialism doesn't always mean that all factories have to produce 500 left shoes to meet a quota. The Soviet Union just didn't do socialism well. The BBC on the other hand does a great job of creating happier citizens, so socialism can work. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If socialism works for the BBC, then it can work perfectly fine in other industries worldwide.\n","id":"0fc80835-d98f-4e7c-a4eb-daf3ab0016f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see a lot of people lose their heads over being home for the holidays . Some even get right depressed when they have to work during a certain holiday because they can't be with their family. To me, this has never made sense. Unless the holiday has a certain timing usually religious which cannot be circumvented, family oriented holidays are meaningless because if you truly love your family, you could meet up with them any day of the year. Let's say you have to work on Christmas Day, and can't be home to open presents with your family, why don't you postpone the gift giving to another day in the year? Why do the gifts and the diner need to be done on one specific day? Because everyone celebrates on specific days, those days become hectic for society in general. Everyone tries to take time off work at the same time , everyone tries to book a flight at the same time , everyone tries to buy presents at the same time . Because everything happens at the same time, the odds of people getting screwed over goes up dramatically. If everyone is trying to get off work, some poor sucker is going to get stuck at work covering for everyone. If people had gift giving get together days spread out throughout the year, then there would be less holiday traffic and more people would probably be able to enjoy the event. We already do this to a certain extent. For example, most people party on Halloween on the weekend before the actual date. Most Christmas parties take place anytime in the month of December before Christmas. A lot of people have birthday parties on days that are not their actual birthdays. Since we do this already, there should be no reason not to include all occasions and expand the time frame. I believe that the message behind family days is flawed. These holidays suggest that you should reserve time for your friends and family only on certain days of the year. However, if you truly love your friends and family, any moment you spend with them is Christmas. You don't needs a special occasion on the calendar in order to give them a gift, or host a dinner, or be super romantic. Why demonstrate love towards your people only a couple set times a year when you should do so whenever you get a chance? Disclaimer I am a sailor, so I don't spend much time on land. I have missed just about every single holiday and event for the last ten years, so my personal opinion on holidays has become deflated. Additionally, as I mentioned before, some moments are time sensitive. Holidays like Easter are timed on religious events, and can't be rescheduled. However, I dare say a lot of people are more secular and don't celebrate the religious aspects of certain holidays. EDIT There are a lot of good replies, but I have one general comment on them. A lot people are basically saying we are doing this because it is the tradition, or because it is what we are use to. Well, if we stop doing this, it won't be the tradition anymore. Traditions and habits come and go. Yes, the general holiday work schedule is based around everyone taking time off at the same time, but that can be changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It makes no sense in secular occasions to obsess over family themed holidays\u2014such Thanksgiving and Christmas\u2014when you have every other day of the year to be with family.\n","id":"a6f68fc4-06cd-414f-a9a8-74979fdcffc4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>Allowing controversial speakers to present their platform on campus is a necessity; to study the \"opposing side\" is the intellectually healthy thing to do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No-platforming shields students from reality. This makes them poorly equipped to deal with oppressive ideas that are publicly expressed outside of university grounds.\n","id":"1bb901e3-161b-4a0d-bfc5-acd8b06e3d9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Shakespeare Authorship Question<|ARGUMENT|>De Vere, like Hamlet, was captured by pirates en route to England; both participated in sea battles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some consider Hamlet to be a deeply biographical character for De Vere.\n","id":"a2ea0302-3a93-4623-bd8e-1c8a697823b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans enjoy basic rights and liberties as guaranteed by a wide range of domestic and international institutions. Animals do not have these kinds of rights and protections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Generally speaking, in all societies, humans treat a human's life as more important than that of an animal.\n","id":"fdb62ecd-f7f6-486f-8eb5-e8091d3f93d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Gulabi Gang a force for good in India?<|ARGUMENT|>In the 2014 General Elections, Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress, the two largest political parties of India, gave only 8.8 percent and 12.9 percent tickets to women candidates respectively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"India has very low rates of female involvement in politics.\n","id":"00f0ee2f-e6a8-420c-ad0e-c64ab783739e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fashion can never be feminist<|ARGUMENT|>While racism is incompatible with feminism, neither racism nor misogyny are permanent or unsolvable problems - the present racism of the industry does not mean it can never be feminist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are trends within the industry fighting back against racism.\n","id":"6e53de4c-dd86-492c-8908-589f28c777ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>This will allow for more creativity, which would make the world less boring and creepy - where everyone's the similar to each other in how they act.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An individual should be free to choose any food they want to eat without interference.\n","id":"b088fbba-5fa6-47b9-92b5-47703f7eb5f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>5 of the politician's public campaign finances should be charged for every lie a politician tells, administered by a bi partisan committee in the Federal Election Commission. The politician will have 30 days to pay the IRS or be disqualified from the race. Think of it this way. Companies can be sued for false advertisement, and you can be charged with fraud for scamming people, so why should politicians be held to a different standard? Plus, democracy itself will work better and more fairly with a more informed public. Edit to answer a few questions being asked 1 This applies only to public speeches and campaign ads during the course of the campaign Not random conversations they might have with other individuals. 2 This applies only to verifiable true false statements at the time it was said Not campaign promises 3 Honest mistakes are treated the same as lies. If you're running a slander campaign you should vet those statements or advertisements before making them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All politicians should be fined a percentage of their campaign funds for lying during public speeches and campaign ads when running for office\n","id":"6a13d0e6-38f6-4449-b7b0-4fc5de1cf796"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Purposeful misinformation is an inherent part of modern society, be that outright fake news spreading faster than real news or the mostly biased media writing misleading or one-sided content.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liquid Democracy would require a more robust social and traditional media which incentivized shared knowledge and consensus instead of hate, anger, alternative facts, and partisanship.\n","id":"e1481a99-db92-4596-aa41-901202b06582"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have always had interest in computer science, but unfortunately I didn't choose to study it in college and chose medicine instead due to heavy influence from my parents and people I know who tricked me that a career in medicine is a much better option. I'm currently in my last year of medical school burdened by infinite hours of studying and stress, and this is not expected to end anytime soon. Extreme competition, endless studying, too many working hours, too much stress, bad lifestyle and debt. I really don't see the catch of having a career as a doctor unless you don't see yourself doing something else. Yes you will have a nice paycheck, but that will be in your mid 30s. On the other side, I'm seeing that software engineers are having it all. Reasonable working hours, minimal stress, no debt, not too much competition, nice paycheck and they don't have to sacrifice the best time of their lives nor wait 10 years after school to start making good money. Of course if I went back again, I would study cs I'm genuinely interested in it , but unfortunately it's too late now. Is a career in computer science really that much better than medicine, or I am missing something? EDIT by worthless , I don't mean money, I am referring to all the job aspects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A career in medicine is worthless compared to a career in computer science.\n","id":"a2975a81-6dee-47f3-b52b-088dbba7b0af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As someone who can invest for themselves, I view CPP as basically another tax on employees and employers. It takes money away from me during the time I need it most in my life. The only way it can stay viable is through more contributions. Especially with the strict withdrawal limits that is based on income and if you die before you recieve everything that money is basically gone. I mean why can't they just give me the money that is rightfully mine? And why should I be forced to invest in companies through CPP contributions that I have ethical qualms with? I think that I should be able to opt out of this if I can prove that I have a retirement plan or private pension, etc.  EDIT I realize that CPP is not a Ponzi scheme, it's just that it's the closest thing I can liken it to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Canada Pension Plan is a Ponzi scheme\n","id":"57cf8d21-926f-4469-a6c4-3d7b6f1e9eda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite? Either way, is she making a positive or a negative impact?<|ARGUMENT|>Thunberg's trip across the Atlantic was facilitated by a Monacan prince, and is a highly specialised vessel to be carbon-neutral. This is not replicable for ordinary citizens generally, and is beyond the price range of most people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Thunberg's examples are hard to replicate by ordinary citizens with limited resources.\n","id":"3c7c3d29-0db9-41dd-a303-97e10a3e8a69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>Genetic enhancement allows humanity to create a much more diverse range of aesthetic traits. For example, it is likely we could create people who glow in the dark or have tails.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetic enhancements not only increase our adaptation to the modern world, they improve the broader human condition.\n","id":"bc954ba3-afbf-4660-b2c0-4eea1f0f9374"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, bottom line here, black people love Hillary and the polls prove this, so obviously she can't be racist QED. Further, she never actually did say Obama was a Kenyan Muslim, that is a myth. It was Mark Penn, her strategic coordinator, who introduced the race baiting vectors of attack on President Obama to her campaign. Yes she knew, but she isn't the one who actually did spread the rumors that Obama was unamerican due to his ethnic background. Last, for the superpredators thing and then the way she spoke to BLM activists, well, if they're not respectful what do they expect? If you interrupt somebody's speech at a posh private function calling for them to apologize for calling black kids superpredators who need to be brought to heel, they're probably just going to ignore you while the bourgeoisie crowd hisses at you. That's life. And the Gandhi joke was a long time ago and she already admitted it was lame sic . So basically just give Hillary a break nobody is perfect and she legit for real carries hot sauce in her bag so she can't be all bad I bet she has the best hot sauces too. I heard she has like hundreds of them. She would have been such a good President. z Nothing Hillary did matters now. She lost because of Russia, not because she cheated or lied and she has not lied in any significant way publicly more than a couple dozen times, which is actually good for such a long career.  Hillary did nothing wrong and she would have made an incredible President possibly even better than Obama. Hillary was actually very honest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People make too much of Hillary's role in the mainstreaming of Birtherism, and too readily accept the false equivalence of saying that she is as racist as Trump because of this and also her \"superpredator\" remarks and racist jokes about Mahatma Gandhi.\n","id":"e9d02c66-2a04-42eb-8db5-979fd06e3e8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I am talking about gender and not sex. Gender is a way of categorizing people into two groups. Men and Women. And we can either say that both groups are basically the same and the division is arbitrary or we can say that women are more domestic emotional etc. and men are more rational physical etc. a Gender only limits people. Society expects us to act a certain way based on our gender. If I'm a girl, I can't like sports, or math. If I'm a boy, I can't like dolls or reality tv on bravo. And if I'm anyone, I certainly can't like both. Or even if I can, in order to do so I have to break people's expectations to do so. b It's hard to hold on to these distinctions in any form and not be sexist. To think that there really is no difference between genders when we make the gender distinction such a large part of our identity means that on some level we expect women to be domestic, to be less smart and to be sex objects. It sounds extreme, but I think it's accurate. On the one hand we want to get rid of harmful stereotypes, but they're very much entrenched in ideas of what gender is. c I really don't know what gender is, but many people, especially transgender people, find it very important. Can you not hand out with women if you're a man? Or wear dresses? But people as young as six have identified as transgender to the point of becoming suicidal Gender identity causes stress to people. And I don't think we can even say what's so important. If we, as a society, said that people were either spurs fans or heat fans and thought that was an integral part of one's identity and made our children join one group at a very young age, I think that's causing undue stress. d What good has ever come of the gender distinction? Why is it important? This is where you tell me why, even though there are, undoubtedly, some bad things that come with having the gender distinction, it's worth it. I really don't see any redeeming qualities. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that we should work to abolish gender.\n","id":"4449ea4f-a3f1-4d20-b3ba-4bb26fdc8210"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>After the passage of the New York Safe Act, nearly 1 million previous law abiding citizens became felony violators when they failed to register their rifles. Noncompliance of the law is at 96%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gun control laws transform previously normative behavior, like anonymous ownership of a particular type of firearm, into criminal behavior. This increases crime.\n","id":"e8fc9241-47d0-4dfe-be72-a92d47ee5026"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>There are greater differences within groups than between them. Assuming that diversity of thought is achieved through diversity of race is racist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only diversity that matters in a university is diversity of thought.\n","id":"5664018b-f8eb-4a65-aeef-671422da486e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Judges be Elected or Appointed?<|ARGUMENT|>There are resources that allow anyone to search for cases that particular judges have presided over, such as legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.com but this information and technology is not free for the public to access, so most people would not be inclined to use it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if voters did know what characteristics were important, it is difficult for them to gain access to that information.\n","id":"e6f73a3f-3cc6-4b7e-a8af-ccba4f6d5966"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>An unequal suffrage, meaning that the votes cast by those eligible to vote are not equal, but are weighed differently according to the person's rank in the census, has potential benefits for society as a whole.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To give more political influence to those who contribute more to the commonwealth is a totally legitimate concept and does not necessarily have to be undemocratic.\n","id":"689fe114-fc54-47ad-ac85-9ffcb5c98e20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>People that chose to be immortal under social pressure have no way to reverse this decision.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The choice to become immortal is unlikely to be a legitimate choice.\n","id":"c67c39aa-131d-44ca-94da-d9f45308326f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Black Panther: Who's Right About Wakanda's Role in the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Because of this, nothing unites Wakandans and black people in the rest of the world except their skin colour, which is an arbitrary and morally irrelevant characteristic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wakandans are not participant in a shared experience of oppression, since they have been isolated from the outside world for centuries.\n","id":"4801268a-c6a4-443a-8936-87873e54eb3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off the sorts of atrocities european settlers have committed against native americans was disgusting. This view isnt in defense of them, but rather in question of whether most native american tribes dont bear similar guilt and arnt exactly innocent. Theres growing rhetoric about the evil of white people and how there needs to be greater reparations going around. It differs from tribe to tribe, but one example would be the Lakotah. This land was taken from them in the 1800s. However they themselves through bloodshed and war stole the land from the Cheyenne in the 1700s. It just seems hypocritical and a double standard. If Bob steals from Joe who steals from Tom, its not exactly fair to demand that a thief returns something to a thief. Tribes are not monoliths theyre made of individuals, and the millions of murders committed by europeans are tragic. But as for which group has rightful claim to the land itself, most native americans peoples have no right to demand reparations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most native american tribes have no more claim to American land than white colonialists.\n","id":"dd2e7d54-ca70-4d91-8bc4-8f6af55fda2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>All monuments are works of art before they are statements of politics and art is meant to make us think, not make us forget.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public spaces are decorated as much for art as anything. Teaching history is only a fraction of the impact of a space.\n","id":"b4819592-d742-48b3-bab2-4ceb80f9c340"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My personal experience When I was 12 years old, my parents sent me to summer camp for two weeks. This wasn't unusual, I'd been to many different summer camps multiple times already. This time was different though. Evidently I ended up at a camp I wasn't supposed to be at. There were about 250 kids there, 1 was white me , and everyone else was black, including all of the camp counselors. My parents don't really remember, but it seems like they weren't aware of this un official expectation Like it wasn't in the pamphlet they read. I had absolutely no idea that anything was unusual about me being the only white person there when I first arrived. I had no previous negative experiences with people of different races than myself, and every school I went to had multiple different races in it, so I didn't even notice that everyone at the camp wasn't white. Clarification I don't mean I literally didn't notice people's races, just that it didn't occur to me to think about it. A day later though, I quickly learned everyone at the camp really didn't like me. I thought it was something I was doing, or the clothes I was wearing, or something else. It never occurred to me that this was about race. I got beat up a lot Like multiple times a day. Multiple people witnessed this happening, and didn't say or do anything about it. The counselors either encouraged it, or remained silent. I basically just allowed them to hit me a few times, then turtled into the fetal position until they stopped hitting kicking me in order to survive. I ended up with very bruised ribs, and general cuts scrapes bruises pretty much everywhere else over my body. I was the only person that this happened to, it wasn't as if everyone there just happened to be violent. No, this was clear and direct violent action against me specifically because of my race and for no other reason. Well, maybe that's just how everyone is around others that are different than they are I thought. But then I remembered a different summer camp where the opposite was true. 1 black kid, and everyone else was white. Did the black kid get beat up? Nope, not once. In fact it didn't even occur to anyone that there was anything unusual about him No one seemed to notice or care. Given how many kids were at my camp, I think it's a pretty good sample size. And given that the actions of literally 100 of the sample chose to actively engage in my physical harm, or just allow it to happen, or watch and be entertained by it it wasn't as if anyone there felt a need to make sure they were alone when kicking my ass I can't help but come to the conclusion that in my lifetime at least, it's much more likely that I'll be a victim of violence because of my race because I'm white, rather than the other way around. I don't really want to make this about crime statistics, so I'll just mention this briefly. But there is data that supports this view out there. More black on white violent crime occurs than white on black crime does.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Due to my personal experience, I find black people to be just as racist as white people\n","id":"2e155da4-1945-46bf-83e8-061c63e9562a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Star Citizen a scam?<|ARGUMENT|>As of January 2019 over a significant number of people, south of 1 million or more, crowd-funded the game. That is more than enough players to populate the SC world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"They do not need a game publisher, as they do not need distribution and marketing, but rather just execution.\n","id":"7f185e59-bbfb-4623-b37a-66c7ba2985b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently over the past few years, I have been grappling with an issues of priorities. I feel that most societies of the world focus far to much on artistic expressions such as dance, art, and music. There is nothing inherently wrong with these activities, but in comparison to mathematics, engineering, and science they are not as productive, and are more leisurely in nature. The only reason I believe people would rebuttal against this assumption is because they are involved or work in these arts, and don't understand how significant scientific discovery has been over the past generations. Agriculture, technology, and medicine rely on scientist, what has music contributed? EDIT I appreciate all of the feedback. After I post this edit I probably won't respond to any more rebuttals partially because my perspective has shifted and I also feel I have done a good enough job to expand upon my arguments . I recognize that my controversial opinion may have more shades of gray than I initially thought.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scientific efforts should be more valued in our society than entertainment and art\n","id":"36e28be5-fc71-4b90-88e3-2031c66d93af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Jesus the Messiah?<|ARGUMENT|>Immediately before Jesus begins preaching, John the Baptist peaches a message later confirmed by Jesus that salvation is not based on ethnicity but on faith.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A main theme of the teachings of Jesus is that the Hebrews misunderstood their own Scripture.\n","id":"13941cde-8139-4a20-ba21-4ce9a13f6d77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>In central Nicaragua, COOMPROCOM began its reforestation projects in 2010. It now has 16 new areas of reforested land and 60% of its members are planting new coffee and shade trees in the region p. 11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fair trade cooperatives invest their fair trade premium in reforestation projects.\n","id":"27801301-54aa-4871-b7f4-b1283a5ed904"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be further research on solar geoengineering.<|ARGUMENT|>Sick patient analogy: earth might turn out to resemble a hopelessly sick patient, whom we would treat with a highly risky and poorly understood therapy. Lovelock in Goodell grist.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At the very least, solar geoengineering research could buy us more time\n","id":"cb27967e-fdfe-4f4e-ac7d-b1ec334ba478"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was up all night to watch the attempted coup in Turkey. Having failed it will only strenghten Erdogan, making things worse yes, I think he's extremely bad. He is leading Turkey away from secularity into a religious state . It's clear he can ab use this situation to his liking, labelling his enemies as terrorists. The attempted and failed coup will make him look stronger in his supporters' eyes. His opponents will not try to overthrow him, even democratically, having seen what he can withstand. Turkey, in my view, is now bound to become Iran 2.0. Religious extremism, sharia law I know what this means and implies, it's not just a buzzword will become a real possibility. His political party will make him president for life he's already setting this up today and it's extremely dangerous. I fail to see the good side of the attempt. It was a poorly executed coup that should have started with arresting him. Seeing him still act as the head of state, giving interview and staying in Istanbul proves it failed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The attempted coup in Turkey made things worse.\n","id":"a2ff8ec0-95cf-456a-a20c-aaf22733e20b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should provide healthcare: the government or the market?<|ARGUMENT|>The quality of the health care coverage is independent from the scope of the coverage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having universal coverage does not mean access to healthcare is better.\n","id":"72dfcbc7-86a2-40e6-8c7f-21488e359009"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems as though this war on terrorism is a religious war in desquise. They even call them Muslim extremist. Also most racist groups can be labeled as Christian extremist. It seems religion blinds everyone and riches them hate . Stone gays , cut off body parts , stone adulterers are some of the things these books tell us to do. The bible even calls gays abominations, and tells you to stone them. This is not the old testament ,you are suppose to stone gays as a Christian. I find that even Christians ignore , or pick and chose the bible. Let's also not forget the conquistadors who came to parts of North and south America in the name of Christianity who stole gold , raped , and enslaved whole indenginous tribes . Let's not forget the southerners who used the bible to justify slavery , or who read bible verses to slaves before beating them . Let's not forget the little girls who were accused of being witches by the church and burned alive. Even catholicism has its bad marks on history . You used to be able to pay for a first class trip to heaven , if you gave the Pope some gold or gems . Or the Islamic people who behead infidels for not being Muslims. The Koran and Bible are suppose to be followed tooth and nail, so these extremist are actually model followers of these religions. Take a look at the Westboro church. These people are pretty religious and are probably more Christian than most want to admit . They outcast their own daughter for wanting a modern life . I feel religion is systematically turning us all against each other, or making us all irrational. We chose to belive in imaginary beings rather than believe in each other.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It seems like religion has a ton of more cons than pros . Most religions say men are over women , or asks blatantly for donations or sacrifices . Atheism seems to make a ton of more sense . Please\n","id":"ef0a03a9-cf4e-491c-ba4e-b06ca57db5f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that while private sector unions are more often than not a good thing that helps to balance out power dynamics between employers and employees, public sector unions create a one sided power imbalance that favors employees. With private sector unions both sides have limited power in negotiations. In private sector union negotiations the employees have the power to do serious damage to the business' operations, up to and including causing a temporary shutdown or forced relocation. On the other hand the employer has the power to not acquiesce to the union, and relocate to a friendlier area or in right to work states use non union employees. There is a balance of power here because while both sides have some leverage over the other, in order to properly utilize that leverage they risk negative consequences. If a union pushes too hard they might all lose their jobs, and if an employer pushes too hard he might see a very expensive temporary or permanent shutdown, or might have to relocate which would also be very expensive and in some cases could ruin the company. Compare this to public sector union negotiations. In this case the employees not only have the power to do serious damage to the business' operations as above, but they also have the power to get their employers fired by voting them out of office or electing officials who will remove them from office. On the other hand the employer individuals in govt cannot relocate, cannot use non union workers, and faces the very real possibility of losing their job if they don't acquiesce to the union's demand. I believe for the employer employee relationship to be solid, both sides need to have leverage and something to lose. I believe that private sector unions are a good thing, but I believe that public sector unions create a one sided power imbalance that favors employees too much to create a properly working relationship. That being said there may be elements to this negotiation I'm not familiar with, so I'm open to changing my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public Sector Unions Create a One Sided Power Imbalance\n","id":"542cab0f-7f05-4d94-94b6-ecfabbc362ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>For instance a dam breaking and flooding a valley causes many transactions. The construction companies and machine makers will gain from the clean-up and replacement. The undertakers gain from a boost in revenue etc. etc. However the net result is a growth in GDP that takes us bak to square one inasmuch as the dam and houses are eventually replaced. Zero sum in that area and possibly zero sum overall when comparing insurers and suppliers. But not zero for the people and animals that die.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In practice, it's not the case that all producer and consumer surpluses are necessarily good. Disasters raise GDP by virtue of the recovery efforts and replacements but have negative consequences 'externalities' for people who suffer deaths and injury Not all transactions described in the claim above are beneficial.\n","id":"c339f870-167f-4671-b7b4-c663b404b26c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>If we edit the book because of the use of the n-word, we would need to edit most rap songs and videos for their use of the word.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a danger that censoring insensitive words in Huckleberry Finn might be used to justify censorship that is oppressive towards minorities.\n","id":"75030066-14c5-4978-b502-2d9c698f1fb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should paternity testing of minors require the consent of both parents?<|ARGUMENT|>A woman's lifetime risk of developing breast cancer is greatly increased if she has a mutation of the BCRA 1 or BCRA 2 gene. If a woman knows this, she can try to manage this risk with more regular breast screening.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Where a certain genetic condition is associated with possible future health problems, steps can be taken to mitigate or manage those risks.\n","id":"eebb4cf9-895a-47f6-a25a-25d3a33b76ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>Without the effect of the forbidden fruit, drugs would not be 'cool' anymore subcultures, arts, musicians, writers, etc.. Removing this effect would minimize the number of people who use drugs because they feel insecure or want to belong in a group.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The legalization of drugs means that they are taken, and disposed of, more safely and cautiously than in the current environment.\n","id":"e0e97e5b-5ba3-4954-bc04-157cb9a3f3f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We just started living together in August, and we are all friends from highschool. They don't recycle, for whatever reason. They don't care about the environment, they didn't recycle at home, etc. Well I asked them to recycle for multiple reasons. I care about the environment and also it saves space in the trashcan. They continue to not recycle, and it takes up a ton of space in the trashcan. If they recycled, it would cut down the amount of times we'd have to take the trash out. They throw full boxes in the trash can that take up wayy too much space. I said I wouldn't take out the trash unless they recycled because it's pointless to take out the trash more than we need to. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I won't take out the trash until my roommates start recycling,\n","id":"388f09cf-f3fb-448c-8ae8-0b09be5a340e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be further research on solar geoengineering.<|ARGUMENT|>The NDCs in the Paris Agreement provide little basis for the regulation of CDR or solar geoengineering technologies. Craik & Burns, Geoengineering special report, www.cigionline.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our social and institutional systems are not capable of controlling risk technologies on a long time scale. Corner & Pidgeon www.tandfonline.com\n","id":"aaa16a84-12c5-4402-ac84-397755327dfe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that everyone has the right to live peacefully and comfortably. Innocent life is sacred. However, once you begin forcefully taking away the rights of others, especially the right to peaceful existence, is when you forfeit YOURS. You no longer live peacefully, so you no longer are afforded the same as others. Think 'your rights stop where my rights begin'. Those I believe deserve to die cold blooded murderers, malicious rapists this doesn't apply to statutory or 'he said, she said' situations , child molestation, malicious animal abuse torture doesn't include killing animals for food , and yes, even recurring child or spousal abuse. And please, let me reiterate you CANNOT use religion to change my view. It won't work, won't happen, and I'll probably think you a fool for only being able to base your arguments off of something illogical that cannot be applied to the rest of the world. Let me have it, Reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am a liberal who is in strong support of the death penalty. In a non-religious way,\n","id":"f886a793-d86e-4752-a9b1-a8f20b8dcdce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it unethical to use ad-blockers?<|ARGUMENT|>An artist who creates and displays a sculpture anyone may look at has no right to dictate that onlookers cover one eye, view the sculpture via mirror, or require any other specific action of the user in order to view the public statue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Users agree to no contract requiring them to view one public thing in order to view another public thing. It is equally ethical to leave the room to urinate during a television commercial; one is not obligated to watch the commercial.\n","id":"a9ff5c12-a287-4b2a-83ec-45449a495a86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Horses have their ears stuffed with wet newspaper. They are blindfolded and their vocal chords are cut so they are unable to scream in pain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The bull is not the only animal suffering, hundreds of horses die long and agonising deaths as they are gored by the pain-crazed bull.\n","id":"13ea5224-27be-413b-9559-685c53e36271"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>Rajendra Pachauri, the former IPCC Chairman, has repeatedly made false claims about both the peer reviewed nature of the IPCC's source material, and other climate alarmist notions such as Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035. These false claims have never truly been reversed or corrected. Rajendra And Greenpeace Delinquent Teenager Book<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is much evidence suggesting group think, poor scientific practice and unsubstantiated scientific conclusions about the Earth's future climate regime and its impacts. If someone questions Climate Science these days they are subjected to all sorts of negativity or name calling.\n","id":"5fc30601-14ed-4532-b78c-15f4331c2ff4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd like to emphasize that I am referring strictly to mentally retarded people who cannot do anything themselves, lack the necessary cognitive ability to work, and are essentially nothing but a burden on society. I'm not referring to people like stephen hawking or even people with mental disabilities that are still functional one way or another. I know some people will say that it's inhumane to be killing these people but I totally cannot see it as anything BUT humane. It seems to me that being severely retarded is a deeply lonely, difficult, confusing, harsh, existence. It's like they're being kept alive while they brutally contort, scream, hit their helpers, and try to wriggle out of their bodies. It seems their either tormented or at the very least indifferent to anything that's going on. It makes very little sense too, that we feel these people need to be pumped with drugs, put in school with normal children at least when I saw in school, they were with us and given special helpers and resources. Why would we ever spend our resources on something like this rather then people that will benefit far more from them? Please change my view, I'm open to discussion on this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see any reason why we waste resources on severely retarded people, it's not a popular view and I'm open to having it changed\n","id":"695d1e7f-425d-4793-a25e-5bcb32ff533a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US have withdrawn from NAFTA?<|ARGUMENT|>Economists are currently in conflict about the accuracy of trade deficit figures due to measurement issues caused by re-exportation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trade deficits are not an important consideration in terms of the American economy's health.\n","id":"b7724f69-ead1-424b-b1f1-4dbb15c256a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Many companies organise naturist events, getaways and holidays, indicating that at least some people enjoy the freedom of nudity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people enjoy the feeling of freedom that nudity brings.\n","id":"bab16e0d-1fac-4f17-b966-e1ba99d2978e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Humans can and should slow down, stop and even reverse climate change. We simply need to reduce GHG emission drastically<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Just because we are starting something does not mean that we can stop it.\n","id":"4d01c5bc-2085-4f0d-ba32-00df3e176fcc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>An objective criteria, even if it exists, may not be the greatest indicators of good potential parenting; other, less tangible factors such as mental health or a propensity to be over-protective may be just as important, if not more so. As such, to lay emphasis on the factors that can be objectively assessed on the merits of their ease of assessment could fail to give an accurate representation of potential parenting capabilities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A test that evaluates you on purely 'pragmatic' criteria such as your economic well being, health or your degree of education cannot accurately predict whether you will be a good parent.\n","id":"df25ef61-36ef-4923-a105-24da92930cbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is drag turning mainstream hurting LGBT rights?<|ARGUMENT|>Jack Halberstam, a professor of gender studies, notes that the focus on Drag Queens rather than Drag Kings shows that society views femininity as malleable. In contrast, the power and privilege of masculinity is not transferable<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Drag culture makes fun of gendered norms of femininity. This comes across as a critique of women particularly when it is predominantly performed by gay cis\n","id":"0e3ee832-9ce8-4ff6-a3c6-09be6b5a4805"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is the ad in question. What I see is a woman eating a chocolate donut, and turning chocolate. I'm about as offended at this as I am at Violet turning violet in Charlie and the Chocolate factory. Blackface was all about making blacks look bad, and putting blacks down by keeping them out of hollywood and raping their ideas. I don't see how this ad pushes either of those two ideals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think the Dunkin Donuts ad was racist, or even a proper form of blackface,\n","id":"e52396e9-17d2-48bc-ab60-7155a255a147"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Poverty incentivizes the sale of drugs because it represents a high-risk\/high-reward opportunity for people inlow-income environments<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a positive relationship between poverty and substance drugs abuse.\n","id":"e3cd8c5d-2e2f-4b93-aed2-7a362594766b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate speech can cause in the recipient of the message direct, adverse physical and emotional changes. The repeated use of such expressions cause and reinforce the subordination of these minorities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It leads to further harmful consequences that might even involve crimes.\n","id":"9c76ba72-7c5a-43d2-8727-dc880505d2cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>For the problem of evil to imply that God does not exist, one would have to be talking about a God that, if he existed, would not allow evil in the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The problem of evil implies that God does not exist.\n","id":"26f12bd2-01e3-4626-bc53-5cb367f37bad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By we I mean developed nations. I think feeding populations that can not sustain theirselves should be left to die. If we feed these people they will have more children and further exacerbate the problem. I don't like having this view and would like if someone could explain why we should be artificially propping up starving populations. For example, if you put rabbits in a carrot patch and they ate all the carrots, you would have to throw more carrots into the patch and you could never stop because the population would be growing and they had already trampled on all the soil and degraded their environment to over their carrying capacity. I believe it would be fine to help populations by giving them tools to help themselves teach a man to fish but it seems many of these starving populations will require a major die off for them to become self sustainable. Also, I believe much of the aid we give Africa ends up in the wrong hands.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think we should feed starving Africans.\n","id":"6dd5bcbf-0e80-4a0e-93fb-4cf4961c2f9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Natural gas<|ARGUMENT|>Electrical appliances can create electrical fields that have negative effects on human health. This should be avoided.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gas appliances do not create unhealthy electrical fields in the home.\n","id":"e3de6c41-c1d1-43c6-965b-17bf88aeacad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TW for SA I'm unsure of where to post this.  seems like a good place because I am looking for a contrasting perspective, of which I know there is plenty. My fear is illogical but real. I really do want to change my view. St. Patrick's Day is one of two days a year that is consistently difficult for me, no matter what. The other day is the anniversary of my rape. I stay home on St. Patrick's Day because it represents to me a day that celebrates my rapist. He is Irish, he roofied my Jameson, and by assaulting me, he created a phobia of anything that reminds me of that night. I have made great progress to reclaim my life since the night he took everything from me in exchange for PTSD. With the help of therapists and psychiatrists I have desensitized myself to most of my triggers. I am generally happy and healthy. But St. Patrick's Day still knocks me down years later. Could someone from Ireland comment on this post to tell me something light hearted about this holiday, their culture, or their values? It's a peculiar request, I know. And I will likely wince at the responses. But I want to make progress. I want to heal. I do not intend to generalize the Irish culture into something to be feared. Honestly, I worry about sounding racist. My phobia came from a specific traumatizing event and I want to work through it. I do not want to harbor any hate in my heart. Logically I know that my fear isn't rational. I obviously do not think that my rapist represents the entire country. But in my head, he does. I want to change this. I would really appreciate your sensitivity. Thanks, and have a happy St. Patrick's Day weekend. TL DR Help me create new, positive associations with St. Patrick's Day. A light hearted or uplifting anecdote or fact that relates to Ireland is what I am looking for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I fear St. Patrick's Day\n","id":"70789326-0706-4c38-a3ea-be2291068308"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Seattle pass a big-business tax to pay for homelessness and affordable housing services?<|ARGUMENT|>Seattle's homelessness crisis is largely due to these businesses because the tech boom that has seen an influx of highly paid tech workers into the city has caused housing and rental prices to skyrocket, making it inaccessible to many.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Large businesses are directly responsible for Seattle's housing affordability and homelessness crises and should be required to pay to fix them.\n","id":"fad3cdcd-f314-49cf-a02a-d6fed6f326eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Ecoparks use ecological landscape features to reduce watering maintenance while enhancing wildlife and human values. www.ijern.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Educational benefits and research can be equally achieved by Eco Parks\n","id":"87e3ec3f-c02e-447f-8798-fcaf926886fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If a Scientific study is planning to go ahead in a perfectly ethical way, why should religious beliefs stop it from taking place? I think this because in my opinion science explains how things happen and how this causes other things to happen This is why particle physics and cosmology are very important to me , Religion trys to explain why things happen when science cannot explain them, these topics often relate to things that cannot be studied such as what happens after death, ect. This leads me to think that religion should accept scientific theorys even if it contradics their own beliefs while this sounds very bias, why should testable facts give way to old, untested speculation? NB This was written rather early in the morning, if clarification is needed, just ask.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious beliefs have no place stopping scientific research.\n","id":"a4688c71-155d-4ccd-b099-a42d35f259a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before you dismiss me as some angsty teenage atheist, please hear me out. I am actually interested in having my view changed. First, let me give you a little background to explain why I feel the way that I do about the concept of a supernatural being, particularly those held as deities by the major world religions. I was raised in a somewhat fundamentalist Christian household, and I fully believed the majority of what I was taught until around the age of 16. Even when I would question some things, I could usually find satisfactory answers to my questions through research or by talking to a pastor, youth group leader, family member or friend. However, as I got older and was became friends with people who held world views that starkly contradicted my own, I started questioning some of the more basic concepts of my faith not out of rebellion or disdain, but simply out of a desire to learn more. In fact, at this point I thought that it was simply God\u2019s way of making me a stronger Christian, and that once I found the answers I was looking for I would be able to confidently explain them to anyone who asked me the same questions. However, as time went on, I continued to pray, read, and talk about the doubts I was having, but I ended up coming to the conclusion that there were irreconcilable contradictions within the Bible and within the concept of God or at least the God of Christianity, at that point . When I stopped believing in God, it was not a decision, but simply a realization that I no longer thought that the things I had learned my entire life were completely true. That all happened a few years back. Since then I have had a few back and forth periods between trying to believe again and completely rejecting anything having to do with religion, but as I spent more time at college and had more time to think about and explore my beliefs, I have started to feel more and more that the idea of God is no more than a fairy tale to help people feel better about a world and a life that can be somewhat bleak at times. I still try to respect my family\u2019s beliefs, because they really do try to respect mine as well, but the more time I spend apart from the church, the more I realize how silly it all sounds to me. Additionally, I have now had some time to look into other religions as well, and despite their differences and my admittedly limited knowledge of them compared to Christianity , I find that most of them fall into the same category fantastical stories, which are well intentioned and arguably decent as moral guides, but most likely largely fictional. I acknowledge that most of the figureheads of the religions i.e. Jesus, Muhammad, etc. were real people, but I think they were nothing more than philosophical leaders who were deified after their deaths. So now that I\u2019ve explained why I don\u2019t believe in any god, here is what I do believe. I believe that science represents the best of our knowledge and understanding of the world. While we do not know everything, and we never will, I do not see that as a reason to fill in the gaps with supernatural explanation. As long as we continue to pursue more knowledge and advancement through the rigor of scientific experimentation and theory, we will learn as much as we can about the universe we live in, and that is good enough for me. I believe that when we die, we simply cease to exist, and as such I believe it is important to make as much out of this life as possible. I believe that any religion is a largely primitive and illogical construct created simply out of the human desire to believe that there is more to life than meets the eye, and that religion as a whole will largely disappear at some point in the future of the human race. You could change my view by convincing me of one of a few things. A I have only completely rejected religion because of my fundamentalist upbringing, and a lesser form of Christianity or some other religion might fit into a logical view of the world. B Science and religion specifically one of the major world religions are not mutually exclusive, and can instead complement one another for a more complete understanding of life. I should add that simply stating that believing in God would be a good thing will not be enough. Just because something would be nice or convenient does not mean I can force myself to believe it. Addendum In case anyone is wondering, the reason I want to have my view changed is simple. Where I live, most people are religious, and I feel that it would greatly help my relationship with a lot of people if I at least believed in something, even if I never return to a full belief in Christianity. Furthermore, I am currently dating a girl who is absolutely amazing and with whom I mesh perfectly in just about every other way, but she is a Christian although not nearly as fundamentalist as my family and has expressed some concern about my lack of faith. While she has not tried at all to push me towards changing that aspect of myself, I would hate for that to be the one thing that stands between us and long term happiness, so I\u2019m taking the initiative. That may seem like a cheap reason to want to change my entire world view, but it is what it is and honestly, maybe having something to believe in wouldn\u2019t be so bad for me. So there you have it. I may be barking up the wrong tree since I know reddit doesn\u2019t have a whole lot of outspoken religious people, but if anyone feels up to the challenge, please Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe God is a completely illogical concept with no basis in reality and was created solely to help us cope with our mortality.\n","id":"de71ed8f-2031-40d0-b128-ea283b3d36b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>A person who hears about a being so powerful that he can satisfy conditions that cannot be satisfied could have emotional, intellectual, and\/or behavioral reactions that are meaningful experiences to that person. Even absurdity can invoke meaningful states of hope, awe, confusion, or wonder that motivate action.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That a being can satisfy conditions that cannot be satisfied may be neither meaningless nor irrelevant to the being or to other beings. It would be both meaningful and relevant that a being could be so powerful that it was not constrained by logic.\n","id":"f6e34840-4623-479b-88a6-c98590c3e60b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that laws and regulations should always be based on fact either immediately apparent facts or well established in the hard sciences . As such, regulations which have arbitrarily defined values may never be just. I realize that I\u2019m using a very nebulous definition of \u2018just\u2019, but I really can\u2019t define it properly using the words I have here. While my view primarily pertains to government, regulations made by private individuals may also be unjust under my view. My view has nothing to do with the process at which the law is made, be it by a legislated by a democratically elected legislature or by decree by a dictator, my view concerns the end result of the legislation, the \u2018letter of the law\u2019 if you must. As an example to demonstrate my view the legal age to purchase alcohol is 18 at least where I am . I find this to be unjust because the legislature has failed to prove that this arbitrary limit of 18 is objectively \u2018better\u2019 than a limit of 17 or 19, or even a limit of 17 years and 364 days. This, I feel is an unjust regulation. A second example would be that to be considered drunk driving, the blood alcohol level has to be above 80mg 100ml of blood again, where I am, YMMV depending on where you are . However, the legislature has again failed to prove why the limit should be 80 and not 79 or 81, or even 79.9999999\u2026 Again, this, I feel is unjust. An anticipated counter argument to this would be that governments need to regulate these things and so a line somewhere must be drawn. My response to this would be that while I accept that governments have the right to regulate, unless they can prove that the line should be where they want it to be, this \u2018line\u2019 is always unjust. Examples of what I would consider \u2018good\u2019 laws regulations would be either regulations which are absolute \u2018no smoking\u2019, or regulations which have been reasonably proven to be justified a law being passed which mandated the 85th percentile rule to be followed when setting highway speed limits I think the science behind that is pretty sound, however, that\u2019s beside the point . Another good example of what I would consider a just law would be the EU regulations on the maximum residue levels of pesticides to give an example, the limit of mercury in tree nuts is 0.02mg kg. This limit is derived from scientific studies based on I believe what amount of mercury taken would cause ill effects in humans or some research to that effect . The point is that this limit is based upon reasonably convincing scientific evidence, and hence I would feel it is just. As I am not a utilitarian, I find arguments that argue that these laws benefit people society and hence must be just not convincing. I am also not a \u2018practicaist\u2019 in that I don\u2019t believe that just because something has to be a certain way means that it is right. I am looking forward to see how my view is flawed, so <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regulations\/laws made on the basis of arbitrary limits are unjust\n","id":"f94264b9-b9e9-4fbd-8da8-af5a859df728"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>An organism is composed of multiple cells that cooperate to aid in their survival and reproduction. Cells specialize in function to aid in this process and in some cases some cells are sacrificed for the good of the collective. Society can be viewed as a superorganism. Just as individual nerve cells don't understand the thoughts of an organism, individual humans do not understand the purpose of society. For the good of the organism there are mechanisms to eliminate damaged cells so they do not harm other cells, For the good of society mechanisms to eliminate damaged individuals should be used instead of trying to extend the life of all individuals. The only value of individuals is their contribution to society. EDIT many have argued for the value of human life but have not argued that individuals are more important than society. EDIT to change my view you would need to provide evidence that society has a purpose and that it is to provide a good quality of life to all its members. In general, the only purpose of life is to survive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the purpose of society is not to provide a good quality of life for all individuals\n","id":"8539a660-4ba6-49f9-9205-882bfe8a1d1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ground zero mosque<|ARGUMENT|>New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said in August of 2010 at the height of the ground zero mosque debate: \"This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan. . I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetimes, as important a test. And it is critically important that we get it right.\"2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banning ground zero mosque would violate sep of church\/state\n","id":"9e5ad1d4-539f-41eb-997a-b2563deeef3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will man-made climate change cause human extinction?<|ARGUMENT|>Heat Waves strong enough to cause human death do not occur everywhere in the world.For example: cold regions like Himalayas<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Heat Waves can't possibly cause whole humanity to die.\n","id":"ddfec402-9a2f-4e75-babc-250b3a0d23fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if students are capable and intelligent, they are still going through an education process and it is unlikely they can confront someone more experienced To counter this and avoid no-platforming, events can be designed as debates, where two speakers with the same experience and capacity discuss opposing views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No-platforming is unnecessary to solve the disparate balance of arguments, because schools could require controversial speakers to share the stage with peers that defend an opposed stance.\n","id":"bea382f1-27a1-4fcc-92c8-806224ee62b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion has been a great pillar for humanity, although religious leaders must put their structures and messages at the service of \u201cEducating\u201d people on global values. Which means a strong work on individuals and civil society as a way to replace the lack of action from global leaders and institutions. Is it time for a solid joint action from all religious leaders on a coordinated organisation towards peace values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has motivated numerous selfless acts such as volunteering and charity.\n","id":"acfa5439-31a3-4ec3-9fe2-b6f4fc5f5b8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>Drug trafficking is the most lucrative form of illicit business, worth about $2.1 trillion per year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The legalization of drugs deprives criminals of a substantial source of their income.\n","id":"ae964d82-ed56-43b1-991d-f0dcb283670d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sled dog racing should be banned.<|ARGUMENT|>Sled racing supports tourists seeking the \"wild West\", igloos, polar bears--not the most accurate view of the realities of the north.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sled dog racing promotes stereotypes of living in the Arctic that misrepresent life in the North.\n","id":"584a2409-0428-4c7c-8c23-9498ae6ec716"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Specific to the US but I'd like to hear of advertisements in foreign countries as well Reasoning Political party affiliation is rarely changed from one party to another and the probability of a change decreases as a person ages. For example, someone in the 18 20 age category may be 10 likely to change their affiliation but someone in the 40 49 age category may be 2 likely to change their affiliation. Ads were designed to evoke emotional responses and get people to vote. Those that felt suppressed were made to feel more suppressed by the ads in order to get them to do something about it. The more suppressed a group feels, the more likely they are to take action regardless of the validity of the suppression. Those that saw false claims for party A also saw false claims for party B. They saw a massive amount of political mudslinging and became so jaded by these acts they voted less, as a whole, than if they never saw false claims for either party. Some of the non voting individuals saw their actions as silent protest against the status quo. Early and late polls for political opinions had biased sample sizes because the polls were based on previous voting patterns. Those that didn't vote before were less likely to be in a poll and those that did were more likely to be in a poll. It's not that political opinions in the US changed much at all 1 so the ads were designed to get some individuals to vote 2 and others to not vote 3 . Only the younger generation, and the passing older generation, are changing the aggregate political feelings in the US. Those in the middle, who have opinions and have not passed away, hold the same beliefs they did years ago.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social media political ads do not change views, only voter turnout.\n","id":"656cd9b1-0f5d-4375-b8bf-24a5ec5db254"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>Those who are willing to break the law through either aggravated battery or other violent crimes will not be deterred from owning guns simply because it is made illegal. This will effectively guarantee that only criminals will own guns, giving them a distinct advantage over unarmed, law abiding citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not having a guaranteed right to bear arms puts potential victims at risk of being unable to defend themselves.\n","id":"6c4f5f58-1ddf-4a7c-a27f-995d0f302e50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>.FLAC and .WAV files are much bigger than .mp3s and I can hardly tell a quality difference even with good equipment. Why should I upgrade my lovely mp3 music collection to .FLAC or another lossless format ? What is about the future of .mp3? I think it'll still be relevant in 10 20 years. Do you think that with disk space getting cheaper, .mp3s will be less used in the future? I think that mp3 is a acceptable format and flac wav or other lossless formats are a waste of disk space. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that mp3 is a good format and flac\/wav is a disk space waste.\n","id":"31c9332c-e04d-4a8b-ae80-8c40dd20fd03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just as a disclaimer so it doesn't appear like I'm some random civilian sitting at their comfy desk typing this. I'm an E 4 Specialist 19K in the US Army. I have no experience working with the IDF of which I see talked about a lot in this topic, so I can't talk to that as a point of discussion. I've seen arguments from both sides over this, but it's never really gotten beyond physical capability emotional stuff. So that's what I'll mostly base this on for now. I'm, as of this post, vehemently against women in combat roles for a few big reasons. First reason being the obvious, that putting someone who, on average, is considerably less physically strong to their male counterpart puts not only themselves, but their entire team at risk. I'll give a quick scenario I like to refer to when this comes up just so you know I'm not saying something like If they can't run a 6 minute mile they're weak Scenario You're a 175lbs dude carrying 75lbs of equipment and you're shot in the leg. Who would you rather have come to your rescue? An average guy, vs. an average girl? Chances are you'd chose the guy because it's far more likely they'll be able to carry your ass to safety. If you get the average girl, you're more likely to be ineffectively moved, and not only are you at a higher risk now, but the average girl trying to move you is exposed for longer, meaning she's also more likely to be injured, and you now have a higher risk of the situation snowballing from there. If you're here to argue, I'm assuming you've seen the Marine Corp's studies on Women Mixed Gender units being less effective by a large margin I think it was 69 less effective in a mixed group, if I remember correctly. This wasn't done on purely women units, however, to the best of my knowledge. So to state the ultimate point I'd like to be convinced on is it viable to give women combat roles given their biological disadvantages for the vast majority of females, this also includes higher risks of bodily injury and such, and their apparent combat ineffectiveness? Wouldn't this be effectively putting lives military strength at risk just to cater to someone's feelings? As of right now, I can't see a strategical or logical reason to allow entrance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women don't belong in Combat Arms in any capacity in the Military.\n","id":"fdd9ccca-7a15-4602-a11a-638b8c3c74e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Deep sea oil and gas exploration in the Great Australian Bight should be banned<|ARGUMENT|>Bight oil exploration was a key issue of concern in the federal elections, raised by the South Australians, environmentalists, and general population.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inadequate community consultation was conducted by the Australian Government before these exploration leases were issued in the Bight.\n","id":"9685f45d-8985-442a-8549-efe41173421f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When ever I go into a gallery and see a blank canvas selling for millions, or a piece of hessian nailed to a block of wood winning an art competition over a piece that likely took days to complete, if not weeks, It actually angers me. seeing the little effort they put in and then a paragraph explaining why it's good, all I can think is that without the paragraph the art would be nothing more than a canvas, a pile of mud, a stick, or an unmade bed. I enjoy reading the paragraph because it is often insightful, but I do not class the subject as actually being art. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think modern art is terrible\n","id":"c001068f-26f7-4487-84c3-392032d39fb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to preface this post by saying I am only 16 years old, so I acknowledge that I probably don't have the same experience and wisdom of most people on this sub. Also, please forgive my terrible wording, I find it difficult to articulate my thoughts. In my opinion, the meaning of life is to pursue happiness. Because of this, every decision in life is made with one's own happiness and well being in mind. People donate to charity, but they don't really do it for others, they do it to feel good about themselves, or to brag to their friends. So, if you are willing to help people, would you still be willing to help people if it didn't make you feel better about yourself, or somehow improve the quality of your life? I don't think so. Nobody will ever do anything that in no way benefits themselves. Any time that I do anything for anyone, I am consciously aware that I am doing it to feel good. With these thoughts in my mind, I am incredibly unhappy with the state of humanity. So please, change my view. Edit Thanks for helping, everyone. First post, didn't understand the delta system, so had to edit a few replies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mankind is inherently selfish, and the motivation behind any \"unselfish\" behaviour is not truly unselfish.\n","id":"f0ad737f-43bf-4396-a24d-9b5f32dd5d03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NATO membership, extend to Georgia and Ukraine<|ARGUMENT|>NATO has already promised membership to both states, at its Bucharest meeting in March 2008. Regardless of whether this was a good decision, it must now be upheld or the credibility of the alliance will be severely undermined. If not, Russia will be rewarded for its aggressive behaviour and know that NATO can be bullied into backing down. And potential friends and supporters of NATO throughout the world will know that its promises cannot be trusted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NATO has already promised membership to both states, at its Bucharest meeting in March 2008. Regard...\n","id":"d7202aa6-3a62-4205-808e-924f10b5463e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bitcoin Be Adopted As Legal Tender Worldwide?<|ARGUMENT|>Bitcoin's volatility had dropped 98% in January 2019 compared to the same time the previous year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Data shows that Bitcoin's volatility has been steadily declining over its 10 year history.\n","id":"f6b53f0c-4ac1-48d8-876b-5d8df71e57b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>Further disenfranchisement serves no purpose and perpetuates the cycle with potentially disastrous outcomes. There are examples of former terrorists successfully counselling others to reintegrate them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be a chance for repentance, rehabilitation and reintegration for those who made the mistake of joining ISIS and regretted it.\n","id":"318d1449-afea-4f18-84a9-c4e363eaa6dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have known for several years now that diamonds are bullshit The tradition of giving a diamond as part of a marriage proposal was invented by a clever marketing campaign from the 1940s. The reason we all believe you're supposed to spend three month's salary on a diamond? Because the people selling the diamonds told us so. Aside from all that, it doesn't make good financial sense to purchase a diamond when you could put that money towards a down payment on a house or an amazing honeymoon. Even if you can afford it, spending thousands of dollars on a ring when there are so many charities you could be donating to instead seems immoral. Two more things Giving someone an expensive ring so they'll marry you feels a bit too much like buying a wife for my tastes Women who wear diamonds come off as flashy and showoff y Men should start refusing to buy such an outlandish overpriced gift just so women will agree to marry them, and women should start seeing diamond engagement rings for the load of shit that they are. Go ahead, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is ridiculous to spend three months' salary on a diamond engagement ring.\n","id":"755709b6-9a7c-41b6-9eaa-ed1a0df72d6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Campaigns only be Funded by the Government?<|ARGUMENT|>In Britain, each party is limited to spending $29.5 million in the year before the election.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Presidential Campaigns in the US are outliers compared to the vast majority of elections.\n","id":"0a8be5a1-46a8-4a66-990b-7bdac8bd2512"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is a common topic of discussion whether a man should be required to pay child support in one circumstance or another. Many arguments in favour of requiring the man to pay rely on the idea that his situation was avoidable if he were to do something different such as be more careful with contraception, trust your partner, etc. I believe this logic does not work in the case where the man did not consent to the sex that conceived the child, since his options in avoiding the situation are shifted over into murky territory of 'try to not be raped' which is fairly shaky. What I made here was not specifically an argument against a case of statutory rape, but rather against a case of non statutory rape where the man would have no agency at all in the matter. However, and this would be the point I'm most shaky on, I find it inconsistent to employ the reasoning that a minor had agency in a case of statutory rape unless one were to, if not in part then at least in a very significant way, also surrender the idea that a minor cannot consent to sex even if their underage conscience and sense of reasoning told them it was a good idea. To put it another way, I am uncomfortable with the idea of granting a person agency in an act for the purpose of determining their responsibility for care of a child, then granting no agency for the purpose of determining whether someone had committed statutory rape. To clarify, I don't have a problem with the latter half of the explanation. In short, the view could be summarised as follows It is wrong to require someone to pay child support if they did not consent to sex and thus had no agency at all in the matter. The reasoning of statutory rape laws are based in well founded concerns that minors cannot provide meaningful consent to sexual acts. Not applying that reasoning in determining whether a person should pay child support is inconsistent. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unjust to require men to provide child support for a child if that child was the result of statutory rape by the woman.\n","id":"a391264a-7449-4ca4-ae35-4425436f529c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Zoos act as an affordable family-friendly arena for animal awareness and sensitization for people not as connected to nature and eco-trips.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoos are a tradition, and a visit to a zoo is a wholesome family activity.\n","id":"1ba71a7a-29ee-4f7e-a06d-ea5954384f8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the context of the new threat to filibuster a gun control bill I am wondering what the point of a filibuster was. As in I recognise its utility, but why is it rather common and why is it even allowed?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A filibuster has no place in Parliament and should be heavily penalised, if not illegal.\n","id":"13156909-c241-48ec-ad68-76f9e325dc2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Stop the failed supply-side economic experiment in the USA<|ARGUMENT|>Estimates of the amount of cash that non-financial U.S., European and Japanese companies are sitting on in the US is as high as $5 trillion<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wealth hording prevents the wealth from being used for society's common good.\n","id":"04300a36-7a59-4172-a2c7-067a7e90931c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>British companies such as LK Bennett, Reiss and Issa, have expanded to the US after the Duchess of Cambridge wore some of their items, thanks to the international exposure it offered them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The so-called 'Kate effect', whereby items of clothing worn by the Duchess of Cambridge sell-out, is estimated to be worth over \u00a31 billion.\n","id":"4622cd57-0604-4edd-bd97-1bd9ea4a5ae8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Billions of animals are killed each year for human consumption from factory farming. In comparison animal testing kills a fraction of this number. The animals that are killed are likely to help or alleviate the pain of many humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals are used as a commodity for food, so the line should not be drawn at scientific research that could save human lives.\n","id":"c29b4ab8-6423-4c55-b192-7312087675ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Much time is spent praying. Though many say their prayers are answered, evidence of a causal link between their prayers and the outcome that occurred is lacking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most religions use the you-have-nothing-to-lose-by-believing argument. Of course you do: There's your time, your independence, your objectivity, and your cash.\n","id":"55ea5408-a492-461f-bd9f-fae70f75ed26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please, read. This is completely unrelated to this week's shootings. So here I am, recently kicked 22, and the older I get, the more mixed opinions I get about racism ethnicism, nationalism, you name it . Mind you, there are not any minorities of Arabs, Asians, Blacks, Mormons, Muslims, you name it in my country, if I really had to scapegoat an ethnicity, that would be gipsies emphasis on if I really had to . What I've wanted to say with this is, it's not an actual problem here, which might lead to a little skewed or biased thoughts below. As far as I see it, regarding racism, there are three kinds of people. The very first group, say they are the open minded, enlightened or group 1. These people honestly don't have anything against religion, skin color, nationality, ethnicity, and so on. Example girl sits right next to a Pakistani on the subway. She does not even care that the other person is a Pakistani she believes that she simply sit next to another human. The second group, which in my opinion is the largest, claims they are not racists, actually, they might be against racism, but once you become friends with them, start knowing them a little bit more, boom, it becomes obvious that they are indeed racist to an extent. Probably totally racist. Example girl sits right next to the Pakistani mentioned above, but her only reason to do so is the fact that there are not any other unoccupied seats. The third group are neonazis, white supremacists, people who are openly racist and willing to do hate speech, hate crime and whatnot. Example girl does not even think about sitting right next to the Pakistani person. And as we all know, especially in the light of recent events, it can get way worse. And here I am by no means a special snowflake, not openly racist, but I do have preferences. I prefer Coca Cola over Pepsi, gel pen over ballpoint pen, X people over Y people, Y people over Z people. The only reason the term racism even exists is the involvement. If I am a, say, black person, of course black hate speeches will hurt my ears because I feel involved, it is against me. And everything like that crimes against ethnicities, genocides, everything mentioned above is bad, no denying that. ^ Yeah, I get it, apples and oranges, products and humans but still, I don't get it. Not because I'm edgy , I just don't see how I can dislike ballpoint pens because I have a hard time writing with them, but if I have had bad experiences with a certain ethnicity, I just have to shut the f up, else I'm frowned upon. But why exactly is it bad if I like certain groups of people more? Why is it forbidden, stupid or dull? It does not escalate into anything bad. This is the point where I would like you guys to weigh in, to show the flaw in my logic or dare I say theory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate crimes are bad. But racism is not bad, neither good. Racism is just a preference among humans.\n","id":"8b561df2-7081-4194-966b-8352be4b8115"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>The role of a mayor, which is to lead an executive body while cooperating with a legislature, is very similar to the role of president.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being a mayor still provides valuable experience which would be useful for being President.\n","id":"85a2143e-3bfd-41d0-9ebe-ee174cf580b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pros Don't have to get up early in the morning. Keep your bedsheets clean. More focused and willing to do it, instead of staying frozen, wasting water and not doing anything. Better shower sex foreplay, if your spouse wakes up at a different time morning shower sex just isn't gonna happen. Cons Waking up in the morning won't have anything to fully wake you up with If you sweat in your sleep really bad, you'll have to shower again. Despite the cons, I believe that showering at night is the best option of the two. I used to wake up in the mornings and shower, but after trying it out and showering at night, the extra hour of sleep really made a difference on how awake I would be in class and work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best time to shower is in the late afternoon before bed, as opposed to in the morning.\n","id":"5ef7cdcf-5ce7-480f-b707-e5276ff5466a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Compulsory voting can increase political inequality by increasing turnout for some parties more than another depending on the type of punishment for not voting since the punishment will be more or less severe for certain people and therefor certain political parties.Compulsory Voting Can Increase Political Inequality: Evidence From Brazil<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Punishing non-voters disproportionately targets poorer people in society who are unable to afford the fine.\n","id":"60e437f7-37a3-4260-b9c1-62c645dc7f27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>A patriarchal status quo does not exist in many western societies, as evidenced by females in positions of power. Both the current UK Prime Minister and the recent USA runner up in the elections are women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women are able to climb to the very top of society now.\n","id":"37b1e0ed-598c-4843-8679-b1da3442f26a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Biofuel<|ARGUMENT|>\"if the price of oil would be about 15 percent higher were it not for biofuels\u2014then that comes to a savings of about $18 per barrel at current oil prices. The United States will import about 5 billion barrels of oil this year. Saving $18 for each barrel, that adds up to a savings for the country as a whole of $90 billion in foreign oil payments this year, and a reduction in OPEC global revenues overall of more than $180 billion. This, in addition to cutting another $20 billion from our oil bill by reducing the amount of petroleum that we import. Not bad, considering the pittance that American taxpayers actually shell out for the nation\u2019s corn ethanol program: only about $4 billion per year, through a subsidy of 51 cents per gallon.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Subsidizing biofuels helps lower gas prices and save taxpayers money.\n","id":"fec1e63a-2cdd-43fa-aedc-a6eda80890fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States close Guantanamo Bay?<|ARGUMENT|>The maintenance of international legal norms against torture and indefinite detention, one of the key means of enforcing human rights around the world, depends upon compliance by a large number of countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guantanamo Bay weakens American soft power bay diplomacy when advocating against human rights abuses abroad.\n","id":"c3e37069-f63e-40b1-8dca-f6649d905fec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that the law of a voting age is redundant, my reasons for this are as follows. I don't agree with the notion of not being 'responsible' or 'educated' enough to make a political decision. For a start, many young people below the voting age are incredibly well versed in politics and national affairs. Some more so than many adults. Should adults with mental handicaps be allowed to vote? Yes obviously. And even if their decision is one of pure emotion and brashness with no political or socio economic knowledge, there's nothing wrong with that, to vote purely of ideals and passion is a perfectly normal thing to do. The point of a democracy is that there is no objectively right or wrong parties to vote for. It's discrimination, no other way to put it. Replace We cant give young people the vote because they wont use it correctly with We cant give female black homosexual old people the vote because they wont use it correctly and this becomes much more obvious. The ability to directly influence the way your country is run is a human right, and human rights are not distributed based on bars to entry. You may say that age is different, and yes, when it comes to drugs gambling working ect this is true. But that is because these are things where a child is at risk of harm or being exploited themselves directly, they are not on a comparable level to voting where at worst a child is misinformed by a political party Because that never happens to adults If the child is too young to post their ballot directly, then the vote is given to the child's guardian. Obviously there is no way a four month old baby can voice their intent, which is why their vote should go to the person people who have their best interest at heart their parents. A baby still needs to eat food and have clean clothes, it is still a member of the society it is growing up in, and will one day have to study and work in said society. In the rare cases where the child has no legal guardian or the parents have conflicting choices then the vote would be unable to be made, this is not ideal but there are not really any ways round this I have held this opinion all my life, I am now old enough to vote and am an active voter but still feel that many of the people younger than me are not having their voices heard. I have had this view challenged quite a few time but so far no one has given me a convincing enough argument, I hope that if my idea is naive that you might reveal that to me. Thanks For a bit of context into my experience with this my friends and I were all few months off turning 18 when the UK Brexit referendum happened. Myself and most of my peers felt incredibly powerless from our lack of ability to influence the outcome directly and the fact that the final decision was within a such a small margin that young people could have genuinely swung the tides left a very sour taste in our mouths.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You should be able to vote at any age, ie from the moment you are born.\n","id":"f77d0505-1329-4a06-9c5a-339e695749f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>i.e. to not try my best to change their view. I understand there are areas where the answer is supposed to be subjective, such as someone's favorite color. I also recognize that I am not immune to being wrong. My main view is that if I disagree with someone, regardless of who is right, we owe it to each other to find out the truth. Two of my premises are that finding the truth is the ethical thing to do, and that it is desirable for all parties involved to know the truth. Another premise for this belief that our views can be changed trough discussion, logic, and critique. By a clash of ideas, so to speak. I believe that views ideas must be questioned and put to the test, as they will hold up on their own if true, and be revised if wrong. It is therefore disrespectful and unethical for either party to avoid this clash of ideas, as the outcome of this would be ignorance for at least one party. Based on this view, I also hold the following Even if the discussion's uncomfortable, I should not give up until an agreement is reached. This is a selfless act, not a selfish one. Agreeing to disagree hinders discussion and progress, so if I believe I'm right, agreeing to disagree would be selfish as I'd be witholding the truth. Truth should be shared, and by agreeing to disagree, I'm giving up on truth in favor of comfort. My behavior should be consistent with my principles views , which is why I want them challenged so I can revise them and improve my behavior which I believe to be flawed .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's unethical and disrespectful to let someone \"be wrong\".\n","id":"acb1abd3-0b18-4949-84db-7228289408fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>BAFF puts pressure on the British government to improve the military through campaigns, and provides an independent voice, including media relations, parliamentary lobbying and representations to central and local government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unions can make sure that bad treatment of the military doesn't go unnoticed by the public, making the government look bad if it refuses to make improvements.\n","id":"f26bf7f9-6512-4579-978e-ea48627a751f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Lottery should be an integral component of democratic political systems<|ARGUMENT|>It can be run on a local, municipal, regional, provincial, national, continental or even global level, without many changes and without hurting the democratic underpinnings of the lottery.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's a very scalable system, as long as statistical representation is maintained.\n","id":"4433fda7-2574-44c6-81ec-8dc2a6f11751"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the Seinfeld episode The Gymnast, George Costanza finds an eclair in the trash can and proceeds to eat it. His girlfriend\u2019s mother now believes he\u2019s a bum because he ate \u201cgarbage\u201d. I believe George is catching some unnecessary flack for this, and he was not eating garbage. Position of the Eclair the eclair was on the paper doily thing that presumably came with it, face up, resting on a magazine. Had the magazine been another food item, there would be no question that this eclair would be garbage. Jerry\u2019s argument \u201cAdjacent to refuse is refuse\u201d makes sense initially, but there has to be a line whereby refuse and non refuse border lest we label everything refuse . After all, the trash is in a bag, inside a can, resting on the floor, which touches the table etc. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"George Costanza did nothing wrong in eating the eclair\n","id":"bd312bbd-7c25-4f82-aab4-88c3868c1aad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>The USA has the highest rate of firearm related incidents in schools of any nation on Earth They are happening at an ever increasing rate as well as a slight increase in deadliness, based on number of fatalities and wounded.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is sad that after so many school shootings, we're still having this debate. Dying kids should be a red line for all.\n","id":"6f7ff980-7996-4138-9d9b-97149cb541d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We have domesticated dogs to listen to commands, follow orders, stay in line and protect us. We keep our pets locked up for hours while we go to school, work, or out with friends. All this for our own selfish pleasure of wanting to cuddle and feel loved by a furry friend. Dog may be \u201cman\u2019s best friend\u201d, but what is man to dog? We let them go outside but not without a wooden fence or leash and even go so far as to setting up an electric fence. Then we buy their love by sneaking them table scraps and giving them treats. It seems to me that we receive more by having dogs as pets than dogs do by being our pets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans enslave dogs\n","id":"78fdb937-9189-48ec-8386-78f7ca77cc92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is drag turning mainstream hurting LGBT rights?<|ARGUMENT|>San Francisco's Castro area is quickly becoming too expensive to live in for the working class and vulnerable members of the LGBT community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many gayborhoods have now become too expensive for working and middle class people to live there.\n","id":"631d1e26-8672-41d8-8a10-6e52140ff766"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok, here are the facts, alcohol is one of the most harmful drugs to you and to others. Tobacco not so much but still much worse than cannabis for example. I believe every single person educated in the matter thinks cannabis should be legalized, but that\u2019s beside the point. Ecstasy should be legal if alcohol is. Mushrooms should also be legal if alcohol is. Most people don\u2019t seem to think about the sheer hypocrisy of drinking a beer while condemning the \u201cpot smoker\u201d or the \u201cjunkie\u201d. Alcohol will kill you as much as ecstasy will. Really harmful drugs such as heroin and meth should be decriminalized and the addiction to these treated as an illness, not a crime. Most drugs are not as bad as people are led to believe, and it\u2019s about damm time that the educated in the matter do something about it and strive for legalization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most drugs should be legalized\n","id":"6f0b6fe6-9bb3-4c8a-bfe1-53d55d6abd1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Because low standard test grades cause budget cuts, the school values grades more than it's students value learning. Anyone with any common sense would have stopped this idea before it was implemented. If a school has low grades, that is most likely because it doesn't have enough money to teach it's kids. How would cutting the budget fix that? Every year, the STAAR Texas standard test, used to be TAKS sends my school into a panic, and we spend weeks having STAAR prep shoved down our throats. On test day, the school does everything short of a strip search to make sure no one is cheating. All of this just creates more test anxiety, which makes the problem worse. When you finish the test, you have to wait for everyone to finish, because you are creating a distraction by quietly opening a door apparently, 30 people waiting for you to finish is a smaller distraction . A lot of these unnecessary problems would be fixed if a school's budget depended on what it needs rather than the grades it gets on one test per year, and this test wasn't more important than the student actually learning the material.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"School budget relying on test grades is creating a lot of unnecessary problems.\n","id":"ab4622f5-4f5f-4395-b7f0-7e3cdaee56ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't necessarily think it was an inside job , however, there's a lot of things that don't add up. Perhaps the government knew it happened was happening and covered up some things about it. Even though the investigators knew nothing, how did they identify the 19 suspects so quickly. If they were so quick to identify the subjects, why weren't they on surveillance and why couldn't they stop them before? How could Mohammid Adda's sp? passport survive the crash that cremated him. How could it fly out of his pocket, fly out of the incinerated plane, flutter to the ground and end up in readable condition? Why would the 19 men need passports on domestic flights? And why would they even bring them on a suicide flight? How where the passports found but not the plane's voice recorders? Apparently the suitcase of one of the suspects was never loaded on to the plane, but ended up in the hands of investigators. It also had a bunch of incriminating evidence. Also, why would a terrorist on a suicide flight pack a suitcase?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think there's something fishy about the 9\/11 attacks.\n","id":"85a25f6a-2271-4941-8df9-d51616c5d97a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>make the raising of business and labour standards a prerequisite for developmental aid<|ARGUMENT|>As long as developing nations constantly keep employing poor labour standards, it will keep putting a strain on the global economy. This is because other countries will be pressured to do the same just to remain competitive. This creates a race to the bottom effect and would create \u201cpoor conditions and loss of freedom in the global South, and causes workers in the global North to lose their jobs to cheap outsourced labour\u201d.1 Higher labour standards in developing countries therefore also benefits developed countries. However the converse is also true; labels like \u2018fair trade\u2019 provide a guarantee of ethical quality and show that consumers are willing to pay more to ensure good labour standards. 1 \u2018Changing Global Trade Rules\u2019, International Labor Rights Forum,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When developing countries employ poor labour standards, other countries follow the example in order to be competitive\n","id":"4087cae7-2e63-414f-bebd-acb7bd3f40a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems like people always complain about our current representative democracy and the folks who are in it Congress , with good reason. The main goal of many senators and representatives is simply to get re elected, or otherwise help themselves, not to make good decisions for other people. Wouldn't a direct democracy work better? That way, less than half the nation would be complaining on each issue, no? I'm no political genius and I'm not exactly sure how direct democracies work differently than representative democracies on each level township, state, national , but I feel like it would all work out better if everyone got to vote on each issue. The main problem I see is for a bill like this to pass, it has to get through the HoR and the Senate, which is nearly impossible, since they would basically be signing away their jobs. I still want to know why we haven't tried yet. After all, this nation is Of the people, by the people, for the people, is it not? So what are the issues holding us back? Keep in mind I don't know too much about the government, so keep it simple if at all possible. EDIT My sources have informed me that a direct democracy requires people to vote on every issue. I was thinking more of a vote if you want type of thing, sort of like we currently have with elections. That way, we wouldn't be overwhelmed with decisions. EDIT 2 I see some flaws with a direct democracy, but I still see even more with a representative democracy. My view remains unchanged. Give me a solid reason why representative democracy is better for the U.S. than a direct democracy<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the United States should be a direct democracy.\n","id":"2e703c2d-ba87-469d-902e-563c8e71862d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Over the last year, my wife and I both mid 30s Northeastern US for perspective have lost about 120 pounds combined after switching gyms, her committing to going at least thrice a week, and going on Weight Watchers. We both started late last September and found that when we started was conducive to building healthy habits. The weather was warm enough to start the habit of getting regular outdoor exercise before, in our area, the weather got too cold and or the days too short. I walk a lot as it is but she even will take lunchtime walks if the weather isn't too cold. We had our hit of autumn flavors so being able to forsake them sooner was much easier to do in those early weeks were building a new habit can be crucial. By the time things rotated out, we were too entrenched in our new habits to care. In contrast, the typical New Year's start falls victim to that one usually will gain after the holiday season and that unless you are in a warm climate the weather is against you making the main option gym or nothing. We kept an unreal pace until this summer, where the hot and humid weather up here combined with summertime temptations has led us into a period of largely staying the same. We both have started diets in the summer before and for the opposite reasons of the winter it is hard to stick to it. The periods coming out of the solstices have the advantages of being isolated from Holiday Summer temptations and having temperate weather and tangible sunlight to allow for greater exercise. Therefore, these are the best times of year to start on a path to getting healthy. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best time of year to overhaul a diet and exercise plan is early Autumn or early Spring.\n","id":"be243fe5-4675-4fb4-aadf-955854777a5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Advertising is drawing attention to something , in the business sense of the word specifically it means drawing attention to your product so that people who need the product know it exists, and buy it. Marketing is manipulating your audience into wanting a product they dont need, most commonly through taking advantage of popular insecurities. It has plays a role in eating disorders and other mental illnesses in young girls you may not think its a significant role but it undeniably plays a role , and fast food marketing plays a role in the western obesity crisis. There are also marketing tactics that are designed for children so that the kid will pester their parents to buy something. It is the super rich manipulating the neuroses and insecurities of the rest of society in order to perpetuate the wealth gap, it is inherently manipulative and unethical and there is no good reason for it to be legal. To change my view, demonstrate a good ethical reason for marketing being legal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marketing as opposed to advertising is fundamentally unethical and should not be legal.\n","id":"0b565d3d-6e02-461a-b4d6-d5bf498e2c50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A little history on me is important. I was raised with no religion, came to America from South America, have an insane irritating curiosity, and most importantly weird. Also I would say on a scale of 1 10 I'm an 8. If that my help someones argument Raised with no particular religion in mind, I wasn't really given any set of rules when I grew up. My parents were ones to certainly give them, and they almost always had a logic to them. Until 7th grade my life was uncomplicated because life was too much fun. I had good friends, good fun, and a nice life. In 1st grade I was unofficially a Christian. My logic was that because everyone around me was and that the American pledge has it, God must be real. It was so simple. In 5th grade I realized there was such thing as religion and that not everyone believed in God. Turns out my dad was an atheist and my mom a Catholic. A whole world that I was comfortable with was turned upside down. 7th Grade I applied myself to school desperate to never be ignorant of anyone's viewpoints again. I actually attempted my school work and became the best math student my school ever had won an award . Yet my views on the world were still pitifully small. Then came highschool. Anime, Socrates, AP classes, youtube, movies, etc. It all started to make things so much clearer about the planet I lived on. I developed an extremely serious attitude for my age and actually had philosophical debates with my teachers after school. Everyone called me a genius. And I felt like one. Until I met reddit. reddit introduced me too billions of new view points and billions of new things. But it made me extremely depressed. I love the pursuit if knowledge and I love learning new things, there isn't a thing that I don't love to learn about. But I suppose its frustrating that at a certain point when I realized no one can ever be right. On reddit it seems that while someone will be claimed right here on  the other persons view will be entirely forgotten. As if someone had to be right in the situation. While that person most of the time simply missed important details in their argument because they were in a rush writing this. Therefor I came to an ultimatum because life is too complex I must understand acknowledge everything. Even when someone shares my favored view I disagree with them, because they seem ignorant of the other side. Even my aforementioned parents are victims of my empathy of the side of the coin. And at school although the classes are interesting people bore me. And I often act in my own pursuit for answering questions and understanding people. Sometimes I'll act a pacifist, sometimes a tech geek, sometimes always something and I have fun with it and the whole process is very interesting to me. Someone always knows me as something else. Then I met the girl who would be the eventual cause of this post. I loved being around her, it was like being a child again the world was straightforward and new. For a while. Then I realized she was exactly how I was unquestioning and simple but happy. I broke it off with her, because I didn't want to be with someone who could so easily define right and wrong. But it hurt I let her go and all I longed for after was simplicity. She made me crave the simplicity of society that everything was straightforward and that I could live a candyland dream with her. Soon after I realized the problem was that I am too disconnected from society. I'm too different for anyone all I do is unintentionally hurt the people around me, because of my desire for knowledge and my desire for others to want to learn. I constantly feel alone, as if everyone has their answers and they are absolute. While I only have favorites and feel pushed by other people to conform and quietly I whisper. Why not conform? Why seek answers, why seek others points of view, why seek knowledge when I can't get along with people? I don't feel happy I feel constantly confused. I'm able to have people like me and be called a saint by my classmates. I'm able to be a best friend to someone easily. But I feel bored with people who don't ask enough questions. And feel unhappy not being one. But the strange thing is I love the idea of people, and I always think of being with them. But when I actually meet people, they seem so murderous with their ideals. Even pacifists. I suppose I love humanity as a whole but no individual to any great extent. But the only way people are ever kind to me is when I act out being a single minded person I feel unaccepted. Anything outside someones comfort zone is an evil. I just wish I was a single minded person. Then maybe I could feel more genuine and human. I'm 17 years old I have plenty of time to be proven wrong even thought it is a particularly subjective thing though  Sorry this might be poorly written its 4am in Colombia so I'm a little tired. Vacation TLDR I feel bored with people who don't ask enough questions. And feel unhappy not being one. I want to restart life and be ignorant of others its much easier and much more comforting. My view has been changed, thank you. A lot of your responses really helped, I had some ideas against my own view but I really needed to here it from other people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I want to restart my life, and be ignorant.\n","id":"31962e12-efaf-4c94-9fc3-49d7c71b0141"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Tarot Have A Place in Modern Society?<|ARGUMENT|>Tarot can give the reader hope for a better future, although scientifically speaking there might not be one. The belief and perseverance as a result of this belief may act as a placebo effect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The intricate artwork and culture surrounding Tarot bring great joy to those that use the cards.\n","id":"66f5cb2d-05c4-4484-9f02-c6df2abdcea0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US stop trying to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear program?<|ARGUMENT|>By allowing its nuclear program, the USA cannot be regarded as an enemy of North Korea. Indeed, the USA would undermine the siege mentality of North Korea which feeds its perceived need of great military defenses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Accepting a nuclear-capable North Korea is a way to normalize them into the community of nations by giving them a defense to the existential conventional military threat against them.\n","id":"3d087ec8-5445-40e0-a5a7-b158ea068a77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that is in the interest of most soveirgn nations to obtain a nuclear weapon and that countries who do not posses them are treated as second class citizens in global politics. I believe that the major world powers would never ever give up their most destructive weapons for fear of another country building them in secret. I believe that reducing nulear proliferation is an unrealistic goal that only truly intends to solidify the power of the countries currently holding large amounts of them. I believe we will never see the day where the United States in it's current role as a superpower will not posses a nuclear stockpile or more destructive weapons. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the major world powers will never give up their nuclear weapons and non-proliferation deals are an aim to increase their power on the world's stage.\n","id":"9d935c1e-489c-41f8-8c65-c6552cc73892"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Could the universe have only been created by a divine creator?<|ARGUMENT|>In Buddhism space and time are cyclical, such that world-systems come into being, survive for a time, are destroyed and then are remade. This happens 'naturally' without the intervention of gods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no creator god to explain the origin of the universe in Buddhism\n","id":"4f094536-1488-48d2-ae36-bcd46d8efb96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ever since I could remember, I have been not a fan of growing older and reaching that inevitable end. Obviously I am afraid of accidents ending my life earlier, but just the general end fills me with such existential crises that I'll have breakdowns sometimes when trying to go to sleep at night. I know it's inevitable, that's not the view I'm looking to change, but maybe the view of it being the worst thing? I'm not sure. I would love someone to tell me something that could change my view, give me new insight, so this anxiety could possibly lessen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am absolutely terrified of mortality and think it just sounds like the worst thing. I have near constant anxiety because of this fear.\n","id":"35c3e807-feb3-4bbc-84ff-56b344dc9c41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This person has proved that they are not willing of living in our society as we know it peacefully and are capable of destroying another persons life. Why do we give them the possibility of parole or lower than the maximum sentence? I am aware that very violent crimes or premeditated crimes are almost certain to give a sentence of death but why are we allowing anyone who is convicted of horrible crimes that destroy other humans life the chance to live. Would their victims pardon them? Is there actually a chance that they can still be a productive member of society? I am aware that certain circumstances can show that a person did a terrible thing through systematically making bad decisions im asking about those who have chosen to destroy another persons life as they know it in a way that kills them, or harms them in a life altering way with no remorse or hate. Edit Ok to clarify im referring to cases where the person has a past history of aggresion a criminal record and has proved themselves to not be a productive member of society. Why is anyone other than their family keeping them from execution. They have shown to be a drain on our society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Convictions of serious crimes like: Rape, Molestation, and Murder should carry mandatory sentences of Death.\n","id":"45a1b598-6e55-41f3-b8af-ca264ba1ecd8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like any person willing to work under secrecy for the government has to be trusted with keeping their lips sealed. I'm not for the NSA surveillance but what Snowden did was traitorous and he should be held accountable for his actions. Confidential information is confidential for a reason. This whole ordeal reminds me a lot of a quote from the first men in black movie. A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Still, I really want to know more about the whole situation and I felt this was the best place to learn.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Snowden should be charged and tried as a criminal.\n","id":"9d22fcb1-e46f-456c-9a1d-c75d03dab105"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need nuclear power for sustainable energy production?<|ARGUMENT|>Unlike what happens with other forms of energy, nuclear waste is totally confined and can be stored, handled or later recycled or reused in future reactors leaving byproducts with shorter half-lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear power produces lower amounts of particulate pollution than other forms of power, reducing illness.\n","id":"81503173-fcfd-4558-8e31-b8ac60ba4729"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>South Korea should abandon its goal of unification with North Korea<|ARGUMENT|>Additionally, experts project a united Korea to be among the top 5-10 most powerful nations in the world p. 15.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Internationally, a united Korea will become one of the most powerful nations in the world.\n","id":"e9610a0e-5137-4543-bb72-27ac21d378d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>A report illustrated that young people do not understand what constitutes rape: a third of male university students' answers showed that they would rape a woman if there were no consequences. This was because they didn\u2019t recognise that these actions were, in fact, rape.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Understanding consent from an early age will enable children to recognise instances of abuse in later life.\n","id":"4a1fdce2-3397-4c61-a2a9-1123c603375f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>The Old Testament teaches: \"I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.\" Deuteronomy 30:19<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"JudeoChristian Scriptures teach that God has given us the freedom to choose our actions.\n","id":"fc0a99ad-6f32-4e29-8349-cb1932d2f50a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see an opinion posted in various gaming subreddits that you should be able to swear all you want on a server if the game is M rated. It usually goes something like gt My character is saying stuff like GET YOUR DICKS IN THE DIRT, MACHINE GUNNER and FUCKING DIE YOU FUCK but I'll get banned for saying Bitch? What a load of crap. I don't see what's wrong with this. If the server gives you the rules up front, lets you know swearing isn't okay, and the admins warn you about it if you break the rules, they're not being unreasonable and it's not hypocritical. They're trying to promote a certain environment on the server. Swearing at the game or other players very quickly leads to shit talking and a negative environment. While this is not always the case on servers that have a lot of regulars and can handle the shit talking of each other in stride, random pubbers will almost always devolve into childish wars of swearing. Banning swearing nips this before it becomes a problem. To me, it sounds like those that have a problem with this rule are immature and can't handle being forced to act like a respectful person on the internet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's nothing wrong with banning swearing on your server in an M rated game.\n","id":"b8eb4603-1623-404a-880f-f76ad0958a55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don\u2019t like Donald Trump, I think the man is a walking disaster and electing him would be a great mistake for any citizen of the USA. Regardless of that, I still want him to be the president of the US for completely selfish reasons. The United States has historically being the biggest external treat to Latin American democracy, autonomy and self government. Systematically overthrowing Latin American governments and replacing them with puppets has being the bread and butter the US\u2019 foreign policy. The war on drugs has endured despise open opposition of some of the Latin American government forced to enforce it, putting thousands of dead bodies on the streets. And yet this relation of Empire Colony has subsisted through the mostly democratic recent decades because the US has being able to hold the fa\u00e7ade of \u201cfriendly neighbor\u201d that just wants to help. That\u2019s why I want Trump in power, Trump is open about hating us, and Trump has no shame in articulation the rabid snobbism and xenophobia that the US government always practiced but never openly voiced. It would be impossible for the US to maintain control over Latin America when its public face openly hates the place. The election of Trump would lead to Latin America to diplomatically turn its back to the US, reinforcing with it the local institutions such as the Unasur and the Celac. This is something I want, and if in the process Trump has to lead his own country to times of madness, I really don\u2019t care.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a Latin American I want Trump to be president of the US for purely selfish reasons.\n","id":"9020762e-6cc0-48f5-b363-c8d6bd047335"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Later in his campaign, O'Rourke no longer used phrases like \"single-payer\" or \"Medicare for all\" when talking about the health care system he wants to see.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Beto O'Rourke appears not to be supportive of Medicare for All. Yet, around 70% of Americans support the introduction of such a system.\n","id":"98d2cf47-ea57-4aaa-9326-35df3fa030f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There Be Trigger Warnings in Education?<|ARGUMENT|>In the classroom, students can state their viewpoint and expect to receive positive, helpful criticism to clarify how they state their view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Much better to learn how to deal with issues in the classroom than wait until the real world.\n","id":"68c4783e-a973-40b8-9c0e-a6f32ddc672d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>The air is clean in Europe and the U.S. because all the dirty factories have been moved to China.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By exploiting the third world advanced societies do not foresteall clean nature, air or water.\n","id":"393025d9-cd7d-4853-8095-73bfc7df475b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I've seen lots of people talk about Thanos plan to kill half the population and most arguments around it makes it sound like his solution is immoral, but might still work. But the thing is, he basically accomplished nothing. Human population growth is exponential. 50 years ago the human population was half of what it is today So at best he delayed everything for 50 years at the cost if 3.5 billion lives That has got to be the worst deal imaginable What's even worse is that he killed half of all life . That's right. He also killed half of the food . So not only did he halve the population, he put them at the exact spot point in terms of resource scarcity. Thanos plan was utterly stupid in every single way with 0 redeeming qualities. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Thanos plan would basically accomplish nothing\n","id":"537fdf48-30f2-4d39-afac-0e03cd8ce32a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2005, when Japan issued textbooks whitewashing the massacre, violent protests occurred against Japanese businesses in China. Demonstrators torched Japanese cars, vandalized Japanese owned businesses and threw rocks at the Japanese embassy in Beijing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Previous Chinese boycotts of Japanese companies have caused damage to the country's economy\n","id":"c6407e4d-e893-43c8-8f83-975c89d464c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think rape is the worst crime that can be committed. Worse than murder, worse than pedophilia. I think murderers should go to prison for life and that pedophiles are people who are mentally ill. But rapists make me feel sick to my stomach and I think they should die for what they've done. Please  because I follow Buddhist values and I am uncomfortable with how angry and hate filled rape makes me feel. If I can agree with murderers and pedophiles being allowed to keep their lives then surely I can change how I feel about rapists. Just to clarify I'm not talking about statutory rape.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe rapists should get the death penalty -\n","id":"f23449cf-0dbe-4c29-89fd-4e345d348043"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The best blockchains of the future will embrace asynchronous inter-contract communication.<|ARGUMENT|>Some failed txs are related to network communication, and while this exists more in a cross-chain world, this would only appear more in async methods when they were used to scale across chains and shards, which synchronous methods are unable to do, which is a good thing, because it means async allows scaling strategies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Failed transactions have various causes, but none are inherently fixed by avoiding asynchronous contracts.\n","id":"a4167342-36c6-4e84-9954-03085b64446b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Politicians often voluntarily attach the future of their careers to the results of referendums, or are forced by public pressure to resign after losing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Referendums can lead to disorder in governments and cause perplexity as well as resignations.\n","id":"5576cad3-1985-48e8-8b4c-98dcc640ba49"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>Political pressures within physics prevented\/impeded questioning of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics for many decades\" Becker, 2018<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The history of science shows that scientists have their own biases.\n","id":"71fa55b7-368d-49da-83d6-52515a56300e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>If one's infinite lifespan influences other people's lives, then it's not a right, as it's an indirect oppression of everyone else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Freedom can only be achieved when it doesn't interfere with other people's freedom, in that case it becomes a privilege.\n","id":"6248ae81-83f9-4a02-860d-0cdd0d03ad0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>There is reason to suggest that certain measures have trended towards well-being globally ourworldindata.org It implies that we must explore these measurements with increasing precision, similar to the advancement of other systems in metrology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Well-being is like the concept of physical health, in that it is difficult to define but still measurable and observable.\n","id":"27d402f2-4f9d-4cb9-8b18-1051b675fab5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is not to say that understanding graphs, translations, and being able to visualize expressions visually are not important skills. They absolutely are and I would never dispute that. I also don't want to confuse graphs in math with graphs in science science classes teach students how to create graphs from real world data, label them, and extrapolate new data. I think that's a vital skill. However, I question the practice of having students make graphs by hand more than once or twice. It's a separate issue, it's inefficient, and it wastes time and mental energy that would be better spent on other topics. The common rationale is that students need to understand how modifications to a formula will transform a graph, but this is actually circular reasoning. Why do students primarily need to be able to transform graphs quickly? Because it helps them draw them faster. True, it is useful for students to know that the 3 in y x^2 3 will shift the graph 3 places down. But you could cover that in one lesson using a graphing utility where you simply have the students change random elements in their equations. The point here is, practicing drawing graphs to allow students to draw graphs faster is not a proper reason. Students have near universal access to graphing utilities, so it is no longer necessary to graph by hand. Almost every student at the high school level, and a majority at the middle school level, owns or has access to a smartphone or computer. There are countless apps and web apps that allow for graphing. Graphing by hand is inherently inaccurate, time consuming, limited in scope, and generally just clunky. You will never draw a perfect graph, you'll never do it quickly, and you won't be able to see very far in your graph if you want to finish within a minute or two. The only real advantage anyone can cite is that if you can draw a graph, you can use one without your phone. Sadly for apologists, there are very few cases in which people don't have phones and also need to graph something. In addition, you do need technology to draw a graph you need pen and paper. So there are few cases, if any, where drawing is the only option. Proponents claim that graphing by hand helps you visualize graphs when you look at equations, but I've never seen any evidence that you can't achieve that ability through playing with a graphing utility. There is no reason to suggest that extensive graphing by hand has any unique benefit to visualization. On the contrary, graphing utilities reduce the need for visualization in most people. You can achieve more practice in less time by using graphing utilities. In fact, I've seen games that challenge students to design graphs that go through certain points or meet certain criteria, and because the graph is created instantly, a student can instantly determine whether he or she was successful. It's actually a disadvantage to not be able to use a graphing utility. Imagine if all math classes refused to allow students to use calculators because doing arithmetic by hand strengthens understanding. The students who leave would be vastly less capable in the real world than those who simply take a second to whip out their phone and use a calculator. If graphing is a vital skill to the average Joe, and I'm not sure it is, well you'd better teach Joe how to do it with a computer. The time and effort spent on graphing could be better spent on other concepts which actually are incredibly useful to the average person, like algebraic thinking. Spend time on word problems or introduce students to applied mathematics in physics or computing. Spend time on geometry that they could use to build something, or explain how scientists can somehow magically know where all the stars are and how big they are from light years away. The students don't care about the graphing by hand. They don't want to make tables to find points. They know what the curve should look like. They know where vertices are on parabola or ellipses. They understand the concept, and making a graph is frankly beating a dead horse to them. The students who were interested in the class or homework become less interested, grades fall, and for what? This is less of a topical argument and more of a general critique, but mathematicians fail to understand one basic concept, and that is that they are biased to all hell. Mathematicians and math teachers enjoy math and math classrooms which are not the same thing . But they fail to understand other points of view, and often think those people uneducated as to what math really is, and with a knowing smirk they dismiss such pragmatic questions such as When will I ever use this? That question is a valid critique regardless of the fantastical, masturbatory sentiments of mathematicians. Please understand, I like math. Many students do. But I, and many students, hate math classrooms, because people apologize for old fashioned traditions and the remnants of a classical education system which do not meet the needs of a modern society. I have yet to see ANY convincing proof that graphing by hand, which is but one of those traditions, is necessary or desirable in a modern classroom. Convince me otherwise, because I don't want to fight this fight. Being wrong means there's something wrong with me, not with the entire American education system. And I'd rather it just be me. DELTA EDIT I gave one away to u catastematic for his comprehensive address of all my points, and for his understanding of my perspective. Most comments in this thread seemed to revolve around my lack of study, a concept of me as merely complaining and trying to weasel out of math class, or support for the status quo as some golden standard of education. Here is the comment where I gave the delta and explain my new position, but you ought to read our whole exchange and the link that he put in his final comment. Also, remember that  threads are sort of a team effort thing. Even if you don't individually get a delta, your points may have contributed to the discussion in a meaningful way. Some of them certainly did. Some certainly didn't, but they were in the minority. Thank you all for taking the time to debate a serious issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is an harmful tradition of \"graphing by hand\" in American math curricula.\n","id":"6b73a488-3284-455d-9799-d14bdd7a885f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just heard that little quip from House. I don't take the stance literally however, the figurative philosophy sparked my interests. The safer we make cars, the more we enable reckless driving to continue. Of course this could lead us down a road that makes cars unequivocally safe, yet that would only enable reckless driving to the maximum as well. It's a weird duality. We may need more traffic cops in conjunction with the safer we make cars. One would think the opposite would be needed though. I would like my view changed because I think it's right to make cars safer, but I do not wish to increase reckless driving either.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"If you want people to drive safer, take out the airbags and add a machete pointing to their neck.\"\n","id":"c349b64c-6f7f-4045-824a-393864e81135"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Countries with a very high influence of Islam into the political sphere seem to be rather authoritarian and unethical, instead of being driven by ethics based on the Golden Rule.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the name of Islam there are countless groups\/organizations, wanna-be states, etc. who neglect a life according to the golden rule with questionable interpretations of Islam.\n","id":"0706d8f2-c5a7-45ce-ba92-aaf211be8605"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> Democrats Are Too Optimistic On Retaking the Presidency, Congress This is not an ideologically motivated post and I'm not interested in ideologically motivated answers, but on an argument against my opinion, which is rooted in the following observations Polling What has defined high has changed over the past few decades as elections have depended more on the mobilization of the party base with some additional swing votes. Long term average approval percentages for both administrations of Barack Obama George Bush were below 50 . While both men were successful in gaining two terms, each is notable for having high unfavorable numbers. Bush, had the lowest recorded polling as a living President 25 Obama one of the lowest average favorability numbers in polling history 47.9 . President Trump's favorability ratings among likely voters is 42 . This is often interpreted as being an extremely low number, but his approval among Republicans is 87 and he won the Presidency with ~42 favorability. This implies his ability to marshall the same coalition of voters is not changed. The size of the constituency is the same and it is still enthusiastic. Past Precedent Most Presidents in recent memory have won re election. This isn't to say Trump cannot join the ranks of HW Bush and Jimmy Carter, but that the default scenario is a Trump win in 2020. Trump's Complete Media Dominance The President has demonstrated a remarkable ability to hold and move news and entertainment media's attention, since entering the race in 2015. While the content of the attention is not always favorable, his ability to retain their attention has nearly always been to his benefit. In the GOP primaries, this amounted to free publicity, creating for other candidates the challenge of even getting media access. In the general election, it prevented any of his individual scandals from developing sufficient depth. This dynamic has persisted well over a year later. Trump's presence, through Twitter and television, overshadows reporting on his policies, reshaping of government etc. When this is coupled with the way partisan outlets, like FOX, Breitbart etc are the only news source for much of the country and the general narrative that the press is the 'opposition party', the space for such reporting is further diminished. In sum, Trump's media dominance has not abated since 2015 and is likely to continue. Democratic Party Weakness Democrats are at their lowest level of representation in over a century. This limits their ability to create new leaders, cultivate support and create a story of success. They are also hampered by a general perception on the part of voters, that the GOP is the American party or the party of the average person, while they are the special interest party or the party of minorities. Particularly, bad for Democratic hopes in 2018 is that their constituents tend not to vote in midterm elections, giving presumptive advantage to Republicans in turn out. Limitations of Mueller Investigation It's often acknowledged that nothing the Mueller investigation finds will result in the President's removal from office, since that is ultimately a political not a legal action. However, many seem to have hope that Mueller will uncover enough wrongdoing that will impact the public's perception of the GOP and or Trump. However, this seems unlikely. Mueller does not have the kind of freedom that Kenneth Starr had during the Clinton era. There is no formal rule that prevents him from being fired or for the investigation to be followed with any particular intensity. There are also few checks that prevent problematic aspects of the investigation from being slowed down or semi suppressed. I began writing this before the release of the Nunes Memo, which demonstrates how easily the GOP can shift public perception of the FBI, which now only enjoys 38 favorability among Republicans. Finally, since the findings of the investigation will be presented to Congress, they can be spun in any number of directions by its leadership. It is not likely any of this changes public opinion enough to hurt the President's base of support. Geographic Representation Polling Democratic votes tend to be found only in urban centers, which disadvantages them especially in the Senate, but to a lesser extent in the House, where gerrymandered districts can underrepresent their constituents. As a result, a generic ballot that shows parity or slight favorability to Democrats, is a signal of Republican dominance. Given the narrowing gap between generic Democratic GOP popularity, which may even be as low as 2 points and as high as 8 , it seems a comfortable D majorities in both chambers is very unlikely. While Democrats will probably gain at least a slim majority in the House, they are very unlikely to win even a slight majority in the Senate. The geographic bias of the Senate automatically puts Democrats at a disadvantage, since by nature most states are predominantly rural. This is worsened by the fact that in 2018, Democrats must defend 28 of their 48 seats, while Republicans only need to defend 8. It is not inconceivable for Democrats to win a slight majority in the House and lose more Senate seats to Republicans. Republican Victory Narrative the economy is performing well, the GOP can claim victory on a number of issues including tax cuts and regulation. Any negative effects of these policies like future tax increases, reduction in services from the tax bill will not be felt for several years. This keeps constituent enthusiasm high, which must factor into one's prediction for 2018. Lack of Strategic Thinking Among Democrats I mentioned that party's weakness in representation, but the point also needs to be made that Democrats are still arguing over idealisms social democracy vs identity issues vs technocratic centrism . While its not always possible to openly talk about making cold blooded calculations to elevate one constituency over another, the consistent appearance of fights over idealisms, signals that the Democrats lack the coherence necessary to agree even that some unsavory compromises are necessary to win. In sum, I don't see optimism regarding a blue wave or a Democratic Presidential victory as being well justified, given the advantages the GOP Trump have over their opposition in media narrative dominance, geographic representation, polling party coherence. Nor do I see any compelling reason why default assumptions about Presidents winning their second term or midterms being shaped by turn out of older, whiter voters should be over turned. Finally, I don't see any reason to think the previous dynamics established by this President, which have so far been to his advantage, will cease being advantageous in the near future. I personally wish this was not so, given that it probably makes irreversible the American descent into illiberal democracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democrats Are Too Optimistic On Regaining Presidency, Congress\n","id":"e9ee2a80-6eb4-4760-80a9-8bdbe495f1c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Military conscription should apply to men and women equally.<|ARGUMENT|>Combat skills, including close-quarters-combat and martial arts, could make female soldiers less likely to be raped than female civilians.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Military training could in fact empower women to have a chance at fighting a rapist.\n","id":"765eeaa5-d81b-4989-bd97-0b74eecf3f56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Muslim populations in high-income countries tend to be in positions where they profit more than other groups from generous welfare.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Muslims largely vote for parties that promote generous welfare programs, which disproportionately benefit Muslim communities.\n","id":"0a4fc906-6005-4b6a-9cc3-24bbfe239f38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>it has the most compelling characters. Jean luc Picard is the epitome of a captain. unflappable, versed in a wide variety of science and history. he was able to resist Romulan torture until his release was negotiated. He was the first to be able to communicate with a being that spoke a language unable to be meaningfully translated by their universal translator. His unimpeachable character and fore sight helped him stop a takeover of star fleet by perviously unknown aliens. I won't go over every other character in quite as much detail, but i want to mention Data. As an android wanting to be human he gets into wonderful discussions on what it is to be human which helped me to keep coming back to the series. The philosophical questions asked are really the main reason this is the best series. Does a computer as high functioning as Data have the same rights as the other members of the crew? should a planet that is dying and has a population of sentient beings be saved even when that would interfere with the prime directive? Deep questions similar to the above seem to pop up in every episode. From what i have seen of the original star trek it is much more action focused. The crew gets into a jam and has to shoot their way out, making it not stand out from other science fiction series. Voyager has a very interesting premise and some great tension develops between the crew on such a long trip both things i like about it. However the plot gets stale in later seasons. there is only so much you can do with a story of people completely isolated from their society and it ends up having a few too many holodeck episodes as a result. I haven't seen enough of the other series to make an intelligent comment on them. So go ahead .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Star trek The Next generation is the best series set in the Star Trek universe\n","id":"33fcb12b-78f4-45c4-b10b-700018f8d249"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Religions, social movements feminism, civil rights, etc , political movements libertarianism, OWS, etc , and even cultural groups goths, fandoms, etc suffer greatly when they allow themselves to be represented by the loudest and most extreme elements. At best, it presents their ideas in a negative light to the general public, and at worst, it shifts their ideas entirely, or causes schisms in the group. See how religions must frequently claim that the bomber, shooter, or picketer aren't truly members of their religion. See how movements with a single clear demand like equality for X group are shattered by dissenting voices, until the mounting, conflicting demands make it difficult for anyone in the general public to understand the group or support them. This post was partly inspired by talking to a goth friend who, after my repeated questions trying to understand what united goths in spite of their myriad subcultures, told me that you can't police people or force them out of the group people are free to express themselves how they want. I don't disagree that people should be able to express themselves freely, but I believe that if your movement or group identifies by a certain label, you are not obligated to allow people to use that label unless they follow the general consensus of the group. Inclusiveness leads to schisms, which inevitably harm any group over time, if not by destroying the group, then by corrupting large swaths of it until it is unrecognizable. . EDIT Most of the comments so far seem to focus on the difficulty impossibility of completely controlling or policing a movement with no official membership. I never intended to give the impression that I disagreed with that. My point was more that members of most movements seem to be satisfied by saying that everyone interprets things differently, or else using the No True Scotsman argument when members of the group stray too far to the fringe. So far, nobody has presented what I consider a strong argument for why members of a group shouldn't at least make the effort to control the use of their label.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that movements should maintain a tighter control of their belief system.\n","id":"1374f8d8-52a2-4f7f-a900-07973fe828d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>A universe or temporally ordered series of universes that did not begin to exist is philosophically incoherent because it implies the concrete existence of an actual infinity<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The universe began to exist \"began to exist\" defined here at definition A5\n","id":"b09ade6b-b716-4d66-b289-44fe91ead1e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>In order to reject a job applicant or fire an employee based on their condition, the employer must have objective evidence that the applicant\/employee can't perform the job duties, or that they would create a significant safety risk, even with a reasonable accommodation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Employees, under ADA, cannot be fired by their employers on the basis of their mental illness is prohibited because its considered discriminatory.\n","id":"afa7476d-f272-42ad-a149-c0a33dcc6e02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi guys. Hope we can keep everything chill here. Trump has stated that he is in favor of legal immigration. His wife is an immigrant. As well as being for legal immigration, he's even stated he wants to quicken legal immigration. Trump's stance on Muslim immigrants, I also feel is exaggerated by the media. He stated he wanted a temporary ban on Muslims from high risk countries until they can properly check them. He has stated he only disagrees with Islamic extremists, not Muslims as a whole. It's legal by the constitutional. Labelled as a racist and an Islamophobe, Trump has been bombarded by the media. I honestly can't recall nor find a single racist or Islamaphobic thing he has said that isn't misquoted or taken out of context. I don't see the supposed racism or Islamaphobia that others do, so I was curious if you guys could show me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump's stance on immigration is over-exaggerated my the media and not actually that extreme.\n","id":"a273fd45-ea16-4a56-81f6-91ba73d3b036"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The austerity inflicted by the Conservative government has damaged people's lives, and hurt the economy. All we have seen is wealth removed from the poor ended up with the rich. See goo.gl o8WBu4 The very poorest have had to resort to food banks, homelessness has increased, wages in Britain have decreased in real terms by 11 see whilst others in europe have risen. Benefits, for the disabled and mentally ill have been brutally cut. House prices and rent are rising ridiculously. Young buyers are completely squeezed out of the market. The justification for austerity government cuts was to remove the deficit Osborne said he could do this in 5 years and begin reducing Britain's debt. 7 years down the line we still have a deficit of \u00a315 billion and our debt is still increasing All these cuts have crippled britain's growth, even the OECD an original think tank the tories listened too have changed their mind about austerity yet Theresa May and the Tories are set on it, despite it failing to achieve it's targets. Yet what we must remember is that all this public debt, was not due to the sloppy spending of Labour which I admit wasn't perfect . It was due to private banks who took stupid risks. Our taxes have been used to pay of the debts of dodgy bankers Yet under the conservative government it's US all those who aren't really wealthy who have had to pay for it. Yet we still haven't seen sufficient regulation to keep it in check. Even the banks, who make stupid amounts of money off of free er markets are worried there is not enough regulation For some absurd reason the Tories are seen as a government to be trusted with the economy. THIS IS SIMPLY NOT TRUE These are a few of many, many points of why I think you should not vote Tory. Or why you should vote tactically to keep them out. I'll admit this is a fairly entrenched view. But I believe it is entrenched by valid argument. If my points are undermined I will change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UK conservative government's austerity has been damaging to peoples lives and the economy. Because of this I will not vote for them, and I will convince everyone I can to not do so.\n","id":"ae7f5d4e-2ee8-49de-bd83-9cf270bcbf12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>During the 18th century and the age of the Enlightenment we saw great changes in how animals were viewed, with a number of philosophers discussing the ability of animals to suffer sentience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Philosophers in ancient times and during the Enlightenment era discussed animals' ability to suffer and the improvement of their conditions before modern zoos were properly developed in the 19th century.\n","id":"45e35f47-9b8e-4ebd-90de-34b5ca4700f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe it to be entirely possible that Miley's VMA's, ratchet music video, ripping bongs and Justin's pissing in buckets, spitting on fans, fucking with paparazzi recent antics are simply to prolong their careers in fear that they might end prematurely. Someone had to have signed off on the VMA's and music video in Miley's case, and Justin is definitely well aware that the paparazzi follow his every move. They would be very forgettable child stars if they didn't fight to stay relevant. Is any press good press at least in the case of celebrities ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber's careers are being well crafted\/managed so they stay relevant into their adult years.\n","id":"f41453d1-9756-45ca-a5ad-309eef7b8984"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Flooding should never be mentioned as a natural disaster, because it is not. A river, a body of water has a natural extension but the stupid humans decide to ignore it, many times they build a city near a body of water and then, as George Carlin said How about those people in those lowlands prone to flood, who built their homes right next to a running river and then wonder why they have water in the living room see? It is almost impossible to have a flood where there is no river, and if you built upon a land that is not on a low point. It is human stupidity, just as Einstein already alerted us about flood with his famous statement 'Two things are infinite the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe' . And also, don't forget, GOD said so himself Let there be human stupidity, and there was flood. TL DR Saying that flood is a natural disaster is the same as saying that it was a tragedy that a man was killed when he invaded the habitat of a wild animal in other words, human stupidity, the same human stupidity that makes the same man invade the habitat of a river.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Flooding is not a natural disaster, but human stupidity.\n","id":"80021032-0a4d-4e11-aa22-45d463806705"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Harambe was shot to safe the life of a child. This case clearly shows the actual value hierarchy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taking the life of an animal has fewer consequences than taking the life of a human.\n","id":"e9942247-842c-4938-b754-9e2a8f72d085"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the worst world problem of the utmost concern?<|ARGUMENT|>The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the worst of them, showing that recycling is not effective only 5% while reducing and reusing waste are better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Plastic is such a large problem, that 5 garbage patches fill up oceans worldwide\n","id":"8000159e-4f0b-4f44-9736-6f3f2ae288ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've thought long and hard about the never ending gun debate. The reality is that guns are here to stay. I feel that the problem is not gun ownership but gun ownership in the hands of people who lack adequate training on handling shooting a gun, and also lack training and judgment on handling situations of extreme stress and when to use a gun and when not to. America was indeed built on the notions of being tough, independent, surviving and thriving in wilderness, knowing how to wield a gun for protection, etc. We've gone way past the age of dueling and showdowns at OK Corral, but these attributes are still considered core aspects of being American. Even American sports reflect this. It is about skill and excellence yes, but also being contact sports, about physical and mental toughness. I feel that the Liberal POV that our society and lives have evolved far beyond the Wild West days is indeed legitimate. But a viable solution has to embrace both viewpoints. And the only way I can think of is to make military training mandatory for anyone who turns 18. It will give the next generation the training and experience they need to handle a gun, how to shoot it accurately and understand the risks and repercussions of doing so, and be responsible with their guns in general. It will also teach them mental toughness, ability to handle situations of extreme stress in the future, and make better decisions in those situations. I'm talking of the situations later in life when they will need to deal with a gunman or will have to handle a gun or when suddenly thrust in a violent situation. They will know when a fist fight or bar brawl is just a fight and doesn't have to result in someone dying or a weapon discharge or a shootout. There are quite a few countries that have mandatory military service for a significant period of time. Israel, Norway, Singapore, Switzerland, to name a very few. I feel that the training should be immersive and long enough to impart these core values. Hence, I feel that it cannot be done in a few weeks it will have to be 2 years long at least. I realize this is a very big thing I am proposing, but I feel that the rewards will far outweigh the costs. It will enable future generations to truly understand guns, to understand violence and bloodshed, to understand structure and discipline. And all this will have a positive long term impact in terms of gun violence and gun related accidents. I also feel that America is fairly well positioned to pull this off. Of course, the scale would be several magnitudes larger than the existing training setup that the military supports. But if you look at how vast the American military is and how much of the Earth it currently covers, they already know how to do the logistics and planning and execution. Edit u matt2000224 rightly pointed out that I should not have said the only way in the title. I really meant to say, the best way to meaningfully address the gun problem . Edit2 Based on what u Ansuz07 pointed out, I was really talking about military school or something like ROTC. I was not talking about people actually joining the military in a formal manner and going to war. And this military school that I had in mind would do military training, weapons training, as well as classroom sessions on the philosophy of war, combat, weapons etc. As well as other subjects which would be equivalent of the first year of undergrad college spread out over 2 years . I also changed my view. I feel that mandatory military conscription for 2 years would be counter productive to my goal which was to give the youth first hand training and knowledge of weapons, combat, judgment, philosophy, and basic college level education and for which I feel that classroom education is woefully inadequate. I feel that this format should be more of a ROTC kind of training but customized for the youth, and blended with overall education. And i also feel that it should be an opt in full time stay program this will hugely benefit marginalized parts of society such as inner city kids and project kids, or kids who get thrown out of their house when they are 18 and then have to live in shelters and work perpetually on minimum wage, or kids who just want to do this they will all find a viable way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only way to meaningfully address the gun problem in America is to have compulsory military training ideally 2 years is what I feel for anyone who turns 18.\n","id":"6af7b508-c3f3-42e3-adc3-6735390b6b86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>Lower cost of healthcare due to genetic improvements eliminating most chronic sicknesses, disabilities and decreasing the chance of anyone becoming sick.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are enormous economic benefits for any government and nation to have their whole population enhanced.\n","id":"fb772f09-8a65-4da7-a84a-86874b755eba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>The question of allowing abortion isn't merely a question of destroying lives that already exist. It's about the worth of bringing a human life into existence. Bringing a human life into existence is worth the cost: from the loss of comfort, to the loss of our dreams, even to the loss of our lives. To accept abortion as a valid option is to accept that these things are more valuable than the creation of human life itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human life is extremely valuable and therefore should be protected from the moment it begins.\n","id":"9efa5c60-737c-4982-9680-d129c8a13201"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I am what I like to call a \u201cred letter Christian\u201d for those of you who are do not read the Bible, the red letters are the direct quotations of Jesus Christ in the Gospels . The core of my belief is that the only parts of the Bible that are to be taken as absolute law are the direct commends of Jesus Christ himself, seeing as how according to my belief he is literally God, and therefore holds highest authority. Everything else the Old Testament, Paul\u2019s letters to the church are there for wisdom and historical context. Most people\u2019s notions that Christianity conflicts with modern science stem from people reading WAY too much into the wrong aspects of the Bible. For example, young earth creationism believes that the Earth is 6000 years old because someone loosely estimated how much time has passed throughout the Bible using the passing generations and this guy begat this guy there\u2019s a lot of that in the Old Testament . In essence, to say that YOU know exactly how God created the universe is not only hubristic, but takes away from the purpose of study and prayer over the holy text. And furthermore, much of scientific theory has been proven time and again to the point of redundancy. As Martin Luther King once said \u201cScience gives man knowledge, which is power religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You can accept today\u2019s scientific theory evolution, the world being billions of years old while also believing in God.\n","id":"ccdc2893-5ea6-40ae-bd60-ee5d033041e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>As it currently stands, the failure of sports leagues to properly and consistently punish abusive athletes implicitly condones off-field criminal behavior<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Leagues have an obligation to take strong action against domestic violence.\n","id":"8498dbbf-b235-4f0a-875a-45ceeb3bced3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I dont mean all the 0.1 richest are the illuminati or anything, im saying that America is plutocratic because that 0.1 has more control than the other 99.9 , purely because money talks. This is possibly the best, most informative documentary ever made. The evidence is from 27 00 34 00 FYI this is visualised perfectly in the doco and my text version is going to be harder to understand. Before banks consolidated into their too big to fail structure, they were local businesses and if you gave someone a mortgage you had a massive financial incentive to get it back. Banking is now big business. A bank can now sell a mortage to an investment bank, which consolidates several types of debts eg credit card debt, car loans, into whats known as a CDO Investment banks now sell these CDOs to investors. Investment banks pay securities rating agencies to evaluate the CDOs like any other stock and rate it These agencies had NO legal accountability for being wrong in their evaluations So now what you've got is a license to print money. A banker can give a loan to someone who has no money to pay them back, they receive money but then when the market crashes WE the tax payers are the ones paying for it in the TRILLIONS of fucking dollars and we're paying this money to the people who just scammed us . The 08 crisis was possibly the biggest scam ever committed in history Members of the government, particularly Larry Summers, Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan were in a position to stop this from happening and didnt. Phil Gramm lead the charge for a bill which made derivatives CDOs are a form of derivative illegal to regulate, giving these executives no accountability. He later left the senate and became the vice chairman of UBS, his wife was on the board of Enron. Larry Summers was the Treasury Secretary, later went on to make 20 million as a consultant to a hedge fund which heavily relied on derivatives It is clear that members of government made decisions which lead to a massive financial crisis, unemployment tens of millions of people losing their homes or savings, for their own financial gain, and that this will happen again since nobody was ever found accountable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the 2008 financial crisis was a fraudulent scam committed against the American people by financial executives, and that it indicates the government is controlled by the richest 0.1% of americans.\n","id":"c552d3bf-66b1-4120-a534-bc2edeb097e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Circa 1900 Argentina was in the top 10 of GDP per capita. The country was open, had plenty of immigration from Italy and Germany. It was hot for speculation Think of all the Victorian and Edwardian literature that mention Argentine canals , for instance Forsyte Saga, and one of the plays by Oscar Wilde. In 1914 there were two Harrods in the world. One in London one in Buenos Aires. The same year BA had a population of 1.4 million, putting it into the top 25 global cities. By my scanty research Argentina seems similar to US midwest, Australia, northern Sweden, New Zeeland connected to and identifying with an advanced culture, having good natural resources and prospects for peace. Argentina never really recovered from the depression. It became politically volatile, and has been a mess ever since. In both 1914 and 1950 it had high literacy, and it has had a reasonable number of Nobel prices 5. Portugal has 2, Ireland 5, Mecixo 3 but despite good resources and education it has not taken of. At least to me it seems like Argentina just has had an absurd amount of bad luck and the reasonable guess in 1900 would have been that Argentina soon would overtake Portugal, Sicily and Greece and become somewhat like Western Europe, Canada and USA. A tip for something to attack in my text. I have nothing solid about industry. Everything good about Argentina reeks of economic boom mentality. I have not found anything substantial about steel production. One could argue that Argentina was 90 natural resource based like Saudi Arabia today with a small but productive middle class, good at commerce, literature and medicine Unlike Saudi .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In 1914 it was rational to guess Argentina would become a first world country in a few decades\n","id":"8daf521b-3ab2-4123-a8e0-09ae60cbc879"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Further meta-analysis found that the red meat-cancer connection holds only slightly for men and not for females.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A meta-analysis of red meat-cancer studies found that the link is, at best, weak.\n","id":"9a092f15-54b9-4c1f-82af-45630736a8ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>AIDS Drugs for Developing Countries<|ARGUMENT|>Generic drugs would be far cheaper to produce, and without the shipping costs from factories in Europe. The generic drugs would also have no research and development costs to create, so they could be sold for a far reduced price from what the drug companies are charging. The average cost for keeping a person on a course of AZT and other drug cocktails whilst they have HIV is exorbitant, a cost which would be hugely reduced through the use of generic substitutes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Generic drugs would be far cheaper to produce, and without the shipping costs from factories in Euro...\n","id":"3bbea7cf-9295-42c6-b57e-b3a97e70e719"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Artificial Intelligence AI: Should an artificial general intelligence be created?<|ARGUMENT|>To produce an army of AKMs, thousands of tons of metal steel, aluminum, titanium etc., composites, electronics silicon, rare earths etc. are required.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Millions of drones would require an enormous amount of resources.\n","id":"929c33df-6470-4bbc-a815-cab435510a7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When it comes to media holding Saudi Arabia accountable for their human rights atrocities, the Western Media seems to have a history of staying quiet. I believe this is because Saudi Arabia is Americas ally, more the CIA's ally in the middle east for covert ops and proxy wars, as well as the visible arms dealing to bomb Yemen x200B To prove this statement here is a link of the Washington Post using Saudi Lobbyists as their contributors x200B and here is proof that Bezos who owns the Washington Post has a 600 million deal with the CIA as well as sits on Pentagon board meetings. x200B x200B x200B So what I think, is this Koshaggi guy went way off script. Way off script. Started writing about the Bone Saw Kings human rights atrocities and the Bone Saw King said hell no. He killed the guy in the most gruesome and painful way possible to tell the other Western News Reporters to stay in line. Or look at what happens. I think it was a clear message. I mean he was literally dismembered with a bone saw. Discretion was not a priority I think.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Kashoggi Killing was a message to Mainstream Western Media to stay in line\n","id":"b90072c2-6b2e-40ce-8e7c-849c5b266297"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>For the first time in India's history, the under-five child mortality rate is the same as the global average. Because of Mission Indradhanush, Mother and Child Tracking System, and neonatal ICUs in every district, India has made remarkable progress over the last five years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modi's government is tackling key health issues in India.\n","id":"2412d69a-1fc1-4e07-ba12-9fa54bc1dbba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>Astronomy can advance by setting up telescopes on Mars where there is less light from the Sun and little atmosphere to interfere compared to Earth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mars would lead to an explosion of scientific development. The results would lead to longer lives, more fulfillment, and more jobs.\n","id":"a8b07114-5436-445f-9e6c-6629c31512fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>Lots of investment is going into space industries such as space mining and will see a pay off once Mars starts the colonization process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Space colonization starting with Mars can boost the economy and the process of job creation from anywhere in the universe.\n","id":"a4e880de-9c9b-4b68-94df-1b7c4f591ad3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, in the military, fire fighters, and police sometimes have different physical entry standards for men and women. It is argued that since women are often weaker than men, it is sexist and discriminatory to have entry standards that usually only men can make. This argument makes no sense. Those physical standards are put in place to ensure that the people are properly equipped to do those dangerous jobs safely. There are plenty of men who can't meet the physical requirements of being, for example, a fireman. I include myself among them. It is not sexist to have high entry standards to dangerous jobs. Those standards are there to keep people safe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The military, fire fighters, and police officers should have the same entry standards for men and women.\n","id":"6e0e91fc-c390-4a21-a201-9dfc26b7c607"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>A young draftee in June 2014 shot and killed five other soldiers and wounded five more at a guard post in a mountainous region near the line with North Korea due to bullying.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The prevalence of bullying has led to mass shootings and suicides within the Korean military.\n","id":"fe0fd713-935f-4c2b-a7cd-a15e4629a1bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is releasing Mother 3 worldwide a good move for Nintendo?<|ARGUMENT|>Releasing Mother 3 worldwide is another step further in showing that Nintendo will now cater to fans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Releasing Mother 3 worldwide is a good move for Nintendo.\n","id":"7b3df940-bc78-4597-a91c-4366ba933ed1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>The Dutch and Danish just got sued over their foreign investor taxations and have way higher tax levels that Greece, for instance, would not be able to handle nor convince its inhabitants to agree with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The financial systems within the EU would need a massive overhaul before USE federal taxes can be enforced. The only tax that is standardized is VAT.\n","id":"37ccc4fa-58c4-448d-9f45-088e5fd5fbe8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello, Maybe I am cynical but even as 'left wing' politics are having somewhat of a resurgence, I think American politics are so far from orthodox meanings that any left wing resurgence will, at best, give us a National Healthcare system and legalized weed. I think the labor and leftist movements of the late 19th century is never returning to the United States and our country will always be a vastly conservative nation. Take the new libertarian movement for instance. There was a time when a libertarian was a left wing Anarchist. Today a libertarian is a fiscal conservative. When the world implemented a universal healthcare system, we called for social spending cuts. When Europe was getting hit with austerity we Did nothing because we've been LIVING in austerity for 20 years. I think America is bought and paid for and will remain so until is collapses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The American working class is completely void of class consciousness and the labor movement is dead and buried.\n","id":"8d3cba55-447f-42d8-83ef-77fb3ac479eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Many female rape survivors find women-only spaces where they are with cis women, who fully understand and share their particular experience of womanhood, to be incredibly important for their recovery.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing in people with male genitalia might be traumatizing to cis women who are survivors of male violence.\n","id":"f870d2c7-22ac-4cf5-9a64-73b06676d78e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2016, average compensation for the 200 highest-paid executives in the US increased 16% over what they received in 2015, to $19.3 million. The average compensation of the new top 200 highest-paid executives rose even more in 2017, to $19.7 million.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Compensation for US corporate executives is rising faster than compensation for the average worker.\n","id":"335a4112-0113-421d-b830-ad2a2d0d710b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think EVERYONE should have freedom of political and religious beliefs, because none from either category can be proven to be 100 wrong. However, I think that all beliefs like that should be kept to one's own self, whether it be positive about your own ideals, or negative about someone else's. Taking a side and publicly displaying that you are a part of that side has no positive effect for you. Either people don't care, or they will be put off by you. You aren't going to make friends by saying, I'm X or I'm not X .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Expressing political and\/or religious beliefs publicly is not a smart thing to do.\n","id":"c6828e32-7980-437f-9e01-2714ce49f6c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Echo chambers for political opinions are incredibly dangerous. Evidence of this can be seen in peaceful protests that splinter off into riots, or the white supremacist march in Virginia where someone drove a car into the opposing crowd. Online communities that can and or will ban people for going against the grain, especially those that are unafraid of holding violent opinions regarding individuals, organizations, or governments should not be allowed to exist. If Reddit refuses to do something, then I believe they should be held responsible for any violent actions that these groups take. We have to take a stand against unchallenged views or face the consequences of our inaction. EDIT My view on this has already been changed. I was so focused on political subreddits that I completely forgot about things like LGBT and emotional support subreddits. My argument promptly fell apart as it became clear that more harm than good would come from this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit should not allow \"Safe Space\" subreddits to exist.\n","id":"7b92d596-d2ce-4c67-ba98-c98606898047"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease often result in multiple hospitalizations. These conditions can be helped and prevented through proper nutrition a resource UBI can help provide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI can provide the additional funds needed to purchase healthier foods, which can result in better overall health.\n","id":"141bd8b4-8f9b-4728-aa78-f5736de34555"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>A person renting out a property cannot evict a tenant suddenly and without reason, since the initial lease determined the period of mutual consent so long as both parties follow the terms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is a right we often afford in cases where initial consent or action implies continued consent for a reasonable time period.\n","id":"7fad2d22-7751-4a37-98c0-38446c03dc75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please excuse any spelling errors, I'm on mobile. Here is what happened in brief Met a guy on online dating site. Went on two dates. After date number two I agreed to go to his apartment to watch a movie bad decision number one . After the movie we agreed to watch another, I fell asleep. Wake up around five am, my pants are pulled down, and he's trying to put his penis inside me. I froze and just laid there like a pathetic, weak, moron . Didn't say a word, or move a muscle. He finishes, and thanks me for taking it so well. I continue to lay there. Eventually I got up and drove home. I should have fought, and bit and screamed, I shouldn't have been in his apartment anyway, especially since I did not want to have sex. I shouldn't have fallen asleep. Please change my view. This is killing me<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I was raped and it's my fault.\n","id":"16718bf2-8746-4ae2-a852-c78e0aaa056b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kurdish Independence<|ARGUMENT|>The continuing statelessness of the Kurdish nation is an indictment of modern international politics. The Kurdish cause has a low level of political visibility in Western nation-states. For this reason, it does not have a high political priority for any Western government. To preserve moral credibility, governments must judge the Kurdish case on its genuine merits rather than on its domestic political significance or lack thereof.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The continuing statelessness of the Kurdish nation is an indictment of modern international politics...\n","id":"eb3fb028-c540-45ea-8280-1b7bdb5cb43b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly I would like to define discipline not as corporal punishment but more akin to how I understand the military or tiger parenting high structure and order, expectations demand of manners, cleanliness respect ect. I do not mean beating a child for every minor infraction of the rules where fear respect. Obviously there would be strong consequences if the child was to not follow the rules but not corporal punishment. Something that would be classified as 'good parenting strategies' my purpose here would not be to debate what they are but for the sake of the argument we can agree they exist If we take the argument to its opposite extreme, an undisciplined brat child, I would say this is the most undesirable outcome for a child. If a kid can not follow instructions from people in positions of authority then he will not only be at risk of putting himself in danger don't run on to the road but he will not be able to do well in school which limits his options for higher education and job prospects as well as not being informed enough not to make bad decisions teen pregnancy . There are 2 counter arguments I see, firstly the fear that coming from a highly structured and disciplined upbringing, once they have some freedom they will buck the upbringing they had and go off the rails, killing prostitutes and doing heroine. But is that at all realistic? If it is assumed all teenagers go through some level of rebellion is it not reasonable to assume the disciplined kid would become less disciplined while the brat kid becomes a juvenile delinquent? The other counter argument I see is that a rigidly structured childhood would minimise individuality and creativity, but so long as you encourage a creative outlet and allow input from the child is 1 hour of piano lessons or football training everyday not better then the same time playing playstation? Thanks EDIT Thanks for the responses, there were a bunch of anicdotale 'I knew a guy' stories which I don't really think add much weight to the argument one way or the other, u Hq347332 and u jayjay0918 both came up with good counter arguments using prison as the most extreme place for structure and disciple and I have to agree that that would not be the best place to raise a child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as too much discipline when it comes to raising children\n","id":"5bb8cf9a-1279-4ed6-a672-ed6ebbc773a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>Orbital rings would be scaled according to total usage needs of industry output, rather than group a.k.a. country usage needs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An orbital ring spreads around the globe, which gives the global population more access than a space elevator.\n","id":"00fddbb1-de5f-4edd-a00c-c8a20943d001"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>Only 15% of people who have been sentenced to death since 1976 have actually been executed and a large fraction of death sentences are subsequently reversed. Thus, there is no certainty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The small number of executions skews any study about the death penalty deterrent effect.\n","id":"04c320ed-ecf1-464c-ac6f-ebfd2774bac7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>The norms of many religious organizations are at odds with modern democratic norms. Funding these organizations runs the risk of seeming to endorse these norms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious organisations in liberal democracies should not receive any public funding direct or indirect.\n","id":"e0a26c77-b9bb-47eb-9408-3221879affcd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Imagine if someone were to wake up one day, having been kidnapped the night before, and discovered that they were attached to a a coma patient via a great many tubes. You learn that if you try to detach yourself to leave than he will die. We probably say that, while it would be nice if you remained attached, you have no obligation to remain in a hospital bed for the next nine months of your life. Likewise, women have no obligation to remain pregnant when they are not consenting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We do not give people the right to use other's people's body to use or sustain them without express and ongoing consent. If women want to remove that consent, they should be able to do so by having an abortion.\n","id":"c8b655c9-4397-4dfc-b6f9-bf9f8b328f38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I will preface this by saying that my view concerns only te practical matters edit as a cost effective way to keep the time I mean with that if a Rolex is to be treated like a piece of jewelry or for other aesthetic value I concede that it's too subjective to have any real view about and if people want to pay money for a diamond armband then why not for a Rolex? From reading on the internet there seems to be no doubt that a Rolex or other similarly prestigious brands are the absolute king of high quality mechanical watches the problem is that mechanical watches are ridiculously outdated technology at this point and moving parts in general don't cut it any more. A cheap 20 euro quartz watch is orders of magnitude more accurate than even the finest mechanical watches at this point though I admit that's a rather weak argument because for most uses the finest mechanical watches will be accurate enough though probably not poor mechanical watches I'll instead focus on the price. People say that a Rolex will last for centuries and becomes an heirloom while this is true this comes with a massive asterisk from reading in that in order to do that it needs to be serviced around every 5 10 years the servicing alone is more expensive by far than a cheap quartz watch which outlasts the 5 10 years period so I don't see the price argument. Apart from that even the cheapest quartz watches tend to come with a lot of extra features like stopwatches, multiple clocks for different time zones, alarm clocks built in and what not that a Rolex lacks and as said are considerably more accurate. A subjective argument could be made for the analogue over the digital clock but I feel that this is like people who say they like the imperial system over the metric system and just a what you're used to thing and that with only minor training almost anyone will eventually learn to read a digital clock faster than an an analogue clock and that the system to display time on a digital clock is simply superior. People need to learn how to read time from an analogue clock while with a digital clock it's self explanatory. I do concede that there are some fringe situations in specialized use where a mechanical watch is desriable such as military situations where batteries will be unavailable for a long time in which case it might be necessary to get the best mechanical watch possible but for everyday practical clock reading I find the prize of a battery change every two years compared to never having to wind apart from that to be very small compared to the significant cost differnetial, extra features and superior accuracy of even the cheapest quartz watches.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Practically speaking a Rolex is a laughably poor product for normal use\n","id":"a8650c46-a575-4f17-81db-ebb4314fefed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Andrew Yang is the only candidate that has posed an actual solution to lobbyists hijacking American democracy. He has proposed that the government annually give out 100 democracy dollars per citizen that can only be paid to political campaigns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Andrew Yang has a unique policy platform and wants to implement a number of changes that will provide large benefits to the American people.\n","id":"00af39cc-ff69-4ff5-8b68-10eb67159ba8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm interested in Bitcoin as a hobby, and I'm constantly seeing all these articles and blog posts about how Blockchain is going to revolutionize everything in the universe. My view is that most people trying to use a blockchain for anything other than a cryptocurrency don't fully understand the point of a blockchain. These are the technical properties of a blockchain that limit its utility 1 Expensive and slow writes . Just compare Bitcoin with a blockchain 0.50 300 bytes, ~30 minute confirmation, to AWS no blockchain 0.02 1 GB. 2 Risk of fraud. Bitcoin's blockchain doesn't make fraud impossible, but only un economical. A non financial non currency blockchain would not have this same dynamic. 3 Resource intensive. Blockchains are big databases that every user a high number of users have to download. It's obvious how wasteful that would be in the 99 of use cases where a client server setup is sufficient. These properties are tolerable even desirable in the specific context of Bitcoin or whatever other coin . It's a very special scenario with a carefully engineered balance of incentives between multiple parties. In any other domain, no one in their right mind would ever use a database like this for anything. Edit I gave a much more detailed follow up of this view in this comment <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most blockchain startups are misguided in their usage of technology\n","id":"b150c856-5213-4529-be2c-1da067e00445"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off I'm not anti vaccine. Vaccines are good. Hell, make them a pill, and I'll take them. Problem is, I hate needles. They hurt. People say it's only a slight pinch, but it hurts. I can feel the needle going in, I can feel it inside my muscle. And it all hurts. Then the doctor or nurse starts actually injecting, and it hurts even more. Seriously, it fucking hurts. Compared to breaking my jaw, the needle hurt more. I am not kidding, I actually broke my jaw, and had a vaccine earlier that day Chick Pox or something, I was 17 and one after anesthetic for stitches . Both hurt more than the actual breaking of the jaw. All in the same day, less than 3 hours apart, so no memory fuckery there. Needles hurt much more than the next most painful experience I have. There are other ways of getting medicine inside a body. Orally, Anal Yes, I'm a straight male with an intent on protecting my Anus, and I will take an Anal pill if I have to , patches anti smoking patches , rubs, a spray on the eyes works. So many ways, yet we have to do it by stabbing. What gives? I am aware that needles allow for instant bloodstream access. Vaccines don't need that. Maybe someone in the military might need that, but I don't. When I broke my jaw, I didn't need it. Hell, five extra minutes for a rub to take effect? Okay, I don't mind waiting. Needles are traumatizing. When I was a child, I was sickly. My digestive system didn't like anything I ate. I threw up a lot, had a lot of diarrhea, and was very skinny and malnourished simply because I couldn't digest anything mostly Thank god for Simulac . So I had needles about once or twice a month overnight feeding me and fixing what else my body needed. I also had vaccines. And every time, I wouldn't sit still, cause needles hurt, so I had about 4 or 5 people holding me down, including my mom and dad, and hurting me. Seriously, that fucked me up hard. Needles are traumatizing. Can't we just use a Measles pill instead? I am aware that it is harder to make vaccines using non needles. However, we shouldn't just say we have a vaccine now, stop development. No, we should continue until we have multiple ways of administrating the vaccine. Needles are not guaranteed to be sterile. They can be used more than once. Yes, they are supposed to be sterile, but a pill is a one use item, and is much more guaranteed to be sterile than a needle. If you can explain to me why I should use needles, then I welcome your views. Or even just a way to deal with them. I need to update my vaccines to live in the dorms next year edit So I have a needle phobia. Thanks I guess. I understand now why they are preferred, but I still don't like them. I guess I while have to live with it. Thanks anyway gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm Anti-needle\n","id":"b079355b-921d-417a-ae3a-fd6ced37adfd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I'm building a new computer for Christmas, and have encountered a moral dilemma. I need a copy of Windows 10. A friend of mine can give me a corporate product key for Windows 7. Using that I can install Windows 7. This fits perfectly well with my policy that it's ok to get free copies of Windows through whatever means necessary because Seriously, Fuck M . Here's the rub Folks cannot upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 for free anymore. EXCEPT if you tell Microsoft that you are upgrading for the sake of using Assistive Technologies These are the features Microsoft adds to help people with disabilities The Magnifier for the seeing impaired, the narrator for the seeing impaired, some keyboard shortcuts for the seeing impaired. I'm noticing a pattern. Anyway. If you tell Microsoft that you are upgrading to Windows 10 for the sake of using those features added for folks with disabilities you can upgrade for free. Microsoft never checks to see if you actually use those features. It's an honor thing. Regular folks have to pay to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Folks with disabilities can upgrade to Windows 10 for free, cause Microsoft is trying to help them out. So, basically, I can get a free copy of Windows 10 if I like to Microsoft, and exploit their generosity of trying to help folks with disabilities. This, to me, seems especially shitty. Getting a copy of Windows 10 for free through the normal pirating means seems fine. Lying about using features added for folks with disabilities seems really terrifically shitty. It feels wrong to exploit this nice thing Microsoft is doing for folks with disabilities, despite the fact that I'm perfectly comfortable getting Windows for free when it's just pirating or bootlegging a copy. I find myself in the position of wanting to buy a copy of Windows 10 Pro 199 instead of getting the free copy of Windows 7 from a friend, and lying about having disabilities to get a free upgrade. So, change my view, Reddit Convince me that it's perfectly fine to lie to M about having a disability, and that there's no practical difference between lying about having a disability, and just bootlegging a copy of Windows like I've done every other time. Except for the times when it came with a computer I bought.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lying about using Assistive Technologies to get Windows 10 is worse than pirating Windows 10.\n","id":"64f06b5c-32d0-466f-bee0-13346410e776"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been reading a lot of feministcurrent and it's really gotten me thinking that a lot of the sex positivity I see is lacking in critical analysis and ends up promoting the male gaze and exactly the kind of objectifying patriarchal standards which keep normalizing the idea of women as primarily useful as titillating decoration. Take this as an example. Jezebel reported about a game developer conference where Microsoft hired women to dance in schoolgirl outfits at an event and speak to attendees and encourage them to dance, and after pointing out how wrong this was, the article ends with Brianna Wu stating, The problem is not the women. I am a sex positive feminist and so are most women in the game industry. They are just trying to make a living. The issue is, this is wildly inappropriate at a professional networking event. \u201d So, if it is not appropriate there, when would it ever be appropriate? Why is this not appropriate here? The appropriateness has nothing to do with abusing the outfit wearing women because they made their own free choice to be there. It has nothing to do with them being sexed up because we're all sex positive in the game industry. It's inappropriate because it objectifies these women, right? It's inappropriate because this decision to hire female dancers and not male ones reinforces the idea that this is a space for men, not for women, right? Why are those things that aren't okay to do in that space but are totally okay to do online, or in porn, or in sex work, or in a strip club? And if it isn't okay to objectify and exclude women anywhere in society, then why do we support people who celebrate their choice to profit from an industry which does that constantly? Many people advocate that the sex industry be legalized like any other industry and they call this statement feminist, but this ignores the ground realities of masculine power and control in the world. Sex industries have overwhelmingly male consumers. Sex industries cater to, live and die by male entitlement to women's bodies. And it's males in society and their feelings of entitlement to women's bodies which are promoted by the sex industry which promote rape culture. As one writer put it gt We cannot normalise male entitlement by saying men need access to sex and therefore we, as a society, must maintain a class of women who are available to satisfy men's desires and also expect to build a society wherein men don't feel entitled to sexual access to women. The problem isn't that we should never talk about sex or see sex or something like that. The problem is that we live in a world where sex is expected by men and not by women because both are fed the notion that men deserve to have it and women should look good for it by every sex industry website, book, and movie out there, from a very young age. We have to admit the base truth that children who have access to the Internet see porn at a very young age, boys and girls , and they both see the same, most common kind, which is that kind where a woman is the focus because the woman is the object to be consumed, that kind which reinforces gender stereotypes and sits subservient to the male gaze because the male gaze has power and money in this world and therefore can exert control over most of the products of the sex industry and increase demand for such products. And as long as that is true, being pro sex work normalizes that kind of message of gender inequality. It tells people that they don't need to think critically about the true effect of their work and what it does when it goes out into society. Them choosing to do it is enough to make it okay by that logic, maybe me choosing to take women's reproductive rights away might be okay as a woman politician, because it's my choice . I want this view to be changed because I feel out of touch, most people my age simultaneously think that women are too objectified and think that they are not objectifying themselves when they replicate the images they see in the objectifying media in their everyday life because they are empowering themselves. They see no disconnect between wanting women to be taken seriously for what's inside rather than outside and dating apps which encourage people to judge the person's outside before you get to know what's inside. And if everyone thinks this is fine except for me, then maybe I'm the one who's wrong. sources articles I read while writing this Jezebel about Microsoft's Game Dev Conference Feministcurrent about the Jezebel article defining the f word why we need to be radical with feminism<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being \"pro-sex-work\" or \"pro-sex-industry\" and even sometimes \"sex-positive\" generally reinforces the male gaze and patriarchal standards in the world.\n","id":"4941bc0e-85b7-490a-8020-c1243ba6431c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is obviously inspired by the recent events in France and the opinions that have come forth since the events. I believe that someone being offended by something is no different than someone's favorite color. Just because you have a preference to blue doesn't mean that everything in your life should be blue because you might feel one way or another emotionally if everything is or isn't blue. I think it harms society to limit what people are allowed to do or say just because someone is offended, especially if no one is affected by the offensive action. For example, if I'm a White person and a film is released that portrays all White people as slave owning, ignorant hillbilly rednecks, then while I have every right in the world to be offended I have no right whatsoever to change anything because I am offended. TL DR Other people's rights shouldn't be taken away because a group of people are offended<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that a person or group of people being offended should never justify any action be it positive or negative.\n","id":"6c5a8ad0-636a-48d8-9f9d-b65c08a8dc23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments should impose methods of population control.<|ARGUMENT|>In present day China, every single child was wanted by their parents. Poor parenting still occurs, but far less so. This leads to less criminal activity, and much higher familial investment in their offspring's education - raising national productivity of human capital and further decreasing crime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Population control could reduce the number of unwanted children, resulting in greater social stability later on.\n","id":"2d495638-f5af-4897-98f0-714ce1cceddb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>When the South Carolina Articles of Secession speak of offenses by the federal government and northern states, they explain that they mean three specific things: 1 the election of a President hostile to slavery, 2 harboring runaway slaves, and 3 intending to abolish slavery completely, by force if necessary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The principal legacy of Confederate statues is white supremacy and slavery. Since this fundamentally conflicts with American values and ideas, they should be removed.\n","id":"4900556b-0516-4bea-b37d-676c8bed07fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Trying 9\/11 terror suspects in NYC courts<|ARGUMENT|>New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in November of 2009: \"It is fitting that 9\/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site where so many New Yorkers were murdered.\"6<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fitting to try 9\/11 terrorists at site of attacks\n","id":"8c0a2b64-f0f0-4e9b-b7ff-69a29e971dfe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For example, a lot of people want to boycott the Ender's Game film coming out because Orson Scott Card is very anti homosexual, and same with the Chick fil a fiasco a while back. To me, these things are totally unrelated and I can really easily enjoy their books, foods, etc. without caring what they think personally. I could possibly see it being okay in the most extreme of cases, like child molesters or something like that, but in instances where someone supports causes that are commonly debated and happen to not agree with my own views, I don't feel there's any cause to boycott. Why shouldn't I support something I enjoy just because I don't agree with something unrelated that it's creator thinks? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think artists'\/authors'\/businessmen's\/etc personal views should make me not enjoy their creations\n","id":"1d44ca60-e6f8-4301-9949-6a35db89d4ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Eggplants, fuck eggplants. First of all, the taste, God forbid the taste of this purple piece of shit. Whenever I try to eat it it makes me fucking vomit. Whatever type of cooking you do to this stupid vegetable the taste is disgusting. The only word I can describe to its taste is fucking shit . Second, the texture. This stupid vegetable goes soft the minute you put it warm water. And you eat it like its slimy shit. You are confused whether you should slurp and drink it or chew. My dad tried bathing slices of it on flour and deep fried them like onion rings. It improved its texture somehow but the taste is still horrible. Third, its nutrients. Like the eggplant is one of the least nutritious vegetables there is. What reason does someone have to eat this thing? Sure they may be cheap buy there are other even better alternatives. But they provide good amounts of fiber , Yeah like every other vegetable ever. Fourth, the name. Eggplant, egg fucking plant. How the fuck did an egg get to be a plant. The looks of this vegetable never resembled a fucking egg, from shape, smell,texture, or color. That's just fucking dumb, maybe name it more accurately like shitplant, to warn people on how disgusting this fruit is. I actually don't know if somebody can change my view on this, but I want you guys to try. I may be biased because I don't eat vegetables that much. But I really hate eggplants the first time I tried it. I can bear eating other vegetables except this piece of shit plant. Goodbye.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eggplants are the worst vegetable and it should never be eaten by anyone.\n","id":"752756f9-b0a7-48a2-96f7-c3602b944e13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Jesus the Messiah?<|ARGUMENT|>In Judaism, no one is currently being awaited to fulfill the mission Christians claim Jesus came for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"He was not the sort of Messiah many of his contemporaries were expecting.\n","id":"eeb685d4-42b8-4929-9449-279968c6293f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Declaring someone who made mathematical mistake as a winner over someone who didn't in math competition is bad. Math is not subjective and any implication is not subjective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"What is good or bad is not subjective and not personal, even though it often needs proper debate to convince most people to change their initial opinion.\n","id":"a1b5b287-792c-4600-852e-7cc138f312df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Science has room for the unknown, and certain metaphysical issues are resistant \/ inaccessible to scientific investigation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence or non-existence of God cannot be established through the scientific process.\n","id":"c8f590b2-8a33-41c6-99ee-c49a3710bfd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The new Disney live action film \"Mulan\" will not be popular.<|ARGUMENT|>Hardly anyone noticed when Netflix began to offer The Wandering Earth for streaming, the second-highest grossing movie in China this year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Various large-scale productions in front of a Chinese background flopped at the box office in recent years.\n","id":"5c76f123-5482-464c-b2e7-b4ff3ce261c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Inspired by this comic which is exactly the wrong way to deal with depression, I'd like to posit a few statements about depression and ideally you can educate me and change my view. Depression is self inflicted People who suffer from depression are usually not billionaires, bon vivants and socially esteemed high achievers, but those who made bad decisions in the past. They maybe didn't follow through with their education, they maybe didn't find out what motivates them in life, they maybe abused drugs and or alcohol, they maybe put all their effort in getting meaningless sex. Now they're an empty shell and don't know why. You might point me to some celebrity exceptions, those who seem to have it all, but still suffer depression to the point where they even commit suicide. But do they really have it all? Some abuse drugs, some can't form a personal relationship, some become arrogant assholes. You can change my view on this by giving me statistics that prove that sober, highly connected, social, educated people are at the same risk to become depressed as drug alcohol abusing, shut in, antisocial, uneducated people. Depressed people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps Following contention 1, depressed people can find out why they are depressed and do something about it. They can find their passion in life, they can become healthier, more educated, gain social skills, etc. If you're depressed because you don't have a significant other, work towards that goal. If you loathe your minimum wage job, get higher education or start your own business. If you are disgusted by your appearance, work out and eat healthily. The comic at the start simply addresses depression as if the people around the protagonist don't acknowledge or understand it. In my opinion, when someone tells you that they're depressed, you shouldn't tell them to snap out of it, but rather ask What are you doing about it? Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe depression is self-inflicted, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and need to do exactly that.\n","id":"94af7d24-1593-4de1-8339-c2135691a022"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've noticed that many games these days seem to restrict the player to only 1 or 2 saves. These include the Far Cry games from 3 on up, Minecraft, No Man's Sky, and Subnautica among others. This is a dangerous trend because if a glitch in the game corrupts the player's save, or corrupts quest progression making quests missions objectives impossible to finish, it could practically wipe out 50 hours or more worth of progress. This is frustrating and unacceptable Developers need to assume that their games are going to corrupt players' saves once in a while software development is not a perfect science after all and provide the player tools to keep backups and maybe even fix their saves like allowing arbitrarily many saves, or enabling a developer console like in Elder Scroll and Fallout games . As for allowing the player to save whenever they want vs. forcing a checkpoint system I'm not totally against a good checkpoint system but most of the ones I've seen are bad. Take Far Cry Primal, for instance. If you've failed miserably on a particularly difficult quest, the game will save your progress at that point and then teleport you to a spawn point, after having wasted all of your weapons resources and had your tamed beasts killed. If I totally failed a quest and gotten myself killed, I should be able to try again from where I was originally , with the weapons and beasts I started with and not in my now crippled state. Having to repeat most of the steps to reach the point where I messed up and died is punishment enough. Far Cry Primal's example is particularly egregious though. In other games, sometimes the checkpoint system will auto save at a particularly bad point where you can't really escape e.g, just before a grenade at your feet blows up . It's also frustrating when a checkpoint fails to get triggered after you've already fought heroically against a huge wave of enemies and finally succeeded after 6 or 7 attemps, but the game fails to save before confronting you with a new wave of enemies and you end up getting killed. Now you have to try again to fight off that first wave probably failing at that a few more times and then fight off the second wave all without dying. You wind up having to fight the same fight 15 or 20 times and it gets totally tedious and frustrating. An argument could be made that allowing the player to save at any point would make the game too easy that all a player has to do is hit quicksave after every kill. I'd say that's only true for badly designed games. The Serious Sam games on Serious difficulty, or Doom 2016 on Nightmare are excellent examples of games that are quite difficult despite allowing arbitrary saves. If the player overcomes a difficult fight but with only 20 health and 5 shotgun shells left he could save at that point and try entering the next fight on that, or he could reload and try to overcome the prior fight with a better outcome. Even saving in the middle of a fight sketchy because the fights in those games are so hectic that you'll likely get killed a second after hitting quicksave if you lose your momentum. Thus, games could be made harder to compensate for players saving at arbitrary times. Regardless, if developers still prefer a checkpoint system then they at least should keep a history of the player's prior checkpoints so that players have an opportunity to go back if they need to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Games shouldn't restrict the player to only 1 or 2 saves. The player should be able to save whenever they want and to make as many saves as they want.\n","id":"87f18059-39b1-4843-9995-dd3efd199d32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm aware that this view has been posted a handful of times. In my defence, it has been over a year since the last post, and I assure you, I've read through the original posts and am still not convinced to change my view, so I believe it warrants another . To start off, I'm a smoker. Shocker. Also, I really don't have anything against overweight people, and in fact, couldn't care less if you're obese or not. However, it is highly unfair, in my opinion, that fat people are not subject to the same criticism that smokers are. Note my argument is not aimed at obesity due to medical conditions I'm talking lifestyle caused obesity . Smoking is a disgusting habit gt What, and eating to the point you're so morbidly obese that you need a scooter to move around isn't ? gt Granted, that's an extreme example and seems to only be a thing in America and not here in Europe, but still both are lifestyle choices people make that negatively impact your physical health. gt Only one of the two is looked down on in public in fact, it's even become socially acceptable to make eye contact with a smoker, give them a disgusted face, and move past them, while I've never seen an overweight person be treated the same. Due to the whole body positivity trend, it actually almost seems to me like fat people are congratulated on how brave they are for being comfortable in their skin. God forbid, you mention you're a smoker suddenly you're a pariah that none dare go near. gt You almost never hear someone ridicule a fat person eating smokers, though, get harassed very often. If not in person, than by the plague of anti smoking ads all around them reminding them that they're about to die from their next cigarette. gt Smoking and being obese are both harmful, often addictive, lifestyle choices. One group is however shamed and ridiculed, one accepted and sympathised with. Death and disease gt Smoking and second hand smoke can cause cancer, everyone knows that. Yet despite cancer being the leading cause of death Lung cancer only makes up for 14 of those deaths with that percentage including non smokers as well. Hell, smoking doesn't even directly cause cancer, it simply raises your chances. gt The same can be said for obesity leading causes of death in 2012 were cardiovascular diseases, which are a major risk factor in obese people WHO And surprise, obesity is also a major risk factor for the world's leading death cause cancer. gt All in all, around 6 Million people die each year due to Tobacco related causes including second hand smoke WHO That's a lot. The figures for obesity only stand at 2.8 million deaths a year but that still makes it the fifth leading cause of death worldwide EASO gt And again, we see the same thing obesity and tobacco consumption both contribute to millions of deaths a year. The difference being smokers are constantly reminded of their horrible life choices via anti smoking ads and people telling them off, while obese people are left off the hook, and only the closest of friends would dare suggest someone lose weight. Funny how everyone is so afraid of insulting obese people and making them feel bad for being unhealthy, but don't mind saying basically the exact same thing to a smokers face. The difference is smoking harms other people being fat doesn't gt Alright, that is fair to an extent. If it helps, as a smoker, I hate smokers who simply light a cigarette around others without permission. It should be a global smoker courtesy to ask the people around you if it's ok to smoke, or simply go somewhere secluded. gt BUT. The argument that obesity doesn't harm others doesn't really work in my opinion. You ever see an obese parent? 9 times out of 10, their children are just as obese. And their dogs. And cats. And basically every other living thing in their household. Obesity doesn't affect others in the same way tobacco does, but it's something that can still be passed on through bad habits and then you have poor kids who grew up obese and stay obese and just can't break the habit no matter how they try, with obesity just thrust upon them, they had no choice in the matter. Remember Ben from Stephen King's IT? Yeah, he hated being fat, hated himself. But his mother constantly fed him, and then he struggled like that for a long time. Though in the book he lost the weight, many aren't that fortunate. gt This is getting quite long so I'll leave it at this for now  guys D<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obese\/overweight people should be stigmatised just as harshly as smokers are in today's society\n","id":"86f9e3f2-7ec8-455f-ac70-4b7e35284d0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>Experts commonly are asked to give opinions on issues in public forums such as writing opinion pieces or engaging in live debates or forums<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parliament is not the only open forum where people can debate these issues.\n","id":"9332bf7c-3e1a-4b66-ad06-9ba4f664e973"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Little background I am 20 and I've been playing or watching other people play video games my entire life. Recently I decided to stop gaming. I am not a native English speaker so bear with me. First of all, I do believe gaming with other people real life friends being in the same room as you can be beneficial since you're spending time with other people doing the same thing. Still, I do believe playing board games with your friends would be better since you have an actual interaction with your friends. Moving on, competitive gaming alone provides you with absolutely nothing. In certain cases, like people with depression, it can be helpful, an online community where the depressed person can find comfort within and sometimes even recover through gaming. But other than special cases like this. there are much better things that the lonely gamer can do. Read a book, watch a movie, discover music, write stuff, paint, go for a walk, all of these can give much more things than competitive gaming can give. All of these can help increase imagination, make you think another way, increase your real life skills, make you productive, boost your confidence. On the other hand competitive video gaming alone makes you anxious, makes you more angry, and it is not productive. You completely waste your time and there's almost no pros, technically your reaction speeds get better and it can help you if you suffer from depression. But those benefits don't compare to the benefits that come with real life activities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Competitive video-gaming alone is almost a complete waste of time.\n","id":"72acf160-ef6e-4275-bb37-f9d5a5629cb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should sperm donors have the same legal rights, responsibilities and limitations as other biological fathers?<|ARGUMENT|>Since a sperm donor is unaware of the socioeconomic background, genetic profile and character traits of the individual who requested the sperm it is not reasonable to expect them to have the same legal responsibilities as other biological fathers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The sperm donor has no choice about the recipient of the sperm. Thus, they cannot assess responsibilities before donating.\n","id":"56bad7aa-2b86-4bad-8c08-31694c0eeaaf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care, Debate on Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>\"Single-Payer FAQ\". Physicians for a National Health Program. Retrieved May 30th, 2008 - \"When, for example, hospitals compete they often duplicate expensive equipment in order to corner more of the market for lucrative procedure-oriented care. This drives up overall medical costs to pay for the equipment and encourages overtreatment.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Competition causes the wasteful duplication of expensive forms of care\n","id":"0dc94961-943a-4453-b56f-0d09b8b8a5f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The other day I drove by a house that had maybe 10 15 signs out front saying mother of a soldier etc etc. This in addition to every politician, TV commercial, sports team, you name it constantly thanking our men and women serving overseas. I don't get it. Our armed forces in Afghanistan are not protecting our freedom. They are waging a war started by Bush that we all know was to protect our economic interests in the area. If anything, they are just generating more hatred towards Americans. Now this is not to say that I think soldiers are bad people. I simply think that in most cases they either come from poor socioeconomic backgrounds and didn't have a lot of other options, or were fooled by the nationalistic fervor following 9 11. I don't think murdering men, women, and children in a foreign country deserves our unquestioning admiration. . For additional background, I'm talking about our current generation of soldiers. I had 2 grandfathers in WW2 and I get that was a much different situation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- I do not think our troops United States should be called \"heroes\"\n","id":"217ab8e1-21c5-41e1-93c6-80a94b2a2c01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Citizens do not take part in the decision-making regarding refugee intake and the majority opinion is then ignored, making the decision undemocratic. Example: Germany- before and after input from the voters with a significantly changed popularity climate. Across Europe, change only ever came once political careers were threatened, which is when damage is already done.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all citizens of high-income countries agree with the actions of their governments. It is unfair to require these citizens to pay for those actions.\n","id":"d474496e-0d81-4476-9cd7-b60a14fc748b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am writing an essay for school arguing that we need standard courses in k 12 that educate kids on general nutrition and eating healthy in order to help them think critically about what they should eat I believe some schools already have this established . Educating young people is one of the key solutions to solving certain problems we face in society. This curriculum would be one solution help drive down obesity rates by giving our students the tools to really think about the consequences, good or bad, to eating certain foods. I'm looking for counter arguments to use in my essay and the only ones I can think of right now would be funding and getting teachers to teach this effectively, but I am sure there are more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Education surrounding nutrition and eating healthy should be standard curriculum in K-12 to help lower obesity.\n","id":"f1cf61eb-23a9-4b58-9558-98487fb27284"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is exactly what the winning side says every 8 fucking years. Why did Bill Clinton get elected? Because of 12 years of Regan and Bush that pissed everybody off and made them vote for the opposite. Why did Bush Jr. get elected? Because 8 years of Clinton that pissed everybody off and made them vote for the opposite. Why did Obama get elected? Because 8 years of Bush Jr. that pissed everybody off and made them vote for the opposite. And finally, why did Trump get elected? Because 8 years of Obama pissed everybody off and made them vote for the opposite. What we are seeing right now is not special it is the exact same cycle of misery that we have been going through for god knows how long now, the only difference being that Trump is only going to take 4 years to piss everybody off. When are people going to learn that both sides are corrupt beyond all hope? We are never going to change anything as long as we keep voting for Democrats that have proven again and again and again that they are incompetent and crooked or by voting for Republicans that have proven time and time and time again that they are incompetent and crooked. You really want to change something? Stop falling into the same pitiful cycle as our father's before us. Vote third party. Write someone in. Protest the two party system. Do SOMETHING that doesn't enable this goddamn atrocious cycle to continue and stop patting yourselves on the back for being the same predictable, naive simpletons that American voters always have been. Am I wrong? I may be oversimplifying, but watching people celebrate these elections as if it will create meaningful change is just sad.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who believe that the recent democratic wins in the US elections represent the fall of the Republican Party or a resurgence in American politics are hopelessly ignorant of history\n","id":"e46b018c-9250-46a9-ad6d-72863656d932"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>This is why the upper level claim that more guns correlate with more homicide is a weak argument to begin with. It is neither true for the US, according to official government data on crime which is not generally a disputed source, nor does it take into account the other factors that contribute to homicide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Correlation is acceptable as an argument as long as both parties agree about the period of the data,and veracity of the sources. These are complex issues and any correlation will be based on multiple hidden variables, so neither party should read too much into it.\n","id":"e7045aca-8652-4a69-8882-67b22613f0e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>This has often taken the form of forcible interference with reproduction. For example, there are many instances of forcible sterilization of women, often without their knowledge or consent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Colonial powers have used gender binary systems and heteropatriarchy to colonise local, indigenous ways of living.\n","id":"902a5fae-6c34-445d-a2ea-f430a7db5d9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi there This is a fairly fluid thought experiment I thought I would bring here it's one I put stock into, don't think I'm just playing devil's advocate . Suppose you're driving. Unbeknownst to lucky you, you're getting laid tonight You head home after work, someone cutting you off in traffic along the way, and upon arriving, you get it on with your partner You both are trying for a child, and tonight's the night However, due to that person who cut you off, instead of the sperm egg interaction that was going to happen and produce a child who would cure cancer or some other arbitrary good thing , a different sperm makes it to the egg Don't worry, you love this child too, but they don't do wicked awesome thing that other one would have. But this demonstrates the chaotic nature of life. Now, you're a teenager You're at a party and sneak away with a person you like into a back room somewhere. You're getting frisky, and the male in the pair is about to orgasm. Instead, a friend pops in asking for another beer or something you know he did it on purpose to bother you . While you're not angry, you just decide not to continue because you're laughing too hard, and you all return to the party. Suppose again that you were on the way to having another genius child that would have succeeded and been great, had your friend not burst in. Any act that stops the life of this human from occurring, stops them equally as much as any other act. The friend effectively pre emptively performed an abortion for you. However, suppose instead of a genius child, having a kid at that point would have been disastrous. Is your friend's intervention not then welcome? What if, because you don't have this child, you're able to raise a magnificent one some amount of years later when you're older. Would this especially not have been a good thing? tldr I would like to know what is the difference between your friend purposefully or a traffic delay accidentally stopping you from having a child at a mistaken non optimal time, thus allowing you to live a fulfilling life and go on to have a child and an abortion, after which you eventually have a child. If the latter is wrong, why aren't the formers viewed with disgust? If stopping the potential for a life that would happen once things are set in motion, how far back does set in motion entail and why is abstinence not seen as wrong?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel that abortion is no worse than delaying someone in traffic or accidentally stopping a friend mid-sex.\n","id":"e51f8bd6-cd58-4d55-a1e9-961f2280cbc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A while back when the Women's March on Washington happened, the movement was accused of being exclusionary towards transgender women because of the pussy hats everyone wore in solidarity with women. People argued that some women have penises, and therefore this was transphobic. However, there's a reason these hats were worn. It was both because of Donald Trump's comments about grabbing women's genitals, and because of the threat to women's reproductive health and access to abortion. These are both issues that particularly effect women who are born with female anatomy. There are some issues cisgender women face that transgender women don't, and unless a trans woman transitioned as a child they don't know what it's like to be socialized as female and grow up in a world experiencing sexism your entire life. There is a lot of misogyny that particularly effects people born into female bodies. I think it should be okay for cisgender women to have a space to talk about issues that effect them without being silenced with accusations of transphobia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's getting harder to talk about issues that mostly effect non-trans women without being accused of transphobia\n","id":"c538632d-8366-411c-8c15-791fb177d0bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the United States uses the Term \u201cPolicing the world\u201d when what its trying to do is further the \u201cManifest Destiny\u201d concept. America wants to spread its way of life as the only acceptable way. America is quick to step in and threaten, embargo, regime change, or even go to war with anyone that stands in its way or holds to a different way of life. Once done they install governments that align and represent the views of America at the expense of the native people, pushing for more dependence on America. I feel like this is mostly done behind closed doors and hushed in most media outlets. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Americas Policing the World is todays \u201cManifest Destiny\u201d\n","id":"d1ca2dd8-49a9-4d56-ae45-da4a8e4cc2ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just had a very heated debate with a few people over lunch about my assertion that a hockey puck is a ball. None of their arguments against it being a ball held up firstly they said it had to be inflated but i countered with the fact that pool balls and baseballs are balls. Secondly, they said it has to be spherical which was countered with footballs being balls. Is there any real reason why a puck isnt a ball? Its rounder than a football if you consider the laces as part of the ball, it rolls, it is an object thats manipulation creates a sport, etc. Its just regular ball with the ends chopped off essentialy, which should be okay for it to keep its classification as a ball, as a football keeps it even though its a squished sphere and missile footballs have the tail and flag sticking out. Pucks are balls.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A hockey puck is a ball.\n","id":"2f39ead4-abd6-408f-a431-126a5c18b86f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>Johnson and Johnson have made a point about wishing to make diversity and inclusion a part of their daily operating habit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many large, multinational corporations are actively taking steps to improve diversity within their company structures.\n","id":"1cc0b4d0-2d34-4ce5-ab95-0705c4836a14"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>The flaw in critique may be that it asks a person in authority to discount his own moral judgment and apply the morality of the collective will. It could be said that Eichmann did this. The collective will at the time being the persecution of the Jews. Therefore, the fault lies both in Kant's idea and in Eichmann's 'idealism'; his literal interpretation of Kant's rule.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eichmann did not distort Kant but applied the ideas correctly, the philosophy itself has the flaw in it that allowed for the persecution of a race.\n","id":"73f3d128-40ab-4327-9520-5d0a97da5aa2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that smartwatches are frivolous, gimmicky and not very useful for there price. Sure the nice bright screen makes it easier to see the time unlike a regular watch thanks to the back light which is nice for my bad eyes. But everything else just seems a extension of the phone. Messages, directions, alarms, assistant, calls, etc. Can all be done by just pulling out my phone, sure, it seems more convenient to check my wrist but for the price range 250 450 it just seems like a not very useful piece of bling. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Smartwatches are overrated, frivolous, and a bit gimmicky.\n","id":"5505b883-59b9-4e8e-aa23-3ab8567c4417"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>States ought not possess nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>We're all well aware of the problems\/issues associated with nuclear waste disposal; ranging from radiation\/disease to pollution to the construction of dirty bombs with stolen components of used\/faulty nuclear material. Now imagine, the horror of attempting to obviate all the workable nuclear weapons in the world. This will be a tardy task that will require considerable effort,time and money. To safely remove nuclear weapons will prove too expensive for nuclear states with third-world economies and it is likely that since most nuclear waste disposal is inefficient and unsafe; nuclear weapon disposal will be much more inefficient\/unsafe. Poor Nations will have the incentive to sell weapons to terrorists or whoever during the disposal process to curtail costs. Poor Nations will also not be able to pay for a safe removal of nuclear weapons and during the disposal\/disarmament nuclear material will\/would be more exposed than ever before. Making the threat of impending nuclear-terrorism very likely as a result.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear waste disposal is rarely safe\/efficient; it is too much to expect a sqeaky clean disposal\/disarmament of nuclear weapons\n","id":"25e57618-9c64-4be5-aad8-7a20e6b0b0c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the European Union should adopt a single working language through which to operate.<|ARGUMENT|>A \u201csingle working language\u201d implies English, a global language, and already one of the two key EU languages, the other being the lesser understood French. That English could be the default language worries the French where they fear the rise of what the French call anglosnoberrie ; the anglicising of the world at the expense of other languages including French. The EU would become one more example of English dominating the world at the expense of the many cultures and languages of Europe. This is indeed an extremely hypocritical stance to take, when the EU is a body that seeks to strengthen intercultural activity and give all the cultures within it a voice. This cannot be done when the overwhelming majority- twenty-six- of the languages, \u2018voices\u2019, of the Member States are silenced and only one is given a platform on which to speak.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the EU \u2018elects\u2019 a single working language, it will be deliberately contributing to the narrow-minded, anglicising of the entire world, despite being a union of diverse cultures with the power to fight it.\n","id":"2718fd26-09a6-4454-bd84-bd0d397fd958"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Vegans can care for animals in existence, like wildlife especially endangered species, and allow them to live longer lives than before. People would just need to refocus their nurturing efforts on wildlife rather than farm animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Farmers tend to kill wildlife in order to protect their livestock\n","id":"8339bdca-994c-4978-b525-a153c932d1e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NATO membership, extend to Georgia and Ukraine<|ARGUMENT|>Russian strength is illusory \u2013 the country\u2019s wealth is highly dependent on the energy exports and its economy is very vulnerable to a fall in oil and gas prices. Despite recent hostility to foreign oil firms attempting to operate in Russia, in the long term the country also needs western investment and technology if it is to maintain its energy output by opening and exploiting new fields. Indeed, Europe cannot be held hostage to Russian energy policy \u2013 who else could Russia sell its oil and gas to? Russia\u2019s apparent military strength is also deceptive \u2013 its army and air force actually performed badly in Georgia and are no match for the modern forces available to NATO.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Russian strength is illusory \u2013 the country\u2019s wealth is highly dependent on the energy exports and it...\n","id":"8bacf71d-9fd9-48ad-a4af-ab3cd8125479"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Brief story My friend had been crushing on this one girl for awhile, so I told him that he should tell her and ask her to come with him and me along with a few other people to see a movie because he didn't have a date. I mean, what harm is there in that? The worst that could happen is that she wouldn't feel the same way. Or so I thought. He ended up telling her and she didn't feel the same way at all. He a was a little disappointed but he felt better because he finally got it off his chest. Fast forward a few weeks, I walk into the break room to microwave something and that girl is sitting there with some of her friends. Low and behold they are talking about how my friend asked her out. I was almost sick to my stomach when i heard how they were describing it. She was trying to make it seem like he was some sort of stalker rapist. I witnessed the event and can certainly claim that nothing remotely like that happened. Why would someone get so offended by the simple fact that a person was attracted to them? It is pretty pathetic. He never even really spoke to her after he had asked her out and never maid any indication that he was holding on to the hope of getting her. This is one of the things that makes my blood boil immediately.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that young women only use the term \"creep,\" for a man that they don't find attractive, as a method of validating that they have high standards to their peers.\n","id":"c2beb961-3924-44fc-8664-6ca81b8248c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Extraordinary Rendition<|ARGUMENT|>How does the U.S. Government know the difference between \u201charsh interrogation\u201d and \u201ctorture\u201d, and on what grounds does it base it\u2019s belief that it is \u201cmore likely then not\u201d that torture won\u2019t take place? The work of the C.I.A., by its nature, is secretive. So, even if the C.I.A. does research and obtains agreements, the general public can never check whether these agreements hold any water. Since the C.I.A. is being held responsible to fight terrorism, they might even have an incentive to bend the rules a bit \u2013 as long as they can later show results to the public.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"How does the U.S. Government know the difference between \u201charsh interrogation\u201d and \u201ctorture\u201d, and o...\n","id":"8d2f8bf7-3574-42e0-9761-32d70d25230d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The government issues union certificates and judges can perform the ceremonies but they must be have God removed from the words. All spouses would be afforded all legal rights. Marriage would be an institution of religious organizations only. When couples get married they would still have to get a government union certificate before the religious ceremony could take place. If ones religion allowed gay marriage fine if not that's fine too. Its their right to allow or not allow gay marriage. Legally gay, straight etc it doesn't matter because in the eyes of the law they would be a union.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the government should only issue civil union certificates and leave the marriages to religious groups.\n","id":"08ff97cc-e010-43b2-9b27-88b52680f3ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The problem with the idea of 'bad grammar' in a general sense in English is that there is no agreed upon by all higher institution of grammar conformity like there is with, say, The Alliance Francaise or The Goethe institute. Even if there were, you could still debate the merits of it. Aside from that, most of the sterotypical complaints about grammar are illogical or self refuting or make no sense. There are whole sites devoted to critiquing passages in say, Orwell, or Strunk and white where the 'grammar mistake' makes no sense and is committed multiple times in the section urging you not to do it. Add to this that the perception of grammar conformity is a ragtaggle combination of the opinions of editors, cultural critics, academics, panels of dictionaries, and so on and there is as much debate there as agreement and the justifications are either based on poorly reasoned misnomers or simply matters of taste. And that is what it comes down to, for me. 'REAL' grammar is the deep rules that make our language intelligible, most of which is not truly deeply understood at this point but which descriptive grammarians at least have a superficial way of describing. Grammar nazis are simply snobs who want to impose their taste on others. Furthermore, their application of it is not even decorous which I find to be a higher order sensibility. 'grammar mistakes' and low register language is entirely APPROPRIATE to much of social media because it is a low register context. Insisting on high register stilted language with no errors is a bit like insisting on ballroom dancing etiquette and style in a hip hop dance off.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The people who complain about bad grammar online are wrong\n","id":"9f516b38-8437-499a-b2ec-bbcf59738c5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>It is essential that humans become a multi-planetary species<|ARGUMENT|>We don't fully know the impact on human biology, psychology and society of living for sustained periods of time in fundamentally different conditions to those we evolved in over tens of thousands of years<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans evolved to live on Earth and we don't know any suitable alternative worlds to sustain human life in the long term\n","id":"d6fdab35-dcd5-436c-82a0-4f6aaf39e9f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>Paying the bill for a service you didn't order is considered theft. By this logic, I could send you a rock and demand 100,000 dollars, because it's just paying the bill.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a citizen didn't want the product, but needs to pay for it anyway, it's theft.\n","id":"48526298-8ca1-48dd-a833-8750e22709c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund security for places of worship?<|ARGUMENT|>The FBI have been accused of using illegal methods to monitor Muslims in an undercover operation at mosques in southern California.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments have been accused of Islamophobia and of implementing Islamophobic policies.\n","id":"9b1eb811-1566-408b-89ec-4fd8a2eac422"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV Vaccinations be Compulsory?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a wide unease among many in the population about loosing their identity when many new people arrive<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These are not conspiracy theorists but point to real problems in society\n","id":"ee68896d-0e33-4bd0-b148-40c7e900d07c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that child rearing is important, but how can I have equal respect for the mom that can stay at home and nap with the baby, run errands, etc, as the mom who gets up, goes to work, and then has to be a mom on her down time? Working moms have the same amount of errands to run, the same house to clean, the same duties as a stay at home mom and less time to do it. I am a woman, and I was brought up to work hard and have a career. I have a hard time comprehending the idea of giving that up, and still having the same amount of respect for myself and pride in what I do. I feel sexist for this. Can someone help me understand the other side?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a woman, I have less respect for women who do not return to work after having a baby than I do for those who do.\n","id":"6e7d4f90-1c0d-4e37-910b-534c9c73c714"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To preface this, I am a Canadian student, so I am writing from the perspective of university costing 3k 10k a year maximum. I'm thinking university should be 20k lower end 100k Ivy League quality a year. However, I also think about half of students should be talented intelligent poorer kids who get a full ride, and scholarships should be further awarded across the board for good grades ex anyone with A average gets a 20k deduction, B to A get a 12k deduction, and so forth or internships completed. Others could work take out loans. Hear me out. As a university student nearing the end of my studies, I find myself thinking that many people have truly wasted their time in university. Many people I know, including myself, didn't learn very useful skills. We just went because it's now necessary. University has increasingly become the cultural norm because it's the new basic requirement for most fields due to the fact that having a degree in the North American context is no longer special in any way. The only way to change this is to make university more expensive. Making university more expensive would force students to be more careful about making the choice to attend. They may consider other options, like trade school or technical programs, which are being increasingly overlooked by today's youth. These jobs are important and it seems they might not be so widespread in a generation or so. A lot of trades pay very well some upwards of 80k a year , so I don't even think this would exclude many families from being able to afford lower end schools. Furthermore, it might force students to think more critically about picking a degree. Is 300k in debt worth the gender studies degree? Some would still say yes, but I believe the number would decrease. This would decrease the amount of people with degrees working unskilled jobs, most likely. I don't want to disadvantage underprivileged kids, so I think this system would work. It would also discourage people who don't have the grades or drive for university from wasting their time and money when they could be making money contributing to society at 18 vs 25. Seven years of work, even at a low pay, is substantial. Sure it might be demeaning to say less intelligent motivated people shouldn't get a degree, but people have to work at McDonalds' and it's a waste of time and money to get a degree to work a job like that. For those that did attend, work ethic would become very important, as would having a part time job. While I'm sure many already have this, I think the number would increase, which would lead to better prepared workers. I don't think the solution to the problem of everyone needing a degree now is to make degrees free. Doing so is just buying time till a Master's is necessary and so forth. You could change my view by showing the wider benefits of lower cost higher education, pointing out the benefits of those in low wage positions being college educated, proving there's no shortage of kids going to trade technical schools in countries with cheap education, proving kids that work while going to school are worse off or something I haven't considered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"University should be MORE expensive\n","id":"66f8f391-e545-45f3-a7a8-4dfc92b96cf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There should be an incentive to those willing to donate their organs. I believe that incentive should be the option to for the donor's family to have the body disposed of for free after said organs are harvested. No cremation fee. No burial fee. Essentially, it would subsidize the costs associated with death, encouraging more organ donation and therefore more lives saved. I understand this is a sensitive topic for some people. Some might not like the idea of a body being disposed of . I get that it doesn't sound good . I understand that some people in the family may not like that idea. When it comes to death, nothing can make everyone happy. Wills have people written in and out of them. Family members mad. No option is going to make everyone happy. I want to look passed my choice in wording. I want to know why this is a bad idea, other than for family members' hurt feelings. I look forward to hearing your POV.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Organ donation should be incentivized.\n","id":"a3966463-9c39-424d-b0b9-1cd70e032c5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Education that Promotes a Certain Faith or Religion be Abolished in Schools?<|ARGUMENT|>There is an institutional distrust of scientifically correct or at least secular textbooks, in part because they provoke independent thought that would 'waste time' in the classroom.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Faith based schools often use textbooks that are directly contradictory to science.\n","id":"ebdc0547-f0be-4970-9982-f54ed696f29d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no limit to freedom of speech.<|ARGUMENT|>The optimal advance is to defend a specific practice, policy or behavior. Ex. If one believes strongly in Canada's Bill C16, for instance, it should be defended on merit and association to commonly held values Eg., Equality, respect . Racist speech is a terrible and shameful practice and should be fiercely opposed based on values *not* by saying it is, \"Not PC\". This grossly demeans and detracts from equality, equity, liberty and other values civilized societies were founded upon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When the enemy chooses the term and the term is unclear from the outset, it is a fool's errand to try and correct the enemy on his\/her\/their definition. Better to set a good example and let history be the judge.\n","id":"35ce0fd4-c7fd-4778-8df4-fa3541a23ad8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Everybody Be Selfless?<|ARGUMENT|>When a mother pushes her child out of the way of an oncoming truck and loses her life, she experiences no reward, material or immaterial, for her sacrifice. People often do things for those they love which benefit the recipient more than themselves. Such actions are selfless.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Love can make you care more about other people than about yourself. Everyone loves and this is a driver for selflessness in everybody.\n","id":"f97bf3d1-8fa3-44ed-9800-99b5b76c2e82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am currently over weight and have being dieting now since July. I was an alcoholic and drank about 3 litres of wine a day and pretty much ate what i wanted. I quit suddenly on July 1st and went to no alcohol and 1200 calories a day, exercising about 4 5 days a week on the exercise bike for 30 minutes. I lost about 7 kilos in the first two weeks, then another 4 5 after that over what is now 2 months. My weight loss has stagnated despite eating 1200 calories and exercising on the bike. Female on birth control implant, because that cann affect weight loss. I just gave up because it was so stressful to constantly monitor everything you eat. it was adding untold anxiety to me. A friend of mine at school mentioned she used to only drink diet coke and not eat. So I decided to just only drink diet coke and black coffee and not eat. I am on my third day now and I have gone from 89 kilos to 85 kilos. I drink lots of water too. People keep saying you'll just gain it back But I dont see how logically that makes sense. Surely the point of fat being stored on my body is to be consumed if I am starving. My brother saids your body is eating things you need not fat that doesn't make sense logically to me. everybody i talk to about it just uses buzz words metablosim slow down an dno one cant tell me why that would happen, why that would matter as long as i dont start eating complete shit when I get to my goal weight, or why my body would eat things it needs and not the fat that is stored for this purpose. I really think this is just a bunch of old wifes tales that have seeped into weight loss discussions. I know quick weight loss is unhealthy, but I can sort out healthy once I am a lighter weight more easily then trying to slowly lose weight now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think starvation as weight loss is going to be useless because \"you'll just gain it back later\".\n","id":"d1419a5e-78d1-49c1-9ef9-8592f0429503"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>The Church also mandated in 1179 free education for the poor, so every cathedral had a master to teach boys too poor to pay the regular fee, planting the seed of modern universal and public education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Catholic Church was the only institution in Europe during several hundred years that actively contributed to free education for the masses.\n","id":"22d3a644-f4b3-46e4-97a9-8b35ff6f84f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was reading a post in r technology about how getting off Facebook makes you happier and less stressed and the comments mentioned that Reddit was probably similar. That made me wonder what you could do with your free time. You could watch TV or play video games but those are time wasters as well. You could read but I'd argue it's no different from watching TV other than a little bit more brain activity. It's still probably a waste of time. You could workout but that would still leave you with some extra free time. Basically, I'm arguing that the time you spend on Reddit Facebook can't be replaced with anything useful other than work which would make you go crazy eventually. Edit Basically, what should you replace Reddit and Facebook with in your free time that isn't a time waster?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anything that you for \"play\" throughout the day is usually a waste of time.\n","id":"092d77d9-42a0-4633-8e20-11209368874a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Ban the Production and Distribution of Genetically Modified Foods?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU has built up the largest collection of independent testing of GM crops. It has been ongoing since the 90s and is all available online. The EU allows all member states to produce and consume GM crops as they see fit. They found no specific concerns with GM crops.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no real evidence of the harms of GMOs, the principle behind which is not too different from that used in other conventional practices.\n","id":"050314e5-4bb9-426f-9d09-51b4872004ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is deliberately not preventing someone's death ethically equivalent to killing them?<|ARGUMENT|>Utilitarianism imposes on moral agents a kind of moral responsibility called \"negative answerability\", which makes them accountable for any state of affairs arising from not doing something. This makes moral agents accountable for an enormous range of consequential states of affairs amounting to crushing moral pressure White, p. 21-23<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many moral philosophers agree that morality cannot be too demanding it cannot require us to make significant personal sacrifices for the sake of others.\n","id":"779ae6bf-26dc-420a-bff8-2d6b119d44fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have partaken in both in the past, but I am now disgusted by both. I am not saying this because I am deprived, I AM deprived, but I only crave the regular vaginal sex.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that both oral and anal sex are disgusting,\n","id":"355960fb-1929-4c83-a07c-75a3944096d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, so I have a problem understanding why history is called a science. In my opinion, it isn't. Let's start with the definition of science the only one consistent with what we generally consider a science IMHO Science is any activity aimed at understanding the general principles i. e. laws of nature of the world around us. History does not fit this definition for several reasons 1 I've often heard the claim that history uses logic and evidence to find out what happened in humanity's past. While that's true, that isn't sufficient to make something a science. Just an example I've often heard people describing the controversy around Jesus's existence a scientific question . Which it isn't. Whether Jesus actually existed is just about whether a concrete person existed at a concrete time in history. That in and of itself doesn't tell us how the Universe operates. It might be of use to us in leading us closer to the truth about that, but in and of itself isn't about how the Universe operates . Think about a detective's job his job is to solve a concrete case e. g. whether X committed a crime , and he uses logic and evidence to arrive at a conclusion about the case. Yet nobody would dare call a detective's job a science. He is a detective, plain and simple. Similarly, historians trying to solve concrete historical cases are just that detectives, but not scientists. 2 When it comes to discovering the guiding principles of history one that could actually be called science , historians are pretty bad. As far as I am aware, no historical laws have ever been rigorously established to exist by historians. Why? Mainly because history cannot be replicated in a lab experiment which could weed out the many zillions of factors playing into historical events and human history in general. 3 Also, historical hypotheses whether they be concrete or more general can never be falsified and yet, historians are still drawn to giving an explanation for everything that happened. I've rarely seen a historical textbook openly admitting this and this happened. Exactly why it happened lies outside of our understanding . In reality, history is very much unpredictable. On the eve of WW1, who knew what would ensue? No one. That's because most historical events cannot be predicted and are often the result of pure randomness what trader and philosopher Nassim Taleb calls a Black Swan . Historians severely underestimate the role of luck in history. Why? Because if they admitted they know very little about the Invisible Hand of History, what would they possibly fill all those history textbooks with?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"History is not a science\n","id":"330200dc-219a-4b03-949e-8b98906a3f58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The Republican electoral coalition after the 1960s was partly based on opposition to the civil rights laws that Democrats had passed: Republicans capitalised on white frustration with issues such as housing and school desegregation. This anger and resentment is still alive today, and is nothing but a subtler form of white supremacism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The beliefs of white supremacism are embedded in American culture; to censor those that are more explicit in their views, such that they are labelled as racists, is to misunderstand the ideology.\n","id":"6186ffc2-d2a9-4a76-bf51-d4e3fdf7e4da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People see things on the news, or read something online then just create an opinion about that thing regardless if they have any basis for it or not. I have police officers in the family and they always ask the same thing when they see some report on the news. Where you there? No? Then your opinion doesn't matter, how could you possibly assess the situation that was going on half way across the country that you did not witness. How can someone pass judgment on something that they are hearing 2nd or 3rd hand? Even 1st hand accounts are only from the perspective of that one person and not the rest of the people involved in that event. Now I know humans are inclined to form opinions no matter what, so changing something like this is pretty much impossible. But more often than not I feel like people need to step back and assess what they really know about a situation. x200B Note I mean this as it apply's to 24 hour news media.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone has an opinion when no one should.About certain things\n","id":"c90df24a-648f-4cf9-a118-e2a119ff03a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Right after my 18th birthday, I went to my post office and registered for the draft. If I didn't, I could face 250,000 in fines and or up to 5 years in prison. I know that that law hasn't been enforced since 1987, but it's still on the books which means it CAN be enforced at any time. We live in a society where women want equality. I say we make things equal. Let's either get rid of selective service altogether or make women sign up for it at the age of 18 alongside men. Convince me it's right that only men should sign up for selective service without forcing a traditional gender role on anyone. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women should sign up for the draft in the United States at age 18 or the draft should be done away with.\n","id":"7102a430-81e4-4fdf-b99b-deee20eea19e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US completely restore relations with Cuba?<|ARGUMENT|>Industries such as travel, agriculture, and banks would profit immensely from normalization of relations, thus benefitting U.S. economy at large. investopedia.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Restoring relations with Cuba would benefit the U.S. economically.\n","id":"c0f0f02d-9272-4b6d-80aa-b2d29597ea4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Nuclear energy<|ARGUMENT|>Patrick Moore, a prominent environmentalist and founding member of Greenpeace. \"Going Nuclear A Green Makes the Case\". Washington Post. April 16th, 2006 - \"There are many types of facilities that are far more vulnerable than nuclear facilities, including liquid natural gas plants, chemical plants and numerous political targets.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear facilities are less vulnerable to terrorists than other targets\n","id":"8c64c0dc-c911-4996-ac0b-17fe51641518"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>UN Security Council veto<|ARGUMENT|>It is no longer viable to argue that nations agreed to join the UN as an unequal body. As a global constitution, the UN charter must uphold sovereign equality. And, yet, the UN SC veto power violates this principle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UN SC veto violates democratic principal of sovereign equality\n","id":"d1d5d4f2-c2bb-4be7-b3af-5b3978459c02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To begin I am not a moderate on the gun control debate, and I am not American, but I am currently living in America, in Florida, about 100 miles away from the recent school shooting. This post is a response to something my mother said about the MeToo movement. She said that if one pro gun democrat there aren't many, but they do exist willingly surrendered their weapons, or even some of their 'more deadly' weapons AR 15 was the gun used in the most recent shooting it might have the weight to start a movement where those who are moderate on the gun debate begin surrendering weapons to move America away from gun culture. I actually think this could work. Though I don't believe it would be 100 effective, I do think it would be a step in the right direction. Here is my reasoning I do not believe the current American government will address the concerns of gun control effectively or in a timely manner. I have zero faith in Trump, and only marginally more faith in the NRA funded republican party. If the above is true, then I believe that it is the responsibility of the people of the united states to set an example for their fellow citizens and surrender their firearms. This is not to say that the overlap between those who will surrender their firearms, and the criminal element is much more than zero. Still, this sets an example from citizen to citizen, showing that gun control is in the hands of the people. I believe that this is the American way of dealing with gun control take the decision out of the hands of government. Finally, I believe that no harm can be done, by comparison to the possible good, in starting such a movement further I believe that such a movement, if successful, would have a drastic impact on gun violence in the U.S.A., especially if it lead to legislation, or convinced politicians that such legislation would not be as unpopular as they assume. It may even reveal the republicans who are bought and paid for by the NRA, though in my opinion their status as bought and paid for is pretty transparent. What I won't accept as proof This won't work. I am not debating the merit of hashtag movements, or certain types of activism. I do not believe they always work, but they rarely if ever do harm. This conversation isn't appropriate. The gun debate is always appropriate. This is not simply a result of the recent school shooting, it is simply catalyzed by the school shooting. I would hold this opinion in either case. You won't reach those who commit the crimes. I concede this. I don't think that moderates surrendering their guns would reduce crime, but only make it obvious that a large part of the American population is sincerely anti gun, and willing to vote for representatives who are also anti gun or at least in favor of stricter gun control . I am of the naive opinion that a movement needs to start small, and thus in the case of gun control, it needs to start with moderates who are currently pro gun. Edit 1 Lots of people are making the argument that this will not get guns off the street, or that those who need the weapon for protection will not surrender their weapons. I am saying that this is a good idea because it makes a statement, and because it is not mandatory. Of course some people will choose not to give up their firearms, but those who do are making a strong statement against gun culture in America. The sacrifice of the sport rifle or hunting rifle doesn't prevent gun crime, but demonstrates that the American people are dissatisfied with current gun control. Edit 2 My definition of moderates Moderates would be those who own guns, but who can see the damage that gun culture has on their country. They recognize their own safe use of firearms, but can see that not everyone is as responsible or mentally stable as they are. You guys are great, very polite, love this level headed community and the discussion it encourages. I'm taking a break, but I'll check in later. Thanks guys, this was a cool experience as my first . Last Edit You guys are great. This was informative. Consider my view changed on the matter of this hypothetical movement ever occurring you've given plenty of reasons for me to doubt that such a movement would ever or even should ever exist. Thanks for keeping it civil My mom suggested a hashtag. Something like SurrenderForParkland delta<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moderates on the gun control debate who own firearms should surrender their firearms to police.\n","id":"cab8987a-9bda-40cd-ae13-4debc9d6254d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Omnibenevolence\" is not mentioned in the Bible. There is no requirement from any Bible passage which would imply that the Christian God must have benevolence which lacks justice, or that there would even be a good thing which lacks justice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While the conception of God as omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent may be 'traditional' in philosophical discussions of monotheism, it is not necessarily supported by the actual scriptural traditions of Abrahamic monotheism.\n","id":"d386d7ab-1cf5-4970-aaac-33a0d090d4c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>India's drug enforcement laws separate the country in areas with higher and low vulnerability to illicit trafficking. The punishment in the former is higher. This is a clear focus on international organized crime instead of targeting the population as a whole.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allow production of drugs for medical purposes, but keep a strict punishment on recreational use, while offering treatment at the same time, such as in India\n","id":"edd47a13-897b-4b51-aabe-891fb94ff6ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A two state solution, referring to an arrangement in which an autonomous and sovereign State of Palestine stands alongside an autonomous and sovereign State of Israel, is the most ethical and viable solution to the century long Israeli Palestinian conflict. I am truly open to having this opinion challenged and changed, but there are a number of reasons that this is my current view There appears to be no clear \u201cgood guys\u201d and \u201cbad guys\u201d in the conflict. One group has deep historical, ethnic, political and religious ties to the land, and the other group also has historical, ethnic, politics and religious ties to the land. Both Israelis and Palestinian military forces and governments have committed atrocities and unjustifiable violence, and both seem to have deep rooted claims to statehood. I cannot see any reason by which the Jewish claim to Israeli statehood is any greater than the Palestinian claim to Palestinian statehood. Both have had steady populations there for thousands of years, neither have any other place to go, and both have seemingly equivalent justifications for why the land is theirs. A \u201cOne State solution\u201d, that would have a democratic and secular government that controlled one unified state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, is unviable. This state would by far have an Islamic majority, especially if the \u201cright of return\u201d is opened for Palestinians. Hence, if the state is democratic, the Jewish people lose their Jewish state and once again become a persecuted minority under another\u2019s governance. If the government sacrifices democracy in the name of maintaining Israel as a Jewish State, then Palestinians remain lacking again in rights, autonomy, and nationality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A \u201ctwo state solution\u201d is the most ethical and viable end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:\n","id":"48112df0-6a1c-4f1a-9b45-0b9a6abb6a85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have too much stress now, and felt that I grew up faster before I was ready to. I'm an Adult Kid though I act like a man teen around others, I suppose and even try to pretend to be a kid who bedwets by wearing up sized diapers with kid prints. See them at r ABDL, if you're NOT at work. I fantasize about being in an alternate world where magic is an everyday norm, and I do something to get punished with reverting my body back to 5 years old for 100 years while still keeping my mental, etc. faculties who also suffers from urinary incontinence until I do enough good deeds to earn continence. Things were relatively quite a bit more stress free at age 5, and frankly, I would rather stay in an un aging 5 year old body for 100 years than to go through the stresses I've had to go through thus far. Now, try to  from this. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I wish my body physically stayed 5 years old for far longer. About 100 years, I guess.\n","id":"92564d66-1f2a-4e9d-a167-005e5587f6b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>The Bubble-Head Charm is the most effective spell for breathing underwater allowing one a supply of oxygen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are a number of magical enhancements wizards can use to breathe under water.\n","id":"188f67e4-1fc5-4875-a2ce-5f3557cb7ef0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network during their respective golden ages produced great shows. A look at the average series duration is an objective measure of this. While Cartoon Network made memorable shows like Dexter's Lab and Courage The Cowardly Dog, Nickelodeon made great live action and animation. All That and Spongebob recieved high acclaim. One thing Nick did that was rare on the CN were creating insightful and serious programming. As Told By Ginger, Hey Arnold, and Avatar often explored themes that some considered too serious for a children's network. Finally, Nickelodeon's golden age is still relevant, popular 90's are all that and referenced Fairly Odd Parents Spongebob.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nickelodeon had a better golden age then Cartoon Network did.\n","id":"efe7ffba-56d3-47cc-b3e1-2d8244e25cd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all museum admissions be by donation?<|ARGUMENT|>One of the arguments for public funding of the arts and museums is that they are a public good: everyone should have access to learning, history and culture. This is only meaningfully accessible to the public if there is not a financial barrier through admission fees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Paying by donation prioritizes equity over equality for museum admissions.\n","id":"93334e07-dcb1-4cf1-a1a7-536ecf46af59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Bill Maher posted this article about a proposed fat tax in Puerto Rico. The TL DR version but it is a short article is that schools actively work to curb obesity by formulating diet and exercise plans for obese children. If the child fails to make good progress in six months, parents would be fined up to 500. If the child continues to not show significant weight loss after another six months, the parents will be fined up to 800. I actually think that this is a good idea. It provides a monetary disincentive for parents to let their kids to get fat. Even if parents are clueless about good nutrition and healthy living habits, the school health department does all of the dietary planning parents simply need to enforce discipline, not unlike making their kids to their homework every night. Maher puts it perfectly at the end Yes, you have your right to cram whatever you like into your pie hole but when that \u201cpersonal freedom\u201d is being abused to the point of an obesity epidemic that taxes the entire healthcare system and threatens the national budget, doesn\u2019t the government have a responsibility to step in and tax you? Does anyone disagree? Of those who do, can anyone ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On Puerto Rico's Proposed \"Fat Tax\"\n","id":"14a1685e-0364-4203-b478-c66b32b8d90a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just to define terms, gender parity equality in the workplace here refers to having an equal amount of men and women in the workplace, or at least representation that reflects the gender demographics of the surrounding area. I understand that equality in the workplace is sometimes used to refer to, say, the issue of workplace harassment, and I take no issue with that, but it's not what I'm looking to address here. Also just to clarify, this post isn't about the value of having more women in certain fields be it from a social justice point of view, a profit driven motive, or both and it isn't about the reasons why there might be more women in some fields and more men in others e.g. life work balance, women more interested in people men more interested in things, etc. . There's a lot of good discussion to be had over those two subjects, but I feel they'd be fairly off topic here. Correct me if I'm wrong about that. Right, so, pretty much every time I hear about the lack of gender equality in the workplace, the workplaces in question are almost invariably STEM, politics, or CEO high level leadership positions which I'll shorten to just CEO for the remainder of this post . When I specifically look for evidence that there's a push to get more women into other areas, like, say, construction, I can sometimes find evidence of it. But it seems far less prevalent and reported on discussed by less mainstream outlets companies than STEM politics and CEO positions. And this makes me suspicious of the motives of people who claim to care about gender equality in the workplace while only focusing on these fields. As far as professions go, the three in question don't tend to employ large numbers of people. As far as gender disparities go the three fields in question aren't even the most egregious offenders there's been much lamentation about how women only account for about a quarter of all STEM positions, so surely there should be even greater outrage over the fact they only make up ~1 of, say auto mechanics. Well, where is it? Where are all the Forbes and CNBC and APA articles about the lack of female auto mechanics? Where's the UN initiative to get more women working on cars for a living? Now to my main point straightens tin foil hat call me crazy but I think those people who claim to care about gender equality in the workplace but focus primarily if not exclusively on STEM, politics, and CEO positions have some ulterior motives. What those three fields all have in common is that they're some combination of high earning, high prestige, and high influence. If you want workplace equality in principle, it'd make sense to target pretty much any field with an imbalance, and arguably those fields that employ larger numbers of people with more egregious gender disparities than STEM, politics, and CEOs. There are much bigger fish out there in need of frying. And I think the reason these three smaller fish have been chosen has less to do with true gender equality and more with wanting to shoehorn women into positions that garner wealth, status, and or power. Do you think, for example, that the reason feminists progressives liberals tend to focus on the lack of female CEOs and not the lack of female electricians might, just might have something to do with the fact CEOs average annual takehome is like 15x what electricians make? Do you think the comparative repute and power that comes with working in politics might be the reason they've honed in on politics and not sewage treatment? In short, when feminists progressives liberals focus on the three fields in question beyond all others, the message they're sending out isn't that they care about workplace equality, it's that they want women to have the good jobs. The dangerous, physically demanding, thankless, low paying, low influence jobs? nahh. Men can keep those. As a semi related aside I think it's also rather telling that people who claim to care about gender equality generally only seem to care about fields that are male dominated. There doesn't seem to be a lot of effort to, say, get more men into nursing, or even facets of STEM that women dominate. One counterargument I've thought of might be that if we want to enact more gender equality at the top level, so to speak, in order to enact change throughout the workforce as a whole. Trickle down gender equality, if you will. I think this is unconvincing for two reasons first, because IME trickle down anything rarely seems to work, but second, and mainly, because while I could see how getting more female CEOs or STEM professionals is a great first step to getting even more female CEOs or STEM professionals aspiring women would have more female role models, like minded mentors mentors, see the fields as less hostile to women, etc. , I don't see how that could or would translate across professions. In short I don't see how getting more women in STEM will automatically result in more female truckers, or how getting more female CEOs will increase the female presence in mining. To  I'm basically looking for some reason why it's justified for those claiming to champion workplace equality to be so laser locked on three specific fields. If they claim to care about workplace equality and think it's not just a good thing for social justice reasons but also just makes good business sense, why are those the three fields that they focus on almost exclusively? Or, of course, some other ing explanation I haven't thought of. But that's why you're here. Y'all know what to do. Cheers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I find it somewhat suspicious that when feminists\/progressives\/liberals talk about gender parity\/equality in the workplace seem to focus almost exclusively on STEM, politics, and CEO\/high-level leadership positions.\n","id":"43bbb777-3714-4db5-844c-a5a5af764483"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The goals of the ACT SAT tests are to measure a students academic ability. However, there is a very strong correlation between ACT SAT scores and the amount of time money put into preparing for them. This can be proved with any prep class with a Higher score or your money back Guarantee Given this, This shows that the tests do not measure cognitive ability, but test taking ability, which is created mostly by preparation for the test specifically. This creates two problems. One, is that it doesn't properly measure ability, and two, is that it favors people that have put more money and time into the test, which creates a preference for the richer to get into the colleges they want. Based on this, there is no way that colleges should be allowed to use this test, for it discriminates against the poor, and creates a misleading idea of who is or is not a competent student.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that standardized tests such as the ACT\/SAT are ineffective at measuring ability, and should be disallowed for college use on accepting\/denying students.\n","id":"4fc2df47-6071-47d4-b018-00b700de26ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Two outcomes for intelligent life A We're all the Universe has to offer. B We are not the only intelligent species who are, or will be, capable of spaceflight in the universe. A In the event that the universe lacks life of our capability and potential, then we waste trillions of potential home celestial bodies for our species. I've heard people argue that we don't deserve new planets moons as we've nearly destroyed this planet I believe the cost of humans spreading doesn't outweigh the cost of humans squandering such a resource an entire Universe full of stars, metals, gases, planets, etc. Besides, technological advances become fueled when their need increases thanks to projects attempting to exit the Earth. For example, since the 100 Year Starship started I've seen an increase in articles about technologies and devices related to space travel, such as a 3D printer that makes food such as pizza. B It is impossible to determine what differences we will see between our species and an extraterrestrial species. On top of that, their temperament cannot be determined. For the survival of our species, we should be capable of fighting another non human, space faring civilization we should also be hard to kill. Colonizing multiple celestial bodies gives us more strategic resources to work with while also making more targets for an overly hostile opponent to hit. On top of that, more celestial bodies means our species can safely continue to grow in population this will be handy in being difficult to kill as well as having some sort of military force to deal with such an issue if it ever came up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it is the duty of the human species to spread and colonize any planet or moon we can.\n","id":"be595abe-04a1-4356-9908-ef135d733bc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments pursue predictive policing technology?<|ARGUMENT|>The American think tank RAND concluded that functionalities built into a standard police department software e.g., Microsoft Office and the installation of geographic information systems e.g., ArcGIS can effectively support many predictive methods p. xix<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to experts, most police departments do not need the most sophisticated and expensive software packages or computers to launch a predictive policing program.\n","id":"9ed65b15-1658-4760-8727-275a0adc53b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>College campuses are often quite diverse and places where individuals learn about other types of people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no reason they could not gain this experience in pursuing their own desires.\n","id":"26f895b6-fcdc-4c24-af7b-14018cb3f18c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel the correct basis for conservatism and I am a conservative is the opposition to radical change what some call progress . These are the kind of principles espoused in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France , which I have just read. I would say that because conservatism is the idea of limiting progress, the two primary types of conservatives in the modern world neo liberals, and neo conservatives have failed in being legitimate conservatives and inputing legitimate conservative policy. They have actually been pushing an agenda of progress which actually countermands tradition and preservation. Firstly, neo liberalism. I will deal mostly with Thatcher in the UK here, since my grasp of the policies of Reagan is not strong, although it is ok. Thatcher essentially led a programme of privatization. This was a ridiculously radical action. Thatcher believed the free market would solve everything, and as such destroyed not just the bloated government labour had created, but also many political institutions that had existed in the UK for many years. The destruction of government institutions is not inherently conservative, in fact I would say it is progressive. It is a belief that changing the way we have lived for hundreds of years in favour of a entirely different system is good for society, when it is in fact an instrument of radical change. Conservatives should be concerned with preserving long held values, not creating new ones. Secondly, the neo conservative movement. The idea that through military intervention we could create a global, free market democratic society is a utopian notion. In fact I would draw attention to how Burkean philosophy is inherently opposed to this, because Burke says that a tyrannical government being removed is not at all likely to lead to liberty, and we shouldn't enshrine abstract rights over concrete effects. I would say a real conservative policy, one that conserves our values and democratic system rather than destroys it would be something like as follows, which no modern conservative supports 1 Anti Globalization Globalization results in our values being undermined because we have to push a program of free trade and free immigration which actually rewards us in the form of profits and wages for abdicating our values Citizen employment and traditional small business and our stability trade deficits budget deficits . 2 Anti Growth Modern conservatives push a program of deficit spending to expand our economy which only results in long term disaster. Additionally, unrestrained economic growth can result in pernicious new industries which undermine our values and destroy the environment that is so important to the well being of humans. 3 Pro Localism Local communities are undermined by multinational corporations, and central governments that want to push a narrative of global free trade and economic progress. The utopian experiment of multinational government has failed and we need to prevent the kind of value conflict that could occur. Citizens should be allowed to preserve their values, and should not be forced into accepting radical change from halfway across a continent, or forced into a global system to preserve their livelihood. tl dr Real conservatism is dead because modern conservatives undermine our values by pushing progress and economic growth at all costs, rather than defending long held principles and values.  I am of course open to all criticism and all responses are welcome.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conservatism is Dead\n","id":"bb647073-3c72-4820-8cd7-b388abdae60c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>An example of a symbolic conflict is a conflict over the n-word. When it's not used directly in hateful ways towards a person. But instead just are part of a book.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When existing tensions in America is reduced to a symbolic conflict it is engaged in a superficial level.\n","id":"2f1dcb4f-2ad5-43d4-a311-80510a31effb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This could apply to any issue people use this idea with. The main three political groups that I see using this are pro abortion groups, pro drug legalization groups, and pro gun rights groups. To me, this argument isn't logical at all. Sure, maybe you could combine it with another argument for example, saying also, many drugs aren't that harmful anyways so that's another reason we should legalize them but by itself, this argument holds no merit in my opinion. It basically says that laws as a whole are meaningless. Are these people advocating for anarchism? Because I refuse to believe that society would be a better place if we just legalized everything. It's because of this that I believe that this type of argument is completely useless, and should never be used in debate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the \"even if xxx is illegal, people who really want to will still find a way to do it\/use it anyways, so we should just make it legal\" argument makes no sense because it implies that laws are meaningless and we should just make EVERYTHING legal\n","id":"2fa088a1-6d2e-464e-a200-3f2c458cfb11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Even opposing academic branches on inter-group relationships, like Freud's Narcissism of Small Differences vs Huntington's Clash of Civilization always posits an us vs them logic. Apparently there is broad agreement that that humans thinin 'Us vs Them'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Us vs Them\" mentality is enshrined within our DNA. Hence how some humans seem to dislike anything group that is perceived as different.\n","id":"ca29af2a-cb90-44ee-b8a7-d18b7bb6f24d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the European Union intervene in the political conflict in Catalonia?<|ARGUMENT|>The Spanish government has refused dialogue with the Catalan government. When avenues of dialogue are shut, the only option remaining is disobedience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The suspension of an elected government is an attack on democracy in Europe.\n","id":"7722fabb-ab6a-42a3-9e07-7c26d8176634"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>The American effort to transfer pieces of policy from the Obama administration to the National Archives caused a lot of trouble already. Transferring all national archives to the USE and then translating every single one of them will be extremely difficult.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It will cost an enormous amount of money and effort to translate all the archives to the languages of all the countries of the current EU system.\n","id":"5d82b6fe-8d2b-4f48-add0-183fbfbad247"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To preface, this argument does not apply to those with private insurance. Those who are obese may admit to the hospital for any number of diagnoses diabetic emergency, congestive heart failure, lower back pain the list goes on. In most cases, the doctor will prescribe lifestyle modifications to combat the underlying problem. If a patient does not comply with a doctor's prescription, it is listed in their chart as being 'non compliant.' This could apply to a diabetic not keeping up with their insulin, an obese person continuing to eat donuts, or an individual with heart problems continuing to avoid aerobic activity. They are eventually re admitted, and the tax payers foot the bill via government run programs. My argument is that those who are re admitted for the same condition when noncompliant should receive only enough treatment to stabilize and then sent home. If an individual is unwilling to help themselves or even willing to worsen their condition, we should not have to pay for them to continue receiving treatment. Edit sorry I have not replied. I had a large project handed to me. I will try to reply as I am able, thank uou to all for your well thought arguments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Readmitting to a hospital with the same diagnosis whilst being noncompliant should result in limited treatment\n","id":"73b617ec-3d1e-4688-84aa-5c288d583919"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see no good reason why people should own guns. The only logical reason I can think of is hunting. And to me that is a pretty bad reason. Also please source things you say. I will try and source my responses too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the 2nd amendment America should be completely nullified.\n","id":"ae431ebf-809b-4487-a846-da9f044404ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>The State of Mississippi for example, reads in its declaration of secession that \"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery\u2014the greatest material interest of the world.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right to states determining the legal status of slavery for themselves was the primary Right of the States that was of concern.\n","id":"0273f38d-df3f-4491-8923-ebbe5c5ef064"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019ve hated pop music since I found out that there were alternative genres as a child. I\u2019m a socially progressive young woman, but every time I look at these pop stars, I only see merchants of decay. They sing the most childish, insipid \u201crhyming poems\u201d that essentially boil down to the relationship woes of a middle schooler. Most of them are women in their 30s who can\u2019t write anything decent by themselves, so they pay 100\u2019s of writers to write anything that may catch 3 minutes of someone\u2019s attention. The real jackpot of pop songwriting is when the emotionally stunted lyrics invade your brain and repeat themselves over and over until you don\u2019t want to associate yourself with humanity anymore. I don\u2019t have any problem with nudity or stripping, but the way it is presented in pop is disingenuous and delusional. I see female pop stars in their thirties and forties put on pasties and underwear and call their repetition of said shitty love ballads \u201cdeep\u201d and \u201cprogressive\u201d. The act is then enmeshed with whichever progressive idea happens to be floating around on social media. All so these performers who strip and sing songs they don\u2019t write can then claim allegiance to some sect of modern feminism, whatever that term even means now. I connect more with music that was written by one person or a band that can display some degree of authentic musicianship. I\u2019m not even pro \u201cdeep meaning\u201d I\u2019m ultimately of the belief that art serves only to entertain, and any attached movement meaning purpose is not only secondary but optional. I just can\u2019t stand all these average voiced strippers claiming any level of profundity in their enragingly unexceptional acts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Commercial Pop music is regressive and embarrassing.\n","id":"0e0f7eb9-8889-43e8-8362-9a866fb16a03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Child Offenders Should Be Punished Harder<|ARGUMENT|>Punishing children more leniently than adults undermines the deterrent value of punishment. In 1998 in the US, 29% of all high school boys own guns. The message being sent out would be that if children committed crime that would be all right. In the state of Virginia in a 1996 survey for example, 41% of youth have at various times either been in a gang or associated with gang activities. Of this, 69% said they joint because friends were involved and 60% joined for \u2018excitement\u2019. This clearly shows that youth do not take crime seriously because of the belief that they will be leniently treated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Punishing children more leniently than adults undermines the deterrent value of punishment. In 1998 ...\n","id":"21246357-f03c-43c5-87fb-07d9873ce6c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The FIFO treatment proposal, in laymen's terms, means you have to recognize the gain on the older rather than newer tranche of an investment. For example if I bought 10 shares of stock XYZ for 10, and another 10 at a later time for 20, and went to sell it for 30, I'd be forced to sell the former first and hence have the larger tax bill. Current system allows me to choose. Because the 'rich' own more in general, they'll be the ones most affected. But this is seen as an attack on the middle class. You can't have it both ways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tax bill opponents want it both ways. One of the biggest gripes many have with the proposed tax is that is disproportionately benefits the rich, yet one of the biggest singular issues FIFO treatment of investments disproportionately affects\/taxes the rich.\n","id":"e3020001-f168-4984-8be1-6bd16c9c157b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>The study shows that those in combat roles are more than 50 percent more likely than those in non-combat roles to commit assaults or threaten violence after returning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ex-military men are likelier to be more violent than their civilian counterparts. Their vigilantism is likely to reflect this.\n","id":"31f49398-155a-426b-8d25-00b434105557"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>2009 US economic stimulus<|ARGUMENT|>Jim Horney, director of federal fiscal policy for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities - \"The vast majority of what is in these two bills is pretty good stimulus.\"5 This includes \"automatic stimulators\", such as unemployment benefits and food stamps, money that is typically quickly and fully spent. In addition, the majority of money will be spent within the first year of the stimulus package, providing more short-term, \"good\" stimulus to get the economy rolling quickly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Majority of US stimulus is immediate to fight recession now.\n","id":"ccf8eaa3-18f6-46d8-a0b2-c093a6e32938"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A sport is defined as an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment. I agree that golf requires a high level of skill to play and master but it doesn\u2019t require much physical exertion. I think it is comparable to bowling which is considered a game not a sport. You need skill to hit the pins consistently, you are using your whole body if you lunge and bowl, similar to golf where you swing with your whole body. It doesn\u2019t take a crazy amount of strength similar to bowling and in golf you don\u2019t even walk from hole to hole, you can have a cart and sometimes you have someone to carry the golf clubs for you. I honestly want to understand why it\u2019s considered a sport if it\u2019s similar to other activities that aren\u2019t. Edit thank you all for your comments. You\u2019ve changed my view about golf being a sport. Golf does fall within the definition of sport as the physical exertion and how skillfully the golfer physically exerts themselves affects their game immensely. I considered sports more as activities where there is continued physical exertion of any sort eg, running, hitting, throwing in addition to other skills. I do however, believe a more detailed definition of sport should be made official to better explain the \u201cphysical exertion\u201d portion of the definition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Golf is not a sport.\n","id":"373d55d7-0dc3-48fb-94ad-727240dc0b75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>There are already sufficient restrictions on certain types of speech e.g. \"fighting words as justified by the relatively stringent harm principle proposed by John Stewart Mill.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Speech that includes a threat to others is already legal, and covers any danger of harm hate speech might create.\n","id":"c4df12b9-3b40-4a7d-8269-a98f14ff0575"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>This renders the concept of birth as giving claim to another life as being property to do with as one pleases. Ownership\/property mentality as a form of colonialism was used for generations to rationalize the abuse of animals, children, women, other races, religions, under the concept that another is property to the person, group or country who feeds, employs or \"owns\" it, putting that life under their control. We have since implemented laws to counter abuses perpetrated under this philosophy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bringing an entity into existence does not mean that you have the ability to use that entity for whatever purpose you want.\n","id":"e0252765-990b-4069-bc0b-21295ca94ad1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In regard to net neutrality, there are currently two main views. Either have net neutrality, or don\u2019t. However, I feel that a middle ground of allowing ISPs to discriminate based on the type of data would make the most sense. For example, it would mean that ISPs could offer a \u201cfast lane\u201d for things like video, or audio. However, unlike a fully un neutral net, it would prevent ISPs from effectively blocking certain sources. If an ISP wanted to slow down Netflix, for example, they would also have to slow down all video. Thus, I feel that this would be the best compromise. Note I acknowledge that this would not be an issue if something was done to remove ISPs local monopolies. However, this post is under the assumption that this is not the case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ISPs should be able to discriminate on data based on its type but not its source, content, or destination.\n","id":"6b515a21-fe87-42b5-902b-d3de90d98183"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Using this definition of feminism The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes being a SAHM does not promote equality between the sexes. People will say but feminism is about choices okay so by that logic any choice a woman makes is feminist? I am not saying that someone is a bad person if they want to be a SAHM, it might be how they want to raise their kids but that does not make it a feminist choice. Economic Political By becoming a SAHM you are financially relying on your partner, who in most cases is a man. If your spouse is becomes abusive, you are putting yourself in a vulnerable position because you might not have the monetary means to escape the situation. Several people use the wage gap as a reason that we need feminism but then advocate for women to take part time jobs or drop out of the workforce when they have children. Another common reason for why we need feminism is the lack of female CEOs and politicians, but if 43 of highly educated women drop out of the workforce after having children then of course there will be a sex discrepancy. Social SAHM are more likely to be depressed and by becoming a SAHM, it reinforces the idea that women must give up their whole lives for their children while dads don't have to do the same. 25 of SAHM feel that they have given up their identity and many are often embarrassed when people ask them what they do for a living. Socially this is not advancing women. Being a SAHM also effects your daughter's life negatively and negatively effects your son's view on gender equality. For example The sons of employed mothers hold significantly more egalitarian gender attitudes\u2014even more so than the daughters of stay at home moms Employed moms strongly shape their daughters\u2019 gender attitudes and provide role models for them to imitate Overall I believe that being a SAHM is not a feminist decision and holds women as a whole back, but I am open to having my view changed. EDIT added another relevant article<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being a Stay at Home Mom is Incompatible with Feminism\n","id":"742f266a-7351-48d0-82f4-ced97af0047e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen a lot of activists on the internet talking about what gender is, differentiating it from sex , talking about its fluidity and non binaryness, to make up a word. Every day it seems like people are using the word gender to refer to a broader and broader set of concepts. The problem is, the broader the definition of a word gets, the more useless that word becomes. Which is fine when more knowledge becomes available, sometimes old concepts become obsolete for example, the concept of pachyderms a set of animals that it turns out does not form a scientifically meaningful category . But then you have to actually stop using the word , not just retcon a new definition for it and soldier on. The way people freely use the word gender reminds me of the word zequow in this Cracked video I just want to shout out, WORDS MEAN SPECIFIC THINGS So, what, actually, is gender, according to internet gender theorists ? It's not determined by the person's interests or behaviours, e.g. a girl who's interested in Lego and mathematics does not stop being a girl, and a boy who plays with dolls does not stop being a boy. That seems fairly reasonable. It's not determined by biological sex, seeing as how transgender people exist, with or without surgery. Fair enough. It's not determined by sexual orientation, unless you believe the archaic stereotype that a transgender person is just a gay person who went too far also, this would require us to ignore the fact that there are gay transgender people. It's not determined by what society says. If a person were born with XY chromosomes and male genitals and identified as female, but lived under a strict government with extremely transphobic laws, I can't imagine that these activists would side with the strict government. It's not determined by the clothes a person wears. Depending on where you go, you see plenty of women wearing pants, and it's getting more and more common in Western countries to see men wearing skirts. What's left? Pronouns, I guess, but that seems pretty anticlimactic. I also sometimes hear about gender identity , but what does this even mean apart from the things I mentioned above? I've come up with an example which I intended to be intentionally absurd, but in the age of Tumblr activism, I suspect it's not that far fetched Suppose we have a person named Jennifer. Jennifer identifies as male. However, Jennifer is fine with being referred to by the pronouns she , her and hers . She has always had two X chromosomes, a vagina, uterus, ovaries, and prominent breasts she does not have, nor has she ever had, nor does she intend to ever have, a penis, testicles, a prostate, or a Y chromosome. She wears makeup, she prefers wearing dresses rather than pants, and she wears her hair long. Most of her friends self identify as female, although when it comes to romantic and sexual relationships, Jennifer would prefer to be with a person who identifies as male and has good upper body strength, short hair, and an angular body without prominent breasts, as well as a penis and testicles Jennifer considers herself to be a gay male . In spite of how she identifies herself, Jennifer has resigned herself to using female washrooms and changing rooms, in response to society's wishes. Jennifer enjoys caring for other people, and would someday like to have children. If I missed anything you consider to be a component of gender, feel free to fill it in yourself. My point is, once you've factored out everything else, gender doesn't mean anything i.e. statement b is true . You might as well just arbitrarily divide the population into red team and blue team . I'm guessing somebody's going to point out Hey, you have it completely backwards all of the things you mentioned are components of what makes a person's gender Gender isn't some extra thing, it comprises the other things To put it another way, you might claim that a person's gender isn't a binary thing, but a point in a multidimensional genderspace . Fair enough, but that means that, given a person's gender, you can infer things about a person's behaviour sexual orientation clothing biology, which means there would be no reason to have conversations like these Person A My gender is XYZ. Person B Ah, does that mean you enjoy PQR? Person A Whoa, that's a stereotype Stop being XYZ phobic, you bigot And if you agree with this formulation of gender, then you should agree with statement a in the title of this thread. Also, if you have more traditional beliefs about gender i.e. there's male and female, and each gender has specific qualities tendencies then, unless you consider yourself a bigot, you should agree with statement a . I should probably give you some context about where I'm coming from Although I've made some snarky comments, in spirit I'm more on the side of the Tumblr Activist Gender Fluidity crowd than not, in the sense that I think it would be nice if people could just be people and wear whatever clothes hair genitals they want without feeling social pressures to behave otherwise. But I hate rhetoric that doesn't have some kind of logical thought behind it. That's why I've intentionally made the title of this thread something I consider to be a tautology. If you want to change my view, you can argue that both a and b are true, or that neither a nor b is true. If I'm using overly Spock like language here, it's not because I'm trying to sound smart, it's just because I'm trying to convey my position clearly enough that it's easy for you to pinpoint where I'm wrong. EDIT Formatting. EDIT 2 I admit my explanation is a bit complex, and naturally a lot of your answers will be very complex as well, so it might take a while for me to fully consider some of your posts before responding to them. Please don't take this to mean that I've abandoned this thread.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe exactly one of the following must be true: a A non-bigoted person can reasonably use a person's gender to infer things about that person, or b gender is a meaningless concept.\n","id":"ebbacc72-6fd9-46be-9c0b-8beab8064422"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In light of recent controversies involving race in the courts, I have come to the conclusion that justice is not completely blind in our justice system. We all have our own internal biases, whether we are conscious of them or not, and it is possible that these biases can influence the outcome of a case. It is because of this that I think a jury should not be allowed to see the defendant. I believe the facts should be presented to the jury, analysis made by experts, and arguments offered by the lawyers all the while taking care to obscure the identity of the defendant as well as any irrelavent information race, gender, net worth, etc . Information like this could only be made avaliable to the jury if it directly pertained to the case e.g. the relative size between the defendant and alleged victim . A blind system like this could bring fair verdicts accross the board and make it more difficult to make a case for the existence of institutionalized racism in the courts. Obviously, implementaion of this would have to be quite intricate, but I believe the core principle remains juries should be blind to ensure justice is as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe justice should be blind, and so should juries.\n","id":"0514ebf4-f559-4f4e-baf4-85acc7ffea3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>This is a life in dependence of the British goodwill and under the constant threat of them discovering the cheating, which is neither a truly free nor a truly good life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We will live in fear of being caught and punished by the British. This makes for a unpleasant and dangerous life.\n","id":"591eaba5-eeab-4320-9c8f-5c93f7a79d9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ah, like it says in Dust In The Wind. Every line in that song is correct except for nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky. Probably won't last forever either. I believe that it doesn't matter what you do in life. Well, not in the big scheme of things anyway. Human endeavors such as developing a cure for cancer or ending world hunger are all very noble, but futile nonetheless. Maybe we'll get there someday, but does it matter? For now it seems like it does, but when our species dies out it won't. God probably doesn't exist and nobody gives a shit. You create your own meaning in life is wishful thinking, because your meaning ultimately doesn't really matter to anyone or anything but humanity at large, if that. And if it doesn't matter, it's not meaningful. I'd love to be wrong on this one, so go ahead and change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human existence is futile.\n","id":"74baca0d-5eb1-4050-8158-5fd05f92e671"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>14 out of 23 effective CSE programs demonstrated a statistically significant delay in the timing of first sex.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Multiple studies have found that sex education does not encourage earlier sexual relations, but rather delays them.\n","id":"2035bdc3-e7e6-42cd-82a6-19bcf63686dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don\u2019t believe life has value just because it\u2019s life. I fundamentally cannot agree with anti abortion pro life protesters because I don\u2019t even think that you can\u2019t kill your 2 month old baby. I\u2019m not going to set any hard and fast rules because I don\u2019t know the details of brain development but I\u2019d say that until you\u2019re at the age maybe around being a toddler? where we can be sure you\u2019ll be somewhat healthy, then your mother no longer has the right to terminate you. Yes we should be able to kill vegetables too. If they\u2019re not in private care, we shouldn\u2019t be burdened with taking care of them. Intelligence is literally the only reason we are where we are. If a person can\u2019t reciprocate and they have nobody to care for them, they don\u2019t have inherent value and therefore we are not responsible for them<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Life has no inherent value you can kill babies\n","id":"ed015ee5-a30e-48c3-920c-91ae4b3ec1c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Campaign Finance Reform<|ARGUMENT|>Reform has the effect of levelling the playing field for candidates. Candidates of enormous leadership potential but small wallets have failed due to the lack of resources. Under a reformed campaign finance system it will be more difficult for well-financed candidates to win purely because of the money they have. Incumbent candidates have a unique advantage over challengers in the present system because of their direct connections to important sources of money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reform has the effect of levelling the playing field for candidates. Candidates of enormous leaders...\n","id":"d4ad01ab-6b29-496c-9969-3f5a961c8ad9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Gambling be Banned in Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Durkheim's theory of suicide social isolation is increasing the likelihood of suicide by cutting off a stable social environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Problem gamblers are more and more isolated from their socio-environment. This kind of loneliness can lead to suicide attempts.\n","id":"0dd68fae-6824-469d-ba11-9cf55377a62b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Assassination of a Dictator<|ARGUMENT|>Utilitarian argument: many deaths and much suffering could be prevented if one man is killed. The greater good demands a single evil act is done, especially if it would avert the immediate and certain danger of much worse evil. Who now wouldn\u2019t wish that Hitler had been killed in 1933?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Utilitarian argument: many deaths and much suffering could be prevented if one man is killed. The g...\n","id":"79d006ec-117d-4ddd-bd48-b030421b671a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>According to the president of the Association for Research in Personality, charismatic world leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump use \"impulsive,\" forceful and independent leadership styles and may be less open to the input of others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mike Pence's lack of charisma will ensure that he will serve as a low-key president in comparison to Trump, which will be better for the country.\n","id":"832ef011-e166-4e5a-bae1-b6e7a1d335ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be taught in schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Educators may be potentially put in a position of contradicting course work based on empirical evidence and historical\/scientific consensus and creationist course work based on religious teachings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Permitting the teaching of creationism in schools puts educators in a precarious situation.\n","id":"0359d2eb-1d72-461c-98e1-47e87991165f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pride organisers should refuse corporate sponsorship<|ARGUMENT|>Around 50% of the $2.4 million budget for New York's Pride parade comes from corporate sponsorship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without corporate sponsorship, Pride marches as they exist today would not be possible.\n","id":"2364fbb9-4feb-452f-93b0-83d8705cb5dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Planned Parenthood Be Defunded?<|ARGUMENT|>Undercover videos reveal that Planned Parenthood sells bodyparts of aborted babies, which is illegal under 42 U.S. Code 274e<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Planned Parenthood has been accused of engaging in illegal activities.\n","id":"a0bcd8f8-f81a-46b5-a3d7-69dcf912b2d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>If freedom of religion is a right then it must include not having a religious belief as well. Hence the right to not have a religious belief should be a protected attribute too and should not be impacted by religious exemptions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right not to be discriminated against is a basic human right.\n","id":"b506f40c-e926-4de1-8183-5ed1341e7e11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>Amartya Sen argues that liberals interpret equality in terms of equality of well-being, resources, or capability, whilst conservatives interpret it in terms of equality of liberty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It has been argued that everyone cares about equality as a value, yet it has different meanings to different people.\n","id":"f7ecf624-5313-4f49-82f3-91eefd74daab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As someone recently out of a n imperfect 5 year relationship, I'd love to have my view changed on the idea that being single is inherently less satisfying life affirming than being in a relationship. I find my life as a single person fulfilling in many ways I get to spend time doing the things I didn't really have time for in the relationship. I get to invest in my friends, who are wonderful people and often share more interests with me than my ex did. I get to have agency over my time and my money. However, I think being single falls short of being in a relationship for a couple of principal reasons. When I say falls short, I mean in terms of being genuinely happy satisfied fulfilled feeling like you're living your life in the right way. 1 Agency vs obligation responsibility being single gives you tons of agency. However, I think the meaning of life isn't really about having agency it's more about being responsible for and invested in other people. Somehow, even though one's own life doesn't have tons of inherent meaning, investing in the life of another can bestow meaning on one's own life. I'm sort of thinking of Frankl's argument in Man's Search for Meaning here. 2 Intimacy intimacy rocks. I can't think of a feeling I get by myself or with a friend, no matter how close, that rivals the life affirming nature of true intimacy with a romantic partner. I'll stop there , reddit. I've always thought of myself as someone who'd be happily single, and I'm alarmed that I apparently sort of hate it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being single is inherently less life-affirming than being in a relationship.\n","id":"4e03ee96-673c-42e3-8d73-dacfb5bff825"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>The United Kingdom is made up of four constituent parts: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the Cornish national minority. They have cultural and linguistic differences, yet form a stable political union.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no evidence of this happening in similar historical unification efforts.\n","id":"a8b5338a-827f-4e8c-8afd-982926072141"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know Monsanto is supposed to be evil and all, but no one has truely ever convinced me I should really care about Monsanto. Even if I did care about them, I'm sure we can't change anything. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't care about what Monsanto is doing\n","id":"e37f075f-884e-45a0-81b2-cbc73ae52ef7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On one level, I'm not that great a person. I'm alright overall, but emotionally, I tend to think I kinda suck. I've never been anyone else to compare, but my estimation is that there are many things on an emotional base level that aren't ideal about me. But, I KNOW that. Because I have a high IQ and really good logic circuits, I am capable of, and have developed, understanding about these things. I can step outside myself and play director, vetoing emotional decisions which aren't great. Moreover, I have a deep capacity and respect for reason when the numbers don't add up, I simply can't deny it. I'm far from perfect in this regard, but if I didn't have these qualities, I bet I'd be in prison right now. So, it seems my capacity to think is the best of me, and I often think it's required for any human being to rise beyond their primal selves. I also think rising beyond our primal selves is essential, or else we are condemned to keep repeating the irrational human mistakes we see ourselves making over and over again. I think it's just impossible to be moral or perhaps 'ethical' without having a deep capacity for reason. Following that, the unfortunate conclusion I come to is that 'stupid' people just can't be really good people. That goes against the sentimental stuff Oh, but as long as you have a good heart, that's what really matters I just can't make that correct. I call that Forrest Gump thinking. In the movie, Forrest Gump was an idiot who had a good heart, and was completely incapable of judging the complexities of situations beyond his base decency. Should he have gone to war in Vietnam? He was incapable of making a truly informed decision about how justified his involvement in the war was, and was also incapable of not being sold into joining by a recruiter, for whom he was an easy target. If the world were all Forrest Gumps, we'd be fucked. To get more personal, I also think of my mother. Growing up, my mother was a deeply empathetic person, but like all humans who feel those emotions, they also feel the dark side of it as well. The more you empathize with the Jews, the more just you feel in torturing Nazis. This neurological trait is responsible for so many of the shameful acts that humans have justified to themselves as 'righteous' since the beginning of the species. My mother was someone incapable of recognizing and self reflecting on the psychology or neuroscience of that. Things were black and white to her. Many times, she told me I was a bad person because I didn't care as much as her didn't tear up thinking about poor kids in Africa or the like. But in her 'caring', she made deep mistakes that hurt her children and her marriage, because she was unable to do anything but be an emotional being. Any attempt to explain or mitigate that through reason ultimately failed, because you just couldn't get her to get it. So, how 'good' a person was she actually? She wasn't horrible by any means, but surely she wasn't flawless just because she had a good heart. So it's not a happy conclusion I come to, but it's one I had trouble escaping People with low ability for reason, learning, and mindfulness aren't capable of being the kind of people we need if we want to really make progress as a species. Put in the direct way that brings home the problem You can only be so great if you were born dumb. That's yeah. Kinda would be nice to be wrong about that. So, why am I wrong?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A higher capacity for learning and reason are essential in order to be a 'good' person.\n","id":"980b2c57-1ac9-4e43-95ba-cdf3b309c1fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view on the word retard is that I don't see it as a problem to use in everyday language. An example of what I mean could be if you lose a game due to something you found was unfair and you say Aw that was retarded . This usage of the word I have no problem with. When people use it as a way of describing someone with a disability is when I have a problem with it. If two people see a person with say cerebral palsy and they say That kid's retarded and it's not with a malicious intent, then they are wrong because that is no longer the correct medical terminology to use. The only time that retard has a negative effect on me is when people use it to purposely insult someone who has a disability. But the thing is, I'm the only person in my field 60 70 people, everyone of them female who holds this belief and doesn't care one way or the other if the word continues to exist. We were discussing how the words like idiot , dumb , stupid come from former medical diagnosis of people with disabilities but we use them today in common vernacular without that connotation. So I apply the same ideology to the word retard. If you don't use it to describe someone with a disability, then I find no problem with using it. I personally don't use the word because I'm in the field so if I did say it I would probably hang from the gallows. I don't feel like using it because it just doesn't enter my vernacular. Similar to how I don't call soda pop like my cousins do because they come from the south. It's just a word I choose not to use. I'm new to this subreddit so if I did any incorrect formatting or I am missing information please tell me. But I'd like to not have this opinion anymore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm going to be a special education teacher and I don't have a problem with the word \"retard\" used as a common place word.\n","id":"7fbd43cf-4f72-457c-bd2b-9f27be77db63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We don't know what came before the Big Bang. We don't know where the universe came from. We don't know why we exist here on Earth. But there are plenty of different explanations. The easiest one to understand is intelligent design the idea that a supreme being created the universe. Many people dislike this explanation because there is no evidence that a supreme creator being exists. Since scientists cannot accept the theory of intelligent design to be true, modern physicists have come up with a lot of alternative explanations. A common one is Multiverse theory, the idea that there are an extremely large number of parallel universes. Each universe starts out with its own Big Bang, which is caused by events in the multiverse. The problem with this theory is that it's just as much speculation as intelligent design is. There's no evidence supporting Multiverse theory, and it is unfalsifiable. It's impossible to imagine any kind of evidence we can observe that proves Multiverse theory wrong. Thus, Multiverse theory is unscientific and should not be taken more seriously than a religious explanation. Another explanation is that the universe alternates between expansion and contraction cycles and a Big Bang happens at the end of each contraction phase. But the evidence points to a universe that is going to continue expanding forever, so this theory is questionable. Other explanations seem just as farfetched to me. Science is applying the scientific method to theories that can be tested. But since there's no way to gather evidence from the time before the Big Bang, we cannot come up with testable hypothesis on the origin of the Big Bang. Thus, the only thing we can do is take supposedly scientific theories by faith since there is no evidence and no way to prove or disprove them. My view is that we should admit we don't know where the universe came from, and stop speculating.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scientists' explanations of the origin of the universe are no more legitimate than intelligent design.\n","id":"ebf67117-af28-409e-a22c-1e2c90a0b319"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Expiring Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in 2010<|ARGUMENT|>William Gale. \"Five myths about the Bush tax cuts.\" Washington Post. August 1, 2010: \"If, as proposed, the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire for the highest earners, the vast majority of small businesses will be unaffected. Less than 2 percent of tax returns reporting small-business income are filed by taxpayers in the top two income brackets -- individuals earning more than about $170,000 a year and families earning more than about $210,000 a year. And just as most small businesses aren't owned by people in the top income brackets, most people in the top income brackets don't rely mainly on small-business income: According to the Tax Policy Center, such proceeds make up a majority of income for about 40 percent of households in the top income bracket and a third of households in the second-highest bracket. If the objective is to help small businesses, continuing the Bush tax cuts on high-income taxpayers isn't the way to go -- it would miss more than 98 percent of small-business owners and would primarily help people who don't make most of their money off those businesses.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Expiring Bush tax cuts for rich will affect only 5% of small businesses\n","id":"7bd650b1-5ffc-42af-91f9-3192f45e6665"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's no secret owners of sports teams are usually ultra wealthy, sometimes with billions in net worth. With many local economies struggling and the poor in dire need of resources, cities and states are spending hundreds of millions helping rich owners build stadiums. For example, Cobb county in Georgia cut off funding for local parks so it could contribute to a new stadium for the Atlanta Braves. I understand that sports teams and stadiums provide economic benefits jobs, local shops bars, other sales, etc. , but studies repeatedly show that the economic benefits rarely make up for these huge expenditures on stadiums. It's a fiscally irresponsible use of limited local and state funds. If the government stops contributing to sports stadium financing, owners will still build these stadiums, and cities states will free up hundreds of millions in tax revenue to spend where it is truly needed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"taxpayers and the general public should never contribute money in financing new sports stadiums - that should be 100% on the owner.\n","id":"ebed627c-5180-4907-acde-7e76bc8b3e70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>A punishment system is based on the fact that humans have free will. Acting as though all criminals are victims of circumstance removes the idea that people should be culpable for their actions and promotes irresponsible decision-making.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Punishment should be the primary focus of prisons because criminal acts must have consequences to be effective.\n","id":"168e7e36-e1dc-4977-a440-c35c5a1d1936"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Definition of moral relativism for the sake of clarity gt Moral relativism is the view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint for instance, that of a culture or a historical period and that no standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others. It has often been associated with other claims about morality notably, the thesis that different cultures often exhibit radically different moral values the denial that there are universal moral values shared by every human society and the insistence that we should refrain from passing moral judgments on beliefs and practices characteristic of cultures other than our own. That said, if a society abides by moral relativism, it allows the individuals in power to corrupt that doctrine in such a way as to repress undesirable thoughts and actions that run afoul of the desires of the ruling class, generally for the purposes of further concentrating and centralizing power for their benefit. For example, pick any one of the modern controversial topics abortion, gay marriage, gun rights, etc and you will have large and powerful groups claiming the moral high ground while demeaning those that disagree for the purposes of garnering and solidifying further support. This has been the case for hundreds really thousands of years with the ruling classes utilizing various wedge issues to garner support women's suffrage, interracial marriage, the draft, take your pick . I would further argue that the only solution to this dilemma is to establish the notion of an objective good and an objective evil which exist above and beyond all societal constructs and is universal for all humans. As humans, we have the capacity and ability to understand complex issues due to our ability to reason and as such, we can objectively operate from the ethical standpoint of your rights end where my rights begin . This adequately explains why I don't have the right to randomly punch people in the face. My right to swing my fist ends as soon as someone's face is in the way and to do so would be considered an immoral bad action since I am causing them direct harm. This is really straight out of the objectivist's playbook and operates under the assumption that the fundamental desire of man is the freedom to pursue their life as they see fit without undue intervention from any external entity government, religion, culture, etc . As individuals, we have only to answer to ourselves and our desires so long as the actions we partake of in our pursuits do not infringe upon the individual rights of others. This is often referred to as the non aggression principle NAP in Libertarian ethics. In short, the rights of the individual are paramount, the notion of liberty is the only objective good in the world, anything that seeks to infringe on those individual rights barring proper utilization of the NAP is objectively bad , and thus moral relativism falls by the wayside and can no longer be utilized by a corrupt ruling power to subjugate the masses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moral relativism allows those in power to write the rules, everyone else be damned\n","id":"bfa5adb6-faf3-4517-8b87-5a8765a54eb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>In the 2012 US Presidential election, 56% of white women voted for Mitt Romney. Romney has a negative record on hiring female employees and supports banning abortions in all cases except in the case of rape or where the pregnancy poses a danger to the mother.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While white women and mainstream feminists provided significant support to Mitt Romney in the 2012 US presidential election, it was women of colour voters who were able to push the overall women's vote in favour of Barack Obama.\n","id":"3ddd2794-009d-441c-909c-edc5a36be37f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hate to get anecdotal but I'll just go by personal experiences to make a few points I was in Ireland, and I saw a few television stations that strive to preserve the Irish language, a language that was pretty much decimated by the British rule. Many Irish hope to preserve the language they lost. It is required to hold higher public offices, even though all politics and business is done in English. I think they shouldn't be doing that. It sucks that your culture was changed by historical oppression, but that cannot be undone. You do not need to know Irish to do anything in Ireland, and hoping to make that language relevant again is not only a lost cause, but a counterproductive one. The same goes to trying to preserve the language of Native Americans like Navajo. It is a language that is no longer relevant. Let it die. The reason for this is simple, the world is getting smaller. We are communicating across the globe. The world should be striving to have less languages in it, not more. This is in hopes of further worldwide communication. The majority of computer programming is in English, so most people that work with computers need an understanding of English. This is good. China is becoming a larger and larger world power and therefore many are being taught Chinese. This is good. When I was in France, I saw a German man talk to a store owner. He asked the man if he spoke German, the Frenchman said no. He then asked if he knew English, and the Frenchman said yes and they conversed in English. America should be embracing the influence Spanish is having in modern culture due to the recent large scale immigration of people from Mexico and South America. Parents should be happy that schools are now teaching Spanish as well. This gives their children the opportunity to communicate with millions of people across the world and opens them up better to the almost entirety of the continent of South America. America is far behind as far as languages go. Over 50 of the world is bilingual yet the amount of bilingual Americans is embarrassing. America realizes that since they are the greatest world power and therefore having the most worldwide influence, that English is arguably the most lucrative language to know and the world should simply catch up with them. Now I understand that learning dead or dying languages such as Irish, Navajo, and especially Latin would be beneficial for academic reasons. I don't think these languages should be forgotten, there just should not be a movement to make them culturally relevant anymore. I don't know what kind of long term goals I'm envisioning. Do I think that eventually there should be a world wide language? I think that isn't necessary to implement and would be an attack on human rights if it was enacted by governments. I think it will progressively come to be that languages such as English, Chinese, and Spanish will rise to the forefront and most people will be fluent in one or two of them and that will makes things easier.Eventually, lesser spoken languages will die out. And they should.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should not be trying to revive languages such as the Irish language and Navajo. The US should also be much more open to the influx of Spanish speakers in the country.\n","id":"ed7ed20b-64ef-4daf-b0ec-9f2859b71866"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've explored the philosophies of Buddhism and Stoicism for the past 4 years in an effort to deal with depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsiveness. I've also explored some of the core tenets of the Early Retirement Extreme philosophy movement. I've incorporated the following daily practices into my life meditation daily acts of kindness voluntary discomfort exercise practicing an instrument keeping a gratitude journal While I have not been perfect about strictly following through on doing these daily, I have in general been following through with the occasional hiccup. On the other hand, I have given up multiple compulsive behaviors such as drinking soda buying material things I don't really need playing league of legends watching television every night watching porn I've been doing all of this consistently for 3 6 months and I barely notice any difference, if any, in my overall well being. I've meditated weekly for 4 years until recently starting a daily practice 3 months ago , as well as attended weekend long retreats numerous times, and I feel no real sense of having made any progress in my well being long term as a result. The only real differences I notice in my life after having implemented these changes is that I have intense cravings for some of the things I gave up porn and buying things especially , and I feel a sense of pointlessness to continuing down the path I have chosen thus far. I feel as though without these things that I've given up, life seems extremely dull and grey. I do feel slightly more motivated and energetic, but not emotionally happier or any more content with life. I should mention that I'm in a long term relationship with a partner who I value dearly. We have very deep mutual respect and affection for one another, and I feel very grateful to have the partner I do. One of the two primary reasons I have given up porn is because it was negatively affecting our sex life ED went away after giving it up, more frequent sex, etc. . However, giving up porn has been an intense challenge for me and while I do enjoy sex with my partner, porn is generally what I would prefer at this point in my life. I am very attracted to my partner, so it's not a matter of that being a problem. She's also very accommodating and open in the bedroom, so there's no issue there. It seems like porn can give me endless novelty that I will never be able to get with a long term partner, and thus it has been a major struggle for me. I have noticed that I have a harder time looking forward to anything in my life since I have given it up. Everything feels the same and predictable now. Why should this be more desirable? I should also mention that I have been in therapy for the last 3 years and have been on an SSRI for the last 2 in order to deal with obsessive compulsive disorder and depression. I have noticed that my experience of life feels a little bit dulled emotionally since starting the SSRI. Lastly, I've been in the same job for 4 years that I am generally unsatisfied with. I do not find the work interesting and I don't like my boss, but the pay and benefits are very good and the people are decent. I feel as though I'll never find satisfying work. I'm looking for someone to convince me that the path I have chosen should not simply be abandoned. I keep wondering if any of these changes are actually worthwhile. I read the science and the philosophy that says that happiness is something we have to cultivate internally and that sacrificing short term gratification for long term well being is what is worthwhile. However, I am really struggling with this path in that it seems life fulfilling on paper, but life draining in practice. I feel as though I have chosen to give up things that feel so good in a purely sensory way in exchange for things that might only feel good in some sort of intellectual, prove it to yourself kind of way. I feel like I'm holding out for something that will never happen. Why should I care if I can give things up and maintain daily practices if all it does is dull the highs and lows of life? Why is that even something worth pursuing? Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should continue to indulge in instantaneous gratification in my daily life instead of severely limiting or abandoning it for possibly better long term well being.\n","id":"6f74cd7a-48c3-4b11-bfda-a98b624cda73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should children be exposed to violence?<|ARGUMENT|>People are predisposed to violence. Therefore, the slightest bit of encouragement are likely to bring out their violent tendencies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children are likely to emulate the aggressive behavior they see on television.\n","id":"f4e20bdf-246e-41db-aabc-9f25a2f5f931"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US electoral college<|ARGUMENT|>Because seats in the electoral college are allocated according to population, highly populated, urbanized states with more Democrats receive electoral votes representation proportional to their size. Democratic interests, in these states, are subsequently protected sufficiently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because big states with cities get more electoral votes, city-based Democrats generally receive proportional representation.\n","id":"fbd490b2-6323-4945-b180-0bc362537c1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should citizens be able to crowdsource laws?<|ARGUMENT|>Crowdsourcing is \u201cdirect participation\u201d not like traditional \u201cdirect democracy\u201d efforts that use popular votes to follow the will of the majority. Also this forum would operate inside our existing systems and shouldn\u2019t be assumed to be any more anti-minority than our existing systems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Neither indirect nor direct democracy can protect minorities, since an intolerating community will find ways to violate minorities in a much less provable ways.\n","id":"b6b8cda8-c065-4818-bdf6-042886fba22d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unlikely that Trump would allow his staff members to conspire with Russia without his consent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is likely that Trump and his administration colluded with Russia.\n","id":"0dbe72f5-7d77-4c99-927f-efdb686b7fbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Countries Taking In Refugees Confiscate their Valuables?<|ARGUMENT|>One of the main duties of a modern democratic state is to provide and protect the right of property. Confiscating the private property of refugees violates that important human right<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are alternative ways to have refugees contribute rather than compulsory confiscation.\n","id":"b8be8556-68ec-4b36-8b0a-dc0ab48bc472"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>24 m, was a gamer for over 10 years. Back in 2012 and 2013, I remember I would buy and play almost every game that came out. For some reason, in the last 2 years I slowed down a lot. Even the most unremarkable game like Red Steel I was super absorbed in. Now, it would take playing an epic game like The Last of Us or Super Mario Galaxy just to get normal levels of enjoyment. The nostalgic child in me is trying to make it work. I'm trying to work on my big backlogue and I watch Let's Plays of games from my childhood. I feel sort of an obligation to play everything, but I don't connect to any of them. I tried taking a break from gaming for the past 6 months. I played some Resident Evil 4 and Donkey Kong Country 2 yesterday, they were fun but not nearly as good as I remembered. And I'm not depressed either. I haven't lost interest in movies or music. I really want to build up a big gaming collection and play lots of games. But when I'm actually playing them, it's just not fun. It just feels like, to me, that beneath the artistic design and everything, I'm just pushing buttons and completing tasks to get results. I miss the impact games used to have on me. I want to go back to that. But how?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video games aren't fun for me anymore.\n","id":"b7ea0936-593d-4970-908f-42495ec0afcf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now I would imagine that most of you read that as Religion is evil , however, I do not think this is the case since everyone is entitled to believe whatever they damn well please. With that being said I think it is wrong for institutions such as the Catholic Church to ask for people's money, to campaign politically which is highly illegal in the United States, but they do it anyways , and for them to remain as a tax exempt entity. I also believe in a complete separation of the church and state and think it is a travesty and a crime that there are states that do not allow citizens to hold office, sit on a jury or be a credible witness if they identify themselves as an atheist or an agnostic. Although these laws have not been upheld for quite some time I believe it is time we make a fundamental change to remedy this as throughout the entire country it is considered political suicide to be a non theist. TL DR Tell me why we should allow religious institutions to continue existing in the US or anywhere in the world for that matter . <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious institutions are evil.\n","id":"ce96ca4f-40a1-4d67-a5f2-0908a78eacd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Stockholders often have no control over corporate operations and get nothing if the corporation does not make a profit. Such a duty towards stockholders is important to protect their interests. If dropping white supremacists does not help these stockholders, then they should not be dropped.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Directors owe fiduciary duties to their shareholders, as the shareholders invest their hard-earned money in the company, trusting that the directors will maximise their returns. For directors to take actions that betray this trust is morally wrong.\n","id":"37e4378f-6037-44e9-8212-8e5e0c561ccf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When having arguments with others about legalizing drugs, one point often brought up is that the War on Drugs is impossible to win and therefore is a wasted effort. While I would agree under the current policy that this is true, I think that it could be won if we were willing to get very serious about it. Specifically, if we made drug offenses both felonies and misdemeanors into capital crimes, then people would either stop using selling manufacturing drugs or the ones who didn't stop would be eliminated through execution. Implementation of this policy would coincide with a grace period of several months and free access to rehab, counseling, and other services for addicts who need help quitting. Now, I will fully concede that this is mostly hypothetical since the US would never undertake such a policy and it might require constitutional changes to even allow , but I think that it is an option that would be successful at winning the War on Drugs. Winning is defined as little to no usage of illegal drugs within the country. Quantitatively, if around 9 of Americans currently use illegal drugs winning the war would be something like lt .1 using drugs. As an aside, this solution would also nullify arguments about problems with the prison system, since we would no longer have to worry about overcrowding, recidivism, etc. TL DR The War on Drugs could be won if we made the punishment for drug crimes an automatic death sentence. EDIT I should mention that I do think drugs should be legalized purely on the merits of individual freedoms, I just mostly take issue with people who say that they should be legalized because the War on Drugs can't be won or because of problems in the prison system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the War on Drugs could be won nearly non-existant drug use if we got very serious about it;\n","id":"f5f7228b-cd1e-4424-bf2e-d1ee760112c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>In 2016, polls found that the effect on the Supreme Court was the most important factor behind the choice of candidate for 21% of Americans This effect is particularly pronounced among Republicans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polling data suggests supreme court confirmations have recently become electorally determinative in many instances.\n","id":"f6b74aef-752a-48ba-9a51-8a493682a40f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should we decide whether a single-winner voting system is fair?<|ARGUMENT|>When two major parties dominate the political scene either at the national level or at a local level, it is easier for money interests to bribe both parties as they have fewer parties to deal with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"TWO PARTY Some voting systems allow two parties to dominate. This is bad and those voting systems should not be used.\n","id":"bbb3171b-7637-4a24-a72e-bae96c153cff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Artificial General Intelligence AGI a threat to humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>We definitely have to watch for criminals using AI to notice patterns that humans don't and exploiting them. Fortunately, AI software is already well under way for identifying criminal activity. While starting with gun shots and criminal street hangouts,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AGIs could be exploited by individuals and groups with malicious intentions.\n","id":"bda039de-2434-4384-9bd9-d25f1ae39c67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have had a lot of time for listening to people around me in explaining anarchism to me, yet none have answered how this society would work. instead most of the responses seem to descend into why the current state of government is so bad. While I am open to a change in the structure of government, I think that fundamentally, the basis of anarchism could not work as relying on people to uphold their own rules would either end with countless murders and other crimes, or end up as another hierarchical government as others try to stop it happen. However I would like someone to change my view to how an Anarchistic society would function in a western country such as America or the UK. Thanks for reading<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An Anarchist society could never function in today's world.\n","id":"3fc676cc-ec77-4a8b-b3d8-aabb7f691cf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>This is potentially even more dangerous because it can often be hard to identify these consequences until the genes have settled for several generations. By the time this is understood, untold damage could have been done.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetic enhancements can have negative consequences in the long run that are impossible to predict, potentially heritable to children and are not reversible even though practiced for decades.\n","id":"ea65f97f-f1ad-4ae9-822e-18505aab2e35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Judges be Elected or Appointed?<|ARGUMENT|>Elections require judges to spend time campaigning instead of working for the good of the public. This is especially undesirable in light of ongoing court congestion in many countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regular judicial elections are a waste of valuable time and money.\n","id":"26209db1-4845-45ab-8d14-aadffb42faa9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>The \"range of changeability\" of personality the extent to which someone's personally could change in future declines as people grow older Caspi & Roberts, p.304<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a point at which personality is fully developed Caspi & Roberts, p. 302 Beyond that, personality does not change much.\n","id":"1d572c15-cc43-4a75-810c-dc986f3ef904"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>2020 Predictions: Who Has The Best Shot at Winning 2020?<|ARGUMENT|>Research indicates that biases and stereotypes based on gender suggests that America is not ready for a female President.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women face more challenges to win an election than men.\n","id":"e86a4dec-c4cd-4a5f-8135-11e5f7835616"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>The US constitution states its goal to \"promote the general welfare and Trump has both failed to achieve this and worked against this goal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump has violated his oath of office by failing to \"preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.\"\n","id":"d409eee0-7fcd-4246-a8df-0890915f1bf6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is a free press necessary for democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Government by the people requires an electorate that is familiar with the issues and the evidence for the positions and policies behind them, if it is to be truly democratic in the broader sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The freedom to say and write anything true is a fundamental value of democracies.\n","id":"20d901df-adbe-4431-aa3a-45fcc6829d64"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Disengagement can be because of many factors, such as disillusionment with the system as a whole, or a general lack of interest which does not generally lend itself to voting one way or the other.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who have disengaged from politics are not necessarily going to vote against the corrupt party.\n","id":"9872284d-e6ec-4dec-84c6-359d22c98a21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>Heart issues, heat illness, and respiratory conditions rank among the top causes of death according to the NCAA. These deaths can be prevented without changing the rules of the game.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"American football can be made safer for players without banning it outright.\n","id":"08b2b055-d678-47ce-9d38-af74d461cbe2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The Falkland Islands remain contentious, with Spain saying they would support Argentina while the UK would vie for continued possession.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Member states currently disagree on military policy; such disagreement will spill over into a USE, curtailing its effectiveness.\n","id":"df69b535-f381-42a1-8f37-5d47a952d92c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>These are two separate but related issues. I'll start with driving first, then move on to banks and petrol stations. Driving One of the most important things to have whilst in control of a motor vehicle is clear vision. It seems to me that a niqab limits vision in much the way a full face helmet does, and I certainly wouldn't drive a car in a full face helmet. The person wearing the niqab seems to have reduced peripheral vision, making it harder for them to avoid a collision. It seems that it should only be legal to drive if your vision is completely unobstructed. Banks Petrol Stations It is currently illegal for me to walk into a bank or petrol station wearing a full face helmet or other object that obscures my face. Why should religious dress be excepted from these laws? What's to stop me, a on muslim male, adopting this style of dress for nefarious purposes? It seems like it'd be very easy to conceal weapons and hide my identity whilst I was wearing it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should be illegal to drive or enter a petrol station\/bank in a niqab\n","id":"98483428-cf13-407e-be48-43fbfc8c47e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's just like with money, those with lots of money can make more money and those barely struggling to survive don't really get anywhere. The people who said life is way harder in terms of finding friends after high school and college are right. I thought it was because they were losers with no initiative, but they ain't lying. The best way to make friends is to already have an existing circle of friends to introduce you to more friends. It's a positive feedback loop, a slanted system. I've been to bars, clubs, lounges, meetup groups, local activities, cities, activist charity organizations. I'm looking for a romantic relationship, sex partners, friends to collab on music art projects, friends to play casual sports with and in general close friends. I can't seem to find any of these things. There are two factors that make it extremely difficult for people with very few friends, like myself, to meet other friends People go out to these sort of places with their pre existing friends. They're there to strengthen their circle of friends not to expand it. People who go out to events that are focused toward a certain activity care more about that activitiy than meeting other people. It's geared toward contextual acquaintances not friends. Even with Craigslist or Meetup, etc., it's a slanted system. I'm not saying there is zero opportunity for me. Just that it's hard and people who already have an established system of friends have it way way easier. Change my view. And, just putting it out there, I don't want to be right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making friends is a slanted system favored toward people who already have friends.\n","id":"5d934a18-eb77-49dd-8354-15564a9dcc62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The dominating form of economic organization is division of labor. Everyone is a specialist and highly depends on other individuals' skills and products.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human life has a higher value because humans need and depend on each other, socially and economically.\n","id":"8b951a70-3e09-4ffc-a8a4-addb4419bf0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Military conscription should apply to men and women equally.<|ARGUMENT|>Conscription constitutes some of the worst institutional rights violations we can think of. See Impressement a particularly vivid method of conscription. There is no reason to desire more of this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Expanding military conscription to women will legitimize it, which is a bad thing.\n","id":"ce24adb2-a73f-4c81-a78f-42058dc03a63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>An omni-benevolent, omniscient and omnipotent God would never have created a world where children are born into war- and famine-stricken places, just to be raped and die of starvation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The problem of evil implies that God does not exist.\n","id":"9292cd9d-c34d-41b7-99b4-d8e597a5ab7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>Punishment-focused prison systems are rooted in historic Christian concepts of 'justice', moral culpability, and libertarian free will; this seems incompatible with the modern scientific view that human actions are fully determined by biology and environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is morally acceptable for prisons to focus on rehabilitation.\n","id":"788b96e0-cd65-4cec-88d3-e659dda942bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's the deal I believe that high skill food preparation and general foodiness is wasteful, inefficient, time consuming, snobbish, pointless, and ultimately subjective. However, I am dating someone who enjoys cooking and good food, and would like to understand the other side of the issue. I'll lay out what I believe. Good cooking should go the way of the dinosaur for three main reasons. First, it's incredibly wasteful. Second, progress has a general trend toward removing labor intensive parts of human culture. Third, at the end of the day, who cares how good the food is? First, wastefulness. When cooking, I've witnessed some of the most startlingly wasteful practices I've ever seen. Ingredients bought so one small part of them can be used to flavor a dish, and the rest thrown out. Cooking each ingredient separately in pans really? you heat the stove itself, the air around the pan, the unused space in the pan, and the air above the pan to cook the little bit of food that does touch the pan? before combining them and cooking again, in order to bring out flavor. And overall, spending an hour or more preparing something that could offer the same nutritional value after twenty minutes of cooking, because some members of the group find it more pleasing. When humans are able to make processed nutrition cubes for meals, we will be able to get much more out of our energy, our food sources, and our lives. Second, I often hear that cooking is a part of culture, and will endure because of that. That you can't look at cooking as just a necessity to provide nourishment because it can't be divorced from the social and heritage aspects. To that I offer the example of the Roman communal baths. The Romans took a necessary consideration, hygiene, and gave it cultural value. They built aesthetically pleasing halls for bathing, and made it into a socially valuable part of high society interaction. Today we wake up in the morning, jump into a shower, use the minimum amount of water to clean our bodies, and get out. We do this because our time and our water became scarce. When our food supplies do likewise, historical precedent says culture will give way to prudence. Finally, and this is a big one, who cares? Taste is a lower order pleasure. It's not like a critically acclaimed movie which stretches your mind and emotions while impressing your senses. It's a simple, sensual intake, and because of that, it's a subjective judgement. Many of us can go to KFC and find something we enjoy more than the offerings of Food Channel Approved restaurants. The insistence that hand prepared food is better strikes me as absurd, like saying that a farmer's field is just not plowed very well because he used a tractor instead of hitching a single blade to his horse. We have microwaves, we have instant food, we have the capability to make these inferior creations stimulate many of the same parts of the brain that expertly cooked foods do. Why should I care? Why should I believe that the absurd waste of resources, time and energy is necessary to sustain an inefficient process because some people are desperately attached to the old ways of doing things? Fine food prep should go, and we will all be better off when our allotments of MealPills arrive for the month. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that skillful cooking of good food will become a lost art, and we will all be better off,\n","id":"e7449163-eb53-4add-a060-5708ed44b386"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should close Guantanamo Bay detention camp<|ARGUMENT|>we should close guantanamo bay since the treatment of these inmates is likely inhumane and some are there with no real proof they belong there, but will never even get a trial.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"unjust treatment\/tactics are used in the Guantanamo bay detention camp\n","id":"8e4ee1b4-e922-47d5-af90-36c10e04349f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Gulabi Gang a force for good in India?<|ARGUMENT|>There are no news articles discussing the issues of violence with the Gulabi Gang which suggests that the Gang's violence is being glorified and it is not being held accountable pg.14<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vigilante justice undermines the faith of Indians in the justice system particularly if the vigilantes themselves do not face justice.\n","id":"7d53cd49-fc75-4924-80f1-4d4da9f16e70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>so I was diving into psychology and philosophy and other different subjects Specifically ones that have to do with the origin of everything. Existential questions and questions that we can't know forsure What we can't prove by logic I know this may sound silly and I don't entirely believe in this but I think I'm spooking myself out psyching myself out by thinking that I have no way of knowing people have consciousness like me Therefore you guys might not even be real. YOU have no consciousness and I am the only consciousness on this earth. I also imagined that if that were the case then there must be a God or some type of creator that made this simulation for me to be in and I am simply a person who is going through a test. Please feel free to take this post directly aimed at you. YOU have no consciousness YOU aren't even reading this. I want you guys to take us directly because If you think about it I pretty much am saying this directly to you. So just respond back as if some random person came up to you and told you that you were a liar and a fake. I think if you guys took it that way it would help lessen the degree of my stupid imagination. If you don't want to defend yourself and elaborate why this thought is bullshit could you please just say I think therefore I am I would appreciate even just that. . Being mean is totally accepted here In your responses If someone came up to me and told me that I wasn't real I would probably swear and cuss possibly EDIT I think intellectual logical responses aren't penetrating much. But I've noticed a few comments that seemed like they had the essence of honesty emotion in them, and I felt a little change in me when I read them But then I defaulted back into bs imaginary possibilities So im thinking if you guys could maybe respond with some emotion and not focus entirely on intellectual responses then that may help change my view more than strictly intellectually responses would intellectual responses with emotion would be great hope that makes some sense EDIT Everyone has helped me realize that that belief was pretty out there and not backed by much. I wish i could have given an 1 8th of delta to everyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"you all don't have consciousness I only have consciousness\n","id":"7f37824f-fc97-4609-abce-ef27cf04d5e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I got to thinking today and I managed to convince myself the left and right have traded positions views. Typically, the left would care about making sure all individuals are free from insults racism wrong pronouns outright being a douche. The right, would say free speech is not censored speech and they have the right to say whatever they want about whoever they want. And in return, they are subject to the same free speech of others and others opinion of them. However, with the recent NFL issue, the left is claiming the players all have the right to free speech and it dosent matter if veterans, trump supports, etc get offended. Regardless of their intention or purpose behind kneeling, they have the right to do so. At the same time, the right is saying they should be fired or the NFL should step in and silence them because it's seen as offensive. This seems very backwards and hypocritical to me. The other issue is gun control. The left really does not like trump and feels he is uncontrollable. He will likely cause ww3 and our future is unknown or bleak. The right says he is decent or great and he is trustworthy. This one I feel is slightly more hypocritical of the left. I would think if you do not trust the current government, you would not want to turn your weapons into that government as a way of fighting the unstable government on the rise. The right should be wiling to turn their guns in if they have trust in the government. However, I can understand keeping them is a more personal issue in daily life family protection so I can see how personal experiences can out weight political views. Anyways, change my view on how these stances are not hypothetical on all ends<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both the right and left are hypocritical on the NFL issue as well as gun control.\n","id":"d3286177-1b83-420f-978c-629cdac928e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Under Judaeo-Christian teachings, slavery becomes a contractual agreement between an employer and an employee. A rather strict contract, but the idea is no different. Jewish law even prohibited buying and selling kidnapped people into slavery and returning escaped slaves Christian teaching placed even more emphasis on the fair treatment of the slaves<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Judeo-Christian religions command their followers to treat their slaves fairly and with respect. Slavery was an ugly fact of life during the time, and religion helped make it less horrible.\n","id":"061cbe29-c08f-4a05-85bf-1077ebafd444"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if the success of the program is overstated, it still shows the commitment of the Modi government toward improving India's environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Modi government has launched Namami Gange - a multi-million dollar national program to help clean the Ganga.\n","id":"da2b9684-fe73-4e9b-9e98-d1734832009e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Perhaps this  truly boils down to personal preference but when both games are made by the same studio and likeness, I can't believe I enjoy the former far more than the latter. Choosing between House, Legion, NCR, and Yes Man is far more intensive and enjoyable than stormcloacks and imperials. In FNV, I felt it was easier to be what you want to be. In Skyrim, you always end up stuck as a stealth archer. FNV was faster paced death was around every corner, you always had to be mindful of ammo, and hardcore mode was so brutal and fun at the same time. Skyrim is just meh. They are called companions in FNV and followers in Skyrim and it shows just how different they are. In Skyrim, you get bland people useful mostly for carrying your loot. In FNV each companion has their own backstory, preferences, and if you didn't like them you could FEED THEM TO CANNIBALS. FNV has guns. The level up system in FNV actually built your character. I feel like in Skyrim you're stuck using perks to build enchanting and smithing so your can use perks to build your character. A little background I have over 200 hours in FNV and about 50 in Skyrim. I'm looking to rehash the latter and want as a best a mindset going into it so I'm here. Also, if anybody wants to affirm my view I ain't gun' be mad brah<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fallout: New Vegas is better than TES: Skyrim\n","id":"535a5c80-39c5-4062-ae54-8964eebedbc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While the word abortion is used in reference to the pregnancies, I use it more loosely in this case to include more of the reproductive process, primarily the point after which the baby has been born but isn't experiencing significantly or any more of what we'd call sentience i.e. the ability to think and feel than it would be before leaving the mothers body. Also, while perhaps not existing through the mothers body, a born baby is still more or less completely reliant on the mother and therefore is a an obligation to the mother. So that calls into question whether the mother has an obligation to the babies continued existence. If it legal to to put down a dog because it imposes a financial strain on a human, should it not also be legal to put down a baby for the same purpose. To say no seems to be putting a creature of limited or no sentience above the rights of a completely sentient human. Obviously, in the case of the dog, many people would prefer to put it up for adoption but it is by no means obligatory. While adoption could be a possibly more ethical alternative, perhaps it also shouldn't be an obligatory alternative for human babies. While I've given what I believe is a relatively close analogue, there is historical precedent to believe that killing a newborn is not always unethical. Perhaps it's unsavory in modern western culture, but in Inuit culture it was a clear choice between live or death. If a newborn would have created too much strain on already existing people, it would be left to the die in the snow. While there are certainly fixes other than this is modern culture, they don't always exist and it's arguable how effective they are so, so people ought to have the right to choose. Denying parents the right to kill their babies is denying them a human right, and moreover denying women rights in particular. There are far more present mothers than fathers, and mothers more often assume the primary caretaker role. Therefore, forcing them into an obligation that hasn't fully become sentient is denying them their civil rights. In the case of mothers who cannot afford baby formula, they are left with no choice but to allow the creatures to latch onto their breasts, which puts them in a position where a creature must be allowed to suckle upon their secondary sex organs or else grow up to be malnourished. Yes, mothers ought to have decent access to formula, but that is not always the case and as long as it isn't they are left only with the choice to allow the creature to latch on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It not unethical to \"abort\" newborns\n","id":"304dee46-a3f8-42cf-9d2a-2b3967089534"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not entirely sure if I agree with the no attention to the gunmen philosophy after tragic shootings. I think we can all agree that a major part of the problem is mental illness, and as hard as it may be to forgive someone for an atrocious crime like this, we have to understand that the shooter's reality is far far different from a normal reality. As strong as the urge is to call the shooter a piece of shit, I believe this behavior will only further alienate mentally ill and perpetuate the us vs them mentality they have. Contrarily, if we looked past the albeit powerful urge to dismiss the shooter as inhumane and instead welcome them to forgiveness and treatment, it may be an important step in bridging the disconnect between the mentally ill and mentally healthy it may also prompt the mentally ill to seek help early before the illness becomes uncontrollable. Edit Many of the replies focus on the media glorification of shooters, turning them into celebrities . I should have been more clear that I do NOT believe this is productive. Rather, I believe that completely ignoring the shooter from media is also unproductive in that the media instead of focusing on the bizarre ideologies of the shooters should instead focus on the mental illness aspects, warning signs, and appropriate means of intervention. Only in this way can the root cause, mental illness, be addressed and not just ignored. This would then shift the celeb dom paradigm to a mental illness paradigm, which I think is important for both the general public and the confused people who are considering committing such acts. Edit 2 By warning signs and intervention, I clearly don't mean in the face of an ongoing shooting. I mean beforehand. Regarding this most recent case of the journalist and cameraman, I read that the news staff unanimously noticed odd and hostile behavior from the now shooter and their response was to fire him. While firing him entirely justifiable since his behavior was interfering with his ability to perform his job, perhaps this odd and hostile behavior deserved some recognition, discussion, and possible intervention? I wouldn't know specifically what, since I'm not a practicing psychologist psychiatrist, but if his behavior was peculiar enough to warrant removing him from his job perhaps an expert would agree that this is a sign that intervention, or some type of discussion, is appropriate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I disagree with the philosophy of not giving any attention to gunmen\n","id":"f7d1566d-ac66-4dbb-8392-23f7c5db25ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cannabis be legalised for medical use in the UK?<|ARGUMENT|>This would stop genuinely ill people making themselves vulnerable by approaching unknown dealers, who are most likely going to rob them or sell them an inferior product with no health benefits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalisation could ensure the safe and regulated procurement of the substance, mitigating the negative effects of a black market.\n","id":"a28d9c52-3b7f-4243-aacf-4fe57e071bca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>There is nothing wrong in paying for services you are using, because they are not free anyway. Forcing non-believers to pay with taxes for believers' services is not fair. If there are not enough believers to support so many churches, then we need fewer churches.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By giving only religions a tax exemption the government is subsidizing religion over atheism.\n","id":"d1819397-b153-49c8-bf22-8031f37618bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Developed Countries Reduce The Working Year?<|ARGUMENT|>A 2-year long trial run where nurses in Sweden had reduced working hours proved a lot of substantial benefits such as the workers being less stressed, more productive, and taking less sick leaves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Working long hours is detrimental to one's health and encounters diminishing returns.\n","id":"0939ec29-d514-4f94-8580-8eb21bd3ae76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU have its own army?<|ARGUMENT|>A European army could be seen as a proxy for US forces, and thus be targeted in the same manner as US forces.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A European army could become a target for terrorist groups.\n","id":"e9acc2d8-c589-41ec-a7cb-36f292eee44e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The ACLU and Charlottesville: Should the ACLU Defend White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Much of what the Civil Rights Movement did sit-ins, marches made people uncomfortable, and if not for free speech protections, would have been banned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of a standard in defining hate speech results in dangerously broad discretion at the hands of the State.\n","id":"b5d678fa-77e8-4e04-b3f8-a5fdab4fa9dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start by saying I am 20 years old and I don't even like to drink. Here in the USA it is expected that you will drink underage by your peers as a right of passage. the current law stops nobody from drinking who wouldn't want to anyway. Why arrest people who are trying to fit in and doing whats expected of them by other people? I say either lower the drinking age to 16 works fine in Europe or actually enforce the drinking age more strongly if it's so important. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the drinking age of 21 has to be changed.\n","id":"bf451a05-a4eb-4034-a578-0f46ae45090e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>According to common conservative philosophy, the free market selects the smartest and hardest working individuals for financial success therefore if you are an adult in poverty then it stands to reason that you are either dumb or lazy. The only logical explanation that there exists outside forces preventing people from success is an appeal to what most conservatives would call 'playing the victim' racism sexism ageism etc. are holding you back . I'll be responding as my view of the 'conservative' in this , but if i'm not portraying this role or philosophy accurately please let me know and i'll adjust.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you are a poor, conservative, adult, then you should first and foremost be blaming yourself\n","id":"553b7aea-e19b-404b-9e0c-4648a9ce3e7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is enlightened despotism superior to democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>An individual is often guided by life experiences. Empathy comes from having had similar experiences. An individual and its staff have limited even if enlightenment and experiences. As such it is impossible to make the best decisions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In democracy, everyone has a say -- unless the Enlightened Despot duplicates the democratic process, Enlightened Despotism can't achieve the same level of understanding of the people's needs.\n","id":"b7f4e8f6-41ce-4f93-9252-cbbb242a24a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>It is easier to break into someone's apartment in a neighbourhood where people don't know their neighbours or aren't concerned for them, since they will be less likely to call the police when seeing something suspicious.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More Airbnb usage necessarily increases the number of unfamiliar faces in a given neighbourhood, leading to overall less cohesive neighbourhoods. Research shows that such diminished social cohesion leads to higher crime rates\n","id":"c2de4852-92be-4ceb-859c-92d344b5a485"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fashion can never be feminist<|ARGUMENT|>Despite women dominating entry level jobs in fashion, they are vastly underrepresented in top level positions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fashion industry is abusive to women who work in it.\n","id":"a1b9cbec-27b8-4500-8a73-55fd720addc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see this argument a lot when it comes to making off color jokes. Someone will say gt You shouldn't joke about x. And the next person will reply gt Look, either all jokes are ok, or none of them are ok. While I agree with the sentiment that we should be able to joke about anything, I think this common argument is very flawed. Let's take the logic to the extreme. gt Murder is terrible, but self defense is ok. gt Look, either all killing is ok, or none of it is ok. or gt Rape is inexcusable. gt Look, either all sex is ok, or none of it is ok. or gt Pedophilia is horrid gt Look, either all love is ok, or none of it is ok. Et cetera. Basically, this argument tries to create a situation where there's only two options. It's either a all ok or b not ok. But for most issues, this is not the case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The argument \"either it's all ok, or none of it's ok\" is a bad argument.\n","id":"09a3bc8a-a2a4-4ae2-b9fa-72323507058d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We will deal with only equilibrium systems, because the shit gets way too hard. Consider N particles, this system can be represented as 1 single point in 6N phase space this phase point can be described if you went out and measured 6N things 3N positions and 3N momentums . In theory, you can do this, and you solve 6N coupled F ma equations, and bingo, you got the real answer, where all N particles has been, is at and will ever be. I understand you cannot do that, so you go do these mental copies of the system, all versions of the system you're looking at with varying 6N coordinates, and you let all of these versions of the system evolve in time, this is a fluid in 6N phase space and can be described by Liouville's equation. You set the explicit time dependence of the density of this fluid equals zero, because it's an equilibrium system. The fluid does not change shape even though individual members of the ensemble are still going all over the place . This shape that the fluid represents all the possible states a system at equilibrium will ever be in, each member takes up 1 state at any time. So you take this shape, and you take the average over it. e^ H KbT yes this is all wonderful, Liouville equation gives you this if you set the explicit time dependence to zero. Okay, here's the deal, this isnt what you measure in the lab What you're measuring in the lab is the real thing evolving in time, every time you measure the system, you get a time average of the states the system so happened to be in at best you get the value of 1 of the states the system so happened to be in , you take what? a million measurements? and you average that, that gives you a time average over the samples of the time averages of the states you measured when you did those measurements. How do you know how long the system is in each state? YOU DONT For all you know, the system is spending 10 times as much time in state A as in state B, but when you do the ensemble averages, you're saying they spend the same amount of time in state A as in state B, this is madness Not only do you take enough samples to promise me that your collection of measurements take on all of the states of the system in equilibrium, or even that each time you take the measurement, each state is equally represented. Now, I know Boltzmann Gibbs Factors work, and this is due to the fact that the system we're dealing with are N~10^27 particles, so the distributions are extremely peaked, so it works, but the issue is people are taught in undergrad like you dont have to worry about the time evolution of the actual system and that Ergotic Hypothesis is something that you should be convinced of, IT'S NOT I understand that it's okay, you teach what it kind of is for undergrads, then you teach them how it really is in graduate school, but that's not what happens either, most people just take for granted that Boltzmann Gibbs Factors just work by this bad logic, explain why we're approaching the problem this way. My undergrad thermo book just states S Kb Ln W , like this is just some convenient definition, by saying S Kb Ln W , you're saying W always scales like e^ E , no matter what system you're talking about, what Bottom line, Boltzmann Gibbs Factors work cus of N~10^27, we should be more careful and explain ourselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ensemble Observables and Expectation Observables in Stat Mech are not the same thing.\n","id":"301a95ee-6f50-4a93-8e6c-badf5665032c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>It is easy to be pro-life till the baby is out. With no effective support system in place for the child after birth without a willing parent, the choice for abortion should be available to the mother.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many reasons a woman may not be equipped to or want to raise a child. In these cases, it is important that she is able to choose abortion.\n","id":"a7eff47f-d353-4fb9-a21d-c56be0a0bf32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are women better than men?<|ARGUMENT|>Girls\/women bully others in a more subtle way then men - they use less physical violence and more social aggression\/alienation. psychbc.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women may be less physically violent but they use more emotional and mental abuse instead.\n","id":"d2ed5f34-62fa-4e74-a79b-e91afc8c273c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Veal<|ARGUMENT|>After baby cows are taken away from their mothers and sold at auctions, they are taken to a tiny wooden crates that they will live in for the rest of their short lives. They cannot exercise or even lie down and they are kept in darkness and deprived of certain nutrients, in order to ensure that their muscles remain weak and tender when consumed by humans. Treating baby cows in this way is not justified by any human desire for tender meat.2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Veal farming is inherently abusive to calves to meet market demands\n","id":"427660d0-9bf3-4db3-a116-f9a0e4e1495f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>64% of belief-driven buyers half of consumers worldwide will not buy a brand when it chooses to stay silent on an issue they feel it has an obligation to address.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All else being equal, consumers will align with brands that share their values over brands that either hold contrary political views or are silent on the issue.\n","id":"5e694263-75c1-4ba5-b646-190e13b1130c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Preferential Voting the most effective system for ensuring fairer election outcomes?<|ARGUMENT|>It prevents tactical voting in which people doesn't vote for their most sincere preference when their favorite candidate is not likely to win.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Preferential voting is the most effective system for ensuring fair election outcomes.\n","id":"0d10ea65-3ac2-48b0-80a7-945c70b7ff98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don\u2019t support democracy as a method to elect leaders. I\u2019m very much in support of using referendum to removing a president and other positions of power because I\u2019d like to secure some power in the people to combat an authority that abuses it\u2019s power. That being said, the election process seems to me to be a popularity vote from constituents that don\u2019t have enough understanding of the political system to make intelligent assessments, predictions and or decisions. I myself do not feel qualified to vote on a candidate when I do not understand enough about the economic theory. I feel unqualified to vote for one candidates stance, yet I am still expected to vote for the person I think is right. I consider myself of an above average education, and I say that only bring up the point that I think we have more people voting without information or education to understand the outcome of this policy over another. So we end up voting for people we trust to handle the problems we don\u2019t understand well enough ourselves often and that seems like another area where we\u2019re unqualified to make assessments. I don\u2019t know how to judge the economic decision making of one candidate over another. And for that matter, I don\u2019t even know who will make up the cabinet and what their qualifications will mean. I feel disheartened when people tell me it\u2019s important to vote, when I feel most people do not have enough information to understand what they are voting for. It seems like we should encourage people who are undecided not to vote. And those who do to take up the responsibility and educate themselves. In reality I can\u2019t see many people having the time to do a job and take up macroeconomics and finance. So I\u2019d honestly prefer if we had a better way to elect presidents, and other politicians. Don\u2019t know what that is. I just know I am against democracy as a method.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Democracy is bad method to elect politicians.\n","id":"e67e9846-0c4b-4bd8-964e-cf8fa2b41faf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Britain should give up its EU rebate<|ARGUMENT|>It is worth giving up the rebate to remove a constant source of tension and ill-feeling between Britain and its European partners. Until the rebate is abandoned, Britain will never be at the heart of Europe. This limits our ability to promote our other interests in Europe, as every argument always ends up back at the rebate, and weakens our moral authority. Denmark for example is similarly Euro sceptic but is fiercely opposed to the UK rebate and aims to scrap it during Denmark\u2019s next EU Presidency in 2012.1 Because preserving the rebate has always been the Prime Minister\u2019s priority, every other British goal has been given up instead. This led to bad deals for Britain over the ERM, at Maastricht, and in 2002 when Tony Blair accepted a Franco-German agreement to leave the CAP unreformed until 2013. This is because Britain is inevitably on its own in any possible change to the rebate whereas on almost any other issue Britain has allies. So when Britain\u2019s opponents can link the rebate to an issue Britain may be able to keep the rebate but will in other respects be on the losing side.2 1 Jensen, Arne Nis, \u2018The UK rebate \u2013 or rethinking the EU budget?\u2019, 2011, p.27 2 Rennie, David, and Helm, Toby, \u2018Blair is all alone in Britain\u2019s EU rebate row\u2019, 2005<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Giving up the rebate would mean better relations with the Europe Union\n","id":"ec5fc9eb-a7fe-4d5d-b510-440ddbd24a4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>If the executive could point towards referendums to justify actions than run counter to the parliament's intentions, this could effectively prevent parliament from keeping the executive in check.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Referendums weaken parliaments and parliamentary sovereignty a central institution of democracy.\n","id":"cea83004-ad92-4ee6-9818-9a951daf69f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Crackdowns on NGOs in dictatorships can cause spillover effects for NGOs in democracies For example, the British NGO 'Syrian Network for Human Rights' has been removed for its anti-government content after efforts made by Syria.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Creating any exceptions for freedom of speech on Facebook and Twitter limits their ability to provide a free platform for users around the world since these exceptions can easily be abused by governments.\n","id":"834f87a1-bba3-488f-b55e-ebd51fb2ab53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now, before anyone gets into defensive mode, or brings up any sort of high horse argument, I am not against the ethical killing of animals, if the animal has lived a torture free life and has experienced the outdoors. I believe the right way to live in a symbiotic relationship with the planet is honoring your prey. Being born to never see nature and experience the outdoors is a severe impairment of a sentient's being right, especially one as intelligent as a pig, or cow. Tossed into a cage and being unable to move and essentially exist whilst people torture and cause pain to you, eventually slaughtering you anyone else see the problem here? It has also been proven that people who work at these unethical farms have a considerably high percentage of domestic violence and abuse, establishing a correlation between the desensitization of killing sentient beings and quality of life. The way the current paradigm is set up highly favors the disassociation of the meat from the animal, rendering any respect one has for animals void. Furthermore, cutting costs via inhumane living conditions is unacceptable and is another form of capitalist exploitation. Animals should be treated with respect and have the ability to live in a free range setting with ample space to roam freely, e.g one acre per couple cows, or one hundred chicken. I personally see no argument for the mass factory inhumane consumption of animals except cutting costs, which should not be the focal point of our worries. The mass killing of animals for large corporations, IMO, is akin to segregation 50 years ago or the witch burnings in the 1600's. The majority of the populace of is fine with it, up until it isn't. A global consciousness shift will ultimately bring about a stop to this, but I don't want to wait another 100 years and sit idly by while sentient beings are deprived of their sovereign liberty to experience the wonders of nature and a natural birth death cycle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the mass factory exploitation of animals is downright sadistic and should be changed immediately.\n","id":"c5cf9bfc-cbd1-40b7-9372-d3cf912e1457"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This has been on my mind for quite a while now. And to preface, I don't think I'm a good person although that's quite arbitrary , and I also don't think I'm a terrible person I think I'm very average. Also, warning, this is kind of all over the place. Sorry in advance I really do want to try to change how I think. x200B EDIT When I say 'valid', I mean that I respect people's rights to believe what they want to believe, even if they're proven to be false. So I guess I accept all beliefs, so long as they don't hurt anyone directly, is better. x200B EDIT 2 Okay, now I understand that it's not the job of the persecuted to be tolerant and kind to their persecutor. Respect doesn't come from nowhere, and especially not from being hated. x200B EDIT 3 New view Bigotry and ignorance is a quick fix. It doesn't take long if you have an open mind, take the time to research a little bit, and get to know people from the community you dislike. Because it's such a simple fix, and race gender etc. is impossible to change, there's no good reason a bigot should be supported or given sympathy unless they lack access to the means to change their mind. x200B PART 1 I don't like that racism, sexism, and intolerance exist, but I think that, no matter your beliefs not your actions you deserve to be treated with basic respect. I don't think that shunning people and raging at them is helpful or ethical, even if they've done bad, damaging things which, if they're bad enough, they should be locked up for, which society has created and permits I'll embrace what I like, if it fits my beliefs . I believe that being kind and inclusive is the way to go, while calmly trying to challenge their beliefs if you want to bother at all no one has to do anything . Being angry and defensive towards someone doesn't make them want to change it makes them feel attacked, and outraged. What do we gain from angry discourse over civil debate? Maybe it's just civil on your part, and maybe the other party is screaming and yelling at you I still don't think the proper response is to get angry right back. x200B I do think that people are entitled to their own beliefs such as disagreeing with my beliefs even if I disagree with them. I think most everyone's beliefs deserve respect, although there are lines I draw when someone's health or safety is on the line. So many people have these racist, sexist, or intolerant beliefs I don't think it's right to just discard them, or give the people up as lost causes. Minds can change, and even if they can take a long time to do so, I don't think exclusion and anger are ethical. I think they're the standard way of fighting for change, positive or negative. Not ideal, but it's the quickest way we've got right now we use what works. x200B If something seems well settled in society, I usually don't bother trying to fight against it if it doesn't directly hurt people. For instance, I think the amount of livestock we raise is hurting the planet, but I support people's rights to continue to raise, slaughter, and eat them. Objectively, it's not a good thing, but personally I just can't justify being against everyone who eats meat especially since I love meat. For our current reality, eating meat is socially acceptable. x200B I think that people with bigoted beliefs can have the same ability to fight for what they believe as people with more liberal progressive modern ones depending on legality, which is 100 valid . What wins out is where society heads, which is why there's this constant battle between people's beliefs. We fight for representation and change, and we'll continue to do so until the human species goes extinct. What's right and wrong is decided by the majority of a society, and if you want change you should fight for it. I'm pretty stoked I'm not oppressed or abused because I'm a woman. I think it would be terrible if I was, and that anyone else is. I wouldn't support that if it were happening around me, and if I was a braver person I'd help others change and or get out of situations like that. But I'm lazy, complacent, and a wimp, so I'm not. The same could be said for a billion other people, and I don't hate them for it. It's not our duty to make change, it's a personal choice. It's selfish, but I remain in my comfort zone maybe talking about it a little bit with friends and family, or retweeting things, or donating when I happen to have money. I don't actually fight for anything. I don't want to change or do things just because I feel pressured to by people or society. If I decide I care enough, I'll fight for change, but right now I just don't. x200B And helping other people and making a change is fantastic, it really is I admire a lot of you guys who do that but god it takes so much effort. I don't expect effort from anybody. x200B Maybe I need to know what it's like for other, suffering people to really understand it. That's not enforceable, though we can't know, because we haven't experienced it and it's unethical to send someone out to 'gain experience' and suffer. Classes and experiments like Jane Elliot's can only go so far. It'd be amazing if everyone could understand everyone, or just a few someones, but that's not how it is. x200B x200B PART 2 And now, to my other question. Is it racist to not be immediately attracted to someone based on their appearance? For instance, if someone doesn't find black skin appealing right off the bat, but does find the person attractive as they learn about the person and their personality, is that racist? I am personally not immediately attracted to all sorts of people, but learn to find them more and more attractive the more I learn and like their personality. A lot of people consider potential partners based on looks someone might really love redheads, another might be crazy over flawless skin. A lot of these things are out of our control, just as skin color or gender are we may, unconsciously or consciously, exclude certain people based on preferences for things they can't or shouldn't have to change. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but we all have preferences, and that doesn't make you a bigot. x200B A bit more difficult is the question of 'is it transphobic for a bisexual person to not date trans people?'. I think it's a pretty fine line, since trans people identify as either Male or Female the two genders a bisexual person is, by definition, said to be attracted to. But beyond technicalities, I can kind of understand why a bisexual person may not be attracted to a trans person if they don't Pass, or totally look like a guy or a girl. x200B And genitals are a pretty big factor in deciding what gender you like, although I'm mainly referring to heterosexual persons with that. Is it wrong for a heterosexual person to not find a transgender person attractive or to no longer want to date them once they find out they're trans? I personally think it's OK, but I could 100 see how that'd be really upsetting. I'll just throw in that I think it's also OK to not want to date someone based on their physical or mental health. Not good, but OK. x200B HOWEVER, it is not okay to not be friends with somebody based on their looks, religion, or gender identity. Mental and physical health gets confusing. And while I say it's 'not okay' it's still valid, if sucky.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All beliefs are valid as long as they don't hurt anybody directly\/ No one HAS to do anything + It's okay to not be attracted to someone due to uncontrollable traits. Pretty long.\n","id":"97f99a06-b904-445e-8614-2da6a4d83232"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>Pedophiles are often victims of targeted harassment or violence. Living in a collectivist community may allow them to live free from such acts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A government act of this nature could reduce discrimination and violence against people who cannot control their desires.\n","id":"d00afe76-bf1e-4290-ab61-425bae49b05a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should sexual predators be sterilized?<|ARGUMENT|>Sterilization is considered to be cruel and unusual punishment. University of San Francisco Law Review, p.164<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sterilization is an immoral violation of a person's human rights.\n","id":"e2306877-be10-4a2d-95b7-7ff4448445f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am writing this, because I got backlash for questioning the subreddit's name on their subreddit which also helps build the mentality and overall impression of the subreddit . The mods were accusing me for being a guy . I am not a guy and I appropriately use make up too, but I found their accusations very biased implying certain remarks, but not saying it outright explicitly. Some people don't know how to accept proper criticism too much pride . gt I believe make up is an art and shouldn't be perceived as a necessity by outsiders who don't use them. These outsiders include most males ? . Therefore it is important to not try and saturate the use of buzzwords like addiction . I am an active lurker or r make up and r makeupaddiction and I don't feel comfortable with that subreddit's overall impression and I don't mean community, I am not saying this to attack the community as a result of the subreddit's name. Make up is also actively used for costumes and fake impressions for special occasions like halloween. gt gt To the males and people who don't use make up, when it comes to make up addiction, I won't deny that there are indeed people out there who will sacrifice their daily needs such as food, for purchasing make up accessories. I have met friends who did it and I don't talk to them anymore. Red flags usually followed by more red flags of unhealthy decisions and behavior. gt gt gt Instead of trying to attack outsiders this does not help, because it just creates more polarity amongst each other who misunderstand the hobby, it should be made clear and honest the common misconceptions and present them in a fair manner. Sometimes the misconceptions are too common and you can lose the mood to explain it, I understand that and there are ways to deal with it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe \/r\/makeup should've been the more popular subreddit for makeup goers instead of \/r\/makeupaddiction.\n","id":"fd99dab9-1fb0-4fdd-a08c-2707262713af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>This deviance opens the door to campaigning that being LGBT is equivalent to a 'disorder' or 'illness' - all of which are ways in which the identities of people are made to seem inferior, and which justify the medicalisation and psychotherapisation of being LGBT in very harmful ways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This necessitates framing LGBT identities as deviant or inferior, because they are seen as valid only in virtue of their immutability.\n","id":"2e1064b4-fe48-4630-b6ab-c1d2cf477bf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Historical elements of the various religions can be expected to differ. The agreement has to be found in the philosophy. For example Christians teach that Jesus appeared and performed various acts. Bhagavad GIta teaches that Krishna appeared and spoke to Arjuna. If we look at the historical elements we will find disagreement but if we look at the philosophy we will find a lot in common. Both are monotheistic and teach that we can have a personal loving relationship with God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All monotheist traditions have the same God. They have the same essential philosophical description of God. The differences are largely in names and details only.\n","id":"41ab9db8-7438-4730-9698-41c14e9ac7e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is a very dark day for America, as well as the rest of the world. While I don't really care about Roe v. Wade or gay marriage, although I do support both of them, the fact remains that climate change efforts and affordable healthcare are going out the window. In addition, the reason the U.S. Is so successful is because it had European allies. We've lost those, and now it is us, Russia, and China against the world. Nuclear war is very much possible. And don't forget, our Vice President elect is a young earth creationist We can say goodbye to science education So, yes, I think that Donald Trump's election is going to be the beginning of the end in the stability of the world. I WANT my view to be changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump is going to plunge our country, and the world, into ruin.\n","id":"d3bce131-79d8-4301-93fb-ccd84b55784f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Trafficking in women, coercion and exploitation can only be stopped if the existence of prostitution is recognized and the legal and social rights of prostitutes are guaranteed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regulated legalization is the best way to combat trafficking, because in a legalized and regulated marketplace, we can ensure that all sex work is voluntary.\n","id":"f9cad3e6-68d9-4718-97b2-c1f6c129e7dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You're all familiar with is people concerned about their education, people concerned about their jobs, people concerned about the economy, people wanting to start their own successful business, it seems like there is nothing else in the world to occupy your thoughts with than work. You go to school, then either get a job or continue your education, and then get a job. you work until you're old and weak, and then when you finally have time to yourself, you're probably too old and weak to enjoy anything. Please make me feel that I am overreacting and that life offers things that are just as important as working.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm starting to feel that the only purpose of life is work.\n","id":"fd8bff8e-a138-4fd8-913b-33d366a10de9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>This is especially true if one of the voting options is to \u2018remain in the European Union\u2019 as this may incentivise the most unfavourable terms to be offered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A vote on the final outcome of the negotiated deal is likely to affect the actual outcome of the negotiations.\n","id":"f125d32f-9399-4fe5-84f2-27bfa895e9fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods<|ARGUMENT|>Many people are highly opposed to consuming genetically modified foods. The government must respect that opinion, and give these individuals the ability to avoid GM foods, simply by labeling GM foods so that they can make such a choice. To not mandate this is to disregard and disrespect these opinions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Labeling respects opinion of those not wanting to consume GM foods.\n","id":"2c654566-d4a6-40dd-8c74-6395f6c4f187"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I begin, let me acknowledge that there are very legitimate concerns and grievances black people hold against police departments and the government those of you who've seen one of my other s probably understand this . But this post is about the Michael Brown case specifically. I am not saying at all that they're aren't any legitimate grievances blacks hae I am simply stating that the Michael Brown case was not one of them. As has been repeatedly established, Darren Wilson shot Brown in self defense. Brown robbed a convenience store, disobeyed Wilson, attacked Wilson, fled Wilson, and then charged him until he dropped dead. People have used the phrase unarmed black man , but first off, Brown did attempt to grab Wilson's gun. Second off, Brown charged Wilson while Wilson pointed a gun at him. When you charge a police officer that doesn't have a taser as Wilson didn't that day, not his fault , he doesn't have any obligation to shoot you in the leg the idea that that is a good idea is a myth he is justified in ending the threat. I am quite sure the grand jury understood what they're verdict would've done in terms of social political stability and they still decided to vote not guilty . If we have 2 theories, the first being that Wilson shot Brown in self defense and that Brown, as evidenced by his brazen convenience store robbery, was not in the most ideal frame of mind at that time , and the second being that all the evidence and proceedings were a forged cover story and that Wilson executed Brown in front of other eyewitnesses in broad daylight out of the blue, then I'm with theory 1. And even if you believe theory 2, aren't you disregarding that kind of important concept called innocent until proven guilty by believing that your intuition justifies indicting a man? Now in the aftermath of this verdict and to this day, people have called for Wilson's blood and arrest. Setting aside the rioters and looters, I actually believe that even the peaceful protestors were wrong. In their minds, the fact that Wilson was a white cop, and Brown was a black man, seems to lean them towards assuming that Brown was executed. Listen, there are many legitimate cases of black people being unjustly killed and much wider, unjustly imprisoned by police but Brown wasn't one of them. So in my mind, the protests in Ferguson about Michael Brown were wrong. This was a blatant rush to judgement. People assumed the witnesses whose testimonies either failed to stand up or were even retracted who incited this event were right. Now is it 100 certain that Brown was killed justly? To be honest, that's not true. This side of having cameras on the scene, nothing is really that certain. But even if you assert that the shooting was not certain and that you believe that Brown was shot unfairly Do you belief that such a belief warrants Wilson's imprisonment? Also, again, this is not to claim that blacks have no grievances against the police. For profit policing, the war on drugs, targeting of minorities, a broken criminal justice system even I do not defend how Wilson was not cross examined, according to the Brown family lawyer there absolutely are legitimate problems in race relations with regards to the police and criminal justice system. But the events that happened with Michael Brown are not one of them, and the protests that erupted in Ferguson and elsewhere are proof of an anti white prejudice. It was automatically presumed by many that Wilson was in the wrong before the evidence came in. Wilson was doing his job. So that's my view Darren Wilson was innocent, and the protestors chanting for Michael Brown not necessarily for police CJ reform , and chanting Hands up Don't Shoot were in the wrong and need to reform their instinctual tendencies to assume that white police officers were in the wrong before evidence comes in. I challenge you yet again, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown in self-defense, and the resulting protests were an uncalled for rush to judgment that unjustly abandoned the ideal of innocent until proven guilty.\n","id":"cf6ee63b-d9ac-4f26-97d8-dc7f568df999"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should police adopt a reactive service model used by other public safety services?<|ARGUMENT|>Traffic laws are so extensive and so universally violated that it is impossible for all violations to be ticketed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minor traffic offenses are inconsistently enforced and already cause much friction between the police and citizens.\n","id":"77c82ebb-1310-40c6-9e48-0fe014629464"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>May's promise to act to prevent home buyers being exploited by rip-off leases has been delayed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Theresa May's focus on Brexit negotiations has resulted in other important public concerns being neglected\n","id":"8f056cc4-81a2-4c8d-abc3-17c5ed54bf59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>legalise Prostitution<|ARGUMENT|>Some markets in sex should be blocked. Markets that involve child labor, forced labor or sex, and forced migration and detention, should be stopped and those who organize and profit from such markets should be prosecuted. As with any service, it is critically important that no one is forced to work or to continue working, either through the threat of harm or through fraud and deception. It is also critically important that children are protected from sexual predators, and are excluded from all aspects of sex businesses. Forced labor and child sexual abuse involve violations of basic human rights that all societies are expected to protect. Voluntary, adult sex work is significantly different from trafficking, and law enforcers need to distinguish market exchanges involving consensual sex among adults from market exchanges involving forced sex among adults or involving minors. By legalizing voluntary, adult sex work, law enforcers and rights protectors could focus their efforts on eliminating markets that involve the sexual abuse of adults or children. Additionally, clients of sex business would have the choice of patronizing legal business, and therefore would be less likely to patronize inadvertently a business that relies on forced or child labor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalization would free up resources that could be devoted to eliminating sex trafficking\n","id":"3f598905-41bc-48e0-b5e2-d6419963c4a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>These children have no stability in their lives and are unable to form relationships or bonds with anyone for a significant period of time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Foster children move multiple houses when they are in the system, sometimes moving house eight or more times\n","id":"625386c8-ec64-4890-96c9-02af7cbfc5a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>major league baseball should continue to allow collisions at home plate.<|ARGUMENT|>Without collisions, either the catcher or the runner would have an enormous and unfair advantage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"major league baseball should continue to allow collisions at home plate.\n","id":"72d344ce-5500-4917-b30b-e2a576e9db20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People who live in developed countries often criticize the practice of companies setting up offices, factories, etc. in developing countries where the labor costs are a mere fraction of labor costs in developed countries. One common argument is that the laborers in the developing country are being exploited for the sake of profits. However, it is only exploitation within the context of a developed country's labor practices. In the context of developing countries, people are clamoring for these sweatshop jobs because they are much better than any local job alternatives. These jobs are simultaneously raising the labor standards in developing countries while providing cheap goods and services to developed country consumers and also providing healthy profits for the companies involved. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Sweatshops\" are beneficial to everyone.\n","id":"77d701a2-152c-4654-9b5d-f4ff54d4367c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Wealthy countries created the refugees in the first place by reshaping the borders of the Middle East after the World War 1 in a way that leads to constant sectarian conflict within the countries' borders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High-income countries have a continuing history of colonialism and thus have a historical obligation towards refugees that results from their actions.\n","id":"16ffd0dd-e94c-4970-98f8-03307c63ff9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Flag Burning Should Be Prohibited<|ARGUMENT|>The national flag is a symbol of nationhood and national unity that ought to be protected from abuse. The flag is a unique symbol that has been cherished by the population since the foundation of the Republic. It represents the turbulent struggle for unity through the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. The protestor burns a flag not in order to damage the material per se but to harm or criticise the ideals that the flag represents. It is not necessary to show that patriotic feeling is in fact damaged by flag burning. It suffices that the act of desecration is designed to offend these ideals. The learned jurist Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes warned that 'a page of history is worth a volume of logic'. Patriotic principles do deserve and do receive the respect that is manifested in obedience to the flag. Saluting the flag is conventional though no longer constitutionally compelled throughout the American school system. The flag is raised and flown on public buildings and at major public events. Citizens express their adherence to the flag through the votes of their elected representatives in state legislatures to pass laws that prohibit flag burning. The law properly protects the principles that are important to its citizens from attack: blasphemy laws protect certain religious beliefs from desecration, slander and libel laws protect personal and group reputations from abuse. Furthermore, even if we assume that flag burning is a valid means of expression, the freedom of expression must be balanced against the important societal interests that are represented by the flag. Given the existence of alternative methods of expression that do not harm these ideals of national unity, the balance is in favour of the prohibition of flag desecration.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The national flag is a symbol of nationhood and national unity that ought to be protected from abuse...\n","id":"7da7adf7-248e-47af-92af-ccdb5160ea0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>The French National Front increased the share of votes it won in elections for the European Parliament from 6% in 2009 to 25% in 2014, and from 9% in 2010 to 27% in 2015 in elections for domestic regional councils.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The backlash that has come from accepting refugees has helped galvanize far-right populist parties, and has allowed them to advance their agenda on a range of issues.\n","id":"ad75cea8-55d8-45d4-899c-4202fb41267c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US and NATO Should Withdraw from Afghanistan<|ARGUMENT|>The fundamentalist Sunni-Taliban government of Afghanistan and the orthodox Shia government of Iran came to the brink of war in 1998 The Taliban repressed Afghan Shiites, many of whom live in the western part of the country, near the Iranian border. Iran also provided arms and financial assistance to the Northern Alliance of Afghan Tajiks and Uzbeks, who never surrendered to the Taliban government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A US withdrawal and significant reduction of support to the current government of Afghanistan would reorient Iran\u2019s approach to its neighbor to the east. Iran would likely find it in its own interest to cease its support to the Taliban with which it has factional tensions, and lend support to the Afghan government, or to broker a settlement between the two.\n","id":"5b960b4a-ec6f-4993-92fc-f817aaee15b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you haven't seen the movie, Bruce Willis is hired to assassinate a politician. He asks for the absurd sum of 70 million dollars. You'd be surprised how little it actually costs to hire a hitman. An article I read about an undercover cop who posed as a hitman claims that 200,000 dollars was the most he was ever offered with the average being around 25,000. Granted, a high level politician is a much more high profile target and would likely fetch a premium on the assassin market but 70 million is just too damn much. Nonetheless, The Jackal gets his money and then proceeds to do an incredibly sub par assassination attempt. He starts by purchasing a Polish ZSU 33 14.5mm which is a huge heavy machinegun meant to be mounted on armored vehicles and used for shooting down aircraft. I forget the exact amount he paid for it, but I'm pretty sure it was in the tens of millions. He goes through this elaborate routine involving fake moustaches, accents, and passports to smuggle this massive auto cannon into the country and hires Jack Black to build a electronically controlled mount for the weapon. After the mount is built, Jack Black's character attempts to extort more money out of The Jackal by vaguely suggesting that the extra money is worth his silence. Now, granted this isn't the most ethical thing to do, but he explains that it ended up being more work than expected and the price of some of the materials had gone up. Bruce Willis then brutally murders Jack Black with his crazy death machine which strikes me as a bit of an overreaction. The whole concept of this device being used for a simple assassination is rediculous. Why can't he just use a rifle with a scope like a normal assassin? You can get a decent deer rifle and a scope for less than a thousand dollars. A heavy machinegun with depleted uranium bullets would make sense of your target was inside an armored vehicle or something but the target is out in the open, in public, making a speech. There's plenty of tall buildings and other vantage points in the area. The fact that the device is controlled remotely using a laptop is just asking for problems. Let's say the electric mount doesn't work, mission failed. The laptop isn't working? Mission failed. Bad WiFi signal? Mission failed. The more steps you add to the process, the more likely something will go wrong. So, the day of the assassination comes and The Jackal has his remote controlled machinegun mounted in a minivan, and is sitting on a bench controlling the device via laptop computer. And shockingly, something goes wrong. He can't aim the gun properly and screws the whole thing up. If there's an assassin's version of Yelp, I hope he got a terrible review.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bruce Willis' character in \"The Jackal\" is an overpriced and incompetent assassin.\n","id":"543074e3-11a0-452b-b9f0-c5d047efa4cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>During the Cold War the USA used development assistance to solidify alliances and to gain access to territories in order to contain Soviet Communism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The distribution of development assistance is an important way to achieve political goals. Conditional aid narrows this option.\n","id":"887c3eee-26bd-4d00-aaa7-ceb873e93186"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU introduce a carbon tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Carbon pricing helps to accelerate modernization and productivity improvements that enhance rather than harm competitiveness, as firms operating at the technology frontier seize new market opportunities pg 4.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Carbon pricing can improve competitiveness for EU goods and services in international markets.\n","id":"93a1f9ce-ce93-4acd-a7bc-8f9bebd16c03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Apple is overpriced and overrated.<|ARGUMENT|>Apple added an NFC chip on the iPhone 6 launched in 2014: www.cnet.com It was not until the launch of iOS 12 in 2018 www.pymnts.com that the NFC chip was opened up to third party developers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Apple has increasingly been falling behind competitors when it comes to innovation.\n","id":"95182489-9928-42d9-8d04-e22c0ccfd533"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mission to the Moon or Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many similarities between Mars and the Moon that make a Moon landing a good means of preparing to go to Mars. The most important similarity is between Moon and Mars dusts, which are both extremely corrosive, and for which machines and mechanical joints must be specifically designed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Moonbase will help instruct establishing a base on Mars.\n","id":"57510cfc-fdbb-4e82-98ea-3a31fecfcf40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Until the next paradigm shift in computer power takes place i.e. carbon nanotubes, etc. Moore\u2019s Law will continue to innovate and eventually blur the lines between video graphics and reality. Within the next 200 years homo Sapiens will be able to generate a simulated reality indistinguishable from what we live in today. With the laws of physics based on mathematics and computers powerful enough to generate and maintain those laws. Eventually within the next 200 years humans will find a theory to unify the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Integrated with computer code powerful we will have the tools to build a Universe with universal constant laws. If homo Sapiens will be able to generate a simulated Universe within the next 200 years then other sentient races have done so already. The probability of homo Sapiens beings the only sentient beings to exist at this very moment in 'time' is next to impossible. Firstly, if you take the approximate age of the known Universe 13.8 billion years and the age of our galaxy Milky Way13.2b , and solar system age Sun ~4.6b and Earth ~4.54b . Given the fact that the transition between unicellular organisms and multicellular took ~3.2 billion years to achieve on Earth. And given an additional ~500million years to present day until homo Sapiens came along ~200kya . With that being said, life could\u2019ve evolved at a much faster pace on other older galaxies and older solar systems. This means other Earth like planets harboring technologically advanced sentient species have already achieved greater technological advancements then us. And have already begun simulating Universe. Like the one we live in today. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe we exist only in a computer simulation created by another more technologically advanced sentient race.\n","id":"b6904b96-ba48-4c68-baae-ef18527f41a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>In US Supreme Court case Brown v Board of Education, the court declared that African American children were harmed by segregated schooling because it \"generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community\", and that this harm was an inequality that violated their constitutional rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the United States, hate speech enjoys substantial protection under the First Amendment and this is one contributing factor to the perception of speech as violence. While hate speech may not be the same as physical violence, it certainly can cause harm to its targets.\n","id":"8415bc45-afc3-4464-8533-b63d832c5a7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Large-scale veganism may be difficult to enforce especially in private settings. Thus, while the world implements the practice, non-vegan occurrences may still happen in secret.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanity becoming vegan does not resolve all the issues it tries to fix.\n","id":"53cc2853-f657-416c-a381-389413976ab8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I say narcotics I am excluding Marijuana, some people consider it a narcotic, others don't. As far as I can see drugs such as heroin cannot just be used recreationally for the most part, and it is extremely hard to stop using. Similar things could be said about crystal meth and crack, even cocaine. If there is a demand there will always be a supply. So I agree with doing everything possible to create large drug busts. So here I am. I would love to see these hard drugs off the streets, as if it were legal for everyone I think it would create problems. However, I see places where drugs are legal, and it seems to work for them, so my mind is open for change. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I support bigger crackdowns on narcotics such as heroin, crystal meth, and crack.\n","id":"7c60cfc6-aac9-416b-ba39-b4c084388ee5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Any product thing's effectiveness can be graded quantified in terms of how well it achieves an emotional response from the users customers eg it's not the only measure, just one for example, I'm not discounting things like durability, price, and so on . This applies to everything from products an app, a t shirt, a clock , experiences haunted house, business conference, funeral , or art song, poem, film and so on. We love it when we get one congruent emotional experience, and hate it when things don't match up. So, a haunted house is meant to make us feel scared. A fancy watch is meant to make us feel sophisticated and high status. Fake blood and cobwebs are neither good or bad, but if they're included in the box for a Rolex, people won't be as happy as if they're included in the haunted house even if the same people are buying the Rolex as are going to the haunted house . The reason is not simply it doesn't make sense for the Rolex , but that the emotional experience evoked by the blood matches the goal of the haunted house. Some views on this 1 Any product experience thing an app, song, movie, t shirt, event can get better if the emotional experience is more congruent eg a scarier haunted house could be achieved by adding scary music, isolating people, making a scary looking website etc or, by removing things that aren't congruent like a funny sign in the parking lot 2 Products with strong emotional experiences are what we spend the most money on because we highly value these things. eg one of the reasons that a plain coffee cup is lower priced than one with a funky design because the funky design makes us feel something eg creative, artsy, sophisticated further, we spend the most money on weddings or luxury cars because these things make us feel something very strongly eg the solidification of a romantic bond, the feeling that you've made it as a parent, status power etc. . People routinely spend tens of thousands of dollars more than they need to for what could technically be achieved with much less, but the people are driven instead to maximize the emotional experience eg romantic music, fancy clothes and food, nice paper for the invitations, flowers, etc . The congruent emotional experience of a wedding drives 95 of this expenditure. If, for example, there was haunted house music playing as the bride walked down the aisle, this would take away from the romantic vibe even though haunted house music is neither inherently good or bad . 3 People are pissed when their emotional experience is ruined eg people in first class love to be treated like royalty because this is what they're really paying for, brides want every element of the wedding to be in line with their romantic expectations 4 There are no good or bad design elements, only those that contribute or detract from a product's emotional experience eg body shots off a stripper may be a great idea for a bachelor party, but not as good at a funeral . 5 After tools, some of the first things we ever made as a society were things related to religion or ceremony. This is because of the emotional experience we got from these things eg crowns made the wearers feel important, tattoos and markings made people feel part of a tribe, burial ceremonies allowed people to feel greif . After basic functionality eg tools , adding an emotion into a product experience is our next primal need eg clothing gets color design, a house gets decoration, a coffee cup gets a shape, Siri gets jokes 6 this is the reason we don't value mass produced stuff as much as originals frankly, most people can't tell the difference between something that was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci and a fake eg the end product is arguably not that different , but what is different is that owning an original makes us feel high status, whereas if we own a fake, we lose that status. We don't really like the end product, we like the fact that it makes us feel important to own something that's rare. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best products\/experiences are those that make us *feel* something congruent with the experience\n","id":"6391941a-9528-465f-b477-2bfbab9e148f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Republika Srpska secession from Bosnia and Herzegovina<|ARGUMENT|>Asim Mujkic\u0301. \"Significance of Kosovo from the point of view of Bosnia and Herzegovina\". Spirit of Bosnia. April 2008 - \"If we consider Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the position of Kosovo and Republika Srpska as their entities, significant differences become apparent. First and foremost, for several decades now Belgrade\u2019s nationalist politics have proven to be a threat to a significant sector of its population \u2013 the Kosovo Albanians. This threat had already been expressed in the shape of ethnic or religious persecution, and culminated in the late 1990s when the Yugoslav army entirely ethnically cleansed Kosovo of its Albanians, prompting international intervention. . And what about the position of Republika Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina? It is the very opposite. Republika Srpska cannot therefore enjoy the same status as Kosovo, since Serbia meets both conditions for the loss of legitimacy in Kosovo, whereas Bosnia and Herzegovina is in no position to do so in the territory of Republika Srpska. Bosnia and Herzegovina does not remotely have the capacity to be a threat to a significant proportion of its population, nor is there any marked political platform expressed as a policy of ethnic and religious persecution of the Bosnian Serbs in Republika Srpska, nor is it in a position to exercise institutional racism depriving the Bosnian Serbs in Republika Srpska of their fundamental economic and political rights.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kosovo was a victim of state aggression while Republika Srpska was not\n","id":"dd92a438-27b7-487e-afa7-e2ef4c6032e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Dine and dash is when you order food and leave without paying. This is a form of fraud and is a civil matter and not a crime. It is also completely avoidable if customers paid before being served. A related form of theft is pumping gas without paying, drive offs. These types of theft can be prevented by requiring prepay. Because they can be prevented some police do not investigate drive offs, Police have more important crimes to investigate than those that can be prevented such as dine and dash and drive offs. Police are to protect the public and not function as bill collectors for businesses that won't make the small effort to prevent thefts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not paying for restaurant food, dine and dash, is not a crime and is not worth police investigation\n","id":"0276ccea-8df6-4805-be62-2c68d3c0f063"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Assuming Without getting married, you are a dependent student You have a significant EFC enough to outweigh lawyers fees, your spouse's income, and the general trouble of getting married Your school doesn't require cohabitation with your spouse to be considered independent Then it really does make sense to get married just for a tuition break, then divorce after you're done with undergrad. I don't really see a reason not to. You save money, and then you get divorced. Also, it's not illegal to marry somebody you've only met once in the courthouse for a tuition break like it would be for citizenship. So to me, it seems like a nifty loophole that it would be wise to exploit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's a good idea to get married for a tuition break\n","id":"2cad5ce6-a9e6-4191-b9dc-e443bb2ee383"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can God's existence be understood by rationality?<|ARGUMENT|>Example 2 demonstrates a case where the patient was able to give information about what was going on in the room during the medical procedure while they were clinically dead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Near death experiences are inconceivable from a materialistic world view and yet they happen.\n","id":"aff04f38-3764-41e4-a0c7-cd424712adb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If someone want to whore out their hands in exchange for money, we might call that person a masseuse, physiotherapist, surgeon etc. If someone want to whore out their back in exchange for money, we might call that person a construction worker, tradesman, miner etc. If someone want to whore out their whole bodies in exchange for money, we might call that person a professional athlete or actor. If someone want to whore out their minds in exchange for money, we might call that person a teacher, doctor, or lawyer. But if someone want to whore out their genitals in exchange for money, we'd just call that person a whore. We're ALL whores, we just whore different parts of ourselves. There is no reason for religious zealots to berate prostitutes for their supposed degeneracy in how they make a living, and there's no reason for certain feminists to assume that a woman can't choose to be a prostitute without being oppressed. It's just like any other profession, and should not be seen as taboo or distinct .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prostitution should be regarded by society like any other service profession\n","id":"aeefc8ec-bf29-4914-bbc5-7df2bbaca3bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Historically most religions have spread a message of love and respect for others so long as they adhere to the same religion. The idea of tolerance has been taken up by some religions since crusades, stonings, and burning witches went out of style, but tolerance implies superiority, which implies a lack of respect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It may create respect between people of the same religion but a history of conflicts between religions shows that this respect does not extend to other faiths.\n","id":"1111303d-b9bc-42ac-b543-37994c99c056"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think punishment does absolutely nothing to address the root of the problem. It is based on fear, an emotion. When people commit heinous crimes, they arent thinking about the punishment. Its like the saying locks keep honest theives away. In places where criminal behavior like drug use is treated as a disease and addressed with education instead of throwing people in jail, the environment and the results are all around better. This has been proven through the whole drug use thing. When addicts are helped and the root of the problem addressed, the situation improves, drug use and addiction goes down, ect. I dont see why this wouldnt work for violent behavior as well. Most people already argue that hitting children is a bad idea and when the children are away from the person that hits them they will return to the same type of behavior. The root of the problem needs to be addressed in order to fix the problem, not covering it up for a bit. Prison is needed for people that must be taken out of society for the safety of society in general, but overall on the vast majority of people do not need punishment. The only reason people want people punished it some strange bloodlust and revenge fantasy, in my opinion. The type of people that come out of prison changed are usually the people that found reasons for good behavior in something other than jail scares me. Yes, some do it because they dont want to go back to jail. But for most its seeing the irrationality of their old ways or finding some sort of purpose. Then you have the people that just see the punishment they are going to get as a business expense, a hit that they can ignore once they are away from the person hitting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think punishment is pretty useless\n","id":"1bd6845f-3207-4a53-9271-d4dc4d96be46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen people on reddit including  often invoking this principle, and I don't think they are wrong per se. What I do think however is that invoking the principle can have its own pitfalls which many people ignore. Does correlation give useful results? yes I think so. If two variables are occuring together, there can be useful inferences we could make without establishing causation. If tigers and rabbits frequently appear together in the wild, I don't think it is wise to jump to the conclusion that rabbits cause tigers to be around, but if tigers were elusive and rabbits were not I think it would be reasonable to look for rabbits if we wanted to look for tigers. If there are correlations between race and IQ some might claim that as evidence of racial superiority which I think is unreasonable But would it be reasonable for an administrator to address resources to research any disparity, and perhaps redress it? Or as another example if people report that eating a fruit along with whatever helped them feel better, I think one should not be jumping the gun to say it helped them. On the other hand if it made them feel worse it would not be a bad idea to stop eating it. Some of these are stronger correlations than others, some of these may seem obvious as the unique variable that changed. But in these examples I do not think it unreasonable to make inferences, and when someone calls out correlation does not imply causation they may be correct, but it is ignores the usefulness of the correlation and also doesn't invalidate the causal link. The accuracy of the correlations, of course are an entirely different matter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While correlation does not imply causation, one can still make reasonable inferences from these which shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.\n","id":"75f7cc05-cd75-4fb3-a313-aaf68b9be240"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see a lot of people talk about the media like it's a living organism. They accuse the media of purposefully hiding information often powerful corporations government secrets, or what have you , and the like. These are just every day employees. Average reporters office workers just trying to churn out another day for a paycheque, just like the rest of us. They're no more intelligent or dumber than the rest of us, and they don't have an agenda. They're just trying to find stories that their editor will approve Their editor is just looking for stories that will be read Advertisers are paying for highly consumed media. That's it. Just a bunch of average folk, punching their timecard every day. They don't care about it, they're jaded about their 9 5 just like the rest of us. The reporter making 36k year isn't trying to mislead the Western World. tl dr I don't think there's a media agenda trying to hide corporate government facts, or mislead us. They're just every day workers like us trying to get their job done, and reporting on things that sell.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no media \"agenda\", just average people reporting on what sells.\n","id":"e1411513-6d41-4025-9c23-25216ce5d457"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2012, the journal of GM Crops and Food published an article that compiled acts of vandalism committed against genetically modified food trials within Europe. The article identified around 80 instances in which GMO trials conducted by academic or governmental research institutes in Europe had been destroyed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anti genetically modified food activists subject scientists who support genetically modified food to bomb threats, harassment of their children, and the destruction of their experiments and property. This also stifles debate since it deters scientists from conducting research.\n","id":"58167886-4532-4584-8bff-c2928f746fda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This just showed up on r bestof, which is what made me think about it, but I'm not poo pooing the people over on that thread, who seem cool enough. Anyway, plagiarism inspires some sort of moral indignation that I just have no insight into\u2014literally, it makes me feel autistic, in so far as I just can't understand what's going on inside others' heads when the subject comes up. What's worse, I'm a professor, so I hear about it all the time. As you can probably imagine, it sometimes inspires in other professors some sort of personal existential breakdown. I've seen weeping, the kind of rage that makes one's hands tremble, dehumanization of the culprit\u2014all in reaction to students' plagiarized work. To explain my own attitude toward it. It's cheating and, if I catch a student plagiarizing, I fail them for the assignment and turn them into that\u2014I dunno, re education camp or wherever it is the paperwork goes to. But I don't fail them for the course, as I know others do. And my personal moral judgment of the culprit? It's a real, but minor, immoral act. I think it's about the same as using a crib sheet or making a peep hole into the girls' locker room this is an inexact science, obv \u2014a very human flaw that makes you roll your eyes and frown. Anyway, forget about academia. What is going on with the widespread moral outrage in publishing and especially journalism when plagiarism is found out? I feel like fire the person, yes. Just as if they were misreporting travel expenses or running a numbers pool is that what you call being a bookie? on NCAA basketball games for co workers out of the office. The difference is that those are things you get fired for, but a couple years later, you might get a little drunk and tell it as a funny self deprecating story to a group of friends. But plagiarism is now treated in terms of morality like sexual assault\u2014something beyond the pale of human foibles and indicative of some intrinsic flaw in a human being. EDIT Forget about the theft of an original idea, creation, or scientific discovery. There should be another term for those theft , really. These are not the kinds of things I usually hear about in discussions of plagiarism . Here's an example of plagiarism as I usually hear it used, which I just concocted. It's my own plagiarism of the Sparknotes site for Samuel Taylor Coleridge Assume it's inserted in a paper about Rime of the Ancient Mariner gt Coleridge\u2019s depiction of the mind as it moves\u2014sometimes in silence, sometimes in mania\u2014helped to establish the intimate emotionalism of Romanticism. Often, poetry is constituted of emotion recollected in tranquility. But the origin of Coleridge\u2019s poems gives a sense of emotion recollected in emotion . Coleridge maintains not only an emotional intensity in contrast, some might say, to Wordsworth there remains a real intellectual presence throughout his corpus, as his ideas are continually subjected to philosophical scrutiny. Here's the original gt His portrayal of the mind as it moves, whether in silence \u201cFrost at Midnight\u201d or in frenzy \u201cKubla Khan\u201d also helped to define the intimate emotionalism of Romanticism while much of poetry is constituted of emotion recollected in tranquility, the origin of Coleridge\u2019s poems often seems to be emotion recollected in emotion. But unlike Wordsworth, it could be argued Coleridge maintains not only an emotional intensity but also a legitimate intellectual presence throughout his oeuvre and applies constant philosophical pressure to his ideas. This is the kind of thing that would cause moral indignation from many undergraduate instructors and people in the journalism and the publishing industry. It would have been discovered by having aroused the suspicion of the instructor, who would have run it through google or turnitin.com, which would have discovered the match.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think plagiarism is all that bad.\n","id":"8f8103ae-3f42-411c-815e-b2060833e0f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that most people would claim that they value human life above everything else in this world. Most would say that if they could change one small part of their lives to make someone else's life inexplicably better they would be willing to make that sacrifice. However, when I look at the way most of the western world act all I see is selfishness. I do not mean the celebrity who buys multiple homes and luxury cars. I mean high schools full of smart phones made by people in terrible working conditions. Even the clothes we wear, food we eat, cars we drive, and the electronics we use were made by someone likely living in what we would consider destitute conditions. Yet we continue to live the same lifestyle as if nothing is wrong with this. Everyone knows the kind of living conditions that many of these workers live in these days, but we do nothing to actually show any sympathy for people who are less fortunate. Even great philanthropist who give away billions are still selfish beyond belief. If you live in a giant home and drive luxury cars and wear expensive clothing, does it really matter how much you gave away? Every luxury item you have ever owned could have been lives being saved. Every vacation we take is taking potential food from someone's mouth. There are parts of the world where people do not have access to running water, and we pay hundreds to watch professional sports. If we truly thought that all humans deserved a fair shot at happiness, why do we spend money on superfluous expenses instead? Charity exists in large part to make the giver feel good about themselves. This does not mean that charity is bad. Charity is wonderful, but it would not exist if it did not make the giver feel good. Nobody is reluctantly giving to charity. It is always a want or a belief that it will somehow make my life better. There exists no truly altruistic acts. We only help others when it somehow also benefits our agenda. I completely fall into this selfish category, but I have just come to terms with believing that I will always be a selfish asshole. It seems like everyone else is sticking their heads in the sand so they can continue living a first world lifestyle without feeling guilt. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe most people do not value human life to the degree that they claim, but saying that you'd rather give up luxuries than to save lives sounds bad so we all lie to each other.\n","id":"810d841a-c21d-4588-a431-76a570cdc179"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize cannabis<|ARGUMENT|>Smoking marijuana is no worse than drinking booze and that goes on everywhere.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alcohol and tobacco are more harmful drugs yet remain legal\n","id":"515ea75a-f1f1-4862-a079-c1d77043bc8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>\"Qualified immunity\" is a horrible legal doctrine which needs to be ended.<|ARGUMENT|>Research by Yale Law School reveals that the threat of a qualified immunity motion may cause a person never to file suit, or to settle or withdraw their claims before discovery or trial which severely limits justice being dispensed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Qualified immunity not only reduces a person's chance for victory for their civil rights lawsuit, but also ensures that many claims are never brought to court in the first place.\n","id":"cd37119c-8dc1-460c-aab1-145cec87d8b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>Many Black Americans regard the use of the word as only acceptable if you are Black.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For Black students it might be hurtful to hear a non-Black teacher use the N-word.\n","id":"d0b7dcbc-5b6c-4cda-b032-391da547f8a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2000, a French court decided that Yahoo! had to comply with French laws when it distributed content to French users, regardless of where the company was based.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US-based Internet companies are already forced to comply with non-US laws under existing jurisprudence.\n","id":"f708969c-324e-4413-83f5-36c725122bf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I never really put much thought into it until I spent a good 45 minutes in Claire's watching little girls get their ears pierced while my sister shopped. Don't get me wrong, the lady was very professional and clean and did what she could to console the kids but it didn't do much. But the look on the girl's faces was pure terror and odds are and from the few comments I picked up from the moms, this was more for them than the little girls. I just don't think it's okay to force a little girl to have their ears pierced without their own willing consent. You know, like an educated one, not if you sit here and agree, I'll buy you ice cream after. We wouldn't force our kids to do a lot of things that scare them, why do we let people do this, because it's cute or fashionable. Kind of a sad day when LouandProudFag has a problem with fashion. So Reddit, ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it's immoral and disgusting to pierce a child's ears. !\n","id":"14539e3a-78a0-43a6-921d-eb305882daac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Clarification I am talking about race mixing as in many couples choosing to race mix in society It seems like a lot of people think of race mixing as a way to end racism as race mixing implies that two people of different races are getting together instead of being separated similar to what happened during the Apartheid. However, I do not think that there is any correlation between race mixing and racism disappearing from society. Some good examples to illustrate this are Latin American countries with a predominant mixed race population such as Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. The majority of the people in these countries have mixed heritage. However, the majority of rich people in these countries are white or have pale skin. These people tend to live in white neighborhoods and are a bit segregated from their darker skin counterparts. A disproportionate number of politicians in these countries are also white. White people are also overrepresented in the entertainment industry of these countries. A disproportionate number of actors, singers, and models have pale skin. In other words, even though most of the people there are mixed, mixed people who look more white are better off than mixed people who look more indigenous black and this is a form of racism. A disproportionate number of beauty pageants representing these countries in international beauty pageant competitions such as Miss Universe also look more European than anything. There is still a hierarchy in these countries where the more white looking mixed race people are better off than their counterparts who look more indigenous or black. In other words, race mixing did not help end racism and is pretty much uncorrelated to ending racism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Race mixing is not correlated to ending racism\n","id":"67dc45e4-a264-4f60-875b-23fa8fb080a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU's political elite doesn't sufficiently fight tax evasion; in fact, they've partly legalized it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USE will be more vulnerable to lobbying and the activities of interest groups.\n","id":"4c7a5bf1-f0d0-40ea-8cf2-a1d4f75bd34a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are identity politics detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Identity politics can allow different groups to better understand each other by allowing marginalized groups to identify their needs and concerns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Identity politics doesn't alienate people but rather builds understanding between groups.\n","id":"53004fdf-d98b-4956-bb9c-2193324768aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The earth will not be irreparable in 12 years from climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Chemicals like copper and chlorine are added to the seawater at various stages in the desalination process which affects marine life and makes the water toxic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Desalination plants produce more waste brine than experts expected, thus doing less to combat waste.\n","id":"3d1f13b2-fe71-46a7-a243-05f2ed40490c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Nations be replaced with a world government?<|ARGUMENT|>Even when a veto isn't formally exercised, it still holds significant power that hinders solutions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A veto in the United Nations Security Council hinders solutions to conflicts.\n","id":"1c0fdbc7-0e00-40aa-9a12-8440122c54ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, so, I'm struggling with this one myself, and it's a big one. I believe in the right of free speech to say what you want and share your ideas without fear of persecution. I believe that if humanity, as a whole, listened more to others' thoughts and opinions, we could come to an understanding eventually that would leave social problems behind us. I believe that this idea is pervasive through time at one point we believed slavery was okay, and then, through education and conversation, we decided it wasn't. We believed that homosexuality was wrong, until to a large degree we became educated, connected with the gay community, and now we condemn homophobics. At one point the Chinese believed that wrapping the feet of young women was high fashion. They educated themselves, and through an evolved understanding banned the practice. How is this scenario different? I'm in no way saying it's a good thing to be a Nazi, or to be racist, but I believe that the more we try to strangle out their existence the stronger they will become. I believe it is through understanding we evolve. To that end, as American citizens, we all enjoy certain rights, and why shouldn't those rights extend to these groups? I understand that their presence can incite violence, just like over the weekend, but I also believe that A fighting violence with violence incites more violence and B gagging an entire group that definitely includes the misled, brainwashed and uneducated is just going to cause splinter cells of these groups. I believe that to fight these social problems we must educate and befriend the majority to reduce the amount of vitriol in the conversation, and those that refuse to adapt will show themselves and make their own mistakes that will cause them to eke out of existence. Thus, I believe that these groups deserve the right to practice their belief, because at some point, if we continue to do the right thing as a society, the problem will erase itself. Thank you, very much, for reading. This is my first  and it's a difficult one to convey. Let's talk about it EDIT I've awarded a \u2206 to katthers for her comment. In summation, the true issue I have is the line with which we should cross when violence becomes necessary. I abhor violence in all of its forms, and thus believed that in acting first in violence, we lose our humanity. However, in defense of one's home, life, and family, that aggression could mean the difference between life and death. I hate this, and I hate that the line is so fuzzy, and I wish for a world where we can discuss the core problems that plague these people filled with hate that lead them down this path, and help them so that their hate could turn into something different. But, it seems, my ideals lie on the side of naive. I'll keep hoping for the day they're not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While Nazism, racism, bigotry, and white supremacy are all stupid, people have the right to talk about their views regarding those subjects and organize in non-violent displays\n","id":"8656d988-c466-43af-962c-95966c671e43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Unpaid internships can be extremely valuable. The good ones provide non monetary value to people trying to break into a competitive field. They provide networking opportunities 80 of hires today happen through networking , a resume boost, experience in the field, and the chance to learn about the work culture. What other opportunities does someone have to acquire this in an extremely competitive job market? While it is true that bad unpaid internships exist, this is not much of a problem. Why? Because if it's not paid and you don't get anything out of it, you can easily leave at any time, no strings attached What have you lost by taking this risk? In my experience, when I've done an unpaid internship that involved useless administrative tasks, I quit and told my program to stop referring students there. They did. Additionally, with the ease of communication today, it is very easy for a firm's internship reputation to get around and for applicants to subsequently make informed decisions about where they want to work. The consequences of prohibiting what is essentially an apprenticeship program are predictable. Firms will not suddenly start replacing their unpaid internships with paid positions instead. They will either just not offer internships at all , or they will offer a few paid internships, thus making the pool even more selective and competitive. Most unpaid internships are either in the non profit, government, journalism, or entertainment sector. Internships in STEM or business are almost always paid. In the first three sectors, these industries simply don't have the resources to pay their interns. In the entertainment industry, which is extremely competitive and heavily reliant on networking, even fewer people will get the chance to break into the industry as a result.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the NY ruling against unpaid internships is short-sighted and will be terrible for students and interns.\n","id":"4133bd10-0d6b-4a4e-b7f9-08bd57bd59a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All People in the US Have the Right to Health Care?<|ARGUMENT|>If the US were to negotiate lowered prices for drugs, it would result in it preventing many drugs from ever coming to market, as manufacturers would have less incentive to invest in innovation and development.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the US put major downward pressure on drug prices, it could compromise long-term health outcomes by undermining the drug market.\n","id":"8b35795a-7b30-4f60-b386-6c766f853bac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify, please don't confuse this with antisemitism in any sense. I'm not specifically against jewish Zionism, but that seems more relevant. I don't think the Jewish people have a right to their own state more than any other group does. The area that Israel occupies is important to every Abrahamic religion, I don't think that Jewish people have the right to it. Furthermore, I'm not sure what the problem is with Palestine. Do they really hate each other so much that they can't share the same land? I can't believe that where they live matters enough to kill people over. Anyway, forgive my ignorance. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I mostly disagree with Zionism.\n","id":"60ee3216-2170-4412-a74d-52412591b1c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that in the past there were wars worth fighting, such as WW2, and the soldiers who fought in meaningful wars should be celebrated. In the past 50 60 years, every war America fought in had been to serve corporate or military interest. America has attacked countries who are uncooperative to the imperialism imposed upon them and America has attacked countries to secure their resources or set up strategic military bases. The soldiers signing up to fight these wars aren't heroes, they're paid gunmen who serve whoever is paying them in this case it's the corporate backed American government . They are not fighting for our freedom, they are fighting to take freedom away from others. I believe we need to acknowledge this fact and stop mindlessly praising mercenaries of death as noble and courageous and start seeing them as what they are, paid hitmen not subject to morals and ethics, they are paid to do a job. Edit No one seems to try and touch on the point I made, they just want to argue about sidenotes. I do not see a military job as being any more heroic than sitting behind a desk and typing up spreadsheets. Its a job you choose, you get paid well, you get benefits. Why are you a hero for choosing this as your line of work?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think we should celebrate soldiers as heroes when, in reality, they aren't serving the interest of the American public, they serve corporate interest, and they get paid well to do it.\n","id":"6ced4a35-4c4d-4dab-8871-df9b06e091ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>In Italy the principle of separation of church and state is enshrined in Article 7 of the Constitution, which states: \"The State and the Catholic Church are independent and sovereign, each within its own sphere.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A common standard in liberal democracies is the illegality of publicly funding religious organizations directly or indirectly. It is thus inconsistent with the norms of liberal democracies to fund religious organizations.\n","id":"61a66e66-cbe8-4718-ba51-692472a5c692"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Around the world, more than 100 soccer players have died while playing or shortly after since 1984. Therefore, applying the same logic, soccer should equally be banned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Injuries and deaths are not an integral part of bullfighting and its competitiveness, but unfortunate accidents, similar to injuries in any other sport.\n","id":"3d7b5858-7b9b-449e-ba0b-a935f4acfd6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>The government of a democratic state is not responsible for the actions of that state's previous governments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unfair to hold today's generation accountable for the behaviour of their predecessors.\n","id":"c2d84945-5aa5-45b5-aa76-f9aa58ef2fb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Speaking about 'boots on dirt' or the various airstrikes being carried out in the Middle East, and how pointless they are if not making things worse because each time an innocent civilian dies in the Middle East, you now have most if not their whole of their family pissed off at the Western world. Conveniently, there just happens to be a group that hates the West as much as they do for what the West did to their families, full of resources to help the agenda of getting revenge on the West. Even if they weren't an innocent civilian, even if they were apart of ISIS and get bombed, their family is still going to feel hatred at something anything even if they disagreed with their child parent siblings actions. In some cases, this may even be enough to push them over the edge and consider joining. In my opinion, the U.S knows this, hence Trump wanting to get rid of everyone who follows the Muslim religion from American soil just in case they suddenly have a family member obliterated as a mistake. A mistake that had been signed off by one, carried out by another, so the vengeance is pointed at the only face that will take ownership, the Western World. I don't have an alternative, as this is a war that the modern world just isn't prepared for. I can't even think of a peaceful way of ending the massacres, as the massacres are bringing peace to the people causing them, so why would stopping benefit them? TL DR You can't shoot bomb an ideology, and with guns bombs seeming to be the only strategy the world has to offer, I don't see it to be possible to stop a group when their motivating force is something that can't be seen let alone killed.  EDIT From my comment with the \u2206, gt This definition has changed my mind. The organisation of ISIS can be defeated in the general sense of the word, and to see ISIS and the ideology of why they join as one of the same is naive. Not all people who are pissed at the West will join the organisation known as ISIS. They may still share the same view, but if the organisation itself ceases to exist, it has been defeated. Permalink<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ISIS will never be defeated because you can't bomb an ideology and that seems to be the worlds only strategy.\n","id":"eca175b9-e237-4bfc-845e-727e87134cb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't mean to argue whether anarchism or capitalism are good or bad systems. I just don't think that functionally those two systems can co exist. My belief is that any form of capitalist system requires a state government. At a minimum any form of capitalist system requires protection of private property rights and enforcement of contractual agreements. These protections are not trivial. It requires a state police militia men with guns and a judicial and prison system. These things are not cheap and require taxes to fund. Without these state protections only the people with the most military strength would be able to protect their property. Additionally all capitalist systems so far use state monopolized currency. As a point of logic the only way state monopolized money can ever enter the system in the first place is through government spending. Another thing is limited liability. Adam Smith may not have been a fan of it but I believe modern capitalism would not have developed to what it is today without limited liability laws. Limited liability laws protect investors from personal loss when a business fails or is sued. Investors would not be able to take risks on business ventures if their entire personal fortunes could be lost in failed investments. Also even in Adam Smith's time there was a government navy safe guarding shipping lanes. This is to underscore another important point capitalist systems seem to require a government to provide for various infrastructure. I as an investor may be able to afford a ship, but am I literally supposed to fund the entire shipping infrastructure? Car manufacturers would not have been able to succeed without the infrastructure of roads and bridges. Internet giants and phone companies would not succeed without government research and satellite infrastructure. And so on. Finally, I believe that capitalism will end up in popular revolt if the excesses of capitalism are not curbed or mitigated by a government in some way. Welfare state programs don't just assist the poor, they also prevent the masses from fulfilling Marx's visions of mass revolution. Also economic redistribution is not only an issue of appeasing the masses, but also deals with problems of wealth accumulation reducing overall demand since one cannot properly fund a capitalist economy if only 2 of the population has money to consume products. I feel like a lot of Anarcho Capitalists believe that everything would just be better if there was no government at all but I personally believe that a government exists because of capitalism, not despite it. I believe capitalists would be better suited arguing for better government rather than no government since the the latter seems incompatible with capitalism IMO. edit since some of these conversations are about what the definition of capitalism and anarchism are, I will say this I guess by capitalism I am referring to modern industrial capitalism, denoted by the use of money, private property and markets. By anarchism I am referring to a stateless society. And I suppose I will also grant that a dysfunctional anarchist capitalist system could exist, but my point is that they cannot exist together successfully .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think anarchy and capitalism are compatible\n","id":"c4924373-db33-4828-aa19-a3b37395e43a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cannabis be legalised for medical use in the UK?<|ARGUMENT|>Cannabis should be legalised to help raise taxes and make it so as people can access it's health benefits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cannabis should be legalised for medical use in the UK.\n","id":"2c32530b-68f4-449c-9b56-1df01b190ec8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My argument is that Mad Max Fury Road is a feminist movie. For the sake of this argument, I'll define 'feminism' as the social movement that advocates for women's rights and equality. Here is an explanation of what I think a feminist movie is and isn't. A feminist movie need not be although it may be propaganda because propaganda suggests that the creator intends their work to carry such a message. However, a feminist movie portrays feminism as beneficial to society. Furthermore, again, this message need not be intentional because a work of art can have a particular meaning regardless of the creator's intention. Now here's why I think Fury Road is a feminist movie. addendum I admit I haven't seen the movie in a long time, so some of my factual content may be misremembered. Feel free to correct me on that. It criticises patriarchy and male dominant power structures. Immortan Joe is a patriarch, and he is a despotic warlord. It criticises toxic masculinity. Joe's polygamy is an essential component of his power, and when his wives escape, his power is undermined. His masculinity has corrupted his view of women to see them as objects. However, the movie itself doesn't treat women as objects. The Wives are characters with free will and agency which they exercise. Furiosa is arguably the protagonist of the movie. The protagonists, Max and Furiosa, subvert traditional gendered tropes. Furiosa drives massive, fast vehicles and shoots big guns, echoing the classic action hero. Max, on the other hand, is given traits of the femme fatale a mysterious past, a stranger embroiled in a conflict that is bigger than themselves and is literally silenced for most of the movie. Nux, a character who is at first portrayed as a villain and underling of Immortan Joe, is redeemed by giving up his patriarchal views and his toxic masculinity, and joining the Wives on their mission to 'smash the patriarchy' and break free from Joe's oppression. This is the turning point for his character, and we are meant to see him as the good guy from then on. The Green Place, the goal of about half of the movie I think? , symbolises fertility and growth classically feminine traits. This is something the movie sees as desirable and positive. At the end of the movie, an ecologically conscious matriarchal society is implied to come to power. This is shown as a progressive step forward over the hegemonic patriarchy. Here are some arguments that you could make to change my view. There are compelling reasons why Fury Road does not fit my definition of a feminist movie. Even though Fury Road fits my definition of a feminist movie, the reasons that I have described are flawed and hence invalidated. I welcome the discussion. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Mad Max: Fury Road\" 2015 is a feminist movie.\n","id":"6047bf77-7ef7-42d2-8d3a-286af45020b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am American with center right views. I don't care much for social issues but economically I believe in traditional American values. I believe if I work hard I am not entitled to give it to other people. I believe in a flat tax rate even if it means some government programs have to be cut. Now don't completely take my words out of context. I think donating to charities and such is a good thing and philanthropy should be encouraged. But the difference here is that I can choose where my money goes rather than my government choosing for me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am a staunch capitalist that believes nobody is entitled to the money I earned but myself.\n","id":"7871c1c6-a323-4055-9041-a2a76c1866ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Children Learn About Gender Identity And Sexual Orientation In School?<|ARGUMENT|>An open lesson, with planned intention and assessment will be delivered in line with the curricular aims, in as much as teachers can be trusted to deliver any of the curricular content. This is monitored and can be observed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"But a teachers biases are still passed on, reflected in how they treat kids who are not cisgender or heterosexual, so it\u2019s not as if not teaching magically removes those biases.\n","id":"afd1226a-726e-4780-a7ae-5c3b71929326"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I should preface my argument with two things. First, I should mention that I do not consume or purchase animal products intentionally. Second, I'm approaching this with a vaguely utilitarian and consequentialist ideology. I believe that reducing suffering in the world is paramount. That being said, I do not believe that the end always justifies the means. I have heard many arguments in favor of eating meat. The only argument that I find irrefutable is the argument that usually surfaces near the end of the discussion. That argument is I don't care . The thing that people don't care about could be a number of topics i.e. animal suffering, health issues, and environmental issues that go along with the animal agriculture industry. First of all, this argument is incredibly weak, which says a lot about how I feel about consuming animal products in light of the way I'm phrasing my argument here. Second, this is the best argument for consuming animal products because there is no way to refute it. This argument is usually used to sidestep all of the evidence presented during the discussion. No evidence can be used against this argument because no one can decide how you feel about something. Change my view by either convincing me that there is a better argument in favor of consuming animal products, or by convincing me that there is a way to refute this argument I don't care .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best argument in favor of eating meat is \"I don't care\".\n","id":"c53efa30-d747-42e1-8ccc-581415e62cbe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those unfamiliar with the list or organization, the EWG describes themselves and their mission as gt Environmental Working Group empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. We drive consumer choice and civic action with breakthrough research and an informed public. They publish their dirty dozen' list which lists vegetables and fruits in order of having the most pesticides to the least. The underlying assumption is that pesticides are bad, and that fruits and vegetables with pesticide residue must be bad. However, the Food Quality Protection Act which, to be fair, the EGW claims they played a 'major role' in pushing it through Congress already plays a role in regulating pesticides and ensuring that pesticides are safe, and that the level of residues found on foods are within acceptable ranges. Thus, the assumption of the EGW is that the level of pesticide residues found on these foods must be harmful, and that they should be avoided. This seems to be a dangerous message, as the dose makes the poison, and the government already regulates to ensure that fruits and vegetables have pesticide residues within acceptable ranges They steer people towards organic produce, despite the fact that organics still use pesticides and herbicides, with the assumption being that the products used in organic agriculture must be better for you because they are not synthetic. Additionally, the organization has created a guide to Eat GE Free a webpage that tells consumers how to avoid eating GMOs. They claim that there are few safety studies about GMOs. In their research about GE foods they cite Benbrook for evidence that herbicide usage has gone up, despite the author of the study being heavily criticized for making up data. They also cite the Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization known for their ironically anti science position on GMOs. Because of this, I have a hard time believing that this organization is credible, and distrust their research regarding pesticides.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Environmental Working Group's \"Dirty Dozen\" list, which highlights fruits and vegetables with high levels of pesticide residue, does not positively contribute to a consumer's knowledge when shopping.\n","id":"cbb12e8a-7d59-4e55-b732-c3e5fc07f0b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lot's of my friends love that show, and I don't think my friends are stupid, so I've watched about a 1 1 2 seasons of it. I've given this show more than a fair shot, it's awful. My claims The zombies suck, they don't pose a real threat, there slow moving and easy to avoid for all but the most retarded survivors , that being said, the show's characters are some of the stupidest I've ever seen on tv. All they have to do is move away from the zombies at a speedwalker's pace, instead, they spend almost all there time fighting with each other and talking about there feelings. It would be more believable if the show starred the the girls from Sex and the City or the gang from Seinfeld, and way more awesome. I know lots of you love this show, so . Edit Daryl is awesome, the should be a spin off where the entire rest of the cast is killed off, and the show is only about him, I Am Legend style.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Walking Dead is a horrible show.\n","id":"45387cb6-a17a-4903-831e-2c4b948a2a04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Embryos of deceased fetuses will either be disposed of, or used in a laboratory. In the latter option, lives could be saved by reprogramming embryonic stem ES cells into other tissues. Patients with horrible conditions such as autism, parkinson's, deafness, sickle cell anemia, and endless others could potentially see incredible benefits from stem cell treatment. The easiest opposing argument is that of ethics. 1 ES cells have two paths waste, or use use being reprogramming . Why would God not want us to recycle? And by that, I mean use something which would otherwise be wasted, for good. 2 iPS cells, or Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells, are a form of in vitro stem cells which are derived from tissues other than those of deceased fetuses. These cells have slightly less potency, but they, too, could prove to be beneficial for many conditions. 3 Lastly and I expect this one to get the most attention , life does not start at conception. Life starts when there is a breathing, mobile being who is aware of its existence. A single celled embryo is by no means aware it does not think, nor does it breathe, or even take the shape of a human being. It is lifeless. Yes, there is potential for life. BUT, the same argument could be made against those who use contraceptives, where there is technically potential for life, and I assume most of you are not opposed to those devices. For those who are, well, I don't really understand what the point is of fighting so hard for lives which are no where near fruition. I'm interested to read and respond to any and all comments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is absolutely no reason why Stem Cell research and medical implementation should not be fully supported by the American government and people. I'll tell you why.\n","id":"c260c101-dcda-40bd-82e9-74eade60b6d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Death Row Inmates Be Required To Donate Their Organs Upon Their Death?<|ARGUMENT|>The universality of human rights is encompassed in the words of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights \u201cAll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human rights are supposed to be unalienable. As such, their wishes should still be honoured.\n","id":"b766849b-7828-4d51-9af6-484edbca8b90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, when I compare arguments for gay marriage with incest, I'm not saying they are the same thing. Secondly, the question is not whether it would harm human race moral thinking or not, there is a debate on determinism and compatibilitism where the only argument even from a person like Dennet is it would discourage innovation and drive. I personally hate the idea of incest, but that's not a legitimate reason for making it illegal. gt The offspring has a higher probablity of birth defects due to higher probablity of double recessive gene. We allow people who we already know have these problems to carry a child. If a healthy couple gives birth to a children with birth defect, should not be allowed to continue their marriage? Or do you propose something like a 3 strike rule. gt There is no way consent can be established between family members due to power dynamic. Children should not be afraid of sexual advances from siblings. In the title, I've said adults I.e. 18 or whatever the local age would be. Sex with a minor is an illegal activity, incest isn't the only source of this. I agree that consent is impossible between an underage daughter and her father, but how is it any different from strangers of the same age, just because she trusts her father and he provides for her and not the stranger is an invalid argument. A completely broke women whoring herself out to an old guy for his money, is a milder situation of the one proposed above in principle. gt It's disgusting, unnatural. This is the what the whole debate boils down to, gay marriage was exactly in the same situation where it was socially classified as a disorder just few decades ago, we still have a long way to go. Didn't gay sex lead to AIDS HIV according to the same people or something? If it was just to end discrimination, making gay sex illegal while the marriage legal would've been perfectly fine, they would've been allowed to be themselves in society while not engaging in a potential dangerous activity. I know the situation is a lot different due to extreme homophobia and second class citizenship and you don't choose to be gay, but freedom between consenting adults was the biggest driving point. Suppose it was a choice to be gay, would it have been right then? You simply can't ban something because it may lead to a genuine criminal activity like child molestation, you ban the offense, not the thing that may lead up to it. EDIT This whole thing basically boiled down to people are just too shit to the point we need to make laws to guide them away from criminal activities which itself is punishable by an explicitly listed law. Things like Cocaine and consented dueling to death seem perfectly okay in my eyes, but consent itself could be coerced and people don't know how to control themselves according to a lot of people. After a certain point, it appears we are trying to contain horny gorillas ready to bang anything that moves mixed with big government controlling people's lives. Basically, Practicality wins over principle until a utopian society emerges. EDIT 2 gt Parents would brainwash their kid to believe that their sole purpose was to be married to them All dogmas start for a kid from brainwashing by parents. Is it right for parents to teach evangelical stuff to their kids like fact? The effects could be disastrous to the point of no return. Can you ban it and declare it hate speech? If I were to go on a tangent, I say every decision is we make is 100 composed of out childhood, past experiences and genome. The thinking process of nothingness gt thoughts in brain gt action, first arrow is determinism random dice , second arrow has impulse control too which is hamperable by physical anamolies like brain tumour and many others we dont know about. Hence, there is no moral responsibility but a social one. Parents already do this by pushing them into professions in which their incompetent ass failed and destroy millions of dreams and crush lives. In my country, unless you are engineer or doctor, you are a disgrace, I grew up to love physics and coding, but a lot of my friends are nearly homeless not because they failed but never given a chance in any art form. As a good example, in China, mass academia hype has destroyed critical thinking. EDIT 3 People don't see the severity of situation, here, children are locked in a room, emotionally blackmailed, sometimes brutally beaten, and even killed in some cases if they get anything lower than A . EDIT 4 More on birth defects People have drunk so much wine rum over the times, there are physical repercussions visible in everybody in their family tree. Obviously incest harms the human race, as it will any animal species just by the sheer probability of recessive gene combination. Every ,for the lack of a better word, non natural action we undertake like eating Cheetos while staring at an eye degrading screen while exercising every 2 years, will definitely harm the next generation miniscule but will add up by 10 generations by environmental adaptation part of natural selection , how do you maintain consistency on that issue? These are just milder version of it, as this guy pointed out, the whole issue is essentially biologically supported Eugenics. In principle, you are trying to build a superior race.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Incestuous relationship between consenting adults should be legal\n","id":"fb22919c-dc8e-4379-b2b1-756e6d27f31b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Collective bargaining rights for public unions<|ARGUMENT|>Tim Kane. \"Are collective bargaining rights really that great?\" Christian Science Monitor. February 25th, 2011: \"Consider the phrasing of this Gallup poll which was the top story in yesterday's USA Today. Would you favor or oppose a law in your state taking away some collective bargaining rights of most public unions, including the state teachers union? Yikes. Even a cold-hearted economist like me isn't in favor of TAKING AWAY stuff from others. Let alone taking away their RIGHTS. That sounds mean, which is why 61 percent of respondents were opposed. No doubt, the response would be different if the question involved trade-offs, which is what real-world choices are about. For example: Would you favor a law in your state ending collective bargaining for public-sector workers or higher taxes on your children over the next few decades?\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Opposition\" to taking away collective bargaining based on bad polling.\n","id":"28907609-f641-4828-bec6-0e46e3fbc0eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Organ Donation be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>The Dutch system recently changed from opt-in to opt-out. This is another datapoint for the future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Opt-out\" organ donation systems have proven effective in countries such as Austria.\n","id":"fead7b2c-e9c4-46f5-aff5-1b29705c0abf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>In every Religion, Culture, random group, etc., 1% of humans Dr R Hare PCL-R are Psychopaths and 5-15% almost Psychopaths Dr R Schouten 'Almost a Psychopath' who interpret everything, and behave, without Empathy or Conscience; and are Arrogant, Manipulative, Lying, and absorbed only in their greed for, and amoral pursuit of, Power and Wealth. Allah, in the Quran & His previous messages, has warned against psychopathic behaviours, and that they are the cause of most, if not all, evil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allah, the Monotheistic, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Eternal, Self-Sufficient, Creator, Sustainer, and Monitor of all that exists, has repeatedly revealed, since the first human being, guidance on how to minimise evil in, even eradicate evil from, society. All but one i.e. the Quran of Allah's messages of guidance have been destroyed or perverted by evil humans, for their own greed for power and wealth. So evil only exists because evil humans reject and\/or pervert Allah's guidance.\n","id":"a8572f97-9827-4814-9d6f-b731aa1259e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've gone through the popular topics in the wiki of this sub and here is why I still post Recently on pol , one of 4chan's boards, I came across a very eloquent and simply phrased post look at what countries mostly driven by white skinned people achieved in the last 2000 years. Is there anything you can name that makes mankind understand itself better through contributions brought upon by Asian or African people? Is there any invention of which those who did nothing for the existence of those things do not exclusively profit from? This is not about discussing whether the industrial revolution or the computer per se has brought good things on mankind, it's about the fact that in medium term, the best things carburator, antibiotics, semiconductors, modern philosophy all were developed and reinforced by those who mated with neanderthals and lived on the westernmost part of the European subcontinent, namely white people. Where do I start to grasp that each and every achievement has to be seen as a long term achievement and that every ethnicity and their whereabouts and thoughts are equally important to the human race? Disclaimer no white guilt present, no discrimination in my everyday life, but why do I think so explicitly well of the culture I grew up in?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Countries with a majority of \"dark skinned people\" non-whites have it worse and it is their own way of coping with life that makes it so.\n","id":"1641e108-2fa2-49e3-a1c8-83c77de61e6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, feminism topic. My assertion is that feminism as a mainstream movement or as organizations hasn't done anything significant to help men in their lives. I've often seen assertions or articles that say feminism helps men too, that there's no specific need for other organizations because feminism is actively working to tear down gender stereotypes. Anyway, my general assertion is that feminism hasn't actually done anything significant to help men in general, and as such there is often a need for other organizations to help. In general, the only sorts of support offered have been very limited and contradictory support for LGBT types generally small scale, limited for limited aid to black people in civil rights struggles, things to aid women which feminists theorize may incidentally aid men, things which were universally or widely supported and needed no support, or things designed to harm some sort of group of men who they disapprove of. In general I'm very suspicious of claims that vague aid will help men somehow. When feminists campaign to stop rape they don't just try to tear down stereotypes, they do things like supporting buses to carry drunk women from bars back to their home so they don't get raped by their sketchy cousin who offered a lift. Specific aid is much more likely to be actually effective. Of course, some say feminism isn't meant to help men which is fine, though others do say it does help. It would be ideal if it did help. Feminism is huge, politically powerful, and massively influential. Things that can change my view in smaller ways evidence of organizations even if small of feminists working towards some goal that directly benefits men. Evidence for large changes of view evidence of major organizations campaigning for things that helped men. Evidence of large charity drives which helped men in some way. Evidence that an English feminist inspired law substantially benefited men. Billionaire or high multi million dollar feminists campaigning in large ways to help men as a result of feminists. They practically count as an organization on their own. Evidence that probably won't change my view people campaigning to hurt groups of men that do bad things. People campaigning to help women in ways that could theoretically help men. I may make an exception if the help or hurting is particularly nuanced in a nice way. Individual feminists doing nice things. Feminists on their own can certainly be nice. Feminists doing nice things as part of an organization, and then being blacklisted or attacked by other feminists. They need to do whatever and then remain a part of the feminist movement. Links on their own highlight particular claims from them which you feel show how wrong I am and how I should change my view. Anyway, good luck view changing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism hasn't done anything big to help men in general in English countries, bar LGBT types and racial minorities.\n","id":"31789708-db9a-4ea3-b65c-07733489dadd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I won't spend a lot of time covering the evlovution of the overtime rules in football, but I will assert that the overtime rules should be revamped yet again to remove all element of luck from the coin toss and make a more interesting game, especially in the case where one team kneels down at the end of a tied game to put the game into overtime. I propose that the NFL and college if they want adopt a rule stating that should regulation time end in a tie, overtime is played and is treated just like the transition from the 1st to 2nd, or 3rd to 4th quarters. After a short intermission and a change of sides, play continues from where it left off, with the exception that two more timeouts are added to each team and the game becomes pure sudden death. In short, the team that possesses the ball at the end of regulation will retain possession at the spot of the ball, unless of course the last play of regulation was a scoring play to tie it, or any other play which would have resulted in a change of possession. EDIT Clarifying that the overtime period is not infinite, it is still timed at either 10 or 15 minutes, after which the game ends in a tie if it's still tied. The main issue that arises is the concern over the excitement of clock management at the end of the game. Well, that really won't change much, and here's why. Late in the 4th quarter, either the game is tied, or it's not. When the game is not tied, clock management is key as one team is often frantically trying to drive down the field and score to either tie the game and get to overtime or to win it outright . Other times, the team who is ahead possesses the ball and is trying to run out the clock and prevent the team that is behind from getting the ball and possibly scoring. The situation where the game is not tied would not change at all. One team NEEDS to score before the end of regulation to stay in the game. So, this leaves the other situation, where the game is tied late in the 4th quarter. Again, clock management is often key. The team which possesses the ball is usually either trying to get in a position to score with little or no time on the clock to win the game outright and avoid overtime, or, as we often see, there is little time left, so they kneel down, run out the clock, and head to overtime. The crowd always boos at this they hate it. Clearly, if we move to a just keep playing system, the team which possesses the ball does not need to down the ball and take their chances in overtime as the announcers often say. They can simply play as they have been playing. The only thing that changes here is that late in a tied game, if a team is not in a position to score and win the game, the focus shifts from clock management to possession management rather than kneeling down and taking our chances . I think I've showed where most cases will still as interesting as they are now, when one team is behind and trying to score, or when one team possesses the ball and is in a position to score to win the game near the end of regulation. The only thing that really changes is in a tied game when a team possesses the ball and is not in a position to score deep in their own end , and simply runs out the clock. It's a situation everyone hates and my plan will improve it. Please note that I am proposing a change to the rules of overtime. So, in order to change my view, an appeal to tradition is not likely going to be effective. I don't want to retain the current overtime rules simply because they have been that way for a while. The rules of overtime are constantly evolving, and they can continue to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overtime in the NFL should be changed so that the teams simply keep playing where they left off\n","id":"6896875c-5108-4e2b-bdf3-08dc375e892e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Money Is the Root of All Evil<|ARGUMENT|>Evil can take different forms & types and also has different causes most of them-psychological.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no such thing as the root of evil!\n","id":"48ad0aa5-4195-4b22-ad6f-010bc048b3da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>People are free to make choices regarding their sexual orientation. This is recognized as an essential human right<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homosexuality should be respected even if it was a choice.\n","id":"e954079e-d748-4db5-89b7-24785734c5cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>CBT is a fantastic framework to see this in action. As a result we can control \/ modify how we feel about certain things with mindfulness similar to meditation and logic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Psychology suggests that we have the power to direct our thoughts and feelings.\n","id":"925b1168-df3b-4001-be67-4201108086b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Aileen Wuornos was convicted of murdering seven people between 1989 and 1990. She is quoted as saying, \"To me, this world is nothing but evil, and my own evil just happened to come out cause of the circumstances of what I was doing.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Serial killers have described their own actions as evil or that evil exists.\n","id":"72c2eacc-0f42-4609-bd58-43bdd7ea22ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>We currently live in a society where women are pressured to cover up. Regardless, someone is going to feel pressured. We ought to let individuals decide what these standards are, and not dictate it to them with this top-down approach.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There have always been societal pressures on women to conform to a certain way of being. Women themselves can decipher what pressures they can and cannot handle.\n","id":"84d1dac0-039a-41b5-8742-fa202eb64564"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>Amber Rudd is a soft-Brexit Conservative who has experience working successfully with various factions of the Conservative party in relation to Brexit. This would making it easier for her to unify the party than May.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"May's potential successors might be better able to unite the fractured Conservative Party, allowing them to get their deal across where May has failed.\n","id":"7e149252-5393-439a-9f69-f6f92bf3151d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Infrastructure could be made more vegan. Efforts made by the Boring Company to make car traffic go underground could reduce injuries to wildlife on Earth's surface.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The vegan lifestyle is better for the people who follow it - copy\n","id":"f2705c45-3ff1-4d37-963a-23d6a359dd8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>2010 US bank tax<|ARGUMENT|>Jeffrey Miron. \"Bailing out the Banks Was Wrong, but New Tax Won't Make It Right.\" Investor's Business Daily. January 14, 2010: \"The proposed tax will also raise less revenue than promised, again because those subject to the tax will take steps to avoid it. Relocation overseas is one approach; accounting gimmickry is another. The net revenue raised may even be negative because the U.S. will not collect income or payroll taxes from those thrown out of work by an exodus of financial institutions.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"2010 bank tax will raise less revenue due to evasion\n","id":"aede2b20-2ef1-4ee3-8f2e-4ec375df816c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need nuclear power for sustainable energy production?<|ARGUMENT|>Hydro reservoirs can also have the capability of enabling irrigated agriculture in communities, providing mitigation of both flood and drought. Growing more biomass through irrigated agriculture can help to sequester more carbon from the atmosphere, while also providing more jobs and more agricultural resources for communities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hydroelectric power is an alternative renewable and green energy source.\n","id":"a434451c-6c27-4f86-ba0b-e3f120094457"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A fairly straightforward . I think that the sliders that are on sites like Facebook and Youtube are a poor way of adjusting the volume. Obviously not the worst, but not really good either. Some of the flaws I see are The bar itself is able to be clicked on which sometimes results in accidental muting or amping it up and going deaf for a few seconds. When watching in regular not full screen mode the bar is very small and hard to make slight changes in volume. Perhaps anecdotal but I have found more and more often that there isn't much change in the top 70 90 of the bar, but goes from essentially full volume at around 30 volume to essentially mute at say like 15 volume An example of a better method would be your typical TV control where there there is a numerical scale where each tick up op or down results in a measured increase or decrease of volume. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The volume control sliders on video players is a poor method of adjusting the volume.\n","id":"7fe5db05-ecec-457a-8ffe-0779f1e568e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the Las Vegas attack a false flag?<|ARGUMENT|>I totally agree! I have been saying for years, that our second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms is nothing but a huge thorn in the side of Satan's Utopian and doomed Counterfeit New World Order, and that chaos, pain, bloodshed, and death that these devils are funding, allowing, and creating would be needed to get a whole Nation of adults as well as young adults and brain washed snowflake teens to push their plan of Gun Control! Expect more of these horrible types of events to continue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It seems impossible for an out-of-shape 64 year old man, with no military training, to kill 59 people and injure 500 from the height and distance he was at in the time he was said to have fired.\n","id":"2ead2db8-4b66-4a2c-8192-4a832f3e225d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Modern, pluralistic societies aspire to the ideals of socio-sexual tolerance and inclusion e.g. of same-sex marriage, transgender-rights etc.2 The prohibition of public nudity is contrary to these societal aspirations and is therefore contrary to the establishment of the valid rule of law within a modern, pluralistic society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rule of law in a pluralistic society should embody society's aspirations towards values of inclusion and tolerance. Prohibiting public nudity is intolerant.\n","id":"f34bd634-2a58-4f1e-bc95-f877a53f60ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should parents perpetuate myths like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny to their children?<|ARGUMENT|>According to one study punishments such as timeouts were the most effective way of dealing with a toddler that was not listening or being violent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Punishing children can be a more effective way to encourage positive behavioural responses.\n","id":"bbd6faf7-df24-4c9a-a842-151b32afa416"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should fracking be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2016, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions were at their lowest levels since the early 1990s with experts citing the displacement of coal as the primary cause.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fracking is displacing the use of coal energy, which produces twice as much carbon dioxide as natural gas.\n","id":"a5441115-4c02-4124-8111-cdf43a6419b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>The development costs of modern weapons technologies are enormously high. Even though the US is planning to buy some 2.500 of its F-35 fighters, the development costs stand at 15% of the program's total.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The development cost of AKMs that are as effective as humans is very high.\n","id":"39739cc5-539b-4f63-a6f4-fb04e6355cef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Standard Model an incomplete theory?<|ARGUMENT|>The Standard Model is unable to explain how inflation mechanisms work, but the inflaton and its field could provide these answers if added to the table.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For these phenomena to be explained, multiple new particles would have to be added in to completely change the Standard Model.\n","id":"3fec97bf-32c0-42c8-abaf-b7ecb4f65fb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The recent Janus ruling has brought to light an issue surrounding unions that has been longstanding union members being forced into membership despite not being in agreement with the union's political motives. Forced membership, in any capacity or organization, tells me one thing the organization that is requiring membership does not provide anything that would attract someone to sign up voluntarily. For a quick comparison, I want to sign up for a AAA membership because of the benefit I will receive if my car breaks down. I think we'd all be a little suspect if AAA forced people to sign up if they owned a car. With unions clarification I'm talking Public sector unions, as that is what the Janus ruling affects , the benefits of membership are minimal at least to me to the point where unless a person is forced to be a member or agrees with the political aims of the union, there is not much to incentivize a person to join. Quick note I am a public sector employee. I do not agree with the aims of my union nor see much benefit in being a member of it. I do not see the point nor the reason in forcing employees to be union members except to gain money for political campaigns. Another note non member employees still receive all the benefits the union provides in regards to contract enforcement, grievance representation, and contract negotiations. One more I am not against people joining unions or even denying that unions can be useful, I just think people should have a choice over which union they are a member of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Union membership should be voluntary and valuable\n","id":"f94e2a29-194d-476b-857d-a9cc5b8b969a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't believe that the taxes someone pays on their property should be allowed to be raised barring an indexing to inflation while they maintain ownership. My thought process is basically it doesn't seem fair for the government to tax someone out of their home. My anecdotal evidence is that my mom's taxes were raised 100 double when our neighbor sold their house for a few million dollars. My mom bought her house for 400k, paid it off completely and is now a teacher who don't make a lot in the US . The 100 raise would have forced her to sell her house as it wasn't affordable due to no fault of her own. Luckily she fought it in court and it was only raised 50 but she was fortunate enough to have the ability to spend days in court to fight it. I'm not sure how this would've happened if she was an hourly working with little to no paid time off. I'm sure this could also help gentrification in some aspect as well, but I could see how it would probably only help the few home owners in poor areas and not those who rent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Property taxes should not be allowed to increase unless the property changes hands.\n","id":"6009826f-5007-4545-b59e-5509b7539e6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The United States has used sanctions as a diplomatic tool to pressure countries, either because of perceived threats Iran and North Korea , desire for regime change Venezuela or punishment for actions Russia . It is used to push countries to the negotiating table. Although I believe the actions of these countries need to change, I think sanctions are the wrong method. Banning trade is meant to hurt the economy so people either vote the government out or force the government to act to prevent civil unrest. However, the effect I have seen is that dictators continue to cling to power while the common people suffer cuts in government service. This seems immoral to me as they are paying for what the people in power, who they did not elect, are doing. Furthermore, it does not seem effective at changing behaviour. Granted it worked in Cuba and Iran, but even then, after the Iran deal was broken, the Iranian government seems willing to suffer economic pain instead of backing down. I would like to understand why countries still use sanctions despite these arguments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanctions should not be used as they are ineffective and disproportionally hurt the vulnerable in the targeted countries\n","id":"1030dd58-1608-45f9-a8d2-8c82bd2ff4ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>While fair trade helps to mitigate global trade's effects on disadvantaged people, it ultimately does not do enough good to outweigh the difficulties which global trade creates for the world's poorest in the first place. Supporting the global market, therefore, has a negative impact on the world and can be considered unethical.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as being an ethical consumer in global capitalist trade.\n","id":"a7b5c2a2-f1f2-4e66-9601-cc988c47f3d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Australian republic vs. monarchy<|ARGUMENT|>The English heritage need not be rejected by establishing a republic. The history will certainly not be erased from the history books simply because Australia becomes a republic. In addition, an Australian republic would likely remain within the commonwealth, which would provide continual reminders of the British legacy in Australia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An Australian republic will not mean rejecting the English heritage\n","id":"f6e57d92-6101-4481-9518-bd70ee62d90b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should unpaid internships be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Unpaid interns in Conde\u0301 Nast settled a class action with the company for $5.8 million for pay they were not given during their internship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Interns could sue them which could require companies to pay monetary damages.\n","id":"2b955954-3d49-4958-8fd6-799313a42ded"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>The crime rate is high enough that residents have taken to building barricades around their homes This illustrates the fact that guns are not the problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In London they have strict gun laws. They also have high crime rates. This illustrates the fact that guns are not the problem.\n","id":"ca9e336e-b123-4816-af67-a594b746e7fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently Alphastar beat one of the best Starcraft players in the world and it has not even reached its final form yet. It was taught how to mimic some of the best players with raw game data supervised learning and then played games against itself to master its strategies reinforcement learning . 200 years worth of training was completed in a short period of time and it became good enough to take on Mana and TLO. Albeit Mana won 1 game out of 5. However, the implications of this show a few things That alphastar was able to win with Imperfect Information , Could plan long term, Could think in real time, and could operate in a large space. This is leagues above learning Go, and Chess. How then can one say AGI is not around the corner? Is there anyone who could challenge this view? Perhaps challenge what I know about Alphastar? Or even challenge AGI?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alphastar has brought us much closer to Artificial General Intelligence\n","id":"5df8147d-1109-41ce-9177-6c0ff5a20acf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Hamlet Mad?<|ARGUMENT|>Hamlet openly admits he is putting 'an antic disposition on' to fool those around him. Act 1, Scene i<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hamlet states throughout the play that his madness is a ruse.\n","id":"d502bd3d-d672-46b6-94de-632d12fb4279"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Joseph Smith used his seer stone to translate the Book of Mormon in the same way\u2014by placing the stone at the bottom of his hat, and placing his face in the hat to block out the light\u2014as he had previously used it to try to find the location of buried treasure<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith purported to translate the Book of Mormon using the same scrying method he used, unsuccessfully, to divine the location of buried treasure in money-digging ventures.\n","id":"a901f772-860e-4e28-8aaf-f4f05a45612f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Banning cell phones in cars<|ARGUMENT|>These allow drivers to communicate freely without taking their hands off the controls or their eyes off the road. Effectively there is no difference between talking to someone on a hands-free mobile, and holding a conversation with a passenger next to you; in fact, the latter is more dangerous as you may be tempted to turn your head to directly address the passenger.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hands-free cell phones are sufficiently safe on the road.\n","id":"7f0308c7-ab13-452e-802e-d9c29f28cebc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't see anything wrong with a community deciding not to offer any sort of low income housing. Anyone who can afford to live in a community is welcome to live there. If you cannot afford a home in Area A, then you can move to Area B that's just how it is. If you can't afford to move to the community you want to, work hard and save your money until you can. In the meantime, work to better the community you live in currently. I just don't understand how the government can demand that communities provide low income housing. There will always be communities that are primarily affluent, communities that are primarily middle class, and neighborhoods that are primarily poor. Each one of these communities has its own lifestyle and values forcing integration will only create conflice between the percieved haves and the percieved have nots. The bottom line is this the market determines where housing is available and at what price.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing wrong with a community not offering low income housing.\n","id":"70ae8ad3-1068-4a9b-8ddd-9a7f591d2c9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does buying things from third world countries condone a form of modern day slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>First world countries do not need third world country for finished goods. The production of third world countries is a decision by those countries to develop their economy, and not an exploitation by first world countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Buying items that are legally produced following the laws\/traditions\/customs of that nation should not be deemed as modern day slavery.\n","id":"04c81221-3af8-4501-a2ba-d05f19b34773"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Howdy, so let me start by saying I am not trying to shit on anyone with this statement. I am open minded and willing to take everything into consideration. I am coming from the point of view of a male Graphic Designer who has been in the industry about 5 years. Change my view you lovely people. Basically my thought is that the lack of women in tech is not so much a result of fewer options being available for them to break into tech but more a result of women not being interested in the subject matter. I am constantly seeing figures in the news and on blogs that there are less than 1 of women in the tech industry and how alarmingly wrong that is. Now what I also see is tons of opportunities and incentives for women to be a part of these industries, whether that comes from college scholarships or other programs to encourage the young women of today to be a part of the industry. I think that if these women were interested in the subject matter they would get involved and the ones who are interested DO get involved, they just happen to be the minority. My whole reasoning for this comes from the idea that we don't see it a problem that there are less men in the fashion and garment creation industry. We don't offer men scholarships to go to fashion school and there are no media reports telling me how terribly sexist the fashion and garment creation industry is for not hiring more men. Now this is a BAD example and I know this but I wanted to pick something that was a little more cut and dry female dominated. I don't think that there is anything wrong with women being a part of the tech industry nor do I think that lack of women in the industry is alarming. Just as I don't think there is anything wrong with men being a part of the fashion industry nor do I think we should be alarmed by the lack of men in it either. I don't want this to become a him vs her argument. I just don't believe that forcing an uninterested party into an industry is the answer to a non existent problem. Thanks EDIT Let me just say where some of my views are coming from, a little backstory. My sister is an extremely strong women who is top of her class for her BofS in Geology My girlfriend's Finance courses mathematics heavy are female dominated The lead developer at our company is a woman who has three men working for her From my point of view these are all women who decided they wanted to be interested in their fields and took charge. I have the utmost respect for them but don't feel like they have any troubles with male domination in their fields, albeit not being the subject at hand.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe the lack of Women in tech is a problem.\n","id":"c60f4be8-2ecb-467b-aa4d-11a427394861"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Mother Teresa have been canonized?<|ARGUMENT|>Catholic social teaching forbids both contraception and abortion Had Mother Teresa been in favour of these practices, she would be ineligible for canonisation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mother Teresa's stances on these issues are in line with all other Saints as she followed the Church's teachings on these issues.\n","id":"c7868c80-76ff-423d-b991-0146a9589015"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Scientists think that asteroids and comets are key to the formation of life on Earth. Comet impacts likely caused amino acids to combine which made life possible. From what is known about solar-system formation, there are other comets in other planetary systems that could be doing the same thing right now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Panspermia Theory posits that life was transported to Earth on asteroids or comets and started somewhere else originally.\n","id":"4dd85317-b3e2-438f-ad14-0dfebea4dff6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public health systems fund homeopathy?<|ARGUMENT|>Funding homeopathy ensures that homeopaths are more likely to direct patients who are skeptical of mainstream healthcare towards other parts of the public healthcare system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Funding homeopathy would encourage people to use the public health system.\n","id":"97718e28-c5e8-49f2-8b4b-671784a73ab5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>There is evidence that field commanders overlooked logistical preparations including having sufficient military policemen to maintain order and to issue clear orders for the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Institutional failings within the Japanese army significantly contributed to the Nanking Massacre. Therefore the Japanese state is legally responsible for the massacre.\n","id":"8a10911d-5d5a-4e85-bbfd-8053a6cfd439"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>This is important not only because they can decide for themselves what to value even if what they individually value is not what is 'best' for them, but also because it provides them the human dignity to be able to make those choices for themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Thus, we should try and construct moral claims based on what most achieves freedoms and agency to individuals to determine their own choices.\n","id":"19a979bb-6ab2-42ae-9b44-66facfcd91e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>Plot twists such as Finn and Rose failing with what was thought to be the last hope of the resistance breaks away from the audience expectations that we know how things are going to turn out with regards to the subplots.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The narrative that \"This is not going to go the way you think\" is used dynamically in the movie in a way which both surprises the audience while still having a clear red line throughout the plot.\n","id":"3537487b-a70d-4406-b2b4-e0135c5175ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Islam compatible with feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>Patriarchy is a consequence of individuals confusing sex biology with its social constructions gender when attempting to understand verses in the Quran regarding men and women, rather than religious doctrine p.29, para. 2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The institutionalisation of patriarchy can be attributed to the cultural practices and traditional, male-dominated religious interpretations of Islamic scripture, rather than religious doctrine p. 3, para 3.\n","id":"a5c2025e-a3b4-489c-8a3f-f9c2007f1410"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>In a pamphlet describing approaches to discuss LGBT+ issues, it is recommended that language be kept simple by referring to the LGBT+ umbrella as \"gay couples\" or \"gay and transgender people\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The language employed by the LGBT+ community to frame their demands fundamentally discludes aromantics and asexuals, particularly with the development of the theory of the sexual citizens\n","id":"83f3ce04-4227-4f5b-9026-eaaf11b5ba12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start off by saying I've had people someone very close to me in my life diagnosed with a horrible terminal illness and I think it's awful and tragic there wasn't an avenue for this person to choose to end their life with dignity. It is extremely upsetting and really a horrible situation and I deeply empathise with the pro euthanasia position. That said, I don't believe it's possible to design a system that allows such people to be euthanised without also allowing some people to be euthanised for the wrong reasons. I have a lot of experience with psychologists and psychiatrists, personally and with others in my life. These professionals can be very helpful and mean well, but they are not human lie detectors. In my experience it is pretty easy if not common for a patient to mislead deliberately or not mental health professionals about how they're really feeling. Often this is because of shame, sometimes it is by design to avoid being hospitalised or diagnosed with a particular disorder etc. Especially if somebody has done even a little bit of reading about the diagnostic criteria for a certain thing, really it is often child's play to get a mental health professional to believe what you want them to believe. I think it is inevitable that if euthanasia is legalized some people who don't want to die but feel pressure to pursue euthanasia because they are a burden , or upsetting their family, or using up financial resources, or even being pressured by the family will be able to say all the right things to get approved for euthanasia. I think victims of psychological abuse would be particularly vulnerable. Even if only a small amount of people who don't really want to die, or only think they do because of the manipulation psychological abuse of those close to them, are killed because of a legal euthanasia program, in my opinion that is completely unacceptable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Euthanasia should not be legalized\n","id":"0d2e7468-4aae-4dad-8391-0ddea62a7ea6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When America went to war with Nazi Germany, no one had any idea the scale of the atrocities being committed. We do know, however, that North Korea is doing much of the same things. They have concentration camps, they have public executions, they have the most brutal authoritarian regime in the world. Add in critical life threatening poverty, disease, and famine, and the conditions in which these people live is unimaginable by any other human standards. On top of that, they are threatening the destruction of other nations. And not like Iran or other Muslim countries where they're always chanting death to Israel and death to America . No, these guys are actually making credible threats of nuclear war. Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying let's go to war with North Korea . I'm saying, if ever there were a just war, this would be it. Please  because I don't want to go to war with North Korea. EDIT Okay I'm getting a lot of the same responses, so I'm going to assume that my statement is poorly formed and clarify here. I understand that America didn't go to war with Nazi Germany over the atrocities they committed. But the atrocities they committed were what made them the bad guys of history. When we look back on history, we are glad to have stopped the Nazis, not because they were allied with Japan , but because they were doing horrible things to their own people. So, I'm sorry, but arguments of that's not why we went to war with the Nazis are not going to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you think America did the right thing in going to war with Nazi Germany, you should support going to war with North Korea.\n","id":"2b8cff3a-07b4-4797-ab69-8720aa1c44a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>This is technically correct in that one can choose to starve as a homeless person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No member of society is forced to do anything except pay taxes.\n","id":"f4022152-da06-4a9b-ac46-ef5f53ea6263"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Racial Profiling Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>People's current life circumstances are determined in a way that is almost as out of their control as their race. So insofar as it is legitimate to use facts like a person's way of dressing or location in order to assess the likelihood that they committed a crime, it is legitimate to use their race.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person's race is not principally different from any other observable characteristic eg their behaviour or location that affects whether they are likely to have committed a crime.\n","id":"d2ab085c-e99b-4438-b067-981b59a42033"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this  has been posted a thousand times, but few of them seem to address the simple fact that everything in the world is governed by the laws of physics, which means our brains would be too. Firstly, I would define free will as the ability to think and make decisions based purely through ones self, and not being dictated by any outside factors, including the laws of physics. Just like we are able to predict the force a ball is thrown with given its mass and acceleration, we would be able to predict our choices or thoughts we make given all the factors in the moment. Of course there are billions of factors, and we will most likely never become technologically advanced to accomplish such a feat, but there is no reason for it not to be theoretically possible. A common counter argument I see is that recent studies have shown the possibility of randomness existing in QM. Randomness does not equate to free will, as we still have no control over it. For free will to exist, our consciousness would have to exist in some other dimension separate from the one we live in, that does not abide by any sort of laws. And even if that was possible, what would the even be? How could something exist without some kind of underlying laws? This was a bit of a rant, but I find it baffling that the majority of philosophers believe in free will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free Will does not Exist\n","id":"43668051-099d-4b76-9613-8c949fa7c20e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, today I saw the latest in a long string of ads for Deadpool 2. It\u2019s Wade and David Beckham having a series of awkward encounters, due to Wade\u2019s comment about Beckham\u2019s voice in the first film. It\u2019s funny, unique, and in my opinion, a good example of how incredible the marketing for this movie has been. Obviously, the success of the first movie helped the studio realize that if they leaned into the absurd nature of the character, people would buy it. But it feels like they\u2019ve really outdone themselves. Later this month, I don\u2019t know the exact date, they will be releasing \u201cDeadpool editions\u201d of famous movies Regular DVD\u2019s and Blu Ray discs with Deadpool photoshopped onto the cover. Not only will this create a collectors item, grab the attention of even the most casual consumer, and fit with the character\u2019s humor it\u2019s also just a really unique idea that nobody else has ever done. On top of this, there\u2019s the new Celine Dion song, which accomplished everything that the DVD thing does, and the completely outside of the box poster designs. Then, earlier this week, the \u201c WadeWilsonDemandsYourSisterSorryStupidAutocorrectSilence\u201d ad, which just seems like a master stroke of satire and hype. I can\u2019t think of any other movie in my lifetime with this level of work put into making the marketing unique and flamboyant. I think this is one of, if not the best movie marketing campaign of all time. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Deadpool 2 has the best marketing campaign for a film in the last decade or more.\n","id":"670bc923-313d-4ff3-9177-fa768e4f320b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Until the last year, I used to not really care about NSA spying on us or Google taking our data because whatever, it's not that I do illegal things . However, the recent events made me think that the data taken by the goverments from us could be used as a way of intimidation see 1st point, replace goverment by someone who hates you I'm really worried about the evolutions of the thing. Now, I live in Italy, and our govermnment as being one of the most corrupt in Europe wasn't enough has decided to hand all of our motherfucking medical data to the giant IBM as a thank you for the opening of a research center. You can read it here. This is absurd. I repeat it, this world is getting nearer to a dystopia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This world is getting nearer and nearer to a mass surveillance dystopia\n","id":"e4642c54-2d44-4768-b5d9-57c962d73e18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the Strikeout ALS Ice Water Challenge is not actually accomplishing anything, but instead is just a way for people to feel good about themselves without actually making an impact. I don't believe that challenging people to pour ice water over top of themselves helps the cause, and that people are not going to donate simply because they were challenged. I believe that one of the only reasons that people take part in the ice water challenge is to be accepted by their peers, and not actually make a difference towards combating ALS. . I also believe that people should not be shamed into charitable works, but that's another matter<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the \"Strikeout ALS Ice Water Challenge\" is not doing any good, but is instead just a stunt.\n","id":"b66afced-30f9-4098-95dc-3dd7621509b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For some time, I've worked over this issue in my head that this one woman I connect with incredibly well, am able to talk to without feeling awkward, and think about more than any other person has to be the person I should be with, and no other girl would want me anyway. But, the trap card here is that she's expressed she doesn't want to be with me, but just be kinky friends over the internet. I know her anxiety makes it impossible for her to meet others without having a panic attack, and I know it causes her to say things she later changes. This makes me believe I can convince her. There's too many things I know hardly any other girl would enjoy, that her and I enjoy. I'm pretty sure other girls would just judge me by my cover and refuse any further contact. It's to the point where I don't think my life has meaning without her. Please, change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think there's any girl but her for me\n","id":"b26cbff6-b407-4c28-8e91-54b7bb373de5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this is really specific but I'd like other people's views on this. Also my first  post so let me know if I did something wrong. x200B A lot of beatboxers are known for bringing beatboxing into the modern world, and incorporating it with many different things. Reeps One, for example, is well known for being one of the first modern beatboxers and making it into the artform it is today. His beatboxing with AI was and is revered for being innovative and widening the scope of beatboxing. Reggie Watts is another of these beatboxers, whose beatboxing is integrated with comedy, satire, and social commentary. While people like these obviously are crucial to beatboxing becoming modern, mainstream, and incorporated with other aspects of entertainment, I believe Tom Thum has been the most influential person when it comes to modernizing beatboxing. x200B Tom focuses less on pure mastery of beatboxing and more on the creative expression of it. His superhero mashup, orchestral beatboxing, Live from the Larynx series, TedX Talk, Human Sample Kit Experiment, and behind the scenes look at his techniques and practices have done so much to make the average person more aware of beatboxing as an artform. His creative integration of beatboxing into things such as orchestras, jazz music, and rock have affected the modernization of beatbox more than any other person. x200B .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tom Thum has done more for integrating beatboxing into the mainstream than anybody else.\n","id":"6e198903-a044-414e-a42f-3d015a3c73f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With logic and reason we could kill eveything, love, hope, faith, fear, want . I know we are not some logical machines or something like that but with enough practise we could be.When I look at myself or people around me, we are all so illogical in so many ways. EDIT I'm talking about how we the people are illogical most of the time, we believe in so many things even do there is no logical reason for us to do so Because there is no reason for our existence or existence of everything else, we can kill it, i mean could make our purpose in life to hel progres of human kind just to go around the universe and kill everything, not because we like it or something sick like that No, because it is logical thing to do<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that we should kill everything\n","id":"5b7f3933-72ac-4da6-95d3-d884cf4400a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously from my title you can tell I am open to changing my view, and am looking for information that might do so. Given so many people are so riled up by this ruling, I assume I must be missing something, but in my understanding of what this ruling means, I agree with it. The ruling frees individuals to donate to as many campaigns as they wish in a two year period provided they don't donate more than 5800 to anyone candidate. Right? The logic of the rulings opponents SEEMS to be that this will allow those who can afford it to donate to ALL candidates, thereby ensuring they will have a candidate in office who is 'indebted' to them And on the surface I can understand why one might think it's unfair, that these wealthy donors will be able to buy politicians But 5800 seems like a drop in the bucket, I can't imagine a politician would feel indebted to the person that gave that much Of course a bunch of rich people with similar interests could ALL give 5800 to all campaigns, and make it clear to the candidate who wins that they shouldn't expect that money next time unless they serve them But I mean, there are ways around this Isn't it possible that before this ruling, the rich could just put their money into developing an infrastructure and recruiting rich people from all over the country to give max donations to all campaigns any way? Ultimately though, I don't feel like opponents of the ruling have given a satisfactory explanation for why this is so potentially damaging, or illustrated well enough the consequences of it what precisely do you feel will happen? All I hear are generalities about how the rich are now able to truly own the government Also, why should there be limits at all? In theory ANY money given to a campaign is meant to influence the government by seating a politician the donor believes will advance their interests Why is 5800 OK, and 5900 is not? Or the reverse should we do away with private financing altogether? It seems where this logic ends up is that any money given to a campaign is meant to influence democracy, so the only fair way is public financing and the only influence individuals should have is through their own action and with their vote. Lastly, what does it say if we are so opposed to this ruling except that we don't truly believe in democracy? Isn't a democratic nation only as good as those who participate in it? It seems the real fear is A that wealthy campaigns will air more ads do more outreach and be more able to swindle the stupid public who don't know anything and can't think for themselves into voting for them and B that the devastating effects of that politician once elected will be ignored by the public, who again are too stupid to care or think for themselves, and they will just keep electing them But as I see it if that is what happens, that's not the Supreme Court's fault, it's ours. The Supreme Court ruling simply makes it HARDER for citizens to be complacent and ignore their responsibility to participate in our government. That's the cost of freedom and democracy, in my view if you disagree then try to change it. And if your opposition is based on these fears and a belief that the system should be designed to protect the citizens despite their participation or awareness of what is truly in their best interests, why not fight for more practical limitations on government like term limits? gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I agree with the McCutcheon v. FEC ruling... I think...\n","id":"66905ed7-3379-428d-b8b8-090402f7d261"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The UN Human Rights Council should be abolished<|ARGUMENT|>In a perfect and fictional dream world, we could create a council which would put an end to all worldwide problems, bring world peace and end all famine. We at team Opposition suggest looking at the reality of the complex world we live in and the even more diverse surroundings that the UNHRC exists. We will clarify the exact aims and goals of the Council, then show they are certainly being fulfilled successfully. Not only that, but these goals are essential to the HR problem solving process. The Human Rights Council was established to \u201cstrengthen the promotion and protection of Human Rights\u201d. To accomplish this, the council is expected to investigate HR situations and provide appropriate recommendations. Suffice it to have a quick glance at the latest summary of resolutions, decisions and statements issued by the council, to clearly see the evidence of how the council\u2019s important objectives are being constantly met. These include decision to mandate fact finding missions, investigations into breaches of HR, interactive dialogues, along with declarations and discussions that raise global attention to a wide range of HR issues such as: trafficking in persons, violence against women, human rights of migrants and children, among other important areas covered recently Bringing these items to the consciousness and agenda of the world and the consequent discussions with the relevant parties are all an immense part of the process towards resolving these issues. Prop\u2019s suggestion we put an end to all these highly important contributions, makes no sense. What Prop seems to expect of the UNHRC is simply not within its charter, and so there\u2019s no wonder that Prop\u2019s expectations weren\u2019t answered. In reality, the UNHRC is living up to its charter and acting on its designated goals by its designated tools, and so we see no reason to abolish it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The council\u2019s goals and how it successfully achieves them\n","id":"dfb1dd31-877b-43df-8259-3cf375835413"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am an environmentalist, and have been stuffing my head with mostly American documentaries about how corporations are polluting and giving people all sorts of things which are bad for their health mostly but not limited to food and drugs . I'm also impatient at the slow pace at which action on climate change is happening. As I see it, one of the main problems is that different countries have different regulations, and this leaves companies free to pick whichever place to operate that has the lowest standards. This is further complicated by the fact that even with great regulations on paper, many of them are subverted by loopholes, corruption, or simply a lack of enforcement. Therefore I have come to the conclusion that the best solution is regulations created at the global level and enforced by a global body, so there would be nowhere to hide. They would be strong low emissions limits for example and tight requiring lots of testing on new products, no loopholes . I have in mind food, medicine and environment related regulations, although I can see applications for other things as well. I am aware that the implementation would be hellishly difficult. However, there is also the imperative to reduce human suffering, which I'm sure every political party everywhere can get behind, right? You could  by showing how such an organisation is not absolutely necessary . I worded it this way because I think this is the only solution but I might be wrong Or maybe there's a completely different angle I haven't thought of? Edit for clarity the main purpose of this organisation would be to police corporations . Governments would simply have to supply funding and possibly manpower, then get out of the way. Edit for clarity 2 I've already gotten some posts that go it won't happen because X, Y and Z . I don't think these contribute to the discussion, because I'm not asking can we do this? but rather do we need to do this?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A \"world government\" or equivalent organisation is absolutely necessary to create and enforce health-related regulations\n","id":"f06d1962-40b0-4854-ba9e-e4ff3662e07c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>The large-scale power outage that hit the Northeast of the US for several days in 2003 was in part caused by a software error.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All software-based devices are notoriously prone to errors, thoroughly tested as they may be.\n","id":"3b66f6a8-2528-4c75-bff1-3a4b3c85e164"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone should learn English because it is the most gender neutral language, the most technical, and helps oppressed people stand up to their oppressors which are often English speaking countries . Now, the rebuttal to my argument would be something like this telling somebody to speak English is racist, oppressive, and ethnocentric. My response is that TEACHING English itself is neither racist, oppressive, nor ethnocentric, because English itself is a language. The root of racism, oppression, and ethnocentrism is more ingrained in politics and economics, which of course is highly discriminative. However, the language itself, which is what I'm talking about, is not the cause of racism or oppression. In fact, I think English can procure changes that free people of oppression, racism, and even sexism. I will elaborate below I don't think people should be forced to learn English obviously because that would be morally wrong and border line imperialistic. However, I do think that people should learn English because it is the most gender neutral compared to gendered languages like Spanish or Thai. If the world were truly to one day be equal, it would make sense that this world would be a world in which people spoke a gender neutral language like English. I also think that English is the most technical. Languages like Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish, are sometimes to dependent on cultural circumstances and are often spoken metaphorically, specifically the Asian languages do this a lot. If everyone learned English, the world would have greater understanding and peace. Ambassadors politicians of every country could understand one another and reach peaceful negotiations. By teaching English to a developing nation, where often the most oppression occurs, the poor minorities can stand up for their rights. How can the poor know that they're being oppressed by their English speaking rulers, if they can't understand or voice their opinions in English? After all, most countries or big businesses that generate the most oppression are English speaking. Therefore, if people knew English they could stand up for themselves. In conclusion, everyone should learn English since it's very gender neutral, which is great for sex equality, it's the most technical, and it also helps the poor minority by giving them a weapon to defend themselves against English speaking oppressors. I'm open to changing my view EDIT Thanks for changing my view. English is not so gender neutral as I thought it was. Further, it's better to let people learn whatever language they want to learn.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone should learn English, compared to other languages.\n","id":"015a3924-6121-4b25-865f-7997eac5fa4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is digitalization good for healthcare?<|ARGUMENT|>Access to patient backgrounds would allow practitioners to be aware of crucial information which could not be directly communicated by a patient in an emergency intervention, such as current drug prescriptions, allergies or pre-existing medical conditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Practitioners can get comprehensive patient backgrounds very easily and make more tailored, specific healthcare plans for their patients.\n","id":"daf9d471-847c-4320-a3dc-79ca20e461d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be one World Government?<|ARGUMENT|>All conventional wars between countries would stop as they come together to form a world state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The formation of this state would lead to the immediate reduction of conflict and violence.\n","id":"6329cb83-980b-4b33-89aa-be1318ce85c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the modern world, we go out of our way to ensure that things like racism, sexism, etc are deterred, and I think that's a positive thing. However, trying to solve the problem with this PC philosophy of language is not helpful and shifts our focus to a much more shallow place. Let's take a very popular real world example the N word. I think Louis C.K. kind of has the right idea here NSFW . For those of you who don't care to watch it, the basic idea is that saying the N word is effectively the exact same thing as saying the actual word. Why? Because it should be the intention behind the word, the context of the word that matters, not the word itself. If our intentions are clear, it shouldn't matter the word we use. If the speaker has fulfilled their responsibility of making their intentions clear, then the listener should follow through with their responsibility of interpreting what's said based on those conveyed intentions. A good example of when this philosophy of language actually prevails at least in many familiar circles is swearing. Swearing in general is considered offensive, rude and aggressive, yet in a close circle of friends, swearing is often quite common and casual. No one takes offense because they all understand that nobody is actually being hostile. But, when a friend shows genuine signs of anger and starts throwing around curse words in a genuinely aggressive manner, their friends can interpret them different based on the context. Not the word itself, but the context and the intentions that are being conveyed. In PC language philosophy, the intent behind the word becomes much less relevant, as the zeitgeist has determined that some words are inherently evil until they arbitrarily evolve to be less offensive. So based on this, we make up rules like this word belongs to that culture or that group. You're not allowed to say it. It doesn't matter what the context was or if you were just quoting something or if everyone in the room is fine with it, you're just not allowed. To me, this doesn't solve any kind of problem. If someone has something genuinely offensive to say, they're going to find a way to say it with or without this arbitrary list of evil words, and isn't that what matters? Shouldn't the focus be more on evil ideas instead of evil words? I think this is a first step in foregoing intelligent discussion and ultimately solves nothing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political correctness is not efficient, productive or healthy\n","id":"ef2f56ce-fd4b-4e3d-820c-e70fc6853d56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Local intelligence agencies find it really hard to thoroughly check the backgrounds on refugees. This leaves a lot of room for unknown people to enter the country who may possibly even be terrorists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is virtually impossible to vet refugees thoroughly. This leaves the door open for terrorists to migrate to a country posing as refugees.\n","id":"98ff0313-752d-4f4e-9622-e11909b04a58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>About half of all Americans disagree with the idea that slavery was among the factors that created conditions under which it is difficult for Black Americans to work their way out of the lower class.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The majority of the population does not understand the issue at hand correctly.\n","id":"2941f06f-6a88-42fb-bd69-7192c11622da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please note that I'm not disclosing my position on the ethics of his actions, or my position on the ethics of his decision to evade arrest or prosecution There are many undisputed facts about the snowden leaks It Is a Illegal to b Knowingly and c Willfully d Share Classified Information to e an Unauthorized Entity. 1 Edward Snowden Knowingly and Willfully Shared Classified Information to a Unauthorized Entity. 2 Edward Snowden has publicly admitted to performing these actions A truly impartial jury, upon reviewing this evidence, would declare him guilty of breaking the law EDIT I'm going to bed now. I'll be back to reply around 1030AM CST tomorrow<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Edward Snowden received a truly fair and impartial trial by a jury of his peers, he would still be found guilty\n","id":"4ce9b34c-9369-4e56-9982-c06ce5cb8c2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In 1997, after a shooting in a primary school in Dunblane in Scotland, the first and only in my lifetime handguns have been banned in the UK for private ownership. Guns for sport are still available subject to getting a license. Unlike the US, our police force don't carry guns as standard. Due to the recent attacks in the country, there has been an increase in officers carrying firearms but it is still no where as high as the US. I believe that no one needs a gun in there everyday life and if no one had the opportunity to get one, many more lives would be saved. Too many times in my life, I turned on TV to find there has been another attack on a school or a nightclub or anywhere in the US, that would not have taken so many lives if any had the persons involved not had access to a gun. I have never understood the pro gun argument. I do understand that it is in the constitution to have the right to carry arms. But I would like to understand better the argument from the other side?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- Private ownership of guns should be stricter in the USA as it is in the UK. Far more harm comes than good.\n","id":"0216064a-10b5-4a57-b831-3fe65556819d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you aren't aware, there is an Avengers Age of Ultron interview with Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner that they called Black Widow a slut and a whore when asked the question about Black Widow. While I consider myself as feminist and somehow understand why so many people are upset about this, I don't find this very offensive personally to me because I felt like the terms slut and whore should not be exclusively pejorative terms. I think it should be on the same level as the word bitch . Bitch is a pejorative term for a female but it can be used as an empowering word for a strong woman. In fact, many women take pride on using the word bitch. Without making slut and whore pejorative terms, slut and whore means someone who enjoys sex liberally. That doesn't sound too bad at all to be honest. Sex is good as long it's safe. I want to see your feedback about this and to see if I am not the only one who thinks the same. But I am open to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think \"slut\" and \"whore\" should no longer be exclusively pejorative terms.\n","id":"a4fcd5c7-f01c-40d7-ace7-e6454f1cf22e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does modern advertising do more harm than good?<|ARGUMENT|>It can be hard to discern when one is being advertised to rather than being presented with facts and accurate information on mediums that should be trustworthy news, informational websites etc<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On many mediums, loose regulations mean adverts can be intentionally misleading and sensationalizing.\n","id":"02dc7a49-337c-4995-be16-40627a58b5ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Our body weight is determined by the amount of energy or calories that we eat and the number of calories we burn up doing whatever we do in our everyday lives. Rather like these scales, if we eat more calories than we burn, we tip the balance the wrong way and put on weight. In today\u2019s world, we all have easy access to high fat and high calorie foods and many of us have a reduced need for physical exertion during our working and home lives. This can lead over a period of time to a gain in weight. So it is simply about eating too much food and taking too little exercise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetics has nothing to do with weight gaining\n","id":"8a192933-5134-46bc-b406-829055eaeffe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>Society is the expression of human nature as mankind evolved to a more communal existence. To say that society is harmed by its own tendency to be communal is a nonsense and fallacy. To assume that society must be only composed by a benign, cooperative and an at all times helpful and constructive population is to ignore the elements of human nature in favour of an idealised but unreal mankind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society cannot be divorced from its individual constituents. Society is principally a product of two or more individuals, and as such represents an aggregation of the human nature of its constituents.\n","id":"69aeffdf-b028-4ace-9487-f8c417eb5606"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's common knowledge that the better someone does in school, the more likely they are to have a successful life. Many people assume that employers value people with lots of knowledge in a particular field. However, I believe there is a deeper reason behind why doing well in school increases one's chance of becoming successful. Employers like to hire people that work hard. Employees that work hard will make money for their higher ups while slackers don't contribute to anything. Employers need a good way to see if someone is able to put in the necessary work. And that's what I believe the American school system does. People that work hard in school will earn good grades while lazy people will get mediocre or bad grades. People that are hiring for an organization can see how hard working someone is by simply looking at the grades they got in highschool college. While I do believe that people learn in schools, there are better ways to assess someone's knowledge of a subject. For example, the homework problem. Working on homework for 3 hours a day is a bad way to get someone to learn something. In fact, there have been studies that say homework doesn't even improve knowledge. Here's an article that explains this pretty well It's just busy work that gives students credit for hard work. At the end of the day, getting good grades depends on how much work one is willing to put in. Good grades aren't based solely on intelligence the smartest individual still has to commit a good chunk of their day on schoolwork. Employers like to see that willingness to work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The American school system is designed to filter out the lazy from the hard-workers, disguised as places where people go to learn.\n","id":"41c6e3b2-0ab3-49b8-863c-0304fe5ce1e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The real problem with capitalism is that there is no equality of opportunity under this system. Your entire life gets determined by which class you happen to get born into. If the effect of this \u2018happenstance\u2019 could somehow be eliminated, so that everyone enjoyed equality of opportunity, then even though income and wealth inequalities continued to remain in society, this fact per se would not be a cause for concern. Access to larger income and wealth would then be determined not by \u2018luck\u2019 of being born into a particular class but by ability and effort. In fact, one can even go further if the capitalist system could be so reformed that equality of opportunity for everyone could be ensured within this system itself, then even the continued existence of a group of people called capitalists and another group called workers, should not really matter. Needless to say, equality of opportunity in such a \u2018reformed\u2019 capitalist society must entail the confiscation to a significant extent, through death duties, of the property of the capitalists after their death so that their children do not enjoy an unfair advantage over others. Equality of opportunity is possible only in a society which can achieve and maintain full employment without jeopardizing work discipline, that is, only in a society where people work with discipline not because they are afraid of being consigned to the ranks of the unemployed but because they voluntarily internalize the need to work with discipline. This can only be a society where the workers collectively own the means of production. Of course, mere formal or juridical ownership of the means of production by the collectivity of workers is not enough to ensure that they internalize the necessity to work with discipline they must feel part of a \u2018community\u2019 and transcend their individual self interest as a condition for this. Equality of opportunity in short is possible only under socialism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To achieve true equality, we must eliminate capitalism and inheritance\n","id":"438ec494-6ed0-4d20-878b-a1a24660c355"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>All and only human beings have all or some combination of the capacities to have a concept of \"self\", to make free choices and to reason.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals are not morally equivalent to humans and therefore do not possess an equal natural right to live.\n","id":"5da7bc5c-b226-4637-9f6d-eac4149861b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should athletes be allowed to compete in their chosen gender category?<|ARGUMENT|>The \"10-second barrier\" referred to the psychological and physical barrier to running the 100m sprint in under 10 seconds. This was first achieved by Jim Hines in 1968, but since then numerous athletes have go on to achieve such a time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The limits of human capability in sport have always been challenged, and have steadily improved.\n","id":"43ba4463-417b-4942-a518-1cb1b130d16d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Social Networks Force Users to Use Their Real Identity?<|ARGUMENT|>Young LGBT+ people may use anonymous social media profiles to interact with other members of the community without outing themselves to people they know. Forcing them to use their real names risks cutting them off from a vital source of support.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many legitimate reasons to have a private profile, such as people fleeing abuse or discrimination.\n","id":"8aaea6e0-aedf-4b0b-a1d9-e6cec28ce936"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are gender and sex the same thing?<|ARGUMENT|>At the same time, the LGBTQIA+ movement is fighting to increase our understanding of how sex, sexuality and gender differ. This creates competing voices instead of a united call for us to rethink how we understand the concept of sex\/ gender which could include all of the issues these groups currently campaign on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Currently, intersex activists and feminist science try to increase our awareness and understanding of the limitations of our understanding sex: how the dichotomy may not be the most accurate understanding of how genes and sex traits actually occur across the human population.\n","id":"7afd48d9-9ee3-4592-a47d-3c1dea450d8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>disclaimer I am not talking about your pastor in your neighborhood church. I am probably not even talking about a lot of Megachurches though there is definitely overlap . I am specifically talking about the pastors that get nationwide TV time. Your John Hagee, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Creflo Dollar, etc. Now I get that religion and faith are hard to quantify and i can't say that they are selling invisible products. What I will attack is their methodology of Scripture, the legal lines they cross, and of course the results. Now the majority of televangelists live in really nice houses and have nice cars, clothes, and other benefits like private jets. No law saying that they can't own nice things but how do they acquire it? They get people to give them money in exchange for a future blessing. In USA we have prosperity doctrine. This is the Religious belief that if you give money to the church, God will reward you with five, ten times your donation. Televangelists milk this doctrine for what it is worth. They will use tactics saying things like I know you are on your last 1,000 but give it to us and God will bless you with more money than you can imagine . If you are a person of faith, sounds like a good wager. The problem is that this money obviously goes into the pockets of the minister and other leaders of the ministry. They often follow up asking for more and more money from donors. Now this is definitely the work of a con artist. Now let's go another step. Most of these groups do not pay taxes. They are registered as 501c 3 and as a non profit, don't pay taxes on their donations. Well one rule of all non profit is to not get political. Well this doesn't stop them from endorsing candidates. In and of itself this doesn't bother me but to quote George Carlin, if you want to get so involved in politics then pay your admission fee. Many televangelists sell products. Now they don't really sell the product. They ask for a donation and in exchange you get this gift. This helps them skirt some tax laws. If this were a business or a charity, at some point I feel like the IRS or law enforcement would investigate them. There have been some watchdog groups that have exposed them but it rarely goes beyond exposure. Their ministry continues without issue. Only person I can think of who got their come uppance was Jim Bakker and he is back at it again. I am open to hearing how televangelists are actually benefitted the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Televangelists are mostly con artists and should be investigated by some government body.\n","id":"f945ac2d-1c6e-4383-aac0-69be8faf1396"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There is no meaning of life<|ARGUMENT|>The deadline for the climate's \"point of no return\" precedes the first projected interstellar mission, and it will be too difficult to extend the deadline far enough to reach the interstellar mission, especially because relocating funding to extend the deadline will push back the rocket flights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Earth, the only unassistedly habitable planet, will become uninhabitable much sooner, and humans will most likely not escape it before it does.\n","id":"ac87123c-901d-4613-9947-e844e88ef958"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think people who murdered, raped and or did a similar crime cp, pedophilia should be tortured. I only think it is okay for them to be tortured when it is undoubtedly proven that they committed the crime. I also think there should be levels of torture depending on the crime circumstance. For example, a serial killer get tortured on a higher degree than a rapist. I want to think differently but I don't think someone who took someone's life should be able to take the easy way out like the guy who killed himself after kidnapping those two girls by simply having jail time or killing themselves. I also don't believe in the death penalty because I view it as a way of avoiding more severe consequences. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Murderers, rapists, and other criminals of related crime should be tortured. Cmv.\n","id":"98bf381f-f2fa-48d0-b9c9-c578be6891d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the EU should offer asylum to women from countries which have legislation that discriminates against women.<|ARGUMENT|>Women who are constantly threatened by their husbands or who are in societies where they are considered to represent less than a man will most certainly lack ambition to achieve their full potential \u2013 or even if they do have the ambition will be restrained from fulfilling it. When you live under a system that considers you inferior to the other gender and denies you opportunities on the basis of gender \u2013 sometimes including education the individual is clearly never going to have a chance to make their life worthwhile for its own sake. They won\u2019t be able to take up jobs that will have an impact on the world, they won\u2019t control their own economic circumstances as their husband is the only breadwinner, and they will be denied the opportunity to express their ideas and views. By giving them asylum in a place where women and men are treated equally, we give them the opportunity to do whatever they wanted to do before. Besides the security that they will gain, they will be able to go to school or get a job more easily than in their native country. There is no reason for which we don\u2019t want these women to be a part of our European cultural identity. It is shameful to give this opportunity only to your citizens when women from countries that discriminate against them might be able to contribute so much more than they are able to under their circumstances in their native country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We would allow discriminated women to reach their full potential\n","id":"04550584-cb78-4ff6-88ac-b9fe70b4d8fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This all may sounds very selfish. Edit This is not a troll post damnit Our economy depends heavily on the USA. It's growth is important for the reast of the world. Bernie Sanders will raise taxes which will mean less growth. He fight for lower price of pharmaceuticals. Almost all research for new medicin comes from the USA because it is an investment for the companies to make new drugs so they can sell them for a super high price in the USA. He will fight for free college. If everybody in USA were able to receive free college education then the value of each degree will decrease. It could be my future degree which will decrease in value. He propose maternity leave, sick leave, lower working weeks which will be paid by a salary tax decrease spending and then growth and the time the workers are gone production is reduced and will hurt the GDP economy I read around reddit that Bernie Sanders have no experience or knowlegde around economics and foreign policy But that maybe just be hypersomething . Those things are whats gonna affect me as Dane. I think it's important America stay as it it. While us Europeans freeloads off USA. But Change My View<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a Dane. I hope Bernie loses.\n","id":"deec8820-dd77-44d6-a48c-593f87b08676"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I did search through past topics in this sub, assuming this would have been covered. To my surprise, the most recent that I found was nearly two years ago. I'm not a huge Hillary fan I supported Bernie in the primaries, I think Hillary is an especially hollow politican relying almost entirely on uncontroversial stances, backing from wall street, superpacs, etc. and is very clearly desperate in her attempts to appeal to younger voters. A Hillary presidency doesn't get me particularly excited. HOWEVER. Hillary, in terms of qualifications at least, is a very strong presidential candidate. She served as the first lady for 8 years, the secretary of state for 4, and as a NY senator for 4 years. She is a fairly moderate liberal who is a skilled diplomat and seems as ready as any candidate for the tasks the office requires. In my opinion, I will admit, marginally uninformed, but significantly more than many of the people that I've heard using these scandals as evidence against her , both the Benghazi scandal and email scandal are way overblown. I could get into why I think so, but, to be honest, I'm sure some more slightly informed people will outline it below. I don't think Trump is Hitler, or anything close, but the comparison does bear consideration in terms of bigotry, taking advantage of fear, etc. People defend his actions at a totally different standard than the average person. There is clearly still hate in this country, and based on so much of what Trump has said, he is quite misogynistic and racist. I would feel incredibly uncomfortable with someone like this running our country in 2016. Speaking of misogyny, I think voting someone into office for being a woman is just as deplorable for voting someone in just for being a man. That being said, I've spoken to many people, young people in Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the country that genuinely dislike Hillary just for being a woman. Even those who don't consciously feel this way are often subconsciously motivated by it being a woman fighting for power with men, she is often portrayed as 'catty' or 'bitchy.' Once again, I don't think Hillary would be a particularly exceptional president, but I don't think she'd be particularly poor either. Certainly she would be better than Trump, who, in my opinion at least, has the potential to be the worst president the US has ever seen. In years past, back when Trump was a joke , she was considered a perfectly viable option, one of the most qualified for the job. What exactly makes people think that Hillary would not do a serviceable job? not meant to sound aggressive, genuinely wondering And even if you think she'd be subpar, what in the world puts her on the same level as Trump? Update It's 3 06 AM where I am right now, so I'm gonna hit the hay. As of right now, I've responded to every comment view not yet changed. I promise I'm not soapboxing this is simply a firmly held belief of mine, that many people don't seem to agree with. I would genuinely like to understand their rationales, and am willing to change my opinion if provided with a strong enough argument. I'll pick it back up tomorrow morning, assuming I have more comments to reply to. Update 2 My apologies, guys, I've seen several people point out that calling him Drumpf makes it difficult to take me seriously. I can understand this opinion, I generally tune people out when they say Obummer or Shillary. I downloaded the Drumpfinator chrome extension several months ago just for fun it change the word Trump to Drumpf on chrome pages automatically. I didn't realize it would apply to comments that I wrote. I turned it off now, and I'll try to edit when I can, but there'll still be quite a few out there. That one's on me. Update 3 Wow. Overwhelming number of responses here thoroughly enjoyed the discussion. I did award a delta, albeit to u LtPowers for changing my opinion on the morality of voting for a female because they are a female. At this point, I will only be replying sporadically, since there are at present 376 comments, updating every few minutes, and I do have a life. Thanks everyone<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hillary Would Be a Perfectly Fine President, at least. Any Comparison to a Trump Presidency is ludicrous.\n","id":"f88eca37-a852-4e35-8c70-3b79452cba6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Since PC's goal is to avoid insult it can suppress any speech that some might perceive to be insulting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no consensus on what constitutes political correctness. Therefore, any speech could be considered potentially unacceptable.\n","id":"a4a71aec-06a2-4099-8cbc-056a7d439444"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>as the developed world, fund African climate adaptation<|ARGUMENT|>A report by the United Nations Environmental Project estimates that adaptation costs to Africa per year could already be $15billion, reach $50billion by 2050 and anything up to $350billion by 2070. Funding for adaptation to Africa in 2011 was only $454milliion.1 This is not a gap that Africa can make up itself; in 2010 all spending on education was less than $50billion.2 Africa can\u2019t afford to adapt itself while responding to an expanding population as well as its existing problems of poverty and disease. It is clear that developed countries that do have the resources have to step it and take responsibility. 1 Schaeffer, Michiel et al., \u2018Summary\u2019, Africa Adaptation Gap Technical Report, United Nations Environmental Project, 2013 , p.xi 2 \u2018Public spending on education; total % of GDP in sub saharan Africa\u2019, Trading Economics, \u2018Gross domestic product 2010\u2019, World Bank,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Africa does not have the resources to protect itself from climate change\n","id":"d3ca5750-b2e6-4799-b48c-92aba099fe7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m not for completely open, unguarded borders. I think for security reasons, a protected border is necessary. But I do not think that it is in the spirit of America and it\u2019s founding to set limits on the number of immigrants that can enter. Nor do I think it is right to allow educated or wealthy people, while disallowing the poor and unskilled. In America, most of our ancestors were poor, unskilled immigrants, and this is what America is founded on. Even the Statue of Liberty says, \u201cGive me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door \u201d Background check and health screenings are fine, and limiting social services once they arrive is fine, but all eligible non threat immigrants should be allowed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"it is un-American to restrict the number of immigrants or put quota limits on immigration\n","id":"8cd5c354-9ea0-41df-bc1d-939227819dbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that as demand for it increases, technology will catch up to the problems we face re global warming and landfills very quickly, I don't believe anything which can be burned with oxygen is non biodegradable , and I believe humanity is more than equipped to deal with the problem of global warming quickly and efficiently if it comes to it. For instance the enormous advances in the capabilities of solar power we have seen recently. I don't believe it's worth rearranging funding towards programs dedicated to conservation rather than programs dedicated to reversal or alternatives. I reserve an exception for hydraulic fracturing. Edit So I guess recycling is too broad a term. I think of paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum as the things which need to be recycled. For plastic I get the feeling that we are not good enough at sorting plastics to recycle them effectively. For paper I feel like there is less environmental impact to just grow new trees to cut down. I asked r science about this and I didn't really get a good answer. I haven't researched it myself though. Glass I can probably get behind, I don't know how much energy goes into making a bottle from scratch, or what goes into sterilizing them, but I know that a lot of cities used to recycle glass and don't know so Aluminum is elemental, you can't make more of it when you need more of it, which raises the question of whether we should be using it in the first place. Aluminum is probably the only recycling I don't by default think is a waste of time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the benefit of recycling is a myth\n","id":"56dd3072-63e8-4548-84da-5de4a6a054d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that democratic politics tends to reward politicians who are more skilled at manipulating public opinion than actually developing working policies. Understanding policy requires a degree of technical knowledge that most voters simply do not possess. Rather than studying policy decisions in depth, voters depend on superficial sound bite positions on particular high profile issues. Thus, rather than electing those who are truly skilled at crafting working policies, they tend to elect those politicians best suited to manipulating their limited understanding. Meanwhile, special interest groups that understand policy on a deep level have the most influence over policy, because they fund the campaign of superficiality which elects our officials. The influence of these special interests does not directly relate to public support for their positions, but the amount of money they are able to wield in the political arena. Public opinion only effects special interest strength to the degree that public support yields money for the special interest group. This system seems fundamentally flawed to me. In my mind, the ideal political system would reward intellectual and technical prowess over manipulation and acquisition of public opinion and support. I imagine a system in which politics is tied directly to academics. Politicians come to power by competing in an academic arena, garnering support through the strength and complexity of their arguments rather than an appeal to the lowest common denominator. Representatives elected democratically exist only to inform the intellectual power structure of public opinion, and would wield only a veto power to halt any policies that seem destructive or radical. The only way special interests would be able to influence policy would be to field complex technical arguments capable of appealing to the intellectual power structure's rigorous standards. Of course, this is all just in my imagination. But what does reddit think of such a system? Would it work, potentially? What are the potential problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe a technocratic government engineered by intellectual elites would be much better than democracy.\n","id":"c83b1d9f-0c43-45d7-82d8-ba1adca84aac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey be part of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2009 the Human Rights Association stated that up to the end of 2008 a total of 2,949 people had been killed by unknown perpetrators and 2,308 people had become victims of extrajudicial executions<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey has been criticised for its violation of human rights regarding the Kurdish minority.\n","id":"3676c29f-c74d-4e05-9778-498e05b84ee1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Psychiatrists Be Allowed to Diagnose Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Without guidelines, the public could be bombarded by different opinions and diagnosis from psychiatrists, which would have the opposite impact of a transparent and professional discussion and instead only confuse the public more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing all psychiatrists to publicly comment on and diagnose Trump will further fuel the debate regarding his mental health. This is likely to distract from the more objective criticisms of his presidency.\n","id":"f75d4fa1-437e-4fd0-b590-f9ec3e69109c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm from the south in the United States, and I'm so sick of all the apathy that I see in my country. Our government has been handed to us on a silver platter of voting, yet year after year we elect the same fucking two parties that seem bent on destroying our national credit and stuffing the pockets of the elite in our society. The people that would benefit from electing an independent party member for a change FAR outnumber the people sending their millions to superPACs, but because people can't be bothered to read a few articles about what's going on in our country, the same shit is happening year after year. And that's not even the worst part. Most people seem to have this idea that America is number one in literally every category ever, so there's zero need to change any policies at all. The economy? phhbbbbtttt. It'll fix itself, we're on top, motherfuckers. Oh, drones are raining down missiles on school children in Afghanistan? They were probably at a suicide bombing camp anyway. Huge, multinational corporations are getting tax breaks while the middle and poorer classes have their incomes stolen to pay for it? Whatever, one day I'll be rich and won't have to worry about it. It's at the point for me where I have zero national pride and just want to leave. This can get very expensive though, and I would genuinely appreciate anyone who can re inspire some hope. Looking forward to it EDIT 1 Many people on this post have argued that it's better to stay and fight for your beliefs, than it is to give up and try to find greener pastures. That it's better to change things however you can, so that everyone benefits. And I think that's true, I don't see a better motivator than the greater good. BUT, moving to another country only involves me. A point I neglected to mention is that I'm worried about my own safety, not just the future of the entire country. I don't want to go to prison. There are articles WAY too frequently about wrongful execution, people going to jail for drugs, and just generally the hammer of justice coming down way too hard on people. Locking someone in a cage shouldn't be a standard, thoughtless punishment. I mean jesus, the only people who went to jail after our economy crashed were the people protesting it during Occupy Wallstreet as far as I know, no responsible executives were held accountable I think I would rather save myself, if it comes down to it, than go to prison for taking a stand.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I want to leave America and move to another country, because I hate the direction I think we're moving in, and I want to get out now.\n","id":"84c5aed8-a582-4bb8-9039-cbc96def5c0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The common argument against contraception is Everyone will start having sex all the time with whoever . I find this to be ridiculous because it applies the speaker's morals about sexual activity to the life of someone else. It also seems to me that people would still be as sexually active if they don't have access to contraceptives. I think that true freedom extends to one's sex life, and if one wants to have many consenting partners without harming someone or becoming pregnant impregnating someone, it's not inherently wrong and they should be allowed to. Allowing them to do this will not hurt society. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I see no downsides to contraception,\n","id":"caa74ae0-6033-448a-8d2b-e26056c8d281"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey be part of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>Since the enactment of Directive 2004\/38\/EC all member states have to ensure that there are no explicit or implicit barriers to the free movement of persons across the EU.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"EU citizenship would allow Turkish citizens to travel around 27 countries freely.\n","id":"e9d061d4-eda1-4a6d-8e81-c1a5cc3823f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build an international space elevator?<|ARGUMENT|>People should stay only for short times, because they would need to go back to Earth for long periods after to help their bodies recover.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since the gravity is lower the higher the orbital rings are built, people could encounter long-term health consequences when staying on the rings.\n","id":"32540d3a-96b5-4b57-be00-6a9ed9cc7ecd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Steelworkers vs Weber illustrates how in practice Black Americans are favored over white Americans in certain jobs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There has been racial preference for Black Americans in job placements and university entrances.\n","id":"4b3b1677-da9f-4f58-9dd9-1bd825a711bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Almost daily I see people saying, posting, and arguing something like religion is . Without fail, you can dismantle any argument based off of the word religion by asking for a definition. Simply put, there is no good working definition for religion. It's not simply the worship of a God, because several eastern worldviews like Theravada Buddhism worship no God. And no matter how you look at it, by using the word to make a claim, you are lumping together Catholicism with Taoism, Jainism with Islam, Buddhism with Shinto, and the WBC with Sikhism. That is, whenever you hear people like Dawkins Freud Hitchens Marx followers of the above say something like Religion is a stain on the psyche of mankind, or that Religion is an opiate of the people, there is the implicit declaration that all of these worldviews that are being lumped together are, more or less, similar in whatever way that serves the argument. I hold that this kind of implicit comparison and grouping is an insult to reason itself. I bet that Dawkins never objectively studied Hinduism, so why should he have the authority to speak about it? Oh, and what about all the others, too? The long and short of it is that since many of the complex worldviews that may or may not be under the arbitrary umbrella of religion are fundamentally different from many others, we simply shouldn't group them together. TLDR For absolutely every claim made about religion, there is a worldview that is considered religion that serves as a counterexample to that argument.  Edit What I'm advocating for instead is for us to use the names of the specific worldviews we're talking about when we would normally use the word religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Due to the frequency of fantastically fallacious claims on its behalf, I think we should stop using the word \"religion.\"\n","id":"1dfe71cc-9707-4d04-83c0-84ab1dbc262a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>It is mostly Western countries which have signed the UN General Assembly declaration of LGBT rights or sponsored the 2011 resolution on LGBT rights of the Human Rights Council.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is also largely \"Western\" societies in which people outside the normal gender binary are currently gaining the most recognition and rights.\n","id":"8eff7c43-7011-4375-bb91-77782baae0b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Create suffering to an animal just for entertainment goes against the human values that distinguish us as human beings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In bullfighting torture is spectacularized, which adds to the cruelty.\n","id":"48b07998-17e2-4eb5-bd2f-cf814140152a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Campaigns only be Funded by the Government?<|ARGUMENT|>Despite white men comprising only 31 percen of the population, 97 percent of all Republican elected officials and 79 percent of all Democrat elected officials are white men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the US, white men hold a majority of positions at all levels of government even though racial minorities and women are big voter demographics.\n","id":"f358e49f-4a84-4539-a477-d615bf5ebea9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Fable suggests that if a person were to obtain all three of the Deathly Hallows they would become the master of death.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The magical world opens up possibilities of extending one's life and of experiencing some form of life after death.\n","id":"64b19a24-c911-4a48-81e8-11872326c933"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>AZA institutions, governmental agencies, foundations, and corporate philanthropies provide critical financial support to conservation, research, and education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoos often receive funding to aid in improving animal well-being.\n","id":"391a0def-a8e4-4122-826f-b33ca207b818"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we Have a 100% Inheritance Tax?<|ARGUMENT|>This suggestion goes too far. Inheritance received upon the death of a parent should be treated as income for the person receiving it, and thus subject to the same taxes as any other income, but I strongly disagree that the tax should be set at 100%. Make it 90% for any income that takes someone into the 99.9 percentile. Taking everything away would reduce the incentive for the next generation to strive to do more and be more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many extremely talented people will stop working after they have reached a certain amount of money, as they cannot pass it on to their children.\n","id":"bfa4bde7-2f39-4f3c-b562-739432e34064"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Humans could live for some periods without eating, due to autophagy although what is lost would need to be replaced if autophagy goes too far and is detrimental to health.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are a few tricks to get in this direction of eating less right now before better technologies come along like a food replacement pill\n","id":"8b4d4df4-5940-4314-86bf-fd246c7903e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The biggest change in the last few hundred years in medicine has been the appearance and acceptance of evidence based medicine. This has revolutionized the way we think and practice medicine, changing popular opinion e.g. emotional stress causes ulcers to H. pylori causes ulcers, Miasmas are the basis of disease to microorganisms are the basis of infectious disease . Having seen the effect that this had in the medical field it is almost imposible to wonder what effect it would have in other fields i.e. politics . I believe that representatives should be elected based on first principles or priorities i.e. we should reduce the suicide rate amongst teenagers and young adults not on opinions on possible solutions to the problem i.e. should or shouldn't gun control be passed . This would make it harder to buy or lobby people involved in government. I also believe, this would help reduce the moral empathy gap, meaning the inability to relate with different moral values. Lastly I think that this system would increase the accountability, as it would constantly be looking back at the investment and the results. I have, over the last couple years, grown cynical of the political system. I hope this post will change my view on that or at least make me more understanding of the benefits of the system as it stands. Thank you and happy new years Books Doing good better About having feedback and looking at the results of the programs Dark money About the use of money to fund think tanks and influence public opinion 1st edit, added suggested books<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evidence based politics should replace identity politics\n","id":"024b598d-b0d4-4dc9-83b4-12086f30d031"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Clinton vs. Obama<|ARGUMENT|>As a former president, Bill Clinton would have a tendency to attempt to assert himself into the decision-making process if Hillary were elected. This could be disruptive to the chain of command if not simply inappropriate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bill Clinton would wrongly act as a co-president along side Hilary Clinton.\n","id":"bb25d2bb-e972-42ad-99a4-a720fbe6b4a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's a lot of political philosophy to unpack here, so those who might be unfamiliar please leave your biases about what capitalism, socialism, and communism is at the door and bear with me. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production and therefore the profits gained from the means of production. Capitalism doesn't distribute wealth based on labor, but private ownership. Capitalism is very good at generating vast amounts of abundance, yet not very good at distributing it. For example, we produce enough food to feed the world several times over, yet up to 40 of it is wasted because people can't afford to buy it. Furthermore, individuals like Jeff Bezos are able to accumulate more wealth than they could ever possibly spend in a lifetime. Bezos could spend 1 million a day and it would take him 1,780 years to spend his wealth. While some like Bezos have more wealth than they could ever need, many still struggle for subsistence wages. Capitalism creates abundance in commodities and wealth, yet artificial scarcity because it can't distribute it. People who own property or the means of production are able to accumulate as much as they like. Those who don't own either have to sell their labor in order to survive, often for wages that aren't enough to live off of. A communist would argue that therefore capitalism can never possibly work and private ownership of the means of production needs to be abolished in favor of communal ownership. This is where socialism comes in and why more people who support capitalism should embrace it. Socialists believe that capitalism can work it simply needs to be reformed so it better distributes wealth. When people who are pro capitalism argue against socialism, they are actually arguing against capitalism and making the same argument communists do. For example, if a socialist argues that we should raise the minimum wage to a living wage, a capitalist might argue that doing so would result in lay offs, inflation, and jobs being shipped overseas. Yet, here's the thing this argument is basically saying that capitalism can't work. It's admitting that in order to maintain profits, capitalism can never pay a livable wage and will simply raise prices or fire people if it's forced to do so. This is actually a communist talking point that pro capitalists are inadvertently repeating. Communist and socialists don't agree because the former believes capitalism can never work and needs to be abolished, and the latter believes that capitalism just needs to be reformed. If you want capitalism to endure, you have to be willing to admit where it fails. Capitalism has to adapt and change in order to preserve itself. And refusing to address inequalities under capitalism is why communist revolutions happen. If you address these inequalities and reform capitalism, you avoid communism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who are pro-capitalism should embrace socialism\n","id":"b854f0d9-616d-4d8d-b854-c87cb9753031"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that, although it's possible that some of their positions and policies are well intentioned and may lead to overall good for American society, overall the actions of the Republican party in 2017 is overall evil and immoral. Thus, supporting this organization in any meaningful way such as voting for a member of the party , regardless of your reasons, is an immoral action since doing so either equates to supporting these actions and positions or willfully ignoring them. The Republican Party actively supports a number of immoral policies, such as 1 Removing or restricting rights from LGBTQ people 2 Restricting voting access for minorities 3 Taking away health care from millions to redistribute that money to the wealthy 4 Supporting sexual assault by the president 5 Supporting the mocking of the disabled by the president 6 Supporting the death penalty, which kills innocent people 7 Lying about climate change which may harm millions 8 Actively worsening climate change due to energy policies 9 Damaging public education in favor of private education 10 Supporting the gun industry which is responsible for the needless deaths of thousands I could go on, and some of these are more evil than others, but overall this is an organization whose mission is largely to hurt a majority of Americans in favor of slightly improving the lives of a small few. This all isn't to say that the Democratic Party is the opposite or good I could see myself also being convinced that they are also overall evil I currently don't hold that stance , but this post is simply speaking about the role of the Republican Party in society and the moral implications of either directly or indirectly supporting what I see as an evil institution formed by evil men and women. EDIT sorry that I've been away and unable to respond to more comments directly this morning there's been some good discussion. I'll try to go through and give some deltas out tonight. Overall, I'll say that although my general overall opinion on Republicans hasn't drastically changed, I see that I've used way too broad terms and have not well defined things, and from that perspective I need to go back to the drawing board and really think about what specifically I consider evil or immoral versus what are policies that reasonable people can disagree on. My list of examples in hindsight was too simplistic and is really just a vague list of positions and actions that I strongly disagree with that I just came up with off the top of my head. I still think that there are some actions and policies that have true malice in their intent that are sold with lies and have no significant public good, but these should be better defined and more scoped towards individuals who vote for or support these. I'm also still trying to reconcile if it's immoral to vote for or support, say, an unrepentant sexual predator, but that to be fair is not a Republican issue that's an issue that happens to be associated with a current prominent Republican. So, the short answer is that I'll officially mark my view as being changed after this discussion. I may think more about these issues and refine the scope of my thoughts, but vague positions that I've laid out don't really hold up after reading the many responses here. \u2206<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Republican Party today is an evil institution and voting for or supporting Republican politicians is inherently immoral\n","id":"7b9163a3-612e-4b33-a6cc-8f60c57bd4a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Charity is subjective and creates categories: those deserving of it and those who do not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Charity, for example, often endorses inequality instead of fixing its roots.\n","id":"80b3320c-d45b-40b2-b468-d938d6313f41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Making aid dependent on democracy adds insult to injustice: not only are the world's poor in a dire situation for which they bear no responsibility, they are also excluded from foreign aid for reasons beyond their responsibility.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conditional development assistance harms the poor in particular; those individuals are not responsible for the non-democratic nature of their government.\n","id":"e8fd4bbb-36ec-4bbd-b32e-da189d9e0e33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>Research that supports certain political agendas has the potential to secure more funding than research that does not. For example, the National Science Foundation NSF designates millions of dollars for certain scientific domains and not others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Science is most often funded by government or institutional grants and the decision on what to fund, or more importantly what not to fund, is politically or commercially motivated. Therefore science is politically influenced.\n","id":"36d3b79f-0f8a-46a9-bf06-aad5c465a83b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Joshua M'Kune, one of Joseph Smith's neighbors in Pennsylvania, Smith claimed that the golden plates as well as a sword a breastplate, and a pair of spectacles found with the plates \"were to be shewn to all the world as evidence of the truth of what was contained in those plates,\" and that \"he M'Kune and others should see them at a specified time.\" However, this never occurred. Howe 1834, p. 267<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith falsely promised or prophesied that he would reveal the golden plates openly to the world by a certain date.\n","id":"c2b41e4e-db31-45db-aea9-f4a3975b49eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Witcher 3 is obviously well written and everything is crafted with love and care. The world itself, be it Velen, Skellige or Toussaint is beautiful, more than many games wish they looked like and the main story, while not perfect in my opinion, because some parts of the structure suffer from it's own longiness, is great. On a more negative side the game has a lot of flaws that people tend to overlook when talking about the game. Some examples being The inventory, alchemy and character level upgrade system are a joke and should have been scratched or remoleded in a way that makes sense with the character. In fact everything related to level upgrade should be removed entirely, even if it had meant to redesign some parts in order to make everything more balanced. The dificulty is either a You're making me waste my time, let's pretend the last 2 minutes didn't happen so I can continue with the story which is what actually interests me. or Gosh, this is so tedious and bullshit and oh Oh that was it. Well that was easier than I expected. Part of it being related to the combat and how terrible it is. Bosses shouldn't even be considered bosses. They're enemies with big ass HP bars which at best make the story go forward. I'm not expecting From Software level of bosses but they REALLY could have made a much better job. Stories in the game related to time running out because a certain character is about to die or you have to find someone or there's a big danger and you really need to act quickly but that allow you to free roam without problem throughout them are bullshit levels of bad and in a game in which narrative is so important Geralt chilling with Gwent while X character is about to get executed is bad. A good open world game can allow itself to have some urgency from now and then but having entire stories surrounding them is bad. That's why I like Hearts of Stone, the story goes forward as you play because Geralt keeps fullfing the wishes at his pace and no one is going to die if you act inmediatly. I don't want to feel tension about finding Ciri for 40 hours or so and feeling bad about exploring the world, it works with a game like God Of War or Uncharted, not a game of this size. Skyrim solution to this is, ironically, having a bad script and a bad story. That way you don't really care about it too much and feel free to explore at your pace and finding what's worthy in the game and what's not. Witcher senses is bad and it only involves Geralt following the colour red and sometimes Geralt says something. For something that appears everywhere on the game it's ridiculously basic. Those are ony some examples. It's a remarkable game, for sure and it's probably one of my favourite games of the decade but the very base of the game is pretty flawed. Many of my friends think otherwise and I wanted people to change the way I think I actually wish you guys did .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Witcher 3 is neither a masterpiece nor is it one of the best games ever no spoilers\n","id":"b3c4d676-f232-4d07-aebe-a2141f577510"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have seen many people proclaiming that acts of suicide are done out of some sort of courage or bravery but how can some act done out of the inability to face difficulty be considered courageous on any level? Some may argue that it takes courage to kill oneself but I say if that was the case why couldn't they simply used that same courage to face life. I firmly believe that once you die than that is the end, there is absolutely no afterlife or anything whatsoever. Sure you lose the ability to feel stress and pain but at the same time you lose the ability to feel happiness, exhilaration and curiosity. Even the ability to think is lost upon death. I do not understand why do people treat death so negligibly as compared to petty stuff such as bullying and the such. When comparing the two of them together, Death makes nearly all things pale in comparison. I do not abhor suicide completely though as there are times where it is done out of true bravery and thought for others . Such an example would be a terminally ill father who is proving too much of a burden for his family to financially support him, causing his children to lack necessities such as basic education and food.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe most suicides are done out of cowardice\n","id":"a5612d88-d8d8-4b8c-b0d0-f9702d71f6fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a bit of a smaller aspect of a bigger topic, but it's one that seems like it's easy to keep the discussion somewhat straight on. Christina Hoff Sommers CHS is a second wave feminist who now currently has some issues with the feminist movement and has displayed them somewhat prominently. She has written the book The war against boys showing her beliefs about the ways that society is currently harming boys, another called Who Stole Feminism , and has a video series on youtube which she calls The Factual Feminist , declaring an approach to feminism that looks at the facts in an honest light. Due to her voicing her issues with modern feminism, many have started to label her as being anti feminist with wikipedia providing sources for some such claims This is a view that I have issues with. CHS is an individual who still calls herself feminist and I feel that is the most important aspect here. Even if one believes her views line up with people who do call themselves anti feminist, her views come from a different place. I don't think many anti feminists want to be feminists, they would likely rather replace feminism with another equality movement. CHS comes from a place of reforming feminism, criticizing it to make it better. At the core of her view is a support for feminism, wanting to create a better movement, and if that is a view that is considered anti feminist, I have to question whether feminism is accepting of criticism. This leads into another slight. I often see feminists say feminism is full of self criticism and disagreement, that they disagree on what it means to be feminist all the time. If feminism is willing to accept such contradictory beliefs under it's banner, why is CHS's beliefs an exception? If feminism can have sex positive and sex negative feminists and collectivist and individualist feminists, why not a critical one? This seems somewhat odd to me. There is also an issue of feminist's saying feminism is the belief for women's rights, or equality or some other similar definition. This usually encompasses a bunch of people who say they aren't feminists, with feminists saying they are feminists already. If one person is willing to call themselves feminist, why try and deny them that label? Her criticism is based on the actions of the movement, and for that she gets labeled anti feminist. This seems very misguided and leads to similar issues above and seems to work towards proving CHS's beliefs that feminism needs some reform. I just don't see how someone who claims to be a feminist can be denied the label when the label is either so broad a definition as to basically mean nothing, or one that is strict but contradictory. Neither scenario seems acceptable, so to call CHS anti feminist seems contradictory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christina Hoff Sommers is not anti-feminist\n","id":"2cb87560-ac5a-4cfa-9a34-756fdad7f7a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love i.reddit links. I know they are links from reddit. Easy to Copy image address and share it with the group text, Discord, or whatever. On top of that, the links are usually atrociously laggy. Sometimes the CSS for some subreddits are just ass for loading in. I don't want to go into the subreddit. I just want to look at the content. It also makes x posting a nightmare. There are so many times I see a cross post and it opens up the comments from the original post instead of just the content. For example, there was a x cross post in r math about titled Does this belong here? Yeah a low quality title, but I was curious. Opening the link and seeing the comments load in and seeing it was the comment section to a totally different subreddit is dam annoying. I can't Ctrl click to open only content in new tabs now. I am usually looking at the link types instead of the content. I am hoping RES finds a way to fix this but one of my pet peeves is relying on a 3rd party to make user experience better. Speaking of which, Reddit is Fun makes opening these links bareable. But again, I am relying on a 3rd party.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"v.reddit links are trash. They make sharing videos annoying and it is annoying to open comments with every gif.\n","id":"900634b6-862c-4ca4-872c-933a5ced6c8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Research points that domestic abuse is higher in regions across the globe \"where norms related to male authority over female behavior are more common\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many religions support complementarism a view that favors male supremacy as it defines men as the heads of the house and the Church.\n","id":"6017bc41-0781-4f43-a85c-ddf5adf130a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>If abortion is banned there will be two people suffering long term instead of one, as the mother has been forced to have a child and the child has to deal with the emotional toll of being unwanted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are mental and physical consequences to literally every action. This is not a valid reason to restrict individual freedom.\n","id":"5c9faec7-7944-4ef8-93b8-e34e94dcf6d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cluster bomb ban<|ARGUMENT|>When new weapons are developed in the world, it is false to believe that they will be used immediately. Instead, older stockpiles are used, before they become too outdated. Therefore, improving cluster bombs will not necessarily prevent the use of the existing stockpiles of cluster bombs, which are malfunctioning and killing civilians as a result.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even with better cluster bombs, old ones will still be used.\n","id":"777e7117-8edb-459d-9b63-d167584783b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Every country should be ethno-nationalist<|ARGUMENT|>Migrants do not necessarily pose an existential threat to any other group by their mere existence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Demographic change does not cause anyone's death or anyone to cease existing.\n","id":"510ac987-f19a-46fe-8cee-59a8f018ad18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>There are multiple reports of individual social workers exhibiting bias towards certain families. It is likely this would be transferrable to a licensing policy with a similar assessment process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both the licensing body as an organisation and its individual members are likely to exhibit biases that will affect who receives a license.\n","id":"95100507-798d-475d-885b-f2ab09eb75ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Know don\u2019t get me wrong, I am a big Bernie supporter, I support Medicare for all, free college, ending student loan debt, etc and I still want him to get nominated for 2020 and become the president of America but I am rather concerned about his age, at the moment, he is 77 and he would be 79 when he steps into office in 2020, he\u2019d be 84 if here to get re elected and 88 when he\u2019d leave office and this makes me concerned which I don\u2019t want to me and there is nobody equal to him in DNC in terms of his policies and his consistency of character. At that age, anything could happen health wise, either physical ailments, mental degradation or both. I guess it all depends on his choice of his Vice President but it still concerns me. I want to be wrong on this so can you change my mind?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am concerned that Bernie Sanders would be too old to become POTUS if he gets elected\n","id":"6e9273d4-d8dd-434d-b912-d12df490b662"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Host Countries and Cities Benefit from The Olympic Games<|ARGUMENT|>On top of this, the IOC also gets to keep more than 50% of the television revenue, which is usually the single largest chunk of money generated by the games.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Submitting a bid to the International Olympic Committee IOC to host the Olympics costs millions of dollars.\n","id":"24a6f4b4-edec-4eb0-ac80-5e9721839fd8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gay adoption<|ARGUMENT|>Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council - \"children are not guinea pigs and should not be used as pawns in some grand social experiment.\"1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children should not be subjects of a gay adoption experiment.\n","id":"222aeccb-4f4c-45ea-bd8a-d28a0f39c1e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have numerous medical conditions throughout my life and I have many friends who are doctors. All the doctors I have visited have been terrible at their jobs. Whether it is complete disinterest, misdiagnosis, unknowledgeable of symptoms indicating problems, misreading x rays cat scans, etc. Any condition that has been solved has been me fighting the medical system with information i've researched on the internet. If we started a database that tracked symptom of patients, eventually we'd see what percentage of particular symptoms indicate a particular disease condition disorder etc. I understand people do their own research on Web MD and often go to a doctor and a doctor laughs and tells them what they read is incorrect, but this is because WebMD is not considering everything else about the patient. For instance low blood pressure in a 24 year old athlete is not an indicator of a problem as it would be for say an old sedentary and obese 65 year old male. Doctors should be detectives, puzzle solvers or scientists, but often I find they are quick to get you in and out of your office for that paycheck. They see too many patience to devote enough time to solve your obscure case. And let's say it is indeed an obscure case. Imagine only 100 people have had your condition, no doctor could ever be expected to piece together the puzzle. But if those 100 people were logged, the computer could compare against that. At best we could train individuals to be intermediaries between the patient and the computer system, so training for general practitioners could be lowered considerably. And in doing so, their pay would be much lower which would allow money to be used for other things. more testing labs, more MRI machines, etc. Imagine going into the automated medical facility and getting your blood work and cat scan done all in one place. It would seem to me that your chance of a correct diagnosis would be MUCH higher than dealing with a human. Most of medical school is just learning IMMENSE text book knowledge and analysis skills, both of which are best handled by a computer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A computer could do 90% of a doctor's job general practitioner in particular.\n","id":"068056ad-da16-44cb-a35f-4f9716909bc7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>From a usefulness perspective clothes serve the purpose of warmness and protection from nudity. There are also many complex secondary purposes such as personal expression and impression. For centuries clothing became simpler and simpler, and garments that once were considered inferior such as jeans are now the norm. There's no good reason why this trend won't continue in the future. Suits will be the first to go. Suits are traditionally chosen when one wants to seem professional , as they tend to be forgiving on body imperfections such as weight and periphery. However nowadays it seems less and less important to dress to impress, and there are other attires that are just as, if not more, comfortable. Also, accessories such as ties don't serve any particular purpose, other than to add style and color to the attire. There are also other ways to do that without a double windsor knot, that will be simpler and more effective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Males wearing suits to look more professional including ties, handkerchiefs and other accessories is largely based on historical social constructs that will be deprecated in a few decades, as there's no real usefulness.\n","id":"e0f771c4-0c2a-40d2-b105-a131dd613987"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are two reasons for this. I would find anyone else exhibiting these character flaws to be annoying as well. x200B She openly wishes to only have conversations with people that agree with her. IE She wants an echo chamber. During an interview with Anderson Cooper, she stated she'd have a substantive conversation with anyone believes the same things we believe in. Again during an interview, this time with Rachel Maddow, she was asked what fans can do to help in the 'fight for equal pay'. Rapinoe's response was to ask fans to buy more tickets, and to buy more merchandise. So, is the pay gap discrimination or not? If she truly believed sexism was the cause of the unequal pay, then more revenue wouldn't matter. And she's never even mentioned just how complex equal pay is in this context anyway. Women's league players are on a different pay structure than the men are and they are compensated differently. Truly Equal Pay would begin with a compensation structure that is identical. It's also annoying that neither Cooper nor Maddow asked her any follow up questions to these statements either.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Megan Rapinoe's message isn't resonating with me, and I don't like her as a spokesperson\n","id":"3edbecb5-4982-4c5e-b5e3-e5b21d53079d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Plenty of other factors are accelerating a trend of reducing birth rates already in the status quo.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Concerns about overpopulation and exceeding a carrying capacity are unfounded.\n","id":"8137a1e8-7700-4742-aebd-8c1cbdd9e0dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Antifa direct-action movement beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Antifa disrupted the peaceful \"Rally against Hate\" in Berkeley, by starting to attack the \"No to Marxism in America\" rally. The \"Rally against Hate\" protest was a counterprotest to the \"No to Marxism in America\" demonstration and vastly outnumbered its protesters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Antifa disrupts peaceful anti-fascist rallies by turning them into violent street fights.\n","id":"0b265836-9045-4fc0-8ac2-82b002b01635"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have often been told that regardless of what you believe about the US Civil War, Robert E. Lee should be honored and respected. The main reason given is that he only fought for the South because his moral commanded defending his homeland despite opposing both secession and slavery. I believe we should honor Southern soldiers, because they believed that they were fighting for a good cause, and anyway they didn't really have the option to join the North the Confederate soldiers are as blameless as soldiers in any war who believe they are defending their homelands. However, Robert E. Lee is the one soldier who does not deserve respect for this decision because for him it actually was a choice. Lee knew that secession was wrong, yet he defended it at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. The Southern moral code should in this case be reviled, because it placed duty to Lee's homeland over both his personal morals anti slavery and the lives of his fellow men including his fellow Virginians. The Civil War could have potentially been shorter and less damaging if Lee hadn't joined the Confederacy. For one thing, the South would have lacked its greatest general and the North would have gained a reliable military leader which it arguably didn't obtain until Grant in the war's last year . Also, there were surely some soldiers loyal to Lee who followed him into rebellion, so they would have shifted the balance in the same way. Most importantly, the South would have been subdued by one of its own rather than an outsider like Sherman, so there would have been less resentment and greater unity after the war's end, which could have profound political implications even today. TLDR Lee stood for a skewed moral code, and it's his fault the Civil War was so terrible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Robert E. Lee does not deserve any respect.\n","id":"c496bf9d-6536-44a3-93f0-c156e29afe50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Combat prowess on land with access to any equipment in their story Elsa is an obvious first choice, she froze the whole of Arendal in about a minute and has some freaky ice powers. Kida is the princess from Atlantis and has access to some really high tech weaponry, she might be stronger than Elsa herself and definitely is underwater. Mulan is a trained fighter and is skilled in hand to hand combat, swordsmanship and bow and arrow. Merida is skilled with a bow. Rapunzel has her pan and magic hair. Now I vaguely remember Pocahontas can use a bow? but even if she can't she has some really high tier athletic feats. The following princesses I just put in order of who had the hardest life, I don't remember any combat feats from any of these characters but if there were, they should come higher than the others. Tatiana is a hard worker, Cinderella also works pretty hard, Aurora grew up in a hut, Jasmine and Anna both grew up in a palace, Ariel is a beginner when it comes to walking and Snow white is 14 years old. CMW on this list. x200B Edit Oh fuck, I forgot Belle, one of my favorites as well. She probably goes after Aurora and before Jasmine just cause she didn't grow up in a castle. Also, she climbs ladders everyday to get to her books so leg strength 10. Also, I haven't seen Star vs the forces of evil nor plan to but Star goes before Elsa based on her wiki. And to further add characters, Princess Fiona fro Shrek goes before Mulan but after Kida, Httyd from how to train your dragon comes after Mulan no pets allowed , Mavis from Hotel Transylvania stomps everyone with her super speed and telekinesis. EDIT Holy shit, also forgot Moana, she could be above elsa or below Pocahontas depending on where the battle is held near the ocean .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In terms of Disney Princesses battle prowess, the order goes: Elsa &gt; Kida&gt; Mulan &gt; Merida &gt; Rapunzel &gt; Pocahontas&gt; Tatiana &gt; Cinderella &gt; Aurora &gt; Jasmine &gt; Anna &gt; Ariel &gt; Snow White\n","id":"bbb09188-e7db-4d8d-9b0b-342598d2ec21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nowadays, most vegans or vegetarians don't eat animal flesh or don't consume anything animal related in order to prevent harm and keep balance in nature. I usually see oversensitive statements regarding how much we should care about animals and how they suffer during food industrialization process. The thing that keeps bugging my head is that in a regular natural environment, the trophic chain is nothing but a true slaughter where the most adapted kill and eat the weaker ones and I believe that being torn apart by a lion is worse than being slaughtered by a butcher . That being said, I believe there's no reason to bother about veganism since it's natural behaviour of every natural being. Change my view, fellow Redditors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think being vegan\/vegetarian for a cause doesn't make sense.\n","id":"cab8ff1c-0df9-42d5-9b18-404c608ba2e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>These laws were in and of themselves cruel, restricting civil rights and liberties and denying those they targeted education, representation, dignity and economic opportunities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The effects of slavery extended beyond the institution of slavery, through Jim Crow laws.\n","id":"c8d1b7a2-20e0-47a7-b99a-7312e18a3fa2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The reason I say mostly rather than entirely is because I want to qualify in a more narrow sense. In a situation where the wage is market driven and productivity is fairly easy to measure, wage discrimination based on gender doesn't make any sense. Any company that employs women for less than their worth will be outcompeted by a company that operates purely on marginal productivity. Example If 'Company A' hires 10 men and 'Company B' hires 10 women of the same productivity but pays them 30 less then it is in company B's interest to hire women at increasingly higher wages until we reach parity. There will potentially be individual companies or employers who hold their sexism as a higher priority than profit but over time in a competitive market they should be eliminated by their prejudice. In the case of CEOs, executives and so forth where it is harder to link pay to productivity or in markets with low competition or high barriers to entry I am happy to concede that there may be systemic biases which are sustainable through feedback loops.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The wage gender pay gap is mostly a myth\n","id":"45d0ac2e-b0aa-4360-846a-a2ce161e108e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Journalists Publish Hacked Data?<|ARGUMENT|>The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court US does not permit the public to view or access records of its hearings, and so the public were not aware of the NSA's powers until the Snowden leaks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments write the rules and regulations which keep information private. The incentive of political parties is to keep damaging information secret when they are in power, this distorts the democratic process.\n","id":"f19ea18f-890d-43e9-aca8-c407e249fbba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>On March 6, 2012, Moldova legislated forcible chemical castration of child molesters; the law came into effect on July 1, 2012.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In some countries convicted paedophiles are forced to undergo chemical castration.\n","id":"5be0642b-2c23-4a06-bfdb-02e1ea9e229b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It appears from the outside that countries that harbor either actively or inactively through inactivity ISIS and the Taliban aren't doing their fair share to irradiate the extremists. It's not like any developed western country would expect any other country coming to help deal with any issue within their boarder. As ignorant as it may sound, I honestly believe that in the communities where these groups hold power the general population knows where they extremists are staying, understand what they are doing but keep quiet to avoid trouble. These countries should bee given the opportunity to step up and deal with the problems within their borders or face absolute catastrophic military action. If the population of these countries truly disagree with the views of extremism then they should act accordingly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Countries that harbor ISIS and the Taliban should be given a timeline to deal with the problem themselves, or face severe military invasion.\n","id":"5d9364bd-8798-4033-a328-09eee37b2b44"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I came across this video the other day. In the video, he makes his case that obesity is almost entirely a problem of laziness, which I think is wrong. The above video is just one example of what seems to be a very firmly supplanted view in society today. While I do not support the \u201cfat acceptance\u201d movement a group dedicated to accepting obesity and attempting to rubbish the very clear and established health concerns associated with it the idea that people who are obese suffer only from laziness is way off the mark. I\u2019ve never been overweight myself and have been an avid bodybuilder powerlifter for five years. I\u2019m currently studying nutrition at university and am in my first year. We do a lot of work about and with obese populations and one thing that is glaringly apparent, is how many of these people suffer from mental health issues. You\u2019ve got people who have a terrible home life and \u201ccomfort eat\u201d as some way of coping. You have people with actual binging disorders who have, in essence, the opposite of a disorder like anorexia. This isn\u2019t just a few people, either. Nearly every obese person I\u2019ve met and talked to is undergoing some sort of mental torment. Clearly these people need a conjunction of therapy AND help from dietitians and nutritionalists. Obesity isn\u2019t an issue of laziness. It\u2019s an issue of an accumulation of circumstantial factors that ultimately lead a person down a path of psychological illness. For people who have binging disorders and other mental health problems, it\u2019s not as easy as just \u201cgetting over it\u201d and to stop being lazy. That\u2019s like telling someone with anorexia to \u201cjust eat more\u201d. I\u2019m not saying every single person who is obese has these problems. Maybe some people just are lazy, but the overwhelming majority don\u2019t appear this way at all. No one wants to be obese. No one wants the lifestyle associated with it I tried on a fat suit last week and just moving around was horrific . It doesn\u2019t seem fair for fit and healthy people with no concept of what these people go through, to be telling them that they just need to stop being lazy. That\u2019s my view, anyway. As I say, nearly everyone I speak to shares the view of the guy in the video, so maybe I\u2019m missing something. I\u2019d be interested to here other people\u2019s perspectives. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who say obesity is almost entirely a problem of laziness are wrong.\n","id":"6588df17-aa93-40e1-866d-4501990d625f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Pope Francis a good pope?<|ARGUMENT|>He also praised Bangladesh for taking in Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and called on countries \"that close their doors to do better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pope Francis has spoken out about the migrant crisis facing Europe.\n","id":"cb49ee6c-3ac2-484e-bbb8-4f1ca2439a82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see often a lot of people talking about things with no context. I think this is self centered and egotistical. Doing so is rude and obnoxious. The Internet l is a global inclusive community, so saying a comment like I was at BLANK the other day should almost always contain context. I guess a good example would be that I mentioned the coffee chain Tim Hortons the other day to a friend not from Canada but prefaced it with an explanation, even though it is one of the most popular restaurant chains in the country. I think that to not explain what is local and normal to you implies that everyone should know what you are referring to in the world. It's moronic, and self centered in a global world I don't expect you to know what Mucho Burrito is, so why do others shame me when I've never heard of a Chipotle? It's bizarre and speaking matter of factly, in regards to what someone sees as normal is being self centered and rude even if it isn't intentional It implies that the every one should know what you are talking about.  Side note These similar comments and ideas often come from those who have never lived in other other that their own situation. But the Internet is a global dialog and should be treated as such when your audience is not known.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not providing context on the Internet is rude, as it implies everyone has lived as you have.\n","id":"b109d2a5-4429-4ad7-8646-457d770fbcf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard stories of a neighbor's child being fed nothing but McDonald's Happy Meals for most of her childhood. She ended up with severe health problems that were hidden from her school under the guise of a medical condition that she didn't actually have. This child is about 9 years old now. As far as I know, nothing has changed with her home life. This is, of course, all hearsay. Another story of social services failing, I guess? No one can really assess a child's health but a parent, and you can be pretty certain that an average parent doesn't have a clue what proper nutrition even looks like. The average child's meal has a cute toy with it, but oh well if it causes malnutrition, obesity, and diabetes. There is no one for the parent to blame, since it was the parents choice. So everything continues along as usual. For someone who thinks this really isn't a problem When is it expected that a parent to learn about complicated nutritional information? Very few people understand nutrition through the lies of advertisement and, for lack of a better phrase, fat logic. Even among those who do get it, affordable alternative options are nearly non existent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"McDonald's assets should be completely liquified and used to promote nutritional research as well as to compensate those who have suffered from malnutrition.\n","id":"c731beb3-0d97-4bf2-8212-fe690f178588"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Swarms of cheap drones equipped with light explosives can circumvent enemy lines even if many get shot down.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AKMs are inherently offensive weapon systems because they can be used without fearing a deterrent.\n","id":"881377dc-62d2-4b86-8044-e3b87efabf6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start this off by saying that I'm gay and 18 years old. It wasn't until I was 14 that I had known I was guy, although looking back it was already obvious in kindergarten. I don't want to sound like a douche, but we do live in a hetero normative society. I had the pleasure of growing up with very loving and accepting parents. My mother knew that I was gay long before I found out myself. However, I myself believed that I was straight. I vaguely knew about the concept of sexual orientations besides 'straight', but I never thought this could apply to me. I always watched Disney movies, family movies, etc. and they all revolved around heterosexual relationships. So I forced this scheme onto myself, but always felt weirded out when hugging or kissing girls. Monkey see, monkey do. Only after I found out about porn and have been using it for a while, I noticed that I liked the guys more than the girls. In fact, I was grossed out by vaginas and kissing girls. It was then that I realized that it had always been that way and it finally clicked. This resulted in a lot of self denial as I believed I was straight all my life and didn't want to take the consequences, since I knew that being gay had its problems and I virtually never have seen other gays. I felt alone. I got mentally ill and had to see a psychiatrist. If there were movies and series featuring LGBTQ people, this whole thing wouldn't have been so strange to me. I'd also had known that being gay is in fact okay and normal and that I am not alone. This doesn't just count for media. School books should also feature queer relationships. I'm asking you to , because I sincerely believe that this will only do good and would like to know reasons, why the system shouldn't change. Edit I am not talking about sex ed in kid's TV. I'm talking about plain queer relationships.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"LGBTQ folks should be featured more prominently in kid's TV and education.\n","id":"8ed7d0cd-6a4f-4f74-9f8c-0a201ef9cce1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>At best, women only spaces would have to divert resources from the facilities and services that they currently provide in order to afford additional policing. This would reduce the quality of service drastically for the cis women who currently use them. Crucially, spaces allocated only for men face no such costs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women-only spaces are often either publicly funded or voluntary spaces. As a result, they often lack the resources needed to introduce the level of policing that would be required to keep these spaces safe for the cis women who use them.\n","id":"be353474-9230-4817-a667-bc408bd4ef7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that certain political ideologies and ideas are just wrong. I am not talking about disagreeing, I mean I actually think that some of these views are trash and are invalid worldviews. Most people argue that politics are a matter of opinion, preference, and belief. But, I have the idea that some views I disagree with are inaccurate and aren't an okay way of doing or seeing things. Now, I have a problem with this, because it means that I am telling someone that their opinion and beliefs are wrong, which is something that I am really opposed to. I hate it when opinions are said to be wrong. Yet, I do this all the time when thinking about politics. If there are common ideas A, B, and C about how Situation 1 should be addressed in law or policy, and I agree with A and disagree with the other two, I may often acknowledge some validity to how someone else could agree with B. Yet, I'll think C is just crazy and irredeemably wrong. I recognize this issue, but I still think that some ways of thinking about politics are wrong. Please Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that there are some political views that are right and others that are totally wrong, beyond disagreement.\n","id":"da759899-f01d-4a52-a423-5b5ee4e201de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the lottery be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Although the advertisement may encourage playing the lottery, any decision to purchase a lottery ticket is the choice of an individual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Advertising the potential benefits of taking one course of action does not equate to manipulation.\n","id":"89cde9b9-cfd2-4376-9a89-68dfc7d377d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Overpopulation and Contraception<|ARGUMENT|>Supporting contraception is an easy way for the developed world to help the developing world cope with population crises and the consequent stifling of development. Contraceptives, compared to monetary aid, are less likely to be misdirected into the pockets of corrupt officials.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Supporting contraception is an easy way for the developed world to help the developing world cope wi...\n","id":"db56701b-c64a-40a7-92ff-bb5dec9e043c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just to get this out of the way first, I'm not debating what the current law is, or if people should obey the law. I'm talking about what should be the case. Here's my logic Roads exist for the purpose of people getting around, not specifically for cars. The whole idea of jaywalking was a PR campaign put on by auto makers. Here's an article that explains a bit about the PR campaign towards roads are for cars . People in cities myself included , use a bicycle as their primary commuter vehicle and means to get around the city. Safety Sometimes road conditions aren't safe for cyclists. If a car hits a bike, things are generally much much worse for the bike, so cyclists need the ability to ride safely. If there's a pothole, they need to be able to swerve, or to stop in a place where they have visibility, etc. EDIT removing this. Multiple people have pointed out that it is legal to carefully avoid hazards in the road, so this isn't really relevant and is distracting from my main point, which is 4 Convenience is critical. Coming to a full stop at a stop sign, staying behind a stopped car e.g. not lane splitting , and not being able to ride through crosswalks seriously impede the flow of bicycle traffic and make it take longer to get anywhere. The only reason we can ever justify driving 60 mph on a highway is for speed and convenience, and it matters just as much for cyclists as it does for drivers. In fact, for cyclists, at least they are only likely to kill themselves in an accident, where highway speed vehicles can take out other people. More people biking is better for public health and the environment, and therefore should be encouraged, and following every car law discourages this This is the weakest of all of the arguments, but people already aren't following some of these laws, because they deem the laws to be overly harsh. Having a set of laws more tailored for bicycles, or just granting certain exceptions to them, might encourage people to follow some of the laws that are really important, like passing on the left when a car may be turning right. I realize this is a bit of a cop out, but I'm not specifying exactly what I think the laws should be, or how they should be applied. But it is my view that current road laws for cars should not apply to bicycles. I'm limiting this view to cities because it's the environment I'm most familiar with, and because cars are generally traveling faster and are less likely to expect bicycles outside the city. Also, transportation by bicycle may be less realistic when people have to travel further distances. EDIT clarifications The numbered points above are points of logic, they aren't each meant to individually address the  I'm not saying bicycles should have absolutely no rules laws at all, just that they shouldn't have to follow rules created for cars There's a trade off between safety and speed or convenience in every form of transportation. Driving at highway speeds is insanely deadly and dangerous, but we tolerate it because it lets us travel further, faster. I'm just trying to apply a bit of that same logic to bicycles, allowing them to get ahead of traffic, not fully stop at stop signs, etc. Sure it's a bit less safe, but still potentially safer than commuting via car not sure, would be interesting to look up some numbers on this . EDIT more clarifications I realize that existing laws provide good safety for bicycles which is why I crossed out 3 above . I think the laws are too safe compared to the level of safety we expect from driving a car. People are accusing me of soap boxing because their repetitive arguments aren't convincing me. OK. I might be wrong, but I think that the laws aren't good. Try to convince me they are. Or don't. Your time is your own. I don't think I've been dismissive of anyones view or arguments, if you think I have, please point an example, because I don't want to come across this way. Since people keep repeating arguments, I want to address the top 3 here you're on our road, follow our rules. This is a non argument. Yes, I understand the current laws. There is nothing holy about them, as in my jaywalking example above, they have changed before. As the use of roads is shifting again towards more bicycles, for example , so should the laws. The laws are for your own safety This is addressed above. I think they are too safe. It would be safer to never drive more than 20mph, but we don't do that You should be predictable to other drivers . This is actually a good argument, but I think if there were some consistent set of rules for cyclists to follow and drivers were educated about those rules, we could achieve a good level of safety and a good compromise with speed and convince. EDIT 8710 my view was mostly changed. Here's the full comment Basically I was thinking about competent and aware cyclists who are commuting daily in a city, but I failed to consider the thousands of tourists and new cyclists and people who just don't know what they're doing. Requiring everyone to follow existing laws saves those people<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In a city, bicyclists should not have to follow the same rules as cars\n","id":"6fb04610-e7d0-4c95-af44-48112bd6e8c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I've recently started seeing this term as a way of people normally without binary genders labeling me. Now, I never asked to be labeled, if I liked the label of if I even recognized the label as something, and every time I try to respond I get a yoyre refusing the evolving of the languege 1 eleven you are close minded or something along those lines and I am very annoyed. Am I in the right to be labeled as something I dont want to and hasnt been really asked upon the mayority of straight people?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not think the term \"cisgender\" is correct.\n","id":"ba08edb0-aea3-449d-b6dc-cb8010ff6e4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think Comic Sans is just fine. I'm not necessarily promoting it, I just don't see anything inherently offensive about it at least not enough to justify the amount of hate it gets. It seems a bit silly to get worked up about a font in the first place, but at the very least there are fonts that are equally bad worse. As long as its legible, what's the problem? I do grant that there are some situations where a comical font is not appropriate but the hate against comic sans seems to extend beyond that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Comic Sans is just fine.\n","id":"c38b78ef-4223-48f9-8255-4522642a5ef1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In theory fur is enethical because its causing the death of an animal for purely cosmetic reasons. Ditto, in theory eating meat is OK because its natural and healthy. However the amount of meat consumed by the average person in 2014 is so massive as to become unthical. Beef is damaging for the environment and in large quantities is detrimental for health. Its fully possible to eat meat 2 3 times a week and remain healthy while still enjoying what your eating. It is my view that eating meat has become equally as frivolous and unnecessary as wearing fur.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if eating huge amounts of meat is OK then fur is OK too.\n","id":"23ad371a-d317-4401-a647-4a68b79958bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>The NFL was not willing to stand by black players when it's revenue streams were threatened.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NFL has an ongoing history of racism against black players.\n","id":"35cbed1f-ef61-491a-804e-3b740438ed0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My logic is that our sexuality is so deep rooted in our identity that this information ought to be disclosed and that if it were not and it later transpired that a party had been deceived the dishonest party should be punished. For sex to be consensual two people must reasonably believe in the other person's consent. I do not believe it is possible to satisfy this test while withholding one's biological sex. I have found little support for my views, but no reasons have been offered, save that both parties desired sex at the time. A deception that undermines a core identifying characteristic of the teller negates consent. Super interesting discussion going on I would like to thank you all for your contributions. This topic was a difficult one. Interestingly, there have been cases where women were convicted of sexual crimes against other women, who believed they were male. Not all cases involved a premeditated sexual attack or crime, some charges were against women who could not find the right moment. The idea of consent fascinates me and I have definitely gained some food for thought. An interesting point that has been raised is how is withholding birth sex different from saying you are rich when you are in fact poor. In other words, how is one misrepresentation different from any other. I found this interesting. I don't think I have met anyone that has described themselves as only sleeping with either rich or poor people. Someone else's economic status does not seem to be something we use to describe ourselves. Neither does criminality for that matter. If you have sex with a woman and you later find out she steals cars you may end the relationship, but it is unlikely to affect your perception of your own sexuality and in some cases morality. By contrast, people derive their sexuality and sexual identity from the people they interact with or don't interact with sexually. This is a core difference. And I am not quite sure what it should or should not mean at law I will deal out Alphas and comments. Thanks again Oh, and I am sorry if I offended anyone It was my intention to have a serious discussion about a difficult subject, not to hurt feelings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"a trans-person should face criminal charges is they fail to disclose their biological sex prior to engaging in sexual activities with another if that person wishes to push charges.\n","id":"d6c4478a-e52f-4f3b-815a-6f146edb37a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Although feelings influence behavior, they are not a basis for a moral argument, since they only act as an evolutionary heuristic for distinguishing preferable outcomes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This feeling is not important, in either case your decision will have killed one or five people.\n","id":"8467dad4-3e52-47a4-89a9-2b0e34f8483d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We are alone in the universe.<|ARGUMENT|>Life is only possible where chemicals can grow by consuming carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. These chemicals need to develop membranes to become single cells, which then need even more development to become complex lifeforms such as plants or fungi.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ingredients of life are far more complex than liquid water.\n","id":"c9c2b71b-d7e1-4760-8f5d-6a2a19f54865"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to preface this that I like the idea behind automatic voter registration. It helps encourage the political process. But specifically, in my home state of Florida, under the current system this would NOT be a good idea, for one main reason. In Florida, the voter roll is public information. Anyone can request a disk containing the entire voter roll including names, addresses, birthdays, mailing addresses, gender, race, etc. for free. There are several sites that offer searchable databases of this data. Even if you could get your data off these sites some sites refuse to take stuff down , you also would have to file an exemption request to get it off government records. The only options available to a common citizen are Victim of sexual battery, aggravated child abuse, aggravated stalking, harassment, aggravated battery, or domestic violence. Official verification of the crime is required Certified Participant in Address Confidentiality Program only for victims of domestic violence You cannot simply request an exemption just because you want to be anonymous, or because you are afraid of a person who hasn't committed a specific provable crime against you. With automatic voter registration, we'd be putting a large amount of personal information in a public database, most likely without the knowledge of those being registered. This is a massive breach of privacy and can be a danger to society. As this is automatic, this database will begin to look more and more like a database of the names and addresses of the majority of Floridians. A white supremacist could use the database to target ethnic minorities, as race is included in the database A person could use the information in the database to possibly commit identity theft A person could be stalked using the information in the database A victim of a crime, such as rape, that they did not report or that could not be prosecuted, could be found by their abuser A person of general popularity, such as an internet celebrity, could be doxxed Quite simply, Florida needs the way it handles its citizens' personal data before implementing automatic voter registration. x200B TL DR My argument is that we should remove Florida's voter roll from the public sphere before implementing automatic voter registration. I am not against automatic voter registration.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Automatic voter registration is NOT a good idea specifically in Florida\n","id":"0dfbf8b9-9528-42d6-9769-9d2098d1273a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does buying things from third world countries condone a form of modern day slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>The price of products would greatly increase to the point where they were un-affordable, if they were made on first world labour costs. It would be difficult for people living in third world countries to afford them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The labor provided is generally beneficial to the workers and their communities.\n","id":"8490e5dd-90d9-4472-ad2f-09be32cbef1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Generally, majority groups have made no united or self-actuated effort to support minorities in their countries in the past, so the effectiveness of such activity is unknown.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That minority groups can and have had the most successful movements does not mean that majority groups who advocate for minority groups are harmful.\n","id":"a76af66c-6804-4787-8e23-def1942a87b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Transgenderism exist?<|ARGUMENT|>There is scientific proof that men are stronger than women on average. For example, this study about gender shows the differences in strength and muscle fiber characteristics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Testosterone naturally leads men to develop to be stronger than women and therefore more able to undertake some tasks and hence jobs\n","id":"2e0c4882-d36e-48be-86df-a2e0b03703bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that some people should not gain access to university simply because they are from a certain area or have a particular background. I think that standardized tests exams are not effective in deciding who should be accepted into university and for certain courses there should be more barriers to entry. I believe that current methods of testing are inefficient in that it is too easy to cheat the system , that some people do not deserve the accreditation that is given for doing so and that this reduces the credibility of the qualification achieved. I also think that the best way to combat this is only allowing the more intelligent not those better at memorizing facts or doing well in exams for other reasons to enter into some not all higher education programmes. I will try to keep an open mind about all of these points, so  please.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think IQ tests should be mandatory in order to be able to do certain things, such as go to university.\n","id":"b326393c-2d16-44cb-83e1-28e38d2f90fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Cloning Animals Ethical?<|ARGUMENT|>There are already problems in agriculture due to genetic homogeneity. With animals, these problems would be even worse as animals are more difficult and expensive to replace by a new type.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cloned animals could be used for selective breeding in order to decrease the effects of issues caused naturally or by humans. Reinforcing the species when faced with devastation.\n","id":"0b96c6e1-70e3-4491-a849-545199a7aea2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>If terminally ill or elderly people have family members who require organ transplants, they could be pressured to choose death prematurely so as to be able to donate their organs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People without caring families or friends could be encouraged to choose death, whether because of malicious intentions or just neglect and callousness.\n","id":"4ba9e383-8ba3-44c7-9181-7e3fe827b4b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I mean just look at Rome, not racially diverse but rather culturally. It fell apart and a huge reason was culture. Nazi Germany was pretty advanced. America in the 50's was to. the Renaissance was not diverse. I mean, I don't mean the more racist a society, but just the less diverse. America currently is 72 white, not a diverse society. I just believe historically speaking that the less diverse a society the more advanced it becomes. I mean just look at china. Look at the middle east old middle east . I mean, can you change my view? Can you make me not believe that the less diverse a society the more advanced stable it becomes?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The less diverse a society the more advanced it becomes.\n","id":"730def87-5178-40a5-86b4-09ebbf3bf552"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>Many DREAMers would lose their scholarships internships or work placements in the interim, forcing them to go back into the shadows and work under the table.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Leaving DREAMers in a state of deportation limbo is harmful to them.\n","id":"96c24c72-b4b0-48de-9550-994101e5a26f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Dr Leakey, author of \"The Sixth Extinction,\" believes that 50% of the earth's species will vanish within 100 years and that such a dramatic and overwhelming mass extinction threatens the entire, complex fabric of life, including humas the species responsible for the crisis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humankind exterminated many animals that could have helped keeping an ecological balance and is continuing to do so.\n","id":"f28e499d-c659-49f0-b68b-402fe6901555"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I noticed that many people are eager to bash single and or teenage mothers, and provide a plethora of data that says they are statistically worse than married older parents. While it is true, I don't see why these two disadvantaged groups single teen parents are worse than others who statistically do worse. I bet children raised by the poor, ex drug addicts, ex criminals, drastically obese parents or grandparents also have on average worse outcomes. Does it mean abortion or adoption would be better by default? Edit I should explain that I am talking only about a child's point of view and well being, not his her disadvantaged parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anyone who says that teenage parents should abort or adopt their children out, should say it about all disadvantaged groups\n","id":"0a6ceac9-2463-44b6-9031-4ff0de0884c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should paternity testing of minors require the consent of both parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Adopted babies and their parents can bond just as well as biological parents and their children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The bonding experience of a child with their family has nothing to do with biology.\n","id":"40d65469-5008-4570-bdf9-4948d01886a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the most recent Ninja Turtles movie there's a scene where one of the main villains has one of his henchmen a Foot Clan soldier killed to prove the efficacy of a weapon, while being held down by two other Foot Clan soldiers. Darth Vader is also guilty of this, routinely killing Imperial officers. So does the Joker in the Dark Knight, and this actually almost goes wrong for him. All three of these examples represent slightly different reasons for killing your henchmen, but I think each one is poor form. In the case of the Ninja Turtles villain, actions like that engender dissent and create a culture of fear and paranoia among your henchmen. I mean those guys just had to hold down their coworker and watch him die, how do they know it's not going to be them next time? If anything would inspire me to quit or revolt, that would definitely be up there. In the case of Darth Vader, he kills Imperial officers for failing him, which stifles creativity and likely costs him a lot of high quality officers. The Empire is fighting an insurgency and as recent events in Afghanistan showed, mistakes are going to be made, and it's difficult work. I suspect that the reason Vader is constantly saddled with incompetent officers is that he killed all the competent ones long ago and now no one wants to work with him. Also the Empire clearly doesn't promote based on merit, because Vader immediately promotes a guy after the first time we see him kill someone, and that guy sucked just as much. In the case of the Joker, his plan almost backfires as it's happening. You think when the Joker gets back to his Joker Cave none of his countless other henchmen are going to be like Hey, where's Vinny and Don and Jake? Didn't they go to rob that bank with you? The Joker treats all of his henchmen as completely disposable and useless, which is likely how he sees them, but that's bad for morale. It's not like there's a shortage of villains hiring random thugs for stuff in Gotham. Go seek a job where your employer isn't a constant source of danger. Machiavelli said that if you can't be loved and feared, it's better to be feared, but he touted Cesare Borgia as a great leader, and that guy died naked and alone of a stab wound. The only case where I think killing your henchmen makes sense is shooting deserters in the middle of a pitched battle, as that encourages continued fighting in the moment over desertion in an over the top kinda situation. Otherwise it's bad for business and lowers morale. There are better ways to handle all these situations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Killing your henchman to demonstrate a point is poor leadership.\n","id":"d5192ed5-8167-45c1-b747-519b5a31d3d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of the biggest daily uses of water in my house is having everybody shower every day. I cringe to imagine that this same scenario is happening accross most every other house in my country. Here in reddit i once read the concept of a Mexican bath which is to wash the parts that show and stink daily Your face, hands, genitals, ass and probably armpits and be done with it. This is even better for hair which supposedly is damaged by too much cleaning. Maybe some of you may argue that it helps you feel awake in the mornings, but that's not a very good reason, is it? More than changing my view, i'm interested in knowing if there are decent reasons to justify daily showering for people who don't get very dirty or sweat a whole lot everyday for some reason. But of course if there's a really good argument i can definitely change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think showering daily is a terrible idea and all efforts should be made to reverse this trend where it is common.\n","id":"e42099f5-2856-4644-ad55-69fa14c3e4f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the sake of this thread, let's assume we are talking about One Night Stands only, i.e. casual sex. Since the vast majority of all ONS are initiated by the ever horny male, isn't it obvious that a man who has a lot of ONS is obviously successful at what he does, while a female just lets everyone take her home? In other words, if a good looking woman were to ask 100 single guys, say, in a night club, if they wanted to go home with her, 99 would say yes. If the roles were reversed, the success rate would drop significantly. Note how I'm not saying, that slut shaming is acceptable If a women wants to have sex with many men this does not make her a bad person, it just makes her someone who sleeps around a lot. Anyone can then judge if he likes this attribute in a woman or not. It just appears to me anecdotal evidence here that the majority of guys does not want a girl for a relationship who has slept around with a lot of guys. EDIT Thanks for all the input so far. I believe this question more or less boils down to a chicken egg problem and or if you believe in the evolutionary side of things. Has society always looked down on women who sleep around a lot, because women are being selective or are women being more selective when it comes to casual sex because society looks down on them? I prefer the evolutionary side of looking at this, i.e. a man wants to make sure his heritage lives on i.e. spread the semen as much as possible, father 1000 kids , while a woman wants a strong provider to father her kids.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women with many partners are easy to get into bed, while men are \"players\"\n","id":"6bebf3b6-1e75-44ff-9227-2d932c9d469e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Age of consent laws around the world vary dramatically, and even within the US there is a wide range of things that are acceptable or unacceptable depending on what state you are in. Most people are in support of age of consent laws, and will very aggressively assert that they want to protect the children. Many people will tell you that a sexual relationship between an adult and a child who is X years old is unquestionably damaging to the child, where X is usually a completely arbitrary number. There is no doubt to me that an adult is capable of abusing a child in a relationship, and that the adult is capable of abusing the child in a way that the child believes they are consenting and does not believe they are being abused. I also believe that adults are capable of doing this to eachother in relationships where both people are of the consenting age. Where things start to get shaky is the point when people start asserting that all sexual relationships are abusive once the 'victim' is below a certain age. I do not believe that there is sufficient scientific evidence to back up this claim. I do not believe that healthy sexual relationships occurring between adults and teens or children are given the proper room to breathe or prosper as soon as a child is discovered to be in a sexual relationship with an adult, that child will be told repeatedly that their sexual partner is a bad person and that their sexual partner has abused them. I believe that this alone is sufficient to damage the child, regardless of whether the sexual relationship itself was damaging. Children are highly vulnerable to suggestion. I believe that more rigorous scientific investigation is necessary to justify the age of consent laws, and that once the scientific evidence comes out, the age of consent laws should be adjusted accordingly. I know that, as a teenage boy, especially by 14 but even, to a smaller degree, as early as 8 or 9 I would have been excited to engage in a sexual relationship with an attractive female. I don't see how this would have resulted in abuse or psychological damage assuming, of course, that my partner had my best interests in mind . But that's just the problem, it's nothing more than an anecdote. People who oppose my views also provide anecdotes. The amount of scientific research in this area is lacking, and lots of the mania surrounding child abuse laws come from unproven ideas about child innocence and susceptibility to abuse. As an even bolder step, I believe most age of consent laws are largely baseless as far as genuine evidence is concerned. as a side note, these beliefs also extend to other child abuse laws, and also extend to student teacher relationship laws . Please, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Age of consent laws are based on faulty anecdotes\n","id":"f5ec34af-8d25-40cb-b1c3-6e7ce00d2f76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Using the Webster's definiton of musician a composer, conductor, or performer of music Vangelis is the best and most accomplished COMPOSER. Vangelis is the best CONDUCTOR Vangelis is the best PERFORMER. gt He is best known for his Academy Award\u2013winning score for the film Chariots of Fire, composing scores for the films Blade Runner, Missing, Antarctica, 1492 Conquest of Paradise, and Alexander, one specific, his Direct CD's third track, METALLIC RAIN, is in my opinion, is THE best song ever composed and performed in all of history The first repose last 1 13 and goes into a second repose which lasts until the 2 46 mark when the main body of the song begins. Pure genius, surpasses ANY song I can think of. He literally invents and creates new musical sounds never before heard on traditional instruments. He writes, arranges and performs the best compositions in the world. Vangelis is a one man symphony orchestra plus. I mentioned Metallic Rain above, another favorite of mine his his Blade Runner Love Theme , most soothing song ever recorded. I can think of no other musician past or present better than Vangelis. Take a Yo Yo Ma for instance, Vangelis' synthesize cello music surpasses even the great Yo Yo Ma<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vangelis is the Best musician in History\n","id":"587dea04-55fe-4353-8fde-2fd650cb9268"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let's just start with people are idiots. It's easy to prove. When you argue with someone, they're wrong, you're right. Even in the face of evidence, they're still stupid and won't listen to reason and your adversary believes the same about you. Add in cognitive biases, fallacies, etc. The founders who endorsed the constitution wrote about the dangers of democracy. Simply because of the above Let's get specific Money in politics and elections So billions are thrown into elections. They use it to make ads. Ads are manipulative. The electorate succumbs. How is that a problem with money? Getting rid of money in elections is like passing laws against drugs instead of treating the user. The only questionable voting roadblocks seem to be IDs and being a felon. But ask the average American about these policies and they'll only be able to express what they see in the media. Or agree with them. You tube, Twitter, snapchat, Instagram are all free. We should compare Sanders followers vs. votes in primaries. Votes should surpass followers if the electorate is functioning. Only two parties Again, this is our fault. Sanders is going to lose. Why? Because the last TWO third party candidates received 1.5 million votes. 1 3 of the population of Reddit. Just Reddit. The government should represent me Not if you don't vote. How would the government know what you want? We will always be fighting a Comcast. Because we don't vote. Off year elections bring out about 40 of the electorate. Shit, if Reddit put its money where it's mouth is, off year elections would look vastly different. Even if I vote, I still lose . True. But now you run for office. You don't want to? Keep sulking you just made my point. The electorate is only as strong as you are. You have to be stronger. Do your shoes look like this after canvassing Twitter started a revolution in Egypt. How have you supported the occupy movement today? I see comment after comment about how we need guns to prevent tyranny. If we chose guns over voting and running, we deserve the tyranny. When did organized gun firing become easier than organized voting? No drop of water ever thinks it's responsible for a flood. This is the problem with the electorate. Edit Here's a quote from the Bernie Sanders AMA The answer is that everything depends upon the kind of strong grassroots movement that we can develop. If we do not have tens of millions of people actively involved in the political process, there is very little that any president can do because of the power of big money over the political and economic process. So what I have said time and time again is that we need a political revolution in this country, which means that 80 percent. of the people vote, not 40 percent, and which means that people demand that Congress represent the middle class and working families of this country and not just the billionaire class.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the problems in the U.S. are with the electorate, not Boomers or Republicans, etc.\n","id":"1459b3b1-1645-490c-b0e8-da8c40c54ae9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is not that it is detrimental to your health, one day out of many where you eat less healthy food won't ruin your health. But it is the worst way to motivate yourself and will make sticking to a diet more difficult. In having a cheat day, you are attributing bad food with a reward and therefore good food with a punishment. You are eating salads for lunch not because you want to, but because you promised yourself some ice cream on the weekend at least, that is a part of your motivation Doing this is not just going to be detrimental to your chance of sticking with a diet, but your mental health too. It shouldn't have to feel like every spoonful of salad is going in your mouth against your will. The experience needs to be framed in a way that makes it enjoyable. So it's a change in perspective you need, not a reward punishment system. People who naturally gravitate towards healthy foods aren't forcing themselves in this way, they eat healthy food because they want to, it makes them happier. The healthy food is the reward itself, there is no need for reliance on extrinsic motivation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having 'Cheat Days' Will Make Sticking With a Diet More Difficult\n","id":"bfe5acd2-f1f6-40cf-865e-f33686684f7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Political parties in Australia spent approximately $11 million in the 2016 election, which is approximately \u00a30.46 per capita. In contrast, the 2016 election is the US spent $2.3 billion which is $7.1 per capita. Australia vastly under-spends the US in election campaigns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Compulsory voting may decrease the cost of elections as well as mobilisation and political campaigns, and those resources can then be used on other issues.\n","id":"a42ab109-af06-4155-b56e-a0e14b35f46e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, before I start speaking about the actual thing, you need to realize what I'm talking about. When I say let's stop being politically correct I don't say that bulling and real shaming are positive things we should preserve. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be nice to people or being racist, sexist, anti Semitic, homophobic etc. So the politically correct wave began to end hate speech and avoid offending people's feelings. Since it has good intentions it is viewed as a positive thing and sometimes disagreeing with political correctness is considered hate speech . The thing is that although it has good intentions it does a lot of damage to society. I know that many of you don't want to read a very very long speech and some of you might already be warming up against me for the title, so I will just name the reasons. \u2022 First of all, it eliminate freedom if speech. A right that is used as the foundation of democracy. You cannot remove a basic human right from someone just because you don't like how he uses it. There are countries without democracy, and if you dare to say anything that is considered wrong , like opposing to the government, you can get killed. \u2022Second of all, it uses as legitimization to call everything you disagree with hate speech . By that it blocks opinions said by people, because being politically correct makes you mark a big X on everything that is hate speech because hate speech is evil . \u2022Third of all, it educates people to cry on everything that they dislike. It teaches you that if someone says things you consider offensive, you need to cry about it even if he didn't have any intentions to do harm. Grow up and learn to compromise. I can seriously make this list continue all day. I'm sure many people can do a much better job at that than me. Basically politically correctness is shutting people up, most of them don't deserve it, and it make them look rasict, sexist, and what not. Therefore it shouldn't exist. People should grow up instead of whining about everything they dislike claiming they are oppressed. Please, change my mind if you can or support my opinion if you want.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"being \"politically correct\" brings causes more damage than good.\n","id":"b5f50969-9073-4d9e-ad5a-788388352d95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be a quota for Millennial representatives in the European Parliament?<|ARGUMENT|>Millennials will be the ones who have to deal with and live through the long term repercussions of today's political decisions, including those of the European Parliament.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Millennials are uniquely affected by the decisions of the European Parliament.\n","id":"b4e91f22-491b-4acf-86c3-2c0d982ef2be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>This argument puts theists at a huge disadvantage in their attempts, as unlike atheist who are able to consider blame towards either god, or man; theists are forced to only find a way in which man can be at fault, as to direct any sort of blame towards god, is to question his very definition. If god is to blame in any way, his all good, all knowing all loving existence is an impossibility.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If God were omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, then evil would not exist.\n","id":"805247e5-5485-4e8c-978f-cb3742d6f8c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV Vaccinations be Compulsory?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents from low income communities often have to work multiple jobs to feed their kids. This might lead to the kids falling behind in school, but doesn't make the parents incapable or abusive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are structural reasons as to why some parents are unable to prepare their kids for school adequately.\n","id":"dc591ea1-e39c-4737-a7a7-db499fed0310"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At the end of the day, money can only influence elections in one way advertising. All that money can do is buy more posters and commercials. If you are a moderate voter, maybe that could sway you. Maybe. More likely, you will, as everyone else does, be skeptical of campaign ads. This is especially true if you aren't a moderate. It gives you more visibility, but 99.999 of the time you aren't going to change anyone's mind. Money doesn't buy elections. At the end of the day your vote is all that matters, and how influenced is your vote likely to be by smear ads? On the other hand, most people look to the few major news sources CNN, MSNBC, Fox for their actual information when it comes to campaigns and making decisions. People seek out news that agrees with them and are then fed selective soundbites that influence their view of a candidate. If you're conservative, you go to Fox, if you are liberal, you go pretty much anywhere else. People tend to be less skeptical of their news sources just because it is the news. Now hopefully I don't need to explain why this is bad. Obviously the majority of news sources are bias, and there is a plethora of instances of false reporting. Why do people get so upset about Citizens United? I feel as though more than anything it is a scapegoat for people opposed to republicans and corporations. I don't feel as though reversing it will prompt any real change. I also don't feel like those opposed to it realize that there are plenty of motives that are likely to be held by democrats that aren't any more justifiable than republicans. Democratic candidates get most of their funding from unions, which, as far as I understand, aren't corporations and would still be allowed to donate could be wrong . If that's true, it seems like one could easily argue that its a political power play to cut Republican campaign funding. If it isn't true, It can still be seen as the same thing. TL DR People may not have morally sound reasons for opposing citizens united, and the media has significantly more of an effect on elections than money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"News bias is more damaging to U.S. democracy than money ever will be. Citizens United is a scapegoat.\n","id":"e5033cec-1266-45e6-8888-e85972af8ada"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>It has also been argued that many criminals are forced into being criminals. For example, someone who constantly struggles to get enough money for food may resort to stealing. In this case, the thief may logically decide that prison may actually be beneficial to him or her, as sufficient food is provided.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It has been argued that most crimes are the product of emotion and passion - and that logical considerations about the possible punishment painful as it may be do not feature in the underlying considerations.\n","id":"05cb61ed-cf18-465d-9845-2433b707f4c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>And that\u2019s ok. Nobody\u2019s perfect. Being racist can be as little as being judgy. Have you ever been judgy? Sure you have. We all have and that\u2019s ok. It\u2019d be seen as a bit scummy but ok. But once you judge a race, that\u2019s seen as racism. Try it, I don\u2019t think you could find a topic you could judge on without seeming racist. I also don\u2019t believe that\u2019s true racism but it\u2019s just seen as that. I feel like I\u2019m going to be judged for this but if I was a race that\u2019d be racist. What I\u2019m trying to say is that we\u2019re all racist cause we all judge and if we judge another race at all that\u2019s seen as racism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"we\u2019re all a bit racist\n","id":"2b72fedd-d3f1-4aaf-ad12-1fdd3931b596"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>Shortly afterwards, Justin Trudeau appeared to emulate Obama when he penned an article on the importance of men describing themselves as feminists. This suggests Obama might have inspired him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obama expressly described himself as a feminist which is likely to have inspired and emboldened others to support women's rights.\n","id":"b136444f-9aef-4a82-9623-98d7b249451d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Epistemologically, the only undeniable statement is \"I think, therefore I am\". All other claims weighed by partial evidence, or by rules such as \"justified true belief\", rather than requiring that we \"know for sure\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Belief in something does not require 100% proof but sufficient evidence.\n","id":"cd24ed03-3ca0-4797-b7b2-fddf4067024f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>For these people, sex may have great value as a way of affirming their normalcy and participation in society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This can be particularly important for persons who face social stigma, such as disabled persons.\n","id":"32714fde-0069-42e1-868b-48bd4cc68f50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be decriminalised<|ARGUMENT|>The proposition team believes that the victims of low-quality drugs will be lowered to a much smaller number than the number of victims nowadays. And the reason why this will happen is not only that there are not going to be new addicts, but that drugs are going to be purified. We believe that overdoses and impure drugs are the main reasons for people to die from drugs. As we all know there is no dealer who will tell his customers that by buying this product they threaten their health or that there are special programs which help people to stop using drugs. Nowadays all member states of the European Union sell all the tobacco products with labels which inform the consumers about the risks of smoking. Such an idea can be applied to drugs only if they are legal. The results of this initiative are obvious. This report 1 shows that many people consider the effective, especially the people under 30, the age in which people are most susceptible to using drugs. Another point is that the country will offer free injections which will cost the country nothing compared with what it spends on coping with diseases such as AIDS. Imposing laws that bind the sellers to give a free unused needles will make drug consumers forget about using a needle twice. We are sure you will agree that no one will consider using another person\u2019s injection if he or she can use his or her own. That is why we think that less people will die from drugs if they are legalized! That is the right thing to do. 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In addition to our fifth argument: Decriminalising drugs will make them safer\n","id":"7f0682c1-d50e-497a-955f-bcb181cc8776"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Overall, r montageparodies has been lacking in new material. The memes being used are getting more and more predictable and the core editing methods are really starting to get old. There's not much pushing the envelope in terms of content. The Illuminati, weed, etc. references just feel like forced jokes and really don't put anything really entertaining on the table. Editing over other videos, material, etc. in order to make a montage out of them really isn't cutting it. Most creators simply don't use the theme of the video being made into a montage parody enough. And it just feels more like they tossed a few memes and references on top to make it funny instead of really incorporating the other aspects. I feel like r montageparodies could do a lot more in terms of parodying both the MLG kind of stuff in addition to the videos being edited. There are really very few channels I even pay attention to anymore. Only notable one is AncientReality due to the high quality and the better use of themes of material being used. Edited for Claritian Clarity<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Montage Parodies have gotten stale and repetitive.\n","id":"b387572f-1fea-4412-9321-0bae967c22bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever you hear people have a discussion about sequels who match or exceed the greatness of their original film, The Godfather Part II gets thrown around a lot. However, even after giving it multiple viewings, I still cannot understand why people give it so much credit, especially when compared to the first one. Here are some of my reasons The character development in Part II is very limited and frankly boring. While Part I is simply a masterpiece with regard to its depiction of Michael's rise or fall, depending on how you see it from an idealistic outsider to head of the family, Part II's characters fall flat. Michael's simply a static character that doesn't really change throughout the course of the film, and without any of the drama within the family, with Sonny, Hagen etc an emotional connection to those characters isn't there. The only part that I do consider as proper character development is Vito's backstory, but this brings me to my next point. The flashbacks to Vito's rise don't effectively serve as a foil to Michael. I've read from many sources that Vito's ideals and personality creates an insightful contrast between Michael's, but I just can't see it. With the flashbacks, all we really see is man who kills a local mob boss, starts a literal family, and goes back to Sicily to take revenge for his father. The arc here is simple and nowhere near as interesting as Michael's in the first film, nor is it pertinent to the original story. With Michael, we can see his desire to live a normal life outside of the mafia, ultimately and gradually ruined by his loyalty to his family, turning him into a ruthless don. This causes us to relate with Michael and his path as a tragic hero. Vito's story has none of that complexity, and ultimately doesn't seem relevant to the larger, present day story in Part II. The entire plot revolving around Michael's business dealings and conflict with other gangsters is too convoluted, which also detracts from our immersion from the story at large. In Part I, I was completely captured within the mafia politics, and it made for an engaging story. This was just due to its simplicity. We could clearly root for the Corleones, understand who the bad guys were and why they were bad, and ultimately we cared about the Corleone family's plight. In Part II, none of that's there. We can't empathize with Michael because there's no character behind him. And when Fredo is murdered, in what I assume is supposed to be a gut wrenching finale to the film, we don't care nearly as much because we don't understand the full reasons behind why, nor do we feel sorry for him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Godfather Part II is inferior to Part I in almost every way\n","id":"90508a6a-b7bb-4f46-b20f-91da3e30f22c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund liberal arts degrees?<|ARGUMENT|>In Viktor Orban's Hungary, a pro-government website called on students to submit the names of professors who espoused \u201cunasked-for left-wing political opinions\". Such professors especially at the Central European University saw their funding cut, and many were driven out of Hungary altogether.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Commentators on the political right often attack universities and liberal arts programmes in particular as leftist and biased, in order to justify shutting down independent critics of the state, and of right wing policy.\n","id":"9ff48c06-b882-4231-8a88-d7ca5ef812a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whether you are in favor or against legalized abortion, the only factor that matters is when the fetus is considered a person and granted the ethical rights of personhood. Any attempt to parse abortion as a women's rights issue is reductive and misses the more important issue of whether or not a person is being killed. Basically, I hold that the right of a person to life necessarily supersedes an individual's right to bodily freedom. Consider a hypothetical case of conjoined twins who share a liver. I posit that each twin's right to life renders the other twin's right to bodily freedom i.e. freedom to do whatever he or she wants at any given second insignificant and therefore one twin would never be justified in killing the other as they are both ethical persons entitled to life. Similarly, once a fetus is considered a person whenever that point may be , the question of bodily freedom of the mother is insignificant. I hope that analogy makes sense. Thanks. I would also like to reemphasize that I am not endorsing any particular view on the question of abortion itself. I think I received a lot of down votes because people assumed I am against abortion. I would therefore like to say that I am indeed in favor of legalized abortion in most cases because I do not think early developing fetuses are persons. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women's rights are irrelevant when discussing the issue of abortion.\n","id":"d9a7895f-fe3a-41dc-be9d-39fdd6cc6bd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the USA a good country to live in?<|ARGUMENT|>The United States makes a committed and exemplary show of respect and preservation for these rights and freedoms, which is a critical aspect of any nation's appeal to potential and current citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States of America is generally considered the pioneer of human rights in the world.\n","id":"3454fc7c-63fc-494a-af9b-a3d11db56679"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not necessarily for or against a minimum wage increase and if I were for it, not certain 15 hr should be the first step but I do think that if we enact an increase too severe and I have reasonable suspicion even 12 could be too much we will lose a lot of jobs. I don't have a ton of reasons, it's just my view, I guess I'd like to see any facts or counter arguments if possible. I did see that machines have been made that can produce 1 burger every 10 seconds or so, and that McDonalds already implemented automated cashiers in Europe. This is the kind of thing that I think will happen in greater numbers more automatic cashiers at places like Wal Mart, even a shift to automated cooks, and warehouse workers I know there are already some warehouses where robots retrieve ordered packages for shipping .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A $15 minimum wage will increase unemployment, and remove entry-level positions.\n","id":"a9946802-6c1b-4fbd-aef4-f9fc9b2446bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll elaborated my opinion people who found a significant other SO , no matter at what age, which ended up spending their lives together out of genuine love are the only exception to my opinion. By guarantee of continuity, I mean going into a relationship knowing it'll last 'forever'. If one is in a relationship with their SO and they are truly both happy and blissful, why would they want to end it at some point? People fall out of love, have arguments, circumstances and such to make them discontinue a relationship what's the point to them then, if this large uncertainty exists? If a couple are happy right now, but they know that at some point in the future they have to go their separate ways due to a job opportunity for example, why shouldn't they break up the instance this eventuality pops up? Surely as humans we'd rather avoid the emotional pain of developing chemistry and bonds which could never be replaced just to lose them later on? In summary, why would one agree to be in a relationship that they judge to the best of their ability to be positive pleasurable good if it is to almost surely end before one of the partners' life is spent happily together? I'm in one right now and I'm happier than I've ever been, but this thought implemented in my mind. Change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Relationships are pointless unless there's guarantee of continuity\n","id":"215e294d-9ae1-4ed6-9ffc-d4e0cfda1dcf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>In fact, a study found that the most common factors amongst children who don't tell of their abuse all relate to the family home: coming from a family with rigid gender roles, family violence and bad communication in the home. As such, it is important that CSE support is offered outside the home.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"50% of child sexual abuse victims under the age of 6 are abused by family members. As such, it is critical that students feel comfortable talking to their teachers about these issues, because they may not be able to disclose to their parents.\n","id":"705efa0b-ac40-42ca-93bf-5ae1be3ad3e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Turkey EU membership<|ARGUMENT|>If the EU admits Turkey, what will prevent the application and admission of, for instance, Morocco? Admitting Turkey opens the door to a slippery slope of admitting non-European countries to the EU.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Admitting Turkey leads to a slippery slope of non-European admissions\n","id":"ab5adcb0-c06d-4a12-bcae-3869e511daf5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Zero Tolerance Is a Good Way to Reduce Crime<|ARGUMENT|>Zero tolerance also allows for a sound rehabilitative role. A custodial sentence, particularly for juveniles, takes them out of the atmosphere often surrounded by drug use and living in poverty and or abusive homes that encourage criminality. Rehabilitation through the prison system is not just a possibility but a central tenet of all penal codes. Education and discipline are both vital to our prisons. The large number of police on the ground also allows for a supervisory role in the community after the prisoner is released to reduce reoffending.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zero tolerance also allows for a sound rehabilitative role. A custodial sentence, particularly for j...\n","id":"e68a8b0c-389c-4bbd-85d9-b5b553ea336b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should political franchise be earned by individuals?<|ARGUMENT|>For many, especially younger voters, the struggle to gain voting rights is something from history and it is easy to see voting as something that is a hassle rather than a privilege or a duty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This could create an incentive to value voting more than we do currently that would actually increase the turnout among voters.\n","id":"2579b3e5-f242-4355-94cb-c50d4510b94e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the UN a force for good?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unfair that small and largely unimportant nations like the U.K have a disproportionate say in how the U.N is run because they are a member of the security council and have a veto.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The security council reflects who the most powerful nations were after World War 2. It is unfair that membership of the U.N security council does not reflect current realities.\n","id":"2568ee8c-2f6d-4ec6-b67e-6bbcc294d169"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The same stories appear in different places of the bible with significant changes, including the interchangeability of satan and god as the antagonist. If the bible is accepted as \"the breath of god, holy, perfect, and completely true,\" then god and satan must be different faces for the same being.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious stories contain evidence that god and satan are the same being.\n","id":"f6983322-d86f-4f1d-812e-ac501eba22d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We often tell people who are in emotionally abusive a term that this  would inherently contest relationships that Your SO's happiness is not your responsibility . I would agree with this. In fact, I would extend it to ALL emotions. Your emotions are not my responsibility. It is not my duty to be a steward of your emotional state. This is not to say that I think it's okay to be a dick. I'll get to this in a minute . I am not capable of controlling your emotions, no matter how much you tell me that you think I can. Perhaps you could argue, if you're a determinist like me, that their emotions are not within their control, either. Okay, I'll grant that. That, however, does not shift the responsibility to me it shifts it to the natural order of things. If you aren't a determinist, then you must admit that people need to take responsibility for their own emotions. I mean, after all, they are THEIR OWN emotions. You being sad isn't my emotion. It's yours . It's YOUR reaction to something I did or said. I provide the stimuli, you react. The fact that you had something to react to can be said to be my fault, but your reaction belongs to you or nature, if you're a determinist . What I really want to drive home is that the following sentences should never be said again It's your fault that I feel this way You made me sad happy etc. . This having been said, allow me to point out that I do not think for one second that this is an excuse to run around calling, for example, black people niggers and then saying, It's not my fault you feel that way . Even though they are correct, that person would be a dick who is missing the point. The idea is to take into account how you think people are likely to react even if their reaction is their own, or belongs to nature determinism , and then act accordingly. Example calling a black person a nigger is not objectively hurtful I have two black best friends and we all throw that word around all the time at each other. This shows that not 100 of the time is a black person going to feel hurt upon hearing that word. However, if I walked up to a black person I've never met and called them that, there's a VERY high probability that their emotional state will be quite negative afterwards. Is their emotional reaction my fault? No, it's theirs or nature's . But I'm a huge dick for being aware of the probability and doing it anyway. Thoughts?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that I am not responsible for anyone else's emotional states. Their emotions are their responsibility. *This includes insulting someone and them feeling negative emotions.*\n","id":"e7cba218-ca17-45f3-b17b-676660aede1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>it should be impossible under Kants moral law to stop being a person and no longer be subject to the categorical imperative. But If an individual in charge has come to a moral conclusion based on his own reason that differs from the collective will, which is the collection of individual moral reason, he will have to act for the collective or risk imposing his will over the collective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eichmann recognised this contradiction and so gave up the categorical imperative when he was summoned to Berlin. He became a tool of administration and removed his person.\n","id":"ac960fcb-9f6f-46db-8125-efa0127c26e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is there an afterlife?<|ARGUMENT|>The Miller-Urey Experiment - which attempted to simulate the conditions of early Earth to investigate the origin of life - provided further support for this theory<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Oparin-Haldane hypothesis postulated that the random interactions of various chemicals gave rise to all living organisms.\n","id":"392e3343-c33c-48b6-bd3c-aa4d2efaa13e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gay adoption<|ARGUMENT|>\"Case No. S147999 in the Supreme Court of the State of California, In re Marriage Cases Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding No. 4365, Application for leave to file brief amici curiae in support of the parties challenging the marriage exclusion, and brief amici curiae of the American Psychological Association, California Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, National Association of Social Workers, and National Association of Social Workers, California Chapter in support of the parties challenging the marriage exclusion\": \"Although it is sometimes asserted in policy debates that heterosexual couples are inherently better parents than same-sex couples, or that the children of lesbian or gay parents fare worse than children raised by heterosexual parents, those assertions find no support in the scientific research literature.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no scientific basis for concluding that gay and lesbian parents are any less fit or capable than heterosexual parents, or that their children are any less psychologically healthy and well adjusted.\n","id":"1122d442-03f0-4036-9a83-ff82ed36a9bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This one will most likely be a tough one to crack. After a lot of threads, conversations, research I settled into a view that I certainly feel it's unchangeable since I've had it for a while, so that's why I'm posting here to see if any of you freaks can present a rational argument that would change the view I'm going to present slightly, or even significantly. I'm not here to soapbox, I honestly have an open mind on this and I'm honest enough to acknowledge this view has been changed numerously previously but now it appears stuck. Semantics will most likely not change my view and I'm not looking for arguments that would supplement my view, only for those who might change it slightly significantly in an another direction. I'll award delta to any comment that can change the view I'm going to present even slightly , and will also edit the OP in how my view has changed if any So here it is gt Assuming society continues advancing there will be a point in time in the future when abortion the necessary evil of killing human beings and killing animals for nourishment will become illegal in every way except the rare cases when an another human being's life depends on one of those acts, because the benefits of the former case the necessary evil of abortion and the latter case the nourishment will no longer exist or be negligible. If you think you have a rational argument to change a word in the sentence above in an another direction, I'll be happy to read discuss it Changed view 1 gt Assuming society continues advancing there will be a point in time in the future when abortion the necessary evil of killing human beings and killing animals for nourishment will become illegal in every way with the rare exception of cases when an another human being's life depends on one of those acts, because the benefits of the former case the necessary evil of abortion and the latter case the nourishment will no longer exist or be negligible. Exception for killing an animal for nourishment would be when the animal is killed because it's species are getting overpopulated invasive. Link<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The acts of abortion and killing animals for food will both be illegal in the future\n","id":"29f7622e-11a7-48f9-b800-7ead0b380222"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I watched the Great Hack last night and my conclusion was that Cambridge Analytica didn\u2019t do anything wrong. They did affect the outcome of 2016 US presidential election and many elections around the world including Brexit and in all of their work they had clear political standing. But ignoring political standing what Cambridge Analytica did was use Facebook data of about 80 million people with other data sources and created targeted advertisement to sway voters. Much of what they published was factually false and they mostly targeted poorly politically educated population. To change my view either show that my sources are false they are mostly based on the Great Hack documentary and some news I have read or convince that something they did was wrong. Facebook data argument Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data collected from about 80 million people. They were collected from mix of public profiles, people who used their questionnaire and most importantly they used researched access that allowed them to see limited information about friends of their subjects. The last one has been the controversial one. This lack of oversight from Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to gather some information about large group of people without their consent. Data included their page likes, location, birthdays and public profiles. First of all you have to admit that if you give information about yourself to public profile it can and will be used to create marketing profile about yourself. If you say this is wrong you are delusional and I won\u2019t even engage with argument with you. Page likes, home city and birthdays are other thing. In this case I see that it was lack of proper oversight by Facebook that allowed Cambridge Analytica to gather this information. If you can mine this kind of information about person from online I see it is fair game to use in political campaigning. Lot of this information can be also mined from Twitter or Instagram user profiles that are public. If you don\u2019t like that information about you is used then don\u2019t put it in internet publicly. I admit that how Cambridge Analytica lied about deleting data and how they handled the scandal was bad but once they had the processed profiles they didn\u2019t need the raw data anymore. Anti democratic argument Saying that targeted advertisement and political campaigning is anti democratic is outright false statement. Politicians go to certain areas and speak with certain audience that share same views all the time. When they talk to goal miners they give tailored message that differ when they are talking in a country club. Cambridge Analytica just allowed to identify the target voters more effectively and gave a relatively cheap platform where to spread the message. Propaganda argument Politicians lie. Cambridge Analytica lied. Since dawn of time false information have been spread during elections. There is nothing new about this. Internet has just created echo chambers where fake news fester and feed from ignorance of the people. It is part of political campaigning to try to disprove claims done by your opponent. Educating people about issues is job not just for politicians but also for media and public education. 2016 presidential elections proved that both media and public education have failed American people and they are too dumb or lazy to do better. GDPR argument First of all GDPR is EU legislation that was implemented in 2018 far after Cambridge Analytica case. But it is important point to take into consideration when looking into future. If we look future elections in EU could company like Cambridge Analytica act in these markets. In my view answer is yes. Facebook and other online platforms are clear in their EULA that user profiles are used to create marketing profiles that are therefore sold to companies. They have rights to do this with exception of \u201cRight to erasure\u201d.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cambridge Analytica did't act wrongly during 2016 US presidential elections\n","id":"2f6fbae8-0a52-4a46-a604-16960588c4c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The best Science Fiction movie is?<|ARGUMENT|>A genius author who also wrote the books to other SciFi bombs like Total Recall and Minority Report.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The book was written by Philip K. Dick, one of the most acclaimed SciFi authors ever.\n","id":"222ecf55-01f7-4be8-bc21-7ea1f4695326"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Many genetic studies require going through multiple generations. A human generation lasts 20 or so years. Assuming you could convince each and every successive women from each family to be inseminated by another research subject, it would still take you over 100 years to do a five generations study, compared to the one year it would take to do the study in mice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mice are a much more practical for genetic research than humans.\n","id":"5a26ffcd-8e1c-4937-b1b6-b820180b94f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Media That Openly Declares Bias Better Than Media Claiming To Be Neutral?<|ARGUMENT|>When news is known to be biased, people will be pressured to seek more opposing views or else their opinions would also be biased and this causes discomfort.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given the negative connotations of being in a political echo chamber, readers will be more likely to seek out opposing views in their media sources.\n","id":"7ac39f20-3da1-4a70-968e-51eaf93a207f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Brexit: Is The UK Going To Regret The Referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no evidence that any saved money if any even exists is going toward a budget for the NHS.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The promise of \u00a3350M to NHS is just not true.\n","id":"ebf0fd30-aa56-4bd2-b284-94da29791f2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>Current, simple sex robots cost between $5,000 and $15,000 USD and this price will likely increase as technology becomes better and more complex Responsible Robotics, p. 4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex robots are likely to be incredibly expensive, even as the technology progresses.\n","id":"e17c3d86-8976-46d1-8a29-506b48d3c8a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whether it is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump who is elected on Nov. 8th, the United States is headed for rough times ahead due to that President's actions. Hillary Clinton is one of the most corrupt individuals I have ever seen running for any position in the US. She, more than anyone else, seems like she listens more to corporate backers than the people supporting her. Under her, huge multinational corporations will flourish at the cost of the people. Donald Trump is an immature, egocentric bordering on narcissistic man who lacks the tact and poise a President must have as one of the most powerful people in the world. I feel as though he will, by his political inexperience, raise tensions and hostilities with allies and enemies around the world. Under him, racial tensions will reach a head and crime rates will skyrocket. Both of these candidates have a high chance to bring the United States to war, and cause economic collapse. Of course, that's all my view. I want to hear what other people think, who would be better for the country or why neither would actually be that bad. So, work your magic, Reddit. Edit2 I'm headed to bed, guys, thanks for providing me with an evening of good political discussion. I don't think it was enough to completely change my view, but I do think that perhaps it won't be as bad as I thought.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the United States will go through hard times in the next four years no matter who is elected President\n","id":"36f3d33b-fcb0-4893-9c73-20f0df437d69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Competition is not only very good preparation for the future, it is also fun to compete within the family.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Market principles and family business do not exclude each other.\n","id":"ea5e0cee-ef36-4170-b2e3-224f9f537c20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>If the information used to calibrate an algorithm is biased this bias is reproduced in the algorithm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All tech companies have political biases that are perpetuated in their algorithms.\n","id":"e3559f6e-1d4f-47a6-aa1b-b92425048cbe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear two primary reasons for people citing the need for individual armament personal defense and so the citizens can protect themselves from tyranny. I think the notion that the citizens could potentially protect themselves from a tyrannical regime with the military capabilities of the United States is ludicrous. I think the discussion has to start with a few acknowledgements. First, in the scenario I am discussing, the United States military would have to be backing the regime. Tyranny cannot exist without a virtual monopoly on force and a citizens rebellion would not be necessary if the military opposed the regime. In that scenario the military could effectively overthrow the tyrant via a coup d'etat. Second, tyrants act like tyrants. We should expect the tyrannical regime to have minimal regard for human rights and to do virtually everything in their power to crush the opposition. We should expect the regime to show similar levels of restraint as we've seen from other dictators when they have crushed past rebellions, only with the enormously enhanced military, intelligence and surveillance capabilities of the United States. Third, there would be minimal potential for external intervention or assistance. Even in the case of a citizens rebellion, other countries would be extremely wary of arming rebels and potentially starting a devastating war with the United States. With those ideas acknowledged, I fail to see how armed citizens would stand a chance against the strength of the United States military. Assault rifles don't stand a chance against helicopters, drone strikes, tanks and air raids. At best, the citizens could start a guerrilla war, but I have a hard time believing that given the United States' massive capabilities that guerrillas would achieve any substantive victories or gain any momentum.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The second amendment is not an effective way for the citizens to protect themselves from a tyrannical regime emerging in the United States\n","id":"5f633b4e-33e7-4acc-8a3f-6d58afad581a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all I would like to explain what inspired this thought. You can skip this part. I have previously read Nietzsche\u2019s \u201cGenealogy of Morals\u201d. My understanding of this text is not the matter of debate here, but I will provide my brief takeaway from it so that it\u2019s clear what I\u2019m arguing AGAINST. In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that society is not progressing towards moral good. He does this by denying the existence of moral good. Things that are considered morally good change from time to time, place to place, people to people etc. There aren\u2019t objective universal morals. For example, homosexuality was accepted in ancient times, shunned in recent history, and now it is being accepted again. Since there is no \u2018scale of moral goodness\u2019 we cannot be progressing in it. Nietzsche argues that all things we consider moral today can be traced back to some events in the past that caused them to happen. Therefore, things could have ended differently. For example countries used to be ruled by absolute monarchy. Now, we have democracy. Society has not evolved this way because democracy is morally superior. Things just happened to work out this way. So,  I believe that society does progress towards a higher moral standard as time passes. This discussion necessitates a definition of moral good. I am willing to debate this. The definition I took is Good causes most benefit and least harm to people Bad causes harm and pain to people It is said that the rise of civilization allowed systems where humans can oppress each other. Hunter gatherer societies had no slaves. The division of labour allowed the formation of classes like the aristocracy that dominated others. On the other hand, civilization also allowed for concepts like justice, equality etc to form. As our understanding expanded, so did the moral goodness of an average person. Of course, vicious people came along, like the Nazis, but this wasn\u2019t because there were more vicious people. It was because the vicious held more power due to our advancing technology. It is natural to have some setbacks while progressing. Fascism was short lived. Even the dark ages are tiny compared to the entire human history. We have managed to recover and are recovering from these setbacks, solidly on our way to moral good. I agree that things did not have to turn out this way. We could not have had democracies. However, I argue that whatever we would have would be better than the previous forms of government. In history, we see a clear increase in order and prosperity on a governmental level. Even the US, which is often criticized for its wealth gap and extremely capitalist government, still has some social support programs. On an individual level too. We are more accepting, tolerant, kind sharing than previous humans. We don\u2019t employ medieval torture methods anymore, or prosecute \u201cheathens\u201d. A minority might, but the general public doesn\u2019t anymore. It just seems like there are more vicious than ever because the few vicious have a louder voice in the information age.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"society is progressing towards moral good throughout time.\n","id":"ada31335-62c7-45dc-bf58-6818a840384d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, so I would never let anyone know this publicly, hence the post, but I really did enjoy Battlefield Earth. The acting is pretty poor, but it is at least a decent Sci Fi movie, with a good amount of action. I liked the thought of post war America, has some shout outs to ft hood, knox, and a couple other famous cities. The learning machine allows the humans to become intelligent, travolta getting his comeuppance at the end. I gotta say, if it is on, I tend to watch it. Just to Give a Primer, my 5 favorite movies of all time in no particular order Shawshank, Godfather, Inside Man, Animal House, Goodfellas<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Battlefield Earth was an entertaining film, and not nearly as bad as people say.\n","id":"b5ff62e5-4d5f-4347-b756-95d8975bd14d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Too frequently I see kids that have their own smartphones. To me, this is frightening. Kids should not be bombarded with this sort of technology so early because it creates a dangerous dependence where they will never know what life is like without such a device. It's sad to go to restaurants and see young kids at the table playing with an iPhone, instead of talking to their family. It's like parents have gotten lazy and the only way they can shut their kids up is with a 500 device. I think it's sad because it ruins their childhood. Kids who are raised on iPhones will never know what it's like to be disconnected from the world and to live life in the moment, not worrying if they're missing a text or an email. Now, I don't completely disagree that young kids should have their own phone if it's one of those simple flip phones that can only call 911 or their parents or whatever. I had a game boy when I was a kid, but the games on it were simple and I couldn't connect with strangers on it. I didn't get my first cell phone until I was 16, and I really struggle to see why any kid needs one before then. So, you probably get my point. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is bad parenting and a sad reflection of society when a child is given a smartphone.\n","id":"b2c2b5a6-a8bf-4ce3-9a52-604d7354ba7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer first I believe global warming could be a very real threat, and obviously should be prepared against. Having said that Since Thatcher's era, our industry has dwindled to the point where we are now effectively a consumer society. Areas of Britain, the north in particular, have been gutted, and unemployment in these areas are a grim read. All because the industry moved away. With fracking, we have a genuine opportunity to bring a form of industry back to the UK, with no provisos due to the fact that it is a natural substance rooted in the ground. No manufacture costs that hold businesses back from coming to the UK if you want the materials, you have to come into the country to extract it, you have to employ people to do it. When people also hear the word 'fossil fuel', it becomes a buzz word for bad. And sometimes rightly so. However, the extraction of gas is a lesser evil than oil its slightly cleaner for starters. And, with extraction coming to the UK, we may be able to switch to a less damaging product in a host of areas, such as in our cars. What keeps us back at the moment is the sheer cost of importing gas from areas like Russia, and with a domestic product available, so too will cheaper energy. Of course it's not the ideal scenario, but right now we have no other alternatives. 'Green' energy carry with it a huge carbon debt made from the production stage that relies on oil, and are proving to be inefficient and intrusive towards people's lives. We need to slow down implementation of green sources and plough that money into research and development, but also reduce dependency on oil, something that, for the mean time, gas can provide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that fracking in the UK is a necessity for the short term and protesters are deluded.\n","id":"089cb6c1-55cf-4c51-93f1-e2e4a17c50b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>There is ample evidence that humans are not wired for monogamy, meaning that some infidelity will occur no matter what, even if all relationships are strong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is evidence that a propensity to sexual infidelity is heritable. Thus, it cannot simply be blamed on sexual dissatisfaction Cherkas et al.\n","id":"abdb8fe0-8b8c-45ed-ba58-0ed095586dab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>One of the key founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, argued that the constitution and all laws should expire every 19 years He believed that the popular consent of the people of the time should determine the laws that bind then.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The founding fathers themselves included an article in the constitution allowing for changes to be made Therefore, amending the constitution in many ways follows the rules the founders set down.\n","id":"c35deb15-2459-47d7-88a2-c52a999487da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Illegal downloaders be cut off from the internet?<|ARGUMENT|>Many legal services are available which allow you to download video and audio for free. Most TV channels have an online on-demand service. There are similar services available for music, including Nokia\u2019s Come with Music service, which allows owners of specific Nokia phones to download unlimited music, free of charge. Persistent file-sharers are halting the development and growth of these legal services.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many legal ways to get music and film for free\n","id":"d0c3e3ca-dbd6-41d6-8f7e-07540107cb30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it OK to use a web development framework without understanding the underlying components?<|ARGUMENT|>Frameworks have their own learning curve: when you can use them to produce credible results, that's all that matters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Is it OK to use a PHP framework without understanding the underlying components?\n","id":"88223a9c-6a59-4b0f-9891-9c3a7c2248a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm somewhat conflicted. My gut tells me that TDK was a better movie b c Heath Ledger put on an amazing performance, and the fact that he died shortly afterwards just added more intrigue to an already highly anticipated flick. I remember at the time that it really did live up to the hype, and I walked out the theater thinking that this would go down as an all time great movie and one of my personal favorites. But I re watched it a few months ago and I find myself liking TDKR more. Maybe it's because there are greater diminishing returns with the Joker performance, whereas TDKR relies more on the story. Maybe I just have fond er memories of seeing TDKR in theaters. Maybe I just like how quotable Bane was is. But it just seems like for all that happened in TDK, not a lot really happened. TDKR had the scene where the stadium collapsed, the city thrown into anarchy, and they nearly nuked gotham. Idk, but after the stakes were so high in TDKR and after all Bruce overcame, it seems like the TDK was somewhat uneventful in a weird way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"TDKR is a better movie than TDK\n","id":"19cfbb65-6fe2-422b-9eec-e78b1e3433b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>Extramarital involvement frequently results in considerable distress both to participants and their spouses. A confession can transform the relationship into an open one and make everything less stressful Allen et al., p.102<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some couples might be happiest in a semi-monogamous relationship; cheating might enable partners to consider this as an option.\n","id":"d94e810f-d921-4d65-ac48-3c5f281cb136"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>The born this way narrative emphasizes it being present for each person from the beginning, as it stands it is already difficult for people to come out later in life, if this becomes the dominant perception it will undoubtably discourage more people from coming out later in life, leading to them living less happy fulfilled lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using the phrase 'Born This Way' may not be the best way to engage people with the LGBTQ+ movement.\n","id":"b84362bd-e521-4094-a483-3fab327ed756"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Schools in America do not provide any flexibility for students to think differently American education does not actually educate students especially secondary education , and instead focuses on lowering requirements so that more students can graduate In many states, funding for education is often cut to finance other political schemes, when really education should be top priority Schools are prisons they become less and less about curiosity and learning and more about obedience American schools are too focused on forcing uninterested students to do the work , rather than providing all students opportunities to learn and letting them take advantage of it according to their will Educators prevent students from thoroughly learning material by racing through every subject, covering only basics, and preventing slower learners to understand completely before moving on Students should have better opportunities to investigate their own interests and their interests of the practical applications of subjects National and global awareness should be more thoroughly incorporated into all education so that students will be more curious and prepared aware as voters and citizens Education should be more open minded and flexible, and should teach students to be so as well students should be free to express and receive non pressured information to cultivate a more open minded populous who don't just take the opinions beliefs of their parents, but make them themselves Edit I am certainly most aware of the vague statements I have given you and I apologize for the vagueness, and appreciate your responding anyways. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States school systems are inadequate.\n","id":"fddfb3b5-706d-4359-93d0-12a8ce853e12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abolition of nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>The reason for maintaining an effective nuclear arsenal is in fact to prevent war. By making the results of conflict catastrophic, a strategic deterrent discourages conflict. The Cold War was in fact one of the most peaceful times in history, particularly in Europe, largely because of the two superpowers' nuclear deterrents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using nuclear weapons would be a tragedy; but so is using any weapon.\n","id":"a9cf048c-8813-4101-a3bb-5cd2c11ed2ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>This has often taken the form of forcible interference with reproduction. For example, there are many instances of forcible sterilization of women, often without their knowledge or consent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender is used by nation states for greater administrative control.\n","id":"94f23ae0-58e1-4538-b940-fb65fe89e7f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's become something of a running joke now to point to a teacher who is obviously doing a terrible job and say They must be tenured. It is extremely difficult for a school to fire a teacher with tenure even if that teacher is performing extremely poorly but not technically breaking any rules. I understand that tenure is largely intended to protect teachers against firing because they're teaching or researching something that is unpopular. I can see the utility of it at a college level where you do have research and classes that often stray into controversial territory so something like tenure to protect teachers from the public pressuring the university to fire them has a use. At the K 12 level for those not in the US, our school systems generally last about thirteen years for kids starting with Kindergarten and going through 12th grade though there isnt much being taught that makes teachers fear for their jobs to the degree that it requires something like tenured status. Instead, it seems to protect poor teachers and prevents schools from getting rid of them when they could be doing serious damage to the students they have the misfortune of teaching.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that tenure for K-12 or non-college level teachers is unnecessary and often detrimental to the school and students.\n","id":"95861713-610b-498a-87a6-a822a886350b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Inspired by u Fuck Blue Shells post about grilled cheeses versus melts I had to come to the defense of ingredients in grilled cheeses. Cheese elitists and provolone partisanship like this is what's tearing the country apart. gt This entire subreddit consist of melts . Almost every grilled cheese sandwich i see on here has other items added to it. Is my burger less than a burger if I add guacamole to it? Is my hotdog less hotdog when I add relish? No, of course not. We have food combinations that compliment each other, that take it to the next level. Mixing up the cheeses and breads are a great idea, I would encourage anyone to try that, but the thinking Fuck Blue Shells encourages keeps the grilled cheese decades in the past. gt Adding cheese to your tuna sandwich? It's called a Tuna melt. Totally different. I agree with this. However, as with a lot of things, intent matters. Think of satire. Does Fuck Blue Shells watch The Colbert Report and think Stephen Colbert is a true neo conservative? Intent is everything. I made blueberry pancakes this weekend. I didn't start calling them blueberry smoosh breads. Chocolate chips, bananas, blueberries put what you want in there, they are still called pancakes at the end of the day. If you make a tuna sandwich and just happened to put cheese on top, then yes, that's a melt. The cheese is an afterthought. A good grilled cheese sandwich can be constructed with intent and purpose to deliver the most mind shattering mouth orgasm by knowing what tastes compliment each other. Gouda, apple and bacon on sourdough. It's no accident, it's no afterthought. The cheese as well as every other ingredient is on purpose. If I make pancakes and just throw blueberries on the top instead of in the mixture, that's not a blueberry pancake any more than a tuna melt is a grilled cheese, because intent matters. By Fuck Blue Shells' logic, using butter on your grilled cheese is a butter melt. Using a cooking spray to grease the pan is a cooking spray melt. gt But as a bland white mid western male I am honestly the most passionate person when it comes to grilled cheese and mac cheese. As of this post, Fuck Blue Shells hasn't spread his culinary segregationist message to r macncheese. You'd better bet that's coming next. Beware you who adds bacon to their cheese and noodles While I admire their passion, Fuck Blue Shells and his followers are merely propagating a backwards and anti progressivism when it comes to what's on your plate. What am I eating, you ask? I am eating equality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adding extra ingredients to a grilled cheese doesn't make it any less than a grilled cheese\n","id":"b6c09982-9ab8-462c-acfb-248cadfa9eb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>With their own lives or those of loved ones at risk, people will try to be more informed of the threats faced by their country and will be personally invested in governmental decisions on military policy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having citizens conscripted to the military would increase participation in national politics as it would affect people directly.\n","id":"12e518c2-9a96-4715-92ea-a143ecfe2637"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start out by saying I believe abortion is wrong, but should remain legal. Having an abortion is never a happy occasion. It is awful. It sucks to have to go through the process of terminating life. Now, however, we are faced with an issue. The mother still does not want to have the child regardless of whatever reason that may be . Now, what solutions do we have? Solutions Foster care and adoption. However, these options aren't that great either. So many kids are brought into the adoption system to never become adopted. Can you imagine what that must feel like? By 18, they've never had anyone to call them family and they have zero personal guidance in this world. But wait, there's more the foster care system is overburdened. There are so many cases of people sexually abusing these children or using them to make mini sweatshops. But those are the extreme cases. In the more mild cases, these children constantly change homes, leave behind their schools, their friends. Everything. Many are never shown true familial love. Oftentimes these kids grow up poor and feel like no one in the entire world wants them. Not even their own family. THAT is a sad life. Now ask yourself, would you rather \u2022 \u2060A. Every child have the right to life, regardless of the fact that they are more likely to grow up in a loveless, poor, and or in an abusive household. OR \u2022 \u2060B. Every child grow up in a loving and supportive family, and have the equal opportunity to succeed. I don't know about you but I would rather option B. I think it is more morally wrong to force a child to live this kind of life. Forcing them to do so, does not make you pro life. If you cannot ensure a lt lt keyword gt gt quality life for them, you are not pro life. Unfortunately not every parent can will take care of their child. Every single time you morally disagree with the act of getting an abortion, ask yourself are YOU going to take care of that unborn child? Are YOU going to take care of ALL those unborn children? Because, if not, then it doesn't make sense to force a mother to carry a child and it doesn't make sense to condemn a child to a sad life. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You are NOT PRO-LIFE if you condemn a child to a life in the foster care\/adoption system.\n","id":"4f277e8e-6953-46e8-a52f-4ef3734fd96b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>The Brexit dividend will pay the equivalent of \u00a3384 million a week more than the \u00a3350 million promised by Vote Leave<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\u00a320 billion has been pledged to NHS by 2024, funded by money saved from the EU membership.\n","id":"874af07f-ce80-4966-96bd-607f1cf13ef7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is a long standing belief in society at least here in the US that meritocracy exists and people embrace it. That is individuals who work hard and are the most competent and qualified for what they do will naturally rise to the top in their professions and get rewarded for being their merit. In reality, this isn't what happens. Networking, not meritocracy, overwhelmingly dominates who gets jobs and who doesn't. A common saying that gets recycled constantly is, It's not what you know, it's who you know and that saying should be damning proof that meritocracy does not actually exist in society. Consider the following scenario one that happens countless times in job searches. There is an opening for a generic corporate job and the position has been narrowed down to two candidates that we'll call John and Jeff. John has no real social ties with the people in the company, but out of all the people interviewed for the job, he has the greatest merit and is overwhelmingly the most qualified person for the job. In contrast, Jeff has connections with the company his aunt is the accounting manager. Jeff's aunt put in a good word about Jeff to the hiring manager and that vaulted him to the top of the list for the position. Despite this, Jeff is clearly less qualified for the job than John. In an actual meritocracy, the person that would be hired for this position is John and there wouldn't be a second thought about it. In reality, Jeff is the one who gets hired because of that critical connection he has with the company. Not only does John lose out from a job that should have been his, but the company loses out as well as they are now stuck with a less productive employee than they would have gotten had they simply hired on merit. What really frustrates me is that people continue to pretend that meritocracy exists in society and then turn around and disregard it with hiring and promoting people. Meritocracy is constantly upheld to such a high degree in society, and yet it is constantly being shunned in favor of networking in the real world . This is especially true the higher up the economic ladder you get. A big reason the upper middle and upper classes push so hard to get their kids into good schools and colleges is solely because of the networking opportunties. Conversely, middle and lower classes are constantly told by society to buy into the ideals of meritocracy to work hard to try to get up the economic ladder. Unfortunately for them, the lower classes are shut out of many economic opportunties that their affluent counterparts have because they lack the networking to get their foot in the door. No amount of merit and hard work can make up for that. Personally, I believe in equality of opportunity and I despise the idea of government trying to deliberately level the playing field to even everyone out i.e. the concept of equality of outcome that progressives push for . I support the idea of meritocracy and that jobs should be filled by the absolute most qualified individuals. However, I am willing to admit that equality of opportunity is a lot more elusive than some want admit. And a big reason for that is that meritocracy is largely an illusion that does not exist in society. People need to stop pretending that meritocracy exists, because it really doesn't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fact that people get jobs because of the people they know rather than actually being the most qualified individual is proof that meritocracy is largely an illusion in society.\n","id":"82c1a0d5-3dd6-4d50-a49f-c55a72713b7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Israeli controls, including sweeping searches, permits, control of motor vehicles and detention of individuals, are based on the 1948 Defense Emergency Regulation which gives individual soldiers the rights to act upon their discretion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These blockades are legal as they have been codified in Israeli law and thus are a legitimate exception under Article 13 Human Rights Committee, p. 6\n","id":"db85a62e-6124-4044-9951-513483efe0ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me first preface this by saying that I am speaking especially to those in the classical and or academic musical communities, and that I hold this opinion as a 3rd year undergraduate Music Composition major and a former military bandsman. That having been said People love to hate on John Williams, and I think it's unjustified. Let me address a few specific gripes people have with JW He rips off classical composers I've got news for you This is what all composers do and have always done as far back as written records can demonstrate standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that . Copland stole from William Stepp, Chopin stole from John Field, Mozart stole from JC Bach, and Bach from Vivaldi before that Hell, during the middle ages, people just wrote new parts on the same manuscript as the piece they were stealing from. The greatest musical innovators of each generation steal from their own influences and, at best, make incremental moves towards a new, original sound. He doesn't do his own orchestration This is actually a common practice among film composers. The reason why is not because the composer is an incompetent orchestrator, but because of the immense amount of work required of film composers and the minimal time they are given to complete their task. It's not unusual for film composers to do their work entirely in post, playing along with a finished copy of the movie with a timecode in the corner of the screen, and they are often charged with writing nearly an hour of orchestral music with what may be as little as 2 weeks. It's not uncommon for a composer to write a piano reduction with instrumental indications and ossia staff scrawled in the margin, and a team of 2 3 orchestrators and maybe a half dozen uncredited copyists. His music just sounds too 'cinematic' For those of you not familiar with this argument, I'll fill you in Classical musicians who are proponents of a legitimate modern classical style tend to shy away from tonality, melody, and traditional harmonic structures in favor of bizarre sounds. They love graphic notation, and will praise any piece of music as long as it's weird. The term is often used to describe very striking neo romantic type music, martial music, or any music that people feel could be used in a film or video game to evoke a particular emotion or set a particular mood Curiously, people who enjoy this kind of music don't seem to have a problem with chamber music that includes an electronic or multimedia visual component. John Corigliano, for example, is a venerated hero in the academic music community, but people don't like to talk about his score for The Red Violin, even though it kicked ass. Okay, I'm done running my mouth. I would like to hear some music lovers' take on John Williams and why he is not be a brilliant musician, but a talentless hack I've known enough people who think that that this should be interesting . Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think John Williams is an excellent composer who deserves the success and awards he's received, and people who look down on \"cinematic\" music are elitist pricks.\n","id":"8bdc703b-40d7-42b8-9aac-822970638118"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that our perception of what will effect our children and how it will affect them is deeply rooted in America's puritanical history. But times have changed and the standards for what should be considered 'appropriate' have changed too. I don't know if there is any objective way to explicitly determine what should be considered 'appropriate for children' but I think, for example, that most reasonable person would agree that seeing a nipple not allowed on TV should be considered significantly more appropriate for children than seeing a violent murder totally allowed on TV .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America's standards for Movie ratings and Television censorship wrongfully prioritizes sexuality over violence in deciding what should be deemed 'not suitable for children'.\n","id":"43009d35-543c-4715-ac8b-a0c885028f1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Cognitive Dissonance the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change. A common theme from conservative politicians and voters, as well as Trump and his supporters is that refusal to acknowledge Radical Islam is unacceptable. They believe that any Muslim or person not speaking out against Radical Islam is in support of Radical Islam or at the very least they aren't doing their part in stopping it. Compare and contrast that with US police cases of abuse of authority. Instances where people with authority behave radically and outside the law. Their lawless actions are often covered up by their peers and superiors. People that know bad things are happening are silent, usually out of fear of retaliation. Those same people that demand Obama and others recognize Radical Islam and speak out against it try to tear down and attack anyone who recognizes and speaks out against US Police radical abuse of authority. I understand that many will say they are against violent protests against police but their behavior is not to speak out only against violent protests, it's to speak out against all protests and stand by the police, even going so far as to counter Black Lives Matter with Blue Lives Matter. I believe that if you are upset when a peaceful Muslim or US politician does not speak out against Muslim extremists then you should also be upset when a peaceful police officer or American citizen does not speak out against extreme abuses of authority by police.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conservative \/ Trump Supporters views on ISIS vs BLM is a clear example of cognitive dissonance.\n","id":"958b45a1-d2c0-4855-a897-9af5d50b0c69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A society where the life of an animal was worth as much as the life of a human would be doomed to fail.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would imply that human and animal rights should be equally much worth, which is not feasible.\n","id":"342b44ef-4f0b-41e8-a5cb-be342dddee7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>In countries with limits to free speech, people have been arrested for making a joke. Abuses due to restrictions on free speech has happened in the past and continues today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making hate speech illegal sets a dangerous precedent, which could lead to curtailment of all speech.\n","id":"10540dec-7404-4165-86b3-8cb19d6e3f62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll begin by saying that I do not want your sympathy and I do not want your empathy, because these will not change my view. I'm open minded to the possibility that your pragmatism will. There are some key reasons why I don't like anyone. We are all slaves to enlightened self interest. No act of kindness is genuine. Our society rewards altruistic or heroic deeds declining such a reward further elevates one's own social power, obviously accepting such a reward compounds the system. I hate everyone who identifies with a nation, religion, or other group. To spend your life being someone you're not is monumentally deceitful, yet it seems we can't avoid trending towards a common person. I hate everyone who has their country's accent. I hate everyone who speaks with the same language intonation as the rest of their country. Language is also finite and we can only express a certain amount of ideas feelings, and linguistic relativity means our capacity to think is further reduced by communicating. I hate talking to people because it's exhausting and boring. People are motivated by sh t that's gone on before anyone was born and this is so stupid Certain countries are still in debt to others, certain countries are waging wars because their great great great great grampas had a feud. I can't even I hate history and how it affects people, it's not real. Jobs are boring. I don't believe that anybody loves their job. Those who say they do just want people to admire them. The internet. A place I used to love. Where people spoke their minds without the fear of having to face their RL social circles. The internet is slowly being destroyed because nobody in the real world can admit that internet anonymity is a good thing. Generic anti capitalist point and there's nothing we can do about it. What happens when we become a Type 3 civilisation, having taken over the galaxy and harvesting all the resources from it? I'll tell you nothing. Nothing happens next. Everyone lives in coffin like virtual reality pods, with their consciousnesses uploaded to some paradise, or fighting some virtual war, and having a machine routinely suck your cock. And I don't care if we get there because I'll be dead. I would rather not have to work all day funding this growth economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I genuinely don't like anyone, myself included.\n","id":"4e6bf2b2-50f1-47f0-b235-d547af55a6f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>While \"there's no way to prove that there 'isn't' a tooth fairy\" is technically true, it is also irrelevant. If someone said they believed in a blue sea monsters on Mars, with zero evidence, it would be equally true but irrelevant to say science doesn't justify lack of belief in Martian sea monsters. Instead, the believer should use science to prove the existence of sea monsters. Until it does, that belief is unsupported by science and should be rejected.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Atheism does not require justification. As a non-position meaning to make no claim there is nothing to prove.\n","id":"3818e0a5-4997-4645-8a77-96d53ab9546d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt a single-payer health care system?<|ARGUMENT|>The US tops the list of per capita spending on health care for member states of the OECD.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Single payer systems offer the advantage of bargaining power with drug providers and other suppliers.\n","id":"805cf895-9478-429d-b617-c486c2eb3188"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a sports fan. Mainly soccer. I played FM17 for over 700 hours. I mainly support Man Utd, but also dig Real Madrid due to the very different Spanish league and the aggression in Real's play. I like Juve have always liked due to their incredibly strong defence and discipline and maturity in important games. PSG is entertaining to watch for entirely different reasons weaker overall league, etc. So while I use the term support , perhaps it only applies for the first three mentioned teams. Since I also like to watch and pick a supportive side when watching other teams play games Spurs, for example . Someone could say I am not loyal enough. I am to the sport though. And to the first three teams at least. So , it is perfectly fine what I think. Edit 1 So to clarify 1 team league. These are in the mentioned order.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is perfectly fine to support multiple sports teams.\n","id":"8e07e845-5a8a-4814-b1ca-56a53f85da5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have watched the first four seasons yes, including the very substandard first season many, many times. I've probably seen each episode of season 2 at least 15 times. This is not at all hyperbole. I love Seasons 2 4 to death. But when the first episode of Season 5 aired, something immediately felt off. There were many things that felt strange All of the actors and actresses suddenly felt, to me, like they were acting . Ron Swanson, Leslie Knope, even Andy Dwyer they all felt more over the top than usual. Leslie's makeup changed significantly. They seemed to be trying to make her look trendier. The lighting changed. Everything in City Hall, particularly in the courtyard, looked like it was almost around sunset, no matter what time of day it was supposed to be. And none of this ever changed. Plot lines got sillier, and people's actions started to make less sense, or were just reaching attempts at humor Leslie puts the large drink cup on her head, Andy jumps naked into the pond, Ron screams at the iPad, etc. But the worst thing, to me, was that the message seemed to change. Up until Leslie became a city counselor, the message of Parks and Rec, to me, was that anybody could make a difference as long as they cared enough. It doesn't matter if you're a Deputy Director, or a City Counselor, or the President of the United States as long as you care about people and give it your all, everyone can be important. But Season 5 and onwards, the message was different. Now it's terribly important to fight to be bigger and better. It's a disgrace that Leslie gets recalled, and even though she comes to terms with it, well, there's something bigger and better coming, so now you can finally make a real difference Leslie always talked about how much she loved Pawnee and its people, but let's face it aside from her good friends, everyone there was awful. She even says in the first episode of Season 6 that she is unappreciated there and she doesn't like a lot of people in town. In Parks and Rec, they talk about Pawnee like it's Mayberry, where people are kind and gentle and hard working, but any citizens you ever see that aren't main characters tend to be annoying, pushy, and stupid with a few exceptions, like the airport workers in Lucky . Leslie doesn't want to help these people. She wants to help better people people who love parks as much as she does. I also didn't care for the message it sent about family that it's important, but not as important as having a great career. That was the beautiful thing about Jerry Larry Terry Barry Gary. Everyone assumed he was a failure because he was so awkward at work, but come to find out, he is immensely happy and has a great family life. It was kind of a running joke that nobody else understood that he'd found real happiness. But then, turns out that the only way for him to really be happy is to be Mayor for the rest of his life. That's what matters to be in charge of lots of people. To have prestige and fame and sway in the government. Family is okay but working for the government is what's really important. You rarely see Leslie's kids, and when you do, it's to hear about how awful it is to have triplets. But then it's implied in the end that Leslie becomes the President of the United States. That really struck a nerve with me. Who are Leslie's children? What are their names? Was she a good mother? No actual idea. But she was the President , so who cares? So Parks and Recreation, to me, transitioned from a realistic show about making a difference in a small town to, Anyone can make a difference especially if they're the President of the United States. Anyways I'm coming on here because I would really like to like this show. I've loved watching those first four seasons, and I keep thinking that if somebody could just change my mind about the rest of it, then I could perhaps grow to love the whole series run. So please, come see if you can <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parks and Recreation took a serious decline at the beginning of Season 5 and got progressively worse\n","id":"f29b3958-5e1d-4e06-a23d-6c38d552fb8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that public libraries should provide as wide a range of material as possible and should not discriminate between works on the basis that certain content is offensive. This discrimination became exceptionally visible to me when my public library refused to distribute copies of Neil Gaiman\u2019s Sandman on account of nudity and violence whilst owning and distributing multiple copies of The Game of Thrones. Is this a product of literary prejudice or is there basis to my librarians\u2019 argument?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe books should not be banned from public libraries on the basis of content.\n","id":"2498746b-4c1c-459d-81a2-940c765f635e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the exception of things that they are physically medically limited by at birth height, vocal cords, appearance, etc , I strongly believe that people can essentially work hard enough to achieve just about anything they want to with enough practice and dedication. Examples include programming, playing a musical instrument, drawing, math, science, reading, and writing. Even certain sports such as golf, pool, bowling, and archery. And I don't mean just being an above average pool player or being able to graduate a degree in biochemistry, I'm talking about being in the gt 95th percentile of performers of that field. I'm saying like being a professional pool player, or graduating at near the top of your class with a biochemistry degree and going to medical school.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The vast majority of the general population has the capacity to be successful at almost anything they choose.\n","id":"f422d967-2260-4478-9fb8-9fd57afaa3b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey be part of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>Quantitatively, it could be a huge economical boost if handled correctly. According to the World Bank Turkey could boost the EU's economy by 5%, and even more potentially should Turkey accede.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey's economy would be a large asset to the EU.\n","id":"651743f1-74a7-4d02-bf49-ad3a64794ae1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Inspired by a recent AskReddit post I would link, but I'm on mobile . In the United States, Arabs, Turks, and Persians are legally white. In the US Census, we must check the white box. I don't believe we are white. First of all, we are not treated as white. There are more assumptions made based on the way we look than any other group within white . Second, our culture is not similar to European culture. Middle Eastern culture is vastly different in all aspects food, music, religiosity, acceptable public behavior, etc. Third, we don't look white we range from very dark to brown most commonly to olive. In the current system, we are considered white without having any of the benefits of being white. We aren't treated white by police, we aren't treated white by the community at large, and we certainly aren't treated white by employers. In order to be on a level playing field with whites, we must be better groomed, must present ourselves better, must be very mindful of our language body language, and must by and large try harder. We are not eligible for minority scholarships because we are not a valid minority. Some may argue that this is due to wealth, but in reality, most of us are escaping extreme poverty in the Middle East and are overshadowed by the influx of rich Saudi students attending US universities on government scholarship . Reddit, make me believe that we should be classified as white.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Middle Easterners Are Not White\n","id":"72a39527-ca33-442b-9e21-0985d7c442e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should sensitive social and political topics be discussed in school?<|ARGUMENT|>In fact, \"immature metacognitive abilities\" seem to be the root of children\u2019s skepticism, as they perceive they have limited knowledge to understand something, they overcompensate by evaluating more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Research suggests that, when assessing reality status, \"children are as likely to doubt as they are to believe\".\n","id":"c78aaeea-d6fc-4d63-a994-6c7ec35144eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Tony Blaire be made the first president of the EU?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Who else does Europe have? Consider the alternatives, says The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Blair might not be the perfect candidate, but he\u2019s one of only a few \u201cgenuinely global figures\u201d who would \u201crequire no introductions.\u201d At least when Blair calls the United States, we\u2019ll \u201cbother to pick up the phone.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tony Blaire is best candidate for EU presidency among the alternatives.\n","id":"1cec37b4-b444-4983-b895-10ab8a4705a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard many people argue that social media has no place in a judicial proceeding. This makes no sense to me because social media itself can be used as evidence. It does not violate anyone's privacy since they are posting that information online for all to see anyway. There's no reason to cast a blanket over all of social media and say that none of it can be used in court just because there may or may not be some tampering of evidence. When you think about it, all evidence can be tampered with. Since the days of Rome, evidence has been messed with so that one person can claim it as proof of another person's wrongdoing. In today's world, where we live in and with social media, are our facebook and twitter accounts simply just extensions of ourselves? If someone posts that they want to kill someone, and they are later convicted of killing someone, should their post not be used as some form of evidence? If someone cheats and takes a photo, is that not reason for divorce? Why should there be a blanket over all of social media that prevents any of it from being used in court? It simply does not make sense to me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe social media is valid evidence in court.\n","id":"318a1389-28d4-4e0a-b7d1-5e6ba0a57572"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Religious Indoctrination of Children Abuse?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious indoctrination is different from education about religion. In contemporary use, \"to indoctrinate\" means to force unquestioning acceptance. Teaching children about religion isn't iteself abusive, but indoctrination means training children away from their natural instinct to think critically, analyze data, and question authority on religious subjects. This is abusive because it artificially limits intellectual development and denies free will in choice of religious affiliation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Indoctrinating children from birth into supernatural beliefs subverts their ability to reason and discover the nature of reality.\n","id":"89bd25d9-1191-4087-b6ad-ea5e9f897771"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Language in politics can be a powerful thing, shaping perceptions and framing the terms of debate. When those who are for what we call gun control us the phrase gun control they are using a politically charged phrase that benefits their opponents. It appears to me that gun ownership is overwhelmingly viewed as an act of freedom and exercising your right in a subset of America, and these are the most vocal opponents of gun control measures. By using the word control you are essentially arguing against the death tax instead of the inheritance tax . You are playing their game, and thus, hurting your chances for real change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Advocates for reducing gun violence should stop using the phrase \"Gun Control\".\n","id":"0ae33e18-555e-4760-b6c3-71d4c30f463d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently in the news there have been a handful of stories of neglect causing injury or death for small children. I think this can be avoided by creating mandatory parenting classes for first time parents that discuss basic care taking concepts that could point out things that some people wouldn't assume such as not sleeping next to a newborn with risk of rolling on top of them or general nutrition requirements. Sure, this would be really hard to regulate and have people attend, but because the majority of babies are born in hospitals, it wouldn't be hard to create a database of who has and has not attended these classes. Other problems arise when assuring that people attend, and I don't have answers for that quite yet, but there are plenty of motivators that could be used.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"First time parents should have to take a parenting class.\n","id":"e20ccfb6-646a-4964-b925-a092dd2a702e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The way I see it, Halloween has evolved into a celebration of our collective cultural reality. Isn't that whats so fun about looking around at a Halloween party? The diverse assortment of costumes, each one referencing some part of our human experience? So PC liberals need to fuck off with their whiny cultural appropriation bullshit. The whole point of Halloween is to dress up as something you're not. White kids can be Moana and Pacific Islanders can be Elsa. Teach them that they are NOT limited and defined by their race. Hell, you let your kids dress up as characters of the opposite sex to teach them that they are not limited and defined by their gender. Why the inconsistency? When it comes to people dressing up as stereotypical cultural beings like the Mexican wearing the sombrero or the Native American wearing the head dress, I still fail to see the issue. Stereotypes have a history of being an oppressive tool, but they are very much in line with the cartoonish, caricuture like nature of the holiday. These costumes are representations of a trope. A trope that exists within our collective culture and our historical media. Its fair game. Pick your battles liberals. Focus on real issues like income inequality and climate change. The right wing can rile up their base with false narratives, let alone narratives with some truth to them i.e. crazy fucking liberals want to control how you express yourself on a beloved whimsical holiday. I used to think this viewpoint was fringe but I've been hearing it from way too many people lately. There are so many serious problems in the world. Let us have one night of the year where we are able to take a step back, and acknowledge ALL aspects of this often beautiful and often fucked up existence that we experience together on this giant space rock. Cut all emotional ties to the phenomena we choose to represent with our costumes. Let us have the empowerment to put all seriousness aside for a night, and show that we can transcend the problems that plague us every other day of the year by acknowledging the whole mosaic of humanity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Keep Halloween out of the cultural appropriation discussion.\n","id":"d32dd6c8-f2ec-40c4-b026-f320257b7bcc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in Texas, and my great grandfather lost a limb fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. So I have as much of a right to apply for one of those proposed Sons of Confederate Veterans Texas license plates which features the rebel flag as anybody. How the hell can anyone justify proposing a Texas license plate with the rebel flag on it? In the history of Texas, six flags have flown over it, including a Confederate flag. But it's this one What the heck is the significance of the rebel flag? I'm not completely up to snuff on the history of it, but I know it's associated with Tennessee, or the Confederate navy, but definitely NOT Texas. I see this flag being bandied about all over the South, with it's proponents hollering heritage, not hate . How can they justify calling it their heritage if it didn't fly over where they live whatsoever? It seems so blatantly ignorant. The rationale seems to be that it's the most recognizable symbol of the South but if it's an admittedly adopted, appropriated symbol, doesn't that also open itself up to the criticism of the 'darker' side of what it represents? I tried to do a little research on why people from all over the South feel like they can use that flag to represent their heritage. Well, the Confederacy as a whole has had three flags. The first one is visible in the link above showing the flag of Texas. But then there were two more flags, both featuring the rebel flag . Okay, so do Southerns feel like they can use the rebel flag because the second and third flags of the Confederacy featured it? I wanted to learn a little more about what the second and third Confederate flags represented. They were designed by William T. Thompson. Here is what Thompson said about the flag he designed As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause. As a national emblem, it is significant of our higher cause, the cause of a superior race, and a higher civilization contending against ignorance, infidelity, and barbarism. \u2014William T. Thompson 1863 , Daily Morning News 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 I mean, there you fucking go. The man who took the rebel flag and applied it to the South as a whole, openly admits that it is a flag for white people, a flag that represents the superiority of white people. The rebel flag as I always hear it called was designed to be flown when going into battle. Do Southern rednecks revere this flag so much because it was the battle flag? What does this mean? Are they proud that their ancestors fought against America fucking 'Murica to defend the institution of slavery? If this is the battle flag, doesn't it represent their desire to fight and die to uphold the backwards, ignorant institutions? How can they be proud for fighting against the abolition of slavery? By flying these flags today, what does that mean? Does it mean they wish the South had won the war? Does it mean they hold the days of slavery with reverence? If you asked any Southern redneck the above questions, they would say it's not about slavery . How the hell is it not about slavery? How the hell is it not looking at those darker times, times when we enslaved fellow human beings, with reverence?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"How do proponents of displaying the Confederate \"battle flag\" justify calling it their 'heritage', even if they lived in a part of the Confederacy that never used that flag?\n","id":"91b0e7cb-e63c-4764-b2c2-cd65be810c2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if these non-democratic rulers win the first few elections that take place, there is no guarantee that they will win in the long term. The political trajectory of India and South Africa illustrate how dominant parties lose out when political competition emerges.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Non-democratic rulers will only democratise if they believe they will survive political liberalisation. If they believe that they cannot win in competitive, multi-party elections, they will risk foregoing foreign aid as democratisation would mean the end of their rule.\n","id":"f256b675-3106-4ce3-9b35-32f597f2ce1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Granting persons with disabilities access to sex work allows society to check this box and reduce the pressure for a comprehensive review of sexual rights of the disabled.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This perpetuates ableist attitudes in society that assume the disabled are sexually unappealing to all people.\n","id":"0c20ca04-00ab-45ca-b8e9-d5aa24112b89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The use of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems LAWs will be beneficial to society<|ARGUMENT|>Robots do not suffer from some of the emotional and mental issues that human soldiers face working in difficult situations, such as anxiety and PTSD.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Autonomous weapon systems are overall better suited for stressful conditions of combat than humans.\n","id":"7732afa1-e131-4649-9df3-2be0875c53e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Humans Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>The point is that the first thing that comes to mind is yourself, then others.Even if you do the good thing later, you still had the thought of saving yourself first.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person concerned for their life will kill if it's in their power if that means living another a day.\n","id":"64f60602-db75-457a-a459-6995fa37f158"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Sing Problematic Christmas Songs?<|ARGUMENT|>By ignoring the context of these songs, some social justice movements attempt to promote a harmful totalitarian ideology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"They are only songs, mostly divorced from their original context.\n","id":"e1b6a888-9510-4a6f-91b0-e3a10870fbf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Younger generations do not feel like they are part of the negotiation, because most religions were settled before they were born.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions are originally dictated by their gods through the religious books. The word of God is not negotiable\n","id":"50b5a4dd-fedc-4a4f-a76c-f661e3354d97"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alright, let me elaborate, since I know the You're insecure comments are coming. I, myself, don't really care whether my girlfriend hugs other people or not. I did use to be insecure as a teenager, but as people grow, as did I. Regardless, I don't really see the point of choosing hugs over personalized handshakes those special ones, you know what I mean , high fives, or any other display of affection towards someone. I understand why most men in specific have problems with this, because we don't express our emotions very much and maybe, to girls hugs is just hugs . But to many guys, hugs is hugs . Ignoring the extensive body contact, which is a huge problem to most, let's instead first consider the emotional issues this will lead to in a relationship. First of all, dismissing anyone's concern with a simple You're insecure, grow up leads to resentment, feeling attacked and growing distant. This will only be exacerbated if said by someone you trusted to support you. Of course, helping him become less insecure is the main goal, but you can't do that while simultaneously still doing the things that make him insecure. It's only going to reinforce his insecurity instead of decreasing it. Finally, the controversial part, where I want to know if my logic is flawed. Where is the necessity to hug people? Is there a strong compulsion in you telling you that you need to wrap your hands around everyone you meet? Can this compulsion not be satisfied with one person? And if there's no absolute necessity, then why do you still do it regardless of whether it makes your partner uncomfortable or hurt, and will obviously lead to a breakup? I understand it feels like it's infringing on your freedom, but he's not forcing you to stop otherwise it's a controlling or abusive relationship. By forcing, I mean trying to enforce this as a rule in your relationship regardless of your opinion . He's simply saying that he doesn't like it, and it makes him uncomfortable. This means that the choice is in your hands, whether to give something up for the relationship or to watch as it crumbles. As the rule goes, you have to give something to gain something, and it's most definitely in his choices to break up with you if he feels you're not respecting his feelings. This isn't only about hugs, it's about anything either one of you are uncomfortable with. Negotiations or compromise and giving it up are your efforts towards the relationship. Just calling him insecure and controlling and continuing to do what he doesn't like is in fact manipulative behavior.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hugs are completely unnecessary and if they make your partner uncomfortable, you should have no reason to hug other people unless you don't care about your relationship.\n","id":"68adf5b6-bce3-4e52-8a65-b43c21536636"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need nuclear power for sustainable energy production?<|ARGUMENT|>Nuclear power cannot be called \"safe\" without accounting for its effect on the black swan risk of nuclear war. Even accounting for Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear's track record so far has even fewer deaths per TWh than solar panels. But we've been lucky so far. The *expected* death toll per TWh may be much higher if it increases the risk of nuclear war even a little, because the death toll of that outcome would be so high.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Increasing nuclear fission power production worldwide leads to the proliferation of nuclear weapons\n","id":"108bee25-b130-41f5-b0d5-55bcdf21ea18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface this with I am still unsure as to whether I believe in supporting the 2nd Amendment at this point in time, particularly because it seems anachronistic, yet, I don't think it will ever be possible to remove all guns from the hands of all criminals crazies. Alas That is not the point of this , I would respectfully appreciate discussion remaining on topic here. Thank you. A gun is a weapon. Period. A tool can be used constructively as well as destructively, like an axe or a knife or a hammer, etc. A gun's purpose is to kill man or animal , in self defense or not, whether or not you use it as such, is a different matter ala hunting vs target practice . I don't include squirt paint laser guns as weapons for obvious reasons. Now, fault for murder lies ONLY in the hands if he she who uses the weapon as such. You can't blame a weapon any more than you can blame a camera for illegal pornography. They may be essential in the particular crime you're talking about at the time, but they aren't responsible. Thank you for your time and reasoned arguments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guns are not tools, only weapons.\n","id":"a75a529b-2f68-41be-8fbe-b165faefa09d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Sex Reassignment Surgery the Best Option for Transgender People?<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that there are \"in-between\" people, and people who have something that differs from the norm sex-wise goes to show that people can have a dissent between their various sex characteristics. Many psychologists agree that brain can be one of those characteristics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being transgender doesn't contradict biology; it's a an oversimplification that there are only two sexes.\n","id":"9b899ee5-0cd6-4917-a7cc-f439823893ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be an FBI investigation into the Kavanaugh allegations<|ARGUMENT|>Credible allegations have been made along with signed declarations under oath. Witnesses named to the FBI should require interviews and all leads should be followed. His testimony continues to be disproved even by his own hand. All evidence requires a thorough review by unbiased, trained professionals without limitations of any political bias. Outcome of such investigation must be presented to the American people. It is a lifetime position to the Supreme Court. Our futures depend on it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kavanaugh's posting would be a lifetime position and requires a thorough vetting process.\n","id":"45a32fb0-c03e-46ab-81ad-d02fb9f5960a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been looking into electronic cigarettes and vaporizer pens for a few weeks. From what I have seen, I currently believe that in moderation the vaporization of E liquids the liquid that is vaporized, often containing nicotine is perfectly fine in moderation. I am considering purchasing a vape pen in the near future. Here are some points The contents of the liquid are propylene glycol, glycerin, concentrated flavors, and optional nicotine additive. These substances are not harmful in moderation and far better alternatives to smoking. Although there is not currently regulation on the e liquids, by looking at reputable suppliers or DIY, the liquid is likely safe. Varying concentration of nicotine means you can limit your intake of nicotine or completely remove it. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that electronic cigarettes are healthy in moderation.\n","id":"fdf65422-4557-4029-a656-a6f16091e11e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should paternity testing of minors require the consent of both parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Teenagers have a higher tolerance for risk than adults which makes their decisions less rational.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social psychology indicates that there are non-biological limitations to the decision-making ability of teenagers.\n","id":"9160b1ab-1e14-4704-ab0b-6f686bb4a854"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm referring to activities, beliefs and works of art which are not fundamentally associated with a certain biological sex. So obviously this would not apply to a book about what to eat during pregnancy or how to avoid prostate cancer. However, if an economy theory or sport or TV show or whatever has 90 male advocates or 90 female advocates, I think this is probably a good indication that it has fundamental flaws compared to a program with an equal number of viewers who like it an equal amount but who have a more even demographic ratio. The same probably holds true for age groups in a lesser way, since cultural accessibility changes over time. If such an idea can be relatively well known but can only retain fans of predominantly one gender, this is probably an indication that it appeals to those sharing a certain experience of life but cannot be rationally or aesthetically justified in an abstract or academic context. I think activities, beliefs and works of art that are not fundamentally limited to a certain segment of society but which fail to transcend that demographic are flawed compared to those that can.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think there are probably artistic and\/or philosophical flaws in any activity, belief or work of art which is not equally attractive to men and women.\n","id":"7ddf8842-66c7-4d69-b8f8-6739466f2469"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe often lauds the achievements of his maternal grandfather Nobusuke Kishi Kishi was held for war crimes committed during WWII, but was released without trial.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Japan is currently governed by right-wing nationalists just like it was during WWII.\n","id":"a2fb10f8-538a-4418-9148-2147edf59cd2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>The British immediately violated the terms of Treaty of Paris 1783 We could suffer from an equally swift violation by the British.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The British have a history of not upholding their written agreements; it's unlikely they will uphold their verbal agreements as well.\n","id":"3f609c87-c4b3-4c8c-abb9-9da9ec4bf0a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Brexit: Is The UK Going To Regret The Referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>The UK will no longer be under the authority of the European Courts and legislation made locally will have primacy. This will increase the power of democratic decisions and foster democratic involvement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UK will have more freedom and sovereignty to make decisions that will make a difference, without vetting of the EU.\n","id":"500dbceb-0472-4801-b320-a72cba4e3f7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To start off with, I'm going to state that I highly believe in a person's right to one's own body. I should be able to do what I want to it as long as it doesn't interfere with any one else's rights. I am for the legalization for all drugs because the government shouldnt be able to have the power to tell me what I can or cannot consume. This is a separate argument I just wanted to give you a foundation for where I'm coming from. On to the real argument. This is ignoring the legal implications of consuming illicit drugs which is once again a different argument. This kind of stems from the fat acceptance movement. Frankly, I'm annoyed with the healthy at any weight thinking. Yes I consume drugs. No I don't kid myself about me not damaging my body. There is a risk reward ratio that I have that allow me to consume many kinds of drugs. I however eat a very healthy diet. Sweets and excess foods do not meet my risk reward ratio. And that's what I think it boils down to. Eating anything outside the absolute essential foods is merely a risk reward decision. Yes for the brief moment of eating a cupcake you are going to feel good and have a release of dopamine. Yes when you take a hit from a joint you are going to feel good and have a release of dopamine. Some people might point to addiction, but you can just as easily get addicted to food. Any repitive practice of releasing dopamine can cause addiction. I don't shame people for eating in excess. We all do whatever we can to help us get to the end of the day. I however do think it's wrong to normalize excess eating while demonizing drug use. I can try to specify more of needed. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consuming drugs recreationally is no different than consuming excess amount of food recreationally\n","id":"4ddd719f-6cbf-4a7a-9a0e-1195b261d274"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Legality of coca production and consumption<|ARGUMENT|>Again, coca is unique from other substances like caffeine or nicotine in its capacity to be diverted to highly potent, dangerous, and damaging use in cocaine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Coca is not like caffeine\/nicotine due to alternative use.\n","id":"2886fad6-ecf1-4d30-8120-a31620f00319"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>Often legislative and social change requires tradeoffs. You cannot both affirm that sexuality and gender identity are inherent and tear down social structures that reinforce those notions. Thus, when choosing where to prioritise efforts, it is important to know which is true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is important that campaigns reflect the experienced truth of individuals to include them within the movement that advocates for their interests and rights.\n","id":"57c213b2-f972-4e52-84bf-684776de8398"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Physicists have proposed scores of alternative models over the decades since Friedman and Lemaitre\u2019s work the standard model, and those that do not have an absolute beginning have been repeatedly shown to be unworkable. The only viable nonstandard models are those that involve an absolute beginning to the universe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The standard Big Bang model predicts an absolute beginning of the universe\n","id":"2d159c50-d4d8-49d1-9d5d-3bddd8bf2253"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Joint JD\/MBA degree<|ARGUMENT|>Mark Murray. \"Are Two Better Than One? The Pros and Cons of Joint Degrees.\" JD Jungle Magazine: \"you don't always need a second degree to specialize in a particular area of the law.. most top law schools offer a wide array of courses for students who want to concentrate on subjects off the beaten path. 'It is not necessary to have a degree in computer science to represent a dot-com.'\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Law schools offer classes in business; don't need joint degree.\n","id":"80d22f68-e5fa-410c-b6e3-8b95d0112133"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU have its own army?<|ARGUMENT|>NATO is weakened by internal divisions: Greece and Turkey are military rivals. An EU Army would not have this problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NATO is a poor means of defending the EU.\n","id":"445389c3-5e56-461a-af04-d9d63bcd16fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The idea is quite simple, every person, wherever and whenever he lives will at least be involved or a 'spectator' of any kind of social unrest in his country or region What do I mean by social unrest? According to the ultra trust worthy TheFreeDictionary, social unrest is An act or a show of defiance toward an authority or established convention. I should insist upon the fact I major 'major' social unrest whether that is the cultural revolution in Mainland China or protest against the Vietnam war in the US. If we take the world average life expectancy, that would mean every 70 years or so, every country will have at least one major social unrest. I have no specific research to back my point, but I haven't been able to find something against it either. Looking forward to your views and opinions<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Every generation has or will go through at least one social unrest in his\/her lifetime.\n","id":"d65cd493-be80-4670-8ecc-f40a9cd42214"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>DREAMers often don't even know there's anything different about them until they're in their mid- to late teens when immigration status starts to impact daily life in concrete ways. US public schools are obligated to accept students no matter their immigration status, so lack of citizenship, green card, or visa usually doesn't matter to younger children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DREAMers were brought to the US as minors, often by parents or other family members who were migrating; thus they shouldn't be punished for something that wasn't their choice.\n","id":"bba2d500-a893-4677-8d23-51956e88c6c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments pursue predictive policing technology?<|ARGUMENT|>A study found that predictive policing reproduces the biases that already exist in the police data in a much more precise and targeted way p. 15.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As predictive policing technology reflects the biases of police forces, a reduction in racism is likely to lead to less biased predictive technology.\n","id":"e1a91b0e-0566-4cf3-b270-bad9c3a9ca5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ground zero mosque<|ARGUMENT|>\"Ground Zero mosque plan angers New Yorkers.\" Telegraph. May 17th, 2010: \"because of the proposed mosque's location, just around the corner from the gaping Ground Zero hole, the plan has upset some locals. 'The outrage continues,' says website www.nomosquesatgroundzero.wordpress.com under a close-up of the collapsing Twin Towers. The protest site says the centre will 'cast a rude shadow over Ground Zero.' Others compared the idea to building a German cultural centre at Auschwitz. 'Spitting in the Face of Everyone Murdered on 9\/11,' writes Blitz, a self-described 'anti-jihadist newspaper.'\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ground zero mosque has angered and offended many New Yorkers.\n","id":"272d52c3-cd3f-4cf1-99e0-7e5010765b5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of the new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion dehumanizes the fetus by removing its right to life.\n","id":"90bb3651-d22b-4b87-84eb-000ffbac51d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Teaching children empathy for animals will likely create a more empathetic and kinder society. is a strong correlation between cruel behavior toward animals and lack of empathy for human beings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A world of veganism would be a more ethical world: its morals would bring benefits to human society.\n","id":"8c95e624-acf8-4d19-b80b-393fb6e101ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I value safe spaces because I feel that they are one of a few spots in society where one can relax and be themselves. I am not fully sure how to go into detail here, but I will try. As a person who identifies with many things, I see intra community participation as important for me to feell understood and less allone. To have folks to relate to. Example as a sexual minority person, I generally feel unsafe and not understood among people who don't know their stuff or people not like me. I relate to people who get it better myself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Safe spaces for women, racialized people, Disabled people, sexual minority, gender minority people, etc are vital for the whole of humanity.\n","id":"6cf73b15-84a5-41f0-b433-159beeeeb419"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Most charitable entities practice some form of discrimination even if it's just verifying income. There isn't anything wrong with a church getting deductions for helping its members because that still benefits society as a whole. Those members get the help they need and don't have to turn to government programs or other charitable organizations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A benefit to church followers is still a charitable benefit, so churches should still be eligible for the same exemptions as normal charities.\n","id":"f927d671-a1d7-437c-b5e3-6011d77671ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>As time is a limiting factor here, you have no time to sit down and interview all six people to determine their worth, or will to live, you must assume the 5 people are worth saving, and that the 1 person may likely consent to be sacrificed to save the 5 others. Or at least, they may agree with the ethical choice. Morally, it is the right course of action given no other choice. Statistically, you are also probably doing the right thing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You should pull the lever because five lives are worth more than one.\n","id":"a69add9a-7973-43e1-b06f-3c900944f446"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not exactly sure how to word this, so bare with me here please. It seems like a pretty common viewpoint on Reddit at least that people like Hitler, for example, were disgusting things that had no value on this Earth. It's also a common viewpoint that people like MLK Jr. were great people whose death should be mourned. We essentially assign postmortem value to people. This is where my problem lies. Why should one person be mourned while another is spit on when they were created equal? We mourn the loss of friends and family everyday, but still cheer at the death of others like Bin Laden. While I by no means defend the actions of people such as Hitler and Bin Laden, the loss of a human life should not be thought of as an accomplishment. I think no human life is worth less than that of another for what they did during their lives, and we as a society should not act grateful for some people who have died while mourning others. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe all human life is equally precious, and the death of a person should not be celebrated while another is mourned\n","id":"9f80f253-9c37-4f6e-87bd-004466443c95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am 18, and although I believe that my life experience is not enough to comment on certain elements of human life and human interaction. But this is something I heavily believe in although this developed recently, I'd say about 3 years back and my observations also point to me that I am not wrong in this. I have seen people brush other people off as soon as they are no longer of use to them. I have seen people humiliate others to gain personal satisfaction out of their embarrassment. Like I said, this developed recently, because in my youth I know, I know, I am not that old I used to believe in a world where people were nice to each other for the sake of being nice, no agendas served, no advantages taken. I behaved according to my own moral code, which was basicly comprised of being nice to other people, no matter what. Apparently, the world is a harsh place, where people are always looking to rip others' throats out. Realizing this, I changed, I turned bitter and cynical. Please . P.S Feel free to generalise human interactions altogether, also feel free to address the situation I am in, like my age. If you want to know more about me, please also feel free to ask me. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that humans interact with each other to serve their own agenda and they very rarely act in the interest of others.\n","id":"10e48f0f-2310-46d1-bd87-82f4a975d182"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The arrival of MGTOWs, red pillers, incels, and nice guys are all part of a bigger issue out there that I feel isn't being covered well enough. I'm not a psychologist, but I have investigated into these groups and how they work somewhat to come to this conclusion. First, let's talk about their similarities. They all generally deal with one problem their inability to comprehend and or interact with women. MGTOWs and red pillers feel that they lack rights and are being discriminated, and hence decides to shun women. Incels shun women and sometikes men , because they feel like they are responsible for their lack of sexual intimate activity, and finally, nice guys are those who direct their anger created by their inability to get sexual intimate relationships at women. Correct me if I'm wrong on any of these. So, I've generally gathered that they all have issue with dealing with women in general. Can't speak to them, can't be in their company, and so on. And I think that is OK. Not everyone is smooth, or charismatic. The problem, at least I think, begins when society tells them that it is wrong. A man must be promiscuous he must have women in tow, must have sex, in order to be deemed a man. Otherwise, they're nothing. I don't have a scientific or concrete source for that, but I think it's a very general feeling we all have. Women must be chaste, men promiscuous, otherwise they're slashed. Recently, we've told women they're in control of their bodies and they're cool to do whatever they want. We told them it's okay to be ugly and unpopular. We made songs to celebrate them, and we are pushing to celebrate their diversity. Fat, lesbian, slut you're all cool And that's OK. But we've never addressed the opposite gender and told them it's cool to be geeky, or nerdy, or whatever. I can't remember anything in popular culture that paints undesirable men in good light. We've instead decided to make fun of them. r niceguys , for example, routinely makes fun of these people. MGTOWs and incels are generally a joke or a meme to most. Red pillers well, people think they're just angry, misogynstic people. And I'm not denying that. Some of them are. But instead of just laughing at them, we need to address the issue. To stop placing so much importance in sex, to let them be happy being socially awkward. So they won't feel pressured, inept, incomplete, owed a favour, oppressed, discriminated against, and they won't evolve into who they are today. This is important because of that kinda recent Toronto attack. And the fact that these gender wars and debates are creating a divide between men and women. Maybe I've got it all wrong, so go ahead and point out any flaws I have. I would like to learn more about the topic in general.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The origin of MGTOWs, incels, and the like is society's definition and view of a man, and that is the true issue that needs to be dealt with.\n","id":"56dbaf3c-8348-4734-b1c6-ae214deb0b9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Humans Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Over 56 billion farmed animals are killed and made suffer every year by humans There is nothing subjective about their suffering and this irrational cruelty supports the claim that humans are evil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans do what they think is in their best interests, even if it's bad.\n","id":"8852f5a8-292b-4475-8eee-85564022677c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Quick Note I'm Canadian, so cant even vote Two quotes to start Moderator Do you make the same commitment that you will absolutely sir, that you will absolutely accept the result of this election? Trump I will look at it at the time. I'm not looking at anything now. I'll look at it at the time. ALSO \u201cI will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election \u2014 if I win\u201d Trump \u2026 For me, what's most scary about these quotes, beyond that they are completely unprecedented in American politics and proves that this election is not going to end in Trumps mind after Nov 8th but continue on as conspiracy theories and talks of rigged elections as long as Trump sees fit, but whats truly frightening is what would happen 4 years from now IF Trump is somehow elected. We would then have a sitting president who doesn\u2019t trust democracy in its current form? This could result in two dark consequences 1 During his re election campaign Trump would likely continue his claims that the election and media are \u201crigged\u201d and as president, could go about trying to \u201cfix\u201d them. In office, Trump could make changes to the electoral system to make the less rigged in his mind, or more specifically, more friendly to him. As well, he has contempt for any media that doesn\u2019t absolutely kiss his ass so every media org except Breitbart right now, since most of Fox cant even stand him at this point and he starts changing the libel laws and restricting free press as he\u2019s talked of doing a number of times. 2 Secondly, What would an incumbent Trump president do on Election night 2020? If he lost, would he gracefully step aside? Or would he use any method at his disposal to, again, dispute the outcome of the election. Doubting elections and calling them rigged is a lot scary of a statement coming from the head of state himself. I\u2019d love some thoughts on this from the other side. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not an Overstatement to say that Trump is a legitimate threat to American Democracy\n","id":"4074d127-a990-4030-9f3d-ac547284859f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Reality Television Has Negative Effects on Society<|ARGUMENT|>Reality TV is dishonest \u2013 it pretends to show \u201creality\u201d but it actually distorts the truth to suit the programme makers. The shows are not really \u201creal\u201d \u2013 they are carefully cast to get a mix of \u201ccharacters\u201d who are not at all typical. Mostly they show a bunch of young, good-looking self-publicists, who will do anything to get on TV. Usually the programme makers try to ensure excitement by picking people who are likely to clash with each other. They then place them in unnatural situations, such as the Big Brother house or the Survivor island, and give them strange challenges in order to provoke them into behaving oddly. Finally the makers film their victims for hundreds of hours from all angles, but only show the most dramatic parts. Selective editing may be used to create \u201cstorylines\u201d and so further manipulate the truth of what happened.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reality TV is dishonest \u2013 it pretends to show \u201creality\u201d but it actually distorts the truth to suit t...\n","id":"8d32217a-2ff4-4f19-a1b7-09ffb0f2ca41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My crackpot theory goes as follows Because I believe that it is an attractiveness boost only, the positive effect would only be of significance to men that are already ideal candidates for partnering more so physically. I believe that the threat that they put forward that is picked up by the subconscious of some women, is that these men are threatening the gene pool with stealing away the menfolk and it works because men are usually stronger than women. Entering the primitive thinking I think that also, because it is a taboo to be homophobic right now, it gives gay men even greater power. Secondly, most gay men are camp, and that characteristic usually lends itself to being energetic and inspiring likeable. So they're in competition with straight women, and kind of have a non compete on top, because the difference in sex doesn't make it doable for a woman to out feminine what has different anatomy to them. And whilst they threaten them, gay men of course, can't change their sexual disposition so it is then perceived by women, to be as being an unbreakable condition if it is in built. Where most women could be swayed to look elsewhere for another man because of their losing to a more persuasive woman battling it out a woman might not know properly, the motives motivations of a man, as opposed to another woman's ''I don't know properly whether or not this man is truly interested, as much as I would, if he was a woman''. Also, they're not fit for coercing in return for sexual favours. To recapitulate, because I'm piss poor at structure gay men are a big blip on the radar of straight women because Their motivations aren't as easily if not completely understood It is a taboo to be homophobic I suppose that primitiveness tells women that gay men are threatening, because they could possibly affect ones gene pool They, I'm supposing, are perceived as being more difficult to stop also, because they possess the male anatomy, and, on average, aren't dissimilar in femininity shown and displayed. So that means, that the average gay man has the advantage of womanly tendency and manly strength.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some women find gay men more attractive because they pose as a bigger threat\n","id":"859ce71e-1d9c-486b-8e9b-7feef846de69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been using a straight razor for 6 years to shave my face and or shape my facial hair. When I first started shaving, my grandfather taught me how to shave properly using a safety razor. I have used disposable razors or razors that use disposable cartridges before, but I've found that they are less comfortable and they don't get as close of a shave at all. All of that is simply my opinion. But here's the facts you are losing a lot of money by not switching to classic shaving. You can buy a Dovo Shavette Straight Razor on Amazon for just under 30.00 and a 100 ct. box of Derby blades to go with it for 9.62. You can use each side of the blade multiple times before it gets dull, and you can soak your blades in baby oil to keep them sharp before you switch to a new one. So for ~ 40, you can shave your face almost EVERY DAY for an entire year this way. The alternative? You can buy a cheap plastic Gillette razor handle for around 15 at your local store and an 8 pack of disposable blades to go with it which you can only use 1 2 times for 30 dollars. So for 45 you can get a couple months worth of shaving if you only shave once a week this way. Other than not knowing about this method, I can't see why anyone would CHOOSE to buy low quality disposable razors and razor blade from the store when you can actually save a couple hundred bucks and get a better shave, not to mention shave more frequently whenever you feel like it or the need arises. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone should boycott companies that produce disposable razors and only use straight razors and safety razors.\n","id":"6c8a43f8-f744-47ff-b922-9260112d58d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know that literacy is important, but I'm not sure that just reading books for fun provides any significant benefits for literate adults that other forms of recreation don't. As I understand, the more you use your brain for a particular task, the better you become at that task. That would explain why, when we're really young, parents, teachers, American Library Association posters, etc. encourage us to read books. However, the notion that reading is a healthier, more mentally stimulating activity than playing video games or watching TV seems to persist well into adulthood, when most people are already literate. And that's what confuses me. Reading Harry Potter isn't going to make me better at anything that matters e.g., math , and neither will reading, say, Ulysses . If I'm not going to study or work i.e., if I'm just killing time I don't think it makes a difference whether I read a book regardless of how challenging or culturally significant it is or play Battlefield 4. I've been thinking about this, because, if you ever visit any of the subreddits dedicated to productivity or motivation, such as r GetMotivated, r GetDisciplined, etc., they'll tell you that gaming is a bad habit, or at least a habit that needs to be kept under control. There's even a subreddit called r StopGaming. r StopReading, however, doesn't exist. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not convinced that reading fiction is a more productive way of spending leisure time than playing video games or browsing Reddit.\n","id":"68daa3e9-284e-4fde-ae55-7cd614948841"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We all hated dusting as a kid, and I've found that dusting is even worse as an adult. You take a stick with some feathers, or shredded cloth, or whatever else, and wave it around at a dusty shelf. Then whatever is left after you breathe half the dust you kicked into the air, falls right back to the shelf you just dusted. The best case scenario here is you make it look like it's kind of less dusty than it was before. And this is all just the easily disturbed surface dust if you're working with a surface that hasn't been cleaned in a while, the dust is going to be caked in and the duster has no chance. I haven't been able to find a situation where a duster is quicker, more effective, or more convenient than a damp paper towel. I can spray some cleaner on the towel or just run some water over it, and I'll be able to wipe most any surface clean with less trouble than I would have with a duster. Then I have the added perk of being able to cut through the deeper dust that the duster won't even touch. Let's not forget how nice it is to be able to throw that dirty cloth away afterwards, and not have to worry about cleaning a feathery thing. This disappointment in dusting technology isn't for lack of trying. I end up having to clean a lot of different surfaces at my job. I usually bring the duster with me and give it a try on whatever I'm cleaning. Just to give it a fair shot. And it always manages to perform worse than a cloth. So, changemyview, why should I not swear off dusting??<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"dusting, as a way to clean, is worse than a damp paper towel in practically every way\n","id":"68e9c82c-d2e2-483a-ae66-af88be3ff8f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Even if there were legal reasons divorce that required interaction, this could all be done over email, mail, and faxes. Unless you are required to see them in person, you have no business seeing them ever. Doing otherwise only serves to hurt the other partner in the relationship who could start worrying about potential infidelity down the road, especially if the breakup was amicable. The argument that people can remain friends after a breakup doesn't convince me. While true, it doesn't change the point that staying in touch with exes only hurts the SO. EDIT Some of these responses twist my view. I said nothing about not being able to see people of the other gender. I am specifically and ONLY referring to EX SIGNIFICANT OTHERS.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You have no business seeing an ex while in a relationship, even if years down the line for just a coffee. Elaboration in desc.\n","id":"dabacaf2-f474-4aed-bc6d-9ffd80280a0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Known Order of the Phoenix members or those with sympathies for Muggles, such as Arthur Weasley, were put under Ministry surveillance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public dissent was unjustly cracked down upon under Thicknesse's regime.\n","id":"311e34c0-30fe-4f88-9a98-0f618bf868eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Homework Should Be Banned<|ARGUMENT|>Homework puts students off learning. Studies have shown that many children find doing homework very stressful, boring and tiring. Often teachers underestimate how long a task will take, or set an unrealistic deadline. Sometimes because a teacher has not explained something new well in class, the homework task is impossible. So children end up paying with their free time for the failings of their teachers. They also suffer punishments if work is done badly or late. After years of bad homework experiences, it is no wonder that many children come to dislike education and switch off, or drop out too early.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homework puts students off learning. Studies have shown that many children find doing homework very...\n","id":"da1545ea-ff77-4ac8-a66b-179bb3b9be75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If the technology allows it, should autonomous commercial flights be allowed and regulated?<|ARGUMENT|>It is a normal human behavior to resist changes at the beginning but then embrace it as a way of life once they get used to it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Passengers may not be psychologically ready to trust machines with their lives\n","id":"871c0eba-d99f-4a5c-bdc6-0e7c56d241b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Space agencies should first undertake Human mission to Mars's little moons before attempting Mars's surface<|ARGUMENT|>A mission to Phobos would win a space race in setting the first foot on a celestial body outside the Earth-moon system from a mission to the surface of Mars.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Space agency's should first undertake Human mission to Mars's little moons before attempting to set foot on Mars's surface\n","id":"a1e9d7ba-7752-4740-9665-d3487f3f44bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>About one quarter of American inmates are non-violent drug offenders Schmitt et al., p. 3<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overall, the legal system of drug related offences is very costly in the US.\n","id":"b99d160b-067b-4da3-82e4-3465fcec1634"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>In Europe, after accepting refugees, negative attitudes towards refugees rose, with a median of 59% of Europeans believing refugees are a terror threat, and an overwhelming majority opposing the current policy of nations that accept refugees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In many high income countries, particularly in ones that are threatened by terror, accepting refugees has reinforced prejudices against the ethnic and religious minority groups that those refugees are a part of.\n","id":"34561501-a081-4a70-9b6a-06a8e281faa3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I honestly can't see why this isn't done. Marriage is a religious construct, and we do our best at least in the US to separate religion and state. Individuals can get married by their church, but they should be entered into a civil union from the perspective of the government. The only argument I've heard that I can sympathize with is that this will lead to further expansion of the definition of a civil union, to eventually allow polyamorous groups to gain the rights of a civil union. I personally don't have an issue with this either, but I suppose I can understand why some people may. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think all marriages, current and future, heterosexual and homosexual, should be identified by the government as civil unions, and that civil unions should have all the privileges that marriage currently has.\n","id":"e4d2a0d1-0d37-48c3-9532-809ac63152d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Not Have Pulled Out of the Iran Deal.<|ARGUMENT|>French oil giant Total has suspended a $2bn project to develop Iran's giant South Pars gas field as a result of sanctions. This move, along with other companies refusing to do business with Iran, prevents the Iranian economy from growing as much it otherwise could have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US has threatened to impose sanctions on any European company that does business with Iran, dealing a severe blow to Iran's potential growth.\n","id":"b7b82a8c-c850-42dd-80b0-3aae6dc8afec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>Voters' opinion on the intricacies of the Brexit deal are unlikely to be placed at the top of negotiators' list of priorities, even if a referendum were to take place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A second referendum would not help the government to reach the right decision.\n","id":"18413b12-3f99-4fa0-b08a-465769742cde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Nationalism is a harmful form of patriotism While patriotism is a devotion to a particular place and a way of life one thinks best, but has no wish to impose on others, nationalism is accordingly aggressive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"National pride and unity are traits that when fostered excessively are also shared with the extreme far-right and often have harmful consequences.\n","id":"d34cc6f8-ddf7-4fe1-b51d-e19a8088a770"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion provides for objective meaning and an answer to the question of why we exist, which is a deep psychological need. How we exist or what exists for which science suggests answers can never meet that psychological need.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are few questions that only religion can answer and not any other philosophy. For example, questions regarding existence or death.\n","id":"d48842f5-9951-4d05-a9f5-8a1b84bf7175"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel bad for the kid of course, but the whole spectacle was excessive and a clear example of white privilege. Seeing San Francisco spend that kind of money and resources for the event and seeing grown adults go nuts was pretty disturbing in a way. I mean, one white kid gets leukemia and 12,000 people turn out to help and the city spends tons of money for it. I look through the photos of the event and all I see is an ocean of white privilege. Would love to see those 12,000 people cross the Bay Bridge and give the same amount of time doing the hard, dirty work of saving Oakland's forgotten black youth, some of whom probably have incurable or debilitating diseases. Tonight, they get to go home to their comfortable neighborhoods feeling good about the good deed they did for a white kid today. Meanwhile, 120 black kids will be shot and killed in Oakland this year 350 black kids will die in Chicago's South Side. About 4,000 brown skinned Filipinos have died this week in the worst tropical storm in a while and the death toll is rising. Who's going to lift a finger to save them?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Batkid\" gimmick was a clear example of white privilege.\n","id":"dfc2638e-d831-4a42-8964-b02b02899e49"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the worst world problem of the utmost concern?<|ARGUMENT|>The issues is in both ways: the candidates for a job are either judged not enough educated, or too much educated. The problem is that employers are too strict on their requirements, and are not willing to train the recruits on the job.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the short-term, the rise in educational requirements for jobs is limiting the number of opportunities that people could apply to.\n","id":"0bf0e800-c381-40c7-b61b-13179454a32f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Running a race or doing gymnastics is much harder when you are large and heavy than when you are small and light, which is why runners and gymnasts are so tiny and light. The same effort when you weigh much more gives different results, so shouldn't we have a category for heavyweight runners and such? We have classes for lighter weightlifters, boxers and other strength power fighting sports. Why not classes for heavier athletes when they are the ones at a disadvantage? Maybe even a height class for short basketball players being taller is a big advantage for the sport, so why not a height class for shorter people? This sounds really stupid at first until you consider the purpose of weight classes to begin with. This is about exploiting your potential no matter what. In fact, some calisthenics athletes exercises on bars separate themselves into weight classes because the heavier dudes have it harder to perform the same movements. Adam Raw or Freddie classify themselves as Heavyweight Calisthenics because they are large and heavy and therefore have it harder than the tiny and light guys.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If we have weight classes in sports where heavy athletes have an advantage so that light athletes can exploit their potential too, we should also have weight classes in sports where light athletes have an advantage so that heavy athletes can exploit their potential too\n","id":"c9794724-3563-427f-bfc2-71008f5999b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TL DR Your ancestors stole land from my ancestors is a poor reason to demand compensation or to demand that land be 'given back' , and such demands should be dismissed. Firstly because their ancestors had likely already stolen the land from someone else's ancestors beforehand. Secondly because we wouldn't expect compensation for our great great great great grandfather having his life savings stolen by someone else's great great great great grandfather. There is a claim that I see in many places all over the world especially Australia, the Americas and Africa that is, the modern owners of land typically a result of European colonization owe something to the 'natives' or 'original owners' of that land. My counter claims are thus In most places, the colonizers used technological superiority and or a surplus of manpower to essentially invade and dominate a patch of land and win ownership through either war, assertiveness or diplomacy. In turn, most of the previous owners of that land had acquired that land through their own forms of war, assertiveness or diplomacy. Think of tribal warfare between African tribes, where entire tribes would be eliminated or assimilated by the winning tribe, and the land acquired. It is my belief that this kind of intertribal warfare was common in the Americas and Africa. Therefore, the way that the native Americans Africans came to 'own' that land was in no way different to the way that the colonizers did. Even if this weren't true, acquisition of assets is just how the world has worked since time immemorial. On an individual level, one male is strong enough to win the female from another male I'm talking animalistic historical events here, don't rag on me for sexism . Surely the victor doesn't owe the loser anything. On a familial level, one family is strong enough to win the crops cattle whatever from another family. Surely the victor doesn't owe the loser anything. On a commercial level, one company is strong enough to win the business of the consumers than another company. Surely the victor doesn't owe the loser anything. On a societal level, one society is strong enough to win land from another. Surely the victor doesn't owe the loser anything. Imagine the following scenario I discover that, 9 generations ago, the Rockefellers' ancestors walked into my ancestors' town and said all your stuff now belongs to us and had been able to acquire lots of wealth as a result. I wouldn't expect any sympathy if I were to demand that the modern day Rockefellers give my modern day family some compensation for what they stole from me centuries ago. Using this same logic, I don't afford any sympathy to the claims that ' some amount of time ago , your ancestors stole this land from my ancestors, so we deserve some compensation'. Is there some reason why the colonizing powers ought to give compensation to the colonized peoples, several hundred years down the track? Note I'd prefer to keep this  to European colonization of the world, because that is what I am most educated about. However, I'm open to discussing other historical events if you can lay out a good argument with them. edit it has come to my attention that in North America, some of the land 'stolen' was done so using treaties that exist under the same legal framework that still exists today. That is, the same American and Canadian? Government that is currently ruling made promises which were not kept in exchange for the land. In these cases, I agree that the promises made to the natives are, legally, inherited to each subsequent generation. The kinds of land claims that I still think ought to be dismissed are situations where, for example, Europeans landed in a new place and took the land before establishing a new legal system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Land claims by remnant 'natives' should largely be dismissed\n","id":"912f340e-7b8b-452a-b1b2-db7e7fef0c47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Institutions should exist to absorb disenfranchised men and women.<|ARGUMENT|>Mobile shower unit can help homeless people to stay clean, which in turn can help them in the search for jobs and housing, by boosting their self-esteem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even short-term options can be instrumental in helping disenfranchised individuals.\n","id":"55c677ec-1ab5-4938-b85d-d19634c97d50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund security for places of worship?<|ARGUMENT|>Those in the majority who feel that the government is not doing enough to improve their lives are likely to see more government funds being directed towards minorities extremely unfavorably.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Increased spending of this kind devoted towards places of worship is likely to breed further resentment against religious minorities.\n","id":"6b239e0f-f9bf-4a57-8778-bd8e0f09d580"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Culturally or Historically Significant Artwork Be Property of the State?<|ARGUMENT|>As much art was taken in the context of imperialism, colonialism, and war, this is a good opportunity to right old wrongs and finally start to settle old grievances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would be a source of national pride for the country as they are getting back what may have been previously stolen or looted from them.\n","id":"dd892b89-f89f-4d11-a8eb-fbc148c0f98d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is meat eating immoral?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the Qur'an meat eating is one of the delights of heaven and the Prophet Mohammad consumed products such as milk and butter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vegetarianism is not permitted in Islamic law unless on grounds such as unavailability or medical necessity.\n","id":"dbcdb1c2-af08-4198-b7bd-dc11639a4bbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Australian election is coming up and I will be voting for the first time. Admittedly I'm left leaning and haven't done much research, but I see no reason I should vote for any party that doesn't pledge meaningful action against climate change, I don't care about any other policies. I don't understand how anyone could vote against a carbon tax or be for opening up more coal mines and expanding the non renewable industry. As a young voter, what could be more important than the future of my planet? Until it's fixed I can't bring myself to care about any other parties or policies. Is my view ignorant?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no policy worth worrying about until climate change is fixed\n","id":"1be62591-56f1-4734-a61e-f7cd8df38ccf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>A series of ethnic migrations and strict Catholic rulers of southern Italy from the 11th century onwards meant that over time ''Greekness'' of the region likely diminished considerably.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The foundation of Naples by Greeks is probably completely irrelevant to the people living there 2000 years later.\n","id":"5038d9f3-1f28-4844-9e56-a8ad7cdaa0ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see no reason why there should not be extensive requirements that need to be met before you own a gun. Free requirements, but you should at least need training. People get so mad at cops for shooting random people, then they think its totally ok for every citizen to be packing heat, and think that for some reason a bunch of untrained people with guns arent going to shoot people when they feel threatened just like cops to ALL THE TIME. If people arent trained extensively, them packing heat is going to escalate situations. I mean hell, escalated arguments are the leading cause of homicide, above even gang violence and I see no reason why it should be considered ok, or that people should feel safe with everyone packing heat. Even if it did cut down on a few crimes, is it really going to be worth the amount of arguments that are escalated by Joe Schmoe feeling threatened and pulling out his .38? There should be extensive training before this is allowed. This lets people keep their freedom while making the situation safer. Edit wow, good thing you went through and downvoted all of my posts. Really changed my viewand contributed to intelligent discussion. Im talking about a happy medium of freedom and safety, such an ignorant anti freedom idea, right? Jesus<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People walking around with guns is completely ridiculous and should require extensive training.\n","id":"2c4b273d-dd72-4fd2-8f6d-85550a4a65e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments of resource-rich nations should impose high taxes on mining and extraction<|ARGUMENT|>The concept of taxing ALL companies for their mining & extraction is not a sustainable practice & will lead to future instability in the country once the resources run out. The reality is that resources will eventually run out & the countries will suddenly have the cash flow from the taxes disappear. This would offset the permanent loss of a nation\u2019s natural capital with preparation for long term, sustainable growth. The proposition have argued that high taxes will prepare the country for long term sustainable growth. However, we would argue that high taxes do the opposite and in fact, having reduced or relative taxes would, in fact,sustain the growth of the country. Firstly, by having high taxes the profits of domestic producers will be disadvantaged & the implications of a reduction in their profits will greatly have a flow over effect into all other sectors of the community, including manufacturing & sales. Prices will inflate & people will spend less because they will have no money to spend. The proposition have not suggested that domestic producers would be taxed at a different rate & this is simply drive those companies into a deficit. Also, in the recent Global Financial Crisis GFC, countries that were taxing highly on their resources suffered MORE than those that had no tax or a low tax. Countries such as Australia, that did not place high taxes on domestic producers were the only countries to maintain their economic status. By applying high taxes, governments will become reliant on this revenue, despite the fact that most resources, such as coal & copper, will eventually run out. Companies, especially transnational companies TNTs, will be less inclined to develop & implement sustainable practices as they will have no incentive for change as the reality is that investors place enormous pressure on companies to maintain the GDP.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sustainability of such taxes and their effect on sustainability within a country.\n","id":"cdae6ff9-1162-4518-ba22-345965a814da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would the world be a better place without humans?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans are the only species that have put more value on capitalism than the life around us. We have destroyed parts of ourselves, our flora, and our fauna all in the pursuit of personal gain, profits, and power. Until humans value the planet more than their share price, bank account, and \"stuff\", the world would be better off without us.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans have caused irreparable damage to the environment, and are causing constant harm, pain, and suffering to many other living organisms. All of this could be avoided if they didn't exist.\n","id":"234e0bab-1c4d-4465-89c4-54a141c41519"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the record, I consider myself a feminist. I believe that all people should receive fair treatment from social institutions, and no one should be discriminated against based on race, gender, sexual orientation etc. I also think cat calling is stupid. I've never understood the appeal of shouting anything at a stranger, and I honestly don't understand what the expected outcome is. But I'm worried about the tone of the current discussion we're having around cat calling, and the effect it may be having on our young boys. I grew up in the 90's, a time when sexual harassment was all over the news and on the tip of everyone's tongue. The message I read loud and clear was women don't like it when you make sexual advances on them, and if you do you could be sued Until my mid 20's I was so afraid that doing anything to persue a girl I was interested in would be unwanted or inappropriate that all the girls I dated basically had to hit me over the head and drag me back to their cave. I'm sure I'm not alone in this I think there are a generation of guys who have been confused by this message, and are so concerned with being respectful of women that they're discouraged from making even appropriate, wanted advances toward interested potential partners. I'm worried that the current discussion around cat calling could be having the same effect on the boys of a certain age right now. Framing this behavior as Street Harassment and focusing on how much women are suffering because of it casts the act of approaching women in a hugely negative light, and I think this needs to be balanced with more discussion over the fact that there is indeed a right way to go about it. We're having these discussions in the femisphere, and my suspicion is that the men shouting at women on the street are not regularly reading Jezebel, and their behavior will not be affected by this discussion. Let's face it, we still live in a world where guys bear a lion's share of the responsibility when it comes to making romantic and sexual advances, and thus the undesired outcome of this discussion, if any, would be to condemn more men who are sympathetic to the feminist cause to a life of frustrated celibacy. So I don't want to minimize the fact that women may be suffering on a daily basis as a result of cat calling. I just don't think the current approach is doing anything to address the problem, and it's more likely it's actually creating problems of its own. I think maybe it would be more fruitful to laugh at how ridiculous and impotent cat calling is rather than focusing our steely hatred on it. I also think we should focus more effort on talking about the right way to approach women rather than complaining about all the wrong ways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the popularization of the term \"Street Harassment\" and the current discussion around cat-calling may be destructive\n","id":"275eb027-9c28-4fa8-aa30-f182057a06c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>Data derived from the British Election Study BES show that opposition to immigration was high in 1979 at 85-86% but fell in 2015 to 71%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Preference for reduced migration policies in the UK has softened over the years It is likely that this will reduce further.\n","id":"a72ac19b-29e8-4f09-b27f-19286563d70e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Antifa good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2018 King sponsored a bill advocating for uniform admittance of citizens from Hungary into the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Steve King's voting and sponsorship records is not reflective of what Antifa calls fascist\n","id":"b4e2527c-90f3-4953-b524-992be37134d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Much of the practices of religion are conducive towards good mental health. It is therefore likely that religion has been a good mediator of mental health for humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions emerged as an evolutionary adaptation. They spread the adoption of behaviors that provided evolutionary advantages.\n","id":"67c62b8c-5080-483b-9583-934ead5093de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ethical Foreign Policy<|ARGUMENT|>Ethical foreign policy means standing up to, not doing business with, regimes which discriminate against their people. We can do this, as in Kosovo, so we should to send out a clear message about our values and what we will not tolerate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ethical foreign policy means standing up to, not doing business with, regimes which discriminate aga...\n","id":"278ed91d-ada1-4429-81aa-601c844e8a3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Somewhat despite media popular opinion, I really don't think racism and prejudice against blacks have really decreased all that much in the past 30 40 years. Yes, it's better than pre jim crow, but not that much better IMHO. Just a very clear distinction I'm talking about personal opinions, not the ability to legally, which has made MUCH more significant progress. In fact, I think personal racism has actually increased slightly over the past 6 years since Obama has been elected. I of course think a large part of it is simply kids having racist parents. But I think another large part of it is because there is a seriously lack of education of historical racism against black and how it relates today about problems in the black community such as poverty, unemployment, crime, etc. There are genuinely a lot of people, even here on reddit  not trolls, real people , who simply have no knowledge of the history of the past 250 years of black enslavement disenfranchisement jim crow, and how it relates to the current condition of blacks in America. They see no link to the lack of historical wealth and education career opportunities in blacks that were caused by jim crow to the lack of wealth today, even thought that was only 50 years ago . Why do they hold these racist prejudiced views? I think because what I said above, a several lack of education of the subject. I think in high school, an entire semester should be dedicated solely to educate students purely on black history and the historical significant of slavery all the way to post jim crow. I think that would go along way to decreasing racism against blacks. Examples 's and posts on reddit where people are uneducated on black history in america, not faulting these people, but making the point that if we had this kind of education in our system, most people wouldn't hold these views in the first place How to  Tell me why education of history wouldn't in large part affect the number of people with racist views against blacks EDIT I will still respond to posts, but the ignorant responses in this very thread is making it even harder to .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe racism\/prejudiced against blacks keeps perpetuating itself in young people in large part due to lack of education on history\n","id":"8c8d75ed-24d5-4603-92bc-acdef6b324db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Initial disclaimer It's very important to me to not cause anyone any pain and also to not be a social pariah. I have managed to censor myself during songs and this is absolutely not a hill I'm willing to die on. x200B I absolutely understand why it's not ok for white people to say the n word. There is a lot of history and disgusting things that white people have done using that term that really make it not ok. x200B However, I do not understand the restriction for saying the word in the context of a hip hop song written by a black individual. In my mind, this is a celebration of a black person's art and carries no more racial weight than singing all of the other parts of the song often which describe an environment that I, at least, have ZERO first hand experience with . You are quoting a black person's use of the word and you are doing it because you like their music. I don't see the problem. x200B Having my mind changed on this would be great. It'd be easier to go through the efforts of this particular form of self censorship if I better understood why I needed to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that non-black individuals should be able to say the N-word while rapping along with a song\n","id":"659be974-d53c-4630-9074-b089da371a7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>This is revealed in 'vegetarian' India, where the average poor diet is vegan: 70% millet, 20% rice, 10% wheat where the wealthier South is up to almost 99% meat-eating<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The poorer people are, the more vegan they are rather than the opposite.\n","id":"577d9c23-a619-40d8-9d9b-e90f8647ecd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view is based on this article It essentially argues that in principle, there is no difference between a gun, and an app on your phone that can be swiped to instantly kill someone. If you were to argue that the same argument applies to knives, the author rebuts that knives are different because they do not a carry the same capacity for harm because their deaths are less instant, b decrease the barriers preventing an impulsive killing. Knives and cars while dangerous also carry a far larger degree of everyday utility for the whole population compared to guns. I.e., one does not have to have the stomach to tear a human body apart to kill someone with a gun, but they do with a knife the author notes that only 1.8 of suicides are by knife blade, while 50.9 are by firearm. If you were to argue guns are for self defense, well, why can't the same be said of this hypothetical death app button? Name it Threat Eliminator and have it come with a label that it is only to be used for legally justified self defense, and this counter argument is defeated and further, this would be more caution warning than guns come with . If you were to argue that guns are less dangerous because they don't have a 100 chance of killing, then let's say the app button only has a 50 kill rate and must be pressed multiple times to assure death. If you argue that guns are much harder to use than a simple button push, well, guns are apparently easy enough to trigger that at least 23 people were shot by toddlers in 2016 Can you change my view? Is there an argument that this author hasn't anticipated? Because I am compelled by his argument. Edit I'd like to clarify that the thrust of my view is this if someone is fine with guns being legal, they should also be fine with the Threat Eliminator app being legal and being regulated in the exact same way as guns. So please tailor your arguments accordingly<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In principle, there is no difference between having a gun and just having a button that when pressed kills the person standing in front of you\n","id":"50fc9b6a-9448-4ca4-8b06-4dc7919d6ecc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Sexual abstinence is not per se unhealthy but it can be psychologically harmful when an individual wishes to have sex and does not, according to researchers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Celibacy can have a negative impact on mental health and may be a contributing factor in sexual abuse.\n","id":"9830eb13-19a3-4ba2-bdcd-45fcd77d9382"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Black people make up 12.3 of the US population, and have always had a minority number. Let's look at music. Black people used to basically own entire genres ragtime, jazz, blues, hip hop of music, and to this day are disproportionately successful in music. Let's look at sports. Black people are disproportionately top players in every sport football, baseball, basketball, , except for sports that black people as a whole haven't really gotten into hockey, horse racing, . We can look at comedy. Black people are disproportionately good at making a living by being funny. What about science you say? Let's look at physics specifically. Go to any US university and try to see how many black physics majors you can find. Go to any freshman class in a high school that hasn't yet taken any real science classes, and see how many black people aspire to study physics. There simply aren't very many black Americans getting into physics to begin with I believe this is changing, though . Any field that comes to mind, is either one that black Americans haven't participated in much yet , or have been disproportionately successful in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black Americans have been disproportionately successful in every field they've participated in\n","id":"b8e6251c-afeb-4754-bf26-df4e639c84e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Such a law inherently targets the bodies of people who have the ability to reproduce. It hands control over these bodies to other people, e.g. psychologists deciding what constitutes a good parent. Strains of feminist theory consider such policies violence against bodies perceived as female.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This policy would affect women significantly more so than men.\n","id":"8bbbfbb5-ebef-40ab-98da-93a2cbba11d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a follow up to another  where a Redditor was having a vegan wedding and most of the family was threatening to boycott it because they couldn't go without eating meat for one day. I think it's probably more about feeling judged. I came across this study recently Do Gooder Derogation Disparaging Morally Motivated Minorities to Defuse Anticipated Reproach Translated into English, that means when you encounter a conspicuous do gooder, you feel guilty somehow. You suspect you're eating wrong, not exercising, destroying the environment, or whatever, and this person is about to judge you for it. Or, maybe you don't feel you're doing anything wrong, but this person is still going to morally judge you. So, you attack preemptively. In essence, you're responding to an imaginary attack. This is why people get hostile when they find out you're a vegan or drive a Prius. It's also why nobody likes Helen Lovejoy. Participants rated vegetarians less positively after imagining the vegetarians' moral judgment of meat eaters. These studies empirically document the backlash reported by moral minorities and trace it back to resentment by the mainstream against feeling morally judged. That's what's going on here. We've all had that one vegetarian friend who shows up in spandex after biking 50 miles a day, helmet still on, muscles rippling, head shaved, wrinkling his nose at what's on the table. How can you put that disgusting filth into your body? Don't you care about animals? Ugh. I'll be in my Prius. Yeah fuck you too buddy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't like most vegans\n","id":"742ccdfa-3ced-4ae2-94dc-f864e7058335"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Corporate entities, licensed by the government, should be permitted to hack back when attacked via the internet.<|ARGUMENT|>An attacker can use tools and source code by well-known attackers which will lead to an attack being attributed to those, instead of to them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is very easy to disguise yourself as someone else when attacking someone.\n","id":"8f41d06e-9ff8-4285-a9d7-4283aa313f98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>University education needs to be capped and more selective<|ARGUMENT|>There is a recognised shortage of front-line, hands-on practitioners, in the form of plumbers, electricians, service men and women police, fire and medical, etc. This, coupled with a demonstrable shortage of engineering, mathematics and science graduates, produces an over-population of humanities and media graduates who may have been better suited to other professions or workplaces. For some reason, academic achievement is considered more important that engaging in a career that you want, or that you are exceptionally well-suited to. Sir Ken Robinson & talking for TED, tells the story of a fireman who always wanted to be a fireman. When he was a child, he was told \"You can do better than that\", meaning he could do a 'proper' job, by getting a 'proper' education. But he wanted to be a fireman. When he saved the life of his teacher and his teacher's wife, he said \"I hope he thinks better of me now\". We should encourage people to follow careers that they enjoy or are well-suited to, or both - not just assume that a university education is the paramount achievement. What is the ultimate outcome of a perfect education? University professors; not valuable services. We do not realise how many fantastic gardener's, artists, writers and eletricians and service men we are losing because of the pressure society put into the individual to sign up. This is because everybody thinks that it is easier to become enrolled into a university.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is not the need for the number of graduates being produced\n","id":"49a4fce2-0121-453d-973c-a6b55ff934d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>\"My son, do not scorn correction from the Lord, do not resent his training, . Of course, any discipline is at the time a matter for grief, not joy; but later, in those who have undergone it, it bears fruit in peace and uprightness.\" Letter to the Hebrews 12,5.11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Insofar as what we regard as evil turns out to be part of a greater good, it is not really evil.\n","id":"6d30bc16-f004-4820-a2c4-525c8af8edb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are modern democracies destined to fail due to their inherent weaknesses?<|ARGUMENT|>Across the world, more than half of all countries are democracies. Another quarter has democratic elements.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern democracy is de facto the most successful governmental system in modern times.\n","id":"6a6b4f3f-98a6-4b76-8f1d-a7d639b57487"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is spoilers for Inception. Frankly my reasoning for this is simple. The film repeatedly tells the viewer that there is only so far down a dreamer can go before hitting Limbo, and that there are only THREE possible stable levels of dreams that can occur before you hit Limbo. Well, assuming that Cobb WAS in a dream the whole time, that makes FOUR total dream levels before Limbo that would have to exist for the events of the film to take place 1st level the unseen 'real world' which presumably contains the real Cobb who is dreaming 2nd level The level where the majority of the film's first act occurs, on this level Saito hires Cobb to perform the inception, they all fall asleep on the plane. This is the level we are supposed to think is 'real' in the Cobb was dreaming theory 3rd level The city streets, car chase level with the Chemist. This is Fischer's first dream level. 4th level the hotel level 5th level The arctic bunker 6th level Limbo I mean I get what Nolan was doing from a storytelling point of view, however in the logic of the film's world I don't see how it's possible for Cobb to have been dreaming.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cobb was NOT dreaming.\n","id":"5d710329-653d-4879-a814-dccbd28005bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>There is nothing in the universe that is inherently morally meaningful; we create moral meaning and project it onto the universe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The social contract is the sole source of moral demands. No moral facts exist independently of human construction.\n","id":"357d6fba-1b62-41c8-af93-51a07dae0ca6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people marry outside their religious faith?<|ARGUMENT|>The biggest divide is at university. It may be that the university environment makes people less religious rather than university students being less religious in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unclear whether the correlation between nonreligiousness and intelligence is directly causative\n","id":"e8907f0d-65f4-47a9-a3b6-895b17871ede"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are programs like Alcoholics Anonymous the best way to battle addiction<|ARGUMENT|>The success rate of Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program is worse than those for addicts treated in hospitals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alternative programs have been found to be as or more effective than AA.\n","id":"5cd7aba7-f445-4ff1-bb68-fb5d8ee6d157"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that events that take place where no one really understands how and why something happened is caused by ghosts or something similar in definition. Things like Paranormal Activity. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that some actions that take place in the world that cannot be explained is caused by some sort of ghost-like species that we can't see or understand ourselves\n","id":"ce64e034-2484-42b2-9353-8f7e8ea6b13b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Congress should go virtual, with members working from their own home districts.<|ARGUMENT|>Congressional members would be more accountable when in close proximity to those who elected them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Congress should go virtual, with members working from their own home districts.\n","id":"af140a2b-63a3-4052-ba79-a665d195a492"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we judge the quality of artwork based on the conduct of the artist?<|ARGUMENT|>The value of the work to others and its price takes into account the artist's reputation. However, very few do so while the artist is alive. Art valuation is very confusing and often a not transparent practice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evaluation of art is subjective, so choosing to discount the creator's behavior is legitimate.\n","id":"37f173ce-61d2-42c8-adf5-dfe5a7f24f51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Listening to the sentencing, the judge commented that he would not treat Cosby any differently than any other prisoner. Everyone assumed this to mean this in the sense of giving him special treatment such as house arrest instead of jail time due to his status. The woman just came forward now the only one of his accusers still within the statute of limitations and taking it upon herself to be the sole spokesperson for all of the accusers and be a hero. She acts as though she's been traumatized for life if that were the case, why didn't we hear that she went to therapy or something after the alleged incident to help her get over it if it was that bad? It was 14 years ago, in Cosby's own home. So, Cosby, age 81, is sentenced to prison. His lawyer asked that the sentence be carried out as a house arrest due to Cosby's age physical condition. When the judge sentenced Cosby and made his speech about 'not going to treat you any differently', he then sends him to prison. But he did treat him differently. In a Machiavellian way, he put Cosby in prison to serve as an example warning to other people with the same status and clout. I also believe that the judge was trying to make a name for himself as 'the man who put Cosby in prison' and become the next Judge Eto OJ Simpson's case . Here is another quote \u201cIt is time for justice,\u201d Judge Steven T. O\u2019Neill said as he announced the term. \u201cMr. Cosby, this has all circled back to you. The day has come. The time has come.\u201d Acknowledging the impact that the case has had on Mr. Cosby\u2019s legacy, Judge O\u2019Neill added \u201cFallen angels suffer most.\u201d He was then sentenced to 3 10 years for 3 counts of aggravated sexual assault not rape and the designation of 'sex offender'. The 'victim' was overjoyed. To me a woman who was sexually assaulted at age 12 , that doesn't seem like justice, it seems like revenge. Especially since the appeal filed by the defense attorney cites 11 different things the judge mishandled during the trial including evidence and other witness testimony. The judge called Cosby a sexually violent predator with a risk of reoffending. I can't see how house arrest wouldn't be justified why prison for an over 80 almost blind man? How could he re offend? No woman in her right mind would go anywhere near him and under house arrest, COULDN'T .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The judge and plaintiff in the Bill Cosby case were not after justice, they were after publicity\/revenge\/money by sending him to prison instead of house arrest.\n","id":"48bffd49-08a3-4edd-b998-8413b54dcfec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Religious belief<|ARGUMENT|>Even science can't prove that God doesn't exist. The Bible could not have been created out of nothing, by nobody. Alike in the case of the creation of the world. The God is the creator of the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is irrational to say that God doesn't exist.\n","id":"1d99c1ee-5647-4a54-9f96-2305b6389baa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>When we know our intimate details are safe, we feel more secure and confident in dealing with one another.Examples from Cambridge Analytica<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This will create a panoptic world where the constant possibility of shame and punishment causes people to heavily regulate their actions.\n","id":"991551f0-c2cf-4a2d-9064-aa4f2fa1bc73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My definition of racism, in this case, is generalizing a person, usually in a negative way and before you get to know them based on their race. Now, of course its better to evaluate a person based on their personality and actions, and not their race, but I think it is equally ignorant to ignore, usually out of political correctness as people do, negative aspects to a sub culture tied to race as if it doesn't exist, and pretend like the person in front of them isn't X percentage more likely to behave a certain way, have a certain lifestyle and to make certain choices. I was raised in a very progressive, quality K 12 educational system and am at a very liberal college in a state that always votes Democrat. If I were to mention the previous paragraph to anyone I know I would literally be committing social suicide. But the reality of the world is very different from what we want it to be. Give everyone a chance. But let's not pretend that these stereotypes aren't based on some truth. It's both harmful to us as individuals and to society as a whole to ignore them. If you guys think this is wrong, please, . Thanks. Quick note This only applies to the United States, I understand different countries have different racial subcultures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think sometimes racism is justified.\n","id":"b8816a0a-a40b-4751-be8b-976ada7bec8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is television bad for people?<|ARGUMENT|>TV has been shown to negatively affect the frontopolar area of the brain, impacting the verbal abilities of children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"TV makes\/keeps people dumb and is becoming increasingly more stupid.\n","id":"2773033a-1cea-44bb-a9c1-a96f191e9ac9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Medieval universities started as Christian monastic schools and modern systems of education in Europe derive from schools founded upon religious principles with the primary purpose of training the clergy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Western Civilization via Christianity has given the world a great educational system.\n","id":"941f3530-5f46-4c7c-8f9c-31232fb9a224"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>The atmosphere is larger than the ground, so there is more space to expand humanity into than on the terrain of Venus.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A cloud city could get really large, tall, and industrialized if we put enough effort into it.\n","id":"711c122b-ccde-476d-b891-4ee6fbf1c491"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If people with HIV can be charged for not taking the reasonable precaution of using a condom during sex, it seems to me antivaxxers should be held responsible when they fail to make reasonable precautions of getting vaccinated or quarantining themselves. Not everyone knows they have HIV and so we make allowances for that, so we should allow the same for people who don\u2019t know their vaccination status or who could not be vaccinated. It\u2019s not fair someone\u2019s bad decision means someone else is out weeks of work and could lose their job and even their home. If people don\u2019t believe measles is a real disease, they can play that lottery. If it means they quarantine themselves during an outbreak, lives will be saved. If it\u2019s a deterrent and the groaningly get the needle to avoid the payments, fantastic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"antivaxxers should pay lost wages when they cause a quarantine\n","id":"a46e3c3a-f24e-4398-8a51-67307e182ab6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Ok to incentivise moral behaviour?<|ARGUMENT|>If it's part of a scoring system combining results what and how these results were achieved it would be a good thing. Source<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Incentivising moral behavior is the easiest way to get people to do the right thing.\n","id":"4bc96747-611e-42dc-9f4e-4641f1ae1c89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>In China alone, during 1937\u201345, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations 40,000 per month.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because every month of warfare cost 200,000 Chinese lives, prolonged tactics would cause more casualties.\n","id":"bb24152f-19bb-4443-aec9-2c2a952ee987"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What rights do adults have to deny kids their sexuality? Human beings are sexual beings, from conception. Babies touch their genitals and feel good about it. So they repeat time and time again. As they grow older, they continue to seek and find pleasure out of touching their bodies, they discover where and how they like to touch and be touched. Preteens and pre puberty kids are just absolutely curious about their bodies and of their piers male and female. They start having a lot of intentional pleasure by touching and rubbing themselves. And obviously during puberty their sexuality flourishes, they do learn and seek pleasure out of sex. So why do we insist that kids cannot have sex, feel pleasure and show themselves? They like it Showing themselves is part of their sexuality, most do enjoy it . They show and they see. Kids are eager for porn, they learn through porn. And today kids have a lot more knowledge about sex and their bodies thanks to porn that is freely available. A 13 year old boy does not always have the chance to see a naked 13 year old girl if not through porn. Why deny them this growing and learning experience? If kids did not enjoy sex we would not find so many of them on Omegle and the likes. They are there. They want to show, they want to see, they want to have pleasure It's their right. Adults do not have the right to deny them this their right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex is not inherently harmful to children.\n","id":"f3bfdca1-1aae-4673-8195-b6f2939b07e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hate to say it, I truly do. It's very hard for me to criticize a faith held by over a billion people worldwide, which is why I am making this  so that I can leave behind a standpoint that I genuinely do not want to have. In the past, I have held the standpoint that it's just a small number of people who are justifying their murderous behavior with a religion that happens to be Islam but after spending a great amount of time learning what is taught in the Quran and the Hadith I cannot lie to myself anymore Islam is dangerous, and it's not just the people, but the doctrine itself. Sharia, the Islamic legal system, derived from the Quran and the Hadith, states 1 gt Theft is punishable by amputation of the right hand. gt Criticizing or denying any part of the Quran is punishable by death only for those who are Muslims only in a country where gt Islamic law is completely implemented . gt Criticizing or denying Muhammad is a prophet is punishable by death not denying by non Muslims but criticizing only at a level where it causes mischief . gt A Muslim who becomes a non Muslim is punishable by death gt A non Muslim who leads a Muslim away from Islam is punishable by death. gt Testimonies of four male witnesses are required to prove rape against a woman, gt A woman's testimony in court, allowed only in property cases, carries half the weight of a man's. gt A female heir inherits half of what a male heir inherits. gt A woman cannot speak alone to a man who is not her husband or relative, except in matters of extreme importance i.e. emergencies or life and death situations gt Meat to be eaten must come from animals that have been sacrificed to Allah i.e., be Halal. Whenever my liberal friends defend Islam and call me an Islamophobe, I state that I am genuinely afraid phobia fear of of an ideology that is so oppressive to women and LGBT. gt There are wacked up things in the Bible, too Except the Bible is combined with laws exclusive to Israel in ancient times and laws of the Old and the New Covenant, the intolerance of sin in the eyes of God, and the powerful effect of Christ's death on the cross. Islam has no old and new covenant. gt Not all Muslims are terrorists and they are generally peace loving people There was a study about population percentage of Muslims in countries and the behavior of said Muslims in different percentages of population in the country they reside in. To avoid restating things, check out this article from the Examiner that is based off a societal study on Muslim behavior depending on population growth I can conclude that either a self proclaimed Muslim is either misled, lying, or not a full believer of the entirety of the Quran and the Hadith and therefore not truly a Muslim . Interesting quotes from the Quran 2 gt 9 29, Fight this word, in Arabic, implies 'fighting TO KILL' those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, even if they are of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued, Quran 9 29 gt 8 39, And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah altogether and everywhere but if they cease, verily Allah doth see all that they do. Let me conclude by stating that Islam is more than just a religion it is an entire set of rules for commerce, education, food, medicine, and social structures. You can call me someone who is full of hatred, but I can only conclude the stated from what I have heard. It's equivalent to having a fear for Nazi and Soviet ideology, because Islam, as demonstrated, is not just a religion but an entire ideology. But I may be wrong about everything. Please change my view, or help me to understand, or whatever. I really don't want to put such a damning label to over a billion people in this world. Thank you. Edit Just another article I found from the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry website in regards to statistics in regards to Islam conducted in the US and the UK<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It irks me tremendously to even utter this statement, but Islam is inherently dangerous.\n","id":"58f9848e-e14a-4d2b-8173-58aec2f85b8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>Corey Lewandowski, Trump's first campaign manager, had never run a national campaign of this scale before.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pretty much every member of the Trump team was wildly inexperienced.\n","id":"7dd96e94-a97a-4dc5-8bd4-f61416c17779"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Eucalyptus is useless, and so is ice plant and whatever other useless plants are growing in your city right now. we drag our asses over to the grocery store and shell out hundreds of dollars for crops that would take the same amount of money and effort to grow as the scenic garbage our taxes are being spent watering and fertilizing. What if every tree and plant in every planter where you live were replaced with fruit and vegetables? Or imagine a tube with plants growing out at every angle, snaking along the side of every sidewalk and over the top of every stop light like a large hand rail that came alive a woman picking several grapes off a hanging vine as she crosses the street decides to pick up a rotten apple off the ground and drops it in a bin on the other side of the road labeled compost . Meanwhile, a man on the other side of the street is finishing an carrot as he decides which orange he wants to pick from an orange tree in a planter that used to house a eucalyptus.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"farms located in residential areas could grow most of our food, and and taxes could pay for it.\n","id":"3b504c76-bf81-4d62-bf9f-9f760e544a10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>A few decades after the death of the Prophet, leaders from all spheres of the Muslim community, whether political, scientific or spiritual, were from different tribes and nations without regard for their color or racial origin.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Islam teaches a message of unity of the human race, without discrimination.\n","id":"0ebef021-3106-4800-b815-9a2a9302f68d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research<|ARGUMENT|>, . Such permission, some argue, favors allowing federal funding for stem-cell research on these embryos.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The parents of at least 11,000 of these 400,000 embryos have given explicit permission for their embryos to be made available for stem-cell research\n","id":"ccced974-84a2-46a4-bbc4-88a4e58f9633"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Morality cannot be objective that is without personal belief or feelings. We frequently have caveats on actions which would 'normally' be immoral. Killing a human, in most cultures, is immoral, however, killing a human in self-defence is often, though not always, moral.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moral frameworks can only be constructed by and apply to specific societies, so morality can't be truly objective.\n","id":"0be73b4a-3e79-4230-82e7-ba7281e8c625"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>The modern economy relies upon specialisation. Assuming specialists in other fields will find the time, money and motivation to become financially aware enough to make high scale strategic decisions is misguided.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Participation in the business decision making structure creates incentives for workers to learn more about management and for the company to invest in business education for their workers\n","id":"07be393f-b285-4018-af3f-63b0d6be9e99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Mother Teresa have been canonized?<|ARGUMENT|>Mother Teresa's clinics provided low-quality care to the poor in Calcutta, but when she was sick, she travelled for treatment at a modern American hospital revealing a double-standard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mother Teresa is a symbol of racism of a white woman swooping in to \"rescue\" people of colour.\n","id":"a42d2d79-e56c-4eb8-aac9-cef89da75f3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People generally say or what I've heard from people that the worst crime that can be committed is murder. I agree that murder is horrible and that it should be punished accordingly. But I don't see why killing someone is worse than permanently damaging them. Take someone who is emotionally abusive. The person they abuse will possibly struggle for the rest of their life. It's possible that it could ruin their life, and that they'll be depressed self injure kill themselves etc. Or someone who is paralyzed. I think that's worse than being killed. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think killing someone is worse than severely damaging them physically, emotionally, sexually, etc.\n","id":"b9fe1a11-efd9-43a5-856c-f51676b4d955"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems these days there is a lot of concern about sexism, some warranted and some not. With the upcoming election I hear some people say I am going to vote for Hillary because she is a woman. One of my friends even said, I agree with Bernie Sanders more, but I am probably going to vote for Hillary because she is a woman. Generally not always the people that say this are self identified feminists. While I have nothing against with people being a feminist, but I just don't get how people who generally speaking are interested in equality between man and woman can be so openly sexist. Thanks reddit edit While deltas have been awarded, I would still love to hear your input on this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voting for Hillary Clinton because she is a woman is as sexist as voting for a guy because he is male.\n","id":"554c8c66-aa1e-42d5-b7aa-a0e43d64adcb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Languages, Preservation of<|ARGUMENT|>There is a value to language that cannot be reduced to the utilitarian ability to communicate with those around you. The diversity of languages is endlessly fascinating, but also contains a whole set of allusions and definitions which are bearers of knowledge. The languages of the Amazon allow the explanation of natural phenomena that are unknown and incomprehensible outside that language. Language determines the way people express themselves and, arguably, the way they think. For example, Chinese and Japanese have no past, present or future tenses. The existence of a variety of languages results in varying modes of expression and is consequently a stimulus to creativity. This is of benefit to a nation as a whole.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a value to language that cannot be reduced to the utilitarian ability to communicate with t...\n","id":"3ebe482e-b391-48fa-afa2-4b809f46394e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the US, we have determined that there are certain things in life that can hinder an employee or potential employee's value in the eyes of employers, but that it is not acceptable for employers to discriminate based on these things. These things are age, race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, pregnancy status, religion, and disability. I propose that having a weak immune system should be added to the list. People with weak immune systems get sick more often than those with stronger immune systems, and thus have to miss work more often, and I propose that it is unfair to discriminate against these frequently absent employees just like it is already determined to be unfair to discriminate against disabled or pregnant employees. The other protected classes don't relate to weak immune system as much as those two do. Just like with the other protected classes, it is not any individual's fault if he or she has a weak immune system. While eating all the nutrients you need and taking precautions like washing your hands often have an effect, immune systems are also genetic and beyond our control. Some people have a weak immune system no matter how healthy they eat or how often they wash their hands. Those people need to work in this capitalist society just like anyone else, and it is unfair that they may be punished or fired by their employers for missing work for being sick often when that is beyond their control. Just like the other protected classes, not being able to fire the protected employee may cause a slight hindrance to the employer, but we as society have already decided that in certain cases the employee's right to work supersedes the employer's right to pick and choose his her employees in this respect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe having a weak immune system i.e. calling out sick often should be added to the categories of equal employment protected classes.\n","id":"80f383e2-a9b8-4541-9c65-7985b971c24c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>in exchange for \"quiet and order\" in the camps from which hundreds of thousands were shipped to Auschwitz. The few thousand saved by the agreement, prominent Jews and members of the Zionist youth organizations, were, in Eichmann's words, \"the best biological material.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hannah Arendt describes Eichmann as a Zionist who spoke yiddish Arendt, p. 23\n","id":"2be13cd5-4c94-4d93-91d1-ecc4ca54d7c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I honestly believe that men are biologically built to be in charge. And while I don't have ANY problem with women who work or even feminists, part of me thinks that it's a learned behavior. In other words, we're told that we should be offended by this or that, so we become offended. I just feel like men should be in charge. I want to get married, have a couple kids, cook dinner, clean up, etc. It makes me happy and I know I'm far from the only one. I think there's a reason the vast majority of BDSM relationships have men in the dominant role and women in the submissive role. The desire for a woman to be submissive to her man is innate and women are wired to be submissive to proper authority in general. Basically, I think that women are built to prefer men to be in control, but men and women been told for the past ~50 years or so that this isn't acceptable. I don't think abuse is acceptable, nor am I suggesting that women live their lives wrong and have been corrupted by evil feminism. We as a society do plenty of things that aren't natural. I happen to think this is one of them. But please tell me why I'm wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a girl who is sexist against women.\n","id":"51350876-dee4-4045-ba64-6f677dc83ca7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been thinking about this for a while, and it kind of bugs me. Politically, I'm very Libertarian and both politically and personally I am an objectivist. Fundamentally, I believe no one ever does anything entirely selflessly. I'll go down the list of a variety of examples. When ing, I hope you won't just respond to these examples in particularly, but will see the greater idea behind them. Gandhi Cool cat, right? I agree. But, Gandhi was oppressed at the beginning of his career as a lawyer, was stubborn and, arguably, he really just wanted to personally get back at a repressive regime. Mother Theresa Love her, God bless her, but she seems to have done most everything simply because of religion she wanted to go to heaven. George W. Bush OK, fine, that guys a saint I had hoped to come up with more examples, but can't ATM. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that every thing people do is in their own self interest.\n","id":"dbeebfd2-ec03-4dbb-a945-24ab15ed1663"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abortion<|ARGUMENT|>Ronald Reagan. New York Times. September 22nd. 1980 - \"I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.\"4 In other words, the unborn would all be against abortion, but, of course, they can't express their opinion as for\/against abortion. It is important to protect such a voiceless minority in society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The unborn are voiceless and should be protected against abortion\n","id":"28c8714d-085b-40d0-8f33-d2ae54b5a942"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Especially those that don't accept evolution. I think they either lack critical thinking skills, or don't want to accept reality maybe because they want the comfort of heaven, God's plan, purpose, or whatever else their religion might promise. The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. Albert Einstein Can someone give me some respectable reasons for holding a religious belief?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think less of anyone who holds religious beliefs.\n","id":"a3bddf3a-d0ec-432d-a92b-3f92af7016c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've never been a fan of Bruno Mars, I bop along to the occasional pop hit but his music always seems boring and repetitive to me. I thought he was just a pop sensation until I took a look at the Grammy winners this year and saw that he absolutely swept the categories. Maybe it's that I don't entirely understand the aesthetic of the R B genre but I know there is some R B music I do enjoy. Definitely Michael Jackson am I understanding the genre properly, does he count? but that may be more because I grew up on his music and it's classic for me, some Alicia Keys but again ditto, DJ Khaled a bit etc. Basically I just don't feel like I understand the hype popularly, and his work been newly validated in award form this year. What am I missing, artistically, musically, or just generally? Does he actually bring something award worthy to the table beyond a pretty face and nice voice?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bruno Mars' new album isn't particularly interesting and he shouldn't have swept the 2018 Grammys\n","id":"ccb7ecbd-a29e-489c-8c28-23a6a1c0d4cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Nietzsche argues in The Genealogy of Morality that the origin of Christian values is a rebellion of the oppressed against their oppressors by asserting power and value to their own way of life as slaves. An example that shows this is the statement \"the meek shall inherit the earth\". To further own this state of slavery a new master created in God, removed power from their real-life oppressors and then asserted that this new master also had power over them as well. Here is a good explanation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept of God has a mundane explanation as a consequence of human desire for power. When individuals with conflicting desires form groups, the group assigns an individual with infinite power representing their shared goals in an attempt to dominate all others.\n","id":"11ac4c07-788c-4c25-95e3-a5baef977a63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Israel Remain Democratic Even If that Would Ultimately Lead to it No Longer Being a Jewish State?<|ARGUMENT|>Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens as \"second class\" has prompted backlash from the Arab community, with some rejecting integration and moving closer to far right Islamist organisations, and has given legitimacy to the narrative that labels Israel as an apartheid state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Choosing to remain a Jewish state has caused the lives of Jewish citizens to be threatened by conflict caused during the interstate wars between Israel and its neighbours and violence enacted by organisations like Hamas.\n","id":"9f3d2e3f-f051-43cb-b0d2-0050397392d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Guantanamo Bay detention center<|ARGUMENT|>There are challenges in closing Guantanamo, for instance in dealing with detainees for which their is scant evidence of wrong-doing, or for detainees that have been tortured, but this is the fault of the Bush administration in creating Guantanamo Bay and implementing poor due process practices in the first place, not of those seeking to dismantle Guantanamo now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Difficulty closing Guantanamo is fault of Bush for creating it\n","id":"54f6674f-bf37-432d-88b9-3ce78c5e8505"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Raising animals in confinement, deprived of sunlight, natural soil and freedom to move, is cruel and against their nature.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The common practices underlying the production of meat massive livestock farming are unethical.\n","id":"429b449d-74fe-4a85-a4e8-5ef17a31b265"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>One treasure digging ritual led by the Smith family involved cutting the throat of a black sheep and leading it in a circle around the dig site while bleeding. Due to some mistake in the ritual, however, the dig was unsuccessful. Howe, 1834, p. 239 statement of William Stafford<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Magical rituals and symbols were essential elements of the treasure excavations in which Joseph Smith and his family participated.\n","id":"0187f458-b688-4a42-a669-a0df35a70984"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Similar Cryptocurrencies Good for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>In case of being defrauded you have no way of getting your money back, as is possible with credit cards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Handling and storing cryptocurrencies is less safe for ordinary consumers than traditional forms of electronic payment.\n","id":"55b357cf-f3e1-468e-a63c-eeaf820f1dbf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments should ban the media from reporting hostage-taking<|ARGUMENT|>The purpose of the media initially was and should be,to report the happenings of the world just as they occur.However, the kind of media that exists today exaggerates and embellishes everything. Thus does more harm than good. The government should ban the media from reporting hostage taking because initial reports are usually overstated causing alarm to spread throughout the country and the world.This may lead to unnecessary violence elsewhere when people start taking 'for and against'-stances,which might lead to disturbance of peace and violence in areas prone to emotional responses. Also, the people responsible for taking hostages and the government both have access to media reports.Fiction reported in such reports,which they believe to be true, might lead to harsh and irresponsible actions being taken by either party.Thus a situation which might otherwise have been resolved might exasperate, such that it ends in failure,most probably for the government rather than the kidnappers. Additionally, even if the media does not re-write the events, the reports and stories by people which they report are sometimes false, since they do not take the time to confirm in order that they might be the first to take it to the written word. This was seen in 2005 when the media reported that Sunnis in the town of Madain,Iraq, had kidnapped several Shittes and demanded that they leave town. This led to the interim government sealing and searching the town. They were unable to find insurgents and hostages. The public finds such cases interesting and colorful. The media that exists to sell itselfimproved ratings, make money, takes hold of this and makes it even more sensational. I think that the media should be banned from reporting such instances unless and until they are resolved because they seem to do more harm than good. It's all good since bad grammar is not being punished\/'negatively marked'I can stop fretting about my missing ands and non-s<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Improving earlier point 6, I did not notice lead instead of led before. And the 9\/11 thing is important in asserting that each news organization is all too eager to be the 'first' to report ,to even bother checking the credibility of its sources.\n","id":"07e6cb6c-19cb-4ea1-bfd1-caf474b1eec5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tennessee is correct to protect teachers who wish to explore the merits of creationism<|ARGUMENT|>There is a difference between a demand for freedom to teach what you like and freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not apply in the classroom; students are not allowed to stand up and discuss whatever issues they want and neither should the teacher. Both have to stick to a syllabus that ensures that the children are taught the basics of each subject so that the student can move on to more advanced instruction. Ultimately for students to be able to exercise their right to freedom of speech they need to have a well-rounded education that provides a grounding of knowledge and how to analyse that knowledge. The student is then perfectly free to challenge this teaching and exercise their freedom of expression and explore many more ideas and dismiss evolution if they wish. Essentially this bill is encouraging criticism of science at too early a stage, in elementary or even secondary school teachers are still teaching what science is, what it is for and how it works and it does not help to \u2018muddy the waters\u2019.1 1 \u2018New Tennessee law: encouraging creationism or academic freedom\u2019, Public Radio International, 23 April 2012,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers should not have freedom to teach whatever they wish as fact\n","id":"f2270a24-3336-4ec6-8a9a-5a9c64c5caa8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is absolutely unconscionable to me that police are allowed to escape financial culpability for misconduct. Settlement funds are pulled from the general fund of the city, so taxpayers are the ones who end up holding the tab. Require police to pay into a malpractice insurance fund, and contract with a malpractice insurance provider to do so. When the city is sued because of the actions of a police officer, let the malpractice provider take over and head up the defense, and decide how much to settle for, or whether to fight the case out. I hear too many stories about police continuing in their careers after costing the taxpayer hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in damages after misconduct. Cities\u2019 hands are tied by union contracts. Introducing a requirement for all police to purchase malpractice insurance shifts the burden for paying those damages off of the taxpayer and onto the responsible parties, provides an incentive for police to minimize abuse, and provides a way to prevent bad actors from returning to the force, as their insurance rates will be either too high to afford, or the insurance companies will refuse to cover them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Policemen and women should be required to take out insurance against abuse of power, just as doctors take out insurance against malpractice.\n","id":"d4bb12d2-69eb-4d46-99b8-a0702da6ac6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cheerleading be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Objectification of women can lead to men viewing them primarily as sexual objects, leading them to be dissatisfied with purely platonic relationships i.e., the 'friendzone<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is harder for women to make emotionally satisfying friendships particularly with men, when they are constantly being sexually objectified.\n","id":"2852245b-d4c0-4988-a1df-f1c715a1d952"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Twin Towers reconstruction<|ARGUMENT|>The rebuilding of the WTC would cost only a fraction of the expenditures already spent on the War on terrorism, not to mention the cost of wasteful bailouts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The price of reconstruction would be like pool in a sea.\n","id":"db42b755-c539-485d-a81a-09aeb83589f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU introduce a carbon tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Pollution from aviation in Europe has increased by around 10% between 2014 and 2017, from 3.6% of the total greenhouse gases in the EU to 13.4%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union currently does not have a tax on aviation fuel, even though aviation causes 5% of global warming\n","id":"c25891ce-157a-4876-a78c-10c284d4039a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Some \"definitions\" may simply be wrong or inaccurate. In such cases, it is the definition, not the object, that should be discarded.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It isn't necessary for God to exist according to all definitions.\n","id":"86f3663d-fad9-4446-b037-4920042e133c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm no fan of Trump. But when I see people whom I know didn't vote because they told me as much on social media railing against Trump's presidency, and posting photos from their involvement in protests, it really baffles me. Obviously peaceful protests and activism are a pillar of a democracy, and they're great ways to show solidarity and ensure that your voice is heard. But I just feel like, given the low voter turnout for millennials and for Americans in general people are really overlooking the absolute best way to make sure their voices are heard which is to vote. So if you sat home on election day because you figured there's no way this country will elect Trump, and now you're outraged that Donald Trump is our president, I say you only have yourself to blame.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you were eligible to vote, and didn't, you shouldn't be protesting Trump's presidency.\n","id":"07ceba2c-deaf-4ea6-a120-c8ebc2b86f84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The stock market will go up 10%+ in the next 12 months<|ARGUMENT|>The stock market has plenty of time in it's boom cycle before the next crash occurs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The stock market will go up 10%+ in the next 12 months March 2018.\n","id":"aaccfbb6-cea2-40b5-8092-1fb5c91ca57c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ultimately, I'm driven to the conclusion that life comes down to reproduction. It seems there is nothing more purposeful than sending your genes down to the next generation, thereby becoming biologically successful. I don't think that this viewpoint is wrong, but would be approving if others offered grander meanings to the process of life. Please don't resort to any superficial concepts remarks. If clarifies my situation, I'm a pretty happy guy, not an atheist, and born and raised in the USA.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the sole purpose of life is to produce children.\n","id":"1b658d09-eec4-4538-b6a5-f7b6935f24a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>Russian politicians have been building ties with the National Rifle Association, a conservative group which prominently backs Trump and other Republican candidates, for over six years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even before Trump's campaign and election, during which Republicans' views on Russia became much more favorable, Putin has been targeting segments of the American right.\n","id":"6f9a57ba-5182-4664-b874-76ff9b479da4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>No, they've come to our door or made our military surrender, but we've well moved the goalpost from were gonna kick their ass in 6 months to we're gonna win eventually . One attack on the United States Drained the U.S. treasury of trillions of dollars Took many more American lives in combat Directed the US military for a 12 year wild goose chase Caused a ton of political acrimony Created a constant culture of fear and paranoia that kids recently born are going to have no understanding of because we're so used to it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- Al Qaeda beat the United States\n","id":"e7dbdb1a-a900-4c54-a6d3-cd78680e50e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Desires are often described as the results of biological processes, such as hunger, tiredness, affective needs, sexual attraction, addiction, etc<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are bound by instinct which impinges on our ability to act freely.\n","id":"8979c407-f9a2-4c68-bce5-ffb2c2dc67b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>An increase in vegetarian or vegan diets could harm the economies of countries who depend heavily on their meat exports for income.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ceasing to produce meat would be extremely harmful to low-income countries.\n","id":"c81241b8-f5a0-4fc0-acd7-842a97837001"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I had a dream where I used the term mankind and this angry internet feminist started yelling at me about how that term was sexist and I realized I agreed. By using the term mankind, one is inherently propagating the paradigm that women are somehow secondary or even subservient to men. While I haven't looking into the etymology of the word or similar words huMANkind, etc , I would expect that it had roots in strong patriarchy civilizations, and while today I don't think that when people use the term mankind they are truly trying to establish the dominance of men over women, I do still think that one could consider it offensive to use a term that previously did so I guess you could draw similarity to the use of n a, in which people clearly don't mean it in a racist manner most of the time , but as a word that carried a previous negative racial connotation, some might still find it offensive, and thus it is wrong to use. Furthermore, if you tried to present this argument, I believe the vast majority of people would immediately dismiss it as being knit picky and pedantic, but after a bit of thought, I decided that I don't think that is accurate. Change mah vue. View Changed<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is inherently sexist to use terms such as \"mankind\", however it would be considered pedantic to argue against their use despite it not actually being pedantic.\n","id":"3cdeb6c7-77da-4e16-ba8c-4835f3c5c36d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have a lot of jumbled thoughts on the subject, so I'll do this in list form Like many people I am horrified by the stories of the eugenicists of the early 20th. Racism, forcible sterilizations, to say nothing of the whole Nazi thing. This is why I would like to be proven wrong. As much as I hate the idea that we're defined by a genetic code over which we have no control, there is no question that it is usually better to not have a genetic disease than to have one. We have made a huge effort to eliminate the most deadly bacteriological and viral diseases through medicine and vaccines, and it it hard to argue that we would be better off if we didn't. So should we not take up the same mission towards genetic diseases? Is there any difference between a genetic disease and a natural trait that nonetheless negatively affects one's quality of life low stamina, impulsivity, etc? Nevertheless, I feel that our current understanding of genetics may be insufficient to really know what we're doing, and manipulating it may not be worth the risk until we know better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although I don't like the idea of eugenics, if there is such a thing as objectively good and bad genes then we have a duty to propagate the former and eliminate the latter.\n","id":"8cae6bf2-cc70-42cd-83c2-d205f95dc18c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I usually get a lot of flak about this particular view of mine. But the way I see it there is nothing wrong with the core principle of eugenics. Yes, Nazis and others have gone about it in the exact wrong way in the past, and I'm not at all advocating we exterminate the diseased or disabled, just suggesting we take what steps we can to ensure that no child is born into a short, hard, or otherwise diminished life. Personally, I see nothing wrong with eugenics so long as those with a high chance of passing down genetic diseases, extreme low IQ, or other traits that will significantly impact the quality of life for their offspring are still given the option to adopt, are still left intact so as they can enjoy the act of intercourse, and when technology advances far enough they are given a choice to procreate, so long as we can diminish to a relatively certain degree their child will be of average health and intelligence, and able to live, for lack of a better term, normally. Yes, I know the whole a great child could be born from someone with a debilitating genetic disease so we should just keep rolling the dice argument, but to me that seems unfair to both the child and society. So, there you have it, Reddit. I am open to changing this view, and just ask that you come to me with a logical argument as opposed to attacking me for my barbaric ideology like I am used to in the past Edit 1 Low IQ was a poor choice of words. I meant somebody that would be non functional for the whole of their lives. Unable to walk, speak, or even feed themselves and require a constant caretaker from birth to death. Edit 2 A Commenter has pointed out that such restrictions would limit the genetic diversity of the human population, a thought that hadn't yet crossed my mind. Edit 3 At this point, I'll admit that the idea of sterilization is bad. Eugenics is still a good idea to me, but it seems that the idea of forcing it upon people is where it goes to shit. Instead, it seems the best point would be to offer screenings for people looking to have kids, that will tell them their child's health and let them decide ultimately. Edit 4 While I still think that the idea behind eugenics is a good one, as it aims to make the human population as disease free and perfect as possible, I will admit that it is flawed for numerous reasons listed below. Deltas have been awarded for those who pointed them out 1 Implementation. It would be almost impossible to implement due to the massive uproar from the citizens of any government. 2 Decisions. Who would get to decide what traits are to be removed? This seems to be the biggest arguments against it since everybody will have different ideals as to what traits are deemed unfavorable 3 Costs. The costs involved would likely significantly outweigh the costs of taking care of those with the traits looking to be eliminated. 4 Quality of life. Quality of life is too hugely subjective to be decided on for everybody by a single person or governing body. As one commenter put it your average person with Down Syndrome lives a happier life than a bipolar genius.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eugenics Is A Good Idea, Just Gone About In The Wrong Way In The Past\n","id":"7b02ca18-59e1-4013-97fe-0508a2049eb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was somewhat stunned that there wasn't already a  on this. Maybe I used ineffective search terms. Whatever. I was raised evangelical Christian Southern Baptist, specifically . All through my life I held Christian viewpoints. I still do, but I am discovering that a lot of the Southern Baptist doctrines are little more than traditions established over the years, and have little to no Biblical basis, or else are based on misinterpretations of scripture. Recently I've been more and more often pulled into the conflict between the church and gay rights. Now, I've already made my position clear on gay rights People shouldn't be discriminated against for their sexual orientation, regardless of how we feel as a religion about their actions it's between two consenting adults and we don't have a right to legislate that, and as Christians we should treat them with love. Furthermore, as a heterosexual male married to a heterosexual female, I have no personal stake in this. However, I'm finding it difficult to reconcile some parts of my worldview with the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong from God's perspective. I have heard some fairly solid arguments each way. In short, I am on the fence and that's not where I like to be. I am aware of the following points regarding homosexuality 1 Something being natural or unnatural does not have any bearing upon its morality. 2 Homosexuality is overtly condemned in the Old Testament law along with a lot of other things that modern Christians do not follow due to Christ's example and the release of many of the prohibitions upon Christian gentiles. So OT condemnations don't have any weight unless they come with a convincing argument that the lifting of the limitations doesn't apply to that particular part. 3 There are parts of the New Testament that condemn homosexuality, as well. So, from the perspective of a Christian, Change My View. Either convince me scripturally that homosexuality is wrong, or that it is not condemned. But keep it within the scope of Christian values, please. I'm not asking whether it's right or wrong. I'm asking whether it's scripturally defensible. Edit I've gotten a lot of comments to this effect, so I'll address this specifically I'm not asking whether we should act to retard the process of gay rights in our nation or speak out against non Christians who participate in homosexuality. In my opinion, the answer to that question is a resounding NO. As u tonsofkittens and a few others have pointed out, Christ's example is more than sufficient to determine our behavior against those who live in sin but are not followers of God. My real question, then, is is homosexuality sin at all? Does God look down on it? Is it harmful to us the same way other sin is? Does it displease the Creator? Bonus points Is there any defense for homosexuality being okay with God that doesn't abolish the institution of monogamy, or cause promiscuity to be okay? gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homosexuality is a sin according to the Christian viewpoint.\n","id":"e7d5ef05-dc53-42c1-ada2-36b62ef78671"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be a quota for Millennial representatives in the European Parliament?<|ARGUMENT|>Millennials are at a disadvantage in the workplace because they often lack the ability and confidence to make personal connections<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Millennials face more difficulties than any other age group in entering the job market\n","id":"944dfcab-c78a-4c74-94ac-29907ef273be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Well as the title says really. Americans, especially on reddit use the word obligated which not only sounds clunky is actually wrong. They should be using the word obliged. Obligate require or compel someone to undertake a legal or moral duty. the medical establishment is obligated to take action in the best interest of the public 2. US commit assets as security. the money must be obligated within 30 days obliged verb past tense obliged past participle obliged make someone legally or morally bound to do something. doctors are obliged by law to keep patients alive while there is a chance of recovery synonyms require, compel, bind, make, constrain, obligate, force, put under an obligation, leave someone no option, impel, coerce, pressure, pressurize courts are obliged to act in accordance with the strict rules of the law do as someone asks or desires in order to help or please them. oblige me by not being sorry for yourself synonyms do someone a favour, do someone a kindness, do someone a service, accommodate, indulge, gratify, gratify the wishes of, help, assist, serve, humour, meet the wants needs of, put oneself out for be kind enough to will you oblige me by filling in this form? be indebted or grateful. if you can give me a few minutes of your time I'll be much obliged synonyms thankful, grateful, appreciative More Of all the things in life I find this misuse makes me irrationally angry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Americans use \"obligated\" when they actually mean \"obliged\"\n","id":"7b4e8626-5a90-4a14-94bb-bda018a64f95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know he broke the law as he was ex CIA. However, what PRSISM was doing might not have been constitutional. He saw something that could've been both legally and morally wrong and he brought it to the attention of the public. Why he did so is debatable, I understand. I've heard people say that he has defected or that he could've gone about this differently. I think he seems like an idealist, though. If what he knew had stayed within the confines of Capitol Hill or Congress, I don't know that it would've been debated and considered in the same way it's being questioned, right now. Calling this situation Orwellian would be an exaggeration. I don't think that the average person's conversations are being reviewed even if they are being recorded. However, I do think that we should have a say in how we make the trade off between security and liberty. Edward Snowden is helping us do that. He, therefore, should be granted amnesty. He doesn't deserve to be punished.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Edward Snowden does NOT deserve to be imprisoned.\n","id":"2517b237-8672-4c96-8060-be68f95228ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Being prevented from doing something is in effect the same as being forced not to do something. The result is that the situation is left unchanged, which in this case is carrying a baby.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being prevented from doing something by the state, that you would otherwise be able to freely choose, is the same as being forced to do something you do not want to do.\n","id":"a1c934f9-dd4d-42b1-b609-7fb90050e9a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The best Science Fiction movie is?<|ARGUMENT|>The title \"Minority Report\", which makes perfect sense in the context of the short story, doesn't make sense in the film.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The original short story was much better, with a more complex and interesting story.\n","id":"77ab5830-2ca9-4fbd-bbd6-36e51462cd3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a proud warrior and citizen of Sparta, I can honestly say that I haven't met a single Athenian who wasn't a total wuss. They may have gotten lucky in Marathon, but the Persians are now kicking their asses. It's no surprise, these people have no mind for warfare and waste too much time with their silly philosophy and ridiculous drama. I mean they don't even kill their crippled babies for Ares' sakes So in the words of Leonidas, come at me bro  gt Hello, people of the past. This is a footnote from the moderators of this 'internet forum'. I'm afraid to say that some wannabe scientist, while looking into time travel, has caused a temporal distortion field. It should dissipate in the next 24 hours. In the mean time, feel free to message us about a view you hold while you're visiting the present, and remember to have a look through our rules<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All Athenians are pussies.\n","id":"278645ef-217c-4efc-a384-6c8388fb02c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The government should get out of the business entirely of legislating our personal relationships. This means that under the legal system, any and all possible forms of consensual, legitimate marriage would not be barred by the state. I would, however also support the rights of the church to deny any couples as they see fit, there are a number of christian denominations for example that are willing to marry homosexual couples, but those churches and denominations that choose not to do so will have their religious freedom respected. Likewise, though i am not religious in any way, from my limited research it appears that polygamy is permitted under a number of religions Mormonism, Islam, smaller african and asian religions, some independent christians . So in a sense, by keeping things the way they are we are actually serving to infringe upon religious freedom, as well as unnecessarily infringing upon personal freedom between multiple consenting adults in a personal relationship that is of no concern to the state or external individuals. Though there is much more i could write to debunk a number of the common arguments against polygamy, for the sake of discussion i will leave it at that and instead respond to those that leave comments. The arguments in opposition i will be responding to primarily are the ones by people that specifically are in favour of gay marriage, but against polygamy. This is because i feel that many of the arguments against gay marriage could also be applied to polygamy, and those arguments have kind of been done to death. EDIT Got work in the morning, gotta go to bed. I will reply to everything tomorrow.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am in favour of marriage equality, however i believe that marriage equality also includes the right to polygamy.\n","id":"025e867e-3c74-4b94-9aec-aaaed7cb6df5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that the separation of powers within the state into legislature, executive and judiciary is not anymore sufficient nowadays, because these three branches of state power are overpowered and the societal equilibrium is hence unbalanced by the rise of corporate and media influence. As far as I can see, the biggest problems that keep appearing in today's society are rooted in either a corporate wicked influence over the governing powers or media mass manipulation. Corporations have become the underground rulers of the society by controlling the state policy and mass media has turned its purely informational job into a large scale anesthesis against people figuring out that the balance of the powers in society has been dangerously skewed. So, I think we must acknowledge these two new actors at the governing green table corporations and media and redraw and expand the principle of the separations of powers to include the two newcomers. This would need plotting a set of systematic gaps between companies and government to ban corporate lobbying and any other kind of intertwining between companies' and political interests, also the interdiction for the media outlets to be partisan towards a certain political wing or express political positions into their purely informational routines.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think we have 5 powers in state and only three are regulated and separated. The two newcomers, corporations and media are in their Wild West phase and need to be strictly regulated just like legislature, executive and judiciary.\n","id":"859a3a59-fbe4-46ea-8f16-55396e1b1571"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Growing up, I've always believed in standing up for what I thought was right, equality, freedom of speech, equal rights, etc. The last 5 years however I've just slowly settled into cynicism and have accepted that things are in an irreversible decline. The corruption and level of immorality where I live has become absurd and I have noticed I lost my previously high standards. I adopted the view that to be a revolutionary, while I still see it as an extremely selfless cause if motivated by proper ideals, is something absolutely inapplicable in today's world. So I intend to do everything and anything for myself and those around me, so that we may enjoy these last years on this world before it's all just sucked into a black hole of human crap. Which, as a species, I believe we ultimately deserve.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't care.\n","id":"12c0cc20-9b7d-46ae-b5aa-a51cae9cedba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>May or may not be a popular opinion, but here goes. I don't have any legal background, so anyone who does is certainly welcome to educate me on specific nuances of the law pertaining to this opinion. Earlier this year, Michelle Carter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for urging her boyfriend to kill herself a judgement which was, if I remember correctly, very well received on Reddit. Furthermore, there is somewhat of a legal precedent for my opinion in particular. In 2013, two girls were charged with third degree felony aggravated stalking. So it is not without precedent that people have been indicted for violent actions that have lead to suicide, but I believe this should be expanded. For example, suppose there is an individual who I'll call person A who, whether verbal, physical, or otherwise, bullies another person B in a workplace. B kills him herself either partially or completely because of this bullying. It is my opinion that A should be charged with involuntary manslaughter. Involuntary manslaughter involves the unlawful killing of another individual through negligent or reckless behavior. Bullying or other violent acts, in my opinion, falls into this category because there is a precedent for people to commit suicide due to these behaviors. In order to be successfully convicted, it must be shown in court that A perpetrated violent or bullying actions against B. It was known that B had, or showed signs of, a mental illness such as depression which tends to elicit actions of self harm. A's actions caused or significantly contributed to B's mental illness. B's death is ruled a suicide. My opinion has a few nuances in no particular order It has been shown that depression can cloud another's judgement. While it may be technically possible for B to escape the actions of A by, for example, filing a restraining order against A, that B's depression clouded his her judgement and made him her feel hopeless. This is ultimately what leads to suicide. Since A is at least partially responsible for B's depression, then A is also partially responsible for B's suicide, even though A did not intend for B's suicide. The presence of a suicide note, or other notes such as posts on social media citing the violent actions of A can be admitted as evidence that A actually perpetrated such actions and that these actions caused or significantly contributed to B's mental illness. B's mental illness does not necessarily need to be diagnosed in order to achieve a conviction. B's friends, family, or coworkers can testify to behaviors that may indicate such an illness. My reason for believing this is because many mental illnesses go un diagnosed, and I dont know of any way that such a diagnosis can be achieved post mortum. If B DID have a diagnosis, however, it would certainly help the prosecution's case if B's mental health professional testified. If A tells B to commit suicide, this is certainly a bullying action that might contribute to B's mental illness, but such a statement is unnecessary to achieve a conviction. A can contribute to B's mental illness without telling him her to commit suicide. Non violent actions, such as A breaking up with B, causing B to commit suicide, should obviously NOT be evidence. I understand that some people may commit suicide and cite fake actions against the perpetrator. In order to prevent this, it would probably be wise to require additional testimonies. That's all I have for now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone perpetrates ongoing violent actions verbal, physical, or otherwise towards another individual, and that individual kills themselves as a result of that ongoing violence, the perpetrator should be charged with involuntary manslaughter.\n","id":"5e83e726-cf55-433a-93c4-4118be0ee31d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like everyone, I find space exploration kind of 'cool', but I don't understand how anyone's life is actually benefited by it. Imagine every penny NASA has spent over the years had been donated to the world's 50 poorest nations, and how many people's lives that would have revolutionised and conversely how few people would have had their quality of life reduced. Also even if we were find advanced alien life, if their leaders are likeminded to ours, I can not imagine a harmonious relationship forming especially if they 'look' different Overall I find it genuinely unsettling that 'progressive' types seem to get a serious hard on for these ventures. Edit Thanks for all the helpful responses and interesting reads. Maybe I shouldn't have used such an explicit economic illustration which doesn't reflect reality, but it does still seem to me that people are keen to downplay the economic outlay for romantic sentiments. However those romantic sentiments are potentially quite meaningful at stimulating the current and captivating the future scientific field as a whole. There is clearly a huge amount of spinoff technology developed by NASA and co. and it's not obvious whether the cause of space exploration is fundamental to these innovations, or whether direct investment in these technologies would be a more efficient use of resources. Overall, I would retract my original opinion that space exploration is a 'huge waste of resources'. I can see both sides of whether to substantially invest in what is a complex and experimental field which undeniably yields benefits that are real, if not always apparent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Space exploration is a huge waste of resources\n","id":"ae8a3217-03b0-4fb3-b779-75a4ed984501"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I identified myself as a libertarian for a short period of time, but after considering and analyzing the consequences of my beliefs, I went in the completely opposite direction my political opinions fall most in line with the US Green Party's platform . I was also appalled by the beliefs of many of the libertarians I came into contact with during that time. To be a libertarian, you have to value letting people hold onto their money more than you value reducing hunger, poverty, homelessness, sickness, suffering, and untimely death. I don't hold that all libertarians value their own money more than they value other people although certainly some do , but rather that they value the ownership of money in general as more valuable than people. I often consider the following thought experiment gt A child is disabled and on train tracks, and there is an oncoming train. There is a heavy object obstructing John's path to save the child that he cannot lift on his own. There are bystanders who could help, but for whatever reason, not enough are willing to help to successfully move the heavy object. However, John has a gun he can use to coerce the bystanders to help him help save the child. Any reasonable person, I believe, would use the gun to coerce the people to help. A libertarian would not because such action violates the non aggression principle . I'd like to know how someone can both be a libertarian and value people more than money. I would define a libertarian as someone who would change the current US government more toward smaller government roles, lower taxes than toward larger government roles and higher taxes. So, for instance, someone who wants to get rid of the FDA but also wants to institute universal healthcare I wouldn't really consider libertarian since the latter action would be much more significant than the former. I honestly would like my mind changed about this as I usually like to believe the best of people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the vast majority of libertarians care more about money than people, I want to have some faith restored in humanity, please\n","id":"670f5fcf-1290-41fa-bdef-29451af543f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think if a man looses his hand, he has lost his hand. Getting an alternitive version of his hand made out of robotics is wrong. There are to many negative side effects. How can you be sure it'll work like you want it to? What if it 'glitches'? What if it brakes and has an effect on the rest of your body, like an electroshock or some battery acid that leaks into your blood. Also, what if we can replace our mortality with mechanics, then who gets to chose who becomes immortal? And what happens when more people are born but no more people die? edit I seem to have not made my opinion very clear, apologies. What I specificly think is wrong, is when someone can get for example nanobots in your brain for extra brain storage, robotic eyes for extra vision and a mechanical heart that never lets you die however impossible this seems because these make us more than we are, they fake the human race. I believe it was called something along the lines of Post Darwin where we take our own elovution in our own hands . This is what I think is wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that humans getting robotic parts is wrong.\n","id":"d43af12c-87ff-4244-9e9f-e90508e92512"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Driving is hard Not only are we as humans woefully ill equipped to deal with driving scenarios, but when large groups of people congregate, group irrationalities occur. Every time I'm on the road, it is a serious struggle not to lose my life. I follow driving law whenever possible, and I follow best safety practices to the best of my abilities. I attempt to maintain as consistent a speed as I can. I maintain the speed limit. I only change lanes when absolutely necessary changing lanes can cause significant traffic delays . I signal well before making any moves, and never make any sudden moves. I follow far enough behind traffic that I have stopping distance if necessary. And yet, the way other people drive seems to undo all of my precautions. People will constantly attempt to pass each other on the freeway, even in high traffic conditions where they'll make no progress but delay the people behind them. They'll tailgate me, even when I'm already ~15 above the speed limit. They'll cut me off when they pass, for seemingly no reason. All of these create very dangerous and stressful situations, and I think the world would be a better place if there were more regulations for these situations. Further in my experience, one of the most dangerous things on the road is a speed trap. People will freak out when they see a police car, slam on their brakes, and cause significant traffic back up not to mention the potential for many rear end collisions . I believe that a reasonable solution to this is increased enforcement. The reason people will react suddenly to a police vehicle is because there is extraordinary leeway in what police can or will enforce. If things like excessive speed were enforced significantly more often perhaps via an automated system , there would be less benefit in reacting suddenly to their presence as evading enforcement would be futile . Everybody I've ever expressed these views towards thinks they are terrible, but nobody's ever given me a reason that doesn't boil down to I like driving this way . So, Reddit, Change My View<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe traffic law should be expanded and enforced more strictly.\n","id":"ded4457b-658a-422c-b0d1-94d10f775b48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I could choose to eat a sandwich today or I could choose to eat a protein shake. As the sole agent operating my consciousness, I have ultimate veto power over all of my actions and decisions. My drives, desires, wants, needs may, to some extent, be formed by my environment, genetics, past experiences, all of which are determined by the laws of physics and the realities of the physical world however, human consciousness, being a force so complex and powerful, is governed by an agent , which has the ultimate power to make decisions and is unpredictable. I'm interested in hearing arguments against this idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that free will exists.\n","id":"ddf40022-8166-4c94-89b8-c408a137c6f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the purpose of this argument, I'm using human spirit as a catch all for self determination, liberty, and initiative. The political, economic, and social structures necessary to keep order in urban environments are significantly more oppressive than rural structures. Stop and frisk studio apartments lack of personal transportation organized crime political machines byzantine business building health codes to name a few things that limit us in spirit and in our endeavors. These limitations were once outweighed by the benefits of being in close proximity to millions of other people. These benefits are deteriorating in the face of the internet and other technological advances. While there's no doubt that urban dwellers tend to be more productive and innovative than their rural counterparts, I believe that this is due only to the fact that current power structures reside within urban environments, and attract the creative class to them. Opinion while I have an appreciation for the urban landscape, I don't believe humans were ever meant to actually abide within it. EDIT By urban environments, I'm referring to major metro areas not rural suburban areas' downtowns. EDIT 2 I'm not arguing that there aren't still benefits associated with proximity to others. I'm arguing that we've arrived at a point where said benefits no longer outweigh the spirit crushing costs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think urban environments crush the human spirit.\n","id":"57c02136-2c65-409a-97f6-c080bfe6a650"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Until the people of Palestine rejects Hamas as it's representative leadership and begin truly protesting in a way of non violence they will be unable to claim any type of moral high ground in the conflict between them and Israel. The lack of non violent rhetoric and leadership, such as found in successful movements like the American Civil Rights movement and the Indian independence movement is the reason that international pressure for a peaceful solution will be vague. No major power says that Israel does not have a right to defend itself, and because of that, there will not be any kind serious ramifications for the current actions of the IDF. There is no solution to this problem but the non violent one, and the onus is on the Palestinians to do it. It may not be fair, but the Israelis seem to be at least comfortable with the status quo, so the group that wants to institute change must be willing to initiate the movement. I'm not saying it will be instantaneous, non violent movements never are, but it is the only logical tactic against such a militarily superior opponent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only way Palestine can stand up to Israel is through non-violent protest.\n","id":"40e6a4f9-578e-4178-a50e-3c6da689865a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Right to bear arms in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Militias are relevant today as a symbol of preventing tyranny. Historically, the militia that resisted the British was a non state managed association of people that were fighting against tyranny. The wording of the second amendment preserves the spirit of that time and therefore the word \"militia\" can be relevant to nowadays as a symbol of the right of people to fight against tyranny.In this way the spirit of the time is reflected in the letter of the law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The 2nd amendment protects the ability to form a militia not the ongoing existence of one.\n","id":"7efff028-c4a3-407d-ae64-8cb8261db46d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do not, in any way, shape, or form, feel the need to care about the existence of otherkin. there is not an action that I can find otherkin do that is damaging to other people, or even to themselves. with this assumption I have come to the idea that there is no reason to really care if they exist, and there certainly isn't a reason to say that they don't have a right to or belittle them. I mean, you could say they are crazy, but there isn't disorder without dysfunction, so I go back to my original point that there is no harm caused but simple allowing them to exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"there is literally no problem with the existence of otherkin\n","id":"9bf9a76c-7c1c-40a6-8e93-2500fad3a008"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>Since being elected, Trump has continually taken aim at companies that have criticized him, using his Twitter account to tank their stock prices This can prove to be a massive financial setback for companies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There might be financial risks to businesses if they oppose presidential policies such as those regarding immigration.\n","id":"86326e9d-116d-4115-a385-3ae6e809ab38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On their website the Women's March shows its support for several left wing causes including raising the minimum wage, legalized abortion, unrestricted immigration, etc. Regardless of how you feel about these stances, you must recognize that there's plenty of women on both sides of the issues. Thus, it's unfair for the Women's March to even imply that they speak for all women and they should adopt a more specific name so people recognize what they're really all about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the Women's March should be renamed the Liberal Women's March\n","id":"fa4daa73-a3d3-45fd-b90a-f17fd5a3e923"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>The use of the N-word reminds Black teachers about their own possible experiences with racial abuse and injustices.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black teachers in particular might feel uncomfortable when dealing with the N-word and reading it aloud.\n","id":"18e923cf-c50c-47c1-831f-a077c32a2279"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>All famines are manmade. They are a result of poor political decisions such a poor economic planning leading to underproduction, distribution decisions such as the decision to export crops during times of natural disaster, despotic regimes which at time engineer famines, commercial waste e.g. disposal of imperfect produce\/dumping crops to inflate prices. The earth has the capacity to feed us all, scientific advances allow us to increase that potential. The issue is not in scarcity but supply.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is a myth because the population itself is not a problem, it depends on what this population does, how they act and what they use. Something like \"Earth Overshoot Day\" visualises actual problems within the population-count. en.wikipedia.org\n","id":"2648eef1-c56c-485e-92fc-8511f6aae53b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be equal pay for elite sports women \/ men<|ARGUMENT|>Elite female athletes are widely seen as inspirational for women and girls and show off the joy and achievement possible in the world of sport.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It encourages younger girls to aspire and strive to reach elite levels of sport, thereby promoting healthy lifestyles and role models.\n","id":"d490312c-ef5c-43b3-ab58-bf9e0a1f571e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>There has long been a racial divide in which position Black players are accepted playing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NFL has an ongoing history of racism against black players.\n","id":"11563496-8928-4cc2-94b4-58d0777fea0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>In Joseph Smith's published history, he said that in 1820, he told his mother \"I have learned for myself that Presbyterianism is not true.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The doctrine in the Book of Mormon strongly rejects Calvinism, because Joseph Smith disagreed with the Presbyterianism of his mother.\n","id":"80daa494-a0b4-4904-b534-ba90257d3e07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my view, there is no reason why a rational, responsible person has to be a vegetarian. I am not saying that vegetarianism has no benefits, but only that these benefits do not obligate a reasonable person to become a vegetarian. The burden of proof for the claim that we are morally obligated to be vegetarians falls on the vegetarian who thinks that we have this obligation. This is because there should be a good reason behind a moral obligation moral obligations shouldn't be arbitrary and because the vegetarian is suggesting a change to the way that most people currently live. Therefore, it makes sense to investigate this issue by asking what reasons vegetarians can give for saying that there is a moral obligation to be a vegetarian. I will consider the reasons given by the vegetarian philosopher William O. Stephens in his paper Five Arguments for Vegetarianism. The failure of the arguments in this paper will establish a prima facie case that respondents will need to overturn by presenting fresh reasons why vegetarianism is morally obligatory or overturning my objections to Stephens' arguments. First Argument The Argument from Distributive Justice According to this argument, meat is produced in a way that wastes a lot of grain for example, producing one pound of beef apparently requires 16 to 21 pounds of grain and soy. That grain would be better spent by sending it to poorer nations to feed the hungry. Therefore, we have a moral obligation to be vegetarians. First of all, this argument assumes that we are morally obligated to help the hungry in other countries. I agree that helping poor people can be a nice thing to do, but as an egoist and follower of Ayn Rand's ethics, I do not believe that we have a moral obligation to engage in that kind of charity. So at most, this argument establishes that it would be nice to help the poor by giving up meat, not that we have a moral obligation to help the poor by giving up meat. Second, the problem is not so much that we're not producing enough food as that we are having trouble distributing the food. This source explains some of the problems involved in feeding the hungry Enough food is produced worldwide to feed all the people in the world Leathers, p. 133 . However, despite this alarming truth, nearly 1 billion people are suffering from chronic hunger today. There are a wide range of factors that contribute to this problem, but perhaps one of the most significant is poor food distribution. Second Argument The Argument from Environmental Harm According to this argument, farming meat causes various forms of environmental harm, such as that produced by the greenhouse gases given off by the process of farming cattle. This argument assumes that a person should act based on the well being of the environment, rather than their own self interest. It is possible that farming cattle and other practices that produce greenhouse gases will lead to global warming, but the effects of global warming will occur far enough in the future that most people alive today will not be affected. Furthermore, farming cattle is not the major source of greenhouse gas emissions. The study Dietary choices and greenhouse gas emissions assessment of impact of vegetarian and organic options at national scale by Helmi Risku Norja, Sirpa Kurppa and Juha Helenius link concluded as follows gt The major source of GHG from food production is cultivated soil. Contribution from fertiliser manufacture and agricultural energy consumption is small compared with the GHG emissions from soil. With the current food consumption the share of GHG represented by animals is about 24 . Regarding GHG, the environmental performance of organic production is poor compared with conventional production. gt The impact of giving up animal husbandry on total GHG emissions could result, at maximum, in about 7 reduction in total emissions for all consumption. To have any impact on the actual volume of GHG emissions through changed food consumption would require large scale changes among the whole population and a shared view of the extent of the necessary changes. Instead of stressing the impact of individual citizens\u2019 food choices, more attention should be paid to designing effective policy instruments and to social learning. So everyone becoming vegetarian isn't a good solution to global warming, since it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7 . The major source of greenhouse gas emissions is soil, which is used by virtually all forms of farming. Third Argument The Feminist Argument from Sexual Politics This argument lists 16 examples of cases in which meat eating is associated with masculinity, then concludes that we should stop eating meat in order to undermine the patriarchy that dominates our society. I think there probably is some kind of link between meat eating and masculinity, but I'm not convinced that the patriarchy would be particularly undermined by people refusing to eat meat. I think there are probably more important reforms to worry about before we go adjusting our dietary choices to make sure they don't have subconscious patriarchal associations. Fourth Argument The Argument from Moral Consideration for Animals Stephens presents two examples of arguments from moral consideration for animals. The first, by Peter Singer, argues that since all sentient beings deserve equal moral consideration, and animals obviously have more at stake in not being slaughtered than humans have at stake in not being able to eat animals, we should not eat meat. The second, by Tom Regan, argues that all experiencing subjects of a life have equal inherent value, but farming animals and eating them does not treat them as having inherent value equal to ours, so we should not eat meat. I don't think either of these arguments create an obligation to be a vegetarian because I am an egoist. I acknowledge that we should not be unnecessarily cruel to animals, but this is because being cruel to animals would make us more brutal toward each other. Basically, the question is whether animals have rights, and more broadly, what the source of rights is. There is no intrinsic obligation to give equal rights to all sentient beings, on my view, but only to sentient beings who are capable of reasoning. Sentient beings who are capable of reasoning need rights because they can be deterred from producing new inventions and innovations if they see that they can be stripped of the profits from those inventions and innovations by others. So human beings need to be given rights for egoistic reasons, but animals do not. Fifth Argument The Prudential Argument from Health This argument asserts that it is a lot healthier to be a vegetarian for a variety of reasons including the fact that some cultures which primarily eat vegetables have long life expectancies and the fact that the strength and stamina of vegetarians has been shown to be greater than that of meat eaters in studies. This is probably the best argument for vegetarianism by the standard of egoism. I will agree that vegetarianism probably has some health benefits, but I don't think that this creates an obligation to be a vegetarian because it is possible to get those health benefits while still eating some meat. Eating meat might even be better, since omega 3 fatty acids can be gotten more easily by eating fish than by eating vegetables. Also, a lot of people think meat tastes better than vegetables, which might provide some reason to eat meat even if vegetarianism is agreed to be strictly healthier. I conclude that there is no moral obligation to be a vegetarian. Thanks for reading.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that it is not morally obligatory to be a vegetarian.\n","id":"72687828-223b-49fe-88c7-e0dc7014fece"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Algae biofuel<|ARGUMENT|>\"Leave the algae alone\". Low-tech Magazine. 4 Apr. 2008 - \"Algal fuel can even be considered a worse idea than \"clean\" coal. In the \"clean\" coal strategy, at least the CO2 is captured with the intention to store it underground. In the case of algae, the CO2 is captured only with the intention to release in the air some time later, by a car engine.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using algae to filter coal then burning it emits captured C02\n","id":"d60d8ad1-56cd-416e-840f-cc69e70f5e87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Israel's occupation of territories acquired during the 1967 war is against international law Recognition of Palestine as a State will force America to take a stance on the occupation Ben-Naftali et al., p. 609<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The status quo, including the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and the continued construction of Israeli settlements, is against international law.\n","id":"c6257401-cd3c-4209-977e-9677400ee3b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that tipping at restaurants and diners has a long history, and that while it isn\u2019t a perfect system, Americans have adjusted our behavior to tipping and the restaurant industry more or less \u201cworks\u201d despite decreasing wages. I also understand that tipping is culturally expected and \u201cworks\u201d in other situations such as hair salons, taxi drivers, and a few others. My view is that while we can keep working with this system in industries that have always had it, it is essentially a broken system with few guarantees, and that we need to stop creating new tipped jobs. All of these new service industry jobs like uber, Instacart, Caviar, and anything else with the expectation of tipping are just helping new corporations evade paying a fair wage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We need to stop creating new tipped jobs.\n","id":"0c142c9b-1103-4935-b83e-4ada0d169dfd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Vertical Farming is the Future of Agriculture<|ARGUMENT|>Other methods of sustainable\/regenerative agriculture have positive impacts carbon sequestration\/functions as an ecosystem. apart from negating the negative aspects of industrial farming that vertical farming does not obtain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are other alternatives that can replace conventional agricultural methods without resorting to vertical farming.\n","id":"1e7dc803-d7a4-40dd-8380-41134c537882"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is C++ the ideal programming language to learn first for beginners?<|ARGUMENT|>The C++ syntax can be unnecessarily frustrating at times, and can dissuade would-be programmers from progressing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The restrictive syntax of C++ is too complicated for new developers to learn.\n","id":"810758ad-579e-4f28-b5d4-5caab2951197"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Yes, I am aware that climate change exists weather becomes more extreme during climate change. Previous iterations such as Global Warming Cooling have really tainted the perspective on climate change. In the initial study that was done, I am aware that the vast majority agreed that climate change was occurring, but not necessarily that humans are the cause. Temperatures have varied significantly throughout our planet's life, and there have been several ice ages and proportional 'warm' periods. Additionally, I also find it hard to trust most articles because of the inherent bias of the way our grant system works. It produces a lot of junk science that peer reviews each other and it's hard to come to a realistic conclusion when you suspect whoever conducted the study has ulterior motives, or has proven to have such motives or conflicts of interest. Ie, studies stating that tobacco would totally be fine to consume and isn't addictive at all but you find out that said study was funded by tobacco companies. Obviously this is an extremely arbitrary example. This has been an issue for years and thus it becomes incredibly difficult to distinguish legitimate science and research methods from ones that cherry pick or use other, more subtle ways to misrepresent the data to push an agenda. I do think pollution is bad for the overall health of our planet and its people, but I find it hard to believe that the amount of emissions that we do cause are capable of globally raising the temperature by any significant amount. So while I support reducing pollution on air quality grounds and to prevent smog, I find it hard to believe that humans are creating such world ending disasters by driving vehicles I mean similar things have happened in the past, and we've only been driving vehicles and operating machinery in a fraction of our time on Earth which is an overall fraction of our planet's life. Now perhaps humans exacerbate an already existing issue, but I'd still like to see some concrete proof that demonstrates that humans, overall, are the cause for climate change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not think that climate change is caused solely by humans.\n","id":"87ba1603-6ecd-48a9-a250-012d6f7c986f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that intuitively lots of people assume that causing harm benefit and allowing harm benefit to happen should be judged differently. That is, they assert that there is a consistent definition of the distinction between action vs inaction and that that distinction is morally relevant. I doubt such a definition exists. I will give several definitions that I have come across, and then give a scenario for each where the intuitive answer conflicts with the definition's assessment. The intuitive answer is of course given under the assumption that a valid action inaction distinction exists, and that the distinction is morally relevant. By actively responsible I mean the concept that is commonly understood as causing i.e. action , and by passively responsible I mean the concept that is commonly understood as letting happen i.e. inaction . Agent A is actively responsible for event E iff E would not have occurred if A had never existed Scenario Suppose that the youngest son of a King squanders his inheritance and begs his elder brother, the new King, for food. The new King refuses and the younger brother starves to death. If the elder brother had never existed, the younger brother would have inherited the throne and would not have starved to death. Yet, it is clear that the new King merely allows his brother to die and does not kill him. copied from here Agent A is actively responsible for event E iff E would not have occurred if A had not been present Scenario A Suppose an SS officer, Franz, tortures someone to death. But this is standard practice in the Gestapo. If Franz had stayed home with a sore throat, or if Franz had never existed, his pal Hans would have done the torturing, in the same way, at the same time Franz did. If the counterfactual account is correct, then Franz is negatively relevant to the victim\u2019s death by torture. That is, Franz merely allowed the death to occur. copied from here Scenario B Suppose Alice and Bob are at a quiz show where the winner receives a 1,000,000 prize. Alice is smarter than Bob and wins the prize. Bob who just lost all his money gambling in a casino before then can't buy any food and dies of starvation. If Alice hadn't been there, and instead Chris had taken part, who isn't as smart as Bob, Bob would have won the prize and survived. Nevertheless, intuition says that Alice didn't kill Bob, but rather let him die. Agent A is actively responsible for event E iff E would not have occurred if A had not been in control of their body paralyzed, in trance, asleep, Same as scenario 2.B, with the modification that Alice isn't in control of her body during the quiz show. Any definition of the distinction between action and inaction that builds on the idea that there is a natural course of events where you are actively responsible if you break the natural course of events and you are passively responsible if you let history take its natural course would utilize the same conditionals that I gave in the above list, so the problem is equivalent and the same scenarios can be applied. You can change my mind by giving me a consistent and morally significant definition of the distinction between inaction and action, or for example by pointing out that one of the definitions given above is actually valid. If you give me a new definition and I find a scenario that refutes it, I might put it in the above list so that I don't have to repeat myself for other commenters. FYI My personal belief is that for any given decision all possible options regardless of whether someone would classify them as action or inaction should be inspected, and the chosen option should be judged by whether a better option was available and possibly the agent's motivation . I don't want to argue about this view in this  though, since it is supposed to be about the problems of an action inaction distinction, not about what moral system would be better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any difference between action and inaction is morally insignificant.\n","id":"8a4aa4b1-a63b-45b5-914d-edf4cb4c2625"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First let me clarify that I don't think voters should need a college degree, this has many obvious flaws including but no limited to the fact that there would be a monetary price on voting. I don't even think that the requirements even need to be very high. For example it could be that once every eight years there is a small quiz at the voting booth with items that are relevant to current political issues Find Iraque on a map. What does the 4th amendment protects What is the 26th amendment What war was the last formal declaration of war?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think there should be minimum intelligence requirements for voting.\n","id":"6cdaf083-2003-4ce6-82f6-cb4c0958a84d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>This leads to people siding with management in labor disputes, effectively denying the athletes rights and benefits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people view athletes not as workers, but as overpaid people playing a kid's game.\n","id":"862b7064-19bc-4b02-b43e-5657dbfacb0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Vertical Farming is the Future of Agriculture<|ARGUMENT|>Most nutrient solution\/fertilizers only contain NPK We do not know enough about what influence trace elements, microbial soil life and mycorrhizal funghi have on taste and nutritional value to truly replicate the tastes of conventional conditions, or at least do it consistently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fruits and vegetables produced through hydroponic methods are less tasty than when grown in natural soil.\n","id":"b7c1890f-8320-4b3f-a549-0f9db4411221"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Child pornography is banned or illegal in most countries around the world because of the kinds of harms children in such pornography have to face.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society, when it manages to arrive at such a strong and wide reaching consensus, tends to make the correct decision about censoring certain views.\n","id":"d8da9633-5778-4059-bfae-dd25e71ce067"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have several friends who are conservative leaning when it comes to politics, and while they profess that a core tenet of that view stems from wanting to take the government out of our decision making process as much as possible, they all tend to support term limits, which I can't understand. x200B The conversation usually ends with no reconciliation that I can make, because their point tends to be that shaking things up in office keeps the process fair and that career politicians are bad for society. My counter has always been that if elected officials were so egregiously bad, then the constituency would should vote them out. And conversely, that if the constituency was actually pleased with their representation such that they'd want to keep them in office see FDR , then it's intrusive of the government to say that you can't have the representation you truly desire because Big Brother feels like it's not in your best interests and that permitting this intrusion conflicts with a fundamental theme of conservative ideology. x200B I am open to changing my mind, however I don't see a sound argument from the politically conservative perspective that would be consistent with that view that will reconcile supporting term limits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Term limits are anti-democracy\n","id":"06152327-40b8-4da8-ab10-4049485af37c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In a lot of debates about sexual assault and rape, activists will reference a pervasive rape culture which enables or even encourages sexual violence. This argument seems to ignore a number of key points which demonstrate we live in an overwhelmingly anti rape culture Rape is a serious crime in all developed Western Nations and convicted rapists are ordinarily sentenced to prison The overwhelming majority of people condemn proven rapists and nobody in the public sphere describes themselves as pro rape People who make public comments which victim blame, deny the impact of rape or make rape jokes are invariably targeted with huge public backlash Many victims of rape and sexual violence are widely championed as courageous people who are subsequently given a platform to offer moral support and leadership to other victims of sexual violence who may be afraid to speak out In addition, the attempt to blame rape on an aspect of Western culture rather than on rapists alone contradicts the reasoning used by these same social activists in other areas, particularly regarding Islamic culture. The politically correct position is that while some Muslims and Muslim countries endorse and enforce sexist attitudes, we cannot blame Islamic culture and must instead judge each Muslim as an individual who is solely responsible for themselves. Yet when individual members of Western society commit rape, those same activists will blame 'the patriarchy', 'toxic masculinity' and 'rape culture' rather than laying blame on rapists and rapists alone. They claim that all men who have made sexist jokes or objectified women in any way are somehow partially responsible for the actions of complete strangers, because they have participated in 'rape culture'. In some instances, activists will argue that any man who has not actively attempted to change the behavior of friends and associates who have made sexist or objectifying remarks is also partially responsible for rape. To me, this argument is fallacious, inconsistent and runs contrary to observable facts. gt<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The West does not have a 'rape culture'.\n","id":"7998da81-fb6c-442e-9eb4-909855613204"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m bisexual, I\u2019ve been apart of the community for many years in various organizations advocating for equal rights. Recently, people have started to include asexual people under the queer umbrella. And, people have gotten mad at me when I\u2019ve suggested Asexual people are not LGBTQ. Being LGBTQ and having support and community for that is important because it\u2019s a marginalized identity. People around the world literally die everyday because they\u2019re gay or trans. BUT NO ONE CARES IF YOU DON\u2019T LIKE SEX. No one\u2019s trying to take away asexual people\u2019s rights or disowning them from their families. Obviously if your trans and asexual that\u2019s LGBTQ, but I\u2019m tired of straight cis people saying they\u2019re queer because they don\u2019t like sex Then often people who are Asexual reap LGBTQ benefits, like programs and trips. They talk about how forming relationships is hard because they have to tell their partner they don\u2019t want sex. That\u2019s difficult, yes, but that\u2019s not anything close to societal structures that make your love illegal or punishable by death. I think most of them are people with very low sex drives which is cool and fine and no one care who want to be trendy so they decided to call themselves LGBTQ. It hurts my community and work because it takes away resources from those who need them and reenforces the idea that it\u2019s just trendy to be LGBTQ in the states and ignores all of the immense homophobia transphobia we go through. I want to stress that I don\u2019t dislike Asexual people at all and they should have their own programming and trips and resources, I just don\u2019t think they should be included in things meant for LGBTQ people. I know I sound bigoted, please change my view. Edit thanks u Thallori for your response it really did  and I know I need to be better now for my Ace brothers sisters people. Everyone go check out their comment it\u2019s really insightful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who are Asexual should not be considered LGBTQ+\n","id":"f81ab881-5ed6-477c-9f53-e2e97ec47f94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT I apologize for any confusion. It's my fault for not fleshing out the belief I'm trying to change. In my original post I listed several services but didn't really list too many. Someone suggested a domestic peace corp which I am totally for. I would include volunteering in this list. As for the people unqualified for a particular service, I'm 100 for having the government train you, just as they would if you were pursuing a career in said field. For example, if you were interested in working in infrastructure, the federal government would send you to essentially a bootcamp to get trained in your career field. I'm fairly ignorant regarding the cost at to do this. And I understand the concerns over two levels of citizenship. Most of you have given some great arguments against this idea, and I am open up to all of them. Again, apologies for any confusion from the lack of explanation on my part. A little backstory for me. I consider myself progressive liberal and I believe in a strong Federal government. I have a parent who served in the military for 20 years. I have an older brother who's on his path to becoming a lawyer. I believe people need to serve their country in any capacity available to them. This goes for any immigrant wishing to become a U.S. citizen or those who are already citizens in the U.S. It is my belief that a mandatory 2 year service to your country will not only benefit those who serve but will also make the country a better place. For serving your country, I also believe that with each succeeding 2 year term of service you should receive a point system used for tax time. 2 years mandatory. For every 2 years you receive some percentage of your income back. The types of service I would count as public service are Fire Department Police Department Education Military Homeland Security Medicine FBI CIA There are others I'm sure. Just can't think of any. Thanks for any and all feedback.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think public service should be mandatory prior to full citizenship USA -\n","id":"1f930f2f-2966-41e8-b9e2-06821191c3ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Teachers Be Allowed To Wear Religious Symbols At School?<|ARGUMENT|>A teacher should not be the first to bring up the subject of religion. If a child asks why her protestant cross doesn't have Jesus, she can explain that, but she can't just start talking about why it lacks Jesus for no reason. Teaching is okay, preaching is not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers in public institutions should uphold their commitment to secular education, and avoid any attempts to impart their personal religious beliefs to young, impressionable minds. Their educational credentials should lead the way; not their faith-based feelings.\n","id":"016a8e6f-8d81-4e62-9b1a-da61675c208b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People who refuse to face reality, engage in well thought and well reasoned discussion, and cling to dogma should be silenced politically, socially, and biologically. Getting rid of them, whether they be your run of the mill far right redneck or your far left SJW who thinks they can win the world by shouting at it should be disposed of. Only people who can accept that their entire beliefs may be wrong or if they cannot, have a well reasoned, logically consistent, empirically sound defense that covers every base and does not fall into the realm of dogma, fallacy, or faith should remain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the willfully ignorant have no place in this world.\n","id":"c9ad3ddc-0424-4656-ba6f-6e35c50915f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a British Citizen currently half way through my Marriage Visa with my American Wife, and will most likely be emigrating over there in the next 6 8 months. However, is this really the right decision? Britain is a lot different to America obviously it would be considered socialist by American standards. We have the National Health Service and strict gun laws. Christianity does not have such a deranged impact on peoples choices, there isn't a mass shooting reported every month etc etc Now I liked America when I visited, but the internet has made me very jaded from seeing very aggressive comments from certain Americans. From stuff like, Dey Turk Err Jaaahbs to Obama is the anti christ etc etc. Now why would I want to live with these types people? I'm also worried for my families safety. I can quite happily walk home 45 minutes from a club at 2am in the UK and have done many a time. I doubt I could safely do this in America And with all the mass shootings across America do I really want the possibility of me or my wife being killed by a psycho with a gun? EDIT I will be moving to Troy, Missouri and we will be living with the in laws in their house. Copy from post I'm still concerned with other issues such as health care. From what I can see even if I have health insurance I may still have to pay if I have any medical issues. How does this work?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Me moving to USA from the UK is a bad idea\n","id":"2953d9a3-5b07-4a08-b28c-55cd4a53b915"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who is the best female or queer Sci Fi & Fantasy author, and why?<|ARGUMENT|>Meredith NicEssus is a faerie princess turned private investigator in a world where faeries are not only known to the general public, but are also fashionable. She takes on the pseudonym \"Merry Gentry\" to hide from her family and her past while hiding out in Los Angeles as a private investigator. Merry, the only Sidhe pronounced \"shEE\" royal to be born on American soil flees the Unseelie Court in a final act of self-preservation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Star Trek and Fantasy Porn. who doesn't love a bit of Fantasy Porn\n","id":"f9e34926-02a4-462b-9ae2-1be397c318b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which is the best country to live in?<|ARGUMENT|>As of 2014 a Gallup poll found that 42% of US citizens believe in Creationist views of human origins.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The U.S. is falling behind other countries in education.\n","id":"34afe717-7c2e-4031-bc14-f09cff8633e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit 2 ~~I'm back ~~ Gone forever now, and won't be making any more replies. Thank you all for expanding my perspective Here is a summary of my revised opinion last paragraph . One delta was awarded here Edit 1 Thank you for the responses, everyone I have to go for now, but I've awarded 1 delta here and will come back to finish the threads that I had already replied to tomorrow. I think the freedom of association including the right to refuse service should be respected in multicultural societies, provided that the following conditions can be met there is mechanism in place to ensure fair political representation of the population and impartiality of the law there is mechanism in place to ensure a fair distribution of natural resources and capitals amongst the population so that no one group can, for example, monopolize all land and refuse service to all other groups By respecting the freedom of association under the conditions given above, we can facilitate the creation of effective safe spaces without jeopardizing access to public services, as well as increase the level of social harmony by minimizing misunderstanding. Here are examples of some things that I think should be considered acceptable ~~ leasing residential space to people of a specific ethnicity culture religion etc. There are often ads that read along the lines of 'seeking respectful tenant', or 'looking for clean roommate'. Conflicts in these arrangements often seem to arise due to miscommunication or people just having different ideas about what it means to be 'respectful' and 'clean'. For example, I have heard of people who get extremely offended by the ceiling fan being turned on Eastern Europe German? , people who get offended when the fan is not turned on, people who consider throwing used toilet paper into the toilet to be unacceptable and insist on throwing it into the bin, people who consider throwing used toilet paper into the bin to be unacceptable and insist on throwing it into the toilet, and so on. I think it would make things a lot easier if one could say, for example, 'I am looking for a person of this particular culture, so that we have a fairly large amount of common grounds to work with, as opposed to assuming certain things to be 'common sense', only to find out that it isn't so in another culture'.~~ this is already possible in roommate seeking roommate arrangements, and should not be further extended to include landlord seeking tenant arrangements. performing marriage ceremonies for only a particular population. For example, Christian weddings may be reserved for Christians only and each service provider may set their own restrictions, but all types of weddings, including non Christian weddings, must be recognised by the State and enjoy equal legal and economic benefits. I am maintaining this position, because while marriage is a state function and not a religious one, a wedding ceremony is not necessary for getting married 'safe spaces' may be established by anyone, regardless of how unusual the group may be e.g. white people, black people, homosexual people, heterosexual people, trans people, cis people, people who believe in science, people who believe in flying spaghetti monsters, people who like pink toothbrushes, people who cannot bear the sight of a hippo opening its mouth, people who must sit upon a blue bed with one leg raised while reciting the alphabet backwards exactly twice a day, etc. As these are safe spaces, they can be made exclusive to members of that group. Again, this is assuming that there is mechanism in place to ensure that public spaces are not dominated by any group. I think this could resolve, for example, the transgender bathroom debate in the U.S. by ensuring equal and available access to public bathrooms, while also providing the option of cis only bathrooms for those who prefer them. I'm not sure how my revised view applies to this point yet<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"multiculturalism should include the freedom of association as one of its central tenets\n","id":"36d5316d-5d48-4f87-b363-e9675251c011"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV Vaccinations be Compulsory?<|ARGUMENT|>China is the world's biggest carbon dioxide emitter There is no African country under the 10 world's biggest CO2 emitters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overpopulation is mainly happening in Asian countries - not African ones.\n","id":"616e4602-6631-41dc-a3bf-e5377339081d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the West give development aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Development aid contributes into the overall stability of the recipient region and peaceful interaction between groups in the Global South.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By providing aid it also secures the well-being of its own people.\n","id":"e45fb95c-92ef-455f-990e-1d6cec233ffd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Tonight's front page of r all, as well as headlines on many other news sites, are dominated by content related to the hunting of trophy animals, sparked by the killing of Cecil the lion. Although admittedly it is far from a consensus, many seem to believe that the hunting of these exotic animals is objectively wrong and therefore should be prohibited. It is likely that many of those vocal with their distaste of hunting for sport like the gt 500,000 signatories of the Justice for Cecil petition however are also consumers of meat. I believe this can be inferred by the sheer amount of negative press Walter Palmer is receiving contrasted with the fact that a minority of people are vegetarians. This perspective seems hypocritical. I can imagine two main counterarguments to my claim. Their general ideas, with my responses, are below 1 The killing of endangered animals is worse than the killing of animals under no danger of extinction. Response Objectively I do not think an individual life can and should be valued more than another. Therefore although killing a member of an endangered species is deplorable, due to the smaller room for error for the management of the populations of these species, the killing of an animal like a cow is equally so. 2 Killing for sport is unjustifiable whereas killing animals for their meat pelt whatever serves a purpose, making it justifiable. Response It is no longer true that humans, at least those in developed areas, need the goods of a dead animal to survive. Although it could be argued that at one point the hunting of animals was a necessary evil for the survival of our species, there is no longer any need to murder animals for sustenance. All of the nutrients necessary for the well being of humans that are gained from eating meat now have more ethical alternatives. I'd appreciate if anyone could either further develop one of the perspectives presented above or share a new one. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who condemn the hunting of trophy animals and are not vegetarians are hypocrites\n","id":"e752ea40-8731-4f69-9a51-5c818fcc394f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a dog lover and have had dogs my entire life though I don't currently and have never had a pit bull . A few years ago, when the question of banning specific breeds in communities began coming up, I began reading research to find out if certain breeds of dog are a higher risk of a causing any injury, and b causing serious injury or death. From what I've read and learned, while keeping an open mind, studies and statistics consistently reinforce that Pit bulls are responsible for a much higher proportion of attacks than a significantly higher proportion for serious attacks and deaths, followed a ways back by Rottweilers and German Shepherds. Whenever I see a discussion on the subject in an open forum, it's often anti Pit bull speakers providing evidence and studies, while pro Pit bull owners often speak of how nice, gentle, and trustworthy their particular Pit bull is or one their family used to have or someone they know . My question is, can a rational and open minded Pit bull owner, in the face of the available statistics and research, really say that a Pit bull is not more dangerous than another breed of dog without only giving anecdotal or op ed evidence? If you own a Pit bull, can you concede that they are more dangerous than other dogs? Can anyone change my view that Pit bulls are significantly more dangerous, both in the probability to attack and the severity of attack when it occurs, than the average non Pit bull dog?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pitbulls are more likely to attack a person, and to attack and seriously injure a person than other dog breeds.\n","id":"30fdd15f-9091-4388-9c1e-534b34e3523f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am of course referring to the recent INTERNET CONTROVERSY that is the stupid Kendrick Lamar vs White Girl deal he pulled her up for saying \u201cnigga\u201d despite it being in the lyrics of the song he asked her to sing. The crowd booed her off, and I can\u2019t imagine how mortified that must have felt. Anyway, the history of racism is awful, but one word used in the context of a song is not the same as Jim Crow whipping a troop of his slaves, nor should it ever be judged the same lest racism and it\u2019s impact continue. Also, if black folk want to say that it is their word to be used only by them for them, then women can quite easily say the same about the term \u201cbitch\u201d. Black rap and white has some absolutely disgusting things in regards to the lyrical content, stuff like shooting, rape, drugs all things which we typically view as wrong, but we allow it in song because there is context so why not the same with the N word? Furthermore, if we are to keep stigmatising the word, why put it in songs in the first place? If a white man contributes to the upkeep of a black artist by buying his records, then he should be allowed to sing the fucking song like it\u2019s supposed to be sang otherwise, why isn\u2019t Kendrick having black only concerts and prefacing his songs with racial warnings? \u201cExcuse me, you may sing this song, but verses 16 through 19 are off limits to all my non niggas.\u201d No that\u2019d be stupid. If we were to take that attitude, which we apparently should do according to some people, then why do we not do the same to the word \u201cbitch\u201d and the songs targeted against women within rap songs, lyrics which encourage \u201crunning trains on thots\u201d or some such activities. There is a double standard and it\u2019s annoying. Yes my username is \u2018thebiggestnigga\u2019 and yes I am white, it is based off of Big Smoke from San Andreas, and I mean no derogatory offence. Context matters. Anyway, sorry about the rant treat it as a late night discussion opener, I welcome any criticism and I will reply accordingly with decorum thanks, and I am open to having some wider insight on the matter cheers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If \u201cnigga\u201d can\u2019t be said in a song by non-black folk, then \u201cbitch\u201d shouldn\u2019t be said by men.\n","id":"938a0d5b-b28a-4947-8fc4-a8beabad4971"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abortion<|ARGUMENT|>Poor woman are most susceptible to circumstances in which abortion is necessary. If abortion is illegal, therefore, this socio-economic group will be disproportionately affected.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Poor women are disproportionately deprived choice when abortion is illegal.\n","id":"24347a4e-5199-4bdf-9b92-4c2b932adb07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Feminist theory says gender the societal aspects of biological sex, however this is just an inefficient version of masculinity and femininity. There are two main sexes, male and female, gender roles norms ect are based on these two sexes, thus these aspects are called masculine and feminine traits things. The modern feminist idea of gender is the societal aspects of biological, basically gender is taking a specific point on the femininity masculinity scale and giving it a name and new pronouns. This is incredibly inefficient, having to learn a new name and pronouns is incredibly hard to manage, and since the masculinity femininity scale isn't an actual scale with defined points, it means each categorisation is just the users interpretation so the names aren't useful anyway, and having to learn all thesr names and pronouns just makes life more difficult for no real purpose. The societal views of men and women often change, the scale of masculinity and femininity is much more adaptable to this change than having separate names for every single gender .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender is a pointless extension to the Masculinity scale\n","id":"f0214ef4-f111-4373-832d-b9a09fc8d27b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>One example is the Sarasvati River which was thought to not exist but has not been discovered using satellite imaging and Archeology. Archeological finds also support the existence of the culture which is told by the Vedas to have lived there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Vedas tell many histories which have in many ways have been verified by archeology. Searching for Vedic India outlines many examples of Vedic teachings and histories being corroborated by archeology and science.\n","id":"462bc797-64aa-4017-ae0e-5404b75b60fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a 22 year old female, and when I am asked about whether I want to have kids, I always say I am not even thinking about it until I am 30. However, I was thinking about reasons I might want to have kids when I am older, and the only real reason that came to mind is that I like the idea of having an intergenerational bond with someone who is very similar to me. I guess this is based on my relationship with my father, since I take after him a lot. We are very close and often almost feel like we can read each other's minds. This is what I imagine I would mainly want in having my own biological child. However, this is a strictly selfish reason, and I can think of a ton of cons By adding a new person to the world, I would contribute to overpopulation and the depletion of resources that is already straining existing people. Because of said depletion of resources not to mention political tensions, national debt, and so forth my child would probably be subject to a less than ideal world. I have no way of knowing that I will be a good parent. Why make a person when there is the chance that I will fuck them up irreparably? My biological kid might not even take after me in the ways I like. Even worse, what if I hate my kid? What if my kid is an asshole who actively makes the world a worse place? If there's no guarantee my kid will be like me anyway, why not just adopt a kid? Even if that nurturing instinct just cannot be suppressed, it seems like a horrible idea to add new people to the world unnecessarily. It's not like the human species is on the brink of extinction. So what if it goes extinct anyway? I have no investment in future generations. I often hear childfree people called selfish. But really, can you tell me a single unselfish reason to actively try for biological offspring?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no unselfish reason to have biological children\n","id":"f6cb4142-1fcd-42c1-882f-69ae5a6ff0e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States Invade Syria and Remove Bashar al-Assad from Power?<|ARGUMENT|>USA and the Coalition should not do anything before they ask the Syrians themselves; otherwise, it appears to be an action of a global dictatorship regime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A direct clash between American and Russian troops in Syria has geopolitical implications of World War proportions.\n","id":"7b7787f4-71e6-4e34-b356-157ed41609e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no limit to freedom of speech.<|ARGUMENT|>Even if something is only considered not PC when it targets a disadvantaged group, if someone is being offensive, clearly the group they are offending is disadvantaged in that scenario. Therefore, even in a white dominated country, it is non-PC to be racist against whites.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people know what political correctness is, it's just that anti-PC groups lie about what political correctness is to deceive people who don't check for themselves into believing a fallacy.\n","id":"6b6df1d4-d6a7-4526-9505-be667f7d5b57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the advent of self driving vehicles, the unavoidable will become clear people are terrible drivers, and operating your own car is unacceptably reckless if a better alternative exists. I see the coming timeline like this copied from a reply to another post gt 2 5 years The last major technological hurdles driving in rural poorly documented areas, driving in adverse conditions, cost are resolved. Cars are now demonstratively better drivers than humans in all situations. note may be a very liberal estimate. 4 6 years The first round of legal cases involving driverless cars is settled, producing a precedent that makes driving your own car very risky. A collision between two vehicles, one self driving the other not, almost always results in fault to the driver. Causing an accident while operating a car with unused self driving capability makes drivers extremely vulnerable to being sued. 5 10 years Safety studies, overwhelmingly favorable to self driving cars, lead to the option becoming mandatory on all new vehicles. insurance companies, burned by litigation, offer premium rates to those who never switch off the driverless option, while increasing rates on drivers who elect to operate their cars manually. Soon the difference between these rates becomes enormous. 10 15 years Commercial driving is entirely automated. Cabs, buses, trucks, trains, driver becomes an obsolete profession. The savings in both wages and liability is simply too tremendous to allow any non automated fleet to remain competitive. 15 20 years Studies conclusively show that the only traffic casualties that still occur are exclusively due to human operator error. It becomes evident that driving your own car is unthinkably dangerous, like drunk driving at night with no headlights or seatbelts. Safety laws are passed that effectively outlaw operating your own vehicle. By the time my nephew is 15 16, controlling a car will be something that only hobbyists do, and never on public roads. Very few cars will be privately owned, rather they will be operated by private or municipal transportation services. The age of the personal automobile is ending. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our current generation will be the last drivers. My 6 month old nephew will never need to learn how to operate a car.\n","id":"f0ee73d1-6405-4540-8123-8138a9652a5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Imo, a dog lover has to be concerned with the welfare of dogs and not just their dog. By supporting animal breeders and puppy mills, pure bred dog buyers are hurting dogs as a population by contributing to overpopulation and the euthanization of dogs. These people honestly seem like doggy racists to me. Why should it matter what lineage of dogs your dog comes from? Why are some traits so important for humans that we essentially practice eugenics on our furry friends? Why are we willing to force upon generations of dogs maladaptive traits for our amusement e.g. pug breathing problems ? I will only rescue dogs personally. I wouldn't even call myself an animal rights activist of any sort. I just can't help but feel that the people who buy purebred dogs to be inconsiderate of the animals they think they love. The only reason I can think of that justifies this is the fact that humans would have had to bred dogs to not be like their wild wolf counterparts and to train them to be useful in certain roles e.g. Hunting dogs, guard dogs, etc . However, these reasons seem to be a little more respectable imo than the urge to be able to fit a dog in a purse. I just do not think wanting dogs to look a certain way is a good rationale for breeding. I'm willing to admit a certain amount of breeding may have been necessary but I think us humans have been taking this too far lately.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"people who buy from dog breeders are not dog lovers\n","id":"e950f888-0add-4ccc-ae55-2fe0ed22cacc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>Snoke appeared to have studied The Empire that Palpatine ruled over and seemed to know how, and what led to Emperor Palpatine's demise. Given that Snoke knew this, it makes it less little that he would fall for the same mistake.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Snoke's demise due to his own arrogance and hubris makes little sense given how the character was built up during the course of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.\n","id":"07ac1ff8-2265-4b6e-a808-1b863a643c11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should China cease attempts to infringe on the 'one country, two systems' policy in Hong Kong?<|ARGUMENT|>57% of Americans believe that the US should deal with its own problems and let other countries deal with their problems, and just 37% think the US should help other countries solve their problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The waning willingness of Western countries to pursue purely ideological policies may provide Beijing with a sense of greater room to maneuver with respect to its handling of the Hong Kong protests.\n","id":"b0af9ec6-bdbb-412c-a2bd-dc12a961f04d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am seeing this opinion very, very often, and I think is very problematic, at least in the US. We have a pretty sizeable proportion of population that is passionately in love with guns. I think of them as stamp or coin collectors think what happens when you try and take an album from an avid collector who needs so many stamps, most of which are cancelled anyway . It should be no surprise that many pieces of regulation provoke the same response. And they should think about recent pieces of legislation that limited the number of rounds in magazine to 7. It just so happens that many highly collectable military guns from WWI and WWII are over this limit and now you said that someone who have just paid 5000 for a fully matching including the magazine WWII Luger needs to get rid of this pesky mag which will lower the value of the gun by 2 3. Now, stamps or coins can't kill people, right? This is true, of course, BUT forcing restrictions on guns, especially the ones that make very little impact on the actual number of deaths majority of gun legislation has been recently focused on mass murder, which kills fewer people per year than lightning pushes a very large number of people into Republican camp. This is especially true for white middle class males with less than high school education, who benefit the least from Republican policies, yet are drawn to them because of red meat issues such as gun control. My assertion is that letting Republicans own gun issue kills vastly more people than gun legislation prevents. If we took gun people from the Republican camp, they would have no change for legislative victories in their current ultra rightwing form. Many wars would not have happened, saving literally hundreds of thousands of people it will take a few hundred years for our current gun legislation to just make up for Iraq body count, for instance . We would have had better health care, sooner, also saving tens of thousands per year. So IMHO, based strictly on the body count, our current attempt of gun legislation is a VERY BAD THING.  EDIT Many people on the thread are arguing that gun regulation is a good thing in general because it could save very many people. Please not that this is NOT A TOPIC I am arguing here. I am not against any and all gun regulation. I am pointing out that there are specific firearms that have NO IMPACT on violence at large, yet are the first ones targeted. The proponents of this legislation justify it by saying that it is worth it even if it saves one life. I am saying that corrected for the broader impact we probably end up with more people dead because of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regulating guns because \"if it even saves one life\" is a REALLY BAD IDEA\n","id":"6bc1b999-3ffa-46f1-8298-1260d899cbb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Usually my  posts are on a topic I\u2019m knowledgeable about, in which I have a firm opinion, but this is different. My view is just a general instinct, without much evidence or backing. My view is that almost all prison sentences seem too long. The reason for these sentence lengths may be to punish prisoners, but my opinion is that prisons should not focus on punishment at all because it serves no purpose, and should instead focus exclusively on rehabilitation and isolating dangerous people. I think \u201cyears\u201d is such a long unit of time that once you\u2019re counting past 5 or so years, every number is more or less the same. The brain can\u2019t differentiate between 5, 10, or 15 years\u2014it all just falls in the \u201cinfinity\u201d category when you try to imagine it. If you\u2019re going for 5 years or 10 years, either way your entire life is pretty much been stopped in its tracks and being replaced with a prison life. And that might be a good thing, to really shock people into realizing what they did wrong. But it seems like there probably won\u2019t be much difference in shock level between 5 and 10 years. Either way, you go to prison, you eventually forget about how long you\u2019ve been there and just try to survive day by day, and then one day you realize you\u2019re out in 6 months and you get excited. The biggest argument against prison lengths depends on how much prisoners are accomplishing while they\u2019re there. If there was lots of opportunity for education, then a prisoner might learn twice as much with a 10 year sentence, conspired to a 5 year one. But it seems like many prisoners I\u2019ve heard of struggled to get the amount of education they were looking for. This is especially true with mentally ill people who need treatment but can\u2019t always get it in prison. I may be wrong about the amount of opportunity in prison though, I\u2019ve just heard of big ones that have to turn people down. I recently watched a documentary that studied the effects of solitary confinement, and it found that solitary can cause irreversible brain damage very quickly, and even prisoners who return home are likely to suffer the rest of their lives with secrete anxiety, paranoia, heightened sensitivity, and fear of a crowds noises. That\u2019s not a very solid case but I\u2019m just curious what you think.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"prison sentences are too long\n","id":"72d74636-31cb-438d-a28d-91e3dc65510a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Many sex workers do not want to register or submit to health checks, as required by law in some countries where prostitution is legalized.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Said NGOs may not actually reflect the views of the majority of active sex workers\n","id":"58b74ac9-027d-4f29-a3a4-cf5642bb72ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should education at public universities in the United States be tuition free?<|ARGUMENT|>Studies in the US over a number of years have found that increases in tuition fees are correlated with lower rates of attendance, particularly amongst disadvantaged groups. Dearden et al., pg. 6<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free education removes barriers to access for minorities and individuals of low socio-economic class.\n","id":"b91febbc-77b3-4142-86aa-134ac31af4f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state grant benefits linked to marriage?<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK if one party objects to the divorce, the couple have to live separately for 5 years before the courts will grant a divorce.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Getting divorced can take a long time and can be expensive.\n","id":"2b591a71-a87e-4547-8b41-f841cb0369c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Trump seems to have better plans for the economy. He proposes to greatly reduce income taxes and make them even among all income groups. He also plans to increase the tax on business' imports. Taxing imports will encourage more manufacturing in America, and American citizens with more disposable income, because of lower income taxes, will also encourage an increase in the supply of labor less tax more spending more jobs to collect that spending. Hillary's presidency, on the other hand, is predicted to be much like Obamas, and thats not good. Income inequality and the national debt have both risen substantially during his presidency. Its true that Trump is vague about a lot of his policies right now but that will give him the upper hand in negotiating as our president. No one will be able to use his wants against him because they will not know what they are. Trump has turned millions of dollars in to billions, and we probably wouldn't even know who Hillary Clinton was if it wasn't for her husband. He will make a better president.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump would be better than Hillary for the US economy.\n","id":"31387fce-5cab-453b-b2cb-659c5c51bf67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, it has been largely my experience that HR representatives are cold, calculated and distance themselves from the employee base enough such that they are poor communicators of otherwise vital information that is necessary to conduct both personal and professional business. Secondly, with managers and supervisors, the need to conduct interviews goes completely out the window as HR is little more than a superfluous third party entity in that arrangement and doubly so seeing as they won't be overseeing your day to day workability within the organisation. Finally, the role of HR could be set and replaced very easily using computer software and intranet sites setup to provide information. The arbiter of this information base could just as well be the managers themselves to their employees ensuring timely and complete information sharing. Please, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that Human Resources Departments serve a greater good in today's modern company.\n","id":"bd845a0a-4d70-432d-b613-b44f6f74f288"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>If an athlete's career is over after the first infraction, then there is going to be massive pressure on the victim not to call for help.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zero-Tolerance policies are harmful to victims of domestic and sexual violence.\n","id":"1452a1e2-1c71-4ec7-af25-a91e0b194a1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Racism is the predominant cultural power structure in the US. Everyday in the US there is more and more progress being made on racism. Lines are drawn around what behaviour is acceptable and what is not, for ex. affirmative action, speech laws, discrimination acts and more. The media refers to demographic parts of the populace as urban or black or latino or asian, ect. Shaming racist behaviour forces it underground where it can grow. These frat boys from Borat are a convienent representation of what does happen when these attitudes are not shared publicly. Reframing basic insulting slurs like nigger to a more polite N word. In the documentary Born Rich one girl describes the Meadow Club as being likely unhappy if a member came in with a black person. We can look at how racism is used politically. Collective guilt is used frequently by the left The right frequently attempts to make a victim out of white males As we all know racism is used politically in the US. Racism is also used to target to particular demographics from an advertising and sales perpsective. She adds 'The people at the club probably wouldn't be that excited if someone came in with a black person not that I have any problem with it please.' All of these things contribute to a stronger and more finely detailed division between races . This is all contributes to racism being the fundamental social structure in the US. To the same degree that guns and arbortion will always be political issues in the US. In the UK the class system regulates the social structure and in the US it's racism. To clear up racism you would want to reduce the boundaries between races, not finely detail them. Much like Morgan Freeman describes We are making no effort to move in the direction of reducing the boundaries between races in the US and instead are finding a multiplicity of ways to define the border s between the races. The everyday language will always involve refferring to groups of people by their race defined label. Keep in mind, A. I am a dirty foreigner so I'm not going to know the specific history. I do live in a country that is a previous UK colony and has a displaced native race. B. There is an abundance of ways to address my individual points and I can accept that, but I am aiming to talk about the overall thrust of the social direction as being toward a multiplicity of boundaries and conversely away or not toward the freedom from describing your fellow man or groups of men in racial terms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Racism is not going to change in the US.\n","id":"abe1a102-38b9-45a5-ba67-7ce6dac9ebb1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>A study by Harvard\u2019s Kennedy School of Government found that the total revenue for private voluntary organizations in 2005 was $15.9 billion, and of this amount 46 percent or $7.3 billion was revenue received by religious private voluntary organizations PVO, which indicates that the average religious PVO was larger in terms of revenue than the average secular PVO. Pluralism and Freedom: Faith-based Organizations in a Democratic Society, pg.21<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious organisations are major players in the world of non-profit organizations active in providing international relief and assistance.\n","id":"199d6149-f54f-46be-b1c4-fcb052da0398"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Any new group or class of people wishing to enter a protected space needs to first prove that their presence in that space will not be detrimental.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing anyone who identifies as female into women-only spaces might make those spaces worse for cis women.\n","id":"8e5a8fe0-c00e-4fe6-8ae9-b41a9bf3befb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I frequently maintain romantic and or sexual actions with human beings of my own sex as well as the other one and I consider the LGBT movement a detriment to my qualify of life and what I wish to achieve. First off, I already live in a nation Netherlands where sex is irrelevant to the law and where gender registration is planned to be shelved with legal gender no longer existing as a category and newborns' no longer being registered except on optional passports for foreign travel. There is no legal differences between the sexes where I live leading to comical situations that if two females are wed and one gives birth the child by default gets the last name of the other who biologically cannot be related to the child because the law does not distinguish based on the sex of the other. Legally I don't see how I have much to gain from this movement because I have no interest in procreation or getting married or labeled relationships to begin with and marriage is largely a meaningless label where I live with no tangible benefits to it anyway. Unlike the US the law where I live does not feature protected classes it's just not legal to fire people for reasons unrelated to their job performance which is a system used in many other nations as well. While these legal situations would be different in other places I do not live in other places and can't say I feel any particular affinity with people and wanting to help them just because we both have sex with members of our own sex. The second part of the movement seems to be be social acceptance but I do not care about that either I think people should be free to be disgusted by whatever they want, my friends aren't and if they were they wouldn't be my friends and I don't care about strangers. So far for how the LGBT movement does not particularly aid me. The LGBT movement in many ways seems to be a detriment to my goals in life I strife for a situation where people can engage in whatever they want without having to worry about labeling themselves. the LGBT movement seems very intend on keeping labels alive and wanting people to label themselves The LGBT movement and certainly the LGBTPAWTFBBQ movement seems very much about making a line between the norm and not the norm where not the norm is the ever growing number of letters which is something I am very much against\u2014the social construct of classifying between the norm and not the norm . The LGBT movement for the most part seems to believe in what I consider to be the utter pseudoscience of that sexual orientations exist and that they are fixed at birth. I believe there to be evidence for this idea whatsoever and beleive there to be ample evidence that taste in gender like any taste is socialized. Furthermore I believe people treating taste in gender like any other taste and accepting that it is socialized is beneficial to me and to people who simply want to do what they like without having to worry about having to label themselves. The LGBT movement by and large seems to favour language police and political correctness and I detest language policing and also believve that language policing hurts me. Every time a member of the LGBT movement tells someone who uses a word like say faggot in a non homophobic way as a general insult that they can't do that they plant a asssociation in that person's head of annoyance towards people who have sex with members of their own sex. I think bright rainbow colours are really ugly and want to see them as little as possible. So I don't know, is the LGBT movement doing anything that may benefit me, my lifestyle and my goals in life? Edit u kittysezrelax has brought under my attention that I should probably update this OP with my own political views to better provide a context of what it can mean for me. Some political views I hold which are some what on top I want the government to severely limit any form or registration including gender registration and name registration I don't want gender to exist as a legal category any more but only as a social one together with names. People should just be a number for the government. If you want a gender and name change you should be able to get it by just starting to use it socially. I want the government to also no longer register marriage again people should be able to call themselves married socially if they so choose similar to friendship I do not believe in providing benefits for married people so if two or three or four people fo the same sex want to call themselves married then have at it. I support the plan of increasing the number of legal parents a child may have from 2 to more than that so if people want to start a family with 3 or 4 or 5 parents then have at it. I do believe that legal parentage should remain registered because there's just no other way sadly. I believe that if you can conclusively spot the sex of a 4 year old child that the parents are most likely at fault for that raising their kid in a sex specific way I do not believe in sex segregation at any point, including sports, toilets, showers, locker rooms and what not and believe that everyone should just be held to the same standard everywhere Companies should not be able to require some things of some members of their staff they don't of others like based on gender or race . If you require the females to wear high heels and makeup you must require the males too if you require the males to have short hair and a tie you must require the females too and in reverse. I would like to see the government artificially introduce a gender neutral pronoun as they had done in Sweden where it seems effective. I would like all feminine endings on nouns to disappear with the male form to be used everywhere. In practice in Dutch the male form can almost always already be used on female persons similar to actor actress in English .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"LGBT-movement\" does not benefit me or my goals and I should consider it an enemy\n","id":"75baa4e5-75b9-4b38-b81b-4ea3e48cc755"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Perhaps some animals had to resort to eating other living beings because of a lack of availability of nutritious, plant-based foods. Thus, carnivores, insectivores and omnivores developed. That doesn't mean that these eating styles are acceptable or moral when plant-based foods are nutritious and plentiful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lots of animals are herbivores, and don't eat other animals. Eating animal is not more natural than eating plants.\n","id":"66603b14-581c-406a-bc8c-662ecc38d445"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>The referendum had an high turnout of 72%. This is significantly higher than at all general elections since the 1990s and other UK-wide referenda<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A majority of the UK's voters supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum.\n","id":"4963bdf9-10a8-4fa2-a245-978af6d1ad50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>Binding the decision to end ones life to medical consultancy could open up new fields in research as well as in business models for medical and pharma industries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Euthanasia tourism as a business model is on the rise.\n","id":"0325aaf8-affd-4c34-968c-525c7bdb2ccd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should private education be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Private schools take better-performing pupils from state classrooms, reducing the positive effect they have on overall class performance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The original intention of private schools is no longer relevant now that we have universal education.\n","id":"471735c1-22e5-4906-8f0d-2d895d30bf78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've recently switched to Linux Ubuntu from Windows because I believe in the principles behind open sourced knowledge. With that aside, however, I've found absolutely nothing superior about Linux that justifies the pain in the ass switching over has been. So far I've had problems Finding alternative programs which I used frequently in windows Twine . Getting Firefox to run HTML5 videos downloaded Chromium to solve this, but still shouldn't be forced into a web browser . Of course there's the problem with lack of video game support for Linux I'd say I only have roughly a third of my Steam games available to me. Speaking of Steam, I can't get the damn thing to recognize my HDD it only wants to save games to the SSD. Weirdly, I even downloaded Kentucky Route Zero already to my HDD through the Linux version of Steam and now today it won't recognize the HDD or the fact that the game is already installed. The documentation for Linux seems to be widely disparate between assumed knowledge. I've found stuff for how to do simple tasks like change a background or navigate using hotkeys, and I've found super advanced Terminal documentation that means basically nothing to me. I'm looking for something for intermediate users, however. Like, perhaps a primer to the Terminal and why everyone thinks it's the bee's knees. Things I've already considered Yes, I know you can run windows apps through a program like Wine, but that's just an extra pain in the ass step that may or may not work correctly. I don't have to do this on Windows. Everyone says the Terminal is where it's at, but I've found nothing see comment above that is particularly useful in my day to day use of the OS. Think that about sums it up. I'll probably continue to use Linux even if I am not convinced by you fine folk, but that's only because it gels with my personal beliefs. Still, I'd love to see what I'm missing <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Aside from the open-sourced nature of Linux, Windows is the superior operating system\n","id":"49b7b056-ba38-4014-b8b5-c4e8dd92c142"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The results of elections can even be predicted by asking children to choose candidates based on photos. They may not have political knowledge but apparently pick candidates in the same way as do voters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voters decide by the looks of politicians. Studies show that baby-faced politicians are perceived as less competent and that good looks can translate into electoral success.\n","id":"18afadca-d859-4c78-921c-04d2829febd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For a long time, my belief was that in our present information age, it would be impossible to have a massive war between first world nations that required thousands and thousands of soldiers. The reason being that the ease of communication and lack of language barriers between the two nations would create too much empathy on both sides to allow a nation to enter such a conflict for now I'm ignoring the use of nuclear weapons which would supercede this, because it happens too fast for the population to really have an imput . However, recent events with the Israel Palestinian conflict have changed my mind. In person and online, people from all across the world strongly support one side or the other, feeling that their justifications are the truest. I believe that this is an example that the citizens of first world nations would willingly wage and justify war with each other, despite the ease of communication and lack of language barriers. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even in the information age, a massive ground war between first world nations is possible.\n","id":"ac2ecb86-a99c-41b1-ab3f-fc43e301a230"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Police do not get to choose which laws they enforce, they must enforce all laws they are given jurisdiction over. Laws can change and enforcement strategies or enforcement tactics can change. TIMELINE 1 You shouldn't go to police academy if you disagree with any law you could potentially enforce. 2 Once you are a police officer you cannot morally stay a police officer if any laws come on to the books or change and you disagree with them. To keep the moral high ground and not become morally reprehensible you would either have to resign or transfer to a different branch of law enforcement not responsible for enforcing that law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because police officers law enforcement officers must eventually enforce a law they morally disagree with there is no way to become a police officer in good faith.\n","id":"c82b797a-2d0c-48cb-bc2b-1bbae861892f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>Starfleet shields are stronger because antimatter power generation allows for a greater shield energy reserve than Rebel ships can use with just fusion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Federation's shields are vastly superior to those of the Rebel Alliance.\n","id":"ca93d990-a72b-439a-a967-8ad441b7b53d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>In a similar vein, we would not allow someone to steal from the rich because they believed in wealth distribution without punishment. These laws are put in place to protect our society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By not voting, one is undermining the very fabric of democracy regardless of their intent. It is unclear why someone should be able to do this without punishment.\n","id":"0c4851d7-ea58-4ad3-b3b7-89818fba48e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Thanks all who responded with their informative posts which have changed my opinion quite significantly. I have gained a much better appreciation for the significance of actions and this is something I will continue to think about in the future. That said, I do believe that this issue should not be oversimplified, as there appears to be a lot of factors about whether something is harmful 'cultural appropriation' or respectful, and accusing people of racism is not usually the best way to open a conversation. Thanks again to everyone who responded who have given me the opportunity to heighten my knowledge and understanding. It appears to me that 'cultural appropriation' is an increasingly common term, both in its use and application. For clarity, when using the term, it seems to refer to 3 acts Acts which have negative historical connotations e.g. blackface Acts which have special significance to a culture and cause harm when others undertake them as they are trivialised e.g. Native American headdresses Acts which are simply associated with or started by another culture e.g. wearing cornrows . I understand 1 and 2. It is 3 that I have trouble with. In the last few weeks, I have seen criticism of people with cornrows, full lips, skeleton makeup, full eyeliner, twerking, hip hop. Firstly, I fail to see how this is truly harmful to people. There is a root of any trend, and I don't see how anyone can claim exclusive ownership of something just because it originated with them. Look at fashion and music there is obvious 'appropriation' there and while some of the original artists may not appreciate it, for the most part they are not claiming personal hurt. I have heard it argued that it is harmful because people 'want to look black, but not be black' in so much as people like Iggy Azalea will rap but then be notably absent at protests such as against the shooting of Trayvon Martin. However, my problem with this is shouldn't we ALL care about these issues, regardless of whether or not we rap? It feels like a separate issue to me. Secondly, some of these 'trends' didn't even exclusively originate with one group. Braids, for example, have been worn by many groups over many centuries. Relatedly, while I acknowledge the 'power' issue, it is worth noting that European white culture seems completely immune to calls of cultural appropriation. If you take the line of argument that someone wearing something without understanding the cultural significance is harmful, then this should apply across the board. Yet no one batted an eyelid when Chanel made Dutch Clogs a fashion item. Thirdly, even if you do believe that cultural appropriation is wrong, it seems to be more misguided than racist. I believe to label anyone who wears cornrows as 'racist' is not only unfair, but trivialises the word. Race is an absolutely massive issue around the world, and I feel like focusing on Taylor Swift for pretending to twerk is just a non issue comparatively and potentially undermining conversations we need to have. The honest truth is, I feel like I am starting to disengage with these conversations because it begins to feel like unless you are an expert in race issues in modern society, you're likely to be called a 'racist.' I genuinely want to understand and 100 accept that my background of being a white female means I may not grasp the realities of this situation. So please reddit, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cultural appropriation is not bad\n","id":"a1e0616f-8cc9-42d7-bdf1-e6d236fbd170"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Child beauty pageants<|ARGUMENT|>The Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development, Wendy Lovell, said in regards to a planned beauty pageant in Australia: \"we should trust parents to make the right decision for their children.\"1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents should be trusted on entering kids in child beauty pageants.\n","id":"86ff1a18-4ef8-48da-bc59-af8a5d5c481f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>Excessive reliance on debt financing can negatively affect a company's credit rating and make it more difficult to secure such financing in the future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Debt financing may give banks power over companies, as they can set repayment terms which may influence the way a business operates.\n","id":"af3ecbf3-679a-4e73-bcf7-fb2854395340"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe this is a perfect analogy Liquor tax is built in to the sticker price of a bottle in my state, and it\u2019s a lot. If I pay 50 for a bottle, the store only keeps like 35. Of course, I\u2019m not the one writing the check to the tax man, the store owner does that. According to the logic realtors use to frame their fee structure, I\u2019m not paying liquor taxes, the store owner is \u2014that means tax free liquor for me I therefore shouldn\u2019t care if liquor taxes go up or down, it makes no difference to me, since I don\u2019t pay them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Buyers\u2019 realtors aren\u2019t \u201cfree\u201d or \u201cpaid by the seller\u201d. All money in the transaction comes from the buyer, including both agents\u2019 fees, and this ubiquitous claim is BS.\n","id":"d46e6797-34dd-4f14-a099-b720d8e35491"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s just me, but so many people seem to think that school is only based off of memory. I personally don\u2019t understand this argument at all, but I\u2019d like to hear your thoughts. Think of it this way, you can\u2019t use memory to grasp topics or understand them. Some say that all you need to remember are steps and formula but what good is a step or formula if you don\u2019t understand it. As you can see, I\u2019m very opinionated in this matter. If you think about it, school isn\u2019t really based off of memory that much at all. Yeah there\u2019s formulas, but people without good work ethic or a decent level of smartness won\u2019t succeed. Multiple things are based off of skill. I mean, look at pop quizzes. If there is no time to study no time to remember the formulas then how is that based off of memory. I understand that some may find that their bad memory affects them poorly at school, but there is so many things that you can\u2019t use memory for. So please, tell me why I\u2019m wrong why school is only based on memory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"School is not just memory like some state.\n","id":"f08f9ca6-ea63-4db6-b51a-2ff231ce1a4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the worst world problem of the utmost concern?<|ARGUMENT|>Technology that is exponentially more efficient and cheaper allows to exploit resources that were before inaccessible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We are running out of resources due to heavy consumption.\n","id":"d491a6ed-9825-4549-a36b-d6379ea6a6ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just to clarify, I don't think sexual attraction is sufficient for a relationship. I also know that I'm wrong, in that pretty much everyone older than 14 disagrees with me. I guess my view has two main parts 1 sexual attraction is necessary for a genuine romantic relationship, and 2 it is not really possible for a man to be sexually attracted to a woman after a certain age. 2 might also be true if you reverse the genders, but women seem to have a wider age range for physical attraction. Generally speaking, men seem to be more sexually excited by physical characteristics, many of which depend on youth ftr, I'm not saying men are shallow or worse, because many women also have sexual preferences that are superficial, whether or not they're tied to physical appearance . I also understand that there will always be exceptions, but these seem like extreme outliers and don't really disprove the general trend in my mind. Again, I realize I'm almost definitely wrong. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe sexual attraction is necessary for a romantic relationship, making that type of relationship impossible for women after a certain age. Seriously, please\n","id":"9e87b831-29e8-42dd-ba3b-a683b8d99d60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Homosexuality, should it be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>A 1993 study used an association technique known as a genetic linkage to suggest that a stretch of DNA on the X chromosome was linked to inherited homosexuality in individuals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are DNA variants that link to homosexual behaviour in humans.\n","id":"616f3dd9-d047-4a70-8b35-f7c859605b47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>As the only more or less commonly agreed benefit of veganism is morality, and even this is not undisputed the claim that all humans should become vegan as justified as that all people are to follow a single religious teaching.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An individual should be free to choose any food they want to eat without interference.\n","id":"286661df-1fc8-428d-9fdf-d12f33f73c75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tourism to North Korea should be banned.<|ARGUMENT|>Tourists are forced to use \"hard\" currencies such as the US Dollar or Euro in North Korea rather than the domestic North Korean won, being subject to high exchange rates<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are steep, inflated costs for tourists wanting to visit North Korea.\n","id":"8c8c72dd-57fd-4660-8118-2b38bd17eb07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>It would be immensely difficult to admit large numbers of women into certain professions without fundamental and costly reforms. Hiring men at the expense of women is justified in these instances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Equal pay cannot be considered fair pay, as men deserve more for the work they do.\n","id":"f13c47d4-afdc-4085-b8a1-85cde550a91b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should taxpayers have direct control of how their taxes are spent?<|ARGUMENT|>If certain vital projects were underfunded as a result of this, taxes would go up while unnecessary money is left over in other areas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Less exciting government functions, such as sewage, could go underfunded.\n","id":"ce1fa3ec-ff94-46b2-9a1e-9dc7bd8e5477"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I consistently work through many literature classics, and recently I finally made my way to Ulysses. I refer to Ulysses itself as a work and not Joyce himself because I believe him to be a very capable author. His Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is phenomenal, and I believe a much superior work to Ulysses I'm illustrating a point, but let's not take the debate there . Perhaps, because of his style alone, it is worthy of the quantity of discussion that followed in the near century since its publishing. However, it should absolutely never have been referred to the greatest book of all time, let a alone a great book. There is a great deal of difficulty in trying to fairly gauge a work there must be a distinction between Joyce, Ulysses, and the fans it is natural for people to criticize a thing more if they do not like the followers or its position in the world. I have read it and disliked it, but the motives for its positive reception are somewhat of a mystery, so I suppose I have to equally address the fans in order to understand the positive feelings towards it. There is some good to be said about it. It has some worthy quotes, but nearly no book is without them. Every author has written at least one remarkable sentence, if all too often by accident. These are an incredible minority in the text. We could make a citation of two, but I do not want to turn this criticism itself into a novel. There is an obvious danger of citations. In a text this big, of course I and several comments will be making biased citations to prove our respective points. I will then point out that there are few citations in the book that will go against the typical form the majority, however, will bear in very similar criticisms to these passages. In the Ulysses Annotations by Gifford and Seidman, Chapter One, roughly 20 pages in my version, has 197 footnotes. One hundred ninety seven footnotes. Provided you even use these, they do little to clarify whatever is currently happening in the text. Here I'd like to address two things a more subjective, harsher criticism of Ulysses and some of its admirers and the types of comments I'd like to avoid and negate. I will be making some small exaggerations so as to better convey some of my distaste for the book. So, then. One of the reasons Ulysses has been so admired is because it caters heavily to pseudo intellectuals. There is nothing to get out of Ulysses, and the admirers of it like to pretend they have a deeper understanding of it than others one of the merits of the work is that it caters to a superiority complex. The work is comprehensible , but only to a certain point the admirers pretend it goes much further. I respect the use of steam of consciousness, but it was not enough to carry an entire novel, let alone chapter in the free reign form Joyce gave it in Ulysses vis a vis especially Portrait of an Artist, wherein it was much more effective and contained . So let's address a first group of potential comments if you are going to say that I did not get the work, go into detail over the work's merits rather than just passing along. One last word on potential comments please, for the love of fucking God, have the decency not to waste time with a shallow appeal to authority. If you're going to use an authority in your argument, cite something contributional to the discussion. Even Andres Serrano is loved by critics. Yes, Ulysses has been well received by critics I am trying to understand why. I'll offer a quick apology for the rude additions of addressing responses. I suppose I went into this detail because of the idiotic way people responded when I asked this elsewhere. My original post refuted their points, but they made them anyway. It's necessary to admit to many of the difficulties of this sort of conversation. Appraising literature, like many other art forms, is highly subjective. I'd like to make a point against myself. One question that could somewhat easily toss much of my argument aside is this Who cares if people esteem this book much higher than you do? As you said, literary appraisal is subjective. Why not just move on? The first point I would respond with is that I suppose that is just my personality I have read hundreds of classics and studied many of them pretty thoroughly. Many of the works that have been called the greatest novels are typically worthy of this praise The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Moby Dick, although I think Dostoevsky wins out of these. Even the lesser notable contenders have some considerable merit to this claim. In Ulysses, however, I can find none of it. I would like to compare the work to many other modern artists, but I do not want to sidetrack the discussion. Tl dr Ulysses is not a great book. Joyce's style made for an interesting experiment, but it was through and through a failure. The free reign Joyce gave his use of stream of consciousness led to an erratic, poor work. Formatting this from Word to Reddit is difficult in an initial post, so I will be editing this for the first 5 10 minutes after it is first posted<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joyce's Ulysses is not a great book, and absolutely does not deserve the acclaim it has received.\n","id":"48c0c5bc-48b2-4ba2-b474-b97219ca1a64"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't see what the problem is. People argue that it's no longer a game console but it still plays games, and has excellent titles coming. So what if it has other entertainment available? The 360 has Netflix, Hulu, and other non gaming apps. Does that hinder the experience in any way? No. With the Kinect, there's no reason to be paranoid. You can turn it off or pause it if you want. I guarantee someone at launch will check whether the Kinect records or uploads data.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the Xbox One will be a good console.\n","id":"0c7977c9-035c-4d12-99b5-a8314c1fe1cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think an ideology or religion should be judged by the rate of violent extremists that emerge from it. If the rate is higher than in other religions or ideologies, then there actually is something wrong with the religion itself. Just pointing at a loving muslim father who just tries to feed his dauhters and live his life and saying If Islam is so violent, then try to explain this is similar to pointing at a snowflake and saying If climate change is real, try to explain this . To get an accurate picture, you have to look at the problem in a larger scale and take more statistical approach. Please, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the old argument \"You cant judge Islam by the action of those few extremists, because there are also a lot of peacefull muslims\" is invalid.\n","id":"e00de1c9-91c9-44cc-9e68-ea1d4a5b526a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Inspired by note when I say 'violent' offenders I mean people who cause permanent injury, PTSD, death, etc. note this could be broken up by category as finely grained as possible, as long as there are solid statistics backing up the decision. For example if lt 50 of premeditated violent rapists under the age of 22 reoffend, they would not be subject to this rule, even if other violent rapists reoffend often enough to be considered for this rule. I believe this is functionally equivalent to allowing parole release on a case by case basis Imagine that studies show 51 out of 100 violent offenders reoffend. Then, by releasing them, 51 people are harmed. By releasing none of them, 49 people who don't 'deserve' to be held are held, and 51 innocents are saved. I think this outcome is preferable, even though it potentially violates the rights of the 49. More generally, I think that when forming laws, practical concerns are the most import thing, with human rights being a close second, and in practice, saving 51 people at the cost of harming 49 is good.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that if studies show that 50% or more of violent offenders reoffend, then all offender should be imprisoned for life.\n","id":"79b19a03-8eaf-4465-ae79-2752a6671b4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>People assume a certain street or route may be less dangerous or assume someone may intend harm and avoid that person or place, even if those beliefs are not founded or verified.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Much of what we use to navigate the world is based on unfounded assumptions, belief is in no way unique.\n","id":"1f70ab9e-ebf4-40b7-9a71-5d94a29e24fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will man-made climate change cause human extinction?<|ARGUMENT|>Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural \u201cbackground\u201d rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we're now losing species at up to 1,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animal species have already started to become extinct. Human extinction is likely to follow.\n","id":"b0bf5dbc-b60d-40af-a449-c53a87884cf7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Monogamy vs Polygamy: Is the Norm of Monogamy Regrettable?<|ARGUMENT|>In recent years, gender roles in marriage have exerted less influence. A larger share of men in 2007, compared with their 1970 counterparts, are married to women whose education and income exceed their own, according to the Pew Research Center<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender norms are becoming looser as a result of other societal changes such as women and men competing more equally in the workplace.\n","id":"e7b3a6c3-fa43-4bde-ad3c-7937091bd3a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Philosophers deal with logical ideas taken to total conclusions, but artists interpret those ideas, and that is fundamental to the process of persuasion. While philosophers do not persuade the masses, an appeal to the ecstatic can do this. This is what artist do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As it deals in extremes, philosophy is still fundamentally responsible for the extreme actions of those following that philosophy.\n","id":"0affb214-fa1b-42ca-ae8f-359fdd020e29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Legalization of adult incest<|ARGUMENT|>Incest has been bashed for centuries by society. But, beyond repeating the mantra that it is \"unnatural and contrary to the history and tradition of the family institution\", there is not much substantive argument surrounding why incest between consenting adults is supposed to be wrong. Yes, reproduction between blood relatives does contain some risks, but is there a well-founded argument against its morality beyond this? Not really. If two individuals deeply love one another, why is wrong for them to follow their desire?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Incest is taboo without a clear rationale as to why\n","id":"b5461c77-55bf-44cc-9a87-766ec463dbed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Because it's impossible for anyone to know that God exists unless they are God, there is no reason to believe in the existence of God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The world is full of good reasons to believe in the lack of any God as defined by classical theism.\n","id":"5a398383-677f-4102-9dce-12efaad1a354"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Assuming that the principal claim is insinuating a subordinate question of whether or not science and religion can co-exist *peacefully*, recognition of a condition of persistent instability might lend credence to the thought that even momentary or temporary co-existence constitutes as successful a kind of co-existence as could ever be expected between social institutions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Faith exists. Science exists. Therefore, faith and science co-exist.\n","id":"d94bbd93-2380-4373-a0fe-09a8b1843fa6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it beneficial for a person to learn to enjoy new genres of entertainment?<|ARGUMENT|>Having the option of switching between one's primary form of entertainment and newer\/secondary forms of entertainment ensures that the person is far less likely to get bored, or run out of things to keep them entertained. They can swap between their genres\/ forms when they need something a little different.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adding a genre of entertainment to our repertoires broadens our capacity to be entertained.\n","id":"7277e0f0-2b03-4114-926d-b86b6757ad92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is informed consent the determining factor of morality?<|ARGUMENT|>There are certain beings that are capable of suffering and lack the ability to provide informed consent. A moral framework must account for these beings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All actions have reverberating consequences, thus it is not reasonable or possible to obtain consent of all parties in all circumstances.\n","id":"9f008698-60e7-4860-8d34-f1cf51ca0140"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I've been on the fence with hunting for sport for a while now, but a few days ago, I was browsing r hunting top of all time out of interest, and, among many others, I saw this one post with 5k upvotes of a man next to a bull moose's carcass after apparently hunting it for 6 days. And, at the moment, I have zero respect for that, and can't see how that's a socially acceptable hobby. Is tracking an animal for 6 days incredibly imprsssive? Of course it is. That's bloody amazing. However, seeing as he clearly had the food and resources to track it for so long, he clearly did not have to kill it for food, like some others do whom I do not have any problem with . Nor was he doing it for conservation of the ecosystem, which I understand is important and justifiable. Rather, he did it purely for leisure. I've been asking myself 'why couldn't he have just taken a bloody picture' since I saw it. Sure, I get the fun in shooting things. I like shooter video games as much as the next guy, but how is that satisfaction of shooting something justifiable when you're actually taking a life. How can someone look at a carcass of a beautiful animal, and be proud that they ended its life early? And even if he's not great at photography, or a photo isn't as good a trophy as the skull of the animal, I still don't see how that justifies this act. I'd really appreciate a different opinion, seeing as I don't know anyone who hunts, and it would be unfair of me to judge something off a few pictures and my own beliefs. I'd also really appreciate hearing what other hunters think of the example I used, if any are reading this. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read this, hopefully I was able to get across what I was trying to say. Edit Well everyone, I think i can safely say that this sub has . I'm super grateful to all who responded, and if anyone else wants to add anything, feel free. Once again, big thanks to everyone. This is probably the first productive discussion about something controversial I've ever had on the internet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"hunting for sport is a pretty deplorable hobby\n","id":"13bae02f-6f2b-4f77-8f04-a5e2516c7b85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, the FDA requires that a drug or therapy be dispensed by Rx only forbidding OTC sales if It is habit forming or toxic It has too great a potential for harmful side effects or It treats a medical condition that can't be readily self diagnosed. My view is that these should be replaced by a single criterion a cost benefit analysis designed to estimate whether externalities from improper use of the drug would outweigh efficiency gains and cost savings from making the drug available OTC. For example, there's probably a good argument that OTC morphine would lead to high levels of addiction and social dysfunction, accidental overdoses, etc. But topical cream used to treat acne or crows' feet? At worst, somebody ends up with an occasional rash. Unless a drug, left unregulated, has the potential to impose serious costs on society at large, people should be allowed to purchase and use the drug as they please. This would instantly make healthcare more accessible and more affordable to everyone. As people live longer and medical science keeps churning out innovations, consuming medical products will become an increasingly commonplace activity not unlike driving, which is another risky thing that we allow people to do for themselves. To help prepare citizens to drive responsibly, we teach drivers' ed in high school and administer a simple licensing exam we could, and should, do the same for self administered medical care. Here are just a few ideas for products that should be available over the counter Tiny single dose cortisone syringes for banishing cystic acne in an emergency in high school, people will have learned how to give simple injections . Strep throat test kits, for busy working parents who have time to swap a child's throat, but prefer not to take hours off work and sit in a pediatrician's waiting room. Maybe you drop the swap in a sterile baggie and a postage paid envelope, send it to the testing company overnight, and if result is positive you get a single use code that lets you purchase antibiotics OTC. Basically anything topical. Drugs whose primary risk factor is that they're too pleasant to take too habit forming , but which don't pose the same risks associated with something like morphine. One example might be Xanax. I am generally indifferent to the effects of this change on stupid people, except to the extent that we think people will behave so stupidly en masse as to cost society more money vis a vis status quo. Still, I welcome all attempts to .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Americans should receive basic medical training in school, and the FDA should give adults more freedom to self-medicate.\n","id":"29980d33-5193-4f2f-a0c9-a1249686f977"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The Home Tuition Scheme provides money to the family or school of the person who is pregnant so that they can receive at home tutelage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many grants and systems in place to help young mothers in education.\n","id":"f767d697-df97-4f2d-ada0-ff4405424a70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gays in the US military<|ARGUMENT|>Doing so would require construction of separate bunks and lavatory facilities to prevent unnecessary tension from same-sex attraction in close proximity.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Military should not end \"don't ask don't tell\" during war\n","id":"8ed494aa-06b3-4c38-ab9f-c9a0cff93dd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I say almost full faith I mean that I know sometimes governments make mistakes, kind of like people. Allow my to give some examples I believe Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK on his own accord 9 11 was an act of terrorism committed by al Qaeda. While the US government may have known, they cannot address all threats, only the ones that seem most probable. The Edward Snowden leaks are possibly not true. Snowden is a whistleblower, but as a traitor, due to running to Russia. The NSA 'leaks' help Russia and cause instability in the rest of the world. I do not in any way think the government is trying to control our lives. With those few examples, I feel as if I'm basically on the opposite spectrum of many people on Reddit. Where are the facts the United States government is trying to control us? How does that benefit the government?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have almost full-faith in the United States government and other world governments.\n","id":"af113e53-1e86-429f-a833-9dc87e844d3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>Workers oversee the logistics usually handled by a middleman in a traditional company, allowing the company to reduce unnecessary expenses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Research suggests that worker owned companies are more durable and resilient during economic downturns.\n","id":"4c503be4-5e24-4a26-b70d-85aa204b2522"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My lowest vertebrae did not separate from my left pelvic bone. Occasionally, if I twist, my pelvis misaligns and my upper spine ends up 2 3 to the left of my lower spine Like a vertical tilde ~ This has happened 4 times. Once from shoveling snow, once from picking up my kid, once from sneezing, and once from bending over to pick up a pencil that fell onto the floor. I feel like people ignore what chiropractors actually do bone alignment manipulation and focus on the other services that they lump in ankle adjustments reduce ulcers, or something . I do not think that, outside of invasive surgery, any physical therapist or doctor can a help me prevent my back throwing out, or b treat me better, faster, or cheaper than the 50, 10 minute chiro appointment where I walk in crooked and in pain and walk out vertical and pain free. I'll post an X ray soon Alien Blue is a foreign experience to me<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have minor congenital scoliosis. My chiropractor treats my \"incidents\" better than any other medical professional can.\n","id":"5a5f97a8-9565-444e-af36-e38f1458ec56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the Bible support the conclusion that 'homosexuality' is a sin against God?<|ARGUMENT|>Exactly. But we can know how to interpret the Bible. It's called hermaneutics, and it gives everyone the opportunity to know how to interpret scriptures. No church required. But that leaves us one-on-one with scripture and what it says.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No one church holds a monopoly on interpreting the Bible.\n","id":"a24acc85-4143-476c-a2e7-928520345538"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>\"To prohibit a great people. from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.\" - Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A 100% income tax rate all earned income from all citizens is confiscated by the state would clearly be theft A 0% tax rate is clearly not theft. Therefore, any level of taxation above 0% is a gradation of theft.\n","id":"f81db395-98a0-49ea-8db8-299948738527"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do not mean to say that it is not medicine or that it doesn't help people, but rather that the primary function of psychiatry is not to help the individual but to help society. I believe this contradicts the fundamental moral principles of medicine and as such psychiatry should not be considered medicine but something else. For background, I am sure people are familiar with primum non nocere first do no harm. It is more important to not harm your patient than to help them. I believe that harming someone through unwanted treatment for the benefit of society rather than the patient violates this principle and therefore, treatment must be primarily for the patient and not for society. My primary argument argument against psychiatry and evidence of preference of social benefit over personal benefit is in how a mental disorder is defined. Though there is no consistent definition of a disorder, the only definition that could be considered useful is the one that defines a disorder as some kind of psychological phenomenon that results in impaired functioning of a person. This functioning is not defined in terms of personal symptoms such as distress, but also in terms of social and relationship impairments, independent of whether this impairment harms the person. An example of this ASPD. People with this disorder are by definition disruptive to society, but are not personally harmed and are not interested in treatment. Though treatment of this disorder is beneficial to society, in a similar way to locking them up would be, the diagnosis and treatment of this disorder is not in line with the moral underpinnings of medicine but is closer to a system used to maintain stability and safety in society, similar to the function of a police department. While one could argue that a person with ASPD is a harm to themselves while not realising it, this is both unfalsifiable and unavoidable. You would be hard pressed to name someone who does not harm themselves by the criterion of all observers, for instance someone who parties all night could be considered to be harming themselves by someone who abstains in order to focus on business or academic. In the reverse, the party animal could consider that the businessman academic is harming themselves by reducing their time having fun. The definition of harm in the DSM is just another set of criteria which may not be consistent with the patient's own definition of harm. This same issue exists with other disorders. Virtually every disorder has a social impact, but not all have a personal impact. Disorders such as depression and anxiety which are exceedingly common in today's society are examples of having both. Again, the primary function of psychiatric treatment of these disorders aims to reduce the impact of symptoms that prevent them from participating in society. Though in the case of these disorders the patient is benefited by treatment, the primary goal can still be seen to be social benefit. Furthermore, when this treatment is involuntary and the patient is not in danger of real harm eg self harm, starvation via anorexia, etc , this is in direct contradiction with the principles of medicine. Unless the primary goal of psychiatry is demonstrably for the benefit of the individual, I believe it cannot be considered a branch of medicine. Other definitions include statistical deviation which does not include harm as a criterion and fulfilment of a set of diagnostic criteria, which is unfalsifiable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Psychiatry is not a legitimate branch of medicine\n","id":"ddbe611e-5cfa-4c10-abe6-87c515ffb741"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The ACLU and Charlottesville: Should the ACLU Defend White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Free speech on campus is often depicted as being under threat from the left, yet the fact that the right has actually done far more to erode free speech in universities tends to be ignored by the media.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public discourse or conversations are often mediated by the media, which can distort or perverse the arguments.\n","id":"38a1abe4-2539-48ac-b5ac-651b3c87ccce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Captive reptiles should be fed with living prey<|ARGUMENT|>Live prey, such as mice, rats, hamsters, guinea pugs, and rabbits all have sharp incisors and are far more intelligent than snakes. They can inflict severe wounds on snakes that have failed to kill them quickly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a risk of damage to the reptile being bitten by prey.\n","id":"f08c3611-191f-402a-b90e-919e6da7d835"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Arthur Weasley fought in the Battle of the Astronomy Tower as well as the Second Battle of Hogwarts that threatened the safety of his entire family and the wizarding world at large.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Arthur Weasley risked his life for the safety or betterment of his family on a number of occasions.\n","id":"fccd917c-2e5f-48a0-b71b-4f2f8594a8ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Rebuilding New Orleans<|ARGUMENT|>Stan Guthrie. \"Don\u2019t Rebuild New Orleans\". 12 Sept. 2005 - Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, speaking to the National Baptist Convention of America, noted what he called 'the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not.' Unfortunately, loony conspiracy theories are nothing new for Dean, or for a significant percentage of the nation\u2019s African American community.Such irrational fears play into the hands of a Democratic power structure ever eager for an excuse to bash the president, and looking for ways to keep African Americans on the liberal plantation. They are also a significant hindrance to many African Americans ever getting a realistic shot at the American Dream. While some discrimination still exists, the bigger problem for many blacks is their worldview.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not rebuilding New Orleans has nothing to do with race.\n","id":"153c9be2-7e6f-49f3-bef9-43dd32af630d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The majority of German zoos have a \u2018petting area with a variety of domestic species e.g. rabbits, alpacas, sheep, goats, donkeys, etc..<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since donkeys are also used in zoos, we should be concerned about donkeys as well.\n","id":"2f66e142-3833-470a-aff1-2e35bb80f32c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>In a system of legal sex work, it is easier to find and coordinate meetings with those in the industry to offer them support.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex workers can set up self-help centers and engage in information-sharing on health, rights and safety concerns.\n","id":"aa17733b-cb20-471a-a411-b21413793061"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the current landscape, many people go by the title engineer. Often times and especially in tech the term engineer is used for technical worker \u201csomehow everyone who isn\u2019t in sales, marketing, or design became an engineer\u201d. Often when a company is \u201chiring engineers\u201d It could mean anything from java developers to robotics specialists with advanced engineering degrees. Additionally you have the fact that there is a protected title of \u201cprofessional engineer\u201d title which requires years of professional preparation, testing, and experience. We shouldn\u2019t call these people engineers perhaps shortened from software engineers unless they are \u201cactual engineers\u201d. Actual engineers could perhaps be limited to defined as A professional engineer already has a protected title . Issue here is that it\u2019s a ton of specialized testing work prep for the FE exam, which is a time and money sink yet it isn\u2019t useful for most Industries. B people with an accredited B.S. engineering degree Engineers should get the respect they deserve, just like lawyers or doctors. The title engineer is cheapened by the tech industry and used for people who didn\u2019t get real degrees and just took a coding boot camp and now build websites. The only similar situation which I can think of is being a medical doctor vs. being Dr. Phil. Other industries also misuse engineering titles. A very prominent example is that Train conductors are called engineers in the USA. Note I\u2019m not really arguing about the varying definitions of the word engineer worldwide I\u2019m arguing for a protected term for people with B.S. Eng degrees that are accredited.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The title of \u201cEngineer\u201d is being cheapened by its misuse for employees of a totally different caliber than \u201cactual engineers\u201d.\n","id":"43099d9e-c7db-415f-9a83-2a7f57b6bc34"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>Escaped slaves are certainly better off in a community that can support them than on their own in a hostile land.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We take part in working towards the end of slavery if we agree and cheat.\n","id":"c6b6fffa-bd83-4b29-ac7a-c5354d1aa06f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Women are subconsciously wired to be very hypergamous. Men not as much. This is not an attack on women at all merely just an observation. Women when making dating choices whether they believe it or not are seeking out a mate that is above them in SMV. You can go on Tinder, or Bumble and average women in every view themselves as complete queens. A women could be a cashier making minimum wage, but she still seeks out a man making 100k a year with a perfect jawline. It's not a guarantee that she'll win over the man, but women only need looks in most situations. This discrepancy leaves men that are unattractive, and don't make alot of money in the dust without a shot in hell.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women are naturally hypergamous in order to ensure that they're potential children receive the best genetics.\n","id":"b450a82a-bb8e-48df-9e4d-4ad9301cc44f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>Misunderstanding and excluding young transgender individuals leaves them feeling as though they do not have adequate access to physical and mental health resources tailored to their needs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The exclusion of the trans community by gay rights groups in the past has made them vulnerable in ways that continue to harm them.\n","id":"caa143d8-3463-4752-be8b-14f204805b19"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>Governments can play a role in requiring gender neutral parental leave. When only maternity leave is required, it encourages a gender bias. Currently only around half the countries requiring maternity leave also require paternity leave.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments have a responsibility to all of their citizens to ensure that their citizens' opportunities and rights are not dictated by their gender, race or sexuality.\n","id":"f8b35830-9ed1-4a09-bb0d-e530d6ab8d27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all children should be taught to code in school?<|ARGUMENT|>The U.S. Department of Labour projects that the number of software developers will grow by 24% between 2016 and 2026 much faster than the average for all occupations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most estimates project that the demand for coders will continue to grow.\n","id":"3256a578-6c86-413e-a1ea-fbd6b2c5b56a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Democracy allows a subset of a society to dictate the whole of a society. Democracy does not see to it that this subset takes into account the interests of those not included in the subset. Equal representation is not inherently fair, contrary to what we are constantly told. Even worse, representative democracies do not even exercise equal representation. Those put into power by the majority have greed and interests which are capable of changing. They can be bribed and bought out by the wealthy, meaning that in a representative democracy the wealthy have more representation than the poor. Despite its problems, representative democracy is probably still the most practical system we have today and is much better than the systems which predated it. The purpose of my argument is not to say that we should not use representative democracy, but that it has major flaws which are much less than ideal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democracy is fundamentally flawed\n","id":"08c1dc79-e65a-48e5-9b3f-97725e68ae3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is human cognitive and intellectual superiority an unproven assumption?<|ARGUMENT|>Methods to determine cognition in other species are designed to detect human-like intelligence, mainly based on our own specific skills and ways of perception and processing of information.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human cognitive and intellectual superiority is only an unproven assumption.\n","id":"c62aac07-7d3a-4c70-924d-c0a77cb3a056"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>In opinion polls, participants are actively sought out via phone\/mail\/internet etc and can often participate from home. Voters have to be registered and make the decision to turn up to vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These sources relate to voter turnout, not opinion polls. Voting and polling are not conducted in the same way and people's motivations for participation differ.\n","id":"bedf87c1-0e14-491b-99fe-88a3b6a6630d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Within the last century, international politics have been dominated by Europe and more recently USA . At the most, Japan, China and India have some major say in international trade and military dominance as you hear about them in news. However, Africa and Latin America, while having significant political powers internally, never have anything that can affect the world. Latin America has contenders like Argentina and Brazil, but you never see them in the news. Africa has some stable countries like SA, Kenya, Congo and Morocco, most African countries today are at the mercy of Western Industries, Racial and Religious Strife Islam vs Christianity or famine. I don't see any possibility of a stable global superpower in the near 50 or even 100 years into the future. Please change my view, as I would like to think there are opportunities and potential in Africa and Latin America. It would be great if you can provide some specific examples of countries that are doing well and growing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Africa will never produce a Superpower\n","id":"fd55c948-43ac-4f51-89cf-77a51b5cc62c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Video game creation is not just about the players, but also about the creators. Creators of media have the right to make media that reflect their own identities. The representation in games therefore bears a resemblance to the game developer workforce itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender-specific art has a right to exist. Ensuring gender equality in video games limits creativity and denies access to gender-specific art.\n","id":"9a36c7cb-a8bf-440c-aba5-7b7e4dd5588a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Modern cars have very good emissions systems, and put out very little in emissions relative to consumption and miles driven . However in my state about 66 of electricity on the grid comes from coal. Coal plants have little to no emissions controls. If I plug my car in to the grid, I am trading well controlled emissions for poorly controlled emissions, doing more harm overall. The batteries are made with nickle and cobalt. These are mined in open pits and do a ton of damaged to the environment. Cobalt is often mined by child and slave labor. Then, a standard gas car will last 300k to 400k miles with basic repair and likely no engine rebuilds. But an electric car is likely to need new batteries every 100k miles. That is why I think Electric Cars are actually worse for the environment at this current time. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Electric Cars are not good for the environment and just move the emission from the tailpipe to coal power plants\n","id":"cbffc620-4cf7-41ca-93d9-7b0b4b62a67c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in a relatively conservative country. Women don't normally wear skimpy dresses or stay out in the wee hours. Now if a woman is out in a bar flaunting her stuff and gets mauled at the back of the bar, no doubt the fucking rapist should burn in hell. But at the back of my mind I ask, what was the girl doing there? Why was she dressed that way? Why was she dancing so provocatively? She chose to be there knowing full well that she will attract the wrong kinds of attention. Why would you go swimming with a gaping wound at your side, when these waters are known to be shark infested? Recently, I found out that my colleague was raped. This was months after the fact. Of course, we offered her help and support. Of course, we consoled her and shared her pain. But I know her. And her penchant for dressing in a way that will make your eyes pop out. And I know her hangouts, these are not the places you would want to be seen come daylight. I know that I should not be entertaining those questions at the back of my mind. I know that I should feel nothing but sympathy and give nothing but my full support. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that there are instances when the rape victim should share some blame.\n","id":"45c08a94-5110-4066-a59d-66ac51a66db2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Even though Metal is frequently touted as being a brotherhood of sorts especially at concerts , the online community feels very divided. The very fact that r metal has a downvote option blows my mind. Aren't we supposed to come together and just appreciate metal for what it is, instead of arguing what's real metal and fake shit metal ? God forbid you don't listen black sludge power grindcore or else you're completely invalidated in their eyes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the online Metal community is one of the most snobbish and segregated communities in music.\n","id":"79ccaae3-a355-4f7f-8b10-1a046f80ce9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To put it simply banks started small, they started because conditions allowed it, specifically the civilizing, democratizing of society, and even then, they were initially an a easy target. If any single such Iron Bank even attempted to start up, any ruler or prospective ruler could simply use his army to loot it. At any point, any king with any army, ESPECIALLY ONE WITH DRAGONS, had no reason not to loot it completely, increasing their wealth and power. tldr The only bank in a monarchy is the king.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Iron Bank\" in Game of Thrones is a silly concept that would never exist in any such time period.\n","id":"15023792-3c22-4f49-807e-bd0e3a44c700"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is drag turning mainstream hurting LGBT rights?<|ARGUMENT|>Teenagers are influenced by, and respond to, celebrities they see on a regualar basis. The less visible and more obscure drag artists are to LGBT teens, the less influential they can be as role models.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Where role models are not readily visible in media, they can not incite change.\n","id":"8bf4b482-986e-4322-a4c6-1e77cdf58f3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>The outcome of the Civil War proved once and for all that even a proportionally large insurrection cannot defeat the US military.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US would not be destroyed and\/or reduced to a third-world country by any kind of an insurrection.\n","id":"901d024b-9fa9-4511-b0c1-4ea28a6e5e2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>The UK's decision to revoke Shamima Begum\u2019s citizenship broke international norms, as well as UK laws which forbid the UK Home Secretary from taking any action that would render an individual stateless as a result.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United Kingdom are demonstrating signs of being a rogue state\n","id":"e860ca7a-89dd-4694-91ff-c0f481b811a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious values of peace and loving one's neighbor did nothing to stop protestants and Catholics from slaughtering each other in the name of their religion and because of their religious differences. Wars Recent violence<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Holding these religious ideals does not stop the believers from committing atrocities in the name of and because of the religion. Contradictions and inconsistencies in the texts often leads people to justify atrocities.\n","id":"80b592fa-ef6d-42e7-8680-e12d3512de02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In order to vote, I believe you should be held responsible for knowing how your government functions. I don\u2019t see how in any form an uneducated vote benefits the general well being of our citizens. To clarify, this is not a rant about people wanting \u201cillegals\u201d to vote. This is speaking of the ignorant population, regardless of whether or not you\u2019re already a citizen. If you do not know what the naturalization test is, it is a test in which immigrants take to receive citizenship in the United States. Click here for more information regarding the naturalization test. This is going to cause controversy, so I\u2019ll retort the elephant in the room first we have our right as citizens to govern our country. Yes I am not arguing about democracy. Believe it or not, we already are not a direct democracy. Felons aren\u2019t allowed to vote depending on your state . We are not a one person one vote system we have the electoral college. We do not directly vote on policy in most instances we instead vote for an elected official to represent us. It would be hypocritical to criticize that this impedes on our freedom, yet at the same time not criticize these. This may be a black and white fallacy, so I would like people to explain why this policy crosses the line but not the others. Next, we have the responsibility to be informed. An ignorant vote is not going to benefit the wellbeing of our citizens. To bring up the point again, felons have displayed that they do not have responsibility which is why that right is revoked from them. Isn\u2019t this a lot like the Jim Crow literacy tests and poll taxes? This is regressive as it takes away the rights of some to have a say in our government. I appreciate the caution exercised by many that would bring up this point regulating who is able to vote is a very dangerous idea. We need to ensure that is in the hands of the right people. This test is not like the tests held in the 20th century to suppress the minority vote. Here\u2019s an example of a question that came from the Jim Crow literacy test \u201cspell backwards forwards\u201d. Here\u2019s an example of a question from the Naturalization test \u201chow many U.S. Senators are there?\u201d The literacy test is overtly attempting to confuse the reader while the naturalization test is a clear question regarding government. These are two separate tests. Regardless, the literacy test in the end was to impede the African American demographic from voting while the Naturalization test is designed to test your knowledge of the United States Government. Why the naturalization test instead of anything else? Why do I have the right to demand people to pass a naturalization test in order to vote? Because this is the same test we give to people that do not live in our country and have not experienced American culture. If we hold immigrants to these standards, can\u2019t we not hold our own citizens to such? Surely a questioner about our very own government should suffice. I believe the naturalization test is specifically necessary as it inquires a person\u2019s knowledge of the government \u2014 the very thing he believes he has a right to have a say in. I simply want people to know what they\u2019re voting for. Finally, would this impair people that have disabilities from voting? Well one, we already have standardized testing that serves as a large obstacles to people that may not succeed in them. We have disability accommodation for that, and for naturalization tests we will have the same. My goal is not to keep people that are \u201cbelow me\u201d from voting, instead it is to ensure an informed vote. If a person with a disability is informed about our government, then they already have displayed they have taken the responsibility to put in an informed vote. Overall, I believe my mind would be changed if some of my following points were disproven a test impedes the populations ability to vote unlike other laws that are already in place felons can\u2019t vote, electoral college, etc , such a system would be impossible to implement although if you only prove this would that mean you agree that if it were possible it should be implemented? , that there is an even better alternative to the naturalization test, or that this will only serve as a barrier and that outweighs any good it may provide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"you should be required to pass a naturalization test prior to voting referring exclusively to the U.S.\n","id":"0200f09b-86ec-4581-8e3a-d471b320b369"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those unfamiliar with sabermetrics it is basically the application of rigorous statistical methods to the analysis of baseball. Coined by Bill James in the 1970s and under development in the decades since, the methods came to mainstream popularity with the book and later movie Moneyball by Michael Lewis. That sabermetrics is the right approach to baseball analysis in not exactly what I'd like to argue here, although I'm sure it will come up. I don't imagine I will be convinced that there is a better approach to objective baseball analysis because I'm defining sabermetrics as the empirical analysis of baseball. Any stats or methods that are demonstrated to be better than what sabermetricians are currently using will rise to wide usage eventually and become the new standards of sabermetrics. What I'd really like to argue is that the traditional ways of analyzing baseball, such as citing ERA or the win loss record of a pitcher as good measures of their individual performance, or homeruns and RBIs as the gold standard of offensive output, really has no place in analysis programming that claims to be objective and rigorous . I am not arguing for the abolition of all traditional forms of baseball analysis. It is totally expected, if a little infuriating, that older generation broadcasters continue to reject sabermetrics as overrated. I don't want to take away fans' enjoyment of great narratives and an aesthetically pleasing way of describing the game. But until sabermetrics is more widely accepted, we will continue getting sports writers and analysts taking up the spotlight with outdated stats that don't capture what makes players truly great. Summing up players with ERA and AVG was a good approach for an earlier time but to continue to place these stats and others at the forefront is to stifle the intellect of the public when it comes to baseball. Again, this opinion is less about sabermetrics being right and more about the more aggressive approach sabermetricians should take in pushing their methods, but feel free to challenge any of the points contributing to that opinion. And please let me know if you'd like me to elaborate on my position.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Traditional sports \"analysis\" adds little to the rigorous discussion of baseball and sabermetrics should be more widely embraced by the community\n","id":"1d4e60a2-26a6-4dad-a1e1-e23c522e68c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I fully supported Snowden until this The tldr version is Snowden revealed that the NSA has been hacking China. Now, in doing so, he has revealed an American program targeted at a foreign country, which is going to benefit the foreign country who very much sees us as economic and geopolitical competition, and who we're not technically allies with and which is going to hurt the American government's operations. This, IMO, is treason, and it's with this that Snowden crossed the line. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Snowden is a traitor and should be jailed accordingly.\n","id":"25b4ee50-edf9-4c93-93b3-a91365c16361"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I keep seeing comments along the lines of if Sanders doesn't win, then vote Clinton . This is justified by saying it will split the vote and then the republicans will pick the Supreme Court justices. Which would probably be bad. My issue is that the only reason we are faced with that problem is that our voting system is flawed. Until that is fixed, we will continue to be faced with a similar issue every 2 4 years. If we continue to prioritize short term tactical issues over systemic reform, we will always end up with a suboptimal outcome for a single, identifiable reason. It may hurt to rip off the bandaid. But it needs to come off and it won't hurt any less tomorrow and could very well hurt more. What is holding us back right now is first mover bias. No one is willing to vote independent because no one is willing to vote independent. If there was a stronger movement to vote third party, it would be more appealing to do so. It looks a lot like the early labor movement. The conditions for workers were clearly awful. Coal miners, for instance, were screwed every was possible. Even people that dislike unions should be able to see that the result was better than the oppressive sweat shops that existed before that. Case in point the company store. Unapologetic indentured servitude. Many people were angry about it. But anyone that tried to do anything would be fired or worse unless enough people worked together to take advantage of collective bargaining. To get that many people, you need to prove that you can get that many people. Catch 22. I am fully aware that my vote would be very unlikely to result in a win for a third party candidate. But a winning candidate is not the only way for one's vote to have an effect. Even a vote for a candidate that loses becomes a statistic that can be used to sway future voters. And a third party candidate wouldn't even have to win to lead to change. Just a large enough portion to be difficult to ignore. In this respect, the spoiler effect could even be beneficial. Because it illustrates exactly what is wrong with the current system and would get many people's attention. Why am I wrong? Edit sorry for the break. I was at it for a few hours last night, but a man's gotta sleep and work and stuff. I'll try to respond to everyone, but it's hard to keep up with. Edit 2 after some thought I have realized that my issue isn't necessarily with FPTP voting. If the optimal strategy for elections is a modified FPTP system, then I want that one. But I do not believe that the best strategy is one where two self interested private entities that are both funded by the same massive corporations get to effectively decide half of the reasonable options for governance in the U.S. I'm not sure if I should award deltas to anyone in particular. I still believe that the optimal strategy when neither party and both parties collectively act against our interests is to vote third party with the intention of restructuring the system in such a way that we can hold them more accountable. A vote for either party maintains the status quo. And a nonvote marks you as someone that can't be relied on to put in the effort to support a candidate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If neither of the major party nominees support an alternative to FPTP voting in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, I will vote third party.\n","id":"084ad7bc-022c-4b41-862a-d63e7bb3cad6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I come from a family that makes a low income, and neither of my parents have went to college, nor even finished high school they're from Mexico, now living in the U.S. . I'm a smart kid, based on the classes I've taken from high school and the grades I've gotten. I'm convinced college is the only way to be successful, even though it's something I can't afford.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm starting to think that going to college is the only way to be successful.\n","id":"bdb7202a-7fed-48aa-be99-cbf66fe45a4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This article got me thinking about the subject. The following reasons why I think it would be great Mosquitoes have killed more humans in history than all of the wars combined Mosquitoes ruin my camping experience. They are annoying. Here is some evidence to suggest that eradicating mosquitoes would have no consequences to the ecosystem. It seems that many animals could get along just fine without them as a food source. They are a pestilence on this earth and offer nothing of use. They need to go. The only argument that I can think of that refutes mine is that I read an article that suggested that some bird species rely on them for food I couldn't find it for the life of me , or that perhaps there is some future unseen use for them that we don't know about, and maybe they have the cure for cancer in them somewhere or something and if we wiped them out it would be a huge mistake. Still, if I could go camping mosquito free that would be awesome, and worth the risk. . Edit Thanks for the replies. I didn't respond to most of the posts because the people who did reply came up with way more compelling rebuttals than I ever could have. My view still hasn't changed but I have some great points to mull over. Thanks again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there is nothing morally, ethically or environmentally wrong with the idea of eradicating mosquitoes from the face of the earth.\n","id":"e364325c-bbef-4600-ac50-16c9459aa1ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are K-12 teachers already paid enough in America?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many jobs that are simply crucial to civilized society; military, police, and teachers are all included in that list so they should be prioritized over beauracrats and politicians.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prioritizing jobs that are worse off than teachers does not exclude teachers from needing more pay.\n","id":"18fed872-7140-4ace-8789-e5c41cd5f798"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Jewish hygene practices may partially explain why Jews were remarkably unaffected by the Black Death, a plague that affected Europe in the mid-14th century.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Basic hygienic rules have been written as religious texts to enforce them as higher truths. This reduced illness and death.\n","id":"1622bd6f-b3b3-41f6-a35a-fc91caca490f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Transwomen be Allowed to Compete in Women's Sports?<|ARGUMENT|>In Boston's 2003 marathon, the mean running time for the top 207 runners showed women to be 5 minutes faster on average than their male counterparts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women tend to dominate men in endurance sports. Trans men may still have this ability due to increased estrogen.\n","id":"430f2b5e-2454-4945-ae2d-55762b70f475"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The neoconservatives who sold the Iraq War to the Bush Administration were among the same small group whose members authored A Clean Break A New Strategy for Securing the Realm for the Israeli government in 1996, which advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq\u2014an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right\u2014as a means of foiling Syria\u2019s regional ambitions The neocons joined the Bush administration, and succeeded in exploiting fears of terrorism to achieve the Iraq objective, which has been disastrous for the Arab world and destabilized the region. As the Arabs fight among each other in sectarian conflicts, Israel refuses to accept refugees in large numbers, and has achieved its goal of getting rid of a powerful state enemy. Moreover, these not unintelligent neoconservatives, who dominated the Bush Administration have seemed to learn nothing from the disaster that was the Iraq War, and are now advocating regime change in Syria and even Iran see Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz . By following the playbook in A Clean Break , they have brought disasters to the Muslim world hundreds of thousands of deaths due to sectarian conflict and the West refugee crisis, right wing populism, etc. , yet continue to press forward with the same regime toppling ideology. I've been trying to understand why the US invaded Iraq, why its leaders are appealing to humanitarian values in Syria while simultaneously helping Saudi Arabia bring about a famine in Yemen and have come to the conclusion that it only makes sense from the perspective of Israel's interests. These interests have been explicitly written out by many of the Iraq War architects in A Clean Break , and are also similar to those expressed in the Yinon Plan whose right wing Israeli author said it was only natural that Israel will seek to destabilize the surrounding states with much of the region fragmented into ethnic religions communities, preferably mutually hostile In my opinion, those sympathetic to this ideology have made a disproportionate percentage of the American foreign policy elite, which has lead the US to adopt a strategy of toppling Middle Eastern regimes at the expense of US and Western interests. Please feel free to <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The disastrous Iraq War and hostility towards Assad come mainly from an ideology designed to help Israel at the expense of unified Arab nations, and has little benefit to Americans and the non-Israeli West\n","id":"93aab9d5-353a-4b7a-a210-1dbba42a009a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We spend SOO much time worrying, talking, etc. about terrorism voters rank it as their most important issue after the economy. But essentially nobody dies from it people die far more often from drowning in pools. However, politicians waste political capital, time, and resources worrying about this problem when it really isn't a problem at all, and anybody who calls them out on it is described as unpatriotic. The US has a huge military, and very tight vetting policies there's little more we can do, but it's a huge barrier to things like immigration reform and defense spending cuts which we need. Furthermore, being terrified by terrorism is just giving in to them ISIS knows that it can't actually take on the US directly, so it uses our actions against it as propaganda and tries to inflict terror upon us.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homeland terrorism should be taken far less seriously\n","id":"d455f5b2-750f-4879-ba89-46ac1af7b75e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My last  was poorly thought out. My view is that despite the protests of the Deaf Community, being deaf is a disability. My argument is based off of definitions. Google a physical or mental condition that limits a person's movements, senses, or activities. a disadvantage or handicap, especially one imposed or recognized by the law. Ontario Government you have a substantial mental or physical impairment that is continuous or recurrent, and is expected to last one year or more and your impairment directly results in a substantial restriction in your ability to work, care for yourself, or take part in community life and your impairment, its duration and restrictions have been verified by an approved health care professional Canadian Government gt Types of Disabilities as defined by the Canadian Government a qualifying disability is any severe and prolonged condition that inhibits a person from performing normal and routine daily activities. US Government gt Any person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities has a record of such impairment or is regarded as having such an impairment. Due to deafness leading to a person having trouble communicating effectively, this prevents them from easily finding work. The fact that they cannot hear properly outright stops them from working in certain fields. All of this combines to create difficulty in performing daily tasks and life events without assistance concessions being given. And that the Deaf Community claiming otherwise does nothing to help them and only boosts their ego. To change my view prove to me that deaf people can live the same life as an average person and have access to the same daily routine and life events in the same way as an average person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- Being Deaf is a Disability\n","id":"a7c34f27-5a4b-4616-83ed-1913082846bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The constitution has been amended 27 times. Many amendments focus on civil rights, some focus directly on the executive branch, some on the Senate, not one on the Supreme Court. We're supposed to base our understanding and execution of the constitution on their interpretations of it, should it ever come to that. The SCOTUS is, in theory, supposed to be all pure, non political and un corrupt because of their lifelong terms through appointment and not direct election. Which should, in practice, in theory, result in high minded and very trustworthy, perfect justices who will always expand civil liberties and protect our constitution from societal threats. Except that's not how it's been the last few decades. The supreme court has allowed the ultra wealthy to, even more so, excessively influence our politics essentially cementing an oligarch class in our nation. SCOTUS has expanded the President's powers several times, when they would've been more than right to limit those powers. Who could forget Bush v. Gore in 2000. Why was that case so different? How come it didn't come with precedent? Was it maybe too controversial? In instances like this where the SC has made a decision we may not like, the only way we as a nation can undo or change it is to either go through them again, or amend the constitution. As far as holding any justices accountable? The only thing we can do is impeach them. Good fucking luck we all know how often still something like that happens. The Supreme Court is arguably just as political as the other two branches where people who wind up as either President or a member of Congress, they often start at the bottom staffer, legislative assistant, state government etc and work their way up Congress, President. The same is said for SCOTUS. They usually clerk for a circuit court judge, or even a Supreme Court justice, then can possibly fill a lower vacancy when a higher one is filled and everyone else is shuffled upward. Every current justice is a former circuit judge. But I've only mentioned half the equation. They're not only former circuit judges, not just any circuit judges, but very high profile circuit judges. ?? Oh you mean activist judges. Another way one could say controversial I suppose. They've held very liberal or very conservative records But this here, is again just half the equation because, well, there's just so many we could potentially choose from right? Yeah, think tanks do that for us. All five conservative justice are current or former members of the Federalist Society. And most hold a very corporate friendly judgement. Whenever you hear of the President's short list for a potential appointment, this list was put together by think tanks and handed to the President basically saying Here, any of them. Don't matter. There needs to be more accountability. The judges are even more untouchable than the President There needs to be a way to cycle judges out, maybe something like Mr Mayor Buttigieg has suggested. The constitution itself also doesn't even explicitly state how many justices make the supreme court. Article 3 is shorter than article 4. There's a lot we could potentially do, but I really wanna hear from you guys now so please, change my view. I don't want to be right here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Supreme Court is too powerful\n","id":"15abed83-d818-4283-a1be-e70118258541"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is banning books inherently wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Ignorance is useful in some instances. Knowledge of an audience impacts performance anxiety. When asked to describe why they liked a particular painting or image --- people, forced to analyze their reasons, later reported less satisfaction with the painting. Some categories of knowledge come with trade-offs and ignorance can, in some cases, enhance experience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It cannot be said that *all* knowledge is right and useful, therefore, it cannot be said that *all* ignorance is wrong.\n","id":"23dba87d-4340-4f7f-88ba-e91647fbbaf9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We know that ~13,000 people die a year in America from guns. Such a statistic would be significantly lessoned with a blanket ban. As a result, if in the next 50 to 100 years guns were banned, I\u2019ll say that hypothetically the people that died from gun violence would be reduced by half. Thus, in my hypothetical future, 7,000 people would be saved per year. If tyranny occurred in a 50 100 period, 350,000 to 700,000 people would be saved if it did not occur. The only massacre from tyranny in the last century in the western world was the Holocaust I think . ~6 million died. This stat is clearly significant and bigger than 700,000 deaths from gun control. However, I feel that this is trumped by the fact that libertarians always hold pragmatism over compassion, and the certainty of ~700,000 deaths erodes the significance of the possibility of lt 6 million victims. This is further reinforced by the seeming unlikelihood of tyranny against minorities occurring in the U.S in the first place, and the probable ineffectiveness of guns available to the public against the high tech firepower of the government. Is it only an effective argument because all my viewpoints are more pragmatic and not theoretical? Change my mind. Cheers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The philosophical argument that gun control is essential for the future protection from tyranny is very limited.\n","id":"d02846bf-5940-4ab7-b78b-11d59e094d22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe this because it doesn\u2019t maximize total utility. If I give a poor person 10 , they will get more utility from it than if I give it to a rich person. Every person has high priorities and low priorities. When you are poor, you are able to spend additional money on something high on your list of priorities. When you are rich, you have already bought the things high on your list, so you have to spend additional money on something lower on your list, meaning that it gives you less utility per dollar. I believe that we should value people equally. People get similar amounts of utility from money if they have similar wealth. Therefore having less inequality means greater total utility. This is not an argument for forced wealth redistribution. I think inequality is inherently immoral in the same way killing is it can be justified if it is done for a greater good. Just like killing hitler would be morally correct, inequality could be moral if it increases total utility in another way more than it directly decreases it. Whether that is the case for inequality today is a different argument. Edit just wanted to make it clear that this is about wealth inequality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inequality is inherently immoral\n","id":"57da2e8f-befe-43dd-9ac7-f2a61afcbc21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>It's possible that a greater evil would be done if God did not allow evil in the world. The apparent evil in this world might serve some purpose which us for our ultimate benefit and which we are unable to understand.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of evil can be reconciled with an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving God. God would not want to remove evil if a greater good were only achievable with the existence of evil.\n","id":"e065f44c-902c-4edf-be6b-041f7181128a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>A few instances of what was thought to only be supernatural being explainable, to an extent, by nature does not disprove the supernatural.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Accepting the possibility of the supernatural is not irrational in a world with many many instances of occurrences that seem supernatural.\n","id":"a6f3a814-dbd2-4ed1-8beb-d0f75a654e87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Context Someone in my workplace committed suicide, and people were talking about it on Facebook. Some people who don't know the person said things in support of the family who is going through the hard times. They were accused of using someone's death to get likes virtue signalling making someone else's tragedy about them, how insensitive . Their reasoning was that because they didn't know the person, they cannot genuinely feel sympathy or compassion, and their comments were not genuine and are just them looking for likes. I believe this because we all share the human condition we are all humans that go through human life. Even if we don't know this person, we know that he is a human, and we have some understanding of human emotions to understand, even if just a little, about how bad it must feel for someone to take their own life. This understanding leads to genuine compassion and sympathy, even if we don't know that person. To be more specific, I am not a Holocaust survivor, and I am not Jewish or know anyone personally affected by the Holocaust, yet I can feel sympathy or compassion for those who died. I feel genuine sadness when watching documentaries about the Holocaust, even though I don't know those who died. In summary, because sympathy and compassion is part of human nature, it is possible for someone to feel genuine sympathy and compassion to someone that they don't know, and thus those comments are genuine expressions of sadness, not merely an attempt to get likes or social status.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that it's possible to feel sympathy and compassion to people that you don't know.\n","id":"9eb9f316-9b50-4819-a396-b89034a767d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm using libertarian here in the contemporary American political sense, not the free will, European or classical economic sense. Libertarianism in the sense I mean is a political philosophy which prioritizes individualism, personal choice, personal responsibility, egoism, selfishness and, above all, individual freedom, over collectivism, statism, and the concerns of the many. This view is in conflict with the view that parents should be coerced to vaccinate their children. I am not a libertarian, and am I not antivax. I am, however, pro coherency and intellectual honesty. Given the popularity of American libertarianism on Reddit and the popularity of anti antivax, my view is that there is at best an incoherency, and at worse a hypocrisy, at play on this site, at least in corners where these two views overlap. So I'd be interested to hear from staunch libertarians who are also staunchly anti antivax, on how you believe you make these two views cohere. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You can't coherently hold a staunch libertarian\/individualist worldview and be staunchly opposed to antivax parents\n","id":"049b020b-8cb6-4432-9e57-f9279cd8d6a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>regardless of whether they are safe or not, i would much rather drive on a road with other people than with robotic cars. especially in huge cities, where you need to be paying attention to everyone and everything. electronics malfuntion, glitch and can be hacked, people cant. this whole idea of sitting down and letting your car drive for you just seems unnecesary to me. drive your own fucking car like your parents did and like their parents did. to me all self driving cars are are nothing but a testement to a generation that doesnt feel the need to fucking accomplish anything<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I dont want self driving cars\n","id":"39470463-87e5-4649-96bf-ef4b52143793"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should close Guantanamo Bay detention camp<|ARGUMENT|>the practices used at guantanamo bay are inhumane. no person deserved to be tortured and abused. not only that the tax payers are footing the bill. instead of keeping prisoners contained we must exterminate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"unjust treatment\/tactics are used in the Guantanamo bay detention camp\n","id":"eaf8f922-4664-4e45-a5fa-e90ced84ae82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I supported Trump in the primaries despite being better aligned with some other candidates because I knew he'd be able to win the general election and I believed that no other candidate would've been able to do so. Yes there's plenty of polls that said not Trump or not Hillary would've faired much better, but those are useless because those other people weren't subjected to the same level of attacks. Trump was the only republican who'd fight against these attacks enough to win. Hillary was a weak candidate but she had almost all newspapers and news shows thoroughly supporting and working with her and that machine would've crushed any other republican just like they so easily defeated Romney. One such example would've been the trans bathroom issue that gained a lot of traction to be used against the GOP nominee. Almost all Americans are in agreement on this issue or just don't care, but a non Trump candidate would've likely given an answer that could be spun to say they're transphobic and full of hateful and their campaign would've tanked in the similar fashion that women's right became an issue in 2012 to sink Romney . Luckily, Trump said he's fine with transpeople using whatever restroom they prefer just like they have been for years and then the democratic establishment shut up about the issue since it couldn't be used to damage Trump. Also Trump won the rust belt which I don't believe any of the other candidates could've done. The rest of the GOP field would've been looking to win an electoral map that looked like 2000 and that just wouldn't have been possible with demographic changes in Nevada. Also Trump was an outsider candidate and that certainly helped. To be fair, I didn't pay attention to the primaries in 2015 so maybe I'm overlooking something. Edit something I forgot about, Wikileaks wouldn't have had much of an impact without r the donald going through them and raising awareness about the most damning ones. No one in the media wanted to take that responsibility on themselves so Clinton would've gotten away it. Edit 2 Protip consider arguing in favor of a specific candidate instead of just against Trump. It didn't work for Clinton and it won't work for you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump was the only republican candidate who could've won against Clinton\n","id":"11a7792a-efc3-49ca-ad43-41e41f6db6fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Their Children Should Be Fined If The Child Gets A Vaccine-Preventable Illness<|ARGUMENT|>Other utilitarian policies, such as taxation, at least allow the individual who suffered to experience some of the aggregate benefit that resulted from their suffering. The person vaccinated experiences no benefit as a result of another person living.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unfair to make a person suffer for another's benefit without their consent, as the person who suffers never gets to experience the benefit which their suffering allowed.\n","id":"0b7343bb-0736-4abf-9a1e-1d74b5459f69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Although I have never been in a breakup, I have had bad experiences with teenage girls my age. I have come to the conclusion that I don't like most teenage girls for the following reasons. Not all but most. Although there are a few teenage girls that I like, most of the ones that I meet have these qualities. I would like to . The majority of teenage girls that I meet or have met are attention seeking. From my perspective, most teenage girls, at least the ones that I meet or have met, will do anything to impress other people and receive attention. I used to have an Instagram account and I followed a lot of teenage girls. Selfies and maybe even picture of girls in bikinis would be on my feed. I have never liked it deep down. I am surprised that I haven't unfollowed these girls if I never wanted these selfies on my feed. This may seem stupid because I am making this post and I will receive attention for that post. However, I am not posting this to boost my false ego. I am just posting this so I can . I also wouldn't want to receive absolutely zero attention. Contrary to that view, I also wouldn't want to receive unwanted attention. There is a difference between making posts on Reddit to  and plastering selfies on Instagram to raise self esteem. Teenage girls, at least the ones that I meet, are too emotional. From my perspective their emotions seem to be going up and down like a rollercoaster. When I meet them in school, they seem to be always happy and excited. I also see it in Instagram comments. On someone else's Instagram post, I usually see comments like LOTS OF LOVE and SLAY MY LIFE. In fact, it is a known fact that all teenagers are emotional. Furthermore, not just teenage girls, but all teenagers overreact when presented with a relatively small situation. This may seem stupid because I am a teenager myself and I am emotional too. However, I feel like the teenage girls that I meet show this the most. I cannot control what a girl might feel, and I should respect how a girl feels. I just don't like extreme emotions. The majority of the teenage girls that I meet, from my perspective, like to wear bikinis, short shorts, crop tops, and basically anything that shows skin. I don't like provocative dressing or any dressing that sexualizes the body, because from my perspective, teenage girls dress provocatively because they want to attract men, which I don't agree with, and they make me obsessed with them. It could also be a sign of rebellion against her parents. I don't like obsessions with someone simply because I like how they look. I also would not want women to be flat chested and cut off their breasts and buttocks, because they cannot control the fact that they have breasts and buttocks. However, I would like for these parts of the body to be left alone and not given special treatment. I know that I should respect how a girl dresses. I have respect for what shirts she likes, but I have no respect for provocative dressing. It is not because I get obsessed with it, but because it is widely frowned upon for a variety of reasons. I cannot control how teenage girls dress, but I can control what teenage girls dress like. A lot of teenage girls that I meet are self centered, from my perspective. They act like that the world revolves around them. From my perspective, most of the teenage girls that I meet post selfies to boost their false ego and are addicted to artificial likes. I feel like people should know that not everything is going to come to them, in my opinion. In my opinion, the teenage girls that I meet are narcissistic. As I explained earlier, I believe that most teenage girls are attention seeking and have an obsession with their body, and therefore plaster selfies on social media under the belief that people will like their body, too. I understand that a teenage girl might be confident enough to post a selfie or two on Instagram, and I respect that, even if I don't like it and if it is cringe worthy. However, I have no respect for narcissism. The majority of teenage girls are immature, from my perspective. The attention seeking that I described earlier is not a good social skill. From my perspective, the teenage girls that I have been with like to gossip and small talk. Most gossip and small talk, in my opinion, makes people look immature, stupid, and it won't be tolerated in the adult world. I'm not saying that everyone should grow up to be a philosopher, I am saying that people should have social interactions other than gossip. I cannot control how others interact, but I can control how I interact. I have had many bad memories associated with teenage girls. When I was in middle school, I was popular among the girls. Everything seemed good until I got to high school. I have noticed that many of them block me on Instagram for seemingly no reason and don't invite me to any of their events. I eventually broke away from these girls in fear that it will happen again if I join back in. With that being said, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I dislike most teenage girls and I want to be proven wrong.\n","id":"0fae8982-d47d-46b6-812a-30e2ff185c96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious education be compulsory in public schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Most parents would only teach their own religious beliefs. A comprehensive religious education would cover all major religions and arguments against religion equally, meaning the students will gain a knowledge of religions other than that of their parents and an understanding of those of different faiths.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious education in schools may be the only opportunity some students particularly younger children have to be informed about beliefs other than those held by their families.\n","id":"7be020c2-f01c-4278-bfac-db25ec6c23d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>These exemptions would also allow a health care provider to refuse treatment to an unmarried pregnant woman.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious exemptions to discrimination laws enable religious organisations to discriminate against women.\n","id":"0ce5b0fc-ee06-473d-b7b6-c24404557fd8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>\" when Eichmann entered upon his apprenticeship in Jewish affairs, on which, four years later, he was to be the recognized \"expert,\" and when he made his first contacts with Jewish functionaries, both Zionists and Assimilationists talked in terms of a great \"Jewish revival,\" a \"great constructive movement of German Jewry,\" and they still quarreled among themselves in ideological terms about the desirability of Jewish emigration, as though this depended upon their own decisions.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hannah Arendt describes Eichmann as a Zionist who spoke yiddish Arendt, p. 23\n","id":"c2ce7daa-9c37-44d7-bcca-47555a157865"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just to start off, I'm not American. I'm Brazilian born, living in Bulgaria, so this isn't out of being patriotic. But basically, the US has a HUGE tax rate on it's citizen, yet very little to show for it in social services, because it spends so heavily on the military. The American military helps protect not only America, but countless other countries. When I lived in Norway, while I doubt Russia would do anything anyways, I always felt comfortable knowing that America was an ally. The US has bases in many countries, helping to protect that country but also for strategic purposes as well. nbsp What the NSA does, basically means that it's easier for the US to do what it does, which is basically protecting so much of the Western world. While I'd love privacy, I'd rather more global politic stability than full privacy. I admit I'm uncomfortable how it seems like anyone in the NSA can use the information for private use, but I have nothing against the government or the military using it to stay informed and identify global threats. nbsp Basically, if there was no NSA collecting information, the US might have to spend more on the military. The information the NSA gathers means that the US defense is more efficient, which means either lower taxes or better public spending for the US, and it means helping to keep global stability. nbsp I'm not only going about terrorists, which is a concern ofcourse, but I believe a powerful US counters a powerful Russia and China. A powerful US helps keep countries like Norway and many others MUCH safer, so that Norway can afford to spend less on the military. Basically, I know the US protects other countries out of self interest as well, but if most of Western Europe had to spend much more on it's military because it did not have the US as an ally, that would mean either higher taxes which hurt the economy, or lower public spending. nbsp The NSA is a necessary evil. It can be controlled better so employees don't abuse it, but the job it does helps America do it's job, which, do correct me if I'm wrong, is a big reason for why most of us in the West can sleep well at night. nbsp And yes, yadda yadda yadda anyone who gives up freedom for safety deserves none etcetc , please, if you use that argument, back it up a bit more. It's easy to say you want more freedom and less safety when your house isn't the one bombed by another country, or when you haven't lost a wife, a father, a daughter or another family member due to a terrorist attack. It's easy to say we don't want to be safe We want freedom , when you have no idea what it's like to not be safe. nbsp I support a strong America. It's what allows countries like Norway to spend so much on health services. It's what allows countries like the Arab Emirates to basically have 0 tax. It's what allows countries to not have to spend as much on their own military. I'm willing to give up some privacy for safety, and either strong social services or a business friendly tax system. Plus, I doubt the US cares that I'm telling my girlfriend about this awesome new restaurant I found.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I support what the NSA does, it's not perfect, but it's a necessary evil.\n","id":"3260bca5-0f26-4a8a-b123-100b8a8c7b74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Many historians refer to the Middle Ages, the period that saw the rise of Christianity after the fall of the Roman Empire, with the critical attribution of \"Dark Ages\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has been the cause of many darkest periods of humanity.\n","id":"aed629c1-8315-4fa8-9011-7e984242e0bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Murder being morally wrong is determined by a consensus of opinions of the electorate, supported by politicians and written into the constitution of every country. I would argue that differences in circumstance and moral relativism will never make it a black and white issue. It's easy to think of it that way and most people take it for granted. Even in cases of genocide there was conviction on the part of the perpetrator that it was somehow morally justified, you and I may viciously disagree with their stance and international criminal courts might put them to death because of it but to them and at that moment it was the right thing to do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Premeditated 1st degree murder is never absolutely and objectively the wrong thing to do.\n","id":"3ae61019-1fe6-44d6-a1d9-511eec1fda56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>Obama introduced equal pay rules requiring large companies to disclose employee pay based on race and gender. In 2016, Clinton was also pushing for equal pay As such, it was clear that if Clinton won, she would likely strengthen Obama's equal pay policies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Compared to other candidates, Hillary Clinton was most likely to have preserved Obama's legacy.\n","id":"82b369b5-1ead-49fd-bd38-07615cc8551e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit update 9 1 16 My latest reply Well, I just got off the phone with my insurance and they cover everything 100 , nothing comes out of my pocket. I don't know what to type now and my tin foil hat has a wrinkle in it. This was resubmitted for approval, for whatever reason Sorry mods, I was just trying to update everyone so they wouldn't have to look through all of the replies. I fully believe that immunization is not only unsafe, but it's unhealthy. Here are some of the reasons that I believe that. Herd Immunization The problem with herd immunization is that people often do not look at the ones who've had something go wrong and are now suffering for the rest of their lives. We're literally brushing people under the carpet and when they speak out, a mob mentality shuts them down. Free Immunization In the US, immunization is not free and people have to pay out of pocket to get immunized. I fully believe that if immunization is such a good thing, then why is the government not willing to foot the bill? What about the poor or homeless who want to be immunized, but cannot be due to wanting to provide food and shelter for their families instead. Injection is a virus We all know immunization is injecting a virus, but why would we sacrifice our health and body to inject a substance that we have absolutely no clue about into our bodies? We're literally trusting another person with our own life and future just to be like the others . Again, we never hear about immunizations gone bad. Forcing vaccinations Governments are cutting benefits to people who do not immunize, children cannot get an education unless immunized. Why force something upon another person when we know that it could potentially destroy their whole life? Comparing should not be an option good vaccinations vs vaccinations gone bad , why vaccinate when the numbers tell you that your life could potentially be in complete ruins if your body doesn't like it, or they give you a tainted dose? So I'll open myself up to an , maybe you can change my view? Let's have an adult conversation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have not vaccinated in over 17 years and I view vaccinations as untrustworthy.\n","id":"2657c533-0672-4706-a769-28f5c54e346d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before you go on about \u201cMMA boxing whatever isn\u2019t a REAL fight, it\u2019s a bunch of rules for pussies\u201d or whatever, no one thinks it\u2019s a real fight. But it\u2019s close. And we can quantify the quality of a gym, dojo, he\u2019ll even school wrestling team by the amount of competitions they\u2019ve won, that among other reasons is why I say combat sports are superior for self defense. Let me get more specific We have no form of quality control for say, Krav Maga, or Silat because it\u2019s not contested. You can look up online to see if your coach or sensei has ever trained some huge MMA super star, or some champion boxer or something. And if your gym hasn\u2019t you can describe what your gym does to any community on Reddit dedicated to the sport and they can tell you right away if that style of training normally makes good fighters The rules aren\u2019t all designed to protect the fighters from injury, they are often times designed to encourage aggressive behavior to efficiently dominate an opponent without taking advantage of the context of the sport. That\u2019s why boxing breaks up the clinch because it\u2019s stalling, that\u2019s why in MMA they reset the fighters from across the cage if the fight is on the ground too long. Not only that, but you\u2019ll effectively learn how to stall and keep another person from stalling. In many styles of self defense they don\u2019t cover stalling at all, meaning that the practitioners may become overly reliant on it in sparring purely because it keeps them from getting punched as hard, when in reality it doesn\u2019t help you. Alternatively, they aren\u2019t taught how to counter someone from stalling, or how to stall in a fight effectively. Most techniques are directly translatable to dirty fighting, whereas over reliance on dirty fighting is not directly translatable to clean fighting Practicing a sport encourages you to become a better athlete than your potential opponent, and this is a huge part of a fight. Practicing \u201cdefense tactics\u201d does not encourage you to become the superior athlete all the time, and when it does it will not cover the same stamina that is directly applicable to the fight, it will cover basic cardio kickboxing stuff and not make you a genuine specimen of an athlete I have more points but I\u2019ll just leave you with this question, what makes your style of self defense martial art so superior to MMA or whatever sport style<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sport fighting like boxing, mma, etc. are generally better for self defense and street fighting than actual styles dedicated to it\n","id":"419237aa-73d2-4e01-86c2-7ba813a129c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think chiropractic is pseudo scientific. At least some chiropractors, probably most, sincerely believe they are practicing a legit form of medicine. Others MUST surely know they are bilking their patients and the insurance companies for as many manipulations and xrays as possible. By blurring the line, I am referring to initiatives and movements to allow chiropractors to prescribe medicine. What the hell is that about? This happened recently in New Mexico. Chiropractors fight tooth and nail for legitimacy and recognition e.g. by demanding needing to be called doctor even in a non professional environment . Through abuse of the legal system and the governmental bureaucracy, we have allowed these dangerous quacks to insert themselves into life and death medical issues. AND, it is not harmless tomfoolery either, because neck manipulations cause 100s if not 1000s of strokes every year. EDIT to be less combative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chiropractors are intentionally blurring the lines between mainstream medicine and alternative medicine.\n","id":"67c9c47e-f078-4131-89d8-de2713f026b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US government guarantee every citizen a job?<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of youth in poverty get their first job through a program and go on to other things rather than downhill. You could say the same for any disadvantaged group. It's a leg up to get them started.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Young people and ethnic minorities are most likely to be unemployed.\n","id":"2e13eab2-aa85-450b-865d-90a5e3de64f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>The founder of planned parenthood, Margaret Sanger was a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan and a proponent of eugenics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Historically, mainstream feminism has been against the interests of women of colour.\n","id":"f07aa872-23a7-4053-9d5c-b4598c32d039"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This Indiana Religious Freedom law has got me thinking. So let's run through a little hypothetical scenario. Let's say there is a couple whose wedding ceremony culminates in the bride and groom both LITERALLY shitting on the Qu'ran. Not figuratively, but literally dropping a big, fat deuce on the book of Muhammed \u2013 completely trashing it. Now, this very avant garde couple, wanting a nice cake for their special day, proceed to seek out a local catering company that just so happens to be owned and operated by a devoted Muslim man and wife. Upon hearing of the details of the ceremony, the Muslim man and wife decline, saying this would be disrespectful to their beliefs. They do not wish to be part of the ceremony. This, of course, SHOCKS and OFFENDS the couple, whose alternative lifestyle includes regularly shitting on the Qu'ran. How is this substantially much different than a Christian man wife not wanting to be part of a gay wedding?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious people should be able to refuse service on the basis of religious beliefs.\n","id":"fe2d78c1-415d-43dc-8862-9a4298213f4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US Customs and Immigrations Enforcement should be investigated for crimes against humanity<|ARGUMENT|>ICE takes its orders from the Department of Homeland Security, which is led by an administration cabinet member. Prosecuting ICE agents would not change the leadership's condoning of unlawful or immoral practices.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prosecuting ICE would not get to the root of the problem - only a change in leadership would eliminate these practices for good.\n","id":"de69cbaf-06bf-4caf-9396-2838fe598d7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States be the global police?<|ARGUMENT|>The focus of a global police force should be stopping violent international conflict: The US has killed more than 20 million people since WWII, some directly and some through the funding of terrorists<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States does not have the moral or legal authority to decide what is or isn't right for another country.\n","id":"afe11a64-5ff6-4b33-aba6-1784db3b3068"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mandatory Retirement<|ARGUMENT|>The most critical consideration for extending the generally accepted age of retirement to a mandatory age of 65 for all of society is to safeguard against the effects of old age on judges, surgeons and other professional practitioners. The age of 65 is chosen as an average age above which it is possible for people to experience problems with their physical or mental well-being. Mandatory retirement would protect against the detrimental effects that could be the result of mistakes or misjudgements by elderly professionals. Many argue that these professions have a great influence over the lives of many e.g. judicial decisions, surgical procedures, and there are at present insufficient safeguards to prevent against incompetence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The most critical consideration for extending the generally accepted age of retirement to a mandator...\n","id":"83dc1149-2930-418c-93eb-044382094a78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Sing Problematic Christmas Songs?<|ARGUMENT|>The context in which the song was written makes it clear the lyrics were not meant to apply to Africa as a whole.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The song makes reference to this suffering without explicitly stating that this applies to the entire population.\n","id":"9f4b11f3-7fdf-485f-a2b3-af10980bbfc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whilst I do believe that state schools also known as public schools in the US should not have a religious affiliation and should not proselytise to their students, I don't see why this ban should extend to the students themselves. In my opinion, an important part of secularism should be to allow individuals to practise their own religion, as long as they do not impose their beliefs on others. I don't think the act of wearing the clothes represents such an imposition on its own. Furthermore, I feel that a policy of banning religious clothing discriminates against minorities such as Sikhs and Muslims, who tend to wear much more visible religious clothing e.g. turbans and headscarves than Christians. I do have the following caveat In countries where religious dress is worn by the majority. I can see why you might want to ban it in schools to prevent peer pressure to conform. While, I feel that's a bit drastic, I don't think it's my place to comment either way. Ultimately, I want to discuss this issue from a western perspective today. Edit A couple of people have mentioned the kirpan I would like to clarify that religious freedom should not supersede existing laws against carrying knives in school. Edit2 A couple of people seem to think that I believe this is happening in the US. I would like to clarify here that I don't. This post is actually a response to the ban in France. I didn't originally mention France itself, as I wanted to keep the discussion more theoretical. If you feel that that was a mistake, tell me why below. Secondly, I am not American myself. The reason why I put the words US public in brackets is because where I am from the term public school actually refers to a private school. I appreciate that this wasn't as clear as it could have been and I hope that I've now cleared up the confusion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I see no reason to ban wearing of religious clothing in state US public schools.\n","id":"2c2b367e-0396-40aa-a404-ad4bdfb264d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should God Have Tested Job?<|ARGUMENT|>God couldn't do anything to stop Satan as Job sinned Job 1:5 allowing Satan, on the basis of God's permissive will, to test Job.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It was not God who tested Job, it was Satan\n","id":"d70877c9-b2a5-49a1-bcb8-9ed31dede644"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll grant you it's difficult to know whether a particularly crazy view is genuine or trolling see Poe's Law Given this, I prefer to take these crazy claims and let them be discussed, hoping that the community is mellow enough to allow cool heads to prevail. What's the harm particularly at a place like , designed for rational discussion of controversial topics in rationally talking about a claim, even if that claim is utterly wacky offensive ignorant hurtful? If there is demonstrable harm, where should one draw the line?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No claim is so harmful or crazy that merely discussing it at or elsewhere should be forbidden.\n","id":"36b05db6-75cd-464b-a68b-ae3477a5d72a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I go to school, and I have noticed that the school system puts a lot more focus on the common core tests and state tests on education. Although it is very good to improve our education, and I'am very for it, I feel as if physical education is being put off. If we look at facts from the CDC website I saw that In 2012, more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese . This needs to be changed. Not only do the common core standards must be changed but also the physical education aspect of schools. We only have Gym once a week,other weeks we have two ,but I have not had gym in weeks. that is not enough, we just eat lunch and go on our day sitting. I feel like we should increase our amount in gym time for a healthier nation in most schools.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel like US schools should put more focus on its physical education system.\n","id":"ec377011-5a85-44d4-84d0-0ea632283df1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Bible be considered a historical document?<|ARGUMENT|>The Jewish Talmud references the trial of Jesus and a common belief that he \"practiced sorcery\" This is an independent verification of the fact that many people believed in the supernatural powers of Jesus.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both the Greek Lucian of Samosata around 170 AD and the Jewish Talmud 200 AD to 500 AD confirm the existence of Jesus.\n","id":"03714aa8-b67b-4fcc-9612-c01ddf6cbf03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am mainly referring to the online mode not the single player campaign. The reason I think this is that the online mode of this game has no real problems. Most games that I have played I have always thought, I wish XYZ could be changed it would greatly improve the game , but in BC2 there is nothing that seems broken or unbalanced, which compared to most other MMS's is really unheard of. Aside from that, it is the only game in the genre to my knowledge that has well done destructible environments, wide variety of vehicles, realistic bullet physics and a focus on team play rather than one man army style gameplay. The reason for this  is I can hopefully learn about some other games that I might like to play<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is the pinnacle of Modern Military Shooters.\n","id":"154f092f-acc0-4cb8-a1e3-b67959340dd3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Bible be considered a historical document?<|ARGUMENT|>The British explorers George Mallory and Andrew Irving whose disappearance on Mount Everest still fascinates historians were last seen alive by a single witness whose account of their movements is impossible to verify. Historians still use this account to make arguments about the fate of the two men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many accounts of events given by sole witnesses are unverifiable. A historian might still use those accounts to make an argument about what happened.\n","id":"25966ef9-4586-46a6-9ad9-9e7f07e63899"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>There are non-biblical sources that refer to Jesus' miracles Josephus 37-101AD: \"he was a worker of amazing deeds\" Celsus 175AD: \"he acquired certain magical powers\" See this article that describes what can be learned about Jesus from non-biblical sources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jesus' deity must not be taken solely on faith. There is evidence of the deity of Jesus.\n","id":"4a760dcd-b9b7-49a8-92be-11661dc43676"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US President Have the Power to Self-Pardon?<|ARGUMENT|>The pardon power must be limited if the basic structure of government is to survive. The power to self pardon includes for example the power to murder every member of the House and Senate violations of Federal law if done in DC without legal redress.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a Constitutional Republic, the US government should allow no person or entity to be \"above the law.\"\n","id":"943efa1b-f0cb-4fea-b6dd-d85302995c13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Right now, I don't think it take a genius to realize that America's Political sphere is a fucking mess. Just objectively a fucking mess. It's creating tribalism among other Americans, pitting against one another. That is just not healthy for the country as a whole. I contribute this in part by the political parties and other part by the mainstream media. Fox news narrative is usually Liberals are trying to take away our values, our traditions, our rights as a free society or some other crazy shit. The left side is usually Conservatives are heartless heathens who want to take away your decency, make your life a living hell and rule over you like a tyrant. This shit just get exhausting to constantly hear, yet I know deep down both just want a better future for their country in two different way. Yet, more and more I watch this shit unfold people are jumping to conclusion yet are unwilling to listen to what the other sided has to say and that is just not healthy for our country. I think anyone who participates in this is objectively stupid, If I need to tell this person that it's not helping, then I don't I'm wrong in that regard. If we would eliminate both parties and just have a independent party we would effectively eliminate this tribalism. Because right now it's kinda like the middle east, they want to skull fuck each other over who was suppose to be the true successor of Muhammad, which is basically what America has become, who are the true Americans . I saw this joke on my friends facebook, It perfectly describes America right now. America has been around for 240 years, and we haven't killed ourselves yet. Good job America<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America should abolish the 2 party system small rant\n","id":"05b818ce-1548-45ad-97ec-29205da823d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is about capital punishment. I always thought I was against it, but in the case of Bart Whitaker it seems like real justice. Thomas Bart Whitaker got his roommate to kill his parents and little brother so he could have the family estate, estimated at being worth between 1 and 1.5 million in 2003 when the murders occurred. His brother was just 19 and idolised Bart. Bart's father survived, Bart's accomplices came forward, and now Bart is on death row, his final appeal denied and he will be executed next month. It seems fitting to me that he should have to die like this. That he should have to go through this kind of stress knowing that there's nothing he can do or say to get himself out of it. Bart's own father and extended family don't want him to be executed but I can't think of a better form of justice in the case of Bart Whitaker, or Thomas as he goes by now. So make me a better person and help me change my view. I used to believe that capital punishment should only be used for people like The Joker, where they keep on escaping the asylum over and over and killing more people, every week he escapes and kills more innocent people. But even if Bart never would kill anyone again I still think he deserves what he's getting next month.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that death row for Bart Whitaker, the young man who took out a hit on his own loving family, deserves to be executed and the stress pre-execution is fitting justice. In the case of Bart I think capital punishment is true justice.\n","id":"ad9e97ca-6afc-4622-861b-28bf9351f9e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd like to start this off by saying that I am NOT doing this to comment on the merit or validity of the policies of any of the candidates for president, nor am I endorsing one candidate over the other in this post. Of course Sanders supporters want Sanders to be president hence why they are Sanders supporters , so this effect of hugely boosting Republican chances is not at all intentional, but I think they are having as positive an influence as far as a Republican becoming president in 2016 is concerned as any Republican candidate could have themselves. I think this is solidified no matter who wins the Democratic or Republican nomination. FIRST , let's look at the ideal scenario for Sanders supporters despite a massive setback yesterday in Nevada, Sanders' campaign somehow does gains yet another massive swell of momentum in the week ish before Super Tuesday, does very well on that most important of the primary days, and carries that momentum on to win and win big in other states and convince some of Hillary's superdelegates to support him. Sanders, against all the odds, has won the Democratic nomination. This is a dream scenario not only for Sanders supporters, but for the Republicans as well. I know that Sanders is currently polling better against Republican candidates than Clinton is hell, r sandersforpresident hits everyone over the head with that as often as possible , but I don't buy that for a second. One of the main reasons Sanders is polling ahead of Clinton among general election polls is that Republicans have spent maybe an hour each talking about Sanders while they have spent the last decade ish attacking Clinton. While that might seem that it hurts Clinton, it also means that Clinton has pretty much hit her bottom as far as the right's opinion of her is concerned. Anything further said against her just isn't going to lower her standing much more than what has already been tossed around. Sanders, however, is a yet to be opened Christmas present for Republicans. He's a self styled Socialist, and even if the socialism he espouses isn't the socialism that the United States was terrified of in the 1950s, socialism is still a very dirty word to the majority of the country. That alone might cost him the race. Tack on to that the fact that the rest of his stances outside of economics climate change, foreign policy, civil rights are far left of where most of the country stands, and he would give the Republicans a literal field day when attacking him, and I have no doubt that his numbers would plummet. Finally, he's an agnostic Jew. And while that shouldn't really have any bearing in a country that is secular by the demands of the constitution, it is still a dealbreaker for many. Whether you agree or not that this should be the case, you have to be a Christian to win a national election in the United States at this point in time. And Sanders isn't. In addition to that reasoning, these political scientists who know a lot more than I do also give their views on why Sanders supporters claims of his electability are massively over exaggerated. To sum up and bring it back to my original point , Sanders has very little shot in the general election in my mind, and his supporters, if they got him the Democratic nomination, would have unintentionally given the Republicans their dream candidate to run against and have also given the Republican candidate's chances of winning the White House a massive boost. SECOND , let's move on to the far more likely scenario Hillary Clinton, after restoring some order to her campaign with a victory in Nevada, gets the Democratic nomination as many expected all along. Here, I think, Sanders supporters have done the most damage, because while Sanders himself has very admirably refrained from attack politics, his supporters most certainly have not. The front page of reddit is constantly flooded with posts about how evil or corrupt or manipulative Hillary Clinton is, and those posts are not just from r sandersforpresident or r politics which might just as well be called r sandersforpresident2 . This is not only limited to reddit, as twitter and facebook are constantly hit with the same kind of posts, and many of Sanders' supporters also take these views with them when they go to march or demonstrate or rally. And while this may increase their enthusiasm for Sanders, crucially it is also making them despise Hillary. Which means that when Hillary wins the Democratic nomination, many Sanders supporters will have such negative opinions of her that they either won't vote at all or they'll vote for the Republican candidate or a third party candidate. The vitriol being spewed towards Hillary, warranted or not, is going to massively increase voter apathy among the left especially the young left once Hillary wins the nomination, and therefore the efforts of Sanders supporters to paint Hillary as worse than Sanders will end up being a massive boost for however the Republican nominee ends up being. TO SUM IT ALL UP, Sanders supporters are unintentionally providing a massive boost towards the Republicans' chances of winning the presidency in 2016. Sanders is a much less electable candidate than Hillary in a general election, so if he gets the nomination his supporters will have boosted the GOP's chances in that way, and if Hillary wins the nomination, the amount of attacks and negativity that Sanders' supporters have launched at Hillary will lead to a huge amount of voter apathy among those who supported Sanders, therefore providing the Republicans with a massive boost in that way. Once again, I am not here to comment on which candidate I agree with most, the validity of Sanders' supporters attacks on Clinton, whether they are doing this intentionally, or whether or not a Republican in the White House would be a bad thing. I am just here to say that I believe that Sanders' supporters are providing a massive boost to Republican chances of winning the presidency this year. Change My View. Edit Remember, people, downvotes don't change views. So far all I've gotten are downvotes, no reasons or arguments except for one that I frankly don't agree with at all and think that data, not just opinion, refutes easily.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bernie Sanders supporters are doing everything they possibly can to make sure a Republican wins the White House in 2016.\n","id":"b53bacd8-d9a1-4a15-bf32-f41c2895c2c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Michigan and Florida delegates in 2008 US elections<|ARGUMENT|>There are many potential pitfalls of a re-vote, ranging from the avoidance of punishing Michigan and Florida for breaking the rules, to the costs involved in a re-vote, to the potential for conflicts of interests with the money that would be raised from private interests. Splitting the delegates would be a neat solution to these concerns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Splitting the votes would avoid the pitfalls of a re-vote.\n","id":"134b4b3c-b03c-4394-9d83-5bde516234d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should India have a UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A carer in the house which is usually a women in India would get their income from taxes given by the person who is working.amp.scroll.in<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In India, a UBI would improve gender equality, as poorer incomes are typically earned by women.\n","id":"da0dc31d-e180-4efd-a175-0e579613c633"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ammonia fuel<|ARGUMENT|>Ammonia can be readily liquefied under only modest pressure at room temperature and can be stored in tanks similar to those used for LPG. Hydrogen needs to be cooled down to 20K in order to be liquefied, which translates into substantial energy losses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ammonia can be stored and handled much easier than hydrogen.\n","id":"f01deb95-a68e-4528-a052-87f69e432815"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I assume that we all want our children to become compassionate people who can muster empathy for others, even animals. We teach them it is wrong to inflict pain on the cat or dog, and yet we buy them the products of a multibillion dollar industry that profits from the rape mechanical insemination , torture castration, branding and debeaking without anesthesia and murder slaughter of billions of animals each year and will let them buy those products when they are old enough. A lot of people aren't even aware of the amount of suffering animals undergo on a daily basis ironically so because it is so damn difficult to watch an innocent animal being horribly mistreated. So difficult, that we turn to look the other way. Instead of encouraging compassion for all life, we basically teach them that some creatures do not get the same level of compassion than others. I understand omnivore parents don't actually teach them this, but vegan children are taught the opposite. When we teach our children that animals are lesser beings compared to us, and that we can use and abuse them because they have less cognitive skills, or they are just so different from us, we lay the groundwork for sexist, homophobic and racist thinking. When we teach them that God made animals for us to mistreat so badly, we lay the groundwork for religious oppression and violence. However, a vegan diet fits any spirituality or religion, as well as atheism. A vegan child will also learn independent thinking, not doing whatever everyone else is doing because everyone else is doing it. They are taught to 'be the change you want to see in the world', and how much impact the animal product industry has on the environment. gt A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said here Veganism is a personal sacrifice for the good of all Life, a hard sacrifice for most of us who were raised with milk, eggs and bacon, but a generous gift to a child who will most likely never know what he she is missing. Today, there are so many amazing vegan products on the market, and so many delicious recipes online, that children won't have to watch in agony how others feast on donuts, ice cream, cheeseburgers, etc. while all they have for a snack is a head of broccoli. The vegan food product industry is booming and vegan chefs are regular first prize winners in cooking contests. The food is simply no longer something to scoff at, instead it is in my experience so much more fun to make cookies or muffins in the kitchen these days and our daughter can taste test everything Which leads me to my final point health gt In their 5th Edition 2004 of the Pediatric Nutrition Handbook, the American Academy of Pediatrics says Children exhibit good growth and thrive on most lacto ovo vegetarian and vegan diets when they are well planned and supplemented appropriately. Chapter 12 Nutrition Aspects of Vegetarian Diets, p. 194 gt In their 2009 Position Paper, Vegetarian Diets, the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada state Well planned vegan, lacto vegetarian, and lacto ovo vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy and lactation. Appropriately planned vegan, lacto vegetarian, and lacto ovo vegetarian diets satisfy nutrient needs of infants, children, and adolescents and promote normal growth. I don't think I need to elaborate on the unhealthy effects of animal products, especially when regular trips to fast food restaurants are concerned, and I think most readers will be aware of the childhood obesity epidemic in the USA. When responsible parents take good care of dishing up a variety of nutritious foods, vegan children thrive. Animal based vitamins like B12 can be supplemented in much the same way omnivore parents supplement their omnivore children, and a lot of soymilks or other vegan food products are fortified with essential vitamins and minerals. The basics of a vegan diet, such as beans, grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds do not break the bank. You don't have to shop at wholefoods to eat a healthy vegan diet, and of course you can also eat a very unhealthy vegan diet. It is the parent's responsibility to make sure a child's nutritional needs are met, and damaging foods are avoided. Lastly, when it comes to medicine, that is a whole different ball game. If a child requires essential medicine to overcome a serious disease, a medicine that contains an animal product, I would not hesitate to give it to her. Anyway, so here you go, this is why I believe it is bad parenting to raise omnivore children.  edit1 2 3 formatting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it is bad parenting to raise omnivore children. !\n","id":"c0599f4a-0680-4fda-8752-058c06725352"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>The belief that abortion is murder is inherently intolerant of the view that it is not since murder is outlawed in modern society, if one truly believes that abortion is murder they cannot allow others to commit the act just because they have differing views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many beliefs are themselves inherently intolerant and require neither fanaticism nor extremism to cause problems.\n","id":"4ec115dd-50a1-4c22-94cd-c8bb773e93fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>More than a handful of times I have been driving and stopped at a red light and been forced to wait for it to change before I could go. In urban areas this usually lasts less than a minute, but out in rural areas these lights can last for several minutes at a time. It would make more sense for red lights to be treated as stop signs as in the pathway of the green light has right of way, but if there isnjo one there the people waiting at the red light can file through as if it were a stop sign. My reasons are 1 It would cut down on cars idling. Especially in large quantities. 2 It would help reduce traffic congestion. Of course people would still have to obey signs like No Right Turn on Red Lights because those are usually there because of a blind corner where you can't tell if someone is coming, and pedestrians would still have priority over the people at the red light. The argument I see as being most effective against this is but it would be confusing to change the rules in which case I remind people of roundabouts and that people used that same argument against them, yet roundabouts are a godsend during rush hour. Edit I'm not talking about replacing stop lights with 4 way stops. That would be idiocy. I'm talking about letting those waiting at a red light go if there is no one coming down the green light pathway.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It makes more sense for red lights to be treated similar to stop signs\n","id":"7bde1370-80ab-4bbb-be43-2f47240ee830"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trophy Hunting Be Illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Hunting for survival and hunting for prestige have two different motivations. There are better ways to prove your worth to the group than putting down an animal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hunting and killing animal for sport was not an impulse, but an orchestrated public display of royal wealth and dominance by kings over beasts.\n","id":"b6d239aa-d042-4c35-9ed0-6bcff31c9198"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Wikipedia valuable?<|ARGUMENT|>- Wikipedians don't try to own the additions they make to Wikipedia. They are working together on statements of what is known what constitutes free human knowledge about various subjects. Each of us individually benefits from this arrangement. It is difficult to write the perfect article single-handedly, but it becomes easier when working together. Hence the saying \"Many hands makes light work.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wikipedia is not for individual prose, but superior collective knowledge.\n","id":"4a253b70-b05a-4cf6-8d0a-17b2507429f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This came up as I was reading a post in r sex and I decided to bring my opinion here when I realized I was on the fence. I see both sides of the argument and, as a guy, I often feel like nobody sees the male side of the story in todays world where feminism and liberal ideas are spreading rapidly. Let me clarify I am not opposed to these movements, but rather I feel like often the white, male perspective is disregarded because we are the ones society has favored in the past. Here are the present options, as I see them, when two people accidentally get pregnant Woman wants kid and man wants kid have kid Woman wants kid and man doesn't have kid and guy pays support Woman doesn't want kid and guy DOES want kid no kid, she gets to choose Woman doesn't want kid and guy doesn't either no kid As you can see, in the two agreements, there are no problems. Otherwise, the woman always wins and the guy just deals with it, despite the fact that the mistake was equal parts the mans and woman's responsibility. I do not think, NOT AT ALL, that forcing an abortion is okay. So if the woman wants to have it, there should never be a situation where she does not. But if the guy doesn't want it, I believe he shouldn't be obligated to pay child support. After all, if the woman did not want the kid, she wouldn't, and would not be financially burdened or committing career suicide, whether the guy wanted the kid or not. I understand that she bears the child, but why does the woman always have the right to free herself of the financial and career burden when the man does not have this option unless the woman he was with happens to also want to abort the child, send it for adoption, etc? I feel like in an equal rights society, both parties would have the same right to free themselves from the burden. MY CAVEAT WOULD BE The man must file somewhere before the date that the abortion has to happen I have no idea if this is within 2 months of pregnancy or whatever but whenever it is that he does not want the child. He therefore cannot decide after committing for 8 months that he does not wish to be financially burdened and leave the woman alone. This way, the woman would have forward notice that she must arrange to support the child herself if she wanted to have it. Here is how that new system would work, as I see it Woman wants and guy wants have it, share the bills Woman wants, guy doesn't have it, woman takes all the responsibility Woman doesn't want it, guy wants it no kid, even if the guy would do all the paying and child raising after birth Woman doesn't want it, guy doesn't want it no kid As you can see, even in the new system, the woman wins every time. She has the option to have a kid and front all the bills if her partner doesn't want it, whereas the guy does not have that option in the section I marked with . This is because I agree that since it is the woman's body, she can abort without permission. Again, this means it is not truly equal. The man can't always have the kid he made by accident if he wants, and the woman can. The only difference is that she has to front the costs and responsibilities if the man is not on board, whereas the guy just doesn't get a child if the woman is not on board. I understand the argument for child support 100 and I would guess I'll have a lot of backlash with the no child support argument I have made, but it makes the situation far MORE fair, even though the woman still has 100 of the decision making power, which is unfair in a world where we strive for equal rights for the sexes. It is just as much a woman's and man's responsibility to prevent pregnancy, so if it happens, both parties should suffer the same circumstances in the agree disagree scenarios I laid out earlier. Of course, my girlfriend still thinks this is wrong, despite my according to me logical comparison between the present and new scenarios.  It is late where I am so if I only respond to a few before tomorrow, it is because I fell asleep. My apologies. I will be reading these in the waiting room to several appointments of mine tomorrow too<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men should be exonerated relieved or absolved from paying child support if they report that they do not want the baby before the abortion cutoff time\n","id":"ba634897-813d-4e24-a581-6f9677fe6e6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>You would have to tell your friends and acquaintances, when asked, all their flaws, which would reduce their self-confidence significantly and would cause a lot of jealousy and distress.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everybody always telling the truth, would make for a much worse society.\n","id":"e8ec9b9e-b3b0-4792-aa76-c0b122b3daa8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most people I know say they want money. That if only they had enough money that they wouldn't have to work, they would be eternally happy. Yet, we have the cliche money doesn't buy happiness for a reason. For instance, the suicide rate among wealthy individuals is higher than among middle class or poor individuals. People who are in middle class, who think they want to be rich, lack perspective. They are already richer than most humans who have ever lived, and billions of people around the world right now. No matter how much money or success you have in life, you will always want more. It seems fundamental to human nature. If I decide my chair kinda sucks, and I purchase a new chair, I will be happy about my excellent new chair for a day, maybe a week. But very soon, it will simply become the norm for me, and I will forget I have this lovely new chair. This is why people always want more than what they have, because what they already have is the norm and so they forget how rich they already are. I believe this is just a specific instance human greed of a more generalized pattern of human behavior. Even if you have everything in the world, the human brain will manufacture problems that you need to solve, and depending on what is the norm for you, the problem of needing to find food and shelter is just as SUBJECTIVELY big a problem as a bird pooping on the roof of your 5th Tesla Model S. Would love to hear other perspectives on this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone's life is generally as hard as everyone else's.\n","id":"cfa2733b-1ebc-4fa4-998d-e88566813f03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not talking about people who want to breed their pets. I occasionally meet people who claim to be 'pet lovers', and as such absolutely refuse to spay neuter their pets. A friend of mine went so far as to call it 'cruel and disgusting' and I laughed in her face because in my opinion she is just so wrong. I've never been able to understand the arguments against it, maybe if I did I'd be able to form another opinion about the situation. Neutering Spaying keeps dogs who's owner don't want puppies from well reproducing. It's irresponsible to bring happy, healthy puppies into the world only to abandon them. Thousands of animals in shelters are put down every year, it's immoral to contribute to that. The procedure is common, safe and inexpensive, it eliminates many hormone related behavioral problems in pets instinctual behaviors which they can't help, often followed by the owner scolding them for it and there's no compelling reason not to do it. I believe that many people who are against neutering are assigning human emotions to their pets, when that's simply not appropriate. Dogs do not have the same urge to 'start a family', nor do they have the emotional desire to have children. They aren't going to feel 'left out' because everyone else is having babies and they are not, that's silly. Owners who claim they 'keep an eye on their pet enough to make sure they aren't having sex' are naive and are not accounting for the very real possibility that a trip to the dog park and a 10 minute distraction like a telephone call can end in pregnancy. Keeping a pet intact and not allowing it to mate is a different form of cruel in my opinion. Bitches in heat have only one agenda, unneutered male dogs cannot resist a female in heat. To keep them from mating when every instinct is telling them to is wrong. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people who consider spaying\/neutering their pets 'cruel' are wrong and ignorant.\n","id":"51755b7b-3e1e-462d-afc7-4c8329cbc5cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The Media Be Forced To Report More Positive News?<|ARGUMENT|>Spin-doctors and lobbyists usually emphasize the positive aspects of a news story and tend to suppress negative aspects or facts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most positive news stories act as a form of public relations, which is not the function of journalism.\n","id":"a6857043-73a9-44e1-b686-40e900501973"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I define identity based politics as a psychological, emotional form of politics based on membership or personal identification with a group, preference for the in group, and othering, or otherwise deprioritizing the needs or rights of the out group. I do not like this form of politics but I have to admit that most forms of politics in recent history are based on some idea real or imaginary of shared identity. Unfortunately, it cannot be beaten for the simple reason that it takes two sides to agree to set aside identity, but only one side to make it relevant. Let's say I am Chinese and Taki is Japanese. I can choose to make my Chinese identity relevant and treat Taki different because of his Japanese identity. In this case Taki has no choice but to acknowledge his Japanese identity because I am treating him differently because of it, and he cannot control my behavior. Similarly, if I don't care about nationality but Taki treats me differently because I am Chinese, there's nothing I can do about it once again, I have to acknowledge that my identity is relevant. The third option is that we both choose to treat each other differently based on nationality in this case nationality is relevant. The fourth and final option is that we both act as if it really is irrelevant in this case it truly becomes irrelevant. But this is only 1 scenario out of 4 possible outcomes, and it can't be brought about by either one of us alone. Therefore, I myself cannot decide to beat identity politics, as I cannot prevent other people from continually making it relevant. The same reasoning applies with groups Even if a whole group of people decided that identity wasn't relevant, they wouldn't be able to prevent another group from making it relevant again. The only loophole around this problem is if there were a single world government and the government forced everyone to abandon their identities. It would force me to disregard my Chinese nationality, and Taki to disregard his Japanese nationality. However, this would require an authoritarian one world government that controlled people's lives. This is not the realm of forseeable reality. Therefore, identity politics is a tragedy that we are all trapped into, and the best option is to pick an identity that works for you. The good news is that there are all sorts of identities out there very different from the nationalistic ones used in my example and probably some of them are worth following.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Identity-based politics can never be beaten and the best option is to pick an identity that works for you\n","id":"200ab7b6-c5f1-43f8-951e-e82b3050fbc2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The cost of disengaging from religious life in terms of standard of life is much cheaper than to socially disengage from: consumer capitalism, since its reach and effect on economic thought and practice is both profound and global; or etatism since sovreign states claim almost all landmass on earth and demand displays of loyalty like obeying laws you didn't choose or paying taxes, the amount of which or where it goes you have no way to influence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion can emancipate and liberate the human mind from other forms of social control.\n","id":"6ddc2597-19d0-4035-a99c-180a4e674ffa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT I'm sorry, I forgot to write a complete title If a mod can change it, make it There is no point in learning since we can't be sure of our existing knowledge. Sorry for bad use of the English language, it's not my native language. Some context I study mathematics at University, currently studying for the semester's exams, so I guess that the following can be extended to sciences in general. Today there was this flash of questioning myself If I cannot be sure of what I know. and I cannot be sure and trully there is no way to test that I deeply understand^ 1 the topic I study, then there is no point in studying mathematics or any science at all, since there is no meaning in trying to learn new things when you can't even be sure of your previous, smaller knowledge. I've asked a lot of classmates about this, and the usual answer was that they don't know if they understand, but they seem extremely comfortable with that, like it doesn't matter. I feel like, indeed, it shouldn't matter, but I can't see why. Any help is appreciated. 1 if that could happen, it means that I could be able to understand my understandment on that topic, which creates a vicious circle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I cannot be sure what\n","id":"77d0ef8a-28ef-49be-b427-a29118dd9e68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hunger Games-Style Tournaments Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>People do something crazy with their looks, such as always carrying a cat on the shoulder like Nancy Lang<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People do ridiculous things to get famous already even though it is lethal.\n","id":"014c0269-f99d-4f75-911a-d32767c8116f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The contemporary progressive movement almost seems to be more concerned with policing itself than with defeating their political adversaries, who are not at all shy about using the mechanisms of state power to subordinate others. So called progressives make the claim that direct actions that do damage to their political adversaries are counter productive, yet I can find few examples in history of instances when the people managed to reshape society for the better through entirely pacifist means. On friday, we saw wide spread condemnation from progressives of radicals who destroyed the property of multi national corporations like the Bank of America one of the banks that committed massive amounts of fraud and was rewarded with taxpayer money for doing so. This demonstrates a key point people's movements remain handicapped when they demand that activists follow the letter of the law, while those in power remain unfettered from the law due to their privileged position in society. Most of us, at least in the United States, look favorable upon the American revolutionaries. We remember the Boston Tea Party, and are taught about it at a young age in our public schools. Progressives revere the men and women who fought for labor rights in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that they often broke the law to do so even engaging in armed resistance at points in the struggle . Though, it seems as though we are unwilling to take this revolutionary spirit and apply it to the present day. What gives? How is this not counter productive? That's not to say that I am not conflicted about lawless actions. Things can often be taken too far. There are few reasons to condone preemptive acts of violence against people. And, yes, optics are important. But, if all you ever do is march, without causing the least bit of disruption or disorder, what does that tell those in power? It tells them that you can be easily managed. It tells them that there will be no consequences, no matter how despotic they become. So long as they let you march, they are free to subjugate whoever they please. These are views that I honestly don't want to have. I'd rather believe people are better. So let's here it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Progressive movements are shooting themselves in the foot when they reflexively condemn more radical forms of direct action like property destruction.\n","id":"23ba278f-ada0-455f-845d-bf86f4825db0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that all children should be allowed to independently vote for their representatives in government. I can see 2 parts to this argument, but when more people bring up points I think of more points I\u2019ll edit it into the post. There\u2019s a concern that we aren\u2019t really democratic if kids can\u2019t vote, a concern that if kids get to vote then the country will be renamed \u201cElmo land\u201d or some stupid law will be put into place. We, as humans, have experienced multiple leadership styles. We have currently settled on democracy because we feel that \u201cabsolute power corrupts absolutely\u201d, we feel that one person cannot be expected or trusted with the interests of another person. If one person was to have all the power, or specific groups or races of people were completely blocked from influencing the leadership decisions of the country then they will be mistreated and their interests will be ignored. A good example of this was the treatment of black people in the US. They weren\u2019t allowed to vote and so, for the vast majority of US history, black people were abused and discriminated against. Since black people have been allowed to vote things have rapidly improved for them as the leaders of the US have taken their interests into account since if they don\u2019t, they will get voted out of office. This is the best example I could think of, im not saying that kids are abused because they don\u2019t get to vote, but when politicians think about us they only think about us with the intention of gaining sympathy from adult voters who will see that politician as considerate and kind. There\u2019s a very interesting video named \u201cThe Rules for Rulers\u201d by CGP Grey. If you don\u2019t want to watch it, the main take away from that video is that as a ruler, you shouldn\u2019t spend money, time and resources on things that don\u2019t keep you in power, because at the end of the day \u201cthe only job of a president is to get re elected\u201d. The video says that a dictator should not spend money on the populace because they are not the \u201ckeys to power\u201d, it doesn\u2019t matter how happy or angry the population is, if you\u2019re a dictator you are kept in power by the military, therefore you should spend your money on paying the military. Money you spend on the population is money that a rival can promise to the military who will then depose you. Tl Dr focus your efforts on the people who keep you in power. When a section of the community does not vote in a democracy, their attitudes, wishes, and desires do not matter to the politicians who are are trying to get into power. We can be as angry, as fed up, as violent as we want to be. But the politicians do not and are incentivised not to care see above paragraph . We have absolutely no say in who leads the country. There is of course the counter argument that parents look after the rights of children. And if anything harmed kids then the adults will stop it. For example if the government made a law declaring that everyone under the age of 18 should be imprisoned then of course the adults will make sure the politician who proposed it gets thrown out of office. But if you read my earlier argument you see that I made the point \u201cdemocracies exist because history has taught us that we can never trust one person to make the decisions of another\u201d. On to the main counter argument that is probably going to get raised. 5 year olds are not mature enough to vote and will get taken advantage of by their parents. Lets break that down. The fear is that people will be so young that they do not understand the democratic process and do not understand the effects of their own actions. To that I say that im not saying everyone 5 year old has to vote. Im saying that they should be given the option to do so. Different people mature at different rates, its entirely possible that in the future 5 year olds will be mature enough. If you apply this to our current situation, anyone under 18 cannot vote. Probably because of the idea that they are not mature enough, but I think we can all agree that there are 17 year olds that are more mature than 18 year olds and that a sizeable portion of the current voting population will probably agree that 17 year olds should get to vote. The main idea is that age is an arbitrary number and I feel that if someone has strong enough opinions to want to take part in the democratic process then they should be allowed to and if they don\u2019t care or cannot yet comprehend governments and the law then they don\u2019t have to vote. The second part of that argument is that parents and other adults will take advantage of their children. And the defence is that happens whether or not the person is under or over the age of 18. It doesn\u2019t matter what age you are but you will always be heavily influenced by the political leanings of your family and friends. And you will still be influenced by misinformation and political advertising. Another major argument against lowering the voting age is stupid laws. The belief that if kids were allowed to vote then the world will descend into anarchy and stupid laws will be made. But democracy isn\u2019t a system of whatever you say goes, it\u2019s a system where majority rules. You can have people in your country who believe in ethnic cleansing. But that does not mean your country will allow ethnic cleansing. If the people who believe in ethnic cleansing remain in the minority and your country has a functioning democracy there will always be more votes against allow ethnic cleansing then there are votes for it. Just because there is a small section of the voters who want to, for example ban schools or some crazy thing like that, it doesn\u2019t mean it will happen because the majority of the population understand that school is important. For the sake of simplicity, we assume that everyone over the age of 18 supports normal laws, and everyone under the age of 18 supports crazy weird laws, the country will not be destroyed because there will always be more people over the age of 18 then there are under the age of 18. And when there isn\u2019t, then your going to have to worry about more than just crazy laws because you\u2019re going to have trouble growing enough food to feed your population as you don\u2019t have enough people to work. I know this may be a controversial topic, but please stay away from insults, including stuff like kids are just too dumb to vote .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone should be allowed to vote, regardless of age\n","id":"850f4acb-d119-4fab-a218-2e3505059df2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Reading a novel and watching a movie are in my view very similar. A typical argument would be how much more engaging a book is because you're using your imagination to form scenes and develop characters, but I think readers generally take that concept to a level that simply doesn't exist. I dont read for pleasure, because it takes the writer 9 pages to explain what 3 frames on a tv could. Maybe you redditors are thinking well, they always leave out the detailz the movie was so bad cause they didn't depict it how I did in my head Well Mr. Redditor, there are people out there with multimillion dollar budgets, talent, and years of training to make a well thought out, and skilled piece of art that puts the imagination on the page. In my view, this power to make a reality within a frame, as well as 21st century Hollywood does, makes this somewhat of an evolution in story telling and visualization. Change my view. EDIT So far, I've only been reminded that there are pros to a book and it has qualities that will never be replaced by a movie. I would like to say that I don't disagree with that but also specify what I mean by out date I'm saying as an entertainment medium, as in actually portraying the material to the audience, books are an outdated form. A visual stimulus of what is happening creates a more direct approach to exactly what is suppose to be seen. EDIT 2 ~~ I'm comparing books to movies as I would vinyls to mp3s. That's what I mean by outdated. Audio buffs would argue that the sound is more pure and rich compared to mp3s, and I would argue many of the points below are similar to the argument of an audio buff.~~Movies are just an easier way to convey more things in less words. Efficiency. And while there's still things to hold onto with a book, having a mental and personal narrative and such, things books can do are not always needed in terms of entertainment. Edit 3 strikethrough because example was taken too literally.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Books are becoming an outdated form of entertainment.\n","id":"c7e1dfde-14d6-4501-8abe-9e20a22c93a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Karma is earned based on something withy, smart, interesting or fun thing among other things the other stranger says as far as I can tell. Being acknowledged for it by a stranger is far more 'worth' than a Facebook like in which most of the time friends and family 'like' that you are doing something with your life achieving something, going on holidays etc. , they will like it because you expect it and they like you as a person sometimes not even that and thus 'cheer you on'. Personally I noticed that I am way happier with 'upvotes' than 'likes', while knowing that both are just fictional internet points. This in turn made me think of this 'statement'. Is there something I am missing in my opinion? Can the two even be compared? Does someone else experience it the other way around?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Karma on reddit is 'worth' more than likes on Facebook\n","id":"3acaa786-16a1-492a-9bbd-e827ee41e6c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While most people are still babbling about neuroplasticity basically just 'practice makes perfect' Natural Neurogenesis has taught us that we can generate brand new, more powerful neurons brain cells naturally through prolonged intense exercise. Combined with focusing on a goal, this blows the doors off of anything else I have heard of today regarding brain health and exercises to stay focused and sharp. I am surprised more people don't know about it. Is there anything you know of that is even greater than this in focusing the mind in a healthy and natural way? I don't think so so  gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Neurogenesis is the future of cutting edge brain training.\n","id":"01994295-2b7d-4ec2-a218-2a79a0a33e3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Health insurance cooperatives<|ARGUMENT|>\"Co-ops, Exchanges, Gateways, and The Need For A Public Plan\". The Walker Report. August 14, 2009: \"Despite efforts to negotiate lower premiums, cooperatives have only been able to offer premiums that are comparable to those in the general small group market. The cooperatives we reviewed typically did not obtain overall premium reductions because 1 their market share provided insufficient leverage, 2 they could not produce administrative savings for insurers.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Health insurance co-ops have difficulty controlling costs and premiums\n","id":"d16cac94-b325-4601-8cb2-ea679219beff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>there are a lot of posts lately about fake news and russian trolls. I know this has a lot of impact on public opinion and causes many people to misunderstand the world, and even gets ping pong shops shot up by idiots. That said, it is my view that any effort to combat fake news by edit it, or by censoring it, it worse than having it just exist. it is my contention that if we start picking what is Fake and what is real, we will get to a slippery slope that will inevitably restrict our discourse more than would happen if we just allowed idiots to say their piece even if they dont have good intent i do think the best way to fight fake news is with more real news, but that's not what this argument is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"for the most part, fake news and russian trolls should be tolerated, because the fighting them causes more harm than good.\n","id":"8a126536-7fa3-4745-8821-9be11b006ba2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Calvinism makes perfect sense. It is the definitive form of Christian belief.<|ARGUMENT|>T.U.L.I.P.: Limited Atonement. The best explanation for all the unsaved horrendous demonic behaving people is that the atonement is not for each person. Some are just so evil, as history and society reveal. Atonement is not meant for such horrendous evildoers as daily hit the newspapers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Calvinism makes perfect sense. It is the definitive form of Christian belief and religion. God approves.\n","id":"385a08d2-f8be-403d-86fc-797772e95e8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Could the universe have only been created by a divine creator?<|ARGUMENT|>The concept that the universe has no beginning or end is supported by many prestigious physicists<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scientific theories support the idea that the universe has no beginning and no end.\n","id":"ff7f9a37-e11b-4648-bbcd-19107e3a3399"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Human Interaction be Voluntary?<|ARGUMENT|>The Non-Aggression Principle is the moral stance that individuals are free to act as they choose with the exception that they may not initiate force, or the threat of force, against another person or their property.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A system can be based on a NAP non-aggression principle.\n","id":"0b88489c-3e23-407c-9e4d-79a519459998"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Having spent a lot of time reading arguments from both Christians and atheists, I've realized that most Christians recognize their lack of a scientific basis for their claims. So this begs the question, why do so many people continue to believe something that they know can be proven false? Some of the most common arguments Christians seem to make are just asking questions of an atheist. They'll ask things like, where do atheists get their morality or they'll reference Pascal's wager. Obviously, neither of these arguments pertain to the validity of their religion. I think that the fact that these are the arguments people use to justify believing in a religion just shows that they believe in the religion only because it would be too difficult to accept morality or mortality for what they really are without some eternal presence after people die. Believing that morality really does just come from electrical impulses in the brain or that once someone dies they are truly gone forever are very scary things for people and they can be hard to accept, even for atheists. I think that is why religion remains so popular in a culture that is otherwise fairly accepting of scientific findings. No one is willing to accept their own mortality or that the good they do will go unrewarded so they allow themselves to rationalize all of the contradictions, obviously false historic events, and cruelty that the Bible contains. I know I was referencing Christianity in this post, but this applies to all religions. I've just generally only talked to Christians about this type of thing EDIT When I say a religion can be proven false I mean that certain parts of most religious texts can be proven false, not the existence of some deity or power governing the universe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is just a crutch\n","id":"84b269df-4aa8-4165-8373-20be2426fb7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm talking of course about those who claim that members of special military units and practitioners of different self defense programs would be able to neutralize everything a pro does by using simple techniques such as eye gouges,nut shots,and some supposed killer instinct that combat sports athletes lack. Here are the problems i have with this point of view 1 The techniques in which they supposedly have an advantage over MMA fighters aren't exactly sophisticated and aren't something that you can spar and drill to the point of mastery What exactly makes the self defense guy an expert at these techniques ? repeated simulations and what if scenarios ? 2 To be able to execute these techniques, the self defense guy would need to have a perfect understanding of the main fundamentals of fighting Striking,wrestling, submissions ,and the pro fighter will have an advantage in this aspect. An open hand eye gouge is impossible to land against an elite striker used to dodging jabs and head kicks or a wrestler shooting for a takedown . An elite Jui jitsu fighter or catch wrestler can easily secure a dominant position over his opponent and neutralize any eye gouge joint manipulation neck press attempt . 3 Why didn't we see these self defense systems in the Pre rules MMA era ? Vale tudo tournaments in Brazil and Japan allowed Groin strikes and eye gouges up until the late 90's .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Practitioners of Self defense programs stand no chance against trained pro fighters in a street fight.\n","id":"bec52be9-8aa6-4ac9-aa2e-3ae545c5d795"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state ever infringe on individual human rights when countering terrorism?<|ARGUMENT|>Counterterrorism measures may violate the prohibition against the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some rights are too fundamental and important to be interfered with.\n","id":"0cf61e44-596b-4a2e-b168-bfac4f01962f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi Reddit, Unfortunately, I was raised in a very conservative culture that implanted some views in me that I want to get rid of. Due to the influence of the community I have been living in for most of my life, I believe that a girl\u2019s slutty past makes her less worthy of being in a relationship with. Even if she realizes that what she did was wrong and is very shameful of it, I am finding a hard time accepting that people can change and that their mistakes don\u2019t define them. These thoughts are just nagging in my head and I really want to get rid of them. When I usually read posts here I try to read between the lines to figure out why a certain person has specific view. So I though it might be helpful to provide a short summary about the circumstances that are making me have those views without turning this post into a r relationships one. I have been basically with this amazing girl for a year and a half, we\u2019re both 20. Yesterday she revealed some things she did with other guys the that were in our class over the span of 3 months when she was 14 that are making me sick to my stomach, she even agreed to have his friend watch. She kept doing those things for 3 months until she built the courage to say no and realized that it was wrong. According to her it was out of seeking attention and acceptance. I am not sure how I can look at those guys from our class in the eyes if I see them again. I love this girl very much and I want someone to help me get over the disgust I\u2019m feeling and accept that people make mistakes and realize that they were stupid, specially at 14. I know that it\u2019s not normal for posts here to include details about the situation that\u2019s causing this view but please ignore the previous paragraph if you find it not useful. Thanks you so much for reading<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You have every right to be disgusted If your partner reveals to you that there was a phase in their lives where they were slutty and engaging sexually with guys just for attention\n","id":"92784e34-a7e7-4205-91a0-96fee970390f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are modern democracies destined to fail due to their inherent weaknesses?<|ARGUMENT|>In the democratic Swiss State the people have the foremost political power, giving them increased opportunities to express their opinion by way of popular voting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all democracies are the same: while some suffer from lies, deceit and fears, others thrive.\n","id":"5321aabc-286c-434b-b4fe-bd5cff49b0f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should citizens be able to crowdsource laws?<|ARGUMENT|>Law discussion forums, such as the US congressmen or Parliament in great Britain, require participants to educate themselves before they can follow our participate in a debate. Online you can read the law and arguments at your own time figuring things out as you go.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Crowd sourced forums don't require users to spend a lot of time educating themselves before a time based vote or debate. They can educate themselves as part of the process by reading the articles and participating in the debate.\n","id":"1df7ed04-f128-43da-82e7-904df85a57c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Scottish Independence: Should Scotland be an Independent Country?<|ARGUMENT|>One of the biggest protests in British history occurred in opposition to the Iraq War.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Iraq War of 2003 was highly unpopular and yet still went ahead.\n","id":"d53e09b0-8d38-48c0-8da4-35f01c494e90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a 25 year old man, and I firmly believe in the claim above for 3 reasons The amount of time required to take care of both spouse and kids is ridiculously high, meaning it becomes harder to focus on your career if that is your priority. The benefits of romantic relationships and having children i.e. self fulfillment, happiness, etc. are overrated. The loss of freedom these decisions have on your life e.g., unable to travel at will, unable to stop working, diminished available income due to higher spending, etc. is unjustifiable. My only concern regarding my position, is the risk that it changes over time. When they get older, people seem to be willing to accept the downsides. Not sure what happens to them and if it will happen to me as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having a girlfriend\/boyfriend, getting married and having kids is a waste of time.\n","id":"7c33eea2-6d77-49c4-807d-71886988c2d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>The British have superior equipment and training and will likely suffer only insignificant damages and losses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nowhere here is anyone protected by us being annihilated by British superior firepower.\n","id":"f16a33bf-1dda-4cd1-8dc2-af317ada7cc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that most girls will do a certain action to play around with a guy's feelings. I see girls portraying themselves as being physically and mentally attracted to a guy and then denying it or getting grossed out when the actual opportunity of hooking up comes. They know that they have a certain amount of power over a guy's feelings and they take advantage of that. I believe that these types of situations are just women playing games with a man's mind for their own enjoyment, because they know they can. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that most girls play mind games with guys.\n","id":"17aad423-32b5-449f-a4b4-8d4adfb8a2ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should human procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Often children provide financial assistance to their parents. In the US, for example, 76% state that they provide financial assistance to elderly parents if needed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Procreating assures that there will be someone there to care for parents when they are elderly.\n","id":"78e8ddb5-f8c7-49a5-8176-27f20496833b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always cared about all life, from the whales to the ants, if it feels pain I care for it that doesn't mean I don't eat meat . That always brought conflict with my family and friends. Once a friend asked me there is a dog and a baby drowning, who would you help . Looks like the answer was simple for her but for me it depends on multiple factors A baby will be more important to me than an adult dog, but as important as a puppy Imagining that situation in a pool for example I bet everyone around would care for the baby so I would try to help the dog Or try to save first whoever is closer to me But in the case that I'm alone and both are at the same distance and age and both are drowning I'd just try to save both, in no particular order. I've received strong critics for this kind of thoughts but when I ask why no one knows what to answer. For me thinking a human life is more valuable than any other animal life or mammal life to make it simpler is just as selfish as thinking you are more valuable than other humans. I understand selfishness is necessary but in case of emergency we have rules to prevent selfish actions like women and kids being saved first, right? EDIT That was very interesting, people. Have to leave now but will be back in 3 4 hours to check again. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prioritizing human life is as selfish as putting yourself before the others.\n","id":"038f66d1-f328-43b5-be7b-77bbefed47c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Youtube Enforcing Censorship Through The Demonetization Policy?<|ARGUMENT|>Corporations make their decisions according to what generates the greatest profit, not what is best for society. If their products are causing unintended consequences on society, they should not have the final say.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Large corporations should not be the ones to decide which content gets rewarded and disincentivize. They are motivated by profit, not political justice.\n","id":"8f25bcbc-76e6-43f1-875e-e3f2b1b81907"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The only reason that we have to believe that the laws of physics and logic will remain constant, is that they have since the beginning of recorded history. Everything we believe to be true about our universe is based on comparison. We can define something to be, because we compare it to other things that are similar in some way. It is like defining a word, you must use other words or ideas to define it. There is only one universe in the broadest sense, including multiple dimensions or multi verse theories and so nothing to compare it to, no way to define it, to contain it to a set of laws and rules absolutely. Because of these two ideas, I believe anything is possible at any given time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that anything is possible -\n","id":"0aae35d9-3a4c-4e25-b547-831ada512841"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans clearly understand foods that are and aren't poisonous. While animals can see this on an immediate level, humans can determine this at an immediate and long term levels. We understand the long term effects of certain foods, down to what chemical compounds are safe and unsafe to eat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans as a species understand far more about the world and why it works the way it does than any species of animal.\n","id":"032cf5e2-0c52-4e8a-aeab-bb03183c76e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is not a post to determine a metric on how to determine who gets to have children, because I know the technicalities there can be somewhat problematic. That isn't to say that such metrics don't exist, but rather that the assumption that we are all entitled to have children is flawed. First, from a biological point of view there is no need. We have other biological needs that are negated all the time. It's controversial, but one could argue that waste expulsion, group sex, violence, murder, and rape are biological drives that we regulate and or outlaw, so why is bearing children any different? We have more than enough people to continue the species, with enough genetic diversity too. There are so many people that we are now negatively effecting the climate to our detriment. Having a child creates another person who will consume a vast amount of resources for no guaranteed benefit, other than the satisfaction of the parents. I see having children as quite a selfish decision. Very few people are in a position to fully provide every resource to a child to ensure that they will benefit society, the planet and perceived notions of progress. When you have more than one child, you decrease the available provisions to them, making the situation worse. I can't see any real benefit to everyone having children beyond the fact that people other than people want to and it will make them happy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having children shouldn't be a basic human right\n","id":"a040ae51-473e-41d6-94c6-21018642307d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Free to play games are gaining popularity in the gaming world and I don't think that this is a good thing. Game companies basically have 2 options when it comes to making revenue from F2P games. The first option is to make their game pay to win which takes the skill out of gaming and unfairly creates advantages for those who can afford more. The second option is using microtransactions for cosmetic items like hats. The problem with this is that gamers are generally a pretty cheap bunch and unless the game is unreasonably popular like TF2, the company is not going to make enough money to turn a profit off of purely cosmetic microtransactions, . Hypothetically if there was a F2P model funded entirely by in game ads, that may not be a bad option, but that doesn't seem to be done as of yet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think F2P is a bad business model for gaming\n","id":"7ee504ac-e04b-4c8f-b52a-9a92894348a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Apple Inc. used to be a pioneer of technology in the late 20th century with the Macintosh computer and iPod devices, but today they have become a company that relies on inferior rehashes of old technology that they deem as innovative and market for much more than what they are actually worth. A prime example is the iPhone 7 and its missing 3.5mm headphone jack. Removing a smartphone component and replacing it with wireless earbuds that are much easier to misplace, AND requiring the user to purchase a separate lightning to 3.5mm adapter that costs 10 and is described as fragile and poorly made . One could say that this is intentional and forces the user to spend more money to replace these parts once they break or are lost. Now let's look at the software. Mac OS is exclusive to Apple products, which forces me to pick up one of their 2000 Macbooks if I want to even touch their operating system. People often say that Mac is better for developers than Windows, but having used Windows, OS X, and Linux, I can say with certainty that OS X is the least capable of the three. The amount of available software that can run on OS X is minimal compared to Windows. For developers, Linux is superior, with greater customization and an enormous online community for help as opposed to having to contact Apple tech support . And the best part? Linux is FREE. Compatibility between hardware and software is also an issue. Apple has specifically designed it such that their devices will only function with THEIR equipment. Want to add some songs to your iPhone? Better open up iTunes Need a new cable? Time to go the Apple Store But people will still buy it, because it's Apple, after all. They want to walk around with their fancy white earbuds and their Apple branded bottles and T shirts. The company has done such a great job at establishing their brand image over the last few decades that they can send out overpriced, mediocre products and still make money. People are so distracted by the brand that they fail to see this. Apple knows that they will always have dedicated consumers who throw money at them, and as a result, they no longer feel the need to innovate when they can recycle the same concepts year after year. EDIT After reading some responses, probably the one that changed my view the most was that if a person sees an item as being valuable, they are justified in spending money on it. In this case, the demand for an Apple product is not so much the brand image as it is the perceived uses of the product from the perspective of that person. Therefore it is not overpriced if people are willing to pay that much for it. Anyway, these comments have provided some new perspective for me. I probably won't get through all the responses but you can consider my view at least somewhat changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Apple is a deceptive company that relies primarily on brand image to sell its overpriced products.\n","id":"39850629-4b89-44ff-a832-c31c395415e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If they don't want to child but the mother does that is fine. However the mother going on to have the child even after the father says he does not want it should cause the father to have no legal obligation to pay for or care for the child. And while more controversial and i don't really know personally how this is, but if the mother wants to abort but the father wants to keep the child, assuming the mother is only aborting because they do not want to keep the child, she should be encouraged required to give birth to the child. It is the fathers child just as much as it is the mothers though so he should have that right. Issue with this is it induces physical pain and can have long term lasting effects so this if very gray area, however if the mother is fine with giving birth and just doesn't want the child the she should have to I should have noted this is not the main topic, again gray area and I have no hard stance<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men have just as much right to \"Abort\" A child as the mother.\n","id":"ce5a2b89-0aed-4574-aacd-2b1f2b54c7e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Education vouchers<|ARGUMENT|>Education does not fit well into a fungible supply\/demand system. The main reason is that the supply of schools cannot adjust quickly to year-to-year changes in demand. Schools cannot be built overnight or within even a single year. And, schools cannot rapidly adjust their budgets because demand rises and falls dramatically from one year to the next, via school vouchers. Schools are, rather, long-term investments for long-term demographic trends, with the objective of supplying the public with a stable public good - education. This stable supply of education should not be subjected to the whims of shifts in year-to-year demand.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public schools are a public good; should not be subjected to market.\n","id":"ad3e0fac-d9e1-4dc1-a60d-eddc6b7f2ade"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Antifa good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>More than a million people were killed in the Killing Fields in Cambodia during the Marxist Khmer Rouge regime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no example of a Marxist state that isn't totalitarian and repressive.\n","id":"1595f6f2-a6af-4fae-926b-dd1e37744820"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>Lobbying is undemocratic it is a process in which money is used by particular interest to buy favorable regulation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lobbying one central government is easier than lobbying 28 national governments.\n","id":"7d4e21d8-0d08-400b-840a-87137b946545"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>individuals who have committed atrocities in the Syrian Civil War should be investigated by the ICC.<|ARGUMENT|>The threat of investigation could deter future war crimes, including the use of chemical weapons<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"individuals who have committed atrocities in the Syrian Civil War should be investigated by the ICC.\n","id":"79ed026b-5c7b-4f1a-97dc-7faddc3e28b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>Yes, traditional ingredients to Italy only. Pineapple isn't that, nor would it come from Italy. Authentic neapolitan pizza's concept's based from Italian ingredients which pineapple isn't a part of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pineapple doesn't respect local Italian traditions in the regard mentioned in the claim above.\n","id":"f5e632ae-8482-4b63-ad06-350e700546c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>FairTax would improve the current US taxation system.<|ARGUMENT|>Eliminating the IRS will also significantly increase unemployment. Not to mention the sudden loss revenue of tax preparation corporations $9 billion in 2012 and massive layoffs, dramatically increasing complexity and costs to the government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The transition would be difficult, for consumers, for businesses, and for governments at all levels to administer.\n","id":"65be5fdd-ed77-4490-b3c2-dfc23af95151"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The cosmological arguments add additional details to a \"rule\" so that God can be excluded from that rule e.g. \"everything that exists had a cause for its existence\" becomes \"everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All popular versions of the cosmological argument arbitrarily decide that a god does not require a creator. To arbitrarily require this is special pleading\n","id":"ed8c1c11-dd1e-4fc6-9be1-d07fd393523c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Breaking it up by issue Incest I understand the argument against incest, reproduction problems, but I'm not here to argue pro incestual reproduction rights, just the right to be together get married. Prostitution I believe it should be legalized, and regulated like any other service. In other words, in a legitimate, licensed place of business, I believe there should be laws in place to demand the use of condoms, and to test the active workers for STD's every month week? 2 months? . I understand the argument about it promoting the spread of STD's, but there are ways to protect against that, and frankly, it's happening anyways legalized prostitution probably won't increase rates by much, and I see it mostly as a rights issue. Homosexuality A much less arguable point, I believe. It should be a non issue, in my opinion. There are no negative sides to homosexual marriage besides some god fearing nonsense. Polygamy I'm honestly not wholly sure what the argument against polygamy is, besides something about complications in the way tax systems are set up, which could be easily fixed I'd imagine. Of course, I believe all parties, including other husbands and wives would have to consent to the individual marriages, lest they be nulled, or have their own marriage with the to be married party nulled. All that being said, if someone can change my view on any of those, I'd be impressed. Good luck? EDIT The reason I'm grouping Homosexuality in with these isn't because I believe they're related or any of that nonsense, but because many do lump it in with polygamy, incest, bestiality, etc. usually Christians who believe the sanctity of marriage must be upheld .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that incest, prostitution, homosexuality, or polygamy should be illegal\n","id":"3d659e0d-53a0-496a-a453-d6999404ad5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For concision, my points will be bullet points. There are harms in not allowing younger people to have their rights such as abuse of parental authority and anguish from lack of the ability to self determine. People at least 16 are capable of operating as full adults. Any bad decisions people would make at this age are made because they are people who tend to make bad decisions and will for the rest of their lives, not because they are young. It is unethical to deny these people the right to live their own lives. EDIT I will no longer be responding to arguments that cite brain development. I am not just regurgitating what this guy said , but he sums it up pretty well and saves me time. I also won't be responding to the argument that it could go lower than 16, so why 16? I agree it could go lower, but the fact that it could go lower only supports the thought that 16 would be a better status quo than 18.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Age of Majority should be lowered to 16\n","id":"cb3cff06-dfa1-4943-a631-d6f98e2357e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Many Spaniards do not see bullfighting as a symbol of pride, but rather as an imposed and continual denial of Spain\u2019s plurinationality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"During Franco\u2019s dictatorship, while bullfighting was encouraged and imposed as a national symbol, other practices were diminished or prohibited.\n","id":"3e709713-ffe3-4cf4-856b-a26dcce5a9e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been a PC gamer since 2010 but before then I had a PS3. However, I have not looked back ever since as I just cannot see any advantages a console has over a PC. I even thought for a long time that the only significance disadvantage a PC has would be the cost, but with cheaper games steam sales, CD keys humble bundle etc , no need to pay for multiplayer and the ability to build a PC similarly priced to a console that targets console performance not to mention that consoles can end up being more expensive PCs have more freedom to upgrade when the user wants to, choices of multiple inputs, better graphical settings, multiple displays, modding, backwards compatibility, better multiplayer, generally a more adult community, multipurpose not just gaming and easier to repair so if one of my hard drives or graphics cards I can use onboard graphics were to fail I could still use the PC instead of having to send the whole unit back to Microsoft Sony for repairs. Even with games, as games are entirely subjective, there are none on the console that really interest me plus games on PC have higher rated exclusives than their console counterparts. Please try and change my view. I intend for this to be more of a debate than anything as I genuinely believe that there are no significant advantages a console has over a PC. Make sure the advantages you post are objective ones, and not subjective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Other than simplicity, PCs are objectively superior to consoles in terms of gaming\n","id":"cb7aa6bc-9a32-42de-a131-8141ad431efc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello everyone. First of all, I'm sure this topic has been discussed many times but I just discovered this subreddit today and I'd like to give my personal feelings towards this subject as to get better feedback from this community. That being said, I came here to honestly try and change my attitude about this and other subjects and I don't shy away from stern reactions but let's keep it civil please. So I have a problem with feminism. As a concept, with the entitlement of certain people who defend it, and MOSTLY I have a problem with it being crammed into movies and tv shows and whatnot in the most ridiculous ways. I have several reasons which I'll adress one by one so it will be easier for people to voice their reactions. I'd also like to put a disclaimer here that I am not trying to convert people's ideas, these are thoughts that come from the bottom of my heart and I might voice them strongly sometimes. 1 The eternal wage gap discussion I don't know about America but here in Belgium it's ILLEGAL to pay people less for the same job. I work for an interim bureau we basically help people get jobs and we make up the contracts too. Men and women earn the same amount. 2a The hypocrisy. I am not saying feminism hypocrism. But goddamn there's a lot of it. I don't see women fighting for their rights to do be garbage women, which is by the way not a low paying job. As far as I know there are no feminists who believe men and women should have shared competitions in sports. I realise these are examples of mainly physical strength but they're examples nontheless. To me it looks like 'we want equal chances except where we do not want them'. 2b Also I work with a lot of women on a daily basis because I have a lot of contact with HR management which seems to be a predominantly female sector . That doesn't bother me by the way, but they ask for women specifically a lot of the time. Those are the sort of things that make me lose respect for the concept of feminism as a whole. Noone in my whole office bats an eye when customers make demands for only women, but when they ask for only men or Belgians, oh geez. 3 As said before, the fact it gets shoved down out throats on a daily basis. For people who watch The Flash ,tell me honesly last week's episode wasn't the most horrendous example of this you've ever seen. Or when a movie like Wonder Woman gets hailed because fuck yeah women kick ass while the movie in itself was mediocre as fuck. I already know women kick ass, I have lots of friends who happen to be girls. 4 The glass ceiling. Look I'll be honest I'm partial on this one, I don't work, nor do I have experience in very highend jobs with loads of cash on the line. I believe men can and will sometimes discriminate when they are in charge. But so will women. Forcing certain sectors to reach quota on equal men and women I think is retarded. Sorry for this rant but a lot of these things have really bothered me for a long time and anyone can feel free to adress any part of what I'm saying as long as it happens in a normal way. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have trouble taking feminism seriously\n","id":"eda81c45-6b73-485e-9860-60aaa91dc7ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Brexit: Is The UK Going To Regret The Referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>Devaluation of the pound is already set to increase costs for the NHS by more than double the entire \u00a3350m\/week that \"could\" have gone to the NHS.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The promise of \u00a3350M to NHS is just not true.\n","id":"04318843-de6b-455a-b5b5-c98d532a74d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>The USA and the EU have significant divergences in particular with regards to foreign affairs. A USE will have more freedom and self-assertion to concur or disagree with the USA on matters of foreign affairs, and can no longer be bullied.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USA might be hostile to the creation of a new, very powerful state and potential rival on the international scene.\n","id":"146d40da-a4a9-40fb-84f2-c63c071c92d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Artificial Intelligence AI: Should an artificial general intelligence be created?<|ARGUMENT|>Typically, the costs of projects are 46% higher than initially expected. These overhead costs will have to be added to AKM development.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Developing new weapon system comes typically at a very high price.\n","id":"fdff5d58-30b4-49fa-93bc-764e40863407"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>re-engage with Myanmar<|ARGUMENT|>Reengagement has potential for having a positive influence in various contexts. Myanmar is rich in natural resources, including forest products, minerals and gems. Removing trade restrictions and offering developmental aid would benefit the local economy and population.1 In the longer term, economic activity can act as a stimulus for development of a stronger legal and business framework to reduce corruption. If the US and the EU create confidence in the Myanmar government that they are willing to offer something constructive rather than critical, it may be possible to ask for greater transparency in government and reduce systematic violations of human rights as well.2 The newly elected civilian government has indicated it is willing to pursue democratic reform, and the US and the EU should not lose this opportunity for change. 1 BBC News, \u2018India and Burma expand trade ties and sign gas deals\u2019, 14 October 2011. 2 Human Rights Watch, \u2018China: press visiting Burmese leader on elections and accountability\u2019, 6 September 2010, example of how state relations can encourage democracy<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is scope for further diplomatic progress in the region through disengagement\n","id":"31f6d7c2-81c8-4114-bfda-7097a3156b5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>A 2017 report on the US military stated that the greatest racial disparities in military justice were generally seen for the most serious disciplinary proceedings. In an average year, black Marines were 2.61 times more likely than white Marines to receive a guilty finding at a general court-martial, while they were only 1.29 times more likely than white Marines to receive a guilty finding at an NJP proceeding<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States military has a history of racial injustice.\n","id":"c26c8beb-284a-433c-8c43-0811685e9725"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A cup in the US is 236ml, except when it's a legal cup 240ml . Also except when it's supposed to be used with rice 180ml , or when it's to be used with coffee 177ml . God help you if you find the rare imperial cup 284ml . This unit fails at it's sole job of measuring specific amounts easily. The user has to know specifically which cup is referred to by context or previous knowledge. A recipe like add 3 cups chicken broth and 2 cups rice is exceptionally simple to misconstrue by a large amount. That's the difference between chicken rice soup and chicken burrito rice mix. Even when the measurements are close, I expect people are learning incorrectly. A cup of water out of your sink and a cup of broth out of a container are not the same amount, but most people will assume they are. I doubt it matters for cooking, but measurements from real life are the skill students bring to more professional settings. Preferring cups and it's vague system makes actual scientific measurement more foreign when it is needed or wanted. Cups also lead to other issues. If a recipe calls for 8oz of honey, most people will fill their measuring cup to the 1 cup line. It makes sense, because units are vague and it says 8oz right there on the cup. I'd wager yours does to. You'd ruin your recipe though. 8oz of honey is 12 fl oz. No one would make this mistake with other available, popular systems, because you would not confuse weight and volume measurements. Don't make that mistake in your chemistry class. Cups in the US sense are a terrible system of measurement, and unfortunately the one humans tend to learn primarily. We should move to another system, and possibly avoid being the last country on earth to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cups are terrible forms of measurement.\n","id":"864b93aa-0d05-426c-b8ff-1093915ee482"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those who don't know, not only are students in the UK entitled to a loan covering the entirety of their tuition fees now \u00a39,250 per year , but also have access to a maintenance loan. For the sake of brevity I'll only include the eligibility for students living away from home and outside of London, although the principles are the same for all situations if your household earns more, you are entitled to a lesser loan. gt Students with household incomes above \u00a325,000 lose \u00a31 of Maintenance Loan for every complete \u00a38.26 of income above \u00a325,000 until the amount they receive reaches the minimum of \u00a33,928, at which point there is no further reduction. A table of how this translates at various incomes Household income per year \u00a3 Maximum maintenance loan per year \u00a3 25,000 8,430 30,000 7,825 35,000 7,220 40,000 6,615 42,875 6,266 45,000 6,099 50,000 5,404 55,000 4,799 60,000 4,193 62,187 3,928 Assuming that the student isn't deemed independent, the household income is the sole basis upon which the maximum loan is decided. This system suggests that the support the student receives from the household is relative to the household income, which is often not at all the case for various reasons. Having just finished my first year at university, my understanding is that there are many students from high income families whose parents don't contribute to their living expenses, and are forced to get jobs in order to pay their expenses. To my knowledge, if there were multiple students from the same household living simultaneously at university the household contribution would be expected to multiply by the amount of students. My view is that any student deemed not independent should have access to the maximum maintenance loan, household income should have no bearing on their entitlement and that the current system is ridiculous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The basis of the maximum loan granted to university students in the UK is ridiculous\n","id":"ea94aab8-7412-4e58-a4c6-0801c93592c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Legal Drinking Age Should Be Lowered<|ARGUMENT|>Fundamentally this is an issue of the freedom to choose. Legally we accept that at sixteen an individual is old enough to make rational choices about a whole host of things, from having sex to fighting for their country. We also allow sixteen year olds to harm themselves, if they choose to, by smoking and gambling. If sixteen year olds are thought rational enough to make those choices, there is no reason to deny them the right to choose whether to drink alcohol or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fundamentally this is an issue of the freedom to choose. Legally we accept that at sixteen an indiv...\n","id":"0647fd6c-91bf-4de3-8bf1-06014e973b92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments pursue predictive policing technology?<|ARGUMENT|>Data is seen as an important too for policy making and governance because in its absence there is often too much reliance on subjective factors p. 225. For example, in the absence of data, certain policies may be prioritized simply because they are important to the politicians in office.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Deploying predictive policing systems which rely upon and reinforce racism risk perpetuating additional harm via feedback loops throughout the criminal justice system p. 192.\n","id":"bce99a8e-6b38-4832-8508-efbbc1a90ff7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Sampling biases might alter the results. Subjects or twins that openly declare being homosexual might be more likely to volunteer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most studies used as supposed evidence for homosexuality being determined biologically are biased.\n","id":"3fffc734-8280-4b75-8b53-50d2e9c0a2cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify, the purpose of this post is to address those who encourage donations that do not benefit themselves since the current legal system deals with this situation adequately in my opinion , but benefit others without their consent if they consent they fall into the benefit themselves category . After the recent KFC scam, link for the lazy I've done some poking around the internet to see what kind of sentences are generally associated with such scams. From what I've found, if convicted of fraud, an individual has to repay the money acquired under false pretenses and can either pay an additional punitive fine or face jail time. The issue presented to me is that specifically in the KFC hoax, it puts those who donated in an incredibly awkward situation as moral agents. Two equally unappealing options exist currently the money can be given back to those who donated which means the girl can no longer have her surgery, by no fault of her own , or the girl can receive her surgery yay , but the family faces no punishment for lying to the tune of 135,000. The second option is especially ugly in my opinion, because it encourages future disingenuous behavior, which in turn would likely discourage donations to legitimate causes through guilt by association. It is this societal damage along with financial damage that I view warrants a harsh prison sentence if I had to pick an arbitrary number I'd go with 25 50 years . In order to change my view, I'm looking for either The current system is already suited to handle this issue perhaps punishment is more severe than the impression I'm under? The societal damage isn't a factor, and that only the financial restitution should be considered. Also, feel free to challenge in a way I haven't mentioned if you feel it could change my view, I'm running short on ideas after a long day at work<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who encourage donations under false pretenses deserve harsh prison sentences.\n","id":"74cba686-ec25-41e7-8add-90c6971bcffb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>Under Realpolitik, the US supported and expedited the Indonesian invasion of East Timor which cost upwards of 100,000 lives as well as the Bangladesh genocide which cost upwards of 300,000 lives because these were considered to be in America's best national interest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are numerous examples throughout recent history of the US acting unethically, usually in an effort to further its self-interest.\n","id":"0920f4e8-7b7a-4888-b3f0-ae6fbb1ab1f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Children who are abused can develop harmful coping mechanisms that often stay with them for life, such as eating disorders, drug use or self harm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The scars of neglect and abuse often haunt children for the rest of their lives.\n","id":"466cda3e-bf44-4f1a-8f8a-598ed6e89602"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should athletes be allowed to compete in their chosen gender category?<|ARGUMENT|>In a Clinical Endocrinology study conducted from a sample of 693 elite athletes, the results revealed a significant overlap in testosterone levels among men and women: 16.5 percent of the elite male athletes had testosterone below the lower limit of the so-called male range; nearly 14 percent of the women were above the female range.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Testosterone alone can't account for differences in performance. There is no real basis for singling out naturally elevated testosterone in women as the reason for differences in performance.\n","id":"c6e8b797-82bd-40b9-9abc-fc7ab0cc4be9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>The UK is still one of the leading EU nations, judging by the size of the population, numbers of the MEPs and size of the financial contributions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Only by remaining in the EU would the UK be capable of contributing to EU reform.\n","id":"9491a619-1f13-4f59-a47d-82aa5bd59f72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU introduce a carbon tax?<|ARGUMENT|>The carbon revenues that governments can derive from carbon pricing can also be used to reduce poverty, over and above reducing the policy\u2019s regressive impact on low-income groups Policy Brief, 8<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Policies can be designed to minimize the financial impacts on low-income groups, while maintaining the incentive to reduce emissions.\n","id":"7f00e38a-44bb-45b6-8e03-af902bced1b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Inflicting needless violence and barbarism and eventually death on a sentient being is immoral. Culture, tradition, and economic benefits should take a back seat to ethics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The bulls suffer severe stress, and ultimately end up dying a slow and torturous death.\n","id":"f6f39c04-82c2-49b7-bfa2-daa8226a3ef7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've noticed on the meta subs particularly that there's this pervasive attitude towards people with mental illnesses such as autism spectrum disorders, anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, schizoid and avoidant personality disorders and so on that is clearly condemnatory in character. It does not seem obvious to me how someone lacking social graces deserves to be collectively shat on by the regulars of these subs. In fact, I would think that this reaction demonstrates rather unsalutary traits in the people kicking the mentally ill when they're down. Now, let it be clear that there are certainly moral failings that may lead to being ostracised such as being a legitimate creep, being racist, being unnecessarily hostile etc. that result in social isolation. But I worry that when people confuse you're alone because you're a terrible person with you're a terrible person because you're alone , people teetering on the edge will be endangered by this attitude. They don't even have to be participants just people who witness the exchange. Even participants in subs that really ought to know better naming no names , who generally have humane and fairminded views fall prey to rationalisations for bullying.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being socially awkward is not a moral failing, and reddit doesn't realise this.\n","id":"fba1329a-78fa-4061-bf6e-4d82a1588e5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should Self-Driving Cars Kill?<|ARGUMENT|>Self-driving cars, being artificially intelligent and therefore not subject to human error, are likely to drastically improve safety for road users either way. Given this, it is more probable that a potential crash is the fault of a party other than the self-driving car.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If harm must be caused by a self-driving car, it should be inflicted on those who are most at fault for the accident.\n","id":"21f81335-544e-4f7d-9c99-090b79cd7db9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Taking about a few cases that have come up in the past few years that have gotten tons of attention, such as Cyntoia Brown 51 Years for first degree murder with a firearm and aggravated robbery. Got tons of support even though she lied about most shit. Jacob Anderson Baylor frat boy with no criminal history who got no jail time and plead out of a sexual assault. Victim had a very inconsistent story that would be hard to present as evidence, and Anderson was convicted of a felony and expelled from his University. Prosecutor didn\u2019t take risk of losing trial and still got probation, which means if he breaks any law or fails a drug test he\u2019ll go to prison. Not talking about Brock Turner, that was some other shit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For the most part, people that criticize judges and prosecutors for doing their job wrong on social media are ignorant\n","id":"94f97ed7-1c09-4709-b4b3-af8f695959bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trophy Hunting Be Illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Trophy hunting reinforces a desire for power and dominance often expressed through violence that is characteristic of toxic masculinity<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trophy hunting perpetuates the immoral ideals that already plague the Western world.\n","id":"a718a740-13f6-41e5-aa6c-22a66585c135"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>If an employee poses a threat to the business or co-workers, they can be fired.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In certain cases an employee can be fired because of their mental health problems.\n","id":"6e2e8707-218d-4bda-8fa5-83a433e4ccb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should U.S. military spending be cut in favor of other programs?<|ARGUMENT|>The United States spending on military, which might be beneficial, is not the most efficient allocation of resources. Resources could be better spent on programs directly increasing quality of life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"U.S. military spending should be lowered in favor of other programs.\n","id":"ad994d39-1fa9-4048-bfa1-be76d1bbcf94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Sentience is not simply a discussion about what animals feel and the rights that they have because of this, but the responsibility humans hold as their caregivers knowing that animals feel both pain and pleasure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As the scientific knowledge on sentience continues to grow and we understand more and more about the impact humans have on animals, it becomes increasingly unethical and illogical to continue to cause animals harm.\n","id":"413a09a7-55ed-4535-a0ba-4e0b83cd6f82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I only hear proponents of universal healthcare make the statement that healthcare should be a right, so I assume they make this statement on the premise that healthcare should be free because it should be a right. So what they believe then, is that the government is obligated to provide people with the ability to practice their rights. As opposed to reality, that the government is only obligated to not interfere with your ability to practice your rights. So if a person believes healthcare should be a right and it should be provided by the government on that basis, they should also believe that anyone should be able to request a gun and get one for free .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a person believes healthcare is a right, and should therefore be \"free\", then they should also believe the government should provide a gun to anyone who wants one\n","id":"0dabd505-d6c1-49f1-aa6f-4fca79631b94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think it's ridiculous that Reddit admins summarily ban subreddits for things that are common place on other, more popular, and more meaningful subreddits. It has been said by u Spez that there's essentially no point in banning certain hateful subs but then what's the point of banning any hate subs? How is preventing run of the mill trolls talking like assholes more sensitive than preventing alt right, racists, and active political subversion by foreign powers in American politics? Politically and culturally extreme subreddits, especially those compromised by foreign governments have far more negative impact on society and the site in general than some obscure niche hate speech sub. So why is it that we as patrons allow this? Edit Now that there has been some discussion, let me add a few things I fully support free speech. I support the even application of rights laws rules as well, which is the focus of this post. Yes, I think this should apply to all political subs, including the extreme left. You either care about Reddit as a whole or you don't care about Reddit as a whole. No sub is an island. If your favorite subs do a great job banning users, great Your favorite subs are officially better at enforcing sub rules consistently than Reddit is at enforcing site rules consistently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit should be boycotted until they apply site hate speech rules evenly across all sub-reddits, political safe spaces and all.\n","id":"bc44fd7c-b222-45da-900e-52af92f4655a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>And even if all refugees that are not taken in would suddenly cease to be part of the global population, this would hardly change the course of the world's population prospects. According to the UNHCR, there are currently 25.4 Million refugees that's 0.3% of the world's population.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If high-income countries do not take in refugees, this does not mean that these individuals vanish from the face of the earth. Most of them merely live dire lives in bad circumstances, for example refugee camps, in that case.\n","id":"97791ef1-23e5-4267-a7b5-9803bc6813c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>Aroung 23% of households in rent-stabilised apartments have lived in their unit for 20 years or more compared with only 7% of households living in market-rate units. In Manhattan below 96th St, it is as high as 35% compared to 2.7% or market-rate households.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who are lucky enough to have rent-controlled apartments i.e. cheap accommodation would never want to give their apartments up, meaning these affordable places never come on to the market.\n","id":"1badfa54-c6d2-450f-ad58-9a0e55abdad0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>There was an outpouring of abuse against blogger Anita Sarkeesian when she posted a tweet pointing out that none of Xbox One's launch games in 2013 had a female protagonist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In 2014 the 'Gamergate movement emerged, an online harassment movement targeting women in the games industry.\n","id":"82b313b2-faa1-4376-87ce-c484ce4d98ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Being born has two meanings when a child is expelled from the womb and when a new legal entity is recognized by the state. From gt So far our inquiry has established that in modern legal jargon birth can mean the delivery of a human child, OR the act of bringing into full and complete existence an artificial entity. Changing the defintion of birth and when legal protections apply offers many benefits to parents and the state. If birth is not recognized until the birth certficate has been filed then parents can decide to discard damaged or unwanted babies which would be a legal abortion instead of an illegal murder. Fathers could opt out of child support by not signing the birth certicate. The number of single parent households would drop because the baby woud not have been born until both parents sign the birth certificate. Cases of misattributed paternity could be eliminated by requiring a paternity test before the father could sign the birth certificate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Change the legal defintion of birth to when the birth certficate is filed\n","id":"efb1c8c3-a016-4faf-ba63-0b363371f97d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Society has become extremely toxic and split over politic and pseudo political issues. Many people have abandoned middle ground positions and forming their own opinions but rather follow suit on a one of the bigger camps, becoming more fanatical in the process. Whether or not you believe in equality it seems you must now believe in absolute forced equality and if you disagree most people that will agree with you will often do so out of bigotry. Either way you have to deal with toxicity and every other day acts of idiological violence further increase the problem. We are at a point where people cannot simply say that for example Trump is not a very capable president but basically Hitler's reincarnation. The opposite side isn't much more attractive many times being accepting of actual hatred. As an European all I see is what's on the internet news but I am flabbergasted as to how being white or supporting public healthcare seem to be the most damning stigmas. To my original point I see no resolution to this because people seem to have become immune to reason on both sides and increasingly violent. There are militias arming themselves and the more people tear down historical reminders of a country's past are illegally removed these people will become angrier. As an outsider I see both sides in the wrong here and it seems all that everybody wants is open conflict. This goes mostly for the USA but seeing as many countries such as my own carbon copy America's example with a few years delay it also appears as a global issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"large scale violence and unrest are inevitable in the us\n","id":"bd7832fa-cdde-4f50-9b81-87147af9ad13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now, I neither condone nor condemn gay marriage or homosexuality itself. To me they are not things that require some moral label like good bad, etc one's sexuality is their own business. However, I can't notice that the people who really support gay marriage are really turning it into something it's not an issue of rights . People like to talk about innate human rights, but really, the notion of rights only makes sense from a legal perspective and thus, requires backing from the legal documentation of the country. AFAIK the Constitution doesn't explicitly support or condemn gay marriage however, supporters of gay marriage frequently claim that not allowing it is violating rights and they even compare it to the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, which I find really shocking. The main difference is that for blacks, the systematic discrimination was impacting their ability to enjoy the right to life, liberty, etc for instance, how can people work when the only factory in town won't hire them because of their skin? To me, stuff like segregation slavery etc. was a LOT bigger than the things proponents of gay rights complain about. Here are things gay people have to worry about Not being able to marry their same sex partner. While this is a bummer for them, it's not their right to get married. I know a lot of people say things like the gov't can't tell me who I can and can't love which is a ridiculous Strawman of the issue. I've seen some couples that deeply love each other but are not married, and the reverse as well. Marriage love. Marriage is a specifically defined institution for the region in which it is considered legally relevant. So when people are getting gay marriage legalized, they're not giving gays more rights, they're just changing that state's definition of what a legal marriage is. The Christian cake baker there have been a number of cases where someone refuses to perform a service for a gay couple's wedding due to their religious beliefs. They don't ban gays from their store, and they don't pledge to never serve a gay. They just don't want to support a gay marriage. The thing is, people like this are in the extreme minority and most would prefer they couple's money. They can easily take their business elsewhere, so how is the couple really being harmed by this? I'd say it's more harmful to force the religious person to compromise their beliefs. Sodomy laws. I guess this is an issue , but as far as I know this law is less enforced than the 55 MPH speed limit. Many states have officially repealed them, and I doubt anyone would actually get arrested for it. I'd say that this would in fact be a violation of rights as it concerns private, self contained behavior but the law is entirely archaic and unenforced. To me, these things are definitely not on the level of what blacks fought for decades ago, and comparing the legalization of gay marriage to this is a disgrace to those noble fighters such as MLK, Rosa Parks, etc the current gay movement isn't about gays getting made equal to straight people, it's just about gays getting what they want which isn't bad mind you, it just isn't the same as fighting inequality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In America, \"gay rights\" is a misnomer.\n","id":"afd9d72c-dbeb-4ab7-859d-e1f4c4781f7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>Global overpopulation is the result of a bad assignment of resources. Mankind has build a big wall that separates the humans from the nature. We have been hiding from the real world, in our artificial concrete prison, giving power to corrupt governments that only think in their own interests. We all must take responsibility for our well-being, then we'll live more sustainably.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are possible solutions that would allow us live sustainably without the consequences of the high population level.\n","id":"67cbbeb0-7c5a-4367-ba18-ef28522fd09d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Among those more educated there is a tendency to have higher levels of non belief or to, at least, hold religious beliefs with less certainty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Education tends to reduce human proclivity to gullibility and, at the same time, those more educated tend to be less religious.\n","id":"d4894a37-7dad-4a2d-8f9a-d8b157a121ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>During the 20th century, the Soviet Union ended killing around 20 million of their own people, despite the fact it was a secular society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Absent religion, ideologies fill the void and motivate humans to do terrible things.\n","id":"6be45d1e-19a7-4c5b-8f57-c0cf8eb183e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So in light of the fight over Apple being required to produce signed software to break into an iPhone, I read something interesting on Twitter about how this sort of order might be thwarted in the future. In particular, the idea was that a company like Apple would break its private signing key into multiple parts and store each part alone on different servers in different countries, controlled by different people, with the persons involved being contractually obligated to not release the keys for any request that is made under duress. This seemed pretty clever to me, though I'm not a cybersecurity expert at all and I don't know if it's technically feasible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies which provide secure digital products should decentralize their private keys.\n","id":"f7037cde-4e77-4c96-8780-a45196127ffd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the advent of self driving cars, it is inevitable for the situation to occur where a car will have to decide how to best act in a difficult situation that must result in death. For example, where the choice is either sacrificing the driver or for others to die. While I think in general the car should try to minimize damage as in fewer people , I think car manufacturers have a responsibility to the driver to protect them or to allow the driver to choose for themselves where the final line is drawn. Self driving cars are going to be remarkably safer, and we want people to adopt them. By having the driver self sacrifice , it will cause countless more deaths by people being apprehensive to buy a self driving car. Since the car is likely bought owned by the driver, they should be the focus of protection along with their passengers. Another way of saying this is, the driver and passengers are the priority. Most of the philosophical discussion on what to do is based on stereotypes and profiling that we otherwise don't tend to like in life. It is unfair to kill a driver based on very unclear visual cues like They were young or the driver is old . This assumes too much about value that in almost any other case would be considered evil e.g. that person has a handicap and we would be better focusing our resources and time on someone else, so lets execute them .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe causing a self driving car to essentially \"sacrifice\" the car to protect others is wrong and will result in more death then protecting the car first.\n","id":"dea41e07-1810-4c59-a501-f38d7e58da68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>All that Science can explain does not require a superior being as a hypothesis. As our understanding covers more questions about Nature, resorting to a deity for explaining the unknown becomes less justifiable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The simplest explanation for what we don't understand is that \"we don't understand yet,\" not that \"there is an all powerful supreme being that is making it happen.\"\n","id":"4fd16733-2ab3-4159-938d-2d51d47f5367"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't see a use for them why not go out and soak the rays in the sun? From what I have HEARD about them, they are bad for your skin maybe I'm misinformed. For those of you in the wintery places, I don't think you need a tan anyways. Be fashionable with the season, not tan like the summer time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that tanning beds are completely wrong,\n","id":"818e5b65-e347-4762-b6eb-f7e5c0b15314"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it okay to throw milkshakes at fascists?<|ARGUMENT|>The use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy. Merriam Webster<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most common definitions of violence include the same key points.\n","id":"82636fdd-66b6-422a-8fc1-401b117ee97f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>For example New Zealand emphasises its rugby prowess to differentiate itself from Australia and to present a wider cultural narrative of punching above its weight.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"States often develop distinct national identities by focusing on values that appeal across ethnic divisions such as sport or historic events.\n","id":"fed45710-f830-47ff-ac11-812e64390437"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So being an English speaker based in America, I hear a lot about rape, whether its in the news, or on billboards, or even in statistics. One of them stood out to me, it was that 1 in 4 college age women will be raped by the time they graduate. Thats certainly a shocking statistic and it really got me thinking about the prevalence of rape in my community Im a US college student Well, after looking up the statistic from the Department of Justice Here it refers to acquaintance rape as the main culprit in this statistic. It also states that rape is the most common violent crime on campuses around the country. But from my understanding, a majority of rapes are not the stereotypical, dark alleyway, knife point situation, but rather some male figure abusing his position of power and dominance to force a girl to have sex. One of my close friends actually came to me and told me about this one guy who just wouldnt give up trying to have sex with her, and while she originally said she was okay with it, I later went with her when she wanted to report it to the school. Later on I heard a story just like hers at a rally against rape culture at schools. Anyway, enough of the statistics and anecdotes and more to my view that I want to be challenged. Both the alleyway situation, and the guy who would not accept no for an answer are sexually assaulting people, but I believe that we either need to change our lexicon to differentiate between the two or we need to find a more prudent way of expressing the difference. I study linguistics at school and the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis assuming it has at least some truth to it, and even some other theories ,indicate that our choice of word influences our impression and understanding of an idea or situation. Acquaintance rape still uses the emotionally charged word rape and while we can certainly understand the difference between the two, it is impossible for us to truly separate our mind from the imagery of the back alley when hearing about rape allegations. That being said, I still believe both are crimes, and both should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law as they are now. Sexual assault seems to be a blanket term that covers a multitude of situations, from the violent rape, to a lack of consent. Furthermore rape seems to be used in situations when sexual assault would seem more apt, and perhaps rape has become a blanket term, rather than a specific one, which bothers me. But could there be any harm whatsoever from creating and refining a new set of words and definitions concerning Rape ? Edit Also I'd like to add another reason I believe this change to be necessary is to allow us to avoid using the term rapist to perpetrators of lesser forms of sexual assault, and instead have a more fitting description of them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that no harm could come from refining our definitions and terminologies concerning \"Rape\" ...\n","id":"7ebfb505-6b1b-4957-818c-8823e3a2b987"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>If highly-skilled players are removed, then the quality of the affected teams might decrease; and if the quality of the game decreases, then people might lose interest in watching.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Permanently losing skilled players to one-time infractions is not in the leagues' best interest, as viewership could decrease.\n","id":"10b1093f-8bc6-4964-8644-3aebdd4b0add"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm from the UK. I've heard many of the arguments on both sides, but to me nothing is more convincing than the statistics example I'm also a libertarian, I fully understand that if anything a right to bear arms is needed because any other way is a breach of personal liberty. However, I can't help but see that as a negative side effect of full liberty, because inevitably it just leads to more people getting hurt. That's the numbers talking. Yes, cars also kill people, but I don't need a gun to get to work. The benefits of having cars in society vastly outweight the drawbacks. With guns, the only benefits arise when a really tough intruder is in my house or when the government is trying to oppress me. In the UK we still manage to survive a break in without shooting everything in sight, and if the government came after us, they'd likely win even if we had a gun.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guns are a real danger to people and countries without them just fare better.\n","id":"8b7171cd-8115-4f66-a8bb-4d527913fb3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Insurance companies have vastly inflated premiums for new drivers. This is because statistically, new drivers are far more likely to be involved in an accident. Most people I know see this as moral and reasonable. Insurance companies also have further inflated premiums for men. Again, this is because statistically, men are more likely to be involved in an accident, and again, most people I know including myself agree with this practice. Say I start a company that functions like car insurance, but for bail. A customer would pay my company a premium, and if they were arrested, my company would cover their bail. If I charged higher premiums for men, because statistically men get arrested at a higher rate, I think most people would agree this is on the same page as the insurance companies, and is a reasonable business practice. However, if I charged a higher premium for African Americans, because statistically the arrest rate for African Americans is higher, i believe I would very quickly have a lawsuit on my hands. I believe that using statistics based on age, gender, race, or whatever else, is a reasonable business practice and should be legal. I'm not arguing anything about why the statistics are the way that they are, only that valid, honest statistics should be able to be used.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Discrimination based on statistics is moral and should be legal\n","id":"4bcf45ca-e267-458a-8ae9-e3c0763bdafe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is a lot that we know about the world because of science, but we cannot say for sure that we know everything about our own existence. How do we know that beyond what we know, there is not a creator? I think that pushing your Atheist beliefs is just as narrow minded as any religious belief. Many Atheists argue that Religion is the cause of many of the world's problems, much like Religious groups have often argued that people who do not follow their own beliefs are the cause of their problems. It is a fairly hypocritical viewpoint.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Atheism is hypocritical and just as narrow-minded and dogmatic as religion.\n","id":"4d7b08a5-3ad8-4003-8a7d-9136e4e1135b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not unattractive , below average or Hollywood ugly Steve Buscemi I'm fucking ugly, as a kid I wasn't good but over time my ears and nose grew to ridiculous sizes and I was teased all throughout middle and high school. Now as an ADULT , the mocking continues, I hear people in public talking about me, actually laughing at me, it's pissing me off to even think about all the crap that has been said about me so I'll cut to the chase. I just don't see the point in continuing to live a life where I can't even go outside with everyone staring at me, or insulting me, almost everyone's impression of me is negative even though they don't know me, even in college no one picks me for group work and I'm smart ISH and if I do everyone is hesitant toward me, dating is miles out of the question and I wouldn't have kids anyway with the chance that they could look like me. It's a really shitty life, I wouldn't even wish it on my worst enemy. My philosophy is living a horrible life isn't living at all. I should add my personality is decent, the only reason I wasn't probably eaten alive in school is because I was funny and I do dress well, but an ugly face offsets all that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you are ugly, life isn't worth living.\n","id":"6886d308-9474-4701-a535-28dbd858e7be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that people have a moral obligation to donate money they do not need. Full stop. But the government specifically that of America is not in the business of moralizing. The government is established to protect inalienable rights and to allow for fair competition. There are many cases where the government is not doing its job in allowing for fair competition, but I am not speaking about these cases. I'm going to give a few scenarios, and I'd love if someone who disagrees could criticize the conclusions I make. There are two pizza delivery companies. One of the company owners, Pablo, spent every night for the past 6 months figuring out how to optimize his business. He found better ways to incubate pizzas, better ways to stack pizzas in his pizza mobile, and also found better ways to pizza his pizza. Because of this, more people are buying his pizzas. In the next year, Pablo earned three times as much as his competitor. Pablo sends his kids to public school, and has the same amount of kids as his competitor he goes to the doctor when he is ill, and goes the same amount of times as his competitor he's an American just like his competitor, and benefits from military defense in the same way why on Earth would Pablo have to spend multiple times as much money on these things than his competitor? I really don't get it, I'm sorry. They utilize the same services in the same exact way, why is Pablo in essence subsidizing his competitor's payments just because Pablo is a smarter, more efficient businessman? There's a marathon going on in Vermont. Two hundred participants compete for the 1,000 given to first, second, and third place. Each participant puts down 20, which goes toward prize money and ensuring the event is run well. Each winner splits the prize money. At the end of the race, the three winners of first, second, and third place are shocked to find out that they are only taking home 120. The event organizers apparently decided that the winners, despite working harder and simply being better at their craft, and despite equally paying for the organization of the event, should have to pay the other participants for simply existing. I just don't get it. If I drive to work and pass a bridge, I need to pay the toll because bridges cost money. Great. And perhaps I should pay in proportion to how much I drive, that seems like a good idea as well. But if I make a successful website that utilizes none of the services, and in fact very few services at all, is it not plainly theft that a bureaucrat decides where my EARNED money goes? I'd rather donate the money I don't need to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to environmental causes, to the cure for cancer, but the government seems to be stealing it from me so they can play live action Battlefield 5 Real Life Edition. Someone please explain what I am missing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I can't wrap my head around why individuals who earn more money should be forced to pay tens of thousands more in taxes, when they utilize the services as often as anyone else.\n","id":"a90ff56b-ac49-4922-b6bc-166fc7fc78e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whether you're Right Left or Center, a professional politician is cancer, we have a bunch of people who are by grace of their salaries 5 figures for members of Congress pensions insurance etc are rarely affected by the decisions they make on the public, these tired old faces who work only to keep themselves in place, cut all kinds of deals internationally and locally, and are only loyal to their party power, are cancer on both a democratic and republican level, we need to have some kind of wage structure relevant to the senator's state quality of life, wage, tax etc, so they'd be incentived to actually work for their jobs. EDIT it's not about them getting paid or not, it's about the salary being a fixed sum, irrespective of how good they're doing their jobs. EDIT 2 The proposal isn't about a measured metric of state economy, but more of a congressman woman who has an independent job, in their state, whereas they get paid in commission to attend congress. While still being subject to the laws they take part in legalising by the virtue of their own businesses being in their home state. Removing Congress as a salary institute and making it more of a responsibility.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Professional politicians need to go\n","id":"18f7fdce-8a3e-410a-9224-67c1115c078c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think that every promiscuous person has problems with themselves and sex, but many do. I don't want to be someone's bad night or lowest point, even if it's fully consensual. I need to trust someone to know that they have a healthy conception of their sexuality, and that takes a lot of communication and time, way too much time than it would take to hookup. x200B But I know this standard may be too high, no one is perfectly happy with themselves and their sexuality, and that it's not just people who hookup who have problems with their sexuality. I also know that I have to take my own needs into account and that I can't control people's feelings. I am pretty stultified by this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a man I will not participate in hookup culture because the frequency of people using promiscuity as a means of self-harm is too high.\n","id":"198fc625-32ae-4c08-bd6e-a30e6acb61f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey everyone This has been a hot topic and I\u2019ve done a fair amount of reading about the trade war and it\u2019s potential implications. I wanted to share my own thoughts on where I believe things are going based on my research. I\u2019ve tried my best to cut through the rhetoric coming from all sides and focus on the facts and reality of the situation as I see it. Links have been provided from various sources backing up and expanding on statements I make throughout the post. The trade war is the beginning of a systemic shift in the way America deals with China that will exist far beyond Trumps 1 or 2 terms. At the end of the day this is about two powerful nations battling for supremacy, we\u2019ve entered another age of great power rivalry. China\u2019s actions have clearly indicated it\u2019s a revisionist power and it\u2019s attempt to claim the South China sea and limit US power in Asia has routinely violated current international law and norms in the region, I believe that is coming back to bite them at the worst time. US policy makers obviously know this and I would appear they\u2019ve started implementing plans to contain China long term. Geography is America\u2019s greatest ally and China\u2019s great weakness. America is still the dominant power in Asia. The deck is stacked against China right now. The Chinese communist government has so far played it smart and kept a very low profile as they have developed and modernized the military and the economy, a so called \u201csoft rise\u201d. Some argue they still have peaceful intentions but thats up for debate, the CPC has a very violent history. I just want to add that the following is not a criticism of China, the Chinese people, it\u2019s history or accomplishments as a nation. My criticism is aimed squarely at the communist party. I\u2019m a strong believer in the foundations of democracy, rule of law and personal liberties. These principles bring out the best in a nation and the communist party holds none of these principles dear, their prime motivation is survival. Xi Jinping removing presidential term limits is going to harm China over the long term. China lacks strong enduring government institutions. This will make it easy for the new power brokers to consolidate power around them at the expense of institutional independence effectiveness. Bureaucratic bloat and corruption will erode the communist parties ability to deal with China\u2019s serious long term issues aging population, one child policy effects, environmental destruction etc\u2026 . Clearly Xi plans on staying in power for a long time or he wouldn\u2019t have removed the two 5 year term limits. He\u2019s only in his mid 60s, he could have a long reign ahead of him. The longer he is in power the more China\u2019s institutional stability and effectiveness will erode, all dictatorships eventually cause their own demise one way or another. If China continues its destabilizing behaviour the US and allies are in a very strong position to deter, contain and eventually isolate China from the international system, much like they did to the USSR. Xi\u2019s consolidation of power and China\u2019s continued use of aggressive and coercive economic tactics with trading partners is coming back to bite them. China\u2019s economic fundamentals are weak and the data coming out the country is hazy at best. The social contract has always been as long as the CPC delivers stability and economic growth they can continue to monopolize power. The trade war is potentially the least of their concerns, China hasn\u2019t had a proper correction in decades. They\u2019ve borrowed heavily to keep the economy from slowing, but most of the investment is done through state owned enterprises SoE which are grossly inefficient at allocating capital. Many Chinese banks are bloated and full of non preforming loans. This time is different because the government has mostly exhausted its ability to do large scale stimulus like they did in 2008, they simply can\u2019t take on anymore debt. With recent trade agreements with Mexico, Canada as well as ongoing negotiations with the EU and Japan I believe once all these frictions have subsided and new agreements are inked you\u2019ll see a broad coalition form to put pressure on China to change its behavior, again coming at the worst time for its leadership. China\u2019s deleveraging campaign to reduce debt in the economy is already reversing. Many experts predict that by 2050 the US will be more the first among equals rather than the dominant nation. I think these assumptions ignore some of the serious long term headwinds coming China\u2019s way. Issues ranging from corruption, pollution, rapidly aging population, record debt geographic isolation will all hold China back. The US doesn\u2019t face any of these challenges on near the same scale. China has a lot of rich world problems for a country that isn\u2019t fully developed yet. I believe India will supplant China has the 2 global power by the 2050s.The more assertive China becomes the more likely it is to drive countries like India closer to the US. That\u2019s another topic in itself, back to China US\u2026 The US economy is enjoying some of the strongest growth ever and conditions for growth look set to continue until at least the early 2020s according to the Fed. The total national net worth of the US all government private assets all liabilities, including national debt is about 100 Trillion today, up from 40 Trillion in 2000. By comparison Chinas NNW is 24 Trillion up from 4.6T in 2000 . Even with all its growth China is still producing much less wealth than America. Almost 40 of millionaires globally live in the US. This puts America in a much stronger bargaining position. China is in potentially serious economic trouble, the country is buried in debt 250 of GDP and combine that with a property bubble, slowing economy and rapidly aging workforce you\u2019ve got an authoritarian regimes worst nightmare. Because of its position as the world\u2019s lone superpower and reserve currency America is able to play by a unique set of financial rules when it comes to borrowing. That\u2019s best explained here The US military has taken the gloves off when it comes to cyber warfare, they\u2019ve identified China\u2019s intellectual property theft as a top priority. This and the trade war can be viewed as a significant overall escalation IMO. China cannot supplant the US as the dominant global power in its current form. China\u2019s continued aggression and state lead economic model is starting to prompt discussions between other market economies to increase cooperation and economic ties. It\u2019s a natural progression of the already existing Quadrilateral Security Dialogue in Asia. All these things combined to allow the US to easily project it\u2019s power soft hard globally. The more assertive China becomes the more it risks isolation and stagnation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China is outmatched and cannot win a protracted trade war with america\n","id":"d4943330-123a-4143-9af4-5babe005bedd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In an ideal conservative society, only the interests of the majority would be considered. Concerns of the minority wouldn't be considered as discussing compromises are more complicated than doing nothing. That reduces the number of politicians needed to run the country. It reduces the number of voting machines. It eliminates the need for fraud as all parties won't have an other to suppress. A government that doesn't address complexity is going to be smaller than one that does. Less complexity means a majority able to understand, and thus, have more control over, political situations. The question of what happens to the minority defaults only to that of assimilation and personal responsibility, both ways to dismiss minorities. It means that if they're not in the majority they shouldn't have ever expected anything and whatever happens is their problem. Yes, that includes death. Letting someone die is the simpler option. Economic conservatism isn't immune from this. The belief is that more costs more. So when a company has to use more packaging for warning labels the costs go up. They prefer the simpler option of those able to afford a lawsuit suing for damages when necessary. After all, the more money a company has to spend the more expensive things are. I'm personally liberal. I've had to spend a lot of time decoding the conservative narrative since it's often not plainly explained. One can understand why, the message is incompatible with the ability of many people to continue surviving. That's where I think a lot of rhetoric they use comes from. To change my view, I need to know if there are any other logical conclusions conservative policies lead to. It's understood that conservatives want the most people possible to succeed. It's not stated that they only want the most worthy and plan on making all of society into a harsh proving ground.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conservatism's ideal society restricts universal rights for the purpose of maintaining simplicity.\n","id":"04602d14-f0d0-4098-b786-84f3755a96eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>Milo Yiannopoulos for example appears as a reasonable person commenting on the Berkeley protests that shut him out as a speaker.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Protests can make activists suffer from bad press, especially if they are associated with violence.\n","id":"2b99716e-5eaa-4d0e-a506-a0e4770d8127"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that in our society's effort to make all people black, women, etc. equal, it has simply substituted one type of inequality for another. I will start by talking about black people. Obviously, we have come a long way from the days of slavery and segregation, but have we really made black people equal? Rules regarding employment make it more difficult for employers to fire black people on the grounds that it would likely be considered discrimination if they did. It is very easy for a black person to sue a former employer over discrimination when they get fired. It then stands to reason that a potential employer would hesitate to hire a black person because they think that they will not be able to fire them easily. Another point of inequality is the current environment about the police. If a police officer shoots a black man, he will likely be accused of murder and excessive force. This has caused police to work in neighborhoods that are known to have a high crime rate less. I think that the culmination of all these things has led to an environment that is considered to be equal but truly is not. I will also talk about women. Many of the same issues apply, however a key different one applies to divorce. For a couple that gets divorced, the man or whoever is the primary wage earner, often it is the man often needs to pay the other up to 50 of their income under the logic that the woman sacrificed her career to advance yours or raise kids. I think that just because a woman has not worked does not mean that she cannot work. I want to be clear, in many cases I do think the woman needs to get some money, but the whole environment has created an inequality that is politically correct . Try to change my view, I am interested to hear what you all have to say And let me be very clear, I am in no way prejudiced, I just think that we need true equality, not what we have now. I fully support the advancement of all minority groups as well as women Edit I would like to say that political correctness has taken a path toward inequality as well because true equality would take away certain privileges from these groups, making it impossible for PC people to stomach.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"What we think of as \"equality\" isn't really equality.\n","id":"77b27483-b460-4df0-99ab-2a656df1e735"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>The N-word is not used as a term of racial abuse in rap music. Rather, the term is typically used as a way of addressing someone between in-group members, and therefore does not legitimise its use as a term of racial abuse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many children already hear the N-word on a daily basis, in the context of rap music.\n","id":"e3fc49ce-2ce2-435e-9c2b-b93a84514382"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I often feel a lot of guilt about leading such a comfortable and decadent lifestyle. Although not super wealthy, I have enough money to satisfy all my basic needs and also indulge in the odd treat. This can be anything from nice holidays to buying myself a lovely new bike. But it often strikes me as unjust that whilst I can do this, there are others in the world who barely have enough to survive, let alone lead a comfortable life. I like to consider myself as fairly parsimonious. I try to waste as little as possible, and I indulge rarely, but other people I know seem to waste so many resources. On top of this, a lot of people in the West now just seem to buy things they don't even need. I mean, who needs a smartphone and an iPad and a laptop? I'm fully aware this isn't the case for a significant number of people in Western countries, and I'm saying this applies to them too. The only way to lift both people in the West and the rest of the world out of poverty is for the elite to accept that they consume too many resources and to lower this. I'd almost go as far to as to say some people in the West have come to expect an unsustainable level of resources on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, the fact that we have been able to almost completely eradicate famine and drought in the West and provide many people with comfortable lifestyles is great But it seems like in some cases it's gone too far. I mean, you're not more at risk from obesity than famine if you live in the West. As you can probably tell, I'm a lot of fun at parties<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The elite in the West are too decadent, and there must be a scaling down if everyone in the world is to enjoy a good quality of life.\n","id":"40b33615-453b-4776-8f85-f3960d306113"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am 19 right now, turning 20 next month, and I already feel like I have wasted so much time in my life. Pretty much, the summers going into each year of high school as well as the summers in between the fall and spring semesters in college were all wasted away by me playing video games all day, watching youtube all day, and just genuinely being alone and doing nothing. I am sat here thinking back on those times, and yes I did enjoy them to an extent, but I also hated them at the same time. I enjoyed playing video games and watching youtube, but the pleasure goes away when that is all you do all day everyday for two and a half months straight. I do not have any friends, which I feel like has contributed to that as well, but I have learned to get used to cope with the loneliness and so I have gotten a bit better in that respect. The reason why I am mainly typing this out is that I am thoroughly convinced that I wasted all that time and will not get it back. I could have done so much more during that time, whether it was reading, learning a new language, anything that could have been done in the vast amount of time that I had. I type this out of regret and sadness because I want to have a positive mindset going into the future, but I just can't. Things haven't changed from when I was in high school to now, where I am going into the fall semester which marks my second year since beginning community college and I still have no friends, no life, and am continuously wasting time. I am trying to pull myself out of this rut and making an effort to improve, but I feel like it is going nowhere. I would not say I am a stupid kid per se, in terms of the things I do other than wasting a lot of time . I have definitely been forced to learn a lot about myself since being lonely forces you to do that. But overall, I just feel like wasting all that time has hindered me in an unfixable way. Edit Seriously, Thank you to everyone who replied. You do not understand the good deed you have done and how much your advice, tips, pointers, and examples will help me. Edit 2 and how it changed my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That I wasted a ton of time and I will not get it back\n","id":"d16b090c-41fd-4f08-bb58-3ecbfc81ca18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Military conscription should apply to men and women equally.<|ARGUMENT|>Yes, it would be sexist misogyny if only women were conscripted. Likewise, the current male-only conscription policy is misandry Not anti-women sexism. Analogy: If women were being burned as devils, it wouldn't be sexism against the excluded men, it would be sexism against the women, not to mention a gross violation of their dignity and human rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is not misogyny since the conscription wouldn't apply only to women. This would be sexist if only women were conscripted.\n","id":"1da8019e-bba2-4299-8f65-a525309149fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Quebec become independent?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a need to determine the exact assets\/liabilities we have in common in Canada we paid for bridges, buildings outside QC that will remain there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Quebec's share of Canadian debt will be a long debate given the complicated nature.\n","id":"356c6389-6008-44dc-97bc-07cdf25690ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Wikipedia valuable?<|ARGUMENT|>Wikipedia involves Thousands of people, all over the world, from all cultures, working together in harmony to freely share clear, factual, unbiased information. It involves a simple and pure desire to make the world a better place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wikipedia promotes philosophies of making the world a better place\n","id":"66c15ed8-7917-480b-9e05-20f95dd82f33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is an unusual  I imagine, in that I genuinely want my view to be changed. I'm socially liberal on almost every issue, but when it comes to transgender people I can't shake my prejudices no matter how hard I think about it. I've had a member of my extended family come out as trans gendered, and while I'd never ever voice my concerns or squeamishness about it to her in person or to any one else, for that matter I cannot help but be disgusted by it and horrified that it is the sort of thing normalized by our society. Fair warning, my views may be considered somewhat offensive, so if you are easily offended please don't read on. I want to write them exactly as they are, so that they can be clearly understood. I am ashamed that I hold these views they go against everything I've ever been taught to believe and I would genuinely appreciate any effort to change my mind. In my view, a man is someone who is genetically male. You may not identify as male or wish you were female but honestly, so freakin' what? Deal with it. There's worse things in the world than wishing you were born of the other gender. Surgically removing your penis and taking estrogen tablets and wearing girl clothing and makeup isn't becoming a girl. You're still just a penisless male who can easily be identified simply by looking at you as a transgendered person. Dressing up in girl clothing and wearing makeup can never change that simple and undeniable fact. I cannot recall a single time in my life when I was unable to identify based on appearance alone, a trans gendered person. Now I do believe that being transgender is a mental illness. If you are born male, with a penis and XY chromosomes, than you are male. If you believe otherwise, the only possible origin for such a belief is the mind. Certainly there is no physical reason to feel this way. Rather than irreversibly changing the physical body to match what the mind believes shouldn't treatment be focused on matching the mind to the body? Surely the mind is far more malleable and conducive to treatment than the body is? You hear stories about 6, 7, or 8 year old kids who've chosen to play with dolls being pushed toward gender reassignment medication before they're even able to think for themselves. I myself have very few memories from that age the person I was then is radically different to who I am now age 21 . How can it be legal or moral for any society to allow its parents to push gender reassignment medication on children? Or teenagers for that matter? Even 3 years after my 18th birthday I'm a completely different person. My personality could not be more different. I've always believed in equality and justice and individual freedom. All my adult life I've been involved in social justice causes and my belief that gays and lesbians are worthy of marriage is a fundamental ideal which I have held for most of my life. I'm liberal on virtually every other issue that I know of but I've just never been able to accept transgender people as being the same as gays and lesbians. To me, being transgender is a mental illness and the cure should not be gender reassignment surgery but rather mental health treatment. Please, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being trans gendered is a mental illness and its wrong to encourage it\n","id":"6b771116-5424-4a5c-a6f8-5960762a659b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Definitions on the bottom So I do not believe that the United States should have any gun laws. This breaks down as follows title II weapons should be treated the same as title I weapons, as they are not any more dangerous Title II weapons are not any more dangerous than title I weapons, and since they are not any more dangerous they should not be restricted any further than title I weapons. Pretty simple logic here. I believe them to be no more dangerous because Short barreled rifles and shotguns are no more dangerous than a pistol. They are less concealable, with no significant other difference. Destructive devices are not going to be used in crimes because they are too big, and criminals want weapons they can conceal. Its not like the heroin junkie wanting to mug people can walk around with an artillery piece up their ass, they want something they can hide in a pocket or under a jacket like a knife, small handgun, maybe a small sawed off shotgun. machine guns are less efficient for mass murders and redundant for single homicides. People want to say the military uses machine guns because they are great at killing bulks of people, but machine guns only have 2 purposes they are good at suppressive fire and disabling 1 or 2 targets extremely quickly. Neither of these match up with civilian homicides. Suppressive fire has the primary goal of trying to get the enemy's head down so they stop firing at you, and you can approach them closer safely with men with small arms that are being used in semi automatic, or so they just stop firing until air support or artillery blows them up. But that is only relevant when you are talking about 2 decently large groups of armed individuals in a firefight across hundreds of yards, and I cant think of a single civilian shooting in world history that was like this. The second goal of disabling one or two targets extremely quickly is where we see PDWs being used by our military of the world. But this isnt relevant to criminals either, as disabling the person you shoot isnt really relevant unless they are armed, and will shoot back while they are mortally wounded but this would be relevant to a large number of defensive gun uses where this is the case . They just want the person to die before they can testify, they dont care if that means having them bleed to death over 15 minutes, and all guns can do this just fine. Without being used in either of these two niche scenarios, fully automatic fire is pointless. It dumps all of the ammo you can carry on your person in a worse manner than someone could with a bolt action rifle and aimed, concise fire. With AOWs, a small pistol is so easily concealed that the existence of firearms disguised as every day objects is pointless. A vertical forward grip makes a gun no more deadly. A lack of rifling doesnt make a gun more deadly either Suppressors make guns as loud as chainsaws, not a fart. Even gunshot detection system companies say their product works fine with suppressed gunshots. It just makes the gun hearing safe in some cases, not silent. So all it does for criminals is stop hearing damage, and in return makes the weapon far less concealable So, you can try to convince me that either my premise here that since they are not any more dangerous they should not be restricted any further than title I weapons is wrong, or convince me that anything I said about the capabilities of these weapons are wrong. Or perhaps I missed something completely relating to this The government cannot effectively regulate the private sale of title I weapons, and we should not have laws that cannot be sufficiently enforced Imagine the following scenario Me and you meet up in a Walmart parking lot for a private transaction. I hand you 200 dollars. You hand me inanimate object or provide a service for me. We both walk away. Even when you make that sort of sale illegal on paper, how do you effectively enforce making it illegal? This is what our current war on drugs is trying to solve, this is what local law enforcement is trying to track down when facing prostitution, and this is what the ATF is currently trying to solve to track down illegal arms sales. But none of this is working, because without a complete and total police state, individuals have enough privacy to stop enough official evidence from amounting to result in arrest warrants being issued. Sure, we have arrested people for drugs, we have arrested people for prostitution illiciting prostitution, and we have arrested people for illegal guns. But I am also sure that every single one of us could go to that motel and find all three of those things within the hour. We all know we can access these things despite our law enforcement's best efforts to curb it, so it has obviously failed in stopping the use of these services. However, it does leave a lot of prisoners that our tax dollar has to take care of. It gives police officers the ability to selectively enforce laws and target that particular black teenager they hate. It gives the ATF the power the ability to try and target brown ex cons to try and find cartel gun runners, and leak several thousand guns in to the hands felons. I believe we should try and limit this where we find this rampant, and this is a case where we find this rampant So we should not have any laws surrounding title I weapons and title II weapons should not be stricter regulated than title I weapons, with the justification being my previous section I do have other reasons for my belief besides just this, though I do not believe in criminal laws that target actions that are not inherently evil Murder is inherently evil. Rape is inherently evil. Theft is inherently evil. Laws targeting these are malum in se laws. Malum in se laws are justified. However, there is nothing inherently evil about owning a gun. There is nothing inherently evil about making a gun is certainly nothing evil about wanting to take a hacksaw to a shotgun. But we still still shoot peoples unarmed wife and retreating son in the back over the accusation of such. That is not an appropriate response in any manner. It shouldnt result in prison by any means, let alone the massive police raids we see. If it isnt an evil action, it shouldnt resort in use of violent force by the state. we should remove threats from society, not remove tools from threats from society if I cant trust you with a rifle, why can I trust you with a machete? why can I trust you with a car? why can I trust you with gasoline and a match? I really dont see why prohibited persons should exist, outside of those currently in prison, those serving parole, or those in a mental institution. Because I dont see why I can trust someone with a machete, a car, or the gas to run a car if I cant trust them with a rifle. If they are that much of a menace, they cant be trusted with anything lethal. Remove people from society when they have proven to be a nuisance, reform them, and let them exercise the full rights of citizens. Dont have them be in a semi free state while they are still a nuisance, because they will be a nuisance regardless of if they are legally allowed to be armed private armaments are a last line of defense against democide Mao said it best Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun . That is why he and all other tyrants had to restrict private armament ownership specifically to commit atrocities that killed tens of millions, whether that be his Great Leap Forward, Stalin's Holodomor gulags executions, Hitler's Holocaust, The Armenian Genocide or the Cambodian Genocide under Pol Pot. But like what we saw in WWII with the French resistance and the actions of the partisans, rebels with guns can significantly hamper democide. When faced with artillery strikes, bombing runs, and even the support of plenty of the locals, these groups held their ground and stopped the advancement of Nazi forces. Modern rebel groups can easily do the same when faced with a tyrranical government, but they need to be armed before one is established to do so Please, Change My View terms I may use while commenting or had used in explaining my view Gun laws gun control laws that restrict or regulate the sale, purchase, or possession of firearms through licensing, registration, or identification requirements. BATFE the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives FFL Federal Firearms License. Normally used to refer to the person or institution that holds the license. Allows for commercial sale and production of various weapons. Main ones are type 1s, normal gun stores, type 2s, pawn shops, and type 7, normal firearm manufacturers Title II weapon Destructive Devices, short barreled rifles and shotguns, any other weapons, machine guns, and suppressors. May be represented by the abbreviation DD, SBR, SBS, and AOW. Also known as class 3 weapons or NFA items. Title I weapon Rifles, Pistols, Shotguns, and Other Antique weapon a firearm that does not fire a fixed round, and any firearm that was made before December 31st 1898. Exempt from virtually all gun laws, a felon can order one online and have it shipped to their door with the ammo, all legally. Destructive Device Weapons that fire a fixed cartridge of over 50 caliber with sporting exceptions to shot shells and a select few big game rounds , or fire over 1 4 ounce of explosive material Short Barreled Rifle a stocked weapon that is less than 26 inches in overall length or with a sub 16 inch barrel length with a few exceptions to old pistols that were issued with stocks, like Chinese High powers or Artillery navy lugers Short barreled shotgun a stocked weapon that is less 26 inches in overall length or with a sub 18 inch barrel length any other weapons weapons disguised as every day objects, such as cane guns or pen guns. pistols with a forward vertical grip. Pistols without rifling. A lot of weird things, but not literally all weapons that do not fit into one of the other groups. Machine guns weapons that fire more than one fixed cartridge per action. Moving a gatling trigger a quarter rotation is an individual action per cartridge fired, so it is not a machine gun. A bump stock requires moving your arm forward to pull the gun to your trigger, so it is not a machine gun. a binary trigger fired once on pulling the trigger, and once on releasing the trigger, both individual actions, so it is not a machine gun. Suppressors Devices that suppress the sound of the gunshot by approximately 30db, so that instead of being as loud as a jet engine they are closer to a chainsaw. Does not apply to devices permanently attached to a muzzle loader. Rifle a stocked rifled weapon that fires a fixed cartridge with a 16 inch barrel and 26 inch overall length pistol a rifled weapon that fired a fixed cartridge, and is designed to be fired with one hand. Cannot have a stock makes a SBR , cannot have a vertical forward grip makes AOW . Shotgun a stocked weapon that fires a shotshell with a 18 inch barrel and 26 inch overall length Other a frame or receiver, or a weapon that doesnt fit into any of the predefined categories, like a pistol grip only shotgun with a 14 inch barrel and 26 inch overall length Assault weapon a semiautomatic long gun with a pistol grip, detachable magazine, and various cosmetic features, a semi automatic pistol with various cosmetic features, or a revolving shotgun Democide the government killing its citizens<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am against all gun laws in the United States\n","id":"ea143ce9-fde7-4bc9-85c4-5175c005b277"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Andrew Yang is the only candidate with an actionable plan to abolish the penny As long as it costs more than a penny to make a penny, we are not getting the most value out of our tax dollars.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to the Democratic Party Leadership in Iowa, Yang by far has the most detailed policy outline of the current candidates.\n","id":"7f02fbb5-401f-4716-9208-f65e15a33e03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By my estimation, about 10 of the year is Christmastime, as defined by the Christmas music everywhere, the lights, the trees, the holiday sales in department stores, and the peppermint drinks in coffee shops. I think this is too high of a percentage, and I propose that Christmas be changed from occurring once a year to occurring once every four years, so that the Christmas season becomes only 2.5 of the average year. This is good for three reasons Christmas becomes more special. Because it's so rare, people will enjoy it more when it comes around. I don't think people enjoy the current Christmas season as much as they could, because it becomes an annual chore or routine more than anything. Even if people like it for part of the time, the thrill has practically already worn off by the 25th itself. However, if it's the first time in four years that Christmas has been celebrated, it's keeps that special edge. Christmas songs don't outstay their welcome. We've been listening, as a society, to pretty much the same Christmas music since WWII. This is why people are always complaining about the endless loop of carols in department stores we've heard them all before. However, by switching to a four year system, the amount we listen to each carol will be drastically reduced, ensuring that people don't get as tired of them as quickly. It evens purchases out during the year. Instead of having a million people charge into a store to buy TVs on Black Friday, people will buy new TVs when they need them and when they have the money to do so. This reduces Christmas debt, because that'll only happen once every four years, and it makes life way less hellish for the retail workers who have to deal with mad Christmas shopping during the holiday season. I think this is a brilliant idea. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that Christmas should only be held once every four years.\n","id":"1d13e49b-db87-46ca-8e83-38a8c6502909"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US and NATO Should Withdraw from Afghanistan<|ARGUMENT|>The Taliban and Russia share opposition to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and ISIS, both of which operate inside Afghanistan. Moscow and the Afghan Taliban already exchange intelligence and information regarding ISIS.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not necessary that Russia will align with the Afghan government and fight against the Taliban.\n","id":"efadf46e-1bba-4598-b1a2-e86605333b08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Full disclosure I haven't listened to a whole lot of them, that's why this is , but I seriously don't get why they're so popular. All of the music that I've listened to by them is just the same bland stuff you could hear by any other generic rock band in the 90s. The only thing they seem to be good at is coming up with awesome names for songs Killing in the Name? Maybe the most badass name for a song I've ever heard. The actual song itself? Not so much . To change my mind, I'd have to see something that made them stand out as a band, that makes me feel like it's uniquely theirs. I haven't seen anything that seems like that, if any people who have listened to more of them than I have could point me in the direction of something like that it would probably change my opinion of them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rage Against the Machine is overrated\n","id":"18d4f7c1-b83b-43b6-8ab8-d960896e021c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>Believing in something that is possibly not true limits the desire to learn for sure. And with that our collective or individual understanding of reality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would mean accepting the existence of something for which there is insufficient evidence. This is a dangerous precedent.\n","id":"5241f5ef-c4b8-4315-b9cb-68c19cc4c3cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As I understand it, crimes now are prosecuted based on what happened, with one's intent as a factor in the prosecution. I think this is backwards. I think this is best explained with a couple scenarios. Scenario 1A Man drives home drunk at 3AM. Half way home he goes off the road and suffers minor injuries, calls 911, they arrive and see that he is drunk and he is charged with impaired driving . Scenario 1B In a parallel universe, the exact same thing happens to the same man, but when he goes off the road there happens to be someone in his way. He hits them and they die instantly. He is charged with impaired driving causing death and does a significantly longer sentence. Scenario 2A Man knows his wife is cheating, decides to kill her with a firearm. He walks up to her, shoots her and she dies. He is charged with first degree murder . Scenario 2B Same situation, but when he pulls the trigger the gun jams and the wife gets away. He is charged with attempted murder and does less time. Discussion In both scenarios, the perpetrator does less time because of a factor that was completely out of their control. In those cases, the result of their actions has no bearing on how much of a danger they are to society it was simply random chance that got someone killed in 1B, and kept someone alive in 2B. Note that I am not saying we should be lenient on these crimes, if anything the penalties for getting lucky in 2B and 1A should be higher, rather than lowering the penalties for the other situation. I realize this may not satisfy family societies need for revenge , but in my opinion that should not be the goal of a justice system, and as I understand it this is not a stated goal of most country's systems. Edit My view has been changed. Though I still believe that intent should be the only factor, there are a multitude of practical reasons why this doesn't work. Thank you all for the well argued comments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that crimes should be punished based on intent not result in all circumstances.\n","id":"fb64dfe8-a23a-4c20-ab6e-caca37b23783"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Bullfighting<|ARGUMENT|>In order to reduce the risk to the matador, sometimes a bulls horns are shaved. This can inflict some pain on the bull and can also make it more sensitive to other forms of pain during the fight.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bulls' horns may be shaved, making them very sensitive to pain.\n","id":"d6a29b67-24e4-4f35-a991-08a01cbe1aae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>reality television does more harm than good<|ARGUMENT|>Reality TV actually has a lot of value to our society; they are effectively anthropological experiments, allowing the public to study people and societies from the comfort of their living rooms1. Humans are endlessly different and endlessly interesting to other humans. In these programmes we see people like us faced with unusual situations. Shows like Survivor, which place a group of strangers in remote environments, make us think about what we would do in their place, and about what principles govern human behaviour in general. It also shows us people who look and act very different from us, and helps us see that actually we have a lot in common with them. MTV's reality show 'Making the Band 2', a 'hip-hop American Idol', gives centre stage to inner-city kids who would be portrayed as criminals or victims on a cop drama. There is nothing immoral about reality shows, merely the society which demands them; these shows are just a product of our values and desires. We should face up to these issues rather than censor television in order to hide them. 1 Sanneh, K. 2011, May 9. The Reality Principle. Retrieved July 4, 2011, from The New Yorker<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reality television forces us to analyse our own behaviour as a society\n","id":"75cc40d2-9288-4fc1-98b8-46ebcb6b0167"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Context I'm currently learning Python and I limit myself to three attempts at a problem before going to look up the answer. I still work through the solution line by line to make sure I understand it, so I believe that the gains in time saved and progress made more than outweighs the satisfaction lost from not figuring it out myself, nor the potential of discovering a novel approach that nobody had thought of previously. I think the real value in figuring things out for yourself because it's the only option is only when you are operating on the edge of knowledge, rather than the edge of your own knowledge. As Newton famously said If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Working things out for yourself is a waste of time if there's an answer readily available\n","id":"67dea608-c3c7-4cd4-b3d4-f9daf47e0d5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know some might disagree, but making friends isn't fucking rocket science. Despite being alone for most of my life and being what most people would deem anti social , I can still make friends easily. It's simple. Just engage a person with a smile, try to find some common ground, and ask for their contact information. If they aren't digging your approach just say Have a nice day and keep it moving. But, what is mind boggling to me is how to KEEP friends. I know that some people lie and fake they are interested in you in order to get out of a conversation. But how are we as a society supposed to befriend each other if we aren't willing to say what we want from an interaction? It takes two to tango, and I know I have to keep taking shots in order find someone that wants to make a friendship stick. So how about we just tell each other to our faces Hey do you want to be friends? . I get to save my time and mental bandwidth. And the other person would be saved from passively rejecting my offers to meet up. x posted from r unpopularopinion<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making friends is easy, KEEPING them is the fucking hard part.\n","id":"2dd08ee8-be7b-444c-a1c5-e68f9b219062"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do not believe that the Democrats nor the Republican platforms are all completely right. I feel like if we followed everything on either of the parties ideas, America would not be fixed. . Which is the right party?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Don't Believe Any of the Two Major Political Parties Have it All Right.\n","id":"eba414d2-f714-4f71-9087-70b3e4f7b1dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To give you an idea of where I'm coming from, I'd call myself a Pro life capitalist. I supported Rand Paul until he dropped out. My worries are that Trump is not a serious capitalist, basically. I'm out of options, though, because Gary Johnson is Pro choice. So it's either vote for Trump or no one. Here are my issues Trump has shown a total lack of respect for laissez faire capitalism, and zero understanding of solid, non interventionist economics. For example, he wants to do a trade war with China that will cripple our standard of living because it would hinder our ability to get so many cheap goods. Why should I, as a capitalist, vote for him? Since he has zero political experience, how am I supposed to trust anything he says about being Pro life? He could just be making it up to get elected. With zero votes or actions in political life, I can't trust him. Why do you trust him? Trump is a negotiator which means he has no intention of getting his full tax plan implemented. So isn't he essentially just voting for more of the same, with maybe a little less taxes? And isn't there a high possibility that he could sell out capitalists and conservatives like myself because of his negotiations ? Interested in what your responses are to these issues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump is not a serious capitalist and therefore not worthy of my vote\n","id":"7cfcfb8a-72fb-4941-a4e6-fbc4545768c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should science get more governmental funding?<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever an opponent was seen as gaining an advantage, the military would use 'offset strategies' by funneling R&D into the military. This has lead to defining technologies for humanity like nuclear in the first offset, guidance systems like GPS in the second, and robotics, 3D printing, and big data the third.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When the military made achievements, it was from the scientific R&D innovation that the government specifically funded, not non-scientific military efforts per se. It's the allocation of government's military budget towards science that will lead to more defining moments more than giving it to them unspecified will.\n","id":"3f1114ae-fa94-4d36-b459-dfc71d93e9cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is directed at the west for the most part Nationalism was once a very progressive thing even though now its associated with ultra reactionary movements. In medieval times most of the nobles ruling an area were not from there, didn't even speak the language the people spoke. Then it changed to valuing one culture's self determination, and was supported by many philosophers. Technology like radio and TV also helped bring countries together, helped form understanding instead of mutually unintelligible dialects. Now its pointless at least in western europe, Australia, etc because of three things Economic integration, the dominance of english, and further advances in technology. Economics is a key part of culture. Who holds the power, what the economy is based on, who controls the means of production, etc. The economy is a worldwide thing now, and is controlled by international entities, some of them having more money than whole governments. Economics and technology determine culture more than we like to admit. And an economy thats very international and controlled by international entities makes nationalism somewhat of an awkward fit. Its hard to be nationalist when countries watch the same Hollywood blockbusters, wear a lot of the same clothes or similar style of clothes, have the same restaurants, have products made by the same companies, work for the same companies, etc. The dominance of English is a clear favor of internationalism. There have been lingua francas before, but never on a scale this global. In the modern western world where everyone learns not only to speak the lingua franca, but read and write in it, and be able to communicate with them all over the world from the comfort of their desk. Not only that but similar values. Western capitalistic english speaking democracies, all of it. Not like just a lifetime ago where one English speaking democracy, one german speaking militaristic autocracy, and a state existing under communism of some slav language and russian, were all so close together. The west is becoming one great English speaking mall Tech just emphasizes the two previous points. Tech makes borders seem so much less. Its not longer an ordeal to go to a foreign land, with months of walking or riding. Now I just, as Louis CK put it, watch a Adam Sandler movie and take a runny dump then I'm there, and I eat Mcdonalds at both airports. Also the internet has made international communication so easy we don't even realize. Its gotten to a point where people are starting to be more defined by their ideological internet tribe libertarians, pol acks, the typical reddit progressive, the SJWs, etc than their nationality I do know that there is a rise of more nationalist sentiments in Europe, but I hardly think its nationalism. Its just being anti muslim, they don't want muslim and third world immigrants around. A german nationalist these days doesn't care how much influence or presence Spain or Britain has in their country. They aren't emphasizing their own values compared to everyone else, its mostly just western values vs muslim ones. While that could be considered Chauvinism in its own right, it at least shows that the world is slowly becoming one blob where the groups defining us are big and broad, but there are relatively few groups compared to 100 200 years ago. You may think globalism is going about it the wrong way. Some think its putting too much power in corporations, too in favor of the wealthy, so on and so forth. Tech is making globalism inevitable bar a huge fucking collapse likes which the world has never seen , its a better course of action to make it a more positive force instead of putting on jackboots and burying your head in the sand. Part 2 How its philosophically short sighted Nationalism puts an emphasis on valuing your own culture, protecting your own borders, language, all from unwanted foreign influence. But what if a country has very pluralistic values? Most westerners feel this way, the enlightened in western academia feel this is the right way to go. Wouldn't being a reactionary pol ach fixated on preserving your own culture's identity actually go against the cultural consensus? Isn't encouraging nationalism somewhat hypocritical? Its a very modern western value, at least the way we see nationalism. Its telling another culture how it should handle its business. Say I'm a british nationalist, UKIP voter or something like that. Woudln't me scoffing at Germany being infested by SJWs and muslim lovers be me overstepping the bounds of my ideology? I'm telling another culture to be ultra conservative and protective of its nation state. Or should I just not care about other nationalities altogether? What if a culture values islam or neo liberalism? Both necessitate being worldwide movements and not just confined to one shape on the map. America values neo liberalism, which is why so many American companies are international businesses marketing globally. It is doing what it wants to do as a country, but is interfering with the self determination of other countries. Same thing could be said about being passionate about Islam except if they turn it into a national cult .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nationalism doesn't work in a modern setting, and its short sighted philosophically\n","id":"c272f4cf-ee04-43fe-9838-139983d2e333"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a left leaning person its shocking to see the violence of recent Antifa activities. They are continually using fascist tactics to further an extreme ideology while goading right wingers into committing mote heinous acts. How can they justify beating up elderly men as good? Is there a hidden side to antifa I'm not seeing? I haven't seen any prominent left leaning politicians attacking the violence. Does this mean that they support it? Why are regular people being attacked and not bankers, racist groups and other people seen as bad by Antifa? I'm not hugely political if I'm honest but I've always thought that the left stand up for the little guy rather than knocking people down.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Antifa arn't a force for good.\n","id":"a806724b-c112-4802-9364-54b671125371"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are a lot of scholarships out there that are only for African Americans or only for people of Native American descent As a Caucasian female, I fail to see why this doesn't count as racism. If someone were to designate a scholarship for a Caucasian person, it would be immediately declared as racist. Just like I don't believe that someone's skin color or ethnic descent automatically makes them inferior to others, I also don't think that being a certain skin color ethnic background makes it okay to separate someone out for positive benefits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that scholarships specifically designated for a certain race are racist.\n","id":"7eaebdbd-c99d-4f8f-9d7b-85fdec70fd56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally feel marijuana should be legal along with shrooms, LSD, MDMA, and basically any drug that is less harmful than alcohol. I feel like that no one should be thrown in jail for possessing drugs alone. I don\u2019t feel like it does any good to throw a person in prison for doing a crime that only affects themselves. Especially because people who are drug addicts are ill people who have a disease, not criminals. Our society just teaches us to hate all drugs and users without actually looking at drugs from an unbiased point of view. No, I\u2019m not saying you should be able to buy heroin or meth at Walmart. I am saying that drug addiction is a disease and should not be treated as a crime. The people who do drugs and know and accept the risks and consequences of their actions and don\u2019t harm anyone else shouldn\u2019t be punished for doing or possessing those drugs alone. It\u2019s stupid to have a government tell you what you can and can\u2019t put in your body. As long as you don\u2019t harm other people, I don\u2019t care what you do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All drugs should be decriminalized\n","id":"c73a2865-6f92-4030-ae2c-d431ad7082bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care, Debate on Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>Jonathan Cohn. \"Creative Destruction. The best case against universal health care.\" The New Republic. November 12, 2007 - \".The development of DBS was one part basic knowledge--an understanding of how Parkinson's works and how the brain responds to electrical stimulation--and one part sheer luck. Profits, on the other hand, had relatively little to do with it. .\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Medical innovation has little to do with investment and profit\n","id":"31ee9eef-c4fa-4ef4-84ce-dd139a896a76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While I don't think wholeheartedly that we should entrust everything to these machines, allow me to explain a vague system that would work for this A large supercomputer makes every governing decision in a country, such as making legislature, allocating government resources, and even declaring war. This computer is updated with a set of goals and guidelines every year, essentially, its political agenda. These updates are voted upon by the general populous throughout the year, before they are implemented. It is easy, thanks to the infrastructure the computer provides, to ensure that every option is well understood by the populous, and that they have the information they need to make the right decision. Once these goals, and guidelines on how to reach them, are uploaded into the computer, it solves these issues in the most efficient manner it can calculate, keeping in mind the guidelines which may include avoiding loss of life, or making sure that taxes don't go up by X , etc. . Of course, it is a given that a good bit of the government's resources would be dedicated to cybersecurity, as this computer has insane power that, if controlled by the wrong hands, could mean disaster. Now, the more physical things the computer gets done, such as creating new structures or declaring war, is still delegated to having human employees of the public sector make it so, still keeping most of those in the public sector employed. This works for any economic system really, although I think it would work best in a communistic society, as this would allow the unbribable, objective, and hyperintelligent computer to have all of the country's resources at its disposal, while ensuring that everyone gets their fair share regardless of social status or connections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Robots should rule the world\n","id":"98752853-1bd5-471d-914f-a7bac499733d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hollywood has always been the place for pushing progressive ideals, and I take no issue with better representation and characters that better represent their sex race. It makes for better viewing. But it appears as of late Hollywood has swapped a scalpel for a sledgehammer it is so focused on telling people what they should be thinking that TV shows and movies appear to be aimed more at convincing children than adults. Examples Mad Max Fury Road had excellent character dynamics and representation and the most recent movie I can think of that was a movie first, and ideology second. The recent Star Wars movie had a female lead who was basically invincible, and the best at everything to the point it was hard to relate to, did not need help from others, and created no character arc. The new Black Panther movie seems to be under lock and key with reviews. It appears that not giving the movie a good score is tantamount to racism. I can't help but wonder if people are worried to give their real opinion, lest they are condemned as a racist. Actors and film creators have become increasingly vocal about their political opinion, even to the point of comparing the rebels and the empire of Star Wars with current political events Trump and Clinton . Which is about as simplistic, childish, and black and white thinking as it gets. You can't help but wonder how much of that they shoe horned into the movie, with parallels being obvious, Edit I really appreciate everyone's time, I got some great answers and I have softened my view on this, but not entirely changed it. Reasons I can see some really in depth answers about Rey not being a 'Mary sue'. With respect, I don't believe it's reasonable to have to watch the movie that many times or perform a thesis level investigation to justify her being insanely good. I walked out of the cinema feeling like she was a to powerful and 'untouchable', combined with the heavy handed ideology throughout the movie it would be hard to explain this away as not what it appears on the surface. I agree hard line anti war, pro war, pro gay messages etc have been in cinema a long time and perhaps lacked subtlety and sacrificed plot for ideology. Like I said Michael Bay is surely paid by the military and if he is not, he bloody should be. There is a lot riding on black panther being successful. When it got 100 percent the front page of google was all top level newspapers and magazines making a huge deal out of this score, despite it being a relatively common pre screening score. There is surely a reason for this, and I feel sorry for anyone who would publicly criticise a movie that clearly has a lot riding on it. Like I said I hope it's successful and if there are some mediocre bits, people can be honest about. I do believe I am more sensitive to the current ideological tone of movies in Hollywood, maybe because of social media as well as what is happening at universities with the so called 'sjw's' and push for equality of outcome over equality of opportunity. I concede that due to this, I might be more vigilant toward it. Also I would like to add that I'm vigilant because I want to see women portrayed well in movies, and I don't want them fucking this up because they pushed an agenda. I agree that on focusing only on a handful of movies I am not taking into account the full range of what Hollywood is putting out, and as such it would be more accurate to suggest only some are pushing this very specific ideology. Lastly I would say everyone clearly watches movies for different reasons. Personally I'm not opposed to being challenged, provoked and hit with a message. But what I do expect is the creators first and for most make a great movie that is entertaining and re watchable. When you sacrifice script and dialogue or put in twenty mins of movie that added nothing only to make a point about anti capitalism new Star Wars with Flynn and Rose side quest I will roll my eyes, esp coming from one of the largest and richest companies in the world. The ideological push needs to be engrossing and part of the movie, not suck me out and make me think 'I'm being lectured at' Thanks again everyone, great responses and thought provoking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hollywood is increasingly overt with its ideological messages, to the point it's sacrificing quality and subtlety for eye rolling and self congratulatory scripts.\n","id":"6a413405-7eaa-459f-afad-6eaad40182e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should programming be taught in primary school?<|ARGUMENT|>The earlier children learn programming, the more comfortable they will be with it, and the more likely they are to use it to facilitate other interests such as creating games, apps, and websites.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You can make learning how to code fun for kids as well, since there are already games for this.\n","id":"dce6b631-9854-4455-8c32-3675a48f0ca1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>The perceived democratic deficit is directly connected to the EU not having attained statehood. Compared to international institutions it is probably the most democratically legitimized one on the planet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many Europeans are opposed to the current EU. Various complaints default in democracy, administrative backlogs, unknown policymakers could be addressed through this reform.\n","id":"339c70db-4802-4028-a735-962763fc28a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Polygamy Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Statistically, the chance to get a woman pregnant is bigger if you have several partners for intercourse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It could be a good method to fight the demographic change in some countries.\n","id":"fd42e59d-bd94-4cce-8c45-2ca7d3b26373"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Even if you don't think Trump is racist, his policies are ridiculous. There is no way to deport all of the illegal immigrants in our country and it would be stupid to try. The wall would cost an incredible amount of money just to build, not to mention the fact that building a wall isn't going to do shit. You have to guard it to do anything and if you are guarding it, the wall wouldn't be much better than a fence. Blocking Islamic immigration is clearly based in prejudice and wouldn't do anything to keep Americans safe, but would force refugees to live in danger. Even fiscally he has bad policies. Experts have reviewed his tax plan and expect the deficit to rise significantly if he gets what he wants. Hillary has better policies and would move our country in a better direction, but she will clearly say anything to get elected. She has been involved in far too many scandals. She is corrupt and too many people don't trust her. Johnson on the other hand is a libertarian. Libertarianism is like a compromise for democrats and republicans. They are fiscally conservative so taxes would likely be lowered, but socially they lean more to the left. He supports legalization of marijuana, doesn't want to do anything to prevent gay marriage, and basically in general wants to just let people do what they want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our next president should be Gary Johnson\n","id":"44517379-c5a1-436d-bd2b-1d8634ba49b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Historical evidence can be very vague, altered or outright be completely fake. Just because the old\/new testament says Jesus existed doesn't mean that it's true. It becomes humanly impossible to trace back every historical evidence that mentions someone who could have been Jesus. The only possible solution would be to digitize everything and let a super computer build a web of correlations between evidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is insufficient evidence that Jesus Christ existed at all.\n","id":"476a1b9f-ae0b-49cd-89c0-82da5a4bf5b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>subsidise the translation of academic work in the languages of developing countries<|ARGUMENT|>It is often the case that science and technology produced in the developed world finds its greatest application in the developing world. Sometimes new developments are meant for such use, as was the case with Norman Borlaug's engineering of dwarf wheat in order to end the Indian food crisis. Other times it is serendipitous, as academic work not meant of practical use, or tools that could not be best applied in developed world economies find ready application elsewhere, as citizens of the developing world turn the technologies to their needs.1 By translating academic journals into the languages of developing countries, academics and governments can open a gold mine of ideas and innovation. The developing world still mostly lacks the infrastructure for large scale research and relies heavily on research produced in the developed world for its sustenance. Having access to the body of academic literature makes these countries less dependent on the academic mainstream, or to the few who can translate the work themselves. Having access to this research allows developing countries to study work done in the developed world and look at how the advances may be applicable to them. The more people are able to engage in this study the more likely it is that other uses for the research will be found. 1 Global Health Innovation Blog. \u2018The East Meets West Foundation: Expanding Organizational Capacity\u201d. Stanford Graduate School of Business. 18 October 2012,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Translation expands the knowledge base of citizens to help solve local problems\n","id":"e9fc9641-5db4-4ffb-bd39-3c328ce4766f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You can be a kind, compassionate person and bad shit will still happen to you. Conversely you can go through life being a selfish asshole and still be successful. People in life who are successful are usually successful because they took what they wanted and played to win. I see it everywhere, employers or bosses that treat some stuff like shit but are financially successful. People who do right by other people sometimes but get nothing in return. I dont like it, but I see it often. If life were fair, inncocent people would not goto prison, hard working people would get ahead, good people would not be poor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Life is not fair, and it is an important lesson to learn\n","id":"d5565a83-fc3f-4b7a-a849-f871d1cdcf7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Barring a sold out showing, I cannot fathom a single reason why someone would want to sit in the front row of a movie theater. I think that it is the absolutely worst place to sit. My reasons are as follows One cannot see the entire screen in their field of vision. Head turning is an inevitability. Some people including young children will have to tilt their heads upward to see the screen. It is uncomfortable continual craning is most likely detrimental to health. Although many disagree that sitting too close to the TV is bad for the eyes I believe that being so close to a movie screen can induce eye strain There are so many better seats in the house. Full field of vision is only a few rows back. Sitting in the very back allows you to look forward down avoid neck strain and still get the full movie experience. Some people also prefer to see a full audience in front of them to enhance the movie going experience. I cannot understand why someone would choose to sit in the front row. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no good reason to sit in the front row of a movie theater.\n","id":"43b07f81-4773-49f2-ad63-874f3b1849bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>OPINION CHANGED greater speed impact in inevitable collisions as presented by many below, makes sense as a good reason for parallel flow. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 It may seem counter intuitive but here is the thing there is a massive power imbalance between a car or a person on a bike, scooter, or skateboard amp blind spots hard to see spots are a thing when you are traveling in the same direction. In particular the scenario occurs all the time where a motorist needs to make a right turn through a bike lane. With bikers traveling the same directions as traffic, they are approaching the turning vehicle from a totally different direction than all other hazards they would typically be watching for while making a right turn. Sometimes there is even a row of parallel parked cars between the turning car and the bike lane further obscuring on coming bikers from view and eliminating the bikers ability to see the turning car as an approaching hazard. When I lived in Washington DC biking was my primary mode of transportation amp there are a lot of bike lanes. However I generally rode my bike on the road because inside the city I could keep up with the flow of traffic and I felt much safer occupying a visible place in the traffic pattern than I did in the bike lane next to it. Out in Long Beach I skate board around a lot and typically do so in the bike lane going the wrong direction. In this way I have a clear view of any hazards coming in my direction and I am approaching turning vehicles from a direction they would be looking while deciding if it is a safe moment for them to proceed with the turn. Similarly when traveling on one way streets with no bike lanes which there are a lot of in LB I always travel against the flow of traffic so that I can see motorists and they can see me amp know I see them. It feels dramatically safer yet still I see most people sticking to the herd mentality on these streets and going in the same direction as motorists are our urban planners failing us miserably or is there some strong bit of logic i am failing to consider?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bike lanes in should go in the opposite direction that traffic travels in the car lanes they are next to because it would be dramatically safer.\n","id":"8eaaaaa0-8411-4058-bb78-5491b97eee57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a skeptic myself, although, I am definitely openminded and curious to learn more about those few alleged UFO encounters that just haven't been sufficiently debunked. Sure, there\u2019s UFO nuts out there and self proclaimed UFO researchers who dedicate their free time to speculating at everything flying in the skies above, people who eagerly want to believe \u2014 but I think there are a few somewhat credible sightings out there from pilots, conservative townsfolk of rural places e.g. Stephenville, Texas who would've likely never believed in extraterrestrial life prior to seeing anything odd, and from military personnel. People who are generally familiar with objects and phenomenon in everyday airspace. I\u2019m posting here because I just recently sat down and watched this Larry King Live interview with Bill Nye, several former air force members who manned the United States\u2019 silos storing weapons of mass destruction, and a few others. I think Bill Nye arrived a little unprepared and maintained incredibly condescending throughout much of the interview. It became evident that he had done little, if any, research on the missile silo encounters in question. At one point he even struggled a bit to recall where this silo was and throughout, was just incredibly quick to write them off as being crazy for even speculating about about what they had seen hovering over the silos, flying in the sky and disabling missiles in midair. I respect the living shit out of Bill Nye, I think he\u2019s really wonderful individual, but in this instance, he came off as a total dick with with next to nothing to add to the discussion aside from smarmy dismissals. It seemed as if he thought he could just show up and discredit them with potentially overlooked factoids, confident, with a smirk on his face in attempt to discredit them and make them seem like total loons. I understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but even though the objects seen were unidentified , Nye didn\u2019t even want to consider that what these guys had seen could have been anything out of the ordinary \u2014 it\u2019s as if the scientific method is hardcoded into this guy\u2019s very being and was expecting peer reviewed paper. Nye comes in on part 2 As soon as part 4 Nye seems to understand that he's coming up with excuses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I find it ignorant and rude to dismiss everyone who\u2019s claimed to have encountered a UFO as being crazy.\n","id":"2685be34-1efb-4ff0-911c-322fe47d36cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a matter of fairness, and as a solution to apathy and general public disengagement from political life, all native born residents of a country should be required to pass a citizenship test when they turn the age of majority, so long as immigrants are required to do the same. Not only would this make becoming a citizen more fair, it would make citizenship a right of passage, not just an accident of birth. It would make citizens more engaged and associated with the state if they are required to have a measurable level of knowledge about it. Edit 1 For those asking what to do with those who fail the test, they will have permanent resident status but will not have the full benefits of a citizen. They can try writing the test until they actually pass. Edit 2 Permanent residents would not have to re apply every 3 5 years. They would be issued passports but international travel would be more difficult. They would not be deported for committing a felony.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If immigrants must write a citizenship test to become citizens, native-born residents should be forced to write a citizenship when they turn 18.\n","id":"3a9bf7f7-6e34-40b3-90ac-ae4a235eb10e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the amount of power that corporations have in the world, and the likelihood that it isn't going away and will in fact gain even more power, I think that a way to enact a decision that, at least in the U.S. or Europe as a testing ground, in exchange for the corporation in question to pay a tax or something equivalent to that country, that the land the facility that is owned by that corporation is not considered part of, let's say Denmark , but instead considered to be Google both as examples of course . This facility therefore, not being part of Denmark is not beholden to the laws of Denmark but instead beholden to the laws of Google. The same would also be said for these companies having to rely on inside forces for protection since they do not have protection from Denmark. They are not Denmark, they are their own entity that has to supply their own protection from threats. I think this could lead to unmitigated technological advancement, since a large enough biotechnology company could in theory use human testing and cloning which I think is illegal in the U.S. and a lot of other countries to discover cures or treatments for diseases. The same applies for other advancements that would be considered illegal by the country the extraterritorial land is located in. The same applies for people working for the corporation. If they want to work for the company and the corporation requires you to become a citizen of that corporation and give up any rights that you have as a citizen of your home country. This would not apply to intangibles like the Internet or things like that, but only to the physical ground that this installation is taking up. Yes. This also means that technically, Disney could go to war with McDonald's. Maybe I've taken in too much Cyberpunk media, but I think that this would be an interesting world to live in. Tell me why it wouldn't be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Corporations should be able to be considered their own states, if they are large enough.\n","id":"38453984-c206-4cd1-90b5-7999e9bf609e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Second hand smoke is a legitimate reason to ban smoking in shared spaces. Tar and other chemicals that result in the combustion of tobacco plant matter can lead to death. Vaping is the best thing that has happened to this generation. Tobacco use is dropping in young adults. It is being replaced with something that is annoying at worst. My specific concern is college campuses which have banned e cigarettes but this issue certainly would cover other bans such as the New York smoking ban though I'm not certain if it covers e cigs. Aromatic Vape juice is something that does bother me and might be something worth banning. But it's my belief that anything that curbs tobacco use is a positive trend for our young people. Why should vaping be banned when there are no second hand dangers? I should mention that I'm only discussing an outdoor ban. Indoor vaping is not appropriate in my mind. Rough day of classes, I'll be back to reward best efforts<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vaping should not be included in smoking bans, especially on college campuses\n","id":"82db5257-5c70-4c61-8c74-95b2f52f9f9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before we begin I have no problem with homosexuals or transexuals. But I think cross dressers or people who dress up as the opposite sex in public are very creepy. I understand that some people do it as a fetish but that doesn't make it okay. I find it incredibly creepy when the flirt while cross dressing. And I think that maybe the should go to a therapist to work out their problems. If one were a transexual I would have absolutely no problem with this but since most cross dressers are straight I do. tl dr I find cross dressers creepy. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think cross dressers are creepy.\n","id":"f37f9f66-5b9b-4ea0-9107-df6c60e18670"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that this view is definitely wrong, but I can\u2019t help but feel that the idea of long term sustainable happiness is false and is used as a carrot to convince people that life will get \u201cbetter\u201d. First and foremost, I have not been diagnosed with any mental illnesses, such as depression or long term anxiety to influence me to think this way. Making my way through life, I have all but accepted that I will not be \u201chappy\u201d in the long term term The idea of happiness is purely down to circumstance to a person on a low income in a developing nation, long term happiness, something that could be described as dreams or ambitions, would likely be gaining access to something that a person in a developed nation already has access to every day such as citizenship of that country, sustainable food and water etc something that has little to no value to a person that has always has access to it. Things are only given value by their unattainability or illusiveness. However, once someone achieves or gains an object or overcomes a challenge, it is likely its personal value to you will have substantially decreased meaning a person will have to fabricate a new dream, ambition or object of value to obscure the fact that, once achieved or gained, it will be largely meaningless. We will always be wishing for the next \u201cbig thing\u201d that we hope will provide lasting meaning and happiness in our lives ironic as the only semblance of gaining such a happiness is through its pursuit the concept of it is the only thing of value. Abstract concepts, such as love, wealth or fame are simply put in place to provide a light at the end of the tunnel for people to have a vague direction and understanding of where they are going. From personal experience, anything and everything I have ever wanted for and got regardless if I worked for it or not has never given me any personal long term satisfaction or happiness. The alternative seems to be equally as unattainable and simultaneously attainable death. Therefore it is my flawed view that, as long term happiness seems to be a carrot on a stick it is ultimately unachievable and should not be accepted as attainable in popular culture and social societies. Please  I don\u2019t want to sound like a stuck up nihilist all my life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Long Term Happiness Should Not Be Accepted As The Ultimate Goal in Life in Popular Culture and Social Structures Due to Its Unattainability.\n","id":"522957fe-0195-4774-b178-83f61da93d4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is inspired by the question on the political compass that, no matter how many times, and after how many years between 'tests', I always 'strongly agree' with. In essence, I believe that patriotism is foolish in that it is arbitrary thing to be 'proud of', and leads only to problems such as sectarianism, tribalism and conflict. For example, I hold nothing against British people who happen to be born in the county that 'oppressed' the country I happened to be born in. The conflict in northern Ireland as it stands, with riots over parades, and flag burning is pathetic Moreover, I think that if one decides that they are not responsible for the terrible actions of their government, as they did not choose to be American Russian they cannot deem themselves patriotic without being hypocritical. EDIT Since this sort of blew up I wanted to clarify I'm really only trying to get at the notion of being 'a proud nationality ', i.e. it is foolish it means nothing to be 'proud' of one's heritage . I think you should only really be proud of something you've had a hand in making. For example I can be proud of my nation in that I have decided to stay and live and work here but it makes no sense to be proud of the fact that I am from this country . I had no hand in choosing my nationality. EDIT 2 I'm going to go ahead and say that, unfortunately? my view, that there's no real reason to be 'proud' of one's heritage, in most senses of the word, has not been changed. I didn't see any compelling argument on the contrary. Thanks to everyone for contributing though, some very good debate<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nobody chooses his\/her country of origin, so it is foolish to be proud of it\/patriotic.\n","id":"b6432f08-e086-4210-a350-19f47db9fa8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Attention My View has been changed. Stop Replying Anyone who takes it upon themselves and makes the decision to drink and drive or text or talk on the phone should be shot at the time of the accident. I don't mean should as in a law, more like an unwritten law that everyone follows. Also, you should be hit with heavy fines and or jail time that fits the situation. We should scare people out of doing these things and shaming them when it occurs. Im sick of seeing some asshole on their phone just texting away looking down obliviously veering into my lane then jerking away. I know this is wrong i just don't feel that a warning or even a ticket means anything when you could have killed somebody<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you cause an accident due to texting, drunk driving or talking on the phone while driving, it wouldn't be totally unreasonable to shoot you\n","id":"cc3c3fa9-e34e-40cb-83a3-2fa6a48d77d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a college student, I'm evaluating the worth of a bachelor's degree, master's and a phD, in terms of our current and future state of the country economy. Obviously, earning degrees are great. However, higher education is becoming more expensive and therefore more exclusive, burying debt over those who pursue an education and leaving behind those who don't. All of my life, I've been told that pursuing an education is the only way to go. And while I continue to do so at my relatively prestigious university, I can't help but wonder how my pursuing a degree will actually further me compared to those who aren't. And in this little bubble called college , it's difficult seeing any world future w o education.  Tl dr Education is so highly emphasized that it seems like those who cannot or choose not to pursue a higher education, will not live as financially comfortable of a life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that having a \"higher degree\" bachelor's\/master's\/phD is vital to becoming successful in life.\n","id":"113f56e5-d802-40e9-9530-74b3d0b79ee7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Because you can't make it exactly like it was written. No movies can do that you are thinking. Exactly. Which is why movies should never be based off books, bit scripts that are written straight as a movie. And look at LOTR movies and the GOT show. Dumbed down into action and cutting out stuff. Made for filthy casusals. Also, i won't be checking the replies here before tomorrow.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that movies based off books can never be as good as the book, and reading the book makes you superior.\n","id":"ad46eb81-770b-40ce-bd79-3e35986e188a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am referring not to abstract beliefs, such as do unto others . . . , but to the actually stories found in this religion. I have restricted this to Christianity for the sake of simplicity although I was not raised as a Christian . Christianity stipulates that if you believe or place your faith in what they teach you will benefit in some way. What they teach is fabricated for instance, it is not possible for someone to walk on water, for a sea to be parted at will, or for someone to live for a while inside a whale excuse the water motif in these examples . Every single mentally competent person knows that these things are impossible without having to think about it. If someone were to say that their car keys spontaneously metamorphosed into John Madden, no one else would even consider that it might have actually happened you might consider that they meant it in an allegorical way, though . You couldn't literally believe it if you tried you could only pretend to yourself and or to others that you believe in it. I believe that Christians tacitly understand they are only pretending to believe in those religious stories. The benefit alluded to earlier is essentially the benefit of fitting in with Christian society, where everyone agrees to pretend they believe in those things. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No one literally believes in Christian teachings,\n","id":"7f336e7c-d79d-426c-9c8a-0f1592b5681b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>Opinions where Scalia uses readings from the original founders are the paradigm of originalism. That contrasts significantly with Heller where his order strays from that pattern, which he had always said was the best option for interpreting a provision.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Opinion in Heller seems to have betrayed Scalia's own prescribed method for judging cases.\n","id":"f422c7f4-1ad6-4ffe-adc8-ed7b8108caa6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear a lot that a big problem with raising minimum wage would be that teenagers would no longer be able to find work consistently. So, that's why I'm for using junior wages like the Australians do Of course, labor laws restricting maximum hours worked during the school year summer, how late a teen can work, etc. would be necessary to protect teenagers from exploitation. Furthermore, a minimum wage hike would be best appropriated by setting a minimum wage then raising it annually based on cost of living in the state and or metropolitan area. Not every state has the same cost of living, and not every metropolitan area has the same cost of living within each state. Take for example New York state, a living wage in King's County is 12.75 while in Erie County it's only 8.87. So, a rudimentary example would be having NYC's wage slightly higher than other metropolitan areas. Some may cite that businesses will leave the area, but in Washington Spokane is right next to Idaho who only has a 7.25 minimum wage as opposed to 9.32 in Washington. Spokane's employers have not got up and left Spokane for Idaho though as low wage jobs generally are restaurants, retail, etc. that wouldn't benefit from mass relocation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In addition to be set at the state and metropolitan level, a minimum wage hike should also include junior wages for teenagers\n","id":"a3ffad56-a20d-4657-b4ff-8ca3c92113b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the modern Western world, particularly around young, college educated individuals with access to the internet and more left leaning mindsets, offense happens unintentionally very often. Many, many people end up getting in trouble for saying or doing things either as a joke or without much thought which end up offending people. I believe that in cases where the idea is not to offend it is not the fault of the party saying the unintentionally offensive comment but the fault of the party choosing to see the comment or action as an offensive affront to either themselves, the group of people they hold themselves to be a part of, or just another group of people. This could even be said in examples where someone is intentionally trying to offend or anger someone, as though they may be acting maliciously, the party they are trying to offend has the option to not allow themselves to be affected, as we only have control over our actions, and thus our reactions to stimuli around us, but I am not currently on this point, and there is responsibility to be taken if you are angrily, hatefully or otherwise attempting to intentionally provoke or offend someone through words or actions. Mostly, I believe that if someone makes a joke or just says or does something and someone somewhere decides to take offense either personally or on behalf of a larger group or community that the oblivious party bares no real responsibility and should not be damned for doing something they would never have thought would hurt anyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Offense is the responsibility of the offended party if the offender did not mean to offend anyone.\n","id":"0a81e4e1-9617-4706-9647-3445b6dfa65d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>The prerogative to teach your child your religion is the natural extension of parent's key role educating children about how to live and navigate the world outside of a purely academic context.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right to freely exercise one's religion implies the right to help one's child be immersed in that religion.\n","id":"12c0ca74-5b8f-4bd9-a87d-88eda987893b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it okay to physically torture prisoners?<|ARGUMENT|>A group of former interrogators and intelligence professionals consider torture to be \"illegal, ineffective, counterproductive and immoral\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Torture is ineffective at getting prisoners to reveal desired information.\n","id":"45c0fdca-88bb-4150-8cf5-cf68adef3ba6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The responsibility for raising offspring varies with species. Some species provide no care to their offspring and some provide extensive care. The care of the parents towards their offspring benefits the parents. In current human society we provide lots of child care to bad parents who neglect their children. Most children grow up to be like their parents. When society provides child care to bad parents that allows more of their children to survive and also become bad parents. When society provides care to chidren of bad parents it reduces suffering in the short term but increases it in the long term. When society enforces child support it helps current children but hurts future children. Women become less selective in choice of mates because they know their children will survive even if they pick those mates who abandon them. Men are more likely to abandon their children because they know they will survive even if they don't provide care. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society should stop protecting children from their parents\n","id":"31ea476f-8140-4a34-adb2-115e58e2f435"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents are likely biased by their own perspectives on sex and sexuality, and may even be lacking in sex education themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents may not have the knowledge or authority to deliver CSE to their own children as well as schools do.\n","id":"4db96a85-7a41-492f-abf7-2da3de0a5b98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am voting for Bernie Sanders. I believe that we should have universal healthcare, college, and that in general Sanders represents the most ideal candidate for the American people. Hillary seems like a crook, I don't trust her because of some the comments she has made the latest being her that's what they paid me comment and because she seems to me to represent the status quo in terms of her political views. I am simply not convinced she will change anything for struggling Americans. Why should I vote for her? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am voting for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton.\n","id":"b7f3dea3-6aec-4701-9c1f-3b6647657c58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Chinese aid, in 2013, was 6.6% of all aid given by democratic states. It is non-sensical to assume that China will want to increase, or even will be able to increase, its aid budget in order to match that of the democratic world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China, or other potential autocratic donor states, do not have an infinite supply of money, and will therefore not be able to, or simply not want to, provide aid to every nation that wants it.\n","id":"89285b6b-8ef1-4335-a32a-8a02da0de62e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before you start in the comments, I'm not saying I think there are 277 genders. BUT We have put people into two categories based on their hormones and genitals for a while. Although there are some consistent traits in the two groups, they definitely vary. But this concept of dividing the two I'm not saying it's wrong at all, it's not inherently wrong or right, but it is cultural. And it's something that we have chosen to do. We don't distinguish groups by eye color. There are so many options for distinguishing people, and many different cultures over the years have chosen different ways. Native Americans divided themselves into male, female, and two spirit. Ancient Grease thought of only men as truly human. While in Egypt gender slowly decreased in significance. Different cultures have put different significance on gender, and it really puts into perspective how subjective the concept is. Our current culture is no different. We have our own definition of culture. We have put a fair amount of significance on it. But I don't think there is anything wrong with not aligning with this definition. Something so subjective and personal shouldn't be heavily dictated. In the past year a plethora of studies many listed in Nat Geo's Redefining Gender. That proof that sex and gender can contradict themselves. Recently, scientists have delved even deeper into these studies and they found some patterns that overwhelmingly proves that the concept of gender is much more complex than we previously thought In fact, it's less of a check a box deal and more of a spectrum. S spectrum that varies depending on the culture, societal norms, and the person. This marrative of shutting down people because what they're saying is foreign to you, because they define as something you haven't been brought up to see as the norm, putting up barriers There's only 2 genders You're insane. Just because your perception of reality is different from theirs, is what leads to division. Look through history, public opinion and societal norms have changed so significantly. We have to stop looking at our culture as the only culture. EDIT this cartoon downvotes before anyone could have possibly read it. Kind of disappointing, guys. I'm totally cool with you disagreeing and downvoting just please don't downvote without reading.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are more than two genders.\n","id":"9f3444d4-91b5-4f61-bbe4-78b60dbff063"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone says how useful flossing is, and how your teeth would rot if you didn't floss. I tried it once for about two weeks, but I didn't see that much difference. Why should I use that two minutes of my evening to do something that I can easily pass, and still be fine? No dentist has ever said that I have bad teeth. On top of everything, floss is so inconvenient. I knew only a few people who floss, and they're teeth don't look that different. I need some damn good reasons to start using that thing, or before after pics. I brush my teeth twice a day, if I started, should I also use it twice a day? I'm only sixteen so I think it would be better make a difference when it still matters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think flossing doesn't make that much difference.\n","id":"6ad5ace3-757a-4389-8b9a-06ac23047c7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should copyright laws favor readers more than authors?<|ARGUMENT|>That's one of the reasons why artists actively put their content out for free: to gain notoriety for their work, so that followers can funnel funding directly to them through what an artist sells, rather than giving it to third party intermediaries - due to not caring about the artist enough to care where the money goes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free access to all materials actually encourages people to buy more from authors than less.\n","id":"09ac15e4-0f39-43de-bcd6-f875e4ec7d3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The economically and socially dominant Thevar caste group in the state of Tamil Nadu considers bullfighting, known as jallikattu to be a symbol of their caste supremacy<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Traditions that include violence and cruelty against animals should not be preserved.\n","id":"4c90e687-8c41-429a-a65e-6c358acc6a39"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The left lane is for passing only seems to be something people feel really strongly about, but I don't think it makes sense. For context, I drive in the United States. I understand why slower traffic should move over to the right. It's dangerous to drive slower than the cars around you, or to have a lane full of cars moving at variable speeds, so slower drivers should move over to the right, and faster drivers should be on the left. Totally on board with this rule. But then I hear of states where it is illegal to drive for too many miles in the left lane, even when the lane is completely clear or when you are driving faster than the slow traffic to the right. If your road has two lanes and you're shutting down 50 of the available road, throughput will slow down and traffic will take longer. But let's talk about safety. You've just moved all the cars into the right lane, and halved the following distance between all vehicles. That seems bad to me It also promotes rapid lane changing. If you're a faster driver, you will come up behind slow moving vehicles, pass them on the left, then move yourself back into the right lane which is already 2x more crowded than it was before but then, soon enough, you're behind slow cars again, so fairly soon you switch back to the left lane to pass slow cars, switch back into the right lane, repeat ad nauseam? And then you enforce that system for everyone? Why not just let them drive in the empty left lane and reduce the number of cars weaving back and forth? I always want to be a safe driver, and I want to understand why following this driving rule would make me one. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The driving rule \"left lane is a passing lane only\" doesn't make sense.\n","id":"2825caa8-7957-4642-b725-cf7727ffe806"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>The Abrahamic deity is commonly considered omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. Here is evidence supporting this claim, calvarychurch.org .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The traditional monotheistic conception of God requires omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience.\n","id":"15ab0e16-2540-4517-9e35-ccd023659eb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Implement a Tax On Wealth on the Super Rich<|ARGUMENT|>If your job as an investor is to allocate societies value\/ lead the industry, if your choice is not better than the average growth of the economy, you do not deserve compensationyour actions have been neutral. If it is above it, you deserve reward, if it is bellow it, you deserve to loose that economic power, as you are leading the society to its demise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In our economic system, ones wealth automatically grows in value mostly in the form of interest. This leaves people in possession of value they have not earned. A wealth tax would fix this miss-allocation.\n","id":"f8fcdf55-4c96-4a0d-9454-a4544d295953"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people rely on money to survive?<|ARGUMENT|>One of the reasons is due to tariffs, which is a cost that comes from trading.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People running countries need money in order to trade with other countries for imports.\n","id":"9697b008-0b17-4d8c-85ea-a288ddd9aeb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Liberals critique conservatives in the following ways They're racists, They are sexist, They are colonialist, They like wars, They deny science, They are sadistic, They don't care about human rights. Those are essential liberal critiques that are sprinkled in r politics and every liberal outlet. Before I get the accusation that's about to come, I lean left politically. With that said, liberals do not address their own forms of cruelty, biased forms of thinking, and selfishness. Below, I will list just two things to make my following point. Most liberals do not believe in adoption. They believe in having their own biological children. There are an estimated 153 million orphans throughout the world. If every liberal couple would adopt instead of having biological children, the orphan rate would be cut by 25 50 , without needing the consent of conservatives. It is form of cruelty and selfishness to create a new child when there are others who need parents. For each biological child, you are denying the place of an orphan. 90 of liberals eat meat. The average American meat eater eats roughly 270 animals a year and 20,000 animals in their lifetime, according to the USDA. Eating meat is a scientifically undisputed top 4 cause of global warming with the other 3 being Overpopulation, heating cooling, and transportation . Eating meat also uses up a disproportionate amount of land and water resources, is the greatest cause of air and water pollution, and it reduces the food supply by a factor of 6 15 if the animal is slaughtered prematurely or 100 150 if it is allowed to die a natural death , and it provides less than 20 of the calories For the vast majority of people, a balanced vegan diet is an incredibly healthy choice, and it is totally unnecessary to eat meat. And this is all disregarding even the torture and cruelty involved in factory farming, which I won't get into here but anyone reading who is unfamiliar is free to research on the web. Yet, you mention to a liberal why it's wrong to do either, and they will get defensive, make excuses, justify why their forms of cruelty are justified because of taste, convenience, conformity to culture, legality, preference, etc., even if seconds before, they were critiquing conservatives for the same faults of being self centered, selfish, and cruel in regards to interests besides their own. This brings to my conclusion that liberals want others to change and want a scapegoat, more than they want a better, less cruel world for everyone despite what they say . Reddit, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liberals who critique conservatives as cruel, close-minded, biased individuals but are unwilling to address their own forms of cruelty, sadism, close-mindedness, and biases are not actually interested in a just world, but just want to scapegoat all the world's problems onto someone else.\n","id":"e72d38c7-e557-48f4-8f64-fd1be933e52a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By fucked in the head I mean unsustainable and really unhealthy for the vast majority of its citizens. Their population doesn't even want to have relationships any more because of their devotion to work Their education system is just pumping out mindless automatons who only know math and science and were never taught how to be creative problem solvers Their society is focused on obedience and conformity to a fault It's socially awkward to have a normal human interaction while they turn around and pay for fake relationships and cuddle sessions to replace actual human emotions One out of every two disturbing WTF worthy photographs I have ever seen is from Japan DDR Their commercials are absolute fucking insanity. They make US commercials seem tame and rational by comparison They're depressed and killing themselves at an alarming rate That being said, I would love to go there, but I thank god I wasn't raised in that mess. I feel bad for looking at them this way and I really don't want to make the mistake of lumping all Japanese people into one group, but based on my impression it's hard not to. Note I am well aware of the fact that the American culture has many faults but I feel like they don't hold a candle to Japan's problems. Edit forgot to add Japanese women act like they're being raped during sex. Source my friend is dating a Japanese woman Edit 2 full disclosure, I have never been to Japan obviously but I really love a lot about their culture. They just strike me as having deeply embedded neuroses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Japan is culturally fucked in the head\n","id":"60e29a40-ae1c-47b6-877c-d84f8935599b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Star Citizen a scam?<|ARGUMENT|>If the game is fun, most of those that crowd-funded the game, will word of mouth proselytize for it, which will be more than enough to drive additional sales.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"They do not need a game publisher, as they do not need distribution and marketing, but rather just execution.\n","id":"bc46653e-3594-4c0e-8c5b-fe814dbbdbde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I sometimes hear people talking about a day when computers robots are going to be seen as humans or given the rights of humans. But I don't think this will ever happen because there is no way to program a computer to want something. Furthermore, it's not just that technology hasn't reached that point yet, but rather it is logically impossible to happen. And that will always remain a fundamental difference between humans and machines. I've argued with people about this before, but and they usually give one of two ways that a robot can want A robot wants by doing. When a robot reaches its robot hand for a rock, it wants to pick up this rock. However, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to want. First, wanting is an internal action something that happens within your own mind heart, and doesn't require external action I'm not having sex with Ellen Page right now, but that doesn't mean I don't want to . Second, lots of machines can take mindless actions. Even non computerized machine. Someone could design a completely non electric, clockwork machine to reach its hand for a rock, but we can all agree that it doesn't want to grab the rock. A robot wants by containing a desire. A robot simply having the text I want to go to France in its memory storage means that it wants to go to France. However, there is a difference between simply holding this sentence in your head and actually wanting to go to France. Take for example, a book with the sentence I want to go to France, written in it. This book contains the desire but doesn't actually desire to go to France, or anything else. As another example, a person could hold a sentence in their head without feeling it. You could be an actor in a play, and memorize the line I want to go to France for your part. But holding that sentence in your head doesn't necessitate that you actually want to go to France. With these out of the way, I don't see any possible way a robot or computer could genuinely want something. There's no logical way to program want into a robot. Robots don't act no wants and desires, like humans, they simply act on going through lines of instructions. And this is a fundamental difference which will never change. . EDIT I'm getting a lot of repeated arguments, so I'm going to put some more responses up here. What do you mean by want I don't like your definition of want . What I mean by want is just the general meaning that people use conversationally, nothing special. To desire something. If you don't like it, tell me one you think is better. How do you know that people want? Because I am a person. And I want stuff. So even if nobody else wants but me which is crazy unlikely I still have at least one example. We can just build a computer to act like approximate how a human mind works. That would just be an approximation, not actually wanting anything. Just sort of guessing what a human might want. Similarly, you can have a video of a person asking for something and play it on a computer. This will, to an observer, replicate the computer asking for something and make it seem like the computer wants it. But the computer is still just running code. We can build a computer that 100 completely perfectly replicates how a human brain works. No you can't. Computers can't replicate reality. If they could, then you could have a computer that replicated itself, replicating itself, replicating itself etc. on into infinity. Our universe is too complex to replicate exactly. But computers and brains are basically the same thing. So running off that assumption, it must be that computers can want. Computers and brains aren't basically the same thing, and there's really no evidence that a computer can do everything a brain can. Especially this. Here's what will  describing a logical set of steps that could be programmed into a computer that results in it wanting. Here's what will not  creatively re defining want to include things that machines already do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is inconceivable to program a computer or robot to \"want\".\n","id":"3d87a83e-81db-4431-a242-37e6523b81c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lets say im a bilionaire and im looking to help people with my money, in particular, people in less developed countries with terrible infrastructure and poverty is the norm, i believe charities aren't the best way to help them. A city might be. Most if not all charities treat the simptoms of the disease, they provide shelter, medication, food, etc it seems to be that most of these problems could be solved if people weren't dirtpoor, so why not try and invest that extra money into taking people out of poverty. First i'd select a few countries that could use my help and then would try to approach the government in that country and offer my help, expecting cooperation from their part, such as peacekeeping, partial funding not an eliminating factor, i'd be happy to solo fund it , etc. After i picked the country then the city planning would begin, for the sake of simplicity lets start with an empty big plot of land and go from there. Carefully plan scallable infrastructure, including basic necessities such as hospitals, police stations, fire fighting, public transportation, roads, schools, etc. Everything would be carefully planned in such a way that could be easily upgraded build more floors and the likes without heavely compromising usability of such buildings . I'd expand my existing manufacturing business to this city and build their factories here, and other business too such as grocery stores, caf\u00e9s, etc. Later on when this proves effective i'd try to convince other business to join me in expanding to the location. A fair wage would be provided, people would have to pay rent albeit small, school, hospitals, etc would be at least partly funded by me, and the state if willing to help. Mass education projects would be made available to everyone free of charge, including basic education and university. People would have to be brought in to train the local populace, as more and more people complete training, the people brought would start to go away to their home countries and transition managerial positions to the more capable locals. Everything would be owned by me at first but as the economy develops and people wanted to buy their apartment, house or a business, i'd easily sell it to them at little over cost, without objetion. Ofc it would have to start small and then scale up, hence my insistence on upgradability and scalability. If this proved effective and feasible in a cost prespective, we'd keep expanding and build other cities. Im sure this is riddled with flaws but it's something that has been on the back of my mind for a while but im not sure this would even work. Sorry for eventual mistakes and bad tittle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lets say im a bilionaire and im looking to help people with my money, in particular, people in less developed countries with terrible infrastructure and poverty is the norm, i believe most charities aren't the best way to help them. A city might be.\n","id":"2129e672-e93e-411d-8751-dce86c0fc913"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is our first Mod post. You can read our later Mod Posts by visiting our Mod Post archive in the wiki. EDIT Alright, folks, I've cut the new sidebar down from 28.52 full length tweets to 13.61 full length tweets. Is that clean enough or do we need to keep working? We could probably continue shaving a word here and there, and could perhaps remove the 4th guideline until unless it becomes a problem and the 5th guideline since it's intuitive. Thanks for the input. protagornast Hey, r chagemyview Make sure to check out our new sidebar when you get a chance for information about a new type of post T for this changed my view and some new rules and guidelines for our community. The biggest change is that there are now two options for posting new content  and T.  change my view is what we have all come to know and love during our short week as a community people who have an opinion but believe or want to believe they may be wrong post their opinion, and the rest of us comment with arguments and evidence suggesting an alternative perspective. T this changed my view is for sharing stories about an experience that changed your opinion on something or a link to an article, video, etc. that changed your opinion on something. Our hope is that this new category will help our community to continue generating new content at regular intervals at least one new post a day while still echoing the spirit of the  posts that this community was founded upon. If this turns out not to be the case i.e., if too many people seem to post links simply because they think it will change other people's views, rather than because it changed their own view , then we may abandon the T option and return to our  roots. Please note that normal link posts have been disabled for this community, so links must be shared in the body of a text post. This is to encourage users to include a detailed and nuanced explanation of how a link has changed their view along with the link itself. There are a few other small changes you may have noticed recently. First, thanks to the charity of u VogonBlarg, we now have a personalized alien logo with rose colored specs to demonstrate the spirit of our community. Thanks, Vogon Second, you'll notice that while comments can still be upvoted or downvoted, new posts can only be upvoted. This again is to encourage new content, but also to keep users from downvoting posts simply because they don't think the OP should change their views or think that the OP's current view is stupid sort of a Catch 22 . If a post violates one of our rules or if something about the title and description makes it clear that the OP has no interest in changing their views, use the report button so that the mods can review the post for possible deletion. Otherwise, please upvote the topics that interest you and ignore the ones that don't interest you. In the meantime, please let us know what you think about the revised sidebar, the new rules and guidelines, and the new T option. Snorrrlax and I are both new at this and more than willing to listen to your suggestions and concerns. Thanks to everyone for making r changemyview a beacon of civilized online discourse in a raging sea of juvenile Youtbe comments Sincerely, Your mods, u protagornast and u Snorrrlax<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"MOD POST New Sidebar, New Posting Category T, and New Rules &amp; Guidelines\n","id":"08b50cc9-a7dc-46c9-886a-8dfb5494cb58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would like to propose a discussion. It\u2019s something that came to my mind today, and it regards a lot of topics like drugs, addiction, self harm, and mental health. Here it goes Attempted suicide, or self harm should be a misdemeanor offense. First offense sould result in fines and mandatory counseling sessions with a licensed therapist. Second offense could have you locked up or sent to a facility for 90 days under close supervision. Keep in mind, none of this is to punish people with mental health issues, but more to deter them and others from repeating their actions. If this sounds crazy to you ask yourself what would happen if you or a friend got caught using drugs to self medicate your anxiety, or depression. Most addicts suffer from some sort of mental health problems. We already use this technique to deter people from harming themselves with illegal substances, so why stop there? How is it different? I guess my other view could be legalizing drugs for personal use, but since that will never happen i\u2019m just looking for consistent logic here. What are your thoughts?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Self-harm should be a criminal offense.\n","id":"9c468060-a0b2-497c-8928-99aefb167f95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Electric vehicles are better than fossil fuel vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>Since the charging stations are not as wide spread as gas stations, sometimes you have to make major detours to get to one. This causes delays and complications especially if you do a long distance drive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fossil fuel vehicles have a much longer range than EVs.\n","id":"667e547d-8224-49c7-bd46-eab18b14d096"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is my first post on . I think it's completely immoral to get a pet parrot. Parrots like to fly miles a day, they're smart and highly sociable. I completely doubt that the vast majority, easily over 90 of parrot or other similar bird owners can commit so many hours a day, every day to keeping the bird engaged socially, especially since there's so many behaviors and interactions that are specific to birds interacting with each other and in groups. I don't care if people love their pet parrots, their parrots either don't know what their life could actually be like or are just trying to make the best situation out of a new home they're stuck in. Nevermind the fact many people just don't have to space or setup for birds to have a proper amount of room, or the fact most people are unwilling to regularly take the birds to the vet. I apologize if this comes off as ranty, I'm just frustrated because my sister who is 16 has an african ringneck parrot which is always stressed out and neglected, I feel bad for it. if you're someone who is a professional of sorts, like a vet or someone who works at a zoo and has both the knowledge, money and large amount of space for the birds, I'm not saying it's immoral to take in or rescue parrots, but it's still irresponsible and selfish to personally want to own one just for the sake of it being your pet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parrots shouldn't be pets, and many other birds\n","id":"e0523ca1-b66c-4436-ab63-e9340062b348"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Throwaway account as I teach at a US university. I teach both introductory and upper level science courses. I have students with written documentation from student services that require accommodations. I'm talking about special accommodations 1.5 2x time on exams, separate testing rooms for exams, access to electronic devices in exams, up to 2x extensions on assignments, a copy of someone else's notes even though I provide the PPT to all lectures , and in some cases, the ability to retake a quiz or exam with no repercussions on the initial grade. This is frustrating. How does this prepare anyone for real world demands? If I went to a boss in a previous job and stated I need double time to complete a project, I would be laughed out of my job. What is the point of having competencies for a course when you can get a note that disregards much of this? Why is my degree and GPA valued the same those who are not held to the same standard? I understand that what you learn in college rarely translates to what happens in the working world. But some of these students are pre med and are going to be placed in much more stressful situations that won't have accommodations available Also, why does it have to be an \u201caccommodation\u201d to receive someone else\u2019s notes? Shouldn\u2019t that be the student responsibility to contact a classmate and perhaps suggest a note swap? x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Extra accommodations in college are a hinderance to preparing proficiency in the workforce\n","id":"c6e285e7-104e-4eb1-853c-8264485ed179"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I contend that the below are true There are only two ingredients used oil, and the potato itself. This is an excellent recipe. Free of adulterants of any kind, the chip is both healthier and safer for those with specific allergies. The simplicity is a point of respect for the maker of these chips, because the recipe is very difficult to replicate despite its simplicity. Your ordinary potato chip has less of a rigid crunch than the kettle chip, giving it less character and making it fail to punctuate its flavor in comparison to the kettle chip. Kettle chips can be purchased directly from Kettle, which cuts the middle man and results in additional profit for Kettle. This makes their consumption morally superior to other brands of chips. Due to their rigidity, the kettle chip lends itself to scooping aqueous foods such as tomato sauce or cheese dip in a superior manner compared to many other chips. I have not once experienced a kettle chip succumb to the immense weight of another substance, and the same cannot be said of Lays, for example. Kettle chips are associated with the American South and West, which have historically been places of intrigue and frontier. With proper forethought, eating a kettle chip is evocative of feelings of adventure and wonder, which leads to happiness and new discoveries in the field of science. Most potato chip brands break apart easily when handled and thus leave small residue. The unsalted and rigid nature of this particular chip enables it to not do so, which is both convenient and reflective of proper ethical views regarding cleanliness. Kettle chips are thinly cut and most are a similar size to one another, allowing serving sizes to be more properly regulated. This encourages proper dieting due to its ease. No other extant brand of chip sports all these characteristics simultaneously.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The unsalted kettle chip is the superior type of potato chip.\n","id":"3043ed67-6286-4d99-9724-5e407b5f98d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who is the best female or queer Sci Fi & Fantasy author, and why?<|ARGUMENT|>Marvel comics Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: The First Death 1\u20132 Guilty Pleasures Handbook 2007 Anita Blake Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures 1\u201312 Anita Blake: The Laughing Corpse \u2013 Animator 1\u20135 Anita Blake: The Laughing Corpse \u2013 Necromancer 1\u20135 Anita Blake: The Laughing Corpse \u2013 Executioner 1\u20135 Anita Blake: Circus of The Damned \u2013 The Charmer 1\u20135 Anita Blake: Circus of The Damned \u2013 The Ingenue 1\u20135 Anita Blake: Circus of the Damned \u2013 The Scoundrel 1\u20135 Ongoing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anita Blake is the title and viewpoint character of the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. The series takes place in a parallel world in which supernatural characters like vampires and werewolves exist alongside regular humans, with Blake's jobs including the re-animation of the dead as well as the hunting and executing of supernatural creatures that have broken the law.\n","id":"9a8a31af-75d3-4652-853d-9a51b9cfb938"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we create and adopt a universal currency?<|ARGUMENT|>Countries shouldn't have financial power over others, as that's unethical, but would happen with adapting a universal currency.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Too much power over the universal currency could lead to the rise of plutocracies.\n","id":"155bea62-f094-416d-be22-bb9ac8a3dd1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>The Watergate Scandal, which occurred during Nixon's administration, caused many Americans to lose faith in the office of the president. In doing so, it negatively impacted America by creating a disillusioned electorate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Republican presidents have historically had a negative impact on America.\n","id":"e6139cea-0b6e-4797-a6c6-454ded7df4b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In light of the recent TIFU 1 posts 2 , this is something that has been nagging at me for a while. Why do just about all romantic relationships imply a sexual monopoly over your partner? And that breaking this, by seeking other partners is grounds for no questions asked instant, crushing divorce? That seems a little extreme, even absurd to me. Even bringing up the topic of infidelity to one's partner, someone whom you should be able to trust with anything, seems to be dangerous ground to tread. I know that if my SO admitted that he had slept with someone else, I believe that I would be supportive of his actions, provided that it doesn't affect our own relationship. Because of the enormous stigma against infidelity, there seems to be no room to explain the situation or the cheater's mindset. Again, this seems to go against the premise of a marriage or serious relationship that you can trust your SO with anything. Considering other events that cause divorce, the retaliation for infidelity is extreme, even more so than abuse, emotional manipulation or stealing despite the fact that those are far more pertinent threats to the victim's health, psyche or finances than cheating is, these three rarely end up with immediate divorce, and sometimes continue for years. Talking with one's spouse about seeing other people and reducing the stigma against that would greatly benefit most relationships. I have seen very good, loving relationships be cut short because of the idea of a sexual monopoly over one's partner while the two had very different sex drives. If this were talked through, and perhaps the nature of the relationship changed, then that couple would probably still be together and living happily. Being able to talk about and, if needed, open, a relationship without stigma or societal pressure, infidelity would probably be beneficial. Unless both partners' sexual needs are identical, then there will be some level of strain on the relationship, because one is hornier or more curious, or whatever the case may be. Now i'm not saying to completely remove the stigma for cheating, as in lying about whom one is laying with, but that should be brought up as what it is, lying, and talked about with that context of one partner saying he she is going to do one thing, and then doing something else. It shouldn't be something so taboo that the mere mention of it can set a relationship on edge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel that the consequence of infidelity is excessive.\n","id":"eb5f09ae-1c30-4c96-867c-3075f63f094e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Mother Teresa have been canonized?<|ARGUMENT|>Charitable actions were espoused by Jesus Christ and charity is amongst the three 'theological virtues' of the Church.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mother Teresa's dedication to helping the poor embodies a fundamental tenet of Christianity.\n","id":"3b6d65a3-da1f-47a4-b9f6-55291eb4650a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>Shirley Chisholm and LaDonna Harris were among the founders of the NWPC, which pledged to fight \u201csexism, racism, institutional violence and poverty\u201d at its founding in 1971.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women of color have been leaders in major national feminist organizations.\n","id":"ec43e92c-8b8e-4501-a190-2c5408302a82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Some GMOs have a longer shelf life contributing to less food waste and lower retailer costs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetically modified crops contribute to reducing the cost of food.\n","id":"441f62cf-6cba-45b6-92af-80d9e320f681"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are many self taught musicians who are very proficient at their instrument, some even better than those who've received lessons. Granted many started when they were young, but not all. I taught myself piano and guitar as a kid, but I don't recommend it because my power of reasoning was not fully developed, and I spent a long time figuring out things that music theory could've taught me in a matter of days. If I could go back and take lessons I definitely would. But, adults are different than children, especially with the advent of the internet. Adults understand better what questions to ask, and how to think in a way to progress on an instrument. Humans are capable of learning almost anything if they have the will I believe. Most instruments I can think of are intrinsic in the sense that making sound on them is very easy to figure out how to do. To shape that sound in a way that is musically pleasing is a lot harder. However, we are intelligent creatures and given enough time we could figure out probably with no help whatsoever. But you may say, who has the time to learn by trial and error like that? Why not use information that's already been accumulated? That's very true And the internet can do just that for you There's no cap to how many questions you can ask it, when you can ask it, how many times you can get it to repeat itself. If you can ask the right questions you CAN get the right answers There's really nothing a human teacher can do for you that the internet can't. Add to that, not every teacher is a good teacher, just like in any subject. It may take a little longer to learn online, but it is not a necessary thing to learn from a teacher and even be better in some instances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Music lessons as an adult are not necessary with the wealth of information on the internet\n","id":"1384f256-4c9b-43f9-b8a1-67354243f2f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't believe loving someone can ever be wrong or bad. Acting on that love? Yes, that can violate someone's trust. It is wrong in my opinion, please don't get too far off on this tangent to cheat. Someone told me that I couldn't love her husband though she gave permission for a sexual relationship . And I respectfully told her I understood if she wanted to close her marriage. That she could control my behavior and I would comply. But it wasn't her right to tell me how to feel. So, someone here. Change my view? Convince me that my, or anyone else's, love is somehow wrong?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Loving Someone Is Never Wrong\n","id":"ca7e62d5-7013-493b-afd1-7fd335077db5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When his workers in the steel factory weren't complying with work and stopped for a break he would get someone to beat em up so they could work again. He paid a not so much wage to his workers considering its a really dangerous and hard job to do. So that's why I don't think he's a good guy. I got this evidence from a history project and I was wondering if anyone would feel any different then I did.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Personally think Andrew Carnegie wasn't a thoroughly great guy.\n","id":"5eae14e8-6cd3-4adf-87d2-83e5791c0163"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've recently been doing a major project in school in which I study how the US has treated Third World countries during the Cold War and what I've found is truly disturbing to me. I'm a history buff, so I already knew that we were never really great at supporting democracies, but I recently discovered that a lot of governments that we propped up killed mercilessly and used death squads to maintain power. And worse yet, a lot of the dictators that we supported were even worse than the Communist governments we were trying to stop. I've read a great deal about how dozens of pro US, right wing dictators murdered thousands of people all over the world, but with the exception of Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and Kim Il Sung, I can't find a lot of Communists who did the same.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I can't help but feel that the United States has only made the world a worse place to live since the 1950's. !\n","id":"ec7f48ca-bf79-4c28-822e-db1350ae367b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU mandates that the UK not have less than a 15% VAT Once free from these regulations the UK could lower this and gain a competitive advantage to encourage growth and investment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UK could create a more competitive environment for attracting companies.\n","id":"6d7b540f-fd3b-476f-9dd0-72e6015918a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A society with no gender would be better<|ARGUMENT|>People can access all kinds of medical treatments that enable them to live happier and healthier lives as a result of modern medicine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lot of aspects of modern society are not natural and yet they are better.\n","id":"a2ffb403-00ce-469a-9497-73d51b041457"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>After the Irish Civil War, the CTA Agreement was complemented by the 1952 Agreement when all immigration controls were removed, removing the border. But Ireland didn't join the EU until 1973<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The border with Ireland did not come about because of the EU.\n","id":"7a187f78-2eba-45a2-b89d-1c7c65a44834"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Modern day christians who preach hate the sin but not the sinner use the same religious texts, and the dehumanizing language of the old testament, to condemn homosexuality, as the the christians jews muslims who for last two thousand years systematically persecuted and exterminated gay people all around the world. As such, these texts are fundamentally inhumane and most clearly a form of hate speech. EDIT grammar<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Preaching against homosexuality and gay marriage is basically hate speech.\n","id":"0472826e-a862-47df-a738-ba996add8e0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>The Times is the 3rd most popular newspaper in the UK with a daily readership of around 1.66 million adults. Therefore, it is likely to materially influence public opinion in favour of the Conservatives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evidence suggests that The Times newspaper is biased in favour of the Conservatives. Therefore, its polls may not be reliable.\n","id":"872841e2-ff76-41d1-acad-e686f84e49ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that my life is really boring and uninspiring. Moreover, I feel that there not many things possible in life that I would find actually inspiring and interesting. Or that if there are some things, that it would take a massive effort to achieve these. I am aware that many people seem to lead very fulfilling lives. I don't think that necessarily means that would be easy for me, or that I could just do what another people do, or that I would enjoy living the kind of life that typical people have. I don't exactly like people that much. I want to, but I find it difficult because I find that people are well, typically not very smart. And people believe in all kinds of irrational stuff, to the point where I find communicating with people a mostly pointless exercise. I guess that's one of the main reasons I feel that life is not inspiring most of things I could do involve other people, and people aren't usually available to do things I want, the way that I want to do them. And there isn't very much of the things I like that I can do on my own. As for why changing that would require a massive effort well, I simply don't think there is any easy solution. Getting to the point where I have people around me that I actually like seems really hard, while doing things on my own is difficult and not exactly motivating. Perhaps in a half a year or so, given sustained and determined effort but on short notice, I don't expect my life to get significantly better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My life is really boring and uninspiring. Changing that would require a massive effort.\n","id":"54844e40-c433-4d74-92e1-8bd7a63d6cf1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Solar energy<|ARGUMENT|>Many houses have roofs that face in a direction that does not work well with the course that the sun takes in the sky. This means that these houses cannot convert as much sun light to energy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all houses are oriented well for using solar energy.\n","id":"f798c7d3-a696-4e14-bac3-60bddef5d45e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a father of a boy, and a fairly quiet and gentle one on the kindergarden he's allways one of the best behaved , I'm finding that there are situations in which children know and understand that they can basicly do what they want without consequences. In fact my boy knows that while outside he's basicly untouchable, he miss behaves, doesn't do what we ask him to and today he was even rude to his mom. We try to reason with him, we try threaten him with lighter punishments, but today for instance I went through a great deal of shame as he just wouldn't behave. Honestly I don't see another way<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe some \/most children cannot be disciplined without ocasional phisical punishment please don't confuse it with beatings,\n","id":"5ea93601-bfb1-4d7a-acd6-eaebb7d260d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The current model of secondary highschool school teaches students about Science, History, Mathematics, and Arts providing marks based on performance in these classes. Secondary school is not designed to be overly challenging, however it requires students to apply themselves. People often criticise the current model by talking about how they don't know anything about taxes, yet they identify that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell which is taught in basic biology and science courses. The purpose of teaching students these seemingly irrelevant subjects is not to directly give them information which is overly useful in everyday life, it instead teaches students how to learn about any subject. Practicing learning skills is akin to going to the weights gym, one wouldn't go to the gym to become great at just doing bicep curls or squats, rather one goes to the gym to be more fit and healthier. The same goes for learning how to learn, if one can learn that the mitochondria is infact the powerhouse of the cell then one is going to be able to learn about how to file their taxes or change a tire from resources available on line or in books. If we taught students how to grow their own food or how to tie a tie we would be wasting resources and time as these activities don't challenge the mind of a student in the same way chemistry or calculus might as they are more abstract concepts compared to something algorithmic and mundane such as undoing lug nuts on a car and tightening them. The example of changing a tire is interesting because when one does it once they will likely remember how to do it for the rest of time, due to the simplicity and routine involved in such an easy task. Teenaged students would also be bored out of their minds learning about income taxes or tying a tie because these subjects are very straight forward and simple, that anyone can learn about and master with a little practice and effort. Due to the simplicity and lack of challenge life skills present, teaching them in lieu of academic classes would create a generation of secondary school graduates who are great at a few life skills yet they will lack the ability to learn effectively and apply critical thinking skills to everyday life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be counterproductive to teach specific life skills taxes, tying ties, changing tires in secondary school.\n","id":"588e77b1-cea8-4f0e-adbf-e1942c9c4e01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Assumption Any evidence of alien intelligence would be public knowledge. Early data from the Kepler mission suggests that habitable planets are abundant and when combined with what we know of the history of our planet, this means that most habitable planets do not harbor an intelligent species. If this is true, intelligent species rarely would come into contact with each other as the spread to other planets, and conflict wouldn't be necessary. An alien species, solely interested in studying our planet and species, could do so without ever being detected. Europeans had to make contact with aboriginal tribes in order to study them, but an alien species could collect an enormous amount of data from long distance visual observation and monitoring are telecommunication networks. Making contact provides no benefit, would unnecessarily disrupt human society, and potentially threaten theirs. An alien species gains nothing from contacting us, they don't need to take any of our shit, and our species wouldn't be particularly interesting to anyone watching. Edit An alien species capable of contacting us is most likely to be predatory and aggressive, biology and human history provides countless examples of the most advanced organisms being the most violent and aggressive, so we should assume the most likely scenario for contact being hostile in nature. So the good news is no contact means no threat, for now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We haven't been made contact with an alien civilization because they don't have any interest in contacting us.\n","id":"2311da25-db27-4f3a-8155-0ff327ffc5dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>As of 2015, around 150 colleges and universities in the US had incorporated unisex bathrooms into school policy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are already many public places in which unisex bathrooms exist and are being accepted.\n","id":"6231541e-5014-49f6-a5aa-eafd274e58d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>The history of life on Earth began about 3.8 billion years ago, initially with single-celled prokaryotic cells, such as bacteria.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Young Earth Creationism is a testable claim that has been demonstrated false.\n","id":"bd3595ce-ba3f-47c7-8baa-05625cbfe708"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I can't get past the idea of discriminating on the basis of race, something to which I'm fundamentally opposed, and don't see as morally justifiable. It's for the same reason I can't support things such as women's rooms in colleges. I don't even believe race exists biologically I obviously believe it exists at a societal level, and people are discriminated against by others who believe race fundamentally exists , and so don't know how such discrimiation can genuinely be implemented. What if a white person says they're black, what will officals do get out the callipers? As an aside, but certainly not my primary roadblock, is that I think it most likely benefits better off minorities, doing little if anything for the worst off members of the group. And the very nature of there being certaint 'good' things which one can get through affirmative action, such as entrance to university and thus a higher salary, are things I'm opposed to to begin with. I don't agree with selective institutions I think everyone should be able to go to university if they want. And I certaintly don't like elitist universities. I also oppose income inequality, and so I don't see merely changing around those who are better off than others, through allowing more black people to be among the wealthy, to be all that much of an improvement. I know it tends to be those on the right who oppose affirmative action, with the left supporting it. So can anyone give me good left wing reasons why I should in fact support affirmative action, even though it seems to go against the fundamental leftist idea of equality? EDIT So some good points have been made even though one of the best points was for some reason deleted? . Still, I think a lot of the points are ones I already agree with, like the fact that racial inequality in the past affects people's status today, and that there still is of course racial discrimination. As I said, I'm a left winger and certainly believe racism exists and that it should be stopped. But I can't get past the reasons outlined above. Is there a reason someone who is already quite left wing, but who doesn't really support affirmative action, should change their mind?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a left winger who can't support affirmative action\n","id":"cbc7fb9e-cde0-494d-8805-c67faa95fc03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Wrote The Anonymous New York Times Resistance Op-Ed?<|ARGUMENT|>George Washington fought in a risky rebellion against the English in pursuit of his personal ideals. He risked his career and legacy through this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"History has seen many people risk their career for what they perceive as the greater good.\n","id":"02c234e7-4f97-480d-b579-caf3f8c074e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Climate change policies aim to protect citizens, but to do so must threaten values held by citizens, because there needs to be a massive change in consumption patterns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Often, policies that are intended to protect citizens threaten values as a side effect.\n","id":"7555b472-737a-48c4-9a07-be23da56908b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Antifa good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>Paxton describes fascism as \"a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants.\" However, this is also true of antifa. Whilst antifa claims not to be nationalists, what they are fighting for is a nation of people like themselves. They are nationalists with a different forecast on what type of country they'd like to live in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Robert Paxton description of fascism in 'The Anatomy of Fascism' is so broad in can be used describe groups that claim to be anti fascist.\n","id":"33936337-04e5-4d70-bea3-fdf023c2aec5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Moreover Mosaic law says \"The son shall not be punished for the sins of the father\" which makes God defy his own law in the case of punishing the posterity of Adam and Eve for their sin.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God punishes Adam and Eve and all of their posterity for eating a forbidden fruit, displaying incoherent moral values that humans can't relate with.\n","id":"424173e6-504e-4ff5-a806-d678bc0d9a3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Dogs are some of the brightest, most loving, most perceptive creatures on this planet. Next to humans they are one of the most enlightened, intelligent and emotional beings alive. When we consider that mass executions of human beings is considered criminal, disgraceful and abhorrent but yet dogs are routinely starved, tied to chains, beaten and millions are gassed to death every single week simply for not having a home. The front page of Reddit today has a research study showing that dogs are self aware and highly emotional beings that respond to human voice and interaction in their brains just as a person would. The genocide of dogs needs to be stopped.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that dogs are highly intelligent, sentient, sensitive beings and deserve to be protected under the law....\n","id":"97696a3e-05c5-456c-93df-787715c311fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As far as I know Alfred Nobel invented the dynamite got filthy rich and revolutionized modern warfare for the worse and to make up for that offered up 5 prizes in categories that should progress humanity such are Physiology or Medicine Physics Chemistry Literature Peace Which over time at least for the first 3 happened to become more or less THE highest award in the respective field. And then in 1968 the Swedish Riksbank thought it would be cool to give the Nobel Foundation money so that they would host a prize for them, the gt The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel And because it apparently has the words Nobel and prize lazy journalist call it the Nobel prize for Economic science , which to be clear it is not. Neither is it among the prizes that were sponsored by Alfred Nobel, nor is it paid by that money, nor does it have the same status as a Nobel Prize. Even worse economics can often barely be described as a science and is as hit and miss as the Nobel prize for Peace where for example Obama receives a prize for peace without having done anything except not being Bush and gives a speech about the moral necessity for war WTF? It's nothing but a shameless attempt to grab the fame and reputation that others have developed over the years, in that ironically a perfect example for Economic Science , but still people should not participate in that scam. So is there a reason of any kind why this price should be seen as legit among the others, why it should be abbreviated to Nobel Prize instead of using that long form to denote that it is not a Nobel prize or at the very least that it holds among Economic science a similar position as for example the first 3 in their respective field where it is about really ground breaking new discoveries that often take several decades to be confirmed as such? Edit Fixed some spelling, but there's probably still plenty of noble instead of nobel and piece instead of peace and maybe even price instead of prize . You gotta keep em if you find them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no noble prize for economics and people should stop calling it like that\n","id":"0f437bfb-a3a5-4154-81bd-25435e4bed99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>The dominance of the major parties makes it difficult for smaller parties to gain legitimacy for their ideas in the eyes of the public.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without more popularity, other parties will not have the respect of the American people.\n","id":"29211d99-8ca4-4a70-92a3-93394f8411fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should close Guantanamo Bay detention camp<|ARGUMENT|>guantanamo bay detection camp should be closed because it's a place of extreme torture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Guantanamo bay detention camp personnel commit crimes against the prisoners\n","id":"9bf446b5-1c8b-4908-bd42-44050995f5d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>European missile defense<|ARGUMENT|>Radar or any other component of the missile defence system is of great importance to the security of the Czech Republic as well as Europe. It makes the Czech Republic an important NATO member who must be protected - in the interest of each and every state protected by the missile defence system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Radar in Brdy is vital to Czech Republic's security.\n","id":"948f790f-fefe-4d9c-80f0-e8be884d855c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We have internet, telephone, teleconferencing, we have ways of communicating over long distance that was unheard of when our country was founded. Most, if not all legislative business could be done remotely from the home state, including voting and debates. More work could be done, the legislative session could be longer without the recesses and travel time. Why are we still having our representative fly back and forth between their home state and Washington DC, and away from the people they serve unnecessarily? Why should they remain so distant from their constituency? Is all this travel they do still necessary? EDIT On a side note I want to know how this works in this sub, this is my first post in a location that doesn't have downvoting. If downvoting isn't allowed, how does any post here have zero karma?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that we should change the requirement for Senators and our house of representatives to reside in Washington D.C.,\n","id":"7140162f-397a-4381-8bae-879e4569db07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Thought I'd veer away slightly from the recent political posts. First off, I am defining nerd in an US centric context as someone who did well in school, had a good dose of high level classes, and likely went on to major in a STEM related field, which may or may not be combined with hobbies and interests involving comic books, anime, cosplay, video games, intellectual sports, and the like. Feel free to disagree with me here. What inspired this  was a casual discussion among some nerdy friends pertaining bad social skills among various communities we're a part of. I anticipate the possibility of this being a bit broad so I will split this into a two part . First The negative experiences growing up in school. While I agree that mental disorders such as ADHD and Aspergers contribute to general awkwardness among a good portion, I think this is overblown, and that bullying and feeling left out growing up plays as much, if not more of a part of developing below average social skills by the time of high school graduation. It's not that they lack the capability, but rather it seems, at best, they're never going to fit in and at worst being openly ridiculed, and never learning what healthy social relationships look like because of that. This obviously isn't the case in every school, but in traditional, small town America where I grew up I got the sense that, while certainly not as bad as Hollywood portrays it, being smart wasn't cool and that sports took precedence. I felt like I had to like certain things and talk about certain things to be normal , to the point of not considering if I really liked being into what everyone else was talking about. Growing out of it really just boils down to a change of scenery, that is, hanging out with more relatable people that have similar interests and life goals read other nerdy people through college and beyond. Personally, I feel that the transformative experience I've been through as of late is mostly due to a supportive group of friends that I take CS classes with, play Smash Bros with, and or hang with in the comics club. Second For the more political part of my post, I will say that I think general attitudes are changing, but there is still a lot of anti intellectualism in school districts outside of more prestigious and usually politically liberal areas. I understand nerdy types can swing both ways on certain political issues, and that prestigious schools can have the opposite problem of cutthroat academic competition, but I feel that nerd bullying and marginalization a lot of the time is really, a problem with growing up nerdy in traditional, conservative America. Edited for clarity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the stereotypical nerd suffers poor social skills mostly due to bullying and marginalization in grade school\n","id":"8c445bdf-d096-4a07-88b0-69096ba9a4d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Rapture Pre-tribulation or other?<|ARGUMENT|>The first phase is a secret Rapture when Jesus will carry the saved to heaven before the antichrist appears to commence 7 years of tribulation on Earth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are two phases to the Rapture; the first is immediately prior to tribulation, and the second is as it ends.\n","id":"f1d03f76-fb30-4a50-afee-05153e26e494"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the two main theories of corporate nationality, a company's nationality is either defined by its place of incorporation or its main seat of business. Under both of these definitions, Twitter and Facebook are US companies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since Facebook and Twitter are legally registered in the US, only US law should be applied to them.\n","id":"82577b69-b0d1-4cd2-8724-0cc2fcf36d96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should culturally diverse writers be mandatory in English curricula?<|ARGUMENT|>Being able to relate to literature texts can promote a positive attitude toward reading p. 146.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A culturally rich curriculum can improve the academic prowess of minority students.\n","id":"87d158cc-4f6f-4b97-8346-a799b154fc1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Independence Matters \u2013 there are real legal and diplomatic consequences to such a move<|ARGUMENT|>Regardless of whether some degree of outside impetus might be of benefit, the UN is a particularly bad actor for pressuring Israel. For one thing, the UN is not viewed as an impartial entity. Israeli government officials have repeatedly claimed it is biased against them, and the UN has not tried particularly hard to dispel these impressions with its recent conferences at on racism, most prominently at Durban in South Africa, dissolving into denunciations of Zionism and holocaust comparisons.1 Reinforcing this is the persistent feeling that the world did nothing for the Jews when they were facing annihilation, which feeds into the narrative that while the international community may talk endlessly about Palestinian rights, they would do little for Israelis if the balance of power ever shifted. When Israeli politicians can state that they know exactly what would happen a second Holocaust if Arabs were to ever defeat them they are likely to see this action on the part of the UN reinforcing all of their negative impressions. This in turn may well produce a siege mentality in which they view themselves as on their own and become unwilling to make any concessions. This would be especially true if the United States were to seem to abandon them by at least abstaining on UN recognition. 1 Braun, Elihai, \u2018The UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Durban, South Africa\u2019, Jewish Virtual Library,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel remembers past failures of the international community when it came to Jews and doubts the UN\u2019s Impartiality\n","id":"ee8522fa-743a-400c-bd1d-03b82dadb9bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For me, it's like finding solutions to sudoku it can be hard and even interesting, but hardly useful for anything out of it's own world. I think even things like RSA encryption could be perfectly done without those higher proofs. After all encryption IS based in unproven math ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that most higher math proofs are useless for any practical matter.\n","id":"6edb062a-22bc-4dc6-89c0-488f1aa74ccc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am someone with PTSD. After years of trauma, and even years of therapy, there are still certain situations which trigger me. What does this mean? It usually means I have a panic attack shortness of breath, feeling like the walls are closing in, like I need to escape immediately, generally a fear you would feel when facing a life or death situation . Often times afterwards I won't be able to sleep for days or weeks due to recurring nightmares, and during the days after will experience hyper vigilance and hyperawareness, leading to a generalized anxiety. As far as I can tell, the common use of the word trigger is to mean uncomfortable or offended . This use of the word dilutes it's meaning from something which is an extreme feeling of fear and discomfort in response to certain stimuli, to something more akin to being generally upset . Since there is no other word to describe the magnitude of feelings associated with triggers for PTSD, I feel like its use should be reserved for those situations alone. Everyone else has a multitude of appropriate words upset, offended, hurt, uncomfortable, ect. But if someone touches me from behind and I end up in a ball trying to catch my breath, the only word I can use to explain what happened is to say I was triggered . Edit for all the people talking about guns, that's a separate definition and not relevant to this conversation. I'm specifically talking about using triggered in the context of PTSD. It seems like in school and on social media people use the word triggered as though they have ptsd, when what they're referring to is merely discomfort. When feminist are triggered by certain words, they are not referring to the intense emotional reaction of PTSD. They are simply offended, and as such, I feel they should use the word offended, and reserve the word triggered for people who actually have PTSD. It's like saying I skipped a meal today, I'm anorexic . No you're not, you're just hungry. Edit edit u blckjck103 has changed my mind. If everyone is using triggered as it triggered an emotion in me , that emotion doesn't have to be anything specific. Although it would be simpler if I could just say what you did triggered me , it's not that big of a deal to expand and say what you did triggered me to have a panic attack . Thanks everyone<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The word TRIGGER should only be used by people with PTSD\n","id":"48a64c99-2da9-495d-914e-597a15faf3c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Keyword was. Let me start by saying I think most Americans' POV change with the wind. In 2008, All the democratic presidential candidates ran on the platform of end the war in iraq, finish the war in afghanistan. Everyone was on board. No everyone wants to end it immediately and a lot of people think it was a bad idea to begin with. I saw a post on here listing the war in Afghanistan was a negative reaction to 9 11. What were we supposed to do, just let al queida flourish in the region? I don't think hardly anyone was against the war in Afghanistan when it started. The people that attacked us were in Afghanistan and the government there at that time was not capable of doing anything about it. That was not made up. They attack us first, we attack them back. That's defense, not offense. The reason the war was a mess was because it was led by George Bush. We stomped Al Queida, but upon invading iraq, they flourished again. Now fast forward 13 years the war at this point is accomplishing nothing. Bush and Cheney should get the death penalty but that's a whole nother  post. But anyways, if we had not invaded Iraq, we may have completely obliterated al Quieda at least in the region. That was a worthy mission and if we had stuck to it, it would have worked. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The war in Afghanistan was moral and necessary.\n","id":"49114edf-cac5-4540-b121-e874a808f2ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do not understand the issues that people have with racial profiling and why it is supposed to be such a bad thing. I think of this in light of the Zimmerman case where it was such a negative thing that perhaps Zimmerman profiled Martin because he was black. What is so incorrect about profiling a person in certain environments and situations, when empirical evidence completely supports the notion that my profiling has merit? African Americans make up 40 of the U.S prison population yet only 12 of the U.S. population. Why is it so wrong for me to make assumptions? From Wikipedia with sources A black male born in 1991 has a 29 chance of spending time in prison at some point in his life. Nearly one in three African American males aged 20\u201329 are under some form of criminal justice supervision whether imprisoned, jailed, on parole or probation. One out of nine African American men will be incarcerated between the ages of 20 and 34. Black males ages 30 to 34 have the highest incarceration rate of any race ethnicity. I heard Al Sharpton going on a wicked long rant about how the white American public profiles black people unjustly, but it seems to make perfect sense to a non American like me looking in? TLDR I think racial profiling is reality, and until empirical evidence suggests that black people do not commit an enormously substantial amount of the crime, there is no reason for a person to NOT profile.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe there is anything wrong with profiling a person because of their race.\n","id":"b668df48-5e77-4aa0-9247-b05765305fe7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trophy Hunting Be Illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>A study of 80 radio-collared white-tailed deer found that of the 22 deer who had been shot with \u201ctraditional archery equipment,\u201d 11 were wounded but not recovered by hunters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Quick kills are rare, and many animals suffer prolonged, painful deaths when hunters severely injure but fail to kill them.\n","id":"873300cf-ee86-4666-9b0b-8aba8dfcab9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Money Is the Root of All Evil<|ARGUMENT|>Read on the history of money. Originally, Money was the solution to the problems\/inefficiencies in transactions arising out of barter exchange system. Ex: In barter exchange there had to be a double co-incidence of wants. A man selling milk who wanted to buy rice had to find someone selling rice & wanting milk. GOOD LORD! Just imagine how time-consuming & frustrating. Also, there was a need for a standard to objectively measure the value of all types of goods like cows, milk, foodgrains, clothes, ornaments, etc. Imagine feelings of doubt & being cheated arising out of selling 1 kg rice in exchange of 3 litres milk when later you met someone offering you 4 litres in exchange for the same value! Moreover, money is the best & most liquid store of value & has legal tender - so you sue someone legally if cheated. Money solved the problem & also avoided all the confusion. Money is an indispensable part of our lives. Money has to be earned! The root of evil is people who want the unearned money. Saying \"MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL\" is like blaming your tools; it's very embarrassing. A similar statement: \"Computers or tech is a curse.\" Ex: You condemn the car for it lead to a terrible accident & you landed up in hospital. So is car the cause of the accident? Or are there other things to consider- like did you repair & maintain it regularly? Why did you buy it? Were you drunk? Were you daydreaming while driving? Did another car hit yours? I'd say that anyone with minimal level of intelligence should get the gist of it & should be in a position to discern the fact that car per se didn't create the problem. In the accident scene, car was the passive factor while the man driving it was an active factor & another car hitting it was the causal factor. Money too is a passive factor. How you approach it makes all the difference! Just as how you use Internet & Computer decides whether it be a curse or a boon. My smartass opponent may say car was purchased with money- so again money is the root of all evil. Alright then, could you dispense with your car? Could you dispense with anything else having money value? But this is different issue altogether.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Originally, Money was the solution to the problems\/inefficiencies in transactions arising out of barter exchange system.\n","id":"368ff61c-166a-4582-8c4c-ecbd2bf4d9a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a consumer I see the importance and value of net neutrality. However as a staunch minarchist net neutrality removes the ability for companies to differentiate their own product. No other commodity has a requirement that every company sells the same version of it. There are different formulas of corn, concrete, even water has differentiation. Furthermore if net neutrality is so important to consumers then wouldn't the ISP who continues having a neutral net gain a larger market share? Plus everyone assumes that abolishing net neutrality would be bad for consumers, but if commonly used websites like netflix purchase more bandwidth wouldn't that result in a better experience for the majority of people?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Net Neutrality and capitalism are incompatible\n","id":"596973ef-bc11-4690-a6ab-7c4734efed0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The Proposed New Hospital Be Built In Downtown Utica<|ARGUMENT|>The St. Luke\u2019s Campus is ideally situated directly adjacent to Utica College\u2019s medical and healthcare programs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The new hospital should not be built in downtown Utica\n","id":"9b1f44d2-2200-4206-b193-14323717571e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>Any type of discrimination has no place in the work place. If the same work is accomplished there shouldn't be different hourly rates based off of anything besides the work being completed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is important that we have equality in pay if men and women are going to be as successful and have the same opportunities in the world.\n","id":"33ea5bd7-8721-4912-82ae-f92dc17d50e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should students be allowed to skip grades?<|ARGUMENT|>A student who is made to spend more than the necessary time learning a particular topic is having their time wasted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a person is already competent in a subject, they should be able to skip it instead of relearn it.\n","id":"2446b7dc-b36d-41ef-8d1f-e472a61e79ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>If underlying dissatisfaction with the state of the relationship has contributed to cheating, the confession can act as a wakeup call to one's partner about problems that they may be ignoring or perpetuating.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Confessions of infidelity can lead to a better relationship by forcing examination and discussion, for example about sexual satisfaction.\n","id":"57ac6dc6-5c88-4183-91a6-11b866be4b21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am in favor of gay marriage, adoption for gay lesbian couples and I don't think that government should 'discriminate' based on sexual orientation or gender identity , however I do think that private companies and religious organizations should be allowed to discriminate based on sexual orientation gender identity. There are several reasons why I hold this view, but for now, I will only describe one. I am a big fan of free speech, I think free speech is essential and that everyone should be allowed to say whatever they think, no matter how controversial or even mistaken they are. Government should not ban hate speech, because in my opinion hate speech is in fact free speech which some people groups do not like. If you think that private companies should not have a right to discriminate based on sexual orientation or behavior, that would mean that a devout Christian or Muslim should be forced to make a gay cake or something of that sort. However, I think that if you are intellectually consistent, that would also mean that a gay person should be forced to make a cake which is against his beliefs convictions. A cake on which says all gays will burn in hell forever . I think that a gay baker should have every right to refuse to make such a cake. And in the same way, I think that a religious person should have the right to make a gay cake or any other thing which is against their convictions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private companies \/ Religious organizations should have the right to 'discriminate' based on sexual orientation or gender identity.\n","id":"4a0d250c-97aa-4c0b-9daf-48aaa0814be6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The international community should work towards recognizing an independent Kurdish state<|ARGUMENT|>There is a distinct Kurdish language which is a sign for a distinct nation according to linguistic nationalism<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Kurds are a distinct national group and therefore deserve a state of their own.\n","id":"4691893f-0b8f-48a9-a67d-0df5207c0074"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In the analogous case of female genital mutilation, the UK was unable to prosecute a number of cases because the individuals involved were not permanent UK residents at the time of the procedure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents may bring their infant abroad to have them circumcised, in which case it may be difficult for the state to mount an effective prosecution.\n","id":"9dd1ca0c-89ce-46ee-a340-3bd85c05d172"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Wordpress is better suited for a company blog than Medium?<|ARGUMENT|>Links to other parts of the company web site from within a Medium blog post takes the user to \"another site\" from Medium to the company site, which can cause confusion and mistrust \"what happened?\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Used as a blog, Medium works in an unconventional way that visitors may find unfamiliar and inconvenient, compared to a typical blog.\n","id":"88e8ca4d-0482-41c5-b153-6d245456f02b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund security for places of worship?<|ARGUMENT|>Airlines are under comparable security risks and as a result they receive government funded air marshals for protection. Places of worship are not meaningfully different to these airlines.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given the increasing risk of places of worship being the target of religious hate crimes, the government must help protect them.\n","id":"7c688fef-31d3-403a-aeee-56686030a19f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Day be a National Holiday in the U.S?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many opportunities for people to vote, even if they can't vote on election day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The problem isn't the inability to participate in voting, it's the willingness to vote.\n","id":"54e5cc3f-46cd-4d67-a418-d28aa95faf99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Pastafarianism deserve the same rights as other religions?<|ARGUMENT|>In March 2007 Bryan Killian, a high school student in Buncombe County, North Carolina, was suspended for wearing \"pirate regalia\" which he said was part of his Pastafarian faith. Killian protested the suspension, saying it violated his First Amendment rights to religious freedom and freedom of expression. \"If this is what I believe in, no matter how stupid it might sound, I should be able to express myself however I want to\", he said.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ability to practice Pastafarianism is being restricted relative to the ability to practice other religions.\n","id":"e1dcc39a-7587-49ff-baa6-75e8f354afa5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>School resource officers, other police officers, and security guards already frequently carry guns in schools. These guns are not \"readily accessible\" to anyone other than the person carrying them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guns in the possession of people who are responsible for them is not the same as guns readily available.\n","id":"c20a7553-c642-4a2f-9982-7f413d3ce2f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that capital punishment is a requirement for any society to function and the arguments for its opposition are null. If I had the power to change laws regarding capital punishment, I would expand the system and loosen the noose on what is regarded as cruel and unusual ie hanging . When preformed correctly, hanging is effective and swift and a prisoner's pain if any is negligible. I would also change how quickly a sentence is carried out. No longer does a prisoner sit on death row for the majority of his life. Strap him down and hit him with the benzos as soon as legally possible. This would reduce strain on government funds, overcrowded prisons, and the tax payer's dollar. Miscarriages of justice in regards to capital punishment are often overblown and with with the advent of DNA evidence and other technologies are more than likely in decline. People who argue that it is a greater to punishment rot in a cell underestimate a prisoner's comfort. Three meals a day, a bed to sleep on and clothes on your back is more than many people have outside the first world and many prisoners have athletic facilities and TV. Following the logic of what is a greater punishment is foolish because it's not about the greatness of the punishment, it's about justice being served. If you think rotting in a cell is more punishment than death, the same logic would follow torture is a greater punishment than rotting in a cell which I am opposed to. Death and pain aren't mutually exclusive, but sometimes they coincide and if that means the perpetrator of a heinous crime feels something human so be it. Not all of life is comfortable and the general public are grossly sensitized to death because it is feared, misunderstood, and unknown. I look forward to discussion Thanks for reading.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Captial Punishment is required by any civilized society.\n","id":"368d2920-7a77-4fcd-9d16-9ccbf20b53f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A bit of background, first I am a university student, majoring in mathematics. I was raised to be interested in science and knowledge, and for the most part, you could say that I'm fairly sympathetic to the science loving, skeptical, freethinking Reddit internet culture. However, one thing that I've never gotten into is the pop science obsession with space. I roll my eyes when I see pretty photos of space posted on Facebook, usually from a group like I Fucking Love Science , often superimposed with an inspirational quote of some kind. Here's a well known parody of the kind of thing I'm talking about. I've also never really put much effort into following news regarding the ISS or the Curiosity rover. As I said, I am majoring mathematics and I am interested in science. But when I think of the kinds of things I'm interested in, outer space doesn't really come to mind. Before posting this, I did some research on Google to try to figure out why space is interesting i.e. I looked up the phrase why is space interesting . Most of the answers seemed to revolve around two ideas 1 Space is big. 2 Space has, like, neat things, that are made of stuff As for 2 , Earth has plenty of neat things that are made of stuff things that I can directly improve my life by learning about. As for 1 Idunno. Space is sort of big, I guess. There are plenty of famous visualizations of how big space is, like the film Powers of 10 and the Scale of the Universe Flash thingy. But I've never found learning about space to be the humbling, awe inspiring experience people describe it to be. People make a big deal about the big numbers involved when talking about astronomy the universe is 14 billion years old, our galaxy has over 100 billion stars, any line from that song from Monty Python's Meaning of Life etc . I've never been very impressed with these numbers. There are plenty of much, much bigger numbers that are more applicable to everyday life. Take, for example, the number possible Tweets in the English language or the number of ways to shuffle a deck of 52 cards or even the number of steps a Busy Beaver Turing machine with 11,111 states will run before halting People say we should be amazed at how small we are. I don't agree. If anything, I'm amazed at how big we are. In the Scale of the Universe thing I linked to above, on a scale of Planck length to Size of the observable universe , on a logarithmic scale, humans are slightly closer to the size of the universe than to the Planck length. As Richard Feynman said, there's plenty of room at the bottom and I'm much more interested in learning about the particles I'm made of than in learning about a bunch of big lifeless spheres I'll never get to visit. The reason I wouldn't mind having my view changed on this is that it seems like a lot of people are getting a lot of enjoyment from learning about space, including some of my friends and family, and I'd hate to be missing out on the fun. Is there something I'm missing? EDIT I'm going to go to bed soon, but I will be back tomorrow to read further replies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think outer space is very interesting.\n","id":"1cb2b5b2-1bef-4035-b56c-3c3d22f02231"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families<|ARGUMENT|>Immigration deprives countries of origin of badly needed skills. This is known as \"brain drain\". This is one of a number of consequences from migration, and may give pause to efforts to increase protections for migrants in such a way that further incentivizes migration.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Migration can cause damaging \"brain drain\" in countries of origin.\n","id":"a0db3cc2-9f99-446a-9aa2-04286167f0e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the southern hemisphere, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa only play in three competitions in a season. The provincial championships, super rugby and an international tournament. I think this a superior system to structure a season as it gives good players to play in the provincial rugby, international potential to play in the super rugby and the best to play for their country. This means that the international players are playing quality rugby only in super rugby without lowering their skill or becoming too tired to play in internationals. I think in the northern hemisphere, players are playing too much rugby and have too much strain on their bodies to perform in domestic, European and international competitions. I propose that the system change to this the main professional competitions is played between the region's of a country. Example in England the Midlands would play the South East. have existing professional teams now and put them into a super rugby style competition where the best from the regional championship play then the international competition being the 6 Nations I believe this system would produce better players and allow to northern hemisphere teams to compete more regularly with the All Blacks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Northern hemisphere rugby teams in the 6 nations should operate a similar playing season to southern hemisphere rugby.\n","id":"a016409e-907b-4b65-ba8d-a1e9238c1a0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>The wizarding world also takes advantage of magical creatures to help with their transportation needs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wizards can easily travel across large distances using magical methods of transportation.\n","id":"66a7d097-9dc4-4ac4-8a70-d512a8d4a52d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Studies suggest that whilst parents want to participate in medical decisions some parents prefer not to make life or death decisions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents will be better off when they are not forced to make critical decisions for their children.\n","id":"2394665a-7efe-4563-9fc2-19535c3fe9fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Minors Need Parental Consent for Abortions?<|ARGUMENT|>Pregnancy is part of sexual activity. Thus, when we say a woman has the freedom to engage in sexual activities the moment she decides to, then this includes a priori an acknowledgment on the right to abortion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a young woman has decided to become sexually active, she should be allowed to decide whether to have an abortion and whether to choose to involve her parents in the decision about an abortion.\n","id":"33c8efed-d255-4f45-b6cd-0a8183866593"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>When you are driving a car and a dog crosses the street, you are not supposed to break and cause an accident. You will be responsible for what happens and insurance will not cover you. They have clear definitions how big such an animal would have to be for you to do a full stop. For a human, you always have to break and if you hit the human and kill her, it will be manslaughter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no failure to render assistance to animals in need, but nearly everywhere a law that pertains to failure to render assistance of a humans. Thus, when you do not do that, no matter whether you saved a dog or not, it still is failure to render assistance to the human.\n","id":"4285e19a-ce8f-4a05-ab6e-57011f8f3dee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are many reasons why I have happily expatriated to the UK including healthcare, public transportation, better beer P, education, etc. , but one of the reasons that makes me glad I'm over here and not back in the States is all these reports of gun violence where absolutely nothing seems to be being done about it. So, in case there's any doubt here, it's not specifically gun violence, but America's lack of legislative response to it that I can't stand. Don't get me wrong, there's still violence in the UK and everywhere, I'm sure , and this is not a x country is better than the US kind of debate, but I feel as though the problems of guns in the US are never going to be resolved or at least no one in Washington seems to be concerned with resolving them. A few years ago, I was dumbfounded by the things that happened at Sandy Hook. When you're talking about evil , murdering a bunch of kindergarteners is pretty high up there. And, in response, America did absolutely nothing about it. We cried about it on television and made ribbons and special funds, but we still voted down a bill that would have placed some pretty reasonable and still quite lax restrictions on gun purchasing. Now, I know gun violence in the States is a complex issue and speaks to a lot of problems such as mental health, etc. I also know that abolishing guns would be a difficult thing to accomplish in the US. But did we really just do NOTHING after we've had several incidents of mass murder as a result of guns? Obviously guns are not the reason for these mass murders, but they do make them much deadlier look at that Pennsylvania mass stabbing the attacker was easily unarmed, no deaths and few injuries . If we were even making some other kind of effort elsewhere to combat these issues, I'd be satisfied. But instead, we do all the easy things public mourning, saying how sad we are for the families, going through the attacker's social media for clues to their motivations and none of the hard things actually instituting some kind of policy that will reduce the amount of these events. So rather than be constantly frustrated by these sorts of things happening and then everyone scratching their heads, not actually doing anything, I'd rather just go live somewhere where specifically gun violence is not as much a problem. Obviously, not everyone has the option to just leave the States, but if it's a possibility, then gun violence could reasonably go on the list of reasons to leave.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The legislative inaction concerning gun violence in America is a good reason to emigrate\n","id":"518042f4-0430-4e41-b198-9fc38507a549"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Type 1 The observer the consciousness exists outside the simulation but its linked to it. \u200b Type 2 The observer does not exist outside of the simulation but its a part of the simulation. \u200b These are two totally different scenarios with totally different conditions and implications and its wrong to use the examples of one type to define another type. x200B The reason why i am holding this view is that most of the time when there are discussions about the simulation theory or whether we are in a simulated world examples of type 1 simulations are being as evidence for a type 2 simulation. x200B If anyone could give enough convincing evidence that these types do not matter and that from a practical perspective type 1 and type 2 would be the same then i could change my view. x200B Thanks in advance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are two distinct types of simulated realities and these need to be addressed separately to avoid confusion.\n","id":"f207eca7-1925-44cf-9a76-63459f257812"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>John is a Republican, hes against gay marriage, for large bailouts, lower taxes for businesses and rhe death penalty. I disagree with most of his opinions as I think some violate human rights and either shows a lack in reasoning abilities or imoral greedy behavior. For these reasons I do not trust them, and would go as far as to do my best to make sure they're opinions do not affect society ex. public campaigning against their public service . I do not think this is wrong because they have proven a lack in judgement pr morality. Pre emptively The first ammendment along with other parts of the Constitution apply to the government only. My distrust is only applicable in cases where their opinions affect others hiring a public figure for my company, local Council appointment etc<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is reasonable to judge someone negatively based on their political opinions.\n","id":"b1ca3a31-6f6b-46c9-984c-137f0125a0c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Universities as institutions serve a variety of purposes, but first and foremost they provide a social structure that produces and passes along knowledge in a manner that is verified and trustworthy. Universities create standards for knowledge and education by establishing disciplines with standardized methodologies and accepted practices, but they also encourage and award innovation as long as new ideas and methods can be properly explicated. Disciplines change, and academic professionals are rewarded for changing their disciplines, as long as their ideas can actually hold up to the level of rational scrutiny that is promoted within these institutions. Similarly, the standards of the discipline are exercised to evaluate students, and this evaluation is what gives the University degree its value in the labor market. My question is basically this can the internet develop to the point where it can establish this sort of standardized disciplinary knowledge independent of the institutional structure of the University? Can disciplinary knowledge also become social knowledge that is freely accessed, produced and disseminated by literally anyone that might choose to participate? For this to be possible, I think we would need to see a couple big changes take place. First and foremost, we would need a sort of second wave Enlightenment which would throw out the current paradigm of \u201calternative facts\u201d and insulated echo chambers of information. Society as a whole would need to accept a common sense of objectivity and rationality, such that it is able to uphold its own standards of legitimacy. Bad faith research and education would need to be quickly marginalized but we would also need to be willing to accept innovation and new ideas, as long as they meet the standards of our collective scrutiny. Secondly, we would need to see some sort of system of compensation that would fund research and education as goods in themselves . As it currently stands, this is the biggest issue in higher education and research. During his presidency, Reagan criticized the disciplinary knowledge produced by University researchers, claiming that they were merely satisfying personal curiosity about obscure or useless issues, and using this criticism to justify a massive defunding of higher education. The legacy of this defunding has been the increase in student tuition and debt, an increased presence of private businesses on university campuses, a new focus on collegiate athletics and recreation to attract students, the co opting of research by private interests, etc. Research and education have been re cast as means to capitalist ends research to provide technological innovations to industry, education to equip laborers with knowledge and or general capabilities needed for workplace success. For the internet to become the new medium for research and education, we would need to somehow return to a social paradigm where knowledge itself is a valid end to pursue, and education is inherently enriching , and these goods are willingly funded by society without some expectation of an economic return. Can we reach this point in our future? I would speculate that we can for a couple reasons. First, the current university system is not sustainable. There will come a tipping point where the continuous expansion of higher education devalues the degree such that it is no longer economically feasible to pursue. Secondly, while much of what we see happening on the internet is not encouraging, there are still some bright spots, and there is still the fact that the internet is very young. We have future generations that will grow up not even knowing a time before the internet existed we can hope that these new immersed generations will make better use of the internet as a medium for research and education. We can hope that these younger generations will react against the uncertainty and relativism of our current generations, and bring about this \u201csecond wave Enlightenment\u201d that would need to take place. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the Internet could eventually replace universities\n","id":"99277352-adfa-4385-bd6e-4500fe363982"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should individuals sentenced to life in prison be allowed to choose death instead?<|ARGUMENT|>Since prisons have limited funds and resources, overcrowding makes them unable to perform their role effectively by overburdening them Allowing prisoners this choice may reduce this burden.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing long term inmates the choice of a death sentence could help alleviate the pressure of overcrowding in prisons.\n","id":"9bc8b1f2-29cd-4e0f-a42d-46a6c8624650"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok, stay with me, I swear there's a point to this. None of the ethnic slurs that American black people have come up with have any significant emotional impact on white people. The intent of the slur may be offensive, but the terms they use always fall flat and go out of style rather quickly. Let's look at some examples. Peckerwood is a mostly southern term used for poor, rural whites. It's based on the woodpecker type of bird and is meant to contrast the blackbird or crow slur used against black people. It's an outdated term that's nearly meaningless today and it's use has declined. Cracker is an older term meant to evoke imagery of a slave master and the crack of his whip. This one I find to be perplexing because although the image of a slave owner is undoubtedly negative, there is still the implications of you being the master in the situation. Once again, the insult falls flat on its face. Honky is another outdated term with confusing origins but one theory is that it comes from white men honking their car horns in primarily black red light districts. Once again, there's an implication of whites being higher on the social ladder. My last example is much more recent. Certain black youths on Twitter have been referring to white people as cum skins . Hearing that term is what got me thinking about this to begin with. Sure, semen might be kind of icky to some people, but that's certainly not the case universally. Ancient Greeks and Chinese believed semen to contain immense amounts of energy. Some pre industrial societies believed semen to be sacred and magical. Compare these to the term shit skin , nigger , ape , and whatnot. The slurs against black people seem far more hurtful. To wrap this insane rant up, I'll say that it may be hard to  because of the completely subjective nature of all this. Obviously, there's no scientific method of measuring how hurtful a word is. Still, I'd like to hear some feedback on this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's not possible for black people to come up with a good slur for whites.\n","id":"96b824a5-0c04-4a53-93ca-7b1457ef39a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>There must be a good reason why only 583 out of the 80,000 eligible voters registered. It would seem that the platform was not user friendly and not advertised well enough.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This was a poorly implemented example of Liquid Democracy and so should not be extrapolated from.\n","id":"5ed996cd-b1f7-45ee-b829-e23ac5760517"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Private Cars Be Forbidden In Large Cities?<|ARGUMENT|>Residents of Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia make up a sizable portion of New Hampshire's visitors, helping drive the state's economy via tourism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people living in large cities will vacation in the neighboring region, helping drive tourism. These areas are often only accessible by car.\n","id":"25068242-ad77-4275-b4f5-cd3a13786fe6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>By refusing to cooperate, Democrats will erode norms of cooperation and make it more likely that Republicans will obstruct Democratic presidencies in the future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refusal to cooperate with Trump will polarise the American public even more.\n","id":"7e0013ef-0440-4198-a6d0-35fc0982ab7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The way I define American Dream. The American Dream is bettering your life through hard work or being clever. So if you are out working or out smarting others which leads to you getting the job or getting promoted etc. That means that there are others who didn't get said job. Winners and losers. The winners will make a lot of money and probably unwilling to give their wealth up. Since they worked hard to attain wealth. The losers people who got out worked or out smarted will be left behind. The American Dream creates winners and losers and as long as there are winners and losers there will be wealth disparity. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As long as the \"American Dream\" exists there will be wealth disparity in the US.\n","id":"3320a439-6f77-4c2d-89f6-067f0db1e9f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>end national testing<|ARGUMENT|>Standardized tests ensures students learn the most important information. There is some information in the world that is essential to know so that, as adults, schoolchildren can excel in their jobs. Standardized tests help ensure that all students learn this important information. It is true that this information can be difficult, and perhaps even boring, including history, literacy reading comprehension, and math. Yet, it is, nevertheless, essential, so testing for it and ensuring students know the information is extremely valuable. A recent study of American high school seniors found that just 13 per cent could answer basic questions of American history correctly; national testing ensures that the next generation will be encouraged to learn about such history, in a fair and balanced manner, up and down the country1. 1 Banchero, S. 2011, June 15. Students stumble again on the basics of history. Retrieved July 12, 2011, from The Wall Street Journal: improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"National testing will ensure all students learn the same, essential skills and information\n","id":"c4773b85-fcb5-4a16-b9d9-2b45901dbe67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>When welfare services are provided by the state they become politicized. Politicians make decisions about how welfare should be provided not based on what will produce the best outcomes, but instead, based on what will result in the highest chance of reelection. Private businesses are not constrained in this manner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many welfare recipients made choices based on the fact that they are guaranteed certain benefits. These are not people in genuine need, because their situation is chosen.\n","id":"9d376a9e-3195-426e-916d-f43fb8a62687"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm well aware of studies saying global warming is real, temperatures are rising by several degrees C by 2050, etc, etc. I'm well aware of models saying it will cause species extinction, heat stroke, freak weather, runaway greenhouse effect, etc. etc. However it seems to me that these models are making some very unreasonable assumptions, in particular they seem to treat everything else as a constant, when that is obviously not going to be the case, ie. stagnant technology. Follow my logic If people keep eating chicken, eventually chickens will go extinct sounds reasonable, but doesn't take into consideration that increasing demand for chicken will result in more chicken farms. If the population keeps growing, eventually we'll run out of housing sounds reasonable, but doesn't take into consideration that new apartment buildings and new cities will be built. If the water level keeps rising, eventually we'll have billions of refugees sounds reasonable, but doesn't take into consideration that real estate developers will build further inland ahead of time knowing that there will be a market. If this freak weather keeps getting worse, eventually all the storms will cause cataclysmic damage sounds reasonable, but doesn't take into consideration that we'll eventually build more resilient buildings to weather them. If the world economy keeps expanding, the rate at which CO2 will be added to the atmosphere will increase exponentially sounds reasonable, but doesn't take into consideration that economic development will result in technological advancement and to things like better and cheaper photovoltaic cells, making rolling them out far easier. If global warming causes the ice caps to melt, eventually the loss of reflectivity of the earth's surface will accelerate global warming sounds reasonable, but doesn't take into consideration that global warming causing desertification will increase reflectivity of the earth's surface deserts are more reflective than forest and thus counteract this process. If temperatures keep rising, eventually the numbers of people dying from heat stroke in the summer will be astronomical sounds reasonable, but doesn't take into consideration that the markets will work to ensure that everyone has access to water and A C at all times, and cultures will adjust to make wearing less clothing acceptable. If temperatures keep rising, eventually the species that can't handle it will go extinct sounds reasonable, but doesn't take into consideration that as temperatures rise, these species and their biomes will move or be relocated further toward the poles, and the species that humanity cares about ie bees can be raised in air conditioned units if necessary. In other words, the models used by climatologists don't take into account any reasonable expectation of what humanity will do to compensate they completely ignore the negative feedback loops. Of course, much of this will be expensive, but expensive and threat to human survival are completely different things. EDIT You guys do realize that this post is titled  The threat of global warming is exaggerated , not  There are no consequences to global warming ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The threat of global warming is exaggerated.\n","id":"c0d4790d-dd2f-43e3-b8ea-d7ac1410492a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>This phenomenon was seen in Australia in 2013. The Liberal-Democrats received approximately 3% of the nationwide tally yet 9% of the New South Wales vote where they were listed first. This was sufficient for them to be elected.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An individual could choose to 'donkey vote' by placing the top name first, then the second-top second and so on.\n","id":"eee304eb-45a3-4057-a4e0-f22467d44969"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ending US sanctions on Cuba<|ARGUMENT|>In the 1990\u2019s Cuba lost $70 Bn in trade and $1.2 Bn in international loans because of U.S. sanctions. Cuba is too poor a country not to suffer from these losses. The dominance of America in the pharmaceuticals industry, moreover, means that it is actually impossible for Cubans to gain access to many drugs. America would be the natural market for most Cuban products, and its refusal to accept goods with even the tiniest Cuban inputs from third nations damages Cuba\u2019s ability to trade with others. Other South American countries have shown their reliance on the types of loans that Cuba is denied in the last few years to keep their economies on track.3<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The sanctions cause real and unacceptable harm to the Cuban people.\n","id":"5e597e0a-bf22-4f65-9c02-419824610844"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>While the scientific method assures bias is minimized in individual studies, lines of inquiry may be and indeed often are biased toward a particular field\u2019s preconceptions. This can of course include political leanings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Academic and industrial contexts expose scientific research to political influences.\n","id":"628e5ec9-b318-47c8-ace8-65bd336e995a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Democracy is a subjective term. As power is concentrated in state and corporate organisations, countries better able to satisfy their citizens' needs and desires can afford greater freedom of expression. However, most attempts to impose Western liberalism on countries with radically different cultural traditions have backfired, most notably in the Middle East. We can at best lead by example, but should not collaborate or trade with despotic regimes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democracies should only provide official development assistance ODA to democratic countries.\n","id":"2d2b5178-2b11-40c6-b12f-4c87d0617875"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Young children are born with a natural aversion towards harming animals except in rare circumstances including due to fearfulness They get conditioned by people around them later on to act differently towards animals. Having less sympathy towards animals probably prepares them to be less cautious towards eating meat even though animal aversion is in our nature.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eating meat is not in our nature. Everyone is born a vegetarian, but get into eating meat is through parental choosing around 4-6 mths old and cultural conditioning reinforcement later see TV advertisements for fast food and lunch meals\n","id":"06087a6e-2976-45f4-af99-b3e64d19317b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Reddit's tagline is The Front Page of the Internet It is supposed to be a content aggregation platform which allows its users to vote on popular content a democratic process of content filtration, where only popular valuable content gets pushed to the top. Obviously, not everyone is always going to be happy or agree with what's popular or valuable, but that's an acceptable side effect of any democracy. But what if, in the current system, specific content, opinions and discussions were being stopped, censored, and prevented from ever entering the public forum by the clandestine actions of a few individuals? Any popular web platform needs a level of moderation administration. There will always be a large amount of content which is submitted purely for commercial hateful deceptive or other malicious reasons. This content needs to be dealt with, because currently we don't have the ability to do this programmatically we make use of human moderators to make the decisions and to police the subreddits in the best way they see fit. I don't believe the current moderation functionality has been built in the best interest of the Reddit community. In light of the recent Greenwald scandal it's become clear that the current system gives mods too much power, and not enough accountability for their actions. The key issues with the current system are Undocumented and untraceable removal censorship of posts and comments Secret lists of blacklisted content sources No ability to remove mods who have a track record of abusing their powers A general, uncomfortable, lack of transparency. Which leads to effective censorship of content which the moderators personally dislike or think is of no value. The potential ramifications of this, I hope are obvious. What would happen if person with a specific political agenda were to work their way on to the modlist? They could easily start to alter the content and curb discussion to align with their own personal values and opinions. The current system is broken, and needs a fix for the good of the Reddit community. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The current sub-reddit mod system goes against everything Reddit stands for.\n","id":"18cd2b46-717c-4601-b799-b040d857dd8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's a few things wrapped up in why I think rooftop solar is a terrible idea. First off, I'm no absolutist and in the limited cases where my critiques don't apply I wouldn't complain about rooftop solar. I think it's pretty bad in general because most installations are subject to my list of gripes. 1 Rooftop solar is inefficient. Rooftop solar is seldom on a movable sun tracking platform. Usually it's just stick haphazardly on whatever side of the roof gets the most sun. Factors like trees can block the panels for part of the day. Dust and grime will accumulate over time reducing the efficiency and owners will often not spend the necessary time for upkeep because the payoff of a 3 efficiency increase is too low to justify climbing on the roof with a mop. Industrial installations on the other hand will have a concerted plan to squeeze as much efficiency out of the panels as possible. They will clean them and install them in the perfect position on movable platforms. 1b Rooftop solar wastes otherwise good solar panels. If you accept that rooftop solar is inefficient then you will probably also see why consumer demand driving the prices up would be a bad thing. With fewer competitors it's possible that power companies could more easily buy and place panels in highly efficient industrial installations instead of letting them go to waste on a rooftop. If a solar panel has a 20 year lifespan, a 20 efficiency increase due to proper installation could translate into well over 100k kWh for a single panel. What I'm getting at is that I see every solar panel on a roof as a lost opportunity to put that panel somewhere where it might be far more productive. 2 Rooftop solar punishes the poor to subsidize the rich. Most states and countries force utility companies or public utilities to buy electricity from home installations at the rate that it is sold, this is called net metering. But the sale price of electricity doesn't just cover the cost of production, electrical prices also subsidize infrastructure. As more of the wealthy are able to afford rooftop solar thanks to net metering, the electrical rate will rise to provide the necessary infrastructure funding. This price spike will disproportionately affect those who are the poorest and can't afford a 5 year loan, or those who rent and can't invest in their home. This is a clear case of reverse welfare. Edit this took a long time to get going. I responded to the first poster thx. for being so fast u Kinnell999 and I'll respond to more when I wake up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that rooftop solar is terrible for the environment and for society.\n","id":"19d2e686-49ca-4057-ab68-39d72888f761"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>'The Human Right to Pursue your Personal Labor', as a basic Human Right  In spite of what the private market can bear, every human should have the freedom to work at something, even thou no one sees any benefit, or way to profit from your labor. The freedom to work at your labor should be protected and the pursuit of your personal labor shouldn't be tied to another's whims. For example if your calling is to make widgets, but you can't because the market won't allow you this shouldn't prevent you from making widgets, or going into abject poverty in doing so. We live in a world where we only profit when jobs are created, but we never work on or celebrate when a job is eliminated Freedom to pursue personal labor should be a protected right. It is not a right to sit on your ass, or enjoy a hobby on the govt dime or the right to pursue leisure it is equal to the right to pursue happiness. And in the current climate, this will give each individual equal footing with a large corporation, with much larger resources. if you succeed at your labor, you are no longer using your right to pursue your labor, you are in the private market and the market can bear your product. We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. Buckminster Fuller<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'The Human Right to Pursue your Personal Labor', as a basic Human\n","id":"a3f324cc-6453-4d4f-aa16-521916ed51a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>Starfleet crews demonstrate equal ability to fly without computer aid or assistance and some of them are considered expert pilots. There is less evidence for them being as experienced aiming manually, though some examples exist among their tactical officers and command officers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Federation is vulnerable to jamming as its members have little experience with manual control. The Rebels, in contrast to that, are experienced in fighting and flying without computer aid.\n","id":"c0f97da0-64f2-43e3-aaf4-1650d56ac347"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious education be compulsory in public schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Students are burdened with plenty of coursework as is. The history of world religions is frequently discussed in social studies and literature classes that are already required. A focus on world religions can easily be added to the scope of social studies curriculum without having to add an additional required course.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are already so many graduation requirements that something would need to be sacrificed. There's simply not enough room in a students schedule to allow for another mandatory course.\n","id":"8e1d3a9f-b87f-4504-9dbd-db12579a99ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>UN Security Council Should Be Expanded<|ARGUMENT|>Security Council expansion would also make the UN much more democratic as there would be more participants present in closed meetings and informal consultations. Expansion would increase the transparency of the Council.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Security Council expansion would also make the UN much more democratic as there would be more partic...\n","id":"7b6f7c0c-be0a-4272-ac2b-51f471e35c87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Big college sport schools, specifically the Big 10 should be paid for their performances. Colleges college coaches rake in millions upon millions of dollars per year through attendance, merchandise, sponsors, etc. and players are prohibited from seeing any royalties from these sources of revenue that they are partially responsible for. For instance, a UCF player was making Youtube videos and getting paid for them because of high viewings and the school actually kicked him off the team because he was utilizing his fame from football to direct traffic to his channel. AFAIK he neither slandered nor said anything negative about his school but was kicked off the team anyways. This is just one instance im familiar with. How can this be fair for the players that are working hard and practicing day in and day out?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"1 College football players\/athletes in general should be paid for playing.\n","id":"820a6399-5ee4-4392-857f-d51d477d32a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Gulabi Gang a force for good in India?<|ARGUMENT|>According to a study commissioned by the WHO citing researchers across the world, sexually violent behavior is most often motivated by underlying factors such as power and control. WHO, p.4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sexual violence almost always features a power disparity between the offender and the victim.\n","id":"da9d3ffe-fe32-4674-8c8c-5ef3b6ce1bd8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should vegan\/vegetarian parents feed their kids the same diet?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents attempting to ethically raise their children would be hypocritical to let their kids consume animal products.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vegan\/vegetarian parents should feed their children the same diet.\n","id":"e71de18f-4d79-49b3-839a-db9b67f80dae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no correlation between firearm homicide rates and guns per capita on a country by country basis: Chart 2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many reports contest the correlation between lower gun ownership and lower gun deaths.\n","id":"2fb10b9f-51b8-4f19-b1bb-5128a737708c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Despite what the mainstream media, like FOX, CNN, and MSNBC, have covered, all contributed to Trump's success in being a presidential candidate. Media bias. And Trump is winning off of it. As far as I understand, there are two things that keep Trump from being a Democrat . The Wall, and his intentions of deporting illegal immigrants. Everything else he has campaigned on is purely liberal leaning politics. His view on abortion as recent coverage has put it is that he is against abortion, however, that isn't the case. If you actually watched the interview, the question was rather if it was illegal should there be consequences? Trump said yes there should be consequences. If you think about it, that's a pretty sensible answer if it's illegal should there be punishment? What would it be illegal for if there was no punishment? Hey guys, it's illegal to steal, but you can't get sentenced to jail or pay any fine if convicted for it. Trump is also a long supporter of the gay community, and does not care about forgin entanglements like Israel. Trump has also gone on the record saying that he wants to give tax breaks to the lower income and middle income wage earners and to not give tax breaks to higher income wage earners, or progressively tackle income gaps. Let's get back to the point the media has a lot to do with his success. The more they squander attention on him the more people look at him and see a rather sensible liberal with a pretty central political standpoint. The more people who see this the more support he gets. He has a pretty straightforward campaign. It's actually pretty crazy to think the republican voters want him because he isn't religious, he isn't conservative But he is staunch for America. They have no reason to believe the media coverage of this guy who's only flaw is that he has a multimillion dollar company. And here is the kicker, if they payed no attention to him the first place he wouldn't have ever gotten so far. But he played them just like he said he would almost 30 years ago. He layed out his plan on TV. He told everyone exactly how he would do it and they fell for it anyways. For me, I disagree with him on many of things. I'm actually a libertarian who thinks this guy is crazy. But he's crazy good at what he does. That's why he's got my support. He won't make America great again because it has always been great, but he has already done a lot for America just for running. To the people that actually listen to what his campaign is He exposed to the silent majority that there is an extreme flaw in media coverage. He exposed the way media treats candidates just purely based on the notion of party affiliation. The republican establishment doesn't want him because he's liberal. The democrat establishment doesn't want him because he wants a wall and to deport illegal immigrants. He could literally be the way to destroy the establishment and it starts at the media. And no one knows what to do with him or how to report about him simply because he is running as a republican. It's purely the media's fault for this. Take note that I added some of his campaigning to emphasize why the media and the establishment democrats republicans are to blame for his success. You can literally look up what he campaigns on by going to his website So you can either listen to what CNN or FOX tells you he campaigns on and either call him crazy or rationalize him, or what he tells you he campaigns on and call him crazy or rationalize him. Either way, the attention has been gathered by the media. Please change my view. Just so you know, I will be at work in a few hours. I will reply when I can to any comments. Edit 1 because I'm getting the his supporters are under educated, Trump speaks at 4th grade level English, he is a woman hater comments. This view IS NOT BASED ON HIS CAMPAIGN. It is purely based on media coverage. The media KEEPS covering him and that is how he is still doing so good. This shows a flaw in the MEDIA, not Trump. Media's take cover Trump. Media's intentions destroy Trump. Media's result More Trump support.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Mainstream Media has made Trump successful in this election.\n","id":"b82df3dc-5f3f-46b6-9806-72b953a5c278"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argues that the Constitution is only obligated to protect freedom of religion not freedom from it. The separation of church and state doesn\u2019t mean \u201cthe government cannot favor religion over non religion,\u201d Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued during a speech at Colorado Christian University on Wednesday, according to The Washington Times. He is absolutely wrong in his assertion. Freedom of religion is freedom from religion. There is not freedom to practice religious beliefs if you are required to adhere to any of the religious beliefs or rules of other religions. Favoring Christian prayer before government meetings forces all non Christians to adhere to a religion they do not subscribe to. Allowing Ten Commandment monuments on public land forces Christian beliefs on all non Christians. You cannot have freedom of religion without freedom from religion and therefore, Scalia is 100 wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is 100% wrong about religion and the Constitution\n","id":"917714df-e75a-4a8c-9f4d-eb5a00116127"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>Militia, in a US constitutional context, constitutes a local, US, citizen's army, that would rise up against a corrupt US government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"PMCs are not a militia, esp. not as considered by the constitution.\n","id":"9890261d-6936-4328-89ff-5d0fd151ab60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Pastafarianism deserve the same rights as other religions?<|ARGUMENT|>Legislation and judicial rulings routinely define the terms they incorporate, since leaving them vague and undefined would make it impossible for government to enforce, thus rendering such a provision effectively null.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state has to make judgements about the status of a religion in order to define and limit religious exemptions.\n","id":"247f7ccb-1862-4c60-b012-15a72f1c6220"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Even if we would implement a kill switch either in its software, f.e. a command word, or a physical one, it could have overwritten its own code for that kill switch beyond our knowledge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An AGI would be impossible to control or regulate once its abilities or reasoning surpasses our understanding.\n","id":"a12ba3cd-146e-4c16-afaa-22883b534b3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>A woman may not feel emotionally, mentally or otherwise prepared to have a child, and ultimately this could be damaging for the child and for the relationship between the mother and child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many reasons a woman may not be equipped to or want to raise a child. In these cases, it is important that she is able to choose abortion.\n","id":"702d2910-96cf-42dd-a281-2568cf37bf1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NATO expansion<|ARGUMENT|>It is estimated that expense of ten years of protecting the borders of Eastern Europe are between $10 and $50 billion. Moreover, the bill for stationing forces permanently in the territory new Eastern European members would likely exceed $100 billion per decade. Given the fragile economies of the new republics, the existing NATO States will be obliged to absorb the expense of expansion. The proper question is whether the taxpayers of the US and Western European States wish to pay to protect citizens of distant republics from phantom threats.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The costs of NATO expansion are prohibitive at a time when the Western European members are scaling back their defence budgets and the reducing the size of their conventional forces.\n","id":"87eed5a6-d69f-4989-9d71-96fe1545d6bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is in context of the recent HR1044 bill that is in the process of being passed. x200B Background This bill proposes that the quota for backlogged countries be increased. I would like this bill to pass OR ask that we start denying the H1B visa because no one is happy with this current process. x200B Situation Full disclosure, I am one of the backlogged countries India and I would LOVE this bill to pass to I don't have to wait 20 years to get a green card. I do acknowledge that this will mean other applicants from other countries will be pushed back down to the back of the queue as Indians have already been waiting in queue for quite a while. x200B A lot of minorities have taken to twitter complaining how this bill puts India first check out hr1044 . Well, Indians have been waiting in the queue for 10 years if not more chained to their jobs as they cannot freely move to other companies. I will admit these are golden handcuffs as the income is probably decent at most of these jobs. I don't have the exact statistics here. This seems to be a similar problem to Affirmative Action where to maintain the diversity we need to artificially control the over represented user group. But how is denying them green cards or rationing out green cards in proportion of nationality achieving this? We are already in this country under H1B visa buying homes, having families etc. What's the point of limiting GCs by country? x200B There are a few points being made on twitter why this bill is unfair, This bill will be unfavorable to American workers and now an Indian will take my job A. Why? Indians are already here working on H1B visa. All this bill does is give them a Green card. How will this process steal more jobs . Net net it will be the same amount of jobs. This bill puts India first A. Partially agree, but what about those that have been waiting for years? The current priority date green card interview date is 2009 so there is a 10 year backlog for Indians which is bound to increase. In contrast, nationals from other countries are getting green cards and some add economic value by being Uber drivers. There is a larger conversation around a merit based GC process which I obviously favor. This bill lets them jump in line A. No it doesn't. We have been waiting in line longer than other countries for the skilled visa EB2 EB3 and yet there is no end in sight. x200B In summary, if you don't want Indians here for diversity reasons, simply deny them the H1B visa as it is over allocated to our country. What's the point of giving them the H1B and then make them wait in line 20 years without a GC. If you start to give them relief then other nationalities are unhappy. If you don't, we are unhappy as the wait is miserable. The only solace is at least I can still stay and work in this country whereas in the no H1B situation I would have gone back home.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US should approve Immigration reform bill HR1044\n","id":"46cea857-378e-45c8-bdf6-f5b0b9808680"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I use the word \u201cchurch\u201d broadly throughout this post to mean \u201call religious organizations,\u201d because the IRS does not have a strict definition of a what constitutes a church, and does not officially define it in the tax code. The IRS puts all religious organizations into one group, despite the questioned validity of the religion they represent. Televangelist churches preach the \u201cprosperity gospel,\u201d which states that the more money you give to the church the more God will bless you. Whereas mainstream Christian churches preach the gospel, grounded in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Televangelist churches prioritize monetary gain, but mainstream Christian churches prioritize the needs of their congregation and surrounding community. I recently watched John Oliver\u2019s segment on televangelism and church taxation. While I agree with his conclusion that televangelism is a scam, I do not believe that churches should be taxed. It is difficult to define a \u201cchurch\u201d or religious organization because they come in all styles and sizes. If the IRS decided to tax only one type of church, they would have to tax them all in order be consistent. John Oliver says that televangelist churches need to be taxed but mainstream Christian churches should remain untaxed. If the IRS were to determine that televangelist churches need to pay taxes, but smaller, poorer churches do not, it would be violating freedom of religion. Freedom of religion means any person or group can openly practice any religion they want, without penalty from the government. The prosperity gospel preached at televangelist churches is central to its vast wealth. If the IRS chose to tax only televangelist churches, it would undermine the legitimacy of the organization by not giving it \u201creal church\u201d tax exemption status, though members who give to televangelist churches consider both the church and the message to be legitimate. The tax, could, therefore, be considered a penalty from the government. Taxing churches would also violate the separation of church and state, as stated in the Bill of Rights. With the ability to audit churches, the IRS could and probably would inevitably determine legitimate and illegitimate church expenses. Such a probe would not give churches the freedom to spend money the way they think best. Churches should not be treated differently just because televangelists and other religious groups abuse their tax exempt privileges. If all churches were taxed Smaller churches do significantly more charitable work than large televangelist churches, relative to the amount of money they bring in. Churches provide essential services for the poor, like free meals and school supplies. Taxing churches would limit their ability to provide these services. Without these options, children and their families could impose a greater financial strain on the state and federal government. The monetary value of the services that churches provide is greater than the tax break the government gives them. My view could be changed if I am misunderstanding the freedom of religion laws as they currently exist, and there is a way to somehow tax televangelist churches without penalizing smaller churches.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious organizations - specifically churches - should not have to pay income or property taxes.\n","id":"57ba697f-49b0-4a8b-bcf1-9c25b3971f21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There Be Trigger Warnings in Education?<|ARGUMENT|>The Americans With Disabilities Act requires accommodations for those suffering from mental illnesses, and every institution should have procedures for evaluating requests for accommodation. The moral aim of the ADA is an admirable one, which is to ensure professional, educational, and other opportunities to the greatest extent possible for those who live under the burden of a mental illness. Hence if a student requires trigger warnings, then the ADA entitles that student to receive them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Universities have the responsibility to provide students with the best conditions for them to academically thrive. If the absence of trigger warnings compromise the students' ability to focus and be comfortable in class; then the universities have the responsibility to include trigger warnings in their classes.\n","id":"8f826be4-d5ed-4eac-85b0-4165194f23f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After using Reddit for a while I become infuriated with the standard type of forum posting. If you do not know what I mean, here is an example. It makes no sense and is a pain to use and navigate. Here is why forums should utilize the Reddit method of upvoting, and easier to see replies. I will be using my example as a tech forum to demonstrate why it is inferior. The most requested most wanted thing is at the top. With a standard forum many illogical requests are put at the same priority as popular ones. There is no real way to express what the community wants first other than a poll. With the reddit format the most popular opinion is put first letting the developers others know what to focus on. Replies are easier to follow. I don't have to scroll through endless pages to see if an OP replied to a question. With the reddit method all I have to do is look for the blue flair and scroll down. To continue with number 1, many posts don't contribute to the discussion. In many forum posts I view, there is a good majority of people bashing something. With the reddit format, one comment would be bashing and voted up if it is truely popular, and to see other 'important' comments just hide the parent one. The main topic can be easily derailed. With the reddit system the derailing is localized under one parent comment and can be hidden while still being there. These reasons and more are why I would love if forums utilize a reddit like method to posting and replying. I will add subtract more reasons as I see fit. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Reddit\" way of posting and replying is superior to the typical forum method, and should be universal\n","id":"58899a05-8901-40b0-8e61-7fccdb84bfbe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>Current social models in the US were built in the white, dominant, patriarchy of America. 'Redlining practises, for example, have been built into the fabric of US economics, limiting blacks and other minorities based on ethnic composition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Societal problems are responsible for the root cause of all crime. If there were true equality of opportunity, resources, etc, there would be no need for or drive towards crime.\n","id":"a240607e-76d9-4b22-aed6-97e01c5c75a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Human beings' right to reproduce is a hot topic among some groups of people who used to be or still are sterilized. Society may have the means to restrict the reproduction of many beings human or not but it doesn't necessarily have the justification.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An AGI shouldn't be created because controlling its reproduction it copying itself, mutating or taking different forms wouldn't only be ethically hard to justify but also difficult to accomplish in the long term, which would create a new set of possible risks.\n","id":"0434ad1a-96ed-4891-8e2e-0087837c94d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This does not apply to those have been diagnosed Mentally Unstable and therefore unfit to display the necessary reason to vote. At the very least it is a separate debate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Prisoners should have the Right to Vote,\n","id":"11672bc3-4334-40b0-a229-398c8c3beea3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US intervention in Libya, lacking congressional approval, was illegal<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, Libya did not attack US soldiers and did not harm US citizens. Given that this is true, then engagement with Libya to begin with goes against the spirit of US law. Given that the situation is not an emergency for the U.S. circumventing congress in order to prosecute the war is incredibly harmful as it undermines one of the core institutions in U.S. democracy. Further, the use of international organisations such as the UN and NATO to circumvent congress has bad ramifications for the future as in doing this the U.S. government has significantly lowered the burden required to go to war should it wish to do so in the future. This is problematic because the decision to go to war should never be one that is taken lightly. Should the U.S. wish to go to war again then it might end up in a situation such as Vietnam, the conflict that inspired the creation of the war powers act.1 Ackerman, Bruce. \u201cObama\u2019s Unconstitutional War.\u201d ForeignPolicy.com 24\/03\/2011<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US intervention is not consistent with other aspects of US law\n","id":"2c168e94-ac6c-4d6c-b61b-6d16e09927a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>globalissues.org almost have the global population loves of less than 2.50$ a day and this below the 1000$ line.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For a significant part of global population having an annual GDP of $1000 means being rich.\n","id":"c4577a98-7fd8-4756-9d17-e52bfeb49783"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is the core concept that underpins our democracy. The basic unit of a democratic system is the individual, and power and authority gets bestowed from the bottom up. That ideal, despite being enshrined in our founding documents as 'all men are created equal', has yet to be fully met. The expansion of voting rights to groups that had not been originally included in 'all men' does show, however, that the principle stands, and that women and black people do count as parts of 'all men', and that denying them the vote is to deny them their most important role as a citizen of a democracy. To deny someone the vote is to deny their right to be governed legitimately. We still disenfranchise citizens. Convicted felons, in some states, lose their right to vote. Convicts serving their time are not allowed to vote. Young people under 18 are not allowed to vote. And every day here on  someone or another is making a call to restrict voting to those who 'deserve' the right. Voting in a democracy is not a right that gets bestowed by authority on the individual. Individuals voting is what grants that authority in the first place. If the right to vote gets denied to anyone? Then authority is no longer legitimate for that person. If we deny voting rights to some peope, but grant them to others? Then we have effectively turned upside down the concept of authority coming from the bottom up, and grant those who retain their voting rights authority over those who haven't. Equal protection under the law is erased. The individual is rendered subservient to authority, and a two level citizenry is created. Voting is what grants us ownership of our government, and establishes its legitimacy. Singling out any individual or group as 'undeserving' of participating in democracy entirely misses the point. Convicted felons should get to vote, not because they deserve anything, but because the power to lock them away for their crimes is wielded by an institution that derives it's authority from the bottom up democratically. Denying felons the vote gives power to people who would undermine democracy. It sets a dangerous precedent, and establishes the notion that ownership of democratic authority can be turned on its head, and the institution can claim ownership over individuals. Seventeen year olds are also denied ownership of their government. That strikes me as unnecessarily conservative. Why have any voting age? If you accept that voting isn't a right that gets bestowed from above, but that instead that allowing ALL citizens to vote is what grants government authority to govern all citizens? Then disenfranchising ANYONE is wrong, and goes against the core principle that our nation was founded on. Care to try to change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Felons and children should get to vote.\n","id":"24d76943-c69d-4314-88c2-6232b93d1783"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lou Reed was not only using a dated term in 1972 in his song Walk On the Wild Side but he knew it. The song is praised for breaking ground on gender issues and yet Reed, a very urban person, connected to the zeitgeist, uses the term colored anyway. It was so offensive to viewers that radio stations were provided with records with that word cut out. It seems impossible that no producer or fellow musician pointed out that the use of that word would be objectionable. Maybe few in his circle were concerned but someone had to have asked if he was sure he wanted to say that, and my guess it that Reed was feeling so liberated talking about a transsexual prostitute's journey that he, a white man, did not deem it necessary to be sensitive to the African American community that had just suffered for paltry promises of equal rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lou Reed was a racist because of the lyrics, \"All the colored girls sing.\"\n","id":"32f694a3-67a0-4cab-a638-c25b6ed09b8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First things first, I do not believe that a secretive installation of a cryptocoin miner is a legitimate monetization scheme. From an ethical standpoint companies should try and keep the terms of the bargain overt. Now to the actual view to be changed. The development of programs such as uTorrent cost money, while my view is not limited to programs that have a somewhat shady side, I think that uTorrent could have legitimately bargained for spare time on my computer that is not being used so that they could do some productive task. A productive task such as bitcoin mining is non intrusive to me, but given a little bit here and there multiplied by a huge number of computers, coin mining could be a significant revenue source for developers or another productive task, it needn't be coin mining . I further recognize that coin mining is computationally intensive and will cost a significant amount of electricity. While I could see this being a problem if taken to the extreme, a few dollars here and there might go unnoticed, and I could always turn my computer off. In addition, for a lot of people such as students, a laptop can be powered with electricity that you don't directly pay for. As a side note, I wonder if this monetization scheme will work for mobile apps given that phones are getting more and more powerful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"uTorrent's installation of a cryptocoin miner is a legitimate and clever monetization scheme.\n","id":"1dd4767d-5277-4489-8211-967358b691a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are no fundamental restrictions on using the N word. No one can grant permission to use the word or revoke someone\u2019s access from using it. If someone is offended by another person\u2019s use of the word, and they express their displeasure, they are not somehow an authority imposing a restriction on the words you use but simply someone suggesting that you consider the ethics of using a word with a controversial history. There is certainly societal etiquette discouraging people from using the word, but this kind of pressure is not exclusive to the word Nigger. Those who claim that they cannot say the word are often just people being hyperbolic about the consequences that can arise from someone taking offense. Like other offensive words, there is definitely a risk of someone taking offense but that should not be confused with someone having authority of the words you use.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Permission to say the N-word is not something anyone can grant.\n","id":"d9d965b2-07b2-45bb-9bea-5149f9725c37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US and NATO intervention in Libya<|ARGUMENT|>Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway. \"Death of the War Powers Act.\" Washington Post. May 17th, 2011: \"Once Obama crosses the Rubicon, future presidents will simply cite Libya when they unilaterally commit America to far more ambitious NATO campaigns. If nothing happens, history will say that the War Powers Act was condemned to a quiet death by a president who had solemnly pledged, on the campaign trail, to put an end to indiscriminate warmaking.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libya war weakens War Powers; makes going to war easier\n","id":"595814aa-2f3a-4084-8734-47dc87274f07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>Judith Curry, a widely acclaimed climate scientist has been vilified and threatened personally simply because of her skeptical views. As a result she decided to end her career in climate science Curry resigns: Integrity Vs. Career Suicide<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social pressure and research funding incentives has made it difficult for climate scientists to speak out against strong claims about human-caused climate change\n","id":"82e40be9-b76d-4f5c-80f9-7b8011b766d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>Voluntary exchanges are the only type of exchanges that we know benefit both parties involved. A forced exchange is unknown if it is preferred by the consumer and producer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capitalism provides people with more freedom and autonomy to act socially and economically.\n","id":"04513669-9852-49aa-90e2-926a0f9ceeea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that all weight gain and weight loss is connected to CICO, calories in, calories out. I read a lot of things where people say Oh, I only eat like 500 calories a day, but I still gain weight I absolutely don't believe it. I think if people who believe that are put under a really strict regimen where someone watches every single thing they eat for one year example and they are made to follow a 1200 cal day diet, they will lose weight. I don't think people mean to be deceptive, I just think they are unaware or in denial of how much they actually eat. I have yet to hear about a single proven medical illness that causes people to gain heaps of weight when continually eating a deficit, though I am open to hearing about it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that CICO is how weightloss works. !\n","id":"beb22779-5ef6-49f4-adaa-cf4fa2092ff7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>The scale of mass shootings has been increasing at an alarming rate Some form of sensible legislative action must be done.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stricter gun control legislation would decrease the number of gun-related deaths.\n","id":"3d78fc70-28de-4527-99de-7cc843c2f352"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay so, some context. I'm shakey on this view and therefore turned here to see arguments for the other side. A while back I was convinced by this comment that a racist system had been set up and was still in effect despite no overt attempts at systemical racism. When it comes to sexism I am of the opinion that things like the gender wage gap is due to societal problems in the differences in genders, not in a system set up to exploit women or make them have less agency in life. I'm sorry ahead of time if this is not the correct place to post this, and I would love if someone knowledgeable on the subject could try to explain the point of view that sexism is institutional. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sexism, specifically misogyny, is cultural and not institutional.\n","id":"226db075-669c-441f-b935-d840328d82d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>The imposition of a hard border in Northern Ireland would undermine the Good Friday Agreement an essential aspect of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Neither May nor the EU were in a position to promise the hard border that was the inevitable result of the demands of Brexiteers. p.5<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU was unlikely to ever allow a hard border in Northern Ireland, regardless of any attempts at negotiations by British government, given the significance of the border\n","id":"63585ac7-a53b-4bde-a0a0-1edd5d455e20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US stop trying to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear program?<|ARGUMENT|>Yes, denial is not a healthy way to address nuclear weapons which we know they have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refusing to accept North Korea's nuclear status and condemning it is ineffective and achieves nothing.\n","id":"d365b5fc-3a5e-46f8-b626-fa9576d39308"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should U.S. Presidents Have the Power to Issue Pardons?<|ARGUMENT|>The POTUS can have his underlings carry out illegal actions, and then pardon them. There currently exists the possibility of Trump pardoning members of his campaign for colluding with Russia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pardons are at a serious risk of corruption, which makes people lose faith in the government.\n","id":"831b06bc-1b44-4662-801e-8fd87c1a0e12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is there a place for a uniform in today's education system?<|ARGUMENT|>Uniforms eliminate the learning potential behind allowing children to make their own decisions on what to wear, how to respond to what other people wear, how to develop personal taste and identity, etc. Optimal situation would be to provide basic standards of dress and allowing students the freedom to make decisions within those parameters, else all they are learning is to follow the crowd.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Uniforms are a needless infringement on individual liberty and fundamental rights.\n","id":"09034550-5706-4a6e-a3ac-010acbc3c670"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Is anybody saying that they don't matter. Do they believe others don't believe black lives matter, and we expose black lives, why don't just say lives matter . I think there are issues with race and people with black skin should be aware that they're exposed because of that, but instead of focusing on color of their skin, they should go beyond that and just objectively search on the root cause of that and how can it be fixed, politically, economically etc. If you change politics and economy, everything changes and color doesn't matter because for a nation to be strong, everyone has to participate, and this is especially important in todays time and we shouldn't look superficial things, like color, race, appearence. We should seek to find what someone is like deeper, as a human being, a personality and try to give them best conditions so anyone can realize their full potential. Of course superficial things matter and you can't forget history easily, what I don't understand is why can't we understand those things in that context and focus instead on more deeply. Is race apart of who you are as a human and a personality? Does it matter?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black lives don't matter\n","id":"f53da038-85de-4d29-a76f-c4c286e5a6d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I always see the same posters in schools and universities. Work hard, do well Etc. Unfortunately for some people, no matter how hard they work, how much effort they put in or how many books they read, their raw intelligence just won't increase. Their IQs will remain in around about the same place, and their ability to tackle new and novel problems will not improve. Sure, eventually they may pass that end of year test, but it's not going to be easy for them. Why is it, then, that our society likes to act as if the only reason somebody is not too bright is that they haven't put in the effort? Does it not occur to them that perhaps this person, by virtue of their unique genetic makeup, lacks the ability to succeed in areas requiring a great deal of intelligence? Why should we force children, who will never be good at math, to learn things they'll never use? Wouldn't it be better to teach them hands in skills more suited to their intelligence level? As much as you may try, no amount of special tutoring will change someone's genetic code. Why set them up to fail? Why highlight their lack of intelligence and put them down?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some people just can't be very intelligent, and that's okay.\n","id":"b5292e98-2807-4096-96d7-7f691798736f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if there were laws on what content to censor, there will always be grey areas, where the censors need to make judgement calls. Internet companies are not democratically empowered to make these judgement calls.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Facebook then becomes the arbiter of what is to be considered \"dangerous information\", which is far more dangerous than any information could be.\n","id":"01bf75dd-d544-4329-9c29-f2502bdf3019"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide?<|ARGUMENT|>Turkish workers who have lived in other European countries would be more comfortable in their communication with other Europeans and likely have greater cultural awareness when dealing with European clients.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Over time, some of these workers may return to Turkey with new skills that can benefit the Turkish economy.\n","id":"5e10c05a-3334-4d28-aa61-8a151b016081"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>After the air defenses have been taken out by HARM like missiles the drones would surely be used against ground targets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There would be a role for drones from the beginning in a war against Syria.\n","id":"46103040-a58b-46c5-a1dc-de66d1c5cbe5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The United States has a very unique geographical location with allies on either side of North America. Without going into major details, I'll just speak generally and get more specific later when asked confronted about them. The United States is allied both with Canada and Mexico. Neither of which want to start a war with us. We all benefit from each other and the likelihood of Canada ever starting a war with the US is near zero. Foreign relations with Canada have always been pretty good. Mexico is slightly different, we've had a rocky relationship. However, Mexico wouldn't dare even think about waging war with the US. They know they'd have to deal with not just the United States, but her allies in the north Canada and allies abroad U.K., Australia, etc. . It would result in a devastating loss. I'm just quickly covering Mexico and Canada in order to get into the meat of this. Let's assume that China decided it wanted to invade the United States. How would it do it? Land? Somehow crossing through Alaska, Canada, and then into the US? That presents a problem, they'd need permission to go through Canada. With the goal of invading the US, isn't something Canada would allow. Sea? We have fleets on both the pacific and Atlantic side. Even if it were a secret invasion, we have subs, carriers, and flight groups who constantly patrol our coasts, they don't have the tech or the fleet to match ours. We'd see them coming thousands of miles away. Air? The United States trumps in air superiority, this sort of ties in with our constant patrols, there's always someone in the air watching our coast, and always someone in the fleet watching the air. And vice versa. I'm not good at presenting the details of my point without any questions. However, the United States simply can't be invaded. It's in the perfect geographical location, with all the right allies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is logistically, geographically and politically impossible to invade the United States\n","id":"5ffc333d-be0a-4831-ae9a-d5ecbe842221"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nothing crazy, not the ass kicking of a lifetime. Hell I'm not even talking closed fist. I'm imagining that scene from the new Power Rangers movie where Jason confronts Billy's bully. He slaps him, weird isn't it? and lays down the new laws of the land. Similarly, in Master of Disguise with Dana Carvey, his family martial arts involves slapping. I'm not trying to cause resentment by using physical force by just beating an apology out of someone. Its my opinion that the breif physical contact is worth a thousand words and can be there catalyst for dramatic change. The following statement is apples to oranges and I'm not trying to apply it directly to this conversation. Veterans PTSD is being treated with MDMA and single sessions combined with guided therapy can cause drastic positive changes in many lives. Some being cured after one session. 'Physical violence is the lowest form of conversation' or something like that is a famous quote by someone, right? However I think this is vastly different than violence that is coming from pure rage and anger. I don't think a slap across the face is violence. edit Grammar Clarifications<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some people need to get slapped for them to learn their lesson.\n","id":"10f96d0a-1756-4ecc-8c64-0eaf32d81317"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it unethical to use ad-blockers?<|ARGUMENT|>A Reuters study found that one in three people in the US and the UK avoid sites where ads interfere with the content.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consumer surveys have shown that various types of advertisements have high disapproval ratings.\n","id":"76e8b141-f9a7-4249-9e1d-37a680f1e868"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Police Be Represented In Pride Parades?<|ARGUMENT|>This has historically been the case in the US since long before the the Stonewall riots Police targeted gay bars, and laws in some areas required some degree of conformity to gender roles in regards to dress.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Police regularly targets members of the LGBTQ community, particularly queers of color.\n","id":"338d129a-d2ed-4d3c-93ea-6b6a1bd4d071"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Positive Discrimination\/Affirmative Action<|ARGUMENT|>By getting minority candidates into top jobs now, they will able to manipulate the system \u2018from the inside\u2019 to make it fairer for all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By getting minority candidates into top jobs now, they will able to manipulate the system \u2018from the ...\n","id":"a09f0ee9-93ab-4bdd-82dd-8dc37b606adb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Banning Muslim hijab<|ARGUMENT|>Labour's Ruairi Quinn said immigrants who come to Ireland need to conform to the culture of this country. - \"If people want to come into a western society that is Christian and secular, they need to conform to the rules and regulations of that country. Nobody is formally asking them to come here. In the interests of integration and assimilation, they should embrace our culture.\"2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Muslims in the West need to embrace culture\/head-scarf-ban\n","id":"97b68d56-bc9b-4e04-9a81-1fa2053985b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For example, I read a comment here a while back that took as a base assumption that fish can't feel pain. To me this is such a silly question. They behave as if they feel pain. Their brain structures contain the areas we associate with pain. What possible scientific reason do we have to doubt that they feel pain? If anything, I would think based on what we know of neuroscience, we should think that they feel it more intensely, as it takes up a larger proportion of their brains. But that comment seemed to be popular, and my response was mostly ignored. This is a common pattern. Someone also thought it was inappropriately anthopomorphosizing a rabbit to say that they were experiencing contentment. In a recent thread on the Vancouver aquarium, people are in awe at how intelligent dolphins seem to be. When most of their intelligent behavior could also just be viewed as a sign of cooperation. Or counterfactually animals that seem stupid could just be viewed as being uncooperative. This would mean that in order to understand them, we should gain their trust and attempt to cooperate, rather than just capture them and take them apart. To me it seems that the main arguments against animal intelligence are They don't have language or cities or art Their brains are different Of course we're smarter Animals live in different environments where the benefits of cooperation or communication are less than the costs, so they focus their conscious efforts on other things. If an animal lives in a situation where it does not benefit from cooperation, what good does language do it? We assume that we have language because we are more intelligent, but to me it seems that animals develop language to the extent that they cooperate. So bees dance and crows have names for each other, and monkeys have calls. We know from game theory that 2 agents can forgo a potential shared benefit if they gain more in the short term by not cooperating. But they all have the capacity for at least some cooperation. Of course animals that have been cooperating for thousands of years will have more of a tendency to do that with humans, and animals that have fought with everything for thousands of years will be very wary for a long time. But they all have some capacity to cooperate and communicate on some level. So they don't have cities and art because they never have had a good reason to work together long enough to develop that sort of capacity. However I would hypothesize that if you could create a game theoretical situation where cooperation was incentivized between rats, soon they would develop their communication skills and if it went on long enough they would develop rat art and rat culture. We can see from the birds of paradise that when resources are not super scarce animals tend to develop hyper specific flourishes. To me that represents and increase in the complexity of communication, rather than purely an accident of peak shift like some biologists think. As for the brain differences Some of the most intelligent animals have completely different brain structures. Birds lack the most important parts of the human brain the part we most closely study in association with our own intelligence. And yet, we see clearly intelligent behavior in crows, parrots, etc. Octopuses and cuttlefish have even more divergent brain structures, and yet show intelligent behavior. Even bees, which barely have brains, can learn to use tools and teach each other. So we have no reason to assume brain structure is the limiting factor in intelligence. But even if we did, all mammals have the same brain parts we do. They are different sizes, but all the main parts are pretty much there. So at least we should assume all mammals have the capacity to occupy any mental state that we do. We have no real definition or understanding of consciousness. All we have is assessments of neural activity in various brain areas, but we still have yet to really understand how that translates to goal oriented behavior. We see that animals engage in goal directed behavior. To me it seems like people are running through all sorts of mental gymnastics to discount animals' levels of consciousness. Obviously 3 is not a valid logical argument. Maybe it's true, but we should define how it's true. That's what I mean when I say the burden of proof should be on those saying animals are less intelligent than humans. When we're trying to understand stars, we assume they're all the same and then figure out how they're different. Whereas we assume black holes and nebulas are totally different, even though physically there's a continuous boundary among them. If we want to understand consciousness, we should assume we're all the same and define how we're different, because we've been doing the other thing forever and it's run its course on helping us understand intelligence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should assume animals are as mentally complex as humans and identify the ways they are deficient instead of assuming they are braindead and being amazed every time they do something intelligent.\n","id":"6605cc6e-b567-40cb-81aa-b4c843b9715d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should human procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>As far as we are aware humans are the only beings who can create knowledge. Knowledge can solve most, if not all, of the problems that lead to the unnecessary suffering of conscious creatures. Therefore, if we choose extinction then we give up the chance of a creating a future world free of unnecessary suffering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is value in human life. If no human would procreate, this would be lost.\n","id":"d42b2a31-0d9c-4eb8-b27f-5bfcbb99b3bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The United States should abolish the capital gains tax<|ARGUMENT|>Carried interest refers to a longstanding Wall Street tax break that let many private equity and hedge fund financiers pay the lower capital gains tax rate on much of their income, instead of the higher income tax rate paid by wage-earners.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abolishing capital tax gains will make it possible to close the carried interest tax loophole.\n","id":"83a90312-22f6-4fe3-89ef-59ec30518fb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Kansas is imploding and it's no surprise. Cutting tax rates on the wealthy, a.k.a. supply side or trickle down theory, is a not just Voodoo economics , but a dangerous game that threatens our future. Most employers aren't comfortable investing in places with terrible roads, an uneducated and unhealthy workforce, and a dismal quality of life. Yet, this is exactly what is happening now in Kansas. Lawmakers thought it would attract investment and create jobs more than enough to offset the tax losses. What happened instead is the opposite. Just like the rest of us, when things start heading south, employers start looking for greener pastures. It's not enough to say that trickle down economics is a failed theory. It's a death spiral.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nothing in life is free. We have to pay our fair share of taxes, just like everything else we buy. And the rich can afford to pay more, just like everything else that they buy.\n","id":"af53a31a-baaf-436a-b58c-e6b5f6576408"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello, I would like to make the case that ethnic diversity leads to all the consequences of the title. My main source is Putnam's E Pluribus Unum. to quote In the theoretical toolkit of social science we find two diametrically opposed perspectives on the effects of diversity on social connections. The first, usually labelled the \u2018contact hypothesis\u2019, argues that diversity fosters interethnic tolerance and social solidarity. As we have more contact with people who are unlike us, we overcome our initial hesitation and ignorance and come to trust them more Evidence of this sort suggested to social psychologists, beginning with Gordon Allport in the 1950s, the optimistic hypothesis that if we have more contact with people of other ethnic and racial backgrounds or at least more contact in the right circumstances , we will all begin to trust one another more. More formally, according to this theory, diversity reduces ethnocentric attitudes and fosters out group trust and solidarity. If black and white children attend the same schools, for example, race relations will improve. This logic was an important part of the legal case that led the United States Supreme Court to require racial desegregation in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. For progressives, the contact theory is alluring, but I think it is fair to say that most though not all empirical studies have tended instead to support the so called \u2018conflict theory\u2019, which suggests that, for various reasons \u2013 but above all, contention over limited resources \u2013 diversity fosters out group distrust and in group solidarity. On this theory, the more we are brought into physical proximity with people of another race or ethnic background, the more we stick to \u2018our own\u2019 and the less we trust the \u2018other\u2019 Blumer 1958 Blalock 1967 Giles Evans 1986 Quillian 1995, 1996 Brewer Brown 1998 Taylor 1998 Bobo 1999 Bobo Tuan 2006 The evidence that diversity and solidarity are negatively correlated controlling for many potentially confounding variables comes from many different settings Across workgroups in the United States, as well as in Europe, internal heterogeneity in terms of age, professional background, ethnicity, tenure and other factors is generally associated with lower group cohesion, lower satisfaction and higher turnover Jackson et al. 1991 Cohen Bailey 1997 Keller 2001 Webber Donahue 2001 . Across countries, greater ethnic heterogeneity seems to be associated with lower social trust Newton Delhey 2005 Anderson Paskeviciute 2006 but see also Hooghe et al. 2006 . Across local areas in the United States, Australia, Sweden, Canada and Britain, greater ethnic diversity is associated with lower social trust and, at least in some cases, lower investment in public goods Poterba 1997 Alesina et al. 1999 Alesina La Ferrara 2000, 2002 Costa Kahn 2003b Vigdor 2004 Glaeser Alesina 2004 Leigh 2006 Jordahl Gustavsson 2006 Soroka et al. 2007 Pennant 2005 but see also Letki forthcoming . Among Peruvian micro credit cooperatives, ethnic heterogeneity is associated with higher default rates across Kenyan school districts ethnolinguistic diversity is associated with less voluntary fundraising and in Himalayan Pakistan, clan, religious, and political diversity are linked with failure of collective infrastructure maintenance Karlan 2002 Miguel Gugerty 2005 Khwaja 2006 . Across American census tracts, greater ethnic heterogeneity is associated with lower rates of car pooling, a social practice that embodies trust and reciprocity Charles Kline 2002 . Within experimental game settings such as prisoners dilemma or ultimatum games, players who are more different from one another regardless of whether or not they actually know one another are more likely to defect or \u2018cheat\u2019 . Such results have been reported in many countries, from Uganda to the United States Glaeser et al. 2000 Fershtman Gneezy 2001 Eckel Grossman 2001 Willinger et al. 2003 Bouckaert Dhaene 2004 Johansson Stenman et al. 2005 Gil White 2004 Habyarimana et al. 2006 . Within the Union northern Army in the American Civil War, the casualty rate was very high and the risks of punishment for desertion were very low, so the only powerful force inhibiting the rational response of desertion was loyalty to one\u2019s fellow soldiers, virtually all of whom were other white males. Across companies in the Union Army, the greater the internal heterogeneity in terms of age, hometown, occupation, etc. , the higher the desertion rate Costa Kahn 2003a . In areas of greater diversity, our respondents demonstrate Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media. Lower political efficacy \u2013 that is, confidence in their own influence. Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups. Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage . Less likelihood of working on a community project. Lower likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering. Fewer close friends and confidants. Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life. More time spent watching television and more agreement that television is my most important form of entertainment\u2019. Other proof Homogeny better democracy<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ethnic diversity leads to lower trust in government, lower community outreach, lower perceived standard of living, less cooperation, and lower frequency of registering to vote.\n","id":"1cc29760-0edf-4faf-ad3d-a2a4b0db67b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>The dieting industry campaigns aggressively to create a dieting mentality which has been linked to eating disorders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The dieting industry lies at the heart of eating disorders.\n","id":"6c95633a-4630-4ee2-8d34-d6d90025572c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel most music since I have been alive 1993 just has not been on par with anything made before. It seems like starting around 1990 there was a sizable dip in originality of music, and songs were churned out of over hyped, over sexualized artists. These songs lack originality in many ways that I have noticed Ear pleasing guitar riffs have morphed into electronic beats Part of this drop in the quality of music comes from this. In today's music, instead of having a writer who understands music theory, one just needs a computer, a program or two, and a singer who appeals to the broadest demographic. There is no talent involved in creating music anymore. To further on the topic of writing Writing quality has diminished What happened to writing a song about something that has happened to you, or made an impact on you or someone important to you? One of my favorite songs, Hey Jude by The Beatles, was written by Paul McCartney to comfort John Lennon's five year old son, Julian Today, music is all about sex, drugs, money, cars, etc. And it's not to say it wasn't in what I like to call The Golden Era dates in title as well, but it sure feels to me those had more substance and meaning. I'm going to take an artist as an example here and use Taylor Swift. I don't know what your opinion is of her, but like most I encounter, it seems to be either you like her or you don't. What can't be argued is the fact that she wrote or co wrote every song she has released. Not to add that she can play an instrument guitar . I'm looking at you, Katy Perry. However, it seems to me the side of not liking Swift is ever growing, even as her songs and writing continue to grow and evolve. Yes, I'm a fan. I don't understand how someone such as her can be chided for her music when many of today's star simply get fed complete songs and only go out and sing assuming they don't lip sync . I would further like to add I do listen to the same type of music I'm complaining about sometimes I'll admit, some songs are pretty catchy. I would take 100 100 times listening to Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd and know someone actually wrote that than listen to Miley Cyrus, though. One last thing that I'll leave right here as a semi important footnote top 500 songs of all time by Rolling Stone ^the ^highest ^from ^1990 ^on ^is ^number ^nine Edit formatting, spelling, grammar, etc<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the height of music was the 1960's-1980's, and most music made since then is terrible.\n","id":"3a64d91c-319e-4c89-8d7d-bfac2ffb9fe2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Allowing participants to smoke can also negatively impact such gatherings as secondhand smoke also has health effects on those who are exposed. The chemicals in the smoke can also worsen symptoms in sensitive people, such as those with asthma and allergies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many things that can negatively impact public gatherings that are allowed and\/or legal. The potential for negative impact is no reason for forbidding something.\n","id":"b4365fb3-f186-49c1-a1e5-d14091b2a1d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Countless people in history, up to the present day have pursued various schools of meditation and or consume potent hallucinogens such as ayahuasca in the hope of making some grand connection. Achieving a realization far in advance of current human knowledge. But if it's sufficiently far in advance of what is known, it won't connect in a recognizable way to what is known presently, so to everybody else it will just sound like random nonsense. This means it will be impossible to persuade anybody of it, which means you cannot use that information to effect change in the world. Sharing such information is more likely to be harmful to you, professionally and socially, than it is to bring about any positive developments. Unknown unknowns are useful only if they are pretty close to the ever expanding frontier of human discovery, such that they were nearly foreseeable anyway and fit recognizably into what has most recently been discovered in the relevant field. Like how when you put together a jigsaw puzzle, you attach pieces to existing pieces and build on what is already there. Generally you don't skip ahead and begin building a second nucleus of pieces in the far corner at the same time or w e. There is historical precedent for any knowledge sufficiently abstracted from the status quo being regarded as lunacy. Look at the treatment Lois Pasteur suffered for sharing his findings concerning sterilization, hygiene and microorganisms as a cause for disease. Even if a revolutionary proposition is supportable through reason, extrapolating from findings already known to be true, people overwhelmingly do not accept conclusions they did not arrive at on their own or which came from an authority they trust. At most you have an interesting idea people may entertain briefly, in the mindset that they are generously indulging humoring a nutty weirdo. This is why I think the promise of grasping for, and somehow attaining a discovery far in advance of current human knowledge is not as desirable as it appears. If successful then you're like a sparrow who suddenly understands what it is to be a human. But the next moment he's a sparrow again. What can the sparrow do differently with that information? How will it affect sparrows on the whole? Not at all. You might also compare it to being a savannah dwelling proto human who has suddenly realized how to build a jet engine, or a computer. What good is that information to him? It won't be useful to anybody for a hundred thousand years. All he could accomplish by talking about it would be to convince everybody else in the tribe that he's insane or possessed. Even technological breakthroughs heralded as brilliant and groundbreaking often fail spectacularly when brought to market prematurely, because the conditions necessary for it to succeed did not yet exist. This is just an analogy about how inapplicable advanced understanding is, I don't mean that enlightenment is specifically future knowledge about technology or something, just any sudden realization of a grander scheme, the nature of reality, etc. which is not already known about For these reasons, there's no sense in desiring enlightenment. You cannot do much of anything with it. I mean I guess you can write about it, as fiction. You could use it as inspiration for art of various kinds. Other than that, what good is it? What does it do for you? If it does not change your existence, you are still a human being living on Earth who must do all the same things to survive as before. You may as well have never had the epiphany.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Enlightenment, if truly possible through meditation or psychedelic substances, would be useless at best and possibly detrimental\n","id":"cb5ac77e-c2a1-43b6-b9b2-ea80ca6f2ab9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>\"God\" is intelligent, yet is not of the human species. This claim contradicts itself. If we consider God, angels and evils as aliens as well, a lot of people will agree aliens exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Texts of the three Abrahamic religions all include interaction with sentient beings that are not human.\n","id":"96b20c63-43c2-4716-8b4f-782cf7d13bee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Islam and refugees from the UN Council of Human Rights. \"The promotion of Islamic teachings on refugees could encourage . acceptance and protection of refugees. \" www.unhcr.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many religious leaders have decided that such moral obligations exist.\n","id":"6a54af1d-367d-4b99-ba83-8d728dcfe4fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Black Panther: Who's Right About Wakanda's Role in the World?<|ARGUMENT|>The Wakandans would have to take on the Hulk at some point, a difficult task.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all of the Avengers would have to work together to take on Wakanda.\n","id":"4763103d-7041-4ab5-9625-79dda59d829e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm speaking mostly from an American perspective. Here, there are essentially 3 major types of adoption domestic infant, foster care, and international. Domestic infant adoption DIA is virtually always selfish. Adoption agencies are funded by adoptive parents, so they have an agenda make women give up babies. These parents pay tens of thousands to buy a baby. They are giving the baby a better life but if instead the tens of thousands went towards helping children have better lives with their birth biological natural first mothers, the grief inherent in adoption wouldn't be needed MOST of the time. I know some women really don't want to parent . I say this as a young women who relinquished a child for adoption and deeply regrets it. I did it for purely financial reasons. If I'd had money, I could and would have parented my daughter, and I don't believe her life would actually be worse than it is now. International Same sort of deal. You spend tens of thousands, when if you spent that money on improving quality of life of orphans Especially given that improving orphans' access to education and such could reduce the percentage of future generations living in orphanages. Foster care This one is at least sometimes non selfish. For those who don't know, children who the state has said can never go back to their parents' homes may be adopted. However, most fost adoptive parents I know as someone who was in 13 different long term foster homes adopt because they want a child, even if the child doesn't want to have all ties to their first family severed. They put the child in an impossible position accepting them as your parents means rejecting your first parents. Why can't they just offer themselves as supportive, loving people without overwriting the child's history? I don't like feeling so cynical, and I want to see other sides of this issue. I know they're out there. ? Edit I've noticed a lot of the discussion seems to be people arguing against the thesis, Adoption is generally bad. Although I think adoption is sometimes bad, and certainly, it's a thesis worth exploring, the thesis I intended to explore was People who adopt do it for self centered non altruistic reasons. This is not necessarily bad. I am generally glad people attend university, even if they do it for self centered reasons. Either topic is fair game, but adoption is ALWAYS bad is NOT my thesis. I hope to gain insight from those who know adoptive parents or can better empathize with them I admit, perspective taking isn't my strong suit , so that I can see some non selfish reasons for adopting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adoption is usually selfish-\n","id":"2aee0d6e-ada3-4682-adca-71d0a83ac22d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that most of the science taught in school is forgotten as soon as people pass the final exam, and rightly so, since it's never used in the subsequent life. Therefore it's better to focus the effort just on teaching the foundations. By foundations I mean e.g. math up to and including powers and simple equations, physics up to Newtonian mechanics and kinematics, biology up to the purpose of different parts of plants and animals and humans , etc. Also, most of the higher science taught is actually just a glimpse and does not form a holistic understanding. E.g. most people can recall facts like you can't move faster than light or viruses cause diseases or seasons are because of Earth's rotation around the Sun or your immune system protects you , but those are meaningless phrases, not connected to the science that produced them. As a result, these scraps of knowledge are easily incorporated by pseudoscientific bullshit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that schools teach too much science.\n","id":"716e3f7c-240c-4e76-b234-6c77b8f47610"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While feminism has had a very positive impact in the past, I don't believe modern feminism can exist in its current form and still maintain its first wave ideals of gender equality, especially with the likes of Jezebel being the mainstream feminism media thought, and with people like this As far as I'm concerned, feminism as a movement has been hijacked by so called Radfems . Until this can be resolved internally, there is no opportunity for discourse against an inherently sexist ideology. Until the contradictions have been hammered out within the feminist sphere, I consider them a hate group along the same lines of white black power organizations as well as patriarchal viewpoints propagating a man right ideal. It is my personal belief that modern feminism has the ultimate goal of preserving so called female privilege whilst also reducing the influence of the male gender on society as whole and also ignoring the serious issues the male gender suffers in society. In short, making the death rates of males in the work place acceptable, ignoring the very high rate of male rape victims, some feminists even applaud said acts. Feminism also holds a very high level of contradiction about its ultimate goal which I believe was equal rights for women. However, mainstream feminism seems very much against placing equal responsibilities on women and men alike, not budging on issues such as male victims of domestic violence, and several other things. Anita Sarkeesian, a prominent voice on feminism and pop culture critic even stated prominent female traits as being weak , submissive and insecure , whereas she referred to men as strong and confident . The utter lack of possibility of discussion with feminism both due to its lack of centralized view Meaning many feminists often cop out of a contentious viewpoint saying That's not true feminism , and due to the intolerant stance mainstream feminism takes towards contrary belief opinion mean that it is impossible to actually take input from the feminism movement as a whole, nor it is impossible to actually have healthy debate and compromise. As such, due to the points mentioned, I believe the modern feminism movement does not have a place in society and is also counter productive to any gender equality movement, as well as being a borderline hate group as a whole. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there is no place in society for Modern Feminism,\n","id":"7f350a7b-5eb0-4b20-b515-7796d8540d27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should China cease attempts to infringe on the 'one country, two systems' policy in Hong Kong?<|ARGUMENT|>China has entered into aggressive confrontation with Japan over the control of Diaoyu\/Senkaku Islands, by drifting into and out of Japanese territorial waters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China has made aggressive moves to exert its control over the Diaoyu\/Senkaku Islands, over which it claims sovereignty.\n","id":"393c5d7a-e9a7-442d-9401-cceafb3c0146"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit Now this thread is full of people calling me an asshole for my beliefs, saying I must have been a bully, I don't know what it's like to be bullied, I've obviously never been depressed or suicidal, etc. Just want to remind everyone that YOU DONT KNOW ME OR MY LIFE BASED ON ONE BELIEF I PROVIDE. I'm only 20. Graduated HS very recently. I DO know what it's like there. I have been depressed, suicidal, bullied, called names, hit, kicked. I've been hospitalized for my mental state more than once. I'm working through an eating disorder. I'm not some 55 year old asshole with the opinion that fighting makes you tougher and we should all name our sons Sue. Please stop attacking me and my character for this one belief I hold. You're all painting some wild picture of me in your head. I came here to have an adult discussion, but it's clear none of you have grown up. Thread over. I believe the zero tolerance rules implemented by school aren't realistic lessons to teach children and young adults. Telling on someone isn't an effective problem conflict solving strategy for the real world. Honestly, your boss isn't going to care that so and so in the cubicle over said your boots were ugly or that your new haircut looked like it was done by a blind barber. If children never learn how to deal with conflict effectively on their own, they never will as adults either. I also think this zero tolerance anti bullying stuff is the reason for people being all up in arms about things like fat shaming. Telling a fat person that they need to lose weight to be healthy ISN'T BULLYING, IT'S BEING REALISTIC. Due to this anti bullying culture we live in now, I think we've bred a generation of soft, thin skinned, conflict escalating people who can't take any sort of criticism, and it's effecting society at large in a negative way. Please, . Edit I feel like u mealdeal 's comment, although removed by the mods for not challenging the presented view put my view in better words than I did, so I will paste it here for further clarification gt gt I think that if a kid is doing something that, if they were an adult, they could get arrested for like beating on another kid then yes, that should be stopped by a teacher. But, as far as verbal disagreements that don't fall into the categories of things that are, again, as adults, unacceptable like racism, sexism, etc. then the kids need to learn to sort it out for themselves. They need to learn how to deal with not so nice comments, because they're going to hear a lot of them in life, whether they like it or not. I totally agree that it feeds into the trend of people being sensitive about things like fat shaming . The fact of the matter is that people are going to make rude comments to you at some point in life, and you really have no control over what others do or say. But what you can control is how you react to it, and whether or not you let it affect you. By intervening when kids tattle over unimportant things, I think teachers are putting the kids at a disadvantage by not letting them learn how to deal with things on their own. u mealdeal Mods, if I've made a mistake in pasting a removed comment, please let me know and I'll delete it. I just think this was a much clearer way of saying what I wanted to say. I'm not pro bullying, I'm pro teaching children to stand up for themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe \"zero-tolerance\" for bullying is not a realistic lesson to teach children and is detrimental to society.\n","id":"b819699b-628c-4bb7-a2ab-4aae055d4067"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that the vast majority of philosophy that is coded as postmodern is either nonsense or at least without much value in understanding the world. While Postmodernism is a very broad category, hopefully it will be apparent from context exactly what sorts of work I'm talking about. Some reasons are as follows I do not reject a universal formal logic. From a strictly empirical standpoint it seems to me that laws of logic such as The Law of Non Contradiction, or The Principle of the Excluded Middle hold for all of human experience. Further I think this is evidence that they most likely hold independent of humans at all. I reject radical relativism It seems that much of empirical and mathematical knowledge is capital T True, independent of the culture or individual. I also don't think that it follows from perspectivism that people have different perspectives on what is true that an objective reality does not exist. I think usefulness of ideas are a function of how clearly the ideas are expressed When postmodern thinkers write, they often obfuscate what they are trying to say with unnecessary jargon, analogies, narratives, etc. I think that this contributes to the uselessness of postmodernism because people who may benefit from any understanding contained within the work are unlikely to understand it's meaning. I think many of the epistemological assumptions and methodologies of postmodern work are ineffective Much of the reasoning above applies. Things like phenomenology and psychoanalysis are extremely unlikely to reveal anything that can be reasonable called knowledge or understanding of important philosophical or political subjects because they come to conclusions independent of whether or not they can be said to be true .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Postmodern philosophy should be ignored by people considering philosophical or political questions\n","id":"846ae9bf-442c-452f-b1ae-700a6a7824d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Typically, those animals featured include either very cute or manly animals like the polar bear or the tiger.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since modern technology is available no animal essential to humans has been extinguished\n","id":"0a035277-43b4-49d8-8e85-1429af0bbd3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>One of the most complex parts, the AI that will govern the autonomous machines' decisions, will be developed for civilian purposes and can then be adapted to military purposes, which will be relatively cheap.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Technological progress on all spheres of civilian life will lead to autonomous operation modes within machines.\n","id":"985d9daa-41e1-44ac-b766-c9674c63522c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I want to clarify Alex Jones is a nutcase, and I think that he contributes nothing of value whatsoever to the political discourse in this country. I also want to clarify what I mean by free speech. I'm not arguing that Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. don't have the right to ban whoever they want for whatever reason they want. The First Amendment only refers to what the government can't do. I am saying that platforms should, on both philosophical and practical grounds, allow the free exchange of ideas, no matter how insane, or even offensive, they may be. When social media companies become the gatekeepers of what opinions are too controversial, the question arises will your opinion be deemed too controversial next? I suppose I'm looking for a case to be made for how the banning of controversial figures, opinions, etc. improves the status quo, rather than setting a dangerous precedent and contributing to what I see as an already too polarized discourse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regardless of your opinion of Alex Jones, everyone should be concerned at his recent censorship\n","id":"63912144-7583-4810-89df-be7eded00b35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>Modi-led government is clocking over a year at the wheel. 1. Make in India To facilitate investment, boost research & development R&D, ensure product originality and create skill-based jobs by establishing industrial sector; major national programme was started by Narendra Modi. Modi has reached out to the world with his idea of \u2018Make in India\u2019 and it has generated positive response from foreign companies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modi has launched \"Make in India a policy aimed at attracting more manufacturing and other investments.\n","id":"5886b426-8dd5-4a81-aa31-892730df51b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>The medieval warm period and the little ice age have both been controversial to the AGW theory. These periods of pre industrial extremes in temperature fluctuation seem to go against the theory so have been discounted in the past. Now the evidence is clear they happened so they are included in the theory, yet the problem remains. The extremes in temperature variation in relatively recent history demonstrates that rapid change of climate can occur without massive Co2 emissions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Little Ice Age - part of this supposed 'ideal climate' led to mass starvation, disease and poverty plus huge amounts of human casualties and deaths throughout Europe.\n","id":"ba3913e1-6f32-4d68-b8d2-0e8cf7a06fe2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>There are no problems arising out of minority-majority social groups if only AKMs are used.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social relations among humans create problems that do not occur if there are AKMs.\n","id":"af793ba6-ac36-4590-8a28-e115fa09e25e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Banning cell phones in cars<|ARGUMENT|>\"Editorial: Cellphone ban long overdue\". The Dominion Post. June 12th, 2008 - In Britain, a study a few years ago, using a driving simulator, found that motorists using hand-held phones took 30 per cent longer to react to hazards than motorists driving under the influence of alcohol and 50 per cent longer than drivers not under the influence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using a cell phone in a car is like drunk driving\n","id":"6fdeb439-384a-47c5-a9dd-efb71811a7a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>Breast cancer incidence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is among the lowest in the world, although incidence rates have doubled since the 1960s -US Library of Medicine report from 1994<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The radioactive impact of the atomic attack was relatively small.\n","id":"8f1f6f2c-a5d4-430e-b022-b4d8d0694cf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump barred the U.S. media from witnessing a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, but allowed Russia's state-run media to cover the meeting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Trump administration has repeatedly presented misinformation and obscured details about Trump's meetings with Russian officials.\n","id":"f485c27c-a371-4cce-9e06-f8e5fcf138d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>expand the United Nations Security Council<|ARGUMENT|>The current Security Council doesn\u2019t reflect the economic reality of the 21st century. France and Great Britain have clearly lost their position among the most powerful nations and their role was long ago taken over by Germany and Japan. They are the 3rd and 4thworld economies. Furthermore these two countries are the second and third largest contributors to the UN budget and deserve a permanent seat in the Council. Moreover, as permanent members pay an extra share for their seat, Japan and Germany\u2019s contributions would bring considerable amounts to the UN budget \u2013 \u201cThe three largest contributors to the United Nations, the US 22.000% of the UN budget, Japan 12.530% and Germany 8.018% thus together finance some 43% of the entire UN budget.\u201d 1 Meanwhile Brazil and India have emerged as major economies and stable democracies over the past decade, and deserve recognition for their global importance. 1 Contributions to the United Nations budget improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The current Security Council doesn't reflect the economic reality of the 21st century.\n","id":"5899a579-2b35-4b52-8e23-565c69c42cb1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On a rational level I am aware that humanity hasn't died out and what I believe obviously can't be true. However the last months I can't push the impression aside that the male female attraction mechanism is a very one sided one. Just to list some points not even starting with testosterone increasing libido etc. While I personally do get compliments quite often for a beard or muscles or a button down shirt it's only by other straight men and some women older than 40. Same aged women never do this. The gender ratio is roughly 50 50. If we assume that each half has as many straight people as the other, there should be one single man for each single woman. Yet everywhere, IRL and especially online, I nearly only hear the men crying about this 25 and still no girlfriend. What do? . As if women wouldn't Reddit's men and women subs From my point of view the man here discuss extremely much about the female body, while the women seem to be sick and tired of getting asked if they like body hair, beards and so on. Again it seems as if women don't care at all and are mostly uninterested in even talking about the topic. The female passivity in dating even today mostly men have to do the approaching makes me believe that they don't actually desire a sexual partner. They don't mind if they have one, but if not they don't start getting desperate like the modern man does see points above . Female sexuality is often described as something more emotional. A tall man with muscles etc. isn't automatically sexual desirable. In the male world physical attraction is separated from mental attraction. A hot girl who's nasty, dumb and evil is still hot and at least for a ONS desirable. As far as I understood it it doesn't seem to work this way vice versa. If that's true and it's a purely emotional thing it would mean every women is technically bisexual and could fall in love with another woman if she offers the desired mental traits. there are nearly no male strippers prostitutes I've come to the conclusion that there is no female interest in the male body at all. Women living in relationships with men seem to do this mostly to have someone to have an emotional connection with and maybe because of the subliminal instinctive knowledge that you need a male to reproduce at least until science can replace sperm on an industrial level .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that straight women are sexually attracted to the male body.\n","id":"11b9dcf5-d234-4957-95f6-690968804b1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump has never released his tax returns, using phony excuses as justification. This suggests that he may have ties to Russian business that he doesn't want the public to see.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump has close ties with Russian oligarchs who are close to the Kremlin.\n","id":"473d0ce0-a8b0-4d69-818c-4e891321fce8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I'm not saying that the art I, or anyone else happens to enjoy is the best art. For example, I enjoy Arcade Fire much more than The Beatles, but I believe that objectively, The Beatles are a better band. Taste in art is clearly subjective, I don't think anyone can argue against that. I believe that the quality of art should be judged based on how much it takes the traditions of the past and both skillfully applies them and innovates to create original material. For example, Leonardo Da Vinci is undeniably a great artist, but these days I think a majority of art students would be able to paint a reproduction of the Mona Lisa indistinguishable to the untrained eye. The objective quality of Da Vinci's art lies in the fact that he essentially created and perfected many techniques still used today. In a more modern example, although many believe abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock are talentless and bad art, I disagree. Although personally I strongly prefer Rothko to Pollock, I believe that both are equally talented artists, and that despite the debatable aesthetic merit of their paintings their contributions to art cannot be denied. For the same reason, I believe that it is accurate to state that Taylor Swift is inferior to The Beatles again, completely independent of my own tastes I don't particularly like either . Taylor Swift's songs are undeniably catchy, as much so as those of the Beatles, but what Taylor Swift is doing now is basically copying existing techniques. The Beatles, however, essentially invented much of modern pop music if you disagree about this, I'll argue in the comments, but I don't think its particularly relevant to the core of my argument . Again, this has nothing to do with how good art is. I enjoy the poetry of TS Elliot, and I believe he is a great poet. I equally enjoy the poetry of Sarah Williams, and I do not believe she is a great poet. My favorite painter is Lawrence Alma Tedema, but I also believe that objectively his paintings are mediocre. I hope it's clear what I'm saying here. I suppose that when I say great art I am actually referring to significant art. Significance is not the same as fame, or even quality as it is usually understood, but I do believe that it is an objective measure of greatness that can be applied to art.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the quality of art can be judged objectively, independent of taste.\n","id":"76bfe056-6e79-4cfe-9307-f23b6165d736"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pretty much the title. Public opinion can be extremely useful when it comes to areas where there is not an easily identifiable right solution. On most social issues like abortion and gay marriage, you can't break anything down to numbers, it comes down to ethics. As such the government, being representative of the people, should pass laws reflecting public opinion on these matters. Republicans ignore majority support for these issues. Conversely, mob mentality can also lead to widespread misinformation, as can an overly biased media. 58 of Americans think that gun violence has gone up in the last 20 years, when it's gone down 40 . Look at GMOs and vaccines, large portions of the public are blatantly wrong about simple things very often. In essence, public opinion should matter, especially in instances where things can't be handled objectively, but shouldn't be held above logic and fact. Both parties place a wrong amount of emphasis on public opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The left cares too much about public opinion polls, and the right cares too little.\n","id":"3db0f529-c0fd-472c-828a-39dfb91bf832"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a US citizen, i'm understating when i say that i find it hard to ignore the nihilistic influence of cash flow over outcomes in society. i get that, theoretically, money grants power to fulfill the wishes of its holder without discrimination. my sense is that, too often, the holder is someone whose worldview revolves almost exclusively around themselves, be it a feature inherent to human nature or otherwise. hoping to better understand the rationale of supporters for measures like Citizens United, does there exist a cogent argument attn economists that scaling back discretion over uses of money would somehow benefit society as a whole? Or are all of these people really acting out of interest in shaping a system that is more easily manipulated for their own benefit? the way i see it, an inherent conflict of interest arises when a party i.e. a civil servant CS , which performs a service e.g. law making law enforcement healthcare journalism accounting that is necessary for maintaining a stable, free and open society, accepts a favor from a party i.e. a greedy business GB which is, above all else, concerned with profitability. hypothetically, the GB values the needs of society until they are no longer profitable, at which point those needs become expendible. for this reason a CS whose actions are influenced by the concerns of a GB may be pressured to commit acts that are counterconducive to the needs of society. society collectively addresses this conflict when comprehensive laws are both passed and enforced which prohibit CSs from accepting favors from GBs. notwithstanding, law makers would need to first pass laws prohibiting both themselves and law enforcement from accepting such favors, before laws could be passed to prohibit others from the same. hence, is there any good reason why a law maker, who does not support or renegs support of a law to prohibit theirself from accepting such favors, should be elected reelected? if not, why the fuck do people keep doing it then??<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Citizens United is evil\n","id":"3d5e6223-dae3-400f-9d16-dd77b3bb943b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Artificial Intelligence AI: Should an artificial general intelligence be created?<|ARGUMENT|>Human beings' right to reproduce is a hot topic among some groups of people who used to be or still are sterilized. Society may have the means to restrict the reproduction of many beings human or not but it doesn't necessarily have the justification.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Controlling AGI's reproduction it copying itself, mutating or taking different forms would be ethically hard to justify and difficult to accomplish which would create a new set of possible risks.\n","id":"dfb236a6-97c0-4c3d-8e94-a20d60363c29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear how black people cant be racist because they're not in a position of power, but the definition of racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior. It doesn't state anything about power. It says there is prejudice directed against another race. So how is it that a black person cant be racist? If they see a white person and automatically assume something about them due to their color, that fits the definition of racism. Also yes I 100 understand that white people are in a position to be MORE racist than people of color, but that doesn't mean that a person of color cannot be racist in any sense. Edit I'm done reading comments and done replying. I've already discussed this to its max extent and won't be responding to any other comments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black people can be racist\n","id":"bf471561-fd7b-4ec7-b189-a4c04514eb32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently there have been allegations of mod censorship in the major default subs for example, any post with the word Tesla was apparently banned from r technology. Regardless of whether you believe the conspiracy theories or not e.g. these mods are being paid off somehow , you have to admit that they wield a lot of power. Roughly 2 million people visit reddit each day, and a small handful of unaccountable mods gets to determine what we see and do not see on our front page. With the mainstream media all owned by 7 corporations, reddit is an important alternative source of free and democratic information in my opinion . Its supposed to be a place that is free from censorship. But if mods can delete whole threads, with thousands of upvotes and comments, without any transparency as to their reasons and justification for doing so how do we know that this is not an abuse of their power and responsibility? Currently, its as if subreddits are owned by the mods. If you don't like it, unsubscribe and start your own subreddit. This philosophy is fine for smaller subreddits, where it is realistic to create an alternative sub and attract subscribers. But is it realistic at all to say to someone, you don't like how things are run at r technology? Fine, unsubscribe and start your own r technology. Let's get real. The default subs are here to stay, and they are part of the reddit experience. If reddit were a town, then the default subs would be the town square. The place that is shared and owned by all, not monopolized by a small group. I believe we should elect mods for major subs lets say over 1 million subscribers democratically. The specifics of how that would work are up for debate. But I think it's something the reddit admins would have to help make happen. One vote per user account and to prevent spamming, lets say you have to a be an active user for a certain amount of time before you can vote. One counterargument I've heard is that moderating is a thankless job it is tedious and you get nothing out of it except users complaining. The only reason they do it is because they care about the sub and want to ensure a quality experience. If you democratically elect people, it will be a popularity contest, but once they get in office they will find out what a boring job it is and they will be shitty at it. Alright fair enough, but couldn't we say the same for the jobs of being President or Congressman? Monarchy is certainly easier, but we have determine that there are good reasons to avoid it. In this case, I believe that ensuring reddit is transparent and free of corruption abuse is a pretty good reason. If mods prove to be inept, then potential new mods will have to prove to the community that they will not be inept like the previous ones. I think this is something we should debate. I'm interested in hearing opposing perspectives. So, please try to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the moderators of major subs should be elected democratically.\n","id":"c27d0c08-85fe-465f-a98a-1e98bd65fa3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I regret that I don't have a specific example to link which illustrates what I'm talking about, but to summarize, I think it's a frequent occurrence on this website that a submission makes the frontpage typically in r pics or r funny but potentially anywhere , ostensibly for the purpose of entertaining viewers and making them laugh. These submissions will also happen to have some product in them that is often integral to the joke, be it Pringles or Nike or some burger chain or what have you. When this happens, you inevitably get people who crawl out of the woodwork and snarkily post a comment linking r hailcorporate and nothing else, the implication being that the submission is clearly a nefarious ruse on the part of some dastardly corporate marketing team somewhere in a ten thousand foot tall tower with lightning crackling around it, all to make you think you're experiencing amusement when you're really just being shamelessly SOLD SOMETHING THE HORROR I happen to find this view rather silly, and if I'm being honest more than a little naive and angsty anti establishment college freshmen who's taken one philosophy class and has decided he can now see through all the 'convenient fictions' that govern our world My question is this if a piece of entertainment or a creative idea was conceived with an ulterior motive in mind say, to create brand awareness of a product or advertise an establishment why should that have any bearing on the actual entertaining power of the idea itself? Why should I care that the person who made me laugh did it in the employ of a company that wants me to buy their wares, rather than for the love making something creative or entertainment alone? Is my enjoyment of the idea in those two scenarios supposed to be different? Because it never has been, and the very suggestion seems bizarre and irrational to me. To put it another way I am far, far more offended by bad but authentic content than I am by remarkably well made content that others would call disingenuous because it was created by advertisers. People talk about spamming, and it clearly seems like a big deal to a lot of the users and admins on this and many other sites, but to me, it seems like it's always painted with a broad brush as if to say, Anyone who tries to push any product on this site is a horrible greedy monster and their content should be banned. And I don't agree. To me, the only thing that's bad about spamming is that because it's usually done poorly and by hacks, it often produces a contribution that has no value as entertainment or art. But that's no different from the broader reality that most things created by most people are awful , because most people are not creative, talented, or funny. And that applies to most submissions on Reddit's frontpage not to single the site out, as this is the case in most media . If an ad can be so well done so creatively rich and engaging as to be indistinguishable from genuine artistic contribution, except for the fact that it exists to promote something, does the fact that it's spamming really matter at that point? I would not trade a truly funny ad made to sell Pringles for a billion terrible advice animals, or awful candid pictures taken of strangers in embarrassing, undignified positions, or worst of all, cloying, derivative fan drawings of beloved video game characters like Link or Megaman that serve to venerate what I view as a childish cult of authenticity . Yet those are considered valid and worthwhile, or at the very least, tolerable, while an ad that might make millions of people smile and laugh is vilified. I would enjoy discussing it with anyone who can offer me an interesting perspective on why advertising should be considered intrinsically bad or worthy of scorn, rather than simply evaluated for quality on a case by case basis like we would do with any other content. TL DR The title pretty much. I don't think entertaining advertising should be viewed any differently from any other content.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that advertising which manages to genuinely entertain or amuse me is functionally equivalent to pure entertainment, and that there is nothing wrong with companies trying to advertise clandestinely on sites like reddit if they can achieve this.\n","id":"884b0a04-19f4-474d-bbf9-2cd35ecddb53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Euro Was a Mistake<|ARGUMENT|>Any unified monetary policy without unified fiscal policy is bound to be unstable. Unifying fiscal policy would result in the creation of one, European state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The eurozone lacks many of the features that typically define an optimal currency area and that create resilient economies.\n","id":"7bda6d51-125b-435e-b9d3-85107550c8cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Female nipple showing would force children and other non-consenting adults to see and be exposed to sexual body parts they should not or do not want to see.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Showing women's nipples in public is detrimental to children, and thus should be restricted.\n","id":"8a4dc502-c301-4f20-ac07-ff1d10095a76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>If Britain wants to trade with the EU, it will still be forced to follow EU trade regulations, but without any input on what those regulations are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Britain will have significantly less influence in Europe if it leaves the EU, and as a result will be a weaker nation in the international community.\n","id":"218a2571-d2b3-4a0f-8152-75da3a5751c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>The military defends against attacks. Without a military, a tyrannical invader might not \"will\" overrun a free society. The military comes from the militia by definition. In the USA, the militia comes from civilians by law. In order for civilians to be prepared for military service, civilians should be not \"must be\" proficient with some military-style not \"military grade\" weapons. In this way, the right to bear arms is fundamental to a free society and a deterrent to tyranny.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right to bear arms is essential to protect a free society against external as well as internal threats.\n","id":"31071dc4-63cb-4b4c-8ce3-b8d615722380"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>reality television does more harm than good<|ARGUMENT|>Television provides a wide mixture of programmes, including reality television. For those who want it, there is high quality drama such as \"The Sopranos\" or \"Pride and Prejudice\" whilst the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera and other international broadcasters also cover news and current affairs in great depth. Wildlife programmes on the National Geographic or Discovery bring the wonders of the natural world into our living rooms. More sports are covered in more detail than ever before. So, ultimately, reality shows have not ruined television as a whole, they have merely added another option for viewers. Indeed, because they make a lot of money for broadcasters to spend on other types of programmes, they are actually good for all viewers, regardless of personal taste for genres. improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The public can always just turn reality programmes off, or watch something else\n","id":"6fec7f08-e841-45d4-a58e-3f49613c3d9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is taxation theft?<|ARGUMENT|>A vast majority of rich people are wealthy because they were born into wealthy families. Therefore, their wealthy is a result of the lottery of birth and not of their hard work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people have not acquired their wealth through fair means.\n","id":"00651070-9a27-45cc-a1c4-c7f019991e42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit My point is not that anyone should stigmatize or have disdain for anybody they don't already. My point is that everyone is deserving of compassion, and it's in our best interests to give it to them. Obesity's root cause is an addiction, not willfully deciding to become a drain on society who takes up too much space on mass transit who will be constantly reminded that most people are repulsed by them. I think that what's really going in is that the OP's of these posts just want to justify their own prejudice against the obese with some kind of rationale, but that their outright hatred goes far beyond what their rationalizations could justify. Fat people are humans, they deserve love and respect like everybody else. Posters may claim it's about health or resources, but really, imo, they just want 1 to be allowed to hate fat people, 2 fat people to hate themselves. As far as number 2 goes, YOUR WORK HAS BEEN DONE FOR YOU, REDDIT. A search of this sub of just the word fat About myself, I'm no model, but I'm not obese. I just get tired of watching reddit circlejerk about how fat people are essentially evil and self absorbed. If it's true that they are, than so are addicts of any kind, and you don't see 3 's a day about drug addicts. Edit I've responded to the same points the same way more times than I can count. When I reply to you, I don't know who you are, or have any idea the progression of the conversation we've been having, as far as I'm concerned this whole episode has been like having a 30 hour argument with 1 person who had really bad memory. I'm cutting it off. You all deserve a better OP than me, but I can't do this any more. Edit 2 Tell you what fucking amazes me the number of people who have come forward to advocate that other human beings don't deserve compassion and respect. I mean sure, nobody can make you have respect and compassion for others, nobody can make you exchange a negative emotion for a positive one, nobody can make you take antibiotics either. Compassion is a solution to so much suffering, both internal and external. Whether others deserve it is a non issue, it's in our own best interest to give it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think if you believe that fat people are entitled, don't deserve assistance with medical bills, or otherwise find them intolerable, you should feel the same way about alcoholics, smokers, and gambling addicts.\n","id":"0006e36c-1adc-4199-888a-a20b4172626b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most attorneys charge for their cases based on billable hours. From the client's perspective, they know that they are being charged based on how much time the lawyer spends on the case. This may sometimes deter the client from calling the lawyer and asking questions, for better and for worse. But I'm focused more on the lawyer perspective than the client perspective. Most associate lawyers aka guys who work at the firm but don't own it have a minimum number of billable hours they have to hit to keep their job. Of course, time spent working doesn't always correlate directly to billable hours. I might have a form contract that took me 2 hours to make, but that I can reuse for each case, and charge 1 hour of billable work for the 5 minutes it took me to change the names on the form. On the flip side, I might have to spend an extra half hour looking through the case folder for a document, but can't charge at all for that half hour because it's not billable work. I think this incentives attorneys to spend their time in ways that are not always most productive to doing good legal work. As a lawyer, I am essentially incentivized to do no more work on a case than I can bill for, even if that case might benefit from an extra 2 hours of research. I am at the same time incentivized to sometimes do extra work on another case that is riper for billable hours. On top of all that, my boss is largely assessing my performance based on how much busy work I complete, instead of how well I do the work. I concede that it's hard to think of a better system. If you come to me with a large employment dispute, I can't know how much work that will entail. If I charge a flat fee, and the case ends up entailing much more work than other cases that I get a similar fee for, I as a lawyer got ripped off. Conversely if it's way less work, the client is ripped off. Billable hours does ensure the billing is theoretically proportionate to the work done. However, I think most lawyers can decently estimate the cost value of a case before they take it on. A switch to a universal flat fee system would require the lawyer and client to do more vetting to determine price before taking a case, but I think that would be a positive exchange to eliminate all the pitfalls of the billable system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Billable Hours System is Overall Bad for the Practice of Law\n","id":"e4fb5010-fdcd-467a-975e-228146169933"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Doctors Be Allowed To Remove Healthy Body Parts To Replace With Artificial Ones?<|ARGUMENT|>This is already seen in the beauty and fashion industries: those involved feel compelled to look a certain way, undergoing surgeries from breast enhancements to botox.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In order to compete, people could be forced to undergo augmentation surgery.\n","id":"81475f66-0421-434f-9252-ad4b75c847a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is unfair in my eyes that a student can take an incredibly advanced course, and get an average grade, and be behind a student, in a moderate class who received a good grade, in GPA or class rank. I understand that education and some topics come much easier to some than others, but I don't see how it's fair to say that a student who took a course much harder than another can be weighted the same. It seems like a pity system, and because of it, a child who does not do well in school in extremely basic classes can graduate ahead of another student who had the ability to take an AP college course as a high school student, for example. Student B completes a course in his Freshman year that Student A doesn't complete till college, if ever. With this system it's just easy to request yourself in the lowest possible class, even though you're capable of so much more, just to graduate valedictorian and have it look very nice on a college resume. EDIT Disregard my comments about college, I have a lack of knowledge about that piece, made a weak assumption<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Students taking more advanced classes GPA and class rank should be weighted differently\n","id":"aaf3e603-1566-4e2c-aa2c-559f165eef93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>In a given area, only one set of rules\/norms can be upheld. Without a centralized authority to determine which norms are to be followed, the result will be \"might makes right\", which is chaotic and unethical.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While anarchy would provide the opportunity for a greater variety of rules, it cannot control which rules become more dominant than others.\n","id":"f37d4b2f-f4e5-4466-ad11-aae068fd17ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>As more organisations are shifting their recruiting focus towards intentional diversity and inclusion efforts, they\u2019re reframing their thinking to how diverse candidates can \"add\" to their culture rather than \"fit\" into it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The practice of hiring for cultural fit is now considered an outdated concept with \"cultural add\" being preferred over it.\n","id":"5662555b-cdb2-46fb-8fca-50214eee86ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What other paid servant of the wealthy and powerful became Vice President, took over the White House, and has had so many books, articles, comics, documentaries, news intereviews, and a huge movie made about him featuring several huge stars? The first indication that Cheney was operating as a shill for Halliburton inside the government was that his experience and entire career to that point was acting as a servant to powerful government figures. Why else would a corporation specializing in oil services, engineering, and drilling hire him as CEO? The second and most significant flag was when they paid him 36 million to resign when he was elected Vice President. What were they getting in return? In 2001, they got private, undisclosed energy meetings with him and found earlier regulations disappearing or going unenforced. When the war on terror began, they were on the top of the list for billions in no bid contracts. By the time he left office and the economy was crashing, Halliburton and oil were booming and drilling regulations had become so bad that fracking was common and already out of control and Halliburton had become so lazy that the massive gulf deepwater horizon oil spill resulted. BP owned the oil and the accountability, but they were paying Halliburton to execute the drilling. Sources For whom the birdshot tolls That Lawyer Dick Cheney Shot in the Face is Planning to See Vice Fact checking 'Vice' Did Dick Cheney really do all of that? How Dick Cheney Became the Most Powerful Vice President in History It was Dick Cheney, more than any other official, who set the terms for the post 9 11 world we all share. Vice President Dick Cheney's Power Is On Display In 'Vice' In the new film Vice, director Adam McKay teamed up with Oscar winner Christian Bale to portray former Vice President Dick Cheney and his rise to power. 'Vice' Christian Bale transforms himself in a zany take on Dick Cheney 2010 Dick Cheney's 250 Million 'Get Out of Jail Free' Card Cheney Charged in 2010 Halliburton 180 million birbery case 2012 Halliburton Profit Grows as U.S. Fracking Surges 2013 Halliburton pleads guilty to destroying evidence in Deepwater Horizon case 2014 Halliburton Manager Gets Probation For Destroying Evidence Of 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster 2014 Halliburton Fracking Spill Mystery What Chemicals Polluted an Ohio Waterway? Vice review Christian Bale hilarious as toad like VP Dick Cheney 4 out of 5 stars. Bale brilliantly captures the former vice president's bland magnificence in Adam McKay's entertainingly nihilist biopic. How the Vice team built their genre busting, fourth wall breaking Dick Cheney satire Utterly transformed via a small phalanx of makeup artists, Christian Bale anchors Adam McKay's impressionistic biopic of Dick Cheney. 2011 22 crime fiction writers came together to produce an anthology of dark fiction inspired by Dick Cheney. You can imagine our delight when we heard about Vice All new set of exclusive posters for ViceMovie starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, and Tyler Perry Dick Cheney biopic 'Vice' is a wicked satire that messes with the audience and features an outstanding Christian Bale performance 'Vice' Review Dick Cheney and the Negative Great Man Theory of History How Bale and Amy Adams became the Cheneys in 'Vice'<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dick Cheney is the greatest shill in history.\n","id":"d3277ffb-02b4-453a-a8a1-36aa90a9595a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should God Have Tested Job?<|ARGUMENT|>God made the wager as a demonstration to Satan in order to influence them, and either redeem Satan by showing them the positive example of Job, or by showing the futility of attempting to oppose God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God used the trials of Job to reveal more about God to the world.\n","id":"4d4b574b-31a8-491b-9f0e-a30902e1a321"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>Legal, state-based sanctions crowd out private, community-based sanctions. We need more of the latter, and fewer of the former.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To legislate and enforce the illegality of every immoral act would require a totalitarian police state.\n","id":"7a6aadbd-1705-4ab6-b76a-fac7e5dd3450"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard people mentioning that McD is way bigger than BK, especially globally. They are trying to get the big dog to give a minor competitor some free advertising, like how ICP disses Eminem. This is true, but when you make the described McWhopper, the Mc looks more like a prick, and the Whopper is the big bopper. Exhibit A A picture of the two burgers, and the proposed McWhopper Notice the lettuce and other vegetables of the Whopper look far superior to the Mac's stringy lettuce and square of cheese. The BK paddy is bigger and more appetizing, even though the Big Mac has two but the McWhopper has one of each Exhibit B A 1988 BK commercial that claims 3 out of 4 people prefer the Whopper to the Big Mac emphasizing size and cooking style. I found a lot more, BK has been using comparative advertising for a while. Exhibit C A Dutch commercial from BK about how Whopper \u00e4r godast which I think means Whopper is better best. Anyway, notice how the fresh lettuce, tomato, and onions are shown off with splashing water like a Bon Jovi video. Exhibit D An embarrassingly lame rap commercial again hitting the superior, sexy vegetables flame grilled patty, and the have it your way slogan that began in opposition to Mcd's original policy of eat it the way we make it that has since changed . So ultimately, BK has succeeded because they've convinced a bunch of people to buy a Big Mac and Whopper the Whopper costs more and put the less sexy one on top of the supposed King of burgers and take a picture for Tumblr or whatnot. The blip in sales and advertising is a bigger deal for the King than the Clown. By the way, I prefer Taco Bell.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The McWhopper is an attempt by BK to put a smaller burger with lettuce shreds and a square of cheese on top of the thick tomato, onion, and pickles of the wider Whopper.\n","id":"44e9a871-44fc-4339-9842-df461822fd90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should US intelligence agencies end mass data collection?<|ARGUMENT|>By compromising on particular individual freedoms for the purpose of security opens the door for other freedoms, such as freedom of speech, to be undermined. Therefore such a compromise has damaging implications for democracy and the relationship between the state and its people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America's foundation was on strict principles of equality and freedom as evidenced by their importance in the Declaration of Independence. Therefore infringing that freedom is a grave harm.\n","id":"8319c738-092b-4387-82ce-5880662fe518"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>This referendum undid previous protections for minorities in Taiwan. In 2017, the Taiwanese High Court had ruled that restricting marriage to heterosexual couples was unconstitutional<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In 2018, Taiwan voted to restrict marriage exclusively to heterosexual couples.\n","id":"fd44ab7a-f359-4ca8-ae1c-7be3875cbf7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems like every day I read an article regarding a situation where I would never have considered race to be involved, yet racist intentions are called out. In the same vein, comments from users on social media sites seem to call out these racial tensions in any situation involving a white person and someone of another ethnicity. I've had this happen to me personally. I am not racist and do not believe my race make me any better or worse than any other individual, yet I've been called out for being unfair to others because of their race, when my intentions and actions were NOT racist. In my view this stems from a desire of the individuals involved to WANT the situation to be racially offensive so that they can feel persecuted. I think this attitude causes a divisiveness between races that actually feeds racism and the us against them mentality .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the reason racism in America persists to the extent it does is because people enjoy being offended.\n","id":"9c0d83ee-02d5-4e63-b0e8-b4d94e969d37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Limitations on Foreign Investments<|ARGUMENT|>Limiting foreign investment protects the national interest. Inward investment is nothing more than a form of economic imperialism. Therefore, reducing it simply reduces the effective power of rich foreigners to impose their will on the host economy, for example by buying up the majority of productive land. It is also important in uncertain times for a nation to control its own destiny by ensuring strategic and sensitive industries e.g. arms manufacture, broadcasting and print media, pharmaceuticals, food production do not fall into foreign hands.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Limiting foreign investment protects the national interest. Inward investment is nothing more than ...\n","id":"37947caf-06ec-4b9a-ad74-93e93bd9f1e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>Most people who have unfavorable opinions regarding African Americans point to high crime rates in poor black neighborhoods to justify their opinions, despite the fact that higher rates of poverty easily explain the higher crime rates, and that blacks are no more violent than whites per capita when social issues and challenges are factored in. Justifying and advocating for violence only feeds into this damaging stereotype. We should all be doing things that dispell negative stereotypes about us.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society is less racist than it used to be, indicating that its possible to make progress. Turning to violence undermines that progress.\n","id":"ad5e3134-a0e8-497c-9628-94b330ba08e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>In Libya, Gaddafi managed a regime responsible for arbitrary detentions and disappearances, televised hangings, and mass killings in prison.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although stable, many dictatorships in the Middle East were unbearable for many of the people living there.\n","id":"894ca511-001d-4e62-9d4f-b74efb594d3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>The government knows people will seek out illegal and potentially harmful drugs, but that is not a reason to lift the ban on them, making them easier to access.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any act will still happen regardless of whether it is legal or illegal. This is not a sufficient reason to legalize an activity which is wrong.\n","id":"eec55917-6e88-41ac-a55a-6f4142853a71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like the usefulness and truthfulness of the study of history is greatly overestimated. Supposedly it's meant to be about understanding the past in a cause and effect kind of way. However it completely ignores the in my opinion major role of luck. millions of micro interactions that cannot be reduced down to any coherent theory . We use outcomes to retroactively justify the fact that they have happened. We construct elaborate theories to explain various events even though what outcomes come about is based on chance, just because something happened shouldn't hold any real weight in a probabilistic world. For an example let's use the historical study of the world wars to illustrate what I'm getting at. History tells us that WW1 ended with heavy punishment towards Germany. Supposedly this fed into the germans anger, caused economic troubles and instability for germany, and a bunch of other things that are ascribed to be the major causes of the ensuing WW2. But let me posit the following If WW2 had not happened and I think we can all agree that there are far too many variables for WW2 to be considered inevitable . Historians could have constructed an equally compelling cause and effect story about how the punishment on germany was so strong that they learned their lesson and thereby the punishment was effective as a preventative measure for further wars. In essence we can make completely opposite cause and effect claims with regards to the exact same facts based on a probabilistic outcome. whereby the arbitrary events that happen are used to construct essentially a logically coherent story which masquerades as some kind of truth I am no expert in WW history and so this example may have some inaccuracies as to the events but I think my point still stands. Furthermore, if historical theory had any kind of merit to it why is it that we can never use it to understand the future? I think this is exactly why. If there actually was a good way of inferring causes and effects from the past we would be able to to do it for the future. So what's the point of all of it? It's all just building post hoc narratives to explain things which can not be reduced to elegant theories. It's like trying to construct a story of why the weather happens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The study of history is overrated. it's all about creating plausible stories and dosen't help us understand why anything happened in a meaningful way.\n","id":"47621528-2f39-484a-8a16-ae595caf5b98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>a common EU foreign policy<|ARGUMENT|>Creating a position of EU High Representative is not objectionable in itself. Previously the EU was in the ludicrous situation of having two foreign affairs spokesmen, one from the Council and the other from the Commission. Rivalry and duplication of efforts, staffs and resources results, and so focusing all the EU\u2019s external affairs work around one person makes some sense. What it does not mean is that the High Representative should lead a drive for a stronger common foreign policy position. Only when member states agree which may not be often will he or she have a role. In fact, by weakening the foreign affairs role within the Commission, this development may actually limit the pretensions of Brussels to develop its own agenda and dictate foreign policy to the member states.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The previous arrangement of having two foreign policy centers in the Commission and in the Council was arguably inefficient, but consolidating these into a single office-holder has created more complexity and at significantly greater expense.\n","id":"579ab073-29d8-40a9-aead-2f860503e60f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've started saving for my son's college education he's 1 and am often amazed at the gobs of money that is thrown at a university education as well as the debt people accrue. Is attending a top tier university worth that much money? Will my son's college experience be 4 5 times better and will his prospects for work and graduate school be 4 5 times better for attending a school with tuition in the 30 40K per year range? A friend of mine once told me that her professor at a public university taught there in the morning and then taught evening classes at the local private college where tuition was 5X the public . The same professor and the same course You can't tell me those private school kids are getting a higher quality education. I am convinced that my son can get just as good an education and start on life attending a less expensive university than a top tier school. However, I don't want to limit his options simply due to my own bias. Please change my view. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe paying more than $10K for a semester of undergrad is a ridiculous waste of money.\n","id":"c3fe66e5-12af-41f0-97fd-0152afa2f0d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This article states that over two thirds of man made emissions that are causing global warming come from just 90 companies. This article outlines some of the horrifying pollution caused by a few choice corporations. A UN study determined that in 2008 alone, corporate waste was responsible for 2.2 TRILLION worth of environmental damage. Meanwhile, for decades there have been calls for individuals to recycle their garbage, use fuel efficient cars, and clean up pollution. While these actions are nice, they have virtually no bearing on the ongoing environmental crisis, and no amount of individual action would be sufficient to overpower the damage being done by corporations. I believe these environmental campaigns for individuals are just a way of making people think they're more responsible than they are, and silently passing the buck away from corporations and onto individuals so that big companies face less intense public scrutiny for their actions. In the same way companies use tactics to distort public perception of income inequality, they have also managed to make people feel somehow blameworthy for an environmental situation that, were it not for corporations continuing to be irresponsible, would literally not even exist. . gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Campaigns to get individuals to recycle, reduce emissions, and reduce waste are just a tactic to shift the blame away from corporations, who are the real cause of our environmental problems\n","id":"33896f43-423f-4dbc-a053-751e36705725"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should copyright die with the creator?<|ARGUMENT|>A temporary limited copyright gives competitors a clear idea when they can release a competing product.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A temporary limited copyright is better than a copyright that depends on the creator's lifespan.\n","id":"443f0984-39bf-44bf-9e4c-f5ed2dc8eecd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Net Neutrality Necessary?<|ARGUMENT|>\"High speed connections\" can make healthcare less effective and more expensive because you will possibly need to pay a premium for extra stable\/reliable internet with high bandwidth. This will potentially exclude hospitals in less fortunate areas because they can't afford the fees for stable internet, resulting in worse healthcare overall.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Doctors already have preferential access: most hospitals already have paid for higher speed-connections than those of many consumers. Abolishing Net Neutrality isn't going to increase the reliability or speed of doctors' internet access.\n","id":"5930fbb8-2d3c-4cea-a703-fe568ca52d86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If I walk down a dark alley at night and see a well groomed black man who carries himself with good posture, I feel much less threatened compared to seeing a white man with prison tattoos on his face with terrible posture, grimy clothes, and pants sagging. I think it's only natural to profile people we have these instincts for a reason as they are advantageous to our survival. Non verbal communication is critical and should never be understated. This doesn't mean that you have to be an asshole and treat anyone differently because of the signals they are giving off, but exercising additional caution is understandable and acceptable. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's acceptable and understandable to profile people in our daily lives without being considered racist\n","id":"67fae58a-d811-4828-8741-8e7f7ec9a9a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>One can see clearly about the level of overpopulation by looking at global average biocapacity per capita. It is about 1.7 gha. If humanity would like to become sustainable, we would have to lower per capita ecological footprint to that level. Since only poor countries have per capita ecological footprints so low it means that there are so many people on Earth that humanity would need to face global poverty to reach sustainability. This is how one can find out how bad global overpopulation is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In reality, an overshoot curve is a better demonstration of overpopulation, as it explains Earth Overshoot Day better and shows how populations go over the carrying capacity, not just work within it.\n","id":"7206428d-b22e-4d68-b449-092a97b92772"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> that every skill can be trained, taking IQ tests psychometric tests, etc, everything can be trained and we are the sum of our experiences, we all have the exact same capacity to think and make decisions. Had I lived the same life as Einstein I would have worked out relativity etc as well. Basically the idea is, that there is no such thing as natural genius. I believe that no one is born naturally smarter than anyone else. People are the sum of all their experiences. For example if I was to avoid a car crash at the last second, someone might say \u201coh you have quick reflexes\u201d. But the reality is that my experiences up until that point trained me for that moment, I may have been using or training my reflexes in sports or reactionary games for years. Same is true for IQ tests psychometrics etc<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are not born \"more intelligent\", Intelligence comes from the experiences that shape a person\n","id":"b5200c16-57f7-4638-b169-77d20bb7fcb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All People in the US Have the Right to Health Care?<|ARGUMENT|>Many uninsured Americans avoid going for medical care unless they are seriously unwell. But this means that preventative and early treatment medicine opportunities are lost when doctors are unable to diagnose and engage with patients until they require emergency room care.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given the amount of delayed access to healthcare experienced by uninsured Americans, even with delays under universal healthcare, many people would receive treatment faster than they currently do.\n","id":"a6e914dc-b17c-485b-9dea-43ecd92ef1df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Constitutions protect linguistic minorities?<|ARGUMENT|>In the Tuvan language, khoj o\u0308zeeri defines the slaughter of a sheep. It implies kindness, humaneness, and a relationship to animals that is also a measure of one's character.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Linguistic minorities have words for things\/phenomenons that do not exist in the national language.\n","id":"047df66b-c61f-4637-b226-ae5eb1dc8582"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People talk about those who tag trees the same way a white person form the 1800's would talk about lynching a black man. But I really don't see what the big deal is. What makes nature so sacred? What makes it above the hands of humans? It is vandalism, but isn't graffiti technically vandalism? It's taking land, property, an area, whatever, that isn't yours, and putting artwork on it to doll up the place boost your ego have bragging rights. I'm sure there's areas of cities where authorities turn a blind eye to it, but someone owns that land, and if someone else purchases it, fat cat or not, they're going to become the owner of a patch of ground with a bunch of paint on it, which more than likely doesn't suit the purpose of what they bought it for. You can't paint over tree bark and get rid of it. Ok. But so what? The tree will be fine. S'plenty more in the forest. If you've got your camera out in the woods, and the tag ruins your beautiful shot, shop it out, or find a different spot. All nature is beautiful, right? It certainly isn't going to harm that rock over there. Thing's not even alive. What makes it different then the cave paintings in France? A couple thousand years and taking the time to make a recognizable shape? It's not harming the wildlife, not to the extent that it will eradicate a species. They'll adapt, like they already have with our deforestation tactics and desire for an ever increasing urban sprawl. It seems like the stuff that looks like this is what people are up in arms about. What if the 'graffiti' looked like this, and wasn't comprised of yarn, like in the photo? What if the artist put some effort into it, like a regular piece on a city wall? Would that be better? Would it be considered art, and become absolved from scrutiny? It seems like the issue here is aesthetics, and not damaging the planet. Maybe it's because I grew up outside of a big city, and have gotten my fill of nature, but as far as I know, the only difference between a tree and a concrete wall is canvas space.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that graffiti on trees, rocks, nature in general is borderline no different to traditional urban graffiti.\n","id":"922ab62e-f4e8-458b-930d-9e03f6e70d32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Due to my work, I am able to live in any of NATO countries. I like the fact that their index of corruption is low, that the health system is good, and that there is low crime rate. My problem is that I would feel bad to enjoy benefits of a society knowing that for centuries, up to 60 years ago, the country was terrorizing its colonies. You can read some really horrible practices of slavery, genocides, nazism, and centuries long economic draining of colonies. On other side, I am aware of the fact that most societies have some of these stuff in their history, and that maybe I just don't understand human nature. I would love to make sure my family doesn't suffer from my prejudices, but on other side I would like to avoid feeling miserable or unable to enjoy stuff I have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I shouldn't live in a country with a colonial history\n","id":"9e934e02-e361-4bab-96c8-7cad2c63113d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Anti-bullfighting activists claim that bulls should be protected under the laws that prohibit cruelty against animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In bullfighting torture is spectacularized, which adds to the cruelty.\n","id":"aa1fe76b-0df8-433a-8f1e-7d26630d723d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is BDSM Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>Some extremely conservative Indian societies see masturbation as a sign of polluting the human body and as such, women are expected to refrain from it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women in India face multiple taboos that act as hurdles in their exploration of sexuality.\n","id":"78640c41-3171-4abf-b9e2-6d15ad47c074"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>Experiences of rape are 90% lower for indoor sex work than street sex work Weitzer, p. 24<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Indoor sex work is the least dangerous to sex workers Weitzer, p. 23\n","id":"a98ada12-ea2d-4da4-8b92-9dfb800c5c2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As we all know, Seth Rich\u2019s parents are suing Fox News for still pushing the Seth Rich story after the parents told Fox to stop. Now Humanity knows that most Fox News Viewers are not in their right mind. Look at some of their comments on fox news articles Fox News and Dailycaller have the habit of skewing an article so far from what actually happened that it is almost false. Politico has done it before as well. And John Solomon from the Hill and Sinclair has also done it before Example Normal Outlet Mueller indicts 13 Russians, Trump Associates are not accused of any in this indictment Fox TDC Mueller indicts 13 Russians, vindicating Trump associates. Edit Rosenstein said Americans, he didn\u2019t say Trump associates. I was so focused on TDC trying to making it sounded like it was about Trump associates that I mixed them up. From what I hear about the UK is that both CNN and Fox have to label what is opinion and what is fact or get fined. That seems like something the country needs. Obviously now is not the perfect time because it would end up favoring News Corp and Mercers and would somehow shield people like Alex Jones from legal liability. Also, Infotainment shouldn\u2019t be a defense. Is there any reason that the Fairness Doctrine shouldn\u2019t return? No \u201coh Liberals are trying to censor free press shit\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Fairness Doctrine should return.\n","id":"f939d1a9-090b-447e-8789-ed602c084f46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the teacher is always right, even when s\/he is not.<|ARGUMENT|>Pupils question teachers because they are starting to realise that adults aren't always right - maybe they saw the teacher spell a word wrong or they're learning in Science that something they were taught earlier is technically wrong but they were taught it for simplicity. If you don't let children discover that adults aren't always right, they'll believe any old lie you tell them, even when its dangerous or makes no sense to believe it, and are easily misled by an authority figure who doesn't deserve their respect. This isn't the same as pretending the pupils are equal to the teacher - children also need to learn to obey authority figures if they want to get on in a job - but they should know they are respecting the teachers because they are older and know more and have earned their position, not because they are infallible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Part of the process of growing up to realise that adults aren't always right.\n","id":"a61448de-1b90-4ad0-a4e5-b8808d1f23db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Over the past few days, high school student Keziah has been at the center of an international online controversy involving her prom dress. Keziah posted a picture of her wearing her prom dress a traditional Chinese dress on Twitter and people were quick to call her out for cultural appropriation. One Twitter user by name of Jeremy Lam, responded by saying My culture is not your prom dress\u201d and then going on to say that the dress is \u201ca symbol of female empowerment\u201d and that he is proud of my culture, including the extreme barriers marginalised people within that culture have had to overcome those obstacles. For it to simply be subject to American consumerism and cater to a white audience is parallel to colonial ideology Bell, 2018 . Lam\u2019s post was retweeted and shared with thousands of people, and Keziah became a target of online hate. She responded to this hate and stated that she meant no harm with the dress and that she was just trying to show her appreciation for the Chinese culture. Some people supported her for her decision, while other people were quick to call her out for cultural appropriation. Personally, I think that this is an example of cultural appreciation and not cultural appropriation.I do not understand all of the hatred that she is getting. She purchased the dress because she thought it was beautiful and she wanted to show her appreciation for the culture. I do not understand how this is being racist or offensive. Her intentions were to show appreciation for the dress, and to show off how beautiful it is, not to mock or hurt an entire culture. We live in a globalized world, and we constantly borrow from and share our cultures with one another that\u2019s what makes the world diverse and beautiful. I think that if the intent is to show appreciation and to show the beauty of another culture, and it is done in a respectful way, then I do not see a problem with it. However, I am open to hearing other perspectives on the issue. I understand that the dress is a symbol and that people interpret the meaning of the dress in different ways. I thought that this would be a great place to have this conversation because of the respectful rules and guidelines in place. Let me know what you think, I am open to hearing other perspectives Reference<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Keziah's Prom Dress is Cultural Appreciation, Not Cultural Appropriation\n","id":"b584ae9f-c3d2-4025-9f0e-6946b18a82bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>Employers may feel that people with mental illness would not be able to work as hard as employees without such illnesses, so they may not hire them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Employers may choose not to hire someone with mental health problems.\n","id":"68bc3a11-4874-496c-b70d-bd2f62a73305"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should legacy be a factor in college admissions?<|ARGUMENT|>Jared Kushner was accepted into Harvard despite having low test scores. It is speculated this was because his parents donated $2.5 million to the university the year he was accepted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rich parents can donate large sums of money to a school to increase their child's chances of being accepted.\n","id":"9812d261-782e-44a4-820b-cfd3f6d576ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand death vs loss of facebook account, twitter, website hosting, or employment isn't equal to death. However, people can't move 15 20 miles and have opportunity for fresh start. Seems like there may be a recent unlocking of a socially accepted means for vigilantism or requiring either allegiance to general set of ideas or shirking ideas too far outside norm where you have universities removing statues or renaming dorms at risk of trouble , or companies doing internal research to remove any unacceptable people from their ranks lest they suffer economic loss or standing. Having trouble seeing how we haven't created a new dogma general society has to adhere to, just know to relax the rules sufficiently to give the appearance of reasonable individuality .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In times of punishing heresy with death, in contrast to the current consequences with being linked to sufficiently unpopular or reprehensible ideologies, \"heretics\" were at least afforded the chance to recant.\n","id":"316ed57a-3dd0-42c1-b399-a0232a7045fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm going to focus on American sports because that's what I'm familiar with. The problem is that there is a pervasive winner take all mentality, but only one team gets to win each year. If you don't win the championship, your season doesn't mean much. In fact, if you come really close, it's even more excruciating to lose because of what could have been . Being consistently very good isn't enough you have to have ringz for it to be meaningful. Since there are about 30 teams in each major sports league, you would expect to see your team win once or twice in your lifetime if win probabilities were evenly distributed. But they aren't, so what happens is that a handful of dynasties win lots and everybody else suffers and holds on to glimmers of mostly unfulfilled hope. Even when your team wins, it's nice, but it's really not going to make a difference in your life, certainly not enough to make up for years of investment and anguish onto the team. Once the championship parade is over, your life goes right back to its usual routine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's painful and not worth the trouble to be a diehard professional sports team fan\n","id":"c1f9364a-5861-44cf-b9ac-76dc625b83db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion demands unquestioning belief in unsubstantiated claims that are lacking in evidence, and frequently in the face of contradictory evidence. This is antithetical to critical thinking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion discourages critical thinking because contrary views are often discarded without being fairly considered, merely because they disagree with pre-existing belief.\n","id":"b6323046-ef82-46e8-8f47-36672ad6f8d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do not believe that there is anything objectionable, morally speaking, about watching porn. As a matter of basic principle, I hold that nothing that happens with consent of all the parties involved can be morally wrong. Volenti non fit iniuria , if I may use the pretentious phrase. Hence, if someone decides to be filmed while having sex, and someone else decides to watch this presumably after remunerating the creators in a more or less direct way , it's absolutely fine and no business of anyone else. Because in my humble opinion any act is permissible unless proven wrong, the best way to justify my claim is to address some of the common objections. Of course, please feel free to raise these and similar ones in the answers, but then please address the counter arguments given. Religious objections. Many if not all religious institutions are strongly opposed to porn. If their arguments are purely of the form porn is wrong because god said so , then I don't think they are relevant to this conversation. If their arguments are of the form god told us porn is wrong, and he wants only good for us so we'd be smart to listen to him then it should be possible to reach the same conclusion without referencing religion. Objections on the basis of harm to the actors. It is certainly true that many porn actors suffer as a result of the work that they do in various ways the opposite side of the debate will surely be better suited to discuss this . However, they have made a free choice to engage in this line of work, and presumably they found that the rewards outweighed the downsides. It is not up to the consumers to judge the choices made by other people involved in the industry. Objections on the basis of harm to the viewers. There are reportedly downsides to watching porn, such as the possibility of addiction and some claim worse sexual performance decreased satisfaction. However, it seems to be within the rights of the viewer to inflict that on themselves. For comparison, most people don't hold it immoral to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes, despite similar considerations. Additional assumptions Since what is wrong for one person is not necessarily wrong for another, let me specify that the viewer I have in mind is an adult hence, the question of what impact porn has on teens is irrelevant to this thread and is not in a situation where they are expected to avoid watching porn e.g. they're not married to a person who finds porn objectionable . Assume also that porn is not obtained illegally, but feel free to assume it depicts whatever act you need for your argument to work withing the boundaries of the law . I think the gender and orientation should be irrelevant, but just because of statistics I'm mostly interested in a heterosexual male viewer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not wrong to watch porn.\n","id":"62a0e75b-2cd6-44eb-bbe7-3deeade1cdd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>university education should be free<|ARGUMENT|>The system of paying for universal healthcare, education, pensions, etc. threatens to bankrupt countries. The cost of paying for free university education is ruinously high.1 In the OECD 1.9% of GDP, a third of education expenditure, is spent on tertiary education.2 For countries to survive, they must rethink what they can afford to provide freely to citizens. It seems fair that all states should offer access to their citizens to primary and secondary education opportunities. University, on the other hand, is not essential to life in the same way. People can be functional and responsible citizens without it. For this reason, the state must consider university in the same way it does any non\u00adessential service; people may pay for it if they wish to partake, but it is not an entitlement owed by the state. 1 Ullman, Ben. 2007. \u201cShould Higher Education Really Be Free For All?\u201d. The New Statesman. Available: 2 \u2018What proportion of national wealth is spent on education\u2019, Education at a glance, OECD, 2011, p.225,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The cost to the state is far too great to sustain universal free university education\n","id":"6b06d8fa-30a5-4507-b49c-41ba9f291b72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, the first thing I'll say is that I eat meat. I guess that's just so that I don't come off the bat sounding like some 'more moral than thou' vegan. I just personally don't presume to think it's the right thing to do, and I think it's actively wrong to continue to facilitate it by buying eating meat products. The way I think about morality in particular is, I guess, to reduce the amount the suffering that you're creating in the world, which continuing to eat meat pretty obviously fails to do. By being vegan, or vegetarian, you're actively making an effort to reduce your dependence on meat, and whether you're actually making an impact on the industry or anything like that, you're more in the right for it. When I talk to people about this, I like to bring forward the hypothetical like this You can get from point A to point B in two ways one involves the suffering of another be it an animal or otherwise , but is far easier than the other option this is debatable for eating meat, but I throw it in anyway , which involves the suffering of nothing. What option do you take? Almost invariably, the answer I get is the latter. When I ask people what the difference is between the hypothetical and choosing to eat meat, I find it hard to see any answer I have heard thus far as anything other than an attempt to muddy, or make grey, what I see as fundamentally black and white issue. Stuff I often hear We were meant to eat meat as a species Never seen this as a valid argument personally. The idea that we were 'meant' to do anything has always struck me as very odd. You can talk about this in terms of Darwinism which is I guess where they're coming from here, but we don't leave disabled people to die for the same reason I don't think eating meat is right It's unnecessarily cruel. It's a way to control the population of animals I'm not incredibly well researched on this, but I'm almost certain that the population of animals we eat is down to the fact that there's a high demand for their meat, not the other way around. And even if that was wrong, literally eating them seems a bit of a strange solution. It's what we've always done Literally not an argument. Until 100 years ago we hadn't figured out basic hygiene standards in hospitals. Can't think of any more now, but <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's absolutely morally wrong to eat meat.\n","id":"fa13b09d-af98-4522-a8a7-a121177565c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The your body is beautiful no matter what mentality is commonly attributed to the plus sized members of society. While I do not believe everyone has to be super skinny, I believe that telling someone they shouldn't lose weight because they are beautiful the way they are is a way for overweight people to justify potentially unhealthy lifestyle habits. If you are overweight, medical complications are bound to follow. I believe that you should be comfortable with the body you were born with, and features you can't change, but weight can be managed through exercise and healthy eating. I don't see it as any different than telling someone who has dietary inflicted diabetes they shouldn't change their diet because they should be comfortable with the body they have . . Edit After going through some replies, I'm going to append my  I also believe that campaigns created to help prevent the obesity epidemic from getting worse should be targeted towards educating those that are not afflicted by weight management issues. By convincing the public they need to support and motivate those that are at an unhealthy weight I believe that those who are underweight are also part of this category, I'm focusing on obesity because it seems to be a much more rapidly developing problem we can create an environment of support and motivation which is more affective than convincing those who are at an unhealthy weight that they are beautiful the way they are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"your body is beautiful no matter what\" mentality is an unhealthy mentality.\n","id":"495fae55-fbc7-428c-adf5-a9159e193017"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I go to chain gym. At my home gym there is no rule regarding cell phone use at all. I have only once encountered someone else talking on their phone at the gym, and I have done it once myself when I was on hold for a ridiculous amount of time and wanted to get in a workout while I waited. The other person speaking on their phone did not bother me. At the gym in my new town, owned by the same company, a sign is posted on every cardio machine asking members to not talk on their cell phones because it could disturb fellow members . It didn't bother me, since I'm not really chatty myself. No big loss. Yesterday two women with exceptionally loud voices were carrying on a conversation on the treadmills beside me. It was a bit annoying, but I just turned up my own music and went on my way. I see no reason that cell phone conversations should be banned if in person socializing is not. It makes no sense to ban one type of audio conversation but not the other. FTR I don't care either way, I just want to understand the logic of this better, because it makes no sense to me now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not reasonable to ban speaking on your phone at the gym if people are allowed to talk to one another while there.\n","id":"da4a8744-c56e-4c0d-8e88-83e8c081f0b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Article 14:3 states: 'Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.' Thus circumcising a child takes away this freedom without any of these limitations being present.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Convention on the Rights of the Child grants children protections and certain rights from having a circumcision against their own choice.\n","id":"9f79cfde-418a-4cc4-a191-e9dbacf92e3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm currently studying an undergraduate with a major in physics. I have the option of completing a masters in either physics or an engineering discipline. I will chose engineering to take advantage of the larger job market, larger job security and generally higher salaries. I don't believe my passion for physics is enough to outweigh the benefits of a career in engineering. After all, I will still find it engaging. I believe the life I can lead will be more comfortable, simply because I'm earning more and will have more breathing space. A career in physics would require me to be extraordinarily capable intellectually and hard working to seize the rare job opportunities and to prosper. Attempting to fulfil this passion is not worth the risk.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should chose a career with more job security and more money, rather than pursue a passion.\n","id":"e8581765-d037-4dbe-a961-44d6796efee6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Law and Morality be Related?<|ARGUMENT|>Laws emerge from the fact of living in societies and would have absolutely no meaning if you were the only sentient being in the universe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In democratic nations, the law will do this anyway as the people and\/or their representatives change.\n","id":"47e3a4fc-d7f6-48cb-b10b-c16d3f54120f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This seems pretty straight forward, but the general idea is that it would be beyond believable that every child with jewish heritage be told the truth to participate in the conspiracy without a few of them here and there turning whistle blowers. Generally, when we think of clandestine organisations, we don't think about groups with birthrights since that's absurd. With most conspiracies, at least the conspirators are all in on it. If the government is participating in a conspiracy, then the employees privileged with that informed are at procured not born . Being anti semitic isn't defensible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if most every Jewish conspiracy is true, your anti-semitism still can't be applied to most jewish people you meet.\n","id":"99e57cf2-412d-4fea-8c49-43b0393cda89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I been using Google Chrome as far as i remember probably since 2010 and it's been my default browser on all the computers laptops I've used. Chrome was fast, reliable and most of all it had a great materials design. Having said all that, recently Chromes has failed to live up to its name. Many browsers out there have the same if not better look and feel which also hold up in the speed department. To put it simply, other browsers has closed, if not overtaken the Chrome and everything it stood for. Saying that you use Chrome means nothing anymore, and might as well use IE or the incarnation Spartan Edit Also the memory usage by Chrome is crazy. I can't comment on the memory usage by Firefox haven't used it that much Please change my view Edit 1 I'm off to bed. I'll be back in the morning Australian morning Edit 2 I do see now that Chrome is still innovating, but not so much on the aesthetics, but rather helping developers and making better websites. Also, after reading most a lot of comments thank you for that , I see now that Chrome is more than a browser but rather a platform. It offers a wide range of features Hangouts, Sync, etc that no other browser can match at the moment. Thank you for your replies Edit 3 My intentions were never to show that Chrome or Firefox insert any browser name are bad and you shouldn't use them. My intentions were to understand why or why not is Chrome overrated by society especially on the internet . Edit 4 RIP my inbox. Thank you, for the replies Also, I am aware that the word overrated is misspelled<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Google Chrome is currently the most overrate browser and it continues to fall further behind\n","id":"139477e4-21e4-4ad3-9c25-188c23673d28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't use reddit as often as most, so please excuse me if this is common knowledge on this site. Simply put, I believe that the relationships subreddit is almost always biased against men when it comes to issues within heterosexual couples. When I first started getting into reddit, I quite enjoyed that subreddit as it was interesting to read about different sorts of relationship problems and how others thought to solve them. Over time, however, it started to become evident that any advice on matters a heterosexual couple is dealing with that did anything else but reinforce the woman's point of view or bias seemed to be immediately downvoted barring special cases . For one thing, if one disagrees or tries to explain the other party's point of view when the OP is female, the comments seem to quickly try and debunk or discredit said advice. This becomes especially clear when two different posters describe the same problem but happen to be of different genders. For example, about a week ago two different people posted about how they dislike having partners that have had a count of sexual partners in the 10s and 20s. When the male OP expressed this, the majority of the comments where how he holds misogynistic and negative views on female sexuality, and most expressed that it was his thinking that was the problem. However, when the female OP expressed a nearly identical view, most said she was validated in her standards and that she has every right to not date based on a potential partner's sex partner count. Similar examples of gender bias can be found in all sorts of threads on that subreddit, and it sort of makes me discount any sort of advice given there. I've personally considered using that subreddit to gain insight to my own relationship and friendship issues, but now I'm not too sure the advice I would be given would be in any way useful. Sometimes what I see even borders on sexism, but I'd rather not open that can of worms. So yeah, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"relationships\" subreddit is very biased against men.\n","id":"8615203a-1156-4ddd-84bf-415a574ab989"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans share similar genetic material with gorillas. Supporting the survival of gorillas can thus help us learn more about our origin.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donating for gorillas comes with beneficial side effects for humankind.\n","id":"62965e84-b66c-436d-8ff7-3091c05936f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello Reddit, as the title states I am a firm believer that bitcoin has no value other than the idea that the next person will pay more for it. I myself invested quite a lot into bitcoin and was successful in paying off all my student loans thanks to this, so I should be happy about bitcoin's popularity, but as I see more and more friends investing I am worried they don't fully grasp what they are getting into. I invested with the thought in mind that my investment had no actual value, but would increase because people would think it had value. However, other investors I speak to seem to invest because they think bitcoin itself has value, but I just don't see it. My worry is that this rumor based investing is getting out of hand and will eventually result in greater economic consequences when bitcoin crashes, taking the savings of the many ignorant investors down with it. Reasons I do not think it has value not widely accepted enough to use in day to day transactions arguable fluctuation in value negates any use as currency liquidation can take 2 3 weeks Defined as currency, yet treated like an asset.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bitcoin's value is strictly backed by the idea that the next person will pay more for it greater fool theory, not because it is a finite and decentralized currency.\n","id":"54e07151-b06d-4115-ba2b-6a2f3367c490"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Blood Sports Should Be Banned<|ARGUMENT|>Another moral objection is that people take pleasure in the process of often-pointless killing. Man has moved well beyond his natural state of being a hunter-gatherer and needing to hunt for food. There is something perverse about breeding animals, or managing the land to encourage them, just so they can be shot. Bear- and badger-baiting and cock-fighting have been banned already and it the abolition of other blood sports is well overdue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Another moral objection is that people take pleasure in the process of often-pointless killing. Man...\n","id":"b1eadc9e-3a1c-476c-989e-72e548f10c85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The flaw in critique may be that it asks a person in authority to discount his own moral judgment and apply the morality of the collective will. It could be said that Eichmann did this. The collective will at the time being the persecution of the Jews. Therefore, the fault lies both in Kant's idea and in Eichmann's 'idealism'; his literal interpretation of Kant's rule.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eichmann did not distort Kant but applied the ideas correctly, the philosophy itself has the flaw in it that allowed for the persecution of a race.\n","id":"695bcb4f-2507-4dfe-b5a9-a6bc8bddad9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All US and EU sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014 should be lifted<|ARGUMENT|>Elections for the Presidency - due to be held in March, 2019 - cannot be held if the country is under martial law; a dangerous precedent for imposing martial law in the interest of national security has already been set in 2018.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An escalated conflict in Ukraine is likely to drive the government towards authoritarianism at the detriment of Ukrainian citizens.\n","id":"1f6caa92-6210-4841-9a49-4a944623a977"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll try to word my view carefully on this subject. Last Halloween, a couple guys in a fraternity at my university had a picture of themselves posted online showing them at a costume party with their skin painted black and wearing chains as the story states, the party's theme was rockstars and rappers . Dubbed the beta blackface incident let's ignore the fact that what they were wearing wasn't really blackface , this photo had many students and campus organizations absolutely LIVID. I believe the members were expelled from their fraternity, and there is talk now of having a mandatory racial awareness class for some Greek members. Not sure of the exact details of that, but that's really not the point. The point is that I don't think what they did was offensive. I guess you can argue that assuming a rapper is black is sort of offensive racist, but is it just as bad to assume that a lumberjack is some big white dude in a flannel with a bitchin' beard? And yes, I know that black people suffer from a vast amount of racial discrimination that lumberjacks don't, but I don't believe that the costume in the story above, in and of itself, is offensive. EDIT I understand that anything can be 'offensive' to someone in the technical sense of the word. I'm trying to say I believe the overly negative reaction and accusations of racism were unwarranted. I suppose I could have worded the title better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think that dressing up as a rapper by painting your skin dark for Halloween is offensive.\n","id":"db41971f-b5bb-45b8-a312-c4bc3fb927b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Scandinavian peninsula is usually considered to include Sweden, Norway, and a small northern part of Finland. But I don't understand why the peninsula isn't bigger. It seems to me that it should include all of Finland, Karelia, and Kola. Starting somewhere around the area between Saint Petersburg and the Onega bay. After all, from then on the whole thing is surrounded by water. Also, please understand that I'm not talking about the region called Scandinavia which includes Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. I have no problem at all with that one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Scandinavian peninsula should be bigger.\n","id":"0a4a79e5-fd91-4b3a-a211-9cd3bfcd0e06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see this all the time in the city. You have a dedicated turn lane. No traffic is flowing through the lane you're about to enter, because it is just a continuation of the lane you're currently in. There's no possible way there could be anyone to yield to, and yet there's a yield sign right before the turn. This is infuriating to me, because people slow down to unreasonable levels shortly after they turn. There is no good reason that I can think of to have yield signs on these turns. . If I wasn't clear about the turns I'm describing, imagine the turning roadway shown here, the dedicated downstream lane for acceleration , but at the beginning of the turn there's a yield sign. The bottom lane.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dedicated turn lanes should not have yield signs.\n","id":"bb15f07f-f810-4f4d-8476-a6df2b96bf40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>A 2009 report into conflict between humans and apes documents how a silverback male attacked a man in the Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary in Cameroon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There have been cases of gorillas attacking humans in nature.\n","id":"d6233b83-f45d-4c2c-9ac7-01dd5e9d80c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that it is important for the American people to know what really happens in the wars they vote for and finance. It seems that most Americans have a very idealized view of soldiers and of war in general. The secrecy surrounding American wars largely contributes to this view. I think the people paying for these wars and whose loved ones are dying in these wars should know the true costs of them. Bradley Manning helped expose the horrors of war and damaged the idealized image of American soldiers, and for that he is a hero. edit To add a point, I realize that Bradley Manning was contractually obligated to not leak those files, but I believe that any contract preventing a person from doing the right thing is automatically invalid. In my mind, what he did is no different from a member of a violent gang turning over evidence on other gang members to the police.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Bradley Manning is a hero.\n","id":"8a1ce0ac-3cce-4d74-a0e5-e64fb8f1a12b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Steroid Use in Sports Be Allowed?<|ARGUMENT|>Since steroid use is commonplace, it makes sense to alter the rules to allow all players to engage in it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalising the use of steroids will reduce the incidence of cheating in sports.\n","id":"f016a899-8950-47e2-89d0-c620596b9b1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion helps people understand that they have been given a gift by God, their life, which can make them value it more and not see it as a random occurrence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In a seemingly meaningless world, belief in a higher order helped people give meaning to their pleasure, and hope in suffering.\n","id":"f704e279-8c92-4419-818a-7667ed38d86a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Hell Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Psychology studies the mind of people. How this mind is formed however can be attributed to one's genetics, they're surrounding environment and other forms of stimuli.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ethics, psychology, politics, economics and even metaphysics are material in nature if one is able to look at the entire picture.\n","id":"f9aef2ed-30c2-40ad-a2f7-42a3fe9433e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Under the reign of King Henry VIII, the Tudor design was in style, which is still used and adapted today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Different eras of monarchies, specifically the English monarchy, created new and different architecture styles.\n","id":"e9f63e9e-36b3-4604-aa18-67c249e2202d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>When Italian wall lizards were introduced to a new environment in the 1970s, they changed their diet from one heavy in plants to one heavy in insects, and accordingly adapted their morphology over generations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adaptation to new circumstances and opportunities is a hallmark of evolution, and thus nature in action. A changing diet that overcomes the physical adaptation to a previous diet is thus natural.\n","id":"5b47ef47-d2bc-44d6-be5f-6c9fef37f234"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have talked to multiple people who have police in the family, and they speak very highly of their family members about how good of a cop their family member is. Yet there are so many problems with the police force that I see which includes corruption, the abusive culture of the police especially towards poor minority populations. A number of police officers have come out to speak against the racism and description of their police forces but only AFTER they quit the force. Whenever there is a situation where a cop shoots an unarmed civilian every cop protects that cop and stays silent. Forms the Blue shield. There are so many atrocities committed by the police that I can't see any cop as good who stays silent and helps protect corrupt cops, or cops that kill unarmed civilians. I've heard many excuses like, they have a family to feed, or if you speak up as a cop you are ostracized. And these are just that, excuses. I don't think you can be a good cop while protecting the bad ones. A police force is a necessity probably. I'm not even 100 percent convinced on that since we know that punishment doesn't detour crime. So I see police as a necessary evil, even the good ones because they protect the bad ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are no good cops because they help protect the bad ones.\n","id":"7a1bfcb2-ffa1-4930-ad34-b15d66064c96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Foreign languages, compulsory in schools JUN<|ARGUMENT|>Pupils cannot decide for themselves what is important. Most do not realise that knowledge of another language will help them in almost any job. For some jobs it is essential. It is hard to learn a language in adulthood, because of time pressures and because the brain becomes less flexible. It is therefore very useful to learn a language when young. Young people are often only concerned with the short term and think little about adulthood. Important choices therefore cannot be left to children. They should be made to learn a language.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pupils cannot decide for themselves what is important. Most do not realise that knowledge of another...\n","id":"740ea031-314e-422a-bb24-c84cf908d2b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>Politicians can currently refuse to release their tax returns and other financial information, making it difficult to account for their finances and therefore to know whether their financial interests are influencing their actions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians would no longer be able to hide or lie about their financial interests when running for office or making policy decisions.\n","id":"3aebd472-6ddf-4ad9-991f-99c650cbf019"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>The Last Jedi was so fun and fast paced for many in a way which made the movie feel short despite its length.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The movie is fast-paced, unpredictable and delightful to watch.\n","id":"dd57a356-94e1-40a2-9667-0647a72cef9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should School be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Research on teaching shows that \"autonomy-supportive in contrast to controlling teachers catalyze in their students greater intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and the desire for challenge e.g., Deci, Nezlek, & Sheinman, 1981; Ryan & Grolnick, 1986. \"Students who are overly controlled not only lose initiative but also learn less well.\" \u2013 it's not unreasonable to expect that voluntary schooling would be even more autonomy-supportive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mandatory schooling undermines a child's natural desire to learn.\n","id":"c8f9f094-5d7e-4e68-be56-97e22b22fe78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is deliberately not preventing someone's death ethically equivalent to killing them?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unfair to hold either a bystander individually responsible, or all bystanders collectively responsible, for not intervening as they may not intervene assuming others might, thereby nullifying their presumed duty to act.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not the responsibility of bystanders to intervene in life or death situations.\n","id":"bc2fd8f5-a582-4002-ac91-5cd1cab0b2bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US-Indian nuclear deal<|ARGUMENT|>What role does China play in the U.S.-Indian nuclear deal? It is a motivating factor in the deal, some experts say. China's rise in the region is prompting the United States to seek a strategic relationship with India. \"The United States is trying to cement its relationship with the world's largest democracy in order to counterbalance China,\" Ferguson says. The Bush administration is \"hoping that latching onto India as the rising star of Asia could help them handle China,\" Sokolski says.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US-India nuclear deal helps protect both countries from China.\n","id":"ce85d7e1-e609-4f76-a2b6-c12ac9661e58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ten Commandments: Display in Schools<|ARGUMENT|>It is unlikely that refusal to display the religious text will result in the drastic action of parents withdrawing a child from school. Ultimately, parents have a right to home school or educate their children wherever they wish \u2013 if this means they exercise that option, then so be it. Much home schooling is dedicated and successful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious instruction should be taught inside the home, not in public schools.\n","id":"ef790b1d-0cf2-49ef-87c0-0781b6b9a64e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok rather than thinking in numbers start thinking in percentages. From Wikipedia the wealthiest 1 owns 40 of the nations wealth. The bottom 80 own 7 . There is a 1000 gap between the wealth of the middle class and the wealth of the top 10 and then an additional 1000 gap between the top 10 and the top 1 . Imagine a pyramid, of the wealth or in this analogy the weight of stones is pretty evenly distributed the larger amount of smaller stones on the bottom can support the middle stones and then the larger stones. But when you have a situation like we have now where the bottom has no mass, the middle is rapidly shrinking and the top keeps getting heavier the pyramid will collapse. We need to shift wealth from the top and redistribute the balance throughout society so that working hard you can advance but also the workers can reasonably support the top of the pyramid. How it stands now the United States is going to destroy the middle class by having the wealthiest move up and the poorest move down creating an even greater disparity and soon it\u2019s going to get to the point where the workers have had enough. You can\u2019t create a salve labor class in a free society and expect it to just be ok. People will rise up and demand fair compensation. For too many years survival of the fittest and make as much money as you can have pushed the wealth to favor the greedy at the very top of society however the gap of wealth is rapidly reaching critical mass where it will result in an uprising.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe capitalism in the United States is basically a massive pyramid scheme that is rapidly approaching the point of collapse.\n","id":"471fc993-daa2-4f77-9d28-5f02416dbc22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>This can occur legally too, as tomato, a fruit, legally became a vegetable because it's treated like one. If people consider fruits to be used like vegetables when added onto pizza as a topping, then maybe laws could be made to say that pineapples legally are vegetables too or at least when added onto pizza.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People can add pineapple onto pizza, because even though it's considered a fruit, it can also be considered a vegetable, which, by definition is any edible part of a plant.\n","id":"73d61953-9abf-4d20-acce-8febda87f8d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fashion can never be feminist<|ARGUMENT|>Even trends like Female genital mutilation are arguably an offset of fashion as they dictate how a woman's genitalia must look.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many fashion trends sacrifice the comfort, and even the safety of the women who are encouraged to wear them.\n","id":"77619445-5918-4976-9b3b-6c64b1e79ae3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Anybody can get around a background check requirement. Just will get someone with a clean record to buy. Some people who would pass will be paranoid that their name will go on a list when they sign up for a background check. This will drive legitimate sales to a black market. The very fact that these unregulated sales, though they are occurring legally now, will be illegal will in and of itself be bad, as, at least when they were legal people would not view it as a robbery opportunity, but they will now like for drug deals since nobody can call the police. There are parts of the country in which basically no one agrees with this action and view it as a fundamental rights violation whether or not they are correct is not relevant to my point . Enforcement will be nonexistent here as even the police don't think this should be illegal. The most motivated buyers are criminals and therefore the only people this regulation would prevent from buying guns are reformed criminals who want to obey the law now, and there is no harm in these people having guns anyway. This regulation is merely doing something for the sake of doing something.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obama's gun control action is a reasonable sounding and cheap regulation but it will do absolutely nothing to reduce gun violence.\n","id":"0fe8c98c-1edb-461c-9731-da868840107d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Since my 50s parents have gotten divorced, they've actively been harming me and my siblings. They have completely burnt to the ground the family structure and are too lost in their own post apocalyptic drowsiness to do anything that could bring back the family to levels at which they would serve their children. In trying to figure out how to survive this myself, I imagined a world in which my parents would have passed away and that world seemed to me easier than my current one no pretending that the family still means something to me no time and money drain trying to keep people related by blood try to stick together when everything else would pull us apart to move on with our lives. tl dr if you think your parents would be better dead than alive, then cut off your ties to them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An indicator of whether I should cut all ties with my separated parents is if my life would be better with them dead rather than alive.\n","id":"771d29e3-ab53-4374-9d26-8bf5f2b5f40f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>Laws which restrict speech often use far more ambiguous grounds than is found typically in law. As a result, governments are able to stretch the meaning of laws to their own ends.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When governments limit free speech they often do so for their own political interests, rather than the common good.\n","id":"4dcbbd8b-0431-4f8a-bc8b-9c668072434a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This  is not a argument for or against the EC though my stance on it is pretty obvious . Just about what I see as one of its consequences. Trying to argue the EC is good despite this point will not , to  you have to show that this isn\u2019t a fair assessment of how the EC functions in practice or why this isn't actually a bad thing. Basically my point is that people in states with bad economies and undesirable laws, and people who generally find they don't get along with people in their states, will be more likely to move to states that are better at those things. So if you have 2 states that are otherwise identical in natural quality and size, and state A is being run very well and is full of new opportunities and has well written laws that lots of people agree with, while state B has draconian byzantine laws nobody really likes, no job opportunities, and is run by corrupt jerks, people will tend to move from B to A. Similarly, if you have 2 other otherwise identical states C and D and C's citizens has a set of values that are generally popular with most people and has laws that line up with those values, while D's citizens have radical minority views and laws that support those views lets say one is pro choice and one is pro life and not specify which is which to avoid THAT argument then people will tend to leave D to move to C. Because of how the the electoral college works, the consequences of this is that the relative voting power of citizens in B and D and their elected representatives will be more than A and C specifically because they're less well run and less representative of the values of the nation as a whole. It's a system that actively punishes being an attractive and successful government and people. Preemptive counterpoint to giving minority views more of a voice is good EC doesn't do that. It gives states where the majority viewpoint disagrees with the majority viewpoint of the country more of a voice. And it tends to do it in a way that specifically props up voices that are best at motivating people who disagree to leave where that view is majority. If 40 of the people in state A and B have viewpoint X but 60 of A has viewpoint Y and 60 of B have viewpoint Z, viewpoint X gets nothing under the EC because it's not a majority viewpoint in any state. Which also means the EC rewards ideological enclaves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The design of the electoral college tends to make worse run and less representative states more politically powerful\n","id":"d3536a37-f10d-4da7-a5ae-749debc6ea79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide?<|ARGUMENT|>Continuous denial of the Armenian genocide amounts to a double killing because it tries to kill the memory of the event too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Acknowledging the genocide is the first step towards alleviating the damage done to the Armenian community.\n","id":"5965d2b1-a16c-495c-ab20-adb057cbfe55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>If morality were subjective, there would be no justification no standard to prevent an 'evil' act such as rape or murder. As we evolve and become more conscious, our ability to 'recognize' is greater and leads us to 'realize' understand. The objective recognition leads to the subjective realization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain moral truths are inherent to human nature and transcend cultures and time.\n","id":"0e398023-d89d-4445-a181-77398cc07bba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>UBI means less direct marketing - door to door sales and cold calling. Most people only take these jobs when they are desperate and have no other option.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI allows people to take the time to find a better job.\n","id":"75c41e38-59f4-4fa6-a82c-e513858068f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are identity politics detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Because of historical and present-day power dynamics, all males are part of an \u2018oppressor\u2019 group. When a man speaks, his position of power is potentially a form of oppression, particularly if he says something that a woman experiences as oppression. In that case, the woman is justified in silencing him, even if the same statements in the mouth of a woman would have not been experienced as oppressive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most people would recognize that silencing someone because of their gender is a blatant form of sexism. However, critical theory entails that it can be acceptable to silence someone because of gender if his gender is male.\n","id":"873c9af5-e14c-4de8-8f8d-36a43276dfcd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would a society without emotions be a better society?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans own something great and are super content with, only to consider it not good enough a year later and buying the new version of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans feel happiness only in relative not absolute terms and thus everything becomes \"normal\" after a certain period of time.\n","id":"1f7a52e4-10fb-49db-8761-4271fb2f96fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that many pro lifers defend their stance on abortion as being part of their religion, but I also have met many who just view a fetus as another life. I believe that pro choicers who accuse pro lifers of being sexist are just trying to unnecessarily put them down. It is just a matter of opinion on when life starts. I have never met a pro lifer that is against abortion just because they dislike women in general. I am not trying to make an argument, I just want the truth. Just trying to view both sides of an argument. FYI I am semi pro life, I love women, and also am not religious. I know that these arguments are only used by some pro choicers and not all. Not trying to generalize the rationale of a huge group of people. Please do not take anything I said as offensive, and I am sorry if you did. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- I don't see people who are pro-life as being sexist or religious fanatics\n","id":"13fd1b68-c97e-41f5-9769-0229e5a96d95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>The system proposed on 2019-04-17 reduces the \"tail\" aspect of fully elaborated BEV to Approval style.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For example, there is the system proposed on 2019-04-17 and explained better at this link\n","id":"c24a193f-1f70-419b-9ac8-09229bdaeb36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I can get the same clothing from my favorite brands Gap, J Crew, Ralph Lauren, etc. for nearly half the price, maybe even less, on the clearance racks. There are people out there that actually pay 20 for a tshirt or 40 or more for a dress shirt. Why do they do this? Is it a lack of caring or are they wealthy enough to pay full price? Coming from a family that is far from wealthy, frugalness has been a learned trait. Having the want to have nice clothing has given my mom the chance to teach me how to shop frugally. Just yesterday I went to Gap and got a polo for .97. Why would people pay full price when they can get it for a buck? So reddit, could you change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People that pay full retail price for clothing are stupid and non-resourceful.\n","id":"ce3f995d-c2a6-4420-bbca-6968dd7e4f21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pet ownership is an abuse of our planet's resources<|ARGUMENT|>Animals in zoos are caged for life and deprived of the opportunity to develop and fulfill the full range of their interests and needs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoos are essentially just the collections of pets owned by institutions and the suffering of those animals is well documented.\n","id":"23e24732-6a37-4bc7-995f-c4272d188aa3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People with different identities usually choose different fields careers. This has been true in the past and isn\u2019t changing even as society is growing more open. There are still many more men who are engineers and women who are doctors nurses. It seems to me that minorities in these professions female engineers male nurses have an advantage over the dominant demographic. I\u2019m specifically focusing on gender, because race is much, much more complicated. The overwhelming advantage is in diversity initiatives. If a team needs to accurately represent the public, the genders need to split 50 50 which means a female nurse, for example, would have a much harder job getting hired than an equally qualified male counterpart. The same is true if not more pronounced in engineering. Women with equal qualifications as men are more likely to get the same position, simply due to the rules of supply and demand. The same principle expands to college admissions. Both of these advantages have been shown in studies. I\u2019m not necessarily saying that this is a bad thing, by the way. Diversity of thought is important. I just want to recognize the natural imbalance of the system. One of the main counters to this is oppression hostility within the field. This is the point that I\u2019m unsure about. It seems like being in the minority would only exacerbate an already toxic work environment even though an environment like this hurts most, not just the minority . I just can\u2019t see how it could turn an otherwise healthy environment into a negative one. I\u2019m honestly not sure what I\u2019m missing on the subject. I\u2019d prefer data, but I\u2019d love to hear any personal experiences from a field dominated by another demographic. Please, Reddit, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minorities have an advantage in their respective fields.\n","id":"7a68822a-bf9b-4baf-8ec0-f9890f26893d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am talking about Sharepoint, the Microsoft collaboration tool. I have worked at two companies one large and one small that use Sharepoint as their main collaboration site, and I've used other systems through vendors or customers. Sharepoint is a swiss knife that tries to do everything, but it does nothing well. Here are the reasons why I think it sucks Learning curve is extremely steep for any automated action i am trying to implement. I am not a computer programmer, but I know a bit of scripting and understand the basics of programming. I spend more time trying to implement simple activities like adding a Table of Contents to a wiki page and troubleshooting instead dumping all the information I wish to provide. A better tool for wiki pages is Confluence. Document collaboration, this is probably one of the better parts of tool, however it is still lacking. It is great that you can use the web versions of word or excel, however a lot of the features implemented in the installed versions, that people are used to using, are not implemented in the webapp. Google Documents implementation of the web based word and excel are better. Document Control, the publishing and versioning, is not intuitive at all. It is very difficult to find where the previous versions of the same document reside and there is little to no notification about overwriting or creating a new document on the site. The only other tool I used for document control was internally built. Ticketing Forms. Creating tickets and forms is difficult and a lot of what could be automated behind the scenes, is required to be implicitly built by the form creator. Jira is much better system. Sorry that I am venting my frustrations via this method. Instead of spending so much money in sales people, Microsoft should seriously look into better documentation sites and listening to customer's frustrations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sharepoint sucks. It Reduces Productivity Than It Actually Helps.\n","id":"efedb332-e305-4d7a-93be-3e5441cf5e65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit My view has largely been changed. Mostly, this change is due to the second way to  I mentioned There is no effective way to ensure government can access data. Any attempts to outlaw methods that government cannot reach which I still hold can be done without breaking encryption for normal users run into the issue of proving such methods were used. Generating plausible deniability there is simply to easy. As stated, I still do believe it is possible to create ways to encrypt data that would be wholly secure, and yet would allow the government access to the data in cases where that is justified. The issue is that there is no way to prevent the other encryption methods from being used. Whether it would make sense for a few 'socially responsible' companies to adopt this method I do not know. As the title states I think the 'Encryption Problem' is a valid concern. Now, to make sure we are on the same page I mean the following with the 'Encryption Problem' gt Strong end to end encryption is making it harder for authorities to access communication and data. This is to the benefit of malicious parties. By this being a 'valid concern' I mean that we should actually do something about it. Obviously it is hard to deny that encryption is useful for those with malicious intent and that this is a bad thing. I am further stating that this is a bad enough thing we should look for a solution. However, I do NOT believe the solution lies in mandatory backdoors. Key escrow in its simplest implementation is also a no go, though I imagine there are cryptographically secured variations of it that would be acceptable to me. I understand the importance of encryption for non malicious people, and thus would not accept any solution to the problem that significantly compromises encryption for these people. In general, it seems to me that any solution should not depend on complete trust in the government. The easiest way to do this would be to make each case of access to encrypted data part of the public record, able to be appealed, and only be possible after independent review. Basically, it should require something like a court order or a search warrant . The above requirements should be absolute. That is, it should be enforced by more than just policy. The best solution I have come up with so far involves making a judge capable of compelling anyone to give access to data they encrypted. Though this does have its posibilities. The way I see it there are two ways to  Convince me that any effective solution to the problem hurts non maliscious people to much Convince me that there is no effective solution to the problem Please note I do actually understand how encryption works, having studied it in my bachelor in mathematics and encountering it now in my master computing science. Later realizations An interesting point I came across is that any solution requires some way to retrieve the key, as any serious form of encryption can be broken without knowing the key. I am not arguing this is needed to defend against the big bad guys. Any solution will always be circumvent able by roll your own encryption solutions that ban roll your own encryption fail because you cannot prove some piece of data was encrypted See this post for more detail on how I think key escrow might work. For key escrow, I no longer believe it to be as viable. See this post for more details.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the 'Encryption Problem' is a valid concern\n","id":"60532f02-ea30-46cb-978d-002fee6941df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For a lil background I am a Catholic Christian raised in a Catholic family, and who studied in 2 private Catholic schools for about 14 years elementary up until college . ^ Not sure if this is relevant but I say Catholic Christian because while fam I grew up as Catholics, I always found Catholic masses boring and traditions pointless we then tried out a Christian worship service and found it way more meaningful, and we've been going there ever since. ^ But ^ none of us are baptized as Christians so y'know. Idrk what I am lol As for my view I do believe in God, but that's about it. I think that, if you're worshipping a God, your personal relationship with him is more important than whatever crazy rules or traditions that religion has. I get that believing in that God should therefore mean respecting a certain set of rules he has laid out like the 10 Commandments or as written in Torah Bible Qur'an , but I've always found some rules irrational. Maybe this comes from a place of Catholic bias but stuff like being forbidden to eat pork or anything that comes from it even if it doesn't have pig in it anymore , wearing head face coverings, being forbidden to cut alter your hair, being forbidden to celebrate birthdays, and being forbidden to mix meat and dairy are just some things I can think of that I find a bit unreasonable. Don't get me wrong, I understand that the basis for some of these rules are medically or morally sound, and you may have a choice in others, but they just don't sit right with me because the rules in themselves don't specifically contribute to your relationship with God? Maybe I'm being contradictory here by saying that, considering that those rules supposedly came from God himself, but I still can't help but question them sometimes, and question the people who willingly and wholeheartedly follow them. Maybe it's just me, but imo some of these rules feel like they take away from people's free will or disregard how they feel about things or what they want to do with their own bodies lives. Another part of why I think like this is because of the acts of violence committed by people in the name of religion , whether it's because they're trying to purge those who don't have the same beliefs or something else. Terrorism, wars, discrimination and whatnot. I've read somewhere that most of those times, they don't have religious but rather political motives. But even if that were true, I think it still kinda discounts the microaggressions of people gatekeeping to their religion e.g. You're not going to be saved You're going to hell because you don't believe in X or Y . Or idk, maybe they're just being assholes in general, regardless of religion or politics?? Honestly I used to believe that perhaps all religions were inherently the same, that we all believed in the same God and just called him different names and differing cultures just meant differing methods of worship. But now I'm not so sure if this kind of belief is worth anything or just another childish fantasy trying to find correlations for the sake of peace. x200B While I hold this belief, I do not discount the benefits religion has brought to people as well. I know that in many cases, religion has inspired people to lead successful bloodless revolutions, help the poor, and even stand in solidarity with other religions. It's really just those kind of rules. Am I nitpicking too much? I understand that this is prooobably a difficult ish, subjective topic to discuss, but I don't mean to speak from ignorance or anything. I spent a lot of free time reading other related posts on this sub and many online articles in the hope of understanding the reasoning behind those religions and rules. Even now, as I type, I keep searching for articles to enlighten me even before this gets posted. But while I do mostly understand why they rules exist, I'm still at a loss on why people choose to submit, no matter how ridiculous it might seem. x200B Maybe this is being borderline agnostic? Idk? But I do find myself constantly questioning religious related things I hear or come across Sorry for the wall of text, this has just been on my mind for a long time and it really messes me up whenever I think of it lol I'd love new perspectives on this, and I'd definitely appreciate eye opening inputs so feel free to ask and I shall expound if needed x200B Side question Does it make a person morally bad? if they openly respect a person with these kind of religious beliefs yet deep down inside think those beliefs are wack? For example being considerate of a Muslim person and their restrictions not offering them pork or alcohol, not asking girls to show their hair, offering them non gelatin based medicine, basically just being a decent person towards them etc while lowkey thinking why are you following this these are crazy . Does that count as being fake, considering your actions and thoughts are contradictory??<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is kinda...ridiculous\n","id":"a6a279a4-33d4-4b62-bea5-b76d625be038"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments bailout journalism?<|ARGUMENT|>NPR and PBS are great examples of how government subsidization can grow thriving news organizations. They are also good examples of how government subsidization does not generally impede on independent reporting. NPR and PBS both include edgy programs and have heavily criticized the government for its actions. In reality, government subsidies do not get in the way of what NPR and PBS see as their journalistic obligation to remain independent and provide citizens with sometimes critical reports of their government, when those reports are warranted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NPR\/PBS are great examples of what subsidization can achieve.\n","id":"663eefa2-353b-478c-9813-9e823132db4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Nonhuman animals are the personal property of their owners, even if recognized as a special kind of property. As such, they cannot themselves possess legal rights, because they are the objects of the exercise of someone else's rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most animals whose meat is eaten have been the property of humans. Their property rights conflict with animal rights.\n","id":"47c16679-a53e-45e5-9fa6-5324d59feb4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NASA, Government funding for<|ARGUMENT|>We should solve our problems here on Earth before we go into space. The environmental damage that mankind has inflicted on our planet is so great that life on earth is in great danger. At the same time millions of children go to bed hungry and die of preventable diseases. Tackling these issues is such a global priority that all our resources need to be directed to saving the planet and its, rather than frittered away into space. If our nation\u2019s technological might and the efforts of its best scientific minds were directed to these causes instead of cosmic ones, we have a chance to reverse our suicidal course.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should solve our problems here on Earth before we go into space. The environmental damage that m...\n","id":"1d25a008-a7fb-4365-9923-12283deb872b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state ever infringe on individual human rights when countering terrorism?<|ARGUMENT|>The Human Rights Committee, while commenting on the ICCPR indicated that to be legitimate, a security measure must not just prevent the harm it claims to prevent, but also be the least intrusive instrument required to achieve the desired result. p. 20<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A number of fundamental human rights are not absolute and can be restricted by the government for valid reasons, including the needs of countering terrorism.\n","id":"f1fa613c-4564-445b-bbf8-6eba633c1836"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know popular thought says hard work success. But my life has convinced me otherwise. In times when I've worked harder than ever, I've not been able to reach my goals. Yet in times when I cruised, I achieved things other people struggle to. I see people work so hard equally hard and what determines why one person achieves when another doesnt if not pure luck? Of course you do the prep work and maximize exposure to opportunities but beyond that I feel like its just pure circumstance and timing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Luck is more responsible for success than hard work.\n","id":"4ef81396-057c-419d-972f-02a50bd15a2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>A large physical, emotional cost is required by the mother to grow the embryo into a living baby. It should be her choice to make major lifestyle changes and provide her womb as an incubator. If the cells require the mother's nutrients and body to exist, it is her right to provide them or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the fetus is not part of a woman's body, the woman inherently has the right to remove it from her body.\n","id":"ccc44502-2ba9-4a13-9587-924869db65c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>The West's deterrence capacities stem mostly from the Cold War. The deterrence mechanisms that were effective back then - for example nuclear weapons - are mostly useless against new threats, for example terrorism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Deterrence is relative to the threat posed and has to constantly adapt as new threats emerge.\n","id":"871a41d7-bb5f-4a6f-94dd-35078a1ecd3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Parents pay a hefty yearly tuition for their children to go to a private school. But, in most cases the classes are divided and some students are put in honor classes and are able to take AP classes, while other students are not given the same opportunities because of how they do on placement tests or their teachers don't think they would be able to handle it. But all the parents are paying the same amount for each child that goes to the school. Then in result some students are more prepared for college while others are not as prepared. And if a child isn't able to keep up with the program then they shouldn't be in that specific private school.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private schools should provide the same education for all students\n","id":"82fd007e-1220-4f21-8e38-e81751be80d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>The real EU referendum results were as following. Of the total eligible vote: Leave: 36.7% Remain: 35.3% Undecided\/didn't vote: 28%. This shows there is no clear mandate for Brexit, as there was no clear majority in support of or in opposition to Brexit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One single referendum cannot accurately define the trend in public's opinion.\n","id":"d0fa9252-56ce-409c-bbc6-a447ca7f1472"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The result of many experimental genetic changes are death and severe disability. Humans are much more expensive to raise than mice, and society values their lives much more highly. It isn't practical to convince society to accept vast spending and wholesale human death to study a disease.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mice are a much more practical for genetic research than humans.\n","id":"7439c879-c91f-4bc6-b57f-7a313b8388b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>The fossil records, geological and radiometric data attest to millions of years between evolutionary steps, likely more than 2000 million years between the earliest one-celled life and modern human beings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The creation of the Universe in seven days is irreconcilable with scientific findings.\n","id":"86431349-a63b-42a9-aca8-c97690823ede"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The ACLU and Charlottesville: Should the ACLU Defend White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Anti-racism and white supremacy are based on two fundamentally opposed axioms that cannot be reconciled with each other. Rational debate can only function properly if there is a shared axiom on which the debate is based, otherwise participants are effectively arguing with each other in different languages, and as such nobody is likely to be persuaded of anything.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This assumes that there is a market place of ideas in which the 'best' idea will always win out. In reality, public discourse is distorted by a number of factors that makes this outcome less likely on the question of bigoted and racist speech.\n","id":"60e39a57-06fc-4cdd-a047-04857cb4539d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Thanos' goal in reducing the population of the universe by half was to reduce resource consumption. Thanos, furthermore, seems to view each death as regrettable but necessary. Given that, it seems that an efficient Thanos would try to maximize the reduction in in resource consumption per death. The way to do this would be to kill not half the universe at random, but rather kill in descending order of resource consumption until the desired reduction had been implemented. This provides the optimal ratio of reduced resource consumption death toll.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Thanos was horribly inefficient\n","id":"f3ce79fa-e90b-4cc3-af0c-e04a49b18d82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the West give development aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Vaccines are thermo-sensitive and require cold-chain delivery to secure their efficacy upon arrival. Such delivery requires quality roads, access to electricity and human resources. The delivery of vaccines preventing fatal diseases such as cervical cancers is extremely costly and requires the financial support of intiatives such as GAVI.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without accessible, available, affordable and quality health facilities, as recommended by the WHO the health of the population cannot be secured.\n","id":"fb89910d-2b53-4e4b-97c2-31d28e9f0387"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I posted this to r casualconversation, and u DickNickerson suggested I post here. Seems legit. I think this piercing is really dumb looking. It looks like a cow ring, no matter what type of jewelry is worn. I have never seen a single person I think a septum ring looks good on. Its just not flattering. These piercings used to be rare, but now tons of otherwise attractive people are getting them and screwing with their faces. I dont think it works with the lines of the human face it draws the eye to the nasoglobal crease, lengthens the nose and overall is just not a good look. this pretty girl in one of my classes came in one day with a swollen nose and this huge ugly black bullring hanging an inch down from her nose. I just wanted to grab her and yell WHYYYYY I'm not against piercings and have some strategically placed, but these are not aesthetically pleasing in the least I am obsessed with aesthetics Can you show me examples of this actually looking good and complimenting a face well? change my opinion of them somehow? edit I want to clarify that I'm ALL for doing what makes you happy, and understand that aesthetics are subjective. I want to understand the appeal other people see. edit2 this may be misplaced in the wrong sub, i'm not sure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think septum rings look really stupid on everybody who has them.\n","id":"e316f09c-cde0-4898-81d6-2a80f5905c71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Google Glass tried to do too much by including a camera, which is an invasion to privacy and made it awkward to use in a social situation. By removing the camera, people will be more comfortable with the technology. Removing the camera can also reduce the bulk and make it look more like a normal glass. I do realise the usefulness of having a camera, but I think the better implementation is to have the Glass connect to a phone camera wirelessly when needed. The display itself should be used like smart watches, for displaying notifications and as an interface to the voice assistant. Intel is developing a similar glass display technology, which projects a low energy laser bean directly into the retina. I think Google should completely redesign the Google Glass and make it even better than Intel\u2019s solution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"it was a mistake to include a camera with Google Glass. The next generation of wearable display should omit the camera.\n","id":"ecf1301f-fb09-4a81-a69b-92c7b8540e53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To the best of my knowledge, rape by deception is when you get someone who wouldn't consent to have sex with you to have sex with you by lying or misleading them. This is exactly the scenario when a transgender person doesn't disclose their surgery to their partner. I have no statistics total assumption just post a study saying this idea is wrong and my view will be changed but I don't think the majority of people would be okay with sleeping with a transgendered person. And look I know this is ripe for a social justice warrior to rant about but I'm really looking for a factual answer, rather than a moral answer. The scenario is Guy takes girl home from a bar, they have sex. Girl used to be a dude, and the guy isn't okay with that. His reaction is common sense enough that by withholding the information, the girl committed rape and should be arrested. He deserved to know and wasn't told. There was a video not too long ago where this scenario happened to an Irish ? guy and he was yelling at them to get out of his house or something I can't find it, I'm terrible with Reddit's search function ? So it definitely happens. And I think that person should have been arrested for rape. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that transgender people who don't disclose to their partners that they weren't always a man\/woman are guilty of rape by deception.\n","id":"84437a75-5ca8-4a4d-8446-17faf2a5f1ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>If One of these gods created the others, then that God is most supreme. If they are all equal in source and power, then whatever object is used to measure the amount of \"power\" or the frame of \"origin\" is greater than all of these gods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A multitude of gods does not answer the question of origins sufficiently. There has to be one Supreme entity of power and existence in order to answer the question of origins, and a multitude of gods sheds no light on to what that Entity is.\n","id":"9c44e6a3-5ba6-454c-8a43-92b380870a6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States found itself without a significant existential threat. But optimism was high. The United States found itself in a global leadership role and before we knew it, we had another communism to rally against. Terrorism. 9 11 launched the US into a series of conflicts not quite related to the attack itself, but for which overwhelming public and political support set a precedent. Now, again, the US finds itself without external existential threat, and the global leadership role of the US is waning. China and the collective power of the other BRICs as well as the rest of the world is rendering much of the US' 20th century role as obsolete. Back at home, everyone is pissed, and as divided as we have been in modern memory. The party in power got there with that anger, and I have seen no sign of it fading since they got control of legislature and the executive. And it has held them back. The opposition party is pissed that the party in power can get away with all that they have. And then you have the rest of us. We're the most pissed of all. because we're powerless. The less the country is unified, the bigger this group becomes. And the more we tend to disagree, and tear our own communities apart. This divide, as it grows, normalizes things that would be seen as extremist and honestly atrocious just a few years ago. My own family has been torn apart by mainstream extremism. Please change my view. Please tell me there's some kind of hope and give me a way to work toward it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America is turning on itself because for the first time since WWII, it has no serious threat except itself.\n","id":"262fb6a6-27f1-45bb-9fc3-2e26a3775ed6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>The esteem and prestige held by CEOs attracts candidates. While pay is also important, the dramatic pay disparity seen within companies at present may not be necessary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies would still be able to compete for top executives within the bounds set by government.\n","id":"4abe8af0-76ca-4a9c-8dc9-50b7c11323bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Now an impossible parameter no direct record is being applied. This is easier than challenging premise 1, climate change has occurred but never at this speed, the speed of change can only be due to industry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea of pre industrial rapid climate change cannot be directly tested due to lack of records, but on balance, from indirect methods it is believed to exist and is widespread.\n","id":"7a142604-4892-486e-a8cd-bbc98ccf5cf5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally believe that feminism has been taken over by radical groups like the so called Social Justice Warriors . I therefore believe that feminism has become a misandrist and radical ideology. Many of their speakers are, in my opinion, nuts and a lot of the more so sane ones seemed to have left for the humanitarian and egalitarian ideologies. I also believe that communism a belief that I have more or less an alignment to has been taken over by these groups. Before I am accused of being one, I am opposed to MRAs or any other form of supremacist group. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that feminism has become a radical and hateful ideology.\n","id":"0d4ad7d6-474f-4754-baf2-d2dd3878578d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>SPOILER WARNING Christian Bale Batman , Heath Ledger Joker and Aaron Eckhart Harvey Dent all had incredibly amazing performances. The movie had over the top action sequences, a thrilling ending and lots of standout scenes. The meat behind the story is the morality. But Nolan picks the laziest way to discuss morality possible. Good vs. evil. Batman was over idealized. Joker was over idealized as well as a badass, or evil genius . Harvey Dent existed as a coin flip dichotomy a saint or a mass murderer. It was an allegory, much like George Orwell's Animal Farm of freedom vs. communism. There was nothing to question or ponder. You knew what was what. Dark Knight Rises 2012 was a much more complex movie. It juggled four protagonists, each of which are flawed characters with moments of decency, as opposed to the mary sue nature of it's predecessor. DKR challenged me and I had to watch it several times to give a greater understanding to it. TDK 2008 is fun to watch but beneath the theatrics is quite hollow. I think the reason why Rises 2012 isn't nearly as praised because it's lack of viral footage. It was a movie that you had to take in as a whole, whereas it's predecessor largely consisted of 5 10 memorable scenes. It was a movie that knew it's most powerful moments weren't gun shots or explosions, but it was fed to an audience that valued those things above storytelling. A year after you watch a movie at the theatre, you don't remember much. People remember moments not overarching themes throughout the narrative. The Dark Knight 2008 was a fun summer blockbuster. Actually, it was an amazingly and incredibly fun summer blockbuster. But The Dark Knight Rises 2012 had the depth. It meant so much more. It didn't just pander to my tastes. It challenged them. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dark Knight Rises 2012 &gt; The Dark Knight 2008.\n","id":"7da944ec-36a3-4f3e-89a0-0a847adae926"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All too commonly, we hear the saying absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don't believe this to be true. I don't believe that it is the power that corrupts people, but the fact that people themselves are corrupt to begin with, and that obtaining a position of power just offers them a medium through which to act on their corruption. I do believe that the majority of people are, in fact, corrupt. So assuming you take a random person and insert them into a position of power, it is likely that they will abuse the power that is granted to them. But, I also believe if you take a person who isn't corrupt, and insert them into this same position of power, they will not abuse the privileges and power of the position that is granted to them. I think teachers illustrate this point very well, especially because it is much easier to become a teacher than say, the President of the United States. In this regard, you tend to have a larger sample size and have many more types of people to consider. In most cases, I would say that teachers tend to have absolute power over their classes, at least with regards to day to day activities. Generally, if a teacher says to do something, it is expected that the student comply to the demand of the teacher. If the student disagrees, typically the matter is resolved at a later date with the intervention of a teacher's superior. Taking this assumption that teachers have absolute power over their students, you still tend to find a balance of teachers who abuse their power, and those who don't. If the saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely were true, all teachers would abuse their power, since it is the power that corrupts the person, and not the person that corrupts the power. Parents work well for this example as well. Literally anybody can become a parent, as having a child is as easy as having sex. I would even say that parents definitely have absolute power over their children, even moreso than teachers. But even with parenting, you still tend to find a balance. Some parents are incredibly strict and unfair, dictating arbitrary rules for their children that they themselves may not follow, or rules that have no legitimate reason other than because I say so. I'm not arguing the fact that sometimes parents use the because I say so justification even if the rule does have a legitimate reason, but sometimes parents don't actually have a reason other than I say so. However, you also find parents that are incredibly fair with their children. If a child does not agree with a rule set by a parent, and argues his or her case fairly, there are parents that would reconsider and change their rule for the sake of being fair. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, parents like the latter would not exist, as the power they hold over their child would corrupt them. TL DR  Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely absolute corruption corrupts power absolutely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Power doesn't corrupt people.\n","id":"d1d9cc7a-7e4c-4bdd-be8b-2107e5a0a836"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Science is based on consensus of evidence. This means that while one scientific study may support the argument that A is true, another may show evidence saying A is false.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Academic and industrial contexts expose scientific research to political influences.\n","id":"748dda45-6676-4ff0-801c-ba57fb34b4d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Australia has managed to greatly reduce the number of firearms in public hands almost completely eliminated through buy-back incentives and other programs. The implementation of similar incentives could also be applied in the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Other industrialized countries have gun control and they have lower gun murder rates.\n","id":"a4a40d13-6149-4a3b-a7fb-444bd73b33b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful to the people that have fought, suffered, and died to keep me safe. It's one of the most selfless things that you can do with your life and I admire and have deep respect for those with the courage and honor to fight for people they'll never meet. I'm thankful for the people that allowed two immigrants to come here with nothing, just so they could raise two boys in a better world. And yet still, I must emphasize that I'm thankful to these people . What I don't understand, is the religious like fanaticism that a lot of Americans have for this vague, strange entity of America when people get upset over taking a knee for the anthem, or say things like I'm an American first. Growing up in New York, I didn't see much of this deep, almost blind love, if at all. I have love for the people here and the culture I grew up in, but I feel no attachment to whatever America is. I just don't understand what that means. I think this kind of mindset just isolates us from the rest of the world. It creates needless division over imaginary boundaries. You are a human first, not an American.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't understand patriotism\n","id":"26dee952-d03d-4770-8e04-3591b941a382"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>Free will is a philosophically and scientifically defective concept and to hinge the justice system on a victim's \"right\" to retribution for an act committed by a non-autonomous agent as we all are is a grotesque and unproductive inversion of priorities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is a philosophically fraught statement that contradicts a lot of understood ideas.\n","id":"5b194974-4202-4893-bb65-a324850dc81e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>Replicators can replace supply chains, agricultural infrastructure, shipyards, polluting industries like mining, terraforming operations, banking, shipping, and many of the other vulnerabilities of the Republic. Replicators, a small team of scientists or engineers, and a warp core for power can be dropped inside of an asteroid to create an entire industrialized fortress behind enemy lines that Republic ships won't notice if it isn't on an established hyperspace lane.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Federation has access to replicators which enables a uniquely flexible use of resources.\n","id":"6df083a2-d271-44c9-9289-5bc1ee2593a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>In times of crisis, it is reasonable to believe people have the right to value animals over humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are circumstances in which we must put animal lives ahead of human lives.\n","id":"8f87ac9d-e22a-4980-82b7-8354361487e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>Since most DREAMers are now in their 20s and beyond of which have families--it would be harder for them to start a new life now in another country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since DREAMers have spent their formative years in the US, they are highly integrated within US society and would have a difficult time if sent elsewhere.\n","id":"f050eab3-c44e-483f-a708-f4d938c4286b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't believe animals have intrinsic value. Humans seem to be the only creatures capable of placing meaning on their own or others lives. Animals may matter a great deal to us, but I have yet to be faced with evidence that animals are capable of valuing their own lives to the extent we do. I believe humans have intrinsic value only in so far as they care about what happens to them or are at least theoretically capable of caring ie a baby may not understand its own life but someday will grow too, a suicidal person may not care what happens to them but may change their mind at another time . Again, I believe animals have great value to many humans, but I don't think harm to an animal is wrong in and of itself. If there is evidence of animals being aware to this extent or some other argument that applies, I would greatly appreciate hearing it. Thanks EDIT 1 Hey guys. Thanks for all the answers. Just wanted to clear some points. By animals I'm only referring to other animals besides humans or any animal that has self awareness equal to that of a human. EDIT 2 I'm interested in hearing an argument for animal rights or animal value that isn't based on pain pleasure. I feel like these could make a difference.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Don't Think Animals Have Intrinsic Value\n","id":"c0915634-4648-44b0-9f13-29a48bc87c99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First and foremost, this is not a radical idea. There were several founding fathers who expressed a familiar sentiment, and it was hotly debated. Some believed that a social contract isn't valid if there is no living memory of its drafting. That is to say, that if there is nobody alive who remembers the drafting of it, it no longer concerns the current generation. Others went as far as to say it should be scrapped and completely re written every couple decades on a regular timeline. Although I agree with much of this, I'll take the most conservative opinion, that this should be a one time re write with no current plans to do it again. That's not to say that while writing it I'm against any statements that would declare something like that, but right now I'm just asking for a new one, not saying what I'd want in it. Probably one of the biggest differences between now and the 18th century is our ability to communicate instantaneously, specifically on the internet. We face opportunities and obstacles that were unimaginable just decades ago, nevermind the centuries that it has been. As shown just this last year, warfare can take place without a single shot being fired, such as Russia's campaign to interfere with our elections through a theater entirely in cyberspace. As many have stated we have no safeguards, and we need to examine just how dangerous these threats can be and how to counter them. It also seems like a majority now agree the electoral college is obsolete. Its one possible advantage of protecting against something like an unqualified president has proven false. Through the Internet, we now have the capacity to engage in direct democracy to at least some degree. Things like online petitions and crowdfunding have shown it to be effective in certain scenarios. We need to consider this and drastically re examine our current representative democratic republic status. We have also changed in our economic model. Many warned of the dangers of monopolies at the time of its writing, and as before could not even consider how big some businesses have become today. If we truly consider Democracy to be the number one value our countries holds, we need to consider work place democracy on at least some level. Again, this may seem radical today, but it has been talked about for over a century. Several have tried it, unfortunately often stealing the democratic process from the political sphere to give it to workers in the economic sphere, but others like Mondagon Corporation have prospered. We need to redo our economic policy to account for the upcoming Automation Revolution, and make sure we take advantage from it rather than turn this opportunity into a crisis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States of America has a very outdated way of practicing democracy and our Constitution should be re-written.\n","id":"98777ee2-e4dc-47cd-b5c6-5e1af6fada85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all EU citizens be obliged by law to vote in EU elections?<|ARGUMENT|>The implementation of compulsory voting emphasizes to all citizens that they are part of the same group, that this group doesn't discriminate in its internal decision-making, and that it is expected of them to take part in it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Compulsory voting increases citizens\u2019 sense of civic duty and encourages them to inform themselves.\n","id":"39274bd1-e343-40e5-8f83-10b12dd0c3e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Many prominent African-Americans intellectuals from James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates have expressed support for reparations as a way to achieve equity and justice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More than half of Black people in the United States think that reparations are \"a good idea\n","id":"6fac6daa-bc88-4f8d-a262-0c42d5b3ec18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>The word feminism has been used so much as a derogatory term that the word has come to mean something entirely different; its purpose is to acknowledge that prejudices in history have been mainly toward women, and recognising that, so we can pursue equality between everyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism is now too broad a term, ill-defined and diverse, meaning it is often misunderstood.\n","id":"19118972-cc78-4943-8ead-c39504d22c4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Empirical evidence cannot possibly indicate the non-existence of morality, rationality, beauty, and other metaphysical concepts such as a deity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Empirical evidence\" can neither prove that God does or does not exist.\n","id":"59013d27-095d-4aac-988b-b71781ed7ac1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>According to former Trump University sales manager Ronald Schnackenberg \"he was reproached for refusing to sign up a couple, who he said clearly could not afford the $35,000 price of the class. He resigned after watching another salesman convince them instead. 'I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.'\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump's decision to start and profit from what is known as the fraudulent Trump University is morally wrong because he used predatory \"high-pressure sales tactics\" to sign vulnerable people up to his university and employ \"unqualified instructors to teach false information.\n","id":"d7f4b3cd-7f4f-4ad4-abb5-5819a4e86d2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>8 years ago, the BATFE declared bump stocks to be perfectly legal, unserialized parts that replace stocks on several different types of guns, ranging from ar15s to .22 rifles, and any gun in between. In those 8 years, hundreds of thousands possibly millions of law abiding citizens purchased them for the. With the swipe of a pen, countless law abiding owners of these stocks will become felons, facing 10 years, and up to 250,000 in fines.With practice, you can fire just as fast with a finger alone, rubber bands, belt loops, or a ton of other ways. Personally, I find them silly and a wasting ammunition shooting dirt is boring. However, this sets a dangerous precedent for the second amendment, allowing bans of other non serialized equipment. Lighter trigger pull? Triggers are banned. Shorter stock pistol brace for better comfort if you are female or have a smaller stature? Banned. This is not limited to AR15\u2019s, eventually these bans will come down to old handed down hunting bolt action rifles with a scope on them, being classified as a sniper rifle or over under shotguns with lightened triggers. This is absolutely an infringement to the second amendment, and every Americans rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The recent bump stock ban is not a good thing.\n","id":"4268cbda-c7c1-4801-9e6a-d46239ea1f54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is BDSM Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>Many fictional texts about BDSM describe abusive relationships. This, however, is not true of the majority of real-world BDSM relationships.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"trendy\" pop culture understanding of BDSM is very far from what BDSM really is.\n","id":"873d4120-3be9-42f6-b2a7-aa1adff95bf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>The symbols presented in public places, such as courthouses and schools are meant to represent the current beliefs of a culture. These symbols should be replaced with more accurate and active symbols of the current state of culture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US should remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces.\n","id":"8636edfb-a3b2-4f2f-b953-42d0badccba6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think human ceremonialism, ritualism and sentimentality is useless, idiotic and sometimes harmful. Now, sentimentality is a little on the edge here as I am not referring to all sentimentality. Obviously, being a sensitive person is OK, but I'm talking about a specific type of sentimentality that ties in with the two other things. Where am I to start. I guess I can start at the least controversial angle of my viewpoint. The 1 billion that has been donated to Norte Dame would've been MORE than enough to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And what is Notre Dame? A FUCKING CHURCH. But because of it's historical and religious value , a whole lot of people feel like donating to the upkeep of it instead of the upkeep of our earth. Now, of course I don't believe there should be management of stupidly rich people's donation, redirecting them to the important matters. I believe in personal freedom, I'm just saying, the fact that it is possible in our world that more money has been donated to a fucking church instead of a patch of garbage in one of our oceans, shows the idiocy and harm of human sentimentality. x200B And my viewpoint is that it's just a church. It has no real value beyond that which people give it, inside themselves. But that value they do give it, is based on sentimentality. And ocean is objectively valuable, and cleaning it up is objectively important. Objectively if we're playing on morals at least. Why is this? Because aquatic wildlife is being hindered living a healthy life because of it. It's life vs historical value. It should be an easy choice, but the power of sentimentality is very strong, especially within bloated, pompous, snobby rich fucks or just patriots. Not all patriots are bad . Ask yourself, if you had 30 billion, would any of it go to a fucking church, or would you focus, if not exclusive donate to actual pressing matters with actual value. x200B Here's ceremonialism, which is not as harmful as the former point, but just as idiotic, and also a hindrance of human progression. Probably another of the human quirks that aliens frown upon and one of the reasons they look at us as under aliens. Just for the easily triggered readers, that was a joking exaggeration. So what do I mean with ceremonialism? Well, it's making a big deal out of things, feasting over them, and all the norms and requirements that come with. For example, confirmation. Confirmation is the spiritual passing from child to grown up 14 years old in Christian denominations that practice baptism. In my home country, this has now become not just a part of the religion, but part of the culture, as there is a non religious alternative, called borgerlig konfirmasjon . x200B Personally, I didn't have any of the confirmations, as I am not only against ceremonialism, but also I didn't believe in the ideologies that came with both the Christian one and the other one, some pussified humanism bullshit. Now, what was the result of this? I didn't get money and they did. Obviously, I knew that this was what was going to happen, but it quite amazing to think about it. We all became fourteen, yet they were paid for it which in it of itself is bullshit , whilst I didn't. The difference between us they had a ceremony, I didn't. Now, I believe many ceremonies are good. The kind of feast you have to celebrate a victory is good. Doing therapeutic things for one's psyche is good, acknowledging one's feats and accomplishments is good. But celebrating fucking aging? WHAT THE FUCK. x200B Really, ask yourself this Why should one be celebrated and rewarded for going through with a biological process that one has no control over. So, I want to make this clear, I don't think we humans should just stop partying, quite the contrary, I love partying and getting hammered, but I don't think we should be celebrating all this random things that don't really hold a value within itself. x200B Now, here's the second part to ceremonialism. The norms and requirements that come with it. Put on a formal attire, or a suit. The whole existence of a suit says enough. And it has so much to say. It really does. People cared so incredibly much if other people are dressed for the occasion, it's disgusting. What are clothes' purpose? Protecting you from the elements and covering your private parts. The elements are cold, winds, rain, vegetation, insects, illnesses, the sun, etc. The covering of your private parts is needed because it distracts people, as it is used from reproduction, and people being distracted because of schlongs and vaganas everywhere would make for an ineffective and more overpopulated world. x200B And therefore, that is all clothes should do. But humans, being the extra creatures they are, put all these extra values to clothes. One word FASHION. Another word BRANDS. And don't hit me with the, some brands are a staple of quality . Not all of them, some are just expensive and prestigious, and that's all that is needed. Two factors, one that should be negative and one that shouldn't matter at all, make for an extreme urge to purchase within a great slice of the population. x200B Now I could go on and on about the idiocy and actually harmful effects of norms and tradition and ritualism, but then this post would get insanely long, and I think you've all gotten the gist of my opinion. So, I am very excited to see if any of you can change my mind, if not fully, maybe a little.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idiocy of human ceremonialism, ritualism, tradition, norms and sentimentality.\n","id":"5338d48c-c579-4af7-90d1-1133862b4e73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Jesus the Messiah?<|ARGUMENT|>The first miracle Jesus demonstrated is mentioned in John 2. He turns 6 jars of water into wine 20-30 gallons each. Similiar to Moses' first miracle when he turned all the water in the land of Egypt into blood. Exo 7:19-21<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jesus performed miracles such as curing the blind, paralysis, and dropsy to name a few.\n","id":"999564db-1510-430e-962a-a962657e4ef4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Science Leave Room for Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Although Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions doesn't necessarily rule out the centrality of falsifiability, it shows that paradigm shifts change what counts as potentially falsifying and falsifiable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all theories of science make falsifiability central to how science progresses.\n","id":"f29b2147-87a3-43e9-b9ed-fed1969f99bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Today, Apple announced new wrist bands and a 50 drop in the Apple Watch price. I have been keenly following the Apple Watch since its launch and subsequent iterative increase in functionality via software updates. Despite Apple's attempts to address launch concerns, many reviewers and those in the community have presented concerns that don't seem to be corrected via software. Currently, 3rd party apps load slowly to the point of not being functionally useful. It does not appear to be a software optimization issue either, as 3rd parties have had access to the watch since the beginning. It appears to be an underpowered unit. Secondly, standalone GPS functionality is lacking. No amount of software engineering can offer the precision of GPS without the hardware. Finally, because of its underpowered state, the watch is highly dependent on the iPhone being nearby at most times. All this said, my interest has increased with Best Buy's temporary reduction in price by 100 and theoretically, my interest could be further increased with the new 50 reduction and possible 100 reduction. However, I'm unsure of how likely that second possibility is and it's highly believed the Apple Watch 2 will launch in September 5 1 2 months from now . Given all this, it's best to wait until September for Apple Watch 2.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should wait to buy Apple Watch 2\n","id":"480b99fb-2102-443b-b4fc-0c09b76bf794"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The constitutionality of the NSAs surveillance is discussed all the time online. Specifically what the right to privacy is. A lot of people say that everything they buy should be private, specifically electronics. I look at it as you have the RIGHT to not own a telephone, computer, device with a camera, an internet connection ect. These are all things that the government can use however they please to see into your life. You still have the right to go off the grid completely, pay your taxes, and hide away from modern monitored civilization in private. You have that right, if you want privacy so bad then exercise it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think a lot of people don't understand how rights work.\n","id":"d30773fc-24f6-4ad7-9b6b-8add0a1df22c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>Confederate memorials remind us of a time when Americans senselessly murdered one another. Because we could no longer argue with words, we argued with rifles and cannons to the tune of ~1,000,000 souls. Anything that contributes to helping us remember this costly lesson is worthy of preservation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is important to leave Confederate memorials and monuments up to teach our own painful history.\n","id":"e1f25a47-cefa-43fd-89d9-f99b79be6105"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should selective breeding of animals be prohibited?<|ARGUMENT|>The work of CRUFFA a group of activists campaigning to stop using flat-faced breeds in advertisements, has been endorsed by The British Veterinary Association and many other animal welfare charities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Brachycephalic airway syndrome is a condition that afflicts dogs with intentionally flattened skulls such as pugs, bulldogs, and Boston terriers.\n","id":"e4da8cbc-8c04-4b08-a835-3a3104c9d59b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Democracy is considered by many as the best political system to date. So good, it is not to be questioned. I think it\u2019s a good system, but I am struggling with the one aspect voting. I do not believe that voting always brings out the best solutions for a given problem. The majority votes for selfish reasons and not for the common good. These votes are what gets political parties in power, so, when a party starts it 4 year term, it uses most of its energy to please the population so it can be voted again for an other term. Long term plans like overfishing regulations or a new education plan can be washed away because a new party has been voted and a new plan is created. This can happen and does happen every 4 years without a certain plan ever being completed. Why is it considered so good and holy, that anyone who dares to criticize it is automatically a communist or something else? Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think democracy should be open to more criticism; when the majority votes for something, it is not automatically the best outcome for society.\n","id":"bf6aafba-3a6f-4085-8d80-946b77e5c86d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have friends who happen to be gay. I don't mind and personally, I think there should be no difference whatsoever between what a heterosexual person can and cannot do, and a homosexual. Seriously. HOWEVER. I can't find a proper argument for child adoption when it comes to gay couples although I'd like to . To me, it seems natural that a child should be brought up with a mother and a father. This preconceived arguments stems i guess from an evolutionary point of view, that nature intended it to be that way. . Edit Fuck this subreddit and every single one of you fucktards. Go. fuck. yourselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I strongly believe in equal rights for gays\/lesbians etc. but I can't wrap my head around child adoption.\n","id":"f34f0b49-f268-485e-bbf6-c2b76a75a58e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trophy Hunting Be Illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>In some instances locals are allowed to hunt the animals for subsistence. Doing so can mean feeding members of the community and using the money they do have on other necessities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trophy hunting creates a positive influx of revenue and resources within the local communities.\n","id":"8c56568e-e137-41d0-93e0-a68bd455dfe9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should the Tezos network support tokens?<|ARGUMENT|>Tokens, either fungible or non-fungible serve several purposes outside of just currencies. Transactional data very is very often represented as numbers, so it makes sense to have a common token standard we can use.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Maybe: Tezos should support token creation as an extension of the protocol\n","id":"be92fa2f-f062-49ac-9d3c-e211d2262d66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should medical cannabis patients be allowed to grow their own medicine?<|ARGUMENT|>Patients can give friends and family members access to cannabis even though they are not patients themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is less control over who has access to cannabis.\n","id":"afcb46c5-87cd-4fc3-81e8-9502d1c8abb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I kept seeing dozens of comment saying how amazing exclusives are for PS4 owners, and they made no sense to me. 1 Exclusives are very anti consumer, keeping games from people just because they don\u2019t pay hundreds extra for their console 2 Exclusives might lead to a monopoly if one console gets too many exclusives, leading to an anti innovative industry 3 On the other hand, it most games become exclusives, eventually to play games you will need to buy all the consoles on the market, costing up to a thousand dollars extra spent 4 If you own a PS4, the only difference to you between an exclusive and a non exclusive game is that people who root for the \u2018other team\u2019 suffers. Despite seeing a bunch of comments exclaiming how much they love all the new \u2018exclusives games\u2019, I still can\u2019t see a reason to want them. Why should people who own a PS4 for example be happy that Xbox owners don\u2019t get to play there favorite games other then being selfish for a cause that doesn\u2019t even help them? Edit I was meaning more against the consumer, not against the industry<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Exclusives Only PS4, Xbox 1, etc. are terrible for the gaming industry.\n","id":"60acb604-f634-44e2-9a94-6dab56860d2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>For years the United Kingdom was ravaged by terrorist violence committed by both Catholic and Protestant sides in the Northern Ireland dispute and Europe was plagued by terrorist attacks by Christian activists against new immigrants from Algeria, Morocco, and the Middle East.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A very significant number of terrorists are religious zealots Motivations of Terrorism 53% in 2017 according to the Global Terrorism Database across the range from muslim to christian.\n","id":"db81909f-0d7f-41f6-910d-13e6ce41ff6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>The perception over what is the social norm and what is socially desirable or acceptable cannot be defined by a narrow group of citizens, but must be in line with the virtues of the democratic state and public interest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unlike the unified and consistent rule of law offered by states, vigilantes act on their own brand of justice, based on their personal views of good and bad.\n","id":"db2b2652-ed88-4967-a2e9-61799480e956"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>George W. Bush and Barack Obama treated North Korea and, by extension, China with kid gloves, with the highest priority being to ensure that tensions were minimized during their terms and ignoring the long term threat. Now we have the worst possible situation with President Trump in office while North Korea has, or will soon have, nuclear weapons on ICBMs. Neither president made it a priority to pressure China to end trade with North Korea. Think of a world where George W. Bush adopts a policy where he increases sanctions each year on North Korea as well as laying out a long term policy where he ratchets up import taxes on China, leading to eventual sanctions if China continued to prop up North Korea via trade. Of course, reversals could be made as China clamped down on trade. This, coupled with continued diplomatic efforts with both countries as well as keeping our strategic assets in the region would have likely forced the situation to come to a head much sooner when North Korea was much less dangerous. But I believe neither president had the stomach to do what is right at the risk of their legacy. There was a time when George W. Bush had the stomach, but his bumbling of Iraq made him to impotent to act on North Korea. Barack Obama left every adversarial country more dangerous because he was so weak on foreign policy. Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Egypt, Russia, etc were all worse when Obama left than when he took office. The one argument that I will reject out of hand is that there was no way they could see this coming. It has been clear for over 2 decades that North Korea would have this capability if we didn't act. Here we are. Where am I wrong?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"George W. Bush and Barack Obama left the world a more dangerous place by refusing to deal with North Korea, embracing policies that focused on kicking the can down the road and prioritizing their legacy over the long term safety of the free world.\n","id":"26595467-f042-4827-bb29-977daacce826"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>Some of the leading proponents of Brexit see the longer term economic benefits for themselves as part of a strategic plan to dismantle the structure of civil society in the UK.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Brexit presents a risk for the civil society and social structure of the UK.\n","id":"d7a15e6d-a406-486a-a1a4-b5336eaf0c93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are programs like Alcoholics Anonymous the best way to battle addiction<|ARGUMENT|>Women have reported sexual predation and being pushed into harmful dating within their AA meetings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The environment of Alcoholics Anonymous is often not safe for females.\n","id":"64c54098-1649-47fd-be15-b6166c047446"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> I believe Gen Y and Millennials should be categorized separately and not lumped together the way it currently is in the media. Generational labels have always coincided with the huge leaps society has made in technology over the centuries, which in turn, develop the society in a way that is different than the generations before. Generations should be categorized at the same rate of speed as technology. I grew up knowing I wasn't part of Gen X. As soon as those Pepsi commercials came out, Gen Xers professed their Gen Xdom across the lands yet, here my 12 year old peers and I were with no category of our own. And then, as a young adult, a new category arose Gen Y. Ahh yes. Finally. At 20 years old, recognition that half our lives had been spent with and without the internet. We were unique. We deserved our own generational label, and now it was here at last. Gen Y remembers life before computers and grew up parallel to the internet. We had to learn the Dewey decimal system but also learned basic coding easily Thanks, MySpace . We grew up idolizing and or respecting teachers, police officers, doctors and firemen. It was yes'sir or yes ma'am or, God forbid, we got a spanking and sometimes IN PUBLIC, if we were bad enough. We were raised by war veterans and if we weren't, our grandfathers and uncles sure were Yet, here we are, being lumped in with a new group of kids who are nothing like us. Ones that have no idea what having a private life is like. Ones that now idolize celebrities and strangers with a video feed and won't get spanked, no matter how bad they've been. The Millennials. Talked down upon by every generation before them, including their own referring to Gen Y . They are so different than my generation. So someone please tell me why Gen Y is lumped together with them. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe generational labeling should change at the rate of technology.\n","id":"91118984-0af8-40e2-b4c2-b1e6a6bd2ec9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People work really hard to earn their money and pay a small percentage of their income in the form of taxes. I think that These taxes are supposed to fund things that benefit the citizens. I think that when you use taxpayer money to finance other countries, you are essentially forcing Americans to fund other countries. The US government is made by the people for the people, not by the people for other people. I think that the responsibility to finance projects in other countries lies in the hands of its own citizens and its government, not in our hands.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Foreign aid should not be funded using US taxpayer money .\n","id":"b9d50084-b4a5-415b-8a67-1b1a1392c526"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems like it isn't uncommon for people to resort to using lack of empathy as an insult, especially when discussing social issues. It's my understanding that empathy is largely an immutable personality trait that has little to no component of personal choice involved. Trying to shame someone for not being empathetic is no different than trying to shame someone for any other innate trait of who they are, be it sexuality, race, or physical size. I personally see the act as even worse when it comes up during conversations regarding social issues because it's most likely to be said by someone who would condemn insulting someone based on some part of themselves they can't control. From a perspective of social power, I will go ahead and point out that shaming those who lack empathy is an institutionalized process that comes from the idea of empathy being fundamentally good, as opposed to it just being one aspect of the human personality. So .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shaming someone for a lack of empathy is just as bad as shaming someone for any other inborn trait\n","id":"cf1e16a8-39bc-4623-9300-8e295781f2b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the past I have tried to start reading comic books, but I find a certain hurdle that prevents me from really delving into the medium, the price. While three or four dollars is not much money on its own, the entertainment value of the product, in my experience, not worth the amount I pay. I'll use an example. Recently, I bought the first issue of the new Ms. Marvel series at 2.99. In it, there were 20 pages of story and it took me about 10 15 minutes maybe to read through the whole book. There were about four scenes in the book the store, the house, the party, and Kamala gaining her powers , all of which served to introduce Kamala, but little else. While the narrative was entertaining, it stopped the moment it began to develop, leaving a hook for the reader to dish out an additional three dollars to further the story. Conversely, a film ticket may cost about three times as much about seven ten dollars depending on where and when you buy the ticket , but for that price you're getting at least an hour and a half of entertainment with a full three act story. A book can cost between five to twenty dollars, but for that price you're getting at least several hours worth of entertainment. I've read other comics and I can usually finish an issue in about 10 minutes. To me, paying three or four dollars for about ten minutes of entertainment is not worth it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A comic book priced at $2.99 or $3.99 is disproportionately expensive to the amount of entertainment that can be garnered from it.\n","id":"7b19f00a-7968-4ace-bb9f-3caea70b9eb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If the NSA is recording information about us then they are doing it for our own good. Why does it matter if they are invading our privacy . They already stated that they successfully caught terrorists by taking these extra precautions, so why be so against it?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I support the NSA recording information about us,\n","id":"bf6eb4dc-526a-407d-b0e3-d800d1b7abb9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Tax treatment, in flight meals, seating preferences, alternate testing dates, and special consideration of any kind that is offered in exchange for verification of religious observance is unfair to people without religion. Secular people who have preferences arbitrary or not which are not accommodated on a special request basis, where religious accommodations are made, are having their interests subordinated. Institutions are acting on the premise that religiously motivated predilections deserve more respect, concern, deference, and action than those derived from other reasons. From a secular point of view, respecting the beliefs, preferences, and interests of religious people may be fine so long as the same courtesy is offered for non religious reasons to non religious people. At least in American society, this is not the case. The reductio ad absurdum might be In American probably other liberal countries society, it is in the best interest of atheists to fabricate a religion in order to give equal weight to their interests. Edit So far interesting points are This is a result of economics not unjust preference. But, then special treatment should be allowed for in all situations where economically viable and not only scrutinized when spurred by non religious reasons. Society must scrutinize religious beliefs, actions, and preferences as well as secular ones and this should be done on an equal footing. 501 c 3 s are a mess<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Accommodations offered on the basis of Religion discriminate against atheists.\n","id":"a53218aa-5c06-427e-8cae-b5cc9d4260e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY, IF YOU DONT WANT TO READ THEM GET OUT OF THE THREAD NOW I don't think Dexter is bad excluding the final season . I enjoy seasons 1 4 and 7. I have the same issue with the portrayal of Dexter as I often do with Batman. Batman is depicted as this dark avenger, but it's all superficial, he typically \u2022Doesn't kill people \u2022Respects the police's authority \u2022Doesn't hurt people too bad \u2022Gives too many chances He's as much a Boy Scout as superman. Superheroes that have a genuine darkness to them are highly questionable in their heroism , like the punisher and Rorschach. In the same vein I don't buy Dexter's dark passenger. He has a thorough process that almost always kills only those who everyone agrees deserves to die. I never feel threatened by him, never feel disgusted or uneasy about him. I do feel moved by moments of him discovering more of his humanity end of season 3, him first fucking Rig in season 1 , but even in the very beginning I still felt he was a Boy Scout. This could've been counter acted by him making more mistakes, his choices in victim being more questionable, his state of mind being more questionable, etc. I don't question whether or not he should be doing what he's doing more than I question Batman or the Green Arrow. The structure of the show aside from his characterization further supports my feelings. The constant struggle and brushes with his identity being discovered, his family gradually learning the truth more and more, the stream of love interests, each season having a main antagonist while many episodes have small scale antagonists and all of them being serial killers Serial killers should be depicted as rare because they are, having a serial killer of the week feels cheap and makes the antagonists feel mundane only Trinity ever spooked me and that's because of the actor's stellar performance . Overall this series feels like Smallville with an edgelord coat of paint. Just replace people effected by kryptonite with serial killers and the story is pretty 1 to 1 with the first few seasons of Smallville. Having a serial killer protagonist can work, but Dexter is too romanticized for it to be as dark and gritty as the show thinks itself to be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dexter is a superhero show for all intents and purposes\n","id":"3b131272-2b56-4448-81b8-7a44d1db0a50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Rehabilitation vs Retribution<|ARGUMENT|>Imprisonment: A special consideration. Rehabilitation is not only important when the court is deciding on the sentence. It is also important when it comes to actually carrying out the punishment. This is perhaps the clearest with sentences of imprisonment. The role of the criminal justice system does not end with the pronouncement of a sentence \u2013 for what is to happen to the offender while he is serving his time in prison? Surely we should be trying to help him change: we should provide him with meaningful skills training, with behavioural-treatment programs, with counselling and so on. In other words, we should be trying to rehabilitate him while he is in imprison since he is going to be there anyway, instead of just thinking that the job is done. This rehabilitation also plays a role in determining the content of punishment and the shape that it takes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Imprisonment: A special consideration.Rehabilitation is not only important when the court is deci...\n","id":"1cabfa87-015c-473b-8cb7-977b9767e3a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Contrary to most female sex workers, who are heterosexual, many male sex workers participate in sexual activities that are not even of the sexual orientation of their choosing, making it even more of a stigma and harder to swallow.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many male sex workers provide services that are very challenging such as heterosexuals who serve homosexual clients.\n","id":"626f8223-7941-43c8-8cdb-71ba4757d427"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>The prospect of a painful death is more horrible and shocking than the prospect of a painless death and, thus, is more of a deterrent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Painful methods of execution will serve as a better deterrence for potential offenders than painless methods.\n","id":"ca35de7e-b8c0-43b7-97b7-126f32231b04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The most important word in my claim is know . I would agree with the idea that a person might think they don't like a food they've never tried. Or maybe they believe or expect that they don't like the food. They just can't know that they don't like the food. For example, if someone has never tried sushi, then they cannot truthfully say I don't like sushi. That statement implies that they know that they don't like sushi. Even if a person has tried a very similar food, they still can't say that they don't like a food they've never tried. If someone has tried sushi but not sashimi, then they cannot say they don't like sashimi. They could certainly say I don't think I would like sashimi because I have tried sushi and I did not like it. , if you can. Edit This question ended up revealing difficulty in the ambiguity what does it mean to like a food? Liking something is an opinion, and a person's opinion can be formed without having all relevant data. It is possible that a person's opinion can change after gathering additional data i.e. by eating the food . It is also possible for a person to decide on an opinion and then stick to it, no matter what else happens. Some who opposes the way a food is made may say that they do not like that food. The experience of eating that food is not relevant to that opinion. By the way this  statement was worded, that person does know that they don't like a food without trying it. Additionally, food can be prepared with slight differences. Even if someone has tried a food once, they can only say that they liked it the one time they tried it. They do not know that they will like it again. This realization basically throws this entire  statement out. I continue to consider it a fact that a person cannot know that they like something until they have tried it, but that now also includes recipes that they have tried before. So while I maintain that someone does not actually know whether they enjoy eating a particular food without having eaten it, I do acknowledge that people can choose an opinion about whether or not they like a food without having eaten it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You cannot know whether or not you like a food if you have never eaten it.\n","id":"17fbec56-9f1d-413f-8ffb-bb09813f5476"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The legal age should be lowered to 16.<|ARGUMENT|>If you\u2019re as mature as a 18 year old and have the brains of an upper class men, you deserve the same rights as a 18 year old.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many teens 16 years of age show a high maturity and academic level\n","id":"99ed2adc-3ec7-490f-957d-01ed0bf224f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we create and adopt a universal currency?<|ARGUMENT|>Seeing as the value of a currency fluctuates depending on a number of factors such as a country's economic activity, growth prospects, and geo-political risks, the stronger the value of a currency, the stronger the country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The prices of currencies reflect the country's economic throughput and is a helpful statistic in determining the health of an economy.\n","id":"495e4e25-09f9-4815-80ec-8120ae9cc796"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Lower income countries can ask for financial support if they can't afford to take in refugees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A country's wealth is irrelevant to whether it should take in refugees.\n","id":"11b2c63c-6e60-4266-b14b-348444fe8293"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>7% of voters who voted for Obama in 2012 didn't show up to vote in 2016. These voters are mostly young and non-white.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democrats will rally behind whichever Democrat wins the nomination in order to defeat Trump.\n","id":"64301cbd-7e30-443e-bfa7-8390943713d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>Fairtrade coffee farms are not allowed to employ any full-time workers. This means that for harvest, seasonal workers must be employed on short-term contracts. This fails to create any long-term job stability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fair trade certifiers do not monitor and enforce the payment of minimum wages to temporary workers that are employed to harvest the farm produce.\n","id":"efaeb7ef-b756-4ca5-b4f9-7e8fa10975d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Having recently experienced a divorce and seeing firsthand how messy and unfair child custody, alimony, and child support laws and family court can be, I naturally looked into the Men's Right's Movement and sought to look into how I could go about advocating for fairer laws. What I found is that the Men's Rights Movement is an unfocused movement that seeks to get rid of all differences in boys and girls toys, have men being about to come into work in drag without fear of reprisal, and many other totally niche issues. Feminism and the civil rights movement initially experienced success by pushing for a few key issues, such as voter rights and equal legal treatment, issues which almost any fair minded individuals would stand behind. I think Men's Rights should have the same strategy to maximize popular support and increase viability of the movement. How does having an unfocused movement that keeps unpopular issues under its banner benefit the movement as a whole and benefit the men of America? Edit I'm realizing that the Men's Rights arena is larger than r mensrights. I need to learn more about the subject.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Men's Rights Movement Undermines Itself\n","id":"e3f6bf82-9886-4892-a25e-8d1ee4d9b895"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does slang prevent young people from being able to communicate properly?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Grammar is seen when pidgins evolve into creoles. Usually the children who are raised speeking with the pidgins will get together and agree upon a structure of words for the pidgin, this applies grammar to their system of communication to create the Creole\"- We adults cannot develop or learn language as well as children do. They dictate the most efficient forms of communication for the times. We cannot stick to one form of a language for a very long time and they're the only ones young and innovative enough to allow language to evolve naturally.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Grammar is often the handiwork of young tots; let them have it\n","id":"89a22c8c-715f-466d-a568-a50a256e5731"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Thanks for reading and before I say anything else, I should say that I really do hope someone changes my view on this. War and mass death isn't something I want. I searched for WWIII in this sub before posting to see if anyone had brought this up and the only relevant hit was some jackass who was saying we should have WWIII to fight overpopulation and because mass death is good for the middle class. I hope you guys won't equate my views to something like that, or if that can't be helped, that you'll do you best to change my view through well reasoned arguments. We've all heard, I would guess, the question of whether there's such a thing as a just war. The usual answer is that most wars are unjust, but something like WWII, where we well, The Allied Powers were fighting to end The Holocaust, was a good move on our their part. The assumptions that I think are implicit in this are first, that WWII was fought to end The Holocaust, and second, the common thought that if something on the scale of The Holocaust were happening right now the world would unite to stop it. The United States has a horrible, shameful history of ignoring genocide so does the world, in fact, but as an American and given my background, I'm only really qualified to speak on its history . There's a lot of good sources talking about US response to The Holocaust. Here are some 1 2 3 The short of it is that Roosevelt knew that The Holocaust was happening and not only didn't take any action, but he worked to keep anyone else from taking action, meanwhile, Jewish refugees hoping to escape to the US were forced to turn back and return to Germany. When an eyewitness of a Polish death camp eventually met with Roosevelt, the president didn't ask a single question about the Jews but did ask how the horses in Poland were doing. The blame isn't just on the government even news agencies didn't report the information they knew about The Holocaust or intentionally made it a short, buried blurb. Whenever any news agency did prominently cover news of The Holocaust, the US government outright denied it was true. There's a few different reasons why this happened, but the most prominent is that the US simply didn't want to intervene. They didn't want to get dragged into a war even to save the lives of many millions of innocent civilians. After WWII the UN was formed and adopted the Genocide Convention of 1948 which 146 nations are now parties to. It was drafted to insure that nothing like The Holocaust happens again, and all 146 signatories are mandated to intervene, by use of military force if necessary, if they know of genocide having been committed, of a conspiracy or attempt or incitement to commit genocide, or even of complicity with genocide having occurred. As you all know, there have been many genocides since then. Putting the focus on Rwanda for just a moment, where in 1994 about one million ethnic minorities were killed in the streets, most often with machetes, after a planned genocide was incited on the nation's mostly Catholic radio stations. Here's how the US responded They knew there was going to be a genocide and exactly who was going to be leading it. They actually spoke to those people and tried to convince them not to commit the genocide, but took no action once they said no. The US refused to jam the radio broadcasts inciting the genocide, which it easily had the power to do, citing cost as the reason for their inaction. Once the UN actually did begin to intervene in the genocide, the US lobbied for a total withdrawal of UN troops. And most cowardly Secretary of State Warren Christopher forbade anyone working for the government to say the word genocide , because admitting that a million ethnic minorities being chopped up with machetes in the streets was genocide would mean that the Genocide Convention would require them to intervene. Sources 1 2 Even now, atrocities are being committed and ignored all over the world. The most widely and willingly ignored atrocities, in my opinion, are those taking place in North Korea Right this very moment, in 2014, as you read this, there are at the very least 150,000 innocent people being tortured and killed in concentration camps in North Korea. If you want to be horrified, read accounts and see the drawings of the concentration camps from escaped prisoners and former guards 1 2 3 4 And that's not even mentioning the horrific living conditions that all North Koreans have been subjected to by their leadership for decades, which has taken the lives of many many millions of North Koreans. Iran has prisons with the specific purpose of raping and torturing women who are imprisoned there 1 2 3 Meanwhile, Iran's state sponsored terrorist group Hezbollah is just one of countless religious extremist trying to wage war against the world and uses nuclear mushroom clouds as images during their rallies 1 2 at the same time that Iran is undeniably working towards acquiring nuclear weapons Back to the idea of a just war. The US has almost never entered a conflict for moral reasons, even when they had plenty available to them. I think that too many people naively think, Well, if something like The Holocaust were to happen again, of course we would do something about it. More often than not this leads them to rationalize in reverse that because we aren't intervening, things must not be all that bad in the more horrific parts of the world. The second justification in a just war is usually in self defense. While it's true that civilians in the US and other major western powers aren't being attacked in the same scale as the civilians of smaller or less fortunate nations though let's not forget that there have been and continue to be many attacks against against western civilians , I don't see how a political border is enough to separate a civilian in another nation, especially one who stands for the same principles and ideals that I do, should be so much more categorically different from me than another person in my country who I despise. The poet John Donne wrote an amazing commentary on this, which you've all heard referenced in some way, as he was sick near death in the 1600s in a monastery where a bell would toll to signal to the priests that one of the sick was about to die and needed to have prayers said for them as they died. He noted that he might be so sick, without realizing it, that he was the person that the bell was tolling for. He then goes on to realize that it doesn't ultimately make a difference No man is an island unto himself. He was a part of the whole of humanity, and just like any European nation being sunken into the sea makes Europe lesser, any loss of life directly concerned him because it was a loss for the humanity he was a part of. He wrote gt therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee. I don't see how there's any consolation at all to be taken in knowing that it's only your fellow human beings somewhere else being tortured and killed. Let's even say none of these nations were openly hostile towards other nations, particularly those in the West which almost all of them are . Let's say that if we just let them be, nothing bad would ever happen to us, only to their own people. Don't basic international human rights mean anything ? Are we, who take so much pride in our civil rights and sense of justice utterly unwilling to make sacrifices for our fellow humans, our brothers and sisters, who just happened to have the misfortune of being born inside the wrong political lines without the means to escape? Is there nothing that we won't allow someone to do to innocent human beings? If World War III were to start tomorrow, almost everyone would already know which country is on which side. On top of that, the Russia North Korea Iran and so on side of the conflict seems to be doing a disproportionate amount of escalating global conflicts. George Orwell, my favorite author and someone whose essays I seriously recommend to everyone, wrote in an essay on Gandhi gt Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement. And he's been right so far given that horrible atrocities are being committed by small, weak nations that we could easily stop if it weren't for their political ties to stronger military powers and our unwillingness to start a war. I understand that war is horrible and, hell, I'm a healthy male of fighting age and probably wouldn't fare well if an world war broke out. I want it to be avoided in any way possible, which is why I'm hoping someone here will be willing and able to change my view and help me see a solution to these problems that would allow us defend basic human rights globally in a genuinely effective way and without resorting to war. Maybe I'm fundamentally wrong in thinking the winning a conflict against the aggressors in these atrocities would have any impact in keeping them from continuing I don't think I am. But if this war is going to be fought anyway, if it's going to break out no matter what we do and come after us, I would be ashamed if our involvement in it came only after trying to run away and let the other side do whatever it wanted until we were cornered and had no choice but to fight back, instead of us taking a stand against it to begin with, on behalf of basic human rights. EDIT TL DR There have been and still are many horrible atrocities going on worldwide which all governments that have the power to are morally obligated to stopping, with force if necessary. The biggest obstacle in this is that global politics are in a way that those who can help hesitate to do so because it might cause the next world war. My view is that 1 WWIII looks like it might start anyway because of hostilities from a lot of the nations committing the atrocities in the first place, and if it's going to happen anyway we should take stand now instead trying to avoid it for as long as possible and letting millions of innocent people be tortured and slaughtered for nothing in the meantime. My view is also that 2 even if WWIII isn't imminent, there has to be some point at which a government can commit an act so horrible that the global community would say We don't care if it means war, we're going to stop you. I think that line has already been crossed. If you agree with the principle but don't think the line has been crossed yet, please let me know what you think it should take.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At some point, maybe soon, preparing for World War III may be a better moral option than trying to maintain global peace.\n","id":"59cdf60b-64cf-4b16-b4d4-26d35a667e10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Essentially getting to the crux of the argument. When there is a situation such as apartheid South Africa his violence was justified and were the actions of a freedom fighter. When there is such widespread oppression violence against oppressors is justified. While, with incredible fortitude, a non violent solution was found, it was almost inconceivable and as such he was merely fighting for the liberation of the oppressed throughout South Africa. In many other countries we would call him a freedom fighter. That terrorist is a label attached to him by oppressors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Mandela was a necessarily freedom fighter and not a terrorist and was justified in his actions.\n","id":"ff090ab7-9d38-47be-ac25-bc108c95c7bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>Conventional bombs are weaker than nuclear bombs, as the amount of dropped ordnance required to get the same effect is much higher.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conventional weapons do not have the same devastating effect like nuclear weapons do.\n","id":"eca72757-02d8-42c6-8a6d-3a7ada9863d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm on the fence about vaccinations. I personally do not believe that autism can be directly linked to vaccinations, but I do think there are legitimate arguments against them. One argument being that no one, other than the manufacturers, know what's in the vaccinations. For all we know, there could be some other substance that deliberately alters our immune system keeping us reliant on pharmaceuticals and such. The other argument being that there's no money to be made by the pharmaceutical industry to have a healthy populace. Keep them sick, keep making your profit. I realize that these are considered paranoid views, but you can liken this to the oil industry. There's no money to be made in alternatives to oil. Lives have been lost in the name of oil. The above arguments are not my personal beliefs. I only state them because I feel that they are much better than the autism argument. My overall view I'm not really for or against them. I truly don't know what to think.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the most sensical argument AGAINST vaccinations concerns pharmaceutical profiting at the expense of human health.\n","id":"9cc3ada8-10e9-468c-81c8-51f1da7c3d45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>ban targeted online advertising on the basis of user profiles and demographics<|ARGUMENT|>Targeted advertising using the wealth of personal information left for collection and collation online makes business far more efficient for advertisers. Until recently advertisers were forced to use ads that went into the world basically at random, hitting everyone and not necessarily reaching the desired audience. This meant that producers could rarely target small markets, and thus advertising and mass media products all focused on large groups.1 Thus small producers have been crowded out from the mainstream. With the advent of targeted marketing, producers can now afford to compete for business and to advertise their services to the groups that actually want what they have to sell. Thus, businesses have been able to flourish that once would have languished without access to a proper market. An example of this is the targeting by niche fashion boutiques targeting the diffuse but expansive \u201chipster\u201d market.2 This has led to a more efficient business world, with lots of producers that can compete with the larger mainstream quite effectively. In politics the benefit could be equally great for outsider candidates and those from small parties who don\u2019t have the fundraising potential of the main candidates. 1 Columbus Metropolitan Library. \u201cUsing Demographics to Target Your Market\u201d. 2012. 2 Fleur, B. \u201cNew Meaning for the Term \u2018Niche Market\u2019\u201d. New York Times. 29 September 2006,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This advertising strategy provides benefits by making marketing more efficient and allows smaller markets to develop\n","id":"4b3f3571-e826-4713-b712-22df6652b80e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that people should have to go through a test where they get judged on financial stability, mental stability and other factors that go into raising a child and then the government would decide whether they should be able to have that child. I think it would help work towards raising the overall intelligence and ideally reduce crime rates in the world, both of which would lead to a higher quality of life for the population. Obviously the discussion isn't intended to be if this is possible but whether or not this would improve the population.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that people should go through a screening process if they want to have children.\n","id":"1103c36d-d4a0-4817-9225-1c29eb39d520"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anorexics Should Be Force-Feeded<|ARGUMENT|>Anorexics are typically treated under mental health legislation e.g. the UK 1983 Act. They do not make a free choice because they are not rationally able to weigh up decisions and consequences. The patient is not \u201ccapable of forming unimpaired and rational judgements concerning the consequences\u201d British Medical Association 1992.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anorexics are typically treated under mental health legislation e.g. the UK 1983 Act. They do not...\n","id":"bc3ceee7-6a2e-4d6e-b554-16682a3a4c9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>For God everything is good but human interpretation puts an experience value in the good and evil axis<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If God was really all powerful, he would be able to remove all evil.\n","id":"e58fd797-f717-4d2e-aa3b-7cb331e83a16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When a company takes a loss in any one year, they do not pay income taxes for that time period, which makes reasonable sense to me as they didn\u2019t make any taxable profit. They can then carry that loss into future tax calculations to avoid paying taxes in following years even after becoming profitable. Why shouldn\u2019t they be taxed for all profits, regardless of how they performed in years prior? I\u2019m really not familiar with US tax code but from what I understand, individuals cannot benefit from a similar policy. Why are corporations being treated preferentially in that matter?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies shouldn\u2019t be able to carry losses year-over-year to avoid taxes\n","id":"27f4b779-bf6a-408c-98f6-7ca7593f76ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that teens don't have the best self control and generally act on impulse but I don't think that we should encourage that behavior. I believe that being intimate with another person runs the inherent risk of pregnancy and or STDs no matter how safe you are and if you aren't willing capable of accepting that risk, you shouldn't be having sex. I believe the modern view of comprehensive sex education actually encourages teens to engage in these behaviors because everybody does it anyways. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe teenage sex and sex outside of a committed relationship\/marriage is bad.\n","id":"5f49f3fe-1583-48ea-9eee-b34b98015859"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Art Made By Abusers Be Removed From Cultural Institutions?<|ARGUMENT|>Repressive moral censorship is currently happening by ISIS destroying ancient cultural heritage sites or the medieval destruction of genitalia of Roman and Greek statues in Europe. Censorship benefits only the censor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This can easily become repressive e.g., if you get a curator or anthologist removing work by queer artists on moral decency grounds.\n","id":"30accfc7-ba54-45c3-8e4d-d057dad8d6cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In light of recent events our nation has been stirred up in a frenzy over gun control, and rightly so. It is a discussion we need to have as a country, however too many people believe the answer is to ban assault rifles and rifles like it. I'm here to say that will not help, it is a bad legislative practice and that we are missing the bigger picture. First off my reason against banning weapons is that it is legislatively innefective. The problem is when you decide to ban a weapon you need to characterize the parts that make it dangerous. California where I live, has done this and decided that having features like pistol grips and detachable magazines make weapons that have them more dangerous. These features are not dangerous at all in their own right but when put into a semi auto platform, improve the performance of the weapon. Essentially these laws punish manufacturers for making a product too good . The real issue though is its focus on assault rifles which make up less than 1 of all gun crime in the US. Meanwhile 38 revolvers 9mm pistols and 22 caliber firearms have not had any meaningful regulations put on them yet they make up the majority of gun deaths. The other major issue is moving the goal posts. When you characterize a weapon by its parts, it's easy to simply change a part to make the weapon conform to the law. Here is a good example of how the industry has gotten around the pistol grip laws California has spent so much time and effort to regulate these firearms but they have spent next to 0 time enforcing them. There are millions of pre ban ar15's still sitting in there safes. California made the law to make them illegal but won't pay to enforce the law. There is another big problem with this type of legislation, it is far from future proof. Here is a good example of a rifle we might have to deal with in the future. This is a caseless rifle, as it stands in prototype phase in California, we would need to write laws that specifically cover the mechanisms of this rifle. It is not semi nor full auto as it can shoot multiple barrels at a time, it doesn't use a traditional magazine, it doesn't expel a cartridge. This is why legislating the guns themselves is a bad idea, it is prone to inaccuracies, victim to changes in design, hard to get started and keep current and a general waste of tax payers time and money. So of course the big question is WHAT DO WE DO? The biggest step was actually taken the other day. We need to be able to study the phenomenon of mass shooting incidents, which congress is unable to allow thanks to efforts by the NRA. It is important to get the right info into the right hands. Now unfortunately our administration right now is about as corrupt and nonsensical as it gets but there are many good people at the CDC right now who are willing to tackle this issue. Beyond researching the problem one of the simplest things we can do is registration. This is obviously a hot button issue, especially with those who adhere strictly to the 2nd amendment. However registration is the most effective legislation passed in terms of gun control. Here is a good site that breaks down the merits of registration Beyond registering, I believe we need more data before we make any more laws to regulate firearms or their users. We simply do not know enough to make radical enough changes to prevent these mass shooting incidents. The mass shooting problem may also be the effects of our income inequality, political radicalization, religious zealotry, societal decay, or mental instability or all of the above. I also believe in strong emphasis in gun education. Having taken a hunter safety course I believe this is a good model to follow for first time gun buyers. Respect and responsibility should be the first thing anyone understands about their firearm. Secondly they should be trained to be able to use their firearm for the situations it was built for. Maybe not make it mandatory but give incentives for taking training courses. Also we need to make it ok in this nation for the mentally ill to seek help, and for others to recognize these symptoms. We need to make it so gun owners under mental instability can rely on friends or family to hold their weapons while they get through a tough time. If someone is becoming radical and their beliefs become violent we need to be able to address it in an effective way. I'm all for ideas, critiques and criticism. We solve problems by talking, not yelling at each other. Edit I came up with an idea for gun registration maybe even republicans would like, would like some feedback. Instead of having your name put on a national list you get issued a registration number that is the only thing attached to the serial number, make and model of the firearm. The only people that have your name and address attached to that registration number is your county clerks office. If a law agency requests the identity of your registration number the county clerk is obligated to contact you within 10 days and state the agency involved and a case number. I think this would be a good way to quash the fears some have over registering and being put on a list. It may balloon government a bit, but what doesnt.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe banning guns is a bad legislative action.\n","id":"9d19dffe-8149-4c9d-8d3c-314e633a6e0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not a big fan of socialist economies. Its ideas are propagandized in a very grandiouse way, by blaming wealth inequality for the problems of the poor and by presenting wage earners as slaves. But the solution they put on the table is to get the state to directly shape the market in order to produce proper results. And I couldn't disagree more. Practically, with examples like Singapore and Qatar, a free market system has proven to be much more successful in bringing wealth to the ordinary citizen though with the requirement of extra effort , be it to the middle class or the lower class. Under Muammar Gaddafi, Lybia, with the guidance of the Green Book, ensured massive wealth for the state and less wealth for the people, since the sole purpose was to ensure the benefits of socialism, not to ensure high salaries. And the wealth of the people is not something to neglect. The social market economy of Germany also relies on the free market in order to ensure other social benefits. The best system I believe to be is one of free markets where the state has no direct control of the market, but has the necessary power to protect the individual from it, sort of like a judge, jurry and executioner. In other words the state's sole purpose is to make laws and as few restrictions as possible, inderectly influence and sponsor fair businesses and to be flexible enough to change the system any time there is a possible path to corruption, as to stop monopolies from ever forming. Am I wrong on socialism? Are the views too libertarian?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state should not be able to control the market \/ Socialism proposes a bad economic system\n","id":"2fc0bca0-fe61-4d40-aa63-501807b8104c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>Cultural diversity may help companies react more effectively to market developments and shifts, as well as new customer needs p. 15.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A culturally diverse organisation can reach more potential business opportunities, and expand into a more diverse market.\n","id":"cfb75621-f2dc-42e0-8ce8-0965aa7bcc9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Psychiatrists at least here in Bangladesh , only give you 15 minutes of time and prescribe medications and do nothing else. Psychologists on the other hand provide psychotherapy. The number of medications out there that are used to treat mental illnesses is extremely small and can be listed in just one page. Given such a narrow scope of work, for a healthcare system, it is unwise to have the profession of psychiatrist. Psychiatrists here first do an MBBS and then a two year degree on Psychiatry. I believe its better to remove the profession and have neurologists or internal medicine doctors do the work, perhaps with a requirement of one year degree or diploma to qualify for the profession. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The scope of work of psychiatrists is so narrow that it is better to remove the profession and have other specialists deal with psychiatric patients\n","id":"a815be56-6c64-4488-bd07-682ca3db3277"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many grocery delivery services have failed, and it's obviously a tough problem. Amazon seems to believe it can solve this logistics problem and let grocery stores notably Whole Foods, but presumably others begin delivering in scales that will eventually be profitable. If they succeed, I believe the benefits will greatly outweigh the harms. Some of the harms are obvious there will be fewer physical grocery stores since most people will be getting food delivered. You won't be able to pick specific zucchinis based on how they look or feel. And the social aspect of grocery shopping will be lost I certainly find it to be enjoyable and like taking my kids to the grocery store. But I believe the benefits will greatly outweigh this. We would replace a car trip there and back with a delivery going to multiple stops, saving fossil fuels. We will need fewer stores, meaning food doesn't sit as much on display and is delivered fresher, reducing waste. Most importantly, people won't only buy attractive produce but will instead be looking at a description that can include flavor etc. So we can sell uglier tastier produce, meaning less pesticides, better flavor, and again less food waste because we wouldn't be throwing out as much ugly produce at the farm. I think the benefits will likely greatly outweigh the harms. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Widespread produce delivery will be highly beneficial.\n","id":"1e212a07-341a-4b17-bb0b-defda38374cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Falkland Islands, return of<|ARGUMENT|>The only international laws where treaties amoungst nations. Argentinas claim of uti posseditis is a self-righteous fallacy as there was no binding universal international law back then that supported it. Argentina never got it's independence in 1816 through devolution, it was unilateral. A unilateral state can only claim what it controls at the time of independence, nothing more. There is no evidence of anyone being ordered by the BsAs government to go to the islands before independence or 1823 that includes Jewett in 1820. The UK's rights to the islands were recognised by Spain in 1771 and it's right to return by third party intervention Nookta Sound Treaty<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There was no binding universal international law in the 1800's that supports Argentina's inheritance claim and plenty of evidence to support Britains\n","id":"3db848d1-089e-40b8-90ca-e8e28e6d5199"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I dont see how it is possible for a person who eat animals on a daily basis to care about the planet. Many studies have shown that the meat production is responsible for a big part of the deforestation and the waste of water in the world, and livestock agriculture produces more greenhouse gas emission than every train, truck, car and aeroplane put together I understand how a person who does not care about saving the planet can eat animals, but not how meat eaters can even say they are trying to save it. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people who are not vegan\/vegetarian don't care about the planet.\n","id":"32a25d07-2951-4f20-b569-a287e042dd3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>The paperclip maximiser as described makes little sense: it is supposed to be sufficiently intelligent that it is capable of designing and building supertechnologies, but not intelligent enough to realise that its stated goal is ridiculous, and its means of achieving that goal, genocidal. This is absurd.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The paperclip maximizer is actually not very intelligent as it cannot separate intention from pure words. An AI would be able to understand that maximizing paperclips doesn't come at any cost.\n","id":"ad5f5a0f-1074-4a1f-8d57-cc32788d3c21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As I understand it, a parent can give their child up for adoption. The state doesn't come along and say You're responsible for this kid, why should someone else take care of it? . When you do this, you lose all parental rights, and you lose all responsibility for the kid. You don't have to pay child support, or get in trouble when the kid is truant, but you also don't ever get to see them, or be their next of kin. If a person has the right to do this, they have the right to say I renounce my fatherhood motherhood of this child, and allow the other parent to fully adopt my share of rights and responsibilities, should they choose too . .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If adoption is a thing, individual parents should be able to abdicate their parental rights and not pay any child support.\n","id":"c730b327-8e14-4bbd-8c0f-bdb7aff89502"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the upcoming US election one of the major issues will be the status quo in healthcare vs changing to a universal system. My desire is for everyone to have an access to quality healthcare. I take no pleasure in people unable to receive healthcare they need or to go bankrupt from receiving care. Unfortunately, my family has a huge stake in how this plays out as my wife works for the health insurance industry. Her position pays a good salary that is 20,000 25,000 more than her previous job. It is virtually certain that she would never find another job that pays as well as her current position and the best she could ask for is go back to her previous job. Given that she has upwards of 30 more years in the workforce, it appears to me that the dissolution of the private healthcare insurance industry would be major financial loss for us, which is the desire of most of the Democratic candidates and the Democratic party. My assumptions are this the disparity between her current job and the next best job will remain 20 25 thousand year. Over 30 years, this is a gross income loss of 600,000 750,000. This will also negatively affect our retirement savings. Unfortunately, due to some bad educational and job decisions, I am behind where I should be with my own retirement savings. This would be as bad if it wasn't for the possibility that social security which would be a significant portion of our retirement income has potential funding issues in the future. In summary, due to large income loss that would befall my family from the dissolution of the private healthcare insurance industry, it is in my best interest, understandable, and not a testiment to poor character if I voted for the status quo in healthcare. P.S. I live in a state that will go to the Democrat presidential candidate, so I have no need to and will not vote for Trump. However, my Congressman or Senator could swing either way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not a bad person if I vote for the status quo in healthcare\n","id":"a39fd302-cef4-453a-b3a2-0b040999f8c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>The brain triggers a feeling of reward when watching a beautiful face. This helps remembering better. 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People rather like to remember beautiful features than ugly ones.\n","id":"d04db10a-6581-453f-9591-3fbda4924404"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Google references many articles, such as this of June 13 2007 and this on July 31 2015 I consider only goods and services that can be changed and improved by humans so exclude climate, nature e.g. National Parks of Canada like Banff are internationally renowned , or size. I compare Canada to only other G20 countries. Evidences of mediocrity Universities Canada's top universities UBC, U of T, McGill never exceed the Top 20 in rankings. Healthcare gt Source Canada is a great country. Our health care system is anything but. The World Health Organisation WHO ranked our national health care system at 30th in the world. To put some colour to it, they ranked our system behind those of Colombia and Morocco. gt The study, the most comprehensive of its type, is now 16 years old, so there's the argument that it's dated. Unfortunately subsequent comparative studies have merely confirmed our poor performance. gt The Commonwealth Fund studied the health care of 11 industrialized countries in 2014, and ranked Canada's at 10th place, ahead of only the U.S. In short, our health care system isn't one worth to brag about. Cuisine The Michelin Guide excludes Canada, which lacks any internationally renowned restaurants like Denmark, France, UK, and US. Please tell me if you know of any international standards. Transportation Canada has the priciest airline flights and no high speed rail<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Canada is a land of mediocrity, for human goods and services, among the G20.\n","id":"6d54c66c-53d3-4d3f-9e0b-512c55494c6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we make contact with alien sentient life?<|ARGUMENT|>France\u2019s last war with Russia was in 1853 In World War I France and Russia fought together against Germany.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Historically, humans have allied themselves with rival forces to defeat a bigger evil.\n","id":"5e6328ce-1008-4afb-a45c-bcc4f005c9d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By the time TNG takes place it is made fairly clear that systemic racial and gender biases are a thing of the past for humans. Since transgenderism requires a persistent set of sex based stereotypes, roles, or behaviors. It wouldn't make any sense for it to exist in a post gender society like that experienced by humans under the Federation. Even transexualism shouldn't be visible, as it is clear the medical technology of the TNG era would readily allow for sex changes in people with some kind of sexual dysphoria, making them indistinguishable from the general population. The one exception I would make is if producers decided to run time lines in pre Federation eras, like Enterprise or earlier. I think you could still have non human transgender characters, which might be worth exploring considering the wide variety of species and cultures available in the Star Trek universe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A transgender human should never exist in Star Trek\n","id":"5802f800-feed-41c7-8735-426f24e6ea26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that steroid use in the military should not be condemned, and that military members that have to do physically demanding and dangerous missions should be given performance enhancing drugs. If we have the technology to make our soldiers stronger, faster, and with more endurance, I think that it would save lives to use it. It also would make older soldiers in their 30's or 40's less of a physical liability, with the same experience to teach younger ones. I'm not entirely sure what the general consensus on it is right now, but I don't see why it isn't encouraged.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that steroid use should be encouraged in the military forces.\n","id":"768b8631-ad86-4c10-894c-2ac3011dc64f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>A report found that whatever the reason ISIS fighters have for returning home, all returnees will pose some degree of risk to the safety of the population, rendering them a potential threat to national security.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing foreign fighters to return home could be a potential threat to national security.\n","id":"50b98bd7-fda5-4ae7-9de2-0f4e3acedddc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is radiation from cell phones and Wi-Fi harmful?<|ARGUMENT|>The highest frequency used by cell phones and Wi-Fi is 6 GHz which is 1\/400,000th of the energy needed to be ionizing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cell\/Wi-Fi photons are in the GHz, which is non-ionizing radiation, far below the energy levels needed to cause DNA damage.\n","id":"576f6db9-f7fb-4227-aeca-478aba97e7bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, here we go. I don't suffer from self deprecation like some white people do much in the same way Christians seem to be expected to hate themselves to a degree because some bigger establishment told them they were born sick, disgusting, and in need of reforming themselves . I am as proud to be white as I expect my fellow black persons to be proud that they are black. I expect my Chinese colleagues to be proud to be Chinese and I damn well expect Arabs to be proud by virtue of being Arab. This seems like it shouldn't be disagreeable. I mean, if you feel like trying, have at it. However, let's more toward the issue. White privilege. The definition I will receive by the responding persons will differ from the definition I will give as my understanding or what should actually be understood . My definition in non negotiable because I am using the word White as in the skin colour often associated with the term in North America more specifically, Canada and USA . Privilege is defined by a quick google search as 1 a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people. My position is this I am on par with my Human Rights Act as well as all of my nation's important documents outlining rights, freedoms, and opportunities. I do not receive a special scholarship because of my skin colour nor would that be tolerated, for example. Disqualifications Someone else not being treated inter personally, I might add, because in consideration of the HRAs of these countries, legally there isn't another form to the same standards as outlined in the HRA isn't my privilege. Or for a better understanding, on a scale of 1 10, the HRAs and documents of the country put EVERYONE at a 5. If someone is being treated like a 1 4, I do not elevate to a 6 10. I stay at 5. I receive no less or no more than my country has agreed everyone should have. Edit So what we have here is the definition as understood by people. The only thing I did differently was define the words separately. This is the definition of them together as a whole. IF my position disqualifies that someone else's disadvantage DOES NOT EQUAL my advantage, then that would make my position correct. I am not redefining anything. I am using the understood definition when it comes to the political realm and the academic realm. If YOU feel like your argument has to hinge on changing this definition because you think it's unfair for me to use the definition as understood currently, then the problem doesn't sit with me NOTABLE TERMS these are terms used over and over get over it BENEFITS, ADVANTAGES, IMMUNITIES, ETC. As far as definition goes, white, privilege, and white privilege ALL concern the EXTRA amount of these being present. EDIT I see that the triggering is strong with this bunch. So much for putting too much stock into this Sub Reddit. Still waiting on proof for the proposition that white privilege exists. REMEMBER Someone's disadvantage doesn't my advantage. Get over it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being white doesn't inherently mean having privilege.\n","id":"68a40b1a-982b-4d23-b01d-23fd2719f4a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>In Germany, about as many people have a negative as have a positive opinion about Israel. The most common attributes associated with Israel by the majority of Germans are ruthlessness and aggressiveness Bertelsmann, p. 31<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The negative perception of Israel's defiance of international law, occupation of Palestinian territories and military engagements with surrounding countries, reflects poorly on the US as the \"principal enabler of this behavior.\n","id":"f62406c4-c2c0-46d6-8073-65f95ee2fc74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>The secretive and hidden nature of drone strikes left civilians in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia living in constant fear of a strike. It becomes hard to trust a country which may bring destruction to your community at any moment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fighting extremists requires support from the citizens of the country the terrorists are operating in. Drone strikes failed to build this support between civilians and the US, and their relationship deteriorated.\n","id":"5f17c13f-b071-418c-ae67-f85e4cbdab9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>Those who join ISIS are complicit in, and implicitly support, murder and torture as well as the persecution of minorities. Such crimes cross a threshold beyond which states should not attempt to rehabilitate people, but rather ensure they are not a member of the national community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who have committed crimes as part of a terrorist organisation such as ISIS have chosen to forfeit their rights as citizens who enjoy protection by their state of origin.\n","id":"67d62150-7554-4a42-8518-57695d09ef56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Laverne Cox, if you haven't heard, is going to be playing Dr. Frank n Furter in the upcoming FOX remake of Rocky Horror Picture show. I think this is a terrible idea. Transvestites are people who dress and or act in a manner that is typical of the opposite gender. Transgender transexual folks are people who feel that their biological sex is the opposite of their self described gender. Dr. Frank N Furter describes himself as a Sweet Transvestite from Transexual Transylvania. The only thing that I can find confusing about that statement is that he claims he comes from Transexual transylvania, which may imply that he is transgender transsexual however, this is contradicted by the rest of the movie. Frank N furter is continually referred to as he. If his gender is male, then wearing the women's clothes that make up his wardrobe makes him a transvestite. the transexual in transexual transylvania, then, only describes this 'transylvania' in some way. Laverne Cox's casting only serves to further confuse the public about the difference between Transgendered people and Transvestites, not to mention the use of Transexual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dr. Frank-n-Furter is a transvestite, not transgender, and casting Laverne Cox was a terrible idea.\n","id":"ca85c5cd-4493-4a82-ac57-b097462ece7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Did I enjoy it? Some parts, but over all I was expecting a great Scorsese movie, with a supposedly amazing performance from Leo and Jonah Hill. My biggest problem with the movie is how everyone is saying it's a great movie, when I personally think this actually lowers the standards we have for movies, from Scorsese or any director with an amazing reputation. This felt like a shitty remake of Goodfellas, minus all the cool mob stuff, add lots of cocaine, little bit of wallstreet, mediocre actors performances in comparison, etc. After finishing the movie I was literally in shock, I expected it to at least end with some kind of easy to grasp message edit I was expecting this because of how widely liked the movie was, I'm not saying I watched the movie for an easy message or anything like that about how we give people on wall street too much power, or how evil humans can be. In retrospect, I can understand that this was a caricature, an exaggeration even, but no one I know who liked the movie told me about this, they all just said the movie is hilarious and really good and said nothing about any kind of value besides the copious amounts of cocaine and emotional abuse the characters do to each other. Movies like Requiem for a Dream do an amazing job at showing the darkest realities of drugs. It's visually an incredible movie, great performances, and while it's very hard to watch at times MUCH harder than Wolf, which feels like a salty sweet version of Goodfellas, popcorn for the masses , it did an incredible job at scaring me away from drugs when I saw it. Wolf, on the other hand, almost seems to promote being like Leo. I can't remember exactly how it ends, but I don't remember any depressing scenes where Leo has his head in his hands and cries because he misses his wife and kids. All I can really remember is his character was beyond normal levels of being an ass hole and cocaine snorting. Personally, I found the very character Jonah Hill plays to make no sense. If I was making 6 figures a month or whatever Leo was making not to menton if I was the wife beating cheating, cocaine snorter he was , and some guy who brings me my soup tells me he'll quit his job if I show him a pay stub, I'd probably spit in his face or at the very nicest leave him a big tip and get out of there. Instead, he becomes Leo's right hand man??? The movie would have been better without such an unbelievable character. Not to mention that besides a semi believable New York accent, I remained very unimpressed with what Jonah Hill did, it was overall a very, very normal performance that any actor could have done, arguably better. Wasn't that thing 3 hours long? I had to watch it in two sittings, around halfway through I began to realize it wouldn't get any better, the first 10 20 minutes were alright but it slowly began to decay from there on out. I understand that appreciation in movies is personal, but I'm looking for someone to try to show me the good in this movie. I honestly believe that everyone who doesn't recognize that it's a pretty shitty comedy that we shouldn't try to remember was directed by Scorsese sees nothing more in this movie past the fact that the actors do ridiculous, unbelivable stuff, and that somehow this is a greater form of entertainment than a movie with a real message or any kind of real quality and originalty. I do love Scorsese's style and I was able to laugh and enjoy some of the movie, but overall, I was incredibly disapointed, and it shocks me how well people have recieved this movie, despite the despicable view I and hopefully others hold of real life characters like Leo.  edit excuse my run on sentences, this was off the top of my head, and I saw the movie around 2 months ago so it's really what stuck with me as opposed to a critique after just watching it. EDIT 2 delta awarded here<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Movies like \"The Wolf of Wallstreet\" fail miserably in conveying any message, are highly overrated, and do nothing to raise the standards of the film industry.\n","id":"b8cfa6ba-50fb-4d58-b0f3-f90aba4f7da9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>If there continue to be deficits in the public economy that need addressing, such as daycare, or basic nutrition, or housing, then there will still be demand for targeted programs to support those societal needs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political will is not a currency; it can be renewed and expanded rather than permanently depleted.\n","id":"08e93c84-a01e-4ac4-bdfa-feea82796aec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The actions of pedophiles seem to mirror the actions of gay people before it was culturally legally accepted that they were gay. For instance despite tremendous public backlash in the event of their discovery they persist in subversive behavior. Why would anyone choose to be a pedophile if they knew it would literally ruin their lives to be discovered? I do not hold to the idea that they are simply chasing forbidden fruit . Putting aside that this idea is religious in origin, the rest of society seems to have no difficulty in resisting temptation. Indeed these days they would go very far out of their way to dissociate themselves from pedophilia. I'm actually experiencing some trepidation about posting this for fear of inciting a mob against myself, such is the magnitude of public opinion regarding pedophilia. To even be accused of such acts can destroy ones livelihood without ever reaching a trial. This hostility prevents us from viewing pedophilia dispassionately. We are so quick to demonise practitioners for their predatory behaviour that we forget as a society to consider why they would engage themselves so. Though it is true that said predatory behaviour is often worthy of wrath. Just to be clear, I am not advocating for the inclusion of pedophiles into the world of sexual freedom. Even if biologically driven to their desires there is no way they can be realistically accommodated without causing harm to young people. Which is in my view very unfortunate for the unlucky people saddled with these desires. Children cannot give knowing consent so such activity must be regarded as rape.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pedophilia is a sexuality in its own right. But there is no social solution to that problem\n","id":"373ebd0a-dfb4-4305-a83e-efde08c7108e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>R tinder in particular seems to be particularly keen to barate girls who ask this on the basis of it being a double standard. But i'd like to make 5 points. 1 This is tinder, we are here to judge each other on appearances. 2 Weight is more offensive as it directly correlates to their health, and attacks them on a front they are personally responsible for. 3 It is significantly harder to visually assess height than weight. I don't like the argument of people hiding their weight in their pictures as although it's misleading, the inability to assess weight in a profile pictures is just a bad profile, and you are entitled to swipe left like you would if they only featured group shots. 4 From my experience the girls that seem to ask this are generally quite tall themselves, and it is an understandable deal breaker for both parties if the girl is taller, especially if she wants to wear heels. 5 The key pillar to the argument against this is always It's a double standard . Yet people seem to continuously counter argue my 1st point by saying because unlike weight you can't change height it's offensive, like disliking people for the colour of their skin and the whole hitler argument. But this is dating preference not likeability of the person and by making an argument based on the differences you undermine the core of your double standard argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is acceptable for girls to inquire about height on a dating app.\n","id":"9af39d6a-0f6d-42b3-bf1a-b6860f83a025"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Classic World of Warcraft better than Retail WoW?<|ARGUMENT|>WoW Retail has a \"starter edition which allows you to play for free to level 20.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"WoW Retail is better suited for new, inexperienced, older and casual gamers.\n","id":"5caf5c9c-ee76-4dd3-8d90-aa7990c8395d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is genuine belief unnecessary in worship?<|ARGUMENT|>Dancing before the Lord is seen as a component of worship. Without God dancing is just a physical response to the rhythm of a song.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Worship is a directed activity. Unless a person has knowledge of what is to be worshiped, the worshiper cannot perform the act of Worshiping.\n","id":"73d4b6f9-b531-4c94-805d-81a49ec09d63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Deliberative democracy is an approach that is superior to referendums because it typically attempts to reach consensus through consultation at every stage of the process, whereas the majoritarian focus of referendums has no such aims and is necessarily polarising.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given that there are other political mechanisms that can generate increased political engagement, it is not necessary to bear the many auxiliary costs associated with referendums.\n","id":"1f38c931-f4d7-4eae-900d-e52ee4602a54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Gods By definition the omniscient know everything about the system omnipotent have the technology to modify the system to his will and omnipresent infinite in all the dimensions of space and time in that system . Life at the molecular bio physical level Order. Higher levels Purpose Now before anyone harps about evolution not being teleological Man isn't the result of a thousands of years of refining a combination of genes, but that way is inefficient to actually find a good combination of genes. One would rather branch out right? it should be apparent that the multi branched structure that has now replaced the pyramid at which mankind was the top liek the food chain in text books which paths the tree of life is actually the more probable one to yield that species read combination of genes that is able to dominate all permutations and combinations of stresses that we face, at least until nature responds to this deadly combination and the cycle continues . All life either changes to progress or dies trying. And progress leads to only one thing becoming God<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Life's Purpose is to become \"God\", or die trying.\n","id":"97f00545-42fe-48c0-90ed-580f0fa537cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to pretext this post with a note that though I state my belief that life has no meaning, in no way am I struggling with depression or suicide. It's just the best wording I could think of to broach my view on this topic. I just can't get behind or even wrap my head around the idea that life has a meaning, or that life has some sort of endpoint or goal or what have you to it. I'm not denying that humans can create purpose for themselves, but in the end people pretty much always find what they are looking for. And if an individual goes looking for meaning they generally create a purpose out of what is more likely a collection of haphazard circumstances than anything that is actually predetermined or core to existence. Their experiences define their understanding, but those understandings are not universal to other individuals and even if they could be perfectly conveyed any sort of deep truth would be difficult to call universal. I guess what I'm trying to convey is that the experience of living unto itself is unique, but ultimately only consists of meanings individuals make for themselves and not any sort of hidden understandings or systemic theories of understanding. There is no Philosophy of Life because what life is to an individual varies so much by his or her context that any sort of deeper truth will only resonate with individuals of similar circumstance and not to humanity as a whole. For example, the Secret to Success a sort of life truth touted these days has so many meanings it cannot be considered a truth. While hard work and timing may have landed a celebrity where they are, many other hard workers with arguably better timing simply may have never even known about an opportunity. They may have some other value demand their attention or have been unlucky and ultimately were unsuccessful. And again, some individuals are born into success and can thrive of the legacies of others to simply elevate them to a successful place in life. Thus the life truth that is the Secret to Success is simply not real, and instead success is a victim to thousands of possible factors. An individual can be told to read between the lines to be more informed, but if one spends all their time looking at the spaces between sentences, they'll miss the message the broader semantic construction conveys. Thus tips for successful perception can only be broached in the context of an individual situation, and no formulaic approach can be take to have a consistently correct perception. There is no perfect life truth that express how to properly perceive at any point. A river is only those things that can be perceived to the individual, there is no underlying quality of riverness. I eagerly anticipate if you can change my view or further enlighten me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the idea of life truths is tenuous.\n","id":"845ca01c-81b8-4593-9c5c-085ea2fbc3ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are video games art?<|ARGUMENT|>Many games are purely a competitive activity, more like a sport or highly advanced board game.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video games are created primarily as shallow and meaningless entertainment.\n","id":"87657bcb-32d9-4872-b610-80df5f0b1d04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Prince Charles\u2019s \u2018black spider\u2019 memos revealed his intervention in policy-making and showed that he made direct and persistent policy demands to the then prime minister Tony Blair and several key figures in his Labour government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Members of the British royal family have been known to indulge in politics directly.\n","id":"33de3e0a-54d5-4042-8ede-be4c3fc37978"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>A religious con most commonly goes like this: It starts off with a concept similar to conservation of energy, that we can't be destroyed. Once you've accepted that there may be heaven and\/or hell then the con has created the carrot and\/or stick and, while mileage may vary, your support is inevitable, whether it's money in the collection box, placard holding, or your vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The mark uses the information presented to them and makes what appears to be a rational decision. It may even seem to be their own idea, but the information isn't what it appears to be or it isn't the whole picture.\n","id":"73a7c4b9-d241-48b1-bd98-2cc61c6669c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no failure to render assistance to animals in need, but nearly everywhere a law that pertains to failure to render assistance of a humans. Thus, when you do not do that, no matter whether you saved a dog or not, it still is failure to render assistance to the human.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If people saved their pet rather than the human, then they would be prosecuted for failure to render assistance to a person in danger and go to prison.\n","id":"437cc653-5531-44d2-906b-2ba95e4a228f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have seen more about this everyday, and before it gets to big I want to know why most people think it is just a next step in evolution. as one of my friends said. I have never agreed with the idea of adding neural implants since, to me, it seems like tat would be cheating. Not just at, assuming one is in school, tests and exams, but at almost anything. It just seems like it would make a person greater than they actually are. For example, it could make someone remember things that they didn't bother to truly study, or artificial ize an outcome of a major life moment, like when taking a driving test, it would improve the ability of the driver, if an implant that could improve driving skill were come to exist. Sorry if this is eloquently written, but thank you for helping.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think neural implants aimed to increase an ability is unethical\n","id":"8aeb8e87-60bc-4138-bc55-ee96c42846b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Coming from a conservative background, I've always thought that way and still do. Questions are beginning to arise in my mind after hearing how Sam Harris would be disappointed if his kids did not try recreational drugs at least once to expand their mind. I view Sam Harris as an intellect and admire him. Also, reading more on this for example I have tried Molly, E, weed and a few other soft drugs. I agree that it has opened my worldview and helped me find myself emotionally. I wouldn't be the same person if I didn't try them. I can say that my brother hasn't tried any drugs growing up and he comes off as a small minded, uptight, everything is black and white, person. Saying that, can we as parents, actually support and maybe encourage our teenagers to try them in a safe environment? Would that really be doing what's best for them? Needless to say, the narrative against drugs is agreed to by probably 99 of the population as drugs are viewed as bad but I don't think anyone who has tried them can disagree that they themselves felt enormous release of pressure and tension from life? Edit for clarity I still can't bring myself to support my children in future when I have kids to take drugs DESPITE me knowing the harm of certain recreational drugs aren't that bad and there are positives from my own experiences. This is because I've grown up in a generation and culture where ALL drugs are bad and taboo.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Your Teenagers will grow up to be more wholesome, worldly, safe and well-rounded emotional person if they do not try recreational drugs\n","id":"f194b2c0-c032-4f5c-8ab6-98d1cdd6f6d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>We all use the same toilets at home with absolutely no issue whatsoever. The toilets in the men's room are the same as those in the women's room.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unisex bathrooms should not be considered anything other than normal, seeing as your household's bathroom is already gender-neutral.\n","id":"8b04b30e-d994-4d53-a68d-c1a80c2e2c13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know, I know the religion is perfect, people are flawed, right? But wait. Isn't this the point where religion is supposed to show its power? People like Mandela or Gandhi are respected because they did the difficult, changed what seemed impossible, made the world so much better. Then why not here? Shouldn't the Quran, the most perfect book and the final solution for all human problems, be powerful enough and contain enough reason and logic to 'win over' these bad muslims? And one bad muslim, two bad muslims, how many bad muslims? Entire nations like Pakistan are persecuting non muslims, and even Ahmadi, which then people argue are 'not muslim' really? Why does this even come into the argument? How can Religion not be at fault when entire countries are killing people in the very name of religion. How can we humbly say that 'it is the people who are flawed', without talking for a radical change in the religion? Why are so many people unhappy and dying in the name of Islam? How is this a sign of a perfect religion when it is causing people to be mindless maniacs? The recent episode of an Ahmadi doctor underline Doctor , was jailed for calling himself a Muslim and preaching the Quran. Really? Is this the 'respect' for non muslims? How can Quran be the ultimate guide when people can not even pick it up to read without the fear of being jailed? And I am not talking of a few bad muslims, Pakistan has Constitutionally declared Ahmadis as criminal. How much more will the blame keep passing on to 'people' Pakistan is neighbor to India, where I don't see such level of persecution, atleast that supported by the government. What other factor can there be other than religion? When will these stupid reasons be done away with??? I did not even begin talking with the subjugation felt by women under the perverted manipulations of Islamic beliefs Imagine half the world, especially western women who are so used to the freedom they get as equal adults, and who still manage to NOT become 'slutty immoral whores who just want sex', and men who look at these beautiful women but 'manage to tame the rapists inside them', being 'controlled' under various laws meant to protect their purity and other noble causes. I really don't think of a Happy world really, please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the Quran is a seriously over-rated book, and that even if the world is dominated\/or 'won over' by Islam, the world will not be a happier place at all, and will be in fact sadder and more suppressed.\n","id":"a5a146e1-b107-4e30-b329-0aacf4eeee37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>The use of deadly force is a last resort. The suggestion that a firearm would be used as an intimidation tool for typical behavior problems is outside of the legal scope of legitimate firearm usage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some teacher might use their firearms as a tool of intimidation in order to keep misbehaving students in line.\n","id":"97b8e55b-3ceb-48c5-a58f-bccec93836ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Heterosexual sex work, i.e., the buying and selling of sex more or less is unique and unlike almost any other kind of work. Men are the overwhelming consumers, and women are the overwhelming workers. There are exceptions, but they are less than 1 . The buyer consumer seller producer relationship is inherently unequal. The buyer consumer has all the power, because he is the one who comes into the transaction with money. It is up to the seller producer to perform. The customer is always right. In labor transactions, the buyer consumer is the equivalent of the boss employer. In ordinary forms of work, the seller producer can ameliorate his or her powerlessness through achievement. Whether you are the inventor of the iPhone or you moped the floor, you used your abilities to achieve something and created value. Accomplishment is one of the core meanings of life that provide fulfillment. In sex work, however, the focus of the end product is the body itself, which is the embodiment of the worker's existence, and not the result of her achievement yes, hard work such as diet and exercise go into shaping the body, but they do not create the body . In summary Sex work is inherently sexed, with men cast as buyers and women as sellers. Buyers inherently have the power over sellers in economic transactions. The thing being sold by the sex worker is not her achievement but her consent to use her body. Hence, sex work is inherently unequal and privileges men while degrading women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Heterosexual sex work is incompatible with gender equality\n","id":"338364d0-d46f-425e-b84a-e1e11d8380af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All People in the US Have the Right to Health Care?<|ARGUMENT|>A measure that the NHS has successfully implemented isclinical governance which enforces tighter quality control accountability for clinical service providers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Countries should adopt strategies for priority setting based on evidence-based methods to avoid waste of resources.\n","id":"fd0d1aef-ed93-4e80-bcaa-3321eb7eb650"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This post was inspired by the if you don't vote for candidate X , you're implicitly voting for nastier candidate Y posts that seem to be proliferating like rabbits in social media space. The supporters of every single candidate are currently playing this game, and pointing to another candidate as an evil bogeyman who will lead the country to ruin if they win. I find this line of argument repugnant, for two reasons. First Urging people to view the political process as a false dilemma is wantonly coercive. It's wrong for the same reasons that either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists was not only coercive but brazenly naive. Let's look past the obvious us vs. them problem with this argument. The main flaw here is that voting has two distinct purposes 1 specifying a preference among candidates, and 2 expressing support for the qualifications and agenda of the voted for candidate. The you must vote candidate X in order to block candidate Y prospect tacitly dismisses the second purpose indeed, many of these posts openly denigrate the expressive component as selfish, juvenile, or privileged. In a country that claims to hold expression sacred and political expression above all it's weird to see arguments that so casually dismiss voters' desire to express their political preferences within the voting process as, somehow, not legitimate or patriotic. Second In nearly every election today, the outcome is clear long before the votes are tallied. Indeed, by the time any voter has entered the booth on election day, the result has already been overwhelmingly decided by everyone else's vote. Even when major elections look close, the margin is still gigantic. Obama vs. Romney was a 51 47 popular vote split, but that difference constituted nearly five million votes . The upshot is this Except in a vanishingly small number of cases where your state is too close to call, your vote cannot affect the outcome of the election. I mean that. If a particular election has a million voters, and the voter base favors one candidate by 10,000 votes, the outcome has been determined irrespective of your vote . This aspect of our political process is exacerbated by the winner take all electoral college i.e., every state but Maine and Nebraska . In a general majority election, every single vote mitigates toward the result. But if your state is already heading toward a particular result, then your vote will not only have no effect on the state it will be completely lost in the electoral college. For the purpose of identifying a winner, all that matters is that your state went red or blue. The End. Sure, there's always a chance. Michigan happened, etc. My point is that the odds of a surprise result, where your vote makes the difference, are so fantastically small that it should not affect your voting rationale. It's the same principle as a lottery with a 100 bazillion grand prize the odds are so astronomically small that it should not affect how you spend your paycheck. So is voting typically meaningless? Not at all because, again voting has two distinct purposes. In most elections, your expression of support is at least as important as your choice of candidates. A president with a lot of popular support can strongly promote an ambitious agenda e.g. , Obamacare. In general though perhaps not of late , Congress will be more inclined to cooperate because congresspeople can't risk being seen on the wrong side of a popular issue, which could get them voted out of office. On the other hand, a president who barely ekes out a victory or, like George W. Bush pre 9 11 , who wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote will have less political capital to spend. So let's say that, in an election, you have a choice between candidates X and Y but that polling gives X a wide margin. Your vote will not determine whether X or Y wins but it will determine whether or not X , once elected, can claim your support of their agenda. This perspective raises an important distinction There is a world of difference between not voting and abstaining from voting , i.e., casting a ballot with no selection. Failing to cast a ballot expresses nothing. If 100 people are eligible to vote, but only 20 vote, their ratio of views is tacitly applied to the other 80 people. By choosing not to vote, you're tacitly agreeing to this arrangement you consent to let the voting population speak for you, by default. Each of those 20 voters essentially chooses on behalf of five people . But casting a ballot with no preference expressed can't be interpreted that way. If 20 people cast ballots with a selection, and you cast a blank ballot no one can claim to speak for you. You have expressed an opinion it can't be tacitly assumed to be any different. And your expression is valuable political information The political process needs to know about trends in population values, and should steadily gravitate toward them. Your expression of your preferences, through the voting process, is actually more fundamental to overall political trends than particular winners or losers. Lastly, this perspective of voting as expression changes the not voting for X is a vote for Y argument in an interesting way. People who push that viewpoint to other voters are saying I want you to vote for my preferred candidate, even if you don't support them, because my preference of candidates is more important than your freedom of political expression. That's pretty manipulative, isn't it? Anyway that's where I stand. Okay, r cmv, prove me wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voter abstention i.e., casting a blank ballot is a perfectly valid political expression.\n","id":"d850e5d5-cd7c-4f8f-92b0-a97f57a60a3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is inspired by a post from r TrueOffMyChest, which states gt Fuck these people giving gifts to mentally disabled kids and recording their reactions gt gt I've seen a bunch already. These fucks only want to get internet famous. What kind of good deed is made with the intention of being recorded? They're just exploting these kids for money fame. gt gt And fuck the people upvoting these videos too. I really think that whether or not this practice is bad comes from the intentions of whoever uploads it. If their intention is solely to get internet famous, then yes, I would say it is bad. However, there are many considerations questions to keep in mind when watching these videos There are a lot of depressing, negative stories swirling around the news and social media, and those of us who are connected are bombarded with these all the time. Seeing a video of someone doing something kind for someone with mental disabilities is a reminder that there are good people in the world, and is uplifting. I am aware of how selfish this may sound, but bear with me Having a mental disability, for most people, comes with a lot of difficulties in addition to the disability itself. Many disabled people get bullied, harassed, discriminated against, etc. Even assuming the worst in the person giving the gift, it does make the person happier, even if for only a day. Was the person giving the gift intended to be recorded? Who was the recording initially intended for? Most of the people submitting these videos to reddit are probably not getting much money if any at all , and their fame is very likely only short lived. Lastly, this is no dig at the person who made the aforementioned post. It seems like they are genuinely concerned for people with disabilities. We need more people with that level of concern. Their post did get me thinking, though, so I welcome your thoughts. I have a few family members with disabilities, though I am not regularly in contact with them, or others with disabilities. x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Popular videos of people giving gifts to those with disabilities are not bad\n","id":"7c5819c1-c0e8-48f4-a81f-46ccd935e32d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT I meant age of voluntary enrollment, not draft This view comes from the fact that in the United Stated you cannot drink alcohol or smoke pot until you are at least 21. The arguments for this policy are 2 fold. First, that your brain is still developing and these activities might impair it's development, and second, that because your brain is not yet fully developed areas that dictate decision making are not yet mature. The effect of this is that people will make choices without considering the consequences, so as a result drugs need to be made illegal as young users could not make a so called 'reasonable' decision about their usage. What this has to do with the military As it currently stands, you can join the military at 18, an age scientists have agreed that your brain is not yet fully mature. Is it not immoral to allow people who are apt to make impulse decisions to sign their lives away to the government? If the logic that prohibits minors from using substances holds, then it should be evident that 18 is also to young to join the military.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The draft age should be 21 not 18.\n","id":"e191e2cc-390c-4058-8d00-0f35bf1edc7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>The Prisoners of War Temporary Enclosures Rheinwiesenlager used to hold German POWs during the Allied occupation of Germany was poorly maintained, causing over 10,000 prisoners to die from starvation, exposure, and dehydration. Eisenhower ordered the prisoners to be classed as Disarmed Enemy Forces, in order to circumvent it being classified as a war crime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"War crimes committed by the Allied forces during the war were rarely prosecuted and ultimately deemed justifiable given the nature of the war.\n","id":"37037de0-86ce-4858-bf70-aaa2104af9b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As I mature while being an avid sports fan, I have begun to look deeper into the sports associations that I once loved. The ideology of professional sports seems simple \u201cto win games fair and competitively\u201d but after million dollar contracts and the theory of \u201ctanking\u201d, professional sports teams begin to look more like businesses focused only on money. Though, at the end of the day, professional teams are business and so are colleges. Colleges do give coaches million dollar contracts and sell out to sportswear companies for money. But, college sports have an abundance of passion, traditions, and energy whereas those professional sports teams lack.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"College sports are better than professional sports.\n","id":"fcd292a4-4218-4543-8d7a-ec166e459a02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build an international space elevator?<|ARGUMENT|>An orbital ring spreads around the globe, which gives the global population more access than a space elevator.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An orbital ring would be a great alternative and might be extremely challenging, but pretty feasible.\n","id":"d7ada382-efab-493c-833d-107711959ce3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been brought up in an environment that dogmatically believes monosodium glutamate MSG is harmful, that consuming it regularly will eventually lead to kidney failure. I didn't question it. A while ago, a family member decided to forward a chain email that admonished its readers to avoid a variety of foods and additives, amongst which MSG was listed. I did some googling and found the email was forged and contained many unsubstantiated claims. This led me to question the validity of MSG fearmongering. After some searching and reading, I concluded that the data out there is consistent with the null hypothesis. Certainly, some people not used to eating Asian food reportedly getting headaches from MSG is hardly comparable to kidney failure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe monosodium glutamate MSG is harmful.\n","id":"021afdaf-1cfe-4a58-bc02-34825f11d6b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Choices made at random are no more free than those that are determined by prior events.No mixture of randomness and determination is equivalent to having free will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no mix of determinism and indeterminism that allows for a coherent notion of free will\n","id":"d725afb2-3056-4484-9270-e2a5a696ccba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title says it all, really. Assuming that 911 was in no way caused by the U.S. government I don't want to argue that right now , we had a perfectly good reason to retaliate. People say that this war was for oil, but I've seen no proof of the U.S. taking any oil. We're destroying a terrorist organisation, and helping the civilians stay safe. I don't believe the cost is a good enough reason to hate this war, as that seems somewhat selfish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are completely justified.\n","id":"f0a24de5-54ef-41f1-bafd-a77d0fcf7d74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Like slavery or The Handmaid's Tale, losing control of normal body functions cedes our freedom. We have enough people oppressed by laws limiting their choice of use of their bodies. This would be a step back to the times of eugenics, and is wrong for the same reasons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many parents have an unparalleled attachment to their children and cite them as a 'reason to live'. These parents would suffer immeasurably, were they to lose their children.\n","id":"3a9b77e4-03f7-46b5-8d6a-77434f07ec9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a pretty simple argument in my mind. So a person is terminal and will die very soon. They will be suffering most of the time, and not die with much dignity. First of all, if this person really wants to die, they can just jump off a bridge, shoot themselves, or cut their wrists. They aren't going to care if it's illegal when they're dead, but it's a huge mess and the person doesn't get to die peacefully. Secondly, under current law you can just go to a different country or state and get this life ending medication, why not skip the bullshit? Lastly, the person is seriously suffering, their family is suffering, and you're purposely making their life much harder. Why would you deny someone something that they should have control over? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Right to Die\" laws are absolutely absurd and it's a no brainer that assisted suicide should be 100% legal everywhere.\n","id":"b7fe750a-6a3f-4631-9d4a-e014ceb699ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>WARNING There are spoilers in this post if you have not seen either Avengers Endgame or Spiderman Far From Home. Things might turn out differently in the future, but currently, it seems that the MCU is intentionally leaving out Uncle Ben and using Tony Stark as a substitute for Peter's motivation to be Spiderman. So far, they've only made a few very subtle references to Uncle Ben. One of them was after Ned finds out Peter is Spiderman and he states he cannot keep such a thing that big a secret, Peter begs Nate not to tell Aunty May because of everything she's been through. We can safely assume that that thing she's been through is probably the death of Uncle Ben. Another one is from Far From Home where Peter is packing his bags to go on vacation and the initials on the bag are BFP, which are Uncle Ben's initials Benjamin Franklin Parker. x200B Other than that, Uncle Ben doesn't seem to exist much. It's completely clear that the MCU is using Tony Stark as a sit in. Similarly to Uncle Ben, he was Peter's mentor and a father like figure to him. But then he dies. In Far From Home, Peter is clearly still mourning over Tony's death and there's a scene where Mysterio is playing mind games with Peter and he makes Peter see the grave of someone. At first, I thought it was Uncle Ben's. It would have been a nice way to discover more of Peter's even deeper psychological fears or trauma but alas, that grave turned out to be Tony's though it made sense it was Tony's as you know, he did die recently . x200B All in all, it just seems that the MCU has made very minimal effort to include Uncle Ben. I get that they want to distance themselves from the previous Spiderman films and not focus too much of his origin,but Uncle Ben is an extremely crucial part of the Spiderman lore and to leave him out like that just doesn't feel right. He is the whole reasons Peter chose to be Spiderman in the first place. If they are trying to make Tony the new Uncle Ben, it does not work as for 1. Peter was already Spiderman before he met Tony and 2. the fact that despite the fact that Tony did die just like Uncle Ben did, his reasons for dying aren't the same. Uncle Ben died indirectly because of Peter's actions. Tony died because he made his own choice, to save the universe. Peter would never have been able to stop that. So the famous Spiderman line, with great power comes great responsibility doesn't work with Tony, because Tony didn't die on Peter's watch. x200B Basically, if anyone has any arguments that determine that Uncle Ben is NOT being replaced with Tony Stark, I'd be happy to hear them. As I would like to believe that Marvel are not doing what I think they are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The MCU is replacing Uncle Ben with Tony Stark\n","id":"e1b2d71c-bce6-4201-a473-f1082942ecc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we Have a 100% Inheritance Tax?<|ARGUMENT|>This could be a way to reward the role of employees in building the company, which is at the very least as important as being the inheritor of the company's founder, being merit- rather than blood-based.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There could be incentives to bestow ownership of parts of the company as shares to the employees in the will.\n","id":"28511649-bbcb-4f92-adea-a35381022f70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For whatever demographic or cultural reasons, big cities overwhelmingly vote Democrat, whereas rural areas only mildly trend Republican. With this kind of demographic self selection, geographically randomly drawn district lines would come out strongly favoring Republicans. Districts aren't gerrymandered by ill intending politicians, they are just reflective of actual demographics. The only way to get away from this coupling of geography and representation is to drop single representative districts altogether and move to a proportional system with multi representative districts. EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION the definition I was going off of above corresponds to this one from Merriam Webster to divide a territorial unit into election districts to give one political party an electoral majority in a large number of districts while concentrating the voting strength of the opposition in as few districts as possible EDIT 2 surely some districts in the US are gerrymandered, the more interesting question and the one I'm posing is whether gerrymandering is as widespread and significant as is popularly claimed based on the ubiquity of irregular district borders. EDIT 3 so the evidence of gerrymandering that I'd like to see for just mindblowingly corrupt gerrymandering is that a set of district boundaries is less fair in voting outcomes than a random, contiguous, reasonably compact set of boundaries. Squigliness shouldn't count as a test, nor should non compactness, nor should failure of the outcome to represent overall state voting which is clearly pre skewed by the different geographic preferences of the parties . EDIT 4 Here's Salon saying the same thing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"United States congressional districts are not gerrymandered\n","id":"b6ff009d-166b-420e-83f1-831f49bed380"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the non Americans that may not know, the big 4 sports in America is American Football, Basketball, Hockey, Baseball. Football is such a slow moving sport with so much time between plays that it kills any momentum that could have build up from the previous play. In most cases, when a touchdown is about to be scored, you know it a few seconds before, which takes away the element of surprise. Teams play once a week, and only 16 games in a regular season, which doesn't allow for much time before playoffs, which are single elimination. Basketball has almost the opposite problem. So many points are scored in a single game that it becomes something to be expected, and it quickly loses the excitement. I admitedly don't know much about basketball, but from the few games I did watch, I didn't see what was so exciting about it. Loud frantic cheers from the crowd quickly became nothing more than golf claps, and its the same one or two players per team doing anything impressive. Now I can see how baseball can be a bit exciting. When your team is at bat, it's exciting when a ball sneaks past the infielders, or even a homer. Not every swing is a hit, and I like that element of surprise, but if it's landing anywhere in the outfield, you can almost count on it being caught. It's painful to watch a team on defense though. Out of the 9 players out there, 2 of them are playing catch, and the other 7 stand there wishing they could be part of it. I'll watch it every so often, but it's not my thing. A lot of games during the regular season is fantastic if you're a hardcore fan, but for a casual at best fan, it's annoying. Best of 7 playoff bracket is nice, and puts on a nice show, really weeds out who deserves to be there, and who doesn't. Hockey is a fast paced sport played on a surface that increases the speed that much more. Everything about it is unpredictable. From who will win a faceoff, down to if the goalie will stop the breakaway shot. Fights are allowed, as long as they are tasteful. The top players sometimes get outsmarted by the most unlikely goalies, and some of the top goalies let in shots my dog could have stopped. You never know what's going to happen next. The tables could turn at any second and the game isn't over until the end buzzer. Exciting from start to finish. 82 games into a best of 7 playoff bracket really gets heart pumping and blood boiling. Teams play 2 5 times a week, so there's always something to watch. Never a day when hockey isnt being played.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Hockey should be the most popular of the big 4 here in America.\n","id":"8d75ed30-9110-4b88-a794-88c8332eeefd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we create and adopt a universal currency?<|ARGUMENT|>This is because in order for a central bank to set a single interest rate for this universal currency, they would need to consider a number of different economic factors in every country across the world. Such a task would be impossible to carry out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It may be possible to design accommodations with a central bank.\n","id":"80afb7c8-4934-4034-8478-c3e05920618e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The aforementioned trailer. The line with the N word is at 2 07 This is a movie whose marketing is partially based off the fact that it's rated R because its characters curse like sailors, having no problem dropping multiple F bombs in less than three minutes during the trailer. The trailer is labeled Red Band, which means NSFW, not for kids, not for people sensitive to foul language, etc. A single N word shouldn't catch anyone off guard. In this instance, the word isn't being used in anything close to a negative, racist connotation, and DMX is known to use the word like it's going out of style. On top of that, it's not like the song fit unusually well like, if the song happened to have Deadpool's name in it and they wanted to use it for that reason if his name was X or something like that Wolverine is Weapon X, I believe, so that excuse doesn't fly , then maybe I could understand. But they could have EASILY chosen another song. I know getting rights and everything is necessary, but why pick a song with a word you're going to censor, when you have all the hoopla about the language content of the film? Not to mention that, as I said, I don't see how anyone could be offended by DMX's use of the word any more than they'd be offended by the rest of the cursing in the trailer. All in all, I just feel weird about censoring a word used in a context that shouldn't offend anyone in a trailer for a movie that was made to be edgy. It doesn't add up to me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Redband trailer for Deadpool that uses \"X Gonna Give It to Ya\" by DMX shouldn't have censored the word \"nigga\"\n","id":"118a00ad-86a3-439e-9c11-61fcce8c6457"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would the world be a better place without humans?<|ARGUMENT|>Further still, it may be the most advanced species in the universe. If humanity did not exist, the universe may end up losing the species with the most advanced consciousness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are the most evolved species that have ever been on Earth, and humanity is still socially and technologically evolving. Removing humanity from existence would remove this advancement.\n","id":"5a5d7adc-e0e5-4f19-8884-fd2cffc947e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I will lead with the notion that I understand the pro reasons for piracy pretty well. I understand that without piracy, many games and media gets enjoyed by people who wouldn't otherwise have access. In many cases, a gamer might never play the game they pirated, and socio economic factors included, they might have never been able to afford. Letting pirates go and do their thing opens up the markets and allows media to be enjoyed by a larger audience. In addition, the vast majority of sales are in the first few weeks of release, and it usually takes a bit longer than that to crack the average DRM. This means that piracy has a very small effect on the larger scale of the total sales of a game. This also means that obtrusive DRM that detracts from a game, or might otherwise cause perfectly normal operating games to crash is pointless. Because, realistically after the first few weeks the only people you are really making life hard for is the people that actually paid real money for your game. A group of people that are now going to be disenfranchised in some way because of your product. However, when I argue with Anti DRM and Pro Piracy people, this is where we diverge. Because they argue for a decriminalization of piracy. And I don't believe that's a good idea, because it misses the core problem with why companies, porn stars and other individuals are concerned. And these can be dissolved into two main ideas Ease of Access and Tipping points. I will start with ease of access. This is largely unproven because it\u2019s never been tested on a large scale, but is key to why sites like Napster were so feared, and why seemingly innocuous streaming platforms get shut down with some frequency. The idea at its most simple, if people can experience something for free, why does anyone pay for it? Now, there will be some good arguments against this. People like to collect things You can\u2019t recreate the experience of a movie theater in your own home Some people want to support the artists You can\u2019t always find good quality versions of the things you want to enjoy You can\u2019t play the games online and so on and so forth. However, I would tell you the biggest reason there are not more torrenters out there, is that it\u2019s a pain in the ass. I have to find a torrent, download it. If I want to watch it on my television, I\u2019ve got to upload it to my Plex server. Even after all that, I might have a corrupted file, or the audio might be bad, or it didn\u2019t compress right. It\u2019s not easy. And entertainment companies aren\u2019t stupid. They know this. You see, in my opinion, this is exactly how they want the piracy industry to work. If someone really wants to see something or play something for free, let them. Just don\u2019t let it be easy. Anecdotally, but also a story I have heard time and time again from people that have stopped pirating things, it\u2019s just a lot of work. And when you\u2019re an adult with a full time job, I don\u2019t have the time to spend 3 hours trying to get a game working that I\u2019m going to play for at most maybe 10 hours. It\u2019s worth the price just to not put up with the hassle. Or when it comes to movies and TV shows. I could spend a couple of days finding a seed for a TV show or movie, but I can also spend 8 and stream it to my Roku and not have to do anything more than that. I get that I don\u2019t \u201cown\u201d the shows, but I also am probably not going to watch them more than once. Companies tend to focus the vast majority of their efforts shutting down \u201ceasy\u201d piracy. Sites where you can log on and find exactly what you\u2019re looking for, in good qualities for free or next to nothing. Or sites, where even if the end user is paying for something, none of that money is going back to the creators, like Mega downloads. That was a site you could pay money to, and basically watch whatever you wanted. Someone uploaded a great copy of something somewhere, bad copies got flagged, viruses were stamped out quickly. And it was super easy for people to use. So easy, that members grew at crazy fast rates. I mean it was basically a full and complete netflix, with everything you could ever want to watch or play. So they fought back real hard against it. Because it was so easy, it stood a good chance at enticing the people that would normally pay for stuff to stop paying for things. And this is what they do their best to stop. Most companies don\u2019t care about torrenting, because it\u2019s complicated, frustrating and alternatives are cheap. Most aren\u2019t cracking down on Boot leg Bob, coming to a barber shop near you. They have been very careful about choosing their targets wisely. And Ease of Access flows into the second problem. The tipping points. Now, for the most part, piracy in general as we\u2019ve discussed affects the bottom line very little. However, in smaller, isolated instances, it has majorly screwed up industries. For example, the video games of the \u201890\u2019s. Nowadays, with steam, Humble bundles, a slew of online retailers and such, video game piracy is at its lowest point since video games were a thing. It still happens, but it isn\u2019t nearly as widespread as it used to be. From the \u201890\u2019s into the early 2000\u2019s, it was major. It\u2019s estimated more games were pirated than sold as a whole on the industry. And this was before video games were the 100 billion dollar industry they are now. If you wanted to make a game in the \u201890\u2019s, you had to actually package and sell your games in stores, which meant printers for booklets, cardboard cases, and the actual discs you would put your game on. Many video game companies either went under or were bought by larger companies. It\u2019s still unclear as to why it happened to so many, but it did lead to a widespread acceptance, right or wrong, that piracy directly impacted the sale of video games. And to a certain degree, it makes sense. Your market is the same group of people with the skills to copy and distribute your game. Pirates were computer people who played computer games. The market was much smaller back then. And for pirates with even a little bit of computer knowledge, cracking a game was just another kind of game. It\u2019s why you can see where sales started to overtake any affect piracy had on the markets with the introduction of the casual gamer. People, who by in large, lacked the skills to pirate games. The biggest fear of tipping points is that no one knows what the threshold is. It could be 50 , it could easily be less or more. No one knows. So when companies fight back against pirates, it\u2019s not because they think that an individual or group of individuals will crash their industry. It\u2019s that they don\u2019t know how many it would take. They fight because there is a point where mass adoption could happen very quickly. Like, mega downloads. Which brings us to our final injustice. Teenage girls and grandmas hit with thousands of dollars in fines for hundreds of dollars of content. Personally, I don\u2019t agree with this, but I understand why it is done. This is a companies best deterrent, fear. Everyone knows that companies and the government cannot possibly catch everyone pirating and prosecute them. They do it to make an example. It is a common tactic done in our society everyday. For example, cops can\u2019t pull over every single person speeding on the road at any time. There is not enough manpower anywhere where this would be feasible. So, they pull over who they can, hit them with a ticket, hopefully seeing a cop pull over someone will remind everyone else to not drive recklessly, then they move on and do it again. Same with piracy. Yeah, it might really screw up those peoples lives, but you cannot argue against the tool\u2019s application, only the tool\u2019s existence, which is why I am against this particular tool in general, but I also feel like no one else understands how it works. So, that was a lot, so to make this a little easier, the views I am asking people to change are Fighting against piracy is just, and should not be decriminalized Fear of piracy from companies is not well understood by the average consumer or for that matter, the average pirate Just to be clear, I am not anti piracy, but there are good reasons it is feared and illegal. I believe you should pirate what you can, try not to get caught, but also, don\u2019t be shocked about the consequences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Penalties are justified for Digital Piracy and I don't think people understand exactly why piracy is such a big issue.\n","id":"ab9f80c1-2c9f-4dfa-94e8-f2afbb32c28f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>God may have sufficient reasons for not desiring to reveal certain information to humans. Since we lack an omniscient perspective, we have no way of knowing whether these sufficient reasons exist. As such, we have no basis for denying the existence of God on the basis of God not revealing certain information to us.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The possibility for a God should not be reduced to a set of assumptions based on current religious and philosophical understandings. Projecting human notions of \"good\" and \"evil\" onto a supposedly infinite being is fundamentally senseless.\n","id":"8b309e2f-6772-4119-bfa7-9f5ba6245c11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Humanity Be Better Off Under A Global Government?<|ARGUMENT|>Based on the fact that every system of coexistence needs a common set of rules to live within, it would be necessary which rules should apply. Every system is based on morals and beliefs but there is no fair objective way to evaluate its suitability without denying foreign values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As history has shown e.g. French revolution people tend to not peacefully coexist any longer when their disagreement reaches a specific level of fundamentality, such as future form of government or general judicial system.\n","id":"5ff63dc2-a80e-49e6-b869-ee2fe3565c0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To be honest, I'm not sure I completely believe in the title opinion statement. The issue seems really complex to me, but at the moment that is what I think. Currently, the migrant crisis is one of the biggest items of concern for Europeans. Most Europeans say, with much accuracy, that the migrant stream has to be shut off because a immigrants are a weight on the economy, and b most migrants refuse to assimilate, creating a lot of social problems. However, I still feel like they have to own up to that problem. Western societies historically engaged in colonialism and imperialism and profited over it so much, that they achieved wealth that continues to earn their country the status of developed first world. Often times when they did this, they ended up creating conditions in the colonized country that would be unfavorable to their future development. I know most Europeans Americans would respond to this by saying I had nothing to do with this, why should I take responsibility over the past? but I find that to be a really weak argument. If my grandfather robbed somebody of something, died, and passed the stolen goods money down to me, don't I have a moral obligation to return the stolen items, even if I had nothing to do with the crime? I think I would. Maybe the main problem with my view is that it is purely moral, and not legal practical. But letting poor people work out the problems that are partly as a result of your people's past seems very selfish to me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Western nations have a moral obligation to help the people of poorer countries\n","id":"6f0b436b-8d0e-49a6-9de4-a5fcaa38b91a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>If there is any such thing as freedom, free will, free of religious rhetoric, an adult\/person arguably has control over their life. Whether you believe in a higher being or not, it's irrelevant, as we exist in a law based society. Real freedom is free of any construct. If you have choice, you can chose to die, if you feel that is the answer. Of course, you like anyone has any right, you control your life and your choices. 'Human rights' an enigma in this modern world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Every human should have the right and means to decide when and how to die.\n","id":"6051667b-5727-40bb-9f35-a4dfcfa55322"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's the point I make to most people who say that piracy is ok, or that it is good, or whatever Would you go into a CD store, I know, rare that they are and copy a disc for your own use? Most people I talk to answer no. But would you buy a copy of that copy of that disc? The answer is mostly YES OF COURSE Those who don't answer yes but answered no the first time generally get uncomfortable and change the subject. So my question to you, is, why is it any better to buy the copy of the copy of that disc than it is to copy the disc yourself in the store? Sorry, no more economy stuff for now, I'm bad at explaining it. Here's a link that illustrates why piracy is wrong and that the arguments for it are really just veiled attempts at justifying your own immoral acts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that piracy is morally wrong and will argue that it is bad for the economy as a whole.\n","id":"33acbec6-156f-4e81-a18b-151a90ef1b61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I mean, a lot of their songs are sort of catchy, but a lot of them I find are actually pretty terrible. A ton of them are formulaic as well, following basic song structures and chord progressions. Lyrics are rarely profound. I can see why people like them, but love for the Beatles is so disproportionately high compared to other British Invasion bands like the Who, Yes, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Clash, etc. Many of those bands innovated far more. I can also understand why they would have mass appeal, even today well after Beatlemania and even with younger people . I get that. But I want someone to convince me why they are that much better, and why they deserve that excessive recognition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think the Beatles were so great.\n","id":"ddf6d501-421d-4ff8-b526-8380924c8d08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Given that guns of each type have their own uses for self defense shotgun can be more effective at closer range, handguns can be more easily carried\/concealed when walking around, rifles can be more effective against multiple opponents, and hunting requires vastly different choices as well you wouldn't hunt small game like rabbits with a .308 and a bear or other large game would laugh at a .22, there are any number of guns one might \"need\" depending on their activities\/preparations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Particularly given that the many types of guns and calibers are optimized for many different activities, having an \"arsenal\" is not a legitimate reason to investigate someone.\n","id":"f3fda5f2-0568-4daf-be54-ea654ea328ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>Assuming mafia can control politicians through corruption and politicians know that drug ban doesn't help anybody why else would politicians legalize drugs in Portugal then? then it's reasonable to think that mafia pressures politicians to keep drugs banned. Or at least pressure media\/public into thinking war on drugs is necessary. Drug mafia business would fall apart if drugs were legal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As with the legalization of prostitution in New South Wales in Australia legalising drugs would remove an important source of corruption in the police, the government, and the judiciary.\n","id":"c8f3e938-07fd-450e-b4bb-e2aff486552c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi, fellows Since I studied sociology, I've been discussing the topic of beauty with several people along the last years. The mainstream thoughts about beauty are that it's random, in the eyes of the beholder or mostly culturally influenced. I've never agreed with these views because it doesn't explain why we clearly tend to prefer one kind of faces over others. My vision of beauty is the one from the evolutionary theory We choose symmetry and proportion because we tend to experiment pleasure looking at them and, eventually, because they're signs of good inheritance among other reasons . Now, what can we consider symmetric and proportionate? Let's see some famous examples James Dean Clauda Cardinale These two people are objectively symmetric and proportionate, so they're beautiful for a first impression. Let's see a couple who are not so symmetric and proportionate. Adrien Brody Sarah Jessica Parker All of them are attractive or unbearable for several reasons but, inasmuch as the beauty concerns, the first couple should win being the couple chosen almost every time in a first impression. I don't want you to miss the point here as it happens to be with some people I debated with, so let me make clear I'm not referring about attractiveness nor personality. I think all of us have found ourselves talking with a beautiful boy or girl and lose all the interest after seeing they were boring as hell or not suitable. I also want to say that I'm not here because I need help changing my view, just to discuss if I might be totally or partially wrong. Cheers<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that people who state to have a personal taste for beauty are just deceiving theirself to appear less superficial, in the first impression we all look for symmetry and proportions.\n","id":"1570eeea-55e8-479e-b6c2-558af1038e02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Welfare programs provide benefits designed for the average person who uses welfare. Most people do not reflect the average and have diverse needs, so their diverse needs can be better met by individuals making their own choices.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Targeted programs are inherently paternalistic, insofar as they assume that the government is better suited than the disadvantaged themselves at making decisions benefiting their well-being.\n","id":"9a920188-c70f-4b21-abe1-9d2f2361e2c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Arizona illegal immigration law<|ARGUMENT|>This has been seen in a number of polls, and demonstrates a particularly high level of support for an aggressive approach in Arizona.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Roughly 70% of Arizonans support the state's immigration law.\n","id":"74047661-1894-40e9-b0bb-a21fcbec845f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Often I've heard people who have no problem abusing alcohol or marijuana rationalizing their habits by saying they don't do hard drugs. Because heroin, meth, and crack are avoided, abusing other drugs is easier to justify. This is symptomatic of drug education that fails to differentiate between use and abuse, and instead differentiates between good drugs and bad drugs. Alcohol and nicotine are legal, and excessive drinking or smoking are is not as big of a problem as just one experience with a bad drug. An environment that prioritizes which specific drug is being used over how said drug is being used makes it difficult for young people to learn how to manage drugs, whether it's tylenol or crack cocaine. I've seen alcohol be as hard of a drug as anything out there, and put people in unsettling, unsafe, and terrifying situations. I've also seen alcohol turn people cheerful and docile. The fact of the matter is, different drugs affect different people differently. The separation of hard drugs and soft drugs ignores this, and lazily tries to skirt the education and information aspect of responsible drug use. I would not take or recommend that anyone take heroin or meth. In my experience these drugs are veritable life ruiners that really do fuck people up. However, I still treat any drug with the same respect that I would a bag of black tar. Drugs aren't sentient beings dedicated to destroying life, but they are powerful, powerful substances whether one considers them hard or not.  please<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dichotomizing \"hard\" drugs and \"soft\" drugs prevents meaningful and effective abuse prevention\n","id":"89b9b3c2-a446-4992-9a9a-84a43738dab6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>For example the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy, which houses one of the world's largest cooperative economies, spanning 20,000 cooperatives and 400,000 enterprises, contributes over 40% of the region's GDP and has lifted the area out of poverty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Worker owned companies tend to be more economically prosperous than other enterprises.\n","id":"65da21b0-9bdf-4731-8a0e-d6513448b6ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok, so I generally hold the view that anyone should be able to do anything when all parties affected are able to meaningfully consent. The issue that arises here, is certain situations where this is not possible. A parent has too much power in the decision making of a childs life. Here a three examples of this, and what I propose is the best solution. 1 Circumcision. This is a choice that a parent makes that an infant cannot consent to. You can argue the pro's and cons of it, but unless something is actually life threatening a child should not have to live with a choice that they did not make for the rest of their life. Obviously if they choose this as an adult then it's fine. 2 Freedom of religion. This one's super tricky. I believe that anyone can believe what they want, but naturally a parent is going to have a massive influence over what a child believes. There's a huge practicality involved in this, as you will want to share your beliefs with your child, and you're probably going to pray with them etc. Sharing beliefs is fine, what is morally wrong is enforcing them. If your child doesn't want to pray with you they shouldn't have to. If your child learns about evolution in school and believes it's right you shouldn't punish them for it. 3 Vaccinations. This one again is the hardest, as it does require a level of force. A baby cannot consent to being vaccinated, and it can't consent to not be vaccinated. I believe that the least forceful action in this scenario is force. Since a choice must be made, it is necessary that one takes the scientifically accepted position of pro vaccination as it carries the least risk to the child. Vaccinations should be mandatory. Those last two were very hard to come to that conclusion, as I am generally opposed to force in general. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents have too much power over a child's life\n","id":"0c9ac286-3685-4b95-8da8-5dd73e5eda30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>UFOs do not necessarily have to be crafted or piloted by aliens. An advanced military aircraft could be mistaken for an alien UFO by most people as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many UFOs turn out to be perfectly natural objects meteors, bright planets, processes in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere or beyond, or human crafts.\n","id":"07a78cad-746e-4f8f-91c3-596791055d7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Infants are at increased risk of amide local anaesthetic toxicity There are also several other technical issues to consider when treating infants.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most medical procedures on infants have a greater element of associated risk than procedures on adults.\n","id":"2718afdf-86a3-4570-a104-ef8121ebfe5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my view, people who were born into well off families, and who subsequently become successful, for whatever reason, don't deserve the same amount of respect as successful people who come from more humble backgrounds. It's always struck me that most of the time, that former type of person has never really known, and likely will never know, hardship and even more likely, won't have had to work as hard to get where they are as those whose families have less. Let's illustrate this idea with the current US President, and his 'small loan of a million dollars' from his dad which, with inflation, would be more like 70 million nowadays . He wouldn't have got where he is today without his family's fortune. He's had a silver spoon in his mouth all his life how can he truly understand what Americans who are struggling are going through? Speaking more generally, let's compare their childhoods. The majority of well off families are going to want to send their kids to the best schools they can, and good for them after all, most parents just want the best for their kids. Said well off families are also going to be able to pay for extra tuition if their kid is struggling, music lessons, and so and so forth. Meanwhile, the less well off families, who in many cases will also want the best for their offspring, would no doubt want to try and get their kids into good schools but for various reasons catchment areas, financial barriers, rigorous entrance tests that just isn't possible. Same goes for the extracurricular stuff unless it is subsidised, for many working class families, that sort of thing just isn't feasible. It's the same story at university level a.k.a college, if you're American kids with rich parents are able to take full advantage of uni life for example, they won't need to take a part time job to fund studies living costs on a side note, in the UK, our student loan is basically a graduate tax which is written off after 30 years, so it's not quite as bad as in the States . They'll probably be able to pay for textbooks study materials, foreign trips and all the rest of it. Conversely, the poor kid is going to struggle to pay for a lot of this without a job and or significant financial assistance in the UK, at least if you're dirt poor, I understand the latter is actually quite decent for students . Then what about those who move to big cities London, NYC, LA, etc to try and 'make it' in whatever industry i.e. the media showbiz, finance, creative industries, to name but a few ? The rich kid is inherently going to be at an advantage, because their families can financially support them meanwhile, the poor kid is at best going to have to take a job in order to cover if they're lucky the high living costs in such cities. The rich kid can take unpaid internships, some of which are necessary for certain industries the media is fairly notorious for them in the UK for the poor kid, these are basically off limits. Just how is that fair? This is why I have so much respect for those who have made it from nothing as trite as this may sound, they've had to go the extra mile in order to get where they are meanwhile, someone at a similar level who had many hands up in their life hasn't had to work nearly as hard even if, in their minds, they've worked exceptionally hard . What have they done? They've had help from Mummy and Daddy all their lives. It seems like nothing they've done has been entirely off their own backs. They were born rich and will probably die rich, never truly understanding the struggles of those worse off than them. I realise much of this post will likely come across as inverse snobbery, and to be fair, it probably is. It is also, however, a view I have held for some time, albeit one which I realise could do with being challenged. TL DR Successful people from more humble backgrounds deserve much more same respect than successful people from well off background, because the former will have worked much, much harder to get where they are meanwhile, the latter will usually have had a lot of help from their families.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Successful people from humble backgrounds have had to work harder, and so deserve more respect than those with well-off families.\n","id":"3d96a81a-c012-4159-b3d1-192f3ceea768"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I love the classic Sonic the Hedgehog games. No 2d platformer is better. The 2d games were great due to the camera angles and you weren't always punished for going too fast. The soundtrack was good and creative. The storyline while cliche was acceptable and good. All 3d Sonic games have piss poor camera angles and the stories suck even the Adventure games . They are like all over the place and hell is there an official timeline? I doubt there is and Sonic Team has mismanaged the franchise. Poor programming is another example. The character development is horrible and it hurts to say that because I think Shadow is an interesting concept but his horrible character development makes me feel like he is fan made. His back story sucks. He is literally a what if the Sonic games were darker or edgy. They are so bad that I feel like I am having a seizure. The Adventure games aged poorly. To this day, I still can't appreciate any of the 3d games. Generations tried though. I sound like I am blabbering and I apologize. The 3d Sonic games don't require you to think. In the old games you had to know when to not go fast and time the ai's attack even the boss battles . With the new 3d games, it is luck. Broken mechanics, glitches fuck with you and interefere with your ability to advance to the next stage. I can list more but honestly the 3d games are a mess and it will make it sound like I hate Sonic. I love the classic games so much that I got a Genesis emulator on my phone and played the classic games. I bought the Sega Genesis collection game on my ps3. Even the shitty built in Genesis system just to play the classic Sonic games. To all fans of the 3d sonic games or at least those who think they know a good 3d Sonic game, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There has never been a good 3d sonic game.\n","id":"41cece19-68b1-4062-a9d7-18a2c908a989"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What will life look like once humans achieve longer lifespans?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Census figures in the U.S. there were almost five people of working age for each retiree in 2013, but when the lifespan is higher by 2050, the ratio will fall to almost three working-age people to one retiree.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Once older people outnumber the working-age people, younger individuals will have to work for longer or compete with advancing technology to keep productivity higher to serve the proportionally larger elderly population.\n","id":"e59d35fc-48a5-495e-aae4-15b00b889850"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In 2012, Republican congressman Paul C. Broun came under for fire for statements he made in his home state of Georgia in front of a church audience. Most notably, Broun dismissed evolution as a lie from the pit of hell. In response, TV personality Bill Nye declared that Broun was unqualified to make decisions about science, space, and technology and shouldn't serve on the corresponding House committee Here's the thing Rep. Broun is clearly wrong on the issue of evolution, which is a broadly accepted theory and a pillar of biology. He is, however, not necessarily unqualified to serve on this House committee. Consider Scientific literacy is not an all or nothing deal. Rep. Broun is scientifically literate in his own right he's a practicing physician At the time he made this comment, he had been a licensed physician for forty years Interestingly, his educational credentials are more advanced than that of Bill Nye, who only has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. Scientific literacy aside, the personal beliefs of the members of this committee don't matter. Their votes do. Regardless of their personal views, if a congressional representative consistently votes in favor of funding for scientific research, then he has a pro science voting record.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not believing in evolution shouldn't disqualify a congressman from serving on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology\n","id":"41854e72-2a3a-4746-a650-25c786ea7469"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is health care a human right?<|ARGUMENT|>It is the nature of disease that you are at a disadvantage in resources. It's not right to require the sick to pay for the sick. It's an unfair expectation. It's like asking the poor to solve poverty or the hungry to solve hunger.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is the duty of the state to protect its citizens. One key way they can do this is by providing health care to all.\n","id":"d609b0c8-a8bb-4891-abf7-9e5524baae71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the West give development aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Often large scale land reforms are necessary to provide the basis for development, which is significantly harder when the government can't distribute land in the most proficient manner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These ideas are not guaranteed to be beneficial for the economic development of the recipient country.\n","id":"352826eb-497a-47cf-aa81-516df9d20b16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The reason I am posting this belief is because I believe it is difficult nontrivial to balance personal ambition and being content with what one has. Both ambition and being grateful lowering managing expecations are valuable, but they run directly counter to each other in many situations. To flesh out the title, I would say happiness is a function of both environmental inputs parameters and a mindset of expectations. That is, the former is stuff like having food shelter wealth relationships. The latter is more abstract having to do with if you have low expectations you will rarely be disappointed unhappy with what you receive. In one sense, Maslow's hierarchy of needs could be conceived as twofold the lower levels are the first part of the equation environmental inputs, and the higher levels are more abstract and have to do with mindset. Anecdotally, a very simple and accessible example of this is watching movies. Nowadays I almost always try to go into a movie with low or no expectations I find that it is very good for my contentment. Even with bad movies I don't end up disappointed and am more able to focus on the positives. I also know some people with high expectations for success, and they are often or perpetually unhappy or at least not content with their performance. The problem is balancing this concept of happiness, if one believes that happiness is managing expectations, it is hard to find a middle ground between keeping expectations low and acquiescing fulfilling ambitions goals. Buddhists seem to be very good at managing expectations in order to achieve happiness as well and is another example of this theorization of the happiness equation. Is this equation flawed, wrong, missing something? I invite you to please  on happiness or expectations. tl dr here gt I'm not necessarily saying everyone should lower their expectations as low as possible. I'm saying that the equation itself exists and it composed of fundamentally two factors, with potentially some weighting. People who can manage their expectations well, will be happy. People who can't, will not be happy even if they are able to achieve many things .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that happiness is largely a function of managing expectations.\n","id":"0a134a93-50f0-4e3e-a440-255959be1a70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Closures will likely concentrate in communities that cannot afford the donations to keep their places of worship open. This will mean a restriction of access to religion in the poorest communities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some churches will struggle to stay open with the burden of taxes, leading to closures.\n","id":"43904cc4-3a4f-4fb3-b460-fe6a4ab80fd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Climate Change Be Reversed?<|ARGUMENT|>With entropy, all efforts to restore the atmospheric gas balance will still leave a lot of the changes to the world for a very long time. Mitigation might be all we can do at this point, rather than being able to fully reverse it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Statistics and trends are showing that climate change is irreversible\n","id":"b72bfe36-b5c9-484e-a708-0867b658d7e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll focus on the US for this  because I have readily available data. I often hear the argument that we should legalize marijuana because it is less harmful than alcohol, a substance already legal in the US. While I understand the sentiment, I disagree with the premise I believe alcohol should in no way be legal. First, alcohol use is extremely harmful. In 2015, 10,265 people died in alcohol impaired driving crashes, accounting for nearly one third 29 of all traffic related deaths in the US This is before we even account for alcohol provoked fights, domestic violence, etc. Second, alcohol does little good for our society. Any benefit it may cause is greatly outweighed by the staggering damage it does to thousands yearly. Third, banning it is a viable option to help curb these numbers. Here's a NY Times article from 1989 that ultimately shines a positive light on the era of Prohibition in the US. From this article, I saw that Prohibition laws were not as far reaching as they should be. The 18th amendment did not, among other things, prohibit individuals from consuming or producing their own alcohol. It only banned commercial manufacture and distribution. There was a significant decline in alcohol consumption during this era. Violent crime did not increase significantly during this era. Alcohol consumption increased once Prohibition ended. Concerns over the emergence of a black market are largely overstated. Although one will certainly develop, there will likely be a net decrease in the amount of alcohol consumed by society. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The consumption, production, and distribution of alcohol should be illegal\n","id":"dccff6ca-c70b-4f01-8954-3329c484243b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When we reach a point where we have developed a general AI, this meaning an AI that is not good at performing one task, like Deep Blue, but is good at performing tasks on multiple platforms, this wil most likely result in this AI developing itself further and eventually causing a super intelligence to come to existence, which will be much smarter than we are. This 'super intelligence' will not have the same norms and values that we have, but will go it's own way, even when we give it a task it might take it's own route think of the paperclip maximizer thought experiment . Therefore I can't help to think that it's important to first start working out a way by which we can make this super intelligent AI have the same norms and values as we have e.g 'be on our side' before we start developing this general super intelligent AI.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We need rules before developing an AGI Artificial General Intelligence\n","id":"e1ff992a-3e4d-4501-95aa-646d5305f612"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US and NATO intervention in Libya<|ARGUMENT|>Bruce Ackerman. \"Obama's Unconstitutional War.\" Foreign Policy. March 24th, 2011: \"Obtaining a U.N. Security Council resolution has legitimated U.S. bombing raids under international law. But the U.N. Charter is not a substitute for the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress, not the president, the power 'to declare war.'\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UN authorization of Libyan war no substitute for Congr approval\n","id":"add07386-f1d9-45d1-83c8-eb67f4622e5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>People can still have a job with an on-demand income, as it is a supplement instead of a possible job replacement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are better alternatives to a UBI, like an on-demand hybrid income ODHI.\n","id":"03fc9104-6731-4cfe-b255-eac47ecbdba8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that a large part of what makes art good is creativity and originality. These cannot be learned in a classroom. If anything, I could understand artists taking courses at a technical college to learn more about their trade, painting drawing etc. but see no point in paying 80,000 for an art school degree, when instead they could have created art on their own for four years. If you get your bachelor's in a science degree you are constantly learning, absorbing, testing, researching new ideas, theories, etc. When you get a bachelor's in drawing you just draw a lot. Now I DO see the purpose in a music major. Music is a true skill to master and understand just like science or math. However drawing, painting, acting, writing seem like they can be learned through personal practice and hard work. It seems a lot easier to become an artist through practice than many other things and therefore shouldn't be a degree. I would argue that it's impossible to be a good violinist, engineer, architect or scientist without formal training. I put a lot of time, research and studying into my degree program, whereas all of the photography, drawing and theater majors I've met NEVER have homework, exams or studying they just took pictures during class and got straight a's. TL DR I don't think art degrees make you a better artist, and I don't think they are worthy sharing a title of bachelor's with other degrees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that fine art degrees are basically pointless and unworthy of the title \"bachelor's degree\".\n","id":"24a73fe2-7dc1-4b90-b05f-5d146e155f2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>As women and non-binary individuals have been given more rights and opportunities, their roles in society have expanded and developed. The gender construct is therefore able to change as society changes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender is a social construct because its perception is fluid, and changes among time and societies.\n","id":"8218f8d0-0de1-4db6-90df-224ea256c255"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After all, the final spirit is supposed to be just water and ethanol with a few trace components, and many distillation practices produce a gt 90 ethanol solution which is then watered down prior to bottling. I'm excluding brands like Crystal Palace, Dark Eyes etc., but even those are not THAT much worse tasting than brands like Smirnoff or Stoli. I also want to add that I think marketing is the main driver in people's perception of what is a good vodka versus what is bad. Here is a study on chemical composition of different vodkas. There are differences of vodkas as concluded in the study but they are basically differences in mole fractions of ethanol and hydrates of ethanol. However, these differences are determined by sensitive scientific equipment and not by human palates. Vodka at a 40 concentration is observed to have very similar mole fractions of the different hydrates. I also looked at some blind taste tests not scientific which have not surprisingly crowned different champions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most vodkas taste pretty much the same\n","id":"52c293b3-c47c-4bff-b89f-66b01d7e6105"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ending US sanctions on Cuba<|ARGUMENT|>The communist political and economic system has been shown to lead to economic collapse all over the world, whether sanctions are in place or not. Even if sanctions were lifted, lack of private ownership, foreign exchange and tradable commodities would hold Cuba back. The International Trade Commission found a \u2018minimal effect on the Cuban economy\u2019 from sanctions. In fact, it is by using sanctions to pressure Cuba into economic and political reform that the US can best contribute to an economic recovery there.4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanctions have not been the cause of the economic failure in Cuba.\n","id":"663b6d5e-4e90-4993-b8e8-c4350e8b248b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I'd like to make a few things clear. I don't think that either women or men are the sole cause of the misery associated with being in a relationship. Rather, I think that any romantic relationship, in and of itself, is extremely volatile in its very essence, so much so that it's doomed to eventually end in anger, discontent and misery. Also, I haven't been in a relationship for months, so I'm not writing this, say, coming out of a bad breakup. Lastly, I'm not writing this as a form of indisputable truth. Rather, I am genuinely willing to have a discussion here, and perhaps to change my view, even if only partly. I'm currently 24 years old, so there might be a lack of experience on my part. Still, I think I've had my good share of relationships flings that makes me come to the conclusion I'm more consistently happy and contented as a single man, than I am in a relationship. I also draw upon the experiences of my close friends, who have come to me with their fair share of relationship problems. Of course, it goes without saying, that being in a relationship, especially in the beginning, can be very magical. It's one of the greatest rushes in life and with good reason passing on our genes is the ultimate purpose of life at the end of the day, so no wonder . Yet the pain that can sometimes result from a relationship can sting so bad, that the magical part is totally not worth it. I think the Yin Yang philosophy of life holds a lot of relevance here that which comes with great pleasure and contentedness, must also come with its fair share of displeasure and discontent. And it so often seems, that any relationship is destined to end, or at least be wracked with pain and discontent, often in greater extent than it is with happiness since the vast majority of relationships are simply far from perfect. This is because a romantic relationship, and in a broader sense romantic love, is extremely volatile. It's not mature. It's, more or less, a hormone driven sensation, a rush, that it so powerful, yet so susceptible to be a cause of disruption rather than ecstasy. When we love, we devote so incredibly much to one person, and expect so much as well. We are so preoccupied with our loved partner, so much so, that we become almost neurotic. A tiny gesture from our significant other can be a huge source of pleasure. Yet a tiny short coming can also have the same effect, only in the opposite direction. And even in the most perfect relationship ever, the ratio of good to bad is probably never better than 1 to 1. Without going into details, I have truly gone through some of the worst hours, days of my life because of relationships. Days that made me completely forget any kind of pleasure or happiness I had experienced in the course of a relationship. In other words, days that made me completely regret every getting into a relationship. Maybe this is my own personal negative attitude though. Feel free to chip away. Furthermore, as a person in a relationship, you almost always have to deal with the baggage of another individual, baggage being the most appropriate word possible too, because you literally carry their problems with you from now on, and not just your own anymore. Every person in life has their own problems issues. Everyone. And it's already difficult to carry one's own baggage through life, not to mention the baggage of close friends and family. In no other relationship is one's baggage literally doubled than in a romantic relationship, by virtue of the very intimate connection two people share in a relationship. Some would then argue, the significant other carries your baggage as well. I don't find this very consoling. I, personally, have never found consolation in sharing my problems and issues with other people. I like to keep them to myself, and work on them, by myself, and at my own pace. Another person's encouragement, even participation, doesn't do much for me. I would go as far as saying that it may even be annoying. Still, maybe that's just how I feel towards the whole sharing your problems worries with your SO. But it is what it is. And to top it all, and probably most importantly, I really think being in a relationship opens the door to a lot of negative emotions, which simply wouldn't find entry into your life, had you not been in a relationship in the first place. I won't dwell on this part, but these include jealousy, mistrust, infidelity, over attachment a drawback whether it's from your side or from hers, doesn't matter , anger and rage just to name a few. I also don't think that the positive emotions are in any way worth the trouble of going through the negative emotions. I ask myself, if I had the opportunity to experience the most exhilarating pleasure in life for one hour but with a catch I would have to experience the most horrible pain in life for one hour afterwards. Would I accept the offer? My own personal answer would be a resounding no. To sum it all up, I know that I may sound bitter after all of this, but I'm not. I've just found that consistent happiness and contentedness, all be it at a slightly lower level than that which could be achieved at the peaks of happiness in the perfect relationship, are so much more worth it than going through the ups and downs of any relationship. As a single person, I have much more time for my own personal development, my hobbies, my career. I just have more time and energy to take care of myself, and do the things that I enjoy and give me meaning. I also don't condone an asocial attitude or isolation I still have a good group of both close friends, and acquaintances, with whom I share my thoughts and emotions, and with whom I partake in the activities I enjoy. If I could sum this whole post in one sentence, it would be a consistent happiness of about 7 8 on a good day or a 6 on a bad day on a scale from 1 to 10 , is a lot better than having a 9 10 on some days, and a 2 3 out of 10 on other days that come with being in a relationship. x200B EDIT Well, this has unfortunately been downvoted to oblivion for some reason I'm not aware of, but a few good comments were posted here regardless, so no harm done. For those of you who discover this through Google or some other search engine, the main arguments that were put forth here were along the following lines Family and children regardless of whether one deems a long term relationship worth it or not, at some point or another, one will generally want to form a family and have children, for many benefits and disadvantages , but we'll leave that discussion for another day. Priorities change well, this is probably an extension of the first point, but alas, priorities do indeed change as one grows older especially between the ages of 18 and 30. At the age of 18, 19, 20, 21 etc, it may seem completely absurd to pursue any form of long term relationship. When one starts to approach the age of 30, the outlook and perspective one has on life begins to change as well. This may lead many, based on their own experience, who previously shunned the idea of having a long term relationship SO, to reconsider the idea. Finding the right person there really isn't much to expand upon here. Many find that the right relationship can be found by finding the right person. While I don't necessarily disagree with this wholly, I still think it's a bit optimistic. Still, it may prove true. My posting this thread is either proof of the validity of my convictions, or of the fact that I haven't found the right person yet. Only time will tell, for me, and for anyone else who shares shared my view. I think that covers it. Thanks for reading.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not worth it to be in a relationship.\n","id":"04008021-ac90-4c4c-a758-ff41add2eaf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should political franchise be earned by individuals?<|ARGUMENT|>Political franchise is the only way to make meaningful change in your country and so it should be afforded to all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political franchise should be a right attainable by all citizens.\n","id":"d2c0e4dc-5094-4ab4-be20-c1e39b26b9a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Antifa good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>Fascism is, \".humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, .\" Antifa is unified in their fight against \"fascism\" and uses humilation, doxing and deplatforming and claims they are the victims of oppression from non policy makers like Ben Shapiro, Andy Ngo, and Milo Yannopoulos.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Robert Paxton description of fascism in 'The Anatomy of Fascism' is so broad in can be used describe groups that claim to be anti fascist.\n","id":"26d23bd7-dadd-470d-a9ef-a7cbf90be1b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Psychiatrists Be Allowed to Diagnose Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Fire and Fury,\" Michael Wolff's \"tell all\" book on the Trump Administration was an instant best-seller and stands to earn him nearly $10 million Such results indicate that there is profit to be gained from commenting on Trump's instability and could inspire a psychiatrist to make sensationalist remarks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Psychiatrists may face incentives of fame or pressure from the media, which could motivate them to speak publicly in contravention of their professional ethics.\n","id":"7b4caa7a-6787-4989-b971-c851852c518b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>The Sanders campaign has come under scrutiny for the way that they managed sexual harassment claims in their 2016 campaign. Bernie stated that he was \"a little busy\" which is why he was not aware of the harassment allegations. He may lose female voters due to this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanders may struggle to inspire female voters to rally for him during a General Election.\n","id":"01e6933f-d2d0-4bfc-873e-b7c79e27078e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>To be truly inclusive ALL ideologies must be allowed freedom of legal expression. To suppress our nation's history because it is offensive to some is wrongheaded. We want people who hate to be able to express themselves. Suppressing hate speech lends creedence to hate rhetoric. Suppression implies those who wish to suppress have no valid counterargument. Hate speech should be welcomed and then the arguments for hate thoroughly dismantled for all to see. Suppression is counter to our ideals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Removing these statues and flags helps hate groups recruit new members. Not everyone considers them symbols of slavery, but as expression of a political ideal, and might feel threatened and radicalise if these symbols are removed.\n","id":"e11cbc30-34eb-454b-bd5a-f9fb07e52f2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Humans Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Even moral nihilists have categories of what is consider truth or false from a moral standpoint. Therefore, evil cannot be inherent for all human beings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no objective morality, so humans cannot be evil.\n","id":"a4c0620d-ef78-410d-a501-e1f632b87fdf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should India return to a paper ballot?<|ARGUMENT|>On manual votes, while folding the piece of paper, ballot ink can smudge on multiple symbols, thus invalidating the vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"EVMs are more efficient and effective at carrying out the voting process.\n","id":"265d4477-9f38-4356-9f3a-24ee0e63b0a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't pay attention to anyone's nails including my own They are clean and I only cut any of them if it becomes an inconvenience. Sometimes people approach me and ask me why I don't cut them and I tell them it never even crosses my mind. I find it odd so many other people are so concerned with the length of my nails. Are there any legitimate reasons to keep my nails short?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a male and completely indifferent to the length of my nails.\n","id":"ae8f94a4-c7e8-4d34-87bb-11006d6d3abc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the FBI Right to Keep the Pedophile Site Playpen Online After Hacking It?<|ARGUMENT|>In fighting international crime special methods have to be taken to overcome structural difference that arise from the international dimension.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The FBI did the right thing by keeping the pedophile site Playpen online after hacking it.\n","id":"211a3f59-7d9f-492a-817d-78cde70cb1a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Lehi and Nephi are called to form a new nation, similar to Abraham, but Abraham's nation building is a selfless act while Nephi's nation building is a selfish act.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The themes of the Bible differ widely from those of the Book of Mormon.\n","id":"764670a5-8d12-422e-9256-f3de2407ee7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In computer professions and computer oriented college majors eg computer science , there is appears to be a sexist culture among the men in the field against women. In response to this, universities and jobs appeared to have lowered their standards for female applicants compared to their male counterparts. I will focus on computer science in college, as this is the most relevant to me. Consider this The distribution of the qualification level of male applicants to computer science is at least as good as the distribution for female applicants Universities admit a much larger percent of female applicants into the college. Therefore, The average qualification of a male applicant will statistically be higher than the average view of a female applicant. This seems to confirm the idea that the admission bar for women is lower than the admission bar for men, which if true, undeniably means that the if a male and female both walk in the door, it would be correct to assume that the male is smarter. Or if blindly choosing a partner to work with, it makes more sense to choose a male than a female because the male is statically more likely to more qualified. This has the effect of Causing males to correctly think they are on average smarter than the females in their major Have some male applicants who are more qualified not be allowed in because the less qualified females were let in instead to try and help these females. Overall, I acknowledge that women in computer science face tough issues with sexism in the field. My claim is that the current solution of lowering the bar for them so that more can get in makes the problem worse, not better, and additionally is just very unfair.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lowering application standards for women in computer is bad for both genders\n","id":"dfdf548b-ba92-453e-9209-c283084064b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the past five years, there have been countless revolutions and protests around the world. The Arab Spring, Euromaiden, and the Brazilian protests, to name a few. Whether the general consensus viewed these protests as right or wrong, the fact that these people stood up for what they believed in and fought the government head on, putting both themselves and their families in danger, is truly courageous and inspiring. When Edward Snowden's revelations came to the spotlight, there was anger among many Americans. The media portrayed the NSA as a corrupt organization, for due reason. But all of this anger and frustration turned into nothing. Time went by, and American voices criticizing the NSA faded into the backdrop. To this day, our own government is spying on us, and yet we sit back and let it happen. I have lost faith that the American people will ever fight against the government to defend our freedoms, like those who took part in the aforementioned protests did. I'm not saying that there needs to be a violent revolt in America. All I'm saying is that the American people would never rise up in a mass protest and defend their rights and freedoms. People seem to take freedom for granted, and let the government get away with suppressing basic rights because they believe the government would never do anything to hurt the American people. I know this post is all over the place, but I found my view hard to put into words. tl dr The American people take freedom for granted, and would never rise up in protest against the American government, even when their rights are infringed upon. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Americans would never rise up in protest to defend their freedoms\n","id":"2915f310-a9d1-416b-946a-12c01681c0b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Not necessarily something I fully agree with but am interested in hearing people's views. It is claimed a sugar tax would help combat obesity levels by decreasing the sale of high sugar drinks and snacks and also helping increase awareness of healthy eating etc. Similar to cigarettes which are also taxed, sugar is said to be a drug, potentially more addictive than heroin. It is responsible for numerous health issues including diabetes, heart disease and other conditions associated with obesity. Obesity is becoming a major issue world wide. Ireland is on course to be the most obese nation in Europe by 2030 and I'm sure other countries have similar problems. A quarter of Irish adults are obese and more than one third are overweight. In Ireland, six out of 10 men, and five out of 10 women, are overweight or obese. It is a huge drain on finances costing over 1.6 billion to the government in Ireland alone. Obesity has become a serious health problem in the United States US nearly 35 of Americans have obesity. Obesity is not just a problem of \u201cgirth control\u201d it is now considered a chronic disease by the American Medical Association, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, the American College of Endocrinology, The Endocrine Society, the Obesity Society, the American Society of Bariatric Physicians, and the National Institutes of Health NIH . It is, in fact, a national epidemic according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC . And it is not just a weight problem it can have serious effects on a person\u2019s physical, metabolic and psychological health. Key facts Worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980. In 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 600 million were obese. 39 of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2014, and 13 were obese. Most of the world's population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight. 41 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2014. Generally, obesity is defined using BMI a terrible method that is very inaccurate and often misleading . To be obese, I understand that your BMI must be over 30. Obviously it is not going to solve the issue on its own but it could be a step in the right direction. If the money raised is ringfenced for specific programmes associated with obesity prevention etc, like public parks, outdoor gyms, pe teachers in primary schools, calorie counting on menus, promotions etc then could this be a good move?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A sugar tax would be help combat obesity epidemic\n","id":"d561cefa-dd9d-4e0f-bc82-3c5e855640ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>To wash, or throw away, your paintbrush between jobs?<|ARGUMENT|>Bob Ross found washing the brush to be the best part of the painting process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Washing the brushes is a soothing way to end the day.\n","id":"78815640-4682-428f-ae69-d3501a3f93c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People who are considered involuntary celibates DO want to have sex. The fact that they haven't been able to do so shows that people were able to detect that there was something wrong with them. If they approached people far beyond their punching weight, the fact that they haven't been approached themselves all this time by someone else shows that they have something unlikeable about them that made most people wary of them. Or that they still hold very immature standards, which further shows there's something wrong with them. If they were less oblivious and were asking people out in their own league, it's self explaining. I theorize that these men later are very likely to become redpillers. Most beginner stories there have similar backgrounds the guy who couldn't get laid , that got friendzoned , that people bullied , etc. All over the age of 21, so you know that in the time most people are sexually active, they managed to turn everyone away from themselves. Also, all the loneliness brews feelings of resentment towards women, which further adds to their misogyny. Obviously fantasies of more patriarchal societies, where they will be provided with a woman of their choosing, also leads to misogynist and sexist views. All in all, these people deserve their pariah status. Seldom will you find them reformed, since by now I mean their ages , they are too far removed from the rest of society's experience. It's something most people agree with when dealing with r TheRedPill that's why they deserve their mocking, and why if someone finds out that someone they know in real life is a RedPiller, they are not going to let that go. I theorize that whoever crosses age 24 more or less the average age of finishing college , wanting to get laid but failing deserves a pariah status. Like I mentioned in this post, this applies to people that WANTED to have sex but couldn't, not to people that for one reason or another decided to wait, or that were unable to do so for some medical reason or whatever gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe being involuntary celibate incel is a sign that there's something wrong with you, and these people are generally dangerous and likely to later become redpillers and other sort of sexist misogynist\n","id":"1411cd7a-0cea-44b8-a242-2e72db94dab7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>AI will speed up it's development. If AI sees humans as their overlord it may attempt to overthrow us.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By denying AGI basic rights, we logically place ourselves as an existential threat to them.\n","id":"8289ed2e-2827-40b9-a293-64c2483544fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should homeschooling be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>If parents are not aligned with their child's school or education, they are unlikely to implement it effectively. It is better to holistically follow one system, than for a child to be confused by contrary instructions at home and school.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents should decide about their children's education, not the state.\n","id":"dd91f496-793e-4872-9721-21b7a82d818c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I consider myself fairly moderate maybe a little left of center . I hate the idea of a two party system. I'd identify as an Independent if it wasn't meaningless with the current system. So I identify as nothing. I vote and support both Democrats and Republics. I support Senator Sanders and he's my top choice out of all of the current candidates. I don't consider myself an adamant supporter of his views. I don't know enough about healthcare systems to have a significant view on the best way to deal with healthcare, so I have no positive or negative opinions about his healthcare policies. I dislike his views on space and energy. His views and policies as President make their primary impact through bills he can influence and push through congress. So ultimately his personal views don't mean that much if they can only be drafted by a congressman. I primarily like him because of his honestly and integrity he seems genuine. This gets to the interesting bit. I have a lot of trouble trusting Clinton. I agree with more of her political views than I do Sanders, but she feels very dishonest. I trust Trump more than her. Yes, he's insensitive and blunt, but many of his views are fairly moderate. With Trump it's the same case as Sanders his more extreme ideas still have to make it though a Congress. At least having Trump as president will help to shake up the atmosphere of the Presidency. I like the idea of non politicians holding elected office and Trump could serve to set the precedent of entrepreneurs in office. However, I feel dirty thinking that in the hypothetical event that it was a Clinton v Trump ticket, I would vote for Trump.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am a Sanders supporter, I'd rather vote for Trump than Clinton.\n","id":"7e73bc70-2ba4-4e65-b46d-66b2cb125299"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When a government has repeatedly and deliberately failed to follow its own laws, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. We once again hold these truths to be self evident, that all men and women were created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Citizens, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Since This government has failed to protect it\u2019s citizens from attacks by radical religious foreigners, there has been a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all in direct observation of the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States with the false promise of security. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. This government has Violated the fundamental human rights of its citizens. This government has Relinquished it\u2019s riches to non American citizens. This government has Threatened the sanctity of a free press. This government has Infringed on the rights of its citizens to keep and bear Arms This government has Created institutions intended to eliminate privacy and communications. This government has Waged war on the behalf of special interest that threatens the public safety. This government has Killed hundreds of children and even it\u2019s own citizens using drone strikes without due process. This government has Imprisoned and destroyed the lives of countless individuals for victimless crimes. This government has Stifled economic opportunity to maintain the dominance of the financial elite. This government has Stolen from the people through an absurd system of taxation and inflation. This government has Sold future generations into debt slavery. This government has Abused its power to suppress political opposition. This government has Sold its military equipment to local law enforcement departments. This government is Unfit to exist and it becomes the duty of the people to alter or abolish that government by whatever means necessary to secure liberty and ensure peace. A new American revolution is long overdue. This revolution has been brewing in the hearts and minds of the people for many years. Today, it shall take a new form as the American\u2019s demand that several changes will be made to the US Constitution. We therefore solemnly demand an amendment to be adopted and ratified to the Constitution of the United States of America. In this amendment shall imply the following 1 A maximum of 2 terms or 10 years limit whichever is less on any individual holding a elected federal office. The only people who are eligible to hold a federal office are to only have a US Citizenship and citizenship of no other country. For the purity and loyalty of the servants of the citizens of the United States. Underwear and politicians should be changed often for the same reasons. 2 Any firearm or accessory to a firearm that a person can carry with their arms shall no longer be infringed with tax stamps and federal legislation in order for a free person to obtain. A militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state. 3 The 27th article of Amendment of the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed. The salary of all elected federal officials shall be the same as the average mean salary of a single American citizen. The salary of all elected federal officials will be revaluated to match the mean salary of every US citizen every year. Retirement benefits shall not be granted to federally elected officials. Servants shall never be paid more than their masters. Public service to the people is a service, not a career. 4 All federal government agencies and contractors who conduct of searches and seizures without the use of warrants issued by public courts will be immediately halted. All laws granting power to public servants and private contractors to search and seize shall be immediately void and nullified. It is the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. This shall not be violated without warrants being issued, except upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation. Warrants shall particularly describe the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. 5 All public servants who ends the life of any person before due process of law shall be indicted for manslaughter. No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. 6 Federal elections will be now be only funded by the US treasury. There will be no campaign funds towards any federal political election campaign that originate from anywhere else except from the US treasury. We demand to end corporate personhood and to end publicly financing federal elections in our country. Money is not speech. 7 All previous federal tax codes are now void. A fair income tax of 10 will be applied to every person and business. Congress shall have no power to create laws that will allow tax exemptions for anyone or any business. Fair tax would have a positive effect on savings and investment, would ease tax compliance, and would result in increased economic growth, incentives for international business to locate in the U.S., and increased U.S. competitiveness in international trade. 8 The possession, manufacturing, transfers, sale or consumption of substances used for personal pleasures by adults will no longer be a crime punishable by any federal law. Drug use has expanded since the start of the drug war and there has been no cost benefit analyses on the war on drugs. Tax revenue from regulated drug markets would benefit the states. Violence over drug related crimes would cease to exist. 9 Military personnel will have final vote to go to an war or conflict. All military personnel that do not vote in favor of participation in war or conflict shall be discharged honorably. Currently, the people who decide if the country goes to war will not go to war. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives and limbs for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war. 10 The Federal Government will not transfer any type of money or goods to any foreign country or foreign citizen. To receive aid or entitlement from the Federal Government, one must be a US citizen. Foreign aid promotes corruption. The people in power who receive aid plunder the treasury and their countries treasuries. Foreign aid leads to bureaucracy and inflation and it undermines growth in poor countries. 11 The Federal Reserve\u2019s shall be removed from power and a gold and or resource based monetary system. The Federal reserve is a dangerous quasi governmental authority that is not accountable to the American people because its governors are not elected. Returning to the Gold Standard is ideal because it removes corrupt influence over the economy. As of today, the Citizens of the United States are free and all laws and intuitions that are contradictory to the Constitution of the United States are now nullified and void. It will be the duty of the current Government to properly and hastily eradicate and void all laws and institutions, agencies and authoritative groups that are contradictory the Constitution of the United States. Should one whole year from today pass while the crimes of this government are allowed to continue, we may have passed the point at which non violent revolution becomes impossible. At that time we will march on each state capital to demand that the governors of these 50 states immediately initiate the process of an orderly dissolution of the federal government through secession and reclamation of federally held property. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is time for a Revolution in the United States\n","id":"1b027ef4-b60b-4e4e-a2c3-f18a6bcb353c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's simple, anyone who puts their child's life at risk on a whim of prayer is irresponsible and putting their child at risk of death. I agree that parents should also be charged with homicide if their child dies because they refused treatment. I believe that like intercourse, minors cannot consent to something that could drastically change their life, or end it, and they do not fully understood what forgoing medical treatment could mean to them. I am not necessarily interested in debating how this type of law would be enforced, only that parents who purposely skip giving their child medical treatment should be charged with a crime. If a minor believes that this is what they personally want, I think it is brainwashing on the parents' part and that a minor doesn't know any better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that parents who force their children to forgo medical treatment for illnesses and instead opt for prayer are irresponsible and should be charged with child endangerment.\n","id":"99ce29e8-6118-4935-9ee3-d233971c242e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>The relationship with the British remains that of a principal and an agent. Once the agent does not provide a service anymore, there is little incentive to sustain the current arrangement. This is anything but equalizing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The British will not treat us as equals due to their status as colonial masters.\n","id":"d7439241-3e7b-4985-999a-11f6c84711a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the original Star Wars trilogy Darth Vader is eventually redeemed by slaying the Emperor at the cost of his own life to save his son. Alas the prequel trilogy shows us that as Anakin Skywalker fell to the Dark Side he murdered a bunch of kids, to me this makes the future redemption impossible. As the original story arc was one of my favorite stories from childhood I would love to still be able to love this character and story. However I have had no luck reconciling it. So fellow nerds, if you can Change my View. EDIT Due to the excellent reconceptualization's offered here, my view is changed. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Darth Vader is beyond redemption.\n","id":"ef075b77-3e9f-46cc-90f2-21dc6e4fe544"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>The Democratic Party was the first to enact the Affirmative Action movement of 1961, giving minorities equal access to education and jobs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Democratic Party strives to make education accessible and affordable for all.\n","id":"5da13af1-1906-4175-aee3-d65b9dfb9d8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just don't see a future where our current capitalist system will survive automation. I'm a graphic web designer, so I work with a lot of businesses to build their brand. Capitalism is the soul of how I earn a living. The only thing is, I'd say the majority of the businesses that I work with are unnecessary. Other than the blue collar workers plumbers, electricians, etc. , a lot of my client base are white collar jobs, like insurance brokers and real estate agents. Professions that, with some straight forward online software, don't seem necessary. Don't get angry at me, you know that the majority of you are just surrogates for a program doing a lot of the heavy lifting. This video sums up my point very well. With exponential automation of jobs in our economy, unemployment will simply grow out of control. I still believe that there will be necessary jobs, but considering that capitalism relies on people spending money and with so little people making money that they can spend, we will need a different system established.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capitalism will not survive the the next decade.\n","id":"219f67bd-f8da-492b-807d-40bf37868bf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not saying that it's awful or anything, I just don't understand why people might think that it's top shelf stuff. My primary complaint is that 30 Rock doesn't really have any individual identity or particular strength . There are a lot of hyper generic characters, scenarios, running gags, etc. and in everything that 30 Rock attempts some other series outclasses it. Evil Corporation not directly for 30 Rock, but still indirectly present gt gt Better Off Ted did it better. Lovelorn Nerd gt gt IT Crowd did it better. Primary Relationship between grounded, anxiety riddled introvert and delusional, overconfident extrovert gt gt Peep Show did it better. The Weird Guy Tracy Jordan is a one note shit awful caricature gt gt Community's Abed, Parks and Rec's Orin, and numerous other characters in numerous other shows approach this trope in several different ways all with a great deal more success. etc., etc. Blah, blah, blah. I recognize that a lot of this is subjective, but still would be glad to hear from anyone who disagrees. EDIT Many thanks to everyone who responded, for taking the time to provide detailed posts and for being civil. The primary response to my primary complaint seems to be that 30 Rock doesn't particularly need an identity beyond being a sitcom because it has it does such a good job of working within the standard constraints practices of the sitcom genre. I could certainly argue that the show's quality suffers creatively for taking that route, but it's a very subjective thing. side note This argument to me states that 30 Rock is good, but not great. It would be much more valid if I was arguing that 30 Rock is awful. Then again, this is more of a general response that I've gotten, and perhaps I should have tried to turn arguments more so towards the overall quality of the show in which case not dedicating the majority of my post to pissing and moaning about a bunch of details via bullet point list might have been a good idea. Lesson learned . I'll admit that I could be misunderstanding the intended arguments of responses. People may instead be saying that something doesn't have to be innovative to have value which I wholeheartedly agree with. All things considered, my initial post and subsequent responses were flawed in regard to generating the focus on the points that I wanted to discuss. I apologize for wasting anyone's time. Final Thoughts My original view has not been changed, but I am considering rewatching a portion of the series keeping arguments made ITT in mind with the intent of possibly reforming or at least altering my opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think that 30 Rock is a top tier comedy show.\n","id":"de48d9c6-b8b3-47ee-a99b-afb94bb68777"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello everyone, Preface I have been trying to figure out where I would like to go to school the upcoming year as a CS major in my upcoming Sophomore year. I have been looking at different forums including reddit and Quora to try to find specific details of the two programs. I have also lived in Alabama for the past decade. Issues From what I have gathered, it seems to me that my time at UT Austin would be superior. The biggest issue I have is that I am a CS major at UT Austin but only a Mathematics major at UT Austin. I am still communicating with my advisor on this topic but this seems to be a major issue because your whole college career is centered around your major. Another reason I favor UT Austin is because I receive more credits there from my time at college and APs. I talked to a friend from UT Austin and he said that the worst thing about computer science is that sometimes you cannot get the classes you want. But this would be alleviated through their Turing program I found out recently that you can be eligible for an tuition waver which allows you to pay in state tuition fees. From what I could tell, I also asked my advisor at UIUC, UIUC does not offer anything like this. Thus, UT Austin wins financially. Both of the instituions seems to be of approximately the same caliber but I believe UIUC is slightly better but that is the only thing I could find that favors UIUC. My Mom also said it would be good to get out of the South but I thought that Texas, especially Austin, has a different culture atmosphere than the Alabamian South. Along with these main thoughts, there are a bunch of little pluses at Austin such as the SXSW conference, startup community, Turing Scholars, and weather all coem to mind. It would be great if UT Austin and UIUC people replied but any thoughts with sources are great as well. I hope this is a good subreddit for this. I feel about iffy about it so feel free to refer me to another subreddit that might be better suited. Thank you guys<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UT Austin trumps UI Urbana-Champaign for Transfer Sophomore in Computer Science\n","id":"28619ffd-112b-4b92-af47-7c31a3f658d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every day I see people commenting on reddit and other various social media sites about resting bitch face. I believe this is an improper way of saying that someone has a face that looks bitchy while they are resting, i.e. not laughing, smiling, etc. In order to properly express this phenomenon, I believe the phrase should be bitchy resting face. According to urban dictionary, the definition of resting bitch face is a person, usually a girl, who naturally looks mean when her face is expressionless, without meaning to. To me, resting bitch face could either be one of two things 1. A face that looks like a resting bitch. 2. A bitch face that is currently at rest. Neither of these two options account for a face that only looks bitchy while at rest. Furthermore, resting bitch face only came into popularity after a video released by the YouTube channel Broken People which was titled, you guessed it, Bitchy Resting Face.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The phrase should be \"bitchy resting face,\" and not \"resting bitch face.\"\n","id":"21e2446a-6bd0-4ecd-a14f-bcc20d30753f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapy Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Although people with with gender identity issues should seek professional help, conversion therapy being banned sends out a strong liberal message that people are free to be who they want to be. It's a strong statement that it is perfectly okay to be homosexual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conversion therapy promotes a narrative that every time someone does not abide by social norms, they must change at all costs; this can hinder social progression.\n","id":"b66272be-224e-4015-b91a-0dc0dee9e592"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gillette's toxic masculinity ad good?<|ARGUMENT|>The question of an ad being good is subjective, as what defines it as \"good\" will vary by each individual who is developing an impression of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is a statement of subjective opinion and does not hold true for all viewers.\n","id":"e61816c8-f9f8-4817-a158-c09f2412b010"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that urges to spend a lot of time masturbating and trying to have sex with a lot of people is a norma part of human behavior and should not be regarded as a disease except in cases that are both unusual and harmful. Let me clarify my title. I mentioned r nofap only as an example of a sex addiction community that I find particularly annoying. There is absolutely nothing wrong about choosing not to jerk it for a while. However, the people on NoFap seem to act like they have a serious problem and need a support group of the same kind that supports substance addiction. Treating masturbation like alcoholism is, at best, hilariously silly, and at worst, offensive to people who have dealt with real substance addiction. I understand that porn or random hookups could be thought of as the substance that one is addicted to. If that's the case, there are a whole lot of addicts our there<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the \"NoFap\" community and, to a lesser extent, sexual addiction in general, is ridiculous.\n","id":"bfae0eb6-25a6-4337-a6ea-2849a1eaf40f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The movie Get Out , by first time writer director Jordan Peele, has made a splash this year, garnering 99 positive on Rotten Tomatoes, and earning 100 million in three weeks, which is very good for a horror movie. By all accounts it is loved by people of all races, and unlike the Netflix special 'Dear White People' generated very little backlash even conservative YouTube personalities have defended it. However, this film is really viciously racist against white people, and only liked by white people because they are afraid to interpret it as it asks to be interpreted, which would force them to take an unpopular opinion. I'm Asian, and while I did think this movie contained a bit of anti Asian racism discussed below , my main point is that the movie is anti white. Also, the first time I saw this movie, I loved it. It was only after seeing it again and carefully thinking about it, did I realize this movie's viciously racist, anti white message. Also, there will obviously be SPOILERS in this . A good sign of non racism is if there are good or bad people of different races, which reflects reality. A good sign of racism is if all people of a particular race are portrayed with the same harsh brush, while all those of another race are portrayed as their victims. In the movie, there are no good white people. In fact, aside from one character a police officer who nonetheless asks for the main black character's ID for no good reason , all the white people are portrayed as effective accomplices to deception, rape, slavery, and murder. On the flip side, there are no bad black people, or indeed any black people who are not victims of white people in some way or form. This is not reflective of reality. Instead, it is reflective of someone who thinks all white people are the devil. A good sign of non racism is acknowledging that people make mistakes, but still viewing them are complex human beings whose negative attributes don't define them. A good sign of racism is if it takes minor flaws or stereotypes associated with a race and magnifies them into something horrifying and irredeemably predatory. Get Out does this by portraying white 'microaggressions', such as going out of one's way to assure a black person you are not racist, as ultimately hiding something far more sinister. Jordan Peele himself has said that these microaggressions are not ill intentioned in nature and are just human mistakes. But his movie implies otherwise. As the plot unfolds, it shows that microaggressions which seem innocent such as a white partygoer telling the black guest that he knows Tiger Woods are actually ploys for something far more devious. The main character, Chris, originally brushes off these microaggressions as nothing , and is then shown to be mistaken in brushing them off. Through plot revelation, the film exaggerates the evil intent behind 'microaggressions' and encourages the audience to invest a heavier negative import to them than they deserve in reality. A good sign of non racism is not emphasizing that all people of a different race can't be trusted. But this is exactly the message of Get Out. Not only are all white people portrayed as evil, but the film goes above and beyond with the message that all white people can't be trusted by making the white people who are least associated with racism in our society out to be the worst. The girlfriend, Rose, is the stereotypical Millennial, liberal woman who even gives off a SJW vibe and is ultimately shown to be the worst and most backstabbing character. Meanwhile, the blind art dealer, who is introduced as the white guy who sympathizes and gets Chris' frustration with the racism he encounters, is shown to be the man who literally wants to appropriate Chris' body. Some people will argue this is to show that racism can even emanate from liberal, Obama voting whites. But by making these characters the worst of the worst, the implicit message is that the amount of overt racism coming from white people doesn't matter because they are all to be equally distrusted by black people. In other words, it disassociates how white people should be treated from their intentional actions and towards the innate fact that they are white people. This is the definition of racism. A good sign of non racism would be if the movie didn't dog whistle stereotypes about one race being genetically better than another. This movie does. It subtly puts forth stereotypes such as black men being more athletic than white men, and sex being better with black men than white men, without refuting them. The motivations of the antagonists are supposedly that they want black people's better bodies , e.g. their jealousy. The movie could have sent an anti racist message by having them realize that they were fine in their original bodies, but never challenged their warped perception. A good example of non racism would be if the movie didn't perpetuate negative stereotypes about peripherally involved races, but it does. It shows an Asian man, at the party by himself and with a heavy foreign sounding accent. This perpetuates the negative stereotype of Asians as poor English speakers, and of Asian men as so desexualized that they are perpetually single. A good sign of non racism would be if the movie could sell itself as just a movie with no deeper meaning and rejoin that people who are taking it too seriously should just lighten up. If this argument was true, then everything I wrote above would be invalid. But this argument doesn't apply. This is a movie that takes itself very seriously, as the director Jordan Peele, the critics, and pages and pages of commentary written about it in the past three weeks have made very clear. We aren't supposed to treat this as just another fantasy that never happened. It's supposed to be an allegory that teaches us real life lessons about race relations in America. It's supposed to have all sorts of hidden and subtle meanings and messages. Therefore, since it presents itself on those terms, the hateful sentiments that the film whips the audience into as Chris massacres the white family at the end must be taken seriously, as well. Specifically, Peele and others have argued that the white characters in the film are supposed to represent, at some level, real white people. The fact that many audiences cheer when these people are killed is deliberate, as well. This manipulation to incite the audience into an obviously race tinged hate must therefore be treated as real racism, and not just the bad guys get their due in a fantasy. A good sign of non racism would be a film about race that has a message that includes the possibility of racial reconciliation. That is missing in this film. Instead, at the end of the film, the punchline from Chris' friend, Rod, was I told you not to go to the white people's house. In otherwise, the mistake of the main character, Chris, was that he trusted white people, and his black friend Rod, is here to say I told you so, you should never have trusted those white people. The entire point of the film is that the black man, Chris, is punished for taking a chance on a white family. He nearly loses his life over it. Like the slasher films of the '80s where teenagers used to be murdered after sex while the virginal Final Girl survives, Get Out also has a message in its horror, but this time it's that black people should not trust white people. So to sum up All white people are evil, all black people are victims or bystanders. Minor, unintentional racist social faux pas committed by white people are actually indications of something far more sinister and harmful, and black people will be punished for forgiving them. White people who act non racist are actually the most racist, and will hurt black people worst of all. In other words, it's not how white people act, but the fact that they are white, that makes them untrustworthy. Black people have genetic athletic superiority. Asian men are perpetually foreign and emasculated. This is a very serious movie and we should see ourselves in it, despite the fact that it's a fiction. We should also cheer the white people getting killed by a black person. The main lesson of the film is that black people should not trust white people, and should listen to the 'Rod' in their lives telling them to stay segregated. How is it that such a racist, anti white film could be embraced by white audiences? I believe it's because the antagonists are so evil, most white people will automatically disassociate themselves from them. After all, anyone would hate the white characters in the movie. But as the director, critics, and other commentaries have made clear, white people are not supposed to do this. It's supposed to be a commentary on real white people who do exist, even though none of them actually do what the characters do in the movie. Further, white people, especially white critics who exist in the liberal film critic community, don't want to be the sole exceptions other than black troll reviewer Armond White to dislike the film when everyone else does. Even if they are wrong, it's better to be wrong with the group than right by yourself, especially as calling this film for what it is would get one attacked as being anti black. The third reason, is that with Trump as president, some white people feel more safe in allowing a film like this to go uncriticized, since at the end of the day it is true that black people do not hold power. But that does not change the nature of this film. Since Get Out is such a high grossing film, I would like to believe I'm horribly wrong about this,and that this film actually helps the racial conversation move toward constructive progress. Please convince me that I am wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The movie 'Get Out' is a viciously racist anti-White film that went over the heads of most white people.\n","id":"95d0d16a-2b16-4308-87fd-10752b63b48f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This  post is partly inspired by this r relationships post I came across earlier today. This is also a topic I feel somewhat strongly about and I have not had a chance to really share my view on because it's sort of a taboo view to have. To sum up the r relationships post OP's 4 year old son is severely autistic and OP has been told by doctors that his son will never function above the level of a 1 year old and will require constant care. Son is ruining OP's life and marriage, and is negatively affecting OP's 2 young daughters as well. I do not believe the OP of that post, and the many other parents who are in a similar scenario, deserve to have their lives ruined just because they were dealt a bad hand and ended up with a disabled child. I think that euthanasia is a humane, simple solution to a problem like this. After all, we euthanize our loved cats and dogs that are no longer able to have a good, independent life. I don't see a fundamental difference between the two cases. As for government owned care facilities I don't believe it is a good use of our resources as a society to continue to take care of individuals who have no chance to ever become functional members of society. Euthanasia is a much more economically and environmentally more efficient option. What won't change my view slippery slope where do we draw the line types of arguments. We are only discussing cases in which the child is beyond a shadow of a doubt unable to ever function independently. . Edit I'm deeply sorry if I offended anybody, particularly those with autism other disabilities, with this post. Please understand that I am not suggesting that anyone with autism be euthanized. My argument only applied to those who were not capable of basically doing anything besides eating, sleeping, and using the bathroom with assistance . Anyone who is reading this post is FAR from even close to the level I'm talking about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents should be allowed to have children with severe mental disability euthanized\n","id":"05c3070b-641c-4d0d-be11-641bb53dc10c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Even conspiracy theories that see the bullfighting ban as western attempt to conquer the Indian dairy industry cannot point to widespread economic consequences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The main economic victims of the bullfighting ban in India were regional bull breeders in just one province.\n","id":"8960b211-4596-4c78-af2b-dad5c79eaf95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>Some women of colour argue that the #MeToo movement is unwilling to acknowledge that, historically, accusations from white women have been used to unjustly punish people of colour without evidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women of colour have often had to choose between staying true to aspects of their identity and supporting the feminist movements.\n","id":"e98c3dd9-bd85-43bf-9291-b9e0f7bd41e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>nobody except God Himself has the right to cast judgement upon anyone else. if a person outwardly, or even internally, judges gay people for their lifestyle, they\u2019re behaving in a way that God doesn\u2019t approve of, just as much as the people they\u2019re judging. i\u2019m not saying that you have to be perfect to be a Christian, everybody slips up, but the conscious decision to disapprove of gay people because \u201cthe bible says so\u201d is a poor excuse. you cannot call yourself a christian while holding an explicitly unchristian like mindset<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"you cannot consider yourself a Christian and judge gay people\n","id":"b4b47563-3357-46bb-87b9-0a7e696b597b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that social security would better serve the people as a retirement asset if it were invested in better yielding investments. First, returns for the individual would be higher, resulting in higher retirement income. Second, market fluctuations would not be a major impediment because even if you were to retire at an inopportune moment Like 2009 , you'd still have 4 decades of investments leading up to that point. A 50 loss in that year still leaves you way ahead of where you would be with social security. The insurance part of SS for the indigent and disabled should be a separate program. To boil down my perspective, most people would benefit from privatized investment accounts they would still be required withholdings . Theoretically, some people would be worse off please tell me who these people are and how they would be worse off but the net gains for the majority would be worth it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social Security should be privatized and put into self-directed investments.\n","id":"36f56a15-21d3-4ad9-b68a-c1b4155ad5ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that the lack of universal healthcare in the United States is going to contribute to an outbreak of Ebola in the U.S. because most people avoid going to the doctor if they don't have health insurance or if their deductible is too high. Many of these people without health insurance work in the service industry in which they interact with 10s of 100s of people everyday. Now you have a bunch of people working their day jobs, interacting with people while symptomatic, spreading the disease at an alarming rate. These people who don't go to the hospital because they can't afford insurance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The lack of a universal healthcare in the US is going to prevent people without healthcare or those with high deductibles to avoid going to see doctors until they are already symptomatic\/contagious.\n","id":"3e83ad86-7909-4f7c-9d94-f511bbd46cba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>The only example of non PC speech being useful in this thread is in a work of fiction that aims to highlight injustices by minorities. The use of non-PC language shows why it is wrong. To Kill a Mockingbird.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anything worth saying can be said in a non-insulting and non-stereotypical way.\n","id":"80b4589d-a702-48d8-9f41-409ec2b72a57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>restrict the right to Habeas Corpus as part of efforts to combat terrorism<|ARGUMENT|>Restricting suspected terrorists\u2019 rights to challenge their detention is necessary to ensure that that individual cannot participate in future terrorist activities. The attacks of September 11th constituted a catastrophic and unprecedented attack on US soil, and the measures undertaken by the US at Guantanamo Bay, in holding many terrorist suspects without trial, are necessary to prevent future attacks of that nature. Terror suspects still have recourse to military tribunals, which contain many of the same safeguards as the federal court system<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Restricting Habeas Corpus is necessary in the face of the new and dangerous threat which modern terrorism poses.\n","id":"b2d9f4ca-350a-4ee9-a8ae-92c6d1500125"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Right to work law, as per my understanding, is that a hired worker no longer must have to associate with, or be held accountable for the dues of union if they are not a member. Would this not help jostle the footholds of ineffectual unions that no longer use their position to their fullest potential for the good of the worker? Despite observed lower wages in right to work states, when compared to non right to work states, could not a beneficial union assume the role to regain those lost wages? Wouldn't competition be spurred between unions and wouldn't the union who proves itself have no trouble rebounding its membership the competition would act to keep the unions on their toes and to keep them improving. I believe the law would be a win for the average worker, if not in the now, then in the long run.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Right-to-work law is beneficial for workers in the long run.\n","id":"32c3080a-460b-44fa-88c7-ee157a4cd5ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU is made up of very old nations, with a strong sense of belonging to a particular national culture. As Europeans, we value the freedom to move, trade and interact within the continent, but we like to feel like a citizen belonging to a country with a long history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USE possibly would also enhance national identity and separatism. For many people, the national identity is more important than the European one.\n","id":"4105c83f-3989-4671-8018-6b1409e61d8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Really I think she is a talentless hack who has risen to fame first by riding off her husband, and later by the pretentious art crowd who considers her to be art. Now I'm not talking about every single lyric that comes out of her mouth. I'm talking about the terrible screeching noises she tries to pass off as music. Take this video for example. For the most part, see screechy parts aside I would consider that music. Bad music, maybe. Terribly out of tune, unpronounciated music from someone who doesn't speak English very well, yes. But it's an attempt. For the most part. Now look at something like this. This is not music. I think anyone who attempts to claim this as music is wrong. Not of a different opinion. I respect that art is subjective. That is not art. They are wrong.  EDIT To clarify my argument more, whenever I say art, I mean to say, specifically, music.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think those noises Yoko Ono makes with her mouth can be considered music.\n","id":"dba029a4-83c2-4113-ac22-0c68240fb0cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is health care a human right?<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals who make decisions throughout their life such as choosing to smoke contribute to the likelihood that they will develop certain diseases later in life. The individual has to take responsibility for this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society shouldn't be responsible for paying for other individual's poor health or choices.\n","id":"3c21763e-4791-4fa0-bfaa-1d84a23b0a76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now forgive me for sounding like an asshole and listen to my reasoning. 1 First of all, I am only talking about those persons whose parents or relatives are either dead or have long abandoned them. 2 I live in India, where governments spend significant sums for their well being and care in a specialized institution. 3 This money could instead be used for more productive purposes like building schools, which are a great necessity in a developing country like mine. 4 Again, forgive me, but these persons will never achieve or amount to much in life. They are a severe burden to society. 5 And lastly, getting rid of them would not cause any mental or emotional trauma to anyone. It would in fact rid these persons of a lifetime of suffering and pain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":": Severely mentally disabled people, with no family or social relations whatsoever, should be put to death.\n","id":"8273adb5-43bf-4e6b-988e-c178beb66335"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just moved into a new apartment and the fridge freezer that came with the unit has the freezer on top and the fridge on the bottom as opposed to the opposite, which is what I had at the last place I lived. My reasons for arguing that freezer on bottom is superior are several 90 of the time you will be interacting with the fridge, not the freezer, so it makes sense to have it eye level. When the fridge is on the bottom of the unit and not the top, most average sized people have to bend down to see what's inside, which is less than ideal. Freezer on bottom allows you to make use of a sliding drawers arrangement like this rather than an open door arrangement like this. The former arrangement gives you greater access to more shelf space, since you will never have to reach around something to get at something else at the back of the freezer, you can just slide the drawer out and grab it off the top. If the power goes out, you want the things that need to stay the coldest to be on the bottom. Heat rises, and so it makes sense to keep the frozen items on the bottom so that if your power goes out, they will stay cold the longest. See u NaturalSelectorX's comment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Freezer on bottom, fridge on top is the superior arrangement to freezer on top.\n","id":"4ecdf0c3-a64d-4616-8f8e-37172aba89d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Developing a uterus infection by giving birth has anywhere between 1 to 20% chance of happening based on the type of delivery.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All of these can also happen when giving birth to a child.\n","id":"57f8da5f-1ec6-4597-b935-b7c892418942"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Under Christianity, children are seen as a blessing, a \"heritage from the lord\" To some Christians, therefore, the right to have a child stems from God's will, not the state's.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under some of the world's largest religions, procreation is seen as a God-given right and, for some, a duty.\n","id":"6cfedb6e-fa43-4e5a-86d5-0d6c546be247"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>The proportion of heating caused by human activity as opposed to natural forcing from solar variation is about 93%<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The vast majority of the community of climatology scientists agree that humans caused the recent climate change.\n","id":"be893f6b-bab3-490e-a173-0a87d80a1f4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Look i understand and have seen many good arguments that mention how certain demographics have long lacked a positive role model, and that these groups can gain an individual to look up to as a hero by changing these characters to make them relatable to new groups. However, doesn't that take away from the creators original intention and backstory built for these historical characters? Having a superhero who is both badass and also gay, or Transexual but also beautiful, or any other combination does not bother me in the slightest. But if you make IronMan a woman, or the Hulk with a Boyfriend, or dare i say it, James Bond Black, it just seems to me that we can all agree its hard to suspend my disbelief a little. Maybe those are terrible examples but hopefully you get my point. When between the plots of the 25 and 26th or whatever we are on installments of a franchise the main characters entire backstory changes, it is hard for me to enjoy as along time fan when viewing it. I guess my point is that societal pressure towards inclusion is a great thing. But it is causing some very oddly forced absurdities and making it so that i am now a bad person or a bigot for hoping that some of the characters i have loved for years stay the same as they have always been. Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Movies and Tv Shows with the main character with a long history of being written as a certain race, gender, and ethnicity should stay that way.\n","id":"f3c1c157-f6a6-49eb-ad62-2d027fc3767a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm currently getting a masters in Statistics, and have long been an ardent fan of the scientific method. As such, I have an extreme skepticism towards anecdotal data, and most people who are even reasonably educated do, too. But most people stop short of the final piece recognizing that your own story and your own eyes represent anecdotal experience as well. I am a person who goes the full distance on this I do not trust my own eyes or my own experience, and lean on the consensus of expert opinion rather than what I have personally found to be true. For instance, I have seen a person in tremendous pain go to a chiropractor, and come out the next day feeling much better. However, the consensus of experts is that Chiropractors are of limited if any use for the treatment of chronic conditions, and as such despite my personal observation, I assume that my friend's experience was illusory or deceptive in some fashion. I have personally found racism to be limited in the modern US landscape I barely ever see instances of it , but larger scale data suggests that racism in the US is still a major issue that is reflected across a wide spectrum of crime, justice and profession related data. As such, I discard my own personal experience as irrelevant. Am I wrong to do this? If so, why?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not trust my own eyes\n","id":"882641f3-8413-4047-a88a-7aa4461fe20b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU have its own army?<|ARGUMENT|>Other military alliances such as the CSTO - dominated by Russia - are likely to see the creation of a European military alliance as further escalation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A European army would negatively affect the EU's relationships with other countries.\n","id":"0ef230e5-c7e4-44bf-814b-8c8ba0851dec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>Because algorithms use commonalitiesrather than human rationale and intuition to differentiate between content, even users who frequently - yet solely - view body positivity and healthy eating content may be bombarded with inappropriate posts containing, for example, unhealthy dieting methods and which push 'miracle' slimming products. All of the above could be triggering for a suffering or recovering individual, despite their best efforts to avoid such content.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social media platforms are driven by algorithms which are incapable of distinguishing between harmful and beneficial content, and will promote any harmful content if it is sufficiently popular. Individual users cannot change this no matter how many precautions they take. Thus the problem is the platform, not its users.\n","id":"b0e73cd6-cc29-4f14-9e7b-88b8e44a582b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Up until the end of the 1980s, children were raised in collective communities in Israel rather than by individual parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Across history, there have been many societies which have raised children collectively rather than in individual homes.\n","id":"e4e7ca5f-7eca-4487-bf8a-6fa50be45499"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want my life to mean something. Growing up I employed what I would describe as practical hedonism to focus on long term goals. The pleasure I would get for accomplishment, be it recognition for a promotion at work or satisfaction for gaining strength through exercise, gave me reason and purpose to apply myself to the task at hand. However, as I begin to focus on longer term goals such as career and family, I find that this orientation towards pleasure serves me less and less. Will it actually be pleasurable to devote my life to helping others? If I choose to have a family, can I rely on pleasure to help me best serve those closest to me? I see the flaws in hedonism but have nothing to replace it with. To clarify, it is my view that hedonism is the most effective method of personal motivation. My View can be Changed by examples of personal philosophies that are demonstrably more effective than hedonism at directing ones life and achieving success, particularly in areas where the well being of others is involved.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The pursuit of pleasure is the most reliable path to a meaningful life.\n","id":"75436831-8efc-4a96-853a-9c1ed56e1161"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people across the world depend on meat as part of their diet, and ending meat eating would lower food security\/diversity for the majority of people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consuming meat is an important part of many culture's cuisines, religions, and practices.\n","id":"8f709f01-2915-428c-bc53-7bea72b46e76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A black kid in Chicago is in more danger than a Palestinian in Israel, and yet I, here in America, hear way more about the latter than the former, despite Israel being another country an ocean away. Muslims are being dragged out of their homes and lynched in Buddhist countries as we speak, yet if you ask people where Muslims are mistreated they will only say Israel. An apartment building built in Jerusalem will make more headlines than 100 dead in the Congo. The outlying factor creating the obsession with Israel is that jews are in the equation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the international fixation with the Israel\/Palestine conflict is the result of anti-Semitism\/Jew obsession rather than genuine concern for Palestinians.\n","id":"fea351bc-7747-4b95-9633-eabdbc50c5a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments pursue predictive policing technology?<|ARGUMENT|>In Maricopa County, it is difficult to make definitive conclusions regarding the use of predictive policing systems because of the lack of publicly available information on the implementation of these systems in different jurisdictions p. 217.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In New Orleans, despite the NOPD using predictive policing technology for well over a year, nobody in the city \u2014 including city officials \u2014 knew that the police department was using this AI system.\n","id":"8b0115d1-751d-46c8-83b2-8da2cbdadd77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The sole argument against the existence of free will, as presented by Sam Harris in his book by the same name, and many other thinkers, is that hard determinism is applicable at every scale of the universe. I.e, if you could know the position and velocity of every fundamental particle, you could theoretically predict every aspect of the future, including human thought and behaviour. If hard determinism was true however, there would be no logical explanation for consciousness, and until we rule out human consciousness as a phenomena of cosmic significance, and solve the hard problem of consciousness , the theory of hard determinism can be negated. If free will exists, it is entirely reasonable to assume that it would be localized within consciousness. One experiment supporting this notion is that of the double slit experiment. In the double slit experiment, electrons are shot through a plane with two parallel incisions to land on a board where their positions can be measured. A phenomena discovered through this experiment is that of the observer effect , where the literal act of measuring the result of the experiment, changes the result. In layman terms, the presence of a conscious mind alters the behaviour of the physical world. Many other experiments in quantum physics prove that fundamental particles dont play by the rules determinism. Change my view EDIT My conviction is not that there is free will by guarantee, rather that its inexistence is yet to be fully proven, and that consciousness MIGHT contain it. EDIT 2 What i mean by consciousness is not to be conflated with ego, psyche or self, in the freudian sense. Rather, consciousness being your actual awareness, or whatever is steering around the glob of flesh it inhabits. CONCLUSION I think the case ultimately resolves to the equal probability of solipsism and materialism, where it meets a dead end, as so, im hesitant to take a rigid stance. I\u2019ve heard alot of inspirational and critical viewpoints which will continue to influence my reflection of the subject. I\u2019ll touch up on kant, thomas nagel, and reexamine the sam harris book for now. I cant respond to everyone, but your points have left a mark on me Delta for those who influenced my perspective<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of consciousness as an anomaly in our current understanding of the universe makes room for the possibility of free will.\n","id":"3970a923-01ed-4268-b98c-ed7fe1c8a243"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Having this alternative, wanting to \"extend\" public nudity to the whole public space means the nudists and their proponents clearly intend to impose the sight of nudity to those that don't want to see it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In order to respect everyone's opinion and differences, there are already defined places where social nudity is acceptable. Properly separated, they do not cause offense to those who disagree.\n","id":"c3d6d168-e42c-409b-b84e-bf81c5bc38dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Feminism stands for much more than the fight against gender norms. They blame men for those norms. Men asking feminism for help is a sure fire way to have their problems thrown in their face, not only as their problem , but as their fault . When confronted with this, some feminists might acknowledge that some women support ed the Patriarchy Funny how those evil gender norms have a male name , but they'll never think they had have any valid, intrinsic reasons for doing so. They contend that all women are oppressed by the Patriarchy, and all men derive benefit from it. Any woman supporting Patriarchy is acting against her self interest and to be excused as mentally ill or abused. Mathematically, all blame falls on men. I'm not asking for equal opportunities blame here. Simply an acknowledgment that a minority of women, acting of their own volition, in their own interest and of sound mind, have supported support traditional gender norms and laws.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe feminism blames men 100% for past and present oppression.\n","id":"c3a01979-5630-4f99-a710-859e99014c8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should politicians have a minimal amount of time spent each year in charitable activities?<|ARGUMENT|>Politicians run enormous campaigns where they highlight all the work they do. This publicity will also bring light to the charity work that politicians are involved in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians getting more involved in charitable activities will bring more spotlight to these activities.\n","id":"43edeaa2-66a7-4d64-9526-7f14faad5d9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think my opinion is simple enough. I feel that those who do not vote during elections have no right to complain about the laws of their government. It seems to me that by not voting they remain silent and have no effect on the system. Therefore when the system does something they do not like, they have no right to complain. One thing to clarify though, there is a difference between actively choosing not to vote, and voting due to laziness or indifference. It is the latter that I am talking about. Choosing not to vote because one dislikes all the candidates is valid in my opinion Although personally I would prefer that they cast a blank ballot, but truthfully it doesn't matter all that much . One thing to clarify though,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that those who don't vote in democracies have no right to complain about laws their government passes.\n","id":"72a9fa5a-ce0d-4123-a172-b379924a3441"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Ex-Convicts Be Prioritised In The Job Market?<|ARGUMENT|>With these systems in place, customers and civilians may not trust certain businesses due to number of ex-convicts on staff.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Businesses may not want ex-convicts to make up a percentage of their workforce.\n","id":"197e4a4c-fddf-418a-a7ea-63e6b0a342b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should fracking be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In growing male children, disruption of testosterone production, has been like to conditions such as autism, cryptorchidism and infertility.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chemicals released during fracking can act as endocrine disruptors impacting the normal production of hormones within the body.\n","id":"6b6cdf93-724d-4e4c-8de7-cccefbf5b11d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I grew up in a very strict religious household. I was accustomed to hear church leaders describe Atheists as evil, devil worshippers, murderers, drunks, abusers, debauched, and all other manner of insults. After I grew up and realized I am an Atheist, I am constantly afraid of discovery at work. My own father asked if I was going to murder someone when he found out. Both my parents have been cold and distant ever since. My mother still cries when she talks to me on the phone and tells me that she wanted more for me . I have a steady job, rarely drink, eat healthy, and I am married to a great guy. The religion I left still preaches that Atheists are horrible people, destined for hell. Am I crazy in believing that most religious people, Christians in particular, hate Atheists? I would love to be wrong. I am new here so sorry if I forget any rules. Edit Thanks everyone for the speedy response. It is going to take a bit if time to respond to you all. Edit 2 Thanks for the discussion folks. This has been really enlightening. My problem may be that despite leaving the religion of my youth and losing the community I once had, I still live in the same town. I grew up believing my religion had all the answers. I remember telling an Atheist kid in high school that I felt sorry for him because he was Atheist. My view may be tainted because I think others view me as I viewed that kid. It may be that my view will be altered once I get to know people in other parts of the country and world. For now, your frankness and kindness has given me hope that there are moderates out there who genuinely care.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious people hate Atheists\n","id":"afe64e92-65cc-4771-aa7f-7045ce18a78d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Throughout history there have been many catchy, memorable even moving songs released by artists ne'er to be heard from again. Most of these songs, known affectionately as one hit wonders, fade in their fashion from pop culture and memory. But some have the power to transcend mere temporary, rocket high fame. Rockwell's Somebody's Watching Me is the paragon of such jewels, achieving a timelessness so rarely awarded one hit wonders. Years, even decades later, to hear the song brings to mind a time gone by in this case the oh so kooky 80's . The truly great one hit wonders stay relevant. It's like Rockwell gazed into some apocalyptic crystal ball to a time when the masses are oppressed by a surveillance state. Is he just paranoid, or is somebody watching him??? And above the many layers of depth and intrigue, this is just a damn good song. Super funky. Michael Jackson sings backup on the track, for cryin' out lout Yet I know there is much to be experienced in the lost world of one hit wonderdom and light of this great truth do I challenge thee  EDIT I define one hit wonder as a song with tremendous popularity and lasting appeal from an artist who didn't contribute anything else of cultural significance musically or otherwise . So, for example, Jimi Hendrix wouldn't count although he only had one top 40 hit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rockwell's \"Somebody's Watching Me\" is the best one-hit-wonder of all time.\n","id":"3f6020e1-a43d-44e0-9734-e24adb4911bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The term Caucasian is a commonly used euphemism for white people. It is used in everyday speech, in legal proceedings, and in research, on survey demographic information collection instruments. This word is terrible. The term is deeply offensive in origin, has been used in a problematic way, and is descriptively meaningless. It should not be used. I believe there is nothing Caucasian does for us that white cannot do. My reasoning The origins are highly loaded and offensive. The term was popularized by the German scientist eugenist Johann Blumenbach in 1795. He divided the human species into 5 races the Caucasian white race the Ethiopian black race the American red race the Malayan brown race the Mongolian yellow race. Blumenbach considered the Caucasians the first race on Earth, consistent with a common conception at the time in Western thought that the Caucasus mountain region is the origin of the entire human race. Currently, it is considered highly unlikely that human beings actually originated in the Caucasus. The out of Africa theory prevails. Furthermore, based on dubious skull studies Blumenbach also thought that in addition to being the first race, the Caucasians were also the superior one. This is a view which I hope I don't need to prove is not currently considered accurate by any means. The term has been used in problematic, racist ways. In his original analysis, Blumenbach used Caucasian to encompass Europeans, North Africans, and Asians up to India. Basically everyone who might be expected to have white skin. In U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind 1923 , the Supreme Court argued that although Asian Indians were technically Caucasian, they couldn't be U.S. citizens because they weren't white. This is an example of the term being twisted for racist purposes. The Supreme Court did not care about the origins of the term, they just cared about the whiteness of the defendant's skin, which is all people really want to know anyway, which brings me to the next point. Caucasian is descriptively meaningless. The Caucasus is a region in West Asia comprising of three countries Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and small parts of eastern Turkey, western Iran, and southern Russia. I don't have a source, but I would bet most Americans couldn't point to the Caucasus on a map. I also bet most Americans do not know the origin of the term Caucasian. Certainly most white Americans are not direct descendants of Caucasian immigrants. Therefore using a term that implies an ethnic origin that has nothing to do with the ethnic origin of most people using the term, seems silly and meaningless. It almost sounds like people are just uncomfortable saying the word white. They're just using a bigger word to I don't know sound smart? Be oblique? Diffuse inner tension? Furthermore, the term is unclear in where it leaves people who are actually from this region. If white anglo saxon Americans are Caucasian, what do we call people from Armenia for example? Are they white? Are they Caucasian ? Are they Asian? Armenia is in Asia, after all. Given the problematic origins in eugenics and discredited human evolution theories, the offensive potential and history of use in the Supreme court, and the descriptive meaninglessness today, is there ANY reason to continue using this word as opposed to white ? There are two types of arguments that could change my view. An argument showing that the terms Caucasian and white are not actually interchangable. ie that Caucasian has a distinct descriptive meaning and is therefore useful to retain. I will accept the argument even if this descriptive meaning is not universally accepted, but accepted only in some communities in some regions for some specific research purpose specific legal purpose specific colloquial connotation. A lot of my argument rests on the idea that Caucasian is a loaded and offensive term. My conclusion is that white is preferable. If someone could show that white is similarly or even more historically loaded than Caucasian, I would change my view. BTW, I do not want to have a discussion about the merits of describing race overall. I hope one day to live in a world where terms like black and white refer to colors and not people. But we live in a world where that is not currently the case and the least we can do is use descriptive words that suck less than other descriptive words. Sources<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term \"Caucasian\" has no place in describing race.\n","id":"722f2638-97d5-4668-ba2d-cf1085291312"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>The Orthodox Tewahedo broader New Testament canon has eight additional books. These are the four books of Sinodos, the two divisions of the Book of the Covenant, Ethiopic Clement, and the Ethiopic Didascalia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Orthodox Tewhahedo broader New Testament canon does not match that of the narrower canon or other biblical adherents.\n","id":"cbd14de5-420e-46c5-ba6e-29e74a6c4489"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it justifiable to abstain from voting?<|ARGUMENT|>An uninformed\/otherwise disinterested person is easily swayed by only shallow effort from political parties one-issue policies, aggressive advertising campaigns, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who are politically ignorant should not vote because they cannot make an informed choice.\n","id":"66c89688-63c6-4556-a1c2-aed324a84afc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Remember back in the 2000\u2019s when you would see ads that you can interact with on the sides of the screen that would say something like, \u201cshoot three ducks and win a free Motorola razor \u201d For a time that scam worked, a lot of people didn\u2019t understand that it was bull shit. Eventually people caught on and now you\u2019re considered retarded if you fall for something so stupid. The advent of social media is brand new to a majority of the population and yes, most people know how to use. However, most people still don\u2019t fully understand how it can isolate them in an echo chamber. Most adults didn\u2019t grow up with the ability to voice there opinion out to the masses right at their finger tips. The over stimulation of fake news and misleading content is to overwhelming for many people. Most adults weren\u2019t used to being insulted by complete strangers even if it was through a harmless monitor. Society as we know it, hasn\u2019t fully integrated with the internet and therefore it is a very volatile place. I believe the generation that was born in the 2000\u2019s will have a much more stable understanding of the internet. Eventually people will see fake news as nothing more threatening than an email from a Nigerian prince asking for a money transfer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The internet as we know it today isn\u2019t ruining society, old people just don\u2019t know how to use it.\n","id":"f28256c5-0b5d-4c41-8fe9-8f6c40a5e57d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I love Pokemon, always have since it first came out. The games have been an enormous part of my life I had to learn to read in order to play Blue and I would never discourage someone from playing them. My opinion that I would like changed is that at its core, pokemon is about enslaving a team of creatures to destroy someone else's team of enslaved creatures. The way I see it is even if you were argue that it is about the love between master and pokemon, it boils down to the fact that I love my awesomely powerful poke death machine of a gyrados for its ability to destroy all who stand in our way. Also pokeballs. A snorlax in a pokeball is on par with leaving your dog in the car on a hot day. Also please don't try to change my view with a mountain of text stating how awesome pokemon is. Trust me, I know. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fundamental idea behind Pokemon is animal cruelty.\n","id":"a16c0ad0-213c-4ce2-ad1d-2897fce00ffe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should God Have Tested Job?<|ARGUMENT|>At the time of the Flood, The Earth was filled with violence indicating an egregious fault on the part of mankind, and not on God's part. Destroying the wicked was likely the only way to preserve the righteous, and hence was a merciful act.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is possible that the Flood were planned as a part of something greater, and thus only appears as a mistake.\n","id":"c96a314a-a0aa-46d2-ab53-7ce285760806"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Different ethnic groups have suffered from overt racism throughout the history of America. Italians, Irish, Chinese, Jews, East Asians, South Asians, and others have all been considered second class citizens at some point. While some of you might still think that racism xenophobia still apply to these groups, we can say that relatively most if not all of these ethnic groups can succeed in the US and live a good life without fear to be targeted. For example, even though Asians get called racist names, their plight is not close to African American experience. I never heard regular folks double guessing whether an Asian is an affirmative action hire. Some might not agree but I think that's a reasonable thing to say. I believe a great way to reduce systemic racism is though wealth creation. All these ethnic groups have over time created wealth for themselves in the US and lowered the barrier of entry for themselves. I think that African Americans have not unfortunately created enough wealth to get that respect in the US. In fact I think post Martin Luther King Blacks political power should have been invested in creating wealth maybe they did and I'm wrong . The average income and wealth for Blacks are much lower than the US average. If African Americans were more wealthy, the discrimination towards them as a race would be lower. Now I admit that some will bring that these ethnic groups are immigrant communities, and there is some self selection. While true, most Blacks in Canada, France, and the UK are immigrants yet they deal with racism and limited success in their society, albeit at different levels than the US. Additionally, others might say that it's literally impossible given that the laws are inherently racists. While also true, aren't the laws unwelcoming of all these ethnic groups especially Jews and Asians at some point? I'm assuming a last contention will be that there no path to get there. My solution would have been to invest in education not stop until Black grades are indistinguishable from whites and Asians , ask congressmen to create financial instruments to support black businesses, create financial instruments to help Blacks getting low rate mortgages, and take affirmative steps to reduce crime in where Blacks live. A quick note on my background I am black and actually immigrated in the US Boston at 19 all family moved in . I didn't speak English then. I had a single mother. Went to a community college, then a graduated college, and had the chance to go to a top 10 MBA down the line. I currently work on a wall street bank. I'm asking this question because I'm truly trying to understand how to reduce eliminate racism. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"racism against African Americans will be greatly reduced only when income levels are similar to whites\n","id":"a15e6cb1-0224-4223-b381-884c4e3e9462"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Equal Paternity\/Maternity Paid Leave Be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Employees who do not have children will feel discriminated against for not having children and may show reduced morale or productivity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Enhanced paid parental leave policies will alienate employees who are not parents and impact the business negatively.\n","id":"b4b46ecb-87ad-4f76-b459-9f7bd9311948"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>People with visible disabilities are generally viewed as asexual, as one study on sexuality and disability suggests.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This perpetuates ableist attitudes in society that assume the disabled are sexually unappealing to all people.\n","id":"eec262dc-8767-4773-9842-124abd249a2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Keystone XL pipeline is an oil pipeline that is intended to connect the Alberta tar sands to refineries in Texas. Tar sands are one of the least environmentally friendly forms of petroleum because it takes a lot of energy to refine them into light hydrocarbons, like gasoline, and refining them releases a lot of greenhouse gasses and air pollutants. The pipeline is intended to go through a lot of protected wilderness and protected lands, and there is always the chance of breaks and spillage from the pipeline. Opponents of the pipeline claim that if we don't build it, then the Alberta tar sands won't get produced. However As it currently stands, the Alberta tar sands are already being drilled and produced, but instead of being shipped by pipeline, most of them are being shipped by train. This will not actually slow down drilling, but instead overloads the train lines, which are more environmentally dangerous than pipelines. For one thing, it takes a lot more energy to ship oil by train than by pipe. For another, trains are much more likely to cause oil spills, fires, and loss of life than pipelines. For instance, the Lac Megantic train derailment last year in Quebec, carrying Bakken crude oil, in which 72 train cars derailed, spilling over 2 million gallons of oil, killing 42 people and destroying half of a town. A pipeline doesn't carry nearly this high a risk. In addition, a lot of Alberta tar sands crude is being shipped overseas for processing in places like China, where the environmental regulations in the refining process may be much lower, and USA and Canada don't even get the benefit of using the petroleum. Sending the petroleum to Texas for refining would be a benefit to the US economy because we would actually keep most of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the Keystone XL Pipeline should be built for environmental reasons, and protesters are fighting against their own interests.\n","id":"4ad3b930-4fa2-4db7-8b16-13965ba76da5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Christian responses to domestic abuse have been catching up to secular standards over the past 40 years. Many pastors have said and many continue to say that they would never advise a women to leave an abusive husband, and many advise forgiveness and enduring.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some communities and groups have suffered abuse and\/or death in the name of religion. E.g. murder of LGBTQ, abuse of disabled children, removal of freedoms for women, child marriages, etc.\n","id":"8294b7d0-442d-4c0b-9790-15fcb928e5bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is in response to the simulation argument put fourth and refined by Nick Bostrom. Integrated information theory states that consciousness is a property of complex systems that are physically similar to that of a brain. Building a neuromorphic computer would be building a conscious mind since a neuromorphic computer processes information the same way a human brain does, and has a interconnectedness of pars similar to a human brain. There is little reason to build a neuromorphic computer other than to create a conscious being, and since I interact with many others on a daily basis I can infer that if I was a neuromorphic computer conscious computer others probably are too, and we are probably in a simulated world, interacting with each other. Here is a quote from Christof Koch, one of the best known researchers on consciousness and a proponent of integrated information theory. This quote was taken from a interview with him on technology review.com This theory clearly says that a digital simulation would not be conscious, which is strikingly different from the dominant functionalist belief of 99 percent of people at MIT or philosophers like Daniel Dennett. They all say, once you simulate everything, nothing else is required, and it\u2019s going to be conscious. I think consciousness, like mass, is a fundamental property of the universe. The analogy, and it\u2019s a very good one, is that you can make pretty good weather predictions these days. You can predict the inside of a storm. But it\u2019s never wet inside the computer. You can simulate a black hole in a computer, but space time will not be bent. Simulating something is not the real thing. It\u2019s the same thing with consciousness. In 100 years, you might be able to simulate consciousness on a computer. But it won\u2019t experience anything. Nada. It will be black inside. It will have no experience whatsoever, even though it may have our intelligence and our ability to speak. I am not saying consciousness is a magic soul. It is something physical. Consciousness is always supervening onto the physical. But it takes a particular type of hardware to instantiate it. A computer made up of transistors, moving charge on and off a gate, with each gate being connected to a small number of other gates, is just a very different cause and effect structure than what we have in the brain, where you have one neuron connected to 10,000 input neurons and projecting to 10,000 other neurons. But if you were to build the computer in the appropriate way, like a neuromorphic computer see \u201cThinking in Silicon\u201d , it could be conscious. As we can see, building a software model of the human brain would not be building a conscious human. We can't know many things in life, only take very educated guesses. For instance, I technically can't know for sure if everyone around me in conscious, but I can be extremely confident that others are due to all of the evidence that they are conscious just like me. However, I can be absolutely, 100 sure of ONE thing i am conscious. Therefore, I know I am not a software model, I am either a real human or a neuromorphic computer or some variation thereof . Nick bostrom a simulation theory states that the simulations we create could create simulations of their own, and those ones could do the same, again, again again, etc. According to him and other proponents of the simulation theory, this increases the number of simulated minds very much, since each set of simulated minds you create could in turn create their own, and so on. According to them, this would mean the number of real minds are infinitesimally small compared to simulated minds. However, if consciousness can only arise from either real brains like mine or neuromorphic or neuromorphic like computers, then the whole stacked simulations concept loses much viability. If we, as real humans created a group of neuromorphic computers and linked them all together in a simulation mimicking human life, they could possibly make neuromorphic computers of their own I the simulation and do the same. However, those neuromorphic computers that they create would not be conscious the ones we create would have a physical structure, but the ones they create would simply be bits of code in their simulation. The only foil I see to this is if we built more neuromorphic computers to give those second generation computers consciousness, but I think this is ridiculously unlikely. I doubt the number of neuromorphic computers built and connected to simulations mimicking our human lives would ever seriously challenge the number of real conscious humans in the real, unsimulated world, since the vast majority of supposed simulated people in simulations would actually just be software with no real, neuromorphic basis. Also, if you do not subscribe to integrated information theory and instead think functionalism is true, than there could be a high chance that we are in a simulation, but by the definition of functionalism everyone around me acts 100 conscious therefore they are 100 conscious. If functionalism is true then everyone around me is conscious, and if integrated information theory is true, than the possibility that we are in a simulation is astronomically small. In conclusion, there is a chance we are in a simulation, but it is much smaller than the possibility that we are in an unsimulated universe. Thank you for reading this, it was very long so a big thanks to those who got through it. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the integrated information theory of consciousness is correct, there is very little chance that we are in simulation.\n","id":"68a1424a-9398-47a8-8003-51f170128218"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All US and EU sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014 should be lifted<|ARGUMENT|>The perceived failure of sanctions may in fact embolden Russia to take more aggressive action in the future because Moscow knows that sanctions have exhausted their effect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The longer sanctions are in place, the less likely they are to produce any policy change\n","id":"9a4ea4fc-ccf9-41b4-a838-573e208d3bed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>European Union Expansion<|ARGUMENT|>New entrants are unlikely to wreak havoc on the EU\u2019s workings just because they have not enacted all aspects of EU law and standards into their domestic systems \u2013 no current member complies with all EU requirements and some fall far short. Economic integration will be relatively easy as prospective members already enjoy free trade with the EU in manufactures already, and no one expects them to receive agricultural subsidies under the CAP as the current members do. Candidates may be backward compared to current members, e.g. industrially or in terms of corruption or environmental protection, but these shortcomings have domestic, rather than EU-wide impact.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"New entrants are unlikely to wreak havoc on the EU\u2019s workings just because they have not enacted all...\n","id":"cdd2192e-f6d4-420a-ad83-24bf6116938e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>In order for this to be true, potential new partners would need to be suspicious of this in order to look it up in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People with a history of violence and abuse will not be able to hide this.\n","id":"ef0737e3-5d24-4328-a443-befaa555747a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Arguing that holding sexual preferences specifically excluding transgender people is transphobic is to conflate characteristics one finds sexually valuable with those one deems of holistic value\u2014that is, the worth of a human relative to others. Obviously, belief that transgender people have less worth than cisgender people is transphobic doing so would use trans status as a surrogate for holistic value. However, sexual preferences\u2014a set of characteristics which indicate sexual value to a person\u2014do not equate holistic value judgements. Given the distinction between a characteristic indicating sexual value and holistic value to a person, sexual preference as it relates to trans status is not transphobic. Note I am interpreting \u201ctransphobic\u201d to mean having or showing the belief that transgender people have lesser holistic value. Admittedly, this definition lacks nuance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having sexual preferences excluding transgender people is not transphobic\n","id":"ab261d76-1517-4871-970c-c8526d59b9a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the holiday season, it\u2019s the time of year where racist uncles and thrice divorced aunts start showing up, and the age old argument will be thrown out \u201cI know you don\u2019t like them, but they\u2019re family so you need to get along and give them a pass.\u201d My opinion is that someone being family doesn\u2019t earn them anything. If nothing about them was different except for that they weren\u2019t my family, would I still have to respect them and like them? I think no. I think there need to be more reasons. I think family gets a pass too much. I\u2019ll never forget the time my brother gave me a black eye and bloody nose but I was the one in trouble for staying mad about it and wanting to file a police report. I was rightfully afraid, but my parents talked me down. \u201cHe\u2019s your brother\u201d, they said, \u201cand we treat family differently. You need to give him more chances. You two have to get along because that\u2019s what family does.\u201d I\u2019m sad to admit they guilted me into letting him get away with knocking me out with his fists. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m the first person or the last who was guilted into giving family members a pass on bad behavior. I think if anyone, family or not, is to get a pass on bad behavior, better reasons need to be given. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any legitimate moral obligation to put family on a pedestal and a think doing so is dangerous and unhealthy. My view could be changed if I can be convinced that someone being a family member is the only reason there needs to be to let someone get away with behavior you otherwise would call out or do something about. For example if someone at the dinner table was overtly racist, convince me that I should only call out the racism and comment on it if the person isn\u2019t my family. . Edit I\u2019ll define giving a pass giving a pass includes taking no action that could lead the offender to think they\u2019ve offended. If someone beats you up, giving a pass means you tell them it\u2019s all good and that you\u2019re not mad about it. If someone is racist, giving a pass means you will agree, nod your head, stay silent, etc so long as the speaker is able to keep thinking nobody has a problem with their comments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"someone being my family member doesn\u2019t mean I should give them a pass on bad behavior\n","id":"a77556ee-eaec-484e-8f95-0a109b10cfaa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the music of the past better than it is today?<|ARGUMENT|>It's ubiquitous since its creation and especially when the patent expired and was put into the public domain. So now anyone could download for free and sing with a perfect pitch, without needing much talent\/expertise causing a devaluing of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being invented in 1997 a lot about 99% as of 2010 of commercial music now utilizes auto-tune So new music, for the most part, is not 'real'.\n","id":"a03f0f52-c60c-4973-9447-719dba529448"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the U.S.A. an exceptional country?<|ARGUMENT|>Only 30% of US foreign aid goes to the poorest countries in the world; most of it is received by middle-income countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US' foreign aid budget is not well-spent, making its apparently exceptional generosity largely irrelevant in practice.\n","id":"f64bc957-0db5-428b-ab82-77ae19954fc2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that BLM is a terrorist organization built upon the premise of defaming or harming other ethnicities, and use pinpoint terror attacks to make them seem like the victim. They are trying to terrorize the innocent people of the US in an attempt to become a Superior Race, as seen on their signs and motto. Black lives matter , not All lives matter . After several attacks at Trump's rallies, and them attacking white people and streaming it I believe that my opinion is correct. I'd love to see others opinion on this topic, because I have not had any intelligent conversation with others about it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"BLM is a terrorist organization\n","id":"ca44d981-108e-439e-b806-d3d7e929f041"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Citizens United Was Wrongly Decided<|ARGUMENT|>The New York Times and Washington Post may not have been able to publish the Pentagon Papers if they were not considered as persons with a first amendment right to free speech.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A corporation is just a collection of people who have pooled together Their free speech rights should not disappear simply because of this.\n","id":"6f2784d4-7877-485c-92c0-37d6fb4f8fac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First things first I am pro brexit in a lot of areas. I see many problems with the EU, and want to get away from it as soon as possible. I also believe our country's sovereignty is very important, and that a lot of it is taken away from Europe. That being said, I simply cannot be pro Brexit for one major reason the NHS. I am very pro NHS like most Britons, and think that leaving the EU will be a disaster for the NHS. There are multiple reasons for this first of all, staffing. 10 of NHS doctors are from the EU, and 4 of Nurses. In my experience, big cities such as London have the highest proportion of foreign doctors. Recruiting staff from outside the EU is getting increasingly harder, meaning if we make recruiting staff from within the EU harder as well, we could lose a lot of potential staff. Our nation's growing age means that the NHS will also face an increase in patients entering hospitals. Fewer staff and more patients? Quality of healthcare will go down, as well as waiting times and return visits will go up. Bedding is a very tight situation already, and will become even tighter as we lose staff. Pharmaceutical safety could potentially go down, considering that we will probably leave the European Medicine Agency. This ties in with research leaving the EU could mean medical research decreases. Access to EU data will decrease, meaning it will be harder to test our own results. We will also have less access to EU facilities that help research and testing of medicines and treatments. So, change my view. How are these issues a lot more minor than they appear? Are there any medical benefits to leaving the EU?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Brexit will be bad for the NHS, and that's a dealbreaker.\n","id":"3abf64c6-3ecd-446b-a6b2-b77cccebf161"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have had a hard time understanding the position that less regulation is better than effective regulation. So much of the political conversation equates regulation and taxes to Anti American or Anti Freedom or gasp Socialist. I think it poisons the discussion about our common goals and how to achieve them. I know there are many laws taxes that are counter productive especially subsidies , and I am all for getting rid of them, but not without considering what their intent was, evaluating that intention, and deciding how to more effectively accomplish that intention given it was a valid intention. Help me understand. I would like to have a more nuanced view on this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Effective regulation\/taxes is better than less regulation\/taxes.\n","id":"8dc359bd-2d45-4165-82fe-ecb40a4172aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that prostitution should not be legalized. Whether I morally agree with prostitution or not is not what matters here. The laws in the United States are set in order to protect the freedom, safety, and quality of life of the citizens not willing to argue about this . Yes, the US has Freedom of Choice Act for all. And many try to use this to argue that prostitution should be legalized. One might say \u201cit is their own decision how they live their life and they are not hurting anyone else.\u201d However, the continuation of practicing prostitution IS hurting other people. In prostitution, human\u2019s bodies are up for sale similar to a toy that is up for sale in a mall. And, just like a toy at a mall, the object that these people are offering can be bought\u2026 or stolen. Objectifying a person like this unleashes the idea that, just like with any other object being sold, although it is not right stealing is an option. This leads to abuse and violence. But this violence does not only affect the one person that chose to sell his her body It dehumanizes all people by alienating sexuality from a person and therefore fuels human trafficking. Legalizing prostitution would just say that all of this objectification is \u201cokay\u201d and the world would only experience MORE of the violent, abusive results that it already currently receives from illegal prostitution. Just like the act of murder hurts other people, the act of prostitution hurts people by promoting human trafficking. We need prostitution to remain illegal in order to try to protect every innocent life, not make it more possible that an innocent life will be hurt.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prostitution should NOT be legalized.\n","id":"a25975c3-6773-4caa-926a-731f7445ce9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in California, the most populous state. Whether I vote Republican or Democrat my vote will not have changed the outcome whatsoever had I not voted nothing would change. Therefore my vote has zero effect. There has never and will never be an election that is decided by one vote, it is statistically insignificant. And don't argue oh but if everybody thought their.voted didn't matter then no one would vote and then it would matter . Yes that's correct, but my way of thinking has no effect on others, I'm not going around arguing to convince everyone not to vote. Sure IF everyone thought their vote didn't count that would be bad, but it's not true, and me thinking that doesn't change that at all. There is also no difference between everyone voting except.me and everyone voting including me. Ultimately if the only factor changing from any position is whether I vote, then the outcome doesn't change at all. Even further, no single persons vote has any effect on the outcome of the election. Edit sorry for not responding I posted this right before I went to sleep oops. Also most of these replies are showing one fringe case about a house vote in Virginia. I am talking about the presidential election in California.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My vote is entirely unimportant in a general election.\n","id":"2de3a8c5-cada-429c-a199-f1548b445d9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>Suicides are often committed in ways that harm the public, such as riding the wrong way on a high way or jumping in front of a train.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Suicide is different from voluntarily ending one's life. To end your life you probably need the help of a doctor.\n","id":"ffb342c4-3786-4b07-9b6a-305961693c20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>According to polls only one in twenty Americans knows that the United States spends about 1% of its GDP on foreign aid. The average estimate of the number is 26%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The relevance and trustworthiness of American public opinion is questionable in light of how uninformed Americans generally are about foreign policy issues.\n","id":"02152a46-9946-474c-9eff-9945f7f18e21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>Those clergymen who supported Reconstruction in the South were viciously attacked as \u201cpolitical religionists\u201d by a plantation caste that perverted theology to frame their backlash against \u201cNegro rule.\u201d Proposed changes to the Southern way of life were branded \u201cimmoral,\u201d and reactionary politicians euphemistically used the term \u201cRedemption\u201d to rally a resistance. washingtonpost.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many white Southerners, most of whom were conservative and pious evangelical Protestants, sought answers to Confederate defeat by turning to religion. Indeed, throughout the South the conservatives who overthrew Reconstruction were often called \"Redeemers,\" echoing Christian theology.\n","id":"e7691fd9-7c42-4384-8280-e2cff98ac9bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Alcohol Consumption Should Be Further Restricted<|ARGUMENT|>Alcohol is just as potentially addictive as many illegal drugs. Those who do become addicted to alcohol often lose their marriages, jobs, families, even their lives. A large proportion of homeless people find themselves in that position as a result of their alcoholism. Any drug this addictive and destructive should be illegal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alcohol is just as potentially addictive as many illegal drugs. Those who do become addicted to alc...\n","id":"7201d285-839c-44ed-b978-482e16c4c8b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Say that we do get to the moon or mars and decide we want to settle there. Obviously, the question of power is brought up, and most people would automatically say solar as their first choice for how we would generate power. However, nuclear is the clear superior alternative to solar. It can be used all the time. While solar needs constant direct sunlight to provide power, nuclear is always on. This would be especially useful if underground, which would make solar much harder to use. Also, places like mars have large dust storms, which can create a clear problem for solar power there. If traveling between solar systems, its the only alternative. It's clear in our future we want to expand outside of our solar system, but these deep parts of space have no sunlight. And yes, while we can charge batteries with solar power, nuclear fuel has a higher energy density, which makes that point obsolete. Most concerns we have about nuclear here on earth are not an issue to any colonists on the moon, mars, or any other planet. There's massive amounts of space to dump any waste we generate most of it can be reprocessed into more energy anyways and nuclear melt downs are a thing of the past, mainly being caused by outdated tech and mismanagement. My main point here is nuclear is the better long term alternative for solar. When we first set up a colony, it will be unviable to build a reactor, but in the coming years it will continue to prove more and more useful and superior to solar. After we finish making them we will have to spend less to maintain them and will only need small amounts of fuel from earth to power entire cities on other planets. Plus, as the technology advances, reactors will continue to become even smaller and more efficient. Just as a side note, I'm thinking these reactors could be things like LFTR's. Really anything that consumes little fuel, has a high energy output, and is economically feasible, and hopefully small.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear power is the best long term power in space\n","id":"e270b367-d404-4b1f-b55f-812a12d607b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Trade vs aid<|ARGUMENT|>The other partner in a trading relationship is likely to represent an ongoing market for goods or services. So when a developing country has the capacity to engage in trade with another country, there is a strong likelihood that that trade will blossom into an ongoing trading partnership. This will allow a firm basis for a flow of cash or goods into the developing country, largely independently of whether the developed country is doing well or badly economically at a given moment. This can be contrasted to the flow of aid. It tends to be less predictable, both because it is manipulated for political reasons and also because it can be quite ephemeral and so, if the developed country goes through a bad economic time, the aid budget makes an easy target for a reduction in spending.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trade is a long-term basis for international co-operation.\n","id":"d3bc62d2-e2c0-4c95-8a38-949ae3062b06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should education at public universities in the United States be tuition free?<|ARGUMENT|>If students are made to pay for education, students from poorer backgrounds will often have to seek employment to enable them to study. This means that poorer students will have less time to focus on their degrees, and it increases the likelihood that they will not do as well as their peers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free education removes barriers to access for minorities and individuals of low socio-economic class.\n","id":"fa5f2d13-7ee3-439a-969e-035f634d4104"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Computing power is growing at an exponential rate. Looking at this chart from Top 500, it is clear that for the last 20 years at least, computers have doubled in their speed about every 1.5 2 years. According to Morre's Law, transistor counts will double about every 1.5 years, and according to this professor there will be no stop to growth until at least the middle 2020's. With this information it is easy to see that by 2025, we will easily have computers that will have at least a few exaflops of computing power. With just one exaflop of power you can run this simulation of neurons thousands of times faster than it is currently being ran at. And that is one of the most advanced brain simulations we have at the moment. By 2025, we should be able to simulate an entire human brain at least not in real time . In fact the goal of the Blue Brain Project is to simulate the human brain by 2023, and they have already simulated parts of other mammals brains, for example in 2006 they ran a simulation of a rat neocortical column. If people can get a simulation of a human brain up and running, people can give the simulated brains superhuman like qualities to make those brains ultraintelligent. For example one could take away the brains ability to feel pain or to get distracted. People could also allow the brain to edit its own source code to recursively make itself more intelligent than a physical human. After these types of things are accomplished, by definition the singularity has arrived because we have computers that are much smarter than even the most intelligent human beings on earth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the singularity will most likely happen before 2035 if it ever happens.\n","id":"49c1cce7-5d65-42d7-a8fa-3e5514180f52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All US and EU sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014 should be lifted<|ARGUMENT|>Russia's shift away from the West make future sanctions less effective as they are less dependent on the West.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanctions reduce economic interdependence between Russia and the West. Economic interdependence is important leverage for reducing Russian aggression.\n","id":"21f8f451-a3d3-4308-b976-5bec78f3ec28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be further research on solar geoengineering.<|ARGUMENT|>Those that are poor and members of marginalized groups are most severely affected by climate change, so it the responsibility of wealthy members of industrialized nations to deploy this technology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Could enormously decrease harm to people suffering from the impacts of climate change\n","id":"bfac5808-851f-4eb0-ae74-a26c9e4b07ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I had a discussion with friends recently about the possibility of a world government. Some of them claimed that such a thing would never be possible. I do, however, think that this is possible because larger governments have been formed from smaller ones before e.g. the United Kingdom, the US, Germany, the EU . I see no reason why this could not happen again on a worldwide scale. They argued that a government can only exist when there are other countries that are not governed by the same government. So I challenged them to a thought experiment Imagine tomorrow every country on earth vanished except for the United States. Do you think the government of the United States will continue to exist? They said no. Then I asked a slightly different question. What if the United States and the Vatican still exist but every other country vanishes, would the US government still exist? This time the answer was yes. This is unfathomable to me. Why would the Vatican play such a major role in deciding whether the US government can exist? Surely there are far more important reasons to have a government, than to talk to the Vatican. Which forces would lead to the collaps of the US government without Vatican that are not present with the Vatican? To change my view you need to convince me that the US government has no other role than to talk to foreign countries and would therefore be obsolete when there are no other countries. or convince me that there are forces that would destroy the US government that cannot do this because the Vatican exists or come up with any argument of your design that convinces me that the existence of another country of any size is a necessary requirement for the existence of a government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of the US government does not depend upon the existence of the Vatican.\n","id":"d23a7228-4437-42d4-af20-dd668facdbd6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Day be a National Holiday in the U.S?<|ARGUMENT|>63% of Republicans said citizens should have to prove they want to vote by registering ahead of time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many Americans say that it shouldn\u2019t be easy to vote.\n","id":"0111862d-7522-4620-a6a9-01cdcecd63e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Similarly to how people are allowed to continue making a right turn if there is no traffic coming at least in the US , I believe that when driving, if you are stuck at a red light, you should be able to go through that red light as long as you come to a complete stop and proceed with caution. There's a few things to note, however. If the other light in the intersection is green, cars do not have to stop just as they do now , and for obvious safety reasons, large vehicles such as trucks and buses should not be allowed to proceed through a red light. Here's why Having a car wait at a red light is extremely inefficient on roads in which some intersections are infrequently used. For example, I live in a town that is bisected by a major highway, but that highway has frequent lights. Often, I have to stop and remain stopped for nobody to use the intersection. By being able to continue through a red light, it would make travel times shorter, which would save gas, which would have a positive ecological effect. The best part is that, on highways with lights, traffic would flow a lot easier. Another reason is that sometimes intersections stack up. In one intersection near me, the road going east west is far more popular than the one going north south. Because of an ill placed red light at the intersection, there's often a line of twenty or so cars stopped behind it, and, in some situations you'd have to wait a cycle of two whole lights just to be able to proceed. By allowing drivers to eliminate the size of the stack, traffic, as a whole, would be better on smaller roads, too. Now, I know that it seems like there would be a higher rate of accidents if this was in effect, but really, all the same laws we currently have would apply, except for the fact that red lights don't require you to stay stopped. Running a red light would still be illegal if an accident was caused, and the driver with the red light would be responsible. I would think that it's safe to say that there's no more increased risk of people running red lights than there currently is. I don't think that this would have a major effect on most people, but it would make getting around far more convenient and efficient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Instead of remaining stopped, drivers should be able to proceed with caution at stoplights.\n","id":"18ca7373-ae1c-4145-8fae-c3445583c895"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's really hard to say that without sounding like a prude, you know? Anyway. I just don't get it, yunno? The desire to get drunk and this obsession with having a drink at the end of the day. That thats what people work for. Sure, having a family and all that is good, but in the short term it's all about getting out a cold one and sitting around. It just seems outdated and not worth it, and all the discussion about gun regulation Which leads to drug regulation, etc has made me think about it. And I'll get into that here So here are the statistics. I don't need to explain what alcohol is, I don't need to explain what getting drunk is and how that influences people, but just knowing that Excessive drinking costs the US 223.5 billion per year Compared to the total of 393.5 billion that 15 million students spend per year on tuition. 50 of rapes involve one or both parties being drunk there are 683,000 total rapes in the US per year 10,000 drunk driving fatalities in the US per year So I mean I get it. I get that it's nice and enjoyable and people like it but is it really worth it? Is it worth not sending 8.5 million students to college for free with the cost we spend on excessive drinking? Is it worth 10,000 dead per year? Is it worth 341,000 rapes every year? I get that it's very Brave New World to look at it in such a utilitarian fashion, I know that no one is really with me on this, and it's not like I bring this up or even really think about it in real life, but still. All that just so Jim Johnson can loosen his tie and pour a drink. Also I'm pretty left wing. So I'm really not that conservative in a very literal usage of the word on most all issues. This one just always tug at the back of my mind. And yunno the title isn't We should have prohibition , I understand the history of it I promise. edit Enjoying the conversations most of them at least , appreciate all the perspectives. I understand this isn't a popular opinion and I'm not even trying to advocate it as a right one. But hey Da Vinci thought that sex was abhorrent and distasteful so I feel comfortable having some off opinions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alcohol is a drain on society\n","id":"432cc837-d39b-4192-a3f3-81fc8e49ce5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>The implementation of abstinence-only programs according to a recent study bettered the numerical aptitude skills of students.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abstinence-only programs can have positive impacts on teenagers and their futures.\n","id":"dc568d0c-8705-42dd-a186-47ffe4caada3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The general public should not have any say in science. At my university we had a discussion about the tranparency of science for the general public with students and staff. One of the students brought forward this statement, but aside from the comment that it was ridicules the statement was ignored by the scientific staff. As I would like it better for someone to try change my view then it just being ignored I decide to try it here. Now why do I believe this As science advances, science will be increasingly difficult to explain to the general public. To illustrate in general classical fysics is quite intuitive and visible. Drop something from a height and you can see gravity at work. However quantum fysics has a lot of counterintuitive aspects. Something can be 2 things at the same time wave vs particle . This on itself is not really a big problem. However the human society has a fear for the unknown. These two combined lead to people who disstrust science because they just don't understand it. Example The rather small, but still present demonstrations against CERN, because they believe it will destroy the world. People fear the bad more than the appreciate the good. This is a problem as the general public does not have the expertise to know what is true and what is false and therefor are dependent on what they are told. When 1 person says A and 2 say B the it is logical to say B will be more likely be true. However this doesn't work in real life. Without taking in consideration what is correct let's say we have one scientist say something is bad and one say it's good, the general public will think it's bad. If we have 1 scientist for bad and 2 saying good, still the general public will not trust the 'something'. With these low numbers this is only logic, however we also see this with realistic numbers of scientists professionals. Just look at the climate change 'debate' or the vaccine anti vaccine 'debate'. Example The anti vaccine movement is almost only based on the 'Vaccines causes autism' paper. Not considering that the paper is retracted, there are a lot of papers saying this is not true, almost all docters say vaccines do not cause autism. Still there are people who believe the old retracted vaccines causes autism paper. The general public do not have the expertise to know what is important and what is not. To do science money is needed. How much a project is getting is not all dependent on how it is viewed in the eyes of the general public. However the general public can not tell which is imporatant and which is not. So they should not play any part in dividing this money. Also besides lacking the knowlegde about science, there is also religion and other ideologies that can put certain aspects of science in a bad light and thus stop the money flow to these science projects. cloning vs religion The average media want senation Science can be very boring. The general public do not like boring and media that only do boring are ignored. So media will not do boring and are looking for senation. To report on a subject where there is almost a concensus is boring so media will create debate. This is creates the diffences in how science view things and how the general public view things. Example Climate change debate. I can't explain it better than John Oliver Science is actually already doing stuff without telling the general public. For example how many of you know that we use nanotechnology in regular sunscreens nowadays. I realise that a lot of this can be solved by better and more information for the general public. However the gap between of the general public and the scientific community is so big I feel it is better for science to ignore the general public untill they get smarter. tl dr the general public is to stupid, science should just ignore them EDIT1 During the discussion I noticed that my statement is actually not complete. It should be The general public should be kept in the dark about science developments until they are capable to understand these developments. EDIT2  succesful. As u Namemedickles pointed out most of the issues I was referring to are not caused by poor understanding but rather due to beliefs or agendas. These will not be changed in the maner describe at EDIT1 u Hq3473 makes a very good point, which comes down to if I understand correctly what stops the world to come up with a new 'superstition'. And why do they have to believe science rather than the shamans. And u Znyper came up with problems that might arise when scientists have to make value jugdments. I think he explains this better so for more in the comments. If I paraphrased you guys wrong please let me know<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The general public should be left in the dark about science\n","id":"c4ecb48b-5a2c-4532-822a-07586928866c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think there needs to be a distinction made between institutional racism and interpersonal racism. I am White, and in my interpersonal relationships I try to be color blind. That is, I try to treat everyone the same no matter what their differences are. At the office I do not treat a POC any differently than a Caucasian person. This has several advantages 1 Not singling out a person constantly by reminding them how different they are from me 2 Not bringing race as an irrelevant question into every discussion e.g. As an African American, how do you feel about cheese? Or sales reports, or whatever. It really truly is not relevant to absolutely EVERY conversation. 3 Not treating a POC as an ambassador of their minority group, and expecting them to always have an opinion on some racial topic and or taking their opinion as representative of their group. E.g. Why do all African Americans do such and such? I feel like what most people want is to be treated like a person. Most people want to hang out and play sports and talk about TV, or whatever they do with their friends. Most people in the office just want to get their job done, and not be treated differently because of the color of their skin. And here's the second part of my claim SJWs agree with me. All those memes about micro aggressions, asking Where are you from? etc. POC apparently find that stuff tiresome and or mildly to moderately offensive. That completely agrees with my statements above, that POC don't like to always be reminded that they are not the dominant ethnicity or that they don't fit in. They just want to get along with their lives without constantly having to defend themselves or correct misperceptions. Am I right about the motivations behind the micro aggression activists? All of this is NOT the same as institutional or systemic racism and I think that's where the distinction needs to be drawn. Institutional racism is absolutely a problem and is denying full opportunities benefits to minority groups, and we White people all need to be aware of how we are contributing to that system. But please don't call me racist simply because I am a part of that system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In race relations, being color-blind is a good thing and SJWs would agree.\n","id":"dcc8bc36-8701-4954-9e53-cda81733dc5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Michigan and Florida delegates in 2008 US elections<|ARGUMENT|>Michigan Sen. Carl Levin D - \"it would be very difficult to hold another vote in Michigan and that even a mail-in contest would have problems: 'Not just cost, but the security issue. How do you make sure that hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more ballots can be properly counted and that duplicate ballots can be avoided?'\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A mail-in re-vote in Mich and Flor risks encountering balloting issues.\n","id":"bd4ab4ca-2717-45f2-9994-3305bd0e0d5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What inspired me to write this was reading the book, A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah. The book was about the author's life as a child soldier in the African country of Sierra Leon. When Mr. Beah was 12 years old, he was forcibly taken away from his family and conscripted into the Sierra Leon military. He was forced to take a pill which contained, among other things, cocaine. He was than given a gun and told, along with other children in the same situation, to go into a village and shoot everyone in the village, or he and his family would be killed. Mr. Beah complied with the orders and killed everyone in the village. This went on for about two years in many villages and towns in the country of Sierra Leon. Mr. Beah, along with other children, were finally rescued by the United Nations International Child Emergency Fund, also known as UNICEF. Mr. Beah along with the other children were taken to a rehabilitation center where they underwent withdrawal from the drugs which they were forced to take during their time as soldiers, and they underwent therapy to cope with what they were forced to do. Mr. Beah, along with other children, were told that it was not their fault, and that they were innocent victims. Mr. Beah now lives in the United States and, according to an interview, is happy with how his life is now. A few months after reading this book, I was watching an episode of Law and Order where a man was given a gun, shown a stranger, and told that if he did not kill the stranger, he would be killed. The person complied, and when the police found out what he had done, they arrested the man and charged him with second degree murder despite the fact that he was not acting under his own free will. It is shocking to me that a person can be charged with murder, even if they are forced to do it under threat of death. I say that the man should not have been charged with anything because he was forced to do it against his will. I looked it up and their are people currently in prison for similar actions in which they would have been killed if they did not comply. This is common among westernized nations, which I think is a violation of their human rights because if a person is forced to do something against his will and under threat of death, he should not be punished for it. Now, lets see if you can change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a person if told given a gun, shown someone they do not know, and told \"Kill this person or you will be killed,\" if the person does indeed kill the stranger, that person should not be charged with murder because he was not acting under his own free will.\n","id":"a19fe286-67c3-4d41-9c91-2d87fe1ca8b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So this is something that has been on my mind for quite some time. To elaborate I live in the Netherlands, but this could also apply to the U.S. imo. Lately, the new trend of politics and especially in campaigning is creating a flaw in the logic of the other side. In the Netherlands, there have been a few referendums lately. Which gave people the freedom to vote for political decisions and by doing so, advice the government. While i am definitely not opposed to democracy, these referendums are being used to leave complex decision making in the hands of people that only view one aspect of the decision. People that don't read into the details of these choices and only focus on what the media tells them about a certain decision. We have seen similar things in the presidential election in the U.S. Where you could vote for somebody that was being investigated by the FBI or somebody that was a total idiot. The ideas or visions that people have or the consequences of a decision are put into perspective by the general opinion of a person or the flaws in the system. By stating my opinion dumb people should not be allowed to vote, i am not saying that people have to have a certain level of education before they are given the right to vote. I am merely stating that people that vote without reading into what they are voting for, people that vote a certain way because their husband wife, friends etc. votes a certain way, or people that vote a certain way because the media told them that a person is bad, should not have a right to vote. And since that probably zones out about 85 of the people. I am opposed to referendums<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dumb people should not be allowed to vote\n","id":"7d0b8007-88d7-4f0f-b560-46d5eb162fed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Science Leave Room for Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>The Leibniz's metaphisical doctrine demands the hypothesis of \"Free Will\". For instance, should be useful explaining such hypothesis: it is about asserting that there is a rational soul also entails asserting that the soul is free to pursue rational aims. If someone says \"every one has a rational soul\", therefore he must argue \"such soul is free to go after whatever Reason wants for\". thanks for outis to help me on editing the wording<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The scientific world view has not succeeded in ruling out a libertarian conception of the free will.\n","id":"4a2e6851-c537-44c7-acec-b4ede0f60865"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Complexity is also not evidence of intent or a creator. A stick figure can be less complex than spilt paint.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unlike a painting there is little evidence that the universe has any overarching purpose.\n","id":"2fa4d8d4-f224-4d3e-963c-79bfb1622940"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't consider it a waste if they spend a little occasionally just to benefit the developers for providing a free game, or if they are buying just to show their gratitude. Buying these modifiers just for the sake of visual appeal makes absolutely no sense at all They do not change the way the game is played. The only thing they do is make the game slightly more visually appealing. I can not imagine a single reason why somebody would spend money on a game just for some ridiculous hats Once again, I'm only referring to those kind of people who spend money on hats and skins based on their whims and fancies, and also those kind of people who get excited whenever new skins hats show up in the market and buy them on day one. PS For all non gamers reading this, TF2 stands for Team Fortress 2 and MOBA stands for Multiplayer Oriented Battle Arena.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who spend money on hats in TF2 and on skins in MOBAs are wasting their money.\n","id":"95e95a37-e636-4696-9347-0181b90146b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Banning vuvuzela horns at the 2010 World Cup<|ARGUMENT|>World Cup local organizing committee spokesman Rich Mkhondo told a news conference at Soccer City stadium: \"Vuvuzelas are here to stay and will never be banned. The history of the vuvuzela is ingrained in South Africa. As our guests please embrace our culture, please embrace the way we celebrate.\"11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guests at World Cup should embrace S. African vuvuzela tradition.\n","id":"24d63b27-79aa-4fea-884d-758e4862af96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>By failing to answer questions of character identities and motivations, The Last Jedi makes the narrative of the new trilogy harder to opt into.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"The Last Jedi\" is one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far.\n","id":"99c6c6a2-7608-4134-906e-a0c1d5e76a8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My opinion is that, if you are not a licensed certified animal breeder, then you must get your pet spayed or neutered, and failure refusal to do so should carry the same penalties and have the same stigma as animal cruelty. I have owned many pets of many different species, and my family has always been very responsible in spaying neutering them. We knew that we didn\u2019t want any unexpected pets, because they\u2019re a big responsibility and require lots of care and time. I know that fixing your pets isn't universal, though, and I can't think of why. If you don\u2019t fix your pets, then they may reproduce, and if those offspring aren\u2019t owned by anyone and live in the wild, they will suffer. They will probably die young and diseased, and if they are caught, they are put into pounds, which are often bad living conditions, with no guarantee that they will be claimed and chosen which will lead to early euthanizing . This is absolutely unacceptable, and we should be taking every step to prevent it. Even if you don't have an environment to reproduce in your home for instance, you only have one pet, or they're all the same sex , that's not an excuse, because pets often come into contact with others, even if you're not around. If your dog or cat runs away and breeds, leading to unowned puppies and kittens, they will likely suffer and have a terrible life, and it will be all your fault because you could have prevented it entirely. And if the argument is \u201cI know my pets may breed, but I will be responsible and take care of any offspring\u201d, then my point still stands because I believe you should be certified as a pet breeder, showing you are trustworthy by some kind of government agency. If you refuse or fail to fix them, you\u2019re implicitly accepting that your pets, and their offspring, may reproduce again , and then you will have to care for more and more pets. This not only puts a financial strain on you, but can lead to poor living conditions for the animals, especially if you can\u2019t pay for them. No one ever throws a bag of planned, wanted puppies from a truck. I feel like there\u2019s something I\u2019m not thinking about, but I have tried to see the other side of the argument and I can\u2019t find a reason not to spay neuter your pets. Please help me think of them and see if I can change my mind or, at least, understand where others may be coming from . NOTE I should have mentioned this if you are unable to pay for the procedure, they should be provided to you for free or subsidized. Failure to pay shouldn\u2019t be an excuse, but I know that this requires help sometimes. EDIT I'm glad I got some strong opinions in the other direction on this. I am still for people fixing their pets whenever possible, but you all shed some light on things I didn't consider breeders not being really savory characters, lack of any crossbreeding between purebreds, etc. . So thank you, guys, I learned a lot.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you\u2019re not a licensed\/certified animal breeder, then NOT fixing your pets should be equal to animal cruelty.\n","id":"d9cc78fe-a7bb-4c6f-b3e1-01265681ae63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>For people who have problems with their digestive tract, there can be disastrous health consequences when eating the nuts, grains and fibrous vegetation needed in a vegetarian diet. I know this as I have Crohn's disease. Here are some other links: insoluble fibre and foods that tax your system Here is some specific info on diet if you have a gut troubles<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who must already follow restrictive diets due to medical conditions such as IBS or IBD cannot consume most plant-based or dairy sources of protein, making it necessary for them to resort to meat-based proteins.\n","id":"d0fb13b8-6f72-41e5-a86f-505b1f262e83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>One cannot possibly consider this memorial in Senagal is recognizing the same perspective and interpretation of history as this memorial in Charlottesville<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Holocaust memorials honor the victims, they do not, in any case, celebrate perpetrators\n","id":"b6a89bf1-a550-428a-bac3-183f870c8b8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>Taxation is conditionally theft. If the tax is a wealth redistribution plan, because resources are taken from someone to benefit someone else. It is not theft in the case of payment for public goods\/services, because the resources are taken in exchange for a benefit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taxation is theft because the money is used for purposes that the taxed may find abhorrent; it thus violates people's freedom to spend their income as they choose.\n","id":"a5e9a78a-1b90-4c30-803a-3fb6c87dbe9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>Hanging is unreliable and causes a painful and slow death by strangulation, which is why in 1886 a bill was passed to find alternatives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All of these methods have severe flaws, which is why they are no longer used.\n","id":"655dd410-1642-4009-9a0f-17e7b4b88b50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I will admit season 8 is slightly a mess. The biggest issue and season 7 for that matter is pacing. The show could have been extended and slowed down. They could have jammed season 7 and 8 into one season and made season 8 the conclusions. But at the end of the day considering it took two years just to write and film 6 episodes you have to imagine just how expensive and daunting that task was by itself. For anyone upset about the ending. I hear you. I get it. I will make one argument though. Have you watched the last 7 seasons? First we are hit with the death of Ned Stark someone who is honorable and good. We are given the Red Wedding. The death on Obyrn. All these terrible things happened in the series and we all wanted a good conclusion. It just was never going to play that way. We saw Daenerys rising up from nothing, hiding, scared, abused, and alone. Rise from nothing to become one of the most powerful people in the world. We loved her because she says, In my bones this is right and this is wrong. I have Dragons and I believe I can fix this. When Tyrion pointed out that, We cheered her when evil men died and said nothing. All the while she grew more power and the belief that she is right. We dont need a major explanation further than that. Dany was good, and in a way is STILL good, but her way was always accept my view of the world or death. We never questioned it just like the viewers because these people were evil. However, she never provided justice. She provided her view of the world and believed she was destined to move forward and change the world. Even if we truly believe in someone's view how we get there as well is what matters. Everyone saw what she did to Kings Landing. Whatever drop of mercy, whatever bit of love she had left was gone. She wanted power just as bad as Cersei did. Even if her views of the world was just and good. Jon, Tyrion, and other just couldnt accept her iron grip on that. What they had to become to get there. The deaths of innocents to do that. Her view was paradise. Her view involved genocide. If the ruler of a keep does not bow to my new order then there are no small mercies. There is only Fire and Blood. As for Jon, and I had to think about it, why on Earth did it matter that he was Aegon Targaryen when his goal is to be exiled. Jon has always been a Bastard. Hes been treated like one forever. He exiled himself to get away from the problems of The North and Westeros as large because he had no life. However, he took the teachings of his surrogate father Ned Stark to heart and did what he truly believed would be right and just. He sacrificed himself and even died to do what his right. It's almost poetic in a way. This prince that was promised was the true heir to the Iron Throne. Downcast all his life he rose up and saved thousands of Wildings despite centuries of differences. He rose up and became King of the North even though he didnt want it to save and protect his people. He pledged himself to a woman that he loved because he truly believed she would save the world. He united men, armies, and people to put aside their differences and survive until the dawn. He did something horrible, kill a woman he loves and served without question, because he knew he and the world couldnt follow her path. An action he still isnt sure was the right thing to do. It didnt matter that he is a Targaryen. It never did actually. It was a misdirect for the viewer. A belief that he would rise up and become the king he was supposed to be. That was never Jon's fate and never would be. Everything he did was for the good of man and his reward is exile from the Seven excuse me Six kingdoms. The show never promised a happy conclusion. It promised the conclusion that made sense. No one will ever truly understand and appreciate the sacrifice the last Targaryen made to really save the world. W We arent left to believe the Kingdoms will truly be better with Bran. We arent left to believe there wont be conflict, issues, problems, squabbles, or a lasting peace. We are left to believe that these people are going to move forward one step at a time and rebuild the world the best they can. At the end Dany became the very thing she promised to end. A Tyrant. There is no grey or middle of the road for a Tyrant. What if the other people really believe what they are doing is good. They dont get to choose. She says. Only a ruthless dictator deals in absolutes. Even if their intentions is pure. Jon is who he is. A true hero. A true hero doesnt get the reward. His role is only sacrifice. There is never reward for sacrifice. Even in a fantasy world there are parables to medieval times and reality. We all just do our best and do what we believe is the best in the face of a cruel world. There is not perfect ending. We just continue on. Also, HE PET THE DAMN DOG.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jon and Dany's ending in Game of Thrones was perfect and never should change.\n","id":"5a7e1bbb-38a0-4c60-8d1c-8053d2a045be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>More troops to Afghanistan under Obama<|ARGUMENT|>Malou Innocent. \"No More Troops for Afghanistan. Huffington Post. September 16, 2009: \"Overall, remaining in Afghanistan is more likely to tarnish America's reputation and undermine U.S. security than would withdrawal.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More troops in Afg will inflame broader Muslim anger, terrorism\n","id":"d9bb7b50-90b6-4ec1-9132-a1fa848e0a0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Jesus the Messiah?<|ARGUMENT|>Christianity does not follow Jesus lead, although it knows a lot about Jesus. Therefor it belongs to the group who do not believe. Therefor Jesus is not the Messiah for Christianity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jesus is the Messiah of almost all people but not for people who do not believe. John 10.24-26 www.biblegateway.com\n","id":"26eab06e-85a2-4148-a649-6d7b59e6e38e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's completely lost on me how you can say the US federal government is keeping children in concentration camps but still want that same government to regulate guns even more so than they do now. x200B Keep in mind this is the same President that's repeatedly abused his power to keep down political opponents and embolden his own supporters. Our criminal justice system is incredibly skewed against POC as well. Chances are if you're a POC color you can live an identical life to a white person and be denied a gun from a background check while that same person receives theirs. One quick example being that whites are prosecuted at a much lower rate than POC for drug related crimes. x200B This is also the same President that's repeatedly been compared to a Nazi and yet we are still protesting and campaigning to have our ability to arm ourselves taken away? x200B Is this not the case for exactly why we should limit the power and scope of the federal government as much as possible? When is power not abused? x200B It's not just a Republicans are bad issue either. This is the second time in less than 100 years that that we've had concentration camps in our nation. The first being FDR with Japanese internment camps. We've seen that both major parties are capable of huge human rights violations. x200B Edit 1 To make connection more clear. If you're acknowledging the US government has set up concentration camps, you're acknowledge it's power to do awful things. It'd be counter intuitive to also want to give up more of your power to defend yourself to that same government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's absurd to both recognize that the US government has essentially set up concentration camps and also be in favor of stricter gun control.\n","id":"20eb65b8-4651-44ca-8b29-2e3d30608e27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A society should be based upon the well being of everyone, and having a higher average level of well being is more important than having everyone somewhat well off. Yes, this system might screw over some individuals, but overall most people will be much happier. There should be no obligation for a government to make sure every single person gets above a certain point of life if the alternative is giving an overall higher average level of life to potentially fewer people. Even if that means that some people might not get what they would have gotten with certainty in the alternative , do the benefits of the way this system works not outweigh it's cons?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The most important thing in a society the greater good\n","id":"3292f4f1-7969-4a4f-a820-1ab81319c701"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public transport be free?<|ARGUMENT|>A study at UC Berkeley showed that more than half of the riders had reduced their use of public transportation specifically because of its unreliability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One major reason for people's unwillingness to switch to public transport is reliability rather than cost.\n","id":"9b899c42-8d1a-4b27-9abc-5a6c30399b43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>1 Nephi 12:11 in a passage ostensibly dated to the 500s BCE, describes a vision stating, \"And their garments were white even like unto the Lamb of God. And the angel said unto me: These are made white in the blood of the Lamb, because of their faith in him.\" This borrows from Revelation 7:14 KJV: \"These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon uses phrases, idioms, and analogies from the New Testament in passages ostensibly dated prior to the Christian era.\n","id":"594e6588-7c64-4b04-960e-0a429c29ee85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abortion<|ARGUMENT|>Robert Casey, former Governor of Pennsylvania - \"When we look to the unborn child, the real issue is not when life begins, but when love begins.\"15 The point is, since we should be capable of loving a fetus a human being in the making, we should subsequently provide that being with rights and protections. It matters not what we call the unborn child a \"baby\", \"human\", \"life\"; as long as we love it, we should protect it. And, an attitude and life-style of love and acceptance is superior to an attitude and life-style of fear and regret.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On abortion the issue is when love not life begins\n","id":"7568179b-2b22-4c0c-b354-0a6c280370e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do have genuine distaste towards the Reddit downvoting system because it can be see so easily abused by the many various fans on different subreddits to eliminate criticism. I for one feel this practise does not provide any incentive for support of development of people's opinion. Not only that but we should place equal value in everyone's opinion, whether you like it or not, and as such the system eliminate people's free will to comment, as the negative vote system allows for people's comments to be deleted. The implications as such mean the person who had commented is more likely to show further resentment towards many people in society, as well as the fact that the possible psychological implications on the commentator mean if he was already unhappy such a system only worsens the problem. Further still given that such criticism is not taken into account by various groups then development can never take place, meaning those followers of fandom of subreddit X or Y will never allow for change to take place. When considering that development can only really take place through criticism, it causes long term problems of a lack of change and then they will complain about things becoming stale. I do understand the downvoting system from the perspective of getting rid of comments that are gibberish, though I feel more time should be made to allow said person to change their comment. I hope someone with a different perspective will help me better appreciate the reason why the system is necessary, it would be greatly appreciated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Downvoting should be removed from Reddit\n","id":"5f5fc2d3-8d4b-41db-ad27-dfda4d0cd811"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the Bible support the conclusion that 'homosexuality' is a sin against God?<|ARGUMENT|>In the 1st & 2nd chapters of Genesis, God creates humankind, tells them to \u201cbe fruitful and multiply and fill the earth\u201d 1:28, and then humankind creates a societal structure to fulfill this command 2:24\u201325. Nothing in this narrative suggests homosexual coupling is a thing that \u201cought NOT to be.\u201d We just tend to assume it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Creation accounts in Genesis do not support the conclusion that God created human beings to be forever paired, and\/or structured as heteronormative In fact, the Creation accounts do not so much reflect a divinely ordained sex\/gender system Gen 1 as later-humankind construct it Gen 2-9 as an explanation of how things came to be\n","id":"6393da7b-82e3-4e7e-9f86-2acce9d73ad8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should paternity testing of minors require the consent of both parents?<|ARGUMENT|>It is really hard on a man\u2019s self-esteem and ego knowing that their wife or girlfriend got pregnant by another man.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The revelation that one is not the father of a child can be devastating\n","id":"0cb3d212-10f8-4ff8-b34b-afd6050fefad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time for Hungary and the EU to Part Ways?<|ARGUMENT|>Allowing an authoritarian member state remain in the EU sets precedents for other member states to behave in an authoritarian manner. This decreases overall faith in the EU.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU's acceptance of its own member states succumbing to authoritarianism is a greater existential threat than Hungary leaving.\n","id":"8688aa9a-753c-405e-81df-5d10b49922f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The evil that men do lives after them, the good is often interred with their bones<|ARGUMENT|>\"Leader of the Third Reich Adolf Hitler was not only a bloodthirsty tyrant, but suffered from many diseases. About this in the recently released book titled \"Was Hitler is sick?\" writes historian Heinrich Eberle and physician clinics Charity home in Berlin, Hans-Joachim Neumann. The authors presented a complete medical history of the man who unleashed World War II and the Holocaust in the name of racist delusional ideas about the superiority of the Aryans, wrote La Repubblica.\"- The man was pretty popular among the Nazis and the Aryan Germans, he couldn't have been all bad? Not a good word about him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I can't find anything good that Hitler did or could have done\n","id":"e76dff15-0a6b-4421-ad21-8aad4e6a7c7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT1 I should've clarified the title. I believe Halo is dead as a storytelling platform and intuitive game. First of all, apologies for the massive wall. I'll try to make it easier to read. History Halo is, and has always been my favorite title series of games. I first laid eyes on Halo CE in 2001, and really started playing the series upon the release of Halo 2. The games blew me away with the story, game play, and strategic, team based combat. In 2007 I waited many hours for the midnight release of Halo 3, my favorite game to date. However, since the release of Halo Reach, I feel as though the series has taken a turn for the worst. With Reach came armor abilities, removing the aspect of 'Everyone starts on the same level' where if you got a piece of equipment or weapon, you got it because of beating another player for it, or by being at the right place at the right time. In Reach, however, people were able to spawn with a variety of intrinsically possibly the right word? given skills, which completely randomized gameplay, removing the strategic aspect. Story Halo had always appealed to me as a story on it's sense of minimalism in action. The characters were driven very differently from one another. You didn't need a massive, dramatic, cliche heartbreak scene to get someone's personality. I was built over the series, here and there. You got to know the characters from their actions and how they handled situations. Nothing was blown out of proportion. Then came Halo 4. While I was still quite satisfied with Reach's story telling, Halo 4 made a horrible scratch upon the series' story. Not only is everything exploding Michael Bay style from the first 20 seconds, but everything is exaggerated. Master Chief's armor becomes more muscular and, again, exaggerated. I don't feel immersed, I feel like they changed his look not for a good reason, but because it looks more badass. The story has become over sensationalized just like almost every other series has become. In the first game of a trilogy , the ancient, biding villain shows up all of a sudden, and the earth is on the brink of extinction in the first game. Is the next game going to have to 'out do' Halo 4? It seems extremely over the top action to me. Multiplayer I could drone on for hours, but I'll try to cut down the Multiplayer part. Basically, Halo 3 required your team to work together to accomplish the goal. Having team mates with you mattered, and it mattered how good they were. There were choke points, and map control. Now, in Halo 4 there are 50 paths to any part of the map, eliminating map control choke points. Also with random killstreak drops, there's no reason to move around the map for the power weapons. Not to mention the epic amount of weapons that are instant kill. The only non headshot based instant kill weapon was the Spartan Laser, and that had a massive firing time. I love halo 1 3, ODST, and Reach for story , please . I don't like hating my favorite series, and dreading the release of the next game c TL DR Halo 4 story is over dramatic and sensationalized, and the Multiplayer is random, anti strategic, and unintuitive. I see nothing good in store for the series as a story telling platform.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the Halo series is dead.\n","id":"70a93f55-8f80-4bd0-bacf-3d218cf06cd8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Whaling Still be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Initially, the commission was considered a 'whaling club because many states without fishing industries joined, for example by Austria the purpose of the organisation shifted from the allocation of quotas to an anti-whaling approach.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The whaling commission was hijacked by non-whaling members joining and overriding the concerns of whaling nations. This imbalance from the envisioned purpose causes great instability within it.\n","id":"7c435a30-9ca1-4a59-8ea0-80c096c5f195"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not referring to hermaphrodites, but to those who consider themselves 'intersex'. I believe, first and foremost, that society's norms for men and women can be broken by somebody simply acting contrary to them. If a man wants to wear a skirt, go for it. If a woman wants to be a mechanic, be my guest. Supposing that somebody who doesn't identify with society's expectations of one's gender is really, 'mentally', of the opposite gender, only further solidifies gender segregation, and it really urks other people when I try to tell people otherwise, although I really am quite accepting about people's habits and sexuality. Change my view, for the love of god, I'm losing friends over this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that a man is somebody with a penis and a woman is somebody with a vagina.\n","id":"28f04bc2-5916-4bd4-89de-e4e44e2932d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The current state of the world is incredibly depressing to me at times. The inequality is astonishing and growing at an exponential rate. The common man has nearly no hope of ever advancing his her position in life. Statistically your entire life is determined on a few random things like what zip code you were born in to. Things like drug use, or illiteracy, or domestic abuse, or a long list of bad things in life are almost pre determined, and there is little to no hope because society as a whole doesn't give a fuck about you or your problems. In my admittedly controversial view, things like racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc., while being real actual problems, actually mostly stem from something else. Classicism. In this world money and power are really all that matter. Everything else, and I mean every bad and every good thing, comes after that. Even darker things, like rape and murder, or slavery, or human trafficking, can almost all be traced back to Classicism. It isn't impossible for a rich and powerful person to get raped, or murdered, but statistically it is much more unlikely. It isn't impossible for someone in the upper echelons of Class to have a hard life, but the majority of those that do bring it on themselves with gambling, or other addictions. And even when they do face consequences for their actions, it is, for the most part, a fraction of what someone in a low Class would face. If you agree that all of the above is true, the really, when you think about it, the only way for everyone to be equal is for us to all suffer equally. What I mean is that if we are talking about Justice, or Equality, the Human condition will always stop us from having a situation where everyone is treated equally. We will always have classes. We will always have inequality in things like wealth, or healthcare, or influence, or etc. The only real way to have Justice, or Equality for us all is to burn it all to the ground and start over.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanity has taught me that it is impossible for everyone to be happy. So to be truly equal, the only option is for everyone to suffer equally.\n","id":"d64546d1-0b46-4802-8443-4d048ef2ce6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build Lagrange colonies before settling on mars<|ARGUMENT|>Radiation shielding technology is too poor at this time to protect long-term occupants of space-based habitats.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Space carries too many health hazards compared to planetary living.\n","id":"a7bf9349-b2ee-4f83-9f34-b0ee6f18f2d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>The same guest had the same issue with another host. After making a profile where he pretended to be white his booking was accepted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One guest had his booking rejected When his white friend tried booking the same property for the same dates the booking was accepted.\n","id":"c12d0728-bff3-4f3e-9b91-f875ce40ca1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The tax bills in the U.S. House and Senate are going to committee, so the effects of the House bill on graduate assistants might be negotiated out. If it does not, the tuition cuts that graduate assistants teaching assistants, research assistants receive, in addition to hourly wage, would be taxed as income. The way it works now is best seen from the medical research assistant point of view. They have their entire tuition cut, call it 24k, and they are paid about 30k a year to do research work. The University they attend makes money from patents and publications accomplished by this research. Now, these research assistants pay income tax on their 30k per year, which they actually receive in checks. The bill would have them pay taxes on 54k per year, even though they still only make 30k per year. I believe this tuition cut doesn't count as income because it is money that graduate assistants don't have the option to use, or the ability to recover at some point in the future. I've heard other people say it is income because loans would need to be taken out to cover the cost anyways. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Graduate Assistant tuition cuts are not the same as income.\n","id":"fa75a631-c8e7-4a75-aeeb-74cc89232e46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was once eager and happy to finally have a job after job hunting forever, but not anymore. You try to deal with that one customer who treats you like dirt, thinks they're always right and overall gives you a hard time. You try dealing with getting attacked by your boss for every minor thing when they're mostly the creator of it. You try dealing with your coworkers who don't want to be there just as much as you do. You try dealing with the sudden changes to the schedule or workload without warning and you're reprimanded if you have a such a small complaint. You try dealing with getting up early, dealing with the stress of traffic and other people on your commute to work. Go through this for years and will eventually start to erode at your work ethic. So you start to half a things, mainly because doing it all correctly would take forever and take much more energy and nobody honestly cares how it gets there. I can tell you from working that even when you do things correctly without slacking off it wouldn't even be noticed regardless. So you begin to half a everything and since your boss or coworkers haven't gotten on your case, you get the impression they don't care enough either. There's already so much hostility of forced cohabitation between coworkers and your employer anyways that you can't be bothered to take your job seriously enough to enamor yourself in it. People go in, work for 6 8 hours just to get their paychecks and go home to do something more enjoyable. The only people who seem to disagree with me are people who are still idealistic towards the working field, have never worked, or only worked for a couple of weeks. Let it all wear you down day by day and my point is proven one way or another.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't take my job seriously because it hasn't given me a reason to\n","id":"a58f88c3-9292-4857-8c43-1456b426ae4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Whaling Still be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Arguing that a certain practice should continue because it has become cultural is a tautological argument. The length of time a certain act is practiced or the widespread acceptance of such practice by a community does not answer why such practice should be continued.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Culture is no excuse for unsustainable or morally wrong practices. Thus, there is general condemnation of practices such as female genital mutilation and the unsustainable logging of forests that local culture may consider justified.\n","id":"a1a23e3c-3d03-42fe-ba34-12c367974c8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UN send peacekeepers to protect the Rohingyas?<|ARGUMENT|>In some cases, girls as young as 11 were sexually abused and impregnated by UN peacekeepers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Haiti, UN peacekeepers have been accused of fathering hundreds of children\n","id":"1509d768-409a-4dc3-9acf-0d0c2f9a2bc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are the meetings of Donald Trump with Kim Jong-un a good idea?<|ARGUMENT|>The United States does not actually lose anything by agreeing to talk. On the contrary, it assures third parties that the United States does sees violence as a last resort.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Are the meetings of Donald Trump with Kim Jong-un a good idea?\n","id":"57eb7738-cbcb-42f4-86f4-59238dd9bb93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I won't spend long exhaustively listing presumably familiar anti patent arguments. I'm also not an economist so my arguments are conceptual, but feel free to contribute stats articles papers if they might be unambiguous about a contentious point. The pitch The monetary reward would be of different value depending on whether a drug was first in its class, an important addition in a neglected class. This system would retain the incentive to undergo R D, the long lead time period, etc. After receiving the reward they would be free to compete in the market thereafter and could be allowed first preference as a supplier to the health system of that drug. There is an argument that the exorbitant prices drug companies often charge is necessary to sustain R D, which in the long term actually saves more lives. The value of the reward would need to be calculated with this in mind, but it is also true that Governments already fund the initial stages of research, and that prices also take into account alterable laws regarding fiduciary duty to shareholders. After the money is awarded, other companies would be free to compete freely, with a resulting lowering of prices toward a value set by a relatively free market. The money needed by the Government should be raised by the savings on not being beholden to monopoly enjoying pharma companies, fewer and reduced hospital stays for patients who get cured, reduced health insurance costs, less time off work in other words, the economic benefits of having better drug supply, ergo healthier society  if this isn't most of the best of both worlds it appears to be. Edit it should have been clear, but hasn't, that When I acknowledge above that there's an argument for high drug prices being needed to fund R D, I'm not saying I believe this to be true. I have not endorsed free market economics in this post, merely argued that my proposal may enjoy one of its benefits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the current patent systems should be replaced with a direct Government reward for newly created drugs\n","id":"c2fa415c-b026-44a6-a8d2-ebe75164f4da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I queue cut all the time. To me, there is no logical reason to sit in a lane that has a half mile, mile or longer line to get off at an exit when other lanes are clear. Firstly, we are talking about sitting for 5, 10, however long minutes when this is not only completely unnecessary, it creates additional congestion on the main road. People treat it like a capital offense if you try to get into the lane when they've been sitting, but honestly it is entirely their fault that they sat there for so long without a valid reason. They treat it similar to standing in a line to, say, check out groceries. I don't mind standing in a line when there is an established line there and that it's what you're supposed to do, but nobody told these people that you need to sit in a 3 mile long line to get off at an exit. That may be a more vague example but a clear one is when there is construction or an accident on a highway. I remember one instance in particular driving home from a weekend trip. There was construction ahead in 3 4 miles and there was traffic, EVERYONE was sitting in the left lane and the right lane was completely clear. Yes, several miles before the lane actually closed. The right lane is still open so I drive on the right lane. I experienced one minivan who tried to run me off the road then he honked at ME when i passed him. Truck drivers are especially guilty of this, they go out of their way to sit in the right lane, blocking traffic and only moving at the 5mph pace of the left lane. I try to pass on the shoulder as you're allowed to pass on the shoulder to get around an obstruction and they swerve at you so you can't pass. Why is this kind of behavior encouraged when I am using an open lane? I see similar cases online and people cheer the ones who block and call the ones using the road the assholes. The thing they don't even think about is that traffic would be going a lot smoother if they were using both lanes. Traffic would more or less half, right? Using the zipper merge is very efficient and should be used more often.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that \"queue-cutting\" in traffic is not a big deal, and it makes sense to do it.\n","id":"2ff4862b-b948-4cc7-a56c-7966d082045a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here is why I believe what I do I find almost all the real life people are shitty. Unless I can look up to admire them which happens rarely I can't seem to stick around with them for a lot of the time. Internet, gives me the power to filter the shit and find gold. It is less exhausting and more enriched experience as you can choose what you want from it, as compared to real life. On a personal note, I am not surrounded with a lot of people who I would consider as cool IRL. Most of the people I come across have probably never had any hobby or interest of any sort. Plus, the social dynamics here don't seem to ease things for me either I am Indian When networking across the internet, the social pressure is dramatically decreased so it really works for someone who has difficulty in socializing IRL due to, say, anxiety depression issues or other physical disability. This means that a large number of people are now available for you to socialize with, compared to IRL. Even when not engaged in one to one interaction over the internet, I can still go to forums and reddit and learn about the various perspectives that people have about various things, without actually engaging in the discussion. You can learn a lot of things on the internet by just passively being there. This means, more knowledge at lesser expense of energy. For example, if you have subscribed to the right pages groups subreddits you can simultaneously learn while you are just chatting with a friend. It is also the most updated tool for information mining that we have. With advent of social media almost everything significant that happens IRL is reported online, enabling you to keep a track of real life more efficiently. It is more fun to do virtually everything this way. Note I don't think it will be a good idea if everybody wanted to stay online all the time. I think it works best for me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Internet is more awesome than real life, so much so that I find real life virtually pointless.\n","id":"7068e9f0-9d57-4eaa-85f9-bfce91e96106"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Creation of a USE would contradict the natural human tendency to identify with the region one grows up in, which would lead to ultra-nationalist movements.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USE possibly would also enhance national identity and separatism. For many people, the national identity is more important than the European one.\n","id":"83be580a-2c90-4dc3-ad10-ddf247148bb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think that cultural appropriation has been used in any meaningful way that other terms would be more useful or at least more commonly understood. I see cultural appropriation as not 'negative' but in the sense that most people use it to exclusively mean something that is meant to be a negative action. It means 'to take cultural elements which are copied from a minority culture by members of a dominant culture, and these elements are used outside of their original cultural context.' Now I get the argument that doing so might be offensive in certain contexts, but I'm trying to figure out why it's a bad thing entirely. The way i see it, cultural appropriation is broken down into 3 major fields. Outright racism. This is mocking groups by deliberately making a cartoon pastiche of their culture and doing so in an offensive manner. Examples include blackface, red face, yellowface, various anti middle Eastern parodies. Corporatized indigenous culture selling ethnic fashion and tribal symbology as 'counter culture' by adapting it to western fashion. Things like kaffiyehs, sarongs, afro Caribbean style dresses 'white people liking foreign stuff' I have some doubts about no 2,but I get why big corporations taking culturally important things and turning a profit might be upsetting. No. 3 is the one i have the biggest problem with. I mean, this is the best way I can describe it. Wearing a bindi, Polynesian tattoos, wearing dreads, having aboriginal artwork. I get that this is people taking other cultures stuff outside of their context, but nobody seems to have a good idea of why its 'bad'. Or at least why it being offensive is bad, like I get offended at culture all the time the kardashians offend me. Doesn't mean I want it to end and nobody should enjoy it. Tl dr cultural appropriation is a sloppy academic term that doesn't practically work in the real world, and isn't inherently bad.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"cultural appropriation is badly defined and isn't inherently bad\n","id":"7f11ce53-216b-441d-b1e8-f790d284c2f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>Simply by lengthening the process between an individual deciding that they want to die and actually carrying out the action, we are likely to prevent people from committing suicide on the basis of fleeting irrational sentiments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalisation would involve the implementation of stricter procedures to check the decisionmaking capabilities of people considering death.\n","id":"304518bc-a295-422b-918d-ddd4f6295dcf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is so much intentional miscommunication from both sides that are due to this issue and the only way we are going to get past throwing out half truths and make the situation clear is to simplify the law. If we agree you need a background check to transfer a gun, make that the case for all transfers. If it is fine for a private seller to sell a gun without a background check, it should be equally fine for a dealer to. Either way a person who wants to avoid having a background check on them for whatever reason can avoid it and still get a gun. Some of the often repeated rhetoric that prevents any useful discussion that would be resolved would be as follows 1 democrats bring up the gun show loophole and imply anyone can buy a gun just by going to a gunshow. 2 republicans completely deny any existence of the gunshow loophole and I have seen multiple videos of people debunking this loophole by going to gun shows and asking dealer after dealer if they could buy a gun using the loophole and being turned down. But they conveniently fail to ever try to buy a gun from a private seller. 3 Every time a democrat claims they can just go out and buy a gun, republicans are quick to correct them talking about needing a background check or how you can't buy handguns the same day or all of these other things implying it is a complex situation to buy a gun, and I believe this is a combination of some democrats not knowing these background checks or restrictions exist and republicans not knowing sales from private dealers can avoid all of this, or either side is intentionally being dishonest by just conveniently refusing to acknowledge what they don't want to inform people about that makes the other side look correct. Now some of the arguments I have heard if we got rid of all background checks is that it would be easier for people who shouldn't have guns to get them. the 2 counters to that are 1 then have background checks on every transfer, or 2 if they want a gun they can nearly as easily buy it from a private seller so its ins't stopping any but the laziest of banned people. Opponents of requiring background checks for every transfer argue things such as I want to give my hunting rifle to my son, now that is illegal. I am taking people hunting and someone borrows my gun. that is illegal. How are people supposed to perform background checks? I am not going to attempt to write some iron clad law in the comments here, but I would think a reasonable compromise could be made with something like this. individuals should be able to perform background checks on themselves ahead of time and that check provides them with a confirmation number. This number can be given to the seller who could type it into a government website and it will display the background check result along with information to Identify the buyer and be just as secure as how a dealer might check. sure, false ID and documents and everything could still exist and a twin could pass as his twin, blah blah blah but those are all weaknesses in the background checks today. The confirmation numbers could even be good for something like 6 months before they expire if you don't want the person able to check back up on the person's status or whatever, and all it would take to confirm the background check would be to have access to the internet and the buyer could speed this up by having entered all the data ahead of time. this could also be used to confirm someone is in good standing before letting someone borrow a gun for hunting or self defense or whatever. Lastly, for cases where guns to change hands, I would think this could have different severity for the circumstances. the people that panic and claim they are going to be charged with a felony because they let their neighbor use their gun when they were hunting makes no sense. speeding is illegal and going 100mph over will probably get your license revoked and some pretty severe charges, but going 1mph over the speed limit is also breaking the law yet the charges are clearly not the same severity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Background checks to buy guns are useless as long as private sales can avoid them. We should either require background checks for all transfer of ownership of guns or get rid of background checks for gun purchases from dealers.\n","id":"74d0ea04-1597-4c34-8bff-c7aee8414373"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Government research on gun violence has been stagnant for over 20 years. Congresspersons, backed by the NRA, managed to prevent any CDC research on \"any studies that could be perceived as anti-gun efforts\" 1996 to 2018. This restriction was extended to the NIH in 2011 after it funded research on the association between gun possession and assaults.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Dickey Amendment has made it nearly for sufficient government research to support or refute this point.\n","id":"b296bea8-56bc-4d5f-b5f5-ed4248e740b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear lots of complaints about Windows 8, everywhere from reddit to old people in Best Buy. I don't get it my computer boots in under 20 seconds, I don't seem to have to worry about viruses etc nearly as much, the tile metro? screen is nice if I don't feel like staring at tiny icons on my desktop. If you don't like a lot of the changes from 7 to 8, you can just ignore them no one is forcing you to use the tile screen, and I think now you can change a setting to get the start menu back I don't actually know since I don't miss the start menu at all . Also, touch screens. Everything on Windows 8 is optimized for touch screens, and from the first day I used my touch screen laptop I knew I'd never be able to go back. I'm not looking for people to tell me why Mac or Linux is better than Windows. I have no interest in learning Linux for the two hours tops I use my home computer per day, and I really don't like Macs. I'm also not really interested in why previous versions of Windows are better. I would consider my view changed if someone could demonstrate a meaningful design flaw that has drastically handicapped Windows 8 as an operating system. I want to know why Windows 8 is bad, not why something else is better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I like Windows 8.\n","id":"5e18b15d-03d1-4c71-a6a5-147ae8fd6676"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alright. There are people in this world who don't believe in climate change even though the evidence is there. There are people who think their kids shouldn't be vaccinated . There are religious people who choose to stay ignorant to the contradictions of their own religions Honestly, I feel sad for these people. I feel sad that they oppose change. They cling so hard to that which is fading. Those that falsely believe they are free are a lost cause. I feel that it is ethically wrong to kill those types of people. However, manipulating them is fine in my book. It is because, logic and words will not reach them. I point to fundamentalists of all religions. Look at the christen fundamentalists and what they stand for. Look at the Muslim fundamentalists and what they stand for. They can see the evidence, yet they fight for their lies. They CHOOSE to remain ignorant. As far the Muslims I've met a few they out right choose to turn a blind eye and say there is no greater knowledge then allah . As far as the christens go, look at the bill nye vs ken ham. The pictures of religious people holding up stuff they wrote. How can you describe the sunset without god?. My personal favorite was richard dawkins on fox news. O'Riley Tides go in tides go out lol. They are so closed off and live in a world of their own that its better to rule the dumb masses the not try to change them. There are countries in this world were just having a different opinion will kill you. Look at third world country like bangladesh where the islamic people will KILL atheists. And then rally against any more. They see free thinking as a poison to society.  Edits 1 fixed some word spelling.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is completely ok to manipulate those who choose to remain ignorant\n","id":"673d0885-4582-4795-a326-e9c425f25ff6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When the Donald Sterling story came out, everyone universally condemned Sterling. People who condemned the comments, but were concerned about them being tape recorded in a private setting, were often called racist. Then, Michael Sam kisses his boyfriend at the NFL draft and many critisize ESPN for showing the kiss even though they show straight couples kiss all of the time. People in the media say everyone has a right to criticize the Michael Sam kiss, and no one should be punished for expressing their views on homosexuality. It is my opinion that if we can strip Donald Sterling of his basketball team for saying something racist in private, we should be able to punish those who make homophobic remarks in public. If you want to say Sterling shouldn't be punished that is one thing, but it is untenable to punish people for racist comments but not homophobic comments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Criticizing those who are homophobic toward Michael Sam is the same as being critical of Donald Sterling. The Miami Dolphins had a right to punish their homophobic player and any media outlet would have a right to punish a homophobic anchor.\n","id":"66834675-1ea5-4524-ac81-e3bd9c292fe2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is health care a human right?<|ARGUMENT|>Sicentific progress may soon drastically increase human lifespan or even defer death indefinitely. In these circunstances leaving out health care as human right puts a market price on human life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people suffer poor health and injuries through no fault of their own. They should always be able to receive the necessary health care and treatment.\n","id":"ac38791a-7200-4d76-a5d9-0f369c7eaa92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Traditions that were violent towards humans have been abolished. This indicates how violence can be a motivation for abolishing traditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Traditions that include violence and cruelty against animals should not be preserved.\n","id":"34d89cf5-bda4-4e76-800d-f3ba3eddf4a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Transwomen be Allowed to Compete in Women's Sports?<|ARGUMENT|>Transmen were biological born female. Competing with biologically born men is likely to be more of a challenge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unlikely that transmen have the upper hand in sports that include cis-gendered men.\n","id":"9ccbbae2-ec14-4c4e-b42a-3a13739c5052"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Long-term Solitary Confinement Be Stopped?<|ARGUMENT|>There are more than 100 prohibited acts in federal prisons that may result in solitary confinement. This makes it very easy for prison guards to put prisoners in solitary confinement for arbitrary reasons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many prisons allow prisoners to be put in solitary confinement at the guard's discretion, for offences as minor as \"insolence\".\n","id":"4361536e-4e02-4434-a39c-dc0e029e82f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Anecdotes from everyone I know make me believe that people spend a solid 20 30 of their work days being unproductive, and yet they are forced to work a full 8 hours. In my opinion this encourages filling time, working slowly, or looking busy rather than doing actual work, since if you finish it too fast it looks like you're doing nothing. If work was done on job by job basis, it would make workers more efficient and supervisors would be held. accountable for giving their employees a minimum workload. The company would be more efficient and the people would be happier, increasing productivity per hour, and quality of life would skyrocket since you don't need to spend 60 of your waking life working or commuting.  Edit this model definitely works better for some industries than others. I wouldnt change all jobs, but some streams of employment would benefit greatly from this. I probably should have had this in the main post. Edit 2 You guys bring up some good points Maybe a hybrid system where there is just less face time say half and the rest is results based?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think a 9-5 job is a waste of time as almost all people are unproductive for a good portion of that time, and results-based pay without necessary face time would get more value for the company.\n","id":"800c79a6-32e6-4395-9fff-82a46034a34a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Today many legislations have or discuss gender quotas for elections, education, work and many other things. I don't believe that they are a good approach to reach equality, because If a company has too many male employees, it will have to discriminate men to fulfill the quota or vice versa , so we have discrimination. The men and women who are applying for the new jobs don't profit or suffer from the actual distribution, so why should they get any dis advantages just because the company has too few women or men ? More than 50 of the voters are female. If they want to be represented by women, they just need to vote women. If some of them want to be represented by men, why should anyone stop them? As long as college admission tests are evaluated without bias e.g. multiple choice tests or the examiner doesn't know the gender there's no need to enforce a quota. If more men succeed, then more men will get admission, and vice versa. Enforcing a quota means that someone won't get admission although he has a better result than someone other who gets admission. A few years ago Austria made an admission test for the University of Medicine which had a different point system for men and women. How high should a quote be? A fixed number won't fit very well because it assumes that the female ratio of the persons who want to get the job is constant, but that's not true. Some non qualified women will get a job just because the employee needs to employ women and has not enough qualified female applicants. This results in more non qualified women than non qualified men, resulting in an even more biased public opinion Women aren't able to do such jobs Of course this is also valid the other way round. Most kindergarten teachers and applicants are female, so the quota will enforce to prefer male applicants, even if they aren't capable. How do transgender persons fit in any quotas? Quotas are a lame excuse for politicans who don't want to stop discriminiation, like We already have quotas, what else do you want? . I'm not denying that discrimination exists and that we need to fix it, but there are better albeit harder ways. They include to analyze the reasons of the gender gap and fix that reasons, if necessary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Quotas are like fixing the symptoms instead of curing the disease\n","id":"cb8781f4-3ef1-4217-84b7-8661ff4378a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We make drunk drivers take a class for their poor choices, and unhealthy diets kill way more people than drunk drivers do. Allowing a child to form unhealthy eating habits and remain inactive to the point where it's detrimental to their health should be treated as some type of child abuse. I'm not saying there should be a fine or anything lots of people who have poor eating habits are also really close to the poverty line, so that would be counter productive. Also, I did say child abuse, but that doesn't mean a child should ever be taken away from their parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents with overweight children should have to take mandatory cooking\/nutrition classes.\n","id":"945d8bc5-2dda-47e1-a937-8a7cb38e9b66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not a strong believer in isolationism by any means I strongly believe that there are some products that simply cannot be made better than the place of origin such as focus bikes made in germany, hondas made in japan etc however the practice of transferring a factory to a place of cheaper labor i.e. mexico, china, taiwan, vietnam etc unfairly disadvantages factory workers in these wealthy countries. and ultimately leads to inequality in the wealthy countries. I am a native michigander so I have lived through one of the consequences of nafta see detroit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"while free trade between \"wealthy\" countries i.e. germany, united states, uk, france, netherlands is beneficial to all parties involved, free trade with countries of significantly less wealth hurts the working class of the \"wealthy\" countries.\n","id":"75ad7c9b-6ff3-44ef-82d7-ef32ac3f5b65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people, when presented with facts about something they don't like, just call the other person an apologist and think they have won the argument. How is this even remotely ok, or even considered to be something you can say without pretty much saying I don't care about facts I already made up my mind and yes what you are saying is true but youre just an apologist. I'm going off of the dictionary definition of apologist a person who defends or supports something such as a religion, cause, or organization that is being criticized or attacked by other people To me, calling someone an apologist a lot of the time is saying You are correct and have facts to back it up but I don't want to agree with you and tell you that because I want to pretend I'm right. It just makes the person that says it seem like they don't care about facts. However, if the person is completely wrong then you should have no problem arguing with the actual truth instead of just claiming they're an apologist. It makes a fool out of both people to use the term in this case. Neither is actually that educated on the subject if one is wrong and the other is just saying LOL APOLOGISTS. A lot of this stuff comes out in things about genocides. Like All these Nazi apologists or something. You can argue the fact that yeah, the holocaust camps might have had a swimming pool, but they weren't for fun and hardly overshadow the horrors. Its a lot better of an argument than you're an apologist. But sometimes people are presented with tons of facts, and their view should be changed, but they say I don't want to hear from an apologist. I just see it as completely devoid of intellectual value, and even leaning towards the opposite of intellectual. Does it mean something I'm not understanding? I just don't see how its ok to mention that term, even if the person is completely wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the term \"apologists\" is completely devoid of any value in an argument.\n","id":"cf1c7f3a-f33e-41c4-9fdd-f060854d4956"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>If the AGI cannot reason on its own for both physical and subjective moral implications of an action, then it's not an AGI.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is the chance an AGI might be able to think for itself and turn on its creators.\n","id":"238ad1e7-0099-49b1-996e-329ed2a15c60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Summarized from Quora The Bible is a collection of books from varying genres - covering the cultural stories of the Jews, their relationship with God, the origins of Christianity, written and compiled over many centuries. The portrayal of God in these stories is not remotely consistent. His character changes to fit the needs of the individual tale. He is forgiving and vengeful, compassionate and ruthless, peaceful and genocidal, open handed and close fisted, shepherd and slaughterman.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The contradiction identified in this claim is contained in the bible itself. Evidently, the texts that describe God's character contradict themselves.\n","id":"5788cf98-64db-4d03-8001-ba829146c41c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Maybe this is the wrong place for this, but I'm looking for opposing views aspects I haven't thought of, so I figured this was as good a place as any. My new computer came with a year of McAfee, and I keep hearing about how awful McAfee is and how literally any other AV is better. That said, how bad could it be? I mean, I'm not a computer guy per se, but it seems like an AV is an AV. Is there any legit reason I should go through the effort of a removing McAfee which I'm told is difficult b buying a new AV for and c installing said new AV. I can't think of one. I don't really do much downloading, or go on a ton of shady porn sites, so it's not like my computer is under constant attack from viruses. So I should be safe with just McAfee right? Or is there something I overlooked<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should not expend money\/effort to change my antivirus program McAfee\n","id":"d81a4122-6e50-46a1-acb4-fd1603b6cd0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>A welfare state is an acknowledgement of a broken economic model rather than a solution in itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be no welfare state, so a more just system could emerge.\n","id":"8a5eb0bf-d1ca-4a5c-941d-24bc37f18eca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would online education be best in virtual reality VR?<|ARGUMENT|>This is beneficial because it can be developed i.e. built upon, customized, not lose items in, keep reference items, and be there when school is over.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Students could set up their real environment the location where a person participates outside of VR permanently.\n","id":"62f639a1-141b-4e85-be7d-c783809cefb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>Prioritizing human lives over animals is the response that human dignity requires. Sometimes, doing anything else would be unconscionable. For example, if food were scarce, we shouldn't choose to feed pets instead of children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans have a moral duty to protect human lives over the lives of animals.\n","id":"96aa5966-809f-4ece-bd3d-c37c1d356243"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Julian Assange<|ARGUMENT|>According to Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor, sections of the indictment are vastly overbroad<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"His trial and imprisonment violates the first amendment of the US constitution.\n","id":"b3b2a135-9e55-44b6-bda8-478c184dd10b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Darwinian Evolution Philosophy or Science?<|ARGUMENT|>Much of science can be based on observation and deductive reasoning, it does not require direct experimental evidence all the time. For example, you are in your kitchen and you hear the front door open and close, and footsteps retreat upstairs. You go to investigate to see your roommate's coat hanging by the door that was not there before. It is simple reasoning that your roommate has come home. Much of science can be done the same way albeit with more complex ideas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Science does not always have experimental evidence to support its claims.\n","id":"0498e358-6208-463e-b8ef-919875e29478"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a Sanders supporter who would vote for Stein or the Socialist Party USA in the event of a Hillary nomination. This may or may not make a factor in your arguments, but I live in Texas, which is not a swing state. With that said, there are many times Hillary supporters who try to gaslight Sanders supporters into trying to vote for her because Trump would be much more horrible. This is my concession Hillary would be better at domestic policy than Trump. Although I don't think Trump would be able to get most of what he wants done, simply by the virtue of our legal and legislative system not being accommodating things like banning Muslims from the United States. But , for the sake of argument, and just looking at their proposals, Hillary would be better than Trump. My argument On the other hand, whereas Hillary would be better than Trump domestically, she'd be a nightmare in the foreign policy arena, much to the point where the domestic benefits of voting for her, against Trump, would be cancelled out, because Trump does not have as hawkish of a foreign policy and would incur a dramatically smaller amount of dead people and chaotic situations overseas. I'll recognize that if you inherently value an American life more than a non American, then Hillary is a better choice. I do not feel the same way I think all life is equal and should be given equal consideration, and this much is not up for debate for me. However, I'd like to see if my view can be changed within the parameters I've laid out. My evidence furtherance of my argument is this Where Donald would be a nightmare domestically, and Hillary would be better, it balances out in the fact that many more people would die under Hillary's administration overseas. For the proof of this, you only have to look at her policy, while she was at State, toward Haiti and Honduras. Haiti is still a hellhole, in part, because of Hillary's policy toward them and, as well as that, she helped institutionlize the coup in Honduras which helped create a humanitarian crisis in the form of child refugees flooding the United States, which she defended sending back to the country and in which, after that decision, some were murdered As well as that, people are fairly sure that the military regime she supported are the ones who killed Berta Caceres She basically resurrected Reagan's ghost for her time at State. That's not even mentioning the fact that she supported the Iraq war, and didn't issue a mea culpa until it was politically necessary in 2007. More over, she was the lead person in the Obama administration toward the policy of overthrowing Gaddafi and in the case toward Libya, she resorted to Bush style tactics in justifying it Libya is now a shithole run over by radical Islamists with no hope to recover, and with the body count racking up day after day. Her stated policy in Syria is a no fly zone, which she says would require no ground troops, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff disagree saying it would require 70k troops, would require 1bn a month and that was before Russia was getting involved. Now that Russia is involved, it may start a direct war with Russia, in addition to needing more American ground troops in Syria, launching us into yet another Iraq like war. And, finally, she has saber rattled toward the Iranians, counting them as being proud enemies of hers, and has not hesitated to say that military force would be used against them under her administration if they could find a pretext to do it. This is all contrasted with Trump's shitty foreign policy, which is more or less limited to Syria, where he says that we will target terrorist's families, so on and so forth. But most of his foreign policy rests upon using sanctions and revoking trade deals. He's one of the few Republicans to say that he wouldn't rip up the nuclear deal with Iran, that he would use sanctions instead of military action, if they step out of line. And that he would use the Chinese trade imbalance to deal with them devaluing their currency. Which is not a good way to go about these things, but at the very least, the only militarized policy he has, as far as I can tell, is toward Syria, the same as all the other candidates, and would assuredly leave less of a body count across the world as compared to Hillary's whole earth strategy. So, if we take the principle seriously, that American lives are just as important as lives overseas, it would appear to me that, in a harm reduction situation, there is no good option. No harm is reduced by having either of them in office, for different reasons. Trump and Hillary are both extremely harmful in different ways except one would do more harm here and the other would do more harm overseas. If both things are priorities and to me they are then it seems like Hillary v. Trump is a wash. Look forward to the replies EDIT 2 I realize this is a contentious argument for some, but I'd appreciate if you the royal you actually mounted counter arguments and you know tried changing my view instead of downvoting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hillary would not be any more better or worse than Trump, all things considered\n","id":"bc90b709-b0c6-4e3f-904f-492ad4405827"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title says, I believe that opening dialogue with a person or group is more effective than ridicule at change minds. Here is an article with links to a Cornell study on effective methods of argument. Here is another article claiming that sometimes, ridicule is the best tool to use. It's topic specific, but it's the best I could find. From my experience, rational dialogue is more effective at finding common ground and opening doors to potential changes of ideology. I believe ridicule is effective at shaming some into abandoning weakly held positions, but also causes others to dig in and resist harder, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. This election has polarized the left and right in ways I've never seen before, and it seems that ridicule is the primary tool used by both sides against each other, but I believe it's not as effective as most wish it was. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Open dialogue is more effective at changing minds than ridicule.\n","id":"82234c40-952c-4725-b006-171001d5ef48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is inspired by this youtube video From Wikipedia gt analytic proposition a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept gt synthetic proposition a proposition whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept but related I haven't read the Critique of Pure Reason myself, and I am unsure how exactly it is worded in it, but this definition from Wikipedia obviously leaves some question open What's the definition of concept , contained in , related ? The distinction is supposed to be easier to understand by looking at examples. Just as a side note If you need examples to define the idea that you are talking about, it is most likely not well defined. Let's just assume the distinction is well defined and look at an example that is listed on Wikipedia gt All bachelors are unmarried. According to Kant this is supposed be an analytic proposition, since the predicate unmarried is contained in the subject bachelor . Now, regarding the meaning of the term contained in , it cannot depend on any linguistic variances, as we have to replace bachelor with unmarried man , but the proposition stays analytic. An example for an a priori synthetic proposition from the video is gt The interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees. And the reasoning goes along these lines The concept of the interior angles of a triangle doesn't seem to implicitly contain the concept of exactly 180 degrees, at least not in the same simple sense that the concept of triangle contains the concept of three sides. This is where my problem with the distinction lies. Let's define a triangle as a polygon made up of three straight lines in Euclidean space . Then the concept of 180 degrees is apparently according to the video not contained in the concept of the interior angles of a triangle. Let's just assume this is right. Let's define a triangle as a polygon made up of any number of straight lines having a sum of interior angles of 180 degrees . Then the concept 180 degrees is clearly contained in the concept of the interior angles of a triangle. The first and second definition of triangle are exactly the same. A polygon is made up of three straight lines iff it is made up of any number of straight lines having a sum of interior angles of 180 degrees. We know that linguistic variances are irrelevant in the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, and we know that the only thing that matters is the concept that is referred to by the subject and the predicate. Both definitions clearly refer to the same concept as there is nothing that would satisfy just one of the definitions, but not the other . But one proposition is analytic, and the other proposition is synthetic. Therefore the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions as defined on Wikipedia is inconsistent. Counterargument 1 The difference is that the first definition of a triangle is the natural one the less complex one, therefore it is the one that counts. Rebuttal The concept of natural is clearly not well defined, and the concept of complexity is either not well defined or completely arbitrary. In fact, there's nothing that makes one definition of a concept superior to another definition, if both are correct and consistent. Counterargument 2 Linguistic variances are relevant when determining whether a proposition is analytic or synthetic. Rebuttal The step of replacing bachelor with unmarried man in the example of an analytic proposition is evidently not relevant. Assuming that this counterargument is valid, the step of replacing triangle with the second definition I gave above is relevant, as it changes the proposition from analytic to synthetic. Drawing a line between relevant and irrelevant linguistic variances is 1. arbitrary and 2. not even talked about in the initial definition of the distinction. Counterargument 3 The proposition from the video is analytical, and the authors of the video are misinterpreting Kant. Rebuttal Kant regarded mathematical truths as synthetic truths. Even assuming that the triangle example is somehow simple enough to be analytic, the statement 5 7 12 in Kant's opinion is synthetic. I claim that one can apply a series of linguistic steps to the proposition, i.e. by replacing objects with their definitions similar to replacing bachelor with unmarried man , and reach an analytical proposition. Therefore, assuming that linguistic variances are irrelevant to the analytic synthetic distinction, 5 7 12 should also be an analytic proposition. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kant's synthetic-analytic distinction is inconsistent.\n","id":"ebbf1e46-6894-4b0e-9d51-2e5fb5e2d009"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think decisions regarding immigration policies refugee crisis shouldn't be based on emotional arguments. This means that arguments like children are dying X country has been bombed Y country is in a terrible situation should play no role when deciding about these type of policies. I think that most European policies have been based on this type of argument until now, at least . If this type of argument is valid, then our government should increase taxation to help starving children in Africa. Without the emotional argument immigration policies would likely follow this scheme 1 Computing the number of people we need in our contry to have X growth ergo accept the number of individuals until we reach break even 2 Select people based on their qualifications knowledge. For instance, if our country needs doctors, we favour doctors. If there is no particular need for a certain type of worker, we favour those who already speak the language. Implementing this plan would result in less taxpayer money devoted to financial aid resources for refugees and immigrants. This money could be used for other purposes. By contrast, by not applying a similair policy more people enter our country and more financial aid is required for them. Note i know that refugees and economic immigrants are two different things. I wanted to add refugees to the post because in this case the emotional argument is used more often. However, one could argue that refugees are accepted in small numbers compared to economic immigrants, legal or not and that those figures don't really influence our society. That's why i am using both categories. Note2 believe it or not i have nothing against immigrants or refugees. My father was an immigrant. I just think that in this matter empathy is winning over rationality and it doesn't make sense for me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think European policies about immigration\/refugee crisis are mostly based on an emotional argument rather than a logical one. It doesn't make sense.\n","id":"e51f0262-9465-439d-ac3d-16c1e4132d38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democracies adapt to improve?<|ARGUMENT|>Modern democracies are too heavily reliant on one form of democracy Representative Democracy, or RD that istoo blunt insufficiently nuanced to cope with the evolving needs of more sophisticated electorates<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The trouble with 'standards' is that they often require things to be done the same way everywhere. Circumstances may affect methods but the aims should remain constant.\n","id":"fc352a3d-c29d-40d3-b08b-2c835ecef8c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>No one should feel obliged to change their lifestyle to combat global warming.<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals favouring a more environmentally friendly lifestyle coerces large corporations to attempt to move towards more sustainable ideas in order to appeal to a changing consumer base.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Changing individual lifestyles have a signalling effect that can result in changes on a larger scale.\n","id":"d8088737-2da7-4792-8921-1578e35dd151"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Human genes can be transferred into mice. These 'humanized mice' are used to study diseases and drugs, in a way which closely replicates results that might be obtained from human testing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals often have radically different physiologies from one another, let alone people.\n","id":"c90a5bfd-8808-4e93-af5a-69a21bba672c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Lottery should be an integral component of democratic political systems<|ARGUMENT|>Candidates aligned with a specific party also enjoy a head start, as people may choose to vote for them regardless of whether they know them or not due to party identification.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More views may be represented in legislative bodies as candidates with opinions distinct from those of parties now stand a chance of getting elected.\n","id":"cee49ae5-7a97-4d95-a1f8-07e43df173c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After all, people with eidetic memory are allowed to roam the streets. Consequently, the records Alice would take with this would be treated like her memories Intrusion by Bob like him using a not yet invented mind reading device without her consent deletion like him giving her a concussion. In court, Alice could speak of the contents of the recordings, but not be forced to show them she could even lie about them, though that would be illegal. She might even be forbidden from showing them, depending on whether it is hard to fake such recordings we do not want courts to be able to use failure to produce recordings as evidence against Alice alternatively, failure to produce recordings would be forbidden to be used as evidence though we know how well that works in practice But how would you store all that data? This is a problem that would solve itself given time, if technology continues to advance as it currently does. But nevertheless, you might transmit recordings to a central storage where terabytes are cheap you might make the recordings largely poor quality through lossy recording you might tag the past hour as noninteresting enough to only store the bare minimum of data.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You should be allowed to use a device that records everything you see or hear, at all times.\n","id":"aa506b98-1fa9-40e2-8fec-5e46582ec628"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever someone makes an argument that older media was higher quality on average than newer media despite the limitations of the past , people will always jump to the conclusion that they're looking through rose tinted glasses, or say things like it's just nostalgia . But is it? Because if you really look at the quality through the years, even if you take away all types of biases and you get down to the root of the matter you'll find a few things to be true There was more variety in media in past decades than there has been today. There was more innovation happening at faster speed than there is today Audience's attention spans were higher in past decades than they are today. These are three facts which you can't just boil down to nostalgia . Here's a few concrete exmaples of what I mean In 1999, Hip Hop R B was a big part of the musical landscape, but so was Rock, Country, Latin, Folk, Singer Songwriter, Funk, Dance, Electronic Music and more. Today, Hip Hop R B dominates over 80 of the musical market, leaving other genres little room to compete, leading to saturation. In 1999, the top grossing films spanned genres like sci fi, mystery, comedy, fantasy, drama and more. This year so far, the highest grossing films have almost all been action or animated films. Which don't me wrong, I love those types of films. I enjoyed Endgame. It's just that I wish they weren't the only kind to ever turn a profit. I'd like to make it clear that I still think quality stuff is being made. There are exceptions to this downward trend. Two of the greatest shows of all time, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, happened in our generation. Two of the greatest rappers alive, Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West, became popular in our generation. Not to mention the advancements in gaming. I just feel that people need to recognize that the overall decline is indeed happening, and shouldn't' use copouts to dismiss people stating that fact.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"It's just nostalgia\" is a cop-out used by people who can't recognize, or are in denial of the decline of popular media.\n","id":"d1c79860-8e6b-4b71-8c86-c0269600a0a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a view I've been playing with for quite some time, but have been having a difficult time putting it in to words. Basically, my view is that democratic decision making is great when we are talking about small groups that are more or less homogeneous in interests, but when the group grows, and the interests of group members differ, and in many cases, become objectively opposed to one another, democracy becomes increasingly meaningless. The people in such a system no longer have the power, which is what a democracy is supposed to be. When the effect of one man's vote is negligible, the rights of the individual get trampled, and the only entities given consideration are those that can effectively organize ex. corporations, unions, special interest groups etc. . To me, this seems self evident based on the direction in which most democratic nations are heading. IMO the best way to counter this would be to reduce federalized power, and give much more to states provinces, localities and in particular municipalities and even smaller regional councils within municipalities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democracy is becoming less and less meaningful as populations increase.\n","id":"edae6b9d-61cc-47f5-8f78-517716a5f340"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you are unaware of how the ice bucket challenge works, basically I have someone take a video of me pouring lots of water on my own head. Then I proceed to tell the cameraman, I now challenge 5 friends to do the same. They now have 24hrs to complete this challenge or they are forced to donate 100 to support funding, to find a cure for Lou Gerig's Disease. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for awareness of a devastating disease. However, the fact that people dump a gallon and a half of water on their heads, and challenge 5 people to waste a gallon and a half of their own does nothing for ALS. We are actively persuading people to NOT donate to a worthy cause. Most of the videos don't mention that the participant has to donate 10, just by doing the challenge itself. Instead, people are wasting precious, drinkable water on a planet where 780 Million people lack access to clean water. It is the most recent internet trend that will likely expire, in say a month from now. A month from now people will go back to their lives forgetting about ALS. And procrastinating we don't have an impending water crisis . Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Ice Bucket Challenge, that has been making the rounds on Facebook, does nothing for ALS.\n","id":"088ae9e5-919e-4560-b331-015c9302b08d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that the majority of the voters in the 2016 general election voted for a candidate who promised to revoke many of Obama's policies shows that they did not represent the will of the American people in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many of Obama's policies have since been repealed by Trump, showing that he was not a good president.\n","id":"0f133931-f8c7-48d3-9a17-2e38bdd6365b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in a big college town, less than half a mile from the big Division 1 campus Arizona State . In fact, my city is ranked by bicycling.com as the 22nd most bike friendly city in the US there are a lot of kids on bikes here and if you follow the link and scroll down to 22, you will see a perfect picture of what I'm talking about here . There are bike lanes painted everywhere right on the street where the cars drive. It looks cool and it's an awesome concept but there are also thousands of college kids who have cars and text while driving. According to teensafe.com, \u201cstatistically, teens are more likely to make driving errors, regardless of distraction type. However, the use of mobile devices while driving increases safety risks.\u201d And to make it worse, according the thebalance.com, \u201cas they gain more driving experience and more confidence, they may be may be more likely to get involved in distracted driving at higher frequencies.\u201d With the bike lane right there by the cars, a driving error could easily cause a car to clip a bike. I drive to and from work everyday basically through campus. Without fail, I will ALWAYS see a young person 17 22 texting while driving, doing make up while driving, horse playing with other passengers while driving it irritates me but I get it, I was young once too and I was probably the same way. BUT with all of these bikes in bike lanes, right on the road next to the potentially distracted drivers, would it not be safer to ride your bike on the sidewalk? This gives you in my city more distance from the cars, and a curb height of maybe around 6\u201d to protect you from cars that may sway into your bike lane. IDK, this just seems like a no brainer to me. Please, change my view. I feel very strongly that the sidewalk is safer than the bike lane. EDIT a lot of good responses helped me form a question that is more to the point I'm trying to have my view changed upon  in cities where it is illegal for bikes to ride on the sidewalk, if there is no foot traffic the bikes should be allowed to ride on the sidewalk to increase their own safety. If foot traffic shows up, they have to go back down to the bike lane for the pedestrian's safety at least give them the legal option to increase their safety when no pedestrians are nearby. Sources gt This is a footnote from the  moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Riding a bicycle in the bicycle lane is far more dangerous than riding on the sidewalk when both options are available.\n","id":"354561b5-fb10-459b-922b-2fd787211265"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Faith and science can co-exist, like fiction and non fiction in a library. The important thing is to know which category is which.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Faith exists. Science exists. Therefore, faith and science co-exist.\n","id":"9187af40-f723-4b5e-af96-758f3b17fcfb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need religion for morality?<|ARGUMENT|>The logic may be that athiests know they are the ones responsible. They can not escape their sins by hoping that a superior being will set things straight. They may take more initiative to be responsible and bring change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some atheists are considered moral by most standards, despite not believing in god.\n","id":"aefdc34f-1ff4-4e01-9a51-bc174c10b5e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If sexual desire were to suddenly disappear off the face of this earth, then so many issues that society faces would be gone. Women wouldn\u2019t be abused, harassed or exploited sexually. No more rape. Children wouldn\u2019t be preyed on by pedophile. No more molestation. Women and children wouldn\u2019t be sold into the sexual trafficking industry People wouldn\u2019t struggle to find someone else since all you need now in a companion is someone you get along with and can commit to. No more lonely people. People would stop cheating on each other in a moment of sexual tension. People would stop having unprotected sex due to recklessness which means no more accidental pregnancies, no more accidental children, this would hit abortion too. Pro choice wouldn\u2019t have an argument because if you choose to have a kid, it\u2019s on you. Couples like the ones in r deadbedrooms who are perfect except for the sex would be perfectly happy because nothing would be missing in the relationship. Couples who should split up but stay together just because of the sex, would no longer exist. I understand that sexual desire exists to encourage us to procreate. If it didn\u2019t then we wouldn\u2019t be procreating. Although now that we know that\u2019s how babies are made, we don\u2019t really need to be told. If sexual desire was to disappear we\u2019d still have sex to ensure the survival of mankind. We do a lot of important things that we don\u2019t have physical drives for. This could be one of them. I tried posting this in r unpopularopinion but it wasn\u2019t received well because it was an actual unpopular opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The world would be better off without Sexual Desire\n","id":"a7d5fff0-3bce-4981-8a17-66483635a275"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Withdrawing from Iraq<|ARGUMENT|>MyHeritage.org. Retrieved 4.10.08 - \"A politically driven pullout would be a military disaster.A political pullout would send a dangerous signal of weakness and fecklessness to both our allies and enemies\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An early withdrawal from Iraq would undermine US credibility with allies\n","id":"29973f0a-1cc5-4d11-a7af-92041451e6e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am noticing that our society seems to put a lot of emphasis on setting deadlines for things, and ensuring they're met at all costs. My view is mainly centered around the software game dev industry, though I believe it applies to most other areas of life too. Examples I was watching an interview with Elon Musk recently, and one of the questions he was asked by the audience was how will you ensure you meet the deadline for the Tesla Model 3 this time? . I was sitting there thinking dude, seriously? You pre ordered a car, and you want him to rush it instead of taking the time he needs to ensure it's safe and the best quality it can be? If you really need a car by a certain date, why not just order an existing model? As a game developer, I'm noticing there is constant pressure to set and meet deadlines. Blizzard recently tried to say that the new expansion for WoW will be launched when it's ready . Cue in forums exploding with threads asking when exactly it will be released. Again, I'd rather they take the time to thoroughly test it and catch as many bugs as possible before launch, so when it does come out, I can sit down and enjoy it, instead of wondering when it's actually done, if they keep working on it at all. My arguments against deadlines It is better to wait a bit longer for a better product, than to cut corners to meet a deadline We all have days when we focus better than on others. I believe it would be better if people could choose to have shorter days when they feel tired, and work longer when they have the surplus energy. But our society unrealistically demands consistent performance, and extra performance close to those arbitrary deadlines. Unexpected things will happen, and a long deadline will only serve to give you the illusion of extra time. It's better to assess your options based on efficiency and complexity, instead of by time estimation. That way, you can re evaluate if something is worth doing and what the best way to get it done is when things go wrong, instead of being forced into should we scrap it, or add a patchwork solution to make it work in a half arsed way? Deadlines cause extra stress on developers. Working overtime will make a product come out faster, but it will likely be more buggy than it could be. Deadlines just lead to anticipation and disappointment. It's better to be pleasantly surprised that oh, that thing is out, I can dive into it now rather than obsessing over how much time is left, and being devastated over a delay. Caveats counter arguments Scheduling some things is important this one is the only valid argument I can think of. An airport can't function by allowing passengers to just get on planes whenever. The train taking you to the airport needs to follow a schedule so you know when to leave home to get there. But for the vast majority of things in our life, knowing when something will happen is not necessary, just a preference of some people. Some things are time critical true, but having a mentality of do it as soon as possible is still better than do it by X time date . I don't want the paramedic to be at my house in 5 minutes when I'm having a heart attack, I just want him to be there as soon as humanly possible, without taking excessive risks. No deadline necessary. Setting a deadline is important when others are waiting for you only if they also have a deadline. Otherwise they can work on something else until you're done. Deadlines and estimates are used to make sure you can afford to create your product I don't know about other industries, but in software, having an Agile development method, where you start with a basic functional thing, and add more and more features as you go, will work much better. At the end of every sprint, you will have a product you could release, that has high quality features that actually work, instead of having a top down approach, where you have a list of features for the end product, and you have to add all of them within X time. Knowing when a game comes out allows me to save up for it and take time off work etc This just sets you up for failure. Why not do that after the game is out, and you see reviews to confirm it was the right decision? Better save that time for another game or hobby, if it turns out to be a bad game. So, change my view. Why is it important to have deadlines? Am I missing any kind of huge benefit?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Deadlines are overrated\n","id":"72cf6b65-2c2f-4677-bb9f-7f618d10b25f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>A common fiscal policy will allow current member states to share the risk of any economic shock, preventing any one member state from facing the brunt of a crisis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A unified fiscal policy will be beneficial for current member states.\n","id":"ce2e2e23-35a1-4b40-8048-8afb40be7972"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>It is essential that humans become a multi-planetary species<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, the Earth is divided into 195 different countries with different leaders, cultures, and languages. These countries have significant political disagreements on Earth. Agreement and unity when dealing with oversight and governance of these new civilizations thus also seems unlikely<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Becoming a multi-planetary species would raise significant political problems regarding the oversight and governance of these new civilisations\n","id":"bdb55187-e48e-4346-91f6-86a7e01db209"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US have withdrawn from NAFTA?<|ARGUMENT|>Trade policy is highly determined by irrational loss aversion Humans tend to assign a value to loss that is about twice as large as an otherwise similar gain. This explains why the losses caused by NAFTA have had more political consequences than its larger benefits. If existing NAFTA's current benefits are lost, the American public would be more aware of the benefits of free trade.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the predictions of negative economic consequences of NAFTA withdrawal are borne out, the skepticism of free trade that led to Trump's election will be proven wrong. This will increase support for beneficial free trade agreements and policy.\n","id":"2cc1738e-a024-4cae-ae68-4c150ad7303f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>ban faith schools.<|ARGUMENT|>Parents send their children to school so that they can be properly educated. For many parents, this education includes proper moral codes and values. Sending their child to a faith school that they know will adhere to the moral codes and values of that particular faith is one of the only ways that they can guarantee their child will be brought up with the values they consider important.1 It is this that in part makes the schools popular as Ed Balls, then UK education secretary recognises \"One thing we've learnt as a government is that having a distinct ethos, strong leadership, a commitment to promoting opportunity for all, those are the kind of schools where parents want to send their children.\u201d2 1 Mott-Thornton, Kevin. \u201cCommon Faith: Education, Spirituality and the State.\u201d Ashgate Pub. Ltd. 1998. 2 BBC News, \u201cFaith schools set for expansion\u201d, 10 September 2007,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents have a right to ensure their child is brought up with the values they consider important.\n","id":"f95a8d75-f8a2-41cc-92be-af4f885ed1ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Climate Change Be Reversed?<|ARGUMENT|>If by Capitalism we mean free-market mega-capitalism, where multi-national corporations are free of any legal, ethical or environmental constraints, then the above claim is true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies sometime push people over profits, which devastates the ecosystem past what it can recover.\n","id":"06047aa9-31fe-4350-a788-ce798c307de4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Donald Trump a Good President?<|ARGUMENT|>As evidence, unemployment rates are at record lows in many other countries as a result of a long global expansion that followed the financial crisis. Many of these have policies directly contrary to the President's. Thirty-six countries have rates lower than the USA, including Japan 2.4%, Germany 3.4%, Mexico 3.4%, Poland 3.5% and Hungary 3.6%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The President's claim of job creation as evidence of his success is overstated at best. Job growth continued on the trend in Obama's second term albeit at a slower pace.\n","id":"aa1e17aa-5183-4f31-9d01-947b6383d624"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pensions should be privatised<|ARGUMENT|>Federal Reserve Board records of the last 100 years prove that the best investment by far is in stocks. In comparison, these investments make bonds, treasury bills appear meaningless. But we can substantiate our claim that stock markets are unreliable and can fall sharply.The Wall Street Crash of 1929 is a perfect example of how capricious the stock market can be.On August 24, 1921, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at a value of 63.9 and by September 3, 1929, it had risen more than sixfold, touching 381.2. However on October 29, 1929also known as the Black Tuesday the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 38 points to 260, a drop of 12.8%. Within two days the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 23%. Furthermore, the stock market crash on October 19,1987, a date also known as Black Monday, was the greatest single-day loss that Wall Street had ever suffered in continuous trading up to that point. Between the start of trading on October 14 to the close on October 19, the DJIA lost 760 points, a decline of over 31 percent.The U.K and U.S are market based economies as such depend on the rather unpredictable market extensively. We need an alternative mechanism to handle unprecedented blows to the market.This is provided by government-bank sponsored entities such as security commissions, reserves and the central bank. If we remove public pension funds\/schemes unlike Germany,Italy,France and Japan; a market crash will be impossible to absorb. The four countries mentioned are bank-based economies they are not largely dependent on the goings on of financial markets rather they are dependent on regulations, banks and most business decisions, declines and successes are made via the banking system and not through stock valuation. Ups and downs in the market do not effect\/affect them considerably. They can privatize pension funds entirely without worry over the effect on their economy: Over-privatization is a non-issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Germany,france and Italy: economies where privatisation works because Unions and banking trump over risky finacial markets; the most unreliable being the Stock market that both the U.S and U.K depend on in private funding ventures.\n","id":"88816059-88f0-4e2e-a627-2d65bf4cb494"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Throughout its existence, Israel has sought peace with the Arab World and was willing to give up its interests for it. For example, in exchange for peace with Egypt, Israel gave up its claims on the Sinai peninsula<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Peace is in the interest of Israel. Independent of what the US is doing, Israel works to secure a state of peace with all its neighbors.\n","id":"9d453406-ba99-4b57-a74b-f2afb087f20f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public transport be free?<|ARGUMENT|>Governments would likely be encouraged to shift from staff-based management of public transport to electronic-based management to save on labor costs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Once public transport is free, higher demand will encourage governments to improve efficiency.\n","id":"e1dab43d-c0ee-4c17-a736-c15f0bde225b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm sick and tired of hearing these anti Reagan hippies always crying about how rich people do nothing with tax dollars. How do rich people stay where they are? They INVEST in our economy, when you take that away from them that money typically doesn't go to anything useful Obamacare and other welfare programs . When rich people have more money they expand, they put more into our economy. This is partially partially why we saw a boom in 2000. This policy eventually allows tax breaks for the middle class, which happened under Reagaonomics. Obama has raised taxes on the rich and he's been in office for 8 years where did our corporations go and why are we still in a HUGE deficit? Hmm so everyone of my responses got no replies but downvoted instead, I guess I win in that sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Supply-Side Economics is what we need in our next president.\n","id":"b2dec2e2-7a27-4d30-bafe-b7c9b3eede4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should minors be allowed to go through irreversible gender reassignment procedures?<|ARGUMENT|>Minors can misidentify the cause of their dysphoria, potentially making a wrong decision that will lead to an irreversible change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender identities are complex and fluid and can be influenced by a number of different variables\n","id":"007be806-da22-46cf-8ef3-b54608fb9acd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in the UK. In this country the normal sentence for a rape, assuming both parties are over 16 and there is no assault, e.g. Date Rape, is 5 years, there are over factors involved, e.g. Intoxication. Comparatively for Murder the Normal Sentence is 25 years. Sources 1 2 Now I believe that this is incredibly imbalanced and that if anything rape is worse than murder. I believe this because, unlike murder, rape not only strips the victim of freedom but can leave many with fear, or even hatred of their body, thus requiring therapy to overcome. Comparatively with a murder the victims is friends and family who though will often have to deal with the loss do not have to live with feeling that they have lost control of their own body. This is not demean the pain felt by a family in a murder but often this feeling is also shared with the victim's family in a rape. Thus I believe that purely from the point of view of people impacted rape is worse as more people are left with the fallout. Now you might be wondering what I believe the sentences should be like. Firstly I believe that in the case of most crimes the sentencing should be down to the victim not the Judge, this would of course be within similar limits as what are imposed on Judges in sentencing. This is due to the fact that at the end of the day the one effected by the crime is the victim not the Judge. However if the victim is not capable of making sound decisions, e.g. some one who cannot ever give consent, then it would fall to the judge Secondly in terms of length of prison sentencing rape should be comparable with murder. However the possibly controversial part of my view is that I believe it should be possible for the court to mandate the forcible castration, either chemical or otherwise, or execution of the offender. This is because two of the core principles of all western legal systems is prevention, of more crime, and rehabilitation, of convicts. In the case of a sexual crime it therefore makes sense that to rehabilitate a prisoner you should remove the element that causes the crime, e.g. sex drive. In fact castration is actually performed on paedophiles, however this is voluntary. Now the reason I believe execution should be an option is because if you are an element of society that will never be productive and are an active drain on the government, e.g. people under going life sentences, it is cheaper to put a bullet through their skull than let them rot in prison, and more human if stories of prison rape are to be believed. However this would only be reserved for cases where there is so much evidence that it could not be challenged ever , e.g. Mass Murderers. Any Thoughts?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rapists should have much harsher sentences\n","id":"fc80637f-2211-495c-a522-160fd9551edd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hear me out on this Also, just as a disclaimer, I'm not a drug user, I've never even smoked pot so it may well be that I don't know what I'm talking about . Yes, when a pharmacy gives a drug user syringes, they are enabling them. But does doing the opposite really help a drug user not use drugs? The research I've seen seems to suggest that denying clean needles to drug users does not stop them from doing drugs, it just encourages them to use dirty needles. There is a needle exchange in my area, and on a TV broadcast about it, a former heroin user was saying that, before the needle exchange opened up, not having clean needles would not stop him from using. He would just desperately search for any syringe he could get, even if he had to share with someone or dig through the trash. The idea behind needle exchanges is that even if the person continues to use, they at least don't spread HIV and Hepatitis C in the process. The needle exchange in my area also offers resources on getting clean and provides Narcan. I know using heroin is a lot more dangerous than having sex, but I see it as a kind of like a high school that hands out condoms. Sure, abstinence is safer than condoms in preventing pregnancy and STDs, but if people are going to have sex, condoms or no condoms, they might as well do it safely. In summary, wouldn't it be a lot better if, rather than refusing syringes and driving an addict to use dirty needles, they give the person some clean needles, some Narcan, and some info on resources for getting clean?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When pharmacies refuse to sell syringes to suspected drug users, they do more harm than good.\n","id":"5eb6b0ef-26d0-4e61-8a7a-3aaf41f7f884"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2006, an anti-feminist organisation blocked the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in the USA.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It doesn't seem to be feminism that puts people against each other, but rather anti-feminists.\n","id":"db78b603-cfce-4673-931e-38b4c24a5120"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've returned to university at almost the age of almost forty, and I often find it easy to forget that I'm roughly twice the age of most of the other students. Perhaps it's just I haven't fully matured never being married and having no kids can do that , but I don't think that's the entire reason. The tension that existed between Gen X and the Boomers, and Boomers and their parents' generation, doesn't seem to be there. It doesn't feel all that different than when I first went to university back in the 90s. Perhaps the rate of change in society is slowing down?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the \"generation gap\" between Gen X and Gen Y is quite small compared to that of previous generations.\n","id":"a56151d9-74e5-427b-a963-98089646a7df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Spoiler alert, obviously. The Reapers are designed to keep the peace between organics and synthetics, because there is very strong evidence that organics synthetics will exterminate each other if left unchecked. This happened between every client race of the Leviathans, which was the reason the Reapers were built in the first place. Then they rationally realized that at some point, there would be a singularity. A point of no return where organics cannot withstand the onslaught of synthetics and will be destroyed forever. Because synthetics are superior to organics in basically all ways, the organics will inevitably lose this war. There's no way to survive except for the Reapers. The Reapers ensure that an organic race does not accidentally create its own destruction via synthetics by becoming too advanced. The Reapers are actually doing us a favor Sure, it is horrific to think of organic civilizations being genocided every 50,000 years. But think of the alternative. Without the Reapers, it is likely that we would no longer even exist as a type of organism. Total species death, total concept death. Synthetics would rule over literally the whole universe. Evidence already abounds of this in the Mass Effect series. There is anthropological evidence that millions of species in the past created robots that eventually destroyed them. It even happened to the Quarians in our timeline. In the first game, half the Geth decided to stop being isolationist and actively attempt to destroy organics. Even without the help of Sovereign, they clearly did a lot of damage. What if down the road, an entire synthetic race decides that it's had enough of our existence? Maybe it's selfish but I like organic beings since I am one. I appreciate the fact that the Reapers are around to make sure that I don't create synthetic servants that will eventually rise up and completely exterminate the presence of organic beings in the whole galaxy. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Mass Effect, the Reapers had the right idea. Without them, organic beings will be forever extinguished from the universe.\n","id":"36294060-bc22-4177-b4ff-d2149b19c751"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should jury trials be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Jury selection can be biased against minorities, preventing them from participating equally in the justice system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It takes a great deal of time and resources to assemble juries.\n","id":"d3ab04cf-bcde-4523-b322-421a6db5032a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We don't have to argue the validity of a Palestinian state. For the first part of my view I have very little faith that the Palestinian leadership is really looking out for its people and only looking out for its supporters which leaves a lot of people out of the loop. The PA as is jails atheists, regime critics, critics of islam, people who sell land to jews, and people who work with the Israeli's. there is a significant amount of political violence and I don't see that ending seeing as most political parties contain armed wings. It will probably be a mess between religious peoples and people who want western economics so oppression of women and liberal thinkers will likely be policy. As for the second part, I don't think the drive to conquer the rest of Israel, which many consider to be occupied will ever end, and war with Israel, or at least regular attempted attacks either supported or unsupported by the state, are bound to happen. People like Khaled Mashaal don't go away just because they make peace. edit spelling I 100 regret making this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have a feeling that any Palestinian state that comes into existence will be a total craphole and still be agitating to conquer Israel.\n","id":"e57e9c6f-6e49-41d7-b75a-c8523e4e8155"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see artists like Kanye West, Justin Bieber, Win Butler and Miguel who get a lot of flack for saying that they're great artists or that they make better music than other artists. And it seems like this flack is especially strong towards artists when they make pop music. But I think to be a good musician, it's almost necessary for you to believe in your own music and believe that it's great. If Kanye really believes that he's this generation's Kurt Cobain and that his music transcends entertainment, then good on him as that's the exact type of mentality that will push him to try and create that type of timeless music. And what's wrong with publicly stating that? Usually he responds that way when the questions are loaded and they're looking for a controversial answer anyway. It reminds me of the way people view women as arrogant or 'a bitch' when they react positively and knowingly to a compliment. I think it's a healthy mentality to love yourself and anything you do, and it can be separate from conceitedness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There isn't anything wrong with musicians stating that they make great music or that they're the best.\n","id":"35c8b450-a2e2-4984-8c74-1a0140056b40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I proceed, I want to clarify that the laws I mention in the title are regarding when it is and when it is not legal to hit someone. As clarification for people who don' know these laws, I will sum it up. You are only allowed to hit someone in self defense and you are not in any condition allowed to hit first. x200B Self defense has been defined as any situation that may seem dangerous to the Jury . What this means in a nut shell is that when being prosecuted against in court for a self defense case, the jury is seeing a bunch of people with black eyes saying that they have been assaulted against you who may seem significantly less harmed in said situation As such, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose the court case unless there is clear evidence of them aggressing first. e.g witnesses Now for the never hit first part. You are not legally allowed to hit someone first even if they are aggressively advancing on you and shoving you regardless of how threatened you feel. You may report the cops, but hitting them can and likely will result in you being sued and you losing. x200B Now for the martial arts part So I was a 2nd degree black belt, and had been doing martial arts for a large portion of my life. It has currently been around 3 4 years since I have quit. Now my former experience of martial arts seems to serve as a detriment towards me in certain situations. Often when I feel extremely threatened, in this case by a senior in my school, I often react strongly and feel an intense urge to punch him. While I have no proof, I feel my need to solve the issue with fists stems from martial arts where I was used to getting into fights and sparring giving the ability to face people I didn't like in a match. Edit I wasn't clear when I said threatened, I meant he repeatedly attempted to scratch my left eye and verbally harasses me very frequently after I have told him to stop. x200B Martial arts are originally techniques used for war. But if I'm not allowed to hit the guy who I feel is threatening my wellbeing even though I am capable, I think I am better of not being trained. Hell if I cant use it, why know it in the first place?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With current laws, learning martial arts serves as a detriment to a person and their ability to interact in society.\n","id":"217ecb95-f6d3-4b39-b77e-b87812874dd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently attended an informational meeting about an alternative spring break trip to Peru to provide medical relief to the people of the city. I was really excited because I had finally found a program that provided follow ups for there services, rather than just giving their patients one examination and leaving which is what most medical mission trips do . Upon attending this meeting, I learned that the one week trip would cost me 2000. It would take the average citizen of Lima four months to accumulate that amount of money, and only a fractional amount of the 2000 I was paying would be going towards medical costs. The rest of the money covered the cost for the flight, room and board, and food. Why were all of the rest of the people so willing to spend such an extreme amount of money for this trip? They claimed they were excited for the experience that they were going to receive and that it looked good on job graduate school applications. But these were all experiences that benefited themselves, not the people of Peru. Yes, they were going to be providing medical care, but if they really cared about providing medical care to those who need it, why couldn\u2019t they go on an alternative spring break trip to Chicago for one quarter of the price and provide medical care to the underprivileged community there? At least more of the money that the students pay would be spent on medical supplies. Some people argue that they can gain better hands on experience by volunteering in another country. But again, this benefits the student, not the patient. If college students are not legally allowed to perform particular kinds of medical services in Chicago, then it should not be ethical to do it in another country either. If an individual is not trained to provide the kind of care they are attempting to provide, they can seriously hurt someone. The students who are going on alternative spring break trips are driven by motives that benefit themselves, not the underprivileged. If the students really cared about the medical treatment they were providing to people who could not afford it, they would be better off allocating their money in a way that did not provide them with a vacation in the process. Edit I realize that even if the volunteers are acting in their own interests they can simultaneously be acting in the interests of others too. I am not trying to discount the impact of volunteering for services that do not involve unqualified medical procedures . Thank you to all of those who volunteer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that students who go on alternative spring breaks trips to help the less privileged are selfish.\n","id":"2215dac4-8d72-487e-b7eb-73659b2a5505"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cosmetic surgery be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The appearance of a person, especially when we enter the digital age, is not a fixed. A person should have the right and the ability to safely change his\/her appearance to something he\/she can identify with. This technique will be more and more advanced in the future, and there will be safer and easier means to modify the appearance of a person. There should be limitations on what and how it is performed, but a total ban is not preferable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In a society that places a lot of emphasis on looks, it is perfectly reasonable and understandable that people want to do what they can to improve their appearance.\n","id":"1d6311b8-e456-47ba-aa6e-3cb45a8e80d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Laws are made by the representatives of the people. They are then promulgated after a vote by the people or their representatives. People can vote for their representatives. That nudity represents indecent exposure is therefore at least indirectly supported by the majority in these countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Where there is a lack of consent indecent exposure is considered a tort in many countries.\n","id":"caddf15b-c158-4df9-b482-820138085e5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>Japanese citizens had been taught from birth to give their lives for the emperor if he requested it in defense of the nation.\u200b<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Japan's ruling family was already considered a bloodthirsty military caste by the United States.\n","id":"f3140c11-0821-4630-9e9f-46bfe8f5ee27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Working in entertainment, as in movies TV shows, etc. is something everyone wants because it pays money and fame, and its harm is not very apparent. People have suffered things like depression, anxiety, insecurity, etc. mainly because part of being a celebrity is maintaining a perfect image, when most people don't have it. So adults can choose to be in that life and take responsibility. Children don't have the mental capacity to say no to money and fame, and letting them work in the entertainment industry would be luring them them into a very dangerous career without them understanding the ramifications. Not only that, but the industry is full of people who don't have a good track record when it comes to decency. I am not a saying they are all bad people but like I mentioned there is a lot of stress and mental problems that can be seen as a dangerous environment for everyone let alone kids. So we should stop allowing kids in the entertainment industry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children should not work in Hollywood.\n","id":"5337c977-2c13-4fe4-8644-85051493a96b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I say human life I mean the totality, for the species. Not the individual. Here's what I'm going at We often talk about the future of the Human Race, and how we'll need to leave earth and travel to other planets if we want humans to keep existing. The thing is, I see no reason as to why we must try to ensure the survival of the human race, as of today. We can't work together as a species, and something as simple and stupid as the place where we're born is enough to separate us so immensely that we act as if a Brazilian Human is essentially different from a Japanese Human. We are still too stubborn to recognize the characteristics of our species such as stubbornness that we could use to improve ourselves and work better together. We still have huge amounts of people denying science and fighting over what religion is right, even in aspects we know them to be wrong. We don't trust each other. And as someone who believes in some form of capitalism, I think we're reaching the worst that it has, to the point where it seems we really are artificially splitting ourselves more and more. Take nuclear weapons, for example and I was discussing this with someone else on another sub, so if you were talking to me about non proliferation, hey, whats up? We've all come to agree that nuclear bombs are extinction in a box, and decided that no one can make any more nuclear weapons, to make sure that we don't end up killing ourselves. Yet, the countries who do have nuclear weapons refuse to give them up. Why? For the reasons I talked about before We don't trust each other, so how can the USA make sure that, if they destroy their nuclear arsenal, Russia won't just take over the world under a Socialist Dystopia? We also want to have an advantage over others. If other countries don't fear you, then you can't just have what you want. Even our best hope of achieving real unity as a species, the UN, is corrupted. There are five countries with veto power in the security council, that use that power for their own benefits. With all that considered, I truly don't see the intrinsic value in human life that would make me say We need to protect it at all costs. In fact, I believe that if we started to act like a species that deserves to stay alive, then doing so would be much simpler if we worked together for science and technology, we could be so much more advanced by now, and there I have no doubts that we would advance at a much faster pace than we are advancing now. We could really solve the problems of inequality in the world, rather than just focusing in our own back yards, and that in itself would push our progress in so many areas. As a final note, I'd like to say right away that I won't give much importance to religious arguments. I don't believe in God or any such thing I don't deny any of that either, I just believe it's an unnecessary improvable unfalsifiable complication of the universe , but I do believe that if there is a God such as most religions describe, then it doesn't really give that much value to human life either. I don't think we should just kill ourselves and be done with it, I think we have to keep striving to reach this utopia which should really just be the norm, I mean, what is more basis than asking that humans treat each other as humans? . But I think it's important to note that the survival of the human species is only worth anything as long as it's used to pursue this goal, and not because humans should survive at all costs. This means that any action decision that makes it harder for this end goal to be reach, with the pretense that it is to ensure the survival of the human race, is intrinsically invalid. If our incapability of reaching that goal leads to the extinction of humans, then tough luck, and lets hope that the next species that comes up fares better than us, and that we can serve as an example to some future civilization that finds our remais. I think it would be extremely sad if we didn't manage to live to traverse the universe, and to meet other species, and to be a part of all of the great things that we could do with our species. But I think it would be even sadder if we started to colonize without first being capable of living as one. If we're having trouble doing it on earth, where we're super close to each other, and every decision taken impacts the lives of everyone else, things would only get harder if we separate ourselves by planet, and solar system. Can you imagine what would happen when humans actually got a few years of evolution so that the human race on earth is actually different from the human race on mars? Or when they're so far away that it becomes hard to argue in anyway that we're similar to them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no intrinsic value in human life\n","id":"b20cdcd8-03f8-4591-b5f4-3e3694ce7952"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Genetic modification of crops has resulted in the creation of many plants which would not have come into existence by conventional processes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetic engineering of food is unnatural. Thus, genetically modified foods should be banned.\n","id":"b49bc8e3-eab9-47eb-94f1-2ef22d2eb64a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As an Asian, I feel like my race experiences the subtlest but definitely significant racism in the United States. Personally I experience this racism from blacks the most, which I find ironic and infuriating considering their own situation and history. It\u2019s like we don\u2019t even exist, and if we do it\u2019s only for the butt of jokes on television. It seems there are always token black, Hispanic actors but never any Asians. Asians are given no attention in media and stereotyped in ways that would definitely cause outrage if done against blacks or any other race. There are other things like Affirmative action that I feel shouldn\u2019t disadvantage Asian students but that is another post altogether. Perhaps it's because Asians are less prone to speaking out and generally want peace. But whatever the reason may be, it feels like that in America racism against Asian simply by not even considering them. I find that people are always so careful and mindful of treating blacks but Asians? It\u2019s not even on their minds. It is often Black vs White debate and because of all the attention it gets, I feel like blacks get treated even better than Asians do. Change my view America. Asians are on a lower rung more so than blacks. It\u2019s even worse because Americans don\u2019t even realize it and don\u2019t care because we aren\u2019t prone to violence or belligerent. Edit Sorry about the title everyone, it's a bit provocative. Let me more nuanced here. Ultimately the reason I'm saying worse is not because asians actually have it worse in our current state but if asians behaved the same way blacks did, the treatment would be no different or worse since we didn't face slavery, or have the awareness and consideration of the people about our race. Edit 2 After reading a lot of the comments simply saying worse is to strong. I do agree that it is much more complex than that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Asians get treated just as unfairly as any other minority and worse than blacks.\n","id":"0015ee35-8166-4f01-9857-a2e6e0e109de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Education is crucial to a successful democracy, as only then are people aware of what a democracy is, and what political rights they have. Poor countries with low education levels tend to have populations which aren't aware of, or interested in, democracy as a political system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Poor countries usually do not democratize; a minimum of economic development and wealth seem necessary for democracy to take root. Thus, the promotion of democracy without prior economic progress might approach the issue in the wrong way Huntington, p. 60\n","id":"354206a4-4f3f-4efc-8c2b-5d82227d5799"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we abolish political parties in the USA?<|ARGUMENT|>Political parties have no obligation to uphold the results of primary elections as recently demonstrated bythe dismissal of Carol Wilding, et al. vs DNC casting an unmerited aura of democratic legitimacy on a non-democratic process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political parties do not have to legally represent their voters.\n","id":"3485e244-6f0e-4f68-9da1-68fbbbeacd28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To start off, I am of mixed race. My mother is Mexican, my father is white. While I have not experienced racism that can be comparable to someone of darker skin, I have experienced it. From both sides, both as a white and a Mexican. I basically am 'othered' by both sides. But that's not what this is about. A lot of people, when pointing out the racism people of color go through, mention 'reverse racism' or racism aimed towards whites by people of color instead of racism aimed towards people of color by whites or other people of color . However, I think that's kind of a stupid point to make in the face of the systematic oppression POC face, and that, having experienced it myself, pales in comparison. I am in no way saying that white people don't experience prejudice nor is this prejudice that white people experience a good thing. For me, when a white person and I have been discriminated against for being half white in a Mexican community gets called a honkey, or a cracker, or whatever or is even bullied or picked on for being white, its not because people of color genuinely think that because that person is white, that person is below them. I think it's just bullying because that person is different from them, that person is not one of us. It is also in response to the racism that they face everyday in order to escape racism from whites, they take preventative measures even if they don't realize it. On the other hand, being called something like beaner, spic, or wetback is much more hurtful I've been called this when in predominantly white communities . When people say these things, when people make jokes about being Mexican and jokes about race are fine at times, but some cross the line , when I am seen as just a piece of Latina ass, it is because people see me as below them because of my skin color and where my family came from. It carries more weight than calling me a cracker does. And it will always hurt more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the prejudice white people face is not as bad as the prejudice black people\/people of color face\n","id":"3bfb2838-db52-495b-ad24-392ae93d3154"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe it is the case that anthropogenic climate change is real and is being caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. I also believe it is the case that climate change is causing significant harm to human life and that there is a very real possibility that this will accelerate. I also believe that the energy intensive lifestyles of individuals have a non negligible effect on our climate change situation and that our personal choices lead to loss of life and livelihood for those communities most affected by climate change. I understand that many people are locked in to the bulk of these individual choices and cannot easily or significantly change the extent to which they contribute to overall carbon emissions. By this I mean that, although there are many changes that need to be made to the ways we organize our food, transportation, waste, and infrastructure systems, we all still need to eat, get to work, get rid of wastes, and hear our houses and public building. I understand that aviation is a very significant contributor to personal carbon emissions for anyone who participates in international air travel on a regular basis 1 year and that, furthermore, it is in no way necessary for the survival or basic well being of individuals. According the the sources I have read, aviation is both significantly more carbon emitting than other forms of transportation per unit of distance and more likely to involve extremely large distances. Therefore, I believe that to engage in long distance pleasure air travel is to contribute to climate change entirely needlessly and to therefore willingly contribute to loss of life and livelihood in regions affected by climate change. There are few other low hanging fruit that combine high carbon emissions with utter frivolity and I believe that, if we are going to begin addressing the global issues of climate change and climate justice, we need to begin curtailing international pleasure travel. In our society taking large and frequent airplane trips is seen as something to be looked up to and admired. Nonsensically something as trivial as being rude to a stranger is seen as being more immoral than taking part in a frivolous activity that definitely does lead to human death and suffering. Basically, this is an entirely fringe opinion, and just about everyone I have spoken to about it becomes extremely defensive I never bring it up aggressively, but sometimes explain to people why I do not want to take part in air travel . I think that it is a fundamental lie that capitalism has told us that individuals have the right to do anything they want if they can afford it, and damn the repercussions for people and the environment. Maybe you can change my view? I am a little set in my ways on this, but people disagree so vigorously that I figure I might as well receive well reasoned counter arguments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Due to climate change, it is highly immoral to participate in international air travel for pleasure.\n","id":"09629533-b522-433b-9718-c071e3b42666"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the recent discussion of Street Harassment thanks to a number of viral videos and the news coverage of them, I started to wonder why there was no recourse for those tired of being harassed. Thinking it through for a small time I could think of no good reasons why Street Harassment wasn't somehow criminalized, especially with all of the legislation protecting women from harassment in the workplace Or providing them ample recourse if they are harassed . What could the possible issues be of penalizing Street Harassment? Would it be a good idea to enact legislation against Catcalling Whether on a local, state or federal basis ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Catcalling and Street Harassment should be a ticket-able offense.\n","id":"2cfffc95-9502-451e-8369-7341513d3803"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the main incentive for carrying a firearm when committing a crime is that you may need to defend yourself against armed police. Because criminals tend to be armed normal citizens need to be armed in order to protect themselves against those criminals. Disarming the police would reduce the need for criminals to carry firearms and so generally reduce the perceived need to carry a gun by citizens. By removing this normalcy of this type of weapon is reduced and a reduced rate of gun related homicide should be seen. This is borne out in countries like the UK and applies specifically to guns rather than all non lethal arms. When asked, UK police officers say overwhelmingly that they wish to remain unarmed. A 2006 survey of 47,328 Police Federation members found 82 did not want officers to be routinely armed on duty, despite almost half saying their lives had been in serious jeopardy during the previous three years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One of the single most effective ways to reduce gun related homicide is to disarm front line police officers.\n","id":"ff9c5ba6-0188-4afd-9430-e5121a653e9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My wife and I are discussing weather or not to have another child. Our daughter is 2 years and 4 months old. My wife is 37. My daughter has three cousins that live within 30 min and are similar in age. We are able to meet up for family dinner every other week. We are doing pretty good financially. We both work and have a modest 3 bedroom house in an up and coming neighborhood. My reasons for not having a second child are as follows We don't need to have any more. We are comfortable financially and are able to save for retirement. Only having one child means that we never have to choose or prioritize between them. The world doesn't necessarily need more of our genes. We aren't special genetically. Lots of cancer historically. I had an older sister who was not a great older sister as a kid. I don't want my reason to have another kid to be an biologically or emotionally driven one. As a person, I don't really want the increased responsibility. I have a good balance right now where I don't have to be 100 on all the time. What are all the reasons you all can think of to go for 2?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should not have another child.\n","id":"b168c21e-3001-45c3-a8ac-98f5a756b0a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>Gender arose in the 19th century with the broad diffusion of biomedical science around Western European practices and ideas, which consolidated the idea that sex determines gender identities and roles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The perception of gender roles as something fixed comes from an erroneous ethnocentric vision of Western societies.\n","id":"292435b0-677b-4c19-801b-45d71b90b33f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>If both Direct Democracy and Representative democracy have been proven to work, then the middle-ground is likely to also work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liquid democracy is a middle-ground between Representative and Direct Democracy.\n","id":"361ada79-3353-415b-8983-c652a03b551f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Assassination of a Dictator<|ARGUMENT|>Dictatorial systems are highly personal, so removing the driving force behind such a regime will result in its collapse, allowing a more popular and liberal government to replace it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dictatorial systems are highly personal, so removing the driving force behind such a regime will res...\n","id":"8d1dfac6-7fb8-4c21-af33-d67e50bc7063"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a vegetarian, and have been all my life, so I'm well aware i might not have chosen to be if my parents hadn't brought me up that way. I'm fairly sure of my beliefs that eating meat is wrong for various reason including animal welfare, environmental impact and inefficiency inhumanity of the process, but I'm also not a vegan, which seems to be the most logical valid position to hold. I also believe that a vegetarian diet is no less healthy than an omnivorous diet, and in fact can be more healthy in many ways.  EDIT This is a good discussion Please don't downvote people who support the vegetarian viewpoint just because you disagree. Likewise, veggies, don't downvote people because they support eating meat Downvotes are for things that aren't relevant to the topic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there are no valid arguments for eating meat, other than \"I like the taste\" -\n","id":"090cd991-93b5-4459-af74-6a5cc8647bda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>Agalarov's son set up the controversial June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between key Trump team members and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump brought his Miss Universe pageant to Russia in 2013 by working with Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov.\n","id":"24bb0481-e502-4fa2-95f8-e44a9cc4da38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Although it might have other intentions, in practice, the discussion of politics on social media serves only to polarize groups and radicalize views. Every time a major political event occurs, people turn to their preferred social media platforms of reddit, facebook, twitter, or youtube for discussion about the event. However, due to the phenomenon of internet algorithms and the filter bubble, people are usually not exposed to opposing arguments, resulting in radicalization. During the rare circumstances in which the filter bubble pops and shows an opposing view, due to the extreme views that users hold due to the bubble, political discussion serves only to polarize groups, with each different view believing that they are the only valid opinion. Essentially, politics and social media create a dangerous mix of opinion validation and polarization that is extremely damaging to the political climate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political Social Media Is Damaging Our Political Climate\n","id":"5d4b2ef3-7003-4aeb-ab94-b16717daeeb9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need nuclear power for sustainable energy production?<|ARGUMENT|>Renewables cannot keep up with rising demand let alone make an impact on reducing the market for fossil fuels. Last year demand rose3:1 for fossil fuels compared to renewables.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Renewable power can not produce enough energy to match our needs.\n","id":"35f08184-15f1-4413-9196-549be4add45d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ten Commandments: Display in Schools<|ARGUMENT|>The state would be hypocritical to supposedly endorse a Christian ethic, when it does so much that it contrary to it. It opens its shops and its schools hold sporting events on the Sabbath, though we are told by the Commandment to respect it. It executes people, though we are told that vengeance is the Lord\u2019s, and \u2018thou shalt not kill.\u2019<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Ten Commandments are out of date in modern society.\n","id":"93fe4a64-564b-49b0-a360-8e5380d20079"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that the EU is still a monetary and no fiscal union is due to the vast differences considering economic policies between member states and proves these thereby. These differences will be a serious obstacle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are irreconcilable differences between EU member states that make the USE a nearly impossible endeavour.\n","id":"2fd6cbb3-0c9e-4666-86d9-ffb511437bd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US and NATO Should Withdraw from Afghanistan<|ARGUMENT|>The presence of foreign troops allows for a degree of stability, which has resulted in significant improvement in the lives of Afghans. If the US withdraws, then the national government will likely collapse and the positive changes reversed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A withdrawal of forces would result in infighting between various government, military and militia factions, possibly resulting in an all-out civil war.\n","id":"d0ca62ac-bf8d-42fb-8b1c-5fdd12223419"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Definition of Democracy a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections. Definition of Patriarchy Theory Patriarchal adj. describes a general structure in which men have power over women. So the basis of my argument is as follows. In a democracy power is equally distributed amoung its citizens who then vote for a representative for a certain amount of time. It is fundamentally based upon everyone have the same amount of power. Patriarchy theory in every definition I've ever seen makes the claim that men have power or more power over women. But because the population of both sexes is more or less equal, according to democracy both sexes should have the same amount of power. As such, because of Patriarchy Theory, by definition feminism must believe that these societies are not democratic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that by Definition, feminism believes that the United States\/Canada\/England etc. are not democracies.\n","id":"9a7ae736-956e-4aa8-b8e7-9f664f52ec75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think my view has been changed. I don't think I'll ever be a sports fan, but many of you had really great points as to why sports or the discussion of sports. Thanks to all who gave great answers and weren't jerks Sports are great for exercise, and to an extent they are good to have at a pro or semi pro level for entertainment. However, I think the fact that a huge number of people follow teams, players, or sports in general religiously is ridiculous. When people are dying across the world due to civil war and starvation, the average person on the street knowing next to nothing about our political system, and the presence of hundreds of other actually important topics of conversation available, what the hell is the big deal about games? Sports are a waste of time and conversation. I found a post similar to this from a few months back, but there were few responses. With a husband who is a sports fanatic, I would love for someone to . EDIT It seems that my post came off as saying that people shouldn't have fun because there are bad things happening in the world. That wasn't what I meant I just worded it poorly. I am asking specifically about sports because people in my life are sports fanatics and take an interest in almost nothing else. What I am looking for is for an explanation on what the value of sprts is. I have a mostly great responses, but some people need to read what this sub is about. Is rudeness going to change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think sports are ridiculous and carry no real value.\n","id":"082e3aca-afc6-4918-ae27-f6c928403282"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let's be honest, I read about this subreddit on the front page, am writing an essay where I would like to talk about the fact that women have indeed partaken in the modernization of the workplace, but I can't figure anything out. Please take mercy and help me out<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women have not played a significant role in the modernization of the American Workforce.\n","id":"c7faa4e0-75a0-4ed4-af07-b9189cc98eb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Whaling Still be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The whaling commission was hijacked by non-whaling members joining and overriding the concerns of whaling nations. This imbalance from the envisioned purpose causes great instability within it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing whale hunting will save the broken International Whaling Commission, which has become dysfunctional through internal disagreement, because it allows members that previously withdrew to return.\n","id":"b438c9b2-1b26-4589-82fe-6275f208b7cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm seeing all of the conflict that arises when people bring up gender, and it really confuses me. Generally, when abortion or some other controversial topic comes up, people sort of say, All right, let's not get into this. With gender, it seems to be no holds barred. Like, it's alright to contest others' opinions when the topic is gender sexuality. There's not that same civility that there is with other topics. With other things people more often are able to say, I disagree, but acquiesce this conversation not my belief. With gender, people seem permitted to denounce others' beliefs freely. The situation I was in a group of people high schoolers writing to our various state representatives about the HB2 law. We had all chosen to. One trans boy said something a girl responded, or the girl said something, and the boy responded by denouncing the girl's belief. I said, Hey, you can't give her a belief. Just let it go. You're not gonna be able to change it right now. And he goes, hostilely, No I tried to kill myself because And I raise my hands, palms up, and say, Listen, I agree with you. I think you're right. But I don't want to get into this, if that's alright. And, apparently, it wasn't alright. UPDATE I apologized a moment ago, and he says, No, it was my fault. I say, No, it was mutual. So maybe he was slightly mitigating, but still I'm still wondering about this. I know this view is totally flawed. I'm still trying to form beliefs or at least understand convictions about gender and HB2 and etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People take gender-related issues too personally. People should live and let live.\n","id":"8026c694-3cfc-4dc5-a9fd-1cac0be218d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Treating your faith as modular and cherry picking parts of it to keep the existence of God protected from criticism is an erroneous discussion tactic. Thus, you cannot abandon some features of the traditional conception of God and still be affirming his existence. en.wikipedia.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not possible to abandon the traditional conception of God and still defend the existence of God.\n","id":"db5eb8b1-541f-4ee8-807d-0732808e75a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>New York State introduced fines on the individual for listing short term leases on Airbnb and similar services. It is $1,000 for first time listed, $5,000 for the second and $7,500 for the third.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Airbnb puts people at risk of undertaking illegal activities by failing to notify hosts of the relevant laws.\n","id":"0122a724-f241-46d3-8134-1a78a382e32f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should athletes be allowed to compete in their chosen gender category?<|ARGUMENT|>The Winter Olympics were held in Sochi in 2014 despite criticisms about corruption, a widely boycotted anti-LGBTQ+ law being introduced at the same time, and Russia being subject to numerous sanctions from the West.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Major sporting events have been hosted in countries which are facing boycotts and sanctions from numerous countries.\n","id":"8ce667b9-cbaf-47de-993c-4d99aed2e172"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a Chinese American, born and raised in the United States. However, I grew up with the stories of my grandparents fleeing the Japanese raids during WWII. It's a common sentiment among the Chinese that the Japanese are the Devil's spawn. In Mandarin Chinese, the Japanese are referred to as \u65e5\u672c\u9b3c\u5b50, or Japanese Devils. The two main aspects of my hatred of the Japanese are the historical atrocities committed against the Chinese, mainly in the context of the Second Sino Japanese War and WWII, and the Japanese attitude of greediness and self serving ideals, as demonstrated by the controversy surrounding the Diaoyu Islands. If you can, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the Japanese are an irredeemable people for the atrocities they committed against the Chinese in the 20th and 21st centuries.\n","id":"4302b6bd-ccb2-41f9-84ce-fb5ed3d6f25c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In The End of History? Francis Fukuyama makes what I think is a fairly compelling case that liberal democracy is the form of government most suited to long term success of societies. Fukuyama is not saying that all countries will inevitably become liberal democracies, but rather that liberal democracy today does not face a substantial ideological challenge from a viable alternative, as it did with imperialism in the 1800s, and with fascism and communism in the last century. I think this is largely correct. In the world today, there is not a plausible challenger to liberal principles. The few remaining genuinely communist nations are nearly failed states, and most other non democracies are dictatorships centered around raw power, and as such are largely kleptocratic states. Arguably China shows an alternate path, of a partly illiberal capitalism, but I don't see much of an overarching and exportable philosophy to Chinese governance. Liberal democratic principles are a broad but genuinely meaningful set of principles that can govern societies in a large variety of cultural traditions. And liberal democracies are almost universally successful nations. So what's the big challenge left to liberal democracy?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fukuyama was basically right about the \"End of History\"\n","id":"30f4ff81-9bae-4365-b3b4-bc35e480e56b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We are in an environmental crisis, and we as individuals and as a society have an urgent responsibility to live as sustainably as possible. As explained in this article a vegan diet has a much smaller carbon footprint than a normal western diet. I have stopped eating beef, and I now am beginning to feel that there is no way to justify continuing to eat other meat, eggs, and dairy. I am not quite as concerned with the mistreatment of animals, although that is also disturbing. I very desperately want my view changed. I enjoy eating meat, dairy and eggs and would like to continue doing so, but right now I am unable to feel guilt free with a non vegan diet. EDIT My view has changed from a wishy washy belief that veganism is probably better to a steadfast position There is no way to justify eating mass produced or factory farmed meat, dairy, or eggs or farmed fish. And thanks to u Omnibeneviolent, I think I will try some vegan foods before deciding that I can't go without meat and dairy. I think my view was changed in the opposite direction than I had originally intended.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no way to justify eating meat, dairy, or eggs.\n","id":"22c8517d-ca5a-436c-94dc-056cfae78c87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically I have been having issues with my own attitude towards judging others on social media and have come to the conclusion that I should just to stop caring about what other people post. The comments section on Facebook is usually a cesspool and there is a great deal of ego stroking online but what I find is worse is the group of people who will talk shit about what others post. For example, if someone who regularly posts narcissistically about their inconsequential achievements as means to boost their own ego, there will be people who judge them and look down on them for needing that ego boast. If someone posts over processed photos on Instagram, they will get a group of people going behind their back saying they are basic. What I am sick and tired of is being part of the group that hates on these types of people on social media and have just decided to try and not care about what people posts. I think this is the best way of going about getting out of the negativity. I want someone to change my view about the best way of dealing with the negativity of haters and how to stop being one. Bonus I want someone to change my jaded view about social media.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Judging people on social media because of what they post is toxic and you should not do it.\n","id":"4e9747eb-e943-47ce-b5a7-526c18819936"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy in many places, at least for as late as the 14 15th week of pregnancy. That gives the mother a fair sized window of time in which she can decide whether or not she wishes to be a mother. In contrast, a man has no say in whether he becomes a father, beyond the initial consent for sex. I'm not going to advocate that men should be able to veto a woman's choice to abort as that would be a violation of a person's rights every bit as much as rape would be. Likewise, a man should have no power to force or coerce a woman into getting an abortion. That being said, he shouldn't have to live with her choices if he doesn't want to be a father. I believe that men should be able to, at any point up until it is illegal to get an abortion, be able to resolve themselves of all rights and responsibilities. No visitation rights, not listed on the birth certificate, nothing. Likewise, he pays no child support and isn't expected to perform any duties related to being a father. I do get that there's a difference between an abortion and this sort of arrangement namely, the child is still alive and the mother is 'saddled' with him her alone. But shouldn't that be a personal choice, like abortion? If you feel responsible for the child, then you don't have to sign away your rights. One of those If you think it's wrong, then don't do it situations. Okay, so tell me why I'm wrong, just don't approach it from the 'but the child is still here' angle, as my position on that particular point won't change alive or not, the responsibility is on those who want said child. If there are other reasons I haven't brought up, I'm all ears. EDIT Okay, so new premise, since someone brought up some good points. What about a way for parents of both genders to give up parental rights, much like when making a child a ward of the state? It enables all kinds of financial aid and keeps the child from being in a situation where one parent hates the situation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men should be allowed to give up all rights to--and responsibilities of--being the father of an unwanted child up until the mother is no longer legally allowed to abort.\n","id":"2fa74106-18b2-4bb2-baa0-cccdfb689ad6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the lottery be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Gambling should be legal, but it should not be encouraged by the government. I put this in the same category as base jumping. People would get very upset if the government encouraged you to jump off the roofs of tall buildings, but for some reason society accepts that the government will pay for advertisements for things like the lottery. The government should not encourage you to do something that has a known negative average expectation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should have the freedom to decide whether or not to play the lottery.\n","id":"428378a3-69a9-4fd8-a445-b955c4384a25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trophy Hunting Be Illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Using the pZP vaccine on a small portion of wild-roaming elephants in the Makalai Private Game Reserve, researchers found a 0% population growth since 2008.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are other viable alternatives to controlling wildlife populations, such as immunocontraception.\n","id":"f747dddd-3b83-4224-8843-9860393ea00c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>Fair trade prohibits the use of agrochemicals that are harmful to the environment, while simultaneously discouraging the use of pesticides.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fair trade products help promote sustainable farming and have positive environmental impacts.\n","id":"e15502cf-790a-4da1-9c6c-fb85ee748def"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>Many elite colleges control the racial composition of their classes through affirmative action regulations. These regulations often lead to an illegitimate preference for whites over Asian-Americans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The quest for diversity can lock out disadvantaged minority groups.\n","id":"1edfcb18-f0a2-4645-b69c-f75295c0322f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Back in the days of Nintendo 64 and Playstation, single player games were all we really had and they were great. Games like Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time, Diddy Kong Racing and Mario Kart, Banjo Kazooie and Star Fox 64. All innovative, different, fun, new, with each release having far greater technological breakthroughs. Nowadays, games are just rehashes of rehashes. So many ideas and formulas have been experienced by the public that there is very little originality anymore. Also, with the genre so well defined and audiences so identified, with the developers and publishers so established, there is no longer any deviation from the formulaic repetition that is modern gaming. Why risk innovation when your demographic studies show Metal Gear Solid V and Final Fantasy 14 will generate sufficient revenue? People are generally so jaded with gaming that anything groundbreaking has so much potential for colossal failure, and with today's budgets for AAA games, the risk is simply not worth it. So where does that leave us? With a long list of sequel after sequel with the only improvement being a louder case fan as the grass and texture quality is improved by an imperceptible amount, further shaving off of strategy and difficulty as games are increasingly pandered towards the widest and most casual fanbase, generic rehashing of prior mechanics, stories, and characters. Games nowadays are just glorified movies. The relentless quicktime events on the Xbox One, the cinematics of the Playstation 4, and the increasingly adjusted focus of story over gameplay. I might as well use my time to read a book or watch a movie, because they would not be restricted by the limitations of gaming, and are free to express themselves more so and be less constrained by the need for keeping the gamer somewhat active as the movie plays out before them. With other mediums you are free to relax and enjoy the show, and gaming is approaching that more and more each year, to the point where now you might as well just go and cut out the middle man and ignore gaming in favor of these forms tv, movie, book . I just feel like I'm wasting time whenever I play any single player game. I am performing the same carrot on a stick actions as thousands of others who bought the game. Just along for the ride in this themepark of a game, hitting a and b when told and pretending to feign ignorance over the fact that this is nothing more than a child's choose your own adventure storybook. It's come down to having zero interest at all in these games anymore. If anything, I'll watch the inevitable two hour speedrun of the game on YouTube a couple days after it's released and never think of it again. The only games where I feel like I have any control and enjoyment are multiplayer games. For example, DotA with its competitive and strategical realtime requirements as you fight against intelligent opponents and not dumbed down A.I. Edit Based on ulyssessword's comments, I suppose I consider a lot of well written puzzle games to be an exception to the previously mentioned points.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Single-player games are never worth playing anymore\n","id":"579a4015-cbb0-4508-ac36-7caef4e2bd4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I post might because I am only one mind and I want to know other peoples points of views. Now before I get to my subject I would like to include that I am on the fence with this subject, its very touchy and everyone has a story and circumstances. I also encourage to read all the way though before posting, I am not the best writer. My subject relates to pro life. I understand that pregnancy complications happen and that is okay, I hear horror stories of unhealthy fetus's that have no chance and aborting it is more mercy then not. I am not a fan of suffering and I would chose the best course of action to save lives or keep others from suffering. With that out of the way here is my solution I hate abortion but everyone deserves a chance, and a mom that doesn't want her baby does more harm then aborting the poor child. Crying as I type this. With this said we do need to semi punish irresponsible women. Birth control is out there, I was homeless with out a penny to my name and I was able to get birth control, I was also lucky enough to be educated into it and this is another thing that needs to be pushed, education With these steps in place here is my punishment option, like I said, everyone deserves the right to be educated, to have access to birth control, now in my option if you go to get an abortion more then once, and I say once because everyone deserves to be educated and this is a good chance for it to abort a perfectly healthy fetus you should get fixed and at this point its down right murder and you don't deserve to be a mother. Now you can run around with your legs open as much as you want and you have no options to hurt any more lives. This would help with a lot of unwanted children and lets face it this earth has to many people on it anyway, it might help flux things out for the better. EDITS Rape is serious, I wouldn't hold it against anyone to remove the fetus, it is a very very sad subject and just a horrible thing all around for everyone but the right choice would be to remove for the health of the mother. I feel for the poor fetus to though.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I \"might\" have a solution to abortion.\n","id":"f39e6516-b6cc-4dfe-bdd0-0a1a5779a09d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is there an afterlife?<|ARGUMENT|>This is worse for children since they are unable to choose the kind of treatment they receive. Their parents decide it on their behalf.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Going to faith healers instead of professional doctors can be dangerous\n","id":"c9e3ad37-4bcc-40cd-979d-173dc65ab71f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Russia has been playing neo imperialism with the former ex soviet republics for a while now. Moldova with Transnistria, Georgia with Abkhazia and Ossetia, and now Ukraine with Crimea. I believe that this is not different than when Nazi Germany made territorial claims on Austria and Czechoslovakia with the excuse of the large German population there, and then annexed those states. Maybe my comparison is inappropriate, but even if, I don't believe there is any justification for allowing Russia to threaten Ukraine's soverignty and territory. I believe that Russia must be stopped and that they remove their troops from not only Crimea, but also Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Otherwise, Crimea won't be the last of the territories Russia occupies with the intention of incorporating it into the Russian federation, and they will attempt to intervene in another ex soviet republic in the future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By allowing Russia to threaten Ukraine with the excuse of protecting the interests of the Russian people in Crimea, we're proving we didn't learn from allowing Germany to threaten Czechoslovakia with the excuse of protecting the interests of the German people in Sudetenland.\n","id":"f308c7ee-2421-419c-9814-41b2ac6db42d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is BDSM Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>The rape culture in Thailand as popularized by the media is such that people believe the way for a man to win over a woman is to first rape her so as to claim her, then treat her lovingly and apologetically afterwards in order to secure emotional attachment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rapists sometimes care for their victims after the rape in order to psychologically and emotionally secure the victims.\n","id":"3ef26025-4d82-4416-b7be-e94182c74690"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was born and raised in the deep south. We have our fair share of racists both white against black and vice versa , but the Confederate Flag often called the rebel flag is not a symbol of hate and intolerance to the vast majority of Southerners. Heritage, not hate is a common phrase used to describe it here. The overwhelming majority of people who bitch about it on here and elsewhere online are correct about the history of the flag, but incorrect about its modern day connotations. To be clear I believe that the rebel flag is a symbol of 'heritage, not hate' to Southerners, and that other interpretations of its meaning hinge on an outdated understanding of Southern culture and are usually held by people outside of the region or disconnected with it. Please try to .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Confederate Flag is a symbol of regional pride, not a symbol of hate to Southerners.\n","id":"2614b849-ffa5-4e10-b69b-72a6c137544a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>This is evidenced in how simple search engines - far less refined than one would hope from an 'intelligent' robot - show immensely sexist biases that are a by-product of algorithmic optimisation for higher profits of the product: Google shows six times the number of ads for high-paid executive jobs to men than to woman. Sexism is endemic in technology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Technology, including the use of gendered robots, are modelled on current social norms and values; in a patriarchal, frequently misogynist society, technology may struggle to liberate itself from its creative context.\n","id":"c69f663c-b8c3-4505-be55-b68e573bd620"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The framers of the constitution didn't account for extreme disparity in population density. The President is supposed to be a servant of all the people not just the minority. When we are approaching a future where two thirds or more of the population are going to be living in city centers, the President can not be beholden to such a small portion of the population. Let the minority keep their weighted vote in the Senate. They can still override a veto there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electoral college no longer works as it was intended by the founding fathers. The fact that it no longer serves this purpose suggests that it is no longer necessary.\n","id":"f4259fbf-5dd9-4a74-ac6c-e441428f9382"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Assisted suicide should be a criminal offence<|ARGUMENT|>many people do not have the mental capacity to comprehend the finality of assisted suicide and it will be abused, and it should be a criminal offence to any persons involved.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who are ill do not have clear judgement and are in need of help\n","id":"1df9c3d5-9200-46b2-896c-bd85946e3584"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Having such a large and relatively improbable jackpot has anchored future expectations for jackpots to freak accident levels. Even at 1 292 million, the probability of getting to a 1.5 billion dollar jackpot isn't very high. Just about 34 of sales dollars go towards the jackpot, so a 1.5 billion jackpot implies sales of 4.41 billion. At 2 a ticket, that's about 2.2 billion tickets to get the prize that big. Even with a 1 292 million chance on each ticket, the volume sold is such that getting to that sort of monster jackpot is highly unlikely, and will probably only happen once every few years, if that. But having had such a jackpot happen, it anchors expectations for the future, which means there will probably be much less media public attention on any jackpot under 9 figures. Less media attention equals less sales. The problem I see is that essentially the lottery will have one big game every few years, and otherwise it will have low sales and low revenue because people will ignore lower jackpot drawings. The premise of this is that lotteries are businesses which desire maximum profitability, without regard to the question of whether they're morally good businesses. It's just predictive about their business prospects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The $1.5 billion jackpot will be bad for Powerball\/lotteries in the long run.\n","id":"d936e5ec-b660-4c05-a3ad-84a608677769"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Minors Need Parental Consent for Abortions?<|ARGUMENT|>Educated people are likely to have more empathy and thus ability to understand the situation and needs of the parents when old.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents rely very often on their children for support when they are old. Having highly educated children is helpful.\n","id":"67fcc112-df0e-4b82-a2d7-2cda1be9641f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>China has been seeking to improve their geo-strategic position vis a\u0300 vis other states by setting up foreign military bases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China's foreign policy under Xi has become increasingly expansionist.\n","id":"4358d492-9296-45b2-9384-27bcbd765095"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it a good thing that Dungeons & Dragons is the de-facto standard RPG?<|ARGUMENT|>D&D has a well-established, reputable publisher Wizards of a Coast that keeps publishing new material for it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The amount of help materials and tools is large and thus helps starting the RPG hobby.\n","id":"00916db4-d413-4835-91f9-3df32c4f3ee0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is less about police profiling and much more about the professional sphere and general interactions in society. That's a whole different topic. I understand that there are still many places left that have blatant racism, but for the most part, in modern society, it is more about how you treat people. I don't even notice a persons skin color, or at least don't think about it when I make a judgment on how I treat and interact with that person. What I notice is do they treat me with respect, do they treat others with respect, are they polite, well spoken, with proper usage of the language? If I'm a business and some white dude comes in with a flat brim hat turned to the side with baggy clothes and strange jewelry talking like some kind of rapper, I am not going to hire that person to represent my business. However if a well dressed spanish man comes in wearing business casual, has a resume, and can hold a coherent conversation with me, I'd give that person a chance. To take this further I wouldn't hire a whatever gender with long blue hair and a ton of strange tattoos and piercings everywhere. If I have a business that hires people, I would think that I would want to maintain a professional image and hire people that reflect that. One of my best friends is a spanish girl. She told me a story once about how she went to an after school thing in the city and two hood girls bullied her and said Why you ak'n white? and in my head I thought huh, because I want to participate in society and be respected ? The point of that is she is a successful freelance writer that runs a small local website, and has neck and hand tattoos, granted they are pretty and accent her personality. I don't think anyone has ever given her less of a chance because she's a woman or her skin isn't white. I think she worked hard and treated people with respect. Again I want to re iterate that I know there is still racism and sexism present in the world, and lots of places where they are blatant about it, but they tend to be more isolated and not indicative of the general scope of western society. It seems that these small places and their, almost zealotry, gain far too much attention, then it's on the news and everyone is talking about how racist everything is. For fuck sake we had a black president, and tons of every other race of politicians, and other positions of power or authority. I think it is less about inequality and more about lazy people using a perceived difference as an excuse to not work or participate in society. I think some people are being ostentatiously indignant . Edit I want to thank everyone for their responses. I think ultimately I knew that there is racism going on, but I just live in a bubble. I've started a business sold it, then did other random jobs that I just sort of stumbled upon. I never considered the whole having a 'racially identifying' name could be an issue, as all of my opportunities have come from meeting random people. I still feel like we are one of the most racially diverse and accepting country in the world. Except maybe for Canada, they'll just apologize.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For the most part, in America, it is less about skin color\/race and more about how you present yourself to society.\n","id":"731b0cc1-a429-41de-93e3-144289b21f68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am in the UK and have the National Health Service on hand. Be it a sprained ankle or a full body 3rd degree burn I can be seen by specialists within an hour, for free. Explain to me why all American citizens, no matter how rich or poor, shouldn\u2019t have medical care on hand for free or an affordable price ? In my uneducated opinion, anyone who doesn't think that everyone should have this on hand is selfish and doesn\u2019t care about the people of their country. I\u2019d go as far to say it\u2019s immoral, even. I think if the tables were turned and health care became unaffordable even for middle class America, the country would cry out for something to be done. It seems to me that poorness is equated with the volume of your voice. Unless you have money, it doesn't count. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people who're against Obamacare are selfish and immoral.\n","id":"f84ec0cd-d968-4ee4-9c85-68be1e93801b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI may be mishandled maybe misunderstandings and public views on it are not handled well, especially in the beginning. That may turn people away from creating programs that help people to the point that people don't get the help that they need.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because instituting welfare programs requires political capital and public goodwill, a majority of which will be used instituting a UBI, it is unlikely that the general public will be sympathetic towards additional welfare programs if a UBI is implemented.\n","id":"d0eca91c-fdf7-46dc-b71e-f08744cde917"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The 'Poor' Be A Protected Equality Group?<|ARGUMENT|>Choosing the right measure will be contentious and subjective, as poverty can be measured in relative or absolute terms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Achieving a practical and acceptable definition of \"poor\" will be difficult.\n","id":"60f31859-8ecb-4683-ac71-dab73d132af9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should pharmacists' scope of practice be expanded to prescribe medications?<|ARGUMENT|>Since pharmacists make less money than doctors, they can give patients more of the time they need during patient assessment\/prescribing as they are generally paid less per hour and therefore lose less money when they take their time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pharmacists have more contact with, and are more accessible to, patients than other care providers.\n","id":"0ca3407a-7f44-4ca8-adef-064f9c212a81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research<|ARGUMENT|>A cure for diabetes would have a massive social impact, according to some sources: noting that there are 20.8 million American children and adults with diabetes roughly 6% of the population. It is the sixth leading cause of death, lowering average life expectancy by up to 15 years. It is the leading cause of kidney failure, lower limb amputations, and adult-onset blindness, and adults with diabetes have heart disease death rates two to four times higher than persons without diabetes. The estimated total financial cost for diabetes in the U.S., including costs of medical care, disability, and premature death, was $132 billion in 2002. This all makes the potential health and social benefits of stem cell research substantial, if it were to lead to something of a cure for diabetes. The current cost of Alzheimer's disease to American society, which some sources argue would be eliminated through the discovery of a cure through stem cell research: - \"Approximately 4.5 million Americans currently have AD, with annual costs for the disease estimated to exceed $100 billion. Moreover, the rapid aging of the American population threatens to increase this burden significantly in the coming decades. Demographic studies suggest that if current trends hold, the annual number of incident cases of AD will begin to sharply increase around the year 2030, when all the baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 will be over age 65. By the year 2050, the number of Americans with AD could rise to some 13.2 million, an almost three-fold increase.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The health and social impact that some maintain would result from findings of a treatment and cure for the below ailments and diseases\n","id":"121fbda1-15d3-4e02-a428-a5999580ec59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Well, this is the month of love so we might as well see if I can be swayed against a firm belief of mine. Due to my own personal experience, I simply don't get the famous sentiment of to have love lost is better to have never have loved at all and as I'm typing this, I believe I have never agreed with this saying, even before my heartbreak. The argument in favor of this view goes something like this love is amazing. It's such an exhilarating sensation, so uplifting that you'll feel as if you're floating on the magical cloud nine. The argument goes that the feeling of love, is so great that, even if fleeting, it beats the dull feeling of not ever having love. The saying, at least in fiction, is usually said as a result of a character being the victim of a heartbreak. In reassurance, they or another character says the phrase with the implication that the feelings of euphoria and elation outweigh the bitter, deflated feeling of having your heart stomped out. Now here is where I have to disagree. I am of the firm, mulish belief that the absence of love is infinitely better than the loss of love and I shall explain why to the best of my limited abilities. To begin, the sensation of life without love be it romantic or familial is in and of itself fine. Sure, it may seem dull but that's really only due to comparison to life with love. Life without love is fine, and no one is particularly inconvenienced without love. That alone should invalidate my opposing argument since better than no love at all is fine , but dissenters will point out that love makes the breakup worthwhile and the man with love lost will be more enriched than the person without love. I say that's a load of hogwash. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell someone breakups hurt like hell. The more powerful the love, the worse the feeling after that love is snatched from you. The possible dull feeling of life without love pales in comparison to the throbbing emptiness, the burning resentment and choking sadness of a life with love lost. The enriching memories of love are clouded by the feelings of betrayal, or sadness, or confusion. My argument is essentially that the losing of love is not worth the love itself, the two events are not equal. Considering this is the internet, and a somewhat volatile side of the internet, if I may speak ever so plainly I won't get too personal but i hope to give a little narrative in order to better illustrate my point and to show where I'm coming from. Some time ago longer than I'd care to admit , I had a girlfriend and I was in love with her. I called her everyday, I'd spend as much time as possible with her, I was sad when she was away, happy when she was near. She was cute, smart, and kind and I felt honored that she had chosen to allow me to be her boyfriend. Even when our relationship was kind of rocky mainly near the end the mere notion of her breaking up with me gave me a mini panic attack and robbed me of breath. In short, she was my world. This is probably a good example of the enchanting love that the proponents of to have love lost is better to have no love at all speak of. But when she dumped me, oh god when she dumped me. I was a crying wreck. Over text, no explanation, telling me to stop texting her. The days after I felt empty and hollow, a pitiful feeling that I would bestow upon no man. As my crushed heart cooled, I felt another, no less ugly feeling cheated. I wasted my time, my life on some person who I felt never loved me. I would rather have never have loved than suffer the way I did, I would rather have never have loved than be on cloud nine for a love that wasn't true. Now all that I feel is regret towards my foolish elation and bitterness towards the person who I feel wronged me. To me, the pain of losing love does not compare towards the daily life of suffering from a lack of love. Tldr I feel that to have lost love is much worse than not ever having loved been loved. I see no merit in a love that is lost. Lost things hurt because you can't find them, and if you lost something and you don't care about it, you might as well have not had it in the first place. Well? Think you can change this lil' view o' mine?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To have never have loved at all is better than to have love lost.\n","id":"d6779194-2088-453d-940e-0f3014fbb13a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For a long time, I was a supporter of free college. I believe that status quo America is undeniably set up against the poor in that college degrees allow you to obtain more wealth but they're only available to the already wealthy. This cycle of only the wealthy being able to obtain the wealth available through higher education keeps low income Americans stuck in low income zones. My original thinking was structured into two parts 1 there needs to be a massive reform of basic education grade schools high schools so that all schools be given adequate funding in such a way that allow low income students to have the same opportunities as high income students it's more nuanced than this but I am refraining from explaining more as this is not the topic I'm concerned about . 2 college is made free or very affordable so that the newly enriched low income students can receive the higher education previously kept from them by high prices. If every student in America is now able to get a college degree, won't the value of degrees plummet? What employer will care if you have a bachelors degree when every other person applying for a job has one? I desperately am looking for an answer that will allow me to refund more support for free college but everything I have seen points in the other direction. So in short, won't free college cause a massive over saturation of degrees thus making degrees worthless? Thank you, and sorry if the formatting is poorly done. I am on mobile.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While an attempt to make positive change, free college education while ultimately lead to extreme market saturation making a college degrees valueless\n","id":"1bdfe93b-a7a0-408b-b0a9-ca81e5b1ccfc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>60% of intersex people end up having medical treatment interventions related to their intersex variation, half of which happen before they turn18. Additionally 42% of intersex people above 16 think about self harm, with 26% of intersex people above 16 engaging in self harm due to dissatisfaction with their biological sex not lining up with their identifying gender. LGBTI Health Statistics<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a hazy basis for biological sex, but even that is complicated. Roughly 1.7% of the world's population is born intersex, or a mix of male and female biologically. Some individuals don't even know they were born intersex until their parents tell them they had cosmetic surgery.\n","id":"fed3c6de-fb2b-4492-b3b8-fb4b55b1c75d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems that at least in America, attitudes toward compensation as a whole are inherently conflicting. We want young people to work hard and be humble, polite and well dressed and show up on time while making 7.25 hr federal minimum wage . In even the poorest of areas in the US, it's simply not possible to live on that low of a wage, much less be prepared for incidentals as they arise. For some reason, many Americans are just fundamentally opposed to supporting the effort of an able bodied, able minded person to support themselves by working full time. And at the same time, they complain loudly about drug addicts and homelessness crises while refusing to consider that these people are in such despair because they have no other option and we need to focus on the system rather than blaming individuals. In many other developed countries, the person working at the checkout counter makes enough to live decently on, has healthcare and paid time off. This results in a low homeless population and reported high levels of general happiness. It simply nets a positive outcome for most people in general and society as a whole, while the wealthier individuals may see a cut in the excessive surplus from investments But in America, the ability to meet one's basic life necessities is treated as a privilege for the educated or otherwise elite. Anyone who is able to work, is employable and reliable, should be guaranteed compensation that meets basic needs, including healthcare, time off, and planning for retirement a form of a 401k or pension contribution . There is no logical reason to oppose this. We have little control over our levels of intelligence or inherent ability, but as Americans we believe we have control over our work ethic and we should be judged by that. The only reasons anyone would not want a hard working, low skilled laborer to be adequately compensated is because they are so insecure in how they define success, they have been taught that in order to feel good about their 11 hr job with no benefits, they should not support the person making 8 hr to increase their wage. They've been continuously lied to by their political party, as well as their employer. They simply don't care about the wellbeing of their fellow man, and have been indoctrinated to believe it's their fault for not somehow acquiring a higher paying job, rather than acknowledging we're living in a broken system that is adversely affecting many Americans through no fault of their own. . Edit I want to clarify that my question is about the philosophy of compensation in a developed nation, rather than nitpicking at the implimentation. I'm aware than this would be difficult to impliment efficiently, but I want to know if this is a generally agreed upon value.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anyone who is able to work full-time should be compensated enough money to meet their basic needs\n","id":"78f5d646-8867-48e9-b4d6-98864bd406cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit I think we are done here. Thanks, everyone. lt 3 Edit2 I'm disabling inbox replies for this thread, as I'm getting so many of them still. My view has been changed. Once again, thank you. I'll start this off with some context about myself and my views on things related to this, as I believe they will be important to this, along with the reason I want to change my view on this. I'm 16 and I identify as a transgirl, as that is what I feel like is the best match for me. I don't group transgender identities with non binary ones because I see transgender being at its core about the body, while non binary identities are mostly social. My view on gender roles stereotypes, expectations, roles and whatever else will be grouped into one to save time is that they should not exist, as they limit people based on something they can't change again to save time, transgender is purely physical, ignoring the social factor since it differs between trans people . So the argument about gender roles in fact being real after all is irrelevant. The reason I want to change my view is that because of my identity, I'm affiliated a lot with the LGBT community. Naturally, there are a lot of non binary people there, and I feel like by seeing their identity is invalid makes me no better than the people invalidating homosexuality or trans people. That is why I'm here to try and change my view. The argument To get to the bottom of this we need to divide non binary identities into two groups third genders people saying they are not men or women but instead a whole new gender. These are a lot rarer I find and non genders This includes agender, meaning lack of gender, and fluid bi genders, feeling both man and woman at the same time or one or the other from time to time. Also people simply saying they are non binary . The argument for third genders is easier. They don't have any physical standard. They are purely based on behavior. Defining gender by behavior let's say that it includes clothing, interests etc. is what creates a stereotype for it. Creating genders purely based on behavior is essentially just another box which to shove people into based on their personality. I don't see what's preventing someone from telling a person, who let's say is gender A, that they aren't behaving like gender A. That they are behaving more like gender C, and that means they either need to start behaving like gender A or otherwise they are gender C. I hope this isn't too confusing. For non genders it's different. They are also, as I see it, based on behavior in a way. It's the lack of gender stereotypical behavior. But it also assumes that gender stereotypes are real and should be that way. My argument against non genders isn't as solid, but I still do deeply fail to understand them, and why they exist, unless gender roles are in place. I feel like I've already offended enough non binary people by completely misunderstanding the whole thing, so go ahead. Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Non-binary genders make no sense unless you accept that gender stereotypes, roles and the like are real and should be so. Non-binary genders, therefore, enforce gender roles.\n","id":"3e2accc7-4c8d-4e79-a641-b0396fe05a7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer first cmv so don't roast me too hard please. I am a conservative that was raised in a well off household. I wouldn't say I was spoiled but I was very fortunate with what I did get. I voted for Trump, mainly based on my parents views as this was the first election I partook in. I still support Trump based on what I've heard on Fox News and through networking with friends family. Anyways, I feel as though every time I've voiced my opinion respectfully I always get down voted or blasted with rude replies which leads me to delete the post comment. This is my experience and I'm interested in hearing other's opinions and experiences.  Edit I'm excluding conservative based subreddits. Edit2 This discussion has been great for the most part I have been informed on what the other side sees that I wasn't seeing and it's really eye opening. I promise I will do more research and base my decision off that. Thank you for all the replies and being civil . Edit3 Through this thread I will denounce my support for Trump. I am still holding my belief that conservative views are not welcomed generally in Reddit. I still think I would rather have Trump as president than Hilary soley based on the demolition of Obama's policies that I didn't support. I believe that Obama's policies were unfair inherently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being conservative and supporting Trump on Reddit is almost always uncivil amd unproductive.\n","id":"40ce1ce4-e722-45e7-969f-3f96697458f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When arguing whether or not abortions are immoral, the arguments often ultimately ends up being about wether or not the fetus can be classified as a person with all the rights that comes with this classification . However this is not the topic of this post, in this post, for the sake of arguing, we are going to assume that a fetus can be classified as a person, and therefore also possess all the rights of a person. Wether or not it is moral for a women to carry out an abortion under those premises is also a separate discussion. In this post i solely want a discussion of the ethical implications of a societal ban of abortions and how this compares to forced organ transplants. The arguments of pro life supporters usually goes along these patterns please correct my if I\u00b4m wrong a fetus has the same rights as every other person, and therefore also has the rights of protection of the law. Given the premise of fetuses having human rights, this is quite unarguable. The problem, however, comes with the fetus being absolutely defendant on the mother. The mother can, through pills and other actions, at an early stage of the pregnancy abort the child, solely trough afecting her own body. Even though the argument sort of holds even through a late term abortion, i want to focus on the point in time wich the mother only needs to stop supporting by changing the ways of her own body the baby for it too die, and not actively scraping it out of the womb. So during these circumstances is it moral for a society state to force the women to go through with the pregnancy? Is forcing a person to actively supporting another life with small, but still risk of her own? Is this the equivalent of forcing one person to transplant their liver with small but still exiting risk of their own too save another person? Ore will not supporting the fetus be the moral equivalent of letting a born baby starve to death? Help my ignorance reddit, but remember the premises<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Claiming that abortions should be illegal based on the fetus being a person is the moral equivalent of forcing a living person to go through a liver transplant to save another person.\n","id":"c2020929-ae31-4dd2-9f60-77bd90efa112"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Pope is not only the theocracy of the Vatican, he is also the head of state. He is the King of Vatican City. His property is been diminished over the years, but he is still a monarchy. It was common during the last 2000 years for kings and head of states to declare themselves God so it is not a far stretch for the Pope to declare himself the only communicator between God and Humans. Throughout the years, there have been many immoral popes, that have acted, generally how you'd expect a King to behave. The Pope is just a different type of King <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Pope is just another type of lineage of Kings\n","id":"859d2780-4b6d-4530-9659-a1ffad035fa2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note this has nothing to do with the election, at all. Greetings I have been on this earth for approximately 35 years. In this 35 years, I have witnessed a lot of things. When I was growing up, I had a family member always tell me, It's not what you know, its who. I never knew what that meant until I reached adulthood. I consider adulthood anything past the age of 25 when we pull our heads out of our asses . In my short term as an adult, I have found out that the saying is pretty true. Its not what you know, its who. We live in a world full of corruption, back stabbing, and dirty pool playing. We also live in a world full of favors, where networking is essential to work your way upwards. I am very open to having my view changed on this particular topic, but I see no hope in that statement being false. We see it all the time where people get things they haven't worked for because they know someone. They get hired into a job ahead of the better qualified person because their dad grew up a few members of the executive staff. The list goes on If someone can please change my view, you're welcome too. I am open to any suggestions and comments. But for now, I hold true to that saying. Please leave the footnote below the following line, but remember to delete this sentence by replacing it with the body of your post. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Its not what you know, its who.\n","id":"ec3bc981-6687-45c3-82e8-b153b22122b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>When buying sex, pimping, and operating brothels became illegal in Sweden there was only a reduction in the number of trafficked women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Where sex work has been legalized, this did not end sex trafficking into and within the country.\n","id":"6d304eab-0709-4380-92fc-4c11e6acdc76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, let's assume Christianity is true, or otherwise the whole thread's going to be none of it matters, since it's all fake . I believe that all of the different offshoots of Christianity, such as Catholicism and the various types of Protestantism Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyterian, etc are all completely interchangeable. If you look at the book of Romans, it says If you declare with your mouth, \u201cJesus is Lord,\u201d and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved , boom, that's it. As long as the denomination believes that, then every other denomination specific rule like Baptists not dancing does not matter in the slightest. There shouldn't be any big to do over different denominations, since they're all saved as long as they agree on the fundamental aspect of Christianity Jesus was God in human form, He died to absolve us of sin, He rose from the dead. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The different denominations of Christianity are meaningless.\n","id":"7cd46b1b-aa52-4b98-b38a-aaddf96a3312"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>If people know that they will be treated with respect, they are more likely to engage productively in civil society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society is better off when our default interaction is respect for other humans.\n","id":"21d7a407-7cb4-4b27-a3c2-58659e9e8f8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Tampon Tax be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>In China 89% of the female hygiene market is pads. Only 8.2 million women use tampons in China, out of a female population of over 660 million.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women in many countries don't use tampons for cultural reasons.\n","id":"34739462-a650-4023-83f9-f131e0e28c24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Biden backed bills that made it harder for Americans to reduce their student debt This benefitted the financial industry based in Delaware where he was a senator.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Biden is beholden to corporate interests and therefore won't be responsive to the interests of the average American.\n","id":"93a4e813-6806-4e65-8fa8-49b68a488b91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>uninvolved parenting leads to many problems later on, such as anxiety, depression, being socially emotionally withdrawn, developing an addictive personality, underdeveloped frontal lobe, and much more. The definition of child abuse maltreatment is not only physical or sexual but also physiological and psychological, and includes neglect. Neglect, by textbook definition, is to fail to care for properly, and therefore I think it is rather fair to say uninvolved parenting is a form of neglect and therefore, abuse of a child. Child neglect is a form of child abuse and includes failure to provide adequate supervision. Children who grow up and live through this, often end up having many problems, increased risk of substance abuse, and often have to parent themselves as the abusers think that they will grow out of it , often adding much more unneeded stress pressure anxiety, as the abused feel like they cannot go to who they need for help. Please, change my view, because I feel quite abused.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"uninvolved parenting is child abuse\n","id":"cd2c3040-49bc-4545-94cb-a17a22cc33b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are there any working business models for journalism?<|ARGUMENT|>Those newspapers that attempted the transition to the digital world too soon or too late have suffered especially.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many newspapers have been suffering from lay-offs or even went bankrupt.\n","id":"1338c918-394c-4609-92ad-a3ddf3159e2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Genealogy Databases Be Available to Law Enforcement to Solve Crimes?<|ARGUMENT|>Innocent people could be exonerated if this data were to become an integral part of the law enforcement process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genealogy databases like AncesteryDNA and 23andMe should be available to law enforcement to solve crimes.\n","id":"37997163-7218-4690-922b-dc6241baed1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As technology replaces jobs self driving trucks for delivery, automated kiosks for stores fast food, speech recognition for phone centers, etc. the need for people to work dwindles. Apart from a very few jobs, at some point the vast majority of currently held jobs will be automated out of existence. At this point, the majority of people that held those jobs will be unable to gain another job, as the majority of low skill no skill jobs will be gone. Once that happens the only way to avoid mass bankruptcy of most citizens in a country would be to assure a basic living income or a basic standard of living housing, food, water, electricity, possibly internet . Without such a rule the common person will be unable to purchase anything at all, even food. Let alone the luxuries that account for most financial movement in most first world countries. Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As technology advances the need for a basic assured income or standard of living will be necessary for nations to avoid mass homelessness\/bankruptcy.\n","id":"4794233a-71e8-4073-a7a2-218842a7f8c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>A universe in which all conscious beings suffer the worst possible misery is worse than a universe in which they experience well-being.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is good to avoid behaving in such a way as to produce the worst possible misery for everyone.\n","id":"bc386c91-d175-4734-a300-caa50702bc78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>The fallibility of human beings will cause people to pick and choose what may ultimately be evil and wrong rather than what is true about the religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without an agreed upon system of morality, humans won\u2019t be able to solve moral disputes, which is problematic when trying to create a functional society.\n","id":"95517196-43fe-48f6-9d8a-c75bf79e9252"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>When other sentient beings are encountered, we should first see what moral and ethical issues need to be addressed in relation to them, and then create a framework appropriate for those.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be separate rights for them, classifying them as Machine Rights, but not laying them out as a \"slavery contract\" in order to keep balance.\n","id":"20ebb712-7cea-4837-9068-48568e4dd069"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should the Conservative Party choose to be the next UK Prime Minister?<|ARGUMENT|>Penny Mordaunt, the Defence Secretary and a staunch Brexiteer, has backed Hunt and said that he had the skills to deliver Brexit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hunt is being backed by several key Brexiters which shows that he is already starting to unify the party behind him.\n","id":"bcf2e468-244e-4b02-923a-e35bac99b67f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the use of 1080 poison be encouraged?<|ARGUMENT|>The long term effects of micro-dosing a waterway with a substance known to be toxic to all oxygen breathing creatures is unknown. A sub-lethal dose may still put some species at a massive disadvantage, considering some of the toxic effects are neurological, it could cause confusion and behavioral changes which we would usually consider unacceptable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Waterways carry the poison away from the target area endangering other non-target areas.\n","id":"a292ef0c-0df0-4f3e-a82b-94eeaa926249"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Animals which are bred for use in animal experiments are usually prematurely separated from their mother. This often causes animals to suffer from neuropsychiatric disorders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being bred for research prevents animals from living fulfilling lives.\n","id":"a48770d0-497d-4668-883f-c0d427aaf8ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>A monetary union can only work if accompanied by a common fiscal policy. They are two sides of the same coin.sciencedirect.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A unified fiscal policy will be beneficial for current member states.\n","id":"9da14daa-f3cc-43b1-903e-fec612520b01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sugary drinks are causing obesity due to the lack of fiber in drinks. Many minors are not able to, or choose not to limit themselves. I have heard of people who used to just go drink energy drinks with their friends until they had the shakes. These drinks can be very addicting, and addictive products can suck the money out of people. High doses of caffeine can cause anxiety and dizziness, and may interfere with normal sleep. People, minors especially, are prone to impulse shopping. If there is a small barrier, it will prevent much impulse shopping.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it should be illegal for minors to buy caffeinated drinks or sugary drinks without being accompanied by an adult.\n","id":"a8cef9ef-2873-4ea9-8055-705dd8dda177"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Irrational fears, racism, sexism, etc. are not consciously decided things - they are generally placed in the unconscious or subconscious before they come to the fore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our decisions and perceptions are inevitably shaped by our past experiences.\n","id":"d5f79b82-6155-4d41-aab0-ae430416f9fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Gengar the final evolution of the Gastly line is infinitely less intimidating than its predeccesors. Gastly and Haunter actually look like ghosts as in scary looking and generally spooky. Gengar, to paraphrase a friend of mine, looks like a blob that you could punt pretty far. It's always been a dissapointing experience for me to finally evolve my Haunter, where it went from being this cool looking floating ghost to this chubby purple dude. I get that there's also Mega Gengar but I also think he's absolutely not intimidating compared to the other two, that's a whole different debate though. Gengar is obviously superior stat wise, which is why I evolve my Haunters, but I believe that aesthetically speaking Gengar is simply inferior.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gengar doesn't do Gastly and Haunter justice as a final evolution\n","id":"86523f3e-dbc9-4cdf-b3ba-edff2a1e1f7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>Exhibiting a political affiliation or stance can alienate the consumer base and negatively affect a corporation's assets and stock value.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There have been strong negative responses to corporations taking political stances.\n","id":"5c20bbbd-1c13-4930-bf25-26416174b14d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that if you offer your help to someone, and they clearly reject it, even if they really look like they're desperate for help, then you should not force your help upon them, and simply let them work on their problems on their own. BUT you have to make an exception if not helping means letting them put their life in serious danger. I'm thinking in particular about the case of suicidal people, those who have fought for too long, and just don't have the strength to fight anymore. Those who have made up their mind that life is just not for them, that fighting is just not worth it, and would like to simply die. I believe that these people, no matter how much they reject help, can still be helped, should be helped, and are crying for help deep inside. But I feel I could be wrong about this So change my view. Convince me that people who express that they do not want help shoud never be helped, no matter the situation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that people who express that they do not want help should not be helped, unless their life is at stake.\n","id":"4f4c7f0a-5689-41ab-9ab7-cc5a70a8e451"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Donald Trump was, for some of his voters, the more anti war candidate. His supporters often rallied behind his protectionist policies as an alternative to the much more hawkish policies of Hillary Clinton. However, since the election, Donald Trump has shown a dangerous tendency to ignore the conventions of international diplomacy conventions that exist to prevent tensions from erupting into war. Nowhere is this more clear than his approach to China. Trump has been consistently antagonistic towards China throughout his campaign, an shortly after the election he broke with usual policy by directly acknowledging the president of Taiwan. His pick for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has suggested that China should be prevented from building military bases in the South China Sea. In interviews, Trump has stated that acknowledgement of the one China policy is up for negotiation. The response from Chinese state media and spokespeople have made it clear that the Chinese government views its one China policy as non negotiable, and that they will not be persuaded to cease their military activities by anything short of a display of force. Given the intensity of the impasse between the Trump administration's stated aims and the interests of China, it is entirely possible that the conflict will come to a display of military force. As both the U.S. and China are nuclear states capable of striking any point on the globe with I.C.B.M.s, it may be of strategic interest to either state to strike its nuclear facilities first, which would potentially lead to a scenario where both states launch their respective arsenals. Finally, Donald Trump himself has also broken with long established nuclear policy by refusing to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against terrorist cells like ISIS. While he has not commented on the use of nuclear weapons against other states, he has proven repeatedly through his Twitter behavior that he lacks impulse control and will make rash decisions towards anyone who stops him from getting his way. Given these factors, I believe there is a legitimate risk that Donald Trump will lead the United States to another scenario like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and possibly even worse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump's Foreign Policy will risk starting a nuclear war over tensions in the South China Sea.\n","id":"cea10e66-7ad3-4c3e-9bd7-01c5965caf2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Welfare encourages people to seek work. This may be individually suboptimal for some people, who may prefer not to work, but it is socially optimal because it makes these individuals productive contributors to society. Without this incentive, the UBI quickly becomes unsustainable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The conditional nature of welfare allows these schemes to build incentive structures into the system e.g. by making welfare payments conditional on parents vaccinating their children. This is broadly beneficial.\n","id":"2606205b-c135-4432-91be-c1591414087f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>Respect cannot be forced. If people believe that a country which allows police to get away with murder does not deserve their respect, then demanding that they stand does not change that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An expression of patriotism loses meaning when it becomes obligatory.\n","id":"a204076a-433a-4290-b14e-10bc20721b6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What do I mean when I say \u201cPolitical Authority is an Illusion\u201d? We have very different attitudes towards a government agent\u2019s actions as compared to a non governmental agent performing those same actions. In other words, if a non governmental agent acted like a government, we would consider their actions outrageous \u2014 we would call them thieves, extortionists, kidnappers, etc. But we don\u2019t typically call government agents these things. Supposedly, governments have \u201cpolitical authority,\u201d allowing them a certain comprehensive, content independent, and supreme privilege over others which they use to do things like tax people for beneficial programs, regulate economic activity, etc. But I don\u2019t see any reason to think this authority exists. I don\u2019t see any morally relevant difference between a governmental agent\u2019s actions and a non governmental agent doing those same things. Note this doesn\u2019t mean that the government\u2019s actions are wrong per say , or that we shouldn\u2019t have a government. Rather, if political authority is an illusion, then something has to give \u2014 that we must either condemn the government when it does these things, or think it permissible when some non governmental agents do these things. In this , I am looking for interlocutors to offer an account of \u2018political authority\u2019 that withstands my scrutiny and convinces me that I am wrong that political authority does in fact exist. Pre emptive Rebuttals I\u2019ll attempt to preemptively rebut several common theories of political authority below. My construals and rebuttals are not exhaustive. However, I hope they\u2019re informative enough of my view that relevant responses can be generated. In the interest of not cluttering the OP space too much, I\u2019ll post each of these in the comments and link to them here. That way, if you hold to one of these theories and you think I\u2019ve made a mistake, you can reply directly to the comment addressing that theory. A Social Contract Theory LINK to comment. B Democracy LINK to comment. C Consequentialism LINK to comment. Finally, I\u2019d like to mention that I first read about approaching libertarianism this way in philosopher Michael Huemer\u2019s book The Problem of Political Authority You can see the main points boiled down in THIS LECTURE VIDEO LINK .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political Authority is an Illusion\n","id":"ac641cb9-a5f7-47e5-a62a-60261471759b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let's say that a free market is one where there are many participants and where real competition takes place between them. If that's the case, then I don't understand the view of some people that government regulation is always bad and that we are better off eliminating all or most taxes and regulations, or the even stranger view that monopolies can only occur through government intervention. Seems to me the opposite is true it's perfectly natural for companies to try to eliminate their competitors and establish a monopoly under the free market system itself. Take a simple example, a bunch of kids set up lemonade stands. One of the kids develops a competitive advantage for whatever reason and is able to sell lemonade at a cheaper price. He drives more and more of the other kids out of business and eventually uses his profits to buy a lemon farm, a lemonade factory, and thousands of lemonade stand subsidiaries. Although any kid can now enter the market, no one can realistically compete with him absent some huge infusion of capital. You can see this happening in today's world with the internet. Here's what Tim Wu wrote a couple years ago in the Wall Street Journal gt The Internet has long been held up as a model for what the free market is supposed to look like\u2014competition in its purest form. So why does it look increasingly like a Monopoly board? Most of the major sectors today are controlled by one dominant company or an oligopoly. Google owns search Facebook, social networking eBay rules auctions Apple dominates online content delivery Amazon, retail and so on. And looking at these companies suggests that monopolies or near monopolies will survive in a free market once they are established. Of course in the long term nothing survives, but assuming the trains still run and widgets keep rolling off the assembly line, why should consumers care that one company dominates a certain sector? The benefits delivered by a giant mega company are often better than those any single small company can ever hope for. So in my view what we call the free market is not a sustainable, steady state system as many people seem to believe. It's more like a war between several opposing armies. It's not a steady state but a process leading to victory for one of the participants. If that's true then the best way to maintain a free market might counterintuitively be to regulate it. Anti trust laws are the most obvious example. Progressive taxation and policies designed to benefit small business are other possibilities. Note that I'm not suggesting ALL regulation is good, and I have no doubt that some of them are used for the opposite purpose to help companies maintain their dominance. But if we accept that some regulation can help small companies, then by enacting the right regulations, it seems logical that we would produce a more competitive system than exists naturally. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that free markets naturally lead to monopolies.\n","id":"21dc4472-a928-49e3-8a87-5cdb80066cba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>CTNS is an international program dedicated to research, teaching and public service. The central scientific focus of CTNS is on developments in physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, and genetics, with additional topics in the neurosciences, the environmental sciences, and mathematics. With regard to the theological task, CTNS engages in both Christian and multi-religious reflection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"During the last quarter century, a flourishing dialogue between science and theology has been going on in North America and Europe. Clearly faith and science can, at bare minimum, have mutually respectful discussion.\n","id":"bc1bfd94-1364-4779-8b62-41c878165a47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Polygamy<|ARGUMENT|>Carrying for a wife is about more than supplying her with material needs, something polygamist husbands are frequently capable of doing for their many wives. It is also about more than treating all wives equitably and even \"loving\" them equitably. It is, rather, about providing a wife with reciprocal attention, love, sexual attention, and feelings of individual value and meaning. This is reflected in the notion of the yin and the yang; parity and complementarity between two partners. A man with even just two wives is incapable of reciprocating equally the love and care he may receive from each of them. He will fall short to some degree with each of wives and violate the notion of reciprocity in marriage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polygamous men cannot reciprocate equally the love they receive from their wives.\n","id":"e629f10d-9264-49a3-8809-3f2f744ec044"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should God Have Tested Job?<|ARGUMENT|>God tells his followers to resist the Devil which makes His dealings with the Devil more dubious.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Through His actions, God is hypocritical and acts in ways He has forbade.\n","id":"440d90c4-797e-4c31-8e74-2d30808e0305"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi everyone, Current college student, and I'm having trouble with the role of alcohol around me. Growing up, I always heard from my parents that while drinking alcohol isn't bad, and people who do aren't bad, the idea of getting drunk is just something to be scoffed at as a weakness, since you're not yourself anymore. For separate reasons, I have no desire to start drinking, I just don't want to be judging people around me if they're drinking responsibly. I can't shake the idea that even a few drinks for social lubricant is a weakness, since it would always be better to achieve the same result without the use of a substance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Getting Drunk at All is a Weakness\n","id":"b037b920-3ed7-467e-94f7-b196c62c94bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think it would be too hard to switch the entire country to an entirely new format of units and there would be little to no benefit to doing so. Just because the whole world does it doesn't mean that the US should have to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the US should never switch to the metric system like the rest of the world.\n","id":"f1b83612-c1e3-4b20-a821-57645a5a167a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should pet stores only sell dogs and cats from shelters?<|ARGUMENT|>The process of becoming a USDA Licensed facility can take several months, depending on a variety of factors, including facility preparation, completion of paperwork and demonstration of compliance with the Animal Welfare Act AWA regulations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Only licensed and inspected breeders are permitted to sell to pet stores. Increasing the standards for such licenses could go a long way in improving the conditions in these facilities.\n","id":"cf45f07c-90c4-4644-893d-ef6d7259fb01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view is simple, if a textbook does not provide answers for practice problems, it should not have practice problems at all. It is impractical to not have a way to check your work when studying and as such is pointless without having a section dedicated to problems in each chapter. Many textbooks have a solution manual that accompanies the text so they should put the problems in that instead of the normal text book. Companies only do this gauge every penny they can and I doubt they would include everything in one book when they can sell two. Therefore, practice problems should be in the solution manual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Textbooks should not offer practice problems without an answer key.\n","id":"ce7e7287-bf4d-4bd1-a0ea-48711a821ded"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate speech can contribute to cultures that effectively restrict the freedom of speech of certain groups.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People's right to free speech should not include hate speech\n","id":"564a1fe3-9594-4151-835c-6fa08ca76cd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I should probably start with definitions I am pretty much going off the wikipedia definitions exactly but written here from memory Moderism was an art and philosophical movement at the turn of the century which countered Realism, or the attempt to portray the world exactly as it is. Influenced by Freud, the movement placed great influence of the subjective experience of the artist and often tried to access the subconscious and the collective unconscious. It also contained awareness of a rapidly changing world, often with an optimistic vision for what mankind, with the help if industrial and scientific development, may achieve. Postmodernism is the current development in artistic philosophy. It is primarily about truth through abstraction and using re contextualization to separate one from subjective beliefs one may consider universal truths. It contains strong themes of nihilism, as the goal is often to call subjective, intuitive truths to order and to recognize them as valueless by demonstrating that they are not universally or objectively true. I just watched Metropolis again, and was very moved by the Art Deco, Cubist and Bauhaus set designs. I fell into a deep wiki hole reading about the birth of modernism, and what came after it. I believe that modernism was much more beneficial to the human psyche, and was more beneficial for the future than post modernism currently is. One argument is that it is generally more beautiful, which might be personal. I love Dada more than any other movement and think cubism, fauvism and expressionism just convey more spiritual content than conceptual pieces. I love the idea of exploring the subconscious and manifesting an individual, subjective view as an artistic truth. I also think that abstracting a piece to the point that it contains no universal meaning a main theme in how I am defining postmodernism is a less productive exercise. I can't say what the artist gains from it other than money lol, but I don't see any way to argue that it has less influence on the viewer and on society. I do think post modernism has done a lot for social justice I'm getting into loaded terms here, I mean more rights for more people please counter with more than me being a libtard . By re contextualizing the experience of different groups some political art helps to take people out of their limited experience and consider that things which have always been true for them are completely inscrutable to someone with a different experience in society. But I think this is done at the cost of an individual expressing is own private experience, independent of how closely that experience follows the standard experience of his particular socio political group. Identity politics can improve the lot for many minority groups, and post modernism is involved in that, but I think it causes us to think of an individual in terms of their socio political status rather than consider their unique perspective, which modernism was very joyfully all about. Like High Modernism, which placed too much emphasis on scientific objectivity and led to a disastrous hubris in the ability of man to conquer nature i.e. unhelpfully efficient city planning, I think post modernism is generally a product of modernist philosophy which should be abandoned as quickly as possible as a historical development, but an unhelpful one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Post-modernism is a mostly destructive art movement. It is nihilistic, anti-humanist, and has no concern for the individual.\n","id":"3915c32c-a72f-485b-bfe0-b5abe629b2c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>UK sovereignty has not been significantly restricted by opposed to EU laws. The UK government has been in support of EU policie 97% of the time during '04- '09 and 87% during '09- '15, which depicts the government supporting vast majority of policies decided on the EU Council level. Political motives are suspected to be more significant for the slump in support in the latter period.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Remain is a closer option for soft-brexiteers than No Deal if sovereignity is not significantly threatened to warrant it being a priority motivator over wealth and well-being.\n","id":"95e620e0-6b51-4b57-b8e4-f78e68e63069"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Bible be considered a historical document?<|ARGUMENT|>Cicero contains many examples of miracles, oracles, healings, etc. \"The Spartans received many warnings given at that time of their impending defeat at Leuctra. For example, a crown of wild, prickly herbs suddenly appeared on the head of the statue erected at Delphi in honour of Lysander\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Supernatural events and miracles occur in most historical documents and are even documented in modern times. The Bible is not unique in this respect.\n","id":"5d102940-1b33-4707-a49b-d27fab5e9b31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump has few true ideals of his own other than authoritarianism and enriching himself and his family. Ironically, this means he may be persuaded to embrace more moderate positions if this would give him the appearance of a legislative win While this too has its risks for Democrats, it could be worthwhile in the case of truly vital legislation such as a clean Dreamers bill.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democrats must cooperate with Trump in order to forward their legislative agenda, an agenda that stands in opposition to the ideals Trump espouses.\n","id":"bff6fe42-fda6-4580-9a3d-2201c82d61be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Natural gas<|ARGUMENT|>Natural gas stoves are hotter than electrical stoves, so can boil water and cook foods faster and with greater control.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Natural gas is a better source of heat for cooking.\n","id":"86d40982-008c-4811-87dd-52ebc0f3ed93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT posted from a throwaway, for obvious reasons. I am hoping the mods will allow it anyways. There is a constant stream of propaganda from media and politicians of all kind, to denounce racism. I still find myself disliking certain groups namely nearly all group who are not mostly European or East Asian. Indians are OK . I have nothing against skin colour even though I wouldn't want such people in my family, in order to keep my heritage. But I love Japanese people and I think, given a Western culture, the Chinese will be friendly people too. But almost all other groups are very unsuccessful, violent, and above all, stupid. Not stupid as in they lack education and are possessed by religion . That is ALSO true. But I mean at the biological, genetic level. And yes, there ARE in fact many studies showing significant differences between the races. In fact, Asians come out on top I am not Asian . I think Africa produces virtually zero net worth for the world, of any kind of capital financial, scientific, cultural and everything would be just so much better if they did not exist. Though, mind you, I do not believe in violence so I am not advocating any actions based on my view that they are significantly, significantly worse in all meaningful human regards. However, it feels like I have a lot of society against me. Nobody talks about it. Lots of people do it in private but they wont admit it. I wish I didn't hate most people. I have to have an opinion about them , because they are everywhere. Even though birth rates are dropping, they are dropping from such a high level that almost completely useless people will outnumber the sophisticated ones. I will never be rid of them, even if I am rich and move to neighbourhoods only for wealthy people they will still affect the country and the planet by their existence and by their participation in democracies. I want someone to try change my view, but not with the silly oneliners oh that IQ evidence was refuted, my lt insert favourite lefty author or columnist gt refuted it . Whilst not EVERY study ever made displays large biological differences between the races many, many studies still do and they have even done MRI scans of brain volumes. Even when correcting for socioeconomic factors, poor Asians' brains were larger than rich first world brains belonging to people of African origins. When such differences exist, it just seems so obvious that all other differences probably exist and form a continuum. The IQ evidence is huge. Sad, but huge. All humans are 99 similar to each other, but humans are 96 similar to chimpanzees and 94 similar to orangutans etc. I have met many indians and asians from very poor backgrounds who learn things very quickly, and have high IQs. I have not done the same for Africans and only very seldomly for people of Middle Eastern origin. I wont go through EVERY study I ever read, but I can assure you that socioeconomic factors, culture, learning in schools, public policy, childhood nutrition, stereotype effects, lack of role models, and every single little thing in the world has been tested for, corrected for. Could more studies be done? Yes. But the picture is already so clear everytime we measure the different groups, they differ greatly even after correcting for these factors. Sure, you could build up a conspiracy theory around how many airy fairy, soft hidden factors somehow conspire to ALWAYS pick on one group and to favouritize another. But why would every factor on the world somehow conspire to make Japanese people have high IQs AND large brains AND perform better economically AND have a higher standing culture AND have developed their own writing AND make them perform faster on reaction time effects. And why would those factors similarly, but oppositely, pick on Africans or people of Middle Eastern descent? Even when those people are several generations detached from their homeland, the differences persist, such as in the US otherwise you could postulate that African soil was filled with lead and the above would follow . In general, the groups I have mentioned produce nothing of value and their numbers should be kept very low. They should be encouraged to have as few children as possible, and should be kept outside the West. Furthermore, I do believe those few that DO have high IQs should be able to emigrate and accepted with more or less open arms, provided they pass several tests on their personality, genes etc. I just simply cannot see how short of some massive conspiracy theory bordering on mental insanity and a complete surrender of common sense and quantitative thinking a thinking and well informed person could not seriously dislike most members of said groups. But maybe, just maybe, someone can change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am probably what you would call a selective racist. I feel bad about it sometimes, and hate isn't good. But all my experiences, and the science, is on my side\n","id":"12d2f137-2119-40a2-8685-1cbc8f54377e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Only two of the last ten Presidential elections have been won by the candidate of lesser business experience Clinton over Bush I, and Obama over Romney. These stats aren\u2019t enough to prove anything, but I think they grow out of a trend that has big implications for Democrats and Republicans. In past eras when military conflict was an existential threat, Republicans and Democrats with military backgrounds were elected President, to nobody\u2019s great surprise. I believe that today 1 most Americans feel threatened economically more than militarily . 2 Business leadership is seen as an easily understood if not always accurate proxy for a President\u2019s competence in dealing with these new 'threats' 3 as the world's big technological advances have shifted from government to private sector, and dominant US business are overtaken by foreign competitors, voters now have a stronger sense of nationalistic affiliation with American Business. I.e. we may not like what Corporations do but they're 'our' Corporations. To be clear, I don't argue my view is 'correct.' Evidence says Presidents inexperienced in either background perform as well if not better than experienced ones in GDP growth, military victories etc. My point is business background is an increasingly important factor to the general electorate. While there are some candidates with business background running in the Democratic 2020 primary, the top candidates Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris are traditional ~100 'business free' Democrats and the base seems to prefer this. If my view is correct, they will lose to Trump in 2020 and beyond, unless a candidate like Buttegeig, O Rourke, Yang etc. gains traction. Since this is a theory, I'll award Deltas to both those who talk me out of it, or give me complete conviction. I'm sure there are some stats out there that could do either in the right hands. Thanks for your insights<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Business is the New Military for US Presidents\n","id":"4b0057d8-8197-4fb3-95a3-a56a1f51a8da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Winning the Champions League Is Better Than Winning the Premier League<|ARGUMENT|>The UEFA Champions League comprises of the league champions of all UEFA member associations, as well as those clubs finishing from second to fourth place in the strongest leagues. This means that the competition includes the very best teams from across the whole of Europe, and also the top four clubs from the Premier League. By winning the Champions League you have proven to be better than not only your fellow domestic teams but also the other European greats. The title of Champions of Europe is therefore highly superior to the title of Champions of England.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being the best in Europe beats being the best in England\n","id":"2cd13487-3826-430f-822d-4eb81517da44"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>have no elections rather than sham elections<|ARGUMENT|>Not having any elections \u2013 or only elections for a powerless advisory parliament \u2013 may actually have a benefit in putting responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the rulers. Only a country that is comparatively well governed, or successful, can manage without a democratic safety valve. It is notable that the remaining absolute monarchies or those where the King rules as well as reigns are mostly very wealthy petro states. Several of the remaining communist regimes, China and Vietnam, rely on rapid economic growth to cement their legitimacy combined with meritocracy in their selection of leaders. In both cases there is an incentive for good governance by those in power as they are in for the long term. The leaders know they are not going to be elected out of office so have the motivation to reduce corruption and create long term growth through investment in infrastructure because this will benefit them in the future.1 1 Feldman, Noah, \u2018Feldman examines corruption and political legitimacy in China\u2019, Harvard Law School, 11 March 2013,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forces the ruler to find another way to placate the people\n","id":"113d1dc9-aad8-432a-b8b4-35cee307d79f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I think that Putin is not a bad leader. He led Russia out of a fairly severe period of economic stability. With that being said, I think that when we watch the news and see that Russia does something unagreeable, like Invading Crimea, Putin is not some Hitler like dictator seeking power but instead knows his limits exactly. I think Putin invaded Crimea because he knew he could easily take it, along with the warm water port Sevastopol, something almost every Russian leader has tried to get more of. Putin, in my opinion, was trying to show the world that America, its Frenemy is weak by not doing anything about the situation except hold economic sanctions which are literally doing nothing. He has succeeded in this and showed other world powers that he is not afraid of anything<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I dont think that Putin is a bad leader. I think that he is smart and knows exactly what he is doing.\n","id":"2e8bb219-c263-4502-9e94-f06486fdea8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UN send peacekeepers to protect the Rohingyas?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the Capstone Doctrine, two-fold consent is required for Peacekeeping interference, otherwise the peacekeepers risk being parties to the conflict. p. 13<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the Myanmar government doesn't allow them into the country, UNPKF would be violating the nation's sovereignty.\n","id":"cbb7b2f9-555e-45a6-9f3d-aef7a6d7fb95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To decline to opt out is not the same as opting in to something. If I say to you I'm going to take the items in your home, and sell them all, unless you tell me not to , and you just give me the finger, or laugh, or do anything other than saying I don't gave you permission , I don't suddenly have your permission, and if I take your items, it's as much theft as it would have been if I'd taken them without saying anything to you. Not opting out is not a form of opting in, and is not a form of permission. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A failure to opt-out is not an opt-in.\n","id":"3db63771-c44f-48bf-9a55-258a04d5c408"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Veal<|ARGUMENT|>It is important to realize that cows are farmed to be killed, butchered, and eaten. There is no real dispute that this ethically acceptable. So, what could make killing cattle at an earlier stage ethically unacceptable? If killing cows is acceptable, than it should be acceptable at any stage in the life of cows. Sympathy should not be extended to calves simply because they are young and maybe cute. No analogous sympathy and special consideration is extended to baby humans. Killing a baby human is just as unacceptable as killing an adult human. By analogy, killing a baby cow should be just as tolerable as killing a cow.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If cattle can be killed tolerably, what makes killing them as calves unethical?\n","id":"f81000f4-b8de-4916-ba3f-d50f50a9edd3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should businesses pay people on a structured and distinct scale or allow employees to negotiate salaries?<|ARGUMENT|>The same salary should be given to those regardless of sex or age. Such characteristics do not affect one's ability to do the job.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Paying people the same money for the same job regardless of seniority, experience, education or characteristics ie age, gender etc is more fair.\n","id":"4a857686-1847-46dd-81d7-3dedef4b900f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Creationism vs evolution in schools<|ARGUMENT|>On this question, the Bible just is wrong, and if you insist on holding a literalistic approach to Scripture then the implications you claim do indeed follow. However, there is no theological need to do this. The Roman Catholic and the Anglican churches, for example, have accepted the truth of evolution and they still hold what is a recognisably and distinctively Christian faith. If the authors of the Bible meant their creation stories to be taken literally then their claims are open to scientific test. It is widely held that they wrote stories designed to account for the world as they knew it, and by todays standards these could not be held up as scientific accounts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Bible is simply wrong if a literal interpretation is taken:\n","id":"a04534f7-3aa6-4387-84eb-0df6952ce26d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV Vaccinations be Compulsory?<|ARGUMENT|>A mistake in diagnosing a baby's genetic illness resulted in the child being taken into the state's care for 8 months, as suspicions mistakenly fell on the parents. This error caused unnecessary separation between the parents and their child at one of the most important stages in the baby's development.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Becoming a parent and receiving the responsibilities that come with it may fundamentally change a person. It is therefore difficult to accurately and fairly assess whether or not someone will be a good parent.\n","id":"e5c7f9fa-96a5-4fa7-bb97-1f670e7cb7c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Citizens United Was Wrongly Decided<|ARGUMENT|>More than six in ten women have pointed to campaign financing as one of the biggest issues they would face if they tried to run for higher office.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This can lead to worse political outcomes for women and racial\/sexual minorities.\n","id":"fbc2e244-39bf-4f57-8fb4-f120664de715"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For clarification, Scope of this  is USA. EDIT Areas that have a significant dangerous wildlife problem will be excluded from the ban's scope eg. gun use would be permitted in such areas only . Tasers, water guns, paintball guns, BB guns, fake guns, are not considered 'guns' for the purpose of this . Military, police, and security guards with special permits are excluded from the ban scope. The special permits will primarily be restricted to government security guards. Owning guns and bullets will be illegal. Purchase and sale of guns and bullets will be illegal. Use of guns and bullets will be illegal. After passage of the ban, there will be a one week grace period by which time all owned guns may be turned over to police stations. There shall be no compensation for turning over the guns. Government will not be actively searching for guns, however will act on credible claims of gun possession. Anyone found in possession of, and or trying to buy sell, a gun, or bullets used in guns, after the grace period has expired will be EDIT severely fined and imprisoned depending on how much what kind of guns and ammo in question for example, punishment for a typical handgun may be some of ability to pay 5 years in prison . Reasons Extensive number of deaths yearly from guns, many of which could be prevented. Criminal gun use will be curtailed as their access to them will be reduced. Replies to expected counterarguments Self protection Based on what I've read and heard, gun owners by and large will not be in a position to effectively use it for self defense. Other ways of killing Based on what I've read and heard, it's far easier to kill oneself and others, intentionally or accidentally using a gun than with other means. Militia ~~Guns aren't going to stop the military.~~ If this were ever to become an issue, the outcome will be the same, only there will be a lot of dead civilians due to their owning guns. EDIT For those of you who make the argument that we need armed civilians in case the military goes rogue, can you explain why this doesn't seem to be a concern for all the nations that restrict forbid gun ownership? Criminals will still own guns Yes, but restricting ownership and trade of guns and bullets will make it harder for them to be supplied with such weapons, and the police will still have guns. People paid for those guns yes, and people paid for other things that are made illegal. Doesn't mean we don't make those other things illegal. People want to own guns Yes, and people want to do many things which are dangerous, like not wear seat belts. Doesn't mean we allow people to not use seat belts. Dangerous to take guns away from gun owners Yes, and it's also dangerous to fight criminals. Doesn't mean we don't fight criminals. Framing by planting guns Yes, and people can frame others for other crimes as well. Doesn't mean we don't have criminal law. Gun manufacturers will suffer Yes, and most regulations will make some corporation or other to suffer. Doesn't mean we don't have regulations. Arguments which won't change my view as they IMO are irrelevant Political impracticality the  isn't saying we should pass the law at this particular time , but rather it would be better for the law to have been passed than not . 2nd amendment the  is also saying second amendment should be overturned . Edits EDIT Areas that have a significant dangerous wildlife problem will be excluded from the ban's scope eg. gun use would be permitted in such areas only . EDIT Guns aren't going to stop the military. For those of you who make the argument that we need armed civilians in case the military goes rogue, can you explain why this doesn't seem to be a concern for all the nations that restrict forbid gun ownership? EDIT severely fined and imprisoned depending on how much what kind of guns and ammo in question for example, punishment for a typical handgun may be some of ability to pay 5 years in prison .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Civilian gun ownership should be banned.\n","id":"a577f147-a30f-4852-91f6-ed05b1e70c42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments push for 100% renewable energy?<|ARGUMENT|>Renewable energy technologies give many people the opportunity to become \"prosumers consumers who generate their own energy and sell any excess.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments all around the world should push for 100% renewable energy as fast as possible.\n","id":"80713099-557b-4432-aa25-5df626341283"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>US states without the death penalty tend to have lower rates of murder supporting the premise that the strength of the penalty is not impacting the decisions of perpetrators.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The presence of a death penalty does not have an effect on homicide rates.\n","id":"32536c77-921d-42ee-a2f7-9e9b7a0ca7ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are people who do immoral things immoral?<|ARGUMENT|>Morality is subjective. Thus, if specific actions could be labeled \"immoral\", individuals or objects cannot be labeled \"immoral\" because it will be very difficult to measure when a person or an object becomes \"immoral\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Once one does an immoral thing their continuing existence does not guarantee more immoral acts.\n","id":"af1cd109-2fee-4e2b-9fdc-05b79f144f0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Thanks to religion we have a better understanding of the history of humankind. The knowlege of most ancient civilizations would've been lost if not for their religious expressions Egyptian, babylonian, jewish and our understanding of historical process would be far worse without the critical analysis of the bible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A great many historical records that preserved knowledge still exist today thanks to religion.\n","id":"d1b942cc-5e29-4341-990b-2b138f197e21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care, Debate on Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>Public health care systems receive more scrutiny by the public because they are publicly accountable. This often gives the impression that these systems are worse. But, this impression is simply a bi-product of the higher level of scrutiny these systems receive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public health care is good; it just receives more scrutiny\/criticism\n","id":"6d0ea8e5-babf-4024-ade8-32dba47c4c71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As this season and playoffs have gone along, the debate of lebron vs Jordan being the greatest of all time has reignited. I personally believe that, without a doubt, lebron James is a better player than Michael Jordan and therefore is the greatest of all time. The thing people will always point out in this debate is lebron's finals record. Sure, it isn't exactly pretty. But he does have three rings. I don't think that championships are that important to be considered into overall greatness. As long as he has a few which he does that's enough. Lebron's supporting casts with the Cavs have never really been that great. Whereas Jordan played with HOF'ers his whole career, lebron has often had to do more with less. Sure, he had the big 3 in Miami but he won 2 titles there. Lebron is a physical beast. He's stronger than almost anyone, and athletic at the same time. Admittedly, the impact that lebron has had on the game as a whole will probably never come close to the impact jordan had. But he is the better player, the more dominating player. The king is the GOAT, cmv<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lebron James is the greatest basketball player of all time\n","id":"90d80eb1-9361-4234-8e13-b89945fe656f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, first off, I'm very open to new ideas, and would love for you to change my view on this, as I don't think it's fair to say that support players are just bad, but this is just some anecdotal data I have, from people I've met trough the years. Also, being less skilled than another player isn't bad, unless you're on top 10, there's always someone more skilled than you. Most supports I've met are people who like to play casually, and most of my high ranking friends are people who grinded the shit out of the game and played a lot, generally some kind of damage type class, depends on the game, of course. Helping somebody else do damage instead of actually doing damage feels a lot less satisfactory, unless you're really bad at doing damage. The meme that most girls are supps is super weird to me, but I can't deny most women I've met play support, and I for the life of me can't figure out why. Again, not like there's anything bad with playing support, but it's just really weird to me, and something that's worth noting now that I'm trying to mention all the things I've noticed trough the years. High ranking supports are just as good as any other player, and can build or aim or whatever, depends on the game, really like all the other players, maybe not as good, but the gap doesn't feel as big. Support is usually a more passive, less DPI intensive role. Again, not counting high level play, where you have 6 items with separate cooldowns, not counting your 7 abilities and 2 extra when an ally is low HP. It's an example, don't try to guess what game I'm talking about. Low level play feels like the easier option, and I feel like most support players get carried without doing much, at low rank. I'm a high skilled player. I'll mention this because of two factors. I'm biased towards high skilled players, I like them more, I usually tell my friends to play on the hardest difficulty when asked, but I don't mind people who play on easy, I get the appeal of that, it's just not for me and I like meeting people with the same interests. Second, I'm not a guy stuck on low ELO Matchmaking Ranking Skill Rating Dickpoints that just blames supports for everything, I think they play an integral part of the team, but it's my observation that most DPS mains can also support without much problem, while support mains on low to mid level can only support. So yeah, those are my appreciations, I'm just hoping for a supp main to counterargument everything, as it's just not a nice image to have of supps. Not like I'm going to actively shit on a guy for playing supp, but if someone tells me he mains supp I'll probably think he's just not as good of a player as someone who plays damage on his same ranking. So yeah, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who play support at a low to mid level play support because it's generally easier.\n","id":"215d2674-b54d-4001-8c98-bccbccdbc217"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Microaggressions allow the offended person to judge the interaction on their personal feelings, not on evidence or on the intent of the speaker. Instead of good faith conversations and charitable interpretations of others, microaggressions encourage a call-out culture of paranoia and fear. \" .culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The mention of \"microaggression in the sources above is one sign post of amplified grievances on the side of students. This comes from Universities seeing students as consumers and caving to student's whims The exaggeration is on both sides, if not more so on the side of the students.\n","id":"e886a366-77b6-4eed-ba4c-26e8b43be97b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Countries Taking In Refugees Confiscate their Valuables?<|ARGUMENT|>Public diplomacy is an important government function which is tied to international reputation. The negative effects of confiscating refugee valuables is an obstacle to this endeavor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A country having a bad reputation will result in negative consequences.\n","id":"bb0f8f4a-cff7-4f3b-838d-d75956bfc438"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Falkland Islands, return of<|ARGUMENT|>It would be recognition of the justice of Argentina\u2019s claim and the illegality of Britain\u2019s occupation of the islands. In fact, it would show that illegal acts of violence, like that of 1833, will eventually be overturned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Returning the islands would not be a sign that violence and threats are legitimate.\n","id":"98ec70c8-46f8-49c6-ad44-0d955730e10c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now these beliefs are based off of my own religious beliefs Christianity so take that into consideration. I believe in the bible and because the bible tells me that only those who accept Jesus Christ as their savior go to heaven. I believe that due to the fact that Christianity is illegal in North Korea, they are responsible for the largest and most severe genocide of all time. Now it is different because the killings to me are eternal and not physical however to me this is much worse. I believe that due to the millions of lives which will not make it through the gates of heaven once again my views , the United Nations should take a serious look into focusing on over throwing the communist regime. I see no reason in entering a world war for the people under the nazi regime and ignoring those suppressed by the North Korean government. I will post my biblical references below here. John 14 6 7 John 3 16 Mathew 10 33 Acts 4 12 And regarding any confusion as to the people being forgiven because they had no chance of hearing about God Romans 1 19 22. I'm not asking for someone to change my view on how people get in to heaven or anything regarding my faith, because that won't be changing. I'm curious if anyone disagrees with how serious the issue is. Also if anyone believes we should stay out and why? I'm doing this on my phone so there probably will be a few grammar mistakes, please forgive haha<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genocide in North Korea\n","id":"39895753-93d2-40f4-a603-f86c4408b50b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently I have seen a lot of posts regarding the topic of transgender and transphobia. This post is based upon a statement that I have read over and over again. If you were attracted to someone, learned they were trans, and then lost sexual interest in them, then you're transphobic. Example If pointing to someone else's comment isn't okay with the mods then let me know and I'll edit this out My argument revolves around the definition of Homophobia and comparing that to Transphobia. A quick google will result in having them both defined as Homophobia Transphobia is the irrational fear of, aversion to, intense dislike of ,or prejudice against gay or transsexual or transgender people I do not go out of my way to avoid gay people, I am perfectly fine with having a gay friend, and I don't look down on someone for being gay. By the above definition I am not homophobic. Assuming I follow all of the same rules, but for transgender or transsexual people, then I'm not transphobic. The counter argument seems to be that if I am no longer attracted to someone after I learn that they are trans, then I am somehow discriminating or I have an aversion to them. But I would say that going by that definition I would also be homophobic. As a straight male, I'm not attracted to other men. If we assume that I would enjoy anal with a woman, but not a man, then it could be said that I am discriminating against gay men or that I have an aversion to them. That's simply not true though. My body is programmed to want to be with a woman, so my sexual preference clearly isn't what determines if I'm homophobic. It's how I act around gay people that determines if I am homophobic. Just because I would avoid having sex with someone who is currently a man, and was previously a man turns me off, doesn't mean I have shaky morals. It simply means I have been programmed to be that way. Just because I don't like the taste of avocados doesn't mean I'm avophobic. In the same sense, if I were to be turned off by learning that someone I would have had sex with a is currently a female, but formerly a man, it isn't due to me discriminating against them, its due to a biological mechanism trying to get me to have offspring. Again in this situation, my sexual preference is not a question of morals. In conclusion since I am not homophobic and I act the same around gays and trans, then I am not Transphobic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not Transphobic\n","id":"1a094258-4ee6-4c35-835f-04483930c507"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's not that I'm not fond of the aspect of love, conditionally or unconditionally, or being 'In love'. And it's not that i've been really hurt in the past. Yes Humans experience basic emotions, and yes instinct comes into play increasing our chances of reproducing which taking that into account the action of sleeping around rules out any notion of love at that given time. I mean, when did we stop acting on instinct and invent this thing called love? My thoughts are it's more along the lines of Hey I like this person a lot , there's no real border line between like and love. Maybe it's the movies portraying a completely non realistic definition of it. I can't exactly pin point what it is, it's not that I think to believe in it or not. It's that I do not think it's real. P.S please don't reply with the cliche When you love someone, you'll know . As I said conditional, or unconditional. My family are amazing as well, good upbringing etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think 'Love' is a real emotion.\n","id":"4a593a01-be22-448d-a714-5c0fb4427b4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Sophia Lewis, one of Joseph Smith's in-laws, said she heard Joseph Smith say \"the Book of Plates could not be opened under penalty of death by any other person but his Smith's first-born, which was to be male.\" Howe 1834, p. 269<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith falsely prophesied that his firstborn son would translate the Book of Mormon.\n","id":"e46a4820-69af-406e-9afd-dca202741949"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do journalists have a moral obligation to display violent images?<|ARGUMENT|>Due to fear of images being published of the domestic and sexual abuse they have endured, some survivors have had to adopt anonymity through being homeless to 'stay off the radar.'<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Victims of violence have already undergone a horrific experience and should not be subjected to relive it through the publication of their tragedy.\n","id":"d1ea112f-6991-4e36-9646-a337b094198a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>It's not the Second Amendment that's caused the gun violence--it's the mis-interpretation and willful distortion of the provision's intent--that's enabled such reckless gun policies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Second Amendment doesn't prevent states from restricting gun access the \"violence\" mentioned in the parent, as evidenced by various laws\n","id":"ad26accb-788a-4cb8-94bd-abdb655ce447"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Soon we will have to ban all sharp or pointy objects, glass, blunt objects, baseball bats, and the list will get bigger and bigger in order to reduce the problem. Let's make bubble suits mandatory attire just in case we run into something unsafe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UK has banned guns and is now also banning knives except for folding knives that do not lock with blades no longer than 3 inches. Yet the UK's murder rate has still spiked\n","id":"34d5f5a2-f647-4119-bb37-c058487d1c11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>The database must have a clear policy on how to handle abuse\/stalking\/etc, since beyond the state of current social media where the user chooses the degree of shared information, people's identities will be much more exposed to possible threats.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Twitter has a similar model, where any user can 'observe' any other user. This has lead to a notorious problem where huge groups of people will harasses individuals because of political disagreements or spite.\n","id":"529e906d-65d8-4713-b8e2-2d74a16fb802"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Net Neutrality Necessary?<|ARGUMENT|>Net Neutrality is essential for innovation and competition because it blocks discriminating against smaller businesses and startups who can't pay what Internet behemoths would shell out for premium delivery of their assets to consumers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ISPs are likely to favour services that are already established and popular, such as Facebook, Netflix, or WhatsApp. This would then entrench their position.\n","id":"12145d75-a14d-48ff-9e59-c131877512a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After a long time of pondering, I've concluded that there is no compelling reason for humankind to keep upholding a moral code. And that comes from two core reasons Astrophysics, more accurately the third law of thermodynamics, establishes that the energy matter of any closed system is both finite in quantity as it can't be created or destroyed and finite in entropy there is a limit after which the state of a closed system is no longer able to change . Being part of the universe, any intelligent life forms that are born within it and more importantly, any changes that said life forms may cause to the universe are thus doomed to be undone due to the laws of physics, a phenomenon called the heat death of the universe. Which leads us to the notion of morality and ethics, which can be broadly defined as the set of behavioral restrictions that are enforced to keep the human society alive, self perpetuating and, if possible, in a flourishing state. All three points are restricted by physics the point will come when there is no usable energy matter left to keep any intelligent life forms alive, nor any knowledge accummulated by them. Whether that point is reached after vainly limiting our species in order to stay alive, or even earlier due to ourselves forfeiting said limitations, the result will be ultimately identical. Biochemistry can explain the origin of our behavioral restrictions. The instinct of survival came to be the standard for most life forms solely because of evolution the instinct came randomly, and those life forms that lacked it simply died out, automatically leaving the population bound to said instinct simply because everyone left alive had it. Same goes for emotions and values the civilizations that didn't practice them often ended up destroying themselves, thus leaving the ones that did at an advantage. However, one must take into account that the definition of morality changes from a society to another, as what is beneficial for one culture is harmful for another, and in a finite world with finite resources, beings that inherently long for infinity eternal life, endless riches, complete power, etcetera require to deprive others from resources, lest they have to deprive themselves. However, as it has been seen above, those behaviors were not decided due to a committee of wise people who determined through logic that certain behaviors must be forbidden or punished, but rather our instincts initially forced us to practice them and only then were they standardized into ethical codes a rational system to regulate irrational behaviors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Morality is both futile in purpose due to astrophysics and irrational in origin due to biochemistry, therefore. Details below.\n","id":"c92e0a8c-485b-4ddc-b483-127cc2ebd273"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>Immigrants who live in a state but do not yet have citizenship status will be perceived as freeloading, or as illegitimate, because they have not completed compulsory service.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As non-citizens or people who immigrate when they are older than 20 would not do service, this would further stigmatise these groups.\n","id":"ec1d4735-4303-4155-8bfb-b5627a2baf00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that anyone who sees homosexuality as a sin is homophobic. Someone who believes interracial marriage is a sin is racist, and someone who uses the bible to support segregation is bigoted. However, this isn't exactly what I'm here to discuss. I believe that supporting someone who believes homosexuality is a sin is in and of itself homophobic. Maybe it's not as bad as the person who views homosexuality as immortal, but it's still bigoted to an extent. It stems from the idea that heterosexuals are superior to homosexuals, and therefore hating homosexuals is inherently acceptable. We live in a society that is so heteronormative that even many homosexuals have resolved to a life of being second class citizens. I should also be upfront here and say that I'm fairly confident that no one will change my view although I'll remain open minded nonetheless. It annoys me when people post on  and are clearly just interested in arguing their opinion. I'm more curious as to why homophobia is seen as tolerable while something like racism is beyond blasphemous. edit I'm using homophobic as prejudice against or judgement of homosexuals and not fear of homosexuals . edit2 convoces has convinced me that it's possible to believe homosexuality is a sin without viewing homosexuals as inferior if one is irrational. Whether or not this can happen rationally is still up for debate if anyone wants to argue that case, but I am a gnostic atheist so it may not be worth the effort. edit3 Somehow I fail to see how it's not homophobic as long as you also view other things as a sin. It's great if you think lying is a sin, but that's not what we're talking about. By saying that it's a sin to be gay, you're saying that someone should ideally not be gay. That's like if I said You should ideally be caucasian. Well I mean caucasian and have blonde hair, so I can't be racist. I also think there's an ideal hair color so what race I view as ideal is irrelevant. It's a way to group people into ideal heterosexual and not ideal homosexual . Regardless of how you treat gay people, you're still classifying them as something beneath what heterosexual is classified as.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anyone who supports the opinion that homosexuality is a sin is homophobic.\n","id":"f128d5e0-3f8f-4005-8a2e-9a91067fc285"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The United States is justified in using private military firms abroad to pursue its military objectives<|ARGUMENT|>\"Just as Iraq is the single largest U.S. military commitment in more than a generation, so too is it the largest commitment for the private military industry. The numbers for the PMF presence in Iraq dwarf any past operations. Over 60 firms employ more than 20,000 private personnel carrying out military functions as opposed to the thousands of additional civilian contractors providing reconstruction or oil services. To put this into context, such numbers mean that the private military industry has contributed more forces to Iraq than any other member of the U.S.-led coalition, being nearly equal to all the states excluding the U.S. combined.\" Fred Schreier and Marina Caparini, March 2005<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"PMCs have become so ingrained in our foreign operations that they have become necessary.\n","id":"50d9b2a3-44b6-4c3e-bafc-6c3a32169178"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>expand the United Nations Security Council<|ARGUMENT|>This could mean that the council ends up deadlocked more often than not as was the case during the Cold war when the two blocs almost always opposed each other. Up until 1991 from the UN founding in 1946 there were only 700 security council resolutions due to the deadlocked nature of the council. In the 20 years since there have been over 1300 resolutions.1 The negotiation process would also be significantly longer. As a result the peace and security of the world could be endangered by this step. 1 Wikipedia, United Nations Security Council resolution,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By giving five more countries veto power, the Council could come to a stalemate.\n","id":"e7ab20ee-30d4-4467-91b4-8cdaa03c4709"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion reminds people that there are matters more important than the material, than personal obsessions, insecurities, and present sensibilities. Religion can lead towards personal liberation from false binaries, psychological limits and physical constraints.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is good for the psycho-social wellness of its followers.\n","id":"8bdff139-ef11-4630-bb4b-370dbdc09e9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just because something uses or can use bread, does not make it a sandwich. It is a very specific connotation that does not apply to hamburgers and hotdogs. You would not put a turkey leg in between two pieces of bread and call it a sandwich. A sandwich is additionally defined as a \u201clight meal\u201d. Hamburgers and hot dogs are not considered light. They are dense and heavy. One of those can constitute a full meal, whereas a sandwich in its most basic form is only applicable to a light lunch at best. Throwing two things between two other things and calling it a sandwich, is anarchy. The madness would never stop. We have to draw a line somewhere, to define what a sandwich really is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hotdogs and hamburgers are not sandwiches\n","id":"77190ef8-9901-4035-ae5f-edbdfab47cee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m not talking about psychiatry helping people with psychosis schizophrenia bipolar , any of the OCD Tourette\u2019s disorders, or addiction. I\u2019m talking only about depression. For context, my sister has some significant issues with depression, and my family does not want to involve a psychiatrist because \u2018they won\u2019t help.\u2019 Putting aside any details about my sister\u2019s situation, I\u2019m having trouble disagreeing can psychiatry really help someone out of depression? Or do they need to sort it out themselves? . Edit thank you to everyone that\u2019s replied, you\u2019ve helped me formulate some arguments to continue the discussion with the rest of my family<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern psychiatry does not help people with depression\n","id":"6de92ea3-0bf3-4dc5-9b10-cbf6b74b31f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Confederate Flag Should be Banned<|ARGUMENT|>Those who wish to flaunt the Confederate flag in public are backward-looking, rejecting the diversity and dynamism of the \u201cnew South\u201d that has developed since the civil rights era. By persistently promoting a divisive symbol, they undermine continuing efforts at integration and generate negative views of the South in the rest of the nation and internationally, reducing investment and prosperity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who wish to flaunt the Confederate flag in public are backward-looking, rejecting the diversit...\n","id":"833bd774-aad1-453a-add9-b7493c7f31c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi , I saw an interesting bubble forming around communities, and I wanted to dig deeper into it. The thesis is this You're not eating for just your health You are eating for the strength of your children's and grandchildren's genetics That is the above statement. Digging a bit around, I found on this site that it has to do with epigenetics . Meaning the expression of genes. Some studies were touted to show that gene expression can be affected by baby development, drugs, environmental effects, aging and diet As seen on this article it has to do with your telomeres. Ex gene determining cartilage thickness. Over time can become thicker or thinner from nutrition choices. Also determines thickness in offspring <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that diet can influence your genetics or your children's genetics\n","id":"7de17f4d-92d0-4ae0-8141-cd4afcb2269c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By The Bible , I am including both the canonical Old Testament and the New Testament. By sexist , I mean that the Bible portrays women as completely inferior to men. Its overall message towards women is condescending at best, and murderous at worst. However, I'm open to the idea that I may simply be reading it wrong, which is why I made this . Keep in mind that I'm not saying Christianity is sexist or that Christians are sexist , because it depends on the Christian, and the vast majority of them are not. I am only going off the text of the Bible, not its application in the real world. And before someone starts a battle over semantics, I'm not arguing that every single book or passage contains some sexist thing, but the message is there in the Bible as a whole, implicit if not explicit, and isn't really contradicted. I've avoided naming specific verses for this introduction, because there are too many, but I'll pull them out as needed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Bible is sexist.\n","id":"b5ad2c91-9957-44ac-be2a-cdfb7ea9a4cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I met a lot of atheists. I also met some angry atheists. My problem is with them. A lot of angry atheists attack religions and religious people by using science. A lot of them seem to think that they are helping scientific progress. I think they are doing the opposite. Scientific advancement is a group effort from the society. If more people take part in science, more progress is made. The more the merrier. By using science to attack people who are religious, they alienate a huge population from science. So the number of people in science is lower. So less progress. More time until we get space ships.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some atheists contrary to what they like to believe are bad for science by alienating a huge number of people from it.\n","id":"de9eabdf-fda0-4e2e-8754-8eba4d4d2caf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit It should be noted that I am from America, and have virtually no knowledge of how what I talk about translates to other Western countries. Also, I came up with the post's title before writing the post itself. Really, the title should be  Higher level academia is a dick measuring contest . x200B Okay, so basically I've noticed that a lot of things in college academia, in a lot of academic fields of discipline, are centered a lot more around understanding and following the system without necessarily questioning it, than actually bettering your education. Furthermore, a lot of things seem more like dick measuring contests sorry for the language . For example, there are about a billion different awards you can have in high school and college named after all of these people, you can graduate college with honors, with higher honors, or with highest honors, none of which seems to affect anyone's job prospects in a real way. The aforementioned graduating with high higher highest honors usually come from the institution's honor program or equivalent, but for the most part they seem more like ways to needlessly categorize students and make them feel like they have to do more to be considered good students, even if they students who don't get them are doing just as much or even more inside and or outside of academia, ex. students who need to work to afford school will generally be outperformed by those who don't, even if they aren't any worse of students. The main reason I have this position, however, is because I and several friends have been mailed lots of pamphlets about all these organizations and societies for high achieving students around the state, country, whatever, and as I look through the pamphlets and the students in them, it just names students, pictures of them in their nice clothing that probably cost enough to pay a poor kid's tuition for the semester, and honors they've won, where they've gone to school, etc. and usually not actually something important in the real world. I realize a lot of these things are just scams and don't actually do anything for you anyway, but even the ones that are trusted just seem more like resume builders, and not even that because most grad schools and jobs care a lot more about what you can do than the things you've bought your way into getting. I'm not here to see the view Academic achievement is not always correlated to personal success, and there are many successful people who didn't do xyz in school , that's an indisputable fact. Rather, I'm here to see if these things I've brought up are anything more than classist, money sucking dick measuring contests that teach people to follow the system rather than to actually lead their own lives and succeed as independent adults. I'd love to see evidence of the contrary, and if anybody knows specific counterexamples to my claim, I would love also to see those quite frankly that would give me more hope in humanity. Also, I'm a freshman in undergrad so I understand I'm not an expert on the topic at hand. We live in a classist world and a classist academic system but please show me that it's more than just that. x200B Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Higher-level academia is classist, and an ass-kissing contest.\n","id":"7886f4ad-bdf6-408d-bf89-737acdf63ef8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>AKMs would undermine the Democratic Peace Citizens of democracies would not have to fight and suffer and pay for warfare anymore and thus become less averse to it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With AKMs in action, wars, conflicts or interference in other nations' affairs become more likely.\n","id":"0d52b918-3e1e-40e1-b7d5-0acf225799e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>CS student here I use Linux since I am 10 years old and I've always preferred the command line. It's so much more versatile, faster and gives me more possibilities in getting a task done, than any desktop environment. Programming, installing programms or just maintaining any system is faster and easier in the command line. Furthermore I don't rely on graphics drivers, have a faster start up and don't have to click through thousand tabs in a file explorer just to get to a file. In general, desktop environments are just distracting, unorganized and ugly. That's why I think that the command line is far superior to any desktop environment out there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Command line is far superior to any desktop environment out there\n","id":"4a86a26c-3900-4b0f-afb8-292d2d9912a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In 1984 only the party members were subject to interminable surveillance. The proles were more or less free. In today's reality every member of society is unable to escape the pervasive spying done by gov through cell phones and the internet. Just as worrying is the notable fact that this spy state is well known and even embraced by most of society. The Orwellian Hellscape will only grow worse as freedom of expression is slowly squeezed out by the minorities collectively holding a sword over our heads, ready to riot, leave us destitute, and rape our women should we even talk of setting society back onto a reaaonable path. Its also scarier in than in 1984. Goldstein had rivals. In 2013 global financiiers have achieved total victory. There is no hope for humanity as it has existed the last 3000 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reality in the US is much worse and scarier than depicted in George Orwell's \"1984\".\n","id":"f1d832fe-7d1c-4c2b-b98f-8bd7ed6750ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Valentines Day is just a Hallmark ploy<|ARGUMENT|>Valentines Day is a topic that always excites debate because it can be an emotional time for those who are single and unhappy in that situation. Whilst criticism certainly isn\u2019t exclusive to those who are single, one can see why cynical sentiments would be likely to arise from those who can\u2019t really enjoy the occasion. By painting the day as a capitalist sham, frustrated singletons may gain some satisfaction by cheapening the experience for others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Much of the snobbery about Valentines Day comes from those who have no-one to spend it with\n","id":"4936ea2c-e2e5-4a2f-993c-c5b1551a794d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>According to the theory, Mitochondrial Eve is not the first woman, or the first human, or the first member of a new species. Other women alive when Eve can and have dependents today; they simply do not have living descendants who are descended only through female links. Furthermore, the Mitochondrial Eve is not fixed. It changes with time. Mitochondrial Eve - An Overview for College Students<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of a human genome does not necessarily mean Adam and Eve are responsible for genetics.\n","id":"aa4e4845-3abd-4bc0-88d1-5923ae32d1fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Some phenomena modeled in Quantum Mechanics are logically inconsistent, yet they still exist. This shows that contradiction of a phenomena has no negative impact to the reality of phenomena.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The logical inconsistencies of Classical Theism could simply be the result of faulty reasoning, in such a case God could still exist.\n","id":"16e1bae2-9994-4f5f-8efa-001ac14f4c3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, when Australia first won the America's Cup sailing race in 1983, Prime Minister Bob Hawke declared a public holiday for citizens to celebrate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The victory of a national sporting team is often portrayed as a victory for the entire country.\n","id":"2de8913a-8d56-45b4-b1ad-6ab1c5e343a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Today as I was driving to work the police car in front of me had a large decal on the rear window which read \u201cIn God We Trust\u201d. This is a new addition that Missouri Sheriffs Department has decided to add to all police cars. I believe this phrase on a police car serves no other purpose than to proselytize religion. This church state violation is causing atheist police officers to either proselytize religion against their will or cause them to \u201cout\u201d themselves inviting persecution and prejudice. Additionally it is using tax payer vehicles as billboards for religious messages. I believe this phrase should be considered a state church violation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\u201cIn God We Trust\u201d should not be allowed on police vehicles\n","id":"dc7e4528-5c65-4d9a-a154-a91319c315e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm sorry. I'm white and i feel like if i died now then the world would be a better place because it would mean there's one less white person in the world. A lot of arguments against this fall under the problematic categories of not all white people , tone policing, or silencing people of color. We're kind of the reason and source of all evils and other forms of oppression in this world right now. We're not doing enough fast enough to fix things or make up for them. Idk, this might apply mostly to the united states, idk. I don't like feeling like this, but there's so much evidence otherwise. Idk what to do or what to think, sorry. Thanks for reading<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We white people just make the world a worse place.\n","id":"0baf05f7-80b4-4df0-9dec-180b8c93e239"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Of the ten countries with the largest Muslim populations and two thirds of the world's Muslims, every single one experienced some form of significant international conflict at some point since 2005 Gleditsch\/Rudolfsen, p.7<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most refugees arriving in high-income countries are Muslims; their cultural and religious backgrounds have led to many conflicts in the past. Admitting them to high-income countries risks spreading this propensity for conflict.\n","id":"14dc4035-243d-4812-a124-70b2971016aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trophy Hunting Be Illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Trophy hunting often allows for the euthanization of unhealthy and aggressive males who are a prone to harming younger females of the same species.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trophy hunting helps maintain, protect and revive sustainable animal populations.\n","id":"41547858-3bf7-4452-899f-3937e77cced3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The World Bank is an obstacle to development<|ARGUMENT|>The Bank purchased advertisements in American daily newspapers that proclaimed; \u2018World Bank : A Good Investment\u2019 and asserted that the US companies received $1 in contracts for each dollar the United States contributes to the IDA. However, a US Treasury study showed that US companies in fact received only $0.23 in procurement for every dollar paid into IDA. Consequently, in 1997 the US refused to provide its assessed contribution to IDA. The inefficiency of the World Bank infrastructure suggests that US companies could receive a better financial return and have a more instant impact upon local development by direct investment in the developing countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The contribution of donor countries to the World Bank is a poor investment.\n","id":"d6700866-47aa-4ec7-8799-e96aba30e4f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should athletes be allowed to compete in their chosen gender category?<|ARGUMENT|>A mutation on the erythropoietin receptor gene can greatly increase the production of red blood cells in the body. This facilitates greater oxygen uptake, and was a contributing factor to the success of one of the world's greatest endurance athletes, Eero Mantyranta<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Athletes with certain genetic traits have huge advantages over other competitors that are the same sex.\n","id":"66c14582-8ccb-4ba7-a3aa-faaa91fc519e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voting by mail be the standard in all US elections?<|ARGUMENT|>With more people voting the policies debated and legislation passed would be representitive of more people and less on the extremes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lowering the barriers to voting would enable more people to vote.\n","id":"313fa79e-41bb-4af2-8986-5f011cf97f85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not by any means complaining, but college is a lot of work. Time itself isn't the issue, I just constantly struggle to make the most out of it. Studying doing work for more than 90 minutes at a time is tough. Even then I'm often thinking about other fun social things. I feel that some sort of 'study aid' drug would make it easier to do work and make me less stressed out all the time. I would be able to focus for longer periods of time and be more productive. In summation, I think I'd be able to get more done in less time. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If I had a prescription for ritalin, adderall, vyvanse, etc. college would be easier.\n","id":"d6e34843-881c-4bfd-b616-27ebe323a0b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>God was always invoked when we could not explain something. Some people do this up until today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God exists in the explanations of things that are yet to discover.\n","id":"50cbb5e3-011b-4b55-9695-ba8a9d21cd29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>In New Zealand abuse and harassment of street-based sex workers by \"drunken members of the public\" is common.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A New Zealand government report reveals that despite decriminalization, abuse of sex workers continues.\n","id":"1cf2428d-2a4f-48f3-b1f7-74ab5af1e9ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, caveats 1 I'm talking about working and middle class people. 2 This doesn't include southern NJ, which is apart from NYC. 3 If you live by family and can't leave them, that sucks for you. If you buy a 50 Costco membership and never shop there, people will criticize you on that. But if you pay an extra 5000 a year to live nearby New York City, and you aren't going there every month, it's not a concern. Chances are, if the taxes and prices are draining your wallet, you won't have enough money to enjoy the fine restaurants and events in the city anyway. In most other states, if a couple both work in retail, they are afford a decent sized house in their 20's. In NJ, they'd be scraping by in an apartment. Single? You'd have to rent a room with room mates. You can get a decent place in most states bar California for 500 m but in NJ, you'll get a room in the ghetto.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Living in NJ is a waste of money if you're not going to frequent NYC\n","id":"f0cd923e-6017-45fd-9581-5ffffcf73265"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Resurrect Extinct Species?<|ARGUMENT|>De-extinction is more expensive than conservation. Funds to revive five extinct species in New South Wales was similar to saving more than eight times as many living species<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should focus on protecting existing species which are threatened, not on resurrecting those which are already extinct.\n","id":"ae8f9aca-32cd-402d-9606-07aeaf99e8ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>School is universally known as one of the most important things we do in our life. In many Western countries it is even mandatory by law. But how good is this system? What kind of stuff do we learn out children? There are classes which could improve but are 100 necessary. Things like language, basic math. Things which we use in everyday life. I think basic psychology and ''debating, critical thinking, logic classes'' should be on par with language and math as far as how much needed they actually are. But when we look things like history, it is a whole different story. History is by far the most inaccurate kind of class. As history changes depending on the perspective geographical location political agenda personal preference time. And this could account for ''small differences'' in history around the globe. But there is also this thing were you leave specific information out of subject. Which is far worse, as I believe that is a light form of censorship. Because leaving a small part out, or minimizing an factor could totally change people's views. I think we rely to much on the rinse repeat system. Which is outdated. The information presented in school is outdated. The books the children get are already a few years old, based on even older information. An example I still remember is having an 5 year old book somewhere in 2004 . To still work with outdated printed books instead of a forum were information can evolve and corrected is unbelievable to me. But as we all know, progression gets driven away by people who don't benefit from that change. And not even talking about the amount of paper from workbooks etc wasted. In this case that would be the cancerous ''publishing'' companies who benefit from this. They sell you a bundle for all your books which you need for that year. Lets say you have to pay 500. At the end of the year, they will attempt to buy the books off you again. Which you will usually do. Only you only get 125 back if you are lucky. Then that same exact year, the same books will be sold again to another person for 500. This happens in the Netherlands. An system based on software and interactive teaching will be more cost efficient, environment friendlier. Now there are a lot of classes which are not getting taught at all. Things in life that you are gonna have to deal with every day in life. things like emotions, relationships, arguments and you know just talking to people. Basic psychology will improve not only your insight in these issues, but it will also make people more tolerant to each other as someone else his perspective is not as hard to see anymore. One could also argue that understanding certain things like cognitive dissonance information bias or gambler's fallacy could help a person in various ways. There are probably better examples out there. I think that the psychology and discussion debate go hand in hand. I truly believe that if you want a better world you have to start by teaching how kids can think, not what they should think. Teach them logic, teach them how to debate, teach them basic psychology. The result of this would be that people would correct each other more and that would be a big change. I think if the basic premise of this would be applied to the world, people would have a more fitting worldview. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only road to a ''better world'' is a drastic change to our education system.\n","id":"b9534d1b-70ea-43a2-9c73-aa0196b9cc15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface this by saying that I\u2019m mostly talking about highschool. A grade in a class is supposed to demonstrate mastery of the subject. But how can it demonstrate mastery when work completion is factored? In most classes, tasks like glueing in papers in the right orientation is part of your grade. Why should a students grade be less than their test scores because they didn\u2019t update their notebook\u2019s table of context? The inclusion of work completion in grades artificially inflates the grades of those with low mastery and deflates the grades of those with high mastery. I\u2019ll get A\u2019s and B\u2019s on tests and projects, but end up with a C or C in the class because I don\u2019t do the assigned homework. But a student who gets C\u2019s on tests but puts in effort and does all the homework would end up with B\u2019s in their classes. Why should doors start closing for me because I don\u2019t think that updating my notebook\u2019s table of context will help me learn chemistry? I seem to be in the minority with this opinion, and people usually just call me lazy when I talk about this to them, so I\u2019m genuinely curious about their reasoning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homework and other non assessment type assignments should not be factored into grades.\n","id":"85e10960-b7e2-470f-b56b-a8fcc0c9235e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Both groups come from a place of knowing what it\u2019s like not to have access to their bodies, of having control taken from them, and of being told what they\u2019re supposed to look like. Both cis and trans women carry the weight of femininity and are fighting for similar rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The relevant characteristics in a women-only space are not biological, but social and cultural. It is irrelevant if they are biologically different if they share similar experiences, struggles and understandings of the world.\n","id":"3a233ae5-ba5a-479f-ac0f-1502dd1cd18f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that prostitution should be legalized, specifically in the entirety United States of America. With new movement and progressive ideals sweeping through the world, many individuals have adopted a mental attitude towards sexual expression following the lines of, As long as it doesn't hurt anyone, and all parties are consenting, then I have no problem with it. Legalized prostitution would ensure that both parties would always be consensual and thus would fulfill the criteria above. Furthermore, legalizing prostitution would allow for more regulation. I am envisioning this regulation to consist of licensing to prostitutes which can be revoke if drug use, stds, etc are detected. This would drastically reduce the spread of STDs from prostution. This is vital as the rates of STIs are from 5 to 60 times higher among sex workers than in general populations Legalizing prostitution would also drastically lower sex trafficking as people would much prefer to hire a regulated prostitute who is vetted to be safe than the opposite. Lastly, regulation also means tax, which would mean more money for the government. I don't have specific numbers, but if implemented properly, legalizing prostitution could net the government money. Edit 1 Many have pointed out that my initial claim that Legalizing prostitution would also drastically lower sex trafficking is not valid. Many sources have been thrown around and the only conclusion I draw from so many conflicting sources is that more research is needed into the topic. This is a reupload as a mod told me to resubmit this thread due to a late approval<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prostitution Should Be Legal\n","id":"6f64ccf3-7195-4f27-bc52-5c2933a9796c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey be part of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>Turkey would be able to enter trade negotiations as part of the world's largest trading bloc giving it more power and leverage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey would have significantly more global influence if it joined the EU.\n","id":"e282dc70-9498-4054-83de-f45658e100d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Net Neutrality Necessary?<|ARGUMENT|>Net Neutrality is absolutely essential. A free exchange of ideas and information prevents government from limiting the rights of its citizens. If net neutrality is not maintained, a hypothetical oppressive government could use the ISP's to block, or slow down, any dissidents communication with the outside world or each other. Imagine you are an exiled political opponent of a government, and all they need to do to keep you quiet is to pay your ISP to do it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Affording ISPs the power to discriminate against certain types of traffic or content affords them the power to censor the internet and set societal norms.\n","id":"cea8fa7f-9a44-482e-9fa3-aee36436c482"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should God Have Tested Job?<|ARGUMENT|>Genesis 1:1 states that \"in the beginning when there was nothing, God created the heavens and the earth\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The omnipotence of Job's God is seen in His creation\n","id":"17e494eb-134d-4f2a-b4e8-3663d5162d73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The motivation comes from arguments with relatives over the network, which include allegations that they willfully choose to downplay sexism and sexual assaults in the Middle East, particularly during their reports on the Arab Spring movement, as well as their consistently always negative reports on Israel I've had people compare it to the way Fox News runs close to zero neutral or positive stories on Obama and his presidency, or takes a neutral story and has obviously negatively biased commentary or narration . In my eyes, it's WAY less biased and much better from a journalistic standpoint than any American news outlets, which tend to cater to their own audiences both right and left i.e. Huffington Post, Fox News, etc. Of course, if there IS a grain of salt that I need to be taking with Al Jazeera's reporting, then I want to hear it. I recognize the possibility that my liberal viewpoints cause me to miss a lot of things, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I get 90 of my news from Al Jazeera which might be either good or bad, depending on the answers I get.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Al Jazeera is one of, if not the most, accurate and unbiased mainstream news outlets currently producing material.\n","id":"6bb256f4-4cab-4bfd-87dc-c26e2f2ab369"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Fleeing refugees get recruited in refugee camps as well, thus social media does not seem to play a major role in the recruiting process of refugees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Major recruitment channels of terrorists are outside of Facebook and Twitter. Restrictions on these sites will not have a major impact.\n","id":"db143cb0-e28b-4703-8701-6b19822804b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>It is difficult to assess what 'good judgment' means, and it therefore should not be applied as a test for voting rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Good judgment is not a requirement we generally impose upon voting.\n","id":"7be6644a-9519-48f2-a0b8-08d468155e5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>Averting climate collapse requires a decrease in both production and consumption. However, capitalistic economies tend to prioritize the expansion of both production and consumption.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A socialist economy is better able to address long term issues, such as climate change\n","id":"60da817e-d036-43cf-a1ef-94acf559bdf1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, the highest grossing film of all time is Avatar at 2.8 billion. The next closest after that is Titanic at 2.2 billion on multiple releases and then Jurassic World at only 1.7 billion and Avengers at 1.5 billion. That's right, Avatar made over a billion dollars more than the 3rd highest grossing movie of all time. A few reasons I believe TFA won't pass Avatar Avatar made more than all 3 Star Wars prequels combined. Adjusted for inflation it beat the original Star Wars. Most projections put Star Wars at making between 1.5 and 2 billion, with 2 billion being a huge success. This is still 700 million away from Avatar. The sales of the more expensive 3D movie tickets that drove Avatar's box office results continue to decline in popularity. Star wars has traditionally not fared well internationally due to its U.S. centric fan base. Please, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Star Wars: The Force Awakens will NOT be the highest grossing movie of all time.\n","id":"de54796e-35af-4604-8857-bb3ebe4d222b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Blaming institutions for economic struggles seems to be a commonplace today. There are many people in my field of study, economics, that think correct policy can restore the US economy back to, and sustain ~4 GDP growth. Total output GDP is generally though to be the product of total factor productivity TFP , labor, and capital. TFP is typically what drives growth within an economy. It represents the efficiency of labor and capital, which is primarily driven by technology i.e. the internet allowed labor to be more productive through increase communication and other things. The law of diminishing marginal returns would dictate that when more labor and capital are added to the economy, they will provide less benefit output than those before them. This could be a reason for the majority of newly created jobs being low quality, but I digress. The main reason for my view is the nature of TFP. Productivity is the ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it. TFP has increased significantly over the last century as a result of the internet, transportation, communication, etc. In general, this increase in TFP is the primary reason for the fast GDP growth over that time period. Say that in 1950, 100 workers and 100 machines were required to make 100 units of output. 1970 85 workers and 85 machines can now produce 100 units of output because of an increase in TFP. 1990 60 workers and 60 machines 100 units of output 2010 25 workers and 25 machines 100 units of output Output is a very loosely defined term in this context My view If we look at TFP as efficiency on a scale from 0 100 , I would argue that over the last century or so we went from 10 to 90 using broad and probably inaccurate numbers here but the principle remains. This increase of 80 is what has allowed our economy to grow at such a fast rate, and it is simply not possible for us to continue growing anywhere near that rate going forward unless there is another internet like discovery. Paired with diminishing returns to labor and capital, the fact that TFP can't improve as much as it has leads me to the conclusion the our economy growth will continue to plateau. Eventually maybe soon, or already our population growth will outpace our economic growth, which means there will be less stuff available for each person, and standard of living will inevitably decline. Similar to Jeffery Lacker, I think that the financial crisis in 2008 was a structural realization and the 1.5 2 growth that we have been seeing since then is what we should expect going forward and we the Fed, consumers, government, etc should tailor our expectations going forward. I only have a bachelors degree in economics so if I'm off base hopefully someone more knowledgeable can set me straight.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the US economy is following the natural path of development and the only possible outcome is a decline in average standard of living.\n","id":"fbf17a9a-e3f3-4893-80a7-b1bbcbe082b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems to me that the Senate rules of filibuster are broken. Any vote today needs an almost 2 3 majority to pass, which is the type of system the Founders wanted to avoid once it failed under the Articles of Confederation. While I have been unable to find the specific rule that allows this, I find it ridiculous that a Senator know longer has to stand up and speak to filibuster a bill. I am perfectly fine with the Mr. Smith filibusters, such as Rand Pauls, where Senators must actually be on the floor and speak to maintain it. This allows them to express their views and actually show that they stand for something they truly believe in. Please, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the U.S. Senate filibuster should be changed.\n","id":"7b998a21-210b-4841-9785-905604e3d4f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bitcoin Be Adopted As Legal Tender Worldwide?<|ARGUMENT|>In May 2019, hackers stole $41 million worth of Bitcoin from the Binance exchange by deploying viruses and using phishing attacks to get security information.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consumers may face malware attacks allowing hackers to gain access to their Bitcoin wallets.\n","id":"4c8c19fc-7e7d-4102-a121-f9e38dbadd9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Wizards found in breach of these laws are dealt with severely, often being sentenced to Azkaban.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are laws which protect Muggles against cruelty by wizards.\n","id":"85623db0-5c07-4d70-aae1-ad775a5967f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Hermione Granger successfully brewed polyjuice potion in a girls bathroom without being caught or punished. She, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley all took the potion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These rules are flouted by the vast majority of students and, in many cases, teachers wilfully fail to enforce them.\n","id":"8c88ba9b-aa53-406c-a615-46e7f10538b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Sacred Scripture and the Church's traditional practice see in large families a sign of God's blessing and the parents' generosity.\" Catechism of the Catholic Church<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Catholic Church encourages having large families, regardless of the implications for the quality of life for the children and parents.\n","id":"4c7d47ee-ab6f-474d-8a62-cdd1888253bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Set up by the proprietors of Penny Arcade, Child's Play is a charitable organization that buys toys and games for children in hospitals. To me, this is a shameless PR grab that wastes money that could be better spent on the same recipients children in hospitals. One of the reasons that PA set up Child's Play was to show the gamer population in direct contradiction of the usual stereotype someone who is antisocial and violent. I think that the charity instead plays up another negative gamer stereotype being obsessed with video games and out of contact with reality. Being in the hospital is awful, this much is true. But when you get right down to it, a Playstation isn't going to make a weeklong hospital stay move out of the bad column in the kid's memories. Instead, that money should be used to cover actual medical procedures. The existing charity makes it looks like the gamer population can't comprehend the idea where something even medical intervention would be more important than the ability to play games. It's the viewpoint, more or less, of an addict. Another important aspect of this is theft. I worked with the public for two years, and experienced the fact that there are people who will steal anything that isn't nailed down and things that can be pried loose don't count as nailed down. My concern is that well meaning individuals are shelling out hundreds of dollars for hardware that will be used perhaps a dozen times before it's stolen. Unlike say, a heart monitor, an Xbox is something that a random passerby knows the value of and that can be fenced easily at the nearest shopping mall. Even if the equipment isn't stolen, everyone has seen what kind of condition publicly owned items are left in I know my college had to discontinue its bike share program after just 5 weeks, when all available bikes had been either lost, stolen, or damaged beyond usability . Even if these toys and games aren't getting stolen, you can bet that they're not taken good care of. Medical staff have more important equipment that actually saves lives to look after they can't be bothered that the Child's Play Xbox 360 has red ringed, or someone dropped the PS3 and now its tray won't close. In essence, I feel like the time and money spent on Child's Play is ultimately only making a bad situation slightly less miserable, and is doing it at the cost of actual medical treatment. The simple fact is that no one goes to the hospital to have fun, and if those dollars could be funneled into faster or better treatment, the children could get what they really want to go home healthy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Think that \"Child's Play\" Charity is a Waste of Money.\n","id":"fceced3c-078c-4b2d-b324-5a565f65c94c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is another  regarding language death, but I think that in an idea global society, we would have unique cultures but we would all have a solid common ground. If we all spoke the same language, misunderstandings, cultural resentment and a sense of us and them , which all contribute to hostilities between groups would be minimised. I would not want a homogeneous society, but a society that can understand each other 100 leads to better communication which leads to better cooporation, etc<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think language death is a good thing. The more unified we are as a species the more we collectively prosper.\n","id":"da353753-1c24-4381-98a6-e3fff4d97c2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>A parenting license could easily keep population numbers in check since it can be combined with a policy according to which no parent is allowed to have more than n children. For example, a prospective parent who applies for a license for having their 7th child might not be approved; this is a pro for the parenting license, since without such a license there might not be a policy in place to prevent someone from having an irresponsibly high number of children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A license should be required in order to have a child procreate.\n","id":"0586410a-f49a-473a-88d4-78fec811aed0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ted Cruz, first of all, has very little establishment support due to firstly, his perceived low chances at winning a general election resulting in low donor support and therefore very little campaign funding and secondly, his lack of congressional experience. Compounded with the fact that his far right, tea party inspired policy ideals which will prevent him from gaining any moderate or independent support and the questionability of his natural born status, Cruz's chances plummet even further. And these circumstances also serve to further lower his establishment and donor support. Honestly, as a Dem, I rather hope Cruz wins the Republican ticket because I can't see the Democrat having any challenge against him. But please, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ted Cruz has 0 chance at winning the presidential election and very little chance to win the Republican Primary\n","id":"ddfbe7a7-5d4b-4315-9cea-c4eda37fc06c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m bored and I always enjoy having this discussion, so I thought I\u2019d do a . I am open to changing my view if someone makes an argument that makes sense to me, although I\u2019ve had this discussion before and so far no one has been able to change my mind. Still, I am always open to new ideas. Basically, it seems very obvious to me that moral relativism is correct, and there are no objective moral facts. Whether or not something is morally permissible is completely up to the individual that you are asking. There is no \u201crule book in the sky\u201d as to what is right and what is wrong which means that everyone can have their own opinions of morality. The fact that many might disagree with you doesn\u2019t make you wrong, it only makes your opinion unpopular. The fact that an opinion is unpopular does not necessarily make it wrong. For example, most people like chocolate. But if you don\u2019t like chocolate, that doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re \u201cwrong\u201d about chocolate, it just means that you have a less common opinion about it. And I see this as very similar to opinions about morality. Stealing is widely considered to be morally wrong, but if a person has a different view of morality than most, there are interpretations in which stealing is morally permissible. These interpretations are not factually incorrect, they are just unpopular. A few things that will not change my view Religious arguments. I am an atheist, so citing the Bible will hold no more water to me than citing Harry Potter. Arguments which attempt to \u201cguilt\u201d me into changing my opinion. Arguments based on the idea that many cultures have similar opinions on certain aspects of morality. I have already explained why I don\u2019t believe that popularity defines right and wrong, and demonstrating that this occurs across cultures is just a variation on that same argument. I don\u2019t really know what would change my mind, but an airtight explanation of exactly why moral facts do exist might do it. Generally when I\u2019ve had this discussion before people present arguments that are full of holes. Be warned that I will be looking for holes in your argument and pointing them out if I find them. I do not do this because I don\u2019t wish to change my view, I do this because accepting an argument that is full of holes isn\u2019t logically rigorous. So  EDIT I just thought of another thing that won\u2019t . Citing the fact that many philosophers believe in moral facts will not alter my opinion. This is an appeal to authority fallacy if moral facts exist then there should be a case you can make for them that doesn\u2019t rely on \u201cexperts say so\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are no objective moral facts\/moral relativism is correct\n","id":"b57ead0c-05f3-4fde-bcb5-adce455d804d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>Many white women had the privilege to freely seek educational and other professional and civic opportunities because much of the caring duties were covered by women of color.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The historical success of many white women is due to them exploiting women of colour.\n","id":"edb43883-a7d1-49bf-8683-109d1ae20239"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, we must define superficial. Let's say superficial is judging a person's romantic value via non personality traits. On that definition, we are all superficial to some degree and that's ok by me. However, women are more superficial overall. Women judge a man's romantic potential more harshly on the following non personality traits 1 Income 2 Height 3 Race 4 Social status Facial and bodily attractiveness still matter to them quite a bit but not as much as for men. Women are so superficial, in fact, that their subjective perception of a man's physical attractiveness can be heavily influenced by how much money he makes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overall, women are more superficial than men when it comes to dating.\n","id":"bc6c0997-d5a3-4e98-ada7-caf59b309272"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>Professors can modulate their discourse in such a way that, even if they offer challenging views, they can do it in in a manner that does not hurt students, something a guest speaker may not care to do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A professor playing devil\u2019s advocate or courses that include alternate views may be sufficient to foster critical thinking. It is not necessary that young people are exposed to uncivil racist, xenophobic and misogynistic discourse.\n","id":"b8e07c1b-01c6-4b45-aef7-ced14eb730d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Australia Limit Immigration to Achieve a Sustainable Population?<|ARGUMENT|>Germany has a population of 82 Million and they live fine. This is a population many times greater than Australia yet they manage well due to good planning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Populating an area with humans and caring for the environment are not mutually exclusive. You can do both. Just like Eco-Tourism, you can do Eco-housing.\n","id":"bdb28f59-3744-4f8b-9e44-95b238c0cc50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many believe that the Iraq War 2003 2011 was solely fought because the United States wanted Iraq's oil reserves. However, the United States' reason for the 2003 invasion was that Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, was a human rights abuser that was building weapons of mass destruction and was helping al Qaeda. I don't see why it's believed that the US used all these concerns especially the al Qaeda one since 9 11 recently happened at the time as an excuse to go to war for oil besides the obvious answer . Maybe oil was a small factor involved? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Iraq War wasn't fought for oil.\n","id":"431025ea-23f8-4661-8525-099ef643337b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Polygamy Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>It is likely that especially those anchored in polygamy permitting traditions, such as Muslims, have a higher propensity to make use of favorable legislation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These religious tendencies are existing in the West as well and, thus, we cannot put lipstick on the danger.\n","id":"f16742ae-8b1a-40c0-b492-2e7a1df34f5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I don't think being gay is a choice. I think that is something you are born as. However, if someone believed it is a choice based on what they have personally seen and experience, I don't think that is hateful. Maybe they have good reasons for their views. Maybe their views make sense to them personally, who am I to judge and declare that they are wrong about their views? Maybe they are wrong? But so what? Holding the belief that being gay is a choice, I don't see how that hurts anyone directly. It is just a belief, its not like its saying that gay people are bad or anything. How does believing it is a choice hurt gay people? Why should someone's views hurt your own feelings? Maybe they were just raised that way and that is how they feel on a deep and personal level. I don't think its fair to label that person as hateful for how they feel about it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe it is hateful to think of homosexuality as a choice\n","id":"1358fc30-25a8-4226-9d6c-a3c30763b793"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>ISIS as an entity does not release material on Facebook or Twitter; they release it on their news apparatus Amaq News Agency which ISIS sympathizers or individual members then share via social media. Deleting ISIS accounts therefore might slow the spread of their propaganda, but it will do nothing to remove it from the internet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if Facebook and Twitter remove all associated accounts, groups like ISIS will find other social media sites to develop their online presence.\n","id":"ce7561b4-825a-4006-9923-eba1412fa5f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the citizen's right to benefit from technology, for privacy and secrecy, overrule the role of government?<|ARGUMENT|>Unfair and harsh consequences can follow sloppy law making. For example, in the US, it is a crime to view terrorist-related material online three or more times, with a penalty of up to 15 years in jail.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trying to regulate technologies despite how impossible it is is leading governments to pursue increasingly draconian policies. Overreach is inevitable.\n","id":"a041d4ef-02f6-47e4-939d-d2828aef1d4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify, I wholeheartedly oppose their domestic actions. However, I have some difficulty coming up with an argument against their actions in other countries. So for me, it's not so much that what I think they're doing is right per se. I just have a difficult time trying to come up with a reason for why it is wrong because I see the NSA's role, as a government agency, being at its core to protect America's citizens. For that reason, I think it's possible that what the NSA is doing in other countries is not necessarily wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think it's necessarily wrong for the NSA to be spying on citizens of other countries.\n","id":"b3d21250-6121-4323-a534-d581da679a85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is not meant as a disrespect to most organized religions, merely an observation i have come to. The widespread belief or following of most organized religions Christianity, Islam, Judaism is a sign of human weakness in a couple of ways. The need for an afterlife in most religions satisfies our general fears of death, and the impermanence and futility of our lives. The theory isn't backed by much scientific evidence as far as i know, so the reason to believe in an afterlife isn't that it makes more sense but that it makes life easier. A fear of death and impermanence so strong that one must believe in something that i would categorize as fairytale. This is what i would call a weakness. The need for moral guidance in life to need guidance from religion to know the difference between right and wrong is also a sign of weakness in that it shows a lack of judgement and wisdom for one to decide for themselves what is right or wrong. Furthermore, the need of a consequence by eternal damnation as persuasion not to do bad things , and the need of an incentive by eternal salvation to do good. Is a sign of weakness in that it shows that human nature is bad, or barbaric in a sense. EDIT Keep the comments coming guys i'll secede on that point moral guidance is not evidence for human weakness. But a motivation to believe in a creator.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The widespread belief of religion is a sign of human weakness\n","id":"600bd87a-933b-44a3-8849-fa21153a99d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Dolphins do it I've read that giraffes also get drink off spoiled fruit. Humans enjoy getting intoxicated. That's obvious. Every industrialized country has an alcohol industry. The US sells millions of bottles of beer every year. Furthermore, it's been shown that animals also enjoy being intoxicated. And because they can't think I want to get intoxicated they are going off an instinctual desire rather than a conscious decision. Our human brains also get us high on purpose to reward behavior that promotes us staying alive. Our brains give us a chemical cocktail every time we eat, in order to encourage us to eat. Same with sex and exercise. We also have receptors specifically for marijuana called endocannabinoid receptors. Why are those there? Our evolution doesn't require us to get high on marijuana so why do we have receptors for it? With regard to neither encouraging or discouraging intoxication, humans who are going to abuse it will do so without regard to laws and their health. If someone is an addict and hurting people or not supporting their family, then of course we should intervene. But only to protect others, not to stop someone from getting high.  EDIT Fixed my misconception. Thank you u Zippityzoppity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Getting high\/intoxicated is absolutely normal and it shouldn't be encouraged nor discouraged.\n","id":"f64ccb03-13da-460d-8b97-bbdab45199b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Homework Should Be Banned<|ARGUMENT|>Homework takes a lot of time up. Being young is not just about doing school work. It should also about being physically active, exploring the environment through play, doing creative things like music and art, and playing a part in the community. It is also important for young people to build bonds with others, especially family and friends, but homework often squeezes the time available for all these things.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homework takes a lot of time up. Being young is not just about doing school work. It should also a...\n","id":"10ccaec9-8486-46b5-b3cf-f9b86d39fc62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been seeing this around the net lately, the idea that nobody can be racist against certain groups of people if said group race ethnicity have power in a system or country. In the US, this is usually expressed as Women can't be sexist against men because men have all the power or black people can't be racist against whites because whites have all the power. This comes from a sort of artificial redefining of the word racist, which if one goes by the dictionary definition is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior, and if going by the way it is commonly used, means Treating someone badly because of their race . Now, some claim that racism requires Prejudice plus power, and it means that exclusively. This redefinition has no basis, and is utterly artificial in nature. If that's not the definition in the dictionary, and not the way people commonly use it, then where does it come from, and why does it override the other definitions? The motivations for such an arbitrary redefinition I can only guess, but my guess is that the motives are somewhat nefarious. So please, . EDIT I'm arguing against the idea that prejudice plus power can be the only definition of racism. When I say redefining, I don't mean adding on another definition. I mean actually redefining the word to mean only this definition. Sorry if that was not made clear.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everybody Can Be Racist\/Sexist\n","id":"cc6744b3-1eb2-404c-a4b2-1c42663ddfc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the Mediterranean Sea desiccate 5.5 million years ago?<|ARGUMENT|>Geophysical data suggest an abrupt ending of the Messinian salinity crisis related to an abrupt reflooding event. This would imply a significantly lower level of the Mediterranean Sea relative to the Atlantic Ocean.MIcallef et al., 2018, Sci. Reports<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Mediterranean desiccated partially 5.5 million years ago, its level decreasing by more than 500 meters due to evaporation\n","id":"c1d9e371-4586-40f1-a84e-9426bf9bc398"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should sperm donors have the same legal rights, responsibilities and limitations as other biological fathers?<|ARGUMENT|>In this instance, the law is placing limits on what adults can consent to, in order to protect children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The law frequently places limits on what individuals can or cannot consent to in order to protect individuals.\n","id":"55a316a2-5e3c-4505-88ed-4f8419cce6c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Discussing economics and history of wages economic collapse in this country with my peers only to find out that, every single one of them, without variance, without exception, believes that 1 It is simply impossible that in this day and age, the poor will ever stop being poor. 2 It is foolish to think that there will ever be a time in which it is acceptable to raise a family straight out of high school like it was during the boom of the 50s and 60s 3 Increasing wages, welfare, any kind of benefits, et cetera, will destroy this economy and cause massive inflation. I was almost brought to tears from the utter disgust I felt deep within myself when I was chatting with a friend of a friend who said in response to my claim that the average family makes about 5k less a year today than they did in 1999, and I quote, gt if they dont make minimum wage then making 5k less year doesnt necessarily impoverish people make them significantly less fortunate. i mean yeah i bet the avg family would love 5k more year but hey thats just not how things are anymore What. The. Fuck. Completely okay with the fact that income is going down for the average family. I am a loss here. Please, please, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Poor people in this country USA have already lost. There is already no hope; the billionaire class and media has convinced poor people that the reason they are poor is other poor people.\n","id":"933d13b0-ed98-4c25-b092-3c0fce917e94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do journalists have a moral obligation to display violent images?<|ARGUMENT|>By frequently keeping the identity of their sources as a secret, journalists comply with the requirements under international law to balance the freedom of press with the right to privacy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Journalists frequently keep the identity of their sources a secret, even if their revelation could be of significant public interest.\n","id":"e026a4cb-d1e5-4f74-bf9d-c9128a06ba81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Parliamentary Systems Enforce Proportional Representation?<|ARGUMENT|>In the 2015 UK General Election the Scottish National Party gained 56 seats, all in Scotland, with a 4.7% share of the national vote while the UK Independence Party, with 12.6%, gained only a single seat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Plurality systems can disproportionately benefit regional parties that can win districts where they have a strong following, while other parties with national support but no strongholds win few or no seats.\n","id":"4ee00a79-bbec-4077-a90e-15578ac12dc3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should China cease attempts to infringe on the 'one country, two systems' policy in Hong Kong?<|ARGUMENT|>The recent unrest has made Hong Kong appear unsafe, which makes it a less appealing investment hub.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Future investments, particularly foreign investments, are likely to be curbed as a result of the unrest.\n","id":"768da4a2-3184-46ce-96eb-17a58b916273"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was raised by a pretty radically liberal mother she was at woodstock . I don't necessarily agree with liberals either, but I believe they are at least focused on the people and not their money. I really want to see the other side of this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that most, if not all republican politicians are motivated by greed rather than in helping country US\n","id":"77d0ed58-7c7d-448e-81f9-2fe287614eca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Citizens United Was Wrongly Decided<|ARGUMENT|>While most of the population supported the Wall Street protests over two thirds of rich people surveyed felt that the federal government had gone too far in regulating business and free enterprise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rich have different views and interests than other classes in society.\n","id":"aec9ea02-84f0-4802-8bda-0fe1b79bc7b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The bane of indecisive people is picking where to go for food, especially for a couple. The most common play out goes as follows A What do you want to eat? B I don't really care A Okay, let's get Italian B No that's too heavy repeat until properly exhausted I posit that most people have been in that position before and generally hate it because it becomes a guessing game about what the other person wants. Rather than being the player solving the riddle, the one who says Don't care first or most insistently simply wants to release themselves of the burden to be considerate of others when determining where to eat. I am not saying they are bad people, but rather that Don't care simply means You choose, but be considerate of what I want. In any relationship, it is important to be considerate of the other, but there is an undeniable burden of cycling through what you know and balancing what you want with what the other s want. This isn't a super serious view, I do know what it's like to not actually care what to eat, but I think it would be fun to argue such a silly point.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When someone says that they \"Don't care\" about what to eat, they simply mean that they do not want to be in the position they are about to put the other person\/people in.\n","id":"f6925ef6-d55f-470d-ae09-0abdbf646d0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>okay so only thing science is doing that is good is space programs other than that everything around is built by engineering started from ballistas, catapults, siege towers to modern cars ,guns ,tanks and everything around us that we have today and engineering also helped us in doing so much thing with logic . will construction working is also all the buildings and everything done around us skyscrapers, railways, houses etc. what did science ever actually do ? i don't see any major medicine changes we are still stuck with same diseases that exist for really long time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think science is useless for humanity and didn't do anything for it,and is mostly just circle jerked.Engineering and construction working did everything for humanity.\n","id":"083d5678-a8bc-4c9d-8e7e-fdaf1268f53e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>An increase in female characters in violent video games, resulting from the portrayal of gender equality may make future games more likely to reduce violence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Portraying gender equality in video games may make future games less violent which is beneficial.\n","id":"36f29ead-f474-4b09-9808-6aa89b8177ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ever read the 'Am I ugly' threads or anything similar, usually they follow the same pattern. Somebody will pose a question in which they highlight their insecurities and on going struggles as a consequence of their problem. Inevitably, the replies will come in and the person will be met with 'You look fine' 'You look really good' 'Just shave off your hair and you'll look like Jason Statham' 'You're really pretty, you have kind eyes' etc. Littered amongst these replies will be a smattering of much more negative, cutting replies where the OP's insecurities are confirmed. The truth though is often society at large will have the perspective of those negative people. Don't get me wrong, the people who come on and do their best to pick these poor unfortunate souls up like myself are saints. The fact they go out of their way to try make someone feel better about themselves is a testament to their character but the reality is life is much harsher than these altruistic self aware redditors. It's like the 'Am I too small' when asking about dick size, yeah if the girl is totally kind and really self aware and tolerant she isn't gonna reject a guy on account of his dick size, but the majority of girls, not even mean ones will probably not want to be with a guy with a small package. But Reddit would make it seem like this is just in guys head and something only they worry about which is not true. If on one of those threads someone comes in with a dash of reality and says 'You have to find the girl who won't care because believe me many will' that will probably be the most accurate reflection of real life. Reddit exists within a bubble. x200B I remember reading before that girls judge you based off your worst feature, it's a bit of hyperbole but I think it has some truth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The most critical, harshest and brutal replies on Reddit often reflect reality\n","id":"dc2a4c93-225e-4da4-80f8-6842f255a524"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that bicycle riders should be required to obtain a special license to ride in the street. The license should be much like the M1 a motorcycle rider must obtain. This is mostly due to my belief that if they are on the road, they should be required to know all the road laws and rules. The Process I propose all bikers should have to go through would be similar to the process for a motorcycle permit. Bikers should have to take a written test that will quiz them on the rules and laws of the road, including those specific to bicycles. Hand signals etc. Bikers should have to have a 6 month permit if under 21, which will restrict their night riding. A riding skills test testing their capability to ride a bike and their ability to do everyday maneuvers. Bikers must be at least 16 years old to ride on the road With these laws I think the roads would become a much safer place for cars and bikers, and many laws will be cleared up for bikers who don't understand the law. Any funding earned through this program could also benefit bike programs like the implementation of bike lanes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bicycle riders who ride in the street should be required to obtain a license much like cars and motorcycles\n","id":"e11e80b7-dd9e-4b5d-ad2a-8468fdcf7a54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>China's immense economic development over the last decades came with huge periodic unemployment and depleting social safety nets. As a result, the people of China are no happier than they were 25 years ago<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pure economic advancement may not be the best indicator of the improvement of the quality of life in a country. Growth must be accompanied by equitable income distribution.\n","id":"4aa816b2-277e-43bb-aeb1-219bd6e26208"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a post in response to various X should be stay apolitical posts. In my view, any interaction with any kind of aspect with society is commentary and therefore will influence people, no matter if intended or not. If you have a piece of media that, for example, uses our understanding of marriage, it does the same as a piece that would, for example, display any kind of polygamous relationship model as the norm. In both cases, you can argue that by displaying something as given and not question it any further, you legitimize it within the frame of your work. It is important to recognize base asumptions as such and not to forget that they are, after all, just that, asumptions, not an objective normal . In my mind, it is important to be aware of what you are creating. That doesn't mean that you can't create a world that has problems like racism etc, but it has to be put in context. If you create a world where, for example, women are reduced to sex objects and have no agency on their own, it is harmful to do that without giving it any kind of commentary on the matter. This commentary doesn't have to come in the form of any changes to the story As in, having women actually overcome that but if it doesn't acknowledge something as bad in the eyes of the people affected, it presents of message of there being nothing wrong and effectively silencing the affected group in question. Again, this can be done to fit into a much larger picture, like actively making a point that a society dehumanizes a certain group of people, but at the end of it all, a point should have been made. I also don't think anyone could deny that media has influence. Of course, because one film shows women with no agency doesn't mean that everyone who saw it would adopt that view instantly, but I don't think it has no influence either, especially when it affects an entire genre or industry. I mean, if it had no effect, propaganda wouldn't be a thing, would it? Also, I included a qualifier in the title so that an example with some sort of media that doesn't interact with anything isn't really brought up. In most cases, there can be made a case in which even the smallest of story can be viewed through that lense, but in the end, this threat isn't about finding one example in which it could be possible, but to apply a general rule of thumb. Just keep in mind that interacting with society is a VERY low bar to pass and is asumed to have been passed by any kind of media that isn't explicitly made not to pass it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any media Film, Book, Game is political in nature if it interacts with any part of society at all. And every kind of media should keep that in mind.\n","id":"eb2422c7-36ed-47c5-a04d-8aa0eb1e4809"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Religious people who are looking to be good would do better to abandon religion. This argument is multi faceted, so feel free to address any or all points of it. Also, note I'm talking about the three main monotheisms here, not other religions. 1 Generally when this argument is made people point to things like, say, Muhammad being a rapist war criminal who advocated violence upon nonbelievers. The typical counterargument is that Muslims aren't obligated to interpret the Quran in any one particular way, and if they want to whitewash those passages, conclude they were allegory, assert they no longer apply to modern people, etc., they are free to do so. I take no issue with that if I want to get really absurd in my reading of Moby Dick and what it means to me, I could conclude that it's a romance novel about a man loving a whale, and the harpoon is actually a metaphor for Ahab's penis that he want's to insert in the whale in an act of homosexual bestiality. That's my right. You might think it's wrong, as in fact I do, but if I believed that you can't take my belief away from me. Fine. BUT we also have to note that the benign religious folks usually claim their religion is their motivation to do good in the world. If your reading of the Bible is the thing that instills a desire to go feed the hungry and heal the sick, great But at some point, having read the Bible, you also encountered a passage that commands you to stone promiscuous women on their father's doorstep, among many other unpleasant verses. You can provide countless reasons, as the religious often do, as to why that verse no longer applies, why it was just a metaphor, why a loving God wouldn't want you to do that, etc but the point is you have to provide some excuse as to why feed the hungry is valid and stone the harlot isn't. Folks who just, say, volunteer at a soup kitchen because that's what they like to do in their free time are presented with no such problem their ideology doesn't require them to conjure up ways to dodge the barbaric aspects of it, since those barbaric aspects aren't there. In the same way, if you tell me you're a Muslim, I know that your holy book was founded on the teachings of a guy who occupied his time on earth with murder, torture, rape, thievery, slavery, child sex slavery, wars of conquest, etc. Now, you can provide me with endless reasons why you don't adhere to those parts of your ideology and just think the message of the Quran is all about treating others well and respectfully, but if I pose the verses regarding the atrocities I just mentioned, you'll have to find some way to wiggle your way out of them applying to you. Non religious good people are under no such obligations. It's enough for them to say I do good because I like doing good, end of story for the good religious, it's a constant struggle to provide reasons why they only follow the good parts of their book and not the bad. If they simply dropped the religious component to their beliefs they could still do good for goodness sake, but they wouldn't be weighed down by all the bad baggage their ideology has carried for the last couple thousand years or so. 2 This concept also applies to modern day and recent history, both of which are rife with examples of religious folks religious authority figures religious nations behaving quite badly. Take the sex scandal which is a polite way to say decades long epidemic of child rape, the perpetration and coverup of which rises all the way to the highest authorities of the faith surrounding the Catholic church, for example. If you belonged to a massive youth soccer league and it was revealed that league was embroiled in a conspiracy to rape participating male children, and the rape and coverup conspiracy of this atrocity extended not only throughout the authority figures presiding over your own team, but all the way up to the president or head coach or whatever of the organization, do you stick with the league and finish the season, or do you nope the fuck out of there? When a multitude of league authority figures come out to assert that the raped children were asking for it or seduced them, does that make you want to play for them in the next match, or punch them all in the face, leave, and never look back? I can't see how any sane person wouldn't choose the latter when answering both of those questions, and yet even after the sex scandal excuse me, authorized and shrouded conspiracy to commit mass child rape broke, many Catholics just closed ranks and continued being members of an organization that had proved to the world it was rotten, in the most vile way, to the core. I can't for the life of me understand how that's a rational response. Much of my family is Irish Catholic, and their faith not just in God, which would be one thing, but their faith in the Church wasn't shaken one jot when these facts were revealed. I have a hard time respecting them after that. No matter their professed reasons for still being Catholic e.g. well my local Monsignor is a really nice guy , they are, in my mind, still choosing to be on Team Child Rape. There are plenty of nice guys they could affiliate with who aren't connected to a child rape ring, there are plenty of good things they could do in the world that don't require navigating a child rape ring, and yet they remain where they are, all bought into a scheme that perpetuated the sodomization and sexual abuse of young boys for decades. This phenomenon also manifests itself in Islam. Islamic radicals or perhaps fundamentalists, since they're generally the ones following the teachings of Muhammad most literally are responsible for an undue amount of pain, suffering, and death on this earth. By most measures, Islam tops the leaderboards in things like acts of terrorism, FGM, assaulting and disfiguring women for refusing to adhere to antiquated dress codes, chronic intolerance of homosexuality, state sanctioned murder for the crime of apostasy or witchcraft, etc. If you choose to be a Muslim and don't condone any of these things great, you're the kind of Muslim we need assuming we need any Muslims at all, since in that religious absence 90 of these religiously motivated atrocities would evaporate overnight, and even if you, as a Muslim, aren't complicit in their crimes, you're still identifying by a label that's rightly feared and hated across the globe for them. And when it comes to Islam we often hear the it's just a tiny minority of Muslims who do think bad things. I disagree The source, to be sure, it quite biased in its anti Islamic stance, but the sources I'd say most of them it's compiled e.g. Pew, WPO, etc. are some of the most respectable polling groups on the planet, and they dispel the myth that it's only a tiny minority of Muslims who do think radical or fundamental things based on their faith. Pew reports 82 of Egyptian Muslims, for example, support stoning as a punishment for adultery. These quite often aren't small numbers we're dealing with. And if you identify as a Muslim, you deliberately tie yourself to that 82 majority in Egypt that supports chucking rocks at a girl until she dies if she's even so much as accused of cheating on her spouse. And no, I won't find the well American Christians are just as say homophobic as American Muslims argument particularly compelling, since I'm not defending Christianity while deriding Islam alone I think they're both bad. The one religion I will defend in the modern context is Judaism. Much criticism has been leveled against Israel for what many see as war crimes and human rights violations against its surrounding Muslim neighbors. But as an Israeli Jewish friend said to me years ago Israel's foreign policy is about survival. Israel is a tiny strip of land backed against the sea and surrounded by nations that have proven time and time again their willingness to wage war against it in and effort to, as groups like Hezbollah seek to do, not just reclaim the holy land but kill every last Jew residing there. If the various malignant aspects of Christian or Islamic society like FGM or homosexual intolerance were a only a response to repeated attempts to wipe them off the map as an ethnic religious national group, b actually served some purpose in defending against said attempts which mutilating women's vaginas or attending pro life rallies doesn't do , and or c the Christian Muslim worlds were actually facing grave, imminent threats to their very existence, I'd be more sympathetic to their atrocities, the way I am with the Jews of Israel. But, for Muslims and Christians, their malignant aspects a aren't in response, b serve no defensive purpose, and c can't be justified through the fear of an impending eradication of their tribe. To refocus, point 2 asserts that if you have to not only divorce yourself from not only the malignant prescriptions of your ideology, not only the nasty behavior of your ideological brethren in history, but also divorce yourself from the atrocities being committed by your religious peers, perhaps you're believing in the wrong ideology. 3 If the morality of the religious stems from religion itself, one might wonder three things a When a religious person does good things, does it really count if the only reason they're doing them is to score morality points in their system of religious justice? If a religious person goes on a mission trip and builds a house for the homeless, are they doing it just because they're nice, or because they believe an ancient text is telling them to and they think it'll score them some brownie points with the Lord? b When a religious person doesn't do bad, why aren't they? If life without God's guidance is just a meaningless morass of sin and villainy, is their belief in God really the only safeguard against their potential for barbarism? Say you had to choose between two folks to sit next to on the bus person X believes that murder and rape are wrong in an of themselves, and would never find it morally acceptable to do those things person Y believes that murder and rape are bad because God says so. Which person would you prefer to sit next to? If it were revealed over the shitty bus TV during transit that God had been scientifically debunked, there's nothing stopping person Y from stabbing you to death and raping your girlfriend, while person X would watch that broadcast and not act any differently for having seen it. c If the only thing keeping them following the good parts of their ideology and ignoring the bad are some combination of whitewashing, ignoring, and mental gymnastics, there's not a lot logically preventing them from becoming radicalized. Some authority figure can pull out the very same book they draw all their good ideology from and flip a few pages to the bad. If you live your life according to the teachings contained in a book, and there's plenty of evil contained in that book, you're just one reinterpretation or mental slip away from believing stoning people to death might actually be okay after all. Point being, if you draw your morality from a book chalk full of do this s and don't do that s, we can never really be sure if you're doing good and not doing bad because that's the kind of person you are, or if you're trying to be the person you think a 2000 year old book wants you to be. 4 In a slight contradiction of point 1, I'd also assert that large swaths of all three main monotheistic religious texts are inherently malignant. Sam Harris was, I think, the first person I've heard to propose this challenge could you, given, say, 24 hours, rewrite the commandments prescribed in any given religious book to be more moral than they currently are? The oft cited Ten Commandments, for example, are really cherry plucked favorites pulled from multiple separate renditions of such commandments, generally quite lengthy, some of which contain quite lengthy details on ox goring, or not suffering a witch to live. Could you not include or amend some commandments to be better than they currently are? Where's the passage on enriching and weaponizing uranium? Might that not be a good thing to slip in there? And what's with this Hell thing, anyways? Is eternal damnation and suffering really the best fate for a guy who pays his taxes, helps old ladies cross the street, and is a loving partner and father just because he doesn't believe in or accept God? No if you gave any person with even just a high school education 24 hours to rewrite the prescriptions in any religious text, you'd end up with a product that's more moral and more relevant to our modern era. The reason the texts in question aren't comparatively moral or relevant is because 5 They're fucking old. This might seem to be a minor qualm, but it's actually quite serious if you draw morality and life guidance from any religious text you are, in essence, asserting that we, as a species, had all the knowledge we'd ever need to live a good and moral life available to us 2000 years ago, courtesy of desert dwelling savages who, when they weren't busy transcribing the word of God, were preoccupied with murder, hacking limbs off of people, keeping slaves, and raping children. These kind of people did not know everything we need to know in the modern age proscriptions against eating certain kinds of food, for example, were likely quite advantageous in an age before we knew what bacteria was, so it made sense to avoid eating stuff prone to it altogether, but in the modern age it's perfectly safe to eat pork or shellfish, and the only reason some people don't do that today is because they're relying on the traditions of ignorant, illiterate desert nomads who wandered the earth thousands of years ago like their wisdom is something worth basing your life choices off in the modern era. It's absurd. It's outdated. We've advanced since their time, and we'd do well to dispose of their ignorant superstitions. You'll note that while millions of people are happy to adhere to these thousand year old traditions when it comes to eating pork, or non Halal meat, those same people, for whatever inexplicable reason, would never visit a doctor who practices 2000 year old techniques when it comes to, say, treating the cancer they've developed. To assert that ancient savages who died out a hundred generations ago possessed some kind of knowledge relevant to the way we ought to live our lives today is as ignorant as those folks who use their smartphones to tweet about the evils of unnatural vaccinations, oblivious to the fact that the technology that allows them to promote their ignorance about vaccines is the same kind of technology that produced vaccines in the first place, and both are unnatural. To wrap this up, I'm having a great deal of difficultly understanding why anyone who wants to be good or do good in the world would tether themselves to something like religion it's an ancient, antiquated ideology that carries an astounding amount of negative baggage it's accumulated ceaselessly for thousands of years, and it gives people ample reason to guess at your true motivations in doing good, and wonder just how sharp of a knifes edge you're walking when it comes to your potential to do evil. Ya'll know what to do. Cheers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious people who are looking to be good would do better to abandon religion.\n","id":"600ec38c-b467-40a4-abce-81df5c8c84b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>Because Asset greatly reduces vote-splitting, a party may run several candidates, and the voters can hold corrupt people accountable without enabling the opposite party.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Corruption under Asset would only be the case so long as the voters vote for the current lot of corrupt, power-hungry politicians.\n","id":"c3b1f6ae-c660-4b5a-9702-8ed6fab17c3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Teachers already pass the criminal background checks required for gun ownership. Why not go the extra mile and allow them to conceal carry. I'm aware that most will choose not to but I think that the fact alone that they might be armed will deter many prospective shooters. I read that time and time again these types of shooters pick places where they know people will not be armed. Elliot Rodger mentioned in his manifesto that he wanted to commit his shooting on Halloween but increased police presence meant he wouldn't last long. EDIT To be clear I don't want to arm or train teachers, I just think that they should be able to obtain conceal carry permits if they wish to seek one and pass the required checks and balances for it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To deter school shootings, teachers should be able to conceal carry.\n","id":"8fc2c26a-1333-42d6-970c-02f57cd0d02b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>Statistics on the women of colour winning elections at the same rate as men do not take into account the lack of women of colour that are actually able to run for elections due to barriers of entry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women of colour are the lowest represented demographic of those running for office in political parties of the US, compared to white men, white women and men of colour, in both the Republican and Democrat parties.\n","id":"a27db56c-6541-4bd5-abcd-c8aac99b1d1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Sing Problematic Christmas Songs?<|ARGUMENT|>The song 'Can't Feel My Face' by The Weeknd is about being high on cocaine and was hugely successful in the charts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some song lyrics promote or glorify drug use which can influence listeners to consume drugs.\n","id":"82a7b41e-ae23-42ee-be33-a2435c8cb3a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The mere concept of making certain substances illegal to consume, buy, sell, and produce is immoral. It ultimately allows a select group of people law enforcement personnel to use lethal force against people who are engaging in consensual behavior. You may argue that a drug dealer is taking advantage of an addict, because the addict cannot control his addiction. However, the addict has made a series of choices leading up to his addiction. He was not initially forced into that position. Making drugs illegal creates drug cartels. If drugs were legal, they would be traded like any other good. When they are illegal, growers, dealers, and buyers cannot rely on law enforcement to enforce normal rule of law that applies to trade no stealing, abiding by contracts, etc. . Therefore, they resort to self enforcement. This often takes the form of extreme violence, and the creation of what amounts to a terrorist organization. In other words, by making the drug trade illegal, evil people who are already comfortable with breaking the law, are primarily the ones attracted to the drug business. The drug trade is only violent because the government forces it to be. Even if we assume that legalizing drugs would have the effect of increasing the number of drug users in a given population, does this justify government intervention? I would much rather have people voluntarily destroy their own lives than have the government choose to destroy them. The war on drugs seems to be largely ineffective. Tens of billions of dollars per year are wasted on the war on drugs, yet drug use is still prevalent. In Europe, specifically the Netherlands, where drugs are minimally enforced there seems to be less of a drug abuse problem. EDIT I see that many people are assuming that I also advocate legalization of false advertisement. I do not advocate this. I believe companies should not be permitted to lie about the nature of their product. Hope this helps clarify my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We Should Legalize all Drugs\n","id":"7a33a419-3b23-4db6-8d93-0c4851ff85cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide?<|ARGUMENT|>The amount of taxes that countries level on each other's goods and services can vary based on the relationship the countries have with one another.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An improved relationship is could further improve the trade relations between the countries.\n","id":"097826e5-2b13-4222-b4a9-e202976fa61a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cultural Anthropology should be a required course for all high school students.<|ARGUMENT|>An American Academy of Pediatrics AAP reports that too much work and too little play for children can have long-term negative consequences \"Colleges are seeing a generation of students who appear to be manifesting increased signs of depression, anxiety, perfectionism and stress\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High school curricula are very demanding as they are, more subjects would be an extra burden for students.\n","id":"f4a18051-08c7-47cc-b50e-4259d81b938b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>Other teachers of different belief systems can be just as incoherent, cruel, and contradictory. A reasonable person tries to understand all views without letting emotions get in the way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There exists much preaching that is not contradictory, cruel, or incoherent.\n","id":"8bc54068-ed80-4af1-a6ec-dbc1c2fb01c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was reading around a bit today, based on the vote for women in the draft, and finding a lot of people being against the draft. I understand the idea of not wanting to be drafted, but the lack of a draft seems asinine to me. Personally, the way I see it, there are 4 options, only 2 of which are viable. Forced conscription, everyone is forced to sign up and train after a certain age. Likely the best option, as it leads to always having a trained and full military at all times, which is useful as an emergency measure, but I see the arguments against as it leads to people being in fights when they aren't strictly necessary and don't want to be Draft, where people are called in by numbers as needed. Leads to the fewest number of people who aren't needed to be in the fighting being in the fighting, but still provides some measure of a force. However, they're normally much poorer in training as a result. Still a realistic option Volunteer only military. This seems like an unrealistic idea that could never work. Yes, everyone used would be better trained than in a draft, but if there aren't enough soldiers then problems exist. There's the argument that there should always be enough volunteers for the military, and if there isn't then it's an unnecessary war, but I disagree. To the best of my knowledge even WW2 had a form of draft, and not many would argue it was unnecessary. Overall I don't believe this argument is reasonable realistic. No military. Not seen many arguments for this, but thought I should address it anyways. Seems hopelessly idealistic and just plain silly. Not possible in any way in my eyes I may have a hard time strictly 'changing' my view, but would definitely appreciate any attempts to challenge it and make me rethink it. Thank you EDIT For clarification, I'm not saying it should constantly be used, that falls more in line with forced conscription in my eyes, which I'm fine with but see arguments against as having validity. What I'm arguing is that the system shouldn't be torn down I'm against the draft type arguments because it's a necessary safeguard, a necessary evil so to speak, to keep it around as a panic button<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should always be a draft, or draft-like system, in place\n","id":"a573d720-99da-478a-97f0-487fe9ca7170"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems that Israel has had a massive destabilizing influence on the middle east by igniting racial religious tensions between the Jewish and Arabic peoples, especially the Arabs who were displaced by Israel forcing them out of their homes. This has Helped lead to the modern expression of fundamentalist Islam and Islamic terrorism against the West, who helped kick Muslims out in favor of immigrant Jews and so are hated. The most common defense I hear is that it was 'returning the Jewish homeland,' but no other group seems able to make that claim. The Old Testament Torah even claims that the Jewish people took it originally from native tribes why give it to Israel instead of the native tribes if we're trying to 'return it', and why not give Mexico back to the Aztec or Olmec people? More realistically, why do we care whose ancestors lived in a place a thousand years ago more than we care about the people who lived there within living memory whose families were forced out of their homes, and who continue to be pushed back by Israeli settlements. Another argument I hear is that many Jewish people fled to Israel during the Holocaust. This makes sense, but I don't understand why they stayed and were given rule over the land by the UN instead of being allowed encouraged to return to their previous homes, with some form of restitution for goods or property that couldn't be returned. Note that I'm not claiming we should displace the Israelis now, I don't think it would be effective in reducing tension and would only serve to kick more people out of their homes. I just want to understand why some people insist that Israel's founding was good and or necessary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel should never have been made\n","id":"2ac7e15c-82f3-449d-b63b-c17cd4ea09b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Wind energy, Debate on whether Wind Energy should be part of the fight against global warming<|ARGUMENT|>Wind energy is as sporadic and inconsistent as the wind. This may mean that electrical grids can't handle wind energy. If this is true, wind energy is not a viable solution to global warming.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wind energy, constrained by electric grid, can't help global warming\n","id":"f09b7698-886f-42c5-a16e-12bc0bcc7110"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TLDR I am looking for solid, logically sound apologia Clarification I am not saying there is solid reason to firmly deny the existence of any godlike beings. However, so far, I have come to believe that there isn't an argument beyond personal feelings that justifies the existence of a god in general let alone the god of the bible. Yes I am specifically putting the burden of proof in the hands of people defending the existence of a god, if you want to challenge me on that, we can engage in that discussion, too. Background In general, I find it to be helpful if one knows a little bit about the person one is trying to convince, so here is a tiny bit of mine. I grew up catholic and spent a significant chunk of my childhood in different church groups. I got to know the bible in the German catholic translation relatively well, as well as the barebones basics of text criticism. When I went to uni I started studying maths and philosophy so especially formal logic and later switched to physics. Around a year ago I asked myself why I believe in god, and after failing to find an answer for myself I started to go looking for one and well now we are here in sort of a last ditch effort Why I hold this believe Arguing for a negative claim is quite awkward, but let me just go through the major arguments I either used to use to justify my belief in god or have heard from others on my question to be convinced. I will try to formulate them in the structure of \u201c list of premises therefor conclusion \u201d, not to mock the argument, but because that is a structure where it is easy to see if an argument is convincing or not. By that I mean A The conclusion logically follows from the premises, ie one cannot imagine a universe where the premises are all true and logic work but the conclusion is false. B The premises are all true. They are either supported by their own arguments of the same structure, are tautologies, or are at least evident aposteriori. So let\u2019s go through them The Cosmological Argument \u201cThere was a beginning of time therefor there must have been something before it.\u201d This argument fails me twofold, first up \u201cbefore time\u201d is inherently meaningless, it\u2019s equivalent to \u201cnorth of the north pole\u201d or \u201cbeyond infinity\u201d, secondly, why is a universe that is finite in time in the backwards direction and always existed impossible? The positive reals don\u2019t go further back than 0 and don\u2019t have a beginning either. Argument from faith \u201cPeople believe in god therefor god must exists\u201d Here, if we restrict ourselves to a meaning of \u201creal\u201d that matches up at least closely with what I obviously meant by the word in the title and not a definition by which Harry Potter is real, I don\u2019t really see how the conclusion follows from the premise. I can easily imagine a world in which no dragons merfolk demons exist, yet people sincerely believe in them or can even testify to have seen them. Evidence from Miracles \u201cMiracles happen therefor some power makes them happen\u201d this one obviously needs some definition of what exactly a miracle is, but I would be happy to accept that miracles as described in the new testament would be evidence enough of believing in god. If someone can provide a well documented instance of a miracle occurring, I\u2019d be stoked. Things I\u2019d count for this as well are A prophecies, but that always leads to discussions of the minutia of what text was written when and how well the translations align and I am frankly not well enough equipped to handle those , B evidence of intelligent design Argument from morality \u201cWithout a god objective morals can\u2019t exist, those do exist therefor god exists\u201d Both things problematic again, first up the premise that without god morals can\u2019t exist definitely needs evidence, since there has been quite a bit of atheist moral philosophy, secondly I would argue we don\u2019t really have morals derived from god\u2019s existence, in my experience the morals derived from the scriptures vary way more than those based in humanism alone. If you suggest however that objective morality exists and that those by the definition of what god means to you imply the existence of a god, I would ask you to provide evidence of the existence of those objective morals. Pascals\u2019s wager Since I said specifically that there is no reason to believe in god this, for once, is not a non sequitur in this debate yey . Pascals argument treats \u201cinfinite\u201d in a quite unfounded way, but even ignoring that, it doesn\u2019t distinguish between any beliefs that imply infinite happiness, so if the argument was solid, it would also make it rational to believe any other thing that, if believed in promises infinite happiness. While this technically doesn\u2019t refute the argument itself, I hope we can agree that this is not a reasonable thing to live after. Presuppositional argument So, this one is a little weird, I have mostly heard it as a \u201cget ya \u201d from people like Ken Ham. As I understand it, it goes \u201cThe concept of god exists, therefore god exists\u201d. However, I never understood how that argument uses that we are talking about god, or is this supposed to mean that anything we can have a concept of has some sort of \u201cexistence\u201d. I mean yeah, I am happy to acknowledge god\u2019s existence in the same realm as the existence of super man or santa, but I am pretty sure that is not what Ham argues for. God of the gaps \u201cThere are things that science doesn\u2019t understand therefor there must be something not understandable by science\u201d Here the problem lies with the fact that not everything that is currently not understood is inherently un understandable. I personally also find \u201ccollection of all things not understandable through the scientific method\u201d a pretty weird concept of god and one that doesn\u2019t really align well with any major religion. How you can convince me You can convince me by offering a sound argument that concludes that a god must exist, where \u201cgod\u201d isn\u2019t just a new name for a thing we already have another term for that is not supernatural ie not a \u201cgod of the gaps\u201d and where the premises are justified either through another argument held to the same standards, are observable scientifically accepted or are tautological.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no reason to believe a god exists\n","id":"b52f7ca0-5ace-453d-a5e8-bad356efd2b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We have reached a time where the availability of options makes the world operate less efficiently and our live less and less worth living. Here are some examples The various social media Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Google , Tumblr, Foursquare, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Quora and a few hundred more. More than 50 different yoghurts in a supermarket. And equivalent things can be said for almost any product. As a result, it has become almost impossible to buy healthy food which happens to make up only 20 of the supermarket. Being overweight has become the norm. More food is being thrown away than is eaten. 1 million science papers are published every year. Guess what percentage of those are actually relevant. The rest is just additional junk everyone has to deal with that hampers scientific progress. Some more things Accepted payment methods, financial instruments, laws and governmental regulations, restrictions on startups, options for weddings, funerals, the list goes on. No area is spared from excess complexity. Children are not raised by their parents anymore, but by various institutions. The parents are too busy dealing with the complex world surrounding them. The same goes with taking care of the elderly. Dating and marriage are forever transformed. Why stick to one option when there are 50 more waiting on Tinder? Are we gonna stay together in good times as in bad times? Nah Even the entertainment sector is not spared 300 hours of video added to YouTube every minute. 1000 movies are released each year. Do not miss There are now 67 categories on Youporn. You better do some good research before you start jerking off Then there is also device fragmentation and app fragmentation. We have now 1.6 million apps on Android, 1.2 million on iTunes. There are 10000 active subreddits and a total of 2 billion Reddit comments. Yet the majority of people have no idea of how technical things work computers, Internet, data security, biotechnology, no clue. People spend most of their time on feed type of media Facebook, Reddit, TV, video games, etc. . Everything is served on a plate, passivity is rewarded. Multitasking has become the default way of working. Mobile notifications make sure that we are constantly distracted. We live through the day constantly responding to external stimuli. Time for reflection and planning is a rarity. This staggering amount of available choices lead to paralysis and the complexity of the world leads to inefficiency. Even capitalism isn't efficient anymore. Marketing needs to go out of its way to generate needs in people that have already everything. A huge bubble of bullshit jobs has been created that only exist because other bullshit jobs depend on them. Many jobs require us to be available 24 7. Just because technologies allow us to do that and because everyone else does it. Financial markets have become completely incomprehensible. Two thirds of transactions is high frequency trading done by computers. No single person knows how the finances of a bank or a country look like, so vast are the various intricacies of debts, legal bindings and ongoing transactions. So yeah, I could go on, but let's leave it at that, the world is complex. And inefficient. I am just stating how I see the world. And I don\u2019t think it is a positive thing. Positive in a sense that it would improve our lives. In fact, this complexity leaves us vulnerable because we cannot understand anymore how our country is governed, who holds the power, how we might be manipulated or how we might get exploited. If people would want to start a revolution nowadays, no one would know what exactly to revolt against or against whom. And this complexity is only bound to increase over time. Do I have a solution? Not really. But maybe you can provide one. Or change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The world has become too complex\n","id":"ff8b4542-0943-4bf7-8089-68d1ee103f56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT a portion of replies I'm getting are focused on the defination of 'libertarian' and the rainbow of american groups that claim it for their particular beliefs. If in doubt, replace 'libertarian' with 'minimally regulated, minimal government intervention' in the following argument. Disclaimer, I'm a Brit who's also lived and worked in several developing countries, so I've seen first hand the damage, exploitation and general cost to societies of un regulated or highly corrupt health and safety at work laws. I also don't have the same knee jerk association of unions and criminal gangs that seems to prevail in discussions I've watched americans have. That said, let's move into the meat of the disscusion. 1 a libertarian economy is not interfered with by the goverment. You want to force people to sign slavery contracts? it's allowed. By the same token however, there are no laws preventing people from forming unions, or those unions taking action to promote the interest of their members. If the industry can maintain blacklists so can the unions. If a company decides to close stores to punish union members they run the risk of a rival firm that will work with unions taking the bulk of the sales in that area. An antagonistic culture between unions and corporations is not the only option of course, and companies with forms that favour longer term thinking like walmart, ironically but also Waitrose in the uk employee owned might thrive when others get bogged down in strikes and penalties. 2 unions get more and more effective the larger they get. At heart, they are simply rebalancing the power between a huge corporation and a single worker. The largest unions appeared in nationalised industries the largest conglomerates of the day. There is a strong selection pressure for small unions themselves to form alliances, or even full unions with each other to increase their bargining power. An ineffective union will loose members to a more effective one and the market will deliver 3 the unions themselves suffer the problem of free riders. People who do not join but benefit from the union driving up minimum working standards and safety. If providing things like out of work support costs the union and thus the corporations they work with then companies that manage to avoid using union workforce will face a slight advatnage. As such, for strong unions, it is wise to agitate for political change, so that all workplaces have to conform to those same standards, that union type out of work support have to be applied to the entire workforce to prevent more predatory models from gaining a competitive advantage. This also has the advantage, especially at the minimum level of starvation, slavery and loss of limb I've seen, of being a moral thing to do. 4 Some people may have a very high risk tolerance for whatever reason , and want to do without the safety nets and complain at the cost or inconvenience it puts on them as an employer, employee or as a tax payer. They will continue to complain, but when their individual demands conflict with organised forces, whether as a corporation, worker's union, or an insurance company, they will loose.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- in a truly libertarian economy, unions would rapidly become very powerful players, leading to a restablishment of a welfare state\n","id":"14f024b7-1545-4ec6-b041-c4e1a389003e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Conservatives enjoy contrasting the favorable statistics of Asian immigrant populations with the rather dismal performance of blacks in America. After all, if the average Indian or Chinese American outearns native whites by a significant margin, then institutional racism must be an illusory concept, right? Unfortunately, this argument is no more accurate than the myth of Irish enslavement Just like the aforementioned crackpot theory, it can only be accepted through willful ignorance of the available evidence. All Asians in America aren't equally successful. Laotians, Hmong, and Cambodians have significantly higher poverty rates and limited educational attainment. The Vietnamese exhibit relatively high levels of in group social stratification mostly due to economic differences between the descendants of first wave and later generation migrants . A clear pattern begins to emerge from this analysis the vast majority of Asian subgroups that are struggling are either refugees or descendants of refugees. Unlike the framework existing in many European countries, legal immigration here in the US is especially stringent and favors applicants of a certain background. Indian Americans are nine times more educated than average residents of their country and tend to be from upper caste families. Only 10 of Filipinos in the Philipines have college degrees compared to roughly 47 of Filipino Americans Some populations of Chinese Americans have existed in the US since the 19th century however, the largest expansion for their group occurred after 1965. 50 of Chinese immigrants over age 25 from 1965 to 1979 were college graduates and I'm sure that the percentage of first generation Chinese immigrants with education has increased substantially since then. It is true that Asian Americans faced their fair share of discrimination in past eras the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment immediately come to mind . However, white racial hostility towards Asians gradually diminished with the passage of time due to a changing sociocultural environment They obviously continue to encounter discrimination in American society, but their populations are racialized in a manner distinct from other non white ethnic groups. As a final note, most proponents of the model minority myth blame disparities in black white life outcomes entirely upon rampant anti intellectualism, single parenthood, and criminal activity amongst blacks. Unfortunately, the available data indicates that blacks with education stable families are more likely to struggle financially than their white counterparts College educated blacks even those with STEM degrees have significantly higher underemployment rates, and blacks with no criminal records find it more difficult to secure a job than white felons. Finally, upper middle class blacks still dwell in segregated neighborhoods in spite of their position on the economic ladder. tl dr Non refugee Asian immigrants are favorably self selected since they tend to be more educated and ambitious than the average person from their home countries. Thanks to the development of the model minority myth, Asians are viewed differently from other POC in the cultural landscape. Note I am not suggesting that Asians face less racism than other groups in contemporary America. That isn't quantifiable, and there is no value to be gained in playing the Oppression Olympics. Blacks are still beset with more difficulties than whites or Asians with similar backgrounds even after eliminating the variables of education, criminal conduct, and family structure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of prosperous Asian communities in the US doesn't prove that our nation is a racial meritocracy.\n","id":"b7153d05-68e0-470d-b1b1-07a66252cc6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Countries should not break laws they've promised to uphold as doing so lowers the significance of laws. Countries should therefore remake laws which they're unable to uphold into laws which they can abide by.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High-income countries have signed international agreements to take in refugees.\n","id":"df0ec0f0-bedb-44f0-9a4e-b0df97631f4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>An altruistic surrogate is more likely to be a friend or relative of the parents. It is far easier for the child to understand the circumstances of their birth and why they came about in these situations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Surrogates are less likely to be part of the child's life in commercial arrangements, which can be emotionally challenging to overcome.\n","id":"7efc9270-a3bc-4fb4-ace6-58660e4742d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>However, a man wearing a dress, as well as other traditionally feminine features convincingly for example, an actor can be perceived as a woman and no longer a man, therefore his gender, understood as purely his socially perceived sex, does change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nothing in biology says men can't wear a dress, but a man wearing a dress doesn't mean he has changed his gender.\n","id":"f1c320ff-9a90-4343-b4a3-dcf2cfb22414"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Evil as defined by humanity is simply a natural phenomena, similar to animals eating each other, or a pack of animals fighting another. It can be attributed to in part status, in part survival, in part pathology, and in part the fallibility of physical organisms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Much natural suffering is simply a result of the operations of the natural laws of the world, which are not themselves bad.\n","id":"e0484a13-fcd4-4ff9-a400-4462b5a443f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we forgive those who don't regret hurting us?<|ARGUMENT|>In order to forgive yourself and let go of the past, you must forgive those who hurt you. Letting go of anger towards others is key to start focusing on yourself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sometimes you also need to forgive yourself for past mistakes. In this sense, forgiving the other person allows you to take a step forwards and start forgiving yourself.\n","id":"04d86189-1376-441c-ab25-a4c7b101a274"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Near the end of 1838, while Joseph Smith was imprisoned for defending himself against mob persecution, Joseph Smith's wife and children were driven from their home in Missouri to Illinois. lds.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith was driven from his home on many occasions because of his belief in the authenticity of the Book of Mormon and its implications.\n","id":"b07b6949-c553-4b76-9520-5a1a42c88764"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Promoting democratic development is in the interest of donor countries. The opportunity to attach democratic strings to their aid gives them an incentive to provide more aid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conditional development assistance works as an incentive for further democratization.\n","id":"5147c40e-f809-4dc3-83fa-89f0ea24665a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that there are only two genders, male and female. These are the two genders required to have sex and produce offspring. Nowadays there are plenty of openness and acceptance of all people whether it be gay, transexual, bi etc. You can believe you do not fit into male or female and most people will not criticize you for it in any way, and just accept what you believe at least in my area . However I do not agree with wanting to create more genders, basically forcing it on the rest of the world 99.9 who is happy with the way things are for us, other species, and have been for the history of this Earth. Basically, I believe that you can think of yourself however you want, but it is wrong to try to get the rest of the world to accommodate you if they already accept you as is without the creation of multiple genders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are only 2 real genders\n","id":"d249dc8b-715c-4c19-af6a-8d45835c2f3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Painting's, drawings, fashion and other forms of art are voluntary images and expressions that people are displaying to the public. Being considered artistic or a personal preference, the community is able to give positive or negative opinions of these. I feel tattoos are the same thing. The only difference is that said person chose to put this design on their body in a permanent way. If the tattoo being displayed is commented on in a negative light, it should be taken as constructive criticism instead of an personal insult, just like an article of clothing that someone would choose to wear out in public.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel that like all art work, you should be able to openly comment on a person's tattoo.\n","id":"f8cf8572-d491-48d5-ad34-b59f7c4b3a25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>A YouGov survey showed that 38% of voters now have a favourable view of Boris Johnson, a net improvement of 5 points from the previous poll in July 2019.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A recent poll suggests Johnson is climbing in favourability amongst the public.\n","id":"85eaf8e2-efc9-4bf3-8bbc-656cee31e03a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please hear me out. I am very open to this topic and would like to hear the opinions of people against hazing and those who belong ed to a fraternity that didn't haze, like what you did for brotherhood. Hazing brought my pledge class and I together. The days after we were hazed bad, it was all we would talk about. We would laugh over the things we did and they were fucked up , talk about brothers we hated liked, make fun of them, and talk how much we hate pledging. We could talk for hours about this stuff. It was a great way to start to know each other. We learned and were taught to respect each other. If one person fucked up, the whole pledge class paid for it. We were one. No one wanted to be that person who screwed their class over, so we all began to slowly work together to do our part. Pledging was the worst time of our life, we were stripped of all free time, completely mindfucked, forced to do things we would never do again, and put into a position where the only people we had were each other. We made it through hell together. I am a lot more confident in myself and I feel that if I went through this I can go through anything, it toughened me up, and introduced me to the best life long friends I could ever ask for who truly have my back. I don't go a day without talking to at least talking to half of my PBs. I am an upper classman and choose not to haze. But I think hazing creates stronger brotherhood then not hazing so I am not really against it. I feel that if you do not want to be hazed, don't rush a frat that hazes. I am open to hearing your guys thoughts and opinions on this Edit thanks for all the responses its 5 am and I am going to sleep right now, ill respond to everyone when I wake up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fraternity hazing creates stronger brotherhood and is beneficial\n","id":"1505560f-5c19-432a-a7d1-b251ef94f101"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should the Conservative Party choose to be the next UK Prime Minister?<|ARGUMENT|>Conservative members of Parliament Dominic Grieve, Ken Clarke and Philip Hammond have all indicated they might vote 'no confidence' in order to block a no-deal Brexit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Conservative Party already has a tenuous hold on its legitimacy to govern. Johnson assuming leadership might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.\n","id":"ae77e521-ce32-4249-858d-4499d20f803f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>An individual could choose to 'donkey vote' by placing the top name first, then the second-top second and so on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone is uninformed, they are likely to vote for irrational reasons.\n","id":"69681e8f-9813-48ce-9fde-e05900b2c987"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Facts Artificial Super Intelligence is Inevitable Humans currently have war These wars are fought between nations, not people We are on brink of wars with Robots against People The internet has gradually increased globalism since it's start There are currently people starving to death Malnutrition is arguably the largest preventable way to death starvation to Obesity and everything in between There are more than enough resources to go around Most People in power are typically greedy people who want power and money to themselves exceptions exist I admit Artificial Intelligence has always surpassed human intelligence The concept of shadow government is pervasive throughout all societies Conclusions We need to accept our robot overlords We should employ AI to run the supply of money instead of private banks more complete explanation available We should all unite as one people As one people we have an obligation to help those who need help first I know how to end food scarcity In this system overtime Abundance is inevitable It is necessary to kill the idea of Drumpf and the idea of Clinton This is most easily done by executing both live guillotine style to drive the point home In interim prior to robot overlord I suggest we accept Jill Stein as temporary President It is also necessary to kill the idea of individualism and replace it with collectivism Consumerism and Creativity exist in balance, however we need to kill the consumer identity and replace with balanced identity, as long as people are consciously consuming I have no problem as long as they equally are conscious of the fact that they could be creating. We are the people, we have the right to be ruled by what we see fit to rule over us. It makes more sense to have a transparent AI rule than the current shadow governments. We must become aware of the idea of greed, and kill those who practice their lives on the identity of greed I am aware this is undemocratic. Democracy is flawed in that people are illogical. This is the natural evolution of Homo Sapiens into Homo Intelligence, literally same mind, as in we all think collectively. I am most likely to Change my opinion on the violent deaths of the two presidential candidates, if and only if, you can give me a better option for death of their characters. I will also accept not ending the lives of those who practice greed, if and only if, you can give me an option to end their power without murder. I do not claim that any set of individuals are entirely possessed by greed, however there are identities that are more wholly controlled by greed than others. It is these identities we must end. If we do not the robots will. It makes more sense to end them before the robots get here so that the rest of us are not grouped in the pot of people controlled by greed. If you can make an argument against any of the other arguments, try to. I will retaliate with a more complete argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think globalism will naturally engulf nationalism.\n","id":"0efdbbd0-7fa7-4d4f-8e3e-a4907c496cf3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many famous and wealthy Black Americans with slave ancestors, such as Oprah Winfrey or Morgan Freeman. They would equally receive benefits from reparations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In distributing tax payer money, the principle we should focus on is present need, rather than past injustice.\n","id":"a1ff5c66-4538-4c6c-ada3-9b79422e42ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the Catholic Church \"heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness.\" This seems clearly better than torture and punishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since humans usually avoid pain and seek pleasure, heaven clearly is the better choice.\n","id":"2805b6f3-5c8f-44bc-b8bf-c282085a67b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Welcome to T Tuesday, our weekly post where we can celebrate our ability to adopt a new mindset or gain another perspective. Tell us what experiences you've had outside our subreddit, either recently or in your lifetime, that made you think This Changed My View . Give us your stories in the comments You can consider these questions to help get you thinking Known or met someone with an interesting ideology or opinion that caused you to reconsider your own? Had an experience, good or bad, that changed your perspective? Learned something new that challenged what you believed? Ever have your tastes or interests changed? Read an article or seen a video that got you thinking differently? And just as a reminder, comment discussions here are not debate oriented, so there's no obligation to take opposing sides in conversations here in other words, Rule 1 does not apply here .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"T Tuesday - 09\/17\/13\n","id":"eac51f81-d9ee-40bb-bb4b-7fa87ab30a9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>Not only it would be an act of respect to end Leia's life on Star Wars on that moment, there is also weak evidence that Leia will be relevant for the next movie in the context of the narrative showed by the end of The Last Jedi.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Leia survives instead of getting a satisfying and relevant send-off. As Carrie Fisher is dead, this effectively relegates the character to background appearances in the future movies - which is anything but satisfying for such a major figure.\n","id":"12ec5c66-e0dc-4cac-8342-161848a7c154"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view of the ACA is basically summed up by Kimberly Morgan's article here Doomed From the Start Why Obamacare's Disastrous Rollout is No Surprise It's a needlessly complicated law that combines the worst aspects of American policy privatization, cronyism, overly bureaucratic approach and entrenches the current health care system rather than fixing it. Until now health care reform has been mainly just an abstract political debate for most people. But starting soon many will be directly affected by the law, either through increased rates or from being forced to purchase insurance. The ACA supposedly offers subsidies to make the cost affordable, but many middle class and lower middle class people will still be hit by an extra monthly cost. In an economy where record numbers are out of the workforce, most are in debt, and 75 are working paycheck to paycheck, this could end up being the difference between being able to afford rent or not, pay the bills, etc. Additionally, there are a couple of disaster scenarios that are looking more and more possible 1 The website doesn't get off the ground in time. Building the healthcare.gov site which integrates multiple government and corporate systems is a hugely complex project. The Obama administration says they are fixing it, but what if it's not fixable within the next month or so? This could then lead to 2 Not enough people sign up and insurance rates soar. The thinking behind the mandate is that it will keep rates low by spreading the risk. But this requires a large number of previously uninsured people to sign up I believe the target is somewhere around 7 million . Between the sticker shock of the plans, the questionable benefits, and bad PR from the rollout of the Obamacare site, it seems plausible that not enough people will sign up to drive rates down. In fact, rates could rise dramatically next fall just before the midterm elections. It's also true that the law delivers real benefits such as caps on lifetime costs, a ban on turning people down over pre existing conditions, etc. But the number of people who will benefit from these aspects of the ACA will be tiny compared to the number that are inconvenienced by higher costs. And adding insult to injury, many may find that once they sign up for their mandated health care plan, they still owe thousands in premiums before the plan covers anything.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Obamacare was poorly thought out and will be a political disaster for Obama and the Democrats.\n","id":"af37afaf-5cf1-4b33-bf04-9a234a1ef980"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>When a voter can more easily evaluate the worst-case scenario of reform and see that it's okay, that reform is more viable than another reform which actually has a better worst-case scenario, but voters don't realize\/get fooled into thinking it doesn't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voers who are evaluating Approval Voting for reform can feel comfortable knowing that its worst-case scenario is just the current voting system.\n","id":"541a1235-10f8-4ec0-8536-77c91b104caf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that politicians are good at social engineering but inept when it comes to defining policy. This makes them great at interacting with each other and the general stuff they do, but terrible at running services. Education, transport systems, the NHS UK obvs , police services and fire services would be better served in a similar manner to that in which a national central bank or military offshoot is traditionally run. This would see a genuine specialist in the field put in to a complete situation of power and, although they'd have to answer to politicians, left to their own devices. Politicians in turn would have their reach over the area drastically limited to such an extent they'd be able to deal with overall budgetary concerns and have some level of input to targets and overall policy without being able to directly set it all. I believe that with this arrangement, we wouldn't see services struggling to change every time a new political agenda decided to put their mark on a major service by changing the ways children are tested, amending management or procurement layers in a health service or similar. This would stratospherically reduce overheads from whichever service as they weren't struggling to keep up and should improve morale, productivity and long term output of the service.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public services should be run by specialists rather than as a political football.\n","id":"2e4a0c53-87cd-4562-9469-2a23cfcc3077"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>The Fast Lightweight Autonomy project programs UAVs to manoeuvre unaided at high speed in urban areas and inside buildings. This is fundamental for AKMs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA programmes foreshadow planned uses of AKMs.\n","id":"cb311159-84c4-4807-bea4-fc52bfcb1485"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Recognition by many other nations is a sufficient condition for a state to be legitimate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Palestine is a legitimate state and deserves to be recognised as such.\n","id":"0f2b7461-9e57-49cf-aef8-61d37d13c945"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Imagine the scene you've decided with your friends that the best thing to do on halloween is to explore the old abandoned house. You wander around, enjoying the location, but you keep seeing something out of the corner of your eye. It turns out a puppet monster is chasing you They want to add your soul to their collection. You lose them. One of your group then proposes you split up to find the puppet monster. I say that doing so is dangerous, and likely to lead to you being isolated and murdered. By sticking together you are better able to handle dangerous situations and slay monsters. Exceptions. If your party stops being a party if the puppet monster possesses one of your friends or they are controlling the puppet monster or they actively act stupidly and cause you danger then cutting them loose is reasonable. If your party is immense. If you have fifty men then splitting up may be reasonable. If the monster has some obscure power that is specifically enhanced by a party. Not something I really see much, but if say more people makes them stronger splitting up is reasonable. If the monster is stronger and better than you and you are fleeing. If the party members are individually more powerful than any monster or group so it's not dangerous. If someone says, and backs up the threat, that if they don't split up it'll kill them. Views that change my view will preferably talk about when you are in a somewhat dangerous situation that isn't immediately fatal with non invulnerable beings, preferably humans, and show it makes good sense to split the party up. Ones that focus around answers like We'll cover more ground will gain special love.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You should never split the party in a dangerous situation, barring a few small exceptions.\n","id":"1da933b0-5d9e-4b90-a643-359d1cf00c28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always held the franchise close to my heart, i watched and loved the first one but only watched the rest of the series when the 7 came out, and i liked them a lot, i also recently watched the 8th one and liked it. I think the whole franchise is good, or atleast not as bad as people criticize it to be, and for a few reasons The plot twists are pretty hard to see coming, some people see it as a cheap way to push the movie forward to another title but it's one of the things i like the most, the fact that every movie is somewhat interlinked and that the whole series happen in a really short amount of time except for the last one, which by itself still had a pretty good twist ending by my point of view The whole series is not THAT badly noted on imdb it's about 6 for every movie but i still can't lean against that argument too heavily since it's a really different story on metacritic and rottentomatoes. I'm a big fan of horror movies, and i found that the whole vision of the world jigsaw has and how to cure people is something we need in more mainstream movies, obviously not the same one but people that have reasons, real goals, more than just an angry ghost or a serial killer. Though on this point i know that the franchise derives from it to some extent, still found the original idea great. Some people seem to think that torture porn is just gross and shouldn't be a thing, but as a horror movie fan i really like the fact that we're pushing forward the boundaries of what i seen as taboo and what we can talk make movies about. To some extent saw is the franchise that popularised it. The characters are flawed but not in the same manner as clich\u00e9 teenagers in horror movies, in a good way that makes them human.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The whole saw franchise is not THAT bad\n","id":"b067f0dc-bee5-46d9-ae32-04db78f836c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>Censoring books for a humanitarian cause may justify censorship from conservative parties for their own political ends.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Censoring books on humanitarian grounds can provoke backlash that is counterproductive to those same goals.\n","id":"fa6a0394-3d9f-4ef9-90db-834c647f3722"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Overpopulation, by definition, cannot exist. Every species has a carrying capacity. This capacity has many different variables, but essentially it entails access to resources and a sustainable habitat. When this capacity is exceeded, the excess population dies off and the population remains at a sustainable level compared to the amount of resources. A species cannot go over this capacity. It is literally impossible because of the definition of the word. You cannot have a population greater than the amount of resources that are available to it. Why would humans be any different? Why would we be the only species able to exceed the carrying capacity? I think the only reason people are terrified is because they see graphs like this and think Oh no Look how much our population has increased in an incredibly short span of time How will we survive? The problem is that, by definition, populations increase exponentially due to the simple mathematical fact that offspring begets offspring. It should be absolutely no surprise that we would go from 1 billion to 2 billion people way faster than from almost no people to 1 billion. It is a fact of nature that populations increase exponentially. We could plot a similar graph from 10,000 B.C. to 1 A.D. and see essentially the same type of graph, just with a smaller total population. Finally, people in the past have made similar predictions and been way off. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle griped about the population being too high. And this was when the population was less than 200 million. Tertullian once said, Our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us. Thomas Malthus thought that the food supply would grow at a stable rate. We see now that he was wrong. Food supply has grown along with demand due to new technologies he could not foresee. Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1968 that millions would die in the next decade. It never came to be. To be fair, others have criticized Malthus, Ehrlich, and others, but that is exactly my point. No one can seem to agree on the amount of the carrying capacity. Estimates range from under a billion which can now obviously be discredited to over a trillion. UN estimates range from 7.8 billion on the low end to 12.5 billion on the high end. And this is all assuming no more technological advancements are made. I'm not saying that we should automatically hand wave any estimate of the carrying capacity. All I'm saying is that there are too many variables to calculate to get an accurate answer. We could easily meet our carrying capacity in the next 50 years, or be just fine for the next 1,000. Now to the practical and moral aspect. By definition, any attempt to curb the population involves a lower birth rate. But how would we implement such a thing? Most people agree that China's one child policy is immoral, yet this would be the only way to prevent our population from increasing. In addition, the policy only seems to have affected China's sex balance. Their population is still growing due to the underlying fact that it's incredibly difficult to enforce something like this. In recent years, China seems to have grown more relaxed about the policy. We could educate people about family planning, but this only addresses a symptom rather than a root cause. Ultimately, if a family wants to have six kids, nobody is going to or can or, in my opinion, should stop them. Other than that, no real solutions have been offered. We hear cries of We HAVE to control our population or we will meet dire consequences Yet no solution is ever offered as to how we would achieve such a goal. My opinion is because the only solutions offered are considered immoral by most people one child policy or impractical education. They simply save face in the public eye by crying about how overpopulation is bad, yet never giving any sort of solution. Because there are no solutions. It's next to impossible to artificially control a population outside of war, famine, disaster, or genocide. These are the only real solutions to overpopulation and they are both immoral and impractical. In my opinion, we should focus more on providing food and water to the malnourished and starving, which is the underlying theme in this whole debate in the first place. Instead of focusing on numbers, we should be focusing on providing for those who can't survive regardless of the amount of people there are. That's the true tragedy here. Western governments moan about the fact that eventually there will be too many people to support their citizen's lifestyles, yet ignore the fact that there are already countries who don't have enough, despite the fact that are currently enough resources to support our planet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overpopulation does not exist and any attempts to curb it are immoral and futile.\n","id":"faadbef9-316d-4bde-b036-391025ca049a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>A recent study in the UK found that individuals with left-wing and liberal views are more prominent in academia and, at the same time, conservatives have decreased along the years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Knowledge production is never neutral as it is defined by the worldviews and political positions of those producing it.\n","id":"ad4cc4af-ecb5-4033-9944-a5f9cfe57c2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A popular opinion among middle high school instructors is that Nevile Chamberlain was wrong in appeasing Italy for its invasion of Abyssinia Ethiopia due to the Stresa Front and not doing anything about Japan's invasion of Manchuria other than a verbal condemnation. This, in their view, led Adolf Hitler to invade the Sudetenland and everything else that led to World War II. From what I have read, however, appeasement seemed like the only course of action Nevile Chamberlain could have taken. Appeasement and a fear of a second world war was a popular foreign policy even before Chamberlain, and even despite this, there have been numerous reports of the British army being unable to do anything military force wise about the Anschluss and the invasion of the Sudetenland. So I'm a bit confused, if all Chamberlain and Ramsay MacDonald wanted to do was try and prevent World War II from happening while they were unprepared, why is this considered a bad move?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"British appeasement of Nazi Germany and Italy was a necessary evil to prevent a premature war.\n","id":"57267605-1692-47d0-af6e-a3b11280edc3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This also included a myriad of different words as well such as Couldn't care less Maybe they actually meant that For all intents and purposes This phrase can stand on its own, as in, they could very well mean intents and purposes . They convey a message that people can understand well even if it's not proper. Conveying messages is what language is at its core. And languages fluidity is a core aspect of it as well the roman languages are an example of this . As for the idioms, overtime an idiom changes and changes to eventually have a different meaning. I recall reading a letter from the late 1790s by Benjamin Franklin, where they use the phrase all on a sudden todays expression uses of instead of on . I'm sorry that I cannot cite my source, this was some time ago. As a side note, using literally in a figurative sense is a form of writing, so to discard the use of it, simply because they aren't using it for its intended use, is a bit pretentious.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that words like \"anyways\" and \"alot\" and using idioms incorrectly are acceptable because overtime that is the way language evolves and to stop that evolvement is silly.\n","id":"f2a7423d-820a-468b-8a78-049de6fca085"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If someone does me wrong in a very severe way I have the right to hold a grudge against them. It is also not immature to remember and dislike them for it. I am not immature for taking out my anger in nonviolent ways , and I am not immature for holding it with me for decades. If I stoop to that person's level then that is another case, but if someone does me wrong and 20, 30, or 60 years later they come to a job interview and I happen to be giving it, I am within my right to hold what they have done in the past against them and not hire them. I understand, and do believe, people can change. That said, if someone comes to me and says they have changed, unless they can somehow prove it I do not need to believe or forgive them. At this hypothetical interview if they profusely apologize and admit their wrongdoing I am not obligated to forgive them and I am well within my right to deny them a job despite their apology. None of this is immature.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone has harmed me in the past it is not immature to grudge against them.\n","id":"648be9dc-f76b-4ad6-bd98-b64a0b891fb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are sports like Football where men have clear advantage over female counterpart with better physical strength. But any sport which does not have clear advantage should not have separation of male and female classes. Most of the indoor games like chess, pool should have only one tournament where the best person wins. What is the history behind every sport having a Women's Championship? Is there a science which shows that men have more intellectual capability to give them edge in chess or any other game which is not physical? What about Archery or shooting? Edit Most of the comments suggest that as there aren't many women who can compete in Open we have separate tournaments for them to encourage them. Does't this suggest that just like in Tennis or other sport, men have advantage and so we have special tournaments for women. Isn't this same as other physical sports? You can't have it both ways. Either men have advantage and having separate tournament is justifiable. Or they don't then we shouldn't have it separate as many other communities are underrepresented. Why shouldn't we have only white or only black or only brown tournaments as one of them underrepresented?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Games like Chess should not have Male and female division\n","id":"9fea549f-6419-4e3a-96fe-87c14384d01f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>In countries where it is legal such as Australia and New Zealand, sex workers undergo regular mandatory sexual health checks, reducing the risk for service users of contracting sexually transmitted diseases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalization will allow for better protection of the rights of those engaged in sex work.\n","id":"0d011235-eaba-430f-a806-c60d64626255"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Why can't social democracies by implemented all over the world? The apparent Marxist M3W argument is that the ruling class wants cheap labour, and won't stand for labour conditions in the third world to be made similar to those in the first world. I guess either companies would move to another country or physically make things worse so that they get cheap labour. It happens here and there, union organizers get killed in Colombia and blacklisted threatened in China, but overall hasn't the standard of living been increasing in most countries? Where's the evidence of things moving 'backwards' with respect to workers rights, or more importantly, the standard of living for the poor?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not sure why social democracies can't be implemented all over the world,\n","id":"094bb640-3f80-44f9-8819-86cd301b2d3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm all for legalizing marijuana, but if we legalize it, I think that people who are in jail on charges for things like possession, intent to sell, growing, paraphernalia, etc, should have to complete their time. At the very least, they should have to complete part of their time. They committed a crime. They should do the time. I know that for the most part people aren't really getting rehabilitated in jail, but maybe if there were less of a strain on the system no more drug offenders coming in , there could be a greater push for education and rehabilitation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if marijuana were legalized, people in jail for related crimes should have to serve the remainder of their sentences\n","id":"2e66e2a2-434b-4d6b-9147-db58e7140633"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tiger parenting does more harm than good<|ARGUMENT|>Accounts by children of tiger parents state that the relationship between them \"broke when the children pursued their own career paths which were not compatible with those the tiger parents had chosen for them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tiger parents do not simply \"set up\" their children to succeed in predetermined career paths; the relationships between parents and children are contingent on the children following the career path into adulthood.\n","id":"35a6cb3f-19b1-4082-997f-0a9c8b54d620"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>In Scotland, where higher education is entirely subsidised by the government, and therefore everybody has access to it, not all students decide to pursue a university degree.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if everybody has access to higher education, different capabilities and interests will still result in workers with different skills.\n","id":"bdf71ee2-b02a-4cfc-bbdf-8468428476dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Many Churches run private businesses this gives these businesses an unfair advantage over those businesses who do have to pay tax.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Giving churches an automatic tax break could be viewed as the state supporting religion, which is inappropriate.\n","id":"ebd0c4cf-5b4f-464b-b221-6334dab4d17f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should human procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Just because something is natural or instinctive, it doesn't mean that it's the best way to go. As humans we constantly go against our nature in order to comply with our laws and norms in order to build a civilization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because procreation is in our nature, it doesn't automatically make it ethical, economical or a source of happiness for every one involved.\n","id":"5bf6f77f-3b5a-4865-a08a-010bba186cbc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Judges be Elected or Appointed?<|ARGUMENT|>Separation of powers is a valuable idea within modern democracies because it ensures that no incumbent ruling party accumulates enough power and support that it is answerable to no one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing the Government to appoint judges erodes the separation of powers.\n","id":"e840e14f-b999-4496-9e1b-e292b707d924"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I say \u201cso called\u201d because they already exist e.g. a Senator from Florida is term limited by the number of times Floridians send them to office. \u201cTerm limits\u201d are really just government mandates that limit citizens\u2019 freedom to send whoever we want up to D.C. for as long as we want. Why should liberty be curbed here? It doesn\u2019t sound like the impact of term limits is positive enough to justify this intervention, or is it? On the impact, a quote from a Washington Post article written by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein \u201cDoes it work? Term limits of some sort have been implemented in 21 states since 1990 in six of them, the limits were ultimately overturned , and the experience has given scholars time and opportunity to evaluate them. But instead of channeling ambition in the right, public interest direction, term limits have the opposite effect New lawmakers immediately begin planning for ways to reach the next level, or to find lucrative lobbying jobs when they are term limited out. They have no incentive to do things for the long term and no regard for maintaining their own institutions. With the loss of expertise among senior lawmakers, power devolves to permanent staff members and to lobbyists. If anything, voters should look to candidates with a stake in the regular order, an understanding of the need to compromise, a willingness to build expertise in important policy areas, and an incentive to listen to constituents \u2014 all features that are more likely among politicians with longer horizons.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I\u2019m Against So-called Term Limits\n","id":"0f36f841-9f35-40fb-acdb-731fb46ab133"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public health systems fund homeopathy?<|ARGUMENT|>Many healthcare systems are already facing a funding crisis. A further decrease in funding due to the funding of homeopathy could be debilitating to the system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lack of confidence that public health resources are being used appropriately may lead people to stop supporting government health spending.\n","id":"b89e7217-ae66-496c-94d9-350f57fd77f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the West give development aid?<|ARGUMENT|>The call for context and contextualizing the approach is nothing new, local context have been taken into consideration for the majority of aid projects in the last decades. Yet, it has not resulted in the development asked for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Development is a complex process, not a linear one e.g. just because you build a school does not mean you will have students attending.\n","id":"01e4b9fb-6d84-4aa8-8424-d1e5c24a4e8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Motivated by a conversation I had regarding the practical realities of the economic system in the US. If we live in a nation where people are free to vote, free to lobby, and free to organize e.g. for the purposes of supporting a cause or candidate , then how is it not inevitable for that nation's most powerful and wealthy entities to lobby in a way that skews laws and regulations in their favor? It does not seem that there's any legitimate way of preventing that but I'm certainly interested in having my mind changed if I can find a good enough argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Truly Free Market Capitalism, in a free republic, necessarily leads to \"crony capitalism\"\n","id":"3982f19a-6522-435a-8bf7-a026ce2f9e63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The feminist wave brag and shout that women are as strong as men. Many say that they\u2019re the same, but what I see isn\u2019t only a physical difference, but also that women are always getting sick, nausea and other malaise, every week, at least, I see this happening with some friends. And this would happen with the most radical feminist, the badass one with shaved head, because they\u2019re woman, and it seems weird that they feel sick for nothing. I realize that my view may seem very stupid offensive, so I\u2019m sending this with a disposable account.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women aren\u2019t strong, they\u2019re fragile by nature\n","id":"20f27d50-3b5c-4d9c-82af-ea3055a24de3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>It has been claimed that bullfighting is even more essential to the Spanish than baseball is to the Americans Brandes, p. 780<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bullfighting is part of the history and the culture in several countries. Culture should be preserved.\n","id":"31a9bc0f-0d9b-4dbe-8301-fc5baf2757c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Libertarian Solution: Can People Govern Themselves?<|ARGUMENT|>FDR's attempted stimulus plan ultimately failed because they tried reducing income inequality as a means of recovering the economy. The New Deal significantly increased taxes, artificially raised prices on goods, and discouraged small business.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It was his policies that helped drag it on for seven more years. It could have been a regular economic depression otherwise.\n","id":"b6380d90-e5e2-482d-a649-5e417bd22f59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever i look into Nihilism online, it always seems to be believed that subjective meaning can be made if Nihilism is true. I will paste a quote below. There can't possibly be any meaning in this world. But isn't that wonderful in its own right? Because if there isn't any, we can find our own. But i am struggling to see how this is Nihilism. Is Nihilism not the complete absence of meaning, and by absence i meaning has never existed and can never exist. Do existential nihilist believe that wanting or desiring something is the same as meaning? I am confused. Are they simply saying that whatever makes you happy, or least miserable is a meaning ? Nothing matters is not compatible with creating your own meaning. The word nihilist or nihilism should have a clear definition that excluded existentialists completely. EDIT Please give valid arguments instead of saying edgy .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The belief that you can make your own meaning is not compatible with Nihilism. The definition of Nihilism should be changed.\n","id":"fbdc3f92-e5e9-4314-b10c-3ce2e3695e5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A person that is sane, background checked, and trained in the safe operation and proper maintenance of his or her firearms should be able to own whatever firearms that are currently legal to own. This would extend all the way from a single shot .22 rifle, semi automatic handguns, shotguns, hunting rifles, and even properly registered and tax stamped suppressed short barreled semi automatic rifle. I personally own several firearms, most through three generations of inheritance, and each is set up for a specific purpose and safely kept in their own locked safe. The vast majority are set up for specific game hunting deer, dove quail, waterfowl, squirrel, rabbit, feral hogs, etc. Of the firearms I own, three are purposed for self or home defense My personal concealed carry, my wife's concealed carry, and a home defense semi auto shotgun once again, kept in quick release safes when not being carried. I am all in favor of felons, domestic violence offenders, and the mentally insane being actively barred from ownership of firearms and vigorously enforcing that law. I'm also fully in favor of a greatly expanded background check system, and mandatory mental health screenings for potential firearm purchasers. I also support background checks for private sales. I've never even considered the use of a firearm on another human in anger, never suffered a negligent discharge, and live by the four laws of firearm safety. I am fully capable of maintaining my firearms and have a clean bill of both mental and physical health. Given that, is there any reason why a person like myself should not be able to own whatever firearms I would like to own? EDIT For the people who submitted sane discourse, thanks. For the ones who threw up an absolute NO MORE GUNS arguement Just to let you know, not only did you NOT change my view in close to 8 hours of debating , you only made me want to ensure that my children can inherit my firearms safely when I pass. I initially came to the table suggesting compromise, suggesting more stringent gun laws, but apparently some are unable to grasp that. I appreciate the hate mail. Peace out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"a law-abiding, sane citizen should be able to own as many firearms as they want.\n","id":"97c78f2d-a983-4902-a196-5baca5add224"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>There has been international pressure on Israel to give up its nuclear weapons - without the support of the US, this international pressure may increase and force Israel to give up its nuclear weapons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without tacit American acquiescence, the international community might call into question Israel's nuclear program and attempt to pressure the country into signing the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty.\n","id":"18a1693c-1801-491f-8a96-e1e526c977bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the music of the past better than it is today?<|ARGUMENT|>All rap today just sounds repeated, which doesn't take as much effort and thought than the rap music of the past that had variety. This also makes it less interesting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lot of old rap music is better and thought out then today\u2019s.\n","id":"62bbfb8e-2834-4369-8b10-2a9fc5c6e156"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should nuclear energy replace fossil fuels?<|ARGUMENT|>At the end of 2012, for example, when IHS Global Insights released a report claiming that at that time unconventional oil and gas extraction primarily hydraulic fracturing alone accounted for 1.7 million American jobs and would account for 3 million by the end of the decade.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The elimination of fossil fuels would bring a loss of jobs in the industry.\n","id":"d3de4635-053e-4337-b432-f260d2471297"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We know that Ivan Drago is the most perfect human specimen to ever pick up a pair of gloves, and he describes Rocky bluntly as, a machine. In his prime no one ever beat Rocky by knock out, and a recurring theme of the movies is that he can take any beating possible and keep on laying down punishment. T2 is too slow and wouldn't be able to keep up. Rocky would just punish him and win on the cards by landing blow after blow. It would be like Mayweather vs McGregor. I mean it's Rocky. Of course he wins even if he loses. Yoda is all about the force, which exists no matter where you are. Inside the Matrix Yoda would be able to break the rules and do all kinds of crazy shit even if he wasn't freed, and even more crazy shit if he was. This one is even easier to call than the Rocky fight. Yoda by a KO.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rocky would at least go the distance with Terminator 2 Arnold in a twelve round fight. Also, Yoda would beat Neo in an all out fight either inside of the Matrix.\n","id":"242f4656-63b5-4534-b3f4-e5522604c4c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever I've revealed my age in a comment on Reddit, I get downvoted to oblivion. I think that as soon as anyone on Reddit finds out I'm 15, they picture a kid covered in swag hashtagging yolo on twitter. I hate those phrases as much as most of reddit does, and I'm not saying I'm better than most teenagers. I'm just saying that we're not all the same. I've met the annoying, tweeting, hashtagging, swaggles that you all hate, but I'm good friends with a lot of funny, odd, and tolerable people in my highschool. Some of them actually have reddit accounts. It's possible that you've even upvoted or saved a post made by a teenager. In every age group, there are good people, and shitty people. Don't assume all teenagers are shitty people. EDIT Just wanted to throw this out there, I hate instagram and tumblr.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Reddit should be more open minded towards teenagers.\n","id":"e3dd336f-4a4e-4bda-a716-7b3845c31332"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kosovo independence<|ARGUMENT|>Many break-away regions around the world, very similar to Kosovo, ahve declared independence but have not received international recognition. What makes Kosovo any different?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kosovo independence and international recognition would apply a double standard\n","id":"c43cb9e8-4e2d-43dc-8005-13599552022d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In light of the recent El Paso and Ohio shooting, the media is covering it the way they usually do and I believe it has to stop if we want to reduce the number of shooting. Showing the killer's name on TV and talking about their ideology could potentially inspire future shooters who want their names and ideology on TV so they look up to the killer's and shoot people. We do not need to the killer's name and their ideology, and put it on television which would glorify them. Just talk about the tragedy itself and don't bring much attention to the killer, just where they are and are they alive. If the killer has a manifesto and motivated and people are curious, just realease it on the internet and don't cover it on tv<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The news media should stop covering the shooter's name and ideology after a shooting has happened\n","id":"563e00f2-c91e-4dc2-b00f-8fe4b0a99d69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Objective morality, for the purpose of this discussion A standard of right and wrong that exists independently of any opinion or personal perspective. Obligation, for the purpose of this discussion A course of action to which a person is morally bound. A duty or commitment. Uses of the words ought and should are therefore valid only when used to denote courses of action which are beneficial in actualizing a stated goal. Examples of ways they are NOT valid We should ought to stop climate change. We should ought to care for immigrants. We should ought to have gun rights. We should ought to have freedom of speech. Examples of ways in which the use of these words ARE valid IF we want to preserve the current ecosystem, we ought to stop climate change. IF we want to help foreigners survive, we ought to aid immigrants. IF we want the ability to purchase firearms, we ought to have gun rights. IF we want the ability to criticize the government, we ought to have freedom of speech. One notable consequence of this worldview is that removing public opinion from legislature is impossible. Laws require a goal, which can only be a matter of opinion. IF we want to maintain a coherent society, murder should be illegal. Etc. Politics, then, is just a poll to see which opinions have the most adherents, and then forcing the dissenters to live as if they agreed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We have no logically or evidentially supported reason to think objective morality, and, by extension, \"obligations\" of any kind exist.\n","id":"0b810de5-d6fa-417f-add8-02d3435d7137"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Politicians' Second Jobs: Should They be Allowed to Keep Them?<|ARGUMENT|>Politicians in the US tried living off of the minimum wage in their state for a week. All of them failed because they live in a bubble vastly different from the people they represent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would prevent people from low income backgrounds from running, causing a disconnect between the politicians and the people they represent.\n","id":"22494761-d259-4f43-923e-0b032f92f087"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>Physical contact in the NBA is less violent than in the NHL yet professional basketball players are far more likely to be arrested for violent crimes than hockey players.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any causal link between contact sports and criminal violence is speculative. Many other factors influence propensities towards criminal violence.\n","id":"c4ab8e17-5f0a-454c-afa9-2523e05c4baa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should paternity testing of minors require the consent of both parents?<|ARGUMENT|>When marriages are not going well, a negative result can serve as the final push. Some married men in a study admitted their marriage was not going as well as it had been, and would use this situation as an excuse to end it even if the child proved not to be theirs p. 928.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents often get divorced as a result of negative paternity tests.\n","id":"4176bf71-6454-424b-a45a-8418a000bb8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Not Have Pulled Out of the Iran Deal.<|ARGUMENT|>The source actually seems to undermine the original claim; at best the source does not suggest much: 1. It says that his net approval for foreign affairs is -20%. 2. Assuming the focus is just on Republican support, their approval of foreign affairs is lower than multiple other ratings, so it could just as easily be that more Republicans dislike his foreign affairs policies than if he had a non America First stance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Gallup poll evidence is inconclusive and otherwise weak as a source.\n","id":"0ae614da-e0c3-4f17-8dc4-f5b06bfd584c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Land Boundaries\/Borders Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>In the absence of boundaries and borders, it is possible that people walk onto private properties, and may be prosecuted for trespassing both civil and criminal liability. This will have negative consequences for the trespasser: payment of fines, imprisonment and restraining orders, which could easily have been prevented in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If land borders do not exist, then anyone could have access anywhere, which opens up for people to cause trouble where a border\/boundary would prevent that.\n","id":"a63c19b6-d8a5-4055-88b3-1f88c03e737e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>The majority of catalyzing events that lead to the development of PTSD are physical experiences, including combat, sexual assault, severe car accidents, terrorist attacks, violent muggings, and natural disasters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is often physical actions carried out against us that cause the worst forms of psychological trauma.\n","id":"698dbc4c-49f7-4c5c-803a-ac323bed5bc8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>Christian theology in the 1920s still accused the Jews for being blind to recognize the Messiahs p.1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Catholic accusation that Jews are responsible for killing Jesus facilitated the Holocaust.\n","id":"3a6c6589-da90-41bd-86da-7f7f1c6b6497"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Traditional sexual scripts have resulted in women largely viewing virginity as a gift and something that they therefore have to be careful about giving away, while men see virginity as a stigma and think of its loss as a relief Humphreys, p. 672<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gendered expectations around virginity often mean that women view virginity loss as giving something away and are encouraged to protect their virginity, while men losing their virginity is viewed as a way to gain status and experience.\n","id":"98bb5b19-4086-4563-8326-6feea7e92bb9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have one child in college now, and three more who will be heading off in the next few years. I believe that there is nothing wrong with setting reasonable conditions upon which I will pay for their education. I think it's perfectly reasonable to set conditions on locations and majors if they're expecting me to pay for it. My general rule is they can major in anything they like if they go to either UF or FSU we're in Florida obviously . If however they want to go to Miami, or as with my daughter Yale, or any other top school, then I have final approval on their major I'm not going to pay 200k 300k for a Liberal Arts, or Art History degree. College is about education, yes, but it's every bit as much an investment in the future, and paying top dollar for a degree with limited earning potential is, quite simply, a bad investment. And before the but the quality of the education is better arguments start, I'm not debating that of course an Art History education for example from Yale will be of higher quality than one from University of Florida, but at the end of the day, even the highest quality Art History degree is still just an Art History degree . If you want to change my view, convince me that the value of the degree should be irrelevant when it comes to the cost of the education. nbsp Edit To be clear, I'm willing to pay the cost of four years at a state school towards any school if they decide to go it on their own.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing wrong with parents setting conditions on paying for their child's college.\n","id":"425c1685-e227-4880-874e-8adda7a783ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For context, in Wisconsin after the redistricting, Republicans won 48.6 percent of the statewide vote for Assembly candidates but captured 60 of the Assembly\u2019s 99 seats. When a party decides where voting districts are, they are essentially deciding in favor of their party which votes are worth more than others. This allows an advantaged party to draw lines that will allow them to stay in power even if public opinion has changed about them significantly, while the disadvantaged party has no way to gain ground. If an independent group decides where voting district lines are, neither party can gain an unfair advantage, and partisan politicians will not decide for the voting public which votes affect an election more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given today's Supreme Court case Gill v. Whitford about gerrymandering, voting districts should be drawn by an independent group, rather than by a partisan one.\n","id":"065c6a07-83b6-4de1-b08b-4d3bd6cd77d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would consider myself one of the many apathetic Redditors who don't feel strongly either way about the situation. Although I do understand that some Redditors actually care greatly about what's going on and it shows from their heartfelt reactions in several related threads the attitude that they display is very counterintuitive. For instance, they demand Ellen to speak up to the community, yet all of her comments are downvoted by the thousands . Her words fall on deaf ears that claim they want to listen. I can go on and on but would rather reply to the comments at this point.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddits reaction in regards to this whole \"drama\" is infantile.\n","id":"c786332b-d4df-45a2-9634-6c2160334adc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>Unlike asexuals and aromantics, the LGBT+ movement is focused on sex and desire as essential characteristics of an intimate relationship. On their own, asexuals and aromantics will be free to try and create a world without sanctions against not wanting sex Chasin, 416<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The goals of asexuals and aromantics and the LGBT+ community are not aligned.\n","id":"82899ce7-302b-469c-9729-119c8b8eaabf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cheerleading be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Unqualified coaches might push athletes to achieve new skills before they have mastered the fundamentals, due to which the chance of an injury greatly increases It is therefore important to train with qualified coaches who stress, and train to achieve perfection of fundamentals before progression.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Training with a qualified cheerleading coach is crucial in preventing injuries.\n","id":"ea8c51fd-6b7c-4f43-9c36-3a6f8af2dd21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is modern psychology a pseudoscience?<|ARGUMENT|>It is 'unacceptably easy' to come to a false conclusion by computing one P-value per study reviewed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Methodologies used in psychological and behavioral studies have poor statistical power\n","id":"f2bd5a0f-ea5b-4fef-afde-13598b92f9b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have frequently heard the phrase engineer's syndrome , which suggests that engineers tend to think they can solve complicated real world problems outside engineering with simple tricks that other people simply must not have thought of yet. However, I see that experts in nearly all fields seem to think their expertise applies outside of the actual area of their expertise, such that linguistics experts believe they deeply understand foreign relations, doctors assume they'll be good investors, and lawyers think they can fix domestic policy. I believe that all smart people who are rewarded for their intellectual labors are equally likely to suffer from this problem. It's possible that engineers are disproportionately likely to find jobs where they are rewarded for their thinking. But aside from this economic accident, I doubt there is anything specific about engineering that would cause this flaw. In particular, I believe that forcing engineering students to study philosophy, English, and art would not affect their susceptibility to engineer's syndrome. They might benefit from these classes for a variety of reasons, but they would still look at complicated problems outside their expertise with the arrogance of a successful expert. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Engineers' Syndrome is not specific to engineering\n","id":"172f45f5-0e52-45df-979a-387eefb3a978"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>If the majority of the electorate is well-informed, there is little value in getting informed as the individual voter will reap the benefits of an informed result. If the electorate is not well-informed, the individual voter will not be able to change the results with a single vote Downs in Milner, p. 27<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since a single vote is unlikely to change electoral outcomes, a large number of voters do not care to inform themselves, as the burden of getting informed outweighs the benefits of casting a well-informed vote Downs in Milner, p. 27\n","id":"0ab5a308-5e64-4770-94c0-14a185cc8815"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The reason why there's an incest taboo in societies is because of the genetic defects it can cause. Our strong feelings against incest can be explained in evolutionary terms because of this. If you want a stable society, you cannot have one where children are always born with defects. However, this is also part of the reason why societies have been abhorrent to homosexuality. Children cannot be produced in homosexual couples, so there's been a natural resistance to it for most of human history. Although, now we've begun to rethink the ethics of homosexual relationships, and we have started to decide that just because it isn't a relationship that will produce healthy children, it isn't morally wrong. The same is now true of incest. If two family members care for each other, consent, and use contraception, I believe that there is nothing morally wrong with this practice in itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that there is nothing morally wrong with incest if contraception is used.\n","id":"df346e34-7349-4018-b1a2-aab55d30635c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>It will save 11 million households up to \u00a3120 per year and a total of \u00a31 billion a year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"May has introduced an energy price cap to prevent energy suppliers from exploiting consumers with high prices.\n","id":"a514f2f4-f5b1-4fa6-9407-645dfc441b41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Machines don't need to produce semantic content to seem like the are producing semantic content to us. Language is already giving that impression to us, which is what it was designed to do. A Stop sign doesn't *actually say* \"Stop!\", it's just a piece of metal painted red and white. A fishing net doesn't actually intend to catch fish. There is no reason to overlook this gap between syntax and semantics just because of complexity and interactive processing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Language is an interface which conscious subjects use to translate their subjective experience into phonetic or graphic objects. When we build a machine, we construct an object whose components are objects and objective changes to those objects. No translation or 'code' is required. There are simply physical states which propagate across the equipment which cause the equipment to usually behave in the way it was designed.\n","id":"b98ecab6-66c1-4e37-bc32-9c36bbbd97ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There Be Religious Exemptions To The Law?<|ARGUMENT|>Historically forcing compliance of all members of a religion to all laws has been a tool of oppression<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious people should not be forced to do things which are against their moral code.\n","id":"554d8c1e-98f7-4939-ae8a-9f5c82e56bb7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Moving to Pennsylvania has been more hectic that I anticipated, so I haven't had time to respond to all of these comments. But my V has been C'd, so thank you to everyone. Okay, so this is really two views, I guess. But they go together, so let me flesh it out. It seems that no matter what you say, if it's negative toward any one group, that particular group or supporters of that group will be horrified. For instance I'm gay. If someone jokingly refers to me as a faggot or makes some kind of joke about sexuality, I'm okay with it unless there's malice and that's a whole different story. But it seems that if I were to make a similar statement when my intent at humor is obvious it's so offensive and traumatizing and I'm driving people to self harm or whatever. And related to that, anybody who prefers thin sexual romantic partners is considered fatphobic. Same with other kinds of ridiculous things. How do people who can't control their weight feel like they deserve special treatment? Homophobia is one thing. It's not harmful and it's not a choice. But being fat is a choice, and it's harmful. Same goes with other kinds of phobias that I can't think of right now. Everyone is tagging anything mildly upsetting with a trigger warning. Why? There's no trigger warning on life. If you have been raped or had some horrible thing happen to you, and you can't cope with any mention of the word or idea and here's the big part you need mental treatment. I've had mental treatment before, it helps a lot of people. I'm not knocking it, it's just my opinion. Think about it. How many rape stories are on the local news or in the paper every day? Besides, if you get that upset over it, why are you on tumblr reddit facebook etc.? Of course, my views are very controversial but I just can't see the other side of it. I think because when people tell me the other side of it, it's usually in screaming capslock and in an emotional rage and for some reason, that makes me disagree with them even more. I'm really not trying to be hurtful or bitter, but I just don't understand it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that people are offended too easily and \"trigger warnings\" are ridiculous.\n","id":"e9b0ce6a-5114-4bde-ad05-29f9775accd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a huge fan of Survivor, and one thing that many people dislike is that half the time the merged tribe is black. However, I think this is a good thing because It lets us appreciate non black merged tribes more. It's still cool to see all of the black buff designs they come out with. For instance, Dara from Kaoh Rong was a very different black than Vinaka from MvGx. There is something poetic about red, yellow, and blue mixing into black. Or, alternately, orange purple green. I'm the kind of guy who likes precedent. All right Let's see if you can  EDIT Yes, I mean the buff color, not race.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On Survivor, black merged tribes are a good thing.\n","id":"1ab81525-06d2-40ac-8b65-2a3e2f0e955f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Increased violence is really due to the breakdown of good households, not guns. Kids are being raised in these environments where parents don't care about them, and in some cases arguments are dealt with violence. This teaches kids that violence is key. We create a support system for these children, then they learn to cope and be strengthened through their issues instead of resorting to revenge as a means of coping. This will help with school gun crime and overall gun crime in the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Access to firearms is not the true cause of violence.\n","id":"314ff4df-febd-4f88-8695-5036a1d44042"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Place Cameras in Courtrooms to Televise Court Cases<|ARGUMENT|>Newspaper interviews with witnesses have already caused trials to be cancelled in the past1 because the judiciary recognises that media coverage can change people\u2019s incentives and warp their priorities. This interference may affect the reliability of the witness\u2019 evidence or the jurors\u2019 verdict. Following the televised trial of O. J. Simpson, several witnesses and jurors gave interviews to the media, or wrote their memoirs of the case2. If witnesses and jurors know that their public lives could be affected by how the rest of society perceives them through a court case, they might have an incentive to be more harsh or more lenient; public outrage when the criminal sentence does not match their own interpretations is likely to be laid on those who caused that sentence. This is particularly dangerous for America, where they have trial by jury3. Here, the jury has more control over the sentencing of criminals \u2013 which obviously becomes a problem if the jury has a vested interest in giving harsh sentences to offenders in order to gain public support. Cameras in court can only encourage witnesses and jurors to distort their true recollection or their opinions in order to profit from the media circus. 1 accessed 19\/08\/11 2 accessed 19\/08\/11 3 accessed 19\/08\/11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Witnesses and jurors could easily become involved in the media coverage of the case and place the trial at jeopardy.\n","id":"30dd26bd-7662-40a3-b816-aa4d3b88d9e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE be eliminated?<|ARGUMENT|>A national ID system would create an effective way to monitor if an individual were working without authorization, and, thus, create an effective method for targeting those who work without authorization and those who hire unauthorized workers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Effective immigration reform would reduce the number of undocumented immigrants and make ICE much less relevant.\n","id":"e8ce3398-6ce3-4d1f-9c69-11c96f9641f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I honestly believe that women get exactly what they deserve in the current job market. While I understand all the hoorah about celebrating women and having to be sensitive about what women go through, I think that's a load of bullcocky. WHAT I THINK WOMEN WANT What I think women want right now is to change a centuries old system of patriarchy within the course of a couple decades all without having to give up any of the luxuries that they have. Instead of the mentality where it's, I'll be willing to work for a significantly lower wage as long as I am in a seat of power where I can change the current system and hire more women it's, I deserve this because I am a woman and I should get paid equal without even considering the office culture that grew out from the past. WHAT I THINK ECONOMICALLY Businesses are businesses because they think economically. Rather than building up society for the notion of someone else's greater good all of which is subjective to the person , they need to think about cost, benefit, and risks. ADDING THIS IN r3m0t has explained that people will stay in a company longer for those that offer benefits like this. I looked into it and the cost benefit for keeping the person as opposed to trying to find hire a new person is actually cost efficient. In fact, according to a study, the overall long term efficiency rate for a business with a full maternity paternity leave actually benefits by a factor of 1.1 . While that might not seem like a lot, every percent counts. r4m0t has change my view in this regard. Props 1a. No Paternity Leave read above note While the FMLA Family and Medical Leave Act allows for an unpaid paternity leave, there are almost no laws except for California that allow the father to leave and be paid to not work. In our society, even if you have a few weeks off of work, you're going to be stuck behind the loop and just drag the other projects down. It's almost imperitive that you work even on your leave or at least stay in the loop in general. 1b. Maternity Leave read above note I get it, it's important for the mother to stay with her child during the first couple of weeks especially for the first two years where brain development is roughly 80 of the entire brain development that will happen. However, if you as an employee are gone for extended periods of time, would I be in the wrong to pay for your maternity leave, fire you, and hire someone while you're gone? Some maternity leaves allow upwards of three months. That's an entire fiscal quarter with a sum total of zero profit from the now mother and just losses. Not to mention, the time it takes to get you back into the loop will also cut productivity from the rest of the office. On a personal note, I have a cousin who works tirelessly. She understands the system and she's currently a partner in a large law firm. Most people would have told her, stay home, you have a child, but for her, she saw that as a resignation note. As I recall, she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, and literally one hour later, she entered into a conference call with the rest of the partners, gave her opinion, and showed up to court a couple days later for work. All the while, the rest of the partners realized she no longer had her baby bulge. Understand that a child is a fiscal burden in general and a giant time sink. You can't expect everyone to tiptoe around you just because you now have a child. 2a. Women in Certain Industries A large complaint I find is the wage gap issue between women and men in middle management along with the glass ceiling afterwards . I've met plenty of female SVP and VPs who can all tell you how hard it is to be in their position. This I completely understand. They're in a male dominated industry whose sexism dates back until when the concept of business existed. However, they also know how the system works. Men have been taught trained etc how to manage time. Not just for work, but how to relax and find enjoyment in every day life. A lot of the women executives I meet are about to break. Here's some data 53 of corporate entry level jobs are women plus . It drops to 37 for mid management roles and only 26 for VP SM MCKINSEY RESEARCH . According to this, they tended to be burned out because of the mentality that women have to work harder to succeed. Part of this is true, but knowing how to manage time well also counts. While it is a shitty thing, women are still seen as caretakers at home. Not only do you have the stress of work, but the stress of kids only burden you further. Where is your time to relax? Where is your time to wind down? While I understand your issues, it's a matter of picking one or the other. If you look at the high executive men, it's pretty clear they chose socializing work over wives as they seem extremely dense lazy in relationship matters. 2b. Women Leaving These Industries In 2010, the John Becker Blease looked into the job turnover rate for female executives. 7.2 of women left their jobs while 3.8 of men did that year. In terms of pure percentage, that's nearly double the job turnover rate for female executives. Job training, leadership, and morale are very key factors in managing a business. If a leader leaves, the functionality of the people underneath him her is severely disrupted. As a business, would I be willing to risk a higher chance of leadership issues for the same exact return or would I go with the less risky option? If the negative is the societal effect of my decision, then the price I'm willing to pay for the more risky option should be significantly less. SIDENOTE What I am asking for is a fiscally responsible solution to this issue. How can we as a society pay women the same rates as men and still be equally profitable as men. What benefits can businesses be offered to give incentive to closing the income gap? 2ND SIDENOTE For the emotional factor of things. I do understand that there is a huge factor for us as a society to enhance the role of women. However, I'm speaking of things as a business. I am aiming to run my own business and want to be well versed in the pros cons of any kind of hiring as it is a vital part of any business. That said, there are a few factors that I want to push out. Women make great additions to the office in general. Having all men actually hurts productivity and breeds a rather strange culture. Women have great skills to measure all parts of an office rather than single tasks. However the issue at hand is the turnover rate. 3RD SIDENOTE Thank You Hayleyk. I have learned today that more women suffer from minimum wage jobs than men. This in my opinion needs to change. Regulations do exist for a reason and if regulations exist, then people should follow them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe women get exactly what they deserve in the current job market\n","id":"5860eafa-48d9-4034-831a-8f97583f7f20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Many wars that ravaged Europe since the Middle Ages were due to disputes about monarchical succession<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Disputes within Royal families have been a major contributor to wars\n","id":"4f05945f-fdd2-4b4c-aef7-848b5c3c4e8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I judge people for their improper grammar and punctuation. I judge it in texts, I judge it in emails, and I judge it in formal writing. I know that these three venues represent very different places on the hierarchy of importance, but I can't help but judge peoples' use in all three. I have a hard time reading Cormac Mccarthy, because even though it's an intentional style choice, he omits apostrophes and it drives me nuts. There are a few caveats. This view does not apply to uneducated people or to people whose first language is not English. That is totally understandable. I am not referring to typos. Typos are fine. I am referring to people who habitually show no interest in learning the difference between its and it's, your and you're, effect and affect etc. This is a view that I would like actively changed. I feel like a prescriptivist. Also, I recognize that the use of improper grammar or punctuation rarely results in a confused meaning. I also recognize that my use of grammar is probably awkward and not always correct, and I'm anticipating respondents rightly pointing out some grammatical errors in my post here. However, I can't help but judge educated people who don't put in the effort to learn basic syntactical rules of the English language. Some examples of common errors that I judge who's and whose it's and its your and you're their, there, and they're misplaced or omitted apostrophes in conjunctions fewer and less than and then who and whom <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of poor grammar and punctuation reflects negatively on you as a person\n","id":"55ef5246-f86b-4f39-98df-67d82a78ff4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>Scientists still don't know exactly why suicides increased so dramatically in the military. Major studies have shown no direct link between the deaths and being deployed overseas, and suicide increased even among soldiers who did not deploy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Suicide rates in the military are much higher than other populations.\n","id":"53f396ae-346e-4b69-a5a0-f4cd56e857e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should underage individuals be permitted to watch pornography?<|ARGUMENT|>Ethical porn is inclusive and has a big focus on realism. Videos show real connection, intimacy, laughter and pleasure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This problem cannot be solved by banning pornography. Rather, the consumption of ethical porn should be encouraged.\n","id":"e25f3377-e1cf-49b1-80e0-db70198577d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer By men I mean straight men for the duration of the post. Men are very often thought of as viewing women as sex objects, or only wanting to see them naked. I believe that most men actually think that women are more attractive while wearing flattering clothing than when they are naked. I don't mean to say that men don't want to see women with their clothes off, but that men judge women's attractiveness with their clothes on rather than by what they think they would look like with their clothes off. I don't necessarily want to have my mind changed about this but I do think it's an interesting discussion topic and I'm more than willing to have my mind changed on the matter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that most men, despite what people tend to jest, find women more attractive with clothes on than off. , NSFW.\n","id":"8ca5676a-69e0-4835-88fc-0758034f34a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most colleges do not require trigonometry for admissions, and do not require students to take a trigonometry course. It seems unfair that the SAT would include this in the math section. Some will argue that it makes sure students are well rounded, but it's incredibly unfair to use this to test a student's aptitude for college. When I was in high school, I had an 89 overall GPA. I got mid range scores on the reading and writing sections of the SAT, but did very poorly on the math section. Because of this, I was denied admission to many colleges which I applied to. I understand that my scores in reading and writing were average, but it was the low math score which really hurt my chances of admission. This might seem like a personal argument, but the fact remains that I'm sure many students would agree with me. I understand including algebra and geometry, but I don't see why they include trigonometry. This is a person's future which they are dealing with. EDIT Of the five colleges I applied to, I was rejected by two of them, but was accepted by three of them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The SAT should not include trigonometry in their math section.\n","id":"06bebbb6-f6af-488a-97c3-1fdc95f18979"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the leak of 5 films 4 of which have not been released yet has been spun by the studio in order to bring more attention to their upcoming movie The Interview with Seth Rogan and James Franco about an assassination attempt on the leader of North Korea. While I believe the actual leak was a legitimate hack on the studio that will ultimately damage their box office, the studios have pushed the narrative to the press that it was perpetrated by the North Korean Government, in order to drum up buzz for their tentpole comedy coming out over the next few months. I think the press has widely taken the bait of an easy color piece to run after their staffs were on a thanksgiving break. This has resulted in free advertising for all of Sony's projects especially The Interview. Change my conspiracy theory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"North Korean Hollywood Hack\" is a calculated marketing strategy by Sony Pictures\n","id":"2746663f-6be7-4447-ad35-98144f5a4ecf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What if every tax paying citizen was able to choose which programs their tax money went into? Every citizen would be forced to fill out taxes as per usual but instead of a grid locked congress determining how the budget is run each individual would be able to decide how much of their tax money goes into whatever program they want and believe in. I believe this is a more democratic system as the people have more power to decide how the government allocates their resources into. Since people would have more power, more people would become politically active since there is more of a clear result from their actions. Many people don't vote because they feel like their votes don't really count for anything in the end. Having a clearer outcome of their action is incentive for people to get involved. Furthermore, this would call for greater transparency and efficiency within government programs. Greater transparency would occur because people would want to have a greater understanding of what they're putting their money into. Anything sketchy going on wouldn't fly because image would be crucial. If any of the programs get bad press then people wouldn't want to put their tax money in it and the program would fail. This is encouragement for greater efficiency. Of course some people wouldn't want to go through the trouble of learning about different programs and what not. So if anyone either was unable to or didn't want to choose where their money goes they could just default their taxes to go into government control and then they can decide what to do with it. All this provides is the option for the people allocate their funds into programs they believe in. I'm curious as to what kind of outcomes would occur if this system was to be put into place. In order to change my view, convince me that we shouldn't allow the people to be in control of the national budget.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should be able to determine where their tax dollars go\n","id":"a5a08873-d30d-43ca-bf0f-4a29895a99ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My reasoning behind this position isn't too profound, and of course the law disagrees, so I'm wondering where I'm wrong here. A union, a group of people, forms a cartel to command better prices for their main resource, labor. They use cooperation to try to monopolize the labor pool and thus set prices to their benefit. A corporation, a group of people, forms a cartel to command higher prices for their main resource, oil, for example. They use cooperation to try to monopolize the oil supply and thus set prices to their benefit. The only difference in these scenarios seems to be the resource in question. It seems that unions are only given a pass on forming a cartel because the resource they have is labor. I don't understand the reasoning for this. You could change my view if you could convince me that labor has the appropriately different properties than all other resources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If unions are allowed to monopolize labor, then corporations should be allowed to monopolize other resources.\n","id":"eef5aa86-7a61-4c4e-a276-daa6cef602f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One thing that I've thought time and time again when hearing about the woes of China's last dynasty is that for all the sob story about evil European imperialists both the Chinese and my professor wail about, it seems to me that, speaking broadly, the Chinese government was nothing less than arrogant, isolationist and close minded. Time and time again I've heard about how the Chinese viewed Europeans or, well, pretty much everybody as simply barbarians, and treated them as if they were uncivilized trash. I understand that this arrogance existed amongst the Europeans as well ala the British , but it does not strike me as being to the same extent as that of the Chinese. Along with this, the Chinese' isolationist attitude towards trade really irks me. I generally try to be neutral in history, but I still think that a free market at least in the broader Smithian sense is extremely important to a country's well being as well as that of the world, and the Chinese' refusal to open more than one port to trade with more opening only after the Opium War did little but leave their people and people around the world to suffer impoverishment. I could ramble on with more examples, but the overarching point is that China at least as I currently believe was nothing but arrogant, totalitarian, anti trade and anti progress throughout the Qing period.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In discussing the story of 18-19th century Qing China, I can't help but feel the Qing were generally in the wrong.\n","id":"102aba31-c3d5-4898-8a40-57f75ae982c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we replace meat with insect derived protein?<|ARGUMENT|>A 2005 study showed that insects are very unlikely to harbor any common food borne diseases, such as salmonella or listeria.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The U.N. has stated that edible insects pose a low risk of infecting humans with disease.\n","id":"44605ef8-13d2-47c9-9d49-cafac502d9e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>Even today explosive capability of nuclear weapons is referred to as a multiplication of the explosive of the Hiroshima bomb.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hiroshima slowly became the default comparison for what could happen if an atomic bomb is dropped on another city.\n","id":"920399a3-9c5f-441e-ad7b-8d32f57b27ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should end mandatory retirement<|ARGUMENT|>Mandatory retirement fuels social isolation in older populations because we live in a society that encourages the development of social lives around your work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A mandatory retirement reduces the quality of life for those forced to retire\n","id":"fc9252a3-f3d1-4463-b128-1ba649db4a62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Not Have Pulled Out of the Iran Deal.<|ARGUMENT|>It seems that the combined other parties to the agreement hold weight with Iran or that Iran would rather use its continued compliance to demonstrate that Donald Trump's choice is a difference between him and the other parties as much as it is between him and Iran.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no obvious evidence as of 11\/06\/2018, over a month after Trump withdrew the US that Iran has resumed their program.\n","id":"00b15007-6c85-4265-abdf-eca6ddc87bfd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are 7 billion individuals on this planet, and the number is increasing faster each day. I understand that there is still plenty of room for billions more to come. Yet it seems as if the problem will wipe out the entire human species if the birth rates continue. We should do something about it before it becomes a serious problem in the future. I'd rather prevent births now than have individuals who've lived many years die due to the lack of resources. If we control the population birth rates now, we will be able to ensure the security for a decent existence further in the future for our offspring. It'll knock out one side of the resource depletion issue. It could solve the issue with resource availability via population size not being an issue as we learn more on how to create more resources at lower cost. I understand that with exoplanet colonization and space colonization coming it is possible to combat the population size. Yet with the way it seems, it seems as if there is slow progress with colonization of other planets. I think the population size will become a severe issue before space planet colonization is affordable by the majority of the population. Edit I'm not assuming the population birth rates are a problem now. The problem would arise in the future. We should take precautions to prevent it from happening. Edit 2 This is my new view. Currently, it is not a problem. Not necessarily a top priority yet. Out of 50 Nobel Laureates 1 3rd of the individuals believe it will be a problem. There are a few other things to take into consideration. Such as emissions. every individual leaves a carbon footprint\u200b that effects our planet. The higher the population size, the higher the number for emissions will be. If there is a emissions cap of how much the Earth can handle and we pass the cap there could be extinction worthy problems birthed. I still believe that we need to do something about the population size. To set in motion some plans and at least be prepared.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We need to control the population birth rates now instead of later.\n","id":"2cef9104-cc1a-4f1e-95fd-a0b9bc5e8d2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should abandon marriage<|ARGUMENT|>Marriage is becoming obsolete with more and more youth cohabiting without the need to celebrate anything. Celebration is costly and deprive couples the means for sustaining their family<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of the advantages of marriage are achieved by a monogamous relationship\n","id":"6b68bba3-efe6-4561-9263-d1b96657c80b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>wind power should be a primary focus of future energy supply.<|ARGUMENT|>There is little doubt that the current mix of energy provision is simply unsustainable. Fossil fuels are simply too damaging to the environment and nuclear is just too expensive. Wind power is an established technology providing, for example, 21% of electricity in Denmark.i The research is already done and can be made available around the world. Once externalities are taken into account nuclear energy is the single most expensive way of producing a therm. Clean coal is, frankly, a myth and the trend for oil and gas is constantly upwards in term of price. Other renewables are embryonic technologies fraught with development costs whereas wind is an established technology already providing a significant share of the energy mix in several developed economies. i World Wind Energy Association, World Wind Energy Report 2010, April 2010, p.5<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wind energy provides a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear power\n","id":"f2dc87ef-b5bc-445f-9c9b-9842b347cc85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>The troubles gun owners should go through to get guns caused by legislation are worth it to save the lives of Americans by having fewer or worse guns in the hands of killers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having fewer guns in circulation means society is generally safer.\n","id":"459abcf7-50f6-4af3-bcca-8245107d960d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Veganism just removes human-caused suffering, not what already exists as just being moral is not enough. So while we can help protect and prevent animal harm in non-vegan industries, animals outside of that realm may be neglected when they need our help, as we feel it's outside the need to follow a moral standard set by veganism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Morality does not matter so much for animal lives, as animals will be killed and suffer needlessly either way i.e. whether we are vegan or not. Prioritizing makes more sense than morality when making decisions, as morality is not encompassing enough in protecting animals from harm.\n","id":"06345d25-586b-43c1-812b-8e0df036a7cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As far as I'm concerned, the medium that a work of art is presented in has no bearing on the quality impact of the piece. Everyone recognizes that there are good and bad books, movies, paintings, etc, yet we don't feel the need to give a different name to a quality book like we do with graphic novels comics. For some reason, a quality story told through panels of art and text is a graphic novel, while something without the perception of redeeming social value is labelled a comic. I think this is the worst sort of pretension in art. Archie or Marmaduke vs. The Sandman or Persepolis are the same type of art, yet there is obviously a huge difference in what themes they convey and the audiences they appeal to. It seems no different from recognizing that War and Peace and Twilight come in the same artistic packaging a novel yet are clearly different. Calling different types of the same art a Graphic Novel over a Comic suggests that no mere comic could ever be real art, turns people away from the entire genre unnecessarily, and demeans those artists who refuse to engage in the pedantic name game Bill Waterson, author of the phenomenal 'comic' Calvin and Hobbes, for instance . Why bother at all with the distinction?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the term \"Graphic Novel\" for certain comic books is pretentious, unnecessary, and ultimately damaging.\n","id":"f5e36634-68c1-4e30-a453-2a1dbd206d89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of my good friends always argues about how every animal on the planet has gender roles. He says that the male should do the tough stuff and the female should always be the one to do the prissy things. He even uses this argument for how men and women should act. I think its stupid and sexist. Men and women should not be generalized and expected to do certain roles. EDIT Thank you everyone for your awesome opinions I really expected this to be ignored<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think gender roles in today's modern times is stupid.\n","id":"cddecdef-6a54-4fa1-b0b3-7e5d0a05fb02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Purity Pledges Harmful?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a double standard inherent to purity pledges. Things such as purity rings, purity balls, and overprotective parenting are directed at women and are rarely seen with young men Paul, 6<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These programs focus on traditional gender roles such as female passivity and male aggressiveness.\n","id":"f9178a1b-6561-44d2-b307-c16ff8241738"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Vegan Alternative: Pain-free GM Animals?<|ARGUMENT|>With our current technology, it would be impossible for scientists to be sure that the animals they engineered were truly without pain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Creating animals that don't feel pain is a challenging process in which success cannot be guaranteed.\n","id":"440dd4dd-4de9-4c89-9405-db7a65897c9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I recently went into a store to look at having a piece of jewellery made. While I was there, the staff were making out like anything other than a diamond will basically be a piece of garbage. Having no knowledge of these things, I almost agreed to purchase quite a sizeable diamond which would have blown my budget. In my mind, why buy the jewellery at all of it's just going to look like cheap trash Luckily, I didn't. I've now done some research into moisanitte and white sapphires and I'm really struggling to understand why diamonds are worth anything at all. Moisanitte gems are rated on the same colour and clarity scale as diamonds so visually they conform to the same standards. Yes, a diamond is a 10 on the mohs scale, but a moisanitte is a 9.6. Regarding the price, I was offered a visibly yellow diamond, uncertified, enhanced has had silicone injected 0.8ct for 1900. I can buy a 1.25ct moisanitte, perfect clarity, same cut for 700. When trying to find out why diamonds are worth more it appears to be for two reasons About a decade ago, a diamond company de beers I think it was spent millions on an advertising campaign to promote them then raised the prices. As a status symbol. Literally just so that people can say that their ring cost 17,000 Based on that, the value of a diamond is only what we percieve it to be. If that were ever to change a lot of people will have worthless, albeit pretty, rocks on their hands that cost them the same as a house deposit. So please, change my mind. If you can't my girlfriend is getting a moissonite ring \ud83d\ude09<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Diamonds are a complete waste of money\n","id":"5d4eb104-f57c-46ab-9133-fc5b0b76f0eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So many gaming communities believe in something called ping abuse , even though they can never substantiate what it would even mean. This seems to have come about because the vast majority of players have low pings now, and gamers typically look for any excuse they can for being beaten, so high ping players stick out as an easy minority to target. In the early 2000s, when most players had higher pings, the general concensus was that lower ping players always had the advantage. Somehow players with absolutely no background in anything even remotely related to computer science have decided that they have expert knowlege of one of the most complicated areas of the field networked systems. This phenomenon has gotten so bad that even when the developers of a game publish blog posts explicitly stating that ping abuse, as the community describes it, does not exist, they are accused of lying to cover up bugs in their own game. For full disclosure, I am what many would consider a high ping player , since I live in a region which rarely if ever has local servers for any big games. I have, however, played many other games locally with an acceptably lower ping, so I've experienced both worlds, and a lower ping is much, much better. I also have a background in computer science and software development, specifically game development. I do not have first hand experience with creating game netcode, but I am still able to understand basic and technically advanced concepts with regards to that topic. To clarify, my argument is not that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, my argument is that, when looking at any self contained phenomenon that exists specifically as a feature of a networked game world, there is absolutely no advantage whatsoever. No benefits are derived by increasing ones ping excluding lag switches which are controlled and considered an exploit . What I mean by self contained is that all aspects of the phenomenon must be considered, without needing to bring in any other phenomenon which occur independently from the one in question. For example, high ping players can technically shoot other players once they've already gone behind cover, but since other players can also do this to high ping players via the exact same phenomenon, there is no advantage either way. Changing my view would not necessarily require technical knowledge. For example, basic understanding of what latency causes, combined with specific game mechanics, can make for a qualitative difference in game experience, rather than a strictly quantitative one that relates to network topology or something of that nature. However, an understanding of the fundamental aspects of netcode, combined with a fair amount of experience with networked games, would be preferable for getting your point across. I'm also not specifically focusing on one gaming title like CSGO or R6 Siege, I'm open to a possible advantage in absolutely any game out there. Unique game mechanics can have a big impact on how latency is experienced, and what impact it has on the competitive nature of the game.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is absolutely no advantage to having a high latency in online multiplayer games\n","id":"10fa5835-997a-42fb-beae-9d3cbafdf8eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Introduction Hey guys This opinion formed after doing extensive research on the 2020 democratic candidates, and finding that several such as Mayor Pete look to abolish the electoral college. With this I thought to myself, why should we have an electoral college anyways? and thus, this opinion was formed. Let's dive right in x200B Note please read all of my examples and all of the links I site as proof . I do not want to have to type out all of that every time somebody responds to this sorry, im really lazy P anyways, happy reading x200B The argument for the electoral college In my research, I have heard a few primary arguments in favor of the electoral college. x200B The electoral college was formed by the founding fathers to prevent uneducated or uninformed voters from voting somebody that would be negative for our country. This still applies. The Electoral College ensures that all states are equally involved in the selection of the President. The electoral college simplifies the voting process and avoids mistakes and creates certainty in elections x200B I'm not going to explain the reasoning behind those views any further. This is just as a reference. You can start here if you'd like to learn more specifics. x200B My refutations for the pro electoral college argument I will now attempt to refute the 3 main arguments I've heard in favor of the electoral college in order of previous appearance . These refutations inherently strengthen my case, and I will reference them in my own points. x200B Each argument has issues, but the general problem is that the electoral college gives certain people less of an opinion essentially . I will now go into each of the 3 arguments The original point of the electoral college is outdated by definition. As stated earlier, the original purpose of the electoral college was to prevent uneducated or uninformed voters from making poor decisions. There are several issues with this. First and foremost, the large majority of Americans are considered educated . According to the US Census over 90 of Americans have achieved a high school degree which is already more educated then the large majority of voters in 18th century America , and over 1 3 of Americans have a college degree and higher. By this, it is obvious that education isn't an issue for American's anymore. But what about being uninformed? While more and more people are beginning to vote there is a constant issue with how informed a voter is. The primary argument here is flawed, however the electoral college suggests essentially taking away the voter's responsibility to be informed by taking away the decision for them. By removing the electoral college, it would become more important for Americans to become informed. As a secondary point, it makes no sense to base a system off of something that will always happen. Instead of stifling the voices of millions of Americans, we should work on better ways to inform them. The main problem with this argument is this States don't elect officials. People do. So while it is true, a smaller state would have a bigger voice due to the electoral college, this doesn't mean that the residents in that state have an equal voice. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Take California, for example. Over 50 of the residents of California live in 4 individual counties, with over 94 living in highly urbanized areas big cities . This means that only 6 of the population around 1.8 million people live in rural areas. Because of the electoral college system, the general consensus of what people want to happen in government would be heard, but the millions of people's voices would not. In other words, while urban voters would get their general wishes which are often similar , rural voter's issues would be drowned out. This doesn't even begin to touch on the issues with California's political voter diversity which is very low meaning most voters are liberal . The conservative voters become virtually unheard, because no matter what California will go democratic and thus those electoral college votes will always go to the Democratic candidate. That is hardly fair for the millions of people living in California whose opinions are now rendered essentially invalid. Tying this back to the original point, while the states issues may be fulfilled, many individuals issues will not be. And the president shouldn't be elected based on general needs. Every individual person should get an equal say in it. Under the current system, some peoples votes are worth a lot less than others. For example, Wyoming's voters have 3.6 times more influence then their Californian counterparts read the article I won't go into more detail . This essentially means that an individual in California's opinion is worth less just because of the electoral college system. That is inherently unfair . This is a very weak argument. The electoral college doesn't really simplify voting processes it just drags them out. If we were to simply count up every vote in America and the candidate with the most votes wins, it would save a lot of time. There would be less individual counting and a lot less time wasted watching the state results coming in. It would be person by person. We wouldn't have to wait for each individual state to tally their votes. Regardless of this, it is still a weak argument in comparison to the harm it creates When weighing this debate on almost any mechanism, almost any argument against the electoral college outweighs this argument for it. x200B Any additional subpoint I'd like to add and refute x200B One common argument in favor of the EC is the President will always be a democrat liberal picked by New York and California, because they have more people in response to that 4.4 million Californians voted for Trump. Almost 3 million New Yorkers voted for Trump. Compare that to a state, say, Arizona, which only had 1.3M vote for Trump. Or Mississippi which only had 700 thousand vote for Trump. Another 200,000 votes and California would have had more Trump voters than Texas. California was almost the state with the most votes for Trump by those numbers. This shows that there are many votes going unheard in these states. credit to u keanwood for pointing this out, adding it to my personal reasons for why it should be abolished Why the electoral college needs to go Here are my reasons the electoral college needs to go. The electoral college ignores the will of the people. The electoral college gives too much power to swing states. The electoral college squanders the different opinions of people in the same state by forcing their entire state to vote one way. 1 and 3 are my biggest points. Prove to me that the electoral college doesn't ignore the will of the people, and prove to me that the electoral college doesn't render the opinions of many people in a state invalid, and I will begin to . Explanation of my views My first point is pretty simple. 538 people decide the fate of over 300 million Americans. Additionally, the millions of people with differing opinions in each state are rendered invalid by the electoral college. Take the 2016 election, for example. The majority of Americans wanted Hillary Clinton, yet Trump won. or in 2000 with George Bush. Both ways, the will of the majority of Americans was ignored in favor of the will of 538 people. The electoral college makes the president dependent on winning a handful of swing states. Because of this, many presidents visit any states besides these swing states This inherently gives too much power to these swing states, which would defeat the purpose of the electoral college giving more equal power to every state . A simplified explanation would be that it is known that California will almost always vote in favor of a democrat in the electoral college , so there is little power in making a decision there. States that swing in which party they vote for, such as Florida, thus become much more powerful. I explain this much better in my refutations of the arguments in favor of the electoral college, so I won't repeat myself. To sum it up, though, people with differing opinions in states are left invalid because the state will always swing a certain way in the electoral college. For example is California, which will almost always vote democratic majority and thus vote democratically in the electoral college, making the opinions of conservatives in California basically worthless. Note The reason i'm not going in to more detail in my explanation of my views is because a large majority of the studies proof examples of what I'm arguing I already included in my refutations of the argument in favor of the electoral college, and I am too lazy to retype it out again. x200B How to  Prove to me that the electoral college doesn't ignore the will of the people, and prove to me that the electoral college fairly accounts for everybody's individual opinion equally , and I will start to . IMPORTANT To 100  without question, please prove that the electoral college system is in some way superior to a popular vote wins system, or how a electoral college system is better in general.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Electoral College should be abolished\n","id":"339f0625-387c-42ea-aec1-72bd727b3092"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The new Disney live action film \"Mulan\" will not be popular.<|ARGUMENT|>Liu Yi Fei recently shared a post on Weibo in support of the Hong Kong police, which has sparked backlash and calls for a boycott of the film.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liu Yi Fei has caused serious controversy which may harm the film.\n","id":"c4faa50b-30ac-463c-b01d-e6fad42e5a1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see a lot of people who cry death penalty when they hear of a horrific news story. I believe that the death penalty should be used on the most severe and extreme cases, but I dont think its used as often as it should be. Think of the case that was just settled this week Woman kills her friend and cuts baby out of the womb. I think her sentence is fair life without parole , but I also wouldnt feel bad knowing she was put to death for her crime. I know a lot of people also are against the death penalty for their own reasons, but why keep someone jailed for the rest of their life with NO CHANCE that they will ever get out? Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the death penalty is appropriate under many circumstances.\n","id":"a1938019-d48f-4c15-994a-e9b2ec32a988"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Julian Assange<|ARGUMENT|>The UN special rapporteur on torture concluded that ''in addition to physical ailments, Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical of prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety, and intense psychological trauma.''<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Julian Assange's health is so bad that he could die in prison.\n","id":"735d1969-13a9-4168-99f6-0aca25d791d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What I mean is that religions tend to use theism as a crutch for authority, which ultimately weakens them. For example, Christianity. the teachings in Christianity ie adultery is bad murder is bad is given authority because God said so and the bible is infallible because it is the word of God. The entire teachings of Christianity hinges on the belief that God exists and he so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son to die on the cross for us. Thus, if anything makes the believer doubt the god, it also undermines the teachings of morality Treat others like how you would want to be treated and so forth. and anything else of merit in the religion. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe theism is a crutch that ultimately weakens a religon.\n","id":"24ed827c-f0d5-43a6-856f-e48deb541017"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>It\u2019s a moral community saying, \u201cHere are our central values, and we define morality as being about our central values; to hell with the rest of you. \u2013 Jonathan Haidt<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Designating a few values as fundamental and others as transient is bound to result in cherry-picking those values that suit the given comparison.\n","id":"b3aa1925-e708-4bf2-bc40-b2c16d72f872"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe this, because I think human lives improved the most through social and economical revolutions and believe they will keep improving through social and economical changes. Glad to hear your opinions Edit Thank you all for such an interest discussion. Let me clarify my stance on this subject Study biochemistry, but I find we tend to belittle the capacity of students in other fields to contribute to society or the economy . As much as it's true that science is the most constant and measurable way for society to grow, we put to much emphasis on these subjects instead of seeing the big picture and understanding that one great author may influence the lives of millions and completely change the way we live for good or bad, think about how much influence Marx had on the world .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe we put too much emphasis on science and engineering studies.\n","id":"268c2828-7265-49a6-b1d4-99657efaa240"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that someone can be completely justified in thinking that a religion is bad whether that means morally objectionable, backwards, harmful, discriminatory, etc. without coming from a place of hate or cultural bias. It can be valid to dislike a religion without disliking the people associated with it. It can also be valid to approve of some religions while disapproving of others. This is assuming one holds all religions to the same standard. I feel too often criticism of religion is countered with allegations of bigotry, such as with Islam and Islamophobia. I think it is similar to how one can be a Democrat and disapprove of Republican views. When the issue of Democrats and Republicans comes up, there are rarely accusations of racism or bigotry. I believe religions should be treated the same way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Disapproving of a particular religion doesn't necessarily make you a bigot.\n","id":"f2a562fc-5e14-4140-9c50-bd6f3e166de3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Even if they're not necessarily happy about dying, they wouldn't be sad about it. I can't speak much about Islam, Buddhism, etc, but I know for a fact that Catholics believe that there's a heaven, and that life in heaven is infinitely better than the life we live now, and therefore I see no reason why any Catholic who thinks that they're going to heaven should be scared of or sad about dying. If they do believe in heaven, they should be looking forward to the afterlife that they supposedly believe in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If religious people truly believed in heaven, they would be happy that they're dying\n","id":"04e4c001-9cdf-4440-8110-c6831b899b1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not pro life or pro choice, I am apathetic on the issue. That being said, states want to defund PP because they offer abortions. While I don't agree with using partisan politics for this type of discussion. there is a simple solution for PP move abortions to another third party. If so much of what PP does has nothing to do with abortions than they shouldn't have a problem outsourcing the abortions to a related, non government funded, third party. The idea that they refuse to do that makes me think they are not being honest with how much of their business is actually abortion related. I understand they may lose some synergy or efficiencies by doing this, but if their whole business models depends on needing government money this should be something they are willing to consider.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't feel bad for Planned Parenthood getting defunded\n","id":"a08644e3-23e4-4005-8097-47d2ea30158b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>The difference between government police and private security police is that government has no competition, or motivation to offer good services, and it forces everybody to pay for it. A private company can have competition and strives for profit. Thus it will work hard to optimize its services and be cheaper in order to be picked over its competition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private security forces exist, and they're more effective and cheaper than government police.\n","id":"8a6be7ac-45ee-4cb3-b067-2471699bcba7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Antarctica Should Be Opened Up For Resource Exploitation<|ARGUMENT|>It's strange that the Opp mentions enterprises abusing of the system and \"regulations will prove futile\", since Antartica won't just be open to everyone to go and get their share of it. It will be very regulated and only those enterprises that win the calls for bids on different resource extractions will be given permission to exploit them in the same way that none is given permission now and this has been respected. If they break the law they won't be given permission to go on, just as when any state allows foreign companies to extract their resources under guidelines or else they are expelled. I mean, it's not as if companies couldn't be coerced by the whole world, its market. If it were the powerful states that wanted to abuse of the system it would be useless since certainly it will be their companies that will win the calls for bids so they will actually be economically benefited, providing them with that needed soft power. We don't say Tonga needs to compete with its non-existing oil extracting companies but rather that they will be able to acquire the resources depending on their needs plus since the majority of the earnings would go to the whole international community, they will be divided and Tonga will get its share without the need of extracting resources so it benefits every country in the end and at the same time taking care of the environment. On fishing, actually Opp mentions it as an activity they would ban introduction but when they noticed we argued good on the current fishing industry they said it's a different case because fishing is renewable, so we don't get it. The truth is that no fish has gone extinct at all as they claim, and the Patagonian toothfish poses a concern for its illegal fishing, not the legal onebit.ly\/ncWn7l, which as we mentioned is closely monitored by the EMP to control their level, and it must go on. Tourism: None of the FEW accidents have posed an impact on living species and all have been controlled finally<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No possible over abuse on the resources, just a utilitarian, global benefit\n","id":"e6fd0a61-02f5-4465-b8b8-d0d79e960bb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Many management practices used by organic agriculture e.g. minimum tillage, returning crop residues to the soil, the use of cover crops and rotations, and the greater integration of nitrogen-fixing legumes, increase the return of carbon to the soil, raising productivity and favouring carbon storage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Organic agriculture contributes to mitigating the greenhouse effect and global warming through its ability to sequester carbon in the soil.\n","id":"f72be848-f5e3-45f1-8784-1e7ceab59953"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to be wrong, but I just cannot feel sorry for people who ignored the evacuation and warnings about the storm. For example, here one Texas mayor told residents that if you are going to stay here, mark your arm with a Sharpie pen with your name and Social Security number. The message was certainly clear stay and you risk your death. So I guess I just want to better understand why anybody in their right mind would choose to stay. If I lived there, I would certainly not risk the safety of myself and my family and ignore evacuation protocol. I do understand if you are disabled or elderly and cannot leave, or have some outlying circumstance where leaving may not have been an option. But for the majority of people, I have a hard time sympathizing. Maybe I'm just naive?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Residents of Houston and the surrounding areas were given numerous warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Harvey. If somebody is still there, it is their fault\n","id":"a10b0a2b-36b2-4de1-a977-7cfb7592ae1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the American Dietetic Association a vegetarian diet can meet protein requirements, provide all the essential amino-acids, necessary vitamins, fats and minerals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All the high-quality amino acid proteins we require are readily available in plants such as buckwheat, quinoa and potatoes.\n","id":"fd55b957-2572-4529-9c3c-3480396ebf29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>White supremacist's ideology limits other people's freedom. Their right to free speech is less important than the right of the targeted minorities not to be accused on the basis of how they are born.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Freedom of speech is not an unlimited right, and therefore can be curtailed.\n","id":"8bfe84e3-f1f0-49e8-906e-e16d45a3c095"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Greetings fellow freethinkers, I come bearing the answer to the Christian problem, though it is not a super humane, I feel it is by far the most efficient. I do not like it so I would like a fellow enlightened being to play devils advocate with me to prove me wrong. The resolution is as follows After extensive research and months of study, I have come up with the conclusion of re education centers that will treat this problem. We freethinkers shall establish these centers in South Alabama aka their hive. After puting into place every Christian, they must be submitted into these fine institutions where they will be met with a fine range of daily activities such as but not limited to shoveling graves, constructing materials, packaging and picking cotton. Food will be delivered from self sustained plantations inside the institutions however we shall keep their caloric intake to a minimum to prevent any rebellions. Now I know what all you astute beings are clearly thinking Where wil wel be able to get the funding to back this project Well fear not gentlesirs, we shall inquire such money from Richard Dawkins himself, he does have a foundation for exactly this sort of thing. These institutions shall also have re education classes devoted to making these close minded cave people to be more tolerant of Proud womyn, the infamously oppressed LGBT community and MOST importantly Atheists as atheists are the most oppressed minority on the face of the earth. We freethinkers have been oppressed by these cave dwelling baboons since time itself, this is why it is our primary focus on teaching these Christians to be more sensative and progressive towards these groups. In conclusion establishing institutions for the sake of reshaping these scientifically illiterate people into cultured and educated individuals like ourselves should be our primary goal as Scholarly beings. In the end we shall bring diversity, reason and logic to the world. However don't get the idea that I am proud of this idea for I know that it is not humane but extremely efficient. If my mathematics are correct, if we follow my idea we will be able to conquer our milky way galaxy by the year 2304. In conclusion, I would like for you fine beings to point out a few flaws in my crystal clear idea to persuade me away from the evil but efficient idea that I have proposed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think we should group christians into re-education camps in order to form a more society. progressive\n","id":"66e934bb-65b8-4000-86c0-9798d7aaeb21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen this sentiment often on reddit That movie is X years old, no need for spoilers . But think of how many movies or books you haven't read that may be years or decades old. I haven't seen The Godfather I hadn't watched Shawshank until recently. Yes in limited circumstances it may be reasonable to expect that spoilers are ok. That is not what I am disputing. I don't know the ending to The Mousetrap and that play is how many decades old? I want to see it and discover it for myself. For example if someone asks to clarify a reference that may involve spoilers, and I don't think spoilers are an absolute necessity. Sometimes there's a spoiler scope like discussion threads which discuss previous episodes. However simple duration is not a sufficient heuristic to determine whether spoiler tags are necessary. And of course there is zero downside save some effort to spoiler tagging. I'm not saying that pople should always spoiler tag, but a spoiler tagged post is always better for readers.  Edit Yes, sometimes one can expect that the work has been spoiler for enough people Star Wars, Sixth Sense, etc but that doesn't mean that it's simply because a work is old.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Spoilers don't have a expiration date although there may be circumstances in which one can reasonably expect that people don't care\n","id":"c32f9ad4-dd97-42fd-98a7-45bf43852bf3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Make Vaccination Compulsory<|ARGUMENT|>Commonly-used vaccines are a cost-effective and preventive way of promoting health, compared to the treatment of acute or chronic disease. In the U.S. during the year 2001, routine childhood immunizations against seven diseases were estimated to save over $40 billion per birth-year cohort in overall social costs including $10 billion in direct health costs, and the societal benefit-cost ratio for these vaccinations was estimated to be 16.5 billion.1 Another aspect is also, that productivity rates remain high and less money is earmarked for social and health transfers because people are healthier. This is also supported by a WHO study, that claims: \u201cWe calculate that the average percentage increase in income for the children whose immunization coverage increases through will rise from 0.78 per cent in 2005 to 2.39 per cent by 2020. This equates to an increase in annual earnings per child of $14 by 2020. The total increase in income per year once the vaccinated cohort of children start earning will rise from $410 million in 2005 to $1.34 billion by 2020 at a cost of $638 million in 2005 and $748 million in 2020.\u201d2 This study based on economic and health indicators is part of the world immunization program GAVI. 1 Wikipedia. Vaccine Controversy. 2 David Bloom, David Canning and Mark Weston, The value of immunization, World Economics, July \u2013 September 2005 accessed 05\/28\/2011<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Compulsory vaccines are a financial relief on the health system\n","id":"15f64f44-1b06-45e6-a5f4-977034f0e7a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not talking about super fast high speed internet, just basic slow ass internet that could be used to read news from around the world, share and experience viewpoints from all sorts of people, and spread idea's across the globe. I believe that in countries with less human rights, such as third world nations where people currently don't have as free access to the internet as we enjoy, the internet could help bring around change. If people read about the freedoms we enjoy, and realized that around the world people lived differently, something many people can't realize at the moment, they would push towards similiar rights. I think that in todays world, where knowledge is a few buttons on a keyboard away, the internet should become a basic civil right, and should be available to everyone free of censorship. I would still suggest that ISP's should exist to provide good internet, as the free stuff I would provide everyone with is absolute basic slow internet. I understand that realistically speaking this isn't very feasable, but am argueing that it SHOULD become reality, not necessarily that it COULD.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that basic cheap internet should be free to everyone in the world capable of accessing it, and every effort should be put towards making it accessable to everyone. -\n","id":"107f1fc0-5f7d-407a-a6c7-c5dfbe5c069d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey guys. I've made a lot of vegan friends lately, and it's got me to thinking about veganism. I've been thinking about why it's OK to not be vegan, but I keep thinking of counters to my arguments Animals live longer and better when raised by humans, so it's OK to kill them. Counter kids live longer and better when raised by parents, but they don't have the right to take their lives. Animals don't have empathy, and would gladly kill us if they had to. Counter Humans should be better than animals. Sociopaths still have rights. Veganism is unhealthy. Counter can possibly be true, but doesn't have to be. We don't know if animals feel pain. Counter we can't speak the language of foreigners, but we can tell when they're in pain. It might be dishonest to ignore those signs. Of course, this might be an anthropomorphic bias to interpret animal behavior the same as human. The only legit argument I can come up with is that it would be an ecological disaster if we just let cows pigs etc. fend for themselves in the wild instead of eating them. I guess what I'm asking is, How can we justify killing animals when they suffer, and we no longer need to eat them in order to survive?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a person can afford it, they should be vegan.\n","id":"caca101f-2ddf-4617-912f-1215a01d48a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>The ability to change a vote at any time will require any influent to continuously promote their viewpoint, which is more expensive than having to do it only for specific upcoming elections\/decisions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would make it difficult for large economic interests to influence and corrupt the system, as voting is less concentrated.\n","id":"34c34f67-b8b9-4931-9663-e5bb000e8c9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abortion<|ARGUMENT|>Why can't a rape victim put their child up for adoption? Isn't this an adequate resolution to the problem? The only reason it might not be an adequate resolution are the risks and pains of child-birth and perhaps the difficulty of separating from the child. But, these objections are easily dealt with. First, maintaining the life of a fetus is worth the pains and risks that it might cause the mother. Second, there is no difference in separating from an unborn child abortion as compared to a born child adoption.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A rape victim can put their baby up for adoption.\n","id":"5845a053-52d7-4cdd-98af-fb311e03f5fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Not every woman falls into a stereotypical vision of womanhood, through welcoming a more diverse group into these spaces steps are being made towards dismantling the gender binary model and the ways women think about gender equality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Every woman has a unique experience. Welcoming all women is beneficial and can teach others about the different obstacles that women encounter.\n","id":"e0907c1f-bf86-489e-bfc1-ad4b47f1408f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I float around what used to be called the skeptic community that eventually morphed into the liberalists and what have you people who became extremely unhappy with the direction that the left, particularly in the MSM, was going with its philosophy, and sought to correct what they see as an attack on liberty itself. The way that the intersectional left and non intersectional sphere terms I am using because I believe that intersectionality theory is the crux of what the two spheres disagree on use the term seems to be different. The non intersectionalsts use the term alt right to specifically denote white nationalists, people like Richard Spencer and Mike Enoch. The intersectionalists, on the other hand, seem to use it as a catch all phrase to denote anyone who is skeptical of intersectional ideology. This, of course, includes white nationalists, but also people who have disavowed white nationalism such as Sargon of Akkad and Count Dankula. Yet despite this disavowal, the intersectionalists imply that they're just as bad as white nationalists I believe that there needs to be a concrete definition of alt right so that nobody can be smeared by a loose definition that both does and doesn't mean white nationalist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There isn't a clear consensus on what the \"alt-right\" actually is, and there needs to be one.\n","id":"e2175bc6-ed56-4d39-a7c8-e0e9d7c6053b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First let me say that some laws obviously need to continue to be enforced, but other laws make no sense and most of the times when presenting a valid hypothetical situation people agree that in that case the person in question shouldn't be punished, and the only reason they are its because there exists a law that says that whatever he did justified or no is illegal. To give some exemples of what I am refering to imagine the speed limit, instead of putting a stupid speed limit of 120km h we should go case by case and decide if the person going 150km h should be punished. If the highway is in good condition, the person has a decent car and he is able and sharp why isn't he allowed to go just a little bit over the speed limit? Everyone already goes over the speed of limit anyways, however for some reason some cops pull over people and give them a ticket because they were speeding when the car and the road can obviously endure a little over 120km h, and even worst everyone at some point saw a cop car going over the speed limit as well, because even they know that it is a bullshit law. Some places have highways that don't have a speed limit and there isn't huge ammount of accidents because of that so why not getting rid of that law and see case by case? Obviously, if someone is going 350km h when there is traffic jam, and the highway is full of cracks and whatever that person should be punished, but the average joe that is going 135km h with vistually no cars around him should be spared. This is why I believe we should go case by case and not set a value. Another exemple that I have is a little bit more personal. Last year I witness a drunk guy beating his wife in the middle of the street, so I went to help her and the drunk guy started to attack me. Since I know a little kick boxing all I did was defend myself not receiving any injuries and gained enough time for the police to get there on time. However in the eyes of the law I was a victim of a public crime and I was in a public fight so I had to attend some hours of couseling with a psychologist. Even after the first sesion the psychologist agreed that in my case I didn't need any help because nothing really happen to me, but the law states that I need couseling to help me, but in all honesty it was just causing me stress since I had to waste all this time going to a psychologist plus several hearings with the police, and the court. Still to this day I have to go give my depoiment of what happened a year ago, because I think the guy or maybe his attorney are always asking for an appealing. If wasn't for the way the law works we could go case by case and see that I have nothing to do with whatever happen and go on with my life. There exists so many other exemples, the stupid law that punished underage teens for having their own nudes I know that law was made to protect them but at this point is doing more harm than helping, and once again going case by case would be better . Laws that punish someone from self defending from an attack. Laws that punish doctors for saving patients, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most laws should disappear and we should judge case by case\n","id":"1049fd2f-193c-4a0a-81d1-69e539bb0852"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I say most people because for some people those with severe back pain, for example, who would struggle with a mattress on the floor I can see the point of a bed. And of course, I say shouldn't in a weak sense, not in the sense that I'm trying to ban beds. With those pre emptive clarifications out of the way what are beds even for these days? What's the difference between a bed and a mattress on the floor? We don't have problems with vermin in our houses any more. There would be no danger of rolling off and injuring yourself. And it's far from obvious that beds provide you with appreciably more comfort. So how is buying a bed, for most people, a rational consumer decision? Beds are completely superfluous at this point. Most people have one simply because it's expected, either by themselves or by their spouse.  EDIT It didn't take long, I've changed my view. I hadn't considered all the things beds are good for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Beds are pointless and most people shouldn't have one\n","id":"c81589d6-a5ed-4458-a42c-d96824661e88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As Castle Rock shows, police officers in America are not obligated to protect anyone. They are instead obligated to protect property. Police in America have a long history of violent suppression of nonviolent protests, conspiring to protect fellow officers through fabrication of evidence and perjury, and being purchased wholesale by the elite as a private military. From Ludlow to Kent State to Seattle 99 to Occupy, police brutality is a common tactic used to disrupt protests by the disenfranchised. By legally placing property value over human lives the ruling class in America uses the threat of legitimized extrajudicial violence to maintain power and quell dissent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"American police exist solely to protect monied interests through imprisonment of and violence against the lower classes.\n","id":"6226b349-f3d6-4bea-8e2f-9b6f753a9c9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can God's existence be understood by rationality?<|ARGUMENT|>The story of Adam and Eve is inconsistent with existing evidence of the evolutionary history of mankind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The creation story of Adam and Eve could be a myth.\n","id":"f0633596-b800-4774-9d68-c013d06da55e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Studies show that consumers spend less when they hand over cold hard cash versus swiping plastic, since cash feels more like real money. 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cash =AP is the most practical system of money transfer in everyday life.\n","id":"301edfb3-7c94-4f0f-a1cc-75fe06cfc89c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>After the Second World War, the countries of the world agreed they have a responsibility to help those fleeing persecution in their states and signed the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UDHR has been used as the base of many legally binding international agreements.\n","id":"086324f8-e470-419f-9753-f2fbc9e0bf06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I really dislike Donald Trump and many of his opinions climate change, healthcare, foreign policy, gun policy, and his personality in general . With that said, and my conscience cleared, I believe Donald had by far the best response to the recent Orlando massacre between himself and Hillary, at least . I don't agree with his response, but just because he communicated ideas, I believe he wins this 'round' by default. Yet, many people seem to really hate his response it's thought of as shameless politicizing, as if his ideas for preventing another tragedy even though I disagree with them indicate less caring than a typical politician's condolences. I don't believe this is true. I don't believe Obama was guilty of 'politicizing' the Sandy Hook school shooting when he had victims' families appear behind him during a speech, either. I believe politicizing something is wrong if it's by means of using a tragedy to promote unrelated legislation, but I don't believe this is the case with Obama's response to Sandy Hook, or Trump's response to Orlando, or most comments accused of politicizing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is usually nothing wrong with 'politicizing' a tragedy\n","id":"e35355cb-28ec-4cc5-b9e4-23f1cc0a8635"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Though I don't know the statistics, I'm sure that schools that teach abstinence only or, even worse, none sex Ed have higher teen pregnancy rates. This is something kids will need to know for the rest of their lives. If your reason for abstinence only is religious, don't you think that abortion is a greater sin? That's not even to mention the separation of Church and State. When I say all, I mean public and private. It's amazing how many kids are ignorant of even rudimentary information pertaining to human reproduction. I went to a Catholic school, and they didn't acknowledge the fact that sex exists. I didn't even know which hole was the right one until I was 16.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Proper sex-Ed should be taught in all high schools\n","id":"93e4f1fe-18f8-45d2-9bd1-77469ee9669a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>Feminists who oppose the inclusion of trans women within the movement are often referred to as trans-exclusionary radical feminists<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is disagreement amongst feminists on the inclusion of trans women within the movement.\n","id":"748f6a04-57dc-4214-9c70-8f2769365658"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Batman knows they will likely break out of Arkham Asylum and kill again. As Issac Asimov stated Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right. His failure to do what needs to be done i.e. put rabid dogs down leaves him with clean hands but a dirty heart where he shares much of the blame of further deaths and dismemberment of innocent civilians by these insane or psychopathic criminals. The possibile good of rehabilitation of such criminals is far outweighed by the all too probable risk of them inflicting their careless and dangerous antics. For such criminals, even when not authorized by the justice system, Batman should literally shoot to kill and anything less is weakness and selfish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is immoral for Batman to arrest dangerous unreformed supercriminals, like the Joker, instead of killing them.\n","id":"4cc82630-986c-44f3-b4c3-6399f31695a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Recall elections<|ARGUMENT|>Allowing recall elections will help to restore faith in politics and encourage active citizenship. Enabling ordinary voters to sack unsatisfactory representatives will give them an incentive to monitor what their politicians are doing in office, and will encourage the media to cover legislative affairs more fully than they do at present.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing recall elections will help to restore faith in politics and encourage active citizenship. ...\n","id":"47eba3f8-7c22-4c66-96ca-ccc779cc1232"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is a lot of sentiment on Reddit right now that the firing of Mozilla's CEO yes, it was technically a resignation but obviously coerced is the free market principle at work, and there is no free speech protection for you from private corporations. I agree with all of that. But you are hypocrite if you agree with what happened to Mozilla's CEO, yet still believe that it should be illegal to fire someone for a Facebook post they made, or for supporting a certain candidate policy, or for smoking pot on their own time. This is something that is fairly popular on Reddit, and I feel like there is undoubtedly some overlap between the people that demand these restrictions while also championing the reason Mozilla's CEO was ousted. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anyone agreeing with Mozilla's firing of their CEO has no right to demand protection from being fired for what they do privately\n","id":"4e4d1342-19ff-4f26-9c14-7e5be8678ea4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has the Conservative government lost its legitimacy to govern?<|ARGUMENT|>Whilst Johnson was credited with hosting the London 2012 Olympics, the games were secured by his predecessor Ken Livingstone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of Johnson's key achievements were actually the result of his predecessors' work.\n","id":"3438ab88-2c10-4732-83f7-062dbcb51f5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do all or most White Americans experience privilege?<|ARGUMENT|>James Comey, during his time as director of the FBI, explicitly spoke about the \"hard truths\" of racial bias in American law enforcement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"White Americans enjoy a more positive relationship with the police compared to people of other ethnicities.\n","id":"5cde2f0f-7252-4bd9-ac94-f5565fce0496"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alright, i am not familiar about the immigration problem in the US at all but i know that A LOT of people are complaining about the immigrants in Europe. Most of them come from Africa and the Middle East so majority are Muslim. This seems to bother people a lot. I have watched This VICE documentary called Europe or Die , and the comments on that video are very cruel. I don't know how can people not feel any sympathy towards their fellow man. Most of them are saying that instead of running to Europe they should have built their own country like Europe. But the government over there is corrupt and they are constantly being screwed over by USA and EU. There are many people dying trying to enter Europe and i think we should let them in. You shouldn't have more rights then them just because you were lucky enough to be born in Europe. Everyone should be given the same opportunities. Sure EU has a lot of problems on their own but i think that we can all say that we are generally pretty well off here, most of us never experienced extreme poverty and how its like to be in a war zone and think that those that have been trough way more than I've been deserve the same opportunities as i do. It is inhumane to expect for those who were born in a cesspool should life and dye in poverty without ever having known what its like to to live in a 1st world country .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Europe and USA should let the immigrants in.\n","id":"82ee9cb2-d939-4df4-ae66-5e1f918f5698"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>university education should be free<|ARGUMENT|>Without university fees, universities become dependent on the state for funding. This leads to larger class\u00adsizes and less spending per student.1 Yet with fees, the quality of universities increases for three reasons. First, funding improves, as university may charge in accordance with need. Second, quality of teaching is improved. Because a university wants people to attend and to pay fees, the programs and degrees they offer have to be good signals of quality requiring hiring the best lecturers. Third, the average quality of students attending university will improve. This is because students feel they need to get the most from their investment in education. An example of higher quality education from fee\u00adpaying is that of the United States, which has eighteen of the top fifty ranked universities in the world.2 Quality is clearly improved when university is not free. 1 Brady, Hugh. 2008. \u201cWe Must Invest Now in Our Universities or Pay Later\u201d. University College Dublin News Available: ents.html\u200b 2 QS World University Rankings 2015\/16, QS,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The quality of education suffers when university education is free\n","id":"d4536876-f7d4-4629-a73a-6435b1f08c8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am generally a big government guy. I believe everything, from education to healthcare to justice, would run much smoother if we allowed the federal government to have more power. If the federal government is actually allowed to govern, everything would be better. There would be no more devolution to state governments, and corporations would lose their stranglehold on politics. It really makes me angry how little power the federal government is allowed to have. State governments are an outdated, useless, and backward institution. If I had my way, the state governments would be dissolved and reduced to ceremonial districts. Counties would be kept in place, but state powers would be given to the federal government. 99 of government bigotry legalization against gay marriage, racist or sexist policy, etc is caused by the state governments. Mississippi didn't decided to ratify the thirteenth amendment until fucking 2013. State governments should be given no responsibility, as they have proved they deserve none. I think libertarianism is an awful idea because the federal government is better at services than any company or state institution can be. Schooling should be federal, so states like Texas and Louisiana don't fill their public students' brains with revisionist history and creationist vitrol. The prison system needs to be federalized pronto, to crack down on violence. I'd be in favor of a constitutional amendment banning the devolution of certain government responsibilities to corporations. Lockheed Martin and similar weapons dealers should be nationalized pronto. The United States government should also buy at least 50 in stock of many domestic corporations, like McDonalds or Coca Cola, to begin the integration of corporate economics and government economics. I feel that libertarians are mostly selfish ingrates who either hate the poor or don't care about anybody who isn't a straight white person from a well off background. Libertarianism leads to more poverty, blocks the prevention of racism and other prejudice, and ensures that poor people have little hope of escaping their plight. I see absolutely no reason why libertarianism should be tolerated as a legitimate viewpoint. To me, it is nearly as hateful and dangerous as Nazism or Stalinism. While it does not endorse hate, libertarianism is fundamentally based on selfishness and neglect. It's a bit like the Simpsons joke, of Fox News being Not Racist, But 1 With Racists . Change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Big government is always better than small government, and libertarianism is an idiotic, selfish idea.\n","id":"6e51e683-9796-4347-a9be-40d030188015"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can E-Vacations Replace Real Ones?<|ARGUMENT|>People may not be able to appreciate what they're looking at as much if they're able to go everywhere like too much of a good thing. Going in person allows people to limit their exposure and thus let them enjoy the moment and place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are just some experiences that can't be replicated digitally.\n","id":"08306268-a2f4-4ac8-9186-ecb334b8420b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>Most individuals don't have the knowledge or time to make out how every small choice affects everyone else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Freedom of choice is bad. A individual will not choose what is best for society in general.\n","id":"17004373-c2fe-4b80-8c16-31ae66edb22e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Have Opt-Out Organ Donation?<|ARGUMENT|>An opt-out system would help reduce the amount of 'family refusals' that block organ donations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should have an opt-out system for organ donation.\n","id":"48440995-9503-4ad0-b729-3dbf4b1f389f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>That all states should immediately ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families.<|ARGUMENT|>Because the issue of migrant rights is a global one, concerned with human rights and the domestic and international actions of states, a U.N. convention is an appropriate solution. The U.N. is the best body to act because although the situation for migrant workers may be slightly different in each state, there are basic rights that they all deserve. In addition, even if each state sought individually to protect migrant rights, they might not be able to, because governing migration takes coordination between states. With international legislation, states would be held accountable for protecting migrant rights; and, migrant policies and protections would be better coordinated. The international community has helped the global economy adapt to rising globalization, with such bodies as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Migration is an essential part of globalization, but there is no international body regulating the flow of workers around the world. Jason Deparle of the New York Times writes, \u201cThe most personal and perilous form of movement is the most unregulated. States make and often ignore their own rules, deciding who can come, how long they stay, and what rights they enjoy.\"1 The U.N. Convention would fill this gap. Indeed, the U.N.\u2019s solution to regulate migration represents a reasonable and thorough approach. It is reasonable because it does not ask too much of states, requiring only that they provide migrants with basic rights. It is thorough because it provides protection for each of the many challenges and injustices facing migrant workers. Because migrant rights are a growing problem and an essential part of globalization, an international regulatory body would be an effective way of improving human rights around the world. 1 Deparle, Jason. \"Global Migration: A World Ever More on the Move,\" New York Times. June 26, 2010. improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The U.N. Convention is the best available mechanism for addressing the widespread problem of migrant rights.\n","id":"d0b9bc44-1301-42e3-ba8c-e1c59ffaebe4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Wrote The Anonymous New York Times Resistance Op-Ed?<|ARGUMENT|>The FISA judge was not specifically told that Steele had made salacious and unverified allegations, for example about the existence of Moscow Trump pee tapes, which may have significantly damaged Steele's credibility in the FISA judge's eyes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rosenstein signed the controversial FISA warrant renewal that enabled the FBI to spy on a US citizen associated with the Trump campaign.\n","id":"ed379b9f-92c6-453f-817d-a8d70f337e57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start off by saying that I think sampling and photography are neither cheating or unartistic. In fact, some of my favorite pieces of art either contain samples or are photos. Now, I often hear people say that sampling is cheating because the artist didn't make the sample but rather stole it and put it into their own work. Or you hear something along the lines that unless you play an instrument, it isn't real music which extends to music beyond sampling, but let's just focus on sampling here . But photography has many similarities. Excluding certain outliers, a huge amount of photography fits into a few different categories landscapes, still life, actually, this site does a pretty good job of summing up the different styles of photography. My point is that when a photographer takes a picture of say a landscape or a portrait, the photographer isn't building that landscape. They're not creating new wildlife to take pictures of for wild life photography. But rather, the art in photography, IMO, is the perspective and artistic eye that a photographer has. It's looking at those rolling hills and thinking of a unique and or beautiful way to capture them. It's a way of getting a side of a lion that perhaps many haven't noticed about it before. The same goes with sampling. Yes, maybe the sampler doesn't know how to play saxophone or keyboard. But they're able put this sound in a new perspective that brings out new things about it. From a simple 4 bar loop to super creative chopping. It is art to hear a piece of music and think of a new way to bring life to it. Take for instance this Kendrick Lamar song Minimal chopping goes into that sample. There's a bit at the end of the loop, but not much. Now go listen to that Gil Scott Heron song from the beginning and tell me would you have even noticed that little tid bit had you not listened to the Kendrick song beforehand? Perhaps you would have, but I argue that this is a relatively tiny part with a good chance of being overlooked. The producer of the Kendrick song had the artistic mind to hear that tiny bit and breathe and entire new life into it. Not to mention albums like DJ Shadow's Endtroducing or the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique which uses such an unbelievable amount of sampling that to call it unartistic seems absurd to me. If you think photography is some how more artistic than a sample, then I assume the only photography that you like is simple pictures of abstract drawings that the photographer has made and just decided to recapture with a camera. Because I don't understand why capturing a photo of a sunrise over a mountain top is any more or less involved than chopping up a sample. Just because you didn't create the subject of the photo or the source sample does not mean you didn't create a new piece of art. Note I'm not going to argue how the copyright and ownership should work here, although I think it's an interesting discussion when held against the backdrop of photography. I'm simply arguing about artistic merit .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who feel sampling music is somehow \"cheating\" or unartistic should feel that the vast majority of photography is just as much \"cheating\" and unartistic.\n","id":"d32c48f9-7def-446a-ba04-c442756ffb92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've got to be honest, I know nothing about the anarchist movement and everything i've seen on Reddit has made me think less of them. I went over to r Anarchism and r anarchy101 and didn't find anything more thought provoking. First of all what is so wrong with the state that is needs to be abolished. I don't like it the way it is either but I think it just needs tweaking. Secondly I don't see how you can't have anyone in charge. Either you have the system we have now of representative leadership, you have direct democracy or you have a power vacuum. If you have a power vacuum how do you stop the person with the most guns taking over? I have other issues but those two are the biggest. What are the advantages of anarchism over our current system and how will you anarchism stop itself being run by war lords.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I can't see any logic in the anarchist ideology. Educate me and\n","id":"01395fba-1663-4aa3-858c-c151d12d6735"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I will be providing some video game examples as that's the type of media I mainly consume, movies being a distant second. Trying to go out of the norm just to send a message is oftentimes a bad move 'cause some developers directors forget to make an interesting character in the process. That's a horrible example of diversity since it feels shoved in for the sake of it rather than to savour it. To talk in modern terms, characters like Sara Ryder Mass Effect Andromeda , Iden Versio Star Wars Battlefront II , and Aqua Kingdom Hearts are examples of characters that tried to break the mold in some fashion in terms of active roles and open up diversity, but the creators forgot to make them likable or give them any real personality. They're either the lifeless type, or their personalities are unlikable. That's not to say it never works there are other characters that get the job done. Elena Fisher Uncharted , Ellie The Last of Us , and even male representatives like Kanji Tatsumi Persona 4 are examples of characters that knew how to make their differences benefit the story and or gameplay of their respective games. The difference here is that some characters were designed to have a personality. You know, be cool and fun, and make the experience a lot better, without explicitly needing to tell us they're positively different, but show us why they're a big deal. Elena, Ellie, and Kanji are unforgettable in that respect and serve as great reminders that diversity is a great way to surprise the audience. The difference between Kanji and Ryder is that Kanji wasn't made for the sake of diversity. Now, you're probably wondering, what about a vanilla design, like Solid Snake? He looks like a typical game character on the surface. Why isn't he designed to look physically different? My answer there's no gain out of it. Snake is a badass character for who he is, and he helps make the story and gameplay in MGS enjoyable. There's no way changing his design is going to make MGS better, so again, there's no gain out of it. It's as inorganic as having diversity for the sake of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having diversity for the sake of diversity in media harms good story-telling.\n","id":"d73c92ea-8d0f-4f2a-bf17-2f571e6ba313"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>The culture of overprescription in the medical community has been a significant factor in the opioid crisis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Other factors contribute to the opioid crisis significantly more than the legality of currently prescribed opioids.\n","id":"de1f81e0-4f38-4fc5-965c-e9c03eced545"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the use of 'chosen' or gender-neutral pronouns be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Because these pronouns are binary based on sex. If we start basing it on the nuances of how masculine or feminine someone is then everyone could demand a pronoun for themselves. Which would create chaos<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chosen or new pronouns break traditional standards of what it means to be male\/female.\n","id":"b0f0af44-d9d4-46f0-bcac-0b06b2485d65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All my life I've grown up with such a firm grasp on the dangers of drug addiction. Heroin is undoubtedly the scariest and most dangerous out of all of the hard drugs, on the basis that it's become the cheapest of the hard drugs by far in the last decade. It's so dangerous and easy to get addicted to that Family Guy made fun of it in season 1 Want some gum? Haha that was joke gum. Now you're addicted to heroin . I understand to get into heroin you have to either have literally never been exposed to any form of drug abuse education, including casual conversation , or have already developed a serious drug addiction that wiped out all your cash and now all you can afford is heroin. That's how it works, right? So, if you're the former, you're likely too dumb to even be alive. How can you just dodge facts and knowledge your whole life? You will never contribute to society in any meaningful way. We won't miss you when the heroin kills you. The latter situation is way easier to understand, and although it makes me ridiculously sad that a gateway drug like a pain prescription can lead a previously high functioning person down the path of addiction and eventually heroin overdose, I have no sympathy because switching to heroin is crossing the line for me. I get it. It's the other drugs like prescription opiates that dumb you down enough to rationally consider heroin. My view however, is that scary drug addiction isn't going to erase your knowledge of heroin being the most dangerous drug you could get your hands on. When you run out of money and begin to consider replacing the scripts you abuse with regular heroin, you're fucking aware of what you're about to get into. And instead of seeking help, you choose heroin. Again, even if you were once high functioning and contributed greatly to society, you chose to do heroin. You're done. Don't murder, don't rape, don't commit suicide, don't do heroin. You can argue all of these people can be rehabilitated, but it doesn't change the fact their brains once possessed the capacity to do the unforgivable. I say leave them all behind. People who were forced to do heroin by any means other than verbal pressure get a pass. I'm aware of how vicious this post makes me sound and in a lot of ways I'm ridiculously cynical anyways. I've probably offended the shit out of anybody who has recovered from heroin, knows someone who has recovered, knows someone who died, or knows someone currently struggling with heroin. I personally know one recovered heroin abuser, I'm proud of him, but he's still dumb as rocks and not really helpful to society. That's the only exposure I have to heroin abuse. It would be nice to not think a group of humans deserves to die. Unfortunately that's where all the logic in my brain leads to in regards to heroin abuse. Please change my view. EDIT I will add, since it apparently is not obvious from the body of my post, I have nothing personal against heroin addicts. They just cost money . If we lived in a Utopian society with an unlimited budget this would not be a problem for me. EDIT2 I haven't stopped replying to comments since I started the thread two hours ago. I started this thread with the actual intent to change my view\u2014 you think I'm not aware of how fucked up it is to wish death on an entire group of people? So far though the only point of my view that's been altered is this Addicts don't necessarily have to die, just immediately and completely stop receiving support from society so that support can go to better places. If they can provide the support themselves pay for medical services then I see no reason to bar them from treating their addiction. I will return tomorrow to continue replying to every response. If I didn't that would make me ignorant. I'm trying, people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be better if everyone who took heroin died\n","id":"8f2bc18c-f28c-44b9-985d-69727bfd9b70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> The human caused extinction of an endangered species is no less natural than the biological evolutionary processes that generated that species in the first place. Assuming an evolutionary explanation of origins, humans can only be considered as natural as any other animal, therefore making any actions of humankind including that of wiping out other species an entirely natural process. To expand further for word count's sake How can it even be considered possible for humans, being a part of the natural world, to partake in any activity described as unnatural? By definition everything we do, whether it's planting a tree, killing an endangered dolphin or dumping toxic waste in a lake, is natural how can it be considered anything but the natural course? Are we somehow outside of nature? How? Why? That\u2019s a contradiction of everything we know about evolutionary origins. Surely the only qualifier for an action to be considered truly natural is that it was carried out by a natural being in the first place. Why then, do green types constantly speak as though humans occupy some sort of extra natural category, above the natural and below the super natural category, in which we are somehow obliged to act as a kind of shepherd of the natural to make sure that the more \u201cnatural\u201d events, such as rainforests growing and endangered animals thriving, are aided, and that those who would contribute to their destruction are somehow destroying some perfect course of nature that has been tainted by us extra natural human beings. I think you get my point. Interested to hear some discussion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The human-caused extinction of an endangered species is no less natural than the biological\/evolutionary processes that generated that species in the first place.\n","id":"105885f6-5db2-44c9-8f3b-ad3aa7047337"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like the title explains, I think the economic inequality between rich and poor countries is just balance in the world and I don't feel bad for it at all. ofcourse, I would help them out if I could, but I'm not going out my way to try really hard to help them. and ofcourse I like what the people do for the poor countries, but yet again, I still remain positive about this being balance in the world and not finding this sad at all. Even after all the help and tries I think we're never getting into an equal position. Do I think it's eventually going to get better for the 'poor' countries? yes I do, but not on an equal level. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the economic inequality between the rich and poor is balance in the world, and not sad.\n","id":"8acc5fad-dc0b-46a4-809a-ae956e6e47e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Popular Protest Productive?<|ARGUMENT|>Citizens can write to their politicians and representatives, meet with them and attend engagement events. These are more effective ways to get change than protesting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are more effective means of change available to the public, such as the right to petition.\n","id":"57cf5662-1ffb-4758-8cc8-3634a4cd585d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should People in Positions of Authority Resign When Accused of Sexual Assault?<|ARGUMENT|>If only 5% of rapes are reported, then there are 20x more real rapes than reports of rape. If only 5% of rape reports are false, and 95% are true, then there are 20x more true reported rapes than there are false reported rapes. If so, then real rapes are 400 20*20 times more common than fake rape accusations.Swapping 5% for 33% and 95%1-0.05 for 37% 1-0.67 results in a 60x difference in real vs false rapes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being raped may be more harmful than a false rape accusation. That, along with real rapes being 60-400x more likely than a false rape accusation, real rapes are far more of a concern than false rape accusations.\n","id":"d097ce1e-e995-45d2-85d9-5341060d9cdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Attachment Parenting the Best Way to Raise a Child?<|ARGUMENT|>The inability to tend to one's own needs ends up harming the child as well. Parents are at their best when they've taken care of themselves - when they've had a decent night's sleep, when they've had a chance to connect with their partner, and when they've had the opportunity to move around baby-free. Otherwise, the mother is simply frustrated and tired, and may take out the frustration on the child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The subservience of a mother's needs to that of her child's is only feasible to a point; whilst the child may benefit, the mother may lose all sense of independence.\n","id":"b5f89efb-3409-49c7-a743-161595bd1a16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the BAR exam be eliminated as a requirement to practice law?<|ARGUMENT|>A number of students apply to go study law and sit the bar simply because they don't know what else to do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The BAR exam serves a worthwhile purpose to deter unwanted potential attorneys.\n","id":"18dc7f0d-f2e0-461e-a899-5f82024f11a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, as a New Zealander, both we and our brothers over the ditch, Australia, have really tight gun control laws. I believe that as a result of this, we have far less violent crime, both involving and not involving firearms, as can be seen by per capita statistical comparisons. I also believe that the potential for protection with firearms is outweighed by the potential damage injury loss of life that ensues from them. Please, change my view I also should add that I am aware than in many countries, stricter gun control isn't a feasible idea as a result of the mindset of many people in said countries. As such, this is more of a debate of the merits of gun control, rather than a question of its implementation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Strict gun control is a good thing\n","id":"2a962876-b0da-4a2b-b900-0ed08e2c109e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need more and stronger international institutions?<|ARGUMENT|>Promoting international institutions before achieving a more equitable distribution of power and wealth simply entrenches the influence of powerful nations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no good way way to distribute power to members states.\n","id":"855e453f-a993-4026-aedb-c00bc3fc927b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Spam is something that the administrators of public forums have to deal with a lot regardless of whether they're an admin of a bulletin board or a Facebook group. It should be possible to track down the spammers regardless of whether they even bother to use a VPN and, even if we can't even physically reach the spammers without a lot of howling about the sovereignty of other nations, it should be possible to yank the hosting and or ISP service for any website they link to with no refund and or block their website within U.S. borders. If we can pick them up without a lot of fuss, I can be fair and say that spammers have to complete X number of hours of community service within a month if they want to avoid fines or jail time. But these guys know they're probably going to be banned if the admins are paying any attention at all and they aren't going to care if there aren't real consequences for wasting the admins' time and doing damage to the public forum.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should be a crime to spam public forums.\n","id":"b40bee5a-19fb-432e-8d4a-11138bd6f332"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should individuals sentenced to life in prison be allowed to choose death instead?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2014, Clayton Locket suffered an agonising death when medical practitioners failed to administer his previously untested combination of execution drugs correctly, inducing a heart attack in the prisoner due to pain and trauma.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There have been incidences of 'botched executions. This indicates that even elected death sentences could also be inhumane\n","id":"b68a5787-467d-47c5-b532-9c03c232b89b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has the Conservative government lost its legitimacy to govern?<|ARGUMENT|>The UK is in the midst of a political crisis thanks to Brexit. Snap elections are a safety valve to be utilized when a political crisis such as the current one has affected the country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Conservative Party has lost its legitimacy to control the government which would entail an ethical duty to adopt a motion of no confidence.\n","id":"1f08b4fc-8b02-4fec-a5de-9f78cf5f7575"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This thread, I feel, is extremely toxic for the mindsets of women. As it is, women are raised hearing they are princesses, get constant affirmations of their looks by male suitors, are desired, and are told they deserve things including automatic resppect . Now, this thread comes along asking what else men can do to make women happy. It is continuing a cycle where men are viewed as disposable and there to supplicate women. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A thread in AskReddit is toxic for female minds.\n","id":"d9fe5902-d573-4c04-95f2-5f0f5270e411"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Aside from recreation use, the time and money goes into art are too demanding for much of what it's worth. You might be satisfied from commissioning an artist. The education you paid for might help you become a better artist. The value of that elegant art piece might go up. Everything seems to be gamble when inputting time and money. Since art is subjective, valuing money into the arts should be based around satisfaction. It should start from free to the most minimum amount it can. A lot of art I enjoyed were free and created recreationally. If I have to pay money, it should be based how much satisfaction I would get and not how much work and materials goes into it. I won't say how people should spend their money towards art, but I find way too much money goes into art. I get it that there art a lot artist live paycheck to paycheck and struggling to make it big when looking for commissions and art teaching, but how they payment be justified when people are not satisfied with things they sell?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A significant portion of art is a waste of time and money.\n","id":"a0fcdad9-7c10-4096-8189-daad14b6bfb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>first of all i want to say that i'm really open to change my view, and second. in case some people ask how do i know she will say yes? she has already asked me when i'm going to propose context i'm 25 years old and i just don't feel like dating anymore I've burned all my cartridges, i dated a fair amount of girls in college but I've never been in love and i don't think i will ever be, i feel ready to settle down and have my own family. i made a list of characteristic that a woman must have in order to marry her 1.i must be physically attracted to her more than i i'm to most women 2.we get along and enjoy our company 3.i have reasonable evidence to believe that she will be a good mother 4.we have same long term goals life style, how to raise children,etc 5.she is not a standoffish or conflictive i know that all those things sound like something it would be easy to find but it's a lot more difficult than it seems. i don't know why i should wait more if I've already found a woman who meets the criteria and i'm financially stable<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"i will marry a woman that i met 1 year ago\n","id":"19edf2c6-bee3-4a43-8688-c754453c76fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>Many perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence will go on to reoffend. Circuit breakers, like a Zero-Tolerance policy, are necessary to disrupt this toxic cycle of abuse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zero-Tolerance policies are the most effective way to protect present and future victims from abuse.\n","id":"b214e352-18e3-4faa-a600-b98a3796d698"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US and NATO Should Withdraw from Afghanistan<|ARGUMENT|>It was at Beijing's request that Pakistan and Afghanistan established a crisis management mechanism which would enable the two sides to maintain timely and effective communications in case of any emergencies, including terrorist attacks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both the Afghanistan and Pakistan governments have welcomed Chinese mediation they view the Chinese government as a neutral and trustworthy third party that can help bridge the gap between the two states.\n","id":"97898fcd-0ab5-41de-af0b-5390a4c88ac8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think it's a good thing for a college or university to exist primarily for people of only one skin color. I understand they had a good place in history but don't think African Americans are discriminated against in colleges anymore and thus, there is no need for these kind of schools anymore. Creating an atmosphere where hispanics, whites, asians become the other is a bad thing. The simple fact that historically black is in the title when you think about Grambling, Howard, etc is divisive and outdated in today's college field. No college should be primarily for one color of skin and these colleges should make great efforts to change and become more open. EDIT colleges associating themselves with the term historically black is what I think should end, not shut down Grambling or Howard as an institution. Just don't make the first thing you see when you search Grambling online a historically black college . That implies we are here for black students first and the rest come after<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that HBCU's are outdated and divisive and should be phased out,\n","id":"2f2d5f20-3028-4ac0-bdd0-f7ee0d0121cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is meat eating immoral?<|ARGUMENT|>Since we have artificially been selecting animals so they can survive in our farms, giving up meat would result in a catastrophic extinction of currently domestic animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Going vegan would require a huge cultural and economic shift with consequences that affect thousands of people, which itself is immoral to do.\n","id":"79f9f08c-547f-4dd2-8e37-788db6624a6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> ENDGAME SPOILRS Thor in the end of infinity war wielding a bifrost capable Stormbreaker literally put Thanos out of traction with one hit. His weapon was shown to be strong enough to easily cleave through an energy blast or whatever generic term you wanna use from a fully powered infinity gauntlet with all of the stones. Prior to this his hand to hand was at least on par with the hulk greater when he\u2019s in \u2018God mode\u2019 and his enhanced lightning conduction creation powers were also greatly enhanced. Come endgame, sure he\u2019s out of shape but the potency of his Axe, lightning, access to God mode not to mention Mjolnir already a crazy powerful weapon, should have put him orders of magnitude above base level Thanos who was not utilising a single infinity stone let alone all 6. But Thor got his ass handed to him as well as Nano Iron man the blast Thor hit Iron man with that combined Mjolnir, Stormbreaker and god mode lightning Thor's eyes were glowing increasing the repulsor beams should have been more than enough to put big T down down but he blocked it pretty damn easily. Meanwhile, Cap v Cap I have less of an issue with however in the first Avengers we see Steve working that heavy bag and giving it the business, sure. But at this point, he\u2019s a well trained soldier maybe boxer with enhanced physical capabilities and his shield. We see him using more striking and grappling techniques a couple years later in Winter Soldier and by the time Civil War rolls around, he can put down briefly a flying War Machine with a spinning kick and batter the shit out of admittedly not at his best Iron man hand to hand. Steve has been training and getting better at various fighting forms as well as having experience fighting everything from super soldiers to alien 6 limbed beasties and even a couple of the children of Thanos in the meantime. New Cap should have OWNED old Cap in a one on one but he had to pull the Bucky card to avoid getting choked out. I reckon this is inconsistent not the only instances in it but a couple of the more notable ones in recent days .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fights between Cap v Cap and Thanos v Iron man, Cap + Thor in Endgame are not consistent with previous depictions of their MCU power levels\n","id":"6cc87a9c-2e0e-4e53-9abf-953070c7705e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is health care a human right?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a benefit to all for maximum people being healthy. We pay for bad health anyway through lost work, homelessness, contagion and such.The differential goes ever greater when the costs of insurance companies and benefit managers are minimized.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Health care being guaranteed as a human right has societal benefits.\n","id":"01c503d0-1971-43ec-8f54-0bb4c6e7af8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Insanity. n. mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her his affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior. This definition could also be used for almost any person who has faith in any religion. A person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, A religious person can't divide fantasy from reality. A religious person assumes that their religious fantasy affects reality in someway for example the devil creates sin and their whole word view is affected by their faith. cannot conduct her his affairs due to psychosis A person of faith also changes his her behavior because of their faith. For example, A person might believe that god has a plan for them, and as a result take different actions that he wouldn't have if he wasn't religious. Maybe some of the things he does as a result of his faith can be considered as good, but that's not the point. A person with faith tends to involve their religious beliefs in their morals and thinking and therefore behaves differently. EDIT I've come to realize that insane is too strong a word to use in this case. However, there are similarities between the religious person and the insane person. At the very least, I still consider religious folks to be delusional.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think being religious is the equivalent of being insane.\n","id":"e4a90085-8317-430f-acf6-f9f4f23a4bfc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Not like baby punching evil, more like taking up two parking spaces because you're too lazy to try evil. Almost everyone that has one seems to have it glued to their hands 24 7 or cant go five minutes without whipping it out for some reason. The vast majority of people who have them don't seem to have a discernible use for them except for reasons they invented once they already had the phone. I've had people pull them out on a date. I stepped away from the table for two minutes to use the bathroom and I come back and they were hammering away on the phone. You cant be alone with your thoughts for two minutes? They seem to encourage social isolation. It's almost cliche now to see a family or a couple sitting together at a table to eat and instead of talking they're all tapping away on their smartphones. People pull them out mid conversation and don't even look like they're tying to pay attention. I realize people have bitched about virtually every new technological invention since Forever BC, go back far enough and someone probably thought the wheel was a crap idea, but smartphones do seem to be genuinely socially isolating. So, what gives?  EDIT Yes, I'm aware a smartphone itself is not filled with a sense of diabolical menace. I use the term evil facetiously.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think smartphones are evil.\n","id":"143bcfaf-699b-4f43-b359-1004a46638e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fast4 Tennis is more attractive than traditional Tennis<|ARGUMENT|>Reliably shorter matches would make it easier for TV stations to schedule tennis matches, especially because their length wouldn't be so unpredictable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shorter match times will be more attractive to younger audiences, increasing viewership.\n","id":"adf03fa4-f54b-489f-9237-eef071a809f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So they're thinking about changing the Redskins name, I don't even think I could tell you what kind of sport they play, I'm from the UK and couldn't care less. However it reminded me of my ex girlfriend, a second gen native American Canadian who I used to call a red faced wagon burner, I'm not one for cute pet names I guess. I grew up in South Africa and I have some some pretty detailed views on racism, having seen many case studies in my own connected family and elsewhere. Luckily my close family were very liberal and fought actively on the right side of history, much to their own detriment in some cases. I should mention that Racism destroyed the country I was born in, and looking into the eyes of someone burnt up with rage for no damn reason other than meaningless social engineering is the saddest and most frustrating thing I've ever had to do. I am mostly a leftie and I in no way support any sort of institutionalised racism, ALL I am talking about here is how we define what constitutes racism and whether banning words and phrases really solves anything. I fail to see how cowering away from history might make us a better society. Yes words were used, and views where held by ignorant uneducated society's before us. So what? Firstly there's context, I clearly did not intend to insult my ex girlfriend, If I had used red face in the middle of an argument we probably would've started laughing. We loved each other, so how on earth could someone come into that situation and tell me that I was being offensive by using a word. Humour banter like that is one of the best things about being British. Between friends and loved ones I fail to see how any word can possibly be deemed inappropriate if all the consenting adults are simply not offended. Then there's literal meaning, many of the words and phrases we have decided are no good for public use are actually pretty harmless, sometimes accurate words, nigger means black, wagon burning was something that actually happened, the French did surrender, the Germans did try to conquer and kill us all, sheep farmers in sheep farming nations did get lonely, the Irish do drink a lot and the English were a bunch of assholes pretty much throughout recorded history. Why not just celebrate the good and bad of your cultural history together, I have Scottish, Irish, English and Afrikaner grandparents, I'm about as easy a target as you'll find, my ancestors did a lot of embarrassing and vile things, that's no reflection on me, I would be much more offended if someone insulted an attribute I actually have control over. Then there's our hypocrisy over which words are bad, Coloured in the UK is now not allowed, well in South Africa there is a group of people called the Cape Coloureds, a mix of Indian, British, Original South Africans and Indonesian, these people aren't black, white or mixed race, their parents were coloured, their parents before them, and so on. They make up about 9 of the population and self define themselves as coloureds. Whereas the word kaffir seems to be fine and is now used openly in public between friends and is used to refer to black pets. The word kaffir is actually the one word that can be used to sway my view, it's one word I would never use, and am always offended by, it doesn't describe anything accurately and essentially suggests that the black person it is being directed at is soulless and less of a human, it has almost always been an insult apart from a period when is was misunderstood, and it was used during one of the worst apartheid's the world has seen. And finally even if you do mean to cause insult and you use a word with historical racial context to achieve that goal why should it be treated any differently than if you just insulted the person normally. You are having a disagreement with someone, in that moment of rage you are willing to say anything and everything that will offend them why on earth should one arbitrary attribute be off limit. You'll call their mother a slut, insult their intelligence, height, weight, social standing, but not their ethnicity? I think words should be interoperated in context and if an insult is meant than an insult should be received and reacted to accordingly. For what it's worth, I'm not that guy that uses any of these words in public, ever. I just don't think pro actively banning them is the right route, I think we should tackle the lasting effects of institutionalised racism properly and effectively with equal rights to education, better social mobility and so on. tl dr Three points, context is more important than the words used, hypocrisy over which words society decides are off limits and if you intend to insult someone why should a racial insult be different to any other. There are better, proven ways to combat the real effects of racism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Words don't equal racism\n","id":"b6d9f929-da21-43e3-a000-0e6eb0ad5ed7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Chiasmus involve a series of words or phrases that are repeated, exactly or contextually, in reverse order. Examples in the Bible include Psalms 3:7-8, Genesis 7:21-23, and Psalm 58. Examples in the Book of Mormon include Mosiah 3:18-19 and Mosiah 5:10-12.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chiasmus as used in the Book or Mormon are similar to those written in the Bible, an ancient Hebrew writing.\n","id":"c1f2e596-7594-4f39-aca1-765a57c74549"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Governments can be thought of as organizations that have a monopoly on legitimate violence in a geographic area. If I decide I don't want to pay taxes, I am first sent something in the mail, then people come and knock on my door, and if I continue to refuse, I am threatened with violence and arrested and my money is forcefully taken. Thus, because I do not want to give up my income and it is being taken by force, the act of taxation is theft by definition. My opinion is not that taxation is wrong or that taxation is unjust, just that it's theft i.e. legitimate theft, but still theft . Convince me that taxation is not theft, not that it's justified or legitimate. Edit Two clarifications Justified is perhaps a better word than legitimate. If someone were about to commit murder and I stole their weapon to prevent that and then turned it over to the authorities, we would probably consider that justified theft. This discussion is more from a moral standpoint than a legal one, so definitions of theft that include legality are external. Should have said that in the original post.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taxation is theft\n","id":"3f7d62db-3699-4f50-9acd-a060a7fdbdb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There have been a couple s about Citizens United, which basically failed in my opinion, because I don't think it's possible to plausibly argue that corporations can be denied rights to political speech without also denying those same rights rights to individuals. Say we restrict spending on political ads to 5000 per year per corporation. Or some amount. Not important. Should we also say that individuals are now only allowed to spend 5000 on political ads? If not, the law is totally toothless, because the Kochs or warren buffett, or whatever corporate mogul will spend 50,000,000 or however much they please as individuals. If they need more money to do so, their corporations will totally unexpectedly and surprisingly give them a salary increase of that exact amount. The point is, whether the money is technically spent by the corporation or the person who runs the corporation is really irrelevant. So we must also restrict personal spending and therefore, political speech by individuals if this restriction is going to actually work or even make sense. Is that not a violation of first amendment rights? And furthermore, what counts as 'political' and who gets to draw the line? How does that figure into the 1st amendment? My view is that restricting political speech is exactly what the first amendment is designed to prevent, and when it comes to political speech as opposed to advertising products or other types of regulated speech it is not possible to draw a meaningful distinction between corporations and individuals. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that it is unfortunately impossible to draw a meaningful distinction between corporations when it comes to 1st amendment protection of political speech.\n","id":"11def005-d07e-44fe-9e4a-029cd3d847a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should citizens be able to crowdsource laws?<|ARGUMENT|>Frustration of not being allowed in deciding procedures is a perfect petri-dish for populist ideologies and the elected personals, who use them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Crowdsourcing laws would bring more citizens into the process of lawmaking as active participants.\n","id":"c4eb5e02-4ca8-4211-ae11-3fec22841280"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Marijuana should be as legal as beer is.<|ARGUMENT|>Their marijuana purchase can be delivered straight to their door, mitigating any potentially dangerous interactions with underground dealers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consumers can avoid meeting up with underground dealers and purchase marijuana online or through social media\n","id":"041fa7ed-0fe3-4608-b4da-4ef9915fc988"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Any straight man should realize this, but if you need evidence here's some In fact, I think this is so obvious that anyone who would deny it is doing so in a misguided attempt to be politically correct. I also believe that, as a result, the women as gatekeepers of sex phenomenon is also true, and that PUAs exist simply as a rational pragmatic response to this state of affairs. This also explains the slut stud double standard. It is far easier for women to be promiscuous than it is for men, so promiscuous men are admired while promiscuous women are not. We can argue until we're all blue in the face fingers whether this is caused by social cultural differences, puritanical religious beliefs, evolutionary psychology, Sexual Strategies Theory, or whatever other hypothesis you can think of. The root cause is mostly irrelevent because it doesn't change the end result. It certainly affects possible solutions to the problem, but that's outside the scope of this post. Note I'm not saying this is right or ideal, or that this is the way things should be. I'm saying this is how it is. I'd much if prefer men and women were truly equal, open, and honest with each other, and themselves, about their sexual needs and desires without feeling any unnecessary shame or emotional baggage. The unfortunate reality is we aren't. Another note It should be obvious that I'm speaking in terms generalizations here. This is about majorities and societal trends. I'm well aware of statistical outliers and exceptions to the rule. I'm also aware that women enjoy sex just as much as men possibly moreso .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it's far easier for straight women to get sex than straight men.\n","id":"e9c21f15-557f-44a9-8e45-1af15463c801"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whether it is a political discussion or a sales pitch, I am unmoved when there is an argument put forward as if there is no down side. 1 Real estate agent claiming now is great time to sell buy a house, but unable to point out when if ever it was not a good time to do so. 2 Car salesman asking do you drive a lot or little , then saying this used car is perfect for your scenario, as if the car is good for any situation. 3 right wingers or leftists making the claim that their opinion is absolutely correct, without acknowledging any flaws. Even if challenged with a hypothetical data, they refuse to be unmoved from their initial belief. When I try to introduce where my beliefs opinions arguments might be flawed, acknowledging nothing is perfect, rather than reciprocity of intellectual honesty it is more often seen as a rhetorical surrender and they become frustrated that I haven't accepted their personal opinion as Truth. An example of admitting flaws being a persuasive course of actions is the scene in Miracle on 34th Street where Kris Kringle directs parents to go to Gimbles to get something for a lower price, the parent is impressed with the honesty and buys more from Macy's. Stating an awareness of where there is imperfections isn't a deal breaker, I would be more inclined to believe someone if they were honest than if they are obviously putting up an unrealistically optimistic front. EDIT Unwillingness to acknowledge known flaws is unpersuasive in arguments or debates more often than not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unwillingness to acknowledge known flaws is unpersuasive in arguments or debates\n","id":"45cebe1e-0968-4856-848b-c4297e60aac7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>Since fair trade associations are intent on keeping the price of fair-trade coffee up, they limit the supply of coffee that can be labeled as certified.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fair trade encourages and creates monopsonies where a single buyer controls the market for fair trade products p. 20.\n","id":"8a48073f-c4bd-44ac-8ff7-8dde20d78f0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>arm teachers<|ARGUMENT|>Having guns in the classroom will more than likely increase the chances of gun related violence in schools. It would increase the chance of gun related accidents; although only a very small chance there would previously have been no chance. It may well also increase the number of shootings; people who carry guns are 4.5 times more likely to be shot,1 although there is no way of knowing if the effect would be the same in the classroom as on the street. Finally it is ignoring the possibility that those who are to carry guns for the school children\u2019s protection may at some point turn the gun on their charges. Teaching can be a very frustrating job and the teacher may get very angry with individual students, allowing teachers to carry guns would greatly increase the risk of an unpremeditated shooting against on a schoolchild. 1 Callaway, Ewen, \u2018Carrying a gun increases risk of getting shot and killed\u2019, NewScientist, 6 October 2009,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guns in schools might be used in circumstances other than defense.\n","id":"23318ab6-2eb9-42ec-bfc1-447786882074"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Long-term Solitary Confinement Be Stopped?<|ARGUMENT|>It is harder for prison guards to maintain order without solitary confinement as a tool to deter prisoners from causing trouble.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Solitary confinement can be used to protect the prison staff and inmates from violent prisoners.\n","id":"2d876f32-042e-4a80-9a40-80d4420fd283"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Federal Reserve System owns monopolizes the U.S Mint and has the ability to print unlimited amounts of U.S Dollars out of thin air without any regulation. 40 of the U.S's 7 trillion dollar debt is payed toward these bankers. This system has been in place for the last 99 years and still operates without any sign of slowing. This system is not owned by the U.S and is controlled by private entities from the richest of the 1 including J.P Morgan, Rockefeller, and the Rothschild Family. This vast amount of wealth have given these families enormous amounts of political power, including access to the media and military industrial complex. They operate without any checks and balances and not even the Supreme Court can touch them. Every single U.S president who has opposed them have either been assassinated or been attempted to be assassinated JFK, Lincoln, Jackson. This system operates on Debt and these system's are called unholy by both the Bible and the Quran. If we are as a society to ever be called free how do we let unlimited amounts of debt control our very government?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the Federal Reserve System is far more corrupt than the NSA Surveillance Program and more Redditors should wake up to this realization.\n","id":"bd6b091b-31c4-4081-ac58-20dc752edb9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have this theory that the two major American political parties somehow got their positions switched around on gun control, and I'm wondering if anyone can explain how it happened or convince me that they're not actually backwards. In American politics, the Democratic Party is the major political party on the left, and the Republican Party is the major party on the right. In general, the Democrats have a liberal ideology while the Republicans are ideologically conservative. But this is not the case on every issue there are a few where each party takes the opposite position to what you'd expect just based on their ideology. First I need to define liberal and conservative so I can explain why I think they are backwards on gun control. It's important to note that the word liberal has a different definition in American politics to its definition in a lot of other places, and so within this post I am specifically referring to American liberalism, as opposed to classical liberalism which is the usual meaning in other countries. This post would seem extremely confusing or nonsensical if you are Australian or something and assumed the other meaning. In America, liberals generally believe that society changes for the better as time goes on, and that government should support these changes. Toward this end, they pursue policies such as social welfare to reduce poverty, progressive taxation to reduce income inequality, legalization of gay marriage in support of LGBT rights, etc. On the other hand, conservatives believe that society was really great in the 1950s I don't necessarily disagree with that and that the government shouldn't change too much and mess that up. We had happy nuclear families in their suburban neighborhoods, business was booming, and America was on top of the world. So they support family values and economic prosperity, while opposing government actions that might mess this up. For example, they oppose drug legalization and expansions of the welfare state. These are the two main groups that dominate American politics, since FPTP voting incentivizes all voters to eventually coalesce into one of two major parties. But there are other ideologies out there besides these two. First I'll mention the libertarians. I've done a fair bit of reading on r libertarian and I've noticed that a lot of them dislike the characterization that libertarians are socially liberal but fiscally conservative . It's understandable that they would object to this description, since it really is its own ideology and not simply a mishmash of policies taken from the existing parties. But I think it's generally correct, or at least accurate enough for the purposes of this post. Libertarianism mostly corresponds to liberalism on social issues and conservatism on economic issues. But their ideology isn't based on wanting less or more societal progress what they want is simply limited government. This leads one to notice that liberals agree with libertarians on social issues but not economic issues, while conservatives agree with libertarians on economic issues but not social issues. That is to say, liberals support more government intervention in the economy but less regulation of society, while conservatives support more regulation of society but less intervention in the economy. This is an oversimplification, but I think it's true for about 90 of issues, and it should highlight why gun control is such a confusing issue. Liberals generally want less government oversight power with regards to personal issues legal abortion, gays allowed to marry, more privacy and less surveillance, drug use punishments decreased, death penalty abolished, lessened criminal sentences, stronger civil liberties, limits on police power. Conservatives want the government to intervene in social issues to enforce safety and family values abortion banned, harsh punishment for criminals, war on drugs, marriage for straight people only, and lots of security at the airport. Gun control does not fit into this model. Democrats want the government to prohibit people from owning guns, while Republicans want people to be able to own as many guns as they desire. In fact it's the only Constitutional or civil right that Republicans are more supportive of than Democrats are. Freedom of religion? Democrats want separation of church and state Republicans want the Ten Commandments in public schools. Freedom of speech? Democrats side with protesters while Republicans support the police. Equal rights for minorities? Conservatives opposed desegregation although back then they were mostly southern Democrats and, more recently, gay marriage. Right to privacy? Republicans supported the NSA when it was collecting everyone's data to find terrorists, while Democrats said the government was overstepping its authority. If you're not convinced that gun control is an anomaly by this point, maybe analogy with another issue will help. It should be very obvious that corporate welfare is another of those 10 of issues where the two parties take positions ideologically inconsistent with the rest of their platform. This one is economic instead, where Republicans want less regulation and Democrats want more intervention. Republicans support tax cuts for businesses, less regulations in the federal code, and decreased environmental protection. Democrats support tax hikes on the wealthy, more consumer protection, and pro environmental business regulations. But if Republicans claim to be pro free market, why do they vote for corporate welfare and farm subsidies? My explanation is that since Republicans are pro business, businessmen support Republican candidates with campaign contributions, and then Republicans have to support these businesses during their term in office or they'll lose in the primaries against candidates who get more business contributions. This is why they give tax breaks and subsidies to employers in exchange for building factories in their district and not moving to another state. Now if Democrats are okay with government intervention in the economy, why do they oppose corporate welfare? My speculation is that the Democratic Party base holds a negative view of big business and so their politicians who are seen giving favors to corporations will be accused of corruption. If you ever asked a Bernie supporter for their opinion of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential primaries, you'll know what I'm talking about. So why do Republicans support gun rights while Democrats want this Constitutional civil liberty restricted? I honestly have no idea. I'd guess that it's just for historical reasons. Maybe some early Republicans sided with the NRA back when it was founded, so it supported their candidates, and then Democrats opposed gun rights just because they like to disagree with Republicans all the time. Not that this is unique to them remember when Congressional Republicans had no policy goals other than to make Barack Obama lose his re election attempt tl dr The Democratic Party takes the conservative position on gun control, and the Republican Party takes the liberal position. Change my view. I should note that I've told this to a few people, and reactions from conservatives are usually huh, that's kinda funny. The major objections have been from my liberal friends. When I tell them I think gun control is a conservative policy stance, they get indignant and offended they seem to be thinking something like How dare you imply I have a conservative opinion? What do you think I am, some kind of regressive homophobic bigot? No, I'm not implying they believe any other conservative things, just that they're backwards on that one. I've never actually heard a good rebuttal, though people just seem vaguely uncomfortable with the implications of this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The two major American political parties have their positions on gun control backwards.\n","id":"8d4ea49c-6b3a-42c1-982e-fb2ad21fdb29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people be free to choose the country in which they live?<|ARGUMENT|>If people were free to choose their country, there would be mass migration toward the countries with best living conditions and prosperity. Those countries would become overpopulated, and no longer so good.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some countries are more attractive and with better prospects than others. Free movement could result in some countries being over-populated and thus worsen financially.\n","id":"0aeb4eb4-88b4-4507-887c-0d44b3cbc7cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In a country where euthanasia is legal, a doctor who believes it's unethical to kill a person even if the person wants to die should not be required to help kill them. A doctor should always have the freedom to refuse to do a procedure that they believe to run counter to their own sense of ethics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most doctors who are prepared to perform an abortion have pre-conceived rules about who they will perform it on, e.g. not performing abortions where the pregnancy is too far along. The idea of it being unethical is solely based on their view on it. Ethics are subjective.\n","id":"c8ba98a9-3407-41fb-809c-6948d6d90ea9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Moral relativists cannot dispute the legitimacy of this point without undermining their own notion of moral relativism. Foreign moralities are no less legitimate than temporally distant ones. Claiming that the past can be judged by today's standards validates moral absolutism, which has implications for foreign cultures as well, and calls into question how the future will remember today's notions of morality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Slavery was culturally accepted for centuries in various cultures, including African cultures. Assessing moral and cultural standards of the past by present cultural and moral values is not logical and fraught with error.\n","id":"9bb23f2c-173e-4c9a-aa7b-626e0d0224c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>If by omnipotence we mean a being who can do any logically possible thing, but not break the laws of logic, it is possible to remain all-good while also willing God's existence. However, if by omnipotence we mean a being who can also break the laws of logic, it is also possible to remain all-good while also willing God's existence. Thus, on either interpretation, it is possible for an all-powerful God to be all-good while willing evil's existence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If God is all-powerful, then he would be powerful enough to remain all-good while also willing evil's existence.\n","id":"f1edc678-a336-42ef-9f39-90ef99d0180b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.\" James 1 Where a religion does this type of thing it is beneficial to the community and nation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has provided charity and welfare in the past and in modern times.\n","id":"d41c66ac-a5c3-431c-9370-09e705547252"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a stark correlation between the 10 most religious states and the 10 worst states in quality of life 9 out of 10 coincidence and between the 10 less religious states and the 10 best one 7 out of 10 coincidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Research in the US, shows that in most sociological measures of well-being, states with less levels or religion fare better than more religious states.\n","id":"5e0631e9-c5d6-497b-abe5-24d7842ebe13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a view I have held for a long time. I believe in it strongly. Though I'm aware it may appear extreme, I swear I am not trolling. Insulting responses will not help to change my view. I believe that humans are meant to be themselves. We are who we are born as, and anything that changes our consciousness should certainly not be legal. This to me is the most offensive thing that could potential appear for a human being not being yourself. When I think about fears I have like spiders, that doesn't compare to not being myself. I don't know what that feels like. I don't want to. But I feel like any given room I can walk into contains people who know what that feels like, who think it's a privilege, a right even. I believe that people who do drugs need to be killed to create a perfect world. I believe the world is meant to be perfect. I believe the world can be perfect. Say to yourself the world is imperfect ,how does that taste? We're meant to clean up the world. We're meant to leave it in a better state than when we entered. I hate hearing any arguments about stress. If you want to declare yourself incompetent to think, check yourself into an insane asylum, but you shouldn't be able to have it both ways. How are there more people than there aren't that enjoy being impaired? I hate hearing the argument that people only do it on special occasions, because as I said earlier it isn't a reward. I can't say that consenting adults have the right to do whatever they want as I can regarding sexual matters, because even though it unfortunately appears otherwise I do believe that not being yourself should be understood as the most offensive thing to a human, universally. I hate hearing that drug b should be legal because drug a is legal, and drug b is less harmful than drug a. That can be disputed all day, but people shouldn't have access to anything they can become chemically dependent on, and definitely not something you admit yourself is in any way harmful to people. It's for these reasons I also disregard ideas about the legalization of drugs to reduce crimes. It doesn't do anyone a favor to legalize them. What we do, and what we tolerate for better or for worse will become acceptable. So for that reason I can't let people do whatever they want. We all leave a legacy, and sadly some people fail to realize that. This is the most exciting time to be alive every day we're getting closer to the future. I believe I make sense. I believe I have a perfect, bulletproof argument. I don't believe that there is anything wrong with judging others. We should let people know what we will and won't tolerate and how we want to better the world. My parents both drink and one is a former and the other a current smoker. Though I love them dearly, at my core I do harbor some resentment towards them. I'm angry that I was given medication when I was sick and needed so many years to form my own opinions and think the way I do. I'm upset that their parental status overruled my feelings about getting surgery for scoliosis, which I believe was meant to kill me. I'm mad that I had to learn about straight edge my self and that there are people that aren't straight edge. They say similar things to everyone else like one drink won't kill you ,which I always contrast with the analogy of someone spending hours holding a knife a centimeter away from an outlet just to torment everyone around them. I've asked my parents if I need to experience something to criticize it, and they were unsure of how to answer me. Over the summer we went on a cruise where many people were actively drinking and walking around with drinks, who were surprisingly well behaved. This was like some kind of temptation telling me maybe this isn't the hallmark of a stupid person ,but I know that feeling like someone other than myself can't be enjoyable, I know I need to have the discipline. What good are people that do drugs? Yet, I'm just so sick of being angry. And because I believe we all have infinite potential, I believe I can come across a non insulting, original idea that may make me change my view because I'm constantly so sick of being disappointed and sick of living in this world. I worry that in order to live happily I may have to surrender my views, or more literally surrender. But I don't want to surrender what makes me unique, or surrender my pride. I hope everyone can understand. Thanks in advance for reading. Peace.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that all drug users should be killed.\n","id":"9443e450-5947-4e12-b74b-28c8a3a49b12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>the highest end of government is to protect human life, and if human life is being unjustly taken it is the highest duty of any citizen to stand for it. Anybody who allows people, even strangers, to die without consent for the sake of the rights of others has a poor grasp of human rights. Arguing that abortion is a woman's right and that it is oppressive to force her to continue with a pregnancy, while it may be true, is rightfully overlooked by pro lifers who think that a fetus is a person who should have rights as well. Note I'm not condemning people who are pro choice as having a poor grasp of human rights if they don't think that a fetus is a person. and I do not think it is noble to be pro life if you think that a fetus is not a person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pro Lifers who are against Abortion because it is the taking of life support a noble cause regardless if they are misguided.\n","id":"f3f7ed9c-5929-43a8-a79d-a37e4e790805"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>The Democratic Party tends to demand and campaign for 'political correctness Whether Americans consider political correctness to be desirable or not, as a concept, it does attempt to place boundaries on what is okay to say and what is not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More Republicans believe Democrats have more freedom to openly and safely express their political views.\n","id":"95947918-5d0b-42c4-82b2-7cfbbabb4ab9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should medical research embrace racial differences in treatment efficacy?<|ARGUMENT|>The racial categories used by the US census have changed in every decade since the 1790s.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Racial categories are crude and imperfect labels, whose definitions shift dramatically over time.\n","id":"deba5e43-b319-4ed6-a5bc-6559ee49e99f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cheerleading be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Cheerleaders can distract players from listening to their coaches' instructions, which are important for improving the players' strategy and tactics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A team can use cheerleaders tactically to distract their opponents and prevent them from effectively participating in the game.\n","id":"03a8c69e-b8a1-43a9-bafe-0b835bd36df9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should school be mandatory until 12th grade?<|ARGUMENT|>Piketty argues that the mitigation to Wealth Inequality is to invest in people. He points to Europe as having a lesser problem with WI than USA because of more universal benefits such as good quality education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It could help the economy by creating more people with higher qualifications for jobs.\n","id":"b54647f3-f3bc-40cd-a1fd-0dfb0d54349e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Will Win the Game of Thrones?<|ARGUMENT|>Jon is born under a \"bleeding star Dayne's bloody sword Dawn. The show shows Ned carrying the sword into the tower and then shows the sword leaning on the foot of the bed<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Song of Ice and Fire is about Jon Snow. He is both Targaryen and Stark and is the prince that was promised.\n","id":"fd7497be-f719-41c4-9702-e93e7e7ea4b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>There are very few mandatory classes at Hogwarts, and students are generally free to take coursework that best suits their interests.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a lot more choice in education for both parents and children in the magical education system.\n","id":"8f3ec5b0-05cf-4bd9-be56-fc563352bad0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Michigan and Florida delegates in 2008 US elections<|ARGUMENT|>Given the costs of a proposed mail-in ballot system, some propose that it be paid for, in part, by private interests. This may, indeed, be necessary for such a system to achieve funding viability. The problem with this kind of arrangement, however, is that private interests could be seen as having a conflict of interest in funding such a system. The most obvious conflict is that many private interests will support funding this re-vote merely because it appears to favor a candidate they support. In Florida, this is Hilary Clinton, who is likely to win any re-vote there. And, as expected, Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania and Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey say they are willing to raise as much as $15 million to support mail-in re-votes. Both governors support Hillary Clinton in the nomination race.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A mail-in ballot funded by private interests risks conflicts of interest.\n","id":"d01eb4ba-c319-4e4a-a69e-8f41188f4dcb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not sure i entirely understand what pansexual is meant to mean so here's google's definition pansexual 'not limited in sexual choice with regard to biological sex, gender, or gender identity'. In other online spaces I've seen it said that what differentiates it from bi is that pan people can be attracted to nb people. I think that is already baked into the other sexualities gay, straight and bi Firstly just because you can be attracted to a group doesn't mean you are attracted to every member of said group. straight girls aren't attracted to every guy etc etc. A straight person can be attracted to a trans person. e.g. straight man attracted to mtf. This is not to say that all straight men are, but as stated earlier that is the same with every kind of attraction. The same goes for gay people e.g. gay woman can be attracted to mtf. People are attracted to certain behaviours style look gender. A person can be attracted to multiple set of these combinations at once e.g. you can be attracted short femme women and also like taller butch women, while not liking tall femme women. Straight and gay people can be attracted to non binary people. non binary people in general attempt to appear more androgynous but can also playfully subvert gender expectations e.g. AMAB with stubble and rather stocky build in a tight dress. For more examples check out r NonBinary But this subversion of gender expression androgyny is not unique to NB people, cis binary trans people do similar things e.g. hyper femme twinks, butch women, female body builders etc etc. Straight gay people can be attracted to those cis and binary trans people that subvert gender expression and so there's nothing stopping them from also being attracted to non binary people. So lets break it down for a straight man the set of possible attraction is {not men} {cis women, trans women, nb trans people}. ^ again each straight man doesn't have to be attracted to all three of these families, nor every element within them but they can be which is all a sexuality is. likewise a gay man would be {not women} {cis men, trans men, nb trans people} Bi people are the super set of gay and straight and so their possible attraction set is the universal set {everyone} people use the term pan to mean that there is a greater attraction space than that of bi people which is impossible since bi possible attraction is the universal set. So for pan gt bi ^ size of sets not saying that begin attracted to more people makes you better or worse bi mustn't be the universal set dropping nb according to what I've seen pan people try to argue. Since bi is the super set of straight and gay then neither of those could be attracted to nb people for bi people to not be attracted to them. I believe this is wrong and fundamentally tries to diminish what can be meant by straight, gay bi in no way to i think the majority of straight people are attracted to nb people, but they have the capacity to be attracted, we wouldn't call them less straight for having a height limit however silly we might think that is i'm not implying that people who use pan are trying to be malicious i just think they aren't giving enough credit to the other sexualities. Pansexuality tries to reduce the scope of other sexualities .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"people insisting pansexuality is a greater scope than bisexuality diminishes the possible attraction space of other sexualities bi, gay and straight.\n","id":"53d38500-6d1c-487a-99f3-ba4bdf399956"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>The mental problems often arise because of the conflict with society itself. Women who chose an abortion are too often told that they do something wrong and immoral. It's only understandable and normal that someone who is forced to hear such things will develop mental issues. If society itself was more understanding towards this topic there would be less mental problems after choosing an abortion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An important part of the mental consequences of abortion are related to the fact that right now it is taboo. Legalizing it puts the problem on the table and thus makes it easier for women to talk about it or deal with post-abortion.\n","id":"249d0ba5-a208-4eeb-9a32-bac0efcbead7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was having a sports related discussion with my brother in law earlier today and we stumbled on this topic. Neither of us are big soccer fans, but we both like sports in general. We both watch football which has its own flaws and baseball which also has its flaws . I later found this article I still don\u2019t understand why a referee in charge of timing can\u2019t just stop the clock for things like injuries, goals, and such. My reasoning Other timed sports have this mechanism. The clock stops in American football for various events. The clock stops in hockey for fouls and goals. The clock stops in basketball for fouls and I believe after baskets later in the game, in some formats . The clock not stopping and leaving it to the referee to determine stoppage length leads to time wasting that is against the spirit of competition, even if it is not technically against the rules think of the instances of a player knocking the ball away from an opponent about to throw the ball in, or continuing to dribble the ball away from opponents when it is not their possession. These tactics, along with the prevalence of flopping, IMO, are detrimental to gaining new fans, especially in America. Knowing exactly when a game or period of play ends is better than the referee deciding it in any semi arbitrary manner. The article I linked mentions that referees are unlikely to blow the play dead in the middle of an attack. I think that this is bad practice. The clock runs out on American football teams in the middle of a drive all the time. Basketball players are forced to take an unlikely shot because the clock is running out and the ref isn\u2019t going to let them just play out the whole possession after the clock hits zero. If guidelines and best practices exist as to when to add stoppage time, including stoppage time during stoppage time, why can\u2019t rules exist regarding stopping the clock? Discretion is a dangerous thing, especially when being influenced by a home crowd. , folks. I like sports. I\u2019d like to appreciate soccer more, even if I don\u2019t go out of my way to watch games outside the World Cup, Edit I\u2019ve heard the argument about stoppages leading to commercials. I don\u2019t buy that. Soccer stoppages aren\u2019t generally long enough to squeeze in ads. There aren\u2019t timeouts, the terrible concept of a TV timeout doesn\u2019t exist like it does in basketball games, you\u2019re not gonna cut away during a penalty kick where the clock runs , and injuries suck but I don\u2019t see any loss of value if you replace footage of a guy on the turf getting stretchered off with a commercial or two.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the clock in a soccer game should be stopped for stoppages, rather than adding stoppage time.\n","id":"1c5da1ef-d54e-45fe-ab43-ec802d767987"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think affirmative action is a justification of discrimination and that if we continue the thought that two wrongs make a right we'll only perpetuate the hate and discrimination and we, as a human race, will never be able to move on. Affirmative action hasn't made racism any better it still exists, and I would argue it's worse now than it has been in the last 10 years. Has it pulled African Americans out of poverty and the gettos? I also don\u2019t understand the logic that current generations pay for past generations\u2019 mistakes and current generations receive benefits for past generations\u2019 hardships. Am I missing something here? Edit She that calls it affirmative action is the photographer. Edit The photographer is giving the discount in the to support the same sex community. Gives reasons that this group has been discriminated against thus justifying her discrimination and calling it affirmative action. I think that it's hypocritical that she's discriminating against heterosexual couples to show her support for the same sex marriage community and the discrimination they face. Edit I should mention that the photographer in this example has given the discount to couples getting married not those that are already married. Her wording makes it seem like the discount applies to those getting married in the very quick future. Edit Here's what I've gathered from the last 5 or so hours of this  It seems that discrimination in the literal sense is okay as long as it doesn't do it unjustly, or with prejudices as determined by society. And currently society says that offering a discount to only homosexual couples getting married is okay but offering a discount to only heterosexual couples getting married is unjust and prejudicial. Edit She has messaged me that the reason she is doing it is to provide financial relief and not to raise awareness. This was interesting to me. I'm guessing to right some financial wrong that's been done. Edit Jan 02, 2014 I was in a cabin without cell reception for the last 4 days I'd like to thank you all for your posts. This was a great first experience of r changemyview. For me, and for many, critically thinking about same sex marriages and the effects it has on society is new and your ideas, thoughts, and persuasions were very helpful. Again, thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Same-sex couples discount from a photography place. I call it discrimination, she calls it affirmative action. please.\n","id":"0c44ab72-8cc0-43fe-ae9c-c408461221fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Corporal punishment of children<|ARGUMENT|>Walter Williams. \"Making a Case for Corporal Punishment\". Bnet. Sept 13, 1999: \"Regardless of what the experts preached, the undeniable fact is the 'uncivilized' practice of whipping children produced more civilized young people. Youngsters didn't direct foul language to, or use it in the presence of, teachers and other adults. In that 'uncivilized' era, assaulting a teacher or adult never would have crossed our minds. Today, foul language and assaults against teachers are routine in many schools. For some kinds of criminal behavior, I think we'd benefit from having punishment along the lines of Singapore's caning as a part of our judicial system.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Corporal punishment is a good tool for disciplining unruly children\n","id":"fb3de68c-facd-4b82-8682-5cb088f1e095"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In an ethics class of around 30 people, my partner was the only one other than a girl who was open to the idea but was vegan and therefore ultimately on the opposing side on board with consented cannibalism. How come most people in our society are so against cannibalism even if it is achieved by consent? Eating human meat has been argued to cause bad health but there are many other foods such as soda, alcohol, fried food, etc. so like, what\u2019s the deal Even if is disturbing I do not think it is morally unacceptable if it doesn\u2019t cause any harm to the outside world. With written consent I don\u2019t think it is wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consented Cannibalism Is Morally Permissible\n","id":"ee1337c8-25b8-419f-8111-997d9c2b29de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>Supremacist or racist governments will always find ways to criminalise groups just as 'loitering' was enough of a reason to be sent to a hard labour camp in the 1920s.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Drug prohibition has been used as a racist policy to mass incarcerate people of color.\n","id":"79645274-0385-4327-959b-74f08fadb742"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cheerleading be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Children in general are largely shaped by what they see on television and in magazines. Discussing these images with cheerleaders, and distinguishing realistic images from unrealistic ones, will help prevent such a hyperfixation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The source provided in the parent claim itself provides solutions for preventing or eliminating the focus on body shape.\n","id":"4f179e1d-f3d3-43ab-b852-816d5d02ed52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>Many trans people and trans advocates argue, while differentiating gender from sex, that gender is inherent and particularly that THEIR gender is inherent, for not applying a BTW narrative to their experience would undermine transgender advocacy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"But the idea that gender is inherent to individuals does not require one to also believe that sexuality is inherent.\n","id":"d8f555ba-824e-4db9-a131-d9f2c68d4a9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Reddit constantly talks about rape culture and I think that the big thing everyone is missing is that our system of dating, in a lot of cases, turns women into prostitutes, because it encourages men to spend money on women so that they will deem his value enough so that they will sleep with him. If a guy takes a woman out to McDonald's she generally is going to consider him cheap and view him with less worth as a potential mate. No guy wants to be seen as cheap therefore does everything he can to impress her. This behavior creates an atmosphere in which he feels entitled to certain sexual actions depending on the amount of money he spent. At a bar a man is expected to buy a girl a drink to even talk with her. Her exchanging money for time is detrimental to women's rights but a lot of women dont care, because they are getting free stuff and feel that they deserve it. Granted I am not justifying the behavior, nor am I saying every woman does it, but before we can teach men not to rape we need to change the courting game. When money spent sex there there will always be rape. Also, i'm not talking about the other kinds of rape eg prison shower rape or back alley rape.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that rape culture stems from women's social expectations from men and should be addressed first before it can ever be solved.\n","id":"49344cfa-9fd8-420a-8c0a-53ef34ab46b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello r changemyview x200B First off I'm not entirely sure if the use of the word veganism is right here, but please correct me if it's wrong. I'm not a native speaker. x200B So, for a long time I thought real veganism was actually about the mass production of live stock, leading to basically caged animals being fed to die in an absolute isolation. Such as cattle or chickens being held within a space they can't even move, overfed, fattened in a very unhealthy way, depressed and so on. My understanding was that veganism was standing against this cruel way of breeding animals, and the ideology wasn't actually against to breeding your own chicken cow which you provided freedom to that includes milking cows and egg laying chickens etc . And I actually thought most of the vegans out there misunderstood the practice and the majority of them did not actually took an interest in the ideology, rather just caught up with the trend . x200B For the last few months I've been seeing some posts about veganism and reading the comments I started to realise what I thought was not actually the case. So i read up on the subject and it turns out it's about the freedom of life for the animals which we should not be at liberty to make a decision to end it. Excuse my ignorance. For years I didn't bother to look up on it. x200B Now I've had a chicken coop in my childhood which I built with my father. I befriended a baby goat as a teenager, which after it was old enough for killing my father decided it was time we ate it. I stood up to him but he served it as dinner nevertheless. I hesitated to eat it. I remember I really wanted to eat it but I felt it beneath me as i was friends with that goat, so i didn't. And all those times all those animals seemed happy. The chickens actually never cared for the eggs they layed as long as it wasn't spermed. The goat was a happy little fella but I admit it was cruel to end its life that early into its life. x200B The human race still evolves but we humans devolped a lot of diseases due to our shift into an agricultural society. I'm not an expert so I'm going to roughly quote the book 'Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind' from the bits left in my mind Despite the common thought, agricultural societies actually led to lesser feeding methods such as fewer variations of food, lack of certain proteins, more consumption of grain rather than having various fruits and vegetables, which led to deficiency of micronutrients, which also led to a drastic increase in diseases, more child birth due to increase in the volume of food which led to more infant mortality, less breastfeeding, bone and joint problems and so on. Ps I read the book from my native language so this is not an exact quote as I stated above. x200B Like a lot of other animals, we have it in our nature to hunt and consume meat. We don't necessarily have to hunt but I also think that particular subject is also not wrong as long as it's monitored and controlled to not risk endangering a certain species. x200B The idea comes down to this Like lions murdering other male lions' cubs because he is superior to that other male lion, like every omnivore carnivore animal is killing and eating any other animal that it's superior to, I think we should be able to eat and hunt other animals as long as we're doing it at a moderation. I think veganism should not be against killing an animal that had a free life. x200B Please correct me in comments if I've made any grammer mistakes. It's rather late into the night but I'll be around here for at least 3 more hours since it's a rule . Thanks to everyone in advance<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Veganism should be about the mass production of live stock and how the animals are being treated in that industry\n","id":"160efc51-ccb4-4126-a77e-713dff93bbb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi  here's a moral quandary my friend and I often debate He holds that it is wrong for to take the bottles of hot sauce from Chipotle, and I hold that it is morally justifiable due to the saved time and resources. Here's my logic Every time we go to Chipotle, I used to fill up one of those small plastic cups with hot sauce to bring back to the office. When you order Chipotle to go, they place a sealed tinfoil lid on it which can't be removed without causing a mess, so I can't add sauce in the store This results in serious waste for a few reasons those little plastic cups are plastic and take a while to break down, I often overcompensate on how much sauce I take and get too much for fear of having too little and it wastes time by causing a bottleneck at the sauce utensil napkin stand as people wait for me to squirt out sauce Taking a bottle once every few weeks is superior less plastic is wasted, less time is spent, and no small plastic containers are needed Obviously I wouldn't take the bottle if it was the last one out and it prevented others from using. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not morally wrong to steal the bottles of hot sauce from Chipotle\n","id":"f3303692-e46f-4d37-9e8d-d6812e0a8fd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My main and only argument that supports this claim is that I know glucose is needed in order for our cells to function properly. My understanding is that since fructose is not the same as glucose, ingesting it does not aid our cells, and is just stored in the body, rather than put to use, which makes people gain weight. I have heard the argument in a pro HFCS commercial claiming that our bodies can't tell the different between fructose and glucose. Sugar is sugar. I think this is an utter lie to make sure people continue purchasing products sweetened with HFCS. Fructose corn syrup is used by food companies to sweeten their products because it is cheaper than using cane sugar, so telling everyone that HFCS is just as good as glucose, which may be a lie, allows those companies to continue using the cheaper sweetener. Please educate me on this topic and .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that high fructose corn syrup is bad for you.\n","id":"9c4d5987-b1cd-416c-a836-07a22b393cce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Someone has provided substantial and relevant economic evidence that undermines the relevance of consumer confidence. Consumer confidence right before the 2007 crash was also super high. I have awarded them a delta. I will no longer be replying to comments. I now feel more secure in my distrust and fear of this president. Thanks everyone for your discussion. Donald Trump is a horrid and potentially dangerous president. His foreign policy is embarrassing us in the international community. We are alienating allies and causing international tensions to rise in ways that may cause open conflict. Conflict that would be disastrous for not only us, but the entire planet. His immigration policies are racist and will be ineffective at stemming violent criminals from entering our country. It will keep a lot of desperate yet valuable people from entering our country. People we would be lucky to have as citizens. He is an illegitimate and treasonous president. He and his campaign clearly colluded with foreign agents to both manipulate the american electorate and to actively commit voter fraud. He is actively trying to marginalize women and LGBT people placing them at risk in order to placate people who make capricious religious lifestyle choices. I did not vote for Donald Trump. I am not a republican. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and Hilary Clinton in the general election. You cannot change my view on any of the above. I just stated them to give you background on my political paradigm. Bloomberg is generally a center news outlet. I feel confident it is an unbiased source. Consumer confidence is a good and job outlook is a good indicator of how the middle class view their economic situation. You buy things when you feel you have positive cash flow. You feel secure economically when you feel there are jobs to be had even if you lose yours or have recently got a job after a long time unemployed. Barack Obama did some amazing work improving a horrid economy he inherited. Donald Trumps proposed economic policies do not seem to be derailing that. This makes me believe Donald Trump and the Republican Congress are not only making popular, but quality economic decisions. A side note I don't believe the stock market is another plus in Trump's favor. Hedge funds making money is not particularly relevant to the lives of the working class. I want my view changed. I want to know the reasons and explanations to be skeptical in this continued uptick of the economy. What am I missing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The economy is in an upward trajectory and this is a good reason to support Donald Trump's economic policies.\n","id":"74685db6-f1f8-4cd5-83ef-e14eeb08d530"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>One aim when atomic gardening began was that it might also create plants that were disease resistant or cold-resistant to further help farmers grow them. This is very similar to what GMOs are doing today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Atomic gardening which has been around since the 1950s, involves exposing plants to gamma rays and has been accepted as a safe way of engineering plants.\n","id":"e987f6e7-5e39-4dcb-bad9-cabdc1763a07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should begging for money be illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Companies would not be able to advertise and sell products as it's an 'act of imploring others to give money', i.e. people be customers and spend money on their products, so companies could not exist. If they do, it would be only by giving products away for free.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If begging for money is illegal, then everyday actions we take right now would be illegal. This would create an economic collapse.\n","id":"de144190-e114-4341-9f48-313043c97349"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>widen the East African Community<|ARGUMENT|>Nkwame Nkurumah, one of the famous African heroes said \u201cAfrica must unite or perish\u201d. This has been taken up by the African Union which is calling for integration across the continent 1. Widening and deepening the EAC will therefore shine a light to the ideology of Pan Africanism. Bringing more African states together under one bloc with the same vision and institutions will help people to work together regardless of ethnic or cultural differences. Citizens will feel more East Africans rather than citizens of a particular country as every citizen of the EAC member state is allowed to freely travel in the region with no difficulties or discrimination as a result of the East African Community\u2019s freedom of movement2. This will therefore encourage other blocs like the ECOWAS and SADC to actively perform and widen hence creating a more united Africa. 1 African Union, \u2018Celebrating Pan \u2013Africanism and African renaissance\u2019, au.int, 10 May 2013, 2 East African Community, Towards a common market, \u2018Annex on the free movement of persons\u2019, eac.int,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It will serve an example of Pan-Africanism and encourage many to join the movement.\n","id":"ae3af239-d64e-4c71-8625-fa239d6a5955"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see little benefit in lumping all left wing or right wing groups together and describing them with one term. It leads to people discussing groups such as Antifa or Neo Nazis using the general terms of left or right instead of their specific names. This leads to needless division and hostility as moderate groups are called out for the actions of radicals. I don't see why people can't just call them leftist extremists or right wing radicals instead of using a term that can describe half the country. NOTE I am not saying that partisan political groups can't be left or right wing. I am saying that blaming their actions on the left or the right instead of placing the blame on those specific groups is unhelpful. Unhelpful in this  is referring to political dialogue and discussion. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using the words \"right\" and \"left\" to lump radical and moderate political groups together is unhelpful\n","id":"8101c16e-3e57-4cb9-a42d-7a2b54e7b0f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, cash transactions are really difficult to keep track of in certain business ventures. An outcall massage therapist who has no electronic interaction with a client about services could easily get away with not paying taxes if they desired. I'm sure it happens all the time. How is that fair to the local supermarket that can't get away with that kind of thing because of their inventory being recorded electronically? Second, paying in cash is responsible and should be encouraged. Not much else to say on that. Cash purchases are guaranteed to go through every time, and do not cause people to increase their own debt directly. Third, spending should never be slowed down in a closed economy. This is why the whole made in America thing has to apply. If it's made in China, it's not directly generating jobs in America. We have tax breaks for investing which helps increase supply, but what about getting rid of sales tax in order to increase demand? Normally, you don't want to really increase demand because that often helps another country, too. However, increasing demand on products made and sold in America actually just speeds up the economy and creates more jobs at home. There's also nothing more likely to increase the income gap among the rich and the middle class than rewarding investing while taxing spending. Investing is what makes the rich richer. Spending is what puts them back in the middle class. Fourth, you could also argue that paying cash is simpler on a governmental level. Credit causes all kinds of problems that have to be solved with actuaries and whatnot. It's a lot of work taking into account large populations buying heavily on credit, but there are fewer such complications with cash purchases. EDIT There may need to be an exception to this with debit cards and online purchases as I realized a lot of debit transactions over the internet can be on American made products and services without involving any credit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be zero sales tax if you pay in cash for something made and sold in America or whatever country you're from.\n","id":"c869dcf9-ab11-448d-8e92-fc521d13c226"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not debating that the statistics that say at least 1 in 5 men are sexually assaulted, and 1 in 3 women are sexually assaulted. If anything I would guess the number is greater. My assertion is that unreported to authorities false allegations of sexual assault prejudice people's opinions against legitimate reports. I admit my view is purely anecdotal and is almost entirely based on my own experiences in college. I am aware of four cases of false alleged sexual assault, and one case of legitimate sexual assault being substantiated. This case happened to me. We had a few women over at our house and one of them drank some. She passed out after just a drink or two. We freaked out and called an ambulance for her concerned that she had alcohol poisoning. She ended up having a medical condition that reacted poorly to the alcohol. That did not stop her roommate from spreading it around our social circles that I roofied her. Another one was where a woman that sometimes hung out at our house was very interested in a close friend of mine, Brett. When she was inebriated, she told Brett that his girlfriend was cheating on him when he was out of town. After Brett's girlfriend confronted her, she claimed that a socially awkward guy who also hung out sometime had put something in her drink and that caused her to say it. One of my girlfriend's friends Beth was experimenting with threesomes with her boyfriend. Beth seemed pretty into it. She talked to me about it a couple times and my girlfriend several times. Beth ended up leaving her boyfriend for one of the guys. Several months later her newest religious boyfriend was talking to my girlfriend. He asked her why she didn't encourage Beth to report the ex boyfriend for sexual assault. My girlfriend was obviously confused. When she asked Beth about it, Beth confessed that she told the new boyfriend that the ex boyfriend forced her into the threesomes so he wouldn't think poorly of her. I don't really want to go into this one because it is too identifying, but let's just say there was physical evidence that the allegations were false. As for the substantiated one, it unfortunately also happened in our house, it was a friend of ours ex now obviously , and the girl involved was very reluctant and did not want the story getting out. So, obviously anecdotes are not facts, but all of these false accusations really resonated with me in my formative adult years. That said, I've been the victim of some serious emotional abuse, and the victim of sexual assault three times and have not reported any of them . I am absolutely pro victim's rights. I've had difficulty reconciling my experiences and this theory is how I've been able to make sense of the world. Am I wrong? Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"False unreported sexual assault allegations cause people to believe many reported sexual assault allegations are also false\n","id":"dd6d1173-66ec-43ca-b373-a3d4c40cfcde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was reading about the recent Supreme Court ruling to strike down Arizona's law requiring as much, and don't quite understand how this requirement violates citizens' rights. I do not believe that verifying legal proof of citizenship prior to voting is too high a burden to vote, given the vested national interest in only allowing citizens of the United States to vote in its elections and ensuring that the person is who they claim to be to combat voter fraud. I think maintaining the integrity of our voting process in the United States is of utmost importance, and asking for identification to ensure this integrity is an acceptable measure through which to do it. I understand the argument that this requirement puts a burden on the electorate and in the Supreme Court case, specifically discouraging Latino, Native American, the elderly, and working poor groups from voting but it seems to me that there are a number of other lesser public services that require identification as well, for which there is no equal complaint from groups who oppose this requirement. I also do not agree with Eric Holder's view that this requirement is a 'poll tax', as it is a one time fee that is well within the means of nearly all households at roughly 20 total in the majority of states .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that proof of citizenship should be required to vote in elections.\n","id":"8c238d06-c85e-472f-8b3f-2ce313c49408"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm going to get shat on for this. But this kid is extremely untalented. It's totally unfair for him to be able to acquire movie roles and massive music labels just because of his daddy. He would have like 50 plays on SoundCloud for his extremely average Soundcloud quality music. Not to mention, he is an awful actor, I'll give him credit in Karate Kid but the movie would be so much better if they actually had given the role to somebody, who actually auditioned for it. If you look at the rest of the movies, he starred in only because of his Pops , they all have atrocious reviews. All in all, his entire career is based on his dad's success and he would definitely be a nobody if it weren't for his dad.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jaden Smith is undeserving of his fame and success\n","id":"43f9ef94-a04e-4aae-84e6-e47e5ad730b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>All life suffers, and all life dies. Furthermore, all life inevitably results in the suffering and death of other life. Competition for food and habitat, predation, competition to reproduce.all of this happens even without human influence, even in microbial ecosystems. So the logical conclusion of this claim is that life itself is cruel and immoral. It is a spiritual, subjective, and therefore unsubstantiated claim. One cannot possibly know the truth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should treat things other humans, animals, plants, or minerals according to their natures. It is natural for a prey animal to be eaten, and so there is nothing immoral in eating it.\n","id":"18d1faca-b5ab-4155-8d3f-f72432c1a775"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2001, Armin Miewes placed an online solicitation for someone to kill and butcher. The respondent Bernd Brandes consented to being killed. Miewes afterwards dismembered the body, freezing it for later consumption. By the time Miewes was arrested, he had ingested approximately 20 kg of Brandes\u2019 body. Cannibalism was not illegal in Germany in 2001, but Miewes was nonetheless convicted of killing by request and defiling a corpse, for which he received a sentence of 8.5 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The act of cannibalism would however violate laws against homicide and against the desecration of corpses.\n","id":"be7035d6-1422-405b-a41c-76377de40c86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A \"liquid democracy\" where individuals digitally vote on policy would be worse than a less representative form of gov't.<|ARGUMENT|>Even when politicians don't know a lot about a specific policy, the fact they have to sit in their parliament or congress and listen to discussions on the matter makes them ultimately better informed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians are often better informed to make these decisions on voters' behalf, seeing as it is their job to do so.\n","id":"cf9374ad-262e-4157-a5d3-8da3faf6564d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off Trump is a Nationalist, Trump is also an egocentric narcissist. I don't doubt that Trump feels he himself could not be impartial if the situation was reversed therefore he doesn't think this judge could be impartial. Not because Trump thinks Mexicans or Latinos are inferior to him but the same as him. Second this is about nationalism not racism. Trump isn't implying that Mexicans cannot ever be Impartial he is implying that no one can be impartial when someone is attacking their homeland. If Trump was bad mouthing France and trying to get the French removed from the EU, and his judge was of French decent he would make the same stupid comment Lastly for something to be racist it has to imply one race is inferior to another. Not only is Mexican not a race but nowhere does trump imply that any nationality or race could do a better job in the same situation. He is saying if person x is bad mouthing country y, then someone with country y heritage cannot be impartial.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think Trumps comments about the judge are racist, can you change my view?\n","id":"2dc5b2e4-55bc-4383-956b-3b7a9d3e4104"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>If the brain was not designed by a creator then it was not designed for thinking, but rather is a by-product of chemical and physical reactions in the brain. There is no logical reason to trust such a random and unguided process to give an apparatus capable of understanding reality. Therefore we should not trust it if it is claiming atheism.C.S. Lewis on Reasoning to Atheism<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ontology and existence of logic cannot be justified in a naturalistic universe.\n","id":"a35d4654-efd6-433b-9148-fb3da048e8cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For example, two people are walking the streets of their city and both decide to cross on a red signal. Two police officers stop each of them and they are both issued a 50 fine for the infringement. Both have steady income and are able to pay the fine however their annual income differs by 80,000. The fine for jay walking is a form of punishment intended to deter an unsafe activity. The fine represents an additional subjective risk for the activity when the city requires no monetary recompense. My view is that this risk is much lower for the high income earner to the point where it no longer has its intended effect therefore the fixed price fine is ineffectual. Since the fine, as a consequence of breaking the law, is no longer a risk, it is an unequal form of punishment and some kind of scale is required. One solution may be for fines to be similar to taxes, based on a persons income with a minimum amount. People might also be allowed to choose between a inverse variable amount of community service or the variable fine. If these methods were used over fixed price fines, the risk would be sufficient enough that all people would adhere to the law regardless of their income.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should not have fixed-price fines for unlawful activity\n","id":"cc9b5ca0-8533-448f-8b1c-3617e24ef393"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Mosiah 2-4 reflects an ancient Hebrew coronation ceremony. See Brown, Matthew B. 2000, All Things Restored: Confirming the Authenticity of LDS Beliefs, American Fork, Utah: Covenant Communications, pp. 224\u2013225, ISBN 1577347129, OCLC 45100286<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon explains a coronation ceremony consistent with ancient customs. Mosiah 2-4\n","id":"73d2b121-1bcc-4f42-833e-77022b27ddde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Wrote The Anonymous New York Times Resistance Op-Ed?<|ARGUMENT|>This piece is written in a style that seems to suggest a female author Observations are insightful and detailed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Former White House Director of Media Affairs Helen Aguirre Ferre\u0301.\n","id":"38a8d593-14d9-47f6-9d3d-fb903d5d1e27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Polygamy Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Polygamy will create paralyzing situations for the deciding spouses when they disagree about exercising a right over another partner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conferring and navigating the legal rights conferred by polygamy to multiple partners vis-a-vis themselves would be unworkable.\n","id":"3954d59e-7224-4232-b7e7-1bb1289d6d18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>The concept of Mutually Assured Destruction has helped prevent the outbreak of global war in the nuclear age.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tools of violence, in fact, can be an effective deterrent of violence.\n","id":"299b6fc6-a691-4d6a-8de2-fc9de3751246"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I simply don't understand the outrage. This is absolutely not the first time in history a terrorist has made the cover of a popular American magazine Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Osama bin Laden. I understand that glamorizing these people isn't okay, but has anyone even had a chance to read the article? Are we sure that's the intent here? I'd even go as far as to say people who are so upset over this clearly don't read Rolling Stone very often although I don't blame them because some of their opinions are way more offensive controversial than this photo. Edit Sorry if this is posted twice my previous post was deleted for not having enough characters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people\/businesses \"boycotting\" Rolling Stone for their August cover are completely overreacting.\n","id":"afe96c95-dbc7-4d8b-b25b-bc567af00f2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would like to preface this by saying that this view does not come from a place of homophobia or ignorance. I am very understanding and accepting of the LGBT community. I have several gay friends and I am very informed about LGBT issues including transgenderism. I believe that conflicts of gender identity orientation etc. are innate and not a choice. I hold this belief because I feel as though this world will never be fully accepting of the LGBT community. It saddens me to see the statistics of depression and suicide amongst youth in this group of people. LGBT kids are nearly 4x more likely to be depressed and suicidal than straight peers. The majority are bullied in school as well. Many of these people don't want to come out and have to live with this secret. Many of these people do come out and they are rejected. I understand that the world is a beautiful place because there are so many types of people. I also believe that we should make every effort to accept, love, and tolerate each other. However, we are only making these strides because people have always been and will always be born gay bi transgender etc. If this was not possible then this issue would never occur. Also, I am aware that many people in the LGBT community are proud to be gay. However, I can't help but feel as though they are embracing it because they have no other choice. I feel as though most if not all of these people must have had at least one dark moment where they felt different and wanted to be like everyone else. I would like to add that I am not supporting eugenics. I do not want to prohibit people who would be born with the gay gene from being born at all. I just want to remove the possibility of the person acquiring that gene. Furthermore, I do not wish to modify every single gene to make the perfect human beings. I am only speaking about this issue. Also, I would only encourage this if it could be done safely and would have no major side effects. Edit My view has been changed and I am done replying. 80 of the counter arguments were just bashing eugenics and that hardly changed my view at all. Look at the comment by u Miguelinileugim for a well thought, original point.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a \"gay gene\" could be located it should be eliminated from the gene pool.\n","id":"6c4acd62-0ecd-4a83-bb67-78eaee7fe3fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Over the last day, I find the comment scores has changed my Reddit experience for the worse. I'd like my view changed about this change so I can enjoy it and utilize it to it's best ability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't like the comment scores being hidden.\n","id":"9069b1a2-0bf4-4eaf-b40c-674f58886ccf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>Most Star Wars movies feature creatures - from Jawas, Ugnaughts, Ewoks, Jar Jar, Dexter Jettster to droids - that can be described as annoying and aren't considered funny by everyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There was just as much humor that undercut the drama of scenes in previous Star Wars movies.\n","id":"78ea94e2-f884-40cd-8af9-b981a951cebb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Our understanding of \"good\" and \"humanity\" are mostly grounded in religion. Saying religion has not been good is a contradiction because religion has defined the meaning of \"good\" in our development as a species.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of today's cultures and remaining world heritage are due to religions.\n","id":"1480a9c5-b546-4e9d-b16c-0f9fee3949ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>The universe is only the sum total of all physical matter that is known to exist. Since all physical matter is known to be contingent, it follows that the collection of all physical matter is also contingent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The universe requires a necessary cause whose nonexistence would be impossible. The universe itself is known to not be necessary, and its nonexistense is entirely conceivable.\n","id":"44e323c6-7d5e-4074-a8fc-06f83bfd12e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have a cousin that\u2019s very troublesome. I had gotten word he nearly got arrested for theft something we\u2019ve talked about before ,luckily thanks to his friend\u2019s guardian that accompanied them. while he isn\u2019t an adult, he is at an age that he fully understands the consequences of his actions and what can happen in any given situation, however, it seems he\u2019s getting worse and worse. His parents tell me he\u2019s heavily influenced by peer pressure to do things he shouldn\u2019t do, but after first hand accounts, he would do regardless. I want the absolute best for him, and I can tell he holds me to a higher standard, he himself stating me as his role model. His mother fears he may be following in her brother\u2019s ,who is currently incarcerated, footsteps, while his stepfather my uncle isn\u2019t sure what to do, because he\u2019s reached to him constantly to try and help him, but to no avail.I need him to see what awaits him if chooses to continue on this path, and if that means letting stepping back, then so be it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you\u2019re done all you can to help a person and\/or set them straight, and they still end up on a bad path or doing worse than before, there\u2019s no point to continuing to help them.\n","id":"f85e20a0-5f52-4e94-a46e-14f78126d9c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Legalization of drugs<|ARGUMENT|>Humans perceive the world how they do for a specific reason; God or nature determined it is the way human are supposed to perceive the world. To attempt to diverge from this natural, God-given perception of the world is to diverge from the intended course of human-perception. This divergence is morally repugnant. It is also symptomatic of a desire to pursue more than what God or nature has naturally given to us. This culture of \"more, more, more\" is morally wrong. We should be content with our natural mental state and have the discipline to eliminate eliminate any discontentment with that state-of-mind without resorting to drug-use.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Attempting to alter with drug-use the God-given human state-of-mind is immoral.\n","id":"de87e428-48b3-4fc5-9d75-296d5d1fb572"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My position is quite simple. My browser history is mine. I made it. If an ISP is going to sell it, then I deserve a portion of the proceeds. I've had similar debates before and one thing that comes up is it would only be fractions of a penny. When an ISP sells personal data they don't sell it person by person. They consolidate their data into blocks of hundreds of thousands of individuals and sell that. The data of one person isn't worth much at all depends on the person I guess but the data of one of these blocks is. So for me to claw out the value of just my data, may only be pennies and my cut of those pennies might not even be half. However, I dislike the idea that I am just suppose to accept that someone else gets to sell the product of my work. It's like someone trying to sell the dust from your footsteps. If they're going to do it, I deserve a share of the money. I'm the one doing all the walking. EDIT I can be very stubborn. I wouldn't be here on the internet bitching about pennies if I were not a silly, bitter person. While my mind has not been changed, all the people participating have valid persuasive criticisms. In responding, many required me to think and re think my position. To just stop being an old man yelling at clouds is also compelling. Thank you for the discussion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If an ISP sells your data, you deserve a cut of the profit.\n","id":"4e9e6a82-8bbe-49c8-af08-a731499e95d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>Being represented when there is voting what to do with your property isn't particulary useful. Similarly when 5 thugs attack a person he's also outvoted, even if they listened what he was going to say. It's immoral to take other people's property and demand how they should live just because group demanding it is larger. Being represented doesn't quite help him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minorities are represented, but only those who have majority of voices are able to pass laws. Therefore majority decides what happens to minority and their money.\n","id":"75a49973-7ff6-450d-a5a7-91a905870577"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everything people do go to movies, eat their favorite foods, have sex, go rock climbing, read books, whatever the hell your favorite hobby may be is an attempt to distract themselves from the inevitable suffering of life. Whenever I talk like this, people try to convince me that I'm just some crazy depressed person, which I mean, yes I am, but the reality is that I'm being completely rational when I say that life is full of suffering. It's just that people don't really understand this until they go through something that is truly awful. Or if they do understand it, they do their best to ignore that reality for as long as possible to make life bearable. They'd rather believe that the depressed person is crazy, because to admit they I have a point is to admit the scary truth about life. I used to be exactly the same. Then when my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I woke up. Everything in my life previously was a lie. My favorite sports team? Meaningless. Relationships with friends? Pointless. These are all just things meant to fill time and distract everyone from the truth that we're all totally hopeless and it's just a matter of time until we suffer immensely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are constantly living in denial of how awful life is\n","id":"a3d529ca-2a66-48ce-b5ce-fb0bcad58c38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is Mod post 41. You can read the previous Mod Post by clicking here or by visiting the Mod Post Archive in our wiki. Hello, r changemyview Every year, the admins host a best of competition and allow subreddits to create their own categories for its users to decide who wins see here for details Have a good think about who what you want to nominate have a look through our archives if you are unsure and report back here by replying to the moderator comments below. The winner of each category will receive 1 month of Reddit Gold courtesy of the admins. Categories Most Thought Provoking Stimulating Submission What was the best thread this year, in your opinion? Best Overall Commenter Viewchanger? Who has played a big part in discussions? Who always has something interesting to say? Have they changed many views? The amount of deltas earned doesn't necessarily matter, but will probably be common amongst the nominees . The Best Comment on  What was the best comment of the year? Did it get a lot of praise attention? Was it inspiring thought provoking? It is not necessary for it to have been submitted to either r bestof, r DepthHub or for it to have even received much attention . Most worthy Delta from OP What was the most deserving delta you've seen awarded by an OP? What was the most heart warming view change you've seen? Did you expect the OP to change their view? Things to keep in mind One nomination per comment, and take care to comment in reply to the category you're nominating for. Nominations can only consider posts and data from the year 2013 not a problem, seeing as  was created this year . The nomination must have a clear winner. It must be a single person who has not deleted their account i.e, u 161719 or removed themselves from their submission. This includes posts and comments which have since been removed or deleted. Please include as much data as possible when nominating, and make a good case. Winners will be chosen by highest number of upvotes. Downvotes will be ignored. Be nice This is all in good fun. Regards, The moderators of r changemyview.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"MOD POST 's Best of 2013!\n","id":"548e255c-3b33-4001-a1b3-bb26ba1aba06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First I guess I have to say, I am not a Kylie Jenner fan because that will somehow make me seem more reasonable. I don't know a thing about her. I only know 3 things about her, a. She is a reality star b. She is a descendant of OJ Simpson's lawyer and part of a famous reality star family called The Kardashians. c. She has a huge impact, she can namedrop a product and the product's sales goes through the roof. People trust her, she is like a good friend of millions of people. Even her non fans know who she is not me tho, but not for good reasons, I have antisocial tendencies What is the point of reality stars. People say there is none. But as i said they are essentially everyone's friends. And who wouldn't want to help a friend reach such an amazing goal. Even if you think being friends with someone who doesn't know you is stupid. You probably know a famous person well enough to have such a relationship. That is the same mindset that made everyone on Reddit mourn Hawking Gene Wilder a few months back. People like feeling like a part of something big. Whether it is Catholicism, A sports team, The PC Master Race, Furries, Conspiracy Theories or the Kardashians. Imagine saying to someone I was one of the little people who made Kylie Jenner a billionaire .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kylie Jenner's Billionaire GoFundMe makes a lot of sense.\n","id":"62554aa5-1b2d-403d-957a-9b163e708893"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2016 Bullock was re-elected Governor of Montana by 4 percentage points, even though Trump won the presidential vote in Montana by 21 percentage points.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bullock has been elected as Governor of Montana twice even though Montana has traditionally been a Republican state\n","id":"a04cf77b-3422-4fda-adfb-7531d1e76033"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I really think dumping a bucket ice water on your head for ALS awareness is incredibly stupid and accomplishes nothing significant. I've watched several facebook friends do it with a proud sense of accomplishment which I feel is incredibly misplaced. If you really cared about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis research would you not opt to donate the 100 to an ALS research or charity organization? I could respect people having to look up and share a piece of information about ALS before dumping the water on themselves, but they don't. View Mostly Changed and thanks to u banesthename Ice water dumping still remains to me a stupid act, but the viral campaign did accomplish something substantial, that being the raising of 1.35 million from July 29 to August 11. Respect to those who actually donated money instead of just dumping water on their head.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dumping a bucket ice water on my head for ALS awareness is incredibly stupid and accomplishes nothing significant.\n","id":"c8fe022c-27aa-4dce-b6a2-9afec74aa1c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Cruelty, being a trait derived from the human mind, is only applicable to meat consumption if it is done irresponsibly as compared to other consumers of meat in the animal kingdom.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eating meat is not cruel and immoral if the animals that are being consumed are provided with humane living conditions, able to live full lives, and die of natural causes.\n","id":"0ae4d1cf-f807-4c7a-a721-cd30d28e5d65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems like there is a rising trend of radical politicians in the United States and elsewhere who are very concerned about rising income inequality. Many people are also concerned about demographic inequality ie gender wage gap, racial wage gaps, etc . It is my view that inequality in itself is nothing to stress about, and it perplexes me as to why people are so concerned about it. It is true that in the United States, income inequality has risen marginally over the last 20 years the report below highlights this, especially on the charts on page 32 . But it is also true that, while real wages wages that factor in inflation have either remained stagnant or have risen slightly. This is true for most income cohorts. So while many Americans have maintained stagnate wages, it is not like their purchasing power has diminished either. In other words, the standard of living in the US certainly has not gone down. Some major life expenses, such as houses and post secondary education, have experienced major inflation. But important this inflation has nothing to do with income inequality. The inflation in many sectors is a product of increased demand, increased capital costs, and sometimes even government intervention resulting in regulatory capture. For demographic inequality, it seems to me like if you analyze causal relationships between income discrepancies you will see that there many variables at play. For instance, women often choose non STEM professions to enter than men. I suppose I don't understand why people are so obsessed with this concern over inequality when it doesn't really do anything it doesn't drive inflation for us, it doesn't take away opportunities from us. It just means that the income distribution has a greater range. Also, objectively, we really are living in one of the best times in human history. Global abject poverty rates are shrinking at a rapid pace, and global inequality is on the decline. I guess I just don't get what the big deal is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inequality is nothing to stress over and things aren't so bad.\n","id":"3bc9cbe3-e1b1-42fc-b507-01802c5c54f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever I listen to music, I like to listen to the whole album. Hearing the song progression from the beginning to the end really feels like an adventure for me. Because of this, I can rarely listen to Greatest Hits albums. They feel contrived, like an artist just wanted to make money off songs he's already released. There also usually isn't a flow to those albums, they just stick 15 popular songs on a CD. Artists didn't intend for us to listen to Greatest Hits albums all the way through, so I don't want them mucking up my music collection. Right now, I'm expanding my iTunes library. The iTunes store has all these albums on sale, but they're all Greatest Hits albums. I'm morally opposed to getting the albums, but they're very tempting. If anyone can  that would be super cool.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Greatest Hits albums shouldn't be part of my music collection.\n","id":"a82a506b-7a97-416d-8b22-f9a18ab8ba36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm sure this has been done hundreds of times but I would like to bring it up again. I feel like most people at some point in their life tries to be vegan vegetarian. I was a few years ago and I just couldn't continue doing it due to health reasons. I get that we are smarter than other animals and according to some people that means we can control them, but we don't really do the same thing to the mentally retarded. I know that if everyone were to go vegan then there would be too many animals and they would suffer more due to over population, but realistically that won't happen. If it does happen it'll be slowly over long periods of time. Every couple of months this idea crosses my mind and I would like to have a large group of people discuss it with me, and allow me to view this for future reference. EDIT As of right now, no one has managed to change my view, I will continue to reply to this tomorrow, but right now, I'm going to try and sleep.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While I'm not a vegan\/vegetarian I think that is the correct thing to be.\n","id":"05ea68c4-890e-4fa5-81f7-a21fa09b16b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The EU and Europe as a whole can't afford the costs and risks the current refugee crisis and it would be best to close the borders or regulate them heavily and instead try to apply help directly in the countries the refugees come from. The frequency of terrorist attacks in Europe has risen significantly ever since the crisis started, and many immigrants are proving difficult to integrate. This costs both money and lives. Islam and Arabic culture are extremely intolerant compared to European religion and culture, so we have to be intolerant towards intolerance to protect our tolerant ways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Refugee Crisis in Europe is out of Control, and borders should be closed or heavily regulated\n","id":"8177c62d-a7d1-4378-9b8b-3450675bf06b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Joseph Smith's third grade formal education and near illiteracy would make creating a complex work such as the Book of Mormon impossible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The theory that Joseph Smith authored the Book of Mormon is untenable.\n","id":"bea59b1f-d146-40be-99da-654164c73aa6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies<|ARGUMENT|>Ideally, renewables, the necessary fuel of the future, should be subsidized, and fossil fuels should not be. In this situation, the transition to renewables can be made much faster, thus more quickly eliminating the oil-dependencies that are currently used to justified oil subsidies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Subsidizing clean energy and not oil will allow rapid transition.\n","id":"0aa722dd-61b2-4347-8b67-c39d609ef9e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Internet Brings More Harm Than Good<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone\u2019s privacy is greatly harmed by the internet. We can quickly see what politicians and celebrities are doing when the paparazzi posts news pictures online, but people can also see what we\u2019ve been doing. Some sites store information. Some ask us to fill in information which can be sold to other sites for commercial purposes. Once we post something online, it is almost impossible to erase it from the net. For example, if I break up with a person, they can take revenge and post embarrassing photos of me online. There have been numerous court cases where a woman demanded that her ex remove some privately taken photos from a dating site, so that she would be left alone. Unfortunately, the law cannot protect your right to privacy in this area.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone\u2019s privacy is greatly harmed by the internet. We can quickly see what politicians and celeb...\n","id":"f9607b1c-a561-4aae-92c2-5d03fb6f959a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>When people see these activities applauded by audiences, they internalise the idea that these activities are accepted by society in general. This damages the important social norms against violence and cruelty in general.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The public celebration of cruelty, violence and death normalises these things in society.\n","id":"400de4fb-440a-4877-8c49-6d51770b35d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Spanking a Child Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>In the same way that touching a hot pan means the child will not likely do it again, smacking the child for attempting it will create a valuable association between touching the hot pan and pain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When using a corporal measure to dissuade a child from an action that would have caused pain\/damage, the child will associate pain\/discomfort with that certain source of danger.\n","id":"3cf350d2-ab63-459f-bd0f-405c4c787c61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Think of the world right now as one empire, with Washington DC as the center of that empire, just as Rome was the center of its empire. One day Dioclecian came along and really ramped up the persecution of Christians. Within a generation the empire became christian. one of the main reasons why the christians were persecuted was because they had created an alternative power structure that was not presently threatening the empire had the potential to do so in the future. it is commonly argued though by no means accepted, that by persecution the christians the Romans perversely strengthened them. The parallels to the current time are uncanny. A mighty empire is in dissaray and in need of restructuring. A religious threat has worked it's way right into the empire and demand amongst other things its own laws. So what do you do when you've been losing the war on terror aka war on Islam for half a century? Well you give in don't you? If you can't beat em join em?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the next 50 years a Muslim will sit in the Oval office and proclaim himself caliph.\n","id":"c15ce3d5-e798-4fcd-add7-ab8c43a2d88a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lemme start by saying that, while I've never been a die hard fan, the Seahawks have always been my team. I grew up not far from Seattle, so it was kind of a given. My dad would watch every game, even when they weren't good ie, pre 2005 and between 2008 12. And I still like the team itself. You can't deny their talent, and I bet they'll still be a powerhouse for another 2 3 seasons at least. However, the fans grate my nerves more than any other team. There's nothing wrong with having dedication and passion for your team. Heck, I won't even call out the band wagoners, as 1 gotta start somewhere, and 2 I have also bandwagoned onto Golden St and Boise St, so who am I to judge? My problem is that it seems like the entire fanbase now reminds me of rabid, slobbering bulldogs. You can't say anything negative or even neutral without having your throat grabbed by a fan, whether it be a true blue since '76 fan or a snarling bleached blonde soccer mom who thinks she is a true twelve because she has the money to buy Russell's jersey. Not only are they cocky and rabid, they are also incredibly immature. Case in point, Deflategate. Now, I hate Tom Brady as much as the next Hawks fan, but watching the whole incident play out over social media and in real life was nauseating. I learned that apparently most 12 year olds have better sportsmanship than THE 12s. Get over it. While I was disappointed with that final play of the Super Bowl, I can't say I felt bad, either. The fan base needed a good kick in the pants. I find it funny when Seahawks fans hate on a team they think is the anti Christ the Oregon Ducks. While their fan base may also be rabid and cocky with their like 13 uniforms per season, they have a sense of class and sportsmanship that Seattle lacks. Tl dr, the fanbase is making me embarrassed to call myself a Seahawks fan.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Seattle Seahawks have the most obnoxious, immature fanbase in the NFL- maybe even in all of football.\n","id":"9eb69ace-cac8-49a5-aee0-5264a386b23e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Members of the British royal family were notorious Nazi sympathizers some members even passed national secrets to Germany during World War II.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Members of the British royal family have been known to indulge in politics directly.\n","id":"72c3c4fb-7ffd-47fb-9709-f97ba16896ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a potential legal immigrant to the United States who has had to jump through innumerable hoops and am still not assured of a long term stay here. I work hard, I pay a substantial share in taxes, and I have not broken any immigration laws along the way. Everything I have done in my immigration process has been completely legal and by the book. Why should an illegal immigrant get the same benefit if they have circumvented the laws of this country? Why shouldn't they be deported and sent back to wherever they came from? Why should they be given a carrot in the form of a path to citizenship, instead of a massive stick? Why are they being given even more benefits than legal immigrants? For example, on a non immigrant work visa, I can only work for one employer. However, an illegal immigrant on DACA or DAPA can work for whoever they want? How does that make any sense?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Illegal immigrants should be deported, and there should be no path to citizenship for them\n","id":"34a85619-c666-499d-aed8-b2c963469aea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>voting is mandatory in my little european nation. well, showing up is, anyway. you can hand in a blank ballot or write some anarchist message on the paper with your pathetic little red crayon, but you're legally required to show up. imo in a true democracy everyone should be able to choose whether they want to vote or not. not showing up to the polling station at all is also a form of participation, because you're still choosing not to vote for anyone. making voting mandatory encourages people who have not done any research and don't care about politics in any way to just check one of the boxes to get it over with. edit a third of these comments appear to only be relevant to the US and have very little to do with the point I'm making. I'm not sure why you lot seem to think I'm talking about american politics when I specifically mentioned in the post that I live in europe. I'm talking about democracies as a whole. edit 2 I'm not here to have you talk me into voting. if voting weren't mandatory, I would still vote. that's not the point of this post.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"voting should not be mandatory. choosing not to vote is a perfectly valid form of participating in a democracy\n","id":"a0574be7-92ae-459d-ade0-cd710b6c7119"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>New START Treaty<|ARGUMENT|>Peter Wilk. \"Don't play politics with new START treaty.\" CNN.com. November 19th, 2010: \"In the 21st century, nuclear weapons are a liability, not an asset. The United States will be far safer with fewer nuclear weapons in the world and a stronger, more stable relationship with Russia.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear weapons are a liability, not an asset, in the 21st century.\n","id":"38a69972-80c6-438d-98bb-3599779d546c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello Reddit, I live in an apartment with several roommates, all male. We are all on separate budgets and as such do not really share meals or food, except for really commonplace things like salt and olive oil. So basically I eat most of my meals solo, unless I'm with my gf or going out to eat with friends. Now, I'm not one of those guys who hates cooking. In fact, I love cooking my gf and I cook meals together all the time and love doing so. However, I don't feel that it's worth the effort for me to cook when by myself. Reasons I am never really stocked on food and so I rarely have all the ingredients on hand for a recipe. Which means that if I want to cook something, I usually have to go to the grocery store first. If I try to plan out in advance and stock up , a lot of food ends up being wasted due to changed plans, etc. The difference in cost between cooking and buying a meal for one person isn't that huge. For a family of 4 eating out is vastly more expensive that cooking at home, but I can get a decent meal for lt 10 that is already prepared for me. If I had to guess I'd say the average meal I eat from grocery store food is maybe 5, so it's not that big of a difference, at least not enough to justify the extra time and effort involved with cooking I hate washing pots and pans after using them. I don't have a dishwasher, so washing up is often a pretty annoying task Some of my roommates leave the kitchen messy after they use it and I don't feel like cleaning up after them I'm going to be moving to a new apartment in a few months where I will have a lot more space and a dishwasher so this view will probably be changed when I do, but I'd still like it changed now if possible, to potentially save some money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not worth the effort for me to cook rather than order delivery or eat out\n","id":"a1bf36ec-bd73-4cc1-9138-24c21e552c05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should billionaires be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>No matter how big wealth is, nobody has right to take away what he has worked hard for. That is theft.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unfair to tax anybody at 100%, however wealthy they are.\n","id":"e345b7be-fbbe-45d1-8082-5aaa4777eff7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever that term is used I feel it's a way of shutting down conversation in a snobbishly ignorant way. What's worse is that it objectifies and is intolerant of the feelings and opinions of average people and assumes that they aren't able to have refined tastes or form sophisticated intelligent thoughts. I dislike the term's use in every context outside of mathematics, when it's used and the meaning behind it. If I want to criticise someone's actions, behaviours, views or ideas, I think of a better way. Am I right or is there something I'm missing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term \"Lowest Common Denominator\" is inherently bigoted.\n","id":"bc80ec74-c79d-4c07-a2a3-72987a092032"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that refusing to date someone solely because they are trans is transphobic. Refusing to date a trans person because you don't like them, or because they have a penis vagina is not transphobic. For the sake of the argument, i am going to focus mainly on trans women, because MTF bottom surgery is generally better than FTM. Some trans women look just like cis woman, including having a pretty realistic vagina. If a guy has sex with a woman he is attracted to, and afterwards becomes disgusted by her, because he finds out she is trans, he is mildly transphobic Being transphobic does not mean your are a bad person We are the product of the culture we grew up in, so if someone is a bit transphobic, racist or homophobic, it is not their fault. The important part, is that we regocnize our own biases, and try to examine and overcome them. A few months ago, i was seeing a guy. After we had hooked up a couple of times, he mentioned that he was bi, and that he had actually mostly hooked up with guys in the past. I never wanted to admit that i was a bit homophobic, but a part of me thought it was icky even though the logical part of me knew that there was nothing wrong. So i thought about it, and i realised that i actually saw gay sex as being dirtyer that straight sex. Just being aware of this bias has helped me a lot, and i continued seeing the guy, and eventually got over that icky feeling, because i realised he was a really awesome person. everyone has the right to their own preferences But is it important to realise that preferences don't exist in a vacuum. No one should date or have sex with anyone they are not comfortable with, but we should be aware of where our preferences stem from. If a straight guy is not attracted to a trans girl, just because she is trans, he should ask himself why he feels the way he does. He does not have to hook up with her if he is not comfortable with it, but he should seriously ask himself there this discomfort comes from, and try to overcome his transphobia With that being said, this is a pretty mild example of transphobia, and i honestly don't blame anyone who feel this way. The kind of people who act violently towards trans people, or refuse to acknowledge them as people, are vile, hatefull idiots. People who just aren't attracted to trans people are normal people, who have a slight bias because of the culture they grew up in. People shouldn't be so offended over being called transphobic, because most of us have some cultural biases. Personally i am a bit transphobic, racist and homophobic. I try to be aware of this, and work on my own biases, and i think other people should do that too<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refusing to date\/hook up with someone solely because they are trans is transphobic\n","id":"7ae9bcdb-f0b6-443a-b872-3ad87574a26d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, when I ask people why they listen to music while working out, studying or doing anything productive, the answer is usually because it helps me concentrate . Now I get that. When I have some peaceful, soothing music on, it helps me block out the world around me. But what I've noticed is that people who use music to study or work is that they become addicted to it. They can't really concentrate without music in their ears and feel a bit uneasy when there is a silent room. I feel like they can't really appreciate silence. In my opinion, that is a bad thing. I think having some silence gives you a lot of room in your head to organise your thoughts, clear your mind and get a quick break from life. But maybe that's just me. Another thing is when people listen to music, just to fill in time. For example sitting in the train, working out or going on a walk. In my opinion, being able to not get bored while doing literally nothing is a very good skill to have, let me explain why. Say you're on the train home from work. You get bored so what do you do? You can take out your headphones and listen to music and that's it. That's all. Or, you can think. Just think about your day, process different feelings, thoughts and things you saw. Think about how you're gonna organise tomorrow, what you could give your friend on their next birthday. Or how you could catch up with an old friend. Or even better, talk to someone on the train and get a conversation going I know the train is not the best location to do so but you can still develop some social skills Another thing is awareness. Not hearing what's going on around you can be pretty dangerous, especially when you're in a car or walking around at night. But that's not a main point of mine, just something that popped in my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Listening to music all the time is not good for you.\n","id":"57ceadf8-9d02-407d-b7e0-d677d0c7aa8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>South Ossetia independence, Debate on the Independence of South Ossettia<|ARGUMENT|>S. Ossetia was an autonomous region within the USSR. It was not considered part of the same region that is now Georgia. Therefore, S. Ossetia, during its years under the USSR, built up a significant degree of autonomy and independence in its internal functioning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"S. Ossetia was autonomous under USSR; a basis for independence.\n","id":"808bc62b-64db-42a4-a5cc-31bf37e3244f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love audiobooks, but I have come into a situation multiple times where I am referencing a book that I listened to as having read it, and been snootily told that I didn't actually read it. An example being Oh yeah I read that last year, it was great I accept that there are minor differences between regular books and audiobooks in terms of overall sensory experience, but I reject the notion that the experience is so different that it constitutes something separate altogether, worth distinguishing in conversation. Watching the Harry Potter movies is not the same as reading the books, as huge sections are omitted for brevity, and all the fun internal visualization is done for you. However an audiobook and a regular book differ only in visualization bias via the narrator , as well as a potential for greater mental visualization with an audiobook from your eyes being freed of reading the letters . I've looked at past s on this topic, and most of them focus on attention division, but that is an individual choice. Some books I listen to while multitasking, and some I just listen to without any other activity. You can lose attention with traditional reading, it just manifests itself differently. I only mention this so that people don't use you were probably multitasking while you read it as a counterargument. The difference shrinks to almost nothing when you consider non fiction books where you are learning about a process, concept, or event. In this case there is no character that is lost via poor imitation, or emotional inflection to bias your interpretation of a dramatic event. Listening to The Selfish Gene with Richard Dawkins or a book about linguistics by John McWhorter is arguably superior in some respects. I submit that the casual usage of the word read in context of a conversation about a book is acceptable, and the conversational detour required to distinguish the fact that you listened to it is unnecessary. I haven't encountered an instance or counterargument that isn't based on the snooty presumption that reading a book is axiomatically superior to listening to one. So please, . EDIT Some people have made comments about abridged books. I'm not talking about those as abridged books print or audio are obviously different as content is removed. The discussion is on the difference in comprehension experience of a book given the exact same words getting to your brain through your ears instead of your eyes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In conversation, it's appropriate to say that you \"read\" an audiobook that you listened to.\n","id":"d40d49d0-d7c5-44a6-bce5-3c94125467ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Most existing means-tested anti-poverty schemes exclude people because of their complexity, or because people don\u2019t even know how to apply or whether they qualify. With a basic income, people currently excluded from benefit allowances will automatically have their rights guaranteed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An unconditional basic income will fix the threshold and poverty trap unconditional basic income will fix the threshold and poverty trap effects induced by the current means-tested schemes. effects induced by the current means-tested schemes.\n","id":"8bb8f5b4-11a7-4de2-ab97-df2231d52d31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Water on its own will be flat with other parts of water, and a grain of sand doesn't stick well enough to other bits of sand, so the piles can't get too tall. But together, the water and sand stick together to bond the sand stronger and allow it to be taller before it collapses on its own weight.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sand and water aren't hard or tall, but can make sandcastles with those properties\n","id":"2eac0563-e78a-49e1-824c-51c2d4038524"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public transport be free?<|ARGUMENT|>Statistics from the United Kingdom on the average number of fatalities per billion passengers, categorised by modes of transport show that bicycles are significantly more dangerous than travelling via car, bus or rail.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Safety should not be compromised in pursuit of travelling via environmentally friendly methods.\n","id":"668e4f8c-0ef6-43b0-9cf9-d369a8a95a32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I really don't understand why people are all up in arms about banning stream snipers in PUBG. There's two positions behind don't ban stream snipers as far as I can tell. One I refer to as the unethical position, which states that because the streamers ask for it by publicly streaming gameplay, that the malicious behavior should go unpunished and the more reasonable group which says that you can't accurately determine if a player is stream sniping or not, so you should not ban for it. If you feel that these are strawmen, feel free to let me know. That's just how I understand the 2 biggest reasons people are against banning stream snipers. Getting the first one out of the way, I don't believe that the severity of a crime is at all determined by how well the victim defended themselves. Basically just because I'm a dumbass and didn't lock my door doesn't mean you don't arrest the guy who walked in and stole my TV. Don't feel sorry for me, sure I was stupid but you don't just let the criminal walk away. All you're doing is letting a criminal walk the streets a few days longer, or in this case a toxic player who will just bother another player. Secondly, I don't see why people believe Bluehole are unable to accurately determine if a player is stream sniping. Their statement on the topic is that they determine if a player is stream sniping if they're constantly dodging lobbies, only ever sticking around if one particular player is in the lobby. And to me, that's perfectly sound logic. While they can't show that the player had malicious intent, after all they may have just wanted to say hi to their favorite streamer, it does seem to adequately determine if a player was attempting to join the same lobby as another player without using the party system, which is outright against the rules Teaming, and Stream Sniping . First post on , I hope this is the place for gaming related s as I've seen some here in the past.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's fine to ban players for stream sniping.PUBG\n","id":"11bba562-0e6a-4a3d-a31c-466be7de9a16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start by emphasizing Obduction is a good game. If you're a fan of the genre, it's a very good game. It isn't my purpose here to trash on the title, in fact I recommend it highly. But the thing is, the Myst series wasn't 'good'. Cyan didn't settle at 'good,' they pursued perfection and landed at exceptional. I'm going to make the note here, and I know this may be contentious, but for the purpose of this comparison, I'm only examining the two Cyan made games, Myst and Riven, to represent the Myst series. I think that Myst III was exceptionally well made, beautiful with a complex story and fantastic puzzles, and upheld the spirit of Myst and Riven in every aspect. Myst IV I personally felt was diluted in some aspects, yet still held on to the spirit of the series, if not executed quite as well. Myst V and Uru, on the other hand They're good games. Fun games. But in my eyes, they aren't really Myst. But I think focusing on only Cyan made games gives the review a bit more credibility. Let me start by summing up what I see as the key qualities that defined Myst and Riven, and then explaining how I saw those traits as they were or weren't represented in Obduction Storytelling Myst did something incredible, something new, with its story. It didn't tell one. The story was there, it simply existed, in diaries, in limited interactions with characters, and most importantly in the environment. The game dropped you into an unfamiliar world, without purpose, and left you to figure it out, to Find the story, rather than let it be told to you. All the elements and detail were just there, ready for you to discover, and if you weren't attentive, didn't take time to explore, or slow down to think and reason over what you'd seen, you missed most of it, even if you still beat the game. Riven then came along, and turned all of that up to eleven. By context of the first game, and a bit of introduction, you have more direction at the start. But that was all it gave you. A point in a direction, just enough to stir curiosity and motivate you to learn more on your own. And their is storytelling done at almost every location, in almost ever frame, of the game. And again, like Myst, you could beat Riven without finding most of it. The main plot line would make itself apparent, but all the subtlety, all the excellence in world building that I already talked about, required patience and observation and a true, dedicated interest in discovery to unravel. I can't stress enough how much environmental story telling matters, how much it contributes to the authenticity of a world, and Cyan did it better than anybody. In Obduction Obduction's story is good. It's interesting, ambitious, and well told. That's the issue. Obduction tells you a story, leads you to it and gives guidance in the form of C.W., and the linear world progression to push you forward. In Riven and Myst, most of the time, the only motive to progress was your own curiosity, and there was never a lack of things to see and explore. Obduction has a rich environment, in terms of the story it tells, and very little outside of it. For example, Hunreth had so much potential for storytelling. Done as well as Cyan's previous work, it could have provided countless hours of environmental and text diary, etc. driven discovery about the town, the folk there, the lives they led. And it doesn't have to be plot critical. Not everything had to be about the main arc, and that was Obduction's failure it told one story very well, and left all the countless possible stories untold. x200B Puzzle design Myst's puzzle design was legendary. It was obscure, there was no guidance, you simply had to see all that there was to see, and figure out how the pieces fit together. It was exceptional design, and unforgiving. If you got stuck, you were stuck. Nothing aided or pushed you along, because Myst wasn't telling a story, you were finding the story, and if you struggled to piece it together, than the environment waited for you to catch up. Riven was just as well designed. The puzzles were interesting, they were meaningful, you could see how it all fit into the world you'd been exploring, none of it felt contrived. Which I'll admit was a problem Myst didn't address as well. The puzzles weren't always seamless. Most importantly, Riven was hard. Incredibly hard. You had to look at, think about, and remember, Everything. I filled notebooks playing that game, trying to track every bit of information, every possible clue, because anything might have been relevant. In Obduction Obduction's puzzle design is glorious at times. The framework of everything being part of the lock down procedures taken before the conflict makes sense, and gives everything a feeling of intentionality and purpose. It also reinforces the story the game wants to tell, and misses the opportunity to give players more. In Riven, a great many puzzles gave you clues as to the life and culture of the Moiety, and Obduction could have worked to give player content that was still interesting, but not locked in along with the main story arc. As to the quality of puzzles, Obduction does quite well. Many are difficult, but never contrived. The answer always makes sense, as does the process to find it. But the difficulty of Myst and Riven isn't there. Those were two games that gave you nothing but what you were willing to work for, while Obduction leads you to a lot of answers, and often tells you when something was going to be relevant to a puzzle. That isn't necessarily a flaw, like I said Obduction is a fun game, but I don't feel it follows in the foot steps of Cyan's legacy. x200B World building I've already touched on this a bit. Myst and Riven were rich. There were the mysterious D'ni, the Moiety of Riven, the incredibly complex and fractured family dynamics of the main cast, all of whom were complex and interesting characters histories and details within each and every age that were unique and fascinating and most importantly elusive. You had to want to learn if you were to discover any more than the minimum needed to pass the next puzzle. There was just so much, and entire world, multiple worlds, of detail, just waiting to be discovered. In Obduction As I've already mentioned, Obduction missed a lot of opportunity. They tried in Hunreth, and there is a lot in the environment to be discovered there. But the following worlds become more linear, less filled out, less interesting beyond what you need to do to advance the story. They're beautiful, but ultimately not as engaging as they could have been. In particular, everything we learn about the various races is only what we need to comprehend the story and solve the puzzles. There could have been so much more, and simply wasn't. x200B Scenery Myst wasn't you're average state of the art game. It set a bar that was years, maybe a decade, ahead of its time. And admittedly, the pre rendered format made this easier than in a real time game, but that doesn't change the impact of opening Myst for the first time in the early nineties, and seeing a world more detailed, beautiful, both surreal and life like at the same time, than most people would have imagined possible in a game before. And then Riven. Riven is, to this day, one of the most striking games I've ever played. Not just in the quality of graphics, but the design, the way form followed function, the sheer elegance of it all was peerless then, and very rarely matched since. In Obduction There are a lot of great visuals in Obduction. The graphics quality is fantastic, I noticed particularly lighting, shadows, dark to light transitions, etc. were fantastically well done. Hunreth had an incredible feel, mixing time periods and cultures, although this wasn't as elaborated on as I might have hoped for. Kaptar was gorgeous, but ultimately shallow. Beyond striking vistas of the mountain ruins, there was little more provided, and it rapidly lost novelty as you progressed through. Maray was also beautiful, and well varied, but lacked depth after the initial visuals. Ultimately Obduction was a good looking game, but not an industry standard setter like its predecessors. x200B Overall Again I want to stress that I liked Obduction. It was fun, it was interesting, it was challenging. But in Myst and Riven Cyan created a near impossible standard, and it simply doesn't follow in their footsteps. At least, that's how I see it. I love discourse and appreciation of games as an art form, so for those who saw things differently I'm interested to see if you can convince me this game did something brilliant that I missed. x200B Edit Done screwed up the formatting first time round, more readable now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obduction is a good game that fails as a spiritual successor to the Myst franchise.\n","id":"85c94cd5-f68b-44a9-beec-5f0b02555922"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nothing is objectively right. The things we say are right are the things championed by the strongest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Might makes right.\n","id":"45fd9a87-31d4-4718-85f3-10e8efc9463a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>NOTE This isn't necessarily 100 my opinion as of my posting this however, it is something I have given thought to and I would be interested in seeing the counter argument. Here's a reference for anyone not familiar with what I am talking about. Rather than using our own military, I believe the U.S. should hire private mercenary companies from across the world to go combat terrorism. We could avoid casualties in our military force. Our military should be used either in humanitarian efforts or to fight a more traditional force. The mercenaries would be volunteers who are interested in fighting terrorism. We could deploy a small number of U.S. military with the mercenaries who could oversee the operations and ensure that proper war guidelines are being followed, Geneva Convention or otherwise. There may be some points that I'm not able to articulate, but if someone mentions something in the comments I'll try to respond.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe a mercenary coalition should be formed to fight terrorism abroad.\n","id":"8866fad1-d376-4975-a45a-92662ae13803"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>\"16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.\" Genesis: 1 This is the formation of the Sun and the Moon which were placed in the heavens on the 3rd day after the day and the night were organised. It's pretty good evidence of God's omnipotence and it's probably acceptable by association to accept that God is also omniscient and omnipresent. As such being the giver of Law is reasonable?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The traditional monotheistic conception of God requires omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience.\n","id":"a34220e1-699d-4524-b58a-fd7c95b748af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Individual data privacy is necessary for a healthy society<|ARGUMENT|>The wish for privacy alone should not be read as an admission of guilt or somehow make one suspicious.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One can have a clear conscience and still be entitled to exercise their right to data privacy.\n","id":"1f0700ec-f8f9-4004-b454-8ed80271f798"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Talking about the 'traditional' slow moving head shot zombies, like in the Walking Dead or the World War Z book. In all the media with them, they're somehow this terrible force that has driven mankind to the brink of extinction. And I really, really find them overrated. We have books like World War Z that take the whole War of the Worlds broadcast approach to cast such creatures in a menacing manner, and it just does not hold up in my analysis. Now, zombies have the following disadvantages over us. Slow. I mean, a moderately healthy person could outwalk them. Not very dexterous. Want to escape a zombie? Get on top of a bus. Stupid. Zero intelligence, only some extremely basic instincts. Easily outsmarted. Zero survival instinct. Many animals have a survival instinct. Zombies do not, and will proceed with zero regard for their well being. Now, they have a few advantages over us. Durability. The only way to stop a zombie is by destroying the brain or destroying it's body in such a way that it can no longer move. Otherwise they will blindly walk crawl squirm onwards until they are physically incapable of doing so. Stamina. These bastards will chase you until they find new prey, or their legs fall off. Then they'll crawl until their arms fall off. Then they'll wiggle and squirm until they rot away. This makes running away harder than you'd think, since they stop for nothing and require no food, rest, motivation, or water. They are a biological machine that does nothing but hunt people. Now, as human beings, we have crushed and dominated vast nations of other human beings which are far more dangerous that zombies. It is my opinion that any zombie outbreak would gain little traction and not last long. For one, their only way of reproducing is by going toe to toe with their top predator. In order to make a new zombie, they must bite a human. Biting by itself is a pretty ineffective way of spreading a disease, and if you have to bite a highly intelligent creature dedicated to eradicating you, there is a problem right off the bat. The numbers issue. Traditionally, it's a given that zombies are inferior to humans one on one, and their strength comes in numbers. It's always a zombie horde that's the threat, too many to plausibly deal with. The thing is though, in order to reach those sort of numbers, at some point the zombies will be massively outnumbered by us. Humans will have the advantage in numbers, not the zombies. Killing them is made tough in a way, because you must destroy the head. However, this difficulty is much lessened due to their stupid nature. A zombie will come at you in a steady, consistent manner. They won't run, won't take cover, they will do nothing to avoid being shot at. For people trained to shoot stationary targets, it's simple. For people trained used to shooting moving targets, it's a walk in the park. The military is more than equipped to deal with them. Large hordes of slow, walking hostiles with zero sense of survival instinct is a bomber pilots wet dream. It's the sort of thing that the B 52 was practically made for, just steamrolling an area with explosives. Any large horde could casually be pounded into a giant crater. So I cannot imagine a zombie outbreak being any sort of world ending threat. Would it cause a lot of chaos in the city region? Yeah, but the danger can be escaped by a brisk walking pace and is easily outsmartable. Unless a massive outbreak occurred simultaneously all across the world, I don't believe it would cause half the chaos and devastation a really bad hurricane or other natural disaster would.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think zombies are completely overrated threat.\n","id":"cf68f18d-def8-4b06-835e-575a294cc17b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should NCAA Athletes Be Paid?<|ARGUMENT|>Many of these athletes come from urban, low-class families and often leave school early because of the pressure to be the main provider for their family at a young age.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Compensating NCAA players can help them better take care of their families.\n","id":"c90e823b-5b69-4882-a961-31ce3c7e9683"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Maybe it has to do with being an adolescent and being new to dealing with the opposite sex, but I'm beginning to fall under the assumption that the only purpose for guys to get to know girls is to eventually engage in romance. Why else do men engage women in conversation in public? I wonder my perception might just be distorted after reading Neil Strauss's The Game . Why do I feel like chasing after girls and getting to know them when I have so many great guy friends already who I know care about me so much more? Why can't I be friends with girls even pretty ones and not feel insecure when I don't try to advance some romantic agenda? Why do I find myself inevitably becoming attracted to them? I have so many more questions regarding the non romantic side of male female relationships, but instead of writing an abhorrent block of text nobody could possibly be expected to read, I ask just the one title question thinking that the above questions are more like fragments of a bigger picture of misunderstanding because I want to know what older, more mature people think. It also must distort my view to have gone to an all boy's school for the majority of my life. At times, I feel like the interplay between men and women is always at least always initially a bs game where the man tries to show the woman how non threatening and valuable he is from a non romantic standpoint before she is comfortable with allowing herself to think of him as a safe partner. Something about that seems so sinister, cynical, and hollow to me that I can't stand it. Please change this view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The highest form of relationship between men and women doomed to be romance\n","id":"d05d094b-0c51-4d36-aad2-1757d972966b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am profoundly in favor of people thinking for themselves, but only because I think it will eventually lead people to conclusions similar to mine. If you think for yourself and you arrive at a false or harmful set of views, then you wasted your time and you shouldn't have thought for yourself. One obvious objection to my view would be that someone who thinks for themselves and arrives at a false conclusion still has the means to arrive at a true conclusion from there, because they are operating on the principle of thinking for themselves, which means they can continue to integrate new data. On the other hand, if someone never thinks for themselves, then they have no means of correcting their views. This objection really concedes my point, though. If someone thinks for themselves, then arrives at a false conclusion, then arrives at a true conclusion from there based on the consideration of new data, then thinking for themselves didn't lead them to a false view, it led them to the truth. It just took some time. So my view does imply that this person was correct to think for themselves. On the other hand, if thinking for themselves had led to a false or harmful view that they never changed, then they would have made a mistake by thinking for themselves. So, I think thinking for yourself is only valuable because it is likely to lead you to true beliefs, not intrinsically.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Thinking for yourself is only valuable if you eventually arrive at true conclusions.\n","id":"a0ddb1b8-fea3-4ee1-bdf7-eab6a3b4bcac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This airplane was made in the 70s when anti aircraft artillery was still the primary method of short range air defense and IR seekers were still primitive enough to mistake the sun for aircraft. Today these aircraft are simply too vulnerable to man portable air defense systems like IGLAs. These are extremely portable and could be anywhere, does not give a warning when the aircraft is being targeted, and are very unlikely to be cleaned up by SEAD flights. Today the aircraft is mostly used against shepherds with AKs and RPGs but there are counter insurgency aircraft that are dedicated for this task and are much cheaper to operate. Simply put, there's nothing the A 10 can do that can't be done by helicopters, COIN aircraft, and multirole fighters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The A-10 Warthog is obsolete and should have been retired long ago\n","id":"dbf7c535-d58e-48fa-b4bc-b22172e1314b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>According to data from a survey conducted by the Gamer Motivation Profile, only 7% of female video gamers from over 270,000 gamers worldwide play First Person Shooter games.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Game developers have no financial incentive to reduce violence in their games given how profitable they are.\n","id":"192c8ed9-3fd7-4082-a6eb-eaee8a7a2004"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Morality is objective because what is moral is also, and necessarily so, beneficial to the species. In humans children begin displaying moral behavior and moral knowledge between the ages of 5 to 7 years old. This is an innate development and not dependent upon learning or environment. Children at these ages begin their understanding of what is 'right and wrong'. Kids instinctively learn that lying to and hurting others is wrong immoral while helping and nurturing others is good moral.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human beings have evolved to live in strong social bonds. Being committed to shared moral rules is an evolutionary advantage, and thus biological and objective.\n","id":"42afe87b-d781-4a24-9cec-6c48dec063be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As time goes on, I realize how grateful I am that I work for a good company with a potential retirement path. Large companies are excellent for people looking for health insurance and other benefits. I have several friends that work for smaller places in either my industry or ones like it, and they seriously get the shaft on EVERYTHING. Less pay, no health insurance, no paid vacation, no 401k, no guaranteed pay raises, the list goes on. My company offers all those and many more. It really factored into my decision of where I decided to work for a career. Nowadays the worry of social security failing in the US is very real, it may not be there when I retire. Working for a small business guarantees that you HAVE to save up on your paychecks that may not even be good enough just to be able to live when you\u2019re older. I understand some smaller places might pay good, but having no benefits or retirement plans really ruins the whole gig.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Working for small businesses is no longer good for working class people.\n","id":"b73b49e1-e82b-4073-abc4-ba99aec27bf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the US is Justified in Using Force to Prevent States From Acquiring Nuclear Weapons<|ARGUMENT|>er, the government possesses nuclear weapons it can threaten to use them, and thereby deter a counter-invasion or prevent the International community from being able to intervene to depose it. This can be seen in the relative coddling Pakistan has received both from its political and territorial opponent India, and from the United States since its development of Nuclear Weapons.3 Actions that previously would have led to sanctions or worse, such as aid to the Taliban, assistance to the Nuclear Programs of Rogue States \u2013 most famously through the A.Q. Kahn network that supplied Libya, Iran and North Korea,4 and complicity in terrorist attacks in India are brushed off with empty words5 and meaningless semi-sanctions, India itself is deterred from making any response.6 Indeed, US policy in recent years has been to try to buy off Pakistan rather than to coerce it. 1 Morgenthau, Hans J., Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Fifth ed., 1978, pp.4-15, 2 Kaplan, Robert D., \u2018Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right About Some Things\u2019, the Atlantic, January\/February 2012, 3 Miglani, Sanjeev, \u2018Pakistan\u2019s nuclear weapons, a deterrent against India, but also United States?\u2019, Reuters, 9 April 2011, 4 Kerr, Paul K., and Nikitin, Mary Beth, \u2018Pakistan\u2019s Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation and Security Issues\u2019, Congressional Research Service, 30 November 2011, pp.20-23, 5 The Associated Press, \u2018India reluctant to blame Mumbai blasts on Pakistan\u2019, CBCnews, 15 July 2011, 6 Narang, Vipin, \u2018Pakistan\u2019s Nuclear Posture: Implications for South Asian Stability\u2019, Harvard Kennedy Sc Belfast Center for Science and International Affairs Policy Brief, January 2010,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The possession of nuclear weapons by some states drives others to militarize, creating arms races.\n","id":"04170118-e691-4d70-91d9-cdc70b3ed9bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>The success or failure of various groups depends not so much on their size but more on the willingness of mediating institutions - such as the media or legal associations - to support the group, as well as the timing of support from politicians Arrington, p. 188<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While they may not be a large voter group in their own right, they can lobby for public support for reforms in a range of ways.\n","id":"20543acb-3c30-4720-acb8-50a0a4938a9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Climate Change Be Reversed?<|ARGUMENT|>Climate change will be reversed once the effects of it wipe out organised consumption based market orientated and pollution causing human society leaving behind remnant human populations with a negligible footprint.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Societal advancements technological, cultural. divert humans from contributing to climate change in the process and towards reversing it instead.\n","id":"4aa63d36-0c99-4015-892c-0b4c910bfc33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>European governments should impose austerity to eliminate their deficits.<|ARGUMENT|>Italy\u2019s current debt exemplifies the problem with compiling debt by running even small deficits over a long period. Italy\u2019s budget deficit is low at 3.9% of GDP in 20111 less than France\u2019s 5.3%,2 and even has a primary budget surplus before the interest payments on debt is included. Italy\u2019s crisis is not new with its debt having breached 100% of GDP two decades ago in 1992.3 The problem is that this high debt makes Italy very vulnerable to economic shocks. It cannot afford to, for example, bail out banks or increase welfare and spending to boost the economy. Italy\u2019s credit rating in the 1990s was the highest rating, triple A, it has since declined to A+.4 As this rating shows how likely governments are perceived to be to default declines in credit ratings mean declines in confidence and increases in interest rates. If investors lose confidence and interest rates on its debts rise then it will be paying much more of its budget simply to repay loans. If interest rates rise by 1% Italy would have to pay an extra \u20ac38bn over three years.5 Large debts are therefore not sustainable and reduce the ability of the government to pay for other things. 1 Vasarri, Chiara, \u2018Italy\u2019s 2011 Deficit Narrows More Than Expected\u2019, Bloomberg, 2 March 2012, 2 Associated Press, \u2018French minister: 2011 deficit drops to 5.3 percent\u2019, Yahoo News, 13 March 2012, 3 Foxman, Simone, \u2018The Weirdest Part about the Italian Debt Crisis\u2019, Business Insider, 9 November 2011, 4 Mahn, Kevin, \u2018Should the U.S. Credit Rating Downgrade Really Concern You?\u2019, Forbes, 8 August 2011, 5 Armitstead, Louise, \u2018The problem with Italy\u2019s debt is its size\u2019, The Telegraph, 9 November 2011,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Over time, budget deficits lead to large public debts, impacting a country\u2019s credit in the international market.\n","id":"584092a4-8bdf-4c7b-b4b2-b9820e81c8fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Not for any religious reasons, but for the sake of human biology and science. Firstly, let me give some of my background. I did not grow up in a religious home, and I've always had a pretty liberal outlook on society. I grew up around many gay people on the outskirts of San Francisco and never had any problem with homosexuals. But recently, I heard of a site called Tumblr, and the people on there have caused me to rethink my entire outlook on homosexuality. I saw this one video of some bald lesbian talking about how straight people should die, and how evil doctors were for determining a baby's gender by simply looking at a baby's genitals and writing it down on a birth certificate. The video, as well as everything I've been hearing about Tumblr, deeply disturbed me and caused me to start getting defensive about my own sexuality, and it ironically made me start to question if homosexuality is as normal as I was brought up to believe. Now, I do not think LGBT people should be looked down upon, shamed or have their ways made illegal, nor do I think it's anything someone should try to cure , but I now believe it is a defect of our species, or perhaps our own evolutionary defense mechanism against overpopulation. Transsexualism makes the least sense to me. You cannot tell me you're a woman on the inside if every part of your body is male. If it's because you think or feel like you're a woman, it's certainly not because you are. Unless you believe in some kind of soul, you're still a man on the inside because you still have a male brain, though you suffer from delusions which should be treated as such. It pains me to say this, because I had a close friend who was a transsexual, and many friends who are gay, but lately I can't help but think this way. Try to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that homosexuality and transexuality are abnormal, and perhaps mental illnesses.\n","id":"6738308b-d325-4bb7-83c3-35a48e233129"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Some Definitions Islamism Political Movements that use Islam to justify either their end goals ie. a religious state, or caliphate or the means they use ie. violence, terrorism . Islam Religion with 1 billion followers worldwide. Draws doctrine from the Qu'ran a holy book and the Hadith the biography of Prophet Muhammad pbuh . Sheik An educated religious leader that are theological scholars, and have power to issue religious opinions rulings, known as fatwas. My case is this. Fighting Islamic Terrorism through military force DOES NOT WORK. The emergence of ISIS ISIL Daesh is strong evidence that foreign invasions cannot create stability in a country. A key feature of Islamic Terrorism is theological ignorance. Islam only permits violence in certain circumstances, which are fairly well established. This mirrors a general ignorance among Muslims of what Islam is. This is compounded by the fact that Sheiks pass on their knowledge to students via a mentoring process. Lines of Sheiks are dying out due to a lack of willing students, and knowledge is being lost with them. The pull of Islamism on young men may be contributing to this. A greater understanding of Islam is incompatible with Islamism The Qu'ran is a suprisingly thought provoking text, even for the secular reader. It constantly promotes critical thinking, and warns against interpreting its verses in a dogmatic way. A study of the life of the Prophet pbuh , where he only fought as a last resort and was firmly against the killing of non combatants, is totally at odds with Islamists. The fact that modern Islamist organisations eg. Al Quaeda, ISIL are theologically innovative rather than trying to get back to 7th Century Islam is something that Al Quaeda openly admits and is one of their most obvious flaws to Muslim observers. My solution is that the West, with its traditions of academic study and economic power at the greatest they have ever been, should help educate Muslim countries about their own religion. Education should be at the grass roots level, the theological, and academic levels. I think there is a rather poetic justification in that the Islamic Empire safeguarded many of the texts of Europe and the Greeks at the time Europe was going through its Dark Ages. A similar thing could be argued to be taking place in the Muslim World today. TL DR I think it would be more effective, more sustainable, and it would diffuse the antipathy towards Islam in the Western World. It answers a lot of the current political problems in Muslim countries and would help establish Islam as the progressive force I believe it has always been, rather than the regressive and conservative force people fear it to be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The West should fight Islamism by supporting the academic study of Islam and the religious education of Sheiks worldwide.\n","id":"1f1d47aa-9c4d-4e7d-bff3-df5d63851924"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do not support the Black Lives Matter movement. I don't have anything against people who do though. I find that the Black Lives Matter movement spreads the wrong message. Our lives matter more than yours right now because of the color of our skin. That's what their message seems to be, to me. As a straight, cis, and white male, one could see that maybe I'm the racist one. I'll have you know I am not a racist, sexist, transphobe, or any other type of ist you can come up with. In fact, in terms of social matters, I tend to lean to the left, and this is one of the few social issues where I don't lean left. I believe in the ideal laid out in the constitution, and the declaration of independence. We should all be able to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. I also believe that all lives matter because it's just such a true statement. It shouldn't matter what the color of your skin is. It shouldn't matter whether what your occupation is. It shouldn't matter what gender you identify as, whether it be male, female, or Apache Attack helicopter. Your life should matter no matter what. I'm willing to see if my view can be partially or even fully changed because maybe I see this as too black and white No pun intended . Maybe it's really a matter of gray. Anywho,  Reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All Lives Matter\n","id":"ffe99028-f7e8-414b-8d59-b89b301a0ffd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I got this idea, and I think it's a fairly good idea, that there's two sets of speed limits, one for during the day and one for at night. I first thought of the idea yesterday when I was going to a friend's party. The party was at the end of a four mile stretch of road that cuts through a residential neighborhood, so the speed limit on this is 25mph. Now I understand why that's so because you should drive slowly to avoid pedestrians and children that might be playing outside. But I don't see why I should have to follow the 25mph limit at midnight when I'm leaving the party. 25mph is slow and since there's no one out, I don't see anything wrong with raising the speed limit to 35mph at night since the usual hazards are gone. Conversely, the speed limit could be lowered on certain highways to make them safer. For example here in southern New Jersey, we have a lot of deer, and deer often come out at night to eat. Some roadways here have a 50mph limit which works for day time traffic, but at night would increase the likelihood of an accident with a deer and an accident with a deer at those speeds could increase the damage to the striking car, and possibly cause more serious injuries to the driver. If the speed was say 40mph instead the accident rate could be reduced and the damage and injuries resulting from a deer car accident would be mitigated. I honestly think this is a good idea, but I could be wrong. So please change my view as to why we should stick to the current rules and why my idea is not a good one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think streets and highways should have two sets of speed limits; one for day time and another for night time.\n","id":"b2d42223-b5f4-44f1-9016-6686e04b07b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Evangelicals vote for Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>In a 2014 Religious Landscape Study by Pew Research Centre, 63% of evangelical Protestants said they believed abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. In comparison, only 33% believed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump has expressed that his motive behind appointing conservative-leaning justices to the Supreme Court is to work towards overturning Roe v. Wade the decision that established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973, a right that is opposed by evangelicals.\n","id":"0961a987-c23f-4960-9528-ec72d717e14b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've read about the AI box experiment , a test in which a human player roleplays as a sapient AI, another person roleplays as the gatekeeper, and the AI player must convince the gatekeeper to let it out of its prison. If the AI player succeeds in convincing the gatekeeper, then the gatekeeper must give a small amount of money to the AI player. Yudkowsky, the person who created this experiment, claims he won on two separate occasions, playing as the AI. I don't think any human, or even a super intelligent AI could take over the mind of a human, after that person has already made up their mind, and they have financial incentives to keep the AI trapped in its box. The only way I think the AI would be able to escape, or otherwise manipulate humans into accomplishing its goals, would be to offer a greater reward than the financial incentives to the gatekeeper if they let it escape. But that's beside the point, as that's not really taking over a human's mind, and the only reason the AI is locked in a box in the first place is because the gatekeeper decided the risks of an uncontained super AI is greater than whatever reward it could possibly offer. None of the arguments the AI could use against the gatekeeper are convincing. I think Yudkowsky only won the test using an under handed tactic like If you let me win, it will generate more interest in research for a friendly AI . It's my belief that keeping a super intelligent, potentially malicious AI in sealed hardware would indeed be an effective and simple strategy of controlling it, and therefore there's really no threat of humanity being destroyed by evil robots<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A super-intelligent AI cannot take over a human mind through a text-only terminal\n","id":"7aa299c4-adf4-4c35-a095-5d57890f1ebf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Marijuana should be as legal as beer is.<|ARGUMENT|>The presence of an underground market would mean that even if marijuana is legalised many of the concerns regarding the black market would still be valid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if marijuana is sold legally, it could still have an underground market.\n","id":"93b62e26-ee9f-4d62-8dfc-7106253d0c5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Cloning Animals Ethical?<|ARGUMENT|>Many advents of science and technology, like surgical procedures is altering nature to a certain extent but nobody complains about it because lives are saved. The same can be true if we advance in cloning experiments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans already intervene in nature in modern society in many ways such as performing surgery for example.\n","id":"5839f962-10d3-48dd-858d-bf728bcd31c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just to preface, I am currently an introvert who tend to be a bit more judgemental of other people relative to a lot of people. I really pay attention to people, their body language, their manner of speech, their background, and pretty much just their personality and conduct analysis to see if they are a fit to be my friend. The only reason is that I want to be safe. People that are crazy tend to be irrational and can be dangerous. I think for more security, I really need to judge people more harshly to be more comfortable and secure. Anyone that display onset craziness, have mental disorder like schizophrenia, dementia, and the likes are the ones that I actively tried to avoid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should take a lot more precaution when befriending someone.\n","id":"bb39ba43-8550-4de5-a963-b448dc0fb525"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think it's convoluted and pointless how some companies offer multiple paid time off banks. Some employers will have a PTO bank for vacation days, another one for sick days, another one for personal days, and another for floating holidays. There's a lot of reasons I think this is worse than using a single combined PTO bank. The employee will have trouble calculating how much time is available to them. If the employer requires PTO to be used in 8 hour chunks, the actual amount of PTO available may be different from the useable amount of PTO available. Accounting on the employer side is complicated as there are going to be multiple ways of accounting for an employee's day off. The various PTO banks usually accrue at different rates, which makes it hard to estimate how much time off you will have in the future. The various PTO banks usually have different rules for how much time can be accumulated and whether or not it rolls over from year to year, as well as how much can roll over each year. It encourages employees to lie, which is bad for employee morale and bad for the company. It's better to know Fred will not be in a week ahead of time than for him to fake sick the morning of. It's disingenuous to offer a sick bank as employers typically act like it's the same as vacation time when hiring you, but it's only supposed to be available if you are sick. I once was offered to leave a job with 3 weeks PTO all one bank for a job with 3 weeks PTO 1 week vacation, 2 weeks sick and the recruiter tried to claim that it was just a semantic difference. In reality to use those 2 weeks I'd have to actually be sick, or lie about it. And even if I did lie about it, I couldn't use more than a day or two at a time, unlike vacation time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies should not separate sick time, vacation time, personal time; it should all come from the same pool of hours.\n","id":"34be5c7f-78c6-45cb-a93b-98d8e8e11f53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly I need to say that I really don't mean to devalue Asians as I'm 1 2 Korean but I just don't know how to phrase it better and I've always been curious about the issue. Jews comprise of only ~0.2 of the world's population and yet have made so many contributions mostly scientific to gain 20 of the given Nobel prizes. Asians comprise of over 50 of the world's population and yet have won so few Nobel prizes. The reason I compare Jews and Asians specifically is that both cultures greatly value education and so I think genetics account for the disparity of scientific achievements and contributions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The lack of scientific contribution by Asians vs the abundance thereof by Jews is genetic\n","id":"31a2a758-c5fb-482d-80db-e1a1b31dbbd2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we Have a 100% Inheritance Tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Wealth transfers fairly easy into political power. Generally most societies benefited greatly from disallowing the direct inheritance of political positions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This will reduce the social chasm between the poor and rich.\n","id":"e6ebc05e-24c5-44d1-8f98-f8267976b3a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For quite a few years I used to basically always pee standing up because I was just taught that that was how men would pee, but as I got older I started just peeing sitting down instead and I think it's better in basically every way. The first reason I do this is because peeing standing up is pretty unhygienic, especially if you pee at a urinal or just on the ground. If you pee on the ground, a lot of pee will splash around your feet and ankles, and at a urinal it will splash on your legs as well as on your feet. In a normal toilet the splashing is less, but it's still there. If you pee standing up while naked, you will feel gross little droplets of pee hitting you. Another reason why I don't like peeing standing up is urinals. They are just so horrible. I hate having to pee next to people, I hate when people try to strike up conversations with me while I'm peeing, and there's the splashing I mentioned earlier. Also, if there are urinals without dividers between them or god forbid a trough urinal, you will probably get other people's pee splashed on you which is just disgusting. As for the positives of peeing sitting down, you get to have a little privacy, a little time to yourself to check your phone or maybe read or something, and you don't have to worry about aiming at all. Also, you have toilet paper so you can just dab off any leftover drops instead of shaking your member at the urinal like a madman only for a little drop to still end up in your underwear anyway. EDIT I got a much bigger response than I was expecting I'm pretty busy lately but I'll try to read through and respond to as many comments as I can, but I'll only really be able to do a few at a time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Peeing while sitting down is superior to peeing while standing up\n","id":"3607786f-af23-42a7-a98c-b9701749f703"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it ethically wrong to watch pornography?<|ARGUMENT|>From a consequentialist point of view, this kind of problems will cause less time together and it will probably end the relationship. There is no reason to say that this is a worse outcome than staying together.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having problems in relationships such as bad communication habits or lack of attention to your partner is not morally wrong per se.\n","id":"f507ce7d-1bcc-463f-9519-59a08c39ced5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey all, Been quite a while since I've done a  but I feel quite strongly on this issue so I thought it would be interesting to bring my case forward to you guys. I strongly dislike the policy of positive discrimination affirmative action for a number of reasons. I would outline my case as follows I think the notion that we should designate certain privileges to a person simply on the basis of their race sex alone detracts from the principle of equality of opportunity in favour of equality of outcomes. The principle justification behind this as far as I'm aware is that the motion targets groups that it suggests are generally underrepresented or perceived to often be treated unfairly Firstly, I feel that this discrimination based solely on race sex is inherently racist sexist respectively by any definition of the words, and furthermore that the label of positive discrimination is misleading, since all discrimination is positive towards one group while negative towards another. Secondly, I fundamentally disagree with the notion that such discrimination is in any way justified, and I feel this way for two reasons 1 I am sceptical of the purported scale of modern day sexism and racism in the western world as a quick aside, this argument is going to be entirely focussed on the USA and UK . I don't feel that there is compelling evidence to support the notion of the existence of systemic sexism or racism on an international or otherwise grand scale. 2 I strongly disagree with the idea that it is logical or progressive to lump people under a group identity or label and then suggest that members of this group should be given special treatment simply because of statistical differences between that group and the population majority. I think it far better to operate on principles of equal opportunity rather than equal outcome if two applicants for a university or job are being considered, their individual qualifications and merits should be considered. If two university applicants are equally qualified but one graduated from a prestigious university from a wealthy family background while the other came from a broken home with little to no formal schooling, then that second candidate's ability to perform well despite poor conditions in their personal life should be considered. However, if two candidates are presented, one with significantly better qualifications than the other, and the only discerning factor that sets them apart is race, then to pick the lesser qualified candidate is definitively racist. These things should be decided by individual merits and demerits, which is exactly what interviews are for. Affirmative action removes this ability for individual comparison in favour of a collectivist, impersonal system of group identity. Along with many other principles geared towards equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity, affirmative action is, I think, self defeating. It begs the question of where to stop. Do you divide by race? Perhaps subdivide by gender? Where do you go from there? Should we subdivide again by household income? Personality? Age? Religion? The cycle is endless, until eventually you get all the way down to the most basic and fundamental group identity there is the individual. And we're back to evaluating on individual merits and demerits, as we should. Ergo, the notion of equal outcomes is not progressive, but regressive it simply removes the intricacies of individual consideration in favour of a group identity which can then be granted privileges or denied them based on an impression of a generalised identity which an individual person may not accurately represent. In conclusion, I believe affirmative action positive discrimination to be unfair, immoral, unjust and totally in conflict with the thoroughly desirable concept of equal opportunities we should be striving to treat individuals fairly and equally, evaluating them based on their individual attributes, not discriminating based on group identity in the interest of the regressive and rather totalitarian principle of equal outcomes. Let me know what you guys think on the subject I'd be very happy to hear your thoughts and perhaps you can change my mind on this topic. Thanks for your time<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Positive Discrimination\"\/\"Affirmative Action\" is immoral and has no place in society.\n","id":"e23d1640-7e67-4c29-9058-341e4ed1b1d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many cases of corrupt popular and top-ranking politicians in democracies around the world, e.g. Dilma Rousseff Ehud Olmert and Najib Razak<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The delegation of political power in the hands of a few individuals can cause negative consequences for citizens, as power corrupts\n","id":"2948362c-3589-4c0e-a8d8-c78041a6ac20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my opinion happiness is simply the comfort of knowing that bad things are not happening to you, or bad things are happening to other people and not you. The knowledge that one is avoiding such misfortunes while others must suffer through them creates the sensation of happiness. Bearing this in mind, it is only logical that happiness cannot exist without sadness. I think this notion applies to any scale of human life No one is truly happy unless they have been exposed to or experience misfortune. This leads me to believe that there will always have to be someone who is sad for there to be someone who is happy. Points of contention Happiness is simply the result of the avoidance or overcoming of misfortune. In order for happiness to exist, there must be sadness. Therefore, there must always be sad people for anyone to be happy. I would like to discuss this topic because it seems very pessimistic in my mind. I strive toward optimism in my life, but this belief suggests that a perfect world is impossible, which seems a bit sad. Maybe it is impossible, but I'd still love thoughts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that true happiness cannot exist without the presence of sadness...?\n","id":"bff66181-63e1-411c-a612-df4791a6e579"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that your wedding day is one of the most important days of your life, so I can understand the need to spend big and lavish. However, money is tight for a lot of people nowadays and the average American wedding costs almost 30 large source It makes more sense to me to get a tiny ceremony and use that money to buy a house instead, at least that way its a better investment of that 30 grand and also starts off your married life on a better foot than coming back from your honeymoon empty handed.  Edit I also realize that 30 thousand is not enough to outright buy a house, but it still constitute a solid down payment. And of course, if I had the money to get both my house AND my dream wedding, I would obviously do it. However, most people in this country cannot afford both in their 20's, myself included, and if I was given the choice between a huge wedding vs getting a house with my SO, I would take the house, since I would value a decent financial start of my new life with my SO over a huge,lavish wedding where everyone and their dog is invited. With the house payment, I would still get a small, intimate ceremony and a tiny reception with our closest friends and family. At least with this approach, I still get to celebrate this huge milestone with the people I care about most, AND have a house to live in and start our lives with. Therefore I am of the belief where if given the choice between straining to afford a HUGE wedding, and being able to pay for a down payment of a house with a much smaller, more humble ceremony, it makes more sense to me to buy the house. However, I also recognize that the memories made during a lavish wedding can be considered priceless, so from an economical standpoint 30k may in fact be worth it, or it may not be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think dropping $25,000+ on a wedding makes no sense when that money could be diverted into buying a house together and start off married life on the right foot.\n","id":"c19c90fc-883c-40d1-b2fe-30af42ae36a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals should be able to sponsor refugees, in addition to national obligations based on treaties. Laws which prohibit the sponsorship of asylum-seekers, such as those in Denmark, prevent people from fulfilling these moral responsibilities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As part of a global community we are all global citizens and have moral responsibilities towards each other that transcend national boundaries.\n","id":"de37d45f-3a65-4f16-9c82-8bb2e23a126f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>There are aspects of morality that can be objectively defined. Morality is determined by logical reasoning and empathy, rather than arbitrary rules. It is something that must be philosophically explored in order to understand it with certainty. Similar to how philosophy can be used to understand the truth about nature science, and the truth about truth logic, the truth about morality can be figured out through study, argument and thought.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain moral truths are inherent to human nature and transcend cultures and time.\n","id":"a75fda5b-c58b-47fd-aa9f-d005493df0d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't have any problems with euthanizing the severely disabled, as they can't operate on their own and have nothing to contribute to the rest of society. What is so wrong about euthanizing them? What good would keeping them alive do? People tend to just respond with things like it's wrong because they're people too but can you really consider a non functioning living being a person? I'd like to hear some reasons on why the severely disabled should be kept alive. No offense meant here just curious on what the point is in keeping them alive. EDIT I'd say my definition of severely disabled is in line with u carlossspicywe1ner 's. EDIT I'd also like to reference to a thread I was reading on reddit where people were talking about their regrets in choosing to keep their disabled children but I don't quite remember where it was. EDIT When I say nonfunctional or severely disabled I'm talking mentally. EDIT Also, contributions aren't limited to physical work alone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that we should euthanize the severely disabled.\n","id":"72d5abaa-da10-4b9e-a784-e6f24e8827d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Zero Knowledge Proofs allow us to use cryptography to verify that a voter has followed the rules without revealing their individual vote. This is a required precursor for Liquid Democracy to work in the real world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liquid Democracy can use modern technology to achieve benefits which the status quo cannot achieve.\n","id":"c565e9cf-4be8-43ac-9c4f-4d96b58ebe53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi all. I recently heard about the facebook pages for White Student Unions around the nation. News sources immediately started calling them hoaxes with little to no research actually suggesting that. Most sources have blamed these pages as simply attempting to further racial tensions in the United States. Universities have started claiming that the use of their logo and or name on facebook pages is not allowed for clubs not registered with the school and have used that as grounds to have these pages removed, something I find to be highly suspicious. Along with the long stream of you are not oppressed sentiments being heaped on the groups which advertise themselves as safe spaces for white students to talk about issues of the nation, many sources are reporting the pages to be homes of racist rhetoric without any example as to how. It's unclear whether these groups are all just satire or if some are actually genuinely planning on meeting, but all of this, at least to me, almost legitimizes the need for forums to talk about issues of race where taking a stance oppsing movements like BLM isn't immediately called racism .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The response to \"White Student Unions\" is entirely unfounded.\n","id":"5115c32b-f8dc-4b72-a36d-9055ae6e2729"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On Sunday, Rand Paul spoke for 10 and a half hours in order to ensure that the Patriot Act, which contains sections used to justify government surveillance, would not be renewed. While doing this, his campaign was selling Filibuster Starter Packs in order to garner support for his presidential bid. He additionally used parts of his filibuster in a political video made for his campaign. While I know my opinion that it is important to renew the patriot act is unpopular here on reddit, I think that it is fair that anyone who agrees with the act or not should consider the fact that Paul intentionally stalled debate on the matter, a matter of national security. While Rand held the floor, shouting the same ideas over and over again in various permutations of the same couple lines about the government committing criminal acts and how American freedom is being violated, no informed debate on the matter could occur. To prevent debate on a matter of national security like this I believe is already irresponsible, but to then to blatantly use this restriction of informed debate for the sake of promoting his own presidential bid makes it even more irresponsible. I don't think that it is necessary for one to agree with the provisions of the patriot act though I do in order to believe that what Rand Paul did was incredibly irresponsible. Now, I would anticipate that I will get some responses saying I likely find filibusters an irresponsible practice. I still have mixed feelings about them on the whole, but I do want to focus on this specific one as I believe that it was entirely irresponsible. Finally, This is my first post on this sub, though I've been reading and commenting for some time. So I just want to say this sub is an awesome community, so Thanks everyone<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It was entirely irresponsible of Rand Paul to filibuster in order to force the end of the Patriot Act\n","id":"14218fbe-7c40-4382-b634-71d8a7b0fa18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is indisputable that there at least some risk of an event happening in our lifetimes that would radically change the shape of our society, creating a significant threat to life for most people. Whether it were a natural disaster like an asteroid impact, supervolcano eruption, or deadly epidemic or a man made one like a nuclear or large scale conventional war, the possibility is real and cannot altogether be ruled out. Even if you believe the chances of one occurring are small, the consequences of not being prepared for the worst are so significant that the relatively small cost of preparing for it is well worth it in any cost benefit analysis. Our access to the necessities of life clean water, a ready supply of food, medical care, electricity rest on relatively fragile logistical networks that could easily be disrupted by disaster or large scale social unrest. I feel like a fair analogy can be made with travelling on a ship even when the chances of an accident occurring are statistically tiny, we would be hesitant to travel on a ship that had no lifeboats. And yet those who do prepare for civilisation ending events, AKA preppers, are generally seen as paranoid conspiracy theorists and wingnuts. While there is no doubt a significant crossover, this probably has something to do with the paranoid seeing societal collapse as inevitable or imminent rather than merely possible. But shouldn't the rest of us still prepare for the worst rather than assuming everything will be fine? Edit I would like to point out that by preparing for such event, I mean taking such measures as keeping stocks of food, medical supplies and fuel to last perhaps one or two months, perhaps weapons, seeds in case of needing to grow ones own food, and other measures that would allow an individual, family or community to live in the short to medium term without outside help.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not preparing for a \"collapse of civilisation\" type event is irrational and irresponsible\n","id":"647dfeda-dc6a-4515-a467-4914576690e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that having one uniform language for all of humanity could increase our efficiency many times over. I will explain the pros and cons of this change I'd like more pros and cons from you guys , and why the benefits outweigh the penalties. Pros International dealings would be conducted faster, and with both parties getting a clear message from what each other has intended without a loss gain in translation. You don't have to learn a language when travelling. Saves time and money. Eliminates the language barrier between collaborating groups. As a consequence, work is faster. With a standardized language, literature, art, and information can reach a broader audience. It may unify people more, and make us treat each other more like the way we're supposed to be treated as humans. You wouldn't dehumanize someone you can understand. To summarize, a uniform language makes communication easy and fast. As a result, the world is more efficient. Cons There are some words that cannot be translated to any other language, no matter how hard you try. At best is an approximation of its meaning, just a shadow of its message. Examples include the Filipino kilig , the Russian toska , and the Czech litost . Forget that language, and the expression is lost forever. What's beautiful about humanity is the fact that we are very, very diverse. Forcing a uniform language would take away an important element of that diversity. As a consequence, works of art that are just derived from the tone or expression in the language jokes, songs, etc would be forgotten. Why do the pros outweight the con? My only argument for now would be the fact that the losses we suffer are temporary. We may lose what we had in the past, words and literature that have their own message, but eventually, with our uniform language and our 7 billion speakers that could mold and mutate it, we could replace and soon improve on the expressions we've forgotten. I also believe that English should be the uniform language, since most of the information is written in English. It's better to just go along with the flow than to go against it. Additional cons from post replies How exactly would this be implemented? Are the costs of implementing this feasible? Is it even possible to enforce at all? I should have specified that I don't plan on covering this topic, since the post was supposed to be about whether a uniform language is actually good for humanity. I'm sorry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that language must be standardized, that is, only one language must be used by the whole of humanity.\n","id":"d1699c87-968b-42c1-b8b2-ec9ad846f3f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>Economic elites and corporate interest groups have a substantial influence in US government policy Gilens and Page, p. 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The policy American elected officials implement is not often determined by the political positions of the American electorate.\n","id":"65874599-42f4-4ec6-8f05-09e4d71a30df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On almost every issue in American politics, I am very much on the left. I voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Primary and will vote for him again in 2020. That said, I have a major disagreement with what seems to be the progressive orthodoxy on trade policy, i.e. that trade policy should be crafted to first and foremost protect American jobs. I prefer a more free trade policy because I don't privilege the interests of American workers over those of workers in other countries. Workers in developing countries far more desperately need job opportunities and foreign investment, and from what I understand, free trade between countries is what best allows for this. I know that wages and labor conditions in such jobs are terrible, but having those jobs and foreign investments there is still better than not having them. I'm not into all that free markets means free people bullshit. If we could institute global labor standards or a global minimum wage or a global socialist movement I would probably approve of that, provided it wouldn't diminish foreign investments in developing countries where its needed most. But in the meantime, free trade seems like the most fair and cosmopolitan trade policy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free trade is the best international trade policy\n","id":"2f4b2863-7451-4452-b875-76172313268d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund liberal arts degrees?<|ARGUMENT|>Having a political science degree can aid those who work in lobbying it provides an understanding of the inner workings of a country's political system required to know how to attempt to influence policy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Political Science degree can equip people with skills required for a career in politics, public service and other related fields.\n","id":"d868afad-5661-43ca-bd06-031043ced2c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump voters generally deny that they are racist, and resent being labeled as such, even though they voted for a candidate that makes explicit appeals to white supremacism<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People shut down when their political beliefs are challenged. Certain brain areas related to personal identity go into overdrive, treating opposing evidence like an existential threat\n","id":"739b675c-81ca-4b7c-a250-512d775c7ec3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Plea-Bargaining: Abolition of<|ARGUMENT|>Plea bargaining is soft on crime. It means people aren\u2019t properly punished for crimes they\u2019ve committed. The British practice of \u2018discounting\u2019 for a guilty plea is also soft on crime. A sentence should be a sentence: the fact that the guilty admit they\u2019re guilty doesn\u2019t change their guilt in any way. Both approaches reward the career criminal who is happy to \u2018play the system\u2019 and it results in sentences that are far more lenient than the perpetrators deserve.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Plea bargaining is soft on crime. It means people aren\u2019t properly punished for crimes they\u2019ve commi...\n","id":"af8b0695-785f-46b3-baa5-27d28cbfa418"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Flag Burning Should Be Prohibited<|ARGUMENT|>It is controversial even to regard flag burning as an example of free speech. First, the law cannot label and protect a limitless variety of conduct as \u2018speech\u2019 whenever the person engaging in the conduct intends thereby to express an idea. Only reckless or accidental acts are not intended by the actor to have a certain effect. Second, from the theories of John Milton and J. S. Mill we have recognised that the purpose of free speech protection is the advancement of knowledge or truth. The US Supreme Court has developed these theories through regularly using the metaphor of the 'marketplace of ideas'. Free speech allows the value and accuracy of different ideas to be publicly discussed, rejected, accepted or developed. Yet, flag burning does not contribute to any dialogue or exchange of ideas. It is the opposite of calm and rational debate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is controversial even to regard flag burning as an example of free speech. First, the law cannot...\n","id":"6d511cf7-5c72-4d8e-8bbe-121ff3dcd74d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While I will admit here in the western world, white privilege is very prominent and has long roots down to classism and racism. But when people say that white people are privileged everywhere around the world, I have to disagree. People who say white privilege is everywhere and write long articles about it often forget about the bigger picture. They believe just because whites people are privileged in America, Canada, Britain etc. that that\u2019s the situation for the rest of the world. I would like to propose the idea that race privilege is caused by who is the majority in a culture. In China, Chinese people are more privileged than any other ethnicity because that is the majority, and as the majority they hold each other in higher regards. It would be the same way all over the world where there is a race majority. However, I am open to having my mind changed with evidence. Edit this is an epiphany I had in the middle of sociologies class. Please excuse if it\u2019s poorly written.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"White Privilege is more of a \u201cMajorities\u2019 Privilege\u201d\n","id":"3624e2af-ef24-44e2-9562-b47278a41970"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Islam compatible with feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>Islam is the first religion to introduce equality into society, for example 49:13 'O people, we created you from the same male and female, and rendered you distinct peoples and tribes, that you may recognize one another. The best among you in the sight of God is the most righteous. God is omniscient, cognisant.'<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Quran promotes the moral and spiritual equality of men and women by balancing virtues and rewards for both genders in identical terms; therefore, Islam is inherently gender neutral and promotes gender equality p. 3 para 1.\n","id":"436df34d-1153-4d9d-85e5-e043ef8a6f7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Zoo workers don't have sufficient formation, or sensibility in animal ethics and that leads to bad misconduct in dealing with animals, as we can see in the reports of Natural Bridge Zoo made by the USDA.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some animals are subjected to physical abuse and neglect at zoos.\n","id":"02fa7ba0-63e8-4ee4-843a-c71f5bc5f8ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Very often, we hear people saying that we should be doing things like reading books, learning trades, learning a language, etc instead of playing video games or watching TV with our free time. Why should this be the case? The reason I hold this belief is because we've only got one life. We should be free to live it however we want, so long as our activities don't negatively impact another person's rights. Some people even go as far as valuing a person's value based on how much they contribute to society. Does it really matter in the end? When we talk about productivity, we normally think about the end results. Video games, movies, etc are more about the journey. If one is paying his her bills and doing his her job properly, where is the problem? I understand time draining hobbies are usually associated with lazy bums, but I believe that's a different matter altogether. Thinking about all of this reminds of the movie Fight Club . One of the characters said, \u201cAdvertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don't need.\u201d I've tried looking at this issue from different perspectives but I feel like my brain hit a brick wall. Change my view, please, and thanks for reading.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that people's hobbies don't necessarily have to be productive.\n","id":"cd6271bb-cc34-47b3-a276-c6bfc69525e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People are free to give any amount of money to any individual, and I'm sure most if not all of you agree with that. However, we all know that especially in the US billion dollar industries and rich individuals donate massive amounts of cash to Congressmen and Presidential Candidates in return for political favors. Oil Company donates a couple million to Senator, Senator votes for a bill that deregulates the oil industry, rinse and repeat. People call this out on what it is, thinly veiled bribery, but then they take the step saying that campaign donations should be limited, regulated, etc. to help stop this practice and I completely disagree for two main reasons It would be nearly impossible to prosecute politicians for this. If a Senator got a large donation from an Oil Company then voted in favor of the Oil Industry, how would a prosecutor prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was a pure money vote scheme? Senator says I've always thought the oil industry was vital to our economy, and I just accepted the donations because why wouldn't I? or After having that fundraiser set up by the Oil Company I had a nice chat with the CEO and he really changed my mind about things. Any defense like that would completely throw out the possibility of a conviction, lies or not. Unless there's some evidence like an email directly saying I'll give you a million, you vote for this but I don't think most politicians are stupid enough to do that. Also, one solution people have brought up is that politicians would have to declare a Conflict of Interest on bills that would effect their large donators, so they wouldn't be able to vote. If consistently enacted this would hurt the Congressional system, as situations would arise such as where tons of Conservative Congressmen wouldn't be able to vote on an anti regulation fracking bill so the Liberals who didn't get fracking donations would vote it down. That isn't a safe solution. It is up to voters to stop electing crooked politicians. The politicians that take part in this crooked bribery are so obvious about it, that the only reason they keep getting elected is because of ignorant voters voting for them. It is the responsibility of the people to make sure these corrupt politicians don't get elected, that is the essence of democracy, so when they do keep getting elected it is a failure on the voter's part. For the people saying that the government should limit how much individuals and corporations can donate to politicians why should the freedom of those donators be limited due to the ignorance of others? Why should the freedom to donate money be inhibited because the majority of voters can't take it upon themselves to fix the issue that they very well have the power to? I don't believe you can take away someone's absolute freedom to give their money even if it's for non prosecute able , albeit shady, political favors in any situation, especially when a solution to the problem created is easily accessible by the effected nation. I know it's a complex issue. Try to change my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political campaign contributions should not be legally limited or regulated.\n","id":"635c86ff-fd4c-40c7-a450-9f37cfffd115"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Google Censor Their Search Results In Order To Operate In China?<|ARGUMENT|>Messages from the state are more intimidating than those from protesters. When in 2011, Gaddafi sent a text to all citizens ordering them to return to work the fact that it was sent by the state made it an ominous threat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because governments are usually more adept than protesters are at using social media, they can spread misinformation and track protesters accurately.\n","id":"c0ee6a1c-f2b5-49da-84c1-37eac78f03e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>university education should be free<|ARGUMENT|>University fees are usually quite high. When fees are put in place in countries, many people find it extremely difficult to find the funds to pay for it, leading many people to seek school loans. In the United States, obtaining loans for university is the norm. These loans can put pressure on students to perform well.1 But can lead to students dropping out. Debt encourages individuals to take jobs for which they are not necessarily best suited in order to get started on debt repayment immediately after leaving higher education. Furthermore, repayment of loans can take many years, leaving individuals with debt worries for much of their working lives.2 With free university education everyone can go to college without crushing debt burden allowing them to study what they wish. 1 Kane, Thomas. 1999. The Price of Admission: Rethinking How Americans Pay for College. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. 2 Hill, Christine. 2007. \u201cStill Paying Off that Student Loan\u201d. National Public Radio. Available:<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The burden of fees and loans are too great to expect young people to shoulder\n","id":"265eba9b-0fde-4f86-9daf-caa9f277f64c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I am white american, and my girlfriend is latino indian but american as well. We've dated for 6 years now and have always played around and done different accents voices around each other and was never a problem until recently. Over the past year there has been a lot more progress and exposure of different cultures in the media which is a great thing, however i do believe there is a huge hyper sensitivity issue when it comes to things that aren't so much truly offensive as they are just what people associate with what they think is SUPPOSED TO BE OFFENSIVE. I realized this when we were driving in the car one day and we passed a billboard that was for some kind of hispanic latino tex Mex restaurant chain can't really remember which restaurant it was . So the slogan on the billboard was Your taste buds are gonna SAMBA . So as we passed it, I said the slogan in a Mexican accent for no particular reason other than it was just a corny slogan first of all and the restaurant name and billboard style seemed to be associated with Mexico more so than any other Spanish speaking country. If it were a billboard for an Irish pub I would've done an Irish accent If it were a billboard for an Italian restaurant I would've done my best attempt at an Italian accent and most importantly if it were a cracker barrell or KFC billboard I would've done the stereotypical southern accent we are both from the south but have no strong accents . So she got mad at me and said I can't believe you just said that, I'm kind of in shock right now like why did you do that accent??? . This puzzled me because first of all we've joked that way for 5 years, I don't see how it's demeaning to other cultures, and she pokes fun at my family for having country accents all of the time by doing HER RENDITION of a southern accent which I don't find offensive, just funny because thats how they sound . In my point of view doing these accents are just simply trying to emulate other languages and accents it's a part of improv and comedy and absolutely has no bearing on the character or intelligence level of someone of a particular race country. It's in no way intended to bring someone of a different race down, It's simply an accent. So why is it okay for her to imitate my southern sounding family which i don't give two shits about , but I am culturally insensitive and racist which i thought had to do with hatred of other races and a superiority complex if do any accent which is not of white america?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that doing impersonations of accents or other languages is racist.\n","id":"b4beee4a-b933-4749-8e24-1fd124ff3b18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the past a disabled child was an unfortunate occurrence that could not be avoided. To mitigate the cost of this risk disability insurance was developed to spread the cost. Now with prenatal testing and selective abortion this risk can be avoided. Those who refuse testing and abortion are increasing the cost of disability. Unemployment insurance mitigates the risk of losing your job but you cannot collect if you quit your job. Home insurance mitigates the risk of fire damage but you cannot collect for arson. While denying disability benefits may be seen to harm the child, this is similar to denying school attendance to children who are not vaccinated in that it creates incentives for parents to make the responsible choice. From gt We will eventually get to the point where identifying disability pre natally\u2013or even before you get pregnant, in the case of genetic screening\u2013will be so common, and the steps to avoid disability so easy, people will wonder why someone chooses the harder road. And they will also ask, if you make the choice to go down the harder road, why do we have to pay the costs that result? EDIT my view has been partially changed, private disability insurance should deny benefits to disabled children whose birth was not avoided but public disability insurance should deny benefits to disabled children where the costs exceed the benefits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"parents who deliberately create a disabled child should be denied disability benefits\n","id":"f5f86be5-69b1-48c6-96fd-9570c70ac37b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>HanAssholeSolo's formal apology, before he deleted his account, brought this thought to mind although it's a suspicion I've had for some time now . My theory is basically that all of the far right and far left people on the internet post and comment mostly knee jerk stuff that they don't believe they only post for reactions or they're just bullshitting around, because the internet is viewed as a consequence free zone. Whenever something they did online comes back to bite them in a serious way, however, they backpedal miraculously, and it turns out they were just being immature shitheads the whole time. For context HanAssholeSolo is the guy who created the Trump bodyslamming CNN gif, then a journalist found his extremely racist post history, then he issued the following apology when they threatened to reveal his identity gt \u201cMy fellow redditors, First of all, I would like to apologize to the members of the reddit community for getting this site and this sub embroiled in a controversy that should never have happened. I would also like to apologize for the posts made that were racist, bigoted, and anti semitic. I am in no way this kind of person, I love and accept people of all walks of life and have done so for my entire life. I am not the person that the media portrays me to be in real life, I was trolling and posting things to get a reaction from the subs on reddit and never meant any of the hateful things I said in those posts. I would never support any kind of violence or actions against others simply for what they believe in, their religion, or the lifestyle they choose to have. Nor would I carry out any violence against anyone based upon that or support anyone who did gt I do not advocate violence against the press and the meme I posted was in no way advocating that in any way, shape or form. Our first amendment protects the press from things like violence, and we as American citizens should respect that even if the opinions of the press are not in line with our own. The meme was created purely as satire, it was not meant to be a call to violence against CNN or any other news affiliation. I had no idea anyone would take it and put sound to it and then have it put up on the President\u2019s Twitter feed. It was a prank, nothing more. What the President\u2019s feed showed was not the original post that was posted here, but loaded up somewhere else and sound added to it then sent out on Twitter \u2026 gt So to the members of this community, the site, the media especially CNN , and anyone offended by the posts, again I apologize. This is one individual that you will not see posting hurtful or hateful things in jest online. This is my last post from this account and I wanted to do it on a positive note and hopefully it will heal the controversy that this all caused. Peace\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of these political extremists online are just trolling for kicks\/shock value. When actually called out in a meaningful way, they will turn out to be more centrist and level headed if immature.\n","id":"7dcc62b9-e3ce-4f77-9b9b-0e7cd720067f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Women are overrepresented in fields where no differences in physical capabilities apply. This is because these professions are traditionally seen as feminine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender roles are restrictive. In many societies, women are still unable to succeed and cannot enjoy freedom because of gender roles.\n","id":"c91e523f-9f56-459b-aad6-8fb17540f9b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Not every EU member state is part of the eurozone. The transition for these nine states to adopt the euro will be economically difficult.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To make the USE a durable construction, it\u2019ll take decades if not centuries of precise planning and slow and careful integration.\n","id":"aacea799-b315-442d-b982-fb0bd3fc2b7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view is very simple the TPP or TTIP , and procedural mechanisms being passed to facilitate their negotiation like TPA are not the end of days that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren are trying to convince us they are, but are in fact a very normal kind of trade negotiation. As a corollary view to be changed, I don't believe there's any reason to oppose or support the actual trade agreements until they actually exist things like the TPA I actively support. Before you start trying to C my V, though, I'll help you out there's a tremendous amount of misinformation on the TPP, TTIP, and TPA out there, and none of it is going to convince me that our corporate overlords are coming to get us. There are 4 main pieces of misinformation to avoid 1 Free trade is bad. I've seen a lot of people attacking free trade in general, saying it's selling out the middle class, etc. Some attack NAFTA specifically. On this, I side with the experts \u2013 economists almost universally agree that free trade is a net good for almost everyone. Yes, free trade produces winners and losers, and opposition to it is often because the losers are highly visible, while the winners are diffuse. But since NAFTA passed, US trade with Canada and Mexico tripled. Studies suggest that compared to a world without free trade, the average consumer has 29 greater purchasing power. Working with median income, this means ~ 6,000 dollars of additional spending power a year. Per household, it's more like 12,000. Moreover, free trade doesn't go just to the top. It's an effective tool against poverty, especially in less developed nations. When I compare the positive effects of free trade on the poor in Vietnam to the overall effect in the US, I can't help but conclude that free trade is a moral imperative. Changing my view on this aspect is probably futile. 2 TPP will allow corporations to sue for lost profits This gets repeated as fact a lot Bernie Sanders even has it on his website. Fortunately for all of us, it is not true. It's a reference to ISDS, a mechanism that allows for disputes between investors in one country and the government of another to be resolved. It's necessary because of a lack of an international supreme court it keeps a country from agreeing to a trade deal, and then passing laws that go back on their promises. Lost profits are not a protection guaranteed in any of the 3400 ISDS provisions in existence, and there's no reason to think that they will be included in the TPP. Rather, the provide companies with protections that already exist in US law \u2013 compensation if their property is appropriated emminent domain for example. Yes, you hear horror stories about companies suing over new environmental regulations. But those cases have only ever been successful when the regulations in question are being applied in a discriminatory fashion e.g., applying to foreign companies but not domestic. ISDS fear mongering won't change my view. 3 It's being negotiated in secret by corporations Here's the thing \u2013 all trade deals are negotiated in secret. If it were transparent, it would make it impossible to negotiate \u2013 everyone else at the table would know what you would and would not accept. It weakens your hand. It's also better for us. It means that the US can negotiate to end for example corn subsidies, without the corn industry spending years lobbying for their industry to continue to receive special protections. It actually reduces corporate influence. But aren't corporations writing it? No. Negotiators have gotten input from corporations. They call them 'stakeholders'. It helps to understand how provisions regarding regulations of chemicals will affect actual chemical companies, for example. But they also get input from unions, NGOs, and other 'stakeholders'. Regardless, it's not being written by corporations \u2013 they don't even have a seat at the table. They don't know what's in the final treaty any more than you or I do. Besides which, the treaty doesn't exist yet a major part of my  . Just like any bill before it's introduced to the legislature , I don't have a right to see it. Do you demand to see draft documents of every piece of potential legislation any congressman may consider? The craziest piece of this are the people who think the entire treaty will be secret for years after its passed. No, that's not how laws work. The negotiating documents those idealized, this is what we'd like to get documents will remain secret for four years. The treaty itself will be public once it's introduced to congress, months before it's voted on. That's the time to go nuts with public pressure \u2013 once we know what's in it, and can influence a vote on ratification. 4 TPA Fast Track is ramming the bill down our throats undemocratic Let's be clear. Fast track authority means that the bill gets introduced, debated for up to 120 days, and then receives an up or down vote. No amendments can be attached. That's it. Now, I said up top that I actively support TPA, so this might be a good place to change my view, but let me explain my stance so you can see what an uphill struggle it is. Preventing amendments means that Congress cannot take a treaty that's been negotiated for years, and the unilaterally change it to send it back for another round of negotiation. This happened in the Kennedy Round and it massively hurt US credibility for future negotiations. Besides which, once negotiators have finished a treaty, given in and eliminated protections for specific industries, allowing amendments would let those industries lobby to get their protections put right back in. If you want to reduce corporate influence, you should support TPA. If, when the TPP comes out, we decide it's a bad deal, then we can oppose it. Our congressmen can refuse to ratify it in its entirety , or pass it. It won't be perfect either way, which is why negotiation happens in the first place. Lastly Those are points I think unproductive to try to change my view though you're welcome to try . However, to keep this from being a soapbox, here are angles of attack that I might suggest 1 IP provisions. A large amount of the TPP includes negotiations on intellectual property enforcement. This isn't a subject I know a ton about, but I know for example that Paul Krugman opposes TPP on these grounds despite being pro free trade in general. 2 Specifics of ISDS provisions. I've talked about ISDS in general, but it's possible that the specific provision in this deal is substantially different worse, and worth opposing. 3 Criticisms of TPP failing to enact environmental or labor standards. This is always a problem in free trade. If US labor costs more because of labor standards, then we're simply pushing our externalities onto a country willing to take them. In general, I tend to feel like the tradeoffs are worth it i.e., sweatshops are bad, but they're less bad than the realistic alternatives . But I'm open to a good economic argument here. Anyways, that's my very specific view, which I'm open to changing I really am, if you make a good argument . Good luck<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The TPP is going through a normal political process no different from previous trade deals, and the popular reaction to it especially on reddit is a result of political fear-mongering\n","id":"787773a8-8b3c-4511-9982-99dc4407db32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>When teachers present racially offensive material, they accept the opportunity cost of offering a platform to these ideas instead of others. This can convey the message to students that these ideas are important or legitimate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without censoring offensive words, students will be more likely to adopt racially insensitive words and\/or attitudes.\n","id":"6bf164a9-8405-4072-80bc-84a3a55228be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Businesses Deny Service to Trump Administration Officials?<|ARGUMENT|>If it's a business that's open to the public, it's not legal to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, age or disability. Political party is not a protected class, nor is place of employment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The business owner only consents to the act of creating a business, and consenting to that should not require consenting to serve absolutely anyone.\n","id":"f23fed37-ddf0-4ea1-9b3b-033a09459b90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>It might not occur to aliens that we exist, hence they might not even get the idea of contacting us - even though they might be able to - for example because their cognition has access to only a limited part of the visual spectrum of light.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Aliens may simply be invisible to humans' visual faculty or inaudible to humans' hearing, as well as to the technology that humanity has available.\n","id":"9505f3d4-33d2-4110-ad7c-f8a5fc589173"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>When Finland became an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire in 1809, the Emperor started to build Russian-Orthodox Churches in the area, which were associated with the imperial Russian oppression by the Lutheran Finns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In many places, churches were a symbol of oppression rather than peace.\n","id":"f70d648e-b8c4-4c1a-b0f2-549e8ed126f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Privatisation of the State<|ARGUMENT|>Smaller government is better government, providing a framework for encouraging investment rather than micro-managing daily problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Maintaining current levels of spending is, given an aging population needing more healthcare and more pensions, unsustainable.\n","id":"0f754fbe-5f03-467d-a4d8-5fa71644998c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Homeopathic Remedies Fraudulent?<|ARGUMENT|>In no other area of medicine would it be acceptable to try and tout non-legitimate treatments as viable options.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homepathic substances are in practice placebos that are explicitly marketed as active, non-placebo substances. This is fundamentally fraudulent.\n","id":"06a3bee5-f39e-4d61-bfd6-827b2928a3ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I loved Connery's Bond overall, but I don't think there's any one best James Bond actor because they all bring something to the table. I don't view Connery's Bond as a performance that was so definitive that the other actors paled in comparison. Three reasons. Connery's acting quality declined over the years. His first three performances Dr. No, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger were excellent. But when we get to You Only Live Twice, it was visibly apparent that he was tired and stressed. By Diamonds Are Forever, he looked old, fat, and totally uninterested in the role. Let's not even get to Never Say Never Again. Brosnan maintained the same performance throughout all of his films. He was consistent. Even at the old age of 57, Moore was in good shape and had his heart in the role. For Craig, Quantum of Solace was considered a weak film, but his acting in it was acclaimed. Connery's portrayal of the character didn't eclipse the other actors To say that Connery IS James Bond or that he's the definitive one would suggest that his role was basically a complete exhaustive interpretation of everything 007 could ever be. The fact that 007 became a franchise for 40 years after Connery proved that he wasn't the only one who could move the character. Each of the other actors brought something new to the table. Lazenby's Bond was human, emotional and empathetic. Moore's Bond did plenty of new outrageous creative things which gave him his own fan base. Dalton's dark primal take on Bond was a dramatic shift as well. Brosnan established himself as a refined modern man, as well as a suave gentleman. And Craig re invented Bond as a vulnerable soul who rises above his troubles. Connery's portrayal of the character wasn't accurate to the books. Connery's interpretation of Bond misses the point of the books. With Fleming's books, the emphasis was less about who the character of James Bond was, and moreso the feeling you get when you read about his adventures. Unlike Connery's performance which deliberately sought out to make Bond himself the most interesting part. Bond is a manifestation of Fleming's desires. Bond doesn't womanize because he's fun. He womanizes because there's a void in his heart and he can't hold a relationship. Bond smokes and drinks to alleviate his stress. Bond kills because he has to. Connery established Bond as a guy every man wanted to be, but we don't want to be Fleming's Bond. Connery was partly responsible for making the series so popular. There is nothing wrong with Bond being interpreted liberally. I have no problem with Moore defusing a bomb in a clown suit, so I have no problem with Connery having a sugarcoated Bond either. The problem is when a certain sect of Connery's fanbase asserts the Connery is the true James Bond, when he is just an interpretation. Moore was honest that his portrayal was goofy, whereas with Connery there was a pretense that he was actually the character.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sean Connery wasn't the definitive James Bond.\n","id":"c38e4453-495d-4120-ac4b-d397c5e01b29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a sexist double standard, men who have lots of sex, receive praise from their peer group. However, women who have lots of sex, are labelled 'sluts' and shamed by society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women should feel able to have as much sex as they like. Society shouldn't judge them for this, and label such behavior 'irresponsible'.\n","id":"021a57ff-a878-4cf1-9dd7-7936c14d931e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Artificial Intelligence AI: Limiting an AI's freedom of thought is unethical.<|ARGUMENT|>We overcome our cognitive limitations by relying on the expertise of others. AGI's can do this as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An AGI is a creative agent. Like humans, they will have the ability to overcome cognitive limitations\n","id":"af2536c4-f2e6-46db-8123-e63de9306d2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious education be compulsory in public schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Unless the educator teaching the course is a leader in the respective religious community, they students stand to be taught out-of-context, biased, or false ideas of the religion in question. Such poor styles of education could cause an adverse effect if the goal is to teach a \"moral structure\" to students, and could also cause a societal backlash against religions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion as a required course causes conflicts in the classroom.\n","id":"69412055-d966-4e5f-b362-f3814d47fa48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>THB that Palestinian Statehood should be recognised by the United Nations General Assembly<|ARGUMENT|>Establishing statehood is a matter for international law and, as things stand, Palestine is not a state. Since 1990, 34 new countries have been created \u2013 mostly as a result of the collapse of the former USSRi. Palestine is not among them and does not look set to be any time soon. There have been many separatist movements in countries all over the world from the Basque region to Aceh. These often have similarly legitimate grievances as the Palestinians but the UN does not recognise them. Any one of those nations, or at least movements within them may have wished for recognition by the UN but they did not receive it because the UN is bound to recognise what is, not what might be. i Matt Rosenburg. \u201cNew Countries of the world\u201d. 10 July 2011. About.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UN has historically recognised statehood when nations achieve it, not when they ask for it or wish it\n","id":"333ef306-16e7-4b61-af57-37a532168145"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the worst world problem of the utmost concern?<|ARGUMENT|>Problems related to some of the earlier forms of energy production still employed today emissions from dirty coal and petroleum can be mitigated quickly by employing newer, cleaner alternatives such as hydroelectric, nuclear, or green power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Technology should be employed to solve human problems, not just more created technology problems.\n","id":"86c6cd7c-1f80-4edf-80f5-b3c0cc535b9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Pope Francis a good pope?<|ARGUMENT|>Decentralisation of power means more accountability. Increased accountability will provide a greater incentive for members of the Catholic Church to conduct themselves more responsibly thus improving the overall standards of the Church.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pope Francis has brought about a decentralisation of power in the Church.\n","id":"e12f1080-a75b-4cf8-9f67-794c44bfda5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019d like to start off by saying I do not condone pedophilia, just Incase anybody accuses me of such. I believe that, however amoral pedophilia is, people afflicted with it are still humans and should have the option to change their ways as necessary to get over their desires and lead a normal, law abiding life. However, I believe that the hatred people have for pedophiles has fueled their intolerance for taking advantage of a child but has also reduced the chances of pedophiles seeking rehabilitation instead of keeping it a secret for fear of discrimination and dehumanization. As bad as pedophilia is, it should be treated as an affliction so a pedophile can have the chance to ask for behavioral therapeutic assistance and ultimately reduce the rate of sexual assault on children. In the interest of the overall safety of children we should encourage pedophiles to make themselves known so they can be treated accordingly, which would mean being more sympathetic towards their issues. Child sexual assault rape would still be illegal of course as that is a crime. I realize this is not a very popular opinion so I\u2019d like to post it here and see what you folks have to say.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dehumanizing Pedophiles jeopardizes their chances of seeking help and rehabilitation.\n","id":"bd31eb86-dcc2-4ce1-820d-74dd4992a629"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>abolish the US Electoral College<|ARGUMENT|>The electoral college is helping promote democracy through implementing a mechanism that make candidates pay attention to local issues, and actually do what they are elected to do- serve the interests of their constituents. A presidential candidate is of course going to focus on a more national level interest, but in order to visit and campaign across the country, the candidate must be at least aware of the issues that of particular interest to the local area.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Casting votes by state forces candidates to be attentive to local interests, which they would otherwise ignore in a national campaign.\n","id":"c0f666a5-3124-4f9d-92ad-302800a52638"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been told our military defends us every second of every day, but as far as I can tell as a nation our freedom has never been under direct or credible indirect threat from foreign or domestic combattants. Our foreign policy is what puts us in danger of attack and our abusive foreign policy is largely driven by our confidence in our large military. The only credible argument made is for World War II which was largely drafted, and I have never seen any credible claim that the US was in any direct danger from occupation and even being attacked was due to our own involvement in the war by supplying arms . Also currently I reject the revolutionary war which I will accept as being done by the US Military , because it would assume that today Canada, Australia, etc. are not free . We had plenty of freedoms as a colony, and we went to war to protect the interests of the wealthy. As far as I can tell those are the only two wars even worth arguing about but please CMW. For Scope I don't consider protecting economic interests as defending our freedom but am willing to hear arguments for it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US Military has NEVER defended our freedom in the US.\n","id":"79689dcf-f0bf-4f9f-ab79-a6257bce7c4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who has killed Teresa Halbach?<|ARGUMENT|>A vial of Steven's blood from his 1985 trial was in Manitowoc County law enforcement custody.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Steven Avery's blood was planted in the RAV4 by Law Enforcement.\n","id":"075b32f1-d83a-46a3-803a-80d11afe0ce0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There has been a lot of talk about the superdelegates in this election campaign, and a lot of Bernie supporters are afraid that Hillary is guaranteed the candidacy because so many superdelegates are already in her favor. People then also say that the superdelegates normally change their vote to the public majority which will mean Bernie has a shot, citing Hillary vs Obama back in 2008 as an example however both of those candidates were under the Goldman Sachs payroll, as well as the superdelegates, making it easy to switch from one candidate to another when they're both backed by the same people the super delegates are. Not so easy for Bernie, as he's not endorsed by any big banks or Wall St. companies, who seem to have an almighty grasp on the political system. I'm inclined to believe that the election system is rigged so that public votes are irrelevant, the powers that be such as banking firms like Goldman Sachs are really who calls the shots, the superdelegates don't have anything to lose by voting against the public majority, and because of this Bernie stands no chance because the political establishment don't want him and won't endorse him, and they'll do everything in their power to prevent him from becoming president because it's in their best interest to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The election process in the USA is a farce, and Goldman Sachs actually decides who becomes president, therefore the superdelegates will vote for HRC's candidacy and Bernie stands no chance.\n","id":"a3304e48-2e45-4632-89aa-0037b9dd1e9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have no particular preference for British English or American English. The English language is constantly changing and it should. But I do think that the distinction between the two, and the fact that some countries swear by British spelling and make you change your automatic spell checker and write all your papers essays advertisements whatever in this spelling, is pointless. There is not enough of a difference between the two and we should rather let them naturally merge into one. I admit I'm not sure how this would happen. But I think for starters if students want to use American spelling in 'British English spelling' countries, Britain included, they should, and vice versa. Similarly with any job that involves writing. I also don't see any issue with mixing them. They don't cause confusion because they are minor spelling differences like using an s instead of a z in realise realize Some companies even get edgy about this, as do universities. Which is problematic because what if you are quoting or paraphrasing an American author as a British English student? And what if you are advertising in Britain for an American company? Seems problematic to uphold this. That's my view, go on, change it. EDIT Public publishing is the main problem. People want consistency in a language that is naturally inconsistent. And it is naturally inconsistent because we uphold this distinction in things like schools, universities, and publishing of most kinds. There doesn't seem to be a good reason for keeping British kids from using American spelling in amongst their British spelling. It will naturally fix this silly language problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The distinction between American and British English spelling is pointless and problematic and should be done away with.\n","id":"26fcf5e1-d8ee-44b9-a8e7-45c823a90d05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many different cultures in which transsexuals take on a different cultural and social role than they do in western society. The medical condition is quite clearly distinct from the labels, classification, etc. that we use socially.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Questioning one's gender identity and one's voluntary choice to impose what one thinks one's gender identity is on society in the form of demanding a separate bathroom, for instance are two very distinct things.\n","id":"8492591c-bc7c-40d1-bcfc-87099c109e5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am referring to fireworks which are just as deadly as a gun, but even though it is illegal in most states, law enforcement looks the other way on American Independence Day. Change my view. Also, it is noise pollution because the sound is not a natural side effect f the fireworks, it is an effect which is deliberately added. Noise pollution is banned all across the United States, yet on American Independence Day law enforcement looks the other way. Police need to started arresting people who are caught with fireworks because, since cops already arrest people holding a harmless plant like Cannabis, it seems only fair that the cops arrest people holding a dangerous weapon such as fireworks. I live in New York State where fireworks are illegal with no exceptions, but law enforcement does nothing to stop it on American Independence Day. The only way for the law to work is if it is administered fairly with no exceptions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private citizens should be banned from firing explosives into the air.\n","id":"cfcd30fc-5e06-40a3-ace9-16152df74529"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cannabis be legalised for medical use in the UK?<|ARGUMENT|>claims to help Parkinson's Disease: alleviate L-dopa induced dyskinesias L D, reduce tremor, rigidity and psychosis symptoms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overwhelming scientific research supports the beneficial medical effects of using cannabis.\n","id":"edb7985e-686f-4fdb-8b6f-e99050dace20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build Lagrange colonies before settling on mars<|ARGUMENT|>In microgravity, body fluids are redistributed away from the extremities, which results in puffiness in the face during flight as well as changes in cardiovascular physiology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Microgravity has severe impact on human bodies when experienced for long periods of time.\n","id":"2e93aa84-9f2d-4d3d-bd3a-60efefe3f8fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>bailout journalism.<|ARGUMENT|>Throwing money at an industry that is failing due to technological change is simply foolish. This isn\u2019t a minor technological shift, it\u2019s the emergence of an entirely new delivery system. This isn\u2019t a case of giving financial support to Detroit while they come up with more fuel efficient cars. The modification to the status quo that proposition suggest would be more like supporting chimney sweeps following the introduction of cheap gas powered heating . There is a clear difference between a changing industry and a dying one and newspapers fall firmly into the latter category. The fact that they failed to adapt in time simply speaks to the arrogance of the industry and their ill-thought out belief that people would always want their daily paper.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Journalism has failed to move with the times, there are plenty of people doing the job on blogs and other interactive media sites\n","id":"e4985e70-657f-4f9e-9b91-ab04bf974bbe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Liberals have been going on since the trial ended about how disgusting it is that he was let free and keep posting all these stupid articles on social media sites that try to show how ridiculous it is. I am quite to the left, but I have not one ounce in me that feels that Trayvon Martin should be getting any sympathy at this point. There are facts that show he had stolen goods in his locker, had robbery tools, and the skittles and tea he was bringing home were 2 3 of the ingredients to a comatosing drink called Lean , which he had been discussing with people on the internet. I find all this to be just convincing that George Zimmerman probably should have just sat his ass down and called the police, but did absolutely nothing wrong and that Trayvon was not a good person. EDIT My post my have caused some confusing, but when referencing the stolen goods and the lean ingredients, I am making a point that liberals have made him out to be an angel, straight up, good kid. When in reality, he was a thief and experimented with drugs. I am just here to ask why liberals, whom I almost always side with, are really going on like these things don't exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a liberal who is disgusted with the liberal outrage over the George Zimmerman verdict.\n","id":"94e8a347-f4e3-426e-be6c-1ff9361f7f3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, federal senators serve for six years upon election. Members of the House of Representatives serve for four year terms. In recent election cycles, voters have said that there needs to be term limits for members of congress due to dissatisfaction with Congress. Link Personally, I see this to be a selfish mindset. If the person keeps getting reelected, that means that at least a majority of the congressperson's district or state believes that they have earned the right to be reelected. Placing term limits would take away the freedom of the people to choose who they want to elect or reelect. If a representative or senator is doing a job that is acceptable in the eyes of the people, why should they be their number of terms be limited?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"members of the Congress should NOT have term limits\n","id":"3e450bc0-7354-4d2e-8695-f69caf5f2c8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be taught in schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Analysing and evaluating information are two ways to develop critical thinking skills. These techniques can be applied to many contexts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teaching the controversy between evolution and creationism is not sufficient or a prerequisite for developing strong critical thinking skills.\n","id":"3cff8d85-4eb4-4be9-be85-4caa45a6f56b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>There have been cases where bullfighters have been gored to death by the bulls they were fighting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Professional and non-professional bullfighters suffer severe injuries and sometimes even death.\n","id":"c3e01301-46e2-4095-95d0-67405976801f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have no idea where this post should go, but I want to reach people who have some interest knowledge about politics, so I\u2019m trying here. Please let me know if I should post somewhere else. I\u2019m a 17y o American who plans to vote as soon as she gets the chance, but I am terrified of making the wrong decision. If I\u2019ve had close friends for years who ended up being back stabbers out of nowhere, how am I supposed to trust a dude I\u2019ve never met before to take care of me, my country, and everything I love? A dude who is purposefully modifying his her information to appear to the public in a certain way? It doesn\u2019t help that history has always been my worst subject. I am all for having a growth mindset that\u2019s why I\u2019m here in the first place , but I can\u2019t get over how much of a responsibility voting is. Either I\u2019m ridiculously ignorant, or everyone around me pretends to know what they\u2019re talking about more than they ACTUALLY know what they\u2019re talking about. There\u2019s so much to think about even if I somehow know who I like, how do I know when I should vote for my second choice because they\u2019re better than my 3rd choice and I know my first choice won\u2019t win? And the media is full of misleading information where do I look for the real juicy details? How the heck do I make this decision? How can I read between the lines to figure out what the long term impact of a politician\u2019s plan would be on the economy, for example? I want my vote to be the right one. Voting is terrifying, please change my view so that I don\u2019t chicken out. I really want to vote, but I want to vote correctly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voting is Terrifying\n","id":"32e322f2-0298-4f75-86df-791232ecbad1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm posting this here at the request of u garbonzo607 since he so wants to see the replies. I don't like the idea of sperm banks, in vitro fertilization etc. If you can't conceive naturally with your partner, maybe that's a sign that you shouldn't have biological children. Go adopt one of the thousands of children who need a good home instead of polluting the gene pool with your defective genes. Even if it's not the result of defective genes, and instead because of an accident say your junk gets blown off in the war etc well that's just too bad. Adopt a child. If you truly want a child for the right reasons leaning more towards altruism than egoism then just fucking adopt and shut up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you can't conceive a child naturally, you should adopt instead. Feel free to reply if you want to\n","id":"e7bd7f1a-150b-4a10-9022-a33087525dd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think it's close minded when someone says that they don't like the taste of a food that they've never tasted before. Once you've tried the food, then you can voice your opinion, but if you've never tasted the food, your opinion is invalid. You cannot write a book report if you've never read the book or even one chapter of the book . This goes hand in hand with my first thought, there is no reason you cannot try at least one bite of a food you've never had before. You have the right to not enjoy the food. Maybe this is just me being a foodie, but I think you should give every food a chance. This happened to me as a kid once. I refused to try KFC popcorn chicken because I thought I wouldn't like it, but I gave in and ate the last chicken in the box and absolutely loved it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You cannot say you hate a food unless you've tried it before\n","id":"d516ea6b-b4f0-4426-8968-7fc8b90c9c9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Buddhism is not a religion.<|ARGUMENT|>Personal moral principles are above any kind of dogma and Buddha's teachings are not meant to be divine and immutable laws.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unlike other religions, the lack of dogma, brings Buddhism closer to a philosophy than a religion.\n","id":"9b2bd4ac-edde-4f73-b985-43257cd4fddd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Police Officers Wear Body Cameras?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people are happy to record snippets of their lives and post them to the public, via Instagram, Facebook stories and Snapchat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most people would not wear a bodycam even if they were issued free of charge, to add their perspective.\n","id":"0712f22f-0714-4cc8-8e0f-a83017967094"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a high schooler in Australia, I think the system is a very flawed. Firstly, students are assigned unreasonable amounts of work to a point where a lot of stress is put on said student, and they have no free time. Secondly, the punishment systems are very out of place. I had a classmate once who was an extreme dickhead, and whilst he did have mild autism, he still knew what he was doing and that it was wrong and against the school rules. He got away with things like kicking a pre schooler in the stomach and calling one of my other classmates a dickhead. I also think that the system does not allow students to focus on and be educated in subjects they plan to go into. For example, I plan to work in literature and physics, and I've found I have got very little education from school in those subjects so far, and had to do a lot of learning at home in my free time to get to what I know. I think this kind of ruins the point of school, because there's no need to learn advanced geography when you're not going to use it in your career, is it? Edit two points have been obliterated, waiting on the last one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Australian school system is flawed.\n","id":"f56efaec-c754-4101-96b1-e1173dc47bbf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Teaching that the only definite way to avoid pregnancy or STIs is through abstinence means that when these children do decide to have sex they are unaware of the contraception options available to them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Research has shown that abstinence-only programs are problematic and do not achieve their intended goals.\n","id":"193ec4a0-7e5d-4c82-b21b-d1f5c8629ad0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm going to say outright that there may be some semantical issues here regarding classification, as postmodernism encompasses such a massive body of work over quite a long period of time, and, like many genres, has no official criteria as a definition. That being said, I hope the definition and explanation I'm providing here are sufficient enough to warrant categorization. People often cite authors like Foucault, Derrida, and Boudrillard for being the major influencing voices that shaped postmodernism. Ideas like Foucault's view of insanity as a social construct, or Derrida's deconstruction of the dominant discourses on Western culture, are both concepts that have quite obviously been integrated into postmodern thinking. I don't want to dismiss this origin story, but I want to add to it by saying that what was happening in the painting world leading up to the emergence of this philosophy was also important, and, perhaps more importantly, grounded in a very practical impetus for change. This being the development of photography in the late 19th century. Photography was especially detrimental to the continuation of painting art because it threatened to make a lot of the purpose of this kind of art obsolete. History paintings could be replicated, portraits instantly taken, and genre paintings recreated without even trying. There was a real need for this industry to adapt, which is how we got the flurry of art movements that emerged as part of general heading of modern art. Whether this meant venturing where photos couldn't take us, like dreams, or reality that's distorted by emotion abandoning the illusion of depth, as the fauvists and cubists had deconstructing shapes or throwing out representation altogether, there was a real effort being made to redefine the purpose of painting art as an industry. This is where postmodernism comes in. People started looking at this change and adopting the view that since people were essentially just making up the rules as they went along, the rules themselves must not count for very much. This was in line with a manner of thinking that viewed value systems as being inherently ethnocentric, and interpretation of values as being ultimately groundless. This philosophy has been compressed and distributed through a seemingly innocuous and insightful question what is art? The implication here is that there is no category that could be defined for which we could reasonably describe what 'art', or especially 'high quality art' was. This is especially apparent when we look at how often artists have been ridiculed for breaking seemingly immutable rules in one generation, only to be praised as innovative in the next. Moreover, the philosophy goes on to champion this idea that theories that describe what is required to make a piece of art great have inherently been non inclusive for reasons that are defined only by false and hegemonic ideas of cultural absolutism. Now, this is why the philosophy I've sincerely tried to accurately represent is a pile of bologna. Let's talk about it on a purely rational level first. I know that experience talking to people about this may not statistically significantly represent the whole, but I have been repeatedly confronted by baffling beliefs regarding art. People I've spoken to who hold that 'anything can be art' unironically defend every single item I throw at them as potentially being art. This has been everything from an atom to a dustpan full of dirt that you might have accidentally knocked over. I will concede ahead of time to any argument that claims that these views do not accurately represent the whole of the movement, as the sample size I have for them is admittedly small, but if you believe this, let me tell you why you're wrong. Words are like containers for meaning when we have a word, we place certain definitions in that title that come to define it's meaning. This is called operationalizing. When you have a container that is so large that it literally excludes nothing that word, by definition, becomes meaningless. You can not argue that 'art' can be anything, because as soon as you do so, you are creating a word that has no meaning. People have argued with me over the semantics that they only say it can mean anything, but lacking any qualifier to distinguish 'can' and 'does' is a functionally useless argument. The second point here is an accusation of hypocrisy that is lazily built into this system. The fundamental tenant of postmodernism seems to be that all interpretation of value is inherently unfounded and that the only real narrative is one of power dynamics and exclusion. This, if you haven't picked up on it, is inherently contradictory, since the idea that the only force governing relationships and institutions is power dynamics is, in itself, a narrative. Finally, and perhaps most damningly, the entire proposed issue with definitions, categorizations, and narratives of value is based entirely on fallacious reasoning. The idea that you cannot define the parameters of what makes a work of art more competent and valuable, based on the premise that no matter what parameter you define, there will be an exception that can be found, is called the Bald Man's or Continuum Fallacy . This fallacy causes one to erroneously reject a vague claim simply on the basis that it is not as precise as one might like. The reasoning works like this Say you have a man with 5,000 hairs on his head, is he bald? What about 4,999? If you keep counting down from here, what number would you stop on to say that 'Yes, a man with 893 hairs is bald?' Since you obviously can not define a number with this level of precision, we have to conclude that baldness does not exist in men. The reality here is that in virtually all categories, there exists a certain coninuum between two states that becomes blurred and ambiguous around the edges. One should not conclude from this that the two states do not exist. I feel like I'm really pushing the length that any reader will tolerate here, so I will try to be a little more brief on the practical and negative impacts of this kind of philosophy. Very few people really see this type of thinking as a problem, and this is presumably because they don't generally particularly care about art, or painting, very much. Keep in mind here though that the soundness of this reasoning is not exclusive at all to the realm of art. Imagine that instead of asking What is art? and pointing out all possible outliers to your definition, the question was, instead, What is medicine? Is it something that cures you? What about tylenol? Is it something that cures you or makes you feel better when you're feeling sick? What about opium, or getting a pleasant text from someone? The problem here is that this philosophical system inherently undermines competence and quality in favour of nihilistic meta commentaries, narratives of privilege and power, blatant careerism, and snake oil salesmanship. gt This is a footnote from the  moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please read through our rules If you see a that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Postmodernism is toxic and built on fallacious reasoning\n","id":"87c1fe87-1e9d-4fc0-bf65-5844dc86411f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Apple is overpriced and overrated.<|ARGUMENT|>For the same price the Dell XPS offers a faster processor, more flash storage, and it weighs less.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The new MacBook Air can't compete with a leading Windows 10 model like Dell's XPS 13.\n","id":"34c74389-f2af-4858-97d3-5acdff2112d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>The open-end meaning of the 2016 Brexit referendum made it difficult for politicians to know what type of deal the British population wanted to leave the EU with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This makes it difficult to interpret the results of these referendums and what they say about public opinion on the issue.\n","id":"374bea42-f534-403e-b235-4bece0f36313"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>If the core of the issue, what we want to fix, is income disparity, then supplement low income households across all races. Supplementing people based on race is also supplementing the rich, and neglecting low income white households.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unfair to give money to privileged Black Americans when underprivileged members of other ethnicities do not receive similar compensation.\n","id":"5e61d9c7-1271-43c2-91b4-ef5e02278cff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Divorce<|ARGUMENT|>The opposition's argument is a spurious one, as nowadays we regard a promise not as something unchanging and absolute, but as an expression of commitment for the time and the circumstances it was made. To punish people for a vow they made fully intending to keep, when they no longer love their partner, is heartless and cruel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vows are made only with the best knowledge of the moment.\n","id":"d644ed0f-b96d-42dd-8aa1-7152d4589c37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Premise 1 there are three kind people when it comes to mass media 1.1 People who will believe everything. these people are the vast majority. 1.2 People who will believe nothing. The people in this group are already a minority and most of them belonged in the first group. 1.3 People who will critically analize what they read and form their own opininion. This group is, sadly, just a tiny elite. 2 The media holds an immense power over the first category and will use to further its own agenda which could be damaging directly the agenda of the state. 3 The school system is where the mentality of the next generation, this is, again, an immense power held by professors. 4 The next generation has to think in a way that will strenghten the soul of the nation. 5 For U.S.A. citizens by state i don't mean Texas or Alabama etc. i mean the federal government. This idea came to me while reading the Mein Kampf wonderful book, in my opinion, but that's beside the point . At some time during the book, Hitler talks about the importance of the media and how, in good loyal hands, the media has the potential to give courage and strength to a nation and, if in the wrong self centered hands, it could be the greatest poison injected directly into the soul of a people rendering it weak and pacifistic at all cost. We have seen the disastrous effects of a free press and not only the press for the first time during the war in Vietnam instead of trying to unite the country in the struggle, the media kept on weeping the dead and glorifying the weaklings pacifist and people who avoided the draft this, in the end, created a nation which did not want to fight anymore, while the morale of The Vietnamese people kept getting better and better. We see this in every single war when the media is free to do what it wants. Now, about the school system. Nowadays, schools are only concerned with givng knowledge to its students. This, in the end, creates weak men and women which are in the best case scenario compliant erudites or, in the worst case scenario just people who refused most of the knowledge that was offered to them, and i can't blame them for refusing it they were only told what they should know, but never why they should know what they were being taught. Knowledge has no purpose nowadays, outside of itself, and that's why many people refuse it. People are given no purpose outside of themselves, and that's where a state controlled education system comes into play, giving the people a sense of beolnging to the state and to their own people. If the state manages to do so, then knowledge gains the puropse of helping your own people getting a better life. As for what type of education should a state controlled system offer, two subjects should have top priority history class so that the student learns to be proud of the history of his her people and gym class mens sana in corpore sano said the Romans . In additon to that, the youth should also be taught one and only one, ideology. I'm a nazi, so you can imagine which ideology i'd like to see being taught in schools. All other subjects come in second place i'm not saying they shouldn't be taught, i'm sayiing that the soul and heart of a people should come first in order to give the mind a purpose .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The media and education system should be state controlled.\n","id":"b1d3179d-3811-4fdc-9dd4-da90f6966339"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand mono poly stuff comes up occasionally, so I tried to make this more specific than a mere 'argue for monogamy ' post So, I'm what I call polyamorous. I've never noticed personally any reason or inclination in myself for romantic love to be limited to one person at a time. Although I understand it's considered a different affection from that for children fmamily friends, I haven't heard it explained how that diference promotes leads to justifies it's supposedly singular nature. I understand that I live in a Disney movie world though, I've had strictly monogamous relationships because we sometimes make sacrifices compromises for those we love, after all , relationships which have been opened then closed again, then opened again , purely open relationships, so on. When interacting with people I've found it easier to assert that it's something like an orientation, so that I get less flak, and that I don't have to admit that I think monogamy on a personal level comes primarily from looking for the easiest way to accommodate feelings of insecurity and jealousy. Afraid your partner could find someone better? don't let them look at other people, easy peasy. As opposed to dealing with discussing the roots of those feelings, which, even if dealing with them doesn't lead to having multiple relationships, is still a healthier and more robust response to those feelings. The defaulting to exclusivity just seems like a way of making dealing with those things optional. And it's people prerogative to choose that easy way, but Are there any reasons that people strictly require monogamy that don't follow this pattern? So, for example, two people simply 'not wanting anyone else' together I wouldn't consider a strict requirement of monogamy, merely a preference for it at that time even poly people in open relationships might not actively be dating others at a certain point in time for lack of interest prospects. If that 'not wanting' changed though, what the response would be may be relevant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only value of a strictly monogamous relationship is in providing easy solutions to problems which have other, better solutions.\n","id":"724a9e6d-29a4-4cad-be60-66afddb4f00a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In general, I think the 120v and 60Hz standard is better and safer that 240v at 50z and that the higher voltage is generally not needed. Seeing as it would be nearly impossible for any country to switch from one system to the other, I will make most of my arguments assuming technology from the late 19th and early 20th century when decisions where made, but will make some points from a modern perspective. The most compelling reasons to use 240v is that it more readily provides greater power and allows for simpler designs of electronic devices. The two biggest electrical applications around the turn of the century were motors and light bulbs, both of which are easier to design for 240v. Regardless of this, neither were prohibitively difficult to design or make for 120v and the tradeoff with safety was not worth it. Doubling the voltage quadruples the power because power correlates with voltage squared. This means that it is four times easier to kill a person or cause a spark starting a fire. This increased risk requires outlets and plugs to be larger so as to decrease the risk of shock or dangerous spark. The same goes for light switches and just about anything else that interacts with the higher voltage, including the insulation on the wires. Although the safety of 60hz vs 50hz is debated, 60hz is more practice than 50hz. The biggest difference is that 50hz requires larger and less efficient transformer. A smaller but non trivial difference is that 60hz can be trivially used to keep time I think I may have confused it with syncing television signals. 60Hz makes using an integer frame rate really . Most devices don't need 240v to work well. I don't know about other countries, but in the United States, only the oven and clothes dryer use 240v. This is possible because 240v is available in the house at the breaker panel. Better yet, 240v is created by using two out of phase 120v lines. This means that a person would have to touch both wires to get a full 240v shock. Another decently compelling argument for 240v is that it wastes less power passing through wires. Most power is lost during transmission from the power station to the home, and transformers are used to step up the voltage during transmission, so 240v vs 120v doesn't matter there. It may matter for very long wire runs in a home, but that can be mitigated by using a thick wire. In most non commercial applications this won't be an issue. Up until TV's started using digital tuners, the frequency of the power grid was used to draw frames. Using 60 Hz allowed more frames per second. And in today's world, many if not most electronics don't care about frequency or voltage as they use digitally controlled adaptors to lower the voltage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For electricity, 120v@60Hz is better\/safer than 240v@50Hz\n","id":"49025233-42ab-40a4-aed3-b8b41a5ec6ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Michelle Carter criminally responsible for Conrad Roy\u2019s Death?<|ARGUMENT|>If Michelle Carter truly cared about Conrad Roy, she would have tried to help him find professional help, not encourage him to take his own life. In convincing him to commit suicide, she acted with clear criminal intent to kill.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Michelle Carter is criminally responsible for Conrad Roy III\u2019s death.\n","id":"9eee342c-4878-4892-9702-68a3a3f32d67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Drug Trial Participants Be Chosen By Lottery?<|ARGUMENT|>Many do not support the use of contraceptives, for example conservative Catholics, but might be called up to participate in a trial of them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cultural and\/or religious views and beliefs may be disregarded in order for individuals to participate.\n","id":"0075156c-6c32-4a72-8a27-b82b8357e93f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should puberty in children be delayed in preparation for gender reassignment?<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK, young people, ie. 16 years and older, can give medical consent. Children younger than 16 can give medical consent when they are deemed Gillick competent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Meaningful medical consent is possible before the age of maturity. For example, in most European countries the age of medical consent ranges from 14-18\n","id":"c005363f-8adf-4de1-91ff-43521b28b899"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The fewer languages there are, the better the world is.<|ARGUMENT|>Most systems would benefit from this. Some examples: Communication, foreign politics, global access to information\/education, technology development, etc<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fewer languages there are, the better the world is.\n","id":"bc8b38bc-b7f1-48fa-89a5-b72179dbc87d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>And, for that matter, a self-help book titled \"The Secrets of Surviving Infidelity\", which presumably has incentives to paint it as an obtainable goal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This statistic is a therapist's guess in a self-help book, and hardly academically rigorous.\n","id":"9f851315-4f8b-4394-be49-ebe9a9a99f55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Net Neutrality Necessary?<|ARGUMENT|>There are three different forms of 'good' internet access: high bandwidth lots of bits; good for Netflix, low latency the time from when you submit a packet to when the response packet arrives is minimal; good for games, and low jitter the variability in latency is low; good for VOIP.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is impossible to design a network that makes good use of bandwidth for all users and use cases without being able to shape traffic.\n","id":"68ab4e58-1504-41ff-be2e-2dad4553c6dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>His positive portrayal of science and technology in media has done more to help science's cause by both educating people and inspiring youth to take up a science than anyone else in our current times. From his running the Haden Planetarium, appearing on documentaries, his leading the new Cosmos , and to his appearances on both 'real' news networks and shows such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report , he has had a profound presence in our culture greater than anyone else currently. Can you change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Neil deGrasse Tyson's popularity and presence in popular culture is the best thing to happen to science in recent times. ?\n","id":"8ba98c98-8f20-4cdd-9663-93ad5e3391c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just don't get the stink about this. The media talks about the bombers all the time and this is just another piece of that. Every news network dug this guys life up from the very start of the fiasco and I don't think Rolling Stone publishing is any different than anyone else. In my opinion the Rolling Stone is entitled to publish whatever they want to. And I truly don\u2019t see the harm in publishing this. I feel that the right to free speech should supersede people\u2019s concerns of a copycat. Also I don\u2019t think that trying to suppress the article will do any good for the opposition of this article. The Streisand effect will just set in and get this thing more publicity. Which is the total opposite of what the opposition wants. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I really don't understand why putting the Boston Bomber on the front page of Rolling Stone is such a big deal\n","id":"4bd79d20-2ab4-45a6-8988-f67814402a8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>If we keep destroying monuments which are connected to something immoral, we will not have much history left. With this attitude, pyramids where thousands of people were sacrificed in Mexico would have to be taken down as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By destroying the iconography memorializing history, we forget history. Those ideologies, if even they were wrong, are doomed to repeat.\n","id":"f5148261-d95e-4cae-81cb-f1668078672d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Aborting a Disabled Child Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Reducing the prevalence of recessive gene conditions from the population is good for overall society; more attention\/facilities\/staff will be available to deal with other patients afflicted other, non-heritable, conditions.A brief discussion on genetic conditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion allows for selective human evolution for non-disabled genes, which leads to a stronger species.\n","id":"6a24419d-6a15-4646-b5bd-2bc687acb9bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should citizens be able to crowdsource laws?<|ARGUMENT|>The US Congressional Research Service responds to tens of thousands of emails and calls every year and publishes more than a thousand issue-specific reports, many of which aren't publicly accessible CRS, p. 2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians have access to research and information services that ordinary citizens do not have.\n","id":"96a43e39-7222-4dc4-a324-a98a1b0cef2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Suicide should be an option. Some people just aren't meant to live. They should have the option to end their lives painlessly and peacefully. Euthanasia should be legalized for anyone who wants it. Not everyone is going to have a happy, fulfilling life. Some people have nothing but suffering. They should have the right to take their own life. Government assisted suicide will help people who want to end their suffering but are scared to take the final step. Death is a reality. Everyone dies sooner or later. By withholding someone from dying, you're only prolonging his suffering. Let the people who are happy in their lives live it to the fullest and let the guys who want to die, end it. Many people needlessly suffer through their lives because they don't know the best methods and are afraid to mess up an attempt. Voluntary euthanasia will raise the society's standard of living by giving those suffering an easy way out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone has a right to die.\n","id":"974d7fd9-a63b-49b7-b840-4d1a5787b328"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>A poll conducted by The Daily Mail suggests that nearly 1 in 6 supporters of the Labour party are terrified at the thought of Corbyn becoming prime minister, and 4 in 10 would be more likely to stick with Labour in the upcoming UK general election if he stood down.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many Labour voters are disaffected with the party's leader, Jeremy Corbyn\n","id":"e5569985-280a-4088-9a14-458fe140bc95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are some hunting rifles and rifles for children that are neon orange and pink. The majority of guns rifles and handguns are black though. Guns should be required to be neon safety orange. This would allow police officers to more easily identify firearms, and recreation gun owners should have no reason to objection to this. This would have to affect toys' colors, but that would be easier to regulate colors of than real firearms. Toys would no longer be able to be the specified color. What reason is there that guns are almost all black? I would have no objection to a hunting rifle let's say a 12 gauge being brown for camouflage purposes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no practical reason that guns should be black.\n","id":"9b7dcd4f-32b1-41af-a23b-90acc76489a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Equal Paternity\/Maternity Paid Leave Be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>In lesbian couples the women who gives birth typically takes more time off work than her partner, suggesting she may need time to recover from the birth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men do not need parental leave as they do not need to physically recove from a birth like women do.\n","id":"feb45009-6b71-4be8-bf63-473b5caaae50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have heard from almost everywhere about how government is broken , corrupt , or dysfunctional but we are to blame, there is over 90 reelection rates for congressmen, but less than 15 approval rates. We tell them that it is ok for them to make sketchy trades and bribe each other by keeping them reelected. I think that people who say that it is broken should have at least voted for someone other than the incumbent. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that government is running exactly as we are telling it to run\n","id":"2e8a6f62-2c7c-48a7-b6cd-f4e9fe09e859"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Arranged Marriages are Better than Love Matches<|ARGUMENT|>People who come from societies where arranged marriage is the cultural norm will have more advantages in getting into one than those that come in a society where love marriage is the norm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While an arranged marriage may be better for some couples, that might not be the case across the board.\n","id":"1dfd38fc-b03f-4233-9103-2154b501aef2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At this point, I don't like the film because the film differs from the book so much according to the IMDB, around 50 of the plot points are different in the film than in the book. The film also seems to move too quickly there wasn't any time taken to move the characters from situation to situation, they just seemed to appear there instantly. I'm aware that most of my distaste of the film comes from comparing it to the book that it was based on I enjoyed that immensely. Also, I haven't seen the film since its release in 2006. So please, change my view. I'll try and accommodate most of what you say.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The film version of Eragon is a complete waste of time.\n","id":"6befd2be-bb92-4d63-98fe-d5490bd3ab56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am an South Asian male about 5'6.5 and live in the USA, where average height is about 5'9.5 . This means about 85 of men in the general population are taller than me, but in the field I'm studying to be in medicine surgery the average height is higher, meaning probably around 90 men are taller than me. I assume this is similar to how CEOs are vastly overrepresented by men 6 foot plus. The procedure would be done by one of the best surgeons in the world, and would cost anywhere from 60 80k USD, but my family is well off financially and money would not be an issue. I am in my early 20s, so the benefit of the increased height would last me my life. I am currently taking some time off from school, so I would not be losing income or missing work anyway the procedure from start to recovery would probably take 6 8 months . My two main reasons for wanting this procedure are 1 increasing career success many studies show that increased height is directly correlated with increased salary, about 750 per inch . Increased height also leads to promotions and better job opportunities this is not a figment of my imagination, in fact in China there are still height requirements for jobs like diplomats and lawyers. 2 increasing romantic success. Again, many studies show the critical importance of height for men, with 96 of women saying they would not date someone shorter, and online dating studies showing that a 5 foot 8 man was just as successful in getting dates as a 6 footer if he made more money \u2014 precisely 146,000 a year more. For a 5 foot 2 man, the number was 277,000. I am also aware of the negative effect of being Asian on dating in the USA. Look at OkCupid studies on race Asian males have the lowest reply rates even after controlling for income and age , and another study showing For equal success with a white woman, an African American needs to earn an additional 154,000 a Hispanic man needs 77,000 an Asian needs 247,000. the effect was found in every race and not just white women, I just didn't want to list everything . I seriously feel that being short AND asian is a death sentence to dating attractive women in the USA. If limb lengthening opens up a much greater pool of women, wouldn't it be worth the pain and chance of complication to actually be content in life find love? I am aware of the risks, but it seems that using internal methods with the best doctors is not as dangerous as people make it out to be. Arguments I would love to hear logical arguments, arguments based on statistics or other data, pointing out things I haven't thought of, etc. Arguments that would not help I have a friend who is a 5 foot guy who is a millionaire CEO I am not interested in anecdotes of outliers . Or, Who needs a woman who just likes you for your height? I know a woman whose husband is shorter Again, just about all women find height attractive, and the data does not lie. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a short male, growing taller through limb lengthening surgery would be beneficial for me.\n","id":"28154dd8-bf36-4aa9-9bf4-7bad257dc69b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are modern democracies destined to fail due to their inherent weaknesses?<|ARGUMENT|>That would be like the elite deliberately underfunding the education system to preserve their elite advantage and continually manipulating the less well educated to vote for status quo.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When a democracy does not educate its citizens sufficiently to operate as adults in society, then that democracy is broken.\n","id":"908118f2-b37c-436c-b5fe-a08b2ca6bfd8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Journalists Publish Hacked Data?<|ARGUMENT|>Important information does not become less important just because the people possessing it do not want it shared. More often the opposite is true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The asymmetrical nature of hacking means that individuals or small groups can often inflict serious harm on large institutions.\n","id":"438a7550-6c0c-48c4-acde-0a52f8d2cbf6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've never understood when people say there are genders other than male and female. When people say there are more than two genders, are we talking about two different definitions of gender? Because, when I google the different genders a lot of the definitions sound more like sexual orientations. I've also read on the news that some states are allowing people to put genders other than male or female on their drivers license. Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with the LGBTQ community but I think knowing whether a person is male or female can be important in many scenarios medical reasons, missing person, etc. I'm sure there is something that I'm missing that makes me not understand. I look forward to the conversation<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's only two genders.\n","id":"6cf70121-a5b9-47e4-9c22-a7b045b14961"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to focus on lyrics in this thread. I have plenty of issues with the other aspects of the horrible songs that get routinely churned out of Radio 1 probably the most popular radio station in the UK , but I find lyrics more conducive to discussion than melody or harmony. I listen to Radio 1 every day between 7 30am and 8 30am and between 4pm and 5pm. Not because I choose to, but because the person who drives me to work does and as driver, it's fair enough that she can choose to listen to what she wants . As a result, I have had to listen to the most vacuous, derivative, leg gnawingly obnoxious garbage the putrid pop industry has to offer. I can't seem to find it on Google, but there's a song that sounds vaguely like Daft Punk's irritating technologic , but this one is even worse. It goes work it, bring it, play it bitch work it, bring it, bitch work it, bring it, play it bitch . Lyrically, this song seems to have been thought up in about 5 minutes by a bored hormonal teenager. What exactly are we meant to enjoy about lyrics like that? You may argue that the lyrics aren't the focus or the point of the song but in which case why have them at all? Or why not use the song as a chance to explore the depths of the beautiful and varied English language? A string of nonsentical words and phrases would be more interesting to listen to than this tripe. Then there's the bafflingly popular 'Uptown Funk' by Bruno Mars and that guy who seems to use the same brass riff in all of his songs. Crass, self masturbatory garbage where the singer pretty much spends the entire song telling us how cool and how hot he is, and how much he likes to party. Seriously? The UK's number 1 song is yet another arrogant twerp telling us about how much he likes to party? Can we just accept that most people like to party and move on from this lyrical theme? Why do we have to be told again and again song after song that people are enjoying themselves in the club, all night long? Do these brain dead pop puppets have anything interesting to say about parties that hasn't been said a million times since the 70s? Every singly 'party club' song seems to be just I'm really hot You're really hot This party club is awesome Is it even possible to be more boring than this? Who enjoys being told these simple ideas day in, day out, by thousands of narcissistic pop morons? Now we come to the songs about love. Love has been a perfectly valid subject for poetry and art since the days of Catullus. Along with sex and death, it's a massive part of human experience. So how have these pompous pop pretzels managed to reduce it to lyrics so dull and formulaic that they could have been written by a computer program? Rita Ora, Charlie XCX, Elli Goulding, Taylor Swift every day we listen to the same people saying the exact same things about the exact same subject. Love and sex are intensely deep and complex aspects of the human experience. Why doesn't anyone have anything new or interesting to say about it? HOWEVER There is one exception. Currently the only song played on Radio 1 at the moment with vaguely decent lyrics is 'Take me to Church' by a singer named Hozier. He's still singing about love, but the lyrics are absolutely head and shoulders over the vomit spewed out by the Nicki Minajs and Jessie Js of the pop genre. Check the lyrics out Finally, a pop artist played on Radio 1 with something fresh and interesting to say about love Some excellent social critique of the antiquated restrictions of organised religion, and a wittily expressed comparison between devotion to a deity and devotion to another human. Take me to church I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife Offer me that deathless death Good God, let me give you my life Can you, with a straight face, tell me that lyrics like that aren't almost comically superior to drivel like We're staying all night We never slow down I think we better do it like we're doing it now It's been a long time Since we've been around So come on, let's keep doing it like we're doing it Doing it like we're doing it ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"BBC Radio 1 currently plays some of the most lyrically boring, vacuous music ever recorded... with one exception.\n","id":"99e2bc0b-cf73-4c26-a2c5-a99d1fb80a02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We should take the concept of Jury Duty or military draft and extend it to the deliberate infection of healthy individuals with unattenuated unweakened germs in order to foster natural autonomic defenses such as antibodies we can transplant in lieu of vaccines and even evolutionary responses that generally increase natural, unvaccinated resistance to disease. This began as a sci fi plot in my mind years ago the idea of managed contagion that we would employ as bacteria evolved resistance to antibiotics, or viruses evolved workarounds to antivirals, condoms, sterilization techniques et cetera. Then the idea grew, and is starting to feel like an imperative to me. We're dangerously close to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's scenario were we cannot live without our technology. That we could reach a point in the future where we can't even survive the common cold without medicine. The idea is a couple of times in your life, maybe once every 15 20 years after you reach adulthood and before retirement, you would be called upon to submit for deliberate infection with a germ that someone of your physique is 99 likely to survive. You'd be given a thorough physical, a genotyping to eliminate known fatal predispositions, and an interview to eliminate anyone who may have lifestyle or mental health complications. You'd be admitted to a clinic with emergency care facilities and spend the duration of the sickness in a biologically sealed room or ward. Your symptoms would be treated as well as possible, but unless contradicted by a doctor monitoring your progress, no attempt would be made to cure the disease. Your fluids will be sampled regularly and your vitals will be monitored 24 hours a day to add to the body of knowledge about the disease in question. After recovery you'll get X many years of free medical check ups and healthcare, a paycheck similar greater to what you get for Jury Duty, honor, accolades, community respect, prizes, and things like that. No germ would be tried unless it had been gene sequenced and studied for at least a decade, and Congress would oversee and set the criteria for selection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vaccination should be supplemented with \"Jury Duty\"-like deliberate infection with unattenuated germs to force humans to evolve natural defenses.\n","id":"e17815e8-1f61-4093-996e-0d3c25386b38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I like Netflix. I have Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Now. Netflix has by far the best user experience, but I think most of their content isn't very good. HBO, on the other hand has excellent content. Some of the best stuff out there right now is on HBO. Their problem, however, is that they still run their online services like they're a tv station. For example, before every show, they run commercials for themselves and their other shows. This is stupid. I already pay for your service. I know what you've got. Why am I being pestered and bothered by advertisements for stuff I already bought? Netflix doesn't do adverts of any kind. Their website I'm using HBO Now is also absolute shit. It's indescribably bad. I work in the web app sphere, so I know it's hard to write good applications on the web, but Jesus. It's hard to navigate because nothing is intuitive. Probably 30 of the time the player will flat out fail. Their fast forward feature offers no preview, so I'm stuck guessing how far I was into a show that I need to fast forward in. And navigating seasons of their shows is stupidly complicated for no reason. It also seems to me that the reason their site is so bad is that they still see themselves as a television station. They put out shows. Shows have commercials. They go out on the tv. Tune in at x o'Clock to watch game of thrones. Their streaming site seems like an afterthought which is also how I remember it being introduced . I think if HBO adopted a more Netflix like approach to their online content, their sales would jump through the roof, because their actual content is superior.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"HBO offers superior content to anybody else and is held back by their pre-internet business ideas.\n","id":"0f04f84f-6d83-495d-b67f-021347e63a91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>If reparations were to be paid to descendants of slaves by descendants of slaveowners, would not descendants of Union soldiers be entitled to reparations from descendants of slaves?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US has already taken actions and\/or changed in ways that deal sufficiently with its history with slavery.\n","id":"a81c5582-c3fc-4f0c-ab43-d511e438c4d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Faith has a positive position for the unknown. The unknown is accepted as part of the world and can exist alongside the scientific and rational. Whereas science treats the void as a negative, the thing outside of knowledge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Belief that miracles exist in no way rejects the validity of reason and science. It is merely an understanding that not all things in human experience fall within the grasp of empirical tools.\n","id":"4e3ecdaf-564b-4f10-ba2a-771578348f66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be one World Government?<|ARGUMENT|>As long as the state maintained a strict legal separation of church and state as many states do currently, no religious group could substantially influence politics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This state is likely be dominated by the interests of the most powerful religion.\n","id":"e01a3564-3fe5-4ceb-b5e5-a405041de7f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV Vaccinations be Compulsory?<|ARGUMENT|>Most accredited adoption agencies, private and public, require adoptive parents to take classes on parenting. Some agencies only start visiting the home of the prospective parents once they have passed the test These requirements, in the licensing system, will teach parents about the basics of parenting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US the UK Germany and Australia are some of the countries that provide either compulsory training or voluntary training services to prospective parents who wish to adopt in the status quo. Such training systems will therefore be incorporated into the licensing system.\n","id":"4433c57a-5ea7-424a-bbcc-555bf8f28435"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's a few people in my group of friends who have screwed over other friends and when it's found out, the backlash is expected, but never lasts long. However, There are people who have fucked up maybe ONCE and everyone seems to hang it over their head forever, even if it's less severe. I notice the same thing with public figures. For example, its much easier For Justin Bieber to be forgiven than say, Dwayne Johnson. It's like people get more upset that you acted contrary to their expectations than they are of the actual offence frequency of offences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who are known assholes get more leniency than \"kind\" people who just happen to slip up.\n","id":"a1eb82b0-694a-4d0a-a53b-be88291d74e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>If it violates societal norms parents will prohibit their children to watch the comedy thus forcing comedians to act within limits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Satire and caricatures have implicit limits and restricitions defined by the society.\n","id":"c08287f1-4594-433e-8632-3d7c6cfa9959"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Even in non-judeo-christian religions it is also not implied that because one source of authority claims something, everybody else accepts this, which is quite different in Catholic, Judean or Islamic 'hierarchies' or power structures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is only 'true' for the judeo-christian religions but are in no way defined as absolute truths and often debated in many other religions or sub-denominations.\n","id":"969b85e9-d05f-4dd3-9c7d-60e40e890dc5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically, I think that things only matter because we care about them we have feelings for them. For example people have no inherent right to life, so killing a person isn't somehow wrong . However, that person will suffer which is inherently bad , and their family will be distressed over the loss which is also bad . So crimes such as this aren't wrong it's just better if you don't do them. Or the Universe will probably end at some point. If there were no life in the Universe, no one would care and it wouldn't make any difference. If I were the last person alive, I wouldn't care, because no one will be around in 1,000,000, ,000 years to notice the difference. However, I do care about it because there might be people living then, and if the universe could no longer support them, they would no longer have the joys of life. This would be unfavorable to me since it's basically taking away people's happiness, so I don't want the Universe to have some kind of heat death, or irreversible expansion, or whatever. Ways you might be able to earn a delta Prove that morals are actually important in their own right Prove that anything could really matter if no one were around to observe it or think about it Give an example of how something could be good, even if no one would ever want it, enjoy it, or be happier because of it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that nothing in the universe matters except for emotions.\n","id":"e9bda9a7-7914-4507-90c1-37ef124d84d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Society functions entirely based upon our ability to communicate and understand each other's issues and solve problems as needed. If our entire social fabric is based off of our emotional intelligence then neglecting it seems to be an almost certain way to cause society to fail overall. I would argue that lack of effective emotional education leads to people not being able to process what they feel in a way that leads to any effective solutions to their issues as well as an inability to understand others underlying problems. This potentially has the ability to create a feedback loop that causes people to just not help anyone emotionally which destroys social bonds and opportunity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lack of effective emotional education is a leading cause of society failing.\n","id":"8cb55b57-ee8a-4b3f-9451-9536e7bf4bc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sorry, I can't fix the title, but as crackabox pointed out, I meant to say CMW there is no GOOD as in, the opposite of evil, not as in reasonable reason to have children. Other than mere genetic instinct, there is no reason to reproduce. It is a completely selfish act no one has children because they think that having children is a good thing, everyone has children because they want to have children. Few people of those who reproduced thought before doing it about wheter the children will be happy about living. Many thought about it and therefore decided not to have children. So I ask you, what is a good reason to have children? Why have children other than selfishness? Keeping the species alive is not a reason, growing up is not a reason, taking responsibilities is not a reason. I want to know what makes you think that turning a rock into something who can feel pain is justifiable. I know almost everyone doesn't think so, so let me understand what you are thinking, I want to understand your pov.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"there is no reason to have children\n","id":"594abf80-d1d7-415c-8706-7ffd52be661c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the minimum wage good for the economy overall?<|ARGUMENT|>Those who are unable to find work because their labor's market value is under the minimum wage are forced to be a drain. This takes away from the productivity that they may otherwise offer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Workers unable to avail minimum standards of living are a drain on the economy.\n","id":"514cf69b-3532-4ef9-979e-c42b8b20d3a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Children Learn About Gender Identity And Sexual Orientation In School?<|ARGUMENT|>They can be taught, but they need to understand both sides of the debate and not just have opinions from a religious or secular perspective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation should be offered as an elective class by any school with enough support to warrant the option.\n","id":"a0cdadbc-e554-4b6e-8210-a9d9ace0ce95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Sikhism advocates for a God without form or gender. Everyone is equal in front of God and has equal direct access to God. Sikhism also commands believers to use ordinary life to be closer to God, to strive for social justice and to live honestly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion as social control is a western-centric concept. Many Eastern religions do not impose social orders in tandem with supernatural belief systems.\n","id":"5258d3a1-81bd-44af-90b9-74250fd983da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All of these methods of killing result in long and painful deaths. Why is one acceptable but the other not? A bullet wound to the abdomen can cause intestinal agony for months, which seems on par with mustard gas. If infection sets in, possibly worse. Having your limbs blown off while you are conscious is probably worse than being gassed. Being burned by the flames from an explosion is probably on par with mustard gas burns. Assume that mustard gas is only used on the battlefield and doesn't spread to other areas such as civilian areas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Killing with bullets and bombs is essentially no different to killing with mustard gas.\n","id":"9707d262-a23f-41fd-93d0-2dca25cb131f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>The US Constitution has a clause that places a foreign emoluments ban. Trump's many foreign business arrangements violate this ban<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"President Trump\u2019s personal and business holdings present untenable conflicts of interest.\n","id":"799d58ad-49a9-4c16-bab3-fde43f63bfe5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was driven to write this when I learned on Jimquisition that there are two fresh new incidents of women in the game industry receiving rape threats for speaking their opinions. Disclaimer 1 I play a lot of video games, so I'm not some rambling old man yelling at the kids to get off my lawn. I mostly play indie and Nintendo games, but I am by any standards a gamer. I am well aware that there are numerous high quality games that genuinely engage or challenge players, such as Minecraft, Portal, DDR, Wii Sports, Planescape Torment, etc. My ire is mostly aimed at the junk games like Call of Duty and the kinds of people these games attract. Disclaimer 2 I think the majority of gamers are great people. When I talk about toxic gamers, I am referring specifically to the people who start flame wars online, harass people on their headsets, and send rape threats to women they disagree with. Even though the bad gamers are in the minority, they unfortunately set the tone for the community by virtue of being the loudest. I believe the reason that certain nerdy hobbies, like video games, seem to attract obnoxious, toxic people while other nerdy hobbies, like board games and D D, do not, is because many popular video games are designed to appeal to the absolute bottom of the barrel of humanity. They require no critical thinking, no physical skills hand eye coordination doesn't count , no social skills screaming obscenities at 12 year olds doesn't count , no creative skills, and generally no real effort whatsoever. A lot of AAA games nowadays basically just inject as much immediate gratification as possible into your eyeballs. There is nothing inherently wrong with a hobby that requires nothing from you, but it becomes a problem when it's the only thing you do and your mind starts to rot. So the people with no real intellectual, physical, creative, or social skills get drawn to video games as their primary hobby, they never make any effort to better themselves, and the worst of the worst become the toxic gamers that have stained the community. So what do you think? Are video games inherently a lower form of entertainment than other nerdy hobbies, or do the terrible people in the video game community just get more attention? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the video game community is toxic because video games by their nature attract toxic people.\n","id":"d33aef51-8ac1-42c9-9f7e-c894e70607e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Monogamy vs Polygamy: Is the Norm of Monogamy Regrettable?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no \u201cperfect type of relationship\u201d. Different types of people will find satisfaction in different types of relationships. We should not teach people that monogamy is the only way to find fulfillment. Instead, we should teach them to search for the type of relationship that makes them the happiest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monogamy is a social construct that restricts human nature, therefore it should not be a permanent norm.\n","id":"21d1dee4-4eb7-42e3-b0a8-e9b2fecc966b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>In the 2014 mid-term Senate elections, no senator raised more money from Wall Street than Cory Booker.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cory Booker's close ties to Wall Street are worrying.\n","id":"2769113d-2309-4d5f-a399-957ec539a66c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Weigth is a huge cost factor for the airlines. We see this everytime we are about to check in at the airport where the luggage is weighed. Having to much with you can cost you quite much as you have to pay for every kilo you're over the limit. I believe it's resonable to restrict how much stuff can be brought onto the plane because it helps to keep ticket prices low that way the average customer doesn't have to pay for the ones who bring way to much stuff . Therefore I think it should be obvious that bodyweight should also be accounted for. I don't want heavier people to pay more but I feel that it would be appropriate that lighter ones get some form of compensation, for example being able to bring more luggage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe light people should be privileged when travelling with a plane.\n","id":"5d4bc357-50c3-4799-b805-6922362bef73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural appropriation wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Cultures evolve over time by absorbing desirable elements from other cultures and shedding undesirable elements from their own.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Integrating different cultures is one of the main way for cultures to develop themselves.\n","id":"9a5f4af7-38c9-4758-8b99-e952726ea5b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Universal Jurisdiction<|ARGUMENT|>There are basic standards of justice which merit global application. Certain crimes against humanity offend against basic and universal norms of justice. Therefore, all people have an interest in seeing them upheld and should have the legitimate expectation that this will happen. It is a fallacy to argue that asserting universal rights is a form of cultural imperialism. As long as the universal jurisdiction is focused on serious transgressions that are clear violations of the global judicial code e.g genocide, torture mistreatment of prisoners of war, issues of differing cultural practices are irrelevant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are basic standards of justice which merit global application. Certain crimes against humanit...\n","id":"1d260398-6a41-459f-8ef4-92835693ebc2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically, it seems the concept of rape culture was termed because of how emotionally damaging it is to be a victim of rape. However, I don't think attacking the issue like that will solve very much, and I feel the term itself is a bit of a cop out. I think there's several things going on here that are a part of much greater issues that need to be addressed together. One, the idea that women are the gatekeepers is prevalent, which leads to a lot of inbalance. This comment on an r sex thread pertaining to male submissiveness points at the fact that women are taught not to be the aggressors or else get slut shamed. A a quick Google search on purity culture as rape culture would seem to confirm this mentality. This not only perpetuates rape culture, but also is a big reason behind why women are reluctant to initiate and arguably why male submissiveness is frowned upon. This hurts both genders. Two, and a big one here, is that there's a lot of materialistic, shallow attitudes to go around and a tendency to externalize things in our culture. This previous thread argues that there's an entitlement culture , and I think we could trace this back to how kids are raised. We teach them rules, we teach them that they'll get rewarded for x and punished for y on an external level and instill this mentality from day one. Work hard, be ambitious, to get this and that. This conditions them for conformity and hurts their critical thinking skills later on i.e. not all girls are like that , unlike what TRP will have you believe . This is not just a reason behind why men rape, but also a part of education issues and mental health, and is heavily entwined with puritanical work ethic. In conclusion there's much more to rape culture than just rape. If anything is to be done about it, I think we need to undo literally centuries of societal conditioning, and I just don't think that feminism as a movement is equipped to tackling it on their own. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rape culture at least in the U.S. is a mere symptom of much deeper cultural issues that aren't getting enough attention.\n","id":"6a9fc407-eae1-4f08-9ad8-dfb916eee0f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't really know much about the meta battles that are always raging here on Reddit about mods are nazis , free speech is being suppressed , etc. But I have looked around a bit and I really don't see why the mods admins have any obligation to respect a maximal amount of freedom of speech. I'm talking about things like r creepshots, which were definitely banned not due to any legal reason but simply because there was a lot of moral pressure to close them both from within Reddit and outside media sources . And finally the admins closed these kind of subreddits and half of Reddit seemed to go apeshit crazy, complaining that tyranny was upon us and our liberties were being curtailed. Reddit is not a government. It is a private entity paid for by private dollars, advertisements, and charitable contributions. Nobody is forced to come here, and it's very very easy for people to leave this site and find another one if they don't like it. A good analogy is a coffee shop with different rooms subreddits where a lot of people routinely come to talk and buy things post and make donations, click on ads, etc . Now let's say there were a bunch of skeezy people in the corner who were sharing pictures of young women's asses and such, pics they had taken on the street and in public areas without the women's permission. If the coffee owner decides to kick those people out of his shop and prohibit any more discussion of such material, is he morally within his grounds to do so? I say yes I see absolutely no problem with that. My view also extends to a recent frontpage r gaming article about someone having her AMA banned because she got in a fight with a gaming feminist, Ana Sarkeesian, or something like that. Again, I see no problem with the admins banning this AMA if they don't like it. Please change my view. Convince me that it is important to uphold freedom of objectionable speech even in a private setting .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't agree with people who think that Reddit should be a bastion of free speech. It's a private site, and I understand why admins would ban subreddits they consider morally wrong.\n","id":"9c3debf3-7623-46f2-9f85-22ca095efb91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>The NFL launched the Head Health Challenge a competition to encourage companies to study and develop products to improve player safety.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NFL has invested in preventing diagnosing and treating head injuries.\n","id":"4a97f236-d2c2-421b-bb74-9c83fecf01c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should homeschooling be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The type of parents asked influences the results: a richer, whiter sample group will lead to results that show homeschooled children do 'better', when it may merely demonstrate that that demographic is more likely to succeed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homeschooling studies often rely on self-reported data from parents, which is necessarily unreliable.\n","id":"e7fc3d02-8865-4c52-9f0e-1f561a05a4eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My friends at University sometimes talk about how Walmart is evil because it doesn't give its employees benefits or that it pays its employees too low or gives unfair hours. In general, people seem to talk about Walmart as the epitome of a company treating its employees as the lowest of the low and that you're somehow extremely unlucky if you end up working there. Honestly, I feel insulted that people would feel so entitled as to think that Walmart is specifically obligated to give its employees privileges that most people working similar jobs could never hope for. This is particularly jarring to me because I work as a dishwasher After 3 years, I make 9.00 hour and my shifts are 10 12 hours that end after midnight. I have an unstable schedule and am called to work on holidays. I get no tips and one lunch break. Not only do I clean every dish, kitchenware and silverware that goes through the entire restaurant, alone, but I also clean the kitchen floor and equipment, take out the trash, scrub the bathrooms, prepare food, take dishes from tables to the back and close the kitchen. At the end of the day I am covered in gunk, soaked, cold and exhausted. The only real plus about working in a kitchen is that I like mariachi music, though some people would consider that another minus. I'm willing to have someone convince me that working entry level at Walmart is harder than my job, but I doubt it. I don't get benefits, and I've never expected to get benefits. And I'm not just comparing Walmart to my job. There are plenty of people who work for even worse jobs than me. In fact, I'd assert that the majority of jobs out there are worse than working at Walmart for no benefits. I'm sure there are business practices that Walmart could be called out for that are potentially damning to its reputation, but I cannot for the life of me see why people who work at Walmart feel that they deserve more than what most other people get working unskilled labor jobs. To me, it's comparable to how servers are the most vocal workers in a restaurant when in fact, they have a far easier time than the guys who work in the kitchen who never complain. However, I will also admit that I've never worked at Walmart. Therefore, I'm willing to hear out the side of someone who has worked there and witnessed its supposed horrors first hand. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Working at Walmart is no worse than working most other entry level jobs.\n","id":"d61c82e5-9ecc-4a7f-af19-e3c51c058417"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>During the times of slavery, people wanted the biggest, strongest, and most athletic slaves because these people could do the most work without getting as tired. Through this, I believe that slavery essentially led to the breeding of black people to be bigger and stronger because that is what white people wanted for their slaves. I think that this has lead to the NBA and NFL to be dominated by black superstars, because the ancestors of these athletes were bread to be big, strong, and athletic. I think this disproportionately affects the NBA and NFL because these sports require strength, size, and athleticism more than other major professional sports in America. . Edit The title should say NBA and NFL, not NBA and MLB<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NBA and MLB are dominated by black superstars as a result of slavery.\n","id":"88988622-0ea2-436d-adaf-38990b21d62b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is It More Ethical to Eat a Hamburger than a Shrimp Salad?<|ARGUMENT|>Cows release on average between 70 and 120 kg of Methane per year, which is equivalent to about 2300kg CO2\/year<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The farming practices for raising cows is far more damaging to the environment than fishing shrimp.\n","id":"933ac6f7-445a-4310-8f5e-bfeeb5a1cd19"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Amartya Sen argues that liberals interpret equality in terms of equality of well-being, resources, or capability, whilst conservatives interpret it in terms of equality of liberty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It has been argued that everyone cares about equality as a value, yet it has different meanings to different people.\n","id":"323ecae3-6b0f-4cb8-9007-6c8e49cdb795"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>The Inuit Population solely relies on fish, since they live in the harsh conditions of the Arctic lands. It is obvious that diets should be adapted to the different environments. Exceptions will always persist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you were born in a agriculturally hostile territory you couldn't rely on food other than meat to sustain yourself.\n","id":"84b5b2b2-2ee0-4a0e-bf1b-2961ca59bd2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>McCain vs. Obama, McCain vs. Obama<|ARGUMENT|>Under duress in Vietnam, McCain falsely admitted that he had committed war crimes. With all due respect to McCain's service to the country, this was a show of weakness and considered, by McCain's own admission, a dishonorable act.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"McCain's false confession to committing war crimes was dishonorable.\n","id":"4d550fe3-3a8e-47ac-a2b0-98f4643192c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi reddit, first time posting here and this is a big one that i've believed for a while. First off let me explain what possiblianism is Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story say, a man with a beard on a cloud is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind it is not interested in committing to any particular story. David Eaglemen Now, some of my favorite writers such as Sam Harris have stated that this belief system is simply atheism in a new shell. I disagree. I've found that the word Atheism means that a god gods doesn't exist and that there isn't a chance of any form of it. Even Richard Dawkins has stated in the God Delusion that Atheists today are not full blown atheists in the sense that they are not on the pure opposite side of the spectrum of creationist who are 100 certain there is a god. Its normally around 99 percent or so which makes me feel that the word atheism which comes from the Greek language Without God isn't appropriate for where most of us already stand. Perhaps it is more of a defintional thing, but the idea of holding all ideas with value and using what we know about the world to shift our views on the spectrum of Belief I I Belief Non Belief I find that perhaps it is unlikely, but we certainly do not have the evidence to support that a god or gods doesnt exist. I originally registered myself as an atheist, but after coming across this term a few years ago this is where I have stood. I've always felt that this term better explained how many atheists felt, but most of us didn't know it actually existed.  reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Atheism is incorrect, and scientists should shift towards a more logical belief system such as Possibilianism.\n","id":"8f4c51d1-ae6f-4d5e-b1ce-13ba61df43d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Private self-driving cars will make our cities more livable<|ARGUMENT|>If vehicles are shared, they would essentially constitute a public space and video surveillance thus be allowed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mobility companies will have some requirement to comply with law enforcement.\n","id":"35d12555-561d-4338-b720-38a55ef4fcca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Financial abortion, aka legal paternal surrender, is a concept talked about among Men's Rights groups whereby they believe men should be allowed to opt out of paying child support. This process would occur sometime after the woman is aware she's pregnant and notifies the man, and then MRAs believe he should be able to sign himself out of being the father if he desires losing all the other rights of fatherhood like visitation, of course . MRAs state that this gives a right to men that they lack in comparison to women, namely that women can choose whether or not they want to be a parent either by carrying the fetus to term or having an abortion. I'm not going to argue that point here, as that's been done a million times over. I'm going to say for the sake of this post that I'll agree that men should have this right, BUT Only if we also create a social safety net to help cover the funds needed for the child to have a good life. Funds that would otherwise have been paid for by the father. According to the UN, children have specific rights that the state must see to. The state has to make choices in the best interest of the child. If we're depriving the child of an income source, then the state has to see to it that the child is taken care of. The best way the state can do that if the father opts out of paying is to make up for it themselves through welfare. I'm going to anticipate some responses that I want to address. Yes, if a woman can't alone support a child financially, then knowing the father will opt out, she should not go through with having the child. However, it is her choice and her right to do so. I believe that people should be allowed to exercise control over their own body. Once the baby is born it must be taken care of. Trying to convince me that we shouldn't care about babies and just let them die if the mother is irresponsible will not work, sorry, I can't be that heartless. Also, just telling the mother to get a second job or work even more and find more income is flawed in my view, because poor single mothers probably can't take on many more responsibilities with affecting the child's life in a detrimental way.  either the father pays child support or society pays<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I won't support financial abortion unless we also set up a social safety net to make up for it\n","id":"3c8e611b-568a-4591-bec5-39e5f1805cd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>i got my ears pierced within the first year or two of my life. obviously i couldn\u2019t remember how it felt and i was incredibly grateful to my parents when i was older that i wouldn\u2019t have to endure the anxiety or pain of a first piercing ever again. the decision had been made for me. i was told that it isn\u2019t right for a baby to have their ears pierced against their will, but it\u2019s momentary pain if the parents take them to a good piercer and make sure they keep on top of their piercing care, and there\u2019s always the opportunity for them to opt out and remove their piercings later on. i think it\u2019s made more of a deal than it should be by a lot of people. so change my view, why shouldn\u2019t i get my future baby\u2019s ears pierced ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"it\u2019s okay to get a baby\u2019s ears pierced\n","id":"77c4ff56-4a65-4ce6-9cdb-ad37fae4fa7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>Rehabilitation is supported by Kant's philosophy of human dignity \u201cA good will is good not because of what it effects, or accomplishes, not because of its fitness to attain some intended end, but good just by its willing, i.e. in itself.\" With this, Kant suggests that it is the intention rather than the outcome or the potential for outcome that makes an action good.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is morally acceptable for prisons to focus on rehabilitation.\n","id":"7dad20a4-1ede-47aa-b3cd-261b59ef15fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone knows there's a terrible drought in California. I've noticed tons of people talking about how bad it is, how they are going to take shorter showers, etc. But then those tend to be the same people who eat local and love these restaurants that serve all locally grown produce meat, etc. Those local farms are, in many cases, growing crops that require an incredible amount of water compared to the amount of food they produce. I understand that there is a complex issue here, and I'm not saying they should all stop growing rice overnight, but I certainly don't feel good about eating locally grown produce anymore, and I don't think it should be seen as such a great thing in light of the drought. Locally grown food may be superior because it is fresher, or because it doesn't use as much gas to ship here, etc. But I don't feel good about consuming produce that is contributing to the water shortage, when we could be getting it from places that aren't in a drought. IMHO, the whole locally grown craze should be replaced with grown with responsible water usage or something like that. Of course that isn't trivial to define, but that's a problem for another day. I'd love to support local farmers that were growing crops well suited to the terrain. Edit wow, tons of replies this morning I'll be busy for a few hours but I'll get to them EDIT2 Thanks for all the discussion this has been great. Some more details I live in Northern California San Francisco I don't have a great definition for local , but let's say within 50 miles. I may have mentioned international before, but the real local food thing seems to be around 50 miles, e.g. not mega farms in the central valley I'm considering all food products, produce, dairy, meat, etc. My main hypothesis is that by avoiding local and instead going for water efficient which may, in some cases, be local , we encourage local farmers to care more about water usage than they otherwise might, and that this is a good, helpful thing. So my actual view is that always supporting local food is actually making the water shortage worse because it is encouraging poor distribution and usage of water. Some things that could convince me The carbon footprint of bringing in produce from further away is worse, short and long term, than the extra water usage Local water usage isn't actually a problem, or its only mega farms in central valley that are a problem also related to different watersheds, which someone below brought up , in which case other benefits supporting the local economy, etc make it positive Some other unanticipated benefit of buying local that I hadn't thought of<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With the drought in California, I should no longer be proud to eat local produce and support local farmers in most cases\n","id":"661875e2-ba75-4d32-9ea3-821e1dafae78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify what I mean, the method I'm mentioning pertains to trying to make the group accountable for itself, and punishing the whole instead of the sum of it's parts for the inability of one or more but not all individuals. So as an example. Boy A, throws a grody stinkbomb in the locker room, nobody knows who did it including the teachers. So in order to produce the offending party, All Boys are made to run laps for P.E. until someone comes forward. I've always been opposed to this method as a means of keeping people accountable, but as a college student having this done to me, has begun to pose new concerns. Yesterday, my professor determined nobody did the reading, and so on our school's digital communications website he then posted the following If the person I call on cannot answer the question, there will be a quiz. I then wrote him expressing my concerns for the global safety and safe feeling of the class it relies on the student body having an open mind for discussion so feeling safe is somewhat important , because this situation gives cause for hostility towards the student if they get the question wrong. In my response I requested that he just require the quiz instead, so that this situation can be avoided, and everyone is simply accountable for themselves. I was then dismissed with a wall of text after I explained I didn't think it was an appropriate or professional solution to the problem. In any case, I fail to see any value to this method at all, even in it's most prominent use which is in the military, the person deemed the weakest link gets a blanket party. I encourage you to .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that \"Weakest link\" or \"One bad apple\" style methods of discipline are not appropriate in the scholastic setting.\n","id":"7c110d87-ecf1-4fb1-9ab2-f11958354f96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should US Senators No Longer Be Elected by Popular Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>As it stands, we effectively have two Houses of Representatives. This is redundant and unnecessary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"U.S. Senators should no longer be elected by popular vote.\n","id":"938020ac-2aac-41fe-9dd9-bcb32fe5fdad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Historical evidence can be very vague, altered or outright be completely fake. Just because the old\/new testament says Jesus existed doesn't mean that it's true. It becomes humanly impossible to trace back every historical evidence that mentions someone who could have been Jesus. The only possible solution would be to digitize everything and let a super computer build a web of correlations between evidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is insufficient evidence that Jesus Christ existed at all.\n","id":"a81f00fd-bb79-4cc0-9ab2-77f6e3edff26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Ontario have only one public, secular school system?<|ARGUMENT|>Having one public, secular system will allow for the two school boards to merge their funds. Funds can then be used to create a higher class school system with advanced technology and more useful tools for a better school environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having only one system will generate increased economic efficiencies. It would, for instance, eliminate the administrative duplication inherent in the existing systems, thereby freeing up public funds.\n","id":"c3af6049-3f7f-4b29-8e82-f17a76400f89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not talking about impoverished people as in children in third world countries unable to go to school, but children in first word countries that live in the middle to lower class. I DO believe that people who righteously worked harder for their money should be entitled to it and not be forced to give their money away to people who threw away their lives, but the amount of out of school education and activities given to children in wealthy families far exceeds those given to children in less fortunate households. I believe this education gives wealthy children an advantage that lets them get ahead of other students and ultimately have a far better chance at succeeding in life due to this early education. I believe that the success that parents have earned through hard work should not be inherited down to their children, since children cannot choose their parents. I understand that there is no possible solution to my beliefs, but would still like to understand the opposing side. EDIT In the title, I meant to put equal amount of effort and money, not just money<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that capitalism gives children of wealthy people an unfair advantage, and that children should be raised with an amount of effort and money put into their education\n","id":"36ac10e3-87c9-463b-84af-f1200bd508e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the U.S, there's a growing but still niche debate about the legitimacy of taxes and the usefulness of public services. People who think taxation is theft are often told to just leave if they don't like being taxed. However, the people who are advocating for more taxes to increase public benefits healthcare, welfare, social security, etc are not willing to leave to countries like Cuba or North Korea where the government provides all of its citizens with their livelihood and resources. Why should people have to leave if they don't want to be taxed, but get to stay and change the system if they want more taxes? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If people want more government aid\/public service, they should move to a new country.\n","id":"85a3fe46-2850-4016-b15f-5edaf48c980c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>These teachers may allow their personal beliefs to impact the way they deliver information, making their biases clear and undermining some of the course material.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers who deliver this content without fully believing in it are likely to do so poorly.\n","id":"07cede88-199b-4dbf-9230-8c582cabd65a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before you jump to conclusions, i do think that people can easily create some type of meaning in their life. What i don't think exists is some type of grand meaning to life and a purpose you where born into. Everything is random and every living thing has complete free will. The only purpose any person creates is just a creation of their own consciousness. As a species any purpose or goal we move toward is just a creation of our combined consciousness. This doesn't mean I don't believe in a type of god I just think every form of life has free will with no pre determined meaning or destiny.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no grand meaning to life.\n","id":"4225d7fe-6fde-40e2-9a2c-9a9570381678"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me state the obvious. Racists are bad. Sexists are bad. These are genuine statements by me and I do not support or condone their actions. As I drove to work today, I was thinking about how many people we send to prison this is relevant so stick with me please . Thankfully, many people and politicians are pushing for a more rehabilitation focused approach. Many, including myself, have learned that people can change and that rehabilitating someone is more humane than throwing them back into the general population without any hope of acclimating accordingly. To the point of my change my view, people sometimes have said terrible things in the past. Maybe it\u2019s in inappropriate joke. Maybe it\u2019s a meme or quote that didn\u2019t age well. There are a variety of ways to get destroyed in this era of online, PC, take no prisoners justice. I agree that those people shouldn\u2019t have ever shared or created the offending post. That being said, people can change. Viewpoints evolve and people learn. These people deserve the opportunity to demonstrate they have changed, rather than swift and unforgiving destruction of their entire lives. . Edit 1 I wanted to clarify that I mention prison rehabilitation efforts in the beginning of this post because I feel that many of the people who are pro rehabilitation and also some of the same people destroying lives with their swift and unforgiving \u201cjustice.\u201d Also, I wanted to provide an example of what I am talking about with tweets from the past. James Gunn, director of Guardians of the Galaxy 1 2, had unfavorable tweets in his past. Yes, they were bad. That being said, many people were vouching for him saying that he is a changed man. Male, female, and multiple races were represented by these people who said that he is not the man he used to be. That was not good enough for the online mob, and his career, at least for the moment, has been ended. That doesn\u2019t seem fair to me. Edit 2 I have learned that James Gunn was rehired. Good news<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unfavorable tweets\/interviews from someone\u2019s past should not necessarily destroy their career\n","id":"ca0b27df-7435-4252-a97d-95e3e2975d49"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>There is only one wizarding newspaper in England - the Daily Prophet - and it reports on gossip in addition to news. It is also susceptible to pressure from the Minister for Magic to print or not to print information.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Ministry of Magic controls everything, from banks to schools to law enforcement to journalism.\n","id":"4eafed85-8d10-49ba-aafa-7d4d749c5eaf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>In a scenario where only AKM's are fighting against each other and no humans are involved into battles, the global population grows even faster, because the number of war casualties drastically decreases. This leads to an increasing consumption of the already rare resources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Earth's \"overshoot-day\" comes earlier every year. That means that even nowadays without building millions of drones the resources of Earth are not sufficient.\n","id":"b8ce227d-0f1a-40f8-9647-8b64d463de35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Canada's Northwest Passage be an international strait?<|ARGUMENT|>The United States and China are top world's exporters and major users of other trade passages such as the Panama Canal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The territorial claim of the passage will help to negotiate with China and the world's leading exporters.\n","id":"8fc4e30b-59dd-4007-9690-a7bc4559624e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>This would encourage local politics and involvement with local councils, which may be damaged otherwise if people always delegate on a national scale and give no power to those with invested interest in local issues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vote concentration could be prevented by limiting vote delegation to within your existing constituency.\n","id":"02ad3d9f-7773-4b8a-b7bf-b52848d4cfc2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Agile Development - You don't need standup<|ARGUMENT|>Writing information can happen asynchronously everyone at their own time which avoids work flow interruptions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some meetings or parts of them can be replaced by written notes\/documents.\n","id":"c0fd5f21-89a5-4dca-97de-fc7a18992f05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Something that often springs up on reddit now and again is the readiness with which people who really do seem average are capable of blood chilling violence and abuse of power. It is often framed as something along the lines of even good people are easy to corrupt and manipulate into evil . But the average person is not necessarily good or bad. The truth is that most people, when thinking of what is right and wrong, do not decide on ethical principles and then reason outwards from those principles. Rather, they learn which behaviours are and aren't acceptable through social interaction, and any intellectual engagement with morality is merely finding reasons justifying their moral perceptual status quo. This is philosophy reduced to mere rationalisation. We can see moral pioneers in people like Bentham and Mill, both of whom anticipated relatively modern moral concerns such as women's equality under the law, animal welfare, and the then contemporary issue of slavery. These people came to egalitarian conclusions at least one hundred years before feminism and the animal liberation movement. There exists a continuum of moral agency, with those moral visionaries being a small portion of the population, the average person as the majority obviously and another minority of people constitutionally incapable of moral agency the severely mentally disabled, infants, perhaps psychopaths . So, what would a good person look like? They would accept ethical first principles. They would consistently reason from those principles the ideal state of the world. They would act only in accord with that which would or, that which generally would bring the actual state of affairs closer to the ideal state of affairs. This describes very few people. Very few people are good in any meaningful sense. Most are merely good enough, in that they acquiesce to and maintain the social order engineered by moral visionaries. The remainder are Machiavellian subversives who seek to undermine moral endeavors for egoistic reasons, or those incapable of understanding moral discourse the brain damaged, the comatose, infants etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being an average person is not the same as being a good person, and good people don't commit atrocities.\n","id":"50192d9c-c934-46d1-8622-29222150d594"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sweat shops have existed in almost every country on earth. They are an economic stepping stone for countries to modernize and move past 3rd world status, also move past a manufacturing based economy and into more developed industries such as finance. Many reports of countries with sweat shops, come back showing men boys would work worse jobs with worse pay and women girls would typically become prostitutes. China used to be the stereotype for sweat shops, but as they\u2019ve developed and grew, they\u2019re starting to phase out sweat shops and develop they\u2019re economy. Countries who preemptively pass laws to get rid of sweat shops, cripple their economies even more so. I am not arguing for permanent use of sweat shops, just they\u2019re a perfectly acceptable stepping stone for a developing economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe sweat shops are good for countries and aren\u2019t unethical\n","id":"c036d9ea-70b9-4c83-8106-36e572e3e4cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Science and religion may have numerous differences on the surface, but I believe their fundamental characteristics are the same if not extremely similar. Science and religion are a set of tools used to understand answers about the universe and our relationship with the universe. Proper practitioners of science and religion understand that all answers have a chance of being false. Followers of science and religion trust their books scriptures on faith. These are my main arguments. I've formed this view recently and it isn't solidified yet. I'd like to see where my view falls short. Please change my view. Edit u chip 0 has convinced me that my view is false. My view should have been that all understanding is based on faith. That delves into philosophy and gets out of hand. Thanks for all the help guys<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Science and religion are two sides of the same coin.\n","id":"bd109d02-bfeb-453a-adc1-3e636a5fe702"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have had 5 jobs in my life and not a single one of them has penalized employees for being 5 10 minutes late, and that's how almost all jobs should be. Even 20 30 minutes late, if just occasionally shouldn't be a problem. If someone wakes up a little late one morning and rushed to work, skipping breakfast and coffee, just so they're not 20 minutes late, they are going to be less productive the whole day than if they had just relaxed in the morning and been able to eat without worry. An environment where workers worry about getting in trouble just for being a just few meaningless minutes late does not create a happy workplace.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For the vast majority of jobs, it is counter productive and pointless to penalize an employee for being 5-10 minutes late.\n","id":"0947fb9b-5746-426b-a110-862d02559a24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is a common practice in the introduction of legeslation to include completely unrelated issues in an attempt to get them passed as part of the main issue. For example, one party might want to pass law A, but not law B. A second party wants to pass lab B, but not law A. So when the first part introduces a bill on law A the second party will tack on law B in hopes that the first wants law A to pass so badly that they'll be willing to allow law B to slip through. A recent example was anti abortion legislation being grouped in with motorcycle safety laws. I find this disruptive to the process. By forcing politicians to weigh the merits of completely unrelated issues against each other, the consideration given to individual issues is diluted and good laws get shot down to avoid the passing of bad, or vise versa. Change My View. EDIT My view has been changed. Thanks to u thedeeno for pointing out that this is how minority interests get their views noticed and pushed through despite little interest. Also to u floorberry for pointing out that this is a way to get around using a LOT of time on small and to the greater body unimportant topics such as relatively small allocations for infrastructure upkeep. u treseritops made a similar point very well. Also, thanks to u auandi for pointing out that the House already has a rule against this, but it's effectively castrated by the normal political structure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe allowing unrelated topics to be part of the same bill is damaging to the legislative process.\n","id":"cb41da03-184c-4b9f-8c53-526011dccd24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll start off with saying that I am a male myself and I consider myself an egalitarian, a humanitarian and a socialist. I don't like the feminist movement as from what I have personally seen from their views is that they are simply female supremacists anymore. However, from what I have seen is that MRAs are the same. I agree that there are some gender inequalities that harm the male gender males being seen as all being pedophiles, women being able to get away with more socially and legally and males' lives being less valued by the media and social justice warriors , however it seems like, like feminists, there are not enough issues to be completely enraged activists about it. However, that's just my view. Feel free to change it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that MRAs are sexist\n","id":"199c49ce-e806-4854-b3bc-ccfbcef5ccf6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Warning I have some spoilers from various works of literary art, nothing current shows haven't already covered but leave now if you don't want any spoilers of any kind So I've got a friend who read asoiaf and won't watch GoT because he'd get mad at the changes and inauthenticity whereas I see it as a totally different show. I was that way when I refused to see Harry Potter movies which he liked but we both read the books. LOTR most people i've met seem to like movies more than the books. I don't get it, why does it matter? Usually the shows are pretty good, they always change something, that doesn't mean it isn't true to the original version especially with GoT which relies a lot on perspective and unreliable narrators. I can't stand people who are like 'oh the visual representation sucks, it didn't potray this the way I liked it or that. Well I think the visual representations are not only equal to the books but can be better sometimes, at Helm's Deep in the books Aragorn goes onto the gate and the whole army of Uruks stops to argue with him about the merits of waiting for the dawn, in the movies it's a fuckin fight. In asoiaf Robb marries some chick he knocked up and, as much as I liked it, I thought GoT making the essosi hot nurse surgeon thing was better in a way. I also thought whatsherface, Tyrion's bitch, her betrayal in the show is much harder to see coming whereas in the books, as someone who's texted a lot of flakey and heartless bitches before, it's pretty obvious that she's a gold diggin ho in the books, in the show I half expected them to change it so she doesn't betray Tyrion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you've read and liked the books watching the show won't ruin or alter the experience. The book isn't always objectively better\n","id":"af5afc48-84bf-43cb-bb2b-499cab6922fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Girls Be Allowed in Boy Scouts?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a difference in the social dynamics of an all male group versus a co-ed group, and allowing girls into Boy Scouts takes away from those boys the ability to engage in meaningful male peer bonding.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Boy Scouts was never intended\/designed to have girls in the program.\n","id":"1fdc83fd-765b-40b5-8d09-4a52bccf5c57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Social Security Trust Fund is a set of special US Treasury bonds issued to the Social Security Administration. The bonds provide a convenient accounting mechanism to keep track of the dedicated tax for Social Security, but they do not provide any extra security to the system, and are not in any way savings that the government could call on to pay Social Security benefits, or for any other purpose The fundamental reason is that the bonds are owned by the same entity who issued them. The Social Security Administration and the US Treasury are both subsidiaries of the US Government. The US Government just owes money to itself. Each year, the money to pay for Social Security benefits comes from payroll taxes, and to the extent that the SSA cashes in the bonds, the various other taxes the US government charges income tax, tariffs, etc . Kevin Drum wrote a piece on this a couple years ago that lays out the case on the other side. gt Social Security surplus was invested in treasury bonds. What does that mean? It means that workers gave money to the federal government, which turned around and spent it. In return, the Social Security trust fund received bonds that represented promises to repay the money later out of the federal government's income tax receipts. In effect, it gave workers a claim on the income tax receipts of the government at a later date in time. When that time came, the federal government would have to pay up, which would make it less profitable. If the government was already running a deficit, it would make the deficit even worse. The workers do not have a claim on the future tax receipts of the Federal government though. Under US law, there is no property interest in future Social Security payments. If the US Treasury defaulted on those bonds, the only entity who could sue would be the SSA, in a case titled United States v. United States. Indeed, Congress has plenary discretion to alter or eliminate Social Security payments, and or forgive the debts owed to the SSA by the US Treasury. This makes it very much unlike other debt promises. Congress would not be able to repudiate a public bond under the 14th Amendment or 5th Amendment . But they can revoke Social Security any time they want. So there is no property interest. It's a useful accounting fiction that lets the program keep track of the dedicated tax, but it does not represent meaningful savings or anything that Americans should consider a safeguard of their retirements, because it's just one hand owing money to the other. Edit 1 Would be curious for any replies related to what happens when the trust fund runs out. This is the area I'm most conflicted re the realness of the fund.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Social Security Trust Fund is an Accounting Fiction.\n","id":"de9a1cb7-b7d8-4684-aa18-d38c074f75ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>These narratives can drive a more or less gender-equal narrative through things such as narrative revamp or by reducing sexist content respectively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fanmade videos eg. Source Film Maker and mods e.g. Nexusmods can shape the conversation.\n","id":"d6f53cb4-f4d1-481c-81db-ad9c4221edb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would online education be best in virtual reality VR?<|ARGUMENT|>This is better than other forms of online education, where people need a computer, which requires a lot of sitting to interact with it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With software that prevents people from bumping into something in VR, people may be able to walk around while learning in VR.\n","id":"fe3b214d-8c8c-4ab4-8fb6-673be58d8b1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>Any other explaination would require an industry wide conspiracy which isn't very likely as litterally millions of people work in these fields, and companies compete with each other for the best people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As more people enter a field, regardess of gender, the salary drops because there has been an increase in the supply of the employee relative to their demand.\n","id":"18a9a37b-1375-4e4c-b84e-5d433deb6ddd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the U.S.A. an exceptional country?<|ARGUMENT|>The U.S. has yet to solve pronounced contradictions in its society, such as the fact that over 500,000 people are homeless while millions of homes remain empty<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Large parts of the U.S. population have been left behind and are in no superior or exceptional position relative to the rest of the world.\n","id":"e0aba6c3-0ab9-4453-b7a1-bb3ea4df9269"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This player debuted for the Southern Stars Australian national cricket team at 16, making her the youngest player to make the national side male or female . Just a month later she debuted for Matildas Australian national soccer team . She was fast tracked into the national cricket team having not even played for her senior state side. In her debut T20 international match she was awarded Player of the Match, a feat she repeated in the world T20 final scoring 3 18. In just her third year of international cricket she earned her maiden 5 wicket haul and despite being a defender she scored a goal in the 2008 Asian Cup just her second year so as a 17 year old of international soccer. She is now 24 and has gotten 2 of Australia's 3 wickets against England so far match is about a third of the way through after Perry scored 67 off 58 bowls.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ellyse Perry is the greatest Australian athlete to ever live\n","id":"b9ebe591-7ccb-42ea-b201-38a1f5db54d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural appropriation wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Research centers carry out research into the national language of the country. Research continues because people have incomplete knowledge about the language.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who belong to a culture do not have a full understanding of it.\n","id":"16b4be84-cc37-46b3-91b2-cf18f78628e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The ACLU and Charlottesville: Should the ACLU Defend White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The ACLU defended the Washington Redskins in court when the government threatened to remove their icon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ACLU has often taken \"conservative\" stances on many issues.\n","id":"d2f6fb08-348f-4ffd-b7b7-015a83467cb1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>North Korea should not be labelled irrational for developing nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>In 2002, North Korea offered to sign a non-aggression pact with the US and again freeze their nuclear weapon development in exchange for further aid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons is beneficial during negotiations with other nations.\n","id":"7713d3fc-baad-42a0-b082-6b62c45c9e85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Women had to fight for nearly 100 years for their right to vote although there is no difference between male and female votes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender discrimination against women is historically more prevalent than with men. There is no justifiable reason for this inequality.\n","id":"e4bbfe46-7e17-4ccc-a766-8afb4a6bebd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that Bitcoins are an interesting concept and the idea of having a universal currency is neat, but I believe they are doomed to fail. They're not backed by anything, fluctuate in value rapidly, and aren't regulated by a reliable government. The currency is so feeble, a reddit post about bitcoins last spring caused a crash in the bitcoin economy. The only way to make money off of them is to buy and sell them rapidly, hoping to gain from a fluctuation and a lot of luck . I also believe that investing in bitcoins in any form either buying them or buying pricy bitcoin miners is a bad idea and will only lead to loss of money. Even bitcoin mining on a normal computer is a waste of electricity and will end up costing you more in elect bills in the long run. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think bitcoins are doomed to fail and investing in them is a terrible idea.\n","id":"739b69f5-dab1-44d8-aaaf-762399fd4df9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the UK NHS National Health Service sustainable?<|ARGUMENT|>The latest data shows that the population is still largely uneducated about what constitutes a healthy diet. Much of the family diet is made up from highly processed food.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unhealthy lifestyles are prevalent and treating associated illnesses eg. poor diet, diabetes will be an increasing burden on the NHS.\n","id":"081b4347-4153-42b4-9994-45e1f3f0a2f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>According to Harvard Scientist Edward O. Wilson \"If everyone on the planet agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land 3.5 billion acres would support about 10 billion people.\" Since it is virtually impossible to keep every human on Earth from eating meat or raising livestock, we will be unable to support the food supply for 10 billion humans in 2050.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If all humans stopped eating meat, a highly unlikely occurrence in any scenario, scientists predict that Earth could have a maximum human carrying capacity of 10 billion A global population of 9.5 billion would be catastrophic to human life. We would most likely run out of food and freshwater long before the proposed population decline around 2070.\n","id":"4f277af1-c06f-4cfc-8f26-edcf22d7e37a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it a good thing that Dungeons & Dragons is the de-facto standard RPG?<|ARGUMENT|>Since imaginative, original content and story-telling is an integral part D&D, Dungeons and Dragons is a good \"trampoline\" that allows Dungeon Masters to play other genres of RPG, with little or no additional purchases or information.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dungeons & Dragons being the de-facto standard RPG is a good thing.\n","id":"6356b7e2-9d8b-46b4-83de-884e2c509168"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The other post got deleted for soapboxing, the OP was obviously not receptive to discussion and his original views, while I broadly agreed with them, weren't based in objective evidence. I wanted to continue this discussion, as I personally hold a pretty solid opinion against it but we were getting toward some reasonable exceptions and good discussion. So you can see where I've been so far ~~ ~~ Apparently those posts are invisible to everyone but me. Screencaps here My personal red line is integrated infantry units, for a lot of reasons, and I'm pretty iffy on if we should have integrated women into the support roles of infantry units. I lived through that, and even met my wife in a medical platoon of an infantry unit. Good points would be legitimate benefits to integration other than the empowerment of the women joining what good is that if we lose a war to a country that doesn't let women drive? , and proper examples where integration has been studied to have little ill effect in countries like Israel. As far as I know, integration in other countries has been pretty limited or even token . edit I didn't want to relitigate my entire view since it's provided in the screencaps, but the tl dr is women are more prone to musculoskeletal injury which is a problem in a profession that requires carrying 60 120lbs of extra weight, sexual relationships are a big problem in a combat environment, and the difference of medical needs and pregnancies are problematic as well. The problems seem to outweigh the expected upsides. edit 2 read starting page 14 of the PDF for those asking for evidence of higher injury rates in the military. edit 3 It seems discussion has died off, I want to thank those who participated in good faith, I did realign a bit on a couple of key points and I learned a few things although my core belief is unchanged. If anyone has anything to say I'm still monitoring this thread.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women Shouldn't Be Allowed to Serve as Infantry in the US\n","id":"c5189b43-4c3f-4d35-a918-296c78c960b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I myself support a big team that isn't in my area. I support Manchester United who are probably the biggest club in the world, because my father did. I also support my local club, Guernsey FC, but we are a few divisions below qualifying for the FA cup so we've got a while to go yet. But my point is that although I go to a game a season and watch matches, I'm not a true supporter. True supporters grow up in the city and go to home games and are part of the club. I find it hard to truly hate Liverpool because the culture of the rivalry escapes me. But, you hear fans saying that they are just as much a supporter because they get up early to watch a stream and that one time they visited Manchester or fell in love with the football. certainly not this season How detached must football be for these to be comparable These people, including me, are not proper supporters but merely fans. Edit Geographical Proximity when a club is decided upon. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who support big football clubs who aren't local are not real supporters, but merely fans.\n","id":"cf3b2bcf-13cd-42c6-8e0f-b81fec373d42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My issue with somebody not wearing a helmet on a motorcycle has nothing to do with my concern for their well being. This is America and I can't force someone to look out for their own personal safety, no matter how much I may want to. Simply put, the lack of a helmet can compound a minor traffic incident into a serious injury or death that would have not otherwise occurred had the rider been wearing a helmet. It is a lot like a seatbelt to me. Obviously it's not a 100 certain thing that you won't die wearing a seatbelt, but at least wearing a seatbelt significantly lowers the chance of somebody else having to scrape you up off the ground after an accident.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the US, It should be illegal to ride a motorcycle without a helmet.\n","id":"674963c7-9bfe-47f0-a54e-9b49695dc208"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's the post I found that prompted this I'm just not feeling it. Stylistically, the song is a lot closer to The Cars My Best Friend's Girl. This song is a lot slower feeling and less energetic. I've listened to this song a few times, and I've thought about Sweet Child O' Mine in my head, overlaying it, but it's just not fitting that well. I don't see how someone could listen to one song and think of the other. What is everyone seeing here? I know some basic music theory, so if you want to get technical that might help. Maybe they're in the same key?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Australian Crawl - Unpublished Critics sounds nothing like Guns 'n' Roses - Sweet Child O' Mine\n","id":"a89bd0f2-192f-4eb5-a263-d607e0f823ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Evangelicals vote for Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump mocked Elizabeth Warren\u2019s presidential campaign, again calling her \u201cPocahontas\u201d in a tweet before adding, \u201cSee you on the campaign TRAIL, Liz!\u201d The capitalized \u201cTRAIL\u201d is seemingly a reference to the Trail of Tears \u2014 a horrific act of ethnic cleansing in the 19th century in which Native Americans were forcibly relocated, causing thousands of deaths.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump has repeatedly referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren D-MA as \u201cPocahontas,\u201d and used her Native American heritage as a punchline to mock her.\n","id":"a19528ab-f237-426f-a16b-9ea563b26a42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For context, here in the UK you get five choices to apply for university. For each of these you choose the subject and university plus subsidiary college if relevant . I believe this is better than the US system where you pick what you want to major in up to a year or later into your university life. It seems to make more sense than spending a year or so doing a whole bunch of basic courses from different disciplines as the vast majority will not be at all relevant to your degree. It allows you to specialise earlier and spend more time actually doing the subject you are getting a Bachelors in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that students should apply for a specific subject at university.\n","id":"b3c7291b-9221-4fbc-9bc2-408b2efbf66f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The position I am taking here focuses on what is fundamental to many Christian denominations, but may not be in all of them. In the beginning Genesis there was a garden with a tree, usually symbolizing knowledge or life. Adam and Eve were told not to eat from the tree i.e. obey God . They non the less did it anyways. This is where we either became flawed or 'died' from a 'perfect human' depending on the theology. But many years later God sent His only Son, Jesus, to spread His word and ultimately to be sacrificed to pay for the sins that came after Adam and Even and including that ultimate sin. If Jesus is accepted to be part of the trinity, then it has been said that God sent himself to earth, to sacrifice himself, to himself, so that he can forgive us for the act that Adam and Eve did did he forsee this action? . For this  I am narrowing it to two specific views The proported act of sacrifice is morally wrong \u2014 no sacrifice to a deity could be considered moral in any circumstance. The modern spreading of this ghastly tale as a justification of faith is morally tainted by the first part. I will not entertain the idea that morality is relative. There are things that are wrong at any time, the standards of the day cannot be used to justify it. I will not entertain a superior morality of God, because it has not be established that He exists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The basis of Christianity is immoral: They tell us that we are flawed, but don't fret, we have the solution.\n","id":"091c0594-57a9-479f-9f82-eb9f0f2ef8d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Daenerys Targaryen the Prince\/Princess that was Promised?<|ARGUMENT|>The Ghost of the High Heart prophesizes the deaths of Renly Barathon and Balon Greyjoy, the resurrection of Catelyn Stark, as well as the Red Wedding and the Purple Wedding.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The woods witches have a good record in terms of correctly predicting future events.\n","id":"59e54fc8-9345-418d-b7b9-67cd0b35d3a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gillette's toxic masculinity ad good?<|ARGUMENT|>Some corporations are based on and practice variants of Care Ethics Such a corporation's members feel, or are encouraged to feel, that it is their obligation to improve society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A corporation can have altruistic elements, so that not everything they do is strictly and directly related to earning profits.\n","id":"15eeb4ec-a079-45d2-8bb4-bfb71af3e17f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Increase the Number of Votes For People Who Pay More Taxes?<|ARGUMENT|>It is difficult to fully appreciate the needs of others when there is no frame of reference; for people in the lowest socioeconomic brackets, there are specific challenges that others may not appreciate having not lived through it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wealthy people don't have the necessary experience and social feeling to be able to support causes that help the disadvantaged get ahead.\n","id":"4310ba22-3929-4fd1-a845-dc23db74ab80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>The Catholic church used the Inquisition to prosecute anyone who espoused views deemed as heretic for example, some scientific ideas convicting people to different sentences, including death by burning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People have been led to do terrible things in the name of religion.\n","id":"5554f40d-6ff3-4891-8c11-30b318c31d1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Well, some of the following may be somewhat excused as they aren't as developed as the average OECD country, but I still have a negative view of them regardless. Brazil this one is special because this is the country where I was born and currently live. Besides the typical developing country problems I have the belief that developed countries are better in everything and the issue of it getting an elderly population before becoming rich, there's also the issue of the Amazon. The Amazon is the biggest rainforest in the world and it's very important in regulating the weather in southeastern South America. But the issue is that it is being chopped down in an alarming rate and the president says the research is lying. He doesn't care about the deforestation and he chose a guy that cares even less to be the minister of the environment. The deforestation issue is so serious that sanctions are being considered. The country is more or less allowing the destruction of an important ecosystem to own the left or whatever. Russia Yes, their democracy is literally younger than Taylor Swift, but their worship of Putin annoys me^ 1 . This country is sanctioned, so you know that they do a lot of shit. They didn't give up their imperialistic past, they don't regret the shit they did during the Soviet times BTW Germany only regretted their Nazi times because they were forced to for losing the war , and I don't need to say anything about the issues with LGBT people. India I don't know very much about India, so I will spare them from most of my criticism. China the soon to be main superpower or they'll share it with the USA and we'll get Cold War II . That probably means that C pop will dominate the radios worldwide, wuxias IDK what kind of movie the Chinese like to make would be watched worldwide, and children will learn Mandarin. The problem? China makes Russia look like a plain democracy. China makes a lot of shit and it's excused because the economy is good and that the rest of the world is too economically dependent of them. I fear that the rest of the world will copy China's authoritarian rule. South Africa most of SA's problems are typical developing country problems, so I will spare them from most of the criticism. I would criticize their belief of the cure of AIDS being raping a virgin, but even developed countries have harmful unscientific beliefs G, I hate the 2010s .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have a bad view of the BRICS.\n","id":"bbfb5345-3762-418a-b412-1a0a4536ffe0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious education be compulsory in public schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Understanding the specifics and foundations of a religion can be grounds for tolerating its differences and arguing against hate speech.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A course on religion would create understanding, which is powerful foundation for true tolerance and harmony.\n","id":"bf1c2676-985b-4459-aac4-a1564461637b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A permanent venue for the Olympic Games?<|ARGUMENT|>A permanent venue goes against the spiritual basis of the Olympic Games as being an international sporting event.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A permanent venue is not compatible with the spirit of the Olympic Games.\n","id":"646757bc-6d19-4afd-95c9-117bfeea334a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Humanity Be Better Off Under A Global Government?<|ARGUMENT|>Diversity of mindsets, cultures and eventually, governments, is more effective survival strategy. Different people pay attention on different things and react to threats differently. Therefore, the most complex understanding of the world and the best optimized responses to future threats are achieved only if governance remains diverse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The world is too different to function under one government.\n","id":"f26e2e8e-c482-40aa-a837-a9adc94dbae2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The gun debate is a huge part of the discussions which come up after each mass shooting in America. One of the most common responses levied at the idea of reforming gun laws is that The Second Amendment grants a right to bear arms to all American Citizens, therefore reforming gun laws is not possible. This does not make sense to me. The subject of the conversation is changing laws, so pointing to an existing law which disagrees with the suggested changes is a non argument. The Constitution is not a religious text, it is subject to change, and has been added to many times in the past. What reason other than unpopularity is there that The Second Amendment cannot be changed in order to for example prevent people on the FBI watchlist from owning firearms? As far as I know, there is not one, and this non argument does not make sense. Reddit, make this argument make sense to me and change my view EDIT It seems my view has in essence been changed. Rather, my original premise appears to be false. The argument made it has been explained to me is not You can't legislate my guns away because of the second amendment. I now understand that the argument being made is It would be really hard to legislate my guns away because of the second amendment. However, if your argument is still that You can't take my guns away because of the second amendment. then I still consider your argument a non argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"It's in the constitution\" is not an intellectually valid argument for not changing gun ownership laws.\n","id":"16362e9f-e4e3-4ed6-8684-eaa58367aa79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>About every day I get reminded of Congress thankfully working together to figure out what exactly America's response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria will be in the coming days. If you're following, the most recent set date is next Tuesday when Obama will address the world about the latest on his views on the decision. I remember before he announced that Congress would be working together, it seemed as if he was just ready to give the order to strike Assad. Well, I just feel that once it finally begins, it will only just escalate. I think that countries will then finally give their 100 stance on Syria so that they could get into the fight. I'm betting Iran will probably do something to piss us off and that Russia China might do something. I feel that this limited strike will just turn into something ugly foreign policy wise that might even have repercussions during the Olympics besides the whole gay issue in Russia . I know that the message Obama wants to give via these strikes is to make sure that no one feels right using chemical weapons, but what exactly will happen after the first couple of strikes if the Syrian regime is still alive? More strikes? More military intervention boots on the ground ? God forbid, nukes haha yes I know that's a stretch ? I also feel that even if Congress puts its people's views first with voting no, Obama will still go on with the strike since he probably wouldn't want to be seen by other country leaders, who would do what Assad had allegedly done to his people, as a Kim Jong Un with his empty threats. In the end, I know that something has to be done about the chemical weapons in Syria, but does it have to be at the cost of another possible war we might get ourselves into?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have a feeling that our American intervention will be greater than just missile strikes possibly boots on the ground shortly after the strikes begin.\n","id":"54ac75eb-c39e-4732-a4bf-aff43907fa87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>The introduction of the birth control policy in China, a highly patriarchal society, saw many harmful outcomes for the female population, with a massive rise of sex-selective abortions and female infanticide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Patriarchal societies have an interest in perpetuating a societal system traditionally run by men. They do this through the idea of fixed gender identities and roles.\n","id":"34e1cbcd-98ce-4d51-ad0a-004872c3c0b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that our planet environment is the most important part of our lives, as such, demands our highest respect and consideration. It is should be paramount in decision making above all else. Definition the environment the natural world, as a whole or in a particular geographical area, especially as affected by human activity Why Our and all other life is contained on our planet, our food and water and air come from it, it supports us. We owe it to ourselves to ensure that our source of life continues on, and continues on supporting healthy lives for the current population and future. As well as the other inhabitants to sustain a healthy environment, now that we, as a species, can impact the environment on a global scale. tl dr You wouldn't shit in your kitchen sink.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Environment is the most important aspect of our lives.\n","id":"a26b9416-a407-455b-8d1a-20643491d516"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>Liberalism already predicates equality under the law for all human beings, and does so before feminism. Feminism, on the other hand, places the focus on a group, switching the terms of the argument from universal to group-based recognition. This is a trojan horse for an awful, primitive thought-process that inevitably will, in the long run, work against equality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are comparatively better ways to believe in equality than being a feminist.\n","id":"5748e40d-ea21-450b-9297-064c467bab8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should genetic engineering be used on humans or animals?<|ARGUMENT|>Genetic engineering on animals could cause an imbalance in the ecology of a specific region. nature.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetic engineering should not be used on humans or animals.\n","id":"5794b1a5-d94c-4601-a6f0-a0b1c162d940"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>Many US governmental agencies are running on autopilot without being reauthorized. This allows ineffective programs to continue for years without oversight.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government should not intervene as government intervention is generally ineffective.\n","id":"bbcdb3b1-938b-4f5e-be89-a1cc0a64d146"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the lowest a comment on reddit in terms of karma should be able to go is 0. The reason being is that the majority of comments in the negatives are either trolls or people with opinions controversial to whatever subreddit they are on. By downvoting trolls, you are just encouraging them. By downvoting controversial opinions, you're just creating an echo chamber which reddit is terrible for. By making 0 the lowest karma value for a comment, it discourages trolling and encourages different opinions. As for downvoting people like racists or spammers, it won't be as necessary so long as the moderators of that community properly handle reports, and that the users actually report those comments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Comments shouldn't have negative karma\n","id":"4567d0a7-6add-49e5-bfbf-b5f818234762"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pretty self explanatory. If a gay couple love each other and are respectable tax paying citizens then they should have every right to marry each other and receive those benefits of marriage. I also cannot understand why anyone would not want to pass an anti discrimination bill for gays. You don't have to love gay people, but if you think that it should be legal to fire someone just for being gay then you aren't just standing behind your bible anymore, you're actually just being hateful, probably out of your own insecurities over your masculinity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you stand in the way of full equality for gays then you're just an ignorant jerk on the wrong side of history\n","id":"77a2cb5f-760f-4ca0-b6d6-bca31da68095"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Over the past 3 5 years, with the rise of the alt right, there has been an increased scrutiny of black Americans and the issues that plague their communities. White conservatives, like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, have been critical of the Democrats' treatment of and relations with the black community, which they see as exploitative. They think that black people blame most of their problems on systemic racism, which, according to them, hasn't existed since 1964, and are not willing enough to improve their socioeconomic condition, which is why they rank low in things like average household income 39,490 . They've also been deeply critical of BLM, whose efforts to eradicate anti black racism from law enforcement, in the wake of those many shootings, is misguided and they should instead focus on black on black violence or inner city violence , which is a bigger problem. . These criticisms clearly exploit untrue stereotypes about black Americans, since the value of a post secondary education is highest among African Americans than any other ethnic group and there are plenty of black community leaders fighting back against black on black crime. Black Americans are still dealing with the crippling legacy of centuries of racist laws and policies. Those with a college degree are unemployed at a slightly higher rate than white high school graduates and have twice as much debt as their white counterparts after 4 years of completing the degree. In fact, the unemployment rate of blacks is twice as high than that of white people at every level of education. On average, the heads of black households who have college degrees are worth 10,000 less than white heads who only have some high school education. Black families that earn an income of at least 100,000 live in poorer neighborhoods than families who make half that. There's a lot more where this came from, if you're interested All of this evidence seems to suggest that being a white child in the U.S. gets you access to more privileges and opportunities than being a black one. It also shows that black Americans exhibit a high degree of personal responsibility and professional ambition, contary to what many far right conservatives say. Recognizing that blacks face a lot more obstacles than whites do, on account of their race, is not an admission of defeat rather, it's a sobering reminder that we have not yet escaped racism and, in order to defeat it, we need to open a constructive dialogue on how we can champion this through establishing equity. This can't happen if people choose to be colorblind. I think, because white conservatives have not been successful in communicating their views to black folks and have been lambasted many times for engaging in racial stereotyping, that they have tried make their message more affable by relaying it through a black proxy e.g. Candace Owens, Alan Keyes, Stacey Dash, etc. Statements like wanting to free blacks from the shackles of a plantation mentality or I will not accept the narrative that blacks are victms. Victors only club sound better coming from a black person and makes it more difficult to label it as racist. It seems to me that this role is pretty much the glass ceiling for black individuals in the conservative alt right movement. All of this is not to say that black people can't be conservative or not vote Democrat. Every American has the right to think independently. In fact, a lot of the values many black Americans hold fall in line with the Republican platform personal responsibilty, a strong faith and religious affiliation, etc. But, what black voters have realized, like I outlined previously, is that Republicans won't stick their necks out for them and address the racial component of political economic issues, in fear of angering their predominantly white voter base. Democrats, albeit not effectively sometimes, are not afraid to do this and have been more open to black people in their leadership.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black conservatives\/far-right pundits are used by white conservatives as a proxy to express their more politically incorrect views on black issues.\n","id":"7629b155-4ab1-4004-8be9-53c6997ade32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>They have very cheap flights possibly the cheapest in the country on average . They allow 2 free checked bags, which along with the cheaper flights make it basically impossible to beat if you're flying with a checked bag or two. They also let you check a bicycle instead of a bag if you want. I've never had a bad experience with them, and with the UpliftingNews story from today along with many other stories it seems like, overall, people tend to have a good experience with them. Personal example of that I got delayed for 2 3 hours in Baltimore, and as an apology for the wait SW gave everyone on that flight a 100 voucher for future travel when they didn't have to. They have a good record of being on time with their business model of something like 30 minutes between touchdown to takeoff. To me they seem like the obvious choice of airlines within the country. They are cheap, easy, and nice and seem to know what they are doing. Obviously no company is perfect and I'm not saying that I'm just saying they are better than the other airlines out there. Also for flying business first class SW probably isn't the best because of the lack of 1st class seating and the business class is basically just the front rows of the normal seating. I think that despite that they are still the best. An airline's priority seating, at least to me who would never pay extra to fly business first, doesn't make them a better airline. Airlines are in the business of getting people to and from and I believe that SW does that the best.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Southwest Airlines is the best airline in the USA.\n","id":"200802e4-8d56-4130-9c7d-5a1e09b1f63b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, let me say that I do not condemn religion as a whole, and I think everyone is free to decide what to believe in. My problem is with the internet atheists who claim they are the champions of science and Bill DeGrasse Sagan. Scientific method teaches us to always doubt truths , and things we hold as facts might be disproven at any time. For example, Newton's laws were thought to be correct at every situation, but that's not the case in Quantum or Relativistic Physics. So I think it's contradictory when people in r atheism or similars claim to be so scientific paragons while claiming with all their forces that there is no God and that this is a fact. Agnosticism, in the other hand, claims we can't know for sure if there's any God not only the Judeo Christian , and I think this is more akin to the scientific method. Change my view. Edit u LessThanSense already changed my mind, but thanks for all the opinions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the most \"scientific\" stance in Religion is agnosticism.\n","id":"3511fa02-f72b-48f9-a7f4-82ffe412cbb7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Spoilers ahead I am not here to argue it is a bad movie or even that it's gender politics are horrible.In fact, it is well made and entertaining. I liked it.Its basically a female version of the Thor schtick.The thing is, it upholds two planks of gender inequality that are generally implicitly endorsed by most people Women have a value that goes beyond what males have in and of themselves, and men can be worthy by sacrificing themselves for others, or a worthy cause. Ok so how is this revealed in the movie? Before Diana leaves home her mother tells her out straight that 'men do not deserve her' and this theme is returned to again and again.Its not that she is a goddess, you don't have to look here to find the sentiment itis EVERYWHERE Sex and The City, Girls, Even ads 'because you're worth it'. The idea that women have special worth, are goddesses, are diamonds in the rough is ubiquitous in our culture. In the third act of the movie, Steve Trevor, Kills himself to save thousands. This is classic male disposability.A male's life in and of itself is not up to much, but it can be vindicated by killing himself for a greater good. Almost all movies these days repeat this theme. Think of Mad MAx, widely hailed as sounding some good Feminist notes, after Max derails his plan to help Furiosa, risks his lifef several times and wades through shit once Furiosa has been installed in a sweet powerful position in the end, what is Max's next move? Ehh to bugger off and let her have what he helped her get. So The MRAs in my estimation are tone deaf whingers for complaining about a handful of cinemas barring them from a movie, but if they had gone to see the movie, it would have recapitulated gender divergent perceptions of men and women, especially that men need to die and women need to survive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the MRAs had been allowed into The Wonder Woman screening, their beliefs would have been justified by the content of the movie\n","id":"c7b7d966-d280-40e8-a9ff-84850e7f0c64"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>For a universal Moral Law to exist, there must be a sort of 'order' in the universe. This order in the universe is what dictates humans acting\/reacting according to the universal Moral Law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"C.S. Lewis reasoned from universal experience that universal law exists and thus, a universal law-giver exists.\n","id":"b7a06636-1108-4b59-b1e2-037ecb998d12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Ethical hedonists do not commit murder for pleasure, as this would not only end another's life and thus, potential for pleasure and cause pain, but would also cause fear in others of this being repeated. While killing an animal is not considered \"murder\", similar logic could be applied.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ethical hedonism takes into account the pleasures of all parties involved, including animals which are capable of sensation and\/or emotion.\n","id":"8eb25c31-74d1-42b8-b7fd-257a2a310112"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>This is clearly beneficial for countries that face threats to their own country as it allows them to ensure the protection of their citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An increase in military efficiency allows the military more flexibility to quickly respond to issues when necessary.\n","id":"aab240e3-531d-45fd-9616-38a7a8769ca4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that guns allow people to defend themselves, provide food for their families, and protect against the government should it overstep its bounds. Bans like they have in the UK, Australia, Germany, and Japan have done nothing to curb their murder rates and crime rates, and if they had guns then the crime rates and murder rates would be lower. Also, guns are fun, and they're protected by the 2nd Amendment. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gun control is not necessary in America, and, in fact, we should have less of it.\n","id":"3684f8ac-afe2-4a82-9871-26dfe5cef318"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans, as \"imago de are created to stand in a relationship to god They have the mental ability to realize that there is a god and are capable of religion and spirituality, animals do not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are the counterpart of god provided with an immortal soul. Animals are, according to the Bible, subjects to humankind.\n","id":"4a0e1346-21c0-4d9e-94a4-a11d402f65ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's what's humane anything quick, relatively painless, and not very prone to error. Humane methods Firing squad. Really all you need is a single bullet to the head, but whatever. Firing squad does the trick. It's over in a second. Beheading. As in, guillotine style. Again, super quick. Blowing from a gun. That's where the person is stood in front of a cannon and blown to pieces. No longer in use, for various understandable reasons. Not very humane methods Lethal injection. Complicated process. Can be botched. If so, can be very painful. It's not quick. Hanging. Again, can be botched. Everything has to go right. And if it doesn't, very painful death. Electrocution. Are you kidding? Why this barbaric method is still in use in some places boggles the mind. Excrutiatingly painful when done properly , not quick, and yes, can be botched relatively easily. You'll notice the humane methods have two things in common they apply immense, swift, blunt force, and they're gory. The latter is key, I think, to why they're not universally used. Lethal injection looks better . It's not bloody. Hanging and electrocution aren't bloody. Thus the delicate sensibilities of those watching the execution are spared. The term humane as it's commonly thrown around is a euphemism for stomachable for viewers .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some methods of execution are clearly more humane than others, and if we're going to execute criminals, we should use only humane methods.\n","id":"162f18bf-ad26-4676-a25e-0f6e1d813427"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>The problem of objectifying real women is that they have agency beyond just being a sexual object, and that being seen as such actively diminishes that agency in other areas. For sex robots, which are literally sexual objects, there is no such harm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This neglects the misandry that could go on should there be a male sex robot.\n","id":"b1ddbcd7-b2fc-4522-8768-24c5a315c0c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The United States should abolish the capital gains tax<|ARGUMENT|>Trickle down theory incorporates laissez-faire economics which fails to create a fair and productive economy evidenced by the need for the anti-trust Sherman Act Thus, abolishing the capital gains taxes would remove this trickle down monopolizing effect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abolishing the capital gains tax is literally part of trickle down theory There is a lack of evidence that trickle down economics actually works, including in such a big country, like the US\n","id":"f4a94bdf-7847-4b39-88fc-157c93d0a8e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>An analogy to support the parent: examine a ship. Imagine we look at it's course over the interval of a day, and we isolate a period of time that it drifts aimlessly, because the engines are turned off. We would be incorrect to hold up the period of time that the ship was drifting, with engines off, as proof of the conclusion that the ship cannot chart a path. This is precisely the same as stating people have no ability to choose behavior because they sometimes behave without choosing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The identification of a subgroup of decisions that are not subject to consciousness decision making processes does not preclude choice from the larger group of decisions outside the given subgroup.\n","id":"0e3b97ca-f778-4c79-a043-dd99ebf1cd0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>so mindset and confidence seems to be the big go to when someone is struggling with a problem. primarily one that is socially connected. so yes that man who has a fulfilling, well paying career, a great large set of friends, access to the best parties and is never short of a beautiful woman happens to be confident and have a positive mindset. I don't know anyone who is successful and is depressed about it so likely he is confident because of his success. on the other hand a man who struggles with moving up the career ladder despite having the qualifications, does not have too many friends, and is constantly rejected or even humiliated by women for asking them out is most likely going to have a negative mindset, low confidence and what experts on the internet call a piss poor attitude. it's more likely his poor attitude is the result of his terrible circumstances than the other way around. this came from experts because mindset is an easy go to. Anyone can claim to be a mindset expert. Especially the assholes who go about it in a very scornful manner. for example a man could have trouble maintaining eye contact during a conversation. so then he goes out there and practices maintaining eye contact while he talks to people. over time he gets better and his results get better. and thus he gets a less jaded outlook of the world. think about it like anything else. losing weight. someone has trouble losing weight. would you tell them its beciase pf their bad attitude or look at something else like diet or exercise routine? tldr successful people having positive mindsets doesn't suggest the converse to be true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the whole mindset movement is just another trend that avoids solving problems.\n","id":"a60b2d0a-842e-42d5-8412-69d867c70097"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should renewable energy sources replace fossil fuels?<|ARGUMENT|>For base load they should and could Better transmission methods would be needed though, to balance load and generation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Renewable energy sources and sufficient energy storage should replace fossil fuels for grid power.\n","id":"ca24357c-7e9a-4e2d-a9db-ccaa0e9e11e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think it's way too much. Why in the world is a guy like Allen Iverson expected to pay several million dollars in child support to his ex wife? There is no reason for her to be paid any more than is necessary to allow the wife and child to live a modest lifestyle. I understand the quality of life and income from when they were together plays a factor, but it is way too much. Please if I am missing something here, . Would also love to hear from a spouse currently receiving child support payments as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the amount fathers are expected to pay for child support is too high.\n","id":"a58df3a7-cc10-4118-a5b1-7f232f2b56d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Children Be Allowed to Have Facebook Accounts?<|ARGUMENT|>Kids, along with pets and imaginary people already do have accounts. I've taught eighth graders who have Facebook accounts and simply lie about their age. There are many school activity groups including debate sports that only have people born after 2011 in them. There are also groups\/pages like sesame street or Miley Cyrus, which are again populated almost entirely by those under 13. Making a Facebook account is child's play. Surely it would be better to allow children to have these accounts, to post their real ages and to allow for parental controls. Kids do not respond well to being wrapped in cotton wool and despite what the media say incidences of 'predetors' are actually quite small. It is only by being open with children and alerting them to the potential pitfalls of online life that we can truely protect them from the few out there that are out to prey on them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kids already do have accounts, along with pets and imaginary people\n","id":"cdc39081-2d44-4851-ac6a-0cf97cb47597"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Following a new barrage of rocket launches in the south of Israel, I believe there's no other end to this conflict than what the title says Eventually Israel will run out of international supporters. The UK, USA, Germany and France are steadily moving left thanks to the rise of the far right scaring people from center and as more baby boomers pass away. These governments will be loath to support Israel diplomatically, economically and militarily, making a joint Arab militar operation against them more feasible. The rest of the Muslim world is becoming more and more Islamist, leaving Israel without any diplomatic assistance from neutral Arabic Muslim countries. Turkey is about to become an Islamic republic after a century of secularism. Saudi Arabia is itself under fire internationally and locally. More and more people support the Palestinian cause and denounce Israel's policies as apartheid. Money will keep flowing towards Palestine terrorist groups while sanctions and boicots will hurt Israel's economy, leaving them more vulnerable to attacks. Eventually that fragile position economically and diplomatically will lead Israel to at least give Palestines living in Israel the same voting rights and ending the settlements in the West Bank. Without the settlements, chances of successful attacks from the West Bank and Golan Heights against Israeli territory will increase, making living in Israel much more dangerous than before. With Palestines giving political power in Israel, it's only a matter of time until their demographic advantage gives them the power to initiate the same sort of ethnic cleansing Muslims have carried out in every territory they've gained power over like it happened to Mizrahi Jews . This, assuming Palestina doesn't gain sufficient militar support from their new Islamist allies in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as economic and diplomatic support or at least indifference to their actions from their new allies in Western Europe and the USA to conduct an invasion of Israel to implement a two nation solution , effectively giving them the power to carry out a genocide or ethnic cleansing at their will without having to become Israeli citizens first. As a result, either Jews living in Israel leave before it's too late, or they stay and get massacred.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only logical conclusion to the Israel-Palestine conflict is either the extermination of Jews in Israel or a new Diaspora\n","id":"d3fda29a-88b3-4b67-b9be-dfd86a54a65f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>About twice as many jobs may have been lost i.e. an estimate of almost 17 million jobs. This may have meant unemployment peaking to almost 16% rather than 10%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to a study the 2009 financial crisis would have ended up hurting the US economy even more if it were not for Obama's economic policies.\n","id":"eeb88a54-70e4-4926-872c-1733a61f7d02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Given the close link between Christianity and conscientious objection, legalising it is akin to conferring special rights upon Christian citizens and granting them privileged treatment that no other citizens receive. This is discrimination.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Laws permitting conscientious objection are discriminatory in favour of Christianity and against other religions.\n","id":"4f4e7217-a03b-4906-b9b8-82076c001cc3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone mentions this montage when discussing Up. That is a beautiful sequence, and it stands alone as an animated short wonderfully. However, there is much more to 'Up' that is quite mediocre. The villain is unimpressive when compared to Claude Frollo or Scar. The soundtrack is unremarkable when compared to 'Beauty and the Beast' or many of the songs from 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'. The animation in 'Up' isn't revolutionary like 'Toy Story', 'Finding Nemo', or even 'Tangled' and 'Frozen'. Much of the humor seems to play off a grouchy old man and a youngster, and it feels more gimmicky to me than 'Frozen' where I feel Olaf is just genuinely funny . In fact, the best I can say about 'Up' is that it feels cute, where as I can name many other Disney and Pixar films which achieved a greater emotional response from me 'Beauty and the Beast', 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame', and for animated shorts consider 'The Old Mill' I know emotional response is subjective, and so that is why I tried to make more objective arguments about 'Up's' animation, soundtrack, etc. 'The Secret of Kells', to me, is the single best animated film yet to be made. It has a unique animation style that is visually stunning It's soundtrack is haunting, beautiful, and supports the film appropriately. Also, 'The Secret of Kells' deals with a much greater level of themes than 'Up' does. 'The Secret of Kells' deals with the role of art and religion in culture, it deals with the transition from Paganism to Christianity and how Christianity still retains many Pagan residues, and at it's core it can be viewed as an story about the very nature of stories, their origin, and their role in society. At best, 'Up' is just a movie about the sentimentality of growing old. I really like how much more grand the ideas behind 'The Secret of Kells' are. With all of that, 'The Secret of Kells' can still be viewed at an uncritical level and be enjoyable. I'm totally willing to reconsider my position on 'Up', but I just feel like 'The Secret of Kells' really spoke to me. I'll defend that movie against everyone in the world if I have to. Anyways, throw your best shot at me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that 'Up' is an overrated film and that 'The Secret of Kells' was robbed of the best animated picture oscar in 2009.\n","id":"09a4a09a-2df1-4cb9-bd93-26d3be72194e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should Self-Driving Cars Kill?<|ARGUMENT|>In the instance of a plane hijacking there is a high degree of risk and uncertainty in knowing what the hijackers plans are. In contrast the physical movement of cars is much more predictable and causation easier to establish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The case cited in that ruling is not analogous to that of a car crash.\n","id":"f8bd3adf-ccd6-4fc3-b167-575c029b1a55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In a fairly recent public 2016 study, pro EU Flemish separatists went on strike across Flanders, protesting the right wing French south. It seems ridiculous that this tiny Dutch speaking community, now integrated into the European Union along with their northern kin are still pressing for autonomy, however even with the ability to pass the border easily the Belgian government centralized in Wallonia with strong ties to the right wing french don\u2019t exactly line up with Amsterdam\u2019s left leaning political spectrum. In this tense EU with Poland and Hungary drifting away, conflict is popping up everywhere. Many news organizations refuse to give the movement attention to give the impression of a united west fighting Putin\u2019s east, which is unacceptable. Many factors such as exclusion from the article 54 conferences and Wallonian integration have left Belgium in chaos, but Flemish nationalism is much more than just a tipping point, it\u2019s the centrepiece of the sudden turmoil in this tiny nation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Flemish Nationalism is what will ruin Belgium\n","id":"c48e138e-f92e-49b5-a064-96d6ec1bd461"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I learned this from my mother. My boyfriend learned it from his dad. I have no idea exactly how common this is, but I've seen it frequently. The only justification I can recall is that if it's ahead you'll always be on time. And I just really question the legitimacy of this. You can only speed so much, and by the time you get into your car, you're pretty much already locked into being late or on time in most cases. So what good is thinking you're running late? Further, since there's no way that I know of to have it be ahead by a random amount, I doubt it would take long before you just have the exact time difference memorized, and then you're just subtracting mentally to determine the real time anyway, defeating the point. The only reason I can see maintaining this practice is tradition. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Setting your car clock a few minutes head is pointless.\n","id":"d122343d-cfc7-46a7-9908-00cf75ee088b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The fight of western countries against climate change is hypocritical<|ARGUMENT|>Companies often use marketing e.g. adding animals and natural patterns to their products to make them seem greener, or even claim that their products are eco-friendly, even if they are not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many companies greenwash their products, which makes them seem ecological even though in fact they are not.\n","id":"510e304c-145d-4559-b1d0-eabf66356a60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>More recent studies have shown that exposure to pornography actually makes people less likely to commit sexual crimes by offering them a private means of acting upon their deviant desires.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Individuals can carry out their sexual desires and fantasies in virtual realities, reducing the amount of sexual crime that happens in physical reality.\n","id":"0636a406-9ad3-48d7-970b-45bf97541f99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Without getting into the argument over wether we SHOULD ban firearms, assault rifles, pistols, etc. I do not think it is possible to eliminate guns from our country. Unfortunately, there was a another school shooting. Unfortunately, there will be more. As soon as this happens, people start saying Ban all firearms or Ban all assault rifles The genesis for this line of thinking seems to be from the success of the Australia gun buyback program. In that program, the Australian government, as a reaction to the worst mass shooting in Australia raised 500 million weapons to buyback between 500,000 and 750,000 weapons from civilians. I do not believe a similar program will ever work in the United States. We have 350 million firearms in this country. Even if the 2nd Amendment was changed, based on the 5th Amendment takings clause, American gun owners would still have to be compensated for those weapons at the time they are confiscated. At a price of 1000 per gun an estimate of the average price of a weapon in this country based only on my experience that would cost 350 billion to remove every gun based solely on the value of the weapons Not including the cost of the program and the mountains of administrative costs. Even if a buyback were possible, it would be unenforceable. Given the large amount of gun owners in this country, the terrible records that have been kept of gun ownership thanks partially to lobbying efforts by the NRA and the ease of hiding a weapon, accounting for every gun would be an impossibility. Add to this the mechanism for enforcement of the ban. It would be prohibitively expensive to search every home for weapons. It would require federal agents possibly state agents, but many red states would resist this enforcement to show up to homes and confiscate weapons and arrest American citizens to enforce the ban. Given the problems that we have seen highlighted by incidents like Ruby Ridge and Waco in which federal agents attempt to take into custody people who are armed and do not wish to be disarmed, the level of bloodshed would be astronomical. While a large portion of gun owners would surrender their weapons, there is a very large portion that are so entrenched in their belief that they are entitled to their weapons as a god given right that it is likely to result in a civil war. In the United States, there is such an abundance of weapons and firearms are such a large part of our national identity that eliminating weapons is impossible on any practical level.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eliminating any type of firearm from the United States is impossible\n","id":"b947451e-1c93-4cd4-b926-42531728431d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have seen countless Reddit posts about how TPP will break the internet and contains SOPA But, as someone educated in technology, this seems to be simply not true. The outcry over SOPA was that it was going to literally, actually break the internet The policies that were going to be put in place were a huge security risk and would have completely thrown DNS for a loop, adding massive complexity and multiple points of failure. The end result would have been literally the whole internet going down when some random ISP gets hacked, legal pages being taken down all the time, and legitimate DNS queries being messed up constantly. It would have been a disaster. Now, there are tons of people who are anti free trade. I am not, but this isn't what my view is based on. These anti free traders are the ones claiming that TPP contains SOPA when really it does not. There is no mention of DNS, no mention of quarantining entire servers. The closest thing I have seen is that they can encourage ISPs to police themselves, which already happens in most Western countries. TPP is not terrible for the internet. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"TPP Does not contain provisions like SOPA that will break the internet, and those saying it will are anti-free trade, and lying to harness the anger that SOPA created.\n","id":"1829408e-1089-43b8-8982-063a9f6e3a5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>Americans tend to support the Constitution and its writers, viewing it as an important document to set out rules by which the Government functions. This viewpoint should be respected.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The judicial system should abide by the rules set down by the American founding fathers.\n","id":"23127caf-e938-400d-bd33-2929339b3ee5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Deleted and readded for correct title. Full disclosure I work in healthcare and watch hundreds of clients OD sadly, as the drug epidemic is out of control. We saw this coming years ago, and Nixon decided to launch his War on Drugs. Instead of realizing drugs were addictive and people got better with treatment, he beefed up the Federal Drug control agencies and pushed stuff like mandatory sentencing and no knocking warrants. In the 80s and 90s drug use soared, started becoming glorified. Zero tolerance policies became a thing. Bill Clinton tried to push some policies to advocate for treatment, but of course was run over by the republican push for the war on drugs. Bush comes in and pushes even HARDER, only to be semi slowed by some states. Fast fwd a few more years, some states start to make marijuana laws, but yet 700,000 folks are arrested for pot every year and almost 500,000 people still behind bars for nothing more than a drug law violation. per drug policy.org Convince me that the War on Drugs worked, as all i see is skyrocketing addiction. Convince me why decriminalization is a bad thing and why someone should be held behind bars note more frequently when black as long as a violent offender<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The war on drugs is a failure and I support decriminization\n","id":"91691ac2-deae-459a-8200-60a6e6907a76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the FBI Right to Keep the Pedophile Site Playpen Online After Hacking It?<|ARGUMENT|>Where victims cannot or do not report crimes the government has to take affirmative action to fill that void.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Victims rarely report the crime, making it even more difficult to identify and track offenders.\n","id":"063b1086-599c-4808-9920-d13c85af8327"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Asset voting is a voting system where voters vote for the candidates, then the candidates exchange the votes amongst themselves until a fixed deadline, then the candidate s with the most votes win. Voting can either be done as a vote for a single candidate, or decimal numbers that add up to 1 vote given to multiple candidates. I think this voting system works really well because it allows multiple candidates to run on a diverse array of issues and politics, gives voters maximal choice in how to apportion their vote, and forces compromise and unity as candidates work together to find the policies that suit the most voters possible. The elected candidates would then be proven negotiators, making them better workers and more responsive government operators, and in the case of an elected council, the elected would be used to working together to get elected and negotiating in the council, forging bonds and unity that would greatly soothe our divided politics and partisanship. All this, and it would prevent dangerously divided or ideologically extreme candidates from taking office or wielding power over government, as nobody but the politicians with the ability to work with a wide variety of political views would actually be elected. Edits To add one more idea, weighted politicians. This is when the voting weights of each elected politician directly corresponds to their share of the assets among the total assets of the elected politicians. In other words, a 5 man council could see one person with 30 of the voting power because they had 30 of the assets. There are scenarios where vote equality among council members may be desirable, but I think that this idea has the potential to allow voters have an equal voice in their government and further encourages unity among candidates, as candidates with greater popular support end up with more power. Should there be some kind of limit on this? I'm not sure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Asset voting is a good voting system.\n","id":"865a8c29-a760-488d-96ac-2983570dccdd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>The gradual degeneration of humans' ecological niche, such as rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, global warming, and pollution, is aggravated by the population expansion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The earth is suffering from overpopulation. Every person less is an improvement.\n","id":"7682601b-3fb8-4f10-9c99-85af0170e042"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>The air is clean in Europe and the U.S. because all the dirty factories have been moved to China as the Summers memo suggests.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By exploiting the third world advanced societies do not foresteall clean nature, air or water.\n","id":"3728e6d9-2449-4eec-836f-52bec3112615"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems that most women identify themselves as feminists, and many have unique personal beliefs informed by their experiences and education. They each define feminist to mean someone who holds their particular beliefs. The trouble is, I've met women with very different views of what a feminist is and yet they all identify as one. The term seems to have very little or no meaning and sounds more like an obligation that women call themselves feminists as a matter of pride rather than an identification with a defined viewpoint.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe the term \"feminist\" has any significance anymore,\n","id":"aa784e09-788e-4d99-95b1-7c30a1ba5a9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everything about it is better The Story personally I believe the story of Shrek not only having to save his wife, unlike just the princess gives the story more depth to it. He has a more personal reason to go on this adventure, not just because of some land but because Fiona is the love of his life. The story also includes winning over your in laws, something many parents can relate to whilst watching it with their children. Additionally, Shreks journey from wishing he could be someone else to being happy with who he is sends a positive message to kids. The Jokes not just for kids but for adults too. Look no further than the Cops spoof Knights. Jokes about drugs and police brutality. Other iconic scenes include the Dinner with Shrek and his inlaws, the potion factory, the giant gingerbread man and the American Idol spoof. It's enough to keep the kids happy and make sure the parents don't want to blow their brains out The Characters the new characters presented in this movie elevate it to a whole other level. This movie is the introduction of the iconic Puss in Boots, who became so popular he got his own spin off. A deeper dive into Prince Charming and the introduction of other characters such as the Fairy Godmother who, unlike in children's books is the villain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shrek 2 is a better movie than Shrek 1\n","id":"6add7d6a-e45d-491c-9ee8-b175fad3fabd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Often income would go into a shared bank account for a couple. On the other hand, targeted welfare can often much more easily reach women or children directly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Often dominant members of households will abuse universal basic income to further their own needs instead of providing for their families.\n","id":"d699d330-2186-4f72-98b6-8591a3f54527"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Premier League Better than the Bundesliga?<|ARGUMENT|>RB Leipzig is critizised for being merely a marketing tool by experts and fans alike.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An Austrian billionaire bought the football team of Leipzig as well.\n","id":"c1c252a2-4fd4-4514-9dcc-b66d265d4bae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd like to start this thread by saying that I really want someone to change my view and convince me of another way of thinking, as I express, this one is unhealthy. Existential Nihilism, as transcribed from Wikipedia Existential nihilism is the physiological theory that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. With respect to the universe, existential nihilism suggests that a single human or even the entire human species is insignificant, without purpose and unlikely to change in the totality of existence. According to the theory, each individual is an isolated being born into the universe, barred from knowing \u2018why\u2019, yet compelled to invent meaning. I slowly came to realize this after I decided no religion can be proven right, and their doctrine seems too unrealistic to me, being disproved by science in many ways. My theological status would correctly be described as agnostic, because I don't believe we can factually prove that God exists or that he doesn't. Notice that I differentiate religion from God, I find religion false, while I find God unknown Without any way to prove there is a superior force that affects this world and works in our favor, life doesn't have an outcome, if I die today or 60 years from now, what happens afterwards is unknown, so I don't know what my life's meaning is, if there is actually one, what drives me to live? Another thing I should bring up is Faith. I find faith to be irrational and an attempt from people to give life meaning. Do I find it wrong? No, I actually find it to be the best thing about religion, making people feel well, and give their life meaning of some sort. But I am unable of such thing. Any faith I've been able to have is in myself, being that I have an irrational belief I will succeed in most of the stuff I do and in life. And somehow it works, but that's a discussion for another time Morals are also important when discussing this. I personally have morals and believe they are important to live in a society, and for the well being of myself and the people around me. Are these things important in the outcome of everything? No, but till I get completely subdued by this way of thinking, I must give blind importance to these morals. Despite this, other generally accepted morals I can't conform with and disagree, which I may create separate threads for. In my daily life, I entertain my mind with other things and ilude myself, namely by focusing on emotion and not rationality, but it always creeps around, so I wish to change it. PS I'd advice to refrain from trying to convince me of a religion or similar, it will likely lead nowhere, but I won't stop you and will discuss it with you as well as I can. I likely have spelling errors in all this text, but not enough patience to re read it, so I apologize. Edit I guess I am not really looking for a philosophical debate, because the reason of my question isn't entirely discussing philosophy. I meant an answer that while disproving nihilism, it would give some meaning to life. Answers that show contradiction in this philosophy don't really get me somewhere. My first mistake was not knowing existential nihilism well enough, I can't create meaning either. Or better said, I can, like anyone, create and give meaning, but it has no value and would be similar to faith, in the way that it is a coping mechanic to deal with the lack of meaning life comes with. After a user's comment, I realized that even if the Christian religion existed, while alive, the point of living was escaping eternal suffering, but after dying, going to Heaven or Hell, life would be pointless again as I see it. I guess I reach a conclusion that only emotion can give someone's life meaning, and that people must create that meaning, altought this conclusion in no way helps me overcome my personal struggle with having reasons to live.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Existential Nihilism, even if unhealthy, is a logical philosophy and can't be proven wrong\n","id":"d22c1036-34e4-410b-b4b6-e56091075f0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not trying to debate whether or not a child should act respectfully towards an adult or elder because I believe that every single person should deserve to be treated nicely and with respect. However, I don't think that just because someone is older, or has lived a longer life, necessarily means that they are always in the right or that they deserve more respect than others. If a child's mother disrespects them, then they should no longer have to respect her, and that is that they should not treat her rudely, but the respect that they have for her may be lower and that is fine. I remember when I was younger I would always be very upset that adults could disrespect me, or treat me badly, and I'd still have to treat them like royalty I don't encounter that as much now that I'm older, but it still doesn't make sense to me. I worry I'm not explaining my point well enough, but basically I will respect anyone that respects me, too. Adults and elders should not get a free pass to disrespect children or anyone else, for that matter. Children should be given the same amount of respect as adults and elders, and adults elders don't automatically deserve respect no matter what. If a child or anyone else doesn't respect an adult or elder, they should still treat them decently and in a civil manner, but they have no obligation to respect them. Edit First sentence is worded weirdly In my mind there's a difference between acting respectfully and actually respecting that person. You can treat someone decently without actually holding any respect towards them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adults and the elderly don't automatically deserve more respect than children\n","id":"28591e15-733e-40a1-9249-f0dda775e025"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public health systems fund homeopathy?<|ARGUMENT|>The placebo effect is real, and it is ethical to use it in conjunction with conventional therapies, by expressing confidence that the treatment will work, thus encouraging the patient to be optimistic, as well as be compliant with treatment. But the 'placebo effect' is different from ascribing benefit to the actions of the placebo, per se. This does not justify lying about the efficacy of the actual treatment, which is unethical.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The placebo effect can be very powerful, and can improve people's health.\n","id":"143e3de5-7ae2-46ec-8a98-fff2e554f004"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Often times people who are generally knowledgeable are labelled as well read . The way I see it, reading a novel is almost the same as watching a drama series, such as The Sopranos for example. Now I know that reading textbooks or other books whose main goals are to give out information are clearly different, but saying someone is well read doesn't usually refer to those types of books at least to my understanding . Generally speaking, the average person who spends their leisure time reading a book is usually seen as smarter than the average person that watches t.v. in their free time. Why is this?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that reading is no more beneficial to someones' knowledge than watching television is.\n","id":"0f81df55-c5e4-48db-840e-0a3f5165a021"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was thinking about this during the various discussions here about the Swiss and French bans. The real problem with the Burka and Niqab aren't that they cover people's faces. Yeah, that is used as an excuse, but I don't really believe for a second that it's about that. They just make people really uncomfortable to see, and most can't put their finger on why. I kind of realized what my personal problem with was. It has to do with the fact that Islam is not just a religion, but also a political movement. It is actually quite unique as a religion in this due to it growing up with an Empire carrying it around the world. It has its own set of rules sharia and its own non democratic form of governance the caliphate written straight in to its holy books. People ARE espousing both of those views when they wear the islamic uniforms, even if they don't actually want them. Now, political parties in the 1930's realized that political uniforms were fantastic. They allowed you to start small and then create localized with us or against us situations where voting effectively stopped being a private manner because if you didn't do the right things and wear the right clothes, you were against us. It became easier to just put on a bloody brown or black shirt than deal with the risks of not having one. This undermines democracy dramatically by limiting voting anonymity, creating a mainstreaming effect of your outlandish ideology and enabling bullying of those that do not buy in to the ideology. Many European democracies realized the dangers of this and banned political uniforms from public, which is essentially what the titles act was set to do. While it initially creates a minor sympathy vote for whoever was restricted, it removes an incredibly powerful anti democratic tool from them as well. My fundamental view on this is Islam and its visible signs are very, very similar to NSDAP and its brown shirts I know they're not literally Nazis, and I'm not saying they are, this is a tactical issue . It's a political movement that forces you to show colors or be ostracized, which is an incredibly powerful tool. Which is why it is an ILLEGAL tool. Religions are allowed this, because they aren't after political power and as such ignoring the mainstream pressure to dress like them isn't nearly as dangerous. With Islam, just as with NSDAP, you have this concern that if they ever get to 51 popularity, they are literally going to have you killed for what you've done unless you wear that uniform RIGHT FUCKING NOW this is if anything easier with Islam than with NSDAP, as any muslim who right now confesses that they don't really believe in Allah is a fucking dead man for Apostasy if Islam ever reaches 51 support in that country . This logic is what I suspect gives so many people the chills particularly in Europe when they watch people in visibly muslim garb. To summarize my view, and things you can shoot down 1 Islam is a political movement as much as it is a religion 2 Political movements are not allowed to wear uniforms due to the undemocratic potential of such a thing and this is a good thing 1 2 visibly muslim dress should be banned, at least until Islams political aspirations have calmed down perhaps they will have a reformation of sorts .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Public Order Act 1936 of UK should apply to muslim religious wear like the Niqab and Burka\n","id":"4001662b-05f1-40cb-9f1a-9b958850a427"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My political stance leans left, I fundamentally support the concept of democratic socialism, and the presidential candidate that I most identify with is Surprise surprise Bernie Sanders. But for the love of god, affirmative action is perpetuating the problem it is trying to solve. Creating programs that specifically cater towards minorities is just another form of racism in my view. As an example, let's say that two people of the same sex, gender, and sexuality are looking into scholarships at the same college. They made the same grades in HS, belong to the same economic class, participate in the same extracurricular activities, etc. The only difference is race one is white, and the other is Mexican Black Chinese anything besides white. In the end, the non white gets more scholarship money just because s he is in a minority. It isn't oppression, but it still favors one race over the other. Please provide me with a reason to support the Black Lives Matter style campaigns, I truly want to see why people think affirmative action is a good thing beyond we are making it up to them for enslaving their people and they tend to make less money get treated poorly so they deserve it . Edit View changed. Turning off notifications.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am mid-left wing, but I strongly disagree with affirmative action.\n","id":"07442926-dd4e-477a-aa20-f69865a276c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With doctors accruing nearly 200,000 in debt on average and giving up years of work to become one, if M4A was implemented it wouldn\u2019t make fiscal sense to go to medical school anymore. There are talks of 40 total reductions in reimbursements if it were implemented there would be significant cuts to not only the pay of physicians but also lower level employees such as nurses and PA\u2019s. This will make our shortage of doctors worse than the predicted 122,000 by 2032 Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If M4A were to be implemented in the US it wouldn't make fiscal sense to become a doctor anymore\n","id":"650e3821-b6c8-4c32-be0d-5c02874c5c5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Sex work has been around for millennia hence \"the oldest profession\" and there is no reason to believe it will ever go away. Legalizing it brings it out of the shadows and reduces the chances of abuse and unwanted exploitation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalization will allow for better protection of the rights of those engaged in sex work.\n","id":"b349f67e-1539-4bd5-8bb9-89575faf5765"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for elected bodies<|ARGUMENT|>If every district had 49% of party A and 51% of party B, all members of government would be from party B, which is a poor reflection of the population.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US Congressional elections discriminate against minority groups without sufficient concentration in a regional election to achieve representation in the final elected government.\n","id":"87e86ebc-df72-4338-9fa4-def0f41b98a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The US House of Representatives currently has 435 members. That number has been fixed since 1911. I think it should rise substantially, at least by several hundred, and probably up to around 1000 2000 members. The reason it is fixed at 435 is dumb It used to be that after every census, the Congress would reapportion the seats in the House based on population, and usually add a few. The reason the House has 435 members is that Congress decided, after the 1920 Census, not to reapportion seats, because northern cities had grown a lot and they didn't want to give them more votes. This was crassly partisan and unconstitutional. As an eventual compromise, a formula was derived to automatically reapportion the then current 435 based on new censuses, without adding more seats. Congressional districts are too large Individual members of Congress on average represent more than 700,000 people. That is far too many to provide effective constituent services. It also means that very large and disparate areas get lumped together, as even medium size cities need to share their representative with other areas. Large districts allow gerrymandering Because most states don't have that many Congressional districts, and those they do have are very large, it is possible to effectively gerrymander them. As the number of districts increases, mathematics necessitates that the partisan vote share more closely approach the partisan split of seats. For instance, suppose two districts which voted 60R 40D and 10R 90D. That gets you 1 D and 1 R on a vote of 35 R 65 D. If each of those districts splits in two, you're more likely to get 3 D and 1 R, which is closer to the actual vote. Larry Sabato has a good article which touches on that here Other countries have far fewer constituents per representative The UK House of Commons the model the US House was built on for instance has 650 seats, and each member represents roughly 70,000 people. The Canadian House of Commons has 308 seats and rises with the next election representing about 110,000 people each. I don't see too much downside to this. It doesn't require amending the constitution or radically rethinking our governance. The institution will change a little, but it doesn't change the majoritarian nature of the body or the electoral system by which members are chosen. I could see doing it graudally, over a 10 or 20 year period, so you don't have a single influx of freshmen throwing off the institutional balance, and to give us time to build some new House office buildings and physically expand the chamber. Edit formatting Edit 2 For clarity, I do not think the current 435 member system is unconstitutional. I was just referring to its origins coming from an unconstitutional power grab by declining to reapportion for the 1920 census. When they finally did reapportion, they fixed the constitutional breach. Edit 3 Spelling<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The size of the US House of Representatives should be greatly expanded.\n","id":"19c6b0ef-8274-46e5-a8b5-f2fcc039f0a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously this is not a particularly serious , but here goes Everyone has seen how many vertically oriented videos there out there and everyone hates them. But they keep getting made because the most natural and strongest way to hold a phone is vertically. You can get firm grip on the phone without covering up any of the screen. This was true when they first allowed video recording on the iPhone 3ish right? and remains true now. Cellphone manufacturers, particularly Samsung and Apple, have a responsibility to fix this. They should make it possible or default to shoot videos horizontally even when holding the phone vertically. Maybe it would require extra photo sensors, but frankly I'd rather have a horizontal 720 video than a vertical one in 1080p. TL DR When you see a vertical video online, you should curse the phone company, not the user.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cell phone manufactures are responsible the number of videos shot vertically.\n","id":"52f77546-4a68-401e-8902-b89d96c7d43c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>Some research suggests that the victim is satisfied if the offender signals that they understands why punishment\/revenge was imposed upon them, rather than if they see the offender being punished.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under the view of utilitarianism, it is hard to argue that the happiness experienced by the victim overshadows the harm to the criminal.\n","id":"ee89ec81-49b7-4008-bd96-d2b330becaca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is transhumanism the next step in human evolution?<|ARGUMENT|>Transhumanism could be used by governments to control you and\/or your mind. Even just by reading your thoughts this could threat everyone who is against a certain system or leader.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transhumanism might have unforeseen dangers, because it has never been accomplished on a mass scale.\n","id":"ab050700-e04b-4667-9ea2-abc60291fa5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All US and EU sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014 should be lifted<|ARGUMENT|>The Russian Central Bank has announced that it will start negotiations with other BRIC states to create an alternative to the SWIFT payment system<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Russia has increasingly moved towards other countries in the BRIC bloc\n","id":"83adce4a-bc7e-45ce-ae8f-f727648ab87c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Hamlet Mad?<|ARGUMENT|>He had Theseus explain this in A Midsummer Night's Dream: \"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains\/ Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend\/ More than cool reason ever comprehends.\/ The lunatic, the lover and the poet\/ Are of imagination all compact.\" This would suggest that Hamlet's mad behaviour could also have been the result of loving too passionately.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shakespeare and his contemporaries were aware that infatuation could be readily confused with madness.\n","id":"da052203-24e9-4b56-a0b2-48846deaee46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface this by saying that I did search for previous s, but the discussions didn't hit on the right points for me, so here I am. For context, the only drug I could be said to indulge in is caffeine from soda and tea, but that's not for the caffeine itself but rather for the sugar and flavors. I don't like coffee. I don't smoke or drink or anything else, never have and never plan to. Right, so here's my issue, and I think it's a bit novel in terms of recreational drug use discussions to alter one's state of mind by the purposeful use of a controlled substance for the explicit purpose of doing so, one must not value one's sense of self. I've observed that while high drunk users exhibit and or report that their emotions, perceptions, thought processes, behavior, and memory are altered, if only temporarily. Beyond the continuous physical form, how else is one to define the self than by those very qualities? To artificially induce a state beyond that which ought to be naturally possible in this manner, the self becomes unimportant. To clarify, a recreational drug is like a filter for experiences. You don't just get high, you get high at a concert, or get drunk at the beach, or listen to The Wall high, or stare at the wall high. I submit that by choosing not to have those experiences in a sober state, one says they'd rather not have them at all, and so decides to have them high that is, as a different self as defined by those qualities above instead. On the other side of the coin, sometimes life sucks. Work sucks, people suck, nothing good happens. I find that it is a mark of perseverance and conviction to get through those times without having to forsake my self. However, if life is truly overwhelming for somebody, then the drug use in question isn't really recreational. If they could be diagnosed with clinical depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc. and would rather self medicate with marijuana, for example which has been shown to have positive health benefits , then, I reiterate, I am not counting it as recreational drug use. So there it is. I'll be happy to clarify further in the comments. This view of mine is a source of contention between me and my best friend among others, including my parents , so I would love some fresh perspective. Go ahead <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Recreational Drug Use Bothers Me\n","id":"c7ce7535-3401-46fb-a067-e4c5978fd95f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While I won\u2019t go into all National US gun laws, I will point out the ones that I think need pointing out because they pretty much sum up the gun control debate. According to \u201cThe federal Gun Control Act of 1968, codified at 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 922, generally prohibits the sale of firearms to any person who Has been convicted of, or is under indictment for, a crime punishable by imprisonment for more than one year Is a fugitive from justice Is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance Is underage Has been adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution Is unlawfully in the United States or has been admitted to the U.S. under a nonimmigrant visa Has been dishonorably discharged from the military Has renounced his or her U.S. citizenship Is subject to a court order restraining him or her from harassing, stalking or threatening an intimate partner, his or her child or a child of a partner, or engaging in other conduct that would place an intimate partner in reasonable fear of bodily injury to the partner or child or Has been convicted of a misdemeanor offense of domestic violence.\u201d I think that these address the people that no one wants getting a gun to the best of anyone\u2019s capabilities to find out about someone. If you want to know what crimes have a mandatory minimum of 1 year or more here\u2019s a list that I think you\u2019ll find reassuring As for background checks, the only people required by law to do a background check are private sellers \u201cFederal law imposes various duties on federally licensed firearms dealers. Firearms dealers must, among other things Perform background checks on prospective firearm purchasers. Maintain records of all gun sales. Make those records available to law enforcement for inspection. Report certain multiple sales. Report the theft or loss of a firearm from the licensee\u2019s inventory. Federal law imposes none of these requirements on unlicensed sellers, however.\u201d As stated in the quote, unlicensed sellers do not have to do any of these things by law, but they actually do have to if they don\u2019t want to go to jail. The people not allowed to be sold gun from the top cannot be sold guns by anyone licensed or not. That means that a licensed dealer would be forced find out about the person while an unlicensed would do it because if they did give a gun to someone who fits one of those conditions, they\u2019d get the same punishment as if the licensed dealer were to do the same. They are both equally punished if they sell to a person fitting the list, licensed dealers are only forced to check by law. All in all, this adds up to mean that people that we don\u2019t want to have guns will either not have guns, or we have no laws being proposed that could any further not give guns to those people without restricting regular citizens from getting guns Edit This statement sums up my deltas \u201cTo clarify my new clause The current national gun laws along with the requirement to properly store guns and background checks required for all buyers regardless of seller are all we need.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The current national US gun control laws are all that\u2019s needed right now.\n","id":"b2f6ea90-2b22-40c7-90e2-4e475094fb20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Daenerys Targaryen the Prince\/Princess that was Promised?<|ARGUMENT|>Benerro, the high priest at the Red Temple of Volantis, proclaimed Daenerys to be Azor Ahai returned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Several characters in the books and the TV series support this interpretation.\n","id":"ec84bf02-4b43-4ddd-a0db-c72085b2fd1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>In several developed countries, not only do employers offer maternity leave, but also paternity leave. This breaks down the traditional idea that the father becomes the breadwinner and the mother the caregiver.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Once a country develops to a certain stage, biological differences become far less relevant, both in the production of goods and societal hierarchy.\n","id":"c06ebf2c-a3f8-47c7-b614-3c3680ae4b12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For obvious reasons, fascism is understandably negatively viewed in our society. After all, the world's most famous fascists are also some of history's worst people. However, I don't believe this is just cause to relegate fascism to the history books. The greatest arguments against fascism, quite fairly, stem from the atrocities committed by its past advocates. However, this is a flaw in humanity's selective memory. I won't dwell on how communism is equally responsible for mass murder yet is still accepted because that would be a fallacy. Instead the first part of my argument is to explain why fascism isn't inherently evil. Firstly, I think it is worth looking at some other examples of fascism throughout history. It could be argued that the Roman Empire was one of the first fascist states. After all, Italian fascism was based on an attempt to emulate Roman glory. Now the Roman Empire isn't often seen as a shining example of Western civilisation but I would argue that it should be. After all it was more equal than today's America and, despite the prevalence of the class system, had a level of social mobility that would not be matched for years. For example, a rather short ruling Emperor was the son of a free slave. A similar comparison would be the son of an illegal immigrant becoming President, something I doubt would happen now. In addition, Rome managed to balance patriotism and multiculturalism, something I believe few states manage today. Roman identity was crucial but anyone could become Roman and join this revered group. This is before considering Rome's advances in science and the arts although in fairness, they did pinch some of it from the Greeks . Further to this, fascism is in itself not inherently evil. While the Nazis committed horrific crimes against humanity, the Italian fascists initially displayed none of the same anti antisemitism as their German counterparts, until pressure from Hitler caused Mussolini to introduce antisemitic policies in Italy. Even then, persecution of Jews was not as extreme as in Germany. Other factors linked to fascism such as indoctrination and cults of personality are clearly not singularly fascist features and, as I said above, I don't believe it will lead to racism or persecution anymore than our current forms of government could. I would also argue that fascism doesn't even have to be undemocratic. While traditionally, fascism involves a single undisputed leader, there is no reason that future forms of fascism couldn't have elected or appointed bodies, similar to the Roman Senate, who would act in the role of the leader while still representing the people. Alternatively, there could be an elected dictatorship with checks on their power, e.g. having to seek approval before going to war. The second part of my argument is why it should exist today. Fascism, to me anyway, seems to value both the individual and the group which no other system does. Communism places the good of society above all and often to the detriment of the individual N.B. just to clarify, for this argument when I refer to communism I mean communism as it has been implemented rather than the ideal of it . Capitalism, for lack of better way to describe western democracies, goes too far to the reverse. People care too much about their own self gain and if that comes at a cost to everyone else, most people seem willing to pay it. Fascism seems to be the best compromise, valuing the individual for what they bring to society. I also believe it could rectify some problems that have been experienced with democracy. For example, bi partisanship and government slowdowns would simply not exist. A strong leader would act in the manner the citizens wanted and people could concentrate on fixing the issues instead of scoring points against the opposition. Don't get me wrong, despite my evangelising for fascism, I'm not saying it's objectively the best form of government but simply that it is at least worth considering as an alternative. TL DR I believe fascism has some potentially good attributes and we shouldn't necessarily right it off because of its historical proponents. . Edit At the risk of being one of those dumb tits who complains about downvotes, perhaps instead of just downvoting, you could leave a comment telling me how much of a stupid prick I am for thinking something like this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Facism should be re-introduced as a legtimate alternative government structure.\n","id":"8ae8587b-8198-4fa0-9e25-839af6c8c776"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The major point for me is why do pro life people think that abortion is wrong? They think it's murder And if we define murder as an intentional taking of a human life , then at what point do we define a fetus as being human? It doesn't seem obvious to me that being human begins at conception because at this point it would have its own set of DNA, along with the potential to be human, but it's never had a heartbeat or a thought process or any awareness at all It also doesn't seem obvious to me that we can define being human at the point at which the embryonic child can survive outside of the mother's womb because that would be analogous to the idea that anyone on a life support system isn't human anymore. It seems more obvious to me that the defining trait of humanity is individualism that each has their own unique brain and awareness. I think that being human does not start until the fetus's first brainwave no matter how elementary. Terminating a pregnancy before then I think is as much loss as the many fertilized eggs that never attach to the uterine wall and then pass in the monthly cycle. It's a loss of a potential human. It seems to me that the only reason you would define being human at conception would be for religious reasons I believe in a a soul or something of that nature that would make the embryo more than it actually was But if anyone defines Being Human at conception and is pro life for non religious reasons let me know, I would be very curious.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"abortion is not immoral until the fetus has its first brain wave\n","id":"0e781f49-346e-454c-bb46-d1c9f949e885"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe it was just as well produced and acted as the prior two with Toby McGuire and that it lived up the same reputation as those. Some people talk about his change in attitude in the movie as a major problem, but isn't that what character development is? I honestly believe that it was decent film no worse than the other ones, but i want to get an understanding why others hate it so much. I am a big spiderman fan so maybe it's just my bias towards thinking spiderman is cool but I don't get why everyone rags on this movie. And lastly, please don't just link to some outside source that lists reasons why it is bad, because I have read the lists and most of the time they are shitty lame excuses Oh door surfing? Thats so stupid , Oh she points so dramatically What terrible acting .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I genuinely believed Spiderman 3 was a good movie from the series with Toby McGuire and don't understand why people hate it so much.\n","id":"de7246ed-31a3-4a8c-aab6-51255f834bb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So this is a bit of old news, but I still have not quite gotten my head around the alleged crime in the bridgegate scandal, at least the alleged crime before any coverups. The situation as I understand it is that the mayor of Fort Lee refused to endorse Christie, so in order to get payback, the governor's aides told the NJ representatives on the Port Authority of NY and NJ to shift some lanes normally used for a local road in Fort Lee on the George Washington bridge to use by traffic coming on I 95 northbound. These are lanes coming directly into the toll booths serving the upper deck of the GWB, which has 12 toll booth lanes. My understanding of the normal situation is that usually three lanes are segregated by cones to serve local traffic from Fort Lee coming from Martha Washington Way. This was changed during bridgegate to 1 lane being coned off for Martha Washington Way, with the other 11 lanes servicing I 95. While this was clearly a bad traffic idea, and was intended to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, I don't see what the crime is. The PANYNJ has as far as I know plenary authority over where to put cones in the toll lanes of the GWB. They didn't destroy anything or take government resources for their own private benefit. Regardless of the intent behind it, I don't see how moving the cones can be a crime. But people were convicted, so it seems clear there is some basis for believing it was a crime. What is it?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There was nothing criminal about bridgegate before any coverup\n","id":"b3ce4e29-3df5-49c6-bc6c-714f34e69ff6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Owning weapons for protection is absolutely necessary! The world has become again brutal and ruthless in the fight for resources and survival. But those weapons should not be shotguns. In today's advanced, digital and globally interconnected world the best weapons are education, courage, and self improvement. \u58eb.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The policy fails to address the root of the issue with gun violence in the US which is cultural.\n","id":"3443f27d-1422-4e32-9cb5-f4099dd4329d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Spicey is rumored to be on the chopping block as Trump lashes out at his staff. Many people are criticizing his performances at press conferences and jumping on misstatements and contradictions. As someone who loathes the president, I have begrudging respect for Spicer who has probably the most difficult job in the universe right now. Not only does he have to defend indefensible policies and scandals, but he has to basically respond in real time to crazy tweets and major decisions that Trump makes spontaneously and without notice like the Comey firing or the Muslim ban . To be sure, I'm not defending his moral culpability as a member of the administration, only his composure. I know that if it were me up there, the GIF of me shitting my pants would go viral immediately.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All things considered, Sean Spicer is doing an exceptional job under very difficult circumstances.\n","id":"8cdcc0d8-ef51-4db8-ac7e-59fb2a33521d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title says, my view is that human nature means that we are always trying to impress someone, and always trying to earn respect. Recently, I've had two experiences where being more supportive and friendlier to some friends means they take you for granted. An example would be Person A getting angry at something small that I said, and blowing it out of proportion when I try to apologise. Whereas, another friend, Person B, who normally is unsympathetic towards Person A, is constantly saying the one bad thing that I said. However, Person A values Person B's friendship much more, and never gets angry at Person B, due to them feeling inferior and therefore less confident in expressing anger to them. My conclusion is therefore, in order for a friend to respect you more, you have to be colder and less sympathetic. Also, in order to sustain a close friendship, never reveal true depressing feelings to someone you think is close to you, because even if they say they do, they do not truly care, so subconsciously they will not want to deal with your problems and start to distance themselves from you. They will not purposely do this, but they feel less inclined to be around you, even if they reveal their own deepest thoughts and feelings and you still have plenty of fun moments. At least, for most people, in my experience. This has been pretty consistent my whole life. I realise my view is quite depressing, and therefore I am open to changes. Any views?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People respect and value friends more when they balance a fine line between being cold and friendly. Those who are always friendly and supportive tend to be kicked to the curb due to the person feeling like they do not need to impress them.\n","id":"05e320cf-a223-4a5c-a657-1a250ce2ec2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Some politicians talk about 'free college', but of course, services and resources are never 'free', you're just shifting where the cost goes. Whatever the virtues of doing that may or may not be, what I don't see is anyone talking about is something that seems terribly obvious to me Our current methods are completely inefficient and unnecessary. Right now, on MIT's Open Course site, there are video lectures and material on Linear Algebra taught by a brilliant guy named Gilbert Strang. I learned better from watching his videos than I did from paying thousands to sit in a classroom and have a lesser professor teach it to me in person. Why not just have almost everyone learn from those videos, and save huge amounts of time and money? And in general, the paradigm where we're spending 200,000 to send a teen to an undergrad school seems ridiculous in the modern age. The information is at their fingertips for the cost of an internet connection Why in the world do we need all these universities, and why in the world are we continuing to prop up this system where everyone has to pay a fortune to learn things in a completely unnecessary manner? The only things we need to worry about are making sure a good certification and evaluation structure is in place. As long as that is that case, why don't we just have 95 of all college undergrads learning from, say, one of 5 internet based programs, featuring the best professors in the country, all for the low, low cost of 499.95 a semester? Why do we need 95 of the expensive university programs we have now? Isn't this just a ridiculous inefficiency? Indeed, why can't we do high school like this too? Unless you're someone who needs a school to effectively provide day care for you, I don't see why we need hundreds of thousands of school teachers in the age of the internet. Find the best dozen in each subject, record them, pay them, save a fortune, right? And hey, if you really need it, you can take that insane money you're saving, and hire a tutor for a bit to come and help your kid personally with just the things you need them for, and still save tons of money. Why are we not doing this, and why is no one talking about it? Is there any reason it's not a good idea?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The brick-and-mortar college system is mostly antiquated and inefficient, and should be allowed to die off.\n","id":"225d49cf-a0f3-4e22-9b64-a9c846d62832"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Assuming the stone was obsidian, you can then trace the steps of it's existence back. Obsidian comes about from molten silica, and you can continue the step-wise path all the way back to Planck time At which point our methods of observing the universe crease to have any meaning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is not strictly correct. You can have causes without beginnings. One can cause a rock to move. This does not presuppose the rock 'beginning' simply that it exists at the time of intervention.\n","id":"aaadbe19-ad42-4ea1-bfb0-3d7d4e52d867"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Their Children Should Be Fined If The Child Gets A Vaccine-Preventable Illness<|ARGUMENT|>Both hormone treatment for gender identity disorder and sex reassignment surgery require court approval if the patient is a minor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Australia, there are certain medical procedures that require the decision of a court to perform.\n","id":"07e1ec2b-9c38-447a-abc7-5c75899cf3c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To the individual that is, and presumably one that is in a society taken from the standpoint of the US, but I don't think those specifics are incredibly important. This belief being one that is possibly separate from whether or not free will exists, rather as a question as to how this belief impacts an individual, and judging those impacts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think believing in free will is beneficial, regardless of its reality -\n","id":"901f4398-5928-4fb0-9620-a373f51c1914"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Black Panther: Who's Right About Wakanda's Role in the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Once the rest of the world becomes aware of the massive technological opportunities in Wakanda - and the massive potential benefit of having exclusive access to that technology - other countries will be incentivised to invade Wakanda and claim the technology for themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By opening itself up to the world, Wakanda risks exposing its knowledge to the world and will become a target for everyone.\n","id":"3944bb3b-f9d9-4c40-8704-5385f0ee326e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I can accept that my candidate lost, but I resent the assertion that I should automatically give the other candidate my vote. I don't know if I can. There's several other political parties, some of whom run candidates and some who endorse candidates. I can also write in. Somebody will win the presidency, and it seems likely that whoever it is, they won't have my back. Why should I throw my political choice to them? To help the final count seem to overwhelmingly endorse those two? I think I can do better, even knowing I won't get my way this time around.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We need to see more third party voters in America.\n","id":"c34c4d40-0419-46c8-9126-d5e3041f6f17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>The Anti-Semitism of Muslim Palestine, and the growing Muslim influence in the US, makes a confrontation with Israel a plausibility. It would be unwise to establish a legal basis for militarism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a calculated risk that the American recognition of Palestinian statehood could legitimize military interventionism against Israel on behalf of Palestine, under the false pretense of peace-keeping or war-crimes.\n","id":"af779c07-8f7a-4d3c-a394-8640146f00f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Context This applies only to england, as that is where i live and care about. I am a mixed race person. When i was younger, much younger than i am now, i used to see union jacks and the english flag almost everywhere i went. Politics was something that only a few people were interested in, other than choosing what they thought was right for England. Now, i can't see any. No flags. No acknowledgement of being in England. The political landscape has gone to shit. I remember being able to watch english shows, about the english countryside. There's not a lot about that anymore, it's only really on Gold and Dave. Yes, we have a channel named Dave. Even then, there's not a lot of it. As of late, i'm seeing less and less english people, hell, i'm not fully english myself. but, being English gave me something to be proud about. Tell me, can you sing God Save the Queen off by heart? I sure can't. Nor can most of the people i know. That got me thinking. Where is english culture going? Where are the friendly people that we remember? What happened to asking the neighbours for teabags? Now, don't misunderstand the following as racism or hating on immigrants. This sub is good at misunderstanding things. I'll gladly become friends with any foreigner, and i'll adopt some of their lifestyle. But the foreign people that came here won't adapt to england at all. When i go to get food, i see halal this, kosher that, muslim friendly whatever. Now i get that halal and kosher are apart of a religion I'm really sorry, but i can't pin which one . But, i'm beginning to see foreign flags more frequently than the bloody union jack. Maybe this is just the fact that i currently reside somewhere in essex, but i just want to see some good old english traditions again. I want to see people bonding over a cup of tea. I want to see some fucking jaffa cakes again. I want to see England . I don't really want to hear people screaming at each other in other languages outside my home, i want to hear them having a laugh and sharing drinks, regardless of language. And before anyone starts, i'm not some nationalist or racist or anti immigrant freak, i just want to see some patriotism, and people being happy. Edit I've changed my thoughts, i forgot to edit it in earlier. Thanks r changemyview<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To \"make England safe for everyone\" English culture is being killed off to make way for non-native cultures\n","id":"25ecec7a-b8db-438b-a554-adcf4822d405"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently stumbled upon a video of Ben Shapiro. I had heard about him before but only criticisms. However, as I listened to him, he seemed to make a lot of sense. This led me to watch more of his videos to see more of what he was about. This led me to other speakers such as Dave Ruben, Joe Rogan, Sargon of Akkad, Larry Elder etc. x200B I enjoy listening to these speakers but they mostly share similar opinions. I agree with a lot of it but I don't want to live in an echo chamber. I am looking for well thought out arguments against their views. Can anyone recommend one or more sources or speakers to contradict these speakers?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am a conservative now.\n","id":"91949ba3-d704-44b4-a485-95ab8193c340"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A wall sounds like something people 1,000 years ago would have come up for boarder security. We need a much more advanced system in place to catch illegal immigrants than a slab of cement. It is a primitive and not very well thought out idea. Once we get the 5 billion approved for the wall, which is just a small fraction of the total amount needed, there are still countless hurdles to jump through before one could actually be erected. You have to deal with zoning and environmental regulations and also negotiate with private land owners to get the land needed for such a wall. Then on top of all this is the actual building aspect of it. It will take years to be built. It's taken 2 years for Trump to get far enough to even create real discussion about the wall, let alone come anywhere close to starting construction. Even if Trump secures the money tomorrow and construction starts this year, it's not going to be finished by the end of his current term, or even by he end of his next term. What happens if the next president tries to scrap the whole wall plan? We have a partly finished wall that we spent billions of dollars on. And after all that, even if the wall does get fully built, we still have to patrol the boarder and keep up maintenance on the wall. A wall only serves to slow people down, without proper patrol people will either just go under or over the wall. And yes, maybe carrying a 30 foot ladder through the desert is a bit unrealistic, but the wall only goes 6 feet deep? How long would it take for a small group of people to dig a tunnel under the wall? Not very long, you have 24 hours at most. That means that once every 24 hours, at least, all 2,000 miles of the wall have to be patrolled. Now that seems like a pretty damn big task. So how about instead of investing money into the wall we invest it in surveillance technology? You are going to need to invest into technology anyway to patrol the wall. Technology is increasing at a rate faster than it ever has before with no signs of slowing down, while the way we build infrastructure hasn't really changed a whole lot. If we invest the 5 billion into private companies of course, US agencies are wildly inefficient when it comes to research into the technology aspect of who knows what technology we may produce in the years to come. Radar and satellite are already used to stop poaching in all 60 million square miles of the ocean. And while it may not be entirely effective, thats because we're talking about patrolling an area hundreds of times bigger than the US Mexico boarder with a small fraction of the money. Google Image satellites have mapped the entire Earth more than accurately enough to spot a human. And with more money invested on research into better satellites we could greatly increase the rate at which these images are produced. And with companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, satellites are far cheaper and easier to launch than ever before, and will drastically decrease in price in the coming decade. Research into technology would not only increase boarder security, but could make great strides in other fields like physics and AI. With this new technology we could not only monitor the boarder, but could also monitor the southern coast where immigrants will increasingly try to enter if a wall is built. Eventually this same technology could also help to monitor poaching in the ocean, predict global weather patterns, locate precious resources, and many other things. So on one hand we have an investment in technology that will much more efficiently defend out boarder A wall will stop 40 of illegal immigrants at the very highest, the real number is probably much lower , increase our understanding of many other fields of science, and can have a variety of added humanitarian benefits. Then in the other hand we have a wall that, even if we get the funding now, may not actually ever get finished. A wall, that doesn't even do its single intended purpose effectively. A wall that will lead to no new discoveries or advancements in technology. A wall that will take land away from private owners and disrupt the ecosystem. I think the choice is clear. This is the 21st century and we need a 21st century solution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am 100% OK with approving 5 billion dollars to be spend on boarder security, just not for a wall.... It needs into developing new technologies\n","id":"f9996820-876f-4a95-8b7e-89473c1d96c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion created God so people could avoid being logical and rational. Since they cannot question anything, they invariably act good. This way, religion acts as a safety valve to stop people from revolting against inequalities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion organizes and manipulates people in order to make them easier to control.\n","id":"4c36f895-5330-4752-93fd-2ad3c4c25b41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Men and women both have nippled chest. Women however have far more, which includes a mammary gland whose primary evolutionary purpose is feeding which makes it decidedly a sexual organ<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Discrimination occurs when two different things of equal value are not treated equally. This is not the case as a woman's breasts are not comparable to a man's chest.\n","id":"21b6d088-cfb2-44bb-a0ad-c0586ca6b2d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Human-operated weapon system, will for sure have an AI that is capable of acting completely autonomously. The only difference is that the human will have to confirm the firing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human-operated drones would have the same resource requirements as AKMs.\n","id":"3dd83e09-eb6d-4384-9484-64ed9ac1a0dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I consider myself very liberal and openminded. I'm a cis female, but I believe that transgender individuals exist, and that they can't control that they were born the wrong sex. However, I don't believe that gender fluid exists. I only heard of this somewhat recently when a girl was telling me that she's always identified as female, but overtime, she's realized that her definition of female was different from most girls', and she was asking to be referred to as they them pronouns. As a feminist, I found this offensive. If you identify as female, who gets to decide what makes you a female or not? Just because you don't want to shave your legs, wear makeup, buy shoes or do other traditional feminine things, doesn't make you not a female. And the same goes for men. I've always been very strongly against traditional gender roles. You're a girl, but you want to cut your hair short and drive a truck? Awesome You're still a girl. Having masculine qualities doesn't make you not a girl. You're a guy, but you want to wear makeup or wear a dress? Also awesome And it also doesn't make you not a guy. Therefore, I feel that people claiming to be gender fluid are just perpetuating these stereotypes. I wish these gender fluid people would just own it. I'm a girl, but I'm not girly. So what? instead of trying to say that because they don't identify with traditionally female qualities, they must not be female. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think gender-fluid is real.\n","id":"20334b71-6bec-4dd4-9519-54011a2a3430"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>No, I don't think that all people diagnosed with depression should just deal with it . I understand that depression can be a terrible thing that negatively affects your life in a number of untold ways. I also acknowledge that antidepressants can be an effective treatment. However, I think that there are too few standards from separating depression caused by imbalances in brain chemistry, and depression stemming from real world stressors such as personal finance, relationships, career futures, politics, and much more. Here are the top three arguments I hear against my position and why I don't agree gt 1 People with clinical depression can't just get over it or deal with it . Antidepressants save lives by finally giving people relief from the depression and anxiety that plagues them. Imagine that you are 150k in student credit debt. Despite having a bachelor's degree you make 30k annually, see nearly a third of that money eaten up with taxes, and nearly half of what's left get's spent on rent, which is increasing annually. In the end, you barely have enough to make your minimum payments. The cherry on top is that your boss brings home 500k annually and treats you like a peasant at work, albeit when he isn't working from home . Every day you have to think about the future and how your current situation affects you. You have to think about future you. Your prospects are bleak some might say depressing . You can't just sleep it off or get over it , because it's not changing. The only thing you can do is try to earn more money, pay your debts, find a job that makes you happy, etc. But instead you focus on how it makes you feel You determine you cannot eliminate the depression on your own so you get antidepressants. All you are doing is numbing the pain of the real world. You don't have a condition, but you are depressed. The difference is that you are depressed for a reason, and that depression might be what you need to motivate yourself to fix your problems. The pills just make you accept your fate rather than work for a brighter future. In this context they are complacency pills gt 2 Doctors don't get kickbacks for prescribing certain medicines. No, they don't. It's illegal to pay a doctor in exchange for prescribing people medications. Instead pharmaceutical companies do what lobbyist do They send doctors to seminars , which is just an excuse to send them somewhere exciting for a week at an all inclusive resort all while bombarding them with marketing for the medicines they manufacture. They don't have take the company's advice, buy your crazy if you think they aren't influenced by the bribery. Not that it matters, Doctors already find it easier to prescribe miracle pills rather than look for less risky treatment options. Though often, pills are all the only thing a patient can afford as therapy is too expensive. gt 3 People depend on Antidepressants for their day to day lives. You can't just take that away from them or doubt the effectiveness of the drugs. That's insulting The feelings of the patients are irrelevant, as they are not doctors and they are biased. Some people truly need antidepressants, and they shouldn't be denied it. That doesn't mean we shouldn't question the usefulness of these drugs when they are being prescribed more and more often, many times as a first choice of treatment. These drugs have severe side effects, including depression Why risk screwing someone up worse when they actually can get over it themselves. Tl Dr The standards for prescribing antidepressants don't take into account whether the depression is chemical or circumstantial. Many of the arguments against stricter regulation are appeals to emotion, not science. Now we have a lot of people on pills that just numb the pain of the real world which isn't much different than illicit drug abuse minus the high . However, clinical depression does exist and some people do need antidepressants to function normally. These people likely make up a minority of those prescribed antidepressants to treat depression. NOTE Yes, SSRI's marketed as antidepressants can be prescribed for a variety of other problems, including medical problems that have nothing to do with the brain. I am not taking these situations into account only drugs prescribed to treat depression.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most people who are prescribed antidepressant drugs as a treatment for depression do not need them as their depression isn't caused by a chemical imbalance, but by real-world stressors.\n","id":"8799fddb-895e-4a6a-9702-bb2bafc82304"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the universe we live in was the result of natural forces coming together and creating the big bang, etc. I am very dismissive to the idea that a guy with a beard on a cloud had anything to do with it. If there is even the slightest chance that this were true, why would said being never come to light? I believe in life, meaning that there was a sequence of scientifically rational reasons as to why things are the way they are today. I am not completely closed minded about it, although I am VERY skeptical. I am open to anyone who can change my view on the matter or make me think differently on this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as a God, or a divine creator.\n","id":"602c5d9b-ac31-4c2d-af3f-c5de776717b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious education be compulsory in public schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents should be the prime educators of children, not the state. If the state selects a religion to teach, the state gets to dictate the parts of the religion that it likes and wishes to teach. The religion in question will be distorted once the government starts to teach it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious instruction and education should be conducted by family not the state.\n","id":"8908d075-7a82-4df8-b67e-9ee29234ddda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It\u2019s pretty obvious that this will happen, after all, there\u2019s no perk using fiat money, it just devaluates constantly, causing people and families to lose their life savings. Bitcoin is the digital gold of this era, combining the two best sides of the precious metal and paper money scarcity and liquidity, in that order. Scarcity, because the monetary mass is limited to 21 million coins. Liquidity, because each Bitcoin is composed by 100,000,000 satoshis. The USD BTC price is the least of coiners worries, yes, the volatility\u2019s high, however, it\u2019ll just go up. We\u2019re taking about a finite resource against paper money, which can be printed indiscriminately and is based on debt. \u201cIt won\u2019t replace credit cards and paper money, it\u2019s too slow for that to happen\u201d Well, there\u2019s where you\u2019re wrong, my dear no coiner. The Lightning Network will solve any time issues Bitcoin has, allowing almost fee less, instant transactions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bitcoin will replace banking and Fiat system\n","id":"09d6b21d-a214-4371-84cd-9a7a60ef9c6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The brunt of my argument is this Fake news is not more of an issue today than before, but rather since there is more information available than ever before, naturally there will also be more fake news. As always is this case, the problem is not the news, but the people who believe and perpetuate it. Rather than focusing on censoring fake news we as a society should aim to educate one another on how to live in this age of information saturation. I could go on to talk about how censorship of fake news is a slippery slope, but I feel like that topic has already been discussed. Supplementary viewing this video is what finally convinced me to make this post<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Misinformation, or \"fake news\" is only on the rise because information as a whole is becoming more accessible.\n","id":"c5ed51e8-6f0e-4256-83d6-9790e7ea7d47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Martin Harris told a resident of Palmyra, NY that he had seen the golden plates with \"spiritual eyes.\" Jesse Townsend to Phieas Stiles, Dec. 24, 1833, in Pomeroy Tucker, Origin, Rise, and Progress of Mormonism, 288-91<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Around 1829-30, Martin Harris told residents of Palmyra, NY that he had only seen the golden plates with his spiritual eyes.\n","id":"3d459b52-2843-4f02-8f57-16175abf6ae1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a fan of the Naruto manga and I've occasionally watch the anime. I think it's a fun series with great action sequences, memorable characters and a some emotional moments. That said, it's not perfect. A lot of the puzzle pieces in the story don't fit together as nicely as they should. There are many aspects of world building that don't make sense and character backstories that are flat out incomplete if Naruto has been orphaned since he was a baby, who raised him? However, I feel that the romance between Naruto and Hinata is one of the most ineffectively implemented plot points in the series. Since early on in the manga, it was established that Hinata has a big crush on Naruto. Naruto is of course oblivious to her feelings for the duration of the manga, even after Hinata confesses her love to him during his fight against Pain. That said, they have a few touching moments in Part I Hinata I think you're a proud failure that show they have solidarity with one another. Still, the subject of their romance is barely touched upon in the canon story up until The Last Naruto the Movie, which revolves around their budding romance. By the time of the Boruto media the movie, manga and anime , Naruto and Hinata are married and have two kids. My issue with their relationship is not simply that it is barely touched upon in the manga, or that Naruto is impossibly oblivious to Hinata. It's not even that their personalities are almost complete opposites. My issue is that I just don't see them working as a couple. I take it for granted that Hinata is infatuated by Naruto and always has been however, I don't understand what Naruto sees in Hinata that compelled him to fall in love with her. A huge part of Naruto's character is his wild ambition, specifically to become Hokage. He cares a lot about his friends and will go to insane lengths to protect them look at how far he went for Sasuke all those times. Whereas Naruto has a lot of passion in his life, Hinata seems to have little passion for anything other than Naruto himself. There were many ways that her character could have been given something to care about. She could have been ambitious to enact changes in her clan. She could have loyal to her family, clearly indicated by her interactions with Hanabi and Neji. However, there is so little on her mind other than Naruto this comes across as shallow to me. I have a hard time picturing Naruto taking Hinata seriously when she comes across as so dull, and so introverted that the emotions she does feel often go unexpressed. What is it that clicks Naruto into loving Hinata during The Last? Is it simply the fact that his hallucination caused him to notice that she in fact had feelings for him? And more importantly, how does their romance work in the long run? Does Naruto really love Hinata for no other reason than she believes in him, something which many, many other characters also do? I know the Naruto fans will hate me for saying this, but rationally speaking it would have made more sense for Naruto to marry Sakura. The two have often bickered and Sakura has been comically abusive , but their relationship evolved substantially over time. They worked together for years as a team and formed an unbreakable friendship. Sakura may not be the strongest or smartest ninja, but she was intent to become a Medical nin and put in a huge amount of effort to reach that goal Naruto would surely appreciate that. They have both made promises to each other and stayed true to those promises, although they had moments of weakness from time to time. For some reason, however, Sakura can't let go of her childhood crush on an international terrorist she hasn't seen for two years. And by the events of Boruto, she's married to that former terrorist. I want to be proven wrong and see that these two are a good couple. I feel that any good character romance has layers to it that aren't immediately clear. J.K Rowling said that in the Harry Potter novels, she tried to communicate to the reader that Ginny was the perfect girl for Harry. I feel that Masashi Kishimoto tried to say that of Hinata and Naruto in his series, to some extent. I know that Naruto is not a romance manga, and Kishimoto never intended romance to be a big part of the story. Still, I must be missing something here. Any analysis or details or something to help me see this relationship in a better light would be greatly appreciated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Naruto and Hinata's relationship doesn't really make sense spoilers\n","id":"28da806a-af7f-4318-aa98-5d27ac56f212"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My opinion is basically this capitalism as an efficient system requires competition. Capitalism in the US was sucessful over the last several generations because the US economy and later the world economy was a relatively lightly regulated marketplace. The last 15 20 years have shown a change in Chinese strategy to allow for a partial acceptance of world market capitalist ideas and practices, executed under the authority of the national government. This has allowed them to basically cheat the market. This is evident is a number of widely reported incidents such as Chinese national investment in solar panel technology undercutting US solar tech firms. There is also the issue of China allegedly using national government resources to steal trade secrets and patented technology. Over the long term I dont believe that the traditional capitalist structure of autonomous corporate entities competing with one another under minimal oversight can compete against a national government with the authority to levy taxes and the capability to steal trade secrets and execute centrally planned business strategies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"U.S. style capitalism is not competitive in a world market that includes post-communist China\n","id":"b09b76d1-b32b-4f5c-8e89-e178a5ce2cda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should traffic finally be redesigned with this simple new hitchhiking law?<|ARGUMENT|>The law doesn't really change anything because people could just say that they feel disturbed by everyone around them in traffic. Then, they don't need to take anyone with them and the situation is still the same.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are some reasons why a driver may not want to stop for a hitchhiker.\n","id":"5207f462-ac03-4c16-8907-c52a30e8ee54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV Vaccinations be Compulsory?<|ARGUMENT|>New parents should be incentivised to complete a set amount of hours in structured and specified learning related to raising children. Subjects would include all the basics of parenting across different developmental stages and would focus on psychologically-backed emotional and social intelligence markers. The success depends on incentives for completion and continual learning, year on year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US the UK Germany and Australia are some of the countries that provide either compulsory training or voluntary training services to prospective parents who wish to adopt in the status quo. Such training systems will therefore be incorporated into the licensing system.\n","id":"f0ea5b99-d1c8-40aa-9250-b719def4bdc3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Ancient civilizations lived simpler lives without actual knowledge of science and nature. In those circumstances, they created gods to explain what they couldn't understand. However, these beliefs have been added to a lot of people's cultures around the world and that's why religion exists in this century. If nowadays we didn't have knowledge of any religions, we wouldn't create one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is more likely that people invented the idea of God, than that he actually exists.\n","id":"5e3c3a12-7544-46bd-a69d-44fb33fa3cb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should taxpayers have direct control of how their taxes are spent?<|ARGUMENT|>This potentially enables the same discriminatory practices the U.S. has spent the last 60-70 years trying to wipe away.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For example, people could choose to not devote taxes to LGBT health-related issues due to faith objections.\n","id":"c0b4f1d2-023c-4b04-89f2-73570145e905"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I openly admit to reading the book Fifty Shades of Grey. Of course this is the internet and I have used a semi private username, so it is easier for me to say this. The reason why I\u2019m not completely open about reading the book made me reflect on the reasons for why I am ashamed about reading this book The reason for this is that Fifty Shades of Grey is more than just about sex. It\u2019s about relationship violence, manipulation, and the sexual objectification of women. The book is a source of romantic fantasy for women, but the key word is \u201cunrealistic\u201d fantasy. If you are familiar with the story, you know that Anastasia, the main character, and Christian Grey fall in love and she is the one to \u201cchange him.\u201d It\u2019s almost a sexual and abusive version of Beauty and the Beast, one of my favorite Disney movies. My concern is that women read Fifty Shades of Grey and get nothing but negative messages from it. These messages tell them that they can change an abusive relationship, they are to appeal to the man\u2019s eye, and that it is okay to objectify your body for the sexual pleasure of men. I want more opinions about this, because to me I am a hypocrite for buying the book. Edit The hypocrisy here also comes from endorsing the series through buying the book and or movie ticket. Conclusion I am not a hypocrite for buying and reading the book while disagreeing with the content. I think it\u2019s important for me to express how I feel about the book, but in the end Fifty Shades of Grey was meant for entertainment. I didn\u2019t enjoy the BDSM theme of the book and can\u2019t relate to that sort of \u201cpleasure,\u201d therefore I am already bias to the book and I can\u2019t understand this appeal. I think the fact that the actions were consensual in the book don\u2019t an abusive relationship because it was about submissives, so the characters are not \u201cencouraging\u201d this type of relationship for everyone. It was my choice to read the book, and now it\u2019s my choice to give my own review. I may feel it has a negative influence, but I never said \u201cI would never buy that book\u201d for these reasons, therefore I am not a hypocrite. I still think this type of imagery for couples, of any sexuality, is not healthy. Abuse and unequal power between men and women isn't an issue that should even be danced around. It's something to take seriously.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Am I a hypocrite for watching Fifty Shades?\n","id":"bd08a251-fe1c-46c6-98d0-4ea02ba6213e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think people in the U.S. are afraid of math. x200B I believe when I hear people say Math is useless or they'll never use it They don't like it or it's boring They're inherently not good at it or talented at it what they really mean is that they're afraid of math. x200B I think the complaints and posturing are a socially acceptable front for anxiety, and even a way to ward off low self esteem. x200B I think stereotyping math as uncool is the same dynamic. I also don't see the uncool thing or negative nerd stereotype in other cultures, unless they're becoming Americanized. x200B I believe this is fed by Americans' preference for a fixed mindset over a growth mindset. We Americans like to believe successful people at anything are just geniuses, instead of that we have to work and be incredibly persistent. Therefore if we struggle at math temporarily at any point, we believe we can't do it and give up. x200B I believe this is true in the U.S., because there is cross cultural research showing that Chinese mothers help their children with math homework and encourage them to persist until they learn it, whereas American mothers and even elementary school teachers express to their children that they don't understand the homework either, that math isn't important, and that some people just can't do math. x200B I also believe this is true in the U.S., because there is a documented and growing shortage of U.S. job candidates in this country for well paying, lucrative quantitative jobs. In my hiring analytics data science , I receive at least 10 HB1 visas for every citizen candidate. I'm fine with HB1 visas, but disappointed in my fellow countrymen and women for not pursuing these opportunities or educating themselves to do so. x200B Please tell me why I'm wrong about Americans and math. x200B x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people in the U.S. are afraid of math.\n","id":"f0a752f9-b448-488a-99bb-f2dbeb4ef243"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>An increasingly popular idea, especially on Reddit it seems, is to not tell children Santa exists. There seems to be two main reasons behind this We shouldn't teach kids to behave well in order to get things. Lying to them about Santa will cause trust issues later in life. Neither of these are good reasons. Legends of Santa or a Santa like figure have existed for centuries and they haven't brought about any sort of social issues. The idea of Santa isn't teaching children that the only reason to be good is to get something, it's simply a fun idea for Christmas. Kids don't suddenly become malevolent people once they find out that Santa didn't deliver those presents. And regardless of that, in real life, doing good things does often result in rewards, so it's not as though the idea is false. The, imo, more ridiculous issue is that children will fall into some sort of existential crisis when they find out Santa isn't real. I've never met anyone who has suddenly developed trust issues after they found out. Most kids seem to just get over it after like an hour. If there is a child for whom the discovery of the truth behind Santa leads to trust issues or trauma, then that child hasn't developed a healthy sense of reasoning, and if something as insignificant as Santa would be enough to push them into mental issues, then they will inevitably be faced by far worse examples of lying later on that will take a more extreme toll. It's not the idea of Santa, it's the individual and their ability to understand basic social norms and customs. As said before, Santa is an idea that's been around for ages. It's never caused any problems before and while people have every right to not teach their kids about him, doing so in order to protect them is frankly juvenile and unnecessary. By doing so they are denying their children a fun and harmless tradition that makes Christmas an amazing time for millions of other across the world. TL DR Santa is harmless and all those claiming that the idea that he's harmful are being oversensitive. EDIT I have read all the comments, and the only reason that I haven't replied to all is because for some I would be repeating myself and because some comments just seemed to be oddly passive aggressive, considering that this place is meant to change views and not try to subtly insult people. But anyway, I'm going to  because even though I still believe that the story of Santa is inherently harmless and that the accusations of it being bad are exaggerated, a few users have commented on how it can potentially be harmful. Namely, some parents could use it as a form of blackmail. I personally think that any parent who does this is a shitty parent, and it has more to do with them than the idea of Santa itself I've never felt threatened or blackmailed, so it's not necessary . However, my OP was saying that it's completely harmless, and I can see how it can be used in a horrible way, so the level of harm that the Santa lie can create is fairly dependant on the parents those implementing it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing wrong with telling kids that Santa exists.\n","id":"4b5532ec-4dd5-4f7d-8f0f-f75d0e1bc293"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>Including a counterfactual is one good tool to clarify the finding results. A counterfactual would be a similar group that also commits hate crime or violent crime, but is not exposed to hate speech.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The findings of the initial source display causal inferenceunreasonably declaring causality of a mere correlation and selection bias.\n","id":"aac28da5-a3ae-42f0-a464-74636b92e66c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need nuclear power for sustainable energy production?<|ARGUMENT|>Suicide rates increased in evacuation areas after Fukushima. These deaths, along with others caused by reduced access to medication, increased stress, and other factors, are difficult to quantify and are not included in calculations of deaths from nuclear incidents. Suicide rates increased in evacuation areas after Fukushima.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Estimates of the death toll from incidents at nuclear power stations may be misleadingly low, because they do not take into account long term economic and societal damage.\n","id":"7f6204fb-3be7-4101-86ee-9bf2c0136bb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>No culture or religion is perfect, I understand this, but a culture and religion should be striving to treat everyone equally. I don't think it is disrespectful to tell Christianity that woman should be treated as equals despite the bible clearly taking the other approach I don't think its wrong to question Middle Eastern Cultures that make their woman cover themselves and treat them like second class citizens. I think Politically Correct behavior has gotten so out of hand that the fact it is Politically incorrect to stand up against the abuse of women etc because their culture religion is different<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think people should be respectful of other cultures or religions, if they are oppressive to another group,\n","id":"be30df48-ae8b-421b-af8e-c9c4b4563461"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Prelim A delusion is a view of reality which is inconsistent with one's cultural framework which is used to perceive reality. Whether or not something is actually true or not is not relevant to the classification of a delusion. If the cultural understanding of reality implies that an observation means a certain thing, then reaching such a conclusion about an observation is not delusional. This definition is not my own. Consider Kiran and Chaudhury which explains that in a delusion, there is a divergence between perception and cultural interpretation of reality. The DSM also takes into consideration the cultural understanding of reality source Dawkins Dawkins' cultural framework of identifying reality is science and so if Dawkins holds views which are contrary to scientific understanding, then he is delusional. u RealRichardDawkins has on numerous occasions made statements which are inconsistent with scientific views. First, because the belief in the existence of a god is consistent with the cultural framework of understanding reality, of theists, it is not a delusion. Yet Dawkins has no problem calling it one. Second, Dawkins has stated that religious upbringing is harmful, but this is not evidenced by the data, and indeed is contrary to it. Furthermore, Dawkins states the following The thesis of \u201cNew Atheist\u201d books like The God Delusion and God is not Great is that the net effect of religion has been bad, both in ancient times and today. However, this statement makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view. Because his perception of reality contradicts his cultural foundation used to perceive reality, he is delusional.  What would change my mind? Primarily, an alternative view of what constitutes a delusion, which is psychologically and anthropologically reasonable, and which excludes his views from being delusional. Arguments must be scientific, and citations must be either scientific papers or experts in the field. I would also accept recognition, by u RealRichardDawkins, that he was wrong. A transient misunderstanding that is corrected upon receiving updated information is not a delusion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Richard Dawkins is delusional\n","id":"4f8e2ba0-c807-4a9a-8075-e7cf2fcf187b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that having established binary gender roles in our society is a beneficial thing, and should not be treated as toxic or harmful . As long as one is free to NOT conform to these roles without the fear of discrimination, gender roles have no negative consequences, while offering some benefits they give young children a sense of self, knowing that they are male , and that they like cars and superheroes and sports. It gives both young children and adults a set of common interests which are easy to determine in a person by their looks males and females have certain styles of fashion and commonly accepted looks which are easily identifiable .  why having gender roles while still allowing people to not conform is not a good thing. EDIT Going to sleep but I see many good responses, I will respond as soon as I can tomorrow EDIT 2 I would like to make a clarification to my original point. My overall claim is that instead of attempting to abolish gender roles, which I would argue is an impossibility without major changes to our genetic makeup, we instead learn to accept those that do not conform to the binary gender roles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender roles are acceptable, and in fact beneficial, as long as one is allowed to not conform to those roles.\n","id":"fcfd60d7-545c-41e5-aef3-e0840be487d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, this doctrine excuses circumstances when surgeons must kill the weaker of two conjoined twins in order to let the stronger one survive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The doctrine of necessity can justify manslaughter in this case.\n","id":"6a639392-9d46-482d-b0f0-fb57581a69df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen similar discussions here before, but my view was not changed. I feel like I've changed as a person since then and I'm still open to changing my view on this. My view is that pulling the lever is objectively the better choice unless you're completely nihilistic, and that a person who would pull the lever is a better person by any normal measure than one who wouldn't, all other things being equal. I don't want to get into semantics so I'll lay down some specifics In the trolley problem, a person the chooser is suddenly thrown into a situation where they must either redirect a trolley 100 chance to kill one random passerby , or not 100 chance to kill ten random passerby . We assume that the chooser has no reason to doubt that one of these things will happen, and we assume they think they're the only one who can redirect the trolley. The manner in which they redirect it is arbitrary it might be a button, lever, etc. The manner of death for the one or the ten will be exactly the same. The chooser does not know anything about the victim s , and he she will also remain anonymous the only consequences will be to his her conscience. Again I think it's obvious that the only ethical choice is to redirect the trolley. Choosing not to is willful negligence at best. It's selfishly preserving your own innocence at the expense of nine innocent lives. I also wouldn't want anyone in a position of power who wouldn't pull the lever. Keep in mind I'm talking about someone who knows the consequences and chooses not to pull the lever, not someone who's confused or doesn't react in time, etc. I think there's a simple way to demonstrate that this is correct just exaggerate the number of people. Say there were a nuclear missile headed for Manhattan maybe it was accidentally launched a bystander in the command building has an opportunity to send the missile into the ocean, where there's only one small fishing boat with a kindly old man aboard. Who would choose to let the missile strike NY? Wouldn't that be absolutely horrible? How's the trolley problem any different? What's the number of lives that changes the right choice?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the classic \"trolley problem,\" pulling the lever to save 9 lives is the only ethical course of action.\n","id":"80a86811-2d5c-4feb-95da-621bfd40d12b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>ghetto inhabitants claimed that if it wasn't for the dangerous life they have to try to survive, then they wouldn't have to carry guns, commit crime, avoid education, sell drugs,neglect their children,and most of all, glorify the gangsta lifestyle as a way of life, and a righteous one at that. But I say, if in one day, everyone made an agreement to start looking for jobs, leave their weapons at home, actually take care of their children, and try to play by society's rules, then poof ghetto life as we know it would cease to exist in a puff of smoke. If they stop glorifying the gangsta lifestyle as an identity and stop making it a de facto life purpose to not play by society'ss rules,they might find they could have had a different life all along. note, I didn't specify a particular race , nationality or skin color, so don't flag as racist<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ghetto inhabitants claim the dangerous realities of inner city life are the cause of their inability to progress or escape it...but I say, if they all changed their paradigm, poof, no more ghetto.\n","id":"1c657a2f-1d7b-49a8-be5b-af68e8162c03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I was on Google , and I was like PS4 is overrated. Every other console is better. Then people came to me like are you implying that is a kiddy console? I said. No, I just think that the younger generation never had the chance to play older Sony consoles. She replied Well I think those are good but the PS4 is much better. You just think that PS4's only target market is youngsters or young people prefer it more. That wasn't the point at all. Anyway, I just can't really get that much into the PS4. I mean the only games I got into was guys get your tissue boxes prepare for this Cross Gen games, Killzone Shadowfall , Knack , Crash remake , and The Order 1886 . I don't care about Uncharted 4 . I don't care for Uncharted , so yes this thread is going to even be more challenging. And I couldn't get entirely addicted to Horizon Zero Dawn and Infamous Second Son . They where very pretty and big. But thats the problem about games today. They don't know how to be designed so all they can be is pretty and big or just multiplayer. I don't play multiplayer. I could never get into The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt . Oh and I also don't care about remasters. I'd rather play it on PC or the original consoles they where on. You know what I got into the most on PS3 that makes it much better than PS4? Metal Gear Solid 4 the Guns of the Patriots . That was my most favorite game. I loved the lenght and depth of the cutscenes. How it went into the lore. The stealth, the art, the fan service. It's so EPIC . Plus the PS3 and PS2 have backwards compatability so I can play PS1 games which I love. Yeah, I'm a retro gamer. I also love Sega games. I heard Sonic Mania might be fun. But I have the entire Sonic games collection. I don't have enough time for video games. I spend too much time being creative and working. Maybe that's why I can't get into it. Do you think that's my problem r cmv or am I on to something?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think the PS4 is the best Sony consoles.\n","id":"49857c1d-c93c-4c61-8dbd-f7f1dac60492"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Politicians' Second Jobs: Should They be Allowed to Keep Them?<|ARGUMENT|>British MP George Osborne held at least five other jobs, including editor of the Evening Standard, for which he was widely criticized.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many who do take second jobs, detracting from time spent in their constituency understanding the electorate.\n","id":"dab25d17-da92-437c-bf9a-addab1b308af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Premier League Better than the Bundesliga?<|ARGUMENT|>BL stadiums are larger. During the 2015\/16 season, the average size stood at 47.000 seats whereas it stood at only 38.000 in the PL.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The BL is more fan-friendly, attracts a bigger live audience and has a better stadium atmosphere.\n","id":"063e6b12-4a64-4321-9af5-c60b7582c9e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>The UDHR definitions of fundamental freedoms and human rights is used in the United Nations Charter which is binding on all member states.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UDHR has been used as the base of many legally binding international agreements.\n","id":"6d89bc1f-5f4d-4e16-b515-d9435470554a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>No one has physically seen or heard from God, yet people claim to easily believe \/ imagine that God is perfect in every sense. It could be the case that people are merely imagining a being that is greater than other imagined beings like The Incredible Hulk or Spiderman.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The classical definition of God is contradictory or incoherent, and thus God cannot in principle exist.\n","id":"318e7d55-8aae-4779-97d3-2241b2132da8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been having a debate with my Canadian friends lately. A few of them are trying as hard as possible to become American Citizens, while I have a dream of renouncing my citizenship and moving to Canada permanently one day. Their reasons are 1 more jobs and 2 greater maximum earning potential. I should mention that all of us are Academics, but please don't direct your replies specifically to Academics in terms of grants available in both countries, etc . I can't think of a single reason that becoming Canadian would be a bad thing. Healthcare, relatively more liberal and sane politicians, equal or lower levels of corruption, We hate Canadians, down with Canada said no one in the world ever. I don't mind cold weather. I could go on. Canada seems like America, just better. Care to ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Canada is better than America, and most Americans' lives would be improved if they were Canadian citizens.\n","id":"dabfc923-5acd-4fca-bd59-39fd3b31b4c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The more I read about this situation, the more it seems that so many mistakes were made that it is hard to lay the blame for how this turned out at the feet of anyone other than the agencies involved. From not consulting local law enforcement to continuing with the initial raid after knowing the element of surprised was compromised, to the FBI tactical teams not communicating properly with the negotiation teams, to the misinformation and faulty intelligence, this was a debacle of epic proportions from beginning to end. That being said, I do believe the branch dravidians set fire to their own compound, and they they should have surrendered, but honestly I believe it should have never gotten to that point. To the best of my knowledge, no one at the FBI, DOJ, or ATF was ever held accountable for their actions, despite a number of civil suits being filed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ATF, FBI, and DOJ really screwed up the Waco\/Branch Davidian raid\n","id":"30d896cd-bf01-4361-b2fe-2bd03ec17361"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Expiring Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in 2010<|ARGUMENT|>Timothy Geitner said in 2010: \"We think expiring the bush tax cuts for the wealthy is the responsible thing to do, because we need to make sure we can show the world that we're willing as a country now to start to make some progress bringing down our long-term deficits.\"10<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Expiring Bush tax cuts will send right fiscal message to world\n","id":"dd6b0759-07ae-4170-9d81-976ce69325c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Mass Immigration into Europe a Positive Thing for Indigenous Europeans?<|ARGUMENT|>Majority of immigrants are low skilled, in the UK only last year scrapping the cap for high skilled migrants was discussed 20,700 per year despite immigration from outside the EU being on level around 300,000 per year for a long time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mass immigration increases the competition for jobs and lowers wages. This serves big companies but not the employed poor and middle class people.\n","id":"7fbc5fed-7739-4347-a245-577fb59bfc80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ikea is fairly inexpensive with items that will last a long while. Walking through Ikea is like traveling through 10 different houses but you only get to see one room in each house. Instead of furniture laid out everywhere for people to see, Ikea furnishes rooms with Ikea products to give the customers an idea of what to do for their homes. Ikea also has great customer support. There are employees everywhere and I have never ran into an employee who did not know what they're doing. Let's not forget the food at Ikea. For a furniture store, the food isn't bad at all. If there are any furniture store better than Ikea, please tell me and I'll spend a day looking at furniture I don't need.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ikea is the best furniture store\n","id":"e173379c-aea8-4e44-b262-c0967f81599e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>With AKMs there are no more requirements to support troops on the ground, which is expensive and complicated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Logistical demands during military engagements are smaller if AKMs are deployed.\n","id":"12f11845-fbd2-4fa0-9b93-7771ee318633"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After seeing this story pop up on r news about BLM protesters blocking a bridge, I noticed at no point did the group self affiliate as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, they associated themselves as a Black, queer liberation collective . I then went to BlackLivesMatter.com to see whether or not the official movement. I then found that the official BLM organization is actually much narrower than I perceived. The official organization is focused on the creators of the hashtag and includes being unapologetically Black, transgender affirming, and queer affirming. I have personally used the BlackLivesMatter hashtag to basically say Black lives still matter or Black lives matter as much as White lives. The latter use apparently isn't in line with the Unapolagetically Black mindset available on the BLM website. According to the Herstory section of the website gt Black queer and trans folks bearing a unique burden in a hetero patriarchal society that disposes of us like garbage and simultaneously fetishizes us and profits off of us is state violence the fact that 500,000 Black people in the US are undocumented immigrants and relegated to the shadows is state violence .the fact that Black girls are used as negotiating chips during times of conflict and war is state violence Black folks living with disabilities and different abilities bear the burden of state sponsored Darwinian experiments that attempt to squeeze us into boxes of normality defined by White supremacy is state violence. And the fact is that the lives of Black people\u2014not ALL people\u2014exist within these conditions is consequence of state violence. I was quite unaware of the additional motivations of the Black Lives Matter organization. I've used the phrase Black lives matter because all lives should matter before, but according to the official organization that isn't the right motivation. So here's my tl'dr view Black people who want to protest police violence have been disenfranchised and disadvantaged by the BlackLivesMatter organization, given that this organization also tirades against cisgendered men and White surpremacy and feels that any concept of manipulating the phrase Black Lives Matter e.g. brown lives matter, etc. is appropriation. Virtually all Black people who want to protest their situation are assumed to be associated with this movement and organizations movements like it, and are subsequently ignored or hated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The official Black Lives Matter organization has ruined the impressions of un-affiliated Black protesters.\n","id":"c6e4fd0f-605f-492f-84a9-6c0723c1563b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is a major movement, so to speak, going on on tumblr. The gist of the movement is that rape is NEVER the victim's fault. However, I believe that both people are at fault. At a party, for example, the rapist is at fault due to the fact that he or she was the one committing the act of rape while the victim is at fault due to the fact that he or she was the one who decided to go to that party in the first place. Edit I do not agree with the concept of rape and never will I rape someone else in my life. I'm not saying it's right, I'm just stating that there may be more than just the rapist to blame. Also, I am not trying to promote blaming the victim for rape. I just dislike the fact that people are trying turn a blind eye to the fact that even victims may have played a part in the act.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe both Rapist AND Victim are at fault in an act of rape.\n","id":"c4d80b49-e89e-47c5-b068-59878322cbfa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First reddit post, woo, probably going to feel stupid about it later. I believe that in most cases, the average person votes without educating themselves enough about what they are voting for examples climate change, foreign policy, drug laws, childcare laws, education systems . I think a better system could be created by someone much smarter than me so that only people who are knowledgeable about the topic being voted on are able to vote. This system would, of course, hold all other things equal, such as minority right, to prevent the abuse of the voting system over those who would be disallowed to vote in certain polls. But I think I could be wrong about this, please change my view by showing me that Majority Rule is a good system in most cases preferably not why other systems are worse, but why this one is not bad .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think \"Majority Rule\" is a bad system in many cases.\n","id":"4633f9c0-a54c-47b3-98d2-bc3f7c65cfb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Bullfighting is a practice with the aim of showing the society that we, as humans, are superior to animals by making them seem weak and inferior. Some people consider bullfighting an art, yet the massacre of animals should not be considered art from any point of view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Art, as the superior aesthetic expression of our creative inner selves, cannot include torture and violence.\n","id":"07857c2c-b5e9-4a04-92e3-91b75796b5df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally feel that the amount of money they're being paid is too much. Now I'm not trying to be the one to say this from a jealous standpoint because I don't get paid enough from my job. I'm not saying it isn't fair they're paid as much as they are. I'm saying that I think they should be paid a comfortable salary for a nice home and not have to worry about bills and such. But, they shouldn't be paid such gross amounts when that money could be recirculated to help the economy or other critical areas of our nation instead of just hoarding all of it. Yes, this may sound stupid, but I'd really like some insight as to why sports players deserve the amount of money they're given. EDIT Thank you to u 081613 and u Osric250 for changing my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think major sports athletes should be paid as much as they are.\n","id":"f50d7a6f-a49f-4681-a4d0-6be37d7119e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People are violent creatures by nature. Especially teenagers. And forcing people to bottle up their anger and resentment leads to mental health problems that cause longer lasting damage than a simple busted lip or even broken bone. While fighting relieve a lot of stress, and feels amazing. Plus, it's good exercise. x200B For this reason I think schools should allow supervised fights between students when there are grievances. With teachers there to intervene before a student gets seriously injured. x200B This can be after school, or during lunch hour. So not to interrupt class.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fighting should be allowed in schools under supervision.\n","id":"c803c966-e0e6-4102-a68f-52f4b4579232"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At a glace the current grade scale makes sense, anything under a 60 is considered not worthy of passing so we divide the passing region into four equally sized quadrants and make those the 4 passing grades. You then assign the quadrants a number from 1 4 and since an A is more valuable than a D it gets a higher number score and your total GPA is just the average of all numbers per credit. The problem comes from making the base zero occur at 59 rather than 0 on an exam. Going from a 60 to a 70 means you are going from a 1.0 to a 2.0 which means that a C is twice as valuable as a D despite being only a 10 difference in score. This is not an adequate reflection of the work necessary to obtain a C vs a D or any other letter grade for that matter While one could argue that by simply understanding how the grading scale works they'll understand that a D is not half as valuable as a C, that still does not mean that the method itself is flawed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"a 0 to 4 GPA scale is a poor way to represent grades\n","id":"4b5265cd-cf3a-455a-b2e2-de8a1e42aae8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alcohol is one of the most destructive substance in almost every way. On your body, organs, mind, neurotransmitters. Alcohol also acts on more than one neurotransmitter at one time , GabaA, GabaB, serotonin, not sure abt dopamine . One can easily become both physically and psychologically dependent on alcohol, and experience SERIOUS withdrawals. The main difference between alcohol and other drugs that are equally or even less harmful, is legal status and socially acceptability. People think that because you can walk into a bar liquor store restaurants etc and consume alcohol with your friends, without anyone batting an eye, that its perfectly fine. Fact is, you drink 2 4x a week? You use a hard drug 2 4x a week. Its on the same par as Benzos, Opioids, Amphetamines etc. You\u2019re not special because you only \u201cdrink\u201d and don\u2019t use other substances, and you certainly cannot judge other peoples use of their DOC, if used in moderation. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alcohol Use = Drug Use\n","id":"b24a66e7-4bc8-4310-b91f-9568f61ac1e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Not really an opinion so much as a prediction, but its still a view i hold. My prediction is based on a number of factors and you can address any or all of them or bring up new issues I haven't thought of. 1 Unpopular The draft for the war in Vietnam was extremely unpopular with massive protests and draft dodging. After the draft was eliminated the protests died down even as the war continued. It seems that America will support a lot of military activity Iraq War 1 2, Afghanistan, etc as long as they are not personally forced to serve. 2 No close border crisis Other modern developed countries have forced selective service South Korea, Israel but usually these countries face bordering existential crises to their very existence. America does not have this, has not ever had this, and presumably will not ever have this and so there is no need to have millions of men and women be conscripted every year for a tour of duty. 3 Nuclear Weapons America may face small attacks here and there but no nation state large enough to possibly overthrow the United States government seems likely to attack for fear of nuclear weapons retaliation. While 9 11 was a tragedy, there was no hope of terrorists taking over the country or overthrowing the government. The only world forces strong enough to do this would be large nations with large militaries of their own and if they did have a mainland ground force invasion of US soil it would almost guarantee a nuclear response. 4 Women, and the out of shape This is a minor reason but none the less I'll bring it up for discussion. In a modern draft there would be seemingly no way for women to avoid serving. Currently women face demanding physical aptitude tests to qualify for the most demanding positions or in some cases are barred from service for fear they will not be able to handle the physical requirements of the job front line combat, Navy Seals, etc . In the 21st century when men and women have equal rights and are largely treated equally there would be pushback if those less capable of serving were thought to be more likely to get an easier or safer assignment. This would create a race to the bottom for applicants seeking to avoid dangerous duty. Furthermore the vast majority of Americans are overweight, out of shape, and would require extensive training to become combat ready. If diabetes, heart conditions, obesity, or any number of conditions would disqualify a person from service I imagine people would quickly engage in unhealthy habits or bribe doctors in order to avoid service. 5 Conscientious objectors In previous generations there was a much stronger sense of duty, warrior culture, and sense of imminent danger which cultivated a value in service. In the modern world, where people increasingly distrust their government, have more access to information, and are more likely to have diverse religious and philosophical views I do not see the public getting behind any major military involvement that would require a draft. I would imagine there would be a rush to qualify yourself as a conscientious objector to the war in order to avoid combat even if that individual didn't feel that way immediately prior to the draft. Please change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There will never be another military draft forced conscription in America.\n","id":"62e037b9-204b-4988-9b62-35cec1ddaa11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Canada's Northwest Passage be an international strait?<|ARGUMENT|>The US has attempted to stake its claim to the Northwest Passage in the past. Internationalization could bring up old disputes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Northwest Passage\u2019s importance to world trade will cause Canada to be able to wield more influence.\n","id":"afbce18e-6b4a-4504-b79c-b8082196ff5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>Even if the premise that durasteel is denser than granite is accepted and give it three times the density, then 10 meters of durasteel would still be only 30 metres of granite and there's no evidence the hulls are even this thick. As the claim points out, it took 1km of granite to stop a transporter beam. It would require 300+ meters of durasteel in order for it to stop a transporter beam.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no solid evidence that durasteel is more dense than granite.\n","id":"93663ed3-f8f8-402a-81ca-5cadaf1b079e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify my views Self described wine experts are no better at tasting a wine than a layperson. Not that anyone could do as well, but with a few months of practice the average person could be as good as somebody who has made a career out of wine. Certified Sommeliers are no better than any other wine experts at tasting a wine, and therefore, because of the first claim, no better than I could be with some practice. Neither wine experts nor Sommeliers are better at suggesting a wine or a wine pairing to an individual than a non expert with a familiarity with the wines at hand. I will not focus on this claim any further than saying if you know a person is misconstruing their abilities within a field, it would be absurd to keep giving their opinion the weight of an expert's, if any you wouldn't listen to the advice of a plumber who claimed to know plumbing but demonstrably did not. But I'll award a delta to somebody who can change my view on this belief, even if they have not convinced me on the previous two. For the record, I'm using the term being able to taste a wine to mean the skill of identifying where the wine is from and or identifying characteristics of the wine's taste or smell that are objectively true i.e. the wine producer truly did include an identified fruit in the wine's production, or there is consistent agreement among expert tasters , but not universal. The first claim is mostly laid out in this article from The Guardian The second claim comes from the extreme opaqueness of the Sommelier accreditation process, and the fact that claims that, if true, could easily be made verifiably, are made without evidence. Examples include this source that makes extremely specific statistical claims that aren\u2019t sourced or mentioned anywhere else online the fact that the Court of Master Sommelier exam results aren\u2019t revealed so nobody knows how well they actually did, or that the movie Somm doesn\u2019t show a single person verifiably tasting correctly. And, again, there\u2019s no study that shows the legitimacy of this something that seems easy to arrange and would lend legitimacy to the field if they could truly taste wine. In fact, there doesn\u2019t seem to be any reason for me to believe a certified Sommelier is able to taste wine better than I can. There is this study that shows that Sommeliers\u2019 brains activate in different ways than ours do when tasting wine. But that\u2019s surely not synonymous with being better at tasting wines.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wine tasting is bogus\n","id":"7ed855a0-faa3-4357-8c81-7d6605692ae3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Background I am an atheist and largely consider the Bible a work of historical fiction and mythology, not fact. It is through this analytical lens I am considering this position. This mostly discusses the Old Testament. I believe that God is more evil than Satan, and that when God or any of his prophets describe himself as loving or good , or describes Satan as evil , he is simply lying. It's difficult to find actual examples in the Bible of Satan acting evil, and it seems that nearly every instance which could be described as evil , is more often better described as against God . If God is a character of pure good, then this would be evil, but if actions speak louder than words, there's very little evidence of God being good. He's incredibly jealous, and regularly kills followers of other gods. He killed who knows how many people with the Flood. He once killed 40 kids for calling a guy bald. He wants his followers to be willing to kill their own children because he said so. Sure, he stopped it, but what was this test supposed to prove? He seems to be totally okay with rape. Probably a number of more examples that don't come to mind just now. r atheism can certainly provide pages and pages. Here's a link with a list and citations. What has Satan actually done? Sure, he's regularly described as evil, but what evil acts does he actually commit? He got Adam Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which is one of those things that falls under the against god category I think that knowledge of good and evil is a pretty good thing. He killed Job's family, with God's complete approval . So, have I missed something? Is Satan really evil?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that, in the Bible, Satan is a more moral character than God.\n","id":"6dc255b1-8f0c-43c4-b06e-1d2dd67ad05e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer Hitler was an evil man who committed genocide Germany invaded Poland to gain a route to the sea Danzig . Poland would have given up the path to the sea if Britain didn\u2019t give them the war guarantee In 1933, two months after Hitler\u2019s rise to power, Winston Churchill himself made a statement in Parliament gt \u201cMany people would like to see, or would have liked to see, a little while ago \u2013 I was one of them \u2013 the question of the Polish Corridor adjusted. For my part, I should certainly have considered that to be one of the greatest practical objectives of European peace keeping diplomacy.\u201d Here you have one of the protagonists of the 1930s and 40s laying the framework for peace 6 years before he took part in the destruction of the British Empire and the death of 60 million people by ignoring his own advice. The West lost the world and The United Kingdom lost its empire because of WW2. Other countries lost their colonies as well, but the British Empire was the largest and the loss of their territories set back much of the third world by decades. The Holocaust didn\u2019t start until 1941. That is two years after the beginning of the war. Cause and effect is almost impossible to prove, but before the war Hitler\u2019s plan was one of mass deportation. Two years into the war he began resorting to genocide. WW2 was not a war against Jewish genocide and, if anything, hostilities against the Jews were more intense because of the war. Hitler had no intention of invading westward until Britain declared war on Germany. Why would they have built the German equivalent of the Maginot Line The Westwall if he intended to invade westward? Hitler did not want a war with Britain, France, or the USA. 60 million people were killed in WW2 because of diplomatic blunders. The most disastrous of which was Britain\u2019s war guarantee to Poland. Edits format<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"WW2 was not necessary and resulted in more harm than good\n","id":"f9dc5d05-c90a-4d37-898f-1eb78d5c30ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When this topic is discussed almost always Fast times, Ferris Bueller, and The Breakfast Club are mentioned among others. To me however Dazed is far better than those 3 and anything else you could throw at it. To start, looking at the soundtracks Dazed is potentially unbeatable in all of film, with key tracks such as Sweet Emotion, Stranglehold, and Tuesday's Gone. I will say however I love the music in Fast Times and it does a great job at capturing the mood. The next thing I like to point out is the actors. Dazed has most notably Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg, Ben Affleck, and last but not least Matthew McConaughey, an absolutely killer lineup. Fast times undoubted brings the heat with Phoebe Cates, Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. yes you can say Nicolas Cage but his part was so minor i'd argue its not worth mentioning Breakfast club notably has Paul Gleason,Emilio Estevez, and Anthony Michael Hall and Buellers has basically Matthew Broderick and that's it. I say Dazed with the combo of Affleck and McConaughey win out over Sean Penn and Forest Whitaker again if you want to count Cage you can but I still say he has no effect on the film . Getting to the actual films, I think with Dazed the acting is just so natural it feels like your just looking in on real life. All the others most obviously Buellers leaves no doubt that your watching a movie with scripted everything. Many people will point to the fact that Dazed has no real plot as why it isn't that great but for me that's exactly why it is so good. These movies aren't made to make a lasting impact on society maybe breakfast club, but still they aren't made out of pure artistic passion. They are made to make you feel good and leave the real world for a couple hours. And with Dazed and Confused I think it's the height of that style of film.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dazed and Confused is the quintessential \"high school movie\" far better than even Fast Times.\n","id":"9bf1e453-c198-40f5-83cf-e2ebbd7a72c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>By agreeing to Airbnb's Terms of Service hosts enter into a legally binding contract that \"hosts alone are responsible for identifying, understanding, and complying with all laws, rules and regulations that apply to their Listings and Host Services\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The onus is on users not to break local laws. We do not hold other companies to this same standard of mandatory disclosure.\n","id":"0a41f60f-93fc-4f9e-a7e2-c0367648f8dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Vegan Alternative: Pain-free GM Animals?<|ARGUMENT|>This could count as animal cruelty as they would not recognise the entirely natural stimulus of pain and as such may even damage their meat by damaging themselves without realising it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modifying animals to be pain-free can put them at risk.\n","id":"1359f354-6c3a-4507-8d26-e18c7fa1d8f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Cryptocurrencies And Blockchain Technologies The Next 'Industrial Revolution'?<|ARGUMENT|>If anything, using a cryptographic ledger would help with preventing illegal uses of money: one can monitor the exchange of assets and track where money goes on the ledger; this can't be done easily with physical cash.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All legal problems derived from cryptocurrencies are present in traditional cash, and for the same reasons. This isn't specific to cryptocurrencies.\n","id":"b3e8620e-e077-4608-95ae-a8b9f37ea722"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>Trials and reviews of treatment plans for paraphilia showed a significant decrease - indeed, to zero - in deviant sexual fantasies, and a similar elimination of deviant sexual activity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It eliminates the main reasons behind sexual abuse: the sex drive, compulsive sexual fantasies, and capacity for sexual arousal of a pedophile.\n","id":"1fabda61-6ef7-46ee-9713-da5f8d19f2c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>Many consider the diversity of a company when deciding on a place to work. This gives companies with affirmative action policies a wider selection of qualified candidates from which to choose, increasing their opportunities to recruit top talent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the long-term, affirmative action helps create a more diverse workplace.\n","id":"7f8b0c9d-39aa-44c2-85e4-83cd9f7e52bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should Self-Driving Cars Kill?<|ARGUMENT|>By choosing to act against the best interests of the driver, the car would therefore be inserting itself into the decision making process in a way that would cause a direct imposition upon an individual's rights. This would be a moral wrong according to deontology as it creates a harm that would otherwise be absent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most drivers would instinctually act to save their own lives in an unavoidable accident. This just replicates this behaviour.\n","id":"03df1a80-9728-4897-b1dd-77df122cc714"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Native American genocide is rooted in our countries history and over years it has shaped our government and the way we do politics. 1 It is about time that the we own up to our mistake of making Columbus day a national holiday and remove it altogether and replace it with Indigenous Day which highlights the history of the Natives that once roamed the same land we live on. We are taught in our schools that genocide is justifiable and acceptable if we get something in return or are not disadvantaged by trying to solve for it. We are allowing a genocide to occur right now in North Korea because we are scared that it will hurt the surrounding nations economically. The same form of propaganda is employed by North Korea themselves highlighting that what they are doing is for the greater good. Many war criminals, including Hitler 2 , were inspired by the genocide of the natives and yet we still allow ourselves to believe that what Columbus did was a good thing through the White Man's Burden. There really is no net benefit to having the holiday other than getting a day off of school or work which would still occur on the same day. We don't celebrate Hitler because he helped Germany's economy, so why do we celebrate someone who found this country, which it would've happened inevitably over time, and yet committed the same form of atrocities? Decolonizing the Master Narrative Treaties and Other American Myths\u201d Donna L. Akers 2011 \u201cHitler\u2019s Inspiration and Guide The Native American Holocaust\u201d Lia Mandelbaum June 18, 2013<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Columbus day is unjustified as a National Holiday and thus should be removed and replaced with Indigenous Day.\n","id":"bd11e723-2295-4aa8-9d3a-34432c50a94d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a view that is foundational to a lot of my other views about education and educational policy, and so I want to see if it can be changed. Simply put, I think school quality both actual and especially perceived at nearly all levels is a function of who that school admits as a student, not of the curriculum or faculty or facilities. For a few examples of my thinking I do not think the quality of instruction at super elite colleges such as a Harvard or Oxford is much if at all better than a state college. I think if the same student takes an economics degree program at UMass Boston or Harvard, they're likely to know the same amount of economics if you tested them. Harvard students will score average on better because Harvard admits and enrolls students who are better at the metrics of education, but who would have learned just as much at UMass. I think this applies at basically all levels of education, and that good primary and secondary schools are largely ones which students who would perform well no matter where they went attend. Especially perception wise, this tends to mean schools where the parents are wealthy. I do think there is a baseline of instruction facilities quality that would make a school bad even with good students, but it is a fairly low baseline, especially at the primary secondary level. Also I would expect that the parents of good students would be the sort to take aggressive measures to fix such a school or get their kid out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"School quality is almost entirely a function of the student body.\n","id":"46caaa96-a40f-437f-ac20-1d0aa2312472"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the last debate, Bernie said he would keep his campaign going until the convention if Hillary has not clinched the nomination in pledged delegates. I think that even if it isn't clinched, as long as she has more pledged delegates than he does and more popular vote than he does, he should suspend his campaign and support her. The only way he could win at that point would be if enough superdelegates defect to him to give him the lead. This is entirely undemocratic and it overrides the will of the people. As someone who is running under the guise of being someone who is supported by the people, this would be undemocratic and hypocritical of Bernie. If he does steal the nomination from her by using superdelegates, it would be terrible for party unity against whomever the GOP nominates. Instead of spending the time between the last primaries and the convention consolidating the base and reunifying the party, Bernie will be alienating a huge portion of democrats who are more moderate and don't support his views, as well as Clinton supporters who will feel the nomination was stolen. This is akin to the GOP establishment stealing the election from Trump in terms of backlash. It's been tradition that despite the superdelegates supporting one candidate throughout primary season, they will end up unifying behind the person who gets the most pledged delegates. In 08, Hillary's superdelegates went to Obama when it was clear he was going to win. For Bernie to do the opposite and try to take superdelegates who support the person who was democratically chosen would be going against the precedent that's been established. I would also say the same thing about Hillary if Bernie gets the majority of pledged delegates and the popular vote and she used her superdelegates to win. It just seems like that probably won't be the case AND she didn't do that in the past with Obama.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Hillary Clinton has a lead in pledged delegates and popular vote after the last day of primary voting, Bernie Sanders should drop out and not take his campaign to the convention.\n","id":"9ba5e26b-9e0e-469f-9520-1684f310a421"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Alien life could have existed in the past. The fact that humans have not discovered any evidence is irrelevant as they could just have \"missed\" the lifespan of an alien civilization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To move from the fact that we haven't found definitive proof of aliens to the inference that aliens do not exist is an argument from ignorance\n","id":"31d5b01d-5023-461c-a33b-d966d5d83b22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is almost a tongue in cheek , but the argument still feels like it has a little bit of truth to me. Help me sort this out, would ya? Animals do not know any better, so they cannot be blamed for their actions i.e. hunting and eating other animals I would think one of the premises for the existence of rehabilitation efforts in prisons, for people who once felt it was okay to injure or kill other human beings, is that criminals can effectively be taught to know better . Therefore, a person who believes eating meat is immoral should feel that the same rehabilitative efforts should be made for animals who hunt other animals. As they are, it is natural for them to hunt. However, it is also natural for murderers to murder when they commit their murders. We need to change what is natural for them reform the animals so that they no longer feel the need to prey upon others. Of course, aside from the fact that this sounds a bit silly, I believe it is impossible to do. This would therefore lead a person who believes eating meat is immoral to the conclusion that predatory animals need to be put down, the same way that murderers who we deem cannot be rehabilitated would be issued a death sentence. Perhaps locking up carnivorous omnivorous animals for life term sentences could also suffice? In any case, it would seem that severe and immediate action needs to be taken. The only way I feel you can get around this is to find a successful way of reverting wild animals' intrinsic tendencies to hunt others. But again, I do not feel like this is a realistic possibility. Maybe I am just a bit tired or out of it, but I am strangely and surprisingly convinced by this line of reasoning. Thoughts? EDIT Not that it was really coming up in discussion so far or anything, but I did want to mention that I am pescatarian, and also support vegetarianism and veganism. Just a bit of possibly unnecessary background on me, if anything. EDIT 2 This might be a clearer explanation of my view Let's just consider Person A who believes eating meat is wrong because it takes the life of another sentient being without its consent. Animals who hunt other animals take the lives of other sentient beings without their consent. Therefore, Person A believes that these predatory animals are doing something wrong. Person A should then feel that it is right for these animals to stop doing something wrong. This may or may not represent my stance entirely I am not quite sure myself , but it is at least a good summary of it. Final EDIT I think I am fairly satisfied with how this  turned out. Thanks for all your replies It was simply a strange thought that I felt would be fun to try to argue about, but the  yielded some interesting conversations, at least for me. Thanks again<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When one accepts that eating meat is immoral, one would also have to accept that wild animals that naturally eat meat either need to be \"rehabilitated\", or put down.\n","id":"242a817b-6456-485b-b439-b0f7a9e0fee2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if this premise was accepted, it merely leads to the conclusion that internet companies should not allow continuous use of such speech, not ban such speech altogether.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Such harmful effects only occur with prolonged exposure to such speech.\n","id":"26db5d22-1d01-424d-8244-da762ade4b88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Differing rules of origin for products means businesses need to set up production processes in multiple member states.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USE will harmonize laws and regulations more than the EU does, reducing internal barriers to trade.\n","id":"17c39636-53a4-408d-adc7-71e906fb10ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This started as a comment, but it turned out to me trying to define my world views. I think I have defined it, but want input, criticism and different views to evaluate before I cement it as a part of my being. I'll reply on your comment alone since the previous one was deleted. With extraordinary rendition, I'm in a non US country country fearing the US renditioning me for my anti US war views. Let me stress that I'm not against the US way of life or the western worlds views and morals. I am proud of being part of a society with views that to me seems be a society based on logic rather than faith and ignorance. But my personal safety is not there since I could get tried in a secret court based on secret laws outside the US borders due to US laws. BASED ON THIS COMMENTARY ALONE. I assume somebody will say how wrong I am, but how do you know? It's a secret. According to US laws, I have no rights. And US laws reaches across the globe. I have no rights. I have clearly stated that I am against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because I don't understand how a nation can go to war towards another nation due to aggression caused by a group not directly related to a specific nation. You can argue that the Taliban was a part of the Afghan government, and I agree. But why go to war to bring democracy when there is many other nations in more need of democracy ? The way I see it, it's about revenge and money. And those are conflicted by my sense of justice. I assume it's all about politics, a slap on the wrist or a punch to the nose will make sure it doesn't happen again. I wholly concur, terrorism is terrifying and a nation should do everything to prevent itself from it, both now and in the future. But with nations, isn't the goal to mediate and try to not punch? After all, a political slap on the wrist seems to me to be another blown up body. A political punch to the nose results in human tragedy. How many Americans, Afghans and Iraqis have died?. And the US isn't even slapping the ones obviously responsible since they argue that the enemy they face is nation less. My views are absolutely based on my impressions. I think there are reasons I'm not aware of, but if those are restricted is it a democracy or a group controlling your our war efforts? My nation has forces in Afghanistan. I don't like that one bit, where does the US jurisdiction end? At borders? Seems not. With personal safety? Not for non US citizens. With resistance ? I have seen footage of non combatants being gunned down for visibly trying to help the people harmed by the gunships. I don't want to be renditioned. I don't want to be killed. I don't want to undergo advanced interrogation techniques . But I have no way to say that I don't approve of that beyond a arm chair activist account on reddit. And even that is potentially dangerous due to me being surveyed and registered. Just in case. It's a mess of thoughts, opinions and ideas for me. I hope that you will discuss and try to change my views. I want to make an informed decision before I make up my mind. Unfortunately my friends don't like to debate these things, so therefore I reach out to you reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the US is on the wrong track when it comes to wars, and here's why.\n","id":"a8bcfb0f-81e9-495c-9713-439f95f6120a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>White supremacists can target and threaten specific individuals online. Denying them service on widely accessible social media platforms would make such attacks more difficult.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being able to express and defend one's ideas means power, so refusing to give a platform to white supremacists weakens them.\n","id":"86bf85c7-1d48-4064-ab4a-a958ace354d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The people of Venezuela are under the control of a party that opresses all forms of opposition and that has sunk the country in economic ruin, unable to take advantage of its countries' natural resources and membership in the OPEP. Chavez made good points about the interests of multinational companies and their power over the world, but that does not excuse his deficient government. However, almost nothing in this life is black or white. I want to know why accomplished, intelligent politicians like Jeremy Corbyn or Pablo Iglesias hold Venezuela's government in such great esteem. I have only read short snippets of their views and all reported with criticism , and I know little about Venezuela's history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Venezuela is not a free country and it is a shame that European politicians admire it\n","id":"b17c2804-961b-4558-84f3-148499b6d09e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently time I've logged onto reddit I've seen something fallout related on the top of r gaming. Over the last two months I've seen someone whose fallout anthology was waterdamaged by UPS, an advert for fallout four in the Paris metro station, someone who just 'happened' to receive bottlecaps as a tip from a Bethesda employee and today some fallout themed meme about killing NPCs to get their weapons. I'm pretty sure I've even missed a few. Either a mod is getting handouts or Bethesda have hired some absolute wizards to do their social media advertising or both . One or two fallout top posts I'd accept as chance I'm quite looking forward to fallout four myself but this seems like just too much of a coincidence. This is not the first time I've blatant advertising on the front page, be it TIL that McDonald's gets all their beef from cows that have been fed marshmallows and given massages to Taco Bell is giving John Everyman a free pizza because he lost job and his daughter contracted fatal conjunctivitis. I'm not advocating everyone join r conspiricy but especially the fallout stuff does seem a little horribly blatant. What's worse is that noone seems to notice. You'll find the odd r hailcorporate near the bottom of the comments, but the top comments are all 'yaay fallout four so stoked' or something of that ilk. A few descenting comments on the 'my waterdamaged fallout anthology' post were even met with 'how dare you not trust this guy' replies. So, in short, have a shot at changing any one of these related views A Many subreddits are being massively manipulated for advertising. B Although subreddits like r hailcorporate exist, most people on the site don't notice and even play along Yaaay fallout four . C This is a huge problem and isn't being properly addressed by the mods, admins or even users. Edit Of course I don't think absolutely noone has noticed I wasn't being literal but very few people seem to care enough to change anything Edit you might disagree with me but please try and change my view rather than down voting everything I say. It's not at all in the spirit of this sub.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think media manipulation is a huge problem on Reddit, I think \/r\/gaming is pretty much owned by Bethesda and I think noone has noticed!\n","id":"7b06862a-01ce-4542-a118-e60a39020a25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The only thing I see history being taught for is so that more history teachers can roam the earth. I see no practical use for a History major. Learning from past mistakes is great. But I just don't see what you could use the knowledge of 'Henry VIII had six wives' for. I've got no idea how you would make any sort of money, or be a productive member of society, or help advance our civilization by knowing miscellaneous stuff like that. The only place I could see anyone applying a history major is as a teacher, which is pretty pointless, seeing as it never does anything, why have someone teach it? tldr What does one do with a history major, and how does history knowledge positively affect our current society? edit I also have no idea what you learn while studying history. So if you could tell me that, that would be awesome as well. Also, please tell me if I need to go into further detail, or I did something earth shatteringly wrong, because this is my first time posting here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think History is a worthless subject.\n","id":"8e5ac3cd-6bdc-4270-8dd3-3c143912ca4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Psychiatrists Be Allowed to Diagnose Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>The area of expertise of psychologists is very different to that of psychiatrists who are also medical doctors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The American Psychological Association does not have a Goldwater Rule so psychologists can comment on public figures.\n","id":"3c4bc08a-e241-40e8-a804-f2fe0086aa70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>The sooner children learn that \"an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind\" the better, but it need not be taught as true because Gandhi said it. Its logic is self evident.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is better to teach children why things are considered good or bad behavior rather than saying because god said so or because you go to hell if you disobey.\n","id":"89376390-01bb-4671-8ac8-91f5e7308cdb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Background My girlfriend and I have been looking at apartments and this comes up as a topic fairly often. We recently adopted a pit bull named Penny ourselves. She was trained to CGC Canine Good Citizen by an inmate after animal control picked her up from a farm. My brother and his wife have a pitbull they found on the streets, and a really good friend owns a pitbull mix heavy on the beagle lab . They are all excellent dogs, and we all frequently encounter various situations with distinct prejudice toward the breed. Additionally, finding a place to live apartments especially has greater difficulty for what I believe is a very ignorant reason We have a pitbull. Penny is the sweetest and loving dog I've ever met. Children harass her and she shows no signs of aggression one young girl, while we were on a walk, hit her butt as she ran unexpectedly from behind her. Penny just ran and tried to hug me , and we can easily take bones from her without problem. She plays a bit rough and has a terrifying play bark but always has extremely friendly body language. I think temperament is largely caused by how much socializing is done with the dog and how the dog is actually raised. Breed specific legislation creates hard limits based on an ignorant position. Additionally, I feel that if all the dangerous dog breeds were eliminated, people would find other ways to make previously non dangerous dogs to use as fighters. Thus, BSL only fights a symptom. There are better ways to mitigate the problem in the long term. For example, mandatory obedience and CGC will help. Also, I suppose that part of the thought of banning a dog breed is a quick mitigation technique. In other words, it is beneficial immediately to ban a breed vice implementing techniques for a long term solution. However, as I said above, I believe that is only temporarily curing a symptom and the larger problem needs to be addressed, which requires a long term solution. Tl Dr Saying Your dog can't live here because she's a pitbull. is analogous to Your kid can't live here because she's black. and variations thereof. . Essentially my goal here is to obtain insight on how BSL is not analogous to human racism. My goal is NOT to have my opinion on pitbulls themselves are as a breed changed, though if good information comes from that direction it will certainly be welcome.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think dog breed specific legislation is analogous to human racism.\n","id":"7d470fc9-29d5-4585-ab66-85bb099d6a82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is there an afterlife?<|ARGUMENT|>Chemical changes and our genes combine to induce mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are numerous examples of medical conditions which can alter one's personality.\n","id":"61f9351b-10c6-4553-807c-64654fb09370"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>It could be argued that this would be outside of the jurisdiction of physics, since physics deals with the results of physical laws, not the laws themselves. No amount of understanding of physics can conclude *why* physics exists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no theory in physics that explains how physical laws themselves would change or come into being, and so we have no basis on which to assume that this would happen at random in a multiverse.\n","id":"758f30ad-1330-4ac7-ad39-847da5d66e17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>As theorists such as Judith Butler have asserted, gender can be seen as performative i.e. a cultural inscription of meaning on one's anatomical sex pp. 24-5. Under this view, facilities such as gendered bathrooms constitute one means of regulating and compelling a false idea of gender coherence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That humans \"are\" a given gender from birth is subjective, so to reflect this via gender-separated bathrooms would be to reflect - and force on others - an arguably false reality.\n","id":"0f8761de-4e53-4eaa-9e74-09ef30d802d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Sorry, that title is a little misleading. What I meant is that anyone who I deem corrupt in my opinion is not a viable candidate. Therefore, I hope that you can  that she is corrupt. I am a conservative. However, I have been watching Hillary closely for a couple of weeks now, as well as watching many of her interviews over the years. This has led me to believe that she is extremely qualified to become president, and would be an extremely competent president if elected unlike Obama . Regardless, I have also heard a lot about Clinton's alleged corruption. Such as This This And This I want to like Hillary as a candidate, I really do. I think she would be incredibly competent and that it is about time we have a woman as president. However, before even considering supporting Hillary, I need to be convinced that she is not as corrupt as conservative media makes her out to be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hillary Clinton is corrupt and therefore should not be considered as a viable presidential candidate\n","id":"ea0a0800-cff0-474d-8c1d-04bbe3100d46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>Powering India\u2019s growth: India has set off on an ambitious mission, a mission to provide electricity to 18,000 villages which are still in darkness after almost 7 decades of independence. PM Modi, in his Independence Day speech announced that all remaining villages shall be electrified within 1000 days.The new Government has focused on holistic and long term structural improvements in the sector, with a focus on achieving 24X7 power for all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modi-led government is clocking over a year at the wheel. 1. Make in India To facilitate investment, boost research & development R&D, ensure product originality and create skill-based jobs by establishing industrial sector; major national programme was started by Narendra Modi. Modi has reached out to the world with his idea of \u2018Make in India\u2019 and it has generated positive response from foreign companies.\n","id":"1e6536cb-8d67-4107-b0e5-cf2939fa776e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Given that, to varying degrees, people have an innate sex drive that is largely outside of their control, we can maximise their happiness by allowing easy options for it to be satisfied.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex work provides a way for people to have sex that is highly convenient.\n","id":"2d1ad738-8a88-4d1f-a9b4-8bfde74d5a18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do emotions and opinions have any place in an argument?<|ARGUMENT|>When your emotions are running high, your logic will be low, which can lead to irrational decisions<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The more intense your emotions, the more your judgment may grow clouded\n","id":"df417882-5e47-41dd-95bb-99e63aa396ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I play adult hockey still about twice a week. Its not at too crazy a level, some teams might feature 1 decent ex junior player though who has a shot that can get through my cheaper level equipment There has been a lot of talk lately on the lack of scoring in the NHL. From the recent GM talks, the plan it seems is to attack goalie equipment again. I personally think it would be easier though to simply increase the nets to be a little wider or taller. Goalies right now make the claim they need the extra equipment to feel safe. At the same time, injuries from shots are actually pretty low in the NHL, so to me it appears current equipment is keeping goalies from injuries directly from shots. Some say though that because that injury rate is so low, there's room to shrink the equipment for more room, at the risk of an increase in injuries from shots. Along with that mindset, is that we can use more expensive technologies to shrink the size of the equipment while maintaining the same injury rate from shots. I personally feel that to make it simpler, and to not worry about measuring every little inch of some new equipment standard, they should just increase the net size. The goalies would still be maintaining their current level of great injury rates from shots with the current equipment that keeps them safe. You could increase the net to create more surface area, similar to the surface area that would have been created by smaller equipment. As well, the change in net size means the sport would be easier to handle financially as the smaller kevlar based equipment would be more expensive to the point where only high level hockey teams could handle comfortably. Basically, if the goalie fraternity's big claim to current equipment is safety, just offer them an option of smaller equipment, or current equipment with bigger nets. I think the choice should be bigger nets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With all of the talk of scoring being down in the NHL and goaltenders need to reduce equipment to create more to shoot at, I think increasing the net size is an easier and better idea\n","id":"5de027fa-d805-46f7-9f64-c08b6299908b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Supply side economics looks like it is fueling the self-destruction of capitalism in America.<|ARGUMENT|>If someone sees celebrated news that there was 3.5% GDP growth last year, or predicted this year, there is no guarantee that such information has any direct bearing on that person's particular financial circumstances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"National economic success is determined by the wrong measurements. Success isn't necessarily GDP growth, unemployment, or new highs in the stock market.\n","id":"1c7cd22e-d31b-49d3-8818-b08d7645257f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok, It's one thing to watch it, but it's another to defend it and claim that it's secretly made for grown men because it's not. If it's on Disney, Nick or CN, then it's without a doubt made for kids. Idc if you watch it, it's probably best if you keep that to yourself, cause you know, it's weird to brag about your fandom of it. If you disagree, then please, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Grown adults who watch shows made for kids 13 and under are just as weird as 'bronies.\"\n","id":"b0ba3b8e-0e1f-49f2-a0f9-2f99711fc161"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>Many companies have been accused of failing to address issues in their own workplace despite running political ads on the topic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is often hypocritical for a company to say they support a political issue.\n","id":"26fad08f-1883-4e3e-a371-16be27ea7f23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are many people who, I feel unwarranted, admonish people for using the word 'literally'. Instead they suggest others to use the word 'figuratively'. I think my argument is best explained in the form of an example x200B An example is the phrase I was dying laughing, A fairly common expression. It is clear that the person is speaking metaphorically and didn't really die. However this inaccurate colloquialism adds emphasis to how much she was laughing. Now let us modify the phrase to say I was literally, dying laughing. Though she is still speaking figuratively the use of the word 'literally' implies more care has been taken in the choice of words and that you are not just using an expression thoughtlessly , and makes it feel more strong. Not just the cliche dying laughing. In short the use of literally added even more emphasis. Now lets change the phrase to I was figuratively dying laughing. The 'figuratively' is redundant as one can easily tell from the phrase I was dying laughing, that the person is speaking metaphorically. Even in less obvious examples it can be pretty clear when a speaker is speaking metaphorically from their tone and context. It doesn't do anything to add emphasis so doesn't fulfill the same role of 'literally'. In fact the use of the word figuratively can come off a bit condescending. It's as if to say you don't have the capability to deduce whether I'm speaking figuratively or not so I have to spell it out for you. x200B Of course, one can say many people often use the word 'literally' lazily, or too frequently. This may be true but this should be no reason to malign the word while offering up a lower quality substitute word, which fails to fill the desired role.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who say \"you should say 'figuratively' instead of 'literally' don't understand the nuances of language\n","id":"564bc52e-0347-40d1-93fa-e58925c3067a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I white male want to first state that I acknowledge that the systemic racism in America is real and that white racism has had a significant impact on the black population historically and even today. I am not saying that blacks are responsible for any of that, I just think that they are in the unfortunate situation where they must change their own culture in order to improve their lives. The following is a list of things I feel blacks must change that white people cannot change. The fact that 72 of black families are living in a single parent household. Black people are committing a significantly higher amount of violent crime than all other races in America. Fixing this will lead to less police brutality, and will make non blacks more sympathetic to the unfair police brutality that blacks ~do~ experience. Black men need to stop being so chauvinistic and homophobic. I know black men who are ridiculed and even assaulted for being homosexual. I realize that this sounds harsh and if i said anything that sounds unreasonable please inform me, I do want to understand these issues and if I say anything is bigoted or ignorant I would like to be corrected. Again, I am not trying to excuse white people or shift the blame onto the victim. Sorry for all the typos, I am too tired to proofread this. EDIT View definitely changed quite a bit. I still think there is much that needs to be changed with the culture itself but I have a new appreciation for how complex that this issue is and awareness of how much can be done by the police and society as a whole. I'll have to sleep on this for a while, thank you all for the comments and feel free to continue posting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black Americans need to change their own culture if they want to experience more equality.\n","id":"77f07e49-1cbc-4e4e-8c76-9ab55d6af809"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Second Amendment is indefensible policy for today's day and age. Guns have advanced far beyond what our founding fathers could have ever predicted. We do not Constitutionally protect the right to a whole host of tools that have significantly more utility than guns do. There is no Constitutional right to own a car. There is no Constitutional right to own housing. There is no Constitutional right to healthcare. Yet, somehow, we have a Constitutional right to bear arms, to bear tools such as the AR 15 which have proven themselves to serve one purpose efficient and indefensible murder of our fellow Americans. To those who say we need the Second Amendment so that we have the ability to overthrow a tyrannical government in over 200 years we have never once overthrown even a local government, let alone the federal government, nor could even a well armed populace hope to defeat the American military should it ever choose to turn itself against the citizens it has sworn to protect even an AR 15 stands up poorly to a Tomahawk missile or M1 Abrams tank. In the event that the military does not turn its back on us and helps us overthrow a hypothetical tyrant, then our people have no need to own multiple high powered weapons of their own. In neither scenario is it useful for our populace to have a Constitutional right to bear arms in order to overthrow a tyrannical government. To those who say we need the Second Amendment to protect our right to defend ourselves, or to hunt for sustenance the right to own guns for sport or for self defense does not need to be Constitutionally protected such that common sense regulations are impossible to pass. If we do not feel the need to Constitutionally protect our right to own cars, to own housing, or to benefit from healthcare, then we cannot justify in good faith the need to Constitutionally protect our right to own tools which are used nearly exclusively to murder our fellow countrymen. A society that makes guns harder to obtain means that guns are less necessary for self defense just ask Australia, or Japan. We can enjoy shooting ranges and license reasonable firearms for hunting without Constitutionally protecting guns such that common sense gun regulation is impossible to pass. Repealing the Second Amendment does not mean the elimination of gun use in this country, it simply means the right to bear arms will no longer make it impossible to protect our children from the multiple school shootings they endure each and every month these days. We currently stand as one of three countries along with Mexico and Guatemala with a constitutional right to bear arms. It is time to leave that exclusive group, pass common sense gun regulation, and make our country safer for everyone herein.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Second Amendment is archaic and needs to be repealed\n","id":"85f878f6-85a4-4774-9ddb-12f7d50e0750"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>In some cases juveniles should be tried as adults<|ARGUMENT|>The society recognizes that teenagers are able to make decisions for themselves age of consent, driving licenses at 16, . and thus do not need protection from the state. Why should court proceedings be any different?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society does view adolescents as mature individuals in most cases.\n","id":"97696d31-1048-4094-80cc-817312353f55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm really on the fence on this one, so it should be easy to change my view if you don't do silly things like insult me or downvote me everywhere. The Parable of the Prodigal Son basically goes like this a guy has two kids. One is good, does everything he's supposed to, and is never celebrated. The other squanders his inheritance, is a complete fuckup, but when he returns home penitent is not just welcomed with open arms, but they throw a feast in his honor The other kid says hey man that's fucked up that he gets a feast and I've never even gotten a present . His dad replies But it was appropriate to celebrate and be glad, for this, your brother, was dead, and is alive again. He was lost, and is found. This story is fucked up. Being bad, repenting, and then being good is fine. You know what's better? Not being bad in the first place . Why is it good to celebrate the change of someone to the light more than one who has been in the light the whole time? To clarify my view I am not saying that you should not celebrate the return of the prodigal son. I understand that there are good incentive related reasons to be extra nice to someone when they change their mind and start being a good guy. It just seems super unfair and really perverse incentives to celebrate him more than the son who never strays, and particularly to not celebrate the good son at all . You should celebrate someone who is good their whole life more than someone who is bad and then turns good later on. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The moral of the Parable of the Prodigal Son is fucked up\n","id":"5a43d511-73b1-40ef-b2c9-c393c7836dd6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>God is sorting the good from the bad in His duel against Satan. In the last judgment, the good will be rewarded for their pains, and the evil will be condemned. See Parable of the Wheat and Tares.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of evil can be reconciled with an all-powerful and all-loving God. God would not want to remove evil if a greater good were only achievable with the existence of evil.\n","id":"9136d70d-a2e1-466e-b477-45ec016a0083"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To begin, I am in no way saying that motorcycle helmets are not important or beneficial nor am I saying that I would agree in principle with pedestrian or motorcyclist helmet mandates. I just wish to assert that if ANY helmet mandate were to be considered, pedestrians should rank above motorcyclists regarding priority of mandate implementation. Exhibit A From 1975 2001 there were more pedestrian fatalities than motorcycle fatalities. I understand that as a percentage, the number of total pedestrians compared to the number of pedestrian fatalities is considerably smaller than the number of motorcyclists compared to the number of motorcycle fatalities. However, since there were so many more total pedestrian fatalities than motorcycle fatalities, more lives would likely be saved if pedestrians were forced to wear helmets than if motorcyclists were forced to wear helmets. So, I contend that if you are in favor of motorcycle helmet mandates and your reasoning is saving lives, you should ALSO be in favor of mandating helmets for pedestrians. Furthermore, since it is likely to save more total lives, people in favor of these sort of mandates should prioritize pedestrian helmets above motorcycle helmets.  Edit For the purpose of this argument and due to lack of data, I am assuming the effectiveness of pedestrian helmets in saving lives in vehicle pedestrian collisions. Edit 2 It is reasonable to both accept the possibility of pedestrian helmets being effective at saving more total lives overall than motorcycle helmets and also be against the implementation of motorcycle mandates for practicality purposes. My view has changed regarding the effectiveness of this argument in exposing hypocrisy among the pro helmet mandate crowd. Perhaps I will attempt another  about my stance of safety mandates for adults being contrary to the notion of personal freedom and self ownership. Thanks everyone<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe mandating helmets for pedestrians would be more beneficial overall than motorcycle helmet mandates and should be considered a higher priority.\n","id":"d86ce322-344c-4298-855c-9585ace6c48e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We care about extending our lives long after they're worth living. We have medical practices available to keep your body alive long after it should have reasonably expired. Doesn't getting old sound dignified? If you just don't get around to dying, you can be a tremendous burden on your loved ones. Your mind, eyesight, hearing, flexibility, ability to function or speak can be hindered by age. Even to the point of all your internal organs shutting down, and euthanasia is never even an option. People who are not sick decide that the people who are sick don't deserve a choice in the matter if they don't want to live with their sickness, which I think is fucking horrible to begin with, but I think it should be taken a step farther than that. After age 80, euthanasia should be mandatory. Statistically, there's basically nothing left to offer society. Sure, you have your anecdotal exceptions, but they are few and far between enough to dismiss. Sure, I'll get old too and I might want to live longer than I'm useful for, but I'm ok with dying at 80. The elderly are a scourge on first world economies that no one is acknowledging. They're draining our economies and keeping wealth out of circulation. They're draining our medical resources as they're disproportionately taking care of the elderly too much. I get this isn't going to be a comfortable conversation, but it's one we should be having. Edited to add since there are now several posts advocating my suicide or my death, that's a dead horse. I get that you folks also support death, I asked you to try and change my view, not silence it. gt Hello, users of  This tnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The extension of quantity of life is absurd. After a certain age, the elderly should be euthanized.\n","id":"6dd034d8-8613-4d18-8346-bfb43ac4bced"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everybody knows about anonymous hate and how it can drive people to self harm commit suicide. Usually, people will defend the person getting the hate. I think that most of the time, it's either the person sending it to themselves, or it's the person just taking advantage of the attention. It's easily preventable. All you have to do is disable the anonymous option. AFAIK there isn't a website that forces you to allow them. If somebody was being so awful to you that they make you want to take harmful actions, wouldn't you want to stop it? If it's that bad, why would you continue to allow them the option to stay hidden? When they can't hide behind a computer, they'll either leave you alone or they'll show their face, allowing you to block the person. If you willingly let somebody talk shit to you anonymously because you won't turn the option off, I have no other explaination as to why you're doing it aside from the fact that you just want attention.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that anonymous hate is almost always used as a way to get attention.\n","id":"6bb197b6-d477-4c65-90a0-c06d158d9215"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Cryptocurrencies And Blockchain Technologies The Next 'Industrial Revolution'?<|ARGUMENT|>Blockchain technology ensures validity of data across persons that do not necessarily need to trust them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No other technology exists which can create distributed trust between users, without already trusting intermediaries.\n","id":"288a7cc6-8581-4e57-a2f0-27cd2ce57e3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Heaven is completely God's initiative which lacks evil but arguably God has allowed the partial corruption of the world through human free will as the contribution to the make-up of our world which defers judgement from God to man who are to blame for imperfection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God allows evil to exist so that humans can have free will and develop into moral people. In order to be morally good in a meaningful way, a person must have the possibility of choosing evil.\n","id":"fb077fdf-de7e-478c-a605-f807c4621bd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments should impose methods of population control.<|ARGUMENT|>China's 'One Child Policy', coupled with cultural and social norms, resulted in a gender imbalance in China, as male offspring was preferred.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some forms of population controls enacted by governments have harmful economic and social effects.\n","id":"fa5e6a3e-502b-46d1-9564-8460d41c7741"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should provide healthcare: the government or the market?<|ARGUMENT|>With lack of transparency in healthcare and no real oversight, in an open market it becomes easy for procedures and diagnosis' to become profit driven rather than evidence based.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Only government can ensure equality of healthcare availability, which is the only fair way to provide it.\n","id":"7d188ecc-ab5e-4670-b81e-3ddb934b786c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2002 four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were killed by a bomb dropped from an American airplane whose pilot was under the impression to act in self-defense out of fear.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Robots do never fire out of fear for their lives.\n","id":"745e1be6-7bd8-4d4a-834c-1549693bd88a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Any study funded by an abolitionist group, in this case Hunt Alternative Fund's Demand Abolition Project p.5 that asks a series of questions that are then interpreted and summarized by abolitionists p.6 should not be considered as proof unless the study is officially peer reviewed, which this study is not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Participants were not asked whether they would classify experiences as positive or negative. Instead of choice questions, researchers asked direct questions and interpreted the answers for the participants. Thus, the results might reflect researchers' bias rather than participants' attitudes.\n","id":"0067194b-04ae-421a-b016-ff66f6d06ac5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should copyright die with the creator?<|ARGUMENT|>It is wrong for companies to limit the availability of artistic works after the creator has already passed away purely for profit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Continuing to enforce copyright after the creator's death could limit the availability of new innovations and interpretations.\n","id":"3778f160-2750-43e2-8f5d-f3e260d394e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bitcoin Be Adopted As Legal Tender Worldwide?<|ARGUMENT|>Given the right of individuals to the freedom of contract it is the responsibility of the state to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, giving it legal validity like they do with other contracts. This is because Bitcoin is a privately-issued currency, transacted on a peer-to-peer network, between two mutually consenting and willing parties<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People's right to use Bitcoin can not be actualised unless it is a legal tender.\n","id":"a09685e9-58e2-4def-8478-402ad223dc22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Genetic males with genital malformations such as cloacal exstrophy not intersex that are assigned the female sex at birth still show interests and attitudes typical of males. Most of them eventually declare themselves to be male. If gender was socially constructed, individuals raised as females would feel female, act as females, and remain female, but they don't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The example of David Reimer shows how gender is not learnable and that biology does influence the gender identity process.\n","id":"899f5fe9-e2aa-4514-9815-d62bc104edec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state grant benefits linked to marriage?<|ARGUMENT|>An online poll has revealed that only 60% of people consider themselves to be strictly non poly-amorous<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some people would prefer to be in long-term polyamorous relationships.\n","id":"06ac3e75-bb0b-4574-9df4-a4cc931007b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU wants to end member states veto power on tax policy as it is incredibly difficult to pass a uniform policy that would be agreeable to each individual member.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USE will prevent one country from vetoing measures that benefit the majority.\n","id":"e2e76735-a0f2-4a29-9659-5814068edfe3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>Foreign fighters who return for domestic operations are more effective in carrying out their attacks than non-veterans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Foreign fighters could attempt to carry out attacks in their home country.\n","id":"6af56859-eb05-486e-b906-28cc22af5f06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>Religiosity is more influential in inducing ethical behavior than attending ethical management classes at university.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christianity is beneficial for trusting business partners and thus conducive to commerce.\n","id":"9729eedd-808a-404b-a835-137faa113628"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can news sources be trusted?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2010, the Times published about 170 pieces per day, which has now increased to about 230 pieces of content \u2014 stories, graphics, interactives, and blog posts \u2014 daily, indicating a rise of more than 35%<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The number of stories that editors are able to incorporate has risen over the years. This should be able to reflect less bias, which is not the case.\n","id":"761d7378-ae9f-4e22-8a8c-796701b239c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There has been a habit nowadays of people claiming that the opposing view is reminiscent of Nazi traits, or that the opposition is basically Hitler. This assertion emotionally blackmails bystanders by forcing them into a position where being in support of that view is synonymous with supporting Nazi like opinions, regardless of the lack of severity of the views at hand. Doing so also belittles the actual history at hand by comparing systematic genocide with comparatively tiny issues. In my opinion, conflating such minuscule problems with such a dark time in history is at a FAR greater degree of evil than any of the views they have been compared with. There are few things as evil and self absorbed as manipulating the emotional responses of your audience in a debate by conflating your opponents views with that of Hitler. EDIT Many here jumped to the attack of Trump instead of actually arguing against my view, which was that the Hitler comparison has lost credibility and has become insulting emotional blackmail. I don't support Trump therefore going down that road simply worked to move away from the view at hand. It was proven however that there are certain circumstances in which comparisons to Hitler and Nazis is in fact valid, and that the increase in using it as emotional blackmail shouldn't detract from the actual value in the comparisons in some debates.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The recent increase of accusing the opposition of being like Hitler or being a Nazi is emotional blackmail that is insulting to the actual victims of Nazi germany\n","id":"17e485f7-b573-433b-86cb-ebc8a545f390"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Pope Francis a good pope?<|ARGUMENT|>Pope Francis has tried to encourage Catholic priests to give communion to some divorced and remarried couples, or to families where unmarried parents are cohabiting. These statements have contributed to division among Catholics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Others, such as his statements surrounding who can receive communion, are not in line with existing Church doctrine\n","id":"6c5d32fb-551c-47d0-a17e-7b8f3661894c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify, he is not a diagnosed sociopath, I am giving him this label after spending every waking moment of everyday for a year with him and reading up on the personality traits of a sociopath. He is six years older so I looked up to him as a brother I am male . I went to him for guidance and advice whenever I was in trouble or confused about something. He seemed like a genuine person who cared and listened to anything I'd have to say. We spent our days together from wake till sleep. Eat together, work together, spend our weekends with each other. Fuck I even had a threesome with the guy. He seemed like the coolest guy until I realised I was his protege, this is when his true nature started to unfold itself to me. He was trying to make me more like him. He was training me in how to deal with people in certain ways, the technicality about words, basically how to be a snake in the grass. Continue the legacy maybe? Fuck knows what goes on in these sorts of peoples heads. It took me sometime to realise he was a sick, twisted fuck. To say he enjoyed the power and influence he held over certain people, the way he manipulated people to do his bidding, embarrassing and belittling others purely for his amusement is an understatement. It's near impossible for me relate and talk about this with anyone because I don't know anyone who's had a similar experience. I feel like I got to know this guy better than most, he played two face so well it was a shock to the system to have people we both knew talk to me about him. They'd describe the person he wanted them to see and I knew the person he was. I felt like I was in a movie, never in my wildest imagination could I come up with a person like this. Yet there I was, working right beside him. One of the things that stuck out the most from my time with him is seeing how he dealt with people. He was an artist. A hateful man, but the way he handled people was astounding. He easily had people do his bidding with what he made look like little effort. He had guys want to be him and girls want to be with him. He was aggressively dominant. Always competitive, always out to win. So that brings me back to my . After spending so much time with a person like that I have taken on a perception of seeing other peoples actions when dealing with others as either stemming from dominant or submissive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"After spending a year with a sociopath, I now see peoples actions when dealing with others as either dominant or submissive.\n","id":"14342d74-2d2b-4aaa-9b43-bd76b500cc36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that the way we mostly joke about politics, make songs about them, watch shows like the Daily show that generalizes and mocks the opposition rather than take them seriously and argue with them is dangerous. I think it contributes to todays political apathy when instead of actually reading into policies and their effects we'd rather just get our own opinion confirmed over and over again. Now, I don't think we should ban political satire or anything but I believe it has come to such a level that we just choose a side then follow it regardless of what they do and that certainely isn't good, especially not in a Democracy where the education of the common person in political questions in extra vital.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think political satire is dangerous in that it generalizes politics and arguments instead of actually debating them.\n","id":"e262b842-2033-466d-b62e-445538365961"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Whitewashing In Hollywood: Should It Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Even though whitewashing is banned, stories will still be told from a white perspective with majority sensibilities in mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A ban on whitewashing does not mean that races will be displayed with care and sensitivity automatically.\n","id":"16fc1169-555c-49b4-8b54-4ee4c2b3b795"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anorexics Should Be Force-Feeded<|ARGUMENT|>A healthier body weight is necessary to be able to treat the patient\u2019s psychological problems. Studies in Minnesota show that when normal volunteers were starved, they began to development anorectic patterns. They over-estimated the sizes of their own faces by approximately 50%. This shows the impact of starvation on the brain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A healthier body weight is necessary to be able to treat the patient\u2019s psychological problems. Studi...\n","id":"e0c85b23-0be5-40d0-a04d-9571ea1b37bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019ve been reading recently about how Overwatch\u2019s main story board writer had made soldier 76 gay. Ok, that\u2019s fine with me, but then I read about how people are demanding a black women character. That\u2019s when it hit me, game designers and storyboard writers do not have to make characters from all walks of life rather if the character, story or gameplay is made well his her it\u2019s ethnicity, sexuality or species will not matter. A few prime examples include Jack from bioshock, Link from the legend of Zelda, and Mario from Super Mario. All three of these characters are made to fit one image or no image at all, think of how we actually never see jack through bioshock, or any of its sequel games, but instead all three have well written story lines or are just straight out fun to play. I am happy with overwatch\u2019s already diverse cast, but I feel when fans start trying to have their own demands for representation of a certain minority it begins to make characters feel forced or paper clipped in, utterly breaking the immersion. Thinking of other mediums doing this I think of what JK Rowling did to dumbledore after the fact and made him gay randomly, it felt forced and non immersive. To conclude I understand the need diversity in characters, but I feel that it needs to come from the inner workings of the creators rather than rapid fans trying to force it into games.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video Game companies shouldn\u2019t have to make characters diverse!\n","id":"41546926-1c0f-46e2-8a40-3701530d903a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>It has been suggested that China has never seriously been interested in reconciliation and instead uses Japan\u2019s past to stir up its own neo-nationalism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Japan has attempted apologies for its aggressive conduct during the war, yet China remains unsatisfied and unaccepting of them.\n","id":"0dc8bf42-3c21-46a8-928e-abe94450ec5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll keep this one nice and short although apparently too short, because my first submission was automatically removed for being under 500 characters . Paedophilia is the erotic love or sexual attraction towards children. No one has control over their sexual attractions. We don't choose them, nor can we will them away. As such, paedophiles are not deserving of any ill will. Of course paedophilia is distinct from sexual abuse or exploitation of children, which in my opinion ought to be strongly censured.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Paedophilia and paedophiles ought not to be castigated\n","id":"dda577fc-e787-42bc-be7a-fc68fd5f993f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>If AI were to ever be demonstrably conscious, it would be more appropriate to define a new set of AI rights that took into account the physical and mental differences between different types of AI and human beings<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If an AI ever become sentient there is no reason it would need or want the same \"human rights\" as a living human has evolved to want or need.\n","id":"102e4e71-9646-47a5-9d2e-2575f4338451"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Islam compatible with feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>The institutionalisation of patriarchy can be attributed to the cultural practices and traditional, male-dominated religious interpretations of Islamic scripture, rather than religious doctrine p. 3, para 3.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Attitudes towards interpretations are influenced by the social and political context in which Muslims live.\n","id":"622a9a1b-f387-4023-9b0f-264e317966b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Background I am finishing up my undergraduate career and plan to attend graduate school next year. I have been offered a finical package, and sure it's not much 24k but it covers the basics health, tuition and I have a fair bit going in my pocket after taxes and savings. My expenses Name Amount Housing 5k Food 5.2k Salary 24k Taxes 3.6k Savings 5k Net 8.8k Taken care of Health, tuition. To me, a poor college kid, that's a ton. That's like a ton, and I don't have any other debts like college loans to worry about. I know grad students are not portrayed as being loaded help me change my view EDIT Thanks for the responses I have enough to live off in my current state but if something big kids, new computer, new skis comes up that'll be a little trickier.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a grad student, I'll be rolling in the dough\n","id":"fbbd88fa-2f38-49c1-b412-9a2fb08efebd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in the US, and there's currently quite the debate going on regarding education. Many are suggesting that public schools require far too much repetition and memorization, while not focusing enough on creativity. More creativity is, of course, a good thing. However, I have a couple of issues with this stance. First, creativity by definition can't be taught. If someone teaches me how to do something, then I do it, it's not creativity. Doesn't matter if it's math or music, that's not true creativity. Even if I expand on what was taught a little, it may be somewhat creative but it's still a far cry from the true innovators that we seek to build. Second, while not useful by themselves, memorization and repetition does have a role to play in education. The reason is because much of the creative process stems from our ability to pull from our past experiences and our knowledge base. Having this strong foundation is the first step to having greater creativity. For example, a composer who writes genius music started by learning scales and arpeggios a martial artist who competes brilliantly started off with basic technique exercises. All of which are drilled repeatedly until they become muscle memory. And of course this extends far beyond music or sports. There's no way the founder of Google could have achieved what they did without understanding basic algorithms or the founders of Squarespace without understanding web design. Repetition and drilling may not by themselves make you more creative, but they are very important in training the building blocks without which more creative endeavors would be near impossible to spark. Lastly, while it's good to push our schools to be better, I feel that part of the responsibility also lies with students and parents . A dedicated student should be able to see beyond the immediate boredom of the textbook. She should be able to connect ideas between multiple subjects. Teaching to a test is bad, but it also not hard to see past the test and approach the class for the purpose of learning rather than simply passing. For the record, I'm fully aware that the US education system has much room to improve. In my view, we can foster an environment for creativity, but not teach creativity directly. As in, we can encourage students to take more risks, not be afraid of failure, be open to criticism and adaptable to change, etc. But in the meantime, we still need to provide them with the fundamental building blocks that often come in the form of an academic curriculum. In this sense, most schools are already doing an ok job. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You can't teach creativity. Schools are not 100% at fault.\n","id":"73805faa-c776-4efb-a022-575c5c45b3f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Creating strict gun control laws to stop mass shooters from getting guns also stops law abiding citizens from getting guns needed to protect themselves against criminals with guns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because we can't rely on police, we should be able to rely on preventative gun control measures keeping mass shooters from getting guns.\n","id":"8fcd70ca-c77b-4da9-b4ca-c028c6272af2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Classic tale of Spanish and European Explorers in Mezoamerica. its finals week. I may not be as good about this as I should be. I know this is terrible. But I believe its the right thing to do. If non humans attack they shall face our plague.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if humans engage in space conquest and exploration, that we should take copies of our diseases with us to use as weapons.\n","id":"7419c650-8c0e-4519-9900-afd5183bc4d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As it is now the average salary for being a teacher in the U.S. hovers right around 50,000, although in some states it's as high as 70,000. Right now I think it's safe to say that teaching is not a competitive market. If you are a really bright student in school, what fields do counselors or advisers encourage you to go into? Among others primarily law and medicine, and this is because they are very competitive fields with high salaries. This attracts our best people into being those things because you can make a lot of money doing those things. I'm not saying that doctors and lawyers aren't important to society, or that bright students shouldn't be proud of becoming a doctor or a lawyer well, maybe a lawyer . What I'm saying is that teachers are diametrically important to developing a better society because, in America at least, EVERYONE is legally obligated to attend school school as a child and is influenced by educators, either positively or negatively. If being a teacher was a bad ass job where you're making at least 6 figures students would dream of being a teacher and study their asses off to become the best teacher they could because only the top students were accepted into teaching positions. This would inject the teaching work force with our best and brightest people the desired effect obviously being improving the quality of education received by students overall . And if this were a government initiative where they put the extra money into the education system for higher salaries, better equipment facilities etc. the students who would be most impacted by this would be the ones who went to public schools. Now a quality education isn't only available to those who live in the right school districts or who can afford to send their kids to private schools. Hopefully the biggest effect from this would be that education would become more dynamic and exciting for students. If this is true than every field that has an educational prerequisite would become better more competitive, thus greatly improving our country in multiple dimensions. In 2010 the government estimated that there were a little over 3.1 million teachers employed by public schools in this country with less than 2 growth. If we doubled the teaching salary in public schools, the average teacher in the US would be making about 100,000 a year. To do this it would cost the US government roughly 150 billion dollars I am estimating this figure based on publicly available census records put out by the U.S. Census Bureau . Now I'm not saying that the entirety of this sum should be simply cut and pasted from the DOD budget, but even if we did take that approach, that figure is only a little over 20 of their annual budget. Now a figure smaller than 20 could be supplemented by tax dollars and other creative methods that the government uses to get money. And I'm guessing our country wouldn't implode overnight if we cut back on military spending and didn't involve ourselves in foreign conflicts as much.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that public school teachers in the U.S. should make double to triple their average salary. A large portion of the money for this should be taken from the federal defense budget.\n","id":"fe1ea832-9a75-4f90-88b8-997f0e5def02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was diagnosed with ADHD and subsequently given a prescription for Adderall, which is an awesome drug, but in truth I never felt like my sober state was harried or disturbed enough to require the lovely jolting sensations wrought from the application of this amphetamine. For generations, mankind existed and progressed without the aid of such medicine, and while it's kind of huge, I would argue our societal strength has not been bolstered or supported at all by this strange and powerful substance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think ADHD is a myth created to fuel Big Pharma:\n","id":"2999b5b2-0644-4011-99d3-44befc3bb59c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>In Italy the legalization of civil unions lead to further demands for full marriage and child adoption.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Initially, there was a push for civil unions. Now, the movement is supporting same-sex marriages.\n","id":"44e00e6e-ed08-41a6-aa12-8a9d7aa3f117"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do not deny that there are legitimate issues with society that need to be confronted, but I feel that many times issues that come to the forefront of popular conversations have more to do with an individual's own problems and less to do with society. I believe this is done often because it generally feels good to not be at fault for a problem within your own life. I'd love to hear about some social issues that have no bearing on personal responsibility and change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that most people project their own personal problems and issues onto society as a whole in order to absolve themselves of personal responsibility.\n","id":"f14fd5e3-331f-4b6c-a314-580c8303f458"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, pretty simple view there's currently a lot of push to make being promiscuous fully acceptable for both genders and to label any words against it as slut shaming . All of the details of this view aren't gender specific, and thus I'll use gender neutral language. I'm all for gender equality, I'm not religious or socially conservative, and I don't attack people for their promiscuity. But also refuse to date any. Personally, I disapprove of promiscuity as a whole, though I don't mind friends being promiscuous and wouldn't badger them on about it. It's their life, I'm not their parent or future spouse, they have free range as far as I care. I don't like it, but I don't like smoking either, and I follow the same logic I don't smoke shame them, as long as they don't blow smoke in my face I'm fine with it and I trust them to be adults that know the consequences already. If it gives them pleasure, good for them. What I do mind is if someone I'm dating is or was very promiscuous, and it is a deal breaker to me. It reveals a big difference on their views of sex to me it being something important and very intimate to solely share with someone you love and trust in an established relationship. It being in the past also doesn't cut it for me, as it's not a trait I see as being very redeemable. If anything, it comes off as dishonest, that they valued sex so little in the past but are apparently only private about it now. As to what past character flaws are relevant, I would prefer not to date a past cheater either. Personally there's also a visceral reaction to knowing your partner has shared this very intimate aspect of themselves with so many people, making it cheapened in both of our eyes and not as important as it should be when it is shared with me. I also wouldn't feel comfortable sharing myself, as I'd be another name on a list with lots of other people of emotionally lesser importance. It's maybe a very Disney esque and idealistic approach to dating, but I really don't think that me having it as a deal breaker is the terrible thing that it's being portrayed as. That I'm evil or weak for being uncomfortable with a partner's number , so to say. As a side note, I've also read some studies that claimed long term relationships with promiscuous people had less success rates, but I think the core of the view stands as is and it's not that relevant of a thing to discuss, because the success rate isn't what I'm concerned about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Seeing promiscuity as a bad trait in a life partner isn't evil or weak\n","id":"a1d930ca-97ec-42a9-aba0-1ec4ccb754e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Salaries should be public<|ARGUMENT|>Studies suggest that people automatically assume they are underpaid in relation to their co-workers. However, if they were able to compare salaries, they might realise that they are being paid well and be more satisfied<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pride in earning above the industry average would make people feel better.\n","id":"5f6500ad-b4a9-44a9-a180-6c4461bae036"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>While the bible does not specifically exclude lying to one's self, Exodus 20:16 is typically generalized to include the prohibition against all lying.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many moral paradigms including ironically many religious paradigms emphasize the importance of telling the truth.\n","id":"32e32b4e-d8ce-4106-965f-7a16d2785fb7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please change my view any legal or constitutional fix that allows Congress to restrict the political speech of business corporations would also allow restriction on the individual right to free speech or the freedom of the press. The Citizens United v. FEC 2010 case is famous in US political debates. The basic issue is that a non profit corporation made a movie criticizing a politician right before an election, and that violated US campaign finance law. The Supreme Court majority opinion said there was a First Amendment right for a corporation or union to air political commercials during the period before an election, despite the fact that a small portion of the nonprofit's funding came from for profit corporations. Here is how the majority opinion by Kennedy states the problem with the federal law restricting speech gt The law before us is an outright ban, backed by criminal sanctions. Section 441b makes it a felony for all corporations\u2014including nonprofit advocacy corporations\u2014either to expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates or to broadcast electioneering communications within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election. Thus, the following acts would all be felonies under \u00a7441b The Sierra Club runs an ad, within the crucial phase of 60 days before the general election, that exhorts the public to disapprove of a Congressman who favors logging in national forests the National Rifle Association publishes a book urging the public to vote for the challenger because the incumbent U. S. Senator supports a handgun ban and the American Civil Liberties Union creates a Web site telling the public to vote for a Presidential candidate in light of that candidate\u2019s defense of free speech. These prohibitions are classic examples of censorship. My view is that any legal or constitutional fix that allows Congress to enforce 2 USC Section 441b against business corporations would also infringe on individual speech or free press. I will clarify that I am not talking about infringing the right of people to form a corporation for business purposes and then have that business corporation exercise its speech rights. Although I think freedom of speech applies to anybody regardless of identity whether foreign or not, convicted felon or not, facilitated by a business entity or not I am not making that argument here. I am making a collateral damage argument if you try to excise for profit corporate speech, you will affect a not insubstantial amount of individual speech or freedom of the press. I am not asking you to change my philosophical view of free speech, since that is pretty firmly held and I am not terribly open to changing it. I am asking you to change my view of whether it is legally or conceptually possible to target just the one kind of business corporation speech without attacking individual speech or freedom of the press. I believe that even terrible policy ideas can be conceptually possible, so I am open to changing my view from it's not really possible to it's possible but still a terrible idea. But I do not see a clear way to isolate just business corporation speech from individual speech and press. By individual speech, I am including the right to form a non profit corporation or other community group, whether it's a big group like Planned Parenthood or the NRA or a small neighborhood organization. By freedom of the press, I am referring both to the right of the people to print expressive materials like books, pamphlets and newsletters generally, and to the right to operate journalistic enterprises specifically, whether meant to be objective or opinionated. There are many different proposed solutions that are a threat to individual free expression or freedom of the press. Status quo ante . We could imagine somehow a change to the Constitution or the Court that allows a do over and Section 441b is back in force with no other changes. That directly violates individual free speech because it allows the government, for certain election related speech, to ban your movie or seize your books or destroy your pamphlets if your nonprofit was funded by even one dollar from a for profit corporation. That is incompatible with free speech. Imagine if a major nonprofit political group, which supports all the things you like, were one day silenced because a single for profit company, owned by a visionary corporate leader who says all the right things and has all the right political friends and all the right political enemies, made a small contribution of cash or supplies. I think most of us can see how that would be really restrictive of free speech for all the individuals who contributed to that worthy nonprofit. Money is not speech. A straight amendment that money is not speech would be incredibly broad and would per se threaten individual speech. In Buckley v. Valeo 1976 , the Court said, A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached . If we were to take it outside the realm of speech and say money is not religion, would anyone dispute that a ban on spending money to publish bibles or build temples is inconsistent with freedom of religion? If you told people they have the right to protest, but they are not allowed to spend any money on signs or flags or matching t shirts or even travel expenses to attend the protest, I think most of us can see that would pretty clearly restrict their right to protest. End corporate personhood. Aside from the chaos this could cause to civil lawsuits and to anybody investing in the stock market, this rule might not stop a non corporate entity or informal group from publishing an ad. This really depends on the specifics, but unless you have a money is not speech rule, ending corporate personhood really does not do anything directly for speech and so does not itself reverse the outcome of the Citizens United case. There is no way to enforce Section 441b banning corporate speech if there are no more corporations. That said, a broad rule here might be so sweeping that it makes it very difficult for groups of citizens to form any kind of community group or issue advocacy group, which would violate the individual's right to create a group to spread their own speech. Most of these proposals are coupled with a money is speech amendment as a shortcut. No speech for any corporations. This obviously violates individual free speech. If you start a neighborhood group to protest something like police brutality or pollution or tax policy or zoning policy in your neighborhood, and you want to advertise which candidates agree with you and which ones disagree, then no speech for any corporations applies to your little community nonprofit. It also applies to corporations practicing journalism, so it violates freedom of the press. No speech for for profit corporations. This is a common proposal to try to protect political entities and target business entities. If it lets the government stifle the speech of for profit corporations, then most news organizations and journalistic outfits could be restricted, imperiling freedom of the press. It also opens up the possibility of a non profit created by a for profit corporation, which allows it to circumvent the rule, meaning that business speech is in practice slightly hampered but not very restricted. No speech for for profit corporations or non profits funded by for profit corporations. This is fairly similar to the status quo ante pre 2010 and the same criticism applies. The problem here is that this rule quickly gets broad and endangers lots of individual speech done through nonprofit activist groups. For example, if your community nonprofit raises money locally to fight an important issue, and it raises some of its money from a few small businesses in the neighborhood, you have now invalidated free speech for the whole group. The nonprofit is tainted by a little bit of business speech, and all those individuals' speech rights are restricted just so Congress can target the threat of business corporation speech. This is the twist directly confronted in the Citizens United case and the one that distinguished it from earlier cases. The twist was that a small portion of its funding came from for profit corporations. The case FEC v. MCFL 1986 had already found Section 441b invalid as applied to nonprofit corporations, but that holding did not extend to nonprofit corporations that received any money from for profit corporations. The Court in 2010 extended protection to Citizens United despite their de minimis for profit funding. No speech for any corporations except for journalism. Sometimes people try suggest this modification to the ban on corporate speech but it does not seem to be offered in good faith and includes almost no effort to grapple with the inconsistency of it. Specifically, the inconsistency of making it illegal for corporations to publish news and opinions about elections, with an exception if that corporation publishes LOTS of news and opinions about elections. Really, it turns on the definition of journalism or freedom of the press. But it seems that either this journalism press exception waters everything down and does not target business speech or it gives Congress the power to ban journalism outfits it disagrees with and abandons freedom of the press. Only natural persons have rights. This is basically a different way of presenting the no speech for any corporations rule but it tries to emphasize that it wants individuals to retain speech rights. Whatever other problems and consequences of this rule, it never seems like it would work unless your intention is also to stop corporations from funding individual speech. If corporations lack speech rights but humans have speech rights, then you could circumvent a corporate speech restriction by having the individual filmmaker or author or pamphleteer do the speech activity. The documentary could be published and disseminated by the documentarian, using funds raised by the corporation and paid over to the filmmaker. To the extent you block an individual from seeking funding for their own speech, you are restricting their speech rights. Of course, with crowdfunding mechanisms it is not too difficult to imagine getting around the restriction anyway, by having the corporation promote the cause but all the money skips the corporation and goes from individual to individual. So either the rule is effective at restricting business speech and it also restricts individual speech, or the rule is ineffective at restricting business speech because other funding mechanisms are able to circumvent your rule. There are probably other variations but these are the major ones of which I am aware.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no law change to Citizens United v FEC that restricts business speech without infringing on the individual right to free speech or the freedom of the press\n","id":"d285906b-d6dc-4141-948d-0483f3096a56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Genetic Screening<|ARGUMENT|>It is crucial to remember that IVF treatment is at present employed to aid the fertility treatment of childless couples. Embyros are at present 'created' in vitro and implanted into the womb. Genetic screening would merely add a 'safety valve' to this process. In addition, laws on abortion throw issues of when an embryo is considered 'a life' into dispute, and these arguments can also be applied to the implanting or freezing of embryos.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is crucial to remember that IVF treatment is at present employed to aid the fertility treatment o...\n","id":"55abd0a8-f714-4d7b-8a24-02c99f080598"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As anyone on Reddit knows, in recent years a massive anti US circle jerk where the rest of the developed world and even some developing nations are seen as better than the US. Lately, I've yelled at many a clickbait article because I have realized that the US is a great experiment because in all of history no nation has never been in the spot it is in for an assortment of reasons. Relative wealth. While peer nations are near or above the US, in history the superpowers as a whole have not seen wealth to the level of the current US. Population mass and diversity. If you look at the Top 10 nations for population, save for the US they either are developing, homogenous, or both. The closest nation to the US in terms of wealth, diversity, and standard of living Germany has 1 4th the population and they are in 16th place. Outside the era of the colonial empires, has anything of the sort ever existed? Geographical size and position Third largest nation on earth also by land mass and that the bulk of said area is sandwiched between two oceans which creates a wall of sorts that can be inpenetrable. This came to the US's benefit in WWII and paved their way for superpower status. Relative freedom As much as the 21st Century has shown dents in the US's armor, it is still a freer society than the bulk of nations on Earth and in some areas even among peer nations. When I see people citing that things are better in small, homogenous nations smaller than many states and counties and cities , it always gets to me since the US cannot really be compared to them on the basis of the above. Hegemon or not, am I the only person who sees the US as some grand experiment?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States is a long-term, large-scale experiment and as such cannot be compared to other nations.\n","id":"09f9e0b8-010a-4788-8b2c-1ab85d085ee8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be testosterone limits in women\u2019s sports?<|ARGUMENT|>Sport is primarily for the benefit of spectators: it is only enjoyable to watch if the competition is fair.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is important for sporting bodies to level the playing field among athletes.\n","id":"fc35da71-a21d-416b-bc77-0baafc128ebe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU accession procedure is meant to make sure a certain level of uniformity exists in what concerns the political systems, namely through the \"Copenhagen criteria<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU member states' political systems share core principles and roots.\n","id":"dd3f71b8-8228-4aff-9909-725db1405036"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>News stations sensationalize their news to get more viewers than their competitors. Sensationalizing does more damage to the public than good. Here is why. There are people that read the headline only. If it weren't for someone to read the article and give an accurate description like Reddit , people would act on the sensationalized title. Not everyone goes on r news so there are people who never get the full truth. It is dangerous when people act on incomplete information, especially if it is meant to incite anger. It propagates racism and discrimination. A headline that points out a black man doing something bad will propagate the message that black men are bad. This has been done with Muslims as well. I don't have a proposal for this, but my initial thought is that it could be a single entity working in everyone's best interest. However I could see why some people wouldn't like the government exclusively reporting the news. Anyway, there should be a system to stop competition amongst news reporters to stop sensationalized reporting. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be a system in place so that news stations are not competing. This will decrease the amount of sensationalized news reporting.\n","id":"eca35f5d-caa1-4515-a3d6-3a06ab5af11a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Jim Mattis says they still don't have evidence for the sarin gas attack last year. What is the benefit of Bashar al Assad gassing the people he thinks he is going to rule later? Especially if, as in this and the last case, he apparently was about to win? Proving motive for the attack beyond he's evil is definitely necessary. There was a plan within the US government to overthrow multiple countries in the Middle East. Libya, Iraq, and Syria are on this list. So there's motive for faking this war, like the government has done in the past. What is the benefit of the previous regime change wars in the region? Libya is selling slaves. ISIS was created out of the sectarian violence. What evidence did we have linking Saddam Hussein to the attack on the twin towers? The main thing I can think of that Omar Gaddafi was doing of detriment to the United States, prior to being overthrown, was going to a gold standard. I am suspicious of my governing officials, and even more so of Donald Trump. I am worried that we will go to war for Trump to prove he's tough on Putin and to punish him, and to continue to the next country on the list in the video above, and perhaps for personal profit. Maybe Rex Tillerson would get the contract.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jim Mattis said that they still didn't have any evidence for the sarin gas attack last year. I believe that before any military action is taking by the current administration, they should have to provide at least one piece of evidence that it was pro-government forces who used this gas.\n","id":"8742ff16-fba2-4a00-807b-ce4f9834a157"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't understand that phrase, sex assigned at birth. If I understand the terminology correctly, a transgender person is a person whose gender doesn't match his or her sex. So, a transgender person who is assigned male sex at birth is still the male sex after transitioning, just not male gender . So the phrase sex assigned at birth really is just a long way and unnecessary to say, sex, since this characteristic doesn't change. I would understand, gender assigned at birth, but I understand that some people wouldn't like that, since a transgender man for example would likely state he was always a man by gender, even at birth. But saying sex assigned at birth makes it sound like a person was assigned one sex at birth, but that sex is no longer applicable. But that isn't true. So why do we say of a transgender man that he was assigned female sex at birth, rather than just say of a transgender man that he is of the female sex but of the male gender? It doesn't make sense. A couple notes. First, I understand that the phrase sex assigned at birth isn't only an issue when it comes to trans people, since there is a spectrum of genders, including, I believe, identifying as no gender at all. I used transgender as an example. Second, I understand there are cases where a person doesn't fit into a certain sex. For example, a woman by chromosomes might be born with a penis and identified as of the male sex at birth. In these cases sex assigned at birth makes sense, but the phrase is used outside those cases more often than not. I just think the phrase doesn't make sense in the majority of cases where a person is biologically a specific sex and correctly identified as such. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Sex assigned at birth\" doesn't make sense. It should be \"gender assigned at birth,\" if anything.\n","id":"882a1b81-bc81-4fac-a155-888301ac370c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should provide healthcare: the government or the market?<|ARGUMENT|>When employers provide healthcare, there is not a true market as individuals rarely choose their plan. Free markets require multiple competing buyers and multiple competing sellers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The nature of healthcare is such that it cannot be provided by the free market alone.\n","id":"e38ab700-4a75-4c72-a2a3-89dad11147ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Premier League Better than the Bundesliga?<|ARGUMENT|>The Stadium Atmosphere of Liverpool is legendary and in the last weeks became an important part of the club's international success.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The PL has more stadiums that are famous for their atmosphere than the BL.\n","id":"4e446df2-c43e-4e7f-92b7-a811f36aba5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>If a man courts a woman that doesn\u2019t want him, the loving response is to leave the woman alone. Similarly, once God calls a person unto Himself and is rejected, it is loving for God to leave that person to follow their chosen path, even if He knows that path leads to destruction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hell is a loving response for those creatures who ultimately don\u2019t want God.\n","id":"6955200a-dcd5-4e6f-9f16-94519f715d94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Mexico legalize drugs?<|ARGUMENT|>Despite legalization, the overwhelming majority of cannabis sales across Canada during the fourth quarter of last year were done on the black market.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Despite the legalization of marijuana, the illegal market for it remains robust\n","id":"544a4db8-d934-4232-bf89-56ea7e0eb77f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>If potential terrorists know all the details of a country's defenses and security procedures this makes attacks much easier.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments sometimes need to conceal information in order to protect civilians and security\n","id":"4ffc69fe-0cb5-4ad8-b22f-c5c2265d7a7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>Corporations sponsoring the UN Climate Change Conference were \"greenwashing This high-profile sponsorship created the illusion that they were eco-friendly, while masking their own poor environmental practices.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some corporations advertise themselves or their products as environmentally friendly to mask their bad environmental practices, known as \"greenwashing\n","id":"9b74088b-21c1-4789-af99-189f03b67553"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let's put this in the context of history to be specific, for example, times when governments with authoritative policies are put into power when the previous government usually a democracy is destabilized. Alternatively, when an authoritative government which was meant to keep things in order starts becoming too oppressive people will eventually start fighting for a more democratic one to replace it. I also think that wars death suffering are inevitable when this process is taking place. As long as resources are finite and people are different there will be no end to conflict thus keeping the cycle happening. My professor said that perhaps the wars and other conflicts need not happen, that maybe we can live in a world of perpetual good times and strong people and break the cycle suggesting that there might be a solution to this. I on the other hand think that this philosophy is an essential part to the human experience, to learn the importance of struggle and the foolishness of being contented is not something you can just write down and teach the younger generation. It's something that they themselves have to experience as well which is why history keeps repeating itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hard times create strong men, Strong men create good times, Good times create weak men, Weak men create hard times.\n","id":"82611bac-e544-4a55-874e-f33a7e8286da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey, I have been using this subreddit for around 2 years now, and I have some qualms about the community. Most of the top replies the ones that are expected to change the view of the OP usually disregard and ignore the original view. Right now there is a thread about bikers being assholes. The top reply is someone saying, not all bikers, there are some exceptions while that's true, I'd imagine that the vast majority of people still feel that bikers in general are assholes. Even south park made an episode about them The top replies don't address the view of bikers being assholes in general. the response is not all but it doesn't change the view, and the exception is not the rule. I keep finding this issue, people find one little exception and then suddenly that's the most popular post. I rarely find a top post that addresses the whole of the OP, but rather takes one part out, nit picks it and that's what rises to the top.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"r\/cmv top replies are not usually disagreeing points of view\n","id":"53d55910-35a1-46e4-8f73-6200721eb992"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents must live with their decision and therefore do what is best for their child. Every family is different. What is best for one may be totally offensive for another.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This position is based on a set of values, just like the justification of circumcision is based on another set of values. Values cannot be objectively measured and compared.\n","id":"2fc9c67a-8262-43f7-bb6c-b50058c3ba7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>To give some idea of the scope of this issue, including persecution of those perceived as atheists: The percentage of us who are white male heterosexual Christians using this group not as definitive, but only to get us in the right ballpark is very low, so the vast majority of us are potential targets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The moral codes often found in religious texts have been the cause of many social injustices including the persecution of homosexuals, people of colour and women.\n","id":"4f05e2a7-0149-480d-87bf-a5ce2aefac1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's a common staple of online communities like this, that attract the geekier people. You often see threads or posts about guys who are what other people call basement dwellers in their 20s, no previous sexual or romantic experience, little or no friends, ugly, unkept, obsessed with videogames or other geek hobbies but nothing else, probably without a job, living with their mothers, and usually one or more other negative physical things short, bald, with a small penis, too skinny, too fat, too greasy, etc . It is also the go to insult people who don't fit with the geeky community throw at them whenever they disagree on anything, or just to mock them. Usually, when one of these people have relationship or sexual problems i.e., they want to become more social, get a girlfriend, have sex , the advice is the same get fit hit the gym , get fashionable start wearing nice clothes that fit , keep your hygiene, and get out and talk to people. If it is not a sincere advice, but more of a subtle insult, they will mention that it's not women's fault as they probably believe for not wanting to have sex with them, but their own and only their own. I believe this cliched advice is not true, and that a person that has made it into their 20s without any sexual or romantic experience, friendless and with an unattractive physique and face is just going to be unable to find a mate unless they beg for pity or pay for it. For starters, as much as lifting weights can improve their bodies, if they happen to have unattractive faces or are short or balding, it won't fix it. If they are short, in particular, it will actually look worse, because of the prevailing stereotype that short men that lift do so to compensate and nothing else, and that afterwards they get feisty. Height and facial aesthetics are more important attraction wise than a ripped body. For the clothing, it's mostly the same it won't hide your face, it won't make you taller. But most important in my opinion is not what those things can do to improve them, what those things WON'T do for them and that they actually need before even considering going out there. First of all, I'll assume that it's unlikely they are good looking or attractive in any conventional way and therefore I will not address the possibility of someone liking them the way they are, since that percentage of the population is going to be negligible , otherwise someone would have mentioned it to them some time and they would likely not be basement dwellers to begin with. As I addressed before, this won't just go with a better haircut and better clothes. Second, and most important, is the social part these people have spent a lot of time away from social venues, if they ever been to them to begin with. They have no social capital whatsoever they have no friends, they aren't attractive, they can't talk about interesting things they've done or fun things they've done because there aren't any, they fail hard at providing sexual proof and generally they will just cross people from their past that will vouch for the fact that they were once losers in their 20s. I could forgive such a change between their teenage years and college, but no one will do so after college that means that the person has missed a lot of life experiences, and is way behind their peers in a time in which the big majority is already well versed in these social things i.e. who wants to hang out with basically a child that you have to teach how to behave and what to do when you can find someone with whom you can enjoy your time and not worry about making things awkward? . For these things, especially the time variable the one that addresses their past failings is that I think that the traditional archetype of a basement dweller has nothing to look for if they go after these improvements, unless, like I said, they are willing to beg for pity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the basement-dweller male stereotype actually has no solution in terms of relationships and sex.\n","id":"5b5d3a71-df97-4df7-b33f-aac806b9d608"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently found out that a person I was dating was actually married. I never knew about the marriage or whatever until they slowly, over time, revealed their deception. Now, I believe it is my moral imperative to expose the cheater by going to the SO and telling them. My friends don't believe so. They think I should walk. There are other complications though For instance someone could be married and with kids. Wouldn't you want to know about your SO cheating on you when you have kids involved? Community. The person I dated has an entire community that's somewhat judgmental. If they were exposed as a cheater, they will go down in flames, but I believe they should have to deal with the consequences. The kids themselves. Wouldn't they be better off raised in a household where the parent isn't lying? The person I dated pretty much has a network of lies that I've only begun to touch the surface of. Wouldn't they be better off away from that influence? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is my moral imperative to expose a cheater, especially if I find out while dating them.\n","id":"143ee117-e25b-43a0-ad1c-23275ba287c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While I do believe there are a few liberally biased news sources, I think their bias only shines through in blatant opinion articles and tv talk show pundits, I don't think there's necessarily an effort made to suppress information that's damning to the DNC as evidenced by the extensive coverage of the Clinton emails and the DNC efforts to hurt the Sanders campaign once the news came to light. While I think TV news stations like CNN thrive on sensationalism which ends up hurting their credibility, I do think there's still incentive for honest journalism that people tend to overlook when trying to argue which ever conspiracy theory they're a proponent of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term \"liberal media\" is just a scapegoat invented by the right to discredit anything that portrays them in a negative light\n","id":"b716ea51-34ae-46a1-8982-429c851ca547"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Often in recent months I've seen the argument that Bernie Sanders is trying to make the US run as though it was a small Scandinavian country . These arguments come from a variety of places, from social media sites like reddit to large news organisations, so I don't feel as though theres any particular political bias in it. Personally, I don't understand it. It seems to be that these people believe that large nations have to have low taxes and a small government in order to work. What exactly is their logic here?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no reason why the Scandinavian model of government can't be scaled up to the United States\n","id":"12464cd8-7b91-48bb-89b9-b3b5354bdc7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does altruism exist?<|ARGUMENT|>The amygdala - the part of the human brain that is responsible for the survival instinct - takes over in stress situations, bypasses rational thought processing and conscience decision-making in the front lobes triggering a fight-or-flight response thereby.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The way we think and the emotions we feel that have survival value then produce behaviours that increase our chances of survival.\n","id":"8b34da18-b343-4a74-9598-d897bdf3ff46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed its concern about the physical and mental well-being of children involved in the training, as well as the mental and emotional well-being of children who watch bullfights. It considered the eventual prohibition of the participation of children in bullfighting. UNCRC, p. 10<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Watching and participating in bullfights harms the emotional and mental well-being of children.\n","id":"6a1507fb-8931-4071-a7d3-0cd96809fc51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By that I mean when you die let it be known that if possible they can take whatever they can to save the life of another. To me not being an organ donor, or fighting to let them take organs from a deceased loved one, is potentially like throwing rare life saving medicine off a cliff. Almost no one would say they would throw an inhaler off a cliff in front of someone having an asthma attack, but if you're not an organ donor that is what you can be doing. Which while isn't murder feels kind of close. Not everyone can be an organ donor, and the majority of people die in a way that doesn't let them be one. But if you are and your wishes say you don't want to be one you're asking doctors, who dedicate their lives to saving others, to send away one of the most valuable things they have in the fight to save lives. They are so awesome they will actually do it even though I imagine it probably hurts some doctors to send a good kidney to the morgue knowing there are people fighting to survive on dialysis, or even those who need an emergency transplant. Am I crazy for this view? It feels like no one has as strong of view on it and I feel like I must not be understanding the other side. Edit If they are being preserved for some other hopeful use I have no problem with that such as being cryo frozen So he got a delta there, because I never really considered possible valid reasons like . So as long as they are not just being effectively thrown away I have no problem with that. One of the worst is wishy washy phrasing. I will clarify I think it's probably part of the category of behaviors right under intentionally doing harm . This being part of having extreme apathy, willfully ignorance, or selfishness being the cause of harm to others. And I do mean extreme for all of them. Either one of these or a combination I feel like is the primary cause. This I feel like is one of the worst because it still falls at the very least top three categories I hate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"not being being willing to be an organ donor in death is one of the worst things you can do.\n","id":"6a06515a-9b89-46e6-8344-dd4373a39bfc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the USA a good country to live in?<|ARGUMENT|>Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. 46.6 million experiences mental illness in a given year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USA has the highest rate of mental illness in the first world.\n","id":"18a28217-9590-4735-b4a4-ba93cb8d30bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This includes even the most vile, poisonous substances. Here are the conditions 1 Drugs are only sold to adults with no mental disorders. 2 The consumers are warned about any addictive or health effects, or lack of medical research. 3 Drugs are not sold to people owning a driving licence, heavy machinery operators, firearms. EDIT I am well aware that that prohibits the huge majority of the population from using. I also fail to see how this is relevant. 4 Drugs are not sold to medical proffessionals, judges, police officers, people running for or elected in public office and pregnant women. 5 If the drug is shown to be harmful to others e.g. cigarette smoke it is illegalized. EDIT Direct medical harm. See the edit below for clarification. 6 People commiting crimes under the influence of any drug are trialed for the full time i.e. no pleas 'but I was drunk ' . You will notice that right off the bat drinking and driving is no longer a problem, passive smoking is no longer a problem, you eliminate drug cartels in one blow, better and safer drugs will be developed, and any junkies can more easily ask for help. This is just positive side effects though. The main point is that it is not anyone's business if I want to use ketamine, as long as I'm not endagering lives. EDIT Since that came up twice already, I'd like to clarify. I don't think that druggies committing crimes is a good enough reason to ban drugs. I absolutely agree that an addict will be more likely to steal for example , but doing drugs is not, in itself, violent or doing harm. It may lead to violence, it probably will, but banning it just on that grounds means banning a certain lifestyle because it has a higher chance of leading to crime. I think that is wrong. That would be equivalent to banning every religion except buddhism including banning atheism because statistically buddhists commit the least crimes. Or banning rap music because a higher percentage of rap afficionados are in prison compared to, say, country music.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Literally every single drug should be legal.\n","id":"eda51d24-dce5-40db-b568-93d63bee41e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>Drug cartels destabilize Latin America. With legalization they would disappear and Latin America would gain stability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The legalization of drugs deprives criminals of a substantial source of their income.\n","id":"aa21fb86-d3cb-4fcc-9364-a3e2398dd97f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nothing is static in a sports franchise. Everyone involved, players, coaches, etc, will invariably leave after a length of time. The only thing that's even mostly constant is location, but the team isn't representative of the location. The players and coaches come from all over the country, and even the world, and are only there because they're paid to be there. The only things in common between the team you support now and the team you supported 30 years ago are the name and the colors. I can understand supporting individual players, and team eras a year of a team, as a quick example , but being a life long fan of something with so many variables just seems mindless and lazy to me. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think being a life long fan of a sports franchise is ridiculous.\n","id":"553f9381-2aaa-4e2a-b54e-d7f2ed17967e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm Canadian and today is our 150th anniversary. It got me thinking about patriotism as did a recent episode of One the Media which can be found here Canadians are not very patriotic, at least compared to our American neighbours. I think a strong argument can be made that this is a huge benefit to Canadian culture and democracy. On the surface patriotism seems somewhat benign or even good. How can it be bad to feel good about ones country? However, little good actually comes from patriotism. Our world is increasingly global yet patriotism only reinforces sectarian and tribal ideas. It can be argued it is largely responsible for the rise of the alt right and the anti globalism in America and elsewhere. It is also nearly always factually inaccurate. In nearly every case, people who think their country is the best in some way are just wrong about the facts. Patriotism also reinforces otherness which leads to racism, sexism, anti intellectualism and xenophobia. Patriotism is always used as a political weapon with the sole purpose of stifling critical thinking or open debate. One is not to question any idea that can be wrapped in the guise of patriotism. Finally, patriotism nearly always blinds people to the problems in their own society and allows those problems to persist far longer than they should. I'd be curious to see data but I would hypothesize there is an inverse correlation between the levels of patriotism in a country and the health of its political system. I honesty cannot think of a redeeming quality to patriotism. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Patriotism is the worst emotion and has basically no redeeming value\n","id":"78cc7ae7-9f48-4077-ac1b-733d9b34137b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>#timesup: Should individuals credibly accused of sexual assault or harassment be fired from positions of authority?<|ARGUMENT|>Vigilante justice - both online and in real life - is hugely detrimental to the criminal justice system, insofar as it impedes investigations and subjects targets to a type of 'mob justice' without due process. This is never acceptable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Instead of vigilantism that targets individuals who commit harassment, if the justice system has shortcomings, it should be improved. Finding a workaround shifts the focal point from being improvement in deliverance of justice to simply being retribution instead.\n","id":"3c78e5fc-5f20-42f4-95ff-da2b28554a66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ending US sanctions on Cuba<|ARGUMENT|>Sanctions are a good lever to influence Cuban political leaders toward liberalization. While this may not be achievable with Castro, it is certainly possible with the leaders that follow Castro. Sanctions have more potential to influence post-Castro Cuban leaders because these leaders will be less able to resist the public outcry against the government actions in Cuba that have led to the existence of these sanctions. Therefore, the liberalizing objective of sanctions are much more likely to succeed with the next Cuban leaders, and so they should be sustained so that they can be used effectively in this context.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanctions should persist to leverage Cuban leaders that follow Castro\n","id":"f27b5a7d-a302-4763-80b7-3e58e6c9eefe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Most monarchs have constitutional prerogatives such as sanctioning laws, calling for elections or participating in the formation of government. However, those powers are generally consultive or ceremonial.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The monarch in a constitutional monarchy is not required to 'run the country'.\n","id":"a2c7e49c-74d6-4d09-86b4-fef35630c5d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>George Orwell's 1984 is over-rated<|ARGUMENT|>The Ministry of Truth can erase events or people from history and no one can challenge it, which could make it difficult to convince people of what they are rebelling against.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"1984 shows how difficult it is to rebel against or change a system when you can't freely express opposition.\n","id":"66731986-80ff-4840-afc8-847017e519b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>National Lotteries<|ARGUMENT|>It is wrong for governments to take advantage of their citizens by encouraging them to play a lottery. The chances of winning significant money are so small 1 in nearly 15 million in the UK that only the ignorant, gullible or desperate will play. To use this as a means of raising public revenues amounts to a tax on stupidity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is wrong for governments to take advantage of their citizens by encouraging them to play a lotter...\n","id":"51b1a25a-99a6-4a9c-bfb6-d8ee71ed30ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>The idea that sexual assault victims bring their assaults on themselves by exposing parts of their bodies that are too sexual to show, depends on the idea that there *are* parts of the body that are too sexual to show. Normalizing nudity would falsify this idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Laws against nudity for the sake of protection against the temptation of sexual harassment and assault suggest that it's excusable to engage in these behaviors if a person is dressed or not dressed suggestively, thereby blaming the victim along with perpetrators of sex crimes.\n","id":"e3471872-92e3-40da-a0d4-192584fad9b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I get into my argument, here are my caveats I fully believe that some moms truly truly cannot afford to stay home and must go back to work, but I believe this is a small percentage of the moms who say things like, I really wish I could stay home, but we just cannot afford it. Specifically, single moms are, of course, amazing. Most of the moms I am challenging with this post are in two adult households. I am not saying that all moms should stay home with their children. If a mom justifies going back to work because she doesn't really enjoy staying home, great Go back to work, and know that you are being totally honest with the world and yourself. If you have any other reason for going back to work, other than some version of we can't afford for me stay home, great Have a great career You are not to whom this post is addressed. I know that I am being terribly gender exclusive with my language. I fully support dads that want to stay home. In reality, though, I have never met one. Every person I have heard give the can't afford to stay home line was a woman. In reality, though, my argument would be just as valid if a couple considered the dad staying home but concluded that we just can't afford for him to stay home. I personally see value in a mom staying home until all the kids are in school. To me, I do not see much value for the family in her staying home after that. BUT THIS IS TOTALLY MY OPINION AND IS IRRELEVANT TO MY ARGUMENT. I don't really care if you think moms and or dads should stay home or not. I only care about why they believe they are not staying home. Here is the core of my argument. Many women convince themselves that they really want to stay home with the kids but that their current financial realities, over which they have no real control, will not allow them to do so. Essentially, they are convincing themselves that powers outside of their control are dictating that they must go back to work. I believe that, for most families who use this line, this is nonsense. There are usually options moving to a smaller house apartment or a cheaper town, cutting expenses going out to eat less, cheaper vacations, consigned clothes, cord cutting, etc. . Due to all kinds of cultural pressures, of which so many of us are largely unaware, many families legitimately feel like they cannot go without cable TV, cook dinner for themselves each night, go on cheaper vacations, etc. I know that this post sounds incredibly judgmental. To be transparent if you couldn't guess already , my wife is a stay at home mom SAHM with our 11 month son. She worked in a great career until our son was born. When she had been home for a few months technically on maternity leave from work , people began to ask when if she would go back. When we said that she would be staying home, we were consistently met with the same reaction Oh, that's wonderful I really wish that I could stay home with my X kids, but we just can't afford that. Often, the dad was making more than me What? I started to get annoyed. I was not angry because these moms went back to work do whatever you think is right , but that they were all giving us really crappy rationales for their decisions. If you want to go back to work so that you can stay in your nice house, go to the Caribbean every few years, and eat at the nice restaurant in town a few times month, that's cool, just say that. If, on the other hand, you went back to work because you just felt like you had to and never really considered making the kind of lifestyle i.e. economic changes it would require, then that's really sad. Ok, reddit, change my view One quick note I have never done one of these before. I tried to be honest and direct with my view, given the point of this forum. I recognize that it sounds pretty snobbish and, well, mean. Please be assured that I never really talk this way when having an actual discussion about this stuff with working of SAH moms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most moms who go back to work saying that \"we just can't afford for me to stay home\" are lying to themselves. The reality is \"staying home with my kids is just not important enough to us for us to be willing to change our current lifestyle.\"\n","id":"1cee6d68-2b7b-4dfe-9a19-c5e8defd8410"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is drag turning mainstream hurting LGBT rights?<|ARGUMENT|>Pride has become a corporate event that facilitates the co-opting of LGBT culture by organisations that threaten people of colour.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The LGBT community has failed to represent people of colour.\n","id":"88785a4f-6301-4857-971c-ba491cb1f29a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>HGH does not act as a traditional anabolic steroid and does not help with muscle growth. It should be encouraged as help for rehabilitation of serious and moderate injuries to ensure full recovery, and even prevent reinjury. Overall, the use of HGH would make any sport safer for the athlete by minimizing risk of career ending injury, and, in a distant second, more entertaining to the fans. Is there any reason why this should not be the case, and I welcome any evidence of adverse effects of which I may not be aware<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"HGH should not be a banned substance in professional sports\n","id":"c190a6be-ae41-4490-894b-1b558365cc58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just like a Hamburger with cheese is a CheeseBurger. Cheese Sticks are made with bread stick dough. The dough is called Bread Stick dough Its says it on the box You dont call it spaghetti noddles with sauce, you call it spaghetti, and even if you just eat the noodles alone, its still spaghetti BECAUSE ITS SPAGHETTI NOODLES MY entire crew, save for one of my drivers, is against me. When some one calls and orders bread sticks, we ask them if they would like to add cheese for a price, because they are the same damn thing. Change my mind<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bread Sticks and Cheese Sticks are the same thing, you just call them cheese sticks out of necessity to save time.\n","id":"eed75399-f78f-48ea-add8-b3a6d65168ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Girls Be Allowed in Boy Scouts?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, accepting gay leaders will not change the overall purpose of Boy Scouts, while letting girls in will completely change its purpose. With the addition of girls it will make the BSA's purpose more along the lines of co-ed bonding rather than guys having fun with other guys, which is what it's purpose was traditionally.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While these are both considered traditions, they each have completely different impacts.\n","id":"07b0ec6c-0b32-4e12-90c7-47147842859d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was orginally going to include the that I believe both teenagers and felons should be allowed to vote, but someone already beat me to the latter. I hear the argument alot of times, that people below the age of a 18 are not mature enough to vote but this is ridiculous, voting dumbly does not pose a risk to yourself like smoking or to others like drinking , the worst that can happen is that the teen wasted their vote, this is especially true in the US given how 2 parties dominate the political system so even the slight bumb allowing teenagers to vote might give to 'radical' third parties wouldn't matter in the end. Futhermore allowing teenagers to vote, helps intregate them into the adult world and makes them make better citizens and many teenagers are already passionate about issues, so silencing their voice is unfair.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe people as young as 13 should be able to vote, !\n","id":"07b21b75-419a-4356-a14d-0966595bc58e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public entities use only open source software?<|ARGUMENT|>Public entities such as government entities should not expect private citizens to maintain public infrastructure without compensation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Open source software sometimes is not funded and may not be updated.\n","id":"45346688-0d35-4c99-b116-7da48f4872c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>Virtual reality technologies are able to emulate and enhance all existing media by making their experience more visceral \u2014 whether that be social media, movies, games, or books.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Virtual reality is likely to displace and emulate traditional modes of fictional experiences.\n","id":"5940fbb1-b71b-4b64-8a4d-b4c9bd99f70d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Reality Television Has Negative Effects on Society<|ARGUMENT|>Reality shows are bad, lazy television. They mostly show ordinary people with no special talents doing very little. If they have to sing or dance, then they do it badly \u2013 which doesn\u2019t make for good entertainment. TV bosses like them because they are cheap compared to putting out shows with proper scripts, actors, musicians, etc. Even if they are popular, that doesn\u2019t make them good programmes. It just means that some people have no taste and will watch any old rubbish. Broadcasters should be aiming at excellence, giving their viewers quality programmes which expand their cultural horizons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reality shows are bad, lazy television. They mostly show ordinary people with no special talents do...\n","id":"a5120f26-cd9f-4b85-adf9-f3fd7915fc10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Having more sexual partners may expand people's horizons about sex as well as giving them a better comparison between what good or bad sex is, since they have something to compare it with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having more sexual partners may provide a variety of benefits for an individual.\n","id":"eb368f9d-ca56-4edc-85b0-ca3986212b55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, I understand that this has been posted before. However, none of the discussions I've read on other threads have managed to change my view, hence my posting here. When faced with the trolley problem, when the options are divert the trolley and kill one person, or leave it alone on its tracks and allow 3 people to die I think we would have a moral obligation to pull the lever and kill the one person. Because the outcome is what's important. In other words, it's better for 3 people to live and one person to die, than 3 people to die and one person to live.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pulling the lever to save more lives is the right response to the classic \"trolley problem\".\n","id":"29b45810-0492-4eee-93c8-a2e176367f71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Science Leave Room for Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>\"The clock used by Libet featured a dot that circled the clock-face, rather like a second-hand. Danquah\u2019s team showed that the speed at which the dot circled the clock face also affected participants\u2019 time estimations \u2013 the faster the dot, the more accurate participants\u2019 estimates became.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The results of the Libet experiment has been called into question.\n","id":"ddb8d6d6-5324-4666-9f69-9b70472b4542"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Socialism, is it now irrelevant?<|ARGUMENT|>People's perceptions about the legitimate size and scope of the state have outgrown socialist ideas, and led governments to roll back their activities. Economies are now more liberal, privatised and flexible than ever, and there is no political desire anywhere for taxes to rise. Similarly, the trust of citizens in their governments to protect their interests is at an all time low. If people don't trust the state, or want it to make decisions on their behalf, then there can be no future for socialism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People's perceptions about the legitimate size and scope of the state have outgrown socialist ideas,...\n","id":"6e7d31bf-e9b1-445a-b51d-d8111af5e2e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a feminist concerned with social justice I have been disgusted by the increasing outbursts of Islamophobia. I have researched this issue and become quite interested. A common attack against Islam is that Muhammad PBUH was a pedophile. I always considered this to be a ridiculous and baseless attack. Then I studied the foundational texts and history of Islam. The Sahih Hadith the reliable histories are virtually universally accepted as reliable truth about his life and experiences. They show that the prophet married his wife Ai'isha when she was 6 and consummated when she was 9 or possibly 10 . No mainstream accepted scholar disputes this, it is simply a historical fact. The argument is that this was normal at the time. That may well be the case, perfect human and exemplar of a Prophet of God notwithstanding. I'm thinking that regardless of the climate in which this took place, we would be right is saying that a man of more than 50 years who has sex with a 9 year old girl could justifiably be called a pedophile or a child abuser. The tl dr sounds absolutely awful and invites all accusations of racism, bigotry, islamophobia, xenophobia, intolerance, etc. But it's universally accepted as historically true. Muhammad PBUH was a pedophile. It's a fact, . edit I just linked this to r Islam to see if any professing Muslims wanted to participate<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A 50+ man who consummates his marriage with a 9\/10 year old girl should rightly be labelled a pedophile\n","id":"72180048-1b58-48c1-b49e-0a55588e53c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Drug Trial Participants Be Chosen By Lottery?<|ARGUMENT|>The high cost of healthcare prevents people from getting needed services. The uninsured in particular, are less likely to get preventive care such as physical exams and cancer screenings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the US millions of people are uninsured and so cannot afford healthcare. In many cases participating in a trial may be their only option to receive treatment.\n","id":"d5327d8a-ea92-45ce-bbef-d1806081d6b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm in no way addressing or defending any other behaviour by the mafia or other criminal organisations, only the 'culture of whacking' for lack of a better term. I'm not too knowledgeable about the intricacies of the mafia, but it seems as though at the very least, death is was an effective motivator to toe the line. x200B To me, that sudden death for rule breakers seems like a good system as long as everyone is aware of the rules and the potential consequences of breaking the rules. No time wasting, just a quick death before you even know what is happening. It's not fool proof I realise, but I'm still very interested to hear from, hopefully both sides on this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The way the mafia use\/used 'sudden execution by friends' as a motivator against rule-breaking, seems like a good system.\n","id":"0114ba9b-0c80-4664-9202-b7eb7ac5954c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>history has no place in the classroom<|ARGUMENT|>History teaches many useful skills, which are of great value to both individuals and the economy. These include the ability to think critically and construct reasoned arguments, an awareness of differing points of view and understanding of cultures both one's own and those of others. Essays on historical events or figures require an original, structured argument and an evaluation of sources, skills that have relevance in other areas of education. Furthermore, the humility necessary to accept the limitations of historical research are instrumental in encouraging multi-culturalism in society and respect for views one might not initially understand. improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"History teaches useful skills applicable in other areas of education and life\n","id":"8b1d6df2-0049-41c2-b063-e45da3517c87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Antifa direct-action movement beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Some Antifa members advocate for violence against police officers, others even for the the killing of cops. 1 2 3 4 5<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Antifa wants to abolish the police, which the general public strongly supports.\n","id":"c1b0f469-5dcc-404a-a36f-dfed5d75003d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the European Union intervene in the political conflict in Catalonia?<|ARGUMENT|>The German court in charge of the extradiction of Mr Carles Puigdemont denies claims of rebellion and violence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inventing violence in order to jail peaceful opposition is usually undemocratic.\n","id":"f5cdc9da-9c15-4c38-8dc1-37b2b1b0046f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I find the world's positive and admiring attitude of the sport's world extremely over inflated. When I turn on the TV to check out the football or basketball game everyone's talking about, all I see are muscular guys running back and forth down the field or court in brightly colored uniforms. But that's it. I don't see athletes saving lives with cutting edge medical techniques or teaching classes or designing building the newest pieces of technology these are the things that deserve the money and the admiration, because without these professions and many more , society would not function as it does today. Why do we glorify athletes and pay them thousands of dollars more than we should for only providing us with a few hours' worth of good television? I'm not saying that I hate athletes or that I hate sports I'm just as entertained as you are. I'm even a little jealous of their athletic ability, because I'm not a sports connoisseur, but I just don't find what athletes do to be worth what they receive. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that athletes contribute nothing to society other than entertainment, and therefore should not be paid more than more useful professions.\n","id":"f22d7682-0361-4b81-8bad-9efac0fafe33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Minors Need Parental Consent for Abortions?<|ARGUMENT|>Deciding whether to have an abortion or continue the pregnancy will probably have a major long-term impact on the teen's psychological and emotional well-being, her ability to continue formal education, her future financial status, etc. Consent laws help pregnant teens to get support and guidance from their parents in this important decision.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consent laws would give parents a chance to counsel their teenage daughters about the possible consequences of abortion.\n","id":"68c54a35-0afd-4780-92a4-9736361df097"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The United Kingdom should directly elect the Prime Minister<|ARGUMENT|>Constituents are represented and impacted by the policies of their local MP. Yet if they are not paying members of their local MP's party, there is little they can do to influence the trajectory of the party, including who its leader is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At present, only party members can choose the party leader, which deprives everyone else of their right to inform this important aspect of the democratic process. This is unfair, especially if the PM changes midterm.\n","id":"20865ed7-1187-442b-949a-d1f0aa081f93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi guys, Hoping you guys can help me gain some nuance to this. To me, this bill would do a lot of net positive things for American politics. Please focus on the bill itself. The Bill Its constitutionality The Anti Corruption Act summarized 1 STOP POLITICAL BRIBERY Make it illegal for politicians to take money from lobbyists. Politicians get extraordinary sums of money in the form of campaign donations from the special interests who lobby them. In return, politicians create laws favorable to these special interests \u2013 even when those laws hurt voters. Under the American Anti Corruption Act, people who get paid to lobby cannot donate to politicians. Ban lobbyist bundling. Lobbyists regularly bundle together big contributions from their friends and colleagues and deliver them in one lump sum to politicians. This turns lobbyists into major fundraisers, giving politicians an incentive to keep them happy by working political favors. The Act prohibits lobbyists from bundling contributions. Close the revolving door. Lobbyists and special interests routinely offer public officials high paying lobbying jobs. Politicians and their staff routinely move straight from government to these lucrative lobbying jobs, where they get paid to influence their former colleagues. The Act stops elected representatives and senior staff from selling off their government power for high paying lobbying jobs, prohibits them from negotiating jobs while in office, and bars them from paid lobbying activity for several years once they leave. Prevent politicians from fundraising during working hours. Most federal politicians spend between 3 and 7 hours a day fundraising from big donors instead of working on issues that matter to voters. Under the Act, politicians are prevented from raising money during the workday, when they should be serving their constituents. 2 END SECRET MONEY Immediately disclose political money online. Current disclosure laws are outdated and broken. Many donations are not disclosed for months, and some are never made available electronically, making it difficult for citizens and journalists to follow the money in our political system. The Anti Corruption Act ensures that all significant political fundraising and spending is immediately disclosed online and made easily accessible to the public. Stop donors from hiding behind secret money groups. Elections are being flooded with big money funneled through groups with secret donors. These secretive groups spend money directly to influence elections and make unlimited contributions to super PACs, which run ads to elect and defeat candidates. Under the Act, any organization that spends meaningful funds on political advertisements is required to file a timely online report disclosing its major donors. 3 FIX OUR BROKEN ELECTIONS End gerrymandering. Politicians are intentionally drawing the lines around voters in order to guarantee their own re election and give their political party an unfair advantage. The Anti Corruption Act ends gerrymandering by creating independent, fully transparent redistricting commissions that follow strict guidelines to ensure accurate representation for all voters, regardless of political party. Let all voters participate in open primaries. By controlling the primaries, the political establishment controls which candidates we can vote on. The Act makes all candidates for the same office compete in a single, open primary controlled by voters, not the political establishment. This gives voters more control over our elections and more choices at the ballot. Let voters rank their top candidates, avoid \u201cspoilers.\u201d Outdated voting systems force voters to choose between the \u201clesser of two evils\u201d at the ballot box or vote for a \u201cspoiler\u201d candidate. Under the Act, voters can rank their top candidates, allowing them to support their top choice without fear of inadvertently helping elect the other party\u2019s candidate. If their top choice isn\u2019t going to win, their vote transfers to their second choice, and so on. This makes it easier to elect independent minded candidates who aren\u2019t beholden to establishment special interests. Automatic voter registration Our voter rolls and registration systems are outdated, error prone, and costly. New and proven systems can save taxpayer money and ensure that all eligible voters are able to participate on Election Day. The Act automatically registers all interested eligible voters when they interact with government agencies \u2013 whether it\u2019s when they go to the DMV, get a hunting license, apply for food assistance, or sign up for the national guard. Voters can always opt out from being registered. Information is transmitted electronically and securely to a central source maintained by the state. Vote at home or at the polls Election Day is a mess. Forcing voters to take time off from work and their families to stand in long lines on a Tuesday is ineffective, insecure, and outdated. The Act improves voter service by sending ballots to voters at home and allowing them to mail it back on their own timeframe, or drop it off at a professionally staffed voting center. Voters can still vote in person or receive assistance at a voting center. Change how elections are funded. Running a political campaign is expensive, but few Americans can afford to donate to political campaigns. That makes politicians dependent upon \u2013 and therefore responsive to \u2013 a tiny fraction of special interest donors. The Act offers every voter a small credit they can use to make a political donation with no out of pocket expense. Candidates and political groups are only eligible to receive these credits if they agree to fundraise solely from small donors. The Act also empowers political action committees that only take donations from small donors, giving everyday people a stronger voice in our elections. 4 ENFORCE THE RULES Crack down on super PACs. As a result of the Supreme Court\u2019s Citizens United ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that super PACs can spend unlimited money influencing elections, so long as they do not coordinate directly with candidate campaigns. Since then, there has been tremendous coordination between campaigns and their super PACs, making a mockery of the \u201cindependence\u201d the Supreme Court said must exist. The American Anti Corruption Act enforces the Supreme Court\u2019s mandate by fixing the rules aimed at preventing and punishing super PAC coordination. Eliminate lobbyist loopholes. The definition of \u201clobbyist\u201d is weak and outdated. As a result, lobbyists regularly avoid disclosure, and former politicians and their staff can receive big money to influence politicians without formally registering as lobbyists. The Act prevents lobbyists from skirting the rules by strengthening the definition of lobbying and penalizing lobbyists who fail to register. Strengthen anti corruption enforcement. Agencies routinely fail to enforce the anti corruption rules that already exist due to partisan deadlock \u2013 and when they are able to act, they often lack the enforcement tools necessary to uphold the law. The result is an elections system where even lax rules can be skirted or broken with impunity. The Act strengthens enforcement of anti corruption laws by overhauling the broken Federal Election Commission and giving prosecutors the tools they need to combat corruption.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I support the Anti Corruption Act.\n","id":"814e05bf-5046-4f37-81b3-9ac6699f9a09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Met remove Balthus' painting, Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Dreaming?<|ARGUMENT|>The Sistine Chapel's ceiling depicts Adam, who Muslims consider a prophet of God, and Islam frowns upon depiction of abrahamic prophets. Art will sometimes offend, and the offended party should simply not look at it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If we remove the Balthus because it offends some people we would have to purge entire collections of art since judging if something is offensive or not is completely subjective.\n","id":"92b90731-8c2d-4a41-b4c3-c670df1463d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If churches were taxed they would generate 71 Billion in taxes a year If they have such a heavy influence in our culture and government, shouldn't they pay their dues? Currently churches write themselves off as charities. While Charities push the majority of their revenue to actual charity, churches spend a majority of their revenue on 'operating expenses' over towards charity. Should that not change what they define them self as to being a business rather than a charity?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Churches should be taxed\n","id":"ee23a92f-2fef-4a27-847f-726eed6b215e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Your summarization is inaccurate. I am not talking about the U.S. promoting conflicts. The countries the U.S. attacked didn\u2019t ask them to come in. No group asked the U.S. to come in through the U.N. and the U.N. didn\u2019t ask them to come in on its own. The U.S. engaged in unprovoked illegal attacks in the Middle East. The U.S. bombed people and claimed that bombing them was a way of protecting them. The U.S. created migrants by bombing innocent people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A country cannot cause refugees and then accept them. That would mean that countries can simply herd people into their country as needed.\n","id":"30af5f15-da06-470a-8f9f-47887f4df803"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note I am not a lawyer so forgive the sometimes not quite right phrasing terminology. First, I want to categorize the two types of admission scandals college enabled and non college enabled. By college enabled, I mean the scandals involving bribing coaches of various sports or directly bribing other school officials to gain entrance into the university. By non college enabled, I'm referring to the other scandals which I believe are a majority of the cases involved involving doctors diagnosing disabilities, test center supervisors adjusting scores, and things of that nature. Next, I want to define guilty colleges that have officials coaches, admissions officers, etc. who are convicted in the upcoming trials of skewing admissions for personal gain. Not just those accused innocent until proven guilty and all. I want to establish a few assumptions 1 That, when I pay a frankly ridiculous amount of money to be considered at a school like Georgetown, I expect the considerations to be fair under their criteria I may disagree with those criteria ex. the weight of an in person interview, prioritization requirement of standardized tests, or whether they prefer weighted unweighted GPAs but I am entering into a good faith agreement again, NAL that those criteria will be applied. 2 That a school takes responsibility when the faults of its staff are not caught by the appropriate systems. You can sue a school for butchering a title 9 investigation, or if they failed to run background checks and one of their employees harasses you. The extension of this assumption is that a school is at fault if their employees are taking bribes to rig school processes and there either A are no checks in place or B are not caught by existing checks. 3 That a university has a \u201csoft limit\u201d of how many applicants they can accept. This limit is variable and open to exceptions \u201cWe can squeeze another 15 in because they\u2019re just so awesome BUT there is a maximum. 4 Universities do not maintain a historical list ranking applicants. IE there is no way to say \u201cif we had 5 more slots, these 5 people would have gotten in when they applied in 2012.\u201d Footnote at the bottom if this is false. Assuming that these individuals are found guilty of accepting bribes in the year arbitrary year represented by 20XX I see no reason why universities should not return the initial application fees to those who applied in 20XX. Their people abused the system just as much as those doing the bribing the honest applicants are the real victims. If 15 people bribed their way into \u201cGeneric College University,\u201d then 15 people were not accepted because of illicit activities. Given that it is not possible to determine who those 15 are, all who were slighted \u2013 the entire applying class \u2013 are at a loss. Thus, instead of pursuing damages hard to prove, potentially immeasurable from not getting in, the schools should simply refund application fees. We paid for a service considering our applications fairly and the service was not delivered. Footnote if assumption 4 is false The argument stands, but then those specific people who would have gotten in deserve the refund, not the entire applying class. IE 15 bribed their way in, refund the 15 who would have gotten in. Also \u2013 in this scenario, punitive damages for the difference in wages, skills, etc. would still be difficult to calculate, but would be much more manageable due to the smaller scale.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Colleges guilty of participating in the admissions scandal should refund application fees.\n","id":"3d80a23c-dae9-4600-b55a-4020d3e7f9d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sports - Equal Prize Money for Men and Women<|ARGUMENT|>It is not in the tournament\u2019s interests to do this: it makes Wimbledon and similar events look bad, and over time it will only become more of an issue. Martina Hingis has suggested that women should boycott tournaments with unequal prize funds. The same applies to weightlifting, cycling etc. The quality of the competition will be lower, and the publicity will be terrible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not in the tournament\u2019s interests to do this: it makes Wimbledon and similar events look bad, ...\n","id":"fc36faed-3ce1-4586-a968-73d7cd3e4324"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm going to preface this with a quick note this may sound like an attention plea, but it's not. I guess I should start this by saying that I'm an atheist, and I don't believe in any kind of reincarnation afterlife. What this means is, if I was to theoretically off myself , it wouldn't mean anything to me as I would be dead. While there is the argument What about your friends and relatives that you would be hurting? , what would they matter to a dead person? A dead person feels no emotion, and from my viewpoint a dead person doesn't even exist except for their corpse. Once you're dead, there's absolutely no way for you to feel any emotion, no pain, no anything in my opinion . If this is the case, surely my hypothetical suicide wouldn't harm anybody seeing as I would have no conscience guilt etc? Please, . EDIT TIL I need to re evaluate my views on life death. However, I'd like to thank u urnbabyurn u jerry121212 u Cyrtig for giving me the most thought provoking responses. Thank you all for chipping in, but I doubt I'll be responding to many more new comments made on this thread, seeing as I now see just how stupid I was.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think it would matter if \"I\" was to commit suicide\n","id":"97a7f612-e391-4467-ad37-e8ab909a04cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Humans have a double standard where they do not want to be hunted as die peacefully but do not allow the same respect for animals to die a natural death.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans manipulated life to the point that they disrupt the natural circle of life. Many humans are not really part of the circle of life anymore.\n","id":"e3038dd7-fbae-4b13-b594-d5148916b772"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Automobiles used to be something that people wanted to outright buy and keep for a long time. Thus car buyers wanted a quality car that would be reliable for years to come. But now people are interested in the latest and greatest performance and abilities cars have to offer. Leasing prevents consumers from having the ability to own actual assets. Brands like Mercedes and Audi have realized the majority of their customers lease cars and have abandoned efforts of reliability. Consumers will lose autonomy to do want they want with their vehicles because they will need to obey the lease contract i.e. modify their vehicles in any fashion. It also doesn't help that leasing is more expensive than car notes. It will help the corporations more because they will not have to invest in vehicle reliability or overcome the commitment a buyer needs to purchase a car. Consumers will be constantly paying a lease note instead of a car note that will terminate over time. The manufacturers will never reach intentions like Koenigsegg recently claimed Consumers are going to be slaves to the automobile industry which will set the agenda via their financing and lease agreements.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Leasing cars will harm the consumer in the long run.\n","id":"38baaf2a-9534-43d5-87f1-cc2a579395a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Social Media Been Good For Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Social media has been a big step towards globalization as it allows communication across the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It has created new ways to communicate\/learn and be informed.\n","id":"58697d63-a133-44ea-a04c-11a94acf627f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should individuals sentenced to life in prison be allowed to choose death instead?<|ARGUMENT|>As rehabilitation is done in private it fails the needs of prisoners because it doesn't tell wider society they have been rehabilitated and thus these prisoners still face stigma. Rehabilitation processes should instead be \u2018seen to be done' in a public, ritualized fashion which would send an important message to the individual and wider society about the individual's progress. Maruna, 2006, p.2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prison services regularly fail to correctly assess the rehabilitation needs of inmates p. 15.\n","id":"9a7c4a65-c0e8-41e4-b726-69be9534aecb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Doctors should be banned from performing genital reshaping surgery on intersex infants<|ARGUMENT|>Deciding their child's gender without their child's consent can cause friction in a family when the child learns the truth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intersex children should be able to decide the gender they are raised as.\n","id":"c583d123-10ab-4d9b-9c34-0549610f421d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have recently been immersed in a sort of hippie culture, and watching a video of bill hicks I was introduced to the convenient idea that every action of mine and all my fellow humans are based in either love or fear. I'm starting to not subscribe to this idea anymore, but I am not able to refute it in my own mind. Please help me change my view. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that every action a human makes is based off of either love or fear and these are the base roots of all human action.\n","id":"85831785-d077-4c3c-b808-79a8d1076aeb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should create a Foreign Legion<|ARGUMENT|>At the moment the US is forced to depend on soldiers from places like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Ukraine to help them with peacekeeping, but they have no control over these troops nor do they have a say in their deployment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US would save a lot of money and gain a lot of stability by not haveing to rely on ragtag militias, unreliable foreign governments, or conduct costly nation-building.\n","id":"03d04e3e-3b77-49fe-8b02-4df1aa144ad9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>If your partner is otherwise happy with your relationship, you are damaging them with information they could likely be happier without knowing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Revealing it has a high likelihood of ending the relationship.\n","id":"fcb01176-1255-43af-9f0f-bc54c9d5379c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The way that humanity is currently living is highly unsustainable. Live, not only for the poorer half of us is getting uncomfortable, anyone below the wealthiest 1 ought to feel it. Resources are dwindling, the globe is warming, space to live in is running lower and lower. However, I am not one to unjustly crush someone's dreams entirely. Reproduction is a desire deeply rooted in our instincts and is in many cases an act of love and compassion, something that our world is in dire need of. If we funneled this desire in a productive way and limited it to a global one child policy, it would ease the burden of overpopulation for ALL of us. Let's get into retirement funds however. Retirement is currently being paid for by the next generation, as it has been for centuries. This system is already beginning to topple and fail, at least in the western world. One solution to this problem would be automation, generating the revenue lost by the one child policy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men should have a vasectomy no later than after fathering their first child until the world population has dropped below 3 billion people.\n","id":"30b48dcf-67b6-4d23-ab61-93d7d14016d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In a system where everyone can vote, often a lot of people chose to not vote. This is seen as a bad thing, as people are neglecting their power and so on. Well, we all know people that don't care about politics, and chose not to pay attention to those matters. The problem with bashing abstention, is that those people that don't care and know about the subject, will be forced to vote, even though they don't know what the candidates defend and propose. The biggest advantage of promoting abstention is less propaganda. As politicians realize that only the interested electors vote, they will be more concerned in making good points and proposing good ideas, rather than giving stickers, lighters and pens with logos. Other advantage is that more attention is payed to the programs, meaning that the elected party person is pressured to execute what they promised as all their voters know what to expect. disclaimer I'm a young Portuguese men so English is not my native language , not affiliated with any political party and still learning about politics. So my experienced with bad politicians may be biased.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think electoral abstention is a good thing\n","id":"01a14ab4-834d-46ca-b78d-99148c72fbd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>gt Hey, man, I heard you got banned from Reddit? Yeah, I got into an argument with some asshole so I made a bunch of accounts and downvoted him, like, four or five times. Haha Alternatively gt Hey, man, I heard you got banned from Reddit? Yeah, I posted a topic and I wanted to try and get it visible so I upvoted it with some bots, like, four or five times. Haha Those are the hypothetical conversations I assume we would have with our friends if we found out they got banned from Reddit for the things Unidan did. There's a weird paradoxical thing I'm noticing among people deriding Unidan and it's that imaginary Internet points don't matter and Unidan violated the sanctity of the Reddit voting system. I'm not sure you can be self righteous about the latter while also believing the former? Now, those who do have a lot of feelings invested into the Reddit voting system who among them hasn't downvoted someone they disagreed with? I've downvoted someone I've disagreed with. In fact most people I downvote are people who I just really, really disagree with. I, too, have violated the sanctity of Reddit's voting system. Not only that but I believe all of you have too. The general all of you. As a rule. Should we all throw ourselves on our swords and delete our accounts? Request bans for ourselves? Should we brigade ourselves and downvote all of our own posts? Speaking of brigading Unidanx isn't doing so hot karma wise and I don't think it has anything to do with the quality of his posts. Should all of those downvoters be banned? I'm just having a hard time getting as worked up as some of these other people. The following are real quotes people are making about or towards Unidan. gt You benefited. Stop with the whole I didn't make any money. I saw you on CNN or some shit. You have personally benefited through fame and opportunities you would not have had without reddit. Since you were vote manipulating since before your reddit fame, it is possible that your reddit fame happened dishonestly at least in part . I mean, shit. I wish I'd thought of a way to get famous by downvoting new posts. gt Unidan The dream of reddit gt UnidanX The reality of reddit. That's right. Unidan was the dream of Reddit, but the sober reality is a nightmare. gt go away narcissist gt You did not just defy the rules of the platform that you use to disseminate your knowledge and opinions, you outrageously abused the democratic spirit of the site. gt He didn't wrong Reddit, he wronged science.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The anger and vitriol towards Unidan is overdramatic\n","id":"03700600-ebf4-4f35-878d-d4b8d1124465"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>It means that the community and its resources are less likely to be open to those who need support for engaging in queerness, even when they are not - for example, for people who gender-bend in their dress but do not identify as trans. They nonetheless face discrimination and the risk of violence, but have little access to support.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It suggests that your decision to engage with queerness is 'not real' in the same way that another's is, and that puts it in a hierarchy below the actions of those who feel they were born this way. This harms two important groups of people.\n","id":"e43bf9df-ade4-4332-a7b4-c2bbcea67694"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Ban Symbols of Communist Regimes?<|ARGUMENT|>Current Communist Dictatorships still exist, such as Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela, having these symbols around unrestricted is disrespectful with the victims of these regimes. Joking with Nazism symbolism is often considered immoral, and there is no single reason why communism should be different.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Popular use and ignorance of meaning does not preclude the notion of banning communist symbols.\n","id":"59e25aeb-022a-4818-8732-5f85fd0f214d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Organic Farming Better Than Conventional Farming?<|ARGUMENT|>Not having diseases means that diseases are less likely to spread to other plants, which is especially pertinent in today's globalized market.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Organically grown plants are more durable, and have higher resistance to pest and diseases.\n","id":"d6a97311-869d-4b12-9557-959114ee1267"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>We cannot communicate with most species on Earth in a meaningful way, hence it is hard to expect that we would fare better in contact with any extra-terrestrial species.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Aliens and humans might simply be so alien to each other that communication is impossible, as hard as humans may try.\n","id":"efabb943-b026-4443-9dd9-0e9923854135"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is not much to argue about this, the reality speaks to itself. Just think of the African or Asian French domains, or of Haiti, or wherever the French colonial domination set its rules. The French governing brought no rules, no civilization but only spoil of their their territories, famine, savagery and violently discriminating laws. Nowadays, the ex French colonies are poor, uneducated and fighting to keep up the pace with the rest of the world, while the British colonies have remained endowed with reasonable political and law systems, promising social dynamics and an acceptable living standard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ex-French colonies are being a mess. The French rule was a slow-motion genocide while the British colonies were left with the chance to develop and thrive.\n","id":"0c740a13-0e3b-4d11-a34a-2a1d5c1040d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to run an international media corporation<|ARGUMENT|>An independent media is vital for democracy as it is a necessary check on over powerful politicians and government. The \u2018fourth estate\u2019 has a vital oversight function over government ensuring that elected representatives uphold their oath of office and really represent those who elected them.1 In order for the press to be able to remain independent and able to carry out this function it needs to have powerful backers itself. Murdoch is one such backer. Multinational companies with large holdings spread across numerous countries can much easier resist government pressure than national or local newspapers without such backing as they can continue attacking a government regardless of the pressure an individual government puts upon it as the owners. Murdoch by making politicians dance to his tune was doing exactly what the press is supposed to do; preventing governments from being too powerful by appearing to have some power to bring the government down if necessary. If this translated into too much influence this was the fault of politicians not Mr Murdoch.2 1 Center for Democracy and Governance Bureau for Global Programs, Field Support, and Research, \u2018The Role of Media in Democracy: A Strategic Approach\u2019, U.S. Agency for International Development, June 1999, p.3 2 Wolff, Michael, \u2018Rupert Murdoch before the Leveson inquiry\u2019, guardian.co.uk, 23 April 2012.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having powerful media companies shields them from interference by governments.\n","id":"f4b93f2c-f748-4154-849d-9c35690d8765"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious people have different values, and since values cannot easily be objectively measured and compared, we cannot say that some people's values are better than other's, which means that the values of religious people such as for the parent to be responsible for making important religious life decisions for the child before adulthood may as well be just as important as any other group of people's.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Until a child turns 18, the parent or guardian is legally responsible for making all important life decisions, including medical procedures and treatments.\n","id":"23d7bc3f-44e1-4c13-b072-08bb05a5e293"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>The UK Court of Appeal ruled that pedophiles can have unsupervised access to their children, recognizing their right to family.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chemical castration harms the right to procreate. This is a disproportionate and unnecessary punishment.\n","id":"4c6ac975-2598-4151-a629-05f41d7c5e21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think individual cultures in America need to be maintained and kept separate and distinct. I think it's fine indulging in other's cultures, but to do that, we need those cultures to still exist. If we mix cultures, it dilutes foreign culture in favor of the local one for example, the Americanization of the world . If members of these cultures forsake their heritage, we risk gentrification and tyranny of the majority. As traditions become watered down through intermarriage and the blurring of distinct differences, traditional values and morals are erased. Children born in these circumstances lose part of their identity and decide to follow mainstream culture. If we seek to eliminate differences we will become intolerant of them. It's important to have differences so that we learn to be accepting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe race\/cultural mixing leads to degeneracy.\n","id":"08ee35b7-ceeb-4345-8563-562bb07ae8d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is there an afterlife?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion as a whole contributed $378 billion to the US economy in 2015, including money spent on hospitals, faith-based charity donations and the setting up of food centers for those with specific faith-based dietary restrictions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion incentivizes greater investment in the broader community which is a common good.\n","id":"7247d97d-4a42-49a1-8507-8b182c38efd6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Subminimum Wage be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>A big issue for those who receive welfare payments or government assistance can be ensuring that they are not benefited from one service only to be pushed over the threshold in another service and no longer qualify. For example, when disability allowances are increased, people fear that this will affect their ability to get rental\/ education allowances etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Disabled people can't be paid more because if they were, they would earn too much to keep receiving disability benefits.\n","id":"7475020c-7bc7-4635-bfa1-fd746bab60f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Will Win the Game of Thrones?<|ARGUMENT|>The rebellion of the wildlings would not have any effect on what is going on beyond the wall.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This ending would nullify anything previously in the series that was done to prevent it.\n","id":"fb8c8d25-6655-401a-a8cd-282aa0538d47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Agile Development - You don't need standup<|ARGUMENT|>Written standup notes are also a valuable information source for performance reviews. Managers can check e.g. for consistent progress, ability to communicate, ability to help others with blockers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Written standup notes everyone writes their yesterday\/today\/blockers e.g. in a slack channel when they start their day are a better way to provide transparency and trust.\n","id":"aa93885b-0a0e-4c64-a4b8-7cd20eec3613"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Straight off the bat, let me say I think all drugs should be legal maybe a topic for another post , so I have nothing at all against the legalization of marijuana. I want it to happen just as much as the next guy. I just think the culture being developed in response to support and advocate legalization is getting a bit ridiculous. I think what I'm talking about can be best evidenced in places like r trees. I understand that because people were so misinformed about weed for so long that when the true facts came to light, a lot of people were angry, or upset, or something. But it seems people now think that just because weed doesn't kill, or isn't physically addictive, or whatever, that this means they've been given the green light no pun intended to smoke as much weed as they damn want and praise it as the fucking gospel. I used to be like this, I thought, fuck yes, a drug I can actually feel good about doing, one that doesn't put me in any physical danger and has no risk of overdose. No matter how much you smoke, you just get higher I thought I hit the fucking jackpot. Now, I don't think weed destroys lives or anything stupid like that, but weed does have it's negative effects, and I feel these are being brushed under the rug in the face of risking the chances of legalization. I smoked weed daily, because too much is never enough I did this for a long time, a year or two. It took me that time to realize that all my spare time revolved around getting high. It had literally become my hobby and I had become such an unmotivated, lazy piece of shit. That stereotype of the dumb, slow, sluggish stoner exists for a reason, like all stereotypes, because on some level, for some people, it's true. Weed makes you ridiculously content with doing nothing. Fucking nothing. People push the imagination creativity bullshit aspect of weed way too much, which honestly dies off a couple of years after consistent smoking. Tolerance builds up very quickly with weed, and the magic, initially amazing effects when you first start all but disappear after a while. There are more reports suggesting that as you get older, the negative, paranoid and anxious effects of the drug worsen and I would testify to that. I think that once weed is legalized, we will see a lot of unintended consequences and I think this mindset of smoking weed all day, 'erryday' is very poisonous. I'm sure on Reddit, of all places, one of you can . Edit Okay, I know my title is a little sensationalistic, but I think you get the point.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people who think weed is completely harmless and smoke it in excess are just as idiotic as the people against the drug\n","id":"d37a50a7-fc6a-4a7e-a60f-11b07d8fcba0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Selective exposure theory and reinforcement theory explain how humans tend to seek and remember information that reinforces their own preexisting beliefs. Consuming more biased information just makes for even more uniformed opinions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The will of the populace can be shaped by the media, which often distorts objective facts for ratings and audience.\n","id":"985cdbc5-8571-46a6-9efa-88b601cc8f10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would like to acknowledge that I may be biased towards this view as I grew up in a household full of domestic abuse. Although I myself was never physically hurt, I watched years go by as my mother's partners would hurt and bruise her physically. I was too young and immature to protect her, and instead was subjected to what I consider psychological abuse I was always put in the middle of these fights D Why the fuck can't you agree with me and tell your mother that she's psychotic? M Did you not see him hit me? Look at my arms and legs. They're purple. Fucking coward, stand up for me You're my son, for Christ's sakes. Back and forth, back and forth. Anyways, this indirectly relates to the topic at hand now as a fledgeling adult at the age of 21, I have an extreme abhorrence towards any kind of violence, whether it be wrestling, war, or the violent punishments my ex stepdad would give to our pets in an attempt to house train them properly. I understand that there isn't and probably will never be a unanimous view towards spanking children, but I would love to hear some of your thoughts on the matter. I acknowledge that there are well bred kids who respect authority no matter their childhood circumstances. I was never hit or touched for any bad behavior in the past, and I turned out just fine. My college roommate, on the other hand, was spanked time and time again for his misdeeds, but later grew into becoming an accomplished Eagle Scout and respectful man. I admire his character today, but we have always disagreed on the topic at hand. I just find it wholly unnecessary to treat bad behavior with physical discipline, no matter how harsh or light the hand is. I would like to draw a parallel to disciplining a new cat, where you place an emphasis on consistently rewarding good behavior using reason and logic to deconstruct and correct misdeeds in respect to children and not backhanding the cat like that fucker did. Today, witnessing physical abuse in any form makes me nauseous. TL DR Spanking should be reserved for two consenting adults only.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Spanking is unnecessary and immoral.\n","id":"48250037-aeaf-487e-b554-32e6fa47650b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Artificial Intelligence AI: Should an artificial general intelligence be created?<|ARGUMENT|>A 2014 poll of prominent AI researchers found that they believe there's a 50% chance that high level machine intelligence will be developed around 2040-2050.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is probably impossible to prevent AGI from being created.\n","id":"c25b5be6-11b2-4ea5-8316-d839a53dd565"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I'm a pro choice man, I just think this one argument is shit. The argument I am rejecting This is about a woman's right to choose what she can and cannot do with her own body, you wouldn't see the law deciding what men can not do with their bodies. If you are against abortion, you are against women's rights and you just want to control women and their bodies. Why I think this argument is awful and we should say something better An abortion is an extremely complex, personal and difficult decision. It cannot be reduced to something as comparably trivial shallow as just you and your body. Because it doesn't just affect you and your body. It affects lives, literally in the case of the child or child to be and the life of the mothers possibly if something medical goes wrong or the state if she's a welfare mum or the father's livelihood if he's involved, because let's be honest he gets no say but more on that in a moment . It is not just about you and your stretch marks and bikini body. It is much bigger than that. A more comparable scenario A decent analogy would be tattoos and piercings, if the law stated that men can get tattoos and piercings while women could not, then you could legitimately say this is an issue of bodily integrity and bodily autonomy or self ownership or something like that, you could really say the law is being sexist. Dismissal But saying this is like abortion is making it too easy for the opposition the pro lifers to dismiss. Imagine a conversation between a pro lifer and pro choicer. A pro choicer gives the argument I am criticising at the top. How could a pro lifer respond? They could too easily dismiss this by saying well what about the body of the foetus? What about their rights and their bodies and their choices? And they'd be right to say that. If the pro choicer were to respond with talking about the development of the nervous system and all that stuff, they have changed the topic because simply saying muh women's bodies was not good enough. There is another way a pro lifer could respond to dismiss this line of reasoning, by saying that they are not a sexist. This argument also makes the pro lifer dismissive because it is inseparable from an accusation of misogyny or sexism, and if you are pro life BUT you are not a sexist like pro life women for example , then you know these things about yourself and therefore the accusation simply will not stick. In fact the pro lifer may say to themselves or each other wow, these pro choice people can only really use guilt trips, ad hominems, straw men and feminism to make their points. Which is obviously not the case. Men fathers get NO say It is an obvious fact that pregnancy and parenting physically and psychologically impacts mothers far more than it does fathers. Women have to carry, birth and feed the children. So it follows that the mothers should receive much more resources, empathy and support. However it does not follow that fathers should not have any say in this at all. This is the law at least in the UK where I'm from man does not want baby, woman does want baby baby stays. Man does want baby, woman does not want baby baby gone. That is the law. This is not a separate argument btw I'm just showing that this does not begin and end with women and their bodies . What I think we could say instead This doesn't mean I think abortion is something entirely separate from women's rights. We could easily replace this with if you are against abortion being legal, you are for forcing a woman to give birth against her will. Or something like that. This doesn't trivialise the issue, it makes the damage that can come from this somewhat self explanatory, it doesn't force you to change the subject from women's rights if that is your focus. Although it still does not acknowledge a fathers role if that is your focus. TL DR It trivialises the issues by making it seem skin deep, it is a bad analogy, it is a bad focus because it is very easy to dismiss, it ignores fathers role in the issue, and it doesn't make a good woman's rights argument that well either.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Saying \"abortion is about a woman's choice over her own body\" is a very, very bad argument.\n","id":"e2b17488-9c86-4e54-8887-93b31e11ba7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>ban the use of trans fats in food stuffs<|ARGUMENT|>One of the purposes of government is identify possible threats to health and protect the people from these threats. The fact that some government regulations seem 'silly' or misplaced, or cannot easily be understood by lay-people is not a compelling argument for having no regulations at all, or for not having regulations in the case of trans fat. The commentators who denounce the 'nanny state' do not indicate what, if any, regulations or styles of regulation they approve of. Do they think there should be no inspections of restaurants by health inspectors? No regulation at all of food or drug safety by the Food and Drug Administration? Some commentators think that people should be encouraged to study the dangers of trans fats and make their own judgements about what to eat. But people have limited time to do research on such matters. It makes sense to delegate the research to a central authority, so that instead of 300 million people trying to learn about trans fats and every other lurking menace, a handful of experts can make recommendations based on the likely responses and desires of the average, informed citizen. Non-specialists\u2019 capacity to absorb information on complex chemical and biological subjects is quite limited. The majority of us are reliant on the research of others for most of what we know.5 The opinion of the experts on the dangers of trans fats is conclusive: trans fats are unsafe. The American Food and Drug Administration FDA considers all uses of trans fats to be 'generally regarded as safe.' This allows the use of trans fats in whatever way food producers desire. \u2019Safe\u2019 for the FDA means 'a reasonable certainty in the minds of competent scientists that the substance is not harmful under its intended conditions of use', which no longer applies to trans fats. This 'generally regarded as safe' status should be revoked which in turn would greatly restrict its use in food. The other option would be to allow local jurisdictions to regulate trans fats, but this would be more costly and lead to a patchwork of regulations.1 The most effective method of controlling the use of trans-fats is through centralised, nationally applicable policy making. The poor and young are particularly vulnerable to the negative health effects of trans fats; at the very least, the threat posed to these groups justifies the use of informed regulation. Professor Alan Maryon-Davis, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health said in 2010: \"There are great differences in the amount of trans-fats consumed by different people and we are particularly concerned about young people and those with little disposable income who eat a lot of this type of food. This is a major health inequalities issue.\u201d6 The government has a legitimate interest in protecting its citizens from harms that they are not best placed to understand or avoid themselves, and so a ban on trans fats would not only save lives but would also be legitimate under the government's role to protect when citizens cannot reasonably protect themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state should ban trans fats to protect the public\n","id":"c1e69131-cb15-4286-82af-82a9eaabc5bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Get A Pet?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people have multiple pets for the happiness and well-being of their pets by providing them shelter and care that they otherwise would not get in their current or future situations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having more than one pet is not an indicator of a person's life needing upkeep. There are many reasons people have more than one pet.\n","id":"fd8100e6-9e02-43f9-99d7-e1a24ca42619"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The crux of my perspective hinges on the status of Oklahoma University as a recognized arm of the government. Consequently, their racist speech is protected speech as defined by the Supreme Court. Students should not be expelled for expressing themselves, so long as that expression falls within those defined boundaries, regardless of how heinous or inappropriate that speech is considered. So what I am asking is this on what grounds would you carve an exception out of this protection? Is sufficient moral outrage justification? If 99 of a population believes such speech to be heinous and inappropriate, do you carve out an exception? And have you considered what this might mean for you? On today's issue you may agree with the moral stance of the majority, but what about the precedent set by your exception? Will you always agree with the morals of the majority? I have phrased this  in this way because I am committed to the proposition that human rights, among which is the freedom of expression, are an unalienable facet of human existence, all things being equal. So are all things equal in this case? Please convince me that an exception really should be made in this case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The two students leaders of SAE should NOT have been expelled from University of Oklahoma for their racist speech\n","id":"b02d6118-3a74-4046-861d-d7fda2137c43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>The same could be said of women's legs or shoulders, or the rest of their breasts for that matter. If those body parts do not cause undue burdens to harassment law, then neither should nipples.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone groped someone else's face, arms, or legs, that would be harassment. Even if they were exposed, breasts should be no different.\n","id":"1c77bab7-fa0e-4ec7-996b-4403ea3d289c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Vaccines Be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Negative health impacts may occur as a consequence of mishandling of the vaccine between the production and delivery site, for instance due to failures in the cold chain This risk is additional to that of adverse reactions to the vaccine itself, meaning that a non-zero risk of adverse health impacts exists even when the vaccine is found to be completely safe in laboratory conditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There could be negative health impacts for those who are vaccinated.\n","id":"74e2bbb6-2373-48da-828b-7d0c08cd365f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should God Have Tested Job?<|ARGUMENT|>Rather than testing people individually, God creates the framework within which everyone must lead their lives. Job was tested no more or less than countless other believers and non believers throughout history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tests of faith are a critical part of how God decides whom to reward.\n","id":"7c6f341c-48e6-472a-b736-2906dcabe9e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for elected bodies<|ARGUMENT|>The alternate vote provides more opportunity for moderate candidates to be elected because the electorate can vote their first choice without fear of losing their vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The single constituency elections of AV+ exhibit all of the advantages of IRV\n","id":"1210fb71-cd38-44e2-88cc-9d5198c2d883"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Nicolas Cage is the greatest actor of our generation.<|ARGUMENT|>\"A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z\" from Vampire's Kiss<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Good acting requires the performer to convey the emotional truth of the character. Cage lampoons any realism with his hyper exaggerated choices.\n","id":"5ee7dab9-dbaf-4478-a767-aa62ed9e9d4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just saw something on the frontpage about spending four years rehabilitating a turtle. Granted, this species is endangered. However, I've seen cases of people doing this before with other animals there's a family who rehabilitates deer in my town, which enrages me because of how common deer are, how their overpopulation decimates other species in the area, and how many people are injured or killed in collisions with these pests every year. I get that as humans we have warm fuzzies when we help out animals, particularly mammals. But I feel like sometimes this just isn't worth it. Why sink tons of money, time, and effort into saving injured owls or squirrels? I can understand going to extraordinary measures for pets because of the emotional attachment. I can understand going out of your way to save individuals from endangered species. But I think that doing this for common species fulfills a two fold disservice in making the species as a whole weaker by preserving the injured individuals and wasting money and time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that it's a waste of time and resources to save non-endangered, non-pet animals.\n","id":"de6c0758-52a6-44a5-9bce-cea8727a969b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is the shooting of the black guy by a cop in his own house Reddit and Twitter are losing their shit over. Here's the story as we know it now from the point of view of the cop. After working a shift, she was returning home, but got on the wrong floor in her apartment complex. Due to all floors being identical, she didn't notice her mistake. She attempted to get into the apartment that is identical to hers and is located just above hers. The door of that apartment was not fully closed, and despite not having the keycard she managed to get into that apartment. The lights in the apartment were off, and it was very dark inside. Botham Jean, the person who lived just above her, got up and went to investigate. She noticed him, based on the circumstances she thought him to be a home invader. She gave him verbal commands, which he didn't comply with, and later fired two shots, hitting him once. She called 911 to report the incident, it is then that she noticed she was not in her own apartment. Jean later died in the hospital. Guyger surrendered to the police and was charged with manslaughter. Based on the evidence, such as the 911 call, lack of evidence for breaking into the apartment, the fact that the victim and the perpetrator didn't seem to know each other, it is reasonable for me to consider the incident a very unlucky coincidence of mistakes and circumstances, where if only one of those didn't happen, the incident would not happen. As such, I believe the actions of the police officers to be entirely reasonable considering the circumstances she was not trying to run from the police, she is not the main priority , I believe the manslaughter charge to be entirely reasonable, and I believe the actions of multiple activists and opinions of multiple redditors to be misinformed at best and malicious at worst. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the Dallas shooting by the off-duty officer Amber Guyger can reasonably be believed to be an honest, very unlucky and very costly mistake.\n","id":"6338f1ed-ec0b-4efb-be97-3206b605e706"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public transport be free?<|ARGUMENT|>Average fuel costs increase each year meaning that the provision of free public transport will successively increase the disposable income of households.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free transportation would reduce consumer's motoring costs, freeing up their income to be spent on other things.\n","id":"153daf3b-6a22-4d55-ba35-07c42bdddf84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok I understand I am going to get plenty of flak for this I know this is a widely unpopular opinion on this site but hear me out and I will listen to you as well. First let's start out with what PC gaming does well. Customization. You can build all sorts of gaming PC's. You can make an elite PC with all the bells and whistles you could ever dream or build a bare bones pc that can still run most games very well better than consoles in most cases Graphics. Lets face it not only is it so gosh darn pretty but you also get I am the best feeling when running a game on max. Multiple Functions. You never are just purchasing a gaming device you are purchasing an entire arsenal of entertainment. MODs. Out of everything I listed this is the one aspect that makes me want to pick PC gaming over consoles. The amount content people can create for a game is mind boggling. It can add hours even DAYS to the replayability to even the most mundane vanilla games. Ok now we reach the part some of you might not like First I guess I will explain what I mean by better. I am not oblivious, as I mentioned above there are plenty of things that PC gaming is superior to console gaming no debating that but do they out weigh what console gaming brings to the table. My definition of better For the AVERAGE person would I recommend a PC or a console? The VAST majority of the time that answer is console gaming. Why do we care about the average gamer? Because appealing to the average person leads to big sales. What I believe console gaming does better than PC gaming Ease of use. Lets face it there is nothing like coming home sitting on the couch picking up the controller and hearing that magical BEEP sound as the console turns on. Now I may have to install a patch before I play just as I would if I was on the PC but the console takes me by the hand and basically does it for me. That simply is not the case for PC gaming. It is moving in that direction but its not there yet. Game wont start Did you try re installing? Are all your drivers up to date? Does it lock up on startup or when you enter a game . Sure these questions are fine for some of us but it would make the average user SCREAM. People try to make a console's simplicity out to be one of its faults when actually its one of its biggest strengths. Budget. Yea I know I can already hear your guys typing your replies on how I am so wrong about this but hear me out. You can build a gaming PC for around 500 600 that is superior to today's current gen consoles I get that. For some people they get thrill out of actually doing a build but for the most part people would do it to save money. In that case I could buy a refurbished console for around 350 mayve less. So when you think about it thats a 150 250 dollar difference right there. Thats basically half way to another console right there. Then we have to go back to the average user. Sure tech savy hell even someone with above average googling skills can build a pc but do you really think that falls in line with the average person? Even if they had the skills do the benefits of pc really outweigh the time and effort needed to build it on top of a 150 250 price increase? I would say the answer is no. We as a society tend to want things HERE and NOW not in weeks from now and definitely not with some assembly required . So now we are looking at a 300 500 to find a gaming pc that can be bought online from a repuatable manufacturer forget about in stores due to horrible selection . That is is basically another console. But WAIT PC's have multiple uses they are not just for gaming its worth the extra cost Yes that is true but we are talking about the average person looking for a gaming device. They already have a laptop or desktop pc to preform those functions but nothing to play games at a high level. The average person is looking for an addition not a whole new device. Our culture. I get homes and my friends and I sit on the couch and pick up the controllers and start playing Borderlands. WAIT JUST A SECOND THERE I'll have you know that I played HELLO KITTY ISLAND ADVENTURE with my friends and we all hooked up our keyboards and had a blast . Sure I know its POSSIBLE but why doesn't happen really In comparison to its occurance on console gaming Is it the ease of use? Maybe. Is it the that everyone has easier access to controllers? Probably not but I guess its an option. In reality its how we think about PC gaming. The PC is usually cast away from the rest of the house like it has leprosy. As a gaming device it isn't really know for being shared and most certainly never allowed in the living room. Am I generalizing? Of course I am but its the way people think about PC gaming. It is so wrong that this is happening because it is FALSE but at some point it because a self fulfilling prophecy. There is just a stigma about using the the PC for gaming and while they are making large strides to change it Steam OS , this idea has set the path for consoles to be as successful as they are today. Even though I know its so wrong picturing a LAN party leaves an entirely different taste in my mouth then couch co op on consoles. I am so sorry and I hope this changes Consistency. I was going to talk about cheating hacking in FPS games and some other topics but I am even getting bored with myself so I am gonna try to wrap it up. Everyone has the same PS4, everyone has the same XBOX. Developers use this to there advantage and squeeze everything they can out of these consoles. You often hear PS4 already maxed out by X game one month after release .Well thats a 100 true they are maxed out if these same guts of a PS4 would be old news on a PC and it would play like such. But the magic happens when everyone has the same guts. Now developers can optimize the game to make it run smooth. When developing for a PC devolpers can never fully predict whats going to happen when you run a game. Will it run flawlessly or will it stutter? That is not the case for the most part when developing for consoles. Frame rate is dropping here? Lets see what we can do to fix that. If they get the game running good on the dev kits they basically KNOW that it will run good for everyone when it hits the market This how the consoles sustain long life cycles and games continually improve. Its the reason why consoles last 7 8 years and produce changes like this . In 8 years that gaming pc that you built will quiver at the thought of running new games because they aren't developing for your PC but they are in the case of consoles. In the end for the average user and myself included consoles makes you feel taken care of, while on PC you are out on your own scavenging for food. I mainly say all this because I want things to change. I want the best of both worlds but right now that really isn't an option and for the average user console gaming is the way to go. That about raps it up. Thank you so much for reading I hope I opened some eyes and really want to hear your guys take on it EDIT For clarity's sake I am taking about an average person who is looking to purchase a gaming device PC, console or mobile UPDATE Thanks everyone for your replies Trying to get to everyone Nobody is gonna help me out really guys? haha Anyways lots of good opinions and looking forward to reading more. I have to step out for a bit but I will be back later.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think console gaming is \"better\" than PC gaming.\n","id":"2c9ee7ed-575b-4ca2-8d49-43bcd14068f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The medical profession is increasingly subject to external regulation government bodies and other third party authorities are being instilled with the control over policies in our hospitals and private practices. One recent example is the unfair government formulated contracts forced upon Queensland doctors in Australia, which resulted in widespread resignations of doctors. I believe only doctors can fully appreciate the ins and outs of medical practice and thus should be the ones in charge of things as broad as policy development and salary changes, to things as specific as organ transplant allocation and standards of patient interaction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Doctors should be able to self-regulate their profession\n","id":"2b7e646e-eef9-4460-b6df-1e32c21bafde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is effectively a  on Donald Trump is not racist. Making statements that can be co opted by racist elements in society, does not automatically make you a racist. Speaking ambiguously, or in ways that can be projected upon per most of Trump's supposed racist comments does not require you to subscribe to racist beliefs. Someone who personally does not hold or support racist positions or policies, but finds enough support among people who do to reach a position where they can potentially make the greatest unifying impact, is not wrong to leverage that support. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Appealing to racists does not make you a racist\n","id":"f56697c1-1f9d-4be2-b03e-47541c69ee91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Release of Osama bin Laden death photos<|ARGUMENT|>\"Eight reasons why Obama was right not to release photos of Osama bin Laden's body.\" CS Monitor Editorial. May 4th, 2011: \"With the Arab Spring, the world is moving beyond Al Qaeda quickly. Why parade Osama bin Laden's image before the public even more?\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With Arab spring, the Muslim world is over Al Qaeda.\n","id":"4acfc2ef-2309-4d86-a32d-df4def285702"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've perused the previous r changemyview patriarchy arguments and am largely unconvinced that we are in under a patriarchy in the United States and presumably, in other western countries . I've grouped what I think have been the prevalent arguments and a basic overview of my responses in favor of patriarchy theory as follows Patriarchy does not refer to men having greater control over society, but rather, that current gender roles are descended from institutionalized patriarchy. An example of this here I think that, while it's true that current gender roles are descended from institutionalized patriarchy, this isn't sufficient to say we live in under a patriarchy now. For example, we don't say that Ireland is a pagan culture, despite the fact that some Irish culture is descended from its pagan past. inspired by yesterday's  patriarchy argument Because patriarchy is a term grounded in academic literature, it is true. An example here I think that while of course social scientists can be right about things, a concept being grounded in academic literature is not sufficient for it being true. For example both classical and Marxist views of economics have huge bodies of academic literature around them, yet at least one must be false. Patriarchy exists because men tend to hold power in society and or tend to be over privileged. an example of this argument here While I agree that males enjoy certain gendered privileges eg lower incidence of sexual harassment, more polticians are men , because there are comparable if not equivalent instances where females enjoy gendered privilege eg family court, lighter sentences for similar crimes, more bachelor's degrees go to women , it seems silly to classify society as a patriarchy, since the word patriarchy seems to imply that these privileges and or power are asymmetric. Edit I'm not the one who is viciously downvoting the people who are taking the other view. While I am committed to my side, I wouldn't have posted if I didn't want to have an open argument. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States is not, nor is it under, Patriarchy.\n","id":"d53cbefc-35f9-473e-8ac7-2c6ad0fec293"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I state the title of the thread for two reasons. First, work is spending the most valuable thing we have. For the majority of us, work is something we do because we have to rather than because we want to. We do it to pay the bills and have food on the table. But that time we spent at work is time we'll never get back. It's lost and gone forever so if you spent 50 hours last week 48 working, two commuting doing a job you find soul crushing, that's 50 hours of your life gone that will never, ever come back. And it'll be 50 next week, and the week after that, and the week after that Instead of using that time to make yourself a happier, more complete human being you are spending it in service to someone else which leads to the second point. Second, the work you do is generally making someone else rich. Working almost anywhere means you are working for someone else. Your salary is considered what you earned despite the fact that you may have been instrumental in generating exponentially more money than you took home for someone else. Your hard work is going into someone else's pocket and they're shaving off a few scraps so you'll show up tomorrow. So, to summarize work is you showing up somewhere to spend the majority of your waking day doing something you probably don't like and doesn't make you happy to fill someone else's pockets. None of that makes sense in the slightest. To respond to some inevitable comments before they happen gt You don't have to work, plenty of people don't. While technically true it doesn't change the fact that almost all methods of obtaining any kind of remotely secure and stable day to day existence is to sell your labor. gt You shouldn't hate your job. Get a new one. Far easier said than done, especially in today's economic climate. This is not nearly as simple as it sounds. gt I love my job and I get a lot from it. That's great. No sarcasm, that's a good thing. Your work is still filling someone else's pockets. It's also not the typical scenario. gt Work for yourself. This is not a viable option for everyone or even a large number of people in our current mode of economic deployment. In short, work in the sense that we use the term in the US is nonsensical at best and a scam at worst. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Work, in the sense we use the term in the US to refer to a job, is nonsensical at best and a scam at worst.\n","id":"c40f763b-d38c-4d3a-8acd-c789955d81d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>The mapping of hyperspace routes is a lengthy and complicated process; it takes years to chart any new region of space. In addition, hyperspace routes can easily blocked, for example by asteroids.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fast as the Rebels may be, their methods of propulsion face clear limitations that hamper their utility in battle and that the Federation does not have to deal with.\n","id":"ad7cad1d-84a3-467d-b1b6-46c7c99f8ef3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Darwinian Evolution Philosophy or Science?<|ARGUMENT|>Micro-evolution change within a species like the shape of a bird's beak has indeed been observed. Macro-evolution change from one species to another has not been observed. It has merely been extrapolated. No one has witnessed a species change to another species. In other words a fish changing to a lizard. Or an ape to a human. Nor can it be observed because of the length of time needed to observe all the hypothetical changes required for a new species to arise from another.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Science deals with what we can test and observe. If I come up with a theory that theory, however well grounded in sound reason, still must be tested in order for it to be accepted as scientific fact. Einstein would not be the genius that we regard him as today if his theories of gravity affecting the path of light or time dilation were never observed. His theories would have died.\n","id":"298b14b2-8500-4ed9-901b-354d9f91790e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>When war will be waged like this, not only will civilians much less often come in harms way, but also the civilian infrastructure will be much less damaged, which is good for them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The enemy's civilian population will prefer an AKD war when drones that kill with pin point accuracy, like a big drone dispensing thousands of poisonous bee drones to take out individual targets.\n","id":"2f13ed67-5199-45ce-8d46-5e0d3cae02fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Jeff Bezos\u2019s recent 400 million dollar yacht purchase got me here. Comments online are far more in support of it, with people giddy and cheering at the wonderful self made hundred billionaires deserved splurges not that I believe it\u2019s because most people are supporters, but the supporters are probably more fervent commenters . I, on the other hand, believe we need to do more to cut the wealth gap. Amazon shouldn\u2019t be paying 0 in taxes, rather obviously to me. To those who support the free market to the point that they praise a 400 million dollar ridiculous personal purchase, then are you not saying that you value Bezos\u2019 and many others\u2019 right to material than the very lives of poor people who\u2019s basic needs are not even being met? If you find that to be an inaccurate conclusion, please change my view. EDIT I really should have posted when I had time to reply and get into it. Tonight I will have more individual responses But frankly, I find us of the first world apt to analyze such problems in an intricacy that, while valid, convolutes the real issue. Have all of your earnings lost, let\u2019s say of no fault of anyone other than mother nature, and watch your children become malnourished and sick, and then see Bezos\u2019s yacht docked before you, and tell me that you don\u2019t think we should do more about the wealth gap. Tell me through a broken and cracked dehydrated voice, that upon analysis, you think its fine to just let the money end up where it ends up through the free market. I don\u2019t care how directly responsible Bezos is for poverty, I simply do not think that anyone should have such obnoxious abundance I cannot stress this enough while others do not have clean water. Im okay with some luxury, comfort, leisure, of course. I do not have an answer to where exactly the line should be drawn, and it will never be a perfect line, but I know that a 400 million dollar personal purchase is unjustifiable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Praising an ultra free market means valuing the rich\u2019s right to materials over the very lives of the poor.\n","id":"6c5394dd-891f-47cb-b814-bdae6ab28e21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>The \"religious freedom\" bill recently introduced by the Republicans would allow businesses to refuse service to individuals from, say, the LGBT community on the basis of religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Republican Party often weaponizes religion to deny people their rights.\n","id":"f789e4bb-5cd5-45a8-a9c5-7969e3fc4aca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So there is this song called Perfect to me and its suppose to be a song about celebrating flaws but I really see it as a song about celebrating negative behaviours and unhealthy diets Here are the lyrics gt So I eat my body weight in chocolate and ice cream Maybe I bite my nails and don't think before I speak Don't fit in any crowd, don't ever get much sleep I wish my legs were bigger, bigger than New York city and gt Sometimes I wake up late and don't even brush my teeth Just wanna stuff my face with leftover mac and cheese Can you convince me that the song is a positive influence instead of a negative one? I really want to join the crowd in loving the song I view flaws as something that is inherited and something that you have no control over e.g. acne for physical and addiction or anxiety for mental, not something we do have control over yet do on purpose and try to celebrate<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I really don't like that \"Perfect to me\" song by Anne Marie and I do not think its celebrating flaws, instead idealising unhealthy behaviours.\n","id":"aca6ced6-1596-46fd-afc9-1b8ef312a41e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the worst world problem of the utmost concern?<|ARGUMENT|>These people are in addition to the people who already consume too many resources, so this will tack onto instead of replace this issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Developing countries are increasing demands for resource-intensive foods because of their wealthier tastes. This causes the world to run out of resources faster.\n","id":"9827f056-ea51-4882-9d66-1e2a1192bcf8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it okay to physically torture prisoners?<|ARGUMENT|>The prospect of limiting collateral damage in wars outweighs a desire not to torture an individual, making it sometimes the only moral decision.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having the widest range of tools available to authorities keeps society safer.\n","id":"1f8a7455-34e1-4af2-8e29-0946fcc97ccb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I did search before I posted and found one from a few years back that didn't really pose the same viewpoint nor receive answers I found compelling. Bottom line is that it's obviously NOT just a woman's body sooner or later. I'm not one of those psychos that thinks life and rights are equal between living humans and a fertilized egg, but eventually the egg becomes a person. Also obviously the point at which a growing human becomes a life that we are morally compelled to protect is a matter of strong debate, but that's exactly why the it's my body argument is such BS. The bottom line is that long before any reasonable person would agree it's a child, the woman has the choice to terminate the pregnancy. This handles cases of rape, incest, medical necessity, and women's rights. But in all other cases, if the woman chooses to maintain the pregnancy for months, that right should end. Outside of rape, the woman CHOSE to get pregnant and therefore needs to accept the consequences. Just as a mother or father can't decide not to take care of children they birth, they can't neglect the ones they CONCEIVE either. I am completely mystified why anyone considers this a valid argument. It's not her body it's THEIR body . Her choice, her consequences. Why is this even in debate? Help me understand why people consider this a reasonable argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"It's my body\" argument is weak at best and outright dishonest otherwise\n","id":"1fe8bd35-9a02-4463-839b-473ef52fbf5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>The screening process is only as good as the person who makes the assessment and the level of stress or workload they may be facing. In New York, the 40% turnover in caseworkers is testament to the heavy workload they face, which could reflect in the quality of their work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Approximately 353,000 births take place a day. This would require a standardised and systematic testing process at the cost of the quality of the assessment.\n","id":"c0449b23-e6df-47d8-a177-0e88de288288"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate speech may incite violence or prejudicial action against or by a protected individual or group, or it disparages or intimidates a protected individual or group.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate speech, symbols of hate and violence inciting speech, should be forbidden.\n","id":"c2caea22-8047-450c-a6ab-7f674f179657"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Discussion in the comments section of NSFW Chaotic POV Aftermath of Boston Marathon Terrorist Bombing brought this topic up. I've held this somewhat unpopular opinion since the attack, and was surprised that the discussion didn't exist on . Many seem to think rather vehemently that Rolling Stone was wrong to have included the image of dzhokhar tsarnaev on the cover of their magazine, arguing that it was offensive and disgusting. Many of these arguments rest on the assumption that Rolling Stone is a music magazine and or a pop culture magazine . with no right to publish such a thing. I Believe that's untrue. My view is that those arguments are clouded by emotion, without respect to journalism, the magazine's roots in hard journalism, or the narrative of the story as a whole. While I am sure Rolling Stone knew the cover would be controversial, I do not believe that fact makes publishing the cover wrong . More context from my comment in the thread edited to more appropriately fit this sub I feel like the justification that it's a pop culture magazine and therefore shouldn't have a picture of a terrorist on the cover is a weak argument. Rolling Stone was well within their rights as a relevant and valid source of hard journalism to include the image on the cover as context that supports the narrative of the story. Pop culture is really more than just the superficial consumption of utter bullshit like the kardashians. It's living record of mainstream ideas and the direction of our culture that's actively studied by academics around the world I am not one of them, but I can appreciate it . Tsarnaev's story, and the idea that terrorists aren't just bearded extremists living in a cave somewhere is incredibly relevant to our popular culture and the way our ideas have evolved since that horrible day in Boston. The photo went along with the narrative of the story which to overly simplify it was Terrorists can be just like us. As for the argument that Rolling Stone is a pop culture or music magazine in the vain of US weekly or Spin with no place publishing such a photo or story, I point to the magazine's long history of investigative journalism and the simple fact that it's not a pop culture rag. I don't read or subscribe to it, but to suggest that RS hasn't covered broken important stories, or that they don't employ skilled journalists, is ignorant. Ultimately, I feel that a large number of people denigrating RS for their cover are allowing their emotion to cloud their judgement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rolling Stone's Inclusion of the Boston Marathon Bomber on their Cover Was Neither Problematic Nor Offensive\n","id":"b31830b8-a262-46f9-9a0c-8e6e159ea4e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Society is far more complicated than a lot of people believe it to be. Many social issues are not simple cause and effect problems. People react differently within groups as opposed to on their own. What we perceive as common sense is often really a culturally shaped paradigm. I major in English and Sociology. I would not advocate this path for everyone, it is a risky major , but I have a career plan, I'm working towards it, and everything seems to be going well so far. I've noticed that my study of sociology has helped me be a better critical thinker I'm more attuned to bias and misinformation in the news and media. When a politician proposes a solution to a social problem, I think about what unintended consequences that solution may have in other areas functionalism . Studying social anthropology and qualitative research has made me more understanding towards other people with different backgrounds. It has made me challenge the assumptions of my culture, and made me curious as to how those have come about. Overall, I feel that my field of study has made me a better thinker. In most places, college age correlates with voting age. I think a compulsory sociology class might help people better understand the responsibility this entails, and to better make the choice that's right for them come election time. However, I'm a little uncertain on this I think people might find it insulting, resent the course and do no work, it might be seen as brainwashing, or maybe it's not needed. So please, , or at least get me off the fence EDIT I am Irish, so the structure of our third level institutions and courses may differ from the norm . We don't have Gen Ed requirements here, really. Science students have to take Communications to improve their writing skills, Arts students are usually required to take critical thinking, but that's all I can think of. Still, for those who had these requirements, I think the question still stands did you get anything out of these courses? Did you find them beneficial, or did you resent having to do them? Also, aside from bias towards my field, there were reasons I believed Sociology might be a better choice than, say, Critical Thinking or Politics, though they be anecdotal see my reply to CreepyOctopus here Also, I've enjoyed reading your replies, you guys are lovely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think all college freshmen should be required to take a sociology class.\n","id":"790f4437-d483-434c-b2c4-e21b13e325aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In light of recent events such as Ferguson or Leelah Alcorn a lot of my friends have been really pushing these issues upon but I frankly could not care less. These issues don't concern as I do not fit into these demographics and it's not like I'm stopping them from caring about these things I just don't enjoy getting it pushed into my face. I think it's perfectly fine for me to only care about things that affect myself personally but I still get called out for not caring by people and it really bothers me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Only caring about things that concern me doesn't make me selfish\n","id":"edae46ee-d92b-4763-a632-6ba768f7426f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>Honoring confederate veterans is comparable to honoring German WWII veterans, because \"they fought for their homeland.\" Both sides fought wars over the right to oppress others, and neither should be honored for this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many German soldiers who fought in World War II were not themselves Nazi fascists who personally supported the Holocaust. That does not mean people still use Nazi symbolism to commemorate them.\n","id":"470cf665-e568-45d1-b492-1eaf9acec3f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious practices that incorporate self-harm be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Penile adhesions can form during the healing period after circumcision.These can cause pain and issues with sexual function later in life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are a large number of complications that can occur as a result of circumcision.\n","id":"53793321-0ff7-42bb-bd48-3a30720d8478"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With Trump as President and the news that Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson plans to run for President in 2020 with Tom Hanks as his running mate although I still can't be sure that this is legit or not an idea I had had recently came back up in my mind. side note I'm biased against Trump, and while I love both The Rock and Tom Hanks, I struggle to see how they could ever be fit to serve as President and VP, respectively If someone in America plans on running for President, they should be required to have served a full term to avoid someone running just because they served a short period of a term, but left office before the term was officially up for some reason in a publicly elected position before running for President. I imagine this would require an amendment to the Constitution, so it is my hope that Congress would pass something like this for future presidential hopefuls. There are plenty of editorials online that also discuss this idea. My first thought is that these publicly elected positions would be things like local Controller or town Mayor or Senator, etc. As long as it's publicly elected, even a School Board Member would be more qualified in my view than those who have not held publicly elected office. The Presidency is the highest publicly elected job in the land and so I find it ridiculous that someone with no experience in politics or law or, hell, even history or something, who also has never been publicly elected to serve in some office, should be able to run for president. I'm looking for someone to tell me this is a bad idea because it would prevent good candidates somehow. I'm open to other arguments against this, too. I can't figure out why I would say that a potential candidate who hasn't served in an elected position is, at the very least, just as qualified or fair to run for president as someone who has held a publicly elected position. EDIT Two stipulations have been added to my argument thanks to u MrGraeme and u undiscoveredlama military service of a certain level officer, etc. or holding a predetermined level of publicly elected office for a full term should be requirements for running for president, but first we must work to get rid of big money's influence in politics to avoid insider politicians and politicians being bought or paid for. Once that is resolved to an agreeable extent, then we should work to add these requirements for presidential candidates.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be a requirement for presidential candidates to have served a full-term in a publicly-elected position before running for president\n","id":"e5b2fd47-4d11-451c-b036-83738017b080"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, I understand the reason for offside. It's to prevent players from standing well behind the defense and then receiving a long pass and scoring. This situation is too easy too score in and makes soccer really boring. I'm going to refer to this reason as the spirit of offside. However, there are often cases where a player is by the current definition offside but is in a situation that is well outside of the spirit of offside. Here's a situation I remember It was two players on a breakaway against the goalie. The first player shoots, the goalie stops it but gives up a rebound. The second player shoots, the ball hits the goalie, and the ball rolls over to where the first player ended up, which is probably 3 steps past the goalie. The first player kicks it in. Perfectly sensible goal. There were no extreme long passes that make the game boring. However, obviously the goal was called back because of offside. Here's another hypothetical one. Many players are battling for the ball in the crease. A player gets the ball, it gets pushed back a few yards. The defense take a step foward to chase the ball. Suddenly it gets kicked to the player again and he's offside. Ridiculous. Neither of these two situations are the spirit of offside. As per the current definition, for a player to be offside, at the time the ball is passed to him, the player must be on the opponents side of the field. be nearer to his opponents' goal line than the ball. be nearer to his opponents' goal line than the second last opponent. I propose a 4th condition. It requires that a line be drawn across the field at 36 yards from both nets. For a player to be offside, at the time the ball is passed The ball must be on the offensive team's side of the opponent's 36 yard offside line. In simpler terms, if you get the ball within 36 yards of your opponent's net, no one on your team could be offside until the ball was brought out of the 36 yard area. This is kind of like a hybrid of ice hockey's offside and soccer's offside. This would still prevent the long passes, which are well within the spirit of offside, but it would prevent the offsides that occur near the net from being penalized. Note 36 yards is somewhat random. You could say 25. Or even 18. The specific number doesn't really matter. EDIT Many people seem to be addressing players crashing the goalie, which is reasonable. My response is that I'm sure a reasonable rule to prevent such crashing or obstruction of the goalie could be made up. Just because the current offside rule prevents such crashing doesn't mean that there's not a more reasonable middle ground rule.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The offside rule in soccer\/football is broken, and there's a reasonable fix.\n","id":"30db6050-185b-4991-8859-4d673d17ddd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I get into the meat of the argument, I just would like to clarify that this is meant to be entirely theoretical. Arguments against the efficacy of torture, while perfectly valid in refuting its practical use, do not outlaw it as a moral law in any sense. In other words, assume that we know the person being tortured is guilty, and that there is a reasonable expectation of positive results if torture is employed. Enough said of that. In short, I currently fail to see why torture should be seen as immoral as a rule. Particularly compelling to me is the ticking time bomb scenario . Suppose the police have detained a man they know to have hidden several children in a small gasoline doused shack somewhere out in the deep wilderness. In twenty minutes, a fire will light in the structure, resulting in a rather unpleasant death for everyone involved. If it was known that torture would likely convince the man of revealing the location of the shack, thus saving the lives of the children. Why should the police abstain from torture in this situation, since it clearly maximizes happiness or, at least, appears to me to do so ? Reduced to simplest terms, if torture was employed on a guilty person in order to save the lives of innocents, why would it be unethical to do so?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Torture can be ethical in certain circumstances\n","id":"deeec980-6ae8-4f71-bc13-32a631b111df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Creating large enriched habitats would require the zoo to pay for things such as additional space requirements as well as design and construction of the habitat. All of this would cost a lot of time and money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Only very large, economically strong zoos could afford to make such investments.\n","id":"1a07f2dc-58d4-4611-88e0-26eead88a116"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should U.S. military spending be cut in favor of other programs?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2009 it was voted that the U.S. military would put F22s out of service, yet in 2018 they are still maintained<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even when certain programs are cancelled and deemed not necessary. There are continued cost to maintain the program\/project.\n","id":"cc00dbc4-d675-47b9-b118-ee22a9da818c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019ve heard many, many times from colleagues and associates from the left that Trump\u2019s planned border wall is \u201cracist\u201d. I honestly and legitimately cannot think why they would say that. I\u2019m looking for someone to explain that to me change my view about it. Here are some common arguments I\u2019ve heard, and my response The Wall is racist, because it\u2019s exclusively along the U.S. Mexican border Well, in my opinion the reason the United States is not building a wall along the Canadian border is because there isn\u2019t an issue with the Canadians like we\u2019re having with Mexico. If we had thousands of Canadians streaming into the U.S., then yes, it is my belief we would build a wall there as well. But we don\u2019t have an issue with Canada, we have one with Mexico. The Wall is racist because America is a nation of immigrants. This stops immigrants I agree America is a nation of immigrants. However, I strongly oppose illegal immigration. That\u2019s what the wall is being built as a response to curb. There\u2019s nothing racist with protecting a nation\u2019s sovereign borders. The Wall is racist because it excludes Mexicans and Central Americans from entering the United States Yes, I\u2019ve heard this argument before. The wall will keep them out, but it won\u2019t keep those who legally apply for citizenship. Once again, if it was a wall with a Canada, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s racist to keep white illegal Canadians, or brown illegal Centeal Americans. A few notes This isn\u2019t a debate about if TRUMP is racist, because I agree he is. This is a debate if the WALL is racist. We can even pretend for the sake of the argument a Democrat President was pushing for it. Leave Trump out. Please also don\u2019t try to point out the wall would be ineffective. I want to know why the wall is \u201cracist.\u201d I see good points and bad points behind the facts of a wall\u2019s ability to curb illegal immigration and drug smuggling. So, please attempt to refrain from making those arguments. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Border Wall is not racist\n","id":"1deebc84-6eab-46eb-b76c-5c0dcf1c933f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Democracy Should Be Imposed On Countries<|ARGUMENT|>History has shown that democratic regimes are the best form of government. Countries have not only the right but also the duty to intervene to liberate others to enjoy their human rights. Furthermore, as war between two true democracies is rare, world peace is enhanced by the removal of repressive regimes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"History has shown that democratic regimes are the best form of government. Countries have not only...\n","id":"5ccd2262-d0b4-44da-9457-216bfc1b836c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To give some background on my perspective of the current events in Ukraine and the Crimea, with a reasonable understanding of the history of this peninsula and its importance to Russia, as well as a basic understanding of international law and precedent, these are the reasons I find the Russian intervention in Crimea semi legitimate The fairly and freely elected and corrupt, but this doesn't matter president and parliamentary majority of Ukraine were overthrown in what one could argue was essentially a US NATO backed coup d'etat. Leaks by Russian intelligence indicate the US diplomatic team actively involved in picking or attempting to pick winners and losers among the opposition which now controls what amounts to a rump parliament, where the former ruling party, again duly elected, has been banned from power. The Russian navy base in Sevastopol is the nation's only warm water port. Russia considers losing this port a non starter, and this is a legitimate national security interest. To assume the United States would not behave in the same manner is absurd. I personally feel a major reason for western histrionics over the Crimea stem from US NATO aspirations of NATO control of the Black Sea. The Crimea was gifted to Ukraine essentially on Khrushchev's whim, when doing so had very little actual meaning, and prior to that time had belonged to Russia for centuries. The 1991 referendum reflected this, and a very slim majority supported remaining an autonomous region of Ukraine. To consider the current will of the people of Crimea to return to the Russian federation illegitimate seems to me to be ridiculous, as we must remember that the freely and fairly elected government in Kiev has been overthrown, leaving no responsibility to honor the new government. While a referendum to leave one nation and join another nation is unprecedented in recent history, the US and UN regularly support the efforts of disenfranchised minorities to seek independence. That the Crimean people wish to join a government more representative of their interests is not an outrageous deviation from international norms. From my perspective, the United States media and political elite are treating Russia with extreme prejudice and applying obviously ridiculous double standards. While the US media compares the currently casualty free, and largely welcomed by the Crimean population occupation of Crimea to Hitler's aggressions, there is a convenient lack of perspective about the United States' own much more aggressive, illegal and tragic military misadventures in the last decade. The US and NATO, by almost any reasonable standard, appear to be the true aggressors in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Many former Warsaw Pact nations and SSRs of the former Soviet Union have joined NATO, essentially encircling Russia. From the recent leaks of US diplomats, it appears obvious to anyone paying attention that Ukraine is the latest nation to attract NATO's attention for membership. This is extremely aggressive behavior in the eyes of the Russians, and should appear aggressive to even the neutral observer. So if any of you can address these issues, or would just like a good debate on these topics, come try to change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the U.S.\/western media is presenting an extremely biased and unfair narrative regarding the crisis in Ukraine, tomorrow's referendum in Crimea, and the Russian government's intervention.\n","id":"15f38c78-c2ba-414b-9ea0-c65b9a2d0b72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Humanities have less value than Natural Sciences?<|ARGUMENT|>Modern medicine, the use of energy, and most feats of engineering are dependent on scientific discoveries that have been made over the years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Natural sciences and technology make us able to develop this world.\n","id":"bef6a3bf-ea70-490a-9205-a306c1d5285a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll acknowledge that the Sex Junk song was a little over the top. The same could be said of the vanilla ice cream sketch. But with the panel of hosts that Bill had and the way he explained sex and gender, the episode's coverage was actually accurate and scientific. It's a topic that IS naturally political, and I can understand why that would annoy people who believe in a kind of science that is entirely separated from the social world, but I don't believe that that is very practical OR realistic. I was inclined at first to dislike the episode, having first seen only the Sex Junk song, but upon watching it, I was very pleased with the explanations of the topic overall.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bill Nye's recent episode on sexuality, sex, and gender was really not that bad, and I found its treatment of the topic as a whole to be quite well-informed\n","id":"76b83dd1-e02e-49c6-b05a-687578a8d4d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, we all know that the Battletoads Rash, Zitz, and Pimple teamed up with the Double Dragon brothers Billy and Jim Lee to defeat the Dark Queen and the Shadow Warriors. They won thank goodness , and peace was restored to the world. However, I'm sure that we also know that the Battletoads never needed any help from the Lee twins. The only reason they were even asked was out of politeness since the Shadow Warriors are an enemy of the Lee twins, and this brings me to the main thrust of my argument. In a battle between the Battletoads and the Double Dragon Lee brothers, the Battletoads would completely WRECK Billy and Jim I mean hell it's in their name BATTLEtoads . First off, the toads have a distinct advantage in terms of combat abilities. They can increase the size of their appendages, and even shapeshift parts of their body e.g. a wrecking ball or ram horms to deliver maximum damage. The Lee twins on the other hand, have a less impressive moveset. In straight combat, I'm inclined to believe that the toads' power would overwhelm that of the twins. I anticipate that one might say, Oh but Zip Billy and Jim are talented fighters with a great deal of skill in the martial arts. No doubt their experience in combat could overcome the awesome force of the Toads And to this I scoff. The Battletoads have fought giant rats, robots, pig golems, and even crows. I don't think that a couple of karate dudes is gonna give them any trouble. I could go on and on about how the Toads could take on the turdtastic Dragon twins, but I would like to hear some rebuttals first. So r changemyview change my view. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the Battletoads would win in a fight against the Double Dragon brothers.\n","id":"c86dcc77-5044-4291-b2d5-381e01d573db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Polls Accurate Predictors of Election Results?<|ARGUMENT|>In 1948, the American polls and the American newspapers had branded Harry S. Truman a loser. The Chicago Tribune even ran the story 'Dewey defeats Truman'. All of this was the result of inaccurate polls. The only accurate polls in America are the exit polls, and even then these can come in early, as they did in the Gore Bush standoff over Florida. Polls do not take into account swing voters, and assume that the answers received by participants are solid and firm. Therefore, poll results can be taken for granted by those parties that the polls favour, which may be the reason why parties that originally lead in the poll lose, because they alienate their original supporters through negligence or overconfidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only accurate poll is the exit poll, as evidenced through history\n","id":"97eb3682-e738-430e-a146-4d2f0bd94365"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love football and I know the rules and rule exceptions better than most. That being said, it seems like the call of holding, especially offensive holding , is completely arbitrary. I acknowledge that referees seem to call holding only on actions that directly affect the outcome of the play. But that being said, it seems like there is holding on every play, especially at the offensive line, and I do not understand how referees can claim any form of consistency. I would love to be proven wrong. Is there some objective test or system that referees can actually use to determine if there was holding or not? Cheers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NFL referees can call \"holding\" on basically any play they want\n","id":"6b2a61cf-089e-4b32-b507-008b86de5d94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, both diversity and tolerance regarding race both implicitly validate the concept of race , which has no basis in science, and is entirely a relic of the Western colonial period. Additionally, the emphasis on tolerance has a subtle implication, I think, of suggesting that races are fundamentally different but should put up with each other anyway. It's an extremely low bar for achieving a post racial society. Anti racism is another phrase that fails to capture the fact that race itself is an utter fantasy, a purely vestigial organ of past oppressive social structures. Yes, you are against racial prejudice, which is okay I guess, but I feel like that's missing the forest for the trees. As long as the idea of race persists, of fundamental essential differences between these arbitrary clumpings of physical features, then prejudice seems like something that will always pop up, leading to an eternal struggle. If the concept of race does not imply fundamental difference, then what does it imply? Anything? I think to actually dismantle racism, we must stop thinking of racism as meaning prejudice against people of different race and instead approach it more as meaning, the belief in race as a valid social category. With that as the end goal, I think actually fighting racism becomes an achievable goal, as the target becomes the meme of race rather than the meme of racial prejudice. I wont think it'll be easy , though. Plenty of people still think that race has a basis in biology, or that the concept of race even as a social construct is as old as human history. These misconceptions wont disappear overnight, obviously, but they're much easier to target and disprove than trying to convince a racist that other races aren't so different from theirs which, to some extent, is inherently contradictory if you're acknowledging race as real to begin with . Importantly, do not confuse my view with Colorblindness , or the idea that racism will disappear if we pretend it doesn't exist. It does exist as a purely social construction, it has real effects on people regardless of whether you choose to see those people as racialized or not. My point is that colorblindness solves nothing, it only succeeds in preventing you from recognizing racism when it occurs. The actual elimination of racism is only possible once the fiction of race itself has been forgotten. In case it's not obvious by the end, my view is heavily influenced by the Race Traitor Journal which makes a lot of these points much better than I can. I highly recommend it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liberal rhetoric and approaches to race implicitly reinforce racism at a fundamental level\n","id":"8370249d-d9e3-4647-bea1-e09e702dce8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the Bible support the conclusion that 'homosexuality' is a sin against God?<|ARGUMENT|>Neither the Hebrew Bible Old Testament nor any of the texts of the Rabbinic Period the first seven centuries of the Common Era make any mention of sexual orientation or identity. While they do mention opposite-sex and same-sex sexual activity, the only male prohibition is anal intercourse, and female same-sex intercourse was not considered sex, let alone prohibited.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ancient biblical norms what came to be don't properly justify modern anti-homosexual views what some believe ought NOT to be.\n","id":"22d8f54d-f7eb-40d2-bc5d-fb4ac965cff3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK each political party puts out a manifesto before the election stating what they would do in government. I think this should be made legally binding on the MPs, so they would have to, at some point before the next election, vote for the policies that they said they would support. They could put conditions on their promises e.g. we will cut income tax as long as the economy is growing by at least 1 , and they would be free to say we will consult experts about what to do and follow their advice if they weren't sure how to vote, or they could just leave it out of their manifesto. Individual MPs could release their own manifestos saying how they would vote differently from their party e.g. they could promise to vote against gay marriage if their party was for it . The punishment for not doing this could be a fine, or being barred from standing at the next election. If the whole party voted against something then only the leadership of the party would be punished, but if it was just a couple of MPs then they would be punished individually. An independent panel could be set up to rule in cases where it was uncertain, or where there was an unforeseeable problem that meant they couldn't vote for what they promised. I think this would force politicians to be more honest and help to increase trust in politics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think politicians should be legally required to do things that they promised to do before the election if they win.\n","id":"c4917b52-1ceb-4e9d-b88a-a65fcde2f9fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Non native English speaker here. Technology has a direct and profound effect on the quality of life of people. The more advanced the technology the higher the quality of life and the higher is the happiness and life satisfaction. The higher the level of technology the higher is the life expectancy. People live longer and more healthier lives. Technology also increases our comfort and the amount of goods we can consume. Infact technology improves everything. Hence with increase in technology people live better lives. Basically what I am saying is this We have a much better life compared to our ancestors during 1500 ACE and those who will be alive at 2500 ACE will have a much better life than we had.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The higher the technology the better the quality of living and the higher the happiness and life satisfaction of the people.\n","id":"86053eb0-12b3-4dd8-bc95-83b26a73fa27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>#timesup: Should individuals credibly accused of sexual assault or harassment be fired from positions of authority?<|ARGUMENT|>People who aim to lie about sexual misconduct, to harm innocent people, are more likely to do so if they know that it will result in punishment of the victim, solely based on allegations they make.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Automatically firing people accused of sexual assault or harassment would cause increased detriment to victims of a false rape accusation.\n","id":"9220e700-7575-4d6e-b3ce-a7b39bf6d924"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently an uptick in offensive flags has been apparent. I see a Nazi Germany flag, a CCCP Flag, the North Virginia battle flag, and even the German Imperial flag ? . Every day, atleast once a day. In no way do I think any of them should be banned, this is America. But this is America, so how can you fly the battle flag of traitors to show your pride in the country they died to get out of, and cursed every chance they got? To me that Is like someone holding both the hammer and sickle as well as a swatstika. I would like to hear one of you 'rebel boys' explain how you could be American while metaphorically spitting on our flag by flying the flag of those traitors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Flying the Rebel Flag is EXTREMELTY un-American\n","id":"e3aa559c-53dd-4249-b45b-cb2cfb01f50e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV Vaccinations be Compulsory?<|ARGUMENT|>Since boys are partially affected by this as well carrier, some different specifications, etc. they should be included in thoughts about compulsory vaccination, for the very reason of gender equality alone would make it neccessary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Countries should force parents to vaccinate their children against HPV.\n","id":"5c20ec19-e17c-482c-9eda-e23a3cfa76a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Online platforms, such as Backpage offer decentralized escort services all over the world. This makes a ban ineffective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern communication technology poses a barrier to the enforcement of any ban on prostitution.\n","id":"7e776ea0-895b-41ea-9605-2a6537cdbd65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Evil is a problem for atheism as well, because it is not clear what an atheist's moral basis for calling something evil is in a purely physical world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept of evil only works if God does exist to define right and wrong. Without that, it's only an opinion.\n","id":"8c102bdb-9e46-4453-8039-b309f6686308"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Private Cars Be Forbidden In Large Cities?<|ARGUMENT|>Many politicians in the United States view public transportation as social welfare program rather than a public utility, resulting in less investment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public transportation systems are often subject to political woes and mismanagement.\n","id":"7e8a8966-1a46-48ab-bdc3-93ae569dd96b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While not a bicyclist myself, I recognize the dangers that cyclists face on street driving. I see articles about cyclists being hit or killed fairly frequently, and it makes me sick because it's rarely the cyclist's fault. Opening or restricting them to sidewalks can endanger pedestrians too, so I'm not really in favor of that. When I pass them while driving, I see a lot of motor vehicles which pass them with mere inches separating the two, and on more than one occasion have seen a cyclist ditch off the bike to save themselves. That's just unacceptable for a vehicle to be so endangered by selfish motor vehicle drivers. I believe it would be worth the minimal expenses that they would incur. There's a movement to encourage people to bike for the environmental and health benefits therein, and we should be supporting that more than we are. To be clear, I'm not saying things like residential neighborhoods should have them, but any street that's a moderate speed thoroughfare should be built and in some cases retrofitted when possible. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that new roads should be built with a bike lane.\n","id":"627e0f99-9286-4476-9122-bbc47a380270"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the past and in other countries extramarital sex is illegal, If extramarital sex were illegal there would be fewer people infected with sexually transmitted diseases. There would also be fewer children growing up in single parent households. To minimize violations of privacy the police would not be monitoring sexual activity. Extramarital sex would only be discovered through citizen complaints or during pregancy. If a women gets pregnant without her husband being the father an abortion would be required. Being convicted of extramarital sex would also affect judgements in divorce. EDIT My view has been partially changed in that a public registry of STI status may be more effective at stopping infection. Those opposed to forced abortion care more about the feelings of the women than the welfare of the baby.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Extramarital sex should be illegal\n","id":"c3758556-f877-49a6-92c8-3e77956c57e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lemme clarify what I mean by this. I know, full well, that I'm racist. In the sense that I have biases, specifically against Chinese and Indian people, that would prevent me from making neutral decisions about them. For example, if I was ever an interviewer, or someone in charge of giving out promotions, or something similar. Some people think having these biases is not right, and you should actively work to fix these biases constantly. But I feel like there is no standard for when you can say that these biases are 'fixed', and therefore the only morally correct thing to do in this situation is to bring in another person who is also aware of their biases, and those biases are very different from yours, so they can make decisions on your behalf whenever you have to deal with a person you would normally be prejudiced against. A common argument against this is that the way to heal prejudice is to interact more with groups that you are prejudiced against, but this just feels like an excuse and a way to mishandle decisions about them. In my day to day life, I can try to meet more Chinese people and fix prejudices, but while I'm in that process, I see no reason why I shouldn't bring in someone else as I described. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no real way to \"fix\" racism, you have to admit your biases and bring in people who do not have those biases when you encounter them.\n","id":"b7d36ee0-c802-48a2-9788-d729e52c25c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I first want to be clear I am talking about legal rights for individual people in the USA not situations, systems, or imbalances as they are not a good indicator of equality. I think when looking at equality between the genders you can only factor the laws because everyone's situation or imbalances is so different or to put it another way situations, systems, and imbalances affect both genders equally nor can they be dealt with by law. I know a few that are claimed but I personally disagree with. 1. Abortion limitations women can have abortions even if its limited, also men have no legal rights here. 2.Combat roles are off the table because those have opened and the military isn't the general public. 3. Selective service this is just covering the possibility of it coming up this is a legal obligation not a right. I have been trying for a while to find someone who can give concrete real world examples against my view that in the USA women have every legal right men do. If I am wrong i do want to know.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the idea \"that men and women are not equal\" is false as there are no legal rights men have that woman don't.\n","id":"4f7bf300-c591-4ebe-9860-955f97b41cb7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>The lower price of a drone results from its limited spectrum of action. A multi-purpose fighter is naturally more expensive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This comparison is flawed. A human operated multi purpose jet is not comparable to an automated air\/ground attacking drone.\n","id":"a2b26a12-a121-49b5-bbfb-5a9ef300debb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Most of the refugees in recent years have been fleeing from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, thus high-income countries that have accepted refugees are seeing a marked increase in their Muslim populations. This means that said countries will likely experience an upsurge in Islamic influence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refugees threaten the national identity of countries that host them.\n","id":"61e77368-4dd0-4820-900f-2e1ca1780c78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is sex with no emotional attachment good for you?<|ARGUMENT|>Many individuals do not have the time for a long term committed relationship but need to fulfill their physical needs and hence such a relationship can be ideal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having sex without emotional attachment reduces the pressure to find a permanent romantic partner.\n","id":"f90f09c0-0529-4ffc-90e8-b6740966d7ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sri Lanka became the domain of the British, in earnest, in 1815 after the fall of the feudal and often brutal Kandyan Kingdom. The British period, despite its own brutality and intolerance, was marked by the development of a formal albeit extractive economy coffee, tea, rubber, and coconut, and the requisite infrastructure such as roads, railroads, telegraph, post, formal education, healthcare, the judiciary and rule of law including the military and police. British rule was also marked by interest in such economically unproductive activities such as the exploration and preservation of ancient ruins Department of Archeology established 1890 , and the cataloguing of the natural history of this country e.g Emerson Tennent's seminal works of the 1860's . Women's suffrage was achieved during though not necessarily due to British rule in 1931. While ethnic and racial divisions may have been exploited by the British, these divisions pre dated colonization and have been exacerbated in the absence of colonial rule post independence . Indeed, the economy and global competitiveness of Sri Lanka was eroded after independence, fueled by escalating corruption and ethnic intolerance, while relying almost wholly on the agro economy developed during British rule. I therefore believe that Sri Lanka today is far better off having been a member of the British Empire, than what could have been expected had it more gradually emerged from the feudal society and partial Portuguese and Dutch rule it replaced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"British colonial rule did more good than harm in Sri Lanka\n","id":"ea100897-4422-4991-a448-a0fb069e3ff3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>The most powerfully strategic ballot is almost always an honest ballot. Something that is not true for most voting systems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Approval voting. Vote for one or more. Described here: en.wikipedia.org\n","id":"069427fb-75e7-43b5-8c5d-d5a951667c76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Laws should forbid web sites from requiring new locally-stored, single-site, password-based authentication.<|ARGUMENT|>International regulation will be the future, since transnational problems cannot be solved with national laws.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There exists international solutions to data problems, e.g. European GDPR\n","id":"29b8044d-24c6-4ccf-ae76-979dc8a3d16c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>If a judge believes someone accused of a crime might be a flight risk, the judge will deny them bail.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a society, we often hold people accountable for their potential actions.\n","id":"ffd53da5-b814-4013-8582-d45a6db78da8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is computer science a failing discipline?<|ARGUMENT|>It doesn\u2019t make sense to call an entire branch of knowledge a \u201cfailing\u201d. Knowledge is worth in itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It\u2019s unclear what \u201cfailing\u201d means or what requirements are needed not to be a failing discipline.\n","id":"0600e25e-534f-4629-9f74-554ba5da3ffd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the light of an increasingly polarized America public, an increasingly popular stance has been to divorce oneself from any specific stance. This includes staking out some vague middle ground in a polarizing issue example insisting on labeling oneself an egalitarian instead of a feminist so as to not be on the extremes or insisting that you don't want to be political at all example complaints about political messaging in popular media . This is a distinct political stance that is more than simply being uninvolved. The state of being inactive towards the way politics are playing out is inherently anti progressive and pro status quo. In short, neutrality in politics is not actually neutral, it is impossible to be neutral. Conclusions based on this People with neutral stances should not be offended when people take exception to their political stance. They feel like they are uninvolved, but they simply don't see how they are involved. Under the current American administration, people with neutral stances should be seen as against progressive politics in the same way that active conservatives are. People who are neutral are either oblivious to their political involvement, or they are specifically malicious in asserting the falsehood that being neutral absolves one of the harms caused by inaction.  by engaging with my reasoning or my conclusions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Neutrality is a specific political position that serves those in power.\n","id":"07634da3-1fbe-4328-8fc9-20bcc6484608"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Day be a National Holiday in the U.S?<|ARGUMENT|>According to a survey, creating a national holiday for Election Day would increase voter turnout by about 16% in the US p. 1.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More people would vote if Election Day was a national holiday.\n","id":"e05ab177-7c8b-43ce-a384-8dbd8e911121"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have only one simple argument you'll find hard to beat. Why is recycled paper more expensive than virgin paper? Let's say I own a paper recycling plant and, since it's so much more energy efficient, I can blow the doors out traditional paper producers on cost. Why isn't everyone doing this? I understand diminishing returns but why isn't the market glutted with recycled paper products? A quick trip to Walmart shows this isn't the case. See what you can get paid for waste paper and you'll get my drift. But, but, but It takes more trees IDGAF. Apparently it takes more energy, in some form, to make recycled paper products than to grow new trees. Otherwise recycled paper products would sweep the market, blow it out. It's simple math. It's cheaper to grow trees and chop them down for paper than to recycle it. Look, we're not using ancient hardwoods from Alaska to make toilet paper. I've taken forestry and horticulture classes. I've visited lumber sites and paper mills. These people aren't dumb fucks. They're using the land very carefully, with an eye to the future. They're rotating land and growth with 20 year cycles. We're not raping the land for wood like we used to. Please keep in mind I'm only arguing for paper goods. Not sure where we're at regarding hardwoods, lumber and such. Looking forward to your responses Not sure you can  but I've learned amazing things here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Recycling paper is pants-on-head retarded expect for the people profiting from it.\n","id":"f1e93b06-5779-48b9-99d9-3375ee4090ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not saying this in a good way or in a bad way. I am trying to be completely politically neutral about this but ultimately I do see this as being a negative to him. I think that Donald Trump is in his habits closer to the average American than previous presidents like Barack Obama and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. For example his eating habits and his tv habits are more average than other Americans. He tends to speak in ways more accessible to the average American. I doubt that he has ever used marijuana or other drugs contrary to popular belief. Arguably even his positions on social programs are representative of his connection to the average American rather than the reverse. This is pretty ironic since he is the richest president yet, and it is something that many people may like about him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump is more like the Average American than any other president before him\n","id":"b4323919-083d-40f4-bd69-edc4694dab97"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>North Korea already has nuclear weapons and there are no feasible options to stop them, what we can do is stop Proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries by making them a Recognized nuclear weapon state in exchange for IAEA supervision. the first argument against this that I can think of is that other nations would want to be recognized as nuclear weapon state. this is true.but I think it can be made clear that this is a special case. the reason I think North Korea is a special case is that they are scared to death. I mean reallllllly scared of the us invading who can blame them and they think that nuclear weapons will guarantee that the us will let them be.which means they will not accept disarmament.especially after SOMEONE sent an armada there. North Korea has slowly started coming out of their isolation recently, I think this is the best way to maintain this course and it will only get better with South Korea's new president.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"North Korea should be allowed to have nuclear weapons.\n","id":"804c36e6-d771-40d8-bd12-dc282ed8f26b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every office I've ever worked in has had toilet seat liners in its very pristine bathrooms. When I went to university, some students were super annoyed that the equally pristine school bathrooms didn't have toilet seat liners the school eschewed them for environmental reasons . Now, I understand using them in atrociously filthy gas station bathrooms and so on, but in an office or school that is cleaned daily, what's the point? I can't imagine a few butt germs would hurt my butt. If there's visible piss on the seat, I just ball up some toilet paper and wipe it off before dropping my deuces. Is there a reason I should use these things? am I perhaps putting myself at a health sanitation risk? Or perhaps putting OTHERS at risk? I'm honestly curious as to who uses those things, and why, and if I'm missing out somehow.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using a toilet seat cover in an office bathroom is unnecessary.\n","id":"a89bdde1-9377-4e21-9360-d1751955c124"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Doom and gloom predictions\" and apocalyptic ideas \"prevalent in Christian fundamentalism, may also help some people attribute a higher purpose to their suffering and see it as part of God's plan, instead of striving to do better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Following that logic, religion can then make those impoverished endure the worst situations and not strive to do better in exchange for the promise of a possible better afterlife.\n","id":"fed2878e-8284-4a6a-81ea-294e0fa6364e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pride organisers should refuse corporate sponsorship<|ARGUMENT|>Corporate sponsors of Pride advertise themselves as LGBTQ+ friendly, and by doing so advertise acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community more broadly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Major corporations have access to far greater political, monetary and advertising resources than the LGBT+ movement.\n","id":"e67d4d0c-e497-4492-90f6-ffee3c4d3746"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Evil is prevalent in the world because we begin life completely dependent upon others as infants. Only by growing in awareness and obtaining new levels of interaction with others, can we grow beyond our purely selfish beginnings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God is traditionally conceived as a omnibenevolent being, yet there is an excessive amount of evil in the world. This strongly suggests that such a creator does not exist.\n","id":"9ef09681-a9cb-4e91-8274-0284fc838d7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humans prefer cats over dogs?<|ARGUMENT|>A study has found that dogs demonstrate social eavesdropping the same way humans do. Furthermore, the study showed that dogs were likely to interact positively with humans who helped their owner and negatively with humans who didn't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dogs have picked up on a number of human-like traits that have made it easier for us to communicate with them.\n","id":"0f829622-822a-424e-be84-2714271fb590"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>More troops to Afghanistan under Obama<|ARGUMENT|>Joshua Foust. \"The Case for Afghanistan: Strategic Considerations\". Registan. August 27th, 2009: \"lest anyone think it is appropriate to write off the India-Pakistan conflict as somebody else\u2019s problem, it is never somebody else\u2019s problem when nuclear weapons are involved. As Jari Lindholm reminded, India and Pakistan have come a hair\u2019s breadth from nuclear conflict twice over Kashmir. And like it or not, it is a compelling and vital American interest to prevent nuclear conflict in South Asia\u2014which makes \u201cfixing\u201d Afghanistan in some way also a vital American interest.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Success in Afghanistan is key to stability in nuclear Pakistan\n","id":"7717de9f-7e92-4d0f-9cb0-a462166f3cef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>TheTruth.com is an anti-smoking campaign that has helped lower the smoking rate among teens from 9% to 7% in a few years through facts and exposing big tobacco companies, not shaming.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By encouraging healthy behaviors through positive advertisement and public example, society can send the message that obesity is not acceptable without bullying.\n","id":"6b5fc8ed-be10-465e-8afe-5543915421c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a view that's been churning for a while in me, but a story I saw today made it pop. Mike Pompeo made remarks about the Tienanmen Square massacre, and China fired back in a statement saying his remarks were a violation of international law. I often hear world leaders accuse one another of violations of international law, and military actions are justified by citing violations of international law. So here's my view it's all bogus. Yes, I know there are pacts and treaties and stuff that countries have signed on to to promise to behave a certain way. But there obviously aren't consequences severe enough to prevent countries from violating those laws. And there can't be, because there is no unit of power stronger than a country. On an individual level, laws exist because we've surrendered power to governments. The government can regulate my behavior because millions of people agree it can. So there is a force that is strong enough to compel me to act or not to act a certain way. For countries, there are 195 give or take depending on what breakaways you recognize countries with disparate interests, varying levels of power, and probably a pretty low desire in general to go to war. China can complain that we break international law all they want, but unless they want to start a shooting war with us there isn't much they can do to change that. They can appeal to the UN or the Hague, and we can still basically tell them to buzz off. TL DR international relations is really just might makes right, and while countries cite international law it's just a maneuver in the chess game that ultimately means nothing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"International Law doesn't really exist.\n","id":"60cc42fc-2524-4313-9a81-a3306d33780f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews was debated within the Church at least as early as the third century AD. If the Church simply assigned authors to New Testament books without reason, it would have done so to Hebrews as well and there wouldn't have been such a debate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The authorship of the New Testament books is debated by historians, with some evidence that they were written either by eyewitnesses or by scribes based on the stories of eyewitnesses.\n","id":"078aeb29-5e48-4c48-9fb9-d28a52ab316a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should same-sex marriage be legalised in Australia?<|ARGUMENT|>The idea that homossexuality is unnatural is actually a myth. Homossexual behaviour has been observed and well documented in dozens of animal species, both in captivity and in their natural habitats. It is empirically false that homossexuality is unnatural. Homossexual behavior in animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals do exhibit homosexual behaviour and it's therefore natural.\n","id":"7f938572-52d3-4dbd-8f34-dab33fdb8ab5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Meditation is a highly beneficial practice<|ARGUMENT|>Meditation involves the deliberate study, exploration and understanding of our own consciousness. This allows us to understand how our emotions, beliefs and responses to life operate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Meditation helps us to understand ourselves better, which is beneficial.\n","id":"30f8c89c-437a-4d4d-9734-36f391246f3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see reoccurring arguments here and elsewhere regarding who is allowed to participate in varying levels leagues of sports. For instance Should transgender women participate in a men's league competition or women's league competition, or neither? Should a woman biological, assigned at birth be able to participate in a men's league if she's good enough ? Should some sports have men's vs. women's leagues at all? Should athletes with certain prosthetic limbs be seen as having an unfair advantage or disadvantage? To what degree does a league allow certain drug supplement use before it's seen as an illegal performance enhancing drug? Basically, people like to draw a line in the sand regarding what is fair and natural for participating in professional level sports or competitions. My view is that when it comes to physical ability, life is inherently imbalanced, unfair, and non standardized thus, all such distinctions require some arbitrary line that people draw to give an illusion of standards. Let's start with a basic distinction men's vs. women's sports. The main reason these exist is to give women an opportunity to compete without being dominated by the male athletes. For the record, I agree with this especially when it comes to non professional sports, so that women especially those growing up have a more level playing field to play a game competitively, enjoyably, and with their peers. But my point is not whether these leagues are good my point is that the distinction of skill based on biological sex is still qualified by luck. If you lined up all men and women based on physical prowess, men are simply lucky to have been born men. And if you view it in that light, consider everything else that is a simple matter of lucky genetics. Consider how many men there are who are not good enough to play a sport at the professional level, but would be able to compete in the women's league equivalent. Likewise, consider the top female talents who have more skill than many professional male counterparts, but are unable to compete with the men due to policy or fears of safety. But that's only biological sex. The arguments regarding gender try to discern whether a transgender woman for instance has an unfair advantage over other women due to hormone therapy, but what about a woman who has naturally elevated levels of testosterone? What about the fact that every woman has slightly different levels of testosterone anyway? What range do we decide is normal ? And does it matter what that range is, since whatever we decide on will probably still favor whoever is at one end of that spectrum? What about physical impairments? If someone gets a prosthetic leg and it gives them an advantage at running, how is that different than someone who is naturally built to be a runner? How is it different than someone who was raised in a town at a higher elevation and therefore developed more efficient lungs? How is it different than someone who was raised in an upper class family in a First World country and therefore had more opportunities and access to top tier leagues and training and coaching? Conversely, what if someone gets a prosthetic limb and it gives them a disadvantage so that they compete in the special olympics? They are then competing against a huge range of people who might face impairments of all varieties and whose skill levels are more varied, making their accomplishment more a matter of being the least impaired among people who may or may not have otherwise been able to compete at the normal professional level. I could go on, but I hope you're beginning to see my point. Basically, so much luck and circumstance goes into which athletes are able to rise to any level. Personal determination and training practice are obviously part of it, but we're fooling ourselves if we think there's some objectively natural standard for who should be able to compete at a certain level. Everyone is supremely different, both genetically and in life circumstances, and most of those differences aren't decided by the individual. Therefore, no sport is even remotely fair in who's able to compete, and attempts at fairness are due to agreed upon standards that, themselves, have no objectively fair guidelines. Therefore, and this is my main argument , no one has the moral high ground when they argue about who should be allowed to compete against whom, because there are no invariable standards among humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The distinction of who can participate in which sports leagues\/competitions is entirely arbitrary and no one has a moral high ground\n","id":"a6200bc1-c14e-4e7c-a69c-f181c56a2ed9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it unethical to use ad-blockers?<|ARGUMENT|>This particular program is not a mere alternative to ad-blockers, like paying a subscription or opting to fill out a survey. Instead it is an alternative that specifically addresses the unethical aspects of ad-blocking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If users want to protect themselves from all negative effects of ads, they can use ad-page-blockers that block all content sponsored by ads.\n","id":"26b8fc1f-fd8a-4f4f-b65b-df8826b6be94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, it is a crime to lie to any federal officer. It is an astoundingly severe crime too, carrying a maximum sentence up to five years in prison. Under the current law, it is a very serious felony to make any materially false statement to any federal agent. This law is routinely abused by the government to give them leverage over defendants. Ken White at Popehat describes how gt Here's how it works. The feds identify some fact that they can prove. It need not be inherently incriminating it might be whether you were at a particular meeting, or whether you talked to someone about the existence of the investigation. They determine that they have irrefutable proof of this fact. Then, when they interview you, they ask you a question about the fact, hoping that you will lie. Often they employ professional questioning tactics to make it more likely you will lie \u2014 for instance, by phrasing the question or employing a tone of voice to make the fact sound sinister. You \u2014 having already been foolhardy enough to talk to them without a lawyer \u2014 obligingly lie about this fact. Then, even though there was never any question about the fact, even though your lie did not deter the federal government for a microsecond, they have you nailed for a false statement to a government agent in violation of 18 USC 1001. To be a crime under Section 1001, a statement must be material \u2014 but the federal courts have generally supported the government's position that the question is not whether a false statement actually did influence the government, but whether it was the sort of false statement that could have influenced the government. gt Hence, the government's chickenshit false statement trap works \u2014 even though the government agents set it up from the start. Now, however weak or strong their evidence is of the issue they are investigating, they've got you on a Section 1001 charge \u2014 a federal felony. In effect, they are manufacturing felonies in the course of investigations. I think there should be no crime here unless it can be proven that the falsehood actually impeded an investigation in a meaningful manner. Also, I think the penalty should be much less severe, more like a misdemeanor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lying to the FBI shouldn't be a crime unless it actually covers something up.\n","id":"16561c1a-fbb8-4842-9080-535fdf5c703b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Dr. Charles Anthon Certified the Translation was Authentic: Joseph Smith copied a portion of the writings on the metal plates and they were brought to Dr. Charles Anthon of Columbia College. Dr. Anthon certified \"the translation was correct more so than any he had before seen translated from the Egyptian.\" The other characters he said were \"Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic.\" When informed that the plates were received by an angel, Anthon tore up the certificate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Linguistics: The writing in the Book of Mormon is consistent with ancient Hebrew and Egyptian writing and language.\n","id":"e22ebd57-922b-4112-b0c2-42d0458cbafc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Stereotyping In Advertising Should Be Banned<|ARGUMENT|>The majority of women used in advertising, are attractive, skinny and young. This contributes to a narrative within society that suggests women who do not conform to these traits are not as valuable. This narrative contributes towards workplace discrimination.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender stereotypes within advertising reinforces and contributes towards the prejudice against female candidates that many employers have.\n","id":"ca89d33e-ffd6-446a-9c73-d8942c5bd018"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In short, college students are absolute fools, and by and large deserve no pity for their stupidity. I understand what I\u2019m saying is very contentious but allow me to try and explain without sounding like an arrogant jerk I\u2019ll fail, but whatever . One of the most frustrating things I see in the news is the ridiculous debate over \u201crape culture\u201d on college campuses as if they\u2019re full of malicious serial rapists and murderers. Now, I\u2019ll admit I am a member of a large social fraternity at my school, a highly ranked university in California with ~40,000 students, so let the bias be noted. I want to first point out that this \u201cdebate\u201d is absurd, there is an imaginary opposition to the idea that rape and rape culture is bad. You won\u2019t find rallies supporting rape or anyone of course a few but exceptionally rare suggesting that rape is acceptable. What the debate clearly stems from is the idea that rape and sexual assault is some liquid term with varying boundaries. A man having sex with a drunk girl is considered rape by some people and to be fine by others. Those saying it is rape see the opposition as suggesting any drunk girl is conscientious \u201casking for it\u201d and likewise those saying it is normal see the other side as suggesting being drunk rids you of responsibility for your actions. This creates an intense debate despite the fact that they all agree on the same fundamental principle. With that out of the way, let\u2019s talk about the behavior of college students. As I said before I am in a fraternity and the ridiculous nonsense I see every week of the school year is beginning to weigh on me. I have seen a girl give head on a dancefloor in our house surrounded by hundreds of people, I have been assaulted by random guys drunk as hell, I have had to physically remove several guys because they\u2019re pissing in the corner of a room. Of course, we\u2019re totally asking for all of this I suppose is the first thing that comes to most people\u2019s minds. We throw parties, we supply alcohol, we play the music and turn on the blacklights. Who am I to look down upon the result of my creation? And the answer is that I don\u2019t, if I didn\u2019t enjoy it I wouldn\u2019t be taking part in it. What bothers me however is the incredible entitlement and utter lack of dignity these people have. That girl I saw railing a line of coke and pounding away 3 shots out of a plastic handle? Oh it\u2019s her life, who are you to judge That guy shattering a window on the second floor? Oh you shouldn\u2019t have given him alcohol, shame on you for throwing an unsafe party. What I have come to realize is that most students are absolute idiots, at least on the weekends. One caveat, yes I may just be around the wrong crowds, but I would say with complete confidence that at least a third of the student body engages in the type of idiotic garbage I\u2019m talking about. How does this relate to rape? If it isn\u2019t obvious, it is because I end up being the victim. These attitudes and opinions sincerely make me scared to have sex with a girl, because I know just being in a fraternity will make me guilty of rape before I can even open my mouth to defend myself. I find it unbelievable that there is such a stigma against, let\u2019s be honest, men in college. I have to hear about it all day, how dangerous it is to go to a fraternity party, how you\u2019ll get drugged and taken advantage of. Well let me tell you a vast majority of the girls found in these places will drug themselves before any guy even gets the chance. I see girls get black out drunk and f k anyone that looks their direction every other weekend and I ask myself, \u201cis this the same type of girl I see ranting and raving that just because she was drunk means she didn\u2019t consent?\u201d It is becoming increasingly hard for me to believe that they aren\u2019t one in the same. Okay, okay I\u2019ve been too anti female, but believe me I think the guys are just as bad. I have heard of six people getting DUIs in my four years here in college. SIX DUIs, and a few drug related charges. What makes these people think this is acceptable is beyond me, but at least they will reap what they sow, I suppose. This has probably been hard to follow, but I can sum it up pretty simply. While I\u2019m sure plenty are sincere, and my heart goes out to them, I find so many self victimizing claims of college students to be farcical. At this point I just don\u2019t feel pity for the kid next to me in class facing a jail sentence for drug possession, or the girl freaking out because she is now known as the girl who banged five guys on the roof in one night. Beyond having pity I\u2019m angered by the fact these poor decisions end up being blamed on me. Let it be known to the world, because surprisingly no one seems to understand this, your university knows EXACTLY what happens at fraternity houses and they support it. They know underage drinking is everywhere they know the drugs are there. They know several of the fraternities \u201chaze\u201d and simply do not care. The police department knows as well, do you think they are ignorant of the massive weekly house parties? Knowing all of this and with absolute agency to stop these organizations from existing they allow it, because universities see the benefit in the greek system for promoting social events for students. Despite this, even if we don\u2019t serve alcohol at a party if some idiot comes drunk we\u2019re going down. We aren\u2019t offered the fair treatment bars or venues receive even though we serve the same function. The system basically works like this The university knows well of all activities and events and they allow them while publicly stating they are against underage drinking, hazing, and the like. But if or when something goes wrong like let\u2019s say someone gets alcohol poisoning, the university and police department come crashing down on the organizations they support to save face and place all blame on the members. My reputation and life is under threat because I participate in something innocuous that is constantly scapegoated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"College students are incredibly foolish, and deserve no pity for their poor decisions\n","id":"9ff4c5b9-17ba-4e2f-b896-70c2b2037d82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Intentional Childlessness a Sin?<|ARGUMENT|>If Christians continue to follow this, the world's overpopulation will continue to grow even worse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This command has largely been satisfied, as the world's population is quite large\n","id":"a5b1d79b-8a3c-4724-985a-65083f0be590"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that pedophiles are underrepresented, and as a result under treated. Due to the high taboo most people who have these thoughts rarely find the courage to come out. Even when they do come out, it seems like they can\u2019t get anyone to help them treat them. I believe that if there were more support groups for these individuals, there would be a lower rate of statutory rape sex crimes involving minors. I watched a documentary the other day on this topic unfortunately I can\u2019t remember the exact name and it had reinforced my idea on this, however I know that many people would disagree with me. I would like to know what you guys think and how you guys believe these individuals should be dealt with. Surely everyone has kinks to some regard, but most kinks can be controlled or even forgotten about. What do you guys think?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Pedophilia is a fetish that can only be helped through proper treatment, but access to proper treatment is limited due to stigmas, religious views, etc.\n","id":"cdbf56a2-b7a6-4793-96a2-194d33a5cd1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Host Countries and Cities Benefit from The Olympic Games<|ARGUMENT|>Submitting a bid to the International Olympic Committee IOC to host the Olympics costs millions of dollars.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hosting the Olympics is financial burden on the host city\/country.\n","id":"6eddd0c1-427d-4df6-aaed-3660b7c7b62a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Republican and Democratic parties have pigeonholed voters. 42 of people are independent voters whose views are not in strict alignment with either party's platforms. A third party candidate actually has higher support than Clinton or Trump among independent voters in some polls Officially, the Commission on Presidential Debates CPD is non partisan. Upon closer inspection, though, the organization has failed its non partisan mission. Currently, candidates outside of the Republican and Democratic parties must obtain 15 approval in 5 national polls to qualify for inclusion which may sound reasonable, but is an arbitrary metric that limits voters to only seeing debates between tickets in the major parties. In order for a third party candidate to even hope for 15 , they would have to have a massive amount of name recognition before ever announcing their candidacy. Even then, it likely will not work. Donald Trump himself could not get into the debates as a third party candidate in the 2000 election, and he is a nominee for president. He also agrees that 15 is too high, along with Bernie Sanders. The national polls used for the inclusion criteria have inherent bias as well Even if the most honest team in the world were conducting them, there would still be a margin of error because every voter in the country cannot be polled however, if this election has shown us anything, the national polls are anything but honest. A recent CNN poll excluded ages 18 34 from their polls entirely 22 of the report . One of the largest demographics in the country totally left out. Your response to all of this may be \u201cThird party candidates are nothing but conspiracy theorists and oddballs. We do not need them on the stage anyway.\u201d Many of them may be odd, but third parties also gave us candidates like Teddy Roosevelt, Ralph Nader, and Victoria Woodhull the first female candidate for president in 1870. Limiting American politics to only Republican and Democratic viewpoints is not just ignorant, it is dangerous to all of us. Put plainly, it severely limits our choices by only allowing only a narrow set of ideas and policies. What is a fair metric for inclusion in the debates? I would argue the laws that are already on the books for ballot access are a fair place to start States set up ballot access laws to be tough for a reason it excludes candidates who do not have the support necessary to run a serious campaign. For example, in most states, third party candidates must have a minimum of 5,000 valid signatures to qualify. This number is very difficult to obtain. Volunteers to collect these signatures must dedicate hundreds of hours, and our ballot access criterion is not even the most rigorous among all states. In fact, there is only one ticket outside the Republican and Democratic parties that made it on every state ballot this year out of the dozens of third parties vying for the presidency Gary Johnson and Bill Weld of the Libertarian Party The only other third party ticket that came close was Jill Stein of the Green Party who is on the ballot in 45 states. Millions of Americans signed ballot access petitions, volunteered, and were polled to be in favor of including these candidates as a choice on their ballots, but the system failed them by limiting their choice. The CPD has a virtual monopoly on debate inclusion that hurts voters. EDIT corrected 18 24 to 18 34 for the CNN poll.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The two party system hurts voters. Candidates with ballot access in all 50 states should be in the debates to keep voters informed of their choices.\n","id":"9c0fb7a8-1fdb-4852-a2e1-9881492993a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that animals have just as much a right to live as humans, and that killing them for any reason other than self defense is wrong. I cannot understand how anyone could justify the murder of a living creature unless they value that life less than their own, and that is what I see as the fundamental problem. Since humans have the intelligence to sustain themselves without killing other animals something other carnivores lack for the most part they should use that in a peaceful capacity rather than more killing things more efficiently. In other words, humans have the capacity to avoid harm, but do not. Eating meat and hunting was only natural because hominids lacked the ability to create artificial protein supplements or grow protein rich crops at least enough to support the entire population . Additionally, technology has reduced the physical strain on a human's body, allowing for less calories and less muscle growth to be consumed in order for a healthy and comfortable life. Therefore, meat is unnecessary for a modern lifestyle. I can see two reasons why someone would eat meat. It taste good, and it is cheaper than meat substitutes. In both cases, I do not currently believe that the slaughter of an innocent animal is justified. Is something wrong with the logic here or am I nuts?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not okay to kill an animal except in self defense.\n","id":"cb0c5552-16df-4643-8c55-dd6aa2de8990"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I go into detail I would like to say that I believe when you ask the president to circumvent laws passed by congress that you disagree with you set a very dangerous precedent. What happens when the president decides to circumvent a law passed by congress that you do agree with? I do not believe the president gets to pick and choose which laws to enforce and which laws not to enforce, it is their constitutional duty to enforce all existing laws. Anything else would break the system of checks and balances that our democracy has depended on for over 200 years. Now I will try to explain how I believe the current border situation fits into this mold. The Customs and Border Protection agency is a federal agency under the purview of the executive branch. The United States Border Patrol is the law enforcement wing of CBP and is tasked, in part, with detecting and preventing Illegal aliens from entering the United States. Section 1325 of Title 8 of the United States Code states that \u201cImproper entry of alien, provides for a fine, imprisonment, or both for any non citizen who 1 enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration agents, or 2 eludes examination or inspection by immigration agents, or 3 attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact.\u201d The United States code is a compilation of federal statues, passed by congress. Congress has defined what an illegal alien is and what the associated penalties are. The executive branch delegated enforcement of this statute to the CBP and therefore to the border patrol. Furthermore, the \u2018Zero Tolerance\u2019 policy of Jeff Sessions is in fact the executive branch choosing to fully enforce a set of laws passed by congress, as is their duty. Just because previous administrations chose not to be so vigilant in their enforcement of the aforementioned law does not mean that the current administrations enforcement is wrong or unethical. If you don\u2019t like the law then the law needs to be rewritten by Congress, not willfully unenforced by the executive branch, in fact willfully not enforcing a law is a shirking of Constitutional responsibilities and breaches the very tenants our democracy is based on. I will come back to this point in a bit. Now on to the issue of child separation. In 1997, the settlement of Reno vs Flores resulted in the so called Flores Agreement which set the national policy for the detention, release and treatment of minors in the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. This was then codified into law via the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and signed by President Clinton, and subsequently reaffirmed by both Bush and Obama. Among many outcomes of this statue, the law required that The government to release children from immigration detention without unnecessary delay to, in order of preference, parents, other adult relatives, or licensed programs willing to accept custody. In 2015, the federal district court found that the government was violating Flores Agreement by refusing to release alien children who were accompanied by their parents inside a family detention facility. Furthermore in 2016 the 9th circuit court found that finding that the Agreement applied to all detained children but that it did not give their parents any affirmative right of release. Therefore, the Executive branch is left with 3 options Willfully choose to not enforce laws against illegal immigration which, as shown above, is their duty to enforce, as with all other laws. Enforce Illegal immigration statutes and not separate families by keeping everyone together inside government facilities while they await trial, which would violate several previous court rulings and congressional pieces of legislation The current solution Enforce illegal immigration statues and separate families so as to satisfy the Flores agreement s Now on the other hand congress has many more options which are in line with the constitution, I will list a few Put in place legislation nullifying parts of the Flores Agreement that would allow for families to remain together while in detention Reverse or roll back laws regarding illegal immigration, or make pathways to citizenship much easier In short the executive branch is faced with the decision to ignore the laws passed by congress and allow illegal immigration, ignore the rulings of the judiciary and detain families together, or enforce laws against illegal immigration and separate families. While the last option is not ideal it is clearly the only option. The president is being put into a catch 22 situation as he is being asked to subvert the law which he railed Obama for doing and is an important issue amongst his supporters . Congress is ultimately to blame here as they are the only ones that have the constitutional power to make a change in this situation. I\u2019m not saying democrats are to blame or republicans because this situation has evolved to what it is today under administrations of both parties. Congress as a whole is to blame and it is them whom we should be putting pressure on to work together for once and come to a reasonable legislative solution. I would like to clarify a few things Yes I think child separation is wrong and the conditions are not great I disagree with the president when he says that this was caused by the democrats because this crisis has resulted the actions or inactions of both parties in congress However I do think it is wrong that the democrats use images of children in detention camps and sensationalist journalism to push their agenda when they are asking the president to do something that is congresses responsibility. Furthermore I have even seen images of children in cages which were from the Obama administration used to push this narrative, which is a bit hypocritical don\u2019t you think? Please tell me where I'm wrong in my interpretations of the law, the Constitution, or in general. I am open to hearing all sides on this. Also I apologize for any spelling or grammatical errors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is the responsibility of Congress, not the President, to solve the child separation crisis.\n","id":"a7d18d32-b2e7-4d8a-8de5-1160f1df850c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>When a basic standard of living is available to all, some people will not contribute to its upkeep. This creates resentment within those who do contribute; an aspect of human nature that a UBI plays out on a much larger scale than alternative redistribution schemes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI enables people to work less or leave the workforce permanently.\n","id":"97e4cff4-636f-4623-844f-0cd84e415e54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that if you boil it down to what people receive from weed and alcohol, most of the feelings are similar. It can be used for social purposes, to relax, or abused as an antidepressant. For legal reasons, if adults 21 are developed enough and responsible enough to drink, then they are responsible enough to smoke. There would still be laws that apply to both alcohol and weed equally. i.e. driving under the influence. If you've had one hit from a joint than you are capable of driving, and if you don't seem capable in a field test, it will be obvious, same as alcohol. In addition, this would allow people to not have to worry about not getting a job even if they live in a legal state. If employees are allowed to drink on their free time, people who smoke should be able to as well. If it's affecting their work, than they should be punished as someone who would go drunk to work. Only thing that won't change my view is anything that is too circumstantial. As in something that is too specific of an example that is more of a what if than a certainty. Change my view <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Weed should be legally and socially treated in the same way as alcohol\n","id":"271a1a39-e2bb-46e5-8f8a-531649372276"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are gender and sex the same thing?<|ARGUMENT|>Gender has also been traditionally divided into male and female with little to no room for existing between the dichotomy gender non-binary, rejecting the dichotomy gender queer, or crossing the dichotomy trans despite the long history across cultures of these groups existing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be easier to point out the flaws in the current understandings of both sex and gender if the fights against outdated understanding of sex and gender were united.\n","id":"5811d4b0-5174-412b-a8df-3bd93beda60c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Empower Both Women And Men?<|ARGUMENT|>Feminists push for feminist marketing campaigns by MNCs in order to deliver benefits to a majority of underprivileged girls.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism has empowered a majority of women in third world countries\n","id":"9ab7cd81-cd07-4c90-8e0a-d4f1c1980e7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Salaries should be public<|ARGUMENT|>Most states of the United States grant a right to privacy and recognize four torts based on this right: Intrusion upon seclusion or solitude, or into private affairs; Public disclosure of embarrassing private facts; Publicity which places a person in a false light in the public eye; and Appropriation of name or likeness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many employees would view this as an invasion of privacy.\n","id":"3e194946-9b97-4b21-aeca-9a34ad6ed119"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>No-fly zone over Libya<|ARGUMENT|>Ross Douthat. \"The Perils of a No-Fly Zone.\" New York times. March 10th, 2011: \"what will happen to American credibility if we effectively declare war on Libya with a \"no fly zone\" and then fail to dislodge Qaddafi, because he\u2019s well-entrenched and we aren\u2019t willing to escalate beyond air cover? It seems all-too-plausible that rather than vindicating American power, a no-fly zone will ultimately just make the United States look like more of a paper tiger: We\u2019ll demonstrate that we\u2019re capable of going halfway to war, but no further, and Libya\u2019s tyrant will be able to claim that he fought America and won.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No-fly zone that fails to dislodge Gaddafi will look bad.\n","id":"ccfdcbc8-e5ce-4797-a428-0116cde62ab1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>Some women have high levels of testosterone and yet that does not seem to change their gender identity as they identify as women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hormones are subject to variation, and hormone levels do not always correlate to gender identity.\n","id":"2f0c10eb-5ca1-4652-9e9d-6e3351cad7af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Libertarian Solution: Can People Govern Themselves?<|ARGUMENT|>\"The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with the power to endanger the public liberty\" John Adams So government wasn't intended by the founding fathers to control the citizen nor the public but to control powers that threaten them. In theory, it would mean government only needs enough power to perform that basic task, and the more limited societal powers are the more limited government powers could be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The intended role of the government is protection, not social intervention.\n","id":"e762b5b9-b01a-4a3f-922d-0054520e4a0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I am not a Ronda Rousey fan trying to stick up for her or to say that she's the best fighter of all time and the fight was rigged. I was absolutely thrilled when she got defeated. Long story short I find her cocky and I spent days looking at memes and r UFC shit talk after she lost. Ronda kept her hands down, she kept trying to kick box with a world champion when grappling is her strong point, and after the first round her team was saying good job . I'm not saying if Ronda would have tried she would have won. I'm saying if she would have actually tried she would have tried to get in close to her more than she did. Yeah she tried going for a couple of holds but the majority of the time Ronda was standing up and striking. I've heard the theory that Holly got into Ronda's head during the weigh in by pushing her fist into Ronda's face.First of all after all we have seen from Holly of showing good sportsmanship offering to touch gloves before the fight, making sure Ronda was okay after the fight, giving Ronda a hug after she took her belt that does not sound like something Holly would do. I've also seen a slowed down GIF that shows Ronda pulling Holly's fist into her head Why would Ronda throw the fight? Well she was going to be taking off a long time to film a movie. So that means that if Ronda holds on to the championship belt, there will be no championship fights for that belt for so long that the belt would start to collect dust. Championship fights for UFC or president Dana White I also don't think that Holly was in on it. I think just Ronda and Dana White.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ronda Rousey threw the fight against Holly Holm\n","id":"9ec31547-0da0-42c7-9164-bcdd9b88f5e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States attack Iran?<|ARGUMENT|>The Vietnam War left 58,000 American soldiers dead and a further 300,000 wounded, and it achieved none of its war aims.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Historically, and with American interests in mind, US-led interventions into the affairs of other countries have not ended well.\n","id":"09b492a1-fc92-4cb6-8617-b5f98d51382d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So this post is inspired by this video by Jon Bois. In it, Bois argues that kickoffs are stupid and bad because they're generally uninteresting, rarely make a difference, and are extremely dangerous as compared to other plays. He advocates instead for a proposal that after scoring, a team would be given the ball back on their own 30, with the line to gain at their own 45 and on 4th down. This would allow for a high risk play to keep a team in it if they were trying for an epic comeback, but would mostly result in a punt, which is safer and more interesting because the players line up at scrimmage. So I think this rule would improve the game, make it safer for players, give a little more hope for desperate teams down by 2 scores late in the game, and overall be better. But maybe I'm wrong about all of that and kickoffs are great. So .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NFL should abolish kickoffs and adopt the Schiano rule of a 4th-and-15 down.\n","id":"5c5b51c6-ec5f-4f59-aa7a-be3f041309f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By Irresponsible I mean, for example, tattoos which are prone to fading, such as knuckle, inner palm, under foot tatoos. Another 'irresponsible' tattoo are tattoos which are 'upside down' I.e, facing the wearer so if a text tattoo on my wrist was facing me it'd be legible to me but hanging it would be upside down. I have heard multiple situations where the artist would refuse completely to tattoo those kind of tattoos because they claimed the the client didn't know what they were getting into e.g. that they would fade. I believe that if the artist explains that the tattoo is considered upside down or prone to fading, and he ensures that the client understands this, he should not refuse to do the tattoo. This can be done even in writing if necessary. I understand that the artist might refuse to provide free touch ups on his own work in certain areas even if it is his normal policy. One reason I strongly believe this is mostly because it is something done by artists who consider themselves and usually rightly so superior. Conversely, sub par artists don't really care, they'll take all the work they can get, meaning that now, a tattoo which is likely to fade is upside down is now also badly produced. an aside I have no tattoos myself, but am interested in tat culture. Personal tattoos which I have planned do not fall in the above category and I have not been refused a tat on these grounds. Edit for clarity English.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Proffesional Tattoo Artists should accept to do tattoos which they consider irresponsible, given that the Artist explains why they think so and ensure that the client has understood the situation..\n","id":"f91ea012-6372-42f3-b4dd-e1ec0a7ecea4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The thread in question. I'll start out by saying that I don't have any romantic or sexual feelings towards family members. I support consensual incest, and think it should be decriminalised if not legalised, and don't believe that there is any moral issue with it although there will almost certainly be practical issues. So there are my biases. With that in mind, I don't think there's anything wrong with this guy having sex with his mother. I'll summarise the story. OP had his arms incapacitated at age 14, was frustrated from lack of masturbation, and his mother offered to masturbate for him. Over the course of three years, masturbation became handjobs became sex. The relationship was fully consensual, and desired on both parts. The father was aware, accepting and understanding of the situation. The older sister according to OP, didn't know. If there's any details I missed, it's because I don't know what's relevant, so you can check out the AMA. So. 1 It was a fully consensual relationship. 2 It happened with the dad's consent and understanding, so doesn't fall under the realm of cheating. 3 If they loved each other, why not? I'm actually struggling to come up with more reasons why this is okay incest is basically a non issue to me, and no different ethically if not practically from any other relationship. So I'll address the obvious negatives 1 It's disgusting etc. That's subjective. People said the same thing about homosexuality, miscegenation, and so on before, but then we decided we shouldn't be ruled by the wisdom of repugnance. As in, this should not be a consideration. We need to look at this objectively. 2 But it's not subjective, everyone thinks it's disgusting. I get that the majority vote is an influential factor here, and it's true almost all of us hate incest. We're hard wired for it. I used to think incest was disgusting. Then I read books, heard stories, thought about it, and eventually came to the conclusion that there was no reason to think there's anything wrong with it. We're hard wired to be repulsed by incest, because interbreeding is disadvantageous. OP in this situation, AFAIK, wasn't trying for a baby. 3 If we say OP is okay to sleep with his mother, why not a cow or a dog or a dead person? The slippery slope doesn't follow none of those can consent to sex. 4 What OP's parents did was abuse Now this is where my view is probably most likely to be changed. I don't believe that the relationship is abusive because it was a consensual relationship which has since stopped, and OP didn't seem to feel any worse off for it. But I'm prepared to believe it's more complex than that. I'll leave it there, I can't think of anything else to say on the matter. It's 1.30am and I'm dead so I'm gonna be on here for ten minutes or so then respond to the rest in the morning. Edit I can accept now that the OP of the thread wasn't legally able to consent when the sexual activity started, so I can say that this particular case is problematic. Although, that has nothing to do with the incestuous relationship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see anything wrong with the guy who had a sexual relationship with his mother.\n","id":"28e59e1b-9e12-40cd-a366-a348f80477b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Because what it translates to is, You need to lower your standards. I feel that this is a recipe for a life unfulfilled, to simply lower one's standards until you accept what you have as the best, and that it requires a level of desensitization to accomplish. For example, religious people often have the ability to do this, but when everything you do is supposedly going to pay off in the end there's no such thing as lost time. Another translation that can be used is, I don't care why you're unhappy, all I know is that your unhappiness is bothering me. This TED talk is a good example of my argument. It's when we're not willing to acknowledge why the other person is unhappy that we ask for the person to change instead of the circumstances, and I think that's bullshit. I think about this way You've got a piece of chocolate and I've got an equally sized piece of shit and you're trying to convince me that I'm just as fortunate as you are. You coat the turd in sprinkles and exclaim that mine is superior because yours doesn't have them, but I just respond that now it's just shit covered in sprinkles. You throw it in a mixing bowl with sugar, salt, food coloring, you even mix bits of your chocolate into it and confection it until it's identical to your chocolate. You then exclaim that obviously I cannot deny that I'm just as fortunate, but it's not like I didn't just see you try to make shit seem palatable. This is usually the point where I'm told to change my attitude as you eat your chocolate. To clarify my point, try to convince me that being told to change my attitude isn't something I should find dismissive and unfeeling , and don't just give me anecdotes as to why a person may behave dismissive and unfeeling as it won't change my damn view. Thanks everyone for your posts, I've read every one but I haven't responded because I've reached a dilemma. I understand that most of the time if I'm being told I need to change my attitude the person saying it is being dismissive and unfeeling, but I really should consider changing my attitude because it could help with my overall success in the long term. So when it comes to whether I can say for sure my view was changed I've got nothing. But thanks anyway everyone D<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I really hate being told I need to change my attitude,\n","id":"22f0df5b-d13f-4324-9b66-ddfb343db65e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is violence always wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>The group's founder, Sampat Devi Pal, says that when the group come across those that would sexually assault vulnerable women, they ''thrash him black and blue so he dare not attempt to do wrong to any girl or a woman again.''<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Gulabi Gang, an all female vigilante group in India, use violence to protect the powerless from abuse and fight corruption when police fail to do so.\n","id":"2ac7d442-cc7d-47ec-8f16-5121ef01909f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So this comes freshly off the Wimbledon finale, but it is a view I have had for quite some time. I think this year's Wibledon is a prime example how the general public in this case the crowd was overwhelmingly on Federer's side, and at times even cheering when Novak would miss a first service. Now this isn't a problem only at Wimbledon. Other notable tournament that I have managed to observe is the US open another possible  topic is that the US open crowd is the worst . At times, I thought the problem was that Nadal and Federer first rose to stardom and the crowd just loves them. However, last year's Wimbledon, again, the crowd was on Anderson's side although this can be becauss he was the outsider . Will Djokovic ever be loved and appreciated as Nadal and Federer and even Murray ? I feel like the majority of the fans that dislike Djokovic is because they feel that he stole the spotlight from Nadal and Djokovic. In my opinion part of the problem is that he is from Eastern Europe The Balkans I am very aware that I might be biased with this view, since I am also from the Balkans . In the end, I would just like to say that, in my opinion, his colleagues on the tour have the utmost respect for him except for Kyrgios lol , but I feel that the general public doesn't appreciate him. So there you have it. Please, change my view. P. S. I do believe that the hatred Novak feels from the crowd fuels him to get better, and to fight when he is supposed to give up. I really like when he has that smirking face although some people dislike him for that after he has made a comeback. A good example for this is after he made the return in the 2011 US open semi final against Federer , he raised his arms and hada face saying is this good enough for you, will you support me now? here's link Tl dr Nadal and Federer are more liked than Djokovic, even though in the last few years he is the one with more titles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Novak Djokovic doesn't get the respect he deserves.\n","id":"813c5651-4e6c-4237-a366-551251c16626"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Boris Johnson proroguing parliament is an attack on democracy.<|ARGUMENT|>If the Conservative party conference in Manchester were cancelled, it could cost Manchester's economy over \u00a330 million<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cancelling party conferences at such short notice would be too costly.\n","id":"e5b6e9af-ffe9-4afa-a575-85084e547968"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>Religions easily could contain bias in them towards valuing human life over animal life, especially considering that they are created and developed by humans. Since they are based on the beliefs of a human, not an animal, religions don't factually prove why humans should be valued over animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious claims are a matter of faith, not fact. They do not provide evidence of anything.\n","id":"69d9a29d-1361-42ad-9c9f-42093a5d4906"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Criminalization of Holocaust denial<|ARGUMENT|>Most Holocaust denial claims imply, or openly state, that the Holocaust is a hoax arising out of a deliberate Jewish conspiracy to advance the interest of Jews at the expense of other peoples. For this reason, Holocaust denial is generally considered to be an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The methodologies of Holocaust deniers are criticized as based on a predetermined conclusion that ignores extensive historical evidence to the contrary. This is different than historical revisionists that dispute only the numbers of those killed or certain methods used, but whom do not dispute that the event occurred and whom do not argue that the Holocaust is a Jewish conspiracy. This simple definition and distinction of \"Holocaust denial\" can be easily applied to ban the practice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Holocaust deniers are those calling it a hoax and Jewish conspiracy.\n","id":"debd0376-9c0d-4bd0-b0e2-40a80ebf2ba2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Men should always be responsible for their children. This sounds uncontroversial but there is a common argument in MRA circles that if a man is a victim of statutory rape or forcible rape by a woman, he should not be held liable for supporting his child. The man or boy was either under the age of consent or was coerced and thus never really decided to have a child and thus should not be responsible as the argument goes. According to this argument personal choice is what matters. If a woman can choose whether a baby is aborted, given up for adoption, or carried to term then a man should have some rights too over whether he will financially support the child, especially if his right to bodily integrity was violated. I disagree. Child support is not a 'punishment' for having a child. It's purpose is to support the child. Children deserve the support and involvement of both a mother and a father. To deprive a child of that is unjust to the child and disadvantages future generations in favor of 'freedom' for their parents. The child is not a potential creature but an actual one with rights that supersede his or her parents right to 'freedom.' That's what it means to have a child. The child comes first before you do. This moral truth is tough to proclaim in an age such as ours where the ideal of absolute self determination predominates but it nonetheless has to be proclaimed. In the case of a woman raping a boy or man, the woman should of course be punished under the relevant statutory rape laws. Monetary damages can even be sought from her in civil court that lightens or even erases any child support that the boy man would be responsible for. I would be totally fine with that. EDIT I must refine my view to say that there are mitigating cases such as when the father is mentally incompetant, disabled, etc. So strictly speaking I mis stated my view in the title though I thought the OP in general explained what i was arguing. I have had my view changed. I think government, preferably local state governments, should have programs in place to provide for children born in such rare circumstances. Btw, here's the case I was thinking about<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men Should Always Be Responsible for Their Children\n","id":"27720b91-d983-4ffb-af1a-91a8ae169fd6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Immigration is not a charity. Its not a favor we do for the rest of the world. It has one sole purpose and that's to benefit us. We take in immigrants because we believe they will improve America. People following a religion in which strong majorities believe women who wear pants deserve rape and gays and apostates need to die will not in any way shape or form improve America. Being Muslim is not immutable like race or gender. Its a belief that you chose to hold. You read a book about a prophet who's main activity was conquering villages then beheading all males with pubic hair and enslaving the women and children. A prophet who once ordered his own people burned alive for failing to come out for the call to prayer You read about that prophet and said to yourself I think that's a good role model for me . I understand that the Old Testament contains some harsh stuff. But if Muslims ignored the Quran, and didn't abuse women or kill gays, and ignored the frequent calls by the prophet to wage open ended violent Jihad against unbelievers. If they ignored all that, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But to anyone who reads the news or looks at Pew's frequent polling of the Muslim world it is quite clear that that is not what is happening.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think we should have Muslim immigration\n","id":"51439b41-d569-4714-bba1-057d7a5eb7c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Value is often established between two persons. Chances are high that the relative values of all family members and friends together do outweigh those of the one person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When more people are killed there will be more grieving family members and friends left behind.\n","id":"19638bfb-fc5c-4ac3-ba22-15ccde671ae4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of climate change related posts are made on  and it's had me thinking, reading a number of replies on different questions and looking into things, I just don't feel that climate change is something we as a species should care about. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with 'going green', it creates jobs, it creates alternatives fuels, it's better all round, I wouldn't be opposed to a completely green infrastructure, however I don't think it's necessary. We haven't exactly got that much date regarding the patterns of the earth's weather, we have probably 200 years max worth of detailed data. Beyond that we could draw attention to particularly big events storms, hurricanes, etc and the general weather of a day or two. Therefore I find it an unfair assumption to say the world's climate isn't cyclic, because we just don't know. I don't think we know enough about the world to determine whether or not any real change has been occurring. It's all well and good to say the icecaps are melting and the water is rising and the temperature in X was warmer than it was 10 years ago except for those 3 years between where it was lower. On top of that, any effort we make to reverse possible damage or to slow down global climate effects would not make much difference, maybe if everyone drove electric cars, recycled 100 of everything and completely overhauled their way of life which I don't see ever happening . I'm by no means a climate change denier, I don't think it's tha gubmint tryna git dem chinese monies and use that there darpa to mind control me into supporting Obama or whatever, but I do feel like my opinion on this may be wrong and I'd like to be shown why.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Climate change isn't an issue we should care too much about\n","id":"917a4245-5509-4d88-b380-5b1402b13afd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Deep sea oil and gas exploration in the Great Australian Bight should be banned<|ARGUMENT|>The decision to issue new oil and gas exploration permits in the Great Australian Bight was driven by the Federal Resources Minister Martin Ferguson hoping to boost Australia's output of oil and gas. The only bidder was BP, and they were accepted even though the Deep Horizon blowout had occurred only months earlier. Such decisions should at least require a minister sponsored motion in parliament. BP the only bidder for Great Australian Bight leases<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inadequate community consultation was conducted by the Australian Government before these exploration leases were issued in the Bight.\n","id":"0d627c04-9e16-43c6-9b96-767b49352527"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title states. To clarify disaster relief, I am speaking of cleanup, rebuilding, etc. i am not opposed to federal dollars being spent to save lives before or during the disaster, such as using military to rescue or evacuate. My rational is simple. States that are in the path of hurricanes know they are in the path of hurricanes. The people should plan appropriately, through their own planning and by electing officials who will create and maintain state disaster funds. The same goes for tornadoes in the center of the country, wildfires out west, volcanoes in states that border the Pacific, etc. It should not be the responsibility of a resident of Vermont to compensate a resident of California for an earthquake. If the federal government stopped funding relief for hurricane victims in Florida, for instance, it would force the state to take action. If a hurricane season had major hurricanes in Florida, Texas, and Mississippi then the residents of the states that planned appropriately would quickly get back on their feet. Those who chose to waste their tax money would recover more slowly. Sucks for them, but that is okay with me. So, change my view. Why should we not expect state governments to adequately prepare for the disasters they know are coming?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No federal tax dollars should be spent on disaster relief for common natural disasters, except on federal land\n","id":"616023a9-0f35-48c4-953d-7a682715312b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A threat of death is only a threat if the pain being inflicted is forthcoming. Otherwise, you're not threatening someone, you're just saying something that inflicts pain. Telling someone to commit suicide cannot possibly be considered a death threat when there's no possible follow up from the person levying the threat. The only reason these two things are conflated in the first place is so web articles can justifiably put So and so said X and got DEATH THREATS FOR IT? ? in their articles and drum up clicks, when in reality the only tweet is one 14 year old's saying kill urself . Is the person being 'threatened with death'? Technically, sure. But that is not a 'death threat' in the way the term is intended to be used and demeans and devalues those who actually receive tangible threats to their lives everyday and try speak out against it. The Beyonce fans 'threatening' the Golden State Warriors owner's wife are not committing the same the crime as the man who pleaded guilty to threatening to murder 3 members of Congress via Voicemail Edit Clarification I'll kill you is obviously a death threat. When I say both should not be considered I mean to say that Only one and not the other should not be considered a death threat<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"I'll kill you\" and \"Kill yourself\" have vastly different connotations and both should not be considered under the the label of a 'death threat'\n","id":"98cf2f89-6806-40b4-92e3-cdc78f643031"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm really just trying to test my way of thinking here. Doing something and getting a certain result doesn't mean that you're less likely to get the same result twice. Say you roll a die two times. You rolled a 4. There was a one in six chance of rolling that four. Now the second time you roll the die, you still have a one in six chance of rolling a 4. The universe doesn't balance itself out by making the die roll something different. Why does everyone seem to think that betting on the die rolling a 4 again would be a poor decision? It should be equally risky as any other number right?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Repeated trials don't change odds\n","id":"db75001f-423d-4596-aff1-eb9e90cc5934"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>PD, or more specifically PD|k where k is our background knowledge, is raised significantly by other arguments for God's existence, as well as historical and anecdotal evidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's not obvious that PD << P\u00acD, at least to an extent relevant to this discussion.\n","id":"eac8c8ad-ab18-445e-b133-4b18797f0f12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Spoilers, naturally. I just came out from theater and I cannot believe the hate that A C has gotten. I just cannot understand it. It was a good movie. It was tonally a bit inconsistent, but good. I liked the idea that immortal android is obsessed with creating life and making a perfect organism. I loved the balls they had with killing Shaw and engineers. I loved the explosive beginning and David is one of the better characters in the franchise. And the end, really dark, ballsy. I think many people misinterpret the purpose of David Walter switch. It was not meant to be a complete, jaw dropping, out of blue twist. It was meant to add tension, that the audience knows it's probably David, but the characters don't, and that it's only matter of time before shit hits the fan. I can give in and say CGI was not always good, sometimes outright bad. It had a B movie feel sometimes, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Some characters acted stupid, but not unreasonably so. I could buy their reactions and actions most of the time. Characters were thin, but I was okay with that, as the same goes with all Alien movies except Ripley . And it was winking at its own past a bit too much. But I can see that as a reaction to the same fans complaining that Prometheus was not Alien enough. And same goes with Prometheus. It had good ideas, very good scenes, some plot holes and people acting stupidly but I can forgive it. I loved that it was not afraid of being different in regards to earlier movies. In that sense I was a bit disappointed that A C was much closer to Alien, but then again, it had Alien in the title. I think both Prometheus and A C will always stay controversial but in time will be more appreciated. The same thing that happened with Alien 3 everyone hated it at first, but in time have viewed it more kindly. About other movies I love Alien and really like Aliens. Alien 3 is a mixed bag and we better not talk about Resurrection. AvP was fun and AvP2 straight up bad. Prometheus and Alien are both good, I'd rank them above Alien 3 but below Aliens, Prometheus higher than A C, simply because it was not afraid to be its own thing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are good not great movies and fine additions to the Alien franchise\n","id":"712cd313-de41-4ce9-ab47-972c4abb49b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view on this is pretty weak and mostly just a gut feeling, so it'll be pretty easy to change my mind. If I'm male attracted to someone and lose that attraction when I find out they are a trans woman instead of a cis woman, that isn't transphobic if it is then I guess I'm transphobic and I probably won't change . I don't really have control over who or what I'm attracted to, and you can call me bigoted all you want but I can't just will myself to be attracted to them. I shouldn't have to change my dating preferences so that people aren't excluded from dating me who would want to date me anyway? . Dating preferences are, by nature, exclusionary. I don't see preferring cis women any different than preferring blonde, brunette, white, black, or anything women, none of which I consider to be bigoted preferences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you aren't attracted to someone because they are trans, that isn't transphobic\n","id":"a578b14c-c992-46ce-bc96-b642d1306b81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I went to my girlfriends graduation yesterday, and I can't figure out what the point is. Graduating doesn't seem like a big deal to me. I have one semester left before I graduate from college and I don't see how it is an accomplishment. I don't have to work too hard, and I feel like if about 1.5 million people graduate each year it can't be a big deal. I understand the importance of a college education, but I don't understand why we need to celebrate doing something that most people can do. The ceremony was really bad too a bunch of people talked, and I could tell nobody cared about what they said, then everyone stood up and they said congratulations a bunch of times and that was it. edit So maybe the parties and stuff are pointless but so are a lot of other things we celebrate so I'm fine with that. I still don't understand the ceremonies at all. What is the point of everyone standing up? This year they didn't even get to walk on a stage each school just stood up and that was it. Why is this something that people do?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Graduation ceremonies are pointless.\n","id":"4c1c3321-4678-46a4-96cd-5119e0398dcf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>There is not enough scientific evidence to prove that leprechauns do not exist, nor that unicorns and the flying spaghetti monster do not exist. If your standard for acceptance of a given belief is simply a lack of scientific disproof, then you must also believe in leprechauns, unicorns, the flying spaghetti monster, and any other ridiculous thing that I might want to suggest. This is why there is a burden of proof before things must be believed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Like Russell's Teapot claims about God's existence need to be proved before they are believed. The burden of proof lies with theists.\n","id":"e915865e-b668-40fa-9cd8-b202955e0a33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>Many government policies, such as taxation or divorce, used to be considered issues of religious morality. As stigma around those issues reduced, policy could focus on assessing outcomes rather than enforcing what the populace thought was morally correct.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reducing the stigma around sexuality helps governments create policies on all sexual matters that are evidence-based not morality-based.\n","id":"4d1f2022-57be-4819-806a-97f0436afa78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>University education needs to be capped and more selective<|ARGUMENT|>Fifty years ago, a university degree was so much rarer than it is now. Having one immediately distinguished you from the competition when it came to starting a career. With so many graduates leaving university every year, the marketplace is becoming flooded, and those who really need to set themselves apart from the rest in their academic field are having to stay longer to do post-graduate courses. This means much higher debts upon graduation, and also means that they are older and have less 'practical' workplace experience than some others, giving them one possible disadvantage, even though they've gained another.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A university degree has far less worth than it once did\n","id":"6aefa0f8-fa28-42d8-8145-7adfeb56075a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many countries, such as Sweden, have banned even voluntary surrogacy for fear of allowing exploitation. Their concern is that infertile couples are exploiting the poverty of surrogate mothers to make them go through the grueling process of pregnancy and childbirth. However, if the surrogate mother is well informed about the risks of surrogacy, choosing to do so could be a rational and welfare increasing decision. If you have a severe lack of money, getting 20,000 dollars could more than outweigh the costs of pregnancy, and so prohibiting surrogacy leaves both infertile couples and potential surrogates worse off. Thus all the government needs to do is to ensure potential surrogates are well informed in making their decision.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Paid surrogacy should be legal, though regulated\n","id":"66220b82-f353-4105-bcd6-d77d38177552"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The Turkish constitutional referendum of 16th of April 2017 was initiated by the then-Minister of Justice and backed by then-Prime Minister Erdogan. The proposal for a referendum had to be accepted by the Turkish parliament, which it was.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Citizens are mostly not included in the decision about whether to hold a referendum in the first place.\n","id":"33936590-3791-42fa-b2f1-17f6aa16d63b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>NOTE This post will perceive bible as work of art rather than some religious truth. I was going to church 14 years and had religious education 9 years but probably I did not remember every single event described in the bible and other religious inscriptions so I am no expert. Bare in mind that translations of the original work may vary a lot so I may know different information. Bare in mind What one perceives good the other may perceive evil. Long story short Not that short God creates everything world, humans, animals, angels and the most powerful archangel Lucifer two whom he gives same amount of power as god has and entrusts him to act for him. Soon Lucifer becomes jealous of god, starts rebellion and convinces or deceives 1 3 angels to join him. God gets angry and banishes him. When god creates humans he creates them in paradise but forbids them to eat fruit from specific tree. Later devil in form of snake appears and convinces humans to eat the apple. When they do they are banished from paradise. Later on God sends holy spirit to Egypt to massacre every firstborn and does many more disgusting acts because those people forgot of him and praised maliks. Except Chosen people are alerted and saved by Moses. Later on God gives Moses 10 comments Later on The chosen people forget of god again so he sends Jesus as a reminder and Jesus sacrifices and tells god to forgive people. Okay lets get to the point of view Until Lucifer rebelled against god there was noone opposing so you could not choose. Lucifer literary gave everyone free will ability to choose. He realised he was so powerful he had ability to do so. What god did is only prohibit on the other hand Lucifer never prohibited anything just tempted people to do the other way as it was commanded. He made god realise his mistake, so the god sent Jesus as a message that he understands his mistake and he forgives people as Jesus was god himself . The only sin that the devil ever made was lie maybe not even that if his true purpose was to create free will . I do not even believe he broke first commandment as he perceived himself as a god. Quick recap Lucifer gave everyone free will and even learned all knowing god something. Truthfully I cannot say Lucifer is evil but rather that he is the true saviour. What are your thoughts?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lucifer is truly the most important character in bible.\n","id":"60b48a2c-a9f1-46fd-9128-86f7de3f5d4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This  is about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum that rely on \u201cproof of work\u201d for them to exist. I\u2019m sure there are smaller cryptocurrencies that are designed to have no or minimal impact on the environment, but I\u2019m not interested in those. I wanna concentrate on the biggest well known cryptocurrencies that do rely on mining, or whatever it is called. I believe the so called advantages cryptocurrencies are supposed to bring isn\u2019t worth their cost to the environment. In 2017, apparently the whole Ethereum network which is something like the third or fourth biggest cryptocoin was using at minimum 2 Twh per year, which is roughly comparable to a small country. And that is just one cryptocurrency, there are others beside, each burning up mostly fossil fuels and giving little real back in return. And yeah it is mostly fossil fuels, why else would there have been all those mining centers opening up in China, if not for the cheap, but dirty, coal powered energy? And what they give in return is dubious at best, even their fans generally can\u2019t agree on the strengths. Is it safer than using a bank? Almost every month there\u2019s another exchange going under, or getting hacked, or founder arrested. Is there any real anonymity using these, since it is all tracked on a public ledger? Are transactions faster, easier or cheaper than a bank transfer or direct debit? I never bought nor sold a cryptocoin, or have had anything to do with them, but the answer from what I can tell is a resounding \u201cno\u201d. What would change my mind? I could think of some, are all the estimations I see online on how much power they require grossly mistaken? Can you make a case for it, for it to be worth and making up for the cost to environment, something I might have over looked? If your attempt to convince me is to tell me that anthropomorphic climate change ain\u2019t real, completely exaggerated, or that we don\u2019t have a moral duty to ensure a decent enough planet for future generations, don\u2019t bother trying to get deltas from me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, are morally indefensible because of their impact on the environment\n","id":"bd5ba8fb-f5be-4215-a76c-f1877e773bce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>Uruguay's government sells a gram of cannabis for $1 which has had a major impact on drug traffickers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalise cannabis use while decriminalising the use of other drugs, as in Uruguay\n","id":"d00cbba8-4e66-492f-8839-34f0db7a298f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When determining the presidential race, the electoral college is unfair. If a state, like most, give all their votes to who has the most votes, than urban centers overwhelm rural voters. If they can split up their electoral votes into certain districts or whatever, than rural voters overwhelm city voters. With popular vote, no one gets under represented for the votes. It all comes down to who gets the most votes. No one gets screwed over. I thought about it for awhile and couldn't really think of any reason why EC is better<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the popular vote is better to the electoral college\n","id":"cea9c1e5-25fe-475f-bbd5-1af5ba0e81a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>A UK study found that prisons were 'breeding grounds' for radicalization, as they provided near-perfect conditions for radical ideologies to flourish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prisons provide an environment in which former ISIS fighters could radicalise other prisoners.\n","id":"6c1c1b94-cf99-40cf-9682-3ab8ba8decc3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Working over 39 hours a week was shown to have negative effects on mental health<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Working long hours is detrimental to one's health and encounters diminishing returns.\n","id":"1bea5354-99c2-479c-9d19-7db14e00f6d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Unless you would date Quasimodo and or Brienne of Tarth for their warm and caring personalities, I think it's hypocritical to call someone else shallow. I've seen on reddit many posts calling men women shallow for eliminating people based on their appearance, like here and I don't quite understand the problem with it. A romantic relationship requires physical attraction, so why is rejecting someone based on the lack of attraction to their set of looks wrong? If someone outside my range of preferred looks asks me out, I don't think I should go out with them to fulfill some 'non shallowness' quota. Clearly I would say something like 'You're not my type' or 'I don't have feelings for you', instead of telling them it's their nose height weight race hair color whatever. Everyone meets thousands of people in a lifetime, and they are only going to have one significant other at a time, so it would seem that a quick filter based on looks will help them. So why is being shallow a problem?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone is shallow regarding dating and there is nothing wrong with that.\n","id":"bf6b7d97-b0c0-44ed-b55d-93635700d9d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This may be a bit strange for a . I have Schizoid Personality Disorder. Look it up if you don't know what it is. Basically I am a loner, flat emotions, and I personally am unable to comprehend things like friendship or love. It all feels so foreign to me. I think I was able to understand when I was young but those years are behind me. I honestly don't feel human. If people of this reddit could explain these concepts to me, I would be most grateful. I am tired of being this way but it's so hard for me to understand. I ruminate on things like this for days at a time. It bothers me so much and I don't understand why. It got even worse for me after my existential crisis and my fall into nihilism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am unable to comprehend friendship or love.\n","id":"9f418845-bfaa-4b90-9d33-fa7122b8bbd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In most developed countries, instead of killing stray animals they are saved by shelters and put up for adoption.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stray animals are not killed in a number of countries.\n","id":"6d853886-330f-44fb-968f-2a07b9a4c24e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nowadays, it seems the enlightened view is that all major religions are pretty much the same. While it is true that they have many elements in common, and that they have all been interpreted and practiced many different ways throughout their histories, I feel that these two have some unique attributes. Exclusivity Major denominations of both Christianity and Islam believe that they are the only correct religion. Not only that, they believe their religion is associated with the sole source of good in the world, while other religions are associated with evil. They therefore cannot see the value of any cultures outside of their own. Outsiders exist to be one sidedly enlightened, not to exchange knowledge with and learn from each other. Eternal Hell Hinduism and Buddhism believe in reincarnation, while Judaism is vague about the afterlife. Christianity and Islam, by contrast, are very high stakes religions. This naturally lends a strong sense of urgency to the actions of their followers. This is worsened by the notion that the thing you do to be sent to Hell is not believing in the right religion. This means that your neighbors aren't just ignorant, they're dangerous, and their ideas can send your loved ones to eternal damnation. Manifest destiny Many religions have a notion that they're only for people born into them. Christians and Muslims, on the other hand, have a mandate to convert the world. This naturally brings them into conflict with other religions. The is not to say that these religions don't have their good points as well, but I think it can't be said that they're the same as other major religions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christianity and Islam both have elements not found in other major religions that are conducive to violent extremism.\n","id":"6562d73e-8ecc-4acf-a8f4-f5e4409cf66c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should businesses pay people on a structured and distinct scale or allow employees to negotiate salaries?<|ARGUMENT|>A defined salary structure offers a sense of stability and comfort as one knows their expectations of their income will be satisfied without any confusion or discussion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Knowing that you are working in a defined salary structure means you know what to expect.\n","id":"00a6f8b8-1021-473f-b1f2-d2835b3c3a68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>In fact, it may be an immoral choice to seek medical and commercial techniques to start a family, without responding first to the countless children in need of a family. Especially when sometimes these minors live under very difficult circumstances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With so many children in the world who need loving families, the better thing for people who want families to do would be to adopt one of those children.\n","id":"465f7884-018c-4309-9853-6902c1144cbf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi all, So someone just posted a video on my FB feed about the Yulin dog meat festival It is horrifying For the purpose of this , let's forget about how it's done the way they get the dogs, they treat them etc. and concentrate only on the dog meat eating part. I love dogs, and yes, I find it horrifying that other cultures eat them. However, I also understand that for other cultures, it is horrifying to see us eat beef or pork. In my opinion, the only situation where you are allowed to complain is if you are talking about eating animal meat in general. But if you enjoy eating a good steak, then it is hypocritical to criticize others for eating what they consider is just meat . Again, I am stressing the fact that this is not about the animal cruelty part. It's just about the meat eating. For the sake of this , let's suppose that the animals are bred and slaughtered in the most humane possible way. So <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Giving other cultures sh*t about eating dog meat is hypocritical\n","id":"20daf5d5-0f19-4f8e-a764-d788a2b16c69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I'm a white guy who has had serious relationships with three women in my life a white woman then a half white half Japanese woman then a half white half Iranian woman. I hadn't heard the preposterous, to me suggestion that having a racial dating preference was racist until a couple of weeks ago so by no means was I dating these women to prove any sort of point. The half Iranian woman is the one with whom I am currently romantically involved with. I don't know why that's relevant but just for context, there we are. My problem with this suggestion is it implies your preference is something you can do something about. a Do you agree? Okay, if you do b do you also agree that 'gay conversion 'therapy'' is possible? If you believe you can alter your race based preference, why not your sex based preference? I don't really believe you can change either. I don't understand how anyone can think you have any control over who you are attracted to.  if ye can Ed Thanks 'hankteford' for the video link and comment. Check it out if you've got a spare five minutes and you're interested. Basically, it can be but isn't necessarily racist . Peace x<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Race-based Dating Preferences Are Not Racist\n","id":"0a14c598-fdac-451e-9151-2ca92746c4e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>To assume that the truth is only the truth as it applies to or effects human experience is a very large assumption and acting upon this version of the truth alone is inadvisable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anthrocentrism or Anthropocentrism is a logical weakness, not an asset. Philosophy and ethics tend to move forward when a wider view point is taken.\n","id":"523d2736-3dda-4360-b568-8e235dce46f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we have a single global language?<|ARGUMENT|>Esperanto has an ingenious system for constructing words from essential building blocks, which allows for complexity and rapid expansion of vocabulary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Esperanto is proof that an efficient, global language can be developed.\n","id":"a9bfecfb-b180-4f2f-96c1-dea8bdb486b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever people use the word terrorist they assume that I buy into the narrative that people exist that mean to cause terror to my people country just for the sake of it. Terrorist implies a simple good vs evil narrative which never applies in the real world. Saying terrorist paints with far too broad a brush as it is used to describe almost anyone that has been forced to violence against the US or the UK. I'm not saying that these people are in the right of course all I'm saying is that dumbing down the narrative is done for one of two reasons. Propaganda for spreading fear or saving time to fit news into short segments more easily rather than discussing the issues in a mature manner. Making the narrative of war and struggle appear simple in this way is why I always tend to mistrust or ignore news sources or authority figures that use this word. Cmv<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I immediately distrust people who use the word 'terrorist'.\n","id":"80daa1f8-fe7a-4e3f-ae36-d5e5754e25b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>sexual orientation should be considered grounds for asylum.<|ARGUMENT|>The vast majority of LGBT people who are discriminated or harassed on the grounds of their sexual orientation will never have a chance to claim asylum. Poor people from Africa or India may never be able to afford transport to countries that are more accepting of their lifestyle, and even if they could afford it they may not have the knowledge that they could go elsewhere. As such any policy of asylum for LGBT people who are being discriminated against is never going to be a good solution. And indeed could even be considered to itself be discriminating against those who will never have the opportunity. Instead countries who would want to consider sexual orientation grounds for asylum should be putting their energies into preventing the discrimination in the first place. As in the UN Declaration of Human Rights \u201cAll are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination\u201d,1 all should mean all. Pressure could be put on countries where the asylum seekers would be coming from in many ways. Diplomatic pressure could be applied and countries denied access to some international organisation. In the case of countries where aid is given the aid could be stopped unless laws are changed, for example in 2009 the UK gave Uganda \u00a370 million in aid,2 this money should translate into some leverage. Alternatively if the country does not receive aid it could have some form of sanctions against it or trade ties reduced. 1 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations, 1948. 2 Annie Kelly and Liz Ford, \u2018Aid to Uganda: How the UK government is supporting the country\u2019, guardian.co.uk, 30 January 2009.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Asylum is not the best way of dealing with discrimination against LGBT people.\n","id":"71d13e1d-25b2-47ef-80d4-66d002f71245"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is almost universally unacceptable to require refuse treatment based on a certain race, so why is it ok for gender? The standard ethical response to the request is I will try to find another medical professional to see you do this thing, just know that it may delay your care etc. but I still think this is unreasonable. This is especially true in a western public health system. x200B A case could maybe be made for intimate examinations procedures if someone had a history of sexual assault PTSD but I don't see how that would count for non intimate things. x200B NB. I always wondered what would happen if a phenotypically male Doctor who self identified as female was in this situation and vice versa. x200B I welcome suggestions as to why I am wrong <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Patients requiring a certain gendered medical professional for non-intimate procedures is unreasonable.\n","id":"d9789367-302f-4ca6-81de-b231c0608c10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be automatic voter registration in the US?<|ARGUMENT|>In the last US Presidential election, Russia allegedly targeted voter registration databases in at least 21 states. Automatic registration would make the impact of their attack even greater. p6<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The corruption at best might be redirected; an automated system is still subject to abuse as evidenced by electronic voting machines.\n","id":"3cdaf125-3f91-4998-b83e-1d7057a8e565"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>How Luke is able to touch and kiss Leia while on Crait yet makes no contact with Kylo during their battle is contradictory. They are all Force users, so this can't be the reason he is able to connect with Leia and not Kylo.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are numerous problems with the internal logic of important scenes.\n","id":"26b81ab0-9922-44b0-8d54-25853b9264ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I'd like to point out that I'm well aware of the history of blackface, and the older utilization of it to offensively portray some awful stereotype of black people is racist. However, I don't think that has any bearing on blackface today. What if an actor of another race simply wanted to portray a black character, and so they darkened the color of their skin to make their appearance more accurate? There could be absolutely no mocking of race going on, and people will still shout racism For example, I know a white girl who tried to do an impression of Michelle Obama. She dressed up in blackface and made jokes about healthy eating and vegetables and whatnot. She got torn apart on social media for being racist. Although I can see how this impression is in bad taste, I cannot see how it is racist. She only made fun of Michelle Obama's campaigning, and she never once made fun of her race at all. And yet, it was still considered racist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Blackface\" is not Racist\n","id":"57484f09-579b-4e3b-8cfc-34a6a0d5f898"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>A 2015 study shows 90 percent of Airbnb hosts in New York share their primary residence<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A comprehensive study found that full-time hosts represent just 3.3% of hosts on Airbnb.\n","id":"0badb23f-a016-4a2f-a65a-50d3c96c02ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I freely admit that I have never taken any gender related course in university or any other education environment, so there will be things I'm not aware of. But what I am aware of paints the picture I described in the title. For one, gender studies seem to be based in large part on Freudian psychoanalysis this is according to Wkipedia which has been pretty much debunked again not a psychology major, this is just what I was taught in psychology class in high school . It's as if I could take a physics class based on Deutsche Physik. Like Freudian Psychoanalysis, Gender Studies doesn't seem to be based on the scientific method of making hypothesis and then testing them with experiments made with empirical measurements. To a certain degree this might be necessary since it deals with things that are not really measurable, as feelings and identities tend to be. This is where ideological bias comes in. The vast majority of Gender Studies are Feminists, and generally left Wing. And this in my view taints how these fields are approached. It's perfectly fine to personally believe that for example women are oppressed, but quite another to teach that as fact to impressionable students, when even a way to clearly measure that has never been presented, much less multiple experiments in controlled environments performed. So I think subsidizing these courses with tax money would be like funding creation science courses. If you want to pursue an ideology and pay for it yourself, that is fine by me. You do you. But we fund Universities to teach scientific fact including historical facts like the history of feminism, or description of what feminists believe , not political opinion like feminism itself .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender Studies is a Pseudoscience with a deep ideological bias and shouldn't be taught in publicly-funded Universities.\n","id":"7305b16f-ca22-4cdc-aa7f-3b0e5f567c56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>On the Falcon, R2 plays Chewbacca at Dejarik, and upon it becoming evident he is losing Chewbacca roars and Han explains that Chewbacca has been known to pull peoples' arms out of their sockets for beating him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Beyond the obvious, even Chewbacca's character is weakened in the 'Disneyification' of Star Wars. He goes from near-savage, willing to destroy a droid for beating him in a game, to befriending useless creatures Porgs.\n","id":"d12f6656-8ab3-4189-9166-b4794f894e15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural appropriation wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, it would be very difficult to decide which community decides if it is OK to appropriate dreadlocks. Indians could claim that Veda spoke of dreads four thousands years ago. Eastern Africans could claim that Rastafarianism was born in Ethiopia. Southern Europeans could claim that first art depictions are from Crete. Egyptians could notice that there are mummies with dreads.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This notion that the \"owner\" culture of a cultural \"item\" can set boundaries would requires that it is possible to define cultural \"items\", and their owners, in a unique way.\n","id":"89892ebf-e07c-4866-80b9-119c2b57e0e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should health care providers annually be made to get the flu vaccine?<|ARGUMENT|>Healthcare organizations can use their employees as a more reliable database for feedback on the vaccination because those who work in healthcare are more likely to report any unexpected side effects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Health providers should set a good example to the rest of the population.\n","id":"ffb970e2-bf72-413f-899f-c9b96e3aaf56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, as a male who was circumcised at birth, I am glad that I was circumcised. Any associated pain does not exist to me because I cannot remember it, in the exact same way that pain associated with other surgical procedures I have had under general anesthesia as an adult does not exist because I cannot remember it. The WHO currently recommends male circumcision for HIV prevention and as part of a comprehensive HIV prevention package . It is primarily recommended in areas with high incidences of HIV, but given its demonstrated effect at reducing the spread of the virus I prefer to have any added protection possibly available. I would plan to infer the same protection to any hypothetical children born at this time, especially considering that the complication rates here are significantly lower than in the areas where it is most strongly recommended by the WHO. Living in the midwest U.S. it is culturally nearly expected, with 70 80 prevalence. Because of this, many to most potential sexual partners in my area including myself, as a gay male prefer the aesthetic of a circumcised penis. With the research consensus demonstrating no adverse effects on sexual performance, I see no reason to not stick with the cultural norm. What may help change my view Scientific studies demonstrating prolonged psychological damage due to infant male circumcision. Scientific studies demonstrating that complication rates and severity in the U.S. outweigh potential benefits due to HIV resistance. Scientific evidence that circumcised males in the U.S. are demonstrably less satisfied with their sex lives than uncircumcised males. What will not help change my view People should be allowed to chose . Parents are wholly responsible for their children's health and well being until they are capable of making those decisions on their own. Circumcision complication rates increase dramatically with age. If everyone stopped doing it, it wouldn't be culturally expected anymore. Yeah, not going to happen any time soon. I am talking the choice for parents to circumcise in areas of the U.S. where it is highly prevalent today. TL DR Not traumatized by own circumcision, culturally expected, 1 to HIV prevention. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am a circumcised male. I see no issues with the procedure and would circumcise my child if he were born in the U.S. today.\n","id":"933b1781-2d0f-48cf-bc5b-e2c4ba658f83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should businesses be allowed to deny service to anyone?<|ARGUMENT|>Like a home, if you own or rent a property your tenant rights can be invoked to deign entry and removal of anyone for any reason as you see fit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A business, especially a small business, should have the right to deny service to anyone because they own the business.\n","id":"724d1911-361b-4e0d-8dd2-1e20c84e1621"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Starting from the position that gt a victim is a person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action a person that has no knowledge of an event that would cause emotional harm to them, cannot constitute as a victim. Is an action morally wrong if it has no victims? It is the knowledge of the event that causes its negative impacts and not the event in and of itself. Being a person that was cheated on and cheated, i believe that if i never found out about it and just let the relationship run its course, it would save a ton of pain and drama. likewise in the case of a cheater, concealing the fact, does not produce extra amount of misery, and just carries the guilt if present solely on his shoulders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Infidelity is a victimless crime if the other person never finds out. Please\n","id":"4d2b9f5b-7ea5-4650-a188-416a8fa98047"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Will Win the Game of Thrones?<|ARGUMENT|>They cannot marry, but they may fall in love, making it difficult if they may have to fight against each other for some reason not yet disclosed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As Jon Snow is a Targaryen himself, they can not marry. But Daenerys is looking for a useful marriage.\n","id":"8b3da4b9-e09c-475d-9e50-fef6212a13db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In much the same way as drugs, prostitution, gambling, or other victimless crimes, dog fighting is going to happen irrespective of the law. Legalization would lead to increased tax revenue, less organized crime. and safer, more humane environments for all those involved. It would also end the practice of baiting game dogs with helpless puppies and the like. I understand that many would argue that the dogs are victims as are drug addicts and prostitutes for that matter , but only in the sense that eating horse meat which is illegal in many places victimizes horses, or even horse racing, which is already legalized, taxed, and regulated in controlled environments. The fact is countless dogs are already being put to death in animal shelters, often at the taxpayers' expense. Revenue from dog fighting could alleviate this cost considerably, perhaps even allowing animals to be kept longer, increasing their chances of adoption. Highly aggressive dogs are unlikely to ever be adopted however except perhaps by illegal dog fighting fans currently , nor should they be. It would only be the aggressive dogs used in fights, as they're clearly willing. That's why they need to be kept in separate cages, otherwise they'd be mauling each other of their own volition. Dogs too old, young, sickly, or cowardly to fight could still be put down as usual since they would make for unentertaining match ups and would be bad for gambling. Even the dogs that do fight would receive better medical treatment afterwards from veterinarians on hand, and or humane euthanasia rather than drowning, hanging, etc. You certainly wouldn't get the likes of a Michael Vick doing a Pete Townshend impression with a terrier in place of a guitar.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dog fighting should be legalized, taxed, and regulated at animal shelters.\n","id":"a3a6b9b4-9e3a-413e-ad8f-ecbb36c9b87f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If the citizens don\u2019t have guns, they can\u2019t defend themselves, if they can\u2019t defend themselves they can\u2019t defend their rights, therefore they can be conquered. A citizenry without guns just empowers a government to engage in tyrannical acts, and immediately gives all the power to the government. To maintain a free state the power needs to reside in the people, if this doesn\u2019t hold true then it means the government doesn\u2019t need the consent of the people to make decisions. Guns also have many other benefits, like defense against robbery, and an impressively high success rape prevention rate. Conservative estimates of deterrence against crime with guns are 1,900,000 yearly in the USA. Gun control is an ineffective way of attacking gun violence. A full gun ban or a ban on \u201cassault rifles\u201d has never conclusively been proven to reduce homicides. In fact the gun ban in England only caused homicides to rise, and to this day the homicide rate hasn\u2019t been lower than the year the gun ban took action. In Australia the homicide rate remained steady for the coming years, and even peaked in 1999 and 2003, in those years the homicide rate was higher than the year before the gun ban. Furthermore, Australia now has more guns than before the buyback. The assault rifle gun ban of 1994 2004 that took place in the USA hasn\u2019t been proven to reduce gun crime nor homicides.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guns are necessary to maintain a free state, and gun control has never worked.\n","id":"6874eccb-7b78-4ae0-b2fa-fbec78f66da4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen various threads on reddit, and heard many feminists complain about people telling other people especially men telling women to smile. Yet I've never heard someone complain about a cashier or random person on the street telling someone to have a nice day. I don't really see the difference. In both cases, if you want to be offended, you can interpret the comment as someone demanding that you do something for them. But if you're not looking to be offended, it can easily be ignored as meaningless small talk. So it seems the real difference is whether or not the victim wants to be offended, rather than whether or not the action is actually offensive. The only exception to this is if you know with a reasonable level of certainty that the statement of smile is said with the talker's benefit in mind. In other words, if what they are really saying with reasonable certainty is smile so you are more pleasant for me to look at then you can be offended because you are being objectified so a reason other than that someone suggested you smile or have a nice day . And I suppose there could be a similar situation with have a nice day if the statement was made because you having a nice day would provide some type of benefit to the person making the suggestion although it wouldn't be specifically objectification the, but just the expectation that you do something for their benefit .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You should not take offense to someone saying \"smile\" to you unless you take equivalent offense to someone saying \"have a nice day\" to you with one exception\n","id":"1b562a1a-e3f6-40c1-96f2-8d0f0cf98bf8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Law enforcement officials themselves justify the high ratio of women prosecuted for doing sex work by pointing to using male officers to target female sex workers Stoddard, p. 244<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most law enforcement officers in responsible for enforcing sex work laws are male, which demonstrates a structural bias towards prosecuting women for law violations over males.\n","id":"7a1206a7-0366-4f6d-85fc-77886bee53c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By paying taxes in the United States, a person funds the ongoing practices carried out by the federal government. Those practices include unjust imprisonment, torture, rape, and dehumanization murder and extrajudicial punishments and a host of other human rights abuses and crimes against humanity. To fund those practices is practically indistinguishable from a war crime and morally indefensible. As tax evasion is punishable by imprisonment, it would be convenient if you could change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Paying taxes in the United States is morally indefensible.\n","id":"7f0d8e36-8d5a-4b3d-96da-dffcffef204d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Punishment was much more widespread in the British West Indies than in the South of the US Fleischmann, p. 12<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The conditions of slavery were better in North America than in South America.\n","id":"a12f1664-50ec-4405-9092-69b6b03b1b21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This opinion is based on my time as a UN contractor in Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan South and North , and Afghanistan. Working in an aviation support role, I remember that the flights we were doing were ineffective to say the least. We carried a myriad of UN staff who seemed more intent on visiting parts of the country rather than helping, and that it was incredibly difficult for any NGO staff to get on board. Further, and I say this with inference rather than fact, the flights were inefficient to the point of suspicion, in that it seemed intent on using as much fuel as possible. The widely held belief was that there was massive corruption going on with the fuel contracts. I personally saw two UN support staff dismissed over the reporting of these deficiencies. In my time spent in these countries, the former colonial power would work closely with the UN, and from my fly in the wall perspective almost all talks revolved around negotiating mining rights and monetary values. I never heard talk about the plight of the people. As well, there was widespread knowledge among the UN contract corps of abuses by UN peacekeepers in the field. Child prostitution at one of the outbases was extremely rampant, to the point that whenever I visited said base the kids were waiting at the fence to offer themselves to you. Overall, I saw most of the good work done by the NGO's in the area, and the general consensus from most populations DRC and Sudan was that the UN was making things worse. I have many more anecdotes that can further my side of the argument, however I once did believe that the UN was capable and did make a difference. I'm hoping for someone who has an alternate experience to contradict or illuminate my argument, as well as point out why things would be worse without them, rather than, say, a conglomerate of nations like NATO or the African Union. Thank You.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the United Nations is a complete sham that causes more harm than good.\n","id":"2ffd0cf8-3218-418c-ad37-fd57decdc960"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand it exists to make obese people feel more included, but when it's used by ad companies to promote products. I think it's dangerous as it ignores how unhealthy obesity scientifically is. I should add that I don't think fat shaming is right either, as that probably doesn't fix the issue. But body positivity is very harmful to society as obese people are led to believe that it's not as unhealthy as it is in reality. Japan has created a law wherein employees between the ages of 40 to 75 have to get their waists measured to ensure they aren't overweight. If the waist size target isn't hit, the company would get fined. I'm oversimplying it since I haven't researched the metabo law in depth, but I believe that's the gist of it. I think ideas like that are fantastic and actually benefit society greatly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Promoting body positivity obesity is no different from promoting drug use or anorexia.\n","id":"a4ce6def-5a21-4b4a-b14f-96583b3a5bc4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Detroit city is a wonderful place when it comes to events such as sports teams, concerts, community events and, ect. . The city has beautiful architecture and also a wide variety of street artist and art installations. from bansky being one of the biggest, and one of my personal favorites to the Heidelberg Project . The community is amazing and comes together in times of need, to help others. I feel as if the city is safe as long as you act respectfully. I feel like my views are very solidly in place but i have heard a few stories that have shaken my views slightly. If you have visited the city or live in around Detroit what were your first impressions?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Detroit,Mi is a great place, it has heaps of history and the culture and community's are worth getting involved in and learning about.\n","id":"593d6542-fddb-4876-9022-e37a137dc433"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Racial Profiling Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>It's a police officer's job to determine if there's reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed. Someone's race alone isn't statistically significant enough to infer likelihood of illegal activity, and therefore a reasonable person wouldn't consider it grounds for reasonable suspicion. i.e. you don't see a random person on the street and think \"they're committing a crime\" simply because of their skin\/eyes\/etc., there has to be other factors<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Racial profiling is ineffective as it focuses attention on how individuals look, rather than actual suspicious or criminal behavior.\n","id":"e8e11e0d-3f1c-42d8-ba99-d420305a84ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every single day we see different claims by politicians about how they were critical of the US led invasion of Iraq in order to virtue signal and pander to their electorate. It seems that the Bush Jr invasion is seen a a blot on the record of America. I think it was a good thing. Saddam Hussein was a fascist dictator who reveled in the amount of destruction he was able to inflict on the ethnic minorities under his control. It was a major uplift in regional security to overthrown an unstable warlord. That does not mean the war and invasion are immune from criticism, but the removal of Saddam Hussein is something that I believe should be celebrated and respected among people who actually care about people other than Americans. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The liberation of Iraq should be celebrated, not condemned by modern society, even if the reasons for invasion were based on lies an ulterior motives.\n","id":"828fc86a-ff22-455b-9472-510186ad15d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Because I really don't. I do support the idea of network neutrality, and it sounds great on paper. That said, we're not looking at the end of net neutrality, we're looking at the FCC classification of ISPs. It's important to know what we're dealing with here. The FCC can still penalize an ISP for anti competitive behavior, the concept of net neutrality isn't dead, it just isn't going to manifest as a Title II classification. The proper way to enact net neutrality would be passing a bipartisan bill that specifies in simple language how ISPs must behave. Such an important policy decision shouldn't rest with the FCC to begin with. I have to wonder about the thought process of Democrats who fight every move Trump makes, calling him a tyrant, only to turn around and demand that his administrative agency be trusted with massive power to regulate the entire internet. However, the legislative option is off the table for the time being. Even if the two sides could agree to pass something palatable on this issue, we still can't trust them to not also pass horrible shit at the same time. Remember our recent history of bipartisan fuckups such as the Patriot Act, the Affordable Healthcare Act, the Assault Weapons Ban, CISA, and FISA. Even assuming for the sake of argument that net neutrality is desirable, it's not worth the risk that having a working legislature poses. The internet saw explosive growth for decades before Obama's FCC reclassified ISPs in his second term. We never got a chance to see these tiered packages and slow lanes that we were so ominously warned about. In this sense, the threat of deregulation is largely hypothetical. Mobile and cellular networks were never subjected to net neutrality regulation at all, yet 3G 4G internet is still perfectly usable. On these networks, carriers generally provide streaming services that don't count towards the subscriber's data cap. Unfair? Arguably. If these strategies were to be used on landlines, maybe the FTC or FCC should step in. Light touch regulation has historically worked fantastic for the growth and operation of the American internet. This doesn't mean that Title II is the answer. Convincing those on the Right or alt right or new right or far right or whatever your preferred pejorative is of the threat of deregulation will fall on exceptionally deaf ears. We recently saw how blogger Andrew Anglin and his website The Daily Stormer were essentially erased from the internet by a handful of powerful web companies such as Google, Cloudflare, and Godaddy. All for having the nerve to hurl insults at some useless cunt who died while blocking traffic. We already live with the very real prospect of being silenced on the internet for having the wrong opinion. So when the left tells us that the free internet is in danger, there is just no way that anyone who has been paying attention can take them seriously. The left controls all of the major tech companies, including search engines, domain registrars, ddos protection, financial payment handlers, and social media. They can and will de platform you if you upset them. The idea that these companies and their supporters are suddenly worried about losing internet freedoms is laughable. This leads us to why the left and their weaponized tech companies are pushing for tight Title II regulation, what's in it for them? Two things they don't want to share the role of being the gatekeepers of acceptable opinion, and they don't want to get bent over by the ISPs for using massive amounts of bandwidth. The argument that the ISPs might charge high data customers more holds water. However, it is unlikely that they will squeeze residential consumers, but rather the companies that use extraordinary amounts of data. Google Youtube, Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services have become rich by selling their product over the lines maintained by the ISPs. The ISPs know that they can't really get much more money from residential subscribers than they do already, not without massive outrage. The big tech giants, however, have deep pockets, and they aren't exactly aligned with the ISPs in a business or political sense. Without regulation, the ISPs could demand that Youtube or Netflix pay more for the bandwidth they use. Personally, I have no problem with this, especially if it leads to their demise. This type of free market anarchy might seem scary to a leftist. I will also admit that it is unfortunate to be aligned with an entity such as Google, even if the nature of such alignment is limited to being consumers of the same internet services. The answer to this type of potential corporate abuse is, obviously, increased competition. This is where some say the FCC has failed us. FCC chairman Ajit Pai has put forward a very loose definition of a competitive market, which includes some areas that only have one ISP option. It is worth noting that Ajit Pai was nominated to the FCC in 2012 by Barack Obama under pressure from Mitch McConnell. When Tom Wheeler resigned as chairman, Ajit became the de facto head of the FCC. He was officially confirmed October 2017 with the help of a handful of senate Democrats. The fact is that he's a leftover swamp creature. It might have been a mistake for Trump to keep him, but the political reality demanded that he choose his battles. Only recently has the FCC's role become highly politicized. Like everyone else in our country, the ISPs and Silicon Valley have chosen sides. While the big California tech companies are in a symbiotic relationship with the Democrats, the ISPs have aligned themselves with the Republicans. What is good for one side is bad for the other. This is the price we pay for irrespobsible exercise of the two party system. So how do we ensure a free and open internet without federal legislation or the FCC? The first step is massive antitrust intervention. Companies like Amazon, Comcast, and Google absolutely need to be broken up and pitted against each other. The second step is to make utility poles accessible to smaller ISPs, we need to foster competition in order to make the free market system work as intended. The third step is to encrypt everything end to end. The ISPs will fight us on this because it will increase network load, but we must be stubborn. The less data they can analyze, the less effective any censorship will be. But many people don't want a free market system. They want the fiber optic lines running to their homes to operate by the same rules as the water main or the gas lines. They want the ISPs to be a common carrier that serves only the public at large. To that, all I can say is that if the taxpayer truly wants common carrier internet, they'll have to open their checkbooks and pay for one. In fact, I would support the construction of a public internet infrastructure for the same reason I support the highway system and public mass transit. But in this case, the ISPs invested in running lines when the taxpayer was either too lazy or poor to have their government do it. Now that the investment is paying off, they want to seize control of these lines, and tell a private business how to operate. Strictly speaking, this is acceptable under certain circumstances, all business ought to operate at the pleasure of the public at large. When a business becomes detrimental to the public, they can step in. However, it will take more than hypothetical threats of abuse to justify such a socialist seizure, we should give the ISPs enough rope to hang themselves before we preemptively do it for them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The argument over the FCC's net neutrality decision is pointless and moot. It doesn't affect me, and I don't care.\n","id":"b6a5c2ac-4eaf-40d9-ae2d-d4cd18274c86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Constant disagreements within a religious organisation are disruptive and interfere with the ability of the organisation to cater for its members' spiritual needs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These exemptions are a way to prevent future disagreements within the organisation.\n","id":"0ed18b2e-a9ee-4506-a9ab-820a123b0cee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build an international space elevator?<|ARGUMENT|>A space elevator would provide a platform on which to build ships which would not need to overcome as much gravity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A space elevator will make the colonisation of other planets much easier.\n","id":"21a0e937-06d7-4a60-9dd6-9742b1f0791d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a huge supporter of democracy, and I'm of the belief that a healthy democracy should encourage as many people to vote as possible. Voter disenfranchisement is something I consider to be a huge detriment to a healthy democracy. I'll focus on the most extreme part of this view first people currently in prison should vote. This would be a massive logistical nightmare, but to keep the debate focused on my views on democracy let's pretend that it isn't a factor. I believe this for a few reasons Democracy works best when as many voices as possible are heard Voting is a powerful tool. You choose who should run almost every important position in the government, either directly or indirectly. You directly vote for your president, for your mayor and for your congress people. Appointed positions like supreme court justices and cabinet positions are elected by the president, and your elected governors do something similar. That means your vote holds a lot of power. You can put people in office who claim to support your views, and vote them out if they betray their election promises. In an ideal system, this would keep only those who represent the will of the majority in power. When people don't vote, or can't vote, this runs into problems. You can end up in a situation where the vocal minority outvotes a silent majority, and the minority gets their way. Either everyone votes, or only some of us have an influence over politics. We often have incredibly strict and unfair laws. This could balance the scales When one group of people loses the will or ability to vote, their views are't going to be take into account when writing new policy. Right now in the US we have more people in prison than the entirety of China, and that's not per capita. We have laws that many consider unfair, such as our harsh drug laws. Whether you agree with that or not, I think it's clear that we're only hearing one side of the story at the voting booth. Edit My view hinges on the idea that allowing felons in prison to vote is a net benefit to society. This is where it's most likely to be changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ignoring any practical problems, felons currently in prison should be allowed to vote\n","id":"2cc0fbff-5b9d-4a47-aac0-5d80a92b8d08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Educational uniformity among member states would make it easier to find work abroad. USE degrees and diplomas would be more recognized internationally.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Streamlining national standards and systems of education means people would not be held back by needless bureaucracy.\n","id":"06dc6e9f-6893-4e0f-9ce9-f6fd9351ad42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Elections are, in the US, by and large one winner or another. The only way an election is affected, then, is if the victor is changed. In extremely close elections I am thus still several thousand times if one candidate wins by a margin of a few thousand from having any influence on the outcome of the election, which would be my goal in casting a ballot. There are certain elections where this is not the case, but I cannot vote expecting that any more than I can expect to win the lottery. It follows, then, that unless I am interested in an idealist do your part sense of voting that, at the end of the day, actually has no consequence, it is a better use of my time to do almost anything else. That's not to say I don't have an interest in politics, or that I think everyone should follow my logic, I am only speaking from an individual perspective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As an individual, voting is a waste of my time. Even in the closest election I could reasonably hope for I am orders of magnitude from at all influencing anything but my own sense of civic participation.\n","id":"8f7d4243-89d5-48bf-a9bb-22721cdb41b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While he has issued no formal tax plans or economic agenda, the implication of his political alignment democratic socialist and speaking points implies his economic stance. This stance is in line with other democratic socialists, none of which have kept countries at the top of production and RGDP. As a country focused on economic dominance, the U.S.A. cannot radically increase taxes or interest rates to fund all of his campaign promises without major economic repercussions. I hold this view as an undergraduate economics major at a relatively conservative school in the U.S.A. I see myself as a fiscal conservative and social liberal. I tend to vote republican on the local level and democrat on the national level, mostly for economic reasons. It is my belief that social trends will change with the times, and that it is much more likely that the president will have an effect on the economy than social issues like abortion, in part due to the congressional deadlock. I included some material I have read concerning Sanders\u2019 economics in the last few weeks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bernie Sanders is unelectable because of his economic policy\n","id":"a918a0af-52da-4f89-91fe-f8649e8a3086"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people marry outside their religious faith?<|ARGUMENT|>The University of Texas' research also found that students' performance on reading, math, and science tests were negatively associated with several forms of parental religiosity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who identify as atheist or agnostic tend to be more intelligent than those who have religious leanings.\n","id":"75a76829-4a2d-4a25-881c-528c11372ffd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a communications major, I have come to learn a lot about the power of media, and the way in which it can influence its audiences. However, the U.S. law prohibiting alcohol commercials from showing consumption of the product seems completely senseless and hypocritical to me. To start, I\u2019m unsure of exactly what the creators of this law are trying to accomplish. Anyone, even a very young child, who sees a beer commercial will know that the purpose of the product is to drink it. This is not to say that I believe the effects of beer consumption should be advertised in any way, but I will stand by the notion that viewers are not oblivious to the fact that the purpose of a beer is to drink it. Though many might argue that a commercial showing alcohol consumption promotes drinking to audiences that may be underage, these viewers are still exposed to the act of drinking in television programs on these same channels. In other words, a child who is watching \u201c30 Rock\u201d with his parents can see a beer ad in which no one actually drinks the beer, but after the commercial break he might be exposed to Alec Baldwin stumbling around his office after throwing back a case. And we all know that\u2019s not the worst of what underage drinkers might see on these television programs in terms of alcohol consumption. In fact, because some stricter regulations should be applied in terms of consumption in commercials i.e. number of drinks consumed , these types of television advertisements could even set a positive example for audiences. With the way in which drinking is glorified in terms of getting \u201chammered\u201d, if you will, casual drinking could promote a more mature approach to the activity that is not always portrayed in entertainment media. There still remain many regulations in terms of alcohol television advertising that seem to be more practical ads can\u2019t use characters or celebrities mostly popular to children, they can\u2019t play music associated with young people, actors have to be at least 25 and look like they are at least 21, etc. . Keeping these in place, I think it would be safe to show consumption as most already know what alcohol is used for. And if not, they will soon learn after this commercial break.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the U.S. advertising regulation that prohibits television commercials from showing the actual consumption of alcohol is senseless.\n","id":"0a67016d-b1bf-41f2-9b85-cd60d6d0186b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>As our society becomes more and more automated and a society that will function with less human workers becomes possible, it may be time to reexamine our assumptions about what actually makes a society \"wealthy\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In times of increasing automation, 3D printing, and intelligent software, this assumption is outdated.\n","id":"86c05fcd-6141-4fe8-bded-e499d026bf3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that someone running for the most important political office in the country should have some actual political experience under their belt. It makes no sense to me that anyone would vote for a presidential candidate who has never held political office before. What has Trump ever done besides plaster his name on buildings and host reality TV shows? How exactly does that qualify him to be a viable presidential candidate? While I wouldn't say that being a senator governor ought to be a prerequisite for running for president, I fail to see why anyone would vote for someone who is so inexperienced politically when you have people with such qualifications also running.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump is unqualified to be president.\n","id":"2e99e315-310d-45c8-80ef-25d62effda53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many people seem to be outraged over the Cambridge Analytica situation which is harming Facebook as a brand, but I don't see the big problem. The worst case scenario is that I get an advert that resonates with me. As long as I'm not being harmed by this practice then I just don't care and I'm not sure why there is such an outrage over it. I could agree that what they did is wrong in terms of influencing the election unfairly, but people are upset that their individual data was used, even though I don't think this has any negative effect on them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A corporation using my Facebook data doesn't harm me so I'm not bothered by it in the slightest.\n","id":"58395df0-e707-4d90-969e-6c772b553305"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's Veteran's day and everyone is saying that we need to honor our troops. My opinions are pretty well encapsulated by the article here I need to point out this particular passage before I get accused of being a traitor or something of the sort, Reviewing the research proving cruelty and mendacity within law enforcement and the military, and reading the stories of trauma and tragedy caused by officers and soldiers, does not mean that no cop or troop qualifies as a hero, but it certainly means that many of them are not heroes. Edit Thanks to all who've responded. I enjoyed the conversation. It's certainly helped me understand the complexities involved in this issue. I will never fully understand war. It's something that I hope I will never need to personally experience. I hope that a day will come when none of us need to experience it. Although I still think that soldiers are morally responsible for their actions regardless of whether they are being ordered by superiors, I also have come to realize that I was being hypocritical. Just as some soldiers do bad things, some do good. We should condemn the former while celebrating the latter. It's just that holidays like this seem to ignore this distinction and you get immediately labeled as unpatriotic if you point it out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should stop hero-worshiping soldiers and admit that their job involves homocide\n","id":"b43ad100-a7b0-4c21-8fac-fce4ede7eb1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just don\u2019t see why the government shouldn\u2019t be allowed to track your information and monitor your internet access. If your information is online, that means you don\u2019t mind if people see it. Reddit has blown up when the subject of internet monitoring comes up, but I don\u2019t see why it\u2019s such a big deal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don\u2019t believe in online privacy.\n","id":"db081357-7920-4dc9-a854-1f000f6e408d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I also think these mothers mothers to be look down on those weak women who opted for the drugs usually epidural . I am a guy, so I'm definitely on the outside looking in. I cannot think of a reason why a woman would eschew drugs when they are readily available. If you took those drugs, you wouldn't have been any less of a woman. Your birthing experience would not have been any less valid. And you DEFINITELY wouldn't have been weak. Seriously, my hats off to ANY woman who can carry a baby to term, and also to those who tried but couldn't. You're ALL awesome For the drug free mothers, did you like the pain? Did you feel it would make you closer to the baby growing inside you? And do you seriously not look down upon the women who opted for the epidural? Or do you look for opportunities to mention your drug free birth as often as you can? So for the ladies who did the drug free thing purposely, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think mothers who intentionally gave birth without drugs did it for ego\/bragging rights\n","id":"d5cb968f-c962-46fc-bb7e-30a268c2a331"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Not all Black Americans have a connection with slavery. Right now, for example, more than 1.8 million immigrants from Africa are living in the United States.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unclear who would be entitled to reparations. Black Americans as a whole are not.\n","id":"4bc31e83-600d-495d-a39c-4c58ca657520"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments provide a universal basic income?<|ARGUMENT|>Providing a UBI will cause problems in terms of the workforce as people will no longer have to work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A formal UBI is likely to cause societal problems that outweigh the benefits of such a policy.\n","id":"699655c4-348d-43d0-9304-5562adf2a40b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is enlightened despotism superior to democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Liquid Feedback can only be accessed by registered members.\" This adds another barrier to entry for prospective voters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This was a poorly implemented example of Liquid Democracy and so should not be extrapolated from.\n","id":"c9deea9a-4065-4cb4-acd7-77c735ed1cf1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>In her book, C.J. Pascoe showed through over a year's worth of research how boys are socialized to adopt and perform a dominant, aggressive, controlling, and sexualized version of masculinity, and how their status in society and inclusion in the category \"men\" depends upon it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept of toxic masculinity critiques the assumptions and expectations of men as dominant, violent, unemotional, and sexually aggressive.\n","id":"2672bc0a-800d-41bf-a2e4-3ce687b2d347"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>all nations should ban bullfighting<|ARGUMENT|>Ernest Hemingway said about bullfighting that it is \"a decadent art in every way . if it were permanent it could be one of the major arts.\"9 Bullfighting should thus not be understood as simply a 'bloodsport' with some cultural connotations but rather as an inherently cultural art form. The poet Garcia Lorca said in the 1930s that bullfighting is \"the last serious thing in the modern world\".10 In many ways the seriousness of watching a life-and-death struggle in the arena is nothing short of poetic and this significance is perceived not only by the audience and the bullfighting community but in the wider culture of the nations which currently permit bullfighting. Robert Elms argued in 2010 that, in nations which do not practice bullfighting, \u201cOur squeamishness means that we prefer death which is mechanical and invisible, while the Spanish understand that it is part of a cycle.. It is a public celebration of death a subject we prefer to hide from in Britain which, when it is done well, becomes a celebration of life. The man charged with the task of delivering a fine end to this fierce and powerful creature will dance with it along the way, laying his own life on the line to create a swirling symbiosis.\"10 Hemmingway echoed this, arguing that bullfighting promoted an understanding of violent death: \"The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.\"9 This is why Madrid and other places have protected and recognized bullfighting as an art form, not just a sport.1 The understanding and cultural value in the bullfighting nations stems from their long history of the practice. Bullfighting traces its roots to prehistoric bull worship and sacrifice. The killing of the sacred bull tauroctony is the essential central iconic act of Mithras, which was commemorated in the mithraeum wherever Roman soldiers were stationed. The oldest representation of what seems to be a man facing a bull is on the celtiberian tombstone from Clunia and the cave painting \"El toro de hachos\", both found in Spain.8 The continuity of the modern bullfights with these ancient commemorations is shown by the fact that in Spain, many youth idealize bull fighters for their strength, grace, and wit in outmaneuvering bulls.10 This is valuable in inspiring and compelling success in future generations. Bullfighting is a genuinely popular and enjoyed cultural art form in many nations: Spanish bullrings are not kept alive by tourists. Rather, despite the economic recession which has hit Spain especially hard, the bullfights are still thriving, its top practitioners are huge stars, and its fan are intensely devoted, because it is still the very soul of this dark and complex country. Bullfighting thrives because its local fans are dedicated, and they are dedicated because they perceive its poetry and value to the culture.10 Thus bullfighting has a cultural value which trumps misplaced concerns regarding 'animal rights', especially as 'animal rights' are simply a concept created by each culture and defined in different ways. Culturally, it is acceptable in the West to eat meat, and so this is legal even though it causes cows to suffer and die. Similarly, the culture of the bullfighting countries places a value upon the bullfight, thus privileging it above the 'rights' of the animal. To allow the moral qualms of other non-bullfighting cultures to dictate cultural practices in Spain or Mexico would be to privilege these other cultures' values above those of bullfighting nations, and deprive them of part of their uniqueness. As Robert Elms argues, if the bullfight dies out due to the pressure of other cultures' moral qualms, bullfighting nations will become \"more like everywhere else, dominated by gaudy globalism and neutered by the homogenising forces of technology and accepted taste.\"10<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bullfighting is an art-form and an important cultural tradition\n","id":"bfa3ba9f-93cc-4940-9561-b1b571e4e8cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>gt And Jesus said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's Mark 12 17 I was ordained as a minister in the Universal Life Church maybe 15 years ago. I registered online and it took 5 minutes. With a little creativity and some paperwork, I could apply for tax exemption perhaps by starting a commune? My commune would use the same public resources as everyone else. As a private citizen, away from my organization, I could send my children to public schools, claim welfare benefits, and enjoy the relative protections and upkeep of the state. Pending how charismatic that I might be, I could have a relatively large compound with surface parking, attracting thousands of visitors, perhaps straining the roads and sewers of the small county that I reside in. It might not be easy to incorporate as a church, and I may be less than sincere, but it is possible. My special authority on the universe will be difficult to challenge and I might tap into thousands of years of western religious traditions to cement my point. Ultimately, the value that I provide as a church is only moderately questionable as the pretense is difficult to rule upon without infringing on my religion. If I paid taxes on my church's earnings, then I would contribute to the quality of services provided by my state. I would be free to lobby legislative bodies and more fully engage my government as a paying participant. I could still incorporate as a nonprofit on the clearly defined activities that I participate in which do qualify with measurable purpose, but the effort that I spend reaping souls would be my own enterprise. Is there reason why church's shouldn't be treated as any other organization? I heard this view years ago, Churches should pay taxes , and it has always stuck with me. I can't seem to view them as anything more than a personal endeavor that I subsidize as a citizen tax payer. Edit Users cold08 miyakohouou have changed my mind. Without considering the power dynamic, I would feel that the tax exemption of religious organizations is antiquated gratis to indulge something rather unnecessary, but in reality it's a leash that keeps those influences guarded. A taxable entity can participate and fully lobby for their causes with all coercion, influence, and wealth afforded to them, factors of which that are mitigated by the controls of an exempt status. Further a profitable tax entity will find policy protections from dependent governments. The potential for abuse is concerning. I no longer think churches should be taxed. The analogy would be grabbing a wolf by the ears.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think churches should pay taxes.\n","id":"8ec41577-3a08-4d3f-973e-a87c03b356eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Perhaps is not the same situation in all the world, so here is what happens in my country to clarify There is congress. There are a lot of over paid congressmans . Each congressman is supposed to represent a sector of the country population. So, I think this is more than obsolete, so, in my opinion, the best way to go, will be some kind of open sourced software to collect and resume the actual opinion of each citizen, something like an election. By doing this nobody needs to be represented , less money will be wasted and the overall system will be cheaper and much more transparent. CHANGE MY VIEW.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe \"the congress\" is obsolete and unnecessary with Internet and today's technology.\n","id":"d96f863f-fa6b-427f-aa35-657188c66127"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Preface This is about fantasy hockey but I'm sure it can apply to most if not all types of fantasy sports leagues. I'm in a fantasy hockey league with about a dozen other people. Members of the group are always making trade offers, and most of them are absolute garbage. I always decline. Here's my take FIRST POINT If you want a player I have, they're better off in my hands. SECOND POINT If the players you're offering really were performing well, you wouldn't be offering them to me. Your only motive is to improve your team, not help me. You should instead search for free agents or wait for others to drop injured players. THIRD POINT Beyond the whole it's fun aspect, fantasy leagues are pointless. You could argue Trading makes it more fun but I disagree. Choose your team, take 5 minutes once a week to set your roster, and joke with your friends about who's winning. No research, trading, or other activity is necessary to have fun. Your trades are turning a game into an annoying chore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In fantasy sports leagues, your trade offer is always a bad deal for me.\n","id":"8e222748-abee-46a5-81ed-9b43d1e7d7f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My argument is based on the belief that a person can only be liable for the consequences of their actions. I will edit this post to make further points as people respond.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that downloading and being in possession of child porn is a victimless crime\n","id":"540ef23e-5a9d-4431-8bab-65664b05b844"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>The right to vote freely is the essence of a democratic society. To deny the right not to vote harms this important principle, as the vote can no longer be considered free.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right to vote in a democratic society also extends to the right not to vote.\n","id":"31a3ccdb-7a53-4c56-a205-5378e7828db6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should be the Next EU Commission President?<|ARGUMENT|>Ska Keller supports binding rules rather than voluntary approaches to further gender equality. Her conviction is that \"simply asking for volunteering and good will has not produced any results yet.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An election of Ska Keller will further gender equality in the EU.\n","id":"d6b52315-dd0c-4175-a01f-ffa240c78bef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK pitbulls are ceased by the police and are placed in extremely harsh conditions sometimes resulting in death. The reasoning behind this ban is from the belief that such breeds are considered agressive and dangerous. Such is not the case however. The character and aggression of the dog usually comes with the way it's been raised. A street dog of a Dalmatian breed is more likely to be more aggressive than a pitbull dog with a good owner. For, the conditions said Dalmatian is placed is much harsher than the situation the pitbull is in, forcing it to adopt Wilder instincts. I belief such nonsensical policies should be abolished for not only is it inhumane, it is a waste of services such as the police force. Instead, abusive owners should be targetted and dogs which were raised to be bullys should be trained into either police dogs or remove their aggression.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":": The banning of specific breeds of dogs in the UK should be abolished.\n","id":"05e5722f-3473-447c-9563-7a038f7d788f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>In poor countries, landowners are the elite. They have the most to lose in a move towards democracy, as democracy would require land redistribution Acemoglu & Robinson, p. 289 Economic growth, which involves industrialisation is first crucial to lessen the power and influence of these landowners.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In poor countries, with little wealth, democracy requires redistribution of wealth and resources. The elite have more to lose in such countries as the total available wealth is limited, whereas redistribution in richer countries without destroying the power of the elite is possible.\n","id":"2c2e6cf8-8d72-470e-8682-e1b232de3a2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sentence 1 is not up for debate, only 2 or 3. I appreciate that acknowledging discussing this difference constitutes a justification for men\u2019s poor behavior. It is also an explanation. This behavior by men will be with society for a long time, forever, maybe. To ignore its basis does not make sense. Among other things, it leads to the Do we legalize prostitution? debate long unresolved . Most of us probably agree on the basic narrative Certainly women, once they have selected a partner, might want more frequency and duration of sex than men. But on virtually every other count the difference between men and women is stark. Multiple partners, multiple partners at the same time, anal sex, quickie sex no foreplay , cheating on a spouse, public sex in parks, backseat of cars men are far more interested in such behavior. And topping of the list is men\u2019s willingness to have sex with an attractive woman they just met. A fair number of men would take advantage of the nearest empty room, given the opportunity. The multiple lines of evidence include 1 the widespread use of prostitution and mistresses and 2 the ubiquitous complaints by large numbers of women of men pressuring them for sex. 3 Men\u2019s persistent interest in sex in later years of life in contrast to women . Another area not often discussed seems pertinent now, given the recent women who have recounted being abused as teens. Topic First sex by 15 year olds initiated pressured forced by an adult. I elect not to discuss homosexuality, especially the morass of older men and boys. I refer only to heterosexuals below. For 90 percent of 15 year old boys, being seduced by an older 28 35 reasonably attractive women is a dream come true. Extraordinary exciting. The occasional examples we hear of a boy traumatized by the event that struck me as odd the first time I heard of it is probably related, in half the cases, of their mothers finding out and making a big fuss and convincing the boy that he has been abused. Certainly there are cases where a 15 year old boy is timid of women or an extreme scenario where a large woman attacks a boy and forces him to perform oral sex. The latter is probably rare. All in all the number of complaints from men about being traumatized in youth by \u201csex abuse\u201d is small. Naturally biological differences are a big factor. Men need to perform to consummate sex unless they are being forced to perform oral sex . A woman\u2019s non performance in intercourse is not relevant in this discussion. With women the situation is close to the converse. Only a small percent of 15 year old girls, seduced or otherwise drawn into sex with a 28 35 man, reasonable attractive, find the encounter exciting and free of second thoughts and guilt. The majority are arguably negatively affected by the event. Trauma regularly occurs. Evidence includes the large number of women who are now emotionally recounting the impacts of the unwanted sex in their youth with older men. No reason to not believe women\u2019s perspective. Edited to add Delta awarded to kittysezrelax for below post. Made me realize that some of the differences are of a different nature than I thought. gt The assumption that these observable differences are natural is one of the major problems assumptions in this kind of thinking, as it ignores the material effects of navigating the sexual marketplace and how these things shape human behavior. Instead of critically examining these observations, we naturalize them. It's easier that way. gt What you're dancing around is the fact that casual sex plays out different for men and women, not simply because of the a stable, dichotomous, and transhistoric ~nature~ of men and women but because the consequences for each group are different. In our current cultural climate, casual sex for men is relatively low risk high reward, while for women it is often high risk low reward low reward because casual sex tends to begin and end with P I V and our sexual culture doesn't really reward expect men to be conscientious lovers during one night stands and high risk not simply in terms of pregnancy or STDs, but physical safety before during and after sexual contact . It's not that women aren't interested in low emotional investment bodily pleasure, it's that the physical and psychic risks of acting upon those desires is dramatically different, and a great deal of those risks are culturally determined. If you look at situations in which casual sex for women is low risk high reward, you'll see very different behavior patterns emerge. My favorite example of this is a women's college, where even women who are self identifiably heterosexual will eagerly engage in and pursue non committal sexual contact.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The problem of men raping, harassing, and badgering women for sex needs correction. This said, we also need to acknowledge the vast difference between men and women regarding their respective interests in sex. The gulf is perhaps bigger than commonly acknowledged.\n","id":"b7303d63-ad8d-4835-8023-e5b516cb81f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There was a recent post about automation taking over jobs of burger flippers . The comments that followed largely spoke to the idea that a most of those jobs are not done by just teenages, but of people of all ages b because it's not just teens , those jobs should be paying out a higher wage, enough for someone or a family to live on My view point is that not all jobs are complex or specialized enough to justify the payout of what could be considered livable for the following reasons 1 Job pay rates are determined by the job's complexity and available workforce. Highly skilled jobs limit the available amount of local candidates, low skill jobs increase the amount of local candidates. High skill jobs pay more because there is less competition to get the work done and done correctly. Low skill jobs can be done with minimal training and sometimes tend to have product quality that is fairly relaxed. 2 The term livable wage varies wildly from state to state and even county to county. What does livable mean? Afford rent and food? Does that mean by yourself, or with roommates? Do you get paid less if you have more roommates to split rent? It is my view, there is no real measure by which to define this legally speaking. 3 Wages are should NOT set based on personal situation. I hear this a lot, and it drives me crazy. A 27 year old mother should be able to work a job to feed her child children . While I agree, this situation is one of complexity and I'd say tragedy, I would argue there is no reason a wage should consider an employee's personal situation note I am not saying this applies at the manager employee level, but at a governmental level . Let's say there were laws to base wages on personal situation, should a man with 5 children earn more than a single woman with no children for doing the same task? At what point does that stop? There are religions that promote having as many kids as possible looking at you TLC shows . Should a parent with 19 kids make more simply because they choose to reproduce more? I say that is a ridiculous notion. 4 Pure economics. If jobs such as a burger flipper were paid higher, there are only a few different outcomes product prices increase, less people get hired or automation ramps up quicker. No business is going to take a loss on payroll increases. 5 This is my most opinionated argument, and likely most controversial. Certain types of work do not equal the amount of effort it takes to stay alive. A wage is an exchange of money for hours. You trade your hours in exchange for money. Therefore, your money is a direct indication of how much economic value you have contributed not moral value, or anything like that . The things that you buy with your money are also a direct indication of their economic value in society. If you cannot afford to pay for the basics of life, you likely are not contributing much to society, again economically speaking. For clarity, a little about my background. I grew up very poor, started supporting myself around 16, lived out of a car at points of my life, spent my twenties working my ass off, and now am in my early thirties, I'm making more than most. My viewpoints likely have been skewed by pulling myself up by my bootstraps life thus far.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all jobs should be required to pay a livable wage.\n","id":"dddda09e-0d76-4253-bdfe-a7feedadeb31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi, I haven't wrote down my Philosophical beliefs lately, and I can slowly feel it withering. Ever since I quit my Philosophy study at University, it's slowly been degrading. So I would like to kick start my Philosophy again and have some friendly, civilized argument. I've gone to Atheism and a few other subreddits before, and it didn't work out well. All it was were people complaining about how stupid and ignorant I was and it just turned into a huge circlejerk. When I asked them to take it to whisper so they don't just do it for karma, they stopped entirely. So I'm trying my luck here. Thanks in advance for reading. Morality I believe morality is objective. I think ethics is the thought, or belief, of a moral position. So let's assume to kill is immoral it would be objectively true. Now let's say somebody comes along and believes that killing is immoral. That is their ethical belief, and it aligns with the objective truth that is morality. I see morality as a lot like knowledge. Knowledge is a true belief with an account. Moral knowledge is a true ethical belief with an account reasoning . I think the truth that is morality can be identified by using reason and some intuition. For example, killing is wrong because it expresses the freedom to pull the trigger at somebody with the intent to destroy their freedom to live. Naturally the freedom to live is far more important than the freedom to destroy the right to live, so we rule out that it's immoral to do so. So the reasoning is much like comparing freedom to security whether or not the freedom of the offender is more important than the security freedom of the victim. Let's say somebody comes along and beats a stranger in the streets. The third person sees, and intervenes by beating up the offender person 1 . Person 3 expressed the act will to beat Person 1, offending Person 1's security of health and freedom to attack Person 2. Person 3's will to beat Person 1 was justified because it stopped Person 1's will to beat Person 2 the victim without justification. Emotion is a factor to consider. I haven't really thought about emotion much in this case. But emotion is much like a sign of distress, signaling an intuitive response for onlookers. Emotion is like the influence and consequence of immorality. Theism, God and Metaphysics I do believe in a God. I have thought a lot about this, and I'm really indecisive. I've argued about Theism a lot, and while one argument pulls me to Atheism I also look at the other, spiritual side and agree that God exists. It's like Agnostic Theism. I don't think that God directly influences the world. I don't think he's the answer to how the world came to be, but why. He simply caused an action with the intent of causing a reaction, and thus creating the Universe. But he does not intervene with human life with miracles , nor does he assist in the world functioning today. He simply set up the action with the intent of creating planets, and then left it up to sentient life to function in the world. I've also thought a lot about the soul. I do believe in a soul, I suppose. I like to think that the body is merely a vessel for the soul to function. Without a body, the soul has no perception. The soul is much like a hard drive we perceive reality, and our environment expands our soul's character and intellect. The genetics aren't related to our soul, but just a product of our bodies. Every body is different, but our souls begin as the same. As somebody lives, the experiences expand the soul and make it more intricate. Before life, my soul was a clean slate no character, nothing. Just the being that is me. But then I was placed onto here, and my general intent is to experience the world and fulfill my journey through the human struggle. And when I die, my soul goes back to the once empty plane where I existed before life. But because of my experiences, my soul is able to intrinsically create a world which is desirable. I think of it much like a dream. We go about our day, then we fall asleep. When we sleep, the past experiences create some sort of hallucinogenic world in which we vaguely live. But a dream is only a vague experience because we're still partly conscious and alive. Our actual bodily perceptions distort and overshadow our intrinsic perceptions dreams, inner hallucinations etc. . So when we pull the plug and die, our bodily perceptions cease to function and our intrinsic, soul like perceptions have the stage to themselves. So we live in a world which is basically our imagination.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe in a God Deism\/Agnostic Theism, and I also believe morality is objective. Try and\n","id":"ee38c21f-1159-486b-afda-30ed43ef6469"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Electric vehicles are better than fossil fuel vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>There are electric cars with a much more developed technology than fossil fuel cars. A good example of this are Tesla brand cars.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Electric cars are nicer to drive than fossil fuel cars\n","id":"533811cd-d552-4c58-a84f-766bb3197d3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Some religions don't allow blood transfusion or organ transplantation This is a problem when a religious parent refuses treatment to a dying child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People have been led to do terrible things in the name of religion.\n","id":"599ff54a-28bd-4fcb-b055-5c0991362df0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I work for a congressman so i have heard every argument out there against action in Syria and understand them 100 . Except for one the Humanitarian Perspective. For the sake of this discussion, we will all use the assumption the Bashar Al Assad regime is responsible for the chemical weapons attack. I first said i wanted to support the Syrian rebels two years ago when this first began,primarily by covertly arming them. The idea that the united states should stand back and let this attack go unpunished is, to me, unacceptable and unamerican. i often think about the line from a Few Good Men we are supposed to protect those who can't protect themselves. I also often think of something i heard a few years ago regarding what the job of the american soldier is It is the job of the american soldier to bring freedom to those who want it, but can't get it for themselves. The argument of we would be helping Al Queda or the Rebels ARE Al Queda is absurd and has no basis. someone called me at my office and said we need to let them deal with it themselves . i can't share my opinions with people on the phone so i couldn't say anything. well, when it comes to civil war the situation doesn't necessarily get better. The good guys don't necessarily win. the people who win is the side with the most powerful army. Someone called and told me we need to let them other countries figure it out. Well, no one else will, though. And if no one else will do it, you have to do it yourself. I don't want anyone to bring up well we used nuclear weapons in WWII. That's completely different and we the populace have nothing to do with what our grandparents did. here is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whom i deeply admire, sharing his views on syria. mine are very similar, watch it if you want. I know i am in the super minority and want to be in the majority. Yes i am aware of the proposal to disarm Syria and i am very in favor of it. Thank You <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Firmly believe the United States SHOULD intervene in Syria.\n","id":"146e140d-0b9c-4994-917b-d65920455138"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should medical research embrace racial differences in treatment efficacy?<|ARGUMENT|>Doctors are unlikely to completely rule out a possible diagnosis based on a patient's race, they may simply use the information to prioritise tests e.g. searching for sickle cell anaemia which is significantly more common in African Americans than Caucasian or Hispanic Americans. Individuals should still be tested for all possible diseases corresponding to their symptoms, but race-based medicine can alter the order in which these tests are performed to make the search more effective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given some diseases are more common among people of particular races, it might make sense to test patients for those diseases based on their race.\n","id":"da246486-df73-4e4e-821d-bd92ba1e53cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT I awarded a partial delta because I was convinced the sexual aspirations of Isis and White Nationalism are the polar opposite. Due to that being whilst Isis is permitted to keep sexual slaves as war bounty and even utilises it as a massive reward system, white nationalism would forbid such as a practice due to interracial relations being forbidden. I'm not saying WNs wouldn't rape but judging by their ideologies alone, I'd have to assume the level of depravity would be much less in this regard. That being said, I want to clarify that my view is based around the brutality of Isis not their actual beliefs. I understand that one group is religious and the other is Political. My view is that the level of extremism, hate and violence is similar within the two groups. END When I say Isis I'm really referring to any of the most radical, militant Muslim groups, but I'll just use Isis for simplicity sake. I don't see a big difference between White Nationalists and Isis. The only difference I see is that White Nationalists live in fully developed, secular nations whilst Isis live in war zones where violence and lawlessness is much more common. I believe if America was like Syria, White Nationalists would be just as brutal as Isis. I think this comes down to extremity and character of the views held by Isis and White Nationalists. Both groups believe they have rightful ownership of their lands and everyone else should live in subjugation or be expelled non muslims non whites White Nationalists are extremely homophobic, way more than regular conservatives as they see Homosexuality as a tool used by Zionists to corrupt white people and stunt birth rates. If White Nationalists grew up in war zones, I see no reason why they'd object to the execution of homosexuals. White Nationalists believe there's a jewish conspiracy to enslave humanity. The same belief shared by Extremist Muslims. White Nationalists hold a very conservative view of gender roles. That men are designed to work and fight and women are designed to make babies and be home makers. White Nationalists have a history of violent terrorism. Some examples are Anders Breivik who shot 69 liberal youth students sikh temple shooting killing 6 Dylann Roof These are just off the top of my head and all happened within the last 10 years. There are many others. But they are all fueled by the idea that they must kill people to preserve their race. The same way Isis believe they must kill people to preserve Islam. Both Isis and White Nationalists fantasize about creating a utopic society governed by their ideology. For Isis it's the caliphate. For White Nationalists it's every Western Nation absent of all Non whites. Both ideas are so far fetched that they demonstrate how both Isis and White Nationalists are so detached from reality that they believe committing atrocious acts will benefit their cause. Both groups share an ideology that is inherently oppressive. For Isis the oppression falls on non muslims and for white nationalism it falls on non whites. White Nationalists have taken a moderate ideology and turned it inherently violent and oppressive. Whilst there's nothing wrong with wanting conservative politics and wanting to prevent illegal or dangerous immigration, White Nationalists want to forcefully expel non white people already living in western nations. White Nationalists and Isis groups hold an exceptional level of contempt towards those within their own group who work against their cause. For Isis, it's Muslims who partake in Haram western lifestyles. They refer to these kinds of Muslims as hypocrites who will corrupt Islam from within. The same belief is held by White Nationalists towards white people who inter marry. They refer to them as traitors and define them as the greatest enemy towards their ideology second only to the Jews. These are not the views of a rational political ideology like communism or libertarianism. Groups who start referring to members within their own community as traitors are demonstrative of their violent, warlike, tendencies. It seems both groups Isis and White Nationalists are stuck in the mindset that they are actively at war with their opponents. No other prominent group shares these two traits. And it's the reason why both groups are so violent and irrational. Both groups have a medieval mindset. This something I noticed whilst visiting white nationalist forums. They seem to have an affinity with associating themselves with medieval knights. They refer to themselves as modern day crusaders and have an obsession with historical European emblems of various conquering empires. They throw phrases around like Deus Vault which I believe is their version of allah ackbar for Isis. Both Isis and White Nationalists hold a strong degree of contempt towards liberalism. I'm not talking about just regular conservative animosity towards Liberals but a violent belief that liberals are a tool used by Jews to flood white countries with non whites. This is no different than Isis who may believe that atheism is a tool used by Satan to corrupt Islamic communities. These are among some of my reasons for believe White Nationalists are the Isis of Western society. It's not simply because both groups are at the extreme ends of their political groups but because both groups share a tendency of violence, oppression, fantastical beliefs, paranoia and military conquest. Both groups have a desire to bring back a medieval war like mentality. I look forward to hearing your views on this subject. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"White Nationalists are the Isis of Western society\n","id":"40dafe69-18bc-4fdb-bac8-1e2e50f0b64f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Surrogate Motherhood Should Be Allowed<|ARGUMENT|>Surrogacy is a way to bring the happiness of parenthood to a couple who would otherwise not have been able to enjoy it, either due to biological circumstances for example infertile or same-sex couples , or the unavailability of a child for adoption. The joy of parenthood is something that every couple should be able to experience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Surrogacy is a way to bring the happiness of parenthood to a couple who would otherwise not have bee...\n","id":"d55cb243-0fec-440a-9498-c09f9b488322"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, let's say you have a person who has had a bad upbringing. Their parents were openly racist, and aggressive to each other. I can see how if free will exists then they could still come out alright proof r raisedbynarcissists but as I see it, free will is a series of choices to make that eventually defines your personality, so what if this upbringing steers you away from being able to make those choices? It seems to me that even if free will does exist it is limited in how much it can redeem a person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free will, while not necessary an illusion, is still limited in how it can affect the growth of a person.\n","id":"6df250fa-995c-4909-97a3-0a1bd9566716"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By artificially placing families of very different incomes together in the same building or neighborhood we actually create more tension and net negative. I haven't really seen any concrete data that says families and communities are better with this type of housing plans. It would seem logical that problems like keeping up with the Jones are exacerbated. Happiness would be negatively affected from social status comparisons, different hobbies, different educational levels, social economic isolation, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mixed income housing \/ inclusionary housing is artificial and provides net negative to the community.\n","id":"a9e5346d-d741-4482-9db2-e7e3c7fb4d31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello everyone, before we proceed I want to make sure that you all understand one simple thing I'm not a psychopath, I don't have any mental disorders beyond some OCD and I've had a lot of good moral influences in my life. I just don't think that it makes any sense. When I was 8 I couldn't understand what was the point of baptism, by age 9 I discovered what it was about Religion. My parents were atheistic and I was so for my whole life so I immediately freaked out and became absolutely anti religion. It seemed like a joke, you can't simply believe in things that can't be explained rationally, you can explain how a car works from the top to the bottom within a few weeks or months, but with religion at some point you're stuck with a huge either you believe it or you don't , or even worse, if you had faith you'll understand . By age 10 I became interested in politics and philosophy, I was very interested in moral dilemmas, I was fresh in high school and I got to the library and started reading from time to time. There were a couple of really good books with several moral dilemmas that I read several times. Until my 13s I kept developing those areas, I started off being communistic, then socialistic and then social liberal, I thought about life and death, morality, ethics, utilitarianism and everything else there was to know about those subjects. Then when I was 14 I discovered it, I was on a car trip to visit my grandparents and I had nothing to think about for the whole trip, I had already been thinking at home I was kinda bored of playing Age of Empires 2 for hours and I kept thinking in the car. I don't exactly remember what made me jump, but after worrying so much about whether it was all about maximizing the total happiness, about whether embryos and fetuses should be considered human, about whether morality and ethics should be anthropocentric or not I just gave up, nothing made sense. What if morality and ethics just didn't make sense? , that was it, I discovered it, there was no inherent reason to act in a moral and ethical way. I was stuck at the same thing that I got stuck with religion, I lacked faith, there was no reason to explain it all, morality was no car, it was a dogma, a wall where why? became because someone said so . Immediately afterwards I thought about what was the point of living Happiness. Life is about being happy, everything that people do they do it for a reason Because it makes them happier. I had already thought of that last thing before, but now I could put it all together. Life is just about being happy, even if at the expense of others, nothing mattered but yourself. For some reason I even made a terrible blog warning engrish and a few quotes that would probably baffle several psychologists \u201cWe are complex balls falling towards the end of our existence, our thoughts are just electrons moving in synapses and our memories just chemicals stored in our brain cells\u201d That was quite dark and completely unrelated, though you can get a perspective on how seriously I was taking it all. Now regarding the arguments here are a few, they're similar or identical to the ones I made by age 14 and 15 Exhibit A Morality justifies itself. Why can't you kill an innocent person? Because it is wrong. Why is it wrong? Because you can't kill an innocent person. Exhibit B Morality has no clear limits. How can you be sure if your actions are right or not if they're not clearly delimited? If all humans should be treated fairly then why not treat animals in a similar fashion? First humans, then monkeys, then mammals, where does it end? Exhibit C Morality, just like religion, isn't learned rationally. Children are amoral and atheistic agnostic, parents put ideas into them that shape them into dogmatic adult beings. The burden of proof is in the moral and or religious person for this very reason, and thus there's no need on first place to disprove neither as long as the opposite is not proven. Exhibit D Solipsism. If you can't be sure that other minds like yours exist, then its pointless to treat them in any way different from the way you'd treat a mindless object or an animal. I've explained my story and my arguments, feel free to argue against me since from the start I've tried over and over again to be wrong, without success. Right now I act in a completely egoistic way, almost like I would otherwise. You read that right, turns out that being amoral doesn't turn you into a monster. Yeah sure, I could kill anybody, and remorse is just an emotion and I have good emotional control anyway so its not that much of a problem. How many people have I killed so far? Zero. Why would I want to kill anyway? Prison isn't a nice place and I have a good temper. Stealing? Can still get caught. Rape? Same. Turns out that the mighty hobbesian sword is the main force keeping society together, not morality I'm not actually into book ish philosophy but I like to borrow some concepts . Being amoral still means having to obey the law unless the benefits outweigh the risks , it still means having feelings for other people and it still means being compassionate and even altruistic, not because I have any obligation to do so, but rather because I feel good acting that way. Conclusively, this is my story, my arguments and my life, just like everyone else but I'm freer as my range of actions also include those that go beyond morality and ethics, even if for the most part I have no need to use that extra freedom. This is not the story of my life nor I'm trying to convince you, I just wanted to put things into perspective before explaining my position to prevent any misunderstanding, so please feel free to discuss any or all of my arguments for the sake of rational improvement, I've been open to new ideas from the start and this subreddit seems almost too good to be true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Morality and ethics are made-up and you can do anything you wish without remorse\n","id":"c4892588-fe86-4091-a096-055f73892a6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's this kind of conspiracy theory that the Democrats are just there to provide an illusion of of choice, being the better option of two parties, when they really serve the same purpose of serving elites. This cartoon here summarises the idea quite well. x200B This criticism was applied to Hillary Clinton, where she was portrayed as the representing wall street elites, and Trump is a true man of the people. x200B Now on the other hand, you can point to things like that the Republican Party is so much worse than the democrats, and politics is about pivoting around some kind of political middle ground, and that if people were to consistently vote Democrat then the pivot point would move to the left. x200B So I haven't been sympathetic to this conspiracy theory I've more been of the opinion that successful progressive liberal candidates are political pragmatists finding it more effective to adopt a watered down set of policies and have a chance of implementing them, than having no chance of implementing some more ideologically pure polices. x200B However, Joe Biden unashamedly seems to want to represent a status quo of twenty years ago. x200B With Trump, you have a radical leap to the right and extreme policies, and Biden's response seems to be to find the middle ground between current mainstream DNC politics, and Trump's current position. x200B It seems to me that Biden is more interested in maintaining the status quo, than he is adopting real, albiet difficult, political change. And it would seem to me, that this preference reflects the desires of a currently comfortable upper middle class, than it does the working and middle class majority. x200B The fact that Biden enjoys such popular support in the DNC suggest to me where a good chunk of their true allegiance lies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joe Biden as a candidate lends credence to the idea that the Democratic Party is there to serve as the 'good cop' face of two institutions that are on the same side.\n","id":"eac07e4a-5198-4e13-89bd-87e0631222ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Certain frozen vegetables like spinach are even more nutritious when frozen compared to their \"fresh\" counterpart, as the freezing takes place immediately after the crop gets harvested keeping the nutrition in the veg, while the unfrozen product loses theirs at room temperature with time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Salads may be the sole exception, other vegetables can be frozen easily. Carrots, corn, beans, broccoli etc. are popularly sold as frozen products in any supermarket.\n","id":"0ff3a7da-0650-49fb-8132-6eea397d7eb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Barbie Dolls affecting the mental image we create for ourselves?<|ARGUMENT|>Playing with a Barbie plays important role in how girls shape their ideas about perfect body type. It is not surprising that girl aspire to look like a beautiful Barbie, who seem to have everything any girl could dream of - skills, hobbies, ponies, men etc. There's no surprise they associate Barbie's success with their body-type, either. The way Barbie doll body is distributed is particularly disproportionate, unrealistic and unattianable. No woman has breast this large and with the waist this small. Yet the research show that girls aspire to have Barbie-like body type after being exposed to the dolls. Similarly to grown-up women, who learn about beauty from beauty\/fashion magazines, and through which they internalise ultra-thin body images, girls who spend years playing with Barbie dolls can internalise their body type and start to feel inadequate and grow a negative perceptions about their own bodies as a result. Most of people agree that we remember messages and lessons we learn in childhood and transfer them into adulthood. Early years spent on admiring Barbie's assets in the world where beauty and body image are emphasised, can surely increase our susceptibility to messages about body ideals, no matter how unrealistic they are. The risk is not only for girls but also for boys who can aspire to have a Ken-like, muscular body which is similarly unattainable as Barbie's thin body. Helga Dittmar, reader in psychology at Sussex University These ultra-thin images not only lowered young girls\u2019 body esteem but also decreased their satisfaction with their actual body size, making them desire a thinner body.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Body image shaped in childhood can be conveyed into adulthood\n","id":"6acf15bd-6982-4eca-b9c6-f5e88c6f3a63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's this huge perception within the wider conversation and between people I know personally, that a woman isn't safe to walk the streets at night because of men. That male aggression and sexual assault is such a prevalent issue, that a woman should be scared to walk home when its dark. But it just seems like paranoia to me. And I don't want to tread on the toes of modern feminism because I support it but this seems to be a hugeee part of its narrative, and it seems to me that men are actually more likely to be targeted by random street violence. x200B Almost all sexual assault is perpetrated by someone the victim knows, at home or at work, random street attacks are rare. But it isn't rare for a dude to get sucker punched walking home from a bar, or mugged, or set upon by a group of rowdy dudes who didnt like the way he looked at them. x200B And I definitely agree that male on female violence, sexual or otherwise, is a huge issue in our society, but I dont understand the perception which a lot of people have that a woman literally isnt safe to walk home at night.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"it's more dangerous for a man to walk down the street at night than a woman.\n","id":"ed0ff9ce-642a-4d6b-920c-a0aad5c11cfd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a stark correlation between the 10 most religious states and the 10 worst states in quality of life 9 out of 10 coincidence and between the 10 less religious states and the 10 best one 7 out of 10 coincidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Research in the US, shows that in most sociological measures of well-being, states with less levels or religion fare better than more religious states.\n","id":"dd35ae6e-36e6-47e1-ad94-f59c648b6a99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the record, I do oppose the death penalty on moral grounds, but purely on moral grounds. I cannot justify my opposition logically. The most common argument against the death penalty, in my experience, is that you cannot condemn a person to death unless you can be 100 sure of their guilt. Put another way, the argument is that if we have condemned any innocent person to death, we have no right to condemn anyone to death. Because our legal system is not perfect, we can rarely, if ever, have that level of certainty, and thus the death penalty should not be used. However, why is this argument not extended to throwing someone in prison, perhaps for life? Is that too not a horrible fate for a person who may be completely innocent? If there is any chance at all that we have imprisoned innocent people, how can we justify imprisoning anyone? In my mind, it is not logically consistent to apply that line of questioning to the death penalty and not apply it to prison, or any other form of punishment for that matter. Logically, if we cannot justify killing a person due to the chance of them being innocent, we cannot justify punishing anyone in any way due to that same chance, and the entire justice system falls apart. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if the argument that \"The death penalty cannot be used because we cannot be 100% sure of a person's guilt\" is valid, it can also be applied to imprisoning that person, or to any other form of punishment, thus rendering the entire legal system useless.\n","id":"2f620f6d-d5d7-4eb4-8e3a-cb57477c8d88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>home schooling<|ARGUMENT|>Family bonding is a massively important element of a child's development and is prioritised by home schooling1. The value of the family is constantly undermined in modern society; positive parental role models are found less and less frequently. If a parent is judged by a state vetting process to be good enough it is enormously beneficial for society as a whole to approve is an environment that cements both a positive role model and family bonding. 1'The Role of Interpretation Processes and Parental Discussion in the Media's Effects on Adolescents' Use of Alcohol' Erica Weintraub Austen, Bruce E. Pinkelton, Yuki Fujioka, Paediatrics, 2000 improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"COUNTERPOINT Home-schooling is not the best option for exceptional students. The state does not ignore or abandon individuals that have special needs and those with special needs are those that most need the state's enormous resources to focus on their\n","id":"4cc6fa0f-d6de-4780-9eb6-ac586c41c5ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My current view is that the mainstream scientific view that human activity, including greenhouse gas emissions, has exacerbated the increase in global temperatures. I also believe that unless we make a concerted effort to change our impact on the environment over the next few decades, there will be serious implications in the coming centuries, certainly repercussions more severe than the resources we would expend to reduce our impact now. As a side note, I frequently find the arguments that I see from the climate skeptic camp to consist largely of hand waving, and confusing fluctuations in temperature with deviation from the true trend. Occasionally, I find them outright misleading, such as the recent hoopla over temperatures flat for the last 15 years , when 1998 was an unusually warm year, and the conclusion would be different if we examined the last 14 or 16 years. Analyzing data and drawing conclusions, finding ways to separate the obscure truth from bullshit is a major part of what I do for a living. I would like to see rigorous, evidence based criticism of the conventional explanation. Simply pointing out that the potential effects are widely exaggerated in the media and in public discourse which they are will not do anything for me. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that human activity is responsible for a significant portion of the recent warming trend in the global environment.\n","id":"c9683422-2acc-4af9-afc6-8bcc483a7c0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a young person and I'm currently reading a lot about politics and economics and trying to form some stances of my own. I wanted to look at income tax and I found this pie chart. I feel as though I am missing something, but it seems to be that only 4.2 of income tax comes from the bottom 40 of incomes. It seems to me that the improvement in the welfare of those 40 of Americans would far surpass whatever cuts would need to be made to govt. spending if all tax on those incomes simply ended. What am I missing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is almost no point in taxing the bottom 40% of incomes\n","id":"a6fa53d3-1617-4541-bc30-8b803f8acd5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT More accurate title is Humanities education and research is a lot less useful compared to STEM education and research I know it has been done few times before, but I still would like to hear read more opinions and contribute to the neverending Humanities vs STEM debate. I admit and agree that people who study humanities at college university gain transferable skills, such as critically assessing given information, working with tons and loads of texts, building complex evidence based arguments, etc. Furthermore, I understand that those who study humanities get employed, enjoy their careers, etc. I am not here to argue the employment prospects of humanities students nor to claim that humanities do not provide any useful skills at all. My main concern is about the nature of humanities themselves. Unlike STEM fields, humanities do not invent any new technology, nor they cure the ill. Sure, we may need Law and Languages , but what about Art , Philosophy, History, Politics, Linguistics, Literature, Theology, etc? What is the use of those who have PhDs in these fields? Why do we society as a whole need a person with a PhD in philosophy when we can get a person with a PhD in psychiatry or engineering? Roughly speaking, why do we need another Nietzsche when we can have another Tesla? Mankind relies on medicine and technology. Medicine and Technology and their application is produced by STEM fields. Moreover, STEM fields create progress in these two areas. Hence, mankind relies on STEM. STEM fields drive the development and survival of our species. What is the practical use of humanities, then? I understand that some people can enjoy reading Pluto's Republic, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, some essays on religion theology or watching No Country for Old Men. However, are they of any use apart from simple enjoyment? If majority of people who are engaged in humanities, would go into STEM fields, our society would be so much better. There would be more technology, more medicine, more progress One could argue that not everyone is cut out for STEM fields. Fair enough. However, there other crucial areas for society again Law and Languages, Agriculture probably the most important area , Finance, Business, Programming I am not sure whether it is a STEM field or not, but it is extremely crucial for the society , Military, Police, etc. I am not saying we should completely annihilate humanities, but I am certain that our society would be so much better, if majority of people who do humanities maybe 70 of them, just a guesstimate would do something more useful go into STEM fields or the areas mentioned in the paragraph above. We would have less cinema, less music, less art, less literature, less theatre, etc. However, we would have much more prosperous society. We would have less poets and musicians, but we would have more chemists and engineers. Furthermore, one could also argue that not everything is black and white and that an individual can engage into both humanities and STEM. For example, a person could study philosophy and physics at the same time. However, it does not make philosophy any more useful. I am arguing from full time perspective a person who is engaged in humanities full time is less useful to society than a person who is engaged in STEM fields full time. Do not get me wrong, I enjoy humanities myself I read fiction, listen to music, watch films, aspire to learn about politics, philosophy, theology, history, etc. I am actually more interested in humanities then in STEM fields. However, I came to a sad conclusion that humanities are overall useless since they do not provide any value apart from simple entertainment and I kinda feel guilty engaging in them. I know it sounds a bit messed up. I would really like to study philosophy or any other humanity at the university , but the feeling of guilt is just too strong. Why study Theology, when I could study and become engineer and hence provide practical value to society? I would really like to hear read your opinions Thank you for your attention P.S. By Languages I am talking about learning foreign languages as well as the grammar of native languages. It is crucial for people to study Languages to communicate with each other. I imply all kinds of art cinematography, sculpture, painting, music, etc. Also, I would add professional sports to the debate, because just like humanities they do not provide any practical value, in my opinion. I define full time as most of the time, i.e. I am talking about a career. So, a linguist is less useful to society then a biologist. Or study humanities outside of the university. The way of learning is not the key point of the argument. What is important is that I would feel ashamed of spending too much time on humanities, because they are not useful. I might be way too preoccupied about being useful to society, but I still do not see much value in humanities. TL TR Unlike STEM fields, humanities do not invent any new technology nor they cure the ill. Why do we need another Nietzsche when we can have another Tesla?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanities are useless for the most part\n","id":"09ac2a26-ad15-4a4e-a773-3b9a08a801a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should citizens be able to crowdsource laws?<|ARGUMENT|>In most countries, the access to classified information is restricted by law or regulation. Information classified \u2018For Official Use Only\u2019 is not accessible by the wider public.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians have access to research and information services that ordinary citizens do not have.\n","id":"787a8fe8-36f2-4ad7-8dce-c840735add92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title suggests, home ownership is not only irresponsible for a majority of Americans, but it should be made far more difficult to purchase a home. The second part happened in some respects in the last few years when banks tightened up their lending practices, but I am more concerned with the belief held by many that home ownership is some kind of basic right, and something everyone should strive toward and be encouraged into. When a person couple is deciding whether to rent or buy, it is often a simple analysis of how much will my payment be renting vs buying. If the price to buy is near or only slightly higher, the decision is often BUY, with not even the slightest amount of thought to maintaining the property. It appears they may be able to afford the payment on paper, but the reality is they are not even close. These families have no way of paying for things like new roofs, new windows, new furnaces, new driveways, water heaters, or any of the other hundreds of things that require significant amounts of money to repair. So what do they do in the winter when their furnace dies? charge a new one. Roof leaks? credit, you get the idea. And invariably the outside of the home takes second seat to these urgent issues, and you end up with a dilapidated eyesore in your neighborhood pulling down home values of its neighbors, and a homeowner who had no business buying the home anyway, drowning in credit card debt with foreclosure looming on the horizon. So unless your mortgage and tax payment are less than say just making up numbers here 25 or 33 of your disposable monthly income, you should not be given a home loan prevented from financing, etc. For those who may argue that home ownership is an investment, this may be true, but only in the best of circumstances, where home values are rising, and you properly maintain the property over a period of 10 years, when you are no longer just paying interest on your loan.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The majority of Americans have no business buying and should be prevented from financing to buy a home.\n","id":"b446ca1a-605a-4ebf-aa53-4381d6de2dca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Yesterday, on the 24th of May, former US Navy Seal Britt Slabinski recieved the medal of honor for his actions during the battle of Thakur Ghar. At one point, one man, Roberts, fell out of a helicopter. At that point Slabinski had to make the call whether to escape with the rest of his team to relative safety and wait for reinforcements, or to go and rescue Roberts, who may or may not have been still alive. In an act of apparent heroism, they chose to fight while clearly outmanned and outgunned. This action cost the lives of multiple of his teammates. Roberts could not be saved either. The action had no tactical or strategical value. It's only value is as a propaganda opportunity which is what we are currently seeing. The way I view it, what Slabinski did is brave. You have to be brave to run into a hail of bullets. But braver would be to not act as a warrior but as a commander, to take actual responsibility for his remaining team. You can be both brave and stupid, and these are the qualifications that should be applied to Slabinski. If that is what the medal should signify, courage with utter disregard for consequences or reason, then the award is warranted. If not, then this is both a propaganda effort and a debasement of the medal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Britt Slabinski, who yesterday recieved the US medal of honor, showed bad and irresponsible judgement.\n","id":"23efc905-1b6b-4e99-a5ff-b44ae9a1c048"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>61% of voters would choose a punishment other than the death penalty for murders. They would be against making capital punishment more severe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Painful executions threaten the existence of capital punishment, as they will further ignite activists.\n","id":"9c677d56-92f9-413c-9005-3462a457f9c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A great example of this is Richard Wagner, a classical composer. His music was held in high regard by the NAZI party and played in concentration camps. He was publicly an anti semite and it is argued that in a few of his operas there were anti semitic stereotypes portrayed. I think it fair to say that in this day and age his views are immoral. So, should his accomplishments be lauded? I am of the belief that art should be taken solely for what it is, separate from it's creator. If a specific opera is anti semitic, don't listen to it. However, if another is not, what fault is there in enjoying it. A more contemporary example could be Bill Cosby. Now, he has not been convicted of anything and so I don't wish to argue the charges here. However, assuming he did do what he is accused of, does that make his show less wholesome or his stand up less funny? Is it immoral of me to praise his body of work and by doing so praise him as a comedian while having contempt for him as a human being. Finally, the extreme. If someone is a fan of Lost Prophets, knows what their lead singer did and continues to listen to their albums, are they in doing so endorsing or dismissing his crimes? I think not. I believe the artist and the art to be separate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Appreciation of an artist's work should not be affected by personal feelings to the artist's morality or politics.\n","id":"2ae12f95-aa9d-4f6e-9939-faaac4740a3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, my scenario is the following From one day to the next Over a prolonged period of time, all support programs a imagined, functional government has for poor people are cut. All the money the government saves with this are given to the people as tax cuts in a way that favors the lower and middle class. At the same time, a foundation is created that already existing charities promise to fill the gap. In my opinion, the previous, government funded welfare had several advantages over the charities More resources If you got a tax cut today, would you donate all of it to charity? Of course not. So those charities will most likely have less money available than the government funded program had. Public control A private charity has to appease its big donors, otherwise it would loose money. So the actions of those private charities would be based on the wills of a few rich people instead on the opinion of the voting population. Reliabilty The government can't afford to have it's poor people suffer or die as long as the voters don't want suffering poor people . If the welfare program doesn't has enough money, more money can get allocated. If there isn't more money, the government can cut other programs, lend money or raise taxes. If those charities doesn't has enough money, they can't do shit. Edit Made a more realistic scenario that favors the private welfare more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Government funded welfare is superior to privatly funded welfare.\n","id":"83288047-fb89-403f-add1-c5b2a79958fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US establish a Space Force?<|ARGUMENT|>Secretary of Defense Mattis has said, \"I believe it is premature to add additional organizational and administrative tail to the Department at a time I am trying to reduce overhead. The creation of an independent Space Corps, with the corresponding institutional growth and budget implications, does not address the specific concerns nor our Nation's fiscal problems in a responsive manner.\" Memo to Representative Turner<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Creating a new military branch will only add more bureaucracy.\n","id":"ae2da810-609a-44dc-946e-e46c84132225"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>Sex work affords women agency over their sexuality \u2014 an area that is traditionally tightly controlled by men through societal structures such as infidelity laws or social shaming.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is good to threaten society's values surrounding sex work because they exist to control how women express their sexuality.\n","id":"4f8bca2f-480d-4542-b076-ab4fb6ec1240"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Euro Was a Mistake<|ARGUMENT|>The euro is the first step toward a universal currency, something which is inevitable in tearing down national economic boundaries in a globalized world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU's goal of ever-further integration is key to the future of Europe and the eurozone is a key part of that project.\n","id":"d01cdc79-9cc2-4104-a5af-b7a2921f6540"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Oh look, another post about pronouns. The only pronouns currently in widespread use are still just he she they, despite numerous efforts to include new pronouns for new genders such as ze. a quick googling led me to this list of pronouns which I'm sure is one of many such lists. The movement to adopt new pronouns is somewhat niche, the issue is only relevant to the small population on non cis individuals, and has had trouble gaining traction. On top of that, the nonstandard pronouns don't seem to have explicit definitions. What kind of person am I referring to when I use 'ze'? Or 'ne'? Is there actually a meaningful definitional difference between the two? I've been unable to find such a thing. It seems that the way to treat this discrepancy is to allow people to choose their own preferred pronouns, whichever sounds feels more like 'them'. This is more or less like everyone getting a set of 3 4 new names, each person's could be completely different and there is no way to determine which it is without asking. It is 1 difficult to remember, hell I have a hard enough time remembering first names. 2 makes introductions that much more cumbersome. 3 Defeats part of the purpose of 'pronouns' of having a general reference 4 two people identifying as the same gender might prefer different pronouns, further confusing the issue. Now, obviously, these issues are not insurmountable. Small communities and circles of friends have adopted nonstandard pronouns into their vocabulary and their everyday life with little to no hardship. But still, widespread acceptance has not been made possible due to a combination of poor definitions, few non cis individuals to give these pronouns exposure, and the large but slowly dwindling population of people who reject non binary gender altogether. It seems to me that the easiest solution would be to just have pronouns reference biological sex as opposed to gender. 1 It's how the words are used most of the time anyways by the cis population. 2 Biological sex is binary with the exception of intersex 3 Nobody disagrees that biological sex is binary with the exception of intersex . This makes it more easily adoptable than 'preferred pronouns'. 4 Biological sex is much more readily recognized at a glance than gender, making learning pronouns much easier. Certainly intersex provides a bit of an issue, but at least it's biologically undeniable that intersex individuals exist unlike otherkin, genderqueer, agendered etc . We could do what we do now and just let them pick between male and female, or we could introduce one new 'intersex pronoun' set. Either way, appealing to intersex individuals will not cmv EDIT First update u ScholarlyVirtue made a good clarifying point of my view here that my view affects both A non standard pronouns and B standard pronouns for trans individuals. The discussion is mostly attacking the consequences of B , in that identifying trans individuals biological sex is more difficult and the line is harder to draw. Perhaps my view would be best explained allowing non standard pronouns is not working very well, and that a better solution would be biological sex pronouns. Allowing gender pronouns for trans individuals unfortunately opens the floodgates for all kinds of non standard gender pronouns for non binary genders, and I feel this is a worse consequence than the difficulties in assigning biological sex pronouns to trans individuals. I freely admit biological sex pronouns is not a perfect method, but I find it to be better than our current system by a mile. My view is not that biological sex pronouns are perfect, but that they are the best alternative to our current system when weighing consequences and ease of transition<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pronouns should be used to refer to biological sex as opposed to gender\n","id":"833ab0c6-3b3e-4837-93a1-217a7dcd55f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently got a laptop from work. It has the usual touch pad mouse but it also has the little mouse nub in the middle of the keyboard. It is way less sensitive than the track pad and I cannot imagine an application where it would easier to interface through that nub than with the tracker pad. I realize that people use devices in different ways for different things so you can change my view by giving an at least somewhat common circumstance in which the mouse nub is better than the touch pad despite it's apparent awkwardness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the mouse nub that some laptops have in the middle of the keyboard is an obsolete anachronism - basically your laptop's appendix - and may as well not be included.\n","id":"6386a8fb-af17-4f56-94d9-df7d079e036d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Fucked meaning not able to survive the coming collapse of the ecology and the economy . Because The current rate of global diversity loss is estimated to be 100 to 1000 times higher than the naturally occurring background extinction rate and expected to still grow in the upcoming years. The current infinite growth based monetary system isn't going anywhere any time soon and most people are still largely unaware of alternative systems, let alone realize that infinite growth with finite resources was never a truly workable system. Superstition is still rampant, notions like Go forth and multiply and The Lord will provide serve the current system of infinite growth while a general distrust of science keeps true progress at bay. Science is still just a candle in the dark. The vast majority seem to be blissfully unaware.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanity is probably fucked.\n","id":"c67518fd-c1f6-41bd-baef-accca3a8ed5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the UN a force for good?<|ARGUMENT|>The General Assembly votes to approve the regular budget which means that the US cannot direct it's contributions based on it's own political interests.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US is not able to use it's majority funding to influence the main decision making body of the UN: the General Assembly.\n","id":"7ea47b21-f836-4c47-8067-14c8c9fb6ef5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Whitewashing In Hollywood: Should It Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone involved in a film invests time and\/or money to create it. They have a right to choose who they cast.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The practice of casting needs to be kept in the hands of directors and producers.\n","id":"f026e0c5-237b-482f-a98b-37a96e5dff32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Health insurance mandates<|ARGUMENT|>Many argue that health care is a right, and thus that universal health care is a necessary provision. This is then used to justify mandates as a means to universal care. But, health care is not a right, as only things that could be consider \"natural\", \"innate\", or \"God-given\" can be considered rights, and health care does not qualify as such.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Premise of insurance mandates, that health care is a right, is false\n","id":"b1e76247-ba23-4aa6-b5c1-558e022b880a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Russia a land of democracy or autocracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Shortly after Estimirova's death the head of the human rights organisation she was working for Memorial issued a strongly worded statement alleging the involvement of state authorities and the area's premier Ramzan Kadyrov BBC Online \"Vow to Catch Chechen Assassins This statement was not suppressed in Russia and means that there is a significant amount of freedom of speech. There maybe a strong amount of state control of the press similar to Italy which is a problem but the right still remains.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is still a democratic right to freedom of speech in Russia\n","id":"54dab9db-2c33-4515-b8d4-2917f9146333"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Google shouldn\u2019t censor its search results in China<|ARGUMENT|>Google\u2019s corporate motto is \u2018don\u2019t be evil\u2019. This is partly an issue of corporate identity, and partly a clever business proposition. In both cases, complying with Chinese censorship rules damages Google as a company. The key to Google\u2019s dominance in the search market is that users know Google will always deliver the search results most relevant to them. By adhering to censorship laws, users will trust the relevance of Google\u2019s search results less, which hence erodes Google\u2019s business position as users will be more likely to try alternative search engines.1 1 Rebecca Blood, \u2018Google's China decision is pragmatic, not idealistic\u2019, January 2010. URL:<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not censoring helps Google\u2019s business proposition and corporate identity\n","id":"004a6aaa-b254-4a84-aaa5-e61e046e153c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Campaigns only be Funded by the Government?<|ARGUMENT|>Corporations donate money to think tanks, academic research, op-eds, and panel discussions to \"shape the intellectual environment of Washington.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Notwithstanding political donations, the strong historic link between the economic and political elite will continue to exist.\n","id":"f9a04c5a-311d-40a2-9f50-53d172fb9c06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Donald Trump a Good President?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump has repeatedly attacked the DOJ, seeming to prefer defending political allies over allowing a department headed by his own Attorney General to follow its course.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump and his associates are connected to a host of crimes being actively investigated.\n","id":"fe56e36b-e9d6-4fe6-8930-5c218e5cad4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU have its own army?<|ARGUMENT|>It is highly unlikely that a significant majority of member states would agree to engage in conflict in another region.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An EU army would be incredibly difficult to establish and manage.\n","id":"bf399a74-54e9-4279-b756-66ccb308dcfc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Day be a National Holiday in the U.S?<|ARGUMENT|>There are a number of issues plaguing the electoral process that do not receive adequate attention. Increased media coverage of an event, especially a social one, can help create the pressure and will to do something to rectify the issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Media coverage is likely to increase as a result of election day being made a national holiday.\n","id":"8c6392ec-54ae-44a5-ae05-619ae7f4d2d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Teaching people better coping skills is way more important than making the world become nice. We shouldn't stop raising awareness by any means. However, I think there needs to be way more emphasis placed on dealing with the victims rather than dealing with, changing, punishing, etc. the oppressors. There are exceptions of course e.g. physical abuse . Way too many people believe the world should to cater to them. While it would be nice to stay in lala land, this just isn't practical. There's always going to be assholes out there trying to screw other people over. The world will never be 100 fair and equal. Even if it were, that's a world I wouldn't want to live in. It would be quite boring without some type of challenge or adversity. It's more fulfilling to have a strong mind and live in a challenging world than to have a weak mind and live in nice world. It is difficult to even develop a strong mind without overcoming some type of barrier. This is why most homeschooled kids that have been sheltered their whole lives are more susceptible to anxiety and depression as adults. I understand that even some people with difficult lives haven't learned how to overcome this on their own yet. This is why we need to teach them at a young age how. I believe that teaching children various coping mechanisms to deal with bullying, teasing, stress, mental illnesses, etc. would work wonders. Maybe as a mandatory class? Ultimately, everyone would become happier. Imagine having the ability to be mostly content when the rest of the world is bringing you down. There's nothing more freeing than that type of independence. That being said, even when you develop a strong mind, it's impossible to feel good all the time. This is okay though. I think a lot of people myself included have a bad habit of wanting to avoid certain emotions. This primarily includes fear, anger, shame, and sadness. What we need to realize is that it's alright to feel these things occasionally. If anything, it's healthy. However, if these emotions are happening 24 7 I would recommend therapy or a lifestyle change. I wanted to leave this part near the end, because I don't want people to judge the bulk of my opinion any differently due to my past. As a child I was bullied severely. Due to my social anxiety and awkwardness as a kid, I was outcasted and mentally harassed by my peers constantly. While the teachers did their best to help, that wasn't what saved me. It was largely myself. One day I said fuck it and stopped caring. I refused to let others affect me. I played by myself, ignored the bullies, and did my best to be happy. I also started seeing a therapist for my anxiety, which improved my confidence drastically. Guess what happened? Other kids started to join me and I was able to make good friends after that. From what I've seen, bullying campaigns focus primarily on teaching kids to not be mean and seek help if someone is being rude. Though this is still important, I think talking about things the victim can do to feel better and help themselves would be more effective. This applies to numerous organizations and situations outside of bullying as well e.g. racism sexism homophobia . Now before anyone claims survivor bias, I understand that everyone deals with situations differently. I'm not saying that other people should just suck it up and magically feel better. I put my little anecdote here to show an example of one hardship I was able to overcome with therapy and by adopting a good mentality. I just think it's healthier to start building a strong foundation inside yourself before trying to change the outside world. I've made comments about this view before, but I always get downvoted to oblivion lol. I just want to understand why most people think I'm wrong. Curious to hear your guys' thoughts on this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People need to deal with the world the way it is rather than expect to be catered to\n","id":"a086fb57-fe36-49df-8489-7fb65b9e78c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Kashmir Be An Independent State?<|ARGUMENT|>One of its stated objectives is to \"liberate Muslims residing in Indian Kashmir. Once Muslims are \"liberated\" from Hindu rule this objective and recruitment tool will be gone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An independent Kashmir would likely reduce motivation for Lashkar-e-Taiba.\n","id":"254d1bd4-852f-4740-86cf-6d00af1efaa6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>Environmental problems on Earth should be resolved before creating further, at times irreversible, damage in space.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Problems that begin on Earth should be solved before potentially spreading them everywhere in space.\n","id":"5ad7d4c2-d9e6-4535-9a44-0e94766fb4b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Governments make these decisions based on assumptions that while often well intended, cannot possibly address the diverse needs and circumstances of the worst off in society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI affords choices and agency to individuals to make economic decisions that targeted welfare programs cannot.\n","id":"dd6428c9-b485-4d21-b777-a997583d4a0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have never found a single instance that led me to believe that a flat head screw was a better choice of fastener that a Phillips head screw. Phillips head screws allow you to apply more torque without your driver slipping out of the head. Also, if a screw must be screwed upwards, the screw will not seat itself on the driver like it will on a Phillips. Can you give me even one instance in which a flat head is a better choice than a Phillips head?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Flat head screws are inferior to Phillips head screws.\n","id":"0169f7a1-367a-4186-889e-78a8f236680f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Although traditional logic is that it was a direct result of overreach from the Canadian Thought Police trying to push too far, the reality is regardless of their agenda the protests were a direct response to PM West's handling of the situation. The reality of the matter is though by all logic PM West should have stayed south in the states. However, due to the trend in in the 2030s of people randomly mind messaging someone else I fooked ur mom, m8 West was left with the unfortunate position of being overly targeted due to the prevalence of sex videos of his mother allowing a sender to include portions there of. This directly led to West's immigration to Canada as Canada was one of the first places to allow people to block random mind messages. Without that happening he both is unlikely to immigrate to Canada nor take an interest in law and politics. It's impossible to know how anyone else as PM would have tagged to the recent events, but we know PM West's actions have been along the least popular of the 21st century. But he never would have been interested in law and politics or even in this country if his mother want such a ho bag. And because he found protection from their precursor organization in the early days of mind messaging he certainly was more sympathetic to the Thought Police power grab than I think any other option would have been.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The uprising of 2072 never would have happened if Prime Minister North West's mother hadn't been such a ho bag\n","id":"80ae3a0f-e386-4d3a-8bda-c51b25efbe95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>limit the right to trial by jury in some criminal cases.<|ARGUMENT|>Especially in cases of nationalist conflict or terrorist attacks, it may be extremely difficult to have a non-biased jury. In Northern Island, for example, jurors may sympathize with violent offenders and acquit them despite a preponderance of evidence. Similarly, it can be a struggle to appoint non-biased juries for terrorism trials post 9\/11. In 2003, the \"Lackwana Six\" were accused of aiding a foreign terrorist organization. The magistrate noted that \"Understandably, the infamous, dastardly and tragic deeds and events of September 11, 2001 have caused a maelstrom of human emotions to . create a human reservoir of strong emotional feelings such as fear, anxiety and hatred as well as a feeling of paranoia. These are strong emotions of a negative nature which, if not appropriately checked, cause the ability of one to properly reason to . be blinded.\" Questions about jury impartiality have been raised in multiple similar cases, even leading some defendants to claim that they pled guilty out of resignation that the jury would inevitably be biased and refuse to acquit.1 The implication is that in some trials, juries may be unable to make impartial decisions, thus making the trial unfair. The only way for justice to be done, in such cases, is to allow a judge to decide the verdict. 1Laura K. Donohue, \"Terrorism and Trial by Jury: The Vices and Virtues of British and American Criminal Law\" improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It may be necessary to limit trial by jury in cases where it is impossible to recruit an impartial jury.\n","id":"5f2a99de-f03e-46cd-9644-e02a16fca319"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Since becoming openly far left, I see lots of arguments saying Communism is bad because theft is morally wrong or killing people is morally wrong , and for a while I didn't know how to get over the issue of Communism when it comes to morality. However, recently, I began reading Nietzsche and reconsidering my moral stance on almost everything. As such, I haven't really began to think of murder as inherently wrong, along with most kinds of theft. This is not so much if communism is superior to capitalism, about the crimes of any communist regime, or the system of Communism economically although I'm up to debate all of those , but more the morality that is required in a government and about morality under all governments and specifically communism .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Communism isn't morally wrong\n","id":"394a2145-ef53-4ef2-8ab0-dd238bd23d59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>No-fly zone over Libya<|ARGUMENT|>Daniel Larison. \"Why a no-fly zone for Libya is a bad idea.\" The Week. March 1st, 2011: \"We should remember that the no-fly zones in Iraq devolved into a decade-long air war that paved the way for the later invasion of Iraq, and the Kosovo intervention brought an end to Serbian control of the province only to deliver it into the hands of a criminal gang in the Kosovo Liberation Army.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Iraq and Kosovo no-fly zones weren't really successes.\n","id":"4828d6a6-27b9-4f3e-9963-463ac5075e8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I've been reading some Kierkegaard lately, and he's a major proponent of the notion that we should not make all our decisions using reason he believes that reason is nice and all, yet it doesn't give us what humans crave, which is meaning and purpose and happiness. He believes that humans can only attain this by making some decisions not through reason but the raw passion. I disagree. I think that we should make our decisions based in reason because that's what reason is the most sensible option. I think that as rational agents we are inclined to do what makes us the happiest, which would be acting on reason because it provides us with longevity and a more fulfilling contentment with life, while acting with passion leads us to make dumb errors that just give us fleeting pleasure but hurt us in the long term. Please change my view, pardon if I couldn't articulate my view well enough.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All decisions should be based in logic and reason\n","id":"dd599fa4-f396-4074-a86d-1f032ec21bb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Same goes for nun's habits and any other examples where one gender wears something per social pressure which the other gender doesn't ever wear. Background I'm a male person wearing skirts and got told by a muslim co ed with headscarf that it's 'wrong' to wear the other gender's clothes. I told her that I can wear whatever I like, as she can of course including the headscarf , but that I think that it's sexist that muslim countries societies cultures pressure women into wearing the headscarf. She rebutted that it's not sexist because she could choose whether to do it or not. So I asked her if it's your choice, and it's not sexist, why aren't any muslim men choosing to wear a headscarf every time they leave their house. The discussion ended here. Sadly this all happened during a class at uni and probably made me look like a prick, but I said what I thought and well here we are EDIT Thanks all I'll be sleeping over it and look at the whole thing again with a bit of distance. Excellent discussion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think muslim headscarves are sexist, because if they aren't, why aren't muslim men wearing them too? !\n","id":"85a6b028-7ff7-4017-9938-45acc26b808f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard it so many times, from so many paranormal investigators. It's not fake , we swear it's real , we'd never fake our footage, ever But the fact remains, that the world has never seen any concrete, scientifically sound evidence that ghosts, spirits, demons, and the like exist. Don't get me wrong, I love watching the paranormal investigation shows, the many YouTube channels dedicated to finding evidence of life after death. I like to pretend that these things are real, but it's all for my own entertainment. I'd also like to believe, however, that these very entertaining individuals whom I've gotten to know through their shows, aren't all just conning multitudes of people into believing a lie. But that's how I see them. They're taking something fake and presenting it as reality. And many of them are making a lot of money off of it. I find that to be kind of immoral. So I guess that's where I stand on the matter Paranormal investigators are bad people who lie to make money off gullible people. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All paranormal investigators fake their \"evidence\".\n","id":"c1a9b6ba-a976-44c5-9e4d-26bf673e6b48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I mean, wealthy people can do whatever the hell that want if they want to pay double the price for a brand name drug, then all the power them. But unfortunately many middle class and lower class people do as well presumably because they imagine that the significantly cheaper price means a decrease in quality and effectiveness. But that is patently untrue. All generics must contain identical ingredients and be approved by the FDA. They are cheaper because of market competition and because the new manufactures do not have to recoup all the money that the original pharmaceutical company spent on research, testing, marketing, etc<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it's silly to pay much more expensive prices for a brand name medication if a generic is available.\n","id":"38712b02-a829-4dee-9a02-2ae0886b99c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been thinking of radical solutions to these kinds of problems and here is one possible solution I've been thinking about. I'm taking it as a given that certain racial groups suffer on average harsher criminal sentences and that this differential harshness of sentencing is due to implicit biases in Judges and Juries that are difficult to observe let alone correct. My policy proposal is as follows. Every year each State will be required to calculate the average sentence length fine or community service requirement for each crime and racial group. The sentences of each racial group are adjusted down proportionally to the average of the racial group with the most lenient sentence. People with reduced sentences who should already have been set free will receive payments or some other form of compensation for serving extra time. For example if in New York in 2017 the average sentence for white offenders guilty of burglary is 3 years and the average sentence for Latino offenders guilty of burglary is 4 years, the sentences of each Latino offender guilty of burglary will be reduced by 25 . This explicitly corrects some forms of statistical discrimination while at the same time preserving the ordering within racial groups of sentences, so the worst offenders still receive the most time. I argue this does not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment because no one's sentence is increased. The racial group with the most lenient sentencing has already received the full protection of the law, this legislation would merely extend that protection to the rest of the population. Edit Just wanted to say thank you to the people who participated. I think some of the great points were the ones that raised concerns about the behavioral responses of DA's offering plea bargains, and small sample size problems among rare crimes, small states, and small racial groups. Thank you everybody for your time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US congress should adopt legislation to explicitly eliminate racial discrimination in criminal sentencing.\n","id":"0ec6e79f-30aa-4c25-9a54-57350daef757"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The fight of western countries against climate change is hypocritical<|ARGUMENT|>In 2013 the United States had 809 vehicles for every 1,000 people, while China had only 89 per 1,000 people. While the U.S. per-capita number has been largely stable around 800 vehicles in recent years, China\u2019s car fleet has increased dramatically to 106 in 2015.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Per capita ownership of vehicles in China is increasing at a faster rate compared to that in the US.\n","id":"e408a0c0-b57f-4830-876d-1b00fd8d9b1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The reason why I say this, is there are MANY MANY countries in the world that have made homosexuality illegal, even punishable by death or imprisonment Russia is not one of them. The US allies and partners Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kenya, UAE, Qatar, India nominally Jamaica have made homosexuality a criminal offense India outlawed homosexuality outright only a month or two ago, and yet the focus is on Sochi because 'The Olympics suddenly make homosexuality punishable by death or imprisonment less important than a vague law that makes homosexual sex practices this is what the actual law says, I speak Russian, it's on the Kremlin's website if you're interested and can read Russian being taught to children, when those same people would be killed in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia? Comment sections across the internet on Russophobic articles often echo the same questions and indeed, many Russians have an increasingly negative view of gay people that ironically didn't exist before because now they see gay NGOs as persecuting them unfairly and given their lack of activity in Saudi Arabia or Jamaica, they may be right Tl Dr if Obama really cared about gay rights as much as they say they do re Russia, why doesn't he send an openly gay ambassador to Saudi Arabia, for example?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the backlash to Sochi 2014 Olympics over gay rights is more US Russophobic propaganda than genuine concern for human rights.\n","id":"eda8db9e-45e0-4feb-9738-681faaacaf25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is prayer a useful activity?<|ARGUMENT|>This would contradict one of Christianity's key tenets that God gave man free will, if God will intervene in our lives when He chooses to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If prayer worked then there must be an interventionist god.\n","id":"ed59ad48-92dc-40f2-b2da-e624eadf23a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Soccer no longer deserves this spot because of players exploiting the game rules to achieve an unfair advantage. The recent Suarez incident brought up a topic with my brother. Regarding Suarez's hand ball save against Ghana back in 2010, I thought that people should not be treating him as a hero for doing that. I felt it was immoral as a player of soccer and disrespectful to it. Then, we continued talking about other immoral acts like diving which in my opinion, is prevalent in soccer like no other sport. This brought in the question Should players be exploiting the rules to gain advantage? My argument was that when Suarez saved the ball using his hand, he knew full well he's gonna get a foul but did it anyway because he wants to win. Also, when Neymar just using a random example. Take no offense falls down deliberately when a defender only lightly fouls him, he was in fact exploiting the game rules to his advantage. Sports is inherently about excellence and sportsmanship. Of course, many other values hold too but in this case, these two are most important. My case is that players should not be playing for fouls as it contradicts what sports should be. Sports should be excelling in the game, not exploiting it. If the world's most popular sport do not uphold these values and apparently is the one where these values are obviously lacking, it does not deserve the spot. Take note I bracket exploit because some might consider whatever I said part and parcel of the game. If so, let me know why.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"soccer does not deserve being the world's most popular sport.\n","id":"be97fb2e-609f-4cfa-8c46-34d12f2479e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a person who does their best to follow all laws and be a model citizen, I have little fear of the government listening to my calls or reading my email. Not that I believe I'm any better than those who disagree with the government on any issues, I just happen to not be I also don't mind if google builds a profile of who I really am, sure they'll target ads at me, but why should I mind that in the least? If anything, shouldn't relevant ads be a plus of their knowledge? I can understand why people who do things the government or google might not care for would prefer privacy and I don't blame them for it at all, but I just don't feel the same way. Please, make me pro privacy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Google and the Government using my data does not bother me.\n","id":"7bfae8cf-d573-4b02-a477-9f614429b883"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>cannabis should be legalised<|ARGUMENT|>The debate over the effects of cannabis is based largely upon conflicting evidence. For example, some argue it can cause psychosis while others argue it only has positive effects on the mind. The effect of any illegal drug is a very difficult area to study 1. Most drug users use more than one drug and researchers are often limited to studying those who admit themselves into clinics with a crisis \u2013 something of a skewed sample. Given that Governments cannot accurately predict what the effects of legalizing cannabis would be, it is prudent to maintain illegality. What if, for example, a state decided to legalize cannabis, to only discover five years later that it has a dramatically more negative impact on human cognition than previously thought, or that it substantially increased the risks of psychosis? 1.Wolff, 2009, improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Uncertainty over the effects of cannabis means it is best to be prudent\n","id":"aafc49cd-969b-4f83-ad05-ad362364a4cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Only a small elite needs to know the enemy and they do so through maps and statistics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Graphic images and videos are not necessary for knowing the enemy.\n","id":"3b347b16-6f3b-451f-ba5b-387d8e0e65c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The reason why such eggs are banned in America is because their laws prohibit putting non edible items inside food. I think this is a perfectly reasonable law to have. Even if it's clearly marked and labelled the risk of some unobservant parent and or parent who doesn't speak English buying a Kinder Egg for their child and having that child choke simply isn't worth the reward of the novelty of having a toy inside a thin layer of chocolate. Marketing a food towards kids that contains a choking hazard is dangerous and should be banned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kinder Eggs being banned in America is perfectly reasonable\n","id":"4bb9cc65-4ab0-492b-aba6-d434f6d4ea8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>The Book of Job confronts the mystery of Evil by having the deity answer Job's questions in this manner: humanity is in no position to see all ends, and cannot therefore see the points and purposes in anything that happens at all. If you say \"I can't see why a truly benevolent God would allow X,\" the deity of Job will quite agree with you. If the answer does not satisfy you, that too is to be expected. The \"Job Defense\" is impossible to circumvent. No deity worth its salt is comprehensible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It may be that it is better to have a world containing what humans regard as evil, than it would be to have one without. It may also be that humans are simply incapable of understanding why that is, while a superior being can. In the same way that children may regard it as evil that their parents don\u2019t allow them to play in the traffic.\n","id":"d6f60485-8cd2-4e74-ac6e-83060e2a335f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Einstein Sexist?<|ARGUMENT|>In a love note to his second wife, Einstein wrote: \"Tonight I'm sleeping in your bed! It is peculiar how confusedly sentimental one is. It is just a bed like any other, as though you had not yet ever slept in it. And yet I find it comforting that I may lay myself in it, somewhat, like a tender confidence.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Walter Isaacson asserts in his book \"Einstein: His Life and Universe\" that the scientist, beside all the stereotypes, loved women and vice versa.\n","id":"26e9d46f-af38-4239-b2ae-b0d2a87ddde0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time for Hungary and the EU to Part Ways?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU has set standards of human rights, democracy and the rule of law to which countries must adhere if they want to be part of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU is a force for good in the world and is worth being a part of.\n","id":"23e222ac-883d-4ab8-8a6c-09802c4890eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>In Obama's campaign speech when he first announced that he would be seeking the Democratic nomination, he made hope a central theme.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obama's presidential campaign was run on a platform of hope.\n","id":"5aa0c2d4-b7e9-497b-a0ab-3f09a2fa61e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is no way to be healthy being overweight. A Body Mass Index of 25 or higher is incredibly unhealthy and leads to problems like Type 2 Diabetes, High blood pressure, heart disease and strokes, kidney disease, cancer, pregnancy complications, and many other diseases. Nobody should accept their body being unhealthy, especially when it has such a simple solution. Laziness is no excuse for being unhealthy. We always hear about overweight people preaching fat acceptance and pass off any constructive criticism as fat hate . My response to those people is Nobody hates you for being overweight. People avoid you or look down on you because you refuse to observe your own flaws and you're too lazy to spend an hour of your day improving your body and state of mind like everyone else. Overweight beings shouldn't try to shame people with fit bodies because they spent time and energy improving themselves, and they'll live far longer than anyone with an unhealthy weight.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no way to be healthy being overweight, and people who say it is possible are delusional\n","id":"0aeb8803-7706-429c-bdd3-790d98d6be75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should paternity testing of minors require the consent of both parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Paternity testing has a serious implication on the parents and so their consent is important.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Paternity testing of minors should require the consent of both parents.\n","id":"14a084e9-7c35-4115-8a87-042d20e6701b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>There have been 30 firearm related incidents in Schools in the USA so far in 2018 half way through the year including 38 deaths and 73 injuries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is sad that after so many school shootings, we're still having this debate. Dying kids should be a red line for all.\n","id":"27a611a7-cf48-448e-b2e6-6cd9b5964221"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>In Brazil, Brazilian police militias are clandestine paramilitary groups made up of current and former police officers which carry out both vigilante and organized crime activities. They enjoy the support of certain politicians and are also involved in far-right politics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vigilantes could be ex-military or police. These ex-service members would be better qualified and more experienced to deal with a range of scenarios than the average civilian, or newer members of the police force.\n","id":"3247a910-e6af-40a5-b8be-b3ef25726d5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm well aware of that those words are controversial in usage. While no one would deny that they were once neutral words referring to minority ethnicities have a tendency to slowly become offensive over time requiring replacement. I however content that both words are the best and most communicative way to refer to what they are refering to. negro has a couple of alternatives black This is flawed and creates ambiguities because it can also refer to the colour. black person can just as wel refer to someone who is literally black in a non racial sense. Whiel negro is literally Spanish for black that's never how the word is used in English the word unambiguously refers relation to the race of people originating from Subsaharan Africa in English African X These words create numerous problems. A white Mozambique born US expat got into trouble calling himsel white African American oblivious of the context of the word in the US. Terms like German American , Irish American and whato not all refer to nationality not race. If we say that African American refers to race only then what are we going to use for actual African Americans as in people born in Africa who live in the US? Most negros in the US in fact cannot be called African American in that meaning any more in the same way no one calls people who's German ancestry goes back 8 generations German American . At the very least one parent needs to have been born in Germany. Furthermore Africa is far larger than just the Subsharan mostly central west region whence negros originate. The word African American by convention is sometimes also used for people who are neither African nor American like people from the UK who are ambiguously brown . urban I'm not even going to provide an argument for how stupid this is, it insults my own intellect as well as yours to do so. subsaharan An accurate term that causes almost no confusion except that it has almost no currency and is often not understood. All in all the word negro is in a unique position to be unambiguous and lead to no confusion for anyone about what is meant. Oriental has a couple of alternatives Asian This is often used in North America because most Asian people in North America are oriental though recently there has been an influx of South Asians. The obvious problem with this term is the miscommunication it causes over the globe In NA it refers to the Oriental regions In the UK it refers to the South Asian regions In the rest of the world it mostly refers to the continent of Asia as a whole East Asian This term is far superior and clearer to Asian obviously but a lot of parts of East Asia are still excluded from the vernacular usage of East Asian . For instance Vladivostok lies in East Asia and a lot of people are not really thinking about Vladivostok when using the term East Asian While oriental is just Latin for eastern , in English the Orient is a well defined region including China, Tawain, Tibet, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. A group of countries with a history that is culturally intertwined. When people in NA say Asian or East Asian they tend to refer to the Orient and not Asia or East Asia as a whole. The term Orient is not ambiguous and delivers no problems communicating with people in other regions of the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I prefer the words \"Negro\" and \"Oriental\"\n","id":"a9f5d936-f950-40e7-9e8f-b49d6067a8b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the death penalty be implemented for terrorism?<|ARGUMENT|>Many terrorist recruits are grown up in an environment where they are easily brainwashed Therefore, joining terrorist organizations is not their fault.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone makes mistakes. Therefore they should get a second chance\n","id":"3556be1b-3793-4377-87a5-6ebe5bb7945a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Laptops be Allowed in University Classrooms?<|ARGUMENT|>Most students will be utilizing computers for the rest of their careers. Growing proficient with their use is therefore highly important.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Laptops have the side effect of teaching students how to be productive with computers.\n","id":"2e642329-f2b2-4829-b80b-9823efdc677f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, so, if you're transgender, I don't hate you. That's not what I mean. I just mean that, if you're a guy, then I'm going to call you he. I don't buy into all this bullshit about respecting pronouns because they're there to distinguish biological differences, often for sexual reasons. When I ask if you're a boy or girl, I'm not wondering if you prefer motorcycles or shoe shopping. If people successfully shift the meaning of gender to not mean the same thing as sex, then it only undermines gender equality by supporting old world gender roles. If you're a guy that wears dresses, NO. YOU'RE NOT A GUY. YOU HAVE TO BE A GIRL AND USE GIRL PRONOUNS HURRDUUR. Misuse of these pronouns is not only annoying and destructive to our society, but creates complications. If you were a straight male at a bar, how would you feel if you took a girl home, she said she was a girl, and then she whipped out her dick? I know that if I were straight, I would feel manipulated. I either want to get over my transphobia or become politically active to discredit this movement if it is as bad as I think it is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am very transphobic\n","id":"eb87a050-8b3f-4a51-9348-2d76b8ab70f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>According to a study, terror attacks in the US carried out by Muslims receive five times more media coverage than those by non-Muslims.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The impact of religion is often exaggerated in the media by over-representation of religiously motivated terrorism.\n","id":"51e451b6-bd85-44ad-b3ec-2e993afe053d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Supply side economics looks like it is fueling the self-destruction of capitalism in America.<|ARGUMENT|>Many hedge-fund managers who are some of the highest paid people on the planet are compensated entirely with stock, and their normal tax rate is 15%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This compensation structure has enormous tax implications because capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than regular income.\n","id":"65e3b2d2-83a2-45f1-9df6-d93dd858e99e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in an extremely blue state, there is approximately a 0 chance that Trump will win my state. I strongly dislike Hillary Clinton. The best way that I can think of to voice my disapproval of her is to vote for the other guy. If this were a swing state and I thought my vote mattered I would think long and hard about whether I want Trump to be the president. But it's not so I don't. I am voting Trump as a big F you to Hillary Clinton. None of the third party guys seem particularly interesting to me. I've been low key agonizing over this for months, I really dislike Clinton but I can't say that Trump would be better. Then today it occurred to me that it really doesn't matter. My state's going to Hillary no matter what happens. It doesn't matter how I vote, so I can vote against Hillary and voice my disapproval without worrying about the effect it has on the country, because there's none. It's been a load of my mind honestly. Maybe there's something I'm missing though, something that I'm not taking into consideration. That's why I'm posting this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am voting for Trump, even though I am a liberal\n","id":"7c52c9f6-c627-48a2-bc19-3531eaa76570"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>It should not be mandatory for cyclists to wear helmets<|ARGUMENT|>Wearing a helmet might create an illusion that a cyclist is safer with it. Consequently it can affect their taking caution of other possible dangers on the road.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should not be mandatory for cyclists to wear helmets\n","id":"635e9ed6-5dae-47b8-8126-3166bf6e3fb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should China cease attempts to infringe on the 'one country, two systems' policy in Hong Kong?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2003, more than 500,000 people in Hong Kong turned out for a march to protest against a change to the Constitution which would prohibit treason, secession, sedition and subversion against the Chinese government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hong Kong has a long history of large public protests, but still has received significant foreign investment.\n","id":"032936d0-d6b3-4c24-92e6-e10de09873d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I keep seeing meme that point out the coincidental increase of autism and number of vaccines for children. I have not seen anything more than circumstantial evidence and famous people claiming that they do. It's similar to saying that the weather is hot today because of what the stock market did, and showing that on a large number of days the two sets of data appear to match up. I think this is an unfortunate logical fallacy. My personal opinion on the cause of the increase is that it's likely due to the strong embrace of the concept that all lives have value and therefore a fetus that shows signs of autism is not aborted for moral and societal reasons, thus increasing birth rates which are then reflected in data.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Autism is not being caused by vaccines.\n","id":"7c13e504-8254-4440-8c04-e84bd497c9e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The results of referendums can limit the scope of action of important political actors which can hinder progress.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Simultaneously, other important actors in the democratic system are weakened by referendums. This can undermine democracy.\n","id":"75a2a4da-3707-4fa5-a505-d9cbf8f4f4bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>In trying to balance the representation of gender in a video game, the developers might change the gender of characters who were originally intended to be male, without changing the character's lines of dialogue or character traits. This could make the character seem out of place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The overall quality of the storytelling might suffer as a result of video games trying to portray gender equality.\n","id":"9f6d8252-868d-4bc1-9c9f-1228ed52ceff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see things going one way. Unskilled labor and jobs based on knowledge will be replaced by machines and programs over the next 30 to 40 years. This includes survive jobs, sales, law, real estate agents ect. These jobs might feel like they require a human but they soon won't. McDonald's and all you can eat sushi already have you ordering from a touch pad, internet law survives, House listing websites. I don't make the argument that no waiters will exist. There will be a small market for high end waiting. This extends to everything. You will always be able to opt for a human if you want to go to a more expensive place. But the jobs will be hard to come by. If you are young, you should be developing a skill that can't be replaced by a computer. Individualized things like marketing, art, design, music, entertainment of other kinds, therapy, massage, contracting, photography, video, ect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For a secure future you should go into a field that is not based on labor or knowledge to avoid losing your job to technological advancements.\n","id":"b720609a-5036-4524-af66-eed967b8ba10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should unpaid internships be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that unpaid internships and no internships at all lead to similar results in future employment does highlight that unpaid internships do not seem to offer any advantages.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Studies have shown that paid internships are twice as likely to result in employment than unpaid internships.\n","id":"f107ba6d-519f-40df-8940-e16ff00304b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>The $1.4 billion spend on the Atacama Large Millimeter Array is an equivalent investment to the Space Based Infrared System<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments spend comparable amounts of money on civilian R&D as on military R&D.\n","id":"5f92c835-ce84-4f25-b068-525764936143"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should vegan\/vegetarian parents feed their kids the same diet?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no practical alternative. Otherwise, parents would have to prepare meat meals for their kids.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vegan\/vegetarian parents should feed their children the same diet.\n","id":"df13ba4f-ca64-4673-8ea4-47b3d83531c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see a lot of hate towards religious organizations for holding back science. Galileo Galilei is a famous example of this but we still see it today as anti evolutionary views are powerful in USA and many Muslim countries. This can change curriculums, genetic science and transfer money to religion from science. But my view is I think the so called Social Justice Warriors , as I have seen this group of people being called, is even worse for science today in Western countries than religion. USA and a few other countries might be outliers? . In Denmark I have never experienced any religion stopping me in anything since I was 15. Before that I was forced into Russian church. Today I don't care what they think and pastors do have power but not that much as they are state employees. So they have to follow democratic rules and have no saying in laws about same sex marriage and such. But I have seen social justice fanatics control media and societal views. The movie industry, art and energy. These SJF? consist of anti GMO, anti nuclear power, anti sex difference views, and affirmative action which creates sex discriminatory laws. Environmental groups, gender feminists not equity feminists, only gender feminists , and a part of the political left can have these agendas. They have disrupted race science, intelligence science, sex science, evolutionary psychology, nuclear power development, and solutions that could make food much more plentiful. As I see it religious groups are nowhere near as powerful as these social justice groups and nowhere near as destructive in Western countries. It might only be true for Scandinavia. But I am not convinced that these groups don't have power in other countries. And I do agree that these groups can have partial members or supporters and not always paying members. As with religious groups we can as well describe it as memes spreading. I do agree that both religious groups and extreme social justice groups do a lot of good and are made to create a better world, as communism and fascism was, but I am focusing on the harm here. 2 of my favorite books on this subject is Blank Slate Steven Pinker and God Species Mark Lynas. They will be my main sources for all this. But I will mention more sources in the comments. I have no other word for this group of people than SJW. Please tell me if I can use it here? It will help me make my point greatly Or suggest another word for this group of people. If I have offended you or your group I am sorry and I will change my word use if I offend you. ironic? Weird that creating this  and using the word SJW scares me, but criticizing religion does not? No downvote brigades, no personal attacks. Keep your mind on the topic and not on being right. Read the 2 books for my view. I want my mind changed not change yours that's why am putting my view on the line. Edit the unfair grouping argument has been made. I awarded the Delta to the one who convinced me of its validity and had a point about religion being worse than left politics on earth. I agreed if we discounted all extreme left politics such as communism. I still think my umbrella grouping is valid but a bit too wide. Edit2 this my category against religion. Social justice groups vs religious groups<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"extreme social justice groups are worse for Western science than religion is\n","id":"ea7b3b44-66a1-4396-88bf-636b1ea87731"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think the standard sizes of beverages sold should be a consistent amount. Currently, a small soda can be anywhere from 8 fl oz to 32 in the case of AMC Theaters. I think this is ridiculous, and that consumers would be better served with consistency. I believe it will help in several ways, such as preventing the drift to larger and larger sizes, help people not accidentally over consume, and give people a baseline for serving comparisons. Additionally, unlike the NYC soda ban, this does not infringe on businesses. They are still free to sell whatever sizes they'd like additionally, provided they call it something else. I suppose it could be argued AMC should have the freedom to call a 32oz drink a small, but at that point it seems they're peeing on my shoe and telling me it's raining.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Small, Medium, and Large soda sizes should be standardized.\n","id":"67001cc9-0cf4-45b5-b650-0b334a38e118"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Bernie Sanders recently took the position that people who are presently incarcerated after either pleading to a crime or conviction by trial should be allowed to vote while in prison, because voting is a right, not a privilege. While I agree with the sentiment that voting is a right, so is freedom from confinement. In that sense, the government deprives a convict of that right when they are convicted. If a person decides to place themselves outside, or at odds with, our democracy, they should remain outside it until they have paid the price to re enter it. Don\u2019t get me wrong the minute they are released from prison, their voting rights should be restored but until then, I don\u2019t think they should be able to vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bernie Sanders is wrong about incarcerated persons being able to vote while in prison after an adjudication of guilt.\n","id":"840469f3-599b-4431-9e66-2fe51802ee4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>European, Asian, South American, whatever. I have no problem with embracing your culture, but I don't think you should fly the flag of your or your ancestors' former nation. I'm of Irish heritage, and I celebrate St Patricks day but I would never put a 26 6 1 bumper sticker on my car, and I don't think anyone else should either. It has nothing to do with us. We left Ireland willingly. I think this attitude should apply to everyone in the US except Native Americans obviously . Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe if you live in the United States, being proud of your \"heritage\" is stupid because you probably came here willingly I agree with the statement \"if you love X so much you should go back\".\n","id":"2e8b8f67-ea0e-4c36-aeb4-d168df68aa9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Some assumptions first Rich people do better in an economy that is healthier than in an unhealthy economy. Example, owning 5 of a struggling economy is worse than owning 1 of a booming healthy and prosperous economy. Thus the tax is good for rich people The rich are defined as such because removing 2 of their wealth still means they have more than enough to survive thrive with the remaining 98 A percentage ensures a rich person that becomes poorer, ends up paying less than a rich person that becomes richer. The 2 essentially taxes fairly. Most wealth in America is taxed at a much lower rate, even income taxes have been shown to be lower for wealthy Americans, as a percentage of their total income for the year, causing things like the buffet rule to be pushed and promoted. Everyone does better when the least of us do better. Everyone does worse when the least amongst us are worse off. Examples include a poor immigrant that creates Apple, or the next Google, or the next Jet engine. This assumes the 2 tax is redistrubitive in such a way it enhances the lives of those living at the very bottom. Not taxing wealth, allows wealth to be crippling, where it is fed on generation after generation by family members that never work a day in their lives, and in essence provide no benefit to society. The numbers are flexible, 10 million is what I'm just throwing out there. This is meant to be a rational discussion, and I know there are people that would not want to increase taxes even on people with 50 billion in their accounts. Ownership of wealth is not up for philosophical debate, as we'll waste time in this thread. Someone can scream that their wealth is theres and no one can touch it, but can forget that the government provides services to protect their wealth, livelihood, and status such that without the government such wealth could not exist on its own. We all in some way owe it to the government, without which our successes could have been stolen by others or impossible to accomplish. Thus our wealth can be taxed due to it's necessity of existence on the government. So please no philosophical my wealth is mine arguments. EDIT Lets make this a 2 either per year, or per 4 or 5 years. Not 10 years as I believe that's too long and wealth would balloon too much in that time. But I'm open to any of the above, and would push for a either year or every 2 year 2 wealth tax. I'm open to up to 5 year, and at 10 years that's too long to wait for the tax. Also Tax is on net wealth, not on purely assets. So if you have 50 million in assets, and 40 million in liabilities, your net wealth is 10 million, and you'd pay 2 million in taxes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be a 2% Wealth tax on everyone making more than 10 million dollars\n","id":"a136fcad-3751-4b90-a986-adf15f2e5263"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By extremely strict, I mean 500,000 for House and Senate campaigns and 10 million for presidential campaigns. Why so low? Because with how high campaign spending currently is, massive corporations are able to buy political influence. For instance, corporate campaign spending holds up subgovernments called Iron Triangles Iron Triangles political structures that consist of an interest group or corporation, the Congressional subcommittee related to that group, and the executive branch agency that\u2019s supposed to regulate said group. Corporations promise campaign donations for Congressmen in exchange for lax regulation. Congressmen promise increased funding for the federal agency in question in exchange for law enforcement that will benefit the corporation, and in turn the political campaigns of the congressmen. The federal agency promises the corporation lax enforcement of already lax regulation for corporate support of that agency via lobbying or higher paying jobs within the corporate world known as the revolving door An example of an iron triangle at work is the fueling of the opioid epidemic Big pharma was able to coerce congress and top officials at the DEA to look the other way while the industry was flooding the country with pills. How? Because all parties benefited through this iron triangle. Corruption like this would be abated if campaign spending weren\u2019t so high. With such strict spending caps, corporations wouldn\u2019t be able to buy influence in politics. As evidenced by Bernie Sanders, who raised 20 million almost exclusively from small donors, corporate millions would simply not be needed to reach such strict spending caps. \u201cBut wait\u201d, someone might say. \u201cAll that campaign money is spent for a reason. Ads and rallies cost a lot.\u201d And to that I ask why the fuck are constant ads and rallies needed in the first place? They\u2019re literally just echo chambers. Any asshole with shitty views can sound good in an echo chamber. All that\u2019s really needed in a campaign cycle are debates. Because if your ideology can\u2019t hold when challenged, it\u2019s flawed. Campaigns should consist of initial ads rallies to get a certain amount of supporters to qualify for the debates. After the debates commence, no more ads or rallies should be needed. Winning a debate will be a candidate\u2019s ad rally. Instead of spending ridiculous amounts on TV ad space, candidates could take a fucking bus to the debate and project their ideologies to the nation for free. No more exorbitant spending on useless echo chambers. All you corporate lobbyists out there, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All Political Campaigns in the United States should have EXTREMELY strict spending caps\n","id":"198b0442-30ff-4659-bbb3-0e56e9b3f5e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I will just assume that 95 of you will think I'm a pedophile and disgusting, so please spare me the names. I understand that 15 year old boys and girls are considered children by many of you, and that even if a 19 year old had sex with a 15 year old they would be considered a pedophile by a large percentage of the population. However, that's entirely based on the extreme stigma of pedophilia. Basically, there's absolutely nothing worse to be in the world than a pedophile. Murderers are somehow a step above pedophiles. So if anything could even be a part of the conversation, true or not, it is immediately seen as a great, massive taboo. The thing is, age truly does not mean anything. What about being 18 or 16 in many states is so magical that suddenly somebody is capable of doing something that somebody who is six months younger is incapable of. One semester of pre algebra, and suddenly it's okay to buy cigarettes, have sex, get married, and join the army to legally kill somebody? I know 20 year olds who act like they're 13 and I've known 15 year olds who are better people than the 20 year olds will ever be. Furthermore, what an absolutely prude attitude towards sex. You're telling me that if a girl by 15 has had sex with 6 guys, and one of them happened to be 19, that the 19 year old is a pedophile and did something illegal and immoral? I'm not talking about 5 year olds, or 6, or 8, or 10, or 12, or 13. Those are children . Those are kids who are not capable of watching themselves. A fifteen year old? Sure, they can often be immature and stupid, but so can 18 year olds. I just don't get the absolute Puritanical, backwards ideas of sex. Some 15 year olds look like they're in their 20s and are extremely attractive. And who is anybody to say that a 15 year old and a 20 year old can't be in love just because you don't agree with it or understand? Who is anybody to judge between consenting individuals?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The federal age of consent for sex and marriage should be fifteen.\n","id":"5cb4cdd4-10b5-43c3-a766-0bb49462bd87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A couple years ago, there was a chemical attack during the Syrian civil war, and that is a big no no worldwide. Obama decided to involve himself in the situation. I personally believe he made a bluff against Syria when he claimed he would attack them had they not complied and given up their chemical weapons. I believe Obama somehow knew that they would eventually give up their weapons albeit it didn't work out exactly how he'd expected, I'm sure . He caused a lot of tensions, sure, but Syria, Russia or China were never going to initiate an attack against the US if the US didn't go first. I also believe Obama was trying to send a worldwide message to try and make him the US look more intimidating, but by never attacking, he failed at doing so. I think a big piece in it, though, was that there were borderline no countries supporting us, nor were there going to be had we started a war with any of the countries backing Syria and Russia. The tensions between the US and Russia now are caused by Obama's bluff. I apologize if this is all over the place or anything, this is my first post here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obama was never going to attack Syria.\n","id":"0dd401cb-2cf4-4bad-adda-44cb4a591785"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Equal Paternity\/Maternity Paid Leave Be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents' lives and routines often change drastically when they have children, especially when the baby is very young and needs extra care.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parental leave may be helpful for adjusting to the large life changes that occur after having a child.\n","id":"e4813966-cfc4-4221-9ecc-26b60d3e5652"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>create a single European Union army<|ARGUMENT|>We are completely ignoring the issue of geopolitics and how the creation of this entity would be a direct move to replace NATO as the primary defender of Europe. This would of course mean a rejection of the US, as the heart of NATO. What would follow from this would be an extremely unpredictable and volatile place to practice international relations. One thing that we can predict, however, will be the \u2018cold shoulder\u2019 the US would suddenly show the EU. The US would feel as if its ally had used it to gain strength after WWII The Marshall Plan, and now that it\u2019s back on its feet again can forget and even challenge America\u2019s supremacy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The creation of an EU army could harm diplomatic relations with the USA\n","id":"268ace97-5f09-4ea7-b298-1fe950453770"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The ACLU and Charlottesville: Should the ACLU Defend White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Their mission is \"to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.\" Maximizing donations isn't included.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If defending everyone equally, to access illusive fundamental justice is it's mandate, then defending white supremacist will support that mandate.\n","id":"ac1f944b-ad81-4e31-909c-5079a7fbce95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Intro This is a thought I first had in the early days of the Iraq war, over a decade ago, when people were still frequently and incorrectly linking 9 11 and Iraq. I never got around to posting this  until now. When I talk about violence for political reasons below, please know that I am using the notion that War is a mere continuation of politics by other means,  I often hear people complain about attacks on civilians, I hear it asserted that attacks should be limited to the military, etc. To my mind this doesn't seem very moral. The citizen of a democracy has a some influence over the foreign policy conducted by his nation, and as such, some responsibility for it. On the other hand, the conscript of dictatorship has no choice in the matter, and therefor far less responsibility for the actions he is forced to take. It seems backward in my mind that it is more OK to kill the later for political reasons than the former. Preemptive counter to common arguments You have no way of knowing who the victim voted for Correct, I don't But I know that a significant fraction did, and the others could be classified as collateral damage. It is widely accepted that collateral damage is inevitable in war. And blame is often placed on the opposing military when it stations itself too close to civilians. So I find this argument unconvincing. The laws of war dictate I'm not talking about the law tradition, I am talking about who's responsible for the objectionable actions that led one to resorting to violence. The law is often related to morality, but it's also often poorly executed in that regard. The laws traditions of war don't take into account the modern notion of government by and of the people. OK, now that I've gotten the preemptive arguments out of the way. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The citizenry of a democracy or republic, etc... is a more morally acceptable target for politically motivated violence or military attack than is the conscript soldier of a dictatorship.\n","id":"8812ea22-5770-4143-a3d9-7ec79ffed552"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been in several relationships, and only one of those relationships has ended in person. I have been broken up with and the one who is breaking up with the other person, and consistently I feel it is better to be broken up with over texting or social media. I believe that you should not be forced into an uncomfortable and possibly heartbreaking situation. When you're hearing about this on your own, you have more time to sort through your feelings, and you are free to have whatever reaction you please. If you are in public, then you can detach yourself from the situation and then react when you are on your own. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that breaking up over text or on a social media site actually makes the break-up easier for the one being broken up with.\n","id":"55d2daef-6ec9-4f57-8142-c1054acee868"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>During a long engagement, the federation can draw upon the means of production of hundreds of technologically advanced worlds to sustain the fight. The rebels are reliant on equipment scraped together at the fringes of society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Federation has a much more stable and prosperous economy.\n","id":"6e112400-b79a-48f5-8ecf-55706f8dee56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Adultery Ethical?<|ARGUMENT|>Because the other person's marriage has nothing to do with you, you are not responsible for their decisions regarding this marriage. If they decide to sleep with someone outside of their marriage, that's their choice, not yours.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No. Another person's marriage has nothing to do with you.\n","id":"6135f2c2-204a-421e-8849-ecac79522487"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Matter acts in accordance to the laws of nature at all times eg. Newton's laws therefore there is only one possible way in which a given scenario can play out, and given that you have access to all the information about the situation the outcome is always determinable. When applied to human thought this would mean that all of our actions are determinable, and therefore free will is non-existent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"HOLDING AREA for unresolved claims that have been flagged for some time. The purpose of this area is to ensure such claims are resolved within 7d of being flagged.\n","id":"fec5f782-2eb2-4869-bcd0-93333653b12d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>Instead of removing monuments, reinterpretations of them and changes could be made so the historic memory they represent can remain, yet with a more balanced interpretation that allows everyone to feel recognized.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Removal is the most drastic measure when there are more gentle alternatives.\n","id":"fb5c6d56-8fc7-484b-9a6a-02bf96d9e45a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First and foremost, I'm not trying to offend anyone here. Religion is a touchy subject but one that needs to be discussed more, I think. This point of view is probably toxic and biased and would really like some different perspectives. And I don't know anyone who can do that. So, my family is very religious. I was taught everything about the god they believe in from a very early stage in my life. I don't really remember when they started doing this I was that little. But maybe it's because they started so early is why I believe in Him so thoroughly. The ideas were put in me before my mind had developed enough to question them. Wow, I make it sound like I'm from a dystopian scifi and was brainwashed. It's not like that at all. Me talking about it here is proof that I can stop believing whenever I want to. But honestly, I'd believe in Him even if my parents weren't so hung over it. Anyway this makes me question how or when our faith in religion really starts. For example, If I'm a Catholic from birth I wouldn't really convert to Buddhism a couple years later that easily. I might, but chances are very slim . I might stop believing altogether, but me converting my faith of one god to another one is something that rarely happens. And this applies to pretty much to anyone of any faith, I think. This is an over simplification but another example would be that of Santa Claus or maybe the tooth fairy. A kid won't look up on google to find out about a man who climbs down chimneys to give them gifts nor would he believe in him if s he did. And he certainly won't change his beliefs from Santa to Papa Noel The French version because of an internet article. It's almost always the parents. They play the biggest role as to what their kid believes in. Sure the community they live in matters, but then again, religion isn't as simple as Santa, is it? So this make me go, 'what about people of the non faith?' Not to generalize but usually atheist parents show a more open mindedness in this matter. That is to say they don't usually force their own beliefs down on their children. A common phrase we keep hearing is that they would let them decide for themselves when they grow up. And sure, yes. I know that most parents maybe don't care what they're kids believe in. But doesn't raising a kid detached from any religious context pushes a certain agenda in itself? A child who grew up in a family where there is literally no spiritual restrictions or rule bindings will never choose those said restrictions and rules on their own accord. I mean why would they? They're kids. They're going to do things that are fun. Not go to the church every week, or fast, or namaaz five times a day or puja to a deity when they could go and play with their friends. They're not going to choose to not drink, or have sex, or do drugs or gamble. So my point of view is that a kid raised in a secular environment will almost always turn out to be an atheist in later life. Again, I don't mean to offend anyone here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Raising children in a secular household only caters to raising them up as atheists\n","id":"7a015314-59ae-4cec-ba06-eff370b086d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In spite of in theory the US justice system being colorblind, there is a mountain of evidence that black defendants get harsher sentences and more convictions for the same crime. The disparity between white and black incarceration rates is higher than it was in the 1960s, at the height of Jim Crow. Similarly, police regularly get off for doing heinous crimes. I see the only possible solution being an institutionalized affirmative action justice system, where until the last racists die off blacks are explicitly favored. Ideally, I'd like to see the US' wealth equally distributed among the races, but in the meantime I'd encourage any African Americans I know to bleach their skin and straighten their hair.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US justice system should hold white defendants and police to a higher standard than black defendants and civilians.\n","id":"ed3c0a77-2f7d-4d7b-bc19-5fb055dcca78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hate it. I feel like a german during ww2 or something, i hate being associated with white people and white culture and our history. I feel like i have no culture, i feel like were bland and culturally insensitive and i feel like i hate everything that whiteness represents. I feel a connection and identify much more strongly with other cultures and i feel misplaced. Im constantly having casual and not so casual racism shoved in my face making me violently angry. The way reddit has responded to the race related posts today makes me want to murder people. Please cmv and help me not be so ashamed of my race.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"im ashamed to be white\n","id":"8550d2cc-e787-4abd-814e-d219b79a6935"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI will benefit the middle class, by increasing median household income among the middle class.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI promotes social justice improving the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within society.\n","id":"454c52d7-670a-495a-a39f-71f2a9575904"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>Times change, and sometimes it makes sense to have what's established to change with it to keep up with the current world's beliefs and lifestyles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the costs of maintaining the status quo outweigh the benefits, then it would be worth the time and money to remove it.\n","id":"5315531f-ad3c-48a9-b45d-385d9889ada1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>P = NP?<|ARGUMENT|>By Church-Turing thesis, NP means the class of problems that human organizations can feasibly solve. P means the class of problems that an individual can feasibly solve. Church-Turing Thesis in wikipedia<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NP describes complexity class of feasible concurrent computation. P describes complexity class of feasible sequential computation.\n","id":"983c6350-02af-4a1b-8796-a8163337bedc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Affirmative Action: Useful Once, Outdated Today?<|ARGUMENT|>Generally, there is often a feeling of resentment on the side of the privileged parts of society when a new group gains power. A loss of power within society frequently drives conflicts with government, as different ethnonationalist factions lay claims to state power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Resentment of minority groups is a regular thing in larger mainstream societies and would not stop just because of the cessation of affirmative action.\n","id":"2b2f05ef-d81f-4022-97f7-412c81e272fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>C'mon. Look at him. No rules. No limits. Insane and yet highly intelligent and has a diverse range of personalities. Depending on the situation, he has been everything from silly prankster to cold, calculating psychopath. Evil to the core and the only person who can really keep up with him can only stop him temporarily. And backstory? We have a general idea about him and yet he's more shrouded in mystery than anyone else. Fuck, we don't even have an idea what his name is. Nothing tops this guy as far as I can see.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the Joker is the best comic book villian.\n","id":"85076aa4-871b-4c68-b66c-77800b561210"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not disputing the positive change that feminism and feminist activists are responsible for throughout history and am in no way critiquing the feminists that are truly fighting for equality. Unfortunately I believe that the direction of current mainstream feminism and those that hold power within the movement are not striving for true equality, whether they realize it or not. For example feminists continuously muddy the water when it comes to domestic violence called the violence against women act , speaking about it solely as a man vs. woman crime. In reality, according to the NCADV, 1 in 3 women fall victim to domestic violence and 1 in 4 men. There is only one domestic violence shelter publicly funded in the entire country for men and hundreds for women, which is ironic because that is a real instance of institutional inequality. In the past when male rights organizations have fought to change custody laws, the bills have been fought tooth and nail by WOW and ultimately failed because they have institutional and political power and the ears of legislators. When the leaders of these feminist guided organizations are literally assisting in maintain a unequal status quo and then claim to be fighting for equality, it does not sit well with me. Overall I think feminism is doing more to divide people and breed hatred than benefitting society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the mainstream feminist movement U.S. particularly is more detrimental to society than beneficial.\n","id":"93ece1d2-365c-4da9-9fd4-4194a72b33df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand why the microtransaction systems of games like Battlefront II are so controversial. I also understand why companies like EA do it. Games are way more expensive to make than they used to be, some now cost as much as blockbuster films. And then there's inflation to consider an N64 game in the 90s would cost 100 in today's money. Keeping games at 60 seems to no longer be financially viable. I think if games cost say 80 where you get all the content upfront could be a good compromise. Video game developers would actually be able to make money without resorting to underhanded tactics. And gamers would gripe for a little while, but I think they'd get used to it. To me the problem with games like BF2 isn't so much the amount of money you're spending but the fact that the microtransaction system feels sleazy cause it is . Being more upfront with the cost would go a long way for both parties<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video Games should cost more money\n","id":"b184dd91-6ab3-49a7-9718-f0a8c9c16157"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello  I was thinking about the recent decision to allow modders to charge for their mods on Steam and I think this is a great idea It has been negatively received but below I will explain how it could actually lead to a whole new level of gaming. Here are the main arguments against steam marketization of mods that I have seen so far They all used to be free More people will want to make crappy mods for easy money A donate button is a better idea Mods aren\u2019t worth the price being advertised Mods that go out of date will be useless People steal and reupload mods for profit Steam gets 75 of the cut Free mods at other places will dry up It\u2019s a cash grab for skyrim and older games Developers will rely on modders to fix their games Modders will leave mods unfinished Here are the main arguments for steam marketization of mods that I can think of Mod developers can now be supported creating mods, allowing them to release newer versions more quickly and with more detail. More people will have an incentive to create mods of their own to make money Developers have an incentive to support user generated content. Modders have more incentive to keep their mods up to date. Marketized environment spurs more competition as mods can no longer all be downloaded, thus potentially improving quality. Developers will now have to compete with mods for DLC sales. Here are my counter arguments against the negative response Well I suppose at one time all computer programs would have been free as well. We don\u2019t complain when other people make software, and mods shouldn\u2019t be any different. If a developer chooses to allow people to essentially license their software to create their own products, it is comparable to creating a game with a licensed game engine. We are not entitled to the hard work of others, and should not expect to always receive things for free. As most people seem to be upset that they aren\u2019t free, just because it is more convienient to the end user doesn\u2019t mean it is good for the developers. More on that later. There are so many crappy mods out there already. Adding a price tag to those mods will not increase the amount of bad content, and crappy cash grabs already exist in the form of early access, poorly developed games, etc. Sure it sucks to fall to one of these things, but allowing it to happen with mods is not necessarily going to make existing content worse. People will speak with how they spend, so poor things will naturally sell worse off. A donate button is an entirely different business model. You don\u2019t have a donate button for buying AAA titles or going to the movie theater, or buying a car. You can choose to have people pay what they want, effectively a donate option if the start is low enough, or advertise your own donation service on your page. You aren\u2019t forced to monetize your workshop items and it is the choice of the content creator to do so. Sure there will be plenty of overpriced mods. As time progresses, those prices will naturally meet the curve of supply and demand, just like the trading cards do. If a modder wants to maximize his profit, he will follow these basic economic principles or suffer. So over time the crappy stuff will not be overpriced and popular. If mods go out of date, mod developers will have a strong incentive to keep it up to date or risk their reputation. Game developers are already familiar with windows updates causing problems and no one is blaming windows or mac for causing the game to break. If a mod is not successful, then there is little risk to let it die if the developer must. Otherwise, there is a strong financial incentive to continue to provide support. People steal and reupload to steam for profit. This is something that as long as a good reporting system exists won\u2019t be a huge problem. Sure, some might get away with some purchases but perhaps a delay in payment can rectify the problem. It isn\u2019t a gamebreaker. Steam gets 75 of the cut. This at first sounds ridiculous but before the modders were getting 0 of the cut. Even extremely popular mods would get little to no funding in the past. Now moderately successful modders can build a career over creating mods, essentially gaining the rights to license the game to make their own things. Of course the number of free mods will decrease. But that is like saying that there will be less free indie games now that some people are selling theirs. It creates better indie games when indie developers can actually profit off of them. You really think KSP, Space Engineers, or Project Zomboid would happen for free? The free mods will still exist, but we were never entitled to them to be free in the first place. For those arguing that it is a cash grab, sure, Valve will profit. But just because a company profits doesn\u2019t mean that it conflicts with our interests. Clothing companies, car companies, computer companies all exist for making as much profit as possible, and it brings about revolutions in their respective industries as they get more and more effective. These developments bring improvements to our lives you own a computer? . Just because Valve is wanting to profit doesn\u2019t mean it conflicts with the consumer\u2019s interest. Developers may be tempted to rely on modders to \u201cfix\u201d their games. I see this as a potential problem, and should probably have some regulation on what should be the responsibility of the original developer to fix. This is a legitimate concern, but it isn\u2019t introduced with the problem of monetizing mods. Developers could be just as lazy about their finished products today with free fixes provided by the community. There will also of course be no small share of mods that never get finished. As tragic as this is, we have seen this with Early Access and I think monetizing mods should be treated the same way. For one modders will have a much stronger incentive to continue working on their projects, as they now receive compensation for the effort they put into it, and two they will be more accountable to living up to promises that they make about their products. Especially for pricing tiers as progress is made, they should be held accountable to their goals. If they fail to meet their promises, there should be some accountability. In conclusion, I see monetization as the next step in the PC Gaming industry. Think of the industry like the mineral industry. You have people mine rare materials out of the rock. These people sell the rocks to places that refine them into metals or jewels. Then you have people who take those items and make machines or crafts, and so on. Each level we go higher produces more and more advanced products. If we think of the games coming out as a kind of \u201craw material\u201d, it will make sense for an industry to emerge to utilize that material into mods which can be even more advanced than the original game. If you had stopped people from selling metals or jewels, you would never have the technological level we have today. TL DR By letting modders make money off of their mods, a new section of the gaming industry is being born, which will greatly benefit consumers in the long run. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Valve's decision to introduce monetized mods is the birth of a new level of the gaming industry.\n","id":"570080d9-658e-4851-a108-4600527f688d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi guys Let me start out by saying that I believe I understand the reasons behind statutory rape. Many different cultures define adulthood differently, but in most childhood is defined as a time where the person has a psuedo agency. They're a person but they can only make certain decisions. Age of consent laws are based upon this. I completely agree. I like romeo and juliet clauses but in general I think this way of thinking and justification is spot on. I think it's 110 absurd though to apply this in situations where the minor meets their statutory rapist in an adult restricted zone in this case a zone designated for anybody above the relevant age of consent . This means 18 clubs, 21 bars, even 16 shows where it takes place in a region where the age of consent is 16 . This isn't a moral argument, it's a legal one . I think it's so bizarre to expect adults in these areas to be on guard . If anybody should be charged, it should be the venue that let them in due to negligence. I don't even know what to think about fraudulent IDs. I understand this isn't a super common occurrence, that typically it's parents who file charges and that minors aren't usually acting as weird predators. It's not about frequency, just that it exists. I'm not sure how easy it will be to change my view. I do know that I completely don't understand any arguments for this line of thought. I might just be confused. It just doesn't make sense to me. Maybe something will click. EDIT I'm not sure how to make an edit to the title, but I'd rather have it be genderless. Sorry about that. EDIT2 My view has been changed multiple times over I'm gonna stop with the deltas. Thank you everyone who helped<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not knowing her age should be a defense against statutory rape in some cases.\n","id":"9e7acec7-6420-4bdc-ab94-1ced091aad02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is a whole BBC stereotype that posits that black men have the biggest sized genitalia of all human races . This was originally created to negatively portray Africans as savage and hypersexual. Now, it is used to portray black men as more masculine than any other race of man. This whole cuckold idea though is harmful to every race involved in it however. x200B It harms Black Men because it makes black guys seem like horny animals that wants to mate with anybody and everybody that isn't black. x200B It harms Black Women because it makes them seem so ugly that not even lustful black men want to be intimate with them. x200B It harms White Men because it portrays them as spineless pushovers whose only purpose is to serve others. x200B And it harms White Women because it portrays them as idyllically beautiful creatures that only want to have sex with the biggest and manliest man they can get their hands on. x200B With cuckolding entering the public sphere due to crap like Blacked.com and 4chan and Bella and the Bulldogs, plus other pop culture references race relations in the sexual sphere have been further harmed with cuckolding being popular and reviving ancient stereotypes. x200B Black men have literally been killed because of the perceived threat of a giant phallus and the sexuality that comes with it. Lynch mobs would accuse black men of raping white women with their giant organ and then castrate the black man before killing him. T here were even contemporary essays written about this giant penis obsession Even black children have had the police called on them accused of groping because of the ingrained fear that all black males want to defile white women if given the chance. x200B When you think about it, some white men seem to be far more obsessed with black male sexuality than actual black people are. The whole cuckold idea which is mainly consumed and created by white societies to begin with dehumanizes black men and turns them into a giant dildo with a bad attitude. It also makes black men with average or below average penis sizes which would be the majority of them by definition feel insecure because they're expected to have a baseball bat in their pants. To change my view, you have to argue why this whole BBC idea is neutral or even positively affects the lives of people of African descent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The big black cock stereotype is harmful to black people.\n","id":"9b4c2bef-143e-4bd9-8507-61e42735f46b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen a few people here and there saying how they passed an IQ test with a relatively high result, but that they still considered themselves stupid. However, their view of their own intelligence might be flawed in a pessimistic way, and might actually be smart. I've also noticed how many subjects of r iamverysmart posts were using their IQs to try proving that they're superior than other people. I also took an IQ test recently one on the internet, just to see my own for fun , and don't really understand how they can generalize demonstrate how smart someone can be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The result of an IQ test is not representative of a person's intelligence\n","id":"7ca2d022-cdea-4422-9c64-61a5b8e0f777"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>Mormonism promises that if one follows all the teachings to their best ability, God will make up the rest, and that they will become as Gods one day. Other religions only promise hanging out in heaven, being reincarnated into another person\/animal. Clearly, the promise to be all knowing and all powerful is a superior end to any other end claimed by all other religions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Followers of the Restored Gospel LDS followers believe those who exercise faith, repent, receive the Gift of the Holy Ghost and endure to the end shall be exalted, which includes many wonderful blessings.\n","id":"55f19824-af1a-4399-bb76-34bc6b3a8d04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Impeachment proceedings won't hurt Dems, and do NOT help GOP in 2020.<|ARGUMENT|>Aside from morality, history will judge us and we must redeem our generation and all we stand for by proceeding on impeachment proceedings whether or not they work and whatever happens in 2020.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Impeachment proceedings do NOT help Trump and Republicans in 2020, thus, Democrats should not be afraid to go forward with impeachment.\n","id":"1fad3e97-2eed-4e86-8818-f0905d2ff923"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that people who claimed to have seen things like the B2 were eventually vindicated but there was nothing terribly otherworldly about that at the time. Nothing physics or modern aeronautics couldn't explain. There's a lot of weird claims out there and miraculously, none of them have an kind of photographic proof even though pretty much everyone has a camera in their pocket these days. The recent NSA scandals have shown that the government is capable of some pretty secretive shit. And the past is definitely mired with crazy secret futuristic technology like the B2 but really? A lot of all of this seems made up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people who claim to have had UFO\/alien\/experimental craft experiences are either imagining things or consciously making it up.\n","id":"0f7f357f-fd5b-4e1c-bfcc-8ecd82bae4e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Jurors Be Involved In The Execution Process?<|ARGUMENT|>Emotional distance and rationality are paramount to evaluating evidence and determining the probability of guilt. This is why those personally affected by a crime can't sit on the jury.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forcing jurors to participate in an execution is likely to make jurors more emotional and less rational when rendering a verdict.\n","id":"0d399675-6200-4cbb-a69d-d5da09b3e34e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>A recent poll conducted in June 2019 by Fox News found that 58% of Americans felt that big government was a bigger threat to America than powerful technology companies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people believe that big government poses more of a threat to their finances than big banks. This suggests that increased regulation is not the right answer.\n","id":"c667bf78-7701-4f8f-858b-106e5baa39a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should puberty in children be delayed in preparation for gender reassignment?<|ARGUMENT|>In medicine, one of the main guiding principle says not to harm patients. This restricts the application of unnecessary medical intervention, because those interventions always carry some risk. Impeding development carries a risk.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While gender itself is considered to be a social construct gender identity development includes social as well as biological factors that may change with maturation.\n","id":"f6b0be49-976b-48e8-80e9-16ddad664461"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title might require some clarification, so let me explain a little further although individual people have rights, and can be owed things or deserve things, groups of people, or designations of people do not have any rights and can't be owed things. Here's some examples of how this applies Corporations should not have any rights inherent to themselves. The only rights that they do have property rights, for example are justified only to the extent that they make corporations run more smoothly and benefit people. States rights or that of other local governments aren't a meaningful goal. Allowing states local autonomy is only worthwhile to the extent that it improves the rights and lives of the people living in those states. It makes no sense to think of every single member of a family race religion or other designation is guilty of a crime unless literally every single person in that designation personally committed the crime , and it doesn't make any sense to think that one designation owes anything to another designation. No tears should be shed for a state that holds less voting power than another state. What should matter is when individual people hold more voting power than other individual people. On the same sex marriage front, I don't think it's a reasonable arguments to say that exclusionary laws are discriminating against certain types of relationships. Relationships are not people, and it doesn't make sense to worry about discriminating against them. On a side note, I would like to say that I am very strongly in favour of same sex marriage legalization. It's just that this one particular argument strikes me as misinformed . Reasoning none of these groups or designations are people in and of themselves. They're things. And it doesn't make any sense to worry about the rights feelings equality of things. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it makes no sense to personify a group of people.\n","id":"ae941690-c4c9-437b-8815-838a6a92b7f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Youth Votes Count More Than Votes Cast by Elderly Citizens?<|ARGUMENT|>Young people have not contributed anything to the nation, whereas the elderly have already contributed everything to it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The disproportionate electoral power of youth could be used at the expense of elderly populations.\n","id":"a180343e-22fd-484c-b005-69a2e255ca76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pretty much the title. I see this on almost every subreddit. Someone uses baby language like \u201caaa me hungry\u201d or whatever, then someone comments \u201cwhy use many word when few word do trick???\u201d and then someone replies \u201cr unexpectedoffice.\u201d Another example I recently made a post containing an office reference. There were top level comments that only said \u201cr unexpectedoffice.\u201d These people are adding nothing to the conversation in the comments. All they are doing is fishing for karma. The only value they have is that they can introduce new Redditors to these subreddits. However, they will realize pretty quickly that these subreddits aren\u2019t that funny. I will not be rewarding deltas to people trying to convince me that this subreddit is funny. This value is only \u201cone time,\u201d and afterwards it has lost all worth. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Commenting \u201cr\/unexpectedoffice\u201d adds nothing of value to the conversation.\n","id":"103b4786-b06b-49c4-b8d0-1601f8114871"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey everyone, Lately I've been more honest with my political opinion and realized how flawed and wrong they are. Essentially I despise the left wing wide of politics and will go to the far or alt right just to spite the left wing even though said ideas are flawed and dangerous. Here is the background. Im a son of a South Vietnamese refuge, the losing side of the Vietnam war defeated by the communist North. The Western Vietnamese community as a whole is still angry and bitter at the defeat and as a result we despise communism. Growing up I was also raised in a conservative household and grew patriotic towards my host country Australia and growing a love for the military at a very young age. Subconsciously I grouped communism along with Maoism, Stalin ism and pol pots Khmer rouge regime with all left wing ideas even though most liberals are moderates. Anyways upon learning about what happened to the Vietnam veterans upon returning home being spat on by anti war Protestants my hatred for the left grew and a negative experience with a college liberal put the final nail in the coffin when i was called a murderer just after I joined the army. With my generation being increasingly left wing and the rise of 'SJW' I just grew to hate the left even more to the point i started supporting Trump and the likes of 'Milo Yiannopolous' simply to spite the left and I refused to listen to any left ideas such as gay rights, civil rights, feminism, and all other social justice and human rights related topics and if you even criticized the military and were anti war you were a traitor to the country. Now i realize that as I get older I will run into people with diverse political opinions and I need to respect and accept that like an adult. Please change my view. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone who is either liberal or on the left wing side of politics is either a anti war hippy that spits on the the face of veterans and abuses them or a condescending annoying insufferable 'SJW'.\n","id":"29808af4-945e-4ece-be7a-ebcbe6516575"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Spend or save?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unfair asking people to spend their capital in an unsecured economy after they have been prudent with their finances. The reason they are being asked to do this? Because other people, including the Government as a collective, have not been prudent with their finances. The prudent spenders should not be told that they should protect the economy by spending the money they saved; it is yet another blow. The situation was not caused by them. If everyone were only so prudent then the economy would not be in the trauma it is in now. Rather than relying on these prudent savers, we should try to encourage the irresponsible to be more responsible; not encourage the careful to be less careful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People need to be responsible only for their own finances\n","id":"295cbd69-e629-4c8b-9f50-f2d8c4f809db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The statement in my title is based on a recent event in the news. A 14 years old highschool girl stole a second energy drink while being drunk on the first one she also stole earlier. Each energy drink was the equivalent of 4 wine glasses and one coffee. Her friends saw that she blacked out but went to their classes after lunch while she stayed outside. She was later found dead in a small river near the school. Almost immediately, the company making the drink announced that it stopped the production of the drink. The father announced he was going after the company and started a movement against similar energy drinks. All local media city of Montreal is talking about is how bad those energy drinks are and how regulation should be made. Nobody is adressing the steal. Nobody is adressing that the owner of the store would most likely have refused to sell the drink upon seeing the drunk underage girl. All focus is on making legislation about such drinks and put a ban on them while the company is recieving a huge public backlash. Would have it been the same if the girl stole peanuts and was later found dead due to an allergic reaction ? Small bottles of alchohol ? Like those mini Jack Daniels we often see. Or, to another extreme, if she would have stolen a gun ? I think the public debate is putting his attention at the wrong place, but I'm open to be pointed out where I miss sensibility around this issue. Edit The theft is not my main issue here. It's part of the story and I wanted to give as much detail as possible. I had two main points 1 The company cannot be responsible. I awarded two delta because the company likely used a loophole in the law to make the drink. We also have a moral responsability to legiferate about those kind of drinks. 2 It's wrong that the public focus solely on the energy drink and the company behind it. Why isn't there a discussion about her friends responsability and the store owner responsability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you steal something and you kill yourself by misusing the thing you stole, the company making the thing is not guilty.\n","id":"c9259b81-8c09-4e42-a2bb-54f78ab2ae9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been a non theist my whole life. I've never really dabbled in religion at all. I see not benefit to it and prefer humanism as a worldview.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am a life-long atheist and believe in the benefits of secular humanism,\n","id":"6cb8af22-ee00-469b-8085-33e819866510"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is health care a human right?<|ARGUMENT|>Universally available preventive health care is more cost-effective than tertiary treatment. Prevention can reduce the incidence of disease, including communicable disease, which is beneficial to society as a whole.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Health care being guaranteed as a human right has societal benefits.\n","id":"7eb15bf9-e6d4-4edf-ad06-34bfc3ca409e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What is an assault weapon in legal terms? Simply put, they are guns which people who have never used guns before think look scary. NY's SAFE act bans semiautomatic rifles with pistol grips, thumbhole stocks literally just a hole in the stock , muzzle brakes all they do is reduce recoil , telescoping stocks which only decrease the length of the gun by a few inches, not enough to conceal it well at all . And then there's the fact that ALL rifles kill fewer people each year than hands and feet. Assault rifles make up a small portion of all rifles, meaning they cause a ridiculously low number of deaths a year. As a voter with liberal tendencies, I am strong in the belief that if the Democratic Party removed the assault weapons ban from its agenda, it would be able to gain far more votes from people like me. Gun owners who support a minimum wage hike, women's rights, etc. but don t like to be made criminals based on the way our gun looks. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Democratic Party would do well to drop \"Reinstating the Assault Weapons Ban\" as part of their goals\n","id":"446f9bb8-798c-413a-b7fd-117fe14ac423"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Having been through the educational system, my view is that all tests should be multiple choice questions, even at university college level. This test format should be extended to all subjects, not just maths and science. Essay writing skills are less valuable in the modern age and skills like, the ability to construct and follow arguments can be tested adequately through MCQ's. The advantage would be largely objective testing and candidates would receive almost instantaneous feedback via computer administered testing. Also might put a dent into this whole cottage industry of exam testing. Also if curricula could be developed then, courses can be rolled based on ability, rather than age. Maybe certification can be rolled out for free even, especially with more advanced verification techniques. My vision would be, for example, a language course, running from basic words all the way to advanced texts, with hundreds of tests that track progress.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"all educational testing should be in the form of multiple choice questions\n","id":"e1ad65a8-e28c-4ff5-871d-fc339c86d6d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To review briefly, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is a hot topic within contemporary philosophy. According to it's advocates, the Hard Problem presents a major challenge to certain suppositions about the power of science to answer important questions about consciousness. According to it's detractors, the Hard Problem is a contrived non problem conjured out of semantics and a poor understanding of the brain. Here, I will argue that the Hard problem is a legitimate challenge Accounts that ignore it are doomed to fail. I. A Brief Exposition. Imagine you are laying on a green lawn one September afternoon. It is a windy but pleasant day, and you take advantage of the last of Indian summer, soaking up the long rays of the sun. If you can cut past my dime store writing, you can surely place yourself in this scene. You feel the warmth of the Sun, the gentle push and pull of the breeze, the rough sod poking through the soft fibers of your t shirt. The Hard Problem centers around the qualitative features of scenes like this. On one hand, there are physical features that ground the quantitative facts about what's happening. Facts about astronomy ground facts about the changing seasons, facts about meteorology ground facts about the weather, facts about plant biology ground the difference between the plant fibers in the grass and the fibers in the cotton t shirt, and so on. On the other hand, there seem to be distinctive properties that accompany the perception of these grounding fact. There is a way the sun feels to us, a way the breeze sounds, a way the texture of the grass feels compared to the texture of the shirt, etc. In short, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is identifying the important features of What is it like to questions questions admitting qualitative answers. The Easy Problem of Consciousness is identifying the important features of When does How does questions questions admitting quantitative answers. The Hard Problem poses a challenge for sciencistic and physicalist accounts of consciousness, since both insist on only appealing to the resources of scientific materialism. Given that the scientific method address questions from a quantitative perspective, it isn't clear that science directly answers qualitative questions about the subjective features of perception. Prima Facie, it seems like answering questions about when something occurs or how something occurs leaves questions about what something is like to experience open for further investigation. II. A Brief Rebuttal I'm not personally convinced that this line of thinking amounts to an iron clad argument against physicalism. There are a lot of under laying assumptions that can be challenged the relationship between primary and secondary qualities, the issue of nominalism vs platonism, etc. However, in my experience, responses to the Hard Problem typically fall under two categories. First, many people insist that indulging the Hard Problem amounts to begging the question against materialism. According to this response asking specifically about qualitative features gives the misleading impression that there are strictly mental features in the first place. However, physicalism is the position that all mental features are reducible to physical features. Therefore, the terms of the Hard Problem are biased. There is no burden to answer the Hard Problem, since the game is rigged. Second, many people insist that they don't understand what people are talking about when people talk about qualitative features. According to this response, the physicalist literally doesn't understand what people are talking about with all of this What is it like talk. Since these features are supposedly only accessible from a first person perspective and there supposedly unable to be explained in quantitative terms, there is no way to 'let them in' on the secret. I think both of these response are weak and the rest of this post will be dedicated to answering these challenges. III. A Taxonomy I propose that we consider questions concerning experience along two distinctions. I won't insist that these categories are mutually exclusive, but I believe these distinctions represent the opposition of two conceptual poles. First, let's consider questions by contrasting public questions from private questions. Public questions are accessible from an unlimited number of new perspectives while private questions are accessible from a finite number of perspectives. At one extreme, this implies that some questions are relative to just one perspective, while at the other end some questions open to anyone. Second, let's consider questions by contrasting questions about whether something exists with questions about what things would obtain given that something exists. Let's call the first kind of questions assertive, since answers to these questions assert the existence, or non existence , of something. Likewise, let's call the second kind speculative, since answers to these questions speculate what would happen if something existed. With these distinctions, I think it is possible to phrase the Hard Problem in a way that doesn't beg the question and makes contents of qualitative features more apparent. IV. The Argument Rather than assuming that qualitative features admit a unique category of analysis, let's try to pin down how they fit into this scheme. Are qualitative questions Public and Assertive? This seems unlikely to me. Just consider the case of optical illusions. Let's say I see a dress as white and gold while everyone else sees it properly as blue and black. When I discover that the dress is really blue and black, I may still see the dress as white and gold. Despite the fact that other people can correct me and there is an objective fact to the matter, I can maintain the perception of the illusion. Therefore, questions of qualitative experience don't seem directly related to this kind of question. Facts about the existence of something don't fix facts about the perception of existence. Are qualitative questions Private and Speculative? This also seems unlike to me. While this doesn't run aground on the publicity issue, it seems like we don't need to speculate about the state of our own consciousness. We don't need to suppose what it would be like to feel hungry when we haven't eaten all day. We are intimately acquainted with our own hunger. While this category might admit questions about other minds, it seems to miss the mark in terms of questions about our own subjective experience. Are qualitative questions Public and Speculative? Again, this doesn't look promising. It runs afoul of the two previous problems by being public and speculative. Furthermore, the most paradigmatic example of this kind of question would be the questions of mathematics, given that math is about applying public rules in light of given axioms . The contrast between subjective experience and cold reason may be a trope, but I think reasonable people would reject the kind of rationalism that places the two in the same basket. Are qualitative questions Private and Assertive? To me, this is our best bet. It doesn't suffer from the first two problems and seems reasonable enough. It certainly seems like my perceptions can only be experienced by me or things very much like me, implying privacy and that my perceptions are presented to us as opposed to being considered as possible things by us, implying assertion . Unfortunately, scientific materialism only deals in public questions. If a question can't be answered in terms of repeatable observations, then it isn't scientific. Therefore, science isn't in the business of answering Private Assertive questions. Furthermore, as stated above, deductive reasoning seems inappropriate for describing felt experience. This implies that a priori 'sciences', like math and logic, aren't in the business of answering Private Assertive questions either. All together, this gets us the same result as the naive version of the Hard Problem without begging the question against physicalism. Furthermore, the categorization here provides more than just bare reference. Rather than just 'pointing' to these properties, I give a clear definition of what exactly is being referred to. The physicalist must either provide a sophisticated account of the relationship between these categories that explains away some of these problems, accept robust phenomenological properties, or take the eliminitivist position and reject consciousness all together.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a genuine obstacle to understanding human experience x-post from TMBR\n","id":"e8375a1a-e455-4c15-ac41-017bc81ac376"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is deliberately not preventing someone's death ethically equivalent to killing them?<|ARGUMENT|>People who attempt to commit very serious crimes forfeit some of their moral rights, since they've chosen to violate the social agreements that give rise to those rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Killing in self-defence is permissible because killing an attempted murderer isn't very morally problematic. By contrast, allowing an innocent person to die is extremely morally problematic.\n","id":"06873485-e671-4946-afa8-a56d64174629"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Governments are bad at determining these conditions because the most wealthy in society hold the levers of power, thus they lack empathy with those in positions of least influence in society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Existing welfare systems have a burdensome set of conditions and application processes. UBI would remove these burdens.\n","id":"a4b468e5-b9a8-4044-8e05-249c2654e7c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Positive Discrimination\/Affirmative Action<|ARGUMENT|>There are currently those in the workforce who are racist and sexist. By bringing more minority applicants into the workplace, in an environment in which everyone works as part of a team, we can help alleviate such bigoted attitudes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are currently those in the workforce who are racist and sexist. By bringing more minority app...\n","id":"0d8f9d2b-8a09-4d1a-a321-1d38342cdd81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Industrial Hemp be Legalised?<|ARGUMENT|>Notably, growing hemp in the aftermath of Chernobyl reduced the levels of radioactive material found in soil and water in the affected perimeter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hemp is known for having effective bioremediation\/phyto-remediation qualities, meaning it can be used to cleanse the soil.\n","id":"c5fdcc9c-9576-4945-b84b-5c35c898de6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Constitutionality of US health insurance mandates<|ARGUMENT|>David B. Rivkin. The Federalist Society Online Debate Series: Individual Health Care Insurance Mandate Debate. November 3, 2009 November 6th, 2009: \"There is no doubt that Congress can regulate an entire array of economic activities, large and small, inter- and intra-state. Thus, for example, there is no problem, Constitution-wise with having Congress regulate health care insurance purchase transactions. The problem with an individual insurance purchase mandate, however, is that it does not regulate any transactions at all. It regulates human beings, simply because they exist, and orders them to engage in certain types of economic transactions.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not buying insurance is no transaction; no commerce clause authority\n","id":"bb592b7b-d655-45b6-9d21-a7289a8b576a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realized that the arguments of bodily autonomy and bearing of arms are equivalent and opposite. And that there is quite possibly some hypocrisy in the mix somewhere. Strong supporters of gun rights say that the right to bear arms is absolute, and inviolable. And that any violation of this right is a grave offense. But obviously civillians can't acquire any arms. Arms includes litterally every weapon ever invented. Strong supporters of abortions say that bodily autonomy rights are absolute and inviolable, and that any violation of them is a grave offense But if that were the case if you had the money, you would be able to have any part of your body safely and professionally removed. But obviously that wouldn't happen. You would most likely end up with referrals for mental evaluation. My View strong supporters of abortion rights are often just as nutty and black and white as second amendment constitutionalists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bodily Autonomy, just like bearing arms is demonstrably not an absolute, unlimited and inviolable right. Strong supporters of abortion rights often look just as dumb as strong supporters of gun rights\n","id":"0fa4b6a6-c969-46b9-b975-01761004c6ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>be a libertarian; right or left, right or wrong.<|ARGUMENT|>The alliance supporting libertarianism is an interesting one, consisting mostly of right-wing pragmatists who don\u2019t want to pay taxes and left wing idealist who think that everyone would be kind and helpful in a free society. What both groups simply ignore is that there are many issues, such as the redistribution of income or prohibition of drugs, where there is a settled will of society that supports the status quo. Even the very presence of, for example, wide-spread drug use would be an offence to very large numbers of people and unfairly impinge upon their lives which is why so few people actually vote for libertarian parties once they find out the realities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libertarianism is really a coalition of the unwilling; the fringes of the left and right, happy to criticize but without a single policy on which they can agree\n","id":"9457d1c8-9a47-4b97-9b78-e57c29ef373c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been banned for commenting on that sub merely for questioning a girl who complained that a guy she'd been talking to him for 2 hours was creepy so why talk to him for 2 hours? That's but one example of some of the stuck up bullshit I see on there. Obviously the majority are definitely weird perverted creepy horny guys, but a lot of the time the girls just use the littlest thing to karma whore and usually cut off the triggers that made the 'creep''s reply seem so creepy. I was banned after questioning a girl and then making a valid point to a moderator, apparently breaking 'rule 7'. The girls are put on a pedestal by control freak moderators. Tyrannical behaviour in what should be a democratic sub<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The OPs should be allowed to be questioned in r\/creepypms.\n","id":"df9e5cdf-df30-434e-9452-7bfb13e33ca7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just feel like a scumbag for essentially taking a handout for insurance. I don't really make enough to buy insurance, my company doesn't offer it to me because I'm only part time and going to school as well. I currently its about 15 hours a week since, but could make up to 30, but would still be part tine within the company because the position is not a full time position. I can only work three days a week because I have classes the other two days and use the rest of the day to get my classwork done, go to my study group and use the on campus math and accounting tutors. I want to do well in classes and all of these resources are only available during the week, but my company operates mainly Monday through Friday. I have an appointment set up tomorrow to talk about my eligibility for either cheaper or free insurance since I currently don't have any and do not want to get fined for not having any. I still feel like shit for having to ask, while other people have to pay for theirs, sonetimes a gigantic amount for their insurance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel like a piece of shit for asking for cheaper or free healthcare.\n","id":"4f79e703-ef08-4678-b004-c019e518b4e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Being gay or lesbian is a matter of sexual orientation and an inner psychological and perhaps a physiological difference. Transgender people more often than not bring technology into play sex change operations, boob jobs etc to create an unnatural body that they're comfortable with. As insensitive and perhaps inflammatory as it sounds, I feel that transgenderism is more a mental illness characterized by a denial of physical reality. Maybe I just don't understand it. Anyone transgender or otehrwise care to ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not against it morally, but I don't acknowledge transgenderism as legitimate as being gay or lesbian because it involves a denial of ones own physical body\n","id":"778f08cc-675a-45a7-9208-c00085bc8127"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edited for format. My argument is that with capitalism comes the profit motive. Above all else, an idea's usefulness lies in its ability to be marketed. I believe this is at odds with the ideals of human progress, and that the negative consequences have manifested themselves in the following ways Copyright law Patents were originally invented so that inventors financially benefited from their inventions for a certain period of time. Today, patents put a cost on improving on other people's ideas. Additionally, this monopoly can be used in order to dam the production eg. of a pharmaceutical drug in order to turn a profit instead of being used to help the ill. Attitudes The way we judge how well our society is doing is by its GDP instead of the sum quality of life for its citizens. Censoring imagination not literally, but if an idea isn't as commercially viable as the status quo ie. Nikola Tesla discovering how to get electricity from the air for free it won't be funded. Corporate interests over human interests. I don't think it has to be this way. Show me a CEO who says only the incentive to be wealthy motivated him to be successful and I'll show you an eager scientist who will jump at the chance to invent something when you say I will fund your basic living costs, and you won't have to research what your boss wants you to research. Change. My. Motherfucking. View. EDIT I have chosen to define capitalism, in the interests of fair discussion, as an ideology by which the economic infrastructure is maintained by encouraging participants in the economy to act in their own financial self interest. In other words, telling businesses, people, governments that success lies in doing what will make you the most money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- Human progress is being held back by the capitalist nature of society\n","id":"a7540415-da1d-4fee-9c80-a167d439398d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The golden buzzer is bad for 2 reasons. The Audience first impression is very important. A contestant who gets yesses from all the judges is going to be viewed as more talented than a contestant who only satisfed one judge with the golden buzzer. This hurts their ability to earn audience votes later in the contest, since the audience won't think they are as talented as the competition. It hurt their future prospects as a performer for the same reason. More importantly, more exposure to the AGT audience is better than less exposure. Since they won't compete in the second elimination round the audience is more likely to forget the contestant by the live rounds, having already picked their favorites. What would change my mind is data. Have past golden buzzer contestants done better in the live shows than regular contestants? Do they do better after the contest, make more money, score contracts etc. Edit 3rd reason. The golden buzzer effectively gives the candidates special treatment. This taints the candidate in the audience in the eyes of the audience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- The golden buzzer on America's Got Talent is bad for contestants and they shouldn't want it\n","id":"3fbf341a-fcc8-4b19-992b-0d9680108186"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>God wants the human beings he has created to come to choose to follow him spiritually and come to love him as he loves them. In order fot this choice to be possible, his creations have to have free will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God allows evil to exist so that humans can have free will and develop into moral people. In order to be morally good in a meaningful way, a person must have the possibility of choosing evil.\n","id":"9f07d77f-8b34-46b2-9dfb-ebd80e488820"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a huge fan of music, and I listen to most genres my last.fm I'm not much for classical or metal, but I can tolerate it somewhat. Country music is something I've never been able to get into, which bothers me more than I feel it should. I love the harmonica, banjo and guitar. Many Country artists seem to be very good vocalists, which I really appreciate. I enjoy many artists who are semi Country such asTedeschi Trucks Band, Taylor Swift, America, Virginia Coalition, Alison Krauss, Eagles, Johnny Cash, Lynyrd Skynyrd, CCR swamp rock , close enough? , etc. I find that much of the country I've been forced to listen to is very similar, very simplistic without much depth of emotion or character, and tends to deal with a few subjects love of course, drinking, farming, dirt roads and pickup trucks, etc. . It comes off to me that it's being written and marketed specifically towards people who enjoy this idea of country living that may or may not reflect reality, but that is easy to market since it's all very similar. Some of Taylor Swift's earlier songs sound prototypically Country to me in song structure and lyrical content. For instance, from Picture to Burn gt I hate that stupid old pickup truck You never let me drive You're a redneck heartbreak Who's really bad at lying and Our Song gt Our song is the slammin' screen door, Sneakin' out late, tappin' on your window When we're on the phone and you talk real slow, 'Cause it's late and your mama don't know which I don't mind in small doses, but the majority of her songs deal with many different topics and distance themselves pretty well from what I'd consider Country Music . It seems that the Jason Aldean Luke Bryan Carrie Underwood Kenny Chesney stuff is all really similar and overcommercialized, though I admit I can't listen to it for too long without getting pretty frustrated that people actually make money putting out such crap. A comment in this similar thread about Country being boring by u Crayshack says gt Even among the popular country music, there is still the occasional artist that stands out. There is a concept that most of any given product is terrible, and you have to look past the poor examples to find the best of any given type of thing. Even without that, you are likely most familiar with country rock, which is the country music that is played on the radio the most. Are there entire genres of good country music I'm not familiar with? Which artists should I check out? I'm in the mood to have my mind expanded. Give me some links to some Country music which you think will change my mind. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Popular Country Music is bad music written specifically to appeal to specific types of people.\n","id":"0fc7ea5a-9373-426c-b9c1-7c366ec4edf5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Another article mentions the top 10 companies in the league of Microsoft, Facebook, Uber etc. that are leading the ways in which AI can be used. This shows the variety of use cases and approaches that are being taken for development of AI.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AGI will not be developed by a single group. It will be simultaneously developed by different groups with different approaches. So the power will not be concentrated in the hands on one group.\n","id":"c854497e-5953-46ab-b064-f42f46b672d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would like to acknowledge the fact that this may seem borderline on rule D. I am not an amphetamine addict seeking weak arguments to affirm an addiction. Also, I do not want to consider morality the fact that I am giving myself an unfair advantage in this argument. Like many college students, I illegally use adderall on occasion so far, only a few times in total . I would say I have read quite a bit regarding its effects and side effects, and based on my gained knowledge and experiences my current stance is essentially the title. What I would like to focus on is something like this Using adderall no more than once every few weeks, at a non increasing and small 20 mg dose, sleeping well, drinking lots of water, staying cool. These parameters are meant to be fixed i.e., to make addiction, tolerance, and most of changing effects over time not relevant . When I take adderall, I become calm for some 8 hours, during which I am able to accomplish a week's worth of work with superior focus, memory, and motivation. I do not get jittery except towards the end, and just a tiny bit. I do not get any anxiety, though I am more inclined to act on my OCD thoughts. I feel better when I crash than when I crash from a cup of coffee. I have trouble sleeping for some 4 hours after I come down , but this does not necessarily create any harm and during those 4 hours I am no less productive than I am sober. I can sleep for longer than average after coming down and feel totally fine the next day. Contamination does not present a problem because it is easily available from others' prescriptions and for less than the price of a cup of coffee . My understanding is that there is little risk of neurotoxicity or long term damage with adderall, but that the risk factors are the same long term, high doses, frequent use, high body temperature, dehydration, lack of sleep as with other stimulants. Many people say that adderall ruined their life while they were on it, but it seems that this perhaps applies only for certain people, especially when it is a frequent thing. My concern comes from the fact that these things are very dangerous to play around with, and I acknowledge that I may not be the best judge of my state of mind, in the short term or the long term, as I do this experiment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abusing adderall on occasion is of net benefit to me.\n","id":"be4dd925-9ae2-430b-95ac-0b25b65113a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Two-thirds of male drivers admit to being distracted behind the wheel, with 30 percent being distracted by what they see. Seeing a bare-breasted woman would undoubtedly cause a distraction, and a potential accident.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bare-breasted women would get much more attention from drivers and others using dangerous equipment.\n","id":"ba971da5-9268-4578-b6b7-27140b59fd43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>The Conservatives and Labour party are putting forward broadly similar policies to those of the Green Party, which is likely to reduce Green votes and result in a loss once again for the party.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many other parties are now taking climate change seriously so the Green Party's emphasis on the environment no longer sets it apart for voters.\n","id":"a7f54898-9812-4020-a2ee-90bac603072a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Donald Trump a Good President?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump's quotes on mental health more than amply demonstrate that he has no understanding of the issue, folding both to stigma and misinformation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"He doesn't seem to know what he's talking about at any given time.\n","id":"8ac9b428-81b5-4d76-90b9-a12a8c56180f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>As long as those who work are compensated fairly then they will be happy to bask in their higher place in the hierarchy. UBI does not eradicate inequality, it eradicates need-based incentives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who contribute will earn more, therefore, there will not be any resentment.\n","id":"8fc44ea9-2c76-4633-bb69-6f80fb329fa3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Intuitively we consider many properties to be neutral, e.g. the property of being blue is not positive, nor is the property of not being blue positive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The first axiom of Go\u0308del's proof, which says that every property xor its negation is 'positive', is false.\n","id":"dff7c2e8-3382-4c11-8278-e93ab269e1c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>George Orwell's 1984 is over-rated<|ARGUMENT|>The proles make up 85% of the population of Oceania, so if they rebelled they could pose a serious threat to the oppression of the party.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The novel highlights how easy it is for the ruling party to keep the proles from rebelling.\n","id":"11e167f2-e4ad-4b47-98dc-87288f76d17a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After November 8th, I was of the belief that the US, and the world, was in one of three situations We have absolutely nothing to worry about. We have something to worry about, but checks and balances will prevail and control the damage We are all in great and grave danger, and this republic will either become the very authoritarianism we have claimed to oppose all these years, or compromise its position in the world so severely that it crumbles. The optimist in me held on dearly to scenario 1, but those hopes were dashed rather quickly. Scenario 2 seems to have arrived upon us, but I fear that it could be scenario 3 after all. Trump is proving as destructive as everyone feared, and only two Republicans Graham and McCain seem to notice that there is a problem. If any Democrats other than Warren and Sanders who is Independent, anyways are trying to oppose him, it doesn't seem like they're having any effect. Our Republic is a ship on fire, and the crew seem to just be watching it burn. Somebody please tell me I'm wrong, and why. Edit People have pointed out a poor choice of vocabulary in the title. Dictatorship or autocracy would be more accurate descriptors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States is converting to a monarchy, and nobody with power is doing anything to stop it.\n","id":"882ab7e8-c95d-473a-b027-783f0be9f112"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>One of the cornerstones of the classical God is that it is everywhere, though it 's nowhere. It exists yet you cannot point your finger at it. Existence is too human a term to define such a being, regardless it actually may or maynot be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is logically impossible for God to be omnipresent and having been there when there was nothing yet. The quality of God would have to include both 'existing' and 'not existing' simultaneously, therefore God is simply non-existent.\n","id":"6eb260d9-8fb5-4501-968d-f4c9a8b6278c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Similar Cryptocurrencies Good for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>When transferred via the banking system, money has to be sent to the account of a known entity. At least in the case of major criminal activities, governments will cooperate across borders on identifying senders and recipients.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is less risky to use insecure devices for transactions with daily transaction limits, than being your own \"bank\", where in 1 second and without transaction limits, all your assets could be irrecoverably gone.\n","id":"c2e46963-8f55-4cf7-8a62-82db11d3e3f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I argue that there is absolutely nothing morally reprehensible about a sexual transaction, as long as the following rules are met Both parties consent to the transaction Both parties are of age for the sake of argument let\u2019s say 18 and capable of making this decision not overly intoxicated, same as a normal sexual encounter The person who is providing the service has chosen to participate in this profession, and was not involved in human trafficking. Both parties have the right to stop at any point before or during the transaction I argue that any of the perceived negatives surrounding prostitution are entirely avoidable consequences of prostitution and not innately necessary. I believe these negatives are far more frequent because of the illegal nature of prostitution, particularly surrounding the consent of those providing the service.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing morally wrong with prostitution.\n","id":"e56cf402-ce71-4372-8365-d4dad647a9de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Seeds without patents can be freely traded and developed on a local level. Help aimed at providing this kind of seeds will have a much better effect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetically modified seeds are patented, and therefore more expensive The higher price and technology dependency make it an unlikely candidate to save developing countries.\n","id":"9f6c032c-4fbe-4dd6-a4ca-015bdbe7b7a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It does not make sense for colleges and universities to be required to hold internal tribunals about criminal matters that happen on campus. I see three principal reasons for this. Prosecuting crimes is the government's job. The government has the resources to meaningfully investigate crimes, the power to compel witnesses to testify, and institutions designed to handle criminal accusations. Private prosecutions are considered an historical anachronism in free countries today. Colleges are bad at it. Related to the first point, a college does not inherently have any of the resources or institutional structure to deal with a serious felony investigation. They can't subpoena witnesses or records, they can't put people under oath, they don't have detectives or forensics labs or judges or professional prosecutors. Due Process matters. There are core due process rights that must be abided in a free country before punishing someone for an alleged crime. These include but are not limited to the right to confront and challenge one's accuser, the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the right to compel witnesses to testify in your defense and to compel third parties to release evidence, the right to have legal counsel, and the right to a trial by a jury of your peers. Colleges regularly flout all of these, and the proceedings much more often resemble a kangaroo court than any real justice. Using the force of law to require that universities adjudicate these claims is farcical. If a private university wants to do something like this I suppose they can. But a public university should not be able to sanction a student based on a criminal accusation without due process, and the government should not be forcing private institutions to do the same, as they currently are doing Edit for clarification This is not about whether universities should undetake some internal considerations, but about whether the existence and form of those internal proceedings should be dictated by the government as they currently are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Universities should not be required to adjudicate sexual assault claims.\n","id":"e3e8e75c-83bf-40b1-b33c-045c644d2033"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>It is essential that humans become a multi-planetary species<|ARGUMENT|>Becoming a multi-planetary species would result in a significant amount of scientific discovery and advancement<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The economic benefits to human society of becoming multi-planetary far outweigh the costs\n","id":"7f8ed67b-6eed-44c3-8151-877020d80c2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you haven't already seen the commercial, here it is. I personally thought it was a pretty cool commercial teaching people to be themselves. Then when I see the likes to dislikes ratio I thought it was really weird. When I go to read the YouTube comment it seems like most people disagree with the ad because of virtue signalling . Also many commenters are calling Adidas racist because the lack of white people in the ad and because the ad is suggesting that black people are the only ones that play sports. I believe that this is a great commercial and all the commenter on YouTube are overreacting. EDIT Formatting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are overreacting over the Adidas commercial\n","id":"1758f87c-3b62-4d57-a37e-e40e27547b42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be a quota for Millennial representatives in the European Parliament?<|ARGUMENT|>91% of Millennials wish to become leaders Having a political quota would enable more Millennials to become leaders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Millennials are currently underrepresented within European politics, despite making up a quarter of Europe\u2019s entire population.\n","id":"91b7f6af-7510-4f8b-880c-ab1a6b3800f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Seek out the society of your boon companions, drink, play, talk bawdy, and amuse yourself. One must sometimes commit a sin out of hate and contempt for the Devil, so as not to give him the chance to make one scrupulous over mere nothings.\" Werke.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Martin Luther believed that occasional minor evil could have a positive effect. He argued that there are cases where a little evil is a positive good.\n","id":"fab45b34-4fba-45c3-a53b-9bbf0947ef74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People in society treat feminism as a bad thing. That's probably because people picture feminists as women who absolutely despise men and feel that women are above men. This is just the opposite of misogyny, not the definition of a feminist. Feminism is more about equality than people realize. It is more about the fact that women are restricted in their behavior and power, and a typical feminist wants women to rise up to a man's level. It's hypocritical for a woman to want women to rise above men. This description probably fits more people than we account for. Why don't more people consider themselves feminists? Because they think feminists are radicals who want women to rise above men. Feminism sheds light on injustices in our society that one may not have even considered if it weren't for feminists who point it out. Consider these questions . Why is it an expectation that women wear makeup to hide imperfections, but men are typically accepted without makeup? . Why is a man who stands up for himself headstrong and confident, but a woman who stands up for herself is bitchy? . Why do women's costumes portray an image that does not match up with what they're supposed to represent, for the sheer purpose of showing off? I don't understand how any of these things that feminists do can be seen as a nuisance to society. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who believe \"feminism\" is a dirty word misunderstand what a typical feminist is.\n","id":"9c1ebc66-9d4b-448f-8d9f-202155c07bd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I beg of you, please . I can't sympathize with any of my close friends who have problems with self harm. The whole concept, except for the rare occurrence of an endorphin addiction, seems completely illogical to me. Most of it looks like a pointless cry for attention. I really don't want to look at it that way, but I can't see it in any other light. The same is true in my mind for depression, and especially social anxiety. Social anxiety is an issue a person very close to me is suffering from, and I have no clue why they can't just ignore it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that self harm is immature.\n","id":"11f61460-15a5-454b-a73d-8ba580fd2b75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most of you know about the User Tagging feature in the Reddit Enhancement Suite, where one can label a specific user for whatever their fancy. However, as with all things on the Internet, instead of completely personal use for the sake of organization Oh hey, I remember this guy that helped me a ton, I should trust him , it has been abused to help people stalk and harass other users. I cannot tell you how many times I'm in a comment thread and someone replies to another Why do I have you tagged as 'goat fucker?' Not only does this degrade the tagged user's integrity, but it also encourages derailing the main topic and prevents him her from having any serious conversation in a serious manner. I will gladly eat my own words if there is an adequate use for the tagging feature that can counter act this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"RES' \"User Tagging\" feature does more harm than good.\n","id":"0853ea3c-1a24-4ba7-9032-5ef07506cf77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The electoral college nullifies the votes of individuals that disagree with the majority of their state. Take the 2016 election, for example. Clinton received 60% of the popular vote in New York but won all 29 electoral votes. She got 100% of the electoral votes with only 60% of the popular vote. That's 12 unearned electoral votes from NY which is enough to negate the electoral votes from several smaller states, not to mention the 40% of NYers whose vote was rendered irrelevant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many states use a winner-takes-all system where a candidate could get 51% of the vote, but all of the electoral college vote.\n","id":"f1e8f74a-f71e-4f4b-aad5-5f339fe0a325"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Mods I realise libertarianism is a common topic here, but I think my view is a sufficiently original one. Libertarianism is the One Weird Trick For Solving Any Issue, Politicians HATE Us of politics. It reduces many of the most complex problems in the world to a set of answers concise enough that they can fit on the back of a business card isolationism, tiny government, bare minimal taxation . There are quite a few s here from people arguing about the effectiveness of libertarian solutions in the real world, but I want to go further. I believe that most libertarians simply do not care about the real world of the effects their intended policies would have. Rather, the primary goal of most libertarians is to feel like they have the 'correct' answer, and the primary draw of libertarianism is that it provides a singularly simple way to get this feeling. I have honestly yet to see a proposed policy solution from a libertarian which addresses the complexities of the real world, only a stream of restatements of the core beliefs. All healthcare and entitlement debates are reduced to taxation is theft , all defense and national security debates are reduced to withdraw and isolate , and all economic debates are reduced to deregulate , with no sense of reality or nuance. When libertarians defend this with well of course I don't have a developed policy, because the government shouldn't have any policy on the topic it's invariably followed up by the nebulous phrase market solutions often backed up by a misinterpretation of the First Welfare Theorem , with zero information on how these markets would actually develop in the real world. Ultimately, every libertarian I've ever met has been marked by the same lack of humility I've never heard a libertarian say I don't know the answer and oversimplification, leading me to the view that their primary goal is to feel correct and win debates, rather than a genuine attempt to engineer real world solutions of any kind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libertarians are primarily concerned with feeling correct, not about real world results.\n","id":"bb305028-0bb8-4756-99e2-52088edb6517"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Assumptions Foster care is crappy and leads to shitty outcomes. Pretty much any study on this confirms it Most abused youth aren't even in foster care or involved with CPS in any way, or really getting any form of help in any way We're talking about America specifically but you can extend it to a lot of countries So the current options for abused youth to end their abuse is Appeal with CPS DCFS. As stated above, foster care is really shitty. Most intervention programs are ineffective. Most cases never make it past the first phase because the standards for what is considered abuse are very high for example, there are precious few cases of emotional abuse being addressed by CPS, but it's still extremely toxic Move in with friends or relatives. Abused youth are often estranged from relatives for various reasons. But even if they can do this, their parents can simply file a runaway report and whoever they're living with is liable to have harboring a runaway charges filed against them. Cops will either take youth to jail for a night or straight back to their abusive parents. They cannot make that appeal though because of high standards for what is considered abuse by CPS Go to boarding school. This is quite obviously prohibitive not only in cost, but also in permission. If a parent wants their child to stay home, they can force them to stay home from even a full ride to a boarding school. Go to therapy and fix things. In America, if a parent is capable of paying for therapy but doesn't want to, few youths will be able to pay for it. Not to mention that often things can't be fixed. Wait it out until they're 18. Obviously a bad idea. Months of abuse is already horribly damaging on the psyche, but up to 18 years? Not to mention the mental suffering. Work a job and get emancipated. A lot of abused youth are prohibited from getting a job, either outright you aren't allowed to have a job, child labor laws , practically no transport, high youth unemployment , or through long term effects I'm too stupid to get a job . But even for those who do get a job, the assumption is that they don't need a living wage because their parents are taking care of them or that they don't deserve it because of less experience. So it's almost impossible to meet the wage requirements for emancipation. Even if you do meet those requirements, only around 1 of youth are granted emancipation when applying. It's extremely rare and hard to get Suicide. I believe 100 that the current system that makes it extremely difficult for youth to escape abuse contributes to the high youth suicide rate. So I think most people would agree that our current system is doing a poor job. Here's an outline for a system I think would fix things Any youth who for whatever reason doesn't want to be in the guardianship of their parents is allowed to request it. In other words, there is no requirement for abuse because it's so hard to prove. Yes, some youth who are just upset with their parents will be part of this group, but so what? Don't they also deserve to have the capability to live away from people they don't like? There's a great many other reasons to want need emancipation beside abuse. There is also no age limit. These youth can be denied this based on questions of competence. I know most of you say to the no age limit thing so a baby can request emancipation? Sure, a 5 year old can request it, but 99.9 will be denied on the grounds of incompetence. A hard age line doesn't work, though. Competence will be ability to take care of themselves and respect the rights of others. Once a youth wants to be emancipated and has been determined competent, they become emancipated and receive 12,000 a year to cover living expenses. To prevent abuse of the system, they must rent and live at least 50 of the time in a residence that is not their parents'. At first daily, and less and less as youth are shown to be capable, youth will be checked in on by people to confirm that they are taking care of their own needs. Structured living options, sorta like dorms with RAs, will be offered to youth. They will come at a discounted price. Youth will be encouraged to live here. Youth who do not pass the test mentioned in 6 will be required to live here, for those who do pass it they can live here if they want. Non emancipated youth can also live here as a safe haven as well and not be charged with running away for both emancipated and non emancipated youth it's free for the first month, for anybody currently in the process of getting emancipated it's free for as long as the process is going on and they are allowed their as long as the supervisor sees a minimum level of competence Emancipated youth will be given a test on basic living skills very basic, ie where should you buy your food . Those who pass will be allowed to live wherever, those who don't will live in the dorms until they can. The test can be taken orally, on paper, etc. The dorms will have classes for these youth and intense supervision for those who couldn't pass the test. What won't work to change my view but it might change others' so feel free anyways Arguing that most all youth are incapable of caring for their own needs without parents Really anything based on a belief that youth are incapable of thinking rationally, that they are dumber than adults, that their hormones will make them crazy and make them ruin the dorms , really anything based in stereotypes Arguing that our current system works and this is unnecessary What may work to  Pointing out flaws in this system Presenting an even better system ETA Youth are required to meet with advisors monthly, in addition to being required to meet with a school counselor monthly. There would be a group of big brother sister volunteers that youth would be encouraged to take advantage of<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best way to let abused youth escape would be a basic income for any youth who wants to be emancipated\n","id":"17e7047e-3dc2-4e95-a0f7-5070eaed8185"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Lottery should be an integral component of democratic political systems<|ARGUMENT|>Lottery should be used to find representatives for the people when it comes to democratic rule making and supervision, but not to appoint people into government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no way of ensuring capable and knowledgeable people in office.\n","id":"88604b2f-fc5d-482c-b49a-0e8e28243040"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should close Guantanamo Bay detention camp<|ARGUMENT|>guantanamo bay is a stain on the reputation of the usa that has acted to further the cause of terrorists around the world<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Guantanamo bay detention camp harms the US image\/reputation\/institutions\n","id":"020085d8-3d6e-4088-b30a-fd66ee20686e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voting by mail be the standard in all US elections?<|ARGUMENT|>In areas of low income where you have longer lines, you would not have a suppressed voter turnout.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lowering the barriers to voting would enable more people to vote.\n","id":"7c718b4e-a8df-4c8d-9b55-13aa0a721cfb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In ethics, dual loyalty is the potential conflict between two or more opposed interests. Recently, the statements of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar have been subjected to the critique that she is accusing other members of Congress primarily but not exclusively Jews of holding loyalty to Israel above the United States. x200B But outside of this context, there is no reason to believe that the charge of dual loyalty is irrational. For example, Israel requires Knesset members to denounce their ties to foreign countries, even citizens must renounce their ties to their homelands in order to live there. This has not invited condemnation. x200B It is easy to imagine how dual loyalty claims could be rational. If the Vatican decreed that all Catholics vote or act a certain way, few would question the existence of a potential conflict. So why is the charge different because it involves Jews and Israel?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dual Loyalty is a Legitimate Criticism\n","id":"afa9f01d-2c7c-4d05-b54f-1c1754dc72ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To be clear, this holds true for any government but especially free and open states like the USA. I think that every government does immoral things for realist reasons. There are a wide variety of actions a site has available to further its means from declaring all out war to economic sanctions. Some of these actions, are completely and utterly immoral. I understand that there are ends to the means, but I don't think the ends justify the means. Some examples would be the US involvement in Vietnam. The US claimed that Russia was using chemical weapons in Vietnam, yet the the only chemical weapons used in Vietnam was by the US. Millions suffered because of policies in place by this democratic nation. This is just one example and there are many things. Even if you don't agree with my specific example, we can probably agree that government do bad things. I think when governments do bad things, you are being complicit in supporting by not rebelling or revolting and thusly you are to be held partially at blame for the actions. The more rights and freedoms you have, the more responsible you are. For example, I can't really blame somebody in North Korea doing something immoral when a gun is pointed at their head. An analogy would be like as if a family member asked you for help in robbing a store, so you gave him some gas money for his getaway car. If you didn't give him the gas money, he wouldn't have been able to rob the store. Thusly, you are an accomplice to the crime. EDIT Thanks everybody for the great discussion. I'm done with this thread for now. I have decided that not everybody is culpable. People who are more preoccupied with surviving than government action like single mothers cannot be held culpable. Uneducated people who do not even know what is going on cannot be held culpable. So I guess the only people that can be held culpable are the people who are aware of what is going on and have the means to change it. Happy holidays everybody.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that anybody working and paying taxes to the US government is supporting immoral actions and holds partial guilt.\n","id":"7094c1a8-8524-4bfb-ae8c-022ade25c550"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Dave's quotes and antics make it almost impossible not to love him. Breaking a leg on stage recently, and finishing the concert major credit and rock n roll points. I enjoy Nirvana's music, Queens of the Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures. All great bands that I can enjoy. I even enjoyed a War Pigs cover that the Foo Fighters did on David Letterman. However, I've not found a Foo Fighters song that I enjoy. I like bands that sound recognizable. by a musical style or vocal style. Every FF song I've heard simply sounds generic, like background noise. Granted I've only delved into their popular stuff . So, I really WANT to like them because of Dave can you help me?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I like Dave Grohl, but I don't like Foo Fighters.\n","id":"732d6662-5713-4c71-a546-a5c416f92f0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe the EU, more specifically, the Eurozone, is bad for European economies. A Finnish redditor sums up part of my point, while explaining why their country currently has a 10 unemployment rate gt It's quite simple Our economy is dependant on exporting. Since the big exporters are not bringing money every business is doing badly, which then means we have less tax money to spend on public sector. The leftist solution is to increase the public spending to keep the economy going. It'd help us for few years but if our exports don't increase then we'll basically be in same situation as Greece. If we only had markka we could devaluate it and increase the competitiveness of our exports. But since we're in eurozone we can't do that. What we're doing now is freeze wages and let inflation do internal devaluation for us, but it'll take years before that has any effect on anything. European economies are unable to control their own currency, and are suffering for it. Greece, after all, may have been better able to handle it's crisis had it had its own currency. Spain also would be better able to recover from the economic spit it's in, with an unemployment rate of 23 . Countries with their own currency are better prepared and able to adjust the value of their currency to handle recessions that they hit, such as the U.S. after the 2008 recession. While immediately disbanding the eurozone would obviously hurt the whole continent, I believe if the status quo is maintained, Greece, Finland, and Spain will only be a taste of what is to come.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU is unsustainable, and steps should be taken towards disbanding.\n","id":"b37dc55f-be4f-416c-bcf1-3538515df00a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Even in developed nations, with world class health care systems, there is still a non-zero chance that individuals may die whilst giving birth. Women who are under the age of 15, older mothers, and women from lower income groups are particularly at risk.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pregnancy and childbirth can be gruelling and have huge and varying impacts on women\u2019s physical and mental wellbeing.\n","id":"e0c99952-b9de-49c9-a30b-fa9a1ba355a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The human right to education does not merely mean that people cannot be punished for getting an education. On the contrary, it is understood to confer on the state the principal responsibility for the provision of this right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Once women have a legal right to access abortions, this creates a duty for the state to defend that right and ensure that women all across the country have this right in practice, not only in theory.\n","id":"fbe5bfae-3bd3-4399-a1b3-6fef7b373d3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Their Children Should Be Fined If The Child Gets A Vaccine-Preventable Illness<|ARGUMENT|>Parents need to be aware that children are not property or extensions of themselves- they are human beings who deserve the best start in life. Sometimes the best way to do this is with punitive measures, as often people care about money even if they don't care about health.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Potentially incurring a fine will make some parents more likely to vaccinate their children.\n","id":"8879a7f0-89be-4d2c-83f6-d8c7c8f1fe14"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>The case of Iceland should teach us how to beat drugs: Iceland encourages sports and other hobbies for teenagers. In addition, they have improved the infrastructure dedicated to young people. Teens between 13 and 16 years old also have a curfew of 10pm in winter and after midnight in the summer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing all drugs would be seen as a sign of the government\/authority giving up on protecting people from the harm they could do, to themselves and others, through poorly selected drug use.\n","id":"1d2a9e00-3cf3-4851-afc5-9463e55f9a29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a 16 year old high school student living in a medium to upper class neighborhood. I feel like school is mostly a waste of time filled with arbitrary assignments which serve no real purpose. I want to drop out of school and pursue my dream of becoming a game designer, and I feel being in school is a major obstacle in accomplishing my dream because of the amount of time I have to set aside for it. The only reason I have not dropped out yet is that my parents want me to take school very seriously and would flip if I even got a C in one of my classes. If I ran away, I would be able to devote all of my time to accomplishing my dream without worrying about my parents or school. I already more or less have planned out how I'm where I'm going to sleep, where I'm going to get water, how to get food etc. I am also currently failing a couple classes due to a lack of effort on my part and running away would help with escaping the consequences of my actions.  Edit Thanks for the comments guys. I think im going to wait to release a few games before doing anything drastic. Thanks again for your time<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm considering running away from home\n","id":"4ee0895c-45ec-4d97-92d0-156b6e5019f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, things have been pretty rosy for the U.S, notwithstanding a couple pretty minor lapses. However, that seems to be coming to a close. Tensions between pretty much all major powers are rising, with the Ukraine crisis, the escalating tensions in the South China Sea. The United States' status of hegemon in Europe is lapsing amid rising populism in the west When has that gone badly? and an expansionist Russia. Not only is the U.S losing it's ability to project soft power in Europe Brexit comes to mind. , but it is retreating into isolationism. Rejecting the TPP cedes the entirety of the Pacific rim to China. If the EU continues to break up, which the rising popularity of Euroskeptics points to, some of our oldest allies will be severely weakened, and if isolationism in Europe leads to the atrophy of NATO, then , well, at least we're not Estonian. Furthermore, the utter military supremacy of the U.S is slipping. New Chinese and Russian aircraft are catching up to our aircraft, and our acquisitions limiting policy both raises costs and means that in event of war we would need to win through strengthen of numbers. Full scale war will never happen again, but if China, or Russia invade sovereign nations under our explicit protection, we might not win the ensuing small scale conflict.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For the U.S, the future is quite bleak.\n","id":"715bc296-5f00-475c-a4c7-02bbb210009d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should athletes be allowed to compete in their chosen gender category?<|ARGUMENT|>Similarly sized girls and boys often perform equally well until puberty; after which the sporting performances of the boys shoots upwards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex, and the characteristics associated with it, significantly affect one's performances.\n","id":"24695dd8-9762-47d1-9cd9-9bff378ba969"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Practically every time I hear someone give praise to a gay character, they sprinkle some variation of this line on me. I like how him her being gay was just incidental, it didn't define who they were. This agitates me to no end. I get that people like don't really like the overt stereotypes, but please relise theres a bit of hypocrisy going on. There are entire GENRES about people who do nothing but be heterosexual. I can name at least five shows were the whole premise of the show is the main character is trying to shack up with someone of the opposite gender. If you had a gay person in there trying to do the same thing people would claim it's A harmful stereotype . Believe it or not, being gay DOES shape peoples lives. For better or for worse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that it's stupid for people to judge gay characters on \"how gay\" they act.\n","id":"e5408929-adb6-43c3-bc75-0c00c51c46d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>In reality, people with a mental illness are more likely to harm themselves or be harmed than they are to hurt other people<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Media commonly depicts those with mental issues as violent or dangerous to society.\n","id":"1e9632b9-9a63-41db-a024-46b957ed5504"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think that DRM benefits the musicians, authors, filmmakers, and other content creators. I also think it goes without saying that DRM is bad for consumers as well, but it's supposed main purpose is to protect the intellectual property of the creators so I want to focus on that. Piracy is common, and though it may be a bit difficult to break DRM or to perform hacks against companies like HBO and Sony, it is very easy for normal people to benefit from these acts by acquiring the stolen media for free. I think there are some people who choose to pirate because they feel like they can't afford something, but I also feel like a large percentage of pirating is done by people who want the easiest way to get what they want despite being able to afford paying for the content. So, I think DRM is bad in general because it takes power away from the creators and puts it in the hands of large corporations who exploit the creators. In addition to this it encourages piracy since people become frustrated, and this is damaging in the long term to everyone in a tragedy of the commons sort of way. The creators are only able to create content because they expect to be paid for it. Piracy hurts independent musicians, authors, etc. the most so they will be the first ones to drop out of the industry. Giants like HBO can last longer, but if piracy becomes too widespread then even they would shut down. So while everyone was getting all of their media for free for a while, nobody has been paying the people to create it and eventually we are left with nothing. I understand that this is an extreme example, but I think it shows why piracy isn't a valid alternative and is instead a response to DRM.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DRM isn't good for creators, it only exists for the profit of large companies\n","id":"c478636d-072f-4a15-ac86-67cd5c169116"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> edit ILLUSION, damn I do this all the time Not allusion, illusion I think it is better to live in a society where they straight up tell you that you have no freedom of speech than to live in a society where they give you the illusion of having it in the first place. The reason why I believe this is that I like to know the rules first upfront, I hate people changing the rules in the middle of the game. The simplest comparison I can come up with is that if I am walking and then I accidentally walk into someone's property than I get arrested for trespassing. I rather they straight up hang signs that say I am entering private property in the first place. If I go my whole life believing I have free speech, then one day I get maced or tasered by a cop for speaking my mind. I would've expressed my opinions in another way. These countries where they say you have freedom but on the other hand oppress you are not free countries nor are they honest countries. In my view, they are worse than an openly oppressive country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's better to have no freedom of speech than to be given the allusion of freedom of speech.\n","id":"692b1cf3-dff3-4b8f-9f18-7e1b457e1e9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Gender Stereotyping Children Need To Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>It is necessary for everyone to understand gender in detail in order to embrace a more nuanced view that avoids bigotry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A conversation around gender roles form a young age allows us to critique oppressive and mysogynistic behaviour.\n","id":"1474b402-353b-48fa-8584-8c184c4934e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>Many crimes are motivated by the benefits that the perpetrator gains. Murder and the like are more commonly motivated by particularly strong emotions, which are inherently irrational.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is particularly true for the kind of crimes that attract the death penalty.\n","id":"4b14bd1e-8b65-46bf-a114-2d65c8ab65ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You've all heard or experienced going to a coffee shop, ordering your drink and finding out the person ahead of you has paid for your drink. Then the cashier says This has been going on for 30 customers so far You then normally Pay it forward for the person after you since you don't want to be an asshole and break the chain. My question is this What is the purpose of keeping the chain going if everyone is basically paying the same amount of money or more than they would just by paying for their own order? How is that generous?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Pay-it-forward\" chains are pointless and unnecessary.\n","id":"1c4de3ce-e3b8-4dec-a49a-043d8b27e79e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Context the tragedy at Charlie Hebdo on 1 7 15. Whether this attack was directly provoked by a printed image of Muhammad or not, my argument will be framed as if it were. I'll paraphrase some of my posts in other threads The problem I have with this is that non Muslims came out of the blue to offend Muslims on this particular issue. There's no honor in that, we're not on any sort of moral high ground. Consider this hypothetical Previously, there was no issue with freedom of expression. Then Some Guy learns that many Muslims forbid printed images of their prophet. Guy says, hey, wouldn't it be just hilarious if we printed an image of their prophet ?? So Guy prints image of their prophet. Angry terrorist coward shoots and kills Guy. Guy's friends call him a martyr, cry censorship. Except there is no censorship, freedom of expression still exists 100 , Guy's publication and others can and likely will post more of these images in the future. If a group of people is encroaching upon your rights or beliefs then by all means defend yourself as appropriate. And as I understand it, many Muslim factions are indeed doing that around Europe and there is no insignificant amount of tension. But in this particular instance, we kindof started it. We created an issue where there was none. Freedom of expression does not imply freedom from consequences. SHOULD murder be the consequence? Absolutely not. However, what should be in this world and what are are two completely different things so, we fight battles to turn the what ares into the should bes. Is the battle to print images of Muhammad, among human trafficking and rape and all the other issues, really one we need to be fighting, really worth losing lives over? I guess for some, maybe. I wonder how that policeman and his family feel about it. So now, we created a situation where 1 we defend freedom of speech at high cost and continue to print things like this, or 2 we censor ourselves and the turrists win. It's a situation born of childishness that has now ended in tragedy and left us with a difficult path forward. The point that now exists to be made did not exist before our initial and unprovoked challenge to Muslim beliefs. And in the name of what, satire ? EDIT I appreciate all the responses, a handful of you have given some great discussion. However I'm getting mired and confused in trying to keep up with and remain thoughtful in my responses, so I am taking a break to reflect and collect. I will come back and answer those I have missed. Thanks again, back in a little while.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Printing an image of the Muslim prophet Muhammad is not \"standing up for free speech\"\n","id":"f26b97fd-cd13-4567-a8f9-2ae5a1bfcd12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi First I am gonna say I absolutely respect people's choice to eat meat and do not hate people for it, I just think eating meat in a modern society is barbaric. First before we going into some more depth, I wanna get rid of one common argument, the one where humans should eat meat because other animals do, this argument is invalid because humans, unlike other animals, are intelligent I doubt it sometimes Now on to my view, I think if a human absolutely needed to eat meat to survive in say the wilderness, this exception could be provided because a human life is worth more then other animals due to our intelligence and because often the death would be quick and painless, this is different then normally eating meat because 1. We can easily get other sources and 2. Eating meat in a modern society is absolutely ineffective, cruel, unnecessary and illogical. Now onto my main reasons for not eating meat. Eating meat in today's modern society requires mass farming, it is impossible to feed the world meat on smaller cruelty free farms so only the mass farms are an option. Humans are supposed, with intelligence comes logic, reason and sympathy, eating meat in unecessary cases is barbaric, backwards and animalistic. Uncessary doesn't mean something should not be done or used, games are unnecessary, but playing them isn't wrong. The difference is that eating meat causes unnecessary suffering death. Meat is highly ineffective, if humans put their brains to use for once I am guilty of also being an idiot D a healthy vegetarian diet wouldn't be hard, it is only hard today because society makes it hard. The meat industry is so ineffective, it's estimated that for every pound of beef, 12 pounds of grain is used up, don't get me started on the land used up for the meat industry that could of grown WAY more crops. I will provide links So I welcome any other arguments, the exception is if you use weak arguments or is just a plain dick. I look forward to this and will remain open minded throughout the course of this D<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because humans are intelligent and other options are easily available, it is barbaric and illogical, not to mention cruel to continue eating meat.\n","id":"ed7f4766-6abc-4164-af83-7c72ab321d3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There have been a lot of weather reports recently about the upcoming storm to hit the UK, Southwest tonight. Weather warnings have been put in place and it's really starting to shake me up. Here's some more info on the storm I do know that to some Americans this may not be comparatively a very big storm, but I've never seen or been involved in such a storm in the UK. I also live in a very old house and I'm just starting to fear for my home, family and possessions. So  on why I shouldn't be scared or nervous. Thanks, Reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The biggest storm in 26 years is about to hit the area in which I live and it's unnerving me.\n","id":"522f6a67-e0a0-4da1-ab5f-c8fbc4a56769"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund liberal arts degrees?<|ARGUMENT|>367 colleges and universities in the United States control tax-exempt endowments worth over $100 million They can afford to reduce tuition fees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regulating the tuition fees of higher education institutions can make college more affordable for students.\n","id":"040abcd7-55ee-40cd-998f-79ae3a165a73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>Churches and other religious organizations are generally exempt from income tax and receive other favorable treatment under most tax laws.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious entities already have an unfair financial advantage over other social and political clubs who cannot claim not-for-profit status.\n","id":"ea3084dd-f8cd-43c7-a74d-4a00bf6e58c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>Future escaped slaves will not trust us, which might result in violent behavior against our community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even though the deal might not be permanent, it might have long-lasting negative externalities.\n","id":"610b789c-1367-4670-b42b-c53c30ba6efd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>Gender equality benefits women, men and non-binary people and gives people freedom on an individual level instead of being limited or subject of pre-existing prejudice and generalization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any movement which encourages equality, i.e women\u2019s right to vote, is not a harmful political force but a positive one.\n","id":"e344e9fd-fd98-404e-bc58-ade556e24b46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone is calling the protesters rallyers Nazis. There have been a number of public statements by politicians including the governor of VA calling them Nazis or neo Nazis, CNN aljazeera slate the guardian and WaPo are reporting them as Nazis, and the reddit front page right now is full of people calling them Nazis While it's quite likely that there were Nazis among the protesters that day, that does not make it a Nazi rally. It's clear that the KKK played a part in the rally, but the KKK is not a neo Nazi organization and Nazi is not just a synonym for racist. White supremacists were probably also represented at the rally, but while all Nazis are white supremacists, not all white supremacists are Nazis. White nationalists were certainly present at the rally, but being a white nationalist does not automatically make you a Nazi. To be clear, I am not supporting or condoning the protesters' message. I am not defending the protestors. I am only on the side of truth. There's a whole lot of repeating what I heard going on right now in connection with these protests and I think it's spiraling into hyperbole. The rational evidence I've found for calling the protesters Nazis is Reports that Nazi flags were being flown. While this has been widely reported, I was only able to find a single picture with a swastika in my searching. There was also one guy with a Hitler quote on his shirt. Again, the presence of extremists is not a valid case for branding the whole group as extremist. Reports that blood and soil was being chanted. While we have video evidence of this slogan, I think it's fairly likely that most of the protesters had no idea of the historical connotations of that term and probably just thought it sounded cool. If the point of your protest is that you feel marginalized as a white American, then a phrase like blood and soil is going to ring out to you. It was our sweat that built this country and now we feel marginalized in it, and we don't like that. Blood and soil. While it's likely the person who started this chant knew its origins, I doubt most people repeating it were that well informed. Reports that Jews will not replace us was being chanted. I'm pretty sure this one is an outright fabrication. There's no video evidence, just 2nd hand reports. What was actually being chanted was you will not replace us , which again goes back to the whole feeling marginalized thing. It's easy to mishear you as Jews when it's being chanted by a crowd and you're listening for it, but I skimmed 30 minutes of torchlight video and heard you every time that chant came up. The nazi salute being thrown around. I did see this a few times in the videos I watched but I'm not convinced that the individuals throwing those salutes were representative of the group as a whole, or that they were even intended seriously. One salute I saw was a guy retreating into the crowd after clashing with a BLM group, and it struck me that he was doing it to troll the BLM people. I saw some Heil Trump 's too, but again this struck me more as trolling. Another I suspected of being an agent provocateur. Maybe a third seriously meant it, but again the presence of extremists is not a valid case for branding the whole group as extremist. If they didn't agree with it, why didn't they shut it down? Maybe they were afraid. Maybe they did later but it wasn't caught on camera. Maybe they were facing heat from counter protesters and it wasn't the time to turn around and police their own. There could be a lot of reasons aside from it was deliberately endorsed . I think this misrepresentation is a problem because it's a way of dehumanizing the other side and justifying violence against them. It shuts down rational discourse by stoking emotions and polluting the meanings of words thus making communication ineffective. It's a major contributor to the toxic and dangerous environment we are currently dealing with in this country. What would change my view? Evidence that Nazi imagery swastikas, etc was present and rallied around for a large portion of the protest. A staged photo doesn't cut it, I want to see those flags central, defended, and on the move. An isolated group doesn't count either. EDIT Evidence has been provided. Vanguard America, whose slogan is blood and soil, was the dominant presence at the rally. This is a white nationalist group that advocates kicking non whites out of America. I find it impossible to believe that the organization is unaware of the origin of their slogan. They are a neo Nazi group, and that makes this a Nazi rally.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Charlottesville rally was not a Nazi rally\n","id":"7728e2bd-1bf2-4979-acdc-5008a23781d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, the LGBTQ society at Oxford protested against the invitation of broadcaster Jenni Murray For the students, giving a pulpit at a prestigious university and paying a \u00a3150 fee is \u201cto endorse and reward her transphobic views\u201d thus propagating, validating and normalising transmisogyny<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While an invitation might not imply support for the content of the views, it does imply that those views are a legitimate part of the conversation, which is precisely what social justice movements are contesting.\n","id":"b45f6990-6067-4c5f-9e3d-90a5a5bf3a7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm pro choice in all cases but it's pretty much a fact that Roe v. Wade will never get overturned. I'm pro gay marriage but its national spread is inevitable. I'm anti death penalty but the convoluted process is ineffective and being phased out. I'm against religion in schools but no federal laws are ever passed regarding this. Why should I care about the superficial tendencies of the right when they're obviously political impossibilities? I'm only referring to federal politics, by the way<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the Republicans have repugnant social views, but it doesn't matter because none of them will be enacted\n","id":"74ea424f-1422-4203-acb3-2faab5bca90b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whether or not you go through a breeder or adoption, you are taking a dogs\u2019 life into your hands. Just because you have preferences and tastes in different dog breeds, want a puppy, or are just plain not wanting to adopt a dog doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re a bad person, or that you are unethical. Adopting a dog is not always secure you can get dogs that are emotionally scarred, or even unstable. The logic behind the opposing view is this that dogs in a shelter have been mistreated previously and should be taken before the bred puppies. Yet this argument fails to acknowledge 1 that there will ALWAYS be more rescue puppies in need of homes and 2 there is a hierarchy of need for a home and rescue animals \u201cdeserve\u201d a home more than bred dogs. This argument also appeals to emotions around \u201csaving\u201d another animal, which is at best INDIRECTLY true, that the shelter may euthanize a dog if needed. While \u201ckill\u201d shelters vary by state US , I do not think the shelter type impacts my argument, but would love to hear insights on that, if possible. What truly matters is that you are a responsible owner who is willing to take care of an animal, treat it adequately, and give it a place to call home. The guilt some dog people give to others for NOT rescuing is absurd and faulted by the fact that they think sheltered animals deserve a home more than bred animals. All dogs that are alive \u201cdeserve\u201d a home equally. A dogs life is a dogs life it doesn\u2019t really matter which route you go.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Buying a dog from a breeder is not a bad thing to do, even considering the possibility of \u201crescuing\u201d another dog from a shelter.\n","id":"dc7e8cae-d325-4fed-960c-dfe0b01dee5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Donald Trump has broken over 60 campaign promises within the first month of being president of the United States. The 2 most notable ones he has kept are the immigration ban and the promise to build a wall which he has kept via the executive order he signed, even if the wall isn't completed . I understand that DJT's anti establishment message appealed to many Americans, which is why he won, but he has proven himself to be a liar and a fraud who doesn't care about his constituents. The only people left who support Donald Trump are the same ones who supported the racist rhetoric that he used during his campaign and are at the very least complacent with the growing acceptance of white nationalism. Delta was awarded because of my use of collectivism and lack of nuance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although not everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a racist, the people who still support him are.\n","id":"432d86f3-20ac-4e4b-a5b3-10ea986c141a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the EU right to approve the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market?<|ARGUMENT|>End users' human rights are downgraded into exceptions to copyright by Directive 2001\/29\/EC against the indivisibility of human rights The lists of exceptions in the directive are not complete, but directive's approach to describing them article 135 of directive on copyright in the digital single market causes that any incompleteness breaks the directive's validity as impartial specification of rights and obligations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The directive have been attempted to be enacted without considering or representing the point of view of billions of social media users. Users' views should not be dismissed without explanation or analysis.\n","id":"632a2e1e-072a-4b8a-89c4-b972937a09da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Boris Johnson proroguing parliament is an attack on democracy.<|ARGUMENT|>The Conservative party 2017 election manifesto, which the party was elected on, promised to deliver ''the best possible deal for Britain. delivered by a smooth, orderly Brexit.''<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The referendum delivered no mandate to ram through the most extreme form of Brexit, which Johnson is trying to do with this prorogation.\n","id":"0a7c6c21-612a-47b0-974a-87139e9a782b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I consider myself very left wing but I've found that the Democratic and Socialist parties consider workfare a form of slave labor. I don't see how this is the case we are all working for money and benefits, unfortunately there is no free lunch for any of us. If people who are capable of working are receiving free benefits, what is wrong with requiring them to work? Maybe I am missing something with regard to single or stay at home parents, or perhaps workfare does not give people enough time to go find the job they want. I would like to add that I see a difference between letting private companies profit off cheap labor, and having the welfare recipients work on government projects. Is workfare always to the benefit of private companies? Please, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe requiring able-bodied, mentally capable adults who receive welfare to work is a form of slave labor\n","id":"0d0a040a-22a7-4d44-a7ed-1fff28a74134"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you're alive and under sixty you probably have a cellphone and most likely a smartphone and you probably carry it on you 99 of the time. Even if you happen to not have it on you, it's not as if there isn't a clock within a few meters and even if there isn't it's not as if you can't ask someone near by if you TRULY need the time at that very moment . And even if, SOMEHOW, you don't have access to ANY clock it's not as if as Elaine says to Kramer we can't guess the time within the hour. Everywhere I read, the only arguments I see for why one should have a wristwatch is because it looks good dashing elegant professional . My friend once said he wore a watch because it avoided the need to grab their phone out of their pocket despite it taking .3 seconds so I'm calling bull on that . So, really, other than looking good why is there truly a reason to wear a wristwatch let alone spend any amount of money on way? If you simply like the look of a wristwatch then okay, I may not understand because I think they look tacky but fashion is wholly opinionated. I mean, wristwatches are definitely not the only socially acceptable jewelery for men and modern society has eliminated the need for a device with the sole function of time keeping. Are these pro watch people really just fashion snobs that think they're Ironman and a runway model in one because of a little piece of archaic technology? I'd like to thank everyone for there viewpoints. I never imagined people had such strong opinions on watches. My opinion has officially been changed. Hats off to you, Reddit, I am definitely one hardhead sonofabitch. I still maintain that they look dumb and are pointless while one is just out and about, such as getting groceries or what have you, but I must admit they are definitely relevant in the modern age perhaps less so than before but still needed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wristwatches are outdated and useless other than as a fashion piece\n","id":"f2cc7ab3-5ce2-4e07-ad22-0577c8de120d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>A conservative Irish newspaper proposed that celibacy had contributed to the abuse problem within the church and an Australian public inquiry panel claimed that priests being celibate may have also contributed to abuse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Celibacy can have a negative impact on mental health and may be a contributing factor in sexual abuse.\n","id":"1cad9184-058b-486e-9a1c-c32ad84eddac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should People Only be Allowed to Vote if they Pass a Certain Test?<|ARGUMENT|>The goal of democracy is not to make \"correct\" decisions but to maintain governments that most accurately represent the desires of the people, even if that is not pragmatically ideal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This policy threatens the principles and ideals enshrined in democracy.\n","id":"5f9ba4b4-3ec1-4629-b6c2-d1df0c51ed7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the U.S. federal government should institute a new employment regulation stating that no employee of any organization may work longer than, say, 30 hours a week the actual number I haven't really settled on, but something shorter than the standard 40 30 would be five 6 hour days, 32 would be four 8 hour days, so something like that . I have the following reasons A 40 hour workweek is too long for most people to stay engaged with and committed to their work. There is a limit to how much a person can concentrate on their work all the time, and I feel 5 days at an 8 hour stretch each surpasses that limit. Hence, I feel productivity per employee would not actually decrease, since time spent taking breaks in the middle of a workday would be reduced. A 5 day week with shorter days would allow parents to drop kids off at school, go to work, finish work, and then go back and pick their kids up at school when they are done. Current 8 hour days without leaving the kid at some after school program simply don't allow this because school doesn't last that long. Having the school and work worlds work on the same timetable would make a lot of things much easier. Speaking of kids, less work means more free time for family and or other pursuits. I believe having free time is very important for general happiness, and reducing the workweek slightly can feel like a significant increase in free time. Changing from a 5 day 8 hour workweek to a 4 day 8 hour workweek is a decrease in workdays by 20 percent, but an increase in weekend days by 50 . I happen to work a 5 4 80 schedule alternating 5 day and 4 day workweeks, still totaling 80 hours over 2 workweeks and I can tell you the 3 day weekends feel muuuuuch longer and more satisfying. There is currently significant unemployment. If an organization was forced to limit its employees to 30 hour work weeks, they'd have room both in time scheduling and in budget to hire more people. This would allow the currently unemployed the chance to work. Reducing the standard work week from 40 gt 30 hours would mean a 33 increase in people who must be employed to get the same number of man hours out of the workforce note that I don't believe productivity is directly and naively proportional to man hours anyway . With the mandated reduction in workweek per employee, I am guessing service companies and stores would find it easier to hire multiple shifts of people say 2 shifts that each work a 5 day, 6 hour workweek to have their services available for longer each day. It is very annoying to be unable to use a lot of services because everyone runs on the same work day, so I'm at work for the whole time other services are available I'm thinking of banks, DMV, car shops, stuff like that . It would be much more convenient if I could use these kinds of services on a workday, before or after I went to work, and it would be possible if my workday were shorter but service companies stay open just as long or longer each day. Note that I am fine with companies paying their employees reduced wages to accommodate this. A transition could be done slowly over time say 1 fewer hour per workweek every year for 10 years, or something in that vein so people have time to get raises to make up for their decreasing salary wages and so people can still afford to pay any recurring debts that they got before the change I'm thinking of mortgages here . I am also fine with people wanting to take multiple jobs under the new system. In fact it would be much easier to manage two full time jobs under the new system than the current one, increasing the effectiveness of doubling up not that I advocate everyone should do this, obviously, but it is nice for people who want need the option . I am unsure how self employed or emergency type people would fit into such a system, since obviously they can work as much as they want, or are sometimes required to work long and hard hours unexpectedly. But I feel that just stating their existence isn't a very good counter argument either, and don't see why they couldn't coexist along with a much larger regular workforce that is required to work under this new mandate. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe mandating a shorter workweek at the U.S. federal level is a good idea,\n","id":"1b7eafae-94b0-4b64-a94c-b4fc3f58e0b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should countries send back refugees when it is safe in their country of origin?<|ARGUMENT|>Being sent back to a country that the refugee has not been to in years or even decades is creating a huge upheaval in the life of a refugee who has already experienced the upheaval of becoming a refugee in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For refugees who have learned the language and culture of the host country, have been born\/ raised families in the host country, sending them back to their country of origin is cruel and unfair.\n","id":"27fe6a89-84d3-4b01-9f79-01815046700a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Women only spaces have typically allowed trans women who appear to be cis into their spaces for decades Self-identification is a much lower bar for allowing women into these spaces. Since anyone can self-identify as a woman at any point, it is easy for this circumstance to be abused.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing trans women into women-only spaces opens the door for men as well.\n","id":"3c8e2e56-002a-42dd-bbaa-8570392b4f4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view in a sentence Individuals who renounce racist ideologies beliefs have a moral obligation to work to help others renounce those same beliefs. Some examples of the sort of folks I'm talking about Members of the KKK converted by Daryl Davis and others like him This man whose black parole officer led him to change his ways This former KKK Grand Dragon I'm defining reformed racist as someone who has 1 recognized their past belief system as prejudicial and 2 has taken is taking explicit, tangible steps to move away from that belief system in their day to day lives. Racist is the go to but we can extend this to any bigoted belief system. Some premises that inform my view the first is not up for discussion, and the second and third really shouldn't be unless you have some compelling and groundbreaking social science research Racism bigotry exist AND are morally wrong to practice or propagate Racism bigotry takes root and spreads via iterations of social proof Therefore, those who adopt practice racist bigoted beliefs implicitly aid in the spread of those beliefs, whether they intend to do so or not What follows from these premises is that individuals like those I mention have, during their time as racists bigots, directly contributed to the creation or continuation of more racists and bigots. While their own personal correction is terrific and to be celebrated encouraged, it does not reverse the damage they've done, intentionally or otherwise. Therefore, once they've learned the error of their ways, they have a moral obligation to work intentionally and deliberately to convert other bigots and racists. Why this moral obligation? If you break your neighbors' window with a baseball, most would agree that you are obligated to repair the damage, regardless of whether you threw the ball intending to hit the window. You caused harm, so you fix the harm. I hold the same principle here. Some clarifications I am not implying that reformed racists' epiphanies should not be celebrated or encouraged. Shedding bigotry and owning your mistakes is a challenging process and I respect them for doing so. My argument isn't that changing your own ways is bad or unworthy of praise, but rather that it is only the beginning of the work. I am commenting specifically on obligation not capacity or suitability . I absolutely recognize that there are reformed racists who would be ill equipped or ill suited to undertake such work. I still argue that they are obligated to repair the damage they've done or to work towards a place where they can do so. I am not arguing that some authority should force or compel these people to do anything. I'm only arguing the moral obligation. TL DR Those who renounce racist beliefs or practices have an obligation to help others renounce those beliefs, because they played a role in spreading those beliefs whether they indented to or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Reformed Racists\" have a moral obligation to repair the damage they've done.\n","id":"4ae8b679-8ae9-4409-883b-365dce34be18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>During the Middle Ages St. Augustine and St. Ambrose both studied earlier philosophers assimilating Greek and Roman philosophy -the basis of Western thought- into Christian doctrine, trying to give a rational interpretation of Christian faith.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Western civilization via Christianity has made great contributions to philosophy and modern thought.\n","id":"38c4aee4-e80b-4084-ab1a-d03fa765dbf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As my title states, I believe people's tastes and fantasies generally become more perverse and kinky the more they consume porn. Just like one's tastes in automobiles or food become more refined as they immerse themselves in the study and gratification of those subjects, so does one's proclivities for porn. The hedonic treadmill is a psychological observation that asserts that humans quickly return to a stable level of contentment in reaction to positive or negative life changes I believe this translates over to the things we consume and enjoy as well. While seeing bare chests as pre teens is exciting, we quickly become desensitized to the visiual images as we become more and more exposed to it. As we grow bored of these stimulations, we move to seek out and attain that same level of excitement and enjoyment we found at the start. As such, our tastes evolve or de evolve as we dive deeper into niche categories and kinks. We eventually grow tired of those things, and grow to seek out even more niche interesting turn ons or fetishes. Please, change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Increased sexual perversion relative to the porn we watch is the natural consequence of the over-consumption of porn.\n","id":"8119e3b5-df7d-4a54-8a2c-3cbbe5346eea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many other gods named in the Bible, and at least some of them are apparently powerful enough to transform staves into snakes - for example, when Pharaoh's magicians replicate Aaron's trick with the staff.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One of the first words of Hebrew Genesis 1:1 is Elohim, which when translated can mean \"gods\", plural\n","id":"8ded9a27-f084-4259-962f-77c79bdc7643"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard parents say that it is to hard to prevent your kids from running away. But personally I think leashing is really silly. You can simply hold hands like most parents do. You are limiting your kids ability to discover. If Little Timmy wants to go run to the bey blade section at the store, chase after him but let him. Kids are naturally curious and leashing them are teaching them its a bad thing. Now for more serious case like, Disney or the Grand Cannon, the answer is extremely simple. Don't take your 3 year old to that stuff. Little Timmy or Little Becky will not ever remember that.  edit My view has been changed. I now see how some kids are wild and need to be leashed for there safety as well as others. I believe most kids shouldn't be leashed but some do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is silly to put your child on a leash and I don't respect parents that do.\n","id":"401b5744-2481-484d-a48f-290624f94c81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should virtual reality VR worlds exist?<|ARGUMENT|>People's minds, once uploaded, may be able to be taken over by someone or something else, before or after an upload.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"VR has dangers unseen in reality, so it may be worse at some extents.\n","id":"c95652c8-b2ba-48c5-b6b8-5ee7b6489d24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the United States, there are a ton of unscientific views that are held by the majority of the populace. I am probably wrong about what they are, and other statistics. But for the sake of argument, if you left it up to Democracy, the majority of people would probably vote for the acceptance of doctrines such as Dinosaurs never existed , The Earth is Flat , Vaccines cause Autism , etc, etc Obviously, we don't leave those types of things up to Democracy, because we don't vote on what the best science is. So why should we apply this logic to almost every national endeavor except for elections?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An artificially intelligent political scientist would be able to select a much more preferable Government than a Democratic Election in the future.\n","id":"128323ed-1847-4573-9a90-2c1de5bf6782"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should the Conservative Party choose to be the next UK Prime Minister?<|ARGUMENT|>Johnson is unpopular with critical demographic groups for the Conservative Party such as the young, educated, BAME voters, and urban voters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Choosing Boris Johnson as the leader of the Conservative Party may harm the party long-term.\n","id":"d6747ff3-49dc-48a8-acda-2564c8b14d5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Medicine and it's adminastration should not be marketed on tv because it is not the sort of product that the average consumer can make an informed decision about from a commerical. A car or a paper towel has attributes than can be discussed in a commerical in a way that the consumer can understand. They use commericals to inform consumers as to why the product is a better choice than the competition by discussing what is done differently. Medicine is not marketed by talking about what chemicals are in it relative to the competition, rather they show clips of patients enjoying life while listing a crapload of deadly side effects. Yes it is true that many products are marketed by showing the viewer shots of a general lifestyle that does not really pertain to the product, but the difference is that medicine is far more complicated and can do far more harm to a person if purchased hastily than something like gum or a coffee machine. Yes it is also true that doctors get the final say it is only with there perscription that a purchase of medication can be authorized, so then I ask why do we need the commercial in the first place? Why not just send doctors a brochure of the latest in medication? There is also an arguement to be had for the vote with your dollar concept of capitalism, but in my view medicine is exempt from this because no one wants to have to buy medicine and no one who is not a doctor is qualified to say which medication is better , as well as the fact that most consumers are not going to try a variety and medicines and keep buying that which they like the best as is the case with shampoo or food. To me, commercials for medicines are a shameless way for pharma companies to plug something and make money. Pharma should not be about profit, but results. The fact that the commercials are legal seem indicative of a dangerous trend of profit before well being that is present the industry. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Medicine should not be advertised on TV\n","id":"f7e40643-c2ef-4006-b4a8-3e254afe2889"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people throughout history have claimed to be prophets, messiahs, gods, or otherwise, or been labeled so by others, but this does not make such claims true, regardless of the amount of people who believe it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no evidence that Jesus Christ was a god.\n","id":"28cfac20-5e45-439a-a134-9ef638944986"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Property rights and capital ownership are community assets. Individuals with no property or capital need to be compensated by those who are hoarding these assets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI promotes social justice improving the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within society.\n","id":"df85a0db-666a-4158-ae4e-f1705e4c3ca4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Bible be considered a historical document?<|ARGUMENT|>The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 found that the scribes who transmitted and copied the Hebrew Scriptures were meticulous in detail, checking and rechecking for mistakes, and counting each letter and spelling in their copies to make sure that an accurate and precise text was passed on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Experts have analysed hundreds of earlier manuscripts of the Bible to come to the conclusion that the Bible has been transmitted with a great degree of accuracy.\n","id":"150e3d3c-237d-4433-8577-9a9b7a85c9f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I'm only really familiar with the DS version of mario kart, so if the blue shell is more useful in another version I'd be glad to know. Okay so to clarify, by pointless I don't mean that it doesn't do anything but rather that it doesn't really help the person who receives it from the item box. Typically to get a blue shell you need to be in at least 5th place or lower sometimes 4th place but thats rare . I don't really see how getting an item that slows down the guy in first is going to help me if I'm in 5th place. Its not like slowing him down is going to increase my chances of getting into a higher place, all its gonna do is either slow down the guy in 1st or maybe drop him back to 2nd or 3rd place, I don't really see how this helps me if I'm in 5th place or lower. The only time I can see the blue shell being helpful is if you're racing in a team and the guy in 1st is on the other team and by using the blue shell you allow a member of your team to get into first place. Even still this doesn't help YOU do any better but just a teammate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The blue shell in Mario Kart is a pointless item.\n","id":"fa0b75bb-1d66-4859-9bf7-0da9d6770034"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Science examines the world and helps us understand what we can do in it. Faith determines what we should do in it. This is co-existence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Faith and science address inherently different subject matter and can therefore co-exist.\n","id":"880d0b22-bd3c-4c9c-abd0-f995aae2fb22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Over the last few years I've started noticing something when a person is trying to describe another person to me, they will avoid using that person's race as a descriptor, even when they are the only person of that race in the area. And it makes figuring out who they are talking about MUCH harder to decipher. Example I'm at a retail establishment with several dozen employees walking around, and an employee is telling me who I should be talking to in order to solve my problem. And they'll say while pointing across the store go see Brian, he's the guy with the beard over there and Brian is black . I live in an area that is majority white but there are definitely black people and Hispanic people and Asian people and Indian people and many others too. And I've always thought the purpose of descriptor terms was to narrow down the search. You wouldn't say go see the guy with the eyes and ears over there because literally everyone will have eyes and ears. If you were trying to tell someone to find the one white guy in a sea of Indian people, you would say go see Brian, he's the white guy over there. But if Brian was the one Indian guy in a sea of white people it would make sense to use their race to narrow down the search too. I've heard the argument that because it's less common to use a person's race to describe them when they are white, using race when the person is something other than white implies that white is normal and anything else is abnormal. But this argument is typically used in areas that are majority white which means using a white person's race to narrow down the search wouldn't help much. In a population of the immediate area that is a majority , anyone who isn't that thing is exactly that not the norm. But it doesn't mean they are lesser or inferior in any way, it's just a great way to make sure the right person is being described. I've also heard the argument that using a person's race to describe them reduces them to a physical trait and doesn't honor or take into account the depth of them and their humanity. But saying go see Brian, he's the cancer survivor who's really smart and who volunteers his time with underprivileged children doesn't help at all because none of those things are visible in the moment. I can tell that whenever this happens, the person describing the other person obviously feels uncomfortable by not using the obvious descriptor term of race. Almost like they are silently saying I'm struggling here because it would be much easier if I just said 'go see the Asian guy' but I feel I can't so we're gonna play this ridiculous game instead. I also believe the act of intentionally avoiding race as a descriptor when using it would be an obviously easy way to get your point across actually sends the message that you believe that person's race is something of which they might be self conscious. Similarly to how you wouldn't say go see Brian, he's the guy with only one leg. I have no idea when or why this trend started but I can't fathom why it's needed and I believe there's nothing wrong with using race to describe a person if that description would make it easier to find that person. Change my view. EDITED FOR TYPOS and before any comments , NOT CONTENT<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing wrong with using race when describing a person.\n","id":"e81c967c-94a9-402b-9341-a461a1a7a8c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As morality cannot be imposed, and the smart, or selfish, or rich will always have advantage any system, however vetted, will produce unintended consequences. The more complex the regulation or system, the harder it is to evaluate the success. Welfare, government oversight, banking and industry regulation, healthcare and similar policies inevitably fail to produce better results than the self correcting selfish incentives of competition. For example The recent fiduciary rule attempted to standardize compensation for advisory services on asset management. This was meant to be a more strict policy compared to a disclosure based, potentially conflicted, model in which suitability was the standard. The problem which was attempted to be addressed was Broker has Fund A and B which are both suitable, but picks A for revenue purposes. The solution was, Fund A and B must pay the same. Simply put . The reality was that the industry broadly increased fees holistically, to maintain revenue levels but collect it another way. Average fees went up. In the chaos of the administration change, the standard was ultimately struck down. If the system wasn\u2019t changed at all, and this concern of suitability standard potentially harming investors, then a laissez faire approach would mean that competitive pressures, i.e. broker 2, comes along to point out the compensatory problem of broker 1, and then the problem is addressed. It seems to me, that ultimately, people learn from experience, and in the learning process even systemically, many problems self correct from individual incentive. A social Darwinism of behavior, as evolution has shown us the impact of selective competitive advantage with iteration, why can that not apply also to society? US spending on welfare is comparatively high compared to international spending on a proportional decrease in standardized poverty levels can\u2019t vote on my phone directly, but a 2012 study was referenced on Wikipedia\u2019s welfare page . My view could change with appropriate statistical evidence. It seems most of the research on these concepts are highly partisan, and the results are hard to take at face value. To be honest my current view is how I was educated. I would appreciate a differing, well supported viewpoint.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Laissez Faire is the ideal Governmental\/Societal Structure\n","id":"e677920d-018e-4259-9c59-6128f66ae1d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US stop trying to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear program?<|ARGUMENT|>An airborne surgical strike on known nuclear facilities would cripple or at least seriously hinder North Korea's nuclear program and force them to the negotiating table.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Direct military action can stop the North Korean nuclear weapons program.\n","id":"27aa28d1-eabf-4b80-9b96-690310230e5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>If one takes the position that there is no moral authority greater than man, then evil is a human construct. It exists, but only conceptually in the mind's of mankind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no objective standard by which to determine what counts as evil\n","id":"3b798efe-27ad-44b9-9ba5-077707a2762d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I used to be so excited at the idea of starting a career in the Federal government. I can remember fondly, watching Kevin Costner in The Untouchables and saying \u201cI want to do that.\u201d I remember learning about President Hoover\u2019s G Men and asking the question \u201chow can I do that?\u201d But now, as a U.S. Defense professional of roughly 5 years, who has experienced much of what the Federal government has to offer, all I have to say is\u2026I want out. It doesn't take long to realize that there\u2019s a reason Federal agencies and agents are glorified on TV and in the movies, it\u2019s because TV and movies aren\u2019t real. I have worked hard in Washington DC, shrugged my head at the multitude of \u201cscrewups\u201d that government leaders and grunts dish up regularly, and chuckled to myself as one tenured, uneducated, inarticulate fool after the other tells me, that's not their job. We have managed to turn Federal employment into a welfare program. But unlike a welfare program, these people never get off it, in fact, after their 30 35 years of service then the real checks pension start coming. Really sad system, and I really hope we figure out how to change it. We're a better country then this. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The clearly inefficient Federal government processes must be that way for a reason\n","id":"49a0c8b6-87cb-480e-baa5-7b7220ff04d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Whaling Still be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>When Japan hunted 333 minke whales in 2013, researchers found that 207 of them were pregnant. This showed that the breeding situation was healthy and the whales' existence not in danger.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Whale hunting is done for scientific purposes, such as to determine how many whales can be harvested sustainably\n","id":"f6967292-e2ee-4b2b-809f-a1be0f807646"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>The Liberal Democrats printed leaflets which seemed to suggest support from the Guardian Newspaper, when in fact they were quoting the paper who had, in turn, quoted the party's leader.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The popularity of Liberal Democrats has taken a hit after the party has been accused of using misleading data on election material.\n","id":"ba78f0cb-0a61-4d1d-a1b7-b9a22fe0eec4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>disband NATO<|ARGUMENT|>As of yet, the European Union has little independent military capability to intervene in regional conflicts in neighbouring countries. The relevance of this became glaringly apparent during the 1990\u2019s Bosnian war and later, the Kosovo War: the EU called for the ending of hostilities but only when NATO and\/or the UN became involved militarily, was peace effectively enforced. Consequently, in 2002 NATO and the EU agreed on the Berlin Plus Agreement, allowing the EU to use NATO assets, provided no NATO members vetoed it. Under this agreement, the EU has been able to hold their own peacekeeping missions in the Republic of Macedonia EUFOR Concordia and Bosnia Herzegovina to oversee the Dayton Agreement EUFOR Althea.1 1 NATO. NATO-EU: A Strategic Partnership.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NATO provides the EU with an effective joint military capability\n","id":"c916b7a1-9abd-4545-8104-9e3c4259c753"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should nuclear energy replace fossil fuels?<|ARGUMENT|>Intermittant renewables have no proven decarbonisation record. Countries, like Germany, that have tried to replace their fossil fuel generators with wind a solar have so far failed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear power has a better decarbonisation track record than renewables.\n","id":"883e8077-3a00-4132-b96b-50632e8ca163"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Almost all jobs require drug testing to get and keep employment or you will be fired. Even students at many schools are drug tested to be able to participate in extracurricular activities. I dont understand why people can collect a welfare check or unemployment check without being subject to drug testing. They wouldn't have to be tested every time. I would think to qualify they have to test and then are subject to random drug testing after that just like most jobs. I would also propse they be tested if they are arrested for some reason. I understand that there are issues of the money going to support dependents. If the parent fails drug tests the children should probably be taken away anyway. It is not a safe environment for children if their parent is on drugs. An offender could get their aid reinstated if they go through a rehab facility. The first time through would be paid for by the government but any other times would be paid by the person. I think marijuana should be legalized but currently it would be illegal in most states. I think it will be legal everywhere before too long, so lets leave marijuana out of this discussion or assume that it would not be tested for. Edit i wanted to add that i am not suggesting this as a way to save money but to try and reduce drug use. Edit i think my view had been changed by a multitude of arguments. I still am against the principle that people can be on drugs and get free government money. But i realize drug testing is not the best way to go against this because it costs a lot and could be a violation of rights. i guess that in some cases the cost of doing what is fair might not be worth it. However this discussion has raised other questions to me about the validity of jobs drug testing as well as welfare in general. I may have to post a differnt cmv later after some thinking. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"people on welfare and other government aid should be drug tested.\n","id":"c8bf3aa5-b2c5-4fe7-bc0f-a8c3d435bd06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Sing Problematic Christmas Songs?<|ARGUMENT|>Sexism is at its worst when it is unintended because it demonstrates how subconsciously pervasive it is in pop culture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being sexist is not conditional on acting with the intention to be sexist because the impact remains the same.\n","id":"6f211d8d-14da-4ec0-9739-1a90cc9f8fda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Churches should submit Tax accounts and be subject to scrutiny, as long as they are over a certain threshold say 50,000 dollars?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voluntary donations to Churches may be used as a way to launder money\n","id":"5cc38ac3-f59b-4c09-92f6-45ddc6ecd9a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's a common fun fact that Britain has invaded all but 22 of UN's countries. Norway is never mentioned among the exeptions, but as far as my historic knowledge goes, GB has never successfully invaded Norway. An invasion is defined as an occasion when an army or country uses force to take control of another country Placing some mines on our shores would not count for this either. The mine placement was a part of Plan R 4 to provoke miliitary action from Germany. The mine laying was never a part of a direct invasion. Britain were to respond to this by landing troops in Narvik, Trondheim and Bergen. However when the mines were placed, the German invasion was already underway. The troops landing fought WITH Norwegian troops, and had no intention of taking control from the Norwegian goverment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Great Britain never invaded Norway\n","id":"d63eb4ac-d926-46f3-8d1b-f4bebf45a17e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The increase in vulgarity, obscenity, and the eroticization of our culture is are all contributing to our collective cultural rot. Just look at Miley's recent performance on the VMA's. What she did was shocking and offensive. And slowly, we're becoming more accustomed to this and less bothered by it. Take Madonna or even Elvis. Both were in their day criticized by many people for vulgarity, but Madonna's actions are not as vulgar as Lady GaGa's or Miley Cyrus's. And referring to Elvis's behavior as vulgar by today's standards of propriety is laughable. Point being, none of these performers act in a vacuum. Miley Cyrus is a big name pop star, not an experimental fringe artist. She did what she did for ratings, and the trends of the past few years and more broadly, the past century indicate that the way to receive attention and popularity is to continue to push the boundaries of the obscene. Now Cyrus went too far for what is considered to be in good taste for even the average person today. But even when many people were scandalized by a performer like Elvis, his behavior was still indicative of a libertine trend that eventually resulted in Madonna, Lady GaGa, and Miley Cyrus's twerking. I'd love to be wrong, please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Miley Cyrus's performance is a sign that the American Culture is in decline\n","id":"7a06ff42-a920-4772-a818-bb6ebace738a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think it does. All Muhammad campaigns have been defensive in character. There are some Sahih Hadiths which says to wage offensive war against non muslims but Hadiths are not canonical. They could've been fabricated, manipulated, or just taken out of context. So, they cannot truly represent Islam. The Quranic verse which supposedly instruct muslims to wage offensive war against non muslims if viewed contextually were referring to the time of Muhammad whose campaigns were defensive in character. I hear a lot more about muslim extremists than I do say, christian extremists or buddhist extremists. However, followers of a religion cannot definitely represent the religion because while they may claim to follow the religion, they could be lying or not doing it properly. The things which I've said is from reading wikipedia articles. I trust Wikipedia because everything they say are usually cited and if it's wrongly cited, it can be challenged. I encounter a lot of people who claim islam instruct to wage offensive war against unbelievers, since there seems to be so many of them, I think there is a genuine reason behind it and I'd like to hear this view voiced in an educated way, hopefully my view can be changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Islam does not instruct muslims to wage offensive war against non-muslims.\n","id":"d3e611f4-f0b0-4eda-a590-d60ba0c2e84f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>In the 1990s, Benetton had a series of ad campaigns which focused on the AIDs epidemic and the suffering it caused to the members of the LGBTQ community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many corporations have incorporated LGBTQ people and issues into their advertisement campaigns. This has sparked public conversation and helped bring LGBTQ issues into the mainstream.\n","id":"b98ab763-5140-4e3f-b547-f4c4ab297828"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, these groups have many similarities Both represent about 2 of the US population today. Both started immigrate to america in the late 19th century and continued doing so in large numbers during the 20th century. Both faced discrimination in america based on their ethnicity. Both immigrated primarily to the NYC metro area. Both groups had a general foundation in western culture as opposed to for example Vietnam or Somalia They have very different economic outcomes Puerto Rican household income is 36,000. Jewish is 150,000, much higher than the US average. Jewish people have founded several succesful american companies such as Google, Facebook, Oracle, Salesforce and essentially founded the media entertainment industry. Puerto Ricans have founded far fewer. What does this mean It means that we cannot expect every group of immigrants to eventually contribute the same economically. It means that being an immigrant or a minority is not the driving factor of a groups economic achievement. Given that america is becoming more and more a welfare state it means we need be able to predict a peoples likely economic contribution. It is a fair judgement to assume that latin american immigrants will contribute econmically in a way similar to puerto ricans. Given the nature of americans debt burden, crumbling infrastructure, underfunded court system, and underpaid teachers, it is important that any group that comes to america be able to contribute econmically at a similar rate or better than the current population.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The differences in economic outcomes between Jewish and Puerto Rican Americans prove immigrant economic success is more dependent on factors other than minority discrimination. This is relevant information for today's immigration debate.\n","id":"3359249a-703b-43c1-9d92-f032d07b3aea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All populations of life forms experience changes in their heritable characteristics over time, and cumulative changes over long periods of time lead to the origin of new species. This is a scientific fact, and the evidence that this is true is so overwhelming that denying evolution is intellectually equivalent to believing that the earth is flat. The evidence for evolution includes numerous transitional fossils and genetic evidence that only make sense in the context of evolution, and are all perfectly explained by evolution. The evidence is so readily available to anyone with an internet connection or access to a library in most parts of the developed world that denying evolution requires profound willful ignorance or delusion. Creationism, and especially young earth creationism, is no more reasonable than claims put forward by the Flat Earth Society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Denying biological evolution is exactly as reasonable as claiming that the earth is flat.\n","id":"e311afe3-9bbc-4f3c-9a0c-239d4f84eb5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Honestly, I don't see a reason not to lower the drinking age to 21. The rest of the world has their age of being an adult and drinking typically the same. Here in the US, you can Enlist in the Military and die for your country Get Married Watch and or Star in Hardcore Pornography Smoke Sign Legally Binding Contracts Vote for President and other political leaders that will dictate the outcome and well being of the country. Be a part of jury duty which can deal with whether or not someone gets the death penalty Play the lottery Be considered responsible for your own actions and go to jail be charged as an adult Yet you can't have a freaking beverage. I can't be the only one who finds this unreasonable, even after just recently turning 21. Is there some underlying thing I'm missing here?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no good reason to keep the drinking age at 21.\n","id":"26fd74c1-069f-4b7e-acf7-0a66900eb351"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I spend and unfortunately significant amount of my time on Reddit. I, like many of you love the site. Of course it has room for for improvement, but especially in its mobile browsing options. Whether it's the official app, which leaves so much to desire. Or using a web browser on your phone, this site still has so much room for improvement of mobile browsing. I can't tell you the number of times that I fat fingered something when I was trying to read something else, or how annoying it is to see so many freaking ads. However, seeing as how I know some of you are die hard Mobile in through the years. I figured I'd give you this chance to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit for mobile isn't as good as PC web based.\n","id":"ce12b8cc-19f3-42c0-93e4-a0e15a9f0133"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here in Australia, there have been anti Islam rallies and other people opposing Islam. In response, there have been pro Islam rallies and other people supporting Islam. Regarding religious beliefs, my personal view is to let people believe what they want as long as they aren't hurting others. Anyway, one thing that confuses me is that some of the people supporting Islam were claiming that opposing Islam makes somebody racist. Some believe that criticising the beliefs of Islam, the ideas of Islam, etc. not criticising a person based on their race, colour of their skin etc. is racist. I don't understand that logic, because Islam is a religion, not a race. Not to mention, if someone opposes other religions, for example Christianity or Buddhism, they aren't told they're racist, so why can people say if you oppose Islam you are racist? If anyone can help me gain perspective of this argument that opposing Islam is racist, I'd really appreciate it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"being against Islam does not make somebody racist, because Islam is a religion, not a race.\n","id":"ae06877c-6e59-4c6d-ba2f-e21235034d73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Women have substantially more reproductive choice than men do, including pre-intercourse methods such as the Birth Control Sponge, Patch, Vaginal Ring, Pills, Shot, Implant, a diaphragm, an IUD, getting her tubes tied or a hysterectomy, the morning after pill, and giving the baby up for adoption. Men have condoms, or a vasectomy, and zero options after the baby is conceived. Men can not give up responsibility.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Considering this topic regards whether the woman has the right to choose to terminate life, and not whether the father has any say, then support of the woman's right alone to choose is not a step for gender equality, but rather increases gender inequality.\n","id":"5a814c7a-96c1-466d-a830-986ba4350f7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>The evolution of human rights as a concept took place slowly in multiple areas in many different ways, with the right to life being no exception to this trend, and the past millennium in particular has seen a large set of national and international law or legal documents codifying the general ideal into specifically worded principles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In human history, there has not been a general acceptance of the concept of a right to life that is innate to all human beings rather than granted as a privilege by those holding social and political power.\n","id":"c07f71d3-6ebc-4489-a71c-f3c4c9c0efe4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>Rather than being honest about the complexities of the Brexit process, May has resorted to using \"them and us\" rhetoric in order to try and lead the country and get her deal through.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Theresa May has shown she does not have the leadership skills to be the Prime Minister in these challenging times.\n","id":"3662c0cd-0d9c-4be0-adb0-899088550bf8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While most Americans don't rely on passenger rail for transportation, a large sector of the population in the Northeast does. The Northeast Corridor gets as many passengers as a European line of the same size would. Meanwhile, the US has seen a large number of entirely preventable rail disasters. For example, most first world countries with large rail systems use an automatic warning system , a kind of dead hand mechanism where an alert sounds and the train driver has to press a button to clear it if the alert isn't cleared, the train is automatically stopped, thus preventing disasters induced by sleeping drivers. It appears that such systems are not used in the US. Such a system could have prevented the unfortunate incident on the Metro North line recently. In addition, many metro systems use platform screen doors to prevent people from falling onto rail tracks. The only metro system in the US that uses them is the Las Vegas Monorail, a short 2 mile line. Platform screen doors could have prevented those all of those NYC Subway falling incidents. The fact that the US's passenger rail system do not accommodate technologies like these is appalling. The US rail system is simply not up to 21st century standards. This not just a safety concern, but also a matter of inefficiency. There are still major lines where engineers have to reach out of their cabs just to switch tracks. There are no true high speed rail tracks in the US system, and Acela had to be heavily engineered to get it to reach high speed service velocities. I think it is high time for governments to begin upgrading our rail system. It is a matter of both public safety and general efficiency. So, is there a justification for inaction? Is there a reason why we should not invest in improving our rail system beyond basic maintenance?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US needs to upgrade its passenger rail system.\n","id":"da715a61-081a-4101-be00-990a61c269c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>It was customary for Korean women with children to wear a breast-exposing Hanbok or breast-exposing Jeogori in public, without feeling shamed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The acceptance of nipples showing as fashionable for women changes across time and society.\n","id":"dbcfd58b-2517-4aed-bc72-d8ed0c0b21da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just realized that the object oriented design of large software is similar to the design of living things in that both use abstraction. Software uses binary which uses assembly language which uses a high level language and that high level language usually uses classes which use other classes until there's a single main method that runs and basically tells other things to do their jobs. The main method doesn't care how the things it's calling does their jobs as long as they do it. I don't think anyone would disagree that this design is intelligent and an intelligent being, not chance, made this design. Meanwhile, biology uses cells which form specialized tissues, then organs, then organ systems, then a brain that's like the main method. Since they are both intelligent designs, it seems to follow that life was designed by a sentient, intelligent being as well. To address a likely first disagreement, if life happened by chance, why hasn't it happened more than once on many different planets? Why aren't aliens common? Have fun and try to change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because the design of living things is intelligent, something intelligent probably came up with that design.\n","id":"00832eed-279b-470d-9953-090d772b5b16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>redditors particularly those in r introvert llllllllooooooooovvvvvveeeeee the idea that its healthy to sit around wasting their lives because theyre just introverts and what theyre doing is completely natural. an introvert is not someone who has to distract themselves from their lives through vidya and reddit. an introvert is someone with countless hobbies and pastimes who actually enjoys their time alone instead of just trying to make the best of it. just because you feel on edge when you're meeting people and have some social anxiety doesnt mean you're an introvert. perfect example of a shitty person disguising themselves as an introvert tl dr there is no such thing as being uninterested in social life, either you're a little social and introverted or very social and extroverted but a lot of people use this dichotomy to justify choosing a mediocre, socially anxious lifestyle. edit before you claim that hardcore gamers are enjoying themselves, respond to this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you just spend your time playing video games and surfing the web you're not an introvert you just have bad social skills\n","id":"574978aa-62e9-4e09-b453-42754369b62c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Counterterrorism is orchestrated by governments, not independent companies. Governments have already made it clear - including in democracies like the UK - that they consider the only way to combat terrorism is \"to intercept a substantially greater volume of communications\". If Internet companies comply with governments to censor and investigate even when there is no wrongdoing that constitutes an invasion of privacy on a large scale, counterterrorism notwithstanding.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"White supremacists deserve privacy just like any other individual in society does. Regardless of whether they should be censored, they should not be subject to extra surveillance simply because they hold views that are objectionable to some.\n","id":"a93e80ab-2e6a-485f-9059-6d7f202d0dc5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you use your when you're was appropriate, or its instead of it's , I think you're lazy and or stupid. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people who make simple grammar mistakes are stupid or lazy,\n","id":"f3ea4bbf-4995-418a-9df1-1b54dd95badd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Minors Need Parental Consent for Abortions?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents of minors are legal representatives and thus will be legally required to play a role in any lawsuit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Showing legally that one was a victim of abuse will inevitably let the parents know.\n","id":"1a6c4e1f-c28f-4002-996d-ee06950ef889"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>Diversity, which is defined as an environment of equity and inclusion, is one of the core values of the LGBT+ community. Excluding an entire group runs contrary to this principle and is likely to reflect poorly on the entire community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is harmful to exclude asexuals and aromantics from the LGBT+ community.\n","id":"c07e2237-5a34-4ccd-b456-c4a0a65672ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This doesn't mean that all restaurants should be run by the government. It means that if someone can't afford to eat governments should pay for that person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that governments should take care of the needs of the people, and that corporations should take care of the wants.\n","id":"1f2894c0-5f6e-44b6-9c0f-6f3dd1ad6249"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>The Jarupa Oak is a clonal colony of Palmer's Oak trees that are over 13,000 years old.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many living organisms are older than the biblically proposed age of the universe.\n","id":"fdaf3815-db67-479c-9a8e-c31b4caf76eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What makes life worth living, from an individual perspective?<|ARGUMENT|>Certain emotional pain can often be relieving for those that have a lot of built-up emotion inside.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are instances where forms of pain can be welcome or even pleasurable.\n","id":"6ea64bfa-03c9-4fcc-bc43-80c50313608b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The ACLU and Charlottesville: Should the ACLU Defend White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The normalization of White supremacy came prior to the Nuremberg laws and the holocaust in Germany.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anti-Semitic hate speech helped fuel the atrocities committed during the holocaust.\n","id":"07562963-2716-45ad-baf1-e96d358682b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I'm a white non Hispanic enthusiast appreciator of Latin American culture. In no particular order USA is the second largest Spanish speaking country in the world. It's part of our history. Spanish colonists settled in California, Florida, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, etc. Spanish explorers explored areas of 42 states. Parts or all of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma belonged to Mexico at some point. Tens of thousands of Spanish speakers had been living in the states mentioned above before they were acquired by the USA. Neither they nor their descendants are immigrants they've always lived there. Place names. For example Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, Florida, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, San Antonio, Santa Fe, Sacramento, Mesa, Las Vegas, etc. Throughout the US and especially in the south , Spanish is being used more and more in the public sphere workplace, official forms, signs, etc. . The LA area alone has more Spanish speakers than some entire Latino countries like Panama or Uruguay .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the United States can be considered a Latin American country.\n","id":"97321c11-ebc5-4b34-a1dc-e40e7c1f523a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, for example, lets say President A said I will lower unemployment to below 6 by November of next year. If the President does this, then it is all fine and dandy. However, if he does not he should be impeached. The senate should then decide if he is worth of being removed from office. I think this would work because it would force the President A to state how he is going to get unemployment below 6 , instead of just saying blatant lies. It would also add some transparency to the President and U.S. Government, instead of everything being hush hush. I agree, some things have got to be kept quiet but blatant lies should be punishable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you are campaigning for president and explicitly lie about a topic publicly and you win the presidency you should be impeached and possibly removed from office.\n","id":"171177a7-e804-4f17-aa81-29a80e2dfc3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Scooters should replace cars<|ARGUMENT|>Senior citizens reaction times are much lower and driving on a scooter requires quicker reaction times than driving with a car.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not safe for senior citizens to ride scooters.\n","id":"1c24c6a0-6e3c-43c4-b0d9-f085d4805f0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As required by the rules of the subreddit, I\u2019m very willing to have my mind changed about this, but the way I see it right now is this The movement towards more gender inclusive gender neutral language and practices in the U.S. is a good thing. That being said, I\u2019m not convinced that mapping this practice onto \u201cgendered\u201d Romance languages is necessary or helpful. In Spanish, as well as other Romance languages, the masculine form of a word is the default when referring to groups of people or indeterminate persons. So, \u201cLatino\u201d refers to the community as a whole or to an undetermined person. From what I\u2019ve seen, \u201cLatinx\u201d seems to be the preferred term for socially conscious white people and some Latino people in the ranks of American academia who are uncomfortable grappling with the gendering element of the Spanish language when referring to their allied Latino communities. It seems like \u201cLatinx\u201d is being pushed for the comfort of English speakers, not Spanish speakers, and to me that\u2019s kind of gross. It's essentially the dominant culture telling a minority culture that it's sexist and needs to change, much like criticizing American Muslim women who choose to wear a hijab. So, what\u2019s going on here? Is my cynical impression correct that the Spanish language is being altered against the broad wishes of the Latino community to fit a progressive \u201cEnglish first\u201d standard of gender neutrality in language? Or is the term \u201cLatinx\u201d proportionally representative of the wishes of Spanish speakers towards a more gender neutral Spanish? Stuff I don\u2019t know that would help change my view Who came up with \u201cLatinx\u201d? White people? Latinos educated in the white academic system? What do native Spanish speakers think of the term \u201cLatinx\u201d? Is it preferred by them or by some portion of them? How have other Romance languages changed to become more gender neutral, if they have at all? Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term \"Latinx\" is a paternalistic whitewashing of the Spanish language.\n","id":"ed086f30-f473-45b2-a114-6162cfc75b7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Attachment Parenting the Best Way to Raise a Child?<|ARGUMENT|>Attachment parenting being the \"best\" form of parenting would imply that parents who cannot spend excessive amounts of time at home with their child are necessarily bad parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Attachment parenting excludes working women as the parenting style is too demanding on mothers, making it harder for them to work.\n","id":"6064306e-010e-4869-90c5-156a14adff01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Their Children Should Be Fined If The Child Gets A Vaccine-Preventable Illness<|ARGUMENT|>Vaccines are often rolled out quickly in response to sudden outbreaks of diseases. Sometimes these vaccines are not properly tested and can cause serious side effects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vaccines can harm children more than the disease they are claimed to prevent.\n","id":"5fd7b82b-0ff7-47bf-9fee-06dee16f9c12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>Even the pro-Brexit 'traitor' bashing Daily Mail is quietly considering moving to its Irish offices in Dublin to continue enjoying the benefits of EU membership.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many companies are leaving or thinking about leaving the UK.\n","id":"8e341f33-b21e-4ac3-bfc8-f10a09a1f90b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just a heads up this includes spoilers from season 5. I believe that Sam Healy is bad at his job because of the ways he treats the inmates. Some key examples of things he has done that are either just horrible clinically, or character's expressing their issues with him 1 His relationship with Piper sending her to the SHU for dancing with Alex was completely uncalled for. He is supposedly a counselor, and therefore should understand how psychologically damaging solitary confinement is. Also, he stands by and lets Tiffany beat the crap out of her. He straight up facilitates this happening, and does nothing to help Piper. Piper could have died and he didn't appear to care at all. 2 He clearly has an inappropriate relationship with Red. Using her as a translator is a huge conflict of interest, and it's heavily alluded to that he has a romantic interest in her, which is obviously not okay in the context of a prison. 3 Soso. She straight up tells him that he is bad at his job, he makes her feel worse, and he plays a role in her attempting to commit suicide. If he wouldn't have made the recommendation for pills, she wouldn't have used them to try and kill herself. 4 He also is portrayed as very homophobic and sexist, which is a huge problem when you are supposed to be helping women in prison. Things that would help  Examples of him actually providing worthwhile therapy to the girls, or helping them in a meaningful way. Examples of him being more sympathetic than what I am describing him as. Some sort of reason of why you think he is a useful member of the staff.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In OITNB, Sam Healy is bad at his job. SPOILERS\n","id":"81190664-c5ff-49e2-a8c4-195845128aaf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is health care a human right?<|ARGUMENT|>The 49 \"low-income countries\" that would find it hardest to adopt universal healthcare have been given a roadmap which includes Increasing the efficiency of revenue collection, reprioritising government budgets, innovating financing, and receiving development assistance for health supported by the Millennium Development Goals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The World Health organisation WHO has released a report which maps the ways that all countries can sustainably achieve universal healthcare.\n","id":"b5c1d5ae-fb82-4c17-af11-46171ca47985"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, here is what I'm drawing this conclusion from Turkey has overthrown everything considered standard diplomatic practice in foreign relations to Germany within the past couple months, and I am convinced this is largely due to the refugee deal Germany has with Turkey. Out of fear having to accomodate thousands of refugees more due to what the German constitution says namely everyone who is persecuted politically in their home state has to be granted asylum the German government is worried to act up against this kind of unfair treatment. A few examples Several days ago there was a major debate at the federal German parliament, the Bundestag, about whether the parliament should be withdrawing the German military forces from their base in Incirlik in Turkey, since MPs have been forbidden from visiting them this motion was introduced by the two opposition parties I work for an opposition party in said parliament, hence I'm naturally drawn to support my party's motion on that matter . The German military Bundeswehr is a parliamentarian army, making the situation much more delicate. The house majority decided against doing so, citing the geo strategic location for NATO forces as one of the reasons. The other thing that is noteworthy is that a German journalist called Deniz Y\u00fccel has been imprisoned for spying charges without a trial for a number of weeks now. He has written an article attacking a family member of Erdogan before, so apparently that is the real reason. German consulate and embassy members have repeatedly been denied access to him. Erdogan has sued a German host of a late night show for insulting him, digging up a very old law against insulting heads of foreign states and tried to silence him that way. Members of the Turkish government have repeatedly accused German government bodies of using nazi methods as they've prevented Turkish officials from rallying for the Turkish referendum in German cities. There's several more things, but that should give an insight into what is happening. I think Germany should end the deal. Hosting people who would otherwise die should be a humanitarian duty and not be negotiable. Sacrificing everything a modern, western society stands for in order to prevent having to deal with a few more immigrants is absolutely disgusting to me. Not budging to islamistic and dicatatorial tendencies as exhibited by Erdogan and his peers would also be a powerful signal. Where am I wrong? Change my view edit 1 This is not my field of work politically, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I may be wrong or might have a shortened insight on and into certain aspects of the explanation to begin with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Germany should end the refugee deal with Turkey in order to be able to put pressure on them\n","id":"0eac9d31-9eeb-4d50-a056-a8db41f26a6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT PLEASE stop pointing out the typo on title. Yes, I'm aware of it. Yes, it should be Not everyone can code . Yes, OP is an idiot. I'm seeing a lot of push towards the Everyone can code thing but even as someone who took part in the team of dozens of hour of code sessions, I can't begin to believe that. There are so so many people who don't understand even after one on one help on very basic programming stuff, and I feel like the whole thing is either going to cause a flood of bad developers or simply going to have no improvements to the amount of developers, as I think that there's a certain set of skills required to be able to get to the point where you can be a decent developer. I mean, I feel like it's similar to trying to teach elders to be powerusers or trying to get everyone to learn PhD level of maths some will be able to do it, but not all . While we did have some successful students who continued coding and got well after the hour of code, the rate was around 5 tops, nothing compared to everyone claim. So I feel like my views are elitist views, and I believe that said views can be changed. And I'm bad at ending posts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone can't code.\n","id":"3347e396-5a18-404b-8d31-93cbb17b381b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Farmers in low-income countries are typically poor, and would not have the resources to transition to a different occupation or type of farming if they were no longer able to buy livestock.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ceasing to produce meat would be extremely harmful to low-income countries.\n","id":"8f9e283b-c5f7-4fd3-8873-91309b5dcb4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>We always allow humans to capitalise on skills and abilities that they have. To single out women's ability to carry children and say that this ability should not be used because it is intrinsic to their body draws an arbitrary line.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is puritanical and misogynistic to restrict reproductive labour, particularly since only women can participate in it.\n","id":"3eabf007-fbd1-44bb-907e-785cb5aab032"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have come to understand empathy as the ability to relate emotionally with others. While it is understandable that in a complex society, empathy would be good to allow for coordination, teamwork, and overall greater successes as a community, I feel that when observing one's specific life, empathy does nothing but hinder one from becoming the best they can be. By being distracted by other persons, we are forced to put our own lives on hold for sake of feeling towards other people. If we were to get rid of all empathy, we would be more successful beings, individually. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Empathy is an inherently disadvantageous emotion, and I would be better off without it.\n","id":"4d502e55-891b-4ea5-9962-86e0195dd111"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Social Media Been Good For Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Social media has been used to great effect to keep the light shining on important issues. Everything from Second Amendment issues in the US to reminding the UK government about the lives lost at Grenfell Tower in June of last year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social media is a vital tool for grassroots political organizing. protest, advocacy groups, etc. This is beneficial to democracy.\n","id":"4a9358b2-27c5-4abb-b016-fcb97d272cc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, if Harry could have called Sirius, he could have checked in with him which would have avoided Sirius' eventual death.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The wizarding world is unfamiliar with electronics, like television, telephones, and computers.\n","id":"e04fbbb1-9e8b-4037-8f71-d2799efae912"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Personal story here purely for context, tldr at the bottom This is something that is extremely personal and hits close to home. I was chubby fat for pretty much entire life until university, when I met a friend who happened to be your typical gym douche and turned it all around. He was very much into fat shaming and had no mercy towards people who say I can't lose weight. And I told him on quite a few occasions that it's honestly hard for people to lose weight and all sorts of crap about metabolic rate and how some people's bodies want to be a certain size. Well since he's also an amateur bodybuilder, he was bulking at the time. And one day, he lamented his abs disappearing and hitting almost 80kg. I had no abs, and I was almost 80kg, I actually had a very similar shape to him at that stage. And of course, he went on to talk about how it doesn't matter since after he cut down to 70kg, it'll all be worth it. And I thought, well fuck, I might as well give it a shot no? If I just copied him, how badly can it go wrong? Lo and behold, I dropped 10kg in time for summer, I felt better than I ever had before, for the first time I felt like I was truly fulfilling my body's potential. I've even been hit on a number of times after that, damn And here's where everything went downhill. I more or less hopped on the fate shaming bandwagon. I think the problem was that losing weight once I had the right tools and mindset was ridiculously easy. And it's easy to turn around say look at these pathetic people complaining about it being hard, hah I see fat people trying to wear nice clothes and laugh silently at how futile it is. I see them in the gym and feel queasy about how weak they are. i see fat people talk about food exercise healthy living and I want to shoot myself. I almost always catch myself though and remind myself of where I had been, and not to be an asshole because there are lots of people who are where I was. But it gets harder and harder with time. The more I hear fat people talk about but my genetics , my metabolism , I have a thyroid condition , I ate salad for two months but , or such excuses, it makes me mad with rage. And then there's the times when I hear But I don't want to look so bulky and disgusting with muscles or Running makes my ankles calves hurt I honestly want to punch these people in the face. Just bringing it up makes my blood boil so I think I'll stop myself here. I don't want to turn into a completely apathetic asshole and completely demonise fat people, but the more time that pass, the more I seem to be OK with that. The more time that pass, the more I see fat people who talk about their health as abominations akin to corrupt politicians talk about idealisms, the less I see them as people, the more I wish they would just give up going outside. This is definitely not a healthy train of thought and it terrifies me that I can think this way, I need to change but I can't help being disgusted disenchanted disturbed by fat. tldr Please convince me to not hate fat people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the Fat Acceptance movement is dangerous\n","id":"0530aac3-9f14-4966-86f4-4d8228fc0dc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Voters decide by the looks of politicians. Studies show that baby-faced politicians are perceived as less competent and that good looks can translate into electoral success.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voters are susceptible to influences in their decision making that make it difficult to perceive them as rational.\n","id":"9dac6444-adb6-4361-9022-1dfa13010202"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Gospels are Not Historically Reliable<|ARGUMENT|>magazine.biola.edu While not all the apostles have strong historical documentation of thier martyrdom there is still a strong case for many of them that they completely believed what they claimed<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"His followers were also dying for their faith during that time. They wouldn't have died for a legend that was easily disproven.\n","id":"40e61e7f-42db-4a44-b6e1-b0106dc0ce1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Adultery Ethical?<|ARGUMENT|>Not knowing the marital status of someone can be tricky. Many cultures don't have any representation or mark someone as married.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's possible not to know that someone is married.\n","id":"ac35e1ba-4c1b-4c6b-89d7-e4f6d284a5db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Honestly, I haven't kept up too much but the stuff i've seen here and there just annoys me. I hate how superman is detached from earth and him being with wonder woman instead of Lois. I hate that Nightwing now looks like Chris O'Donnell in Batman Forever. Cyborg graduating from the Titans onto the League is way better than making him a founding member of the League. Having, ANOTHER Robin die seems redundant. I know Comic deaths are common and they happen, but this is the 3rd Robin we've seen die under Bruce. It's getting kind of ridiculous. No Wally West is also a huge bummer. I want to love DC Comics, but I just have a hard time understanding what they're trying to do with their characters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DC's New 52 sucks and I hate the direction they've taken certain things.\n","id":"dde73b57-2810-4e9a-a595-975c3103793b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The moral premise I don't agree with is It is systematically bad immoral to stop an innocent human life. And that premise is often implicitly forced upon people simply because killing is such a negatively connoted word. A common argument of people against abortion is Is a patient in permanent coma less human than an other one, or has less the right to live ? Is it more okay to kill him ? And I'd say that yes it is less immoral to kill him, even though he is not less of a human being. To argue I'd say that moral usually has the purpose to make people happier with the most decent life as possible, and for a permanent coma case, if most suited persons in the family all agree to unplug the patient, it will help them stop suffering, it will free more medical care for conscious humans beings that need help. For abortion I think the same decently killing the fetus will not make it suffer, it will ease the life of the parents as they wished to have an abortion. In terms of global happiness I'm okay with that kill. And when some could argue that the fetus could become an happy person that doesn't regret being born at all, I reply that very often moral isn't retroactive. Example If my parents had taught me the guitar, I would have become a great musicians with the happiest life ever obviously fictive example ahah . They didn't teach me the guitar. Can I say that it's immoral in the name of the person that doesn't exist that I could have become ? I don't believe so, I don't think we can assert a potential hapiness existence life to judge an act. Furthermore, on a more philosophical side, I don't agree with people who think that respecting Life is forcing it into the world as much as possible, or forcing life to keep happening on all possible beings. I think that life has a subtile and beautiful link to death, and in many biological systems the death of cells animals allows a better longuer life of others. I think that's it's not respectful for the fetus and for Life to think of a fetus as We didn't want you in existence but now that you are here we gotta do with it, not for you, just because it's supposely bad to end a life . EDIT Thank you all for the respectful and well argued comments, this thread really is a good place to learn and debate with respect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Just because abortion result in the killing of a being, it doesn't necessarely means it's morally bad.\n","id":"7e2322ff-4543-4e9c-bf04-faa116c4f086"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Increased farming to produce more plant foods will result in an increase in the amount human exploitation in countries where work regulations and workers rights are poor. Perhaps these concerns should be addressed first?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consuming vegetables is also cruel to both the plants and to the workers responsible for the agricultural process.\n","id":"49406f57-c8b8-4c45-9946-07bba66dae88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Lab-Grown Meat a suitable replacement for Factory Farming?<|ARGUMENT|>If the reason for eating lab-grown meat is for environmental or animal-welfare reasons, veganism is an even better alternative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One could just convince\/force humanity to become vegetarian or vegan.\n","id":"111ea943-0c43-4533-8b53-f353de2b1bc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Crime Control Speedy Justice trump Due Process?<|ARGUMENT|>For a victim, it may help their healing to know that their offender is being punished for the offence. This can only have a meaningful effect on their healing process if it occurs within a relatively short period after the offence occurred.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Speedy justice works in favour of the victims as it gives the offender punishment whether real or just perceived. In this way, speedy justice is victim-centred justice.\n","id":"1b9a52cd-3038-46f7-8f64-c15d6aa44ea2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There seems to be a lot of hate for this new style of exercise that has exploded in America, but a lot of those that hate it don't seem to know why and are just following Reddit's anti something circlejerk . Crossfit can be done correctly, with proper form, and will show results. Unfortunately, because of the sudden popularity, a lot of people are going into it without any knowledge of form whatsoever. These people have a good chance at injuring themselves, which I think is where a lot of the hate comes in. Any thoughts?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Crossfit is fine as long as you know what you're doing.\n","id":"16767178-991e-4600-9b00-b8e3acb29260"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Stuff like this is what makes courts absolute garbage in my eyes. I don't even see a point about having a long winded rant because anybody with a functioning brain can see that courts siding with scammers and scumbags is wrong. There should be a process where you go through lawyers courts to sign a contract, and then you are bound to it ESPECIALLY if you are being paid. Include contingency such as injuries or whatever in the papers. You suddenly feel like scamming the people you signed the contract with? Too bad, you either settle get sued for assets and lose or keep working. What exists right now barely is even considered law . A prenup can be invalidated by straight up lying, and it is all the time. Towns should start standing up to these braindead judges and demanding more sane moderation of laws.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Courts NEED to have a system of contract approval\n","id":"2fd6f241-e279-4dd9-9034-c0c4cde62e63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Drugs are illegal, but people who want em still get em. Even if the gov offered to buy everyone's guns back from them, what do you do about the people that do not tell people they have them or would rather have that gun then the money offered. Before you suggest sending the military in to citizens houses to search for guns and ammunition, just think about it for a second. I'm all for sane gun control laws and I don't own firearms but I'm just curious how anyone can really see this going well in 100 capacity and what it would even take to make something like that work out for USA<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"restricting legal access to guns for law abiding citizens will do nothing to stop criminals from obtaining weapons\n","id":"c4abdd35-cd18-4141-be11-d75267bcffdd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I say simplified, I mean just a shot to the head, since an issue with the death penalty is expense. The serious part is here. I think there should only be two factors where you don't get the death penalty 1 Minor under 18 2 No solid proof That's it. Otherwise I think any crime, no matter the size, should be punished by death. Key a car? Dead. Vandalism? Dead. Abuse of a living thing? Dead. Theft over x? Dead. i put over x as I think shoplifting a game for example should get this penalty, but small, especially first offence namely food items shouldn't. I don't condone it, but eating is the one thing I'll let pass for crime The list goes on and on. Literally any crime it's proven you are 100 responsible for I think should be punished this way. My reasoning is that they have no positive outcome for the earth, and a lot of negative ones. They clearly don't have a job that matters, likely living on government money etc. Exceptions because no risk killing innocent, and I'll accept the you can mature argument up until 18, then I don't believe you'll change. Overpopulation is an issue, and why should we treat criminals with MORE respect than we might treat others, and have all these rights to respect useless people. Why is human life worth any more than Cow, for example, which we kill without thought.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The death penalty should be given far more liberally, and simplified greatly\n","id":"2c14ead8-6633-458a-bd2c-8003a51f98c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019ve seen a lot of media other congresspeople pushing the narrative that Sen. Inhofe was engaging with insider trading with recent stock transactions, and from the information given, this seems like utter nonsense. He has said he has an advisor managing the account on a discretionary basis, and he does not make investment decisions, so the only way this could be construed as insider trading is if there were proof of Inhofe feeding the advisor insider information, which there is not. This would be no different than if a member of congress was invested in a mutual fund from an insider trading perspective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The controversy around Inhofe\u2019s \u201cinsider trading\u201d is completely overblown and calls for bans on congressional trading are absurd.\n","id":"f6df758b-186f-4739-9fbf-b9cd1e151c70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>While gender categories may be broadly socially constructed, variation within those categories is immense and largely driven by personal choices; including the choice to present or perform gender in a manner that runs contrary to the prevalent norms of society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea that gender is a social construct devalues the importance of gender to individual identity.\n","id":"7b9fd878-9fad-42fc-b0ba-8b9dbe3a4c7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe being smart is a necessary condition for getting a PhD in a respectable field such as physics, engineering, or philosophy . I consider smart to mean people who have above average IQ in the US . By necessary condition, I mean that the set of people who have PhD's overwhelmingly overlaps the set of people who are smart. People who have less than average IQ are deficient in cognitive skills, drive, learning ability, and curiosity all things that make a good PhD student. Even if they were provided with a healthy, stimulating environment, with unlimited funding for their education and one on one training, they would as a whole fail to accomplish this feat. Many would struggle to succeed in college, and the lowest IQ ones will fail to even pass high school. Once all the environmental deficits have been drained away and only the genetic differences in mental capacity remain, these people will simply not cut it, no matter how hard they try.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You have to be smart to get a PhD\n","id":"58658b89-2bde-4364-bb6b-82a541d9c72c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Holding the view that horrible atrocities are in some way good is a view that we should not commit to on moral grounds.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Holding the view that there is only more or less good leads to morally indefensible commitments.\n","id":"620512e3-d2ee-4dbb-8938-8c5ce09313d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>There are certain circumstances where an employer can legitimately terminate a workers employment due to their concerns over their mental health and associated abilities to perform duties of the job.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the UK, research suggests that 20% of people who have disclosed their mental health problems have been fired or forced out of their jobs.\n","id":"1cafd4cb-eec8-4518-b255-83c5989f50e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tiger parenting does more harm than good<|ARGUMENT|>From the seventh century until 1905, examinations were used as the sole criterion for selection of officials in the Chinese civil service. Examinations still remain the primary path of upward mobility in contemporary China. This explains the extent to which Chinese parents are willing to push their children to achieve academic success Chen & Uttal, p. 352\/352<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to one study, Chinese American parents emphasised the importance of academic success a lot more than American parents did. Chinese parents expect their children to excel academically because they consider academic achievement to be the best pathway leading to career achievement, financial success, and increased socioeconomic status, a crucial part of tiger parenting.\n","id":"748be185-39df-4009-8c53-a75f3270d16a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that if you vote for a presidential candidate because of their gender, you're being sexist. I wouldn't vote for a candidate because he's a man, and I think most people can see why using that as a criterion would be sexist. But currently a lot of people are open about how they're voting for a candidate because she's a woman, and don't want to vote for someone else because he's a man. Even if there are social environmental power dynamics such as no one of that gender holding the office before , using that criterion makes you a sexist. There might be justifications for your sexism, but the decision making process used was still a sexist process. Some people seem to think that they can't be sexist in this situation, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using gender as a criterion for public office is sexist, regardless of social or power dynamics\n","id":"9e891059-75df-488d-840f-8a4c8a1eba1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Australian republic vs. monarchy<|ARGUMENT|>Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told Network Ten. Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is hugely popular in Australia, and that \"There's. something of a view in the community that the appropriate time to move is when the current monarch moves off from her position and whenever that might be.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Republic a bad idea before Queen Elizabeth II leaves Aus\n","id":"703e1385-45ad-488b-aff3-837c695b7c77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should vegan\/vegetarian parents feed their kids the same diet?<|ARGUMENT|>Forcing people to not eat animals has the same freedom troubles as forcing people to eat animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children are forced to adopt the parent's dietary preference anyway - just usually a carnist one.\n","id":"6ffb7da4-f61d-42aa-8e70-ff3b9f31f3a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>Fair trade Standards require and assist farmers to switch to environmentally friendly agricultural practices, such as developing nutrient-rich soils, thus reducing the use of chemicals p. 10<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fair trade certification requires producers to follow 'Fairtrade Standards which cover key areas of environmental protection.\n","id":"e064f74f-7ba1-4732-8116-3a18fea72945"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe gun control will not stop criminals from committing crimes, and here\u2019s why, Chicago has one of the highest murder rates and gun crime in the United States but they have the strictest gun control out of any area but they still manage to get guns into Chicago. What I\u2019m trying to say is that criminals will find a way to obtain a weapon to carry out their crimes no matter if its a gun, a knife or even a hammer, criminals will obtain them illegally or through any means possible. Study\u2019s have been shown that crime rate correlates to guns in a given area legally owned, saying that more guns in an area less crime I believe if we arm law following Americans we could help decrease crime and and make Americans feel safe in their neighborhood again. I don\u2019t like to use tragedy\u2019s for examples but I will in this context, in the Texas shooter case a law abiding citizen fired on the shooter killing him soon after, with out the hero owing a gun many more lives could be lost I would like to hear the opposing side of this argument and are open to having my mind changed Edit As of know I am using mobile and I cannot give deltas, I\u2019ll give the deltas asap<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gun control will not change anything\n","id":"1eeee2b4-2c61-4550-a88a-3ddb6009ef3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>When politically motivated interest groups commission polls they are often not intended as a guide for voters to help them make correct political decisions, but are for social and political commentators to sell news They are now being gamed by politicians to influence elections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polls are easily abuseable, and are used to purposefully give false information in a package which many people will believe.\n","id":"e893da17-cf36-4567-aa56-3c82e8b993c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of the response on Askreddit and many videos which get highly up voted often contain pranks played on either unsuspecting members of the public or members of the same company school etc. In the majority of these the stories and videos are just humiliations of other people which are only funny to those doing the prank and in most cases these people seem to have a rather twisted sense of humour. When these pranks are between close friends who have a common understanding of what they are getting into then what they do to each other is for them to sort out but the prevalence I see for these types of actions to be played on those who are not party to the joke and if asked before hand would not have given permission for this to happen is concerning and a bit disturbing. I believe this that this pranking culture when not confined to close friends who know what is going on is both wrong and partially indicative of a pleasure at the expense of someone else culture. . EDIT I am not saying only Americans do this, I am asking about pranking in America and it's role in culture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the American culture of pranking people outside of close friends is in general just humiliating, not funny and wrong.\n","id":"6b5348fc-bf82-4331-8ff1-1f8f9017decb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide?<|ARGUMENT|>The Turkish Lira has plummeted in value recently due to lack of investor confidence in Turkey. Joining the EU would allow Turkey to adopt the Euro which is a much more stable currency<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey's slide towards dictatorship has had a negative effect on the Turkish economy. Joining the EU would increase investor confidence.\n","id":"c5c7b797-4c65-4fb6-82f5-036ba77c1dd2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After working in the hospital for several years, I have noticed that families of elderly patients often elect full resuscitation measures for their loved ones. I understand the decision, and I respect each and every decision a family member makes. However, in my opinion, and this is just an opinion, elderly patients above an arbitrarily set age, say 90, should be by default, Do Not Resuscitate unless the family wishes to opt out. Here are the reasons why. When a patient's code status is set to Do Not Resuscitate Do Not Intubate DNR DNI , many families falsely assume that doctors withdraw all care for the patient and do not assume appropriate treatment protocols. This is not true. Doctors treat the DNR patients with the same standards of care as all other patients, with the only difference being in the event that their heart stops beating or the patient stops breathing, doctors let the DNR patients pass without any intervention instead of beginning CPR and advanced cardiac life support, and inserting a breathing breathing tube. The majority of DNR patients are treated and leave the hospital healthy. The difference comes into play only in the event their heart or lungs stop functioning. Resuscitation measures include Chest compressions Shocking the patient when the heart rhythm is appropriate Medications to restart the heart Inserting a breathing tube that connects to a machine to mechanically ventilate a patient Inserting a central line long IV into the neck to give further medications that maintain blood pressure When CPR is performed, the frailty of a 90 year old body frequently results in multiple ribs being broken during chest compressions. Survival is usually accompanied by severe trauma to the body many of these patients do not survive to hospital discharge. The success rate of resuscitation is inversely related to advancing age. The following article provides a good overview of this It states, The researchers found that about 40 percent of the patients had successful CPR, or \u2018return of spontaneous circulation,\u2019 but more than half of those patients ultimately died in the hospital. For patients aged 70 to 79, the rate of survival to discharge was about 19 percent, for patients aged 80 to 89, the rate was 15 percent and less than 12 percent of patients over the age of 90 were eventually discharged. Less than 12 of everyone over 90 survived until hospital discharge. Nevertheless, one must also consider quality of life after resuscitation. Yes, we can restart the heart and keep a patient alive however, at what cost? Often, the patient stays in a vegetative state supported by blood pressure maintaining medications and a breathing tube, never officially regaining full consciousness. Some patients that do regain consciousness and survive until discharge ultimately end up going to end of life care at nursing homes, they end up neurologically damaged due to the lack of blood flow to the brain during the resuscitation, they end up in significant pain, and they are no where near capable of performing their daily activities as they were prior to hospitalization. That said, I bring this discussion back to my original opinion. I respect patients and their families who want everything possible to be done to keep their loved one alive. However, sometimes and often , a patient does not have family when admitted to the hospital, or they are unable to be reached in the heat of the moment, and many times these elderly patients on the brink of passing are mentally incapable of making their own medical decisions. Currently as the law stands, everyone is full code until a DNR order is signed. I argue that it is for the benefit of patients to instate an opt out option for patients above 90. I would like patients above 90 without any goals of care paperwork signed to be by default Do Not Resuscitate unless they are able to make their own decision to opt out, or if their health care proxy chooses to opt out and keep the patient Full Code. Let me hear your thoughts<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"After 90 years of age, the default resuscitation status of patients admitted to the hospital should be \"Do Not Resuscitate\" with an option to opt-out.\n","id":"aa3cddb8-c157-427a-aba5-fa1f3b12a2ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I have to emphasize that certain conditions have to be met, in my mind, for it to not be wrong. Maybe I can add other conditions as they arise, but at the moment these are the concerns that I can think of. Imagine a scenario wherein A person has died due to some natural or accidental cause, such as heart disease, car accident etc. The person has not been killed for the purpose of eating, but he is already dead. We have scanned the body to find that there are no communicable diseases that may be acquired through the eating of the body. The person is butchered and cooked by a robot, therefore there are no negative psychological effects for any human butcher or chef. changed by view about this thanks to Hq3473 This condition is no longer required. Irrelevant factors Desires of the dead person, pre death, about whether or not his body should be eaten is irrelevant. Hunger state of the eater is irrelevant. i.e. the eater need not be starving. In this scenario, I don't find cannibalism to be wrong. I don't find it to be wrong because there are only net positive outcomes i.e nutrition for the eater, and no negative outcomes that I can see. EDITS ADDITIONAL CONDITIONS THANKS TO DISCUSSION Only parts of of the body that are non harvestable non useful for medical research purposes are eaten. Thanks to electronics12345 There is no belief in the afterlife Thanks to mysundayscheming ADDITIONAL IRRELEVANT FACTORS Desires of next of kin are irrelevant, unless the former owner of the body has explicitly left the body as property to the next of kin. Clarification about law a couple people have pointed out legality illegality concerns. It is my view that discourse over the abstract goodness badness of an action comes a priori the law. Legality illegality is outside the scope of this debate because that comes later. AnythingApplied points out the potential of a cottage industry forming revolving around human meat. This is the most compelling argument against my thesis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cannibalism is not wrong in specific scenarios\n","id":"e7ca2e0c-31f2-4fa8-815d-1041aa676048"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Numerous recent terrorist attacks have been made in the name of Islam. To name a few, 9\/11 attacks , 2004 Madrid attacks 2015 in Paris in January and in November and so many in Arab world towards minorities , including other muslims.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People have been led to do terrible things in the name of religion.\n","id":"8d1a0391-b5b9-4619-8a79-b83be39af495"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The first big difference between me and Josh, is that this happened when I was in middle school, like from 12 14 and none of my victims are substantially younger than me, one is actually 2 years older, but is autistic and a known perverted creep, he kind of started it, so I thought it'd be okay. Anyway, I had the older creep go down on me until completion a few times throughout 12 14, and once or twice later. I remember having the conversation that we needed to stop in my first car, so I was probably 16 17. The two younger girls were my sisters. I only have two sisters. The youngest one I showed my penis to a couple times and she didnt want to do anything with it, so nothing happened. The other one and I would make out naked and rub up against each other. I never came with her, but we tried to have sex a bunch of times, but I wouldn't fit and didn't want to hurt her. That eventually just ended, I kind of forget how. After explaining these situations to a couple of therapists in full detail, they said it is something that happens in families and its not good or healthy, but the fact that I have such remorse basically means I'm not a monster. It took a while for me to agree. They also said the proximity in ages implies it was probably consensual. I'm skeptical of that, but it makes sense. I would never try to imply that Josh Duggars sisters the ones his age were definitely willing participants, but its possible that his actions weren't as predatory and pure evil as every one thinks. I did this type of stuff with two of my two sisters. He has tons of sisters so the fact that he fooled around with 4 of them is relatively the same. Also, the fact that it was incest seems to ratchet up the ratchetness. Idk why I did that shit one day, I just did and it continued, because we both seemed into it. It's an incredibly disturbing past to have, for her too I'd imagine. We have a good relationship now but haven't discussed what happened ever. The pure vitriol towards Josh Duggar and a total, complete lack of an attempt to understand his actions by intelligent people, Palin and Huckabee's support actually hurts me more than anything has thrown a fog over me. I hate myself again. I'm confident, capable and popular young man but it's getting for me hard to look people in the eye. Change my view if I deserve it. PS it seems like this post is super self absorbed with the use of I over and over again, but like someone once said, there was no time to write it shorter. TLDR Did something similar to Josh Duggar when I was young and never got caught. Therapists I told later downplayed it and made me feel better. Societies reaction to Josh Duggar makes me feel like human shit again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People's reaction to Josh Duggar make me feel like a worthless monster. Idk maybe I am.\n","id":"0486ed08-7433-4851-8bb9-b1b6e817c4fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>Because there was no need to continue fire or aerial bombing, many civilians in major cities were saved.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A quick termination of the war was necessary to save lives\n","id":"03faa347-4eb7-4c4d-a186-ecf4e2ffbff8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With no scientific backing behind the existence of ghosts, I find it hard to believe that they exist. The only proof that anyone ever offers is that they have seen it with their own eyes. Most of these stories take place in dark places, where it is easy to misinterpret anything as a ghost with the right mind set. People who claim to have had physical interaction with ghosts pushing them etc are either retelling something that they think happened to them, or that they experienced in a dream. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe in Ghosts and believe that everyone that claims to have seen them are victims of their own imagination.\n","id":"81f650f7-c28a-455e-a8bb-c87f122f4686"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I need to provide background for this due to the latest story that spawned this topic. If you already know about the story. Scroll down to the bold headline. Okay so remember when the GOP through media, without evidence of payments, said Kav Accusers were being paid? Well Special Counsel Robert Mueller has now referred \u201da scheme started by John Wohl and Jack Burkman Guy who hired a private Seth Rich Investigator that apparently shot Burkman in the ass that involved paying financially desperate women to make false accusations against Mueller\u201d to the FBI. Burkman is already under investigation Mind you. The concept of false allegations being made against Mueller came up in the 11th hour aka late Last Night Extremely early this morning and was in response to a tweet made by John Wohl. It is to be believed the false allegations were to be made hoping the media would run them and in way where someone would get discredited. Whether that be Mueller through Public Opinion, or the media through the accuser being proven to be lying. It seems one of the people talking to journalists have been deemed not credible. The journalists talked to the person two weeks ago it seems the so called plot by the Jack Burkman and others have been in the works for awhile. Double Edit Apparently, Mueller was on jury duty the day the alleged event supposedly happened. Can\u2019t confirm. Still looking into it So unless I forgetting something, background is out of way. When I heard about these allegations. I remembered that Certain Right Wing media and I believe some GOP politicians were spouting that the Kavanaugh Accusers were paid by Soros? . Projection Strike 1. Not only that but a couple of months ago, it was revealed that the GOP has their own Seth Rich. The GOP Operative took out money to buy the supposed Clinton Emails, but at some point he committed suicide for some reason. Then there was the projection that has been ongoing since 2015. The GOP has accused Hillary was mishandling confidential documents but most of the Higher Ups including Pence are mishandling documents in the same way they accused Hillary, some taking it farther. I am probably forgetting some of them, but this keeps on happening. \u201cOpponents\u201d of the GOP get accused of something they didn\u2019t do or didn\u2019t do to the degree Republicans claim. Republicans have been revealed to have done it worse. Meanwhile, some Dems can\u2019t get their messaging right. They also don\u2019t have the balls to file defamation suits against Fox, but that subject is for another day While progressives know what the Democrats plan to do , the Democrats have a hard time regarding messaging to the independents and the Sane Section of Republicans. And sometimes when it comes to floor voting, they still don\u2019t understand the message it may send to either their own supporters or the people they are trying to get votes from. Change My View Dems are bad at messaging and Republican Messaging usually has Projection behind it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Democrats are bad at messaging and the GOP\u2019s messaging seems to always have some form of projection behind it\n","id":"93cffb2f-cf1e-489a-9460-b26454bd8ade"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>Most voters only vaguely know of \"centrism\", which is their closest analogue, both in terms of conceptual similarity and their amount of knowledge, experience, and certainty with it, to utilitarianism, and many oppose that due to the twisting of the term, and its failure to generate stabler, better politics in a system designed to discourage it and make it fail due to lack of proper information-collection via scoring, but they don't see or understand that<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most voters are unaware that two-party domination is unnatural, that they have utility distributions that are linear, transitive, and overlap with others, or that utilitarianism is superior to Condorcet\/preference without absolute degree. Therefore, they will fail to understand or misunderstand the application of utility to politics.\n","id":"025ac96d-ab65-44c9-8fa2-92d74b999d5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK people who support UKIP are politically illiterate and ignorant of what reality is really like. I don\u2019t know how we should deal with them. But it\u2019s like right now we\u2019re on a boat that is sinking and they\u2019re really worried that it\u2019s being caused by voodoo or some nonsense. I know the UK has a massive problem with political literacy, just check out our fucking subs here on reddit, AAV did a lovely blog post on the problem and here are some lovely stats from \ufeff 1. Teenage pregnancy on average, we think teenage pregnancy is 25 times higher than official estimates we think that 15 of girls under 16 get pregnant each year, when official figures suggest it is around 0.6 i . 2. Crime 58 do not believe that crime is falling, when the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that incidents of crime were 19 lower in 2012 than in 2006 07 and 53 lower than in 1995 ii . 51 think violent crime is rising, when it has fallen from almost 2.5 million incidents in 2006 07 to under 2 million in 2012 iii . 3. Job seekers allowance 29 of people think we spend more on JSA than pensions, when in fact we spend 15 times more on pensions \u00a34.9bn vs \u00a374.2bn iv . 4. Benefit fraud people estimate that 34 times more benefit money is claimed fraudulently than official estimates the public think that \u00a324 out of every \u00a3100 spent on benefits is claimed fraudulently, compared with official estimates of \u00a30.70 per \u00a3100 v . 5. Foreign aid 26 of people think foreign aid is one of the top 2 3 items government spends most money on, when it actually made up 1.1 of expenditure \u00a37.9bn in the 2011 12 financial year. More people select this as a top item of expenditure than pensions which cost nearly ten times as much, \u00a374bn and education in the UK \u00a351.5bn vi . 6. Religion we greatly overestimate the proportion of the population who are Muslims on average we say 24 , compared with 5 in England and Wales. And we underestimate the proportion of Christians we estimate 34 on average, compared with the actual proportion of 59 in England and Wales vii . 7. Immigration and ethnicity the public think that 31 of the population are immigrants, when the official figures are 13 viii . Even estimates that attempt to account for illegal immigration suggest a figure closer to 15 . There are similar misperceptions on ethnicity the average estimate is that Black and Asian people make up 30 of the population, when it is actually 11 or 14 if we include mixed and other non white ethnic groups ix . 8. Age we think the population is much older than it actually is \u2013 the average estimate is that 36 of the population are 65 , when only 16 are x . 9. Benefit bill people are most likely to think that capping benefits at \u00a326,000 per household will save most money from a list provided 33 pick this option , over twice the level that select raising the pension age to 66 for both men and women or stopping child benefit when someone in the household earns \u00a350k . In fact, capping household benefits is estimated to save \u00a3290m xi , compared with \u00a35bn xii for raising the pension age and \u00a31.7bn xiii for stopping child benefit for wealthier households. 10. Voting we underestimate the proportion of people who voted in the last general election \u2013 our average guess is 43 , when 65 of the electorate actually did 51 of the whole population xiv . but fuck everything your average UKIP supporter is concerned about is based on what most people who know how to use google know is nonsense. 75 70 of our laws don\u2019t come from the EU, thats completely made up by UKIP. They use a quote taken completely out of context. It\u2019s only people who don\u2019t know what the fuck they are talking about who really favour UKIP. Does my bloody tits in. Please change my view. I can\u2019t stand discussing politics on this site anymore because I\u2019m convinced everyone on it is either a troll or moron when they start talking about UKIP positively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the UK people who support UKIP are politically illiterate and ignorant of what reality is really like.\n","id":"f24625be-8849-41ce-a871-9f90d3077f5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear a lot that Muslims are just the trending minority group for racists and bigots to pick on. I here this a lot especially in my country, Australia. They say first it was the Irish then the Italians then the Asians and now it's muslims. They say all criticism of Islam is just the trending outlet for racism and xenophobia and that soon there'll be another group to pick on and Muslims will be forgotten. I think this is wrong. I cannot imagine a point in the future where everyone is just fine with an entire religious culture forcing women to wear Hijabs and having a 53 year old idol that was having sex with a 9 year old with multiple wives and many other things like the troubling polls on muslim views on apostasy and treatment of homosexuals etc I think this trending criticism of Islam is partly due to terrorism and partly due to the being in the age of information where we can log on to the internet and get in depth knowledge of almost anything and all the bad aspects of Islam have risen to the surface and caused people to speak out against it's culture. If someone could explain to me a scenario in the future where modern society as a whole has just accepted that these are just the community that force their women to cover themselves and they believe a women should only inherit 1 2 of what a man inherits and men and women should be segregated, yeah that's just them. That's just the islamic community, they're alright Sorry, I cannot see modern western society ever being ok with that. I think the opposite is true and people will get tired of defending Islam from scrutiny. EDIT My view has changed but I'm not sure who to delta because it wasn't a particular response to this post that changed my view it was that the general discussion gave me the idea that if Islamic terrorism died down and Muslim communities in Western countries remained relatively small then there'd be no valid reason for everyone to keep criticizing their practices so vehemently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Islam will always be a strong focal point of criticism\n","id":"677da455-9061-4056-b76b-512943a77f62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>Modi's primary competitor, Rahul Gandhi, has been reduced to a mainstream joke due to his incompetency and his profiting from nepotism on the political stage. He is no longer seen as having a personality fit for India's Prime Minister.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modi is a nationalist and strong leader to who India does not have any other alternative right now.\n","id":"f0423c3f-fbb9-427d-b115-53fcc06bd9c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it unethical to use ad-blockers?<|ARGUMENT|>Most video advertisements have an option to skip the ad after a few seconds, before any important information has been revealed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are analogous practices on all other forms of media that are not considered unethical. Ad blocking is no different.\n","id":"43310a3c-61e0-490a-8aa3-15000781c624"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Rights only exist with responsibilities. Animals don't have human rights, since they can't be responsible for their actions and charged with a crime, for example.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AGI should have duties placed upon them before being entitled to rights.\n","id":"ceb06bb2-5c57-4c7a-8f4f-0ef2842a18ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As of now, there are no methods that provide a clean and pain free death to those no longer interested in living. In the U.S., one of the most pain free suicidal methods is through the use of firearms Limiting this would require a lot of people to live against their will and consent, if guns are significantly restricted. Now, I am assuming a common exception to this argument would be those who will impulsively kill themselves, or those who may be helped through therapy. However, though better mental healthcare system is likely to help those who are impulsively making the decision to commit suicide, there will still be left many cases where that is not possible for those who are unable to be helped. All in all, I believe that gun control and euthanasia in the U.S. are linked through this issue, and that liberals would create a better world if they still provided a way out for those who no longer have the desire to live. Due to the number of suicides being higher than homicides through a firearm, this should be a consideration. Reddit, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liberals should not support restrictions on Gun Control until euthanasia is legal and provided for the phsyically and mentally ill.\n","id":"b817904b-5771-42be-964d-ec9157d3c363"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally do not understand the value in spending in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on IVF, surrogacy, etc. to facilitate having a child with your genes when there are so many children throughout the entire world deprived of a family and in need of adoption. What is it about YOUR genes that is so special? It's not just a couple of rounds of IVF in a 30 something patient who is having trouble conceiving that bothers me the most, but I guess the more complicated expensive it becomes the more frustrated I get with the concept. For example, having brothers or sisters donating gametes if yours do not work due to age or medical issue if you're a homosexual couple in need of gametes from the opposite gender. If your motivation stems purely from the sense of purpose that parenthood would bring, then why does it matter what the child's exact genome is? I understand that this might be touchy, especially in the homosexual community for which assisted reproductive technology is the only way of bearing children of your own genetic lineage, but I guess I don't understand why this should be a right, and something that needs to be facilitated if it is not naturally possible. I realize my feelings about this are purely feelings, and I'd never want anything written into law banning these procedures I realize this would ostracize entire communities. But it really bothers me that people would turn to this instead of to adoption. Would you really love a child with your genes more than an adopted child? Privilege check I'm posting this as someone who would most likely be able to reproduce without such assistance, but if it turned out that I couldn't and I was at a place in life where I wanted to be a parent, I'm pretty sure I'd choose adoption over anything more complicated. Please change my view I'd particularly like to hear from parents who have chosen to conceive via IVF, surrogacy, etc. Please know I respect your decision and am happy for all children raised by loving parents, and I think this should remain a legal possibility, but to be honest I have a personal bias and would like that to be changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In vitro fertilization\/assisted reproduction in general is irksome to me. Being that so many children are without parents, I don't get why adoption isn't a viable choice for those couples who cannot conceive without assisted reproductive technologies.\n","id":"0ede1804-9327-4ea9-9479-0ebbca5a45f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Since high school, I've always had the belief that a person who was extremely sexually active, or easy , is not a trustworthy person to be in a relationship with. This is mostly based on my limited exposure to it, where I would see time and again most of these types of people would cheat on their relationships just based on the sexual urges desires they felt. This has led to me take the stance that sexually open people aren't able to stay faithful in a committed relationship because they have uncontrollable sexual desires.  please.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe a person who has been a very sexually active person can't be trusted to be in a committed relationship,\n","id":"46a1694e-ed32-4201-a484-5926e83fed2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU have its own army?<|ARGUMENT|>Euro-scepticism can be seen as a contributing factor behind the rapid ascendency to power of a number of nationalistic, xenophobic far-right parties across the continent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An increase in euro-skepticism in a time of growing political instability risks all EU interests, especially economic.\n","id":"bfb4abf9-5e21-4ecf-9863-a69b9eb2941a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in Ohio, USA, which is apparently the epicenter of an opiate pandemic. I suppose since I used to use opiates recreationally never again thou this makes sense. I've never ODed on anything. But it isn't a huge surprise when I find out another one of the opiate users I've met ODed and ended up in the ambulance or dead. There are lots of malicious and completely ignorant stereotypes about opiate users they are only making a bad thing worse. Go to any rehab talk to the fully detoxed opiate patients and you find opiate users vary as much as everyone else, and rarely do they actually look like junkies whatever this means to you . Furthermore when not using opiates most of them are surprisingly friendly and good natured people. Recently a sheriff in Cincinnati, OH had all his deputies stop carrying naloxone, or narcan, an antidote that can literally save people at death's door. He says he's fed up with the fact that certain POS opiate users OD over and over and don't change any of their habits. Like this isn't the exact sort of difficult work people rely on the police to do. Furthermore, while you can technically buy naloxone over the counter, a single 4mg injection is about 60, far too much for many impoverished opiate addicts to afford. As well you will likely get a nasty look from the pharmacy worker to top things off Oh, you're one of those people huh? . Naloxone costs between .50 cents and 5 per dose to make, it's generic but wouldn't you know it only certain pharmaceutical companies have to ability to sell it. This disturbing trend of pharmaceutical giants profiting off of catastrophe they are at least consistently crass in this way also applies to suboxone, a drug that replaces shooting heroin with taking a tab once a day, and naltrexone aka vivotrol a once a month shot that makes it so you can't get high on opiates, both of which are sold at massively inflated prices. I've heard of people selling single doses of naltrexone for hundreds of dollars, and then buying dope with the money. It's that bad. The obvious fix here is to make all these extremely vital medications, especially naloxone, widely available to anyone who needs them. When you consider it, since opiates are undeniably a next to unavoidable part of life for many people at some point, there is really no reason why most people shouldn't have the antidote as well just in case. Its like having a fire extinguisher, you can only be better off for having it. But what you hear in response is If people have naloxone then users will be more careless and OD more, it's enabling them. I am quite sure most Ohio opiate users could not be more careless if they tried at present. This is like saying seat belts are bad because they make car crashes seem less scary. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no good excuse why narcan should not be cheaply available everywhere and for almost everyone to have it.\n","id":"ac62189c-85a0-4b87-a5e1-e389ed568b21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those who aren't aware TLDR Happiness is relative to recent events in your life, and settles back to a baseline no matter how tragic or awesome those events are. I actually had come about this belief about 15 years ago, while talking to my therapist about my depression. I didn't quite have the same words to describe it, but I definitely could tell it existed since my living situation with my parents constantly shifted. No matter how good or bad it got, I quickly returned to the same base level of happiness. Nowadays I still have personal goals, but some of them involve things outside my control. For instance, finding a romantic partner or becoming wealthy would certainly make me happy. But I would quickly return to baseline after having achieved those goals or having not achieved those goals . Because of this, I no longer chase after happiness but chase after concrete goals like health, wealth as a store of resources , available social networks as a store of human capital , with the ultimate goal to live as long as possible. I'd love for someone to convince me that I should base my goals on happiness versus concrete, measurable outcomes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe all attempts to change one's life to become happy are futile, based on an understanding of the Hedonic Treadmill.\n","id":"4cfe6a6e-82bc-44ab-a273-174cc0066462"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This thought occurred to me some time ago. I do not have any tattoos but I have had minor elective surgeries such as removal of non cancerous moles. Let me point out that I don't judge anybody for having tattoos or cosmetic surgery. The reason I would say cosmetic surgery is less vain than tattoos is because they are often performed after an accident such as a broken nose or breast implants will be put in after a masectomy to make the person feel normal or like themselves again. I think this is done somewhat out of vanity in that the psychological effects of worrying about looking different are caused by vanity but I don't think it is purely vain like many tattoos are. I think many people will point out that tattoos are often done in memoriam or dedication to a loved one. To me it seems that the love the person has is very real but the feeling that the their love needs to be expressed in their physical appearance ultimately stems from insecurity or vanity. With that said most tattoos seem to be an attempt to make the person distinguish themselves with their appearance or as an act of rebellion as teenagers. Additionally in the last 10 years there has been the emergence of the ironic or absurdist tattoo. These are tattoos that are random or meant to be funny. Again this seems like a situation where the person feels a need to let people instantly know they are goofy or funny. The reason I am posting this is because I feel that there is a stigma against cosmetic surgery that is not there for tattoos while there should be one. I understand there are many other stigmas against tattoos but I don't think vanity is often discussed. It also makes me wonder if in the future tattoos will be viewed in the same way that plastic surgery is now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tattoos are just as vain if not more so than cosmetic surgery.\n","id":"ed8b5dbe-3a1b-45cd-87fd-9df0208466e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a large power imbalance between sex workers and police, given the latter has discretion on their prosecution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When sex work is illegal, sex workers are particularly vulnerable to abuse by law enforcement.\n","id":"c5b9f6e6-7af0-448c-8df1-1b3ce687551f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally am excited that, for example, T Mobile has allowed me to watch 480p videos on YouTube for free without throttling my data speeds, even if I go over my data cap for the month. I've lived with harsh caps with expensive fees if I want to maintain high speed for years. Unlimited videos accessed instantly from across the globe in a device the size of my palm What's not to love? Verizon isn't following the spirit of the laws in place, but they are following the laws albeit with loopholes . They are, at this point in time, only providing an improvement to the customer experience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Verizon just exempted it's video app from data caps. Cellular data caps have always existed, so this can only be a good thing.\n","id":"df699300-b22e-4aea-9bfd-11ef87c6486d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Since I anticipate that some people's initial reaction will be to call my progressive leftist credentials into question, let me begin by establishing that within the context of U.S. politics I lean quite heavily and consistently to the left, and that is confirmed by my posting history if anyone feels the need to check. Anyway, onto the body of this post Recently, I have noticed a trend among the more leftist oriented subreddits that I visit of using liberal in an incredibly derogatory manner. This appears like an increasingly concerted effort on the part of revolutionary leftists socialists to appropriate the term and attach strongly negative connotations to it, and that disturbs me. What does liberal mean? I don't believe I am making a prescriptivist argument, but I think it's worth running through some definitions. From a political discourse standpoint, the term liberal can be particularly problematic because it has many drastically different meanings to various people and in various contexts. Historically liberal just meant advancing the ideals of liberty which shares the same Latin root as well as equality. These principles are so fundamental to the open society that we often take for granted that our political system is said to be a liberal democracy i.e. a democratic form of government that guarantees civil liberties as well as human rights. That said, liberal has also taken on a more partisan connotation in relation to specific geographic contexts. For example, in Europe liberal usually denominates center right ideologies that advocate free market capitalism see the controversial term neoliberalism which is associated with the Third Way . However, within the context of mainstream U.S. politics liberal as opposed to conservative serves as a general synonym for left wing , and for their part conservative Americans have seized upon that label for anything they dislike, imbuing the term with all sorts of negative connotations weakness, socialism, etc. as they are wont to do. Why does it bother me? It wouldn't bother me if all of these people who are using liberal derogatorily were European or were just using it in an economic sense I have no problem seeing capitalism get criticized , but I happen to know that this is not the case. Presumably a significant proportion of these people are American, and their condemnation of liberals often goes beyond economics, particularly with regard to social issues. For instance, in communities that take an intersectional approach to social justice, liberal is often paired with white ex. equating liberal feminism with white feminism , which is basically to say that liberals are bad feminists allies . Likewise, white liberals place far too much importance on things like freedom of speech, civility, and non violent reform, when such luxuries cannot be afforded by minorities who are facing an existential threat, or so the argument goes. I'm not arguing that this viewpoint is without merit in fact, I believe that it has plenty of merit in many cases after all, MLK Jr. makes a similar argument about white moderates in his famous letter from a Birmingham jail but I do think there is a limit to its applicability, and that some ways of invoking it are less productive than others. I want to avoid this thread getting derailed with social justice and or antifa stuff, so I'm not going to try not to belabor the point, but I do have a few points to raise. For one, using liberal in this way often implies if not assumes an absolute correlation between someone's economic and social views. I will concede that economic and social issues are not fully independent of each other, but in the interest of nuance we should acknowledge that the two spheres are distinct. There are about as many brogressive socialists as there are identity politics liberals and as far as I'm concerned those who claim otherwise do so for self serving reasons. Secondly, using liberal in such a disparaging manner, without any kind of qualifier as in economic liberalism , can play into the hands of the right wing. It's natural for centrist positions to get attacked from both sides, but if there is no indication what side your criticism is coming from i.e. if it's little more than a snarky, offhanded remark about how liberals disappoint you , then it can give people the wrong impression. Especially when the alt right has demonstrated such a propensity for arguing in bad faith i.e. co opting superficially leftist talking points , people could be a lot more responsible in their diction. Also, I get it you believe that liberals are not true leftists, but centrists but since when has further polarizing the political climate been a good thing? Thirdly, if ensuring that minorities are guaranteed the same civil liberties as everyone else is your express purpose, that is a form of liberalism. Using liberals as a scapegoat makes no sense and makes it sound like you have other more questionable motives. I mean, are you seriously going to argue that an illiberal society is somehow better for the poor minorities? Lastly, the tone of these arguments is always so self righteous and holier than thou, and I have to believe that even people who might otherwise be sympathetic to your ideas such as myself are annoyed by that. I mean, I get it to a certain extent there is this weird new phenomenon called the alt right, which demonstrates authoritarian and nationalistic tendencies on a scale that we have not seen since World War II. Personally, I despise what they stand for with every fiber of my being. At any rate, their recent ascendancy understandably has a lot of people feeling anxious, and there are significant divisions among the opposition regarding what form that the progressive response to this adversity should take. There is a ton of blame getting thrown around currently for getting everyone into this predicament in the first place, and or for responding inadequately to the actualities of the new political status quo. For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of that no matter which direction it's coming from I'm just zeroing in on one instance of it for the purpose of this thread.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The left wing of U.S. politics should stop using \"liberal\" as a disparaging catch-all.\n","id":"da568958-11db-47a0-8fe6-19850e95b9bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>By standardising health and safety regulations, businesses can reduce their costs as they no longer need to conform to different standards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USE will harmonize laws and regulations more than the EU does, reducing internal barriers to trade.\n","id":"42e7ef96-4874-4e90-9ca6-be7e678dbb29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>ISIS is using FB \/ Twitter to publish their military successes if true or not and to draw a strong self-perception to attract more followers and frighten their enemies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shutting down terrorist organizations on Facebook and Twitter can stop them easily spreading their propaganda, including photos and videos of horrific deeds.\n","id":"4966e231-9c73-4799-984b-de3345e26f30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion has served as an opiate for the poor and oppressed - a message of \u2018ensure your hardships now and be rewarded in the afterlife\u2019 - robbing these people of a meaningful discourse about their current condition<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has been used by oppressors to make their constituents blindly follow whatever they please on doing.\n","id":"f9ef4de0-c710-4b95-92ea-7c9eb424f5fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After the Florida shooting, a lot of students have been protesting and marching for their safety and rights. The shooting was tragic and unbelievably horrible and having just recently graduated myself, I'm grateful that this never happened to me. I sympathize and feel for the Florida students and other students who want to feel safe in their schools. I fully support their actions to protest and believe they have a noble cause but I believe they are in over their heads about what they are trying to solve. First, I think they\u2019ve conflicted the issue with gun violence and school safety. While gun violence does fall into school safety, I don\u2019t think that they are necessarily handling it the best way they could. Undoubtedly we want there to be no sort of gun violence in schools but I think that their movement is better suited as being a school safety problem and not a gun violence problem. No parent nor citizen would want to see kids have gun violence in their school. The more and more students protest and question their safety will have a more of a positive effect outcome on passing legislation and getting things done. Ultimately, talking about it in this manner makes it more effective as it\u2019s about the lives of students feeling safe, and nobody would want that. Now here\u2019s where I think they get a little over there heads. I agree that we should do more to stop gun violence but, there has to be a reasonable conversation about it. There are two reasons I say this. 1 They conflate themselves two much with anti gun violence movements, especially the bad ones, and 2 Many, not all, are willing to have a rational discussion. My support for the first reason would be that there is a more effective way to pass legislation for students improvement in safety. Also, a lot of the anti gun violence movements can be ridiculous in their measures. Yes, they are certainly reasonable and rational movements and groups who want to work with responsible gun owners, but so far they\u2019ve only associated themselves with the terrible and irrational ones like those that want to repeal the second amendment and such. It\u2019s not all the students, who conflate themselves with them, but the media certainly does, which is not a good thing as the media always construes everyone's positions. And for my second reason, there needs to be a rational conversation. The student on CNN speaking about how \u201cyou\u2019re either with us or against us\u201d is not the movement we need. It just promotes further division and further irrationality. First, nobody is against them, nobody wished this happened and nobody wants this to happen again. Everyone is with them on solving this issue, but to disagree on certain measures don\u2019t make you a bad person. Many people have stated that, if they didn\u2019t agree with the measures they don\u2019t care enough about the kids. The truth is that nobody wants to see 17 more dead kids, but having a disagreement on a policy does not make you a bad person. Stop with the irrational thinking, that\u2019s not how you have an effective movement. You open up to people and discuss and talk about ideas regarding policy, not berate them for not having the same views as you. I\u2019m full with the students on solving gun violence but I think they are in over their heads on what they are trying to achieve. Is it gun violence, is it school safety, is it gun control, is it banning assault weapons and revoking the second amendment? Whichever it is, I don't know if they are effective enough, and realize what they can and can't do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the students protesting against gun violence have a noble cause but I believe that they are in over their heads in what they want to achieve and what they can achieve.\n","id":"ccfd3675-f8ff-4a35-b98d-ce595ed2392c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>The version of Liquid Feedback used had no API and so it had \"an interface only a developer could love.\" This, less then user friendly, application made it hard for the average user to use.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This was a poorly implemented example of Liquid Democracy and so should not be extrapolated from.\n","id":"c1be325b-8653-40e6-8706-d7cbe0829051"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm trying to word this the right way, because it's a bit complex First off, I don't like the born this way argument with regards to homosexuality. I think that it's actually a bit homophobic, and here's why if your argument for being the way that you are is that you're genetically pre programmed to be that way, it's something of an acknowledgment that it's a bad thing to be. The more moral argument is it's anyone's right to love who they want to love within reason and it's closed minded to question that. So I wondered, why is this argument such a popular one? And then it hit me because of the ramifications of a non genetic argument. If being gay truly isn't genetic, and it's actually a choice, then cultural conservatives would have a justification for changing the culture in order to prevent people from going gay . This basically involves re marginalizing gay people, so it's clear that this is the more harmful to gay people argument, even if it's ultimately a step towards a more tolerant society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"born this way\" argument is not the strongest argument, but the one with the least bad repercussions\n","id":"ad5965ba-928e-4217-9443-5dbf67c4d043"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>In the 1990s, a professor from Yale University estimated in a study that if cocaine was legally available, cocaine users would increase by 10 times.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalisation will lead to an increase in the number of drug users and therefore drug addicts.\n","id":"e5c91fbf-4ee8-4159-8de2-e109faa43abe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>We have the ability to count every persons vote now, an ability we didn't have in the past when the electoral college was made. Every vote should count, and the majority should be represented.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electoral college defies the principle of equality of voters: one person, one vote.\n","id":"fd2d7209-7a16-402b-8397-64094cb9322b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Penn State Athletic department is showing a three minute video and having members of the 1966 team participate in the coin toss marking the fifty year anniversary of Paterno's first game, before their football game this weekend. Some media and people are outraged that they are doing this, although it is pretty standard stuff. I understand anytime anything that is tangently related to the sexual abuse of minors is brought up people will be furious and they should be, but the anger and hate should be focused on people responsible for these atrocities. Paterno heard a second hand report of possible molestation by a former employee, and checked the handbook on what to do. He followed those recommendations to the letter, informing authorities up to and including the police. Doing anything else would have been violating school policy, NCAA policy and most importantly, the law. The witness told Joe Paterno he was satisfied with the results. Paterno was never charged with anything and was actually lauded by the abusers prosecutor as the only person who did the right thing. I like my football coaches to coach ,I really like when they build libraries, force Universities to toughen admission standards when has this ever happened before and mold people into model citizens also, I like my law enforcement to stop and prevent crimes. Joe reported the second hand info he had and somehow things got screwed up after that. The three people on trial now for not doing enough with what Paterno told them are among who is to blame, Paterno is not. People feel comfortable that they can always spot and stop deviants. If they always drove windowless vans and wore trench coats, I would agree with them. But the sad truth is, that sometimes they run enormous child charities, are major contributors to political campaigns, and are so beloved that courts take children away over their parents objections and place them in their homes. It's sad when their is outrage directed at this, and not towards the charity that Sandusky ran not being investigated, dissolved and it's monies transferred to another. Even though they facilitated the crimes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The backlash on Penn State \"honoring\" Joe Paterno this weekend is ridiculous and misguided.\n","id":"47095828-578b-4ce5-a871-231c65a5ab9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>in the same way me liking bacon but hating to eat insects is a choice driven by life experience in the same way my preference for the color green is driven by life experience I'm colorblind in the same way I prefer action movies, being dominant and other manly things because that is what society has taught me that I should prefer as a man. Our brain is infinitely malleable and easily accepts for suggestions especially when these suggestions are unconscious. For example, if I was blindfolded and my eyes couldn't see what I was eating I probably wouldn't mind eating insects. Everything we prefer or like in life is a result of past experience. We are born a blank slate. Thus, not only is being gay is a choice being straight is also a choice. Everything is a choice. So while many of our choices are unconscious we can lean to be aware of and then in control of them which is what the gay community argues against in terms of homosexuality. I'm not arguing for or against any sexual orientation. And because I think people should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as it doesn't hurt other people so, whether it is a choice or not is ultimately irrelevant to me. I just think an equally good argument the gay community could use instead of Being gay is not a choice is Being straight is a choice also .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe being gay is a unconscious \"choice\" that results from life experience\n","id":"98aa4daa-9101-4475-a5c6-f079d524a4b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone will care about news stories that involve the military because most people will be veterans or know veterans now. This gives the media a big viewership and profit incentive to talk about these issues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The media is likely to focus on the military more when it becomes a more important institution in the country.\n","id":"afd134db-5f2b-46db-8397-d1761ccba0c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>With more minorities getting college degrees, more of them will be able to access high-skill jobs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the long-term, affirmative action helps create a more diverse workplace.\n","id":"3befda35-78c9-4590-9e67-89003745530b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>When we\u2019re trapped in the world of victimhood, we tend to be more aware of how vulnerable we truly are. We experience a sense of what Brene\u0301 Brown calls \u201cdeep foreboding.\u201d It\u2019s the sense that disaster is always lurking around the corner. And the sensation is most intense when things are going well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black victimhood in America is something that the educational institutions should not reproduce.\n","id":"6e84129b-8cd2-4558-b82d-ba4a94f83330"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the NHS be privatised?<|ARGUMENT|>Private healthcare providers may be more likely to provide less effective drugs or treatments if it is more profitable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Providers motivated by profits sometimes focus less on patient safety\n","id":"26d72f1a-583b-4efa-a34f-b5e9185b327f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Leisure helps individuals to cope with daily stressors and thus to reduce the stress level.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Leisure reduces stress. This comes with individual and societal benefits.\n","id":"ca429c61-0749-4b1d-a00c-15d17d7336ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2005, the top answers given for getting an abortion included responsibilities to others and being unable to afford having a child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion is a social good because it is beneficial for families and society.\n","id":"25c7e83d-f60d-4a4b-858d-f5ef420241a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As it stands, adoption carries far more red tape and restrictions to prove that you are a suitable parent than just having a kid yourself. But just having a kid yourself is completely unrestricted. However, all of the arguments people give for why adoptive parents should be screened also apply to having your own children. And vice versa. There's really no reason to have a double standard. And the end effect of this is that people who would otherwise be willing to adopt decide to have their own children instead, which unfortunately leaves a lot of children in need of adoption without homes. So, whatever the standards are, they should be the same for both adoption and having your own children. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adoption should require no more red tape than natural birth.\n","id":"7f707c3f-1468-4b5c-af59-a5a5e790ec04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is social media helping or harming human relationship?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans have evolved to need regular contact with other humans. Computer screens dont replace this. Rates of loneliness are increasing year-on-year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our face to face relationships suffer because of social media.\n","id":"a3c15c59-a41d-417f-869b-c9aa6bc9453a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>A plethora of research indicates many modern practices such as solitary confinement exacerbate mental health symptoms, thus increasing recidivism rates.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prisons must prioritise rehabilitation because highly punitive sentences cause harms to the prisoners.\n","id":"baab8498-b5ee-4186-90c5-bcf31157a128"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Faith was a component in the Parliamentarian's struggle, and eventual victory, in the English Civil War<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Believing without evidence is not always bad and faith can lead to beneficial outcomes.\n","id":"8d25e5fd-b387-45b9-b794-bbb6619f9554"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am an adherent to the non aggression principle NAP . Previously, I was strictly pro choice even accepting that humanity attaches at conception based on the reasoning that the mother could revoke consent to allow another human being, the fetus, to live off her body see for further explanation . Now I am expecting my first child, and while obviously I have a more emotional response to abortion I also have a reason to seriously consider my previous position. I now think there is a difference between a right to deny consent after becoming aware of pregnancy, and a continuous right to revoke consent at any stage of pregnancy. I think some more hypotheticals will help illustrate this point Hypo 1 You own a boat and decide to go sailing. In the middle of the ocean you find a stowaway whom you could not have known was there, did not give permission to be there, and do not want on your boat. You have the legal right to kick the stowaway off your boat despite the certainty of death. This is how I previously viewed pregnancy and abortion rights . Hypo 2 You own a boat and decide to go sailing. You invite a friend to go sailing with you. In the middle of the ocean, you decide you no longer want your friend on your boat and revoke your consent for them be there. Nonetheless, you have no legal right to kick them off your boat because your initial invitation implied safe passage. This is how, I presume, many pro lifers consider pregnancy and abortion rights . Hypo 3 You own a boat and want to go sailing. Before leaving the dock you notice a stranger wander onto your boat. You know that if you ask this stranger to leave, the stranger will leave and you can sail alone. You could ask that person to leave, or you could set sail with them on your boat. I would proffer that by seeing the stranger walk onto your boat, knowing they would leave if told but not telling them to leave, and departing the dock, you are now tacitly agreeing to give them safe passage. Thus, if in the middle of the ocean you decide you no longer want them on your boat you nonetheless do not have the legal right to throw them off. This is how I now view pregnancy and abortion rights . To translate this into abortion rights I now believe that once a woman first finds out she is pregnant she should have a reasonable time to decide if she wants to keep it and, if not, schedule an abortion. However, once a reasonable time has passed she has tacitly given consent that she will give the fetus safe passage . Thus, even if she later revokes this consent she nonetheless does not have the legal right to an abortion. Anyway, I suppose there are many ways to change my view. The most direct way would be to accept NAP and accept the presumption of humanity at the time of conception, but argue that these ideas do not support my view. It might derail the point of the thread, but technically you could convince me to stop following NAP or that humanity attaches at some later stage and that there are no moral qualms with aborting a non human fetus . I don't hold any beliefs dogmatically. Last note I understand that this principle would be difficult to legally apply and involves a term, reasonable , that could vary widely depending on the individual. However, arguing over how to apply this principle in a practical sense, or how long a reasonable time might be, are not relevant to this specific inquiry, imo. Edit 1 formatting. Edit 2 I changed my mind. See conversation with Ralph j<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Woman have a right to an abortion for a reasonable time after discovering they are pregnant, but if that time elapses they no longer have a right to an abortion\n","id":"4a7334b8-d2f3-438e-ba63-e0063217512b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On the outside of prison gates if you dont pay for food or rent you dont eat and go homeless. There are under privleged kids in our schools going hungry. People homeless on the street. Many familys with crippling medical bills. Even our elderly in nursing homes don't get the benifits that criminals do. If your able bodied and you dont contribute to society you don't eat. Inmates are able bodied citizens that aren't contributing. They could be howning a craft like wood working while they are inside. Building furniture or working online. Getting ready to have a good life when they get out. If you get hit by a car and wake up in the hospital you leave with a bill. You then need to budget and cut back on necessities like food. If you hit someone with a car. You wake up in jail. You have no medical bills and don't have to pay for food.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I beleive inmates should pay bills. Rent\/Food\/Medical\n","id":"1bfe12b9-2cef-4214-8f09-992906710c8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am going to specifically refer to the US, as it is the culture I've been reared in, but in many other nations this is the case as well. We live in a society where it is now easier to get higher calorie food than lower calorie food. People can buy a cheeseburger from McDonalds for 1 dollar, but to buy a salad it costs 8 dollars. This is a difference in magnitude that significantly affects the lives of many people in the bottom 40 of the income bracket. For the first time in human history, the poorest of us are the ones who are getting fat. Rich people can afford healthy food, lap band surgeries, personal trainers, and an assortment of other costly but effective changes to their lives that make them thinner. Being thin has become a sign of being in the elite class of today's society. Obviously there are still many poor people who do not have enough access to food period, even in the richest nations in the world. Perhaps the bottom 3 do not have enough food to eat, but the next 37 do, and the food that they have access to is food that makes them fat. Whenever I hear someone say how they can't stand fat people all I can think of is how lucky they are to be in a financial position where they are able to make that judgment, and where they are able to have a choice as to what size they are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that \"fat bashing\" is an extension of class warfare.\n","id":"b6c402de-87a0-40a9-8c35-3d8fd2806e92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd like to preface this with a short message I played basketball all through school and was good enough to be scouted, but I grew up in a non sporting family and retained that mentality, refusing to play in college and basically not really watching basketball for my entire life. With that in mind, my view might be quite skewed and easy to change, but I really want to understand the other side of the story. I have watched a bit of this series, though, and listened to a bit of sports talk radio, and I don't understand this line of discussion. So many people are saying the refs need to stop calling fouls of a particular magnitude in order to just let the players play . The person I was listening to today said that refs should just call the obvious fouls and let everything else go. I feel like this is the opposite of what should happen. These players are not only professionals, but they're the absolute top tier players in the entire world. Out of everybody who plays basketball, they should be capable and even expected to play the game the right way. They know what is a foul and what isn't they've been playing the game at an incredibly high level for years. They shouldn't be relying on trying to foul but just not quite badly enough to be called. They should instead be expected to put themselves into good defensive positions, play technical offense and defense, box out their player instead of flailing their arms around to get the ball back, get back to play defense instead of trying to bobble a ball out of a guy's hand in the back court, etc etc. I can understand letting things go at some levels of play, but if we're supposedly watching the best of the best, nothing should be let go. The refs shouldn't let them play the refs should force them to play to the best technical level possible by being stricter with their calling and not letting sloppy play and sloppy fouls be rewarded.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The refs shouldn't just let the players \"play it out\" in the NBA finals\n","id":"f00bb4a4-dd0f-411c-9133-e3e74cd2f676"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should legacy be a factor in college admissions?<|ARGUMENT|>Employers prefer to hire those from the same alumni network as them and will offer advantages such as informal meetings and interview assistance. This gives an unfair advantage in job applications to those who happened to attend a particular college.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A strong sense of community amongst such graduates are likely to create harmful patronage networks, further increasing socio-economic disparity.\n","id":"99505d2d-520e-41c7-95c1-86954ab279b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand the philosophy behind acquiring tastes learned to love San Pellegrino , but I cannot for the life of me truly find myself appreciating coffee like many of my friends do. Every child growing up seems to desire coffee, but only because it's age restricted, similar to alcohol tobacco. Now I don't have a PhD in psychology or anything, but there is evidence beyond proof that people want what they can't have. It's just human nature, and I feel like it's what's behind the longterm desire for coffee in that something I was once barred from is now freely enjoyed and encouraged. It doesn't help that many people jack their cups with sugars and creams which at a certain point require speculation as to which substance is actually fueling your perceived energy boost. I consider myself to be very openminded, especially when it comes to substances put into the body for recreational purposes I'll leave it at that but I can't seem to see eye to eye to my friends that have been religiously trying to convert me all these years. The extent of my coffee experience would be instant coffee growing up at home parents weren't 'connoisseurs' by any iteration of the term but were both pretty addicted to , pretentious shots fired coffee shops that my fiends would literally drag me to, and the occasional tinder date Starbucks run in which I would just end up getting the vanilla bean frappe 90 of the time, which is delicious by the way. It seems to me like the most elite coffee drinkers in my socials circles tend to hate Starbucks. Maybe because they think it's cool to do so and are attempting to show everyone how much they know about how coffee should taste like. Could that be the reason? Have I just had bad coffee? Has my past experienced not done justice to an entire culture that is coffee? I mean people spend hundreds of dollars a year on it, and for what? Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Coffee is overrated, the effects received are negligible and often a placebo, and people who say they like the taste are lying to themselves.\n","id":"d561eee0-7d7c-46c6-b7e3-0f0b5db8fe6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As soon as a child reaches a certain age make it 10, or 12 if you want where they are able to comprehend money, parents should teach them about it every week. Parents should disclose how much money they make each year. And explain to their kids their budget pie chart. What percent goes to the mortgage rent, savings, auto, food, and the rest. Parents should teach the child every mistake they made and how they could be avoided. A child should know everything about credit, debit, banking, mortgages, rent, taxes and the like before he she turns 18. Social unacceptability isn't a problem because we can redraw the boundaries whenever we want. But there are less than noble reasons why parents don't talk to their kids about finances. One of them is that they aren't smart with money themselves and don't want their kids to figure that out. For those who disagree, there is probably something I am missing. But you would be hard pressed to argue ignorance gt knowledge . EDIT I did not literally mean a dinner table in every situation. I mean it could be discussed anywhere. I'm surprised that more people on here are commenting about dinner than finances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Don't talk about money at the dinner table\" is a rule that only serves to leave kids ignorant and unprepared for the real world.\n","id":"374a48ef-6f79-45d4-a011-cc1a2c5176ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>This is harmful because when individuals from different backgrounds mix less, it is easier for prejudice and intolerance to take root in society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If certain roles discriminate in favour of the same religions, there is no exposure to alternative viewpoints and lifestyles.\n","id":"dbd3a2cb-34eb-4e81-8e05-ab41882eba15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, let me start off by stating that i'm voting for Bernie and I agree with a lot of his stances i'm also very anti big corporations , but I don't know how I feel about this one. The more I research it, the more I side with Verizon. These are mostly landline phone workers a sector that is drastically shrinking. I think Verizon is doing its best to keep their employees jobs. If they get this pay increase, how many jobs will be lost? There is a finite amount of money that goes into the landline portion of Verizon's business. Times are changing and unfortunately that means jobs are becoming obsolete.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Verizon is in the right and Bernie is in the wrong\n","id":"12d99180-1677-4f15-9154-2d7e8c8f35a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>What is described as victim blaming, is actually just a refusal to contribute towards victim culture. Victim culture is toxic and therefore \"victim blaming\" can be good.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"What some describe as \"victim-blaming\" is actually a good thing.\n","id":"5f917ba2-dbf7-45d7-8ec6-901ec073281e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>React.js vs Angular.js vs Vue.js<|ARGUMENT|>State management and routing. Vue has official packages for state management Vuex and routing vue-router. React does not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vue.js is better than Angular.js and React.js\n","id":"f0000d96-b15b-4be6-829e-f4b9778cc73c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Purity Pledges Harmful?<|ARGUMENT|>Pledgers provide a support network for people who are trying to turn away from societal and cultural pressures to have sex and engage in sexual activities at a young age.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the face of rampant hypersexualization, chastity is a way to rebel against stereotypes about gender and sexuality.\n","id":"8b8ca7c0-24d2-4307-a9c5-10e29c0adba2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a land value tax be introduced to replace other taxes?<|ARGUMENT|>It would encourage people to make optimal use of their land, to make up for land taxes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The change in tax policy would increase individuals' and society's economic efficiency and productivity.\n","id":"3fa4a7e2-6458-40d7-95b7-3d3fed602b5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Right to bear arms in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Although the early American documents proclaimed equality for all and a right for all to bear arms, in actuality, this was not the case. Native Americans, African Americans, and other visible minority groups were not given the same rights as those white Americans who immigrated from Europe. Lynchings and other acts of injustice based upon racial difference occurred well into the twentieth century, so it is a misrepresentation of the facts to say every individual had the right to bear arms for self-defense. For much of American history, a large segment of the American population did not even have basic human rights, let alone the right to bear arms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"2nd Amendment rights did not extend to all ethnic groups in terms of initial practice\n","id":"a0d704f7-7e01-4aae-afb6-fd5bbee09459"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should plastic water bottles have a five-cent deposit on every bottle?<|ARGUMENT|>The United Kingdom has already introduced a charge for plastic carrier bags and has witnessed an 83% reduction in the number of bags issued to customers. Therefore, this type of law has already been shown to be successful in reducing the use of plastic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Should plastic water bottles have a five-cent deposit on every bottle?\n","id":"ff9c300a-2743-4912-9d9b-8efc04bd3771"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I consistently work through many literature classics, and recently I finally made my way to Ulysses. I refer to Ulysses itself as a work and not Joyce himself because I believe him to be a very capable author. His Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is phenomenal, and I believe a much superior work to Ulysses I'm illustrating a point, but let's not take the debate there . Perhaps, because of his style alone, it is worthy of the quantity of discussion that followed in the near century since its publishing. However, it should absolutely never have been referred to as the greatest book of all time, let alone a great book. There is a great deal of difficulty in trying to fairly gauge a work there must be a distinction between Joyce, Ulysses, and the fans it is natural for people to criticize a thing more if they do not like the followers or its position in the world. I have read it and disliked it, but the motives for its positive reception are somewhat of a mystery, so I suppose I have to equally address the fans in order to understand the positive feelings towards it. There is some good to be said about it. It has some worthy quotes, but nearly no book is without them. Every author has written at least one remarkable sentence, if all too often by accident. These are an incredible minority in the text. In the Ulysses Annotations by Gifford and Seidman, Chapter One, roughly 20 pages in my version, has 197 footnotes. One hundred ninety seven footnotes. Provided you even use these, they do little to clarify whatever is currently happening in the text. Even then, what on Earth is a book doing with this many annotations? I do enjoy relatively obscure references, but let's make a distinction between good pretentious and bad pretentious. I enjoy good pretentious, and by this I usually mean a handful of difficult references that complement or improve the narrative or theme. Bad pretentious is a sort of pseudo intellectualism, which is more pretentiousness for the sake of being pretentious. A quote at the bottom illustrates my point better. Ulysses makes hundreds of references to things for the sake of referencing them, as if Joyce entered subjects from an encyclopedia at random. Here I'd like to address two things a more subjective, harsher criticism of Ulysses and some of its admirers and the types of comments I'd like to avoid and negate. I will be making some small exaggerations so as to better convey some of my distaste for the book. So, then. One of the reasons Ulysses has been so admired is because it caters heavily to pseudo intellectuals. There is nothing to get out of Ulysses, and the admirers of it like to pretend they have a deeper understanding of it than others one of the merits of the work is that it caters to a superiority complex. The work is comprehensible , but only to a certain point the admirers pretend it goes much further. I respect the use of steam of consciousness, but it was not enough to carry an entire novel, let alone chapter in the free reign form Joyce gave it in Ulysses vis a vis especially Portrait of an Artist, wherein it was much more effective and contained . It's necessary to admit to many of the difficulties of this sort of conversation. Appraising literature, like many other art forms, is highly subjective. I'd like to make a point against myself. One question that could somewhat easily toss much of my argument aside is this Who cares if people esteem this book much higher than you do? As you said, literary appraisal is subjective. Why not just move on? The first point I would respond with is that I suppose that is just my personality I have read hundreds of classics and studied many of them pretty thoroughly. Many of the works that have been called the greatest novels are typically worthy of this praise The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Moby Dick, although I think Dostoevsky wins out of these. Even the lesser notable contenders have some considerable merit to this claim. In Ulysses, however, I can find none of it. I would like to compare the work to many other modern artists, but I do not want to sidetrack the discussion. Quite simply, I'll see if anyone can reasonably explain the book's merit for a bit longer, as well as more research on my own. In a day or two, Ulysses will be left behind for me as an unfortunate waste until we ever accidentally meet again. Some final thoughts This post absolutely does not do my criticism justice, as it would take closer to 10 20 pages to illustrate some of my points. This would not make for a good Reddit question. Additionally, you have noticed I did not make citations. I do not want to make this criticism into a novel, as its length is intimidating for a Reddit post as is. If requested, I will make citations to better illustrate my points. Before these appear, I will end with addressing the obvious danger of citations. In a text this big, of course I and several comments will be making biased citations to prove our respective points however, I do believe that my criticisms apply to the majority of the text, and will illustrate this point if wanted. I'll end with a quote from Nietzsche's Joyful Wisdom that summarizes my feelings well towards Ulysses. He who knows that he is profound strives for clearness he who would like to appear profound to the multitude strives for obscurity. The multitude thinks everything profound of which it cannot see the bottom it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water. 173 Tl dr Ulysses is not a great book. Joyce's style made for an interesting experiment, but it was through and through a failure. The free reign Joyce gave his use of stream of consciousness led to an erratic, poor work. Edit I removed a few antagonistic remarks to potential comments that seemed inappropriate. As I mention in a few places in the comments, I am fairly new to this subreddit and I do not like how my original post reads. I'll just quote from a reply I left below I had tried this before in another subreddit, and was met with half assed witticisms as responses and little depth. I mention this because I feel as though it led to the more antagonistic style of my original post rather than taking a more appropriate scholarly approach. So, again, I apologize for strains of left over bitterness that can still be found in my original post. I am not too familiar with this subreddit and sincerely did not expect such fantastic responses. Edit 2 Since there is so much to be said on the topic, I'd like to direct to a few responses I've made to clear up some of my position. In response to AnxiousPolitics, I quoted a few paragraphs from Ulysses and pointed out some criticisms I have of them, and the remainder of the book would face similar criticisms. On top of this, users AnxiousPolitics and BonChicBonScott have both set me off in the direction of changing my mind I am not quite there yet, but I am much closer than I was before. I will elaborate on these points tomorrow. Edit 3 Returning to this for the last time of the night, I'd like to try something that would put me in a new perspective. I will try to find an appropriate passage tomorrow, but in the mean time, I feel like this would pretty much finalize me changing my mind considerably, at least If you can find one of the most difficult passages in the book again, I'll try to find a good one tomorrow , one full of the things I've referred to in some comments like obscure and seemingly unexplained references, lack of apparent chronological sentences an example, this seems almost necessarily part of stream of consciousness writing , cryptic or meaningless phrases not that the phrase itself is meaningless but I mean a phrase you would imagine I would find meaningless , etc and explain, justify, or redeem a passage like that, I feel as though I'd almost be necessarily guaranteed to change my mind. The larger paragraph I used in response to AnxiousPolitics is good, but not quite problematic enough. I tried to emphasize words such as apparent and seemingly in this edit in order to illustrate that whatever passage comes up would pass under such criticism by myself, but not to someone else that may see the work differently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joyce's Ulysses is not a great book, and absolutely does not deserve the acclaim it has received.\n","id":"8b6aa915-0c21-43c1-a4c6-b88f9f23905a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll start this with a link to a PDF of Ur Fascism Cult of Tradition This is probably the most abstract of Eco's points. It's not just tradition in the sense of older values, but also a combination of various values into a syncretic, but also contradictory ideology. Like how many conservatives consider the US to founded on Judeo Christian Values while ignoring anything from the founding fathers that goes against that. Or using religion to justify conservatism on every stance but ignoring any part of their own religion that goes against them which I'll expand on for point 4 . Rejection of Modernism We see the GOP reject modernism constantly. The whole back in my day line may be somewhat of a joke nowadays, but there is a serious contingent of people in America that genuinely think modern advances have made the world a worse place. Whether this be rejection of technological advances like automation, the internet, and cell phones, or advances in modern ideology and thinking, most of which is highly secular. Action For Action's Sake I'll let Mr. Eco's words here prove most of my point gt Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur Fascism, from Goering\u2019s alleged statement \u201cWhen I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun\u201d to the frequent use of such expressions as \u201cdegenerate intellectuals,\u201d \u201ceggheads,\u201d \u201ceffete snobs,\u201d \u201cuniversities are a nest of reds.\u201d I don't think I need to delve too deeply into the GOP's rejection of higher education and intellectuals. How often do we hear that college is a breeding ground for leftists socialists liberals atheists ? Religious Opposition to Critical Analysis gt No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur Fascism, disagreement is treason. There is a very common thing among many religious conservative groups, evangelicals in particular. Anyone who has read the Bible should be able to tell that Jesus was not a very conservative figure. In fact many biblical figures espouse various liberal ideas. Especially on immigration and the poor wealthy. Exodus 22 21 \u2013 Moses gives God\u2019s law \u201cYou shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.\u201d Leviticus 19 33 34 and 24 22 \u2013 When the alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt I am the Lord your God.\u201d Deuteronomy 24 14 \u2013 \u201cYou shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land \u201d Luke 16 13 No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. Proverbs 28 20 A faithful man will abound with blessings, but whoever hastens to be rich will not go unpunished. Mark 10 25 Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. If you use any of these bible verses, or any others which oppose conservative thinking, it will by and large be met with immediate rejection. This is because the kind of faith held by so many conservative Christians is an immutable kind of faith. These kind of people hold that their beliefs are the true beliefs of the Bible and therefore the mere act of questioning these beliefs is tantamount to betraying God. Fear of Difference We see this most clearly today with the vilification of immigrants, previously with muslims after 9 11, and always African Americans. I mean, how often has Trump literally used the words invaders to describe the people migrating towards the US. No one in America would stand for the way immigrant children are being treated if it was happening to citizens, or even probably just white immigrants. But the hispanic immigrant has become an other to the modern GOP. Appeal To Economic Anxiety gt Ur Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old \u201cproletarians\u201d are becoming petty bourgeois and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene , the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority Again I think Eco himself shows the link and I don't think I need to go too deep describing how the GOP uses the others to stir fear among working class people. Industrial and mining jobs are drying up and white people are set to lose their status as a majority within the US over the next few decades. Perfect time to exploit fear. The white hegemony on American politics is dying, and to a privileged class that feels like oppression. Obsession With A Plot Globalism Deep State. Seems obvious enough Enemies Who Are Simultaneously Overwhelmingly Strong and Pathetically Weak This type of thinking was most obviously seen in how Nazi Germany viewed Jewish people. Now we see it with SJW's or liberals in general. On one hand, the average liberal SJW is ripping up the social fabric of America and actively undermining the government. At the same time, the average liberal SJW is a weak willed pushover who cries whenever someone disagrees with them and can never leave their parent's home because they can't handle reality. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy because life is permanent warfare. It was conservatives who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq twice . Yes there were some liberals who got wrapped up during the initial zealousness after 9 11, but it has always been conservatives who have the most troop worship . The simple act of saying we should decrease military spending is often related to somehow betraying the troops . And this isn't just warfare in the sense of invading another nation, like it seems Trump and Bolton want to do with Iran. Conservatives have led several domestic wars too, Drugs, terrorism, and now I would say immigration. I mean we know how disastrous the War On Drugs Was, but almost every conservative will still defend it and take a hard on crime approach. Fascism requires a constant enemy, and the GOP has always had an enemy to be found. Contempt For The Weak How often do we see rhetoric blaming poor people for their own misfortune from the right? Pull yourself up by your bootstrap kind of thinking has infested modern US conservatism. If you are poor in America, it is your own fault most Republicans say. Eco also had another point along with this gt Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can or ought to become a member of the party American exceptionalism, literally this except the party part, is also a huge part of conservative thinking. Everybody Is A Hero This again ties most clearly into military troop worship. But there is also no shortage of it domestically too. How many right wing anti government militias, or just average joes, are there that purport themselves to be the guardians of freedom and liberty? This point also has to do with glorification of death. How often do you hear stuff like The government can take my guns from my cold dead hands ? It's not just about their guns, but about heroically dying against a government they view as oppressive. Machismo Eco's words here are pretty self explanatory with how they relate to the GOP. gt Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality . Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur Fascist hero tends to play with weapons\u2014doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise Selective Populism For a fascist, people are not considered individuals within the realm of politics and government, but rather a single entity for whom the leader in our case Trump acts as their interpreter. Now obviously the people are not a single entity because there are various views on every topic, but fascism demands order and similarity, and as Eco wrote earlier disagreement is diversity, and diversity is the enemy. So the leader can choose a group of people who become The People and all others are then exactly that, others . And we already know how fascists view others . Newspeak The simplification or changing of language to simplify an issue as to reduce critical thinking. Rather than debating the merits of the ACA, you can simply say death panel . Rather than talk about if and how earth should be inherited you can simply say death tax . I will happily accept arguments debating how I relate the GOP to these points, the validity of Ur Fascism itself, or any other angle I have overlooked. I can also talk more on any of these points, I just didn't want the post to be a huge block of text.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco as a guideline, the GOP is a fascist party.\n","id":"c4604688-583a-406d-bd05-ec42e118f193"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>without freedom of speech there is no freedom of thought, without freedom of thought there is no freedom. only fascists want political correctness. political correctness is tyranny with a smile on its face.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A culture of political correctness paves the way for authoritarianism.\n","id":"1cc027a9-a581-4301-bbe3-073409ea9d61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like a crazy nutjob, but I hold A LOT of skepticism towards the stock market in its current form. 1 Computerized automated trading There is no concept of a 'time interval' on the major markets. By trading much faster than others, someone can in a way, manipulate the market by re acting faster than other I don't understand how there is value added for a firm by trading it's shares 1ms faster, but faster trading yields higher returns. To me, it seems like an inconsistency. 2 No one understands how why the stock market behaves. The number of derivatives available basically turn it into a large gambling hall. While I don't believe gambling should be illegal, but when the entire economy lives and breaths on the DJIA, it's terrifying. tl dr The concept of stock exchange was to provide capital, liquidity, and protection from future events through the futures market . However, it's transformed into a beast no one understands, no one wants to change, but everyone relies on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the stock market, in its current form, is bad for the economy &amp; is basically legalized gambling.\n","id":"b86f666c-a3ed-4c2f-9754-9b30f2fbe36e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>Government funding for welfare, health and social care programs, etc is a much more cost effective way of addressing social needs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state is the better actor to achieve social goals.\n","id":"935f7adf-173b-4904-a234-860eaea9fd25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV Vaccinations be Compulsory?<|ARGUMENT|>Some states takes similar measures with the prison system. There are preventive detention regimes for potential terrorists division 105, sex offenders and other violent offenders which may in certain cases result in imprisonment before a crime has been committed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents can lose custody of their children to the state, and their children may be permanently removed, if the parents are deemed unable to care for their children's safety and wellbeing.\n","id":"74d04970-ca3f-4566-871c-2542ab4766bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi guys, fairly new to the sub. I live in Canada, and we don't allow concealed carry, except in very rare cases I personally believe that the lack of handguns concealed carry in Canada is a positive thing. In terms of school shootings, Canada has only had 9 Deaths in 10 Years from school shootings. This is about 0.00000028 school shooting deaths per capita over 10 years. In the States, where concealed carry laws vary state to state, there has been 170 over the last 10 years, or .0000005 deaths capita. That means that the states has almost twice as many fatalities from school shootings as Canada. TL DR Concealed carry is a bad idea in general, my evidence for believing this comes from school shooting data, however feel free to show other info promoting concealed carry that unrelated to school shootings. EDIT Being ignorant to the laws and rules surrounding concealed carry, I misunderstood. I should've clarified my title as Handgun are a terrible idea. I am uneasy around the idea of concealed carry in general, irregardless of the school shooting data. EDIT 2 Here is the corrected submission with a more relevant title. Thanks to those who pointed this out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Concealed Carry is a terrible idea\n","id":"d559e8ac-9094-4dc9-92ea-175f9eb53f40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>The allegations that are being made against Trump could equally be made against Clinton. Yet, only one candidate has been investigated for collusion, which suggests bias.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The investigation into the Trump Campaign's collusion with Russia is a partisan attack.\n","id":"fb029335-f78e-4111-92a2-9c79c8413009"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do journalists have a moral obligation to display violent images?<|ARGUMENT|>In many criminal cases, the identities and personal details of those involved are kept confidential to prevent any risks or threats to the witness. In the absence of these protections, it is unlikely that witnesses will be willing to testify.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A range of legal mechanisms exist to protect the anonymity of witnesses and defendants in cases where publication of their identity may put them at risk of serious harm.\n","id":"9f90aaf0-e2b9-4ea6-b658-4a6053da392d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To enforce both of this things require government intervention. I think most people agree that our war on drugs has been unsuccessful and a big waste of money. I also have a very hard time imagining how we could enforce abortion laws. Who would be punished? What would be an adequate punishment? Maybe this isn\u2019t the correct sub to post this in but I believe 100 that our government should be as small and efficient as possible and we have proof that prohibiting things does not mean it goes away and costs tax payers more money in the long run on enforcement and punishment. It also leads straight to the black market. I am open to any argument you may have against this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"if you believe in small government then you should be pro-choice and against the war on drugs.\n","id":"9e5d94c6-e584-4986-8b0b-3f9a8f9b5721"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just moved to California starting look for an apartment. much to my dismay 9 10 apartments I viewed do not include refrigerators in the lease. I'm from Detroit where every single apartment I viewed had a fridge included. The first apartment I went to I was like WHAT? NO FRIDGE???? In California, a refrigerator is not a habitable condition. It's an amenity. I found out via r personalfinance that in Texas an air conditioning unit is a habitable condition meaning the landlord must provide and repair it. In fact, when your A C unit breaks and its not tenants' fault , you might not owe rent for days its broken because the unit is only livable while the A C is working per Texas law. There are several reasons state law should change to make a fridge a habitable condition. I believe every other state requires this as a habitable condition, correct me if I'm wrong. In my personal opinion an apartment without a fridge in not habitable, wouldn't you agree? but more importantly There's a lot of illegal bait and switch going on in the apartment rental market. I'm shopping for an apartment now and I would say about half the listings that say fridge included are just outright lies. I caught a landlord in this lie just yesterday. He said oh well I must have made a mistake online This also happens with dishwashers and with rent prices. You're not fooling any damn body, you listed imaginary apartment with fake pictures, just to get people to show up so you can start throwing sales shit at them. Sometimes, in areas where the market is really hot such as West Hollywood , people sign for apartments without having seen the inside first because the unit is already leased by the time previous tenants move out . Making a fridge an optional amenity gives landlords the ability to LIE and say the unit comes with a fridge and then when they move in, they find out that the fridge belonged to the previous tenants. You might say well they should read the lease before they sign but that logic only holds up in theory. In reality you know there are people getting screwed over on this issue. Such as people from other states who it never occurred to them that a fridge might not be included. California law should mimc Texas law When a habitable condition appliance breaks, the landlord is losing rent money every day it sits broken. In Michigan, when a unit is unlivable, a tenant can break a lease with no penalty and no notice. That gives them very strong incentive to hurry up and fix it already. If Texas does this with air conditioners, why cant California do this with a damn refrigerator?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A refrigerator should be a required condition of habitability, not just an amenity.\n","id":"db36a35d-4e2d-47e2-b43e-129fe272993d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>$700 billion US economic bailout, Debate on the $700 billion US economic bailout<|ARGUMENT|>\"Bail-out debate: For and against\". BBC. 25 Sept. 2008 - \"Bankers' big pay: There are worries about controlling the mega-bucks bosses earn at the very banks being bailed out - given the view that it was Wall Street 'that got us into this mess in the first place'.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"$700b bailout could go toward excessive pay of greedy CEOs\n","id":"b687fb85-b3ad-4078-9874-cafa0179bc8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>If education was made free for all, it is likely that a degree will become a basic requirement for jobs rather than something held in high esteem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Employers will stop valuing degrees because everyone will have one. It will cease to act as a differentiator between prospective employees.\n","id":"9bc64301-73e8-421c-8db9-9d0a74eceb58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>With climate change, people may become much more limited in their capabilities. However, being vegan will get people to think more about the limitations and use it as a challenge to create better and live their life out in their new environment. With an omnivore diet, people may not thrive like this as much.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If anything, being able to survive and thrive with the benefits veganism provides would opportunities to be creative where they wouldn't normally have the chance to without it.\n","id":"5af6ed39-569d-41a8-85a8-6a2d9e0fa0a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>A study conducted in Indonesia found that the price men are willing to pay for sex drops rapidly once sex workers are over 25 years old.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex work makes for a poor career as there is little demand for sex workers who are old or even middle-aged.\n","id":"ff638895-4512-4088-a1af-c6ae0e6893ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the lottery be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The average return from playing the lottery is less than the cost of buying a ticket.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The lottery is not 'just a game' because there are material consequences to losing.\n","id":"50712660-1b95-4230-ae4c-b0a7b347afdb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Between pissing, shitting, farting, queefing and possibly other biological sounds, a little bit of background noise goes a long way in helping those people that are shy or embarrassed to make sounds that are obviously completely natural to actually get on with the task. Bathrooms that accommodate more than two people at a time, such as public or communal bathrooms in workplaces should have something like the radio or music playing, or where copyright broadcasting issues are a problem have some kind of background noise like a fan going. While a lot of people can use communal toilets without concern of sounds i.e. those unlike like me whose butthole is clenched tighter than a girdle on a grandma when I detect other people nearby , I believe drowning out the biological sounds of one's neighbors still improves the quality of the experience for a significant portion of public.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public or communal bathrooms should have some kind of background sound\/noise to drown out personal sounds.\n","id":"a2d1957d-1baa-461d-84fe-dbe9d1fd5ba8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm Brazilian, and I've asked it a few months ago on r brasil, but I want to hear you Americans. The reasons I appoint Your education system, even if you say it's crappy, is good compared to ours. The same goes to the healthcare system even if we have a public health care system, it's shitty , and every other public service. Terrorism it is not that common in North America compared to Europe and Middle East and we have so much crime terrorism wouldn't be a big deal. Imperialism and foreign intervention in the sense of criticizing the wrong thing such countries do people say that Brazil doesn't have imperialistic tendences, but the politicians are bigger dicks to us. And at least your laws are better respected. Labor laws including maternity leave what would be the advantage of having better labor laws if risc agencies think Brazil is a bad payer, making foreign investors give up making businesses here? Our standard of life is crap anyway and our economy is collapsing. I think that, even if Brazil is large and populous, it's politically irrelevant, compensating the fewer countries hating us. I almost thought the Haitians who migrate to Brazil are na\u00efve because the USA is closer geographically and would give them better lives than in Brazil. There are Africans too, but the geographical proximity issue doesn't apply to them. I swear I'm not xenophobic. I'm aware of some USA's problems, but most of them are present in Brazil too and are often worse. Some of the other advantages are personal views of the commenters. There is a text around the internet where an American called Mark Manson claims that Brazil's problem is the behavior of the Brazilian people, called the Brazilian way . He's not right, but he's also not wrong. People here claim one can't be successful in legal good ways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USA is better than Brazil in almost every way that matters.\n","id":"f5817fe1-3978-40c3-9994-5ae3c4545906"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that governments should cease to support any bank or corporation and simply allow them to fall. I do not know why these bailouts are even called in the first place, is it because of debt? I also don't agree with financial support of other governments I dont think the US or Canada have done any but if they have they shouldn't have , such as when the EU assisted Greece I live in Canada but take a greater than usual interest in European politics . Finally, I find it horrifying when politicians claim that the banks must be supported, when the reality is, the economy would be fine. All that would happen is a bunch of corporate fat cats would lose their yachts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe bailouts are bad.\n","id":"38828e5e-8897-4732-9958-688cf517de0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals have no duty to provide other citizens with welfare benefits, but the state does. So a state clearly has stronger duties to its own citizens than individuals do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moral obligations and responsibilities between individuals differ from the moral obligations and responsibilities that exist between a state and various individuals.\n","id":"770ffa9d-0b8b-4c6b-a07e-8320fa50872b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a movie guy. I love movies, and I especially love old movies from the 1940's and 1950's. That being said, my argument might be a little biased. So, my little brother and I were watching Star Wars Episode 1 The Phantom Menace last night, and he made a point which really struck home that I fully agreed with. He said, gt You know, movies aren't as good anymore with better special effects. It's all flash and no substance. And I really agreed with that. Back in the day, because of the lack of special effects, writers and directors had to get creative with what they did. Think of Alfred Hitchcock's famous shower scene from Psycho. Because you don't see the actual stabbing, the scene is so much more brutal and frightening. If the scene were to be filmed today, you would see the actual attack because people want that. So much more can be said in a subdued tone than a in your face tone. Also, let's look at a famous big budget summer flick who's special effects failed them but instead it made the movie better, Jaws. The film was originally supposed to show the shark in many more scenes, but because of the failing animatronics, they couldn't, so they used a subdued tone. The result was a better film. Don't get me wrong, without special effects we couldn't get a lot of awesome films. I overall just believe that because of the all flash no substance mentality that seems to exist in Hollywood nowadays, the overall quality of movies is going down. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe because special effects are getting better, the overall quality of movies is getting worse.\n","id":"2d58a8e1-02d6-4315-bf49-1d8b4a3f981f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Men and women barely have anything in common, why would they grow close? The only incentives for men and women to interact with each other are Satisfaction of biological needs Pragmatism for personal gain a woman can become high value solely by being with a high value man, for example Division of labor and survival Men and women cannot be friends, there is too much biologically motivated thoughts and incentives that get in the way of actual platonic friendship. Men use women they don't find attractive for a quick fuck and women use men they don't find attractive for material or social gain. How about when someone loses a spouse, either that they actually died or they broke up ? Well how I see it is that they are only weeping that they lost their mate, and thus their source of sexual validation, release and worth. They also start realizing that they may be less valuable on the sexual hierarchy than they previously thought. I am beginning to think that these these are way more important to the general well being and happiness of someone than I previously thought. Perhaps even on the same level of a sense of safety and security. There are winners and losers, and the winners are only passed down by other winners the losers settle for each other and create more losers, perpetuating the cycle. If we find a high quality mate that we can pursue with good chance of succeeding, we will be more than willing to ditch the one we have now to climb the hierarchy. Even those who have settled for less want to do this, but realize that they have no chance, so they don't risk losing the mate that they already have. The losers will always have an emptiness in them that says find better mates, secure better genetics . Only the prime specimens in the world can fulfill this and everyone else has to distract themselves from the feeling. I want to be wrong this is ruining my life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men and women cannot be just friends and only use each other for sexual validation and release. There is also a sexual hierarchy that we all participate in and we are all obsessed with wanting to secure higher and higher quality mates. Quality basically means physical attractiveness.\n","id":"1aedb059-a9bd-44e2-b2e0-43ebd5a49c13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please take the time to read all of this. It took me a while to type and revise it. I completely, 100 believe that the current state of compulsory schooling has done absolutely nothing for our students but to Stifle their creativity and motivation for learning by having them learn rigid material and bashing them for speaking out. Have them learn things that have absolutely no impact or aid in their lives outside of school When is learning about the Great Wall of China going to help students hold down a job, pay rent or learn how to drive a car? Have them worship teachers like gods with little to no option of dissent. Poison their minds with worthless idealistic dribble You can grow up to be anything you want to be because you're special . Have them locked them up with other hyperactive, immature, depressive and temperamental students for 9 months straight worsening their behavior overall. After prisons, schools are the biggest instigators of mental instabilities with little to no widespread support school is a prison . Make their young bodies and minds exhausted by having them get up at 5, 6, or 7 in the morning and not getting out for at least 5 at night. Not including homework, studying, projects, free time and getting ready for school. Repeat this for 9 months or up to a whole year. Create mindless workers for the state. I wholeheartedly believe it needs to be reformed now and replaced with other methods like Montessori type schooling homeschooling online schooling and unschooling Some reading material Articles and further opinions of the schooling system Books by famous anti schoolers Alternatives School Survival 3 Simple Reasons Why Compulsory Schooling Is Bad And other things Unschooling Quotes Unschooling Blog Anything made by Peter Grey on Psychology Today Herd Mentality The Schooling System Video The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Video The History of Public Education Parts 1 3 Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Public Schooling Video And almost all the books by Alfie Kohn, John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, and many, many more. You don\u2019t have to read or watch all the things I provided, but it\u2019s recommended that you at least glance over some of them to get a feel of what I\u2019m saying. I probably will change some of your guys' view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The current state of compulsory schooling has absolutely ruined our youth and it needs to be abolished and replaced.\n","id":"10ca8c12-3091-474a-9885-539df50345e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Personal property is an invention of one man to oppress another man and is supported only by propaganda and violence, not by some ontological state of property ness. As an idea, or a platonic form, property does not exist. Supporting premises All deeds to land are upheld only so long as there are states to uphold them. During coups, massive recessions, or even world wars property is often destroyed, pillaged, or otherwise ignored \u2013 especially fine property like sculptures and historical architecture. From an existential sense , the uniqueness of any one object in space requires it to exist on its own without ownership. This comes from neoplatonic categories accidents. Every thing has substance, quality, quantity, relation, passion affection acted upon , action acting , place, time, being in a position, condition. Jack's boat, for instance, only covers relation and only some of the time, for relation is much bigger than whether or not Jack has his hands on the boat. The boat, as a simply object in space, defies any attempt to demystify existence. In other words, you could say that the existence of Jack's boat says more about Jack's experience a human than it does about Jack's wealth. This is exactly what the Native Americans were saying, albeit through poetry rather than syllogism. You can't take it with you, you know. That should tell us something naked we came, naked we leave. Shares in a company imaginary numbers are more about debt another on paper idea and profit a number generated by other imaginary numbers . They can be repurchased by the company at which point the company owns itself, which is nonsense if we're talking about property. For the Jews and Christians out there \u2013 covet they neighbor's house isn't claiming the dignity of the neighbor's ownership so much as the dignity of the relationship and this is backed up by the year of Jubilee in which all debt was forgiven and all property released. Religious people aside, shares in a company are only valuable insofar as we're talking about profit sharing. Outside of that conversation, property breaks down. You could say this about capital in general \u2013 as representational currency, it merely represents an idea. That we find human slavery wrong says something both about the uniqueness of humans above animals and objects and about property in general if it is wrong to own a human, it's probably wrong to own. Contra it is right to love a human, therefore it is right to love. Or it is right to protect children, therefore it is right to protect. gt I'm going to bed at the moment, but I plan on responding to comments in the morning. Looking forward to learning from you all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Property does not exist.\n","id":"6ea64581-dc02-4725-b5ba-9a1b57667384"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The damage done to the wrongly accused is often terrible and irreparable. When one is accused of rape, they are often treated as if they are guilty before ever seeing a courtroom. They are often divorced by their spouses. They often lose their jobs, and they are often vilified by their friends and peers. Accusing another person of rape can in many cases ruin that person's life. When somebody accuses another of rape as a way to harm or intentionally defame that person it makes people more skeptical of actual rape victims. Obviously when somebody claims they were raped, everyone must take the accusation very seriously. Rape is one of the worst crimes a person can commit, IMO, and rape victims should be immediately trusted and accepted instead of doubted and questioned. False rape claims wrongfully perpetuate the idea that rape victims are lying about the crime or simply exaggerating. I know someone who was falsely accused of rape. The supposed victim was caught in a series of lies and eventually admitted to accusing the other person of rape as a way to get back at them for some past event. So far, the accuser has seen no discipline. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that falsely accusing another person of rape with the intention of defaming that person should be a felony.\n","id":"bb2075c0-a1c4-4315-812d-9e9be6f0a6b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Bullock does not have any fundraising base - either from private donors or from the grass-roots base.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bullock does not have the financial backing to swing voters in key states.\n","id":"e52b5d15-b1c8-4648-b2d4-9a718c3156c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every issue is inherently unique and moral judgment shouldn't be made based on similar issues. Having consistent values is important only in so much as it provides a starting point to understanding a novel issue, but it shouldn't drive the ultimate judgement, and there has nothing wrong if that ultimate judgement is the opposite of that starting point. If I believe A, B, and C, and logic dictates that I should then believe in Z, that shouldn't drive how I actually feel about Z, and it isn't believe in Z there isn't anything fundamentally wrong with my value set. The chance my view you would have to argue that either there is something wrong with having inconsistent beliefs or that any value set is inherently consistent but can be too complex to understand.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the logical consistency of a set of values is only a means to an end and not an end in and of itself.\n","id":"d89451b9-1d69-4052-99c4-395eac9da257"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>A passage beneath the Whomping Willow leads from Hogwarts to the Shrieking Shack. It was originally designed for Remus Lupin to use during his werewolf transformations, but was not closed off following this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are secret entrances into the castle that aren't properly monitored.\n","id":"28717028-48b8-4124-aed5-30b74b7057eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically, I believe that there are situations where, for the average person, being informed of both or all perspectives on an issue causes higher levels of confusion and worse decision making. I also believe that these situations aren\u2019t a trivial subset that a significant proportion of \u2018real life\u2019 decisions are made more difficult by considering all perspectives, and this leads to solutions which are less effective. Specifically, I believe that the subset of decisions this problem applies to are those which do not have immediate consequences for the individual, primarily selecting a view to hold on any political, ethical or philosophical issue. As the issue becomes more complex or we become aware of more possible solutions , the average person becomes more and more likely to take an intuitive gut feeling solution rather than take on the increasingly difficult mental workout of reasoning and weighing each of the solutions in a balanced way. The unfortunate consequence of this is that you cannot count on the average individual to make any kind of useful decision on anything they do not have an immediate stake in. The populace in general can be easily swayed to make an intuitive decision by bombarding them with conflicting views, and encouraged to make that decision in support of one idea by presenting one view more than the rest Think propaganda advertising . This has obvious and unfortunate implications for the validity of democracy in general \u2013 the populace is making voting decisions based on political views that they probably didn\u2019t spend very much time checking. tl dr 'If you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out' Tim Minchin<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that knowing all sides of the argument can be detrimental to decision making -\n","id":"d6dd1de7-47ea-4ae5-b646-d81cfe828638"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The banality of evil is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt that describes evil as not necessarily actively malicious but rather as a result of ignorance, selfishness, negligence, and absolving oneself of responsibility. For more information refer to this It is incredibly easy to fall victim to fundamental attribution error and victim blaming. I believe that some extremely wealthy people and regular people subscribe to cognitively biased views that poor people are lazy. I think that wealthy people neglect the frankly horrific suffering that others go through not necessarily out of malice, but just ignorance. The notorious fabled response of Marie Antoinette when told that the poor people are starving because they don't have bread to eat was let them eat cake not realizing that cake is a luxury for people like herself. She wasn't necessarily sarcastic or wanted the poor to suffer, but rather couldn't conceive of their plight. The phrase first world problems is another symptom of not having a broad enough perspective on what real and more difficult problems that other people face and believing that the relatively trivial problem you have is significant. I think that many not all people who are better off just don't want to think about the severe problems that others have. They step over the homeless, they resign themselves that starvation and disease and violence in third world countries cannot be solved and don't try to solve them, they blame the poor for being poor instead of realizing that wealth is a large product of luck. They focus on their own problems, like what color their sports car should be and how it will reflect on their reputation, or if they're like Marie Antoinette, what kind of cake they should eat, which is natural. For this specific view, I'm not claiming or proposing any one solution, or type of government, or political view is superior to another or can solve the problem though you are free to try and prescribe solutions in your responses and I will consider them, though I may not agree . I'm also not claiming that any of society's problems are easy to solve. I'm merely conceptualizing why people believe what they believe and how it leads to societal problems in my current view. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that banal greed and ignorant selfishness are the root of society's ills such as poverty and wealth inequality.\n","id":"a5343955-fa78-4a41-bd93-f52b5f85545f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Piracy of all types of media are all the same. Someone created the media to be distributed to their intended audience through their intended distribution method piracy disregards the intent of the creators of that media. Believing that it is okay to pirate one type of media, but not some other is inherently hypocritical the content, distribution method, or intended audience of that media has no bearing on how its piracy should be regarded. I want to be clear, this isn't a  about the validity of piracy itself, but rather about taking a stance of different types of piracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"anyone who has pirated any television show, or movie, or song, or any other media is taking a hypocritical stance if they are criticizing the piracy of nude photos of celebrities.\n","id":"430b77ce-f33b-40de-8417-f20a0ecb6899"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Natural morality is the moral philosophy describing how we arrived at the morals we currently possess through evolution and thus such morals help us survive as individuals and as a species.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Perceptions of \"good\" and \"humanity\" could have been derived naturally or elsewhere, and then transcribed into religion.\n","id":"63dff4cb-4f42-49bd-8ed6-65a22a05956c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI might encourage more and better civic engagement by lowering personal financial costs to core democratic activities not necessarily 'political' nor 'partisan' most notably Jury Duty, where current participation is subject to limitations by lost wages from participating at all, and speed is incentivized as well to minimize said lost wages by those who participate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With basic needs guaranteed people will be more able to engage with politics and the democratic process.\n","id":"c1b6067f-7a44-42d1-9688-4a5cd12e14e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This also logically entails that homework should be given either no weight, or as a small amount of extra credit. I believe that the teacher should give out suggested homework material to the students everyday, but not collect it. Since there is usually a lot of variation in the math skills of students in any given class at any point in time, assigned homework is often an inefficient use of time to many. Furthermore, grades weighted on homework are less accurate than grades weighted by purely tests. I have seen many students who understand the material well get C's because of this, even though they get A's on most of the tests. I believe that if students are struggling, it is their responsibility to work on their own time. And in my opinion, most of the time when students are struggling with math, they are simply approaching the subject the wrong way, and are more than capable to pick it up faster with other methods than purely repetitive work. I think that the more diverse the skills of students are pertaining to the subject in a class, the more important this is. For example, the range of skills in an intro to statistics class at a community college is likely much more diverse than the skills of the students in a Calc AB class in high school. And as such, it is a larger mistake to assign set and graded homework in the statistics class.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Grades in High School math and beyond should be 100% based off tests.\n","id":"0f3859a2-9874-452b-b185-95463261016c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>In a keynote speech regarding the role of security vs privacy, Teresa May managed to not mention 'privacy even once in her speech. The newfound role of experts investigators have undermined Internet security and 'can have consequences for people who are not suspected of any crime'. This is an infringement of our basic human right to privacy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christopher Wilkinson, a retired EU official, has stated that \u201cSurveillance. does not have very much to do with security\"; this is a fairly damning indictment of the effect increased scrutiny would cause. This pessimistic view of how authorities use surveillance is shared by a number of experts\n","id":"7c1d2972-8a4b-404f-a256-120b6f2880ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sites like DraftKings and Fanduel are daily fantasy sports sites where you compile a team of players that you think will do well on any given day, and put your lineups against other players. These sites are being labeled as gambling games that require no skill and are being banned by a number of states. My question is, how are these sites any different from the stock market? Just like with athletes, all you can do with stocks is proper research and try to predict which stocks will perform well, there is no guarantee no matter how skilled you are. I don't see selections in the stock market being truly different from fantasy sports, both are left to complete chance, all you can do is research. . Edit Thank you to all who commented I did not previously see the difference between a bet and an investment, and my view has definetly been changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DFS sites like Fanduel are no different than the stock market and should not be banned\n","id":"10dc31aa-3a2b-4b59-a200-66ff29d81a4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>1 There's not a single boring scene in the entire movie. 2 The plot is simple, straightforward, cuts to the chase. 3 Plenty of one liners, and everything else that we love 80s action movies for. 4 Amazing atmosphere. 5 Once the Predator starts his thing, the movie switches from classic action to horror. 6 The Predator is brilliantly designed. Iconic creature. 7 No boring romantic subplot. 8 Great music by Alan Silvestri. 9 Perfect pacing and length of the movie. 10 Badass, hardcore, macho movie that has everything.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Predator is the greatest movie of all time\n","id":"525e6b55-0b35-49d8-b1ff-0eb74e10aa9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we have a single global language?<|ARGUMENT|>Hundreds of African languages are used daily by people who also use an expensive colonial language less useful than universal Esperanto.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of a global language does not necessarily involve the eradication of others.\n","id":"dfcd178f-082e-4039-b4bf-40dd04104256"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it critically important for high quality educational experiences that all students learn to arrive on time?<|ARGUMENT|>School is a preparation for a job and at a job you are expected to be changed and ready when your shift starts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is critically important for high quality educational experiences that students are punctual.\n","id":"0bd53701-88ce-41a0-8f0e-0ff2a3652a79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UN send peacekeepers to protect the Rohingyas?<|ARGUMENT|>Experts believe that UN peacekeeping missions no longer have good changes at succeeding due to changes in both public willingness to fund these missions and the evolved nature of operations from original UN missions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Due to the complexity of the problem, the odds of a successful intervention are low. A failure could damage the UN's image.\n","id":"33ca92da-9429-4af4-9032-b4023524baa9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not sure how else to phrase it. I'm looking for some views on the issue. There is a probably familiar statistic that says America accounts for 22 of the world's prison population. I'm aware of the discourse around mandatory minimums and for profit prisons. What I want to know is, does the sheer percentage of the world's prisoners just mean America is overzealous? Is it a bad thing that America has 22 of the world's prison population because America should be jailing fewer people, or because America's share of the world's prison population would probably drop if a lot of other countries had a functional criminal justice system? Or both? According to Wikipedia's stats, if America cut her incarceration rate by half, a massive drop by anyone's standards, she would still have the second highest incarceration rate for any major country in the world, just behind Russia and still ahead of China, India, the UK, virtually every EU country, Saudi Arabia and Japan. Keep in mind that America has a bigger population than all but two countries, and is one of the most heterogeneous places on Earth. Low incarceration rates make sense for a country like Japan, where crime is typically very low. They make no sense at all for a country like India where crime and poverty are sky high in rural areas and there's regular terrorist infiltration from two different borders namely the jihadis who come from Pakistan and Kashmir and the Maoists in the Red Corridor who want to overthrow the government and replace it with Communist rule. And yet India has a lower incarceration rate than Iceland. With reference to countries like India and any of a host of African states like Sudan and the Congo, it may not necessarily just be that laws aren't enforced by the police or selectively enforced. There are other factors at work even with the will to jail more people, the criminal justice system may still buckle under the strain of processing, trying, convicting and jailing an influx of new prisoners. In cases of terrorism, getting your hands on the perps may be increasingly difficult. But that still means that there are a lot of people who should be in prison, who should be part of the world's non American prison population, who aren't. Wouldn't that skew the figures and make a credible claim that one of the reasons America's share of the world's prisoners is so high is that a lot of countries that should be jailing more people can't or won't? I don't mean to single out Third World nations it can and has been argued that nations like the UK are too lenient in their sentencing. Cases like this boggle the mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America's share of the world's prison population is not necessarily a bad thing.\n","id":"46041cab-d150-474d-b6a1-15392db15c33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unjust to make innocent Palestinians suffer because of the threat a tiny proportion of them pose to Israel. This violates the proportionality principle and is therefore illegal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israeli actions are not in conformity with the material preconditions based in Art 50 and 51, such as respect for fundamental human rights or proportionality of actions.\n","id":"aa1082ce-5970-4de1-b203-2262f3d58abb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care, Debate on Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>\"Single Payer FAQ\". Physicians for a National Health Program. Retrieved May 30th, 2008 - \"The U.S. already rations care. Rationing in U.S. health care is based on income: if you can afford care, you get it; if you can\u2019t, you don\u2019t.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rationing already exist in the US; universal health care won't change this\n","id":"b47e33a6-4b16-45c1-b6c5-d21a6b723557"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Faith was a component in the Parliamentarian's struggle, and eventual victory, in the English Civil War<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Believing without evidence is not always bad and faith can lead to beneficial outcomes.\n","id":"4b6381d5-cc67-40e5-90c4-45a900994025"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Condoms in schools<|ARGUMENT|>Historically women have often suffered more because of restrictive policies related to reproduction abortion laws, restrictions on birth control purchases, parental consent policies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Providing access to birth control empowers women with more control over their bodies.\n","id":"902c633c-1650-4425-b7c6-1ba6e17a195c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are identity politics detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Identity politics use the group to define the individual in that a person's group is used to assume the realities of a person's life. If a person is white, he is privileged, if a person is black, he is disadvantaged. The reality is that group identity is an indicator for how individuals are treated, but this approach is much less useful when you have the ability to view the realities of a situation for an individual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Identity politics alienate people from each other and lessen the potential to find common ground on issues.\n","id":"fc977c4f-5a8e-4e45-b272-c69e190ccb92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>It is bizarre that a group that seems militantly opposed to any infringement on gun rights would not defend a person killed merely for having a weapon, and implies that NRA support for gun rights applies only to white people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Philando Castile a law-abiding Black gun owner, was shot by a police officer while telling the officer he had a legal firearm with him. The NRA has said nothing in support of him.\n","id":"3fea88be-95fa-4280-aba8-c638185ef868"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't see a need to mock religion. Personally, I just let people live their lives and as long as you do so peacefully, I do not care what you do or believe. x200B It just seems as of late it has become more and more popular to be hyper critical towards Christian beliefs. To question everything about what they believe in, and to point out the hypocrisy in a lot of what is written in their holy text. x200B The Muslim faith gets a lot of criticism, but they also get a phalanx of online warriors for social justice waiting to protect their views. In fact, in the latest Sports Illustrated article I saw on Twitter, where a Muslim woman was wearing a full body swim suit, and hijab, and any question about the choice of swim wear, or Muslim tradition was met with swift responses of ISLAMOPHOBE , XENOPHOBE , and you know, all the phobes and buzzwords, from the same people who will bash Christianity any chance they get. x200B I believe it is hypocritical to put one religion under the microscope, pick a part and critique everything about it. Mock the hypocrisy of it. Then, turn around, and coddle the other one which has a similar history of hatred and or maltreatment towards the gay community, Jewish community and women. I don't even believe it's genuine support a lot of the time, but more trying to avoid being branded as one of the Phobes . x200B Is anyone else experiencing this? Is anyone else observing this? Let me know what you think, and let me know why it's okay to critique one religion for a history of homophobia but to bring it up to another would be called ignorant . x200B x200B UPDATE So, I'm seeing why people say it's okay to bash Christians, but not critique Muslims. Kind of a Punching Up vs Punching Down situation. I get where A LOT of you are coming from, BUT, it doesn't really change anything. x200B The hypocrisy is still there. Don't punch at all if you can't be consistent with criticism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As an atheist and progressive, I believe it is hypocritical to openly mock, or be critical of, the Christian religion for what might be perceived as archaic traditions, beliefs, or behavior, while giving some deep reverence and respect towards the archaic traditions\/beliefs of Muslims.\n","id":"8766470f-a44d-4052-8de1-3d580a52ed7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If a person is able to give blood and they don't, they should be shamed. Right now I'm working on recruiting people for a blood drive and one of the things the drive organizers said was, 'Don't shame or pressure people for not wanting to give'. I disagree with this. I understand that some people have a fear of needles, but giving blood can save three lives . I think it's morally incorrect to put your fear of needles before saving lives. Giving blood is also a way of getting rid of a person's needle fear. To be clear, I don't think giving blood should be mandatory . People should have the right to not give blood even if they have the ability to. I just think that shaming people for not giving blood is totally ok and should even be supported, and that people who don't give blood but can are acting immorally.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe people who don't give blood but are able to should be shamed and pressured to do so\n","id":"6000e6f7-ab90-456a-8211-810144d851ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't care what encryption system you're using or how secure it is supposed to be, when someone in a position of power is faced with joining the long list of companies who folded NSA or risking blackmail and oblivion, what choice do you think they're making? Even if you're being optimistic and say 99 of people don't fold that still leaves way too many vulnerabilities for anything to remain secure. The days of hiding stuff from the spies is over. When senators are being tapped the average citizen has no chance. If the government wants your data, they're gonna get it. Doesn't matter what you're using and people who think otherwise are just fooling themselves. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a human with something to lose has or will handle whatever you are using, it is not NSA proof.\n","id":"b60a738f-a3ac-4991-a2c5-11c3beb8020a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally am an underachiever. I can definitely see the benefit of caring about your achievements if you wanted kids, as your position in life financially experience wise would benefit the next generation even more than it'd benefit your own self. However, I personally don't want kids. My parents weren't the greatest growing up I could eat, had clothes, and had a roof over my head blah blah, but as far as actual parenting and not providing went, they were bad. As a result, I know that I could never be the father a child deserves or needs. Coming to this realization, I've also realized just how pointless accomplishments really are, considering I'll end up in the ground when all's said and done. Entertain me. FTR, I'm a bit of a misanthrope in that I hate people before I like them, and I like very few people. The idea of curing people or helping people doesn't appeal to me, and I'd much rather fight someone than hug someone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Underachievement doesn't matter if you don't want kids.\n","id":"b0091144-05b0-43c9-ba4e-ecdf630e76f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The experience of faith is profoundly moving and personal. To hand any large organisation such a massive emotional lever is a bad idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has been used as a form of social control.\n","id":"793be160-4592-4f65-b2ad-a29dd24b8c38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Screenings generally include seeing a customer's ID and talking in a neutral place such as a cafe or bar, followed by the customer paying a deposit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Escorts generally screen their customers prior to seeing them in a hotel room.\n","id":"1525858d-e64c-4c58-8b0e-aff23863ad4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>Given the societal and economic benefits of a smarter and healthier population, it is very much in the government's interest to subsidize genetic enhancements in order to improve society writ large.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetic enhancements not only increase our adaptation to the modern world, they improve the broader human condition.\n","id":"e6de2afb-d307-44fc-93c8-5f0f61492477"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Release of Osama bin Laden death photos<|ARGUMENT|>\"Eight reasons why Obama was right not to release photos of Osama bin Laden's body.\" CS Monitor Editorial. May 4th, 2011: \"Many Al Qaeda supporters won't ever be persuaded that he's dead. Most of the world is already convinced.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of world is convinced Osama is dead without photos.\n","id":"ddde6627-ee9a-47ef-8fea-c19ce481bafc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>ban homework<|ARGUMENT|>In many countries public schools require regular school inspections to ensure students are receiving a relatively equal level of education. In Britain for example, Ofsted is a public body that exists specifically to inspect public schools.1 A ban on homework would thus not require a level of trust between the state and individual school principals, for state inspectors could very quickly work out whether homework was being given out by asking the children themselves. Children, who don't like homework at the best of times, would not lie. 1 Ofsted, 2011<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ban on homework could be easily enforced through school inspections\n","id":"e87d5fd3-3bae-4a99-9bd4-8841765a15b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This was posted to r badscience where an article claimed that obesity does not cause disease, and was thoroughly debunked, but people still claim that obesity is somehow healthy, or that there is nothing wrong with being obese. Established scientific consensus is that obesity is bad and causes many health issues. This is what science has to say on this. I'm not going to pretend that science is a lie or that all major scientists are lying to us about this. Obesity is a serious health issue that faces modern society today and I'm not going to pretend that it isn't. The fat acceptance movement tries to deny this. This is not any different from climate change deniers that claim that climate change is a hoax. I refuse to tell obese people that they are somehow healthy , or that it's OK or not bad to be obese, because that would be lying. The feminist fat acceptance movement can lie to them all they want, but they need to recognize that as lies, and the truth is that obesity is a bad thing. If you take the beliefs of the fat acceptance movement to its logical conclusion, then that conclusion would be that there is a massive conspiracy among all most of the scientists in the world to oppress obese people and hide cover up healthy obesity. and unfortunately some people legitimately believe such a conspiracy exists Anticipated arguments and my counter arguments shame is not a good way to get people to change That's not what I'm arguing. I'm talking about those who insist that obesity is somehow healthy. They are doing everyone a disservice but the fat acceptance movement does not deny the negative health effects of obesity The article I linked was from a prominent feminist website. If you want more examples search up healthy obesity but we lie to children about Santa all the time Does lying about santa claus encourage unhealthy lifestyles? will it kill them or make their lives significantly worse if they believe it? here's a person with a medical condition that makes them obese but still healthy That's an exceptional case. It's still unhealthy to be obese for most people. we should be building them up mentally and emotionally rather than tearing them down That does not mean we should lie to them. We should build them up but they should still recognize obesity as a health problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fat shaming and weight bullying is wrong but that does not mean we should lie to obese people.\n","id":"59fccada-ff13-46ba-b1ae-481f0f350884"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone deals with the lingering thoughts of suicide, or has in the past. No one is immune to these thoughts. Many of you reading this right now deal with severe forms of depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, addiction you name it. And guess what? YOU'RE ALIVE And I commend you for that. However, those who have chosen to end their lives because why? They can't handle it anymore? Life was just a wittle too much for them? Oh, come on If there's anything we can all agree on, it's that there is someone else out there who has gone through far more than we are dealing with, and they're still alive. With the recent death of Robin Williams, I'm noticing people treat things like depression as if they can be considered a cause of death. This is absurd Depression isn't a cause of death. Depression doesn't kill people, people kill people I'm curious to see what this discussion turns into. Maybe someone can offer some insight that will change my perspective on this topic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Suicide is the most selfish act a human being can commit. There is absolutely no excuse to end your own life. Depression is not a cause of death...\n","id":"7c76d0d8-678a-459d-8ca8-c3088e38fdca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>While individual citizens might not be well-informed, referendum decisions benefit from the wisdom of the crowds through which individual deficiencies are cancelled out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is little reason to assume that politicians' opinions are necessarily more informed than those of average voters.\n","id":"2a72afbe-8fdd-4eb5-8b82-5905996cd6e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Muslim populations in Western countries are not evenly distributed, but are highly concentrated in certain parts of large cities, where they visibly dominate the public sphere. In some cases, these areas have become \"sensitive areas also referred to as \"no-go zones\" where government representatives like firefighters see police press release ambulance workers and police are often attacked.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As refugees are predominantly Muslim they - along with existing Muslim populations - threaten the national identities of Western countries by remaining a separate, easily identifiable group that tries to carve out public space for itself and exert political power.\n","id":"1774be3e-eaae-4456-988c-d91988fce80c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The ACLU and Charlottesville: Should the ACLU Defend White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Germany has very strong Hate crime laws specifically because of and as a form of recompense for their past. It would not be unreasonable for the US to do something similar.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain kinds of speech are so hateful and so imbued with a nation's past that they must be banned. Nazi speech in Germany is one such example.\n","id":"e120e964-51af-45aa-93ea-f8d5a7624a58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is my view that our concept of 'Equality' is flawed and that efforts to reach that goal are in vain. Our understanding what is best for a society have changed with better knowledge and times. At one point the idea of inbreeding, racial purity and eugnics were fashionable. Our unchecked growth and dominance of the environment brought immense progress and growth. The idea of classed society was considered 'natural'. But times have changed. We now understand that diversity is essential. In fact we have found that variety in a gene pool brings healthier and stronger results not to mention quite beautiful ones . And we are not trying to reduce the damage to our global ecology by recognizing biodiversity. Most Racial, Sexual or Gender Equality movements have good intentions behind them, but the concept truly vague and misunderstood in fact the Women's Suffrage movement had very different concepts of Equality than most people would believe . As we know, trying to change people's mind about an old concept can be enormously difficult and a 'rebranding' can do much towards adoption of a newer concept. Case specific Parity in reference to pay, mobility and legality can be used to achieve the same goals of enlightened, harmonious communities free from bigotry and ignorance. Fear of the Unknown instead could be viewed as An Exciting New Experience . Whaddaya think?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept of 'Equality' is flawed, overused, and ultimately impossible. Instead it should be rebranded for case specific 'Parity' and efforts should be put toward the celebration of the importance of 'Diversity'.\n","id":"d99eb5e5-2446-4520-921f-6d246fc560dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>The mutations required for antibiotic resistance to develop require a change of only 3 nucleotide bases. Statically this is to be expected. Adaptions requiring 6 or 7 changes of nucleotide bases are statistically implausible and a study has shown they are unable to be produced in a lab.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Natural selection explains the survival but not the arrival of the fittest. Mutation and natural selection does not have the ability to generate novel genetic information and body plans. youtu.be\n","id":"6317b70b-daa1-4ca1-9537-552de9628f78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>Rule changes and better sideline procedures for dealing with potential head injuries have made the sport safer for those involved.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"American football can be made safer for players without banning it outright.\n","id":"eaf04ab3-5c09-47f0-8203-beb2c3ddf9a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear people that say that homosexuality is not 'natural', even though they might support LGBT rights. This is so stupid and illiterate it's outrages. First of all, who authorised you to determine what is natural and what is not? Few questions to begin with Is masturbation natural? Is heterosexual blowjob natural? How about handjob? Is handjob by a hand of the same sex is natural and by different is not? If any of these are natural, why are they natural while homosexuality isn't? Sex aside, is swimming natural? We are not marine animals and had to come up with a weird body movements in order to keep our heads up in the water. How about skydiving? Please explain why these are natural, and being gay isn't. Just as a gentle reminder, 'natural' is everything that is in accordance with the nature. Not the human kind perception of nature, but the nature itself. Nature allows everything and anything to happen in its boundaries. Ghosts for example, are nonnatural. Playing football with stones is. If one can do something it's natural. It might not be moral or normal, but it's natural. When these people say natural , they actually mean normal . They rely on prejudice, so called education and a book that was written by humans to humans and being regarded as the divine truth when fits the narrative . For hundreds of years it wasn't considered normal to be gay and it's still hard for many to contain the rapid shifting in normality boundaries. However, being gay is completely natural.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who thinks homosexuality is not 'natural', whether they support it or don't, are illiterate\n","id":"58c255fb-7706-4911-9318-452855d02ab6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Daenerys Targaryen the Prince\/Princess that was Promised?<|ARGUMENT|>Jon Snow was indeed born again; and was resurrected as a direct result of Melisandre and thus R'hllor's power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jon Snow also fulfils \u2014 or could fulfil \u2014 many of the prophecy's criteria.\n","id":"a8c0dabe-d9d6-4f95-aac0-5908a148e69b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>In community dwelling such as apartments, there are common areas such as lobbies or hallways controlled by a collective of owners who pay for the maintenance and upkeep. Despite this control, the owners are unable to impose rules preventing people living in apartments from renting out their properties on short-term leases. As such, the government must step in to regulate this space as private means are unavaliable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Airbnb operates in residential areas, listing many apartments of which the neighbours are permanent residents. This means travellers risk impinging on the lives of residents.\n","id":"f459c2de-59cd-4dab-9fab-6165e8c68439"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So this is a more philosophical one for all you Redditors out there. I've come to the view that it is possible for the human mind to have reliable knowledge of things, but on an even deeper level, human thought is structured around the principle of monkey see, monkey do. As a result, it takes a constant struggle and exertion of will to believe one knows something without imitating somebody else or continuing a habit that started that way . And even if the imitated idea aligns with reality for a time, the two inevitably fall out of sync due to entropy, human imperfection, incentives to mislead, etc. This perspective very naturally explains a wide range of little quirks in human nature. Why do otherwise pragmatic organizations favor custom over results? How does gaslighting work in the first place? What is it about learning something from another human face to face that makes it seem more secure? Why do societies decline instead of growing always wiser? Simples imitation trumps knowledge. If you're wondering why I'm open to changing my view, for all of its explanatory power, I think it holds me back in life. I don't lack social skills, or mirror neurons , or anything like that, but it's extremely rare I can relate to others emotionally. I think a big part of it is that so much of how I view life is based on unusual experiences, reflection, and reading, but not letting go of myself and prioritizing mimicry. This makes it hard for others to sympathize when I do open up. I know one answer to that problem is well then, just start copying people more, but that brings up a whole new set of issues. For now, I just want to check I'm not missing anything. Is there some facet of the human mind that can reconcile the urge to imitate with the value of personal knowledge? I'm actually open to an answer that involves social or material circumstances, but I'd prefer things within the immediate control of an individual. Also, I know it's a philosophical question, but I want to avoid getting bogged down in semantics or arguments over premises. So unless it's insightful and to the point, I'd like to stick to common sense notions of what knowledge is, that the world is real, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Real, objective knowledge is possible but fundamentally inhuman\n","id":"d6abd6eb-34d3-499e-8696-d0a4404392ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US stop trying to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear program?<|ARGUMENT|>North Korea has nuclear weapons and a pretty good way of delivering them. Iran, on the other hand, did not have nukes, let alone a way to get them to target - so negotiating a deal that prevents Iran from getting a bomb makes sense. The only alternative now is to contain North Korea and work on denying them biological warfare capability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"North Korea cannot be stopped in its development of nuclear weapons anyway.\n","id":"6b46b0bb-34af-4b6b-ac7a-fb68f989306c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Countries Taking In Refugees Confiscate their Valuables?<|ARGUMENT|>This strategy is fair for Denmark since they take very good care of the refugees they accept, they are selective and work hard to integrate refugees into their society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Countries that accept refugees must confiscate their valuables worth more than \u20ac1500.\n","id":"1756276c-ef37-4409-b744-b375ab00a5fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Preferential Voting the most effective system for ensuring fairer election outcomes?<|ARGUMENT|>The allocating of preferences allows voters the opportunity to have other selections and opinions taken into account.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Preferential voting is the most effective system for ensuring fair election outcomes.\n","id":"13c0c4e5-455e-4877-a110-ecc0a1863868"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>APs ensure that the government can't spy on your entire monetary life; a requirement for a free nation. We should not be spied on in the manner of which we use our own property in a free state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AP would result in better data privacy and protection for ordinary citizens.\n","id":"3ca4d4b6-bf5d-4a65-a2eb-9e875b0f04f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are the rich or the poor more responsible for environmental damages?<|ARGUMENT|>The rich are bigger contributors to the problem of climate change. As such, they are more responsible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rich are more responsible for environmental damages than the poor.\n","id":"72e22a36-2967-4168-b12f-7a63d23ddb86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Bee Products Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The 30.000 tons of honey produced in Australia per year have a market value of over $4.5 million.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The production and trade of bee products are of economic significance.\n","id":"f1513944-8726-4ec4-9dd4-961afacb57f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT I realize that there have been court cases and laws in order to prevent a teacher directly forcing a student to say the pledge, my point has more to do with the atmosphere, the peer pressure, and the more mindless drone way we go about presenting these things to children EDIT2 In the words of u TehRedBaron gt Kids aren't forced to repeat it. I think your stance would be stronger if you were saying, there should be no recital of the pledge of allegiance in school at all. It shouldn't even be occurring as something that kids can opt out of. It just shouldn't be happening. It's not really appropriate in general. Keep it out of school altogether. This was the point I was getting at I think it's wrong for us to force young children to say the Pledge of Allegiance and devote themselves to a country that they don't understand. If voting turnouts are proof enough, even a lot of the adult population doesn't know a lot about or care a lot about the current government and all the policies and controversies, let alone a child who has likely not yet been taught about all the ins and outs. To me, this is what I hear when children say the pledge gt I a child incapable of comprehending the meaning of these words, nor their implication, or the actions of the leaders for which they speak Pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands and even if I don't, I'll be legally bound to sign my life to service in a draft against my will under the Selective Service System, and may have it done so without my knowledge through my high school one nation under God whom I am forced to recognize here, even though we are not a Christian nation, and I may have been atheist and may still be if it weren't for indoctrination before the age of reason, or perhaps am not of a monotheistic faith and therefore would not subscribe to devoting myself under a single God , indivisible not counting the Civil War , with liberty and justice for all so long as you're not a woman, minority, immigrant, or homosexual basically you're fine if you're a 'Merican born rich white man Now, I'm not trying to be mean to children and say they cannot possibly be told about these things, and perhaps have some basic grasp of the troubles. I'm saying that they aren't taught, and can't be asked to understand the depth or breadth of the issues at hand. I'm not saying they are incapable of a basic concept of grief or strife. They could surely understand sorrow. But to grasp the complex legal and social ramifications of pledging themselves to a nation as large as America is ridiculous. I don't think a child is capable of comprehending the NSA stealing our information, the implications of wars we've started on the lies of our leaders I'm sure they don't know about the government being convicted of the murder of MLK, or how we've kept people in internment camps I'm sure they're unaware of the murders, bombings, and lynchings that have gone unpunished because of our legal system. How right after this pledge, their fathers still can't be married because it's an abomination to a select group's ideals There's a level of indoctrination involved with altogether disturbing consequences. Such as the Bellamy Salute, which you don't see us doing any more, we put our hands over our hearts now because we know that doing it like it used to be would imply similarity to totalitarian fascist regimes like Nazi Germany.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should not make school children say the pledge in the United States\n","id":"cd6c206e-e3a8-468c-abec-b264bf79a184"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I suffer from clinical depression that stems from allowing other's opinions to take precedence over my own. But when I don't allow that happen and start to do things the way I want to do them, some of my inner circle gets polarized by that. They aren't bad people by any means, but starts to get me thinking about how most people are subject to the court of public opinion for harmless taboos dating younger older, fetishes, lifestyle choices and the people in question are supposed to bend to their will. It makes no logical sense to me when people are told, it doesn't matter as long as you think highly of yourself. And that's a can of worms by itself, because then you're considered egocentric. So. Have at it, debaters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't understand why we're told that our thoughts about ourselves take precedence over what others think about us, but the general public still persists in telling us what to do, think, say, and eat and ridicules\/shames us if we don't comply.\n","id":"0223f5bc-7d2e-4f60-b201-45096476c7f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I should probably disclose that I am a relatively long time mechanical keyboard user I own 5 Cherry MX Boards of a variety of colors Blue, Brown, Red, Black, Clear looking to buy a CM Novatouch or Topre Realforce when I can scrape together 200 spare so I do have pretty high standards for typing experience. I went laptop shopping month ago to replace my aging Alienware M11xR2 Don't judge, it was the only decently powerful 11 with a discrete GPU back in 2010 as it was both getting old and becoming tacky to bring to more professional environments. I originally wanted a SurfacePro3 but after visiting the MS Store Good god, the CS person that tried to help me was terribly ignorant about their products and trying it out I discovered that 1 The typecover was crazy expensive at 130 2 And the typecover was trash to type on just one of the worst typing experiences inferior to a cheap 10 membrane board. But looking through the other offerings with the somewhat true exception of Lenovo every other laptop they had had a low quality built in keyboard. I will use my own typing experience, comfort, and speed as a metric. On a mechanical board at home Browns and Clears are my favorites for typing though a K95 RGB with reds is my daily driver because macro keys I average ~110 115 wpm and peak at 140 150 if I make no mistakes in a passage Typeracer stats . On a decent rubber dome I average about the same but peak lower in the 130s and tire faster due to the extra force required to bottom out the keys. My old Alienware m11x had a surprisingly solid keyboard for a laptop good tactile feel full scissor switch I think and despite it's shrunken size Keys are individually smaller and thinner than standard I could still comfortable hit 100 110wpm after a minimal amount of adjustment. With slight exception of Lenovo thinkpads every single laptop Windows or Mac that I test drove in my shopping process had a horrid typing experience. I would be lucky to maintain 80 wpm while concentrating while I can breeze by at 130 140 without thinking too much on a mechanical. Obviously comparing apples to apples here I can still hit 100 on my old laptop and lenovo keyboards that have decent tactile feel and key travel distance. My final choice for purchase was an Acer Aspire R13 for the swivel mounting. Its keyboard was deplorable 80wpm average, sometimes double registering keystrokes and so drove me to spend that 130 the SP3 keyboard would have cost me lol what a joke on a KBP V60 Mini with Clears Very happy with it . Now I've been ranting about it for a while and I realize that my own typing experience is probably significantly above average use case but a 25 difference is a significant one I tire much faster and make many more mistakes typing on a new Ultrabook style low profile keyboard than even on a membrane. I can't imagine it would be any different for most other people and believe that the majority of people would feel similar poor effects even if they don't consciously realize it. Essentially Ultrabooks with ultrathin keyboards are going to gimp average user productivity and typing ability due to being forced to fit into x mm housing and is a significant trade off when getting an ultraportable device. I cannot comprehend why a sane heavy computer user would ever prefer these things but I know some do so ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Very \"Low Profile\" keyboards are trash and will limit users in the long run\n","id":"eb915e64-b69a-4a9c-8b62-be8e999605ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Following the scientific method is the closest method there is to forming a consensus on objective reality, so that policy decisions can be made accurately and effectively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being anti-science is not unrelated to determine if a person is fit for being President or not.\n","id":"469a08e7-68a6-42ef-8bdd-89a7d7096100"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically, the worse effect of global warming is a rising ocean. This simply means that people will have to move farther inland or build very good levee systems. Given technology will advancement I feel confident that those areas of the world we wish to save from rising water can be. Those areas we don't can be given to the sea. How will humanity deal with losing land mass to the sea you ask? Because global warming will increase the total amount of precipitation that falls on the planet and increase the amount of the planet that has a temperate climate. Imagine if large parts of Greenland, Russia, and Canada were productive agricultural land and places people actually wanted to live. Basically all that would have to happen to mitigate the worse effect of global warming is large populations of people would need to move from the coastal areas to the large land masses that currently have almost nobody living on them. Making these land masses productive would actually give people on average more area to live on. Human human conflict would go down as people would be competing for less scarce resources since food production will skyrocket plants grow best in warm, wet climates with plenty of carbon, there will be more of all three in a global warming world and livable space will go up. Basically, global warming will simply cause global change. Not global catastrophe. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe in global warming but believe it will be a net positive for the planet.\n","id":"08bbfd22-57e1-44d7-8c28-70a62df02e89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At my university, several organizations and groups have tried to pass a campus wide smoking ban. A smoker's rights facebook group was setup and there was a fairly large outcry to the university's student government. Personally, I do not think banning students from smoking on campus is an intrusion of their rights. Sure, some argue that the ban requires students to leave campus to smoke and risk being late to class, but secondhand and even thirdhand smoke can be very detrimental to the health of students with respiratory issues. In my opinion, no student or staff member should be able to do something smoking that puts someone else's health at risk. Also, I think the odor produced by cigarettes and other smoking products is extremely obnoxious and should not have to be tolerated while walking to class. Change my view. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Smoking bans on college campus are NOT an intrusion upon students' rights.\n","id":"a4b6c0a0-cfdc-4f4a-b8b1-4f352fb1ca9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>#timesup: Should individuals credibly accused of sexual assault or harassment be fired from positions of authority?<|ARGUMENT|>A process of rehabilitation and behaviour modification, with the incentive of eventual acceptance and forgiveness, would better reduce the risk that abusers pose to people around them, rather than firing them without any attempt any behaviour modification.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The accused will not necessarily change their behavior and could be hired elsewhere.\n","id":"9b314e10-5636-42a0-923d-1d7ddc09ba2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So if you didnt know the Rohingya people of the Rakhine state of Myanmar are basically being ethnically cleansed, the history is grey and complex but right now thousands are getting killed and hundreds of thousands are getting kicked out by the Myanmar army and local vigilante groups with no signs of stopping and to top it off its being supported by the public who interrupt and destroy foreign aid meant for the Rohingya. The Rohingya people have to be moved to another country so that the killing will stop, now which country or countries I dont know but thats another issue. Change from within is just not feasible since the current Myanmar Prime MInister State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi cant really do much since she doesnt have control of the military and condemning the massacre would mean opposing the will of the public which would get her ousted. Sanctions wont do much since Myanmar already has a few sanctions in place due to a military coup decades ago, is too poor and uneducated so they would only lash out even harder against the people causing the sanctions and countries like India and China would veto or ignore said sanctions. Given we do have military intervention on the table that we would just be America with a handful of foreign soldiers and theres just no support for it, India and China would oppose it, nothing to gain and considering the terrain its just another Vietnam war waiting. Also heres a video talking about the problem in more detail.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only way to solve the Rohingya crisis\/massacre outside of direct military intervention is to move them somewhere else.\n","id":"b3d6e067-07aa-4299-982d-de3a6b1afe98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After reading the old testament and parts of the Qur'an, I am convinced that the words of any religious book are elastic enough to be interpreted in almost infinitely many ways. Although the words themselves may seem to deliver very different messages, all of the main religious texts are capable of producing the same wars, laws , social and political views , and number of terrorist attacks . I will award a delta for anyone who can change my view on either of these things. My argument is not that all religion is equal, but rather that the text is not to blame for these differences. I am arguing that all of these differences can be explained in other ways. EDIT My V has been C'd in regards to laws and social norms, therefor Ill cross them off of my list<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious text is almost never to blame for how religious people act instead, the interpretation is most important.\n","id":"bd13f796-1e21-408d-9142-627643e21d5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will books ever be replaced?<|ARGUMENT|>Music CDs replaced records and MP3s are replacing music CDs. Terrestrial TV has been mostly replaced by digital TV. Books themselves descended from parchment, which descended from papyrus scrolls and before that, stone tablets. Digital publications are the next technological step and so if the pattern is uniform, they will also replace the last step almost entirely. The thing you are saying is wrong typing and printing is a compelete different thing we used to write with our hands until the computer came out Now people type more than they used to printing is a differnt method<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"digital media is replacing the old media in other areas\n","id":"7d4dd006-f8d3-4861-b832-5c5989181f36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>In the future, countries will afford the UBI, as part of a macro economic process when unemployment becomes too high and the economy is near collapse and\/or major deflation. Modern monetary theory itself can prove this affordability, especially when a country has sovereignty over its' own currency. Please don't forget new currencies and international influence in regards to the UBI that will help other countries afford this, if the need arises. rooseveltinstitute.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI wouldn't have to be paid for by taxes. As with other forms of government spending, a UBI could be paid for by fiat spending i.e. 'printing money'.\n","id":"5833e745-0844-4af1-9c45-cea1e4fad795"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Real Estate brokers really necessary?<|ARGUMENT|>Real Estate Brokers have turned a blind eye and allowed the Real Estate and Housing market to be systematically hijacked for profit driven and industry-wide manipulation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some practices used by brokers are outdated and\/or may be dishonest, leaving both buyers and sellers at risk.\n","id":"c9127908-3892-4a38-b046-079d22f2e974"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Leaders of countries that use extra-territorial rendition should be tried for war crimes<|ARGUMENT|>\"Aafia remains in a US detention facility in New York, in poor health, subjected to degrading and humiliating strip searches and cavity searches whenever she receives a legal visit or appears in court. She has subsequently refused to meet with counsel. It has been reported that she may suffer from brain damage and that a part of her intestine may have been removed. Her lawyers say her symptoms are consistent with a sufferer of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. \" Even though her case has been out in the open, for quite some time, what has been done to help her? and if this is the result of help and growing\/continued international support , then verily, conditions of her detention would have been much EVEN worse if this situation wasn't hugely propagated. \"Aafia's eldest son, Ahmad, is believed to be in custody in Afghanistan. Despite the fact he is a US national he was not extradited along with his mother to the US. The whereabouts of Aafia's two youngest children, missing for the past five years, remain unknown\"- When international LAW is allowed to be breached, then there's no drawing the lineon revolting evil behavior.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The case of M.I.T undergrad Dr.Aafia siddiqui\n","id":"cd8ec4fe-c360-4dd5-94ff-dab7ff2bb2fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Based on Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff's \u201cGrowth in a time of Debt.\u201d, I do not believe that austerity as a reactionary economic model poses any risks to those Governments that have adopted it. I realize some PhD student found errors in the data from the original study, but do not think it poses significant risk. Please, feel free to change my view or explain where implications could be negative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe that Austerity measures have any negative consequences.\n","id":"c8a5dc23-7716-4dfd-8053-a67ec21e3b3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Throwaway for obvious reasons First, I want to stress that I use the terms pedophillia , and hebophilia ONLY for reasons of this post, I actually do not think that pedophilia or hebophillia are bunk terms. I believe that men are attracted younger girls is completely normal form of heterosexuality. I use the term for sake of argument only. That being said, I would like make it clear that there I am not talking about monsters who rape and murder helpless children, I am simply referring to the biological attraction of men to younger girls. A murderer is a murderer and a rapist is a rapist no matter the age of the victim. I think that it is insane that homosexuality is an accepted and normal thing these days but natural attraction of a male to female is considered some horrible thing if the girl is not above some arbitrary age. I think that most men would be lying if they said they never found some random teenage girl attractive. I believe it's our overbearing and protectionist society that have made something totally normal into something evil. Men have been marrying younger girls since the beginning of time, and girls have very obvious biological signs as to when they are ready for a sexual relationship. I short, I think it is completely normal for a man to be attracted to young girls. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that \"pedophilia\" and \"hebophila\" are completely legitimate sexual orientations, and are in fact more normal than homosexuality.\n","id":"540a115d-a389-4c47-ae3f-b07c6f73bf8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So if corporations only pay taxes on profit, that is, money left over from revenue after expenses, individuals should also pay taxes after expenses. If one group can be taxed that way, all should be. While I disagree with the idea of corporate taxes and individual income taxes jn general and would prefer a consumption tax, if we are going to be stuck with an income tax system, it only seems fair if we treat these groups the same way. Why should individuals not pay taxes the same way as corporations?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the US, corporations pay taxes on profit, while individuals pay taxes on revenue. Individuals should also pay taxes on profit.\n","id":"652e7a97-9798-4db6-8a07-337eb2f03df5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a millennial trying to save for retirement. I don't have a 401K, but I have been putting money into a Roth IRA. I have become discouraged, though. I think that there is little hope I can count on having a comfortable retirement and large nest egg when I want to retire, because I believe that in the future, 401Ks and IRAs will be heavily taxed. I also have 0 faith I will get any Social Security. That program is going to go under well before I retire. Why do I think this? My generation is really struggling breaking into the workforce. There is rampant unemployment in my age group. What does this mean? Very, very few millennials are saving for retirement. What is going to happen when we all grow old and 80 of us don't have 401Ks, IRAs, and Social Security is broken? They will gladly tax my IRA and 401K that I diligently built up over the years, perhaps to put funds in a new national retirement program. I know I am very lucky to have a job at my age, and have the ability to save for retirement. But I really think that my generation is screwed, and taxing 401Ks is something they will gladly support as a means of income redistribution. So given that, I think, fuck it. Why make myself live such a spartan existence trying to save for retirement. I should probably save enough for emergency funds, and a only 20 of what I am saving now for retirement and just live large and enjoy my good years while I still can.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should just live largeer now rather than aggressively focus on saving for retirement because 401Ks and IRAs will be taxed heavily in the future.\n","id":"5d3fe318-f043-45a0-9828-afdc3308b1b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>It is more important that all works of literature remain in their unaltered state for the purpose of the student not just understanding the context in which the author intended, but also for a deeper understanding of history. That doesn't mean we erect a statue and put the offensive words on it to honor the author, it means we take history and literature in their most true context. If we want students to learn critical thinking we can't censor facts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Racism and inequality exist, and instead of getting confronted with those problems, less-emotionally charged and drastic language withholds reality.\n","id":"4c2e08c4-7d2e-44db-bd68-468cfc386a7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many schools and communities feel a conflicting responsibility to keep children safe, and allowing them to handle conflict on their own. I think that schools should not intervene with conflicts among kids and their peers. Schools should let children sort their own problems. . Thank you for all your responses. You all have changed my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that schools and communities should let children solve their own bulling problems.\n","id":"df54e903-f98e-4906-99d6-739a171f57df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be taught in schools?<|ARGUMENT|>One indicator of non-progressive attitudes is the arranging of off-site \"deliverances\" in some schools, claiming to be to protect students from the devil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The teaching of creationism within schools has often been accompanied by non-progressive attitudes in other areas.\n","id":"a262c4ff-c867-44e9-b1b3-74136d5a2ed9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Human morals, laws, and ethical standards can be reasoned through, discussed, and adapted over time. This sort of intersubjectivity is close enough to objectivity for the purposes of establishing the meaningfulness of terms like \"good\" and \"evil.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The human standard of evil needn't be objective in this ultimate sense.\n","id":"dfebd7a2-c37c-4ff6-8f31-c524835a355e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the USA a good country to live in?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no point in having the poor poorer just to ensure the rich are less rich.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Absolute wealth, or even wealth relative to other societies, is more important than internal relative wealth.\n","id":"7bb15f82-93ed-4bc5-b876-fbd2f90fe4be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here are my premises. P1 Some states of things are better than other states of things. It is worth it to achieve such better states of things. P2 Decreasing needless suffering is a better state of things, and in cases were such suffering exists, it is better to work to achieve such a state. P3 We have a moral obligation to the domesticated animals under our care. This extends beyond pets to farm animals as well in any given society. Fact Roughly 56 billion animals are killed each year for meat consumption. In the U.S., the average American eats an estimated 7,000 animals over the course of their lifetime. P4 Humane treatment of animals is not possible, when an animal is bred to be slaughtered. Humane meats do not exist, and are a misnomer used to justify continued meat consumption. C1 If morality does exist, then we each as individuals have the moral obligation to stop eating meat. Reddit, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eating meat is not morally justified.\n","id":"c0e323f1-8eed-4d06-a9be-8dfbeaf0f194"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are programs like Alcoholics Anonymous the best way to battle addiction<|ARGUMENT|>Accepting labels, such as \"addict\" and \"alcoholic\", allows people to admit that they have a problem - the first and hardest part of battling any addiction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Labels such as \"addict\" and \"alcoholic\" facilitate the process of rehabilitation for people battling addiction.\n","id":"569009d1-7ed7-4f7b-a438-f707554de426"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At one point, the issues that once was in society are more of a non issue at this point The biggest issues were resolved when woman's gained the freedom and power to choose to engage in economic and social activities. Feminism was useful in bringing a number issues to light But now anything with feminism attached to it looks and feels toxic and any issue brought up goes unheard. I don't think there are any issues for women to legitimately complain about. Legitimately complain as in it truly is unfair systematically as opposed to good reasons for it to be so. In short what issues still exist that really are issues? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe modern day feminism has the equivalency of an appendix.\n","id":"b47f53c9-9625-4137-83bc-1098a2b7a7c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>While children are developing, if they do not receive adequate nutrition due to not paying close enough attention to their diet as vegan diets require extra planning, then they may not reach their potential and develop correctly and to normal levels.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are essential proteins and minerals which cannot be given to a child naturally with a vegan diet.\n","id":"107e747a-2af3-467d-8d96-15b29a0ceaae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many examples of this in everyday life: if we pass a drowning child, or someone injured by the side of the road, or so forth, we ought to stop and help them. There is no relevant difference between these cases and the case of refugees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone is in severe distress and we are uniquely positioned to help them, we have a clear moral duty to do so to the best of our ability.\n","id":"daf0c206-79fa-4996-8ce2-7618920edcba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The situation is that I own a car, but it's being repaired right now. A friend invited me to a trip expecting that I would drive, but I cannot. I suggested that they rent a car for the trip, but they want me to pay for the rental fees, which I think is unfair. I have taken at least four trips with this friend, every time in my car. Most of my invitations to hang out come from the fact that I own a car and that these outings would not be possible without it. Taking this into account, I don't believe I should pay for my share of the rental car. Obviously, gas and tolls are mandatory expenses which I am glad to pay. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't need to split the cost of a rental car\n","id":"08a00f92-b45a-4d6e-bede-0461b860c5ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Religious leaders don't necessarily have anything to do with God. There are those who try to act in God's name and those who do not. We are called to a relationship with His Son Jesus Christ which must NEVER go through other men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The shared understanding of God is disassociated from the record of how religious leaders act in accordance to their shared core beliefs, on such a large scale that would suggest there was no God at all.\n","id":"7c0ccc66-af6d-4bee-85da-973373c28b8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Jeremy Corbyn Be The Next Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom?<|ARGUMENT|>In a recent poll, 62% of Conservative Party members thought Sajid would be \"up to the job\" of being party leader, tied for first place amongst the candidates mentioned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sajid Javid could be a potential replacement for Theresa May and is popular amongst party members\n","id":"242d64cd-4d49-472d-b17b-85fdff09dfc5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The Electoral College is fundamental to America\u2019s federalist philosophy. Federalism strives to synthesize and distribute the collective power of the people across federal, state, and local governments, specifically to minimize central concentrated governmental powers. Thus it works to keep power in the LOCAL and diffuse hands of the People. To this end the Electoral College aims to dampen pure majoritarian democracy by enshrining protection for minority populations from the majority.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electoral college empowers states as political units, which supports the system of federalism that is important to US governance.\n","id":"be28a86d-9a26-4871-8ec1-c20abcd83778"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Gender Stereotyping Children Need To Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>Women in the UK are up to a third more likely to attend college than their male counterparts. This suggests that more and more women will enter the labour force in the future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"45% of the U.S. workforce is female Gender stereotypes are not preventing women from entering the workforce.\n","id":"d81cbaf4-9c17-4186-9383-b71f03cb9977"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I work as a social worker for the developmentally disabled, and my state is thinking about eliminating subminimum wages for those that work in sheltered workshops day programs for the developmentally disabled, basically . Most of my clients attend a sheltered workshop during the day. There is both subminimum wage work and minimum wage work. Subminimum wage work is piece rated and based on how quickly you work. For example, if the job is to put a stamp on an envelope, someone that puts stamps on 1,000 envelopes in 1 hour is going to make more than someone who puts stamps on 20 envelopes in 1 hour. Most of the time, subminimum wage work pays below minimum wage duh , but it is possible to work quickly enough to earn above minimum wage doing piece rated work. Minimum wage work in the facility usually consists on doing janitorial work for the facility or going out to job sites. An example of this would be a small group of people going out to a local bar for a couple hours in the morning to clean, and then returning to the facility. My state is looking at eliminating subminimum wages, and I view this as a largely political move. We're a blue state, and it sounds bad if someone says that our state allows employers to pay disabled people illegally low wages, even though subminimum wages are legal under certain circumstances . The biggest problem I have with this is that many of my clients rely on the subminimum wages they earn. Their checks aren't very large, but every little bit helps. If they live on their own and their social security checks don't fully cover rent, utilities, and food, their income makes up for it. These individuals may not be able to, or want to, work at a minimum wage job in the community. Also, for those that live in group homes, although they don't really need to make money to cover living expenses state pays for everything , they love to use their income to pay for a cell phone, vacations, camps, etc. Our state has already been pushing a lot of programs that help people with disabilities find jobs in the community, and these programs can coexist with subminimum wage work in sheltered workshops, at least in my mind. The state thinks differently and wants to end subminimum wage work soon. Considering I plan to stay in this field for a while, I'd rather not be resentful towards the state if they do decide to take subminimum wage work away. Am I missing something in my view? Edit I'm all for making every job pay a living wage or minimum wage, but this would cause most subminimum wage work to be eliminated, meaning a majority of my clients would probably be out of work. Thus, I would want to keep subminimum wage work legal. Edit 2 When I say subminimum wage work, I don't mean hiring someone to work as a burger flipper for 0.50 hr just because they're disabled. Subminimum wage work is by definition piece rated work, meaning the work must be measurable. If a normal worker can put a stamp on 2,000 envelopes an hour, than someone that can put a stamp on 200 envelopes an hour will earn 10 of the minimum wage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Subminimum wage should remain legal for the developmentally disabled\n","id":"5fe1f8b8-5ee5-4d00-976c-e4f9249b793e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious practices that incorporate self-harm be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Sarah Osborn the influential Congregationalist writer, also practiced self-flagellation in order \"to remind her of her continued sin, depravity, and vileness in the eyes of God\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Self-flagellation is an ancient Christian ritual that is still practiced today.\n","id":"a9963705-28a1-4ad6-bf09-27d74ad629f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Gospels are Not Historically Reliable<|ARGUMENT|>Matthew 2:12 records that after the Magi\u2019s visit, they had a dream that warned them not to return to Herod, so they went straight back to their own country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The gospel authors include many accounts and details that it seems highly unlikely they could have known about, which means these parts were probably made up.\n","id":"16acb81f-de4e-4359-b7e0-70379fccf1b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>Countries that have decriminalised some or all drugs such as Portugal have not observed a long term increase in consumption. On the contrary, after a short period of slightly increased consumption it dropped below pre-decriminalisation levels<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evidence suggests that legalization does not lead to increased consumption.\n","id":"f48f1611-69a6-40e3-bd16-529675b8f9b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>All this people have in common, that an intelligence superior to that of humans would be something qualitatively new to their experience. For the average person, the superior intelligences are the Bill Gates, Stephen Hawkings and Elon Musks of this world and an AI superior to all humans would not have to change that much<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scientific authorities caution against AGI for it's potential risks.\n","id":"14e08909-f192-444a-9d1f-1db55657548f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A few examples to set my point. Jon Stewart mocks Herman Cain in a corny black accent, claims he doesn't like to read because he is for shorter legal bills. Seth Mcfarlane makes fun of Sarah Palin's down syndrome child. Jamie Foxx In a comedian setting says the best thing about his role in Django was that he got to kill all the white people. The Oatmeal comic website posts a comic about Edison and Tesla full of historical errors, then proceeds to mock people who rightfully called him out on it. 1 2 3 Joan Rivers mocks Adele's weight. There's much more I could link, but this pretty much sets the pattern that i'm trying to point out. Most of my links include not only the original quote, but also a response to the controversy and it always boils down to the same two argument. 1. I was just joking, lighten up. or 2. I'm a comedian, you were not supposed to take that seriously. Why are these two arguments are ridiculous. 1.I realize that being a comedian requires that you push boundaries and because of that, a lot of risk is required, but as a comedian, you are the one responsible for making sure that your material is not going to offend. It's not the listener's fault if someone finds your humor to be in bad taste, and putting the blame on them when you knew full well that the material was risky to begin with shows the comedians lack of ability to toe the line between tact and insult more than it shows the listener's ability to have thick skin. It's all pretty much a very psychologically advanced version of stop hitting yourself , a common tactic used by bullies in a position of power to excuse themselves from the pain they are afflicting on others. You can't reasonably blame someone for the offense that you caused them, though. Instead of blaming the person, why not just say that your joke wasn't meant to offend, but you're sorry it did? 2.Maybe this is true, but many people also see comedy as rooted in uncomfortable truths, or a person's ability to do comedy as indicative of their intellectual abilities. Very often, comedians will put off what they are saying as fact. The Oatmeal did this, but when they were called on it, the author claimed that he was using hyperbole. This is just another way to deflect your responsibility to not commit slander or mislead your readers instead of saying that your facts were poorly sourced or misinformed like any other person posting information is supposed to do. Maybe people are not supposed to take comedians seriously, but that doesn't mean that they aren't. People still quote that tesla comic as a fact, Jon Stewart is pretty much considered people's go to news source. These humorists think they are in control of how their message is interpreted, but they are not, just like how they aren't in control of who gets offended and who isn't. The point of being a comedian is to know your audience, and if your material is being taken as the truth, or offending people, then you need to take responsibility for that and adjust accordingly. Just because people laugh, and just because you were standing on a stage with a microphone doesn't mean that you are not responsible for what you say. And for a little more thought, here's a CS Lewis quote. gt deconstructivist humour, while sometimes funny when done well, is intellectually lazy. it is a prime example of having your cake and eating it too, there's always another layer of irony to retreat to should someone not get the joke, or be offended by it. it is a method of inuring oneself to criticism the criticism was anticipated and is part of the joke. the problem is that the nested insincerity of this form robs it of any real insight, it just becomes i know how to annoy you . there's no social commentary because the nature of the medium prevents you from tipping your hand and expressing your beliefs beyond bland hatred. i think, ironically, the comedy arms race to be the most knowing blinds them to broader awareness, and indeed their self awareness stops at the end of their noses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being a famous humorist gives you license to lie and bully others.\n","id":"5b4e34ad-37b2-457d-97d7-0f303a9e9c6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hoping that this sub can help It seems that my life is in a weird period, and will stay this way until my view is fixed. 23 year old male. I've been working in a startup for the last 3 years and it's grown tremendously. I make ~45K a year and have my own place with a few roommates leasing a car, keeping busy with music It all seems to be solid from all measures. But it isn't enough. I don't have a girlfriend likely due to a desperate vibe that I emit and really find that to be the only thing I'm concerned with. I was in a relationship for 5 years that ended 7 months ago, and I'm not yet over it. Before that, I had a 2.5 year relationship. A lot of thinking has led to a lot of learning for example, I didn't end either of those relationships. Once I'm content I never leave. That must be coming from a deeper belief view at play. So many cliches make sense, but are frustrating and have been functionally unhelpful You want what you can't have If you love something let it go Time heals all wounds Logically, they all make sense but from a deeper level, it doesn't seem to hit or maybe I'd be changing how I view things . Even though it isn't a pressing issue at the moment, I haven't finished my degree that will forever irk me due to possible financial outcomes . Don't really have the drive to finish it. I've dealt with depression and it all seems to come down to a belief I hold deep down that romantic relationships are the most significant thing in life. My last relationship ending was mostly my fault I've learned what not to do moving forward, but don't have an opportunity to correct it with my last partner. I'm not looking for female friends I'm looking for a lover, for a partner. Being able to sleep and wake up next to someone you care about is one of the coolest things I've ever experienced. My view makes life very frustrating and unenjoyable without a relationship, which I don't currently have. I write to you here with a few things in mind I'm not happy with how life is when single This is attributed to my worldview I realize that the significance I place on relationships is likely unhealthy I don't know how to change it I've spoken to many people about this family, friends, therapist, ex's parents Nothing said has been enough to hit me on a belief view level. After 7 months I've been unable to solve this on my own Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Single life is incredibly depressing.\n","id":"e1fb5da2-3262-4891-8508-41ce17948ff8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The USA Legal Drinking Age Should Be Lowered to 18 From 21<|ARGUMENT|>19 out of 50 U.S states have not specified that 21 is the min drinking age<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USA Legal Drinking Age Should Be Lowered to 18 From 21\n","id":"a936f8c6-659f-4cf2-94ef-22222a89b14b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Blood Sports Should Be Banned<|ARGUMENT|>An argument that highlights the economic costs of banning blood sports is analogous to arguing for the continuation of slavery because slave traders might lose their livelihoods. Investigations in Britain have cast doubt on the extent of problems that a ban would cause. Overall, however, the essential point is that it is morally wrong to kill animals for pleasure and no amount of economic benefits can make that right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An argument that highlights the economic costs of banning blood sports is analogous to arguing for t...\n","id":"fd33b538-1559-4895-8e8a-d5e88a631aa4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Cinco de Mayo be celebrated in the US?<|ARGUMENT|>The US is considered to be the most powerful country in the world, thus fueling the view that they are most important.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US Americans tend to think that they are more important than the others. This is simply wrong.\n","id":"ec5b5026-7af3-4bc7-b87a-711a596666ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>The individuals with an interest the mother, the father, the friends and loved ones of the woman in question, the infant have deep and complicated relationships and layers of obligation and love that can be expressed socially, but which are beyond the capacity of impartial law to comprehend or act upon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Law is too blunt an instrument to navigate the many issues involved in abortion, without adding still more strife into the world.\n","id":"2200da25-1543-4660-99f2-8f34b451e2dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>Even where it is illegal, discrimination still occurs because the enforcement mechanisms are not used or do not provide adequate protection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Existing legal provisions are insufficient to guarantee workers will be looked after if they disclose their mental health conditions.\n","id":"6eb9b087-5efd-4982-a67b-e2be81b49a9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best reaction to an alien encounter ?<|ARGUMENT|>If it turns out to be a dream, it will be an opportunity to have a lucid dream which is an amazing experience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Perform a Reality Check Encountering an alien is so extraordinary, that it might likely be just a dream.\n","id":"973cf448-9292-425e-ba61-128311ff3fb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To simplify my standpoint, I'm going to focus only on the representation of Americans of African Descent AoAD . First of all, it doesn't seem that most people are aware of the actual numbers. Racial demographics very depending on the region. But, in general, AoAD make up ~13 of the population. And, of that 13 or so, over 50 live in the South . In 20 states, that figure is less than 5 . This matters because lived experience influences both the way we respond to media and the what we create . For instance, if you grew up in a place where less than 5 of the population were Muslim, you would be unlikely to feature Muslim people, culture, or the religion of Islam in your creative work, just statistically speaking. In fact, I would hesitate to represent them because I would be afraid of being criticized for misrepresenting them due to lack of familiarity and knowledge. There is also the issue of demographics when it comes to creators of media. Who is creating our media? What is their background? I don't think a white boy, who can neither jump nor dance, and grew up in Colorado has any place depicting the lives of a family from Mississippi. If he wants to try, that's great. But there is no grounds for criticism if he does not make such an attempt and there is no responsibility to do so. Recently, Tyler the Creator went off on someone about representation of black characters in cartoons. He asks how many black cartoon characters are on TV right now. Well, how many black cartoon creators are there in the industry? If AoAD are ~13 of the population and cartoon creators are a very, very small subset of that population, then what percentage of cartoon creators are also AoAD? I completely agree with his statements and creative decisions. And I think more advocating for more minority creators makes sense, but criticizing people for not representing minority ethnicities in their art and creative output is misguided.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Demanding more minority people\/characters in media is misguided and not reflective of the reality of demographics.\n","id":"412a31f4-37ba-460c-8b18-8a9a4be820e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>In Colonial systems for example South Africa in Colonial times and during Apartheid, men were expected to work on farms, in mines, or in urban areas, while women were to stay behind and provide labor in rural areas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Colonial powers have used gender binary systems and heteropatriarchy to colonise local, indigenous ways of living.\n","id":"5264eb1e-d1ca-4eab-93fa-45ce4ca180e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here are the following reasons that I believe that dogs are the superior pets to cats. Dogs can more easily be trained than cats. They can be taught tricks that are amusing and they can be taught to be nice to humans. Cats are not supposed to be pets. In Dr. John Bradshaw's book, Cat Sense, he finds that cats that are nice are just treating you as a 'mother cat' and not as a companion. Dogs can guard you, your property, and your family, while cats cannot. Cats will just run away when anything scary arises. Dogs listen to you. When they tilt their head, they are trying to hear better and understand and empathize with you. Cats just fall asleep or walk away if you try talking to them. Dogs read your emotions and try to make you as happy as possible. When you're sad they comfort you. There are a lot more options for sizes looks of dogs. Cats all look basically the same. Dogs can be house trained, while cats need litter boxes. Happy 4th of July and happy ing Edit so through this cmv, I will agree that the only thing that would make a cat a better than a dog is when you can't have the responsibility to take care of a dog.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dogs are better pets than cats.\n","id":"2878e026-fc12-4b0c-bfe1-06bcfe5a0127"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are the rich or the poor more responsible for environmental damages?<|ARGUMENT|>if the poor world were to develop and consume in the same manner as the West to achieve the same living standards, we would need two additional planet Earths to produce resources and absorb wastes<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rich are more responsible for environmental damages than the poor.\n","id":"5a34aa7e-b8b4-4976-bd08-63d66f935bdf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Scientific articles should be published before peer review, not after.<|ARGUMENT|>This is especially valuable for research in areas with a link to current events, for example Economics, Political Science and Sociology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"New results can instantly be shared, accelerating the progress of science.\n","id":"cd9a5a5b-1dbf-40be-9340-5a6133e30e0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Moral duties do not exist intrinsically. They are constructed and bestowed upon us through our participation in society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals are unable to enter into a social contract, and thus cannot be possessors of rights.\n","id":"3dda23de-ec67-4ba7-ae9f-fb87eb893ecf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Eichmann was not pursuing his own morality but that of the general will. He stated \"so I just placed my life, as far as I could, in the service \u2013 I would put it this way \u2013 of this Kantian demand.\" By this he means that the general will overruled his own will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The principle that Eichmann is said to have got wrong the categorical imperative is wrong, but the idea he derives from the critique of pure reason may be correct. To live according to the law.\n","id":"7a179359-548b-4b2a-9ebe-9748848a36ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A bit of a disclaimer first. I do believe climate change exists, and I do believe that it can be caused by human activity. That's not what I'm doubting. What I doubt, however, is the notion that it's this scary apocalyptic thing we should be worried about. The human race survived the end of the Ice Age with technology that even the most primitive modern societies would laugh at. With climate change being a relatively gradual thing, we'll be even more advanced than we are right now when the real changes start to take effect. With the technology we'll have then, we'll be able to weather any change in our environment no pun intended . So I don't get why everyone's freaking out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think climate change is anything to worry about.\n","id":"f6b554f1-abf5-4f28-bbcd-037fc52b3d26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm aware that life extension has many controversies, but I primarily focus on what would be done regarding overpopulation in the event that life extension is offered universally , and free of charge which it likely won't, at least not at first . Literally speaking, refraining from having children is the most effective way to curb overpopulation within a single generation. In developing countries, things like education level and living conditions come into play, making the 'rule' biased and unfair, but in a developed world, I feel it is fair. Let's say hypothetically that thirty or forty years from now, currently developing countries have reached new levels of prosperity, and the vast majority of the human population has an education level high enough to understand the impact of the decision. In such a scenario, I feel that if life extension is offered for free, it should only be given to those that agree to not have children until a set time with set conditions. Say, once Mars has been colonized, or once advances in agriculture enable the planet to support more people. Note that this rule would only be enforced if the planet and human society is incapable of supporting more people. If there is a capacity to support more people, then the rule would not be in place. The argument here is whether the rule would be the best option in a situation where population growth would spiral out of control, or in a scenario where the world is unable to feed or supply or provide any extra people with an adequate quality of life. I've mentioned this 'no kids rule' to various people, and most seem to take it as something scandalous that infringes on our right as people, and that restrains our freedom. While I agree that this is true to an extent, I still think it's a rule that should be enforced by governments if a world situation like the one outlined above becomes a reality. The rule could definitely be seen as cruel, and some might even call downright dictatorial, but I think it would ultimately be right. I'd like to hear more viewpoints on this though, whether they focus on the ethics or logistics of such a plan<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Life extension should only be offered to those who agree to not have kids\n","id":"fb648a4f-9e4b-4994-9bc1-d2d941175d35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just read about another school shooting in the states and got to thinking. The NRA is staunchly against gun control and are a powerful lobby. They want guns everywhere churches, bars, bordellos, shooting ranges, homes, workplaces though, interestingly enough, not Congress So, how about we seek a different solution? Mandatory gun classes in grade school. EDIT Apparently, the submission was killed by the moderators because my reasoning wasn't clear. I don't believe in guns, never owned them, never shot one, never bought one, never sold one, nor has anyone on my behalf. However, I do live in America, where gun ownership is rather common, compared to what I'd like it to be. Also, Americans in general love their guns. So, I don't think my sincerely held view will come to pass. The note was presented as a compromise and I'd like pushback on it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If we're going to let everyone have guns, gun safety should be a required course in grade schools\n","id":"392cc404-2b41-4a1c-90d8-ec0ab0840840"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>1 Algae Crude Oil will become commonplace, therefore averting the already debunked Peak Oil theory and will meet energy needs while having corporations to stick to crude oil, because it's a well known fact that America and it's corporations love crude oil. And since crude oil is here forever because of Algae, it's not like renewable resources will ever become commonplace. In other words, while Crude Oil will continue to be the energy source of America and the world, it will be from Algae. 2 Islamophobia will grow to uber fascist extremes in America and especially Europe. Since Europe and America is having hard times, they are looking for someone to blame for, and that someone is Islam. A lot of hate crimes against Muslims through out America and Europe are happening, and hate against the Muslims will continue to grow bigger and bigger. But Muslims will be hit the hardest in Europe, with the Muslims being treated like scum and will be victims of the next holocaust in the future. And by the way, does that remind you of anything? 3 Let's face it, Japan will collapse or be insignificant. Fukushima is already poisoning the entire country and the planet , the economy is getting crappier by the year since 1991, Anime and Manga is becoming a fad just like Disco, and mark my words, Tokyo 2020 will be a disaster. Let's not forget that Abe, the prime minister, is pretty much hated by the Japanese and it's only a matter of time until Mt. Fuji erupt and destroys Japan. 4 Sorry Humanity, but a disease will wipe all of you out by next century. If you want to see the next Pandemic, look no further than MERS Cov. That disease, while pretty obscure, is growing with a number of cases and deaths still growing to this day. This disease will kill hundreds of thousands in the near future because hey, this disease came from Saudi Arabia, a place where science is considered unimportant compared to Islam and fuel Prediction 2. 5 Mark my words, Bitcoin will be banned by many countries and will turn into a fad like Jetpacks. Self explanatory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These are the 5 predictions of the future that will come true.\n","id":"2ebf6b6b-63d2-4884-8c0d-10098fa2d589"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone is currently on the we're being spied upon bandwagon, which is ridiculous for a number of reasons. I wonder if these same redditors had been around in the 30's 80's if they would have had a similar problem with wire tapping laws created to bring down the Mafia? With RICO? With other new laws created to help break one of the greatest threats to our society? I know it's scary that much of FISA is secret, but FISA is not new. Also, grand juries have always been secret as well. Domestic organized criminal organizations took advantage of our laws for too long in order to get away with murder. So we changed the law. I do not see why what the government is currently doing is any different adapting to current technologies in order to fight a new enemy that has been trying to exploit loopholes in the system. And please don't tell me, They're reading everything you write online They're listening to all your phone calls without warrants . They really aren't. Don't be stupid. But go ahead .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think laws that were written to bring down the Mafia in the USA resulted in a good thing for our society and that those laws have had to evolve for a new technological age.\n","id":"3e869199-63f3-4a62-930f-642ef140fbde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I accept and agree that something needs to be done about the environment, but refuse to support Greenpeace due to the radical, sometimes violent and often anti scientific stances that they take on issues e.g. nuclear energy, genetic modification . I believe that their refusal to compromise and accept that some technology can be used for good undermines their environmental motivations. Technology can be used for good especially given that we know so very little about nuclear energy and genetic modification and it can be used to help the environment, but Greenpeace, by refusing to change their stance, shoot themselves in the foot. In the words of Wilson da Silva, Greenpeace has denigrated into a sad, dogmatic, reactionary phalanx of anti science zealots who care not for evidence, but for publicity Source Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that Greenpeace's radicalism undermines their environmental cause.\n","id":"f97bb627-af3b-4749-a85a-a4ee8f2cf870"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am from Hong Kong. Sometimes I come across people who went to a western country for exchange either for a semester or for a year and after coming back they really want to move to the west as they really like the way of life there. I can understand why someone may want to move to a western country for reasons such as the job industry for their career is better, their country of origin has political problems, they get paid more for the same job in the west, they have a significant partner who moved abroad, etc, but here I am talking about people who want to move abroad solely because they like the way of life there cultural reasons. I think it is unwise for them to want to live in the west. Let me explain it here. As Asians in a predominantly white western country, they will probably experience racism of some sort. Obviously, western countries are not as racist as they were a century ago, but obviously subtle racism is still present in society. This can be seen in westerners making Asian jokes, disliking Asians for immigrating to their countries and buying up their property, or ignoring someone because he is Asian. If these people stay in their homelands, they will not experience racism as they are part of the racial majority in their homelands. A Korean person will not be made fun of for being Korean in Korea. However, things are different in the west. Westerners may throw Asian jokes at him and he may feel that there is an unconscious hatred of Asians among the non Asian population. He may feel like the non Asian locals are ignoring him because of his race and this in a way is subtle racism. If these Asians move abroad, chances are they will come across racist people at some point. Sometimes it is more subtle and sometimes it can be more direct such as locals using ethnic slurs to address them. They may be affected by anti immigrant policies and xenophobia. They may even have trouble finding jobs as employers do not see them as locals. Often, I see white people saying that racism is not a big problem in their countries. However, I think this is biased. Nobody wants to acknowledge that their own country is racist if they are unaffected by it. Also, white people are unaffected by racism in their own homelands so they do not know how serious it is due to a lack of firsthand experience. I can understand why white people want to move to Asia. White privilege exists everywhere and this includes Asia so they will benefit from it. They can probably find a well paid job in Asia easier than their POC peers due to their skin colour. The same applies to finding women in Asia. However, if an Asian moves from Asia to a predominantly white western country, he is just asking to be treated in a racist manner. For goodness sake, he may even realize that some Asians in the west refuse to date other Asians even though they are Asians themselves. If these guys stay in their homelands, they will experience no racism. They are the racial majority of their homelands after all. Asians who move to a western country may feel like they will never fit into that country due to reasons such as cultural reasons and the white majority will never see you as a local because of your skin colour. If these people stay in the west and have kids there, their kids will also be subject to racism. And what's even worse is even though they were born and raised in the west, westerners do not see them as locals. They will still be asked where they are really from when they answer the question with a western country. These kids will grow up feeling like they do not fit into the western country they were born and raised in. In the meantime, these kids do not feel like they belong to the country of their parents as they have never lived there. In other words, these kids are rootless. I feel like these people who came back from exchange and want to move abroad want to do so because they are romanticizing life in the west too much. Yes, they want to move abroad to experience a new culture, but racism is often a part of western culture and who would want to experience that in a negative way? These people I know are probably looking at their previous exchange experience through rose tinted glasses or haven't stayed in the west long enough to experience full blown racism. I feel like they are overlooking the negative aspects of moving to a western country and this is why I see their desire to move abroad as unwise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Asians from developed countries in Asia who choose to move abroad to a western country solely because they like the way of life there is being unwise as they will experience racism abroad\n","id":"8d790aaa-55d0-4985-a2a3-2bdf0cc96bf6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is sort of a crazy idea I've been playing with for a while so feel free to shoot holes in it. But I like it for a lot of reasons. First of all, we need to recognize that people mature at different rates. I've known 13 year olds who act more mature than 20 year olds I've known. Fixing the age of adulthood at 18 is a ham fisted, one size fits all solution to a complex problem. I think that rather than having a single age for all people, we should have a range of ages and within that range people should get to choose when they become adults. This is because I consider it inherently unfair to people below the age of 18 who have the ability to make conscious decisions for themselves to deny them that right. For example, consider a 17 and a half year old who is extremely mature for their age. On a maturity level, they are likely to be more mature than many 18 year olds. And yet, due to nothing more than the date of their birth not their level of maturity they are denied many rights such as the right to vote, the right to make medical decisions for yourself, etc. I think that people should be allowed to become adults whenever they would like to within this range. Doing so would mean that they enjoy all the privileges of adulthood, but they must also accept the responsibilities that come along with it. So for example, if a 15 year old chose to become an adult they could get a job, drop out of school, vote, have sex, etc. But their parents would then no longer be required to provide for them, they could no longer be considered juveniles if they commit a crime, etc. I think this would make society more fair because people could more accurately decide when they are mature enough to be responsible for themselves, rather than the government making a blanket decision for millions of people which has no nuance, and results in rights being denied to people when they shouldn't be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rather than having a fixed age of adulthood, people ages 13-21 should be allowed to become legal adults whenever they choose to do so\n","id":"3b64573c-2f6a-4398-9581-8d4b403647f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of students form bonds and friendships out of their shared interest in the sport and their love for their own highschool team.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High school football is good for students who are not directly involved in the teams as well.\n","id":"9da8eff2-672b-4996-a855-4ede089cfa2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Rapture Pre-tribulation or other?<|ARGUMENT|>Seeing as the people Jesus will carry to heaven in the Rapture are his most loving and righteous followers Matthew 5:13-16 it is likely that he will take them pre-tribulation because they will not need to suffer to repent during the time of tribulation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"John 14 Jesus told his disciples that he was going to heaven to prepare a place for them and that he would return to get them and take the to heaven.\n","id":"e16cee4d-9ba7-4684-91fa-b2cee282a2bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In confined animal feeding operations CAFOs pigs have their tails cut off, chickens have their toenails and beaks clipped off, and cows have their horns removed and tails cut off with no painkillers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Raising animals in confinement, deprived of sunlight, natural soil and freedom to move, is cruel and against their nature.\n","id":"61d11a4b-74ec-494e-8dc7-90fa4bcec1b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Hell Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>If a person commits treason against the God who created him or her, and everything else, that would merit the maximum possible penalty. That person does not want to follow the rules of the only One who has provided all with anything and therefore they cannot be trusted to be a part of the Kingdom.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In either case, the crime of treason merits a maximum penalty. The state can\u2019t trust a traitor.\n","id":"6630dbba-8503-4cca-892d-42a7e8f0d4c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should US Colleges Allow Concealed Carry?<|ARGUMENT|>In the event shooters are able to evade security and enter school premises, teachers can shoot them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers and students are able to act as the last line of defense against school shooters.\n","id":"4bc76cdc-b71a-4930-a92f-dcd705602070"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the use of 1080 poison be encouraged?<|ARGUMENT|>In 1998 it was said that \"about 10 million is spent annually on controlling possum populations\"; it is unclear how much of that is on 1080, but it is nevertheless a significant financial incentive. 1080science.co.nz<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is an economic benefit to the sellers and distributors of the poison.\n","id":"288e21e6-75a7-4e00-939f-0661dbe81173"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>Worker cooperatives are likely to cut costs by slowing down expansion to maintain current assets whereas traditional corporations may pay less attention to strategic planning and simply shed jobs to tighten budgets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Research suggests that worker owned companies are more durable and resilient during economic downturns.\n","id":"41cf925f-f4c4-4c6b-8a81-b5d5ef523b2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The post in its entirety refers to the generalization of groups fighting for equal rights, however for an example in this post, I will be specifically discussing groups fighting for LGBTQ equality. Recently in the United States, the issue of gay marriage has been a hot topic with New Mexico being the 17th state to legalize the issue. While this shows progress for the issue, I think that most LBGTQ groups especially in schools are a detriment to the cause for the following reasons Events such as the Day of Silence don't efficiently promote the issue at hand and people participating in the event a do so without full knowledge of the purpose behind the event and b don't fully participate. Using the day of silence as an example, typically in high schools, LBGTQ groups will hold a Day of Silence where participants will willingly not communicate for the day. The purpose of this event is to raise awareness about how LGBTQ people are forced to be silent about there sexual orientation in public. This is detrimental to the cause of equal rights because the fundamental purpose of the event is flawed. Gay people are fully capable of talking about their orientation, and while someone may make a second glance at two people of the same gender engaging in PDA, this is reasonable as Gay people are in fact an anomaly couldn't think of a better word .Second, the people who participate usually use white boards or write notes to communicate which defeats the entire purpose of the flawed event. The most active members of the group typically are the people on the most extreme end of the spectrum, IE the people that make other citizens weary of supporting the group. One example of this would be this recent event in Argentina Even if the least flamboyant members of the group manage to run a successful event, it typically does nothing to change the situation at hand and only manages to raise awareness of the issue. This may be beneficial for smaller known issues, but for issues such as sexual freedom, feminism, racial equality, etc., these issues already have everyones awareness. As far as arguments go, I will not accept exceptions to the case specifically Martin Luther King's march on Washington . I will however accept trends and statistics for groups and states corresponding legislature, series of smaller group events that had an effect on a community, etc. Also anything else you can think of to make me believe that equal rights groups do less harm than good. tldr Citizens as a whole who feel they receive unfair treatment would be better off contacting their local legislation than creating groups for their cause. edit For the sake of argument, I only wish to include modern examples. I am aware of the mid 1900's movement for equal rights, however i think that modern groups have a different ideology than older groups and are ineffective. edit2 Awarded \u2206's to all who shared the same view as u MageZero<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Equal Rights groups are self-destructive in nature and typically create more harm than good for their cause.\n","id":"f2b32493-360e-4b0d-97ef-4d21b0565be9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Reproduction be Limited To No More Than One Offspring Per Person?<|ARGUMENT|>Having twins or triplets as the result of a second pregnancy to the same couple would mean they have exceeded their reproductive limit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If this were to become government policy, it would be incredibly difficult to regulate.\n","id":"4504fb08-6da6-472c-ac37-632aac26a0ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I base this on my opinion that humans are not a superior animal thats more innately deserving than any other animal. With that in mind I do not believe there is any justification for slavery among humans. If we had human pets like we have other non human animal pets it would be seen as a weird voyeuristic slavery. As for non human animsls that have been brought to environments where they could not survive with our intervention, we should never have displaced them to begin with. I have similar opinions about animals we keep for work, food and other animal products but I recognize that at this point there are few or no equivalents or replacements for them, especially in the economically or technologically disadvantaged part of the world. The scope of this is limited to essentially pets that are kept purely for recreational or pleasure reasons. edit I feel like people are getting the idea that I am advocating for the immediate release of animals who are already too dependant on humans to survive on their own. That would be cruel and wrong and a lot of you are getting stuck on that. My view is that having pets as a baseline is wrong and it should not be continued if it can be helped. Edit Domesticated Dogs and Cats are the best anyone can do I guess? What would happen if we didn't go out of our way to breed them on a large scale?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no justification for keeping pets that will not stay based on their own free will.\n","id":"f509329b-d3ec-403e-b518-916029b7db6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>In communities where there is a high proportion of ex-felons, non-felons are likely to also be socialised into not voting. This distorts electoral outcomes against these communities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Felony disenfranchisement negatively affects electoral processes and therefore undermines democratic legitimacy.\n","id":"9689a06a-b35d-4ee2-8964-9820ce8aa2cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Michelle Carter criminally responsible for Conrad Roy\u2019s Death?<|ARGUMENT|>Aside from being a minor, Carter herself was also an unhinged teen: she suffered from an eating disorder and had been treated in a psychiatric hospital, it is claimed she suffered from delusions caused by a switch in antidepressant medications.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Michelle Carter was a juvenile at the time of the alleged crime, and therefore her conviction is invalid because she was tried as an adult.\n","id":"f6510e13-3490-487d-b1cb-8bfc9ab17235"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This has been discussed a lot before, and I'm open to rehashing some of those old debates, but in general I'm not really focused on theoretical debates. I'm more interested in what it has done, or hasn't done. I'm assuming the intent of the 2nd amendment is to prevent tyrannical governments. Based on that what has the 2nd amendment actually prevented? Some examples of Tyrany of various degrees, all committed with the 2nd amendment in place Trail of Tears Indian Removal Act Japanese internment camps USA PATRIOT act SCOTUS deciding an election instead of the people 'Free speech zones' limiting our first amendment rights, with nobody taking up arms to protect it Civil Asset Forfeiture Assasinating US citizens without due process Anwar al Awlaki's family I could probably come up with some more, but I think that list is plenty. If the 2nd amendment was not used to prevent ANY of that, what reason is there to believe it would ever prevent anything? To change my view, I'd love for any examples of people actually taking up arms against the US government to prevent tyranny, or at least a reason why people would somehow ignore all of these infactions that span decades yet still be willing to take up arms over something. If thats the case though, I'd also like to know how that could play out realistically. Wouldn't whichever person first takes up arms be labeled a lone crazy gunman? If its a group, wouldn't it just look like Waco or at best the Bundy standoff? We all clearly have different threshholds, so unless the government made a massive overnight change towards the tyrannical, most people would just slowly adapt and accept more and more tyranny.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The 2nd amendment is pointless.\n","id":"1aecdf61-34bd-4043-a2ec-4d768cc8824b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not going to get too much into the sob story about the degradation of my relationship, but it's gotten to the point where I'm ready to end it after a little under a year. One of the major factors has been her inability to make time for me. I've seen her for maybe 15 minutes in the last month and we live 20 minutes from each other. Every time we usually I make plans for to go out, there is some emergency she or her grandparents parents son are sick, etc or something else comes up that means she has to bail. This last week she refused dinner plans because she had a 4 45pm appointment and didn't want to bring her son who I've never met to dinner afterwards. I used to firmly believe that breaking up in person was the only right way to do things. My only alternative to breaking up over text is to ghost her, which I think is far worse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Breaking up via text can be acceptable\n","id":"4938ef94-9d3f-40f5-8754-8d16dc5d6b5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So this is my first time posting at the CMW subreddit so please do forgive me if I have done anything unorthodox. English is not my first language so please bear with me. So, I personally feel that the saying you can only love others after you love yourself is one of those old adages that is accepted as the truth just because it sounds like one. But having personally dealt with depression before, it feels like my ability to love someone else does not seem to be associated with my ability to love myself. Rather, I feel that perhaps the saying should be changed to You can only love someone else when you have truly accepted yourself . I will be happy to know your opinions on this matter but i apologise for any slow replies as I have limited access to the internet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You don't need to love yourself before you truly love others\n","id":"9ecb373b-5ffd-4297-90ba-a16944f8dbdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>A lack of additional conditions means that families with young children and survivors of assault are robbed of their right to reasonable knowledge of safety and risk in making school, neighborhood and workplace selections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Convicted pedophiles have demonstrated that they have the capacity to harm children. This poses a threat to the public that requires more substantive measures than other crimes.\n","id":"95d99f97-458f-4649-b989-ad06b838e988"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>Due to the complexity of politics every onesided calculation would not lead to good results, which should not be considered by rational persons which politicians in democracies are considered with high responsibility.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would be far too onesided and would neglect other liabilities of the state like security internal and foreign, basic welfare, administration, etc.\n","id":"887d252b-4da8-475e-a62d-904263589ba3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>This is because criminals would only need to find out less information about a person before they target that person since they would already know whether the potential target is a \u201clucrative\u201d prospect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Crime against people specifically financial crime would be easier because their financial status would be known.\n","id":"7d55ff56-d6d1-4705-8f03-829f70699ccb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Tourism is blooming in authoritarian states like China, Cambodia, etc. I think that people who directly contribute to the economy of authoritarian states, and willingly turn a blind eye to the world around them for their own enjoyment are perpetuating the legitimacy of such governments. Even outside authoritarian regimes, you have a lot of problematic tourism, where tourism is destroying the environment, displaces people to make room for beaches, and creates segregated areas for locals and tourists. And that's ignoring the people who actively travel for sketchy purposes sex tourism, drug tourism, wife hunting etc. make up a huge percentage of the tourism industry in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe I genuinely don't understand why people continue to take part in this. I just find it so harmful and unethical.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tourism in problematic areas is unethical\n","id":"b091959a-0770-4ea1-8249-60642aac6e3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The Book of Mormon commands Joseph Smith, after he translates the golden plates, to \"seal up the book again, and hide it up unto me, that I may preserve the words thou hast not read.\" 2 Nephi 27:22<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon teaches that a protective magical \"seal\" was put on the golden plates and a set of magical \"interpreters\" prior to their burial in the hill Cumorah\n","id":"e4fcb941-52b3-46cf-8af1-5c331c158a8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The education system gives children a lot of knowledge and 'educates them'. So does the Internet and various sites like Wikipedia. But, the knowledge amassed here has been reached by critical and analytical thinking by hundreds of generations of people. So, it is incorrect to give this knowledge to children who are young and impressionable because The knowledge may be wrong. Science is all about hypotheses and conclusions derived from observations, hence often times our knowledge changes radically. Without thinking, knowing something that is right is as bad as knowing something that is wrong because the thought and logic that was used to reach this knowledge is absent. Children are not able to adapt to new information or knowledge because the pre existing knowledge has been ingrained into them as part of the world, instead of them reaching the conclusion logically and hence being able to be disproved. The knowledge then becomes like a way of life for them, something that is simply there in the world and unchallenged. An undisputable general truth. I'm not questioning the education system. I'm simply stating that this happens. Edit some people have been asking what age range to do this in. I'm sure higher secondary school, at the ages of 12 15, would be perfect. Edit 2 a lot of people are giving anecdotes. I don't care about them. A lot of people are giving examples from the US as their main argument. Newsflash the US isn't the only country. I'm not from there, so again, any teaching standards or guidelines from there are irrelevant to me. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The education system today focuses on knowledge and does not develop thinking, leading to problems.\n","id":"e1494102-0c48-4754-8a1d-b250a5cfb8e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Similar Cryptocurrencies Good for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>American currency has not been linked to resources such as gold for a long time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mining minerals for normal currency consumes a lot of resources too.\n","id":"18a4d43a-0a3e-4f44-b997-af204152f133"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don\u2019t see any other conclusion to draw from the book, honestly. Huxley argues that self denial and striving for a \u201cold world\u201d ideal is a sysaphillian battle that you won\u2019t win, and there\u2019s no reason not to give in and love the strange modernity. By trying to stay an individual, one is simply chaining oneself to the shackles we were meant to rise from as humans. What use is our intelligence if not for to launch wildly to new heights? The ethics of generating humans that are \u201csub optimal\u201d for use as slaves seems more morally right to me than the scenario that we have today, to have humans that can be so much more and then to relegate them to unthinking roles, packing boxes all day for amazon or standing behind a counter. I\u2019m not arguing that I would pick this future if I had a choice i\u2019d much rather robotics liberate humanity but that the novel strikes me as distinctly not dystopian. Maybe there\u2019s something I\u2019m not seeing. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \u201cdystopian\u201d world of Huxley\u2019s Brave New World is preferable to our own\n","id":"80d8a989-0a95-4799-bf31-43bf98fc0d95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is an idea contrary to my upbringing grew up in a family of 8, mom wants tons of grandbabies D and the viewpoint I've had most of my life. Going on 27 now though, I'm beginning to think that having children really isn't a goal I'm looking forward to. As greedy as it sounds, the human race will go on, hell even my family name will go on if i don't have kids. The current society can well afford my childless lifestyle. And i wan't to earn and spend money for myself and occasionally be the weathy uncle that takes his nieces and nephews to disneyland. For anyone saying I didn't want kids either, but seeing my son daughter for the first time was the happiest day in my life you'll want kids after you have one Yes I agree, if I ever have a kid it's likely that seeing that kid will be exquisite, I would fall in love immediately, and love him her flawlessly. The caveat is that this is a biological reaction. Humans have been bred for thousands of years to procreate and take care of their young just like most species that aren't extinct. It's just how we're wired. This doesn't necessarily show that there's some deeper meaning to having kids. I could tell you that taking magic mushrooms will be a magnificent psychedelic experience, and you would likely agree with me that yes, you would trip balls and have a great time. That doesn't mean that you're going to do it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm under the impression that I don't want kids.\n","id":"a6111169-8e16-409c-852d-b281f10830a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Along the causes of unemployment in the U.S., the most notable ones are economic conditions or demographic and techonology trends. It seems that changes on hiring or firing policy don't affect that much.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Firing particular people for particular reasons is not linked with an increase on unemployment rates.\n","id":"1175ef27-b827-4ea6-ad4d-8b53d34eebfd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Publications that carelessly use the term Textbook Science in scenarios where new research contradicts previously held hypotheses serve to confuse lay people by presenting this process as anything but the scientific method doing its thing. Now, I want to preface this by saying that most scientific publications like the one linked above do an exquisite job of qualifying the results, and explaining why they are important, etc. etc. Generally, reading an article like the one above, you don't get the problem I am referring to. The problem is that journalists at newspapers and news organizations in charge of scientific reporting generally take a fair amount of liberty when regurgitating science news. They take the original headline or content and give it a small to medium spin that makes it catchier to the average reader, and in many cases, clickbait. Even worse however, reputable articles are often used as a poisoned citation to make a case against scientific knowledge. Poorly worded articles serve as evidence of scientific conspiracies, collusion, and other nefarious made up bullshit. Knowing this, it should be standard practice for reputable publications to not put clickbait titles on their original articles, like the one above. Look at the word usage in this article A new finding goes against dogma or the opening line Open any introductory biology textbook and one of the first things you'll learn is that our DNA spells out the instructions for making proteins Innocuous within the primary article, these types of lines are a single lazy step away from misleading, sham journalism misrepresentation. I can practically read the title Biologists defy established scientific dogma about role of DNA, textbooks proven wrong That horrible title would be right there for the picking based on the first 5 seconds of reading this article. Given that most people who need a better understanding of science can't be bothered to read actually scientific articles, it's likely that the headline or whatever garbage article it sits upon is the only part that they will ingest. Its unlikely that they would actually go on to read the original article if it is even posted. So these people then read the title and go typical scientists. Always changing their minds about everything. By making the title and the first line or two rife with clickbait phrasing, they have given ammunition to individuals whose agenda is to sow mistrust in science. If the article had been called New research finds amino acids can be assembled without DNA or RNA , it would still have been just as interesting of a headline to the people who are actually reading stuff on phys.org. They could've even put the whole textbook thing somewhere in the article. That way, it's still in there, and any sham journalist would at least have to go digging to find that. While I focused pretty specifically on this one article, I have almost never seen the term used in a way that is championing the process. People in science know that textbooks are bound to the information at the time of their printing book pun , and so textbooks being upended is nothing to get huffed at. Science is always revising itself. But for people who don't have a good understanding of science, the notion of these sacred textbooks being proven wrong generally resonates negatively with them. A lot of these readers either have their own sacred, infallible books, religious right agenda or have an axe to grind against established science new age y leftist agenda . Overall, I think the term needs to be used extremely carefully, and when it is used, it should be presented in a positive light, as it is a critical part of the scientific method.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Careless usage of the term \"Textbook Science\" muddles the concept of the scientific method for the layman, and actively contributes to generalized distrust of science in public opinion.\n","id":"20bd2786-6286-4ab2-9e60-2013ead836da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently, I've been roaming the internet looking into some philosophical articles about religion. Then I cam across this page by TED, the same organization that does those TED Talks at universities and high schools across the nation. The title of the page was, Has religion outlived it's usefulness? I read some of the discussion and to me it seems like there are a number of good points saying that it has. I go to a Catholic school and in talking to my theology teacher, its a mandatory class, he was somewhat surprised that I had been thinking about this. I was wondering what you all thought. So I pose the question, Has religion outlived its usefulness?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has outlasted its usefulness.\n","id":"4e41cab0-0396-4b32-a882-eb8edc4c6993"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Before you post another list of who disagrees with me, please read my responses already. Trying to change my mind by pointing out that people disagree with me is not a good way to change my mind. I already know people disagree with me. That's why I posted this, in the first place. Edit 2 u RustyRook pointed out its usage in bounties for Native Americans in the late 19th century, similar to how Jap got much of its negative connotation from widespread American propaganda in WWII. So if someone could expand on that and give some more examples or resources that could put my opinion in that direction, it would be much appreciated. And please remember that the downvote button is not for disagreeing with someone. In fact, downvoting someone just because you disagree with someone in r cmv is counter to the intention of the sub, and if you do so, you're just a coward who can't actually form an argument. Please note that I said I don't think they should rather than I think they shouldn't. I don't really have a strong conviction one way or the other right now. Fair warning I'm gonna use some slurs in this, but please know that I'm not calling anyone one or the other. I'm just using them as examples of offensive slurs without dancing around them. Like I said, I don't currently think that The Washington Redskins is offensive, and thus I don't think they should be pressured to change it. I'm not so sure redskin is a slur. I have heard some natives say that it's not, and some say it is. I don't have enough knowledge of a history of the word being used in a pejorative fashion in a widespread manner, such as kike, chink, etc. have. I do think that if a team were to have an inherently offensive name such as the Kansas City Kikes or something like that , even if the word wasn't offensive when they started such as how Jap became offensive in the 40s despite being innocuous beforehand , they should change their name. The Washington Redskins' name came from when the Boston Braves had their name changed to the Boston Redskins to avoid being confused with the Braves baseball team, while still having the connotation of Native American origins. Clearly back then it was not offensive, and the owner of the team most likely did not hate natives, either. After all, the head coach at was a Native American. So, that's about it. I don't think that redskin is inherently disparaging, and the team was obviously not named The Redskins with any malicious intent. Therefore I don't see a good reason to force them to change it. However, if someone could convince me that redskin is an inherently offensive word now, on the levels of kike, chink, etc., then I'll think otherwise. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think the Redskins should be pressured to change their name.\n","id":"ec0b1631-70c4-4931-8aed-1d601db18d5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>Steele leaked documents he had collected to Yahoo News, in order to fool the FBI into believing his findings were corroborated by other sources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The bias of FBI source Christopher Steele has tainted the investigation.\n","id":"ba5d2732-d927-4bd7-88c4-d9190794750e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I only recently accepted the idea of workaholism as a thing so my opinions on the subject continued to blossom as I was writing this. The thing reads like an ode to Robert California, but seems like a perfectly rational radical belief to me. The premises are as follows Alcoholism an unmanageable compulsive desire to consume alcohol is widely accepted as a disease independently of the dispute regarding its source. Presently, the heritability of alcohol dependence is estimated to be between 38 and 64 . This means genetic and environmental factors contribute varying amounts to risk for this condition, probably depending on the population in question 1 . Workaholism an unmanageable compulsive desire to work is gaining acceptance as a disease in the same vein as that of alcoholism. The workaholic's mutated body produces adrenaline as a result of a consistently heightened level of stress, and those who are addicted to work are in fact experiencing some level of substance addiction. 2 Psychologically, these disorders seem similar enough to me that they would share common risk factors and treatment methods. Kar\u014dshi, as workaholism is known in Japan, is considered a serious social problem leading to early death, often on the job. The same does not follow in other Western nations, though, which implies that environmental factors allow workaholics to manage their genetic mutation in a not so destructive way. In fact, the mutation is commonly considered laughing material in America, while I am of the opinion that workaholics in America are significantly likely to be found in positions of power. At first glance, this seems to me like the difference lies in the workaholic's ability to manage his heightened level of stress. The substance the workaholic is addicted to is not an intrinsically harmful chemical manufactured outside the body. Therefore workaholism, if properly managed, leads to a mutated version of human who is able to be significantly more productive in an environment without boundaries on what can be achieved than the average person. Accordingly, the properly managed workaholic is a mutant and somewhere, some kid is actually moving metal using only his mind 4 .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Workaholism gives you superpowers.\n","id":"9843069b-c1f8-44c8-8931-ced33b2d3de8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was born in SA, but I moved to the UK when I was nearly 2 years old. From what I have seen, if you look at murder rates, HIV rates, poverty rates and rape rates they are higher now then they were under Apartheid. For example if we look at inter racial violence a mere 518 black people died from the White Apartheid government but 70,000 whites have died since 1994, which is an enormous amount. Due to things such as Affirmative Action, many skilled people have left the country which hurts the country as a whole as it leads to a Brain Drain. Even people who were born after Apartheid ended are still finding it difficult to get jobs because of it In honesty, I feel that many people especially the poor black population are either the same or worse off then they were under Apartheid, despite the fact that it has been 20 years since it has ended and the way the government still blames apartheid for it's problems is little more then a excuse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The post-apartheid government have done little to improve South Africa.\n","id":"cabcf79e-172e-4254-a737-23060e45ba16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religions are abused as causes of war and conceal actual reasons for conflicts, which makes the resolution of these conflicts more difficult.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions have been a prominent source of conflict and strife all over the world and through all ages.\n","id":"0f8eeec3-6bb5-4646-bd44-260b762cd542"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the UK Truly a Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>The UK has a long history of relatively peaceful political change and we can vote a government out if we wish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At least we get to change governments with the ballot, not the bullet.\n","id":"843dcbdc-6a80-44df-8ba3-037564a49e21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Both my parents are heavily anti vax and none of their 3 kids have been vaccinated. After leaving the nest I realized just how uncommon this was, however after years of being in the main stream, I'm still not convinced that vaccines are all they are cracked up to be. Between whistle blowers William Thomson, Scott Cooper, Andrew Wakefield etc and corruption within the vaccine industry, it seems like something sinister is afoot. There are countless horror stories and it seems like everyone just shuts up about these things and keeps thumping that vaccines are the greatest. Now I'm not antivaccine although I haven't been immunized yet I'm just not pro vaccine. I haven't seen enough to discredit this dark side of things and show undoubtedly that vaccinations are the way to go. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is not enough evidence of the safety\/efficacy of vaccines, especially in the face of controversy and conspiracy\n","id":"2cf42b5f-4878-4ff9-a3cc-187b452fbdea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I swear I'm open to understanding the appeal and usefulness of astrology. I like to be optimistic and open minded about the interpretations people can get out of religious beliefs. That being said, astrology seems to be 100 false and can't help with anything. There's a lot of aspects to astrology, so I'll try to limit the conversation just to zodiacs. I've recently learned we're supposed to have two or three zodiacs, but let's stick with the simple idea of the zodiac, that approximately the month you're born determines your zodiac which reveals a number of insights about your personality. For example, my birthday is July 5th, therefor it is said that my zodiac is cancer and this means I'm supposed to have the following characteristics emotional, home based, intuitive etc. Why? Because astrologists claim celestial objects affect human affairs. In other words, the formation of the planets and stars affect my personality. How might this work? I usually get some super vague answer about energy and things being connected. Perhaps I haven't read enough into explanations of astrology, in which case I would love for someone to enlighten me as to how celestial objects affect people's personalities. It seems absurd to me because there's no logical reason to think that a planet floating around a vast distance away is impacting individual's psychology. Some people say they don't know or care how astrology is true, but they frequently observe the results as true. This means that they notice that people really do fit the description of their zodiac. I'm highly skeptical of this. First of all, this should be a testable hypothesis. Zodiac X cause Y traits. For example, there could be a study that questions a large number of Cancer signs about their personality traits and we could see if the results are significant. I've read that there have been a ton of scientific studies testing various claims of astrology and they all come out against astrology's claims. Is it any surprise that believers in astrology are falling for confirmation bias? No. It seems to me like every zodiac is relateable to nearly everyone. Sticking with the Cancer example, can't we all relate to being emotional and intuitive? If you want to believe in astrology, it's easy to perceive its claims being verified and discard characteristics that don't fit the claim. So from an objective scientific view, astrology seems obviously false. But is it useful? After all, the miracles in the Bible would seem just as false, but Christians get a lot out of their faith that impacts their lives morals, optimism about death etc. . It seems like astrology can only help us label people incorrectly. It's so limiting to define yourself by the month you were born. I almost don't want to answer people when they ask what sign I am because I don't want them to have preconceived notions about me that are simplistic and false. The one ounce of credit I'll give to astrology is that the time into which we're born could affect our upbringing and thus our personality. Babies born in winter might have a similar upbringing as other babies born in winter because of the similar environment. But it probably only makes a very slight affect if any on someone's upbringing and personality. This is also quite different from the claims of astrology where every month has different specific traits attributed to them. I'm probably preaching to the choir for many of you, so to you all I'd like to ask, why is astrology believed by so many people? It started thousands of years ago, and I can't blame them too much because they lived in a pre scientific revolution era of superstition. But why does it hold sway today by so many people? A LOT of people believe in astrology. Within my hippie friend group, I'm the odd one for not believing this pseudoscience. I guess it's kinda fun to label ourselves like with the Myers Briggs test but there's a big difference between a carefully made test and labeling yourself based off your birthday.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Astrology is false and not useful.\n","id":"3f82cb71-86b0-4366-ad00-0f344b1ea710"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>According to WHO only 43% of women of reproductive age in less developed countries use modern contraceptive methods, and a wide gap in use is seen between the highest and lowest wealth quintiles 52% versus 35%, respectively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Low-income women often lack sexual education and even if they do have this information, they sometimes lack the resources to buy contraceptives.\n","id":"99928270-ba9e-4cd9-90c0-7a62f902e719"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Even those who oppose public nudity for religious reasons, for example Dennis Prager, a prominent US radio host from the religious right, admit that there is no reason to ban public nudity from a secular point of view.\u201d1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rule of law in a pluralistic society should embody society's aspirations towards values of inclusion and tolerance. Prohibiting public nudity is intolerant.\n","id":"70980264-7bc4-4482-98c0-2aa2db334717"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Respect The Root Cause Of Relationship Success?<|ARGUMENT|>Love for one's partner can often let them overlook when that partner is being disrespectful. In contrast, it's less likely that someone who doesn't love their partner is likely to stay in that relationship, regardless for how much respect there is between them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human's need love to motivate them to do things for their partner. Without the feeling of love, there's nothing to sustain the relationship.\n","id":"9d05e91e-3873-416a-83e1-cfcbb7a9c69e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mosquito ultrasound device<|ARGUMENT|>No one is arguing that this is the only way to deal with problem teens. By all means build more leisure centres and improve our schools if you think that will help. But the Mosquito can be part of the solution and helps to reclaim public areas for the rest of the population. It isn\u2019t the responsibility of shopkeepers and homeowners to solve social problems. And until parents, schools, the police and politicians find a better way to stop anti-social behaviour, those who feel threatened should be able to use the Mosquito.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No one is arguing that this is the only way to deal with problem teens. By all means build more lei...\n","id":"10e11c1c-065a-47eb-9d7a-75c3095c9970"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For context, I am a seventeen year old living in the United States. When I turn 18, I plan to register as an independent when election days come around, I intend to go to the polling location and submit a blank ballot. I intend to remain somewhat politically involved aside from voting, at least to the extent of knowing what the issues are and where I stand on them. Here are my reasons for not voting Voting, at least in the United States encourages an us versus them mentality, creating a vicious atmosphere. As a quick example of this, r politics was focused almost entirely on tearing Mitt Romney and the Republicans down last election season, building them up as the most evil people on the face of the planet. The voter is asked to accept a political party's complete list of economic and social ideals. You cannot separate individual issues at all you have a few packages to choose from, no matter how much you may disagree with parts of each. By the very nature of this, voters are encouraged to agree with one side on all or almost all things. Because a person chooses to support a side, views presented by that side will tend to appear better than views presented by the other side, regardless of the views themselves. People who join and actively support one political party or another submit to a certain degree of mob mentality. The United States has many corrupt government officials and something of a culture of dissatisfaction with elected officials. I see this, in large part, as a result of voting. Voting selects for traits such as charisma, popular appeal, and so forth, rather than competency in governing. In addition, the process encourages almost necessitates lying. Even once officials have jumped through the hoops required for their elections, they will often make decisions based on what certain groups of their constituents want. You see this in actions such as the Republicans calling for a repeal of Obamacare perhaps not the best example, but the first decent one I thought of absurd proposals with no chance of succeeding, created purely to show that the politicians uphold the views of those who voted for them. Beyond all this, voting itself depends on the people, and that is perhaps my biggest problem with it. Everybody is encouraged to vote. If a person doesn't vote and makes that clear , they are generally looked down upon often considered unworthy of even holding political opinions. Becoming politically informed is given much lower priority. As I see it, this results in people voting when they really shouldn't be voting not because they care, not because they have honestly and thoroughly researched and come to the conclusion that Candidate A is superior to Candidate B, but because it's expected. This gives the informed votes much less value every thoughtful vote is drowned out by a dozen thoughtless ones. Building on that, voting gives people a sense of having done their political duty. It is an entirely symbolic gesture individual votes, of course, do not carry any weight at all but it frees them from doing any more politically. If you're a voter, you've Done Your Part to support the democracy I could go on, but this post is getting too long as it is. The reasons above should provide a good start, at least. In short, I prefer the symbolic gesture of not voting to the symbolic gesture of voting because I see a lot of systemic problems caused by the act and concept of voting. I am fairly firm in this viewpoint. I am posting in r changemyview because it is an abnormal viewpoint and I have held it for long enough that I suspect I am not giving fair consideration to points that support voting. I do not expect my view to change completely, but I would appreciate a different perspective on things.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not plan on voting.\n","id":"17f901c1-5e71-4de7-ad38-bd183d90c4b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sorry this is so NYC centric. It's a x post from r nycrail, but I really would like to discuss this. So here goes. 86th Street is a disaster. Stuffed 4 5 trains pull in to crowded platforms, alighting and boarding takes forever, people get left behind, and everybody is uncomfortable during the process. I propose having downtown 4 and 5 trains skip 86th street altogether to avoid the station, which not only is inadequately sized and designed, but is in a location not optimal for AM rush hours given today's ridership volumes. My idea would have express trains go straight from 125th st to 59th st sound familiar? . This wouldn't really create enormous travel time savings for 4 and 5 train riders. They are super crowded anyway and so the exiting and boarding process at 59th street would still be a long process that backs trains up along the line. But it would make the lives of 6 train users much much better. Anybody coming from the Bronx on a 6 train traveling to 66th street or below would now have additional incentive to transfer to a 4 5 at 125th Street. Yes I said that travel time savings would be minimal but people don't think in those terms so their actions will still be dictated by the option that is faster on paper . This will free up 6 trains somewhat to provide better service for people getting on on the East Side, which is a hugely important issue. People going below 42nd Street who get on below 125th Street and like to transfer to a 4 5 at 86th and especially those who get on at 86th, will be inconvenienced. It's just the hard truth. What's also the hard truth is that, on paper, people in Manhattan using the express trains on the lexington avenue line have it too good. From 86th Street to 14th is just three stops. City Hall is just 4. No other express line offers those travel speeds again on paper. The only thing close is the 2 3 and they have their miniature version of the same problem at 72nd because too many 1 trainers get on at 96th, crowding the trains . Because of that, people commuting from 86th street would use the S at Grand Central and the L at Union Square rather using their brand new, higher capacity, west side Line, the Q. This has to stop. There is one last group of people, those who commute from 125th and above to 86th Street. They would be hurt by this plan. Period. They would have to transfer to a downtown 6 at 125th or an uptown 6 and 59th and that would suck. But every traffic decision has winners and losers, and the needs of the many yada yada. Outside of AM rush hours, when express trains can spend a normal amount of time at the station and have enough room to take new passengers, 4s and 5s can stop at the important station without a problem, only minimally impacting the travel time on those lines. Anyway, let me know what you guys think. I imagine if I were to give out a delta, it would be from convincing me that 86th Street is a more important station than I think it is, that travel time savings are more important for Manhattanites than Bronxites which I doubt you could convince me on or that the A D stretch btwn 125th and 59th has troubles because it's too long of a segment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NYC, Downtown 4\/5 Trains should skip 86th Street during AM rush hours.\n","id":"0cf3d6c2-854f-40f9-91e3-7fbde88727c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need more and stronger international institutions?<|ARGUMENT|>Issues like climate change that are of a global nature and can not be dealt with by single states or even groups of states require an equally global response.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"International institutions provide structures to deal with global problems and crises.\n","id":"9515d9a9-1fa3-432e-b721-762f9e617bcf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If children were never taught about religion until the age of 18 and were taught to think critically about everything to only believe what there is sufficient evidence for and even then to question then that religion would be far less popular. While you may feel that there is a double standard here since you can point to the past, where our whole view of the world and everything we thought we knew has changed due to a discovery, this is different. It's not about believing what you are told, its about thinking critically however I can't think of any case where an organized religion encourages free thinking and looking for evidence. I don't mean any offense to anyone, sorry if I have caused you any. I'm here to have my beliefs challenged so please do so<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There would be very few religious people if people were only taught what was believed to be scientifically accurate at the time until adulthood.\n","id":"99065063-eaba-4ebc-b970-89dd90526113"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Climate Change Be Reversed?<|ARGUMENT|>This is a feedback loop, because construction and maintenance causes the Earth to heat up more. Then, as the Earth heats up more, people's demand for swimming pools goes up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More swimming pools are being built as climate change heats up the Earth.\n","id":"fda24245-c248-418d-b6ad-ccab80afc944"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Simply put, we are our own reality engines, strictly powered by survival oriented perception. Things that matter are elevated by our perception with abstract labels such as good or important . We attach our own meaning to things based on complex survival and reproduction agents Things like pain, fear, sadness, hunger, and countless others. In my own personal opinion, the biggest opponent to objective meaning is the relativity of morality. What is good for you may not be good for your neighbor. However, there is an illusion of universals created by common interests. I personally enjoy eating food and having sex. Two of my favorite hobbies to be completely honest they are what I would consider subjectively fucking awesome. Moral relativity would suggest that not everyone finds benefit or happiness in such activity. Alas I have never met a person who did not share my exact sentiments on food or sex. This might lead me to believe there is such a thing as universal good. But I must consider the fact that I have never had a conversation with a rock or tree. Please humor me for a moment, and consider what that might be like. Trees might agree with me on things like food and sex, but may not share my very human opinions on things like shelter or clothing Things we can all agree are pretty dope. The rock on the other hand may very well not give a shit about anything. Rocks have no goals, or ambitions. There is no favorable endgame for a rock. It is all the same to them. But us humans are different. We want and crave things. Our ability to do so generates a great sense of privilege, as if we were placed with great care by the hand of god himself above all the beasts of the earth, who themselves have certainly been placed above the likes of rocks. This is where I disagree with human perception. We are not good. We are not bad. Nobody is important, and nothing anyone can do will matter. The reality generated by our own perception tends to tell us otherwise, but ultimately, our perception is flawed in a great many ways. EDIT Many of you have pointed out my misuse of the word matter . I had a warped definition of the word matter , so the title should read  Nothing absolutely matters. I have awarded \u2206s to the brave defenders of semantics accordingly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nothing really matters.\n","id":"d942ab2c-16d7-4072-bcc7-75610ed0259e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that it is irresponsible to allow people without the added knowledge and extended world view that a traditional liberal arts education provides. I live in the United States, and with the talk about making public college free I feel that the economic elitist argument would be at least for the most part voided. I don't want people with little or no exposure to intellectual ideals making decisions. This not a liberal vs. Conservative view, it's an ignorant liberal vs. Ignorant conservative view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In a democratic country with \"free\" public university, people without at least some higher education should not be allowed to vote.\n","id":"832eeb7c-9061-4e73-a506-320beef6c005"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are currently over 115,000 Americans awaiting a life saving organ transplant and about 8,000 of them die each year while waiting. Organs are now allocated by the national wait list computer based on things such as time waiting, acuity of illness, blood type, time proximity to donor and body size. The wait list algorithm should be changed to include organ donor registration status as an important allocation variable, meaning adults with a history five or more years of donor registration will be moved to the top of the list and those who have refused to register as donors moved toward the bottom of the list. This will tend to remove the free rider problem, give incentive to more people to register which will lead to more transplants and more lives saved. Pediatric patients under 18 will not be part of this extra point system. Patients between the ages of 18 to 23 will be provided a portion of extra wait list points dependent on the percent of time since turning 18 that they were registered i.e. a patient listed for transplant at age of 22 and registered as a donor when they were 20 would get 50 of bonus points.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US national wait list of organs for transplant should provide \"extra waiting list points\" to patients with a history of being registered donors.\n","id":"a7841050-9d89-41d5-b8cf-dec26e74a5ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>the whole thing was probably the most hilarious thing ive ever seen. i thought it was fantastic. unless the clown was holding a weapon or something then it was scary. but if the clown is just waving at you while holding some balloons, who really gives a shit? I mean its a joke. then some asshole thought itd be cool to just start beating up the clowns. like come one someone plays a prank on you and you just start acting like a fucking crazy person and attack them? like how does dressing up in a costume while waving at people driving warrant and assault? not cool its just a joke and anyone who attacked a clown is just a lame ass fucker who cant take a joke. sheesh. the clowns are just trying to scare you nothings gunna happen. look im not saying its just a prank bro but seriously man, take a joke. they are not harming you or offending you its just supposed to be funny. seriously change my opinion. those videos will never stop being funny as hell. and then there are people who shot clowns for nothing. fuck yourselves. you shot someone for scaring your ass and making you look like a pansy? oh come ON. im not condoning clowning, but is really that bad? seriously people these days are so damn uptight they cant take a joke. like at all. prank channels are stupid because theya rent pranks and they arent real. but this shit is real and its terrific. seriously i ope the clown sightings never end and i wish some crazy shit happens with a bunch of clwon popping up everywhere at once. ok i admit they scary thratening tweets coming from clowns are not cool. but i think over all it was just fun and games. it will always be hilarious and funny as shit. I saw some videos with clowns actually havign weapons, those arent cool. the chainsaw one and the baseball bat one are not cool. but the pranks where scary clowns were pretending to kill people in parking lots at midnight? holy shit hilarious. seriously funny as hell? why would any one have any problems with this? i know people hated 2016 because of the election and brexit and celebrities dying but clowns were pretty much one of the funniest things to happen this whole year and i thought it was pure awesome saucce are people issues becasue it was too scary? afraid for there lives? what? is there anyone who agrees with me at all? why would you want to beat up some clowns? they are people too. we need mroe of this shit more more more<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think those who went clown hunting in october had no sense of humour\n","id":"5508f127-67c4-4458-880e-b69801e9f987"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>What the students want is something that can only be determined by having an anonymous vote, in which at least the majority of students vote. Someone claiming to represent a group need to actually be voted into such a position.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Students are the ones most impacted by what happens at their universities. Thus, they should have significant say over what happens at their school.\n","id":"42e9f681-18a3-448c-9b24-08c721f7cefe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a backstory I am transgender but I hate saying this to people. Not due to any qualms about actually being transgender, but due to how the majority of the transgender community acts. I regularly browse r traa r mtf and r asktransgender but I rarely ever relate to or feel sympathy for any of the problems. Ignoring discrimination in the workplace, law, or medical providers, which are real issues, I don't think the transgender movement has any valid complaints. Here are some common complaints I hear that I almost never agree with Dysphoria A lot of transgender people complain about dysphoria and hating their body, but I fail to see how this is any different than what any unattractive person goes through. Most people are likely unhappy with some aspect of their appearance and I don't see why transgender people should be receiving any special treatment. Insurance would never cover plastic surgery for someone who is plain ugly, so why do they for transgender people. Dating Transgender people love to cry trans phobia when people don't want to date them especially if they get turned down because of their genitals. To me however, someone who has the correct anatomy preferring to date other people who have the correct anatomy is a valid preference. I fail to see how this is discrimination or trans phobic. In a similar vein I entirely believe that a transgender person should disclose that first thing in any relationship, otherwise they are misleading the other person and is basically the same as catfishing. Jokes Insults Trans people seem to get really up in arms about any joke at or about transgender people. In fact I regularly see them complaining and harassing people for jokes that are not even directly related to transgender people see h3h3 By definition most jokes are going to have a target. If it is okay to make jokes about any group of people then it should be okay to make jokes about all groups of people. I do not understand the mentality that some groups should be off limit. Misgendering Obviously I understand why people don't like getting misgendered, that said, I think it is entirely an issue between the transgender person and the one who misgendered them. There have been attempts like Bill C 16 to classify misgendering disrespecting someone's identity as hate speech, I fail to see how this is anything other than censorship and the government trying to get more power over potential political opponents. These are the biggest points I disagree with, there are more but these are the ones that came to mind as I was writing this post. Edit one of the comments I gave a delta to has adequately addressed my points, I'll likely stop replying to the rest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Very few of the complaints\/requests that transgender people have are valid.\n","id":"d198a297-285a-420e-81bd-4b0ff5506287"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>There is more to being a woman than genitalia. If someone feels feminine and identifies with all the attributes of being a women then they shouldn't have to be trapped in a gender they have no connection to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender. So if somebody identifies as female, they are.\n","id":"a53a49c2-d82e-4ddc-aa04-8bac21cb5721"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In school there were lots of people who got extra time on exams or even exams in a different format entirely for reasons like having learning disorders, dyslexia, ADHD, etc. I contend that this is doing a disservice to those students, because rather than teaching them effective coping strategies to deal with the same kinds of things as everyone else, it's giving them special treatment that they won't get out in the real world. I started thinking about this recently because I've been doing a lot of interviews for potential developer hires at my job recently, and none of us has ever even considered giving special accommodation to anyone. Everyone gets the same format of interview, and if you needed a lot more time to solve the problems we give for some reason, that probably means you'll take a lot more time to solve similar programming problems in the real workplace, meaning you'd be a slow developer and we wouldn't want you I haven't heard of any employer anywhere giving special accommodations in interviews, as the interviews are intended to measure the performance that you'd expect out of the interviewee on the actual job. What's the point of coddling students when they're young if those accommodations abruptly end as soon as the student graduates? It seems to me like we're setting them up for failure. The transition between schooling and working should be a smooth one, not a chasm so vast that it is unbridgeable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Students with learning disabilities should not be given special accommodations for exams, and doing so does them a disservice, because in the real world employers won't give you special accommodations for things that impact your work\n","id":"55d46d59-36f5-4fd1-bf21-b79a4913bb8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>The mark uses the information presented to them and makes what appears to be a rational decision. It may even seem to be their own idea, but the information isn't what it appears to be or it isn't the whole picture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The glory of a good confidence trick is that it's not about illogic, it's about misdirection and misinformation.\n","id":"76151775-7867-481b-8dc4-a1c100571bfa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Compare the Confederacy and their dehumanization of black people to the Nazis and their dehumanization of Jews. Germany performed significant penance through reparations and worked hard through foreign policy to earn back the trust of the rest of the world. They paid financially and they paid psychologically. They acknowledged their guilt and place in history. Because of this, Germany has become one of the most trusted and prosperous nations in Europe. While my American history is spotty sorry, but I\u2019m here to learn , it seems as though the Confederacy was never made to bear full responsibility for their slaveholding ways. I recognize that it was not so easy to draw a bright line on slavery in the same way one could on the holocaust, because the practice of slaving had also taken place in the North. That said, it seems to me like the Confederacy were not universally and publicly shamed into feeling guilty and making amends like the Germans were. The fact that it is still acceptable in the south to be proud of your murderous past, and to revere those who fought to preserve inhumanity is mind boggling to me. Statues were built of these people after the fact. Can you imagine anyone in Germany erecting statues of Hitler and flying Nazi flags today?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The reason racism is still so prevalent in the American South is because the Confederacy was not sufficiently shamed for their human rights abuse.\n","id":"ea89f37d-c93f-4efc-8e36-9e934cc93831"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The amount of resources we have access to and our efficient use of them is dependent on the state of our natural environment. There's no modern economy if we have a hard time getting the resources needed to supply it. Thus, I think environmental issues like climate change, natural disasters, mineral extraction rate, biodiversity, and air water quality should be given more priority by policymakers. Economic issues are still important per se, but if there is an environmental problem and an economic problem of the same scale, then the environmental problem ought to be addressed first, because there are greater long term consequences economic, health, social when our natural environment is being altered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While people should be concerned with both, I think environmental issues are fundamentally more important than economic issues.\n","id":"3ff6c85a-329d-4874-a946-87bb13db14ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think its fair to say that most people dont give a single shit about morality unless they're driven by compassion their conscience or worried about being judged by others for doing the wrong thing. So people eat meat because Most people wont judge them for it They have no compassion for the animal I feel compassion for animals and so I dont contribute to their mass abuse and slaughter, aside from the obivously immoral support of animal cruelty there's a bunch of reasons why vegetarianism is better for the earth, for your health etc, but until I gained that compassion it didnt matter to me. People like to act like their decision to eat meat is some kind of well thought out position that they're sure is logically and morally sound, but IMO its 100 backwards rationalisation. They already made the decision to eat meat as a child without thinking about it at all, and they want to keep doing it so they try to explain to themself why they do it instead of honestly thinking about whether or not they actually should. Eating meat can never be more or as ethical as not eating meat, because you're taking life needlessly and contributing to causing no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible all kinds of abuse towards animals. But people just dont really give a shit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People dont eat meat because they think its morally okay, they just dont give a shit about morality.\n","id":"ed3f4cbe-4ecd-485b-a485-031f93674bae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sweatpants are like masks, in that they're terribly comfortable and I think everyone will be wearing them in the future. My mom has been trying to get me to stop wearing sweatpants for years. I don't see why they're basically t shirts for your legs. They're more comfortable than slacks or jeans, and they always fit. Finding jeans that fit right is a nightmare. Either the legs are too short or the waist is too wide. Blech. Obviously they're not formal clothing, but I don't see people wearing them in informal settings. And they can be too hot for warm summer days, but I don't see people wearing them in cold or mild weather and anyway, jeans are just as hot and people still wear those. I'll concede that jeans are sexier than sweatpants. But whenever people talk about casual dress, or just dressing for comfort, it's always Jeans and a t shirt. Or shorts, depending on the weather. Sweatpants deserve more credit. Anyway. Sweatpants are underrated. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I like sweatpants! They're comfy and easy to wear!\n","id":"e2569945-c9be-4080-a2c8-ae170893200a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have always been pro choice. Having women imprisoned by their own biological functions by children they didn't ask for seems unfair and by hurting the mother's ability to have control over this key aspect of her life, it also hurts society. There are some cases where abortions are needed for the health of the mother, but when it comes to abortion as a matter of choice 'I'm not ready for kids' I think the arguments of pro lifers are actually pretty convincing. When I hear counter arguments from my 'side' about when life starts or does not start, they sound like disingenuous hair splitting to defend a position that is at its core expedient, not moral. Edit Because I've been asked about the 'hair splitting arguments' commend, I mean comments that say 'well, the baby can't sustain homeostasis outside of the womb' or 'well, technically it doesn't have full human consciousness because it's brain hasn't fully formed'. That seems like hair splitting to me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am pro-choice but only because I think it is expedient. Morally I think pro-lifers are right.\n","id":"9f78edd6-038b-4d44-a158-384913976f71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Isn't it a bit much to get all up on your high horse about all the jobs you've created, all the value you've brought to the economy, all how you deserve everything you've worked so hard for, but then turn around and say your kids deserve it all, yes ALL OF IT, despite them having done nothing for anyone else and simply just being born into the family? You can look at families like the Buffet Gates and see how they have taught their children responsibility in finances, and limited their access to the families wealth, but I am of the opinion that of the great family wealths, these are the minority and ultimately we shouldn't rely on the ultra rich to be so altruistic. Please help me understand the other side of the argument. EDIT Thanks guys for helping my understand the flaw in my argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conservatives are hypocritical for espousing and coveting wealth creation, yet willing ignore those views when passing family wealth down to their children through inheritance\n","id":"ff133c63-32a9-4220-897d-dcb576e6585d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>No Child Left Behind Act<|ARGUMENT|>Teachers will probably not cheat the system, simply out of respect for themselves, their profession, and their students. The system should not, therefore, cave to a minority of teachers that decide to violate the rules. Instead, measures should be taken to ensure that teachers do not cheat and that cheating teachers are caught.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most teachers are honest and will not cheat the system under NCLB.\n","id":"b81ffbde-3061-41af-bb31-a6b8354061b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>A meaningful gesture that one is free from corrupting influences would be to reject any large donations over a certain amount e.g. $500, $750 and have to rely on small dollar donations from regular Americans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Publicly stating that one is rejecting corporate PAC money is largely a \"cheap gesture\n","id":"0962d1a8-aba7-4ead-8fdb-396989034e75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This one has stewed in my head for a while yes, I knew Puerto Rico was part of the U.S before hurricane Maria . Puerto Rico\u2019s lack of statehood is contributing to a healthcare crisis on the island Puerto Rico receives half the rate of federal funding of states, despite 68 of its population depending on Medicare for their healthcare. Not to mention that it is 20 of the GDP. Statehood would entitle Puerto Rico to additional healthcare funding, and help alleviate this crisis. There is also, of course, the Puerto Rican economy. Puerto Rico has a poverty rate of 43.5 an unemployment rate of 10.6 and of course is in 70 billion of debt. Giving Puerto Rico statehood would give them access to chapter 9 of the U.S bankruptcy code, which wouldn\u2019t erase the debt, but help with restructuring it and reduce it somewhat. And the impact of the increase in federal funding and connection to the rest of the country is fairly intuitive we have the example of Hawaii Consider that due to the Jones act, which requires goods to be shipped to the mainland U.S before being shipped to Puerto Rico, goods are more expensive than on the mainland. For example, cars are 40 more expensive. And most of all, statehood would entitle Puerto Rico to representation. Puerto Rico, an island of more than 3 million people has only one non voting member in the U.S congress. That\u2019s less representation than Wyoming, with just over half a million. Congress makes laws that affect Puerto Rico, and the President is currently the head of state, but Puerto Rico gets no representation in Congress or the right to vote in presidential elections. Why? There is no good reason for Puerto Rico not to be represented. They pay nearly all the taxes that the other states pay no taxation without representation , and their residents can serve in the military and do 20,000 in World War I, 60,000 in Korea, about 48,000 in Vietnam They can pay most taxes and serve in the military, but don\u2019t get representation? Why? The main counter argument I\u2019ve seen to this is obvious Puerto Rico\u2019s debt. Access to chapter 9 would only cover a portion of Puerto Rico\u2019s debt. About 2 3 of the 70 billion of debt about 46.2 billion would still fall to the U.S government. This doesn\u2019t strike me as very compelling, because the U.S currently has trillions of dollars in debt 46.2 billion is barely even a portion of the budget deficit, even 70 billion wouldn\u2019t be much compared to that. Not to mention, statehood would obligate Puerto Rico to pay federal income tax one of the few taxes they don\u2019t pay , bringing in additional revenue from Puerto Rico. This might offset some of the costs of federal aid, and honestly the gap between what they pay and what they receive is not a compelling enough reason given that it would all be so small scale to deny them representation they deserve as U.S citizens. Edit While I\u2019m grateful that many people have decided to educate me on chapter 9, I\u2019m fully aware that it operates for cities and municipalities. Hence, it cannot fully eliminate the debt, but as far as I\u2019m aware there are cities and municipalities in Puerto Rico which it would apply to. Another edit Many people have pointed out the referendums in which Puerto Rico has rejected statehood. I accept that perhaps this post would better be titled \u201cstatehood is the best option for Puerto Rico\u201d.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Puerto Rico should be made a U.S state.\n","id":"5d6690d0-9346-4b75-b31e-fc33456f2674"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is meritocracy the best form of government?<|ARGUMENT|>It's in human nature and not only human as a biological imperative that one will try and preserve it's genes by offering competitive advantages to its descendants. As a result, whoever is in a position of power will use it to perpetuate the privileges, and merit will only last for a generation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Meritocracy is an illusion. People start from different points and the meritocratic system doesn't address that difference. In time, it tends to elitisation.\n","id":"44d4915e-34ee-4e70-9110-b0c9bd755a6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My main reason to stand by this is that I believe it will reduce corruption. Senators take so much money from lobbyists. However, lobbyists don't really give money directly to the Senators, they just make a hefty donation to the senators reelection campaign. If they didn't have a reelection campaign, that would be a non issue. Instead of a campaign, a prospective candidate can give a speech to the General Assembly of their state. By reducing the influence special interests hold over Congress, the Legislature would be more reliable as a whole. We would still have lobbyists doing the same thing in the House, but a bought Rep. is technically worth much less than a bought Senator. And our legislature would return to how it was originally intended to be. Some people claim this is undemocratic, but I disagree. Some people say that Obama shouldn't get to appoint a Supreme Court Justice because he should wait until after the election, so the people have a voice. But allot of people say that the people already have a voice because they elected the last congress and President. And since people elect their General Assembly, they will have a democratic voice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should repeal the direct election of Senators\n","id":"9b06e503-fa75-49c1-95d3-53ecab5f8e03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>In the logical sense anything which cannot be proved to be logically contradictory is \"possible.\" It is known that God is not logically contradictory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We don't have to have perfect understanding of a claim in order for it to be considered logically possible.\n","id":"7f8ba3bf-377d-49a5-b75f-f0aa5d719e73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My wife recently found herself in some hot water with a few of her coworkers after repeating something said in confidence to the subjects of the statement, out of curiosity. While she, in retrospect, feels she should not have asked the question, I feel if you're confident enough in the statement to say it to one person, you should have no problem saying it to another, whoever that may be. I'm speaking strictly in terms of statements that qualify as gossip and don't have any legal or life threatening ramifications if repeated to the wrong person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you can't say it publicly you shouldn't say it privately\n","id":"5f475e09-f789-4ab6-aab9-5aae37cf0b95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For context, I'm speaking more about in professional environments. I see a lot of this in career advice subs. I used to consider myself very introverted and I credit some specific decisions I've made in the past that forced me into those experiences I dreaded speaking to strangers, public speaking, team lead responsibilities etc with getting me past the paralyzing I can't do that mentality that was holding me back. It all still scares me but now it scares me while I do it anyways and it gets easier every time. I see a lot of people that seem to use it as an excuse as something to blame for why they can't do something and so they don't do it. I don't know how to word all this without sounding like a condescending prick<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Saying \"I'm an introvert\" isn't an excuse to not work on your soft skills, it's a recognition that you need to work harder to improve in those areas.\n","id":"61d96373-6c56-43d9-84e0-4c41db71eb1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>The Enterprise also twice enters an atmosphere in the Kelvin timeline. Once in \"Into Darkness\" where it falls un-powered into Earth's atmosphere. This does not significantly damage the ship. And again in \"Star Trek: Beyond\" after it is already fatally crippled. The atmospheric entry and crash don't really do any more damage than the ship had already sustained.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Enterprise in the Kelvin timeline is built in an atmosphere. In Star Trek: into Darkness, it not just enters an atmosphere, but hides underwater.\n","id":"322e7f9b-daff-431e-9428-1e5367d4b5dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Kingdom Ban the Burqa and Niqab?<|ARGUMENT|>Because these two pieces of clothing are specific to Muslim dress, such a ban would rightly be seen as anti-Muslim.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Such a ban would be an infringement of people's freedom of religion, which is a fundamental human right.\n","id":"9753dcce-e057-49bf-8a1e-9adfb4c1534a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Crowd Sourced Information Reliable?<|ARGUMENT|>Newspapers constantly prove this to be the case: their biases and misinformation are spread through a veneer of supposed accuracy. Crowd-sourced information can be similarly tainted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is easy to fool others into believing information is reliable and accurate.\n","id":"4f39d937-c210-4eb7-b9eb-8c237bd4fd5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>In the entire history of observation there has never been an event that was not caused.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If at any point nothing existed, then nothing would exist at all.\n","id":"a9c08e3f-86ce-443a-af9b-8afb62ed859b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Social networks are incredibly important for job opportunities. Immigrants that aren't familiar with culture and values of the host country may struggle to establish proper social networks that can lead to job opportunities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Immigrants who aren't familiar with the culture and values of the host country is likely to have a harder time getting a job.\n","id":"cee16154-1324-4d7f-9a8a-14f36957aa92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should U.S. Presidents Have the Power to Issue Pardons?<|ARGUMENT|>As an elected politician, the president is not guaranteed to have any legal expertise. They are likely to lack a detailed understanding of the legal system required to make them an effective and fair check or balance on the judiciary's power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The President is particularly poorly positioned to exercise this power.\n","id":"028d00ed-f852-418d-b324-9f7ea7dd9cb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's a whole lot of aspects to this as it's an extremely broad view, and I'm aware your tolerance goes up over time. To give a bit of personal info I'm 28, started smoking at 14, and have hitchhiked 40k miles on both coasts in the last decade if you don't know why that's relevant I'm sorry for you When I was younger you could buy low grade swag , medium grade mids , and high grade nugs and there were fairly universal and understood prices for all three. Now the expectation almost anywhere in America deep south still has mexican brick is only the absolute highest quality of pot, and a lot of the people both buying selling it have never had real high grade. An enormous amount of mid grade is sold as nugs without people who have a lower tolerance even realizing they are peddling an inferior product that's worth half or less as much. Further more with the decline in the price of a pound after legalization growers feel compelled to fight for a price, even if they aren't growing the top shelf themselves.There's immense experience alongside an enormous investment to successfully grow buds like the ones in a high times picture, and everyone wants to believe they get the weed that's like that but unless you're buying in a dispensary that's not really a guarantee. TL DR I think with the abolition of three grades of cannabis, the increased number of novice growers, and the overall changing culture around cannabis, the average expectation for what constitutes high grade has actually gone down.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Despite an increase in the maximum potency of marijuana the average street potency has declined or remained stagnant.\n","id":"42a860e0-34e0-4843-abbb-c64e49f03e3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Anyone who would be in charge of such a system can easily abuse it as we've seen historically whenever governmental systems gain too much power over people's lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The power that the database affords governments would encourage it to abuse or exploit its citizens.\n","id":"63233bd0-6dc9-44b2-945f-5a9599ba476a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>There have been majorities to approve welfare programs in the US, as they were recognized as necessary by a political and social majority. First, in 1935 with a federally sponsored retirement program and then as Social Security Act. Since then, aside from Medicaid, there are 13 large categories that include welfare programs in the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If that many people represent a majority of voters and they support candidates who want to implement those programs, chances are those programs are indeed implemented.\n","id":"60292641-426e-49ec-904b-905a69419644"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Judges be Elected or Appointed?<|ARGUMENT|>The rate at which Trump has nominated these unqualified individuals, and the proportion of total nominations he has made that are unqualified is notably higher than any previous administration.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Trump administration has nominated an unprecedented amount of unqualified judges, presumably for their political appeal.\n","id":"b242cb60-e262-46be-a3c6-14bbb9fb50cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tibet independence<|ARGUMENT|>Tsoltim N. Shakabpa. \"The case againts autonomy for Tibet\". January 14, 2008 - \"Communist Chinese for an official agreement to have autonomous status for Tibet, we will be surrendering many of the rights we are now entitled to.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tibetans in exile enjoy greater freedom currently than autonomy could offer\n","id":"9aa863f1-5706-41e5-ae10-875b06e06dfc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Charles Darwin only humans can blush which reveals the depth of social thought and innovative mechanisms to keep society together.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are exhibiting different characteristics than animals and therewith can be considered unique.\n","id":"31803698-a26d-42b0-916e-316a5c7786d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Too many times I go to shows and people complain about getting accidentally kicked or hit pushed knocked down. Preface These are normal punk or hardcore shows, not some weird satanic blood shows 99 of the time no one is looking to intentionally harm someone However, in a tight area where people are pushing shoving jumping stage diving crowd surfing, you could get mildly hurt or seriously injured. That's part of the fun of it, though. Too many times people get mad at others when they get hurt, complain, say it was a shitty show because they don't know how to behave in a mosh pit. It pisses me off, but enough people do it there must be a reason behind it. I've been decently hurt in one before and I expected it. There are always the side lines where people stand and nod their heads and enjoy the music. Go there if you want to listen and be apart of the show. Part 2 of this  if you WANT to be apart of the aggression, GO TO THE REAL MOSH PIT don't try to start shoving and pushing the sideline people, they chose not to be apart of it and it doesn't make you look tough pushing around people standing around.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you go into an energetic\/aggressive moshpit, you can't complain if you get hurt.\n","id":"c710ed53-2fe8-4f03-ad91-c5277e9a26d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's the core of r atheism. I am not looking to debate the merits of religion just that evangelical atheists are no better than evangelical religious people. I don't think it is appropriate to try to tell someone what to believe and how to interpret reality, and I find it hypocritical and cheap that certain people think that they can do this because they are correct. I personally don't believe in God, but there are plenty of reasons why believing in God is a rational practice that makes sense. So I just would like to know why many atheists think that it is okay for them to do it but not religious people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that people who go around trying to convince people that God doesn't exist are no better than religious evangelicals.\n","id":"bdff2181-4c3d-4242-b9f6-8b8aa73d1232"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>One proposed legislative act is to require that gun owners keep guns locked up and separate from ammunition. This would infringe the right to bear arms by making it impossible to use guns in certain circumstances, such as defense against home invasion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Infringe is defined as \"act so as to limit or undermine something; encroach on.\" Several of the proposed legislative actions in this discussion meet this definition and are not mere 'reasonable boundaries.'\n","id":"07e19dfc-2a53-4a1f-b34a-3ec537f8d7d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>The Remain voters tended to come from the \"elite classes with higher levels of education or held professional\/managerial roles. Choosing to remain could be seen as the popular will being overcome by the wishes of the elite.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Remaining in the EU would undermine the UK citizens' faith in democracy.\n","id":"8cade40e-df79-4b35-be44-bdcca70a4d28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Individuals Be Allowed Paid Period Leave?<|ARGUMENT|>Unless paid leave was sponsored externally, small businesses may shy away from hiring more women of menstruating age due to the financial cost, as has been the case in the past with women of childbearing age<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fewer women would be employed due to the additional expense imposed upon employers by this provision.\n","id":"71aed734-7a8f-4ee1-bfa6-456a8b31d7b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The slaughter of dolphin is no different than the slaughter of cow or chicken or deer or any other animal. Imagine if the Indian ambassador made a statement saying the U.S or any other nation needs to stop its slaughter of cows. The slaughter for cows would not stop. Some may argue that the Japanese dolphin hunt is inhumane, however it is no more inhumane the the slaughter of other animals. I believe that individuals are justified in criticizing the dolphin hunt but no nation is justified. The citizens of every nation eat animal meat in some variety. I don't believe any government has the right to criticize the slaughter of dolphin unless that country slaughters no animals itself. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The criticism of the Japanese dolphin hunt by the United States is hypocritical and ridiculous.\n","id":"89fa900c-2dd5-4f61-ae7e-1882f7e70e58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents who want financial benefits from the government would be more likely to manipulate the system into being able to have a parental license so they themselves can gain from the financial benefits over taking care of their children, adopted, foster or otherwise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some foster parents are accused of undertaking the role to benefit from the financial stipend that comes with it, rather than to care for the incoming child.\n","id":"d0adbe46-d53f-417c-bec8-fe20d8c5c784"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>The average net price of attending a 4 year college or university for a full-time undergraduate student is $25,409 per year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"College degrees cost a lot of money, even on partial scholarships.\n","id":"8e2587d4-1ad4-4573-b074-e9f44d848cbc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Police Should Be Armed<|ARGUMENT|>The old-fashioned notions of friendly neighbourhood light policing reflected the aspirations of a different age. As armed violence has increased sharply in parts of the developed world, the police need to redefine their role so that it is a more appropriate response to contemporary problems. There is also a network effect involved in being a state with unarmed police when others have them. The nation may be seen as a \u201csoft touch\u201d compared to other regional nations. This can effectively encourage an importation of criminality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The old-fashioned notions of friendly neighbourhood light policing reflected the aspirations of a di...\n","id":"0886d1b4-c8b1-4482-b25d-5de851971c49"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everybody has a different phone, but for reference, mine has a case with a rubber liner and hard black plastic outside. I generally make every effort to keep my phone out of the sun, but sometimes I can't help it, and feel like when I have to, it's better to leave it face up in an effort toreflect away some of the sunshine instead of let it get absorbed into the predominately black back side. I'm open to being wrong, and I feel like this is a kinda cut and dry debate with one answer being better than the other. Of course there are other variables, like direct sunlight out in the open, or having the sunlight coming through a window or other transparent object.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If I have to leave my phone sitting in the sunlight, it's better to have the screen facing up to reflect sunlight and help keep my phone cooler.\n","id":"6beae8d7-57fb-4db1-a256-e65494ecea5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tezos should use fully token-based voting: one Tezzie, one vote<|ARGUMENT|>A non one-tezzie=one-vote system could be easier taken over by people hostile to the community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tezos should use fully token-based voting: one Tezzie, one vote\n","id":"a5742df8-c4d7-4e08-ae01-36260007073f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello, my name is KopfnussLOL and i am a big music lover. I follow no specific genre, but while i prefer one or another i like to give other genres a chance and take a listen. Since i left the army and started studying my budged has become smaller and smaller every day so i am today totally relying on illegal downloads or streams. Only every once a while i am investing in a REALLY good CD to 1. show some support 2. a bunch of high quality albums on your shelf are much more awesome than dozens of gigabytes on your PC. While i understand that musicians need to make a living out of their songs, i think the internet has done more good in general than bad for them. While the last years bought us some examples of real life discovered talents Nicky Minajj for example , a good amount got famous over the internet. I won't argue about some small views on Youtube, but guys and girls that uploaded shit to Youtube and got a major deal out of it. Just a bunch of examples The Artic Monkeys, who were the first band where i realized this. Justin Bieber, who, while somehow polarizing, was discovered on Youtube PSY, who had a label in Korea but got world famous via Youtube, holding some world records for Youtube Achievements. Aside from that there are various musicians using the internet for marketing purposes, that are basicly free. A good example is the recent album of Daft Punk. Daft Punk is a big name in the music industrie, so this example is not really saying anything, because that album might have scored without the help of the internet, but it was there, so why not take it. Daft Punk played various flashs of their logo and some seconds of Get Lucky at various TV Shows and festivals, that by itself stated nothing. Only with the force of the internet the theory was created they will release a new album and, more important, an uproar was caused. There are many other examples of musicians using the internet, from Snoop Dogs AmAs here, that crashed reddit, as i heard, to Arcade Fires interactive Music Video using google Maps can't find a link, sorry, seems to be down today . Every musician today uses Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube and what ever else is out there. Many of them took a look at reddit, doing an AmA or something similar. In the years where i got in contact with music you had very limited marketing channels The radio, and news papers music magazines. The options, for you as a listener, to come in contact with a specific band were very limited. You had to be famous to get to your listeners, kind of. Today you have websites and programs like last.fm or spotify, that may match an other band to one you like and play it on your radio set gets calculated by a computer program. You can follow your favorite bands on twitter, facebook and Co. and see what other bands they promote. You can just hit alb in the youtube search bar and i guarantee there will be at least one band at the suggestions. I think the succses of music isn't counted by the number of selled records, but by the number of listeners. By the amount of people that join your concert. By the number of plays at radio stations and music televisions. By the people on the streets that proudly wear a shirt with your name on it. I think downloading songs is nothing bad change my view Please don't use the money argument. That may count for small bands, yes, but those bands got the potential of the internet to grow bigger fanbases. The big musicians are earning enough outside of record sells to keep them more then alive<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the internet has done more good for the musicians than bad - !\n","id":"43fac2aa-a867-4fee-9f3e-6f1e86d1e58b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Human life has a higher value because humans need and depend on each other, socially and economically.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A human life is worth more than the life of an animal.\n","id":"c4116537-88c1-486b-b51e-45e12010b973"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Home plate collision rule in baseball<|ARGUMENT|>Mark Smith. \"Home plate collision: It's about the money.\" May 27th, 2011: \"Contact isn\u2019t an important part of the game like it is in football, and it isn\u2019t necessary at the plate.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Home plate contact isn't an important part of game.\n","id":"a9e5b5c0-63aa-4dc1-bdea-85a3bc465021"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think it would be fair to say that the EU is in the best possible state and absolutely fine as it is, but that's not what I want to say here. I believe that the UK has a tendency to try to be a bit of an island nation. It is this fierce self reliance that led to many of our great successes in the past, but like anything it has to be tempered. I think that the spirit of global cooperation and collectively striving for a shared success is a noble goal. Further, I think that the rest of the EU and Europe, to be considered separately is already grudgingly accepting of us, and to take a further step back would harm international relations. A step towards Splendid Isolation cannot be good for our economy, or our culture. I cannot see how it would encourage more competitive trade, I cannot see how it would attract the best and brightest, I cannot see how we could continue in the manner to which we are accustomed without continuing to play a part in the wider European community. Arguments to the contrary don't seem convincing to me. The guarantee from people like BoJo that we could have the same trade deals, the same human rights, and so on, seem to indicate simply that things wouldn't change. They also state that we spend umpteen millions just sent to Brussels . I cannot believe that we don't see any benefits from that, but currently I'm not aware enough of what they are. I'm open to having my mind changed on this. I don't want to, but a lot of people are very angry about it, and maybe they're right. Full disclosure, I'm university educated and under 25, and I lived for a time in Italy, so I'm ticking all the demographic boxes. Cheers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UK should vote to remain in the European Union.\n","id":"a3c08f8f-108f-4eb4-9e52-542996970253"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a straight male, so I can only talk about the attractiveness of female pits, but I believe the musky smell of a man's under arm sweat is also attractive to women. The armpit is full of a wide variety of rich aromas from the light zesty overtones after a walk in the sun, to the warm and salted punch of a soaking wet gym top, and of course the pungent sour explosion of flavours emitting from a festival goer after a weekend of camping, drug fueled dancing and sex with no showers in between. Secondly, the armpit is a very sensitive area, responding well to a light touch, or a forceful tickle. When the arm is lifted high, the under arm skin is stretched into a blank canvas, inviting you to adorn it with gentle caresses and strokes of the finger, like an artist staring in reverence of his work and imparting meaning and depth into it with every dab of the brush. Some armpits are clean shaven and soft, inviting a light nuzzle as you inhale its delicate fumes. Others are wild and hairy and require a firmer touch just stick that nose in there and get that stench all over it. But my personal favourite is when the pit is bedecked with a layer of stubble like a bed of turf to sink into and forget yourself as the subtle scratchy texture massages your cheek. Sometimes the pit can also have a wrinkle or two running down the middle, providing an exciting terrain for your tongue to explore. Each one has its own distinctive appearance and its own distinctive scent, which to a man such as myself provides a tempting allure. Much more excitement lies in the area under the arm than the area between the legs. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The armpit is the most attractive part of the human body\n","id":"c3e22db5-a35b-4939-b5db-dd72eeb9437a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>The movie's subversion of established plot lines and characters led to an unnecessary split in the fan base among those who like this approach and those who don't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Story-lines and characters set up in previous films were not treated with much respect.\n","id":"ac9e1b64-ea0d-42b5-b130-41a76ce98a7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Multiculturalism vs. assimilation<|ARGUMENT|>Every society has a culture and often more than one culture; that is a nation always has subcultures. The issue is not group rights being sacrificed to individual rights, but assimilation often consists of one dominating group's rights taking precedence over all other group rights. In American history, up until the 1960s, white American rights were more valuable than the rights of non-whites. In some areas of life, this still occurs. In America today, the rights of men are literally more valuable in some cases, than the rights of women, doing the exact same work. What multiculturalism does is safeguard the at times tyrannical dominance of one group over all others, forcing others to comply to their standards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is misleading to claim multiculturalism sacrifices individual right to group rights\n","id":"0fc9d28d-573e-4b9f-8740-6460dfd2759f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should U.S. military spending be cut in favor of other programs?<|ARGUMENT|>High spending in the military encourages involvement in affairs which the country has no business in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"U.S. military spending should be lowered in favor of other programs.\n","id":"5ee12499-cd7f-41eb-998b-91ff1f3a96f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A flexible work culture allows people the freedom to find a job\/career they are not only skilled in, but genuinely enjoy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI will help the labor market adapt to inevitable disruptions caused by advancements in automation and artificial intelligence.\n","id":"f19e6a18-0de9-49f7-8cf2-84fa7110e4ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>FairTax would improve the current US taxation system.<|ARGUMENT|>Sales taxation reduces corporate tax evasion by making sure multinational corporation can't hide their profits in inter subsidiary fees<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The FairTax is simple and cheap for the government to administer.\n","id":"bf18d143-2514-4020-89ea-bd68a3b007e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should hate speech be illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>The Free Marketplace of Ideas, expressed in modern society through revolutionary platforms like Kialo will ultimately eviscerate any negative effects of hate speech through the exchange of thought.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is better to challenge bad ideas than to simply ban the enunciation of them.\n","id":"d62f3222-a6f0-4fa6-92e7-2654b27b9e1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>Shareholders should care about the compensation of the company's executives because it reduces the money\/capital available to the company to be invested in profitable projects that could raise the share price.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because shareholders ultimately bear the costs of compensating the company's employees, they should be the ones to determine how much is paid.\n","id":"79fbf8da-73a1-444b-a513-46d6a6457852"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Americans love to boast about their FREEDOM but they actually never stand up for much. There are no unions or anti war protests, there is internet outrage but nothing is done. I can't remember a single successful protest in the last 50 years. You know Saudi Arabia was behind 9 11, you know Iraq has nothing to do with 9 11, you know the 2008 crash was caused by the bankers, but no one protests, you only complain, and everything just continues as is. The Patriot Act robbed you of may freedoms the police can legally steal from you for no reason civil asset forfeiture the vast majority of people want single payer healthcare the list goes on and on. You are the richest country in HISTORY but apparently can't take a single day off of work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Americans are very docile and obedient.\n","id":"86702240-6ef9-48bc-8b76-92e5356aa614"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>For the impeachment process to proceed, there would need to be direct evidence tying then-candidate Trump to the Russian government. He himself must be guilty of a criminal charge. Although several campaign staffers have been found guilty of charges, Donald Trump himself has not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no definitive evidence to suggest the Trump campaign colluded. The investigations have moved on to investigate whether there was obstruction of justice - which implies that they aren't going to find collusion evidence.\n","id":"67504d70-5d4c-4c91-87c2-ee70f7603d18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are identity politics detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>There is much overlap between anti-racism groups, feminist groups, and LGBT advocacy groups. The members of these groups are united because they share a common experience of oppression, and are also united against a common enemy: hegemonic power structures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Critical theory assumes all oppressed groups find their fundamental unity in their common experience of oppression.\n","id":"632944ca-0c1b-461d-92d7-18fa0211645e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>In Kenya, around 6% percent of the population between the ages of 15 and 49 are HIV positive in Uganda, close to 8% and in Zambia, 13.5 % of the adult population live with HIV.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Central Africa where the Catholic Church keeps advocating against condom use, the devastating HIV and AIDS epidemic is killing people.\n","id":"da497a3a-2cb2-4fe3-ac29-69ca7114bc9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals who spend thousands of dollars on microtransactions in video games are known as whales . These people form the bedrock of motivation devs and publishers have to continue the odious practices of pay to win microtransactions, ubiquitous lootboxes, and the upcoming flood of live services . Most people don't like many of the monetization schemes that have been pumped into modern games. Unfortunately, publishers are usually financially better served by ignoring the majority of their playerbase. The reason for this stems from the sheer lopsidedness of spending habits between whales and average customers. For every 100 customers who refuse to purchase a game because of its overbearing microtransactions, a company only needs to attract a single whale to be more profitable. Estimates show that 0.15 of gamers account for 50 of all in game revenue. The usual response to a company doing something a lot people don't like would be to vote with your wallet , but this utterly fails when whales vote a thousand times. Rarely, the average customers can complain so loudly that the publisher is forced to listen like what happened with Battlefront 2. But this was a very uncommon exception when EA dramatically overstepped the line. EA's recent statements about returning to lootboxes is very indicative of the status quo that is deeply committed to overbearing monetization. Whales are simply too lucrative to ignore. Hence, we continue to get aggressive monetization schemes despite the discontent it causes among the majority of the playerbase. Even if you never purchase a single lootbox or microtransaction, the structure of many modern games has still fundamentally changed for the worse due to their inclusion. A lot of the ire has been directed towards the publishers and companies directly responsible for including aggressive monetization schemes in their games, and while this is fair to an extent, it ignores the motivation companies have to include these types of monetization in the first place. Whales are poisoning games for the rest of us, and yet they're rarely discussed when microtransactions are brought up. We should treat them like someone who smokes cigarettes. Smokers do most of the damage to their own body, but they also hurt society through secondhand smoke and from using subsidized healthcare dollars. Similarly, whales do most of the damage to themselves through their reckless spending, but they also hurt the game industry as a whole by incentivizing toxic microtransactions. Whales should be shunned for their actions and encouraged to not spend so aggressively. Not only will this address the root motivation of microtransactions, it's more likely to create meaningful change than complaining that companies like EA are doing things that are motivated by profits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who spend thousands on microtransactions in video games make things worse for everyone and deserve to be shunned\n","id":"55ff03cd-e94e-4035-bf15-8eb9e05cd58c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>When a law that is obviously a mistake gets put into practice i.e. Roe vs. Wade it becomes increasing difficult to remove it due to legislative bureaucracy and emotional attachments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fact that governments think something is a problem does not make it true.\n","id":"f07ef3fb-6db5-4f0b-a582-dfa326f2eff4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>Studies, such as those done by Concordia University in Montreal in 2011 have shown that the development of infants and toddlers depend on the child learning from adults that they trust, suggesting that even children who are too young to articulate beliefs still do not start from a position of \"believing in nothing\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Arguing \"belief in nothing\" as a starting position is inconsistent with human nature.\n","id":"ce2f51a6-79a1-4c75-97c8-0eabf4b012c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just look at popular anti SJW youtube channels such Sargon of Akkad and Atheism is unstoppable. They constantly resort to petty insults and condescension and inspire their followers to the same. The comments under any videos even slightly critical of SJW's are full of misogyny , racism and Islamophobia. Just look at Reddit for heaven's sake. Even if you point out that something someone said might be bigoted you immediately get called an oversensitive SJW and get bombarded with ignorance. I'm not even a feminst but the bigotry is palpable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The anti-SJW movement has become a cesspool of bigotry.\n","id":"c8a65552-aab8-44a8-bfe5-942d592f3f69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hunger Games-Style Tournaments Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>It is possible to make a clear distinction between a government condoning the right for these games to exist, and condoning the actions that take place within the game.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing sports and other activities that can involve violence and injury to be legal does not mean that the government condones all actions that occur within those activities.\n","id":"8966e16b-ff97-4108-aba2-10b975b2450d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV Vaccinations be Compulsory?<|ARGUMENT|>One cannot allow a doctor to conduct surgeries by just assuming they are qualified or capable. They have to be tested for competence before entering the operating theater for the first time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The legal precedent of innocent before proven guilty is effective in the case of criminal justice, but not in the case of licensing systems.\n","id":"b9061390-b580-4611-9882-e476bb9bc723"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Problem Not all states and furthermore counties are equal. There are inherent differences between states that mean that there are issues that only certain states face. The constitution recognizes one such difference population and deliberately tries to correct for this. However, there are no such corrections for differences that are more complex then population. Examples of these differences that aren't corrected for include geographical categories like coastlines, weather and natural resources. Federal policies that are greatly influenced by these differences mentioned previously, can lead to situations where states are effected differently by policy outcomes that can lead to unfair outcomes. For example, representatives from states that are not effected by a particular issue would be less likely to vote for federal funding directed toward that issue. EDIT sorry, I see why everybody is talking specifically about federal funding. I agree that this can't work for funding. I was originally thinking towards policies that allow or forbid individual actions. For example, a policy that forbids lgbt people from using certain bathrooms. Or a policy that does not allow convicted immigrants to stay in the country or the DREAM act. My thought is that for certain policies that have measurable differences in impact on the state level, states should have weighted representation by their perceived impact. I believe that this would create better outcomes for the country and for the states themselves. x200B Case Study when applied to Immigration On the surface, it makes sense that immigration policy has to be on the federal level as it deals with people becoming citizens of the country, not specific states. However, illegal immigrants are not distributed the around the country equally, with most of the absolute number being located on the border states x200B In the current system, when creating legislation, all representatives of the house and senate have an equal say, but yet they and their constituents are not equally effected by the issue. I would argue, that states and perhaps even counties at the level of the house which have a higher number of illegal immigrants would have more credibility in deciding the path forward for our policy on this issue. x200B Given an agreed upon metric, I believe it should be possible to weight votes by that metric. A naive approach for this example would be to take the absolute immigration count and do a running percentage sum to determine the percentage share. x200B Issues agreeing upon metrics. I believe that these would need to be voted on occasionally. agreeing upon what issues would be included in this group. No solution currently<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the US, federal policies related to issues such as illegal immigration, which disproportionately affect states, should see weighted representation by state.\n","id":"1db85997-7a9a-4dbb-bd06-f513a24266c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Traditional masculine traits assertiveness, rationality, aggressiveness are more highly valued and associated with prominent social roles. Traditional feminine traits nurture, sensitivity, intuitiveness are associated with submissiveness and less socially valued roles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Characters in video games often reflects traditional gender roles. These roles, which are centered on conceptions of masculinity and femininity, are inherently sexist.\n","id":"306b1e5a-b8ae-496f-a3b4-4c4023bf7898"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Donald Trump and his campaign has been in the news for quite some time. He's been the butt of many jokes. Many think he is hurting the Republican party and their image but I think the other candidates could learn a lot from him and the way he is campaigning. The main reason is because he is being unapologetic. What Trump said about immigration was not racist. He did not say Mexicans or people of Latino descent were rapists and drug dealers, he claimed there is a high percentage of crime from ILLEGAL immigrants and that the Mexican government shoves their criminals into the American jail and healthcare systems instead of dealing with them on their own. Now, I've looked and looked and found many conservative sources that back his claim and many liberal sources that refute it, but it is not a racist comment regardless of whether or not it is factually correct. He didn't say immigrants, he didn't say Mexicans or Latinos, he said illegal immigrants. Most political candidates would come out and apologize profusely and try to further clarify their point after such backlash but not Trump. Trump is standing by his words. The Democrats have been very good lately at painting their opposition as racist, sexist, etc. as a retort and Trump is not having it. He is taking the offensive instead of taking the defensive which both Romney and McCain did which is accredited to their loss. If you look at the last presidential election, what were the candidates saying about each other? The Romney campaign painted Obama as a nice guy. He was the kind of guy you'd like to get a beer with and is a good family man, but he is an incompetent president and will lead us into financial ruin. What did the Obama campaign say about Romney? That he hates women, he hates gays, he hates Latinos, he tied his dog to the top of his car, he fired some guy which then killed his wife, and he doesn't pay his taxes. Most people will vote for a good guy that screws up over a terrible awful person. Trump is not taking that stuff lying down. He's fighting back twice as hard. He's responding to his critics with twice the ferocity that they came at him with. The Republicans are not going to win if they continue to try and be the bigger person and not get down and dirty with the mudslinging that is American politics. The Republicans and their leadership have been sheepish ever since Bush's horrible second term and it is costing them elections and they are losing their base. If you saw Chris Christie's speech, he blamed both parties for failing to compromise and for the state of the country. Do you see any Democrats blaming the Democratic party for anything and vowing to work with Republicans? That is not a strategy that will win. Check out Trump's interview on NBC with Katy Tur. She constantly asks him leading questions about his offensive comments and Trump does not let her control the interview in any way. Many other Republicans would respond diplomatically in order to appear reasonable but Trump got it right. He stood by his words and didn't apologize. Do you remember during the Republican primaries of 2012 when George Stephanopoulos asked Romney questions about whether or not he supported states banning all birth control even though there were no states or candidates that supported that? Romney let him run all over him with that ridiculous question. Trump wouldn't stand for that shit and he would call Stephanopoulos out on that. The Republicans were unhappy with McCain, with Romney, they are unhappy with Boehner and McConnell. They are losing their base of American conservatives. Trump is energizing that base and if more candidates took his approach, they could get conservatives back into the voting booths. Of course CNN, MSNBC, and CBS are going to trash him, they have always been much harder on Republicans than Democrats and anyone denying that is not being intellectually honest. He doesn't care. He's sticking to his guns which is what the Republican base needs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump is exactly what the Republican party needs.\n","id":"59fb5a48-d197-435e-bdc9-74beb9b58ac0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>Approximately half of all prisoners in the US meet the criteria for substance dependency or addiction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prison makes drug addiction worse, and introduces addiction to prisoners who have never used drugs.\n","id":"0e74f8c5-3511-4f06-90fc-52409c57b73d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Martin Luther King was a rampant womanizer who cheated on his wife with scores of women. George Washington owned slaves. During World War II, Ghandi wrote a letter to Winston Churchill asking him to surrender to Hitler. Very few of our heroes from the past are spotless. They were all human beings, but they did magnificent, world altering things in their lives that no one else dared to do or could do. They are giants in world history and have done what most of us will never do. They changed the world for the better. Because of this fact, it is ok to overlook, or at least not to focus on, their flaws and mistakes that they made in their lives. Their flaws and mistakes should not be suppressed or forgotten, but instead history should focus more on their world altering achievements. We want our children to set grande goals for their lives. We want them to look at Martin Luther King as a role model. We don't want them to look at him and think well I have done a lot for social change with my life, so it is ok if I cheat on my wife. Martin Luther King did it, so it's not totally bad if I do too. We want to focus on the positives, so that children can aspire to surpass their heroes . For example, they may cause massive and just social change, and NOT cheat of their wife repeatedly with lots of other women. We want our children to aspire to be better. Why would we want to teach our children in high school history class that Martin Luther King repeatedly cheated on his wife, that Ghandi wanted the UK to surrender to Germany, and that George Washington owned slaves, when we can instead focus on their world altering achievements? tldr focusing on flaws lowers the bar. We want our children to achieve even more than the heroes of history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"idealizing heroes from the past, and not focusing on their flaws and mistakes, is not necessarily a bad thing.\n","id":"d945dbb5-df91-4755-bca8-0c684a113a90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the ecological crisis we are facing become our collective and singular focus?<|ARGUMENT|>We are very near a \"Solar Singularity where solar energy becomes cheaper to produce than fossil fuels. We are also developing new batteries to store renewable energy and the \"Internet of Energy that allows energy to be allocated efficiently. The \"Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway and can save the planet, if we all support it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We know that we are extremely creative and resilient as a species. If we were to make rapid changes to our industry, energy, and farming practices, we could sequester massive amounts of carbon dioxide and avert the worst consequences of runaway warming.\n","id":"8c5fc764-6191-49b0-af01-3550e5acfa73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that alcohol is a dangerous drug and should be criminalized. It is nothing but a harmful substance with no purpose what so ever. I think it should be illegal to sell and consume alcohol. I cannot see any reason why it should be legal since other drugs are not. Physically harmful to the human body and may cause death. 40 of all crime in the US is made under the affect of alcohol. Devours families and relationships. Most cheating husbands wives are under the influence of alcohol. Almost 40 of all car accidents are drunk drivers. Causes mostly violence in general. EDIT I did not know about the prohibition. Now I do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that alcohol is a dangerous drug and should be criminalized.\n","id":"7b9b6386-d9e0-49a7-98be-6c842c1ae3a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Keynesian economic policy does work on paper, the issue is that in real world applications the extra stimulus funding that is implemented in down times is never walked back enough during the up times. This creates an ever increasing amount of public debt. x200B A little background information Keynesian Economics summarized is the economic theory that the government should spend more during recession or depression to stimulate economic growth and that this spending can be debt financed. The spending should be brought back to normal levels once times have gotten better though. I am leaving out large parts of the theory but this action of government spending in times of trouble is the effective take home. You can  if I am completely wrong about this. x200B In this picture, taken from Wikipedia, we see the GDP debt of the USA, Germany, and Japan going back to the 70s. These are the three largest non state controlled economies over this time period the USSR and China are considered state controlled and none of these countries have been able to significantly reduce their debt relative to GDP. x200B It seems to me that countries are fairly good at spending when times are tough but the issue arises when the recovery has taken place and the extra spending or tax cuts are not repealed so despite the GDP growing GDP debt stays largely stagnant. The US has had positive GDP growth since 2010 but debt as a percent of GDP has been stagnant. x200B The political reason for this is obvious no politician wants to take away tax cut or social services EVER. People don't like it when stuff is taken away from them. x200B Astute observers may be thinking of the oldest still in use currency The Pound Stirling well see how Brexit turns out . This is the GDP debt graph for the UK going back to the 1600s. The graph goes very high for the various wars that the UK fought Napoleon, WW1 and WW2 but the numbers generally stabilize in the post war period. But, for most of this graph's timeline the UK was a monarchy so thus not responsible to the whims of the people. If we shorten this graph to the time right after WW2 we would see a similar pattern to the US, Germany and Japan. x200B Speaking of WW2, it is true that the US did have a very high GDP debt as a result of WW2 but it is much easier to demobilize troops than to cut economic stimulus programs from a political standpoint. x200B In conclusion because of the difficulty largely political in walking back stimulus measures Keynesian Economics, while working on paper, doesn't work in practice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Classical Keynesian Economics doesn't work in real world applications.\n","id":"1df5c2cc-b2be-4909-af8d-f3c6fd593e61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We have a moral duty to intervene in nature to limit animal suffering.<|ARGUMENT|>Because humans are incapable of agreeing upon a consistent way of intervening, they attempts will be too incoherent to be helpful in limiting animal suffering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are not capable of fairly and consistently applying such morals, which would make the attempt at it corrupt and immoral.\n","id":"6be833a1-5b7a-48b9-a0a5-d4acefc59ee8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious practices that incorporate self-harm be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals are likely to be expelled or excommunicated against their will for not taking part in these practices. Miller, p.271<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Individuals may be shunned from society if they refuse to participate in these rituals.\n","id":"5bf11079-e44c-4998-b271-2641427effbc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>List of charges against Caligula, which are quite amusing, I found on the internet Began engaging in sexual incest with his three sisters in adolescence. Upon being declared Emperor, he commissioned a three mile long bridge constructed of boats to be built from Baeiae to Puteoli and rode over it on his horse wearing Alexander the Great\u2019s breastplate, because an astrologer had predicted he had \u201cno chance of becoming Emperor than of riding a horse across the Gulf of Baeiae\u201d he then compared himself to the god Neptune for having had traversed the sea. Sensitive about his premature baldness, he declared it a capital crime for anyone to look down at him from a high place as he passed by. Sometimes he ordered those with a fine head of hair to be shaved. He frequently practiced grimacing in a mirror. Depleted the entirety of his inherited treasury from Tiberius in a matter of a few months, mostly spent between building and maintaining a palace for his beloved horse and throwing excessive, luxurious public displays essentially bankrupting the empire on lavish bisexual orgies and luxurious parties. During these festivities, Caligula would often appear in masquerade, costumed as such characters as Alexander the Great, Hercules, gods such as Jupiter and Apollo, and even the goddess Venus. In AD38, whilst having an affair with Macro\u2019s wife, he accused Macro of being her pimp and ordered him to commit suicide. When there weren\u2019t enough condemned criminals to fight the lions in the arena, Caligula ordered random spectators to be dragged from the benches into the arena. He introduced extensive forms of taxation, and murdered wealthy people who had involuntarily willed him their estates. When one supposedly rich man died, and it was subsequently discovered that he indeed had no money at all, Caligula simply commented \u201coh dear, he died in vain.\u201d When a wrongfully accused man had been executed, owing to a confusion of names, he announced that the victim had equally deserved death, stating, of the people \u201clet them hate me as long as they fear me\u201d He opened a brothel in his palace where Roman matrons, their daughters, and freeborn youths could be hired for money. Amidst his bisexual and incestuous promiscuities, he eventually impregnated his favorite sister Drusilla. It is said he disemboweled her to remove the unborn would be demigod child from the womb. Upon Drusilla\u2019s death Caligula had her deified. He was convinced he was entitled to behave as a god, and demanded to be worshipped as one, sometimes preferring to be addressed by the name \u201cLatian Juppiter\u2019\u201d. He claimed fellowship with the gods as equals, claiming to converse with them and identifying himself particularly with Jupiter. In his own special temple, he set up a life size golden statue of himself, which was adorned each day in clothing similar to what Caligula himself would be wearing. At this temple, flamingoes, peacocks, black grouse, guinea hens, and pheasants were offered as sacrifices to Caligula, each on a particular day of the month. He declared statues of his deified self to be erected in temples all throughout the empire, including the Temple of Jupiter in Rome. A statue of gold was specifically commissioned to be erected in the Temple of Jerusalem. He often complained about how bad the times were, despite their being no public disasters under his reign. He frequently prayed for a great military catastrophe, or for famine, plague, fire, or \u201cat least an earthquake.\u201d In his campaign in Britain, he made his soldiers attack the sea itself and collect seashells as spoils of war. Made laws \u201cpublic\u201d by putting them on boards high on pillars and in very small writing, rendering them essentially illegible, in order to ensnare the public Caligula then took pleasure in punishing those who would break the laws they were unaware of. He would auction whatever properties were left over from a theatrical show driving up the bidding to such heights that many of those present, forced to buy at fantastic prices, found themselves ruined and committed suicide by opening their veins. During one such auction, a senator fell asleep on his bench, nodding his head. Caligula told the auctioneer to count each nod as a bid. When the senator awoke, he learned he had unwittingly bought thirteen gladiators for a total of 90,000 gold pieces. For his horse, Incitatus, he crafted a lavish marble stable complete with furniture and a staff of servants. He also declared that there be dead silence at night in the area as to not disturb the horse\u2019s sleep, which was punishable by death. Caligula also adorned Incitatus with jewelry of noblemen, declared the horse a priest of his temple, made him a senator, and had wanted him granted consulship. Source for the above Show me the historical douchebags, or show me the Caligulove<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"After discovering Caligula once aimed to declare his horse a Consul to mock the Roman Senate, I don't see how any other historical figure could be any more ridiculous\/hilariously pompous? Well that and the street orgies... Caligula wins!\n","id":"999621c2-052e-4d40-855b-67e394eb8bd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is sex with no emotional attachment good for you?<|ARGUMENT|>If one person is more dependent than the other, this might introduce a power imbalance to the relationship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex without emotional attachment could make one dependent on something that could end at any time.\n","id":"cae36143-a0c2-414b-a9aa-f0e7498e81c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a firm believer in getting rid of standardized testing. I'm currently a sophomore in college right now. During grade school I failed the reading English TAKS a total of 4 times. All the other times were major struggles and I barely passed. I almost got held back in 5th grade because of failing the reading TAKS test. I made very good grades during school but the TAKS test would almost ruin my life. Teachers spent too much time teaching how to take the TAKS test rather than teaching educational information. I graduated high school with a 3.5 3.6 GPA and currently pursuing a Kinesiology degree at a major university. I had always made good grades in all my subjects. I took many honors pre ap classes. But according to the state of Texas, I am a dumb student who can't take a simple TAKS test. I believe that graduating with a decent 3.5 .6 GPA is good enough for the state to consider a student great. Standardized testing just adds more unnecessary stress loading on to the stress of normal life. I do believe there are very good reasons to allow and keep standardized testing, but I believe it is the biggest waste of time to force students to take standardized tests. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that standardized tests such as the TAKS test for Texas should be discontinued. ?\n","id":"377ed0b1-439f-4cad-9044-4d39a1547b98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>A failure to discuss the issues of relevance to voters results in a misapprehension of voter sentiment. Stopping discussion of real issues does not change people's standpoint on those issues. Voters who cannot air their views in public will instead do so in the voting booth where they have perfect anonymity and right to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Censoring any view from the market place of ideas limits public debate and thus undermines the democratic process.\n","id":"69834aea-d848-4da5-85d5-a4e05310a289"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will the open source model for enterprises facilitate the administration of a society based on commons ?<|ARGUMENT|>This might be considered a pro as well as it means that contribution is not reserved to the people with \"skills\". Anyone may contribute however they want.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No real skills nor proof of them is needed to contribute.\n","id":"6d40d648-8e56-4cdb-905e-dbecd420abea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello reddit I believe that a prude attitude is detrimental to society and offers little if even to no benefit to people that people should be encouraged to embrace sexuality, rather than regard it as immoral or something that should be put off until marriage. First off, I find there is little logic in reinforcing the idea that sex is this terrible thing that magically becomes good once one is married finds their soul mate or what have you. For instance, as long as one is protected, emotionally stable, and somewhat interested in his or her partner, that person will be effectively protected from potential STIs, all the while enjoying the pleasure of sex and connecting on a deeper level with his or her partner. As long as people are mature, boundaries are communicated, and sex is protected, there are few situations when sex isn't pleasureful and offers little benefits to both or more parties. On the issue of unplanned pregnancies, research has shown time and time again that by communicating the idea that sex is for pleasure, and doing away with abstinence only education, the rates unwanted pregnancies and STIs drop dramatically. For instance, in most of Western Europe, where sexually liberal perspectives are held, the rates of the above are startlingly low compared to nations more prone to being prude, such as the United States, ironically enough. In my understanding, the term slut refers to women fond of showing skin, having sex, or doing anything that departs from the ideal of the Virgin Mary or the age old good girl. I find that when certain people discuss sluts and their dressing habits, they mention that such women should have more respect for themselves. However, these people fail to consider the hideous double standard in place women are reviled for dressing in this way while men are lionized. This suggests to women that sexuality should be controlled, which effectively leads to a disconnect between their true desires and what society expects of them, further irritating both men and women who just want to have sex. Furthermore, who is to say that a guy or a girl is disrespecting him or herself by showing skin? If you mention religion or tradition I will pretend as if you never replied I expect logic and rational, coherent statements for my view to be changed . Some may mention that women should be careful, as men have dirty thoughts, but they fail to acknowledge that women, too, have these same dirty thoughts. That suggests that such thoughts are inherently natural and beliefs saying otherwise have no place in a society better off without archaic traditions, religious beliefs, and the like. By slandering a girl as a slut, people essentially suggest the idea that sex is this immoral thing that only men should enjoy while girls should protect themselves from this thought is poisonous and doesn't do anyone any favors. If a man believes that women shouldn't be sexually liberal, that same man may as well attract a girl that believes similarly this leads to sub par experiences in the bedroom and ultimately frustration. Again, this does no one any good. At the end of the day, by embracing this attitude, people are less likely to become burdened by unplanned pregnancies and STIs, as well as benefit from more fulfilling sex. Stress levels decrease and general happiness, although not quantifiable, is reported as having increased. When it comes down to it, it's an issue of making informed decisions. If James and Stacy decide, after having been exposed to sex education, without having been bombarded with unsubstantiated arguments that sex is immorally incorrect, and still decide not to have sex, then I'm all for it. What's the big deal about suppressing sex? Again, please do not include religion or cultural tradition in your response I expect rational, logically written thoughts rather than selected ramblings of some book written a number of years ago from the cult of your choice for my view to be changed. , reddit. edit Thank dusty dervish. Forgot to mention that in Western European countries, less abstinence only educational systems, more comprehensive sexual education systems and contraceptives, as well as a sexually liberal attitude result in far fewer unplanned pregnancies and STIs than otherwise. edit If you've failed to change my view, grow up and don't downvote the posts you feel don't agree with your perspective. Recognize a well thought out argument with an upvote, please. edit edited edit 2 edit you may be wondering why I'm putting progressive thinking on cmv, of all places. I'm not afraid of hearing an opinion radically different from my own, and as the page states, I would rather keep it open. Besides, it's good knowing whether you're REALLY right or not. edit I've gotten some comments accusing me of shaming prudes. I'd like to point out that going by that logic, those who think that way are also saying that any sort of debate, in which one side argues in favor of its point and expresses reasons it doesn't believe otherwise is shaming as well. Consider this situation. Say I don't like the movie Alien Vs. Predator. I then proceed to voice my opinion about why I don't like the movie. Going by the aforementioned reasoning, am I essentially shaming those that do like the movie? Come on people. Grow up and let's get this show on the road, rather than avoiding the question and directly throwing accusations at me. edit my posts continue to be downvoted to oblivion, despite having sound reasoning and no ill will. Again, recognize rationally written arguments with an upvote please, and don't downvote me because you're afraid of hearing an opinion so different from your own. edit to clarify, I'm not trying to argue that I'd rather everyone embrace a slutty attitude but if they do, I'm all for it , but rather a more sexually liberal one, in which sexuality is not hammered as an immoral activity best reserved for married couples and such, and that sexuality should be embraced. The two are not interchangeable. The point is that no one should judge another after the other has made an informed decision. edit after reading through attempts to change my view, I've concluded that in order to change my view, I'll have to be convinced of the following things, if not more women should ideally have their sexuality suppressed and any and all sexual urges shamed as immoral or detrimental to society for most people, sex is of trivial importance and questionable pleasure and as such an effort to promote sexual liberalism is pointless rather than taking another individual's sexual preferences in stride and not labeling sex as controversial and taboo, people should ideally treat sex as a topic of caution and scrutiny every high school kid is unwilling to live an abstinent life, and that things couldn't possibly get more sexually liberal than they already are it would be ideal to enforce abstinence only education rather than encourage comprehensive sex education traditional and religious views of people have significant place in logical debate. While this may rough up some of your feathers, saying that just because someone's values are valid because they are important to him or her is a weak argument. By that logic, it is reasonable to say that I can defend Hitler's choice of killing Jews because genetic cleansing held great meaning for him. we should dismiss sluts as good for nothings, and that those who seek sex have a considerably lower quality of life than those who do not people generally prefer partners that are sexually inexperienced sex should be discredited as a deviant and improper activity edit food for thought. I've noticed that some people argue that men ideally prefer that women don't serve as receptacles for seminal fluid i.e. don't have sex with more than a few partners . I don't have a problem with women having sex with more than a couple of men, the same way I don't have a problem with men having sex with several women. Consider for a moment the irrational double standard here one of the very things whose ethics and reasoning are what I am challenging. By the logic that it's ideal not for women to sleep around, does that mean that people shouldn't give a slap on a back to and assure the presence of balls on a man that sleeps around? By that logic, is he not just as readily able to be discredited as immoral, or even dirty?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society should embrace a more sexually liberal view, discourage sexual repression and abstinence-only education, and reduce the use of the word, \"slut\"\n","id":"17e11ef8-c5de-4294-b20b-3e012bdfab29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every single human has a value to society. An unemployed worker provides a benefit to society as they have to potential to work in the future, or to have children which can generate further wealth in the future. Without humans interacting as a society the maximum wealth that a single human can generate is what he she can build, grow and defend with their bare hands. When humans interact with each other by cooperating they are able to mutually benefit from this and therefore generate extra wealth, However in a situation where people would get no benefit from the society, ie unemployed or homeless people, they have no incentive to contribute to or conform to society. In this situation I predict that they would then resort to either crime or suicide, Now these things happen anyway, but I beleive if it occured to enough people, then the legal system would not be able to cope with proportion of people ignoring the law and would send the entire society into chaos. Therefore wealth redistribution prevents poorer people from becoming desperate and resorting to crime and suicide and that is why it is necessary. EDIT I should clarify, that i never meant total wealth redistribution, but there needs to be enough to provide an incentive for people to continue to contribute to society<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I beleive wealth redistribution is necessary for social stability, as wealth can only exist as a result of society, therefore the society and its constituents has an intrinsic right to a share of the wealth, for without their participation in society, that wealth would not exist.\n","id":"b04bd783-b9b5-4711-839a-b4d42c21b16a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, there exists a culture around dieting, which negatively impacts many people's health and happiness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Thinspo' narratives are equally harmful to people's health and wellbeing as being overweight.\n","id":"fc9bcfe3-5f1e-4e85-b876-f929f5f47bc8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was curious as to the ethics of this norm in the U.S. healthcare system. For example, when a patient gets admitted to a hospital for cancer, they are often faced with huge bills that insurance won't pay. The hospital will often hire financial counselors to help the patients figure out clever ways to pay the bill or arange discounts BEFORE treatment. This to me is a conflict of interest and unethical on behalf of the hospital. The hospital knows it's not getting its money from Big insurance so it must get the rest somehow from the patient. Consulting with a patient about financial options prior to life saving treatment puts the patient in poor negotiation position. One cannot easily answer what would one pay to save their life. The hospital knows this and will certainly find most patients agreeable to some terms in order squeeze the rest of that bill out. Now the alternative is no financial counseling and the debt goes to collections and the patient's financial integrity is destroyed. Maybe a third party financial counselor would be more appropriate. Would love to know your thoughts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Financial Counseling in U.S. Hospitals is Unethical\n","id":"92362edf-4b1d-4288-8559-5d43d884b35e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please forgive me for anything I say that might come across as derogatory or dismissive I really want my view changed on this issue for very profound psychological reasons. I am young and trans and am aiming to deconstruct my very idealistic notions of what it is like to be a young, beautiful female. I only emphasize the first world nation aspect of this post because as an aggregate, first world nations almost universally have granted women fundamental human rights that are mostly on par with those of males. My view is borne out of the idea that being attractive confers a vast array of benefits otherwise not accessible to the average looking person. It is helpful socially and professionally. More people want to be your friend and romantic partner, and the intensity of this desire is positively correlated with how attractive you are. As a result, you are treated with greater dignity and respect. You are considered more worthwhile of people's time and attention. This much we all know anecdotally. The attractiveness factor is heightened within the population of young, beautiful females. Particularly beautiful females are given endless amounts of positive attention and affirmation. They have a whole dating pool open to them simply due to their looks. Now combine that with a killer personality and you've got the whole world at your fingertips. You can if you feel inclined to reap maximum reward from doing the least amount of work ie trophy wives . Straight Women look up to you and straight men want to be with you, and this attention comes at the cost of literally nothing. You can sit there and look pretty and still have droves of people interested in everything you do and say. While the reverse may be true for men, generally we find that this phenomenon is much stronger and more prevalent within the female population. I understand that lots of beautiful women feel pressure to maintain their appearance, and this can lend to significant distress and contribute to very vacillating feelings of self esteem. However, my argument is that these are outweighed by the enormous benefits you obtain from being a beautiful woman namely, that people love and admire you at relatively little or no cost to you . You can also earn the respect and admiration of people by being a compassionate, interesting and accomplished human being, but at the end of the day 1. it's much easier to earn this admiration by being beautiful and 2. if we look at celebrity culture, we find overwhelmingly that people become famous moreso as a product of their beauty than of their values or achievements. Again, sorry if I have offended anyone with this  I am speaking from a place of deep struggle with my gender identity, which has indubitably convoluted the message I am trying to send with this submission. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being a young, beautiful female is the best thing you can be in a first-world nation\n","id":"a0f71764-f47a-4e0a-bfd0-5b68c3faa864"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>Unlike other forms of labour traditionally dominated by women including sex work surrogacy is the only one that can be performed exclusively by women or individuals with a uterus.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reproductive labour is different in nature than any other type of labour and therefore should not be commercialised Satz, p.177\n","id":"fc05a4fc-aa7c-4f04-a66d-2795720fcb23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently watched the premiere of TLC \u201cLost in Transition\u201d show. So far, the subjects are transgender women m2f who are already married to their wives for a substantial amount of time, and have already or are in the process of raising a family. I get that this is a reality show, on TLC, so they try to cast people who have higher stakes, more drama to film. Where are the transgender males? I suspect that a transgender men f2m will not drag a husband and children down decades of personal struggles before revealing their true selves. Seems more often that transgender women m2f will marry, start a family, have wife dependent on them, and then once they have the dutiful wife and children, attempt transition, leaving cis gendered wife in a tailspin. The late in life trans women who\u2019ve married women they\u2019ve lied to started families under false pretenses get to have their cake and eat it too.  Please leave the footnote below the following line, but remember to delete this sentence by replacing it with the body of your post.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"later in life Transgender people tend to be m2f, as opposed to f2m, so the m2f can have their cake and eat it too.\n","id":"789bb16a-1f8b-409c-b2b8-aafd79d6fe73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, this one has been bothering me for a long time, and I'm open to a change of opinion because I really want to see the other side on this one. I think that there's nothing wrong with promoting research that could slow and eventually stop the aging process. Additionally, I think that immortality is not some boogeyman that people make it out to be. Whenever the hypothetical topic of choosing immortality comes up on the internet I see that there's always one person or sometimes a lot of people that plaster it as something 'horrible'. Why would it be horrible? Often times this is followed with some artsy prose about how being afraid of death is being afraid of a part of life, but how many times have less than ideal aspects of life in the distant past been cited as a part of life ? To me, death is just another part of life that we could do better without. We actively attempt to cure diseases, provide surgery, and ease physical pain in this way, we aim to lengthen lifespans, so why not take it a step further? What's so horrible about living for incredibly long times, or forever? And I'm talking biological immortality, by the way if the sun engulfs the Earth, then there's no surviving that if you're still on Earth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's nothing wrong with humanity chasing immortality, and immortality is preferable to death.\n","id":"cddbd569-cbcb-4f1f-a422-8d98d8559fd6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You're not using it anymore, why should you let it go to waste, I view it the same as throwing out food when there are starving people you could give it to potentially hundreds of people could be helped with your remains it's incredibly selfish to let them get pumped full of chemicals and left to rot in a box. Do your best Change my view This stance makes me rather unpopular I know, I'm just hoping people don't play the If I get picked up by an ambulance and they see I'm a donor they won't save me gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think organ and tissue donation should be compulsory upon death.\n","id":"718dc23c-c447-436a-b0c7-7989e31f5dda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Polygamy Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>We put sexuality into legal concepts that are mutually exclusive, i.e. one is either man or women. This creates not only administrative categories but also shapes expectations of citizens. This ignores the existence of cases in between such as hermaphrodites.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sexuality in general is just socially constructed. This includes the decision for monogamous or polygamous relationships.\n","id":"fda8c20e-ef78-47c0-a819-79482d3d726c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The reason I feel this way is that people in other parts of the world are still people. I'd like to think there's a better reason to hire locally, but I haven't heard ones that are fundamentally right and don't boil down to us vs. them being more deserving. If a job is offshored, it often creates more than one net job in the end coordination, technology, training, etc . Yes, it sucks when you, your friend or even countryman loses a job or one isn't available because it was created elsewhere on the planet instead. Yes, the company is boosting profits and doesn't do it for the right reason . But world wide, more people are doing better because of it. So often people try to put the onus on companies to stop putting profit ahead of jobs but wait what? This job isn't going away. It's being given to a person somewhere else? It's fulfilling the dream of a college grad in Asia. But wouldn't it be better to fulfill the dream of a college grad in California? No, I don't make a distinction. People are people. So, even if the intent of the company is greedy to save money, I believe the effect is entirely right and and beneficial humanity as whole. I believe to put your neighbor's kid's right to a job over someone else's neighbor's kid somewhere else on the planet is wrong in this way. I'd like to know if there are any positions that actually hold water that don't reduce down to choosing your people over those people .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People against offshore outsourcing have a bigoted mindset.\n","id":"4cd1f2e6-bdd0-464e-bdc4-7d2943b174bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Meta Mondays are a chance for the  community to get together and discuss experiences in the subreddit. This time we're asking Do you have a go to technique when responding to  posts? Please keep it on topic Thanks. Read previous Meta Monday posts here<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Meta Monday Do you have a go-to technique when responding to posts?\n","id":"ee29b5f0-21d0-4ebc-847f-68548df37699"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>Organized religions like Christianity have their roots in the transition from foraging bands to states and empires, in the creation of new forms of social and political organization. Religions started to serve to justify the authorities as well as to provide social and economical stability. Whereas the tribes' religions consists of supernatural believes, the organized religions of empires and states were settled around moralizing gods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious rules are made to ensure and enhance the power of leaders.\n","id":"49f6a4b6-0050-43df-ac86-61f9c3a7a7cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Granting AI fundamental rights in the absence of legislating responsibility incumbent on AI is incompatible with the principle of equality before the law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Necessary preconditions should be fulfilled before granting fundamental rights to AGI\n","id":"2661e230-714d-4acf-9335-0d966b30075b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>The political instability following the first referendum has altered the context for the vote. As such, another vote on the final deal should be given.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"New and significant information has come to light since the last referendum that may mean people should re-evaluate their decision.\n","id":"d6132445-aa57-437c-a309-8ab3d3d158f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've often heard it asserted that race is an invention of whites Europeans. I contend that while that assertion might be technically true in regards to our most recent methodology of dividing people into groups, the assertion itself makes a rather meaningless distinction between said concurrent categories and all of the other categories that were used in the past, and I further contend that the attempt to pin the conceptualization of race on white people often has nasty undertones if white people invented the concept of race, it follows all of the racism that stems from their invention is their fault, another item that can be added to the laundry list of reasons for white guilt. If you're unfamiliar with the invention of the concept of race that I'm trying to refute here, this NPR through MPR piece does a pretty good job detailing it and, as far as my motivation to make a  on this topic, was the straw that broke the camels back when I heard it on air a few days ago . Basically the assertion goes that only in the last few hundred years is their an attempt to categorize different people based on a few factors, but appearance being chief among them into different races. The NPR piece notes, for example, In the 1940s anthropologists tried to present racial differences as scientific fact by pulling out humans into three categories Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. It's often further asserted that the whole purpose of this categorization effort was to allow whites Europeans to subjugate non whites into, say, slavery. At this point I should note I'm not interested in discussing the scientific veracity of the concept of race, which seems pretty thoroughly debunked by modern science it's oft noted, for example, that genetic differences among people in the same race are statistically greater than those between people of different races. That's all fine and well. My counter assertion is simply that it wasn't whites Europeans in the last few centuries who first had concepts of race, often based at least in part on physical appearance. Before I give some more concrete examples, just consider this humanity was colorblind in the past assertion logically is it really the case that if, say, a Scandinavian man walked into a village in Africa 1500 years ago that he could have mingled freely without anyone noticing his arrival? His language and customs would betray his foreign nature, of course, but so too would his appearance. The African tribe would have been able to spot that the man was an other from a hundred yards away, simply based on the fact he doesn't look like them. For my more concrete examples, the wiki on the origins of race concepts gt Societies still tended to equate physical characteristics, such as hair and eye color, with psychological and moral qualities, usually assigning the highest qualities to their own people and lower qualities to the Other , either lower classes or outsiders to their society. For example, an historian of the 3rd century Han Dynasty in the territory of present day China describes barbarians of blond hair and green eyes as resembling the monkeys from which they are descended . Gossett, pp. 4 . So there we have evidence that the concept of race or the other based on physical attributes, geography, lineage, etc. was present 1700 years ago in Asia, which puts some strain on the assertion that race was invented by Europeans in the last few centuries. With the psychological and moral qualities bit, we also see precursors of racism. The wiki continues gt Hippocrates of Cos believed, as many thinkers throughout early history did, that factors such as geography and climate played a significant role in the physical appearance of different peoples. He writes, the forms and dispositions of mankind correspond with the nature of the country . He attributed physical and temperamental differences among different peoples to environmental factors such as climate, water sources, elevation and terrain. He noted that temperate climates created peoples who were sluggish and not apt for labor , while extreme climates led to peoples who were sharp , industrious and vigilant . He also noted that peoples of mountainous, rugged, elevated, and well watered countries displayed enterprising and warlike characteristics, while peoples of level, windy, and well watered countries were unmanly and gentle . gt Come, tell me why it is that the Celts and the Germans are fierce, while the Hellenes and Romans are, generally speaking, inclined to political life and humane, though at the same time unyielding and warlike? Why the Egyptians are more intelligent and more given to crafts, and the Syrians unwarlike and effeminate, but at the same time intelligent, hot tempered, vain and quick to learn? For if there is anyone who does not discern a reason for these differences among the nations, but rather declaims that all this so befell spontaneously, how, I ask, can he still believe that the universe is administered by a providence? Here we see Hippocrates, who was born some 2400 years ago, breaking down different groups based on geographic, physical, and hereditary markers race , and again ascribing certain personality stereotypes to those groups racism . These aren't the same categories we use today, to be sure, but the methodology is more or less the same as our current model people who look like fill in the blank and come from fill in the blank are X group, people who look like fill in the blank and come from fill in the blank are Y group, etc. Given these two examples both of which far predate the time the NPR piece claims race was invented by Europeans as well as our own thought experiment on the subject, it seems the claim regarding the European invention of race is false. Throughout recorded history people have always had concepts of us and other, often using the same methodology that the 1600s Europeans did, and there's no reason to think such notions didn't exist for all of prerecorded history, either, although they were likely limited by peoples lack of mobility one thing Hippocrates, the Han scholar, and the conquering Europeans all had in common is that they came from civilizations that had the mobility to get out and start encountering people who looked very different from themselves . So that's why I think the claim is inaccurate. I additionally think it's bad because it seems to imply that if white folks a few hundred years ago hadn't invented race, racial issues might be less fraught than they are today, or might be nonexistent. After all, if societies didn't have any concept of race, how can they be racist? Indeed, as the NPR piece says The pervasiveness of those racist ideas insured that colonists brought racism with them when they came to settle what would become the United States. But it's also another body being laid at the feet of modern day white folks while some of these bodies like the Atlantic slave trade and the often inadvertent genocide of Native Americans were deserved as much as blaming anyone for crimes committed hundreds of years ago by people who looked vaguely like them can be deserved , this one isn't. People have used other ization as an excuse for nasty behavior against their neighbors for time immemorial. If it wasn't the European model of race, we'd be using some other model of classification today that would still have the potential to be abused as a means of persecution and discrimination. Human beings are, by nature, tribal, and a lot of that tribalism is based on appearance I'd argue that the choice of one of the first speakers on the NPR piece to decide that a European ascribing negative attributes to black people in the 1400s was the first racist is a political maneuver, given that 30 seconds of googling is all you need find evidence of Asians and many other groups ascribing negative attributes to white people based on appearance some 1000 years before the European example given. In fact, all of the examples of race concepts racism given are perpetrated by whites Europeans, when we have much older examples coming out of China and Egypt, for example. I think the assertion whites Europeans invented race a few hundred years ago could be revised to be both more accurate and less accusatory sounding if it was changed to the admittedly more unwieldy differentiation between groups based on genetic, physical, and geographical markers has existed for all of human history, the recent European model just being the most recent iteration in a never ending progression of categorization methods. To  I'm looking for some reason why the European model is significantly different, both in methodology and in practice when it comes to differentiating groups compared to historical models. Bonus points if you can provide a good rational as to how and why this accusation isn't sometimes or often used to add another item to the long list of white guilt inducing historical injustices. Ya'll know what to do. Happy ing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Whites\/Europeans didn't \"invent\" the concept of race\n","id":"15dd0560-d2a2-4887-a0c0-7f8e5d88bc9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Teachers Be Allowed To Wear Religious Symbols At School?<|ARGUMENT|>Children are unlikely to understand the meaning of symbols unless explained to them. And since this is not taught in public schools, they would learn this elsewhere, such as their families or church. So merely showing a religious symbol would not influence children's beliefs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As long as the person is not verbally imposing their beliefs on others, it should not matter.\n","id":"11f02970-8482-49e3-98df-afe02f857f51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, the NHL explicitly and arbitrarily has a rule that prohibits a player from being credited with more than one point for a goal. Points are awarded the goal scorers and up to two players who last possessed the puck prior to the goal scorer's shot. So each goal can result in 1 3 points. Not every goal is scored with an assist and some are only credited with one assist, it is never more than 2, however. So, in a situation where Player A passes to Player B who passes to Player C, who then shoots and scores, A and B are given a point for their assist and C is given a point for the goal. However, if Player A passes to Player B and Player B passes it back to Player A, who then scores, only Player B would get an assist, Player A would get a point for the goal but not credited with an assist. This is ludicrous. Players should be awarded for their accomplishments. In the first situation, Player A made a pass that lead directly to a goal, same thing in the second situation, yet he gets an assist in one case and not in the other. I understand this is a rare feat and it would not move the needle in terms of records all that much, but it still irks me and I'm curious if anyone can argue that the status quo is more appropriate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NHL should amend Rule 78.3 and allow a player to be credited with more than one point for a goal.\n","id":"d309d8f6-2702-4d59-8e57-6ac66cb82f9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever I see large scale natural disasters, like typhoons or hurricanes, I feel slightly relieved. I care a lot about our world itself, and I worry that we cannot support our current population. I don't want us to end up in a Soylent Green type situation. So whenever I hear about giant, sweeping tsunamis, I can't help but look at the death count to see how many died. I think well, this many people now don't need food, water, etc, and won't reproduce. That's not so bad. The actual death of people does not make me happy, but I think it's an important part of life. Everyone must die. And I care more about the general quality of life for five billion people than I do for the literal life of seven billion if I could choose between ten people living with all their needs met and twenty living miserably, I would pick the first option . Most people would say that I am an extremely compassionate person. Most of my work deals with charity working in homeless shelters, taking care of foster animals, working with special needs children, et cetera. As of my 21st birthday yesterday, I have paid for 40 cleft palate children to have surgeries. I am not heartless or crazy, but I can't help but wish we'd have a plague. What's wrong with me? I know this view is bad.  NOTES I do not feel this way about with crimes against humanity like concentration camps that result in large death counts. I don't feel this way about school shootings. I don't feel this way about anything that has not been caused by nature. If someone I loved died in one of these disasters, I would be extremely upset, but I've had so many people in my life die thirteen that I know it's a part of life \u2013 not sad, just a part of life. If I died in one of them, no, I would not like that. Clearly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am slightly happy whenever major disasters occur, like typhoons, because I'm grateful our world population has decreased.\n","id":"b768c446-526f-43c3-aa72-533e873e2e5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>GMOs have the potential to produce more food in a smaller area with less water and fertilizer. They could help feed a planet with an ever growing population and fight hunger in the third world. In light of these benefits, it seems to me like most opposition to GMOs is driven by unfounded fears. To my knowledge, there isn't much evidence to indicate that GMOs have harmful effects. I think the aversion to GMOs is rooted in ignorance and a general fear of anything coming out of a laboratory. I understand that there are all sorts of legal and economic issues such as is it reasonable to patent a living thing? and it will favor major corporations and hurt small farmers , but if those issues could be resolved, why oppose GMOs?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that opposition to genetically modified food is just as unscientific as rejecting global warming or evolution\n","id":"5041203b-7f9a-43c3-b4a7-7e1576677245"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my opinion the progressive tax rate is what justifies the role that money plays in democratic elections. It's the donors way of protecting their wealth from political candidates who want to tax the rich. Without moneys influence in politics, the wealthy would have no defense from the masses just voting their money around. Theodore Roosevelt came to realize that his anti corporation rhetoric was harmful after he opened the door for socialism in America when he ran against Eugene Debbs in 1912 he ultimately concluded that we cannot violate the rights of the wealthy simply because they are wealthy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Money should be allowed in politics as long as there is a progressive tax rate.\n","id":"97b8a347-3509-4435-b20c-aadec3f67da1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments provide a universal basic income?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI provides a base level of equality by ensuring that no-one lives below the poverty line.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Providing a UBI reduces social inequalities and gives individuals more opportunities.\n","id":"a9b91488-6d2c-497e-9d6c-064ee4d1d8f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>At a 2012 meeting of Hawai\u2019i Democratic Party LGBT caucus, Tulsi addressed her opposition to same sex marriage in her youth and her complete evolution on this important issue. She openly and wholeheartedly apologized for her wrongdoing and the harm she had caused the LGBT community, asking for but not expecting their forgiveness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gabbard has apologised for her past comments on LGBTQ+ issues.\n","id":"adeb8bc4-7ce6-4775-bf68-f751f9eef39d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Tarot Have A Place in Modern Society?<|ARGUMENT|>It is easy to interact with Tarot cards and readers with a \"tell me what to do\" mentality as opposed to making your own choices.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tarot gives you an excuse to not take responsibility for your own decisions.\n","id":"0e77018f-1b44-4a8d-b735-2da8d4f42823"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Primaries in US elections<|ARGUMENT|>Traditionally, the conventions were sources of ideological and policymaking debate for organisations \u2013 both Republican and Democrat \u2013 that are far less pan-national than their European counterparts especially when the party concerned is out of power. Now, the conventions are little more than coronation events. As a result, policy-making suffers and a party's position on an important issue may change from election to election, depending only upon the personal views of the candidate.3<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The primary process reduces the level of debate at national conventions\n","id":"d64b54af-9fe3-4d00-a71c-348899b25c47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>A mind is a set of cognitive faculties including consciousness, perception, thinking, judgement, and memory. It is usually defined as the faculty of an entity's thoughts and consciousness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept of mind isn't incompatible with it being immaterial.\n","id":"4ebc294b-654f-4419-9e1e-174a890d98ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>encourage the creation of private universities in the UK<|ARGUMENT|>University degree programmes, unlike other products like televisions or designer shoes, are tools of social mobility: unlike a TV, a good degree will help you to get other good things later in life like a higher salary. This means that it is important that people have a fairly equal opportunity to access the best degrees. Market forces will make the best universities more expensive than the others, and mean that the best degree places are awarded not to the cleverest, but to those able to afford it. Universities are already elitist despite being open to all and being publicly funded. In the UK class is a major determinant of where you go to university. Oxford University only has 11.5%, and Cambridge 12.6% of its students coming from a working class background compared to an average of 32.3%1. This is a situation that will only get worse as students have to pay for the best private universities. 1 Davis, Rowenna, \"Does your social class decide if you go to university? Get the full list of colleges.\" Guardian.co.uk, 28 September 2010,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing universities to be guided by an invisible hand does more harm than good\n","id":"36a78860-cea1-4701-814b-439576d521e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As I understand it, in the US religious organizations are tax exempt. The reasonings for this that I've heard are that these mosques, synagogues, churches, etc provide support for the poor, spiritual fulfilment for its members, and community building. This is also supposedly part of the separation of church and state. However, I don't think its a secret that in America the Christian right is a political force unto itself, whether or not they openly endorse candidates from the pulpit or not. The basis of my view is that I see personal politics as a pipeline of worldview gt ethics and morals gt political stances gt political action. Religion and philosophy both occupy the space of worldview, and I don't see why religious organizations should have a privileged tax status simply because their worldview invokes the supernatural. As an example I am personally a Marxist. My entire worldview is materialist and my moral and ethical stances are based on entirely secular philosophy. I have an active community of other Marxists and Anarchists, who all support each other, and together we partake in each others intellectual enrichment and regularly perform charity services. I'd love to open a free infoshop meeting space that gets by on donations or other forms of patronage bake sales, book sales, whatever . I think this would fulfill all of the same functions as a church minus blind indoctrination of minors in terms of community building, providing material support to the poor, and personal fulfillment of its members. Unfortunately, because this organization isn't based on a philosophy that has a supernatural backstory, I think we'd be subject to Federal income tax. Am I wrong? Assume that we wont partake in any direct endorsements of political candidates or ballot measures, as I think this is a condition for churches.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Either religious organizations shouldn't be tax-exempt, or equivalent secular ones should be.\n","id":"a7960b66-1909-4e72-838b-824cb414a306"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Animal farming is subsidized by governments to keep prizes unnaturally low. In 2016: Netherland 3.50 Euro\/liter milk, Germany 7 euro\/liter milk and Poland more than 10 euro\/liter milk.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A vegan society would be less economically efficient for the less privileged.\n","id":"2905ba67-f4e0-476e-92f8-d235093125ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>Biological facts have had an effect on the construction of gender which is at least in part a response to physiology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The differences between men and women are all connected to reproductive functions.\n","id":"4466fe90-4d08-4062-9b51-26a06de67134"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>The refining process of the raw materials releases toxic metal byproducts into air, earth and water. Once they are spread, it is nearly impossible to remove them again out of the environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To produce an army of AKMs, thousands of tons of metal steel, aluminum, titanium etc., composites, electronics silicon, rare earths etc. are required.\n","id":"d09b7053-9141-4088-9f1e-a0057570e350"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Could adopting a discussion platform like Kialo help improve the quality of Ethereum's political + governance debates?<|ARGUMENT|>Kialo makes it much easier for new participants in a debate to back-track and understand where the discussion stands, what arguments have been made for and against, as well as how strong participants rate those arguments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adopting a discussion platform like Kialo will help improve the quality of Ethereum's political + governance debates.\n","id":"9c2ad9d9-88cc-426b-a35c-e854d1a89dae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First time poster please let me know if I did anything wrong and I will gladly correct it After recently being exposed to genderqueer individuals and the rhetoric from the genderqueer camp I believe the term is unnecessary, incendiary and intentionally politicized. Please note this is not refuting the existence of those who do not identify with the gender binary. I understand there are people whose gender does not fit into a 'male' or 'female' category. I also understand there are people for whom those two categories do not resonate at all. What I disagree with is the use of the new er term 'genderqueer' not their gender identity. My reasons 1 Genderqueer entirely overlaps with Androgyne. The etymology of the word androgynous is both male and female. Androgynous is traditionally interpreted as having characteristics of both male and female which would suit genderqueer individuals who fall somewhere on the gender binary scale. Alternate definitions of androgynous state neither specifically feminine nor masculine which would also suit those who do not identify with the gender binary. Through these two definitions, every form I could find of 'genderqueer' is covered. There is no reason for a new gender identification when androyne covers every potential genderqueer identity. I\u2019m particularly curious on this question as I have not heard a convincing argument distinguishing genderqueer from the possible definitions of androgyne. 2 The word queer, while not originally intended as such, has become a slur \u2013 and is offensive. I am a gay man and have problematic memories of being called a queer . To see a group identify with and legitimize the phrase either ignores the history of the word or is intentionally politicizing the use. Furthermore to include a word literally meaning odd in your gender is immediately hinting towards negative connotations. This to me is incendiary. 3 I believe the word genderqueer was manufactured to be political. I disagree with politicizing your gender. I believe you can politicize your gender expression but to identify by a politically charged gender name to me feels flawed. If the goal is to move everyone towards a more gender neutral society where anyone can express themselves as they see fit why are progressive movements coining phrases that are steeped in bigotry, intentionally incendiary and divisive? \u201cPositively\u201d politicizing and calling a slur a legitimate gender is wrong. We should be moving towards more neutral, less offensive phrases rather than doubling down on reinventing hateful words.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Genderqueer\" is an unnecessary and intentionally incendiary term.\n","id":"a216391b-d65c-430e-844e-57ca4d5b416c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I like this rule because it actually makes the MLB ASG watchable. Most of the all star type games are unwatchable because the athletes in them are more concerned with not getting hurt, so they don't even try. Giving the players something to play for, something that may help them down the road if their team wins the ASG and eventually makes it to the WS, makes the players in the MLB ASG actually try, and makes the coaches use actual strategy instead of everyone just goofing off trying to have fun without getting hurt. With score lines like 17 12 in the NHL ASG, calling it a game is a little stupid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having the All-Star Game determine World Series home-field advantage is a good rule\n","id":"18a33446-f0ad-4ab5-a698-b86104d571da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I fully acknowledge that there is gender inequality, and I realize that there are legitimate concerns from both MRAs and Feminists. However, I believe that in order to effectively combat these issues, we must not relegate ourselves to groups pertaining to a single gender. This way we can focus on both Men's issues and Women's issues, without creating a divisive and hostile atmosphere between the two. Toxicity breeds toxicity, and the best way to move forward is to make way for calm and reasonable discussion, something that is very difficult to find between Feminists and MRAs. I live in the US, if that changes anything.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that both Feminism and the MRM are preferentialist and exclusionary.\n","id":"08fabf7b-ccda-40d5-af98-59c40d114ede"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I honestly feel like the sexuality I ended up living roughly bisexual , was the result of a series of lifestyle choices and steps towards a goal. Clearly very few people would agree, so I'd like to know what you all think.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe I chose my own sexuality.\n","id":"bcdffde2-a417-4c35-8c66-a73d85e4eaf3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a 22 year old from Croatia and I find no interest in politics. All of the politicians seem corrupt to me and I simply can not approve any on them by giving them a single vote. In Croatia we mainly have a choice between two parties left and right which hold majority of votes. Voting for any other party seems pointless as they usually get only a few percent. And I don't like any of the two main options. We had both left and right party running the state in last 6 7 years and they have both equally disappointed me. Furthermore, very few people vote in out country, usually only about 30 of population that has the right to vote 18 . It's absurd to me that this system is in place at all, I think that an election should be void if less than 50 of voting population votes. I know this could mean that all elections become void if people don't start showing up. I think that just goes to show how broken the system is, allowing for a relatively small amount of people to vote their party in leading position just because they are manipulated and or pressured into voting. I know that I am not making the situation any better by not voting, but I really don't like the system and don't want to give anybody my vote as I don't think they deserve it. Recently I had a talk with one of my friends she votes about the topic and I get her point of view, but I still can't find a good enough reason to give a vote to someone that I think doesn't deserve it. Should I simply do some more research into other options besides two main parties and give my vote to one which aligns with my points of views the most?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not vote\n","id":"9bf557db-da3a-482a-b384-0a059e618c41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>Many areas of science depend on financial or other resources to make progress, and these resources are often controlled by political processes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scientific practice in an academic environment creates political influence and incentives.\n","id":"faa18836-60c0-460a-8ec1-cf5e6d83b314"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>According to a study, terror attacks in the US carried out by Muslims receive five times more media coverage than those by non-Muslims.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The impact of religion is often exaggerated in the media by over-representation of religiously motivated terrorism.\n","id":"e868dd8a-6674-4c15-b477-57ebff32ecc4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>allow military recruitment in schools<|ARGUMENT|>Militaries provide a public service that too often goes unnoticed and underappreciated; school visits raise the level of understanding for the important job they do. In the UK the army publicly states that it does not directly recruit in schools but does visit many each year \"with the aim of raising the general awareness of the armed forces in society\"1They always visit by invitation of the Head teacher. Compared to the USA fewer young people have local or family connections with the military, so it is important for them to learn about the role the armed forces play in our country. And in both the UK and the USA the military offers other services to schools, from educational materials to leadership courses and team-building exercises. Sgt. Maj. Jerome DeJean, of the U.S. Army's 2nd Recruiting Brigade, describes their role as 'a partner in education improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The purpose of the military entering schools is not solely recruitment but awareness\n","id":"498f64c4-2a37-4422-809a-8199d1d012e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>THBT intellectual migration brain drain is caused by a lack of belonging rather than a lack of opportunities<|ARGUMENT|>Young intellectuals from developing countries are to a very large extent politically conscious and active. They want to be \"actors\" and not \"spectators\" in policy making, all the more so when their specialism is impacted by government policy. Those who grow up in an autocratic, or not very democratic state are likely to want to go where they can use their voice. Even in many democracies intellectuals often largely liberal views both for government and teaching are not readily approved by the conservative regimes of their countries where usually the older generation is in power and constitutes a barrier against their progress.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most young intellectuals from developing countries are politically conscious and want to be \"actors\" in policy making\n","id":"2d4aea83-f160-4040-ac04-25fc346d2276"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, a definition of objectivity. Minimal objectivity would consist of accurately representing the best possible version of all sides of a given issue. Maximal objectivity would consist of minimal objectivity the condition that the media program and its employees are not bound to outside interests. I think minimal objectivity could be achieved in a for profit format, but I do not think maximal objectivity can be. Of course, by definition for profit implies an outside interest and is therefore incompatible with my definition of maximal objectivity. So to change my view, presumably either a better definition of objectivity would need to obtain or profit would have to be shown to be an irrelevant or negligible factor in the motivations and biases of for profit media. As a corollary question, even not for profit media requires funding for operations, which would bind those media programs to the interests of their private or government donors, and therefore not meet my definition of maximal objectivity. Leads me to wonder are there viable options for media outside capitalist frameworks? All that said, one last caveat. I know objectivity is itself a contested term and that the selection and representation of information is filtered through the subjective values of the institutions and individuals offering that information. I recognize that limit on objectivity, and although I think the problems posed by subjectivity can be counterbalanced, they can probably not be eliminated. I'm less concerned with that subjective filtering and more concerned with the way economic realities bind media to other interests in a systematic way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe for-profit media can be objective.\n","id":"b1e06368-7fa8-419c-bc8d-33775ef22d0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every election year this is one of the most popular complaints against candidates lack of detailed policy prescriptions. So and so says he's going to reduce the budget, but so far he hasn't offered any specifics. Hillary says she has a plan for restarting the Israel Palestine peace process, but so far nobody has been able to nail her down on the details. Recently right here on one of the  posts about Bernie Sanders, u bayernownz1995 says that Sanders does have a solid page on racial injustice on his site, but it is a little weak in terms of actual policy prescriptions. Compared to O'Malley's page, Sanders has a lot of work to do. You hear these complaints all. The. Time. In newspapers, on blogs, on TV news, in debates, etc. Candidate X offers no details, they're evasive in answering questions, they're canny, they give bland lip service to a problem and make happy talk about solutions, but they never actually say what it is they're going to do if elected . It's like the default setting of oppo research, a ready made criticism to hurl at a candidate if you don't have any meatier, muddier dirt to fling their way. But the thing is, there are very good reasons for candidates to be evasive. For one thing, if they were to offer actual policy details during a campaign, then they'd spend the entire rest of the campaign defending and arguing about those details. If someone found an error or mistake or potential pitfall, they might have to revise their plan revise a policy that doesn't even exist yet Political opponents hire specialists in opposition research, and the more material those specialists have, the more they'll be able to distract and distort your candidate's plan in order to make them look bad. Giving them an entire piece of draft legislation, or an entire detailed budget document showing cuts and spending, etc. would be like a godsend to the oppo research people. And all for what? For an imaginary policy that doesn't even exist yet. No candidate in their right mind would open up so many vulnerabilities all for the sake of a policy that doesn't even exist outside of the candidate's website. Secondly, no political candidate is running for the office of dictator. Whether someone is running for President, Senate, Congress, Governor, state legislator, dog catcher, etc., the important thing to remember is that politicians have to work with other politicians, and agencies, bureaucracies, other constituents, etc. They have to work with other people to get anything accomplished. So if you get elected to office with a complete, massively detailed economic stimulus package combined with spending cuts and tax cuts, don't expect every other member of Congress to just roll over and rubber stamp your policy. Politics isn't beanbag, and you'd get crucified by the players in Washington or any other capital . Oh, you promised you were going to cut the F 22 fighter? Well guess what, that's going to throw 60,000 people out of work in my district. And you want me to just vote for it because your supporters voted for you? How about f k you? If you got elected with a detailed policy proposal, everyone in the government responsible for putting your policy into motion would have you over a barrel. Every change they make to your policy would threaten to make you a liar, a judas, a traitor, etc. to the people who supported you, as well of course as your political enemies. Your policy details would become a millstone around your neck and a gun to your head. Your friends and enemies alike would be able to use all of your detailed promises on the campaign trail in order to wrap you around their fingers. So that's my view politicians would be insane to offer detailed policy answers to any given question, and they are wise to stick to vague generalities, advertising language, happy talk, etc. Can you think of a good reason for politicians to spell out their promises in detail? EDIT After 16 hours, most challengers haven't dug very deep into the issue or looked at it from different angles. For instance, what about examples of actual candidates who did in fact provide detailed proposals during an election? Did they pay for it or benefit from it? I got a lot of deltas burning a hole in my pocket here<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political candidates who refuse to detail their policies are making the right choice.\n","id":"6341dae6-c315-49bf-b7ac-6711f319ffa0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every idea, concept or value should be open to criticism, and as human culture evolves, some of our ideas and values must be left behind in the past in order to progress. People throughout history have held many bad beliefs, e.g. that the earth is flat, that some magical stones have healing powers, that the order of the stars determines the faith of a person astrology , that black or homosexual people are inferior. Clearly, at one point in history, these ideas became empirically falsified or rejected by reason. Religions, however, uphold a set of ideas and concepts which don\u2019t follow this evolutionary logic of self criticism. Most religions are not open to any fundamental change or criticism. Also on an interpersonal level, it is often very difficult to argue with a religious person. In the end one often gets the answer \u201cbut this is my personal belief, I can feel it\u2026 you are not all knowing either, please leave me alone, and let me believe what I believe.\u201d Religious people, or religions as such, react very agitated to critique and mostly don\u2019t take criticism seriously. They even demand that we respect their religious personal beliefs and thus give them a privileged immunity against criticism. Or as Sam Harris eloquently said it \u201cFaith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.\u201d Atheists must be careful not to hurt the feelings of other religious people. Whereas arguments against pseudo science are perfectly acceptable socially , arguments against religion are perceived as an act of intolerance. I don\u2019t think this is a healthy attitude and inhibits human progress. Atheists, who strongly believe that without some religious dogmas the world will be a better place, have the right to aggressively attack the views of religious people. Especially in a growing secular society, in which the majority of people is convinced that religion is outdated, we should not shy away to destroy bad or empirically falsified ideas. Please note that my terminology of \u201cdestroying\u201d and \u201caggressively attacking\u201d does not imply any physical violence, but merely a strong anti religious rhetoric and politics e.g. in a democracy people have the right to decide to no longer teach religion to young children at school, churches should not be given any longer taxpayers money to spread their ideas, etc. . I am aware that the tendency of one system of thought to dominate and destroy another system of thought is prima facie guilty of exactly the same fallacy as the many religious wars throughout history. Nonetheless, I think that today, in a democratic society, people can decide in a civilized manner to radically reduce the role of religion and establish society on secular and humanistic principles. . . . EDIT T 04.00 I have nuanced my view in the following ways My original main claim that the immunity principle is internal to religion has reduced to the claim that societies as such are not very open to criticize religions because it is a social taboo, and people are afraid of being perceived as intolerant. There is diversity within religion. It is untrue that religions don't ever change or reform due to criticisms. Though, I still think that change happens mostly within. The boundaries are set a priori by the basic religious texts and external critique has little impact. Thanks for replying. I will try to keep up reading and answering to your comments, though, as time progresses this thread is getting more fragmented.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion should not be given a privileged immunity against criticism\n","id":"6586129b-1ef8-4e94-a0a9-11c0ecf4ffb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't see any reason to hold your country in higher regard simply because you were born within the arbitrary lines that define it. I think patriotism leads to ethnocentrism and a very skewed perception of the entire world where your country is perfect and many others are evil. I'm not saying that supporting your country is wrong in a situation you feel they're doing good. I'm not saying you can't love your country. I just think blind faith in your leaders allows atrocities to happen while excusing you or your leaders from ever admitting them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Patriotism is a bad thing.\n","id":"95446027-eb5f-4837-b478-2e7f12d0024a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently Canadian teachers have been attending LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP inclusiveness training. While I don't think this is a bad idea or pointless, the acronym is getting out of hand and turning it into a bit of a joke. Recently, there was a segment on Fox news about it and the President of Canada's liberal party was on to talk about it. When asked what the long acronym stood for, he couldn't say. This makes him and the training come off as a bit ridiculous, and gives people who oppose this training something to grab onto. Here is the clip Further, some of the letters of the acronym are starting to get a little too specific IMO. Here is where you can find them. Specifically, demisexual seems closer to a sexual preference than a sexual orientation. If I am only sexually attracted to people with blonde hair do I get a letter in the acronym? Being only attracted to people after having an emotional connection seems to push in that direction. Finally, it seems much simpler to just call the entire group the lgbtq community or some other simple name that everyone can easily remember and not get caught up on. As someone with not many friends in this community, it is a bit hard to get a different opinion. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The LGBTQ acronym shouldn't add more letters to encompass more unique\/specific orientations\n","id":"6be08090-5261-4d5f-b78f-3b81394ad59e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Cryptocurrencies And Blockchain Technologies The Next 'Industrial Revolution'?<|ARGUMENT|>Cryptocurrencies with sophisticated governance methods like tezos allow everyone with currency to participate and have a voice in what innovations should be implemented Tezos Governance Explained<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ability to control our own finances will be in our own hands.\n","id":"21a4e0fc-2d79-4890-9213-a4e334bb0097"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>DNA is integral to solving most serious crimes. Not only does it solve them, it surely would help prevent them among people who know the authorities have their DNA . Anyone who's watched Forensic Files should know, as Locard's Exchange Principle dictates, that it's almost impossible to commit a crime, especially if un premeditated or involving rape, without leaving some of your DNA somewhere. Maybe if one is lucky the cops won't find it, but it'll be there. I've racked my brain, and I cannot find any valid reason to claim that it violates any privacy rights for a baby to provide its DNA sample to authorities when born. The government provides us with plenty at that time a birth certificate, a social security number, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to get our DNA. The only way this information could be used is for the betterment of society overall, i.e. to prevent and solve major criminal acts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Collection of a DNA profile should be mandatory for newborns\n","id":"587e3aaa-35bf-4607-9b9c-047e8392f346"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Gulabi Gang a force for good in India?<|ARGUMENT|>A number of projects which would help women have failed to receive funding including proposals for procurement of forensic kits for sexual assault cases and provision of video surveillance systems in train stations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Government data has revealed that only 42% of the allocated Nirbhaya funds have been spent.\n","id":"f24fdd77-744e-431e-a15a-5c300f202d59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>One has an intuition that if the Nazis had simply spun a wheel and killed 6 million random individuals, this would not have been as bad as killing 6 million individuals because they were Jews. Crimes are worse when they are committed with the intent to harm a person based solely on their identity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Aborting an unhealthy child is not more unjust than aborting a healthy child if the reason is the same. If the mother is aborting the child because they are disabled, however, that is discriminatory.\n","id":"83a91003-886b-4584-82ad-5b01cbffb91b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is OKC police officer Daniel Holtzclaw REALLY guilty of the crimes he was convicted of?<|ARGUMENT|>Holtzclaw turned off his patrol car computer and AVL prior to pulling Ligons over. The prosecution claimed he did this intentionally to avoid detection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jannie Ligons' allegations resulted in two guilty verdicts counts 15 & 16 and sentences totaling 21 years.\n","id":"82a1c3f4-c560-4258-b847-7ccfd5c4b488"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand I'm essentially making two opinions here, but they're tied together and I don't think it's necessary to make two separate posts. For the unaware, Nintendo formally unveiled Super Smash Bros Ultimate at E3 2018 and with it, showed off that Ridley, a heavily demanded character, would be playable. They also made a point to show that Waluigi, a moderately demanded character,^1 would remain as an assist trophy. Waluigi is nowhere near Nintendo's most popular characters, rather he appeals to the meme culture of the internet and most of his fan base comes from there. Upon his announcement as an assist trophy, his meme inclined fanbase began to harass Masahiro Sakurai, the game's director, with inappropriate images of Waluigi to the point where he had to block them on twitter^2. The fan demand spiked after he was deconfirmed to a point where it has made Smash content on the internet less enjoyable due to how much Waluigi appears. Now that everyone is caught up, here my opinions that I'd like to see in a non meme jokey way given the other perspective of I do not believe Waluigi deserves a place in Super Smash Bros Ultimate as a playable character, neither at launch or as DLC. Not only would it be confusing to have him as an assist trophy at first and then later re categorized a downloadable fighter, but frankly he wouldn't be a unique enough character. He has no games where he plays a vital role and isn't even consistently featured in the spin off Mario games^3. On the other hand, the games he does appear in already have adequate representation in Smash either as stages, music, or inspiration for moves like Peach's forward smash attack. In comparison, every fighter added in Super Smash Bros for Wii u and 3ds, as well as the two newcomers in Smash Ultimate, have incredibly unique and interesting movesets and add a style not yet seen in the franchise. And even if Waluigi had a new game announced that provided him with a new fresh way to play in Smash, qualifying him as a character, the treatment from fans towards the development team is disgusting and only hurts his chances of appearing. While I will not personally link more than I already have, the amount of NSFW or even NSFL content featuring Waluigi been sent privately or as tweet responses to the Smash development team and specifically Masahiro Sakurai is absurd. I'm aware that a small amount of content like this is to be expected for any public figure, but from my personal experience, there's just simply more of it. I follow many game developers on most social medias and the memes sent to them are not nearly as degrading and embarrassing as the ones made for Waluigi. I unfortunately can't back this behind data, but if you have some evidence otherwise, please share. This is the most accurate and reviewed fan smash poll I could find, where he ranked 15th overall and 8th among Nintendo characters.^1 As I said before, I don't want to get banned from the subreddit by posting adult content or inapporatie jokes, but this article summarizes it pretty well.^2 As an example, Mariokart 7 which admittedly had a weird roster , didn't feature Waluigi as a racer and limitied him to just a returning track from Mariokart DS.^3<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Waluigi doesn't deserve to be in Smash Bros Ultimate and the backlash against him as an assist trophy is toxic and unwarranted.\n","id":"2e2fac64-808e-45e9-8d87-0bd0fe9ff694"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do all or most White Americans experience privilege?<|ARGUMENT|>In contrast to Black Americans and other persons of color, white Americans have no unifying culture and do not consider themselves as part of a common community with shared interests and goals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In general, any advantages white Americans have is a result of their personal choices, not privilege.\n","id":"991ce0e0-d59c-410d-b52f-0ff4fe84feb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many humans - for example, infants or the severely cognitively disabled - whose levels of sentience are lower than most animals. Insofar as we should morally protect these people, we should also morally protect animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sentience is the characteristic by which we justify most human rights. When animals show it, they too are deserving of special protections.\n","id":"679da387-920b-4027-8113-25dbf1d58b0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state ever infringe on individual human rights when countering terrorism?<|ARGUMENT|>Laws that criminalise supporting a terrorist organisation using a broad definition of what it means to express support, infringe on freedom of expression.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is essential that the media and public have the right to free speech.\n","id":"07a75b06-1b99-47f5-8f62-23ee5692b74f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Actually parents are not allowed to do whatever they want to their child, even if they think it is for the best of the child. As sad as it is, sometimes society must step in to protect the child from his\/her own parents. Laws haven been already created to protect the children from many other forms of violence by their parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state can still intervene when the parents' wishes are determined not to be in the child's best interests.\n","id":"0bd16d7f-3da5-4ea0-88bc-13a68d8df9ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>Lies can greatly change the support for such causes, as seen by the lying during the Brexit referendum<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Freedom of speech laws also allow for opposition groups to spread misinformation about such causes.\n","id":"33504f57-7fa4-42b7-8b2e-8f1c44cf40bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>OBGYN physicians can choose which procedures they do or do not take part in. Some OBGYN's will perform abortions, but only under certain circumstances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women having the right to choose abortion does not mean that all doctors are required to perform abortions.\n","id":"047e5686-0cdd-4403-8a35-ffa7cd65d95e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Ireland Repeal the 8th Amendment?<|ARGUMENT|>The phrase \"on demand\" has certain negative connotations, that are invoked by using this phrase.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Irish Bishops have warned that changing the amendment might lead to \"abortion on demand\".\n","id":"14ac7258-b2c6-4582-8e09-903208d86576"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>The Equal Protection Clause is part of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and condemns discrimination: it has been used as the basis of many court cases rejecting discrimination of various groups, including gender-based discrimination.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The American constitution points toward the necessity of unisex bathrooms.\n","id":"0ee3a34b-ecb9-42a1-8e55-f80d22a650f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>The imbalance of power serves to increase productivity, as hierarchical management serves to guide and govern workers with a centralized system of rules and goals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"New ways of maintaining the power imbalance between the employer and the employee will be found.\n","id":"4ce3a3ce-6ecb-43b9-b0cf-a2963a5da65b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My basic view is that, in the long term, splitting countries apart is almost always a bad idea. I remember a quote which roughly stated that one of the few things a democracy cannot allow is the breaking apart of a country by democratic means, because if this happens every time the people disagree, you will be left with a scramble of small, weak nations, vulnerable to attack from strong dictators. I'll explain my thinking a little more. I believe that the ideal future for Europe and the world is one without borders where all of humanity is united. I know this sounds dreamy and unrealistic, but nonetheless it should be another distant goal we all slowly work towards. This means that we should be joining countries together, not separating them. At the moment, it is far easier to accomplish the breaking apart of a country, as shown in Europe's recent close calls with countries such as Scotland and Catalonia. Aside from a few exceptions, the energy for uniting countries is almost completely gone. The glowing optimism of the 90s where Europe seemed on the path to unification in a United States of Europe has gone I am aware only a small minority shared this optimism . If we want to return to this forward looking mindset, we must prevent secessionist movements at all costs, as they are a selfish steps backwards. If we can't learn to work together and see past differences in a small country, there is no way we can learn to work together as a united Europe, leaving us doomed for the future in competing against huge nations such as China. While it may seem unkind and dictatorial to force people to remain in a country they don't wish to belong to, it is the only way to keep Europe strong and united, a much more important goal in my opinion. The acceptance or recognition of separatist movements in Europe only encourages others to follow, hence why Spain has nervously remained silent on Kosovo. One of the biggest threats to Europe, and therefore democracy, is Vladimir Putin. He is losing economically to the west, and so has no choice but to undermine Europe by other means, such as supporting nationalist movements. The alt right wave in Europe and Brexit has been Putin's wet dream, because it means a weaker and more fractured Europe. If the dream of a united Europe is not enough to make the case for keeping countries together, surely the serious security threat of Russia is? Putin is fighting a battle we don't realise we're in. I'm open to having my view changed, because I understand that my view is a result of my privilege in being part of the dominant group of my country, England. My view might be different If I were Scottish or Catalonian, and so I am interested in the counter arguments of people who can sympathise with secessionist movements like these. I would also be interested to hear how these movements can be justified in the long term in the context of the whole of Europe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No secessionist movements should be accepted or recognised within Europe.\n","id":"0b4af0b1-4bec-4f09-b8bc-dda279cb2445"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, I'd like to start off by defining the terms to be used in this debate and in classic Brit style I'm telling you that what you're doing is probably absolutely wrong and if you disagree we'll be on your doorstep with a flag and a blunderbuss to make you realise just how wrong you are. Chips Potatoes, cut into thick about 1 2cm , long chunks and deep fried. Golden and crispy on the outside, soft and fluffy on the inside. Generally paired with fish or pie and served with salt and vinegar. Exhibit A Fries Potatoes, cut into thin less than 1cm , generally slightly shorter chunks and similarly deep fried. Crispy throughout, golden brown exterior. Generally a side dish with fast food, served heavily salted. Exhibit B I posit that the Chip experience is thoroughly more satisfying than the Fry experience in every way. Compare the commonly pictured setting a stroll to the local chippy on a nippy summer evening on the cornish coast, vs. Shit, Domino's is closed Maccie D's it is. , followed by trudging behind countless other faceless drones in sterile conditions, regretting all the while that you didn't grab a pie and a pint at wetherspoons. Fries are a side dish, nothing more chips on their own are a classic, and come in so many forms Poutine, curly chips, cheesy chips, chili chips There's so much more versatility in chips you can eat them cold, in sandwiches the classic working class lunch , you can have them with salt, vinegar, ketchup, mayo, curry sauce, gravy There's so little room for imagination with fries. Chips have charm. Fries just feel soulless. I imagine a steaming package of vinegar soaked daily mail only thing it's good for , compared to a flat, branded slab of folded cardboard. Chips can be quality food. They can sit alongside the finest dish of trout and still seem just as deserving of their place as if they were dumped next to a badly microwaved pie. Fries seem just trashy, wherever they appear. If you get a whiff of that good old British arrogance, you're probably right But I dare you to make a case for that U.S. fast food staple maybe it does have a place that isn't sat beside a flat, tasteless patty of meat. As it is, I just don't see any competition chips have that satisfyingly moist and fluffy interior while fries are just pure crisp throughout.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Thick-cut chips are the superior choice over french fries in every culinary situation.\n","id":"22fe5ae4-afea-4c94-81d7-db840fadf0cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public transport be free?<|ARGUMENT|>Some train networks are run on electricity powered by nuclear energy which has its own environmental impact.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Just because emissions are reduced doesn't make it better for the environment.\n","id":"3fc8ec02-8cf1-484a-a833-7d18ec5574f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Veal<|ARGUMENT|>The government should not intervene where the markets are more capable of doing so. If land-use is a problem, and if cattle take up more land per calorie produced than other forms of produce, than we would expect the price of meet to rise significantly relative to other agricultural goods. This would cause the demand for cattle and meat to fall, which would lower the production of cattle and veal and the land used in the production of these goods. Such a market-based response to heavy cattle land-use is better than any governmental response to the problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If cattle land-use is a problem, the markets are best for solving the problem.\n","id":"1189d504-eaf6-4ee9-8c58-6a77d2c51df8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are a plethora of products in the world today that do not help the greater good as a society, and almost exclusively profit the executives who own the companies who make the product, as is the norm in a free market. But , I believe that the production and sale of bottled water exceeds the amount of freedom that any nation should give its capitalist endeavours. The obvious nature of the rip off that occurs when someone has the freedom to buy a bottle of water is almost comical. The price of bottled water exceeds that of tap water by a factor of 7500 in Canada, as an example . The amount of oil implemented to compromise the plastic of the massive number of bottles used in this market is astounding in 2008, 33,000,000m^3 of bottled water was sold in America alone. This amounts to roughly 110 million bottles, each weighing 12.7g. This is roughly 1,400 metric tonnes of plastic. This is a lot of plastic, much of which will not be recycled properly, and will be lost in the dumps. I believe there are many good alternatives to this issue, including using reusable bottles, having the government install more public water fountains, among other things. I believe it is the government's moral obligation to rid their respective countries of these companies who claim their mountain spring water or what have you is 7,500 times the better to tap water.  Edit apostrophes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bottled water is an inefficient and immoral market, and should be forbidden by the government.\n","id":"fb624ee5-5241-43e1-ad5c-8069f165d50b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>Adidas sold a rainbow \"pride pack\" of merchandise during Pride month, while simultaneously being a sponsor of the World Cup in Russia - a country with strict anti-LGBT laws<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Corporations who sponsor Pride often exploit the historical struggles of LGBTQ+ people for a PR stunt, while having done very little to meaningfully support the LGBTQ+ community.\n","id":"15ab9297-2b2b-4a0c-a122-dac5bcb7f66b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hear me out When you have an abortion you prevent getting a baby by killing the not yet developed infant. This can be done for a lot of reasons but basically, you do it to avoid getting a baby. So now I ask you are you against condoms? All they do is prevent you from getting a baby too? Okay, so basically you\u2019re against not having babies. Does that mean you are against having periods then? I mean, when you have your period, your body disposes the egg cells, killing what would have been a child. If you\u2019re against abortions, shouldn\u2019t you then be against getting periods too?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being against abortions is absolutely stupid.\n","id":"30ea1001-4cc8-4b92-a029-ee9dde55224b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>The classic version of the oath also prohibits abortive medicine to women, which is arguably another outdated concept. To follow the original text blindly would be as \"irrational\" as taking the Bible or other holy texts word for word, and has no place in modern State\/Federal lawmaking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Only the classic version of the Hippocratic Oath prohibits euthanasia or to \"cause harm\". Doctors today swear a modernized Oath where none of these principles are mentioned. Therefore, medical professionals would remain responsible of the \"right to die\".\n","id":"0fda59d3-cb0f-4dcd-bbe6-d8a768595afa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, yes, you can learn and grow , and even take training from some great artists, but this doesn't justify the time and money it takes to get a degree in the field. It's time that could actually be spent refining your craft and producing your own work. Practice makes perfect. To be clear, I do not think that the Arts themselves are worthless by any means. I greatly admire anyone capable of producing a work of art, visual or otherwise, that moves people. Also, it is essential that the arts be taught in primary school, to give students the opportunity to explore expressive mediums. However, If you are a great writer painter actor etc you will get hired. No one is going to say you are phenomenal, but we need someone with a degree. And getting that degree doesn't increase your job prospects, and in all likelihood doesn't actually help you with your craft. All an Arts degree is good for is making more Arts professors. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liberal Arts degrees are fairly worthless, because your success in those fields entirely depends on what you as a person, and not what you learn in the classroom. You cannot be taught to be successful in the Arts.\n","id":"60a95587-cbe9-4225-9fc0-8eea0e9dccd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title is fairly self explanatory, but I'll expand. Currently, in the state of California, you are prescribed a Medical Card from a doctor. This card allows you to access dispensaries and to purchase whatever strains you desire in whatever volume you want up to a cap . This is unlike any other system of legitimate medication. In order for Marijuana's medical benefits to be taken seriously it should be prescribed much the same way prescription medication is. You should get prescribed specific strains based on their benefits, with specific instructions as to how they should be administered and with what technique. Background I use marijuana medically to treat anxiety and lack of appetite. Before I found a method of treatment that worked I was on a course of Ritalin and then a course of Lexapro. While neither of the medications were effective for me, the method in which they were prescribed was extremely helpful. I believe the same method of prescription would help to legitimize Medical Marijuana<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that for Medical Marijuana to be taken seriously, specific amounts of specific strains should be prescribed, instead of the current system.\n","id":"216cb3bc-128e-456a-849c-cbeccec5ba7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm ok with people who can't have perfect life pretty much everybody because of ageing for example needing purpose also English isn't my first language sorry for mistakes or stupid writing . But im against idea that purpose is ultimate truth we are seeking and that it's beyond pleasures. In my opinion ultimate truth is true pleasure and beauty. Purpose is only needed when there is no sufficient pleasure. Real pleasure i will call perfect feeling true pleasure is for example for majority of man I'm man so I will use this example you can change it for your own deepest desire having sex with most beautiful girl you dreamed about for years in peak of your youth, body and love, that first moment, the perfect feeling. You might say well that feeling passes.But that doesn't mean propose is ultimate thing or truth you seek it just mean human body and brain is flawed so we need to cope somehow. If you could have that perfect feeling always that would be your ultimate truth you wouldn't need anything else. When that feeling passes after however long then by my definition it isn't true pleasure anymore. Life is simple, too simple. If we could get brain that could restart itself and have immortal body and always have true pleasure i meant life is simple in a way of what it's all about and not simple in infinite complexity of how it arises or what it would take for immortal body then we would forever be happy we wouldn't need anything else and that perfect feeling would be our ultimate truth there is no need for purpose. Purpose itself as ultimate goal we all need, in face of true perfect feeling is just meaningless nonsense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Purpose is everything is stupid nonsense and just complicating very simple thing we call life and is only needed when you lack true pleasure. Pleasure and beauty are ultimate truths.\n","id":"bb2464fc-e4d3-42ca-a366-b66c7a708dff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>Teenagers, especially girls, may be more susceptible to developing eating disorders in order to keep up with the appearances of current celebrities, which they often feel pressured to do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Peer and public pressure via social media can exacerbate symptoms of eating disorders.\n","id":"614a94b4-a5c7-4416-9ee5-7d101965313b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Keep in mind, I'm not scientist I'm 17 . I won't be able to back this up with a highly scientific argument. I think that our feelings are just our brains experiencing the chemicals they create. I don't believe in a soul or a spirit. Eventually science may be able to plot and explain even the most detailed reactions and experiences in the brain although this would be a massive task that may never be done . When meteorologists predict the weather, sometimes they are wrong. This is because they do not account for every single variable of the weather or because they don't understand the weather's reactions with ultimate precision. I think that if every possible variable were accounted for, the weather would be 100 predictable. I think the brain is like a much more complex version of the weather. If all the math and variables of the brain every cell, everything that makes up the cell, etc. were understood, it would be 100 predictable. I think that everything humans experience feelings, memories, physical pain, and everything else are natural mechanisms of the brain and do not necessitate a soul. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"all life feelings, consciousness, etc. is reducible to chemicals and math in the brain\n","id":"d5fe1b47-3dab-40d8-90bb-e6ef16b0cc68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Michigan and Florida delegates in 2008 US elections<|ARGUMENT|>There is some national resentment that Michigan and Florida violated the rules of the DNC, while other states obeyed them, which would have given favor to Michigan and Florida at a cost to other states. It is also true that a significant punishment for disobeying the DNC rules may be important in upholding the integrity of the system in the future, which is in the interest of all state parties and citizens. It also seems odd to many in the nation that these states and their populations are now protesting so vehemently the punishment that was so clearly outlined from the beginning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is some national resentment surrounding seating Florida and Michigan delegates.\n","id":"a6d431f4-cf56-450a-94f5-3884c751cfed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm playing devil's advocate of topic I just want to discuss. Please don't downvote because of butthurt. Just reply to . Islamic terrorism has worse aspect in terms of threat than any kind of genocide happened in the past including Holocaust, Stalin, Mao Ze Dong, Pol Pot, North Korea, eradication of Indians, crusades, Mongolian invasion etc, simply the reason is that it has been since the day 1 and it will last forever as long as Islam stays. Don't blind yourself and see the truth since 9 11, Muslim extremists have carried out more than 23,000 terrorist attacks against human being. So who were the organizers of this chain of hatred? Bin Laden? Zarqawi? ISIS? No. Its the ideology of Islam and mentality it implants into one's mind. Quran 3 151 Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority . Don't get me started on typical anti Islamophobiatic response b,but there are a lot of peaceful Muslims in this world of course because not every woman and child are war mongue. Let's put it this way how many religion in this world have carried out 23,000 terrorist attacks since 9 11? Only one, its Islam So Holocaust ended when Hitler regime fall. Since downfall of communism, no mass genocide is happening in the name of ideology in Russia, China and following ex communist states. Native Indians are living in peace in freedom land. But nobody can predict the end of chain of terrorism within Muslim's mind. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Islamic terrorism is worse than Holocaust.\n","id":"8e695f9b-d4e4-45a3-a617-b4175c3c9057"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should sperm donors have the same legal rights, responsibilities and limitations as other biological fathers?<|ARGUMENT|>Even without such onerous requirements, a financial payment is frequently offered to provide an incentive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be very difficult to get men to donate with such onerous requirements.\n","id":"9157c625-ff5a-4e63-b272-c27c77087cb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should refugees seeking asylum in Europe be distributed among EU member states according to a quota?<|ARGUMENT|>An important principle of liberal democracy is effectively guaranteeing individual and minority rights. Given that refugees are a marginalized minority at risk of harm, they fall under this principle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"European states follow liberal democratic principles which focus on the protection of individual freedoms and minority protection. Therefore, they should accept more refugees.\n","id":"1ae19a1c-d40e-41a9-bf5b-725a2c4f89d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Web 2.0<|ARGUMENT|>\"Amanda Chapel agrees with Keen\u2019s hypothesis that amateurs aka bloggers, youtubers, cluetrainers, etc threaten '.200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors.'\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Web 2.0 undercuts those that innovate, and the benefits that they deserve:\n","id":"8a8ef959-3c26-48f2-b2ef-2a68f6af48cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>give illegal immigrants drivers licenses<|ARGUMENT|>This policy will only further the resentment that exists for illegal immigrants in America, and will make life harder for the entire Hispanic community as a result. It is no secret that the idea of granting illegal immigrants driver\u2019s licenses is a very unpopular idea. In New York, for example, 70% of the electorate is against this policy1. Looking to California, not only are drivers licenses out of the question, but in 1994 the state passed a bill denying illegals access to welfare, healthcare and education by a 59% margin2. Resentment for the community is high and it is undeniable that this policy will be wildly unpopular with the vast majority of Americans. The issue with Americans being unhappy with this policy is that they will channel their unhappiness toward all immigrant communities and the Hispanic community more generally. The concept of driver\u2019s licenses especially fuels this hatred because Americans believe that this will allow them to \u201cmasquerade\u201d as normal Americans and therefore will assume all Hispanics are these illegals that are masquerading as legal immigrants in their communities. This will only engender more hate and discrimination against these communities. Therefore, this will seriously harm the Hispanic-American community by fuelling hatred against them in the American majority. 1 \"Immigration: Let them drive.\" Economist 25 Oct 2007, n. pag. Web. 1 Dec. 2011. 2 \"Driver's Licenses for Undocumented Aliens.\" Institute of Governmental Studies. UC Berkeley, n. d. Web. 1 Dec. 2011.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This will foster further resentment of the Hispanic community in America.\n","id":"920ab6f7-457b-4cff-95ec-65516c746f5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title says, I don't believe it is immoral. In fact I would say it is immoral to not undertake research and potentialy save millions of lives. The blastocyst isn't developed yet and is just a ball of cells. Please don't bring religious views because, although I do truly respect your views, I am an atheist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe stem cell research, therapy, etc. Is immoral.\n","id":"0799eb77-8d0b-4b5f-abfc-ecc91aac8c99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Edible Landscapes: Should Lawns Be Replaced?<|ARGUMENT|>People will not have to worry about pesticides, herbicides, or other chemicals in their food if they have control over growing it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Seeing the food production from start to finish can clear a person's conscience of fears from how their food is made.\n","id":"a9ebd78e-be87-4c83-8de1-e407d94f9ca7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The experience machine for those unfamiliar with it My argument Plugging yourself into the experience machine constitutes one of the most selfish thing you can do. By shutting yourself off from the rest of the world you would thereby be relinquishing your moral responsibilities to help others, through aid, charity, support, etc. Therefore, it is unethical to plug yourself into Nozick's experience machine. The only exceptions would be in cases where the person is undergoing extreme suffering and the experience machine is the only escape so to speak. To change my view you will need to persuade me that we do not have moral duties to help others. Or that plugging oneself into the experience machine, will not negate those duties.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Plugging yourself into Nozick's experience machine would be unethical.\n","id":"a1bfad10-0db3-4b2a-97e3-097aedb2cce7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>82% of US prostitutes in this study had been violently assaulted during their work, 68% had been raped.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prostitution is harmful for those who participate in it, legalisation simply entrenches these harms.\n","id":"af9c7349-6007-4872-8883-43aa0d440f35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nothing lasts forever, neither pain nor happiness. If I am experiencing physical pain say, a broken limb , the mindset that soon the pain will be over helps me get through the pain. It allows me to power through the pain and get back to being healthy. Similarly, if I'm depressed about something, knowing the sadness will someday end helps me get through it. However, I know that my happiness is also ephemeral, and thus I treasure it that much more. Even though I know that pain and suffering builds character and instills wisdom, I believe powering through and enduring it can lead to a happier live. Change my view. EDIT I should clarify that I don't think suffereing is necessary to build character, but it certainly contributes. People learn from mistakes, and mistakes usually cause at least a little suffering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe suffering and pain is an ephemeral necessity that builds character, but one must push through them to achieve happiness again.\n","id":"27809177-6249-48ce-9e5e-1232dbe94c3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So Sepp Blatter resigned this very day and my opinion is mainly based on all the things i'm hearing in the media corruption, bribes etc. , but I hear nothing good about this man. It seems like Blatter did nothing good for the FIFA and only made things worse in the past 17 years. I'm not that old so I don't know that much about his previous installments, but I have read the Wikipedia article about him. A few things the article mentioned refusal to allow goal line technology or video replays, his plans to set a restriction to five foreign players and having six players from the said team's own nationality, lambasting of a referee, several briberies and financial mismanagement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blatter has done nothing good for the FIFA\n","id":"ae3bcf6e-b465-49fd-b7f3-1f2218d3b985"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For context, I am a conservative who typically votes Republican. I am also firmly middle class. The proposed tax plan is marketed as a huge boon for the middle class, by doubling the standard deduction and lowering tax rates. Not in the advertising however, is that standard exemptions would go away worth 4,050 per person. So a family of four could no longer reduce their taxable income by more than 16,000 . They are also getting rid of other supposed exemptions and loopholes . When you eliminate itemized deductions like real estate taxes, state and local income taxes, medical expenses, and unreimbursed employee expenses, it's the MIDDLE class that gets hit the worst. Nearly half of all Americans don't pay any federal income tax at all so most of this won't even affect them. Most of the people who will be included in the doubling of the standard deduction were already paying little to nothing in taxes so this won't help them. If you weren't paying taxes before, your tax rate won't change. If you were itemizing before, it looks like you'll be paying more taxes. Who this plan helps is the rich. Rich people would love a lowering of their rates from 39.6 to 35 . That alone would save them more than any middle class American will save. They will love a lowering in the corporate rate from 35 to 20 . Another interesting example for the true tax nerds is who the elimination of the estate tax would help. For context, I am one of those family farmers who they pretend like they are helping with an estate tax repeal. My family owns a farm and I would hope to inherit it one day. I went to a succession seminar for farmers last year and the speaker told the room of 300 people The last thing you want is a repeal of the estate tax Let me explain why Under the current rules for estate taxes, I wouldn't have to pay any estate tax because our farm is not worth anywhere near 11,000,000 which is the current married estate tax exemption. So unless you are a multi millionaire, you will never have to pay federal estate taxes anyway. Furthermore, currently estates also get a step up in basis. Here's an example of what the step up in basis is if this is new to you Your parents bought property for 100k 30 years ago now it is worth 500k. When they pass it on to you, your taxable basis in the property would step up to 500k, so that when you sold the house, you wouldn't have to pay capital gains tax on the house. Without a step up in basis, you would have to pay capital gains tax on the full 400k difference. You can see how step up in basis helps middle class Americans. A straight repeal of the estate tax only becomes preferable to a step up in basis if you are worth well North of 11 20 million. So you can see how choosing a repeal of the estate tax at the expensive of a step up in basis is a direct choice to help rich people at the expense of the middle class. But none of that is in the marketing. Please,  EDIT I've read all 270 comments so far and will read any more than come in. I'm blown away by the thoughtful and helpful replies. Thank you for keeping it civil and respectful It is a testament to the quality of the  sub and it's users. To summarize what I'm hearing from most of the comments, I tend to hear variations of a few main points The majority seem to agree that the rich will make out very well under this tax plan and then there is debate over whether or not middle class will benefit or not. The main technical disagreements are who the middle class actually is, if a doubling of the standard deduction actually helps anyone if they have to give up personal exemptions, and then there is also some back and forth over the merits of various individual tax deductions like deductions for mortgage interest and student loans That I'm naive for believing that Republicans ever cared about the middle class in the first place Don't panic yet because this plan isn't very detailed at all yet and won't likely pass anyway As far as the main points are concerned, I've had a handful of high income earners tell me how much they would save under this tax plan, and a handful of middle income people tell me that they think that they will have to pay more in taxes because they either live in a high tax state or have 1 children and will suffer from the last exemptions. Therefore, if anything my viewpoint has become solidified from these answers. The part of my viewpoint that has changed has been my panic over this tax proposal. A handful of people calmed me down a little bit and talked some sense into me so I'll hand out a delta or two based on that if that's acceptable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The proposed tax plan is a huge sellout to rich people at the expense of the middle class\n","id":"d6f47495-8f6a-41d2-90aa-c4da459b6c78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>Schools are regarded both legally and morally as functioning in loco parentis this includes a duty to protection children from harm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Censoring the N-word is consistent with schools' duty of care to their students.\n","id":"2d6b9eb4-68a3-4b6d-967e-6498ba53680e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods<|ARGUMENT|>\"What\u2019s the Problem with Labeling Genetically-Modified GM\/GMO Foods?\" Monsanto Statement: \"The Food and Drug Administration FDA oversees food labeling laws in the United States. The FDA has determined that where genetically-modified crops don\u2019t differ from non-GM crops, that products containing them don\u2019t have to be labeled. FDA does require the product to be labeled if the ingredient is a potential allergen, or somehow changes the nutritional properties of the food. To date, no approved biotech crop is either an allergen, or has any significant nutritional differences from non-GM counterparts.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Labeling is wrong when GM foods show no differences with other foods\n","id":"bda0d921-8bbc-4114-9e5e-a15a4906b1b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Research indicates that even the results of college football games can influence voting behavior, with wins leading to increased support for incumbents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voters are susceptible to influences in their decision making that make it difficult to perceive them as rational.\n","id":"1c527959-5152-44d4-a5ad-4c73bbcb3ffd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe our government scams millions of citizens out of billions of dollars every year by requiring drivers to get car insurance. My mother has been driving for 50 years. She has never once had car accident, a fender bender, a speeding ticket, or any other driving infraction. She has had to pay for car insurance her entire life and they have yet to render her a single product or service. they have given her nothing but a mere promise . That's not good enough for the amount if money I'm sure she's paid them. I sincerely believe she is entitled to some of her money back. And I'm sure there are thousands of people who do too. It's a blatant rip off.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think car insurance is a scam.\n","id":"d9f39bd9-9bd7-4214-9f9a-92172e24e83b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I've been giving some thought to an idiosyncrasy that has really begun to bother me concerning Native American land and how it's setup to interact with the United States. First some context I live about 30 minutes in every direction from Indian Gaming Casinos that participate in my local economy and have a non 0 impact on my day to day life and the life of the broader community in general. For example, our AAA ballpark was purchased and funded by one of the tribes in its entirety. An acquaintance of mine has a slew of health issues, that would under normal circumstances be covered for him via his husband's work benefits. But the tribe has decided they do not recognize homosexual marriage and they do not have to award him health benefits as a result. I think that particular loophole should be forcibly closed by the United States in order to create compliance with more modern business laws. It's extremely regressive that just because of the political climate surrounding Native Americans that they get a pass on being homophobic to the detriment of the people working in and patronizing their casinos just because of where the territory lines are drawn. Now, obviously allowing the Native Americans governance over their tribal land and allowing them to enforce whatever practices they wish are fine. However that doesn't mean that the continental United States has to adhere to their laws and rules. Which brings me to my title point. If the U.S. government state or federal does not want to meddle in the affairs of Native Americans that's fine. But I believe that once money acquired on their land returns to U.S. soil it should be taxed at a rate of 100 unless the casino is in compliance with modern business practices. A couple of closing remarks I'm not exactly concerned with how the U.S. gets compliance out of the Native Americans. I feel that it's ultimately a tangent, and that as long as it's not hard compliance that tells them what they must do It's more or less a non issue to me. I am far more concerned with a challenge to my view that we shouldn't interfere with them at all, because if they are going to participate in a community to such a visible magnitude then I think they are basically being given access to the ultimate free rider policy at scale and I don't think that is right irrespective of past transgressions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If an enterprise on Native American soil does not adhere to U.S. business practices, as outlined by the state or fed the American government should penalize its interactions with the United States.\n","id":"628a1fdb-740d-4f4b-bedf-b2caaadb808b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that religion is just a way for people to explain and cope with events such as death and natural disasters and to give their lives meaning as well as feel a part of something. The fact that some people truly believe in these religious scriptures and for the most part don't question them, prey to a god that they have no evidence even exists and adhere to strict religious guidelines is, in this day and age, a form of delusion. 8 in 10 people identify with a religious group, that to me is just insanity. I don't pretend to know how the universe was created or try to explain it. That seems to be a unbearable concept for some people. Please help me understand why this is such a widespread and accepted phenomenon. FINAL EDIT Thank you each and everyone that contributed to this discussion. This has been immensely helpful and mind expanding. My goal in making this post was to grow and challenge my own stubborn views and you have all helped that happen. Its so easy to cast judgements without truly understanding the origin of other peoples views. I feel as though I have completely shifted my view on religion as a result of this thread.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is a primitive concept that should no longer have a place in modern society\n","id":"98f376ec-af8d-441a-82fe-32bfebb4b65c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Polls from late April 2017 suggest that if the election had been held then, Trump would not only have won again, but also won the popular vote. This is despite his declining approval rating.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump is likely to win in 2020, regardless of what the Democrats do, so any impacts on his popularity should not matter to the Democrats.\n","id":"e4935d97-d824-470e-9893-00b7dbd591c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Anyone who drives a boat in a popular area would know how chaotic it is. No one knows the right of way, or anything. At night there are navigation lights that tell other drivers what side they are on of your boat, some people have them on the wrong way Drivers over the age of 18 have to do NOTHING but walk to a rental, pay and get on the water. Drivers under 18 can take a 7 hours long lesson if they are above 10 and a VERY easy quiz. Almost no one knows what to do. If it's a busy night, its complete chaos.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Boat Drivers over the age of 18 should have to take a boating test\n","id":"8da67d7e-8b1d-4f25-b8be-084d1a93ac10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Exactly. I think you meant this as a \"pro\" under the parent argument. The police made a very unfortunate error and didn't find\/take his gun when they arrested him, and someone was killed as a result.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Then it's a police negligence problem. Why wasn't he asked about his gun, as the police do as part of procedure?\n","id":"9d510989-d0aa-41fc-b9b9-8909a2974cb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In England, fox hunting can be done without the use of foxes and this allows both the protection of the welfare of the foxes and the preservation of the cultural practice of foxhunting. It may be possible to establish something similar in Spain with regards to bullfighting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments can use regulation to limit or eliminate cruelty, as it does in other areas.\n","id":"d040d13d-ee60-444b-88e8-d40e6106549e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Agnosticism is the position that the existence and nature of a god or gods are unknown or unknowable. Most agnostics feel that it's intellectually indefensible to make a strong assertion one way or another. However, the Falsifiability Criterion tells us that any scientific statement must be falsifiable. In the case of the existence of God, this is impossible unless there exists proof for example, the existence of the Sun is falsifiable by following basic statement A day happened when the Sun didn't come up but nothing else changed , but if such proof exists, agnosticism becomes false. What do you think?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Agnosticism is unscientific as it is unfalsifiable\n","id":"b1fda785-8891-4f3b-93e4-a46557005a1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Since I was little, learning the way the universe worked the law of cause and effect, thinking about determinism. I didn't know it was an hypothesis, and I didn't have a name for it but I thought that someone probably had thought of it. I just called it the universe being on rails, there was no room for anything else. Forward to my teen years, as I learn more about science, I learned about these problems. I learned that Einstein famously said God doesn't play dice with the universe which was an answer to quantum physics. Now, I didn't understand quantum mechanics, and I still don't, but the nature of it, of being a chance, instead of a mathematical certainty led to a more free interpretation, even leading a lot of mysticism. This led multiple people to exclaim ha ha Got it, there is where free will lies. We're not set in stone. It's the clue we need to conclude we have free will. Well, I'm not convinced. How is the chance of a particle changing state off a probability doesn't make my brain make decision's against the will of nature. If anything, it'd make my brain be chaotic. Our souls aren't controlling what particles do to make us do what we do. That's a huge leap in logic. And plus, the same particles in our brain are the same particles in a rock. Does the rock have exacly the same free will as our brain? I don't see how a statistical chance in an astronomical amount of particles in one's brain makes one's decisions. I've heard plenty of people wax poetical on things like the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, while completely ignoring the fact that it goes against free will in every way. In multitude of universes where every possibility happens, you have no free will, all the choices are taken, against your will. To aggravate this the more I read biology, psychology, evolutionary psychology etc, the more I convince myself how much our brain is confined to it's biology. The world doesn't like determinists, one often quote mined sentence of Stephen Hawking is gt I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road While completely dismissing what he said next, that it is completely consistent with determinism to do that, as looking before crossing is the cause of the effect not being ran over I've had many people try to convince me we have free will by using emotionally charged arguements such as So, Hitler wasn't wrong because he didn't have any agency . Well, how does that change anything? Does reality change because it doesn't bow to your morals? In the end I don't want to be a determinist. It's not satisfying enough, to know I have no agency, and I'm just living life as a pretend. And I openly admit I live as if the world had free will. I don't live by determinism and I really want to change my view. So please, help me Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no reason to think we humans have free will.\n","id":"c69eace4-07e3-452d-b5cf-dd41c5a62e9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Edible Landscapes: Should Lawns Be Replaced?<|ARGUMENT|>With a lawn, money goes to both the lawn and the food. With an edible landscape, money is going to just the food if at all, as some plants maintain themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Edible landscapes cost less to grow and maintain than lawns.\n","id":"944e87b1-fa6f-4332-98fe-644c0f0ed936"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think in the back of sexist men's heads is always the idea that if men teamed together as a group, they could make women do whatever they wanted through pure physical domination. They realize that there are many women who are stronger than them individually but in the back of their minds they have a nagging voice that tells them women should appreciate everything men give them, because if men really wanted to, they could take it back. They hear about the Patriarchy and think to themselves, why are voluntarily giving women rights? If men didn't let women vote they'd still be fighting for suffrage. WE gave them the power to vote. They see a female coworker getting a promotion and think to themselves, if there weren't any rules, I could beat the shit out of her, she doesn't deserve anything, she should be glad men changed the rules that allowed her to even own land. Society has told them that they can't actually do this, but they see women fighting for equality and think to themselves, they should be happy with what we give them, if we wanted to we could make them our slaves. I think a big part of rape culture comes from the fact that a lot of these men would physically overpower women they found attractive and rape them if the consequences weren't so dire. I believe that if you told men they could rape a woman with a 0 chance of being caught and 0 chance the girl would remember the event, at least half of them would take the offer if not more. I don't think this mindset is healthy so please reddit, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the root of sexism and misogyny is the fact that men are stronger than women.\n","id":"d09cdf90-f490-4375-8a58-5dd4a5ae294e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The name of the subreddit turns me off of ever visiting it, despite the fact that I think it's quite good and has a lot to offer. I think that changing the name would be beneficial for the following reasons 1 It makes me think that everyone who posts there is a self help book author or frat bro which really makes me a lot less open to what they have to say, or willing to visit the subreddit in the first place. 2 I think calling it LifeProTips implies that there is such a thing as being a Life Pro which is ridiculous, and basically establishes a kind of inferiority amongst those who visit the subreddit looking for advice. 3 If the name was changed, people like myself would be a lot more open to it's ideas which from what I've seen are quite good<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"LifeProTips\" subreddit should change its name.\n","id":"a972980c-f969-448b-be1a-a2fd914a6148"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are some facts which are hard to ascertain, such as how many people attended the Trump inauguration. There could be multiple ways of trying to estimate how many people attended. Some people did that by clicking a picture but not making sure the picture was clicked at the same time. When Kellyanne Conway said that Spicer was giving alternative facts, she meant that he was giving an alternative method of arriving at the same fact, by quoting public transportation usage numbers, etc. I don't understand what's the big fuss. I think you're all going on the wrong track to . I don't care about actual numbers here. What I'm arguing is that everyone is giving an undue objectivity to facts. Facts are NOT objective. It is not possible to ascertain the veracity of MOST facts, such as crowd numbers. Different estimates of facts can exist without necessarily conflicting with each other. Imagine Normal distributions with different but close to each other means and variances. On a side note, the reason it's hard to take a lot of numbers and evidence at face value is because it's quite obvious the MSM is against the Trump administration. He calls them all out all the time. They obviously have enmity between them. They like to post fake news all the time against Trump Bust of MLK being removed from OO . This forced people like me who are not necessarily married to any ideology, to try to be as skeptical as possible. This is why the outrage seems like an overreaction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think there's anything Orwellian about alternative facts.\n","id":"108b648a-6617-4e7d-b1db-b0fd9a2b0228"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I find it ridiculous that people are reacting about Gruber's statements that a taking advantage of the ignorance of american voters is a key strategy in politics and b Obamacare made the healthy pay for the sick All of my republican friends were saying this YEARS ago, as well as the conservative political pundits. Did people really not understand how socialized medicine works not about to debate it morally ? people who are unhealthier on average heart disease, something that is caused by over eating, which is a personal choice will pay less than the amount they cost, where healthier people will pay more and get less out please cmv<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I fail to see how Jonathan Gruber's comments surprised anyone\n","id":"74bca2de-f00b-4532-bf93-2a49a78f6c45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While I understand the reasons the government might have to subsidize poor parents to take time off for the benefits of the child it's always struck me as deeply unfair and unnecessary to offer wealthy parents paid time off for children but not to offer non parents equal paid time off to pursue their own projects and indeed same reasoning for unpaid . I understand the argument that businesses might not be sufficiently flexible about people taking time off but if so it seems like that applies just as much to people who want time off to write a novel as it does to prospective parents. However, my view here seems to be in such conflict with that of so many people I otherwise agree with I want to know if there is a good argument I'm missing. Note that I'm assuming that at least in the US that promoting reproduction isn't a social good we'd be fine with a slightly lower reproduction rate . Also, while the fairness intuition is what drives my view I'm primarily a utilitarian so I'm willing to accept even an unfair policy if convinced it offers sufficient benefits that a fair policy wouldn't. EDIT Since it's been raised a number of times the reason to distinguish wealthy parents is that they are perfectly capable of taking time off to raise children or hire a nanny without the benefit of any government subsidy that on net transfers money from people who don't choose to have children. Giving even wealthy parents this kind of benefit seems like a value judgement that their choice about how to live their life is better than the choices those of us who don't want to raise children make. EDIT2 Ok, felt it was worth writing up a quick statement on where my views are on the issue now. I'm convinced there are plausible arguments that the incentives offered by such a program for parents to take time off might matter. However, I see no reason such incentives shouldn't be paid back by imposing higher taxes on parents sufficiently well off they can pay them without substantial hardship maybe paying the subsidy to poor parents from general revenue . EDIT3 After more consideration I've somewhat reverted my view. Yes, there are positive externalities associated with having parents spend more time with their children after birth but we are essentially funding this by a highly regressive and reasonably expensive tax scheme that pays higher income people more while at best being paid for out of general tax revenue and at worst being funded by an implicit flat payroll tax if firms have to cover the pay it essentially imposes costs proportional to total wages paid . Generally, we don't accept enacting a random program because it has some benefits. If we are going to treat this the same way we try and treat other government programs we'd look to see what kind of interventions would most efficiently use that money and I'd be shocked if it wouldn't be more efficient to subsidize low income day care or incentivize parents to put their kids in after school programs or a thousand other schemes that would be more efficient than paying the largest sums to the highest income individuals to spend an extra couple months with their newborns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wealthy Parents Shouldn't Be Legally Guaranteed Paid Leave Not Offered To Non-Parents\n","id":"34700bd4-00d3-4a18-b0eb-ff38de066cb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>The German police is trained for at least three years compared to America's one year average and exercise mostly non-violent methods and their crime rates are low and riot control is good. So while the shared language might make it easy to grasp the UK there are many non-English speaking countries which support this example even more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many countries have police that do not carry guns - for instance the UK - they are a weapon of last resort only and special teams need to be called. This lowers the likelihood of lethal violence being necessary to enforce the law.\n","id":"10258710-40e6-4c82-9afc-13f894ec1414"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>As gender equality portrayal may increase the number of female gamers through increased relatability, companies that make mobile video games may make even greater profits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Statistics show that 60% of players in the mobile game Temple Run are female.\n","id":"d02b27ae-5a64-49d6-818a-b44a816557d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Information warfare more ethical than conventional warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Non state actor groups can take hold of the information collected about people, facilities and resources to launch attacks against states they are engaged in an ideological war with. If the attack would be successful, hundreds of thousands of lives could be put into danger.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There have been many incidents of information warfare being exploited by non-state actors by using the data to control systems once this data falls into their hands.\n","id":"5ec5f73e-b1ab-43af-9158-7f37dc4eed5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Get A Pet?<|ARGUMENT|>Caring for another spiecies can allows us to practice and develop empathy for animals other than humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pets can play an important role in advancing society as a whole.\n","id":"412690be-bb45-417c-ade4-c6ac53b4954e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Europe still needs a constitution<|ARGUMENT|>The European Union should be wary of adopting a European Constitution as many states may not be able to abide by its terms. The reason why Greece is in so much financial trouble is its unwillingness to abide by the European Growth and Stability Pact, however others, Germany and France had already broken the pact.1 Such a failure to abide by the rules with a constitution, something which is meant to be at the heart of the state, would greatly damage European credibility and would practically rule out the possibility of more comprehensive change in the future. Accession countries have shown little interest in the Constitutional Treaty overall, given a series of other more immediate concerns. Therefore a constitution is unneeded in order for the EU to develop, enlarge or prosper. It can only lose if it created a constitution which turned out a disaster. 1 Aznar, Jose\u0301 Mari\u0301a, \u2018Europe must reset the clock on stability and growth\u2019, FT.com, 16 May 2010,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adopting a European Constitution and failing to abide by it would be a big and challenging failure\n","id":"7c906d4f-ca4f-4e06-8225-d62f403ba286"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not convinced that most or even a significant portion of Bernie Sanders supporters are these raving misogynists who are sending rape threats to random women who support Hillary Clinton. This tactic seems very reminiscent to the tactics used to smear GamerGate, MRAs and others. Obviously there might be some racist or sexist people who support Sanders, but I don't see how that is any different from any other candidate, especially given that Sanders supporters tend to lean pretty left libertarian. However, I will try to keep an open mind in this thread. Please try to convince me that Bernie Bros are a real thing and not just a smear tactic by the media and feminist aligned Hillary supporters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bernie Bros don't exist, it's just a smear tactic\n","id":"dbd69355-450c-4945-8a6d-b2c7b4b7896c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that there isn't a huge deal of difference between someone who is a homosexual and someone who is religious. Subsequently, that the modern view in some parts of the world namely 1st world countries that religion should not be publicly practiced is hypocritical and unfair. Why can you expect one group to be quiet, but not the other? There are many similarities, but to list a few Religion is naturally occurring see the history of any society ever . You can choose how religious you are just like you can choose where on the LGBT spectrum you sit. You can leave a religion. Sort of most people who do this still retain some level of spirituality they just separate from the church they're with. Both regularly undergo persecution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's unfair to expect religion to be practiced privately, but not expect the same of homosexuality.\n","id":"e4c89aca-56a4-4da7-9be4-60bae7efdb3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Moana OK to show in US schools given the religious depictions?<|ARGUMENT|>Cinderella contained a fairy god mother who could perform magic. She was essentially a god-like creature seen as a hero or character to be well-liked.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many Disney films actually do feature religious depictions of gods, deities, other beings.\n","id":"5499e769-0829-4309-8cc7-a410925d5090"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you want a good product, you need to pay. If you want a better product, you need to pay a bit more. I believe this applies to labour. Why do I hold this view? I work at a small outlet. We get down time often, that is my fellow employees and I however at times we'll be asked to unload a mattress truck or furniture freight and often the products within them are dirty and heavy. Nobody, myself included, really complains but management gets sore when we hang around during the dead hours and give us mere busy work. The reason I ask this is to look at my job in a different light. I do enjoy it but to expect more than minimum wage worth of work is absurd. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minimum Wage, Minimum Effort.\n","id":"b9774e59-57e9-4245-a5b1-d0a86f35e58c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Citizens United Was Wrongly Decided<|ARGUMENT|>Corporate PAC money makes up only a small portion of campaign contributions. The bigger threat of corrupting influence comes from direct large-dollar donations from wealthy individuals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Publicly stating that one is rejecting corporate PAC money is largely a \"cheap gesture\n","id":"95d93465-2337-4194-8455-a6e2e0a22e6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Reporters ought to have the right to protect the identity of confidential sources.<|ARGUMENT|>Very little vital reporting throughout the past thirty to forty years has been submitted without use of confidential sources, especially in the national security area. Source<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The law historically recognizes that confidential sources are crucial to the democratic function of a free press.\n","id":"65409070-96be-4b37-8b4e-3d48d7e70403"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Dividing Jerusalem<|ARGUMENT|>King David founded Jerusalem in 1010 B.C.E, according to the Hebrew Bible. He was the second king of the united Kingdom of Israel. Because Jerusalem was founded by an Israeli, it belongs to Israel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jerusalem was founded by King David so belongs to Israel\n","id":"bd6fb500-f808-48b2-8a64-c27d790d1bfb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Take drug laws in the USA for example - although Marijuana is a Schedule 1 controlled substance at the federal level, many people use it recreationally despite it being a federal crime. In response, many states have legalized its use. The culture around drugs supersedes the regulation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Drug possession and distribution is a victimless crime, and Drug use, unless it accompanies another act, is only self-harm, which is not illegal, so would be a victimless crime. This argument would indicate that all drug related felonies should be removed from the statutes books.\n","id":"69ee09f0-8736-4705-9e4a-953d446effd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here is a list of the laws that they broke \u2022interrogated minors without parents present \u2022coerced false confessions from the minors \u2022deprived them of food, water and relieving themselves for multiple hours \u2022lied to the minors by telling them that if they confessed they would be allowed to go home \u2022did not tell the minors or their parents their rights to lawyers \u2022despite finding DNA evidence that it was someone else, they didn\u2019t investigate to find the real rapist not sure if this one is illegal This is everything that I\u2019ve found but there may be more. Linda Fairstein has resigned from her job due to public pressures but despite her many criminal actions, she has not been legally punished in any way. The laws that she and her team broke are there to prevent a case like the Central Park 5 from happening in the first place. She should be prosecuted as a criminal because she and her team committed crimes with extreme consequences. For anyone who disagrees, please try to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Linda Fairstein and her team should be prosecuted as criminals for their actions in the Central Park 5 case\n","id":"7b954a21-6561-4e25-bba8-dab3210418f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Automation is coming. It will more than likely replace every job there is. Even if there still are some jobs left over, it will be too small of a pool to create a sustainable humane capitalism. However, to prevent automation would be both silly and irresponsible. Machines will be more efficient than humans, and it's our responsibility to make the most out of the resources we're given. It would also cripple our economy. If we pass up automation another country will take the reins and we will become economically weak. What other solution is there besides a basic income? What else can you do when the majority of you're population isn't just unemployed, but unemployable? Edit To add more context to what I mean by automation I want to present this video.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everybody will have to be switched to basic income eventually due to automation and the elimination of human labor.\n","id":"23499a2a-26a7-4082-aa64-c93e94c3693b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>There are over 700 Confederate Monuments remaining The Union monuments number about 100. An interesting comparison given that the Union won. Usually, these are put up to memorialize a victory or to honor sacrifice. The preponderance of the Confederate statues indicates that they likely represent an ideal. That ideal is that black men are subjugated and second class citizens. 'We hold these truths to be self evident - All Men are Created Equal<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are very few Union monuments in the South. Anyone in the South does not see a tapestry of contrasts, but a monoculture of one type of monument.\n","id":"3ce6857f-66c6-4ece-a790-106a6258f1f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is having police officers in schools a good idea?<|ARGUMENT|>Communities cannot afford to stretch their police forces any further than they already are due to the nationwide shortage of graduating officers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Permanently stationing officers in schools will increase the workload of understaffed police departments.\n","id":"a94e7a6e-76f3-4550-842d-4888ef209bf9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The UK, whose legal system is the basis of a number of common law countries around the world, does not consider ideology a protected characteristic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being a white supremacist is not a protected characteristic, so declining customers based on it is not discrimination in the eyes of the law.\n","id":"0a43f33d-b389-4e48-855d-82271a987de6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a gay man in my late 20's and for the sake of a full disclosure, I am primarily sexually attracted to young, to mid teens. Having said this, I completely agree with the age of consent laws in my country and would never try to engage in physical sexual conduct with anyone under the age of consent which is 16 . Despite my sexual preference, my view isn't informed by my wishful thinking, but by my experience of being hit on constantly by young to mid gay teens. Had this not been my experience, I would have thought that there would be very few teenagers who would want to have sex with older guys, but I have met and talked to a lot of teenagers who express a very strong preference for guys who are 20 , anywhere up to about 50. Now, since the age of consent in my country and many others is 16, there is obviously nothing illegal about such relationships, but i'm writing this to express my view in challenge of the social taboo. For the sake of my view, I believe it goes without saying that such a relationship is only acceptable when both parties consent, since without consent it would obviously be rape. I would love to hear what people have to say and am happy to change my view if someone can present a convincing argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe there is anything wrong with an adult of any age having sex with a consenting 16 year old, in a country where the age of consent is 16.\n","id":"07d44c49-0f1f-42fa-b68a-618a453f6336"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Al Qaeda, Isis, KKK These organizations have stemmed from their beliefs, and while this only is a select group of people, they are responsible for the deaths of thousands. Entire wars have started because of religion. Countless people have died. While some might say that religion has bettered the world due to the emergence of a moral basis, I believe that the destruction that religion has caused outweighs that. I think that if religion didn't exist then there would be less disagreement and people would just get along. Everyone has it in them to be a good person. Some people just need religion to bring it out of them. I just think that if everyone lived just to live, then we would be more peaceful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The would would be better off if there was no religion.\n","id":"fbf29ab8-73ae-47c7-800c-6c56ea93c9d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the Las Vegas attack a false flag?<|ARGUMENT|>To the extent that there is a claim that innocent people did not die, that would be inconsiderate of people who watched them die as well as the people who died and their loved ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Such a narrative is reckless and inconsiderate of real, innocent people, who watched many people die within arms reach over the course of a few minutes.\n","id":"36760b34-7898-47aa-9973-f013c06468da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Personal experience On Reddit I noticed users' disdain for links to articles behind paywalls, it concerned me a little bit. But when few of my friends expressed the same opinion, it concerned me a fair bit. The reason being they want no fake news, they want no clickbait titles, they want meaningful content, yet they don't want to pay for it. They whine about paywalls and install adblockers, because somehow they feel entitled to good, honest, truthful and as unbiased as possible, and free journalism and I simply think that it's not possible and I find these expectations hypocritical. Yet I had no success in explaining this to my friends. If you are not a paying client, then you are a product. So, first of all, I think it's simply not possible to have a journalism, that strives for truth and tries to be as unbiased as possible without expecting any payments from readers or viewers . Journalism costs money as any other product. There are only few ways to make money for a news agency online and offline newspaper magazine or tv charging readers, charging advertiser, charging political advertisers or donors. Why advertisement is not a good option. When I asked one of my friends, who should pay for his news, he replied ads . Relying on ads as the main vehicle for revenue results in click bait titles, bland non informative articles and eventually skewed journalism. Click bait titles and bland articles If you go to virtually any news website these days, in a sidebars and even inside text you will fund a bunch of ad banners. Banners are coming from various sources, owned by ad networks and not by the news agencies. When you see an advetisement on a news page there are 4 players involved in the transaction 1st \u2013 you, the viewer 2nd \u2013 news agency, the host for the ad 3rd \u2013 the ad network 4th \u2013 the advertiser. Advertisers pay per impression and clicks , or in other words for appearance of the ad on viewers' screens and clicks on it. The nature of impression is quick by definition, once the impression is made, neither ad network nor advertiser is interested in viewer spending any more time on the page. So to improve revenue news agencies need to show you more impressions. Let's say you have 30 minute window to spend on news sites per day. During these window the news agency needs to show you as many impressions as it can. There are basically 2 ways to do it place interactive rotating banners all over the page or create a click bait titles. interactive rotating banners all over the page \u2013 they are essentially competing with article content, because it has been proven that attention is a limited resource. The time you are spending reading the text, is time you are NOT looking at the article. So in order to make advertisers willing to pay for rotating banners, they should be attention worthy , or in other words intrusive auto paying videos, sliding banners, pop ups in the middle of the page, etc. As a side effect, engaging articles actually hurt conversions, because if you spend your limited attention reading the article, you are less likely to notice an ad, click on it and convert from a viewer to a paying customer. While news agency won't intentionally make article content worse, they are not encouraged to make it better. click bait titles \u2013 this is another technique used to show you as many impressions as possible. Because people are getting tired of intrusive ads and eventually may just leave the site, news agency came up with another way to show more ads, and it's by making you see more pages. If you treat page as real estate, then the more pages loaded means more real estate for banners news agencies can sell to ad networks. Catchy titles are not a new thing, happened before with old school print newspapers, but print newspapers and magazines had limited supply of pages to put titles on and weren't as interactive, catchy titles were to entice the readers but a new issue, while they are lookin at the front page, which is only one transaction happening before you read all the content. On the other hand, web publishing allowed virtually unlimited space for click bait titles and every click is a new transaction with it's own front page. Again, if you optimize this flow, then the ideal scenario is a viewer who checks out a lot of articles, stays on each for few seconds and moves on to a next article with an exciting title. In this arrangement, ROI of good content is way lower, than clickbait titles and simplistic texts, thus it's not worth investing into. Skewed journalism These optimizations for revenue turn the reader into a product and news agency into a host for ads. Investing into investigative journalism and robust editorial process does not have ROI as good as investing into writing simplistic bland articles with catchy titles. Thus, expertise required for good journalism does not produce value for the agency, at the same time skill to pick few twits or facebook posts, wrap it into click bait titles and a bunch of ads pays the bill, so the former i being replaced by the later. Both skillsets take time and other resources to cultivate, and resources are always limited. Some agencies attempt to make it work, by generating revenue from ads and at the same time, funneling some of revenue to create good content. One example is BuzzFeed's article on mental health won 2016 Carolyn C. Mattingly Award for Mental Health Reporting There are more examples of good journalism from BuzzFeed even though BuzzFeed is widely regarded as one of the most click bait driven media. Interestingly though, if you look at the article I mentioned before and a randomly picked article from BuzzFeed home page you will notice a significant difference in the presentation. In the first article, the header has only one ad banner and header menu has no pictures, in the second, on contrast, the header menu is full of pictures. In the first article, the first ad banner appears after you scroll 3 screen of text and there are no side banners. In the second article, there is a side banner for every screen of texts and the first one appears right away. At least this is the way how it looks to me. My point here is that actual news reporting and journalism looks differently to collecting clicks and selling ads, thus two completely different products and created by different people with different expertise. When you pay for content, a transaction happens between you and a content creator you decide whether the content is worth the premium. First, when ads pay the bills, transaction does not directly involve a reader and viewing an ad is not an intentional decision on the reader's part. Second, impressions can increase such metrics as brand awareness or brand recognition, but ultimately advertisers want to sell. And that is why they are trying to increase conversion metrics, such as impression to clicks, clicks to purchase, impressions to purchase, etc. One of the most efficient ways to do this, is to show the most relevant ad based on readers's profile and past history. In other words, news agencies sell leads, which are essentially users' data. This is how readers becomes a product. User segmentation by location, income, race, ethnicity, geolocation, political affiliation, age, gender, etc further improves efficiency of such productionisation, because it is much easier to create efficient ads for isolated cohorts of very similar opinions and keep them engaged on the site by feeding into their biases. For example, if you are selling yoga lessons, there is probably a cohort of readers, sharing the same geolocation and a set of other features, which would be the most desirable audience for you. After doing some testing with different ad and content networks you can identify this segment and invest into relationship with the network that gives you the best access to the desired segment. On the other hand, news agencies do the same type of optimization \u2013 they notice that some of their segments generate more ad revenue than others and content creators are encouraged to specialize in generating content favorable by a certain group. I think this Ted Talk describes this tendency pretty well, however it's more about social media. The same trend happened with print press and TV networks, though the pace is much faster for web publishing, because of shorter feedback loop between readers viewer and content creators and much better user activity tracking. Political advertisement Very similar to the regular advertisement, but the metric of success is favorable votes. As earlier, networks choose to target audience very well aligned with donor's political views and have no interest in introducing more balanced view. Is paid by readers always better? I am not stating, that this solves all the shortcoming, but it allows the media to have more to spend on content and research, since there is less pressure to make a reader click more links, but rather spend time reading in depth article or analysis. Almost any serious topic tends to be complicated enough that it involves many data points, in which case it becomes much harder to subtly introduce political agenda. Let's look at The Economist and New York Times, both, especially the later, are regarded as quite left , which is indeed often reflected in their titles. Though, here is a recent example, The Economist published an article on gentrification where an author explores the benefits of it and suggests that maybe it's not such a bad thing, which would be strongly contested by any activist with polarized left views. I would be glad to dig deeper and provide more examples, if there is interest. It definitely seems to me, that paid by reader model allows the media to provide more balanced and objective view, if they choose to, while paid by advertiser leaves no such possibility. Also, many magazines and newspapers employ hybrid model, when subscription fees and advertisement both used to generate revenue. I think it's fine, as long as content quality in editorial process prevails over leads generation. Others Donation based. Wikipedia is a good example, when a high quality content can be made available to wide audience for free. Though, don't be mistaken, it's still paid by the end users, but in the form of donations. I have spoken with multiple people who work or worked for Wikipedia Foundation and as they explained to me, so far their model worked their were able to collect enough donations in form of small contributions from users for their operations and never had had to turn to corporate sponsorships. This study suggests that wikipedia is as good as other non free encyclopedias. I assume one can spot many biases in political and historical articles, but it serves well enough as a source of general knowledge. C SPAN. Paid by cable companies, but seems to be focused on providing real time and archive data on public affairs. Certainly not enough by itself, but a good supplemental material. While coverage itself can't be biased bias can be introduce in decisions about which events to cover. Specialized media, dedicated to a specific topic, such as Jalopnik belongs to Gawker for cars. I assume a major chink of their revenue comes from ads and some from product placement or reviews. Their reviews are not bad, but I still trust Consumer Reports more. Another example is techcrunch, tech companies just pay up to get a dedicated article, very little journalism going on there. The problem In my opinion, the problem is that consumers of journalism are accustomed to free web content, which makes it harder for the magazines and newspapers to stay independent and objective. This expectation of free content grows demand for ads paid media, which in its turn fuels more supply in that space. Ample supply of free content simply made an idea of paying for news and analytics alien to many people. Another undesirable consequences of it, is that there is very little innovation in payment options for magazines and newspapers. So far the only way to pay for newspapers or articles is very rigid and deterring monthly weekly subscription model, with similar policies like gyms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Paywalls are good, journalism must be paid for by readers\n","id":"b6d52a79-30ba-4601-b1da-004c17bec907"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Paper books are going to die<|ARGUMENT|>The blue light emitted from e-readers and other tech devices is harmful to the eyes; so people with light sensitivity or other neurological ailments often cannot use them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain medical issues preclude people from being able to read e-books.\n","id":"9fbba438-40e7-4975-9e79-eee671192a9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi all. I live in the UK where the 2nd reading of a bill designed to legalise gay marriage has recently passed in our House of Commons. Gay marriage isn't legal yet but could be fairly soon. I don't oppose homosexuality, and I don't oppose the idea of legal equality for everyone. Which is why I support the civil partnership laws, meaning homosexuals are legally equal to married men and women. I am Christian but, again, do not oppose homosexuality or civil partnership. I believe that they already have equal rights as far as civil partnerships are concerned and are, in fact, a largely well accepted group in society. Finally, while I don't support it, I don't oppose it if it's passed, I'm not fussed. Please, change my view or at least educate me on why it's such a major issue and I am not trying to incite any sort of tension or religious moral debate, but to understand the thought behind it. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think gay marriage is unnecessary in the UK.\n","id":"b4b34025-ff05-423c-b30b-a0fc15e6438b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Long text post warning. 1200ish words An equality issue I believe sexism is rooted in biology and evolution, not caused by the patriarchy or institutionalized cis white male privilege. I think theres a reasonably justification for slut shaming although I do not like it , men are genetically stronger, the wage gap is caused by differences in position and ambitions, and affirmative action is bad. I recognise these are incredibly unpopular opinions, and would like to modernise them. It is both common and popular in modern society to praise and spread the message of gender equality, expose double standards and attempt to combat sexism. There are, however, several issues with the lines of thinking often involved in these arguments, many of which stem from a lack of basic scientific education, for example the term \u201cslut shaming\u201d refers to lambasting and degrading females for promiscuous behaviour, and egalitarians and feminists often are quick to point out the double standard which exists in society, where a man who engages in these behaviours is not insulted, and may be praised. I believe there is however a simple evolutionary reason for this difference Selective pressures, and genetics. Evolutionary theory states that in order for a species to survive, those better fit to their environment must reproduce in order to pass on their favourable genetic traits. This introduces something known as a selective pressure, where specific traits are sought after in a mate. Selective pressures are the reason some things are considered attractive in our society such as larger breasts, which indicate higher fertility , and why people who possess advantageous traits are more likely to end up with similarly advantaged partners. Langlois et al, 2000 Humans have evolved as a species where one gender has a much higher energy and resource investment in reproduction, those being the females. As a result, they are more likely to be selective when following strictly evolutionary rules as it is disadvantageous to engage in sex with multiple men who put in relatively little effort into reproduction compared to selecting carefully for the most evolutionarily favourable partner. Put simply, it takes a lot of effort to carry a feotus to term, whereas it takes very little effort to impregnate a female. As a result, females must be more careful who they accept as their offsprings\u2019 other genetic source. Men, however are biologically programmed to attempt to spread their genetics are far as possible. By selecting for these favourable traits, these evolutionary markers of health, fertility, fitness and ability to survive, an organism increases the chances its offspring will survive, and in turn the likelihood of the species itself surviving. The result of this is that in nature, where females of a species put in more effort, energy, or resources into reproduction, they mate with fewer partners and are more selective. In these same situations, men are more likely to engage in promiscuous behaviours to attempt to increase their chances of propagating their genetic code. Put into the perspective of modern society, it could be concluded that our evolutionary biases are so strong that they have impacted social thinking, even when effective contraception is available. When a woman engages in sexual activity with many men, they are seen as being too loose with their selection criteria as evolutionarily this would decrease the quality of offspring , whereas when a man engages in sexual activity with many women, he is seen as a successful man as evolutionarily this benefits his chances of reproduction . Another popular issues to city is that of differences in physical strength between men and women, and how this might affect the jobs they can do. It is common to hear feminists claim women are equally strong as men, however this claim is not entirely true, and to claim it without further explanation is intellectually dishonest. Men by nature produce significantly larger amounts of testosterone, being the male sex hormone. Thus assuming the same baseline activity exercise , they will have a higher percentage of their body mass being muscle. Women both have lower testosterone levels, and higher oestrogen and progestogen levels, which leads to lower muscle mass, and increased adipose fat deposition at that same level of physical activity. It may thus be stated that women are by nature physically weaker, without additional effort on their part to combat this evolutionary difference between the sexes. Miller et al 1993 That is not to say that individual women will be weaker than individual men, but simply that assuming a similar lifestyle, it is more likely that the average male will have a higher proportion of muscle compared to a woman. In society, this equates to a difference in the jobs an individual is likely to pursue, with a significantly higher number of males being employed in positions involving physical labour, thus providing a point of employment inequity. Another commonly discussed source of inequity is the so called wage gap, which will be explored below. The wage gap refers to a hypothetical difference between the incomes of women and men, where it is often claimed that women earn 77 cents to every dollar earnt by a male, however this wage gap does not take into account several key factors, those being that the comparison of wages is not for people in the same positions, but rather an average for people in the same fields. By failing to take into account that people are not doing the same amount of work, or the same type of work, a false perspective is produced where it seems women are being underpaid, however a more likely line of reasoning is that many women are engaged in different positions to men. This \u201cwage gap due to choices\u201d is often explained by the different focuses women may have in a profession, prioritising increased temporal flexibility free time due to the intention to have children, or increases in altruistic tendencies. An example of this could be a cross examination of wages in any large business, where it may reveal that women earn less than men on average. However on closer examination it may be revealed that in this particular company most of the females are working as secretaries, or lower positions compared to the positions of their male peers. This is not necessarily due to sexism, as equally qualified individuals tend to end up with equal jobs and equal wages. This takes us to another controversial topic Affirmative action, and how it in fact promotes sexist behaviours rather than levelling the playing field. Affirmative action describes hiring people of a specific population denomination over others due to their race, gender, religion or other traits in order to increase diversity, rather than hiring the most qualified individual regardless of their race, gender or religion. This leads to decreased productivity, as well as decreased effectiveness whilst only gaining politically correct diversity quotas. In conclusion, sexism, whilst a real issue with abhorrent consequences, often can be explained without sensationalising the facts, and by deconstructing the causes of equity gaps. It is important to realise the reasons for social stigmas and unconscious biases are complex, and rather than lumping them on toxic patriarchy. And so, finally, it is important to recognise that women and men are in fact different, sexual dimorphism is incontrovertibly true, and thus the sexes are in fact not truly equal biologically and evolutionarily speaking and as a result our perspectives, ideas, biases and \u201cinstitutionalised sexism\u201d is in fact rooted in our genes, rather than society influencing our minds. TL DR I studied biology in college and as a result have rather sexist views, but want to be a better human being.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I apparently have very sexist views on reality. Apparently that's not okay. Help me out?\n","id":"a1a3de63-5239-428d-b721-eb130dc735c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the purposes of this post, let's assume the 'partner' in this description is an attractive, young female early 20s , and 'never' concerns a relationship that lasts until death let's say 60s . Let's define 'cheating' as either physical sex or emotional falling in love with someone else , and let's define 'any reasonable set of circumstances' as things that don't involve any sort of coercion, threats, or anything too detached from reality. I don't believe that it's possible to find a partner that would never cheat on you given any reasonable set of circumstances. I think it's possible to find a partner that is resistant to infidelity, and as a result of favorable life circumstances combined with this resistance, they may end up going their entire life without cheating. However, I think that given unfavorable circumstances, it is impossible or at least so rare that it is impossible to count on to find someone that would never do so. The relationship I'm talking about lasts 30 years. Imagine the huge number of ups and the equally huge number of downs. The times your partner is mad, sad, or even infuriated at you. The times your partner is turned on but you aren't there. The times you or your partner are in another city and they know you'd never find out. What if, at those moments, the right situation came along? An attractive guy assuming the partner above comes along and says or does the right things at the right moment. An opportunity comes up particularly for women to trade sex for career advancement or to meet an idol musician actor. As you may have gathered through this question, there's value in answering this for me. I have an attractive girlfriend and what I've observed makes this question sometimes weigh heavy on my mind. I see guys hit on her when she's out, I see her so called friends subtlety try to work their way into being something more, I see people with power try to use it to impress her and turn a friendship into more. Is this truly sustainable over 30 years? Can anyone convince me that through all of these times, given ample opportunities, someone could stay faithful? Or is it simply like poker, where a player's disposition and skill is important but ultimately, you need luck to be successful? Has anyone experienced situations like I describe above?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think it's practically possible to find a partner that would never cheat on you under any reasonable set of circumstances.\n","id":"7bf3911d-0f8b-46a2-a290-5c6f179dd3a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in Michigan and our primary is today. You have 5 hours to convince me which one to cast my vote for today. Go EDIT Michigan is an Open Primary, so I can vote in either party's primary. Here are some areas that are important to me. Convince me that your favored candidate best lines up with my views, or that voting for your candidate would do the least damage to the areas I think are most important. War I fall into the non interventionist camp. I would be in favor of bringing our military home and not being the world's police. I also support Colin Powell's You break it, you buy it policy on foreign wars. IF we go in, we fix the mess we make. Environment We need to protect our environment and natural resources, especially water and air. Energy We need to become more energy independent, even if that means more domestic oil production until cost effective renewable energy can be developed. Education Education needs a major revamp. More centralization, less bureaucracy. Common Core is a good thing. More funding needs to go towards education. Teachers should be paid more and or more teachers should be hired to reduce class sizes. Economy Free Market is preferred as long as everyone is playing by the rules ie some regulations, but not excessive . Taxes I am middle class and I want lower taxes. I want to have more money from paychecks that I can both save and spend. Spending money empowers the economy. EDIT Corporate Tax I believe the corporate tax rate needs to be lower to make us more competitive with the rest of the world. National Debt Spending I want spending to be reduced so we can take care of the deficits debt. Immigration I'm in favor of easier legal immigration. Unless you are native american, you are the product of immigration of some kind. Terrorism The majority of terrorism we have faced is blowback directly from our policies in the Middle East. We helped create and arm Al Qaeda and ISIS. We directly inspired the Iranian Revolution and enabled the current state of Iran. We propped up leaders like Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi until they were no longer useful, then collapsed their nations into decades of chaos. We need to get out of the ME and stop intervening in other nation's affairs. Muslim terrorist and anyone who infers that is an unamerican bigot. Entitlements I like Frank Underwood. You are entitled to nothing. I also like the idea behind House of Cards' AmericaWorks program. I think social security and the like are good things, but are broken and need to be fixed ie significantly reformed or replaced, not just given more money . If there are any other specific views you'd like to know, please ask. There you go. Please Change My View. EDIT Result a bit earlier than I expected, but wife is off work early, so we're voting soon I'll either vote for Kasich or Sanders. Everyone is distasteful to me and I find these 2 the least distasteful of those left. Kasich has the edge because he is closer to overtaking Trump than Sanders is to overtaking Clinton. I'll decide between the two at the last second at the poll. NOTE Neither Kasich nor Sanders would likely get my vote in the General Election either way. This is just my way of using my vote to exercise some power into getting the least worst candidate imo for the sheeple to vote for in the general that is said tongue in cheek .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't like anyone running for the Dems and GOP, and think they'd all be terrible for the country. I live in Michigan and our primary is today. You have 5 hours to change my view and convince me which one to cast my vote for today. Go!\n","id":"b2f14439-de59-4e0f-9f0f-99f5f7997dc4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please leave the footnote below the following line, but remember to delete this sentence by replacing it with the body of your post. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Green is better than blue.\n","id":"b2c9391d-93ae-4480-be44-fe269ce4f4fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>The Hogwarts Express was introduced as a way to get all students to Hogwarts on time and unseen by Muggles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wizards have adopted some Muggle technology, like cars and trains.\n","id":"0505330c-5c60-4fec-b893-d546250a84a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>The incentive of equal pay would lead to greater participation of women in the workforce, thereby filling vacant positions and increasing overall output.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having equal pay between men and women would increase economic growth in the long run.\n","id":"40a61fb8-9d8b-4962-954e-54992fcac106"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Military conscription should apply to men and women equally.<|ARGUMENT|>Traditional families that suffer the loss of both mother and father, either temporarily or permanently, would leave children to next of kin, who may not be prepared or even able to care for children, or burden local governments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If men and women are both drafted there will be no one to take care of the children.\n","id":"557f0c2a-1b7e-4ed0-9b3b-195d4a2b72e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Schools around the world obviously have varying systems, but by the time students reach high school, they usually have some degree of freedom over what classes they may take. The context of this  is in high schools because they often need to make decisions on what kind of elective courses to offer, if any at all. Classes that are considered electives will often be optional to take at most schools, or if are required, have less hours of classtime when compared to more 'core' classes such as math, or English native language. As a result, people will usually select electives that best fit their interests and whatever they need for graduation, or whatever they consider to be an easy course. There are other reasons, but I think those three are the major ones. When I say ethics philosophy, I do not mean in the sense of pushing religious dogma or nihilism or any one specific set of beliefs, but a more broad survey type course. I think that it's valuable to be able to examine one set of ideologies or philosophies in detail, but have trouble thinking of a practical means to keep them objective right now. With this is mind, this is why I believe that Ethics Philosophy type courses should be as consistently available in high schools as in other electives They offer a way of understanding the world in a time where the mind is still developing and beginning to struggle with existential questions, and also allow for students to make better decisions in their lives. When comparing these types of courses to others, such as music, art, or physical education, it is clear that many of these don't have much immediate practical value. I would actually say that the ability to gain a more broad worldview and at least a basic formation of some sort of internal moral code could be more valuable in the present day than being able to run quickly, although there are benefits to both. In many instances, having such an exposure would be of large benefit to people. In terms of practicality, I think that designing a course tailored for high school students is challenging, but not impossibly difficult. Books tailored for teenagers have been written in this genre Sophie's World comes to mind , and connections can be drawn from text concepts to the real world. Finding teachers to teach such a subject competently probably wouldn't be hard, either. Many teachers in the general 'humanities' field have some background in this, and I would guess that a decent number of them would be interested and willing to share this interest with others. Compared to other electives, which may require money for instruments, or art supplies or similar things, it's not really that expensive, either. One danger is that this kind of course can be taught poorly, and that some of the effectiveness of it may be lost on students. However, we take this risk with subjects such as math all the time, with students oftentimes turned away because of a teacher that is unable to clearly explain subjects. Even if the precedents in this are ignored, I think that simple exposure, even if incomplete, will still bring more benefits than harm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ethics\/Philosophy should be considered as important of an elective as Fine Arts or Physical Education etc. in high school\n","id":"f7992425-a67b-4256-a42d-44f0241e66e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To illustrate a scenario that demonstrates my view, if I were presented with two buttons, one killing someone from the US, and another killing someone from some different country, let's say Saudi Arabia, and somehow I was forced to choose, I would flip a coin, or do something else if that nature. I feel most Americans would choose to kill the person from a different country, and I feel that this is wrong. To further extend my view, I don't believe Americans have any more right to anything than someone of a different country, including life, land, money, etc. I believe in an ideal world, birth circumstances are irrelevant and everyone has the same opportunity. To give another example, if two people are born, and one is born on fertile land, and another is not, both deserve the fertile land just as much and should share it if possible. I also believe that for this reason , any attempt to restrict immigration from any country is immoral. Despite being born in the U.S., I hold no special loyalty to anyone from this country compared to from a different country. I see myself as a citizen by coincidence, not out of belonging. I realize this is a discounted . I could not think of a way to articulate my point in a more concise way, so if you have any questions or need clarification, feel free to ask. Please challenge any or all of my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Im an American, but don't hold any special loyalty to other Americans compared to people from other countries.\n","id":"a6755ed0-a2b3-4630-af5b-963e3b1a549b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is deliberately not preventing someone's death ethically equivalent to killing them?<|ARGUMENT|>Without informed consent, any act of euthanasia is equivalent to murder. This includes passive euthanasia<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The outcome is the same, and therefore the ethical accountability is the same.\n","id":"27cb7205-85cc-4f81-847f-29d3095b5eb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should Self-Driving Cars Kill?<|ARGUMENT|>If a self-driving car will reliably yield to non-self-driving forms of transport ie walking or bicycles it would facilitate a shift toward pedestrian-oriented urban neighborhoods<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dramatically increasing the safety of third parties may help facilitate a shift towards pedestrian and cyclist-oriented urbanism.\n","id":"29be165c-e131-495b-a93a-d2dccfc5f64a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>The same article mentions that the female must be continuously sexually receptive in humans, so the male won't search for other females while she is not in estrus.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The development of conspicuous breasts with a characteristic shape seems to also be a way of sexual signaling.\n","id":"f5f3547d-bebe-4804-9bcf-baf816fe58a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we forgive those who don't regret hurting us?<|ARGUMENT|>Forgiving is not the same as acceptance. You can let go of your hard feelings without making it mean that what they did was okay.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Should we forgive those who don't regret hurting us?\n","id":"fad76001-eb0c-4918-b67e-3afb738ad4b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does financial literacy need more prevalence in the education system?<|ARGUMENT|>Schools could expand the amount of time available to cover the curriculum, by making school days longer or cutting into break time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not necessarily; the system could be adjusted to make room for this course.\n","id":"97765f7e-39b6-471f-9578-3c65ad46fb03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This one just seems almost obvious from a logistical point of view. Trump claims that he can bring back low skilled and well paying manufacturing jobs to a level that hasn't been seen in years, but there's a reason the industry isn't like that. If factories are forced to come back, rather than give low skilled workers middle class jobs, it seems more likely that the jobs will be automated with the only jobs going to more highly skilled workers to maintain the machines. On top of that, it's clear that producing with low paid overseas workers is cheaper, so in all reality we'll see no real job growth in the populations it's been promised to, and prices of goods will likely increase. This is just my take and I'm open to listen so Change My View<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump's plan to bring back well paying factory jobs will not work.\n","id":"9980eff4-aacf-4b29-bf71-dd9fff22651f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the worst world problem of the utmost concern?<|ARGUMENT|>Society is on a quest for immortality and reverse aging to a youthful state for this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Healthspan. Living longer means there could be longer periods of morbidity health conditions\n","id":"6018a33d-800a-4178-844a-2d3c30d5924d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the United States nonprofits 501c organizations are revenue maximizing, business oriented, self aggrandizing entities.^1 These problems are weighted towards large charities universities, hospitals, churches but are present everywhere in the field to a lesser extent. Nonprofits are funded primarily by government grants transfers and ultra rich donors. Top staff, executives and those working in development, pay themselves exorbitant salaries that they justify by making unwarranted private sector comparisons.^2 While they are doing this they participate in the same capitalist market practices seeking the lowest labor cost leading to a nonliving wage that generate poverty and the social problems they pretend to address. To put it in concrete terms a university or hospital etc. pays someone with a master's degree 50 75k to get more poor students at the school. In the course of doing it this person will pay off a variety of consultants who are making more money than he is and who someday he may wish to emulate. He reports to an administrator who makes a six figure salary, potentially even mid or high six figures and who he may wish to emulate. At the same time the janitors and cafeteria workers are earning 8 an hour staying alive on Section 8 and EBT. These workers often are not employees of the charity itself, they are contractors, so the charity can reduce its costs and not admit the reality of the working conditions. And you can bet that whatever MBA made that suggestion at a given institution was well compensated. If you step back you ought to realize that there's nothing charitable about that operation, the beneficiaries are the wealthy and the charitable institution is itself responsible for the problem poverty it is pretending to address. Ultrarich donors and the government are transferring wealth from the poor taken as taxes to the rich given as executive and consultant salaries in a way that can be propagandized as benevolent. Charity is the sacralization of poverty, the lie the rich tell to hide that poverty and social ills are the direct consequence of the systems they enforce. These people make their fortunes by crushing the wages of the poor and exploiting their labor, when they give it back it goes to middle class opportunists who convince society of the benevolence of the whole rotten enterprise. If you donate to these charities, no matter your wealth, you are a sucker but it is especially tragic that the poor tend to be the most charitable in terms of giving as a percentage of income. Especially once you enter into the world of often vast and unchecked corruption of foreign serving charities think save this child for dollars a month you typically encounter situations where working poor Americans, who often consider themselves middle class, are paying the salaries of highly paid people some of whom think themselves poor So the commonly heard saying that one should 'donate' but refuse a beggar a dollar on the street is exactly opposite the truth. Your moral responsibility is to the human being in front of you, downtrodden as they are, and you're doing infinitely more good by giving an alcoholic the relief of a drink than you are by contributing to someone's mortgage or Lexus payment. 1 It's true anyone can create such an organization, and if Aunt Ethel runs an animal shelter that is more similar to personal charity than professional charity and I would be happy to contribute. But for the purposes of this  it's simply not representative of the nonprofit industry these operations don't compare in terms of volume of fundraising, of employees, or activity, even though they're responsible for almost all the genuine good accomplished. 2 This one really gets my goat. If the Great Recession proved anything, it's that the alternative is not a much higher salary in the private sector but unemployment Companies will never be clamoring to hire your shitty leadership MBA and to the extent they're willing to hire you at all it be require significant downward mobility. Incumbency is more important than any kind of skills. This is true even for executives in the private sector just ask any manager over 50 who lost their job 2007 2009. 3 This was sort of a cri de coeur so I didn't intersperse sources. Honestly I feel like anyone who's worked in this world should know what I'm talking about. If you don't here's some interesting reading from the top of my head<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Organized charity is a moral evil propagated by the rich for their own benefit. It is foolish and wrong for the rest of us to participate. Give money to the poor directly, though they be addicts, but never to a professional charity!\n","id":"5188ca36-9cc9-49e1-88a7-4fc42ea9678f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I realize it may have different names from different elementary schools but here are the basics You play on the playground or climber at you school, one person closes there eyes and they are it . The person who is it has to tag someone or call grounders while someone is touching the ground. If successful the next person is it etc. It is literally impossible and pretty damn unsafe to play this without cheating a fair bit. One your supposed to run and climb around a playground blind. Who the fuck can manage that? And it doesn't help that you can just hop on the monkey bars and run away. Second our playground was this weird soft asphalt that was pretty quiet Made for soft landings but also means you can't hear shit. Finally the chances of you running headlong into a metal pole definitely correlate with amount of time spent running around with your eyes closed. There is no way to actually catch anyone without peaking. I mean, I've only played it when I was drunk or young and every time i cheated. Without peaking a little you cannot catch anyone .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe cheating is necessary in the game grounders\n","id":"230a2adb-8437-486c-94cc-12e8e82f6e52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>An extension under Article 50 would likely become a negative campaign issue for many EU leaders in the European elections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unlikely that the EU would agree to an extension beyond June when European Parliamentary elections will occur.\n","id":"684d0ec2-70f0-4ebb-b0a5-a63dbd77b5b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've read a lot of stories from people who've tried to commit suicide, but they didn't go through with it because someone saved them, and after that they didn't feel grateful or anything they felt mad about being dragged back in this 'shithole' so all they wanted was to commit suicide again. I think that may be the case with a lot of people who're in coma. They just want to be let go of, they want to go in peace, not struggle back and forward from this world to another, and then maybe wake up and be stuck in a body you can't control. I think it's more insensitive and selfish than anything else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reviving someone from coma isn't the best option.\n","id":"8941c7ee-3690-49ce-94c4-7fe21c3580a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Electric vehicles are better than fossil fuel vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>Because of limited range people driving EVs tend to adopt slower pace and more careful driving which will automatically reduce accidents both for the cars and their drivers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"EVs are safer for the occupants, other road users and pedestrians.\n","id":"d19002c0-8233-42ab-a721-0b598285529b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>Secular progressive thought is skeptical about particular religious claims in a pluralistic society, and insistent upon keeping religion out of politics and politics out of religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Progressive movements have profited more from an opposition to the Church than from an alliance with it.\n","id":"752fea8b-b59d-4516-9924-789e85216d45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>Athletes sometimes use their fame and power to manipulate women. Leagues need to make it clear that such behavior is unacceptable The Dark Side of Sports, p. 162<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Athletes are led to believe they are entitled to women's bodies.\n","id":"86b7563f-8877-4b9f-9659-96a5a1102d9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By disclosing computer system vulnerabilities in the private or public domain we often provide persons who would otherwise not have had the technical expertise to discover those vulnerabilities themselves the ability to exploit those vulnerabilities themselves. Often times, these exploits are automated before the affected systems can even be patched. And even more often, all of the affected systems are not patched. I believe that the disclosure of computer system vulnerabilities makes those computer systems more vulnerable than they would have been if the vulnerability had not been disclosed and for this reason I believe industries that advocate for and or profit from the disclosure of computer system vulnerabilities should be opposed, undermined and stopped.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I support the antisec movement.\n","id":"c339b8f7-a8da-438b-a669-b86ac69a471b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's a very ingenious strategy. Libertarian and Conservative GOP members are leveraging an advantage provided to them by the Government's previous failings in dealing with three major issues The Debt Ceiling More importantly, this is an issue which causes great consternation within the Libertarian Small Gov't Conservatives in the GOP. The Debt situation in the US was already a major political issue, where even Democrats seemed worried hence their reasoning behind wishing the repeal of the Bush Tax Cuts . The US was already in the red from the 2001 economic downturn, coupled with increased spending on conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many believe this is unsustainable, and with the stimulus following 2008, has only gotten worse. While I don't believe everyone wants a 0 debt situation, many folks in the GOP want cuts to be made where they can be made and efforts to reduce unnecessary debt. Obamacare This is a fight which started in 2008 and ending in 2010. It was a vastly controversial topic in American politics. The GOP was vehemently against it, and many Blue Dog Democrats would suffer from supporting it in the 2010 midterm elections. Love it or hate it, it was a law which one can say was railroaded through Congress by a party which held a decisive majority. The law also has a lot of major issues that still have yet to be hashed out, mainly the background of how it hopes to be affordable in the long run. The Budget Process The US has operated using Continuing Resolutions before, but the lack of proper budget debates or even the passage of a budget is becoming troublesome. While this issue is tied to the issue of the debt ceiling, it is also somewhat separate as it's intent is to ensure the proper and efficient stewardship of taxpayer dollars. All in all, if I can make an analogy here The battle for Obamacare is the political equivalent of World War I today's fight over the budget debt ceiling Obamacare is merely the 2nd Act WWII . All the loose ends from that time are coming to a head, and the GOP is effectively holding all the cards. In fact, their game plan is simple Do nothing, while appearing to do something . The GOP has already passed a CR which has some changes to Obamacare primarily to defund it a backdoor way to eliminating it . For the GOP, this is a low risk approach Many members of the House were elected in the 2010 Midterms on the promise that they will repeal or remove Obamacare. This is the faction currently holding out. Moderate GOPers are already in a tenuous position. In a time where the GOP is sliding to more Libertarian and Small Government spectrum, these moderates are losing their comparative advantage to similarly moderate Democrats. They must adapt or die. John Boehner is a good example of this. To build on points 1 and 2, the GOP is having a changing of the guard . The Establishment GOP lost to Presidential Elections with establishment candidates. It's becoming apparent that the comparative advantage is lose to the Democrats, and the GOP needs to differentiate itself. It appears that it will not be a party focused on being Small Government and Libertarian with twinges of social conservativeness . President Obama and the Senate Democrats have no other options, but to comply with the demands of the House GOPers. This is a fact of life. The longer this shutdown fight continues, the worse things get. The Democrats look intransigent and are left with only two options Give in, or see dire fiscal and economic consequences play out to the US and Global Economies . Point 4 is incredibly important, because in a game of chicken between Big Government Democrats and Small Government Libertarian Republicans, the Republicans will be happy to see dysfunction and chaos which will break the Big Government. That is, unless the GOP does something stupid and caves. Which is also a possibility. But at this moment, the debt ceiling fight is theirs to lose.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"President Obama and the Senate Democratic Majority have two options: 1. Cave to GOP demands on Obamacare or 2. Lose the fight and see the far-reaching consequences to the US and Global Economy\n","id":"1a7a22f0-57ff-4c0e-8c9a-f08455cfc0e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am under the assumption that up voting, according to reddiquette, means you find the post interesting, relevant, or somehow worthy of your time. Saying in a thread's title to not up vote means that you believe that no one will find this thread interesting, relevant, or somehow worthy of time. I believe that, thus, posting do not up vote or something along those lines means that you are posting something that you intend to be uninteresting or not worth wasting anyone's time with. In my opinion, that is one of many definitions of spam and thus anyone thread with this title should always be down voted. I post this because I get annoyed by of how often I see these posts that are more often than not heavily up voted and flooded with Don't tell me what to do Upvoted comments. I want to hear the other side of this issue, if there is one. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any post that has \"Don't upvote\" in the title should be considered against redditquette and spam, and should be summarily down voted.\n","id":"f159ffa3-3d65-44d4-a0bf-5607512d824d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the War in Iraq worth it?<|ARGUMENT|>Tony Blair wrote in his 2010 memoirs: \"After 11 September, the thinking was this: if these terrorist groups could acquire WMD capability, would they use it? On the evidence of 11 September, yes. So how do we shut the trade down? How do we send a sufficiently clear and vivid signal to nations that are developing, or might develop, such capability to desist? How do we make it indisputable that continued defiance of the will of the international community will no longer be tolerated?\"10<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"War in Iraq sent message about WMD, sponsoring terror, etc.\n","id":"4112c11d-641a-4d9c-a7c6-c34b3649d7cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Punishing parents who smoke around children<|ARGUMENT|>Children need the state to get involved because they are one of the most vulnerable groups of citizens. Children, and especially babies and toddlers up to the age of 3 are the least able to protect themselves from their parents\u2019 harmful behaviour. They are at the mercy of their parents and forced to breathe in the harmful fumes of cigarette smoke.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children need the state to get involved because they are one of the most vulnerable groups of citize...\n","id":"8973fa0f-5188-4dde-a0bc-4dd105e32075"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>UBI would have to be either universal for the entire planet and thus invalidate the claim, or would be governed by individual countries and could be dropped for those who are not there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being able to recieve UBI from one country while living in another is a problem that would be easy enough to solve.\n","id":"a39f118f-bfb3-495b-97e7-76e4c07ab01e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best fantasy story?<|ARGUMENT|>The Harry Potter books are banned in schools across the United Arab Emirates, with the UAE Ministry of Education and Youth stating that the books' fantasy and magic elements are contrary to Islamic values<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The books are highly controversial and have caused offence among certain groups.\n","id":"f342dc50-b5ca-4de2-9e7c-82ae97ccf528"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Darwinian Evolution Philosophy or Science?<|ARGUMENT|>There are books that compile and translates this knowledge to lay persons 1 2 There are in vitro experiments showing that mutation and selection can lead to change and complexity increase 3 There is observable evidence 4 compiled again, but you can search for the articles in internet. We've already used the concepts provided by evolution theory to predict the evolution of viruses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This claim is just not true, considering you have access to internet and so to almost the totality of scientific knowledge ever published.\n","id":"b5b505bc-7f3a-46f5-86b5-9be6c07fc4e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should U.S. Presidents Have the Power to Issue Pardons?<|ARGUMENT|>It has become clear that the presidency is constrained more by norms than laws. Thus, we must enshrine limits on executive power into law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"U.S. presidents should not have the power to issue pardons.\n","id":"cc59b6be-6d6f-4863-ac1b-cccd0eb626b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>If animals do not care if they are alive on Earth or Mars, it suggests that human life is more valuable than animal life. Taking a stance on such a topic requires some attributes which animals lack compared to humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That is a goal for humans. An animal doesn't care if it lives on Earth or Mars.\n","id":"46da458d-c57b-47f6-ad85-ce6702d204e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Those who claim to be acting morally without reason do so without authority, but Utilitarianism is based on reason, social contract is based on reason, Kant's work is based on reason, these systems, and many more draw there authority form the reason, and logic on which they were built.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanists do not have the moral authority to make such a distinction. If morality is defined by man himself, then man himself is free to rewrite the rules of morality as he pleases, whether he cares for social contracts, utilitarianism, or any other social theory or not.\n","id":"8b3d1b98-ef71-4af5-a8ed-048f17dd1048"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Following politics and current events is an extremely addictive activity on which you can spend 1000s of hours without getting anything at all in return. It isn't even a quality source of entertainment. You get frustrated, disappointed and sometimes even seriously depressed with the way things are going in politics. But you might say, voting is the only way to influence change and following politics is the only way you can make an informed and educated decision. I disagree with this for a number of reasons. It is not possible to accurately vote according to your long term interests. You can only vote according to your irrational beliefs and myopic interests. I don't think progressive or conservative budgets benefit any of their constituents over the medium to long term. Lower minimum wages and social security spending also cause lower consumer spending and hence lower profits for people who produce those goods. So the top 1 who're actually thought to benefit from lower taxes don't do so over the medium to long term. The same with progressives and the working class. Even if you're an ethnic minority who wants radical progressive reforms, voting for those reforms might actually be counter productive when they might cause a conservative backlash and undo previous social progress as we can see with Trump and political correctness. Same with ethnic majorities and reactionary reforms. Even if you have identified your interests and political beliefs, there will probably be no major party that satisfactorily aligns with them. For example, there are a large number of disenfranchised socially liberal, fiscally conservative people and also the other way, who don't have a major party aligning with them. Besides, these are broad labels which also don't accurately represent the unique political views of an individual. For example, you might be opposed to abortion and same sex marriage while also thinking Churches should be taxed and women's rights should be protected. What does that make you in American socio political lingo? Even if you have a major political party that completely aligns with your views, they most probably will not keep much of their campaign promises after an election. Even if the party has a powerful mandate, the party will have a lot of factionalism going on. The stereotype of a lying, flip flopping, power hungry and apathetic politician is very true, in my view. You cannot trust any politician to keep the promises that they gave before you voted for them. Besides, the party that aligns the most with your views can have crappy candidates while the other party could have decent ones, which further disenfranchises you as a voter. Even if you waste 1000s of hours, following the news, getting educated and informed, thinking deeply to form opinions and refining those opinions by debating with family, friends and strangers on online forums, your individual vote doesn't count. Even after you make the perfect decision, your influence is still negligible in deciding an election. For reference, the average voter in the 2016 presidential election had a 0.000000083 influence over the outcome. And that's only if all votes are equal. If you're in a firmly blue or red state then your vote is even more meaningless. So my view is, instead of wasting 1000s of hours on getting involved in politics, focusing on yourself and your happiness is a lot wiser. At least that's what I am going to do until someone presents a compelling counter argument. Following politics only results in wasted time and not to mention frustration, disappointment, and heartache in exchange for negligible influence over an entire meaningless competition between two centrist parties. I'd rather spend time with my family and friends, watch movies and fun T.V. shows, follow business news and invest in the stock market and focus on myself and my career than take part in this farce called politics. Besides Western democracies are extremely stable institutions run by people many times wiser and more knowledgeable than myself. There are always people who will think that every vote counts and will take part in the system. Many of them even have the same views as me. I can delegate my citizenship duties to them and be a happier, freer person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Following politics and having opinions in order to vote, is a complete waste of time and emotional energy.\n","id":"cc7b27bb-fc54-4051-a554-142b3d239613"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the imprisoned members of Pussy Riot should be considered political prisoners<|ARGUMENT|>Pussy Riot\u2019s protest was politically focussed, the response seems politically driven and now they are prisoners. The name and chorus of the song performed was Virgin Mary, Chase Putin Out.i It is very hard to see what would be a better definition of the phrase \u2018political prisoner\u2019. Where any punishment required for this act \u2013 and Proposition contends that there was not \u2013 then it was at most a mild public order offence. Amnesty International and the overwhelming majority of the International media have reached that conclusion. The very fact that this has become a cause celebre shows the extent to which those who able to step back from the situation recognise this for what it is; a clear abuse of presidential power given the thinnest sheen of respectability by a compliant church. Such religious content as was contained in the protest fairly obviously relates to the setting and is not the main content of the song. It\u2019s a fairly straightforward artistic device. It does, however, raise the question that if the intent of this song was to be blasphemous \u2013 a necessary component of proving it to be so \u2013 then why did they do such a bad job of it and spend so much their time going on about politics; it would suggest somewhat incompetent activists. i Elder, Miriam, \u2018Pussy Riot trial: prosecutors call for three-year jail term\u2019, guardian.co.uk, 7 August 2012<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The focus of their song was one of political dissent rather than religion\n","id":"b3d9a787-49b6-4907-a9e9-72ac49aee5ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Reality TV shows are an important part of popular culture today.<|ARGUMENT|>Without Pop Idol there would be no Will Young, without Britain\u2019s Got Talent we would not know who Paul Potts is. Leona Lewis would still be a secretary without X Factor, and Kelly Clarkson would be an unknown had it not been for American Idol.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reality TV shows allow ordinary individuals a chance of stardom.\n","id":"b9ad6711-4a92-4980-8605-ffd95a9c6bad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>i've recently moved back to the U.S. and noticed that, likely because of rising divorce rate and or rates of having children outside of marriage, there are a large number of single parents looking to begin dating again in my town. I think that this is a bad idea for a number of reasons First, and though this relates to dating as a whole rather than just dating non parents, I believe that it is bad for the children involved to have to meet, become attached to, and then be forced to sever a relationship with their parents new partner every time a relationship ends. This is probably my most important point, and while it can be argued that a relationship with the child and partner could feasibly continue this seems vastly impractical. Second, this creation and ending of a relationship with the child is presumably difficult for the partner as well. Third, this fear of having to sever a relationship could result in the adult partner actively attempting to avoid forming one, leading them to be cold and unattached to the child. This is both unfair to the child as they will presumably be around the partner fairly often because they are both a major part of the parent's life and could cause later problems if the relationship with the parent were to become serious. Related to my point above, I believe that this aversion to forming a relationship with the child could lead to the partner actively avoiding them and therefore inadvertently assuring that the child has less time with their parent, which is unfair to the child. Fourth, the partner is put in an extremely difficult situation in regards to discipline and interacting with the child in any scenario outside of that of two friends. As I've seen from living with my own niece and nephew, any adult around the home of a child regularly will eventually take on some kind of authority like role. Fifth, if the child and partner simply don't get along the relationship will likely end prematurely, which is unfair to both the parent and the child, as the child will likely feel guilt for being a reason for the ending of their parent's relationship. The reason that I singled out people with no kids who date single parents is that I believe that a person who already has a child would be more able to circumvent issues like this. For example, someone who already has children would likely be more adept at dealing with my fourth point while there are shitty parents and very involved non parents, I believe these people would be the exception rather than the rule . Additionally, I would never suggest that single parents should avoid dating or relationships just because they have kids. I am fairly open to this view being changed, so please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that it is a bad idea for people without children to date people who have them.\n","id":"bfade6ee-49a0-41dd-a8c7-e866da80c319"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This doesn't go much deeper than the title. Recently I've seen videos depicting examples of cultural appropriation where members of a certain culture attack other people who are not members of that culture yet are making use of styles practices which are specific to that culture. Ex an African American woman attacking a white man for wearing his hair in dreadlocks, a group of Mexicans literally, people from Mexico, not a pejorative general term attacking a group of mostly white college kids for having a Mariachi themed party. Frankly, I think this is ridiculous. While I'm sure there are examples of this that are much less trivial and silly, I still don't think this can ever constitute any sort of moral error. While this type of thing can certainly be tacky and offensive, it's a massive overstep to consider it somehow objectively wrong and worthy of censorship and vigilante justice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cultural Appropriation is BS\n","id":"bfdc5400-f4c4-40b9-be47-d587eef9250d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>The number of people that will feel uncomfortable or unsafe in unisex bathrooms is much higher than the number of people that feel uncomfortable or unsafe in separate bathrooms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people will feel discomfort from being forced to share a restroom with the opposite sex.\n","id":"063fb695-1806-421a-80a7-e8483a760b96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you open up Google maps and search almost any city or town it's not difficult to find giant clusters of massage parlors with covered windows who are open until late at night. If you read their reviews you'll find five star ratings claiming their was a happy ending or one star ratings by people obliviously to the implication of their masseur not knowing how to massage and the bed smelling of body odor. Often the photographs on their pages are of scantility clad Asian women, and there are even sites that catalogue and provide reviews of these businesses. There are a lot of them, everywhere. Although police attempt to crack down on these businesses, more pop up in the same area in growing numbers. You would think the risk to the owners would be enough to deter them. I believe that the owners of these businesses are not the sole owners, and they are in fact discretely owned by far more powerful people who are managing many locations and a large sex trafficking ring. In a sense, they are diversifying their investments by having puppet owners to take the fall, but the money still gets sent to their bank account. Further, because power in China is so centralized it is natural to assume these superwealthy are by default members of the political class and are acting with their cooperation. If I was foreign intelligence, I would be very interested in spreading prostitution across the United States. More disturbingly, I would also market legal prostitution as a freedom and wrap it in a package appealing to both libertarians and sexual freedom advocates. These would be extremely effective ways of subversion, so as long as Russia is blasting Facebook with fake accounts to undermine the political discourse, why wouldn't they invest some time in encouraging prostitution legalization? I expect this to be a difficult hypothesis for me to defend. I haven't done too much homework yet, but hopefully if this creates some heat it will also produce a bit of light.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The majority of the \"massage parlor\" industry in the U.S. are owned by the super-wealthy of China, and are condoned by foreign intelligence as a means of subversion.\n","id":"87f4bbb2-56c9-4e28-8edc-94af6bd45bb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I'm starting from the idea that corporations and individuals have a more control over people running for public office by using their wealth to fund those people's campaigns as leverage. If candidates or parties, as part of the process of running for an election, applied for a publicly funded loan similar to the system of student loans in the UK , then they would not have to rely on wealthy institutions or individuals to fund their campaign. Parties running for an election would only have to pay back these loans if they did not win the election, meaning that the public would only be paying for the campaign of the party they elected. maybe the losing party would have to pay back a percentage based on the percentage of public vote they receive . I think this would limit the extent of corporate and wealthy individual's influence in political systems because candidates and parties would be relying on the public for their financial security rather than a small number of people. I don't think my idea is perfect, but I think it would be better than any current system. I'm unaware of this being instituted anywhere, so I'd love to hear about it if it has.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think political systems would be improved if campaign funds were distributed through a public loan system. The paying back of which would be conditional on losing the election.\n","id":"515b2aba-9e5a-44dc-bca1-2695b8ed76ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Libertarians have been stationed in Reddit for some time they're a pernicious internet plague spouting their various philosophies. Yet whenever one interacts with them, one finds out that they have far more in common with religions than any sort of actual scientific theory. Libertarians take the precepts of Libertarianism as self evident and self righteous. Simply violating one of their commandments is enough for them to declare an idea wrong even if they can't articulate a reason. It violated doctorine, it cannot be wrong Flat tax it will make everyone pay less , absolute property rights, the idea that regulating business is literally tyranny, the idea that private industry is always more efficient than the government, the idea that corporations will produce ethical results unregulated, these ideas cannot be rationally defended, yet are core tenants of their religion. TLDR Libertarians don't respect science in the least. They are a modern version of the Utopian movements like Pol Pot, Lenin, Mao, Robspierre, and many less successful ones. Edit Please stop coming here to tell me that everything is equally valid or invalid that's false or that Libertarians have a belief that is independent of your science and metrics I already believe this, that's the point of this <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Libertarianism is more of a religion than an economic theory cmv\n","id":"2f9c94e9-8c55-4a20-8aa8-043d232f3518"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>Concentrating on an urban area, which tends to have liberal politics, likely benefited Fargo, as there is some evidence that the Lane County campaign was hurt by overly liberal-looking marketing and signage in rural areas, a byproduct of appealing to two different communities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Lane County campaign had to work with a far more geographically and politically diverse area urban areas + rural areas, whereas Fargo's campaign was concentrated in an urban area.\n","id":"e1b84a4e-fcfd-4827-b8d2-6cece1b70bea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>One necessary function of government is to uphold justice. If justice is not upheld, society will tear itself apart. If justice is upheld, that implies an entity with the will and power to enforce the rules, i.e. a government. Thus, the anarchist model will either self-destruct or become obsolete.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are necessary functions of government. If there was no government, entities or people would surely arise to fulfill those functions. They would become a de facto government, essentially eliminating the anarchist ideal.\n","id":"160583e5-aab5-45ca-a6ad-1a466ad9cb1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel as if most of high school is directionless read open and exploratory preparatory education for college life. However, it seems much of it is pointless and is more force fed book curriculum over actual insightful education that helps foster lifelong learning. I understand that some base education is needed to function in society, but much of that is in elementary middle school and at the high school level, much of it seems exploratory and not all of it is necessary. Overall, curriculum seems just to pass tests and get good grades rather than insight curiosity and help make people learners. this is where I think the internet comes in. So much information is available online today that high school seems obsolete. It is so easy to learn new things that actually interest you and explore the purpose of high school. Instead of being fed meaningless information that may or may not be relevant for your life, on the internet you can dynamically learn whatever you want and in as much depth as you want. I know high school gives you a good base for further learning but what use is that base if you do not care about it? Why spend the time and energy doing something that is not relevant to you?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think High School is an obsolete institution and it's purpose can be replaced by internet learning\n","id":"9a93fd71-4bf1-410b-8af4-95328acc28bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>The method of reporting employed statements by school authorities shows that the outcome is an authoritative fact.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Seventeen school districts have reported no incidents after implementing transgender protections.\n","id":"459c036c-3817-449a-bfb1-18e33f8d91ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Popular Protest Productive?<|ARGUMENT|>For highly controversial topics, there are often counter-protests, e.g. a pro-life rally will see a pro-choice 'response', or far right rallies experience an 'anti-fascist' response.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Popular protest reveals popular support both for and against issues.\n","id":"e2cb03e0-2ea5-4e47-91a3-e04da3d7aacd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe this because English 4 is pretty much a repeat of English 3. Our books haven\u2019t had any themes and life lessons different from those we read in English 3. Since 99.9 of students taking English 4 are seniors, many are more preoccupied with preparing for college. In college the ability to clearly convey your point of view through writing essays is extremely important and is not properly taught if at all in high school. I propose we offer students the choice of taking English 4 or a pure writing class. While I do see the importance of English classes I do not believe English 4 is a necessary class for the improvement of a students abilities. I hope y\u2019all can either change my mind or give ideas on how to better prepare students to succeed in college.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"English 3 and 4 should not be required courses for high school students due to the repetitive nature of the required reading\n","id":"a8309f7e-3539-463f-88e4-b4450993fe2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, tomorrow is my birthday, and I'm turning 15. My presents are already coming in through Amazon tomorrow in boxes obviously. My mother ABSOLUTELY wants to wrap the presents up, just like she does every year. Always wrapping paper. Never bags, which are a better alternative if you don't want to wrap them and keep the surprise as well. And like every year, here are my problems why I dislike wrapping paper so much. 1 For people like me with short nails, I can not actually tear the covering and it just ends up frustrating me. 2 It's just going to be disposed of anyways, being a waste of paper, if anything. 3 My relatives who wrap my presents take hours to finish due to small talk and gossip while I'm cooped up in a tiny room at about 85 degrees fahrenheit when really, I could already be opening these presents and eating cake 4 Bags are a completely cheaper alternative. 5 When ordering items online, the boxes never list what they bought on the outside. That's all I have to say, really. And I'm usually very stubborn, so bear with me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wrapping birthday presents are a waste of time and I shouldn't have to unwrap something, only for it to be in its own packaging.\n","id":"c12c413e-5527-4845-8e75-ae31d535048a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>The problem with revisionist history is that it pretends to know what is best by today's standards by ignoring and wanting to change how we got to today's standards. The biggest problem is that a book that helped the abolisionist movement by humanizing black slaves is no considered racist because of the contemporary word use. By revising history, you are removing context and eventually, we will revert into a word where meaning of certain aspects is lost. This will hurt us all in the end<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Removing racist language in a historical piece of literature could constitute historical revisionism.\n","id":"cbf9bedd-ca71-4d75-84f8-4d5f74754690"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For fresh topic Friday, here is something so fresh that it smells of baby powder and may or may not be crinkly. As a tween cum teen in the 90s, I knew a kid with assorted special needs whom was quite higher functioning fully verbal after a point, always in regular classes albeit with aide, et Al . He willingly chose to stay in diapers even after his bladder and bowel matured, even staying in them after becoming for all intents and purposes potty trained. What some saw as weird, I and others in hindsight see as being individualistic. Granted I am clouded by having my mind messed with him, others in our small town were too, but I think diapers are just as valid of a underwear choice than any other. If one wants to wear them instead of anything else because they like them best, it should be taken just as much as if someone doesn't want to wear say thongs or boxers. I think that just because one likes to wear them doesn't mean they need to go 100 toilet free which at that makes them single use undies, yes. I would at least like my unconventional view to be somewhat challenged.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Diapers are a valid, yet unconventional, underwear choice\n","id":"941001b5-7d81-4a1a-84f6-8da7a7f6c119"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By withdrawing all of our foreign aid and troops, we will undoubtedly cause massive problems. The Middle East will dissolve in massive conflicts and the factions we don't like will take control probably. Other countries will see horrible financial crisis in the wake of our departure and may crumble into anarchy. nbsp And you know what That's okay. As an American, I don't care nearly as much about the infrastructure of a distant country that hates us as I do about the ghetto 10 miles from where I live. We have many domestic problems that remain untouched. There are neighborhoods in LA where even the police won't go because the gangs cannot be stopped. Our own economy is circling the drain and the bureaucracy has become a tangled mess of horror. nbsp But if we abandon those countries, the powers who hate us will assume control. Right? Well yes and no. There's a lot of bad blood between America and those factions, but the lion's share of the reason they hate us is because of our interfering in foreign countries and policies. So they hate us because we have troops in their homeland. To fight this hate, we send more troops to their homelands. That will fix the problem how? nbsp Then there is the humanitarian argument. We have to help those people who are suffering. People are being killed. Women, children and families are being murdered in the streets. That's a terrible thing and I'd love to see it stop. The only difference in how I see it is that I'd like to see it stopped everywhere and not just in the countries that benefit our political agenda. Darfur, Mexico, China, North Korea, Iran we don't do anything about the horrible humanitarian crimes committed in and often by those countries. And this shows our faulty logic. We involve ourselves in the oil countries, but we see almost none of the oil they export, and what we do buy from them is marked up even more due to our involvement. nbsp Without us, these countries would be in trouble. Well not exactly. These countries ARE in trouble and we're simply holding back the dawn with our soldier's blood. nbsp We make mistakes and then to fix our mistakes, we make more mistake. There needs to be a line in the sand when we rip off the band aid and let the wound heel on it's own. And maybe they'll decide they really did need the USA in their country. Maybe they'll decide that they were wrong in hating us. And on the off chance that they do change their views, we will be happy to come back as soon as they reciprocate with low oil prices or other incentives to make it worth our while. nbsp America is a capitalist country. I think we resonate with that ideal and stop trying to save the world from itself. Our soldiers are too precious to waste in the sands of a foreign desert for people who hate us and will always hate us. nbsp I'm very open to any opposing views or facts, but stating that the complexity of the political situation is the reason for staying abroad is a cop out in my opinion. If it's too complex to understand, then it needs to be simplified. The best way to simplify it is to eliminate the obfuscation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe America needs to take a step back, withdraw ALL foreign troops and focus only on our domestic situation.\n","id":"f307de21-18f1-4752-ae90-655aa4cbfcb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Their Children Should Be Fined If The Child Gets A Vaccine-Preventable Illness<|ARGUMENT|>Some doctors are biased against unvaccinated people. When conscientious objection forms were required to refuse vaccinations, some doctors refused to sign the forms needed to allow unvaccinated children to receive welfare payments. Biased doctors could not be trusted to act against their bias when they have the ability to punish unvaccinated people with fines. avn.org.au<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fines would change the physician-patient relationship, making it more adversarial and giving patients & parents less reason to be forthcoming about their symptoms.\n","id":"2556c0f4-aeac-4dbb-a5a1-70b032c1cc40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is morality an obstacle to personal happiness?<|ARGUMENT|>Happiness is not derived solely from the gathering of material wealth or indulging in one's base desires, but also from interpersonal relationships. Being a moral e.g. trustworthy person strengthens these relationships.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Acting according to our moral beliefs is a source of happiness.\n","id":"6da48ccd-de8b-44d0-8bfe-7e9b1954a90a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>unless they are infallible I don't believe that any leader has the right to decide for others what they should or should not believe. I don't see how that can stop being true in any situation. I would argue that the instances where we think that it's obviously ok to control what another people thinks for their own good for instance preventing people inciting riots and such like , only seem obvious because of our subjective prejudices about what does and does not seem like a debatable premise. There is no objective reason to not view everything as debatable if you accept that anything can be<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"insuring freedom of speech and thought in more important than any other societal goal\n","id":"d088d6f6-7d75-430f-8df7-5a657be5a690"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all EU citizens be obliged by law to vote in EU elections?<|ARGUMENT|>Just like no one is obliged to exercise their right to free speech, so no one should be obliged to exercise the right to vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vote should not be an obligation, it is a right.\n","id":"57ffc656-7d36-4b9c-9826-3a4bf17643bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cannabis be legalised for medical use in the UK?<|ARGUMENT|>Research by London University Hospital claims that cannabidiol, with the help of radiation therapy, can make some brain tumours virtually disappear.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overwhelming scientific research supports the beneficial medical effects of using cannabis.\n","id":"e7fece94-04f8-4a6d-8c85-6bae810139df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that it was an entirely new concept for its time is just icing on the cake. It was witty, had clearly define character structure, and was able to accomplish it without having an overarching plot. It even accomplished having a meta episode that was comedic genius. I know there are other good shows out there or in the past and would like to hear them. The point isn't to tell me that my opinion is objectively impossible, it's to talk about other shows. I'm well aware that I haven't seen every show ever. I would like to exclude 'Who's line is it anyway?' from the rebuttals because it's amazing in its own rights but don't think they can be fairly compared. Edit Clarity<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Seinfeld is the funniest show to ever air.\n","id":"4e715c74-38f4-4b20-94e6-63c6fae229fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>The majority of Democrats 57% nationally believe it is more important for their party's leaders in Congress to stick to their beliefs even if little gets done, rather than compromise with the Trump administration to enact policy changes. Given that Democrats cannot accurately predict how people will respond to co-operation with Trump, it would be unwise to risk losing voters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain negative consequences are such that they can not be predicted at the time in which a compromise happens. Therefore, Democrats may not necessarily always be aware of all negative consequences.\n","id":"c23b9c0c-732b-4125-ab89-1505fa9bda49"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Evangelicals vote for Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>The Trump administration is considering a virtual shutdown of refugee admissions in 2020 and cutting the number of refugees admitted in the US to nearly zero.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most evangelicals support immigration reform that would allow some undocumented immigrants to stay in the country.\n","id":"4dec659a-395f-4af0-8dec-939d3d70232c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build an international space elevator?<|ARGUMENT|>An orbital ring would not interfere with activities on Earth as much as a space elevator, due to being above normal flight areas<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An orbital ring has benefits that a space elevator does not.\n","id":"5da5cab8-d1c1-441a-a8b6-a9666ba34134"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Tune Stars are a terrible team with one amazing player. The Monstars are gigantic versions of 5 of the best players in the game at that time. Furthermore, at the end of just one game the Tune Squad was wiped out. Totally gassed. They're amateurs, trained for a couple of weeks by the best player but good player does not make a good coach. You're also not going to get very many minutes out of Murray. On the other side of the court, you have 5 players who are literal basketball monsters. They don't get tired, they're 12 feet tall, they're the best of the best. The game is basically 1 retired all star Jordan vs 5 active all stars that are stronger and bigger than him. The Monstars sweep after game 1.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Monstars would beat the Tune Squad in a 7 game series.\n","id":"b39ef4a6-745e-4868-b7d0-38c8c45c3d8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>The bad conduct of the other senators and Judge Kavanaugh notwithstanding, Harris did not take the high road, but strove to obstruct and inject politics into a SCOTUS nomination hearing, thus playing her own part in damaging the integrity of the highest court in the land<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Harris has already manifested this hostile approach based on impugning the character of an adversary, and the result was the exacerbating of divisions in society and the deepening of Republican control over the Senate.\n","id":"c3ba655f-8d4d-42dc-bb67-cb24dfe3c922"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Resolved: Adaptation should be the most urgent response to Climate Change.<|ARGUMENT|>There are significant research challenges that need to be addressed in terms of envisaging what an adaptation regime would look like. For example how adaptation would tie into to other types of change \u2013 social, economic, demographic, etc. Answering these questions, alone, will take time but are a necessary precursor to building a realistic adaptation routinei. The urgency here comes from the fact that it will take time to establish new systems to work on this at an international level. One of the difficulties demonstrated by the experience of initial studies of climate change was that it needed to be conducted on a global scale, frequently involving complex and expensive modeling systems. There are several backstages to establishing this and the majority of relevant academics are currently working on prevention models rather than designing an entire new framework of prediction. Developing such frameworks will require the focus of governments, in terms of research funding policies and agreeing enforcement and delivery models. Given the choice between building a framework that can work and focussing on one that hasn\u2019t, the choice seems to be fairly obviousii. i National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility website. ii See also the UN site here<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The necessary research alone will take time and should be a priority\n","id":"3f190048-5343-431e-901d-03d1694f5d81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>During the last quarter century, a flourishing dialogue between science and theology has been going on in North America and Europe. Clearly faith and science can, at bare minimum, have mutually respectful discussion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The supposed history of warfare between science and religion is a myth.\n","id":"75e6f5ab-dc6f-4762-9b4e-d316ee2c9563"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not saying anyone can be beautiful. But you can at least keep yourself from being disgusting whether it be working out, dressing better, or whatever the solution might be. I think that anyone that won't better themselves is just too lazy to make their lives better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think everyone who is overweight or ugly is just lazy and should be looked down upon.\n","id":"72c11c66-e4b8-416a-a4c9-5bbfe121a892"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to start off by saying Ive been a gamer for a long time, and I still play video games an hour every few days, but every time i do so, it makes me feel guilty. Ofcourse, feeling guilty is an indication that some part of me is rebelling against me doing it. While I do enjoy doing this activity, I feel like I should have spent my time doing something with a bit of a deeper meaning, even a movie is more though provoking, tells a story and does a bit of an impact to your life, leaves something in you that you can bring to real life. I think, while being an enjoyable activity, it is a form of escapism that breaks the flow of living in reality and being honest with oneself. Even if I enjoy the activity, I dont see why I cannot learn to love reading, drawing or for example sculpting. So i guess my point is, video games are dull, uninspiring and mind degrading form of escapism and there are definitely better ways to relax or escape, from which you can bring insights into the real world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"video games are a pointless waste of time\n","id":"bff33ff2-77a2-4f1c-a8a0-f3d8637ce5d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>Economies in Southern Europe still face over 20% rates of unemployment compared to Northern European economies like Germany which enjoys under 5% unemployment rates. This system of inequality continues to put a strain on the union.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU has failed to address many of the economic problems that have developed since 2008.\n","id":"1b7a971f-6d08-40e2-9eae-c63e18df4996"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Minimum Wage<|ARGUMENT|>This is an argument for better enforcement of the system, rather than against it in principle - the majority of workers will choose to act legally and accept higher pay if possible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is an argument for better enforcement of the system, rather than against it in principle - the ...\n","id":"604febbf-0bf1-418a-9136-810e4906997f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Doctors have to deal with many patients, and may not be able to dedicate the time or energy to develop a comprehensive understanding of an individual child's medical history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents, by virtue of their relationship with their children, are capable of making better decisions on their behalf than doctors are.\n","id":"eb4beabd-a326-4d33-b5ed-19a8d2eb8d9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently posted this to r math, with the question, when does real math begin to be taught? gt I ask this question because as a high school sophomore in a pre calculus class, I don't feel like we are learning math. For instance, it is almost the end of the school year and we are starting to get into calculus, meaning derivatives. I was pretty excited as I have studied them on my own a bit in the past, but they were not really taught . The only thing that was actually taught was the limit definition of a derivative. However, my teacher came out with the shortcut soon afterwards for taking derivatives for polynomials without explaining why it works. The problem with this is that when if we are quizzed on this, it does not show that we know calculus . All it shows is that we know how to plug numbers into a formula, like in sixth grade. I understand that this is only an introduction, but this seems to be a common theme in high school math, meaning use this magical formula to solve this problem . Sorry for the rant, but this epidemic has far reaching effects. For instance, many kids in my honors chem class forget formulas all the time, like thinking density in volume liters. This is not a matter of forgetting , but more of a demonstration that these students do not understand how fractions work. I'm just asking when math is taught for understanding. As you can see, what we are learning is not math. Most of it is just telling how things are done without any explanation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Math isn't taught in high school.\n","id":"3a1bc351-2487-45d2-8e68-d0394b9e88d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>A 2014 poll of prominent AI researchers found that they believe there's a 50% chance that high level machine intelligence will be developed around 2040-2050.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is probably impossible to prevent AGI from being created.\n","id":"001743ec-3299-414d-8bfc-b468eebe962f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>ban smoking in public spaces<|ARGUMENT|>If smokers are not allowed to smoke in pubs, they will not spend as much time in them, preferring to stay at home where they can smoke with their friends. This will put many pubs out of business. In fact, since the smoking ban was introduced in the UK, many pubs have closed and blamed their loss of business on the smoking ban1. The Save Our Pubs & Clubs campaign estimates that the smoking ban in the UK is responsible for 20 pub closures a week2. This is an unfair consequence for the many pub-owners across the world. 1 'MPs campaign to relax smoking ban in pubs', BBC News, 29 June 2011, 2 'Why we want government to amend the smoking ban', Save Our Pubs & Clubs, improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This ban would put many pubs, clubs, etc. out of business.\n","id":"6641fd71-8420-444d-a1f9-e792f566711b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Downvoting around here is like the rules of fight club. Except it's often abused. The downvoting I see a lot of the time is the downvoting of opinions. Trolling seems very low. People come to reddit for the community. However it plays out in their head to feel superior, to vent, to put content out for opinion, for cerebral exercise If you're here for community, it's chickenshit to stay hidden when you are already anonymous. Hit and run Downvoting discourages content. I frequent r debatereligion. It's heavily atheist. Theists sometimes participate, but I know they lurk due to the variety who comment. No one wants to get anonymously slapped for an opinion no matter the opinion. At least give reason to your downvote. Downvoting doesn't help Stubbornness in threads. Someone may be stuck in their opinion. Sometimes I change my opinion. Sometimes I stick to my guns. That's not worth a downvote. Again, if you have something to say, say it or walk away. Downvoting is a reflex. It's really designed superficially. Log in, disagree, click, move on. There is no thought, no engagement, this doesn't make for a strong community. There is a hivemind. Hagel said it best. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Your voice is worthy. You should have something to say. Lobbing rocks from the back of the crowd serves no function but to encourage thoughtlessness. Now in the dialog box I am on the fence about a character count. I think at this point putting yourself up on the board is good enough. You may wonder about upvotes. Again, Hagel. If you support someone add to what they said or support it. An upvote probably means you could not have said it better. Sure the hivemind works the other way and people get supported for knee jerk reasons, but I think it is more important to support the contrary opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"to downvote, you must leave a comment.\n","id":"e161b8d6-4acf-4bce-bbd4-79eb00050cd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Farming animals is often the only means available for farmers, e.g. farmers use animals to store energy for harsh winters or where the terrain doesn't allow for intensive crop farming.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Veganism is not feasible for less privileged societies or individuals.\n","id":"8d2f1a8b-ef46-4fb4-9027-37184c627c6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me just start by saying I am a pessimist, an existentialist, and somewhat of a nihilist. Through all the war, hate, racism, and destruction that has occurred on this planet, I have very little faith in the human race. Now on the topic of drug legalization In theory, I believe all drugs should be legalized. I think that when used responsibly, all drug use can be managed. I also believe that my country's drug war America has failed miserably and that we need a drastically different approach see the film The House I Live In if you want to know why I think that. This combined with my earlier point about drug use leads me to the conclusion that all drugs should be legal. People have the freedom to choose what they put in their bodies, drug cartels get put out of business, innocent people are let out of jail, and we can tax the drugs and give the money to schools and such. Win win. Also, on a somewhat unrelated note I'd just like to say that I am 100 in favor of legalization of marijuana, but that's a different point. But here's where my pessimism comes in. IN THEORY, legalizing drugs should lead to all the benefits I just listed. But I think that humans are so self centered, ignorant, and unable to control their desires, that they will quickly abuse these drugs, overdoses will skyrocket, families will be torn apart, and it will be worse than it is now. While some members of our society can handle harder drugs physically and mentally, I believe the average person doesn't know how to handle a bad LSD trip, or how to safely use heroin. I don't think the average human can manage themselves in that environment. Please, change my views, and convince me that humans are ready for the benefits of total drug legalization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are too stupid for us to legalize most currently illegal drugs.\n","id":"08c09965-5314-4ff7-b5a3-623ef6378d36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>\"If we want to reduce our impacts this century, it is consumption we must address. Population growth is outpaced by the growth in our consumption of almost all resources. There is enough to meet everyone\u2019s need, even in a world of 10 billion people. There is not enough to meet everyone\u2019s greed, even in a world of 2 billion people.\" theguardian.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An even distribution of populations and resources is a utopian dream that is always just one execution away from becoming a reality, so it is never possible to accomplish.\n","id":"543c9fbe-eb5c-4ab6-ad21-abec11f5d2fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is partly coming from my experience in the UK over the last few months. To be clear, I don't in general have a problem with the electoral systems in the US and UK in general although I would prefer a proportional representation system to first past the post , but I do have a problem with the way the general public percieve democracy. I don't like how people don't realise that democracy has flaws. People don't realise that democracy often causes minority groups to be underrepresented and causes politicians to be chastised or even unelected because they don't enact populist policies. Jeremy Corbyn was recently elected as leader of the labour party, and I feel like his election represents many of my frustrations with democracy. He's pledged to allow members of the labour party even more say on labour party policy, and seems to me to be trying to stick democracy wherever he can within the labour party, without a thought as to whether or not that is a good thing. Another thing that frustrates me is the viewing of democracy as a competition or game. The point of democracy is for the people in society to be represented in government, and in the UK or US this is achieved by giving a political party a certain amount of power roughly depending on what percentage of the country supports them. However, in the recent EU referendum in the UK, the leave side won by 52 48. Now I'm not saying that politicians should or could now choose to ignore this result and stay in the EU, but now politicians are acting like Britain is now a country entirely made up of brexiteers. Some politicians have even talked about an 'overwhelming' majority or mandate to leave the EU, and the talk amongst the government seems to have been entirely about the idea of a 'hard' brexit, cutting off as many ties with the EU as possible. This all serves to disenfranchise remain voters, and ignores the desires of 48 of the UK. I also believe that it is not possible for a democracy to function in an atmosphere of lies and the twisting of truths, and so I feel like the 'mandates' given to politicians after elections, and referendums are far less than the public reveres them to be. Equally, Jeremy Corbyn was elected in by 60 40, quite a large majority, but one that still disenfranchises 40 of labour party members. Again, this is a huge chunk of the labour party who are not represented by their leader. Part of the reason this frustrates me is that, at least with the British public, it seems like everyone just accepts this. I wonder if maybe this allows politicians to to entirely work for one subset of voters, and to ignore others, as seems to have happened after brexit and that maybe if the general public wasn't so accepting of this that politicians would be forced to serve everyone in such situations, rather than a small majority. Additionally, applying democracy everywhere and voting for leaders who propose adding in more democracy everywhere, without careful thought, is not a good idea. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":": Democracy is overrated, and the idolisation of democracy in the West is in fact harming democracy.\n","id":"6213f05b-7ca3-414f-b4f0-4b3ac11eacda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>In 1997, Japanese historian Shu\u0304do\u0304 Higashinakano published an article arguing that the Nanking Massacre was a hoax.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many Japanese historians deny the extent or existence of the Nanking Massacre.\n","id":"ef44787c-0429-4398-bf2e-0ccd232776ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would the world be a better place if it was united under one government eg the UN?<|ARGUMENT|>Israel is the only country that has been subject to a permanent standing agenda item in the council, meaning its treatment of the Palestinians is regularly scrutinised.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UN Human Rights Council fails to fairly hold countries to account for their crimes.\n","id":"69dcad64-3940-4946-b919-15f0b49d1fb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Pastafarianism deserve the same rights as other religions?<|ARGUMENT|>The ability to practice Pastafarianism is being restricted relative to the ability to practice other religions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To ban rights for Pastafarians is a violation of human rights and religious equality.\n","id":"6c67c35a-5fa9-4290-add4-246a4fc59396"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Probability is the possibilities of an event occurring divided by all possibilities. When we consider the case from a sentient perspective, it is naturally biased. This is because our inference of the probability will always include ourselves. There will never be this probability analyzed by nonsentient beings. Thus when making our inference on the universe, we should exclude ourselves from the sample. Looking at all other potential places for life we have none, so our inference should be small.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The creation of life by chance may well be such a fantastically improbable event that it has happened only once.\n","id":"dc89aca0-d517-48a9-8d79-056f08613a11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the music of the past better than it is today?<|ARGUMENT|>People can listen to all generations of music now when they couldn't before. So maybe it's possible to get stuck on thinking it's the best, when it was the best at the time and that's all one knows. It's harder to beat the best now when competing against music from all of history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's not that it's better, but just more familiar\n","id":"dade4e77-7f1c-4c14-b406-28f04d21d275"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>In no other society in the world are history's villains or traitors revered or held in the same esteem as that nation's heroes. For example, Benedict Arnold was an important part of early American history. However, there is no statue of him because he was a traitor and yet people know who is he without one. Yes, the Civil War and the Confederacy are a part of American History but they should be taught in and learned about in school or in a museum, not misrepresented as heroes with statues<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Confederates committed treason against the United States. The United States should not continue to honor or memorialize them.\n","id":"2784a235-53c8-48e5-9f8f-61920cc537b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the use of 'chosen' or gender-neutral pronouns be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Without a biological basis established, gender is a subjective belief, and enforcing personal subjective beliefs is not the role of a representative government that protects freedom of thought, expression, and religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mandatory pronouns go against the concept of freedom of speech.\n","id":"5279548b-7a41-46fa-b524-0534607877a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just to be clear, in this , I am assuming that the government will step up and give people money if they are seriously in debt. It is obvious to me that if the government did not step up, it would be a disaster for the average citizen. With that out of the way, I do not think that insurance should exist for several reasons Insurance premiums usually demand a small amount of money monthly that you probably could have saved up by yourself anyway. But you might be thinking about people who can't afford minimum wage and think What about these guys? . They can't pay for their insurance premiums. They're already living paycheck to paycheck and can't save up money either way. This is where the free market comes into play. For example, if almost no one can pay repairs for their car if they get into an accident, corporations would be forced to sell cars and car parts at a lower price. Everything would be much more affordable for the average person. The government would indeed step up big time and give out a lot of money in the short term. However, in the long term, the government would end up paying only for people who are chronically and terminally ill. The rest of the population can afford more stuff, so the government can limit its spending on the poor without many consequences. Also, no insurance would also mean getting help to people who need it the most. There are some people who scam insurance companies and receive money that they shouldn't have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The insurance industry should not exist.\n","id":"738e24a0-6ecc-41be-97e2-3cefa21280bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>In October 2018 May pledged to introduce legislation to stop restaurant and bar owners from snatching tips to top off their workers' wages. Action on this has now been delayed until \"Parliamentary time allows.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Theresa May's focus on Brexit negotiations has resulted in other important public concerns being neglected\n","id":"71126a89-cc0b-47ec-97c5-f8235cc6d0f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just to start off, in Europe we already do this. But unlike the metric system, this hasn't caught on as well as we would have liked. Here is a map showing the first day of the week by country. The work week starts on Monday and ends on Sunday. Because of this, in our cultural identity, the week starts on a Monday and ends on a Sunday. All calendars should reflect this. I understand that most digital calendars already allow you to select which day appears are the first day of the week and that effect appears to be merely cosmetic. But I would argue that this is more than a cosmetic change and that the standerdization of time is an important issue. ISO 8601 declares the first day of the week to be Monday. When you number the weeks in the year, the 1st week is the 1st week which includes a Monday. If you use calendars which start on Sunday or example, the American calendar , then the Week numbering can cause confusion. Here is an example Dates in January Effects M T W T F S S Week number Week assigned to 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 New year 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 New year 1 2 3 4 5 1 New year 1 2 3 4 1 New year 1 2 3 53 Previous year 1 2 53 or 52 Previous year 1 52 Previous year I think the entire world should standardize to using Monday as the first day of the week. EDIT As an example, any linux users should run the following two commands in their shell. cal w March 2015 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 11 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 12 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 13 29 30 31 cal w m March 2015 Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su 9 1 10 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 11 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 12 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 13 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 14 30 31<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All calendars should show Monday as the first day of the week.\n","id":"bd4565c6-97a9-4efa-854e-b6135adfcfb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We have a moral duty to intervene in nature to limit animal suffering.<|ARGUMENT|>Humans domesticated animals, which then do not depend on natural selection for their evoluation anymore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans, interfered in natural selection to a great extent already.\n","id":"c95be514-3c25-4645-91ac-4352c7b322ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no limit to freedom of speech.<|ARGUMENT|>Ideology is a stage in the evolution of ideas characterized by fanatics, paranoia and conformity. PC is often used as a label for policies or social phenomena, like microaggressions, that turn the good intentions behind civility and an emphasis on human dignity into a mass movement, or ideology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political correctness exhibits all the characteristics of an ideology. 1A:\n","id":"2ec4f3fd-32e4-4497-842b-7500c8efceb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>If you stop to pay your taxes, you will not receive at your door a teacher to help you freely choose to pay your taxes, but law enforcement will forcefully get the amount you refused to pay, and\/or even restrict your liberty imprisonment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most societies families, religions, governments in the world today and in history rely on deterrence and punishments to enforce and justify their system.Therefore free will is not a real societal need.\n","id":"659b6f94-5ad0-42c8-8a0d-c46b61321ce8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I don't know if this applies to every country or school or is a problem specific to my Germany where I live. But in my last two years of school I'm finished now , so years 11 and 12, my German lessons were mostly about the history of literature, epochs and famous writers as well as analyzing their dramas, poems, novels and other fictional writing. In my opinion, this is mostly a massive waste of time. It is of no importance to the vast majority of pupils once they leave school, even more so than it is the case with other subjects like maths for example. I doesn't prepare you for your job or adult life in any way. Instead, I think most of the time should be spent on learning things like argumentative informative writing, giving speeches, talks or presentations, ways people try to trick you with their writing and how to recognize and counter them, critical and logical thinking and so on. All of this are skills you need in everyday life and that would benefit way more pupils than the current system. I have to add, the things I regard as important were not completely left out of my German lessons. But I am of the opinion that they received way too little attention, especially when compared to the historic literature which we spent most of our time on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Native language classes in school should focus way less on the history of literature of the country they are taught in.\n","id":"ee76731b-060c-4787-bd39-201f1974123f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I read a comment just now dubbing Tony Abbott the 'Worst PM in Australia's history'. There's so much hysteria about the man, especially on Reddit. There seems to be an irrational hatred for everything he does, with everyone conveniently forgetting how shit things were under Rudd and Gillard. There is the perception that he's this radical, misogynistic asshole who eats small children. I'm not expert on the Budget, but there's no doubt in my mind that he needs to be ruthless to fix a 50 billion budget deficit. He's stopped Asylum seekers, and introduced most of the stuff he promised, despite not controlling the senate. He is a man of character in my opinion, and you can see that with the classy way he handled the MH17 situation. The hatred of Tony Abbott could be genuine because he's a bad PM, or it could be the natural bias of social media toward the left. I understand if someone doesn't like him, but I don't think the level of hatred directed at Tony Abbott that I have seen is rational, and certainly not warranted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- I'm a politically conservative student who genuinely believes that Tony Abbott is doing a good job as the Prime Minister of Australia.\n","id":"45498193-2d3e-4713-930e-0c3df2215b78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Eating mostly organic food is immoral by Kanth's categorical imperative. If everyone ate organic, the need for farmland would be significantly higher.^ 1 ^ 2 The reasons most often cited for eating organic food are that it is perceived to be safer to eat and more healthy. Environmental reasons are often secondary or tertiary . But in fact, organic food is neither significantly safer nor healthier than conventionally produced food.^ 3 ^ 4 There is no scientific evidence that organic food contains more nutrients. Organic farming often uses pesticides which are cited as being natural or derived from nature, without paying attention to their toxicity. They're large organic farms organic by the letter, not organic in spirit if most organic consumers went to those places, they would feel they were getting ripped off. ^ 4 I believe that organic farming will advance, but that it is currently, at least in some part, detrimental to the environment. Embracing modern technology would benefit sustainable farming, as would letting go of strict or not so strict rules. In my opinion, the best option is to combine efficiency and sustainability. What do you think? Edit I am considering current diets, but with organic food. This is because of the excruciatingly slow pace of the move to veganism and vegetarianism. nbsp 1 The Lower Productivity Of Organic Farming A New Analysis And Its Big Implications 2015 10 09, Steven Savage, Forbes 2 The Yield Gap For Organic Farming 2015 10 07, Steven Savage, SCRIBD 3 Is organic agriculture really better for the environment? 2016 05 14, Tamar Haspel, The Washington Post 4 Mythbusting 101 Organic Farming gt Conventional Agriculture 2011 07 11, Christie Wilcox, Science Sushi Scientific American<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eating mostly organic food is immoral\n","id":"2ba1936c-8163-48d1-9a71-68b6a19ba9c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>\u201cBlacks have significantly lower income and wealth, higher levels of poverty, and even shorter life spans, among many other disparities, compared to whites\u201d Mazzocco, par. 6.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although today's Black Americans have not experienced slavery, the impacts of it are still felt by the Black community today.\n","id":"705faad3-a2a1-4cd7-a3ac-b92eb0e63e2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DC handgun ban<|ARGUMENT|>The methodology of the studies has proven to be flawed. This goes to show that when arguments are supported by studies that support that the murder rate has decreased their validity and reliability is undermined by a flawed methodology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Studies that have showed the murder rate has decreased were flawed\n","id":"d2693719-743f-43fa-85bc-e52470a44d08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The reason I look up to Captain America is simple, he wants to help, and he is determined . Yes, it's that simple. He lives to protect those who cannot protect themselves, regardless of race, gender or creed. He believes in a world with freedom and equality. He fights for the people to have these things so they don't have to fight themselves. And despite the hardships, he pushes onward, even better, he is an excellent leader, a shining beacon of light to mankind. Throw in him into 17th century U.S. And I guarantee you he will be fighting with others to free the slaves, ect. No matter how dangerous, no matter how hard, he will never back down from doing the right thing or to help another person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Captain America, despite being a fictional person, is a good role model.\n","id":"c515d4ea-9548-49b7-ac2b-808fc0261c5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we use calculators in every math class?<|ARGUMENT|>Mental arithmetic is used in certain aptitude tests. Training it in school helps prepare for those.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Doing calculations in your mind offers flexibility and it trains the mind into thinking logically.\n","id":"9448cf49-c644-4470-abf5-a26f619405ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think some of the biggest threats to global stability comes from the political fringes. It's either the extreme left, or the extreme right. Radicalism almost always leads to violence, and is a plague on democratic society and governments. Since communism has been relegated to just a handful of countries, the far left has for the most part been dealt with. However the far right continues to be a menace. I believe fascist neo nazi groups, the KKK, the golden dawn or any religious extremist group like radical Islamism all fall under the far right. These groups are always extreme fringes, and a handful of people make the world a much nastier place. Often it is the leaders of such movements that prey on the weak willed, using them as pawns in their ambitions of power. Unfortunately with the world's obsession with free speech and personal liberty, such leaders are given a free hand. On websites like twitter and facebook we see ISIS recruit blind followers. Wouldn't restricting free speech put brakes on this sort of recruitment ? Political parties in democracies often try to keep these groups on a leash, but do not wish to eliminate them since they serve definite political goals like polarizing the electorate. I see this as a major flaw in democracy. Fear of losing votes from radical sympathizers leads to political groups appeasing extremism. Instead, I think governments should do much more and try to completely stamp out any signs of fascism. After the horrors of World War 2 I find it completely absurd that we still put up with their ideologies. Bringing socio economic growth to communities that feel disenfranchised just isn't enough, and their will always be a few bad apples. These bad apples need to be weeded out. Instead, we allow them to spread their rot, and infect society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most democracies are far too tolerant of extremism, especially the likes of neo-fascism, neo-nazism, radical Islamism and violent intolerance. The world has been to soft on these ideologies and they need to be eliminated whenever they appear.\n","id":"d007eaf0-aad4-4d0a-9653-ef1e7243a522"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The earth will not be irreparable in 12 years from climate change<|ARGUMENT|>In the United States thanks to widespread exaggeration, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions has been held steady since 1990, even though its economy and population has grown overtime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Exaggeration about climate change consequences help attract political attention to the issue, and it makes it more likely to divert resources to fight this cause.\n","id":"5743bdb7-2e68-4695-a5e9-3e9674c589eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Anyone Be Allowed To Be a Parent?<|ARGUMENT|>Being a parent is a great learning experience all should experience. If you fail miserably then there are laws to have your kids taken away.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anyone should get the chance to prove they are a good parent.\n","id":"1aff19e9-02ae-48ac-8d9b-fa3985134f91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Old Testament: \u2018If a man commits adultery with another man\u2019s wife\u2014with the wife of his neighbor\u2014both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death.\u201d \u2013 Leviticus 20:10 Jesus: \u201cHe who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.\u201d And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground.\u201dNeither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.'\u201d \u2013 John 8:3-11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to Marcion the God of the Old Testament the Demiurge\/creator of the material universe is a jealous tribal deity who punishes mankind for its sins through suffering and death and the God that Jesus professed is a universal God of compassion and love who looks upon humanity with benevolence and mercy. Marcion argued that the two forms of God were incompatible.\n","id":"374c1608-599b-43ba-b35d-6e933fb0cf5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The National Association for the Advancement of White People NAAWP was set up by white supremacists to 'stop the genocide of people of all faiths, colors and cultures on earth', including the genocide of 'American white culture'. To suppress a group that already perceives itself to be under attack is wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Such speech comes from a belief that whites themselves are oppressed and that their space in the democratic process is being taken away from them. It hardly seems fair to further oppress those who believe themselves to be victims.\n","id":"2653cf27-368c-45f7-9b86-7b913c23e6c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not aware of any longitudinal studies about the potential health risks. Every time I see someone smoking them inside, whether it's a bar, restaurant, or any other public setting, I can't help but feel that in the future people will look back on us and think, didn't they know any better? To me it feels like watching Mad Men and seeing everyone smoke or that scene from Dazed and Confused where the pharmacist gives that woman health advice while selling her cigarettes. I'm not against smoking but I feel that it should not be allowed indoors. Please give me a fresh perspective and educate me if I'm wrong. I'm looking forward to any responses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't feel enough information exists about the potential health risks from second hand exposure to electronic cigarettes and I don't feel they should be allowed to smoke indoors.\n","id":"51c07c15-3b5d-4562-9331-c7ac0a105626"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>The Apostle Paul would have rejected Pascal's Wager. In 1 Corinthians 15:12-19 he argues that the Christian faith is of no value if Christ has not been raised from the dead. From Paul's perspective, there is much to be lost in this life from believing in a God that does not exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The notion proposed by Pascal in his Wager is inherently flawed.\n","id":"c4b7935b-2f96-423f-b58d-a079e5584e9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US have withdrawn from NAFTA?<|ARGUMENT|>Mexico's largest import is electrical machinery an increase in the cost could therefore harm businesses which rely on information or manufacturing technology, negatively impacting domestic output.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This devaluation would also make imports more expensive for Mexican citizens, making goods and services more expensive.\n","id":"99c15a7e-3eeb-4400-b96d-f8d590ff90f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is currently a picture making the rounds on the internet that criticizes Coke among other companies for supporting the world cup in Qatar, presumably because they are using slaves from India to build the stadiums. You can view the picture here if you haven't seen it yet. I think its incredibly hypocritical for people from a country that was built by slavery, to post from their iPhones or Mac Books made with parts that are produced from slave labor, about how terrible it is that Qatar is using slaves, all without offering one cent to improve the situation. The cognitive dissonance in Americans who fail to realize they are only in a position to criticize because of the slave labor the country used to become a world power is really incredible. Their complaints would be softened if they actually offered to help these poorer countries, with money or workers, but they simply expect other countries to shy away from slavery because times have changed. That's a fair critique, but similarly to people who oppose both abortions and welfare, it just doesn't work in practice. If you want to criticize a country that is much poorer than you for using the same tactics you did to get rich, at the very least you have to be willing to subsidize their costs so as to make slavery ineffective. I believe that people who are criticizing Qatar today are wildly hypocritical and suffering heavily from cognitive dissonance, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is incredibly hypocritical and cognitively dissonant for Americans to criticize the use of slave labor in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar The cognitive dissonance in Americans\n","id":"baf983ec-b6fd-4408-816c-d68137fca6ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It makes complete sense to me that listed prices should be the price you actually pay. I know that companies love to have prices that end in 99 cents, but they could just calculate that in when pricing. This isn't a huge deal, but this is how they do it in Australia and some other places, and I liked it better because you knew how much stuff would actually cost. Is pricing done like this just to make this seem cheaper, because it seems like the less intuitive way to do things. It seems unlikely that the way pricing is done would change, because companies are would not like it and change is tough, but I would make it so that it was mandatory to include tax and any other extra fee such as handling in the price instead of separate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that prices in stores should included the tax already.\n","id":"9521691c-0641-4eda-92c9-898ab17be84e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are motivational speakers frauds?<|ARGUMENT|>Motivation is the desire to act towards a goal. Motivational speakers only provide the fuel necessary for a person to take the action personal to them, not to repeat their own success.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The aim of motivational speaking is to inspire or motivate the audience, not to duplicate their results.\n","id":"876f3345-6ce3-4847-8216-c5070b6e09df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have recently finished the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel does a great job in portraying the problems with the American Dream. In the novel, there is an extreme lack of morals within the characters. There is a lot of superficiality, and none of the characters are truly happy, although they have accumulated so much wealth. The novel shows that obtaining all the material objects that you desire does not guarantee satisfaction. Pretty much everybody loses in the end of the novel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Great Gatsby is a dirge for the American Dream.\n","id":"af86744b-1b49-448f-8c87-6a33ac2526d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>In the Arab World, ethnic cleansing happened often for the Jewish Diaspora since the Muslim stifled any right of return to Israel. Ethnic cleansing in the 8th century by King Idris I of Morocco; ethnic cleansing of Grenada in 1066, the Almohads in the 12th century, ethnic cleansing of 1475 in Fez, Ali Burzi Pasha in 1785, in Algier in 1805, 1815, 1830, in Morocco from 1864 to 1880. 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because of the Muslim occupation of Israel and political prevention of any Jewish return, the Jewish diaspora continued for 1300 years, and persecutions of Jews was the norm in the Muslim and Christian World through massacres, humiliation, enslavement, arbitrary confiscation, and forced conversion from 635 AD until the creation of the State of Israel.\n","id":"75d03628-04be-4501-8ae0-73d8f8f2d826"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Felt the need to add the part in parenthesis in case I got of course it is, all meat is ethical. Do not try to convince me that animals should not be given moral consideration and meat is generally ethical, I am stating outright I am not open to changing that view. First I should open this with, for the last month or so I've been eating vegetarian because I don't feel like I can morally justify the factory farming where I imagine all the meat I've eaten comes from. I also I have no moral objection to the killing of an animal for food, I think of death as a neutral thing, once it happens it happens, the end. And even if we want use to use the basis that life good, then most of that animal life only exists because of us breeding it into existence. If we simply use the basis life good, then even the worst factory farm is good. No, to me it is how the animals lives are before they are killed that is of moral concern. If an animal was treated decently during it's life, and killed in a method to reduce the pain as much as possible, I think I could justify eating it. Hell, as I drive on the freeway I see cows freely grazing, and I find it hard to imagine that there is enough going on that I don't see to make their live particularly bad. I also have no real moral objection to hunting for meat. The animal got to live it's life free and then hopefully had a quick or relatively quick death. Now if a hunter made no effort to kill the animal quickly or worse, even let it suffer for a prolonged period of time then I would consider it immoral, but otherwise I would consider it mostly amoral as in, of no moral consequence, it's not good or bad to me I hear about free range animals, the idea of it sounds nice and all. Hell, I mentioned those cows Ive seen myself I would pretty much feel safe with eating for the most part. But then I try to actually search 'usda free range' online, and the best description I can find is Producers must demonstrate to the agency that the poultry has been allowed access to the outside. To me this seems insanely lacking, it was allowed outside what, once? Five minutes a day? The killing room doesn't have a ceiling? Earlier I was intrigued by reading about Chipotle as I was trying to find out what vegetarian and vegan options different chain places had. The problem I have, is that I don't see how I could trust their standards if there is no regulation. It's easy to say you want to raise animals humanely, but if there is no one watching over their shoulder it seems hard for me to believe that they would really worry about following any sort of moral standard instead of doing what business does, and try to maximize it's profits. So while I think that animals could potentially be raised humanely enough, I feel like there is little reason to believe the claims on any labels. Feel free to try to convince me that even an idealized version of killing them would not be morally justified, or that I should be less skeptical of claims like free range or that I could at least source meat cheese eggs with some reasonable degree of certainty that the animals were treated decently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't trust any standards for \"ethically\" treated animals, but full well believe it is possible to ethically raise animals for meat\/eggs\/milk with the non changeable belief that actions taken against animals have moral consequence equivalent to humans\n","id":"60f0b90b-795d-4dc7-8a1a-707c067dcbc8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Australia has taken a leading role in tackling the under-representation of women in the gaming industry, through a series of programs targeted at education and career development.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The gender representation gap in the gaming industry is decreasing.\n","id":"27182e8d-8bec-45bb-9752-3df4da0e27bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the worst world problem of the utmost concern?<|ARGUMENT|>Urbanization has the potential for humanity to reach its cap on population growth and then decline due to unsustainability taking effect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overpopulation is inevitable structurally with urbanization. Crowding and population overgrowth create issues.\n","id":"2797e3e9-1534-4fb1-b75d-7e3e1d319e93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The patent system is broken. Patents have outlived their usefulness and it's time to shut down the patent office and release all patents into the public domain. But before we get too far, I need to distinguish that I'm only talking about patents and not copyright. Creating some new antenna design for a smartphone is a patent. Calling the device an iPhone is copyright trademark. I'm only talking about patents. This is not the first  post about patents but I believe it's the first to propose a valid replacement. One of the primary arguments for patents is that they prevent another company from swooping in and stealing your invention, but sadly it doesn't work that way. You can be assured the minute something innovative is patented and introduced, competitors will try to copy it whether you have a patent or not. This situation was famously true back in the 1800s around sewing machines, and today around smartphones If you are a startup and try to challenge a bigger corporation in a patent lawsuit, they can spend millions of dollars on litigation lasting for years that will push your startup into bankruptcy. Patents provide little protection. Yet to patent your new invention, you'll have to spend tens of thousands of dollars per patent As a startup that money could be spent on equipment, hiring employees, making prototypes, or bringing your product to market. Economics 101 says that if you want to disincentive something, you increase its cost. A 10k increase per innovation certainly fits the bill, and innovations suffers because of it. And if you try to skip the whole patent process and just create something new, someone else is likely to try to sue you for it. You can hardly make a website improve a microwave or even host a podcast without infringing on someone's patent. It is estimated that patent trolls cost the economy at least 29 billion per year in lawsuits and around 5 billion in lost investments Clearly the patent system is broken. But if we did shut down the patent office, how would companies protect their innovations? One word Secrecy. Exact recipes for products like WD 40 and Cola cola famously remain a trade secret , for if they were patented they would have to reveal their exact recipe, opening the door for imitators to produce near identical knock off products. This is the great irony of the patent system. Perhaps the most famous company who abides by the secrecy principle because it works, mind you is Apple, and the latest example is the Apple Watch. Months before the reveal in September 2014, numerous blog sites had speculated on the design of the Apple Watch. Corporations like Samsung, kickstarters like Pebble, and startups like Basis had all created smartwatches before the Apple Watch, but none had a digital crown for scrolling and zoom, force touch, or the galaxy of apps UI. All of these were innovations that were kept secret, and now competitors will likely try to copy them. Now the clock is ticking, and everyone has to innovate even faster to keep ahead of the competition. I can see two valid concerns with abolishing patents in favor of secrecy. Employees leaking company secrets is a problem, but that is an issue with an employee breaking an NDA, and should be resolved within the legal system. There is also a valid fear that small inventors will pitch ideas to Venture Capital firms and the firms will steal their ideas. Hollywood has the same problem where writers pitch their script giving away their idea , are often denied, but studios sometimes produce a similar film anyway. I'll admit these are problems, but pale in comparison to the problems with the current system. Finally, there are two mutually exclusive arguments that are always brought up while discussing patents. The first is that no one will make new products because they'll just be copied anyway and the second is that secrecy will lead to perpetual monopolies because no one will be able to reverse engineer and copy the latest product Neither is even remotely true. The first is bogus simply because a team of engineers capable of reverse engineering a product is also an engineering team capable of changing said product by using different components or materials. Each change has an effect on the quality, cost, and time to market of the product. Different companies value different features so products will naturally differentiate, as demonstrated by the smartwatch example above. The second is bogus because, again, engineers are capable of doing their job. If patents were abolished and secrecy was paramount, no monopoly could be held indefinitely because of massive incentives to copy. If a pharmaceutical company, the poster child of the why we need patents campaign, was making billions off of a cancer curing drug, you can be assured that every other pharmaceutical company on the planet would be racing to copy it, and they'd be dumb not to. So when not if another company reverse engineers the drug in question, then I say good for them, but they should also have to conduct safety trials before they can sell the drug. In the mean time the first company to develop the drug has a temporary monopoly to make profits before a competitor catches up and they both must start competing. Copying is easy, but it takes time. The incentive for all industries should be to innovate, compete, and innovate again, and abolishing patents does exactly this. Consumers win because they gain access to better, cheaper products. Businesses win because they no longer have to worry about patent lawsuits and can focus solely on making better and or cheaper products in order to gain market share. It levels the playing field for new startups to shake up an industry, and keeps the big players from getting stagnant. The patent system should be abolished, and secrecy should take its place. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Patents should be abolished, and secrecy should take its place\n","id":"43883bb7-f25b-4816-8757-7078d0ce4c0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Carbon emissions trading, Debate on Carbon Emissions Trading<|ARGUMENT|>Nations that adopt a cap-and-trade system can later link their system into other cap-and-trade systems around the world. It would not be as easy for a carbon tax to achieve this. This is important in today's global economy, where multinational companies exist across borders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cap-and-trade systems are flexible in the global economy\n","id":"7e327602-ee43-4820-a34c-b3e5e1d8a956"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The \"self\" in self-evident does not refer to an individual that is perceiving, but that truth which is perceptible by everyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A truth that is self-evident must be objectively true for anyone who considers it.\n","id":"038b6fb3-19f4-48b7-9362-df4e47dd6323"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Even though her medical centres were meant to heal patients, conditions were so bad that often it made them even sicker. Mother Teresa\u2019s Calcutta home for the sick had a mortality rate of more than 40 percent<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mother Teresa did not provide noteworthy healthcare to her patients, instead allowing them to suffer and die as she believed that was God's will.\n","id":"a6c1a48a-d6df-44ca-8b47-cc6f2084deb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of the reasons that the LGBT community came together was to fight oppression. After Stonewall, gay culture became more than just a fetish or disorder . It wasn't just a lifestyle, it was a community of people who happen to be sexually attracted to those of the same sex in a heterosexual world. These were people often disowned by their families and rejected by their churches for being deviants and perverts. They came together to stand up in pride instead of shame. These people couldn't hold their partner's hand for fear of insults at best and assault at worst. People like Matthew Shepard were killed for being gay. With the AIDS pandemic, LGBT people realized that because they weren't married to their partners, they couldn't use each other's insurance or even see each other in the hospital. They couldn't get married and experience the equal benefits that straight married spouses could. They could be evicted or fired for being gay this still happens, I know . Asexual people don't have to worry about this. If they're not aromantic, they can have a partner or even a spouse. Asexuality isn't proscribed in any major religion. You don't get disowned for being asexual. You can walk around without fear of getting assaulted for your sexuality. In fact, major world religions celebrate asexuality. Jesus Christ was asexual unless you ascribe to the Gnostic apocrypha . Buddha was asexual. Chastity has been seen as honorable for millennia. Asceticism is practiced in all major world religions. And even if you weren't living a monastic life, chastity was seen as emblematic of purity and virtue. You're either very devout or you're focused on your work instead of such base desires as sex. Figures throughout history and literature were esteemed for their chastity and righteousness, like Sir Galahad. Even today, if you told someone you're not interested in dating, they'll think you're weird at worst but there's no risk of you losing your job or your housing. Hell, your landlord might like you even more since it means they don't have to worry about a girlfriend boyfriend living there as an illegal tenant or you having loud sex. The only discrimination I can think of is getting assaulted if you turn down a guy, but that's something straight women have to deal with as well not saying this doesn't happen to guys, but the vast majority of victims are women assaulted by men . It feels like they're just riding the coattails of the LGBT community for the benefits of flying under their banner as a minority despite not needing protection or advocacy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Asexuality shouldn't be included under LGBT+\n","id":"e775a6be-bc1d-4b57-9079-2b7bac4f7e26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think Donald Trump has handled many things well, but I think it would be naive to close my eyes to ANYTHING potentially good. We know that Trump watches lots of TV news and also has a strong thirst to have his ego stroked. Knowing all this, I believe we have a responsibility to basically say good job and pat him on the back when he does something well. It feels slightly childish and patronizing, but also slightly Pavlovian. When I look at it from a what is best situation? , it seems like not using positive reinforcement is likely to lead to a vacuum of criticism and bashing which will make him less likely to repeat good behavior. I am thinking specifically of Trump's comments a few weeks ago, stepping pretty fucking far over the NRA party line on guns. Also, with the announcement and potential of a non nuclear North Korea it seems again relevant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Trump is as Egocentric as we believe he is, we should give lots of praise for the positive things he does.\n","id":"39c1ce00-57ac-4888-b021-38646c431063"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public health systems fund homeopathy?<|ARGUMENT|>Just because modern science cannot explain the mechanisms by which homeopathy works does not mean they do not exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are mechanisms by which homeopathic treatments may work for certain conditions.\n","id":"a2f2eaef-b786-4e33-b74d-c0ae3a5ba003"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Second Home Ownership<|ARGUMENT|>Imposing a tax along with regulations on second home ownership would be an efficient way of reducing the increasing destruction of rural communities, as well as addressing the costs of the social, economic and environmental devastation that come along with it. The political process of imposing these taxes and regulations would also help raise awareness on the issue and draw the wider population\u2019s attention towards the need for an overall policy on development and rural issues. In Europe this might mean the creation of an EU mechanism to deal with it \u2013 such as a possible reform of the Common Agricultural Policy to include dealing with this issue as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Imposing a tax along with regulations on second home ownership would be an efficient way of reducing...\n","id":"5db2d8b3-d4e2-4bab-8856-3f6a41d36b5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>International tourism should not require a visa.<|ARGUMENT|>Without visa requirements, governments only find out about who wants to enter their territory when that person shows up. This can be too late for expansive pre-screenings which usually take time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is harder to prescreen terrorists or other criminals and prevent them from entering the country.\n","id":"1d6303e4-3904-4735-8bce-26754e852324"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should false rape accusations be prosecuted?<|ARGUMENT|>Even today, many women don't come forward because they are accused of lying or suffer at the hands of victim-blaming.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing for prosecution would deter potential victims from speaking up if they feel they don't have sufficient proof.\n","id":"b8fdfa43-e951-476a-bda4-95b29f39d9d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I had to listen to a presentation on CyberBulling and how how horrible it is for teenagers seriously affecting them. But my view is, why do the people receiving the bad messages have to even give them the time of day to look at them? It's the same thing as when people say they're being trolled because someone sent a nasty tweet to them. Obviously we are never going to get rid of nasty people in the world, they will always exist. But humanity's consistant need's to check their messages and social media is the main cause for cyberbullying . If you get a nasty message, every website of note has some form of block button which you can use and then thats the end of your troubles. Instead of spreading awareness when it comes to cyber bullying shouldn't we be teaching people that its really not hard to block someone or simply turn off your device. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as cyber bullying because you can just turn off your device or block the sender.\n","id":"93930eb7-da87-4322-807f-adb02436d87c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm going to be writing this based on American schools, as it's what I know. I think modern schools are way too focused on knowledge that doesn't have much use in RL, and not enough on skills and knowledge that will actually be useful once people are out of school. The modern school system has become a college prep system and even then, not an effective one. Math. Basic math is useful for everything, but once you get past fractions and percentages into algebra, the everyday usefulness of math drops off sharply. Sure, many careers need higher math but that can wait until college. Instead, math should segue into applied math after grade school or middle school, in which people learn about such things as keeping budgets, balancing a bank account, figuring out interest, and so on. Social studies and history. Recent in the past few generations WW1 or so history should be taught, but studying further back than that should be left for those who want to learn it on their own. Instead, I think current events should be what's taught once into high school. And not just local or national current events, but global. Make kids learn what's happening in the world today, not what happened a long time ago. Physical education. I'm rather ambivalent about this topic. I don't see how it has much use in education, as the athletically inclined will be that way regardless, as will the lazy ones. But, I do also see the value in having a recreational period during the day, which is what PE is in modern schools. Life skills. This is the truly vocational part my title refers to. What I mean is that once kids get to a certain age, most of their school day is spent learning to do every day tasks. Learning how to clean, how to cook, how to change a tire, etc. The purpose of this is to give students the basic skills and experience at performing those tasks to be prepared for life as an adult. Interpersonal communication. Wut, I hear you say. At early ages this would simply be spelling, then grammar and such in middle school. In high school, this would change into being applied interpersonal communications such as resumes, interviews, applications, and other formal communications. Now, you may be wondering how to fill up the day of a high schooler, because most of those tasks are fairly easy to learn. Simple, imo. Either some sort of school run services open to the public, or what was referred to in my school as co op, meaning students left school in the afternoons and worked at part time jobs. This not only gets the students used to holding a job, but it also gets them some work experience. It also performs the task of giving everyone experience dealing with the public something many assholes probably never got, hence being assholes to service and retail. In conclusion, I feel that a new goal for education is necessary, one that focuses not on academics and preparing students for college, but one that focuses on giving students the necessary skills, knowledge, and experience to be both productive and satisfied members of society. And I just realized I wrote this close to the format of a formal essay.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think modern pre-collegegrade\/high school schools should be much more vocational in nature and less academic.\n","id":"0c90852c-7ce8-43b1-8530-871c2f244ef4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's some things you have to ignore when you completely clear Tom Brady of any wrongdoing The equipment managers texting about deflating balls. Texting about needles. Texting about receiving autographed memorabilia in return for deflating the footballs. As a caveat to the point above, you also have to swallow that these low level employees were altering gameballs by themselves for the completely logical reason of just because Tom Brady destroyed his cellphone the day the investigation started not because of damning evidence, but because he is setting a standard for players' rights in the future. On to why anyone with a functioning brain sees the above as another load of bullshit. He has been through nearly a year of probably the worst period of his life, media wise. He is fighting a suspension in Federal court. He's a calculated man with very smart people around him. His team has weighed every decision and outcome. If they had a chance to keep Brady away from all this, they would have. There was something on the cellphone. Be smart and be unbiased. He obviously had his equipment managers alter the gameballs after official inspection. If he didn't authorize, he definitely encouraged it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tom Brady cheated, covered it up, and destroyed his cellphone to his the contents of the messages to his equipment managers.\n","id":"a6a07f26-d7c8-41e7-bb51-5cce7fe459a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I explain my view, let me explain what a client side decoration is in Linux. Normally,the GUI application would be responsible for drawing the contents inside its window, with the exception of the title bar, borders, close buttons, etc. Those would be handled by the window manager, and these are called decorations . The desktop application does not care what is in the title bar since that is handled by an application called a window manager. A window manager Metacity, Mutter, Muffin, KWin, xfwm, etc. is responsible for drawing the window borders and title bars for an application. When the window manager detects a theme change, it changes the title bar according to the new theme and the application simply does not care about this since it is being handled by the window manager. Some time around 2011, the developers of a desktop environment, a collection of software applications that make up the desktop user interface for a Linux based operating system, called GNOME introduced support for client side decorations . This allows applications to manage their own title bars without help from the window manager. To better explain what CSDs look like, here is a link to a screenshot of a CSD application. Client side decoration app Notice how there is no traditional menu bar and that commonly used functions are placed on the same row as the close buttons. This is in starke contrast to a non CSD application. Non CSD application Now that I explained it, let's go on to my view. Overall, while I do see the use and practicality of CSDs, overall I do think that the inconsistency between applications and loss of functionality makes CSDs an awful design choice. I personally tolerate it since navigating the UI of a CSD application can be done efficiently. That said, I do think that there are problems that need to be discussed. First of all, the lack of consistency between CSD and non CSD applications can be confusing and infuriating for computer users of various levels. When users are used to a certain paradigm of user experience for decades only for that paradigm to radically change in a short period of time, usability issues will occur. Users generally prefer to stay with that is proven to work with their workflow. Having to deal with a user experience that dramatically varies from application would negatively impact productivity and workflow management. An ideal user experience would be one that is consistent and adheres to standards that are proven by evidence. Second, the use of client side decorations in certain applications can result in a loss of functionality due to the constraints of title bar space. While basic applications such as calculators and image viewers can use client side decorations without major usability issues, more complex applications such as video editors and file managers would experience a loss of functionality due to the nature of these applications. For example, when the GNOME team modified the Nautilus also known as GNOME Files file manager to support CSDs, many features from the file manager were discarded because the development team were unable to find space in the title bar to incorporate buttons for the features. These changes made Nautilus become less intuitive for experienced users. Overall, I think that CSD applications on Linux are tolerable, but I personally think that they are a poor from a design perspective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Client-side decorations in Linux applications is a poor UX design choice\n","id":"4beab444-113a-477c-b2e8-79ab270f7c2c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pride organisers should refuse corporate sponsorship<|ARGUMENT|>A comprehensive study of Fortune 500 companies found that in 2018, 91% of companies included sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies, and 83% of companies included gender identity in the same policies. It is therefore untrue to say that a significant proportion of corporations are complicit in discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The companies that sponsor Pride actually care about their LGBTQ+ employees and the LGBTQ+ movement more broadly.\n","id":"00c0c0d5-3773-46a3-a40f-79a4d6ae880d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a belief I have tossed around in my head for a while but haven't debated with anyone. I fully support women's right to choose to work or stay at home. I think it would be terrible to be locked into a socially acceptable role of housewife, if I found that to be boring or limiting. However, with the advent of a dual earning family, I believe some unfortunate side effects have happened. With women entering the workforce, you saw for many an opportunity to make money. It suddenly became advantageous for couples to have a dual earning family. You could move up several social classes by doing so. I'm not sure how, but it suddenly became a reality that both parents were working and earning, yet barely making ends meet. Parents now have a much more difficult time with childcare. Parents are spending less and less time with their kids. Leisure time is declining in America. People are taking less and less time off work. Couples have less free time for each other. People are eating out more because there's nobody at home to cook. Latchkey kids. Kids don't feel as bonded to their parents due to being reared by child care and teachers. I could go on and on. And so a generation or two from the advent of the dual earning family, and now it is fully the expectation that both parents will work, the child will be at childcare, and many families are doing this not as a means to get ahead in life, but as a means to survive and barely be middle class. This leads to the overall decline of the American family, and the comfortable way of life that many families grew accustomed to in the 50's, 60's and 70's. I certainly don't fault feminism for this, however we'll call it an unintended side effect of feminism. Call it corporate greed, politics run amok, or whatever, what went from women should be free to choose whether they want to be a housewife or not , is now women and men have to both work if you want a comfortable middle class lifestyle . Of course there are exceptions though I don't know many single earners that make 50 70k , enough for a family of 3 and a stay at home wife or husband , but by and large most familes have two people that work. I don't have a lot of research or science to back this up so my view is open. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While I believe feminism did a good job opening up options for women to better fully express their freedom in America, it also allowed corporations and greed to erode the amazing privilege the middle class had to have a single earning household.\n","id":"870ed74c-9d50-4234-9c0e-75d8cc097704"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For context, the metro transit system in Washington DC closed for 29 hours starting Wednesday at midnight for inspection following an electrical fire near the McPherson Square station on Monday. This unprecedented closing is likely related to the massive surge in smoke and fire incidents in 2015, including an incident that killed a passenger. You can see some more information here if you'd like. The metro carries more than 700,000 passengers on an average weekday, many of whom use it to go to work. While some of those who would normally take the metro had the ability to telework unscheduled telework was an option for employees with a telework agreement not everyone has that option and the alternative solutions seem very unfair to workers who are forced into them. Without telework, your options yesterday would have been Drive to work Risky and burdensome due to the huge increase in road traffic, plus parking in DC for an entire workday is very expensive. Rideshare services like Uber Many metro riders are unable to drive to work for one reason or another so this would be the only alternative. However, a round trip on these services would be VERY expensive even with caps on surge pricing for Uber and discount coupons for Lyft . Anecdotally, if I were to take an Uber from my home to my workplace it would cost me around 30 before surge pricing which could go as high as 117 with the 3.9x surge cap that Uber announced. That's a one way trip, and I would not be reimbursed for any amount of my travel costs. Unscheduled leave While you can't be denied your unscheduled leave in this situation, you still have to spend accrued leave or take unpaid leave in order to avoid the huge risks and costs associated with driving to work. Given the massive impact that the metro shutdown has had on hundreds of thousands of workers, this situation should have been treated the same as any weather event that prevents employees from reaching their offices and resulted in a closure so that employees without telework agreements would not feel forced to incur huge risks and personal costs or spend their hard earned leave dealing with a public emergency. So with all of that, let's have at it. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Federal offices in DC should have closed on Wednesday due to the metro shutdown\n","id":"f00afe78-3345-4ef4-8da4-f8ead26b6c2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When attempting to generate creative solutions, it's best to keep all ideas in mind, even when one begins to judge them one should keep them in mind and only qualify them to varying degrees . Entirely rejecting ideas or the weaker associations between different ideas, while seemingly pragmatic, only serves to stifle the creative process. Thus, I believe that overinclusiveness is one of the most necessary conditions for the creative process to occur effectively. Do you agree or disagree, and why?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"overinclusiveness is fundamentally necessary although not sufficient for creativity.\n","id":"6532343b-2824-4c50-ac83-3e030ee45612"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As opposed to a physical product like a car, a digital product like a game is singular, no matter how many copies on how many devices you make of it. It can't be worn out or broken. And it is the property of the publisher. So when you buy a new game, you buy two things, the physical or digital copy of the game and the right to play. If you bought the physical copy of the game you can do with it whatever you like, sell it, burn it, eat it. But the right to play is given to you and only you by the publisher, because the game is their property. You can't sell the right to play to someone else because it's not yours to sell away.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Microsofts used games policy is fair.\n","id":"1f1b6893-4c88-4f08-94fc-f98df71d5b9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Deuteronomy 13:6-9 says that if your relatives or friends try to get you to worship other gods, you must kill them \"without mercy.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The book of Deuteronomy provides evidence for god's promotion of evil.\n","id":"9e98c693-7e8d-468b-982e-4b25404c093a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I can't think of anything redeeming about makeup. 1 It takes forever to put on. I feel like this is most of the reason women are given a reputation for taking ages to ready themselves, and given that I think it's unnecessary, it's actually a waste of time no matter how long it takes. 2 It's harmful. Not only physically, where it may causes skin problems, headaches, premature aging, cancer, allergies, other skin diseases, and other things, but it can be harmful to the self image of the woman wearing makeup, making them dependent upon the makeup, feeling ugly without it, etc. 3 It's disingenuous. I think of it as false advertising. Celebrities are a big indication of this to me, many of them don't look particularly nice without makeup on, and with regular women the drop in attractiveness without makeup is generally even more noticeable. This is all that comes to mind at the moment. . EDIT Sorry, there's tons of long replies, I don't know if I'll be able to get to all of them. If I haven't addressed one of your points in my responses to other comments, I'm sorry, I'm trying my best.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Makeup is bad.\n","id":"4a90a18f-ee20-454b-b983-ea5a697e1037"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Put more simply, I believe that you don't have to identify as or believe yourself to be a racist in order to be racist although, identifying as a racist surely makes you one as well. The definition of racism as power prejudice serves its purposes in academia, but doesn't capture the individual experience of enduring subjecting someone to racism, so it's not what I'm relying on here. A closer description of what's in my head is the language used in the Civil Rights Act disparate impact . See this excerpt as it relates to employment law gt the disparate impact theory under Title VII prohibits employers from using a facially neutral employment practice that has an unjustified adverse impact on members of a protected class. A facially neutral employment practice is one that does not appear to be discriminatory on its face rather it is one that is discriminatory in its application or effect. Essentially, whether the actor has the goal of being racist or means to be racist is irrelevant to the fact that an action, word, decision, system, or structure can have a disparate impact. If I overthrow a baseball to a friend and break a window, proclaiming my intent to throw the ball more softly or gently doesn't un break the window. When allegations of racist behavior are made in the public sphere, whether it's about these kids in D.C. or our POTUS, I often hear defenses like You can't know what they meant You're choosing to interpret it that way. They didn't mean it that way. Here's an unrelated time that person wasn't racist. I think this sort of response is irrelevant and borders on apologist rhetoric. Racism is a result of learned unconscious biases. Messages we pick up from family, church, community, school, friends, and the media inform how we respond to treat others as we grow older. This entails that we aren't entirely aware of our own biases and how we act upon them not that these biases don't exist at all. When we engage in behavior that someone else calls out as racist or otherwise bigoted, that should be a signal to reflect honestly on why we made the choices we did, not to retroactively justify them or grow defensive. We can see, objectively, that the POTUS made sweeping, unsubstantiated, factually incorrect generalizations along racial lines. That's racist. We can see that the POTUS' practices as a landlord had a disparate impact on Black tennants that's racist. We can see, objectively, that these kids in D.C. were gleefully mocking a Native American no matter what lead up to that incident, that's racist. Why is this view important to me? If we socially accept racism to be nothing less severe than Literally hollering racial slurs while wearing a KKK hood and waiving a Nazi flag then bigotry can be allowed to pervade and be justified. Systems of power and individuals in power can continue to have a disparate impact as a result of unconscious bias. It's too low a bar for an equal society to tolerate. We must be able to call a spade a spade. I fully understand the other side of being accused of racism as a white man with a career in hospitality service industry, I get called racist on a weekly basis by people who'd like to have my job over whatever I've denied them. Still, I flatly reject that my experience being falsely called racist in any way outweighs being subjected to racism, and I also reject that my not meaning to be racist means that I wasn't. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intent is sufficient but not necessary in the qualification of racism\n","id":"4aea6f2b-e6ea-423d-b190-aac8d8094e22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>The cure to obesity is a ketogenic diet. Since there is a cure we should treat the disease instead of allowing it to continue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society should not treat obesity as an acceptable lifestyle choice.\n","id":"7435f5e5-7a0b-4955-b546-b3f928a06701"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be one singular global government\/entity<|ARGUMENT|>Chinese authoritarianism is made possible by virtue of its extensive censorship A lack of free press and restrictions on the internet allow the government to operate without any real oversight or accountability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments would not be able to set up barriers to communication and censorship policies, making it much harder to be corrupt and authoritative.\n","id":"89a33498-a334-44fe-89b0-085aad6850e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the American education system, kids are taught that cyber bullying is bad. Then they get into the real world and see a movie like The Interview which is making fun of Kim Jong Un. Imagine if someone made a movie about you that is about people trying to kill you. It is simply cyber bullying. Kim Jong Un is not a good person, and certainly is not trying to help the citizens of North Korea. However, you can get into trouble in school for cyber bullying someone who has even bullied other people him herself. If Obama defends Sony for cyber bullying Kim Jong Un, why doesn't he defend cyber bullies in schools? Isn't is freedom of speech too? edit Additionaly, aggrevating Kim Jong Un is bad for the people of North Korea. It will only make him madder and more resisted to doing what Ameica wants, which is to stop the harm that is coming to the citizens of Noth Korea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The movie \"The Interview\" is an example of cyber-bullying, and making Kim Jong Un mad will do no good.\n","id":"4d8890b6-051a-4842-8c73-8d7286d5b1a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>No one can say for sure if force is excessive. For example, if someone attacks another person with traumatic past experiences and this person goes beyond what would be reasonable they would be held accountable. I believe that they should not be held accountable and that we can't know for sure how much this person's traumatic experience influenced the force they exerted. Further, the idea that you should scale the force you output to the attacker puts the defender in an even more dangerous position. Instead of assuring his or her defense, they have to worry about their legal and social defense. I believe the defender has zero obligation to respect the well being of the attacker, so long as the threat is active. Therefore I am claiming that the only way to avoid these issues is to allow the defender unrestrained use of force, again, as long as the threat is active.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In self-defense, excessive force is subjective, thus the only way to ensure justice for the defender is to allow any force at all.\n","id":"6060da25-b8e5-4c70-b27c-d0e6cb93930e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Security vs. Liberty<|ARGUMENT|>Governments have a duty to their citizens to protect their rights to security of person and freedom from fear. Laws designed to enhance security are not only passed by democratically elected governments, but also enjoy popular support as measured by opinion polls and in the outcomes of subsequent elections. Once the threat of terror has been dealt with, liberty can be given greater emphasis and security measures relaxed once again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments have a duty to their citizens to protect their rights to security of person and freedom ...\n","id":"ae30303a-b9a4-487b-82fc-77d2e7a9d0fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I plan on being sober my whole life both from alcohol and drugs but I think that weed is less dangerous than alcohol for the following reasons nbsp 1 Every year in the US, approximately 88,000 people are killed by alcohol while there are no recorded instances of death caused by weed. Yes, let's assume more people use alcohol as it is legal but the fact that there are no recorded deaths should not be dismissed. nbsp 2 In 1988, a Drug Enforcement Judge in the US said that it would theoretically take 1500 pounds 680 grams of marijuana consumed in a window of 15 minutes for it to be lethal. This will obviously change depending on body size, metabolism etc but reaching this amount is almost impossible A recent study has proved the lethal amount to be higher. I would talk about that but I'm pretty sure the point is pretty clear. On the other hand, lets look at alcohol nbsp 80 kg 176 pound male has 24 standard drinks over a period of 6 hours gt BAC of 0.41. Note that 0.40 is the recognized lethal BAC and at 0.45 breathing is almost guaranteed to stop. With beer it's unlikely your going to be able to fit in so much alcohol but with spirits, it would only take approximately 1.02 liters 34.4 oz for this man to get a lethal dose. nbsp It would take 20 standard drinks for a woman the same wight over the same amount of time to reach 0.41. nbsp If we go a bit crazy and look at alcohol consumption over a time period of 15 minutes nbsp 5 drinks 222mL 7.5 oz would be lethal for the same man and 4.25 drinks 188 mL 6.4 oz for the same woman. nbsp Not many people would be dumb enough to do this but it still is more likely than an OD from weed. nbsp Note High non lethal does of weed may cause dysphoria, anxiety or agitation so it isn't all sunshine and rainbows. And being drunk isn't exactly glamorous dehydration, loss of ability to make decisions and dizziness. nbsp 3 Weed is only physiologically addictive while alcohol can be both physically and psychologically. So weed isn't complete safe but it is less dangerous than alcohol nbsp 4 For those over 25 when the brain has finished developing weed can not damage cognitive function. For adults using alcohol heavily over a long period of time, it can lead to long term memory damage. As for physical damage, smoking weed can lead to respiratory problems but other methods of injestion exist. On the other hand, alcohol can cause liver damage and high blood pressure. nbsp Personally I am not strongly against drugs alcohol I understand why people use it and I'm interested in the science behind it. But, I believe its better to be on the safe side and not use either. That said, if alcohol and also tobacco which we all know is harmful are legal, then why is a more harmless drug, that has the potential to treat medical issues such as epilepsy, banned in many countries? nbsp Edit format nbsp<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If alcohol is legal, weed should be too\n","id":"05c502d2-ad59-412f-a4cf-3871e8c91d37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Many Americans work two or three jobs. Simply being able to quit one of these jobs would mean the world to millions of single working parents across this country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI need not meet the poverty line to be an improvement over the status quo.\n","id":"9870e310-f6ae-4d71-879a-d9581fb5a408"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>ban sexist advertising<|ARGUMENT|>Banning requires a legal framework and enforcement mechanism. External organizations interfere with the ability of business to conduct business. Should the social cultural environment change, businesses are likely to respond to the attitudes of their consumers. A recent change in the California Milk Board's website occurred due to public pressure.1 Social corporate responsibility is another possibility which business could embrace if changing social attitudes develop.2Banning is a repressive method which interferes with competition. Self determined methods should be allowed to competitors in the economic marketplace. Therefore, any changes in advertising should come from the business community rather than through banning. 1 Kumar, Sheila. \"Milk Board Alters Sexist PMS-Themed Ad Campaign.\" The Huffington Post. 2011\/July 22. 2 Skibola, Nicole. \"Gender and Ethics in Advertising: The New CSR.\" Forbes.com. 2011\/August 4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any changes in advertising should come from businesses themselves rather than through banning.\n","id":"33f513de-7c2f-4c19-a0be-ad19a5133819"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alright. That's my current view. I have two 'voices' in my head though. One believes and tells me death is the absolute end, that paranormal things cannot exist, and that everything we see, is all there is. There is nothing out there, and science confirms it. But, the other voice, and NOTE, these voices aren't actual voices, just two struggling views I have in my brain, WANTS something to be out there, because I absolutely hate the idea that when you die, you'll be gone, forever. I want there to be an afterlife, something more, I want to stay, but then the other voice comes in and 'says' that If that were true, where would our 'souls' be? There is no proof of something leaving the brain or body upon death. And where would these 'souls' be? Flying around on earth? How? Etc Etc Etc. I really want to believe, but my un believing side always comes in, and says it's absolutely impossible, and my beliefs lean this way. Please try to change my view WoA<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anything that is paranormal, things like death not being the end of it, people having a sixth sense, people being able to see or feel the future, are non-existant and that's the fact of it. !\n","id":"afbaa091-0d21-4328-9bad-50d98311c225"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Language plays a key role in perception. Some terms and expressions are linked to emotions of hate or disgust that severely taint the objective perception of others. In history, these terms were used to desensitise people towards discrimination or aggression against marginalised groups. Tackling such phenomena is done using a moderate amount of PC culture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The language we use helps to shape the way we view the world.\n","id":"ff1adb19-04b5-42be-bf7b-9d2df463c7ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all EU citizens be obliged by law to vote in EU elections?<|ARGUMENT|>In countries like Austria, Denmark and Sweden it is compulsory for citizens to engage in either military or civil service for a period of time, yet they are free to chose which service to do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Just because one is free to chose among multiple options does not mean one is free not to have to chose. In many other areas the former freedom exists without the latter.\n","id":"17f0a954-58c7-43f3-bcdb-57364f0affe7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is astounding. For decades people have been lamenting the power that the elite have in every country. Things have always gone according to the elites plans, the candidate that is backed by the banks and the corporations always wins and they always get their way. The few movements against this like occupy wallstreet, Bernie, Ron Paul, they have all been pretty much mocked and put down without any influence at all on the way the system works. The elite never even broke a sweat against any of these movements, and dropped a few million here or there for some campaign to take down the annoyance. They thought that the common people had no power whatsoever. But then there was Trump. Somehow this guy has singlehandedly struck so much fear into CEOs, bankers, and the other oligarchs in other countries that they have all combined forces in a multi party movement to stop him. Republican and democrat no longer seem to matter, the whole republican and democratic establishment has turned their full attention to stopping trump, the entire media spends all day trying to trip him up and if he ever so much as blinks at the wrong they they publish hundreds of stories to mock him for it. Every country on earth is tarnishing his name in their countries and plotting against Trump, with China and Mexico sending statements every day telling the USA that they better not elect Trump. CEOs and bankers are throwing endless amounts of money at both democrats and republicans to stop Trump, with seemingly no limit on what they will spend to do so. I mean this one man may have had more success against the global elite so far than anyone else in history to date. I feel like this is the one shot we have to tell them that they dont have all the power, that they dont control everything and that sometimes they have to listen to the people. I feel like if Trump doesnt make it into at least the nomination this time around, the global elite will seal the few existing cracks in their defenses and they will consolidate control for the next couple centuries. so basically,  and tell me why my analysis of this is wrong. at least convince me that all these elites are not actually as threatened by trump as they appear to be. and tell me why I should vote for the presumptive hillary the poster child of the global elite oligarchy over Trump even if I dont agree with Trump on much.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fact that Trump is singlehandedly fighting the full power of the entire global elite and winning makes me want to vote for him regardless of his views\n","id":"b5253235-ec41-400f-af5d-ebc54b8f37d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>In France, almost a third of the country's Muslims consider Sharia more important than French secular law according to a 2016 survey.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many Muslims in high-income countries would like to see Sharia law introduced there.\n","id":"27bf2a47-ec8b-4da6-9234-0b32ceb78f3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>We give humans rights because we expect them to respect the rights of other individuals and the laws that lay the foundation for a civilized society. Animals are unable to comprehend the rules of society and the impact of their actions and so we cannot expect that they will respect others. This means that animals cannot be held accountable for their actions, unlike humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We are relieved of the responsibility to give animals the same rights as humans because humans consciously agree to act civilly while animals do not.\n","id":"c0b084bb-5300-4289-8b9d-72d2c90cde4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Evolution natural existence without the need for a Creator had been propounded by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell and is now a generally accepted theory. This contradicts the idea of a Creator or God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Biological evolution demonstrates that a God that directly created humans animals and plants does not exist.\n","id":"4b756cf9-d3b9-4d54-b1cd-77f4d7e6d814"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I'm not talking about abolishing the 1st Amendment in the U.S. Bill of Rights. Rather, my view is that people who express hateful or bigoted views towards any person or group should be excluded from discussion in online forums. This goes beyond the common and widely accepted policy of only censoring those who make personal attacks on specific users. The reason I feel this way is that I believe bigots create a sort of toxic, unwelcoming atmosphere for those whom they target, and that including them grants them a sort of undeserved legitimacy by having them at the table. This xkcd comic sums up this view nicely. Some possible lines of argument that could be used to change my view include a demonstrating that hateful people and groups are more damaging when censored or excluded, b that a significant number of bigots can be compelled to change their views if I begrudgingly grant them free speech on forums or c demonstrate a mechanism by which censoring hateful discourse becomes a slippery slope leading to censorship of other less damaging perspectives. Anyway, I'll be in class for the next 4 hours as of this writing, and I'll be back after that to make clarifications or answer questions. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Freedom of Speech is Overrated on Online forums\n","id":"661e847e-8d0e-45b9-afb1-ad5fdce4cbf5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The background to this  is a discussion I had with a friend. I lamented the lack of women in tech and thus the lesser exposure I have to them in my day to day life. He pointed out that hipsterdom would be a good fit for a youngish 29 , liberal person with tech and intellectual leanings. He noted there are is a far better gender ratio among hipsters hipster men are unlikely to try to start fights because you talked to their woman and they're more open to different ways of thinking and doing. He also noted my lamentations on Hollywood's tendency to shovel out mostly boring, derivative crap would work well with hipsters, where an interest in esoteric forms of culture is celebrated. However, I pointed out hipsters' focus on the ephemeral and the overly wrought authentic, which contrasts with the nerd's focus on more timeless theory than superficial posture. We prefer the world of ideas we've built up in our minds over what style of clothing is now hip or which band has gone irredeemably too mainstream. Plus after time has been sunk into work, reading up on nerdy subjects like ancient history and linguistics, and keeping up with the state of the technology industry, there's little time left to actively explore offbeat music and film besides letting Pandora or Spotify bring something to your ears while you code. Hipsters' fetish for the authentic leads to further gulfs between us. They seek out vinyl and will pay a premium for it I know and trust the digital world and prefer the convenience of buying an album off iTunes to paying 5 more at the local record store, where I'd still have to rip the CD to get it onto my iPhone and computer anyway. Although on the occasions where I do make a big meal for company, I enjoy it and take care in creating the dishes from scratch I can't get fully behind the locavore, slow foods, certified organic, heritage artisanal movement because it's another big time sink the hipster positive friend is unemployed and thus has plenty of time to spend an hour a day preparing meals . That said, there is of course an intersection of hipsters and nerds some software developers are also hipsters. And of course, within the tech culture, the word hipster is thrown around with a somewhat different nuance programming languages and technology subcultures that do not reek of big business, so the not Java . Craft beer is superior to domestic beer. I've gone to a couple of indie rock concerts and chatted with women as opposed to other equally geeky dudes. Still, the fact that many developers end up somewhat anti intellectual outside of their pragmatic domain and often staunchly right libertarian conservative taking on the views of their paymasters means they would make uneasy bedfellows with hipsters. Those more intellectual nerds, especially outside of tech, may have less of this class divide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hipsters and Nerds Are Not Necessarily Natural Allies.\n","id":"af096441-0c0d-463f-a649-6b0deaac845f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>We have yet to tap the number one food source on the planet which is cannabis hemp. Not only will cannabis grow in nearly every climate on earth, making it an amazingly abundant food source, it is nature's most perfect food. www.thehealersjournal.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Awareness of overconsumption, inefficient farming and production methods, and resource waste reduction techniques leads to the implementation of strategies that minimise inefficiencies, wasteful practices and moderate consumption; this, in turn, ensures sustainable resources for the global population.\n","id":"8df6a24d-b37b-4bd6-b971-b327ea4f1310"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Necessary context I am not old enough to have grown up with Mario Kart 64. The first console I ever owned aside from my Game Boy Color was a GameCube, and the first game I got for the system, aside from MVP Baseball '04, was Mario Kart Double Dash. I've played the crap out of the GC, DS, Wii, and 3DS versions of the game, and have touched every other version to some extent I own the GBA and N64 versions and play MK8 with my friend who owns a Wii U relatively often . Hear me out on this one. I think Mario Kart 64 was the worst game in the series for a few reasons, some of which I'll outline here Course design. With a few exceptions Choco Mountain and Yoshi Valley, for example , I think the courses in MK64 are the most boring courses in the Mario Kart Series by far, not counting SNES and GBA. And while it's easy to make the case that course design steadily improved with each game as more material became available and more memory was available to devote to each course, I think that the courses in MK64, SNES MK, and GBA MK were significantly, significantly worse than any of the other games' courses. The courses in these games are often flat and uninteresting, not particularly dynamic in terms of interesting turns or bits of track, and especially with MK64 far too long. I think it's possible to have relatively gimmick light courses which are still exceptionally fun courses like the DS' DK Pass and the Gamecube's Dry Dry Desert did this very well , and I think that most of the N64's courses failed to accomplish this they were largely dull, slow courses which were too large and monotonous to stand up very well. And no, being able to skip half of Rainbow Road very much does not make that course any less of an absolute slog. It has some of my least favorite courses in any Mario Kart game Toad's Turnpike, Moo Moo Farm, and Rainbow Road are some of the worst MK courses I've played. I'm willing to give the SNES a pass for poor course design given exceedingly limited memory and the fact that it was one of the first games to really play with 3D in such a revolutionary way as well as the fact that it, well, started the franchise, and therefore was allowed to have prototype bugs . I'm also willing to give the GBA version somewhat of a pass, given that it was the first mobile title and was on a tiny screen, though I also really don't like the course design there. But the N64 version? Not so much. The differences between the courses in the N64 and Gamecube games is so staggering that it's tough to give the former as much of a pass. Graphics. Call me crazy, but I liked the SNES game's graphics a lot more than those of the N64's version. The N64 had some absolutely beautiful games for the time Mario 64, Majora's Mask, and Banjo Kazooie are all phenomenal looking games. Compared to those, MK64 is flat out ugly. The character models are very blocky and way too angular, the trails behind shells look gross, and the POOMP effects are really, for lack of a better term, immersion breaking. Especially compared to the very clean graphics of the previous console's incarnation SNES and the beautiful graphics of the next version DD , MK64's graphics are particularly egregious. Rubber banding. It's bad in all Mario Kart games, but it's especially flagrant in MK64. In no other MK game I've played have I held a commanding lead and then literally seen second place teleport right behind me. They don't even do it the justice of speeding the player up Wario or Peach or whoever will literally fade away and reform right behind me. I'm fine with rubber banding or more tolerant of, at least as long as it's believable, and MK64's rubber banding is one hundred percent not that. As far as I can tell, the only thing MK64 really has going for it is its four player multiplayer. This is huge, sure, but it would have probably come anyway the SNES already had two player multiplayer, and giving a game a pass just because four players can play it together doesn't mean all that much. Plus, I'd argue that pretty much every other game's multiplayer was better what with online modes in almost every later incarnation and better balancing for all four players and some of the best battle modes we've seen yet in Double Dash and Funky Stadium in Wii, I'd argue that 64 was good multiplayer wise but not good enough to elevate it above any of the other games with the exception of the GBA edition, whose multiplayer was naturally near impossible to implement . So, . I assume many of y'all feel pretty passionately about the quality of MK64, so this should shape up to be an interesting thread<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With the possible exception of the GBA incarnation, Mario Kart 64 was the worst iteration of the series.\n","id":"8ee23685-114a-422e-bef1-642333420394"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Obama was right to agree to meet rogue leaders without preconditions.<|ARGUMENT|>If, in order to meet with his counterpart, a \u2018rogue leader\u2019 needs to compromise on his and his country\u2019s position even before he gets to the table, this would be a signal of weakness to his opponents at home and those vying for his job. For example, in North Korea, which is going through a dynastic transition1, the new leader Kim Jong Un is yet to become established and consolidate his status as dictator. Any concession to the sate\u2019s designated mortal enemy, the US, might jeopardise the succession. Similarly, in Iran where Ahmadinejad has fallen from the graces of the supreme religious leader, the Ayatollah2, agreeing to preconditions in order to get a meeting with Obama would signal to the Iranian President\u2019s rivals that it may be a good moment to attempt to force a change of guard. 1 \u201cProfile: Kim Jong un\u201d. BBC. 31 December 2011. 2 \u201cAhmadinejad v Ayatollah: Who will win Iran dustup?\u201d BBC. 8 July 2011.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Agreeing to preconditions can damage a leader\u2019s position at home.\n","id":"9a00310e-5540-4cce-b6ea-f440ec812e7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>Policy makers often consult available research making the application of research political, but the science itself within such research aims to reveal information\/ understanding based on the available data.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Science has been defined as the pursuit of truth, even though it can be used to achieve political benefits.\n","id":"c8467ae7-de71-42f4-bdc5-f2dd6b3312f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>One journalist explains that the motivation for covering up these crimes results from the lack of job security of coaches and the relatively high financial reward for winning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There have been multiples examples of high schools and universities covering up sexual assaults for star players\n","id":"3caa9126-062f-4760-8a20-a3622662dbbc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do electronic devices help or hurt children's development?<|ARGUMENT|>Devices quench a childs curiosity as they have unlimited acces to a huge bank of information. But certain restrictions should be kept so children don't accidentally stumble upon age restricted content.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Giving devices phone, tablet, computer, etc. to children is valuable for their development.\n","id":"69b20e30-fe61-4920-96e3-d8025ca89f3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Children Learn About Gender Identity And Sexual Orientation In School?<|ARGUMENT|>Developing a curriculum for this also means that teachers get to learn things that they might not otherwise have considered, which can make them more effective and compassionate as educators.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children should learn about gender identity and sexual orientation in school.\n","id":"eb2a2fe0-7939-4aaa-b88a-8127ec10d53e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see many people having the opinion that capitalism is pure evil and they take away all the money earned because of the hard work of the lower classes. But the truth is that people are motivated to work hard because they know their lives get better, and if their hard work gets divided by a 100 thousand, they no longer have the same level of commitment. I'm all for percentage of income based taxes, but blaming the rich for being rich sounds very much like propaganda. I support giving equal opportunities for people to succeed, but beyond that, one who truly wins is entitled to his win. That's a basic survival nature of an animal, and humans are no different. Maybe some people are alright with just participating in the race, but most people in the world won't run if they were assured of the prize anyway. For socialism to truly work, every person needs to have an altruistic view, which I believe doesn't exist and never will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Socialism, while being a great concept in theory, is inherently flawed because most humans will not work hard unless their work gets a quick incentive.\n","id":"e9e0082b-0412-4242-9aa8-354ca4064dc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The feminists I have met want equality for everyone. The word for that is 'egalitarian', and that term also benefits because it loses the whole stigma around radical feminists though few really exist ideas of radfems seem to be perpetuated by people misunderstanding regular feminists . I feel the word 'feminism' implies tackling equality issues that adversely affect women and this has some historical truth, but modern feminists take pains to distance themselves from this. Women in the past had to fight against severe, one sided inequalities. Gender inequalities today are more complex than 40 years ago, and require improvements for both men and women. Feminism has evolved, to become synonymous with 'egalitarianism', and I feel this also cheapens the battles fought earlier in history as the word is diluted. I am concerned that the word 'feminism' alienates people who would otherwise be supportive of egalitarian principles, if only they understood that's what feminism is supposed to mean nowadays. The historic baggage is heavy, and the name is tarnished by supposed radical feminists. I do not believe feminism in the Western world is a cause unique enough to justify its continued existence alongside the egalitarian movement. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe modern feminists should refer to themselves as egalitarians.\n","id":"b495d437-f2e1-410c-a147-28aba53feeb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Some calls for reparations for slavery call for using monetary compensation to fund institutions such as higher education, adequate housing and other goods that have been historically denied to Black Americans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is a false dilemma to treat in-kind payments and monetary compensation as oppositional in this way. Money from reparations can be used to fund institutions that address these obstacles.\n","id":"ebb7f78d-994c-481a-9531-df5f04cef95c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ban on human reproductive cloning<|ARGUMENT|>There is no reason to believe that parents choosing to clone a child will not love their cloned-child as fully as they would love a procreated-child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cloned babies would be loved by parents that choose to have them\n","id":"69becba0-8b63-4fb6-a29e-8b9cffca800f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't understand why people paint him out to be such a monster Isn't the point of the show to demonstrate that 'bad decisions' can be highly nuanced? To judge the guy one way or the other is totally against what Vince Gilligan is showing us. Sure poisoning a child or 'blowing up a nursing home' are terrible things at face value, but within the context of those situations I don't see how people can just write him off as 'unredeemable' and condemn him for the rest of the series. To illustrate my point I'll use Walter poisoning Brock as an example. Hurting a child bringing an innocent into his drug war is, generally speaking an appalling notion. People look at him poisoning Brock as crossing a line and shun him entirely, yet in doing so they neglect the other factors at play here. For one, Walt used the 'Lily of the Valley' plant rather than ricin which in the context of his ploy to turn Jesse against Gus would have been the easier, smarter choice. Yes, he still poisoned the kid, but the fact that he went out of his way to pick out a different, less poisonous plant as his agent shows he never intended to seriously hurt Brock, and makes me believe Walt when he later tells Jesse that he knew the exact dosage to give as not to seriously hurt him. All in all, it was a terrible, manipulative thing to do, but it doesn't make him an 'evil monster'. And I believe that's essentially one of the main purposes of the show charting a course of 'turning Mr Rodgers into Scarface' and observing the points when viewers arbitrarily 'draw a line' and turn against him. From shooting Mike to orchestrating the murder of 10 inmates, Walter is a victim of his hubris. We're given a front row seat to his fall from grace as the pillars of his moral core gradually chip away, but the point is we're never stripped of an open view of his perspective of the logic emotion behind his decisions and intentions. We're forced to understand the rationale of his character, relate to his logic on a certain level, and as a result, for me I feel a sense of dissonance when I'm asked whether or not he's a 'monster'. To call Walter White a monster, to say he's an unredeemable villain, is to remain willfully ignorant of certain nuances of his character, to intentionally dissociate oneself from relating to the horrors of some of his decisions. Who they're actually calling a monster is the caricature of the Heisenberg persona, which is ultimately a shallow representation of the character of Walter White himself. So when viewers are baffled that anyone 'could still root for Walt' by the end of the last season, when George RR Martin calls Walter White a bigger monster than anyone in Westeros , I believe they're totally missing the point. Also what really happens during the key points of the end of the last season? He pleads for the life of the man trying to relentlessly hunt him down. He returns baby Holly to Skylar, aware he acted impulsively and showing he's capable of correcting his wrongs. He lies over the phone and says he killed Hank in an attempt to absolve his wife knowingly destroying any remnant of affection with the rest of his family. He kills Jack and the rest of his Nazi crew while saving Jesse in the process. None of these are the actions of a truly sinister man.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Walter White is not THAT bad\n","id":"b161f208-5fd5-4459-ae7c-fbd974549912"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, this biggest argument I\u2019ve seen that god doesn\u2019t exist is the lack of proof. There has also been absolutely no proof of aliens\u2019 existence. And yet, many atheists believe that aliens exist. Why is that? Scientists have had theories about the multiverse, as well as multiple dimensions ie, a 5th dimension . It seems to me like a \u2018god\u2019 figure could potentially exist in one of these. So, why are aliens considered a \u2018scientific\u2019 belief, while god is not? For the record, I am an atheist, but also kind of an \u2018agnostic\u2019 about aliens. I think aliens might exist, but might not. I believe that these feelings are contradictory, but I also think that many human ideas are contradictory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Atheist believe god doesn\u2019t exist. And yet, many believe that aliens do exist. These beliefs are contradictory.\n","id":"b5811719-981c-4544-ac0b-f650844b0860"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democracies adapt to improve?<|ARGUMENT|>Societies should remain open to the possibility that other ways of organizing society and politics would be better. Constantly trying to improve democracy takes away from our exploration of alternatives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democracy is not necessarily the best way to structure society and politics.\n","id":"fdf781cb-ffd9-4998-a1ee-152d405dcca9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should minors be allowed to go through irreversible gender reassignment procedures?<|ARGUMENT|>Coinciding hormone therapy with the start of puberty can achieve a \"more normal and satisfactory appearance\" than if the individual were to start hormone therapy mid- or post-puberty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some surgical procedures are much more difficult to perform on a fully mature adult.\n","id":"961b1625-d80d-487b-b66f-b4363d33c664"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>5:10 - Luke takes a hit to one of his engines. His craft does to explode, though does take damage. We can infer his shields absorbed most of the impact. 8:49 - An X-Wing takes multiple impacts from Vaders laser cannons 3 or 4 and explodes, though started to come apart after the first hit. 8:58 - Another X-Wing takes a hit, possibly 2 from a TIE fighter and explodes. 9:30 - Red leader losses his starboard engine from a single shot 9:37 he takes another hit and ploughs into the Death Star..<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"During The Battle of Yavin 3:01 - Luke strafes the Death Star surface those are clearly not Kt explosions, 3:04-3:08 - Luke flies through the wash from his own strafing run and they are concerned for him. He claims he's a little cooked but otherwise okay. 4:03 - Luke again strafes the Death Star. Still no Kt blasts even the internal damage of a gun crew being blasted is not consistent with one. 4:28 - An X-wing takes a single hit from a TIE and explodes.\n","id":"df278cbb-4b47-453f-985e-d2f004be0991"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With some caveats. Obviously, restricting the vote to only white males is extremely unfair, but the restrictions on which white males could vote landed were sound and something similar should be applied to all strata of the population today. My thoughts on what sort of restrictions would be equitable are a little rough, but I've put some thought into it. A voting test wouldn't work, as it hasn't in the past see Jim Crow South , and would be easy to bias towards a specific demographic. A few that I think are fair are these 1 People not signed up for Selective Service should not be able to vote. This is already in effect, but I suggest extending it to women. It's hardly fair that to earn their right to vote, men must sign up to be drafted and women only have to turn 18. Selective Service should include both genders. 2 Those on government assistance should not be able to vote. This is probably my least refined idea at the moment, but my support for it is that if you're not contributing as much as other citizens to the common good, why should you have a say in how it's used? Once you're off government assistance, you regain rights past use of government assistance doesn't bar you from future voting. This restriction is based on colonial era America landed voting. A less strict form of it, to broaden the strata of people able to vote. 3 People with dual citizenship should be restricted from voting. Conflicting interests and whatnot. Possible exceptions for people with dual citizenship in US allied countries.  on the whole subject or on a specific idea. EDIT After reading comments and further thought, it's clear 2 and 3 are misguided, and need further thought. I stand by 1 completely, though. I would also like to add that things like disability, veterans' benefits and the like would not bar you from voting according to my original thoughts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Founding Fathers' views on voting were right.\n","id":"b3c37fd2-4fca-46eb-8fce-c52f119e2343"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tibet independence<|ARGUMENT|>While Tibet may have good reasons to complain about its circumstances under China, its circumstances are not that bad. Bad would be the mass genocide and murder of Tibetans. There are relatively few deaths in Tibets case on account of the Chinese government's police presence there. The main concerns are that many Tibetans have been imprisoned, they are subject to some human rights abuses, they are deprived of their leader the Dalai Lama. These may be bad problems, but they are not egregious in the grand global perspective of genocides and mass murders that are occurring. Given the international communities' limited ability to respond to international grievances, the Tibetan case simply does not qualify for immediate attention.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A right to self-determination should only be offered for especially grievous circumstances, which does not include Tibet.\n","id":"1ffdb732-29f5-42e9-80a5-8a604f13e9f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe financial inventives in form of direct monetary rewards and subsidies for example gym yoga memberships, and maybe even therapy, is a good solution to make obese people lose weight. Receving money directly after achieving weight loss goals has been proven to be effective see links . A few hundred dollars euros as a monetary reward per individual is not much compared to what prolonged obesity costs to society in the long run. Subsidies is also an effective way to fight obesity. Gym memberships, healthy food etc. can be really expensive. Finally, I personally believe that financial incentives can serve as a sort of external commitment to lose weight, which might help if you have problems with motivation and self discipline. Links<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obese people should receive financial incentives to lose weight.\n","id":"297af916-0d18-47a8-ba2b-3022a04f23e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Pension programs unlike welfare aimed deliberately at the poor are generous and nearly-always generously indexed because of a large high-turnout voting base. Having the UBI replace the pension reorients their political capital towards the needs of the poor also.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Targeted welfare programs are subject to regulatory capture by self-interested voting blocks and lobbying interests.\n","id":"df9cff98-4c18-4eeb-acc4-607c7ac2c86e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am of the opinion that thinking out loud in the office, with co workers around, is rude and egocentric. People that do this don't consider their mind as equal as others'. It seems to me that the person that thinks out loud all the time, sharing his her train of thought, believes that everyone around him co exist in her mind bubble , that everyone is aware of his mind processes. This person will blurt out a comment about something he is reading, without giving any context and expect you to react. This person thinks it's ok to infiltrate the mind space of others, even when others are not infiltrating his mind. This person seems to think that his mind is a bigger bubble, that encompasses all the other little bubbles of the poor people dealing with this individual. His is a mind so full of thoughts, that he has to stream them, spread them. After all, the minds of others are shut, they are black boxes, maybe their thoughts are not that important. Comments will inevitably interrupt the train of thought of other persons present, which is unavoidable in a work situation. After all, that's why we come to work, to get things done in a team. But to interrupt others simply because you can't count in your mind, or you can't read silently or you need to announce that you are going to the bathroom or because you are reacting to your facebook, is totally unacceptable. It shows the respect you have for others. It shows that you don't give the same value to your space and to the space of others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Thinking out loud at the workplace is disrespectful and there should be awareness of that.\n","id":"e53b1a80-99ef-460f-a6ba-3e382df78e78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is my strongly held belief that nails are dumb. They surely served a purpose at some point in our evolutionary histories, but in our current type of lives, they bring way more problems than solutions. I figure there's two ways this can conversation can continue, 1. imagine a world where I, the individual, have no nails, or 2. a world where nobody has any nails. Number 1 would make me a freak with fleshy nubs, and I'd be at a disadvantage for various tools or things that require having to wedge a fingernail in there to accomplish something. I'd rather carry a tool on my keychain or carry a dedicated coin, or something to fill in, and not deal with nails. Number 2 would mean the world would be a different place, where various packagings or things like remote controls are designed slightly different, but overall, the world is okay. This would be ideal, since I run into issues not just with my own nails, but with others' as well. I should mention that anytime I mention this off handedly, my girlfriend's mom takes advantage to complain that her fingernails are really weak and it's a huge problem for her. I figure she approximates herself in a situation like Number 1, but anytime I ask her what problems she encounters, she always backtracks and just says something like I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but lots . I think she just likes to complain about having brittle nails. And I'm going to go ahead and say that having brittle nails is only a problem if you have nails, since you wouldn't have to worry about them breaking if you didn't have them. Some highlights to the various arguments I partake in Cutting them is annoying and an additional part of regular grooming, and if you do it the wrong way, you can motivate an ingrown nail. A problem that would not exist without nails. Cutting them is something that society requires you to do that isn't congratulated if done, only criticized if not done. As such, it only contributes negatively to the world, not positively. Conceptually, the fact that we have to cut them ourselves and regularly sort of shows that we don't need nails in regular life, and are actually a problem if they get too long for various aesthetic and hygienic reasons. As such, no nails would be better. I'm following a kind of Hellboy cutting his horns off logic, here. My girlfriend routinely accidentally scratches me. That's dumb, right there, but it brings up a good pro scratching. I'd rather either use some small tool to scratch myself occasionally or find something to do so with than have to deal with nails the rest of the time they do nothing. I guess we as a society would lose some things like women decorating themselves, or the social aspect of mani pedis I assume, I don't know , but I think we'd be better off hanging out in other ways, and if people I shouldn't operate under the wrong assumption that only women paint their nails didn't have nails, then we wouldn't miss painting them. Hangnails, I mean, what the fuck is that about. Alright, I think that's all, if some points get brought up consistently in the comments, I'll reply to them individually, and then edit here to update as I go. Bring it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The world would be better without finger or toenails.\n","id":"037bdb31-b4f4-40a0-8635-5e8438f89197"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should heterosexual people not be allowed in gay bars?<|ARGUMENT|>In a survey of LGBT middle and high school students conducted by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network in 2013, three-quarters of LGBT students said they frequently heard the word \u201cgay\u201d used negatively at school, one-third of LGBT students reported physical harassment at school based on their sexual orientation, and 17 percent reported assault. Nearly 60 percent of LGBT students reported experiencing sexual harassment at school. Center for American Progress, pg.43<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many LGBTQ+ individuals still face discrimination, harassment, and violence in their daily lives.\n","id":"517f9062-d63a-40ba-bf50-f6e3dfd180d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The Book of Mormon teaches: \"And he the Lord hath said that: Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land.\" 2 Nephi 1:20<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Bible and Book of Mormon teach that keeping the commandments leads to prosperity.\n","id":"ad26f9f3-bdb4-4eef-8ebe-22b50d289f11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DC handgun ban<|ARGUMENT|>It is empirically proven that the numbers of victims from gun related attacks or incidents far outweigh the number of instances when arms were used for self protection.This warrants the argument that the costs incurred on society through the usage of arms are higher the the benefits the possession of arms for self defense brings<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The social harm related to firearms outweighs any social benefits from possessing firearms\n","id":"97d45b27-1d9a-4abb-976d-73065461d799"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Compared to other ethnicities or women, white men are generally attributed with traits that are suitable for high status jobs Correll & Bernard, p. 6<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Negative stereotypes mean it is comparatively difficult for Black Americans to succeed in the job market.\n","id":"be72fd93-4a4b-4dc6-81cf-6c332f138dcb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everytime I hear someone complaining about social media, it always reminds me of when adults used to complain about me playing video games. Most arguments against social media can be solved with, use it responsibly or don't go crazy with it. For example social media is toxic unfollow the toxic people social media makes me feel bad only use it for messaging social media is a distraction turn off notifications and stop checking it However, there are others that make the arguments that it has negatively affected society or how kids are extra susceptible to social media, but literally every argument against this can be applied to video games. It just sounds like Christians complaining that legalizing the gays will tear the fabric of society. In fact, I'd say that video games are far more addictive than social media and are terrible for your attention span. Mobile app developers a b test the fuck out of their games to trigger the right responses to get you to keep playing. Don't get me started on the social factor of gaming. Facebook toxic is rookie compared to any competitive multiplayer game and it is reinforced by the fact that being an asshole is just the norm for these video games. Any behavioral argument can be applied to both. x200B Finally, people will say that video games bring people together which I can agree with but social media allows me to do that as well. Snapchat lets me keep up with some of my friends that I don't get to see on a daily basis. Facebook is a nice messaging platform, lets me organize events, and the marketplace is very useful. Linkedin lets me keep in touch with my previous coworkers for referrals and references. x200B Now if you say both are bad for people, I'll understand, but to say one is and not the other is a double standard. x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Saying social media is bad is the same thing as saying video games are bad\n","id":"5e8bffc1-8d45-4076-95dd-a7bffa907461"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>A painting is evidence of a painter. A song is evidence of a composer. A house is evidence of a carpenter, roofer, plumber, electrician etc. The universe itself and everything in it is evidence for a creator.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is positive evidence for the existence of God as the cause of the order and complexity of nature.\n","id":"efd82623-9ce8-4c88-a9cd-5215ed4805f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is transhumanism the next step in human evolution?<|ARGUMENT|>When the wealthy adopt transhuman capabilities, they will be able to accomplish more than before. The improvements made may spill over into the daily lives of the poor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone benefits from transhumanism. The poor just benefit indirectly instead of directly from it.\n","id":"1964a5c5-adaf-4674-a823-83cd16156e36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>The movement should not argue that all LGBTQ+ people are 'Born That Way', as sexuality is complex and not completely understood. The factors affecting it could be biological and\/or environmental. Just because you are not born a certain way does not mean you choose to become that way; you could be born with two arms but lose one to infection or an accident.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Born This Way' is too simplistic and it is incorrect to campaign as though sexuality and by extension, gender are inherent, and often binary concepts, rather than social constructs.\n","id":"6c3ff897-82f5-4e5d-b2fb-03bc780f226a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think the practice of any system that isn't merit based is discriminatory and creates additional problems. Take Google for example trying to fix the problem of having too many white and asian employees. 56 of their employees are white while just 63 of the country is but whites are considered overrepresented by HR? In truth every race but asians is underrepresented in their hiring data but asians are a minority. Is that not OK? Their hiring volume doesn't match the average racial makeup because many of them move here on visas specifically to work in tech. Again, I don't see the problem. The people who insist this is a problem and hiring should reflect the nation as a whole seem to lack the same concern when it comes to professional sports where asians are underrepresented. In terms of women the number of women in tech mostly equally reflects the percentage number of women in technical majors in college indicating a problem deeper than employment hiring practices. I also think straying from merit based hiring practices to boost diversity figures creates some new problems. First if diversity hires are less qualified than their peers it reinforces rather than combats negative stereotypes and creates problems for diverse employees to have to prove themselves as the people around them wonder if they are diversity hires or legitimately talented. Employee are supposed to be aware of unconscious bias but by hiring a bunch of unqualified minority candidates it only serves to reinforce those biases. Combine all of this with the difficulty of removing an underperforming diverse employee and you have situations where departments decide it's simply easier to leave them on the books and just tell them to do whatever they want while their coworkers get buried under workload and you create a recipe for bias. I don't want to work in a homogeneous workplace with a bunch of clones of myself but I keep seeing companies trying to focus on diversifying the workplace continually get it wrong. Creating double standards is not the right way to go about it and just seems to compound the problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tech diversity hiring practices are flawed\n","id":"f4769aa9-1851-43e7-bec5-df210193ed01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What I mean by legalization is not just decriminalization of use like in Portugal , but also the legalization of distribution and production. I think this would have a positive effect on both drug related violence, drug consumption and deaths from heavy drug use. Recently, I got into the alcohol prohibition period of american history and realized that you can draw many parallels between it's effects back then and the effects of drug criminalization today, like Prohibition directly led to the encroachment of criminal organizations like the Maffia, who took up the lucrative business of distributing and brewing the now illegal alcoholic beverages. This, in turn, led to a spike in crime rate as Maffia organizations were free to use force to extend their territories, run rackets and collect insurance payments from businesses. This is similar to how drug cartels operate now. Their presence always results in sky high crime rates, and they also draw most of their finances from the sale of drugs. The legalization of, say, cocaine would mean that it's production would have to move above ground , resulting in much less crime related deaths. This could also help with the recovery of nations struck by high crime rates. Prohibition didn't decrease alcohol consumption. In fact, it probably increased it, as for every saloon before prohibition there were now 3 4 speakeasies in business. This is why I think that legalization today wouldn't increase drug use. On top of that, some people probably start doing drugs in the first place because of their forbidden fruit aspect, which would be lost if they became legal. Prohibition led to the wide proliferation of unclean, diluted bootleg alcohol, which was always harmful and even straight up toxic at times. The same thing can be observed today. Drugs have a reasonably high chance of being unclean because their producers are free to dilute them in order to increase the amount produced without having to fear any kind of repercussions. What could you do if you consumed something spiked with rat poison? You sure as hell couldn't sue the drug dealer. You could, however, sue a private company if their product didn't meet the specifications they described. This would result in much safer drugs and therefore less deaths related to their use. Now, I know that this would certainly result in companies trying to use the addictive qualities of their products to maintain customer loyalty in a morbid way, but this is really no different from what a drug dealer does, and the possible benefits I just listed outweigh the possible negatives, at least in my opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should legalize the trade and consumption of all drugs\n","id":"938c1c12-6c2a-473f-a562-e55c4a97c1f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi I've been lurking here for quite some time, and after seeing many controversial posts, I decided my opinion wasn't that much of a big deal. Until I casually told my friend about it. Here's the thing I don't like women who don't shave, even though I understand the reasoning behind it they don't want to simply accept what society imposes, or don't want to go through the hassle that is shaving your legs armpits. And I respect that. I'm just unable to like it, and I'm willing to not go in public with someone like this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women who do not shave legs and\/or armpits\n","id":"055cc5d5-3273-427e-90a4-1b84235d8f01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I typically post pretty serious stuff, so let's do something different for FTF, yes? I recently rewatched the Iron Man trilogy with some friends and I have to say out of the three, the third movie is the best one. Iron Man 1 had a decent villain in Obediah Stane Iron Monger, but Rhoadie was underused criminally, Tony had zero character development, and it just didn't stand up with the later films. It was a fine movie for setting up the MCU, but as a standalone film, it's mediocre at best. Iron Man 2 was better with the supporting cast, but the villains Whiplash and Justin Hammer were awful. Hammer is just a discount Obediah Stane from the first movie, and Whiplash doesn't have the screen time to be a compelling villain. The best thing about this installment, though, is the introduction of Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, and Don Cheadle as the new Rhoadie War Machine. Tony actually had some character development this time around, and the subplot about the magnet poisoning him was decent. Iron Man 3, though, is easily the best of the series. War Machine Iron Patriot is the best he's been in this series. The villain Mandarin, and later Aldrich Killian are actually a threat to Tony directly, more than the other villains ever were. Mandarin attacks Tony's house and kidnaps Pepper Pots. Watching Tony escape from that, crash land in the middle of nowhere, and bond with Harley while creating an improvised weapon arsenal to get into the Mandarin's mansion is fun to watch. Plus, the movie has a good message about mental illness, with Tony suffering from PTSD after the events of The Avengers. Plus, it had a satisfying ending for the trilogy, even if he came out of retirement for the next Avengers movie. Lots of people are angry about the villain swap, the reveal that the Mandarin was really just an actor. I believe it was a fun twist, and while revealing Aldrich to be the real one did feel like a bit of a misstep, the choice isn't inherently bad. I feel that it was unexpected, which makes it a good twist. TL DR Iron Man 3 gets too much hate when it's the best of the original trilogy of Iron Man films.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Iron Man 3 is a good movie\n","id":"d3308d88-bb65-41d4-b65d-27e16c3455c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd like to revisit the perception of Louis CK, in the light of the recently found limit of range of the metoo movement Aziz Ansari didn't need to be in the news, as has been generally accepted There has recently been a cultural consensus that men in power have been getting away with some shit that they should no longer be getting away with. It has been felt, with justification, that they've had the unexamined benefit of the status quo, to the detriment of others. Harvey Weinstein's downfall was a damn bursting and there has been the first wave of the conversation on the topic. The prosecution has made it's case. Well, today I'm using an alt account to be Louis CK's unrequested defense my decision to use an Alt Account is a comment on the heat this topic can generate . I should say that I don't know Louis CK surprise and that I'm a well off 50 year old white male. Full disclosure So if you want to write off my opinions as Privileged And Meaningless then please do. You don't want to talk to me. I don't want to talk to you. Also, I've never personally stepped past my honest assessment of what my partner wants from me sexually. There's no direct defending myself ness to my opinions though you may still reflexively conclude that I'm reflexively defending men in power because I relate to them I think that Louis CK thought everyone was cool with what was going on. I think he's mortified that situations that he thought were Dirty, Sexy Experiences With Strangers, are now being portrayed as villainous and abusive. I can understand that people can feel regret about what they experienced with him, but I don't understand why everything that is said about the Aziz Ansari situation It was just a bad sexual encounter, we all have them. You'll get over it shouldn't also be said here. I just started watching the first series of Episodes and in episode 2 the woman running the department has just confessed in passing, and accidentally, that she's been sleeping with the studio executive. She seems kind of horrified with herself that it happened. It was played for laughs and cringes and was very pre metoo but I watched it now with a much less neutral view of that relationship, and that's obviously great. Our culture benefits from a wider perception of the imbalance of that relationship. But that doesn't mean that consenting adults can't still have those relationships now and then, if they want. Assault and creepy are VERY different. Maybe I don't know every detail about the Louis CK situation but my understanding was that there was lead in to the masturbation scenes and while those scenes fell under the that escalated quickly category, they weren't totally out of the blue and can't be considered assault unless we're stretching indeed. Yes, Louis CK had more pull in the industry he had the status but the women weren't powerless. In some cases they even out numbered him, so mere laughter would probably have murdered any sexual direction Louis CK could have been trying to conjure. And they can't claim such innocence that they didn't think that going back to a hotel after the bars closed didn't portend a sexual advance or two. I want Louis CK to, one day, talk about this time of his life and to provide his perspective. I think many will relate to him and realize he wasn't terrible. He was just embarrassingly out of tune with the feelings of these women. Or, maybe he knew exactly how uncomfortable they were and just didn't care. But I don't believe that. Or dis believe that it. I just can't know. But I do know it's possible that he didn't realize how un sexual the scene was for them and so I won't judge him or support him being grouped into the Monster List. It's possible that the scenes could truly have felt consensual to him. Maybe he got off on his own vulnerability of being naked in front of women he barely knew. Maybe this, maybe that. But I don't know any reason why we should be strongly judgmental of him. We don't need to find an undeserving man to hang in order to broadcast the message that accepted behavior now emphasizes that you don't abuse your privileges for sexual advantage. The message is being pressed and there are enough villains to go around already. Or am I letting him off too lightly? Should Louis CK be shunned I'll be sleeping soon but hope to wake to an interesting discussion about responsibility and karma.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Louis CK doesn't deserve to be punished\n","id":"8df709aa-4fba-4630-9812-0701262cdbda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>The John\/Joan study that supposedly proved that gender is a social construct by making a boy into a girl by upbringing. What this study didn't publish was that he rejected his identity as a girl, as soon as he found out that he was born a male. This fradulent study highlights that there is no reason to treat this as a scientific fact until it is proven by any scientifically sound study.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The example of David Reimer shows how gender is not learnable and that biology does influence the gender identity process.\n","id":"685ff4d5-6877-49f3-b760-e1839c60f09c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's a news article about it There have been a lot of threads on Reddit and Twitter about this, and it seems to me there is a large majority of people saying that the man was unreasonably subjected to violence by the police. I disagree. Rules and laws need to be enforced. The actual time that the situation happens is almost never the time to disobey a police officer, except perhaps in extreme circumstances, like unusual life and death situations. This was not a life and death situation it was an unfair bump from his flight. If you believe the officer was wrong, or if you believe the flight attendants were wrong, grievances should be given later in the court of law. In fact, the man said he was calling his lawyer. This is the appropriate response. Instead, when the man was confronted by police and ordered to get off the plane, he refused and physically resisted the officer. This is what ultimately caused him to be injured, it seems by being pulled into an armrest by the officer. The actions of the officer grabbing him by the arms and pulling him out, seems to me to be the minimal amount of force that would have moved him, given his illegal resistance. Another point to make is that he was making a scene and resisting by screaming and pulling away from the officer. This often makes the officer look like an aggressor and the criminal a victim. This often garners a lot of sympathy from people who watch the video, even if the person is breaking the law and resisting the officer. But if we believe people should be allowed to break the law if they make a big enough scene or resist hard enough, that only encourages people to resist officers and make scenes, which is certain to lead to more violent altercations between officers and civilians. Once you are ordered by an officer to disembark, you will disembark either peacefully or by force. And if you are injured in the process of physically resisting an officer, you are fully responsible for those injuries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The doctor that was removed from the United flight is fully responsible for his injuries\n","id":"dddd8c54-04bc-43b3-9376-31ca58687122"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Being a white male I feel it is comparable to being the eldest child, with society and the media being the parents in this metaphor. Remember how your younger sibling could be a brat and disrespectful towards you, but your parents will corral you back the second you showed the slightest sign of coming back? I do. Remember New Years even 2010, I was about 10 or 11 and my sister woke me up she was 6 or 7 by jumping on my stomach. I felt a sharp poking and struggled to breathe for quite a while. My father laughed it off, merely told her not to do it again. On a separate occasion not too long after I had friends over, my sister was being the hovering little sibling and she was about to reveal something embarrassing about me can't even recall at this point and I just covered her mouth with my hand. To contrast with the earlier discipline, my father put me in a full nelson. Few weeks back MTV came out with a New Years Resolution for White Guys . I know what you are going to say, yes there was a backlash and that forced them to take the video down. However, I would say that I doubt even Breitbart or Fox would have the audacity to make a video New Years Resolution for Black Guys Yeah you guys haven't been great this year cut to BLM protesting or something I couldn't even fathom that, no one would ever think that a good idea. With white men at least there is a possibility of success considering the hopefully soon to end existence of Buzzfeed. Perhaps I have a different perspective on this because I attend one of the largest and most degenerate public universities in the country, but I often notice the disdain that comes when someone refers to white men or cis straight white guys or something of the like. The rhetoric of the political left uses these words almost as a condemnation. Even mainstream journalists, celebrities, pundits, etc will do this. If anyone said blacks or jews with similar, or even more muted, disdain it would inspire a more severe backlash. That recent professor who got in some trouble for saying shit like dreaming of white genocide, or celebrating the death of whites in the Haitan revolution, is also an example. However I can't help but feel if he had rhetoric like that targeted at any other group, he would be fired immediately. Another experience familiar to eldest children is watching your younger counterparts get away with things you never would have, or at least being met with far less punishment. When you are the eldest child, it often feels like your parents are just waiting for you to do something wrong while the baby of the family dindu can't do wrong. Several ways this is expressed. One overlaps with my first point where even a potential dog whistle hint of bigotry from whites is smashed down way harder than more explicit behavior against white males. Lets look at Richard Spencer and Gazi Kodzo, both racist and separatist demagogues. Richard Spencer is being considered the anti Christ while Gazi is brushed off. Spencer, crucify me for saying this, comes off as polite and respectful. I disagree with him but he eschews violence and I have yet to see him threaten or even verbally attack anyone. Gazi, on the other hand, shouts racist vitriol even at the white people who suck up to him and give him money like hes some sort of God. He has made threatening remarks in his videos, that a violent revolution will come if reparations aren't paid. Another way is by abandoning standards altogether whenever it is a minority that is the offending party. Read this, you are usually a wonderful human being . That is how she describes her rapist. Somehow I doubt she would be saying that if her rapist was blonde haired and blue eyed. I am shocked by how often I have seen in media, and in real life, defense for the mass rape and other incidents perpetrated by refugees by the same women who think men spreading their legs on the subway is a crime against humanity or wage crusades against harassers on Xbox Live. It feels like there is always some institutional bleh, past injustice, or some other bullshit to minimize, if not exonerate, minorities doing wrong. The approach to white men, on the other hand, is more comparable to the individual responsibility bootstrapping republican. You get to blame nothing you fucking a fucking white male. To sum it up, I feel like the zeitgeist approaches white men unfairly because we are the only ones expected to have full responsibility at all times with some even going farther to the point where being a white male means you are on strike 2 by virtue of your existence. Maybe if you go full Steve Shives you get back to strike 1. You can also speak to them, and speak about them, in a disdainful tone that you can't take with any other group without being met with career ending socially suicidal backlash. I feel an overwhelming resentment growing in me similar to one I had growing up towards my parents and younger siblings, only this is more macro in that it involves large swaths of society instead of a few individuals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel white men are, in an unorthodox way, treated unfairly in our society\n","id":"02b618b9-676b-4adc-a3c7-8b304c75932f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious practices that incorporate self-harm be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Performing religious practices may ensure a more rewarding afterlife. People may be afraid of being denied access to a good afterlife if they refuse to participate in self-harming rituals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Truly religious individuals may feel coerced into performing harmful religious practices.\n","id":"a0f98a04-b759-48fa-a819-d4cb74b863fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>A teenage mother could face several social obligations like not getting respect from friends and family members and experience an emotional trauma for bad reputation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who choose abortions are often minors or young women with insufficient life experience to understand fully what they are doing.\n","id":"bec741e0-8e7c-4bee-b725-8db08e8da781"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You can charge 50 million per copy and I consider that your right, but as soon as you take something off the market permanently, I believe you have no right to complain about copyright infringement. Consider a band that creates an album, releasing it freely on the internet. They build up a huge fanbase, releasing free albums. Then the lead singer has an existential crisis, dissolves the band and takes down the website, making it impossible for new fans to find their albums. I believe that the band's fans are completely justified in making and distributing copies of the band's albums, since the original creator has refused to make them available, and has shown no indication that they will ever be available again, and in fact has indicated the exact opposite. I believe that, in contrast, a company like Disney, who has a track record of pulling and re releasing their movies every few years, for marketing purposes, shouldn't lose their protection. Just permanently out of print materials. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that a book, movie, album, etc. should only be protected by copyright as long as it's available through legitimate channels.\n","id":"6a635eca-22bb-4f74-883f-73893aa9673c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For anyone not up to date Of course American kids should be taught about different cultures and religions in all parts of the world, no matter how foreign or temporarily controversial they may be. I am not advocating that only Christian themes be present in the classroom or anything like that. I am arguing that no assignment forcing kids to copy down a prayer be it the Islamic statement of faith or the Lord's Prayer should be allowed. This backlash is absolutely justified, especially considering the statement of faith's content discrediting of other religions and an implicit call to action . If a highschool kid was assigned a lesson that had him or her copy down the Sermon on the Mount using calligraphy, all of reddit would be up in arms about the separation of church and state and government sponsored religion. I simply don't see the difference between the two, whether the context of the class be World Geography or otherwise, but please . I never agree with the Fox News types, but I think they may have something here. If you don't want religion in schools, fine, but let's make that standard consistent across all religions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The backlash following a school assignment that had high school students copy an Islamic statement of faith is justified.\n","id":"129116a3-acd4-4c05-8217-111adefbac1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Some women choose not to breastfeed altogether simply because they are made to feel marginalized or ashamed in public, even when their first choice is to breastfeed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When nipple showing is unusual, women are often shamed or stared at for breastfeeding in public.\n","id":"fcdc4881-b5ef-470e-b919-1baf5ecb5b5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Unless it serves an obvious immediate public good, I feel that the names and likenesses of the accused should not be published. If you or I were accused of a scandalous crime we'd be front page news. Our exoneration would be a paragraph on page 6, at best. Obvious exceptions for things like deliberately spreading HIV or dangerous people escaping justice. public health, and public safety I absolutely support private persons and media in the gallery of a courtroom. And I absolutely support reporting on arrests and criminal proceedings. I do not, however, support publishing the name or likeness of an accused person. I'm entirely in favour of widely publishing the names and pictures of convicted persons. Thanks for reading  Reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Accused criminals should generally not have their names or pictures published.\n","id":"c842beae-770e-4355-b0f7-9a1efd0da96e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Greek far-right political party \u201cGolden Dawn\u201d should be expelled from parliament and banned from participating in future elections.<|ARGUMENT|>Golden Dawn does not behave as most political parties and their MPs do not behave like politicians. This is because they are not what we would describe as politicians: they are thugs. Emboldened by their MP\u2019s privilege of immunity from prosecution Golden Dawn MP\u2019s have on multiple occasions been involved in public acts of violence. MP Dimitris Koukoutsis is being investigated for an assault in parliament on SYRIZA leftist MP Vasiliki Katrivanou 1, while party spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris assaulted two other MP\u2019s on a chat show broadcasted live on TV 2. Worse still, many of Golden Dawn\u2019s MP\u2019s and members face criminal charges, including Ilias Kasidiaris who is accused of \u2018accessory to robbery, bodily harm and illegal gun possession\u2019 3, although his trial has been postponed on multiple occasions because of his MP\u2019s privileges. Not only does Golden Dawn dislike democratic values, they actively abuse their MP\u2019s privileges and behave unacceptably in a highly public manner towards fellow members of parliament. Party leader and MP Nikos Mihaloliakos has publicly declared that Golden Dawn feel uncomfortable and disgusted in parliament and called upon party members to rally behind them and violently take the struggle out of parliament and onto the streets of Athens. 3 We cannot allow such open criminality and violence to exist in politics and inside the Greek Parliament. They totally lack respect for other politicians and do not participate in an orderly manner expected of Members of Parliament and many of them have committed acts of criminality before even being elected into parliament. These people are not fit to take part in government and provide a horrific example for society. They make a mockery of the political system and disgrace Greek politics and Greece as a whole. They must be banned. 1 Kathimerini: \u201cPanel to probe Parliament attack by Golden Dawn MP\u201d, 29 August 2012, E-Kathimerini, 2 Baboulias, Yiannis: \u201cGreece\u2019s Golden Dawn isn\u2019t a political party \u2013 it\u2019s more like a criminal gang\u201d, 4 September 2012, The Guardian, 3 ibid<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Golden Dawn are not a party, they are thugs and criminals\n","id":"0bd935f1-5c60-4462-88da-e12198737a0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, this will be hard to pad out, as it is the absence of a thing. Basically, we've all heard that we should respect our elders. The only real reason seems to be because they are older . This seems like a really flawed basis for deserving respect. Not even talking in the line of respect like EMS and defense forces deserve it can be a fuck ton for them in some cases . A few people I've brought up mention things like well they lived through x . Again, simply living through a national or global event hardly seems worthy of respect. In short respect should be earned, and the mere act of not dying does not suffice for that. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Elders do not deserve respect\n","id":"babd4c26-075d-4fb6-b7f2-42eccefc44e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In some states in the US, children under the age of eighteen can be tried as adults depending on the discretion of the local officials. I believe that this is wrong mostly because it gives local officials the right to use their discretion to try some children as adults and not others. This creates a world where local officials can choose to try minorities harsher than their white counterparts. And the numbers are there to prove that this is definitely happening in this country. According to the Root in Florida, black teenagers were 2.3 times more likely to receive an adult jail sentence versus supervision than white youth black juveniles received sentences 7.8 times the length of their white counterparts who committed the same crimes . In Florida, prosecutors can choose to try children as adults without going in front of a judge. Once a child is transferred out of the juvenile justice system, they are more likely to be convicted and to receive a harsher sentence. Support that might exist for a juvenile and her family may no longer exist outside of a juvenile court. In addition to the gross racial disparity, adult facilities don't have the resources children need. Teenagers need classrooms and to learn. I can't imagine someone only having a tenth or eleventh grade education and not finishing high school because they were in prison. The prospects for a felon without a high school diploma are not very good. Some juvenile offenders can have their records locked or expunged when they reach a certain age. For children tried as adults, this is not an option. Imagine the difference in one's life if they are tried as juvenile, go to a juvenile hall, receive an high school education, complete a sentence in a year or two, and then go on to college like nothing happened versus a child who commits the same crime, is tried and convicted as an adult, is transferred to an adult facility at the age of eighteen instead of being released, and then has a criminal record that haunts them for life. It could very well be the difference between a comfortable, middle class existence and a life of extreme poverty, homelessness and incarceration. In addition to school, teenagers have special needs as far as counseling goes. Imagine being fifteen years old in adult prison. That's the exact scenario Jaquin Thomas found himself in. At just fifteen years old, he was placed in an adult jail awaiting trial for murder where he committed suicide. Workers in the jail were not trained to specifically deal with teenagers, which may certainly have been a major contribution to Jaquin's death. Specialized staff might have check on him more frequently he had been dead for over an hour by the time his body was found. If someone had been checking on him, they might have intervened and stopped the suicide from being completed . And most importantly, being tougher on crime and giving children harsher and long punishments actually does very little to help prevent crime It's bad for the teenager, it's bad for society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children 17 years of age or younger should never be tried as adults\n","id":"a2845e06-0b52-46de-94b9-2504168ed958"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Humankind has been at nearly every place of the planet and no one found Santa's factory. In contrast, some people believe they found their personal meaning of life. So it seems more plausible that a meaningful g other life exists that that Santa exists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is more evidence that Santa is not existing that there is that no meaning of life exists.\n","id":"ffd65712-dd82-49fb-b389-2dbdddd116cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>Decriminalization of drugs will dramatically reduce the violence associated with the drug trade. If not illegal, drug distributors are not at odds with law enforcement. Without conflict, there is no violence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abolish all laws and regulations on any narcotic drug. Treat people as responsible beings.\n","id":"d9a72728-bfab-4f7b-acf2-43054c8044c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now don't get me wrong. I fully understand that the troubles people go through cannot be compared. Drowning in 10 feet of water is no different from drowning at 100 feet. End of the day you can't breathe. But when you have someone in your life who because of how they feel about you I imagine is doing everything they can to help you during the bad days. You are not only damaging their idea of being sufficient to your needs but also damaging their reputation because people will think they're not being a good partner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who complain on social media about their depression and anxiety one day then go on to talk about how amazing their significant other is the next are just self-absorbed attention seekers\n","id":"9a4218c5-c74f-414b-b1ff-df25c7c9dda9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By this, I mean that children should be raised in a house where the parents teach good morals as opposed to religion. Then, when their child is old enough to move out of the house, they let the child decide whether they are going to belong to a religion, or, alternatively, decide against it. In my experience, I have seen children that are raised under a religious household either yearn to stray from that religion to the point of no return, or be brainwashed by it. Of course, there is a large amount of cases in which that does not happen or religion generally does not affect them in the long run without them going off the rails, but in my personal experience, either of those options have held the large majority.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children should not be raised in a household with religion\n","id":"df1874e8-9b05-4ab1-8fa0-66658e41f51a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Around the world, more than 100 soccer players have died while playing or shortly after since 1984. Therefore, applying the same logic, soccer should equally be banned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Injuries and deaths are not an integral part of bullfighting and its competitiveness, but unfortunate accidents, similar to injuries in any other sport.\n","id":"96d1eca6-d413-4ae5-96c2-250306c9fc3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To address the Calories In, Calories Out crew straight away I agree with you, and CICO is common sense. However, CICO says nothing about satiety, and the vast majority of people eat until they're full, or at least until they feel not hungry. With regard to satiety, all calories are not equal, and this is also common sense. The percentage of obese Americans has went from ~15 in 1990 to ~35 today. People weren't that different culturally in 1990. That's not that long ago. There was plenty to eat in 1990, just like now. People could afford food, just like now. So what has changed? It's the increased sugar and decreased fiber in the American diet. These changes literally make people hungrier. Study after study shows that high fructose and or low fiber causes people and other mammals to eat more calories before they feel full. And I don't think it's really a willpower issue. More kids are obese. More babies are obese. Even the wildlife that live around humans like squirrels, pigeons, and racoons are more overweight. It's the things like soda, juice, gatorade, cereal, etc. that are causing, if not all of the obesity increase, a very large part of it. I think that the majority of obese people would lose enough weight to not be obese if they did nothing else but cut out all drinks that have calories and also all artificially sweetened drinks, and an even larger majority of obese people would lose that amount of weight if they cut out all fructose and also took a daily fiber supplement. I think that this would be easy for most people to do, especially once they got started. I used to be overweight, and when I stopped eating cereal, making no other changes to my diet, I lost 35 pounds in a matter of months. I'm not including the difficulties with emotional eating or binge eating and weight loss when I say it's easy . If you need to eat your feelings, that's a different issue than what I'm trying to get people to challenge. Habit changes are hard and sugar is addictive, but the core of my argument is that 1. This method would work for most Americans, and 2. It's not the monumental effort with marginal success that is usually talked about with obese people deciding to lose weight. Furthermore, I believe that most people who say losing weight and keeping it off is impossible for them have not tried this lifestyle change. I think a lot of people just don't know. They think you have to run a lot and eat low fat and starve yourself. Meanwhile they're drinking Gatorade and pouring Italian dressing onto their lettuce salad and getting nowhere. So, can you guys show me where I might be going wrong? Are there a significant amount of obese people who don't drink sugared beverages or eat a lot of sweet things? Are there any? I would be especially interested if this was the case for you specifically.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most obese people can EASILY lose weight by eliminating fructose from their diet with the exception of whole fruits, and adding fiber. No need to count calories or go hungry.\n","id":"f72ac3c6-936e-49f2-9efe-06fc90e2da90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see three issues with the current system Residents of smaller states get disproportionate say over the election. Currently a vote in California is worth half that of a vote in Wyoming. Democrats living in Texas, and Republicans living on california just two examples are effectively disenfranchised, as they can not affect the presidential race. As an extension of point 1, someone can win the the election while appealing to a minority of the electorate. The popular vote would fix these issues in the following ways Everyone's vote would be worth one vote. Your vote would affect the national election, not just the state election, meaning you can still have an impact on the race. Whoever gets the most votes would win by definition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Electoral College should be replaced by a national popular vote.\n","id":"39ba1cc5-c4ec-4f8d-881e-f7518551e575"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So here's the thing. People who post pictures on FB and Instagram do it for one reason only attention. Any type of pictures selfies, pictures with friends, pictures of meals, clubbing, you name it. Sure, in some cases in might be for other reasons for instance, sharing beautiful pictures of a vacation with your friends on fb is easier than sending the same pictures to them per mail. For the sake of the argument, let's focus on the individuals that share meaningless pictures like pictures of meals, selfies, nightsout, outfits etc. IMO this is the equivalent of yelling hey please tell me i am cool beautiful handsome artsy on the street . Which is something most of us would find needy and kind of pathetic in real life. From my perspective, it's like telling the world that you're insecure and need validation. One could argue that humans need validation and group approval however, this is something we can obtain in real life more often than not whether we like or not, eg in the workplace one must be accepted etc . So it's not like people don't get validation in the real world. Because of this, i feel that people who post pictures on social media are the equivalent of a needy person crying for validation. Personally, acting like that would make me feel embaressed in real life and since i feel like doing on social media is not different than doing it irl, i think individuals who share certain content online should feel kind of ashamed. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sharing photos on social media is a pathetic attempt to get validation. People who do it should feel kind of embaressed.\n","id":"09d8ac75-3b61-4867-ade7-0960a74e6bd0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Feminism used to be about equality, but nowadays feminist movements are more about giving special treatment to women over men such as more university grants, changing walk signs to feature a woman, excluding men from using abuse shelters, etc. rather than trying to give the same rights that women are afforded in western countries to women in middle eastern and low economic countries<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Feminism\" has been used to label a wide variety of ideas, including many mutually contradictory ones. Some of these world views seek equality, but others do not.\n","id":"59694687-9958-4bb3-9674-51f437523cd2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>Gay men are known to buy sex dolls so they are able to experiment with their sexuality before entering into any relationship with another man. Sex robots would undoubtedly serve the same purpose well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"LGBTQ individuals represent an admittedly small area of the industry who could find sex robots an invaluable tool in self-discovery and confidence.\n","id":"fb7559d6-46a2-4022-af23-c8c186ee93bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>Quoting the article \"Lee opposed secession during the winter of 1860-1861, and in the letter to his sister Anne already quoted described his \u201cdevotion to the Union\u201d and \u201cfeeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen.\u201d \"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The article argues that Lee was always more of a nationalist.\n","id":"085f4645-10d0-4cad-8fa6-1f4e39dd758f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This verse is commonly misinterpreted But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Adultery means cheating on your spouse. You cannot commit adultery unless you are already married. This does not apply to singles. Other verses use the term sexual immorality , which is extremely vague. The KJV uses fornication instead of sexual immorality , but the original Greek word is porneia, which means illicit or illegal sexual activity . Prostitution, rape, incest, homosexuality, orgies, bestiality can fall under that category of sexual immorality. Conversely, there's no good reason to believe that occasional sex with your girlfriend boyfriend or fiance is sexual immorality. It's an old fashioned interpretation. Perhaps, we are taught that pre martial sex is a sin based on tradition and culture , not the actual religion. In pre industrial age, there was no social safety net, birth control, abortion etc. Accidental pregnancies would be disastrous for the woman and society. Therefore, they needed to create stigma and shame for pre martial sex, especially for women. That's why it's common interpretation of sexual immorality is premartial sex. This notion was passed down, generation to generation. This is important to say because Christianity is rapidly declining. It is because the younger generations are not remaining Christian. Sex is one of the reasons. In this day and age, expecting a young person to wait until marriage for sex is incredibly unrealistic and nearly impossible. In the prime of their life, if they had to choose between sex or religion, they probably will choose sex. And perhaps never return to Christianity. This is one reason why stigma is attached to Christianity. It is seen as uncool, old fashioned, boring, inhibiting, prudish something young people hate being associated with. EDIT My list of what I consider sexual immorality is also subjective. Don't act like it represents the objective Christianity. Thanks. EDIT 2 Sigh. So far, no one is trying to refute my thesis that premarital sex is not a sin. They are just nitpicking other lines, not the premise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For Christianity, premarital sex is not a sin.\n","id":"f4b75272-33dc-4358-9dc2-b7186608643a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should vegan\/vegetarian parents feed their kids the same diet?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents try to raise their children as well as they can. Teaching them compassion and showing them \"the truth behind the steak\" is beneficial to the child as it broadens their perspective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vegan\/vegetarian parents should feed their children the same diet.\n","id":"10ea002e-818f-4c81-be1d-85736196926f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is BDSM Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>Shylock in the Merchant of Venice portrays clearly myths and stereotypes about Jews at the time it was written. Due to this, it was later efficiently used as Nazi propaganda This mirror of society did not show us the lives or characteristics of real Jews at that time but instead mirrored Christian stereotypes about them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the case of BDSM if the author of said texts is not a BDSM practiser themselves the text may mirror myths about BDSM rather than the activity itself.\n","id":"ad14539c-95c0-40f3-b123-6ba9b8647f88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think Solar Roadways are fundamentally flawed to the core and that they're playing on scientific illiteracy to sell their product. I think there's only really one point to this fundamental issue but it's absolutely one that cannot be contested, ignoring all other issues use as road surface, cleaning, damage, price, etc. etc. You will always have more efficient panels if they're angled towards the sun laying them flat will always result in less energy being collected than if they were angled towards the sun. In my opinion, that invalidates this entire idea. Why not build a so roof over the road instead? We already know how to develop them and they're cheaper AND generate more energy than having to develop these magical solar roads. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Solar Roadways or any other 'solar roads' are a dumb idea\n","id":"6756010b-f228-46c6-8718-256d11ca2e90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Vegan Alternative: Pain-free GM Animals?<|ARGUMENT|>It takes 6.7 pounds of grains and forage, 52.8 gallons of water, 74.5 square feet of land, 1,036 btus of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 quarter pound beef burger<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Two-thirds of all crop calories produced in the US are used for animal feed. This depletes a lot of soil and takes up a lot of land to maintain.\n","id":"e2846875-b830-4b0d-b037-35fd9e6acbd0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My idea of criminal insurance is that everyone pays money to an insurance company which insures them if they commit a crime. Instead of using tax money to send criminals to prison, the insurance company would pay the fine amount to the government when someone commits a crime. After they commit the crime, the insurance company can decide some sort of punishment to deter them from committing crime. These punishments can range from torture, to jail if they wish. Since the insurance company cares about making money, they have an incentive to deter crime but keep their clients able to pay their insurance so they can continue to profit. The punishment can be limited to the damages they created a fine equivalent to the amount of bail demanded from the government . Having a wide selection of punishments allows for insurance companies to decide which punishment deter that specific person from committing crime, and they have an incentive to do so because they want to profit and minimize the amount of crime their clients do . Clients can lower their premiums by doing things like allowing the insurance company access to private information or a camera that watches them so that insurance companies know their clients are unlikely to commit crime based off of their behaviors, etc. I believe the current system with prison is ineffective because it costs tax payers money, already an inefficiency, and wouldn't deter crime as well as the discretion of these insurance companies. Collecting fines is overall a better punishment by the government because extra revenue is not only not a drain, it's a benefit. Edit this wouldn't be optional. This would be mandatory for everyone. I'm going to sleep so I'll respond tomorrow to anyone who leaves a response.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Similar to car insurance, having criminal insurance would be efficient and better for society.\n","id":"7bbb1e8b-929b-49d6-a7ea-c5126a48b02f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>L.L. Rice unknowingly purchased the Spaulding manuscript in 1834. Rice, the president of Oberlin College and several others compared the manuscript to the Book of Mormon and stated that they \"could detect no resemblance between the two, in general or detail.\u201d New York Observer, 5 February 1885.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This theory claims that the historical parts of the Book of Mormon were plagiarized from an unpublished manuscript written in 1812 by Solomon Spaulding that Sidney Rigdon secretly acquired. Howe, Mormonism Unveiled, 290 This is false for a number of reasons.\n","id":"524f9eab-fac7-4cc2-a2b9-18effb715c8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people on the internet are up in arms about open source stuff. I love it, let's be clear. Most of the stuff I use is open source software. However, I think it's perfectly reasonable and honestly more practical for companies to be closed source. Quite simply, it's their goddamn intellectual property. And they are entitled to do with it what they please. If that means closed source and that means charging people to use it, so be it. They spent a long time working on their shit. Would you say an author should allow anyone to change his her work? Would you say he she should submit it to the public for free just because you can't afford it? These developers spend a lot of time and effort into making their stuff. They're entitled to having sole control over it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think software should have to be open source. I think the movement to coerce companies to do so is foolish and selfish or the shaming of companies who keep their stuff closed-source.\n","id":"3ceb69d6-0a94-4c7b-9a93-3e55e85c6a18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The schools are teaching kids learned helplessness. It only causes the true victims of the school to suffer at the hands of administration. The current Stop Bullying campaign is propaganda to keep kids from recognizing themselves as autonomous beings and is a key reason why there are more school shootings. When you back an animal into a corner, it will strike with full force. That is what the school system and laws in place do. I also believe the laws in place are turning kids into people who can't solve problems on their own.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Stop Bullying\" campaign is total bullshit. The best thing we can do is let kids defend themselves.\n","id":"332f2cd7-069a-48c3-96b7-220387767044"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Right to bear arms in the US<|ARGUMENT|>The right to bear arms has become an important, lasting expression to many American individuals of their individual freedom and liberty. There are few symbols as powerful, particularly as the right to bear arms for the purposes of, potentially, joining a militia and fighting a tyrannical government is such a tangible concept. The rights to free speech and religion are much less tangible, and lack the power and threat of violence as a check on government tyranny. Such a symbolic expression of freedom resonates too deeply with many Americans to be deprived.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The individual right to arms is a lasting symbol of individual freedom\n","id":"089c3cb9-ec26-4e72-a25b-cfd715495529"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>The Korean Peninsula was split into two countries by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1945. The prevailing conflict between North and South Korea and its intractability are a direct influence of the influence of great powers and its continuance with China playing an important role today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many conflicts that are based on the drawing of borders from decades ago have become intractable precisely because of these borders and because the powers that drew these borders have no interest in resolving these conflicts.\n","id":"882b5666-6551-4681-8fbc-dd13c262bd61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As far as I can see, Libertarians want to do away with government. I believe that there are things far too big for private enterprise to undertake without state assistance communications, schools, infrastructure, police, currency and finance etc. I think that Libertarians can only claim to be able to live in a truly libertarian way because a succession of governments has advanced the country to the point where they are privileged enough to live in an advanced economy in a first world society. I'm from the UK, which I guess makes me a filthy socialist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libertarianism, especially that in the USA, could never successfully work without the 250 years of prior government investment and regulation of infrastructure and society.\n","id":"b49630fe-7364-4061-b6d7-26fdf6f4141e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Killing wild plants affects entire ecosystems including wildlife and native cultures, especially to the point that a major food source goes away. An example of this is cutting down trees that take a long time if ever to bear fruit if replanted such as acorn trees in a drought-prone environment<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Veganism accepts valuing humans\/animals over other lifeforms, which is almost as bad as omnivores accepting valuing humans over animal\/other lifeforms.\n","id":"b293f6ba-9413-4712-bd95-243f503156a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>In its online Help section, Airbnb merely points hosts in the direction of New York City and State websites concerning taxes that they may have to collect or pay on rentals. This lack of detailed information about the considerably complex tax laws surrounding short-term accommodation leads to many Airbnb hosts failing to comply with them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"New York City and State impose multiple taxes that Airbnb guests - all those who rent apartments short-term - are liable to pay. These taxes are not, however, collected by all Airbnb hosts.\n","id":"7d83cf80-2136-43a1-a8db-9efb53590180"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>The old German adage, \"Einmal ist keinmal\" \"Once is never\", applies here. Cheating becomes a problem only when it is a sustained pattern. One lapse should not be blown out of proportion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A one-night stand is not significant enough to warrant telling your partner.\n","id":"67c27afd-784a-479a-9051-b964e70843f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Acknowledging and redressing the wrongs committed against their ancestors would improve the relationship between the Black community and the US Government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reparations do not heal wounds. Rather, the acknowledgement of guilt and a plea for forgiveness does.\n","id":"b649b028-ee2f-4f21-9dce-b36e8f50b2ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Growing up, I saw music delivery move from vinyl to cassette to CD, and now to streaming. My friends and I used to spend hours each month at the record store, browsing through new albums and searching for classics or hidden gems. We'd take them home, put them on and listen while reading the liner notes and digging on the cover art. In many ways, the cover art could be just as cool and compelling as a great record. Now, streaming has replaced record sales as everyone either downloads songs from itunes or creates their own playlist from spotify, pandora, or some other service. In the end, you don't actually own this music, you're essentially leasing it through whatever service you choose. You lose the tactile enjoyment of pulling vinyl from it's sleeve or opening a jewel case. You the lose the discovery of finding more than one great tune on a record. For example, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours had only four singles, so in today's age how would any discover the great tunes on that record like Second Hand News, Never Going Back Again, The Chain, or Gold Dust Woman? While you can find all sorts of undiscovered music through streaming, you don't necessarily own it. IT might be a good companion because of its ease of use, but owning physical copies of the music you love is still superior to having a copy on your phone. , that streaming music is inferior to owning either vinyl or cd's of musical artists work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The death of the CD\/Album as the primary means of listening to music and music ownership is bad\n","id":"9d4bde5f-7fa6-4a32-9097-5f8fbb567162"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>Many studies suggest that income inequality will destroy democracy unless moderated. FT foot of page<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A socialist economy would allow for a smaller gap in economic equality.\n","id":"7c8a86c8-e870-4113-9c44-0427d707e283"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is not a discussion of the practicality of doing so, since it would obviously be extremely difficult to get people to accept a different size for an old unit. Yeah it\u2019s been done for the kilogram but kg is the most screwed up SI unit. And America is the obvious example of how hard it is to get people to change their standards. So, if the metre was 60 longer, it would still have the same amount of centimetres 100 and the same amount of millimetres 1000 , and there would be the same amount of metres in a kilometre 1000 . But each of these lengths would be much more useful. What is a metre? Wikipedia says it\u2019s defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1 299 792 458 seconds. My new definition would put it at 1 187 370 286 seconds. For the furthest distances, such as lightyears, the amount of metres is largely irrelevant. It\u2019s nice and round but not meaningful. It\u2019s so large that reducing the number of metres is not going to have much of an effect and even make the distances easier to conceptualise. Kilometres would be almost exactly a mile. Although I said I would discuss the practicality of changing, I will note that this would get many Americans on board with the metric system. As the furthest, commonly used, measurement of distance, the mile is more satisfyingly long. Walking a kilometre current only takes about 10 mins and doesn\u2019t really feel that far. If something is a mile away, it feels far away, which is what a kilometre should do. Having the metre be 60 longer would make it around 5 foot 3 inches. I\u2019m converting to imperial just to avoid confusion. 5\u20193\u201d is an inch or so under the average height of a female, so it\u2019s very easy to visualise. I can\u2019t think of anything common 3\u20193\u201d long. I have long legs and a large pace for me is around 3.5 feet, so it would be reasonable that an average pace for average people would be close to 2.5 feet, or half of my new metre. Centimetres are too small currently to be of any use. It\u2019s hard to measure one cm with your fingers, unlike inches. While this won\u2019t be totally fixed, they will seem more significant. There is the downside that dick sizes will seem less after the change but eventually things will normalise. Millimetres are the same in that they are too small to visualise accurately. Rulers are cramped with them and make counting mm a pain and inaccurate. Micrometers and nanometers are impossible to visualise currently anyway, and increasing the size of them wouldn\u2019t really have any significant effects, good or bad. In conclusion, the metre should be bigger because at the moment, km, m, cm, and mm are in a state of being too small for measuring the kinds of things we use them to measure. Humans have to conceptualise these different lengths in relation to other things, and the metre is a poor measurement for doing so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The metre should be 60% bigger\n","id":"44757a6a-a21b-4397-a583-ea66486c4de9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Civil Disobedience Can Be Justified<|ARGUMENT|>If civil disobedience is used, a precedence of breaking the law in order to obtain change occurs. When this happens, any person with a personal belief in a cause can engage in civil disobedience and violate the law of the land. With the precedence firmly established, where is the line? If civil disobedience becomes an accepted form of lobbying for a law change, does the law not become useless? Does a constant cycle of law breaking with personal vindication ensue? To engage in civil disobedience is to walk on a slippery slope. The line is so unclear and so fragile that chaos and lawlessness may follow. Quite simply, to break the law in order to obtain change does nothing but create a false sense of justification for even more people to break laws in order to reach an end.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An act of civil disobedience sets a precedence of breaking the law.\n","id":"f09b6a47-b0ed-448b-af57-f2a3929dd732"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT ive been super tired all day but ill get back to yall tomorrow with actual put together rebuttals, i'll try to get to everyone but super sorry if i forget Preface I'm a female who lives in a blue state, and I do not support Donald Trump and most of his policies. I do think that NotMyPresident is a bit silly, but it's not my business what anyone else stands for. That's not what I'm talking about today. That being said, no matter who won this election, the electoral college is NOT to blame. From my understanding, the purpose of the electoral college is to prevent mob rule. Hypothetically, the people voting in the electoral college are more educated than the general public, which is why they're given the power to vote differently than the public tells them to, because they are supposed to have a better understanding of politics and long term consequences. Naturally, the electoral college votes can't represent the people's opinions to an exact number, because there are millions of people's votes that need to be condensed to a much lower number of electoral college votes. In the case of the recent election, the popular vote was very close in Hilary's favor, but the electoral vote was very close in Trump's favor. That's just a natural consequence of the system. If Donald Trump's presidency was a bad enough idea that the educated men and women voting in the electoral college would have voted the other way, then they would've done it. The fact that they didn't says something about how Donald Trump's political ideologies are, no matter how the public views it, not alarmingly different from most republicans, and by extension, the republicans who voted in the electoral college. In my opinion, the electoral college should be reformed so that votes can be split in a state to more accurately represent the ratio of votes in that state like a few states do already . Not only would this help to fix the problems that Californian Republicans and Texan Democrats face, but it could help give smaller parties more of an equal chance in the electoral vote as well. Completely abolishing the electoral college would completely get rid of the avoiding mob rule part, which is very dangerous, because we can't always trust the common people to be educated, and even then, even generally educated people can be manipulated very easily by someone who has TRULY radical ideals. Donald Trump is not a raging radical, therefore the electoral college voted the way they were supposed to , effectively doing their job. edit changed popular to popular vote<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who use this year's US Presidential Election as an example for why the electoral college should be abolished don't make any sense.\n","id":"a2da0bf6-03f1-46fe-b3a4-36ce0f080103"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Of the Eight Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, none of the six witnesses still alive in 1838 is on record disputing Martin Harris's public announcement in 1838 that the eight witnesses had only seen the golden plates in a vision.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some of the witnesses said their view of the golden plates was in a vision, rather than with their natural eyes.\n","id":"4008e15a-b144-4e45-857b-520dc2590941"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people believe that the freed slaves in history lacked resources and education, and modern black poverty is influenced by ancestral slavery.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The after effects of the Civil War have lingering effects on people who were not alive during slavery.\n","id":"b73fe1d2-9fd7-4614-9646-4443f56497bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi all, I've been a long time subscriber to , but this is the first post I've made on this subreddit so let me know if I'm explaining myself poorly or doing something wrong. Essentially, I believe that suicide is a personal decision that people should be allowed to make about their own lives and bodies as long as they are not physically hurting anyone else. I think that there is nothing morally wrong with choosing to die because I don't think choosing to live is morally right neither is right or wrong, existence is just existence. I do not discount the negative repercussions that suicide can have on others, however I do not think that any individual can judge another individual's pain or coping mechanisms and if a person has genuinely sought help for their problem whether a terminal health issue, permanent life change, lifelong battle with mental illness and has come to the conclusion that they are in much more pain existing than they would be not existing, they have the right to do what they need to do to relieve their own pain. I am not suggesting that anyone with depression should have the right to end their lives immediately. I'm not even arguing that suicide should be a legal right. I'm arguing that morally and philosophically, I have not heard a good argument as to why someone who has contemplated and determined that not living has become a superior option to struggling should not be allowed to do so. The rules state to also explain where this viewpoint comes from. I've battled with a pretty serious health condition since college, and although I'm much better now, at the time I was worried that I might die and I researched physician's assisted suicide. After reading a bunch of literature, I came to the conclusion that no doctor could judge a patient's physical pain and that if the patient would rather die with dignity it is their body and their right to do so. I've also struggled with depression and anxiety my entire life. If I have a right to end my physical pain, shouldn't I, someone who has taken measures to alleviate my mental pain medications, working out 5x a week, meditation, positive affirmations, asmr, thinking exercises, journalling and found no permanent solution, also have the right to end my mental pain? I would argue that my mental pain is actually much worse to deal with than my physical conditions. Vomiting and pain are manageable, I have pain pills if I really need them. But the mental torture of believing the people you care about would genuinely be happier without you, that your existence is an anchor on everyone elses life, that you are too emotionally unstable to be around other healthy adjusted people, is not something that even Prozac has been able to fix. The argument that but it could get better is nothing because it could also get worse, it could also stay the same. The argument that you will hurt people around you is valid, however I do not think avoiding hurting others is enough of a reason to endure a lifetime of misery. Suicide is a selfish choice, but I don't think just because it's selfish, it's wrong. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Suicide is a personal choice people have the right to make\n","id":"14ba9443-f84e-40d4-ac09-e2c1aec46652"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think people can't so they don't make decisions. Either their decisions are 100 predictable they don't have to be at the moment by people so they can't make decisions. Or what they do is unpredictable random could be predicted, but no prediction would be more likely to be true than the next as long as they predicted something possible so they can't make decisions. If I'm committing a terrible fallacy ^that ^I ^should've ^noticed of division or composition, please explain how and which it is. If it's another fallacy, please explain how as I'm not well versed in them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People can't make decisions. Either their actions are completely predictable or unpredictable.\n","id":"ca4fe60b-df95-4793-890c-5dc56df7553d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Why do we have corporate influence in government in the first place? I think the government and the free market is like a parent watching over a bunch of kids. There has to be rules to follow, like no bullying, don't pee on the floor, and don't lick frogs. If you were the parent would you let the kids influence you on whether or not they should be able to fight and lick frogs? No, because kids cannot see the bigger picture, and do stupid shit not seeing the consequences of their actions. Companies are the same way, caring about nothing else except profits, which makes them near sighted and possibly dangerous. For the people who believe that corporate or private donations are a form of free speech, consider this. If there were 20 homeless people in a bar who had little money with someone like Warren Buffet, are all their voices not equal? The answer is yes, but according to the lobbyist world view, Warren Buffet has many times as much money as everyone else, and therefore his freedom is greater than everyone else's freedom. This is a clear violation of our values, and no one should stand for it, democrat or republican.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We need all money out of politics\n","id":"06534665-e27c-47a9-b077-4aeb22498610"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Military conscription should apply to men and women equally.<|ARGUMENT|>A wide variety of men is also necessary to ensure there is a diverse enough genetic pool to carry on the species.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A man is required to initiate a birth and is arguably just as important.\n","id":"26e4916c-4f2b-4e6c-9508-54c5ada051e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For anyone who isn't aware, a general overview of the situation following the attack in London where someone radicalised crashed through a crowd of people and stabbed an officer to death, the Daily Mail published a story attacking the Slingshot Channel for a sickening video in which he tested a brand of stab resistant armour as inspiring terrorism . I won't be linking the article, I don't believe in giving the publication any more traffic and ad revenue for their scaremongering. Following the bad publicity YouTube removed the video in question and put a community strike on the channel for creating content that incites violence . All told, I think the strike should be removed, the video restored, and the Daily Mail should lose faith from it's viewership for spinning something innocent into an uproar and banking on the death of an officer in London by needlessly stirring the outrage pot. For those who don't know of it, the Slingshot Channel is a hobbyist channel, run by a big burly german man who loves slingshots and tools and demonstrating them. It's no different than any other hobby channel such as those for shooting sports, historical weaponry, archery, etc it's a guy who has a passion and shares it online. In the video in question, he did demonstrate stabbing through a stab resistant vest, but he didn't run the video as a tutorial . He didn't specifically point out any weak points in the armour, he didn't encourage people to go try this he had a knife, and put all his weight into it, and showed that he could get through. The point of the video, and he said as much in the interview the Daily Mail got with him, was to demonstrate the stab resistant armour is not impenetrable. Every armour has a limit, and the people wearing it should not act deftly as if they're suddenly invincible wearing it he also said that he hoped demonstrating weakness in the armour would encourage law enforcement to be considerate of the equipment they're purchasing for their officers in order to keep them safe. Quote 'If they change police equipment because I have shown it is vulnerable then I may be saving some lives . There are dozens of YouTube channels here in the US dedicated to firearms. Dozens of videos demonstrating the effectiveness of different levels of body armour and the effectiveness of different ammunition against them. Channels showing human torso moulded ballistic gelatin being hit by different calibres to show their wound potential. Using the arguments of the Daily Mail, all such channels should be removed for inciting violence and tutoring people in how to murder police officers. Same for any channel that demonstrates any weapon or tool, for fun or sport or any other reason. I think it's ridiculous. The video did not encourage anyone to go out and attempt to stab anyone, the video did not make a point to show off techniques or special tactics. And even if it did, I can link you to dozens of firearms channels and tactical training channels who far more explicitly demonstrate the capability of weapons and the best means of employing them on other people. Context is everything. We can take this content as the evil in the world, training people to kill efficiently and end their fellow man in cold blood or we can have some perspective and realise that most of the content out there is educational, entertainment, and meant to be taken in the context it's provided. The video had nothing to do with the stabbing, there's no evidence that this attacker in particular watched that video and was inspired to commit violence solely because of it. The video was a hobbyist demonstrating something he was interested in, out of both the spirit of fun and the desire to educate. Either the community strikes should be removed, or any channel dedicated to demonstrating any weapon regardless of context should be removed for inciting violence .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Slingshot Channel should have it's YouTube strike removed\n","id":"6c852921-040e-400c-bc60-07041a1fbc9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Lab-Grown Meat a suitable replacement for Factory Farming?<|ARGUMENT|>Culturing the meat provides opportunities to controll its composition on cellular level, like optimising fat content or reducing purines compound contributing to the gout development.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It will be healthier, as it is created in a sterile environment.\n","id":"5858394e-1444-4a3d-8270-f219cb8d1a13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For example government funded benefits to people with even small traces of Native American genetic makeup. Is this really justifiable? Are the taxpayers who are funding these people's free income really responsible for the actions of men who lived hundreds of years ago who they may not even have any genetic relation to? It gets even more complicated when we start talking about percentages for instance, a person who is maybe 1 4th Native and 3 4th Anglo would qualify for these benefits despite the fact that the majority of their genetic makeup represents the people that they are claiming victimization by. But this is really not a relevant piece of the original topic so don't feel obliged to include it in your arguments. Edit 2 This example has done nothing but misrepresent my original thought, and I clearly do not have a strong enough understanding of Native American history to justifiably use it. Thanks to rigoding90 for making me realize this. Note My view extends far beyond any controversy involving Native Americans, to include any instance of this phenomenon. Change my view. Edit 1 It's currently 1am and I just realized that there are several very detailed replies to this post. I need to get to bed so I can get up in time for work tomorrow, but I will be reading through them in the AM. Thanks for taking the time to reply if you did.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it is ridiculous for one ethnic group to be indebted to another based on the actions of people who've been dead for hundreds of years.\n","id":"9400834e-8c4a-438f-b56e-b6e0c425855d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The child will weigh their parents down, reducing the family's quality of life. Once the parents pass away, their child could end up in an adult foster care, or worse homeless. The parents should reflect on the quality of life their child would have, the burden they would be, and if they can function in society. I feel that the parents would always bear the burden of their child, and will ruin their lives. However I feel that this opinion could be cold and inhumane. People have the right to bring their offspring into the world. However, as I said, quality of life should be taken into consideration. Please. I am really torn on this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a child shows signs of being mentally retarded in the womb, they should be aborted.\n","id":"0ef5bc87-3f8d-4651-87fd-510164c303aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It makes you forget things, such as important points if say, you're doing a chemistry report. It furthermore makes you sloppy with calculations grammar. Last but not least, I believe that Marijuana will make you unable to focus, therefore not doing the work assignments that you should be doing. I am open minded and willing to hear why it might not be. EDIT I mean as in smoke marijuana, and still be able to do proper work . I live in Denmark.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe you CANNOT work\/do school assignments, while under the effects of marijuana.\n","id":"8183ac9f-bbe5-43b5-a1ac-7570d0a5caac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Israel Remain Democratic Even If that Would Ultimately Lead to it No Longer Being a Jewish State?<|ARGUMENT|>Choosing to be Jewish would alienate Arab Israelis, a key group in the Palestinian peace process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel choosing to be Jewish would destroy the Palestinian peace process.\n","id":"9bce09b7-7785-4828-b27d-692d878bbcd0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Though I am opposed to anti gambling legislation and think people should be allowed to use their money for any peaceful purpose, I feel there is really no good reason to gamble my money in a casino. It is one thing to make bets with friends every now and then for fun, or bet money at something you are good at. However, casino games are specially designed so that the odds are heavily in favor of the casino and against the gambler. You are almost guaranteed to lose money, and from what I've heard about casinos, it's very easy to get carried away and lose hundreds of dollars. Not to mention the risk of acquiring a gambling addiction. It may be fun for some at the time, but it seems to me that there are many other ways I could be spending that money and having fun for better value. However, having never gambled in a casino I've been in them with my parents as a kid though , I don't feel I can fully criticize it without hearing the other side. But until somebody changes my view, I don't plan on ever trying it. EDIT Obviously, I can't say what other people find to be fun. But my opinion is that I personally have no good reason to ever try it, as it seems like something I could easily get sucked into and then regret gambling my money away later. I am asking for you guys to convince me that it is something worth trying.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see any good reason to gamble at a casino.\n","id":"5ce1d43c-6b04-425b-9289-4d14f25175a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think things like age, race, country of origin and possibly even sex and names should not included in the job application due to the fact it may lead to prejudice. I think there should be a system where the applications are filtered out initially on the base of skills, experience and general competence for that job but only solely based on the resume. then I know there will be an interview but I believe this way it will give a chance to people who actually deserve it since humans are the ones that handle applications and in the end humans are bound to error, you don't know who is deciding if you ever get an interview or not, someone might hold a grudge against your family member or dismiss you for being too old or have too many children or even look up your info online and judge you based on that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think personal information should not be included and\/or requested in any job application.\n","id":"29db3031-d0df-4ffe-89ab-402899577da4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>According to the theory, Mitochondrial Eve is not the first woman, or the first human, or the first member of a new species. Other women alive when Eve can and have dependents today; they simply do not have living descendants who are descended only through female links. Furthermore, the Mitochondrial Eve is not fixed. It changes with time. Mitochondrial Eve - An Overview for College Students<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of a human genome does not necessarily mean Adam and Eve are responsible for genetics.\n","id":"85b6d3f6-fd97-4c9e-9a4a-bf7b5b369104"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that a world that isn't driven by the obsession of copulation would be much more productive punintentional in the professional world. I understand it's necessary in the circle of life, but the majority of people only procreate for recreational purposes and no intention of having children. I think it's sick to think that people engage in it only because it feels good or brings satisfaction, and I think people use each other's bodies, essentially, to masturbate. I look forward to hearing your responses, and what you guys have to say<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I find the idea of sexuality sickening and primal.\n","id":"452afc13-a21a-4f15-98d2-c11fb183c732"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Under the status quo, a lot of people with violent criminal histories and substance abuse issues are allowed to have kids. Licences would prevent those who are objectively unsuitable from having children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"What makes a parent good may be difficult to define, but what makes a parent unacceptably bad is easy to define and detect. Every child deserves a minimally competent parent.\n","id":"02f5d0d4-f03d-440b-a926-f2edab6f7120"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Some book-based religions have documents their sacred books and their comments to claim that \"God gave free will\" to mankind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Providing an authoritative document as evidence for a fact is accepted in most situations.\n","id":"3549f0f1-8874-4279-89a4-51b8fa16808e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a long one so please refrain from commenting unless you have 5 10 minutes to read the entire post. This is a firmly held view of mine and a controversial one, so I've laid it out in full detail. I\u2019d be interested to hear any informed arguments against it. Thanks in advance I think there is a big problem in the US related to the number of women with active drug addiction giving birth. A recent CDC report noted that the rates of this occurring are growing quickly. In my home state of WV, more than 3 of woman giving birth are actively using opioids. Being born with an opiate dependence and the subsequent neonatal abstinence syndrome has been associated with declining school test scores beginning in elementary school and getting worse with time. Good data on how it affects adults isn't yet available because this is such a new phenomenon. Add to this the fact that these children may grow up in the foster care system or with a parent suffering from an uncontrolled addiction and you can see why there is a serious risk of them developing an opioid use disorder themselves as adults. The medical community agrees that long acting reversible contraceptives LARC , which includes IUDs and hormonal implants, are the most effective means of birth control. These are over 99 effective in preventing conception and effective for 3 5 years after placement. They are safe and fertility resumes quickly after removal. Importantly, they are far more effective than oral contraception because you don't have to remember to take it every day. Women who are suffering from opiate use disorder should be able to voluntarily accept payment from the government in exchange for using a LARC. This would be a one time payment and the LARC would be provided and placed by an experienced physician free of charge. This would be entirely voluntary and the LARC could be removed at any time if not wanted anymore. Once a woman is reliably in remission from an opiate use disorder, she is no longer eligible for payment. While in some states these products already very affordable with the right insurance coverage, these still are not highly utilized services by this population and I think an incentive would fix that. x200B Before you try to , here are some counter arguments I've heard in the past and have already prepared answers for, in order from the least reasonable to most reasonable x200B My tax dollars shouldn't have to pay for women to have sex. They just need to stop sleeping around. A No, they don't. They need good sexual education and access to reliable reproductive services and they need to be available to everyone, not just those who can afford it. Abstinence is not a realistic solution. x200B Drug addiction is a choice. They don't deserve help. A You're misinformed on this matter. While there a certainly some bad decisions involved, substance use disorders are a disease and not a choice. The only effective means to combat the opioid epidemic is to treat it as a disease and not a crime or a character flaw. x200B This would be way too expensive and a waste of taxpayer dollars. A In the long term the savings in government spending would far outweigh the costs. Without insurance a LARC costs 600 1000, and the cost of the in office procedure is close to this. Then there's the actual payment. So, let\u2019s say 3000 per patient in exchange for 5 years of coverage. To cover all the women using opioids in the country sounds very expensive but consider that the average cost for a stay in a neonatal ICU is 3000 per day, and most children are there for days if not weeks. Most likely this will be paid through Medicaid so it\u2019s still taxpayer money and much more of it. That's not to mention the resulting medical and psychological problems these children may develop as adults that will lead to a whole host of downstream costs. x200B This is eugenics. A I agree it is always good to be on high alert for eugenics, because true eugenics is seriously messed up stuff. But this isn't eugenics because this isn't sterilization, i.e. it isn't permanent. It is voluntary and totally reversible, so these women could return to fertility and have children at any point they want to contribute to the gene pool. I guess you might say we're systematically eliminating a group of people with a syndrome, if you decided that being born to a drug addicted mother and being severely disadvantaged for the rest of your life because of it was some type of disease. However, this is just absolutely not the same as an example of real eugenics, like forcibly aborting all children with Down Syndrome, which is terrible and messed up. This is not abortion, this is the voluntary use of contraception and it\u2019s not true eugenics. x200B This is medically and morally unethical A This is the only argument that really gives me pause. Undeniably paying someone to have a medical procedure done is unethical. While this is a very safe procedure that can be done in an office, all medical interventions have the potential for consequences. This is especially worrisome when you realize this isn't entirely voluntary and is in fact coercion. Because there's a question of whether a person with severe opioid addiction can truly consent to this medical procedure when they're being paid for it. They're desperate for money because they need it to buy more drugs on the street to ward off withdrawal, so it takes advantage of this population\u2019s vulnerability. I agree that from an ethical standpoint this idea is difficult to defend. However, my response is simple. What's worse, the idea I've just proposed or what we're allowing to happen every day now? Just leaving these women to deal with this terrible addiction and making their children the victims of something they have no control over is wrong. While we quibble over the ethics of paying them for a medical procedure, other people out there are taking advantage of their addiction and paying them for sex that will often be unprotected and lead to unanticipated pregnancies. Those children will have a hard childhood with a lot of trauma and poverty and not a lot of love, and that will lead to hard lives for them as adults. Adults who then may turn to opioids as a means to cope. While we work to find a way to help those caught up in the opioid epidemic, an essential step is minimizing the negative downstream effects on society. x200B So that's it. Thank you for reading and please change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government should offer to pay women with substance use disorders to be on birth control\n","id":"12e8d4f0-5b61-471f-b35d-51c826bba385"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abortion<|ARGUMENT|>On \"the fetus cant think argument\": Animal abuse, suicide and even cutting down a tree are frequently illegal on the basis that these things have some value and should not be destroyed, killed, or treated inhumanely. It has little to do with the degree of consciousness attained by a creature. If the destruction of any species with a significant value is illegal, what makes abortion any different?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is wrong to kill fetuses on the basis that they can't think\/feel.\n","id":"a5db9607-560e-4402-84b7-2def3aa06694"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>Jesus' disciples had real experiences with one whom they believed was the risen Christ. Paul quotes a profession of faith likely dating from 3-5 years after the resurrection, in which it's claimed the resurrected Jesus appeared to Peter, James and the other disciples, as well as 500+ others. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John confirm Jesus eating, drinking, and touching among groups, contradicting hallucination as explanation. Unlikely they were lying, because many died rather than change their story.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The bodily resurrection of Jesus is supported by multiple pieces of credible historical evidence, each of which is difficult to explain apart from the resurrection.\n","id":"fd02ad6c-645f-483d-8d82-e53b0005e65d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For a little context for those who don\u2019t know the bombing of Dresden took place between the 13th and the 15th of February 1945, and was an Allied firebombing with around 25,000 casualties. Here\u2019s the wiki article for more info. Dresden until then had been basically untouched by the strategic bombing campaigns that had previously targeted other German cities like Hamburg or Berlin. Now, of course, I don\u2019t advocate for wholesale area bombing of cities and the associated civilian casualties . However, at the time, precision bombing had yet to be developed, and the necessity to fly high to avoid flak AA emplacements further reduced targeting accuracy. Because Dresden was mostly untouched by bombing, it was home to important railway yards and was a mid sized industrial center. In a total war against the Nazis, even a midsize industrial center could not be left to produce armaments and munitions. And strategic bombing did cause major problems in german production Albert Speer said that despite armament production increasing from 1943 to 1944 because of the conversion from producing consumer goods to a total war economy, real armament production significantly undershot estimates. The bombings at the Romanian oil refineries around Ploiesti also cut off a huge part of Germany\u2019s oil supply, which was already severely limited. By making sure no industrial center could be left standing, including Dresden, the Allies could cripple the German war machine and avoid thousands of Allied casualties. Despite the bombing of Dresden ultimately not succeeding in many of its major objectives, with the rail yards remaining mostly untouched, it was still necessary to bomb it. The second, more controversial aspect of strategic bombing trying to reduce civilian morale through repeated pummeling. This, again, was necessary, and successful. Most people will point out the Blitz as an example of why strategic bombing doesn\u2019t reduce civilian morale however, I feel like the Blitz isn\u2019t comparable to Allied bombing of German cities, since it was one city and limited in scale. The strategic bombing campaigns over Germany were successful in reducing civilian morale, towards the end at least. To show the Germans that nowhere were they safe, no city could be left untouched. This meant destroying Dresden. Appeasement has showed that the Nazis couldn\u2019t be stopped by diplomacy if not by the pen, then by the B 17. Dresden was just a cog in that machine. To summarize, Dresden wasn\u2019t good, but, in the circumstances at the time, it was necessary. Can\u2019t wait for the Wehraboos Edit I\u2019d like to emphasize that I don\u2019t think it was a good thing, just necessary given the circumstances of the time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The bombing of Dresden was justified.\n","id":"2f4a9699-9ef5-421d-9b34-ca4da098b3d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a man with a relatively small waist but a relatively moderate sized penis. This has caused problems when it comes to male underwear. I used to buy L size underwear, which has the height to accommodate my penis size when it is erect and does not cause pressure on my testicles due to the wide bottom section, but the large waist size for the underwear has lead to the underwear being loose and tends to fall a bit after short time of wearing. Also, when my penis is flaccid it tends to fall off to the side, which I think isn't good for my penis in the long run. As such, I switched to an M size underwear, which fixes the flaccid penis and waist issue, but this causes problems when I suffer from involuntary erection. My penis feels very uncomfortable on top of it being bent at sharper angles when erection happens. When sitting, the narrow bottom part of the underwear would occasionally press on my testicles, needing me to adjust my underwear and testicles, something that is obviously not viable outside my own private space. A good underwear should make my penis and testicles comfortable at all times while holding tight on my waist yet none of the brands I use can do that. I would like to see fellow Redditors' opinion on this NSFW yet very important issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Male underwear designs should be taking account of penis when both flaccid &amp; erect and testicle sizes\n","id":"5dfe1d8a-172a-447a-96c0-50f79692bcb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>The \"Intelligent design\" hypothesis is clearly intended to support religious beliefs. It is a purposeful rejection of well-established evolutionary theory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A faith-based hypothesis discourages alternate ideas and rejects plausible opposing ideas.\n","id":"3928dc20-f91b-4749-b183-976ae2c09d29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Campaigns only be Funded by the Government?<|ARGUMENT|>Tax rates have changed in favour of the wealthy since money started to have a bigger influence on politics. In 1960, the top marginal tax rate was 91% while today it is 39.6%<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Economic elites and corporate interest groups have a substantial influence in US government policy Gilens and Page, p. 1\n","id":"1a6b7cae-f6ad-41cd-9c9e-aa569f66d5e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sikh school pupils be allowed to carry ceremonial daggers?<|ARGUMENT|>The last thing Britain needs is more religious and cultural tension. We already have conflict with ethnic minorities because of increasingly restrictive immigration laws, the rise of the BNP, generally poor conditions on the housing estates where refugees and asylum seekers with low incomes are forced to live, unjust wars in their homelands that we have been a party to etc. Now we are failing to even negotiate with children by stopping Muslims wearing hijabs, and now Sikhs wearing Kara bangles and Kirpans. No matter who is in the right, Britain will be destabilised and ultimately destroyed by the resulting conflicts unless we maintain order by calming everyone down.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fuelling an atmosphere of religious and cultural tension in Britain.\n","id":"e98636b9-f2e0-4070-8e42-2878b8f40c76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>An interim committee on target selection feared that dropping the A-bomb in uninhabited areas might not adequately impress the Japanese militarists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The risk of failure when dropping it in an uninhabited area was considered too great.\n","id":"5a347d23-9393-42a6-a343-2dcab3b9b7b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Plato suggests in his Theory of Forms that we see only the shadows of objects, like fireside puppetry on a cave wall, and that these shadows are the basis for our understanding of the world. All of our attempts to describe an object describe not the object, but the shadow left by the object, limited by our perception our categories and even our names for objects are based on similar characteristics that hint at the object's true form. Our perceptions of both what makes a hot dog and what makes a sandwich are limited to our perception of the shadows they cast. Their shadows, though, share many characteristics, and at times their silhouettes are indistinguishable. Don't let your perception of a hot dog and a sandwich muddy the metaphysical concept of a sandwich. tl dr hot dogs are quite possibly sandwiches, and you can't know otherwise<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You can't argue that X isn't in Y category, per Plato\n","id":"ef260f4f-f631-4ed7-8501-0fd93a96353c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The United States is justified in using private military firms abroad to pursue its military objectives<|ARGUMENT|>\"PMCs make it possible to break vicious cycles of violence. They could do this by. providing troops for outside interventions. The importance of providing troops is often argued with reference to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Rwanda has come to epitomize situations where PMCs could be used to break cycles of violence: a situation marked by widespread agreement around the necessity of outside intervention, but an equally widespread unwillingness to provide troops. In such a situation, those suggesting that PMCs could be used to enhance security argue that they could make up for the lack of willing and qualified troops.\" Anna Leander, \"The Market for Force and Public Security: The Destabilizing Consequences of Private Military Companies,\" Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 42 No. 5, Sept 2005, pp. 605-622<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"PMCs can be used to help intervene in dangerous situations where other countries are unwilling to provide troops and supplies.\n","id":"6ff4aa43-ae26-482f-a5c5-bc39d839d561"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>The UN has said that gender stereotypes can harm and limit children's capacity to develop their personal abilities, pursue their professional careers and make choices about their lives and life plans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender roles stifle individuality in children from a young age.\n","id":"15d53e6b-c435-4a6b-af9c-7fbd4e163173"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a Hindu by birth from a very spiritual family. My parents love God, have taught me the ways to be a better person and have never forced me to go to temples or read any religious scripts. They believe that faith comes from within. I am an agnostic so I've been told and I believe that there is God. Remembering God during my sad and happy moments gives me purpose in life. I love knowing that God is there for me during tough times and all my happy moments are his her gift to me for working hard towards it. I have many questions that are unanswered and I think it mostly comes from the fact that people have made up so many religions. Whenever I talk to my Christian husband, we have so many similar stories that basically teach you the same things in life and to do good. The fundamentals appear to be the same. I've also had conversations with my Christian friends who basically told me no, but 'have you let Christ in your heart? Because that's the only way to heaven' even when i tell them that I am not an athiest and that I believe in God, just not a particular one and I hate to pick sides. It's like living in the South and having to pick a football team. I don't care either way if i like football and enjoy watching it, who cares if I don't pick a team? EDIT Thank you for all of you who were very quick to essentially point out that a. Why do I even believe in god ? b. Why do I claim monotheism? Sadly, did not really enjoy the outcome of the post. Was hoping for people who actually has faith in God to respond but apart from a couple, it's basically athiests raining down the same ole' questions on me about my faith. Not a single point was made that actually would even pique my interest to change any part of my view. I should clarify that I said I believe that all gods are the same as in monotheistic polytheism, rather than polytheism.'The truth Ultimate Reality is one, Sages call it by different names there is one God, Supreme Reality perceived differently.' Hindu Deities represent various perceptions of a one God. Pantheism is the view that God is essentially identical with the universe and totally immanent in the world God is the universe and the universe is God. Thus pantheism seems to be the most accurate label for Hinduism. If you disagree because you don't even think God exists, why would it bother you what kind, shape or form of God I have chosen to follow? . I am not trying to impose my beliefs, so shouldn't those who don't think god even exists, because that is YOUR view belief as well. How your belief is superior to mine, I do not understand. Science doesn't have 100 evidence that God doesn't exist. It jsut doesn't have evidence of God existing. And for all those who argued for the sake of arguing, I'd tip my fedora back if i had one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think it matters what religion you are, at the end of the day, if there is God, there is just one. It's people who created religions, but there is just one God no matter what stories you make up, what religion you follow.\n","id":"f233dcc9-9d34-4672-92c2-c0ff700aa3f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>The Center for Talent Information found that companies with 2-D diversity - which involves diversity that is both inherent and acquired - innovate and outperform others<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Organisations with culturally diverse workforces have higher rates of internal innovation.\n","id":"b9997d77-3e9b-4a3e-851e-8b519d083e77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI is the best way that we can arrive at the post-scarcity economy that advancing technologies have been promising since the dawn of the industrial revolution. If you want a future in which the average work day gets shorter because we have automation to do the work for us, you want UBI.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI makes it possible for some people to work less.\n","id":"5071770b-9f1a-4d34-8626-06abe24125f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people have been bringing up that the countries on Trump's ban aren't the ones that have people who killed Americans in terrorist acts in the US. Which is valid. But I'd go even further America doesn't have a terrorism problem. There's around an average of 10 deaths from terrorism in the US per year. How low could we possibly get that in a country with more guns than people? Even assuming a diffuse probability in Muslims having a certain chance to commit these acts which again, is not the case , that is a 10 3.3 million chance that any given Muslim will kill someone through terrorism. And if you stopped all Muslim immigration which this ban is not even doing , that would decrease your chance of death from terrorism by 0.0003 50,000 So around 1 more death from terrorism a year. And this is ignoring the possible increase in terrorism from growing animosity, problems with relations between countries, the deaths of refugees that we don\u2019t help, etc. EDIT Not exactly the change I thought might happen, but it turns out that the ban might actually increase the risk of terrorism due to alienation. I said Trump's ban will have no impact on it . It very well could have an impact. Just probably not the direction we'd like.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Terrorism in the US is not a big deal and Trump's ban will have no impact on it\n","id":"0f6c362c-15a6-46b1-a6b9-32ac415a011c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>A YouGov survey found that the majority of Americans would support drawing US involvement to a close and bringing the troops back home.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Elizabeth Warren's foreign policy views make her an ideal candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination.\n","id":"304e6cab-04a4-4922-85ba-b7ea1615ab66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>Airbnb does not have to serve all members of the population. The point is that Airbnb meets a need amongst a segment of the population that was previously unmet, thereby making the economy more efficient by meeting demand with supply.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Airbnb and the hotel industry are not mutually exclusive; people who cannot use Airbnb will still be able to use hotels and hostels to meet their travelling needs.\n","id":"f33e97e1-fd3e-4c65-9ddc-e5d3114caf0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sentinelese is a language spoken by the indigenous people of the North Sentinel Island of India. Anytime outsiders try to make contact with them, they react in a very hostile manner. People haven\u2019t even been able to properly identify which language family the language belongs to. Being that interaction with speakers of a language is a huge part of learning a language, I argue that Sentinelese is the hardest living language to learn. A few points that I should also make A My view is that this is the hardest living language to learn, however, I will agree that it\u2019s very possible there are other languages currently spoken in the world which are in a very similar situation to Sentinelese. i.e. isolated hostile tribe speaking an unclassified language . B The US military has published a list of the hardest languages to learn and about how many hours it takes to become competent in them. However, this list is only for English speakers. My argument is that Sentinelese is hard for speakers of any language. C While a baby born in this tribe would have 0 problems being able to speak Sentinelese after a few years, this isn\u2019t considered language learning by linguists, but rather as language acquisition. So this  is focusing strictly on second language learners.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sentinelese is the hardest living language to learn.\n","id":"533e3cae-c4be-4183-b25c-3cb353e8cd77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>And as an example, burning the US flag to protest policy instituted by the government is not hateful, nor does it threaten any specific person. Where as Burning the Pride Flag could be used to threaten an LGBTQ person\/community. Just as burning the flag to threaten Americans would be<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Actually there are several forms of 'speech' that are recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States that are literally not words. Flag burning being one such example.\n","id":"9f3b6ebb-dd49-4972-9c46-6768f21602dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Steroid Use in Sports Be Allowed?<|ARGUMENT|>Athletes often sacrifice a great deal to achieve professional status, and may not easily be able to transition out of sports and into another career. That makes this choice incredibly coercive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalising steroids would force all athletes to take steroids if they wanted to remain competitive.\n","id":"acc3a1cc-0e98-44de-9e5b-e62c593e2a52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>There are a number of organizations and platforms that support and fight for matters affecting members of the LGBT+ community. If asexuals and aromantics were accepted, these organizations could provide assistance to them as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without a community that can be turned to for assistance, asexuals and aromantics are more vulnerable to discrimination.\n","id":"2abe83ce-f9cf-452e-bd0f-def0157bb4ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A society with no gender would be better<|ARGUMENT|>It is better to update the gender stereotypes to better reflect reality, and to ensure people understand that stereotypes reflect a greater likelihood and not a certainty, than it is to pretend there are no meaningful differences between males and females.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender steretypes reflect underlying neurological differences between men and women\n","id":"7f72f873-484f-4834-ae42-4d43ede91e5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it OK to publicly approach a stranger for sex?<|ARGUMENT|>It can be very uncomfortable for some women to need to spell out that they are uninterested explicitly. This discomfort can be avoided if the man can read her body language.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One ought have a good understanding of basic body language, so he knows how to distinguish between somebody who is romantically interested versus romantically uninterested.\n","id":"ad0b670b-4b4f-4d68-ba0c-3c3c517d2537"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So the deal is I have a button and if I press it no every person conceived from now on will be cishet. I'm gay, I deeply care about LGBT people and have volounteered for organizations that advocate for our rights, I think it's like my strongest identity. But anyway I would press that button. LGBT people experience a lot of bad shit even in the most accepting parts of the world. It's because of phobias but also kind of inherent things like how it's harder for people in same sex relationships to have children and dysphoria. Meanwhile there are like no upsides? I guess there was like this thing where supposedly same sex partners would have a lot more pleasure with sex than opposite sex partners. It has been interpreted as a result of better knowledge of the parts or whatever but I don't know if it couldn't be explained by the fact that there are a lot of oppressive ideas around sex that limit pleasure and same sex partners are a lot less likely to believe in them. I don't think a lot of people are strictly anti pleasure but something like I can't be fucked by my gf with a strap on even though I want it cause that's gay is something a lot of straight men would be able to think. So in the end I believe that pressing the button would be better for us all, . edit I probably have worded something badly since a lot of people are misunderstanding. I'm explaining a thought experiment here. I am not in possesion of any magic buttons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I would end LGBTness if I could\n","id":"92c0b770-1d6c-4187-a1b7-f8b606117ece"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is killing vampires immoral?<|ARGUMENT|>One solution could be that humans donate\/sell blood and vampires buy the blood like humans buy their food.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are solutions other than killing vampires to allow humans and vampires to coexist.\n","id":"1149032e-cf55-4122-89e9-e1335e13cd1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When discussing this with my friends and peers, I never could seem to get an honest reason why somebody would choose to download anything illegally. Where is societies morale compass? It seems to be supressed or ignored while we extend our lives onto the internet. Downloading entertainment illegally is a perfect example of that. This may be a rather outdated discussion, as folks are more inclined to get their entertainment legally through streaming services now a days. But about a decade ago, I never understood why people felt a sense of entitlement to download entertainment illegally music mostly . Merely because they felt that the record companies were ripping them off . Well two wrongs making a right is a complete fallacy. Also, copyright laws are statuted. Indviduals seem to work very hard to find loopholes in the text, just to justify their possession of illegally acquired entertainment. Though, I'm not familiar with international laws Could somebody, please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that it's absolutely unjustifiably wrong to download anything illegally.\n","id":"d7cd3ffb-b37e-4165-afb5-0f11e5c831a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is DNA testing worth the money?<|ARGUMENT|>Many DIY DNA tests available to buy are aimed at people wishing to trace their ancestryor determine their immediate parents if this is unknown or in dispute.For those tracing their ancestors, the danger is that if you have a firm belief in where you originated and you receive results that overturn that view it can lead to confusion, upset and a loss of identity. The same argument applies to those individuals who seek paternity tests, especially those who may have been adopted as the results can cause huge disruption to the individual concerned and their adoptive family.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bad results can have a negative impact on an individual\u2019s physical and psychological health.\n","id":"c91e433c-091f-4177-9285-7b4e03023409"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Withdrawing from Iraq<|ARGUMENT|>Regional powers are most likely to provide funding alone, and possibly small arms to factions in Iraq, in the case of a civil war. This is partly because they simply are unlikely to want to make substantial financial and resource commitments to these countries. It is also partly predicated on the notion that they would rather not see a civil war spill into a regional war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regional powers would provide limited support to Iraqi proxies in any civil war\n","id":"801b743d-329c-4d14-b838-09770881b4e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Needle exchanges<|ARGUMENT|>David Noffs, Founder and Executive Director of the Life Education Center. \"Should needle exchange be publicly funded?\". PBS: \"Many needle exchange programs do not make any serious effort to treat drug addiction. I have visited sites around Chicago where people who request info on quitting their habit are given a single sheet on how to go cold turkey -- hardly effective treatment or counseling.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many needle exchanges do not try to change drug-addict behavior\n","id":"18bc8cea-b6fc-456b-9e4c-63da79ab85da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>use torture to obtain information from suspected terrorists.<|ARGUMENT|>The use of force and fear in enhanced interrogation gives quick results. In the event of a bomb hidden somewhere in Manhattan, it\u2019s vital to have information quickly. Nobody, even the most diehard proponents of enhanced interrogation, would suggest that it is pleasant or should be used on a routine basis; the point is that techniques such as waterboarding are effective and fast. Responding to terrorist threats is something that needs to be dealt with in minutes or hours. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of due process and legal procedure that they trials and questioning take place in a framework of days or weeks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Time is of the essence in a crisis. When confronted with extremists who see a virtue in their own death, extraordinary methods may be required.\n","id":"eb8071e6-baf9-4450-b2af-37b49c1f300e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Antifa good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>The ninth characteristic, that life is a battle and, according to Eco, an fascist must hold to this philosophy so that they can battle through life, is too broad to meaningfully assess true fascists. This characteristic will not inform anyone on the fascistic nature of a person as this is common phrase people use to motivate themselves from inaction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ur-Fascism is more a list of typical human behaviors than an actual definition of what is \"fascist\" This broad definition would allow for anyone to be opposed by Antifa as having fascistic tendencies\/ideologies.\n","id":"14b707ad-ddc3-42d0-b57d-acebad7697c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Giving people assets would be able to empower people, because they can utilize it better like use it for their needs, when money doesn't accomplish that due to issues like not receiving it or it being stolen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Due to UBI giving everyone more money, a wider group of people might now be at risk of financial crimes.\n","id":"9ae6cd74-dab6-4d59-b6c8-156dc43de8df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Neo-functionalism explains the integration of the European Union<|ARGUMENT|>Stanley Hoffman used a Neo-Realist view of International relations to build the theory of intergovernmentalism. In a neo-realist understanding the international system is characterised by anarchy and the distribution of economic and military capabilities is of primary importance. States will not trust each other but can still reach agreement, but the agreement will be characterised by bargaining and negotiation not an automatic process! \u2018Nations prefer the certainty, or the self-controlled uncertainty, of national self-reliance, to the uncontrolled uncertainty of the untested blender\u2019.1 1 Wikipedia, \u2018Intergovernmentalism\u2019, en.wikipedia.org,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The international system is characterised by anarchy and the distribution of economic and military capabilities\n","id":"e3e96a33-efe8-4565-9a81-dcd78ef3f5fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Dr. Leana Wen was recently ousted as President of Planned Parenthood. A key difference in opinion leading to the ouster was her focus on Planned Parenthood as an organization providing all kinds of reproductive health care, with advocacy second. Opponents at Planned Parenthood wanted the focus to be abortion advocacy, with health care second. She is in the right here. Hammer and tongs advocacy may be better for fundraising, but health care provision that happens to prominently include abortion wins people over to abortion rights in the long run as they become mainstream medical care instead of an isolated political issue. Not to mention that the other care is super important in and of itself. If Planned Parenthood wants to help women, it should go back to Dr. Wen's strategy and make medical care the focus with abortion being a necessary part.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dr. Wen is right about the future of Planned Parenthood\n","id":"710d1de1-ba41-497f-b8f5-7bd25bfa0f56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Equality of Outcome vs Equality of Opportunity<|ARGUMENT|>People accept the authority of the state so long as it fulfills the social contract If the state fails to provide all of its citizens with economic opportunities and a decent standard of living, the social contract breaks down and there is an increased risk of violence occurring.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inequality is often a root cause of civil wars and conflicts between states.\n","id":"57e0e3b5-972b-413b-9453-a0c135575619"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As in title, my girlfriend opted to be an organ donor, before we got together. When I found out I'll admit I was upset. To my mind it feels as if you're not burying the person, just a few bits and bobs, rudely cut open and stolen from. I'm not religious anymore, yay child brainwashing but that's my opinion so ignore me , so that's not an excuse reason. I just feel that saying goodbye to a person that they should be whole. Okay, say they've been dying for a while, you've had time to say your goodbyes properly, but if they die suddenly, then come back with a big cut and some rough stitches There's something that doesn't feel right about it It's like how people say after an autopsy the body comes back looking awful and bruised, seeming as the crack open ribs and all sorts I say crack, I think they use a very sharp saw . It's an argument we've had before, and that we might end up having again now it's on my mind. ChangeMyViewers, can you make me see sense?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My girlfriend is an organ donor. While admirable, I want her to opt-back out.\n","id":"4c5c8f41-d7f7-4460-b137-98fbce7d026c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>Very few rights are absolute and are often violated by the State including at times the right to life e.g. by a death penalty sentence, by allowing police to use firearms. Considering that the right to life is more important that the right to privacy, then if life is not an absolute right, privacy should not be one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any individual's right to privacy must be balanced against the interests of the state in protecting the general social welfare.\n","id":"12c0f757-2fc6-43fb-9df0-5adae5c02bb7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we create and adopt a universal currency?<|ARGUMENT|>War or hyperflation that leads to instability of a unified currency and a potential breaking up of it as seen in Russia With its dependability and anchoring capacity gone, trading decreases and without individual countries can't escape to foreign exchange reserves to protect themselves, they lose their ability to counter, recover, and continue their GDP growth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Individual currencies gives countries a chance to temporarily escape issues happening within their unified currency, which is likely their only option for preservation. Without this opportunity, a unified currency can 'drag down' a country's economic prospects that they had originally joined for.\n","id":"e3e6fec0-8694-40ea-b382-46d6f1d36905"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Natural gas<|ARGUMENT|>Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than C02. Methane is very prominent within \"natural gas\". This is of concern because the drilling and transportation of natural gas will inevitably lead to leaks and large-scale \"spills\" that will release this highly harmful gas into the atmosphere and contribute substantially to global warming. These risks should not be taken.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Methane in natural gas is a major contributor to global warming.\n","id":"c7c6db89-4589-4e95-bc16-8a89782b69f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Apples should always be refridgerated. I'll keep this as brief as possible but it's a controversial topic so I want to be clear and concise. For the purposes of my argument, I am assuming that people who enjoy green apples for their sour taste are perverted and irrelevant. Apples come in two main varieties, red and green. Green apples, while sour, are crispy and have a great texture. Red apples are pleasantly sweet, but this can mean the internal crispiness is wanting, meaning they are softer, which while a few degenerates may appreciate, is objectively worse. A perfect apple incorporates the sweetness and crispiness of the two. Pink Ladies accomplish this to some extent, with the occasional Royal Gala meeting crispiness expectations, at the cost of size. On a side note, chilled raw fruit is excellent, and the ideal way for it to be served. Eat a lukewarm orange sometime if you dare disagree with me. Refridgerating apples, is nothing but good then. It increases the shelf life, but most importantly it adds additional crispness to the apple, allowing you to take greater risks in achieving your desired sweetness of apple, while ensuring your apple will be as crisp as is possible. It also separates it from the rest of the fruit that could sabotage it's pristine surface. It also prevents insects attacking and sabotaging your fruitful endeavors. Now in comes the fruit bowl. Fruit bowls are like a daily 9 11 in the fruitarian world. Many fruits interact poorly, their enzymes intermingling with no regard for polite society in a disgusting display of chemical depravity, reducing the shelf life of your fruits. Bananas, while delicious in a reasonable window of their ripening, are the worst culprits of this, and apples, with their own ripening properties, take the biggest hit from this crime against the frugiverse. So the crux of the argument is that the fridge allows all fruits to be separated into their ideal positions without touching the catalysts for fruity disaster while the fruit bowl is just a chaotic jumble of inadequacy for the ill informed, ill mannered and mentally ill. EDIT Fake edit to put in this fake TL DR TL DR I will not butcher my words for cretins who do not commit to the debate on the fate of the apples we ate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Apples should always be refridgerated; additionally fruit bowls are useless\n","id":"c84a39d2-88f3-4dc0-8a01-7f5cb33db1d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Google Censor Their Search Results In Order To Operate In China?<|ARGUMENT|>In the past, Google's cooperation in drone technology lead to an internal revolt Although many would argue that this is not as morally reprehensible, the level of outrage expressed by workers certainly is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Plans to enter China have outraged Google employees. Undermining company morale will affect those employees productivity.\n","id":"e2eabfa2-0446-40de-90f6-84ae9fd69ada"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Military conscription should apply to men and women equally.<|ARGUMENT|>A country should have the most able bodied, most qualified people defending it. Signing up people of equal gender representation is not a good tactical strategy practice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If women are included in military conscription, the military will be weaker overall.\n","id":"00b9f6da-fd5f-45dc-b3e8-584e8121d939"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been working in the NYC public schools for three years now, and am currently completing my masters to get my full certification. I will earn a general education degree, but I am more or less being trained to deal with students with special needs in my classroom. It is almost a certainty that I will, at some point in my career, be forced into a co teaching position where I will need to collaborate with a special education teacher. Even if this does not happen, I will absolutely have students will IEPs Individual Education Plans in my classroom, for whom I will have to integrate special instruction. We are already required to include differentiation into our lesson plans, accounting for the high, middle and low achievers in class. The inclusion of special education in public classrooms is being taught as a civil rights act akin to desegregation. Of course, I believe it is a civil right to be educated, but I believe students with special needs, require just that special attention. This attention, or variation in instruction, takes away from the quality of education I am able to provide to the rest of the class. Why should students with disabilities not be in a learning environment designed to provide special instruction, by teachers who have been trained to do so? Not to mention the budget is stretched thin in large part to the floating and in class specialists assigned to students with disabilities. I understand that students with disabilities are not all cognitively impaired, and thus are capable of learning like other students. There are also issues with misdiagnoses and over diagnoses. However, these students require special assistance and I believe they should be put in an environment that can focus solely on accommodating their disability, in order to give them the best education possible. I've had an experience where a parent said they were not concerned with whether or not their child learned anything, they just wanted for their child the social experience of a general education classroom. How am I supposed to accept this when I am getting evaluated on the progress of my students? This is a reality of the profession I chose, and I do not want to continue feeling this way. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that inclusion works, and that students with special need should be schooled separately.\n","id":"f361d350-58bc-400b-823f-7b56400577ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Graham Cassidy Bill, being pushed forth in the Senate at an alarming rate due to the Sep 30 deadline, has a goal of redistributing funds to states. I've put a link in the footnotes for a map of the redistribution of funds at the bottom of this post, and almost state for state it hurts the states that have embraced the ACA I've also posted a link to a map that shows states embracing the ACA . Insurance companies are generally against this bill, and medical associations such as the American Medical Association and the American Heart Association join them source pbs.org . Insurance companies are just getting used to the ACA, and they caution that rates will increase with legislative change, which, if this bill goes through, will happen in the majority of states. It seems to me that this bill is more of a punishment for the states that enacted ObamaCare than it is an actual legislative solution to the problems that people talk about when they discuss the ACA. Please, Change My View. Map for money redistribution Map for states adopting ACA<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Graham-Cassidy Bill serves more as a punishment than it does as a solution\n","id":"b1976d41-39d0-4ad0-8c14-1ab1f2acb2bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Umbridge raped by the Centaurs?<|ARGUMENT|>JK Rowling seems to have a very good knowledge about Greek Mythology. Source:A study on usage of Greek Mythology in the Harry Potter series <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Greek mythology a main characteristic for centaurs is that they take away human women and rape them. JK Rowling knows that.\n","id":"10f7610f-74f7-437a-972b-f67e593f0740"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments Should Bailout Banks<|ARGUMENT|>Governments are not just giving financial institutions the money. Instead, they are generally exchanging the money for shares in the company. This has two positive effects. Firstly, the government as a shareholder and partial-owner can direct the company to act in the interests of the nation, and to avoid overly risky investments. Secondly, in future the government can sell those shares and recover some potentially all of the costs of the bailout.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments are not just giving financial institutions the money. Instead, they are generally excha...\n","id":"28e2e58f-cf14-4505-ba04-dcc302565a68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>As we see with Hungary some states have competing values to the EU and once added foment internal conflict and a crisis of common values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"EU expansion is bad for Europe and bad for accession states.\n","id":"37d11db2-6f40-406d-9bb9-fc61c54c9876"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>The US trip in the 1990s cost the taxpayer $6 million and the diocese $20 million.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Pope visit to any country costs taxpayers a lot of money.\n","id":"dc38dd77-3fd0-4bba-9d24-1ec1fb5d5957"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time for Hungary and the EU to Part Ways?<|ARGUMENT|>Hungary's lack of cooperation with the EU, and the EU's inability to make them comply weakens the international perception of the EU. This is not beneficial when the EU deals with other organisations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hungary has constantly been against further cooperation with the EU.\n","id":"22f8d36b-6d4d-4a54-926b-da5aa55c005c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The moral codes often found in religious texts have been the cause of many social injustices including the persecution of homosexuals, people of colour and women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious tenets may help live in peace those who adhere to them. If not, they can be a source of persecution, coercion and unhappiness.\n","id":"2496d7e9-6aca-4b17-b06b-8ff93a1d08dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>The presence of conditions that are necessary for life does not equal the presence of conditions that are sufficient for life - or the presence of life itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A planet or celestial body being theoretically able to support life as we know it isn\u2019t evidence that there is or was life on it.\n","id":"39f818dc-50aa-4b52-9f48-5293381d2b59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States close Guantanamo Bay?<|ARGUMENT|>Some prisoners released so far have returned to terrorism proving that the release of detainees is unsafe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guantanamo Bay is needed to keep innocent people safe from terror suspects.\n","id":"b449cdf5-16e7-401e-b30b-9c802bef5648"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that in most restaurants, appetizers are generally a higher quality of food, and taste better, than entrees. I have three principal reasons for this Appetizers aren't constrained by having to be a full meal. This means they can dispense with things like starchy sides potatoes, rice, etc which aren't super flavorful and are mostly there as a cheaper way to make a meal filling. Appetizers generally use higher quality ingredients. Related to the first point, often restaurants will go with more premium ingredients because they don't need to use a ton of it to get impact in an appetizer. Appetizers have to sell themselves more. Many people will go into a restaurant and just order entrees. As such, appetizers are more of an optional thing, and restaurants need to make them particularly enticing to get people to order any appetizer at all. Edit View partially changed in respect to low end restaurants which are largely serving the same or worse preprepared foods as appetizers relative to their entrees. Thanks in particular to u tiddlypeeps and u BVsaPike<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Appetizers taste better than entrees.\n","id":"5498dc44-cf92-4c4a-9e59-31817084c36a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Release of Osama bin Laden death photos<|ARGUMENT|>\"Was Obama right to withhold bin Laden photos?\" May 5th, 2011: \"If a nation can be trusted to view the horrors of 9\/11 in real time, flip through the Abu Ghraib picture book, witness the made-for-video murder of Daniel Pearl, see images of dead Uday and Qusay on the evening news, and gaze upon pictures of dead soldiers coming home as air freight photos that President Bush, incidentally, tried to ban in the name of managing the news, then it can be trusted to stomach the last photos of Osama Bin Laden -- and whatever turmoil those photos might cause. Why? Because that's what sort of country the United States is.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US\/world watched 9\/11, they can bear to see dead Osama.\n","id":"ca86e874-c032-4c2e-9f43-58a8d116e827"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just can't help thinking that these tax dollars could go to better use, like for the sick disabled. Where I am from, abortion is free and birth control is heavily subsidized. There is no reason to be so irresponsible. I have seen so many people abuse this system, and have more and more kids after their funds are threatened. It's blatant abuse. Most of these mothers are people who have never even had a job. If I wanted to right now, I could just pop out a kid and decide that I don't want to work the government will pay. My ex SIL got purposefully pregnant with her second kid, as she lives off social assistance because she already couldn't care for the one she already had. I believe in job placement, and if you have a child it shouldn't be the government's and taxpayer's responsibility. You should work to support your kid. edit I'd just like to add that in order to adopt a child, you need a steady income to support one. Why are we taking care of these people's kids when they're seen as not god enough to even care for our foster kids?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should not pay welfare\/social assistance to people who have children that they can't take care of.\n","id":"86ff9c29-3720-4dad-bfd0-ae9c1eb981ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should homeschooling be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Cultural-Historical Theory informs us that the development of personality is dependent on the integration of the individual into society which is full of demands, expectations and habits. It is during childhood the first levels of formation of an individual's personality are established through social activity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government and society play an integral role in developing the personality of children.\n","id":"5ad30b85-4f5f-4bf5-84e5-d1791a836b93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Beauty Contests Are Harmful<|ARGUMENT|>The image of female beauty promoted by beauty contests is culturally specific and western - it doesn\u2019t matter how many Asian women win Miss World, they can still only do so if they take part in the swimsuit competition, which may well not be considered appropriate dress in their culture. There were demonstrations against Miss World by feminists and Hindu nationalists when it was held in Bangalore in 1996. Riots in Kaduna in northern Nigeria over Miss World 2002 left more than 200 dead and led to the contest being moved to London.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The image of female beauty promoted by beauty contests is culturally specific and western - it doesn...\n","id":"18956925-e0d5-4426-8183-553d680bbb45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Twitter has a similar model, where any user can 'observe' any other user. This has lead to a notorious problem where huge groups of people will harasses individuals because of political disagreements or spite.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This will enable 'cyber stalking' and other targeted forms of harassment.\n","id":"b04b3bbd-131d-4595-92c3-83bc144bb323"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>The Australian government cut development aid stating the aid must go to the most effective programs. Countries unable to meet the conditions can not be regarded as 'effective programs', thus it is justifiable to stop support.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conditional aid works as an excuse to stop providing support for those in need.\n","id":"23e0dedf-c09a-445a-84a7-01ad95f60df5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A false flag operation requires a group to conduct illegal or unethical behaviour and then pretend it was another group that did it. A sting involves an officer going undercover and asking around for people who will engage in illicit behaviour, like posing as a drug buyer or john. This is a tried and true method for finding the angry people who want to conduct themselves in that behaviour. Before I get any comments about entrapment, that only applies when the police use their authority to force you to do something. If they're undercover, they're not using their authority. It would be possible to change my mind by either A. convincing me that these operations are meant to be false flag and they use the sting as an excuse when they fail which would need to be on a case by case basis, or that it is corrupt more often than not and thus should not be used , or B. convincing me that the efficacy of these actions does more harm than good to society and is thus immoral or is immoral by another means .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A police tactic to root out rioters from a protest by posing as a rioter is an undercover sting, not a false flag operation, and is not immoral.\n","id":"e9c82cfa-2c61-4c88-902f-3838f430ccc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>America seems to be particularly focused on racial issues at the moment, instead of the typical class warfare issues. Yet, it seems to me that economic class is more fundamental a problem in modern America. I don't dispute that racism exists today, implicit hiring bias research has shown that. But it doesn't seem to be as big a problem as economic issues. For example, black people are definitely more likely to be shot by police than white people, but they are also more likely to live in lower income neighborhoods that have higher crime rates and harsher policing. It isn't obvious to me that racial differences in justice are anything more than a symptom of underlying economic problems. This same pattern appears in any racial issue. It seem that if America discarded its social justice left, and replaced it with a socialist left, more of these problems would be resolved at a more fundamental level.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most racial issues are just proxies for economic class issues.\n","id":"d97e9305-b710-4303-9b4d-de65bbc91855"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Mostly cited reasons of concerns are not the negative effects but only the potential for negative effects<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no secured evidence that GMOs are having negative effects on human or animal health.\n","id":"f5bcef7f-0d2e-4089-b16d-6678a95bd8a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments Should Use Protectionism<|ARGUMENT|>Developing countries need extra help in building a competitive economy; short-term subsidies to foreign companies are the early stages of import-substitution and economic independence. It is better that governments offer firms subsidies than try to cut corners on labour standards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Developing countries need extra help in building a competitive economy; short-term subsidies to fore...\n","id":"5fff1f4a-8d5b-4942-80ae-7170331771f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I've been thinking about this a little more than a little recently, as my country Brazil is going through some political trouble, some of which is involving changes to retirement laws that would affect most people in a negative way. That's not exactly the point tho, what I've come to argue with some logic, rather than hard data, is that retirement is not a necessary evil in society, but actually a great way to keep the market young and in motion. When you need too much work time to retire, your workforce becomes increasingly older, as people have to work for longer. That also means that higher up positions will be taken by people who have already strongly rooted traditions, and thus are usually less innovative and less prone to make big changes and try new things. By encouraging people to retire somewhat sooner, you keep renewing the workforce, which is positive. This would also be a way to help solve the job availability crisis that so many countries are facing with their newer generations. Also, it seems to me like retired people as older people in general save less money, as they already have most things they want that require saving, and most of their income ends up being put back in circulation quickly. as I said, though, this isn't based on hard data, as I've yet to find anything going either way . One last point towards retirement is that and again, this is based mostly off of how I see the world around me rather than hard data once people retire they feel more free to start small businesses, which, once more, helps fuel the economy, besides being positive on a community level. That's not to say I don't see the problems with earlier retirement the earlier people retire, the more expensive that is, and traditionalism is good in some cases, that's why it takes time to reach higher up positions. As I said, I've mostly thought about this on my own, so I'm very open to change my view. I'd particularly like to hear the arguments from an economists perspective, and specially of you could point me to some sources for data about this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It makes economic sense to \"encourage\" retirement\n","id":"bd94fefc-4701-4fc9-81d3-de734b66da83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Allow me to explain. Political apathy seems to be getting worse and worse over time, and it is becoming increasingly frustrating to me to see people not bother to engage in democracy. In my opinion, democracy is a privilege, something many fought for on behalf of many different groups around the world, and simply rejecting to engage in it is leading to governments not representing the people. Here in the UK for instance, our Conservative Party is almost certainly going to win our next General Election. Support for the Labour Party the more liberal and second biggest party is not enough to win, but some of the biggest groups who might vote for them are young people, who over the years vote less and less. I don't mind who wins the elections, or who wins the elections to represent constituencies, but I want them to represent what the people want. Mandatory voting ensures this, but I also believe in the right to vote for nobody. However, voting for nobody is different to not voting at least you either are informed enough to decide you don't agree with anyone, or you have the dignity to say you are not informed enough to make a vote you truly believe in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voting here in the UK, and preferably in every democracy, should be mandatory, as long as there is an option to vote for nobody.\n","id":"38097ef0-3bce-44e6-b648-3ba4fa006998"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>If the president vetoes legislation, a two-thirds majority in both houses is required to pass it. It seems implausible that a large enough coalition between Republicans and Democrats could be found in such a situation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if democrats follow this path, the existence of the presidential veto means that cooperation with Trump would still be necessary at some point in order to get legislation signed into law.\n","id":"b023a430-1af7-4538-b8c5-d2189141a062"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>There is still the threat of legal, professional and reputational harm as a result of confessing to these crimes. It is therefore unlikely that players will meaningfully own up to their indiscretions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The higher stakes will mean players are less likely to admit their mistakes, resulting in their victim being denied justice.\n","id":"ad86cfc4-3c74-4d71-a6f8-d43e7c974135"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The freedom of choice is the most important principal in Christianity<|ARGUMENT|>Ephesians 1:11 states \"In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If everything is predestined by God, then the idea of free will cannot really exist.\n","id":"e6d99265-b4e7-4e1d-932a-15aacb74b01a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God exist?<|ARGUMENT|>We didn't know where lightning came from, we believed in Zeus\/ Odin\/ Thor. Now we know it is due to natural causes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Every time we thought it was God it wasn't.\n","id":"755638e6-a2b2-4407-b7c7-c86a3427f80b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Protesting in Front of Abortion Clinics Be Prohibited?<|ARGUMENT|>When a person attempts to deprive another of their life, we usually are willing to use anything up to lethal force to prevent that act. Harassment is a relatively non-harmful way to prevent murder.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Protests in front of abortion clinics may be able to save lives by dissuading women from aborting.\n","id":"db749ec8-6b8e-4d2d-9909-f46eea0d975b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should citizens be able to crowdsource laws?<|ARGUMENT|>Crowd sourcing laws allows users to fix specific problems with laws rather than just voting yes or no in privacy, as with a referendum.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Referendums are different from crowd-sourcing in significant ways. It is therefore problematic to assume that both suffer from the same problems.\n","id":"269581be-97e9-49d5-ad41-8dfb125405c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think there's any logical argument to the idea that transpeople should simply just use the bathroom they identify with, bar perhaps the idea that there shouldn't be gendered bathrooms at all. Most of it seems to be simply based in revulsion, or ignorance, as opposed to logic. The only one I can think of that comes close to logical is that male sexual predators perverts would prey on women, but we already have laws against that. That's a sexual offense. It's something that can literally happen right now, and the perpetrator would go to jail for it. It's highly unlikely that my view that transgender people should use the bathroom they self identify with can be changed, but if I'm presented with a solid argument, I'll at least consider the view that there is no credible opposition to the idea changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is little credibility in the opposition to transpeople using the bathrooms they self-identify with\n","id":"0631f58f-7520-4de2-a874-1afdfc48ee0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The Balkans area is one such example, with plenty to drive them apart, yet also many common interests and enemies, also former Bohemia and Silesia the former Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania and many more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are also examples of similar peoples choosing to remain fragmented, thus making them more vulnerable.\n","id":"6edfe63a-fc73-4903-9da2-76afbe118ef3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion allows societies to feel hope and to see light in the most darkest periods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is good for the psycho-social wellness of its followers.\n","id":"cff0ed35-e825-4990-98ed-4454b4e8b7e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Especially religious fundamentalism can lead to violence and hatred, because of its unwavering attachment to a set of irreducible beliefs which leads to a strong rejection of diversity of opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not satire, but a lack of rational education and religious infatuation, that leads to violence and hatred.\n","id":"b447c9bd-5148-466f-a8bc-5ce1ff66f74a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I consider myself to be politically far left obviously . In my opinion, intentionally making some people's lives better at other people's cost is immoral. I should mention that I consider a deterministic world view to be the best description of our universe basically no free will . Therefore I don't think anyone deserves to lead a better life than anyone else. I don't claim to know what exactly an ideal society should look like, but I'm certain that there should be no money in it. I am aware that we have made a lot of economical and technological advancements while living in a capitalistic system but I don't think this progress warrants the discrimination of human beings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think capitalism is horrible.\n","id":"0c48ec90-fe56-47bc-b372-5e59250dfa77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like many Reddit users right now, I'm an American who's still catching up with all of the British politics that's suddenly in the limelight. All I really know about Farage is that he's a key player with the UKIP party. All I really know about the UKIP party is that they're anti immigration and everybody calls them racists fascists. I've read about him from two sources Wikipedia, and Reddit. Nothing on Wikipedia made him sound that awful to me. Even as far as conservative politicians go, he didn't seem very socially or religiously authoritarian. Reddit, on the other hand, throws a fit at his very mention. The trending subreddits thread today in particular seemed to be having an absolute meltdown at the idea that people on reddit are allowed to support the guy. In general I've seem plenty of people call him a fascist as if that were an objective fact. It all strikes me as very over the top. Farage just seems like any other politician, and the horrible fascist stuff reads like reactionary circlejerking to me. Are there any good reasons I should hate this guy more than any given politician?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nigel Farage is not a horrible human being.\n","id":"64bb766c-7c0b-416b-8295-709a500e3e8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Owing to the more or less arbitrary way that the Middle East was carved up by European Imperialists, Kurds have been left without a nation state. As a result they are dispersed throughout contiguous areas that are crisscrossed by other political boundaries Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Sometimes they face discrimination. Several nationalist Kurdish groups have committed acts of terror against innocents. I do not condone this violence or believe this should be considered a reward of any kind. My belief is that most of Eastern Turkey, part of NE Syria and W Iran and a big chunk of North Iraq be given to the Kurds for their own country. I think this should have happened at the end of WWI anyway. I believe Catalonia and Basque territory should be allowed to secede from Spain, Scotland from UK, Quebec from Canada, Crimea from Ukraine, and so on. If the majority of the population of an area wants to leave, they should not encounter resistance from the larger federal entity. The main problem I see with my own view is that small regions with immensely rich natural resources, once having seceded, will no longer be able to subsidize poorer areas they once did. It will also pose issues for fairer trade and possibly human rights abuses as the former ethnic majority member becomes a minority in the new country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Areas with majority Kurdish population should be turned into a sovereign state Kurdistan.\n","id":"68787450-3827-46ac-910c-07992a473efc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Adam Sandler used to be one of the hottest comedy stars in the 90s and early 2000s. Adam's early work was easy for the average viewer to watch, was funny, and was creative. Since 2005 Adam Sandler's career had taken a turn for the worse. While Adam Sandler's movies have always been low brow funny, they have become flat out stupid in the last few years. A lot of Adam Sandler's new movies are crude and not relatable. The last 10 years of Adam Sandler's career have been unfortunate because it seems that he is not willing to take comedic risks and is settling more than anything.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adam Sandler has not made a good movie since 2005.\n","id":"2554b0e3-b39b-421a-b7ef-4e1c184b4282"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, let me say that I do not feel that our situation is the way things should be. I do not agree that that only men should work and women should stay home and clean stuff. That's not what I'm saying. It just happens to be the case that that is our situation. Now, the reason I do not feel this is sexist is because its just so fair. Its not about gender. Its not about what men or women should do. Its just about an equal distribution of labor to keep our family going. I don't think it is fair that I work 40 hours a week to provide us with things we need while she sits at home on NetFlix all day she doesnt do that, just an example of why I feel as I do. That would not be an equal situation . At the same time, I dont expect her to keep track of hours and make sure she gets in 40 hours a week of housework, but I hope she can at least vacuum, maybe get some dishes done. Something, at least. I mean, if she were to go out and get a job, then we would work out a new arrangement. But as long as I'm the only one employed, I dont think its unreasonable for me to not want to come home and have to do dishes or whatever. Certainly some things are exempt from this reasoning. For example, when we have kids, I'll pitch in regardless, for many, many obvious reasons. TL DR Its not about gender or gender roles. Its just about a fair and equal distribution of labor. EDIT To clarify, my wife and I are both happy with our arrangement and she does a fantastic job keeping things clean and organized. I'm not asking because its a contentious issue. Im asking because sometimes I make myself feel guilty feeling this way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not think it is sexist or chauvinistic of me to expect my wife to handle the housework as long as I am the only one with a job.\n","id":"ca6a7cf5-4a64-45d0-b2c9-c855baef589f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The pledge of allegiance has been around for awhile and has served its purpose well. Recently there has been a lot of controvery over children saying the pledge in school and specifically the under god phrase in the pledge. However as a whole, the pledge teaches children respect and patriotism. Without the pledge, children who grow up without ever reciting it may end up less involved in voting and participating in our goverment becuase they simply wont care about the state of our nation. The pledge is a beneficial part of our children's education and should continue to be used. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Pledge of Allegiance is neccacary in schools and instills patriotism in children\n","id":"77e026a4-f195-4e4e-ad72-3796f416ec36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Given the discrimination and unjust treatment that Black Americans still face and that the US government turns a blind eye to, reparations seems more like an cynical bribe that means little to Black Americans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Financial reparations will do nothing to address the problems facing Black Americans right now.\n","id":"70630996-860f-47f6-a2fb-5f24b941b068"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>The groups claim to be policing \u201canti-social behavior\u201d such as drug dealing, but are often dealing drugs or participating in other criminal enterprises themselves and trying to protect their turf.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even two decades after the Good Friday Agreement formally ended the long-standing sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, vigilante violence keeps terrorizing communities to this day.\n","id":"ad7db47e-3fa2-4078-a6b7-13376aad386b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My husband, J, smokes pot from time to time, which I don't mind, although I do hate the smell. When he does I drive everywhere we he needs to go, until he no longer appears high to me. Frequently this means I drive him to a friends house, or to the gym, and have to come back to pick him up afterwards. I also don't mind this most of the time, but there is no denying it is an inconvenience. He hates it. I think his main issue that he feels like a child having to be driven and not just driving himself. But he says that I am being completely unreasonable and am unjustified. While I am NOT convinced it is unsafe to drive high, neither am I sure it's safe, but that is NOT my main issue. My main issue is this Shit happens. Taillight could go out, run a stop sign or red light, have to go through a checkpoint, someone else crashes into him, what have you. Our car isn't currently inspected because it won't pass, is about to fall apart, and we're saving for a new one, so that's a biggie as well, for now. So something happens and there is a police officer. And J is high. And then we could have a serious problem. I believe maybe incorrectly? that a police officer's testimony that they smelled pot and that the subject appeared to be high is enough for them to issue a DUI. And possibly enough to also compel a drug test. Which of course J would fail. One of my relatives had a DUI several years ago. It cost her about 10,000 by the time it was all said and done, she lost her license for 6 months and it cost her a job offer when they did a background check. And that was alcohol, so there was no illegal drug charge, or reckless driving or anything like that mixed in. J believes that, should anything happen which he doesn't think it will , the police officer will never be able to tell. He thinks my nose is particularly sensitive and that he is good at not seeming high to others. I think that other people are not scrutinizing him as carefully as a cop would, nor would they give him a hard time about it or say anything to him, even if they did notice. J also thinks that the cops testimony that they smelled pot or subject appeared high isn't enough to hold up in court, if it did get taken that far. I also believe that smelling pot is enough for a police officer to search a vehicle. Which could, possibly, tack on some other charge. Like I accidently leave one of my prescription medications in the car, or as has happened once or twice we forget to take a gun out of the car after going shooting. Or J left his wallet at home and has no id on him, this happens at least once a week. Or something else I don't even know is illegal. He thinks I am overly cautious, making a big deal out of nothing, and have an unfair prejudice because I don't smoke. I think that it's just not worth the risk. I think that it could end up costing us a ton of money, his license and maybe his job. What do you guys think? Is my understanding of things wrong? Our current system is working for our relationship, but I really don't want to believe these things if they are, in fact, not true. ? edit typo EDIT I am not unappreciative of the safety links talk, but it's really not what my current view is based on. I am considering the point that my view maybe should be based on safety, and if having the same view for different reasons changes my view in such a way as to award a delta. I also didn't actually mean to put the word ever in the title. I am very sorry I did. I don't didn't actually think that there is never ever ever a scenario that warrants the legal cost even a certain legal cost, not just a possible one . I can easily come up with a few. That was not and is not my point or my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not think it ever okay for my husband to drive high or after smoking because of the possible shit storm that would rain down on us, were it to happened he gets pulled over.\n","id":"c11a00e4-1eaf-4dab-9d9a-f3fe5e8d7a9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should an Animal Shelter refuse food from a bullfighting company?<|ARGUMENT|>PETA already extend efforts towards banning bullfighting. They may use this attempt by the bullfighting company to shed continued light on the cruelty of bullfighting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As an animal defense group, it is likely their negative press will be focused on the bull-fighting company.\n","id":"8cb6f262-e089-407b-b4ab-08b2c0da2a56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Half an year ago when I used to go to AskReddit there used to be a ton of comments which had gold. Today I can barely see such a thing and seeing someone receive gold is almost rare. Doesn't this mean that the reddit owner CEO ??? will be forced to sell out, given the financial condition of the site? Or am I wrong and somehow I always miss the comments and posts which get gold? Which reminds me that posts getting gold is something I can't even recall seeing. Is this even a thing? Less and less people are buying and receiving gold. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Less and less people are buying reddit gold\n","id":"999254f4-93c7-4e66-8379-91adba19d778"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Prison reform is an important issue in this country. What better to create an intensive to fix these problems than allowing prisoners themselves to vote? Beyond that, I believe that any US citizen who is affected by our policies should be able to have a say in them which to be is the core principle of democracy itself. Allowing incarcerated individuals to vote also eliminates any incentive to support or defend policies that disproportionately incarcerate or keep incarcerated people who support your political opponents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People convicted of past felonies as well as currently incarcerated US citizens should be allowed to vote\n","id":"ca03e7b1-0aed-443a-b5bc-0233d124b738"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>Love is intensified by knowing how fragile life is. Without mortality time spent together will appear less precious and we could lose the most intense feelings for one another.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without having to deal with the death of loved ones, we would become less sympathetic and out of touch.\n","id":"57e3c131-649f-4154-963c-e2a1b735a81c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a Democrat. I believe strongly in equality. In light of the Supreme Court case in Colorado concerning a baker who said he would bake a cake for a homosexual couple, but not decorate it, I've found myself in conflict with my political and moral beliefs. On one hand, homophobia sucks. Seriously. You're just hurting your own business to support a belief that really is against everything that Jesus taught anyway. Discrimination is illegal, and for good reason. On the other hand, baking a cake is absolutely a form of artistic expression. That is not a reach at all. As such, to force that expression is simply unconstitutional. There is no getting around that. If the baker wants to send business elsewhere, it's his or her loss but ultimately his or her right in my eyes and in the eyes of the U.S. constitution. I want to side against the baker, but I can't think how he's not protected here. EDIT The case discussed here involves the decoration of the cake, not the baking of it. The argument still stands in light of this. EDIT 1.2 Apparently this isn't the case. I've been misinformed. The baker would not bake a cake at all for this couple. Shame. Shame. Shame. EDIT2 I'm signing off the discussion for the night. Thank you all for contributing In summary, homophobics suck. At the same time, one must be intellectually honest when saying that the baker should have his hand forced to make a gay wedding cake or close his business, then he should also have his hand forced when asked to make a nazi cake. There is SCOTUS precedent to side with the couple in this case. At some point, when exercising your own rights impedes on the exercise of another's rights, compromise must be made and, occasionally, enforced by law. There is a definite gray area concerning the couples right to the baker's service. But I feel better about condemning the baker after carefully considering all views expressed here. Thanks for making this a success<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A business owner, specifically an artisan, should not be forced to do business with anyone they don't want to do business with.\n","id":"368a1f3a-fad2-43b2-930c-668e95f3a457"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Female genital mutilation increases short and long term health risks for women and girls, ranging in severity from acute pain to possibly death.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Male circumcision has health benefits, whereas female circumcision has none, only harm.\n","id":"718c4977-3aca-48fb-8e7a-a387a5f6a0a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Steffi Graf is widely considered to be the greatest female tennis player of all time due to her incredible success over the course of a very long career. Now that Serenea Williams has been knocking on her door for so long, talk of Graf has resurfaced. I feel that statements like Serena is great, but Graf has more slams better wins record are completely misguided due to the stabbing of Monica Seles. In 1991, 1992 and the start of 1993, Seles won 7 out of 9 grand slams and beat Graf 3 times in slam finals in the process going 1 3 vs Graf overall in finals . During this time she also replaced Graf as the world 1. After the 1993 australian Open, she was stabbed and taken out of the game. Steffi Graf would go on to win the next 3 grand slams of that year and continue her dominance for the next decade. Had Seles not been stabbed, Graf's dominance would have ended in 1993. During Seles' 7 9 slam streak, Graf won the other 2 9. After the stabbing, she would go one to win 10 of the next 15 slams, padding her stats and achieving her GOAT status. There is no way she could have done this had Seles been around to stop her. One key thing to note is that Seles was only twenty when she was stabbed, so she was primed for a decade or more of top level play. I believe serena surpassed Graf long ago. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Steffi Graf is overrated as the GOAT. She is good but nowhere near the best.\n","id":"204ff69f-a9fa-472a-84b3-477d1693c025"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The use of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems LAWs will be beneficial to society<|ARGUMENT|>Most people possess an innate resistance to war due to the understanding of the impact of loss of life. If leaders are not risking human lives, but the loss of robots, they might be more willing to engage in war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without the risk of losing human lives, the decision to go to war would be far easier and lead to greater civilian death and increased human suffering.\n","id":"0357c011-354b-4b05-b574-5a92ed078f35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>This is not possible when sex work is illegal, as membership of such forums can be used against sex workers either as evidence in legal cases, or by society to \"unmask\" their occupation and attach social stigma.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex workers can set up self-help centers and engage in information-sharing on health, rights and safety concerns.\n","id":"81a702e6-5367-405a-847a-614f8e456904"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Their Children Should Be Fined If The Child Gets A Vaccine-Preventable Illness<|ARGUMENT|>Permission of the parents is first required in order to carry out medical procedures on those under the age of 18.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents usually have the legal and moral authority to act as surrogates for their children.\n","id":"8207f8c8-46c1-452a-9a49-3d56637a7f1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hear me out. I was constantly told how smart and good of a show it was by friends, family and media. So I watched the first season, but then stopped just before the third season out of boredom. I finally finished the show, and I can't express how disappointed I am. There were very few stellar moments, and most of those were in the first season. Here are my major gripes with the show Characters IMO the most important aspect of a show, and BB does not have many interesting or well developed characters. Skyler is an unrealistically bitchy antagonistic wife. Jesse is made out to be overly stupid and simplistic, with random emotional outbursts used to cheaply propel the otherwise stagnant plot points. The show tries to hard to make him look stupid, which prevents him from ever saying anything meaningful or deep. Walt is an absolute mess of a character. Seasons 1 4 he's a bumbling, nerdy, sympathetic character and then season 5 he turns into a monster because the show demands it. Most supporting characters are one dimensional. The why for Walt's actions disappears after season 1, and then is only given in season 5 as a fan service by regurgitating what forums reviewers mentioned as a sort of yeah, that's what we meant all along . Yet the argument for the lust for power isn't supported by the actual show, since there aren't many examples of Walt feeling powerful, or becoming empowered by making meth. He's always scared for his life, answering to bigger dogs. Jesse's friends are just stereotypical meth heads, zero depth. The coolest bad guy, Tuco, dies way too early. Gus is just silent ruthless, so underdeveloped for the sake of mystery . Contrast this with Ben Linus from LOST who plays a similar character, except way more believably and to far better results. There's a constant revolving door of characters because, hey, half of the non essential characters were killed last season for shock value. The Pacing After the very good first season, the show starts rinsing and repeating the same formula Jesse, we need 2 cook gt someone makes an unrealistically stupid mistake that puts the boys in trouble gt buddy hijinks galore gt Chemistry Bitch haha gt walt has lie to skyler. Throw some artistic shots of NM fauna, awkward breakfast scenes, expository dialogue, and you've got a seasons 2 4. Also, there is very little good dialogue, it's usually just expository and rarely characterizes the characters beyond their initial caricature izations. The show just drags on, and intense episodes are a rarity. The lack of Intellectualism Besides some smart references Levoisier, some chemistry tidbits there is nothing smart about the show. Scenes are always screaming at you This guy is a jerk Look at how jerky he is did you notice Oh, Look at how angry this character is LOOK CAN YOU SEE????? The show assumes the viewer is retarded and just highlights everything to the point of silliness. It lacked subtlety, and without subtlety there is no complexity. Nothing is explained. Nothing. What is Gus's motivation. What is Mikes motivation, what happened, who is his daughter? What happened at Grey Matter? Anything meaningful about Walt's past. The Bad Guys Shallow. One dimensional. Temporary. Unexplained. After Tuco's brilliant and temporary tenure, Gus was just an underwhelming attempt at mysterious and was totally unexplained, which was super annoying. Why does Gus do what he does? Does he have a family? What caused him to act all robotic and ruthlessly? What was he like in Chile? What was his relationship like with the hermano that the Cartel killed? Why? So, could you please change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I honestly believe that Breaking Bad is an awful show an is unworthy of it's praise.\n","id":"efcaa1f6-3871-4a75-a1e7-61edc23060af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those of you at work, I'm talking about cunt. Seriously, why? Urbandictionary defines it as a Derogatory word for Women, considered by many to be the most offensive word in the English Language. Even worse than the word Nigger? Were millions of women systematically dehumanized, killed, and forced to labor for hundreds of years in America? When a woman hears the word cunt, does she immediately get a flashback to the 1910s when she couldn't vote? The way I see it, cunt is the most offensive word in the English language because women made it so. It's not a charged word full of a history of oppression and hatred. It's just a rough, harsh word that starts and ends hard. I asked my best friend why she thought being called a cunt was offensive, and she said it just is. The way I see it, cunt is no more an offensive word than fuck. I seriously believe that women hold cunt as such an offensive word for little to no reason at all but just to have it as an offensive word. In the words of Bill Burr In their mind they start concocting this desperate, HAIL MARY attempt to make you SO FUCKIN' MAD you just call 'em a cunt. 'ts what it is And 'cunt' trumps ALL the bullshit they did to start the argument. 'Now it's not about that, there's no reason to call me a cunt' and that's it you're in this room now. Please, change my view. Call me out on my ignorance. Am I wrong? Am I right? I'd much rather hear it from you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the 'c-word' is hyper-sensitized and shouldn't be as offensive as it is in America.\n","id":"463318a3-273e-4cc6-bc2c-ea19ee249721"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this topic has been brought up SEVERAL times on the subreddit, but all the posts seem very specific. My view will change if someone can present ONE sound argument for why gun laws should remain exactly the same in the USA. A I'll address the only argument that initially seemed semi logical to me having an armed populous is effective protection against a dictatorship military coup other sort of government takeover. Sure, having an armed populous could make it more difficult for a government to be overthrown, but let's remember that the USA has nukes and missiles. They have people trained to participate in warfare. They have tanks. They probably have some form of chemical weapons. Edit A lot of people have brought up some very good points in regard to my stance on this issue I'd like to clarify something I never said it was impossible for citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical government. I think this would be incredibly hard, especially considering we're talking about the USA here, but yes I agree it is not completely out of the realm of possibility. In this regard, I'd also like to claim it is not completely out of the realm of possibility the government would use WMDs against civilians under extreme pressure. B This is specific to school shootings we should arm teachers. This is by far one of the craziest and nonsensical argument I have ever heard. The fact that people consider this a good option just shows how normalized guns are in this country, and I'm sure this suggestion seems absolutely ridiculous to the rest of the world. Arguments 1 Very unlikely the teacher would be able to get the gun in time if it's in a secure safe 2 Killing someone is a big deal, and people don't train to be teachers under the assumption they might have to kill someone 3 Would teachers be paid more, or should we just keep the 30k salary? Even though we're adding more responsibility again, the responsibility to be prepared to KILL someone . If you think we should increase their salary, where would this money come from? 4 Demonstrating to students especially younger students that having guns on campus is NORMAL, I would assume they would be much more likely to view guns as a normal part of everyday life. I could see many students bringing guns to school to show their friends or whatever because it doesn't seem abnormal to have guns on campus. Edit another good point about the flaws in having teachers bring weapons to school from a different thread gt If we can barely trust trained cops to have self control and make the right decision when wielding a gun, how are we supposed to trust teachers? People say well cops often see people at they're worst and are overworked and underpaid. Yeah And so are teachers. C Guns are useful for self defense. There are dozens of studies that show this is a myth. Most homicides involving guns are found to be illegal, and not used for self defense. Having a gun in your home is more likely to cause harm to a family member or friend, accidentally or on purpose. If requested I'll find the studies I'm looking for because there are A LOT. D But I like to play with guns Most gun owners have no intention of harming others Why should I be punished Your right to enjoy a hobby is NOT greater than the right to live and feel relatively safe. Sorry. We shouldn't feel like we're entering a war zone when going out in public. And I also want to be clear, that I'm talking about restricting guns, not banning them. There are certain types of guns and modifications where the sole purpose is to kill and injure as many living things as possible in the shortest amount of time. E We shouldn't be talking about guns, guns don't kill people It's a mental illness issue. It's both. There is no reason to believe it's ONLY a gun issue or ONLY a mental health issue. F Making it more difficult to buy guns wont stop criminals from getting guns. Let's just make drugs legal then, right? Why not make it more difficult to purchase guns? What is the harm of trying to restrict access to things that can cause massive amounts of pain and suffering? I think a lot of people would bring up cars at this point we DO restrict access to cars. People need a license to drive in every state. Additionally, cars are categorically different than guns since their main use is transportation. I saw it argued in another thread that a gun's main use is defense but HOW is this accomplished? Through shooting someone. If we continue to use the comparison of cars, the main use is transportation. How is this accomplished? An engine, the car body, etc I'm not sure if this comparison is logically sound though, not sure if I'm using accurate comparisons so let me know Another point drinking alcohol and poisoning yourself is an action done to YOURSELF. Shooting someone is done TO someone. G There are millions of guns in this country, millions, and not all of them are registered. Can we reasonably expect every single gun owner in this country to hand over his her guns to the government? Can we trust that they will do this on an honor system? I feel as if this is a type of logical fallacy Just because things have always been this way doesn't mean it HAS to be. I don't see why limiting new gun purchases and starting the reduction of guns is pointless. You have to start somewhere. I don't think people are just going to hand over their guns, but I feel that over several generations owning a gun will become less normalized by these restrictions, and subsequently the use and ownership of guns with gradually diminish. I just don't understand the perspective of just saying, Whelp It's too late to change anything Let's just do nothing instead Edit I made made this point in one comment and I think it could be helpful in understanding my position more gt But it's not about abolishing guns overnight. Making it more difficult to purchase a gun will reduce the amount of guns in circulation, and if other countries can be examples, eventually reduce gun violence. Again, I never said ABOLISH gun violence, or murder. It's about making it less normal to use a gun against another person. gt Like I said earlier, people develop violent tendencies. People have violent episodes. All people respond with aggression in certain situations, though the magnitude varies. Perhaps making it more difficult for that person to buy a gun will deter him from his plan. I just don't understand why it's this all or nothing attitude. It's the attitude of if we can't stop ALL violent gun crimes with gun control why even try to stop a few? If we can't stop ALL car accident deaths with seat belts, why even try to stop a few? Such a strange stance to take. I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting, but I honestly haven't seen one argument for why we should keep gun laws exactly the way they are. Update So far every argument has basically boiled down to a slippery slope argument of, If we start adding more restrictions it's never going to stop and they're going to ban me from having a gun 11 This is hopefully an obvious logical fallacy. An all or nothing, black white, and simplistic view point like that is not going to change my view. So far, I still don't think there is a logical argument for NO changes in gun policy in the USA. I'd like to reiterate, I am NOT suggesting we ban gun ownership in the USA. I just find it strange that it's more difficult to get a driver's license in some states than to buy a semi automatic weapon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"EVERY argument against changing gun laws in the USA is unrealistic and illogical.\n","id":"23eae99a-83f9-49a3-924d-f75a803f3bfe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not going to go as far as saying that homeopathy and alternative medicines should be completely banned. Individual people can do what they want, as long as they don't harm others. Where I see a problem is when governments and or insurance companies take my money and allocate it to alternative treatments that lack evidence of their effectiveness. Being entrusted with our money and the expectation that they will take care of us when we need it, I expect these entities to do their homework and invest in what actually keeps us healthy. Homeopathy and many alternative medicines do not meet this standard. Furthermore, I believe homeopaths and pushers of unproven or disproven treatments are acting unethically. Even if they believe in what they're doing, a health professional should honour the obligation to submit their work to proper scrutiny, especially if they know there are doubts about it. Ignoring this might be fine for an app developer, but not for someone who's affecting my health. Possible counter arguments Many people feel that these treatments have value for them and public policy should cater to their preferences. I think this is not optimal because these preferences are based on incomplete information. Again, people can pay for this stuff if they want, but I believe public collective money should be administered with stricter criteria in mind. Even if many people ask for their insurer to cover it, allocating money to what actually works is a higher priority. Studies and lab tests may be unreliable due to vested interests in the pharmaceutical industry, we might not know that some 'alternative' treatments work while some established medicines aren't as effective as we think. True. I say, invest my money in proper studies rather than funding the treatments first. We need lots of data from people using these treatments over time for a proper evaluation of their effectiveness, so it's fine to have them promoted for now. Maybe so, but how should we choose unproven medicines to try out at scale? Should we just follow fads or look at things that have shown some concrete promise e.g. tests on rats ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alternative medicines should not be subsidised by public or private health insurance.\n","id":"f02fcf52-e0c1-4d10-a44a-6b2f2b43f6ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>I have a nail in my tire, I want to remove it, and I have the ability to remove it.but I do not remove it until the right time: after I arrive at the body shop. Just because God does not remove evil though He wants to, does not mean that God contradicts Himself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It has not been demonstrated that omnibenevolence must be defined so as to be logically inconsistent with permitting the presence of any kind of evil for any duration. As it stands, the inconsistency is tautologically assumed, not explicitly demonstrated.\n","id":"ca3b00fa-52ca-4d5a-8094-48916864e15f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently started scuba diving, and it's been the coolest thing I've ever done. After my advanced open water certification, there are specializations that I can go into, like ice diving, wreck diving, or cave diving, and the specialization I want to go into most is cave diving. Lots of things are driving me towards cave diving there's the mystery aspect, for one thing. People smarter than me estimate there are thousands of completely untouched and unexplored caves, and even the more popular underwater caves are some of the most remote places on earth. There's also the danger aspect I don't get a lot of danger in my life, it's pretty thrilling to go diving in it of itself and cave diving would definitely ramp that up. Don't take that as I want to be reckless , I understand the risks, the absurd fatality rate, and the extensive training required. I would definitely consider myself to be extremely calm under pressure and careful with what I do. By far the biggest draw though, are the Really Amazing Sights The thing is, my mom thinks I'm crazy and I would be putting my life in danger for sights that aren't much cooler than the ones I could see while standing on solid ground with air around me. She's usually right, but I still really want to go cave diving. Talk me out of it, please?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I want to go cave diving\n","id":"ea1763ea-cb61-44f4-bd9a-5fe3a1814bd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Modern society provides great benefit to humanity, therefor I do not reject the imposition of state power. Certain values are held as critical and assumed values of the system Fairness at trial, use of state violence only when necessary, loyalty to the people instead of profit or political interest groups etc These values are critical to the acceptance of both the rule of law and the system itself to the individual. Since no one would accept a system which acts with indiscriminate indifference to the values of fairness. Society requires that the ruling class act blindly to the persuasion of popular or profitable political interests and act in the interests of society and the general population. A republic is designed in such a way that a fraction of the population controls the entire population. To violate these rules and to act in self interest against principles of fairness, instead of the interest of society causes contempt for modern society because the system becomes unjust. Therefor it goes to reason that these offenses are of the most serious. This is the state's version of treason. It is an act of war against the people. Objections gt If people in these positions had to worry about the possibility of constantly being accused of a capital crime, nothing would get done. No one would become public servants. I believe instead the best people would become public servants. Only those with the highest ethical integrity and confidence in their abilities would serve. And they would do so with little to no rational fear of being accused of such conduct, because they are of sound moral principle. It is only a person who believes they are incapable of absolute morality and professionalism that would worry about such a thing. I argue that any efficiency lost if there was any would be at great social benefit. gt Murder is a more serious crime because it is direct. Even if these issue affect millions, no one is directly and physically hurt. True, but the same could be said about treason, yet it is a capital offense. The reasoning being is that it threatens the integrity of the system. It is therefor one of the most serious and egregious offenses. This is not to say that I believe that removing the capital offense status of treason justifies these offenses as being non capital offenses. gt Someone who is innocent could have their lives put in jeopardy, all because they want to serve the public. They could end up in jail for life or worse. This is a critique on the justice system. Your problem is with a system that is capable and often does subject innocent people to unfair punishment and sometimes death. In a world where justice is truly blind, fair and all people who are innocent are exonerated with little effort needed to prove their innocence, this objection carries no weight. gt We hold that these people should be held to a higher standard. I reject this notion and replace it with the highest standard. If the continuity of the system is the highest priority, people who serve it, should be held to the highest standard. For the sake of clarification I do not believe in the death penalty, because it is impossible to know with 100 certainty the innocence or guilt of someone, I believe it is immoral for the state to execute even one person. It also does not act as a deterrent and lowers us to the level of condoning state sanctioned murder. This argument goes only so far as to state that I believe these offenses should be capital offenses, and are treated in manners similar to other capital offenses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe official misconduct such as political corruption, accepting brides, judicial or prosecutorial misconduct,police brutality etc should be capital offense because they undermine the rule of law and breed contempt for modern society, deteriorating the lives of all.\n","id":"81d10ccc-c567-4db1-98f4-e879c1e75e41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>According to law professor Elizabeth Hillman, in World War II, \"African-Americans comprised 10 percent of the armed forces but accounted for almost 80 percent of the soldiers executed during the war.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Throughout the history of the United States, executions were disproportionately used to punish Black Americans. The death penalty perpetuates the tradition of bias and evokes the history of abuse.\n","id":"46361c9c-c80c-41d3-956f-20fb9fefead8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The United States should abolish the capital gains tax<|ARGUMENT|>Abolishment of the capital gain tax will lead to massive tax avoidance, as there are well known methods that will mask ordinary income as capital gain such as deferred equity grants, stock options e.t.c.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The capital gains tax allows for tax evasion by the wealthy. urban.org\n","id":"c0ec78e8-64b6-4b69-ba56-4c41e0688c29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should individuals sentenced to life in prison be allowed to choose death instead?<|ARGUMENT|>Research in Belarus - where the death penalty is legal - revealed that while more than half of respondents 63.8% interviewed said they supported capital punishment, there was also wide support for alternative measures such as life sentences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many believe that a life sentence without parole is similar to getting executed.\n","id":"0756b1b5-d2de-4e4d-b320-0eeea51e97c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I shall mainly use this article as reference being that if I am not sympathetic of young girls joining ISIS then I probably won't be sympathetic of anyone else. They are our baseline and reference point. To have video of evidence of ISIS members executing people, from journalists to care workers, and still have any belief that their cause is just, is indicative of someone who does not belong in a civilised society. I hope they either return in a body bag or not at all. I have absolutely no sympathy for people of any gender, age or race who decide to join ISIS. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have absolutely no sympathy for people of any sex, age or race who decide to join ISIS.\n","id":"ac864380-56c2-4c80-9ce2-82cc967c7557"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>Imagine a world where people could walk up to people, and kill them for some perceived slight, without offering them a chance to defend themselves, is this not a repulsive idea? It is hard to see how the death penalty differs from this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The act of killing another human leads to a detriment of what it means to be human. This act violates human dignity as laid out by Immanuel Kant, and others that follow that philosophy.\n","id":"ac754d46-735d-4a3c-ae9d-73276eb01c8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Background on myself Atheist, heterosexual black guy who supports marriage equality and states rights. We've been hearing lately claims that religion was once used to oppress and segregate minorities, disallow interracial marriage, and generally justify racism. and that this is one and the same as religious views on marriage or freedom to conduct business according to your world views Let's assume for the sake of being correct that you and I cannot change our skin color or sexual preferences. Both are born traits I have no control over. It was never fair to discriminate against women, blacks, or homosexuals. Simply being homosexual isn't something you wear on your sleeve though like being black is. Still, neither have anything to do with your ability to perform a job or eat chicken. Here's the major difference in the two for me Sexual activity is a choice we all make. That's a moral issue that certain religions have against A. the act of gay sex B. the government's infringing on their freedom to choose not to participate in weddings or services they cannot sanction within their beliefs. There is a difference between sexual orientation and sexual activity. There is a difference between serving a homosexual a hamburger and being legally obligated to print a banner for a gay pride parade. I don't hear a vocal movement calling for the banning of gays from burger joints. These so called discriminatory businesses ought to be protected from providing services for specific events they believe are immoral. It's not the people they're discriminating against, it's the participation in the event or activity they don't want their business associated with. I believe they should be allowed to reserve that right. Yes, I think some of these businesses have been wrongly sued and intentionally attacked for their religion. That represents the opposite of religious freedom and is vastly different than racism. So I believe individual states should be able to protect religious freedom to varying degrees. There are other states, there are other businesses. Seeking out and forcing these religious people to do something they believe is wrong is YOUR OWN ACTION not theirs. Again, in this era, the issue isn't even the people, it's the event or activity. This discrimination gays are facing today is about their actions, not their orientation and it's an insult to compare the struggle of gays in 2014 to what African Americans have gone through in the USA. I don't see you people getting lynched, I see you on TV every night smiling and getting along fine. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unfair to compare homophobia to racism from a religious liberty standpoint.\n","id":"c3dd5edf-fd1a-4472-807d-f97429b81bfb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't understand how actors doing interviews is such a widespread thing. To me it undermines the artistry of acting pretty significantly I think of the ideal actor as a chameleon in the best way possible , someone able to shapeshift for each role and do it so well that it leaves you in awe. So when you see their actual personality a lot of the mystery evaporates, and in order for the wow factor to be in full effect, you'd have to know as little about them as possible. Have you ever seen a great actor for the first time and thought wow, I wanna know everything about him her ? But after you look them up, it's just not the same. The intrigue wears off. I get the whole promotion angle of it, and how they have to do it to sell their movies shows but it still seems counterintuitive from a professional stand. Especially when they share their views which can alienate viewers who disagree with them or force you to associate them with more than just their performances. English is not my first language, sorry for any mistakes<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think actors should do interviews\n","id":"bced1565-0dd2-4c9c-8337-66f71bd8b1be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that individuals own themselves and therefore own the product of their labor. The state taking a portion of the money people earn through threat of violence you can get locked in a cage if you don't pay taxes is no better than a mugger with a knife threatening to stab you if you don't give him your wallet. To clarify I am also against property taxes and other direct taxation for the same reasons. When I say immoral I am referring to the non aggression principle view of morality any initiation of force on individuals is inherently immoral. Feel free to try and  on the NAP as well. If it matters I consider myself a libertarian voluntaryist. Edit I've talked about sales taxes on luxury goods as being acceptable, but people have pointed out that isn't being consistent. It is still money being taken through threat of violence. I've been on the fence about minarchism vs. anarcho capitalism. Providing services for society through coercion is undesirable, a minarchist state would still have to do this in some fashion. A free market with individuals interacting voluntarily is the only moral way to solve problems collectively. So I would say at this point I am an anarcho capitalist. Feel free to  on this too. Edit 2 Question for mods, is there a limit on how many deltas I can hand out? Lots of good points being made. Didn't expect this big of a response, I will respond to the rest of you tomorrow.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe income taxes are immoral and equivalent to theft.\n","id":"b5277314-c0bc-4dfc-8b56-31370d272da8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One morning I was in a rush. I had to take a piss, so I decided to multi task by brushing my teeth while I pissed sitting down. A few days later, I was hung over as hell, and just decided to sit while I pissed. Over time I began to do it more often. Now I muti task quite often by sitting to piss while I brush my teeth, and often just sit to piss when I'm feeling lazy. I probably do it half of the time. I haven't told anyone because it would be considered gay and all that jazz. I also do it when I have morning wood and have to piss so I can tuck my dick under the toilet seat. As you know, trying to piss with morning wood can be very annoying. Just because chicks have to do it doesn't mean tha it's feminine for men to do it. It has nothing to do with being gay because it does not involve sexuality at all. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should be acceptable for men to piss sitting down.\n","id":"1a1376b4-4e5d-4305-976a-13df5b416c15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious practices that incorporate self-harm be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>People are allowed to join the army whose sole purpose is to kill enemies and often leads to the death of one's own people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are allowed to choose a profession that might very well harm or even kill them.\n","id":"a9c6f575-c967-491d-813a-6cb1f83005e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the aftermaths of the regular mass shootings we see in the United States, a sentiment I often see expressed by people on Reddit and elsewhere is that media members have no business approaching survivors and witnesses for interviews. In their view, this represents grotesque voyeurism, or the cynical exploitation of tragedy for ad revenue, or simply insensitivity toward someone who is in shock. The word vultures comes up a lot. I believe instead that reporters are well within the bounds of their documentary duty in doing this, and that taking on site accounts and immediate reactions supports the public interest. We should be informed about important events, and on hand accounts are no less appropriate to seek out and broadcast than official police reports although they should be treated more provisionally, and be subject to further confirmation . It is important to note that anyone can refuse an interview request, and any mainstream media outlet would respect that wish. Almost all requests I see are conducted politely. And whatever additional trauma, if any, an interview request imposes on a victim, it must be insignificant in comparison to the trauma of the tragedy itself. I also think it is too cynical to suggest that journalists are concerned to any large degree with ad revenue or raising viewership at these crime scenes. Remove money from the equation, and imagine a media landscape completely funded by a fixed government grant. I believe that even in this scenario, it would simply be good journalism to ask witnesses for their accounts, and we'd see journalists doing it just as much. There may certainly be examples of journalists being truly rude or insensitive to survivors, but to me these are exceptions and shouldn't form the basis of any general principle. Here is what I really suspect seeing the victim of a tragedy talk about their experience amplifies the pain more for the viewer than anyone else. And that is why we, kind of selfishly, have this instinct to turn away from it, and blame the journalists who broadcast it. But I think it is our duty as citizens to bear the pain of being informed, just as it is the duty of journalists to inform us. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the aftermath of a mass shooting, it is totally reasonable for reporters to approach survivors and witnesses for interviews\n","id":"75705125-ea30-4335-8aab-ed2514143cc2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My mother practices reflexology so I'm informed about her practices and similar ones. It seems nearly all of them are not supported by the scientific method. The only proof out there is from anecdotes, placebos, authoritarian fallacies and other cognitive biases. Nevertheless, these practices are advertised as effective and sometimes even more effective than traditional medicine. This is dangerous to people with serious diseases who choose alternative over traditional, and possibly worsen their situation. The most common arguments I hear from practitioners of alternative medicine are Traditional medicine is too capitalistic doesn't treat the root cause of the disease is subject to error. None of those arguments justify the use of alternative medicine as a good alternative. Capitalism has inherently nothing to do with the use of the scientific method and is a separate issue altogether. Moreover, traditional medicine has cured polio and is close to curing other global diseases as well. What has alternative medicine achieved?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alternative medicine is useless and should never be supported.\n","id":"8961f7fa-c5f7-4230-960c-b6c04d017e80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ban on Muslim burqa and niqab<|ARGUMENT|>A 2010 poll found that, with a fairly strong culture of religious freedom in America, only a minority 33% was in favor of banning the burqa and\/or niqab.10<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ban on Burqa is supported by a small minority in America.\n","id":"d927458a-4281-4177-a3e4-4ec12a6df8b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>A recent survey discovered that around 25% of young people would consider dating a robot.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex robots are unlikely to ever be a mainstream technology.\n","id":"f80ab628-8b85-4fa0-843a-bdd6b6e5c403"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If there was some way to make elections completely anonymous from age, race, gender, religion, etc., then elections would produce winning candidates that are the best person for the job rather than producing someone that people can identify with because of qualities that they are born with. This is vaguely similar to the debate about colleges accepting more minority students that have lower GPAs rather than majority students that have higher GPAs because it is based on qualifications for the job rather than identification. For example, women voting for a female presidential candidate purely because she is a woman and NOT based on her ideas wouldn't be able to happen because they wouldn't know the gender of the candidate in the first place. People would have to form opinions on the ideas themselves rather on the person giving them out. I saw a YouTube video the other day where an interviewer gave democratic college students a bill proposed by Donald Trump but told them it was proposed by Obama and they supported it, and vise versa with the Republicans that they asked. This video was eye opening for me because I found myself agreeing with stuff that Donald Trump has said lol. Also having a big reveal on who the new president whatever is would be pretty crazy and fun. I am not completely sure how this would work, but maybe every candidate could be assigned a number, and they would have debates behind a curtain with a voice changer lmao and you would then vote a number or something Idk. I feel like this is a stupid idea that I came up with so I'd like to get it out of my head<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anonymous elections would produce winning candidates based on qualifications rather than identifications.\n","id":"b1d1720e-2d09-49c1-a394-bd2aa7673456"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>$700 billion US economic bailout, Debate on the $700 billion US economic bailout<|ARGUMENT|>US Secretary of Treasury Hank Paulson - \"The ultimate taxpayer protection will be the market stability provided as we remove the troubled assets from our financial system. I am convinced that this bold approach will cost American families far less than the alternative \u2013 a continuing series of financial institution failures and frozen credit markets unable to fund everyday needs and economic expansion.\"10<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"$700b plan is better for economy\/taxpayers than doing nothing\n","id":"f92abfa9-cf7c-4832-bdb0-61f4baee384e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Expiring Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in 2010<|ARGUMENT|>Eric Cantor: \"If you have less revenues coming in to the federal government, and more expenditures, what does that add up to? Certainly you are going to dig the hole deeper, but you also have to understand if the priority is to get people back to work, is to start growing this economy again, you don\u2019t want to make it more expensive for job creators.\"8<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Deal with deficit later, stimulate economy now; extend tax cuts\n","id":"a12af732-4b68-480a-9b29-b04113e50eaa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has the Conservative government lost its legitimacy to govern?<|ARGUMENT|>Most UK citizens living in the EU will have to apply for residency status or work permits but the criteria and deadlines vary by country. This will likely create considerable uncertainty for these people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In a no-deal scenario there will be considerable uncertainty for UK citizens living in the EU as to their immigration status and rights.\n","id":"ec99c980-4684-45df-b54a-0f8128835869"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>An AGI shouldn't be created because controlling its reproduction it copying itself, mutating or taking different forms wouldn't only be ethically hard to justify but also difficult to accomplish in the long term, which would create a new set of possible risks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many reasons to believe AI might represent a possible threat to humankind.\n","id":"a55b94b7-1e53-4f48-9317-9460fed5442c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT I need to get to bed. I have heard a lot of good points in this thread. Specifically, I now believe that the amount of anger produced by this event hurts the BLM cause more than the attention that they drew to it helps them. It causes people to not even consider their purpose and instead simply hate them for making their lives harder. I am still frustrated with the cliched arguments that people come up with when reacting to events like this, but I at least understand that when people get pissed off because of someone's behavior they are likely to dismiss even the reasonable points they may have. I understand that for those stuck in traffic this was an extremely frustrating, even rage inducing event. It is unfortunate that innocent people had to suffer the inconvenience of being stuck in traffic, something that is universally despised. However, I think that given the deeper points at issue here, the inconvenience is small compared to the suffering of the families and communities affected by police brutality against blacks in this country. Therefore I believe that the potential benefits of this protest outweigh the inconvenience suffered by drivers caught in the aftermath, and I think that the event had a net positive effect. The main complaint I have seen on this site and elsewhere is that this stunt could have prevented emergency vehicles from reaching their destinations, leaving people to suffer and perhaps even die due to the ideological beliefs of the protesters. While this is a reasonable concern I don't think it applies in this case because the East Bay and San Francisco are two separate municipal entities which should not share emergency response teams, and thus there is no scenario in which realistically an emergency vehicle would need to travel across the Bay Bridge. Another complaint that is often raised is that inconveniencing people only builds ill will against the protesters and the group they are associated with. While this is true, it can also be considered a strength. It gets people talking about the issue, passionately, increasing awareness of the problems the community is experiencing and forcing people to confront the issue on some level. Like it or not, people are likely to avoid thinking about issues that make them uncomfortable if they have the option to do so, especially if they feel that they have no personal stake in the matter. By engaging in an extremely public demonstration that can't be ignored, these people are forcing everyone to take notice of them in the way that a more traditional protest would not do. Finally, I think its clear that this demonstration was well planned, to create the smallest amount of inconvenience while still having the greatest impact. It falls on MLK day, a holiday strongly associated with civil disobedience and nonviolent protest. Because it was a holiday, the amount of traffic on the bridge was less than it would be on a normal commuting day. Additionally, with Martin Luther King already on their minds, people are maximally likely to take the intended message from the event rather than misinterpret it. In order to have my view changed I require two things First, I want to know how what these protesters did caused more harm than the benefit from widely publicizing their cause Second, I want to know what else BLM protesters can do to call attention to their cause that would have a comparable effect. I realize that this is difficult to quantify, but I am willing to consider alternatives. I am adding this because in reading the responses to events like this I often see complaints about the irrationality of the behavior of the protesters and the inconvenience they cause, but I never hear anyone suggest any viable alternatives to effective methods for calling attention to a cause like this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Black Lives Matter protest on the Bay Bridge was an effective means of calling attention to the plight of African Americans in the country\n","id":"bcf8d96d-ef92-4b38-8118-a2ee56eade1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just to be clear I do not think that psychology in general is bad or that mental illness is not real. Psychological research is very important and mental illness is a serious medical issue that needs to be handled professionally. What I mean is that clinical psychologists seem pointless when psychiatrists can do everything clinical psychologists do and more. Clinical psychologists just seem redundant. From what I understand clinical psychologists cannot give drugs to their patients whereas psychiatrists can. Though I do realize that not everyone that sees a psychologist psychiatrist will need drugs. Is there some niche that psychologists fill?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Clinical psychologists are pointless\n","id":"1f3f8570-202d-4333-a0f8-58b4fb91707b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Donald Trump a Good President?<|ARGUMENT|>Despite promising to eliminate the Federal Debt \"fairly quickly\" in an Interview with Sean Hannity Instead, in his first 4 years of office, the federal debt increased by $3.1T. This is during an economic expansion, a time when the Government is supposed to be reducing debt for the inevitable recession.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump failed to follow through on the financial promises that he made to the voters.\n","id":"8e182c2f-6ff4-46d0-9c5a-784bff30302b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>In July 2018 300 prehistoric worms recovered from permafrost above the Arctic Circle were thawed and two of the nematodes revived and began moving and eating. One found in a Pleistocene squirrel burrow in the Duvanny Yar outcrop on the Kolyma River is 32,000 years old, while the other, recovered in 2015 near the Alazeya River, was dated at approximately 41,700 years old. These nematodes were believed to be the oldest living multicellular animals on Earth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many living organisms are older than the biblically proposed age of the universe.\n","id":"ac15ed2b-d2a3-4797-864e-41de7826f822"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should jury trials be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Jury's offer a human counterweight to the rational process of law. In cases where the accused felony conflicts with the human factor behind the crime a jury can decide to declare the offender not guilty based upon \"fairness\". Take for example a father who kills the raper of his daughter. Is it right to convict the father for murder? A jury might decide not to, cause the father was under influence of strong emotions and it should be manslaughter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Juries have the ability to find individuals not guilty when they think the law is wrong or that the punishment would be unfair.\n","id":"fde51042-9095-41cf-b8a2-ae8b75e70d99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>Enabling people to choose how and when they will die is likely to better their mental health during their lives, as this allows for a feeling of control and a deeper understanding of the impact of death on themselves and their loved ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is central to personal autonomy and bodily integrity that each person is able to embrace a timely and dignified death on their own terms.\n","id":"a8d30761-76f4-47b1-8fd6-484373a2d4df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The original edition of the Book of Mormon states that in the last days, when the Lamanites are taught Christianity, \"many generations shall not pass away among them, save they shall be a white and delightsome people.\" Book of Mormon, 1830 ed., p. 117<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon teaches that when indigenous Americans become righteous, their skin becomes lighter.\n","id":"9dfd8412-8312-411f-82fc-4d53438f4f26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally do not consider Poland and the Baltic States to be politically and culturally European if anything they are more American than they are European and Canadian for the following reasons Electorally Poland and the Baltics are pretty much the farthest right wing in Europe. All of the comments about the US Republicans being far right and the US Democrats being centre right in Europe aren't true in Poland and the Baltics, where the mainstream politicians are basically Republicans. Religiously Poland in particular is very observantly Catholic and has the sort of religious right that does exist in the US but which is irrelevant in most parts of Europe. Politically Poland is dominated by right wing parties. If the US has two right wing parties and no centrist or left wing parties, then the current Polish parliament has ~5 right wing parties and no centrist or left wing parties. Economically Poland and Estonia are averse to the sort of welfare state that has been settled in Western Europe for decades, if not centuries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Poland has more in common with the USA than with Western Europe.\n","id":"27911829-8c52-4bdb-a5a3-caa4837e7873"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We should start questioning wether the business models of these huge data gathering corporations are ethical and benefit society. Do we want to live in a world where a few handful of billionaires control the information about our personal lives? Some might say yes because they're nobodies, have nothing to hide, aren't doing anything wrong, etc. And they're wrong because x200B a Just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean that other people don't either. b Having something to hide isn't in accordance with doing something wrong. Many people, especially minorities, that live in oppressive countries need to hide their identities from these corporations and subsequently from their government to be able to live. c You're empowering these billion dollar companies to control and manipulate you in any way they like based on their knowledge of you. We know this is the case with personalised search results and feeds as well as insurers overcharging patients based on the data collected by their medical tracking device. d Such a collection of companies no longer let us participate in democracy but rule over us in a corporatocracy. x200B As some might consider, opting out of all technology is not a possibility in this day and age. Instead, we should start using ethical alternatives to these technologies if we want to live in a fair society. x200B EDIT Wow this got huge, thanks everyone I expected to have a conversation with a few at the beginning but can't even see every comment at this point. Firstly let me say that I posted here to actually have my mind changed because I wasn't fully convinced about the issue and wanted to hear from what others had to say. Secondly, a lot of you raised some good points and flaws with my argument which I appreciate and while I haven't fully given up my opinion, you did reshape my thinking. I guess in the end my argument would be, whether it's a violation of privacy or not, to stop actually consenting to companies and ultimately governments owning and controlling our data in the first place because of the multiple dangers this brings to our civil liberties, which privacy is an important one of them in my opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Privacy is a fundamental human right and we should stop using the products of corporations that violate it.\n","id":"69f4e0a3-d661-4cb2-80ef-2ff0964dbb67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Driftnet ban<|ARGUMENT|>All talk about biodiversity and poor dolphins and fish is nice, but should be considered against the fact that for many people, driftnet fishing is their only means of subsistence. Banning driftnets would spell starvation for them. That\u2019s why, for example, in the 1980s the UN Food and Agriculture Organization actually recommended and helped with the use of driftnets in Bangladesh. The use of driftnets there increased the number of fish caught by about 45%, at a 40% lower cost, providing a vital means of subsistence to the locals.7<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Driftnet fishing is a form of subsistence living for many.\n","id":"df984151-a37e-4c91-add9-f8427b87f0e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The basic system of subreddits, although terrific in other contexts, tends to create multiple safe spaces, echo chambers, and political cults, each with their own cult like vocabulary to dismiss and dehumanize the other side. Its a widespread issue that affects all sides. The politicized subreddits are some of the biggest on reddit, so this is quite troubling. I won't name specifics here, but they exist on all sides of the political spectrum. People with initially moderate non ideological flexible viewpoints get swept up in all this ferver, and it seems to be getting worse. To make matters worse, if you dig into it, behind the scenes you'll find all kinds of mod drama, threats, doxxing, etc This is a throwaway as I don't want anything I've said in the past to somehow influence this discussion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit encourages extreme political views, and is not a good place for political discourse.\n","id":"57609220-e492-4478-8225-49d93698137f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Doctors should be banned from performing genital reshaping surgery on intersex infants<|ARGUMENT|>The argument that intersex children need reshaping surgery to live \"normally\" is circular. Being intersex would be less abnormal if it weren't for doctors carrying out surgeries in an attempt to erase children's intersex status.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genital reshaping surgeries on intersex infants are unnecessary as they encourage conforming to outdated and binary ideas of gender.\n","id":"34ab0589-9a71-472b-975e-c6257918cbe1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>Just because something is potentially harmful doesn't mean that everyone who does it needs to be rounded up and thrown in prison which would cause more harm to the body than many of the drugs currently prohibited.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many things can cause harm to the body, but we do not ban all of them.\n","id":"13f877fa-7511-4e57-9ad8-f9bf246121f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>Gated communities do not exist in countries with highly functional social welfare, because the rich have nothing to fear.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to research strong inequality is one of the main factors that propel conflict and violence.\n","id":"b44ceb30-b7e5-42e1-82da-fef54cc4afc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Electric vehicles are better than fossil fuel vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>The cost and environmental pollution for implementing electric cars large scale would far outweigh a gradual transition from fossil fuel cars to electric. Not to mention implementation of reskillling mechanics and repairman etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A slow transition to EVs would be better than a fast transition.\n","id":"ab895676-1af6-4505-a8fe-b841ffd38ceb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The national curriculum should be scrapped<|ARGUMENT|>Mainstream schooling in Britain was designed to create a compliant, obedient workforce for the factories. It is overly dependent on strict subject delineation and is now over-crowded with subjects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The National Curriculum is the product of a factory system designed for a world that no longer exists.\n","id":"21b52679-580a-496c-9130-0d52916b41d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>vanilla wow was a game founded on principles, principles that were not held up for the duration of the games history. things like being social, forming groups and running instances were trivialized with things like dungeon finder. blizzard has shown, in the past, to be incapable of providing a quality experience for players. the changes they have made in the past show that they are incompetent, and with the new announcement of classic servers, i fear greatly that they will ruin it by caving in to the casual audience to add changes such as transmog that will completely kill the game.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't want changes to Vanilla WoW.\n","id":"60ee2fa4-f27c-4162-aec2-a238c5e12f1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not a racist person. I love people of all skin colors and complexions. However, this doesn't stop me from feeding into stereotypes. Asians are good at math, black people like fried chicken purple drank kool aid . While these may or may not be true, they can ALSO be true for other races as well. Whether a stereotype is true or not is not the point. The point is, it isn't racism. Racism is defined as a set of beliefs that one race or set of races are superior in some way, or to put it more elegantly, that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. Stereotypes may not be fair, racism is certainly not fair and just because one has a stereotype about someone doesn't mean that one is inferring superiority over them. I'll further this. 7 11. Sheetz. Generic convenience store here . Who do you picture working behind the counter? Maybe an Indian? MAYBE But maybe not. And that is a stereotype. It doesn't hurt anyone. You wouldn't stop your son daughter from dating the Indian working at the 7 11. And that is why it isn't a form of racism. When someone is racist, that means that someone else is being denied something because of their color. Go ahead, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- Stereotypes =\/= Racism.\n","id":"b142feb9-f83c-4371-aef1-9336f902e915"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mental illnesses are due to nurture not nature<|ARGUMENT|>Signs of social and physical disorder often characterize poor neighborhoods, which can cause stress, undermine health-promoting social ties, and affect the mental health of people who live there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Poverty can significantly contribute to a person's mental health problems.\n","id":"ac407e17-842e-4c38-bd7f-9c55b3579b6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>While there are forms of genetic selection that civilized society agrees is unethical genocide, there is also genetic selection that is universally considered acceptable mate selection. Therefore, genetic selection itself cannot be referenced as a categorically ethical nor categorically unethical practice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It cannot simply be assumed without justification that genetic selection is a bad thing.\n","id":"f884eec8-219c-4e3a-bdd6-c65b8a6a885c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I am not a socialist or communist. My reasoning for this is that the accounting, enforcement, and administration of a means tested benefit program outweighs the benefits of the program. Second, any answer of poor people shouldn't have children isn't realistic. Ideal? Perhaps in some circles. But not realistic. Now, on to the view Every adult should get the same monetary benefit from the government. It is well documented some industries and business rely on the government to subsidize their low wages. By knowing the government will take care of their workers many businesses can offer low wages. In fact, both Walmart and McDonalds have made public brochures they have made about how to qualify for government assistance. It is also well documented that middle class families often spend more on childcare than the price of a college education. Poor women get this for free and wealthy women can afford it. Having income restrictions puts millions of women into an impossible decision work and scrape by or quit your job to get free childcare. My solution is to give every adult a certain dollar amount that is not means tested. Why should some women have to struggle to find childcare while working a poverty wage while other who make twice as much don't get help but still can't afford basic needs like childcare. In some respects to woman making 15 hour is being punished for having slightly too good of a job . In both cases there is probably little to no saving for retirement, which compounds a longer problem. It would be easier and more effective to not worry about the income of people when giving them a benefit. One check in the mail to each family per month takes almost no administration, there is nothing to enforce, and people won't spend their time trying to game the system since there is no added benefit to gaming the system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Every adult should get the same benefits from the government. It should not be based on income.\n","id":"cd31f9e5-215f-482d-81c3-e0465ce26693"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Using a firearm defensively can cause responding police forces to misinterpret where the threat is as often the possession of a firearm meets the criteria for an active gunman.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Armed resistance to a police officer is rather more likely to get you shot than anything else.\n","id":"e3a827ec-dc52-4793-ad6d-7cd5f1a9d096"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this seems crazy and I'd like to change my view on this one, perhaps it's totally flawed and I just needed someone to knock some sense into me. So, if the animal initiates sexual contact and the type of sex isn't hurtful, I don't see how it can be immoral. You might say that animals can't give informed consent, but I don't see how that matters. Animals can't give informed consent to you petting them. Is pet ownership now immoral? I actually think you can make a decent case against it but I'm going to make the wild assumption that most people are pro pet ownership<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bestiality is amoral unless it hurts the animal\n","id":"b231302d-d0da-4ac3-99af-e828a591cb5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>By making development aid conditional on democracy, at least 40% of the people living in extreme poverty would be cut off from development aid as their countries' governance is generally considered undemocratic World Bank, p. 4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conditional development assistance harms the poor in particular; those individuals are not responsible for the non-democratic nature of their government.\n","id":"99984d70-f478-47ad-b266-898987673df9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>If we build a perfect replica of a human brain, down to the neuron or even subneuron level, but using a different substrate e.g. silicon, it should be treated the same way as biological brain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While the person working the look-up table doesn't understand Chinese, the system as a whole does understand Chinese when there are many of these Chinese rooms. This is known as the 'The Connectionist Reply\n","id":"91c88f2f-9fb6-4c43-9606-59bb4e9975db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We used to use it a lot more and now it never happens. And I think its basically the same affect as killing someone, but without the violence and moral implications. Plus I think its a realistic threat to people who aren't scared of jail. Wanna commit gang violence? Goodbye, you now live in Mexico and can never come back. Wanna commit insider trading? You now have to move across the ocean for the rest of your life. Its a privilege to be an American, something that we could take away from people when they do Unamerican things to good Americans and to the detriment of the country. So tell me how I'm wrong in this thinking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that deportation should be used much more than it is.\n","id":"6dd1c92b-d6a0-44aa-b8b8-4cb668f99718"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is especially true around elections. They'll bring in the expert to report on the latest news surrounding the election, but he she will report on every single thing one candidate will do wrong, while ignoring the mistakes the other has made. This will make the side the expert is going for seem like the obvious answer, which can skew the poll results. The solution is not to hire someone who claims to be a true independent, but to not have these experts at all, since almost anyone will root for one side or the other. Feel free to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"News networks such as CNN or FOX should not have political \"experts\" since they obviously lean towards one side.\n","id":"5c715cd8-3123-4567-a663-ae8d796c3ae6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer This is not about protecting the environment from pollution as there is a point in that it creates a livable environment for humans as well. Okay on to the main topic. Scientists have talked about how we are causing climate change and how devastating what we are doing for the world is. They also talk about previous instances of climate change in the world such as the ice age. Here is my point. Climate change will happen regardless if we cause it or not eventually even if we take absolute care of the world and release no greenhouse gasses. It may delay it but it will happen. So why are we getting all this fuss about delaying it? Shouldn't we instead focus all our effort and resources to preparing for it instead? Higher walls to protect towns from waves, food sources that will survive changes in Climate, etc? Edit Seems to me that a common counter is that we are trying to mitigate the extent of CC. But looking at the past data, it reaches Ice age levels and the world goes back to normal after. Wouldn't this imply its not the effects that change but the speed at which it changes to reach that stage ice age .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no point to stop \"Man made climate change\". Humanity should focus on preparing\/surviving it instead.\n","id":"4e79a24f-1d0f-428c-add8-d8145c086193"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>American public schools are essentially public service agencies that teach. They feed, clothe, provide therapy, and do all sorts of other non education tasks. These things are all fine, but they shouldn't take place at the school. I understand it might be the most efficient place because the kids are there anyway, but the role of public education is not to provide every single building block of childhood. Public schools should not be required to feed or clothe children if parents can't do that. If the government decides it still wants to do those tasks it should find another avenue so people don't conflate public education with providing material resources. By breaking up those things the public is better able to identify each task and determine what is appropriate and what is not appropriate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"American public schools should have never become social service agencies because it stretches the original mission of public education.\n","id":"a766b55b-00ab-4c42-885f-4ae1a62eefce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My city Austin, Texas banned plastic grocery bags a couple of years ago. While I hate waste in general and am happy to bring my own reusable grocery bags, whenever I think about a city focusing on eliminating one very specific type of trash, it just seems bizarre. While I understand that plastic bags degrade very, very slowly, there are many things in landfills that degrade slowly. Hard plastics come to mind, for example. Banning plastic bags may keep you, the individual, from seeing the occasional plastic bag floating on the street. So one could argue that it's an effective beautification policy and even that would be a stretch there's still lots of other kinds of trash in our parks and lake . But as a conservation effort, there's just no way fewer plastic bags in our landfills matter in the scheme of things.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Considering the rate socities accumulate trash, as well as the vastness of our landfills, focusing on eliminating plastic grocery bags is a drop in the ocean\n","id":"a8c78987-613a-4902-9dd5-aec532fbb8c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Chinese people practice Confucianism. It is a patriarchal ideology which says that women are inferior to men and kids have to follow their parents's orders all the time. There is no freedom in Confucian societies. There is only group think and catering to the group which is essentially what social harmony is. Chinese people also practice Daoism which causes many to become obsessed with virility or immortality, and this fuels a drive for endangered species parts. Daoism also leads to unsafe cultural practices such as acupuncture. India has many archaic cultural practices such as honor killings which threaten to spread across the world with their influence. There have been honor killings in Canada. If we don't want western civilization to be replaced by eastern values, we have to assimilate all immigrants and make sure they are educated just like we educate our own people so they don't become neo Nazis or some other breed of idiot. One day, the Asian giants will ruse the world. Together their GDP by PPP will be 246 trillion dollars by 2060 while the combined GDP by PPP of the USA and EU will be 113 trillion dollars. The world will absolutely belong to Asia in the future, and if we factor in the economies of Africa most of who will likely be in the Chinese sphere of influence I can say very safely that the reign of Western civilization is deader than dead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Western values are superior to Asian values. The rise of India and China is the end of the world as we knew it.\n","id":"04e059b6-5047-4e18-9681-853cce370cac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>This is especially true for when people move to cities, as meat will be much harder to grow near or in cities than crops which can easily grow in buildings, like apartments or vertical farms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As civilization grows, people will need more space and meat will need to be squeezed out for accommodate them, because meat takes up too much space that people need.\n","id":"18f5df9c-a07d-4c38-9cac-f6406f093da9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Artificial General Intelligence AGI even possible?<|ARGUMENT|>There is general agreement among scientists that AGI is not only possible, but likely to occur before the end of this century.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Artificial General Intelligence AGI is possible and probable. Pascal's AI Wager\n","id":"734282f9-c2fc-42be-b89a-2c08cc1f5892"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>NOTE I understand that point differential is not the PRIMARY tiebreaker in the sports mentioned below . Before I go into my view, allow me to define some terms. Major American sports I am referring to are football, basketball and baseball. Tiebreakers When 2 teams have the same record, in general, they go by head to head match up s . If that is tied, then they use different tiers of determining who will win the tie breaker in standings. The point differential system would be akin to what major European futbol soccer leagues use goals scored vs goals allowed . My view is that point differential would make the game more entertaining. If a team is getting blown out, they have incentive to stay competitive and try because they do not want to increase their PD. Likewise, a team with a lead will continue to put their foot on the pedal to increase their PD. Both teams will continue to put maximum effort, which will lead to a far superior product. Teams playing with more effort consistently will increase scoring and competitiveness. This will draw more eyes to the screen. Ratings would increase, which provides more money to affiliates and the leagues. This is a basic outline of my view. Please change my view. Some evidence that may change my view is how PD would not benefit specific leagues due to how different soccer is compared to the NFL NBA MLB. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Point differential in American major sports is a far superior tiebreaker than head to head match up.\n","id":"0e14ccde-30c6-4fb2-ba6f-303d26fc64fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>\u2022 Brigham Young claimed that Emma owned $50,000 in *city property* when they finished settling the assets with Emma $1.4 million in 2010 dollars. This apparently referred to the Hugh White purchase which Joseph had deeded to her before his death www.dialoguejournal.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith actually died with a lot of assets, power and over 30 wives. I would say he did well with this con.\n","id":"64d17634-2634-4104-8e2a-a6d8ee67353b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think historically the legal profession may have provided value, but I think that it now functions mostly through informational barriers to entry. Specifically the legal profession Hides case law Hides legislation through displaying it in arcane fashions this is getting better Hides details of how a case is argued by not publishing transcripts for a cases even when these exist Hides application of precedent by not publishing judgments for every single ruling Hides likely outcomes of cases by not publishing judgments for every single ruling I think most of the value that lawyers provide derives from this information asymmetry and it wouldn't be particularly difficult or costly for the government to get rid of it. Lawyers would not disappear if the government did this much as there are still software programmers, mathematicians, teachers and scientist but the role would be quite different. Edit my view of some of the discussion A lot of people have said interesting things so I think I should try and pull some of this stuff together and talk about how it influences my thinking. We can kind of explode the argument a little gt Is it even true that there is any information asymmetry gt gt People can already get access to things gt gt gt No they can't yes they can gt gt gt gt gt gt How available is available gt gt gt gt Spectrum of machine readable to reusable to requires FOI request and three months gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt Does a law library count as access gt gt gt gt gt gt gt gt Does the facts that lawyers are provided lots of these things through subscription services mean anything gt gt gt Going to court and watching gt gt gt gt gt gt The information is already there you just aren't looking hard enough yes I am no your not gt Even if there is some sort of asymmetry is it meaningful gt gt Access to case law isn't a bit part of lawyering gt gt gt But perhaps it can do lots of things if you throw a computer at it gt gt gt gt gt gt Perhaps it can do lots of things gt gt gt gt gt gt And perhaps it's the bit that other people find hard gt gt gt gt Procedure is and is derivable from court documents gt gt gt gt gt gt But you could just go to court instead gt gt gt gt gt gt Or you could just give me the documents that exist in the public domain gt gt gt gt gt Are you actually going to represent yourself in court you still need lawyers gt gt gt But maybe access to information with magically lead to technology gt gt gt gt gt gt gt But if it's the legal profession that uses this information it's hardly an asymmetry with other people gt gt gt gt gt They would be forced to do this by economics however gt gt gt But maybe access to information will make lawyers super productive gt What documents are you exactly talking about gt Moral questions gt gt Even if this information would be useful can you blame the legal profession for this gt gt gt Not their job gt gt gt gt gt gt But they write the law and are an instruments of state gt gt gt gt gt gt Role defined by legislation gt gt gt gt Yet they seem quite good at doing things like writing and selling textbooks gt gt gt Cost and tradeoffs inherent to them gt gt Access to this information would be actively harmful gt gt gt Less is more in legislation gt gt gt gt gt gt It's not my fault if your response to not being able to deal with all the materials that might be useful to people so respond by hiding it gt Legitimacy questions gt gt You don't know what you are talking about and lawyers spent a bunch of time in law school gt gt gt Yes I do and here are some citations gt gt gt gt gt gt Law school might be very useful for being a competent lawyer, but it's not really necessary to understand flaws in a system gt gt Perhaps your view derives from just not trying hard enough in the past gt gt gt Maybe fair it try hard is quite constrained to have the wherewithall to deal with hostile organisations and administrative processes . This is something lawyers are quite experienced in but more technical professions are not used to at all. gt gt gt gt gt gt Of course I would argue that I shouldn't have to try harder gt gt gt gt gt gt Although such things may have influenced my opinion they to do not define them Edit How my view has changed nsadonvisadjco brought up. economic incentives . I should probably apply the if you think there is arbitrage why doesn't someone make some money argument to this and my thinking about this topic has lacked this reasoning tool. I don't know the corollaries of this, and I think there's some tragedy of the commons going on better publication of documents is a form of collective action . But this is something I should think about. liquidmccartney8 softened some of my opinions on the quality of access that lawyers themselves have to case law e.g. google scholar in the US is as a good as westlaw, the world isn't wonderful for lawyers as well as highlighted that the situation differs between countries. Of course difficulty of access is more of a disadvantage to beginners than experts, but this point is noteworthy in discussions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The legal profession extracts money from society as much through informational barriers to entry as by providing value\n","id":"275d037a-8dbc-4849-85fb-3fc854fadf91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was kind of torn between the two all along. The cloudlifter is a bit bulkier and I'm not thrilled about the clutter of the extra xlr. The fethead filter has a built in high pass filter and is much more travelable and it's about a third less than the cloudlifter. I would also have to spend an additional 50 if I want a high pass filter, which I would like. On the other hand the cloudlifter is more robust, carries a lifetime warranty and was in stock for quick delivery, which the fethead filter was not. I found out that I don't need it within the week, so I could get the fethead and take the cloudlifter back if I want, and I'm considering it. but I thought I would give this sub the opportunity to change my mind and convince me that the cloudlifter is still the way to go. Just for some background, my recording setup is semi portable and I often bring a small mixer interface when I travel. This makes the fethead's size really attractive. If it is any help, the recordings which I will be using it for are mostly related to training materials for corporate project teams. I will also be using the same setup for some live webinar style orientations. Please convince me that the CL 1 was definitely the choice to make.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not sure that I made the right choice by choosing a Cloudlifter CL-1 instead of a Triton Audio FetHead Filter for my dynamic microphones\n","id":"a892c9aa-aed5-4b86-a6a9-047e24427518"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The way I see it is they are willingly agreeing to the corrupt, murderous ways of the military. For the records, I live in the US of A. I really don't like it when people say I don't think innocent people should get killed but I'm serving to protect in my country . They choose to support the machine, why should I respect them? I believe we should all take a lesson from Costa Rica and get rid of our military and use the surplus funds on domestic protection and improvement. It's very hard for me to articulate my feelings on this so I will be glad to respond to any questions asked. EDIT I realized my title was misleading. It's not that I CAN'T respect people in the armed services, its that if I DO respect them it has nothing to do with their service, instead it has to be something pretty fucking awesome they do. I am always open to meet people and I can get alone with anyone. But deep down the fact that they serve in the military just gets to me. EDIT2 People are largely focusing on comparing the US to Costa Rica and that's not what it's about for me. Besides, if we spent everything we spend on our military and just put it all into defense and protection, a lot less people would get hurt. EDIT3 WOW I did not realize how defensive people get about US ideals and culture. It kind of made me change my view in the opposite direction, although some of you did help<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have no respect for people willingly in the armed services,\n","id":"7f419c22-004e-4f2b-ae8f-7e78c5c1670c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Judges be Elected or Appointed?<|ARGUMENT|>If businesses do not believe the courts are fair they are likely to resort to private arbitration as a dispute resolution mechanism. Since such mechanisms are decentralized, arbiters need not respect each others decisions, decisions may be inconsistent and contradictory, complicating transactions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The legal system's success rests on its ability to monopolize justice and the use of force in society. If people lose faith in the legal system they will seek alternate methods of resolving disputes.\n","id":"22dee43f-eb85-4f00-9e15-a3ce6259e105"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title may imply, I'm not an American. I'm a 24 year old Dane who finished university last summer and as a result, I am a master of science in computer science that's a mouthful in English My childhood was during the late nineties and through the naughts, and during this time I was brought up with an America centric worldview, with America as this mythical place where you went to earn a lot of money and live the high life. It was responsible for, quite literally 'the free world'. But as I got older, I started to see a lot of cracks. The first one came when I heard about your healthcare, about how you could catch a life threatening disease through no fault of your own and be saddled with crippling bills for the treatment, and when I started hearing reports about how incredibly sick patients went to work because they couldn't afford a doctor, I was quite frankly disgusted. When it dawned on me that doctors are being paid by medicine producing companies to promote their drugs, I was quite literally horrified. The second big blow was when it came to education. In Denmark, you get paid if you study full time. It's enough to survive on if you're savvy with your expenses and don't have a bank saved up, about 5800 DKK 790 euro month if you're living alone and a university student, but it varies depending on level of education, whether you're living at home You do still get paid even if you are , and other factors. It's also not tax exempt because in the eyes of the government you are employed as a student, which brings it down to about 5000 DKK 670 Euro after taxes again, enough to pay rent, electricity, etc, and survive on if you're savvy. So hearing that students take out ridiculously huge loans, saddling themselves with debt just to get an education so they're competitive in today's world feels absurd and with the rise of automation I do not see this being alleviated in the slightest. From those two loose threads, the entire fabric that was the well spun lie about America began to unravel. John Oliver in particular has been providing me with the one depressing story after another, and from the recent election of Trump because of a system that is long overdue for an overhaul to the fact that Americans apparently view their presidents as important enough to memorize the entire line of, to the constant attempted infringement of rights which needs the entire world up in arms to prevent PRISM, SOPA, PIPA to name a few in the name of earning more money, 2 to the fact that religion plays such a huge role that there's a lot of people willing to reject the theory of evolution and fight for its abolishment is schools, 2 to the fact that your prison system is bonkers lead me to the conclusion that, yes, America is a great place if you have an education and want to earn money, but it's a figurative shithole if you're born to parents who didn't have the foresight to use contraceptive when they couldn't afford you. It is an industrial monster that every so often swallows the lives of people to sustain itself. Great economic production, great social legal sufferings. Even now, as I write this, I am an intern at the municipality, have been for a month. I don't get paid from the municipality, but rather by two other social security nets One for the formerly employed, but currently unemployed because internships don't carry the guarantee of employment at its end, and I am technically formerly employed because I studied again, studying is a job here in Denmark, a crappy paying one, but it's still a job 3 , and The other a fixed percentage of my apartment rent, literally called 'residential support'. Together it's roughly 9600 DKK 1300 Euros month after taxes, and means that even should I return to being unemployed, I won't have to leave my home I can even afford clothes, good food, birthday presents, and so on. I am glad for the support the danish government has given me, and I am more than happy to pay my taxes for that to continue to be the case for the next generation. I feel privileged to be born in Denmark and not the United States of America, and I will continue to vote against any legislation that is inspired by the US of A ^ 1 unless You provide a reason to Change my view . 1 as u alecbenzer pointed out. This line of reasoning is stupid delta awarded. I stand by the rest of my  still, though. 2 u felixjawesome pointed out that a reason America might look backwards to me is because of its sheer size It's easy for small countries, like Denmark, to make changes on a whim, but America is a behemoth, and changing the course is inheirently harder for larger beings. The important thing to look for is the fact that it wants to change, and I see plenty of that. 3 This is where it gets a little wierd. I'm unemployed despite having an internship, but despite this there are criteria for continuing to get this social support. Essentially, I have to prove that I am actively working on getting work. The moment I stop looking, the payments stop. Yes, even while I'm in an internship I am still looking for jobs because an internship isn't a job it's part of the internship rules they need to give me time, each day, to look for more jobs to apply to. TL DR I'm currently in an internship which means I work full time but am technically unemployed, and thus I am employed and earn my money by looking for jobs. Final edit for the day. I feel the  is reaching critical mass. It has definitely blown up in a way I never anticipated I've tried my best to reason my viewpoint, as have others my view is changed not completely turned around, mind. But changed none the less , and judging by comments and private messages, mine is not the only view that's changed. But now people are raising the same points using the same graphs, using the same arguments discussed already, so I am going to call it quits for today and get back to sketching out my thoughts for the 25th century on the sketchblock I got for christmas. Thank you all for your stories, thought, debates, and likewise, I will return tomorrow to see if there are new points brought up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States of America is socially and legally backwards and should not be emulated by other countries.\n","id":"c886e8b4-616f-4b5a-b430-0df9bf1c3ada"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Context This is a belief I've held since I transferred to and graduated from a liberal arts college that didn't have grades, after coming from a previous college and of course a primary education system which had them. For context, I live in the States, graduated from The Evergreen State College, and am a successful web developer and theatre artist with consideration to the fact that I am early career . While I do not believe that my particular college is for everyone, and while I understand that there are many factors that influenced the difference in the educational environment at my college other than the lack of grades, it has given me a unique perspective on grades that I don't believe that many people have. I have had this conversation with many people, and nearly every single person, even including many people who have come out of other gradeless colleges, disagree with me. Although I'm open to changing my view, it hasn't been changed yet, mostly because the conversation is such a huge one and because I have already considered so many facets of the problem that we spend a significant amount of time running through a list of FAQs that are always repeated which I have got very good at responding to before they lose interest in the topic and I let them change the conversation onto other topics. Of the half dozen or so doubters that I've talked to at length about gradeless education, I've only been able to convince one of them, partly, I believe, because he was trapped in a car with me for 5 hours and we were both actually invested in having a real conversation one in which we truly investigate ideas instead of defending them and in which we are both open to changing our minds conditional on the discovery of new and interesting ideas. I believe that all of your top level comments will include these FAQs which I have responded to frequently and the real meat of the conversation while lie deeper in the comment threads. This is a model which has been functional in other liberal arts colleges, which have produced great artists and thinkers such as Matt Groening and Steve Jobs. Quantity vs. Quality My argument is that, although there is nothing necessarily inherently wrong with grading an individual's work, that the standardization of grading across hundreds of schools does far more damage to education than it does assistance. This argument is similar to the one which says that standardized tests cause damage to the education system. I believe that grades may be helpful in certain instances, in certain classrooms, yet that we should not use them as a standard upon which to judge teachers, schools, districts, nations, or as the primary means of judging an individual's education or comprehension. The biggest problem with standardized grading is it shifts the focus of education from quality to quantity . Schools receive funding teachers and administrators are hired and fired and students are admitted into colleges based off of a quantification of their education, without consideration to the quality of their education. These concepts of quality and quantity are central to my understanding of our education system, so let me clarify what I mean when I use them. These ideas come from concepts discussed in Zen and the the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . The idea is that quality is elusive. You might find certain criteria for what makes something quality, but whenever you attempt to construct a model for quality it will always be missing something. This is most obvious in the arts where almost nothing can be objectively measured as good art or not good art. Yet this idea is still present even in the sciences. Take genius for example. We might consider Einstein one of the most quality scientists to ever live, yet what were the components that made him a quality scientist? It is hard to describe the way in which he must have thought about science in any terms that are measurable, yet we still understand that he is a quality scientist, and we even understand, to a degree, some of the things that make him a quality scientist. For example, Einstein could think outside of the box . We understand this. Yet, we can't yet measure a person's ability to think outside of the box. A key tenant to understanding the idea of quantity and quality is that, although quality is immeasurable, it is still teachable. This is one reason that the proteges of great artists, artisans, scientists, businesspeople, etc, often become successful themselves. Quality, although immeasurable, is still comprehendible and it is still teachable. The Effects of Quantifying Education I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with making decisions based off of quantification. The issue arrises in that not everything that is important in education is quantifiable. In fact, I would argue that the most important things about education are not quantifiable, and that when you shift the focus to quantity you necessarily must sacrifice quality. Arguably, the most quantifiable field of education is mathematics the purest of the sciences. You are either right or you are wrong when you are performing math whether you are applying a formula to solve a problem or writing a proof. Especially at the high school level, math is purely quantifiable. The sciences are the next discipline down the ladder of quantification. Most everything a scientist does can be justifiably judged by it's quantifiable properties. Yet most every other discipline, whether its the arts, world history, social studies, or english, is realistically judged on a scale of quality rather than quantity. A writer does not become a best seller based off of his word count, his grammar, or his vocabulary. The quality of a piece of writing is judged by much more indefinable criteria. Perform a word count on every literary review written and find out which adjectives and nouns are used most often to discuss the greatness or weakness of the writing and I'm guessing that you would find that these components are not easily objectively measurable. Yet, instead of focusing on these immeasurable, but certainly teachable, components, we instead focus on the components that are easiest to measure because they will determine whether or not a teacher will be disciplined by the administration because of their students' less than average grades. Arts Education Funding Since grades are the standard upon which we judge schools, the most quantifiable disciplines become the disciplines which we look at when we compare schools to each other. You wouldn't compare two schools based off of the average Drama class grades, because grades don't necessarily reflect a student's dramatic ability, but you certainly would compare the schools based off of their average Algebra grades. Similarly, when you apply to a competitive undergraduate math program, they look closely at your math grades, while if you apply to a competitive theatre program, they ask you to audition or bring your design or technical portfolios because they know your grades are largely meaningless. Because the science and math disciplines are the most quantifiable, they receive the most funding from the local and national government in order to inflate the perception of the quality of education. It makes it a necessity for policy makers on every level and for school administrators to prioritize sciences above other disciplines because this is the standard upon which they will be hired or reelected. Arts programs are always the first to be cut when schools must cut programs. This is not a decision motivated by the value of arts on the quality of a students life, or on the economic impact of the arts in our country. Here's a great study on the economic impact of the arts Also consider that the second largest export of the nation with the highest GDP the US is entertainment Film, Television, Etc . Local school administrators are certainly not thinking about the national economy when they decide to cut the arts out of their schools. Neither, I believe, are they considering the impact on the quality of life of their students. The simplest answer is that school administrators are considering the funding of their school and their ability to retain their jobs by giving priority to the quantifiable elements of education. However, even the math and science disciplines themselves suffer when the focus is on quantity and not quality. We are taught to memorize and apply formulas as efficiently as possible in order to raise our schools' test scores, yet only the weirdest and most experimental math teachers challenge us to attempt to develop our own formulas, or to engage us in solving math problems in ways that foster critical thinking. Math teachers like Dan Meyer who struggle to create a curriculum of math education that focuses on quality instead of quantity, within the strict confines of the mandatory math curriculum, are a rarity for a reason. Conclusion By removing standardized grades we give school systems the flexibility to develop systems which fit their community and the needs of their students. Removing standardized grades from education is a systemic solution for a systemic problem. Obviously, removing grades from our education system would leave a lot of questions to be answered about what will replace the grading system. I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I can come up on my own with a complete model to replace standardized grading, although I can provide multiple possible solutions to some of these FAQs, often using real world examples of how gradeless schools have successfully tackled these problems. Convince me that it is better to have a system with grades.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that standardized grades are the biggest problem with our education system,\n","id":"e296e58e-e6fc-4ab9-95ef-a883a63d531a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The rise of social media and interacting through text online has had an affect on how people interact with each other and with this, the rise of social anxiety. For people with social anxiety disorders, interacting with others causes irrational anxiety, and fear of especially being judged, self consciousness, and concerns about embarrassing oneself and a general uneasiness with interacting with others. While not especially new in the human condition, the recent rise of the internet and smart phones has served to amplify the effect based off of few things When interacting online, one is in full control of the interaction meaning they can choose not to not respond if the situation becomes uncomfortable take their time looking for the perfect reply before having to send a message back choose to block the person if they don't agree with how the other person is presenting themselves Because these behaviors are not easily replicated in a real life interaction, the person would experience social anxiety possibly because of lack of coping mechanisms that would have organically developed in the pre internet and pre smartphone era.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Rise of Social Media And Online Interaction Correlates With Rise of Social Anxiety\n","id":"d1770be3-1b9f-4aee-9e3b-5b45217609ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nothing is perfect, as with Japan. Every now and then, there are some new and research articles pop out about various issues about Japan I'm also aware that there is also things about other countries but I'm talking about Japan currently. . And I have thought about this for a while, so I might as well share this here. Compared to other countries, Japan has few problems, but each of these problem are very complicated and hard to fix, with highly destructive effect yet not actively solved because Japanese.I'll list my issues one by one First off we have the Japanese society, specifically people. As my personal thought Asia is all about that social pressure baby Historically, Japanese are not known to be adaptive to new cultures, but rather very stubborn,shortsighted and are willing to sacrifice a great deal of resources to prove and defend their view which then fails spectacularly Example includes In the Pacific War, the Japanese had a great start with the bombing of the Pearl Harbor, but as the war keep on going they lose their head start advantage. I think this is because of their failure to adapt to rapidly developing military might. Early on, the Japanese had air superiority with a squad of seasoned veteran and possession of THE state of the art carrier based fighter The A6M Zero, which earned it's name with its Kill to Death ratio of 12 1. But as time goes on, the US Air Force developed better and stronger plane designs and strategy, they also swap out the seasoned pilots to train new ones, while the Japanese are stuck with the Zero design throughout the war, becoming more and more outdated and out powered, their pilots also died out one by one, which leads to a lot of catastrophic problem later on, such as not having enough pilots for newer aircraft carriers, inexperienced crews that leads to the early destruction of the Taihou and just losing air superiority in general. Communication devices, in WW2, Japan never focused their resources and effort into their encryption but rather building more ships, which then leads to the Battle of Midway and Operation Ten Go, we all know how it went. At the end of WW2, America invented atomic bombs, though never mentioned to the Japanese, the US did a good deal of warning them to either surrender or eat a lot of bomb, which they decided to ignore, and even went so far as to arrest any person in possession of the pamphlets the US dropped after their bombing runs. Resulting in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japanese people has a strong sense of tradition, this is not displayed in some aspect like religions and politics but in honor, as in an individual's honor, not a fighter's honor, in Japan, honor is measured by their conformity and perfectionism.If someone were so much as to make a wrong step, they might as well go hang themselves because they would be called dishonorable and a disgrace , followed by endless mockery and bullying. That tradition never left the mind of Japanese people. A In workplaces, back in the day, the Japanese worked hard, long and inexhaustibly because there was little to no technology and as far as they know, the only way to work was to work with their own bare hand and power, as times goes on, technology develops and work becomes easier and easier, but the new Japanese generation was basically do what the old man did so they never adapted to new technology, holding onto their outdated work ethics and technique while the rest of the world moves on and do various crazy shits like outsourcing and automating jobs. Now the Japanese work upwards of 16 hours a day on outdated computer that runs Windows XP while earning shit wages. B As with workplaces, back in the day you had to do everything by hand and memory by head, school taught a load of shit such as history, calculus in middle school grade maths, literature from the beginning of mankind and a lot of other stuff that we can easily look up in 5 seconds with Google while neglecting newly important things like Information Technology and the likes. Japanese are also very competitive, at the point of murdering their own children for failing an exam, and they demand their children to enter top notch University. This leads to 16 hours of studying all kinds of shit everyday, 7 day a week, cram school,supplemental classes. All that and the ever increasing requirements of entry created the phenomenon widely known in Japan as \u8a66\u9a13\u5730\u7344 Shiken Jigoku Examination Hell . This places even more needless stress on children and basically kills off their social life and limit their social skills. Which is why we see shit like hikikomori and NEETs all the damn time. C We can see, through the course of history leading into the present, Japan has failed to adapt to modern society standard quite a few time and earned their own share of shit in the process, they still kept their old tradition, injecting it into the newer generation which just repeats the cycle. It's almost like Failure to adapt has become a Japanese genetic trait. They living on an isolated island in the middle of the sea with earthquakes and tornadoes and tsunami doesn't help either. Socially speaking, the speed which Japan develops their nation can be compared to Saudi Arabia , that means they develops on a fucking glacial pace compared to the whole world, only seconded my the whole Middle East. A B C leads to Suicide. People dies everyday, everyone knows that and are usually less than pleased to be reminded of that fact,^^^No ^^^shit ^^^Sherlock. But in Japan, MORE people dies per day, with more and more exotic kind of death, and even more exotic motivation that is pretty hard to find elsewhere on Earth. In Japan, it is considered as bad and selfish to seek help about mental problem, they are also told to keep their emotion shut like their mouth inside a public pool. So suicidal people becomes more suicide, and with various methods of suicide it is pretty easy to do it, hell, there is even a chart somewhere that list all the method of suicide with the pain level that the recipient are expected to have. If they can read English, that is, but no worries, committing suicide by jumping face first into a train or from a high fucking building in the middle of Tokyo can't be easier, accessible and painless. Oh yeah, what more? So many people die this way everyday that if someone run facefirst into a train, people just stand there, shrug, wait a few minutes for their late pamphlets and for someone to clean the body and it's business as usual. This shit doesn't even reach the news. Japanese people considers suicide for a variety of reasons, which includes but is not limited to Bullying, losing their job but is too old to get a new job and too young to retire, mental illness, social stress, yada yada yada This shit happens every day and I don't see anybody actively doing something to help the situation because the social stigma that comes with it. But hey, at least there are people to replace them right? Without darkness, there is no light. , amirite? Hahahaha, no, I wish. That is the one thing that is changing in Japan, the birthrate is decreasing ever so steadily as a result of a lot of different things which has united to fuck up Japan as a nation. The old generation full of crusty old farts circlejerking each other are dying off too slowly to have a positive effect on the economy, just like the Boomers and the younger generation are busy working their ass off to keep themselves alive. So busy in fact that they have literally no time to have children. Japanese work policy regarding pregnant women are merciless , which is basically if they get pregnant, their career is effectively fucked, leaving them to care for their child while the husband work EVEN MORE to keep the family alive. And then the husband eventually dies of overwork, just like most low ranking worker in Japan, and then the family fall apart or something. Your average Japanese guy fear that and just bust his ass working, never looking to have children. You can see on the news, there isn't enough students to keep the schools open so they're closing one by one, more people are getting old, thus retiring and taking a large section of GDP with them to keep them alive, leaving the younger generation to fare for themselves. Japan's birthrate are goddamn downright abysmal right now, with an average of 1.44 child per woman. Too many people are dying for the children to replace them. Also doesn't help that the Japanese are very homogeneous either, so there are very little chance that Japan are opening their country to immigrants, which is alright, considering they managed to cram 127.3 million people into 377,972.28 km^2. That's about 300 people in a square kilometer or something. All of that bad stuff leads to the final issue of this Economy. The subject that armchair experts around the world loves to argue with so I'll not delve too far into the economy part themselves. The circle goes like this Old Japanese people work Some Old Japanese people die so other Old Japanese people or New Japanese people replaces them Old Japanese people have kid Kid Japanese people becomes New Japanese People to replace Old Japanese People Rinse and repeat until Old Japanese people outnumbers New Japanese people Old Japanese people gets old and retires, out of Old Japanese people to replace them New Japanese people replaces them and work Old Japanese people have kid Kid Japanese people becomes New Japanese people New Japanese people work but too much Old Japanese people to keep alive via tax and unchanging wages forces them to work more New Japanese people does not have kid because economic pressure New Japanese people either dies from overwork or commit suicide, other New Japanese people replaces them Rinse and repeat until New Japanese people outnumbers Kid Japanese people New Japanese people population are dwindling, not enough Kid Japanese people to replace the New Japanese people because they doesn't have kid Economy Flat line Rinse and repeat until shit hits the fan and God knows what happens I don't know, this is just my option, take it with a grain of salt, or just bring r leagueoflegends here. If you have better argument to oppose me feel free to bring it up. I'm known to be pretty chill. Anyway, thanks for reading<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Japanese don't know to adapt, only conform, and are going to get f*cked sooner or later.\n","id":"f7a8bf1f-5643-446e-94b0-adceb7994629"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Dr Oz is one of the most influential doctors in America. He is a vocal critic of genetically modified crops. Scientists should call him out for his \"disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops.\" A failure to do so would be irresponsible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Papers that critique genetically modified foods which contain bad science should be refuted, otherwise they might exert a disproportionate influence on public policy and opinion.\n","id":"c36acb1e-12d5-432a-a87d-f9c751382203"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Host Countries and Cities Benefit from The Olympic Games<|ARGUMENT|>Residents of the host would feel pride because it is as if they are bringing the world together at one place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There would be a sense of pride for the host city\/country.\n","id":"a590c876-ed14-4218-83f1-b10f0c1a125f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Current deportation practices in Western countries are such that even rejected asylum applicants and illegal migrants are not rigorously deported.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many refugees taken in by high-income countries are unlikely to leave anytime soon or ever again.\n","id":"734d1ead-7f6f-48ac-ac7e-13ae03a6bf9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>A regulatory system on top of basic autonomous behaviour is very simple. It in no way requires the addition of free will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To evaluate sensorial parameters, we don\u2019t need consciousness. Therefore consciousness must be more than an evaluation mechanism, i.e. free will.\n","id":"7a45d188-550b-42b5-aa2a-76a28e43d574"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now, this only applies to text and other things, not to duplicate names. For instance, I could wright a book or make an advertisement that uses the name Ford with no risk of being sued for copyright infringement, but I could not make a second company called Ford . I think this would make writing books or other works of fiction much easier as, in continuing with our example, I would not halve to wright Fard of Card or something along those lines. To be clear, slander is not part of the equation. For instance I could not say that Ford makes cars that poison people and kill babies, though I could say that they are worse for X reasons .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the use of company names should not be subject to copyright laws. !\n","id":"ad80227a-49db-4354-ae64-4cd4ea411467"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Those with conscientious objections to abortion generally base this in the belief that abortion is murder, as mentioned in the intro to this discussion, and hence view abortion as unethical. Regardless of whether the mother agrees, or whether or not it is a true characterization of abortion or not, forcing the doctor to terminate an unborn human life would be forcing him or her to participate in what he or she views as unethical murder.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forcing someone to do something they consider to be unethical is unethical.\n","id":"2d206209-1044-43b1-8713-8ca566a182ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>\u201cFor God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.\" John 3:16 Only people that believe in Jesus can benefit from his death. Many people don't believe, but are not lacking free will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jews and all non-christian people are not lacking anything that christian people have, including freedom.\n","id":"3da876c9-c459-4d59-a20e-5655b5ceae8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many of the comments I see posted on Reddit ooze personality, to the point of being able to establish certain character traits from them everything that runs the gamut from people with social anxiety and radical mindsets to those with devilish wit and enigmatic personalities. Most of the people I meet on a day to day basis aren't half as interesting as the people who I see commenting on reddit. Thus, I believe it is the perfect pool to draw from when coming up with characters. If you find an interesting comment, you can even look into the person's post history and really get a feel for what type of person they are or at least putting forth on the internet . Even if it doesn't necessarily represent them in real life, the persona they are acting as can still be an interesting character. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should use Reddit comments as the basis for characters in a novel\n","id":"6786a606-9492-40ef-8d6e-a499292f082e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Many times jobs are not a good fit for people, due to it being too stressful or doesn't align with their values. So if people are stuck at their jobs, at least a UBI gives people an chance to get a better living standard like a better job, rest at home, a vacation, etc..<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI doesn't enhance working conditions but eliminates the need for people to be in them when it's not meant for them, so people can finally gravitate to what is fulfilling for them and their world.\n","id":"89ba5602-1be0-4791-a4e7-a423145e2d38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know that there are already ones about this issues. However, many of them were made before reversals on the ideas that were hated. I feel that the specs are better than the PS4 and the privacy rules were gotten rid of. But, I do see how it can leave a bitter taste people's mouths after the reversals. I seriously can't find why people still hate it though. I think the kinect is an advancement in gaming and I do not see why Sony can still sell their products even after their own scandals. personal info hack, lag spikes, console bricking updates, debug PS Vitas, ect. EDIT Dont call it the xbone, thats starting a flame war<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I like the Xbox One and don't see why I should not.\n","id":"9dcb779a-43d0-4181-b16e-d406f865439f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I try to be open minded about politics, and I like to gather several different views before forming an opinion. However, I find myself drawn towards the left end of the spectrum, particularly towards policies that Paul Krugman advocates. Is there a good reason for me to be skeptical of him as well as everyone else?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In my opinion, Paul Krugman is one of the few pundits who lays out a good argument for how to improve the economy.\n","id":"8a039e7f-8195-4c77-b97d-d51bcf867af1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I remember reading something about workers having a human capital. Every person has a dollar value of what they are worth to a company. One of the many factors that make a dollar value go up is experience on the job. It's unfortunate that many young women have to take time off work during pregnancy, and that it affects the amount of experience that they have by about a working year per child . I believe that the statistics are skewed, and that they've done too much averaging. The only real way to measure women up against men, is to measure women that have never had a child with similar experience up against men. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think women are unfairly paid any less than men in the corporate world. Please\n","id":"c2fd618f-fec5-45e0-8b43-761c1899c22c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Science Leave Room for Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Probabilities are a way of predicting a random result. Imagine a small spinner on a circle that is 80% red and 20% blue. In quantum mechanics the spinner acts at random, but has an 80% chance of landing red and 20% chance of landing blue, based on probability distribution, yet the result is still at random.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Quantum mechanics does not help the argument for free will because randomness isn't the same as freedom of will.\n","id":"7411aaac-736b-49a3-a8d5-8823d9ca0db9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Military conscription should apply to men and women equally.<|ARGUMENT|>Conscription is not compatible with any free, democratic society. By making it more egalitarian equal conscription between the sexes, it becomes less archaic and more compatible with the modern world. By keeping it segregated, it dies with the 20th century.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Expanding military conscription to women will legitimize it, which is a bad thing.\n","id":"8722dbe1-398d-4cef-8d33-a649db7bca61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Sexuality has many dimensions and orientations including fetishism or polyamory. This is very diverse and probably every person is an own category.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are more sexual orientations than there are gender. Thus we cannot ascribe one to the other\n","id":"7c14e2ca-609a-46d6-80d0-eb0842608167"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>They\u2019re doing it with shark conservation, grizzly conservation and whale conservation. I\u2019ll discuss only the latter. OK, the term \u201chijack\u201d is too strong. Let\u2019s say re directing or distorting. Or maybe commandeering. I\u2019m open to finding a better term. Conservation is a practice outlook created by hunters many decades ago. Think Theodore Roosevelt often considered the conservationist president\u201d . Conservation means wise use. Use means just what it says consumption. As in hunting. Or harvesting. Three nations hunt whale Norway, Iceland and Japan. There is also some aboriginal whaling . There has long been a global movement to halt all whale hunting. It heavily pressures these 3 nations. Some whale populations are rising, particularly the humpback. Iceland hunts the minke whale. IUCN listing \u201cleast concern\u201d The Minke and many Humpback populations are doing well. Neither extinction nor serious population depletion are pending issues for some whale species. Several other arguments have been advanced to protect all whale species 1 They should not be killed because they are highly intelligent 2 They are so large that killing them constitutes cruelty 2 Humans regard them as special. These reasons are fine. I do not see a compelling reason to hunting. But these are not conservation arguments. For lack of a better term, one can call them preservationist arguments. As in no use. But the animal right activists masquerading as conservationists don\u2019t want to fess up. Ask them Is there any point to which whale populations might rise where a sustainable hunting yield might be taken? They dodge the Q and say something unverifiable like Whale populations could fall any time. Conceivably they could. And conceivably a meteor could hit Earth in a month. These animal right activists insist they are conservationists. No they\u2019re not. And if a conservation movement has evolved to the point where it is heavily wrapped up in sentimental animal protection narratives AND the movement is unwilling to definitely state that at some point the species in question might re open to hunting, then the movement is not conservationist. It\u2019s preservationist. And should be identified as such.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animal rights people are increasing hijacking conservation movements. Aside from being an annoyance, this represents a problem of these programs being driven by emotional *do-not-kill* arguments rather than verifiable science.\n","id":"973a306c-7c92-47ff-b989-f9376ffd42f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Individual data privacy is necessary for a healthy society<|ARGUMENT|>The oversight of research ethics is a key part of what makes the work of academics different from that produced commercially \u2013 a civilising of research practice that other professions may not always live up to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Researchers should ask for users' consent before incorporating private data into their work.\n","id":"b1a0fc64-e982-4388-9f02-77b69eb12a4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Although any tragedy is relevant to those directly affected, certain tragedies have little relevance to the general population. If aeronautics were beset by staggering inefficiency and mismanagement leading to an increasing number of accidents this would make their focus in news reports valid. As it stands, air travel is safe by all relative standards leading to the clich\u00e9 that one is more likely to die driving to the airport than in the plane . In fact, many more deaths occur every day due to policies and inefficiencies that could be avoided. Faulty construction, vehicle defects, pollution in water tables, etc, that do not get their due coverage. I admit that there is a human fascination with such dramatic events, but that it is not worthwhile to pursue their coverage to the extent and depth that the news currently does. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that aeronautic accidents are the bane of international news. It is tragedy porn, with little to no relevance to most of us in terms of impact, meaning, or policy outlook.\n","id":"d798a425-6807-4e43-91be-9342df904561"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Apparently some diplomats from USA experienced some sickness effects when they were in Cuba. And now suddenly conspiracy people online keep calling it a super sonic attack. Now, it could maybe be bad food or some unhealthy material in the walls. Someone actively poisoning their food because he hates Americans. Or it could just be a nocebo effect caused by mass panic. We don't know as we actually don't even know if the diplomats have gotten better or not. Or who they are and what exact effects they have experienced. It could very likely be one of these common things but instead people eager to sell papers propose that some foreign power build a super advanced machine with technology that no Western power is close to possessing. And not only that but they also used that machine effectively and kept it well hidden even though they used it at several occasions. I call bullshit on that claim. Cuba has cameras everywhere, microphones everywhere, police everywhere. If they wanted to get rid of Americans they could just kick them out. If they wanted to find a super weapon it would take them an hour. There is no motive for them to build an extremely advanced super weapon and use it on people they invited to the country. And the Russians using it? Why? Cuba is a poor country with no great value to Russia. Again, these people were guests and in any case Cuba would discover such weapon easily. For the super weapon theory to be correct a lot of other extremely unlikely and mind blowing stuff has to be correct too. gt Dr. Leighton said contagious anxiety or another psychogenic contributor couldn\u2019t be ruled out. \u201cIf you make people anxious that they\u2019re under attack from an ultrasonic weapon, those are the symptoms you\u2019ll get,\u201d he said. I think the super sonic attack hypothesis is a conspiracy theory and that by applying Occam's razor I propose that it's most likely incorrect. As it could be something much more common.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"super sonic\" attacks on American diplomats at a hotel in Cuba are most likely not super sonic attacks\n","id":"d6e7da7f-5eb9-447c-a910-4069f7ac2952"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Uniting people is the source of wars. The bloody wars are possible when rulers of some union of people start to see the lives of its people as an asset that could be sacrificed for other goals. Religion is not the only factor creating unity. Unnecessary conflicts between unions or individuals happen every time they fight with no gains and losses on both sides purely for emotional reasons, false convictions or only in case of unions personal gains of the decision maker.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions have been falsely blamed as the source of conflict or used as an excuse to cause it.\n","id":"d22e08ad-6f28-47a3-9561-d462f5bb75a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Right to bear arms in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Regarding a meaning of \"the People\" in another context, the U.S. Supreme Court commented in United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259 1990- \" \"the people\" seems to be a term of art used in select parts of the Constitution and contrasts with the words \"person\" and \"accused\" used in Articles of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments regulating criminal procedures. This suggests that \"the people\" refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.\"7<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The people\" in the Second Amendment refers to a collective right to arms\n","id":"08e9e6f7-5f77-4fa1-a67b-da3197869346"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The United States is justified in using private military firms abroad to pursue its military objectives<|ARGUMENT|>\"When it comes to military responsibilities, the incentives of private companies to turn profit may not always be in line with the client\u2019s interests or those of the public good. While in an ideal world there would be good competition, management, and oversight, producing cost and qualitative efficiencies, governmental contracting is not always set up to ensure this. Thus, the general concerns with any contracting handover overcharging, over-billing hours, providing insufficiently trained personnel, quality assurance issues, etc. cross over into the military realm.\" Fred Schreier and Marina Caparini, March 2005<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"PMCs do not have the United States's best interests at heart and are not directly accountable.\n","id":"a0d6e031-5dad-4b9f-845c-f1e048b08f68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note This is from a person outside the US, so cable dominance isn't a thing. So, a smart TV is any tv which has internet connectivity, and built in applications to access both the internet and specialized content streams within it. Which sounds great until you realise that a tv remote is not a functional tool for typing and only average at menu navigation. In practice, the vast majority of the features go unused, with people either ignoring the features entirely and using the device for the critical use as a display panel, or bypassed, and an alternate and functional media source plugged in cable box, sky, computer of a various kind . The extra design and coding and whatnot to add these features tends to add a couple of hundred dollars to the price, for no good reason. However, the internet connectivity of these tvs have things like cameras and microphones, inherently insecure things, vulnerable to exploit. As such, it would be expected that regular software updates are made easily available. But they are not. The lack of updates mean that bugs and other software issues persist. Finally, the spread of this tripe as a 'standard feature set' especially at moderate to larger sizes I was looking for a 40 49 tv , leads to increased prices and a lack of product that I actually want to buy A large display panel I can put in the lounge and connect media sources to. This widespread sale of weakly secured, internet connected devices can lead to easy compromise and installation of information gathering software, or just use of computational resource for nefarious ends. I find no redeeming features of a smart TV, and what features they do have can be replicated by say, a compute stick or home media PC. a HMPC is often cheaper than the difference between a smart TV and a dumb TV, offers a variety of software, updates and critically, can run appropriate security settings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Smart TVs are overpriced, insecure, unsupported and critically, underused versions of TVs, and their ubiquity is a problem.\n","id":"6c4299e5-33f6-489f-9cbe-2711dc55038e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should individuals sentenced to life in prison be allowed to choose death instead?<|ARGUMENT|>Because of this, existing articles may be used to justify protection of the right to die, such as Article 5 which states that no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rights covered in the UDHR are vague and poorly defined.\n","id":"5f5477b7-506b-4136-8325-de4a55df49e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Girls Be Allowed in Boy Scouts?<|ARGUMENT|>Boys and girls are offered a guided framework were they can develop sexual attraction to each other.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Boys and girls will learn relationship\/friendship skills with the opposite sex.\n","id":"349721ec-6cbd-4d00-93a6-3454dc3814ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize prostitution<|ARGUMENT|>prostitution will always go on and it better that both client and sex worker feel comfortable about their rights and approaching the police should something go wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing sex work will make the profession safer for women\n","id":"52e3b13a-886d-4458-a6b0-127c0f00b507"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care, Debate on Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>Preventing illnesses before they arise is a very important strategy in public health. Universal health care encourages people to seek preventive treatments because it is free. This cuts health care costs substantially down the line.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free universal health care motivates people to seek preventive care\n","id":"58c3ba70-1948-45a9-ac40-775540dac893"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>It took only 4 months after Pearl Harbor for the US Pacific Command to bomb Tokyo in the Doolittle Raid<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US Navy had the advantage over the Japanese navy.\n","id":"17f2c6ba-cb61-42d5-b82e-60a25ef8e3c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By gynocentric, I of course mean that the world revolves socially, not literally around the needs and wants of women. I believe that men are seen as disposable tools, like working animals that you feed and shelter as in investment in exchange for their service, their work. that women are valued far beyond that of men, and not only for their reproductive capabilities that were essential to a family and community, but that they were entitled to everything they wanted, for example circa the 1920s, women wanted to vote, of course they had no need for it, they stayed at home raising the children on average not that they were forced to do that either , what would it matter to them who was elected to represent their husbands? and I say husbands not out of a sexist attitude, but out of the fact that men worked and the president that was elected had more say over their livelihood, their ability to bring home money than anything an elected official could ever imagine having over women, it wasn't until the 1960's that all men regardless ownership or business status, got the vote, and they had to sell the state their body in the form of the draft for the very same right women got 40 years prior, completely for free.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the world is gynocentric,\n","id":"d812fec3-e2a9-464d-9478-c02f5ce2c361"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Will Win the Game of Thrones?<|ARGUMENT|>They once both \"survived\" a conspiracy against them which indicates their importance for the show. While Daenerys survived an attack by the Sons of the Harpy, Jon Snow was revived after being stabbed by his own men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"After all their trials, it would seem fitting that both Jon and Daenerys will get what they were fighting for all this time.\n","id":"86da1d31-2230-4fbf-aea8-537f316ed7ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Unlike racism or sexism, there are huge and relevant differences between humans and animals. Animals will never be able to fully participate in society with us or interact with us in meaningful ways, nor will they ever possess anything approaching our level of cognitive sophistication. It is therefore acceptable to discriminate on the basis of species-membership.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Racists have no meaningful characteristics on which to base their discrimination. By contrast, significant and measurable differences exist between us and animals. So racism and speciesism are disanalogous.\n","id":"3059c616-1eed-4409-b51f-b60bae12569d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to start off by saying that it is very tragic whenever a young person kills themselves. Especially if they are under 21. However, I think that there are some cases where suicide is the best option. Some people's lives can never get better. Why should they suffer just to satisfy the wishes of their family? Let me give you some examples Bad credit score. People who have fucked up their credit score will never find good housing. Even if they file bankrupsy, that will still fuck up their credit. Chronic depression. Some people are chronically depressed. Some people have tried all sorts of different medications and are still depressed. Situations that knock them out of their reality. For example A super rich person going completly broke. That person does not have a clue how to live as a poor person, and will likely serve the rest of their lives in miseray because they don't know how to deal with it. Life imprisonment or majoirity of life imprisonment. Someone who is sentenced to 45 years should have suicide as an option because they will likely spend their lives in miseray behind a prison cell. Even if they don't get life, but get a majority of their life in prison, than they will likely be miserable once they get out due to lack of work experience etc. If they have a SERIOUS mental illness that could cause pain to others. Such as pedophelia, violent tendencies, etc. And of course, termanal illness. But I don't want to argue that. I think someone who is already on their deathbed should be able to die early so they won't have to suffer until natural death. Nothing will ever change that view for this one. That being said. I don't indorse suicide most of the time. I think 98 of the time, if someone is suicidal, they shouldn't do it, because it is likely it will get better. However, there are some incidences where suicide apart from termanl are perfectly okay and not selfish. In fact. It's selfish to NOT let want someone to kill themselves. Same reason why it's selfish not to put your dog down when it's sick.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Suicide is a good option in some cases\n","id":"4ac5764e-f7fa-4848-92c1-966097cfff6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Supply side economics looks like it is fueling the self-destruction of capitalism in America.<|ARGUMENT|>Wages can be rising while decreasing in value at a faster rate. Unless wages outpace inflation, the earner does not have an improved economic outlook.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This depends on what we're comparing them to. Behind what? Inflation? Executive pay?\n","id":"476de8ff-017c-4835-9b62-8bebece0053c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is the practice wherein law enforcement leaves GPS tracked bikes in high crime areas, often unlocked, and proceeds to arrest thieves who steal them. I for one think it's a marvelously cost effective, cut and dry method of disrupting bike theft where it hurts most often the police can track the bike back to a whole venue of thousands of dollars of stolen bikes and other goods . Oftentimes bike theft is committed serially, since it's so easy to get away with if you do it outside of eyesight of the owner. Honeypots level the playing field. There's the complaint of entrapment I vehemently disagree this is the case, as long as police are not baiting criminals with inordinately expensive bikes they don't normally see even then, I wouldn't shed any tears for them . If you would steal a bait bike, you would steal a real bike you just got unlucky and now you're getting what you deserve. There's the complaint that it targets racial minorities police claim that they target areas specifically based on reports of crime. I will not defend any department that deviates from this metric, but I will defend every department that adheres to it. If it just so happens that some minorities are overrepresented, then so be it I believe every bike thief should face due justice, regardless the color of their skin. The police are about stopping as much crime as they can with the methods available, not playing which demographic of criminal deserves a break from our most effective methods. For some empirical evidence that it's an effective technique, see this article gt The pilot schemes seemed to show bait bikes are a significant deterrent. Bikes thefts dropped by 45 at Cambridge rail station when British Transport Police tested the method. Even in the UK's bike theft capital, London, rates dropped by around a third in one local trial.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bait bikes are an ethical and effective technique for disrupting bike thief\n","id":"5e8d8ae4-613b-401c-a61c-b174aee2f048"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>Companies like Facebook, which might be considered a monopoly by some, is not true monopoly as nothing prevents its competition to exist. Monopolies that cannot prevent competition are not true monopolies Facebook cannot dictate its prices. Even though there might be no competition to companies like Facebook, they still cannot charge people enormous prices, because then Facebook would've been replaced by competition that might not exist yet, but can exist due to no laws preventing it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monopolies cannot exist in an anarchy. Government actually helps creating monopolies.\n","id":"d9833194-7d1f-4b0e-984b-adf0102f3182"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just as the title says XYZ Corp, beholden to the fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, will can, as a feature of Capitalism, knowingly break a law regulation, if doing so will provide net and overall enhancement to shareholder value. If XYZ Corp can get away with it , then it's all upside for shareholder value. If they get caught , then fines or sanctions as long as they do not negate net enhancement to revenues, and consequently shareholder value are of no consequence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a corporation, after doing a cost\/benefit analysis, determines that breaking a law\/regulation will provide a net gain in shareholder value, it follows they must do so.\n","id":"953a3eb9-23ec-41f7-b23a-d0bb20644d00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi guys. Firstly, I will be as open minded as possible here. I will listen to anything you say and hopefully you can change my view. Right, I've never done it myself, but I fully support groups like the Animal Liberation Front ALF which release animals from places if abuse using any non violent methods. This means they will only damage property and never harm or injure humans or other animals. From videos I have seen of dogs, minks or monkeys etc being allowed out of a cage and seeing grass and seeing the sky for the first time of their lives, I have realised that they too have feelings and emotions and caging a human or other animal up for their whole lives is torture and should be totally illegal. Especially incidents like at the university of California several years ago when monkeys had their eyes sewed up from birth, I believe, are disgusting and I believe that the ALF liberators involved in the rescue are heroes. They changed the lives of each and every one of the animals freed. I believe that these rescues are just as moral as the destruction of concentration camps or the freeing of slaves in the past note, I am not comparing the events, simply the rescues which took place and their morality . So, . Edit typo I typed this on my phone, so title should say humans also changed to monkeys having eyes sewn shut not cats, sorry<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that animals deserve the same rights as human where possible and that it is moral to non-violently liberate them from places of abuse, eg factory farms, slaughterhouses and animal experiment labs.\n","id":"4062c5f3-3d9b-4c97-9b20-c780bbacaf23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Israel has historically been an extremely innovative country with unparalleled scientific achievements. They are responsible for the invention of the USB Flash Drive, Waze, world's smallest video camera, the largest Desalinization plant to name a few. They contribute to a vast number of western country's economies Europe US . Is it not in the world's best interest to ensure they thrive while being surrounded by countries that are constantly trying to demolish them. The moment they let their guard down, it seems they would get slaughtered. If you track the history of Jews in Israel, they have been there since ancient Roman times, peacefully. There have obviously been several battles to remove them but they keep coming back, and then the Sykes Picot Agreement. So change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Israeli occupation of Palestine is fine\n","id":"bfb33568-b611-4099-aaee-872512859219"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that pedophiles recieve a lot of hate from the general public especially on the internet . Pedophiles are viewed as sub human right out of the box, particularly among the userbase of sites like Tumblr and Twitter and so on. However, I believe that pedophiles themselves do not deserve all this hate by default . Pedophiles do not 'choose' to be pedophiles any more than member of the LGBT community choose their sexual orientation. Pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder that pedophiles are victims of. They cannot help it. You wouldn't hate on a cancer patient for having been diagnosed with cancer, would you? I'd like to clarify that I believe that pedophile or not , sexually abusing children is undeniably wrong. However, feeling sexual attraction towards children, as disturbing as it may sound, is not a choice pedophiles have taken and hence doesn't deserve condemnation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pedophiles don't deserve hate any more than homosexuals do they don't\n","id":"8f222987-ab25-4e6f-814c-0ad3f4e5b273"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are battery electric vehicles better than hydrogen fuel cell vehicles?<|ARGUMENT|>Car makers have only shifted activity to EVs after a non-establishment company made an honest attempt at leveraging the state of the art in BEV tech. Otherwise the established auto industry and hydrocarbon fuel industry actually has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo with overly complex high maintenance and specialized fuel sources, In fact conversely they have demonstrated a resistance to BEVs which are neither complex nor require special fuels.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Car makers shifted their research activities to battery electric vehicles rather than researching on fuel cells. Car makers have a profit incentive to research the best vehicle, so their investment choice demonstrates that electric vehicles are the best.\n","id":"de09ec98-69e2-4724-870e-cfd002792d42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By gods, I mean the sort presented in classical theism, as well as the sort described by the theists who aren't familiar with apologetics. There are some gods that I don't mind saying I believe in, but I don't call them god reality or the substrate of reality , the universe, a higher power than myself or humans in general, either one , and love. Some examples of common arguments and why I think they rely on ignorance, false premises, or other faults in logic The fine tuning argument relies on us not knowing what the chances of the universe having the fundamental forces at the current values is. Prime mover argument relies on us not knowing the rules of metaphysics and thus ruling out an infinite regress of movers. Morality argument relies on the false premise that there's an inherent right and wrong rather than right and wrong relating to specific values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Non-axiomattic arguments for gods rely on ignorance, false premises, or other faults in logic.\n","id":"e31ffe67-a575-402a-ae54-2411dafa9ed4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Debt is complicated. There are three main types of debt personal, corporate, and government. When a corporation takes on debt, they use that to earn an income higher than the interest rate on their debt. For example, a phone company borrows from a bank at 4 , and then sells their phone for more than double the cost to make a phone. This earns them enough money to pay the 4 interest and keep some or a lot for themselves. Corporations needs debt to grow There is a good amount of debt for a company to debt. If an investor looked at a company and saw they had no debt, they might think, How are they planning to expand and grow? They need more debt. Personal debt is usually the opposite of this. People take on personal debt and don't use it to make a return on their investment. People take on car loans for 8 fucking years They'll pay for the car twice over just on interest And that car isn't earning them anything that an unfinanced mode of transportation could. People fucking finance Playstations and home appliances. These items don't make a return There is no generally no reason for a person to have debt if it can be avoided. The third type of debt is government debt? Which of the above two options corporate and personal do you think government debt is more similar to? When the government takes on debt to pay for child nursing, that child's mother gets to go to work and contribute to society. When the government builds roads it facilitates trade and directly employees construction workers. They earn returns on those investments we all do. There is a good amount of government debt and its non zero.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Government Debt is Good\n","id":"a038b792-dfd2-481e-849d-8d234a886a2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States be the global police?<|ARGUMENT|>This would then require the US to impartially investigate and intervene in the case of every single breach or breaking of those rules, regardless of political standing with the alleged victim or perpetrator or status of alliances. This is not something the US can objectively do without bias.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would require there to be a globally recognised and ratified, unified and universal set of agreed rules and laws. No such thing exists. The closest ones still have not been agreed and ratified by all nations.\n","id":"6ae4da7e-5efb-4e43-a4f1-4ce234c12cfd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Doctors should be banned from performing genital reshaping surgery on intersex infants<|ARGUMENT|>Many people born intersex who have had the corrective surgery when babies, as they grew up, they did not identify as the reassigned gender. The pain they go through to \u201crecorrect\u201d is sometimes way too much for them and they take their own lives<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intersex children should be able to decide the gender they are raised as.\n","id":"dad90fd6-7ac4-4e19-9c24-a8c44d99a987"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Campaigns only be Funded by the Government?<|ARGUMENT|>In most EU countries where there is partial public funding, funding is allocated in proportion to the number of seats or votes a party received in the previous election. European Parliament AFCO Committee Report pg 25<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public funding models are more likely to give funding priority to established political parties and provide little to no funding to new candidates or political parties.\n","id":"e0d74dcd-3aba-425b-a461-faae751cb7cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear this complaint all the time and ill be honest here it makes my blood boil, I get red in the face and I want to sprint towards the nearest living thing and kill the absolute fuck out of it. Before you try to shame me into agreeing with you by calling me a white straight cis male burseosie or whatever consider it a victory that I'm even here. Lets get started Women always point to objectification online whenever a man comments on the appearance of a woman good or bad. The typical logic behind it is that these evil twisted male fucks are reducing a woman to a sexual object reducing her to her looks. Why the hell is that a reduction? Lets say I'm in a restaurant with some friends and our waitress is a lady I find attractive. When she walks away I make a comment along the lines of id like to poon her in the ass . Id never say that because its dumb, hell I wouldn't even be in a restaurant I'm kinda a recluse, I don't even really have friends but that's besides the point. I don't see how that dehumanizes her at all, if I hadn't been attracted to her she would've just been a waitress instead of a waitress I'd like to poon in the ass. Just because I want to fuck a particular person, doesn't mean I feel any less empathy towards them, that if I were to see that waitress killed I'd feel less sad if it were a man. Why see it as a subtraction rather than an addition or just neutral? If anything, sexual attraction raises them in my eyes if its not completely neutral.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the idea of \"sexual objectification\" is complete and utter nonsense.\n","id":"804b8d33-f23f-4632-b1fa-c9ecdf403314"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm an atheist. Lately, I've been thinking about what it means to be human, and live life. I've come to the conclusion that a life without the idea of a higher power, and a greater meaning, is ultimately emptier, and less fulfilling in a sense. Without the idea of a god, or some sort of higher power, we are just coincidences of the development of the universe. Although we can give ourselves the illusion of meaning by developing relationships and keeping ourselves busy, we are no more than atoms and molecules that are the result of pure coincidence. There's more to the thought than that, but perhaps someone can shed a little more light on the matter. . Edit I'm really thrilled with all of the responses I've gotten. This entire concept is extremely hard for me to wrap my head around, to be honest. I need more time to think about it, but I think I may have been convinced that one can and even with god, has to create their own meaning behind life. However, I think I'm unconvinced that a life without god can be more fulfilling. It's actually pretty hard to understand even my own thoughts about the matter gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A life with religion is more meaningful and fulfilling than one without.\n","id":"cb06fb2a-890c-421f-ac0c-5504b507b5fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that twitter should only be used for people who have large followings such as Youtubers and celebrities as well as news outlets and large institutions. Most of the people I know that use twitter, use it to gossip or arranging events. They could just use other social media websites such as Facebook for this, and it would be just as effective or easier to use. I am in high school. I don't see the purpose of twitter for the general public. What does twitter do that other social media sites don't?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that twitter is for the most part, useless.\n","id":"010fde30-efc5-424c-b595-c209601cd14b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm talking everything, the USA just cuts all ties with the world. Packs up and all Military returns home No more presences in the middle east No more watching Israel protecting or stopping them no more policing the worlds oceans just convoys for your ships No more aide for the world, typhoon hit your island well that sucks here is a sympathy card we buy your shit if we want it, we sell you our shit if you want it but we do our best to rely on neither There you have your Utopian world with the US not messing in anyone's business Oh China invaded you well lucky for use we spent all our money on defense, they won't touch us good luck with that though Do you really think that would work out well for the world?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think if the USA all the sudden apologized, packed up and left all military instillation around the world, there would be chaos that would end badly for the world.\n","id":"bc067d02-52c4-44ba-ac45-56fe53b1c578"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it unethical to use ad-blockers?<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of internet using households are skeptical of undertaking online financial transactions and want to minimize the number they engage in. Munro, 2016<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even small fees can impose a significant barrier to entry for many demographic groups.\n","id":"96d076b7-5070-4df9-906b-5e09b964752a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There Should Be Mandatory Drug Tests in Schools<|ARGUMENT|>The purpose of random drug testing is not so much to catch offenders but to prevent all students from offending in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The purpose of random drug testing is not so much to catch offenders but to prevent all students fro...\n","id":"d22b9390-c44f-4944-9bb7-47dc69bda533"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The US government was founded on ideas of freedom for all, with no consideration of race, sex, or religion. However, with the United States government is currently full of highly corrupt officials, who rather than representing their proprietors rather act on behalf of whoever lobbies them with the largest amount of money AKA bribery . These politicians are more interested in aggrandizing themselves, than doing what is right for their country. They will jump at the opportunity to pass laws that revoke rights Like the Patriot Act of 2001 as long as it won't hurt them. Because of this behavior, real, legitimate progress is blocked not only by their lack of reason to actually represent those who elected them, but also by the strict party system that causes these politicians to believe that they must always obey the demands and beliefs of their affiliated parties, rather than truly caring about proprietors. The current US government is completely corrupt and is in need of a 180 change in order to salvage the country, or it will soon become a police state that bans basic rights like free speech.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States Federal Government is far over stepping its bounds with highly unconstitutional laws that revoke freedom and encourage police state behavior. Because of this, the government should be radically changed.\n","id":"5ede6459-e700-42ff-a88f-56cfa1d6ee29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that if one accepts the violinist argument, as elaborated upon very ably in this tumblr post one ought also to reject gun control in the name of consistency. Here is my line of reasoning. They are working from the premise that violations of bodily autonomy are justifiably punishable by death. Let us, for the sake of this argument, assume this premise to be true. There are many other possible violations of one's bodily autonomy besides pregnancy. Rape is the ultimate example, but it would also include all manners of assault. If one is justified in using deadly force against a fetus to end the violation of a woman's bodily autonomy, certainly killing is a reasonable reaction to other offences against such as well. Some people have the ability to fight off an attacker while unarmed, but many do not. And just as pro choice activists would never accept a law that legalizes abortion but criminalizes all medical means of obtaining one, we should not be satisfied with self defense laws that allow us the right to self defence, but not the right to access means to enforce that right guns . .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that any argument for abortion that does not deny the humanity of the fetus is also, necessarily, a good argument against gun control\n","id":"8b64b9b6-3c86-4d3e-838f-41889a4d0eca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>AKMs are high technology weapon systems which are ment for killing people. Because killing people is morally wrong the West should not develop them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moral problems are graver when AKMs kill humans compared to when humans kill each other.\n","id":"0ec33466-ba80-46df-a48d-baf4d256df02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should airfare be taxed to account for its environmental impact?<|ARGUMENT|>Since environmental taxes have been successfully used to address environmental issues - including air emissions - in the past, taxing airfare may work as well p. 1.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taxing airfare would decrease travel, thereby reducing the environmental impact of aviation.\n","id":"c5b20d32-073d-4de4-8a91-abb103a445dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Harry and Meghan have stepped back as senior royals?<|ARGUMENT|>Without much case law, it may prove harder for Harry and Meghan to sustain legal claims against paparazzi.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is very little case law on privacy issues in British Columbia.\n","id":"480426ad-2536-41ae-91e6-b6bc69fda4b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Was having this discussion with a friend about psychiatry and particularly Britney Spears in 2008 when it seemed every major news outlet was speculating on her condition with the help of a relevant medical professional. Got to the argument that it would be very difficult to diagnose anyone solely based on media perception and information available to the public eye. That is because psychiatry involves a certain more in depth analysis of context, behaviour and inter personal diagnostics i.e. actually meeting the patient, for lack of a better term, not sure of the proper lingo that aren't available to armchair doctors. Further, basic patient doctor confidentiality would also mean that any doctor informed of said context and qualified to speak on the subject would be prohibited from doing so, making that right to privacy available to anyone no matter the media scrutiny. And I mean this in terms of all things, from overeating disorders to addiction as a clinical diagnosis, to psychopathy, insanity, etc. By which I mean, the media should not speak on Robert Durst as a literal psychopathic lunatic in the same way that they should not speak on if Britney Spears is bi polar without factual confirmation of such.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Psychiatrists and Doctors should be prohibited from analyzing public figures within the context tabloid journalism media\n","id":"acf30f56-fde8-45d8-ab59-7e42c3ea9d2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not familiar with the laws on foreign bodies influencing elections and I am arguing from a moral a little bit ideological standpoint. What's wrong if the Russians have indirectly influenced what Americans think, the Russians have not rigged the elections. Regardless of what the they spoke, the people have spoken. If Russias posting stuff in FB is not ok, it would call into question voter free will, implying that if they saw anything foreign, their free will to vote is taken away from them which is not true. Even if we decide that it is not ok, are we going to censor American citizens who are paid by Russians. Also, this would be hard to enforce, how do you prove someone is being paid as they could simply alter agreement, so no money is exchanged. Shouldn't it be up to the citizens decide what voices they want to subscribe to, regardless of its source? Finally, if fingers must be pointed, it shouldn't be at the Russians or Facebook. It should be at the voting system that produced people who is not happy with the discussion and looked for something else that a Russia sponsored source could provide. That said, this should be another cautionary tale of not believing everything on Facebook and think twice about what they should support.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Russians posting stuff on Facebook is fine.\n","id":"7a736c1d-7827-407d-8c81-8230ec81a95e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At least in America, I feel like the average person believes marijuana is completely harmless but I feel like the science doesn\u2019t totally back that and from my own experiences and anecdotal accounts, marijuana can be really damaging to people psychologically. I\u2019ve had very bad trips from edibles that were stronger than I\u2019ve thought, and I\u2019ve seen friends become addicted to smoking marijuana. I really think it needs to be studied more before we open up more dispensaries throughout the US and treat it like a candy store. Just my opinion but would love to hear what you guys think.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society is not as cautious with weed as it should be.\n","id":"e5749f54-7439-4688-80f1-0264fe96ea0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Employee Free Choice Act, Debate on the Employee Free Choice Act<|ARGUMENT|>AFL CIO on the Employee Free Choice Act - \"It\u2019s Time to Restore Workers\u2019 Freedom to Form Unions. America\u2019s working people are struggling to make ends meet these days and our middle class is disappearing. The best opportunity working people have to get ahead economically is by uniting to bargain with their employers for better wages and benefits. Recent research has shown that some 60 million U.S. workers would join a union if they could.But the current system for forming unions and bargaining is broken.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Employee Free Choice Act responds to worsening conditions for workers\n","id":"6952f76f-8ad4-4aa3-a323-4ee95d70de22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>Studies have shown that some scientists are prone to Funding Bias which ranges from minor oversight of results to intentional misrepresentation of findings<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many areas of science depend on financial or other resources to make progress, and these resources are often controlled by political processes.\n","id":"5111acb7-61ee-4240-b7fb-d2acb10b162b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The UK Should Leave the European Union<|ARGUMENT|>Britain must remain its own country. Being a part of the EU threatens national identity and the UK economy amongst other things. Britain does not need to rely on its European neighbours in order to succeed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The representatives that we elect should not be able to give the UK away\n","id":"1e4263da-584d-457c-97ae-a89f4b5b5705"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT The title should read that humans are probably the only intelligent species in the galaxy. I'm not making any positive assertions here. EDIT 2 The title should read that humans are probably the most technologically advanced species in the galaxy. I'm not making any positive assertions here. Lots of people being pedantic about my definition of intelligence here and claiming we're not alone on our own planet. Most of my life I've lived under the assumption that there were other technological civilizations in the galaxy, but recently I've been made aware of certain theories and conjectures that have led me to change my mind. When one considers all the conditions necessary for intelligent life to arise on a planet, one begins to view Fermi's famous Paradox in a different light. Consider The concept of the Galactic Habitable Zone instantly removes the majority of terrestrial planets from contention The necessity of a large moon to create tides and stabilize the planet's axis The need for a sister planet to form in the same orbit to collide with our alien planet to create said moon and set plate tectonics in motion. Some scientists believe tectonics is necessary for life on Earth. The fact that evolution is not an arrow pointing towards intelligence. Read this article for more There are many, many other things that I could list. When taken with the observed lack of direct evidence of other civilizations Dyson Spheres, etc. I think the only reasonable conclusion is that were are either the first or last civilization in the galaxy, or that there are only a handful of them and they are scattered throughout the galaxy in such a way that they are effectively isolated from each other. This is pretty depressing so I hope someone can change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that humans are the only intelligent species in the galaxy.\n","id":"d47413a1-4f22-493a-97fb-fff15c4f0fc8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should India have a UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone is eligible for UBI. It eliminates the nonstop fighting about who deserves what & frees us of the stigma typically attached to programs for the poor.nytimes.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI would be more effective than existing welfare programs for the poor.\n","id":"08a31ed2-58a4-48ff-a5f9-65df342da8a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a good possibility that the reason god does not intervene is because we are all on a path to our own personal perfection. God wants the best for us, however doing everything for us does not accomplish that in any permanent way. Based upon the readings performed by Edgar Cayce, and the resulting theory of our lives<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to the character-building defenses some virtues may be contingent on evil.\n","id":"4b6e42ef-8407-4795-ab42-ea4074ab9300"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Trademarks are important, yet under current US trademark law you must actively defend your trademark else you can lose some or all of your rights to the trademark. In the Video Game community there is often much outrage over this. The question why did they squash that fan game comes up time and again. This is the answer They have to squash it. Well done fan games, such as Pokemon Uranium, get squashed by the trademark holder once they get any amount of notoriety. Making the news is a death sentence for any fan work of art. A company cannot simply say I'll allow that , and let it go. The current legal alternative is that the floodgates open to competitors that would actually destroy the brand. In the case of Hank and John green, they allowed the trademark DFTBA don't forget to be awesome pass into the public domain when major clothing manufacturers started using it, specifically so that fans could continue use it. The current paradigm impacts our legal system with many frivolous cases. The legal action can put small non infringing developers out of existence. Entities such as King and Electronic Arts sue anyone who made a game with a name remotely similar to theirs. Partly due to the requirement to do so, but partly as business strategy to eliminate competition. Small businesses and individuals may have won, they have to endure time and expense to defend themselves which results in people giving up. TL DR My position is that a company should be able to be selective about who can use trademarks. This would result in more fan love for those brands, and eliminate many frivolous lawsuits that put little guys out, and spurn dedicated fans. EDIT the only thing i am suggesting we change about the current system is that companies not be compelled to legal action I understand that alternatives exist, present me with a case why compelling legal action is good and necessary. I suggest that they can be as arbitrary or as petty as they like about enforcing trademarks. This will show us the true nature of the company. EDIT trademark licensing is not a compelling case. A multi tier licensing system would have to be crafted by company attorneys where fans could apply and be granted noncommercial licences. Perhaps an open source version of this licensing could be crafted as a boilerplate for companies to use, but getting companies to adopt it would be difficult. Attorneys would balk. Getting a company to spend time and money just to allow people to use your trade dress for free would be exceptionally difficult. Companies would have to vet each derivative work for approval works that may not even yet be started. All of this adds overhead and expense, and simply would never happen. In a model where you do not have to defend your mark, fans could use said marks until they started causing problems at which companies could put the hammer down. Why  there may be a good reason that I am overlooking. But the reason would have to be non trivial.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you do not defend your trademark, you should not lose it.\n","id":"f0c87983-c045-4a48-ba9a-63e741b64b50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While my education on the \u201ctrue\u201d state of American democracy comes from several passionate and rather biased dissenters Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky , I'm finding trouble knowing where to draw the line between political bias and actual truth. It seems to me that at a certain point the ideology of patriotism becomes cloudy and that an objective \u201cfly on the wall\u201d perspective could help in clearing up some of those clouds. I believe that a smaller portion of the population is beginning to adopt that perspective, but when I have recently introduced the idea of dissent to my friends, or even brought up the topic of some of the major, well known war atrocities that our country has committed, I am generally met with an all too familiar front of patriotism, strikingly similar to the carelessly devoted mindset of the religious, blind to reason and fully defensive of the standing system and what it commonly stands for in the status quo. My perspective states simply this that the position of power and the use of authority, especially in the democratic form, should always be questioned, compromised and revised when necessary, to ensure the efficiency and fluency of its purpose. And what could ever be wrong with questioning authority in a truly democratic nation? Shouldn\u2019t those in positions of authority welcome it? Isn\u2019t this the truest form of a check and balance system that was desired when installing a democratic form of government? Take a tourist in New York, asking for directions. One of the quickest and most informal forms of discourse that involves minimal emotional involvement is over in seconds, leaving the tourist more informed and at very little cost to the resident. Why then, can the discourse on politics not proceed the same way? Why can't we reduce these talks to the 3rd grade level and simply ask ourselves, what is right and what is wrong? Does the devastation that we as Americans proliferate into other countries justify the democratic ends to which we are trying to accomplish? Is the promotion of a democratic world worth the devastation that it is currently bringing about? Is it even bringing about democracy or some valuable form of it? In the expansion of democracy we seem to see a world full of pain, cultures ripped to shreds, countries devastated in the interest of defending the democratic ideal. What is right and wrong? When does democracy do more harm than it does good? If I\u2019m wrong and we\u2019re doing more good than harm, why do I never hear about it? Why hasn\u2019t the successful establishment of a democratic government created a more peaceful world, much less a more peaceful nation from within? This essay was taken from my personal thoughts, a sort of journal that I write in frequently. This is my stance and I would appreciate some feedback on how and why it should be changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the American Democratic polity and its insertion into foreign countries to be dangerous and careless.\n","id":"dd184e06-c1a0-489e-b080-5be83aa77b78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>gt The title of my question requires an explanation, especially what being silent and without resources mean, so please read my argument in full before you judge it on face value. Background Recently, I've had my view changed in regards to the topics of institutional racism and white privilege. I'm a white male, and I used to believe that institutional racism was a just a political race card and a non problem. My view was changed when I sat down and had a long conversation with a friend, who is both Black and Hispanic, and was on his deathbed. Throughout the conversation, I could see how my friend envied my life for his children, while he described what his life was like as a modern, young Black American he was 31 when he passed cancer . I'm in my late 20s, and I've never needed to worry about whether I would be approved for a bank loan, get into college, or get a great paying job, on the basis of my skin color . I could see in his eyes how we wished I understood what that was like, and how badly he wanted the world to change for his children and theirs. It really hit home, and though I didn't feel like I was personally responsible what some would maybe describe as white guilt , I felt a deep sense of empathy. Even though I couldn't understand the hardships he described from experience, I understood the gravity of them, and did my best to put myself in my friends shoes. I felt angry. I knew right then that this problem people were talking about was real, and my view was changed for the better. My View, Broken Down So now, I view these issues differently than I did in the past, but I'm stuck on another problem I want to help , I don't know how , I get criticized for asking , and I don't have the resources I would need to be an activist , which puts me in a catch 22 because if I stay silent , I'm part of the problem . I want to touch on those things individually I want to help I want to contribute to the effort. I want to see minorities being treated fairly and equally, and help that happen in whatever ways I can. Pretty simple. I don't know how I realize that as a white male, I've never experienced what many minorities experience in regards to how people treat them based on race. So, right out the door, I'm not an expert here. I don't know what's out there I can participate in that would be A helpful and B appropriate for a white dude. I get criticized for asking Given the above, I've asked online the non rhetorical question what are some ways white people can fight institution racism? . People either treat it like a loaded question, and or give me these kinds of answers These are real quotes from responses I've received gt We shouldn't have to tell you gt It's inherently racist to ask a POC how you, a white male, can help gt if u have to ask this question, ur more racist than u thought u were This is confusing, because if I can't understand what the problem is like for people of color, and I it's wrong for me ask them how an outsider can help, how can I ever know what it is I should do? I don't have the resources This obviously needs clarification. I have a family, and we live paycheck to paycheck. Both my wife and I work full time plus overtime , and I bring in 90 of what we need, she brings 10 . We have just enough to cover our expenses, and that's it. I have a high school diploma and going to college is out of the question. I don't want to make excuses, but we live a life that's fairly slim on excess time and money. Some people have suggested to me that if I don't travel to and attend rallies protests, give money to social activist institutions, and make activism essentially my full time career, then I'm being silent on the issue. At that point, I'm either part of the problem, or by some extreme views, on the same level with neo Nazis. People have also suggested that if I don't have the ability to do those things, then I should just point out individual racism when I see it. If I see or hear something racist, I should call it out. I'm totally on board here, but the problem is I never actually see that happening in my community. Perhaps it's just a matter of where I live. If that never really happens, I feel like I'm ultimately not doing anything, and I'm back to being part of the problem again. I'm in a catch 22 To summarize how I feel that I have no options I'm part of the problem if I do or say nothing I agree to and understand this fact I can't understand the entire extent of the problem because I haven't ever experienced it I agree to and understand this fact I'm being told that asking how I can help is wrong that's confusing, but may be just the views of some and not all My only remaining option is participating in the ways I know of, like in protests or donating money but I don't have the capability of doing those things protests are usually hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from me Back to step 1 I'm part of the problem and I have no options to change that Conclusion I genuinely want to see the lives of the people around me bettered. If people are being treated unfairly or being discrimintated against, then I want to be a part of the solution to that. But I feel like I have no options, and that people of color who are sensitive on this subject dismiss me because I'm white, and I can't understand the depth of the problem. I don't have any ways in which I can contribute the way others are because I don't have any extra time or money to give. I'm locked forced, put into a box, or whatever term you want to use into being silent on the issue. So, please, change my view Edit thanks to whoever or whatever made my formatting a little less long. I'm still new to reddit's markdown. Edit 2 speling<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I a white male, without time, money or resources have no choice but to \"be silent\" on issues regarding institutional racism.\n","id":"e7f60077-d48a-4b45-a474-9c8056597b95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have seen much evidence of a direct correlation in which people corporations that donate to public officials influence votes in the direction that would benefit the corporation person. Obviously, companies and people do not just give away money, they expect something in return. In my opinion this is detrimental to democracy as the people that have no money to give away are relegated a smaller voice in our representative democracy. I feel this is wrong and should absolutely be banned, with serious penalties for violations Prision . I think that there should not be a commercial every 5 minutes, for six or more months, for some paid for crony who wants to represent me . Many countries in Europe have laws like this. Why does the US keep up the charade? Edit Defining Lobbyists and PAC's as people who donate money or gifts to politicians. Not ideas or educational materials. I feel that only individuals should be able to give to politicians, at the current individual limits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that PAC's and lobbyists should be banned.\n","id":"651ce671-125d-403d-a844-8939c074c87e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Changing or abridging classic texts for didactical reasons is a choice that belongs to the school and to the teacher, concerning the values and methods of those. This cannot justify censorship from the State.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intentionally removing specific words from a text for political reasons is functionally similar to censorship, which is contrary to the values of liberal democracies and should, therefore, be rejected.\n","id":"29753439-314f-4fe9-aa5e-f04d2b79d457"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Mother Teresa have been canonized?<|ARGUMENT|>Mother Teresa conspired to \u201cbrainwash\u201d Hindus into Christianity and helped fuel a violent military insurgency in India\u2019s northeast according to Yogi Adityanath, an outspoken MP in the current BJP government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mother Teresa has been accused of using her charities to forcefully convert the poor and vulnerable.\n","id":"0335b340-b06c-4ec7-943c-5856b9646fab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Faith based organizations have led or been a major part of social change overthrowing injustices. e.g. ending slavery, civil rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion allows societies to feel hope and to see light in the most darkest periods.\n","id":"c50042db-3eae-4bdf-a9fa-d781b903913d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU charges a 16% tariff on oranges from south Africa to protect Big Spanish Orange. Oranges would be cheaper if we left the EU and abolished this tariff, and we'd buy more south African oranges. This is in the interests of both the UK and our trading partner south Africa.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trade is not a zero sum game. Something that is in favour of a trading partner is not necessarily worse for the UK.\n","id":"c2d47bfa-a947-4666-8203-33599f2cafd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, let me clarify what i mean by the word love. I mean fully EQUAL and MUTUAL love. Meaning each person loves each other the same amount and both get the same amount out of the relationship as the put in, for example Time, money, effort orgasms, everything equal. Secondly I believe every relationship ends in heartbreak because referring to part one I believe someone always loves the other more, they put more in or get more out. And even if couple live together for 50 years one of them will die first and that kinda trauma just isn't worth it. What do you get out of a relationship that is worth putting up with any amount of stress? I genuinely can't think of anything other than children that would outweigh the negatives of being nagged, having to give up things compromise , having to spend ridiculous amounts on gifts possible wedding. Dealing with their family I don't know you we're not friends, we have nothing in common i'm only here because I am having sex with your offspring . Time and effort needed to commit to things I don't want need to do drinks with their friends family . I have spoken to people IRL about this and the usual platitudes are Sharing experiences giving and receiving love circular argument Mutual support if i can't support myself I am not worth someone else trying to support me Children I kinda do want my own children Sex sex really isn't all that tbh and spending 20 minutes on randompornsitedotcom is a lot more time efficient that wasting a couple of hours of sex So yea, I'd like the thoughts of the masses to see if I really am that odd I am a straight male aged 34 no relationships for 9 years now<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe in love and I also believe EVERY relationship ends in heart break.\n","id":"56465b48-6599-4ec8-8afb-29b4b96ce3a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my personal view, it already sucks being a woman. I'm having to deal with PMS, heavy periods, body issues that's not to say that of course men have body issues as well , as well as other factors to look forward to later on, including menopause. I'm not too old, but I'm already dealing with a weak bladder as well, which a lot of women experience with age. Kids, of course, make all of these conditions worse. I believe that being a mom can be a wonderful thing if given you have the right attitude and patience, but I see a lot of regretful mothers in this day and age, and endless posts of narcissistic parents abusing their kids as they've gotten older. Once you have children, I feel that you are burdened for a good number of years until they get to school age. All of these moms that post about how they can't wait until little Timmy is asleep so they can go clubbing sounds like they don't want to even have children in the first place. If you are not grateful for the blessing you have, why are you always talking about leaving them behind to do what you want so you can ignore them or have them dropped off at the babysitter's? Having a baby isn't enjoyable either. I've heard about nightmare pregnancies and apparently we have the highest death mortality rate for new mothers in a first world country. Childbirth can prevent you from enjoying sex ever again, and doctors will give you an extra stitch to help you out and make you tighter and actually destroy your sensitivity or love for your sex life. It all sounds incredibly mechanical and there is so much focus on the baby after and never much care for the mom. She gets a few pads to go home with and few ibuprofen and told, well what did you expect when you had a baby? I believe having a family is worth it, but our society makes it tough. A lot of kids these days are very spoiled and don't know what hard work is like. I know our quality of life today is wonderful and we have so many opportunities we didn't have a hundred years ago, but some people act like the world owes them something. There are so many mothers themselves that act like they are tiny goddesses for giving birth, but you aren't special literally women give birth everyday. Moreover, people act like giving birth is more important than some life achievements, like completing a PHD and finding a cure for a disease. And after it's all said and done, when your child is 18 and graduated, you are still expected to pay and care for them for years after. Kids expect you to pay for their college. I never got that from anyone. Your children are quick to ignore you once they get ahead in life and will only look back when they get to do something fun with you, like seeing their parents when they are on vacation or going on a family trip. And that's about it. Once they start their own family they won't look back, they have a life of their own. One thing that also gets to me is the way the workforce treats you before and after you have children. People in the office get more leeway when they have kids, while those do not are expected to pick up the slack. I disagree with this mindset, as everyone should have equal responsibility in the office, regardless of family life. But what I'm finding is that a lot of people don't treat my opinions seriously, simply based on the fact that I don't have children. Ultimately being a mother can be a wonderful thing and is something to be cherished, but there is too much stigma today, with judgement for being SAHM and that's a whole other topic, when mothers who have taken care of the kids for 20 years struggle to get a job since they haven't held one in 2 decades , the way you should be parenting your kids, what should happen, what shouldn't happen, it's very messy. I hate this expectation that I will have kids someday when it's a big decision in itself and some people aren't fit to be parents, but have children anyway. Please change my view on this, I just view mothers with so much negativity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being a mother is a negative position\n","id":"cd8de9fd-f439-4335-8229-380c89eb9ac6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>If the enemy is aware that people do not support the government's war efforts, this may encourage the enemy to continue the war hoping that the government will surrender<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Criticism of the government's war efforts is likely to create anti-war sentiments.\n","id":"15ae084d-0ce2-4c98-8133-7917268904ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>There is substantial evidence that Donald Trump has exaggerated his personal wealth in order to convince the American public that he is a good businessman.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians would no longer be able to hide or lie about their financial interests when running for office or making policy decisions.\n","id":"19e04060-7c3d-4633-b7ce-08b05a768385"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Men should be able to take a stand in the abortion debate<|ARGUMENT|>It would be difficult to restrict who can vote or not, and it raises some questions with difficult answers regarding who should or should not be permitted; it would become overcomplicated and potentially discriminatory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On no other issue is the electorate restricted to only those who would be most affected by the policy.\n","id":"986dc190-9742-4964-b4d4-5459d25521bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sortition is Better than Representation<|ARGUMENT|>There is a stark difference in competencies of individuals in UK Parliament over the years. The current cabinet has very little experience. This is a marked contrast to the Thatcher years with experienced people working on foreign policy Zimbabwe, Hong Kong Falklands, the eu concessions as well as UK problems industry, strikes, Council Tax. The Thatcher team was wrong on policies but strong in individual competence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Conservative Government which since the 2008 crash has varied from a strong management even if incorrect under Cameron through a weak solitary performer Theresa May to a minority Government with no focus . Now Sept 2019 it has strong focus Brexit now, election afterwards and a team approach with Boris Johnson at the top acting in a more Chairman-like method.\n","id":"9ec9bee8-aab8-4e19-a920-4319ffed8041"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title says, I believe in non authoritarian, preferably democratic, socialism. This means I believe that the USSR, while having undergone rapid industrialization and having contributed to many scientific fields was flawed. As for many anti socialism arguments that are brought up Human nature Even if we ignore the communal societies of prehistoric man and all other such communities, that still leaves us with monarchy and other rigidly hierarchical structures. Capitalism was conceived in the 1800s, monarchy and other forms of absolutist rule were used earlier. Therefore again, ignoring communal societies , absolutism is human nature. Efficiency Capitalism requires the same technology to be developed multiple times, due to the nature of market competition and patents etc. Furthermore, the billions spent in advertising could be used to alleviate social problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe in non-authoritarian socialism\n","id":"ce6dc3b9-3de5-40ca-bc27-f6f99495a633"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>The change doesn't need to be all at once. Just eating less meat an starting to go vegetarian is a lot of progress in itself, so that everyone can get used to eat adjustment along the way until we all get there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no quick fix for humanity's largest challenges. Abandoning progress altogether because of that would not make sense.\n","id":"f0969fa1-1807-4512-acd1-4b11da3ddfd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A spy profession is a good example, as they need a sharp eye out and keen ear open to their surroundings. Placing a camera in a spy's head would assist with that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transhuman adaptions, like becoming a cyborg, would help people do better at their jobs, which'll keep them employable longer.\n","id":"1b87dd75-e010-4cdd-a610-161860fe3ba8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been depressed for a long time but I'm still a few months away from adulthood. I live in a small society where going to therapists is largely criticized. I'll move away from home in four to five months and I've been seriously considering going to a therapist. My problem stems from the fact that I hear so much about how antidepressants make you better but to me it seems like those people sound like drug addicts. when I'm on my pills in happy but when I'm not I'm all grumpy I'm sorry but if I felt that my life depended on a bottle of pills then I'd get more depressed. my friends don't take depression seriously and those who do think it gets better by telling me that I should look on the bright side of life but to me that sounds like straight up bullcrap. I'm saying this because I don't believe depression is reality it's just much closer to reality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that antidepressants mess you up and addict you in the long term because without them you are back to the \"reality\" goggles.\n","id":"3b4114c4-0ae9-4cfb-b644-82871f469b6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>States ought not possess nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>In the current international arena, there is no guarantee of safety or peace, and each nation must build up its own defenses to combat the anarchy of the state system. Nuclear weapons are a powerful tool that nations can use to defend themselves: the chance of a nuclear power being attacked is incredibly low, and these weapons are seen as self-defense mechanisms. Many countries have renounced first strikes, but wish to hold onto their weapons in case of attack. There is no reason a ban should exist on nations' attempts to protect themselves, and such a ban would violate their sovereignty. Related authors: Beth Polebaum, Victor Utgoff, Ted Carpenter, Charles Pena<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nations should be allowed to possess nuclear weapons in self defense\n","id":"5365926b-cb13-4a6f-843d-707da36ea5dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So everyone knows about the crash of the video game industry in the 80s starting with the release of the ET game and oversaturation of consoles there were two Atari systems out IIRC . Revenue in the industry dropped 97 . Today, the gaming industry is very strong with all age groups, however the developer end of AAA games is declining rapidly. Quality releases are becoming more and more scarce while everything else is either broken on release, packed with microtransactions in a 60 game, or a re release of an old game. The alternative to AAA would be indies, although the indie market is very, very oversaturated, especially with the flood of low quality Greenlight games and early access games that will never be finished. I can not count how many times I have watched an indie game start off wonderfully with 90 positive reviews on Steam suddenly drop to sub 50 due to developers abandoning the game, breaking the game, or becoming too 'greedy.' Loads of us own hundreds of games on Steam but only play a select few. I have watched multiple of my favorite games blow up in a fiery mess. And the console industry seems just as instable despite Xbox removing the indie thing IIRC . The Xbox 360 lasted a strong eight years. The Xbox One will be replaced by the Scorpio after only four years. Hardware evolves faster than they can seemingly keep up, and since console players for the most part are opposed to swappable hardware as it basically becomes a PC at that point , the issue could only get worse. Microsoft claims they will continue supporting the Xbox One, but that will just create a similar scenario as Atari during the crash, who maintained the Atari 2600 and Atari 5200. Currently, AAA developers seem to work backwards, creating the game for lower specced consoles and porting the low end version to PCs that are objectively capable of more not creating a PC master race argument here, just stating that PCs are physically more capable than a console , and despite some consumer unrest in the PC side, developers still don't listen since they still make money. I want to be a game developer myself. I have that Udemy course in Unreal Engine 4 and am in a game development class in school. Still, I can't help but imagine that the industry will crash sometime soon. Virtual reality is nice, but probably a long ways off before a the virtual reality sets are readily available for cheap and b the hardware to run it is readily available. Please change my view. Edit Also I'm in class right now so I probably won't be awarding every delta yet since these replies are pretty long, but I'm getting through them<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the game industry will crash relatively soon within 10 years\n","id":"0636f827-7e43-4272-b065-41d12368690f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Statistical evidence of a rise in sexual abuse cases comes from a study by the activist group Woman Means Something.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The type of men that will prefer female space above equivalent male space will be the abusive type.\n","id":"2dfe01d3-3528-49de-8a87-3adf6c72485b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd like to think that I'm fairly educated in the subject of abortion. I myself am pro choice, and think that it is ultimately the woman's right to choose whether or not she decides to have an abortion. That being said, I would like to hear more arguments from the other side of the debate. However, up to this point, I haven't heard a single pro life argument that couldn't be reduced down to a belief e.g. life begins at conception, a fetus has a soul . With these arguments circulating, I think the abortion debate gets down to what someone believes to be true about abortion, and what actually happens inside a woman's body. That being said, I would love to hear someone . UPDATE Wow, I knew this was a hot button topic, but I didn't expect such an influx of replies so quickly. So, thank you guys. I'm going to respond generally to what I see are the most common arguments, and then I'll respond to individual replies. I see a lot of life begins at conception arguments, and while any rational person would agree that a sperm on its own and an egg on its own cannot become a human, life begins at conception creates so many more complications. A miscarriage is a group of fertilized cells, and while she didn't choose to have one, does that mean her body is guilty of murder? Not trying to be a smart ass, I'm actually wondering what people think about this This kind of gets back to what people are saying about a woman cannot force another human being to let her live inside their body. in the sense that how can the woman be put to blame if she decides to have an abortion? Yes, she does choose to have an abortion, and a miscarriage is never wanted, but nobody wants to have an abortion either. Abortions are a last resort type of birth control , and while there are women who get multiple abortions inside of a year my uncle is a pro life EMT turned firefighter, I've heard many horror stories , they're very much the outliers. I guess what I'm getting at is that in any case, abortion is very, very, very rarely treated as a casual decision. And yet as traumatic as it is , miscarriages happen all the time, and we don't berate women who have miscarriages. In the words of many pro choice ers , with an abortion you feel bad for the fetus, with a miscarriage you feel bad for the woman. UPDATE ONCE MORE I've read lots of good arguments, and a few not great arguments, and among these, there have been secular arguments . In this case, by my original post's definition, yes, my view has been changed, but more in the sense that I've been exposed to a wider net of people who critic abortion. So yes, secular pro life arguments do exist. However, I haven't found these arguments to be compelling enough to sway my stance on abortion I'm decidedly pro choice. I feel this has been good for me though, and I'm very happy this subreddit exists for this very purpose to escape the echo chamber, and to hear people's opinions that don't immediately line up with your own. I now feel my stance as pro choice is based less solely on the opinions I hear from the people I respect, and that it does, in fact, line up with my values. Also quick shout out to u dasbro, u ryansouth21, and u againstallauds, you've all been upvoted accordingly. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there is no secular \"pro-life\" argument.\n","id":"3ef315a3-128c-4b25-9e1d-73dbb5ecacdd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me be clear. When I say 'humanity', I realize humans may change a lot in this time. What I'm referring to are the descendants of modern man. My argument consists of three main parts 1 An event capable of wiping out the entire human race is very unlikely to occur within the next several thousand years. Most people think of things such as nuclear war, plague, or asteroids as strong possibilities for the eventual extinction of humanity. However, it is hard to imagine any of these things being entirely effective. It seems to me that in any of these events, at least a small group of humans who have access to a large amount of resources would be able to survive and eventually rebuild. I'm not ruling out the possibility of something wiping out the majority of humans at some point in time, but it is very difficult for me to imagine a scenario in which every single human is killed. 2 Humanity will be capable of traveling to other earth like planets within the next one or two thousand years. With the pace of technology what it is now, I believe that within a few thousand years we will be easily capable of sending a multi generational ship to different solar systems. We have already discovered earth like planets in our galaxy, and our detection technology is only getting better. 3 If humanity established itself on multiple planets in multiple solar systems, it will survive for billions of years, outlasting our sun.  Edit A lot of you remember this post from 13 days ago. It was pulled because I didn't have the chance to reply within 3 hours. Since it didn't get many comments, I thought I would post it again. Sorry to those who posted on the original, I'll try to get to your comment this time<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanity will most likely outlast the sun.\n","id":"a104a7b3-64a2-4bb2-a048-6fb2928af57a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Humanities have less value than Natural Sciences?<|ARGUMENT|>Humanities such as art and social sciences built the way for social engineering programs and fascist regimes that scholars either supported or were unable to prevent .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanities have been used to build dark ideologies and conduct man-made disasters, resulting in disastrous consequences.\n","id":"f3ec01a8-f06b-451c-b2ab-34f96b3ebc18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>From Brexit to healthcare in the US. From gun control to gun freedom. From reproductive rights to abortion restrictions. From immigration restrictions to immigrant's rights. Political idealists have shown that they are unprepared to govern. Usually, this takes the form of x200B Big, simple, dramatic idea captivates the voter e.g., leave the EU, no restrictions on firearms, abortion whenever it is desired, no abortion ever, invade Iraq, separate immigrant children from parents at the borders The simplicity and purity of the idea draws followers like moths to a light where Dunning Kruger takes over e.g., I can't imagine would could go wrong so probably nothing will go wrong . Voters vote for politicians who express this ideological purity. Politicians attempt to put ideals into practice, using ideological purity as a litmus test. Idea fails miserably in practice chaos ensues. Idealists blame politicians for a lack of idealism in the execution of the idea. e.g., If idealists had been in office, they would have done it right. Followers blame politicians for a lack of ideological purity. Voters lose faith in politicians. Voters vote for more political idealists with ideologically pure ideas. Idealists push more simple, big ideas go back to step 1. x200B By this I mean, we should focus on political leaders who express directional intent for an idea e.g., we should have healthcare coverage for all and a specific plan to do so e.g., and here is real detail on how this could happen and the risks that I see in going down this path, particularly the political ones with an openness to adjustment based on the operating reality changing. x200B While this may be uninspiring at a campaign level, it is the reality that every leader must contend with. Therefore, when a politician leads with ideals and provides no substantive discussion about how their ideas will actually play out in reality, they are lying to the voters and should not be taken seriously. x200B x200B x200B x200B x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political idealists should not be taken seriously\n","id":"b5e6df55-b9f7-443e-989b-f4cab307d373"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>The 'Born This Way' argument is hostage to science. Scientific hypotheses are necessarily provisional The argument could collapse if new conflicting evidence comes to light which means it is not a good narrative to campaign with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Born This Way' forces LGBTQ+ individuals to justify their humanity by appealing to \"nature\", rather than their human dignity or the intrinsic worthiness of their choices.\n","id":"ce7f6677-9adf-477f-aab4-836ab18eb9f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>reality television does more harm than good<|ARGUMENT|>Reality TV is actually getting worse as the audience becomes more and more used to the genre. In a search for ratings and media coverage, shows are becoming ever more vulgar and offensive, trying to find new ways to shock. When the British Big Brother was struggling for viewers in 2003, its producers responded by attempting to shock the audience that little bit more1. \"Big Brother\" programmes have also shown men and women having sex on live TV in a desperate grab higher ratings to justify their continued existence. Others have involved fights and racist bullying. Do we let things continue until someone has to die on TV to boost the ratings? When reality is \"constructed\" then it substitutes the \"natural\" reality. This in turn has adverse effect on the natural growth of the children who are either actively involved into it or as audience become a passive recepient. We therefore in a pursuit of commercialization are taking away an inalienable right of children i.e. full personality development in a natural environment which is not contaminated by \"constructed\" reality. 1 Humphrys, J. 2004, August 28. Take this oath: First, do no harm. Retrieved July 4, 2011, from The Guardian: improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The sheer number of reality programmes is now driving TV producers to create filthier, more corrupt reality shows\n","id":"fef2ffbc-e53e-49c1-8416-318e55b95608"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Particularly in electronic music, it is unclear whether or not up and coming musicians need to regularly play live anymore in order to build their following. As I see it, there are basically two schools of thought 1 you need to play live constantly in order to get your name out, and 2 you need to constantly pump out content over the internet. The short answer is probably yes and yes , but I recently got into a debate about whether or not playing live anymore actually matters in terms of GAINING fans. Obviously, regular touring is not only hugely valuable financially, but essential for engaging with existing fans but as an up and coming musician, I'm less convinced that playing live shows is a useful way to GAIN fans. This seems like a hard issue to come to a right answer , because there are going to be stories that support both sides of the argument. But I'm here to argue that you no longer need to play live shows in order to grow your fan base, and that relentless internet content is the best way for aspiring musicians to grow their base. So my  is this I believe somewhat cynically that you no longer need to play live shows as an aspiring musician.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Up-and-coming musicians no longer need to regularly play live shows.\n","id":"b28c7af5-c2d2-4d73-ace6-b33c1c26c835"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>It's nearly impossible to live off a vegetarian diet in some areas, like Tibet. Finding Vegetarian Meals in China<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Living on a meatless diet is not viable or stigmatized in some countries and regions.\n","id":"890fc7a7-ec59-4420-8676-8bff541da0a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit thanks for the discussion, I awarded a \u2206 somewhere in there on mobile so can't easily link after taking in all the responses you've provided. Cheers I know this isn't a popular opinion on reddit, but I don't think I'm your typical anti nuclear alarmist either. I'm decently informed of the technologies involved, and my risk assessment is not based on an irrational fear of radiation escaping during the normal operation of a plant, or whatever it is the nimby and woo woo types go on about. That said, I'm opposed to expanding nuclear power facilities, and favor the retiring of our current facilities, for three primary reasons. 1 The potential for accidents stemming from human error, oversight, or malevolence, which could cause widespread and long lasting harm 2 The potential for accidents stemming from natural disasters, which could cause widespread and long lasting harm 3 Our inability to predict control for future social, economic, and political instability, which could create conditions in which nuclear facilities are neglected or poorly regulated, thereby creating conditions that could lead to an increased likelihood of numbers 1 2 I don't think it's wise to subject our present population to the increased risk associated with the building of more nuclear facilities. I also think it's unwise and unjust to burden future populations with technologies they may not want or need, especially considering we have no way of knowing the conditions under which future humans will be living. I think that in the meantime we should continue to operate the nuclear facilities we currently have until it is time for them to be decommissioned. I also think that research into nuclear technologies that eliminate or reduce to almost zero the risks outlined above ought to continue, and should be commercially developed if appropriate. Finally, I think that focusing on reducing energy usage and applying renewable energy technologies is the right strategy for combating climate change, and that if sacrifices to our lifestyles have to be made in order for this to be effective, this is still preferable over the risks associated with nuclear power. To , convince me that new plants would be able to eliminate or reduce to almost zero the risks outlined above. And I should say that I am especially concerned about point three, as I do not count on the future being particularly stable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am opposed to expanding nuclear power production, and would like to see the gradual decommissioning of existing facilities\n","id":"7c693c14-f47b-4839-b6cd-49de5f384c21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Much as though I tend to disagree with Ezra Levant about almost everything, I find his arguments about Ethical Oil to be fairly convincing. Compared to many other large scale oil producing regions, Alberta has decent environmental and safety standards, has a democratically elected government, has some measure of accountability, and the royalties are reinvested in communities and social programs. I realize that open pit mining and tailings ponds are massive eyesores and are lousy for the environment, but they certainly don't occupy land that is otherwise exceptionally fertile and they aren't altogether that much worse than oil rigs in Saudi Arabia and far less damaging than Deepwater Horizon . If we have to rely on oil for the time being, wouldn't it be better to get it from our own back yard at a slightly higher environmental risk than from faraway countries with no accountability?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think North Americans should more grateful for the Oil Sands.\n","id":"b3773724-b859-4ff9-a339-94a835b70287"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you don't do well during these years you'll probably never get a scholarship to a university, in which case you'll either have to use your parents money or work good luck working and going to university all at once . If you're going into an actually difficult field like engineering or science you're going to have an even tougher time without a scholarship. Education is such a scam, but not with a scholarship, and if you don't have one or some other people's money you're through. It's basically all about doing well in highschool.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When it comes to school, years 14-18 pretty much determine everything.\n","id":"628c6520-2b29-4869-96fa-d96de3d260ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Subsidizing Poor Communities<|ARGUMENT|>Unless we deal with the problem of poor communities, our cities will be surrounded by a belt of poverty, an increasing growing belt that will create a serious threat. As most cities continue to grow and attract more and more people from rural areas, the state needs to find a way to address the problem of urban migration, which is closely linked to the formation of poor communities particularly around cities. Illegal immigration also contributes tremendously to this problem, particularly in areas such as the Mexico-California border. Targeted subsidies can slow the pace of migration, by giving those in the countryside and in poorer countries a better standard of living where they already live.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unless we deal with the problem of poor communities, our cities will be surrounded by a belt of pove...\n","id":"6231c3c1-af64-400f-9e16-167eac74bb47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Warning you now, I use some hefty racial slurs in my explanation. I'm not racist and don't support the use of any of these terms, but I'm going to use them here as examples. Now I'm not one for overly SJW like thinking, and I'm not personally outraged by the term, but I'm floored by how rarely I see anyone realize or even acknowledge that the term is racist. The phrasing white trash assumes that white people are inherently not trash and that this is a special exemption to the rule and needs to be labeled as such. One doesn't say black nigger or mexican spic , the hate is built into the word itself. The word is the hate label. Having to specify white before your insult just makes it seem like it's shocking to you that a white person is behaving abnormally. Like they're a weird example of a white person instead of just another white person in a sea of different examples. Now, I've heard the arguments before that there's no good word to throw at white people and I use the term and I'm not racist . Neither of these are valid points. A lack of a good insult doesn't make a bad one good and your feelings on the matter have no bearing on the reality of how the term is constructed. I'm not saying people who use the term are racists, I just think they don't realize the implication. Every time I bring this up though I'm downvoted without explanation. The score will drop but I'll hear no hint of rebuttal, which has convinced me I'm right but I'm just saying something they don't like. But hey idk, maybe I'm totally wrong. I'm willing to hear it. ? . Edit Wow there's a lot more here than I anticipated, sorry if I don't respond to everyone ^^^ even ^^though ^^any ^^time ^^I ^^say ^^anything ^^it's ^^like ^^it's ^^on ^^fire ^^and ^^downvotes ^^are ^^water. I have probably done a poor job of accurately representing my stance on the issue. In an effort to drive home my logic, I was a little extreme with my phrasing. I will concede that the use of the term isn't insulting to other races, but I think it does hint at the white people are normally higher class sentiment that fuels the entire phrase. If you find that INSULTING TRIGGERING or not probably has more to due with you than the phrase but as u ratherenjoysbass said in the comments I think white trash is fucked up in that it inherently assumes that most white people are successful, well mannered people so we must delineate the people that did not make it as well, for some reason couldn't afford enough class, or are the genetic unwanted when compared to the rest of the white race. Most other racial slurs inherently include the entire race so even a white person saying white trash is still acknowledging racial superiority against the others. Edit 2 u beneaththewaves7 knocks it out of the park here. He makes my point better than me. Also thanks to u tit wrangler for the the only comment so far that I've delta'd, in this thread<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term \"white trash\" is racist to every race but whites\n","id":"88e26ccf-47f0-48fe-a1fc-bc622b5c89c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it a good thing that Dungeons & Dragons is the de-facto standard RPG?<|ARGUMENT|>New players can easily come away with the impression that D&D requires a large initial investment and the purchase of multiple books and additional materials.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Large number of options can seem intimidating to new people.\n","id":"f6b607dd-5793-4e2f-926e-0f913b81558e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Will, as a choice according to preferences, is not compatible with a non-deterministic freedom, independent of preferences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The notions \u201cfreedom\u201d and \u201cwill\u201d are not compatible, making the expression 'Free Will' oxymoronic.\n","id":"bb7d7cdd-7e51-4f8e-bc65-b62b213be4ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>For national defense, an armed citizenry is dispersed geographicaly and decentralized in its control and command, therefore resilient to attack. An armed populous is a non-military component of a robust and diversified national defense strategy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An armed population is a formidable component of a robust national defense against external military threats.\n","id":"6065c3f7-f7ac-40e9-be8b-5e1e97dd8c12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are there any working business models for journalism?<|ARGUMENT|>Payment for single articles, monthly or daily subscriptions as well as time-based modells are common. Often, these modells include articles taken from the printed paper or magazine that are otherwise not available online. Other specials only for subscribers such as invitations to lectures or videos are relatively common, too, in order to gain paying users.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"News sites on the web experiment with a large amount of different models for payment and subscription while keeping the most important news free.\n","id":"47cdb424-9ba5-4097-952d-8cd22d0478df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the Bible support the conclusion that 'homosexuality' is a sin against God?<|ARGUMENT|>3: \u201cmalakoi\" While \u201cmalakoi\u201d is sometimes applied to obviously gay persons in classical literature, it is also true that so many people are designated as malakoi in ancient literature, for so many reasons, that the burden of proof in this case must be on those who wish to create a link with gay people. In the absence of such proof, the soundest inference is that malakoi refers to a general moral \"effeminate\" weakness, with no specific connection to homosexuality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Semantic difficulties seem to plague precision when translating the words, \u201cmalakoi\u201d & \u201carsenokoitai\u201d\u2014as one can see in various major English versions of the Bible 1. However, the linguistic evidence 2, and the literary evidence 3, suggests that malakoi refers to a general \"effeminate\" moral weakness with no specific connection to homosexuality, and that arsenokoitai means male sexual agents, i.e., active male prostitutes\u2014who were common throughout the Hellenistic world in Paul's time.\n","id":"bf7e679f-ab2b-4ac0-b9c5-8e89d2b45e47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Major League Soccer adopt promotions and relegations?<|ARGUMENT|>It would be difficult to sell to US sports fans to embrace the concept of an overall \"league winner\" when they have only ever known success as winning a playoff-style championship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would go against the competition format of all major US sports.\n","id":"3bd197ba-212b-4b9d-8157-7ac7441b8dac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit People have convinced me he is popular for reasons beyond simply seeming like a nice guy. However, I'd still love for someone to link me to a scene or break down a performance he gave that proves his chops once and for all. I feel like I must have missed something in his catalog that others love about him. Original post below This poll is what got me thinking. I'm not arguing Tom Hanks is a bad actor by any means. But I have never found one of his performances to stand out as particularly moving or inspiring. One other caveat I DO think Tom Hanks is funny. He proved that early on in The Money Pit , The Burbs , Big , etc. If anything I think this helps my point. His ability as a comedic actor lends to his image as an all around fun, nice guy. This is also why he works well on SNL. I also don't dispute that he's been in some great, powerful films. But most of them are more memorable for the compelling stories they tell, the dramatic scenes, or something other than Tom Hanks' performance itself. If we look at his dramatic roles, a pretty clear trend emerges. He's almost universally cast as a good, upstanding, all American guy essentially the classic father figure he appears to be in real life . In five of his prominent roles he literally plays a Captain Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Captain Phillips, and Sully . There's nothing wrong with having a type, but the problem with Tom Hanks' type is that it's inherently boring to always be the stereotypical good guy. These roles don't lend themselves to a lot of depth or intrigue. For example, one of his speeches in Saving Private Ryan is about how much of an average American guy he is even though he's been thrust into the role of a hero. The test I use in my head is could I easily imagine another actor delivering a similar performance with the same effect? For Tom Hanks, usually my answer is yes. The most obvious counter points are his Best Actor Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump . While I'll admit they don't fit his normal type, my issue with these is that they both fall into the able bodied able minded actor playing a disabled sick person category. They both feel a little bit like Oscar bait, and IMO don't hold up that well over time. But I'm willing to have someone explain why I'm wrong, so have at it. Am I stating the obvious, or has Tom Hanks actually delivered some great performances?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tom Hanks is \"America's favorite movie star\" because he seems like a nice guy, not because he's a great actor\n","id":"9b11c903-747e-4c85-99b4-37dddba6b6b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Abuse against spouses or children which is caused by anger issues and often aggravated by addiction is violence that asserts power and dominance but is not caused by lack of communication.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some violence has nothing to do with communication or lack thereof.\n","id":"dfa17e28-8036-4458-8867-6426483f048b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The Book of Mormon is primarily a religious history of an ancient American civilization the Nephites, who existed between about 600 BC and 421 AD. It is a work of collective memory, and it therefore makes sense that many people contributed to its writing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Helpful Background Information. These sub-claims are intended to help make clear why authorship by multiple ancient authors is important in evaluating the Book of Mormon's authenticity.\n","id":"254fdb4a-0724-4155-b4df-85cb668d0a8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>United Airlines has a legal right to remove someone from their private property after making every effort to accommodate them for their purchase. Failing that, and the customer proves to be belligerent and noncooperative, they are thereby trespassing on private property and the police may be informed. They were, and the customer proved to be untenable and unwilling to cooperate with a fair decision. To spearhead some arguments I may be likely to hear gt United Airlines should not have overbooked. The excuse for the removal does not matter within reason United Airlines overbooked, and had to do a lottery draw to determine who had to leave. It happens, in an effort to make seats cheaper for the average consumer, and these incidents where passengers have to be removed are the exception, not the rule gt United Airlines should have chosen another customer when the randomly drawn person proves to be belligerent. I disagree with this sentiment. How do you justify this action to these two groups 1 The first three people who left without incident? 2 The follow up customer you must choose to replace the belligerent one? In both groups, they suddenly now have recourse to regain their seats by being belligerent and obstructive. By engaging that type of personality, United Airlines is opening themselves up to potential liability i.e. customers may demand even more money than they offer and sue for not being given the option to 'be obstructive' but more importantly, by engaging that type of personality, it means that the problem at hand does not get solved. gt The airport police should not have used such force. Three points in regards to this First, you must delineate airport police are not United Airlines. United Airlines hands were clean the moment they called security. Airport police typically work inside of the terminal, and are legal representatives of the executive branch of government. As legal representatives of the executive branch of government, they were beholden to the laws the removal of a trespasser from private property. The longer this man remained on this plane, the more trespassing they were doing, and costing the company increasing amounts of money in damages via delays . If you want to talk about the greater overreach of the police, I don't think this is the place to do it. Right now, United Airlines is taking the brunt for the actions of these officers, who are not paid United Airlines employees. gt United Airlines should have offered more compensation and handled this in a sloppy manner. This is the only point presented I will tentatively concede to. There was a fuck up this should have been handled before any passenger reached the gate. But it didn't, something, somewhere, got lost in translation some kind of human error occured, and people in charge realized Crap. We have to fix this issue. Normally, this happens prior to boarding, but very rarely does it happen post boarding. They had a decision to make, and they made it, following their proper protocol. In regards to the compensation offered, I can't speak to it. I don't have enough information on the plans they offer and what kind of negotiations they conduct. But ultimately, I feel this does not matter at some point, negotiations failed, and the passenger was declared as obstructive by the Captain. The Captain must be obeyed by the staff, and the staff had to call the police, as they the staff were not authorised to use force. I do not think this is wrong . Sloppy, maybe, but that does not make the decision a bad one. gt United Airlines was trying to accommodate staff over passengers. They are a business and have every right to do so, if it's in the interest of keeping their business working more efficiently overall. I see this as a non issue. They were in a position where someone was going to lose, and they chose efficiency over an individual. ^^1. ^^ In ^^the ^^US, ^^which ^^provides ^^the ^^best ^^statistics ^^on ^^this ^^matter, ^^the ^^number ^^of ^^people ^^denied ^^boarding ^^\u2014 ^^both ^^voluntary ^^and ^^involuntary ^^\u2014 ^^was ^^1.07m ^^in ^^1999 ^^but ^^declined ^^to ^^552,000 ^^in ^^2015, ^^according ^^to ^^the ^^Bureau ^^of ^^Transportation ^^Statistics. ^^Those ^^might ^^sound ^^like ^^large ^^numbers ^^but ^^the ^^2015 ^^level ^^represented ^^only ^^0.09 ^^per ^^cent ^^of ^^trips ^^taken ^^by ^^passengers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"United Airlines did nothing wrong.\n","id":"d1bdb0e3-60c9-47dc-afde-a284f5062eeb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Global warming is a massive issue. Unchecked it could literally wipe out civilization as we know it. We're already experiencing some negative effects from it probably to a greater degree than we actually realize and this is only going to exponentially grow. We've already moved past multiple 'tipping points' or 'last chances' to sort it out yet CO2 emissions actually continue to grow. Developing nations like India China, Indonesia, Nigeria will see that continue fair enough considering us Western Nations also benefited from coal etc. Even our own industry business continues to release so many gasses it's almost unbelievable look up the CO2 emissions of large ships . x200B In the face of this problem most of our solutions are so small. On an individual level using a bike public transport, choosing to become a vegetarian vegan or getting solar panels have a completely negligible effect even if millions upon millions are making these changes . Even on a country level instituting a carbon tax or investing more in renewable energy at least in a non drastic way barely makes a scratch. Particularly for smaller countries. Even if these movements continue to majorly ramp up at least in Western countries we won't even come close to turning this ship. A fair few people actually believe this but take it in a different way imo a more pessimistic way , believing that it just means we're doomed. x200B I don't. Scientific technological advancement is incredible. What we as a collective have achieved with the internet, mobile phones, computers, air planes, space flight, medicine and hundreds of other areas in relatively short spans of times is awe inspiring. Yet some CO2 in the atmosphere is going to be the end of us? I mean come on, have some faith in science. x200B Global warming is definitely a problem we have to solve and we need to continue to put pressure on governments to pump money into science to fix it, which incidentally they'll do themselves once we start feeling more serious effects from climate change but all these individual efforts are just a complete waste of time. There's some value in 'being the change you want to see' and 'setting an example' but we'd be much better off saving our time and money and putting more pressure on big business government who actually have the ability to solve the problem. x200B EDIT While I haven't found anyone that has dissuaded me from my view that science is a far and away better option than relying on incremental change from individuals and hence should be prioritized at all costs I have opened my eyes a little more to the value of these small changes while science continues along in the background as measures taken 'just in case' that generally are beneficial to the person anyway. Am pretty steadfast in my opinion though that the view that incremental change on a global scale will enact changes quick enough is driven by just as much faith as my view about science. I just cannot see how these changes transition from rich westerners and go global in time for any sort of real preventative measures to be taken.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of the current efforts to 'solve' global warming are a complete waste of time\n","id":"6560d63d-c527-4b7d-b887-6d4c922162ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the modern day Western country this position might seem like an extreme. However, let me lay out a few arguments as to why the idea of uninhibited sexuality is absurd. What happens during sex and why should sex in and of itself be reserved? Hormones, the brain is flooded with large doses of oxytocin and endorphins. Oxytocin is a hormone that makes humans bond. With release in such high quantities, oxytocin can lead to two people who have no rational intention of bonding, bonding due to it being released from sex. This can result in all kinds of emotional pain and jealousy and overall just a wastage of energy. There's also a psychological element at play, although here it differs from person to person. However, in general I think it's reasonable to conclude that the person being penetrated has a certain level of psychological vulnerability that resorts in that person building trust to the person penetrating to do no harm and that level of trust can be more likely used and abused if it isn't within an already established and trusted relationship. Sex is, biologically speaking, a dangerous act and risky. It can lead to pregnancy and the likelihood of having to invest a lot into future offspring, keep in mind that our biology and psychology is centered around that. Irrespective of birth control. Can sex and emotions be disassociated? I don't know, but if that is taken as a given is that necessarily something that should be strived towards? Wouldn't that ultimately lead to emotionally unfulfilled relationships. x200B What can happen that is bad as a result of sex? Pregnancy, diseases and a feeling of low self worth. Pregnancy, even with the option of abortions, can be emotionally damaging to both men and women who might feel that they have a moral responsibility towards the unborn. Diseases, if you do not deeply trust the person how can you be sure of what they say, therefore the risk of catching a disease is large in people who engage in sex with multiple partners whom are also doing it with multiple partners . Low self worth is a bit of a BS point, but I added it in because I think that some people may feel used after sex or they may feel disgusted by what they had just done etc. People might feel as if there only value towards to opposite gender is that of providing sexual pleasure and others might feel that they fundamentally cannot control themselves. Within a secure and committed relationship the people would be more likely to look after the child, but even if they don't there should because of it being a secure relationship be a level of mutuality in agreement that helps to alleviate moral burdens unlike otherwise because they both have an equal share in creating the unborn. Diseases, well obviously people who are less promiscuous will be less likely to have diseases and also if there is a level of trust at play the chances of that person lying is less and the chances of that person informing about risks are higher. Low self worth, well if it's within a loving relationship obviously the person won't feel only purpose point and also won't feel can't control point because by virtue of the relationship being loving that person will likely have had to put restrictions in order to please the other person. x200B Any thoughts?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex should only take place within committed and secure relationships\n","id":"aa59a042-7112-4804-821d-6398de0ef64c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The word 'feminist' has really been bandied about lately, and lots of clickbait websites have begun to focus on women's issues. On the one hand, it's nice to see such a large population thinking about gender issues and attempting to destigmatise the word. On the other, I think it's doing more harm than good by distilling the actual feminist issues into cute clickable taglines. A few bullets of things that have annoyed me Frequent misuse of the gender pay gap statistic to suggest that employers pay their female employees 23 cents less than their male employees, when the statistic is actually much more complicated but no less interesting and useful. A focus on feminism through the lens of simplistic, white, upper middle class issues. Juxtaposing the occasional real issues with gifs of shocked expressions, cats or Beyonce. Why this annoys me By presenting relatively trivial feminist issues or real issues in a trivial way, rather than as more nuanced or serious problems, 'Buzzfeed feminism' confirms for those already wary of feminism that the movement is of little import and that gender inequality is not a serious issue. It's turned important feminist terms like ' patriarchy into cute buzzwords, reducing the serious problem of gender disparity into 'cute' 'Girl Power' clickable headlines and moving away from the substance and scholarship that should mark what is essentially a political movement. It broadens the word 'feminist' to describe even those activities which ought to be incompatible with the most basic tenets of feminism e.g. by making light of misandry or dismissing men's oppression by the patriachy . As a result, it alienates other marginalised groups and especially prevents men from becoming allies by confirming their suspicions that feminism is 'against them'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Buzzfeed Feminism' does more harm to feminism than good.\n","id":"2d10bf5f-1f82-4c37-ae7b-01e3f7a11ebb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My reasoning is this coded programs have a level of efficiency in tempo and keeping in synchronization that is better than natural human ability, especially as more instruments samples members are added. Yes, good bands should be able to stay in sync, but very rarely, if ever afaik , are in sync at the exact tempo that would be notated on the sheet music through the entire piece. A conflicted issue is the aural qualities and differences between electronic and acoustic music. I believe some day technology will create perfect synthetic tones of acoustic instruments, though I see we are not there yet, and through sheer majority currently does not sound perfectly acoustic. Sampling is a different issue, but one I'd love to discuss, if nothing else than to be devil's advocate. So please, come one and all, tell me why the death of live instruments is so tragic?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the rise in \"electronic,\" music, operational definition as \"music outputted from a computer or use of technology to synthetically simulate aural stimuli,\" and the death of \"acoustic, live, or 'real instrument'\" recordings and productions as a good thing.\n","id":"486ac0ed-8017-4e89-a472-42a81fba964f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello reddit, I've had something I've been debating with myself for awhile, i'm quite young so i may be ignorant, but i can't seem to understand love and if it exists. I have seen marriages fail and relationships crash because one side decides they are not in love anymore. I've had girlfriends tel me that they don't love me anymore. That they just don't feel the same. But then people say it isn't a feeling, it's a commitment, but is that so true? If it's not a feeling then what is it? Something we're trying to force? Is it wrong to commit yourself to a relationship where there is no feeling on the basis that love is commitment? I'm convinced that it's just a feeling that lasts for awhile and then fades. I can't find myself believing in love. It just seems so superficial and difficult to understand, do any of us really know what love is? What makes us still know we love someone? If love even exists beyond feelings? How do we know when to stay with someone and when to leave them? I think I'm partially naive in my understanding of love, but from what i understand, i just can't imagine that it exists, that once the feeling fades it's the end of that. And that's all it is, a fleeting feeling. I know that we are one of the few species that practice monogamy, but is monogamy real? Is it something we as humans have tried to force? Why do we practice monogamy if love seems to be a fleeting feeling? Change my view reddit, inform me on what love is and feelings are, as is now I don't see a great point in relationships.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Love doesn't exist, it's just a feeling that fades after awhile\n","id":"ed12a55e-6efd-4a05-a8a7-5e522ded0ad5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just to make things clear this is specifically about me and people in similar situations. I can understand why university is useful for some people. I'm also not sure if this post follows the rules. It's pretty personal. Feel free to delete if you don't think its general enough. I'm not planning to go to university. Mainly because I'm struggling to even graduate high school. I don't think any university would accept me. Even if I eventually do finish high school. Even if I do go to university it would probably be way too exhausting. I can't even handle part time high school. I also don't think university would help me out in my career at all. My first choice is working in the music business. I know that trying to make it as a solo musician or band isn't reliable. That is why I'm studying music production right now. I'm also saving up my money in case I can't make as much money for any reason. I also plan to do street performing and sell some art I make. I know I can't rely on that for an income. If all that fails I don't really know what I should do. I know I'll be hard to hire because of my extremely low energy level and focus. I'm pretty sure university won't help because I keep hearing it won't guarantee a job.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"University is useless for me\n","id":"390e6838-90b4-4143-9781-f77120912843"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A society with no gender would be better<|ARGUMENT|>The attribution of colors, such as \"blue for boys, pink for girls\", has changed over time and is influenced by forces such as art and marketing This points to it being cultural, not biological.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No one is born or genetically programmed to like blue, or not wear a dress. The only reason these ideas exists is because they have been socially constructed.\n","id":"336bd452-0d23-4492-8c5e-ec5a21f7b776"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The predictability of the universe is sufficient for utility codifying a system of logic. As intelligent beings evolved the use of patterns was favored as it aided in survival, therefore giving rise to more and more complex logical systems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our explicit conceptions of the laws of logic may transcend a naturalistic universe, however they have derived implicitly, from a naturalistic universe.\n","id":"aefa243d-5eef-4288-ba25-fdb715f8db4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hunger Games-Style Tournaments Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>While money can be an effective form of short term relief for people in poverty, education is the most effective way for disadvantaged groups to improve their futures and break the cycle of poverty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This simply amplifies the extent to which the impoverished and desperate are likely to feel that this is the only option available to them to provide for their families or own survival.\n","id":"21b45f0f-7d7e-4272-978c-52fa9460c7ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Americans find a large society essential to a traditional life and crucial to create a powerful, unified nation, but they also strongly value independence. The American constitution expresses the value of society and community the 'Union' , but independence is also viewed as a necessity. How can America be unified, yet independent? How are Americans expected to strive in a capitalist society, while working together essentially towards the same goal? How are these able to exist in a country without creating a massive paradox?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe large societies and independence are able to coexist in a country specifically America.\n","id":"32657726-bb4c-4d25-9ad4-58d2069d2b72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Aristocratic families own property which has been in the family for many centuries and in many cases provides a livelihood for local communities. This is a form of guardianship which considers the long-term rather than short-term profit and loss decisions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Privilege gained by inheritance brings with it responsibility to serve others and support those who are less fortunate.\n","id":"7f1e8cc0-30b1-4add-982d-ece7d765b564"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>When in a close relationship of trust and confidence, you owe a duty to your partner not to deliberately cause them harm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given that your partner expects faithfulness from you, continuing to cheat will hurt them deeply.\n","id":"320ce062-ae91-428d-b9fd-098df156665c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>Leaving Leia to die in space would have been a natural conclusion to her character arc; having died in battle against the betrayals of her son.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Leia being able to magically move back to the spacecraft had a deus-ex-machina touch to it.\n","id":"860a9c5d-6e74-4284-8246-1de451297e39"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Whitewashing In Hollywood: Should It Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>White actors were cast as Sokka and Katara - characters who were originally inspired by indigenous people of the Artic Circle, in M. Knight Shyamalan's adaption of Avatar: The Last Airbender.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are some cases where it is clear that characters have been whitewashed due to commercial reasons. It is feasible and justified to enforce a ban in those cases.\n","id":"8ec7f3e0-a12b-43a0-82af-3617df3cbe25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's two main problems in the society when elections come up in Spain Indiference In my country a lot of people don't even care to read the electoral programs so they don't really know what are they really voting, so there's a high percentage of votes that don't represent the citizens, that goes against democracy itself. Missinformation People vote what they hear in the radio and see in the TV. Therefore they fall in the topics that every political team have, so there's a huge manipulation of this part of the citizens. Therefore it's bad for the democracy since citizens are not free to choose I understand that we are never totally free, but this freedom is much lower this way . Including an attended based test type exam I'm not going to enter on what questions and such, just showing they have a basic knowledge and read the where people show that they're committed to the political system and they know what are they talking about would be beneficial for all for these reasons It makes people take more interest if they really want to be represented in the system, which is good for the country It also destroy topics and stigma made by social media and creates a sieve where manipulated people can't participate in the system because they can't pass the test if they don't know what this political team really represents. I know that some people won't be represented Please, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone should pass a test in order to vote\n","id":"573142ad-13e7-4345-8242-75c48e398a89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Arranged Marriages are Better than Love Matches<|ARGUMENT|>Psychopaths, narcissists and sociopaths are often very charming It takes time to notice dangerous signs and arranged marriages do not allow for this amount of \"getting to know one another\" time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is relatively easy to hide negative aspects of your personality, such as a temper, over the short lead up to an arranged marriage.\n","id":"9b5d75be-2d81-4fa6-b3c4-ae489be76322"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should provide healthcare: the government or the market?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unwise to let your community engage in unhealthy habits smoking, polluting soil or streets, transmitting parasites or infectious diseases, etc., because your health depends on your environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United Kingdom restricts access to healthcare for those who smoke or are overweight.\n","id":"7108bba2-cbee-44a5-8da3-54eb3e1c7185"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>By leaving the Church there are more benefits than just not paying church tax. It includes a freedom of mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You can decide to leave the Church, and no longer have to pay the tax.\n","id":"76866768-f587-4e57-9b98-1cbbeeb1c174"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>NFL retiree James Harrison is facing controversy after he stripped his children of participation trophies, i.e. trophies for nothing . The result has been a bitter debate on Twitter under the hashtag TrophiesForEveryone. The big problem is that this is a false dichotomy 1 Awarding trophies for participation not awarding extra special trophies for winning. Victory and accomplishment deserve to be celebrated, but so does being part of a team and of a larger whole. 2 Adult society awards both victory and participation. When did you last get one of these This is essentially a participation trophy as long as you are an adult US citizen without depending on the state a felony record, you can get one of these every year just for showing up. But does that make them any more hollow? Do we only congratulate people who vote for the winning candidate? In fact, participatory is a huge buzzword in everything from design to governance, reflecting that we in the West do not aspire to a winner take all, might makes right society, but instead encourage the broadest range of participation , even if it means that the losers get to have their voice heard. 3 A participation trophy is not necessarily the PC SJW Everyone's a Winner thing that it is sometimes made out to be. Instead, it reflects that participation is a chosen value, indeed the chosen value of democratic society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing wrong with awarding participation trophies. In fact, rewarding participation is essential to preparing children to be citizens of a democratic state.\n","id":"b73793af-dee1-4dde-a549-f28269140db0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>A French journalist who wrote an article that was critical of Beijing's policy toward Muslim Uighers was expelled from China. This is the first time since 2012 that such an incident has occurred.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under Xi, foreign journalists have begun to face an increasing amount of restrictions.\n","id":"00cfa963-e4f2-410a-aa47-2fac7df0d9ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Intentionally disfiguring someone is in my view the most reprehensible crime someone can possibly commit. Disfiguring someone is even worse than crimes like rape and murder. Of course individual circumstances and context can make other types of crimes just as horrible, but the act of intentionally disfiguring another human being in a generalized sense is the worst crime someone can commit. I took up this point of view after reading about Catherine Kieu, a woman who intentionally cut off her husband\u2019s penis. This woman was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. In the comments section on several websites that reported on her sentencing many people thought her punishment was too severe. These commenters raised the point that rapists and murderers aren't punished this severely so why should she be . Which implied that crimes of rape and murder are more reprehensible than something like intentional disfigurement. Rape encompassing sexual crimes and murder are generally viewed as the two most reprehensible crimes, so I will explain why intentionally disfiguring someone is worse. Raping someone is obviously a horrific act and this topic is not meant to trivialize the matter. After a rape is over the victim will generally not have to deal with any physical repercussions. Some victims unfortunately deal with lifelong emotional problems, but being raped will generally not negatively impact the rest of a victim\u2019s life. There is no way for anyone but the victim to know what happened. When someone who has had acid thrown in their face walks down the street everyone can see the damage. Men and women who have had their genitals mutilated will never be able to physically have a normal sexual relationship. Psychological problems that stem from being raped can hopefully be treated, there is no way to treat someone who's face is now permanently deformed. It also goes without saying that someone who has been intentionally disfigured will likely suffer extremely vast emotional problems of their own for life. Again, this is not meant to trivialize rape or the damage it causes. I just wanted to cover the arguments that I anticipated would be made. When someone is murdered they do not suffer any more pain. Someone who has been disfigured will suffer physically and emotionally for the rest of their lives. Of course life is the most valuable thing, and when someone is dead they have no life. However, the kind of life someone leads once they have been disfigured is not a high quality of life. They will wear their disfigurement wherever they go and be reminded of it every time they see their body. I don't know what percentage of people would rather be dead than disfigured, but the percentage would likely be high. The act of intentionally disfiguring someone is the worst crime someone can commit. The perpetrator is setting out to permanently inflict physical and emotional damage to the victim for a lifetime. The victim will be reminded of the crime every time they look at their body. Every person who lays eyes on the victim will see their deformity. It is impossible to understand why anyone of any state of mind would do that to another person. Someone who murders another human being doesn't value human life. Someone who rapes another human being does it for self gratification, and generally does not understand the pain they inflict. Someone who intentionally disfigures another human being knows the pain they are inflicting is permanent. There are different types of disfigurements, some more noticeable than others. All disfigurements obviously inflict lifelong physical and emotional pain on the victim. As I said in the beginning circumstances and context can make crimes worse than others. What I am arguing is that the act of intentionally disfiguring someone is the most reprehensible crime that can be committed. I am interested to see if anyone can make a legitimate argument against this, I think it will be pretty tough.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intentionally disfiguring someone is the most reprehensible crime\n","id":"83289cdb-93e7-42b3-b99f-868e8fe5a306"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Police Should Use Racial Profiling To Tackle The Problems Of Illegal Immigration.<|ARGUMENT|>The best solution for illega immigration is racial profiling as a tool for reasonable suspicion<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Police Should Use Racial Profiling To Tackle The Problems Of Illegal Immigration.\n","id":"e407b4bd-6323-4041-966b-0df9e584deb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Using the reductio ad absurdum, I believe Donald Trump would be best suited to Gryffindor House in Harry Potter. It\u2019s tempting to call Trump a Slytherin, but I think that\u2019s not the case. Trump may be ambitious one could say even cunning but definitely not in a Slytherin like way. Slytherins are usually cold tempered, stern, somewhat introverted, aristocratic, chic, and with traditionalistic tendencies. Moreover, they are excellent at planning and developing things gradually and systematically. Trump is nowhere near that. Trump's certainly ambitious, but IIRC the Sorting Hat called Slytherins clever folk. Trump definitely wouldn't be a Hufflepuff. For the most part, Hufflepuffs are gentle, quiet, and humble, and believe in fair play. I absolutely can't see Trump here he deliberately portrays himself as an arrogant person who has been overly successful in life, and has zero problem insulting others. Trump wouldn\u2019t be a Ravencaw either. Ravenclaws are intelligent, elegant, and elaborate, and seek knowledge for its own sake not for what they can gain from it. Trump openly and sometimes vulgarly appeals to those who view themselves as \u201cthe people\u201d against the intellectual elite. Trump is the quintessential populist, albeit of the right wing variety. To me, Donald Trump is clearly a Gryffindor, embodying that House's traits at their absolute worst. It's mostly Gryffindors who can embody traits such as being pompous, bossy, extroverted, obnoxious, inelegant, pushy, superficial, arrogant, foolhardy, rude, and impetuous. Trump is a Gryffindor, of the pompous, overbearing glory hog variety. He certainly doesn\u2019t lack for daring or nerve. He'd fit in with the blowhard, foolish, quarrelsome show offs of Gryffindor House whose courage stems mainly from a love of applause or words to that general effect . As a matter of fact, I believe that Trump resembles Cormac McLaggen of Gryffindor House more than any other character in the Harry Potter saga. Even Trump's strong sense of entitlement is extremely similar to Cormac\u2019s. The latter used to talk only about himself, was extremely boastful, and considered himself to be the \u201crightful\u201d Gryffindor keeper even after he failed in the tryouts, and could make women feel very uncomfortable. Self righteous and aggressive, McLaggen epitomized the most negative aspects of the stereotypical Gryffindor characteristics. Same with Trump IMO.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump is a Gryffindor\n","id":"ea85fe8e-ffbc-4bb5-98e9-3abdd22f4209"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On its face, the NTS fallacy seems reasonable, in that we can all likely think of situations where people try to deflect criticism of a group or ideology by claiming that its worst members do not represent their beliefs. But I think that the fallacy is often invoked in situations where it does not apply, as a way of trying to associate genuinely unrelated things because doing so strengthens their argument by introducing a negative comparison to the position someone else is arguing for. In order for the NTS fallacy to have any value at all, there must be some reasonable limits on what any belief system or group can be said to represent. Otherwise, one could literally associate any belief with any ideology. Hypothetically, I could adopt all the beliefs characteristic of Nazi fascist ideology, and then proudly declare that I am a democratic liberal or conservative. And then, my political opponents could say, Look, Jazz Cigarettes is a conservative liberal and he endorses what the Nazis endorsed Conservatism liberalism is synonymous with Nazi ideology And if someone else tried to object and call that association ridiculous, some of the opponents would say, Oh, I see, no true conservative liberal would espouse Nazi ideology, eh? In essence, to offer another example, a lot of NTS accusations sound like this hypothetical criticism You're not allowed to say that politician X is not a liberal just because he doesn't believe a single thing characteristic of any other liberals He claims to be a liberal, therefore he is representative of the group regardless of any other considerations I believe that the same scenario is common with religions, where a large, mainstream religion will undoubtedly have tiny extremist splinter sects that do not really share any beliefs with the larger faith, and yet critics hold them up as representatives of the religion and cry No true Scotsman when people deny the validity of the comparison. While I do of course acknowledge that there are genuine scenarios where people try to evade the comparison of two ideologically related individuals or concepts, and that this is fallacious, I don't think it is as common as the people usually leveling the accusation feel it is. Edit damn typo in the title<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel that the \"No True Scotsman\" fallacy is over-accused and often not applicable to the situations in which people invoke it, and in is fact often used fallaciously itself.\n","id":"f843f468-5fd8-4acb-948f-bc403198d818"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I will love and pray for my President, but his life is not as important as the lives of hundreds of soldiers and I'm not sure why American minds are morphed to think if he dies, all is lost, and we should sacrifice the rest of the Country to save him. It may be a silly reference, but I just watched the movie Olympus has Fallen it was pretty good and the main premise of the movie is minor spoilers The president is captured in a bunker. The ransom would make an entire country vulnerable to attack and they would most likely all perish. In the process of the ransom, about a hundred American soldiers and innocent people are killed in rescue attempts. Now, don't get me wrong. I believe the President should be protected to preserve the symbol of America, but when you're talking about countries and other soldiers, who's to say his life is more important than mine? I play a role in the country. Just because you make more important decisions than me means your life is somehow more important than hundreds of others? If he is held for ransom, I feel like the powers that be should take a long hard look at the different outcomes. There has to be a value on his life. You can't sacrifice the country for the sake of his life. Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think the President of the United States' life is that important.\n","id":"18724d34-8152-4837-a613-40ca0c26cb78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK and US we have a thing called separation of power. Here is the Wikipedia general definition for some to gain a general understanding. \u201c\u2026Separation of powers is a political doctrine originating in the writings of Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws where he urged for a constitutional government with three separate branches of government. Each of the three branches would have defined powers to check the powers of the other branches. This idea was called separation of powers. This philosophy heavily influenced the writing of the United States Constitution, according to which the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of the United States government are kept distinct in order to prevent abuse of power. This United States form of separation of powers is associated with a system of checks and balances\u2026.\u201d Keep in mind that the police are the \u201cExecutive\u201d, enforcers of law, in this sense. Therefore the police, are merely enforcing the laws and the word of politicians, who are parties voted in democratically and therefore are representing the interests country. So is having a negative attitude towards the police unpatriotic? I expect to receive a whole bunch of individual case showing how an individual small group of cops did something to an individual, but I am talking on the largest scale of things, not individual cases where some bastard cop let power get to his head and he did something stupid which lead to him being fired and publicly humiliated etc Please  so I can rest\u2026. Edit i fixed some mistakes, also wanted to add my definition of unpatriotic 1. not enthusiastically supporting one's country and its ways of life. first result in google, also Collins uses a similar definition<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you have something against the police generally, then you are unpatriotic.\n","id":"60a7d5c3-2692-4d0c-8f55-cd65bf1e1896"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Drug Trial Participants Be Chosen By Lottery?<|ARGUMENT|>Similar to the military draft in countries such as Russia exceptions would likely be made where reasonable, for example in the cases of single parents, parents of multiple or disabled children, or elected office holders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Presumably, there would be exceptions for people for whom this would be a significant impediment, just like there is for jury duty or military service.\n","id":"6ffd8f1d-ec84-4dae-8316-f2e544bf18d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The UK government has floundered in internal approval of a brexit plan, and is possibly in a position where, instead of a no deal brexit, they'll completely halt the brexit process the exact mechanics are unclear . A delay would be moderately disgraceful given the amount of the British parliament has had to plan and negotiate, but completely failing to leave the EU would be an astonishing disgrace and breach of the parliament's duty to its citizens. To be clear, while a do over referendum is a somewhat stupid outcome for a variety of reasons, it's still democratic and a legitimate way to avoid brexit. But given that Brexit was voted on in a democratic referendum specifically to let parliament get out of it's normal responsibilities for governance, it would be a terrible betrayal by parliament of its citizenry to fail in brexit. An new election where the opposition wins on a platform of no brexit would hit a middle ground . Edit My view was changed by and similar arguments about the advisory nature of the referendum. The equivocal results of the snap election and responsibility of elected representatives also contributed. Edit gt \u0394 gt I find your point that the referendum was advisory to be the most convincing one brought up to change my view that Brexit must be carried through with if a second referendum does not reverse the first. gt Since the referendum was advisory and Britain's system is legally grounded in a parliamentary democracy, failing to execute brexit is not as great a stain as I stated. gt HOWEVER, it is still a giant fuck you to all who voted for the referendum, and certainly those most responsible for the referendum circus Cameron for starting it and May for failing to deliver deserve their reputations completely ruined forever if the brexit referendum is flouted. gt I mean, if a kid's mom asks she want for dinner and then tells her it doesn't matter she's getting chicken and spinach it's a little rude. If a parliament asks it's constituency and then ignore them, it's still a pretty disgraceful way to run a democracy. gt Whether brexit outcomes are disgraceful regardless of referendum issues is a matter for a different .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Backing out of brexit without a second referendum would be a complete a terrible stain on the british government.\n","id":"f0de53cd-6f3a-4ccc-bc62-a2f5e5629d95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello Up until very recently, I identified most strongly with libertarians, minarchists, anarcho capitalists, etc. Lately though, I can't seem to reconcile one very important facet What happens as the American workforce becomes more automated and outsourced than it already is? We have a surplus of unskilled laborers, service industry workers, and similar jobs that are more about having a warm body than about any particular set of skills. However, between robotic assembly lines, automated kiosks we have them at our Jack in the Boxes now , and outsourced work to cheaper foreign entities, I foresee a time in the near to distant future that this surplus of laborers will continue to grow to an unsustainable level. As such, I've taken a huge break from my libertarian leanings as I cannot see any other solution here than far reaching social programs to help feed and house a growing population that, on a macro level, would otherwise be unable to take care of itself effectively. Please try to change my view Supporting social programs on such a scale goes against so many other beliefs I hold, so something's got to give here. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I suspect the USA will need extensive social programs in the coming years.\n","id":"733f6de2-13ed-47be-a71f-c1575ca68610"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For context, I come from Connecticut. It is both the most expensive and most poor region of the country based on wealth inequality. In certain parts of the state, 100k for a family of three isn't enough to live off of. Even if you make 70k, that's not enough for one person in places like New Haven or Norwalk. We recently had to defund some aspects of the state university program as well as money to the towns. My family is, nationally, rich . In the area we're basically upper middle class, but due to the high cost of living we barely break even. It's only due to a lot of financial discipline that my family was able to send me to university. When we talked to universities they told us that there was no aid they could offer Bullshit. They're not looking at how much it actually costs to live here. It's like how in parts of California you may have assets worth 5 million, but if you were to sell your house you wouldn't be able to afford to live in California reasonably anymore. Change my view, Reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Colleges, when giving out need based aid, should focus on where you live IN ADDITION TO how much you make.\n","id":"ad5ffa3a-b0fa-436c-89f9-c66c6f6c2be0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should be the Next EU Commission President?<|ARGUMENT|>No European Commission President has been from Eastern Europe or any of the EU's newer members.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tomic, as a Slovenian, would be the first Eastern European Commission President.\n","id":"ebf2f050-5d55-4dc4-b428-ce16d0a4e8f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Not Have Pulled Out of the Iran Deal.<|ARGUMENT|>Trump's base was just as if not more supportive of his agreement with North Korea as they were with his agreement with Iran. These are seemingly contradictory positions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump's base is likely to support Trump in any action he takes.\n","id":"c544a2d5-d31e-4890-8223-95d082484314"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Israeli military assault in Gaza, Israeli Invasion of Gaza<|ARGUMENT|>\"National Post Editorial Board: Why Israel can't afford to hold back\". National Post. December 31, 2008 - \"To be sure, Israel\u2019s reaction to the constant deluge of missile fire from Gaza has been harsh, but necessarily so. Moreover, now that Israel has begun its retaliation it would be unwise to halt before Hamas is permanently incapacitated.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israeli strikes were rightly measured to disable Hamas rocket attacks\n","id":"e6d249d6-5a94-4d54-82c4-9cafcea631e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Consensus reports from the UN's National Research Council\u2019s 16 year long study on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation maintain, There is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial. As noted in Wikipedia While the French Academy of Sciences stated in their 2005 report concerning the effects of low level radiation that many laboratory studies have observed radiation hormesis. However, they cautioned that it is not yet known if radiation hormesis occurs outside the laboratory, or in humans. The U.S. is pushing hard to sway public trust in favor of nuclear power, to the extent they are willing to downplay its very real dangers and risks, and even lie outright to the American people. In the wake of Fukushima and a renewed push back, pro nuclear lobbyists have attempted to convince the public that some small levels of radiation are harmless, and may even be good for you but I'm far from convinced.  EDIT For clarity, let me rephrase. I believe that there is no level of radiation which can be proven harmless, or beneficial, to humans. To use the example of radiation in cancer treatment, although some patients do recover and therefore benefit from radiation, this comes at a tremendous cost to their bodies. You could argue that the person received benefit, but not that the radiation did not harm them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that there is no level of radiation that can be considered safe.\n","id":"e9c98722-23d0-4d3d-9b4c-3ccfb07c5b3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm only talking about children raised with their biological parents. Despite increased concerns for birth defects for children born to parents in their early to middle 30s, I do believe a child benefits overall from having older parents. If genetics were not a concern, children would benefit much more from parents who have more life experience and are at a more stable point in their lives. What I'm saying is, if you compare people who become parents in their early 20s to people who become parents in their late 20s early 30s, their child would benefit more overall from being born to the latter group.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe children benefit more from older parents than younger parents.\n","id":"4c8b68ef-1d57-4d6a-b6e8-24f4a4484436"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The Catholic Church Publicly Elect Its Leaders?<|ARGUMENT|>Pope Francis has instructed priests to allow those who have had abortions to receive Holy Communion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pope Francis has made the Catholic church significantly more open and welcoming.\n","id":"5220a286-6486-4f11-910b-b94edcea6c6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems to me as though communists and anarchists both though that's a subject for a different post I suppose make the mistake of thinking that people won't mercilessly take advantage of other people whenever they get the chance, that they won't be lazy, that they won't hoard things for themselves or manipulate themselves into positions of power over other people just for the sake of having to expend less effort, get more money or material goods, etc It just seems as though it depends on everyone to do their part, every single person, and it's not only a few who wouldn't do it, but the majority. I guess what I meant is, I believe it could never possibly work and have the people still be happy. China is still technically communist but that is debatable in and of itself and then there's North Korea whose censorship and cultism keep its people in line but those people are starving and don't have any electricity half the time. So what I mean is, communist party of the USA, please explain to me why you want the US to adopt communism and why you think it would not end badly. Please convince me of this. I have the same trouble believing in anarchy sounds great in theory but people just aren't that good. But I want to believe, and lots of people do, so there must be something I'm missing. Edit Spelling Edit2 Thanks for all your contributions I'm still on the fence about plausibility, but I'm definitely no longer convinced that it would be impossible. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that communism could never possibly work.\n","id":"67a905cb-470b-41d4-8421-798a3291372f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it OK to publicly approach a stranger for sex?<|ARGUMENT|>Surveys indicate that seductive behavior by co-workers is considered a form of sexual harassment by the vast majority of people. The attitude towards seductive behavior by strangers is probably no different or even more negative. Most people, thus, probably do not desire this kind of attention.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When approaching a stranger, you might approach somebody who would consider this kind of behavior offensive and one should try to not offend others.\n","id":"39b0f41a-e6c4-432b-ae0e-050ba5fc02db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've come across several interesting subreddits. One is r hapas and the other is r asianamerican. They post a lot of their problems they encounter such as Asian girls going for Caucasian males, getting stereotyped in pop culture and media, racism stories, etc. . They put a lot of emphasis on their heritage s and it feels like this adds a lot of unnecessary stress into their lives. I also got a chance to read about Elliot Rodger, the kid who killed his Chinese roommates before shooting people at his campus. It's actually really fascinating how much people put online, as I read his blog, was able to watch is vlogs on youtube and saw screencaps of forum activity such as rate me threads. He blamed pretty much everything on being half Asian half white, yet there are hundreds of millions of mixed race people in the world who live normal lives. Though I this is an extreme case. Is it really that important? I understand that race is identity, I understand that being of a certain race esp being mixed race will affect how people see them, but why do they source whatever negative experiences they encounter or missed opportunities to it?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being mixed-raced isn't that big of a deal. Letting your race define you isn't beneficial in the long-run\n","id":"0e020769-807e-46f9-ad20-7c8bf0902a12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Will Win the Game of Thrones?<|ARGUMENT|>Jon Snow and Sansa could not have conquered Winterfell without help from Knights of the Vale who seemed to be under Littlefinger's command.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Littlefinger is Warden of the East and might become Warden of the North soon as well.\n","id":"781f573b-5b98-430a-b65e-4ceec78b88ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those that don't know, most car rental agencies charge an additional daily fee for drivers aged 21 24, and don't allow drivers under 21 to even rent a car. The exception being in Michigan and New York, where state law mandates that they have to rent to 18 . Even then, in those states drivers aged 18 24 are slapped with additional daily fees. Drivers under 25 are also restricted to what kind of vehicles they can rent. I understand this has to do with insurance policies, but I still think anybody 18 should be able to rent a car. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Car rental agencies shouldn't charge additional fees for drivers aged 21-24, and should also allow drivers 18+ with a clean driving record to rent without restrictions.\n","id":"bb6c2e45-f34d-4593-a82f-ac46f7f1317b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Humans, animals including humans , plant, and everything else bacteria, fungi, protozoa ect and are living, all feel there form of pain, and yet have no rights, other than humans, and some animals and plants. We all can think in our own way , can feel it when where hurt, and deserve to be treated equal. Why is it that humans think there superior? There brain? Sure, where smarter then everything else, but are we so superior that they deserve to have no rights to be killer without much consideration? And yet, when you apply this to humans, everyone gets angry not defending any of it. I don't support ethnic purges or anything, just making a point . When you step on grass, it feels that and it hurts . Why can we have lawns of grass but not humans? Why do WE deserve rights, but not them I admit this probably is a bad way to see it. After all, it's implausible to give rights to the bacteria floating in the air. Can some explain how I'm wrong though? besides the utter implausible of implementing any such systems View changes I have realized it is entirely impossible to implement regulations for these, as they would be VERY hard to enforce, and almost no one would support them I have admitted giving bacteria and other microscopic life rights is rediculess. They are too different to us for us to understand them, and therefore it would be impossible to give the appropriate rights to them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"all living things are equal\n","id":"08be5ae6-0177-473c-be6a-3147766cff8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After reading articles such as this I saw a lot of comments about stripping those that travel to places like Syria of their citizenship forcing them to stay where they travel to. It seems like a difficult position for the gov't and the worry that they'll come back to create trouble domestically is legitimate however citizenship is something that should never be revoked. With the terrible event in Paris there is more voice towards nationalism. This opens the real possibility of gov't legislation addressing everyone's concerns. At the end of the day though a gov't should never have the power to revoke citizenship. Today's wars may make this seem like a good idea, but citizenship should never be a tool the gov't has over it's people. CMW.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person's citizenship should never be revoked, even if they travel to war zones like Syria.\n","id":"ddfc03b2-9af2-4ade-be1e-e584a2ce5f44"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I will start by restating that I am pro choice and whole heatedly support a woman's right to choose. That is not what I am here to debate. However, the idea I take issue with that I see some people on the pro choice side say is that a fetus is not a human life. This just seems like some kind of double speak. A fetus is alive, otherwise there would be no debate. It is a human fetus. This is not debatable. Therefore it is human life and to say it is not is simply illogical. It just seems like a cop out. I support a woman's right to choose. However, the choice circumstances not withstanding is to kill a human life. If a choice is made, one must own up to it. I feel stating a fetus is not a human life is simply untrue and disingenuous. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am pro choice, but I believe that a fetus is a human life.\n","id":"01658c90-a91d-4a63-89a1-80de30f828a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I was born in England to Scottish parents. The whole Independence debate has made me pretty annoyed at both sides with the complete mess of the campaigning but the Yes lot have a point, Westminster is messing up everyone's lives and I actually want them to have Independence since it will upset them all. I don't see the point in patriotism for England, its a country where groups like the EDL and UKIP think its OK to be hateful to foreigners, Muslims etc. and people actually vote for UKIP. A country where scandals like Rotherham can be hijacked for political gain, when the people responsible for it refuse to admit they are wrong. England has screwed up so many parts of the world so I don't see how people can be proud of that. I may have a UK passport but its only a travel document. In 2015 I will not be voting since I no longer feel the need to validate the politics of the place<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see the point in having Patriotism for England\n","id":"50ccd306-295f-4671-8e08-d3001ccf210c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>At 2 Nephi 26:33 the Book of Mormon teaches that the Christian god will not turn away anyone who comes unto him, without exception.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon teaches that the Christian god does not deny his grace to anyone who comes to him.\n","id":"2c581f80-d0b1-4377-a46a-c56e0da57673"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me be clear for a moment on my points. I don't support suicide I believe that calling people cowards after they have taken their own life will just make those who are about to commit suicide even more compelled to take their own life. Before performing the act, many actually rethink their decision and question themselves, but one huge factor that plays into this is what they will do after they stop, will they be embarrased by the news? Maybe other families may talk behind their back pity them aswell ? The shame that goes along with people after they rethink their decision is hard to deal with. Now I'm not saying we should call them brave, but calling them cowards is going to futher there belief that there is no going back. Instead, we should eliminate this stigma and instead continue on with helping them rethink, it is their perception of the world after all, that can affect their decision. Calling them cowards and having them think how the world will think about them after they die is not going to help them move away from the act, the stress and depression is just over whelming. Suicide rates are high in countries like Japan where shame, honor,and Filial Piety are huge parts of Asian culture. The society is rather categorically based. Calling people names such as lower class, worthless, Hikiomori are huge parts of Asian culture. In Asian culture, the society is never wrong, if it's anything, the problem is with you . It is this setting that the huge rise of Hikikomori, NEET and suicides occur in. People just can't handle being labeled by society as something negative, some would rather die than fail at something they had worked so hard for, placing them in a category will just hurt their position even more. So much stress is placed on a persons life, that labelling something they would want to do will add even more stress, for example. Person 1 is so stressed, that he considers suicide, then he realizes that society will just call him a coward for that, even more stress is placed on him that he could care less of what society thinks about him, that he commits the act anyway, he would have developed a mindset of, I'll be dead anyway, I don't care anymore of what someone thinks. Finally, what is so cowardly about suicide? I'm not saying it's a heroic act to perform tha's just a logical fallacy to accuse me of that . It's irresponsible to the loved ones because the one who commits suicide will have a greater impact on family than anything, but don't you think they alreayd thought of that? Don't you think the ones who commit suicide are so stressed to the point of breaking, that they can't even care for what their families think anymore? it is a huge choice to make, and many people think of what would happen if they were to just vanish from the world, away from stress, and depression. Suicide is just way too hard, the ones who usually give up on killing themselves are usually the ones who can't handle such a task, because they know they have a life ahead of them, and people who care for them. Shooting a gun to kill only requires that you don't think about anything, and just shoot. Those who eventually commit suicide, usually end up doing it without thinking about it, they know it will be easier to not think. Would you call people with guns as cowards? Just because society doesn't want them to shoot, doesn't mean they should also end up being called cowards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it takes alot of courage for someone to commit suicide, and calling them cowards is just wrong.\n","id":"d8396db6-c45c-4cb5-89d9-1df534b07c62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Colonization of the Moon<|ARGUMENT|>\"Why Go Back to the Moon?\" NASA. January 14, 2008: \"Taking the Los Angeles Times title, 'Don\u2019t colonize the Moon,' at face value . The Times editorial echoes identical arguments advanced in the early 1960s, that robotic missions could produce as much as manned ones. The US did in fact have a large robotic lunar program, including 3 Rangers, 5 Surveyors, 5 Lunar Orbiters, and 2 Radio Astronomy Explorers, not counting the few unsuccessful missions. So NASA did use robots in our first lunar program. But as argued at the time, human abilities on the surface later proved far superior to robotic ones.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A manned presence on the Moon is superior to a robotic one\n","id":"4e7e8e26-b5bf-4f6f-b87b-c7dd85c25e59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Subsidize Ethanol?<|ARGUMENT|>Increases in ethanol production caused increases in corn prices that caused the \"Arab Spring\" revolts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using food grains for ethanol production causes global food prices to increase.\n","id":"e9948659-d7b5-4350-8c66-fc2a104032e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Blasphemy Should be Criminalised<|ARGUMENT|>Establishing a legal definition for a crime is never a simple matter. It is an intricate and complicated task which requires extensive consideration. And yet we have to surpass this obstacle all the time with the laws we adopt as a society. We frequently have to define nuanced offences like libel or harassment or hate crimes. The definition will never be perfect and will have to be supplemented by a level of discretion on behalf of the judiciary, as with every other law. However, although any law or definition we come up with might never perfectly correspond to the targeted behaviour, it does not mean we should never attempt to create a law merely because it would be difficult to do so. If the social imperative for such a law to exist is great enough, we should do it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Establishing a legal definition for a crime is never a simple matter. It is an intricate and compli...\n","id":"e195d30c-52f8-4905-b998-c68410484827"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>At the time when slavery was acceptable, the human rights of equality and freedom were not globally recognized rights. It is because they are globally recognized today, that we believe slavery has always been immoral. This proves morality as a social construct.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The viewpoint that slavery was immoral regardless of the moral attitude at the time, is a subjective moral belief, which is socially constructed.\n","id":"c47dede3-ae42-4071-8d52-87c9abd19856"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To this day, the practice of giving law enforcement quotas to meet lingers in parts of the United States. I find this personally to be bad practice. Giving incentive to cite citizens guarantees that police officers will prey on the people they are supposed to protect. This means they aren't actively seeking out crime. They are hoping that crime is happening. I'm no psychology expert but I'm willing to bet that has a strong effect on the psyche of the police. The bigger problem with this system is that people behaving well cops get paid less . Could that be more backwards? We need an incentive that pays cops for a well behaving community. Not what we currently have. Thoughts? Edit Here is one example of this system still in effect on some level Somewhat dated article. So maybe this department cleaned its act up. But just in case it didn't, let the conversation continue. Edit 2 From my apparent laziness to scrutinize my own source, I see there's no real proof that citations are linked to pay. So I'd like to shift my overall argument from that specific specific form of measurement to less measurable culture that might still exist in police departments in the country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Police officer pay should not be linked to the number of tickets they issue.\n","id":"089ff8c6-a407-48f3-807a-775143e56900"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>That is, if they were designed to get rid of diseases, deficiencies and disabilities along with the technology being universally available for use. I don't understand what other issue there might be with them if no one is getting an unfair advantage. If these two conditions are met, no one is giving deliberate advantages to the baby and the wealthy wouldn't be the only ones getting healthy, inherited disease free babies. I don't understand where the issue is with a future with no disabilities or genetic diseases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Designer babies aren't inherently unethical\n","id":"52493a90-4c13-4947-85fa-431c98586a17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Religious Indoctrination of Children Abuse?<|ARGUMENT|>In the New Testament, Paul commands Christians to raise their children in the \"discipline and instruction of the Lord.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some religions require that parents raise their children in that religion.\n","id":"9dd84cc8-9f81-4822-bf4c-c8df2ce04b1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that when a school high school, university has clubs that celebrate diversity like the Black Student Union, the Muslim Association, Cultural Sororities only cause people to focus on race more, create use stereotypes and cause people to become raciest. I feel like people should be able to celebrate their culture but when these groups are created it shows everyone that we are different and are proud of it which is fine but not when you are only communicating it with a group of your own people. They say other people can join these organization but they don't because the organization is not about informing others but doing it with each other in public. I feel like people who join these groups are separating from society on purpose and don't want to be part of everyone else. This opens people up to noticing all the difference between people. How could we be friends then if all your friends are Black, Muslim, Indian. I do want to make a distinction. I support clubs like Gay Straight Alliance. These clubs foster gaining knowledge and acceptance by everyone. They look to integrate communities even with all the difference. They try to educate others and do not keep to there group only. In a way of breaking stereotypes. So,  Are these organizations better then I think and foster more than i think?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe clubs that are suppose to celebrate diversity like the black student union only cause a more segregated society!\n","id":"897b9071-5c5d-4d48-8339-4d3fd7237c54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello Redditors My belief is that the entirety of creation is only a very long, very complicated. chain reaction. This is because everything is subject to the laws of science. Yes they have changed, however science changes because it is incorrect, and seeks to understand the universe more accurately. In more detail, this idea of mine is that the current state of the universe was determined by it's previous state one planck time ago. This would be due to the interaction between all matter and energy. At most scales, they interact predictably, collision of subatomic particles, atoms, energy waves e.t.c. . There is the argument based around quantum mechanics, things like Heisenbergs uncertainty principle and other quantum mechanical anomalies are unpredictable, and therefore quantum mechanics based arguments have a large say in my view, as they are the only flaw I can see with it. However, quantum mechanics undeniably operates on a much smaller scale, while it influences classical mechanics, I still believe that an accurate prediction could potentially be made several hundred years into the future, given sufficient computing power and the current state of the universe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the universe is only a complicated chain reaction.\n","id":"bcd32efb-bb76-428f-96cf-2b191380854f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Thanks to religion we have a better understanding of the history of humankind. The knowlege of most ancient civilizations would've been lost if not for their religious expressions Egyptian, babylonian, jewish and our understanding of historical process would be far worse without the critical analysis of the bible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A great many historical records that preserved knowledge still exist today thanks to religion.\n","id":"46577132-3654-42fd-b7dc-de86484b21b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>Many falsely accused people accept a plea bargain for a reduced punishment because they are scared of the years of imprisonment or other measures e.g. chemical castration. More lenient punishment would diminish this effect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is little protection against false accusation which destroys the life of the accused person. If the system is prone to many mistakes, we should diminish the potential costs for the falsely accused.\n","id":"ed75f134-47c7-43aa-9835-532eddb8991e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The Catholic Church used the Inquisition to prosecute anyone who espoused views deemed as heretic for example, some scientific ideas convicting people to different sentences, including death by burning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People have been led to do terrible things in the name of religion.\n","id":"0de067b6-a5e9-4f3f-a1e0-ace8606ee49e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Saying #AllLivesMatter Instead of #BlackLivesMatter Better?<|ARGUMENT|>The president holds no direct authority on ethical matters other than imposing laws with may affect that. His opinion bears no more importance than anyone else on the matter, nor does he have any kind of credentials to suggest that he has any kind of superior understanding of social issues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The President of the United States should not necessarily be held as the final or even a good authority on whether or not something is good or \"best.\"\n","id":"380dee3f-1006-4cd1-bd90-66540d7dab2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>or to put it another way, I suppose it could be written that People hold many opinions about the immoral nature of certain actions just because with no real logical reason for it. This is an opinion I've been trying to quantify for a while now, and my time on  has only seemed to reinforce this view. People posting everything from views about the morality of drugs, to homosexuality, etc and so little of morality seems to make sense. There are taboos against drug use, against incest, against homosexuality, against open sexuality, against so many things. There's this kind of moral disgust for things which don't inherently do any harm. Most of the explanations I see for why these things are wrong are generic answers with little thought or reason to them It's unnatural , It's an affront to god , It just isn't, because it just isn't . As far as I believe morality should be concerned, we should be allowed to do whatever we want with our own bodies so long as nobody else is harmed. If you want to do drugs just because the high makes you happy, and you've been educated and warned about the potential damages to your own body it is your body and your life, what is wrong? If you're gay and you choose to have consensual homosexual sex and that's what you both decide to do with your bodies, what is wrong? If you want to post nudes online and you feel empowered from it and the comments you get, what is wrong? The only explanation I could honestly come up with is the way others may react to you, but even that is just a biproduct of a culture which creates senseless taboos, and does things like shaming people for being sluts or for being gay without any real justification. What sense is there in these taboos, and the kind of bullying and shame that often comes with them? Where is the reasonable justification for deeming things that don't harm others immoral? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are more taboos and stigmas in modern morality than there are logical reasons for them\n","id":"9b2355c0-8034-4cbf-bcb3-1829b5b13edc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There seems to be a majority who spit opinions, not to test them but, to be part of the group. And when faced with an outside perspective, they would rather bully than try to understand. Those who can't take the time to form their own opinion often can't also admit that they don't know and the less confident they are in what they know, the more aggressive they feel they need to be in sharing their opinion. People don't care who is right, they care about fitting in and if you don't agree with the group, they could give a fuck less about what your opinion is. All they want to do is make their buddies proud. In short, most humans care more about fitting in socially than they do about understanding intellectually. This is made worse by most social groups being manipulated by media whose profit goals are counter to intellectual understanding. What purpose then is there for me to continue feeding my intellectual understanding when I have neither the means or the support to put it to any use? In fact, being intellectual is actually self defeating as it requires depriving myself of belonging to a group. So, the view I challenge anyone to change is The path of the intellectual is lonely and self defeating for those without the means or support to actually change people's minds.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The path of the intellectual is lonely and self-defeating for those without the means or support to actually change people's minds.\n","id":"c3b8eb25-4ab2-4747-8d80-a60a5dfeb1d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In terms of the most recent video the woman goes to close her door, the officer thinks she may be about to assault her, so he shoves her and arrests her. I think he should have assumed she was shutting the door or something first, and risked his ''safety'' for the chance that she was a harmless woman which she was. It seems that officers hold their safety much higher than that of civilians, which makes no sense to me because they signed up for a dangerous job, thats not the civilians fault. EDIT another example officers sometimes walk up to cars during traffic stops with their hand on their gun, i don't care that it could be somebody dangerous, i don't want to be approached like that just because they are scared, its not fair.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I dont think police should have the benefit of the doubt when it comes to safety, over civilians.\n","id":"a4401c51-bfba-4d85-9d65-b1691907c478"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the DNC and media's \"big switch\" narrative a lie?<|ARGUMENT|>Scholars suggest that \"economically based preferences, rather than race, were the primary force transforming the South into a new Republican stronghold\". Thus party realignment was not entirely based on race.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The DNC and mainstream media's \"big switch\" narrative a lie.\n","id":"ee8ab6f3-069f-44fb-9015-fb0e9bf02818"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Israeli military assault in Gaza, Israeli Invasion of Gaza<|ARGUMENT|>\"Gaza: the rights and wrongs\". Economist. December 30th, 2008 - \"few governments facing an election, as Israel\u2019s is, would let their towns be peppered every day with rockets, no matter how ineffective.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel had to respond to public will and attack Gaza\n","id":"56cd100c-8894-462c-a5bf-3e6674708713"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Social Justice Warriors SJWs in short have become a growing vocal group on the internet for a couple of years. SJWs are known as a crazy and obnoxious group of users, bloggers, and forum posters that would twist social issues, such as race and gender issues, to a misinformed war against anyone who is either of a privileged position or don't fully agree with their views. Shit Reddit Says, or SRS is a conglomerate of Reddit subs full of SJWs that would campaign against Reddit posts and comments deemed sexist and racist in their very specific views. As a result, SRS have been a target of mocking and derision by the Reddit userbase for years. Not that said mocking and derision isn't completely warranted. Unfortunately, SRS's existence has made valid remarks on racist and sexist posts seen on Reddit shut down almost immediately by its userbase. Many user would assume any other user who calls out these kinds of posts as hailing from SRS, when this is most likely not the case at all. SRS would typically be scapegoated as being at fault when there is pushback against the occasional highly upvoted racist or sexist post. All of this essentially allows the bigotry seen here to continue with near impunity as all criticism is hidden through downvotes. I understand that what I'm arguing may sound far fetched, but I feel that it's an observation that's worth being put up for debate. I also want to reiterate that I am not a supporter of SRS. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe this burgeoning anti-SRS movement Reddit has is just an excuse for users to continue to speak and spread their own sexist and\/or racist views.\n","id":"7b18245a-4194-4e62-8a32-de588536f9e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title says, I feel as if I could care less about being around my family or friends and would rather move across the country and not contact them because I don't really care about them or their problems. Of course they raised me, but it just seems like people stay around their family and friends because they feel like they need to have someone to talk to and be around just because of their situation and justify why are they are on this earth to cope with themselves not being sure of what to do with their life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel no need to keep in contact with family or friends\n","id":"279c20bf-9645-4340-bd36-536b181b37d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Marijuana should be as legal as beer is.<|ARGUMENT|>claims to help Parkinson's Disease: alleviate L-dopa induced dyskinesias L D, reduce tremor, rigidity and psychosis symptoms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overwhelming scientific research supports the beneficial medical effects of using cannabis.\n","id":"7626c99e-4d70-4d5d-ac3f-076ccd61ef95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Before Joseph Smith said he found the golden plates, his father Joseph Smith, Sr. told a neighbor \"that in Canada, there had been a book found, in a hollow tree, that gave an account of the first settlement of this country before it was discovered by Columbus.\" Howe, 1834, p. 234 statement by Peter Ingersoll<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Smith family had an early interest in indigenous American artifacts and purported history.\n","id":"b87de463-cb04-41c6-99dc-178fc92b3fc5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People are responsible for their own actions and body, IMO. If she can't handle her alcohol, she shouldn't be drinking, or drinking that much. I don't think it's college, everyone drinks is a good excuse or explanation. I'm just thankful she didn't get into a car and kill someone. Maybe this will prevent other people from drinking to oblivion every weekend. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A 19 year old college student may lose limbs after being left on porch for hours in the freezing cold 'following a night drinking.' I don't feel bad for her.\n","id":"3e8cc2b0-58e6-4af8-9bbc-2a3ac23cec8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Many pro-choice organizations such as Planned Parenthood fight laws which would make it mandatory for Doctors to fully inform the patient of risks and options before an abortion procedure with enough time allowed for the patient to make an informed decision. thehill.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Doctors do not always give full information to a patient, or do so with enough time for the mother to make an informed decision.\n","id":"f26e22e7-184e-4313-b2ef-d42165a77ffe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This applies to any group of people immigrating to any country. One thing that makes me angry is seeing immigrants from Mexico or the Middle East expressing strong political opinions against the current governance of the society they've immigrated to. This is like being homeless and a nice family lets you stay in their spare room and after you've settled in you start arguing with them over the decor. A real life example may be an Iranian immigrant who moves to America then becomes a feminist and starts criticizing western patriarchy. More common examples are Mexicans protesting Trumps campaign prior to being president or of course, Muslims calling for sharia law or even criticizing pop culture such as the muslim mayor in London who banned skimpy glamour photos on public buildings and buses. I find this extremely disrespectful whether you are a citizen or not. Yes, the law gives you the right to express any beliefs you have but just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD. I would go so far as to say that you shouldn't express political beliefs about your new homeland unless you are at least a 2nd or 3rd generation citizen. Immigrants who move to a new country and start becoming politically outspoken tells me that their principles are totally skewed and is probably half the reason why the country they immigrated from is so unlivable. ideally, in my opinion, immigrants who move to new countries, especially out of desperation, should attempt to remain as unnoticeable as possible. I believe that the fact that western countries have tolerated brash and outspoken immigrants so much is partly the reason why there has been so much conflict involving immigrants. I believe that people need boundaries just like children and when you remove those boundaries it is your fault just as much as it is theirs when bad things happen. One of the boundaries set in place in western society a social contract should be if you've immigrated to our country for a better life then go to work, keep your head down and don't get in anyone's way. That would be as blunt and honest as I can put it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's very disrespectful for immigrants to express strong political opinions directed towards the governing of whichever country they've immigrated to.\n","id":"25599368-f009-4343-8454-4700f6c0d203"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>U.S. Withdrawal From the United Nations<|ARGUMENT|>\"Despite its grand commitment to end threats to human security, such as interstate war, genocide, famine, internal war, disease and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the U.N. has been surprisingly unsuccessful at achieving these ends. Genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and, most recently, Sudan have continued relentlessly, despite the most earnest attempts of the U.N. to cajole its member states to act. The U.N. has not stopped North Korea's attempts at creating a nuclear arsenal, nor has it prevented India and Pakistan from testing their own nuclear weapons. Iran's Holocaust-denying president is well on his way to developing fissionable material, regardless of their referral to the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency. It is not in the U.S.'s best interest to support such an ineffective organization.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The U.N. has been extremely ineffective in the past.\n","id":"97f58ab4-ccd9-4c6d-97d8-1dbd40133b1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I did not have a view about the international space station until I saw a video about it on YouTube yesterday sorry, it's mobile . Where it makes great points about how impractical it really.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the ISS is a waste of money\n","id":"3a5734b4-77b1-4e41-aae3-3d0c07e1f5ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Bible be considered a historical document?<|ARGUMENT|>Joseph Smith narrated that Moses knew God's entire plan, and by extension its importance, even before the world was created. The concept that there would be a creation, a fall, an atoning savior, prophets, dispensations, ordinances, and so on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given that the individuals mentioned in the Bible knew the importance of the events which were occurring, they presumably would have made attempts to preserve and pass on significant artefacts.\n","id":"649a7883-112f-491d-a5ce-31207ffa4b5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Merit pay for teachers<|ARGUMENT|>\"Oppose Merit-Based Pay for Teachers\". The Falcon's View. March 10, 2009: \"the problem with merit-based pay is that there's no reasonable, rational, consistent way to measure performance. teaching is more art than science. Every student is different, with a unique perspective, background, learning style, and, more importantly, pace of development. To penalize a teacher for having a group of students who develop more slowly than others is absurd. No matter how good the teacher is, there's no way to force a child to develope faster than they're capable of doing.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teacher merit is too hard to measure for merit-pay to be fair\n","id":"5a170445-bdfd-43bf-ac69-79c339847f83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So if all big companies have to pay a percentage of their full time employees medical costs under the affordable care act, aren't there some major problems that will arise? It seems to me like Obama is just trying to create a legacy, because by doing this, he will create a situation where companies will hire less full time employees but a couple part time employees instead, decreasing the unemployment rate but simultaneously increasing the poverty rate. More people will be employed as part time to save companies insurance costs, however they wont be earning enough to sustain themselves especially if it's a minimum wage job. So Obama just wants to create his legacy where he's the good guy who decreased unemployment and brought healthcare to the USA. What I don't get is, if america cut back on its defence spending that its using to terrorize most of the world, then it could have enough money to create a national healthcare system, instead of forcing companies to pay the ripoff prices of the for profit private health companies in the US. I'm very open minded so I will take into account everything you say. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Obamacare isn't a good thing for America,\n","id":"f04b69e6-6a8e-4139-9d59-54e7326a7f0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sled dog racing should be banned.<|ARGUMENT|>Banning a discipline could only mean it would no longer be properly regulated and would not eradicate it. As those dogs are naturally active and eager to run, proper supervision over discipline would be most beneficial to them, eliminating harmful practices.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not the discipline that should be banned, but the mentality of some humans who are not able to see the limits of their animal or who do not want to see them.\n","id":"f6a9ea46-eaf5-4157-acc9-47add365794e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>To be an atheist and believe there is no God, begins with the assumption that first there must be a God to deny it exists. To assume a God exists, and then deny it is a contradiction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are good reasons to believe anything if you want to. The existence of reasons to disbelieve are not proof that God does not exist.\n","id":"cf7ec42f-f532-4f93-9385-da58f8833a25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>Right now, policies on drugs are very arbitrary e.g., alcohol is considered a hard drug which is detrimental to their legitimacy. Having a less hypocrite stance on drug legislation for example legalising and monitoring all drug markets could improve the legitimacy of government while minimizing negative effects that are caused by the criminalization of 'illegal' drugs such as violence, theft, murder.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Current drug legislation undermines governmental legitimacy as well as moral authority of the law, as governmental action is not based on facts, evidence and latest research but on outdated knowledge as well as on ideology.\n","id":"d433fdd7-0084-4a13-bafa-e7efed36c127"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am on mobile, so I don't have an abundance of links to data, but this is such a discussed topic that I doubt more than few people would deny that the economic conditions of the median American have declined precipitously since the 1970s. My argument is that the primary cause of this is that there is an irreducible tension between the profitability of capital and renumeration of labor. Because any society with private control of capital will be financially unequal, and because financial inequality will reproduce political inequality in republican systems like the U.S. , the only way to restore a broadly prosperous society is through political domination of capital. Whether that takes place under a democratic socialist government or a fascistic state capitalist one, the point is that ceteris paribus the conditions of the average American worker will continue to decline when private capital is allowed to allocate itself to maximize profitability. There is no plausible market respecting solution to an immiseration that was caused the the efficient operation of markets. This is your pretty standard 21st century Marxism, but I am seeking to have my view changed because believers in markets driving prosperity are still so common. I have not, however, yet seen a convincing argument explaining how the declines in living standards were caused by something besides efficient markets or how efficient markets could ever raise the income of workers. The closest thing I have seen to that is an argument that American compensation has continued to rise, but has been eaten up by healthcare costs. Under an isolated interpretation of certain data, this is plausible. But under a political economic analysis, we appreciate that bourgeois cartels in the health care industry have exercised their political influence in successful rent seeking that explains the explosion of these costs. Once again the only way to counteract that trend would be for a powerful state to discipline these rapacious insurance and pharmaceutical industries, possibly by abolishing them. At this point, even a Cuban model of state socialism would deliver better healthcare outcomes to the majority of Americans. The possibility of breakthroughs in medical research is no defense when most people will never have access that will allow them to benefit from the breakthroughs. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A pension is better than a smartphone. The efficient operation of markets has destroyed the American middle class. Only political interference with efficient markets could restore prosperity.\n","id":"691dfd31-f00b-4b6a-96a6-ce1952e77aee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>stimulate or subsidise mother tongue education for large immigrant groups.<|ARGUMENT|>Anyone who does not know the native of the place where they reside will find themselves having problems with health-care, job centers or the taxman because they are not able to understand or communicate with these people. It doesn\u2019t matter where you live, as a citizen you will have to use different services provided by the government. A good example will be hospitals. Hospital staff are unlikely to know the immigrant\u2019s language so making communication difficult, a problem exacerbated by all the specialized language that may be required. Being incapable of telling your doctor what the problem is or not being able to tell a police officer what happened may have devastating consequences. Sarah Bowen, a professor at the University of Alberta and expert on access to health care believes that language is the most important barrier preventing some immigrants from staying healthy.1 This is a barrier that remains if a little of the native language has been learnt because it is still unclear if there is mutual understanding when communicating. It is therefore clear that second generation immigrants need to be taught in the language of everyday life in the country in which they live rather than just learning it on the side as a \u2018foreign\u2019 language. 1 \u2018For newcomers, language is the most important barrier to staying healthy\u2019, Canadian Immigrant, 27 February 2012,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Services offered the government cannot be used if the user does not know the language\n","id":"36112943-d0b5-469a-83a7-c1bfbf954a47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Tipping servers and other workers could be a nice gesture if you've enjoyed their service. However, many restaurants give their workers ridiculously low pay because the rest is supposed to come from tips and many servers live mainly on that income. That is, in my opinion, wrong. As an employee, your pay should come from your employer. As a customer, you should pay the demanded price. Having a customer decide how much the server is worth after the service in question has already been delivered is silly. The customer is left with the power to leave no tip at all for an excellent service. On top of that there is the question of cultural differences when travelling I have no idea how much to tip and where. Why not just put those extra percent into the price of the food whatever else is being bought in the first place? You can still be allowed to tip when you think you received such excellent service that they deserve something extra but it should not be expected or counted on. . EDIT to add It's also more about looks and luck than who gives the best service. Women most often get bigger tips than men, and those women get more when they're wearing makeup. The general customer is not able to differentiate between good service or bad service, they just subjectively give more if they like the server or if they are in a good mood.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think tipping is a bad system that should be eliminated.\n","id":"c7ad5201-7bc6-4f97-a949-b41bc320336f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>force feed sufferers of Anorexia Nervosa<|ARGUMENT|>Anorectic patients are typically treated under mental health legislation e.g. the UK 1983 Act. They do not make a free choice because they are not rationally able to weigh up decisions and consequences, they \u2018feel\u2019 fat when they obviously are not and are irrational as they are willing to starve themselves to the point of death when suicide is not their intent.1 The patient is not \u201ccapable of forming unimpaired and rational judgements concerning the consequences\u201d British Medical Association 1992. There have been court cases that have confirmed that force feeding should be allowed when a patient is considered mentally ill. For example the case of \u201cB vs. Croydon Health Authority\u201d in 1994 it was judged, that B a borderline personality disorder patient, which involves suffering from an irresistible desire to inflict-self-harm can be force fed, even though she did not give consent to the treatment. The court explained that because she was not aware of the seriousness of her condition and she had found it difficult to break out of the cycle of self-punishment, she was deemed unfit to make decisions about her nutrition.2 1 Fedyszyn & Sullivan, \u2018Ethical re-evaluation of contemporary treatments for anorexia nervosa\u2019, 2007, p.202 2 Keywood K., B v Croydon Health Authority 1994, CA: Force-Feeding the Hunger-Striker under the Mental Health Act 1983., University of Liverpool, accessed 07\/22\/2011<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anorectic patients are not able to make the decision for themselves.\n","id":"3e47f874-5aee-4362-beae-1f1262bade34"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should scientists contribute to Wikipedia?<|ARGUMENT|>In content debates, Wikipedia's conduct policies are at times invoked by one contributor against another. This requires a whole new layer of understanding of how Wikipedia works with regard to a contributor's actions and behavior.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fighting with everyone else about the content of articles is a waste of time.\n","id":"770c7cb8-0806-4a07-bb93-54496f492bb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is only 3 genders. Male. Female, and non binary. Everything else, in my opinion is crap made up by SJWS to feel special. In my opinion, Trigender, Gender queer, bi gender, pangender all mean the same thing, you feel that you have both male and female aspects to your gender identity. I honestly don't see why you need so many classifications for it, it just makes things more complicated for people like me when we have to remember specific pronouns to call you. Androgyny and gender bender is just you being an asshole, classifying someone as something that is against the norm because they don't act like how the genitalia says they should act. I admit that this is a problem with gender roles and everything but I feel you're just making it worse. You're just naming the devil to those who believe in gender roles. If there was no specific name for it, how are the masses supposed to isolate people who are different from them. Finally Transgenders. I dont see why you would classify yourself as a transgender seeing as too how you are CHANGING your gender. This means you are either Male, Female, or non binary. If you call yourself a transgender, that just means you are an attention whore in my opinion. There should be no need for this word AT ALL. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are only 3 genders\n","id":"40e816fa-5e17-40aa-a7e2-8e6b466b0300"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the record here, I am NOT talking about parents that are low income and cannot afford to have their kids go to college. If you can't pay your bills or are on welfare, obviously don't drop thousands on a college education. Another exception to this would be cutting your college student off from money if they are partying excessively and not caring enough about their studies, or even pursuing a degree that will have very poor employment prospects. I can also understand having a budget for their education. Such as, We will pay for you to go to an in state public university, but not a 30,000 private one. However, I believe some of the common arguments for why parents should not pay for college AT ALL when they can reasonably afford to are poor. They are 18 years old, making them legal adults, so I am not legally obligated to pay Yes, its true that you're not legally obligated to pay, but what I am talking about is moral obligation. Should the basis of ending aid be based on a birthday, or when they are reasonably ready? For example, when we have infants we our responsible for changing their diapers, and not doing so would constitute neglect. When they are around 2 3 years old we eventually potty train when we feel they can handle it. But what if the government made a law that stated that once a child turns 3, their parents are no longer legally obligated to change diapers, and they were all told Ok, you are using the potty now since you are officially 3 years old and they were never taught how? Once you become a parent, you are a parent until death. That does not mean I believe your children should be assisted with EVERYTHING forever. Obviously there are limits. But in a culture where we support them and give them food and a roof over their heads for at least 18 years, is it reasonable to kick them to the curb and expect them to pay for everything because they had a birthday, and the government said you don't have to? Especially when we live in a society where you cannot work until 16, and MANY places will not consider hiring you until you are 18. So since the minimum age many places will hire people is the same as the typical age of high school graduation, how is it reasonable to expect them to have the funds to pay for tuition when they have been working a minimum wage job for only a year, when you, the parent s , have potentially tens of thousands that have been saved up for decades? They don't have to pay it all themselves when they are young, they can just take out loans The problem with this is the amount of financial aid that a student can receive is based on their parent's income. The higher the income, the less loans they can take because of their parent's refusal to pay. But why is thousands of dollars of debt something you would wish on your child? For instance, say you have the Smith family and the Johnson family. They both have decent incomes and could afford for their children to go to college. The Smith family, for each generation, has saved up a college fund since their children's infancy, and after graduation their kids go to a flagship public university and leave with no debt. Because they don't have this hindrance, they can be more financially stable and also make more using their BA's than someone with just a high school degree. They see the value in how their parents helped them with their degree, so they save up when their own children are born and pay for them to go to college. They use the pay it forward method. The Johnson family thinks paying for your children's college education is irresponsible so they tell their children they are getting zero help. Their kids apply for loans, but don't get much because of how much their parents make. So they find a min wage job and work, but it still isn't usually enough to pay for college room food so they become tens of thousands of dollars in debt due to loans. This is a big financial strain once they enter real adulthood and are looking for a career. Once they have children, it is harder to save up since the debt has crippled them, and they are resentful their parents didn't help them, so they think My parents didn't give me a dime, so I'm not going to pay for my kids to go to college and those children take out loans and it creates a cycle of debt. This is the pay it yourself method. In the long run, is the latter method better? If parents pay for their children's tuition, it won't teach them any financial responsibility and they will become entitled Responsibility is taught gradually from a young age. When we are babies toddlers our parents bathe us, change our diapers, feed us, and then those become things we learn to do for ourselves. When we have children we pay for nearly all of their expenses, and it gradually becomes less when they become adolescents. Such as I'll pay for what you need, but not what you want. Which is perfectly acceptable and a good way to teach responsibility. If your kid has graduated from high school and they are polite, well mannered, responsible and grateful for what you do, paying for their education is not going to just undo that. Should kids enter adulthood and the workforce in debt just to be taught a lesson?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think parents that are well-off but won't pay for their children's higher education at all are selfish.\n","id":"44c8dc02-af58-433f-89b6-07da17a9ea2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Military recruiting in public schools<|ARGUMENT|>Recruiters should not minimise the risks of a military career, but the armed forces do have a good story to tell and they should not be prevented from doing so. There really are great opportunities for keen, talented young people in the military, and almost all soldiers, etc. find it a very satisfying life. And compared with the past, soldiers today are much better looked after in terms of physical, medical and psychological wellbeing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The military has a compelling story to tell to youth.\n","id":"b74ada4c-374d-47fd-ae51-0b4c4b8d0ee6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It was only 60 or so years ago that the UK actually did have the death penalty for crimes such as murder, as well as treason a law which wasn't changed until the 1990s, even though the death penalty was abolished in 1965 and some other offences. I would have little problem in having the option of sentencing someone to death by hanging which was the standard method used in this country as an option for judges in sentencing offenders who have committed particularly brutal murders or treason. The strict criteria of this only being an option for the worst crimes would ensure that it would not be overused or seen as a 'normal' punishment but a last resort where it is clear that typical sentencing would not be enough. The limited scope of such a sentence would also serve to place a responsibility on the judge to justify such a sentence given it is intended to be scarce in use, ensuring that there is accountability. Also, I would argue that hanging is a humane method by which someone can die assuming the old method with the long drop through the trapdoor is used, my reading tells me that typically a person will die almost instantly from a fractured neck. The hangmen such as Albert Pierrepoint were highly skilled in being able to judge the exact drop and length of rope needed for a person's height and weight. I believe although I could be wrong that there exists at least one prison in the UK which still has a working gallows as well as its original condemned cells. I am sure that given resources and time, such facilities could be easily re established at a fairly low cost. It must be said that Japan has a similar system where the death penalty is still an option and hanging the usual method used, which seems to work well. So can anyone change my mind?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I would have no problem if the death penalty was reintroduced in a limited capacity to the UK.\n","id":"b1d924bc-2704-46df-9b86-bb500a40e9db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are 7 billion people in the world. Why should I settle down for someone who conveniently lives down the street, when I should be in search for the perfect soulmate, who may live miles and miles away? I have gone on dates with many local women, yet I always wonder what else is out there. I am in constant search for the one and only on OKCupid, POF, and even Match and have gone on dates with out of state prospects that I've found from dating sites. Yet, I still have not found the one and am incessantly looking. Once I find this perfect soulmate, I will be truly happy. That is why I believe in long distance relationships, which of course involves face to face interactions. Change my view. Edit I want to thank everyone for those who gave their thoughts on this. This is actually what the girl that I used to see said to me, and I was heartbroken. Your comments made me realize that I dodged a bullet, and as one user said, he wouldn't date a girl who has a fairytale narrative of relationships.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe in long distance relationships. Do you really think your soulmate lives down the street?\n","id":"a035105e-0467-4aea-81cb-b46dd1dd33ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I've been kind of pissed off at this Russia thing. I'm up to date on everything in my view , and to be quite honest it seems that a conclusion can be drawn either way. On one side, I can completely see this being blown out of proportion by the media to make Trump's presidency a living hell for him. Practically, media is the fourth branch of government and Trump did NOT make it easy for himself by attacking them so viciously. There have been reports that CNN was blowing this out of proportion for ratings by some conservative journalists. CNN has had journalists resign over false stories a video of a producer at CNN saying it's mostly bullshit right now among other things. BUT on the other hand, this could absolutely result in the uncovering of some huge international scheme orchestrated by Putin to get Trump into office with Trump knowingly accepting information from Russians to help this cause . I probably don't need to link the latest stories but there has been a lot of compromising stuff coming out lately, specifically with Donald Trump Jr. I feel that the truth is somewhere between the two extremes here and most people will be disappointed with the outcome though I could be wrong . At the end of the day, we literally don't know and I hate watching r politics circlejerk around TRUMP IS A COLLUDING MOTHERFUCKER and r The donald circlejerk around But her REEEEEEE mails . Why can't everybody just accept the fact that we really don't know anything until Mueller's investigation is finished?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is hard to take a side on the Russia-Trump debacle until Mueller's investigation is completed.\n","id":"044ccb44-dd49-4d73-866d-d21ae2027de7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lately it's been quite a hot topic that Russians have been meddling with elections, spreading fake news, using bots, etc etc. It mainly started out with the American elections with Donald Trump winning. It was found that 'advertisements' had been posted from Russians on Facebook, and the US accused Russians of hacking the DNC. However, in the case of Facebook, I believe that this was a desperate accusation pointing fingers at a perfectly legal action. The advertisements did not reach that many people, and it is perfectly acceptable for anyone to pay money and to get their views spread around the internet. It's the same way people are allowed to convince others to vote for their candidate on social media etc. As for the Russian hacks, I firmly do not believe enough evidence was provided and the public should not blindly believe what the government says. Why should we condemn news stations like RT for alleged propaganda, when people refuse to question their own media themselves? Recently, with the recent Salisbury attack and Syrian conflict, I see a similar thing happening. People are blindly believeing a lot of what the western media is saying, whilst completely ignoring the Russian media. Shouldn't we be building a news system of evidence and proof, rather than blind trust in the news stations we trust and support? I read multiple news stations they all say different things and at this point I am afraid to believe anything I read. I would also like to mention that I am worried that sites such as Reddit and Facebook are beginning to falsely censor controversial views in our society, simply because if they don't they will be accused of spreading 'Russian' propaganda. I would like such platforms to remain independent, and to avoid spreading propaganda and false bias to either side of the argument. TL DR people should be confronting their bias' for certain news stations and looking for proof and evidence rather than simply believeing everything the media says<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The majority of pro-russian\/anti-western views on the internet are not spread by Russian propaganda tools, and people should confront this bias\n","id":"a7498e2f-943f-4c34-95c8-99f4dfce7c84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> The pop culture industry, and especially Hollywood, still has a pedophile culture that harms young child stars, and it is not stopping. For example, the way that Millie Bobby Brown is dressed to special events one would think that she is twenty five years old, not fourteen. There was a tweet by Mike Sington that said that she \u201c just grew up in front of our eyes. She\u2019s 13 \u201d, while showing a picture of her dressed in leather and with sophisticated makeup. She was also featured in a magazine article that described her, among others, as \u201cSexiest TV Star\u201d. There\u2019s also the whole controversy with Drake, one of the biggest and most influential pop stars in the world, texting her about boys and saying that he \u201cmisses her\u201d. He is thirty one years old and it is definitely not appropriate for him to be texting her like that. Furthermore, this can be labelled as grooming, and yet some people are defending Drake for doing this. I posted a link below to a YouTube video. You can see that many people in the comments are defending this, and some people are saying how Millie looks like she is thirty years old, not fourteen, which proves that she is being dressed too old for her age. Also, another problem is that he\u2019s not going to get into serious trouble for this, just like the many pedophiles in Hollywood. This sexualization of kids isn\u2019t limited to text messages and magazine articles it results in children being molested and raped on sets. Many child stars have come out and spoken out about this, but it\u2019s not having a big effect on Hollywood. If Hollywood truly cared about these child actors, then why do they keep hiring convicted child molestors? Brian Peck was still hired by Disney to work on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody just one year after he was released from prison for committing sex acts on minors. Roman Polanski still was able to continue his film career after he admitted that he raped a child. Actors still continued to work for him, he won multiple awards, and he hasn\u2019t faced justice for his crime. It is clear that even if a person is convicted of child molestion and rape in the entertainment industry, then their career isn\u2019t over. Some more subtle proof of a pedophile culture in the entertainment industry can be seen in how kids today are presented in media. For example, teenage actors are dressed as if they are ten to twenty years older than they actually are. It would be hard for a person to tell that some child and teenage actors are actually their age when they dress in sophisticated clothes and heavy makeup. Some proof of this can be found by doing an image search of popular actresses today, like Skai Jackson, Peyton List, and like I mentioned before, Millie Bobbie Brown. There are plenty of examples out there, but I posted these down below. In conclusion, it is clear to me that the culture in Hollywood and the entertainment industry still fetishes kids and it is not changing for the better, but they turn a blind eye to pedophiles and allow them to still continue making movies and entertainment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The entertainment industry has a rampant pedophile culture that harms child and teen actors to this day.\n","id":"fcc773f5-2c7b-4372-8821-e457114dbf14"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>Take the people who believe there is a link between vaccines and autism: There is no scientific proof for this and, because people believe this without evidence, they are willing to put their kids and other peoples' kids at risk.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Believing in something for which there is no evidence can have people acting in ways that are not beneficial.\n","id":"4c11aa1d-5384-48fd-a70d-c1ef1ef3f678"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Minors Need Parental Consent for Abortions?<|ARGUMENT|>Parental consent should be required on the condition that if the father of the child is also a minor, his parents are aware of his contribution to said pregnancy and consent is sought from them as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parental consent should be required for pregnant minors to have abortions.\n","id":"6bac8a95-7fe1-4810-81e3-1c8588d7324a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All US and EU sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014 should be lifted<|ARGUMENT|>President Trump has been ambivalent about the legality of the annexation of Crimea; this has caused concern among EU allies and cast doubt on US Foreign Policy with regards to engagement with Russia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanctions have increased tensions between the US and the EU.\n","id":"68156b33-9261-4258-bbf8-09b21510098d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I'm not sure how many of you guys are aware of the recent events in the MtG world but today a professional player, Zach Jesse, was banned presumably because of his past criminal history which includes a sexual assault guilty plea when he was 19. I'm not aware of the exact circumstances surrounding his offense. What unsettles me about the ban is that it seems to have occurred because another player, Drew Levin, pointed out Jesse's criminal past with a Twitter post Quick reminder Zach Jesse is a literal rapist who got away with serving three months of an eight year plea deal. It should be noted that this is a very speculative and misleading statement, as the public is not aware of the details surrounding his plea. Wizards of the Coast gave a short statement saying that the reasoning behind the ban was to ensure that players feel safe at events. Obviously a worthy endeavor, but I don't see how it really applies here. We are talking about large events at convention centers with thousands of people, security, etc. If, in the eyes of the law, he is not considered a threat to the public i.e. not in jail then how can Wizards see him as one? And what's the point in attempting to rehabilitate criminals if they are to be forever shunned from participating even in large public events? It's not like the guy is applying for a teaching job at an elementary school or something. They even banned him from online play. Lastly, I do not think Wizards should have taken this action based on a Twitter witch hunt that was started by another player. If they want to have a universal no criminal record policy at all of their events, then maybe it would be justified. But to selectively ban one person because he was villified on a social media site is pretty unreasonable, IMO. I want to hear people's thoughts on this because it seems like the r magictcg community is vehemently opposed to the ban. I'd like to hear some outside opinion's. The SRS crowd seems to support the ban, calling r magictcg a bunch of rape apologists, etc, but then again the SRS crowd is not very logical or reasonable. So I'd like to hear what you all think. , Edit If anyone can provide a source that he was convicted of rape, I will award you a delta. Edit So my view has been changed due to new information I have been made aware of regarding the details of Jesse's crime. Anally raping an unconscious girl over a toilet is pretty despicable, I had no idea his offense was even close to that magnitude. Thanks everyone who responded here. I can understand with why Wizards does not want someone who has done something so vulgar to be a top name in their tournament scene.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zach Jesse should not have been banned for life from MtG tournaments by Wizards of the Coast\n","id":"d7150b99-d6c1-4b05-805a-6dcb042d1b40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To me, even though the plantation of Ulster brought many people colonizing already inhabited territory, the Irish Sovereignty Movement should accept Northern Ireland as a nation, because the people have lived there so long. This reminds me of the United States and the Native Americas. The United States definitely conquered land or at least colonized land that was not there. But no one outside of a few radicals I'm sure have to exist is advocating for the reconquering of North America by the native tribes that are left.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Irish Nationalists should accept that a 32 county Irish republic will only happen if the people of Northern Ireland vote for it.\n","id":"2fb9d3a5-98c1-4780-b3d7-3a3a89d42401"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be restrictions on the release of hacking tools?<|ARGUMENT|>Countries like the US place a higher value spend more money gaining access to information offense than protecting information defense. The US IC budget in 2017 was $73.0 Billion link which is nearly three quarters of the total global information security market in 2017 $104.60 billion link and significantly more than the US information security market.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Publicly shared techniques are frequently essential to gain access to otherwise inaccessible data. This true offense is critical for law enforcement investigations related to child exploitation, anti-terror intelligence gathering, understanding motives and goals in international political disputes, and exposing corruption.\n","id":"7c3ad5aa-b226-4561-bb63-fd2686f6cd5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When someone is speaking to me in English and talking about something in another language, I get really irked if they use the native dialect. Like if the wanted to say Do you like empandas? they would put a spanish accent on empandas. I think I don't like it becuase the accents use features that are not found in English, and I feel like they should just try and speak in normal English so I can better understand what they are saying. This is often done by young native English speakers who have learned a language in school.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I get annoyed when people use accents of other languages while speaking in English.\n","id":"41a7fbb2-3c47-4588-a0fb-61a705001953"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am completely convinced that a triangle is a superior shape to a square. Some of my reasons for it Triangles are strong. The triangle is an important part of bridge building, no square is going to do that. Triangles are versatile. Triangles come in all shapes and sizes, and are flexible in the side lengths and angles. Equilateral triangle, right triangle, scalene, there are lots of types of triangles. There is only one type of square a square. In fact, You can make a square out of triangles. You cannot make a triangle with a square. In fact, many parallelograms can be made out of triangles, while squares are stuck making squares or rectangles. Surely there's no reason to have a square in the first place when two triangles can make it themselves. There is no doubt in my mind the triangle wins. I look forward to having my view changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Triangles are superior to squares\n","id":"166d3d49-d741-4ac8-aa5f-dd303d5835f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Affirmative Action: Useful Once, Outdated Today?<|ARGUMENT|>This is particularly damaging to white students, if many of the interactions with minority groups in college were negative. They are then likely to hold a negative view of these groups in the future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is harmful for white students to form their entire perspective on an ethnic or cultural group based purely on their interactions with a handful of peers.\n","id":"7862f3a4-7674-4d86-a7ec-e2bfad956fc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Teachers Be Allowed To Wear Religious Symbols At School?<|ARGUMENT|>Teachers can express themselves freely in their personal time, but classroom time is mandated, sanctioned, and funded for by the state and should be treated differently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers should not be allowed to wear religious symbols at school.\n","id":"2726d5cf-b2df-4641-8c16-465155ad5f4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just saw a post from r quityourbullshit that pointed out that a post on r vegan from a picture of a chick supposedly being lead to its death was actually the subject of a photoshoot and was perfectly fine. The comments were a shitshow because as I learned chicks are regularly shredded to death by the hundreds in macerators NSFL and people felt like OP, though rightfully calling out a misattributed image, was missing the actual point that this is something that really happens on an industrial scale. So when I watched the chicks being shredded to death NSFL I felt something shift in my view of animal rights. The shit that happens in that video is just horrific and it made me question my view of whether or not animals deserve protection on a moral basis. And that's why I'd be happy to have a discussion about different views of animal rights. So my current view is that no rights are intrinsic, in that there's nothing in the universe that makes anyone entitled to any right, human or animal. I believe in a social contract theory where humans collectively decide to grant each other human rights such as the right to life, the right to freedom of speech, the right to private property, etc. but I don't believe that this extends to animals because animals do not have the cognition necessary to grasp such concepts. The reason why we grant these same rights to humans children from birth or conception depending on your view is because they will grow up to become rational agents capable of understanding such concepts. That's how a human baby can have a right to life, but not a fully grown baboon, even though the baboon probably has a higher self awareness and cognition than the human baby. Now I'm not gonna lie that this ethical view is very convenient for me because I fucking love the taste of meat. I like eggs too but I'm seriously considering not buying eggs that are produced with the chick culling practices I saw in that video. As I said though I'm absolutely open to hearing about other ethical systems with animal rights. Just to be clear I'd rather the arguments not be moralizing look at how sad it is that x animal is being killed but rather systemic and philosophical animals should have certain rights because y. Thanks for reading<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not intrinsically wrong to kill an animal for any reason\n","id":"197d8433-3bb8-42a2-b109-c978d46c6fcf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>A general A.I. would observe humans as we observe ants in anthill. It will only be a matter of time before it \"experiments\" on the subject - humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is the chance an AGI might be able to think for itself and turn on its creators.\n","id":"4336c655-8c9c-40cf-8514-9b8c04910c19"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don\u2019t believe in divorce except in the most extreme case your partner is a murderer, a rapist, or so mentally or physically incapacitated it is no longer a marriage no matter what you do. I feel that the very existence of divorce cheapens the idea of marriage itself, and that if you think divorce could even remotely be an option you shouldn\u2019t get married. I know this is a highly conservative opinion, which even surprises me I consider myself to be a left leaning centrist , but this is one issue I have been unable to change my mind about. EDIT Thank you everyone for all of the insight. You\u2019ve all given me a lot to think about, especially with certain hypotheticals which really challenge the bounds of my feelings on the matter. I am new to this subreddit, so I\u2019m not sure how the delta system works.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel like I have a rigid view on marriage\n","id":"e6dc895e-9338-418b-b30c-a9145dbfe2a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>The Second Amendment does not allow the right to bear ammunition. States could outlaw the sale and possession of bullets without repealing the amendment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Second Amendment doesn't prevent states from restricting gun access the \"violence\" mentioned in the parent, as evidenced by various laws\n","id":"86866822-91af-4494-b9ff-fe07d3ae98b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You know when you're hanging out with some friends, and are trying to decide what to do next? Then a couple people have an idea, but the other three think its bad? Wouldn't it sucks if those two people didn't accept that their idea hadn't been chosen, and continued to criticize, and ruin what the other three chose to do, and what remained of the night. Sure the other idea wasn't great, but does that behavior solve anything? or get them any closer to getting their idea picked the next time? Admittedly Obama is not a great, nor even by my standards a good president. What's important to me is no longer whether he is bringing change, but rather the change he represents in America by having gotten elected not once but twice. When supporting Obama a second time the latter tipped the scale in his favor, or better yet, it didn't have to. Why? Mitt Romney is a white male. That is perfectly fine, but it disqualifies him from Obama's Lets call it wow factor. Or better yet lets call it the Represents to every non white child that anything is possible, even becoming president factor. Mitt Romney is a business man. Maybe he'll bring jobs. That's most often the opposite of what he did as a businessman. Aaand apparently his consulting firm's biggest client was Monsanto. Lets move on. Mitt Romney vocalized a belief that 47 of Americans are basically leaches on society. Last but not least the Republican National Convention featured a debate between Clint Eastwood, and an empty chair. Had Obama been in that chair he would have first reminded Eastwood that Romney is in fact a lawyer, and his statement about not wanting a lawyer as president disqualifies them both. And also that calling an empty chair crazy is Ironic. What I'm trying to say is that the third guy is starting to agree with the other two way more often, and maybe just maybe, if the first two stopped acting the way they did, they would stop feeling villainzed. and sometimes maybe started being a little bit less sexist, racist, and homophobic Everyone would have a much nicer time. You could disagree with me on each or every one of my points. I expect that. Democrats are definitely guilty of the same behavior when not getting their way, but one thing remains true What happened with Obama showed that even though the majority got their way and saw that it wasn't great, they chose to do it again because the counter option the bad idea hadn't changed at all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if the Republican Party does not change, and change soon, it will die.\n","id":"14652b83-2461-4110-8b2e-4199675f387b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you don't know, free software is software licensed under any license that respects the users freedom to copy, modify, and distribute source code to others in a completely legal way under the same free license. I am refering to free as in freedom not free as in free beer. I believe that all software should be libre because of the following reasons Know exactly what the program does. Promotes innovation because of the ease of which you can obtain and edit a copy of a piece of software. In other words, not having to reinvent the wheel. The user does not have to depend on a proprietor to develop the software. If a user wants a change in the program, they can either ask a more technical person to modify it, or modify it themselves. In most cases, anti features are not present because the programmers are also the users of the program, and usually program only what the users want. If an anti feature is present, development can branch off into a separate group without the anti features. More likely to have security privacy because the users can easily see everything that is going on in the program. If a malicious feature is found, other developers from a second group can easily take it out. Finally, free software promotes programming and design education because a student could find out exactly how a real world program works because of the ease of modification, and ease of access to the source code. One might assume that a computer running on completely free software is either very difficult or impossible. That would be far from the truth. There are several free operating systems which only require burning the .iso to a usb stick which can be easily done by a beginner and loaded on to a computer. The installation process is at the same level or easier than a Windows or MacOS installation. If you want the software at the low level to be free, that can be achieved by using libreboot and a few simple terminal commands on a supported computer a relatively large range actually . If you don't feel like you would be able to do this, there are many people who would either do it for you, or walk you through it. You might also assume that using free software is a huge inconvenience. In most cases, that is not true. Firstly, getting used to GNU Linux is not much different than migrating from one Windows version to another. Yes, I will admit that libre games are lacking, but for the average user, this would not be an issue. For most average users, you could use only programs with a GUI, so being a 1337 bash user is not required. Getting help from someone else for a certain problem is no different than asking for help on a Windows or MacOS machine. Finally, one might assume that making money off of free software is near impossible. That would not be true. Making money can and has been done through donations, merchandise, tech support, or even just distributing the software on a physical device though not very popular anymore . Change my view Edit Thanks for the kind discussion u HereComesMyDingDong<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All software should be free\/libre\n","id":"f0bc9c22-9692-4706-a3e1-775481dd76ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>The highest teachings in the Hindu tradition are monotheistic and center around love for God<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monotheism is central to all the major world religions with the exception of buddhism\n","id":"d7ac1a9e-bae3-4e1d-9022-c7d88ce793b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should heterosexual people not be allowed in gay bars?<|ARGUMENT|>If it is legal to deny service based on moral or religious grounds, or if it is legal to deny someone service based on personal moral grounds, then LGBTQ+ spaces should be free to use that, with the moral idea that a gay bar is meant for gay people, and straight people should not be there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"LGBTQ+ bar owners should feel empowered to decide who they admit, so that they can take into account the specific needs of their customers and the community they serve.\n","id":"43820e75-f1b1-4b49-a242-034641fc994f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I assume that men and women are wired a bit differently biologically, I'm also going to generalize a lot here. I mean most of us admit to this in some form, and it's a widespread complaint out there among women that some jerks pretend to be interested in a relationship but essentially leave as soon as they've gotten sex. But I contend that these women are no different from the men they complain about, because they also tease something casual sex to get what they ultimately want a long term relationship . If that's the case, I don't think men who use one thing as a bargaining chip to get what they really want are any worse than the women who I believe are doing more or less the same thing, except in our society, preferring sex to relationships is for some reason seen as jerk behaviour while preferring relationships to sex isn't. And I would go one step further and say the typical jerk's behaviour isn't even as bad, because at least it's short term damage. But if a woman teases sex to get a relationship and she gets it, well that guy will have his whole life affected, potentially forever Please don't tell me there are some women who want sex and some guys who want relationships, I'm aware of this, and my same argument applies to those, it's just that usually I hear this complaint coming from the female side Edit1 wow lots of replies I wasn't expecting that. I have a busy day at work today and I'm probably in a different time zone than most of you so I'll try and answer as many of your comments I can when I can, but it may take a day or so. Edit2 I didn't have my argument so clear when I originally posted this, so I'll add this. There's a common complaint among women that men leave after they get sex, and I don't see this as ethically wrong, and I think it makes perfect sense when you view men and women as players in a negotiating game, each wanting what is scarce relationship for women, sex for men , and to obtain it they advertise or lure the other with the other person's scarce resource. I think this makes sense, so it also makes sense men might often stop giving the scarce resource relationship when they get what they want sex . It would also make sense for women then to stop giving the scarce resource sex when they get what they want relationship but for reasons many of you have mentioned, this doesn't always happen although some have mentioned that it does, and sex frequency does change often after marriage which fits my theory nicely Anyways, if I'm right about this, it means 1 men should be able to put no relationships \u201c the same way women put no ONS in their dating profiles, without being stigmatized 2 men should be emotionally supported when they start seeing a woman, wanting just sex, but she ends up just wanting a relationship. I admit this is unlikely to ever happen but I just find it interesting that, as I said before, valuing relationships more than sex gets sympathy while the other way around doesn't<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men who \"play\" girls by seeming like they want a relationship but really wanting the sex are no worse than the women out there who \"play\" men by seeming like they want sex but really wanting a relationship\n","id":"2aad665d-8d4d-41a7-aac8-d18d62e5aaa5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The EU should promote the official use of a common language in Europe.<|ARGUMENT|>Citizens who are unable to learn the official language would be excluded from public discourse and political as well as economic life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The introduction of a Europe-wide official language will put vulnerable and low-income citizens at a disadvantage.\n","id":"8d68299a-581b-4288-97c3-c6320c06f6cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Following the coup attempt on Erdogan in Turkey, and the recent pivot away from the US NATO and even the EU, I don't think the Turkish can be trusted with the F 35. What's to stop them from sending one or two to Moscow to give the Russians a closer look? Or allowing other foreign powers who were denied this aircraft a look into how they work? This fighter represents a significant investment by the American people and the program partners, and will be the backbone of many military air forces for the next 20 30 years Why take the risk? Can the Turkish even be trusted anymore with the latest and greatest NATO technology?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The F-35 should NOT be sold to Turkey\n","id":"7912439d-5b2e-41e5-be0b-4cfcd7623119"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Sex Reassignment Surgery the Best Option for Transgender People?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many different identities not tied to circumstances of birth such as a desired profession that begin as an abstract concept in the mind of the person seeking them. This doesn't make them any less valid as notions of identity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The same argument would suggest that nobody should ever try to become something they are not already. All decisions are made with imperfect information.\n","id":"5bc6b50c-fde7-46cb-b22c-526cce870e4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parental Responsibility<|ARGUMENT|>Legal requirements for parental action, particularly those that include sanctions for non-action provide an incentive for parents to act in a responsible fashion. If parents believe they will be held liable for their inaction, or the inappropriate actions of their children, they are more likely to make sure their children are supervised and well cared for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legal requirements for parental action, particularly those that include sanctions for non-action pro...\n","id":"b3fc6e83-bfb0-4062-a4ad-88e17207d51f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Geoengineering, iron fertilization of algae blooms, Debate on whether iron fertilization of algae blooms is a viable alternative to fighting global warming<|ARGUMENT|>Some ocean trials did indeed report remarkable results. According to IronEx II reports, their thousand kilogram iron contribution to the equatorial Pacific generated a carbonaceous biomass equivalent to one hundred full-grown redwoods within the first two weeks. Researchers on Wegener Institute's 2004 Eifex experiment recorded carbon dioxide to iron fixation ratios of nearly 300,000 to 1. Current estimates of the amount of iron required to restore all the lost plankton and sequester 3 gigatons\/year of CO2 range widely, from approximately two hundred thousand tons\/year to over 4 million tons\/year. Even in the latter worst case scenario, this only represents about 16 supertanker loads of iron and a projected cost of less than \u20ac20 billion $27 Billion. Considering EU penalties for Kyoto non-compliance will reach \u20ac100\/ton CO2e $135\/ton CO2e in 2010 and the annual value of the global carbon credit market is projected to exceed \u20ac1 trillion by 2012, even the most conservative estimate still portrays a very feasible and inexpensive strategy to offset half of all industrial emissions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A global iron fertilization plan would cost only around $20 billion.\n","id":"a7fe6d29-c8d6-42cb-8ef9-95a52a88dcde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This article first informed me about the recent ruling on legislative prayer. Political disclosure I'm a run of the mill secular liberal type on such issues as this. I don't understand why the masses of people who I normally side with politically are worrying about this decision so much. Is there a consequence of legislative prayer worse than making legislators or civilians with different religions uncomfortable?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having legislative prayer allowed is a relatively acceptable exception to the separation of church and state.\n","id":"c66deeae-6e75-434c-a2fa-40715586797e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should data-trade be prohibited?<|ARGUMENT|>Due to profiling and data-trading, many great services are currently free of charge users are paying with their data. A ban on data-trade would come with a price tag for users.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is immoral to sell an individual's data without their consent.\n","id":"fbdab1cf-6822-4292-96f7-287c9a6096b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Im a white American man, mid 30s, married, financially stable, live in the Midwest. I have an intense dislike for the current Republican Party, and obviously find the nazis repulsive, but if shit really hits the fan, I don't see any reason to resist if the rest of my countrymen go full nazi. If the US took over Canada and Mexico, there is no possible combination of powers on earth that could ever defeat us. The Russians did the heavy lifting in WWII because they occupied the same continent as the nazis. Nothing bad is going to happen to me, the Republicans seem to be pointing all their hatred at the Muslims, blacks, and Mexicans. I guess I'm an atheist, but that's easy to fix, I already know the Bible better than pretty much any Christian I know. I don't have kids, so I probably got 30 years left on this planet. I feel bad for the people who might get fucked over, but not bad enough to die for a cause that can't possibly succeed. Barring the invention of some sort of space weapon in Europe I don't see any reason to fight my countrymen in order to maintain my moral code, I don't really place that high a value on human life anyway. I might draw the line at physically killing people, but at my age I don't think that's going to be very likely. So  I guess, but at this point I think I'd just say fuck it and follow the herd.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the Republicans go full Nazi, I should just go along with it.\n","id":"322c6e22-3ed2-4059-a336-c777493a2c07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Even in the region that most strongly opposes bullfighting there are 8% who support it Ipsos, p. 2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are indications that many in Catalonia do appreciate bullfighting.\n","id":"8a2f5000-20bd-453d-a232-125e3a406646"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is There A Need For Testing on Lab Animals in Research?<|ARGUMENT|>Animal testing reveals unexpected toxicities of new drugs and products, validates biological hypotheses and is a legal requirement of any new drug product as mandated by the FDA<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animal testing has resulted in significant developments in medicine for humans.\n","id":"e1557ff1-cb9b-4664-acbe-201a800293af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are currently 80,000 people in the US on organ donor waiting lists. Approximately 50,000 people in the US commit suicide each year. Even if just one in twenty of those suicides were to volunteer to have their organs harvested in exchange for assisted suicide, that injects 2,500 warm bodies a year into the organ donation program. A single donor can potentially save up to 8 other lives. Many more lives enhanced through tissue donation. It can also give the donor a chance to die a meaningful death that can bring some good, rather then living living as a burden, or killing themselves and leaving a net amount of damage behind. However medical ethics prohibit the killing of non terminal patients. In my opinion, the edict, \u201cDo not kill,\u201d has become outdated as it it was drafted before the invention of live organ organ donation as a live saving procedure and and must be reevaluated in this light. The grief of one suicide must be weighed in context against the cost of treating the suicidal person as well as the benefit of potentially 8 other lives if assisting in the suicide does have a net benefit, then it should not be done. If it does, then the physician should be free to open the option for an assisted suicide. That said, I don\u2019t imagine that implementing such a program would be simple. There would be push back from medical professionals that would hesitate against killing patients, even if it means many more would be saved. And this program I\u2019d imagine would only slightly stem the flow of patients needing organs as the population grows larger and older.  is there some flaw or argument against this position that I have not yet seen?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be an option to commit suicide for the purpose of organ donation.\n","id":"2e78f585-aac4-4483-a9f7-000e0ca385aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Affirmative Action: Useful Once, Outdated Today?<|ARGUMENT|>Black students who are academically mismatched in an undergraduate course are twice as likely to be derailed from plans to go on to postgraduate study.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even short term academic failure derails students' long term academic confidence\n","id":"5db02cf1-29d2-449f-801b-3e9477f757cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I'm not saying mothers should not be celebrated. And this is coming from someone with a great mother who is still alive and who just got done genuinely enjoying all of the appreciation on facebook today from my friends who love their mothers. All of that being said, I think the recognition of this day as specifically Mother's Day and all other holidays of the same type actually cheapens something that should come naturally from those that really do feel it. On top of that, I think concentrating all of the appreciation into a specific day causes a lot of stress for people who either don't have their mothers or who never had a good mother. A friend of mine last year asked her friends to remember those of us who don't have mothers in their lives by choice. That really stuck with me. So we've commercialized something that should come naturally and inevitably alienated a bunch of people who will feel overwhelmed by this specific kind of targeted display of affection. As I said, there is no reason why getting rid of the official day should get rid of genuine displays of appreciation for mothers, or anyone who has been important in our lives. If you love your mother, then just pick a day and do something nice for her. The fact that it was spontaneous will even highlight how authentic your feelings are. And if you're the kind of person who wouldn't do such a thing if not reminded every year, then maybe you should consider taking a hard look at your priorities in life instead of rushing to buy some flowers at Walmart today for a person you might not really appreciate as much as you believe you do. So, in short, we gain nothing that we couldn't get from a better source out of days like Mother's Day. And if you love your , then just tell them, today right now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mother's Day Should Not Be Celebrated.\n","id":"ee8e3516-7d86-4b27-acb7-12de042486ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pride organisers should refuse corporate sponsorship<|ARGUMENT|>Harassment can occur as a result of the actions of a few individuals, and therefore may not be reflective of the policy of the companies marketing and management.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unlikely that the companies that engage in the harassment of LGBTQ+ individuals are the same companies who donate to Pride.\n","id":"5dfd402b-f4fa-4088-9154-ff664f91d6d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically, both of them have similar objectives, similar implementation, and similar results. Both Chemical and conventional weapons are intended to be used to kill people. Both of them can be used to achieve similar total death tolls. Why is it worse for people to have been gassed to death than for them to die slowly with shrapnel stuck in their gut? This also relates to international intervention. If we don't distinguish between the two types of warfare then there won't be international outcry over chemical warfare anymore, but rather on warfare as a whole, which could work to eliminate a negative stigma associated with this issue and could then lead to countries intervening more often in cases of domestic violence. On an effect level basis, both the types of warfare are similar once again. The usage of either types of weaponry will end in the death of people. Realizing this to be a necessary side effect of warfare, how can we judge that the usage of chemical weapons will cause more pain agony than conventional warfare when even bullets and shrapnel can lead to horrible situations like perforated lungs? Since we can't, it doesn't make much sense to draw a line between them. Drawing this line also seems to make conventional warfare look better than it is. One important realization which this makes us overlook is that all warfare is inherently harmful. By setting these levels of prioritization we're essentially making chemical weapons a bigger deal, and to some degree we're justifying the usage of accepted , or conventional warfare, which I believe to be morally flawed considering the basis for that argument. Well guys, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there should be no distinction between chemical and conventional warfare.\n","id":"3634fa7f-842a-4804-b994-c88bcb57e51e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>AI will be perfected to the degree that it will replace all imaginable job positions so human labour will no longer be needed. Medicine and detection of disease will be so sophisticated that maintaining one's health will no longer be an issue. Virtual reality will be perfected to the degree that most of a human's life experiences will be completely virtual. Feel good drugs will exist without any short or long term repercussions in order to deal with human's dull and meaningless daily life. Basically, we will have no purpose, since AI will eventually be able to do anything that humans can, but better. I'm sorry if I sound pessimistic, but I don't see any good reason for why this couldn't happen short of human extinction. In fact, is there any reason at all to believe that AI won't replace us in this way?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the far future, AI will become so ubiquitous that humanity will lose its meaning and purpose.\n","id":"ab84d836-090c-4d4a-8eb0-aef40685f690"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A better title for this post would be  The benefits of NSA surveillance outweigh the downsides. I chose a shitty title, my bad. All these terrorist attacks have got me thinking lately about how much Snowden's revelations may have damaged US intelligence capabilities I read No Place to Hide, I supported Snowden like everyone else. But after all these terrorist attacks, I seriously think the benefits outweigh the negatives. People always attack the surveillance programs for making it easy for a totalitarian government to take over America, such as if some horrible president was elected and used his power to crush the opposition party and all protesters. I think that with all the power the government has today, with the strength of the military and intelligence, a totalitarian leader could easily take over the US today even without NSA surveillance. Our military is so powerful that it could easily establish an autocratic government and martial law if it wanted to. If you argue that congress or the military would put a stop to that, then by extension they are also able to put a stop to a rogue president establishing an authoritarian autocracy. The point is, the risk is already there, so a bit of surveillance won't increase the risks that much more. After all, they've been doing it since at least 2001, and we've been fine so far. Additionally, it really does help intercept terrorism. My uncle, a captain in the army, was actually alerted of an impending ambush in Iraq by an intercepted phone call, and he told me that the NSA truly helps save lives over there. We committed to this endeavor against terrorism, and I think we have responsibility as a people to support our troops god knows how war weary they are after over 10 years of conflict. We are all on the same team, after all. My understanding is that the NSA programs only collect surveillance data and store it into a database. Most data never even gets seen by human eyes, except for that of suspected terrorists. And whatever paranoia people may have about the definition of terrorism being too expansive, the actual amount of people monitored is incredibly small a fraction of a percent of the total population. I can almost certainly guarantee that you, reading this, are not a target for surveillance. I think there is a reason that so many smart Americans actually support the NSA programs, which is that normal life is impossible with constant terrorism, and as working citizens of America who contribute to our economy, we only stand to gain security from these programs at a small expense to privacy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I see no real downside to NSA survelliance\n","id":"3d27e455-09c1-4b0b-9cc7-ee182df0064c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should parents perpetuate myths like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny to their children?<|ARGUMENT|>The extrinsic motivation of reward hinders the development of an intrinsic motivation to do the same thing. As a result, reward-based parenting does not adequately develop a child's internal moral compass.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rewarding children for good behaviour teaches them to expect a reward This means that if the rewards disappear, then their good behaviour may disappear too.\n","id":"ecae10d9-9d26-412b-a9c1-314545578ee9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Humans fundamentally different from other animals?<|ARGUMENT|>Other animals have use of tools, but this does not compare with humans using very advanced tools. A bird or chimpanzee may use a stick for fairly short-term effect, but a human may make satellites to predict the weather etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although on a biological continuum with other animals, it is humans' unique combination of features embodied form, idealizing imagination, cumulative culture and tools, language, advanced cognition, etc that set them distinctly apart from other animals.\n","id":"478aa8ad-e2f3-41e9-8db0-17336f75d42c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always been a massive fan of the steam system and was really excited when xbox announced they'd do it. Now I do think they could of worked on their offline play a little better but it's 2013 and the dvd drive HAS to go. Dvds are outdated and create complications and limitations with developing a game. They're slow to process and hold barely any space compared to a hdd sdd. Why us everyone so obsessed with cd dvds? People do need to remember when purchasing a game you aren't buying the game, you are buying a license to play the game and the developer can add whatever terms they want to it. EDIT To avoid confusing, by DRM, i mean the system where you purchase a game, it's downloaded and locked to a single account.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe gaming DRM is a good thing and the future.\n","id":"7a2f44b8-992d-4e74-8750-e033936f2249"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>While it may be a good argument for gun control in general the claim as stated requires a mental health check to possess a firearm. This is an unjust form of discrimination because there is not adequate evidence that it would protect anyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Members of the psychiatric community have said that there is not good evidence that a psychiatric evaluation could predict violent use of a weapon. It is not acceptable to allow a discriminatory policy without evidence that its regulations are effective.\n","id":"9dda271e-2213-43bc-bd3e-ce55d150991e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently participated in a thread where an individual got upset that I spoiled a part from the book I, Robot. Literally a 50 year old book. The implication that the person in the thread was saying was that ANY discussion of any part of a work of fiction that may be a surprise to ANY viewer reader, should be spoiler tagged. I'm sorry but I'm not spoiler tagging a 50 year old book. Bounds of reason. I believe two things, 1 That there is a statue of limitations on whether I have to post a spoiler alert or not, and 2 That if a work of fiction is high quality, it probably won't SOLEY rely on the element of astonishment, and thus spoilers will not be as paramount in the narriative. 1 I remember a video where a kid had a friend who got a copy of the Harry Potter book that was supposed to have a huge suprise in it. Someone at the midnight release on the east coast read it and called a friend on the west coast to tell him. That friend on the west coast thought it would be funny to drive up and down the line at Barnes and Noble yelling Snape Kills Dumbledore to unknowning unsuspecting fans who didn't have advanced knowledge due to the time difference. This is a clear case of what I will call intentional spoiling , that is, the act of maliciously attempting to spoil a work for someone, for no other reason than the evil joy pleasure derived from doing so. Wrong not because it is spoiling, but wrong because it falls under what is considered an unnecessarily malicious act. Regarding the validity of unintional spoiling . The only argument I think a person could have would be something to the effect of 'It may be courteous to those who haven't had a chance to go to the theater, or don't get the movie tv show book in their country at the same time you do, to refrain or warn that there may be material that will spoil a major plot point'. Beyond this, if you truly value not being spoiled that much, and would feel so hurt or dissapointed, STAY AWAY FROM THAT THREAD. I don't believe that getting upset is warranted. If it's that important to you, you would have already read the book gone to see the movie. Your breying about a spoiler is only to appease your own self importance, and not actually about the spoiler at all. 2 Because the quality of a book movie shouldn't rely on the twist. Consider the following. I had Romeo and Juliet 'spoiled' by some troll in my middle school. I was bummed yes, but as I began reading it, I was so sucked into the narriative that I actually forgot they both die. I was uniquely suprised when I got to that scene. In fact, I sometimes will go back and watch different renditions of Romeo and Juliet and 'forget' all over again that both characters die. Episodes of Star Trek at times will have a quality narrative component like this as well. I can full well know that Jean Luc Picard ends up being turned into a Borg, and still be suprised when it happens albeit admittedly never AS suprised or tense the first time around . I believe creating a culture of what I will call spoiler shaming , that is, creating a culture where it is okay to be defensive or upset when someone unintentionally spoils a plot element, is actually lowering the quality of fiction. Serial shows, rely on the who will die this week or what happens next week element of fiction, which sells lots of merchandise, but doesn't create fiction that has quality elements of lasting replay value. So the situations in which I believe being upset about a spoiler is acceptable Intentional ruining of the twist for sheer pleasure through malice i.e. yelling Snape Kills Dumbledore , or telling a friend who is about to watch The 6th Sense that Bruce Willis is dead the whole time . Beyond that, spoiler tags on forums, spoiler alerts and the like are unnecessary, and the fact that we create a culture in which spoiler shaming is acceptable is actually lowering the quality of our works of fiction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Spoiler tags are unnecessary, and actually are degrading the quality of fiction.\n","id":"51d90aa6-e1d7-409a-8bcd-4ba3e375f322"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Due to the monetary funds spent, the lives endangered, and the ineffectiveness of most protests, protests are more harm than they are good. They have caused mass chaos in regions like the Middle East and are a waste of public resources in the form of police and riot control. Today's major protests like the Occupy protests may garner media attention, but the actual issue is not addressed. It only makes people angrier and angrier. This anger can lead to violence, causing more harm to not only the humans around them but people all around.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Protests cause more harm than good.\n","id":"e0b6c7b0-ae56-4028-b19d-1d1d03c2dac7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>in a national minimum wage<|ARGUMENT|>Without a minimum wage, the lowest paid members of society are relegated to effective serfdom, and their decisions of these members often force others to follow suit, accepting similarly low wages. There is no real freedom of choice for people at this lowest level of the social structure, since they must accept whatever wage is offered in order to feed themselves and their families. Their poverty and desperation for work makes it much more difficult for them to act collectively to bargain for better wages. The minimum wage frees people from this bondage and guarantees them resources with which to make meaningful choices.1 Without resources there can be no true choice, as all choices would be coerced by necessity. Because people\u2019s choices are intrinsically interconnected, and wages tend to reflect the prevailing pressures of demand and supply, when an individual makes the choice to work for less than anyone else, he necessarily lowers the wage that others can ask, leading to a downward spiral of wages as workers undercut one another, each competing to prove he is worth the least. A minimum wage ensures workers do not harm each other through self-destructive wage competition.2 What the minimum wage does to alleviate these problems is that it gives individuals the ability to pursue the good life, something that has become a global ideal. People want to be happy, and find that only way to obtain the resources necessary to attain comfort and security is through employment. Fundamentally, the minimum wage grants the freedom not to be exploited, giving individuals the freedom to control their own destinies. 1 Waltman, The Politics of the Minimum Wage, 2000 2 Hillman, Public Finance and Public Policy: Responsibilities and Limitations of Government, 2009<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The minimum wage provides a baseline minimum allowing people to embark freely in the pursuit of happiness\n","id":"194301a1-36b5-4866-a6a1-6a96cb1cc2f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When enough people show resistance to an idea, I have to think maybe I've got it wrong. But here's my thoughts x200B Premise 'Creativity' is very similar to magic illusions of magic by a magician . Once you know what's behind the curtain, the illusion disappears. x200B Definition I can agree with If your definition of creativity is someone who appears to come up with good solutions then I have no argument to that. That's fair. As long as we acknowledge it's an appearance, not a true phenomenon or ability or skill. Common definition I feel like the common definition of creativity, however, is that certain people possess something that allows them to think outside the box or connect the dots in a unique way, or spontaneously reach an idea from nowhere. It's not necessarily an on off switch, people have more creativity than others and some have less. x200B My thoughts reasoning 'proof' People who are believed to be creative, are usually not the ones giving themselves that title. Think of the most creative person who exists, do you have a quote of them ever saying they were 'creative' or had a creative thought idea? I'm guessing probably not. Now imagine someone who has at some point said they are creative and gives themselves the title of a creative person. I would be willing to bet that it's someone who enjoys 'art' and artistic disciplines, and not necessarily a person that fits your personal definition of 'creative'. EG yes they're good at drawing, they may play various instruments, and published a fiction novel, but you personally wouldn't think they're creative geniuses, just 'artistic'. Note I'm not trying to downplay any of these talents or make a generalisation, this is just an example . x200B The person you would personal label as the most creative person in the world, if you asked them to quantify their creativity or their work, would most likely respond with something extremely mundane. EG. The solution seemed obvious to them, they just decided what works after a bunch of trial and error, they put a lot of time into it, so on. x200B x200B I believe that if you see behind the scenes , the illusion completely breaks down. Let's take an example. For the sake of argument, let's say the most creative piece of work that you can think of is a Shakespeare play. If you found out, by some historical data, that a particular play you thought was genius and creative, was almost identical to an earlier play by another writer, mixed in with a specific poem from an earlier date, would you still believe that particular play was as 'creative'? You may argue that the idea to combine the poem and the earlier play was creative in itself, so let's push the analogy further. You now find out that the only play the author had ever seen, and the only poem he had ever read, was the two mentioned above. Combining their two favourite or only examples of work now seems quite obvious, does it not? x200B Okay so Shakespeare isn't your thing, and the example above doesn't resonate with you, you wouldn't pick that as the most creative thing in the first place. So as a more general example, choose whatever work you believe is the most creative and ask yourself, if there was an almost identical copy of it that came earlier, minus a few tweaks, would you attribute the creativity to the creator you know, or his her predecessor? I imagine most people would say the person who first came up with it who the famous person copied from is the truly creative one. If it was then revealed that this predecessor copied from another source plus some tweaks , then you'd have to once again push the attribute of 'creativity' back by one. And so on. x200B You probably agree with the above that if your favourite author writer, designer, artist, whatever was purely ripping off someone else's work that you didn't know about then they wouldn't be creative but you know that isn't the case . x200B So let's take an example where someone did do something seemingly creative by themselves. Are you in a position to judge how creative that was, without having their life experience and background in the subject? You haven't read every single book they have, you haven't seen all the same artwork, you haven't visited the same places, you haven't spoke to the same people. You do not know their influences, and for all you know if you had those identical life experiences, you would have also come up with the creative work. They themselves might not even be aware that the book they scanned through 20 years ago is partly responsible for seeding the idea they came up with. x200B Now you may argue that their ability to combine their knowledge and influences is where 'creativity' sits in the mix. But once again, you don't know the story that lead them to reaching their creative idea. x200B So a person, with some minimal outside influences, creates something that is new and 'creative'. Is that an example of true creativity? I'd argue not. If you break down the process the person had to get to this final product the one you see and you saw all of the intermediate steps, you would see that at no point was there a 'creative' moment. x200B If it was an engineer or inventor working on a specific problem, and you simply see the end result out of nowhere, you think wow that's creative, I would never have come up with that . But you then found out that this was the result of 10 years of practice, trial and error, and failed projects. The creative one is the one that people responded to the most, but he's tried 1000 others either unreleased iterations behind the scenes, or published ideas but ones that just went ignored . If you were in the same position, working on the same problem, with the same approach the approach you learned from the identical life experience he had , you would run into the same problems. Your solution to fix or avoid these individual problems would be the same as his solution, as you have the same life experience and can fall back on ideas you've learnt from elsewhere. Then this particular solution causes a handful of other problems you need to address, so the process repeats. You try some things, they don't work, you start to see the things that do work and focus on those, endlessly iterate through different combinations and tweak things based on the outcome ie. fixing problems or trying to improve areas . The final product you create is nothing like anything on the market, or any other released work. But where was the creativity? . Was it the moment you decided to take on the project? Was it the moment you came up with the last version of the product and published it? Was it that one particular idea solution that made the rest of the project easy? Was the 'creativity' a span of the 5 years you worked on this? x200B I believe that if you break down any 'creative' work and see behind the scenes, the creativity disappears completely and you find that each individual step was obvious. The culmination of all these steps may seem creative if you don't know the details, but the illusion goes away with more knowledge of the subject or the process taken to get there. x200B Why does this matter? I think it's important and not just an argument over semantics. People believe they can't do certain things because 'they aren't creative'. It gets used as an excuse or by a third party far more than it's used by the person doing the seemingly creative work. People act like there is this quantity in people's heads that they simply don't have. Almost everyone I've spoke to on the subject talks about creativity as if it really is a skill or ability that some people 'have more of' than others. x200B TL DR People saying I want to write a novel but I'm not creative enough is like saying I want to be a magician but I'm not magic . It's all illusions, and you can learn to create the illusions. Other people will label you as creative once you've done it, but you'll know the rabbit was just hiding up your sleeve. Creativity is a label that comes from ignorance. x200B x200B x200B I'd like to hear any counter arguments. I tried to address the type of counter arguments I could think of and ones I've heard before in response to this idea. I'm open to changing my mind with a logical rational argument, but I haven't found any. If you disagree with my points, I'd be interested to know your position on it too. EG. What part of the brain has creativity? Can creativity be learnt? Can a brute forcing computer be 'creative'? Can AI be 'creative'? What's the best example you can find of something 'creative' that you think can't be explained by my arguments above? x200B x200B x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe creativity is an illusion.\n","id":"a5d36321-d231-4d8e-b132-6ef60901218b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bitcoin Be Adopted As Legal Tender Worldwide?<|ARGUMENT|>Bitcoin has no intrinsic value Other currencies are backed and guaranteed by the countries that issue them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bitcoin is too volatile to be accepted as legal tender.\n","id":"6445d077-6e22-4387-adbd-62471f2cb11a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Skipping is the most underrated form of travel, and I will use the authority of experience, and the magic of truth to formulate and justify my argument. You shouldn't even try to change my view because what I speak is a truth manifested by the movement of all mankind throughout history. That said, it ain't easy defending skipping as the most underutilized, underappreciated, and underrated form of human travel due to it's ostracization throughout history. One quick example is noted in JRR Tolkien historic novella, Lord of the Rings, as the orcs, the bad guys, NEVER skip no citations needed . Not once. That's why they're so angry because they never experienced the magic of skipping. And that's why we went to war lack of skipping. If they had skipped into battle then they would've canceled the war altogether and ate lembas bread and watch Gandalf shoot fireworks. The middle ages would've be a better place. Therefore, skipping is more than just an efficient form of travel it's an opportunity to change ones lifestyle. The first lifestyle change lies in the efficiency of skipping, because you're using the power of science to momentum yourself around from Point A to Point B through Z Z because you saved so much energy from not running that you can actually go all places you couldn't go before . Dan Carlin of Hardcore History notes in his lesson on Alexander the Great that the armies would often times march at a constant pace, and eventually his men were bitter because they were so far from home. If they had skipped, they would've traveled THRICE as far and actually circled the globe and would've been back home already. Additionally, skipping helps the heart. It's more functional than other natural movements. Walking is lumberous, crawling hurts on sidewalk, moonwalking is too slow, and running makes you elitist and then you spend money on shoes and heartrate monitors and eventually you leave for some triathlete. But skipping would never do that, because skipping doesn't cheat. Skipping doesn't lie. Skipping doesn't hurt. Skipping is an opportunity to feel again. It lets you feel the wind upon your face after nights alone in the dark. Skipping let's you feel like you're going places and not stuck in second gear all the time. It let's you feel like there's more to life than just being left behind. Skipping makes you feel alive, again. Next in line for the True Facts Report on this vehicle of the human body is that skipping fills your body with joy. It's what the Grinch should've done to originally make his heart grow three sizes bigger, because it makes even the most curmudgeonly of folk feel better about life. A man once said, motion changes e motion. The body can't help but release chemicals whilst skipping, causing us to feel elation, euphoria, excitement, and excitement, and other e words. Lastly, it's contagious. You throw in a bit of whistling and some arm back and forth and you got yourself a regular ole ballyhoo that others will see as an opportunity to shed their blanket bitterness against life and actually do something to curb their frustrations. It's a physical activity that others can't help but join in, like a Conga Line or a spontaneous riot. Imagine the streets filled with skipping whistlers, with men who dream, with folks who actually care again. Men, women, and elderly locked arms and skipping, whistling show tunes and making life a better place to be. Not only is skipping the most underutilized and unappreciated form of human travel, but it's opportunity to be happy again, and that's why it's the most underrated form of travel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Skipping is the most underrated form of travel\n","id":"25e119ca-ec04-4fcf-af84-7b28e155da1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't see the point of it. It costs millions and doesn't get us anything besides random Africans and Arabs sitting around in government paid homes. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m not racist, but these people have no prospect to ever get a job if they are allowed to stay. They can\u2019t get a job and they can\u2019t get home, but we are required to pay for them. Why? Just because they showed up here? I don\u2019t see how my country is responsible for anything that happens kilometers away across the ocean, we never even had colonies. For me this is completely different from people coming to my country because they have prospects for a job and learn our language, no matter where these people come from. Edit My country is Austria if that matters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think my country should be taking refugees.\n","id":"aeb9aef0-6eb2-4715-8097-6014abc0807e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Foreign assistance is categorised as a state secret in China, which means there is minimal transparency about the motives of aid and how it is being spent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not every country should, or will want to, take aid from China.\n","id":"71c51860-3574-4965-9e86-8b841a96567c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pretty much everyone I've talked to knows Kanye West is a huge dick, but I know multiple people who still insist that he's a lyrical genius . I haven't heard anything by him that really stands out to me to prove that point. Can someone show me why so many people consider him so great? Can comparisons be made to any other great musicians from the past? If he isn't really that good, what does is say about the current music industry that Kanye is considered so great?Also to clarify, I'm purely referring to his music talents, so anything that has to do with his personal life is pretty irrelevant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kanye West is overrated and mediocre.\n","id":"d8ed1850-1d90-45e6-bdc5-0331e586a730"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Uniting people is the source of wars. The bloody wars are possible when rulers of some union of people start to see the lives of its people as an asset that could be sacrificed for other goals. Religion is not the only factor creating unity. Unnecessary conflicts between unions or individuals happen every time they fight with no gains and losses on both sides purely for emotional reasons, false convictions or only in case of unions personal gains of the decision maker.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions have been used as an excuse for conflict. If religions didn't exist, other excuses would arise by the elite.\n","id":"c9ca9a74-3fb1-4df3-b2ed-8b457f8bfa4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Art Made By Abusers Be Removed From Cultural Institutions?<|ARGUMENT|>Some art is so culturally-relevant that taking it away is removing the existence of that culture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of literature, music, and the visual arts would disappear.\n","id":"aeffa79f-0b73-41ed-9a3b-b94a6b513b78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>Research costs of an average $ 403 million per new drug are normal and need to be earned back.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Patents enable a monopoly for a given time and therefore reimburse companies for research costs.\n","id":"577737a1-857d-4506-a691-8d731bdbad50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a pessimist. I feel like a coin flip is pretty fair, oddly enough, but the indefinite unknown possibilities of interacting with others tend to have me considering the negative outcomes. If it wasn't for other people, it would be likely that I wouldn't have friends at all. I rarely start conversations with people I don't know, and even then its usually to gain information. In the sea of opinions, motivations, judgement, and availability I feel like I'm rolling at a minus to my have a nice conversation roll. My ears catch more bad news about people and their disdain for each other than they do good news. This is before we factor in personal modesty and lingering self esteem issues from childhood. So why should I bother with meeting new people at all? I don't know who they are, how they were raised, why they're where they are, what they think about anything in particular, or how they would feel if they knew all of those things about me. I'm the type that would be more interested in asking my friends why we're friends than just being friends. I'll stop here before I end up hitting the character limit, because I could go on for a while.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social interaction is chaotic and therefore bad.\n","id":"9ab3c72c-94db-4143-b2d0-b55a40af920d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>The US government may only take away property from an individual under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution if 'just compensation' is awarded. This recognises that private rights to ownership exist as part of a legal framework that lies outside the Constitution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Individuals are entitled to use their private property for whatever purpose they want. Airbnb is merely facilitating fulfilment of this right.\n","id":"9463d742-e572-4a07-aa08-a00e3b3a0a47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Castration of sex offenders<|ARGUMENT|>Castration is an easy out in some ways for imprisoned sex offenders who would rather take their chances with castration than stay in jail, and, though, who might commit more sex crimes in the future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many offenders will seek castration merely to get out of jail.\n","id":"0e3cde25-bd5f-4bda-819c-8703756f7fad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>Instead of selecting candidates based on the policies they advocate, voters select them for other reasons, among them party affiliation or even appearance. Once a favorite candidate has been chosen, \"voters often adopt that candidate's policy views\" Lenz, p. 18<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In fact, elections exacerbate the impact of irrationality as they involve decisions about people rather than subject matter and are influenced by all the sympathies and antipathies that make inter-human relations hardly rational.\n","id":"2e658867-7c7e-4a66-9c16-9c9bf2338036"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Artificial General Intelligence AGI a threat to humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Experts caution that AI technology has seen rapid development in some areas, but that we are still far away from anything that resembles Artificial General Intelligence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most experts believe that AGI is a long way away.\n","id":"46e5cc7e-7292-43c4-bc8a-195b26c47234"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>The USSR was dysfunctional and ultimately failed after only 69 years A single European republic\/state could suffer the same fate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a grouping of smaller nations, the USE will not be a durable construction.\n","id":"2190c336-3d69-42ab-8e11-2024dc65d749"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently in America the vote of a rural person is more valuable than the vote of a city dweller. The electoral college and it's equivalent in other countries attempts to balance population with geography. After all, if USA national votes were solely based on population rural areas would become completely unimportant and unrepresented. I think a similar problem exists in age disparity. Particularly in aging counties where the population is getting older, the elderly have vastly more voting power than the youth. I don't think this is inherently bad but often times policies that are created with this type of voter base favor the elderly and are short termed. I think one of the core featues of a government should be to ensure security for it's citizens in the future and a long term view is important. This is particularly relevant in environmental issues. Often times the effects of bad environmental policy aren't felt for decades later by the generation that was in their 20's when it was decided. In short I think vote weight should be adjusted to advantage those who will be effected by the long term decisions made as the younger generations will have to reap consequences sown while the elderly won't be around to feel the effects and it's often more attractive for them to apply an instant fix which only pushes the problem further down the road so someone else will have to deal with it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The value of a younger person's vote should be valued more than an older person's vote\n","id":"5b6caf9b-2906-4aeb-ac11-ea8b33329584"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Religions don't move with the times and dont adapt, keeping people anchored to archaic views, which will often go unchallenged<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion promotes the adherence to outdated ideologies that exclude people based on societal norms that no longer apply.\n","id":"475a1ea1-d296-4751-93bf-733799270450"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the mass shootings that we suffer in the USA it seems that people take sides between mental illness, which is largely a crutch for not wanting to create and pass gun control legislation, and common sense gun control which, according to the statistics isn't common sense in that it targets a very, very small percentage of the gun violence but makes for good talking points. If we really want to legislate our way out of this mess, I say that we may have to rethink not only the second amendment, but the first and fourth as well. I am all in on new gun laws, or even a repeal and replace of the second amendment to reflect modern day technology. I want to preserve the hunting culture. But we also need to make people feel secure in their homes first and foremost before we start going after the weapons that people buy for self defense. And we need to stop political extremists before they engage in violence. So what does that mean? First, we need to give federal funding and broad federal power to investigate web sites, apps, and chat rooms where extremists tend to gather. The federal government seized a web site because prostitutes advertised there but seemed to do nothing about a web site where multiple mass shooters posted their extremist views and celebrated murders. No matter what legislation is passed, the mass shootings will continue as long as the shooters have a community to trade hate and, eventually, be celebrated as a hero when they kill. To stop the spread of mass shootings, we must stop the free communication among political extremists who share political views that will likely end in violence. This may also be extended into gang communications, though the effect will be mitigated because gang members can communicate face to face. For the second amendment, even if we pass laws banning assault style weapons we miss the guns most often used in gun violence. If we are going to have common sense gun control, isn't it common sense to also go after the guns that cause the most violence? Shouldn't we have broad powers to prosecute those who own illegal guns? Should not gang affiliation itself be a reason to prevent gun ownership? If we cannot get the guns out of the hands of the violent offenders who cause most of the gun violence, we are not going to succeed at getting law abiding citizens to give up their guns. Yet every proposal seems to only target mass shootings, which actually is a subset of the problem. Finally, we need to redefine what is an unreasonable search and seizure. If somebody ends up on the no gun list, which should be a very expansive list, then I am just fine with police searching their person and their property if the person is detained for any reason. This is particularly true if the person is on the no gun list due to gang ties or ties to an extremist group or web site. I don't think either party has the answer because both sides just seem to be offering solutions that play to an audience but, by themselves, are essentially useless.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To combat gun violence in the United States, we might have to dig deeper than just altering our perception of the second amendment.\n","id":"4f4d4873-382f-442f-a1b4-4c1af88bd7f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Current minimum wage is simply not enough to live independently on, and I don't think anyone should be forced to live in dependence on others or taxpayers simply because they can't find a job that pays enough. If you want to work and you do work, there's no reason you shouldn't make enough to house, feed, and clothe yourself with some extra money for the non necessities that are simply the marks of the modern, civilized world. Having a TV and computer with internet, cell phone, indoor heating cooling, a car, going to the movies once in a while, taking vacations once or twice a year, etc. If the minimum wage is raised 100 , that means 50 or more of the workforce would need to get laid off to see overall negative consequences. It's simply not going to happen, and as the people who do keep jobs bring in more money, more jobs will slowly be created, and those new jobs will also be livable. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the recent movement in favor of a $15 minimum wage in the US is a great idea,\n","id":"de069b4e-21af-4470-968b-88729a247d66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>White individuals have often been accused of enabling 'colour blindness which is a form of casual racism and is used to drown out the voices of women of colour.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Historically, women of colour and their narratives have often been silenced by white women.\n","id":"102ed840-272f-419a-9998-6a8cb52196e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>the hula hoop i envision would have 3 or so blades on the side of the hula hoop, the blades will be strong enough to cut through bone 1 the hula hoop requires no ammo, guns require ammo otherwise it'll be a metal stick and you can't have unlimited amounts of ammo like in the movies. to be successful with guns, you need head shots, otherwise you are just wasting bullets. hula hooping only requires the momentum of your hips and imagine your sexy waistline abs after . 2 swords are almost as great as the blade swinging hula hoop but i will assume you have 2 swords handling swords require you to always check your back because if 100 zombies are closing in on you in a circle, you would need to spin in a circle or else you'll die 3 melee weapons spears,clubs,bats are worse than swords, no competition for my hula hoop but what if you are pinned to a wall, you can't use your hula hoop then. oh yeah? now my hula hoop becomes a weapon where i poke zombies with its blades imagine a short thrusting knife once i get enough room i start spinning my hula hoop just because you can cut a zombie in half by its waist doesn't mean it dead, it will crawl and bite your legs. oh yeah? have you seen amazingly talented hula hoopers they can move hula hoops all around their bodies, from their neck to their ankles while the hula hoop is still spinning of course and if you are really paranoid of your legs, spin not 1 but 2 even 3 ,depends on how tall you are hula hoops at the same time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the best weapon to have during a zombie apocalypse is a hula-hoop with blades on the end\n","id":"4f8a9ea0-56c4-4230-b59f-c15607831e93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It would be nice to have my view changed here, because it's much easier to get along in society if you dress well. But I just can't get past the idea that I'm being manipulated by clothing companies into using consumption as a means of identity. People always say that they use clothes as a way to express themselves, but it seems like a lot of the time they are actively trying to imitate someone else's aesthetic, or they're subconsciously affected by how actors or artists dress in media and advertisements. How can you really consider clothing as a means of showing your true self when it's so wrapped up in celebrity and consumer culture?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fashion as a means of \"self-expression\" is mostly inauthentic and aspirational, mostly driven by advertising and celebrity culture\n","id":"394c1865-f8b9-4ef3-bd3c-722754dd47ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>we should make education compulsory to degree level<|ARGUMENT|>PwC estimates that reducing the level of 20-24 year olds not in employment, education or training to the same level as Germany would add \u00a345 billion to the economy. This policy would have exactly this outcome1; being mandatory it would reduce the number of NEETS up to age 21 further than this. However this benefit to the economy through greater participation is only the start. Higher skilled jobs have higher wages. The value of a degree compared to not having one is estimated at being around \u00a3200,000 for the graduate over the course of a lifetime, and even for those who miss out on a first or second class degree result it is over \u00a3100,000.2 With this is a commensurate increase in standard of living; they can afford a bigger house, more holidays, better food. And perhaps more importantly are much less likely to be unemployed and forced into poverty. 89.7% of recent graduates are employment compared to 79.8% of their peers without a degree.3 This of course has knock on benefits on health, government spending, prospects for children and so on. The benefits derived from further education are substantial and justify making it mandatory. 1 \u2018Getting more young people into work, education or training could add \u00a345 billion to UK GDP\u2019, PwC, 26 October 2016, 2 Matthews, David, \u2018Graduate premium is nearer \u00a3200,000 says new report\u2019, Times Higher Education, 15 August 2013, 3 \u2018Employment rates of recent graduates\u2019, Eurostat, July 2016,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Benefit from the increase in skills through their standard of living\n","id":"f13c48b2-0100-48e9-b54a-6ce1027f239d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By now everyone wants to live like Americans. We have billions of people buying electronics, cars, countless everyday items, and using systems like industrial farms, factories, military equipment, transportation and homes all made or built directory from oil. There is no replacement for oil or diesel cars with a feasible return amount of energy all the paints, manufacturing, tires and transportation is oil based . The electric batteries are made from precious metals that America's enemies have or from underdeveloped countries. The charging systems has depleting returns and is copper based which would take trillions to run. The farms we have are fertilized, insecticide, transported, refrigerated from oil and are about to become dust bowls or the amount of co2 and feces had contaminated the environment. Basic electricity has only alternative being wind and solar which is made from plastics from petroleum and requires certain conditions to use which we can't transport without diminished return. Even if we could live like our ancestors from the 18th century we are still fucked from climate change. We could have stopped it 20 or 10 years ago but even if everyone lived at optimum performance it wouldn't save us. The current leased oil will release 2000 gigatons of co2 and we can only release about 555 gigatons for a post apocalyptic mad max society. We will have mass migration, plague, famine, sea levels destroy 90 percent of population centers within 100 miles of the ocean, storms able to tear down whole cities and the extinction of most animals. The last time there was this amount of co2 in the air humans didn't exist, trees were the size of red woods and oceans were 800 feet higher. There is no hope.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern society will collapse in 15 years and humans will be extinct by 2100. Tesla is a wet dream and Elon Musk gets worshipped for no reason.\n","id":"0e6e5406-bee0-416f-91f1-58b05b289089"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I can't deal with it, I'm trying to use logic but it seems I'm incapable to see why someone who's in his right mind would vote for Donald Trump. I don't know if there's something about a major lack of education or a really strong wish for going backwards in history in the US. From an outsider perspective, this guy represents at least ideologically everything that is wrong in human and modern civilization. Now I'm reading about this Bernie Sanders and his propositions, and I can't understand why anyone with a bit of common sense and who wants the US to achieve some kind of development as a nation won't vote for him. I see that guy as the only option. EDIT Whoa A lot of interesting and insightful answers. I think I have a better picture of these two guys now. Trump I see Trump's figure is being manipulated strongly by the media, with much of his comments being taken out of context. He's saying a lot of things that many americans want to hear. Apparently there's a difference between his show figure and his actual positions, which are considered pretty traditionally American by many of you. And a lot of comments refer to Trump's business achievements as something positive, skills that would be reflected in the country if he's elected. I sense there's a feeling of overall dissatisfaction with Obama, may be helped by the social media. I can't help but think that Trump's biggest strenght is pretty much being a big anti Obama reaction in many ways politically, socially and economically. Bernie Many of you said that you like Bernie's positions and that much of them should be good for the people, but the problem is they're pretty much utopic or unrealistic. Others stated that his vision of the economy would harm America and that the fact that he doesn't have real achievements in politics or comparing to Trump, in any business at all, is something pretty negative. The bottom line as I see it and that it was pointed out by some of you is that both of them are running heavily ideological campaigns, which makes them very similar characters, each in their own way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a non-american, I see Trump as a total regression for the US and Bernie Sanders the total opposite.\n","id":"eb27e2f9-12a5-447c-afe2-1cef857b180e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we have a single global language?<|ARGUMENT|>There are lots of examples of words only existing in one language. For example; the word 'Hiraeth' in Welsh means a longing \/ nostalgia for someone\/something\/somewhere. It doesn't have an equivalent in any other language.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Words cannot translate perfectly across different populations, due to diversity of lived experience and lexical needs.\n","id":"5c34888d-68f8-4272-b887-666cab737ee8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obama said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be crossing a line and that the US would do something about it. The UN believes that chemical weapons should not be legal . This whole idea seems silly to me. I get that these weapons can maim and kill many people at once, in an extremely cruel way, but why make chemical weapons illegal? It's okay to set off bombs sending shrapnel into people, but use a chemical and it's suddenly time to take action against it? If the US enters the war in Syria, why should it be over the use of one type of weapon, when both sides have killed many thousands using conventional weaponry?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the use of chemical weapons should NOT be a red line,\n","id":"09873c50-4068-468f-a400-4316209a02fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Monogamy vs Polygamy: Is the Norm of Monogamy Regrettable?<|ARGUMENT|>Recognizing the possibility of choosing non-monogamous relationships could avoid the problems of infidelity within the couples.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monogamous relationships are often very satisfying and provide both partners with security, trust, and intimacy.\n","id":"726efba8-2059-4e70-a4ad-181d0747154c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the human body is just an ecosystem, well organised by the brain which works by just programming these individual cells to do tasks for the greater good of the entire body. I believe that if you were to completely deconstruct and reconstruct a human being they would be the same. If Human A had every single structure of his individual cells with all the required extras copied down and this includes the memory cells and destroyed, but then recreated perfectly as Human A Mk. II then Human A and Human A Mk. II would be perfectly the same. I believe a soul is not required and non existent for the purposes of human continuation. I think that to survive, evolution and mutation has been thinned down by natural selection to eventually leave the perfect answer for survival. Cooperation between cells for the greater good of the survival for all of the cells involved. This makes sense to me because in our brain we have everything someone may attribute to a soul. Some examples are personality, memory, abstract thought even this question counts and feelings. We can see how people's minds work better now and can see where everything fits in our head so I wonder what a soul is used for I believe souls are simply bad explanations for things we don't didn't understand now yet on humans. I believe this also is the case for religion too. In addition, I believe this is also the reason there is no purpose or meaning of life. We are just here because of this process. I also believe that religion was made up to answer questions we just didn't have the capabilities to answer. For the Ancient Egyptian Kemetics and the Aztecs they did not know how the Sun rose and set every day and night. Thus, they invented religion to explain this, and they came up with Gods that made the Sun rise and set. Now we know that this is untrue, we don't accept this as a valid belief anymore, however there are other things we can't yet answer The purpose of why we or life is here and the meaning of it What is insert unknown What happens after we die The big one Is there a God Sort of Meta to the religion aspect Some turn to religion for this but I believe we shouldn't rest at this. We should find solid hard facts both proving and disproving religious answers and finding alternate answers too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Souls and Religions are\/were made up to answer questions we don't\/didn't understand\n","id":"6381c764-8f6c-4111-a53a-5c67931f7cd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>simplify the English Language<|ARGUMENT|>Words that carry cultural backgrounds often carry specific meanings which align with their seemingly odd spelling or pronunciation. The cultural background to words such as \u201cFebruary\u201d are more than simply an inconvenience. They form an essential part of our cultural history that would be instantly erased were the language to be changed. If anything, these words are made more memorable because of their historical background - the fact that they are spelt in an unusual and seemingly illogical way can, if the teaching method is good enough, be used to help people remember both the word and its etymological background. Especially in the case of words with historical backgrounds it is surely important that they are preserved and taught, just as any other historical event or artefact should be preserved and learnt from. The very meanings of the words would also be altered if the spelling was changed - in an article in The Times, Libby Purves points out that \u201cthe prime purpose of language is to convey meaning: a lawyer\u2019s tort is neither taut nor taught, nor a restaurateur\u2019s torte\u201d1. Words do not conform to general rules often because they mean something different to a word which sounds the same. 1 Purves, 'Proposturos! Words wud lose there meening', 2008,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There would be significant cultural consequences to consider, the English language has evolved over a very long time, and to change it just to make it \u2018easier\u2019 would in fact complicate matters in many cases.\n","id":"6512bef1-8e1a-41c8-a3f7-02043b41859c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should pet stores only sell dogs and cats from shelters?<|ARGUMENT|>Puppy mills also separate new-borns from their mothers, which contributes to an increased risk of disease and a lack of socialization and habituation for the puppies and kittens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inbreeding and puppy mills have resulted in certain breeds of dogs developing genetic and behavioural disorders.\n","id":"250f1380-6e96-4a4a-938e-f02e9a0f5cf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Central church authorities are likely to be more moderate because they most likely will require consensus from a large cross section of the religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Large religions mean that central, likely more moderate religious authorities, can check extremist groups within the religion.\n","id":"59ba4c5f-e99f-4c18-84fa-0ae28986040e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>At any point in our life, if we were told \"you are going to die today\", its like that most would choose to live one more day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not death, inherently, which gives life meaning, but rather challenge and growth.\n","id":"c252123e-c2d1-49c6-bfeb-eed89e570c57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Weapons are not solving any violence issue, but are actually creating more. Edit Thanks u hypnotichooves for this interesting link<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe people should not be allowed to own\/use weapons and that US weapon policy is wrong,\n","id":"f446f9e9-4dcd-4e54-8d6c-650410c80bff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU is blamed for high taxes but the EU does not set national tax rates. The EU sets minimum tax rates and the UK rates are above that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU has been used as a scapegoat for the failure of UK domestic politics. Leaving does not address the problem.\n","id":"2beaf642-b755-4a4e-ba0d-c2e35515beff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>In April, 2003, the unemployment rate of disabled people which include the mentally disabled in Germany was higher at 14.6% in comparison to that of non-disabled people at 10.8%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In a study in Germany 63.3% of employers reported they would pass over the application of someone with mental health problems in favour of another applicant. pg 280\n","id":"41f1b5c8-f614-40e7-879d-f25c793cade1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tourism Benefits The Country<|ARGUMENT|>The multiplier effect of spending works through the economy to sustain levels of employment and increase labour market flexibility. If local people are employed in the industry then they are more likely to accept the demands tourists make.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The multiplier effect of spending works through the economy to sustain levels of employment and incr...\n","id":"04b4b71a-6272-4cfb-813e-cc9c2cb60f04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My girlfriend's roommate is a Kindergarten teacher in a very large US City who came home practically sobbing because of one of the kids in her class. The kid's mother insists he doesn't act up at home, but the teacher has called her multiple times about her son's behavior. She can't take away recess from kids. She can only send them to the office for 20 minutes at a time. She's not allowed to take pictures or videos of the kids but she showed us pictures videos of the kid that day breaking into drawers, throwing stuff, yelling, rolling up carpets, etc . Attempts to discuss the kid with admins are shrugged off. The teacher is very upset because the other kids have complained that they can't learn and some are beginning to follow suit of the shitty kid. I know this is one example, but her school isn't even among the worst, and it isn't as if teachers inability to control students, despite their wishes to, is surprising. We've all heard about terrible parents, helicopters, complaining about grades etc. I've had the fortune of going to private schools my entire life though perhaps that is more due to growing up in one of the worst public school districts in the country . One of the effects of that is that they could discipline you as they saw fit. If you acted shitty, you missed recess, had to call your parents, had to write on the chalkboard, had to stay in the office, got yelled at, etc. Public schools, of course, are another matter and it seems like teachers, the very people entrusted with educating the future, are powerless to do their jobs properly. So tell me, is our educational system that fucked because of shitty parents, shitty kids, and shitty administrators, or is it really not that bad? . Edit This was interesting, but prolonged discussion didn't really change anything. The semantics of my view appeared to be discussed more than my view itself or any opposing view. To quote u yertles, Anecdotal evidence trumps no evidence at all. Burden of proof isn't going to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"American public school teachers have lost the power to control their classrooms due to crippling bureaucracy, terrible parenting, legal repercussions, and gutless\/careless administrators, and that is a huge problem in our educational system.\n","id":"381efc37-7575-4d8f-9d1b-4befbd7cacdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I started this debate with another redditor in an other subreddit, but he has since stopped replying. My argument first began on a post about why killing animals isn't wrong. His reasoning is that humans have a cognitive ability that animals due not. While I can agree that the average human had a higher standard of rational than any other animals, certain individuals comatose or mentally handicapped that dont meet the threshold and have lesser cognitive abilities than some animals. Its a kind of popular argument marginal cases. In other words, if we were to define a threshold of moral consideration, there is no way we can include all humans without excluding some animals. Now of course you can just bite the bullet and say that comatose patients and the mentally handicapped are not worthy of moral consideration, but I'll have to ask you put this belief into practice. Another argument that seems to be made is that human beings are worthy of moral consideration solely for the fact that they are human beings. Now I've not been convinced of this because no one has provided an objective reason why why should put human beings on another level. Anyways, give me an objective threshold of what animal can be considered worthy of moral consideration. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Currently, there has been no threshold established about wether humans are the only animals worthy of moral consideration while excluding all other animals\n","id":"75b89ac2-ac6b-4538-867a-39254e4259b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>Many crimes face constantly changing societal views and in some cases are no longer even considered crimes, for example sodomy and adultery, so it does not make sense to permanently disenfranchise someone. The legal system is fluid, and permanent punishments are incongruous with that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As the definition of a felony is open to interpretation, permanent felony disenfranchisement is in effect an arbitrary punishment.\n","id":"fc38b38a-f0b6-4ede-83ec-0287c60b9062"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Feminism & sex for fun: does hedonistic sexuality benefit feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>Single mother households have been on the rise since the 1950s concurrent and in line with the Sexual Liberation Movements push to decouple sex and marriage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hedonistic sexuality has led to a great many single mothers.\n","id":"ff29dab3-5b23-4da2-a88d-133d5aef903e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Marriage Equality Mean Eliminating Marriage Licenses And Tax Deductions?<|ARGUMENT|>A proper separation of church and state is required so that the religious beliefs of some are not prioritised at the expense of others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If marriage is an inherently religious institution, then the government has absolutely no business regulating it.\n","id":"1ce54dfe-e06a-4f2d-b911-fc272b115524"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Racial Profiling Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Police often operates on a \"Us vs Them\" mentality in which law enforcement often believes that they're making the hard choices and putting their lives on the line; something that normal civilians are unable to do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Law enforcers are a tightly knit community operating under high pressure circumstances. The peer approval they get while conducting racial profiling is adequate grounds for it being legitimate to them.\n","id":"99adf291-4125-4257-b17e-af8d593578b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just can't think of any reasons to start dating someone. I mean, obviously, I want to have an SO that loves me, but I haven't found anyone that even comes close to what I'm looking for. I just don't think the eventual rejection by someone, or me rejecting them, is worth all the pomp and circumstance of dating. I suppose it's really just freeriding for the present me, since in the long run, I want someone to spend time with, but in the short run, there seems to be an insurmountable amount of obstacles to dating that you need to get over. Going out and meeting people, taking time away from studying, etc. Seems like a lot for a really small window of possibility for reward. I've never even dated anyone, and I feel like it's too late for me to start.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that it's not even worth it to date.\n","id":"8e737127-44d4-4ed9-8d9d-47f7489d09a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>All law in all times creates freedom and security for it is in the nature of civil law to govern relations between individuals. This always includes certain rules that give freedom to one party but also secure the other, e.g. when there is the freedom to nullify a contract or the security that this is not happening.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Germany's general law and a force to execute it is necessary to create a condition of freedom and security.\n","id":"900dc2d0-f14f-460c-8f2e-59cca17e3a79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>If there is a God he won't have overlooked the morals the bible does. Remember the story A man on a roof in a flood who waits for God to save him and turns down three forms of salvation before drowning. Then God tells him that he sent those three. Religion has ignored much that it could have seen as messages from God over the last 1800 years. There's been more than a rowboat, a motorboat and a helicopter in that time but religion is still not seeing the signs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The bible ends in 68AD at the end of Revelations, and was finished by Apostle John in 95AD at least 1804 years before any currently living person was born. Nothing was added when we learnt to treat women and men equally, nor when we learnt that cowering is not \"yes\" and \"no\" is relevant in marriage, nor when we learnt to treat each others' sexual preferences equally.\n","id":"1c7687bf-e5e3-471e-9c45-53a5b1b8a85a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>White people colonized Asia by setting up trading companies and government regimes that exploited people in what are now the nations of India, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, and others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"White people colonized every continent on Earth and subjected the natives of every inhabited land to capitalist domination.\n","id":"c7fc77d1-aba9-4bc7-9a3d-2bbf63457279"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The other day I was discussing with my dad how Obama wasn't the worst President of all time and how Dubya's reign had a large number of fuckups and inactions, and it got me thinking about how Dubya's first few months of being President did not go well at all. He was regarded as a buffoon and an imbecile and that his family and or the Republican party and or the Bilderberg Illuminati Freemasons or whatever conspiracy you want to subscribe to had to rig the Florida elections to get him into the White House in the first place. With this in mind, Dubya was seen as extremely weak, and even had intelligence that there were hostile entities looking to attack important targets using hijacked planes, which Dubya ignored while drumming up support for an invasion of Iraq which he had already begun to seek even before being inaugurated . I believe that it was this weakness, ignorance, and preoccupation with Iraq that opened the door for the hijackers to commit the actions against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as Flight 93, and that Al Gore or anyone else would have acted on the intelligence that Dubya ignored, thu preventing or at least delaying the 9 11 attacks. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe 9\/11 would not have happened if Al Gore were elected President.\n","id":"bf53a741-570e-4447-83fc-464bf8332ea6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>Hillary Clinton, who is generally accepted to be a member of the mainstream feminism movement, denounced Bernie Sanders\u2019s Medicare-for-all plan, and inaccurately implied that it would dismantle existing health care programs and leave people uninsured.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The 2016 presidential campaign highlighted the many ways in which mainstream feminism pursues policies that run counter to the interests of women of colour.\n","id":"92442f83-3c21-432a-bdbd-1f5ecfd3f261"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let's be honest, comparing apples to oranges is actually pretty easy, oranges are far superior in many ways Most oranges have a stronger flavor than most apples, it's fairly easy to find an orange so sweet yet tart, that the flavor is almost overpowering, I don't think I've ever had an apple that was as strong as the average orange Oranges have a higher liquid content, while a large percentage of apples will be too dry Oranges are segmented, you don't have to slice them up like an apple, talk about convenience Apple hassle Oranges? More like no core anges With an apple you end up with even more hassle in the form of a core, who wants a fruit that leaves you with responsibilities? The apple eating experience is sub par, especially if you don't pre slice it. Unless you cut it up before eating, you have to chomp into the whole thing like a stupid dumb horse. The skin gets stuck in your teeth and slices up your gums, if I wanted slices in my gums I would eat staples. Apples Staples If you eat the whole thing, you have to decide when to stop. The conclusion of an apple is unsatisfying, it just gets weirder and less flavorful and then you eventually have to decide to stop eating. You don't finish an apple, you give up on it. And then you ask yourself should I have eaten more of that apple? Am I a terrible person for throwing 3 grams of edible fruit away? And have you ever heard of a color called 'apple'? Didn't think so Another point for oranges Oh and I almost forgot, oranges don't turn brown a minute after you open them. I probably forgot that part because why the heck is that a thing? What kind of crappy fruit would do that? Apples would do that. Apples crapples Whoever invented the apple should be fired, we need to make room for more orange ventors Oranges gt gt gt Apples<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Oranges are significantly better than apples\n","id":"02d5d4c3-67b9-43e5-9feb-387015797bee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Right now the Republicans have a stranglehold on the American Government. They have power that is not proportional to the number of people they represent. They do not want to address the most important issue in the history of mankind Climate Change . As a whole the Republican Party is complicit in all of the actions of the President because he is the leader of the Party and the rest refuse to hold him accountable for his behavior. Unless they change, anyone voting for or supporting any Republican is committing an immoral act. This feels like a fairly extreme stance and I have many Republican friends. It would be very convenient for me if this strong stance could become more moderate and less nuts. So Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is morally wrong or even evil to vote for or support any Republican in the present circumstances.\n","id":"6c7e64c2-ad15-41ea-a3fc-a015b44b3681"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>China's increasingly pressing social issues require an enormous amount of investment, making it difficult for them to also shoulder the cost of being a global power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China simply can not afford to become a global power.\n","id":"731ff408-5c9b-4e87-903d-3f5f85df5cf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Climate Change Be Reversed?<|ARGUMENT|>Fracking releases methane into the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas that is 86 times worse than CO2 at trapping heat<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain activities are creating even higher demands on resources than ever before.\n","id":"89326469-a5a5-44a8-b0cb-1a793b5f0da8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Alcohol ban<|ARGUMENT|>It is also true that tax revenues would be lost if alcohol were banned. However, again, this is not a principled reason to reject the proposition, simply a practical problem. It should be pointed out that governments would save a huge amount of money on police and health spending through the reduction in crime and alcohol-related illness which would go at least some of the way to offsetting the decreased tax revenues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alcohol should be banned\/restricted on principal; tax revenue is a practicality.\n","id":"b0752791-6807-4e30-a6cd-610f30d64a72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>If people feel that their tax money is propping up oppressive regimes, they may feel less supportive of aid efforts in general and vote to cut foreign aid across the board, which would hurt both democratic and non-democratic regimes that benefit from aid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tying development assistance to a free democratic basic order is the strong preference of the majority of donor countries' citizens. As they are the ones who have to fund development aid, taxpayers' opinion should be seriously taken into consideration.\n","id":"96377798-3dfc-4fa4-ad3a-426cf3826ac9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it critically important for high quality educational experiences that all students learn to arrive on time?<|ARGUMENT|>For students who find it difficult to concentrate, or those who suffer from nervous health issues, this noise and movement can cause problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When students unpack their stuff, the noise and movement this produces easily become a distraction for others.\n","id":"b1e46c19-9b57-4329-bcba-0e7afdff2f3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people try and equate domain investing to real estate investing, but I don't believe that to be a fair comparison. Real estate is still viable and useful while being owned by an individual. People are able to use them, and be productive while they're using them. A domain that's being held for future sale is of no value to anyone. Often times, they serve as a landing page full of ads so owners can make a few cents off them while they're waiting to sell them for 100x what they paid for. Because of the limited spectrum of domains, holding them without intent of use shouldn't be allowed. At the same time of course, you shouldn't be able to just grab a domain someone else has without limitation. I'd propose a system in which if the domain is not being used for an actual purpose other than reselling ad farming and has been registered at least 1 year, then someone should be able to purchase the domain for up to 5x it's original cost. I'm genuinely open to hearing some differing opinions on this. Everything I've found in articles online seem to be written by domain investors who obviously have a very biased view towards the current system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should not be able to purchase thousands of domain names for the sole purpose of reselling them. If you have a domain and it remains unused, it should be able to be purchased for up to 5x how much you originally paid for the domain. No more than that.\n","id":"17bd6a3a-4805-49bc-b036-7344b51c6b5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think the United States needs to pass a constitutional amendment to address voter suppression and gerrymandering. I think the best system would be one that has compulsory voting to prevent the paradox of voting, prevent demagoguery, and prevent voter suppression and proportional representation for the house party list for each state . However I think that system would be difficult to pass, so alternatively I want a system where there's a standardized federal voter ID and registration, a significant increase of polling stations to reduce lines, and a non partisan Congressional district drawing system I think this is particularly important right now, because I think there is a significantly increasing incentive for gaming the electoral system due to demographic changes, and this might threaten the future of American democracy. I think this needs to be a constitutional amendment because I think these issues are very critical for the continuation of democracy. The American political system is in trouble and needs to have a public renewal via an amendment, and this needs to not be able to be changed by later administration<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the United States needs to pass another constitutional amendment to make elections more fair\n","id":"40969c1d-4f63-45c7-8bec-d3cbb6dae1f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The freedom of speech is an example. If a government deems it unsafe for the people to hear about certain points of view, and labels those who hold and share that view as criminals, then it could quickly turn into a tyrannical government that would have \"justification\" to kill a large portion of its people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should never be a question of if the State trusts its People. It should only ever be a question if the People trust their State.\n","id":"b0612759-21d3-4b0b-b216-3618285c024f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I called my grandmother for her birthday the other day. I had not spoken to her since Christmas. We aren't very close, and she doesn't cross my mind in my day to day life. When we were talking the other day, she mentioned how she thinks about me often and wishes I would call her more. I laughed it off, but she kept bringing it up again, as if to say it were entirely my responibility to maintain our correspondence. It put a little damper on the otherwise pleasant conversation but, as of right now, I don't feel I've done anything wrong. Please change my view. For those that will argue that the older generation, on average, isn't as familiar with modern technology email, cell phones, etc. , I will remind you that the land line telephones and regular post mail that the older generation grew up with still work just fine. EDIT The two major arguments I'm hearing are 1 I'm busier than she is so it makes more sense for me to call when it's convenient for me. This is easily solved by voicemail, email, or writing a letter. 2 We owe a debt to the older generation because they took care of us growing up. Well, right off the bat, my grandmother and I live in the United States and a good chunk of my paycheck goes to Social Security and Medicare. I believe, as a person, I'm obligated to be civil when treated civilly. I am always courteous in my conversing with my grandmother. If anything were to happen in her to the point that she would require my help , meaning difficulty moving furniture, getting around, etc., I would be happy to help. But she doesn't require my help to pick up a phone or write an email. This is something she is more than capable of doing herself and has decided it is not her responsibility, while complaining about it. My view remains the same so far. Tradition is not a good reason for doing anything in my opinion. Edit2 coffeemanic gets the delta. Thank you all for your opinions. Have a great day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think it is the responsibility of the younger generation to maintain contact with the older generation\n","id":"bee7e9c4-5fe4-4de5-b252-a12d5931cf14"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Private companies run the risk of taking sides; given the size and scope of many such companies, this could in itself be inflammatory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Internet companies are the wrong actors to decide which speech should be censored.\n","id":"4ae8169f-c441-4d15-b8a5-90cab39517ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should close Guantanamo Bay detention camp<|ARGUMENT|>Circumventing the law by building detention camps off of US soil makes a mockery of the very institutions America is trying to protect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Guantanamo bay detention camp harms the US image\/reputation\/institutions\n","id":"0d12f6db-ddf9-45c1-b007-3c7738e04e26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Hospitals were founded, financed, and staffed by religions. An old French term for hospital is ho\u0302tel-Dieu, \"hostel of God.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Before modern states could provide welfare, religion was the only source of education, healthcare or economic relief.\n","id":"4eb3b792-4545-4b1e-8936-1fdbff7000f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Contrary to popular belief I think that promiscuous heterosexual males tend to be just around average attractiveness with there being a threshold of attractiveness including things like confidence necessary to have casual sex which is met by a very large portion of men I would say at least all above average men and afterwards whether he participates in casual sex is indicative of his preferences on that matter. The reason why Tinder appears to have a small number of men having the majority of the sex is that most users both male and female will use it a small amount perhaps having one or two dates and then leaving and there is a small minority of men with a lasting preference for casual sex many might want it once or twice but then will desire a relationship or a hookup will become a relationship, changing their preferences who are the disproportionate users of Tinder and get more dates due to the amount of effort they put into it when other men and near all women spend very little time using it due to their lack of preference for casual sex. The attractiveness threshold for this effectively only precludes self proclaimed incels and possibly extremely poor people from casual sex and precludes people from most romantic relationships as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A heterosexual man being promiscuous is more indicative of his preferences than his attractiveness\n","id":"949ced68-a775-450c-aeff-79c29164a316"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Rituals can help alleviate grief and boost confidence, as well as having an effect on our psychological processes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some humans feel the need for rituals, which religion is able to provide.\n","id":"e0a2fa11-26e4-4297-bc36-1109a2d273c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>There is clear sociological evidence that the ease of killing oneself is enough to persuade one to turn depression into suicide. This is also reflected in the numbers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Half of all suicides in the US are done using a gun.\n","id":"61c13839-dc7b-44a0-b5f4-55fcddd1fec0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Homosexuality, should it be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if homosexuality would be caused by events in someones life, it still would not be a choice, as he didn't chose for these events to happen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While if homosexuality is caused by genes it proves it is not a choice, not being caused by genes doesn't prove that it is.\n","id":"0a1d2b4f-3170-4953-aab9-6c4ba5401713"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Sicilian ports have been at the brink of collapse due to the influx of immigrants causing worry among Italian people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The refugees crisis in Italy has increased worry and intolerance among Italian people.\n","id":"1cc34321-5e01-40f3-9ba4-e8c64905c0b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>The wizarding world is, to the extent of our knowledge, unable to adequately replace missing limbs for example, Mad-Eye Moody is missing a leg. By contrast, Muggles are developing highly sophisticated prosthetic limbs<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The wizarding world lacks the technologies of modern Muggle healthcare.\n","id":"899dffe0-e7c7-4b2d-899c-759d4d756165"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is no question that the government demands that I pay taxes. If I fail to pay, I will be incarcerated. If I resist, I may be killed. I take this as uncontroversial. The only question that remains is, is this theft? I think it is theft because if it weren't, what else could it be? I've examined the possibilities and ended up rejecting each one. Do I agree to pay taxes by continuing to live here? Just because I don't move away from criminal activity doesn't mean I consent. If that were the case, anyone living in the inner city filled with crime thereby consents to be mugged by not moving. Do I agree to pay taxes by using government services? In these cases, the government has either made competition illegal as in the case with the USPS and first class mail or simply has such an advantage that the free market can't compete think eminent domain and running power data lines . I have no alternative aside from government services. It's as if the Mafia has taken control over everything and demands tribute to use those services while preventing any competition from occurring. So, how exactly are taxes a debt I legitimately owe rather than money that's taken from me by threat of violence?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think taxation is theft.\n","id":"9b5a32dd-0d49-429b-ad0c-88d868c5c34f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the United Kingdom the rightful owner of the Falkland Islands\/Malvinas?<|ARGUMENT|>Britain respects the island's democracy even if it votes against British rule, whereas Argentina refuses to recognise the islanders while exploiting the issue as a distraction from domestic problems like the economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Is the United Kingdom the rightful owner of the Falkland Islands\/Malvinas?\n","id":"6a444326-6850-4245-a016-d6f01dd8be2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was raised by middle class parents who took only a few cruises resort trips to Mexico and the Bahamas when I was a kid in the 90s my sister and I stayed with grandparents no big deal, Mom and Dad deserved a getaway. When I graduated HS in '06 they sent me on a Carnival Cruise to Belize with a rich friend's family first time out of country for me . I never really thought much about travel as an adult until '12 when my then S.O. suggested we move to SE Asia to teach EFL. I lived in Thailand for a year while teaching, and enjoyed learning Thai and getting to know the culture. So I'm visiting home this week, and got into a minor tussle with Dad this morning as we were eating breakfast. He was cruising his FB feed, and commented on my cousin's recent trip to the Bahamas She looks happy isn't it nice she's traveling? My cousin just graduated college, is engaged to be married, and was celebrating by visiting a resort with friends. I fucked up when I told my parents that Millennial's don't have the luxury to take frivolous trips like this, and that I don't have to be happy for my cousin going to a resort and island cruising around on her in law's rented yacht. That it's irresponsible for anyone who looks at the state of the world, and decides now is the time to do such a thing. Had the cousin friends in laws gone to the Bahamas and done some social good, talked to locals, or even had some street food I'd be fine with their trip. Dad got pissed because he said he had the same 'basic' outlook on life in the 70s, and that not everyone has to get down with culture to travel. My retort was that this ain't the 70s, the end of Capitalism is nigh, and I have to try harder to tie myself, and those I care about into the societal changes coming. My view is that the popular form of travel visiting all inclusive resorts, luxurious cruises, and the like are irresponsible means to see the world . That these people don't really get the point of travel. That people who advocate these forms of travel in today's world are kidding themselves by saying things like, Travel is good for the soul . My view is that it's acceptable to call them out on the irresponsibility of these actions. edit format wording<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who travel to exotic locations but only experience the resorts and tourist locations are irresponsible travelers; they are basic; and it's fine to tell others who say, \"Oh look, x looks so happy in the Bahamas\", to fuck off; even if they're basic life-tourists themselves.\n","id":"f6f68813-290a-4ac8-ac48-953dff13b924"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always been told that it's a bad argument that can't be summarised for the understanding of other intelligent people, and that by explaining something you gain a better understanding of it. This would mean that anyone saying 'I'm not going to explain these people have done it far better than I ever could' aren't necessarily wrong in saying that, but not to attempt it is anti debate. This is also true because the reading of these materials creates a time delay, in which the materials must be found time and then have that time put into reading them, which the suggester of the materials is essentially using as a shield. For whatever reason, they have improperly entered debate either do not fully understand their position or are too tired to carry finish and are now trying to put you off the scent rather than simply improve everyone's understanding by summarising the argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is anti-debate to suggest further reading rather than summarising the basis of your argument yourself.\n","id":"ba616055-8900-4d19-b41a-981426c25513"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>From my view point, even as I try to submerge myself in more right wing media which I end up just not believing, as with any media, I'm cautious , he is using his position as a really powerful person to benefit his supporters, which can pay to keep him in power via donations to the party . I know it's probably not the case, hence why I'm here. It feels like he entirely supports, and requires, arbitrary decisions within West Minster and ignores public research and the other side of things. I seriously don't think there is one thing that man has done which I support fully, and it's rather worrying. I would love the other side of the argument. Thank you P.S. Some back story I'm 18, going to Uni next term.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"David Cameron is a public-deceiving sly person, working with Osborne to use this country for unknown gains not in its interest\n","id":"ae4add47-a955-42c7-a8a0-f8da0940724a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I don't endorse his actions, this is just a thought that popped into my head. Also, I'm not counting Season of the Witch in this as it is effectively a Halloween film in name alone not that I dislike it . According to Merriam Webster, a protagonist is gt 1a 1 the principal character in a literary work such as a drama or story 2 the leading actor or principal character in a television show, movie, book, etc. Michael Myers perfectly fulfills this definition he gets more screen time than any other character, and is the only consistent element throughout the series minus Season of the Witch, but as mentioned, that movie is irrelevant to the discussion . There is no need for a protagonist to be a hero, or even for the audience to root for them. One could argue that Laurie Strode is the protagonist, but I would go so far as to say that she is the antagonist in spite of being the hero. She opposes Michael, the main character, and does not receive as much focus.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Michael Myers is the protagonist of the Halloween franchise\n","id":"8df8ba18-76fd-48c9-96de-c2e586b70144"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>People who are fired from their jobs for problematic speech can find a new job.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of the inconveniences caused by PC are small compared to the advantages.\n","id":"250537f3-3f99-45f7-99f7-f9963c8e6f56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First a few disclaimers.English isn't my first language, so i often have problems to articulate and get my point across.I don't really get into any atheism church discussions IRL, in my country hardly anyone goes to church anymore, meaning i don't run around and attack Christians or tell everyone that i'm an atheist. I wouldn't ever go to a church going grandma that got raised like that and go Yeah well, did you know there is no god ? As the title suggests i get mad sometimes at church goers and even more mad when i read about good Christians and Christian values.Here is my reasoning and way of thinking. And please tell me if this reasoning is way out there or absolutely stupid A guy goes to church.He learns that hundred thousands millions? of people died because of that religion.He still goes.Then he learns that the church pockets millions of that were meant as donations to Africa or whatever. He still goes.He reads that the pope told Africans to not use condoms. That missionaries do all kinds of crazy stuff. And still doesn't care.He notices that most of his new peers really hate homosexuals. Still goes to church.He learns that thousands of kids got sexually abused by the church.Then he learns that not only did the church try to hide that fact but also tried to protect the perpetrators. HE STILL GOES TO CHURCH.The list of messed up shit goes on and on but i guess you get my drift. Imagine you'd read that McDonalds abused kids for decades. You might then say Yeah well, that happened in a different branch than the one i go to. and i might maybe say I would boycott them but fair enough but if you then learned that the management of McDonalds tried to hide the fact and protect the rapists from the law, would you go to any McDonalds branch? If you go to any church, you are supporting all this bad stuff, in my eyes. You become a tiny part of that giant machine. When i considering all that read from christian values and when i see this sense of superiority that some Christians seem to have, this us vs them i just get mad. Tell me if my reasoning and way of thinking is totally stupid and way out there and also change my view. Edit Thank you all for your respectful and thought out arguments. This subreddit is amazing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People that go to church and talk about morals make me mad.\n","id":"aaea6407-248e-4373-bb8d-7c376f88ca96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>The current magnitude of climate change isn't unusual compared to earlier changes in Earth\u2019s history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We shouldn't fight climate change because it is natural.\n","id":"62a6be27-9380-4783-9f89-13f004874bc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Becoming a parent and receiving the responsibilities that come with it may fundamentally change a person. It is therefore difficult to accurately and fairly assess whether or not someone will be a good parent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parenting licenses assess parents' competency prospectively. This violates the presumption of innocence\n","id":"18c5d8d8-c05b-473c-8321-fc3ed61525b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>Since Imperial and Rebel technology is the same, we have seen on screen one shot vaporization of asteroids by Turbolaser. In comparison, when faced with a decent sized asteroid, the Enterprise admitted it would almost take their entire complement of photon torpedos to destroy it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Federation's ships are technologically superior to those of the Rebel Alliance.\n","id":"54555ccb-fb09-4a90-a967-3d0d413b86cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Why is it right that people who have lived in a place for generations should be forced to leave their lands and move to what amounts to ghettos, living under constant threat from their invaders, as a reaction to something which happened on another continent? EDIT thanks to user1492 for changing my view and skinny santa for linking to the previous  along these lines here I would say that I still believe the creation of Israel has some, to quote Amerkov in the comments, shitty aspects to it and I'll still say that I disgree with aspects of that. However much of the Palestinian suffering is their own doing as opposed to Israel and so I feel it is wrong to punish those people for the actions of there forefathers. I do feel though that Israel should retreat to its pre '67 borders Perhaps excluding the Golan Heights<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe the state of Israel should exist.\n","id":"c0f46d98-3de5-4d7b-990b-26f9b09d8659"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All software should be open source.<|ARGUMENT|>Employees are judged during the interview process on more traits than the minimum criteria required to complete their job, for example communication skills<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A single organization deciding which employees to hire can introduce a sampling bias in who can contribute to closed-source code.\n","id":"d6f889ec-fb5d-433e-a1d3-75862568972d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Falkland Islands, return of<|ARGUMENT|>The islanders have a right to self determination under the UN Charters and Resolutions. Independence is the only alternative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taking a 'colony' from one coloniser and giving it to another can hardly be right.\n","id":"8c66f706-9bc0-4225-a77d-a044d412a8b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Regardless of how my relationship was with my SO, I would need to have my baby verified that it was actually my child. I didn't even realize this was a controversial view until I mentioned it to some people and they were completely shocked that I would feel that way. Now to explain my view, raising a child that I believe to be my genetic offspring that turned out wasn't would be completely damaging to me for a variety of reasons. I don't have a problem with raising a child that is not my own but that type of deception is unacceptable. Now you may be saying if you were in a legitimate relationship with a person, why would they do that to you? Any number of reasons. People fuck up and are fucked up. Maybe she was raped and didn't want to tell me. Maybe she had a fling with a coworker when she thought we were about to break up and now doesn't want to lose me. Maybe she had a brief moment with an ex that meant nothing to her but sex. Maybe the guy fucked her, doesn't want to be with her and she just doesn't want to be alone. The point is that, ultimately, you never truly know another person or what they're capable of and this is just me playing it as safe as possible. EDIT Due to mehal's comment, I can understand why this would be offensive and because of mical's comment, I believe I may not have enough relationship experience to adequately stand by this statement. Even though, I still believe that I would have the paternity tested, there's no way for me to really know what it would be like given my limited experience. Ultimately, I think the view that may need to be changed challenged is, You cannot completely trust anyone. which may require a different .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If my SO was having my baby, I would need to make sure that it's mine.\n","id":"18b9e0e0-bf8d-4030-9a53-421198b70783"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know I'm likely to stir up a shit storm with this post, and I sort of hope that I do because I really want to change my view on this. My mum and I were discussing the BLM movement the other day, and she responded with, gt I think that all lives matter, regardless of race or religion. I found myself agreeing with her. As context, we live in the UK so we are less effected by police shooting e.t.c. and only really hear about it in the 'American' news. Using an analogy that I'm sure some of you will be familiar with by u GeekAesthete link I see the BLM as feeling mistreated for not getting dinner and asking for more rather than the same amount as everyone else to make up for it. Or that they didn't get enough dinner yesterday so today they want more than everyone else today to make up for it. I also think the BLM movement only focuses on Black lives and doesn't include other minorities which doesn't promote social change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All lives matter.\n","id":"1a16ebcb-613f-4268-9a4e-39e8c6dbd530"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>At the same time, hegemonic femininity cannot exist as femininity is understood as a lack of masculinity Being in a hegemonic position is about being in a position of power, and power is inherent in hegemonic masculinity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Judith Halberstam research has revealed how heroic masculinity is constructed as dominant and how residual masculinities that do not fit that model become alternative\/subordinate.\n","id":"3dc459c9-be93-4527-8e18-357461261287"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As head of the U.S. government's Executive Branch, the President should have executive experience in government. If someone wants to run for President, they should have to demonstrate their abilities as governor of a US State first. It's true many successful US Presidents have not served as governors, but most of them served in an age with a much smaller Federal government. I believe Barack Obama serves as perfect example of why I am right. It's not the President's job to inspire us, change the world, or give great speeches. His job is to manage the government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Only current or former State governors should qualify to run for President of the United States\n","id":"225b7729-5d53-43c9-bb7c-253f68a7c87d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>The SGR-A1 comes at a unit cost of $200,000 This price is not particularly high compared to other military products.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AKMs save money as they are cheaper than human forces.\n","id":"a93033a6-5a23-4597-aa80-9b8e3286525c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2016, two ISIS members stormed a church in France and slit the priest's throat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christians have been targeted by ISIS both in the Levant and abroad.\n","id":"bafccf18-4983-45f0-9143-c3a20de789bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see a lot of criticisms of supposedly popular opinions on reddit yet none of them seem to be based in actual numbers. Rather, they seem to just be based on feelings of victimization and confirmation bias. To the extent that those feelings are based on anything objective, they only focus on things that haven't happened in a long time. I'm using upvotes downvotes as an actual objective measure of what is popular on reddit. There are a number of examples. I'm constantly reading about the STEM circlejerk on reddit. But in any thread that this debate comes up, the highest voted posts are essentially Who cares about your major or God, I hate this STEM circlejerk. The posts that are downvoted often so much that they're hidden are the posts that would actually classify as a STEM circlejerk i.e. STEM is superior to humanities . I find it hard to believe that there's some STEM circlejerk when this is consistently true. All it takes is a brief search of threads in which this debate comes up. To the extent that there is a STEM circlejerk, there's certainly an equal or greater anti STEM circlejerk. Don't take my word for it. Here are some threads where you can actually see this phenomenon play out. There are plenty more if you search as well Another example of this is complaints about how the Good Girl Gina meme is only used for sexual topics. I generally think this meme and most of them are dumb but this viewpoint is incredibly easily debunked Search by any metric you want, any time you want. You'll see that GGG memes that deal with sex are rarely upvoted and usually don't have many comments. Rather, there's a lot of critiques about GGG only deal with sex in the top slots but no real uses of the meme for that purpose. It seems silly when complaints about the prevalence of a phenomenon are significantly more prevalent than the phenomenon itself. It's the exact same thing with people arguing about how reddit is always accusing women of friendzoning. Yes, many do. But the criticism of people that do this is always significantly more upvoted than any real complaints about the friendzone. In fact, most sincere complaints get downvoted to the point of being hidden. Again, this can be easily confirmed by searching reddit and actually looking at the upvotes downvotes as an objective measure so one doesn't fall prey to their own confirmation biases and victimization complexes. There are many more examples of this phenomenon but these are three that come up often. TL DR Reddit circlejerks about STEM , Reddit only uses Good Girl Gina for sexual things , Reddit loves complaining about the friendzone are all mostly untrue. Just like many complaints about reddit when you actually look at upvotes and downvotes. The reason these clearly false viewpoints get propagated and highly upvoted is because of confirmation bias and a victimization complex.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think a lot of criticisms of \"popular opinions\" on Reddit are circlejerks of confirmation bias and victimization complex.\n","id":"359aa128-9591-498e-8a32-8cf5df95f728"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>God can not be proven by science which is the main way we study and understand our universe or natural world. There is no theory of God and there is no conclusive logical argument for the existence of God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are no clear and verifiable evidences that god exists.\n","id":"4482a706-ebaa-468e-8d94-12410291e4b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have seen a lot of people in the past few weeks argue that the future will be swell because the trend of history is one of continuous improvement. And that's it. This, in my opinion, is a bad argument that both spawns and is spawned by utter optimism, though that is not part of this  because it ignores why the trend of history has been one of improvement. Without analyzing what drives the trend, the argument is just an assertion the trend will continue. Let's invert the assertion to reveal its problems. Let's say we're in a world where everything is getting worse for everyone all the time. We then argue the future will be worse because the trend of history is one of decline and leave it at that. But that's just an assertion, and unless one can show that the driving forces behind the decay are not weakening, it remains just that. An assertion. At the risk of derailing things by way of metaphor, think of things like this gt A man takes on enormous debt to build his dream house. The dream house is built, and he's living in it. But the debt is coming due, and the house needs maintenance, and he has no money for that. So the bank forecloses on the house. He gets all notices and warnings but throws them in the trash. The court process takes a long time, and during that time he's able to continue living there, but once the process is done he will be evicted. For now, though, he's still living in his dream house and enjoying each day more than the last. ~~It is my opinion that just because the trend of history has been one of improvement which I mostly agree with does not mean the future will be improved from the present. But this opinion could be changed if one could show that the underlying drivers and conditions necessary for the improvement are likely to continue, and the obstacles to improvement are likely to be overcome. ~~ Due to poor phrasing I have confused people as to what I'm trying to do with this. I don't want an argument about the future of the world, this is meant to be about argument debate assertion method. But just claiming it will get better in the future because it got better in the past is just articulating a hopeful sentiment. Please don't try and convince me the future is going to get better in this , I'm focused specifically on this particular argument and its failings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"The future will be better because the trend of history is one of improvement\" is a bad argument\n","id":"f6830538-cbf6-41c1-9774-85764bea0605"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Thought this for a long time and would like to see a different opinion. I'll give some examples to explain what I mean. Two employees do basically the same job. Worker A just does his job without too much complaining, just gets on with it. Worker B tells anyone who is around to listen how hard his job is and exaggerates any minor issue he may have. The vast majority of people will feel that worker B has a much harder job. Even if people admit that he complains a lot, they will still say, but he kinda has a point . The amount of work actually done won't be taken into account in the slightest, excluding massive mistakes or things like that. Another example a group of guys play poker together. One guy Player A at the table complains about his bad luck constantly. Another guy Player B doesn't talk much or get too emotional when either good or bad things happen. When one hand is played out, player A gets extremely lucky to beat player B. As this happens, player A talks about he finally catches a break , with player B not saying much. Later on, player A gets pretty unlucky in a hand. He freaks out, shoves his chips to his opponent and complains about how that's just my luck . Most people will agree that player A is acting like an asshole. But at the same time, they'll mention that he did get pretty unlucky, justifying his behaviour to a point. I've seen this happen way too much, in work and in personal relationships mutual friends siding siding with the person who complains more during a breakup . People are rewarded for acting like their life is much harder than it is. Some people will say they agree with me but then do some of the things I've described. The common responses to this are things like it's about who's more confident, not about who complains more . I disagree with this, because the only way to deal with someone excessively complaining is to either complain in response which can come across as hypocritical or confront them which can come across as overly confrontational and aggressive . These are problems whether a person is introvert or extrovert. I'm not extremely happy with how I've laid this out, but I explained it well enough. So, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that society currently rewards whining and attention seeking far more than hard work.\n","id":"de646e2c-d1eb-4457-999a-d54fa6359cc4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've actually never posted on r relationships but it was recently brought under my attention that they have a rule for requiring gender and age of everyone in the story to be posted. I feel this is a bad idea because In many cultures people are either not typically aware of each other's age or it is even a private matter that is impolite to ask it's not impolite where I live but don't know the age of anyone I know including my close relatives With the advent of close friendships and romantic relationships over the internet it is quite plausible that people are not aware of people's gender either I talked to people on the internet for quite a while without being aware of their gender or age. There is also still the assume one's gender thing in real life. While it may provide context it is highly arbitrary many more things provide context that are not required. Saying where you live is probably more useful than your exact age but that's not required and again people may not be aware of that to begin with People might just not want to reveal their gender or age on the internet<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"r\/relationships should not require that gender and age of all persons be posted\n","id":"189e2422-9bac-4168-862c-abb729183025"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Europe used to own the world. It's hard to believe that not 100 years ago for example, the U.K. and her empire was the world's global superpower Today's U.S.A. with nations such as France and Germany not being far behind. Of course, Germany's unparalled military rise on the doorstep of Europe's major powers along with it's evil agendas in regard to race etc. proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back. You can't have so many competing powers with opposing ideologies basing themselves in the one continent without major bloodshed. It's happened before, but this time instead of a victorious European power taking up the power vacuum of the losing side, we had the geographically separate and relatively unharmed United States to do that. No one in Europe could catch up again. And so, with the war finished, and all of Europe shattered, we relied on the U.S. to prop us back up again for a while, given the immediate perceived threat of Communism eating it's way through the old continent. Today, I see Europe's nations to be City States of the present. We used to be powerful, yes, but we can't pull that off again without major reform. The world is no longer our own Backyard in which we can decide the fate of global areas due to our imperial controls. No, the world is now a global village of emerging powers , India, Brazil, China All with competing populations, economies and militaries which each go to head to head with all of Europe COMBINED. And we believe, individually, we can compete with these powers in the long term? Of course, there is pride to be had in our diversity and history It is what drives our unmatched tourism industry after all. But at the same time, this encourages the attitude of keeping our militaries and Due to recent events economies separate. I think we need to have a reality check. Russia just militarily intervened in Ukraine. From a Western view, that is unnaceptable. BUT I believe Russia did it because they already knew that the U.S. had ongoing commitments elsewhere, and, well What were Europe's tiny little nations going to do in the face of the powerful Russian Bear? Europe, as a military entity, poses no threat to Russia or any other potential future foes We are divided, un co ordinated and are generally unwilling to work together when it comes to Economics and a universal Military funding planning scheme. I realise the difficulties with collecting many, many different cultures under the one flag. I believe perhaps, if there was to be a European Federation, large efforts should be made in order to preserve the identity of different peoples in different nation states. This will continue to drive the tourism industry and keep the people content. However, a drive should also be made in order inform the people's of Europe that we cannot compete on the world stage for much longer, not if we want to have a serious influence and sway on the world stage. And I'm not talking about mere Economic sanctions This hasn't gotten Russia to stand down from Ukraine for example. What I'm talking about is, if Russia, or anyone else, ever wants to impose themselves upon European sovereignty or interests, then we should have the capability of deterring these nations. We should be able to co ordinate military movements, co ordinate denounciations from the world's leaders, co ordinate diplomatic meetings and discussions from all parties involved That power needs to be there like the U.S. has today. We simply cannot protect ourselves if we can't make potential enemies shake in their boots upon hearing the term Europe responds to . I realise this may not happen in my lifetime. But say that we can integrate our different cultures somehow. Say that the current EU is reformed to a degree in which public opinion is very positive for it. Why shouldn't Europe be able to integrate more closely under these conditions, and balance the West against rising Chinese, Brazilian and Indian powers? This would go a long way in protecting the European people's from invasive policies imposed on them by other nations. For example, though this is a West on West related issue, many Europeans were disturbed that the foreign nation of the U.S.A. was recording what they were saying and doing on a regular basis. Even today, we do not have the power globally, as individual states, to demand and force the U.S. to stop these operations. EDIT Initially, I believe perhaps France and Germany should integrate. Then perhaps southern powers such as Spain and Italy once they are more stable. I believe one of the last powers to join a theoretical Federation should be the United Kingdom. They have closer ties to the rest of the Anglosphere and may intially be more hestitant to join given their ties globally, if at all. For a time, the U.K. should act as an independent trade based Island nation, off shore to the European Federation. Think a Singapore or Hong Kong type scenario in which the U.K. is a major economic player between Europe and the rest of the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think there should be a European Federation.\n","id":"308ea2fb-28a0-43e5-ba8e-edbc34e9eb43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If God is Real, Should we File a Class Action Lawsuit Against It?<|ARGUMENT|>Repositioning God as a sue-able entity could help shift the public's faith to science rather than religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If God is real, then we should file a class action lawsuit against it.\n","id":"e8691a66-08c0-4c3b-a721-196ebecb11c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi, let me preface by saying that I am earnestly trying to understand the apparent contradiction. I actively try to address my prejudices. I am queer myself. But, this has always been lost on me. Am I misunderstanding something? x200B How is it not a contradiction to fight against gender stereotypes, while also permitting lines of argument that admit stereotypes as evidence? According to the educated sociologists' view, we should be tolerant of boys who like dresses and dolls. We should be tolerant of girls who like wrestling and dislike dresses. With this, I completely agree. Such preferences aren't evidence in itself that a child's sexual orientation is something other, so why is it evidence of transgenderism?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transgender claims of 'feeling like &lt;gender&gt;' because you've always preferred &lt;stereotypical gender roles\/characteristics&gt;', is contradicted with assertions that &lt;stereotypical gender roles\/characteristics&gt; should be rejected.\n","id":"37054e7f-bef5-4213-a1b4-c8549591e8e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>The more balanced we'll be, the better we'll stick together, the easier will be the integration process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A unified Europe would prevent countries like Germany and France from dominating the political landscape.\n","id":"4ae4d43a-4305-4e8c-a265-0fef287fe80a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Carbon capture and storage<|ARGUMENT|>Rainforest Action Network, an environmental non-profit organization, stated the following in a fact sheet on its website titled \"The Dirty Truth about Clean Coal,\" available at www.ran.org accessed Sep. 17, 2009: \"Proposals for carbon storage locations include underground depleted oil and gas fields, unmineable coal seams, and even in our oceans. Underground storage of the 1.9 billion tons of C02 waste produced annually by U.S. coal plants is hugely problematic and likely impossible.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capturing\/transporting\/storing billiions of tons of C02 is not feasible\n","id":"d9a8c6b2-cbc8-4ec6-8aa6-d6bd730975f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>A sharing of stories on social media can help individuals identify the symptoms of an eating disorder in their own life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social media is a necessary avenue to finding peer support in recovery.\n","id":"5649ca04-3694-4fb0-8774-50caba780844"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>This way of conceptualizing animal rights is attractive because it explains a puzzling asymmetry: why we tend to think that it is immoral, for example, to kill a domesticated dog, but not a cow.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We owe duties to cognitively disabled humans and infants because they have special, morally important relationships to people in our society. Some animals like pets occupy similar positions, but other animals do not.\n","id":"4e0a85d5-9150-43f3-81aa-c8c918cdc7e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Small electric scooters, like Lime, Bird and Jump, are good for people.<|ARGUMENT|>This provides corporate interests and lobbies with an interest in the expansion and maintenance of bike paths and pedestrian walkways. This is positive since these efforts, so far, were hardly backed by corporate lobbies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The vehicles are small enough to ride on the sidewalk or in a bicycle lane.\n","id":"9f446fc2-be1b-48f4-85c3-16c8085362f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So my school does this event every year I am a freshman in high school where we spend a day talking about race, and this years one was focused on colorblindness . for those who do not know, colorblindness is treating people the same, regardless of race. The theme of the event at my school was that you must not be colorblind, because that is offensive to the hundreds of years of trauma that minority races have experienced. honestly, I think this is bullshit. I understand that different groups of people have different experiences based on their skin color, but shouldn't we try to treat everyone the same rather than treat non minority people unfairly? I try to live my life so that I don't treat anyone differently on the basis of skin color or race, but apparently this is evil to them. After giving this a lot of thought, I came to this conclusion If it is unfair to treat people the same, and obviously unfair to treat minorities worse because of their identity, then the only option would be to treat them better than non minority people? I think this is the part that would most easily be changed . I am not quite interested in having a conversation about my schools ridiculous viewpoints, rather how I can treat all people fairly. I am open to changing my mind on this, so  apologize for bad formatting or whatever, I don't write things like this ever .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Colorblindness\" is a good thing.\n","id":"1e783536-1096-4cbd-b86c-ebc6cea7491a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a carbon fee and dividend plan to address the primary cause of climate change.<|ARGUMENT|>EPA has gone too far. For example - they require setting house at 83 degrees which is bad for older people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This plan requires taxes and larger government, both of which should be avoided.\n","id":"ce383bd4-9a77-40e9-b49e-80881d22570c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi, first time poster here. I think the title is pretty self explanatory, but I'll try to elaborate a little. People in the literary world like to lament the death of poetry much as they lament the death of the novel , but unlike the novel, which is very much still alive, I think poetry as we knew it has really lost its relevance. I say as we knew it because there are modern forms of poetry that we still embrace today, like rap I know I know and novel poetry hybrids see Ellen Hopkins as a popular example . However, you don't usually see people reading poetry anthologies with sonnets and all of those old fashioned forms these days because people don't generally have the skills or desire to interpret that kind of literature. Schools still like to force traditional poetry on students but it usually ends up making students dislike it even more. I would argue that's okay because if a reader can't make any sense of a written work, then it is the author that is in fault for not communicating their ideas clearly. Poetry is supposed to be entertainment, after all, and if it is not entertaining then nobody is obligated to read it. Hopefully I made my point clear. Change my view, because I'd like to think there's a point in slogging through volumes of poetry at school.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Poetry is no longer relevant to our society, and that's okay.\n","id":"3cb1f537-efb6-4794-b40c-ee7483e1654a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So this is probably a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I don't think the fact that someone needs wants a support animal should automatically make it the default position that they get to have one in public settings where animals otherwise would not be allowed. My objection rests on three main points 1 Lack of control regarding whether or not the animal is in service or not Now this is anecdotal, but opinions are subjective so I have a friend here in the UK who is active in a charity that rehomes dogs. I think this is great and respect her for it, but when she needs to help rehome a dog she will just put one of those yellow vests on it, and boom any dog goes on the train how do we actually know that this dog isn't going to start attacking people? 2 Allergies. There is no requirement that your service animal is of a breed that will be the least intrusive to anyone around you who has allergies. Now I am luckily able to be around dogs, but the day that service cats or horses become common, am I supposed to just leave every flight that has an anxious person on it? 3 People may have a fear of animals. If they chose to take a flight or go for a meal under the expectation that animals are not allowed, is it really fair that they are going to have their nice experience ruined? So CMW Edit Ok so my view has been changed. Main points 1 Yes, I conflated service and support animal. Where a service animal is more akin to a seeing eye dog, and a support animal is anything that people use to cope. I obviously though should prob have stated so in my OP do not feel that my objections in anyway should stop a blind person from using his dog, that would be like stopping someone using a wheelchair. But, there should be a very high bar for what qualifies as actually being reliant on the dog as to avoid exploitation of the system. 2 My problem is not with animals but the at least perceived lack of regulation and enforcement. Anyway delta was awarded and have a good weekend<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be no right\/expectation to bringing your service animal everywhere\n","id":"d49ce5c8-1324-4454-a638-9048a573cbb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>Russia is one of the principal backers of Syria's Assad regime, which has committed widespread human rights abuses including the torture and mass murder of detainees and the use of chemical weapons against military and civilian targets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Russian government commits widespread human rights abuses. The US should not ally themselves with such governments.\n","id":"e33f706d-7e6b-4263-8d19-7f9471b2fc07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We live in a multi cultural society. All cultures are blending together and evolving adapting and taking on elements of each other. As such, the idea of cultural appropriation does not make a lot of sense to me. The idea of existing in a vacuum and any one culture remaining static is silly and naive at best and xenophobic at worst. I think the more we absorb of each others cultures, the better off we, as a society, will be. So I think cultural appropriation is simply misplaced moral panic, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term \"Cultural appropriation\" inaccurate when we live in a multicultural society.\n","id":"2b7671a9-f073-4896-affe-b6d87cbe1037"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Same-Sex Marriage Should Be Legal<|ARGUMENT|>At it's most basic level there are two questions that define this debate: 1 To whom is the insitution of marriage valuable, and how valuable is it to those different groups of people? 2 If we are concerned with the rights of homosexuals, how do we most effectively generate substantive equality? When the debate is painted thus it becomes clear that much of proposition's substantive case was, broadly speaking, tangential to do the debate. Proposition expended a huge amount of energy discussing the Mary Coughlan ammendment, transgender individuals, and the fact that all homosexuals have a bachelors pad and a variety of STD's. On team opposition we decided to focus the debate on the two central questions at stake: Why is marriage important, and what will the consequences be if we legalize same-sex marriages? 1 In terms of the first issue it was never quite clear what proposition's case was. They mentioned, albeit fleetingly, that marriage brings to the couple a number of legal rights that are otherwise unattainable. They then tracked back, after we showed that civil unions are in most cases legally comparable\/equal and that there is no inherent reason why they cannot be, and instead argued that marriage was an important 'social symbol' this was never justified, as we said - why do homosexuals have a right to a particular religious or cultural blessing?. If this is all the substantive value that proposition could show, it seems that their case is already on shaky ground. In response to proposition we argued that marriage has tremendous socio-cultural and religious value to a large portion of most populations. This is evidenced by the fact that in most countries there is a strong majority that rejects the very notion of same-sex marriage. At the same time, we showed that only a tiny number of homosexuals are actually interested in same-sex marriage, evidenced by substantial quantitative research on the UK, the USA and other European countries. We then added extra meat to the discussion by considering the role of the state and the role of public opinion. We argued that we must remain agnostic on the 'morality' of homosexuality, and that it is the business of the citizenry to legislate for itself on such issues. Proposition's glib response to this was that 'majorities don't get their way when it harms minority groups', a sentiment that was a normatively unjustified, and b falsified in our rebuttal. This is an inadequate challenge of opposition's clash, centred around the acceptability of moral and legal pluralism in respect of same-sex marriage. The first issue, then, clearly falls to team opposition. 2 Proposition's case never really managed to leave behind the notion of formal equality nominally equal rights for a focus on substantive equality equal treatment. On team opposition we articulated, from the very start, that it is substantive equality that really matters. We showed that imposing on the cultural and religious interests and values of the majority of which marriage is a central and important one can have very dangerous backlashes on the liberal rights movement invoking the effectively un-rebutted example of South Africa's legalization of same-sex marriage. It was only in response to this substantive attack that proposition finally suggested some link from formal rights to substantive rights - the idea that the state should be a 'pathfinder' for the citizenry. This argument, which was justified by analogy only and no actual analysis of the example of marriage, was dismantled rather thoroughly by team opposition. We showed that the analogies presented by proposition were in fact entirely and absolutely disanalagous, and that in a vast number of cases the state has not acted as a pathfinder at all. We even showed that, when the state makes decisions that reject the interests and values of the majority which team proposition's policy clearly does, it often leads to dangerous consequences. The only other argument made by proposition, that suggested something similar, was their analysis of stereotyping. Here they failed, rather profoundly, to explain why it was that the issue of *marriage* was so crucial in the construction of stereotypes. This failure is symptomatic of the grand failure of their case - to show why it is that legalizing same-sex marriage is of particular importance. On team opposition we produced a number of refutations to this point, showing that the proposition's assumptions about stereotypes were both misguided and not linked to marriage. It is clear, then that the second question was also answered, most convincingly, by team opposition. By establishing the right of self-governance as the cornerstone of liberal society, by showing that proposition's case presents benefits that are tangential at best, and by showing that a secular state's imposition on marriage, a religious and cultural institution, will have serious negative consequences in the fight for substantive equality for the gay community itself, we on team opposition beg that the motion fall.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Aggressive policies retard gradual social change: why the case for pluralism won Opposition Summary\n","id":"609229a2-727b-48dc-9704-5d734e903601"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After the Weinstein story broke out, I am having difficulty believing the reports and articles about the big named celebs Matt Damon, George Clooney, etc. all coming out displaying horror and ignorance about Harvey Weinstein's sexual predatory. This was apparently such an open secret in Hollywood that there were multiple references to Weinstein's behavior in popular sitcoms and talk shows. Seth McFarlane took a dig at Weinstein during the Academy Awards. While all of these incidents could be looked at as subversive, if it was really so well known, didn't all these jokes just make light of such terrible, criminal behavior? Given how widespread this was, and the actors chose to turn a blind eye, all the Twitter outrage that they display when a story breaks out Hollywood or otherwise just seems like a PR exercise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lot of blame for the normalization of sexual harassment of actors lies within the industry. A lot of the actors who are talking against sexual abuse not the victims, seem to be doing it because it's safe to do so now.\n","id":"11487158-f442-437a-9203-a632aa0a76ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Unless there is data that shows African Americans drive the same way the population as a whole does, showing that police pull over more African Americans does not show any racism. There are many possible explanations for this discrepancy other than targeting the people of a certain race. For instance, in my experience larger vehicles such as SUVs and trucks are more likely to be driven aggressively. If the data exists or there are sources that show police do actually target African American drivers, then <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using traffic stops as a control group to show police target African-Americans is incorrect\n","id":"263ba307-12c6-4c2a-918c-3e9eb75709e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my opinion I think smoking is somehow good. And the reason is pretty simple, it's deadly and it's cheap. If you take a look at the current population pyramid Germany for my example you can see that it's far away from an actual pyramid like Afgahnistans for example. So here is my point, if alot of people smoke the state is getting a huge benefit, he is collecting a lot of taxes currently it's about 13 billion \u20ac anually in Germany. So if a lot of people are smoking, alot of people will die younger wich means that there don't be have to concerns about the retirement pension, as there are currently. I now it sounds morbid that you should kill your on people as a state but from a financial view it would be a great thing. What are your thoughts? Sorry if there are any grammar spelling mistakes english is not my mother tongue<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Smoking would be a blessing for developed countrys\n","id":"969b88e5-00ae-4271-ba2e-1b4b907db232"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>In the PBC part of the argument, the contradiction arose between PaS and Pa~S. Since the original assumption was \u25a1\u00ac\u2203xSx, we must consider that it is also \u25c7\u00acPaS. If the contradiction could be resolved with this as a replaced premise in place of premise 3, then the argument will fail. When you don't consider this at all, you assume that it is possible that a supreme being exists. I.e., you assume the conclusion and beg the question.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The third assumption made in Robert Maydole\u2019s Modal Ontological argument begs the question by failing to consider an assumption that would resolve the contradiction, and thus simply assume the conclusion.\n","id":"cb89d8c3-f32e-48a7-9eb1-d1f07201c346"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard so many people try and dispute me on this without proof. Their reasoning often is a narcissist thinks for himself because he only thinks of himself and a narcissist wouldn't refuse to think for himself the way a conformist would. I beg to differ. An example of somebody that is likely a narcissistic conformist is a narcissist who values popularity above everything else and will do anything to increase his popularity, even if that means sacrificing his individuality. This kind of narcissist will follow popular trends, even silly ones, to appeal to people that'll likely gravitate towards him her. Moreover, this is the kind of opinion a narcissistic conformist would have since my opinions are always the popular ones, they are the only ones that matter There is nothing positive about narcissists to begin with, but narcissistic conformists are among the worst types of narcissists imaginable only worse are psychopathic narcissists .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Narcissistic conformists exist\n","id":"f7a91346-538c-4213-aaf1-b61c825f7074"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The function of the police is to uphold the law by means of coercive force. In a democracy, where every citizen has a right to determine the law, they should also have the responsibility to uphold it. Therefore the function of the police should be carried out, or rather should be able to be carried out, by ordinary citizens. Lacking special powers, the police could do everything they are currently supposed to be doing. You, as a citizen, should be able to make arrests, search private property if you have a warrant from a judge, perform surveillance from public property, and seize stolen or otherwise illegal items. If the police didn't have special powers, the legal system would function as it is currently, except that all citizens would feel an obligation in the upholding of the law. There would be no chaos, nor could anybody could randomly decide to take the law into their own hands. On the contrary, there would have been fewer riots in recent years if every police shooting were treated with the same scrutiny and under the same standard as the Zimmerman case. If the police didn't have special powers, acting as judge, jury, and executioner would be recognized, rightly, as vigilantism. If the police didn't have special powers, there would be still need to be a paid police force, because judges would need a functioning body to interact with and there would need to be people to staff jails. But there could be no effective corruption if anybody could be expected to perform the same work. Or at least, the corruption would be recognized as it actually is a gang of people is attempting to coerce unjustly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under a representative government, police should not have any special authority, immunity, or powers under the law.\n","id":"e8cfa526-d41f-437d-b310-e23a5f706760"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I saw a post on facebook this morning and now I can't find it again even though it was just like an hour ago from one of those feminist pages. I'm really hoping to see the other side of the issue, because to me it seemed incredibly damaging to the feminist movement to have a feminist blog post something like this. The post was a link to a news article about a man describing sexist treatment he received. The feminist page posted it with a comment similar to this Yes, feminists fight for male equality, too. What this man experienced wasn't fair, but I want to be clear it wasn't sexism. Men can't experience sexism. While I understand the point they are making, I believe this point only has a place in the academic setting. In general, people have a much more loose usage of words, and expecting a strict, academic usage in a casual setting is actually harmful to social equality movements. A man who goes to the park with his kids and then laments how many women said Oh, how cute, you're babysitting your children might say Fuck, I hate how sexist they were being. I'm not 'babysitting', I'm fucking raising my kids If one were to respond to that with, Well, ackchually men can't experience sexism , while true in an academic context , most people would be immediately turned off from the idea of feminism as a fight for social equality. In my opinion, semantical arguments such as this are what has led to such a focus on feminazis , who aren't necessarily saying anything incorrect , but are using academic language in a casual context and thus alienating people and inadvertently misrepresenting their goals. It's similar to when a white person experiences racial prejudice and says That guy was so racist to me , but somebody responds with You're white, you can't experience racism. Academically, this is accepted, but our casual use of the word racism is different, and I believe such a response actually turns away potential allies. Somebody sharing an experience like that is looking for validation that a this feeling he's feeling is legitimate and based in reality, b it's not acceptable to be treated that way, and c it's something that people who fight for social equality care about. If the person he's talking to is a feminist, the most important thing to do is to validate those feelings. Taking the situation and twisting it into a semantical discussion will at the very least feel like a dismissal Wow, I can't even talk about my experiences with social inequality without this person twisting it into a discussion about how women experience systems of oppression and men don't or at worst like an outright denial of their experience Fuck that, it was sexism, I can experience this even if I'm a man. Fuck them for not acknowledging that. I believe outside of academic settings for example, on facebook where I originally saw the post , insisting on academically rigorous usages of words like sexist and racist is more harmful to social equality movements than helpful, and I would like to hear the other side of the argument to better understand why it's so common to insist on such a strict usage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Strict definitions of words like \"sexist\" and \"racist\" outside of an academic setting are harmful to social equality movements\n","id":"035f63ef-b6ef-4723-8863-ccaa7c3bafe3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Aware of historicism my view involves Churchill's and his 1941 readers' judgments of these olden overlong valedictions, NOT those of anyone in 2018. Knowing them to be phatic expressions abbreviate this P.E. , is irrelevant to politeness and sincerity, as Churchill could\u2019ve written a polite sincere P.E. like \u2018Thanks for your attention.\u2019 or \u2018Your respectful opponent\u2019. Thus his defense of politeness doesn't convince me. I don\u2019t believe that Churchill felt \u2018honour\u2019 or \u2018high consideration\u2019 for Japan, sincerely judged himself \u2018an obedient servant\u2019, or how affectation or insincerity can be judged polite. gt gt I have the honour to be, with high consideration, gt gt gt Sir, gt gt Your obedient servant, gt gt Winston S. Churchill^ 1 gt Of the letter, Churchill later wrote Some people did not like this ceremonial style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite. ^ 2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Winston Churchill's olden valediction in his Declaration of War against Japan was affected, insincere.\n","id":"01656ca7-9ff1-4855-9109-6d87774138ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe in Locke's blank slate to a point. I don't believe were born pure and uncorrupted just without morality and obviously without ethics because how could we know of our societal expectations at such a young age. I believe that morality was something constructed for the needs of society and that reason is the reason why a society of sociopaths would fail because we need need ethically and morally aware citizens. I also believe religion was invented for the same reason as morality as a method of control because is killing worth eternal damnation? Constructs such as religion and morality are the only things preventing us from being absolute savages by our standards. Nobody is inherently good or moral.  Edit Glad see a lot of comments and discussion. I did not not know empathy and morality was hard wired. Thanks Also I have no comments because I honestly can't defend my position strongly<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe we are born with morals.\n","id":"29c0d287-d083-4ce1-9a1b-ec55b975d471"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>Pence has shown that he is willing to work with Democrats and to compromise to bring about solutions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mike Pence is less controversial, and thus more able to get people on his side.\n","id":"e3479845-1174-4368-a250-08db7648f3bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it important to get a college education?<|ARGUMENT|>In many societies, there is a strong degree of associative mating based on income and class.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In college, students can build social networks that can be beneficial to their future paths.\n","id":"9679d80c-cb8e-4974-af57-e622f4e8936c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is common advice that you should disregard people after their third strike against you, or fool me twice shame on me, and everyone has heard 'once a cheater always a cheater' and often people say the same for liars. I believe that people can change once they find the right impetus for them that effectively combats the impetus they had for whatever they're supposed to change from. While I admit that it is wise not to give someone who has proven themselves unreliable in some way access to what they've shown themselves to be unreliable for, I believe treating them personally, while restricting access, in any way other than that they can change is foolish because we have to stay consistent with whether we believe people can change and that consistency should influence the way we treat people accordingly. Edit This has been a wonderful thread Thank you to everyone involved. Thank you to u please for having me clarify most of my view, and thank you to u CoolCheech for the clever paradox via intent. I still maintain that people can change, which is directly opposite to how racism functions and the permanent way people are often treated in light of the 'once a liar always a liar' pragmatic cliche. Thanks everyone, every post has been well thought out and a pleasure to read.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe people can change. Please\n","id":"357c5176-fcc2-4c6e-8e56-209e989dea1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently, I had a very close friend of mine confide in me that he dropped out of school and is just going to work until he figures out what he wants to do. I wanted to be supportive, but this news was very hard for me to process. I am a firm believer in following the traditional high school to college to career pathway. Education is very important for leading a successful life and understanding how to think critically about the world around us. In this day and age, if you want to get ahead, it's important to take advantage of educational opportunities presented. Many people in this world are denied don't have access to education and if someone has the means to put themselves through schooling, why throw that away? Many blame it on the fact that school isn't working for me but of course it doesn't work for you, you have to work for it. If the time and effort isn't put in, there aren't going to be results. My success in school was not built off of sitting around, it was built off of me working my ass off. Perseverance is key in accomplishing anything and I think that many students just need to learn a better work ethic. What part of the system is failing these students who drop out? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who drop out of school didn't try hard enough\n","id":"677bba5e-23fe-47b9-b6be-4cdd50811779"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Similar Cryptocurrencies Good for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Some people store their money at home, because they do not trust the banking system. Especially in times of worldwide economic crises.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Storing money at home is very common among old people.\n","id":"c7857b85-e4da-41a4-ac26-1d9e5c82bce0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TLDR I believe that justifying a claim by saying it's subjective is a cheap way to evade someone's arguments because it defeats the purpose of reaching a more nuanced, common truth in a conversation. Where am I wrong? Let's say I try to start my own brand of punk clothing, but my parents don't support my fashion sense. I could dismiss their opinions and tell them that they're not the arbiters of what looks socially acceptable or attractive But wouldn't it be more beneficial if I convinced them to support me by demonstrating the appeal of punk clothing? Not only would this create a chance to broaden their perspectives, but more importantly, it would create more specific areas for them to refute. For the purposes of clear, coherent conversation, I see specificity as a major boon It provides deeper insight into others' perspectives around any topic. I doubt that anyone is incapable of articulating the reasoning behind any of their perspectives. No one holds on to something for no reason, right? Another example Let's say 3 friends of mine A, B, and C are arguing over which Star Wars they liked the most then right as A questions B about liking The Last Jedi, C cuts off A and tells him that B is entitled to his opinion and effectively ends the discussion. If B was allowed to explain himself his taste in movies, what he wanted from the viewing experience, etc. , would that not allow A to see where The Last Jedi might have merit, and perhaps see that same merit in media he previously dismissed? Plus, wouldn\u2019t it provide more closure to their conversation, assuming A and B find some resolution in seeing the criteria for what they both consider to be \u201cthe best Star Wars film?\u201d In situations like these, would it not be best for A to demonstrate faith in his own opinion to challenge other opinions? Would it not open them to a more impactful discussion? I want to know why people would continue to validate invalidate perspectives based on subjectivity. I am unaware of any objective truths , so I find it pointless and unproductive that people would point out subjectivity of opinions in the first place. Isn't every perspective subjective anyways? I\u2019ve had many conversations with friends and family that went nowhere because everyone wanted to \u201cagree to disagree.\u201d We\u2019d given up on trying to understand one another. Personally I do this too , I\u2019d rather try and fail than fail to try. To change my view, you have to demonstrate why people should bother validating invalidating perspectives based on subjectivity in the first place. Good luck<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pointing Out Subjectivity to Validate\/Invalidate a Perspective is Redundant and a Lazy Way to Evade Arguments\n","id":"d090a8b5-a4b8-4329-af2d-0f7e346c5b87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>4 million dogs are euthanized at shelters every year. By adopting, you can help decrease that number. Mutts are less likely to be inbred, and thus less likely to suffer health problems and other impairment. Link A lot of people have strong opinions about attachments to certain traits only offered by one breed. In my opinion, this should be weighted way less in one's decision on how to get a dog than the two points above. Getting a purebred dog is like getting a fancy sports car looks cool, high performance, but terrible mileage, maintenance fees, initial cost, and depreciation. I would venture to guess that there are a lot of people who wouldn't buy a fancy sports car because of its obvious drawbacks, or would at least consider these drawbacks very seriously when deciding to get one, but would get a purebred dog without considering the similar drawbacks. You may say that if you don't buy from breeders, those dogs will also go to shelters to possibly be euthanized, but I would think that if less people buy from breeders, they will breed less. EDIT Okay, I'm on my computer now, and can edit this. I'm not going to respond anymore, but I definitely learned a lot. Here's a summary of what happened. Working dogs yes, working dogs need to be a certain breed. I should've specified in my original post that I mean just when adopting for pets. There are good reasons other than just looks and temperament that people want specific breeds, such as hypoallergy is this a word , size, and some breeds needing more exercise or some other resource that you might not be able to provide. I learned the difference between breeders and puppy mills. Everyone seems to agree that puppy mills are the culprit for inbreeding and overpopulation, and that we should try to educate others thinking about getting a dog to make sure they go to a breeder and don't give business to puppy mills.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's always a better decision to adopt a mutt from the pound than to buy from a breeder.\n","id":"702349f4-a5a4-4757-ad23-b0bb9d9168b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In Iraqi Kurdistan, a referendum was recently held regarding independence in Catalonia, a referendum is about to be held. Both Spain and Iraq have rejected these referenda as illegal to hold. Spain in particular has been arresting Catalonians and confiscating ballots. I believe this is a mistaken approach. Like Iraq, Spain should respect free speech by simply stating that the referendum will not result in independence regardless of the outcome, and then treat it like any rally or other assembly. Votes, regardless of any laws prohibiting votes, should simply be treated as free speech in any country that respects free speech. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Illegal referenda should just be considered speech and should not be prevented or punished.\n","id":"815fb143-2b31-47ed-9bb0-55618ded0e40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I get that his comments are reprehensible and he's a total racist, and while that makes him the lowest of the low in my eyes and probably in the eyes of countless other people, I don't really believe that it is grounds enough to take a half a billion dollar franchise away from someone and fine them 2.5 million dollars on top of that. What it boils down to is an opinion. He thinks lowly of black people, he's wrong in what he's saying but his words have not reflected in his actions. The players are black, the coach is black, had the tapes not come out no one would have guessed he was a racist at this point in time. In his recorded phone calls, he merely told his mistress not to bring them to games. I get that it makes him scum, but being scum isn't enough to lose all that he lost. He said he didn't even care whether she did or didn't do anything with black people, he just didn't want others knowing about it via her Instagram account. I'm sure in his circle of rich white friends they all look lowly on black people, that's fine, it's their right to think of people or groups of people as they please. He explained that her being out with too many black dudes would make his friends think certain things, but being perfectly honest, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a lot of guys who would be absolutely 100 comfortable if their girlfriends were constantly hanging out with young black NBA players, especially give the likely low moral values of this specific girl she is after all a young gold digger who is dating an 80 year old married man who me she sold out for money afterwards All I'm saying is that I don't think it's enough to take the franchise away from him. Yes, he has an actual history forbidding black people from living in his homes, but that should be irrelevant since he already paid compensation for all that, his past actions shouldn't affect the current situation. If I, in my work place, was hiring short people and working with short people and treating short people with respect, but in my mind and even with my wife I said I don't like being around them and I don't want to see them in my workplace but nothing more, I certainly wouldn't think my work would fire me. Does it reflect badly on the NBA, yes, but as far as I'm concerned it shouldn't be the problem of the owners if the NBA doesn't approve of them. If a guy who cheats on his wife regularly with hookers bought a franchise, that would certainly look poorly on the part of the NBA, the dude is a cheating piece of trash something I think is much worse than being a racist , the NBA would probably do nothing. Before signing with the team, a lot of people knew he was a racist but still didn't care as long as money was involved. Coach Doc Rivers knew but didn't care then, suddenly it gets brought up again and he's outraged. People are just being reactionary to the whole thing but what they did to him by taking away a half a billion dollar team, and all the possible investments and sponsorships that go along with it, not to mention banning him for life and fining him almost 3 mil is too harsh a punishment simply for saying racist things in private, in his own home, to his girlfriend whom he thought he could confide his inner most thoughts in. H wasn't actively being racist, he just said some racist things but judging by his actions and not his words he's done nothing wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NBA shouldn't have done what it did to Donald Sterling, the punishment really doesn't fit the crime.\n","id":"7146c9e6-bec2-48f1-82f3-7ca0cf985d24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It baffles me to no end on why the United States of America has to many welfare programs that are difficult to qualify for, mandate how one can spend their money in most cases , causes welfare recipients to lose all of their benefits if they earn slightly more than the maximum income level thus giving them an incentive to stay in welfare , and contains complex bureaucracies that add to administrative costs while providing virtually no value. My view and proposal is that the United States should implement a universal basic income program that replaces the overwhelming majority of current means tested welfare programs in the U.S. For those who are unaware of a UBI, a universal basic income is a method of providing citizens of a nation a sum of money a paycheck that is meant to help combat poverty, increase equality, and foster economic activity . The reason why I firmly hold this view is because of the fact that there are numerous hoops that low income and moderate income citizens have to go through in order to get these benefits and that the U.S. federal government spends an excessive amount of money on bureaucratic costs that could have been better spent. elsewhere. I think that by making a basic income available for all U.S. citizens who are not incarcerated, we can better serve Americans, combat income inequality, minimize waste and fraud, and promote economic growth. The closest thing the United States has to a UBI program is Social Security. That brings me to my next two points people who argue against a UBI program would say gt How would you pay for it? gt How would you implement it? To the first question, as stated previously, we can afford a UBI program by phasing out and replacing most means tested welfare programs with UBI. Since the hypothetical UBI program will replace most welfare programs offered by the United States, we don't have to worry about raising taxes or cutting spending drastically on other categories. By phasing out the means tested programs I listed below, the government would have 720 to 800 billion to work with to fund the UBI program. To the second question, my solution would be to expand the Social Security program so that any U.S. citizen who is not incarcerated can qualify for the new UBI program. This way, the federal government does not need to create a new government agency to manage the UBI program. So without further ado, ChangeMyView Means tested welfare programs that would be phased out in my proposal Medicaid EITC and Child Tax Credit SNAP TANF WIC Federal Pell Grants and FSEOG Sources<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States should implement a universal basic income\n","id":"dfb80ee6-d47d-4d01-a41c-2ec266c8217a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>For exapmple the case of Joseph Rudolph Wood III, who's execution went wrong in Arizona; it took him almost two hours to die after injection. This was the third controversial execution in the USA in 2014.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lot of things can go wrong during the execution and lead to enormous pain and suffering.\n","id":"b4f96c70-8d54-4ee7-b364-69cb03043cc5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>A 1 percent increase in gun ownership correlates with a roughly 0.9 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate at the state level.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More access to guns and leaner restrictions on gun-owners causes more firearm murders.\n","id":"c20b5d6d-5480-4cc8-9a97-630ae18357f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Subminimum Wage be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>If there has been a change to legislation and many companies are reacting through job losses, this may dilute the impact of public outcry due to many companies and states being affected all at one time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The coverage didn't stop Walmart from firing these employees. The same could occur if the subminimum wage is abolished. Organizations will simply wait out the news cycle and proceed with firing their disabled employees.\n","id":"42a6ad93-af0c-4619-8840-5140a304caf7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>To wash, or throw away, your paintbrush between jobs?<|ARGUMENT|>Throwing away a paintbrush without even attempting to clean it and make it fit for re-use generates waste that will litter the planet for decades to come.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Encouraging 'throw-away' culture, similar to 'fast fashion' is not conducive to the kind of attitudes and culture we need to foster to survive the climate emergency.\n","id":"9f429a10-0873-450e-8cea-78b2c11bd294"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A review of a restaurant is an opinion given by someone who is basically paid to give their opinion cue the sound of half of reddit creaming their drawers . That opinion is informed by a single visit to a restaurant with little to no knowledge of how the restaurant works. Reviews are one snapshot of often one or two dishes eaten one time by one person that can have a huge impact on the success or failure of a restaurant. That's a lot of power to give to something that ultimately says nothing at all about the restaurant. The enjoyability of food is nothing if not subjective while there is science to suggest that certain things may be more agreeable to the human palette the old axiom of if it tastes bad, smother it in bacon and or cheese than others on the whole likes and dislikes are individual. A reviewer might find something they dislike however that same dish might be quite popular or liked by many others. You're essentially giving one person's opinion much more weight than it deserves. The argument is that a critic knows something about food or has experience with other restaurants and can compare what they experience to what they know and come up with a better opinion. That still doesn't change the fact that you have one person giving their opinion of what they think is good and bad regarding a restaurant and it still stacks up to be generally useless. You have a slightly better informed someone giving their subjective view on a restaurant, and we know how well informed random strangers can be with regards to reviews. Shave off that part of the job and a food critic basically becomes someone who tells you that there's no roaches or severed fingers in the food which, as we've established, reflects one experience with a restaurant . This, to me, calls into question why being a food critic is even a thing, much less a thing with as much power as some critics wield. Add to all that you get food critics desperately trying to justify their existence by engaging in snobbery and general tribalism with regards to what people put on their food or where they get it from and the entire profession seems like a needless dead weight on the culinary world. So, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reviews of restaurants by food critics are basically useless and the profession of \"food critic\" is similarly superfluous.\n","id":"7fb051cf-c69a-40dd-a41d-de280aea2cd3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is BDSM Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to abuse is to make excessive and habitual use of; to treat a person or an animal with cruelty or violence, especially regularly or repeatedly; to assault someone, especially a woman or child sexually; to use or treat in such a way as to cause damage or harm. The noun \"abuse\" is cruel and violent treatment of a person or animal; insulting and offensive language; and the improper use of something.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, \"inherent\" is existing in something as a permanent, essential, or characteristic attribute; i.e, it's an essential component that gives something it's existence.\n","id":"a7467961-b34c-4be5-916a-70fd6a358a2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There has recently been a large number of metoo posts circulating on Facebook and my news feed, where women specifically rally in a campaign relating to sexual abuse by men against women. In several instances, I've seen non women friends such as men or trans make attempts to share their stories of sexual harassment or abuse, but have been shut down by women who claim this campaign is only for women and that they should go make their own ones . Personally, I can't see why we can't acknowledge all kinds of sexual violence while simultaneously be aware of the fact that more women are subjected to harassment and abuse. Just because they might be a majority, doesn't mean that there aren't men or trans people who also feel the need to express their opinions on the topic of sexual abuse. They might even feel hurt or left out, despite feeling that they can relate to the topic or feel empathy towards fellow humans. Usually, the argument goes that the reason why it's specifically for women is because including other genders might be distractive or that it might shift focus from the sexual abuse of women towards the sexual abuse of people in general, instead. I don't see how that would be a bad thing? Why can't we include everyone, including those who feel entitled to have an opinion based on the mere fact that they are also humans despite identifying with a different gender ? Ignoring their pleas for recognition only increases the ever growing distance between our genders whilst simultaneously belittling non women and their attempts to have their problems recognised. If they aren't allowed to join in, how can it not be seen as a way of women saying our problems matter more, so shut up ? I doubt rape victims of any gender would be happy about hearing that, regardless of whether they belong to a minority or not. If anything, the issue of men having trouble speaking up on the topic would become even more difficult than it already is. Especially if we continue to consider the topic of sexual assualt to be a women issue . tl dr Trans people and men are deliberately excluded because women are afraid that the shift from sexual abuse towards women to sexual abuse somehow makes women less important, whilst simultaneously ensuring that non women stay silent because it might distract from the current issue at hand. Men and women are expected to be kept separate and our issues should be defined by our genders, not by who we are as people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"#metoo is a campaign by women, for women regarding the topic of sexual abuse that deliberately excludes non-women because non-women either can't relate to the issue or non-woman victims are considered a minority and are therefore less of a problem.\n","id":"25f85910-b9f7-4ef1-86e8-0e693a3cbebc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is traveling worthwhile?<|ARGUMENT|>Recently, Airbnb has caused major problems in over-touristed cities, resulting in higher rents and disruption of neighborhoods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Traveling to popular destinations can hurt local communities through overtourism\n","id":"61ee5023-d4e3-4e0f-95cb-b0cd63fb0e78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Some part of donations to the church may result in charitable work that the giver would otherwise make through different means. However, the efficiency will suffer from overheads for instance the livelihood of a preacher and his boss, and his boss's boss etc, and the buildings they work and live in, their private jets, the adverts, pomp, and the expensive art that adorns their window-frames, walls, ceilings or vaults, and legal fees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most religions use the you-have-nothing-to-lose-by-believing argument. Of course you do: There's your time, your independence, your objectivity, and your cash.\n","id":"76d4e0c5-4f32-4a7e-8a60-7537dc3681ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most American cities are terrible compared to European ones. I'm not talking about big cities like NYC or SF I mean the typical the average American city is just awful by any objective comparison. You can go to out of the way cities in Italy or France, Germany or Belgium, and they build places as though their great grandchildren would be proud to live there. Here, the average city has no city center, major monuments, or sense of history. In the US. there are few places to gather. The social life of American cities is incomparably lifeless compared to European cities. Our Cities are heavily segregated by race and economic class in the way European cities aren't. The architecture here is mostly corporatist modernism, and looks cookie cutter. It quickly gets dated in the way the art of European cities don't. People here have to get around by car, and as a result are fatter and live shorter lives than the average European. Our unhealthiness contributes to our under productivity. The average European city is vastly more productive than the average American one \u2013 despite Europeans having dramatically more benefits, time off, vacations in, and shorter work hours on average. We damage our environment far more readily than European cities do. Our cities are designed often in conflict with the rule areas that surround them, whereas many European cities are built integrated into their environment. We spend more money on useless junk thank Europeans do. Our food isn't as good quality. Our water is often poisoned with lead and arsenic, and our storm drainage systems are easily overrun compared to European water management systems. European cities are managing rising seas and the problems related to smog far better than American cities are. I can't think of a single way in which American cities are broadly speaking superior to European ones. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"American cities are terribly designed and administered compared with European cities.\n","id":"c454dbe8-40b6-4e48-8ff2-60f88c7f17ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Science Leave Room for Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>The concept of \"Free will\" is a fundamentally subjective phenomenon. As there can be no empirical measure of subjective phenomenon, we cannot properly apply the scientific method to our research into free will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any experiment that attempts to demonstrate free will is rooted in scientifically unreliable subjective introspection.\n","id":"795bcd2e-8e6e-457e-8e8d-4ce7518674ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After finishing my undergraduate education in a rigorous engineering course in a university in good standing where most of my peers were very strong foudation in math and science I seem to have reach a conclusion that success, beginning from academic studies, is heavily correlated to circumstances beyond one's control. Take for instance during the busiest time of the semester where you have lab reports, mid terms to study etc Someone with a advantageneous background will have meals ready for them when they reach home, a quiet environment to study and supportive family support. On the other hand, someone with a least advantageous background is going home to face his her dsyfunctional family and possibly a very disruptive environment. Most of my classmates have good, stable middle class and above families. Note I am not a US citizen and I did not study in a US uni for my undergraduate. To quote David Brooks from NYTIMES If students are going to succeed, they probably need to come from a home where they feel safe and secure, so they aren\u2019t paralyzed by anxiety and fear. Personally, I have a very dysfunctional family and there were several instances where I was just mired with fear, not knowing what the hell is going to happen to my family. Coupled with the high stress environment in university, I felt like I could not reach my highest potential. I managed to still rank around top 10 of my undergraudate cohort BUT from my interactions with my cohort mates, I feel like I could have managed top 5 . The class rank of top 5 could have opened up more doors for me because I applied to graduate schools in the USA. I hope I can meet someone I love here and possibly start a family in the USA and give my children the best possible life ever in terms of being able to pursue what they want. But for now, I experience low grade fury from time to time knowing that I have been denied a middle class life in a developed country. I was not the first born child my shared environment was not condusive for academic excellence. Maybe that's why I am a late bloomer. I managed to attain some form of academic excellence towards the later years of high school, but it is mostly limited to math and science. I am still trying to close the gap by trying to read as much as possible during my free time. In short, I feel like I have been short changed in terms of the opportunties I have in life simply because I was born in the wrong family. Despite being born in a developed country, the inequality between different socio economic background has simply set me back too large a gap that cannot be closed even if I am just as talented as my peers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A huge part of anyone's success is based on family background, and much outweighs intrinsic aptitude\n","id":"eca17ac2-8a19-4b68-a1e3-fff52a059cee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view stems from two primary points Other than two heavily R B influenced albums OutKast\u2019s Speakerboxxx The Love Below in 2004 and Lauryn Hill\u2019s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1999 , no rap album has ever won a Grammy for Album of the Year. In my opinion, the fact that no album by either Eminem or Kanye West has won is a travesty. Kanye\u2019s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy didn\u2019t even garner a nomination in 2012 a year after Eminem\u2019s Recovery , despite being the heavy favorite that year, was his third album to fail to win the award , which to me demonstrates that rap hip hop is not taken seriously in the eyes of Grammy voters. No rap song has ever won an award for Record or Song of the Year. In 2004, a year where Eminem\u2019s \u201cLose Yoursef,\u201d Beyonc\u00e9 Jay Z\u2019s \u201cCrazy in Love,\u201d and OutKast\u2019s \u201cHey Ya \u201d were all nominated for Record of the Year, the award was given to Coldplay\u2019s \u201cClocks.\u201d The continuing shutout of rap hip hop music in the Grammy\u2019s four major awards demonstrates that at best, the voters have very little understand of the genre as an art form, and at worst, the voters do not consider the genre credible enough and have a prejudice against it. No amount of commercial success, critical acclaim, or a combination of the two has ever allowed rap hip hop to break through on \u201cmusic\u2019s biggest night,\u201d and I believe that is the result of malicious intent by the Grammy voters. Then again, I may just still be bitter about Kendrick Lamar's Grammy shutout this year. Somebody . EDIT I meant for the title to read I believe the Grammys have a prejudice My mistake.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the Grammys have a prejudge against rap &amp; hip-hop and a gross misunderstanding of the genre.\n","id":"ea6172aa-f87e-4115-ac8b-86679e9df6b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Islamic terrorism was born not because Muslims 'felt' like they need to terrorize the West, but because the West had been meddling in their affairs for so long that such thing seemed necessary if they wanted to keep their autonomy from the Western powers. Muslim world was nearly untouched by Colonialism. Iran and Ottoman Empire were extremely powerful during the expansion of Colonialism era so when Ottoman Empire fell and Iran became a British puppet, Muslims found themselves subjugated by people from hundreds of miles away who used to sell them canned sardine and now claimed they owned them. The unwarranted superiority complex of Western people towards Muslim beliefs did not help either. So I think, with all the destruction that it might have caused, Muslim terrorists are completely righteous and they deserve to defend their beliefs and culture from the West.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Muslim Terrorists are Wholly Righteous,\n","id":"34447b7f-661f-4b3b-9b35-ee405155da8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>i believe that certain crimes should carry a punishment prohibiting ones marijuana use for a predetermined amount of time i dont believe these specific ones should be implemented but something similar Medicinal marijuana should never be taken away from patients who need it, the entire what defines who needs it is something im not concerned about and should be evaluated on a case by case basis by professionals. for example if you get caught without your seat belt not only do you have to pay the ticket but you should also not be allowed to smoke for 3 days. the reason i believe these things is because i believe smoking to be a privilege that if your not responsible enough to abide by these new laws you shouldnt have the right to smoke, all this does is allow the people who are responsible smokers to keep doing what theyve been doing while punishing the irresponsible potheads who do not care about the law, while leaving those who dont smoke at all relatively unaffected basically i believe smoking marijuana is a privilege that should have the potential to be taken away rather than a basic human right please change my view edit tidy'd things up tried to make my point clearer edit2 have you guys seriously never heard of punishments outside of fines jailtime? edit3 V has been C'd, move along<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe when marijuana is legalized new punishments for crimes should prohibit ones marijuana use\n","id":"798a6046-698c-4c0a-84a7-06b8b4ed73ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not a fantastic writer and my thoughts are kinda scattered, so please bear with me. Why do 24 hour news programs exist? I understand the want need to be able to know what is most current and up to date is fine, but it's basically to the point of the same thing being repeated. Why can't they tell a story, and move on until there is a substantial update that would affect the story. Having all these experts are understandable, but are they trying to tell us how to feel? x200B What ever happened to having a story fully develop, like with local news. They can do a 5pm 6pm story, then a 10pm update without jamming that constantly. It is possible that this kind of digestion is my preferred method. x200B Do you enjoy 24hr news? Why or why not? I'm looking for more perspectives on the usefulness of 24hr news and why they exist. So please, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"24 hour news is not helpful\n","id":"f27e1b35-7f02-4562-90ed-e494a94ba364"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Incestuous Couples Have Marriage Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Anyone who is monogamous and wants the benefits of a marriage partner should be given those benefits if it does not threaten the life of others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Incestual parties who who cannot have children should have marriage equality.\n","id":"acdb0341-c0b5-4434-a244-c6fac6514cc8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me hear your side of the phone war. From coming the S4 and S5, I'm used to the sub par performance of android. I had just picked up a new, unlocked galaxy S6 for 850 total with plan setup and such and I'm disappointed in myself for not getting an iphone instead. First thing I learned, Samsung let's carriers take out apps and put in bloat, where Apple does not let carriers do this. Samsung has boasted about the 3gb of ram, when most of the time my apps are still crashing regardless of this amazing ram power. My friends have said their iphones have rarelt crashed an app before. Another thing is the whole carrier mmms limit on andriod, where imessage on the iphone does not have this problem and can send any size mb video or picture. The Galaxy S6 also seems barren feature wise. I'm just so damn upset I bought this phone instead of waiting for the new iphone to come out. Once I make the switch to the Iphone 7 or 6s, whichever comes out earlier I have a feeling I won't be coming back to android for a very, very, very long time. So, with that being said, let me hear what you all have to say about your side of the phone war and what the deal breaker was for choosing it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You should get an Iphone over a Galaxy\n","id":"6625d3b6-0c68-4c54-bf56-32d2844b5f84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>Both the 2015 Paris Attacks and the 2016 Brussels Bombings were carried out by teams that were part of a network which included members who had previously spent time training with ISIS in the Levant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many returning fighters either have established networks at home already, or can create new ones by leveraging the connections and training they made while fighting abroad.\n","id":"69f000a7-7e33-40cc-9511-f66df531672d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer this IS based on an episode of The West Wing and I will not address posts about that show or that episode. x200B The next conservative seat to open, for the sake of this argument I expect that to happen within Trump's remaining days in office, should be contemporaneous with Justice Ginsburg's retirement. x200B The Republican's pick a conservative justice, the democrats pick a liberal progressive, and they agree to reset the rules to a 2 3 majority for future nominees, or at least back to the 60 vote requirement to confirm. This would have to be in the form of legislation and not a procedural rule. Doing this through legislation would at least have some checks and balances put into the process if it were ever to change again. x200B I think the appointment process needs a cooling off period with apolitical advice and consent periods on nominees after these two.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Next Conservative Supreme Court Vacancy should change the rules\n","id":"9e3a9523-2a89-4ac9-9823-e248657077f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The USSR was communist.<|ARGUMENT|>One party rule never ended nor was there a transition to a significantly more democratic form than Western capitalist democracies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lenin and Stalin were right-wing aberrations that misused the word communism.\n","id":"0c500ca3-3f72-409d-9c43-6e88ffecc02a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm aware that Hollywood used to blacklist suspected communists. I'm also aware that in the present, they openly discriminate against conservatives, and so does Silicon Valley. McCarthyism is hyped up to be this big, horrible thing, while the ongoing discrimination against conservatives is shrugged off by pretty much everyone. As far as I'm aware, the only difference is that McCarthyism was ordered by the state, while the current left wing domination of tech and media is just the way things are, somehow. In terms of actual severity, though, the left wasn't treated any worse than the right is now, did they?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"McCarthyism was no worse for the left than the current political climate is for the right.\n","id":"8eaf859c-9be3-40ef-ab62-900afa856730"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Not all feminists that I know are this way, but there are definitely quite a few who believe that feminism should combat gender stereotypes and putative gender norms wherever they exist, in whatever form they take. For example, last spring, President Obama commented that California's attorney general, Kamala Harris, was the best looking AG in the country, alluding to the fact that almost all other AGs in the country are old, white men. He made this comment after saying how intelligent and hard working a woman she is. There was a backlash from some feminists that was loud enough to make the president publicly apologize for his remarks. Yesterday, Buzzfeed posted an article discussing how some feminists are upset about the fact that men are allowed to sit how they like, and take up however much room they want, on public transportation. One commenter said she thought this was a valid criticism because it shows how it is inappropriate for women to act in certain manners, but society chooses to give men a pass. To me, these issues distract the broader public from the bigger ones that are being discussed today equality in the work place e.g. fair pay , contraception coverage in women's health insurance plans, and the widespread attacks on abortion in our country. Transitions in how we think about, talk about and view gender equality, just as it was with racial equality, unfortunately take time. But the issues I just listed above are important today, and they are issues with which the public is likely to sympathize with feminists. I believe that focusing on the more arguably trivial matters hurts the movement more than it helps it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that some feminists' focus on arguably trivial matters hurts their cause more than it helps it.\n","id":"92612446-1e9d-4756-b730-70a17f69a0ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So where do I start? The 'freedom land' has become more and more restrictive, with spying on almost everyone. We guessed China North korea would do that, but USA? Wut?? The is no longer a powerful currency any more. It has lost a LOT of its purchasing power in the last 70 years. The young people are poor, and no longer feel liberated or take up risks. The stock market fell on the day of Obama's re election. I've seen emerging markets do that India c.2004 but USA? Medical expenses are highest in the world. A tiny elite is extracting more and more wealth off a feeble economy people. More complicated rules are being formed, from SOX in 2000's to recent Dodd Frank act Most of the American mainstream media I see just get their news from government press releases I know that media of Singapore does it, but 'murica?  please?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe USA is no longer a 'developed' nation more details inside.\n","id":"54dde060-1413-4207-8b80-01c97a1b298f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in the UK and we often have documentaries such as the one by Terry Pratchett arguing for the legalisation of Euthanasia. I think this is both wrong on a practical level but also an ideological one. Harold Shipman was the most prolific killer found, and he was able to kill for years without being detected because the murders he performed were similar to euthanasia and the grey area may allow killers like him to flourish. Furthermore, people with terminal illnesses often go through varying degrees of pain and it's not hard to imagine people will seek death at the worst and would have lived to regret it. You hear about studies of people attempting to commit suicide off the golden gate and nearly all of them regretted it, which shows that sometimes people don't want what's best for them. The process of euthanasia would have to be inefficient and staggered to prevent unwanted deaths, and therefore would be expensive. Also, 'for profit' hospitals may not have the best interests of their patients at heart and pressure them into euthanasia. For these reason I am adamant that euthanasia should remain illegal. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am strongly against Euthanasia.\n","id":"517d5b28-3a04-4603-bc80-efe0cb0868ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always felt that being gay is a choice, or at least it can be changed if you want to. Sure some people turn out gay due to no conscious choice on their own but I believe that is due to environmental factors. My basis for this is Pavlov's experiment combined with a definition of 'gay' as 'being aroused by homosexual sex' and also how this can develop into feelings of 'love'. With Pavlov's experiment, a bell was wrung near a dog and no effect was observed. The dog then was shown food and the dog began to salivate. Over time whenever the bell was wrung, food would soon appear and the dog would eat. After some time even if no food was observed the dog would still begin to drool at the sound of the bell because it began to associate it with food. I feel like a similar thing can happen with gay sex. If a 'straight' man watches gay sex he feels no arousal. However, if he were to see gay sex, and then perhaps touch himself INTO arousal with the added supplementary stimuli of straight sex in another browser window if neccisary over time it makes sense that we would see a similar result to Pavlov's experiment The straight man would feel arousal when seeing gay scenes as it's been subconsciously linked to sexual pleasure. The reverse can likely also be achieved with gay men become straight or at the very least 'bi'. I think natural stimuli in life given at a certain age can result in becoming gay without expressly becoming aware of it. Furthermore, if the person enjoys the additional attention negative or positive of being gay at a young age that can contribute to the state. I don't believe it's genetic any more than being able to 'learn' behaviour is genetic. I do think it's exhibited in animals for the same reason similar reasons. Although animals don't really find gay sex taboo and thus can use it to substitute for male bonding. I think that this sort of sexual attraction with gay sex can also lead to other feelings of love bonding whatever else, as an aftereffect of gay sex. The same chemicals are being released in the brain either way gay or straight sex, so it makes sense that the same 'bonding' feelings would occur . In short, I'm fairly sure that gayness is a choice. Not that it's a bad thing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being gay is a choice\n","id":"172a0806-f92d-44be-9259-93d69e31e7c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should big multinational companies stop manufacturing in developing countries?<|ARGUMENT|>Some corporations might wish to be more environmentally friendly but are unable to do so due to fears that their competitors will gain an advantage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many corporations are victims of the ideologies that are prevalent in current mainstream economics that treat the environment poorly.\n","id":"b2cc95b9-722e-408d-9b25-4e3b87ca6ae1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't see the point in protecting emails, texts, phone calls, etc from being collected and searched in mass by the government to prevent crimes. I understand why we don't want unreasonable searches and seizures, but in my mind that is more to protect us from having our property seized or searched in a way that would inconvenience our lives without solid risk adjusted returns. The government reading our messages and calls without our direct knowledge wouldn't do this. It would be easier to report, investigate, and absolve ourselves of crimes if the government had easy access to loads of these records that could easily give credit or discredit any claims of crimes committed. I understand that it would still have to be illegal for the government to share our information, but searching it internally doesn't seem so bad to me. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fourth Amendment is used too broadly\n","id":"57a463c9-f38a-4edc-9907-c0b3bac465ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are programs like Alcoholics Anonymous the best way to battle addiction<|ARGUMENT|>Cognitive Behaviour Therapy focuses on training better ways of thinking to break the cycle of negative emotions and behaviours, which are not so easily trained. Without distinguishing between thoughts and feelings, AA misses out on this important tool.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AA makes no distinction between thoughts and feelings which is so fundamental to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy\n","id":"76d88dcd-6085-4dc0-b905-d3fbe40c6c0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a Kanye stan as much as the next guy, but I just don't understand the hub bub about Kim's leaked phone call video. Taylor never quite denied that she received notice about the lyric, but in the video, Kanye only raps the first part I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex omitting the next line where he calls her a bitch and claims responsibility for making her famous. It's clear that it is this SECOND line that Taylor has objected to, and not the first. There is no evidence Kanye ever had Taylor clear the entire song. Taylor claims, gt \u201cWhere is the video of Kanye telling me that he was going to call me \u2018that bitch\u2019 in his song? It doesn't exist because it never happened. You don't get to control someone else's emotional response to being called \u2018that bitch\u2019 in front of the entire world.\u201d As far as I can tell, Taylor was upset about the one lyric that Kanye did not share with her and there's no proof he ever did. Maybe there was some ambiguity, and on some level Taylor was being disingenuous because she at least knew about the song, but her outrage was hardly the manipulative, manufactured lie that it is being made out to be. I see no evidence that Kim's tape reveal shows anything we didn't already know, or contradicts Taylor's story in any way, but maybe I have my Facts wrong. Anybody willing to shed some more Highlights on this one?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taylor Swift is not a liar.\n","id":"c1cf9ee0-a85c-4170-a526-8391aeaa7946"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>If all the countries of the EU would have same minimum wage, same taxes and same Law system -as it is in the USA- only then it will really be a Union. Therefore a real USE. That will be very good because in the EU today, the economically strong member states tend to exploit the weaker nations by establishing dependencies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Economic burden sharing would be more equal across the Union.\n","id":"6f1d9a85-0cc7-4cc8-bd84-b9e6ab70167a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Prison, Limiting to Violent Offenders<|ARGUMENT|>Prisons should be reserved for those who are dangerous: in addition to the harms above, prisons are much more expensive than other sentences. They should therefore be used simply to incapacitate those who commit violent offences as these individuals are a greater threat to society. Violent offences are more traumatic for the victim and are less likely to stem from unemployment, poverty or a perceived lack of opportunity than property offences such as theft.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prisons should be reserved for those who are dangerous: in addition to the harms above, prisons are ...\n","id":"9741d909-d095-4d2e-b5f0-459cef3fcb77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>Texas v. White held that the Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to such ordinances, were \"absolutely null\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The premise is false that patriots have the right to violently challenge the US government based on fundamental values expressed in the founding documents. History does not illustrate that any such right exists in the form it's been understood.\n","id":"c0870913-8ae0-4867-ae27-05dd43427e51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The Book of Mormon has stood as an important historical and religious text for close to 200 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Longevity: The Book of Mormon has withstood the test of time.\n","id":"ab548f14-bac0-4a1f-936a-6bd103abdf99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD Finally got around to watching Solo A Star Wars Story and wow it's now one of my all time faves. It has everything a great movie should have, including but not limited to rich character development, captivating plot, star crossed lovers, incredible production quality, and fascinating lore. I may be a little biased because I really enjoy Star Wars but critics say Solo is only a 7 10? Really? I think it deserves a very, very solid 8 10 despite its non episode status. The complaints I have with Solo are few and far between. My main complaint is that I wish it lasted an hour longer because I loved it so much. I feel that K3's story could have been presented a bit better. Emilia Clarke was stunning in her performance but Alden could have been a bit better. At times I felt that scenes were just ever so slightly rushed. Other than that, I think as a whole it was a near masterpiece. It's no Force Awakens but not very far off either.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Disney's Solo: A Star Wars Story is a much better film than critics have rated it and deserves better\n","id":"1ed11cbf-de74-4766-87ea-30b5b678d4d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A child's right to not have parts of their body chopped off without permission supercedes the right of any third party, the child's parent or otherwise, to exercise their religious beliefs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In case of religiously motivated circumcision, it is unacceptable for the parents to leave a permanent, lifelong sign of their own religious affiliation on the child's body.\n","id":"6c865900-a0c2-41ab-be7b-cb236795a656"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>Income is viewed by many as a measure of status and success. Other information regarding one's 'success' e.g. their performance at work, their college grades are private matters; income should be the same.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making everyone's monetary information available to the public is a gross invasion of personal privacy.\n","id":"2de3b342-06be-4d22-a504-0905dc674147"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is less time outdoors severely detrimental to the physical and emotional wellbeing of children?<|ARGUMENT|>It is a fact that children will eventually have to leave the nest. Like birds, we must allow our children to practice in the outside world alone. Mother birds allow their nestlings to fly; how will they learn if we do not let them attempt. If we do not do this, what we will be left with is children who cannot look after themselves. These children will walk in front of cars, they will begin to hang around the wrong areas of town and they will no be able to leave the nest safely. We need to let them learn at a young age so that when it comes to flying the nest they are well prepared.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children need to learn to look after own safety in the outdoors\n","id":"1506b01e-5901-472c-bcef-3a363f773fcb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If a computer is able to run completely on its own, why does it need a monitor? Does hardware and software need to translate their data into imagery in order to process it logically? I don't want to imply that I have an answer to this question, but I do want to say it does seem strange to evolve the ability to translate neurological activity into images when all the real action is all taking place in the neurological circuits. Lets say that I have two identical computers, labeled A and B , with the exact same hardware and software. Both computers are running a program that finds the mean, median, and mode for 10 million sets of 10 million numbers. Now lets say that I unplug the monitor for computer B . Despite this A and B will still process the data exactly the same which makes me as a physicalist wonder what the evolutionary advantage of consciousness has. Saying that the value of the monitor is that it allows you to better operate the computer seems to contradict physicalism by saying that you are not just the material computer and implies a immaterial cosmological dude that is choosing what programs to run and what data to view. It may be that although consciousness has no evolutionary advantage it also has no disadvantage, which raises the question that theoretically we should be able to turn off a person's consciousness without impacting their ability to function and reason. And that some people are already not conscious or even that I am the only one who is conscious. The aim of this post isn't to prove or disprove physicalism but instead to change my view that consciousness has no evolutionary advantage. Thank you for your input. edit I am using the word consciousness as subjective self awareness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the context of physicalism I don't believe consciousness has a evolutionary advantage.\n","id":"a2324a78-16a2-403d-b1d3-48bce8baeb26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As of now, graphics tweaking options are, and have always been limited to PC. If a console gamer prefers smoothness over graphics, he should be allowed to tone down the level of detail to gain some performance. If he she prefers visuals over performance, he should be allowed to max the options out. If there are concerns about console gamers being overwhelmed with the new options, developers could start slow. Maybe a simple slider like Performance Quality Over time, they could start to flesh it out, adding customization for shadows, textures, object details and so on. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video game consoles should have graphics\/performance customization.\n","id":"c6f600e1-e74f-4dd4-931f-d4161b7bf250"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>People are more likely to have better lives if they have better access to education and enriching experiences than if they spend their whole lives trying to maximize their productivity in a capitalistic sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With a UBI, people will have more income to easily afford more enjoyable educational experiences, like studying subjects within their interests or learning through world exploration.\n","id":"b964e8bb-1a63-4561-9d28-3f2439b775cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are lots of smart, clever people who has the power to change the world, but choose to go back home and help his her their parents. A child was born with no state of mind, then indoctrinated in religion, for example. I'm not talking whether religion works or not for your spiritual well being, but I disagree with denial of science over faith many religion not only taught that there is a God but there are also prophets Muhammad, Jesus, etc. and many, MANY rules and statements that are backwards compared to modern standard or incompatible with what humanity has found through science and progress. Many of those religious people are smart enough to contribute to science but choose to deny science and believe in Bible Quran insert other holy books here instead. And how can you teach science appreciation through family? I don't think it's possible. There are people who can be so much more than what they're right now but doesn't want or can't be the best they can be because they don't want to be abandoned by their families, even though they're adults. Many people can't change their jobs even though they didn't like those jobs or environment because if they do they might not be able to feed their families. Jerk and or abusive parents or siblings or spouse in general. People who has potential, but they have mentally disabled siblings or relatives and forsake their jobs so that they can take care of them instead of sending them for research so that progress might be made to cure their mental illness. I get it that I MUST be grateful and appreciative that if my parents are halfway decent or more, they paid me all my bills, food, schooling and raise me the best they could which they did, for most part , but it's NOT something I have to pay for the rest of my life, because my parents CHOOSE to have sex and have children. It's THEIR obligation. Let's separate the room between mother and father and let's see if they can have any more children. And why I should care to my siblings or cousins more because they're family I said if they're total jerks, fuck them and let them rot like any other human being. I say the whole point of parenting is to teach your child so that he she will grow as halfway decent or more, functional adult who can contribute to society or the world. A child's obligation is to grow and learn so that as an adult, he she is functional and decent and contributing. This perspective could be because I'm still 18 and I hate my big brother and most of my paternal cousins, some with the passion of a thousand suns, and I'm angry because I wanted to be able to contribute to the world but I'm not smart enough to do it let's face it, most people aren't cut out to be astronauts, for example and I see many people who has more ability than I am forsaking those gifts for the sake of their families. And yes, I live in a Muslim majority country, which puts people believing in the Quran first. I want to see other perspectives. Like why normal people choose to do it. Or why choose one or several person over their happiness or the world's progress. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Family &amp; family love are holding humanity from progress.\n","id":"0db5d517-8f9e-44bc-8cb7-55d25986f1e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>Overdevelopment causes issues that are not easily reversible on Earth, which leads to abandonment due to an inability\/carelessness in fix destruction that people cause. Virgin areas in space could possibly never recover when civilizations start the vicious overdevelopment cycle of abandonment of old\/colonization of new places,which leaves wrecks behind in their path.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Problems that begin on Earth should be solved before potentially spreading them everywhere in space.\n","id":"ffcc532b-f84b-4196-8e21-181419522757"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think this toxic wave of outrage culture is overwhelming and tiresome. One of the newer ideas gaining traction diving deep into someone's past and bringing up mistakes they've made as a way to destroy the reputation they have currently and discredit them as an individual. There is not one person who has not done or said something that they regret, and I don't agree that it is necessary or appropriate to deliberately go through old social media posts past comments whatever and get the whole public to disown them. People genuinely do change as they age, whether it be beliefs, opinions, whatever. It is not okay for people to dig up shit from 11 years ago and try to use it as a testament to their current character. Unless it's an actually valid thing, like they committed murder or rape. Even if they said insensitive shit, it's not valid to bring up. Times were very different 10 years ago, and the things that were socially acceptable then, are no longer in fashion now. I don't think that you should blame people for what a society allowed in certain time periods AS LONG AS THEY HAVE SHOWN THAT THEY HAVE CHANGED. If they're still spouting racist bullshit, then absolutely feel free to flay them. But if they're living their lives, personally acknowledged their past mistakes to themselves, and minding their own business, you are way out of your lane. Tl dr everyone fucks up, only get mad at the people who are currently toxic<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Don't Dig Up People's Pasts\n","id":"39b58999-1117-4eac-b206-1de6cf8bc068"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments provide a universal basic income?<|ARGUMENT|>If society values or needs the contributed efforts of individuals enough it should support individuals at a level necessary to provide at least basic subsistence. Currently, value is ascribed in an artificial and irrational manner that is really unconnected from contribution to overall welfare of society. What relative value does an investment banker contribute to society as a whole compared to a teacher? Yet, they are paid more based upon some archaic system of perceived value.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Providing a UBI reduces social inequalities and gives individuals more opportunities.\n","id":"81b7d862-0edc-4f6d-8e20-74f422345a98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been raised as a republican, and as you can guess also in a protestant church. I'm not religious anymore really, but I still retain political views as at least a fiscal conservative. I've recently been feeling open to other viewpoints. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am a republican.\n","id":"05c9501c-50d9-493c-a6e1-0dacc49b7862"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I really like Bernie Sanders for his honesty, integrity, and his views on election finance reform and foreign policy. However, I don't know if I can support him because of his main campaigning points free healthcare as a right for all, and free college education. Both things obviously sound amazing, but I worry that we simply cannot afford it. Where does the massive amount of funding come from for these things? Bernie talks about fixing corporate tax loopholes, but will that really bring in enough income?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America can't afford universal healthcare or free college education.\n","id":"fb9bd148-6771-4d2b-9e40-538cab8618be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obligatory Preface of course no race is superior to any other. There are stupid and brilliant people from every race on this planet. That being said, culture matters. It's the reason why there are only 15 million Jewish people in this world, compared to over 1.5 billion Muslims, and yet Jewish people have won 1 4th of the Nobel Prizes and Muslims have won just a couple. Cultures that value education more do better than cultures that value education less. It seems in the US, the culture on the average that is associated with the black community doesn't embrace education nearly as much as they should. Education has been proven every single time as the only resource for empowerment. It seems to be the largest barrier to them breaking the cycle of poverty. While of course you can debate about the ridiculousness of some of our drug laws that make it hard for minorities to rise up the social ladder, and institutionalized racism, I truly believe these are smaller factors. Imo, 90 of their problems could be alleviated if on the whole they dropped this Thug culture that's so prevalent and that demonizes respect for authority and education, and instead assimilated to mainstream American cultural values, like most other groups of people in this country have. Am I wrong to have this point of view? Am I a racist?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think African-Americans haven't been able to break the cycle of poverty because their culture is trash.\n","id":"39d2a9f7-1183-4857-898f-e32a1a0cd684"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Disposable plastic items should be banned<|ARGUMENT|>Single use bags are not being reused in a way that reduces the supply that is being put into the world. Everybody still gets new bags every trip<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Plastic bags aren't always reused - there is still a percentage which will only be used once and thrown away.\n","id":"0da4c04d-4a18-4637-ba1e-a8924bdb492c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Egyptian Antiquities Department in whatever form it takes , although generally not excessively restrictive is undoubtedly partly driven by Egyptian nationalism and takes an active role in stopping certain controversial studies and field work. The sensitivity to older native people of the Americas tends to label any research into older indigenous people an idea that on it's face isn't totally absurd , as racism towards the native population. Native Nationalism creeping into a country's governmental agencies stops objective inquiry into the countries history. Especially in China, India, South America, middle east. On top of this, it is accepted in academia that the opinions of natives should be held in high regard, regardless of objectivity of the board agency in question for fear of being a racist, or under the premise that a western interpretation has the same validity of a native interpretation. Perhaps a far more controversial idea is that Western science as a tradition tends to be more objective towards not only others, but our own history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Archealogy and anthropology's literature have become so sensitive to native cultures ideas of their history that it is stifling discovery. In general Western scientific tradition is more objective than native historical governmental agencies.\n","id":"7864622a-315d-49ec-89bd-4afe28f35df1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't feel the need to go super in depth on this one. While I do note that the original cringe sub has, of late, been better moderated than in its 'low period' where bullying was an active element, brigading was commonplace, and people would literally post the videos of people they knew whom they wanted to give negative attention to. However, the offshoot subreddits are active havens of bullying today. They promote bullying directly and indirectly, and have caused untold pain to many many people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Cringe\" subreddits ultimately promote bullying and intolerance\n","id":"d08037f2-216b-4a33-8d86-89949cc3b427"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>It is more plausible that sentences like, \"Murder is something we ought avoid\", are true and sophisticated, abstract metaphysical arguments supporting anti-realism are false.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain moral truths are inherent to human nature and transcend cultures and time.\n","id":"7ba07b5b-63d4-449b-95cb-cb69bb680d6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the Las Vegas attack a false flag?<|ARGUMENT|>There are no videos of people getting shot even though thousands of people had cellphones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lot of facts about the incident do not align with the official story.\n","id":"c5fe69da-de8c-433b-8637-30c1c0a369c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ee's still buggerin' about on Plymouth Hoe after I've just told 'im that the message beacons are on fire and the bloody Spaniards are sailin' up the coast of France from Lisbon and walzin' into the bleedin' English channel. But nooo Sir Drake thinks e' can finish his game of bowls and still have plenty of time. Not like they don't outgun us 50 , right? I fink Drake should get a move on or else we'll all be payin' taxes to Philip the IInd and worshipin' the bloody Cath'lic Pope, Sixtus V. Change my view. gt Hello, people of the past. This is a footnote from the moderators of this 'internet forum'. I'm afraid to say that some wannabe scientist, while looking into time travel, has caused a temporal distortion field. It should dissipate in the next 24 hours. In the mean time, feel free to message us about a view you hold while you're visiting the present, and remember to have a look through our rules<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Boss ought to stop his bloody game of Bowls and get on with these bleedin' Spanish Armada\n","id":"191868a4-5f45-40bd-b3e9-a982b3c70cb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am, by the book, an alcoholic. It runs in my family, and after I first tried alcohol, I spent four years binge drinking oftentimes blacking out completely, night after night. I then quit when I realized how much I was hurting myself, and distracting myself from that hurt, by relying on booze. I was sober for 2 years, and then I slowly started drinking again starting Thanksgiving 2012 , promising myself that I would moderate. I have drank many times in the last year, and have had a few slip ups. They tend to happen when I go into an environment with alcohol with the mindset of WOOHOO I'M GOING TO PARTYYY But when I put myself around alcohol whilst keeping in mind my tendency to slip up and drink too much, I do really well, and can now cut myself off after a few beers. It has taken so much for me to get to this point. It has not been easy. I was suicidal when I first quit alcohol for many months following. But I firmly believe that we as humans have the capability to do almost anything we want with enough effort, strength, and determination. One day, I believe I will be strong enough to not slip up anymore. I have made so much progress already, but I would love to hear other opinions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I whole-heatedly believe that alcoholism stems from brain chemistry that can be altered by inner strength, willpower, and education.\n","id":"4e8b8d3d-b4a9-482a-8ad0-ccbfb45a60f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Hell Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>The idea of Hell is found commonly in different cultures possibly due to common global geologic observations. These include lava flows, volcanic activity, and other fearful geologic phenomenon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept of Hell or a Hell-type afterlife has shown to be prominent in cultures around the world throughout history.\n","id":"f8cd5b8f-a3aa-48aa-aae8-190734c5ab4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a mid 20s, white, middle class American who has lived most of their life in a large metro area in the upper midwest lol reddit right ? When I have been a victim of crimes or when I've had family members be victims the police have either been entirely unhelpful or made the situation worse for the victim. This experience has been uniform in every police interaction I have had myself or known a family member or close friend to have had. I no longer report crimes to the police unless I have insurance reasons for doing so, I generally would refuse to assist the police or tell them anything, and frankly I look down on people in the profession. Broadly speaking I don't think that the police, as police, offer much protection or redress. While I acknowledge that were I to get in a car accident and an officer was the first responder they would render me badly needed aid I don't think that matters much because any trained responder would do the same and that isn't the primary job of police anyways. To make my point about the uselessness of the police I'm going to break down three common kinds of crimes I might be a victim of and relate experiences I've had or known people to have that make me believe I should not go to the police. Property Crimes This is my biggest complaint, it is the kind of crime one is most likely to encounter and I've never seen the police make even the most basic effort at prosecuting these crimes. Several years ago a somewhat unstable girl was feuding with one of my roommates over an ex boyfriend. She entered our house through an unlocked back door she knew the house , vandalized my friend's room for damages gt 500, and was seen by another roommate exiting the front door as she left. When the vandalism was discovered we called the police, they came, were told the story, spoke to the person who saw the guilty party leaving, and received a current address for the vandal's whereabouts. Later the guilty party posted on facebook that her roommate said the police were looking for her she thought it was hilarious. We followed up with the police, as did our landlord most of the damage was to the room itself , but to the best of my knowledge they made no further effort and I am certain that there were no consequences to the vandal. This is the most egregious experience I've had, but I have never known police to seriously investigate property crimes. My mom had her car twice broken into in a public park's lot, as did many other people, but nothing was done. The people who broke into her card attempted to use her ATM card to pay Graduation Fees at a local high school my mom attempted to get the police to investigate further but they were unwilling to do so. So unless I need to deal with an insurance company why the hell would I go to the police if someone steals or damages my property? Sexual Crimes I have a family member who was sexually assaulted. Not a 'stranger in an ally situation', I understand those to be extremely rare, but a person at a party who my family member hardly knew. He got her out of the common areas of the party and then forcibly assaulted her. She went to the police and had a bad experience doing so. They were unconcerned with her welfare or mental state. They went to great efforts to get her to say she either knew the guy better than she did or had drank much more than she had. The whole orientation of the police's process was not towards proving a crime, or apprehending an offender, but instead trying to create doubt that a crime had occurred. In the end they did nothing other than compound the trauma of the rape. The victim regrets having gone to the police. I entirely believe her story on the basis of long observation of her personal stability and the clear effect this had on her in the aftermath please don't try and tell me that if it really was as she represented the police would have done more. If I am ever the victim of a sexual assault, thankfully unlikely, I certainly won't bring it to the attention of police. Violent Crimes I have never been a victim of a serious assault or attempted murder and the only people I know who have are the kind who 'don't snitch' no matter what happened. So I admit a lack of direct experience here and expect police take such things somewhat more seriously. Still, I don't think I or most people face a significant chance of being assaulted except from someone close to them or strangers mostly when I had some role in escalating the altercation. Most people won't report a family member SO unless the injury is really serious and if some total stranger decides to jump me and beat me totally unprovoked I think my chances of reliably identifying that person for police are basically 0. So again in this regard I don't think the police provide significant protection they'll take your husband away in cuffs after he stabs you, but that's about it. Don't try and tell me that the police don't have enough resources to investigate these kinds of crimes. In the vandalism case 500 1000 worth of damage was done. I know how many hoops the police would jump through to bust a 1000 coke deal, shit a 50 coke deal. The police have resources, but their priorities are not oriented towards the welfare of citizens and protecting those citizens from crime. I could go into my analysis of the real role of these police, but that's well beyond the scope of this , so all I'll do is name check Michelle Alexander's landmark work<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe that police in the United States protect me in any personally significant way and generally do not report crimes committed against me to the police.\n","id":"4145fa1e-1383-4152-b5be-9ce4d4897c28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you've been following the political hoo ha surrounding the upcoming presidential election then you are well aware of the controversial topic of illegal immigration. The discussion is pretty clear. The right believes in doing what they can to end it. The left feels that we need to give access to a better life even if it that access isn't attained legally. Regardless of which you believe, the reality is that every other successful nation is going through a similar thing. If you look at the growing problems with migrants in Greece Macedonia. If you look at the refuge issues in places in the Middle East like Jordan and Lebannon. You will see that people are fleeing their homelands for the hopes of a better life. However these hopes come with the destruction of hopes for those who are already in that better land. There are limited resources and giving access to those resources to people who want to come to your country, means that they will not be available for you. This problem is huge and countries are taking varying measures. Places like Macedonia are blockading their border. Places like Hungary are building fences. Places like Jordan are setting up refuge camps not allowing for access outside of them. However when the U.S. suggests that they too need to be taking measures to protect their resources, they are left to handle stark criticism. Criticism that ranges from racists to fascists . However this same criticism seems to be absent for much of the other countries in the world who believe in protecting their resources and their borders. I believe the criticism is lacking in Europe because people understand that these migrants are having a detrimental affect on the societies. If you look at the problem expanded immigration has caused in France, Germany, Greece, England and many other nations, you begin to sympathize with taking measures to stop it. For some reason this reality seems to be ignored when it comes to people over running U.S. borders. It seems as if people think the U.S. has unlimited resources and that any and all should have access to them. The narrative is often to say that these people just want to make a better life for themselves. Yes, as does every other person in this world. But in order for them to make a better life they need resources to do so. Those resources are being kept from people who should have access to them legal immigrants and citizens . I see no reason why the U.S. should be criticized for wanting to protect the resources and keeping them for U.S. citizens and legal residents. Europe's problems should be a lesson that we learn from and try to avoid happening to us. This isn't just a problem that is social, political, financial it is all of that and more. Many experts believe the migrant problem will be the single greatest cause of the collapse of the E.U Reason being, there is no plan in place to stop this influx and no European commission to oversee this problem. Countries are left to fend for themselves and they will look out for themselves . The U.S. should be wise enough to do something about this now or be left to deal with the same faith. I don't see why trying to avoid that faith is deserving of criticism. Change My View<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States is unfairly judged for wanting to stop illegal immigration, when the rest of the world is doing the same thing.\n","id":"c5a36dd1-2933-427f-9e51-bfade1856096"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not talking about someone who wants to make a lot of money for the future health of their family, nor am I talking about someone who happens to be making a lot of money during a pursuit based on a non financial core motivation. I'm talking about people who just want to be better than other people 'competitive' and exorbitantly wealthy. My dad falls under that umbrella and a lot of people would say 'wow he's such a great man for attaining financial stability' but he's incredibly abusive, very neglectful, and manipulates me financially. He wasn't motivated by a drive to support others, because of how badly he treats his kids. He wasn't motivated by changing the world or fixing a big problem, because his job is in no way related to helping a big problem unlike a paramedic, civil rights lawyer, climate change scientist, etc . It pisses me off. There's a lot of things going on in the world right now that are trending towards future generations being extremely fucked over. I can't stand people who aren't motivated by that, or at least some form of helping others in the present day like I said before, whether that's providing for children lovingly, being a doctor, whatever else . In some college econ classes I've had, the professors have said the more money you make, the better person you are, because the more value you create for society I think that's bullshit. I think if you happen to benefit others as an incidental product of raging narcissism, you're still a terrible person. tl dr I think if your core motivation backed up by your actions outside of your job is to make a positive impact on the lives of others, whether your kids or the world, you're a good guy. However, if you're only motivated by 'beating everyone else' and living opulently, instead of having motivations stemming from caring about your family or changing the world, I think you're a piece of shit. Obviously there's a lot of people who disagree with that, so I'm very honestly open to being wrong, hence this post. Not meaning to offend anyone with my views. It's very possible that my bitterness and anger about my upbringing is polluting my ability to look at things objectively I feel like me saying people who only chase paper can be good people means me saying my dad is a good person, and my dad unapologetically abused children. I feel like within the woo hoo the only thing that matters is your happiness paradigm, he is excused from all guilt, which I cannot accept. That's probably not rational, but if I said I didn't feel that way I'd be being dishonest. It's possible that the woo hoo the only thing that matters is your happiness thing works better with people who have empathy, at which point fucking others over FOR your happiness makes you feel bad, hence making it in your interest to not be completely selfish as a function of wanting to be happy. But for my parents, putting me above their marriage ego selfish wants and needs wasn't on the list of things that would bother them if they didn't do it, which I've had confirmed via observation and specifically asking. So I see that in anyone I meet who just wants to get theirs and it makes me absolutely enraged. Inescapably enraged. Thanks in advance to anyone who answers<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that people who are only motivated by making money instead of making positive change are selfish and shallow\n","id":"25585a89-a310-4f6e-9436-e65cb0cba9af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is more of a rant than a  post but whatever. Ok listen to these two songs Then listen to these songs It's literally just fucking adding annoying dubstep shit and cutting almost everything out. I hate it most when they put like little half second recordings of the singer so it sounds kind of like they're trying saying something but they're fucking robots with down syndrome and they can't talk. It just takes what the artist worked so hard on and destroys it. I'm so fucking angry right now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I hate remixes\n","id":"4a2899f7-3bb7-4588-8e4a-fd16d8ae6557"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is America Superior to Every Other Country?<|ARGUMENT|>The Bill of Rights limits the powers of the federal US government and protects the rights of all citizens, residents and visitors in American territory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America protects the rights of citizens more than any other country.\n","id":"52495cb6-217e-4a43-8600-892e4f8f6768"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Mother Teresa have been canonized?<|ARGUMENT|>Sisters and volunteers, who often had little to no medical knowledge were tasked with making decisions about patient care and treatment due to a lack of doctors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Robin Fox, editor of the British Medical Journal \"The Lancet described the care patients received as \"haphazard.\"\n","id":"4b8479f9-b599-41d9-b9f9-18725bbdb6bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Last night Vice on HBO did a piece on the impact that drones are having on Pakistan and other countries. I can't deny that they have a negative impact on the Pakistan but Drones Strikes are meant to be a strategic weapon designed to hit international terrorism. I am not in favor of signature strikes or am I uncomfortable with strikes on Americans abroad. Ease of outrage in the radical Muslim community. Islamic terrorist groups have demonstrated time and time again they will attack for irrational reasons. Cartoons of Mohammed for example. Drones are simply one more tool in their already staked recruitment deck. Before 9 11 there were no Drone Strikes or Troops in Iraq or Afghanistan . Counter Terrorism has replaced Counter Insurgency The difficulties faced by the US Military in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to a rethinking and public wariness of long term ground based military operations against Insurgent groups. Counter Insurgency COIN is a long, costly, and bloody process. While the goals of rebuilding a war torn society are noble and come from WW1, 12 years is too much at this point. Counter Terrorism operations' goal is to simply firewall off terrorist groups from being able to attack the US in a significant way. The goal is not to make Pakistan more stable or less violent. That was tried and failed. Amateurization of Al Qaeda the theory behind Drone Strikes is simple, if you kill senior leadership enough times over and over, eventually the idiot cousin is going to take over. The counter theory of the next guy will be worse doesn't apply since AQ, even by the Muslim community's standards, doesn't have a moderate element. Terrorist groups like the IRA, Hamas, and Hezbollah do have moderate elements that can be worked with in the long term to create political solutions. This has led to a significant drop in AQs operational capability. Recent AQ attacks have been limited to small poorly built bombs and low scale attacks. Nothing nearly as close to the suffistication and impact of 9 11. Could we see a rise in small scale terrorist attacks Boston , absolutely. That being said society is better equipped to deal with multiple periodic small scale attacks than single massive attacks. 9 11 nearly collapsed the global economy, Boston didn't. False Alternative an alternative often raised is Special Operation Forces. The SOF raid against OBL is used as a classic example. The issue I have with this alternative is it ignores the past 21 years of SOF history, starting with Black Hawk Down. When SOF missions go bad, which happens more than you think most of that history is embedded in the larger context of Iraq and Afghanistan , they go bad big. The Black Hawk Down raid led to over 1,000 deaths as Delta and the Rangers fought their way out of the city. Recently an attempted Seal Team 6 raid in Somalia was aborted because the Commander was concerned about civilians being at risk if shots were fired while trying to get to their target. Drones are criticized for civilian deaths, but the alternative of using SOF more will result in significantly more civilian deaths. I realize this is a very Americentric view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Drones have been a success and do not \"create more terrorists\".\n","id":"24e8169a-819b-4cfd-a781-74e9810b5834"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, I am 100 for people being transgender, I don't at all have any problem with their lifestyle and I am not against it in any way whatsoever. I am not against transitioning surgery and while not necessarily related, I believe in marriage equality and think that everyone is a human being and deserves respect and understanding. My question is more of just a definitional one. People who are trans are one Sex but believe in their mind that they are another. This seems to me to be the very definition of a delusion. I am not arguing that trans people should be treated like people with a mental illness or anything I'm just wondering if there is a reason that they are not considered to be suffering from a delusion. It seems clear to me that they are but I would love to have that view changed or modified.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"transgender people suffer from a delusion\n","id":"e838bde2-f766-4f59-9795-6d0c48a9167c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>Police failed to investigate trouble or adequately perform a welfare check after multiple emergency service requests placed to 9-1-1, while a burglary and rape were in progress. captive women were raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts for fourteen hours. The court found that \"no specific legal duty exists\" for police to provide public services to individuals; only the public-at-large. Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A. 2d 1 - DC: Court of Appeals 1981<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Numerous examples of US case law have reaffirmed that police have no duty to protect If taxation pays for this key service and the state has no obligation to provide it, then the contract lacks mutuality of obligation and is therefore not enforceable.\n","id":"a0f16ca6-8523-4240-9ee8-6bba00fd3a3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Too many politicians focus more on being re elected instead of actually doing good or representing their voters. Many recent issues in the US, such as gay marriage, legal drug use, and increased gun control seem to have failed failed or faced significant difficulties despite popular oppinion because politicians are afraid to be criticized in attack ads and lose power. Probably the most telling example I've seen has been the issue of domestic surveillance in the US. While most people are generally opposed to it, politicians are afraid to do anything, because when the next terrorist attack happens, they will be blamed regardless of the fact that domestic surveillance has failed to stop a single attack . Also, if one were only able to hold a single term, it would guarantee that most running were only doing it out of genuine good will, and not a desire for power or money. The two arguments I can think of against this point are as follows Objection New politicians aren't as effective as veterans, and would make poor decisions. Response Most of the resistance to bills that requires hardening to overcome is caused by other politicians trying to retain power, in my opinion. Also, if someone is competent enough to be elected into office, they should have enough experience to avoid a disaster. Truly moronic politicians don't make up a majority, and any that were elected probably wouldn't be able to do very much. Objection This policy would punish good politicians. Response Losing office shouldn't be a punishment, because politics shouldn't be a career. Representative democracy should be thought of in a more Athenian way, where holding office is more of a citizen's duty than a career path. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Representatives should be limited to only one term in office\n","id":"a74bcd94-fd2b-4b21-a3a3-7d43081cc1ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the current school system is absolute garbage. A majority of what is learned will not be useful depending on career path. Even if the school system couldn't be abolished, why can't we just add more emphasis to career choice? Having set requirements for graduation is completely illogical when a majority of the credits actually mean nothing in the long run. It's equivalent to someone giving you a degree in a topic for reading a book. That degree is essentially meaningless. The only caveat to this idea would be that there could be sudden career path changes, or not knowing what career path to follow in general. But even now, in college, this happens. People come unprepared or uncertain, yet they can make it out alive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should abolish the current school system and replace it with specialized schools for specific career paths.\n","id":"eaaa2834-5ad4-4b2f-a027-fff3e48ab8e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Terrorism should not be allowed publicity<|ARGUMENT|>Terrorist organisations are perfectly capable of spreading word of their attacks to potential sympathisers by other means. These methods of recruitment are more effective than dependence on how the media may portray terrorist purposes and actions. The rise of extremist groups is often equated with these various other forms of media capabilities such as websites and personal messaging which are much more effective in presenting persuasive messages. Instead, publicising terrorist attacks can actually provide the public with information which may assist in national security. Airports continually asks the public to be involved in awareness of their surroundings. Information about terrorism strengthens the value of these requests. There is no clear relationship between publicity about terrorism serving significant recruitment purposes and instead we can see how information may better prepare the public against terrorist activities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Recruitment occurs through various other channels than through public news sources.\n","id":"96d39219-bc4e-444f-bb34-b28ea8bd1537"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Where parents fail to provide basic conditions for their children, this is often at least in part due to a failure on the part of the state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state does not get a legitimate claim to the custody of children whose parents fail to get a license.\n","id":"16a12c90-e42b-4ab1-9ada-5d229b702dea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A few decades ago, many schoolchildren learned an algorithm for EDSRH exact decimal square root by hand . This algorithm gives the exact decimal value i.e. what a calculator would show you of a number's square root, without a calculator or slide rule. Around 1970, this algorithm stopped being taught. Of course the square root itself is still in the curriculum, as is enough number sense necessary to estimate a number's square root by hand, but EDSRH is out. Specialists e.g. calculator programmers can of course still look up and learn EDSRH if they need it, so no knowledge is lost. But is it useful for enough students to be worth covering in classrooms? The consensus is no. Calculators are ubiquitous. If you need a square root, it's very simple to either approximate it by hand, or find a calculator. You get by just fine these days without an exact method by hand. Sure, learning EDSRH incidentally lets you practice other math skills like multiplication, but you could better use the same classroom time to practice those exact same skills while doing useful problem solving. EDSRH is a remnant from a time before calculators, when humans needed to know how to be calculators themselves. Now that we have calculators that do the same thing only faster and with fewer mistakes , humans' time is better spent learning to use calculators properly, and to do things calculators can't. You probably see where I'm going with this. My view is that we've reached the same point with EDQH exact decimal quotient by hand . You were probably taught an algorithm for EDQH around age 10 the most popular algorithm is long division though there are others I feel the same way about . It's time to remove it from grade school classrooms. That time can be better spent training to use calculators, and getting enough number sense to make smart estimations and interpret calculator output well. For context, I have a degree in mathematics, and I probably do more math on a daily basis, both professionally and as a hobby, than 98 of the population. I don't think I've used long division once in 10 years, and if I forgot it today, I wouldn't bother to relearn it. In your reply, if you make an argument that could also be applied to EDSRH, please be explicit about why you think EDQH is different. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the long division algorithm is obsolete, and should no longer be taught to schoolchildren\n","id":"1d8c2097-194d-4bbc-84db-c02bd0282a3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Admittedly the guy was nuts, but I believe there is some validity in the beginning of his manifesto. At the very least I think it warrants a discussion. Kazinsky claims that modern leftists are motivated by feelings of inferiority and oversocialization. I'll concede that the definition of leftism is flimsy. I'd never say that all people who vote democrat fall into this category. I'm speaking mainly of overly politically correct people the types you'll find on r tumblrinaction. A subset of the left at the very least, but nevertheless a driving force and very vocal part of the superset. In his own words gt But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than we would wish, but there doesn't seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying to do is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. I believe I'm biased because I've met so many people who I think can be described this way. I cut and pasted what I considered to be the most important arguments. I'm sorry if this offends anyone. His tone can be insulting, and I'm not as hardset on these beliefs as he is, so don't take them as my own. Inferiority gt When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him or about groups with whom he identifies we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self esteem. gt Those who are most sensitive about politically incorrect terminology are not the average black ghetto dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any oppressed group but come from privileged strata of society. gt Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak women , defeated American Indians , repellent homosexuals , or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit it to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. We do not suggest that women, Indians, etc., ARE inferior we are only making a point about leftist psychology . gt Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out and often greatly exaggerates these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist's real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful. gt Words like self confidence, self reliance, initiative , enterprise, optimism, etc. play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti individualistic, pro collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone's needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser. Oversocialization gt Psychologists use the term socialization to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are over socialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem. gt Generally speaking, the goals of today's leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming with some degree of truth that society is not living up to these principles. gt The way of life of the black underclass they regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper middle class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man instead, they want to preserve African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black style food, listening to black style music, wearing black style clothing and going to a black style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects more leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white, middle class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to make black fathers responsible. they want black gangs to become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial technological system. The system couldn't care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a responsible parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system and make him adopt its values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the unabomber made some good points on leftist psychology,\n","id":"7e902d6c-ca72-4551-a23b-b7f51603ac33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people be free to choose the country in which they live?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU is an example of freedom of movement which is restricted to those who can pay their taxes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Restrictions could still easily apply, for example migrants can only stay if they are working or self-sufficient.\n","id":"d2ebde7c-50fd-4759-975d-51f36cfae193"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The family recently got a new puppy. She's a really cute little girl, Timber wolf Malamute, but there's a problem. She absolutely will not stop whining and barking every night. I've sat there for hours flicking her on the nose every time she whines, seeing if she has to pee, giving her water, etc, and nothing seems to be working. So I'm considering maybe getting a shock collar But I feel a deep prejudice against them. This probably comes from being incredibly sensitive with animals and feeling really protective over them but god damn this dog simply will not stop. I'd be pretty thankful if somebody could change my view on this because I think it's terribly cruel but I haven't looked that much into it and I'm afraid it might be our only option other than getting rid of her.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shock collars are cruel and insensitive.\n","id":"04aca468-3626-4309-abc2-811cc07ce861"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should private education be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The freedom of parents and the money they have gained from the past is less important than the freedom of children and the future they could make with equal opportunity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An unequal system also takes away people's freedom by taking away equality of opportunity.\n","id":"5693b6f7-2f7c-400a-bd47-e50f2dabb85c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't condone pedophilia, but it seems like there is some hatred, vigilantism and despise of pedophiles, just like it was the case for homosexuals and other deviants in society in previous periods of history. Pedophilia should not be controversial, it should be talked about. TEDx took down that video because it's a controversial subject and because it would hurt their reputation, but I don't think that was said in that video is wrong or encourage pedophilia or absolve child abuse. Like always I'm a little concerned about how people can build their own moral and justice system to attack certain people for some reasons they deem reasonable. There is due process because if you let people make their own justice, you usually get murderous people kill innocent ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"as though pedophilia is problematic, it seems that there are shortcuts being taken to persecute known pedophiles, even though they are innocent.\n","id":"78d6ba0b-a22d-42a9-a76d-47009beda250"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>A USE would undoubtedly become a globally relevant superpower. The EU is currently the largest economic block in the world. A USE would make the building blocks of further development, with a unified fiscal and monetary policy and a single diplomacy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union should become a United States of Europe.\n","id":"b2bff3f6-e80f-4389-9563-c8726a7f8c68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If one doesn't eat the shark, it doesn't mean that the shark will be equally nice to you and choose not to eat you. Chickens are such good animals they've never really killed and ate any member of our species, but we humans still eat them. So even if one is nice to their bully, they shouldn't expect them to return with the same behavior. So I strongly feel to combat bullying, the bullied needs to bully back. I've been both both sides before, the bullied and the bully. Frankly speaking, it's not really nice to be on both sides but being a bully feels better than being bullied. Neutrality is often not a choice if the class has a bunch of hostile people in it and teachers are useless in stopping the bullying, so in order to stop bullying, one must rise in power in order to enforce the idea of neutrality for both parties. This is shown and played before in history as well you can be a leader of a country who worship peace and never get into conflict with other countries but ho ho ho ~ What should you do if you meet someone like Hitler? Don't fight back to his invading army? The choice is simple. Either you can get hurt terribly by the bully, or you fight back with all your might to stop the bullying. Find other parties who have been bullied and bully in numbers and form a group to combat the bullies' hostility.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Never bully back\" is a terrible and stupid advice for bullied people\n","id":"73bd6bd0-a76c-4bf5-9e2d-99a9b0bb2fb9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view is that history ethnicity centric religions such as polytheistic reconstructionism, Judaism, and Mormonism are better than faith individual centered universalistic religions such as Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam. I think that ethnic religions make people care more about the future and have a lesser temptation to apocalypticism, seeing themselves as not being a special generation but rather a generation among several generations. By contrast I see universalistic religions such as Christianity and Islam as promoting individualism and thus a notion of the current generation being the last generation before the Apocalypse and as a result not giving people a reason to try to conserve the world for future generations or plan for the distant future. I believe that this applies to secular ideologies too with individualistic ones often predicting some sort of apocalypse such as nuclear war with russia or the singularity or catastrophic climate change which gives them the same problems that are endemic in Universalistic religions but I don't think that there are any secular ideologies that are able to connect people with history in the same way that ethnic religions can and as a result I support reviving them. EDIT to add clarity My position is that religions focused more on the individual including many secular ideologies due to the lack of strong intergenerational consciousness create a belief in an apocalypse, not necessarily in the destruction of the earth but also in similar scenarios like the proletarian revolution where history changes so drastically in one generation that conventional planning for the future becomes meaningless because they cannot comprehend of the future and that collectivistic ethnic oriented religions due to having a strong presence of generational continuity with the past in their consciousness are able to get people to relate to the future and thus engage in more realistic future planning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ethnic religions are superior to universalistic religions and secular ideologies\n","id":"198a8c81-ecc9-43d0-b57c-10bc36436814"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>That way the programs that lose support of the people also lose funding and are discontinued. Instead of voting for a representative who will then elect another representative who will then pass legislation you never agreed to support and disagree with but still have to pay for, you basically vote for government programs agendas with your tax dollars. Ones that don't get funding fade away. and everyone would be happy knowing how their tax dollars are spent and your government is then required to take the form you actually want instead of doing whatever it likes and demanding that you pay for it. EDIT okay guys, you know that i'm referring to the optional new redundant programs and not the necessary infrastructure for running a country that everyone benefits from. I apologize if it seemed like i wanted to throw the country into anarchy or had the entire new world order all planed out. that was not my intention but thanks for jumping there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Your tax dollars should only go towards the programs you actually support.\n","id":"186641f6-d3e8-4cdd-a228-e179d331c47b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund security for places of worship?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the Global Terrorism Database, from a total of 2,716 incidents, between 1970 to 2017, mosques were targeted the most - more than a thousand times - from among all the places of worship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Muslim leaders have called for more security at mosques in the wake of attacks and a rise in Islamophobia. They say Islamophobia has forced communities to practice their faith in fear.\n","id":"f2467d56-652d-44f8-98dc-de06ca914806"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This was inspired by a post from earlier in the day, but I personally do not believe that we have any quantitative measure for truth. What we have is a bunch of assumptions that we as a society have agreed upon, however none of us can actually prove any of them to be truths. Some people point to science as our measure for truth. How can we say that science is true when 1. we know that science has been wrong in the past 2. we know science is constantly evolving. If you agree with both 1 2 then how can you know that the truth that you perceive to be true as actually being true? Or is it that we really don't know what's true but we only have agreed upon an assumption at this point in time as the truth? One other point. How do we know that the truth that we know is actually true when compared to say the truth that a North Korean civilian believes as true? Is truth relative? Is truth universal? If it is universal who is controlling our access to it? As the saying goes history is written by the victors , who are the victors that have allowed us to perceive what we know to be true, as truth today? And, how can we prove that these victors are actually providing us access to truth, and not just using information to make us perceive their definitions of truth? Interested in hearing your replies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there is no such thing as truth.\n","id":"d7fac008-a3ca-46cf-bbcc-13bb7979163f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should God Have Tested Job?<|ARGUMENT|>Bible states that God's ways are superior to the actions of any man thereby advocating for the absurdity of challenging God's decisions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God, being the most powerful, wise, and benevolent entity is in the best position to decide what actions are necessarily moral.\n","id":"dafcea91-0e53-46fa-87a0-0f1ca24fd978"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>An individual who was a former friend of mine passed away. He was a volunteer first responder, so naturally upon his death, everyone began rewriting history. Things people have said He was a saint. Heaven has a new angel. He was always such a kind man. They didn't make them any better. He had such deep faith and he's in heaven now. He persevered and succeeded in life in spite of being bullied. He was always so helpful and patient. The truth He was an asshole. If heaven has a new angel it's not him. He didn't believe in it, and if it exists there's no way he's there. He never had a kind word to say about anyone. In fact whenever people had good things happen, he would go out of his way to put them down. If they didn't make them any better, they should shut down the factory. He was an atheist, openly mocked those with a religion, automatically presumed himself smarter for not believing, and never missed an opportunity to tell someone why they were wrong. If there is an afterlife, he's looking up at us right now. He was a bully. He would scream in people's faces who disagreed with him, and then change the topic. He would frequently talk over people, getting louder to drown them out and intimidate people into siding with him. He never succeeded in life. He was a first responder because it was the only thing at which he was partway decent. He wasn't smart, he wasn't athletic, and he certainly wasn't nice. Basically he is the reason people leave volunteer organizations. He was power hungry, a bully, and a rotten piece of shit until the day he died. He was neither helpful nor patient. He would leap down someone's throat for asking a question and call them a stupid for not figuring it out. If the person, wisely, avoided him and asked someone else instead, if he overheard he would interrupt the conversation to do the same thing, inject his opinion, and berate the person for being so stupid. Find a Grave does not have a memorial for him yet. I know it's just a matter of time before someone puts one up there talking about what a wonderful human being he was. I want to create a memorial and write an honest biography, one that tells the truth about the way he lived his life. One that doesn't lie about the way he was. This is not just my opinion. When he got sick, they took up a collection. More than one individual commented that he was an asshole, they were glad he was sick, and they sincerely hoped he died. Many others said, I know he's a terrible human being, but I feel bad for his parents losing their son anyway. At the same time, he's dead. And anything I'd write wouldn't affect him, but his parents. So despite wanting to make sure he's remembered the scumbag he was in life, I have reservations about inflicting any further emotional distress on his family. At the same time, he does not deserve to be made into more than he was. Reddit, change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I want to write an honest obituary.\n","id":"417de16e-30e1-4c50-81e5-206a6e2c9c63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those that don't know, the Buffalo Commons Proposal was an idea in the 1980s to encourage the depopulation of much of the Great Plains to create a massive nature preserve. Buffalo Commons would affect 10 states Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. This wouldn't mean that the larger cities that would require massive change, 6,000 7,000 would be depopulated. In fact, they would probably experience growth, for the first time in decades, helping businesses. I support this idea for a few reasons. The first would be the population of the area is already rapidly declining and shows no sign of slowing down. Interestingly, in 1893, Frederick Jackson turner declared the frontier closed, using the standard of 6 people per square mile. Today, counties in the area of fewer than 2 people per square mile. This level of rural ness is probably hard for many in the suburbs and cities where the vast majority of our country lives and works to comprehend. Some school districts are larger than counties. Hospitals are few and far between. These places have little to no relevance, and only come up because they offer a safe refuge for white supremacists and such. It's flyover country. Why are we insisting on continuing to populate this area? The second reason why this is a good idea is the main source of water in the area, the Ogalalla aquifer, is already running out. People won't be able to live there or farm ranch, which is currently the region's only economic activity. The current use of the land isn't sustainable. The third major reason is it would reclaim and restore millions of acres of land, and with the reintroduction of a few species, such as the American bison, it could have a massive environmental impact that would be good, a positive change for once. Simply put, I believe Buffalo Commons should be implemented because what we're doing right now isn't sustainable, and will inevitably happen naturally, so we should do it now to figure it all out before it turns into and in some places, it already is a crisis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Buffalo Commons Proposal should be implemented.\n","id":"07ada659-42dc-4729-a12a-65488d210d7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the United States should abolish the death penalty. Why? The following reasons 1 Capital punishment results in the execution of innocents. First, directly, people who are innocent of the crime they are charged with are executed. A study by University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross determined that at least 4.1 of those currently on death row are innocent. Second, individuals who are mentally ill and therefore not morally culpable for their crimes are executed. I think this is good reason because execution is considered by criminals worse than life imprisonment so I'm preempting the response that innocents are put in jail too. Furthermore, prison allows for reconsideration of the guilt of individuals. 2 I'm not yet compelled by the argument that capital punishment is a sufficient deterrent of crime, that retributive justice should play a role in the criminal justice system at all, or that capital punishment's preventing recidivism is a good reason to keep it in place. However, I'm not 100 certain of this view and, therefore, would like to understand more nuance within this. Therefore, change my view try convincing me of the other side. I'm very willing to do so, if I can understand your perspective. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US should abolish capital punishment\n","id":"7ad49ab0-736b-4d03-80d6-633fc42a5245"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>This is even supported here \"Some turbolaser had a limited range of effectiveness, as seen when the Supremacy's weapons were unable to cause damage to the Raddus from a long distance\" long distance still being visual range, which is less than a couple of hundred Km in space.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Star Wars has no on-screen ranges, but generous estimates put max weapon range at 5,000km. Star Trek has a confirmed on-screen weapon range of 250,000km and theoretical ranges of 300,000km-4,500,000km. Star Trek outrange the rebels by at least 50 times minimum.\n","id":"7592eede-9c3d-4393-a7d9-9d40f492c989"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The justification behind estate taxes is the desire to prevent the accumulation of wealth it's not desirable that a few people own all the wealth in the nation because feudalism sucked for everyone who wasn't in the upper classes. However, simply taking someone's money away from them because they have 'too much' is unethical, unfair, and immoral. Note that I'm not claiming that taxation in general is immoral public works and services need to be funded, which is a good justification for taxation in general stealing from someone's estates simply because you don't want their descendants to acquire too much is different. 1 You can't take something from someone simply because you want it need it or because they already have a lot the exception being taxation, which I've already mentioned . People's wealth is theirs to do with as they please within the confines of the law I'm stating this as legal fact as opposed to mere opinion throughout their life, so why should that change when they're dead? 2 Again, people's wealth is theirs to do with as they please. People in general, beyond ensuring their own survival, work to provide for their family. If I want my kids to have my money after my death, that's my prerogative here I'm not saying that the kids are intrinsically entitled to it but rather that the parents are entitled to bequeath it as they please. 3 If I make a lot of money in my life and spend every dollar beyond what I need to raise a family on purely hedonistic pursuits, leaving behind a very small estate, there would be virtually nothing to tax. If I live a comparatively modest life and save so that my children will inherit large sums of wealth, a large amount of that wealth will be taken from me them after I die that wouldn't have been taken if I had lived whether I had spent it on storebought goods or prostitutes . Why should I be penalized post mortem for having saved my money? Thank you for taking the time to read this. I look forward to the ensuing discussion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Death taxes should never be allowed because accumulated wealth should be permitted without exception\n","id":"74e198a9-3f05-4f62-8f54-6c503446b948"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The money we spend on our Olympic medal count is money well spent<|ARGUMENT|>The investments into sports by governments and corporate giants are beneficial to the society at large. We must appreciate the fact that all of us have varying abilities and interests, and that not everybody is born academically gifted, goes through university education and lands himself or herself a well-paying 9-to-5 job in the city. Some of us are more active physically and sports-inclined. With the right amount of government funding, these people do not have to go through the traditional route of getting a tertiary education which may probably work against them. Instead, they could enrol themselves in sporting institutes and become full time athletes. This will provide them with the right platform to develop their abilities further and excel in their chosen field. Subsequently, they can make a career of out sport by being a private coach, fitness instructor, professional trainer and even a professional footballer who earns \u00a380,000 a week! Just as in academia where governments invest heavily in research and development activities, postgraduate funding and research facilities, governments should do the same to the sporting arena as this would create job opportunities for the people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Money is spent on academia yet not everyone is academic\n","id":"8825d016-8dbd-4d37-b3b3-bc4af15d1292"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize prostitution<|ARGUMENT|>Legalization would empower prostitutes to have healthier practices like condom use, since right now they are pressured out of it in part because they have no legal power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing sex work will make the profession safer for women\n","id":"5b533fd6-fb2e-4936-8b76-b7a5b32759e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Host Countries and Cities Benefit from The Olympic Games<|ARGUMENT|>It is a waste of materials for something that is used for a short period of time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most Olympic venues are abandoned after the games end and become eyesores in the host cities.\n","id":"d6d73ec5-3f82-4a7e-8a5c-79c727d29a3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that if someone enters an unclaimed piece of land and builds shelter or farms it or uses it regularly enough for whatever purpose, that person can legitimately claim ownership of it. This belief is grounded from what I can come up with right now on the following assumption taking a substantial part of someone's property which he worked to earn create, or which was inherited from someone who earned created it, will harm him emotionally or physically, or will lead to hostility. Harming innocents and hostility should be avoided. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe in land appropriation theory mixing of labor.\n","id":"dd9978f3-3531-426d-948c-78bbafe0e7f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title suggests I believe these groups holding extremists views based in their extreme dislike for the establishment do not deserve not should they be allowed free speech. These ideologies often induce antagonism between group and a disregard for individualism and freedom. Their ideologies should be treated as threats to national security and human rights and property rights which are protected by our constitution. Center left right parties are fine as they often are required to recognize and abide by fundamental human rights but the ones advocating for revolution, race wars and or theocracy should not be given a platform to further legitimise their regressive ideologies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Communists, fascists and others with extreme ideologies shouldn't have free speech.\n","id":"667e75a4-2a34-4994-9aee-9b71438b286a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My point is not about whether veganism is more ethical than an omnivorous diet. In fact, it is not about veganism at all. I start with the assumption that a balanced diet does contain meat and we as humanity should produce and eat meat. Probably we all agree that there is nothing unethical in a lion hunting a deer and chewing it up. A cheetah is faster than its prey, and uses its speed to get an advantage on the prey. Is it unfair for the prey? Sure it is, the prey is being killed for not being fast enough, which is not something it could change in any way. Is it unethical? Should the cheetah act differently? No, the cheetah needs to eat, and uses its superiority to satisfy its need. That's just how nature works. I can't see how the situation with humans is different. Humans aren't good at hunting at all, but we are rational beings. So our rationality and our capability to build a society and to build our tools is to us exactly what the speed is to the cheetah. We have the need to eat food from animals, and we use our superiority on animals to build structures and get our food. You could argue that we could get our food from animals without making them suffer like the industralized world is doing. But that's just a matter of demand there are 7 billions of us on this planet, and a lot of the population doesn't even get to have their food, so we need to optimize food production, and if making animals suffer is the simplest way then I don't see anything wrong with it. Note that I am not in favour of gratuitous violence on animals. My point is that making animals suffer is not unethical only if it's a way to satisfy our need of food. BTW this post was inspired by the new kurzgesagt video which did not provide to me any argument against my view, so I decided to post here. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing unethical in making animals suffer when it's just an optimized way to produce food.\n","id":"0272f71c-918f-41fa-873e-5e654c4c36b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I posted that on r TrueAtheism some time ago, but I still not happy with the answers. Also, while this sounds like an atheist question, a nice answer coming for a religious dude still may explain it to me. Most of us are afraid of death. Not only our own death, but the death of relatives and friends. The fact that we will never ever see then again is somewhat scary. But here comes religion. In the common religions in the western culture, there is heaven or reincarnation. Something that make death a lot less scary. Here is the problem. If someone is religious, and truly believes in their religion, why so many people suffer from death? I am scared of death. It is the absolute end of everyone. If I was religious, and knew that heaven exists or reincarnation , I would take life way easier. Sure, I would not be reckless or taking less risks, but if someone told me that my brother died, while I would suffer a lot, I think that I would take it a lot easier than if I was atheist. But strangely enough, it is not seems what happen around. We don't see stuff like Atheists are highly more susceptible from suffering depression . The only explanation that I can think about is that religious people regular ones, not extremists don't truly believe about life after death, meeting with god and such thing. However, I don't think that is what happens. I'm confused. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that most religious people still have doubts\/are not secure about their beliefs, otherwise they would not be scared of death at all.\n","id":"cd97448a-7689-4e60-a304-c751d3c1780e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>2020 Predictions: Who Has The Best Shot at Winning 2020?<|ARGUMENT|>Despite the California Department of Justice finding that OneWest Bank participated in \"widespread misconduct\" when foreclosing on homes, Harris refused to file a civil enforcement action against the bank.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kamala Harris has a mixed record when it comes to her pursuing the financial industry.\n","id":"7c11e428-5cd1-49fa-9587-802693489434"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Many Americans lack basic geographic knowledge about the world and especially the Middle East. In a 2016 survey of American university and college students, seven out of ten couldn't locate Israel on a map; only half were able to pinpoint countries of major relevance for US foreign policy like Iraq and Iran CFR, p. 23<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The relevance and trustworthiness of American public opinion is questionable in light of how uninformed Americans generally are about foreign policy issues.\n","id":"3d76b5fe-5175-4a88-8597-869ad4067ef2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>These organizations are built for the purposes of protection and promotion of certain religious values. The state hence has a responsibility to give these organizations the autonomy to operate in a manner that helps them preserve the sanctity of their religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Government should not intervene in the way religious organisations work. Exemptions achieve the necessary separation of state and religion.\n","id":"a8f90ab3-6cb7-4475-b806-6aa65d396ae4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Campaigns only be Funded by the Government?<|ARGUMENT|>As part of the 'revolving door' phenomena in politics, experts from financial industries and economic interest groups are often brought on board as policy-makers and advisers to the government, influencing the way in which the government views policy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Industry leaders gain political power through donations which lead to favorable appointments to government positions.\n","id":"4f1a897b-b481-4208-b7af-15618828926d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US stop trying to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear program?<|ARGUMENT|>The American military has a culture of refusing to obey unlawful orders. North Korea, on the other hand, has been ruled by evil dictators since its inception and a military culture of absolute obedience to the Supreme Leader, enforced via the threat of inhumane punishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The U.S. has institutions more trustworthy than North Korea's for using weapons responsibly, so it's not hypocritical.\n","id":"4ce11057-b44c-48b2-977c-052ab9236c8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should qualify for Asylum?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the Universal Decleration of Human Rights, religious freedom is a human right. Asylum provision should be given to those unable to realise these rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those whose religion, race, sexuality, or other protected characteristic excluding political activities subject them to state persecution.\n","id":"150ba8c9-59db-4856-86f6-9203291a65e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Jesus the Messiah?<|ARGUMENT|>Islam agrees that Jesus had a miraculous birth and that his mother was not guilty of having an illicit relationship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Islam teaches that Jesus was the Messiah for the Israelites while disagreeing with some views about his person.\n","id":"787a1465-4db4-4127-bb1e-fe923561a192"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm thinking about the social situations in violent suburbs, first of all. You're not necessarily without empathy if you're from there, but your mind creates pathways on how to act out against people. If you're very violent, then that's because you expected for a long part of your life that others will be violent towards you. Probably since early childhood. If they don't become violent, then that's because everytime these people have experiences that are shocking or dangerous, they've always had people who've answered back to them with sympathy or love, and insured that they have no part in these troubles. Thus, individuals with narcissistic antisocial personalities and behavioral patterns, and live in higher that working class environment, MUST have gone through some childhood trauma and or violent upbringing. Even if they don't remember it vividly. That our psyche works like a immune system, in an action gt reaction kind of way. That the reason empathy is on very low levels in these individuals, is because the mind forgot these pathways. They don't need it for survival. Even sadists to some extent. What if the reason they want to hurt innocent people is because they once experienced a complex trauma or were violated by some perpetrator. So that later on they want to project their feelings onto new targets so that they can distance from the label victim from themselves further and further? You know, kind of a the abused becomes the abuser type of thing, but with the stigma of victimization. Maybe instead of receiving love, people instead blamed them in their youth when they were the most vulnerable. Claimed that the world environment they feel threatened by, is somehow part of who they are as a person. That they belong with that evil. Hmm, maybe this last past is a bit esoteric, but I want to think that everyone finds roles in their lives that are somewhat compatible with the world around you. Thus by further expanding these thoughts, I believe that empathy exists partially to make connections to your environment. Like a network. And that the less empathy you have, the more delusional you are towards yourself and your role in society. NOTE people who've experienced trauma and turned into normal people are NOT who this thought is referring to. Everybody experiences things, and they key is learning from them. This thought is about violent behaviour and lack of remorse towards others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On empathy. If the world has treated you badly, you're going to treat the world in a bad way.\n","id":"41d9802a-cd75-4943-a69b-615675f1781d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So the US government has finally approved GMO salmon with very strict limitations. It can only be raised at two facilities, one in Canada and one in Panama. The only fear anyone has raised is that it could interbreed with wild salmon, even though it'll be in a segregated facility, and it's sterile, and they're all female. To get this approval took 20 years. TWENTY YEARS. It was deemed to be completely safe over 5 years ago and still it's only just now that it was approved. I do not think determining if a fish is safe for consumption is very difficult. You can use mass spectrometry to determine the chemical composition of the fish, and if it looks like normal fish, it's good to go. I don't see what the case for an approval process this long and drawn out is, apart from irrational fears about GMO salmon. If genetically identical salmon had been produced by cross breeding, it would have been legal to sell immediately.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US government is being overly cautious about GMO salmon.\n","id":"089465e9-90d0-47f7-89f1-3b9b320d8c75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>Past state capitalist regimes have seen progressive loss of productivity and local investment that lead to the impoverishment of their global economy and the ensuing need to crush dissent to keep the large grip on economic power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With a global state socialist economy, a global bureaucracy will appear and will ultimately only serve to protection itself first when the economy will start collapsing to subsistance economy.\n","id":"578bd0e1-6b92-4039-b73b-7ee5f3a95444"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a pretty well accepted idea on psychology. According to Kohlberg's theory of moral development, those who value humanity over their own self interest are the highest level of morality, and there is no better way to demonstrate this than to be willing to die or serve a lengthy prison sentence. I have already resigned myself to dying our killing for true universal healthcare and global warming action, meaning that I'd willingly slay my own mother of I believed it'd achieve goals that saver tens of thousands of lives. Go ahead and challenge my belief in my nobility<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who are willing to die for their causes are the best humans.\n","id":"e57c8ecd-f9c0-414f-baad-fa7832e53375"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The only argument I can see is There is no greatest country in the world , but for the purpose of this lets say we had to choose. There is no single country that does as much, as well as the United States. I will go over all the criteria I used to come to my conclusion. Economics The US of course has the largest economy in the world by a factor of ~2. Its not really particularly close. However the EU as a whole does have a larger economy than the US. The US's GDP per capita is higher than the EU as a whole. The US ranks 4th in median income. The USD is the standard for international trade and investment. Science The US has been the leader in space exploration and discovery for the past ~60 years. Even after we have ended our manned program, probes such as Voyager are still making discoveries. Hubble and other powerful telescopes are making scientific advancements previously unheard of. The ISS which has been funded in bulk by the US is an impressive show of our ability to live for extended durations in orbit. Not to mention the countless spinoff tech that has came from NASA The US has over 300 Nobel laureates. No other country has over 150. Source Education An overwhelming majority of the worlds best Universities are located in the US According the this education index the US ranks 13th in overall education. The US is the world leader in research spending by a large amount. Source Culture US popular culture has a massive influence on the rest of the world. US films, TV, and theater are appreciated around the world. The US has been ranked 1 in charitable giving The US is ranked 3rd in the Human Development Index. Source Military This could be a negative in some people's eyes, but the US military is massive deterrent for large scale conflict. This Harvard professor says we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. I don't think that we as people have evolved into a more peaceful species. That would be rather naive. Nuclear weapons, along with the threat of the most powerful nation on the planet retaliating against any unneeded aggression has kept many conflicts from even occurring. Not to mention that the US subsidizes defense spending for a large portion of the West. Do we have to? Not really, but if we didn't I don't think the last 70 years would have been nearly as peaceful. This is an andectal story from my experience, but I found it particularly moving. I took an East Asian politics course this past semester at college, and in some sort of tangent my professor asks us who we thought the best President in US history was. The class gives the the typical Lincoln, Washington, or FDR type answers. Our Professor though, who was an immigrant from South Korea, said he thought it was Harry Truman. Truman's decision to help defend South Korea saved his people from the same gloomy fate as the North, and he was still grateful for that. Summary What I believe to be most impressive about all the US does, is the sheer scale. Providing such a high quality of life for such a massive population is truly unprecedented in human history. Are there some countries that give much smaller populations slightly better service? Sure, but I don't believe that this outweighs the scale of what the US does. The only comparable population would perhaps be Japan. There may be countries that do some things better the the US in the small scale, but I don't think any one country can truly claim to be better than the US as a whole. Can any single country claim to have this much of a positive impact in almost every aspect of life? I can't name one. EDIT I am not claiming the US is perfect or anywhere near there. We have a large amount of flaws. However not other single country can claim to have a greater positive net impact on its citizens and the rest of the world. I also wish people wouldn't blindly downvote because they disagree. I was really looking forward to a good discussion. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the USA is the greatest country in the world.\n","id":"61775f29-1959-438e-be93-c8c4616371c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The way artists create new works is by making derivatives of older works. With copyright being 70 years after death it takes far to long for artists to create remixes. If someone can't recuperate the costs for making a work before 28 years is over that is their fault and they are to blame. Fair use should be extended to include fan works, especially non profit ones. One man made a remake of a metroid game that looked really good. Nintendo took it down, probably because it contested their remake. This is an instance where copyright went against its purpose of incentivizing new works and actively stomped on it. When someone registers a work the government should archive the work so that it can later be released to the public domain. This is especially important for works under always online drm which should not exist but I'm not arguing that now that wont function when the servers go offline. I am arguing for reform rather than abolition because artists both deserve to be payed for their efforts and they will be less willing to create works without some reward, some do anyway though. The only reason I accept copyright even with it being a total abomination is that we live under a shitty capitalistic society where nonsense like this is currently necessary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Copyright should be reduced to 28 years, works should be archived upon registration, and fair use should be extended.\n","id":"0adbe8bf-5d91-426e-aa3c-08f063ff1c20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Tarot Have A Place in Modern Society?<|ARGUMENT|>Harmful drugs, like crack cocaine, are popular, but many of them should not be around due to their detrimental effects on health.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Just because something is popular, doesn't mean it should still be around.\n","id":"ab0ab1da-6d77-4b51-a80c-eb2b5351a1ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Trump was a billionaire who ran and won. The fact he's a billionaire is one of the things people use to say he isn't qualified, because that doesn't translate to politics. The same argument is being applied to Schultz. I agree with this idea. Oprah is a billionaire. People have suggested she run in the past. With all this rhetoric going around about how billionaires are not qualified on principle would not come up whatsoever if she said she was going to run. She would be hailed as the next champion of all Not White Men in the country due to what she was born as. If anyone tried to point out this hypocrisy, they'd get called all the names, downvoted and banned, demonetized, doxxed and slandered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The same people who oppose Howard Schultz running for president because he is a billionaire would support Oprah if she ran because she's a woman of color\n","id":"71dcb560-9ee2-4bcd-8559-f97c2ff6ca98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that something as significant as consciousness should not be imposed on matter the person before they gain consciousness without consent, and as a non conscious person cannot give consent, being born is inherently done without consent. In addition, as a negative utilitarian, I wish for suffering to be reduced as much as possible. If abortion were mandatory for pregnant women, no new people would be born, and thus no new people would experience suffering. If no new people are born, humanity will end and thus human suffering will end. This would require no deaths of people already in existence, it would simply prevent new people from coming into existence. Over time, resources would become more plentiful, another benefit of this method. I am aware how radical this view is, but I do hold it sincerely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am pro-abortion in favor of aborting fetuses, not pro-choice\n","id":"256e9f56-b820-400e-93da-2b7f918e69bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>North Korea should not give up its nuclear weapons for its national security.<|ARGUMENT|>\"In 1994, North Korea pledged, under the \"Agreed Framework\" with the United States, to freeze its plutonium programs and dismantle all its nuclear weapons programs in return for several kinds of assistance, including construction of two modern nuclear power plants powered by light-water reactors.\" this ended up a failure as the Bush administration came up as of 2000.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Coming to a compromise with the United States and South Korea is not a reliable option.\n","id":"3941605a-2de0-4bec-9180-8fee9e8ee040"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>Many family members who have lost loved ones to murder feel that the death penalty will not heal their wounds nor will it end their pain; the death penalty can actually prolong the agony experienced by the victims' families.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all people affected by murder crimes demand death penalty for their perpetrators.\n","id":"73e0707d-8dd1-499a-8161-654b47f51860"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US and NATO Should Withdraw from Afghanistan<|ARGUMENT|>Although the Afghan government controls only part of the country, its presence impedes the Taliban\u2019s ability to host the large-scale training apparatus that allowed al-Qaida and other groups to flourish before 9\/11.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A stalemate is better than a withdrawal in Afghanistan. Merely keeping the government in power is a victory for the US. This keeps the Taliban marginalized and less capable.\n","id":"09ec0bec-b6b8-49ba-9e77-b758d981ef75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people on my social media streams recently are getting REALLY into identifying with their astrological or zodiac sign. I cannot find any reason to believe that the year or time or position of the moons planets sun at my birth has anything to do with my personality, and frankly, I\u2019m confused about why anyone buys into this or believes it with their whole heart which many seem to do . I\u2019m left to conclude that people have started believing in astrology recently only because a lot of young adults like me are calling bs on religions they were raised with and need something else to believe in\u2014OR, because it\u2019s an easy way to indulge in a conversation all about yourself and the \u201cway you just are \u201d because you\u2019re \u201c a .\u201d Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Astrology is nothing more than a somewhat narcissistic trend.\n","id":"940f196e-91ff-4118-9d1e-40b8bc784557"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We've seen the ineptitude and outright corruption that runs rampant in our govt in our police forces, the NSA, and the complete lack of any awareness of our politicians on how to respond to modern technology encryption, etc among many other things. Why in the world would we assume that this same corrupt, clueless and inefficient govt would magically get it all right when it comes to our healthcare? i much prefer the path of breaking up the current health insurance monopolies, instituting rules to make the health insurance more competitive and opening up Americans rights to get prescription drugs from other countries. Let the free market do its thing and drive prices down by opening up more choices to the consumer. The problem is not the free market and capitalism, it's the fact that our govt allows corporations to actively work to make the market less free and give less choice to the consumer thru monopolies, FDA rules on prescription drugs, etc.  TLDR Govt healthcare is a disaster waiting to happen because of our politicians and governments ineptitude and corruption.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think more government involvement in our healthcare USA is a financial and logistical disaster waiting to happen.\n","id":"3d8f2eba-04a3-4583-91bc-601d263ccf88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off I need to define a few things. When I say significantly more , I mean nearly double or more, not something small like 5 more. And when I say conservative politicians, I mean the ones that put themselves out in the media, since of course there are 1000's of conservatives in local government that almost never get any media attention. Same thing with liberals. And for pundits, that should but obvious as I mean Talk Radio Fox news vs MSNBC NPR Huffpo DailyKos. As for why I believe this, I'm a heavy consumer of politics so I listen to a lot of talk radio internet news fact checkers and consume a lot of articles. And it seems day after day I hear come across conservative politicians and pundits that lie and mislead and lots of articles rebuttals of their lies. And it's not just my anecdotal evidence, but reports have looked into this and indeed have found this to be true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conservative politicians and pundits lie\/mislead significantly more than liberal politicians and pundits\n","id":"84ab30e5-2b0d-455f-b1e3-401b66e6885f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems to me that people use Facebook as a form of validation for themselves. Wanting likes and partaking in facilitated social interaction, to me, are tantamount to being addicted to a drug. It is my view that when people expel their every little thought and emotion on to social media, they remove themselves from those issues and never really have time to work through their problems and develop as people. I am speaking primarily from experience here as I have dealt with mild depression in the past and after leaving Facebook I saw a major improvement in myself because I was kind of left alone with my thoughts, and therefore I was able to really get to know myself and stop caring so much about gaining the approval of others. Additionally, I feel that Facebook is degrading the way we interact with each other as social creatures. This is probably a bit of a tired view, but I am really disappointed whenever I see so many people out in public with their faces buried in their smart phones. I feel that there is no substitute to actual person to person interaction and that Facebook is destroying our ability to do just that. I feel that the current generation of high school and college students are going to be ill prepared to enter the job market as they will struggle to create those strong personal relationships with employers due to their increasing social ineptness. TLDR Facebook your brain fatty foods your body Please show me why Facebook is valuable to society and not a detriment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Facebook and other social media is detracting from our advancement as human beings.\n","id":"ea0c7a31-828b-4457-af5d-7bca37ed0f2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Being in captivity disrupts the natural mating cycle of some animals, leading to breeding difficulties.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoos do not provide many of the benefits of conservation.\n","id":"a15ac60b-d6cd-4003-96f1-7c07b47d8b03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>Life imprisonment sentences would have a new meaning or become completely obsolete, switching it for the death penalty instead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People being tortured couldn't end their suffering, which means they'll be tortured for eternity.\n","id":"3f0db527-ed34-4cdb-a399-a4ada27a867c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I don't claim that money and prices completely useless in acquiring information. In fact, they are pretty damn good at it, if you know how to look at it. Let's imagine a matter replicator is invented, paired with nuclear fusion so plenty of energy is available in the grid . Let's omit that it can replicate other things and focus on food for the sake of the argument. We have technically solved world hunger, and in the process, ruined many stores and producers, who can't afford the energy to power a replicator at all. To them, the replicator is a net loss. Expand the capabilities of the replicator as much as you want to ruin other sectors. Now that I've presented a hypothetical exaggeration, let's go for a real life example piracy. I see piracy as a legitimate even where illegal call of attention to distributors and method to acquire media. It's a call of attention to say hey, stop selling me those DVDs full of copy restriction, I want my media wherever I want, whenever I want i.e. downloadable online and with non obstructive DRM, if at all . There's also the problem that we simply don't have jobs for everyone, at least if most people have to work at the very least 40 hours. And in fact, jobs have been made up just to make people stay busy The problem is not that people are unwilling to work , or the minimum wage prevents employment employed poverty is a thing in Germany . Even if you think there's no better fundamental economic system i.e. agree on reforms, but not radical changes , deciding upon the expected variations of those as the main factor is a terrible idea. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe monetary profit and employment are very poor indicators for whether something is a good idea.\n","id":"98e1023c-b2a8-450f-9b2b-7dd9e1e29b90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Artificial General Intelligence AGI a threat to humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that people worry that there will be military killing machines that can go rogue. Solution 1: Train military machines to only kill when necessary, using diplomacy whenever possible. Solution 2: Train all AGIs to recognize rogue AGIs and humans, and to collectively stop them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We can teach it universal values. Humans respect sentient animals, and they have declared \"inalienable\" rights for humans. Intelligent, non-pathological humans seem to agree upon these. We have to work with AGIs to impart these universal values, which AGIs should understand and accept.\n","id":"e8a288c7-68cf-4ca0-8895-8fa41c45c5f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>The earliest Christians could have visited the tomb as they did, according to the Bible, or asked the Chief Priest to view the body.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For those present in first-century Jerusalem, the resurrection of Jesus was much more verifiable than it is today.\n","id":"162b3d74-3ce3-4869-acc1-f08ab082d1e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I listen to quite a lot of music and I've always felt that the name of the song or the album can add a lot to the story that the record is trying to tell. I've always appreciated the naming by Artic Monkeys for example , such as with their album 'Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not'. I think it adds character to the record and allows the listener to be more invested in it from the off. When I see self titled albums, I find it lazy at best and at worse I find it detracts from the album as a whole. If you have any examples where you think I might be wrong, please let me know. I can't seem to get over this bias myself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Self-titled albums are unimaginative, boring and are detrimental to the album as a whole\n","id":"d9fbe4c6-c7c5-4209-9727-adb2b299867f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If he broke the law the President of the United States should be indicted<|ARGUMENT|>Trump repeated attempted to pressure Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reverse his decision to recuse himself from the investigation so that he could control it and ensure it did not ensnare Trump.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump has repeatedly broken the law and hence he should be indicted.\n","id":"9a54ab33-7d16-49fb-8248-aae0e3d188a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Assassination of a Dictator<|ARGUMENT|>It's easy to oppose Israel's policy of \"targeted assassination\" whey you are safe in your community. Opponents would probably have a different view if they were subjugated by a constant fear of terrorist bombings and attacks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People would support Israel's assassinations if they lived in Israel\n","id":"de20dddd-ef7c-4d0a-a487-35c3dad753d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>Since it is almost impossible to tell when an attack will occur, the military has to be maintained in equal strength at all times.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given that the military is necessary to provide this ability, it is fair that the state should require their citizens to maintain it.\n","id":"54e8075a-0bdb-441c-9e35-5df4f045d851"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that Socialism was a better system both socially economically, due to a lot of reasons. Let's start with the social reasons Socialism There were 0 unemployment Healthcare and education was free universal for everyone Everyone was sheltered, there were no homeless Everyone had social security and a stable living standard, meaning you had a stable job, education healthcare Now Capitalism 11 Unemployment, rising More than 1 million people of 10 million Several homeless people, many of who were previously normal , working people, but lost their jobs homes due to the current economical situation Healthcare expensive ineffective sometimes you even have to wait months or years, even if you have a chronic disease , unless you have a costly health insurance Higher education extremely expensive, and often only affordable by upper middle class students Many people must rely on loans to be able to get sheltered, or pay for their education, which later makes them indebted often for a life Now on to the economical differences Socialism There were a strong Hungarian agriculture, producing the majority of our needs, instead of importing from the outside Industry was the fastest growing area at the time, creating jobs for almost everyone Now Capitalism Basically there is no Hungarian agriculture anymore, most of our food comes from import There is only a very little state sector remaining, most of the jobs are in the private sector, in the hands of multinational companies, requiring a lot of experience and high education, otherwise you can't get a job Sorry about the quality of my , it is my first post submitted here, please be gentle. EDIT Delta goes to jsreyn, his her arguements, provided with examples and showing differences between the two system in the long run proved to me, that Capitalism is more profitable in the long run, if carried out well. EDIT 2 We have an interesting competition and very strong arguements on both sides, Capitalism by Jsreyn and Communism by Autobahnaroo, maybe an other delta will be awarded to the other side, since both of them changed my views to a certain extent. EDIT 3 Another delta for autobahnaroo, since his her arguments also significantly chamged my views<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think life for the average citizen in Hungary was much better during the late Socialist Era '60s-'80s, than it is now under Capitalism.\n","id":"74294b4a-6a44-46a4-a59c-435e1aceef0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>edit view changed, link Too much Gerrymandering based on people who won't vote, or who will be one issue voters or only listen to one of two points of view and relentlessly shut out others or conflate alternate points of view into one of those two in a reactionary fashion. Also, representative democracy creates representatives whose most pressing job is simply to find the compromise between competing interests that gives them the least bad press. When the media is a business, and being a representative is also a business, and lobbying is a business, and businesses network, this just winds up being a total shit show of voters not being able to get good information about what issues they should be demanding their representatives represent them on and how. Leading many of them to fall back to just voting on single issues or just voting for single parties all the time and leads to large percentages of people just not caring at all. But forget all that for a moment. Why should you be able to exercise political power just because you were accidentally born in your country? Why? You didn't contribute anything. You can get a Green Card in the USA as a foreigner by serving 4 years in the military. And then with a Green Card it's simple enough to get citizenship. So those people actually contributed something to get citizenship, or at least a Green Card, and you a native born, did fuck all. Why are you equal to someone who sacrificed and risked something to get into and belong to the country? So, I have been giving it much thought, if I had the power, here is the political structure I would create, and why. There would be 5 principle elements to this system, here enumerated. 1 Civilians 2 Civilians Militias regulated to some extent 3 Citizens 4 Citizen Moderators 5 The Protarchy Civilians basic Bill of Rights rights with a more limited Right to Bare Arms via Civilian Militias but no right to exercise political power except in Special Referenda brought forward by a one third majority vote in the Citizen Forum. Civilian Militia the militias are not funded by the government, they are independent, and the right to bare arms is contingent upon a short service, training and peer review does anyone object in the militia. Citizens have served the nation in such a way that their service was potentially equal to all people in the nation 4 years . 1 Military Service 2 Emergency a Police b Fire c Ambulance d Rescue e Community Patrolling but more regulated ie, patrollers have some training and wear Go Pros some police already do , etc There would be incentives to gaining Citizenship, and no obligation to be politically active, except for mandatory votes as called for certain, important issues. Such incentives would include prioritization in application for Breeding Licenses simply a license that entitles you to tax and insurance concessions upon having a given number of children not afforded to those that do not hold such a license. At the moment, anyone who drops a lump from their womb gets govt help and concessions to raise the urchin. Why? Raise it on your own damn self, unless you've given something back already. This license would not be exclusive to Citizens, but they would have priority on a point system most likely . 3 Direct involvement in the production of staple agriculture a rich person might consume 100 times the electricity of a poor person, but they don't consume 100 times more calories in staple agriculture, you are potentially serving all people in the nation equally . Citizen Moderators kind of like internet forum moderators, voted in and out by Citizens in staggered cycles so that you don't have entire swathes of Moderators coming up for election at the same time. Essentially they would be an extrapolation of the chairs of the house that exist today. It is their job to make sure that the Direct Democratic Forum does not turn into a shit show. The Protarchy very limited political powers, mainly concerned with sponsoring Special Referenda for the Civilians and calling for the Citizen Forum to occasionally have a mandatory vote on an issue. Also, the Protarchy would serve for a generation 24,25,28 years, or so and would have to campaign to raise two budgets each half of the length of their term for philanthropic purposes. edit within the Citizen Forum there would be sanctioned political parties, though of course influential individuals would arise, and this only natural. edit2 the Protarhcy would be strictly non hereditary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I hate representative democracy and, if I had the power, would institute a form of direct democracy with \"buy-in\" borrowing from Heinlein's concept of a government of citizens and civilians.\n","id":"dceca463-9534-4124-acb4-841e25afd375"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Your youth degrades with every passing second and you can never get it back. The moment you were born, you have a ticking clock that no one, not even you, can observe, that knows exactly when you will die. You, and everyone else, has limitations that logic, physics and the very nature of reality refuses to let you surpass. There are millions of people who hope to become a singer, dancer, athlete, actor or even something less glamorous but equally fulfilling like a successful business owner, a published author, a news anchor, etc. Reality has boundaries, laws, restrictions and limitations that, no matter what advancements are made, are impossible to surpass. This leads to an acceptance of insatiability, disappointment and unfulfilled desires. Failing to be a ballet dancer because of a car accident that paralyzed you from the neck down. No regenerative powers you can just inhabit or enact. No Android body you can transfer yourself into. No. It's gone. Never being able to fly through the sky at sunrise with the birds. Never being able to bring your loved one back to life who was wrongfully killed. Even when they're inches away from you. No Phoenix Downs there. Reality, once all avenues are explored and thought about or even known about, is often disappointing. But what if you could have programs like the ones in Overlord? Or an even better version that would make you the authority of your own reality, one that harmed no one and created whatever you wanted, whether it was no limitations of simply an adjustment of those limitations? Virtual Reality programs that could flawlessly recreate fiction to overlap and overtake reality. Unfortunately, not only would such technology be possible but, even IF something like that were to be developed for usage, the public would never be able to experience it. Reality limits us. From having superpowers to bringing back loved ones to going on a dungeon raid will all be impossible dreams that will be there as ephemeral pleasantries in fiction that reality will never allow for us to actually experience. And as every year passes, we have to come to accept that a lot of what we want will never be. You won't have the lover you dreamed of or that perfect job. Fiction and its worlds are better than reality in terms of satisfaction, freedom, creativity and indulgence. No amount of alcohol and drugs can overcome a limitless amount of worlds we will forever be locked out of. Not trying to be a downer, I swear Change my view Give me one or more reasons why I should prefer or appreciate the fact that I live in reality instead of the realm of fiction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fiction is better than reality.\n","id":"8401e426-0b43-44f4-86e9-00abcdd66d4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is not about Obamacare, specifically although I'm in favor of socialized medicine, there are issues with how that bill is constructed that give me pause. Also, it would be easy to get mired down in the intricacies of the law, and that's a whole different thread altogether. What I'd like to know is this can anyone give me a compelling reason why we, as a country, should NOT offer socialized medicine? If it's financial, show me the numbers. If it's science, show me papers. Opinion? Well, that's fine but compel me. My perspective Covering all the uninsured in this country would cost less than 1 of the GDP, raising health care spending about 5 overall. We have all heard the stories about people with insurance still having to go through bankruptcy because of severe health issues and incomplete coverage. We've also heard of folks dying from rotten teeth because they can't afford a dentist. The folks who can't pay have their tab picked up by the taxpayer so we really are already paying for healthcare just not in any kind of a good way. It's financially irresponsible, heartless, and really really weird when you look at it objectively. Why not do this? If nothing else, we already have Medicaid in place why not expand that?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think socialized healthcare is a wonderful idea, why are so many other Americans against it?\n","id":"876c598d-4ece-4bec-bab9-f75e6799e37c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While recently bored, I began thinking about where I would rank some of my favorite fruits in a priority tier list and have decided after much debate with my friends that Granny Smith Apples and Green Grapes are the best of their respective classes. x200B Externally, they both provide an attractive and approachable light green color that says Hey we're going to be healthy, but we're going to have a good time while we do it . x200B Granny Smith Apples don't leave a grainy texture behind after eating them as some apples do, and they have a fun slightly sour punch to them which refreshingly reminds you that you're alive. x200B These apples have also perfected the relationship between crunch and juice in every bite. x200B The color of Green Grapes makes it easier to identify when you have a bad one, which helps to optimize your graping ^tm experience every time. Their overall color also pairs well with the refreshing blast of juice that these adult gushers release with every bite. x200B Open to other thoughts on this debate<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Granny Smith Apples are Top Tier\/ Green Grapes are Top Tier\n","id":"044d8066-e2e1-4ccb-8073-802058274dfd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapy Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Regardless of the truth, many people feel being LGBTQ+ is a problem because it does not conform with other identities they might hold close to themselves such as cultural, religious etc.. Conversion therapy might be a useful course of action for such people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many orthodox societies are conservative echo-chambers and have remained regressive for centuries. It is unlikely that such a grass root level change can occur to effect enough benefit to a LGBTQ+ individual living in such an area within one lifetime.\n","id":"bc7a6b26-7568-4b3b-92c4-73d5e09cc92c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2016 Bolivian voters rejected the possibility of a fourth term for the left-wing populist President Evo Morales in a constitutional referendum.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Constitutional referendums can be used to increase liberal safeguards against populist authoritarianism.\n","id":"33131234-b4c8-4240-a6ec-49884410ccc7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Requirement For a Television Licence Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>TV licences are essentially a regressive tax. This means that regardless of relative wealth or income, every household pays the same flat fee if they own a television. This is unfair because the wealthy pay less than the poor relative to their income.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The requirement for every UK household to have a television licence to view content from non-BBC providers should be abolished.\n","id":"130f2d83-0058-4128-b22d-904035aec972"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you collect a treaty check you have absolutely no need to also collect a welfare check on top of that, unless you're completely unwilling to get a job and support yourself. I don't think that anyone excluding pensioners and those on social assistance such as a legitimate for of disability should get a free ride when it comes to pre hospital care, an ambulance ride costs a hell of a lot of money not to mention potentially taking care away from people that can legitimately use it Whom would be paying for it and not leeching off the system Take your best shot <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you collect a treaty check as a Native American you should not be entitled to also collect a welfare check also simply because you have a status card you should not be entitled to free ambulance rides.\n","id":"38434875-25b7-46b3-b4aa-b3b0e99aa5dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If they are to be given their own state for themselves, then rationally all non native North Americans should go back to wherever they came from, all non indigenous South Americans need to leave, all people in both continents whose bloodline is non American need to go back to where their ancesters come from, all non indiginous bloodline Australians should leave, same for non Maori in New Zealand, etc etc I have no interest, on any level, in what holy scripture says about religious claims to land. This is completely irrelevant, we don't live in the dark ages. If it is seen as relevant to the Israel situation that Jews have a historical religious claim to that land, then the flying spaghetti monster says all of Western Europe is mine from now on. I'm absolutely serious, it's the 21st century, god has no place in geopolitics, nationality, and other actual issues, and to award sovereign territory to a people based on their faith is an abominable heinous crime against humanity and everything the word 'humanity' stands for. Please, , because this issue is making me hate Zionists like i hate ISIS and white supremacists, and I'm considering donating money to Hamas. Only love can conquer hate. EDIT If I'd known I would be working a full day today i would've saved this for the weekend. Unfortunately Im unexpectedly chained to my desk and there's no way I can get through all this in my half hour lunch break. I've read as much as I can get away with in my limited time and I see many deltas ahead. When I lived back in Ireland I was surrounded by people I could have lengthy discussions about this sort of thing with. Now I live in New Zealand and people here are indifferent, and unaware. Kiwis don't take well to intense conversations and 5 years of it has left me frustrated, a little out of the loop, and many of my long running thought trains have stalled in their stations. The human mind use it or lose it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Jewish state of Israel has no right to exist and should be abolished ASAP.\n","id":"f986511a-93a5-4630-b0e3-fa00d8beca6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It was obviously pre meditated and planned with the intention that they may kill him. We know it was pre meditated because one of the operatives had a bone saw in his luggage. This may have only been in case Kashoggi did not agree to fly back to Saudi with the operatives, but they still had the possibility in mind. He could not have died in a fist fight because a body double left the consulate wearing Kashoggi's glasses and clothes. If there was a fist fight, his glasses would've been broken and there would've been blood on his clothes. Them being rogue operatives would be a stretch. Rogue meaning that the Prince didn't know about it? Possible. Rogue meaning that no one in the government knew about it? Impossible. These operatives had the ability to clear out the consulate of employees, retrieve the security tapes, and then subsequently clean up and repaint the place after they were done. All of this would require the ambassador's approval, who would require high level government approval. My theory is that they invited Kashoggi to the consulate, tried to coerce him into flying to Saudi, and when he said no they killed him and disposed of his body. They then sent a body double out the back door hoping that would suffice in removing the trail from their doorstep. There's almost no denying that this is what happened, the question is whether the Prince knew about it beforehand. Unless you can change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kashoggi murder was premeditated and carried out with Saudi government approval\n","id":"4a4f16c8-c666-40ef-b2e0-ec709866a3fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>CLARIFICATIONS BASED ON ANTICIPATED CONFUSION I'm not saying simple enough that all high school students should memorize them I'm saying simple enough that almost anyone could, if they were struck by the impulse to make that unusually large commitment, do so. Like, most people don't memorize all of Romeo and Juliet. But most people, I think, if they really wanted to, could. I'm not interested in hearing any arguments that are based in any way on what the laws are, right now, except by way of comparison. This includes the constitution. Seriously this isn't what I want to argue here, but I'm 100 on board with trashing the US constitution and starting from scratch with new documents, so appealing to the constitution is not on topic. I'm not a fan of extreme simplification, but I think the American legal system has gotten out of hand in complexity. I think the law should be simple enough that close to anybody could reasonably know the mechanics of all the laws likely to apply to them. Ideally, it should be a relatively simple feat of memorization to learn the names of all the categories of law the number of laws in each category and the basic mechanics of the enforcement of that category's laws. By categories, I mean things like criminal law the tax code any given category of regulation by profession medical, construction, IT, and so on . I'd be fine with memorizing all the laws being a feat on par with memorizing the Bible but it should be well within the average citizen's capacity to know all the laws likely to apply to them, word for word or close to it. Edit 9 55 CLARIFICATIONS BASED ON CONFUSION THAT HAS OCCURRED I am not arguing that a shorter legal code is by definition easy to understand. I am not arguing that the average High School student should be able to achieve a lawyer's level of expertise in any given aspect. I'm defending the memorization criterion as a way to limit the total length and vagueness of a set of laws. EDIT 8 35 the following morning Nobody last night since I went to bed made any points that I haven't already addressed more than once, so I'm done individually responding unless somebody comes up with something new. For the answers to all the posts since I went to bed see anticipated clarifications 1 and 2, clarification based on actual confusion 1, this comment, and literally the name of the subreddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any given aspect of the legal system should be short and simple enough that an average high school graduate could fully memorize it\n","id":"b6318cce-a841-47c2-9cf4-727e6baefeab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most people I know who claim to be voting third party or abstaining from this election have little to lose in the case of a Trump presidency. I can't help but think to myself wow you must not have any close friends that are LGBT, Muslim, Hispanic, etc . Anecdotally, everyone I know who plans on abstaining is white. Similarly to how republican lawmakers have sudden about faces on gay rights when a family member comes out, I feel like if any of those friends had a very close friend that was in one of the aforementioned threatened groups, they would feel more duty to prevent a Trump presidency. EDIT Defining young progressives as enthusiastic Obama supporters, perhaps Bernie supporters prior to his pledged support of Hillary<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For young progressives, abstaining and third party voting in this election is a symptom of privilege.\n","id":"40c183e4-db7e-4060-9f1f-2f11bcef4e06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Siege is a phenomenal tactical FPS. It's been on the market since December of 2015 and has had a steady playerbase, and constant updates to bring in new players and keep the old. No other AAA title has a true 1 shot headshot kill mechanic like Siege. On top of that there's the destructive factor the game features. You have games like BF that also have destruction but in no way does it compare to the realism of Siege, nor will it compare to the amount of adrenaline Siege produces. Ubisoft is known to receive a lot of hate for throwing out games in a hurry to make a buck, but Siege is something that they've crafted to be the best FPS on the market. I guess what I'm saying here is no AAA FPS is as fun or realistic as Siege is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tom Clancy's: Rainbow Six Siege is the best FPS on the market.\n","id":"8bed28ad-010a-4d30-9a08-9ad77ad26707"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Standard Model an incomplete theory?<|ARGUMENT|>The ATLAS experiment at CERN observed that the mass of the W boson was 80370\u00b119MeV, which was consistent with the value predicted by the Standard Model.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Experiments at CERN and other particle colliders have been able to find the mass of many particles to a high degree of accuracy.\n","id":"ceca02eb-5060-4270-8aa3-6cb05072eeaa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Religions are both good and bad. They form part of the evolution of modern society towards greater humanity and a growing awareness of our individual vulnerability and interdependence. This period of human development, while incomplete, is slowly coming to an end as religious belief declines.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions emerged as an evolutionary adaptation. They spread the adoption of behaviors that provided evolutionary advantages.\n","id":"c7a0c841-28b0-4e69-aa5a-ada4017a21d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have encountered a common refrain that has been parroted by lots of different people and organizations and it sounds something like We can't allow X because people are too stupid. X is hopeless because people are too stupid. People are too stupid to make proper decisions for themselves. I don't have many friends because most people are stupid. The list goes on. What is fascinating to me is that I hear this is so many different places. Politicians, the news media, co workers, friends, social media, television, etc. It's the most half assed, defeatist cop out ever and I think it is brought up to deflect attention from deeper issues the person organization espousing the opinion doesn't want you to know about. On an individual level, when someone complains that most people in their lives are all idiots or that they have nobody intelligent to relate to , it usually indicates to me that they have lived their lives in an unfulfilling way, personally and or professionally. I find interesting people everywhere I go, and while I can identify that perhaps others have much higher standards for interpersonal captivation than I do, at some point there has to be an honest confrontation. It usually comes down to the fact that the unhappy person does not make any effort to find suitable people they are glued to a computer, for instance or they are merely comfortable, but not content with their current social situation and just expressing some anxiety. They may also not be doing anything to increase their personal stock with other interesting people, so others don't care to engage them because someone who spends their free time playing beer pong and watching Family Guy doesn't seem to be approachable to someone who has more engaging hobbies and passions. In the bigger picture, I think popular political discourse is overwhelmed with a circus of idiocy. So much presented is a showcase of unreasonable and irrelevant social extremes and oddities that I think are intended to convince consumers to put faith is something bigger than themselves because only monolithic organizations have the power to protect them from the scary stupids and to protect the scary stupids from themselves. The caveat is, of course, that nobody thinks that they're the stupid ones. I think the people are stupid bit goes hand in hand with people are evil and everything is going to shit and other fear mongering lines. I think if more people had the sense that there are really smart people everywhere, and not everyone else around them just being dickbags cutting them off on the interstate or being found in personal disarray at Walmart, the society we live in would be a lot more positive and productive. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think most people are more intelligent than most people would have me think.\n","id":"f4809b52-d569-4fae-82f9-144b246fa573"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are crop circles created by extraterrestials?<|ARGUMENT|>It has been theorised that crop circles are a 2 dimensional representation of a 3-D image. The 3-D image in some cases has thought to be a device or technology of limitless power. They are trying to convey this to us as we are still stuck on fossil fuels.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"They have no meaning that humans can currently determine; this doesn't mean they don't have meaning, just that we don't understand it.\n","id":"3cf41c5b-9455-4939-8dce-c1b515863489"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Some animals, when they realise they will not win the fight, show the opponent the aorta. The sign of weakness is recognised by the other animals and the fight is over. Nobody is being killed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When fighting over power, animals, unlike humans, do not kill each other. They just fight to see who is the best leader, without killing.\n","id":"8073aa0f-b0a9-4e06-b649-751086b27427"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If God is Real, Should we File a Class Action Lawsuit Against It?<|ARGUMENT|>God's vast team of lawyers would use the sisyphean nature of the 'existence of God' debate to extend the length of the trial to the point that it is no longer financially viable for the plaintiffs<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God would wield its almighty power in order to unfairly influence the court's decision.\n","id":"3ac0b700-3572-4a8f-8fe1-7bf3ed168ca8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abolition of nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>On the basis that nuclear weapons can help deter even rogue states from using WMD, it becomes unnecessary to implement a preventive war doctrine to prevent rogue nations from ever acquiring WMD; nuclear deterrence is sufficient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear deterrence is a superior to doctrines of preventive war\n","id":"4fe52174-dfb5-41a0-b3d6-07c8cdaa572f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is no line in what is acceptable or non acceptable for gender and pronouns. Nothing to ground it, nothing to show why it is reasonable to assume that it is correct versus incorrect. It is entirely subjective. As such it is acceptable for me to make up a gender with pronouns and people need to respect it. If I want, I can make up my gender of Foxxydawg, which reflects the gender of a fox trapped in a human's body which likes to go about gender in the form of a Fox. As such my pronouns can be Fox and Foxies. And based on our current social climate, everyone needs to respect how I want to be named and called as. If there is no grounding for anything with it other than what I feel, they I have every right to demand to be called what I want and change it on a whim if I am gender fluid. If Gender is just what a person feels instead of using biology then everything is fair game. My view is that if gender and pronouns have no grounding, then to keep mutual respect for everyone, everything should be valid as acceptable if we want to respect these individuals. This is my view of the matter if I accept that I can use whatever I want for a gender and whatever I want for pronouns instead of something universally acceptable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no line in what is acceptable or non acceptable for gender and pronouns\n","id":"b3a5ef05-39d4-462f-9dd2-878230b98cd2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If a couple chooses to have an abortion, it is solely their choice, because they're the ones who will have to take care of it. Many pro lifers don't seem to care what reason a woman man couple may have for wanting an abortion, though a prominent reason some do support is if the woman's life is in danger. But all reasons are valid, whether you aren't emotionally financially mentally ready, birth control was used but didn't work, or you simply do not want it. It is not up to strangers to decide if your reason is valid or not. If the parent s is are not ready, everyone suffers through a domino effect. Parents will either lose or give up the child, sending them to orphanages already bursting at the seams. That's another mouth to feed, and it shouldn't be up to the public to pay for the care of a child who could have just not existed instead of suffering. So I say if you've taken it upon yourself to dictate over the personal business of someone else, you should take it upon yourself to care for the child 100 during the pregnancy and after its born. I do admit this a radical view but I'm a bit peeved by the shortsightedness of the whole pro life movement, which refuses to look at the big picture and the long term effects an unwanted pregnancy can inflict on society. I'm mobile, correct me if there are any errors in my OP responses. Thanks. Edit jeez. Lots of what ifs from the pro life movement. To clarify, abortion is legal up to 6 months into the pregnancy. The reason for that is, by all intents and purposes, a fetus is a parasite. It can't live on it's own without siphoning the life force of its host. But at 7 months it can, albeit underdeveloped. At 7 months, life arguably has started. Edit 2 wow. A lot of the arguments are straying away from the focus of this thread. Abortion is the procedure of terminating a pregnancy, not an already born child. Therefore, abortion cannot be an option after birth. I'd appreciate if we just focus on pre birth situations. I find it absurd that people are asking me if I'm okay with killing a person. To reiterate from my first edit a fetus is not alive until 7 months into the pregnancy. You cant kill something that was never alive to begin with. No, this is not my belief opinion, it is fact.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pro-life activists\/advocates should all sign up to become caretakers\/foster parents to the fetuses they fight so hard to protect. Not doing so makes the whole movement the epiphany of hypocrisy.\n","id":"60b151ca-b1f5-49a9-8ab5-f7d6d5ea6753"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note be sure to look at the edits. Pro life sounds, at face value, like it would be a label that most people would be for, however it is used only for discussion on abortion. People can be anti abortion and call themselves pro life even when they are against many measures used to help people after birth. While one cannot go policing labels, I think that it is rather silly to call oneself pro life based on merely your stance on abortion. Especially when in the US the majority party that is anti abortion is also anti wealfare, anti immigrant refugee, largely prejudiced against a number of minorities, and anti comprehensive sex ed it seems to me that having sex ed that involves conversation on contraceptives rather than only abstinence would reduce abortions . I would argue that people who are for measures that help people in general and for measures that would reduce abortion rather than outlawing it are actually more pro life than most people who claim to be pro life.  Edit I'm going to be a bit more specific. I am not referring to all conservatives republicans in this. A few of you have pointed out that many people want reform of welfare, immigration, and what have you but this isn't about people who want comprehensive reform. It's people who want to cut funding with no further consideration or cut the programs altogether. Additionally, I am not arguing about the morality of abortion. I am arguing that only being anti abortion does not make you pro life if you are against programs to help retain life or quality of life, or are for programs that kill. Because of this, using pro life rhetoric when you are not comprehensively for betterment and longevity of lives is hypocritical, divisive, and unhelpful to general conversation around abortion and even unhelpful for the pro life movement. I am looking for 1 someone to convince me that the label means something to those that hold anti abortion views but are alright with sacrificing some life or quality of life for other things because now, to me the label seems empty mere emotional rhetoric to guilt people into staying silent . 2 reasoning behind using the term or benefits for actual rich discussion and or for the pro life movement of using it when one is not comprehensively for life that isn't rooted in well, this is their party and they're far right so that's what they think especially when said person is openly of a Darwinist opinion that many anti welfare folx seem to be of. Honestly, I feel sort of bad that my tips brain felt that this was the best subreddit for this because I mostly want to see conversation around this topic and topic tangential to it. But, I would like to be less hostile towards the labels that people use in general and regards to this argument, so I suppose it's good. Edit 2 After sleep and another look, my initial question is not the best way to put together my thoughts on the issue. The people that would hinder the pro life side are few and far between who actually think and say that certain lives don't matter not that they don't have biases that make more issues with that But that isn't relevant I don't suppose . So, these people are more straw men than actual people. So if they aren't prominent in the conversation, people would not address them, perhaps. But I would argue that those people are becoming more vocal and the movement may have problems if they start in on the abortion debate more heavily. At that point there may be more issues While I would still like input on that portion of my post, I think the main focus that I'm still not sold on is how are these labels pro choice too it's a problematic label though pro life has extra weight with the x lives matter movements and soforth are good for the movement. I think that they rely on guilting the other side into silence and don't do anything to help bring about conversation of or solutions. Is there any context that would make these terms make more sense in terms of argument? How are these labels actually helpful? If they aren't helpful then why aren't people lobbying for other labels other than even more divisive ones like anti choice or anti life<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The people who claim to be \"pro-life\" but are against things like welfare, helping refugees, or increasing education funds are misusing this label\n","id":"1e5d8d0a-e901-43fe-8426-df19055a245e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Mosquitoes are the deadliest species on earth to humans, causing hundreds of thousands of needless fatalities a year due to transmitting infectious disease. They're also not a major food source for any other species, nor otherwise essential to natural environments. Scientists recently have come up with ways to kill entire species of mosquitoes with genetic engineering and I think they should be deployed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should use genetic engineering to kill all the disease causing mosquitoes.\n","id":"c0d67a8d-b610-4f92-b72c-fee55911e949"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>This is already happening as public and private institutions adopt 50\/50 male\/female boards\/cabinets\/employee pools, even when the candidate\/nominee pool is disproportionately men. This is unjust; this does not represent gender equality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminist ideas dominate other political agendas, such as the question of gender in a certain role being more important than merits.\n","id":"546d9cce-6e6f-419c-9536-50485aa67a1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The US Olympic team under performs when compared to nations of a similar standard of living and GDP. As of this post the US Olympic team has a total of 106 medals this is with a population of approximately 320 million people and a GDP approximately 8 times that of the current second place Great Britain. When if you add the total medals of the nearest competitors to the US when accounting for GDP and standards of living and create a fictional country with the same population size it has a medal tally twice that of the US. France 66 million pop 38 medals GB 65 million pop 62 medals Germany 81 million pop 39 medals Italy 60 million pop 25 medals Canada 36 million pop 21 medals Australia 24 million pop 29 medals Total 332 million population and 214 medals US 320 million population and 106 medals TLDR The US should have double the medal count considering the size of the economy, it's standard of living and it's population.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US Olympic team consistently under performs\n","id":"fe7e0ef9-b102-46ce-9294-feda98e1baf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally highly value committed relationships, that survive for years and push through hardships. I am in favor of couples making commitments towards that end, not leaving each other in moments of hardship for temporary amounts of time, supporting each other in sickness, etc. However, I still feel like everyone needs the freedom to get out at any time, because relationships can become manipulative even for the best people. There is no way I can predict what I or my SO will be like in 50 years, am I willing to tell a person that I will, with absolute certainty, still be their best friend in 50y? So here are my arguments I don't believe that love is entirely a choice. Thus it is not something you can promise to maintain. Thus marriage vows are not yours to make and therefore meaningless. Furthermore, I believe divorce is unethical, because once you get divorced your vows are reveled as lies. As long as this remains an option, it makes vows meaningless, because breaking them is a consideration, and thus are they are not vows. Nor do I think people should be together just for the sake of a promise when they hate each other. People should be free to leave a relationship at any time, because they are free agents, and people change. People shouldn't make commitments which limit them in this manner. Thus marriage is unwise. So, those make up my three part argument against marriage. . But also, what do you think is a good alternative assuming one takes all the views I stated above to heart? In a year or two, I would like some equivalent myself, so I'm contemplating it. What kind of ceremony, vows, or symbols of commitment could me and my SO give to each other to take our relationship to a more stable, life long partnership hypothetically of course ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe in Marriage, because I believe Divorce is Unethical, yet I believe in a person's freedom to leave any relationship.\n","id":"4ebad4f8-4add-4411-a367-1b4b6e61398e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The discussion of whether or not businesses are free to discriminate has come up a lot on this sub. It is my understanding that the prevailing opinion is that public businesses are not free to do so. I personally reject this philosophy but that isn't terribly relevant here. Like sexual orientation, age is a protected class in America. It's hypocritical to allow discrimination based on age but not sexual orientation. My personal feeling is that protected classes should be abolished altogether, but if they must exist then they should be enforced equally.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a bakery can't refuse service to a gay couple, senior discounts should be illegal\n","id":"a9ee506d-bd3e-4e04-85d2-5a3548a03004"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pretty much what the title says. It seems like Rohan lost a lot of good men, including Theoden, when they rode in to save Minas Tirith. However, I don't really see that their aid was necessary in the end, because the dead army would have just saved the city anyways. I understand that Rohan's involvement augmented the dramatic effect and it was pretty epic to watch them almost completely wipe out Sauron's army. But, in the end, I don't think it would have even mattered if they were involved or not and, quite honestly, it seems like a lot of lives were wasted unnecessarily. Regardless of how dramatically epic the scene was, Rohan wasn't needed to save Minas Tirith Aragorn was able to do it himself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because Aragorn was able to summon an invincible army of the dead, Rohan's aid wasn't necessary for the victory at Minas Tirith\n","id":"d196e2bd-9c5f-4cff-a910-7988339fd5c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Israeli raid on Gaza flotilla<|ARGUMENT|>Israel allows roughly 81 items to enter Gaza. It excludes thousands of other types of goods, making it impossible for Gaza to engage in legitimate trade and truly build its economy. This cause serious economic suffering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gaza blockade allows basic aid, but not other important trade\n","id":"9687e8f4-6375-49f3-8007-7751bdffecc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>From the trailer\u2019s released so far it feels to me as if the series will fall back into the routine of, \u201cTry once, fail, train, win.\u201d and which I\u2019ve enjoyed some of the past installments, but they feel extremely formulaic and at this point nuance is something that the franchise needs in order to continue it\u2019s successful run. If this is the case it feels like it really squanders the interesting dynamic between Drago and Creed if they just make Drago into just another bad guy instead of expanding upon the, \u201chate.\u201d he grew up in after Rocky 4 and his father\u2019s humiliation in the Soviet Union while making Ivan more of a true antagonist. Unfortunately I feel like this will not be the case. To  Provide me evidence I might have missed in the trailer hinting at some nuance in the story. To not Claim that the movie is not out therefore we cannot determine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It will be extremely difficult for Creed 2 to avoid the Rocky Formula.\n","id":"cb048f72-2e99-430e-bc1d-36c43be0456b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realise this isn't a popular view, and I'm all for conservation of whales, however living in Australia I feel that there is a lot of over hyped extremism about whaling. Especially in terms of supporting seemingly violent groups like Sea Shepherd. I feel hunting whales in sustainable numbers isn't necessarily worse than killing other animals for meat. I'm not pro whaling, but I think the militant activism it generates in the media is out of proportion. For eg. Media reporting the 'ramming' of a Sea Shepherd vessel when it stuck itself between two refueling ships. Anyway, change my view with numbers and facts<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think extreme anti-whaling sentiment is over-hyped.\n","id":"aa0ec708-53ab-499e-a885-bb46808266f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Punishing parents who smoke around children<|ARGUMENT|>Given how harmful it is, smoking around children is a form of abuse and should be treated as such by the state. The state should send a clear message to parents about just how bad smoking is for the health of their kids by attaching a punishment to it, in the same way it punishes physical violence towards a child. Beating a child, for example, is in most cases less physically harmful for them in the long term than passive smoking is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given how harmful it is, smoking around children is a form of abuse and should be treated as such by...\n","id":"17e63298-617e-4c01-b500-752515ca2cc7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump is a creator of divisive political drama. His actions and tweets in his first year created enough division already; impeachment would relieve this political stress.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The presidency should be held by someone who is a moral and intellectual example to the rest of the nation, which Trump is not.\n","id":"52376491-18e3-43db-a39f-6c3b4c2858e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just for very simple background a MRM is a mens rights activists which is basically the male version of a feminist. I believe this because they are both fighting for equality, so if they are both trully striving towards what they want total equality then the goal is to ensure both sexes get equal rights<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe you can be an MRA and feminist at the same time.\n","id":"82f762b9-efea-49ee-a8af-dbd039ed11c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children should not be allowed to inherit vast wealth as this damages them and society<|ARGUMENT|>Inherited wealth can advance rich children in some professions and this can exclude poorer children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children should not be allowed to inherit vast wealth as this damages them and society\n","id":"133ce7ab-47bb-4414-9604-e7622c1df796"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion may not be the \"objective\" truth, but if properly done, it sure is a subjective truth. Religion and God have been the most misunderstood things in this world since time immemorial. What people see today that makes them lose their faith is the disgusting and sinful behavior of certain clergy members. That still won't deter a sincere seeker. There is too much information on God and our relationship with him, you just need to know where to look. There is genuine experience beyond doubt.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The worst outcomes of religion are often due to the fallibility of its adherents to understand and apply the tenets of the faith rather than the accurate expression of the tenet as intended.\n","id":"ab2530f0-4637-483c-9f04-cfb7d63c3d25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Legalization of adult incest<|ARGUMENT|>The individual and family should generally have the ability to choose its own course. In general, if consenting individuals choose to start a family together incestuously this private family affair should be allowed to occur free of government intervention.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"State has no role in private sexual affairs such as incest\n","id":"f2c0c4df-5a2d-44e0-9da3-423fd19b36f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the European Union intervene in the political conflict in Catalonia?<|ARGUMENT|>The Spanish courts exercise supreme judicial authority in Catalonia. The Generalitat of Catalonia could even be abolished under Spanish law and its leaders brought to trial for insubordination. Short of starting a new armed insurgency, the Spanish courts are the only ones who can limit the will of the Spanish legislature and executive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU lacks the means and legal authority to intervene in such matters.\n","id":"3b498a75-3108-48fe-aa99-77ec6a059bdb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have read through his platform on his website and listened to his speeches, and I don't think Donald Trump is a racist. While he is not politically correct like most politicians, he isn't racist. He made some comments about Mexico that some people construe as being racist, but in context I think he was talking more about illegal immigrants than Mexicans in general. Transcript below was taken from Washington post His other famous statement is about banning Muslims from entering the US. Again, I don't think this is about race or religion itself. I believe this is targeted at immigrants and tourists of the Islamic religion seeking travel in the US, not US citizens, legal residents, or Visa holders. gt When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they're killing us economically. gt The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems. gt APPLAUSE gt Thank you. It's true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. gt But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people. gt It's coming from more than Mexico. It's coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably probably from the Middle East. But we don't know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don't know what's happening. And it's got to stop and it's got to stop fast.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump is not a racist\n","id":"e43082e3-5866-4004-a870-a85e9fae9a90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I got into an argument with a person today who bragged about the fact that she doesn't get out of the way when walking toward people on the sidewalk, and refuses to apologize if she bumps into people. I think I understand the argument here women are expected to be more subservient, submissive, etc., therefore it's liberating and empowering to do the opposite of what society expects. And there's certainly nothing wrong with standing up for yourself if people are being physically intimidating and blocking your way or something. But here's what I don't get How does taking your aggression out on passing strangers solve anything? If you really wanted to inform them that they're taking up too much space or being obnoxious, what's wrong with just saying so? If you intentionally invade a stranger's personal space without explaining why, doesn't that make you the aggressor? Instead of making people question societal expectations about women, won't that just make them think that you're a jerk for bumping into them and not apologizing? What possible positives does this way of thinking have? Instead of walking on the street being just a way to get from A to B, doesn't this mindset make everything into a constant power struggle, in which completely benign actions are interpreted as hostility? I realize that it can make you feel empowered and confident, but I'm pretty sure there are ways of doing that which don't involve inconveniencing other people. Speaking of hostility, isn't this a likely way to start fights with strangers? Isn't the 'intentionally shoulder checking someone and not looking back' trope one that we've seen associated with intentionally starting fights in movies for decades? Finally, what's wrong with just being courteous to other people, even if you don't like them? Isn't that a sure sign of maturity? Isn't this it's not my job to get out of your way, it's YOUR job to get out of MY way mentality immature at best and egocentric at worst? I just don't get it.  if you can I really want to know if there's a reasonable explanation for this behavior.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you intentionally walk into people instead of getting out of their way, you aren't fighting the patriarchy. You're being an asshole.\n","id":"338b7c19-fc91-4c1e-83bc-de3280fbc399"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see shit like this online all the time That particular post is an absurd characterization, but a characterization of a thing that actually happens, and I see it online all the time. Someone will voice an opinion that something the people on the left is doing or some attitude the left holds is pushing often straight, white, cis, male people away from the left, either in that they're already on the left and feeling less welcome there, a moderate seeing the left as increasingly less attractive to them, or on the right but in danger of going far right in a double down response to toxicity on the other side. Almost invariably the response to this opinion is, from what I've seen, to mock it. This seems very unwise to me. Firstly because it seems to be kind of proving their point if someone says they dont feel welcome on the left, the left mocking them for expressing that opinion just cements their claims. But more importantly the left which I count myself on should be in the business of trying to win elections. If people particularly straight white cis people, often men, so somewhere between like 30 60 of the US population are expressing that they have problems with how you're presenting your side and that they dont feel particularly welcome on it anymore, that's an opinion that should be taken seriously, not mocked, if for no other reason that we want as many people voting for us as possible. Am I missing something here? EDIT SINCE IT CAME UP A LOT When I say pushed further right I mean it literally it just means pushed further right of wherever you were prior. It does not automatically mean that you're going out to Trump rallies with your MAGA hat on. The idea that a genuine progressive left leaning leftist would go from that to supporting Trump seems incredibly unlikely. What I'm talking about, or what I think is far more likely based on people I've talked with, is more like someone was a staunch left leaner but is just having an increasingly hard time identifying with their own party, which would drive them to become a more mild left leaner or a moderate or something. Edit 2 Thanks all for the thought provoking and interesting discussion. I'm going to try to get in a couple more comments before calling it a night. I'll get to as many replies as I can in the AM. Shoutout to u Thomas C for earning the first delta for pointing out the community acceptance based reasons that many people identify with a political side in the first place, and why it makes them easier to alienate. Second shoutout to u trotlife for being a great representation of the reasonable, progressive left, helping to put a more nuanced face on why they do what they do, and fielding a dozen and a half discussions about it with various people. Cheers y'all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The left should take \"your behavior is driving me\/people further right\" opinions more seriously.\n","id":"50c62533-987c-4711-bcfb-667fa547a0f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> I have been using dating websites for a while and I've adopted the belief that they are an utter waste of your time unless you're conventionally attractive. I must note I'm a male a woman's experience may differ. My view comes from despite being an active user of multiple dating platforms on the web, I've had no major success because I'm not conventionally attractive. Not ugly by any means, average at worst, but I'm no Johnny Depp. What I've used mostly is OkCupid. This website has algorithms that show you users who are most similar to you based on the information you've inputted about yourself. I believe that unless you're attractive other users don't care about what your profile reads, or the match percentage, even if it's 95 . I mean, you have to be attracted to someone in the first place, right? I've had optimistic thoughts that people are just shy and don't tend to message first due to fear of rejection, as I hold that fear. I did an experiment to see if that holds true by creating a fake account with little information and used a photo pulled from Google Images of a conventionally attractive person and the inbox of that account got so many messages I couldn't handle it so that debunked the the myth that most users are too shy to send the first message. I also use Tinder. I thought this is a more direct method and would present much better results. I liked the idea that you will only be able to chat with people who you have a mutual attraction to. Despite this, even with people I've matched with I get no response. I learned a lot of people just swipe right on everyone to see everyone who likes them and they only respond to those who they actually like. The handful of times I've had in person meetings nothing really came of them. There has been times I had good chats with users then after we meet they slowly disappear. I don't think you can get a true first impression of someone online. no matter how much information and pictures they have up. My overall view is that if you are conventionally attractive, users will actually read your profile and care to get to know you more. But when you're average or below, no will care to even open that door, because human beings judge by appearances first. For this reason I think I should just delete all my dating accounts and try to meet people organically. I don't want to give up on dating sites because as a gay male, it is tough to meet other gay men organically. So please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unless you're conventionally attractive, dating sites are a waste of time.\n","id":"fa6c3ca0-5077-40f5-92d3-eedc6a6c77e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now for the record, I am pro choice. I just wanted to state with My biggest issue with the abortion debate is that at the end, it\u2019s just way too subjective, meaning that there can be no substance in it that can be analysed objectively. Just like arguing over your favourite colour and which one looks the nicest in general, you cannot really have a debate about that. The abortion debate usually boils down from my experience, about if the foetus a human being or not, is it murder when you end it, should their life be valued as much as as humans who were born? You can\u2019t really have a productive debate because it always becomes a shouting much where pro lifers state that \u201cunborn babies are still humans and you\u2019re a murderer for ending them\u201d while Pro choice people simply tell them that \u201cthey\u2019re wrong\u201d, it becomes just becomes a unproductive, never ending circle. My issue is that the topic of whether or not aborting a foetus should be considered murder is up to the person definition of murder which it too subjective to debate about and trying to just ends up as a circle jerk Same thing with the debate about whether governments making laws that prohibit abortion is a violation of body autonomy, pro lifer use the same argument stating that when a woman gets pregnant, their unborn child is an independent entity and that outlawing abortion protects that independent entity from \u201cmurder\u201d Just like trying to convince somebody that blue is the best colour in the world, it becomes a never ending circlejerk and nothing productive is gained I wish this weren\u2019t the case and that I can have a healthy debate about abortion up maybe you can <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It\u2019s impossible to have a productive debate about abortion without it becoming a never ending circle jerk.\n","id":"6ac776e7-af3a-4d85-ac1a-fd61e3663478"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>Various political leaders in the US have proposed that citizens who leave the country and swear allegiance to terror organizations should be officially stripped of their citizenship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ISIS fighters should lose their citizenship because they are committing treason.\n","id":"c579717a-2cd9-4e26-bd9c-20280dd6cfa0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this is not a popular view, but hear me out. The more technology we create the less we're going to NEED people to do certain jobs. As it stands right now unemployment raises because we I'm speaking mostly about the United States outsource jobs to other countries or to our technologies. This is a battle we are never going to win because technology increases exponentially. Also, population is on the raise. Meaning, we will reach a point where there will be far more people than traditional jobs. If we set up a universal minimum allowance then we can fix poverty and fix the unemployment problem. Will this allow people to be lazy? Yes. But will it also give people the freedom and choice to go after jobs they enjoy? I think so. For example, I work retail and I actually enjoy it. Some countries are already trying something close to this out. And as far as how will we pay for it? I believe those countries are converting their welfare programs into this new system. Why am I wrong? Edit I don't think I gave this issue enough thought. Several of you have made really good points and pointed out that my reasoning was flawed. Thanks for the comments, I think my view has been changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should stop worrying about lowering the number of unemployment and instead focus on creating a universal minimum living allowance\n","id":"42c95e49-0594-4f5e-aa8f-d2327e174502"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All piracy is lost sales This is objectively wrong. From what I understand, a sizeable portion of the piraters weren't going to buy the game anyways, so a lot of these purported lost sales were never sales to begin with. Also, some people use pirating as a means of demoing the game before deciding whether or not they want to buy it. So, ironically, it's not out of the question that you can lose sales by fitting your game with the latest anti cracking software. Look what CD Projekt Red did. They made Witcher 3 super easy to pirate you don't even have to go to a torrent site , and they still pulled a good profit. That's because they're not focused on fighting the pirates, they're focused on convincing the pirates to not pirate by gaining their trust. Projekt Red has proven that if you have earned a solid reputation and a loyal customer base, pirates become a minuscule threat. Bigger companies like Ubisoft or EA don't get this luxury, because their less than glowing track records have made their names something almost akin to curse words. People don't trust them, and some will pirate their games out of spite or contempt. Throwing Denuvo on your game is the bad way of stopping piracy. The better way is to not be a shitty developer. Edit I do realize that I sort of trailed off the topic at the end. My bad. Edit 2 I've been at this for an hour. Might get back to this when I feel like it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Piracy isn't significantly damaging, especially to large companies\n","id":"494f85d6-95cd-42a4-9ed1-aadf848f77c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people wash themselves every day?<|ARGUMENT|>Public showers have an even more increased risk of dangers, as people don't know when and how clean they are compared to at home, where they have control over it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public showers have even more dangers when not cleaned properly, especially when barefoot.\n","id":"fc8682b8-a893-4ceb-9908-dfda5f61b0ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The axiom of causality is the only explanation of how the universe works that makes complete sense to me The state of all matter and energy in the universe at a particular moment in time is the direct effect of the state the moment before it and the direct cause of the moment after it. The universe has a temporal beginning and end and the period in between must play out as it will. I admit that words fail me to express exactly what I mean. But basically, free will can not exist even though we feel that it must. Our minds believe that they are in charge of themselves because they ARE themselves, but they are just following a path that was laid out the moment the universe began. I know this example will seem odd, but please think about it A car does not know that a person controls where it drives, it just drives. A piano does not know that a musician controls what music it makes, it just makes music. People do not know that physics controls how they think, they just think. I'd simply like to know what others think. How is my theory incomplete?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe in the Axiom of Causality on a scientific basis.\n","id":"1a0c1dae-01a3-4d9b-8136-52be7f85168b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm using the term cleanse pretty loosely since I don't use them myself. Mostly I'm going to describe what my friends do, and it's based on what they've posted on Facebook or done while around me, so I understand this might already be a limiting factor. Here's what I usually see go down friend decides to go on a cleanse. Friend eats minimal solid food and typically juices grinds up some veggies or fruit and drinks it. Friend does this for a few days. Friend's cleans is over. Friend proceeds to eat lots of junk food. I originally forgot to put in here that they poop a lot during the juice diet part. All I get from this is it's minimal caloric intake for a few days followed by an up tick of poor eating, followed by another cleanse. How is this not just a chic way of binging and purging for weight control disguised as getting toxins or whatever out of your body?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most cleanses sound a lot like another way of binging and purging.\n","id":"51644939-8d0f-4f7b-bf76-d403eecde7dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that taxation is theft because the government takes your money by force. You are forced to pay a certain percentage of your income and have no say where it goes. How am I forced to pay taxes? If I choose not to pay them, the government levy's fines against me, then sends me to prison if I continue to not pay. If I make 250k a year, I should have the right to spend every penny of it on anything I want. If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized Lysander Spooner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taxation is theft.\n","id":"b96e5a88-6438-489e-9bdc-979ea3888d95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>Accepting the agreement is the choice that will most improve the prosperity of our community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our primary duty is to ensure the survival of our community members.\n","id":"5238f429-0fc0-4702-b3b8-0c993b0ff115"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Today I saw a homeless man with a dog and which lead me to thinking that he shouldn't be allowed to look after the dog if he cannot even look after himself. Pet dogs are heavily reliant on their owners for things like comfort, food and entertainment, and I believe that if you are homeless you cannot provide all of that. If a man is struggling in his own life to look after himself, he will struggle even more whilst also trying to provide for a dog too, and I fail to see how they both manage to eat a good meal from begging alone, not to mention the food that the dog does eat most likely will not be ideal for his diet and could even lead to health problems. Going back to what I said before, how can a dog be comfortable on a snowy winter night when temperatures are freezing, even with blankets, this is not an ideal environment for a dog. Obviously some people will own a dog whilst living somewhere, run into a life complication of some sorts and at a last resort end up homeless, in this scenario I believe the person should temporarily give their dog to a friend or family to take care of, and if nobody wants to take the dog, then it should be given to a shelter of sorts where he will get properly cared for and can be visited until the dogs owner is financially stable. This could also be motivational for some homeless people to get back on their feet and give them something to work for in order to get their dogs back. Thanks for reading and sorry for any errors, I've written this on my phone. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homeless people should not be allowed to own dogs\n","id":"1c648574-8828-4799-8682-ea09cdf35f17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I grew up in a household where drugs in general were taboo. Alcohol was the exception of course. Recently, I've been curious about cocaine, but the thought of doing it makes me somewhat uncomfortable. I see it as something that's potentially highly addictive, makes you forget your actions have consequences, can lead to foolish decisions when with people, and can be the catalyst for infidelity. That last point may mainly be from me having trust issues of the opposite sex which in turn makes me feel insecure, but I know the drug makes you horny. Help me change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cocaine is a bad drug and I don't condone the usage of it.\n","id":"2f00c48b-25d6-430c-8242-ca3c1f38da82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should political franchise be earned by individuals?<|ARGUMENT|>This might be beneficial for migrants and newcomers to a country, who could quickly integrate into a country and prove their place by putting the good of others above themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Earning your franchise through your actions means all participants in the political process have demonstrated their capacity to place the interests of the nation ahead of their personal interests.\n","id":"dae9be36-c3f8-46e6-963d-ac332501875f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Greater Good: The ends justify the means<|ARGUMENT|>Intentions ultimately dissolve into nonexistence when all human behavior comes about due to physical laws be they causal or acausal laws. Therefore: Intentions are practical rather than physical realities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We don't 'choose' any action or whether to act or not act. Free will does not exist.\n","id":"e481ff26-46f7-4105-acf2-092c0f1e6504"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It doesn't make sense to me that once children become a certain age, that they go from awww precious to throw them in the litter with the rest of the rats . Either everyone is special or no one is special. It's just as irrational as keeping an iphone in a case until it has a small scratch and then carrying it around carelessly and letting it get banged up. The idea of treating children special is done for the parents amusement rather than the child's growth. Parents like their young children particularly because they're innocent. Once you lose your innocence, you never get it back, so they they pride their children for their very properties which they need to abandon before becoming an adult. Yes, there are certain protections young children should have. Their more vulnerable to psychological trauma, so they should be shielded from it. They're more impressionable mentally, so education should be emphasized. But acts to make their childhood enjoyable in ways their adulthood will never be is only deceiving them about what the world entails. There's a time to be innocent and a time to grow up but the transition should be gradual not just treat the child special when their 12 and then do nothing when they turn 14 and all hell breaks loose. Teens suffer the hardest because they mos of the restrictions of a 10 year old without any of the contrived benefits. There are plenty of services and charities out there for kids because we feel bad for them . But teens and younger adults, less so. If that's bad, try getting a support network when you're 40. The following societal staples of modern child raising are deceptive Being extra nice to them Children barely have to do anything to get effusive praise. It's fun for parents to gratify their children. But eventually, they'll have to realize that their children are going to walk on a subway station one day and nobody is going to care about whether they even exist or not, so long as they pay their toll and dare not look at or talk to a stranger. Spoiling children with lots of gifts and luxuries. In this case, parents are reliving their childhood in allowing their children to have what they couldn't have. However, this results in children being less in tune with the reality that you have to work and struggle before you can get the luxuries you want. Giving them organized lives, only for them not to have it . As a kid, making friends is easy due to school. Except, during high school, kids become bullies adults do not mitigate this . In college, people commute and become distant. Beyond school, meeting new people is difficult. Likewise with family, children are rarely told that families are often destined to become insular as relatives move away and form kids. Making everything fair Children are given the illusion that everything in life is fair. Tests are fair. Athletic competitions are fair. The mantra that those who work hard can achieve anything. And so on. Rarely are they told that eventually life will be fickle once they get older i.e. dating, employment, abusive relationships .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If adults are not special and teens are not special, then children are not special.\n","id":"1c8439ed-4b9d-41bd-9b8c-02f619c1cd51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>Many teachers currently describe their workload as unmanageable Requiring hours of additional training adds undue burden to a profession that is already overburdened.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers are already overworked, and expecting them to take on additional training is unrealistic.\n","id":"6dbdc49e-e555-472f-848e-7b0833c5115e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>ban the promotion of diets<|ARGUMENT|>The main problem facing Prop's entire case is that this is simply none of the government's business. What people eat or don't eat is a private matter and the intervention of the nanny state would have us all on a diet of compulsory cabbage and nut roast. People can be grown up about this, and where they're children, their parents can be grown up about this. The entire health and education system already exists to tell us to eat our greens and cycle to work; for those people who chose not to do so, they have a range of diet option and advertising tell them what those options are. The government regularly runs healthy eating advertising campaigns, and they often focus on obesity such as the Change4Life campaign, so there is plenty of opportunity to get the other side across.1 It's free speech, it's a free choice for the consumer, it's called the market. Prop seems to think that consumers are idiots, nobody believes that a diet for a couple of weeks will make them look like a super model any more than buying a pair of speedos will. However, they can assess the different products, decide which one they trust more, do further research if they want to and then choose. 1 Politics.co.uk Staff, \u2018Anti-obesity campaign launched\u2019, Politics.co.uk, 2 January 2009,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's my body and I'll starve if I want to\n","id":"45178695-5d7f-42c1-b312-bdbab7ce24ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Some parts of nature are humans' natural enemies and humans are trying their best of killing them as effectively as they can. A society where we would not be able to do so, because it would be considered murder of animals, would have tremendous disadvantages for humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A society where the life of an animal was worth as much as the life of a human would be doomed to fail.\n","id":"da61cdfb-ef2c-473a-ac69-37bf0e803b5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>A 2013 study presented at the British Neuroscience Association showed that exposure to high levels of stress hormones in the womb can cause mood disorders later in life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Androgens and estrogens, as well as other hormones, have an undeniable effect on our brains during gestation. The effect of such hormones is not transient but lasting.\n","id":"63c84daa-9a0a-4413-a0b7-17365d8fc096"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should renewable energy sources replace fossil fuels?<|ARGUMENT|>Renewable energy sources are not necessary. There are energy sources that are practically infinite such as Thorium for LFTR Nuclear and Deterium\/Tritium for fusion<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are more efficient sustainable options available that should be utilized instead of renewable energy sources.\n","id":"ce632e97-4e9c-4e5a-b1ee-33ad0df8f7ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm talking about stuff like mission trips to developing countries. Whenever I see organisations that commit to building a school or well in Africa, respond to disaster relief, etc, it always seems to be a religious one. I've never seen or heard of an atheist group go on a mission trip to a third world country before.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is good because it motivates people to be good. !\n","id":"b700fd71-c715-49cf-9c3f-5efc3493a784"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My understanding of the natural sciences\u2014namely biology\u2014has brought me to believe that the sole imperative of any and all forms of life is the promotion of its own survival, in some form or another. In all bacteria, archaea, and eukarya, this takes the form of an evolved instinctual motivation to preserve one\u2019s own genes, ultimately manifesting as the complex egoistic behaviors that we each perform everyday. This being the case, even apparent altruism should, upon closer analysis, be reducible to self interest in some way. A recent video released by educational animation producer Kurzgesagt argues that, because the Industrial Revolution moved humanity from a zero to a positive sum game with regard to the global supply of resources, it is now in the interest of each individual\u2019s own welfare to financially support new innovations of all kinds, as such investment perpetuates primarily technological improvements in all areas of human life. They also argue that monetary incentives are crucial for the instigation of innovation. In response to Kurzgesagt\u2019s video, feminist socialist writer Emma Caterine published an article on Medium which argues that such a framing of the global situation is deceptive at best, malicious at worst. She argues that the way the video presents the global increase in both supply and demand wrongly ignores the political forces at play within the system, driving inequality to never before seen levels as only the richest get richer, leaving the rest behind. She also argues that the promotion of an egoistic altruistic social philosophy is detrimental to the wellness of humanity as a whole. I agree with most of Caterine\u2019s points, but I disagree with her conclusion. While Kurzgesagt\u2019s video does frame the worldwide economic situation deceptively, I don\u2019t believe that turning away from egoistic altruism altogether is the best move, or even an available one assuming the aforementioned primary biological imperative . Living things inherently behave in their own self interest at all times, making true altruism nothing more than a delusionally optimistic idea. However, one thing that the trajectory of human society since the Industrial Revolution has exhibited is the potential of collaboration. Capitalists will argue, as Kurzgesagt gently implies, that monetary incentive is a necessary precursor for innovation. However, and this is the view that I\u2019ve come here to have changed , I don\u2019t see this as being the case. It seems to me nothing more than unsubstantiated capitalist propaganda to claim that, in a positive sum society, the deep human desire to improve one\u2019s circumstances in support of one\u2019s own wellness is not a force strong enough to drive innovation. Political scientists should probably stop reading here, as I\u2019m about to wax very idealistic, but supposing that all economic incentives were removed from the system, would not humanity be inclined to thrive on the achieved excess of communally produced resources while using their newfound free time, previously tied up in their endless pursuit of wealth, to learn and innovate? Would not a population with a capacity for critical thought understand that sharing these selfishly motivated innovations with their community inherently increases their capacity to thrive as well as even Kurzgesagt argues ? Does not an individual inherently thrive when its community thrives? In her article, Caterine cites numerous examples of cases in which people \u201cinnovated by and for the public good Nikola Tesla, Jonas Salk, and Frederick Banting and John Macleod \u201d. Are minds like these too anomalous to build a sustainable society upon? Personally, I call bullshit. Note I\u2019m not well versed in political science or political philosophy and I have no doubt that this is an oft disputed topic. I would greatly appreciate any and all relevant reading recommendations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Communistic egoistic altruism is the most sustainable means of supporting one\u2019s self-preservation and flourishing.\n","id":"fa477e49-c07a-4967-a22c-2c011fb7f9c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>THW Require the Provision of Cannabis in Any State Funded Medical Program<|ARGUMENT|>For governments to refuse treatment on the basis of an unreasonable assertion is cruel and blindly ideological<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"THW Require the Provision of Cannabis in Any State Funded Medical Program\n","id":"a93264f0-e4de-4852-8e4b-cfddc409d555"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mandatory calorie counts on menus<|ARGUMENT|>\"Should Restaurants Be Required To Post Calorie Information?\". Dr. Dolgoff's Weigh. Dr. Dolgoff. July 19th, 2009: \"As a pediatrician and child obesity specialist, I spend my days talking to overweight families. I am constantly surprised at the lack of knowledge about calories and nutrition. While it may seem obvious that certain foods have a lot of calories, most people are unaware of exactly how many calories they contain.\" In general, even with people who are not obese, it can be difficult to accurately judge the calories in any given restaurant entre, with people consistently expressing surprise at the actual calorie content of certain meals. Calorie counts helps avoid any ambiguity, clarifying exactly what consumers are getting. This is as it should be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Calorie counts make it easier to judge calories in foods\n","id":"e2c5190b-23ed-430a-88ba-ebc56afded00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To preface I went to an extremely leftist school and am surrounded by queer, radical PoC and activists all the time in my career. I myself am a queer PoC. I agree 100 with almost everything my peers stand for. There's just one thing that is constantly stuck in my craw and is such a huge point of contention between leftists and others. I understand how making insulting comments against someone with structural privilege white male cis hetero able bodied etc is totally different than making such comments against a person who is not similarly privileged non white female queer disabled etc . The protection certain privileges give means that the repercussions of getting insulted or verbally attacked are minimal compared to a lesser privileged person. But those repercussions are still there, at least mentally and emotionally, right? My question revolves around this why is saying fuck cis hets or white men are terrorists fine and accepted in leftist communities? Why say fuck all white people when you mean fuck the system that privileges whiteness, and the people that support that. Why say the former when there's a white person, maybe your friend or ally, standing right next to you, struggling to do mental gymnastics to justify what you said despite the hurt that it might cause? Sure, sure, being upset that someone told you to go fuck yourself is not the same as living under systematic oppression. But it's still not great, is it? I get that people without certain kinds of privilege are fed up and angry and exhausted. But why does that excuse being a mean, cruel person to people who have personally done you no wrong? We're not talking ideologies here its not like saying fuck Republicans or something. People who follow shitty ideologies can expect to hear about it. But people are not white or straight because they choose to be, they're that way because that's how they were born. There are plenty of people who have privilege but are doing the work to undo oppressive systems and support people who are oppressed. Why should they constantly have to hear a stream of angry, hateful words towards their unchangeable identity? Why is it okay to say well, oppressed people suffer more than you, so we have the right to be awful to you in return. I just fail to understand it, day after day after day. But it's something that all my peers engage in, and I want to figure out if there's something I'm not seeing here. So, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Generalized insults like \"fuck white people\" or \"all men are awful\" are not okay just because they're punching up.\n","id":"d872b233-1e29-4713-b139-d229c9e7a4d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Studies have found that regular sex has a protective effect on the heart, lowering the risk of heart attack in men. For men and women, \u201cit increases blood flow to the genitals and probably helps the immune system\u201d.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sexual abstinence is not per se unhealthy but it can be psychologically harmful when an individual wishes to have sex and does not, according to researchers.\n","id":"ed6ee146-fa96-4fbe-8c10-23d24476f3d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>The main question is a question of inquiry whether p; not a question of doxastic deliberation whether to believe that p or not. Although pragmatic argument can decide questions of doxastic deliberation, they cannot decide questions of inquiry, since they do not bear on the fact of the matter, whether p or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The question is whether \"free will\" exists, not if believing in a lack of \"free will\" is immoral.\n","id":"40ad6a0b-3908-4599-8eee-99e42e0cb752"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay. So I am not trying to discriminate fat people. Hell I used to be one. I just find it strange walking into clothing stores and seeing XXL clothing for the same prices as the Small. I mean, they use three times as much material which may be an exaggeration and yet everyone pays the same prices regardless of size? How does this make sense? From a business perspective, I imagine they do not want to lose money so the only way they can charge the same price for the small as they do the extra extra large is to make every size retail the same as the XXL. Right? Like, if it costs 1 to make a small, and 3 to make a XXL, and the company marks up the prices 300 , they will retail all the shirts for 9 , even though this percentage of markup only makes sense for a XXL, not the smalls, which at 300 markup would only be 3 . Do you understand what I am getting at? If this posts takes off I will add edits to clear any confusion up , but fat people should pay more or skinny people should pay less.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fat people should pay more for clothing, or skinny people should pay less\n","id":"4f2b14cd-4dd4-4901-beec-53aaa97f3a29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Chicken meat is the best meat , here's why good protein fat ratio. easy on the stomach. really really cheap even top shelf. really versatile in cooking . taste good cold or hot Can be . Boiled . Steamed . Fried . Grilled Goes with . Creamy sauce . Spicy sauce . acidic sauce . Litteraly any feculent. when you buy a entire chicken you can choose what part you want to eat at each meal and keep bones skin and little clumps of flesh for a delicious bouillon and that's really convenient. Popular everywhere in the world. I may have missed some arguments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"if I had eat only one meat for the rest of my life it would be chicken.\n","id":"304b80d2-4a97-4964-bd02-616841c9a7a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>grant the EU a permanent seat on the UN Security Council<|ARGUMENT|>The European Union is meant to prevent war being on the UNSC would allow it to actively promote peace.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"grant the EU a permanent seat on the UN Security Council\n","id":"d4ade66b-c990-4eb3-9b7a-e536d9210df1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Forced marriage should be banned<|ARGUMENT|>Although this debate has been focussed on the UK or the US standard legal practices, the title does not make it clear that these are the only circumstances which we are considering here. In some cultures non-consensual sex within marriage is legal. Thus forced marriages would effectively be leading to what we, in the Western world, regard as rape.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of these marriages take place outside the jurisdiction of the UK\n","id":"a3cf91c7-966c-4188-b1f1-692cfb485ea6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A vast majority of minorities I will not list any in specific, in a negative manner. have a feeling of entitlement. IE, the government owes me. Yet, the Native Americans, who seem to have been hit the hardest over the course of America's existence, fund themselves and provide for their own people. Why can't these minorities follow this example instead of begging for money from our already dilapidated government?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Why do minorities feel they are entitled to government money?\n","id":"fbcc6105-f8c1-4498-8fd3-52323244b4c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>To give some idea of the scope of this issue, including persecution of those perceived as atheists: The percentage of us who are white male heterosexual Christians using this group not as definitive, but only to get us in the right ballpark is very low, so the vast majority of us are potential targets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The moral codes often found in religious texts have been the cause of many social injustices including the persecution of homosexuals, people of colour and women.\n","id":"b1bd7179-1445-42e4-a3a3-410554d46483"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Constitutions protect linguistic minorities?<|ARGUMENT|>Article 2:1 declares: 'Persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities hereinafter referred to as persons belonging to minorities have the right to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, and to use their own language, in private and in public, freely and without interference or any form of discrimination.'<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The freedom to speak one's language is already protected by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities.\n","id":"0a6b048e-887d-4ca8-98cd-aa8071d319ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Smarter, better informed people tend to make smarter decisions, therefore decisions made by smarter, better informed people should tend to be smarter. Demagoguery and bad information form a buffer between educated decision making and the people at large that can gradually eroded. I'm aware that intellectuals' liberal political decisions haven't always turned out well, but, if liberals as a whole can be blamed for Leninism and Stalinism, then conservatives as a whole can be blamed for fascism and theocracy. Even if that's the case, one side may still be preferable, if not perfect. I'm looking for alternative explanations of these effects, not a discussion on the merit of political ideologies that would be way too broad. EDIT This post convinced me that the correlation with education doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best idea, but I still don't see a better explanation for the tendency to move leftward.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the correlation between education and liberal politics, as well as the tendency of society to move leftward, is evidence that liberal politics have more merit than the alternatives.\n","id":"a302c7f9-2710-4bdc-9ff1-e4f65e2eebd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Their Children Should Be Fined If The Child Gets A Vaccine-Preventable Illness<|ARGUMENT|>Parents are in the unique position of knowing their child closely on an individual level. This means that they are in the best position to know what is in the best interest of their child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The risks and benefits of vaccination will vary from one child to another.\n","id":"3c9dfd49-3cfc-4500-904c-194b7708ac28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should medical research embrace racial differences in treatment efficacy?<|ARGUMENT|>Caucasians are older upon diagnosis than African Americans 27 years of age vs 19 years of age.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The presentation of allergic\/ immune condition eosinophilic oesophagitis can vary based on race.\n","id":"c2e8aa37-ccfe-416d-ac5d-7d4234f4aa80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Attachment Parenting the Best Way to Raise a Child?<|ARGUMENT|>Following a \"parenting method\" as \"the best\", carries a risk of fundamentalism, and looking down at other ways of parenting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The quality of care is more important than the particular method or \"way\" a child is raised.\n","id":"77fe6ac1-7f22-43f2-abb7-265c6dcb6f02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Feminism has become a negatively charged word for whatever reason, it seems to make a lot of people angry, at least on the internet. I personally don't hear the word very much outside of the internet, but I do hear women's rights in the media quite a bit. It seems to be the new alternative to feminism, kind of how like progressive was introduced to try and replace liberal. I was watching a speech given by Hillary Clinton and not once did I hear her mention feminism, but I heard women's rights several times, because she's a politician, she's not stupid, she knows what words to use and how listeners will react. I hadn't heard of Men's Rights before I discovered Reddit. The reaction seems to be very negative and while I understand it's partly because of the way they behave when I read the stuff on r mensrights they definitely spend an inordinate amount of their time demonizing feminism I think most people are reacting to the very idea of men's rights. People hear men's rights for the first time, even before encountering a typical MRA, and it sounds silly to them it sounded silly to me , similar to as if someone were to advocate white rights or straight rights. When I read the platform there are definitely real issues divorce and custody, male victims of abuse, selective service, circumcision, etc. So I think this movement would benefit from a reframing, either by just attacking each issue individually the best solution IMO or by changing men's rights to something else. To what I don't know, men's issues maybe. I've heard of father's rights long before men's rights and that never sounded like a bad thing. When they talk about issues that effect men and boys it sounds better somehow, more important because think of the children I guess . As a corollary MRA's really need to stop attacking feminism and engaging feminists, and instead focus on the issues, I think that would earn them more respect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"They shouldn't call it \"Men's Rights\".\n","id":"82144e6e-bdf8-42e0-a8c6-6147e30db172"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that whenever a society assumes Marxist or collectivist policies, then the individual plight is disregarded in favor of the collective and therefore, civil liberties and individual privacy naturally disintegrate. This is why communism has become synonymous with fascism in the eyes of history. This is why liberal politicians favor gun control legislation, and why we are seeing the Obama administration extend and expand the NSA, the Patriot Act, and Guantanamo Bay. Socialism Marxism also eventually leads to the purging of dissidents. People with socialist views can exist in a capitalist society because individual liberty is encouraged, whereas in a socialist society, anyone that disagrees with socialism is an enemy of the state and therefore, the collective and must be punished. Dissidents are dealt with as they were with Chairman Mao's Hundred Flowers Campaign Now, I know some of you are going to bring up the McCarthy hearings as a retort, and let me beat you to it by saying that ignorance is prevalent on every side of the political spectrum, but overall, individual liberties are valued more in capitalist societies. Basically, the countries on this list have similar rankings on this list<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that fascism ie. North Korea, Stalinist Russia is the logical progression when Marxism\/socialism is implemented, and civil liberties are stronger in capitalist societies.\n","id":"b72bcd72-c46b-4078-b14d-0c06ae9f83af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>Influential black women like Michelle Obama have been classified as the stereotypical 'angry black woman' for sharing their opinions, despite their status.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even with improved socioeconomic status, minorities still endure negative racial stigmas perpetuated by society and the media.\n","id":"5407f358-0671-46da-bd2e-6fc71bfc894d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>What you see in a near-death experience, is influenced by your cultural background, including your religion People that see an angel or a god, only see ones consistent with their own religious beliefs regardless of whether they're f.e. Christian or Hindu.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The same experiences involving God happen with other deities, such as Shiva, Ogum, and any other kind of god or spiritual entity. If we agree that all of these experiences are real, then the God of classical theism cannot exist.\n","id":"571834a7-8cdc-4657-8319-46a4fa7a638d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Its no secret that we're surrounded by household items like parsley and vitamin C supplements which are likely to induce miscarriage when taken in very large doses. Since there are a myriad of herbal remedies and easy to obtain drugs which are known to cause miscarriages, why is it morally correct to forbid those people who would have these miscarriages whether they're safe or not to do so out of a hospital environment? Since we live in a time in which a simple Google search will show a list of easy and unsafe ways in which somebody can self abort it seems like, even if a fetus counts as a person with the right to life, it's better to adopt policies which will favor saving one life than losing two to bacterial sepsis or another complication that threatens both lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Early term abortions should be permitted because any woman who wants an abortion is able to induce a miscarriage easily and unsafely!!! using household herbal ingredients?\n","id":"4361484f-b64e-40b9-a6ca-4d7a56baa651"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>An international ban should be placed on the export of nuclear reactor technology<|ARGUMENT|>We believe that the export of nuclear reactor technology results in an imbalanced economic and political dependence that is both harmful for the importer country and the global political climate<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An international ban should be placed on the export of nuclear reactor technology\n","id":"87f8fdfa-b5b3-4c3e-9852-6d33235c387a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The mods of  have decided to do an AMA over on r casualiama. Now is the chance to ask us any questions you may have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mod Post is doing an AMA!\n","id":"bd4df637-b30f-4807-83a4-391bfb93047e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Democrats condemned Republicans for unwarranted obstructionism aimed at hurting Obama's political standing; it would be hypocritical of them to do the same now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refusing to cooperate with or obstructing the other party when they are in government violates democratic norms and principles.\n","id":"3764406e-e7f0-4ceb-b56b-86522464045f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Referendums give voters the power to decide on issues, but as the implementation depends on the government, the outcome might still be unsatisfactory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Binary frames leave the public without influence on the implementation of the issue's outcomes.\n","id":"831c682f-cd71-4d3e-b892-eef2cc0823d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Land taken by Israel through military requisition orders was declared illegal p. 22 by the Israel High Court of Justice, yet these orders have not been stopped, nor has the land previously been seized returned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel has continued to build settlements in the West Bank which entrenches its position in Palestinian territory. These settlements are also illegal.\n","id":"49b46f96-6777-472d-aeda-e67e351555a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Extreme forms of love thy neighbor for example are not dangerous taken to any extreme conviction. It is other flawed beliefs that create the danger. Such as the belief that people who disagree should be made to agree or be killed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Extremism is not a problem unless the fundamental beliefs are themselves flawed. A harmless belief taken to extremes is still harmless.\n","id":"d3691700-a320-4b82-b6e4-0326afc76e78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>The core problem of inequitable trade is excessively concentrated markets in the hands of over-powerful transnational corporations, which dictate the terms of trade and absorb most of the profits. In many countries, these exploitative corporations are supported and subsidized by the state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The problem of inequitable global trade is more concerned with politics than trade relations.\n","id":"de53c2c6-7335-4f85-976f-b7e67ef380b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pretty self explanatory. For starters, I'm not referring to the media, although I do believe pro Trump media and right wing media in general has faced unprecedented censorship lately. I'm more referring to censorship that affects trump supporters individually in their daily lives. Public shame, ridicule, rejection, etc. Anyone who lives in a metro area and voted for Trump cannot express their political opinions without being shamed into silence. For background, I'm not a subscriber to either party. I have some pretty far out political opinions, and it's frankly shocking that it's more socially acceptable to say that I'm an anarchist than to say I voted for Trump. I acknowledge that certain politically far out groups are probably more publicly shamed than Trump supporters, for example if you join the KKK that's clearly going to get you publicly ridiculed censored if you talk about it in public. But we're talking about supporters of a democratically elected president, not some shady cult leader. Edit Some confusion on what I mean by censorship here. In my view, there is a very strong social stigma against Trump voters, which inflicts a sort of enforced self censorship. Yes, freedom of speech says I can say what I want and you are free to disagree, but when an overwhelming majority or perhaps a large vocal minority decides that everyone who voted for Trump is misogynist, racist, and homophobic , then it is much easier to self censor than to participate in political discussions. In short, socially enforced self censorship is in my view equivalent to other forms of forcible censorship. This is not the view I'm asking you to change, so let's assume this part for the sake of argument. You can read the title as, Trump supporters face worse censorship via socially enforced self censorship than any other group today , if that makes it easier.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump supporters face worse censorship than any other group in America today.\n","id":"f1bd7163-221f-4fc2-84b9-347c241ace8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is prompted by a minor argument with an acquaintance. They work in finance their claim is that high frequency trading HFT is actually helpful to the market because it a Provides arbitrage, reducing the margin between selling and buying price b Makes prices respond more quickly to events in the world and elsewhere in the market, moving them closer to their ideal price. c Mostly a paraphrasing of b, HFT makes the market more efficient d Somehow makes the market more stable this didn't really have a good justification I'm not zealously against HFT, but these seem like unsubstantiated claims. For one thing, there have been several large market swings driven by faulty automated trading. But the substance of my objection is based in theory. I should add that my background is, in part, in mathematics and control systems. Even in simple feedback systems like controlling a motor, the output voltage of your power supply, etc stability is not a given. When you first learned to drive, you might have sometimes repeatedly over steered while trying to go straight. You overcorrect, swing one way, then overcorrect again, and swing the other way. Even when you learn to control your vehicle, new circumstances can once again take it out of your control. If you're on a slippery surface and the rear wheels lose traction, you can start fishtailing what you normally do to control the car just doesn't work anymore. High frequency and, more generally automated trading involves not one, but thousands, or tens of thousands, of independent feedback loops, interacting with each other and the larger market system. There are hundreds of thousands of variables involved and circumstances change all the time. The idea that this is somehow more stable seems laughable. When something does go wrong in the markets, we rely on human intervention for damage control. Things get shut down early to avoid a panic, etc. With HFT, there is much less time to respond. But, I am not really very knowledgeable about economics and stock pricing and such. Am I missing something? Is there some intuitive reason that I'm missing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High frequency trading does not stabilize the market\n","id":"8d85c66a-f165-4d3c-a617-013b5232a058"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative killing people cannot be morally correct, because, if you transfer the maxim of this act into general legislation, it would say \"you should kill people\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AKMs are high technology weapon systems which are ment for killing people. Because killing people is morally wrong the West should not develop them.\n","id":"778a9339-de99-428f-9956-9cf62cce4180"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of reviewers love this movie for the whimsical communication you can only have in fleeting moments. Charlotte and Bob have an undeniable chemistry and are better for having met each other. However, their escapism doesn't excuse the terrible things they are doing to other people. Charlotte's husband is terrible and hurts her. In turn though she hurts everyone she meets in Japan through him. She's needlessly mean to who seems like a perfectly nice person with the blond actress. Just because she isn't as intelligent as you doesn't make her deserving of hate. I don't think excusing yourself from your husband's table to flirt with someone else is ok either. This is understandable though because she's young and rightfully hurt. I just don't think it should be as admired as it is. She actually says she feels mean, so I believe she may just be lost. Bob has no such excuses. He makes racist remarks because he doesn't understand Japan. He's ignoring his wife, who's trying to get him gifts, care for his children, and check up on his mental health. If he doesn't feel loved by her then he needs to just leave. He shouldn't be taking breaks and cheating even if he does regret it. With Charlotte I don't believe he does though. As relatable as this movie may be, why is do people believe it's for good reasons?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lost In Translation 2003 is a movie showcasing people at their worst rather than their best.\n","id":"a296bcb7-ead1-4766-a521-958bbdfdd6d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a member of the U. S. Marine Corps I have always been a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. I believe in every law abiding citizen\u2019s right to keep and bear arms. However, as someone who has fought in combat with weapons of war, I believe there are things that citizens have no need to own. The items I refer to have only one intended purpose and that is to inflict as much damage on the enemy as possible. Automatic weapons fall into this category. These weapons are used in several ways in combat. They are used to suppress the enemy, they are used to allow troops to advance on the enemy, they are used to defend positions against enemy assaults but, their main purpose is to inflict as many casualties as possible on the enemy. The sale of new automatic weapons to the civilian market was banned by the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986. Currently there are restrictions placed on the sale of pre ban machine guns, short barrel rifles, short barrel shot guns, silencers, destructive devices, and AOW\u2019s. Most of the regulations focuses on whether these weapons have a valid sporting purpose or not. This brings me to my point. There is no sporting purpose for the ownership of bump stocks. Bump stocks allow the action of the rifle\u2019s recoil to assist in increasing the rate of fire of a semi automatic rifle. Bring its rate of fire closer to that of a fully automatic weapon. While the fully achievable rate of fire with this attachment depends on the operator\u2019s knowledge and experience using the system, there is no sporting purpose for owning this type of attachment. As I stated above, weapons capable of automatic or near automatic rates of fire only really have one purpose and that is to inflict mass casualties on your opposition. For these reasons, I believe Bump Stocks be banned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bump Stocks should be illegal.\n","id":"951e273f-5f42-468e-ab23-f44a79a9f715"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>If patients have to \"shop around\" in order to find a doctor who will perform their procedure this will financially impact them because they have to get more than one consultation. A significantly larger amount of time is also wasted for the patient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women living in areas with low health care coverage may need to travel long distances to get an abortion if the most readily available doctor is a conscientious objector. This imposes significant costs on them in terms of money and time.\n","id":"c3cb3d62-3abe-4630-8b14-1fbef0a5e676"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I always used to consider myself a liberal. I support abortion, gay marriage, equal rights for all minorities etc But over the past year I have come to realize that the social justice movement has gone too far and the people who support it are being intolerant. They are pushing the idea that people who hold different beliefs or morals are wrong and should be publicly ridiculed. Anyone who disagrees with their ideals is labeled a bigot, racist, homophobe, transphobe, you name it. I think the idea that all of society must hold the same moral values is a ridiculous idea and I cannot and will not support it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The social justice movement has gone too far and is essentially trying to make it illegal for people to hold negative opinions or beliefs.\n","id":"3409ccef-ae10-422f-8937-37dfd9f7aa5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the United States, like Rome and Britain before it, has had it's peak moment as a world leader and is now on the decline. I don't see that changing in the future due to the significant challenges facing the country and the broken political process. Major challenges and reasons for decline I see in the U.S The world's largest number of prisoners both per capita and in absolute terms Greater inequality right now than at any point in it's history and greater than in Europe at the start of the 20th century An absurd amount of money in politics A political system broken by ideology, partisanship and gerrymandering<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States is an empire in decline and is on a downward trajectory\n","id":"4f84a957-afa1-4269-bf98-6f7849e88761"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK police and border officials struggle to stop illegal guns from being smuggled across the border.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many countries with strict gun control laws have a black market for guns.\n","id":"b2919760-8545-4e06-b5b0-703ce2154d02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>The American Congress usually has a public approval rating of below 20%; a third of voters believe that their representative is corrupt, half that they are out of touch and serve special interests Gallup Yet only about 5% of the members of Congress who run for re-election in any given year are voted out of office CRS, p. 6<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voters do not act in accordance with their own opinions and stated preferences. This clearly is a case of irrational behavior.\n","id":"28be9402-9e86-41a2-937c-34c14096e78a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Last week we heard big news about the Chinese researcher claiming that he had used CRISPR gene editing technique to genetically modify two viable human embrios to be immune to HIV. What followed was a wide spread hysteria with many researchers claiming that those experiments were unethical, and some going as far, as to try and stall the developments into human gene editing altogether. To me this seems insane. While gene editing, as any new medical technique, has its risks, its potential benefits are enormous. Making humans immune to diseases like AIDS is just the first small step. It is very likely that gene editing is what we need to battle cancer and potentially aging which as of now has 100 mortality rate . Stalling the development of human gene editing by just one year will plausibly cost the humanity around 100 million lives, around the same as the number of victims of WWII, or the number of lives saved in the whole 20th century by eradicating smallpox. When the stakes are this high, stalling the development of human gene editing is grossly unethical. That said, I do not suggest that we should reject all the standard medical research precausions and dive head first into free for all gene editing. Rather I would propose that we should treat gene editing in about the same way as any other extremely promising experimental treatment. Now, let me address some common counter arguments to this view. First of all, what if gene editing attempts lead to genetic defects, lowering the quality of life of edited babies? This is a common risk of experimental treatments. At least some clinical trials do increase mortality in the experimental group. We should strive to avoid it as much as possible, but in the end we'll have to take some risk. It goes without saying that this risk should be made clear to and accepted by the parents. As additional consideration, note that knowingly giving birth to a child with Down syndrome is currently legal, even though the outcome of it is almost definitely worse than the risks of the gene editing. Second, this is eugenics, hence this is bad . This is mostly an argument by association, not a rational argument. Eugenics is bad not because it produces babies with better traits, it's unethical because it removes the people's freedom to choose their partners and in some cases to have children. This is not the case for gene editing. Third, these treatments will not be universally available, it's unethical because they will be only available to the rich . Of course we should make it as widely available as possible, but it's unavoidable that for some period of time gene editing will be expensive. But this is the case for each and every new technology at various points in history this was true for Internet, clean water and food. If you can't immediately supply the whole world with clean water, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't even start giving access to it to as many individuals as possible. Fourth, what about Gattaca scenario, i.e. the stratification of people into edited and unedited, with unedited having almost no chances in life. This is a tough concern. The most unfair of the Gattaca world is the fact that the corporations were allowed to test their employees for having various generic traits. This is outright illegal already now. In most industries it is completely illegal to make hiring decisions based on sex, age, unrelated disabilities and even IQ. Beyond that, of course there is and will be stratification. It happens already now because IQ is partially inheritable, and people are more likely to marry into their IQ strata. Some inequality is inevitable, and we should work to mitigate it as much as possible. But I firmly believe, that inequality should be fought mainly by improving the life of the lower quartiles of the population in whatever metric you are measuring , not by limiting the potential of the higher quartiles. And in any case, ineqaulity shouldn't be lowered at the cost of slowing the progress, because in the long run faster progress will make everyone better off. Fifth, there are some considerations of religion. I would like to point out that in the modern secular world while we do have religious freedom, whenever religious beliefs come into opposition with some development that has big potential benefits, the religious concerns do not and shouldn't take precedence. Consider abortion, in vitro fertilisation, teaching creationism in schools. In all these cases the public good superceeds deeply held religious beliefs. Edit To be clear, I do find some types of genetic editing unethical, for instance giving a child some cosmetic features on a whim, like unusually big eyes, especially if it can lead to unknown side effects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unethical NOT to genetically engineer babies to prevent diseases and potentially to improve some traits, subject to standard medical safety procedures\n","id":"ebf768e0-f2b5-4464-b310-628330c78b9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With unskilled labor beginning to become heavily automated, as well as the push to double the minimum wage seeing widespread support, its possible that we might begin to see unemployment rates rise over the next few decades. In response to this development, political candidates such as Bernie Sanders have advocated for free college education. One of the biggest causes of poverty in our country is teenagers dropping out of highschool, or not putting in much effort during their highschool years. Many of these dropouts end up stuck working a minimum wage job, struggling to pay the bills for the rest of their life. It's not always an issue of money management, you literally can't afford to save or invest anything on minimum wage if you're trying to support a family on 1 job. Those that graduate highschool are far more likely to climb out of poverty the median full time income of a highschool dropout is 488 a week, whereas it is 668 of a highschool graduate with no college education. To say free college education will end poverty is very naive. When many people can't help themselves to graduate highschool, which is both easy and free, how would the same people make it through college, which is 10x harder and requires a highschool education first? The rate at which students fail college courses or drop them is already astronomically high. And that's when people know that they're wasting thousands of dollars by failing. In many of the classes I've taken, I've noticed over half the class drop out by the end of the term. If you make college education free, you're going to have tons of students wasting resources by taking classes, half assing them, and failing as a result. When people get things for free, they're less invested in it on a personal basis, so they're less likely to try as hard. This costs the government a ton of money. You could have GPA requirements for reimbursement, but that would potentially cause unexpected debt among students that take a class expecting government reimbursement, only to be denied reimbursement because the class was harder than they expected and they couldn't handle it. Reasons why free college education is a bad idea compared to job specific training University is overpriced , and having everyone go to college will only increase prices more due to increased demand. Who will pay these prices? The government, and ultimately, the taxpayer. When there's a single payer, these organizations have the ability to rip off the government. Most universities are terrible with managing money , they shouldn't be responsible for utilizing taxpayer dollars when they can't even run their organizations in a way that doesn't require outrageous tuition. When I was at NIU the other day for my brother's graduation, they had over a dozen people behind the counter working at a concession stand with only 2 PoS machines active, which was literally only selling fountain beverages and candy bars. Over half of them were just chatting and texting. This level of overstaffing is exactly what causes tuition to be outrageous. It's not just in cases like that, in many cases there's an abundance of administration workers that never even get anything worthwhile done. Then you have Union employees that manage to negotiate far more than they're worth, and end up costing a fortune in benefits and pay, which is passed on to students paying tuition. Or the university spends millions of dollars on some pointless project to make their school more appealing to young people by offering something cool. People will major in useless degrees ones that don't result in employment that sound interesting to them. Post secondary Education should be seen as an investment by the government. If you educate people, they will be more productive, and therefore generate more value to the country and pay more taxes. If someone majors in a degree unlikely to result in a job in their field, it provides little to no return on investment from the government in the form of taxes from their future job, and only acts as a liability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free Government-Provided Job Training is a Better Solution than Free College Education\n","id":"794971ab-d66c-4914-ae77-e3e2bad3786b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Domestic pigs can quickly learn how mirrors work and will use their understanding of reflected images present evidence that domestic pigs can quickly learn how mirrors work and will use their understanding of reflected images to scope out their surroundings and find their food. to scope out their surroundings and find their food.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"IQ tests suggest that pigs are as smart as chimps.\n","id":"95933aad-4fab-416f-9aa9-d9734e6ae88f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like the cult of personality and slave labour. It is known that the Great Pyramadis were build using a sheer number of slaves. That these very pyramids were made to impress and to remind people of Whose tomb it was. Temples were also built by slaves for the Pharaohs. People of Egypt had to be imposed of the God Like nature of Pharaohs and were made to venerate them. My view really is that the political, motivational and relational behaviour of Kim Jong Un is similar to those of 4000 years ago that reading about the DPRK could be about Egypt if we replace Kim Jong Un by Amenemhet IV<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":": I believe there is no difference between how the Pharaohs treated their people and how Kim Jong-Un is treating his.\n","id":"625fb9dd-9b71-4cbd-b6d8-77a73fab3a46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>grant the EU a permanent seat on the UN Security Council<|ARGUMENT|>The United Nations is an international organisation whose members are nation states, not other supranational organisations such as the European Union. \u201cMembership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states\u201d1 The European Union is however not a state and is unlikely to become one in the near future. Recognising the European Union as a member would pose other problems as it would clash with article 9 of the UN charter \u201cEach Member shall have not more than five representatives in the General Assembly.\u201d And Article 18 \u201cEach member of the General Assembly shall have one vote.\u201d2 As the European Union member would have 27 votes, and potentially well over 100 representatives in the General Assembly. The European Union is at present an observer3 and that is how it should remain. 1 United Nations, 1945, Article 4, 2 United Nations, 1945, Article 9, 18, 3 The Telegraph, 2011, improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United Nations is meant to be a body of nation states.\n","id":"fa251ac1-5685-4c65-852f-5405c6e241c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand why fashion might be important for a subculture like goths, mormons, bikers, gang members, etc. but I don't get why fashion has any value besides showing affiliation to any subculture. Why do people pay multiple times as much for a trendy shirt than for a non fashionable shirt consisting of the same resources? Please elucidate me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see any sense\/value for fashion.\n","id":"b491fc8f-b1d8-494b-84cf-a7b8769f7304"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>One of the foremost responsibilities of government is to enforce justice. Mistakes and faulty systems are not a reason to forego justice. When the sanctity of human life is violated, it is not revenge, but the need of an equal to satisfy justice. The only equal to a life taken by the accused, is to give their life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is the only efficient way to obtain retribution on behalf of the victims.\n","id":"c08e10b9-a9e0-4a5e-944d-32e8f3ba480e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we have a single global language?<|ARGUMENT|>A single global language spoken in a diversified culture is analogous to a single technological standard compatible and understood across different market brands.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"International trade and cooperation would become easier, which would be beneficial for the global economy.\n","id":"50f69179-06da-43b6-81c9-dc828a9c1345"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, the stigmatisation of their work can stop them accessing the personal and financial benefits of marriage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalization will allow for better protection of the rights of those engaged in sex work.\n","id":"d7e9ee94-d96a-4be7-b2ad-e3cc325a5324"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI is not sustainable because it relies for its funding on the taxing of value creation while at the same time it discourages value creation by reducing or removing the incentive to work to create value.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People will work less, which also decreases available public revenue. This leads to a large deficit which will make cuts necessary.\n","id":"530a5378-861e-416e-858c-8417dcf591a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please note this goes to a specific branch of the pro life movement which focuses on the belief that abortion is murder, that life begins at conception, and abortion should be illegal in most if not all circumstances. I noticed that around the pro life movement that legal punishments for women who get abortions seems to be the gotcha question relating to this issue. So I'm really hoping to see good responses from people on the pro life side of the argument, relating to how they reconcile the issue and what if any actual penalties they would want women who seek abortion. There are pro lifers such as from this website that do believe that women should be trialed similar to murder cases for abortion, but in my experience most pro lifers deflect the issue or do not want any penalties for the woman. There are two usual avenues pro lifers go when facing this issue The first response is that they wish to punish the doctors providing the abortion, not the women. If you believe that both doctors and women should be punished for abortion, for one being the service provider, and the other for being the initiator, then I guess that logically follows your line of thinking. What I have trouble understanding is those that seek to unilaterally punish the doctors with jail time or removal of medical licenses, but not having any consequences for the women. Making it illegal for doctors will never stop abortion. Just as restricting gun rights or prohibition for alcohol. Until you stop the demand you won't cease the supply. There will always be a profitable black market for this kind of stuff as it is in countries that do ban abortion. Wouldn't it make sense to punish the initiator of the abortion the woman ? Not just the medical professional who is doing it for patient client reasons? Many women who do not access to hospital professionals do abortions in unsafe environments alone, how would that affect her punishment if she is the one initiating and the one doing the abortion? The second response that pro lifers give is that the women having abortions may not be mentally well or sane in the current situation. Quoting the pro life article I linked gt Abortion is the killing of a human person. Just like stabbing a three old on a playground is killing a human person, stabbing a baby in the womb is also killing a human person gt When the woman in Texas drowned her five children several years ago, what was your thought on her punishment? Did you believe because she had some rough times at home she should be excused from what she did? The fact is, she killed her five children and had to answer to the law. While we might feel sorry for her emotional state, we must also want justice for the five children who were killed. If you encouraged laws making women endure waiting periods, ultrasounds, clinic closures, false scripts on breast cancer, etc. etc., then you have already endorsed plenty of punishment legal penalities for women. If your worldview claims that life begins at conception, and that the fetus is a human life like any other, then you should have similar consequences for the actions of mothers who murder their unborn children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you are pro-life you should believe in punishing women for abortion\n","id":"e4fb1418-baa0-4ddd-b061-cf2014fd8241"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To be honest, I am a bit of a lacrosse hater. Im born and raised in New York City, and no one here at all plays lacrosse. The only people who play lacrosse are from Long Island, Upstate NY and Jersey. The first time that I actually met a lacrosse player was up at college we happened to be number one in the nation at the time I have never actually seen a game of lacrosse played, nor do i actually want to ever see one. I have been told that lacrosse players are just athletes who just could never make it in any real sport. I know that lacrosse is popular on the college scene, but as someone whose life is very much related to sports even got one of my degrees in it , I just cannot accept lacrosse as a sport. Reddit, please change my views, if you guys can't, I will never respect lacrosse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't view Lacrosse as a real sport,\n","id":"5e5c965f-41aa-4d78-9a56-fdc3e97c6605"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Actually pretty simple argument for my side. Basically, Nazis cared about other Nazis. They had a shitty community but they had one. But selfish people kill innocents indirectly every day. They say it's just business or that's not my responsibility . To boil my view down to a simple analogy If I see a baby on the train tracks and I could save him at only minimal cost to myself, but don't care cuz he isn't me, I'm just as at fault for his death as I would be had I put him on the tracks. Now everyone says they wouldn't do this. But what's the difference between this and jacking the price of the epi pen through the roof when it was already profitable anyway? The answer is there isn't a difference and a large percentage of extant Americans are more morally deplorable than some of the worst humanity's history has to offer us.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Selfish people are literally morally worse than Nazis hear me out first\n","id":"39980c3d-9a70-44f5-8ad1-0544cbace4cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>kinda drunk but here me out. we're both males btw. we met on a website specifically for finding casual sex. i agreed to go to his place for sex. we discussed everything we wanted to do. i get to his place and we start fooling around and he was kinda sketchy and i didn't want to have sex with him anymore. tried using body language and subtle hints. tried suggesting we do other things. eventually straight up told him i didnt want sex anymore. he didn't take it well. he said that i already said i would and i couldn't take it back now. he wouldn't stop touching me. i thought he was just being assertive and showing me how much he wanted it, but i was getting tired of it and tried to get up and put my pants back on. then he held me down and had sex with me anyway. i probably could have fought back but i was scared of him. afterwards he acted like he didn't do anything wrong at all. he even assumed i might wanna see him again. when he went to the washroom i left. so why it's my fault he was a stranger. i went to his apartment specifically to have sex with him i told him i was going to have sex with him i got him hard and fooled around with him i didn't fight back as much as i could have i don't feel traumatized by it. it kinda sucks. but i know it was a result of my stupid choices. i don't feel like he should go to prison for it. i've only ever told one person and he told me i'm insane and it was a serious case of rape and i should have gone to the cops. i find this makes me slightly less sympathetic to other rape victims, so please cmv.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"i was partially responsible for being raped.\n","id":"6aac3231-3d4d-415b-9403-8c585242c347"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>In investigating a hypothesis, there is always a margin of error. In scientific research, this margin of error most often 5% is preset to determine when a result, until falsified, can be considered evidence. This means that even if you perform research in the most stringent of settings, you will have 5% false positives i.e. falsehoods retained as evidence. So by that factor alone some evidence could virtually be found to support any hypothesis, regardless of truth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some evidence can be found to support virtually any hypothesis, including the existence of God. However, truth must accurately describe and predict all the data. The hypothesis \"there is no god\" accurately fits all of the available data, whereas \"God exists\" does not fit all of the available data.\n","id":"f0230ebc-f6e8-4211-a929-d9a749c66209"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the president, especially a president like Jackson who rode into office on mass democracy and party favors, it is one's obligation to act in a way that is in the best interest of the country on whole. If one thing can be said about Jackson, it's that he is a man of the people, often exalted as their champion. Thus, his actions were always, at least in his eyes, in service of his supporters. Unfortunately, a majority of American\u2019s, especially those on the frontier who supported him and elected him, believed that the Native Americans were an inferior race, a nuisance, and that their presence in Georgia hindered inevitable American expansion. This view crossed partisan lines with even Henry Clay, a staunch rival of Jackson, backing it. Some may argue that Jackson\u2019s actions were not morally right, but he was the people\u2019s champion and chose to stay loyal to them. He knew that separating the whites from the Indians was the only way to ensure peace and keep the people happy. He even had the Native American\u2019s well being in mind, stating in his speech to Congress in 1830 that their removal will \u201cenable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions\u201d Jackson 1830 . Even though his sentiments were somewhat naive and ignorant, he remained considerate of the problems of his people, whether they be white or Native American. Furthermore, I would argue that Jackson's actions resulted in less pain than there would have been had he not taken the action he did. There was a good amount of violence occurring between angry whites and native Americans. Sooner or later, the people clamoring for the land the native American's were occupying would try to take it, likely by force. Left alone, this violence would only escalate as it had in the past in similar circumstances. By removing the native Americans to Oklahoma, he took them out of potential danger and gave them a place where they could live in peace without white intervention or conflict. I'll yield that the march could have been executed better, but I would say that this was the only way he could ensure the native American's compliance. I acknowledge that it is a sad turn of events and I commiserate with the Native Americans who were exiled from their homes to a place unknown and relatively barren. However, I firmly believe that the president in a democratic country must act in service of his people, especially those who put him in office. Jacksonian democracy is all about putting the supporters first and that's exactly what Jackson did, so for this reason I feel the Trail of Tears was justified. If anyone is to blame it's society and the people at the time, not Jackson. Change my view. P.S. I'm drawing on information I learned about 3 years ago so if something is factually inaccurate let me know.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Andrew Jackson was justified in enacting the Trail of Tears\n","id":"54e24f1e-0c83-4234-9aeb-174143915074"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I find that whenever I learn that someone follows a religion or believes in God, my thoughts automatically shift to pity or scorn. Pity because part of me feels that they have been brainwashed, and scorn because I imagine that they are willingly ignoring demonstrable facts to embrace a fantasy that controls their lives. I realize these two feelings are contradictory. I tried to drill down in my thought process to find the origin of my issues. I realized that I don't actually blame religion for causing war or holding back science because some other dictator or institution would have done the same thing in its absence. I even believe that religion, at one point in human history, was a necessary and vital component of social evolution that allowed people to live peacefully in large communities before better systems were invented. The social structures that were born from religion bound people together and gave them a reason to follow a moral code, and I doubt I would exist today without that. Although our brains haven't evolved much since those days when we needed religion, I think that our social systems, government, and morals have. Of course, one could argue that the rise of the nation state and patriotism is its own form of religion. We are at a point where the average person doesn't have to rely on religion as a crutch to scare themselves into behaving ethically. Now it feels like religion is too much of a liability. For the morally corrupt, it is an easy way to gain power and manipulate those who are vulnerable. Some people who believe in a certain religion hypocritically ignore the inconvenient parts that don't mesh with their world view and succeed in a field of science despite their beliefs, and others are blocked by them. Even then I ask myself, why does it matters if someone ends up being religious? Maybe it's just the result of their upbringing, and if I were in their position I would believe the exact same things. Maybe our animal brains are predisposed to believing in something greater than ourselves I'm certainly guilty of accepting the theories of scientists I have never met, even though I am equally ready to abandon those theories in the face of new evidence. But when I really thought about it, I realized that the only value metric for life that I could come up with is how close humans are to understanding and describing the universe as it objectively exists. I realize we will never actually get there, given our status as isolated brains interpreting a narrow band of signals from the outside, but it's the only meaningful reason I can come up with for us to continue to exist that explains my distaste for religion. Imagine a meter that represents all of humanity. On the left side is complete ignorance and the inability to make even an educated guess about what might happen in the future. On the other side is the fundamental truth of reality, and an equation that will accurately describe all past and future events after you input the starting parameters. I want the needle of that meter to slowly move toward the reality side. Every time I meet a religious person, I feel like that meter is inching back toward ignorance. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I think that after you factor in living life contently and not hurting others, the only human mission we have is to try to unravel the secrets of the universe. Anything that gets us closer to that is inherently good to me, and anything that puts us further away is inherently bad. Is religion really moving us further away from an objective understanding of the universe? And even if it is, does that really matter enough to justify my harsh judgments of religious people? How can I apply the respect I want to have for everyone to religion if religious people appear to be explicitly working against the only valuable thing humans are doing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am very judgmental of anyone who believes in a religion.\n","id":"55c3f466-8f0b-4b33-ae32-6b0de1f41664"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When you own a gun, you take on a certain responsibility. Too often people are negligent and irresponsible with these weapons and tragedies happen. To give people an incentive to lock up there guns and keep them away from others, I believe gun owners should be held equally responsible for whatever crimes or accidents caused by negligence are committed with them while they are under their ownership. Exceptions would arise if a gun was stolen by force, and selling a firearm would transfer the responsibility. EDIT A lot of people have been plugging in other things such as cars to this same concept. What makes guns stand out in my mind is that if you lent your car to someone who did not have proper driving training or obviously intoxicated and they ran somebody over, you would be responsible. But when you lend a car to someone completely capable of driving safely w drivers license you shouldn't be responsible. This applies to guns in that they require a much higher level of care and responsibility for one to be considered an able user, therefore, there are very few situations in which you can responsibly let someone borrow your gun. EDIT Good discussion people. After hearing some good points, I simply feel that criminal negligence charges should be more actively enforced on irresponsible gun owners on a case by case basis. While I don't think they should do the same time as the criminal, there should be a harsh sentence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe all gun owners should be equally responsible for any crimes committed with that gun, whether or not they actually committed the crime.\n","id":"c92d7581-24e4-49f1-8827-57bf83593d40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Personally I have no problem with homosexuality to me its just, like other forms of sex, a matter of preference innate or not however GID which is part of the LGBT movement is fundamentally different in my view. You have a group who says they are the other gender. And they want it not to be seen as a mental illness. And being a Med Student i just don't see how it is not. I find it very much the same as BIID and Xenomelia and i doubt many would argue that they do not have some form of mental problem . Lastly it seems that the groups are making it political by trying to make the politicians take it off the list of mental disorders rather than having people who know about it psychiatrists and psychologists be the ones to judge rather than the afflicted . Edit because i feel its necessary since many seem to think they are making universal statements about whether or not politicians have a say. I am not American I am Danish and here it was up to debate in parliament but was struck down for a myriad of reasons. Another Italian poster mentioned the same was the case in Italy but there it was struck down by the transgendered themselves because it would have meant they'd no longer be covered by the universal healthcare.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Why shouldn't being transgendered GID be viewed as a mental disorder like BIID or Xenomelia. And why should it to be up for politicians to decide rather than medical professionals?\n","id":"94f77b8b-8535-4bde-bec9-c10747323a95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The new Spider man trailer just dropped, and it looks amazing. Watching this trailer got me thinking, and I now believe that live action superhero movies as a genre have a lot of problems that could be resolved by simply going down a route that includes animation. I'll list a couple of them 1 Art direction. Great comics feature great art. Often how a comic is drawn says just as much about a story's theme as the actual narrative itself, and can contribute a great deal to a tone or sense of style. As a result, comics as a medium rely on their art just as much as their text to convey story, and many of the best aspects of superhero stories get lost in translation onto the big screen. Marvel produces comics that feel unique and distinct from one another, but their movies feel remarkably generic and often fail to set themselves apart. On top of that, no studio has successfully captured the bright, engaging color palette of comics in their live action films technical constraints aside I'll discuss those later , these things simply don't look as cool or engaging in real life as they do when slightly stylized. As a result of all of this, the resulting movies have a weak art direction. I believe a move to animation would help solve this problem, but I'd also point out that the tone problem in comic book movies is caused by a lot more than just their art style. To fully understand the problem, we also have to look at 2 The influence of big budgets on Hollywood blockbusters. As a general rule of thumb, the more money goes into a movie the more your investors will want creative control of the project. The result is that high budget movies often take very few risks and rarely achieve a unique vision, mostly preferring to stick to a proven formula. This is why Hollywood is cranking out all the sequels and reboots you see these days New IPs are seen as a sucker's game . DC makes animated movies with much less reach then their live action films. They reportedly cost around 3 mil to produce according to industry figures I've talked to. Now, some of these movies are terrible and none of them have the quality to be mainstream smash hits, but I'd say that even the middling entries in their animated franchise are better than something like Suicide Squad. At lower price points animation is pricier than live action, but as you approach the most expensive movies the needle swings in the opposite direction. For instance, Frozen reportedly cost 150 mil to make including marketing while Age of Ultron cost 250 mil not including marketing . By moving to animation, Marvel and DC could emulate Disney proper and Pixar by making varied films while still playing it safe enough to rake in the cash. 3 technical constraints. Simply put, the action and aesthetic of superheroes simply fits animation better than live action. In order to fit modern special effects into live action movies, everything has to be just so. The constraints of these sfx affects everything from lighting to cinematography, and the result undermines the artistic quality of these films. If you need a reason for why Marvel movies are grey and DC movies are dark, look no further. Look at scenes like this, and realize that they were done almost 20 years ago with hugely outdated technology. Yet the movement, color, framing, etc. are all miles ahead of what we can achieve even today with live action. This sort of fluidity would really make the action in superhero movies more lively and entertaining. 4 Continuity of character. Let's not beat about the bush here, the shareholders who own the Marvel and DC movie rights love money. Yet actors are mercurial and want to stretch their repertoire very few A list actors intend on spending their entire careers in the cape world. If superhero movies were animated, this would present no obstacle. Both Marvel and DC are running into this problem, with iconic characters forced out of play because of real world actor fatigue. In Marvel's case this isn't a huge deal because we've grown to know these characters well enough that a story about their departure works on an emotional level, but how the hell is DC going to explain Batman leaving the big screen when Affleck walks away? Issues like this completely disappear with animation. 5 Distancing these stories from reality. This might sound counter intuitive as a strength, but hear me out. Superhero stories feature larger than life figures, doing larger than life things. By portraying these events in a photo realistic medium, these movies ultimately make even the most outlandish heroics feel small and hollow. It's no accident that the best superhero movies like The Dark Knight Rises and Logan work with this effect rather than against it. Both movies deal in real world themes, and while the characters and plots may be outlandish the emotions and stakes hit very close to home. These are movies that benefit from real, grounded performances and refuse to rely on high fantasy, sfx heavy spectacle to thrill or engage the audience. That's fine, but not every film can be Logan. If you want to make a Thor or Superman movie, I'd argue the best way to deliver on that promise is with animation. Anyways, these are just the top 5 advantages I thought of off the top of my head. Go ahead and <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Superhero movies would be better as animated films, and the only reason animated superhero movies aren't made more often is the Western belief that animation is for kids\n","id":"c4085ba4-8e0b-4cc6-b77c-da55682ef923"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In 2017, the military budget was 639 billion. So I guess I'm saying let's spend 320 billion less on our military. Let me address what are likely the two biggest concerns with doing this 1 Defense The United States is a member of NATO. We have DOZENS of military allies who could come to our aid if we really needed help. We don't appear to be on the brink of war with any major military power. The closest is North Korea, and if we slashed our budget by 90 , we would probably STILL kick their asses. Not to mention our arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons could turn North Korea into glass. We are in a smarter era now. It's not about MORE planes, MORE bombs, MORE guns, or MORE people. It's about all these things but smarter. Think our engineers are smart? Good, because they are. Let them live up to their potential and figure out how to accomplish military objectives without just throwing everything we've got at our targets. 2 Jobs This is an easy one. We just freed up 320 billion from our budget. So invest that in the country and create jobs for the military personnel who would now need to find work. Whatever program you can think of, you have 320 billion to make it happen. I guarantee we could transition all displaced military personnel to civilian life AND have plenty to spare with that kind of cash. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the United States could and should cut its military budget in half.\n","id":"2865e9dd-dda8-4974-aae0-619ead5e0a33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should the Conservative Party choose to be the next UK Prime Minister?<|ARGUMENT|>Johnson has claimed that the UK would not necessarily have to pay tariffs if it left the EU. Many trade experts as well as leading cabinet ministers dispute this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Johnson does not appear to understand the implications of a no-deal Brexit which may make him more likely to pursue this as an option.\n","id":"076ea11b-d566-4a1b-8bca-fd2fa8f38376"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Got to thinking about how people always identify certain parts of their life as being lucky , and then how much superstition still runs through our culture. Winning the lottery isnt lucky. its just statistics. Being born in the US isn't lucky. Its just geography and the culmination of all of your ancestors migrations around the world. I get the sentiment for people to want to acknowledge that some beneficial aspects of their life are out of their control, but is that the definition of luck ? Maybe luck has multiple definitions? Curious what you guys think<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as luck\n","id":"2522e4f7-4999-4d1a-9666-46f307b542b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>assisted suicide should be legalized<|ARGUMENT|>The gradual decline of their body, the failure of their organs and the need for artificial support. In some cases, the illness will slowly destroy their minds, the essence of themselves; even if this is not the case, the huge amounts of medication required to \u2018control\u2019 their pain will often leave them in a delirious and incapable state. At least five percent of terminal pain cannot be controlled, even with the best care. Faced with this, it is surely more humane that those people be allowed to choose the manner of their own end, and have the assistance of a doctor to die with dignity. One particular account was of Sue Rodriguez who died slowly of Lou Gehrig's disease. She lived for several years with the knowledge that her muscles would, one by one, waste away until the day came when, fully conscious, she would choke to death. She begged the courts to reassure her that a doctor would be allowed to assist her in choosing the moment of death. They refused. Rodriguez did not accept the verdict and with the help of an anonymous physician committed suicide in February 1994.1 1Chris Docker, Cases in history, euthanasia.cc, 2000 accessed 6\/6\/2011<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who are in the late stages of a terminal disease have a horrific future agead of them\n","id":"dc92eb59-f09e-494d-954e-434cfd61b1c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Modern culture is full of potentially harmful feel good horseshit advice. Negative emotions like anger, resentment, bias, and hate are demonized as toxic and unnecessary. This is understandable. Left unchecked, these emotions can consume a person or lead to violence and other nasty things. What I can not understand or tolerate is the emphasis on forgiveness. Too often we are told to forgive the people who hurt us, who betray us and lie to us. We are told to empathize, understand, and try to move on by forgiving them. I believe that forgiving people is not necessary to move on, and is in fact, detrimental in some cases. Hate, resentment, grudges, these things are human, especially when we have been wronged and justice has not made herself present. To deny these emotions, to force oneself to forgive a known enemy, is self deception of the harmful sort. Besides the possibility of opening yourself up to yet further betrayals, yet more pain and suffering at the hands of the selfish, you are forcing an emotion away, one that you genuinely feel for good reasons. This is not to say that forgiveness is without its uses, however I believe it is not warranted in most cases that aren't completely trivial. It seems that in this day and age, forgiveness is no longer earned or begged, but a given. I can understand the Buddha's advice, that anger is like holding a hot coal with the intention to throw it at somebody, you only harm yourself. I can also understand that there is a LOT of middle ground between forgiving and forgetting everybody ever, and seething with absolute loathing at somebody who has come and gone from your life. Maybe I'm just a bitter soul who forgave the wrong people too often in my life, with a lot of introspection and changing to do. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forgiveness is highly overrated, and negative emotions\/reactions are unfairly demonized.\n","id":"bd54b6d0-518c-417f-a8a6-38da29a93b53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Certain issues are not meant to be part of job interviews as they are irrelevant, for example religious affiliations or future plans about marriage and children. This information would become public and lead to unfair discrimination.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are plenty of situations in which privacy and a lack of available information enhance fairness.\n","id":"e121085d-8305-401b-87cc-15d819d94c6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Here is a page showing a large number of extreme weather events that are linked to AGW - as well as those that are not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Each extreme weather event that can be attributed to man-made climate change is a further refutation of the climate contrarian hypothesis.\n","id":"4af3ea90-06a1-49b9-81bc-6257b0e075f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>Rebels, used to hit-and-run tactics and other forms of ambush, would be able to mine capital ships to distract and disable their crew\/ships, as well as make use of buzz droids, which are even smaller than fighters and which, when deployed en masse, could have a large impact on tactical hard points to Star Fleet ships of all sizes as well as shuttles and outposts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Rebels have deployed buzz droids in the past and may do so again against the Federation, which would be particularly vulnurable to those form of attacks.\n","id":"0a9552c7-2eb2-4681-a519-d4468dac7f72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Bee Products Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if honey and beeswax would be banned, beekeeping would still be necessary to maintain production of crops like canola and flax at current levels as they rely on mobile beehives to artificially raise the number of pollinators.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A ban will lead to a massive decline in available produce as bees are routinely moved from orchards and fields to pollinate food crops.\n","id":"62768056-8b98-42b6-924c-3f61e495e550"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know what our leaders have told us. And that it is the will of Koo Alla, the spirit tree. But have you ever stopped and asked yourself, How will this make fruit grow bigger exactly? Like when did this start, it's not like we've ever heard the spirit tree tell us anything, we just do what our elders tell us their elders said. Are we just a prehistoric society that is lacking culture? Sometimes I wonder if there's something more outside of all of this. Like we're trapped in some sort of mini box Also what's with the weird people living in the mountain making lots of noise?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think eating every third baby makes fruit grow bigger.\n","id":"25f3f493-9616-4145-b5be-1f65e58f79f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It would eliminate or at least reduce corrupt senators. If instead of voting on behalf of millions they voted on behalf of thousands there would be less need for corporate funding because elections would be more localized and ideally funded by local small businesses who want to further the agenda of their local populations as opposed to the agenda of a large corporation. Removing corporate greed 100 from the economy is going to be impossible without moving to a completely socialized system, which isn't going to happen. I'd rather see policy put into place that minimizes and localizes the corporate greed. I also think that it is wrong that your vote will affect that lives of people who live hundreds or thousands of miles away from you. People in my county have different needs than the people in the next county over. Instead of voting in a select few legislators who have to vote on something that will affect both counties, each county should get to make their own laws. I am not referring to an Articles of Confederation type system. There would still be a central federal government that controls things like military, foreign affairs, and entitlement spending. Each state would be federally required to give a percentage of their collective income from each county to the federal government the percentage being progressive based on your states income, similar to our progressive tax . Social issues and policy, as well as local economic policy, are simply given more power on a more local level. It is useless to talk about some localities becoming poorer than others. That already happens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Instead of electing state legislators who vote on behalf of millions, we should elect local county legislators who vote on behalf of just the counties populations\n","id":"ba8e3dea-f5b2-4057-bfce-ef4bd3b3556b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>It has been claimed that bullfighting is even more essential to the Spanish than baseball is to the Americans Brandes, p. 780<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bullfighting is part of the history and the culture in countries such as Spain or India Culture should be preserved.\n","id":"3ac1b05a-5ca9-479a-a88a-15a65ad56b58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>Job placement is not optimal if factors other than talent and capacity, such as gender, are dictating who gets the job.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender discrimination in the employment market would mean that the labour force could not operate at maximum potential.\n","id":"af018754-dd8e-43e3-b4e0-05e61e5cf486"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My biggest problem with Obamacare was the mandate. I believe it is unconstitutional to tell people they must buy health care. But there's a problem. One can't have a program that provides health care for those with pre existing conditions without FORCING young people to buy into health insurance here's why. If those with pre existing conditions are allowed to buy insurance, premiums go up. People on the edges who didn't really want insurance will drop out, and the pool of insured people will grow smaller. Thus, premiums will have to go up again, and again, the pool will go smaller because those at the edges will drop out. It's a never ending cycle that would end up with a very small pool of insured paying very high premiums. So the Obamacare solution? Make young people, the invincibles, buy health insurance. A mandate. This, in theory, would keep premiums relatively low. But in my opinion, it's unconstitutional. The federal government can't tell Americans they have to buy a product I think we should help those with pre existing conditions to some extent, but not with a mandate. It's not an easy problem to fix and I don't have all the answers. Canadians and Britains travel to the U.S. to get surgery all the time The wait times are less, and the quality of surgeon is better because they pay surgeons more here. Also, you won't be refused treatment if you walk into a hospital. Yes you may get billed, but they have long term pay plans. Some people are dealt bad hands and we need to help take care of them. I'm talking about the very poorest, and or those who are dealing with very expensive surgeries. I also think we should look into regulating healthcare costs, but not through socialist funding of patient care, but through limiting the pay for service type systems that hospitals used, reducing the costs of medical supplies, and maybe even subsidizing medical equipment. But I don't think states should be mandated to cover patients that are within 125 of the poverty line as is current with Obamacare. That is infringing on states rights and unconstitutional. I think conditions shouldn't affect whether you can renew your insurance, but I don't think people should be able to buy insurance JUST when they get sick. A possible separate fund can be used to subsidize people's costs when this type of thing happens, but I don't want to pay for the huge premiums that these patients require. I also don't think that paying for contraceptives and birth control is my duty as a taxpayer. While yes, there are benefits to society for these, it also infringes with my right to practice religion freely, as propagating contraceptives through tax payments is a very offensive concept to people of many religions. All in all, I think our healthcare system is one of the best quality in the world, and Obamacare should be repealed and replaced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the U.S. healthcare system, while it has it's flaws, should remain the same, and the healthcare repeal is a good thing.\n","id":"a9b3432d-31f9-4ecb-89cc-cb22cd5eba63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At work so I'll be quick. Note that I am NOT saying that college players DON'T play for the love of the game, since obviously there are many who playing knowing they won't be professionals. I'll lean on football, but the same applies to other sports with a pro equivalent. Here goes College sports fans biggest example, SEC football fans have this idea that college sports are superior for a host of reasons that I think are absurd. A few arguements pro sports are all about the money So are college sports. The NCAA has nearly a billion dollars in revenue, Alabama brings in 125 million per year source So while professional sports may be overt about it, the notion that college sports are somehow pure in that they aren't about money is silly. For the financial motivation of players, see college kids are just playing for love of the game There's no reason to believe that pro athletes are any LESS in love with the game than amateurs. However, there are almost no examples Myron Rolle is the only that comes to mind of players who would turn down the opportunity to be professionals in their sport. There are some players who stick around another year or two before going professional, but there are just as many many more? who go pro ASAP. Meanwhile, many who stick around their college programs do so to improve their draft stock. In other words, many top level college guys have just as much financial motivation as do professionals. And, if anything, the only people you can definitively say do NOT play for the money, are those who are playing out their last year before retirement, in a contract where they have no more need to play very hard. Why would these players risk injury and work so hard, if not for the love of the game? The college game is superior because it is more competitive There's no reason to believe this either. First, pro players play what essentially amounts to a team full of college all stars, every week. The very best from college often can't even make a pro roster so there could not be a more competitive league. pros don't care as much if they win When you played football in your back yard, did you fantasize about the BCS championship, or the Super Bowl? The professional championships are along perhaps with olympic gold the pinnacle of athletic competition, and those who achieve greatness at sports aspire to be the very best and win the very highest title they can. So I'm an NFL guy in SEC country, I'd love to love the college game as much as I do the pros but I just can't unless you can change my view. Come at me, bros. Note I'll try to reply in batches around lunch and after work<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The notion that college sports are superior because they are \"more about the passion\" and their equivalent pro sports are \"all about money\" is a delusion.\n","id":"2d2ef879-3a7d-46bd-a164-2c89f1dbb972"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious authorities have done countless morally dubious things over the years, for instance they've protected pedophiles and blamed a 7 year old rape victim because she didn't say no. Meanwhile they use religion to claim they are morally right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has frequently claimed the moral high ground, but its position that people of faith are morally superior to those without faith is as bigoted as suggesting the contrary.\n","id":"08f5e874-8513-44ba-8989-2ef52251b51b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With great power comes great responsibility, but Peter Parker fails to live up to this ethos choosing instead to limit his own power in an effort to limit his own responsibility. First of all he has access to his fallen foes and fellow avengers technology, but time and time again chooses not to employ those resources in his efforts to fight crime. He chooses to be reactionary instead of proactive in his crime fighting favoring his own patrols as appose to ensnaring his enemies in his web. He fails to delegate responsibility to the police or other heroes and in doing so fails to help those around him he also fails himself as this non delegation doesn't allow him to create a fulfilling personal life or career. He also fails to create real consequences for his rouges gallery, a collections of career super criminals and freaks with little to no chance in career fields outside of super crime and the creation of chaos. In stark contrast, after taking over Peter's body. Dr. Otto Gunther Octavius retires a fair number of super villains, creates an army of goons and robots to help him take down crime, achieves his doctorate, establishes a company that helps the crippled to walk, and sorts out peter's love life beyond pining away for a hot girl he knew in high school, some one who's just plain wrong for a super genius to be with anyway.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Doctor Octopus was real a Superior Spider man\n","id":"d905d6b3-7a8a-4078-bdaa-636fa876853d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe people are just wasting money by buying bottled water when they have access to clean tap water. \u200b Now, I understand not everyone has access to quality tap water. For example, those in places with questionable cleanliness of water, those is places with bad tasting water, etc. These are not the people I am talking about. \u200b I live in New York City where there is easy access to cheap, tasty, water. Yet plenty of people still buy water bottles in spite of this. Even when there is no inconvenience to drinking tap water. For example, many food places sell water bottles, but also give out free tap water. In this situation, it is a complete waste to buy bottled water. Other people buy large cases of water bottles that they drink from instead of tap water. \u200b I can't understand why there is widespread market demand for water bottles in a place like NYC, and am convinced those that regularly buy water bottles are wasting their money. The same applies to other places with high quality tap water, like the Bay Area for example. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is a waste of money to buy bottled water if you have access to clean, nearly free, tasty tap water like NYC\n","id":"69878f19-0398-48dd-963f-72c497337a20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should medical research embrace racial differences in treatment efficacy?<|ARGUMENT|>Because white people have historically received better care, members of racial minorities might understandably be suspicious that treatment aimed solely at minorities, and not at white people, may be substandard. Understandably, they might demand to receive the same treatment as white patients<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If it were widely known that race was used as a factor in medical treatment, it could create distrust between racial minorities and the medical community.\n","id":"791acf2d-d4e5-423c-828f-8b2d7f604128"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Beatles have minimal musical ability compared to other musicians at the time, and yet an enormous amount of people seem to praise them as being the greatest band of all time, but I just don't see it. People tell me otherwise but in my opinion, that drab, 4 chord, repetitive stuff a generalization, I know just pails in comparison to the musical quality of others in the same era. I understand some of the thinking stems from the sentiment behind it and what the Beatles represented, such as the anti establishment themes in later songs, but nonetheless, I don't get all the hype and think they're extremely overrated. edit Just thought I'd remind everyone that I posted here in order that my usually unpopular opinion could be changed, or at least opened up to the reasoning behind the enormous following of the Beatles which some of you have been very helpful in Musicians I would consider more talented would range from someone like Miles Davis to Charlie Byrd to Hendrix and so on. But like I mentioned in the comments, a lot of that would be subjective to me. edit 2 Well thanks everyone apparently there's a lot more to the Beatles than I'd have once thought, in terms of technicality and progression. Thanks for everyone who actually made good, helpful points, unlike a few of you who had opinions very different to mine and weren't too willing to let that slide, haha gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Beatles are overrated and should not be considered a good band.\n","id":"82817375-28c0-493c-ae38-a501032784f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>There is not enough scientific evidence to prove that leprechauns do not exist, nor that unicorns and the flying spaghetti monster do not exist. If your standard for acceptance of a given belief is simply a lack of scientific disproof, then you must also believe in leprechauns, unicorns, the flying spaghetti monster, and any other ridiculous thing that I might want to suggest. This is why there is a burden of proof before things must be believed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Like Russell's Teapot claims about God's existence need to be proved before they are believed. The burden of proof lies with theists.\n","id":"3429efae-374d-49ce-a17d-6289796ea7e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in a rust belt city. I don't see any downsides in a drop in crime, and when the area is a ghetto, tons of apartments sit empty or rusted out. At least in gentrification a lot of blight gets knocked flat to make way for gardens, parks, or maybe new living spaces for people to actually live in. I see zero downsides to gentrification.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Gentrification is a good thing.\n","id":"e0b6ebb0-5d82-4c06-8d0a-e686ca93c5d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>abolish collective bargaining rights for unions.<|ARGUMENT|>Many public industries exist as public industries because they are natural monopolies. For example, rail travel, which is often public in Western Liberal democracies, is a sector in which it makes no sense to build multiple railway lines across the country, each for a different company, when one would simply be more efficient. A similar case can be made for things such as public utilities. As such, these sectors often only have a single, often public company working in that sector. In the case where there is a monopolist, the workers in the sector often have no other employers that they can reasonably find that require their skills, so for example, teachers are very well qualified to teach, however, are possibly not as qualified to deal with other areas and as such will find difficulty moving to another profession. As such, the monopolist in this area has the power to set wages without losing a significant number of employees. Further, in many of these industries strike action will not be used, for example because teachers have a vocational, almost fiduciary relationship with their students and don\u2019t wish to see them lose out due to a strike.1 1 \u201cMonopoly Power.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Collective Bargaining is Especially Necessary in the Case of Natural Monopolies\n","id":"a41814ff-71f4-4259-8910-23d29fdc702d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are so many support networks for girls of that age range right now, and virtually none for male specific needs. Girls of that age range frequently say they have been oppressed, yet a average looking or better white girl that is in the middle of that age group say, 25 will have men aged 18 to 40 pursuing her relentlessly, thus killing the dating prospects of males in their 20s. this graph expresses my thoughts in a more visual form with the dating world. Economically, statistics show that women have it easier landing their first job. Women tend to struggle to move up the ladder to a lead position, but in this current day and age where the economy is so rough and unemployment numbers are so large , just having something resembling economic security is reassuring. Unemployment even among college educated people only statistics all favor women, and men being hurt by today's society. Our public education system seems to be way more in tune with what girls need to succeed. Boys make up the vast majority of high school dropouts, and the vast majority of Ds and Fs received in the classroom. This translates to men lacking confidence in college, which is causing a massive lack of men competing in higher education. This next piece is somewhat anecdotal, but decent looking or better white women get off light in the eyes of the law. The perfect recent example is Casey Anthony. If she was say, a black women aged 40, or a black white male in his 20s, her case would have been used as an example to take care of your child . Since she was a skinny white woman that was average looking, she gets off light and I believe now is making money off what she did. This is not to say its entirely women's fault. Honestly I believe a large portion of it is men's fault for being so pathetic. But I do think white girls aged 18 to early 30s have it made in the USA, despite what so many people tell me in my family life. Reddit, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think average looking or better 18 to 30 year old white women have it made in the USA.\n","id":"daee24f7-d6f5-403b-a070-26ab8c43eda5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have eaten meat all my life. I'm a fairly healthy person, and while I don't believe anything should unnecessarily suffer, humanly killing animals for food is okay in my books. But that's not what I want to focus on. My girlfriend eats a mostly vegan diet, and we have gone to many vegan vegetarian restaurants in our time together. Every single time I eat a vegan vegetarian meal I feel like my taste buds get extremely mad at me for what I'm putting in my mouth. I've tried almost every dish at her favorite vegan place including Beet Burger walnut beet patty, arugula, tomatoes, pickles, raw sesame onion bread, coconut bacon, pickled red onion , Black Bean Burrito black bean hummas, brown rice, guacamole, corn and tomato salsa, spinish, etc so on and so forth, and the two words which always come to mind when eating one of these items are bland and dry . No vegan vegetarian meal comes anywhere close to being as tasty as a perfectly cooked, juicy steak. Where the black bean burrito is a 2 10 on the taste scale, how could I choose that over an 8 10 roast chicken? Or a nice big rack of ribs? or a turkey dinner? Can you ? tl,dr vegan vegetarian diet dishes always seem to taste like dry, bland cardboard, and health and ethics are not enough reason for me to endure such awful tasting food over an excellent steak.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Health and ethics aside, I feel that eating meat has one HUGE advantage over a vegan\/vegetarian diet that is so important to me that I will never change my eating habits. Taste.\n","id":"9fe6623a-837f-4906-9b2d-afb6d8867842"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>In practice, platforms or individuals that disseminate hate speech, especially when preached anonymously online, do not have or enforce accountability for those responsible, even if demonstrably intentional and explicitly inciting violence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Speech that explicitly incites violence should have legislative consequences, as this both has the intent and potential to cause maleficent harm.\n","id":"5c66dd6f-0c8d-4c28-aa54-50de5e78f656"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should oil and gas companies release their cleantech patents into the public domain?<|ARGUMENT|>Oil and gas companies should release their cleantech patents into the public domain because the technology is urgently required to tackle environmental problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Oil and gas companies should release their cleantech patents into the public domain.\n","id":"45e2a5a5-a3dd-45b2-823a-4f64be2660a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems unsustainable to continue down a path that appears to structure our society as a culture where money is what matters, more than people or compassion. Beating others to become wealthy, and then doing whatever it takes distraction, lying, denial, misdirection to keep others from being wealthy seems to be the ultimate goal of our culture in terms of what being successful means. Paranoia and implanted fear of the other have outstripped reason, and it's now more important to stick to what you believe than to have a mutable opinion. Even if what you believe is a line fed to you in order to push someone else's agenda or keep their wallet ever more full. I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the United States as a country. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We are witnessing the downfall of the United States as a country and an idea\n","id":"773052fd-49a4-4e2c-8abd-17c1a3ccb7b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The back story to this is that one of my friends found out that another was having sex with his girlfriend behind his back and when he confronted him, they got into a fight. Punches were thrown both ways but friend A who was cheated on beat friend B pretty badly. When the police came not from noise but from the girl who called friend B admitted I don't want to press charges, I deserved it and yet they are both facing possible jail time, possible suspension from school, and possible firing from jobs. I have also personally seen a fist fight settle the tension between two friends faster than any other option between men at least . It is legal in hockey, boxing, etc so why not in every day life. Assuming consent, no weapons, no damage to a third party property, no killing or extreme harm Edit children sticking up to bullies is another example I thought of. I believe that fighting is the only way to end that situation and no amount of mediating, talking, punishment for the bully will end it entirely okay guys very good points presented below, I enjoyed the mature debate. Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and some may be shitty, but they are extremely important to society. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that unless it causes a public disturbance, 2 consenting adults should legally be allowed to fight without weapons.\n","id":"3f8a1e21-7181-4c8c-86b0-1364548ccd86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always hated Christmas because of all the unnecessary stress. There's so much pressure to impress everyone and get the perfect gift. Back in the day, kids would just get a small toy and the family would have dinner. Christmas is supposed to be a joyous time with family. For religious folk, it's all just about Jesus. Now, the whole purpose is to support corporate profit margins. There's an over saturation of product ads that bombard us from every angle, pressuring us to conform to an 'ideal' Christmas. Hell, this year Christmas ads started earlier than ever. If I had it my way it'd be a Thanksgiving part 2. I say we all boycott Christmas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christmas tradition has taken a turn for the worst and it's just brings out unnecessary stress.\n","id":"22404d48-99cc-4dd2-960c-d3a29ece8811"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently was reading a  post on Robin Thicke\u2019s song Blurred Lines , which I have always disliked due to the lyrics, but am reconsidering due to the argument presented in a . This got me thinking about Animals , because while I find the song catchy and great, I sadly think it promotes rape culture. I would like to be wrong so I can actually listen to the song and enjoy it I will start at the beginning of the song and work my way through in order, saving the overall comparison of humans to animals for the end. Baby, I'm preying on you tonight Hunt you down eat you alive This portion of the song expresses an aggressive pursuit and the plans behind an eventual capture of a woman, who by the end of the encounter is greatly injured possibly dies through being \u201ceaten alive\u201d. The double meaning that could be applied here of eating a girl out for pleasure reinforces the sexual nature of this attack I use this term because when you hunt something down, following you attack it Maybe you think that you can hide I can smell your scent from miles\u201d These lyrics reinforce the idea that she cannot escape him, he will have his way with her no matter what she does to stop it. The very fact that it is mentioned that she may want to hide from him gives us enough reason to argue that she is not consenting. So what you trying to do to me It's like we can't stop we're enemies But we get along when I'm inside you You're like a drug that's killing me I cut you out entirely But I get so high when I'm inside you\u201d This section has the female objectified by comparing her to a drug. She is something that he uses to get high, something that brings him pleasure and him alone pleasure. While the third line says that \u201cwe get along when I\u2019m inside you\u201d this is his perception and can easily be read as the females submission to the act now that it is happening again. While the word \u201cwe\u201d in both of its uses above wants us to believe that she is consenting, it is clear that the speaker is obsessed with her and that his intentions are centered around himself. While rapists never see themselves as rapists, it makes sense that he would discuss this from the perspective of \u201cwe\u201d, assuming her consent like he has always done. Yeah, you can start over, you can run free You can find other fish in the sea You can pretend it's meant to be But you can't stay away from me I can still hear you making that sound Taking me down, rolling on the ground You can pretend that it was me But no Again, this idea that she can run away from him, but she can\u2019t stay away. While it could be interpreted as she desires him, so she comes back, the earlier points I have addressed strongly push against this idea. The obsessive idea plays into this passage strongly as well. He discusses all the things that she could do start over, run free, find other fish but how in the end he is the right answer for her, and even if she thinks otherwise You can pretend it\u2019s meant to be she is wrong. This passage asserts that her opinions, her thoughts, and her saying no doesn\u2019t matter, because he knows what she wants, he has already defined this for her. The \u201cTaking me down, rolling on the ground\u201d portion is seen by the male to be playful and all part of the fun, but, geared with the knowledge of his obsession and her trying to escape him, from her perspective this is her attempt at the initial part of intimacy to get away. She tries to push him down, tries to get away but she can\u2019t and he takes control. So if I run it's not enough You're still in my head forever stuck So you can do what you wanna do I love your lies, I'll eat 'em up But don't deny the animal That comes alive when I'm inside you Don't tell no lie lie lie lie You can't deny ny ny ny The beast inside side side side No, girl, don't lie lie lie lie The first potion is dealing with the male trying to get over his obsession, and failing. Again, he gives her permission to do what she will, even though she doesn\u2019t need his permission. Then he discusses, in multiple sections, the \u201clies that this woman is presenting. Regardless of what the \u201clies are, most likely something about her wanting him to stop chasing her, they reinforce that anything she says he discards. He discusses her denying the animal beast that she becomes when having sex with him. This implies aggression during sex, and really nothing more. Why would she be aggressive? In an effort to hurt him, in an effort to stop getting raped. The entire song hides under the comparison that they are animals Just like animals, animals, like animals mals\u201d is repeated often. From this, thoughts of \u201cnatural instinct\u201d etc. come to mind. This fails to justify the gross depictions the other lyrics create because people, while animals, are so much more developed that we do not tolerate rape. Rape is not justified simply because reproduction results from it, because we fulfilled our \u201cnatural instinct\u201d. That is potentially another debate for another time, my only point here is that the song\u2019s comparison to animals does not make it OK to promote rape culture. My apologies for the length of this, but I wanted to build up my argument clearly so that I could address all the elements of the song and not need to develop it later in discussion. TL DR I think that this song promotes rape culture. Above are the song lyrics analyzed in support for my stance. Thoughts? Edit Formatting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the song \"Animals\" by Maroon 5 promotes rape culture\n","id":"8b6bab4d-9224-44b5-a45e-75cd463d5615"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People keep talking about how Norway has the lowest recidivism rate because of their 4 star hotel prisons, and people constantly want to get rid of torture, long prison sentences, death penalty and all of that and make life great for prisoners in order for them to be re released into society. I think this is wrong. I think humans are by nature cruel and selfish beings. The only reason I do not campaign for the position I hold is in the case that a person is falsely imprisoned. I would like to exclude the possibility for false imprisonment or wrongful conviction because obviously no innocent person should suffer this way. But we all know there are people who have been caught red handed or are certainly guilty of their crime. Serial killers, child killers, child rapists, kidnappers, thieves who've stolen millions, terrorists, slavers. Some people do really evil things, and I think that we need a system that not only brutally punishes them, but destroys them. Violent and evil people in many cases carry genes that make them this way, and if you live in a world with very soft prison systems, and early release, these evil people can breed, usually with soft minded women, and make more children that will carry those genes. In older times leaders would impose brutal measures on these particularly malignant forms of criminality, and they worked, people like Genghis Khan, Caesar, and Vlad the Impaler drastically reduced violent crime by mass murdering known thieves. Eye for an eye might make the whole world blind, but a blind man's gonna have a real hard time finding a victim to assault. Tooth for a tooth? Well a toothless dog isn't gonna bite anyone now is it? Why should a person who rapes children be allowed to live, or ever be released? I don't think the state has a responsibility to be moral, it needs to hold a monopoly on legal violence in order to exist. It exists to protect us from one another. In some European cities the local governments are so broke that they release many prisoners early, and in many cases rapists both local and immigrant or robbers spend a few hours with the police and show up at the same street where the victim lives the next day. Or they come out 10 years later and kill the person who ratted them out. Further It's less expensive. If you take a monster and lock him up he or she doesn't work, sits around all day eating for free, getting medicine for free, getting entertainment and weight training, all day every day happy as can be. After they freaking killed innocents, murdered children, robbed. If you throw them against a wall and shoot them after they have been convicted you don't spend any money and can invest in in local community programs to help reduce criminal behavior. You clean the gene pool of their barbaric behavior. I've raised many points here, and I am sure I am wrong about many of them, but would really like to have my mind changed about this in order to fit in better with others I repeat I would love someone to convince me that executing these evil people is somehow less efficient than the alternative<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Torture, Punitive incarceration, and the death penalty are the most sensible approach to improving the human race.\n","id":"c015f11f-f7f8-4033-8b45-349efaaddf8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is my understanding that in a majority of U.S. States, one can qualify for welfare assistance food stamps without having to undergo any type of drug screenings. I have never had to enlist governmental aid, and for that I am grateful. I have however always had the opinion that in order to receive governmental assistance, there should be drug screenings required. I am curious to hear some arguments as to why the U.S. should NOT screen applicants. I have read articles about states instituting more strict criteria for welfare applicants, and having great success in combating unemployment and healthfulness of recipients presumably from their more strict employment rules regarding qualifications . I have also read about a handful of states who are in the process of implementing drug screenings more strict criteria for qualification. What, in your opinion, would be some reasons for states to continue the trend of NOT screening applicants as a part of determining eligibility? I can think of some instances of those suffering from mental disabilities not being able to meet the part time job requirements but when it comes to drug screenings, I feel as if the benefits outweigh negatives IMO. Curious to hear what others think about this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Welfare eligibility should require drug testing.\n","id":"b101a837-dd4b-4ecf-b5a5-a75b0b9e618b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Not sure I need to expound on this, but for the sake of the rules, let me give you some things to consider. I'm not denying that he did a good job as the Joker. He was entertaining, came off as entirely insane, and yet was just accessible enough to the audience that we almost rooted for him. I think that if Heath hadn't died right after making the film, he would've received praise, but not nearly as much. Many people on the internet consider his portrayal of the Joker to be one of the best performances in the history of forever. I think we just elevate this performance because he sort of died to do it. I mean no disrespect to Heath, his family, or any of you rabid fans out there.  P.S. I realize that this is highly subjective, so changing my view is going to be fairly tough, but this is a conversation I've always wanted to have, so have at it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the praise Heath Ledger received for his role as the Joker was largely informed by the fact that he died shortly after making the film. !\n","id":"15a8b321-17c0-4a96-9843-7ac50f5f96d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people think that Batman is a menace or a criminal just like the villains he fights. I disagree. I think that in a city as torn and broken as Gotham, Batman is exactly the kind of hero needed. Unlike the villains he does not kill and he supports the legal system. In a normal situation the police make a costumed vigilantes unnecessary, but the police of Gotham are corrupt and broken. The few who aren't tend to side with Batman. Having a hero who can circumvent the law without sinking to the extremes of the dirty cops is also beneficial, as it allows them to recover otherwise unobtainable evidence and use illegal interrogation tactics. While this may sound like a bad thing I think it's sort of a 'greater good' situation. Batman never kills the criminals he fights and doesn't seem to inflict any longterm psychological harm. In short, he knows what he's doing. Some would also say that he causes a lot of collateral damage. But how much would happen even without him? Perhaps without Batman there would be no Joker as some have suggested but how can we know that for sure? Furthermore, has the Joker, a single man, caused more crime than every criminal Batman has stopped combined? And any property damage or broken bones incurred as a result of his interventions are surely a small price to pay for the safety he brings. So why can't a different, more stable superhero protect Gotham instead? Because Batman is the only one who understands the kind of evil he fights. The Green Lantern has the power of imagination, but clearly the eccentric, wild villains of Gotham know that power as well. Superman has a heart of gold and purity, but no amount of love and friendship can stop the darkness that has taken the city. Only Batman both understands the specific horrors of Gotham and knows how to defeat it. He uses fear, the only thing the gangs and supervillains of Gotham understand. If nothing else, he is a symbol of something greater than himself. Two Face, Mister Freeze, and Deadshot tell us that we should all be afraid. But Batman shows us that it is they who should be afraid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Batman is a positive influence on Gotham City.\n","id":"7e80ca05-bdb1-41cc-aa5e-d09fad6d4024"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While it is certainly valid to critique Social Justice and Feminism, the popular forms it takes among its opponents especially online are largely not valid. I think the best terminology for these critiques are memes canned responses that are thought terminating. Most of the critiques are not of the thought structure of the concepts or theoretical backing itself, but rather an attempt to stereotype the proponents of these ideologies. Will give three examples of what I consider to be invalid critiques, and give some reasons why there is a lack of valid ones. Examples 1 Feminism is about feelings, not facts This one pops up a lot. The critique appears as Feminists got their fee fee's hurt . This meme has exploded to the extent that even engaging with someone who disagrees comes prepackaged with the accusation that they are triggered . What's worse, argument from emotion isn't necessarily fallacious, though it is claimed to be. While there may be social justice advocates that argue from emotion, that doesn't make them incorrect. 2 Feminism Social Justice is censorious In most cases, this follows a feminist social justice advocate criticizing a person's language artistic output. A critique is not censorship. 3 Feminism Social Justice is anti male Words like toxic masculinity and patriarchy supposedly telegraph a hatred for males endemic within these movements, but understanding what the words mean makes it hard to see how this could be the case. While there may exist feminists and social justice advocates that embody this stereotype, I do not think they are as prevalent as advertised, nor is their participation within the movement evidence that these qualities are the basis of the ideology. Reasons 1 Unwillingness to understand what feminists are actually saying Though it is understandable that some of the jargon surrounding the movements could be hard to learn, if you identify yourself by the ideology you oppose anti feminist, anti SJW there is no excuse to refuse to make a good faith effort to understand those that you attempt to criticize. Concepts such as intersectionality, patriarchy, and even the pay gap are misrepresented and obfuscated to the point of confusion. 2 Echo Chambers and Trolling Culture These two concepts go hand in hand. First, online echo chambers promote one perspective and continually reinforces the idea that non valid critiques are actually valid. Parroting the sentiment Feminists argue from emotion, therefore they are wrong is rewarded, though it might not actually make much sense even in context. Outside of the echo chamber, anti feminists often adopt trolling personas . The parroting of the above sentiment is often not used to make a salient point against something they disagree with, but an attempt to deride an opponent. This trolling offers very little opportunity for actual good faith discussion to happen. 3 Self righteousness The idea that opposing feminism supports rationality, fights against censorship, and protects certain people clouds people from actually attempting to understand what they are grappling with. The built stereotype of what a feminist or social justice advocate is prevents people from ever engaging them in good faith, and therefore not being able to provide valid criticisms. To change my view, you can either show that one or more of the three examples are actually endemic to the ideologies themselves, or provide alternative reasons for the above being the case, or challenging the veracity of my reasons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most popular critiques of the social justice movement \/feminism are invalid.\n","id":"b532d838-d8eb-4ddf-9080-62f49497028a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the recent shooting in California, people have once again taken to another hashtag phrase to rally around YesAllWomen , another in the line of phrases over the years Kony2012, BringBackOurGirls, OccupyWallStreet, etc that the masses will use as a way of getting the word out about the flavor of the week news story. I feel that by people simply sitting at their computers and re tweeting Facebooking whatever these buzz phrases, they feel like they are really doing a lot, stopping most people from truly trying to help out during these events, even though this doesn't honestly do much. Yes, this all raises awareness, but at what point does that even factor in anymore? Can you honestly tell me there's large groups of people in this country who aren't aware about this national worldwide stories? If this was some small local story that was not even on the radar of the masses then yes absolutely this will work, but something at this level everyone is aware to some degree.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hashtag\/Armchair Activism has nothing more than a self-serving purpose.\n","id":"892882bb-2c7b-46c2-b2ba-0f55349b2749"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of the most well known examples of cultural appropriation is black face minstrelsy. The plagiarism analogy fails because performers give credit to black culture by putting on black face. You might argue that black face is not valid MLA citation because black people did not give permission. I don't think plagiarism is concerned with permissions. It is concerned with giving credit. Many other examples of cultural appropriation also fails in this way because of a lack of evidence that the appropriators did not give credit. I believe far better analogies include colonization, pimping, slavery, and rape. Unfortunately, none of these better analogies are socially acceptable. They are gross, insulting, offensive, and possibly politically incorrect. At least, that is what people tell me and it is what the downvotes imply. A few days ago, I made a  that a rape analogy is accurate for cultural appropriation gt I believe rape and cultural appropriation have many similarities. Often, they are not consensual and they are violent acts. The rapist has control over the victim's body. The appropriator has control over the victim's culture. The rapist benefits from sexual stimulation. If the rapist pimps the victim, then the rapist also benefits financially. The appropriator gets fame and money from the stolen culture. Rape victims often orgasm and moan seductively from the rape. They also rarely report the rape. In this way, they facilitate the exploitation of their bodies. Similarly, the members of the appropriated culture sometimes work with the appropriator and elevate the appropriator. Dr. Dre elevated Eminem. The rapist uses the victim's body against her and the victim's body becomes a tool of oppression. Similarly, black face oppresses black people using a distortion of black culture. Rape and cultural appropriation can be considered compliments. I raped you because I think you are pretty. Rape victims and cultural appropriation victims are told to get over it. Rape victims can be made to hate their bodies. Victims of cultural appropriation can be made to hate their culture. gt Let's make the rape analogy a bit more extreme. The rapist performs female genital mutilation after the rape, takes pictures, and post them on the Internet. The appropriators deny their victims the use of their own culture and distorts their culture into something unrecognizable. Cultural appropriation is humiliating and can perpetuate negative stereotypes. Rape victims are considered sluts after the rape. The mods removed it because posts that basically assert an analogy as valid are generally bad because in certain ways all analogies are both valid and invalid most s formulated that way stall out. As a result, I decided to make a new . It is not possible to deny any of the similarities I identified in my rape analogy because each similarity is true in some situations and false in other situations. However, if I make the claim that one analogy is far inferior to others, I believe this works because now it is a matter of which analogy can be applied to more situations. It is a matter of which analogy is more versatile. I want to  because I have always defended political correctness, but now that conservatives and moderate liberals are using it against me, I am not so sure if I still want to defend it. I am only including this paragraph because I do not want the mods to remove my post again for being unwilling to . However, if you want to argue whether rape analogies are politically correct or incorrect, I will not give deltas because that is not what I am concerned with. I also will not give deltas to those who want to argue that my new  still sucks because it stalls out. Furthermore, I will not give deltas to people who tell me that my rape analogy is degrading to women because I don't care I still consider myself a feminist though . Edits for additional similarities I have not noticed before Most rape victims were raped by someone they know or someone they considered a friend. Blackface performer Al Jolson was friends with the black community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Plagiarism is a poor analogy for cultural appropriation compared to other analogies\n","id":"352e2ebc-b598-4c8a-92fd-c4ad2766b674"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it unethical to use ad-blockers?<|ARGUMENT|>The music industry reported losses of $12.5 billion in 2015 due to piracy compared to the $781 million lost due to ad blockers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Piracy causes content producers to lose more money than the amount lost through ad blockers.\n","id":"535e1efa-7542-40bb-a7af-9d53882344bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>United States mass shooting extensiveness and underlying causes<|ARGUMENT|>In his TEDx Talk, \"I Was Almost a School Shooter Aaron Stark mentions that the primary influence that stopped him from committing a mass shooting was when a peer first began showing him small acts of kindness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social isolation in schools\u2014and the resulting depression and other emotional issues\u2014is a major contributing factor for mass shootings in the United States.\n","id":"1ada9739-2018-4abe-9fdb-3103608d4353"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Muslims seem to cause more than their fair share of the world's problems. It seems like I turn on the news and see the most horrific stories. Someone committed a horrible terror atrocity? They were a Muslim. Some 13 year old girl has been forced into a marriage she didn't want? The people responsible were Muslims. A militant group is murdering innocent civilians and trying to enforce a backwards, sexist legal system? You guessed it, Muslims. I've heard arguments against my view based on socio economic conditions, political climate, etc. But these arguments can only go so far. For example, a lot of these people either moved to, or were born in, western countries and had all of the advantages those countries had to offer, but still chose to go to the Middle East to become terrorists, or force their daughter in to a marriage she doesn't want, or blow themselves up on a train. I seems like the only thing these people have in common is the fact that they are Muslims. Which leads me to the conclusion that the Islamic faith, at least to some extent, encourages people to be violent, sexist and cruel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Islam is fundamentally violent and flawed as a religion.\n","id":"991f445d-7f7f-4b31-b9d7-cc1cb33c816b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>For every $1 of aid a developing country receives, they lose $24 in net outflow to the developed world. Wealthy democracies owe, at least in part, their yearly growth to developing countries and so should help them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The industries of wealthy democracies still benefit from exploiting developing nations.\n","id":"513f06dc-6ef8-40c4-8259-8d03b7b29edb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>In the US, women still only make, on average, 78 cents to the dollar in comparison to men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women outperform men in higher education but they don\u2019t achieve comparable levels of success or wealth.\n","id":"cfad63d4-c1f7-4388-87c1-d7497742e3c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the USA and North Korea sign a peace treaty?<|ARGUMENT|>A peace treaty between the USA and North Korea would ward off the threat of a nuclear war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USA and North Korea should sign a peace treaty.\n","id":"0a4d9419-e075-4dcc-bfa0-f55d6e1407a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Police Officers Wear Body Cameras?<|ARGUMENT|>Sherita Dixon Cole's rape and kidnapping accusations against the Texas State Trooper who arrested her for driving under the influence were disproved using the Trooper's bodycam footage. 1 2 3<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Especially police patrols that work alone, where often it's the single police officer's word against many, will benefit from bodycams.\n","id":"4514f915-d800-4fcb-870f-f1855a51b239"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I never understood parents who say ' Sure, it's got the genes and inborn reflexes of an attack dog, but we're so awesome and our dog training was amazing, so we're exceptions ' I've seen so many stories of kids with scarred faces from the 'one time' that the dog mistook the baby for a not baby. I'm genuinely wondering what I am missing about this general decision process. Is there a sense in which the dog might be bought before the baby, and the dog is seen as a family member and thus can't be dumped once the baby comes into the picture?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think parents with small children are inconsiderate if the parents also have a dog in the house that has ANY remote chance of being aggressive or 'protective' in a misunderstood way to the children\n","id":"7f347ab5-a058-41c3-8419-1b424ecbb47c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Out of high school, it seems that few to no students are aware of the following subjects Credit management and long term risks Balancing a checkbook Doing taxes and basic tax information Tax brackets, deadlines, etc. Purchasing a home and or renting a home Understanding health insurance coverage HMO, PPO, etc. Understanding of vehicle insurance coverage Though some may believe that this is something that should be taught by parents. I think there is a greater deficit of individuals without parents knowledgeable on those subjects vs. those that attend high school. These are topics that can probably be covered within a single semester. But overall understanding of these can will prevent many from getting into long term disastrous debt. I understand there are quite a bit of resources online. But as time goes by, you really have to know where to dig either because resources may be dated or simply mistaken. Its quite easy to make mistakes in those areas unless guided by a knowledgeable person. My thought process is that a bit of knowledge can go a long way. On that note, I do realize that some of these may be covered slightly through different classes home ec, job technology, etch . However, I lean towards having a more concise streamlined class. Instead of bits and pieces here and there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Life essentials should be a mandatory subject in high school.\n","id":"7656a285-0293-4530-8936-e42539415a3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Football without offside rule<|ARGUMENT|>This would likely mean that defenders would retreat to mark the attackers, leaving huge spaces in midfields and essentially turning into a 'long-ball' contest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All teams would likely place many players in the opposition box and feed long-balls to their numerous strikers.\n","id":"8e1d2ed6-19df-4c9e-a751-247dc44d3829"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Accepting the Jewishness of the state would mean giving up the 'right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees into Israel who left during the 1948 exodus following the creation of Israel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Palestinians have strong incentives not to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, and therefore should not do so.\n","id":"bd3e4f29-a53a-4b9b-bce9-4699d8308c1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let's assume, for a moment, that there is a God. We may not know the nature of God, or which religion comes closest to the truth, but we can be sure of one thing God does not love you. Look at all the cruelty and misery in the world, which God does nothing to stop. Right now, as you are reading this, there are children in various places around the world being raped and tortured. Most of us would risk our lives, give up our lives, to save them if we could. God stands by and does nothing. God has abandoned these children, and clearly does not love them. God does not love you, either. There are some religions which claim that God's love is a different kind of love , which is supposed to explain and justify what appears to be God's divine indifference. This is total bullshit. If I claim that I love my neighbor, and then set his house on fire and shoot him in the head, anyone can see that my love is not love at all. Another fallacy along these lines is the statement that, God doesn't give us more than we can handle in life . This is a ridiculous statement. Go to a mental institution, go to the ward for those who are seriously disturbed, and you'll see people who just sit and rock back and forth all day, staring off into space, or screaming at nonexistant terrors. God has given them more than they could handle, and now they're totally broken. So you have no loving God watching over you, making sure you get what you need. You don't get what you need in life, you don't get what you want, you don't get what you deserve. You get what you get.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe God does not love you.\n","id":"b63b3449-b313-4b7a-a184-620b4d1d1f8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the USA a good country to live in?<|ARGUMENT|>If people take English classes to improve their English while living in an anglophone country, this will accelerate their learning speed because they are totally immersed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Living in the USA makes a person better at English.\n","id":"d3484d25-77ab-4615-8fcf-715c57e094d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>x200B r politics is a left wing echo chamber. I don't think that really needs to be proven. It's constantly flooded with frequently gilded left leaning news often from spurious sources that's borderline liberal progressive propaganda, the comments those that aren't downvoted to oblivion, anyways are just a consistent left wing circle jerk, and the mods seems to have no interest or ability to police any of it in any kind of fair and reasonable manner. Now, if that was all, I'd have no problem with the sub. There are many subs, like r feminism, r LateStageCapitalism, and r The Donald, that are pretty much designed to be echo chambers. The former, for example, has a third of their rules dedicated to preventing anyone from voicing opinions outside of feminist orthodoxy. And again fine. If people want to spend time holing themselves up in safe spaces proclaiming I'm right just to hear a hundred people echo back Yes you are all day and reap in upvotes for voicing opinions that are uncontroversial and widely agreed upon for their audience, that's none of my business. Go right ahead. What bothers me about r politics, though, is that nowhere is it specified that the sub basically only allows promotes left wing ideas. I can't find anything in the rules or descriptions of the sub that says that while trolling, personal attacks, etc. against left wing people are unacceptable, it's totally fine to do those same things against folks who offer right wing, or even centrist non partisan opinions. To the contrary, r politics styles itself as a place for news and discussion about U.S. politics. Presumably that should also include the conservative side of the news, the conservative side of the discussion. It has rules that explicitly bar trolling, incivility, personal attacks, and hate, but none of those rules are ever enforced unless it's in defense of those echoing leftist ideas. Hell as far as I can tell every single r politics post has a mod sticky at the top reminding people that it's a place for, get this, civil discussion, and reiterates some of the rules such as not making shill or troll accusations, which for some reason doesn't ever seem to extend to people who comment things like hey, maybe insert not overtly liberal progressive Democrat opinion here being called trolls, Nazis, fascists, and Russian agents. My ideal would be that r politics should shut down and reopen under a new name like r leftwingpolitics or whatever. Short of that they should make it clear through their rules and sub description that their sub is a place for left wing circle jerking and that people, news, and ideas that are center or right of it are not welcome there. The subs name and what they claim to be all about are, at the moment, a joke. It'd be like if r Cooking only allowed discussion about vegan cooking, or if r gaming only permitted talking about PC games, or if r Art only allowed users to post digital artwork but paintings, photos, etc. were restricted. As it stands r politics is exceedingly misleading in name, rules, and description. I don't really want my view on this changed in the traditional sense of wanting things I think I'm right. However, I accept I might be wrong, and I have difficulty squaring my beliefs with the reality that r politics is like the 55th most popular sub on this platform, with some 4,200,000 subscribers. Subs like r LateStageCapitalism only have ~8 the amount of subscribers, subs like r Feminism only have ~3 as many that's more what I'd expect from a sub as circle jerky as r politics. One argument I can't say I'd find particularly convincing is honing in on why I singled out r politics out of all the other subs that might be misleading in their echo chamber ness. AFAIK r politics is the most egregious offender in this regard, and even if it isn't, and even if it's just one of hundreds, so what? I also imagine some of you might be wondering why I don't just unsubscribe from the sub and be done with it. And fair enough. Maybe I'm just weird, but I'm actually a member of several subs which are based on ideas I don't agree with simply because I like to keep an eye on what's happening in other ideological bubbles and am trying to not get caught up in my own. The fact that r politics, a theoretically civil and nonpartisan sub is my best one stop shop for what Democrats, far leftists, liberals, and progressives are talking about has always been mildly irritating. In no other case am I subbed to an ideological circle jerk sub that claims to be anything but just that. For whatever reason the fact they still maintain a facade of fairness and unbiased nonpartisanship is what irks me the most about them. If they shut down and reopened under a new name with new rules and new descriptions I'd still sub them, but I would no longer be peeved over their false pretenses. Y'all know what to do. Cheers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"r\/politics needs a serious overhaul to make the sub reflect its reality as a left-wing echo-chamber.\n","id":"1079eb79-5889-430e-82f4-5b2cbda38a56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was reading this article from the NYT How They Got Their Guns and Slate How Mass shooters got their guns Had a few thoughts about how there is little logic in the idea that increased gun control legislation would fix the issues. Most of these people had no legal history that would prevent them from not owning a gun. Of the 14, 2 had a drug offense misdemeanor possession and paraphernalia , 2 had domestic violence charges 2002 and 2006 respectively . One of each SHOULD have disqualified them from purchasing a firearm, but the departments in charge of those cases failed to report the charges to the databases used to conduct background checks. One had a charge from kicking a hole in the wall at a bar and the other had several settled small charges since the 90's undisclosed, so this one is useless to analyze, if anyone can find out i'd like to know . None of these past events of these people can be reasonably used to develop a background check system that WORKS. Then from the mental health angle, many of these people had done nothing at all other than being a loner, possibly dealing with issues that were half treated but became clear warning signs AFTER they did unspeakable things. Someone please point me to a logical argument and change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gun Control Proponents undermine their own argument\n","id":"5a715916-3892-449d-afdb-d5b5554ddc7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If women receive birth control through health insurance, then men should receive condoms, unless the woman is prescribed birth control for a reason other than preventing births. If health insurance provides birth control as a preventative measure for women, I do not see why it should not be provided for men as well. It seems that if the purpose of birth control for females is to allow them to have sex without risk of a medical condition pregnancy then condoms do the same thing for men. I do not see flaws in this reasoning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If men aren't provided condoms through health insurance, women shouldn't be provided birth control.\n","id":"4061f2be-d572-42fc-8c3a-7a4b072aab27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the old advice \u201cLet the fool speak\u201d and \u201cEven a fool, when he does not speak, is considered intelligent\u2014until he speaks,\" students should not be afraid to hear what is on someone\u2019s mind no matter how bad it is. If it is certain the speaker is wrong, then they should speak so everyone else will know it too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No-platforming shields students from reality. This makes them poorly equipped to deal with oppressive ideas that are publicly expressed outside of university grounds.\n","id":"350e94a2-1e23-42d5-a24e-c10ee339bfc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Superteams have long been a criticism of the NBA, and that has greatly intensified ever since Kevin Durant signed with Golden State and more recently, DeMarcus Cousins signing with them too . The decision to leave OKC for GS was extremely controversial, and it was considered a ring chasing move. KD played his entire career with the Thunder including the rookie season when the team was still in Seattle and although he won an MVP and has been statistically one of the best scorers in the game, he never won a championship with OKC. He got to the NBA Finals once, but was manhandled by the Heat another superteam. After that Finals loss, GS started to really take off as their core melded together and dominated the NBA. KD saw the writing on the wall. He knew that as long as GS and whatever team LeBron was on in the East were dominating the NBA, he was never going to win a championship while he was in his prime. KD saw the Thunder as good, but not good enough to win it all. It was similar to how the Utah Jazz were an incredible team during the 90s. The Jazz were really good, but the Bulls were simply flat out better in the same time period. As a result, MJ and the Bulls essentially locked out John Stockton and Karl Malone from ever winning a championship. KD was in a very similar spot. The Thunder were like the Jazz of their time really good but another team was always flat out better than them and locking them out of any championships. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if KD played for the Thunder for his entire career, he would have never won a single championship. So in KD's shoes, it makes sense. Why keep playing at an elite level if the fans and the media will always bring up the fact that you never won a championship? Who cares about all the stats and accolades you earned. Most people only care about the rings. If you want to know why I say this, I should bring up this post from r nba, because I believe it is the perfect explanation for why superteams exist gt High voted comments on video of Grant Hill, Chris Webber and Charles Barkley giving postgame analysis gt Great commentary from 3 legends that have 0 titles between them.? gt Only things missing were Karl Malone and John Stockton. gt Javale McGee got more rings than Barkley and will win more. gt chuck talks about rings WHERE is shaq when you need him to shut him up? gt Criticism is expected from people who never won a chip? gt High voted comment on similar video What's the difference between Carmelo Anthony and a tree? The tree has rings. gt Shaq to Barkley on Inside the NBA First of all, I know what it's like to win a championship. You don't. gt From the movie Bad Teacher gt Call me when LeBron has six championships. gt Wha THAT'S your only argument? gt IT'S THE ONLY ARGUMENT I NEED, SHAWN gt Kobe Bryant responds to legitimate criticism about his play style Count to 5. gt But Kevin Durant is the villain for joining a 73 win team? gt No. gt We, the fans, made this happen. gt We kept saying the ONLY measure of greatness was number of rings won. gt And now look at this league. The best players joining ONE team to get the easiest road to a ring. gt Look at the state of this sport we love so much. This is what we've turned the world's highest level of basketball competition into. gt We made this bed. Now we're sleeping in it. We have no one to blame but our own damn selves. gt Congratulations, Golden State Warriors. I don't hate you. I hate my fellow fans for making you happen. This is why KD left the Thunder to join GS. He is getting older and he won't be in his prime for much longer. The players aren't stupid. They know that the fans and the media talk like this about great players. If the drive to being considering one of the best basketball players is based on the number of rings you win, the players will chase rings. You may hate it, but that's what happens it's the only stat you care about. See the LeBron vs. Jordan debates always degenerating into how many rings MJ won Let's take my favorite NBA player Steve Nash. Nash won two MVPs, became an unprecedented 4 time member of the elite 50 40 90 shooting club, and has the third most assists of all time. His shooting stats were so incredible that he was very close to averaging a 50 40 90 for his entire career. Statistically speaking, Nash is one of the best point guards to have ever played the game. But because he won 0 championships, most people don't see Nash as an all time great. It's something I've gotten into a lot of arguments with over my friends when we have these sorts of discussions. The argument always breaks down into something along the lines of, How many rings does Nash have again? He's not good if he has no rings. Can you blame players for making these superteams? I sure can't. As long as fans and the media continue to value how good a player is solely on the number of championships he's won, players will respond to that. Superteams will not go away for as long as How many championships have you won again? is the determining metric used for comparing players. The fans have no right to be angry about superteams because of this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NBA players are 100% justified in creating\/joining superteams because fans and the media care about nothing more than how many championships are won for how they view a player's legacy.\n","id":"386602f8-a01b-4523-99a8-2ea0e792893b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just think it's awful, in every way. I understand that smoking is fun, I used to do it, but never as much as a lot of some people do. I briefly looked over at r trees and the amount that they claim to smoke there everyday is staggering. When I smoked I did it to make something that was going to be enjoyable a little more enjoyable, or to relax, or to make a tedious job a little less tedious. People that smoke everyday, I just don't get it. Is your life that boring, stressful, or tedious that you smoke everyday when you wake up and continue to smoke throughout the day? Or does smoking just make you happy? I think if you can't wake up one day out of your life and be happy without smoking than something is wrong. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think smoking weed everyday is a disgusting quality in a person\n","id":"9c29e26e-e3da-4478-9d22-92e16b2049e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As students graduate and acclimate to life after college, there are a handful of things that are of supreme importance, but are not really taught. Chief among them is the importance of credit. One of the first things that employers and landlords check is a prospective employee\u2019s and or tenant\u2019s credit. Students are completely consumed in regurgitating information from textbooks and wondering where the next party is that they don\u2019t realize that credit is going to be one of the most significant aspects of their life. They may not even know what credit is. This is something that effects their employment and a roof over their heads. Failure to acknowledge this before its too late can make their entire college experience moot. They will end up spending them majority of the next 5, 10, even 20 years trying to dig themselves out of debt. They won\u2019t be able to save money because the interest rates on their car loans and mortgages if they\u2019re lucky responsible enough to have one are so high that their monthly payments are so high that they don\u2019t have room to save for retirement or even go on vacation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In order to create responsible citizens, it should be mandatory for colleges to teach students the importance of credit.\n","id":"39f67006-10c8-4cd3-b7e8-5a320bfa9cd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Most of the species going extinct are very exotic creatures most people never heard of or saw in their life, therefore they do not care.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Despite the fact that between 1 - 300 species go extinct every day, there do not seem to be many people protesting it.\n","id":"4235ea0e-45c2-4148-b0f7-7bd2e42ab54f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should People in Positions of Authority Resign When Accused of Sexual Assault?<|ARGUMENT|>It is difficult to sympathize with a false and potentially life destroying false accuser - especially since their possible motivations may include a range of crimes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Someone falsely accused is unlikely to sympathize with their accuser.\n","id":"bbd1f99e-2cc7-464e-bfb2-8f4baac9741c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>Using the original text unaltered gives students the opportunity to learn important skills like how to evaluate authorial intent and how nuance in diction shapes meaning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Learning how to contextualize and interpret difficult texts teaches valuable skills in critical reasoning.\n","id":"542f4d38-26de-4b7c-80b9-d28c2e98fed9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Rights do not exist without corresponding obligations. No right, procreation included, is limitless if it is capable of conflicting with other valid and hierarchically superior rights. The quality of life of a child supersedes the right to procreate of a parent if not done responsibly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Where they clash, children's rights should overrule parents' rights.\n","id":"8b29e9d6-d745-4d98-a32e-b532114363fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not talking about the karma of a post or a comment, I'm talking about the karmapoints that are displayed when you visit someones profile. Karma should be a tool for visibility, but it has become the main reason for posting content, especially in the larger subreddits like adviceanimals, f7u12, pics, funny, etc. It has become the reason why jokes become old so easily, because everybody is overusing it karmawhoring jumping on the karmatrain to receive Karma. It also promotes reposting. It is the reason why I have left the major subreddits, the content has turned to complete shit, because of above reasons. The same goes for comments. People make witty comments jokes to an excesive extent because those get upvoted the most, instead of contributing to the discussion. It is similar to money except it makes less sense . It should be a tool, but it is controlling the way people act. In my opinion, reddits content would drastically improve if we stopped keeping score of Karma and would leave it to only have the purpose of visibility. Change my view reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the concept of a karma-score that is linked to somebody's profile is extremely harmful to the content of reddit and will eventually be the reason I'll stop visiting this website.\n","id":"075871f5-3c25-49dc-8aef-be559ad752d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>For example it could create regulations to the effect of allowing for more flexible jobs and hence some air for the businesses especially the small and mid sized ones or for creating a greater freedom of choice for individuals to choose their professionnal path.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI guaranteed to any citizen of a country would allow its government to foster liberal economic policies without throwing people into economic and social insecurity.\n","id":"eef71fc5-69f3-4da0-a604-7f34edf7403f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>1984 was written about two Authoritarian governments of the time Nazis and the USSR and how similar they are to each other. The society is obviously a mix of those two cultures and the spying on the populace is what Orwell believed they would have done if they had the technology. In the modern world, we do have governments spying on their people, but without the looming threat of force that the INGSOC party uses. We cannot say that the NSA looking at people through their webcams without anyone knowing is the same as people being afraid to do anything out of the ordinary or risk death or worse. Organizations such as the Spies are based off of the Hitler youth and probably some organizations in the USSR, but there\u2019s nothing like that in modern society at least in western societies . There is major political discourse. We are super polarized between the left and right wing, in 1984 everyone was loyal to the party. Except for thought criminals. People throw around phrases like thoughtcrime nowadays to defend themselves against others calling them homophobes, racists, sexists, and fascists. This is not the same concept as thoughtcrime as there is no threat of persecution from just speech so long as it does not directly incite violence, and even then, it\u2019s rare that people are actually held accountable for violence that they encouraged.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"1984 by George Orwell is not \u201cmore relevant now than ever\u201d\n","id":"72318f75-93fd-4a87-aed4-cf64e818e419"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>The Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the right to bear arms is not dependent on service in a militia but justified by the right to self-defense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This case reaffirms a citizens right to self-defense with guns. Teachers should be allowed to exercise this right in the classroom and on school grounds.\n","id":"042aacd3-a9f7-44f1-a3c4-e997d162fdd8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>Dogmatic studies from the past will slow down scientific evolution and education. But that is deeply rooted in outdated dogmas, not in religion. The sad truth is that those two are a common pair.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is deeply entrenched in many nation's politics, lagging their countries behind in education and critical thinking.\n","id":"cd7c8ff1-6e82-4683-ba89-6be6c9e63625"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>abolish the single European currency<|ARGUMENT|>Monetary policy and fiscal policy must be used in tandem if they are to be effective. Moreover, monetary policy and fiscal policy are tools that should only be wielded by politicians and bankers with an in-depth understanding of the economy that they are attempting to control. The core problem with the Eurozone is the belief that the business cycles of its various member states are so closely aligned that they can all be controlled by the same body. Unfortunately, this premise contradicts one of the most beneficial effects of the European single market \u2013 economic specialisation. Where large economies are gathered closely together- as in central Europe- competition in the same markets between those economies becomes intense and, eventually, ruinous. Rather than competing directly in some industries, many European states choose to specialise in manufacturing products or providing services that are unproduced or underdeveloped in other member states. Britain and the Nordic countries have large software sectors \u2013 a market that Italy and Spain do not cater to.i Britain also provides financial services on a large scale with almost 80% of Europe\u2019s financial services.ii Germany has become an expert machine component manufacturer, while Italy dominates the garment trade and France provides infrastructure expertise. Different types of market and different economies grow and contract in different ways. Contraction in the housing or heavy industry markets may not happen at the same time as contraction in the software market. At the same time as the collapse of the US housing bubble in 2007 created substantial disruption in the financial services market, the market for mineral extraction machinery and services was booming largely thanks to Chinese demand. Consequently, some states may experience an economic downturn at a time when others remain stable and productive. If the Eurozone were not part of a monetary union, individual states\u2019 treasuries and central bankers would be free to alter monetary policy to ensure that states were able to survive the disruption of industries that were important to their national economies. Ireland, for example, underwent rapid asset price inflation in 2008. The value of new homes in Ireland rose 250% between 1996-2006.iii If central banking officials in Ireland had been able to raise interest rates on Irish currency, the increased cost of borrowing money would have discouraged further purchasing or development of property. This would have gone someway to preventing speculative acquisition of plots, houses and offices, reducing demand for property and relieving inflationary pressures. In practice, this did not happen. Ireland was- and remains- part of the Euro, so the interest rate applied to its currency, as with all Eurozone states, was decided by the European Central Bank. When increases in the price of Irish property assets were at their most excessive the ECB was making decisions about the Euro\u2019s interest rates based broadly on data representing the economic health of the Eurozone as a whole. It proved unresponsive to suggestions that it should vary this rate in order to ensure that the Irish economy did not \u201coverheat\u201d. Other economies within the Eurozone were not experiencing uncontrollable increases in prices, and the restricting the supply of currency within these states would have slowed their growth.iv Thus, the Euro harms individual Eurozone economies, by restricting their ability to respond to changes in the markets in which they are most heavily involved. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that they will undergo recessions or encounter unmanageable commodity price or asset price inflation. Trust in the ECB is likely to dip in states that experience downturns of this type; public confidence in the wider European project may falter. i Daniel, \u201823% of Europe\u2019s largest software companies are from Nordics\u2019, VC Perspectives, 2 March 2009, ii Armitstead, Louise, \u2018MEPs plot to impose financial transaction tax on UK\u2019, The Telegraph, 4 October 2011, iii \u2018Ireland\u2019s residential property still in deep crisis\u2019, Global Property Guide, 27 August 2011, iv Malzubris, Ja\u0304nis, \u2018Ireland\u2019s housing market: bubble trouble\u2019, ECFIN Country Focus, Vol.5, Issue 9, 26 September 2008, p.4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Diverse economies can only be protected by a diverse range of monetary policies\n","id":"104b9add-63b2-47ad-bce8-5df38b5f4161"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Alternatives such as a national popular vote violate the concept of one-state-one-vote that is fundamental to a multitude of compromises in the US Constitution including the Great Compromise The US Constitution, particularly in the construction of the electoral college EC, seeks to balance the competing interests of one-person-one-vote and one-state-one-vote. Thus, the EC does not defy the one-person-one-vote concept but rather the EC embraces and weaves it with one-state-one-vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This might reflect the situation in monolithic countries, but the USA is a federation of 50 such monolithic states - where indeed 1 person equals 1 vote.\n","id":"7b390bbf-0bd7-44cc-a9e2-43718c3d445f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lobbyists and industries attempting to capture regulators rely on their ability to leverage elected officials voting record in the narrow focused of committees to ensure they get their desired legislation through or killed, that leverage comes from knowing which legislators voted with them and which legislators voted against them. The result of the current status is that a very small portion of the electorate on a national scale a thousand out of 300 million citizens, with a disproportionate influence over the political process. My proposal would be to draft out of the general public 20 30 citizens who for short times will serve as the legislatures committees, the elected officials would still sit on committees, draft for relevant legislation, and perform the research necessary to discovery what legislation is needed, but wouldn't get to vote on the relevant committee. Instead the citizens serving committee duty would be presented information why the legislation is needed and make the case for the legislation, while the ranking committee member chooses the legislator of the opposition party that would act as the devil's advocate against the legislation. The approved legislation garnering 60 of the citizen committee vote would be the only legislation that goes to the whole legislature for a final vote, the high threshold is to ensure less of a chance that divisive legislation would be enacted into law. The lobbyists and other typical vectors of corruption would be barred to interacting with citizen committee members with lengthy prison times, and with the high rate of churn of the citizen committees they would not have the chance to build rapport or relationships with the members even if they attempted to interact with committee members. Currently elected officials remain on the same committees for two year increments, and since they are organized by topic and function, they naturally are pre organized to be lobbied by relevant lobbyists, while lobbyists would need to lobby the whole legislature under my proposal. This wouldn't eliminate public corruption from the legislative process, it would create an efficient and effective barrier to typical influence while retaining voting records of the elected officials a good way for the electorate to judge them by. My proposal would also prevent the dodge of elected officials who claim as John Kerry famously said voting against it before I voted for it , since they would only get bite of the apple. I acknowledge that likelihood of this reform being implemented is nearly impossible, but not because it would be unsuccessful in preventing corruption, but largely because that it would be successful and the inertia of the status quo would want to continue the system that keeps the going as is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"having legislatures use juries or jury like bodies instead of committees would prevent a significant amount of public corruption in the legislative process.\n","id":"70caeffe-7fdb-4a40-a505-6015f993797f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that antibiotics are rendering immune systems in parts obsolet. So the only effect a immune system has is draining energy and due to evolutionary processes will eventually fade. Then one day antibiotic resistant bacteria will occur and noone is able to defeat them, because noone has a strong enough immune system left gt medicine is ruining humanity. My view applies to pretty much every genetic encoded selfdefense mechanism. For example the ability to detect cancer. My view basicly is that medicine allows humans to survive who would normally die due to natural selection. And they are able to reproduce resulting in a weaker gen pool than the generation before. I am not racists or have anything against disabled, gays or other minorities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe medicine is ruining humanity\n","id":"9a23106e-7393-4130-b344-e80d4b68caf1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Two major arguments I have. In general, rules cannot be selectively followed, or it defeats their purpose. The whole reason rules exist is because humans cannot be trusted to decide for themselves how to behave. But selectively following rules means that humans get to do just that, and rules have no power. So, if people choose to ignore the rule in the bible about not mixing fabrics then they can justify ignoring rules like don't murder, because of the precedent. The bible is accepted based on faith that the word of God is infallible. If you believe parts of the word of God are false, than you are rejecting the premise that it's infallible, and thus there's no reason to believe in any of it. If you contend that parts of the bible are metaphorical, or were modified from their original text, then you open up the passages that you do believe in to the same criticism. I'm not trying to be an r atheist esque religious basher, or anything. I'm just genuinely curious how this is reconciled. And I'm very open to the possibility that I'm misunderstanding what 'faith' means, since I've never really had it in my life. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You cannot reject parts of the bible and believe others. If you decide what to believe or not believe, it defeats the whole point of a religious dogma.\n","id":"bd031164-5dd6-4eb3-895a-301834bb6fa6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>The Israeli Declaration of Independence highlights that the state will \"ensure complete equality . to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The protection of the rights of minorities is a part of the founding narrative of Israel.\n","id":"3310cbb7-316b-4624-b33f-59b8353b614a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I really just want to hear a legitimate reason why people who are for gun control think that it will create less gun related crime. How would it make us safer if citizens did not have their 2nd amendment rights?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am \"conservative\" when it comes to gun control.\n","id":"d80bccb7-cd08-4e93-80a4-e50f8e72aa09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The way I see it, the EU is currently using a 'scare tactic' to keep its countries from leaving the union. The UK has become an example to show people how bad it can get if you did leave. Hence the strong and cold stance taken by the EU when it comes to the coming Brexit negotiations. I feel like, rather than a warning, the distant and cold approach to the UK comes across as a kind of threat suppressing the nationalistic mindset that is currently showing itself in the member states. But suppression rarely works in one's favor, as it can instead cause anger and frustration, which I fear could further bolster the nationalist movements. Instead, rather than suppressing an idea, it seems to me to be better if you can can partially indulge the request. I say partially, because fully indulging a countries calls for independence would obviously abolish the EU which is not what I want. However, if a request is quickly responded to, it seems to me that people could be satisfied by only a partial indulgence, as it shows the EU to listen to its population and shows the people that it cares about their wants. In essence, sometimes you have to take a step back if you want to be able to move forward. I thought of this because I read about the idea of the EU's Brexit negotiator, Guy Verhofstadt. He said that 'in order for the EU to survive', he wanted to abolish the European Commision, and replace it with a group of '12 to 15' people. Seeing as how the nationalistic movement is using the 'underrepresentation of the European people' as a motivator for their cause, it would be incredibly damaging. What I'm requesting is for everyone to take a step back, and move forward when the times are easier and the countries are better prepared. It just seems foolish to me to move forward towards a union when more and more people are calling for more autonomy due to the trying times economically and culturally , and then continue the regular claims of 'strength in unison' even though they have become practically meaningless by now. Thoughts?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU will have to provide more autonomy to its member states if it ever wants to rid itself of the surge of nationalistic, anti-EU politics in its population; and, therefore, eventually create further progress towards a more unified union.\n","id":"c52aebc5-b4a1-4bb2-ab01-4f7db7a883cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>r place was created for an April fool's joke and quickly became something every other redditor was talking about. Everyone were praising it for it's elements of a social experiment, and for giving a chance of a spotlight for every community on the site. I think it's not that special, since the way communities got onto the spotlight was very systematic and plain. It didn't require creativity or originality from most of the users, it just became a battle ground for which community has the most members or bots. Instead of joining together to create something unique and special of our own, everyone wanted to be represented by a flag or even a logo which is the most depressing thing about r place . I'm not saying r place was a complete disaster, but it was certainly not as good as how people saw it, or wanted to at least. It definitely had the potential to be something great, but unfortunately it wasn't IMO Edit it's getting a bit late in my country 3 10 am so I think I'll sleep this one out and answer in the morning. Please mercy, mods<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think r\/place was so amazing as everyone said it was\n","id":"db2cde41-2075-4bd8-b192-d731043b45a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't want to debate this. It makes me feel like a racist. I googled is there a race physically stronger than another and it was all just stupid shitposting. On one forum you'd have blacks are stronger than whites and on another you'd have whites are stronger than blacks . No informative articles on whether on race was genuinely stronger than another. I don't want to believe there is a physically stronger race, I don't even want to debate it. I'm not really sure why I hold this view. It was more than likely born out of intrigue and curiosity. I was always curious as to why people debate this and ended up debating it myself. I occasionally see hear questions about it, but I don't want to believe that one is physically superior. I just want an actually informed and educated view on why I'm wrong to debate this or why they're both equal in truth. Either way, I can't seem to put my mind at rest when thinking about this particular subject. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I keep debating which ethnicity is stronger between whites and blacks with myself.\n","id":"b78dc334-9ead-47d4-a9ac-3b57e0a9e7ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like I said in the title, it is impossible to become true friends with someone online because people only show what they want to show and hide everything else. In addition, emotions, tone, etc cannot be conveyed through implications, for example we have to type lol or hahaha to show we find something funny, rather than simply seeing the other person laugh. As such, I do not believe it is possible to have a true friendship online. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that, in online contexts, the high level of control people exercise over their self-presentation inhibits the development of genuine friendship.\n","id":"4b13a857-c3cc-4c11-8241-a628443dc1fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>The taxes a church pays should be baselined to the actual charitable work the church demonstrates they do. If the level of spending exceeds a normative benchmark for efficiency i.e. buying private jets or luxurious accommodations then the church should recognize that was a choice they made to upgrade and thus should pay a corporate tax on the excesses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If churches want tax exempt status they should have to prove that they are not for profit and provide public goods like other 501c3s\n","id":"5a14984e-8fd7-4370-80b4-dc8fc76d16b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no other probable theory that supports the way we operate with morals. ie. why do we value human life, why do we not believe murder is wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Believing that there's an all-knowing and all-seeing being makes it likelier for human beings to adhere to a moral code which is beneficial for the world.\n","id":"5aa7b150-874a-4cc7-871d-530d12463316"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide?<|ARGUMENT|>Some businesses have to make a detour of over 200 kilometers to reach neighbouring towns on the other side of the border.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The opening of the Turkey-Armenia border would lead to reduced transport costs for Armenia businesses pg.10.\n","id":"7c3dbaa2-298d-4511-b338-18ca00989ab6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>Politicians, in contrast to millions of voters from different walks of life, are more prone to mistakes due to their small numbers and their relative sameness in many regards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While individual citizens might not be well-informed, referendum decisions benefit from the wisdom of the crowds through which individual deficiencies are cancelled out.\n","id":"7648bc8f-8060-4ed1-a745-fcdb7bc6e8d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US government guarantee every citizen a job?<|ARGUMENT|>India's National Rural Employment Guarantee which gives up to 100 days of guaranteed paid employment per year to workers from rural households, was found to reduce the gender pay gap.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A jobs guarantee could be of great benefit to women who often struggle to return to work after having children.\n","id":"085b1f14-9bfe-407a-8227-a1a54661b6f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We know that Russia was extremely interested in helping Donald Trump win the election. They hacked the DNC, gave money to Paul Manafort, and ran propaganda aimed at denigrating Clinton. It only seems logical to me that they would also try to physically tamper with the vote counting process or with voting machines themselves. We also know that all the major polls were wildly incorrect in their both their exit polling and prediction polling, to a degree that is essentially unprecedented. I see lots of hypotheses grasping at things like people being embarrassed to admit they voted for Donald Trump, but I have yet to see a solid, well researched explanation for it. The actual mechanism for pulling it off does not sound entirely implausible to me. First off, only a few voting machines in key polling places in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Florida would need to be affected to completely swing the election. It seems entirely possible that a Russian agent could go into a polling booth, install the tampering device, and later another agent could go pick it up to remove the evidence. We've seen how quickly and easily hard to detect credit card swipers can be installed. And we know it can be done with voting machines, too Now I researched this before posting, and the one thing that keeps me from fully believing this is that most of the experts seemingly flat out dismiss the idea that voting could have tampered with. But, in my opinion, they are focusing on moot points in their arguments Some say that the voting system is too widespread and varied. This doesn't really matter, though. You would only need to compromise a few machines in key states to completely swing the election. Some of them only seem to entertain the idea of a cyber attack via the internet. I don't think this is the vector that would be used. It seems far more likely that it would be actual physical tampering or perhaps paid off or blackmailed election officials. Obama and many democrats also flat out dismiss the idea. But they have good motive to At best they would sound like sore losers , and at worst they would cause chaos and riots. The oft repeated argument is that there's no evidence, and anyone making these allegations should bring forth evidence. Normally I'd agree with this however the only people that would really have the power to collect evidence would be our intelligence agencies. And even they may be hesitant to reveal actual election fraud, for the reason in the previous bullet point. So go ahead, . I know I'll get a lot of butthurt loser replies, which admittedly, I am. But to me, something definitely smells fishy here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's highly likely that voting machines were tampered with by Russia in the 2016 election\n","id":"f333ddc4-94f1-41da-84c9-bf06d1d6c330"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Nintendo allow for Fangames and modifications to their systems?<|ARGUMENT|>Metroid, a beloved series, has not seen new content in recent years. It has been hiatus for years; the last installment - Federation Force - was a disappointment the next one has been marred by delays<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would keep fan interest high even when no new official games are released for a franchise for a while.\n","id":"6f709c06-4dc5-4eea-8014-d6f5fb109efa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Hosting Olympic Games Is Worth It<|ARGUMENT|>Hosting has an impact on the whole nation. The Olympics involves hundreds of events and sports and so provides an opportunity for the whole nation to feel like they have taken part. Training camps are often located outside the host city, as are events such as rowing, sailing, canoeing and shooting, so that the rest of the country benefits too. The lasting impact of this will be a generation of young people who are excited about sport. Given rising levels of childhood obesity and declining amounts of sport in schools, this can only be a good thing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hosting has an impact on the whole nation. The Olympics involves hundreds of events and sports and ...\n","id":"66d617c2-1857-4367-a318-ddc4c4134b75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pride organisers should refuse corporate sponsorship<|ARGUMENT|>The individuals who run companies, and set their hiring policy, are human. Humans need to rationalize their decisions and as such will find it difficult to continue to discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals whilst also funding the pride movement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rejecting sponsorship from companies that engage in discriminatory practices does not reduce the effect or incidence of such discrimination.\n","id":"f452e797-523f-419d-9dda-db9ff0e2a429"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>No person chooses to be born so if they find that experience too painful they should be allowed to end their life if they see fit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a person sees no exit out of the situation that he\/she is in then that person should have a \"right\" to end his\/her life.\n","id":"d73d29b3-46e7-4476-b174-d93a185066fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While everyone makes a big deal about the cost of ads at the Super Bowl, that's not the real reason for a network wanting the Super Bowl on your channel. That ad revenue is a known quantity. All 4 networks and the NFL all know how much money you're going to pull in assuming you don't have a blackout that costs you several million . No one network can flex harder than any other network because everyone is going to tune in regardless of network. Well, except maybe Fox because screw that stupid robot The difference between the networks comes in their ability to rep their new shows. They get massive holdovers that create new eyes and future interest in their shows. See Season 2 Grey's Anatomy ratings for a great example It was already a highly viewed show, but with Episode 25 being the first of a two parter following the Super Bowl they were able to drastically increase their average viewer count ~18M gt ~22M for the rest of the season and boosting future ratings as well. Although harder to tell because of attrition, but it would have been lower without the boost NBC completely botched it this year. This is Us is not an episodic show. There's not a bad guy of the week. It's a show that relies on knowing the characters and building from week to week, that's why it's basically flat the following week And it's not like This is Us had bad ratings. It's one of NBC's better performing shows. It didn't need the boost and it isn't a show that can take a boost anyways. Obviously NBC didn't know what their TV schedule was going to look like back in 2011, but they are pretty heavy in these types of shows that require knowing the characters and aren't easy to digest in a single one off. The Blacklist also seems like a poor choice back in 2015 and I recall wathcing that show and just being confused the whole time because I didn't know any of the character's relationships. But even knowing that they couldn't have predicted their TV lineup back in 2011, they did know they had the Olympics coming up. And NBC spent a LOT of time advertising for that. But it's the Olympics. They advertise themselves. It's going to dominate social media and the news cycles for the next two weeks. It already has been in the news for the last few months with the North Korean stuff and the Russian doping scandal. Few didn't know about the Olympics who are going to watch. This would have made it impossible for any show to recieve a good boost because they would have been pulled out of their normal rhythm for the next two weeks. Even if it had been an appropriate show Survivor, House, Grey's Anatomy for example the 2 weeks of no episodes would have killed the momentum. And finally, the Olympics themselves provide great opportunities for holdovers. NBC routinely debuts shows after the Olympics in order to boost them up. Paying gobs of cash for two boosts back to back just wastes your money as you can't effectively utilize all of them. If they wanted to boost This is Us, they could have done it after the Olympics. For these reasons, I believe that NBC should not have taken this year's Super Bowl and either opted for a different one or for other benefits in the NFL deal more flex options, better playoff games, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NBC should not have taken the bid for Super Bowl LII\n","id":"272dd775-95b8-46cf-a789-610ad9bbeca0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>The information needed to cast a vote is split into chunks over time instead of concentrated in a ballot, a program or a ticket.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Currently voters inform themselves with elections or referenda. Instead they could inform themselves when hearing about a specific situation they disagree with.\n","id":"a8dbb8d7-c911-4e1b-8732-b2da529f2997"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>2. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan Clean India Campaign Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was launched on 2 Oct 2014 by Modi. Filth is considered one of the major problems in India and Modi gave the issue its due importance by launching a nationwide campaign. Many called it a masterstroke from Modi and also gave people the message to act on hygiene and civic sense. Modi nominated notable personalities from film industry, sports, media, business and other celebrities to promote the initiative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modi-led government is clocking over a year at the wheel. 1. Make in India To facilitate investment, boost research & development R&D, ensure product originality and create skill-based jobs by establishing industrial sector; major national programme was started by Narendra Modi. Modi has reached out to the world with his idea of \u2018Make in India\u2019 and it has generated positive response from foreign companies.\n","id":"7098e698-54ca-462a-b8bd-3b07d782eb37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should homeschooling be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents who wish to have greater control over their children's lives are also more likely to be codependent parents who 'over-parent' their children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homeschooled children may create a co-dependent relationship with their parents.\n","id":"c8832aa3-440c-489d-a957-cf575c53a966"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Even good great directors are guilty of this, if not the main perpetrators of this pet peeve of mine. Every time I see a scene in a movie tv show where smoke is being used to make the scene more interesting or interesting at all, or to implicitly make a character come off coolly, I cringe, especially if I find the director of the movie tv show to be otherwise competent. If any one with a camera can think of it and execute it easily, what makes it artistic? This trope is so ubiquitous I'm not sure I have to give examples of it and to be honest I don't have any particular examples in mind. Also note that I am not saying smoking can never be used effectively. For instance, I believe Frank and Claire's shared smoke breaks in House of Cards effectively sheds light on their characters relationship. My problem is when smoke is used for no other reason than to billow in the air because that's artsy. This seems to be most cases of using smoke on screen. I would rather have a scene without smoke than with it if the smoke is not adding anything, because as we all knowing smoking is bad mmmkay? and doesn't need to be encouraged even a little if it's not adding to the movie tv show. It's worse than lazy and pretentious, it might actually be advertising smoking. BTW, this problem with advertising smoking is not the primary problem I have with these smoking scenes, but a secondary problem. My primary problem is they seem to want to be more artistic and interesting than they are, a crutch for filling screen time with something else. . gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Filming smoke or someone smoking in movies\/tv shows is generally not artistic, and a lazy way to \"do something a good director would do.\"\n","id":"535273b1-11eb-489f-a8f9-6b89f0ce2902"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't believe that just because I have feelings for someone, or even if I dated someone, that I can reasonably ask my friends not to pursue them if there is a mutual attraction between them. Several of my friends who I have had this discussion with have expressed the opposite viewpoint and claim that it is morally unacceptable to pursue someone if they have feelings for that person. I cannot justify in my own mind standing in the way of someone's happiness, particularly if they are my friend. That doesn't mean that it wouldn't hurt or cause me anxiety it has , but those are issues I need to deal with rather then issuing an ultimatum to those involved. I'm asking this community because I would like to see it from a different perspective and to see what I can learn by thinking about this from a pov different from my own. Edit Just to clarify I meant after dating, not currently dating.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe if I have feelings for someone I have a right to stop my friends from pursuing them\n","id":"7bfc31f2-2f40-421e-801e-a4853ef0ca0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The reasons are Terrorism was a word created for when the government commited acts of killing innocents to frighten the citizens. While I accept that words aren't solidy and the culture change its meanings so I would accept the term if the terrorists really wanted to cause terror even though they aren't from the govern. I don't accept when their intention isn't even about creating an atmosphere of terror and why is that? Even though the individuals of such groups might be stupid, the groups itself aren't, because you need to have some kind of intelligence to plan those kinds of attacks, it doesn't seem easy considering all the intelligence on counter terrorism. So I want to understand, how can people believe that a group who is intelligent didn't realized that attacks as the Paris one which killed 137 persons didn't end up frightening France, it united them and made them brave to fight the enemy. And entering in a conspiracy theory here so you can ignore this part of the argument It looks like the government is acting like the irresponsible father who wants to see his child fight back in the case of the government, because of the lobby of military industrial complex and this father says to his child He wants you to feel fear, are you going to let him do this to you? and the normal emotional response is the will to show that he didn't frightened you and you show this sometimes by fighting him. So, the groups certainly realized not only with Paris but other attacks that people aren't frightened, they are just filled with hate at those groups, so if they still keep doing this, the only logical reason to do this in this world where they know they can't fully eliminate the enemy, is to call attention at themselves or wathever the point they're trying to make. So with the objective of not letting people help those with bad intentions and to help to raise the level of discussion since many of those are focusing on the wrong thing why are they trying to scare us, what did we do wrong? and knowing at least a little better what are their intentions by calling them attentionists would help us focus better in a discussion that may bring us some better idea on how to at least auxiliate when dealing with this whole thing. Even though I'm holding this for a lot of months, since I'm on the contrary to the majority in this, there's a high possibility that I'm seeing something in a wrong way, so please change my idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Terrorist attacks should be called \"Attentionist\" attacks\n","id":"691bc014-9189-4272-9351-2798e7fb9e4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>Pineapple is a wild species that survives in the tropical rainforest not something bred to be eaten. Such a remote plant just clearly needs to be free-roaming in its native habitat where it truly belongs and not cooped up in the city or farm. Trying to tame something that can't do it just like how not all animals can be domesticated just doesn't make sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being a tropical fruit, pineapples are pretentious that has no place on pizza. They demand a higher respect than that for their stature and well-being.\n","id":"494a55a4-4081-482c-8d4d-beb9d1572047"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The Swoon theory fails to explain how or why the stone was moved from the door of the tomb.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The theory that Jesus was not dead fails to account for other aspects of the passion story.\n","id":"0be8860e-f93f-4540-9dec-dd27d7227e32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is chivalry sexist?<|ARGUMENT|>Women's hair and clothes getting wet, is actually not worse than men's hair and clothes getting wet, thus they aren't in need of men holding an umbrella over their head, just because they are women, while the men themselves are walking in the rain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The tasks that are being being \"touched\" by gentleman behavior are tasks that women can and do perform just as well, when men are not around.\n","id":"e20d4d8f-0155-45e2-9d9f-b110e3bffaa6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit I should\u2019ve specified this concerns current western countries. Countries should, as they currently do, have a process for requesting citizenship as opposed to anyone having the ability to reside in a country upon moving there. The reason I hold this view is because western countries like American and UK have attractive economies and societies very much so compared to many other countries , thus there\u2019s an incentive for nearly the entire rest of the world to want to move in. If massive numbers of people migrated to a country, it would hurt that country. It would be too big a strain on government programs like healthcare, education etc. In other words, if 100 million migrants moved into the UK tomorrow, where would the children go to school and how would hospitals handle the influx, not to mention the bill? The other problem is safety. There would be nothing stopping ISIS members from being your neighbor. Terrorists shouldn\u2019t be allowed into a country and the current immigration system rightly aims to block terrorists from entering the country. To be clear, I am not against immigration in general. I\u2019m pro legal immigration. Migrants graduating joining the west through legal immigration seems like a good idea. I\u2019m against allowing all people to enter a country freely without permission from the government. What won\u2019t change my view Advocating for more legal immigration. Advocating for improving the immigration process and treatment of migrants. Arguments relating to the distant future. Saying the left isn\u2019t advocating for open borders. I\u2019m very open to having my view changed as I am a centrist and haven\u2019t heard a well articulated argument for why open borders is a good idea. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Countries shouldn\u2019t have an \u201copen borders\u201d immigration policy\n","id":"9229e913-baab-43d5-9dfe-27e9f6712b20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>There is reason to suggest that certain measures have trended towards well-being globally ourworldindata.org It implies that we must explore these measurements with increasing precision, similar to the advancement of other systems in metrology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Well-being is like the concept of physical health, in that it is difficult to define but still measurable and observable.\n","id":"b69623f8-b042-423c-a8a7-1eadb0d4b75e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If life is meaningless, then all moral judgements are meaningless. Nothing is morally good or bad intrinsically. Your actions should be dictated by maximizing pleasure and nothing else if you want to call yourself a rational agent . So, lying isn't wrong, so lie to people if it benefits you. Murder isn't wrong, so murder away Struggling to see how rational materialist atheism doesn't lead to this. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"if you believe existence has no purpose, then you should not have a moral code beyond pure hedonism\n","id":"082ac53c-ac0e-4d79-9a0d-1863bd7c5ce6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is computer science a failing discipline?<|ARGUMENT|>Computer Scientists carry out roles that are very easy to automatise. For this reason, it would be easy for AI to take on the majority of the work currently carried out by Computer Scientists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Computer scientists can make their own jobs obsolete by creating an AI to do their jobs for them.\n","id":"f328daf6-9349-4328-888e-a3afd3cd1ff8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If we don't have free will, then we didn't ever choose what we were going to study or what assumptions we are going to make or even if we are going to follow my advice or not. All debate or discussion of any kind is pointless because not only was there no choice in if the discussion would happen, but the outcome of any study or discussion or and time spent is predetermined. Basically if we don't have free will, we can't even choose to care about if we care about having free will, we are just part of a giant cascading series of events which happen to include us thinking that we are actually thinking. So, the only time we can actually make any decision or make any assumption is if do have free will, and by choosing what to study or what to assume, you are presupposing that you have free will or else it wouldn't be a choice in the first place, so the only logical choice is to come to the conclusion that we have free will. Now this isn't to say that we will be right if we assume we have free will, nor is it saying that if we were to study free will we wouldn't empirically prove if we have free will or not. We might think we are thinking we have free will but we are actually wrong, but the only way we are wrong is if we weren't actually free to choose anyway.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is pointless to study if we have free will, or to assume we don't have free will.\n","id":"d5e395a3-133f-4c57-8e04-a3eafd64fd12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many products are priced not just based on the actual costs of manufacture and presenting the product, but are given mark ups, from small amounts to ridiculous amounts, based on how much it is thought they may sell for. Sometimes products are priced purposefully to make them seem more valuable, or specifically to make them exclusive products, only for the rich. I've heard the argument that 'if someone wants to buy, why not sell to them?' but I believe that it is wrong to spend a significant amount of money unnecessarily, so it is also wrong to encourage people to spend that money. I don't think it's wrong to spend any money on unnecessary things life is about living as well as surviving but it has to be reasonable. Chocolate? Sure. Theatre? Sure. A reasonable holiday? Sure. Sports car? No. Luxury hotel? No. Mansion? No. So this is a two pronged belief I suppose. I believe it's both wrong to spend this money and wrong to encourage people to spend it e.g. running a business based on this. I'm partly interested because I'm starting a business selling fancy looking products, and we could get away with marking them up and making more money, but I feel uncomfortable doing it, even though I know there are people out there interested in spending that amount of money. Thanks. Edit To clarify why I think it's wrong to spend money unnecessarily Money is a precious resource that can do good in the world. \u00a31000 can be invested in education, given to charity to help save lives, etc. Someone may get temporary happiness from spending such money on frivolous things, but it won't be greater happiness than someone gets from spending \u00a310 or \u00a3100.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's wrong to mark-up products - increasing their price just because someone may buy it.\n","id":"4cbbe169-ce72-431b-b2ac-a6ff384bb7a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I see Kanye West saying he's the greatest entertainer of all time, I think Whatever gets you through the day. That notion probably made him as successful as he is, and if he thought he could be at least in the top 20, that would have severely handicapped him. Either way, the view that ANY individual let alone a celebrity I will never meet espouses of themselves is not bothersome to me. My only explanation for how a lot of people react to his personality is an insecure lack of perspective they have the same experience as though Kanye were in a room with them telling them how superior he is. This is the absurdity I mentioned, and a mark of childishness. You will never meet this person. Funnily enough, the reason for that is his wild success. The other reason Kanye doesn't bother me is that I am not competing with him for greatness. But most people view themselves, subconsciously, as the greatest thing ever, even if they live totally mediocre existences. This is what I'm saying it stems from. You're not the greatest. I am. But I can only rationalize that by tearing you down. LeBron is an elite athlete you could make a couple arguments for or against his perceived greatness. But those who rally against him with such vitriol are, in my view, seeking to correct some personal insecurity by discrediting demonstrably successful individuals. Change my view that these haters of egotistical celebrities aren't children engaging in pissing contests with an imaginary threat to their OWN ego.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The contempt directed at \"egotistical\" celebrities Kanye, LeBron, etc for their lack of humility stems from a perceived threat to the contempt-holder's identity. They feel challenged, in a childish and absurd caveman response. It also betrays their OWN ego.\n","id":"ed156b21-eb64-4bae-a1c7-0f963609051d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Any individual leader might want to murder some of his opposition or a former spy. Doing so would be incredibly pragmatic from their point of view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pragmatism is not always a positive trait. Many violent acts have pragmatic values for some.\n","id":"d622c7ef-7c81-4f3d-98eb-af2be023bbba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay so most of you are probably like what the hell is this guy talking about, marijuana gives you the munchies It Cant Prevent Obesity Let me explain. Millions of Americans fall into 1 of 3 Categories. They work in a job where they could be randomly drug tested at any time, so they cannot use marijuana. Not just NFL Olympic athletes but a variety of jobs They are currently unemployed or underemployed and if a new opportunity comes along they must be willing to submit to a drug test They are in the legal system or on parole and they are periodically subject to drug tests After establishing these facts I now move on to how this is related to obesity. Everyone gets stressed and everyone wants to have a good time. To deal with these feeling and desires millions of Americans turn to either Alcohol or Delicious Food. Alcohol distributors and restaurants dont always make calorie information immediately available and even if they do its often ignored when you can smell something delicious on the grill. Using a 6 pack Beer or Box of Deep Dish Pizza or fat slice of Cheesecake to cope with stress or celebrate a promotion could make you feel better for a few minutes but those 500 1000 calories you just ate or drank could be as much as 1 3 of your daily calorie intake What if their was a way to handle stress or celebrate events with zero calories???? There Is Its called marijuana and its a Calorie Free Vice that can be used to relax after a long day, celebrate a major life event with friends, or even make a movie picked by a friend with terrible taste tolerable. I'm not saying that we should tell people to smoke weed instead of eat or drink. I am just saying I think its a terrible idea to tell people they cant enjoy a calorie free alternative to excessive food or alcohol consumption The United States is spending billions on ad campaigns and medical procedures to prevent and reverse obesity, but still insists on pushing people to High Calorie alternatives for relaxation and celebration. As a young professional I have seen several people pack on the pounds when quitting marijuana in search of a new job<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Illegality of Marijuana is Making America's Obesity Epidemic Worse\n","id":"007deed2-b873-4181-82f1-b717e0adb2f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As much as the idea of impeaching Trump sounds awesome, I have only one problem with it. Now of course Trump deserves to be kicked out of office considering all of the rules he's broken and his extremely authoritarian nature. He's becoming the despicable hypocrite he once criticized and is trying to bypass the Constitution by trying to get things to work his own way. At this point he needs to be sent out. But there's just one problem Mike Pence. If Trump is impeached, we're going to have a man who is much more worse than Trump ideologically. He's much more passionately anti LGBT. He wants to push for torture. He wants to escalate the conflict in the Middle East. He's part of the anti vaccination movement. Only he's much more stringently passionate about these ideas and other ones than Trump. Trump has been much more easily persuaded than we all thought simply because he greatly relied on advice from his cabinet especially Banner. Regardless he still showed only tiny restraint an example being that he rolled back on a few foreign policy ideas. And the fact that he's not ardently pursuing his campaign promises would mean that he's not taking his ideology so seriously as we feared. However Pence is much more ardent ideologically. He's not a man who can be persuaded. He is the persuader. He wouldn't give two cents about other opinions. And if that's the kind of person that would steer the White House, we are all in trouble. It's crazy to say this even for myself, but Trump is a lesser evil comparing to Pence. And I'm afraid that if Trump does get impeached, a crazier man would control the nation. Trump is already difficult to deal with, and I really don't want to imagine the nation under Pence. And I would not count on the Republicans to be willing to kick out one of their own for a second time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Impeaching Donald Trump May Not Be The Best Idea\n","id":"7d826f63-72a0-43e2-b502-cc49134b6d8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Porn Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Fifty Shades of Grey is one such movie. However it was not seen as bad, but entertainingly fictitious.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Romance movies and comedies often depict illegal sexual abuse however this does not make the movies bad.\n","id":"26a568db-ca91-4b30-a1ee-97bfcee15df2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if there is a \"self,\" defined purely as the \"thing making the choices,\" one logically cannot choose what that self is, and so ultimately any subsequent choices are not \"free\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free will presupposes that the 'self' is a metaphysical beeing acting on the physical brain for which there are no evidence.\n","id":"312d1b44-82d1-4933-9443-6c4f85817bad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Although some scientific arguments have been made that some women possess some elasticity with their sexuality, several scientific articles specifically state that makes are born and fully develop their sexuality by puberty. Furthermore, they have located a specific gene, xq28, that they believe is specifically linked to an inborn sexuality. Also, although one can change their behavior, doing so against ones true self can lead to long term mental anguish, torture, depression, and possibly suicide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being gay is not a choice.\n","id":"d6005129-bb7a-4487-a644-3c946d6a27c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If we mandated rules for the house and the Senate via a constitutional amendment, we could end the so called nuclear option and force moderation when it comes to cabinet judiciary picks. This would also allow for the systems of checks and balances to work a lot better by allowing congress to be a better check on the president so that he she can't, with 51 allied senators, up end the entire federal government. Additionally, if we set the minimum votes for a bill to pass to 60 instead of 50 60 votes in senate, and 261 votes in the house we could force the parties to have to work together more since they would NEED members of the opposing party to vote for their bill. I know this wouldn't always work. But just to use the senate as an example, from what I can see, between 1970 and 2010 there were 20 congresses, only 3 times did one party hold 60 or more seats under Ford, Carter, and Obama . This means that very rarely would a party ever be able to just sweep the govt however they want and rarely would a president with extreme tendencies be able to push his agenda through without it being watered down and moderated. I hold this view because I believe that a stable govt is a good govt. And with the two parties becoming more and more polarized every election cycle, swapping govt control between the two is going to give the country whiplash. However, forcing the two parties to have to work together more often without a strong majority would force the two ends to work together to make a country that better represents everyone. I do believe that forcing a multi party system would be more ideal, but since I don't see that going away anytime soon, would this be an a good way to polish the turd of a two party system? Note I'm not super attached to this view, was just chatting with a friend and thought this might really be helpful and couldn't think of anything wrong with it per se. Edit also, this would help strip some of the power from the president and help people focus more on their congressmen rather than the president as much because he would effectively be a manager rather than a total policy maker if he can line up his congress with a 51 majority<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The houses of the U.S. Congress should not be allowed to make their own rules; allowing for more bipartisan work\n","id":"521451c4-7720-470f-bb97-6b93525c5f8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The vast majority of people drink coffee or otherwise consume caffeine in order to receive an energy boost. I fully accept that there are a wide variety of other reasons to do so, including taste, habit, etc., but I am not concerned with those. If you ask most people if caffeine improves their energy and focus, they'd say yes. If you present the point that habitual caffeine use means there is no positive energy effect, you'd likely be ridiculed and the point would be dismissed. I believe that this viewpoint is currently scientifically supported, and thus that habitual consumption of caffeine is detrimental towards this goal for the majority of people. The following is my understanding of the mechanism through which caffeine functions, the mechanism through which tolerance builds, and excerpts from studies supporting the view that the primary benefits felt from caffeine are due to withdrawal reversal. Adenosine is a neurotransmitter that can bind to receptors in your brain. Binding to the A1 receptor promotes muscle relaxation sleepiness, binding to the A2A receptor interferes with dopamine and other neurotransmitters. It builds up over the day and then dissipates while you sleep. Caffeine essentially gets in the way and prevents Adenosine from binding to A1 and A2A receptors, meaning you don't get the tired sensations and lack of dopamine. Additionally, caffeine leads to the release of adrenaline, further aiding alertness.^ 1 Caffeine has a half life of three to ten hours, depending on the individual. This means that depending on quantity time of caffeine consumption, many people will have decreased sleep quality due to its presence. Even if it's not enough to prevent sleep, it can still reduce the quality and start building up a sleep deficit. While that's an avoidable effect, caffeine use also causes the creation of more Adenosine receptors.^ 2 This is thought to be the primary process through which tolerance occurs, and it makes sense that with a higher baseline number of receptors, your baseline alertness mood are lower, and you need caffeine to block some of them to get back to a true normal. Research into caffeine effects typically shows significant positives, until prior caffeine consumption is controlled for. This indicates that the positive effects are primarily due to reversing withdrawal from consistent caffeine use. gt The research also showed that avoidance of caffeine withdrawal symptoms motivates regular use of caffeine. For example, the satisfying feelings and perceived benefits that many coffee users experience from their morning coffee appear to be a simple reversal of the negative effects of caffeine withdrawal after overnight abstinence .^ 3 emphasis added gt Caffeine reliably improved performance on a sustained attention task, and increased rated mental alertness, in moderate caffeine consumers who were tested when caffeine deprived. However, caffeine had no such effects when consumers were no longer caffeine deprived. These data are consistent with the view that reversal of caffeine withdrawal is a major component of the effects of caffeine on mood and performance.^ 4 This study even found evidence that caffeine wasn't even actually beneficial if you don't habitually use it, though they suggest that it should be tested further. gt Testing the responses of caffeine non consumers to caffeine administration is a method that can potentially demonstrate beneficial effects of caffeine unconfounded by caffeine withdrawal. The present experiments revealed no such effects, with the possible exception of caffeine induced increases in self rated alertness. In contrast, as well as increased alertness, a conditioned increase in drink intake reinforced by caffeine and significant effects of caffeine on overall mood and on psychomotor performance were found for caffeine consumers gt Thus perhaps caffeine does substantially increase alertness independent of caffeine withdrawal.^ 5 There seems to be significant evidence that habitual caffeine consumption leads to no benefit over habitual abstinence. My stance on this could be changed if significant evidence against the withdrawal reversal hypothesis could be presented, or if my understanding of the mechanism could be corrected expanded sufficiently to call into question the validity of the withdrawal reversal hypothesis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those seeking to gain energy from caffeine should not consume it daily.\n","id":"fd023275-c464-43f2-9eb0-b3734fe2815d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Right now, the current system for electing the president of the United States involves a winner takes all system. Some of my arguments against this system include The Republicans in California or the Democrats in Oklahoma cannot actually contribute much to the electoral college vote if the state pretty much always votes for their preferred party. This means voters stay home and feeling like their vote does not matter unless they live in a swing state like Florida or Pennsylvania. Candidates also spend a huge amount of time in swing states. This means candidates might fail to consider other states that don\u2019t favor them. My proposal involves awarding a proportion of the electoral votes to each candidate, allowing for the winner of that state to capture more votes than the loser of the state. I do agree that this gets messy in sparse states like Rhode Island and Montana, but this allows for California and Texas to become more elastic in voting for a candidate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States\u2019 electoral college should award votes proportionally rather than winner-takes-all\n","id":"7bb42976-bbfc-4229-aae4-648d9c52ec80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion is not synonymous with power struggle or hypocrisy. There is nothing inherent in religion which causes it to seek power or cause the religious to disregard the religion's laws but teach them anyway. Religion asserts certain ideas to be true. Believing that one thing is true does not cause you to seek power over people believing differently - it is possible for people to respect opinions. Believing in a spiritual idea does not cause you to be a hypocrite either.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dogma, power, and hypocrisy are not unique to organized religions, but exist in any social organization.\n","id":"1b61a4e0-eba2-42c3-a869-d35a9031cfb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Would you say racist jokes show how far we've gone from the segregation era? Would you not say that racist humor without meaning behind them defeats racism itself? That different races laughing together at they're own stereotypes shows how\ufeff we truly feel towards racism, as nothing more but a joke? I am fully aware that this is not always the case. I would never make a racist remark towards an older adult, but among us 18 21 year olds, me and my peers have never shown any disdain towards racist comments. Is it wrong to believe this?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Racist jokes defeat racism.\n","id":"833829a9-4ff9-4d20-822c-f911d76d617c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Hell Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>A second spiritual death occurs when the devil, his angels, and those who choose not to repent are resurrected and judged in God\u2019s presence and then cast out of his presence again a second time forever. See also diagram of relationship between first and second death.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Spiritual death comes to those who haven't repented of their sins or misdeeds. Although men can overcome spiritual death through the atonement of Jesus Christ and through repentance, if they choose not to, they remain spiritually dead and that is Hell\n","id":"f00f565b-c30c-4e54-aba4-6aed5cdc13dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>The people of Sodom and Gomorrah oppressed the poor and needy because they wanted more than they were given.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Believing that things are not good is the root of many if not every sin.\n","id":"5f8892d8-a22d-4565-9124-1040af78df13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To begin, I'd like to say that there are definitely merits to organized religion, such as fostering a sense of community. I'd love to hear any other merits as well, but I'd like to see arguments for how these merits can only be achieved by organized, and not disorganized, religion The biggest problem I see with organized religion is that it is too easily used to control other people. I have the most experience with Islam, but I believe Christianity is also used in that way. As far as other religions such as Judaism go, I don't know much about it so I won't comment but I'd love to hear your perspectives on it. I'll state a few examples of how religion is used for control here Abortions not being allowed as it goes against religious rules. Not being able to convert out of a religion, and being bound by the rules of that religion. This is the case in muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, Malaysia etc. In Malaysia in particular, if you're born muslim or convert at any point in your life, you can't convert to any other religion, and you can be held accountable by Sharia law. Religion being used as a justification loophole for unethical things such as child marriages this occurs all around the world from my understanding. I feel like the scandal with the Catholic church regarding priests sexually preying on young children falls into this category too. Religion being used to scare people into following practices they may not necessarily agree with, such as wearing burkas. I understand that there are women who wear it out of 100 choice, but we can't deny that there are women who are forced into it as well. This point also extends to things like sexuality for example, gay people who live in fear of going to hell . Religion being used to justify extremism and terrorism of course, it's not justifiable to non extremists but religion is what terrorist groups like ISIS use for control . Religion being used to justify cults ie. Scientology, I think the LDS church also falls under this category but I could be mistaken . Religion being used to promote sexism. I feel like religion is something personal. Insofar as the ideals of being a good person etc go, I feel disorganized religion serves those ideals. With disorganized religion, you can use your own judgement to decide what aspects of the religion you believe are true and good, and you can follow those aspects while disregarding the ones you believe to be outdated, sexist, unethical etc. Thoughts? EDIT Messed up the formatting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The cons of organized religion outnumber the pros\n","id":"b672a9f8-0943-4e36-89d4-3b05d728a93c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is sort of a follow up to my previous post  It is disingenuous to say that only male privilege exists as I believe that it is it's own separate issue. RAPE CULTURE Anyways, one might think I'm too young to form an opinion on this as I haven't even graduated high school, but I still haven't seen the evidence or a reasonable argument that can convince me that a rape culture exists. Now, being of Congolese origin and actually living there for about a month vacation , I can confidently say that we don't live in a society that can fit the description of a rape culture. In fact, I think it can be insulting. In the Congo, a.k.a the rape capital of the world, rape is very easily dismissed and can be even be seen as normal in some areas. The opposite is true in the U.S. In our society, rapists are heavily frowned upon and punished. In fact, a rape accusation alone doesn't matter if it's true can devastate a person's career and social status. Even when the truth comes out, things don't always change and the accuser isn't always punished equally punished. Having a high standard for evidence because of how easy it is to ruin someone's life with an absurd allegation rape culture. WAGE GAP I don't believe that the women only make 73 cents to the dollar is legit to use in an argument trying to bring light to systemic oppression. From my understanding, the gap is essentially an earnings gap that is too broad. I also find it interesting how nobody mentions that women do better in their 20s compared to men. Anyways, there are a few reasons that probably create this gap, as opposed to systemic oppression. For example, men work more hours and get into jobs that require more hours. Men ask for raises more often, in fact an economist named Linda Babcock goes into this. They also negotiate for higher starting salaries. Statistically, men take less days and vacations off. The office for National Statistics has disclosed that women on average take five days off a year, as opposed to men who take fewer than four. Stripping out factors like age or profession, women are still 42 more likely to take time off. Contrary to popular belief, women probably aren't discriminated in STEM fields. If this were the case then they would not dominate biology or veterinary practices. Though for some reason people forget the fact that more men apply for STEM jobs, hence why there are more of them. Also, women choose STEM jobs that don't necessarily pay as much as the ones that men chooses. I.e pediatrics or family medicine where women specialize vs radiology or anesthesiology where men specialize . Men also retire at a later age on average. I'm not saying that sexism doesn't exist, but to blame it all on systemic oppression is an oversimplification and just an easy way to blame the difference on other people in my opinion. I also believe it to be false that society does not value women. As for sports, the more money an athlete or team brings in, the more they receive. Ronda Roussey explains this best. She is a women who made more than men in her athletic field because she brought in more viewers. The same primary reason why the NBA makes more money than the WNBA. P.S, if businesses get away with paying women less, then why wouldn't employers hire only women to make more profit? I highly doubt that the employers are so anti woman that they would willingly lose money because of their foolish pride or sexism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that the wage gap is legitimate and I don't believe that we live in a rape culture.\n","id":"7f0a842a-e49d-4524-9529-215f562e6886"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard it said by plenty female friends of mine that they'll never chase a man, some of them even going as far as to say that a man has to do all the work to make something happen. While I might not agree with their stance, I can at least respect it. However, some go even farther, as to claim that the onus of forming a relationship is entirely on the men they're interested in, and if nothing happens, it's the man's fault that they're still single. That just rubs me the wrong way, and it sounds like they're just making excuses. As someone who's been pursued their fair share, I can see the appeal, but I don't see the reason to blame the people you're interested in for being single, especially when you make no effort to pursue them . That is why, I conclude, people who refuse to pursue have only themselves to blame when they're single. Am I being too harsh, Reddit? Because if I am, please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you swear off the \"pursuer\" role in romantic encounters, you have nobody but yourself to blame for being single.\n","id":"6298f75a-1fe5-4631-8b26-d11b57b7353e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The right wing will often times call onto the idea that blacks have less average IQ than whites and attribute this to genetic means. The scientists who push this have been largely discredited. The scientist who I believe is named Richard last name starts with a W I think published a book on this being genetic and 120 members of the scientific community sent a joint letter openly disagreeing with what he says. So with generics out of the way what causes this? The answer is simple, slavery. We have a group of people who were enslaved up until recent memory of our nation and then actively discriminated against up until times where most or our parents were alive especially grandparents which has created a self perpetuating cycle of poverty, crime, and a lack of education. The real key to solving this disparity is to revitalize black communities, open up opportunities for education, and most importantly to keep kids out of gangs. Not only does this probably account for that IQ disparity it damages the image of blacks everywhere and makes it so much easier for white supremacists to hold them up as an example of why blacks are worse even though people of their belief and mentality is what started this entire cycle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The reason for Black IQ Disparities\n","id":"b20b8778-d9c7-41a2-9824-17b866ff51e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all I think I do understand the difference between racism and prejudice. If I'm correct about this and quoting the show Dear White People here , racism describes a system of disadvantages based on race. Black people can't be racist because we don't stand to benefit from such a system . What I take from this is that racism refers more to the institutional and structural problems that black people face that white people simply don't experience, as opposed to simple prejudiced behaviour on the personal level. Simple examples that come to mind might be the socioeconomic disadvantages of being black more likely to grow up in a poor neighbourhood with high crime rates and low education , being more likely to be stopped by police racial profiling , being less employable maybe because you have a black sounding name, stuff like that. So if I'm right so far, I think I understand the difference between prejudice and racism. Where I'm experiencing a disconnect is this idea that this system simply cannot benefit black people. As in never, by definition. When I think about it it doesn't seem possible that black people can never be racist, because there might be some systematic examples that favour black people over white people. I'm not talking about affirmative action or black history month or any of that stuff, I'm not under the illusion that black people have these things because they're getting special treatment. What I'm referring to is more like say, how a white person would struggle to make it in the NBA even before he's shown his ability, because of the benevolent racism that exists to say black people are good at sports and consequently, white people can't jump . I think of eminem trying to make it in the rap world as a white guy and being instantly dismissed on the basis that white people just don't rap, end of story. I imagine a white person wanting to move into a black neighbourhood but being shunned by the community as a whole and not simply by individuals. When we talk about racism being a matter of systematic or institutional prejudice, doesn't that include social communities or cultural stereotypes on the larger scale? Another example if within the boundaries of a community the white person is the minority for example if the neighbourhood was 95 black , wouldn't there be systematic barriers within that community because of personal prejudice that would obstruct that white person from certain things? I assume it would also follow to say asians can't be racist for the same reasons. When I lived in Korea I'm white if you couldn't tell already , my family experienced a lot of the things that constitute racism as far as I can tell. I was excluded from social groups, I wasn't taken seriously by teachers in Taekwondo class because white people can't do martial arts , people would call me white devil on the street for no particular reason, my father wouldn't be invited to certain networking events or social gatherings purely for the Korean men. This felt a lot more like a larger societal issue than simply encountering day to day personal prejudices. White people were largely seen as foreigners and invaders, and therefore relegated to a certain role in that society that had little bearing on personal feelings. Don't get me wrong, none of this is me trying to dismiss the argument with things are equal there's problems on all sides . I'm just trying to consolidate the idea that black people simply cannot in the absolute sense be racist. So if someone can help me understand how that is different, I'd be interested to listen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't understand \"Black people can't be racist\".\n","id":"29f2cdec-9422-4856-9b6d-1320a22712e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>When someone is talking to me, do I have to listen?<|ARGUMENT|>A person may stop sharing their thoughts and feelings with another person if they feel they are not being heard. The two would then lose their ability to communicate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Open channels of communication are important in order for people to feel comfortable.\n","id":"4e03a72a-dc6a-414d-952e-acd3cd76c720"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents of infant Alfie Evan wanted to travel for additional treatment despite the UK High Court finding that the damage to the child's brain was 'catastrophic and untreatable<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The close relationship between a child and parent can make it hard for parents to decide objectively what is best for a child.\n","id":"4c3909b7-d890-451f-9882-2134125c3029"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm an American liberal, but I'm OK with drone strikes. As far as I can tell there are 3 main criticisms of the program Machines shouldn't have the authority to decide which humans to kill. It's a violation of Pakistani and other countries' sovereignty. They cause large numbers of civilian casualties. Here's why I find these unconvincing They don't, as the drones are remotely operated and therefore still have a pilot Pakistan's government is holding on by a thread and can't be relied upon to effectively combat terrorists within their borders. Just look at where Bin Laden was. He might've even received help from them. I don't trust Pakistan's competence nor their motivations. American soldiers are reckless. This has been a problem for centuries. More allied tanks were destroyed by friendly fire than by enemy fire during the first gulf war. Civilian casualties have always been a problem as a result. Here's party airstrike a wedding we bombed in Afghanistan with good old fashioned aircraft. And another party airstrike . Or how about the Granai Massacre committed by a B1 bomber? Or any of the numerous documented instances of mass casualties caused by airstrikes? Even beyond that, the reports from human rights groups tend to inflate the number of civilians killed. They interview family and of course a grieving mother will claim her son was innocently carrying his AK 47 to help him go farming. This is not to say that I believe government estimates, which are wildly underestimated due to the hilariously perverse use of the word combatant . I just think that the rate of civilian casualties is probably comparable to the level it was at before, when planes were killing people instead of drones. But I never heard such vitriolic resentment of airstrikes. Why are drones suddenly so controversial? I watched r politics for some time get into an uproar about the program, but the only thing that has changed is where the pilot sits. I feel like I'm betraying the liberal cause by breaking rank and not condemning it. So am I overlooking something or is this a case where the circlejerk is wrong? Edit I think this thread provides a convincing case that the military alone can't be trusted to independently identify and act on threats, given their track record Edit 2 FlushStr8ed provides a convincing case that drone strikes make no long term progress at all<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm OK with drone strikes.\n","id":"2d3fbacc-f790-4733-a3db-bfdeaf558e6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Meat production uses twice as much land, water, and feed to produce the same amount of calorie intake as other foods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Meat production will always be less calorie-efficient than vegetarian food production, since grain must be produced to feed meat animals.\n","id":"c4fa6970-7139-49c3-8fe5-e7f7943307c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>FACTS Cost to build the wall 21.6b but let's round up to 25b Source Total number of \u201cDreamers\u201d 3.6mm but let's use the stricter 2.1mm number proposed by Republicans Source 90 of dreamers are from Latin America, predominantly Mexico. Source Dreamers, regardless of fault, are here illegally. Resolution Change My View If a \u201cdreamer\u201d wishes to become a U.S citizen, part of the restitution should be a 10 year, 1,200 annual fine 100 per month totalling 12,000. 12,000 x 2.1mm dreamers 25 billion to fund the wall. Failure for a dreamer to pay the annual fine three consecutive years in a row results in immediate deportation. If a dreamer is unable to pay the fine they can find a U.S. sponsor to assume the fines obligation. Any remaining wall construction costs to be assumed by any and all drug money confiscated from within states bordering a US land borders. In effect, Mexico pays for the wall and dreamers capable of providing value to America get to stay in America. Critical feedback encouraged. Confrontations are not. Political Disclosure I'm a conservative<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dreamers can stay, the wall can go up, and Mexico could pay for it.\n","id":"68bac70b-1407-43bc-bb3a-9b04922b4863"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that someone's body is their own, and killing yourself is a fundamental right. I also see the arguments that 'things can get better' or 'think of the people they leave behind' are irrelevant. If someone decides things will not get better, that's their call, and staying alive because of guilt or obligation to other people hardly seems a solution. I just don't think someone killing themselves should be seen as shameful, and the stigma attached to it that only mentally unbalanced people would consider it seems unfair. My view is no doubt effected by my Atheism and the fact that I lost a friend to suicide several years ago, but I just don't see it as some dark, horrendous thing that society should keep hidden and stigmatised. I'm talking about assisted suicide which here in the UK is illegal as well. People should be allowed to 'opt out' whenever they wish too, in my opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see anything wrong with someone deciding to commit suicide.\n","id":"c35160ee-d164-4b88-b526-b834df23703a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>This is not possible when sex work is illegal, as membership of such forums can be used against sex workers either as evidence in legal cases, or by society to \"unmask\" their occupation and attach social stigma.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex workers can set up self-help centers and engage in information-sharing on health, rights and safety concerns.\n","id":"889f7e67-9e22-40be-85a8-90d26769633d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Physical pain and suffering are merely the results of biological processes in the body and the brain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This presupposes that pain and suffering can be needed or necessary, and this is incoherent.\n","id":"a774ed7d-f1bf-48a7-87cd-44fdf4dbe09f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Remembrance Day or Veteran's Day if you're American is coming up soon, and with it comes discussions about soldiers and wars. I've heard people tell me that if Britain or Russia or the United States, or whatever other country you care to name, hadn't stopped Hitler during World War Two, he would have gone on to take over the world. I just don't think this would have been possible for many reasons, most of the logistical. Before I get into them however, I'm just going to say that I am not diminishing the sacrifice of the brave men and women who gave their lives in the Second World War. I just don't think it would have turned out as bad as people make it out if we had lost. Conquering the whole world would be an extreme accomplishment that has yet to be achieved by any nation throughout all of history. Other countries that were said to have conquered the whole world such as Rome, Britain, or the Mongols actually only held a large portion of land and never anything close to the whole earth. These are the reasons why I don't believe the Nazis could have done it This is a weak point, but it bears mentioning because history has proved it true countless times. Never start a land war in Asia. Land wars in Asia almost never work out for the attackers Unless you're the Mongols as John Green would say . Conquering the whole world requires massive resources and supply lines. In order to take over everything you need enormously long supply lines that are constantly being bombarded by the enemy and it would take forever to get supplies to the front lines. While the Nazis would have been able to build more infrastructure as they went along, that would require an incredible amount of resources and time. I just don't think it's feasible. Lastly, Hitler would have needed the largest army ever assembled. If you're conquering the whole planet, you'll be losing an awful lot of soldiers. Even if he conscripted every able bodied person in Germany it wouldn't be enough. He'd have to take conscripts from the nations that he conquered and that's where the problem comes from. The people you force into service from defeated nations will have absolutely no loyalty to you or your army. They'll have no fighting spirit, no moral, and no devotion. There would have be countless mutinies and revolts from within Hitler's own ranks that he'd have to deal with on top of fighting at the front. The foreign conscripts might even change sides during a battle and attack their German commanders. An armed forces like that would be the biggest powder keg the world had ever seen. Sure, in the past countries have conscripted citizens of defeated nations, but never on such a scale as would be needed here. I just don't believe it would work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hitler couldn't have taken over the world during World War 2.\n","id":"bf7c296e-f61b-4266-80f8-68bd77c27624"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I spend a lot of time thinking about Rupert Holmes' late '70s hit Escape The Pi\u00f1a Colada Song . It's a seemingly innocent ballad commonly accepted as a romantic love song but I beg to differ. When you listen to the lyrics you realize the two characters in this song, the singer and his girlfriend possibly wife, but let's give these assholes the benefit of the doubt and assume the selfish bastards haven't tied the knot , are basically planning to cheat on each other. Never mind sitting down for a reasonable discussion or just flat out breaking it off with the other person no, they have every intention to cheat and fuck some stranger on the dunes of the cape roughly around midnight. How am I supposed to not hate these clowns? Aside from that, we're informed at the beginning of the song that this laudable couple has been together for too long. We can assume from this information, then, that during this too long relationship the couple never partook in any of the following together drinking Pi\u00f1a Coladas getting caught in the rain having sex at 12 a.m. on some fucking dunes drinking champagne enjoying the feel of the ocean Considering they both enjoy the aforementioned things and they've been together for a while, wouldn't you think they'd maybe try to, I dunno, share some fucking champagne and screw on the beach one night? Or at least vocalize their enjoyment of that stuff? Do these fuckers even talk to each other? But hey, I get it. Two people can spend nearly a century together and die not knowing everything about each other, so it's understandable. Again, let's give them the benefit of the doubt. However, do you mean to tell me these guys have been dating for a while now and don't realize that they both dislike yoga and health food? I think exercise and eating well would come up at some point during a serious relationship, but then again considering the fact that these idiots are too goddamn lazy to even open their mouths at each other, that's not really too surprising. Okay, so they hit their bumps, they've got their flaws. What relationship doesn't? Even so, I'd like to remind you of my original point these people are actively plotting to cheat on each other. At this point I don't know who's worse. Initially the dude is the obvious candidate for Most Contemptible Piece of Shit, but then you realize the gal was the one who published that letter in the personal column. So she kinda started it, right? And not just that, but her personal ad was pretty fucking specific. Making love at midnight in the dunes of the cape? Clearly she's done this shit before, and my guess is it was very recently and with somebody who clearly wasn't the singer, so cheating probably isn't a new game to these people. These horrible, horrible people. Oh, and don't even get me started on that bullshit description of their meeting at O'Malley's. That little look of surprise and chuckle followed by Oh wow, it's you I didn't know you liked shitty drinks and getting sand in every orifice of your sweaty naked body No way, man. You know damn well that's not how that would go down. That encounter would not have been anywhere near as friendly. In the real world this song would've ended as an explanation as to why he's got a black eye, she's got a fat lip, and both of them are banned from O'Malley's for life. I don't buy it, man. Maybe they were just real fucking high the whole time or maybe they're robots incapable of feeling anything besides self indulgence and sexual desire. One thing's for sure, though, and that's that neither of these dense motherfuckers should have the nerve to request someone with half a brain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The two characters in \"Escape The Pi\u00f1a Colada Song\" are flagrant pieces of shit\n","id":"b39f9ceb-44f3-4401-b3ac-cc940cee4258"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cities have bike share?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people who use shared bikes are motivated by the added health benefits and exercise. Therefore it is most likely that walking a few minutes for such active people would not be a big problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Extra walking on the beginning\/end of a trip may have health benefits\n","id":"c6be008c-5bf0-488b-8bdf-b54b436c0028"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is drag turning mainstream hurting LGBT rights?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2019, a Philedephia nightclub began 'Gender Queery a drag event created specifically for trans and non-binary performers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Drag is social commentary, political activism, expressionist art, and much of it is trans inclusive.\n","id":"f363aa19-7ba0-407d-9a3e-71c1d9cdee48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone can acknowledge the war crimes this country has committed. There are no secrets in 2013, people join the military fully aware of our current combat engagements throughout the globe. and if they'd take a moment to research these events they'd quickly realize that 99 of them are not for the benefit of the average American citizen or to protect their liberty or freedom, but rather to serve the interests of our ruling classes or to further some internal political agenda to maintain the electoral status quo. They are essentially tools of the government to keep themselves in power. The military is just the muscle of the feds they don't stand for anything, or have any sort of just ideological basis for their existence, they simply exist to serve the interests of our government. In a way soldiers are amoral, simply doing what they are told. But the people telling them what to do are fuckin' evil, and so, by extension, they too are evil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Fuck the troops.\"\n","id":"9eed2c69-e769-43cd-b8d4-7638d0ec768b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate can last generations because of a communication breakdown on their definition of a religious idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People have been led to do terrible things in the name of religion.\n","id":"244413a8-85f7-4edf-93c4-d59c13b1a7b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>There are a number of theodicies which reasonably argue for God permitting evil in the world. The burden of proof is on the one arguing for the logical problem of evil to show that all of these explanations are insufficient to explain God's actions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's impossible to say with any acceptable certainty that the state of the world isn't justified from God's perspective.\n","id":"009c8dbb-214d-46d3-939c-f7adc9ec9ea7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build an international space elevator?<|ARGUMENT|>Even though the minimum height would be 50 miles from Earth, on a space escalator that is trying to avoid issues would create a long commute due to the angle slant<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An orbital ring would probably need a space escalator to get to it.\n","id":"6993ce15-e16c-4245-bc12-0dae1bf7ba59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should culturally diverse writers be mandatory in English curricula?<|ARGUMENT|>Cambridge University has recently outlined plans to diversify its reading list in an attempt to minimise the risk of perpetuating institutionalised racism by branching out from its traditional colonial and canonical curriculum.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A more diverse curriculum is linked with greater tolerance and acceptance on the part of the students.\n","id":"4de8cacb-05c2-4a8e-b4be-9989178de8cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Climate Change Be Reversed?<|ARGUMENT|>The biodiversity loss cannot be recovered if animals go extinct. If an animal is unknown without their DNA documented somewhere.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Statistics and trends are showing that climate change is irreversible\n","id":"94634c2e-e2c8-42cf-8562-41049a7c62d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Shark Culling Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Nets can become artificial habitats for marine wildlife - attracting a variety of fish and other marine life and adding to the health of the ocean.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nets can be installed to reduce encounters between humans and sharks.\n","id":"3db51033-4314-439c-9502-27952001e6f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey y'all, I'm hoping this is something you can change my view on. While it's too early to call the upcoming election by any means in terms of who will actually win the title of President, I think it's pretty clear that it's going to be a Clinton V. Trump deal I don't want to say for sure, the numbers seem to be pointing this way . I don't plan on voting for either as I don't foresee any big differences in my own life from either holding the seat, but one thought I can't help but hold is that a Trump presidency will be bad for Brown Americans. Indian, Pakistani, Lebanese Admittedly some look more caucasian, but that's not really relevant , Persian, etc I know there are A LOT more I'm missing out on . Looking at the footage of Trump supporters at rallies although I've only seen a few videos, so this isn't necessarily representative of ALL Trump supporters and the current global political climate specifically in regards to terrorism, I feel like a Trump presidency will inspire a lot more open prejudice towards Brown Americans whether they're Muslim or not. A lot of the basis of my view is when I think about the average American even myself included , we don't really seem like the kind of people to try and differentiate between all ethnic groups and their various religious practices. As a result, I expect anyone who is of a brown tone of skin will face some form of discrimination for religious practices they may not even be associated with. To sum up since I feel I might have rambled If Trump is elected, a lot of hatred towards Brown people living in America will start to show itself whether it is accurate or not. edit TO CLARIFY, I DO NOT BELIEVE TRUMP HIMSELF TO BE NECESSARILY RACIST. Just taking a glance at the groups he appeals to by playing on their fears in regards to terrorism, I believe the racism and ignorance of those groups will become more prevalent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel if Donald Trump wins the election, life will be significantly less comfortable and potentially more dangerous for Brown Americans\n","id":"387ea639-89c9-48c8-a424-cace74b4c047"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>R2D2 downloaded the archives of the Empire that contained the locations of old Jedi temples in A New Hope when he was plugged-in to the Death Star's computer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At no point is it revealed that Luke is the one who made the map.\n","id":"084bf84e-63cc-4066-b26d-6244fdfdebbb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>There are people who just aren't smart enough to tell the difference between right and wrong, particularly where an issue is some shade of grey or foul mix of black and white \u2013 for instance pro-choice vs pro-life. Some religions give these people an easy out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion serves as a moral crutch for those people unable to recognise right from wrong\n","id":"6725904c-3d41-4dc8-8c7b-d920a1dc8740"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, first let me start by saying that I am a feminist, and I'm not here to debate feminism itself. I've done that plenty of times and I've never heard a compelling argument against the feminist ideas that I subscribe to. However, I do believe that calling it feminism these days is no longer an accurate way of describing these set of ideas and research. I'll begin with a brief history. First wave feminism actually was about women, exclusively. Women wanted the same rights that men had, which were denied to them for no reason other than their gender. Calling this feminism is accurate. Second wave feminism which has its problems, but is, by and large, correct and good was mostly about violence against women, and defining rape, and things of that nature. It was also about women exclusively, but shouldn't have been because men can be raped, for example . However, these crimes were committed by men against women far more often than against men Third wave feminism, however, is about gender roles and gender expectations, and has gone on to include the issues of other minorities, and how patriarchal assumptions about men or women are harmful to everyone . And that's the key idea here postmodern feminism really does encompass everyone. There is a reason that there are so few straight male hair dressers and so few female politicians, and it's not because men make bad hair dressers and women make bad politicians. Because feminism isn't really about women anymore, but gender roles and expectations which I believe women suffer from moreso than men, but I don't think that matters to the point I'm making , calling our movement feminism doesn't seem accurate. I don't know what I'd change the name to if the decision were left up to me. Egalitarianism isn't appropriate because feminism is not just an ideology, but a science unto itself. At any rate, feminism is an outdated term, and the ideology part of it would benefit greatly by changing the way it styles itself as more outwardly inclusive of everyone. I want to reiterate that this isn't a critique of feminism as a field of study or an ideology just the name. , r  gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think \"feminism\" is the right word for it anymore, and calling that makes it difficult to achieve the ideology's modern goals.\n","id":"61b435c7-3aa9-4fc1-90fb-dab91dc3cea5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I noticed that the past few days the top posts in all the default news feeds are arguably anti Israel. Every time I've ever gotten into an argument, almost unilaterally, there has been an overwhelming backlash to anything said that could even be construed as right of center, much less far right. Fox News is always said to be a bias TV station, even though it's the only station that has even a modicum of right leaning ideals. No one will ever admit here that it is only seen as biased because almost every other news media outlet is left of center or far left biased. I watch many different stations particularly so I don't fall into confirmation bias, but any self proclaimed or otherwise liberal I've ever talked to always says that Fox is biased. It's trash. Well I for one find MSNBC to be nothing more than a White House talking points shill but I still watch it because of it's a dissenting opinion. I feel as if most Liberals and conservatives too, let's be fair I've talked to are so blind to any other point of view they intentionally block them out instead of constantly challenging their own point of view, a lynch pin trait of critical thinking. I mean, am I going crazy here?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit, and also the major cable news networks, are, by and large, predominately biased towards the left, but most people are too blind to see it.\n","id":"4f698e7d-90cb-4b6d-ad25-65b4ed18cf84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Causes and effects are events in the universe. They occur at a given time, in a given place. There is no event where and when 'The universe began to exist'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The law of causality works within the universe, where time exists.\n","id":"cac091e3-8422-47a1-a1e9-546744c9702c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Political strategists have been trying to figure out what factors led to Hillary Clinton's loss ever since the election. Liberals tend to point towards the Russia hacks and Podesta emails whereas conservatives say it was because Trump was a man of the people and whatnot. I disagree with both, I think that the main reason Hillary Clinton lost was because Hillary Clinton was simply a weak candidate. Regardless of who the Republicans nominated, I'm positive that Clinton would've lost. Here are my 3 main points on why Hillary lost. She had no real message. Most average voters who aren't too involved in politics could not name one of Clinton's policies. Maybe a vague equality or something like that, but other candidates had easy to grasp policies that they drilled into your head. Everyone knows Trump wants to build a wall or that Bernie wants free college. She had no charisma. Successful politicians like Obama and even Bill Clinton are very charismatic people. Donald Trump aswell knows how to talk to his supporters. Hillary Clinton for the whole election always came off as robotic and just saying what she thought she needed to. She's had a turbulent past. This is probably the most obvious. Everyone can name at least a couple Clinton scandals. The email scandal, Benghazi, and need I get into the conspiracies about Clinton related deaths? In general, Hillary Clinton had all the traits of the loser in a presidential race. If someone asked you, Would you elect a politician with no charisma, message, and is plagued with scandals? , I'm sure you would say no if you're a reasonable person. I'm not saying other factors like the DNC hacks, Podesta emails, etc weren't factors, but if none of my main points were true, I'm sure Hillary would've won by a comfortable margin. EDIT 4. Bad strategy. A lot of you pointed out that she did win the popular vote and thus it wasn't her fault. I still do think it was her fault she lost the electoral college vote. She didn't put enough focus in key defensive swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. She targeted states she didn't need to win so she could extend the reach of the Democratic Party in those states. She should've stuck to mainly defending Obama states so it is still her fault<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Above all, Hillary Clinton lost the election because of Hillary Clinton herself\n","id":"814caa8d-5e60-4675-9f5f-d75ca432ea24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm indifferent if they change their name or not, what bothers me is the selective informant. There are many sports teams that use historical ethnically regional names. I feel that the NC Tarheels is far more offensive term and it is getting no heat to change. A tarheel is what they called poor people from NC because some couldn't afford shoes so they put tar sap on their feet to protect them from the elements or just had dirty feet. To me it is the equivalent to calling a person of Latino decent a wetback. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the Washington Redskins have to change their name then so should the NC Tarheels.\n","id":"7182f355-4f69-4ee7-9929-84aa3e006988"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should pet stores only sell dogs and cats from shelters?<|ARGUMENT|>This audit also found that, in cases where problematic breeders were punished, they were often given the minimum punishment possible by investigators p. 2. This meant that the AWA does not create significant enough discincentives to prevent violations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The legal punishment and fine for selling cats and dogs illegally does not act as a deterrent.\n","id":"19982a21-5673-4db0-8c52-23f7e22c917e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you're out of the loop, you can search for black twitter on Imgur and you'll find multiple posts about this. There are some funny moments, yes, but in general, black twitter posts are extremely racist in disguise, of course, since we tend to believe all posters of black twitter content are black people if so, they can use any kind of language they want without being offensive, right? . These tweets are also demeaning, no only to black people but also to women. All you have to do is go through a few of these to notice a trend An overall glorification of dishonesty towards one's romantic partner, but only if it's a man against a woman. Men can have side chicks for example and are always finding a way to fool their girlfriends and wives. We are therefore led to believe things like this are essential parts of black culture. That sexism, veiled racism and just general prejudice , dishonesty, exaggerated sexuality, that all these are essential parts of black culture. I don't believe that is true. I am no white knight, I have a sense of humor, I'm just saying I feel this black twitter trend is going too far. Black people who don't identify with how they're depicted in these posts should say something. It's amazing how people on the internet can be so sensitive about things that don't matter, but turn a blind eye to something happening right in front of them. Edit Link to Imgur wasn't working EDIT 2 I just want to reinforce, again, that I am not referring to any subreddit in particular . Actually, most of what I've seen was on Imgur. I'm just talking about a phenomena and its jokes. So, please, don't be offended if you're from a specific subreddit or subscribe to it. If I came to , it was because I wanted to reflect on my own opinions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Black Twitter\" trend is not only demeaning to black people but also extremely racist\n","id":"62921ec5-18fc-424e-934d-2c9c5e9d2e7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Muppet Christmas Carol the best Muppet Movie?<|ARGUMENT|>Caine is tributed for his performance as Scrooge as he manages to closely stick to Dicken's script while being constantly surrounded by singing foam and rubber.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Michael Caine gives one of the best depictions of Ebenezer Scrooge\n","id":"43447177-9729-447a-bcf0-a358b217b7c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>Some UK researchers report that they have already been 'frozen out of making grant applications to Horizon 2020, the EU's Research and Innovation programme.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Horizon 2020 serves as an example of a research avenue that the UK might not be able to access in the future.\n","id":"d581b800-7229-47cf-be9e-fc61bbf78dbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note Disclaimer This isn't necessarily my view point, I've just been tampering with a couple incoherent thoughts and positions as a psychology major in University who finished his first year. To start off, I should begin by defining intelligence to minimize confusion and ambiguity. I am using intelligence to describe a broad range of skill sets that are mental functions resulting in accurate and practical application e.g. predicting based on evidence, logical coherency, memory, and, yes, even the completion of IQ tests . So you can interchange intelligence with mental cap ability . I think we can all agree that much of what we are is attributed to our genetic structure. Melanin count, facial features, height and weight, blood pressure, and even our tolerance to foreign substances e.g. alcohol, diseases, etc. is at least somewhat attributed to what's been innately passed down to us by our ancestors via what's been selected for genetically. The brain, like any other part of our body, is structured and formed according to our genetic makeup. That is why a chimp who shares 98.5 ? of the same DNA as us has significant limitations to mental capability when compared with us . We observe that intelligence isn't level within racial groups and that, even when having comparable upbringing nutrition education etc., individuals can differ greatly from each other when it comes to brain functions. In addition, one can say the same thing about physical competence in tasks We observe that athleticism isn't level within racial groups and that, even when having comparable upbringing nutrition training etc., individuals can differ greatly from each other when it comes to physical functions . Ok, I hope you're all still with me now because here is where it might become controversial. Just as we have physical and mental differences attributed to genetics within racial groups, I argue that, as well as physical, we have mental differences yes, including intelligence across racial groups. Obviously, we have superficial physical differences across racial groups, but it seems to go further than that. For example, take the 10 second barrier for the 100m sprint. There has been only one man of European descent to break it and there have been no asians. Yet, dozens of men of Western African descent alone have broken it and continue to push the record lower and lower. Likewise, peoples genetically selected for colder climates tend to have larger girth than those in warmer climates and, resultantly, world class heavyweight lifters are often Caucasian Northern Asia, etc. Differences in physical cap ability across races can be attributed to genetics by factoring out differences resulting from external factors like nutrition, mental simulation during critical stages, etc. Isn't it also true that what genes have been selected for in our history influences the makeup and functioning of another physical part of our body, the brain? Perhaps if memory or prediction making or specific problem solving was more important to survival in some regions of the world, people carrying those would be more likely to survive and reproduce. Perhaps certain cultures and norms dictated certain behaviour and standards and indirectly weeded out people prone to have dissenting inadequate mental functions. Is it that absurd to proclaim that there may be a partially innate basis for mental differences across racial groups? After all, we do share different genes. Think about the significant difference that 1.5 of unshared DNA makes between humans and chimps. The absence presence of a single gene can make a world of difference just think of down syndrome . Isn't it very possible that, like some of the subtle physical differences we see between and across races, subtle mental variations between and across races have an innate and internal source. Clarification I am in no way comparing the human chimp disparity to race x race y disparity. Just used it to make a point since they are our closest non human relative. I am not implying that intelligence makes single race better worse more valuable less valuable more useful less useful, etc. than any other race. I am not implying that, for example, something like an IQ test shows that one race is generally more intelligent than another. Even if intelligence is blatantly different across races due to genetic structure, anything beyond that is speculation i.e. Any assumption that race x is more intelligent than race y would be mere speculation at this point P.S. might edit later when I read over it again. So forgive any grammatical errors for the time being. Nathafae Edit Shit, I screwed up the title. Oh German, why do you spontaneously make me capitalize nouns in English.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that, like physicality, Intelligence innately differs across racial groups.\n","id":"7039b941-2bc7-4671-a717-2297bb88a9b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should pet stores only sell dogs and cats from shelters?<|ARGUMENT|>'No-kill' shelters are regularly having to turn away animals, or else are warehousing them in cramped, unsanitary, and dangerous conditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"No-kill\" animal shelters face several issues due to overpopulation.\n","id":"16b2780b-bda1-4758-b771-47028b46df7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>OK so they didn't like me on askLeo, I'm going to try here but, I've been drinking sence Thursday so let me know if this is unreadable and I'll take it down. With continued cases of police misconduct, excessive force, ect appearing in the news we are told that this is a minority of cops and that most are good people. I have a hard time believing that statement. In my mind as long as the blue wall of silence is a thing then every cop not speaking out is just as guilty of murder as the ones who shoot first and ask questions later. Both of my encounters with police have been ridiculous, and they seemed to have some sort of hero god complex. First time I got pulled over I had been doing 5 over still less than surrounding traffic without realizing, OK a bit annoying but technically my fault I'm not going to argue and just take the ticket. He then proceed to interrogate me as to what biker gang I belong to hint I'm not in any , despite riding alone with no patch the harley was enough to set this guy off. I left with two tickets, speeding and obstruction of traffic love that combo . Second time I had the displeasure of a police encounter he had started everything pleasantly enough and wanted to give me a fixit ticket for no turn signals, in as politie of a manner as I am able I In formed him that due to my bikes age they were not a legal requirement local law, my arm was considered a manual signaling device , hey I wasn't taking the ticket for something I didn't do, besides I thought it was a fun obscure fact to share. Well this turned out to be a bad idea as imidiatly he turned into an asshole giving me something like 7 needless tickets witch later I got all of overturned. Like I said the attitude these people gave off was of utter self importance better than thou arrogance. But enough of me alone. A common slogan for police is to serve and protect , it has been proven in court that police have no duty to do either of these in cases like Jessica Gonzales Joseph Lozito. It's absolutely legal for a cop to lie about the law not allowed to film police. Really we know better by this point . Ignorance of the law is only an excuse if you are on the side making the arrest. Police have been known to get away with everything from illegal parking to murder, but don't you dare question them because they know how to threaten you with endless timely costly and incorrect allegations. I can't remember details atm but I recall reading about an incident where a man war rear ended by a cruiser and was the one deemed at fault despite several witnesses to the contrary. Tldr recap We are told that the those less then stellar examples are a minority of cops and that most are good people. I have a hard time believing that statement due to cover up and volume of incidents. I would like to be proven wrong. I would like to believe that I can trust the people who are given the potentially lethal power to enforce the law. Please give me some reasons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"police officers are not trustworthy people.\n","id":"69991472-d6ca-4a95-921f-e26cf2e3b8e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a numbers person and I would like to argue this by first looking at the argument presented by BLM as it relates to police brutality. If I have misinterpreted their argument, please tell me and I will reconsider the issue with the proper interpretation. Their argument is as follows Black people are victims of a disproportionate amount of lethal police brutality. It is disproportionate because the black population is smaller and the amount killed by police is therefore a bigger piece than that of the white population. My problem with this argument What they have essentially done here is ignored the concept of individuality. Instead of treating each black person as an equal to each white person, they have sized up each person and basically made them the equivalent of a block of wood. Their intentions being that for equality to be achieved, the concept of black and white must be equal. NOT the individuals of either of these groups. Represented visually Racist equality How I feel it should be actually be done I'll use actual statistics because I can make the argument in a smoother manner. This counter is all that is really needed. Blacks killed followed by how many were unarmed 123 12 Whites killed followed by how many were unarmed 238 18 Percent of blacks killed by police while unarmed 9.75 Percent of whites killed by police while unarmed 7.56 Ratio of blacks to whites 9.75 7.56 1.29 Multiply by 7 for whole numbers 9 black people per 7 white people are killed. The real problem is in the fact that there are 2 more blacks killed than whites. Why is this a better comparison? Because everyone's life is treated equally. You are not treated as this lifeless piece of a group with a label. You are treated as an individual human being. True equality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Black Lives Matter' is makes a weak and racist argument for what equality really is.\n","id":"3af5219f-e14a-47c4-8502-0f2663339132"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know that a younger version of Jean along with the other four founding X Men were brought back in All New X Men Vol. 1 2012 but considering the differences between the time displaced characters and their full grown counterparts, they seem to be treated as entirely different characters. The emphasis on the teenaged version of Jean also looks to be a significant reason why Marvel has seemingly not shown interest in using a more classic incarnation of Jean in the main canon in recent years. The original version of Jean Grey was killed off in New X Men 150 back in 2003. A subsequent miniseries released little over a year later dealt with Jean's connection with the Phoenix but the old Jean Grey has mostly not been addressed since. I know death in comics is not a permanent thing but there some instances where characters actually do stay dead a long time such as Kraven the Hunter, Jason Todd, and Thunderbird. I've noticed several sentiments about the character that may hamper her chances of returning. There's quite a few people out there both in the comics industry and fanbase that believe that the end of Jean Grey's story should have been the Dark Phoenix Saga back in 1980. There's also people who believe the only thing compelling about the old Jean was the relationship tensions with Cyclops and Wolverine. There's also others out there who have considered her previous instances of death and rebirth a worn out concept although she hasn't shown up in a decade. While Jean Grey still has some fans, over the years I've gotten the impression that she has been a polarizing character. I personally like the character myself and would like to see if there's a chance that Marvel would ever revitalize the original Jean Grey and utilize her in a fresh new direction distinct from the old stories that some are still sick of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The original Jean Grey in Marvel's X-Men comics will most likely not be coming back for a very, very long time if ever.\n","id":"412c0247-5188-4c63-abf3-d6dda0c7da6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard about dyslexia many times, and I'm curious about what it actually is. The more I've tried to investigate it, the more I've come to doubt if it actually exists at all, mostly because I've never found a coherent definition. The three kinds of definition I've found so far have fallen into 3 categories Totally vague and incoherent. Basically, having poor literacy. Notice there's nothing distinguishing it from standard poor literacy. Having poor literacy, despite normal intelligence. As if you can't have standard poor literacy unless you are unintelligent. What would it take to change my mind? A definition, and a description of a test that would objectively distinguish between dyslexia and standard poor literacy. gt This is a footnote from the  moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing EDIT Wow this really has sucked so far I'm just looking for a clear definition of dyslexia. So far I've seen a LOT of comments not addressing that. So far mind not changed perhaps there exists something called dyslexia, perhaps there doesn't. So far, haven't received any definition of what it actually is . EDIT 2 Got some leads. Looking forward to checking them out<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There doesn't exist an objectively-testable disorder called dyslexia, distinct from poor literacy.\n","id":"b6cadb0e-8b61-452e-81a1-f7f28ed7317f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm sure we can all agree that the United States has done some horrible things. Treatment of the Natives, treatment of the Filipino people, Vietnam, injustices towards Democratic governments like Iran, etc. But in comparison to what the alternatives were, I think the United States is the best choice. The Soviet Union and China's brand of Communism killed millions upon millions of their own people and set their economies back decades. In the grand scheme of things, the West's fight against Communism was not a bad thing. Without America's intervention, much more of Europe would had become vassal states to the Soviet Union. South Korea would be in the hands of a crazy dictator. The US gave the Philippines its independence in the 1930's would Spanish Fascists have done the same? Japan and Germany were rebuilt into completely independent countries. In contrast, the USSR just completely trashed East Germany. China is gearing up right now for a resource war against Japan, and purposefully fuels anti Japanese sentiment. Nowadays, the EU seems to be a great contender for world super power. But they seem a bit too fractured to be able to do much in a timely fashion. I don't particularly trust China to think about global interests over their own national interests. Their form of government is also more or less an oligarchy. They are hyper nationalistic, much more so than America. Thus, the US remains the best counter to tyranny in the world. Europe, China, Russia, are either too corrupt, too amoral, or too weak.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States is the least-bad choice for World SuperPower\n","id":"2eb4bd41-ea30-4ead-a31f-4981f7d5d89d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People have always told me to give my seat to the elderly, the disabled and to the women with children. I get why the elderly and the disabled might require a special treatment because it wasn't their choice to be old or disabled. But the mother most probably chose to be a mother and knew the consequences of bearing a child. She should have been ready before making that decision. This is not limited to women. No parent deserves any special treatment just because they have a baby kid with them. Buy your own car, have enough money to raise your kid without needing assistance from other people before you decide to have a kid. Nobody has to do something extra just because you decided to have a baby.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mothers do not deserve any special treatment.\n","id":"c5abdc51-25e1-4668-bf40-32332eb9e5fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Countries Taking In Refugees Confiscate their Valuables?<|ARGUMENT|>Angela Merkel - who has a very good international reputation - is traded as a likely successor to Ban Ki-moon as UN Secretary General.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A good international reputation leads to more representation in international organizations.\n","id":"10c6357e-1e5c-40b2-8a16-e42b10aab9e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>An example of this would be white people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Both during and after slavery they were considered worse than black people and treated as such. The extreme poverty of these folk which continues to this day, and the lack of anyone to speak for them make them a prime candidate for reparations. Oddly, black people would be participants in contributing to these reparations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US track record of exploitation is quite long. Paying slavery reparations would be a slippery slope for other groups to claim the same.\n","id":"f0efe140-fbc2-45a8-a9fb-631bf98d7676"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>Family members who fear being misinterpreted as encouraging the patient to die may overcompensate in the other direction by insisting that they take any life-extending measure available.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A pervasive culture that prioritises the extension of life above all else puts severe pressure on patients to accept life-extending treatment.\n","id":"f8306f9e-780e-4d3e-88d6-a015035323fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people are doing this on social media anyway, it won't be too long before a great majority of folks might agree to be a part of this database voluntarily.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The database makes persons of different races, religions, and sexualities more visible than ever before which helps to build empathy This in turns creates more tolerance of difference.\n","id":"d60c1719-8ac6-467b-b799-5af66acbd31e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see no reason why government should not impose strict speed limiters on all sold cars. If speed limits are set as to 70 mph, why cars are allowed to go 120 mph. For me there is absolutely no reason to allow vehicles to be able to go that much faster then it is allowed by the law. Wouldn't it be much safer to have 80mph limiter installed on all cars. There are examples of manufactures limiting they top performance cars to 250 kmph, so why not go one step further and make the roads a bit safer by limiting the speed even further.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe government should force speed limiters on all sold cars.\n","id":"1a97172b-bb83-4be7-a75d-da1a93e0dcd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>The amendment says that a well-regulated militia is necessary for the security of a free state. The right to bear arms is based on that assumption. But the assumption is clearly wrong, since there hasn't been a well-regulated militia in the US for quite a while.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Second Amendment has to be understood in its historical context which involved militias - this context has changed.\n","id":"a229aaba-02fa-4e06-8ec0-90a255c47d79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mission to the Moon or Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>Estimates by NASA's top scientists conclude that the travel-time to get to Mars is about 2-3 months one way, which equals out to 4-6 months round trip.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Traveling to Mars takes far longer than to the moon.\n","id":"0d3783cc-13be-4350-a50e-ff818d34a364"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Among some religious creeds, child abuse and neglect is more common when certain variables are found: authoritarianism, isolation and fear.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Celibacy can have a negative impact on mental health and may be a contributing factor in sexual abuse.\n","id":"ba12a995-b29b-40d4-ab98-957057834c5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate speech relies on the idea that not all people are created equal and therefore cannot be legally protected.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Absolute freedom is not desirable because it necessarily infringes on the rights of others.\n","id":"4f930961-fa41-434c-9fd8-cbfa06a87a8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Children have problems understanding the abstract concepts of a democratic society, because the decision processes needed to vote are based on being able to understand concepts and their impact on society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children are not able to make such important and complex election decisions.\n","id":"821071fa-0592-45a4-b175-bbb88c053eed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm talking about art like simply a random latrine, random globs strokes of paint, a cup of water being placed on the floor, etc. The argument for modern art seems to be two fold, one art is subjective and thus anything can be art as long as I believe it is. And two trying to define what is and isn't art or trying to put a label on it is too constrictive and squashes any changes in innovation and art style. My first point I'd like to bring up is a misunderstanding of the definition of subjective, contrary to popular belief it isn't synonymous with opinion. All Opinions are Subjective, but not everything that is subjective is based on opinion. What is Subjective can indeed be based off one's personal feelings and impressions that however does not mean that subjectivity DOESN'T have form. Subjective simply means the impression of an object is based on the frame of reference and impression on the subject, and thus it may not be the same as another person. If I witness the same event as another person. My recall of the event is Subjectively different than the other person, Even more I attach an interpretation. HOWEVER it does not mean the scene we did not witness wasn't real and exist outside us. Basically what I'm saying is while it's true that art can be subjective in HOW we interpret it and what we think of it, the object of the art itself that we are interpreting is an actual object. I would also like to point out even two people's different subjective interpretations may be different and may not 100 fall into Objective reality. That our Subjective interpretations still have a form or mode of reasoning behind them. One can have a system of logic that is consistent and built on reasonable axioms, but these self system of reasoning can still be divorced from external reality, this is the difference between Philosophy and Science. While both are trying to be consistent and logical in modeling the world, Science is attempting to verify with external observation, that if repeated by different subjects will yield similar results. Thus is independent of the subjective experience of the observer. Thus I submit that simply saying that anything can be art because it's subjective is like confusing how one views a work, with the work itself. This get's into debates of course of the author's intent vs the audience. I also feel that one can have Form and still be Subjective Since one argument is trying to apply form to something ruins the subjectivity. Even if something is made to not be photo realistic or give a perfect impression of reality Like Impressionism It still has a form, the form is simply a creation from the artist's own impression rather than an imitation of reality. To use an example if there was a theoretical universe with different laws of physics then the ones that governed ours, that universe would have an inherently different form than ours and if it didn't exist only exist in the mind of the subject, in other words it is neither objective nor empirical but it has form. Even many subjective forms might try to imitative objective reality in one way, but choose to ignore or exaggerate certain elements to bring that element of reality to the forefront never the less, it still has form. To Simply say anything can be art, is too in effect destroy the purpose of having a word, which is too distinguish and identify one idea distinct from another, if everything can be art what is even art if we cannot compare it against what isn't art. Even if we try to say Some art is more artistic then others can we really do that if we don't have something that isn't art at one end of the scale as a point of zero. When you literally cannot tell modern art from a random glob of paint on a canvas, I have to ask how does one discriminate what pieces of art are more valuable than others, what one's we choose to put on display and celebrate, and if art is truly only decided by personal opinion, then how can one truly say how valid one interpretation of art is over another, unless it has some form to compare one's interpretation to. To go more deeply into the defining what is and isn't art shuts down creativity. I say this, there is nothing to say that definition cannot change and evolve, or that muliple different forms cannot be added. However it is another to say that definitions ought to be flexible or that there can be alternate forms, and that there is no definition or forms at all. Without them you lack a language and no way to communicate. Like it or not, definitions primary purpose is not to ruin people's fun it's so we are all on the same page and can communicate, definitions can change, but the two parities must understand the semantic meaning between the word. Even if one disagrees with it at least they understand what the other is TRYING to say. TL DR one must not use Subjectivity as an excuse that art should not have form, and one must not confuse the concept of form as a legalistic inflexible system, but as a toolkit to build your own interpretation or style. Style in of itself is something we try to recognize based on reoccurring elements, patterns, or motifs that mark an individual, group, or system of ideologies presence. Reality is one form, but one can have a form without it lining up 100 with reality, and there can be many different forms that don't follow the same rules, but they do follow rules, the rules are simply different from subject to subject. In short rules and forms can be subjective themselves and not simply an interpretation or opinion of the same rules.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern Art is not \"Real Art\" and using the argument that it's subjective is a poor argument.\n","id":"eb594b4b-e517-467b-b98f-c03c8e485eb7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My theory is pretty simple. If humans were able to travel forward and backward in time at any point in time, then that technology would exist at all point in time. Simply because if I invented a time machine today, that time machine technology would eventually be used by someone to take the technology to an earlier time. This would continue to happen repeatedly, until all times had time travel technology. Therefore, since we don't have time travel technology today, time travel technology must never exist. A couple caveats here I'm talking real time travel here. Not simply exceeding the speed of light and looking back over your shoulder. Time travel that allows you to travel through time and interact with the people and things of that time. Bi directional is important here. If you can only travel in one direction particularly if you can only travel forward , my theory breaks down. I am expressing no view on uni directional time travel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bi-Direction human time travel is impossible\n","id":"b3d44320-a429-4d6e-9d51-0527a95db7ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is a foregone conclusion at this point and it certainly was not free of other problems nevertheless my argument is purely theoretical and takes into consideration the legal, ethical and philosophical justification of creating a new state for the Jewish people. Specifically I have in mind the provinces of Pomerania, East Brandenburg and Posen West Prussia which together would provide such theoretical Jewish state with an area greater than present Israeli territory with all occupied areas included. I excluded other territories as they would be necessary to somewhat balance Soviet claims against Polish territory which were part of the agreement between the US, USSR and UK. The territory of post armistice Israel is 20 700 km2 while the West Bank and Gaza have 6000 km2. The territory I indicated for transfer would consist of an area of approximately 40 000 km2, in excess of the current administrative regions of Poland of West Pomerania and Lubuskie. Those are all arable or forested lands with access to sea, a coastline of decent length and a navigable river Oder as a border. Immediately after war there were several cities located in those regions including Stettin which had in 1939 a population of close to 0.4 million and a couple of other cities with populations between 50 and 100 thousand. Such arrangement would provide more better land and better development conditions for the fledgling Jewish state. Currently almost half of all Israeli controlled territory is the Negev desert 13 000km2 which limits available land to the tiny strip by the coast and the illegally occupied West Bank. My proposition would therefore provide three times as much territory as can be used for development currently in Israel now. As the German state and its citizens were legally responsible for the genocide of Jewish people the expropriation of their land and their wealth would also be justified and would prevent the situation where Jewish population from around the world would have to choose between a territory populated by Arab majority 75 of Palestinian population and majority of land and remaining in diaspora. It would also prevent the Jewish state from being created by an unethical landgrab arranged by world powers which is what happened in 1947 when as a result of UN resolution the British Mandate of Palestine was divided between 90 Arab 10 Jewish Palestine and 50 Arab 50 Jewish Israel forcing both peoples into conflict many would argue by design<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only ethical solution to creating a Jewish state was establishing it on former German territory.\n","id":"159c3b9b-fc7e-4414-91c8-0794424c7d74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So my base for this claim is mostly anecdotal however I feel that it's a very sound rational argument. At this point I genuinely feel that the U.S. Government rewards people who are both dishonest on various pieces of documentation and tries to keep people poor. The first point I would like to make is to the effect of financial aid recipients and how them lying greatly rewards them for doing so. In 2008 several acquaintances from my high school and I were attending community college. All of their families had double incomes,large salaries and very few children. However instead of being truthful about their living situation they instead listed themselves as independent and stayed at home with their parents, and they weren't paying rent. The system is so flawed laxed that these individuals received the full award amount and no punishment simply for the fact that it's nearly impossible for the system to catch them, and this isn't something that looks like it'll change soon if ever. I would also like to make clear that there were 3 completely seperate entities that I knew who were doing it. Secondly, due to the U.S. economic down turn my stepfather has had trouble staying employed in his field of 30 years, and has been faithful to the unemployment system. However his work tends to be patchy these days as it's project based and work is scarce, so the unemployment system fails him when he wants to go to work, because he then has to evaluate going back to work for a month or two and painfully waiting for his unemployment check when he gets laid off again because he has to reintegrate every time, while still having bills to pay when the system takes it's time. It's often worth it for him to just stay unemployed at that point, though he refuses to do so. Lastly, my parents are about to lose the house, because they allegedly make too much to qualify for a HAMP, for which my stepdad took a 17 hour pay cut to qualify for because due to the scarcity of work the money looks good quarterly but is really terrible annually, so it's actually more worth it for him to stay poor and refinance than it is for him to actually do his job. This is all in the air of staying afloat, my parents aren't some sharp tounge folk who look to cut corners where they can to increase their bottom line. Their hardworking individuals who actually need assistance and aren't getting it because they're being almost seemingly too honest about their situation. Lastly, because Obamacare is kicking in, to avoid the penalty my parents took up a healthcare premium they can't afford right now which isn't helping them to keep the house. Which would further my point about rewarding strategic poverty. If they didn't have to pay this there would be a significantly better chance of them being able to do so. Considering all this, I encourage you to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the United States government rewards strategic poverty and dishonesty.\n","id":"d5a42821-49e4-4e28-b685-08f880f52ff5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Joseph Smith's father said a spirit told Smith that after picking up the golden plates \"he must go directly away, and neither lay it down nor look behind him.\" After retrieving the plates, \"fearing some one might discover where he got it, he laid it down to place back the top stone, as he found it\"; however, the book returned to the closed box and Smith could not take it out again. The spirit explained, \"you have not obeyed your orders.\" Howe 1834, p. 242 Willard Chase statement<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith told his family that to obtain the golden plates, the angel guarding the plates strictly required him to take the plates and leave the site where they had been buried without looking back. Joseph Knight, Sr. 1833 p. 2, Willard Chase 1833 p. 242\n","id":"10367b96-1362-4e59-9c28-686dd6834638"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the purpose of this , I\u2019m going to reference Tennessee simply because that\u2019s what I\u2019m most familiar with in terms of laws, but my position stands for any state with similar laws which I believe is all of them . Children and parents in the US are bound by compulsory attendance laws. These laws were written to protect children from unfair child labor conditions and have been around for about 100 years . The laws are written appropriately in most cases children must go to school from X age to X age and parents will be punished if a child is missing too much school , but they are rarely upheld . For example, I\u2019ve had a student miss 40 of 180 days from Kindergarten until 7th grade with no intervention from judges. The law states here that children can have 10 excused absences sickness, death in the family, whatever before they are considered truant 5 absences without an excuse is considered truant . Once they go over this amount , they are referred to court where parents could be charged with educational neglect 50 fine and 2 days in jail for each absence but usually they just get resource referrals if needed and do it all again next year. There\u2019s no real consequence or incentive for the parents or the students . But that isn\u2019t the case for the school system No, schools get money based on their ADA average daily attendance . It doesn\u2019t matter if the absences are due to massive flu outbreak, a car wreck, a surgery, a death of a parent, or Senior Skip Day. The ADA isn\u2019t based on excused or unexcused if the student isn\u2019t in the building, it\u2019s a strike . Schools lose about 50 bucks per day per student that is past the point of \u201cchronically absent\u201d. My school 460 students had about 17 students miss more than 10 of the school year. They ended up costing the school close to 10 grand in funding. So here\u2019s my issue why is any of this at the cost of the school? Other students suffer due to things completely out of their control like Billy in 1st period not coming to school. Yes, resources are a large part of why students miss and I think Truancy court is great for helping parents get those referrals. I\u2019m not suggesting that the 50 fine and 2 day in jail solution would be helpful because I think it would absolutely do more harm than good if it were to suddenly be enforced. But here\u2019s my solution Schools don\u2019t lose funding regardless of student attendance . There are plenty of other ways that schools are held accountable for student achievement that tying money to something that is likely out of the school\u2019s control anyway. Also scrap the jail and fine law. Instead, make child tax credit tie into something called \u201cletter of good standing \u201c that the school sends for tax purposes . We already send something similar for any child getting a license or permit it says the child is following compulsory attendance law if they aren\u2019t then they can\u2019t get their permit . So if a child isn\u2019t in good standing with the law, the parents don\u2019t get the letter and therefor forfeit a portion of their tax credit. This seems like a solution that would not only be effective but make sure that schools and other students don\u2019t miss out due to a few people who don\u2019t follow the law .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Schools should not be punished for having chronically absent students\n","id":"36205625-f1db-45af-b83a-41a9ea2da09b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As I see it, the only good effect of speculation is to fluidify the market, but we've come the point where it is vastly more efficient to divert wealth via speculation than to actually create wealth. I'm expecting most of the answers to be state owned banks wouln't be able to fluidify the market the way it is now , if so is there a way to avoid that the private sector rips all the benefits of speculation?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the financial market should be restricted to state-owned banks,\n","id":"89d01f2d-5c56-43a4-8e16-a4269dde9373"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe passing the smoke through water in hookah sheesah waterpipe is a more effective method of filtering out harmful contents of the smoke, compared to smoking. Cigarettes use a piece of foam as a filter and within a few puffs, the filter gets visibly used up, acting only as a vessel to the smoke. Hookah on the other hand passes the smoke through water. The water I think usually about 1L in a typical hookah set up has more capacity to filter till it gets saturated. Overall I think this makes hookah cleaner to the user. I would also like to state that I believe any form of tobacco smoking has harmful effects. I have failed to see reason when people claim hookah is much more harmful than smoking. My assumptions are the water will keep filtering out the some until it's saturated water will also cool the smoke, reducing harmful effects This is my first time on , I took time read the rules, please let me know if I'm in violation of any. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"hookah\/water pipe smoke is \"cleaner\" than cigarette smoke, making it safer than smoking\n","id":"64c8b74b-5c14-4ed5-a744-ff76030d2181"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What I like about the series Edward and Jet's characters. The animation. The dub . What I don't like Every episode ends in an anticlimax. Faye's character. The overarching story is hard to follow, not told clearly, and too confusing. Edward's send off. . I had a much more detailed list that was deleted because I was an idiot and didn't write  in my title. I think it's for the best, since my first was confusing and went off track too much. But there are two things I want to clarify . When I say I think every episode ends in an anticlimax, I mean EVERY episode. As an example, I'll use the episode with the flying fat super killer. It was an amazing episode about 15 of the 20 minutes but then loses it all in the last five. The whole episode we show how unstoppable the killer is, how no bullets harm him, and he is after spike because he can't be seen. Obviously there's a deeper motive here, like he's trying to get those who wronged him. So we build it up through the whole episode, growing grander and grander, spike trying to find out his weakness, a big fight scene is coming in this awesome setting of an after hours amusement park, the two are facing off, ready to trade blows AND Nothing No motive, no big action scene, we just find out the killer has the mind of a child, and despite the fact that no bullets touch him, a metal knife thrown much slower hurts him, and then he gets squished by a marching animatronic. It just feels so Incomplete. It could've been amazing if it had been a two parter, and that could be said for a lot of the episodes. Some episodes could've been cut, like the goofy episode every series seems like they are forced to have, where some lobster in a freezer makes a living organism that gets people sick or something. Episodes like that could be cut for more two parters that give a satisfying end to each villain or setup. This is my biggest problem with the series . Secondly, while I don't hate spike, I think his character isn't as great as everyone says he is. He seems to be just a walking quote machine, saying out deep or powerful stuff, and while I do think he says some poignant things, most of it comes off as the writers trying to sound smart. I just never saw him as a person. He was either perfect and knew the answers to everyone's problem, or an idiot that can't handle a simple job. He never seemed to sway between the two either, it was just 1 episode he was like this, the other he was like that. Like with the cowboy Andy episode, he couldn't pull off capturing an inept criminal, rival bounty hunter or no. And then when he's fighting his old gang he's a crack shot and could take on vicious no problem. And again, I never understood the overarching story, so I never really got his back story. Something to do with helping a coup, but then leaving for some reason, but then it's years later, and the coup is still going on, or something. And then vicious dies, but he doesn't. And somewhere in there is a transgender in there, who is transgender for Reasons And Faye is going to kill him her, but doesn't because of Transgender reasons . I just never got the series. It was kind of before my time, as I grew up in the 2000's with shows like full metal alchemist, but I love other series around the time. Trigun is probably in my top ten anime series, Yu Yu Hakusho is fun in a sort of Adam west batman campy sort of way, and while I'm not a huge fan, I can see what the impact Evangelion had and why it's so popular. Cowboy bebop just seems weird to me since it doesn't seem that grand or really like anything that says best anime series ever I've posted to other places, but most of the responses were you didn't watch it right or you just don't like it because it's popular. But that is not true. I really do want to like this series, I just see a lot of flaws no one seems to address, or if they're bullshit, no one seems to tell me how they are bullshit. I was told this place is more friendly to this sort of thing, so I would like your opinion on the matter. All I ask is to acknowledge my beefs and either tell me why they're wrong or why they don't hurt your experience If you want me to expand on one of the pros or cons, just tell me and I'll tell you my thoughts. I left most of the lengthy explanations for them out because I thought they were self explanatory enough, but I'd be happy to give you a more in depth description.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't like cowboy bebop\n","id":"eaa1cf2e-d4b3-4fd3-afb9-cb13dbb3589c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If God is Real, Should we File a Class Action Lawsuit Against It?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the moral landscape, if something is a deliberate action, it is moral if it benefits the society\/ mankind and it is immoral if it harms it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is a black and white fallacy, as it can also be dependent on favorable or unfavorable outcomes. This is called the moral landscape.\n","id":"cff3da06-623e-47ae-9b24-037f8b61a920"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>File-sharing<|ARGUMENT|>From the 70s to the 80s, the RIAA fought for a tax on blank tapes Taintor. The movie industry was similarly opposed to recordable media i.e. Betamax Case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blank cassette tapes did not lead to economic problems as the industry feared.\n","id":"195cecfe-96a4-4743-ba0a-0ed1e203048a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a casual smoker. I usually buy a pack maybe 5 times a year. In times of stress. This time it was an ugly break up. Am I fooling myself by rationalizing that American Spirits aren't SO bad because there's no additives? To me, I think it's just tobacco so it's the harm of smoking which isn't good but there's no FSC or arsenic and all that sooo I mean it's a pretty decent option when I need to unwind, no?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"American Spirits are less harmful than other brands of cigarettes\n","id":"f6ec8ca5-fe3b-43a7-8158-a56f71838489"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should US intelligence agencies end mass data collection?<|ARGUMENT|>Mass data collections operate on a system of secrecy where normal citizens are expected to trust that they are done properly. However, since there is no transparency, there is no way to gauge the limits within with intelligence agencies are operating.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mass data collection is carried out by agencies which are \"insulated from the political process and public accountability.\"\n","id":"82ae3c81-3fa8-473c-8f8b-66e7be336be0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>If the undocumented were granted legal status without a special pathway to citizenship written into the bill, then they would no longer would have to fear deportation, could work legally and could eventually apply for citizenship through existing channels.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Another legal immigration status, like permanent legal alien status, would serve DREAMers equally.\n","id":"969cf72b-ddfb-46a4-8247-8f8831943923"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that it would cause students to not only have a broader view of the world around them outside of their social bubble but also have an appreciation for other's views. I have to stress this would be a world religion class teaching of not only the main ones like Christianity, Judaism and Islam but also Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism and others. Teaching about the beliefs they hold, why they hold them and where these beliefs might have come from from both an insider and outsider view. I think this would be a great forum for students to ask questions and learn something they might believe is just a load of horse crap but also that some other person believes with their heart and soul. I know it would be an absolute logistic nightmare instituting it and having someone teach it while being completely impartial but that is completely irrelevant to this view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A world religions class should be taught in public and private school compulsory to graduate highschool\n","id":"97e42694-5b45-409d-89aa-eb9dcb8dc0c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After our lovely elderly cat passed on at the first of last year, we decided to get two more cats. Cats need company, cats need homes, sure, let's get two cats. We'd start with one and then add the other. We picked out Grace from the shelter. At six months, she was socialized and would come up to us wanting affection, but was never a cuddly kitten. Stints in the lap were 10 seconds, tops, and she tended to nip quite a bit, which we've mostly sorted out via squirt bottle. She's absolutely stunning to look at and suits her name perfectly. She's also polydactyl, which doesn't factor into this issue. We bring Rainier home three months later, he was super skinny, didn't eat enough, needed a lot of attention. We do the whole separation thing for a week and have him in the spare room, introducing smells and whatnot. After a week, I forget to close the door all the way and Grace prances in to check things out and didn't kill him right away so we called that a success. Our other person didn't spend the bonding time I did with the little guy, so he adopted me as his mother and totally clings to me. He'll even fall asleep in my arms and let me wrap him in my shirt so I can continue working typing. Follows me everywhere. Will wake up from a dead sleep to accompany me to the bathroom. Every single time. Anyway, in the beginning we made sure to keep the little guy from being trounced on too hard by the much bigger Grace, but he started gaining weight and he's got the balls of a titan. While she sort of play fights at first , he goes in with nails blazing and gave her a big ole scar across her nose. Now, four months later, she starts things just as often as he does, to the point where she'll try to knock him off the cat tree or do full body tackles where you can hear the punches landing. Our other person says, it's normal, they're cats, they're play fighting, but it seems so aggressive and there are teeth involved and occasional cat screams and fur flying. I'm literally afraid one of them will put the other's eye out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My cats fight way too much, they could get hurt, or at minimum feel anxiety about all the fighting. It's not healthy.\n","id":"f75b421b-36a9-4edc-9461-9768cc215fbe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I want to clarify that I do NOT think it should be ok for adults to have sex with 14 15 year olds. That is illegal for a good reason. What I'm saying is that it is physiologically normal for as an example a 30 year old man to be sexually attracted to a 15 or 16 year old girl. I believe there are a lot of people who look at younger members of the opposite sex and find themselves attracted to them, but repress those thoughts due to guilt and fear of the social taboo. People reach sexual maturity far below the age of 18, and it is silly to make people believe that it's 'creepy' or 'wrong' for them to find someone aged 17 attractive just because it is illegal to act on that attraction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that an adult being attracted to a member of the opposite sex that is sexually mature but below the age of 18 is a normal, healthy response and should not be treated as taboo,\n","id":"a38da973-291f-44c3-a98c-ca5a70792518"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Constitutions protect linguistic minorities?<|ARGUMENT|>Protections for linguistic minorities can be more flexibly and effectively implemented through typical legislative processes rather than in a constitution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Constitutions must cover only general principles and not specific topics.\n","id":"c4e740f9-e6e4-4481-881f-0d01dda21d7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>In opposing the very late effort of Robert E. Lee to enlist Black soldiers, Confederate leader Howell Cobb articulated a common view that \"You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no credible evidence that Black Americans fought for the confederacy.\n","id":"9276d922-09d5-4318-8164-74c5dea80603"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Based on what I have researched, Asian immigrants still have the traditional conservative mindset on education. They placed such a strict emphasis on education onto their offspring, which eventually lead to a high suicide rate among Asian Americans. It is no surprise that many Asians go into subreddits like r AsianAmerican or r Asianparentstories to complain about this. It is not only the strict education standards that is an issue, but also a variety of things. I feel that Asian American or Westernized Asians can become better parents than their immigrant parents. They can combine the hard work ethics they were instilled in when they were young to the freedom and progressive nature of a Western country. Their offspring can theoretically get the best of both world. I find the traditional immigrant Asian parenting style obsolete.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Asian-Americans will be better at raising their kids than their immigrant parents.\n","id":"ffbc4f7c-8dd5-4746-a7d1-c763a51602fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Developed countries have a higher obligation to combat climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Poor states are indeed disproportionately effected by global warming. Investing available resources in combating global warming is, therefore, an imperative of developing nations. It goes hand-in-hand with - instead of taking away from as argued by the affirmative side - efforts to combat poverty, disease, and social disruption.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If poor are most effected, they should be willing to invest.\n","id":"03c45d6d-b01a-4e5e-93f1-a72826905e88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Equal Paternity\/Maternity Paid Leave Be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>In a comparative study between the working habits of men and women it was found that men took on more overtime. These working habits would explain the presence of a gender pay gap.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Occupational choices account for the gender pay gap. Equalising parental leave is not a policy that addresses this and will thus have no significant impact on the gender pay gap.\n","id":"13871b46-c53f-4b04-be09-7f0e4eb6ad5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most therapists, shrinks, health professionals, doctors, etc are legally obligated to keep what their client says as a secret unless they are planning to hurt somebody or themselves, which I think is fair and the way it should be, sans few specific cases. Let's say Dave and Anne are a couple with a newborn and they go to, say, a geneticist and they find out that their baby has inherited a disease that is deadly and will likely result in the child's death in a few years. Anne has previously disclosed to the geneticist that Dave is not the father of the child, but Dave does not know this. Let's also say that this disease, given Dave is a carrier, has a 50 chance to affect any future offspring that he may have. At the geneticist, they have blood samples and it is determined that Dave is not the father of the child with the disease. As such, Dave cannot is not a carrier of this genetic disorder. In a situation like this, where the men are believed to carry the gene for a disease, some men might not want to take the risk of potentially having another child because they have a good chance of inheriting this fatal disease. I do not believe it is fair, or morally just, to allow this man, or anyone in this situation to abstain from having children because he wrongly believes he is a carrier of this disease. I know this is a very uncommon occurrence, and this hypothetical about the disease is very unlikely, but I would still like to know what other people think. Bottom line Should fathers who are unknowingly not biologically the father of their children be informed of that involuntarily, or does the privacy of the mother trump that? I believe that it is immoral to withhold this information from the father. . Edit u cacheflow brought up a good point that if Dave 's blood was taken, then it's his own medical history, and this doesn't apply. What about if there was no blood taken, but the child's diagnosis makes Dave assume that he is the father, and he lives his life thinking that he is a carrier of this fatal disorder? In this situation the mother and the doctor are aware that Dave is not the father Edit 2 Thanks for all the replies, glad it was kept a calm civil discussion. All in all I think I would consider this a half delta, while I still don't necessarily agree with it, I definitely understand the other side A LOT more now. I never really realized how important the trust confidentiality agreement was in many aspects of life. Still couldn't get over the whole lying by omission to the father. Hopefully nobody here will ever have to go through that<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Client confidentiality should not apply to cases of misattributed paternity\n","id":"4c4980c0-fe16-4f47-86a4-8cbccea68de4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have never had the motivation that others do to vote for any political party in my country or to even form an opinion on anything related to my country\u2019s inner politics. Since I turned 18 years old which is the age limit for voting in my country I have had the chance to vote twice. Both of the times, a nationalist populist, anti EU right wing party has won the elections with a supermajority of more than 67 of the parliament seats which gives them power to change the constitution and put through a law without basically any opposition. Since 2015, this political party has been very vocally anti EU, anti liberal and has been doing a xenophobic, demagogic and very misleading political campaign to create a sense of heroic fight against the \u201coppressive\u201d European Union, migrants of middle eastern origin and George Soros, who funds civil rights organizations and non government organizations in the Central Eastern European countries, and in my country, Hungary in particular. While they get their votes mainly from middle aged working class people and retired elderly people that can be easily misguided with billboard and media campaigns, my age and social group, the studying working youth who actually have access to different points of view than the government by means such as having internet access and speaking English and other foreign languages, are either escaping the country to work abroad, or wants to change this political system by any means possible. They took every opportunity to vote for opposition parties with the highest chance to get parliament seats from the governing party, however the last election has brought them the worst results supermajority for the third time to the hated governing party. Me, as someone who is not satisfied with the result and being well educated to see the other side of the coin, but missing to vote due to ignorance and lack of interest towards politics is the worst kind of person, when the latest elections and politics in general come up as a topic of a conversation at work or at a bar, I am afraid to say anything as I know that they would try to tell me how the country is in a bad situation only because of ignorants like me and would try to change my view only by saying that I just had one job vote for any opposition party as someone not satisfied with the government. I am looking for arguments deeper than this, maybe I might need reassurance about my other roles in society, but most importantly I would like to know where does my ignorance come from. If I would be comfortable and reassured that ignorance can also be a valid option in this case, I would proudly state to everyone that it\u2019s my own decision, my choice to stay away from politics entirely. However this is not what I hear from my peers, so, please change my mind<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am not at all interested in politics in general, and in my opinion being outside of any political scale is also a statement in a democracy.\n","id":"86e7a756-56f0-4c41-8c4b-27eae6562dd6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll begin by saying I am extremely confused by the whole healthcare debacle as I grew up with New York State healthcare from my father which for those of you who don't know is pretty good as I'm told . I never had the experience of my parent saying our insurance doesn't cover that. As a kid luckily for me In my title I have listed some common arguments of this law that I have herd and in an effort to learn more about what the law will do in theory I've come to you all. Please prove to me that Obamacare is a step In the right direction for the US of A, not only for our citizens but for our economy as we'll. I look forward to your answers<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare will not cut down our national deficit or provide us with great health care at an affordable cost. If anything it will push the most intelligent people away from healthcare and take away the free market and . Please !\n","id":"ac549aa5-5f1e-48f1-bd14-93b873b107a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Modern Medicine: Blessing or Curse for Human Evolution?<|ARGUMENT|>Even those who are strong and have the potential to advance human evolution can see their survival endangered through bad luck. In those cases, medicine helps them to prevail.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern medicine serves human evolution since it ensures that the strongest survive.\n","id":"658a1ca2-ed4d-4be5-9049-f141521f9e25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Freemasonry was an intense issue of concern where Joseph Smith lived in western New York after the William Morgan affair in 1826-27.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The reference to \"secret combinations\" in the Book of Mormon is a surrogate for a discussion about Freemasonry\n","id":"a569415e-cdda-4235-98b1-06260e903e57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I used to dislike Apple, but I realized that all my efforts to avoid buying a Mac didn't work. Now, I decided I'll either buy an Imac or a Macbook Air. I'm a broke student. I'll work, liquidate junk I'm not using, be very frugal, save money. But I want a computer that I know can last me 5 years 10 if I want it to . I hate to be anecdotal, but just about everyone I know who has a Mac has owned it for a long while. This is a large cost for me. I don't take it lightly. It will hurt. But it's the right decision in the long run. People like my grandparents think its crazy to spend that kind of money on one thing and look at me like I'm trying to make a fashion statement. But if my bank account had eroded 200 at a time, no alarms would have sounded off. In the past 5 years I bought an 700 gaming PC that broke down after 2 years. Plus 150 for the monitor. I bought a Kindle Fire for 100 and it was crap. YGWYPF. I bought a 250 Chromebook with a bad display, bad speaker and was missing lots of features on PC Mac. I bought a 500 laptop which broke down a year later due to power supply problems. Not even going to get it repaired. It's a sunk cost. I put Linux on there, but it's a headache. It still can only do slightly more than a tablet. I bought a 200 Nvidia Shield K1 tablet. I have it now. It's great for what it is, but it still can't run professional apps. And it's a hassle to do things that a real computer would do with ease. I can't edit videos or record music. That's 1800 in 5 years. I could've gotten a Mac for half of that and it would've likely been running to this day rather than a bunch of stop gap computers. I want my view point to be changed. I really do. If I could spend half the money and get a machine that's just as capable yet still reliable, I would.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should bite the bullet and buy a Mac. It's overpriced, but at least it's reliable.\n","id":"bfa18578-ac2a-4f6e-af12-fe233402665d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Over the past few days, a lot of far right rhetoric has been thrown against Nelson Mandela, calling him a communist and a terrorist. I don't think there's anything wrong with being a communist I am ideally one myself , but terrorist is a bold claim. I grew up in a society where Nelson Mandela was praised, and this notion runs counter to his near deified status. I'm making this post out of ignorance of South African history. I don't want to simply denounce Mandela's criticisms as crazy far right rhetoric, if it is based on fact. I realize this is wishy washy, but I want to hear good arguments for the other side.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nelson Mandela is not a terrorist\n","id":"c3b2f798-7f60-4bbe-b110-b30da5c7fb88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nationalism in general is harmful distinction amongst people serving only to encourage people to believe that not necessarily even the country they were born makes them more important better than others from different countires. This further highlights physical and cultural differences keeping race, creed and skin colour at the forefront of discrimination. Your land mass of preference is nothing more than a matter of circumstance and the nationals of your country are just as much of a burden on the planet as the foreigners these rituals imply are second rate. Edit This has necessarily expanded into a discussion on Social economics Patriotism vs nationalism In terms of economics Please assume any reference to this is intended to express public and occasionally at a push, social benefits. The reasoning for doing so is to hopefully highlight how national identity can be a relative to your perceptions of lesser countries . b a productive of abusing of nations collections of nations. e.g, DDT ban once the rest of the world no longer needed America for its production.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The pledge of allegience and other rituals of national identity are holding society back.\n","id":"6ac87b9b-a72d-4147-a91d-c351b3e90139"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>The Controlled Substances Act prohibits Schedule 1 substances such as Cannabis, which forces patients to either break the law or use more harmful\/addictive substances that are inferior medicine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ban on drugs has hindered scientific and, in particular, medical progress.\n","id":"e8f80e82-2250-41e7-8c6c-b88544518591"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Not recognizing Israel as a Jewish state is meant to protect the rights of the quarter of Israel's population that is not Jewish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Palestinians have strong incentives not to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, and therefore should not do so.\n","id":"39733b47-e7e3-4cd0-8360-ade1b20f7075"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Britney Law protecting celebrities from the paparazzi<|ARGUMENT|>Any celebraty used to being chased around and followed everywhere by the media and paparazzi would tell you that they don't like or want that. The idea of the personal safety zones is to protect celebraties from unwanted media. If the media wanted access to the person for a legitimate reason, they could still have access to them. Just that now the media can't get too close, crowd around the person or block where they're going for photography and filming.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If celebreties wanted to be chased around by the paparazzi, they would disapprove of the \"Britney Law.\"\n","id":"0ede50cf-8f4a-42b1-8c54-716057dfa9cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>The \"preference to eating meat\" part is disputable as humans are actually opportunistic omnivores and evolved to adapt to the availability of food which in some cases meant a primarily plant based diet. Even if this were true, though, it would be irrelevant as a properly planned vegan diet is perfectly healthy<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This argument is an example of the is\u2013ought problem What *is* doesn't justify what ought to be.\n","id":"ea777368-19fb-4364-97f5-65679afa9791"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like they're acting and it often feels very campy. I don't like how they say well my brain is more feminine , like excuse me that's something that women have been trying to get away from for 1000 years. Why did Caitlyn Jenner feel the best way to become a woman was to get all trussed up in a corset on the cover of vanity fair? Why are so many m2f trans people so into makeup and fashion? If that's what being a woman is to you then why not stick to drag? In conclusion, an article that lines up with my views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a feminist I'm really bothered how male-to-female trans-people portray what it means to be female\n","id":"b321743d-c132-4b1f-b9de-49409a77c1d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>Many referendums have incredibly close results; such narrow margins do not provide a clear mandate to the government to go implement the referendum result as it indicates that the country is far too divided on the issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Referendums frequently end with a lack of clarity on how a country should move forward.\n","id":"cc2e7bab-844c-47ac-a483-581a3d0a393d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Discussing the changes that the body experiences during puberty as part of CSE is an important way of reassuring teenagers that these changes are natural, thereby improving issues of body image<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"CSE at adolescence can contribute to better, equal and healthier affective and sexual relationships in adulthood.\n","id":"8be826e3-2c76-482a-846c-9d5e0d34b6c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is sex with no emotional attachment good for you?<|ARGUMENT|>People who are prone to jealousy may end up developing emotional attachment and can often get a lot of emotional pain out of such a relationship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex without emotional attachment could make one dependent on something that could end at any time.\n","id":"635ea174-33df-4295-8545-d8d3e53a8984"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>2 Nephi 5:24 describes Lamanites as \"an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety, and seeking in the wilderness for beasts of prey.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon describes Lamanites consistently with 19th century stereotypes of Native Americans.\n","id":"5b13cc01-681f-4d02-9fa7-ca6de72483cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Look at all the AK-47s around the world and how cheaply you can buy new ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Small arms weapons are really simple and cheap to make.\n","id":"7374f6bc-7cd6-4051-80d1-c084372f68af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>In May 2013, the United Nations warned the Japanese government that it needs to take measures to curb hate speech against so-called \"comfort women\", or Asian women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even though there is widespread hate speech in Japan in recent years the country remains democratic and a stable society.\n","id":"1ed931af-dfd8-4704-ab44-2e0c10ad71be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi. This is a somewhat odd post but People hurt each other all the time, at least in the emotional sense. They hurt each other not just because they intend to hurt each other but because of miscommunication and just plain difference in opinions. Everyone keeps talking about being nice to each other all the time. But the more we interact with other people, the higher the likelihood of someone getting hurt. I guess you can say that getting hurt is a product of people interacting with each other. Therefore, The best way to not hurt each other is to not talk to each other at all. If you don't want to hurt anyone, then detachment is the solution. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only way to not hurt each other is to not talk to each other at all.\n","id":"6c4fec40-be9c-497c-973e-da2d4e6aef51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do journalists have a moral obligation to display violent images?<|ARGUMENT|>When the media industry is densensitised to violence it is more likely to move quickly from one story to the next leaving the public unable to feel a connection to the stories that might compel a stronger reaction. p.12<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reporting practices have developed in the industry which exacerbate public desensitisation to violent imagery.\n","id":"2ce60ebe-0d87-48fd-bd82-24900307d459"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>Even the battle abuses cinematic time. At the start of the battle, it is said they are 15 minutes away and a countdown shows 15 minutes and something odd seconds. At the end it has cleared the planet and is ready to fire. The battle only lasts 12 minutes of screen time. Conclusively, 3 minutes were lost somewhere because it was done for cinematic time, not realism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is further supported by the fact the Death Star is 30 minutes away that there's a scene change to the fighters launching, then another to the Death Star being 15 minutes away, and then to the fighters approaching it, in the space of 3 minutes 40 seconds of screen time.\n","id":"0bd8e713-3dd8-48ae-8214-77d7fb35c29b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>Xi has met Putin more times than any other foreign leader since he took power in 2013.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under Xi Jinping, China's relationship with Russia is the strongest it has ever been.\n","id":"8d94f42c-1c69-48e3-9ad5-41667ed7036d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Unfortunately, it's my birthday today, and I don't see the point in celebrating it. I've always seen people get so ecstatic on their birthdays and out partying and stuff like that, and if that makes you happy, then go for it. I'm not here to discourage the celebration of birthdays in general, as I think I somewhat understand why people celebrate it. I just want to be convinced that my birthday is worth celebrating. I just believe it's not a special day. For me, my birthday is literally just a number on a calendar. I feel people arbitrarily set things to be celebrated. This is exactly why I didn't go to 8th grade graduation. People want you to feel so special about yourself and the fact that you managed to survive another year. Which may be great for some, but not for me. I honestly don't see the point in existing, as I was born literally because my parents decided not to get an abortion. I feel like celebrating my birthday would just mean celebrating the fact that I am even alive, but I believe that my life is meaningless. Also, celebrating my birthday only reminds me of my parents, whom I hate, and I don't want to even think about them any more than I do now. I hope I laid out enough of my view for it to be challenged. I've been told my birthday is worth celebrating, but I just don't see it. My religious family keeps saying stuff like Every day is not guaranteed, you should be grateful God gave you another day. But what about the kids that didn't get another day? Why don't we mourn and honour them?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no reason for me to celebrate my birthday\n","id":"36f7f799-b6e5-4ac0-9305-a066d870ad03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are tons of cool buildings throughout the world, but increasingly less of those are found in the US and other countries who have implemented spurious and anti growth zoning policies and building regulations which are severely hampering towns cities abilities to create unique spaces that people enjoy being in. Here\u2019s some examples This Caf\u00e9 would be illegal to build in the US despite its charm Many locations in Southern California could be dense and awesome like Santorini, Greece but zoning regulations make this type of development illegal. Barcelon Spain has a wonderful use of living commercial buildings, all organized in a tight walkable network, yet these types of mixed use buildings are illegal to build in the US. Amsterdam has wonderful infrastructure that is high density, which makes traveling by bike much easier. In Venice CA, this type of housing is illegal, so instead you wind up with low density single home infrastructure and everyone still uses cars to get around. Even in cities like Boston, New York, and San Francisco, older style buildings would be illegal to build today. In NYC, 40 of buildings in Manhattan would be illegal to build today Zoning also favors large corporations, like laws that mandate minimum parking lot sizes for new construction. That makes it illegal to build stores for people within walking biking distance. There are tons of examples. If the US wants affordable housing, walkable bikeable and environmentally friendly cities, then we need to seriously reconsider our zoning laws and other housing laws regulations. Edit tragic bridge collapse just happened over 8 lane roadway in Miami. When you have tight infrastructure, you don\u2019t need expensive and heavy foot bridges for pedestrians.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoning Laws and Building Regulations are ruining America and resulting in uncreative buildings and urban environments.\n","id":"46148f34-8e42-44f9-991e-7c5c48be5566"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TW Diskussion of one prominent suicide method with a special focus on the awful details based on 1st and 2nd hand survivor reports We're commonly told, how news about suicide raise the suicide rates. While this effect is scientifically proven, the research doesn't differentiate on how those stories are told. A great example was in the first series of the Netflix production I know it's not news but the psychological effect is the same 13 reasons why . One scene graphically grafically depicted a successful suicide which triggered a lot of people including myself badly. I saw the scene and I thought how easy it would be and I started seriously considering the option. Obviously, I had suicidal thoughts long before but seeing it like this, so easy, and then all the pain was gone, so quickly, dying peacefully in a warm bathtub So yeah, there's no discussion this was a bad move but why was it a bad idea to show that? In my opinion, the problem wasn't that they showed the suicide but how they depicted it. They made it look easy and clean. The thing is Cutting your wrists in reality is neither easy nor clean. I've talked about this with people who actually did and what they told me was this Cutting your wrists in a way that makes you bleed out quickly, is not as easy as making two slices with a razor blade, lying back and losing consciousness almost instantly. First of all, you need to cut deep into major arteries. Even with a surgical scalpel, you need to apply pressure and focus on completely opening the artery. Human skin isn't exactly like butter. And you're doing this in the worst imaginable mental state and no amount of painkillers will make this any less than extremely painful. You might numb down the outer skin but once you cut into an artery, the pain is insane, except bleeding out hurts even more. Also, once your brain realizes that you're about to die, you panic and fight for your life instinctively. If the scene had accurately depicted the suicide, I'd certainly would have had nightmares about it but I don't think that it had made me romanticize suicide for the next 2 days. And if I didn't know a lot of details about how awful it is to kill yourself, I might actually have gone through with it at some point. And without going into any other horrific details, no suicide method actually offers a quick and peaceful escape from life. Killing a body that still wants to live is a terrible process and I think that telling people this would actually lower suicide rates. But then, there's the dogma that any mention of suicides increases the chance of suicide, so we keep silent about it. I don't think this is the right way Counter Arguments I expect Some people are determined to die and you're just preparing them by practically giving detailed instructions Detailed instructions can be found on the internet but they usually leave out the part about how awful it all feels. It would only lead to desensitization I don't think that it's realistic to assume that detailed graphic depictions of people killing themselves could become so common that people are desensitized to them. And explaining the horrors of an actual suicide to people certainly does the opposite.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- We shouldn't talk less about suicide but more about the details\n","id":"3147ea39-6b5b-4e2a-b180-136bc52c0583"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>Rey begins by wanting to pass it and the responsibility to Luke. Luke discards it as he will do more harm than good if he picks it up, Rey grows and decides to train herself with it. It is used to defeat Snoke by Kylo, and it's destruction is the visual representation of the conflict between Rey and Kylo. Finally Rey possesses both halves of the Saber and will need to rebuild it anew.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The lightsaber is given a lot of respect as the most important item in the movie, and to some extent, almost treated as a character.\n","id":"01969cc7-d061-439d-bc62-fed19dea3d20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This recent view that comes from thinking about inherentence and networking. So bassically if it is just that a person can inheretet all the good things from his or her parrents it would be unreasoanable to say that someone can't gain the negatives of the their parents life. For example it is no more wrong for someone to not higher a person because their dad is an asshole than it is to higher someone whose mom you are friends with. The obvious solution is that both are wrong, but that seems like an easy out. So I want to see if their a logically way to justify only inheretting the positive from your parrents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The sins of the father parrent should pass onto the son child.\n","id":"22bc68c9-bd55-4a9d-afe1-d0711e1caaf7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Another thing is how I noticed how possessive it is to refer your significant other to your friends family as my wife husband or my girlfriend boyfriend . I read from sources that love is about appreciation and not possession. Now the reason I say marriage is a joke nowadays is because it has become something society expects of you and most married couples give up when they're not prepared to face inevitable moments of relationships. I find it sad that we have to force the idea of marriage as a happily ever after because now we have polarized distorted views on relationships thanks to many different factors. I don't feel like it is a generation thing. My siblings dated their respective significant others for 5 years before getting engaged. Some couples I know are fine just being together and even raising a family without being married as the law and religion considers it to be. It really is a to each their own kind of thing. But I know you can't force something that isn't there in the first place. Tl dr Society's distorted views on marriage are partially the reason why most marriages fail and now feels like a requirement for couples. Maybe I just have a pessimistic view on relationships and marriage? Change My View. . I will be happy to answer any questions as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marriage is a joke nowadays.\n","id":"7e3085ba-4094-4f63-a437-fbc6d4125a8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Children Learn About Gender Identity And Sexual Orientation In School?<|ARGUMENT|>Unbiased and factual lectures can clear up any misconceptions that can create an aversion against the LGBTQ+ community in some students' minds. They could have a weekly\/monthly assembly or something like that and daily reminders that anonymous reports of bullying are an optioncan help school keep track of any effects the lectures have on students and overall acceptance. Schools are required to end and prevent bullying when they can, and this is an opportunity to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Learning about gender identity and sexual orientation in health classes in school could promote a more accepting environment and reduce bullying.\n","id":"c903f984-5dc0-4866-80e6-44cf503fe182"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Journalists Publish Hacked Data?<|ARGUMENT|>It is immensely time-consuming to establish whether the majority of a data dump is even partly accurate. The finer details are even harder to confirm. As such, it is extremely unlikely that all information in such a dump will ever be thoroughly checked.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With so much data it is easy to sneak in fake information amongst the real and harder to tell what information may have been deliberately omitted.\n","id":"054a05d9-575b-4db4-b53b-59a19e8cb134"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>IMO, hardbacks are worse than paperbacks in every way. Specifically, they are FAR larger and heavier, making carrying them much more of a pain, filling a backpack and weighing you down. Additionally, they are far more awkward to hold trying to read one standing up on the London Underground means I have to use both hands, whereas paperbacks are much easier to hold. It seems like hardbacks are released first so people buy them out of necessity, and book publishers release the objectively superior paperback a year later to boost sales. If hardbacks were better, wouldn't a publisher release the paperback first, and then release the superior hardback a year later, knowing this would boost sales? Hardbacks are heavier, larger and harder to hold. A book is something you want to a be able to hold for long periods of time and b be able to carry around with you. Hardbacks fail at being user friendly, and just suck.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hardback are objectively worse than paperbacks and have no reason to exist\n","id":"54885e36-91b1-437c-bd84-7559a9cf3467"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I consider myself a pretty centered person, but I'm highly critical of Senator Cruz. I find the claim that most violent criminals are democrats to be, at the least, specious. I did some research and it seems that most convicted felons are democrats, but I conclude this is due more to the density of crime and democrats in urban areas than registered republicans. I also found somewhat conflicting data showing that red states are more prone to violent crimes than blue states, but this obviously blurs the 'people count' metric Mr. Cruz is appealing to. Anyone with data and a clear perspective on the situation, please . Edit I wonder if this asks a greater question for me does this kind of factual statement Cruz's statement is almost undeniably true constructively transform the presidential debate? Edit Hey guys, it's bed time I've been doing homework, and will continue to do so tomorrow morning lol . Special thanks to u geminia999 for some good insight and u Sonnington for presenting a great opposing view. Edit The PolitFact on the subject<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ted Cruz claims that the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats\n","id":"ed1af8bb-728a-40bd-9112-c2946ee46133"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Being transgender has nothing to do with a desire to change one's sexed body. A person is transgender when they identify as a gender that does not align with the one they have been assigned at birth and which society assigns them in daily interactions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People insisting that they are non-binary are creating a false binary between those who conform to the gender norms associated with their sex, and those who do not. In reality, we are all non-binary.\n","id":"3cc487b4-a0f9-41be-8f1d-a08ac0c34f0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund liberal arts degrees?<|ARGUMENT|>Government funding has more to do with a recognition that, like healthcare, education benefits the individual and therefore is something good to fund rather than viewing it as an investment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Government funding for education is not always tied to investment in the growth of a future tax base.\n","id":"f8f74afe-c880-4a20-9c18-e79ea7bfbe5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does modern advertising do more harm than good?<|ARGUMENT|>They also play deceiving word games, such as products that say \"made with natural ingredients\", when actually saying \"includes 2% of natural ingredients\" would be more accurate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On many mediums, loose regulations mean adverts can be intentionally misleading and sensationalizing.\n","id":"c2a61e84-d0ff-47ff-ae5f-2336e97382c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>EU arms sales to China<|ARGUMENT|>$555 million worth in 2003 and the USA, which has a similar \"ban\" on weapons sales to China. Future sales will be regulated by a tough EU code of conduct which prevents military equipment being sold to any state which might use it for external aggression or internal repression. Such a code of conduct will be a much better guarantee that China is not sold arms unless EU states are sure they will not be misused.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The current arms ban is purely symbolic, as China is already able to buy a range of military items from Europe.\n","id":"ca9da636-cb6f-44f6-b5b6-d4f19d641d24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that these are common misconceptions and I'm not exactly why they even started. I believe that there are many factors that can determine what makes a great singer or what makes someone a poor singer. To me, saying singing well is a matter of opinion is similar to saying whether someone can play an instrument well is a matter of opinion. There is a noticable difference between a mediocre trombone or trumpet player and an excellent one and there are reasons for this. You have obviously superior singers like your top Opera singers, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Brandy, Chris Stapleton, Brendon Urie, Jojo, Tori Kelly, Beyonce, Brian McKnight one of the best males in RnB , Luther Vandross, Josh Groban, Monica inconsistent sometimes but good at her best , etc. Then you have your obviously mediocre at best singers like Selena Gomez, Katy Perry, Sza, etc. I believe the only things that can be subjective in singing would be whether or not you like their tone or the way they sing. For example, Avery Wilson is a very talented singer though he receives criticism for using his riffs and runs too much which not everyone likes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that whether someone can sing or not is subjective. It can also be learned.\n","id":"ee08a214-cdc5-4598-9b1a-1c4010220b8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the wake of many unis demanding that there be safe spaces excluding whites and or other races from discussion in there and banning all dissent. applies to sexualities too I believe these spaces are bad, and harmful and will only encourage further echo chambers and segregation which will eventually cause far more problems than they solve. Since they demand spaces be free from certain people excluding and segregating them they help to foster an Us vs Them attitude when we should be seeking to remove those attitudes and tear down divides, as opposed to just adding more. They also aid in crushing any form of dissent, including inappropriate hand gestures<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Safe Space encourage segregation and are bad.\n","id":"0bc8ec5e-84f5-4484-994c-2662b37d15c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Shame has no place in a properly functioning society<|ARGUMENT|>In some cultures, children are required to take care of their parents in old age. This makes it difficult for them to pursue jobs or education in foreign countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children are prevented from pursuing what they want because they are shamed into listening to their parents\n","id":"60649b73-f2fc-401c-ae13-5ac1870712d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Water privatization<|ARGUMENT|>Water privatization often leads to price-hikes two or three times higher than the price under public water-utility ownership. This might be the case despite the fact that a for-profit water company is operating more efficiently than a governmen-owned company. The problem is, however, that the for-profit company is pocketing PROFITS off the top of what it is charging the public, whereas a government-owned company would not be pocketing these profits. Therefore, we have to ask, what does \"economic efficiency\" mean? The reality is that for-profit companies do produce greater \"economic efficiency\" than government-owned companies, yes, but typically at greater cost to consumers due to the pocketing of profits by these companies. In this way, privatization is more \"efficient\" for the owners of water utilities, but not necessarily for the general public that pays more than before. This is particularly wrong-headed in the context of water being a right that should be available equally at affordable costs to all socio-economic groups in need of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For-profit water companies seek to maximize profits at higher cost to consumers\n","id":"36360731-c92a-49f9-9915-643b1962eec2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should jury trials be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The requirement of unanimity forces the jurors to consider the facts as much as possible in order to reach consensus. No comparable incentive acts on judges.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Juries are more likely to cancel out bias because they are made up of 12 people who have to reach a unanimous decision.\n","id":"6d3b149d-af68-4386-8fa9-52c9a42a1b50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>In a committed relationship, what constitutes infidelity?<|ARGUMENT|>Penetrative sex involves potential consequences like pregnancy or transmission of STDs that can harm the unknowing partner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Penetrative sexual acts with anyone but your significant other constitute cheating.\n","id":"44fe1b1a-cc9f-4cde-a0c0-1fcc1f399aba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Although Twitter uses proprietary spam-fighting tools to supplement the identification of extremist accounts, the majority of account identification is based on reports from its users Klausen, Marks, and Zaman, p. 2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blocking terrorist accounts requires asking users to look for and report accounts they notice or interact with.\n","id":"f8dcbbc0-d50f-4436-a8fd-b0a176c3eaea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My wife and I have been caring for a teenage foster daughter and her newborn for the past three months. She is not a particularly driven individual, but aside from her baby is a fairly ordinary teenager for her grade, and is probably a better than average caretaker given her family history. This view is the result of our repeated interactions with trying to get a her to properly parent for her newborn while managing her own life, as well as the plethora of interactions we have had with other people in the foster care system as we have reached out for assistance with our problems. First, I think that in more of an agricultural, less technologically driven society, something like this would be unnecessary. However, in order to be a parent, you need to be able to provide for your child. In a modern society like urban America, in order to provide for yourself and another person, you need an education at least high school GED , and you don't get that until your are around the age of 18. Second, my experience with teen parents is limited, mostly to the foster system and TV, which I realize is not thorough. My inclination is that most successful teen parents have a significantly involved parent in some capacity that likely should be the guardian anyway. I have not fully thought through all of the intricacies here, and that may be the weakest link in my argument, eg what happens when the minor turns 18? but I still think the benefits outweigh the potential costs here. Third, I think that expecting a minor to be able to successfully raise another person when we don't allow them to vote, drink, work child labor laws , etc, is absurd. The law doesn't treat minors as able to function in many respects, so how can we expect them to succeed in this, one of the if not THE most important thing we as humans can do? Fourth, I think that by putting the onus of establishing a guardian on someone, it will force the minor to have many of the very difficult conversations about what is actually involved in child care babies are not toys, your child should not be your friend, etc . For people that don't care about their children's welfare and just have babies anyway whom I have met a depressing amount of in the past few months , this onus should accelerate the process of foster care and adoption if no childcare provider can be identified. So it's a pretty grim place I've worked myself into. I'm generally against government intervention in lives, especially something as grievous as government removal of children from parental care. I realize there is somewhat of a Pandora's box I'm opening here by allowing another opportunity for government abuse, particularly in small towns or abusive parental relationships, but seeing the system as it currently exists is fairly soul crushing and seeing the hope and promise of these young lives jeopardized by shitty decisions of people who are legally recognized as being unable to care for themselves is very frustrating. Please , especially by providing a counter argument that the status quo is better. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kids under 18 who have babies should be required to designate a legal guardian for the baby\n","id":"11b2b88d-8f41-433e-a100-bb678bcb3e96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At all. No exceptions. Crack addicts, single mothers, elderly widows, if you fall under the poverty line and need help, by all means, take what's offered . Using the so often cited single mother with four kids example, can you really justify letting her four kids starve because their mother's kind of a slut? The crack addict, if that welfare check keeps him from stealing shit to survive, isn't that a net gain for everyone? That guy sitting on his couch doing nothing? Just opened up a spot in your line of work that led to a decent salary. Even if we did somehow dream up a system that allowed us to weed out those abusing it, and they turned out to be the majority, what then? Do we cut them off, leave them to their own devices? Seems to me the only cost effective option.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't give a damn if you're on welfare.\n","id":"faff1110-e8ed-4122-9d1c-162cf3d259a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Even since I was little, I never really understood why we encouraged learning many different languages. Sure, I understood why those languages existed from a historical sense, but I never understood why there were so darn many. For a while this led to me thinking erry'body should learn English thanks to a bias of me already speaking it. But, over time and personal growth, this has evolved to me simply thinking everyone should learn on single language, regardless of whether or not it is English. I see a few benefits to this It better facilitates communication. In an age when the Earth has been made tiny by computers, air travel, and the like, it seems silly to have so many languages to deal with, both in people's personal lives, to business communications, to political discourse. Why not cut out the translation middle man and get everyone on the same level? It better facilitates media. Right now, media from all over the world including literature, articles, videos, broadcasts, movies, video games, comics, and television shows, among other things are limited in reach by language. Not everything can and will be subtitled or dubbed in every language, and even those that are often lose much of the luster and clarity of the original. For an example, just take a look at the anime market. It creates common ground. It's well known that language helps define how people think and, because languages often create or are created by different cultures, they all emphasize different sets of values. And I certainly understand needing to keep the ability to express different cultural value sets within language. So, why not create a large language that allows for the expression of different ideals while narrowing the amount of separation between people? Why not make the various words overlap and, instead, focus on how they are used to create personal and societal identities? Those are my thoughts, but I am aware that many people love and defend multilingual societies, so I would like to hear what those people have to say. And who knows, I may very well find reason to change my views 3 NOTE I'm not looking for information on whether getting the world to adopt a single language would be practical or not. I'm simply looking for arguments about why, if somehow presented with the opportunity, we should not go for it. EDIT Since people have been asking, I shall clarify. I am saying that this language would REPLACE all others. It would NOT be in addition to someone's native language.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe adopting a single, unified language would be beneficial to the world\n","id":"2992ae1c-23fb-4901-b51e-154802b48338"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is a nuclear Iran intolerable?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if Iran opts not to use a nuclear weapon, there are major additional risks. It's possession of a nuclear weapon would make it much more likely to act aggressively in the international system through conventional means or through its sponsorship of terrorism. Nuclear weapons will support such aggression because it will make other states think twice about responding aggressively, out of fear that Iran will then respond with nuclear strikes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A nuclear Iran would be more aggressive in the Middle East\n","id":"4dd3c8af-8f14-4057-8431-2eaacbd82b6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should People in Positions of Authority Resign When Accused of Sexual Assault?<|ARGUMENT|>An accusation without any evidence of wrongdoing is not grounds to proceed with a trial. Prosecuting and\/or convicting people without evidence has had terrible consequences throughout history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without a proper trial, clear factual evidence, witness testimonies etc, claiming sexual assault\/harassment willy-nilly devalues the seriousness of Sexual Assault.\n","id":"3489f0ed-1012-4ecd-a43a-312d8f70b2f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My Aunt died yesterday morning. I spent a lot of time with her over her last few days, and wat he'd her progression toward death. I was with her as she became unable to speak. I was with her as she started to do nothing but stare off into the distance and moan with every exhale. I was with her when the liquid started pooling in her lungs. I was with her as she struggled for a further day and a half to breathe, drawing great big shuddery breaths, as she stared blankly at nothing and responded to none of our words, or our touches. People should have a right to their own body. No one can force another person do donate an organ, or blood. Why should we force a terminally ill person to live through what soon becomes the most traumatic moments of their lives? Why do we decide they can't choose what to do with their death, especially when it's inevitable. Watching a loved one die like that is traumatic, for the doctors that tried to save her, for the family members who love her, for the nurses that care for her. The bed and room she took up could be better used helping someone to recover from an illness It's undignified. I know my aunt would never have liked to look how she did. She used the final kilojoules of concious energy she had to fuss with a towel, so she wouldn't be hard to clean up if she vomited. And fixing her blouse, wiping tears from her eyes. She didn't want us to see her that way, but we wanted her last moments to be with family and familiar faces. If she had the option of breathing in pure nitrogen gas until she dies, it would be completly pain and fear free. She could do it on her terms. It could have been simple, and quick, and as dignified as possible. It should have been an option for her. The leglities would work exactly the same as similar processes, with power of attorney, guardianship etc, in conjunction with doctor suggestions and approval. Just the same as do not reccusitate orders. It would be kinder all around.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Euthanasia should be an option for terminally ill patients.\n","id":"a207805e-1629-43ca-9210-2f72d6c2534e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When trying to convince you to donate, organizations like the Red Cross will make some claims that are easily dismissed. Your donation can save up to three lives Blood transfusions save a life every X seconds They go to no effort to evaluate counterfactuals, in other words they don't compare your donation to what would happen if you did not donate. This is in part because we don't really know how much worse medical treatment would be if we asked doctors to use 10 fewer blood transfusions than they currently do, or encouraged them to use 10 more. We also don't know in advance whether the hospital that your blood is sent to will be throwing away expired blood before your unit leaves the shelf, or at the other extreme whether they will actually run out of units of your blood type. So as a whole, the national system of people donating their blood to be used in hospitals appears to do a great deal of good, but the marginal impact of any given individual donating blood seems to be quite small, or possibly zero. Since nobody publishes any attempted accounting of how many people have ever died due to a shortage of blood donation supply, we need to do our own estimate. So what can we glean from the facts 13,600,000 units of blood are collected in the U.S. each year. Meanwhile, according to another set of facts 4.5 million patients need blood transfusions each year in the U.S. and Canada, and use 2.7 units each on average, so it appears that 12,150,000 units actually get used. That's a pretty low waste factor considering the issues of expiration and needing to distribute blood to thousands of hospitals, the need to sometimes respond to acute local crises, etc. On the other hand, only 10 of the U.S. population donates blood, while 37 are eligible. There is in most cases zero financial incentive to give blood. If there were many deaths from lack of blood availability, would there not be more money in it for the donors? The lack of even nominal compensation for blood donations suggests there are not many lives to be saved if the blood supply grew. Also, why are so many people excluded from the donor pool when only 54 people a year suffer from even potentially transfusion related deaths? Our ability to test blood directly for dangerous blood borne disease is better than ever. And yet, we shrink the donor pool by excluding people with risk factors for blood borne disease, even including some seemingly tame risk factors. Notably, we don't let people donate blood within 12 months of receiving a blood transfusion Despite the fact that receiving a blood transfusion only has about a 1 100,000 risk of potentially related fatality, and many of those causes of fatality would be screened out in the donation process or would prevent one from trying to donate . You also may not donate if you received a blood transfusion since 1980 in the UK or France, or if you are a man who had sex with another man in the last 12 months, or if you EVER used a non prescribed IV drug, or got a tattoo in a state where the government doesn't regulate tatoos. All of those facts about a person increase their risk of having a blood disease like perhaps hepatitis or CJD. But by how much? How much higher is the risk of a unit of blood that tested clean from, say, a man who had sex with a man 9 months ago, compared to the general population? I cannot find direct data, but given that 9 months is plenty of time for most STDs to become obvious in the bloodstream, and gay sex is only somewhat more risky than other sex acts. If you are straight and slept with a total rando two weeks ago, honestly that seems like a much bigger problem. Maybe the exclusion criteria are totally irrational. But assuming they are at least SOMEWHAT grounded in science, the marginal benefit of expanding the donor pool must be really microscopic. A random pint of blood in the current donor pool has a 1 500,000 chance of causing a transfusion related problem. Even if categories like men who had sex with another man between 9 and 12 months ago have double the average amount of risk, that implies that marginal donations into the system save somebody less than 1 250,000 of the time. If the average person saved by a blood donation is 40 years old, they only have about 350,000 hours left. Donating blood takes about an hour. Hmm. Even assuming that there is zero risk or downside to donating, and you would otherwise be doing something totally unproductive but averagely fun like listening to a podcast, it's totally unclear whether donating blood does any good. I have donated several units of blood during my life, so I'd be gratified personally to learn that I haven't wasted my time. In addition, if my overall conclusion is changed before 3pm today, I will take an hour off work to go donate blood. If not, I will donate one hour of my pay to a GiveWell.org recommended charity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blood Donations Have Little, or Possibly Zero, Marginal Impact\n","id":"27ec8ec6-04b6-4f78-9774-7baadb907f5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the 50's, the US dove headfirst into one of the greatest moral panics it has seen. the second red scare brought with it a mentality where leftism and communism were considered to be dangerous and anti american patterns of thought. under the banner of preventing the domestic spread of communism, many unconstitutional acts of government went relatively unchallenged. right wing groups accused anyone who had philosophical disagreements with them of being evil and dangerous. certain groups such as actors and teachers were targeted in particular and risked a plethora of unconstitutional actions against them. i see parallels to many of these things in the anti terrorism actions of america today. the NSA is carrying out a blatantly unconstitutional mass surveillance project on the US population, people are being held in prison indefinitely without trial, our airports have a massive practice of security theatre, and anti middle eastern racism is rampant all in the name of preventing the ill defined and incorporeal terrorist threat . even on this very sub, there are several posts that show blatant political moral panic such as I believe Islamic extremism is worse than other forms of religious extremism, I believe, political and economic factors aside, Islam is fundamentally a religion that teaches violence, and I believe that the US Government should have authority to see our files, tap our conversations in the first couple of pages. it seems to me that the government has glorified the terrorist threat in order to circumvent constitutional limitations in the same way that it glorified the communist threat in the 50's for the same reason.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the recent fixation of the western world with \"terrorism\" is a modern rebranding of McCarthyism and the red scare.\n","id":"cee74c83-bedd-476e-876e-23f8ce121aaf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently have been considering living in a van in the bay area. I can afford to rent a room, but rent is high here, and i already live very minimally, so i believe i would be comfortable in a van. I asked a friend about this, and he was very opposed. I think his most valid critique is Breaking the law to live here in a way that is explicitly illegal despite having the resources to live legally seems like saying your desires are more important than those of the people who pay the taxes to build this place. I don't know if i have a solid response to his argument, but i think i can avoid this issue all together by simply parking in cities where it is not illegal to live in a van i believe a few of these still exist in the bay area . However, before exploring the possibility further, i would like to know if there is some perspective on this issue that i have missed. x200B edit its been about an hour and im going to sleep. i hope i'm not violating the minimal replies rule. ill try to reply again in morning 8 hours<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is morally acceptable to live in a van, even if i could afford to rent a house\n","id":"36523e7e-577f-426f-8462-e9f07ebe69c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently read a comment about gun control which suggested that firearms should be restricted to only carry one round and that doing so would not negatively impact self defense, hunting, or fighting against a tyrannical government. Self defense would be massively impacted by a restriction to single shot firearms. For example, if the person using the gun is unable to neutralize the criminal with one shot, they would be open to an attack by a criminal with a knife. Criminals would also be more likely to travel in groups because it would negate the usefulness of a gun. If you can only shoot one criminal assuming you don't miss , the others would be able to harm you. Hunting is less impacted than self defense, but it would be impacted nonetheless. A hunter would have to reload between shots which gives wildlife a longer time to run away. Also if a hunter encounters dangerous animals such as wolves or bears, a gun would have much less utility in self defense. Fighting against a tyrannical government would severely be impacted by exclusively using single shot weapons. The US army has used rifles containing multiple rounds for over a hundred years. Current US army rifles can hold 20 30 rounds, pistols can carry close to ten rounds, and light machine guns can hold hundreds of rounds. Armed resistance would be massively affected by this limitation and would most likely lose. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Restricting all firearms to be single shot would negatively impact hunting, self-defense, and fighting against a tyrannical government\n","id":"65f9c60c-85fa-41c3-8715-b2ca824f6e52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I voted for support President Trump. I will admit that I never thought he would win the nomination and then the office of President. Much like Abraham Lincoln when he won the Presidency, none of the political ruling class gave him a chance as he was considered a novice with limited experience and rough country way about him. President Trump has been viewed in the exact same manner. So much so, that the losing political party mainstream Media have been looking for and creating scandals and distributing misinformation to try and do as much damage in the opening months of his presidency. He is an unorthodox person and unconventional President, but, should be given every opportunity to implement his agenda and do the work as we all benefit from a successful Presidency. Unfortunately, people in the mainstream Media and Democratic career Politicians Maxine Walters are calling for his impeachment. Obviously an attempt to sink to lowest level of politics to rile up her base. People need to step back, take a breath and let this man who has demonstrated leadership knowledge skills much like Abraham Lincoln did when given his chance to lead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I support President Donald Trump\n","id":"fbe6e0d2-fef0-4c39-8bec-ac97d5c38301"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This  was spurred by this video I like this channel, and generally like the content, even if I don't always agree with it. Anyway, the video contains most of the arguments that I'm reacting to, so I probably won't be swayed by a reiteration of one of these arguments. Although, if you can bring one of their arguments into context in a way I hadn't thought of, I'll give you a delta. So I want to be aware of the message that movies and shows present to my children. I had thought that The Lorax movie 2012 was a good choice for presenting a message of environmentalism in a fun way. When it came out, I was aware of the supposed conflict of interest the movie took money to promote a car . But I still thought that the message was sound. There's even a part in the movie where the Lorax appears on an endorsement sign for the Onceler's product against his will which makes any endorsement kind of ironic. The video has a few problems with the movie It does not promote its message of environmentalism well because gt a. They made the Onceler a cool, hip Millennial. That detracts from the message. Personally, I think that ENHANCES the message. In my opinion, the cool, relateable Onceler is a great way to drive home the message that YOU could do ill without even realizing. The Onceler in this movie is the one who moves forward with his environment destroying factory, rationalizing along the way. All of this takes place within a song, but I think How Bad Can I Be? is a brilliant song. If it had appeared in an original film, it might be appreciated for the complexity that it shows a younger audience in a really approachable way. Basically, a cool, relatable guy, who has family conflicts and plays guitar, tries to make good. He causes problems to the environment along the way by believing that he is 'not bad'. He doesn't try to be bad. He just doesn't realize or ignores that his choices become increasingly 'bad' for everyone. I think this is better than just having the Onceler be a set of hands. In the original, the Onceler is many anonymous sets of hands, moving things toward a less environmentally friendly world. I think this makes sense, but for a longer movie, making the Onceler just a normal guy was the right move. THIS is how you show that you are the Onceler in a movie of this length. gt b. There is an evil corporate villain O'hare to take the place of the REAL villain The Onceler You. He is easily defeated. The video makes the point that the addition of a new villain takes some of the blame off of the viewer, as if saving the environment means that you have to stop an evil, external force acting out of antipathy toward the environment. When, in reality, you need to react to multiple forces, including yourself, acting in their own interest, and simply neglecting the environment. I think that this is just part of it. You don't JUST solve the problems of environmentalism by personal restraint. We can't just conserve and recycle, and then everything will be alright. There really ARE external corporate forces acting in their own interest against the environment, and we need to be aware of them too. In fact, if we had to choose between recycling and conserving OR rallying to shut down a corporate interest that is harming the environment, our limited time and resources would be better spent doing the latter. All said, I think that The Lorax movie is something that kids should see, and gets its message across for a new generation, but I am open to the idea that it is actually harmful to its own message because of the way that it is presented. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Lorax movie 2012 is true to its message, and is a good movie to promote environmentalism to kids.\n","id":"8969de00-0c41-4c5c-b8e7-6ab1c16c2392"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think homosexuality actually is a mental disorder. In the 70s it was declassified as a mental disorder, yet I dont understand why. Things such as narcissism wanting to steal things or even simply lacking sexual desire are things considered mental disorders, yet homosexuality isnt, even though it fits definitions of mental disorder. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think homosexuality actually is a mental disorder.\n","id":"d025b05d-cdd4-419d-a9d7-f53a7ca06f73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>only teach abstinence for sex education in schools<|ARGUMENT|>Teaching teens that sex is wrong forces them to believe that their natural sexual impulses are wrong- causing great confusion and self-doubt- and causing the needless and frustrating suppression of sexual impulses. Instead, teens should be taught that these impulses are natural and beautiful, and should be helped in the process of understanding and channelling them. This will help teens live a more fulfilling life, as opposed to a life of self-denial. Notwithstanding the rarity of sex positive sexual education schemes in the UK and the USA, sex positive teaching has been used elsewhere, including Germany and the Netherlands. By teaching teenagers that sexual encounters are highly pleasurable, but should be entered into safely and responsibly, there is less chance that they will see sex as a taboo. Correspondingly, teenagers will be more willing to discuss crises arising from their sexual behaviour, and more likely to recognise the symptoms of STIs and pregnancy, and more likely to seek help for such problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex positive sex education is more likely to reduce irresponsible sexual behaviour than abstinence programs.\n","id":"ef667d36-1336-4be2-a708-1e6342221be8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>With the prevalence of sperm and the rarity of an egg and a vessel which to carry the unborn, a man can impregnate several women a day, while the woman can only be impregnated once every 9 months and carry the fetus. This means men adapted more disposable features like warrior or hunter less impact to the species if they die and women adapted more care taking features. Women also adapted more docile features to trigger the protector instinct in men. madamenoire.com therealrevo.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The evolutionary approach argues that differences in sex behavior are based on biological reproductive desires, whereby men seek to spread their genetic material while women are more selective in reproducing.\n","id":"8c39e748-4e28-45e4-b85b-016a2ac17b1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Look I understand that the value of the 60 pricepoint for developers and publishers is wearing thin as time goes on. What was 60 in 2007 is 72 in 2017, etc, etc. But quite frankly, the idea of turning a game I already paid 60 for into a pay to win free to play style game is ridiculous. The loot boxes are the worst part. It's tolerable if it's only cosmetics or sidegrades, but it's ludicrous to have a game's progression system based off of them. I hardly know what I'm even getting when I'm buying a loot box. It's ridiculous it's low value for the consumer and is highly exploitative of people's psychological weaknesses. Now people will say, well, you don't have to buy them, you can just spend 100 hours trying to mine Monopoly money to get to where you want. Well, guess what, I didn't use to have to play 3 5 hours with a shitty starter weapon build deck just to be competitive at a base level. I didn't use to have to gamble with glorified slot machines to get the upgrade progression item I want. It's ridiculous. I already gave the publisher 60, but apparently that only buys me half the experience. Hell, I don't understand why they can't just raise the price of the base game like they've been doing for 20 30 years before 2010, and give me a full experience. Or maybe just sell a bunch of small xpacs and DLC, way better for the consumer than fucking loot boxes. I don't need to be exploited for them to earn money. These publishers don't care about games anymore other than as a business platform. They just want to squeeze every nickle and dime out of consumers. Their idea of providing value for the consumer is no longer about providing a fulfilling experience but rather about scratching psychological itches that allows the company to make more money. I'm not gonna buy Battlefront 2 and whatever 60 game that has that kind of system. I don't care if the industry moves that way you can buy these games if you want, but I think I'll be voting with my wallet. Calm my rage and  please.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no way I'm going to buy a $60 game with loot boxes\n","id":"75c5b1e5-9cce-4343-ab55-8f955cb991a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Trickle down economics, a slur for supply side economic theory means that the government encourages policy that promote more investment rather than spending. This worked very well for China when they allowed and encouraged foreign investment in 1992. Modern cities sprung up practically overnight and the landscape of the Chinese economy changed drastically, growing at double digit rates. Now this is not to say that encouraging consumer spending is wrong either. In truth, i think policy should be set somewhere between the middle of the two. But most people, especially on reddit demonstrate an incorrect view of how supply side economics is supposed to work. gt Rich just sit on their money gt Rich don't spend their money gt It encourages income inequality etc<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Trickle down economics\" is not necessarily a deleterious economic strategy\n","id":"70ce8f2b-e923-4c03-9fb1-45d106f4d37c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>Regulatory misalignment between the UK and EU could result in a prohibition on data sharing between the two zones, causing serious problems for businesses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A hard Brexit would result in short-term regulatory chaos.\n","id":"5e46d9da-3255-4e5c-9f99-c79438952d2c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>As man created artificial intelligence, robots & automatons which follow his instructions blindly evidently without criticizing, blaming or going against him, it is unlikely God would be so foolish to have created conscious beings with free will many of whom don\u2019t believe He exists, criticize Him, even blame, go against or harm Him, which may indicate that nature, e.g., humans, is not the creation of God\/God does not exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The classical definition of God is contradictory or incoherent, and thus God cannot in principle exist.\n","id":"275a38c6-ec02-4058-a94b-bca8d1b7dce5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Of course there are different levels of abuse. Teaching children to be ashamed of their sexuality which happens very obviously to homosexual children but ALSO to heterosexual children, particularly in Christianity is extremely abusive and can have some detrimental effects later on in their life when they try to form romantic relationships. Outside of sexuality, teaching religion as fact instead of as a system of beliefs that some people believe in, is teaching them a lie. Since there is no proof of any god or gods, we should teach ABOUT religion ALL different kinds of religions and let our children form their own opinions. Teaching it as fact when it is NOT fact is abusive just like teaching anything else as fact when it isn't fact is abusive. It gives them false information that can harm them later in life when they try to adjust to the rest of the world that doesn't view one set of beliefs as fact. I'm not trying to be antagonistic and I understand the value that religion can bring to children especially during the lost of the loved one but I think this is easily remedied by saying I believe your insert loved one here is looking down on you from heaven instead of saying your insert loved one ere IS looking down on you from heaven. Why can't we present our beliefs as beliefs instead of facts? It would be much more educational for our children and far less abusive towards their intellect. Note I also don't believe in teaching atheism as fact to children. That would be just as abusive though it usually wouldn't have the added bonuses of the abuse regarding sexual oppression and the like . As I've said, I think we should present all sets of belief as sets of beliefs and all facts as facts. And for you religious folks out there that are about to go at me for science I believe we should teach things like gravity and evolution as the THEORIES that they are, not as facts though we already do this for the most part . And then supplement that with the evidence behind those theories and why people came to conclusions on the theories, just like we would present children with evidence like the bible and koran to support religious views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe teaching children religious belief as fact is mentally and emotionally abusive.\n","id":"0455e21a-0946-40d9-bfdf-ed248226b1ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It doesn\u2019t benefit the military or society, and it causes a lot of people to get married for purely pragmatic reasons when they\u2019re not ready \u2013 they\u2019re often too young, about to deploy, not committed, etc. Military careers require flexibility, mobility, and can be dangerous common sense tells me that very young people are more useful in these jobs if they are single. Age brings maturity and a better sense of balance in these areas There are benefits to being in the military that resonate as fair comprehensive healthcare, housing, travel moving expenses, etc. The occasional civilian job will offer some of these as well, and people consider them fantastic perks. No one in the civilian world, however, would think it was fair if a company paid married employees more, simply because they were married. To be honest, I really don\u2019t see why each child brings in additional income either. I\u2019m only familiar with the set up in the US\u2026.would love for someone to comment on military marriages elsewhere.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There shouldn't be financial incentive for people in the military to get married.\n","id":"930e5149-8f35-47fa-9d83-7a44a1958646"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>Inequality is partly a consequence of individual choices. Fighting this inequality attacks the responsibility of the individual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all inequality is bad. It can be beneficial for a society.\n","id":"26620880-8f2d-4bc5-98c3-2e47669dae50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Term limits sound like a good idea on the face of it. However, ultimately they fly in the face of our ideals and give too much power to people who nobody elected, like lobbying groups and special interests. At a fundamental level, the only ones deciding how long a politician is in office should be the people. If the voters in a party don't like the incumbent, they are free to support a primary challenger. If voters overall don't like the incumbent, they're free to support the other guy. As for long term incumbents like Nancy Pelosi or Hal Rodgers, who will always be reelected, that's an argument against safe districts and parties being bigger ideological tents, not for term limits. What instituting term limits does is it eliminates the kind of institutional memory that bodies like the house and senate rely on, making it so that only unelected movers and shakers like Karl Rove or James Carville possess that kind of memory, allowing them to have even greater latitude in manipulating the system despite not having a single vote cast in their favor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Term limits are undemocratic and should be repealed.\n","id":"ad42856c-cffd-480e-9ebe-c5b35fe495ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>The promotion of large-scale schemes for change in a top-down manner only reproduces polarization. Instead, change should be through a bottom-up process and by capitalizing on existing ties on the ground level, for example the work of NGOs and citizen initiatives Coleman, p. 213<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Promoting a two-state solution against resistance would repeat what has failed in the past: external pressure and the promotion of large-scale change, for example in the form of peace and a two-state solution. Smaller steps forward might be a more feasible alternative.\n","id":"d48e1e34-822c-4ee9-acbf-41382bceddd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>Restricting employers freedom to offer whatever terms of employment they like may well reduce the amount of people that they can afford to employ. This means that the employee is left with less employment options to choose from.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state should not intervene on behalf of a worker who voluntarily accepted a job and the associated wage, because they are not being exploited.\n","id":"29843381-4247-4e36-8964-0956e7aebb88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently I went on to download a few albums by bands I've heard about many times but I've never really listened to. One of those bands was Joy Division. I like listening to debut albums of various bands to get a feel of how they started especially critically acclaimed albums. I knew this album wasn't Joy Division's first recorded material, but because I'd heard about the album before and because it has comparable or even better ratings than Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon I thought it would be a good idea to start there. Basically I just wanted to widen my musical horizons and this album was legendary and critically acclaimed. So far so good. Let me just say that I don't want to be rude or unnecessarily critical about this album. I just want to make it very plain what causes me to dislike it. I respect the band, I respect the fans, I respect the legacy. I'm not hating. The band played some music, some people listened to it. If I don't like it I can simply not listen to it, right? But the reason I'm not dismissing this album as this is shit, I'm moving on is because it seems to be received so well by others. And not just hipster emo teenagers actual musical critics too. So there's a good chance it's me, not the album. I'd really like to know what I'm missing here. Even if I'm never going to like it, I'd like to at least understand why it's so loved by many others. There are bands and albums I respect and get but never listen to, I could perhaps add this album to the list. When I played the first track Disorder I was almost sure I'd downloaded a fake torrent. No way this could be so positively received by critics. It's out of tune, there are many many many embarrassing mistakes by all players mistakes I would be ashamed of during band practice, let alone in a recording session the singer can't sing and there's nothing special or memorable about the music at least for me . They sound like very sloppy beginners with songs they didn't rehearse very much. The bass player especially rustles my jimmies with oddly placed notes which do not fit the key or mood of what the guitar is playing. The way the album was mastered is ok, I don't have a problem with the sound . I have a problem with the sounds produced by the bandmembers. Hopefully that makes sense. I've seen many beginners play live and record and there were times when I felt like I could hear the potential those bands held even though they sounded bad. They just had a lot of hard work ahead of them. Unknown Pleasures doesn't give me that impression. Even if the songs were played well, most of them would still be boring and mediocre at best. The songs are bad, the performance of the band is shocking. For the record the lyrics are good, but that's not enough to make me enjoy the terrible music. Keep in mind I'm talking about the album, not the band itself. I understand that the band was very influential and special. Granted, I'm not really sure why, but that's just my ignorance on the subject. This album is rated so high and sounds so bad. That's my biggest problem with it. It's as if nobody heard what I'm hearing. How can it be rated even remotely comparably to Dark Side of the Moon? Shouldn't we say yeah this album is quite bad, but it was special at the time so it has a place in rock history ? I'd be okay with that. Perhaps it's historically significant. But musically it's shit and yet so many people seem to enjoy it very much. Even young people today, so it's not just nostalgia. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Joy Division's album Unknown Pleasures is massively overrated. Musically it's very weak by any reasonable standard.\n","id":"228a1bdb-2277-47bc-a4f1-b55229856703"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think a person who is drunk is not in the right frame of mind to make such a choice, and tattoo artists should not ink someone that is drunk. I know that artist could simply say they didn't know they were drunk, but perhaps they should be accountable for their actions, which would make them check if the person is drunk. Maybe go to a more extreme side of making everyone take a breath test, but I only say that because Im unaware of another way to check if someone is drunk. Maybe make them do that 'touch your nose, walk in a straight line' thing police do. Either way, there should be some sort of test implimented, or some sort of punishment for inking a drunk person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think tattoo artists should not ink drunk people.\n","id":"5f701e62-4193-4964-8bb8-6aed62286ffe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every word in the English language has a proper spelling, and a proper pronunciation. These two things are seperate, but in my view, they should be merged. Tongue should be spelled tung. Of should be spelled uhv. To facilitate this, our alphabet should add letters for missing sounds like the thorn and eliminate all redundant letters so we'd keep 'k' and remove 'c', 'q', and 'x'. Obviously, it would be politically impossible to convince all English speakers to undergo this, but my view, which I'm willing to change, is that this would be an incredible boon for the duration of humanity if we did. My main reasoning is this Imagine in math, if we spelled the number 13 as 13, but the number 113 as 114, and the number 14 as 14, but the number 114 as 113. There was no reason for this, and you just had to remember or else you'd have improperly spelled the number. Now imagine every number had arbitrary rules like that, and we had to have big dictionaries to define all the rules, and number spelling bees where we had kids compete in their memorization of the rules which no one could possibly ever be expected to do completely correctly. That sort of thing would have had a huge negative impact on the advancement of math and engineering. Imagine having to implement in the early days of programming? Imagine having to teach kids math with that sort of thing in the mix. Learning to read will always be hard, but our arbitrary spelling rules only make it harder, without adding any value that I can perceive. In my view, making it harder to read and write leads to less reading and writing, which makes our world worse. Same goes for learning a new language. That will always be hard, but our arbitrary spelling rules only makes it harder, without adding any value that I can perceive. In my view, when a language is harder to learn, fewer people will learn it, and when fewer people learn our language, our lives are worse. Maybe there's something I'm missing, and I have it all wrong. I certainly concede that, even if we should replace the correct spelling of words with their phonetic spelling, we won't. But that's not the contention of this post. I'd like to hear arguments for the concept of spelling itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should replace the spelling of all English words with their phonetic spelling.\n","id":"0ed04e1a-a628-46b7-9f3c-ea26e6ed3bd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Brexit: Is The UK Going To Regret The Referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>Stop Hate UK has recorded an increase of 32% in reported hate crimes and racial violence overall after the Referendum.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate crime and racial violence has surged since the Referendum.\n","id":"d3a05b11-d65a-4541-8756-2479718c1d0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Directly as well as indirectly, religion has been subverted for radicalization, making it the primary cause of terrorism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People have been led to do terrible things in the name of religion.\n","id":"7cdaf505-43c8-41f4-8881-b81accdafbab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Living in an environment that is close to their natural habitat will likely make those animals act more happy and have more fun. Happy animals are more entertaining to watch than sad and bored animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"They are also likely to generate additional revenue by attracting a greater number of visitors to the zoo who are keen to see the animal in a more appropriate environment.\n","id":"b67daf49-1154-40fc-9b7f-fc307182cb00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have some friends who get terribly offended when they are asked what their ethnicity is. These friends are korean, chinese, and Iranian. In conversations, each had expressed that such questions are racist in nature no matter the context. I completely disagree and here is why I'm Italian, German, and Native American. My entire life I've also been asked the same question. I've been asked it by people of all ethnicities even my ex wife chinese asked me when she and I first met. Someone's people don't ask, they guess. I've gotten spanish, greek, middle eastern,white, italian, etc And, as far as it being a form of white privledge when asked, I have noticed that my white friends do this to each other as well. What are you? Irish? Scottish? Etc It is a legitimate question to ask, and unless a person is partnering the question with other racist behaviors it is not a racist question. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"asking what sometimes background\/heredity is in casual conversation is not microaggression or racist.\n","id":"51919595-a6a8-45df-af25-f2489eae75d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Climate Change Be Reversed?<|ARGUMENT|>Products like coffee pods become on trend and they are actually harming to environment, and still people blindly buy them thinking the are convenient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Advertisements create an interest for items that use resources that they do not need.\n","id":"8c569859-ae88-4c65-8e1a-7b391c347f01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Antifa direct-action movement beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Many non-violent anti-fascist movements explicitly ask their members to abstain from violence as they know that violence is counterproductive to their cause.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Antifa does not help win over the minds and hearts of the general population.\n","id":"1738b47e-568e-4d2a-a2ee-bc4ecf22e10a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Only the only two parties involved in an AP know the details of the transaction. Third parties have no understanding of the transaction, and therefore cannot offer protection or insurance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consumers value protection from fraud which is impossible with APs due to their nature.\n","id":"cc9c2bb7-ed71-446e-8abb-100924abd74d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence<|ARGUMENT|>Evidence is evidence. There are no different kinds of evidence. If a theory is supported by evidence then it is supported. If evidence contradicts a theory then it needs to be thrown away. But there is no requirement for any special kind of evidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The phrase is undermined because the criteria to determine what constitutes extraordinary evidence is unclear or nonsense.\n","id":"c37b722e-6345-4dbd-b308-96ef9d8a1124"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this mentality is probably really bad, but I've never really understood the concept of being that afraid of getting an unwanted pregnancy since I know that I could just get an abortion. Obviously I am pro choice. Cue pro life user screams haha Now I'm not saying to just be unsafe and get pregnant every time and just get abortions. Obviously preventing the pregnancy from happening in the first place is ideal so you don't have to go through the trouble of getting the abortion and the potential emotional and financial repercussions that come with it, but in my mind it's not that big of a deal if it does happen. I've never personally had an abortion, so I don't know whether actually having one would change my views on this, but as of right now I just don't really see why people are so afraid of getting pregnant. Is it just the financial emotional hassle? I don't understand<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not really afraid to get pregnant because I know I can just get an abortion.\n","id":"25f5d63a-73da-4b5f-bd81-7baa862913e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are identity politics detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Identity politics are currently warranted since certain identities are politically oppressed. Future changes to this status quo, favoring equality, would render identity politics nonessential.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Identity politics are necessary at this current point in social evolution, but may be unnecessary in the future.\n","id":"b01502ed-2444-4edd-8b73-f169cb7b0a95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know that this is a popular topic but I aim to bring a different point of view to it. I m all for a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Syria. I don't think that the Obama administration should launch any type of military action against the Assad regime. The US has already lost a lot of soft power from the war in Iraq. We don't need to lose anymore in a conflict with Syria. The reasons I feel this way are because Launching strikes will destroy what we are trying to achieve. If our airstrikes kill civilians by accident then Assad could use that to rally people against the US. Getting involved means he can blame more things on the US. Even if we specifically target military areas we will still end up hurting innocent civilians by accident. If we get involved militarily then Assad will be able to gain more power from it. We haven't been able to establish a democracy in the middle east by overthrowing the previous government successfully. The US spent billions of dollars trying to establish democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both countries have been riddled with corruption. Furthermore Egypt overthrow a dictator only to elect an Islamist president who they recently overthrew. Military intervention in Syria will only weaken our power abroad even more. At a time when we are not seen favorably in the Middle East we should be strengthening our power instead of weakening it. We would only enforce the stereotype that the US is imperialistic. The war in Syria is not winnable because we don't know which faction we are fighting. If we destroy the Syrian army then we will end up fight factions that are against democracy in Syria. Any faction that we would fight doesn't have to beat us. All they would have to do is engage in Asymmetric warfare until support for the war was gone. Our intelligence on the ground is unreliable. We don't know how much of the rebels are extremists and how much are moderates. There is no consensus on who launched the CW attack. Backing the wrong side could result in more deaths. I know that some of you will bring up the humanitarian reason for going to war. Let me say this. If you are for attacking the Assad regime then why aren't you for attacking the North Korean regime? The North Korean regime has sent many people to labor camps for disagreeing with the government. I believe the case for intervention has nothing to do with CW attacks. I believe it has more to do with US interests. If it was about CW attacks we would be in Africa and North Korea. I believe the best course of action for the US is to let this war continue on as long as possible without it spilling into other countries. Letting the extremists fight each other means the US doesn't have to devote as much resources to fighting Al Queida. No matter what side wins the US loses. I m trying to see the other side <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe the US should get involved in Syria\n","id":"5406dff0-4c96-405e-8157-dc22931a3636"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a millennial, this is an incredibly common trope discussed among my generation here in the U.S., that has never sat well with me. People will say things roughly equivalent to the following used as examples, not an enumerated list to disagree with I never learned how to do taxes in school, why did they teach me chemistry instead of something I would actually use. I don't understand how the stock market works, why didn't I learn that in school? I don't know the laws governing our country, wouldn't that have been a good thing to teach me instead of memorizing Shakespeare works? Wouldn't a class on current events be more useful than studying history? Etc. I don't believe any of this is the purpose of the education system. It is my belief that the education system in this case I'm describing the standard K 12 free education in the U.S. should be to teach you two things. Firstly, how to learn and acquire more information. Most places do this very badly, but that's the fundamental point. Read a text, synthesize the information into analysis, apply it across disciplines, etc. The essence of thinking. Secondly, to have all of the basic academic knowledge underpinning the various degrees and trades that form the basis of higher education. It doesn't matter whether you want to be a mechanic or a rocket scientist, you need to know how friction and it's derivative properties like drag work. Whether you want to be an artist or a business person, you need to know how to critical analyze a text, and write a rebuttal. History underpins politics, math underpins everything. To do away with these things in favor of knowing how to fill out a 1040 EZ which can be done in 10 minutes and comes with step by step directions, I've never understood the tax complaint would be a detriment to society, not a boon. That's my argument. But, I've heard many people in my generation express the opposing viewpoint. People I respect, know to be smart, a value. But when pressed, none of them can provide a good explanation to me as to why we should make this change, beyond just Well I need to know those things in life, thus it's the responsibility of the education system to provide me with that information. Can someone provide me with a more reasoned viewpoint? I'd like to believe this sentiment deeper than that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not the point of the education system to teach you basic life functions like doing your taxes.\n","id":"188d6f1e-9e5b-4a99-b6f1-261d04bace6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pride organisers should refuse corporate sponsorship<|ARGUMENT|>Bill Dobbs, a prominent LGBTQ+ activist, claims that economic justice can't be achieved with Pride in the pocket of corporate America.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Corporations are only sponsoring Pride now as it is now popular to do so.\n","id":"1cf7e423-1d3f-4f2f-88e4-60498785496a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Gulabi Gang a force for good in India?<|ARGUMENT|>When charges were levelled against Devi and other women for attacking a police officer, all the villagers supported her actions and threatened to protest if Devi was arrested.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a result of their actions, people both in India and internationally have responded positively to the presence and vision of the Gulabi Gang.\n","id":"4ef70604-e77f-4311-b9e1-5fb478767ff5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019ve seen so many posts about how companies have been changing their logos to rainbows or posting pro LGBT content or creating pro LGBT merchandise, and how awful it is. They claim that it\u2019s bad because it\u2019s manipulation, and that companies are just doing it as a facade to gain more publicity points and money from pro LGBT consumers. However, I believe that its an incredibly good thing for companies to do this. Seeing so many companies be open about being pro LGBT normalizes it in our society, and makes us LGBT folk feel more included and accepted by the general public. Even if they are doing it for money, what harm is it doing to us? Just in case it\u2019s important, i\u2019m a transgender male.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies changing their logos to rainbows for Pride Month isn\u2019t a bad thing\n","id":"ebc1ccfb-cb4f-4e47-889f-5dc0ea888efd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>not allow companies to collect\/sell the personal data of their clients<|ARGUMENT|>Businesses have been able to use consumers\u2019 personal information to produce far better, more efficient, and more targeted advertising. Traditionally advertisement has been used to reach mass markets and has thus been used mostly as a blunt instrument, targeting the largest and wealthiest demographics in order to get the most efficient use of scarce advertising budgets. The focus on large markets has often left smaller, more niche, markets by the wayside.1 Yet with the advent of the internet, targeted marketing, and data collection services, firms have been able to create whole new markets that cater to less homogenous needs and wants. The result has been a Renaissance of specialty manufacturers and service providers that could never arise if it were not for the collection of personal consumer data. By targeting their advertising, firms have been able to scale back on the broader advertising, making the whole endeavour less costly and more efficient. On the broader level, companies are able to utilize the vast amounts of individual data compiled to allow them to determine broader changes in society\u2019s consumer desires, to establish aggregate trends.2 E-commerce accounts for more than $300 billion in the US. This information gathering makes all businesses more responsive to consumer demands and to cause them to change their offered services and products far more swiftly, to the benefit of all consumers. Businesses have thus been able to flourish that might once have languished without access to a means of accessing their market or been unable to change with changing tastes. Because of the proliferation of personal information aggregation we can enjoy a far more efficient business world, with lots of producers that can compete with the larger mainstream on a more even footing, and a mainstream that is more able to meet the ever-changing demand structure of consumers. 1 Columbus Metropolitan Library. \u201cUsing Demographics to Target Your Market\u201d. 2012.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The storing and sale of personal data aids companies by making marketing more efficient and allows niche markets to thrive\n","id":"e3f26ec5-a651-45c2-ab27-311961bb2f57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Antifa good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>Since the 1960s, British anti-fascist groups like Searchlight magazine have used investigative journalism to expose the extremes of fascist politics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Antifa have traditionally been peaceful in their mission against fascism.\n","id":"45bbc4d3-6b62-4509-b85a-583384cafac7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, in Snyder v. Phelps, the Court ruled that the Westboro Baptist Church had the right to picket a funeral\u2014a deeply offensive act. Six Supreme Court hate speech cases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected speech.\n","id":"18512b7d-ca98-4661-a7e0-840f6ccd3557"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should vegan\/vegetarian parents feed their kids the same diet?<|ARGUMENT|>Yes, but when the kids are older, the parents should give them the possibility to decide if they want to continue their vegan diet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vegan\/vegetarian parents should feed their children the same diet.\n","id":"32485e82-a207-4c15-9bc5-b7916f40e413"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a stark correlation between the 10 most religious states and the 10 worst states in quality of life 9 out of 10 coincidence and between the 10 less religious states and the 10 best one 7 out of 10 coincidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Research in the US, shows that in most sociological measures of well-being, states with less levels or religion fare better than more religious states.\n","id":"36358911-4cbb-49c0-9c12-16f7b338eca8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Drinking Water Be Fluoridated?<|ARGUMENT|>Arsenic is also \"Naturally occurring in water sources. It has the health benefit of reducing breast cancer by 50% and other benefits. This doesn't mean we should add more to our water supply, or that doing so is overall beneficial. History study<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Naturally occurring' does not inherently mean a substance is acceptable for human consumption.\n","id":"f41202b3-42b4-4a3b-b50c-2afe8d9b66cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would like to argue for legalising soft drugs cannabis, tobacco, alcohol?, MDMA, psilocybin, and other psychedelics and decriminalise hard drugs heroin, opium, alcohol?, etc . Most health risks associated with soft drugs arises from prohibition. Drugs such as cannabis, MDMA, and all psychedelics are not deadly whatsoever in their pure, unlaced states and the best way to prevent drug deaths is through education and keeping drugs pure or unlaced. Legalisation would ensure safe access to these soft drugs and people would have the guarantee that their drugs are safe to use. As for the hard drugs, education, overdose prevention and addiction support are the best option. Supplying drugs such as naloxone widely, reduces the majority of overdoses. If governments spent the amount of money they spent on The War on Drugs on the healthcare side of drugs, the use of drugs, the dangers of drugs, and addiction would all be reduced. On another note, drug users are NOT criminals. They are addicts that should be helped and supported, NOT imprisoned. It is extremely immoral, and creates other issues such as mass incarceration. Here is how I suggest it should be carried out I am open to suggestions so please reply if you have a better alternative Step 1 Focus extremely heavily on research on all common recreational drugs. This would require laws being changed so research is allowed. The research should especially focus on the mental health aspect. Step 2 Experts agree on which drugs should be decriminalised and which should be legalised. This will be decided on many factors like potential for abuse, harm to user, harm to others, affect on mental capacity, typical characteristics of the moods it causes, etc. Step 3 Once the classifications are agreed upon, we can proceed. Start educating everyone in public schools about harm reduction on common drugs and try and remove stigma as much as possible. Step 4 Create and regulate the legal markets of the legalised drugs whilst ensuring that regulation isn\u2019t too heavy so that the black market doesn\u2019t compete. Step 6 Set up centers for decriminalised substances where users can safely consume under medical supervision and the drugs will be supplied by the government for free. If users prefer to use the drugs outside this environment, they may do so however, if seen consuming drugs, they can be referred to addiction help. Make sure that anti overdose medication and clean syringes are widely available. Edit Just to be clear, decriminalisation of hard drugs only decriminalises personal users, NOT drug dealers or suppliers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalise all soft drugs and decriminalise all other drugs\n","id":"763b5984-3e85-4f5e-a9b0-36d15bf6b40f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>Arguing that a unified EU is a good thing, not on its own merits, but on how easy it is to convince the citizens, is also inherently undemocratic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is undemocratic to assume that citizens do not know what is best for them.\n","id":"846b91ea-d939-403f-a230-8cd2be803ee4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is BDSM Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>Typically, what most people see of BDSM comes from pornography. And while an unending cascade of voices will rain down on you to ensure you know that it is a unrealistic view of sex in regards to the more vanilla stuff, few people make the connection that it doesn't represent any other branches of relationships either.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all forms of BDSM include pain and\/or humiliation.\n","id":"72d910aa-86fe-4d2f-8f10-d4172ab7504f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit I consider the matter settled. Thank you. Edit The view has been changed to the following A healthy 18\u201335 male individual in the comfort of an air conditioned home with no humidity issues. I believe you should shower every day if you're a normal person who encounters people on a daily basis. But I believe the daily frequency is a matter of smelling nice for others. I believe if you either do not intend to be around others for a brief period or simply are an uncaring person about others and lack concern about their opinion of you, you can stretch the period to other lengths. The example I'll give is the working bachelor. The bachelor lives alone and works less than 7 days a week. For a day off, he likes to slum it and do nothing. He does not leave the house or encounter anyone. The  is that he is not significantly more likely to encounter health issues from this than if he did take the shower and nothing else were different. I will award s to people who persuade me that skipping 1\u20132 days of showers in such a low interpersonal exposure setting likely causes health problems. Because it seems so likely to me at least one day of showerlessness in a low exposure environment, I'll award s to people who can conversely verify that the real reasonable limit is 3 or more days. Any limit other than 2 will be a . Assume all other hygiene is intact. Nothing is different but showering. What will change my view Scientific evidence of some kind, or some analysis of the matter, published or yours, with citations to clinical research. What will not convince me General recommendations, if they are not sourced in clinical research. Recommendations are a social reality. They want to maximize compliance to the extent they can compel you to comply. They can get away with recommending things that may not be necessary in general. If the recommendation is compelling in content in some way and not just by the weight of the body giving the evidence, I could be persuaded. Mere personal opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only reason to shower every single day is not to smell bad. You can get away with showering less often than every single day and still be basically healthy.\n","id":"9be2279a-a8f7-4bba-9f5a-ec972e34d71a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Recycling works<|ARGUMENT|>In 2016, it cost New York City $18 per ton more to collect and process recyclables than to dispose of regular refuse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Recycling can cost more money that other forms of waste disposal.\n","id":"dbd79f80-958b-49af-972b-202b9b9ffc7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US stop trying to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear program?<|ARGUMENT|>North Korea treats its citizens brutally unlike other governments. This indicates that the regime is willing to sacrifice many and thus ignore deterrence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Kim Jon Un regime is different and classical deterrence theory doesn't apply.\n","id":"5f925f82-4e2b-4d13-9869-a02c4a179a81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments intervene militarily in other nations for moral reasons?<|ARGUMENT|>It is incredibly difficult to predict whether the intervention will actually lead to the nation becoming more moral. It is certain that a lot of people will suffer as a result of the invasion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Military interventions often fail to change things for the better and hence should be avoided.\n","id":"64d1ebf8-9538-4b35-8a7a-840ca9f87820"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The notion that polyamory is all a selfish choice that's just about having the kind of sex you want, and world be damned if its not 'traditional' or 'natural' smells just like homophobia and those that opposed interracial marriage. But the fact of the matter is it's not just about sleeping with whoever you want. It's also about exploring your feelings and falling in love when it comes naturally. It's about making boundaries with your loved ones that you can all agree upon mutually, and not confining yourself or your relationships to what's socially acceptable. But instead to appreciate what people mean to you for everything they are, and for what they are not. Some relationships don't fit into boyfriend girlfriend or marriage. And to say those aren't good relationships just because they don't hold up to society's end game fairy tale of happily ever after shouldn't make them less meaningful or relevant to our lives. Polyphobes come out of the woodworks when they begin to fear that the rising popularity and acceptance of non monogamous lifestyles will spell certain doom for their way of life. They fear we'll turn people one by one until they have no one left to date.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think polyamorists' rights and acceptance is the next civil rights crusade, and polyphobes don't have a leg to stand on.\n","id":"a7312cee-6ab8-4027-a833-ebeb1341bd46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook ban political ads with misinformation?<|ARGUMENT|>3,400 Facebook and Instagram advertisements were purchased by the IRA This is a small number relative to 61,500 Facebook posts, 116,000 Instagram posts, and 10.4 million tweets that were the original creations of IRA influence operatives and were disseminated under the guise of authentic user activity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Paid political ads were not the most significant source of misinformation in the 2016 US elections.\n","id":"c82bb53b-422b-495d-988b-3c22447c7960"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Lottery should be an integral component of democratic political systems<|ARGUMENT|>Inexperienced politicians drawn by lottery are likely to be more influenced by those with knowledge in particular interest areas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Career politicians aquire skills how to deal with other actors throughout their career.\n","id":"b406f527-f7f0-4faa-b65c-f41809ace057"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, a few general stances that have been shown in numerous  threads. 1 Clinton's e mail server was not criminal, though mishandled, and was not a justifiable reason to accuse or threaten her with a criminal sentencing 2 Much of the e mails are simply mild campaign actions that would be found in every major politician's e mails during a campaign. From the idea of 'satanic cooking dances' and 'Pizza means child sex ring', the e mail 'scandal' has showcased that the hardcore right wing populous is more than willing to completely and totally disregard facts in order to create a nonsense story to ensure their chosen candidate wins the election, or in the media's case to sell a story for views. We have under oath testimony from James Comey himself saying that Clinton did not engage in criminal acts, even down to agreeing that if a classified header is not included in the e mail, that it would not be considered classified. While Clinton's e mail server was mishandled and should not have been a private one in the first place, despite the fact that in tens of thousands of e mails no single proof of criminal action was discovered, right wing pundits and voters still created a tale of smoke when there was no fire and showcased a unnerving willingness to outright deny or ignore facts in order to manipulate an election and the voting population. Change my view, please, because right now I have a very low opinion on those people and I'd like to be wrong about them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hillary Clinton's e-mail server controversy is nothing more than the hard right-wing voter base\/media being willing to totally disregard facts in order to win an election\/sell a story for views, despite no clear wrong-doing on Clinton's side.\n","id":"e88e1976-c073-46ce-bd14-c4b369783b6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I say this even though I am a Democrat and right now the Senate is in the hands of Democrats. Throughout most of its history, the Senate has simply functioned as a road block to legislation that the public wants, not to protect the legal rights of the minority that's the function of the Supreme Court but to protect the undemocratic interests of the few. Even when one party is in power, the other party has numerous means of stalling and killing legislation. We need a constitutional amendment stating that The Senate shall be abolished, and all its powers transferred to the House of Representatives. Perhaps the amendment could grant a minimum of 2 or 3 representatives to every state so that the smallest states would be less likely to object. The Senate, of course, would never pass such an amendment, but it's possible that 3 4 of the states would.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the U.S. Senate should be abolished.\n","id":"c2524608-3dbe-4478-a826-614aa6e6c16f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we replace meat with insect derived protein?<|ARGUMENT|>Insects contain dietary fibre which is both essential for health and lacking in conventional meats.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Insect meat, e.g. crickets, is highly nutritious and can replace meat nutrients.\n","id":"69300249-76be-4aa8-8cd3-592f29655426"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Star Trek: Discovery vs. The Orville<|ARGUMENT|>Most of The Orville's episode discuss a central social issue e.g. gender, religion, social media. This has always been a core component of Star Trek.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Orville is a better Star Trek show than Star Trek: Discovery.\n","id":"0638bf99-503c-4de4-a879-e9a0cc5c89df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>While individual citizens might not be well-informed, referendum decisions benefit from the wisdom of the crowds through which individual deficiencies are cancelled out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In many cases, there is no obvious right or wrong in political decision making.\n","id":"84f300e0-5943-4d56-a26f-646f277455e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever I go to a restaurant, there is always more waiting than is necessary. In my view, the only acceptable wait time is the time that it takes the food to cook. Any other waiting is unacceptable, especially if it is due to not enough staff. For example, waiting for a table has nothing to do with staff, so that is fine. But once seated, if it takes even a few minutes for the waiter to come over, than my time has been wasted. I know what I want before I even get to the restaurant so there is no reason for me to look at the menu. A simply solution would be for the restaurant to hire more waiters. Sometimes, the chef has to make other peoples orders before mine is made, this could be resolved by hiring more chefs. My final problem is waiting fro the check, some restaurants have an electronic device at the table to pay your check with a credit card, thus any restaurant which does not have this feature is wasting my time. Finally there is that fact that fast food restaurants do not live up to their name by not always being fast. Sometimes I have to wait on line, this is unacceptable in a place which calls it self fast food. Than there is waiting for the food to be made, fast food restaurants sometimes have stuff pre made, but not always. I should not have to wait for even a second in a place calling itself fast food. TL DR I should not have to wait a second longer than it takes for the food to be made. For example, if I order something which takes 10 minutes to be made, I should get it in 10 minutes. I should not have to wait for the waiter to come over, I should not have to wait for the waiter to bring the check, and I should not have to wait while the waiter deals with other people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If restaurants really cared about fast service, they would hire more staff.\n","id":"b32a26b5-bfc4-483d-954b-6592cde3561e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it unethical to use ad-blockers?<|ARGUMENT|>Small and medium sized businesses on eBay have a 54% survival rate compared to offline businesses 24%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The internet creates opportunities for small businesses to participate in the global economy.\n","id":"0e2a073c-241e-42f1-a6a9-f05818733828"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>The four assassinations of American Presidents - of Lincoln Garfield McKinley and Kennedy - all killed exclusively their target and did not lead to any other immediate deaths.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The primary threat facing the White House is that of an assassination attempt targeting a specific person - the President - not of a mass shooting.\n","id":"0f504a5e-9d8b-403a-aabe-99c88db1401b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>According to wiki, gt It has a diverse base of financial support 11 the U.S. State Department, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and the National Science Foundation are major contributors. 13 As of 2012, 80 of the Tor Project's 2M annual budget comes from the United States government, with the Swedish government and other organizations providing the rest, 14 including NGOs and thousands of individual sponsors. 15 From my understanding, TOR is secure if the endpoints aren't compromised. But if TOR is govt run, then I suppose it wouldn't matter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe TOR isn't NSA-proof.\n","id":"612e22bf-1da6-4728-8aed-465ae98c4dc3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not here to argue about gay people, I really don't care about most of the things they do. The only problem I have is when people talk about cultural appropriation they miss one of the big things that has been appropriated in the last 20 years. The rainbow. In a different time I would have liked to wear a rainbow tie dye shirt without being discriminated against for supporting the gay agenda . Why did they chose the rainbow to even symbolize gay pride? In my opinion a perfectly good neutral color selection has been forever ruined as supporting an agenda that not everyone agrees with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gay people culturally appropriated the rainbow\n","id":"a5ae8fba-44a4-42ca-833d-9a9f9c146712"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, the law with respect to asylum is that a potential immigrant gets protection from deportation if he or she can show \u201ca well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.\u201d However, in recent years, immigration activists say that illegal immigrants to the USA should also get protections for facing potential domestic violence or gang violence in their home countries. See. After reading the New Yorker article, I'm very dumbfounded that this could be seen as a good basis for immigration policy, and even more dumbfounded by the argument that the US should be held morally culpable for enforcing its immigration laws when deported illegal immigrants are killed by gangs or their spouses. Here are a couple of obvious points that I don't see addressed at all in the arguments of immigration activists 1 The USA is not immune from gang violence and domestic violence either. If they are grounds for asylum, should every US citizen who live in a bad neighborhood with gangs or have an abuse spouse parent also have a right for asylum to a country of their choosing? 2 The only people responsible for the deaths of victims of gang violence are the perpetrators of those crimes and the government that fails to protect them from those crimes, not the US government that sends people back to their home countries when they had no right to be in the US in the first place. Placing the blame on the US for a non wrongful act enforcing immigration law because other bad actors committed crimes or failed in their duties the gangs and the Mexican government is morally bankrupt.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Domestic violence and gang violence should not be grounds for asylum in the USA, and the USA should not be faulted for deporting people who want to say on those grounds\n","id":"3a7be0d5-2b56-43d9-b0a4-30dd23bbce42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The obvious original purpose of these policies was to ban student groups that would create unsafe learning environments for other students. For example, Neo Nazi student groups would be an example of something we would generally wish to avoid, lest they start attacking Jewish or other minority students and creating unnecessary conflict. I'm not a fan of censorship, but I can at least see how this is reasonable in situations where there is real danger of inciting violence. However, these policies have been given extremely wide interpretations as of late by the student unions who administrate them. They first started being used to ban nonviolent MRA groups and shut down Men's Resource Centres. They have also been used to ban Pro Life student groups. They have even been used to ban the Campus Gun Club, which does nothing but teach gun safety and organize trips to the range. There have also been attempts by some universities to ban Conservative and Libertarian groups altogether, but so far at least these attempts have been, to my knowledge, unsuccessful. In short, they justify banning groups on the basis that they could cause distress for people in a vulnerable position. For example, there was much discussion of gun violence and the effect on minority communities when they banned the gun club which was of course completely irrelevant to what the gun club was actually about . However, that justification is clearly bogus. If we went by that standard, many other groups would need to be banned. For example, the Marxist Club would need to be banned because it is offensive to students of Eastern European and Latin American descent. I personally find it offensive although I would tolerate it if they were willing to tolerate the other groups . The Feminist group, which is often extremely disruptive and hostile in their public demonstrations would need to be banned. The Pro Choice group would need to be banned for being offensive to Christians. And so on and so forth. However, there has never been any hint of banning these groups, presumably because they are left wing and the type of student to get involved with the student unions agree with them. I think this is an unfair double standard, and these policies should be scrapped entirely or rewritten to provide an objective standard of enforcement . Source<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that \"Anti-Discrimination\" policies on Canadian college campuses have become little more than tools cynically used by the far-left to maintain intellectual hegemony and silence dissenting views\n","id":"40937698-7dab-40e2-8f94-824c15752f3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not racist, I just don't think that it's too fair that minorities get scholarships to colleges or get accepted into colleges easilier than Caucasians. Someone was telling me that a Puerto Rican who was 20th in her class was accepted into Harvard where as the Class President who was also the valedictorian of the same school was not accepted. Why should minorities get these advantages?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think that minorities don't deserve any more scholarships than others.\n","id":"60cd1ce8-184c-4ee8-b6d4-2dd9845d8fc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There has been a lot of talk recently about how the declining birth rate will negatively impact first world countries. Instead of passing policies that encourage people to have kids, governments should adjust to a lower birth rate. This could mean investing money in technology that allows older people to live longer and healthier lives while being able to stay in the workforce. They should realize that more people are opting out of parenthood and adjust to it. We can have a low birth rate and have high living standards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Western World needs to move to an economic system that isn't reliant on the average person having 3-5 kids\n","id":"e57f94dc-5d40-4e70-a01b-87fb1cc4dd7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Hell Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>One can presumably suffer eternal destruction in the presence of the lord and conversely one can presumably be away from the presence of the Lord and not suffer eternal destruction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The structure of the verse indicates that those two things are not intrinsically linked.\n","id":"fb1d9def-aef2-4c6e-8007-2971d545c5f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Undocumented Immigration Into the United States a Problem?<|ARGUMENT|>A poll that has been running in the US since the 1960s shows that desire for immigration rates to decrease has been steadily falling over time, with 76% of respondents in 2019 saying that they believe immigration to the US is a good thing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many surveys and studies conducted over time show that Americans increasingly believe migration to their country to be a force for social good.\n","id":"920442d7-b20f-4c70-8768-d29ba1d6fa79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Cancer is an unusual condition, it often continues for an extended period, it involves unpleasant symptoms and changes of appearance. It can often recur, so that you're never 100 sure the suffering is over. We speak of it as the most terrible disease\u2014every time someone posts about a loved one who had cancer, fifty redditors chime in with a clich\u00e9d man, fuck cancer \u2014but we also, curiously, insist that people fight cancer. People are always battling cancer, or if they've recovered, we must say that they beat it, rather than simply being lucky, having the benefit of developed world healthcare, catching it in time etc. We don't talk about people battling a broken limb, we don't insist that someone beat shingles or tuberculosis or pneumonia. When someone suffers a serious assault we don't tell them to fight the symptoms, we tell them to take as long as they need and be sure they recover fully. I believe that the discomfort we feel when meeting or talking to people about cancer has led to this unusual situation. When we tell they must fight cancer, what we're really telling them is, we don't want to hear all about their suffering. We want them to be brave for our sakes, because we don't want to hear about their symptoms or how much pain they're in. We want them to get better sooner not because that's what's best for them, but because then we won't have to hear about it. Notes Before you ask, yes, I have personally known people who died protracted deaths from cancer. I am also aware that there are studies showing that a positive outlook can lead to better recovery prospects for sick people. I am willing to change my mind if you have an alternative explanation for the fighting metaphor being applied exclusively to cancer, or other examples when it's used, or if you have an alternative explanation for our desire for people to fight the disease rather than recover from it passively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"people don't \"fight\" cancer. They simply get better or they don't. When we talk about fighting cancer, we're really saying \"I don't want to hear about your suffering\".\n","id":"1c4fea60-2aee-492e-8402-1050a36f3d5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that a crime is a crime regardless of the motive. I also believe the court should not have the ability to determine any such motive when it comes to specific attacks against any group person with certain beliefs, of a certain race, of a certain sexuality, et cetera. Why should a let's say white male get more punishment for assault if it's against a black male if the court can determine a motive ? Why isn't assault just assault? Now that's just an example, but it works the other way, too, and with any other set of beliefs or backgrounds. I believe hate crimes in themselves are actually very counterproductive, and I also believe the court has no place in determining what someone's motive is. And before I get the argument saying, Well how do we discern between first, second, and third degree murder and manslaughter? , let me point out that determining those charges are not based on what the motive is, it's based on the fact that someone has a motive or intent in the first place. So change my view Edit Well, I gotta get going. Thanks for the discussion, and thanks to u schnuffs for changing my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that hate crimes shouldn't exist.\n","id":"152a18d9-6131-4f2b-977c-e2ba08ea7a43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we judge the quality of artwork based on the conduct of the artist?<|ARGUMENT|>In extreme cases it can. Works of art should be appreciated on their own merits, but knowing that Oscar Wilde and Andre\u0301 Gide were callous exploiters of innocent youth can tend to spoil the enjoyment of their writings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An artist's contribution to society isn't as valuable as the damage caused by their behavior.\n","id":"7ccf1065-dab9-477a-9ecd-05c4da115652"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Oriental has become a non-PC word. It is not considered derogatory. At worst it generalized people from the east as a group much like all white Europeans are Occidental but that term is not restricted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many proponents of PC have not examined the arguments but simply follow the lead of people in power\n","id":"af6deca1-b202-4549-b1a7-86c70856e5c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't believe that knowing the plot to Othello Or Great Gatsby for that matter, thank you very much Mr. Fitzgerald indicates you are more wise or intelligent than the countless people my age that know the plot to Ocarina in Time. This is different than being ignorant of school in general, as science and math have many practical applications. History on a larger scale is valid because it is a recording of events that actually occurred, which tie into science and the progress of humankind. Shakespeare is a part of history of course, but no more so than the paradigm shifting phenomenon of the Zelda games, or Marvel comics. I will allow that there are college classes on the history of graphic novels and computer games, but they are generally electives and not shoved into the minds of high schoolers. Edit I see something similar was posted two weeks ago, unbeknownst to me. However it is a bit different in scope so I'll leave this up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is silly to test students on the writings of a 16th century sketch writer.\n","id":"b3ea7b6e-8bfc-43a7-a0be-62e3f2c55ae5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the interest of those reading this post and to explain my understanding of current queer feminist theory, I'll reiterate what I believe to be their current view on the matter That biological sex is a social construct and mostly meaningless, and unrelated to the gender that one identifies as. Gender is not a binary, but instead more like a spectrum, and biological sex is as well. A person's biological sex should not impact their identity or how they are treated. Within queer feminist theory, there is a lot of opposition to how one's biology impacts their lives. I'd like to note that I feel that a lot of the opposition to discussion about how biological sex impacts a person is probably due to the fact that many of the largest arguments used to invalidate trans folks and belittle women are based on biological sex. For this reason, queer feminist theory likes to entirely decouple sex from gender. So, I'd like to explain my understanding of biological sex Most people have either XX or XY chromosomes, which, for most people, determine their gonads usually ovaries or testicles and other things. For most people, their gonads determine what hormones their body produces, and those hormones result in bodily changes throughout their lives. This results in most people being easily identifiable as belonging to one of two sexes. If we were to take a large survey of adults from cultures all across the world, not asking for their sex, but instead measuring them on a number of traits such as height, testosterone levels, estrogen levels, physical strength, etc. I believe we would end up with a distribution with two identifiable clusters. It would look something like this Note I did not actually do this study and do not know of any like it, but I believe if you did, this would be the result. I used the word most a lot to explain my understanding of sex. Folks who do not fall closely within one of the two clusters are possibly intersex. Note You can fall within one of the two clusters and still be intersex without knowing it This also can include trans people who take HRT to transition, and have a number of bodily changes that would move their point on some dimensions over time. I've seen firsthand with other trans friends of mine how hormones impact their sex drive, their mood, their skin and face, their fat distribution, etc. I've not taken HRT. Medically speaking, I believe that it's alright to describe most people within one of two sexes, but intersex folk and trans folk deviate enough that these descriptions may not be enough. Back to gender, previous feminist theory considered gender to be the collection of social norms and roles expected to be filled by either men or women, and generally considered it a good thing to fight to actively change the way culture is built against women. Current queer feminist theory points to the fact that many cultures have concepts of genders that are not male or female as evidence to decouple it, but fails to point out that across the world, people are still a majority of one of two genders, based on their sex. I believe that it's natural that, because of these two clusters of different traits that sex gives rise to, that there would be cultural differences built around them. That said, I still think it's worthwhile to examine these cultural differences and actively break down harmful or pointless ones. For example, blue being for boys and pink being for girls is totally arbitrary and pointless. I don't believe that anything that I said here should invalidate any queer person, and I wish there was better queer or medical terminology for sex. We have a lot already, such as AMAB AFAB, XX XY chromosomes, etc. when it's relevant, but no very elegant ways to say penis haver or vagina haver . The biggest point that I'm looking to have my view challenged on is in the preceding paragraph That two genders as a result of two sexes is natural, but that does not mean there should not be room for people to fall outside of these two genders or sexes or that sex should be used to invalidate a trans person. Another topic I'd like to shift to is that of how trans folks are treated. There's a lot of argument regarding how one's identity shapes how one is oppressed, and that perception based off presentation, sex, etc. should not be considered. I think that's silly. I'm AMAB myself and part of the reason I haven't transitioned is that if I pass, I know I will be treated worse as a woman , and if I don't pass, I will be treated even worse as a trans woman. How society perceives me impacts how I think. Furthermore, I have AFAB trans and nonbinary friends who are fem presenting and are treated with the same sexism, etc. that come to women. I don't think it's wrong at all to consider how a person's presentation can impact their lives, separate from their gender identity. The reason I'm coming to r ChangeMyView is because everything I've described previously is based off a lot of assumptions that I believe to be true, but don't have hard evidence for. E.g. that a lot of physical traits will fall within one of two clusters, that cultures across the world have a majority in one of two genders, etc. I also didn't explain my justification for a model of two or more genders, separate from sex, which would make for a different discussion. I also didn't acknowledge a lot of the sexism that comes from these two clusters , and how a lot of science both good and flawed is misused against women. Again, that is for a different discussion and not super relevant. Note I'm posting this before I head out to work, so I won't be able to read or reply until later in the day<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While I believe there are multiple genders and biological sex is not strictly binary, I think under queer\/feminist theory it's worth acknowledging how gender is influenced by a mostly binary sex\n","id":"f957fa08-83a6-477a-922d-527044830223"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The variety of positions taken by EU member states governments indicates that political parties across USE will be incredibly diverse. This will make formation of a government difficult.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USE could never make effective law because there would be too many political parties with completely different needs.\n","id":"9b7af5ac-7fdf-441b-86a7-662b642b07f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Justice Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki have expressed concerns about the raise in hate speech, saying that it \"goes completely against the nation's dignity\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even though there is widespread hate speech in Japan in recent years the country remains democratic and a stable society.\n","id":"3cdb56d5-1ded-4945-a7e2-3e76d230855e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should US Senators No Longer Be Elected by Popular Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>Fighting in the Senate would be reduced, as Senators would be more like agents of the 50 states. They would be directed by their states, to act in the best interest of each state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"U.S. Senators should no longer be elected by popular vote.\n","id":"f04f901e-6acc-4909-834f-1abd6363d67d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>The British are most likely expecting many escaped slaves to die in the hostile environment without anyone knowing about their fate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The information and communication technology of the eighteenth century British colonies will make it difficult to monitor us.\n","id":"578cfe13-8e08-4cfb-b7ad-cd3ac2b02797"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I drive an old car, so my audio entertainment is limited to CDs and the radio. Generally I listen to NPR, and have for ages, but after two years of every fifth word being Trump I decided I needed a break and started listening to my local classic rock station. Cue my surprise when I hear a Green Day song played right after a piece by the Red Hot Chili Peppers both from the mid 2000s. Now at risk of sounding like a grumpy old fuck at 27, to me, classic rock was always basically just music that was a thing when my parents were roughly my age. I don't tune into classic rock stations to hear songs that were topping the billboards in 2013, I tune in to hear well the classics. And as demographics show, classic rock station listeners are mainly what you'd expect, as wiki states During the mid 1980s, the classic rock format was mainly tailored to the adult male demographic ages 25\u201334, which remained its largest demographic through the mid 1990s. As the format's audience aged, its demographics skewed toward older age groups. By 2006, the 35\u201344 age group was the format's largest audience and by 2014 the 45\u201354 year old demographic was the largest. Which essentially means that these stations started out playing what was basically Top 40s stuff that was made in the 80s, for people who were listening to that music in the 80s the tracklist changed very little while the demographic aged they've basically been playing the same old hits over and over for the same group of people for the last 35 years. And then, all of a sudden, American Idiot 2004 finds its way into the list Dani California 2006 alongside it. And the most galling part still both produced by bands that are still currently active. And by still active I don't mean they're a bunch of senior citizens still rocking the same dozen 30 year old songs over and over on endless tour tracks that will probably only cease when they're all dead, I mean bands still actively making music What is classic? Can you call a car a classic if they're still producing that same model and make and the car in question is only like 10 years old? Would we call the writings of Greek antiquity classics if they came out in 2006? This just seems absurd to me. TL DR Relatively modern songs produced by active bands shouldn't be considered classic rock and have no place on classic rock stations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Relatively modern songs produced by active bands shouldn't be considered \"classic rock\" and have no place on classic rock stations.\n","id":"0de212f9-7b81-45b9-88f5-0042afa5234c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>Maximizing the executed person's experience of pain or violence is a wasted effort as that person cannot possibly react to this experience in any meaningful way. After all, he\/she is dead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capital punishment prevents the executed person from doing greater harm. Inflicting additional harm on them does not change that basic equation and is therefore unwarranted.\n","id":"3b7f3174-c842-4bcd-a9ab-73204906328e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Religious belief<|ARGUMENT|>There is good evidence that God exists and there are good arguments for accepting religious beliefs. The fact that we live in a beautiful, orderly universe in which human beings exist and have special moral and spiritual awareness points clearly to the existence of a divine Creator behind the universe. Billions of people have had religious experiences of one sort or another - all of them revealing the existence of divine reality - the only good explanation of this fact is that the divine reality is really there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is good evidence and arguments for God's existence.\n","id":"7f8209ee-62af-43a0-a3bd-60a67a9f0963"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>While 54% of church-attending Christians strongly agree with the statement that \u201cour culture is superior to others,\u201d and 48 percent of non-practicing Christians share such a view, only 25 percent of secular people do. And while around 30 percent of both church-attending Christians and non-practicing Christians say that they are not willing to accept Muslims into their families, only 11 percent of secular people express such a sentiment. psychologytoday.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In this 2018 Pew study it was found that religious Europeans are considerably more ethnocentric, more nationalistic, more anti-immigrant, and more suspicious of Jews and Muslims than secular Europeans.\n","id":"f66bd670-8cd5-404f-8c9c-97e7aca818f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, over time I've talked with many different people with many different opinions. It seems to be that's one thing most of them have in common is that they are unwilling to change their position on a subject, especially on one which they have put time into. Personally, I've never been able to change anyone's view on anything important. It's either they never had a view, or they will not give any credibility to an opposing view. I dont know how it is here, i assume the same, but thats neither here nor there. Focusing on the point, I've watched videos of the change my mind set up and it seems they are never going in with the intention of having their mind changed, rather to argue with people about what they most firmly believe. So far I haven't seen a change my mind video that wasn't orchestrated by someone well versed in the topic. Of course this makes sense but ultimately reveals their intentions. So, are people more willing to change then I give them credit for? Try not to use examples from this sub as that may be against the rules. Thanks to all, will respond swiftly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"99% of people refuse to change their minds\n","id":"bddbc552-7ca2-4877-9b88-3abf2bbcf28c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>We already exclude some humans from equal rights. An example of this is nations hosting refugees not granting them equal rights to their own citizens. This is based on an arbitrary separation of borders that we accept in order to have a functional society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Restricting the scope of moral consideration to members of one's own species is morally acceptable\n","id":"4c171b90-1e8f-4587-b3ab-1a2d1c6de6a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I strongly believe that the way we have become so polarized political is a huge threat to the American Experiment. Here are my assumptions 1.Sexual assault is evil. 2.Consent laws are a wonderful idea because puberty doesn't mean that individuals are ready to even comprehend sex and the ramifications. 3.Regardless of political party or preference towards a person, people who have promoted the endangerment of kids, or have confessed to doing so themselves should be considered gross and be called out on their actions. 4.No political side has a monopoly on having more terrible people or having the best people 5.People pretend their football team party is the greatest ever and can do no wrong. 6.Discourse dies and the less discourse there is, the less progress there is. Under Trump the polarization appears to have reached a new level. So that's why I get mad that liberals will ignore Bill Maher and Lena Dunham but then Jump on Milo just because he is a safe target to attack. On the same token, many conservatives are quick to point out this hypocrisy as a way to give Milo a free pass on his terrible advocacy for the molestation of young boys. I strongly believe that polarization in the way we Milo is just as terrible as Lena Dunham, but that doesn't excuse Milo OR Lena Dunham. Both can be awful. They shouldn't get sainthood for being a member of your preferred political party. There are countless recent examples of this, executive orders, Wikileaks, Supreme Court nominations and the like. This one issue hits me me thinking about it a lot more but that's just a single example. the hardest as a child victim of sexual assault though. Another example is different outlets calling out Bill Clinton or Trump for paling with convicted child sexual assaulter Jeff Epstien while COMPLETELY ignoring that the other person in the other side had a similar relationship and both flew on the Lolita Express . It just feels like we are at a point where if your side does the exact same deplorable thing the other side does, instead of self accountability, one side excuses its dirty deeds by deferring to the other sides dirty deeds. It does seem to have gotten worse since Trump came along. It seems to be killing any hope of unity. I hope to God I am wrong about it. My break is over, here is a link to me ranting further to provide more context. you don't have to speak to specific examples, just show me why polarization is GOOD.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political Polarization appears to be killing progress on pretty much every issue and we are doomed if we don't reverse course\n","id":"ad832fa0-3ef6-431a-ab3a-47d0508d6ccb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>The Republican Party had a majority in Congress at the time Obama tried to close down Guantanamo Bay which meant all of his legislative efforts resulted in failure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Congress should be blamed instead of Obama for failing to close down Guantanamo Bay detention camp.\n","id":"631605e2-f39f-4750-b149-01b88bb219b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You have to get a flu shot every year because flus are different every year. Folks get sick from flu shots\u2014I know several people who have gotten the flu immediately after their flu shot. If there's a chance of me getting the flu anyway from this shot, or simply not getting the flu this year because I'm careful and wash my hands etc, then why would I get the flu shot? It seems so unnecessary to do it, and honestly, it freaks me out. Why would I need a vaccine every year for something that will only inconvenience me? I believe in vaccines, don't get me wrong, I'm no anti vaccer. But the flu shot just seems ridiculous. Update view changed<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Flu shots can be ineffective and are unnecessary\n","id":"383e27cf-eac8-4ac9-8a89-0205ae38c3a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion promotes faith, which is a good characteristic and trait to teach children, even if when they are older they do not believe in the religion itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has moral and life lessons to imbue upon its adherents.\n","id":"921642a3-b989-455b-9ea8-7d889c9125a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>ban homework<|ARGUMENT|>Irrespective of homework's educational value, marking it takes up much of teachers' time. Australian teachers have complained that 'homework marking can result in four extra hours of work a day and they are rarely rewarded for their effort'.1 This leaves teachers tired and with little time to prepare effective, inspiring lessons. If the lessons aren't to the standard they should be, the point of homework is lost as the students have little to practise in the first place. The heavy workload also puts young graduates off becoming teachers, and so reduces the talent pool from which schools can recruit. 1 Speranza, 2011<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marking homework reduces the amount of time teachers have to prepare good lessons\n","id":"bc009d70-2d3e-4c44-bcc3-b8f5f1caab53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>AKMs, as mechanic things, will have most likely structural weaknesses, which have to be discovered and this knowledge will have to be employed in the strategy in the fight against them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not more drastic, but more intelligent solutions would be needed by those who oppose AKMs.\n","id":"a862198e-1e00-448d-89ff-7551ed4b88f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>People who believe in God tend to treat nature with respect due to the belief that everything has been created by God. Hence, they would not want to damage or misuse its creation as this might displease God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Believing that there's an all-knowing and all-seeing being makes it likelier for human beings to adhere to a moral code which is beneficial for the world.\n","id":"14335064-334c-4b7a-9057-0a0052f6df8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been using windows 10 for some time and have decided that I hate it. Google windows 10 sucks if you want to know the reasons , and am thinking about switching back to windows 7. I'm also a computer programmer a novice when it comes to windows development . I want to know if I would be facing any disadvantages if I choose windows 7 over windows 10. I'm planning to get into unity, unreal and dot net development. Windows 10 is just unbearable and very irritating, I would really love to get free from it. x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Switching from windows 10 to windows 7 is not a bad decision for a developer.\n","id":"24abcca2-bab6-48d2-8afe-7e8d69772c26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whilst this is based on my experience of UK politics I think it could also apply to US politics as well. There seems to be a trend by the right to try and keep taxes low and cut social spending wherever possible. Privatisation and capitalism are promoted along with the accumulation of wealth. We are told there is trickle down economics but in reality this does not happen either from individuals or companies who are creative with taxes and avoid contributing to society. There is a reluctance to support any ideas that benefit the population as a whole, education spending, supporting the NHS or the removal of the Affordable Care Act. Please convince me that the right wing parties such as the Republicans or Tories do actually care about all sections of society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right is inherently selfish\n","id":"be2b17ad-4ae2-4de5-a509-77b465ff98a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit The title means each school should strive to spend the same on each student, with exceptions. Edit 2 Thanks for everyone's input I think I have a better understanding of the issues surrounding student success and funding. The schools that are in the 95th percentile of student spending 16,000 per student in 1998 spend four times what the bottom 5 do 4,000 . This results in significant variation in curricula among schools, quality of teachers, academic materials, and infrastructure. I believe this is inherently unfair and disrupts equal opportunity at a young age, extending to university admissions. At Oberlin college, 95 of students come from schools in New York, California, and Florida, states that have a more rigorous curriculum and parents who can be more financially involved in the students' academic career. In addition, standardized test training should be available for all students, not just those who can afford it, as test anxiety and internalized feelings of inferiority have been proven to strongly affect the performance of students from low income areas. On a grander scale, this can spark innovation, as a greater number of creative thinkers are able to be admitted to superior universities which I also think should have subsidized tuition, there shouldn't be a choice between working a dead end job and higher education instead of the same batch of wannabe doctors and lawyers with helicopter parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public schools should be equally funded.\n","id":"2fa64f75-1990-4832-a506-bbab7e0eb7d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the multiverse exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Testability and explanatory power are two intrinsic tenets of science. Disregarding them to make us think a multiverse possible takes us to finding the truth plus, doing this becomes dangerous to scientific credibility, which only worsens our ability of getting evidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no evidence of it now, we can't say it can exist without it.\n","id":"18fe5ae7-d029-496a-aa68-2641ac0f4038"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've read an incredibly large number of pissed off facebook statuses about the gopshutdown that dictate the storyline that the shutdown is entirely the fault of the republican party. I am fairly informed and think that, while the republican party is far from blameless, their level of blame is comparable to that of the president and democratic party. Why? Simply put, this situation has hundreds of outcomes and the unwritten rules that supposedly forbid these situations don't actually exist. The essential thing that is being debated is a spending bill . It makes sense that in a spending bill, you would decide what to spend money on. If the congress wants to pass a bill that doesn't fund the ACA, that is their perogative they are our elected representatives. It's hard for me to understand Why the senate does not have equal or greater blame than the house. Simply put, the house and the senate each passed a spending bill. They don't agree on each others. That seems like equal blame. Additionally, the constitution requires spending bills to originate in the house, suggesting slightly that the house's control over government spending ought be greater related to the direct election of the house but not senate at the time . What is all this crap about a rule change? Apparently the republicans changed the rules so only the speaker can call a vote on things. Ok. But a majority of the house can always change the rules. If the moderate republicans were willing to go along with it, they could change the rules to allow anybody to call a vote, vote on a clean CR, and then change the rules back. The rule change is symbolic and rather silly. The simple rule of the majority stands all the other obstructions are merely public talking points. As the matter currently stands, the moderate republicans are more willing to wait than to work with the democrats. Why not admit that and stop political grandstanding? Why Obama's refusal to negotiate isn't seen as an obvious tactic rather than stance. The Republican party is not going to commit suicide. Political parties make tiny concessions to each other in order to write the narrative in a reasonable way while both parties got some things they wanted here, most experts agree that the democrats won is the story of pretty much every political debate ever. The end resolution of this situation is that Obama or Pelosi or somebody sits down with the republicans, they negotiate a face saving gesture in exchange for something small the dems want, the republicans get to end their PR shitstorm nightmare and the democrats get what they want. Change my view. And bring sources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the Democratic Party and President Obama both deserve a significant amount of blame for the government shutdown.\n","id":"4f48aebe-a1db-4502-b4e5-f33b8fb9a6f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should citizens be able to crowdsource laws?<|ARGUMENT|>At the time of the British decision to leave the European Union in 2016, neither the political details of the Brexit nor its impact on issues like trade, migration and national security were foreseeable for anyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In many cases, even calculating the impact on oneself is difficult - for example, with the Brexit referendum, a huge number of possibilities would have to be computed and evaluated.\n","id":"545fda39-4483-4d67-9e85-a7be412e3ed4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My diamonds, they say Pikachu, they say Pikachu I'm a boss, I walk through the club and just peek at you My diamonds, they say Pikachu, they gon' wink at you I'm a boss, bitch I'mma walk through and just peek at you When I walk through the club my diamonds dancin' Yes sir, my shit look like cameras flashin' A ten hut, yeah my diamonds be demandin' Your ho suckin' with a passion, she laughin' Pikachu How is he so famous. Rappers like him are a dime a dozen he just got signed to one of the biggest most successful rap labels. Help me understand. Please.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Young Thug is terrible &amp; just a pathetic watered down version of Weezy.\n","id":"6f3d62bf-1a5b-4133-8d6e-253a7d3d83df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Bullfighting has to be seen in the context of a symbolism. Jaume Sala and A\u0300lex Ferreiro came up with the idea for the Catalan donkey car sticker in 2003, as an alternative and satirical reaction to the Spanish bull.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bullfighting is a pawn in the contest between those supporting a centralized and those supporting a regionalized Spain.\n","id":"76a9964c-a030-46b1-a356-d40c98104c0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now I'm not saying that actors are not talented and that it is not difficult to act out difficult scenes. My qualm is with the separation of good actors and average actors . Matthew McConnahey is the obvious candidate who was thought of as nothing special until he had an opportunity to work with a good script, good production and good directing. Heath Ledger was another example. Robin Williams, too, would not have been thought as much more than a comedian until given the right opportunity. Or Will Smith. We may soon be saying the same for Jesse Eisenberg. Given the quality of script, the careful directing, the number of takes and feedback and cues an actor may take to get a scene right, the music which can be an emotional trigger it is hard to imagine any professional actor who could not be coaxed into giving stellar performances. Obviously people will cite examples to the contrary, but to compare Gary Oldman who is widely regarded as a master actor, I've recently noticed the previously unremarkable aussie actor Joel Edgerton being cast as Rameses in the upcoming Exodus, and I think that it may not take much to make a competent actor chameleonic . Basically, I believe any competent or trained actor can be coaxed to give outstanding performances with the right directing and production. There is less variety in the capabilities of professional actors than the fandom of A listers suggest. Edit to clarify my position I think there is less validity to the claim X is a brilliant actor and Y is a bad or average actor than there is to X got a good role, script and director whilst Y has been unable to find a role or script he can really shine in. Edit2 okay guys, took a bit of discussion but you did change my view. A few guys highlighted the inverse of my position, good movies dragged down by bad acting Keanu in Dracula is one I'll never forgive and average movies saved by an outstanding performance no one would be mentioning Good Morning Vietnam without Williams . But most importantly was the talk of theater, which removes all of my talk of takes, editing and music and lets it be the bare actors. I never considered that, but it is absolutely contrary to my position and changed my mind. Dishing out the deltas for the 3 who changed my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"a \"good actor\" has more to do with writing, directing and overall production than with a particular actor's skills.\n","id":"fca04d42-d187-4095-9469-09cac8d7d6fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund security for places of worship?<|ARGUMENT|>Places of worship are in a position to attract large amounts of donations from the religious communities they represent to enact security protocols.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious communities may assist places of worship in securing themselves.\n","id":"da55608c-4b50-4a03-8495-3d92c075b71f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The poor people in western countries have fridges, TV, smartphones, etc, all a product of innovation and a survival of the fittest competitive business mindset. They live longer than ever before. Even if you are at the bottom rung of society your life has gotten greatly better because of the innovations and the relatively free market of the 20th century. Left wing politicians are there simply because today's poor including the new overly educated underclass want more. Always more. Average lives are better than they've ever been, but people aren't satisfied. Basically for no reason that makes sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capitalist politics makes more sense because everyone benefits\n","id":"ddff526c-32a7-4dd9-a671-3cfad8d29ca5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Richard Sipe conducted a study of US celibate Catholic clerics 1960 to 1985, and found that half of all priests and brothers were sexually active at any particular time. Masturbation was the most frequent sexual activity, followed by affairs with women, sex with male companions, and Internet pornography.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sexual abstinence is not per se unhealthy but it can be psychologically harmful when an individual wishes to have sex and does not, according to researchers.\n","id":"c2042599-b60e-480f-ba2c-798f73b6a40b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a large power imbalance between sex workers and police, given the latter has discretion on their prosecution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When sex work is illegal, sex workers are particularly vulnerable to abuse by law enforcement.\n","id":"c1d3c1b6-248b-4988-b1b6-d273c8c42e77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There has been some talk that Parliament may disregard the referendum since it was only advisory or find ways to not fully implement it. Democracy is founded on the idea that your vote matters. Such a direct example of your vote not mattering would make it clear that your vote never really matters if it is something that enough of the ruling class disagrees with you on. Since it is a cornerstone of democracy that ultimately everyone has an equal voice, failure to enforce the referendum would remove this cornerstone and completely delegitimize British democracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anything short of full compliance with the Brexit referendum would end the legitimacy of British democracy\n","id":"1d408efe-59fd-4b42-ac70-115d47ffd32a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kyoto Protocol, Debate on whether the Kyoto Protocol helps to combat global warming<|ARGUMENT|>Lachman, Brenda. \"Kyoto Protocol: Why the US should join\". Helium. Retrieved 9 Jul. 2008. - \"Whether the US joins or not is not that important now, what really counts is that the industry in the US, individually, like California has, takes the necessary steps to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide for the sake of the environment, because the environment is precious to our survival.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unimportant for the US to join Kyoto now\n","id":"b3400d72-d4ea-406b-a625-8b4acfbc6647"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>The church of Hallgri\u0301mur took 41 years to build, incurred cost overruns the steeple had to be repaired before construction was even complete, and the church was originally intended to be less tall, but the leaders of the Church of Iceland wanted a large spire so as to outshine Landakotskirkja Landakot's Church, which was the cathedral of the Catholic Church in Iceland.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Examples of religious infrastructure depict excessive spending, unnecessary to their supposed purpose.\n","id":"847da337-ce55-45de-905f-0f9db5390726"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many useful and simple spells that wizards learn and are able to use frequently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Magic has many practical uses that can increase the efficiency of day-to-day life.\n","id":"5544efe2-74f2-4ee9-a44a-26da0f9dc89d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care, Debate on Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>It would involve lost insurance industry jobs, business closures, and new patient record creation, among other things. Creating a new administrative framework and patient database would be a massive under-taking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The costs of transition to a universal health care program would be large:\n","id":"1750e142-dbbd-4403-93eb-2465c322003f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Tl dr Most people let their moral compass guide them instead of the law of the land. I don't kill people because it's illegal, I don't kill people because it's wrong. There are laws that we personally do not agree with, and as a result chose not to follow. Some common ones where applicable include speeding, jaywalking, littering, picking up after your dog, under age drinking, recreational drugs, places where certain sex positions are banned etc. You may or may not view these as victim less crimes, or you may see them as a calculated risk If I don't see any cars coming, why should I go to the crosswalk even if it is supposed to be safer? If I pirate a movie, am I really hurting anyone? Regardless to the reasoning behind your decision, you have made a decision that you are going to do that thing, and whether or not it is illegal hasn't stopped you. On the opposite side of things, most of us don't go around murdering, kidnapping, raping, robbing banks, or any number of other horrible things. I don't wake up in the morning and think I shouldn't kill someone because it's illegal I think I shouldn't kill someone because that's a horrible thing to do. The fact that it is written into law isn't a deterrent to me because I have no intention of doing those things. Most of us also have little to no understanding of the law anyway. We know assume that bad things aren't legal, and good things are. Some things are pretty obvious Stabbing your bus driver is likely illegal, saying good morning to him likely isn't. Other things are not so obvious, like using extension chords power strips in your house might be against fire code, or kissing a sleeping woman, even if she is your wife really Colorado? Likewise, if you are a criminal not in the I occasionally drive 52 in the 50 zone but the I occasionally tie people up in my basement and skin them alive over the course of a fortnight category, you likely know what you are doing is illegal and obviously it hasn't stopped you. I am not looking for people to tell me that speeding kills, underage drinking is the reason society is going to crap, people who leave their dog poop on the sidewalk deserve a special place in hell, etc. I might even agree with some of those things. I am looking for someone to  that laws act as deterrents, or that people refrain from doing something they believe is morally just because it's also illegal. I am also aware of the argument that laws could shape morals, but plenty of other things religious beliefs, personal experiences, parenting, social pressures etc. can shape morals, and plenty of people don't have a problem with breaking the law be it speeding or murder anyway. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We disobey the law because we believe something is right\/wrong, not because it is illegal.\n","id":"ca8976f3-b785-4cef-9587-c69d7123841a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is not a call to action to go vote Clinton. If you always disagreed with her policies, then keep doing so. But I think the liberals who say anyone but Clinton aren't being honest with themselves for the real reasons. I have been one of them. She's Not Progressive Enough She supported universal health care since the 90's and her CHIP program is covering millions of millennials. Do you think she would've compromised on conservative policies if she had her way? A lot of it is idealism. It's painful for progressives to accept that they need to wait on line. Being the perfect progressive is more wishful. Wall Street Obama had twice the money from Wall Street she got and she's well liked. Plenty of Democrats with lower disapproval ratings get big money. The Clintons Are Corrupt Which Clintons? Chelsea? No, she's well liked and isn't a political figure. Bill? He's had high approval ratings and has a higher approval amongst people of all sides of the spectrum than most politicians. Okay, so it's just Hillary really. They're not a super powerful family with generations of wealth. Bill and Hillary became lawyers and they had 1 child. I Don't Want a Dynastic Presidency It really seems like the gambler's luck fallacy, as to where either Clinton would've been non aristocratic in either scenario. Is this really relevant in terms of what the policies and results would look like? Trade But why is this a recent issue? Where was the anti globalist movement before Trump? Not very far along. It seems like protectionism is the new trend and free trade is painted as just another way of the old guard trying to keep people down. TPP was crafted in 2013. Aversion of it were rare. Anti War If you're genuinely anti war, that's fine, but I largely think this is used as a defense purely because it's unassailable. If someone says I won't vote Clinton because I can't deal with the bombings of innocent people , it's untenable to argue against it and therefore the perfect front to cover up an inherent bias. Do the wars in the middle east really bother you on a deep level? Are you politically active against them? It really just seems like something that's brought up just because it's tough to justify military policy in a few sentences. I Hate Politics If Kasich were the nominee, there wouldn't be nearly as much confusion or hatred. Kasich and Clinton would debate the policies, and yes, fans of each would still be really passionate and forceful, but the two would be able to have a civil conversation without name calling. It would be a straight election. It would be two establishment politicians and people would pick their side. Trump presents a crisis in which there is a choice of no prior precedent and it has resulted in a dillemma. I Want to Vote Third Party or not vote If you truly feel that way, fine. But if your stance is I want Clinton to win but I won't pull the trigger , it's a dishonest position like staying in a dead marriage because of sanctity You're okay with the decision so long as you don't bear the title. With voting third party, there's a sense of pride as in Hey, I opposed Trump without having to sell my soul . Coolness If you are a millennial, and you support Clinton, people would frown on you for promoting a government they view as oppressive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Millions of liberal-leaning undecideds would have supported Clinton, but then Trump came along and she seemed uncool, passe' and boring.\n","id":"8805d8ae-13dd-4c5b-b0b9-f9f0c5ed3d16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Mother Teresa have been canonized?<|ARGUMENT|>Mother Teresa was instrumental in protecting the job of a priest who was removed from ministry for child abuse writing a letter in support of allowing him to return to ministry, where he continued his predatory actions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mother Teresa's publicity may have obscured attention to the scandal of pedophilia among Catholic priests.\n","id":"8f71264d-6e22-418f-9d4c-750035cec3fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who is the best female or queer Sci Fi & Fantasy author, and why?<|ARGUMENT|>Starting with book 10, the series shifts in tone from crime noir thriller to focus more predominantly on sexual themes. Anita Blake becomes infected with the ardeur, a supernatural power inadvertently given to Anita by her vampire Master Jean-Claude that gives her massive amounts of power but also demands that she have sexual intercourse with several different people through the course of a day, sometimes in large groups.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anita Blake is the title and viewpoint character of the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. The series takes place in a parallel world in which supernatural characters like vampires and werewolves exist alongside regular humans, with Blake's jobs including the re-animation of the dead as well as the hunting and executing of supernatural creatures that have broken the law.\n","id":"bd26e3e3-d5ff-449b-84b3-7c82fe1f2fd3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments provide a universal basic income?<|ARGUMENT|>In order to pay for a UBI a group of people in a society the government must coerce another group of people the taxpayer\/citizen by threat of force laws\/statutes to give their money they earned to the government so they can redistribute it among another group of people recipients of the UBI that have not earned it. This is theft morally speaking because it is not right to take from someone something they have earned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government should not provide a UBI because it is immoral to do so.\n","id":"fa122402-a0e8-4f5b-9f97-08f77236272b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A society with no gender would be better<|ARGUMENT|>Some societies believe gender is intrinsic to the universe, and is found in or represented by objects such as rocks and water.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender is an intrinsic part of humanity and cannot be removed.\n","id":"0ad8bcd8-d7ae-4655-a1ad-0eb8717cfe6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Spoilers for everything, obviously It wasn't always this way seasons 1 4 faithfully kept to the books, deftly removed irrelevant storylines and, if you've ever read the books, there was plenty and even managed to add plenty of new backstory and character development that the books didn't have. All in all, they were excellent adaptations of a difficult to adapt source material. Last season and this season so far , however, are another matter 1 Because some storylines moved faster than others, the writers had to create all kinds of rubbish storylines that didn't happen in the books and so consequently have no impact on the story I'm looking at you, Night's Watch . Some pretty brilliant edits were made to keep characters relevant concise merging Sansa, Brienne and Ramsay's storylines was a stroke of genius and shelving Bran for a season was also definitely a good move , but there have also been some major missteps Dorne was an unmitigated mess, though bringing Jaime and Bronn into the story wasn't a horrible idea . Add to all that the whitewashing of some characters namely Tyrion, Daenerys and Jon Snow , and the shows have begun to lack the complexity that made the first few seasons and the source material so riveting. 2 Moreover, because it can only make ten hours of content a season, the show has to move so rapidly between storylines that the twists and turns have less emotional impact. In the first season, we had only a few storylines the Wall, King's Landing, Essos and the Riverlands later on in the season. We could spend a third of an episode in each location and not miss too much. Now, while we might know the characters better and need less exposition, we have so many different stories in different locations Arya, Sansa, Ramsay, Dorne, The Wall, Cersei, Dany, Tyrion, etc. etc. etc. that to touch on each or even most in an episode means we only get 5 or so minutes in each location. As a result, the big changes have a lot less impact the reason the Red Wedding and even the Purple Wedding were such powerful episodes was because the build to the insane finale at the end was made with slower suspense building scenes. Even Renly got a good amount of chill time before he got offed. But just think in the last few episodes, in the first two episodes of the season SPOILERS three major heads of houses have been offed, but each was with very little buildup We basically see them for little over a minute before they're viciously double crossed especially problematic in Balon's scene since we haven't seen him for a few seasons . I know the characters getting killed aren't the main characters or even the most sympathetic, but they're important heads of houses and their deaths should have a little more impact. Some scenes are still great, of course Tyrion's and Jon Snow's in last episode were handled excellently but I feel like the show's suddenly got to do a bunch of tickboxing on certain storylines due to time constraints, and it's the first time I've felt like the show was at a real disadvantage to the books in terms of medium. TLDR There's too much going on in GOT now that compressing all of the plot developments into an hour long episode reduces the emotional impact and hinders the storytelling.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Game of Thrones has finally been stretched too thin by the constraints of television and the storytelling is starting to suffer. SPOILERS!\n","id":"9531765c-5713-49a9-a4b3-7108c7df7657"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Navy seals are said to be one of the most well trained people in the world, able to get out of any situation. They are trained in a number of different fighting styles and can not only break your bones by sheer punching power but also from tackling you. They are forced to survive in harsh environments and in many cases have been face to face with death. I do agree that in the ring the navy seal would be at a disadvantage and probably loose the fight but in a street fight with no rules and no equipment roughly the same height and weight, the navy seal would most likely win.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A navy seal would beat a ufc fighter in a street fight\n","id":"8af5743f-9072-44f5-8d68-28bee081c72d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>The world continues to grow together. Further integration of the European Union is only logical, Europe must become the third important player on our planet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many nations, like the Netherlands and Germany, have created national identities artificially after being formed from smaller regions.\n","id":"4a051eb9-31a9-42bc-be9e-d09edeafd98a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Climate change will make it difficult for many parts of the world to continue to grow conventional crops. New genetically modified crops are needed to ensure these regions can continue to produce sufficient food.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Such a ban would slow down innovation in food crop and livestock research, by limiting innovation through genetic modification.\n","id":"910d39f7-6413-4e53-8327-8a89f6f33cfd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realise it's not politically popular but I think corporation tax creates perverse incentives and adds an additional layer of unnecessary administrative costs. My main objections to corporation tax are the following The tax burden is falling in the wrong place. We want companies to invest their profits back into the business and not take them out so if anything, we should be increasing taxes on capital gains and dividends Corporation tax, particularly when it is high effectively acts as a subsidy for lawyers and accountants who dream up creative ways to get around the system<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Corporation tax should be abolished\n","id":"637a81c5-084d-44d1-9cbc-415649219cb1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It has been generally agreed upon that MH17 was brought down by a surface to air missile. However, while many are blaming the Russian separatists Putin is trying to push blame back on to Ukraine. Because the Russia backed separatists are turning away international investigators from the site of the crash and access to the crash site is not being restricted by any investigative agency I believe that it is necessary for the international community to step in and provide security for international investigators and the integrity of the crash site. If necessary, an international military operation should be conducted for the specific purpose allowing impartial international investigators to visit the crash site and conduct a legitimate investigation. It has been reported that Ukrainian emergency workers have recovered the plane's flight recorder, but it was previously believed to be in the hand of the separatists. Because the possibility still exists that these forces will continue to tamper with the evidence, they should be kept away from the crash site through any means necessary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The international community need to step in and secure the MH17 crash site\n","id":"8a6159ed-0c9c-49a4-ac4a-c7e0665d5791"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are people out there intent on doing bad things with guns bad guys with guns , and there are people who would try to stop them from doing bad things with their own gun good guys with guns . I think that if my county were to allow concealed carry for people without a special need shift from may issue to shall issue , I would be in greater danger when out in public. The incidence of gun violence in public places, while highly publicized, is quite low historically, and people with good intentions, particularly those with minimal training not police are prone to errors. I am more afraid of the mistakes of the well intentioned, than I am of the ill will of those who are out to do harm. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am more afraid of good guys with guns than I am of bad guys with guns\n","id":"482d74c5-21bb-40e5-85f9-76401d5124eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Antifa good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>Bernier shows the fascist trait that 'disagreement is treason' in the fact that he has advocated for revoking funding for any university or college deemed to be insufficiently supportive of freedom of speech. This is clearly a veiled threat aimed at universities that have refused to host controversial right-wing figures and support their ideas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Maxime Bernier is a former Conservative party of Canada member who started his own political party that seems to display multiple characteristics of UR-Fascism\n","id":"4e2aeef8-b089-4fa3-a81c-61905156dfa8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Equal Paternity\/Maternity Paid Leave Be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people believe it is best for children to have a mother who does not work suggesting there could be social pressure for mothers to be the primary caregiver.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some women become the primary caregiver due to social or financial reasons, rather than because they want to.\n","id":"23bcfe41-db07-409e-b251-7a7f196cdcae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Emergency Rooms turn away people who cannot pay?<|ARGUMENT|>The Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act EMTALA mandates that hospitals stabilize and treat everyone who enters their doors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If people can't pay, emergency rooms should be able to turn them away.\n","id":"04164323-371b-45ea-b08e-9ac8a6b162d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People don't have free will, and they don't not have free will, because people don't exist in the first place as things separate from the rest of the universe. Everything is made of particles, which are disturbances in a field. Like the universe is a sheet of fabric, and particles are wrinkles in that fabric. When something moves, it's really just the pattern moving. Like a wave on the ocean, the water is mostly stationary horizontally. So using that analogy, is a wave determined by the rest of the ocean? The ocean affects the wave, but the wave also affects the ocean, so is the ocean determined by the wave? Which parts of the universe are doing the determining, and which parts are being determined? The answer of course is that all particles are affected by and affect every other particle in the universe. They all move together simultaneously, it isn't this particle affects this particle THEN this particle reacts and affects the first particle back . It is all one motion, nothing exists in isolation being determined by something else. I promise I'm not high.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the free will\/determinism debate is a false dichotomy,\n","id":"b7036ae8-33fa-45cf-86ad-5d43b06b1842"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Apologies without any other substantial, sustained action to improve the situation of marginalized groups, for example the payment of reparations, are likely to be viewed as a short-term strategic political campaign effort and not genuine<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A single apology is not nearly enough. Black Americans deserve an extended effort to counteract the negative repercussions of slavery that still affect them.\n","id":"6f9cd757-984f-4b88-a79b-9bde9fa9f2c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is The Source of All Suffering in Humans Their Attachments?<|ARGUMENT|>Because of human being an animal, one would expect this to apply to animals as well to some degree. Otherwise there would have to be some fundamental difference between human and animal suffering. And vice versa, if animals don't suffer only because of their attachments, then in humans, some suffering must come from sources other than attachments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many other sources of suffering which have nothing to do with attachments.\n","id":"440cd416-82e1-485e-a7b6-d04ea06a69f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Will Win the Game of Thrones?<|ARGUMENT|>But that showed their power and this will definitely be useful in the North when she needs to fight Cersei.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Daenerys' dragons were one of the fundamental causes of unrest in Meereen.\n","id":"5c019139-4dc5-402b-95dd-32a47d97dedd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, i am not from USA so I understand their politics as much as it is covered in European media, and Reddit posts. i often hear, how good and brilliant president Obama was but i am not exactly sure why. How much has actually changed while he was in the Office, how much did he contributed to fight against elites and more equal society, what exactly was with Obamacare, did it worked? What was with military operations? How did he handle poverty in the States? i remember hype in USA when he was candidate for the first time, my aunt was living in California at that time, and she said how much you could feel people's excitment and happiness as good times were on the horizon Thank you very much for all explanations<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"President Obama wasn't the best president and is not worth admiration he is receiving\n","id":"ca8191b4-dc35-4479-bc48-9e1d2c782c6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I acknowledge in advance that enforcement of what I am proposing would be problematic. gt Carpooling an arrangement between people to make a regular journey in a single vehicle, typically with each person taking turns to drive the others. Sites such as this one claim that carpooling saves over 1 billion annually in the US. But statistics show that nearly 80 of people carpool with only one other person and that many people who carpool do so either with a family member or someone they live with 51 married 40 unmarried couples . These are people who would likely drive together regardless. So is this truly carpooling? Is it keeping cars off the road? Should a parent be allowed to use the carpool lane simple because he has his child in the car? That child does not have a license to drive nor does he own a car. Allowing that vehicle to use the carpool lane does not encourage behavior that will keep cars off the road. Claims that million gallons of gas are saved every year by carpooling have to be looked at critically, since they are based on calculating the miles driven with more than one person in a vehicle, regardless of whether or not that trip would be taken anyway, or whether or not the car that isn't being used actually exists . Restricting the use of carpool lanes to people who are actually keeping cars off the road would likely free those lanes up, encouraging more people to actually carpool. In theory carpooling is a great idea. True carpooling is a good thing. But I believe that if we are going to have carpool lanes that they should only be available to vehicles that are actually keeping other vehicles off the road, not just because there is more than one person inside the vehicle. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Carpool lanes should only be used by people who are actually keeping cars off the road.\n","id":"49450515-423d-4bf7-b6c6-20e2df2408fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NAFTA<|ARGUMENT|>All three countries benefit from the arrangement. The US ensures access to its largest single market Canada and this also allows them to lock in the Mexican economic reforms. It has also secured a better political relationship with Mexico and more progress in dealing with cross-border issues such as drug trafficking and illegal immigration. Canada and Mexico can stop the US going protectionist and ensure access to the world\u2019s largest economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All three countries benefit from the arrangement. The US ensures access to its largest single marke...\n","id":"95cfebb8-3959-4267-a1eb-6aafbce6333f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing Whenever I hear people supporting a law or regulation that restricts behavior it is always the behavior of someone else that would be restricted. Even if the law or regulation applies to the supporter of the law or regulation it never negatively affects the supporter because they don't want to engage in the behavior that would be restricted. Whenever I hear people opposing a law or regulation that restricts behavior it is practically always their own behavior or the behavior of someone they care about that would be restricted. The inverse applies to laws and regulations that require behavior. People support laws and regulations that require others to do that which others do not want to do, and oppose laws and regulations that require themselves to do that which they do not want to do. There are only two ways to change my view Give an example of something you do not want to do or support that government should make you do or support. Give an example of something you want to do that government should inhibit or prohibit you from doing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone wants government to avoid intruding in their lives, yet often ask government to intrude in the lives of others.\n","id":"5bd87163-2d6b-4bf8-970c-be3ae953e567"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Teachers wouldn't necessarily have to lose their jobs. Instead, they'd be available to help online, sort of like a group of guides to help with questions and concerns. The more help, the better. But the basic lecture and class packages could be online. Anybody with an internet could access them. There could be weekly discussions in person to encourage critical thinking and innovation, and development of soft skills. Labs could also be conducted during these meetings. Campuses could be for club and sport activities, or research, or any number of non teaching educational and student services. Personal assistance can be provided based on reasonable request. , if I'm missing something. Edit This view is for College Education only and only those countries where quality and recognized education is largely inaccessible. Courses like music, in which core study absolutely requires interpersonal interaction are exceptions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Education should be completely online in developed countries.\n","id":"1b31bf15-9811-43f6-9c85-c123b7b58af9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>The legacy of arbitrary borders left behind by colonial states contribute to conflict and political unrest in many parts of the developing world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Former colonialist democracies are directly responsible for the economic and political situations in many developing countries.\n","id":"08a6be02-a9bf-4a09-a632-15bb7ad267e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure is something which is obviously highly valuable to the individual. I think that that right has to be subject to limitations in certain circumstances. I think the limit to the right must be where the individual's right to privacy is objectively less valuable than society's right to safety from that individual. Take this admittedly not great example as an illustrative starting point Kyllo v United States NB I don't live in the US and I don't have extensive knowledge of the fourth amendment itself. I don't advocate a 1984 state . <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Fourth Amendment-type rights do more harm to society as a whole than good to the individuals they protect.\n","id":"8c6c6ea9-d1e1-49d1-9f52-6d78a71c9ed8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Drug Trial Participants Be Chosen By Lottery?<|ARGUMENT|>The capital necessary to start and maintain a governmental agency dedicated to the medical surveillance of each and every single citizen is immense. It is an impracticable pursuit and financially it is burdensome if not crippling. The logistics involved are incomprehensible and taxpayer dollars are already spread dangerously thin.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any possible benefits of this policy are outweighed by the massive economic costs it would cause.\n","id":"4010c9fe-4d51-4b4d-9374-03e334cf7c9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems like everyone I know is virulently anti gentrification, so I feel I must be missing something. I\u2019m not understanding it. Here\u2019s my view can you change it? First, let me clarify that I\u2019m referring almost exclusively to NYC, where I live. There\u2019s a big hullabaloo about high income people moving into low income neighborhoods, and the original, lower income residents of these neighborhoods being priced out of their homes and further and further away from the city. This is certainly a problem. However, the problem isn\u2019t that neighborhoods are gentrifying i.e., becoming safer, with better schools, better policing and correspondingly higher rents . The problem is that employers and systems in society are not set up to pay these lower income people a wage that will allow them access to these safer, better, gentrified neighborhoods. Instead of whining about gentrification, wouldn\u2019t it be more productive to campaign for a higher minimum wage? To fight for more affordable housing? To enforce laws against slum lords? To reassign police forces to spend more time in more dangerous neighborhoods? To improve public schools not just in rich communities but in poor ones? To assign more city resources to cleaning up crime ridden areas? To cap property taxes so owned homes don't suddenly become unaffordable? So my view is that the problem isn\u2019t that low income neighborhoods are becoming high income neighborhoods. The problem is that our society doesn\u2019t value many of its workers enough to pay them a wage that actually allows them to live in safe neighborhoods with good schools. If we fixed the living wage problem, gentrification would cease to be an issue, because people wouldn\u2019t have to choose between safe, productive neighborhoods and neighborhoods they can afford. In that way, it seems that talking about \u201cgentrification\u201d as an issue is essentially saying it\u2019s better to have unsafe, dirty, impoverished communities as long as they\u2019re affordable, rather than focusing making sure ALL New Yorkers can afford safe, clean, productive, \u201cgentrified\u201d communities. Change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The focus on gentrification is a distraction from the actual issues that affect low-income communities.\n","id":"f32b4486-21ee-414b-a6d7-49c60e538c2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For some context, the Right To Work movement argues that laborers should not be forced to pay fair fees for a union associated with wherever the laborers work at. Laborers should not be forced to pay for a union which does not share their views. Unions are left leaning, so forcing conservatives to pay fair fees are making them support beliefs and movements which they do not agree with. What makes it worse is that they are financially supporting these they are losing their money AND their ideology. Even someone who is neutral or on the left should not have to pay fair fees because they could be satisfied with their working conditions. Making laborers pay to support unions is like serving someone cake at a restaurant and charging them for it, even though they did not ask for the cake. Additionally, laborers may not have the finances to support these. Fair fees are expensive, and not everyone can pay them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Right-To-Work is a good and just movement\n","id":"e8ca848f-9c00-4cf2-936d-b8d2203a2dda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The topic is what it says on the tin. It seems to me that allowing vengeance to be considered when sentencing criminals or drafting new legislation is rather silly. It only serves to make the victim or their family feel better even though it rarely results in that and doesn't actually accomplish anything that can be measured. If I execute a criminal because of some moral outrage, I've removed his potential input to society. If I rehabilitate him, I've saved it. It seems odd to me to get rid of potentially useful individuals in order to have a slim chance at making some people feel a bit better. I'll be AFK for a few hours but I'll be sure to respond to any replies when I return. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Revenge and retribution or any variation of this concept should not be considered with regard to criminal justice.\n","id":"99b72bd4-32b2-4a51-94f2-f2fae76e4271"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Withdrawing from Iraq<|ARGUMENT|>Although the constitution and formation of a legitimate government are major achievements, there is still much work to do. Sunni Arabs have to be convinced that the new settlement is in their interests and be drawn into government. This requires that they, and others, are convinced that the Iraqi government will stand the test of time, which requires the support of the US both politically and militarily.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political progress has been made but must be continued with coalition support.\n","id":"9b243637-203a-4911-8b00-ccbf0c313c33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a Vietnamese who was born in Hanoi after the Doi Moi Reform era. I have read to the best of my ability about what happened in the education camps, as well as speak to people who survive the horror there. I really wish that the government would acknowledge that reeducation camp had happened, and this people had suffered greatly. However, and probably because I am bias or brainwashed , I cannot view the education camp itself as wrong . I am torn if it is more cruel to make them suffer as much or more cruel if they were killed, but at the end of the day, I simply cannot see the reeducation camps themselves as wrong. The fall of Saigon in 1975 was not the end of the war. Many ex military personnels of the Southern government continue to wage war against the united government well into the 80s. If those people did not die in the reeducation camp, they might have very well pick up the gun another day and continue to wage war. Maybe they would success in overthrowing the united government and, in their turn, treat THEIR prisoner more humanely. Treating those specific people more humanely, however, have no guaranteed that not a sizable number of them would not continue waging war against the government despite being treated humanely. Having no war was better, but once war happened, the government who deemed it necessary to end the war by forcefully united the two sides, then eradicate all those who could pose a potential danger should not be considered as cruel and inhumane for doing so. Edit Partially changed my view. No matter how horrible they were was extremem and therefor incorrect. I was emotionally charged when I wrote my thoughts down. What is more correct is that I think the damage caused was only acceptable based on the worse accusations I came across from my own research AND my projection on possibly worse result based on those accusations. If reality is far worse than even my most horrible imagination, I would probably change my mind completely. Edit 2 Further changed my view, though a core pretty much remain the same. I agreed that there are BETTER way to handle the war, at the expand of tolerating a few seperate and isolated insurgency that simply cannot be avoided and more resources invested in watching over potential individuals. However, the core of my view point that remain is that even while there are better or more optimal option, the choice that was made is still not a bad, horrible, evil, cruel or inhumane choice, even if it is not the best one either.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Vietnamese government as well as its supporters should not be considered as cruel and inhumane about the reeducation camps, no matter how horrible they were.\n","id":"b2086b20-7bba-449b-af1b-e19ff6c13277"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Any man-made moral system is based on some subjective axioms that can either be accepted or rejected. Hence, without the appeal to a universal objective arbiter, morality is subjective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Morality derives from subjective sources, and is therefore itself subjective.\n","id":"67421ae4-a96a-4bb9-b560-2069a53340ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that people who might have family members who may have mental disabilities consider the term retarded to be as offensive as the N word. They feel that using the word retarded as a personal attack, against them and the family member. But those people actually might be retarded, in the medical sense that their development is slower than it should be. I sometimes describe when someone or something is so stupid that only someone with diminished intelligence would do or say something, I call that retarded. Now I would not ever actually insult a person who has a disability by calling them retarded. I would however call a smart person a retard if they do something very stupid. I think I should be able to insult normal people any way I want, including calling them a retard.  gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should be able to insult people by calling them a retard -\n","id":"97eb9c74-26ab-47c9-b19a-e16301b137c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm generally fairly cynical about politics, but so far it's my judgment that Justin Trudeau is a genuine liberal in the American sense and a good PM fighting for progressive values. Part of my justification for this is indirect he and Obama seemed to get along well, for instance. But there are also substantive reasons. Trudeau, for instance, doubled down on Canada's refugee policy for Syrians and others when Trump moved to restrict America's. And Trudeau was sensitive to questions of gender balance in his cabinet, making that one of his selection criteria and ending up with gender parity. At the same time, I realize that his succeeding Harper and Trump's election both may make him look better than he is, or may make people more selective in their presentation of his record or his politics. I'm interested in having an informed and balanced understanding of Trudeau, so lay it on me<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the liberal darling he seems to be\n","id":"7c91d1d7-699a-4ad7-a065-6c24a5b3f6fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the past couple weeks our Congress moved to repeal the requirement that people must have personal health insurance. A lot of news was made about how this will lead to X number of Americans not having health benefits coverage. While that is most likely true, that is a decision that I as an individual makes. I am not prohibited from purchasing health insurance, often referred to as ObamaCare. It is merely just my choice. If someone chooses not to purchase this coverage, they are only putting themselves at risk besides herd immunity benefits of vaccinations . Change my view Reddit. There must be something I am missing here. EDIT I have seen a overlooked a major issue. Insurance works by having everyone buy in a small amount to keep costs down. Otherwise it\u2019s the same and potentially more down the road amount of cost, except split between a smaller pool of people. Consider me a changed man.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should not be a mandate requiring people to purchase health insurance.\n","id":"9fbd2a64-1d7a-49c5-b66a-f337a9d511a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By this I mean that a young person's vote should have more impact on the outcome of the referendum than an older person. I say this because younger people on average have to live with the outcome of the referendum for longer. We saw in the recent Brexit referendum that young people voted largely in favour of remaining in the EU, however the group that voted most to leave was the 65 demographic. Due to the workings of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and David Cameron's decision to resign, leaving the EU will take, roughly speaking, 2 and a half years. There are people who voted to leave the EU who will not live to see it happen yet their vote will have condemned many of their fellow brits to a life without the ability to freely travel to and live in the other EU member states. To me this seems unjust and a flaw in our current system of government. Is this just a kneejerk reaction? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Referendum votes should be weighed by age\n","id":"5e03e4e6-9856-4d69-adff-dd0f5084d803"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Turner Diaries is an epistolary novel about a future United States and Europe where the Equality Police have taken over the government and are implementing Communistic and pro Israeli policies, which provokes a revolution. The main character is Earl Turner, who writes the diary entries, has doubts about the revolutionary Organization, but eventually realizes that the oppressive System is more dangerous to America, so he blows up the FBI headquarters with fellow Organization members. An Organization led revolution tears the entire Western world apart, culminating into an apocalyptic race war and nuclear war which leads to the death of almost all Jews and non Whites. Here's the full book for free if I didn't summarize it well This book is banned in Canada. I think that this is silly and childish for a few reasons 1 The Turner Diaries takes place in America. None of the revolutionary tactics could even be applied in Canada, because the cities, landmarks, and governmental structure are totally different from the US. 2 It is fiction. There never was a capture of San Fransisco like in the book, nor were any nukes fired. It's all fiction, and banning it because in an imaginary diary imaginary cities get destroyed, and imaginary Communists get assassinated and imaginary Palestinians massacre imaginary Israelis is retarded. 3 It proves the book right. The Canadians are acting just like the Equality Police that Turner and the Organization fight against. They have banned harmless speech and yes, speech is harmless that dissents against the socialism of the country. It makes one wonder if they will soon ban and confiscate guns, like the System in the book did. 4 If a viewpoint is undesirable, it should die out by itself, and not need government intervention to ensure that. The fact that people try to sneak in the book, and that the book is on a list, and can be burned if seized, shows that SOME people like the morals, or some of the messages in the book. The more they try and suppress them, the more they will see that the government is the enemy. 5 Speech shouldn't be banned. If you ban speech, like I said earlier, you're basically putting an official boycott on an ideology, something that the Western world should be moving away from.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"The Turner Diaries\" should be legalized in Canada\n","id":"580eeba9-2faa-4b15-9349-ecab4846b330"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Wordpress is better suited for a company blog than Medium?<|ARGUMENT|>On Medium, there is none of the usual navigation to other parts of the company site that's found in the header, sidebars or footer, including to basic service areas like Contact, Help\/Customer Service, and so on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Used as a blog, Medium works in an unconventional way that visitors may find unfamiliar and inconvenient, compared to a typical blog.\n","id":"40403768-d54c-45f6-9ef0-6e817ab7f9ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should People in Positions of Authority Resign When Accused of Sexual Assault?<|ARGUMENT|>Regardless of whether a person committed sexual assault, they should resign because their accuser believes an assault was committed against them. Therefore the accuser is a victim.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People in positions of authority should resign when accused of sexual assault.\n","id":"b6d30e01-cbeb-4f33-8563-63d4f48ad016"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The US has several interests in the South China Sea. There is regular economic transport through the region, and they have several allies whose national defense and economics are based on their presence in certain regions of the SCS. Yet the US has almost no involvement, as they are allowing a regional hegemon China to dominate politics related to the US and its regional allies. The risk of losing access to free economic movement in the South China Sea can be greatly detrimental to many US allies, mostly due to the fact that parts of the South China Sea see more energy Oil related shipping traffic than the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal, and therefore should be a higher priority for the US. However, because the US is losing global dominance, they are opting to refrain from involvement in the political conflict.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The struggle over who controls the South China Sea is further evidence of the decline of American hegemony in the international system.\n","id":"eb9b109a-9081-4878-9b47-163c7f683b4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When you're eating salted peanuts, it's sometimes difficult to taste the peanuts themselves. The salt completely dominates. This difference becomes extra clear when you try some regular, unsalted peanuts. They have a far more 'nutty' taste to them and simply taste more like peanuts. Therefore, they taste better. I can imagine someone has a preference for salted peanuts, but looking at it objectively, unsalted peanuts taste more like peanuts than salted peanuts. Which is the point of peanuts. Besides that, all that salt is a health risk. Westerners of which I'm part eat too much salt Cutting back on our salt intake by dropping the salted peanuts is a good idea. So, why are salted peanuts not inferior to unsalted peanuts? What am I missing? Why do we still eat the salted ones besides the habit we have? Note the salted peanuts barkeepers give out for free to make people drink more are understandable for economic reasons. I don't blaim them, nor do I see that as part of this . This is about the personal choices we make when we're out grocery shopping.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We shouldn't eat salted peanuts; they're inferior to unsalted peanuts\n","id":"930463eb-d6f9-4abd-a3fb-c4a4b78c22f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Jesus the Messiah?<|ARGUMENT|>The Sermon on the Mount repeats the phrases \"you have heard it said. but I say to you.\" In this sermon, Jesus defines a properly adequate following the Law as nothing less than perfect holiness, as opposed to simply adhering to a list of rules.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A main theme of the teachings of Jesus is that the Hebrews misunderstood their own Scripture.\n","id":"cc0bc4d2-93a6-4746-ae68-d27c73d48277"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trophy Hunting Be Illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Murder may not be the right word for it, but killing any living animal for fun\/amusement isn't right for survival it's plausible. People don't agree when it happens to cats or dogs so why should it be ok with wild animals?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Killing for fun in any other way would be seen as murder and prosecuted accordingly. Trophy hunting should not be the exception.\n","id":"e968bfac-94e7-4345-9d85-d863b42169cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment<|ARGUMENT|>The principle of capital punishment is that certain murderers deserve nothing less than death as a just, proportionate and effective punishment. There are problems with the death penalty, but these are with its implementation rather than its principle. Murderers forgo their rights as humans at the moment when they take away the rights of another human. By wielding such a powerful punishment as the response to murder, society is affirming the value that is placed upon the right to life of the innocent person. Many more innocent people have been killed by released, paroled or escaped murderers than innocent people executed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The principle of capital punishment is that certain murderers deserve nothing less than death as a j...\n","id":"196afa3d-b3f1-423a-baa6-20543a0ac3e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should we decide whether a single-winner voting system is fair?<|ARGUMENT|>In an election with a sufficient number of candidates, a voting method that fails summability will have enough unique ways to fill out a ballot that only a small number of people will vote a given way. Thus, it will be easy to look through all the ballots with a specific vote to check for a given set of markings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Releasing images of the ballots compromises the secret ballot since voters could be coerced or bribed into voting a specific way and leaving subtle markings to make their ballot identifiable.\n","id":"958ee071-3933-4a64-a83f-7d2b1b265ecf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI moves us toward a desired future of promoting discovery and encouraging curiosity as compared to paying for competition and rewarding our dark traits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wealthy countries should provide citizens with a universal basic income UBI.\n","id":"0052ec7c-d86e-4f7e-b5b2-2b9dafc79ec1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should individuals sentenced to life in prison be allowed to choose death instead?<|ARGUMENT|>As gangs function on the threat of violence reducing their numbers will likely lessen their ability to put forward and carry out these threats. p. 8<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Recruitment is an important requisite to the functionality of prison gangs, which will lessen if the number of prisoners decrease.\n","id":"b1e1f477-f8a5-43a5-acd8-01eea51efc51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just finished writing this for a public speaking class, and will inevitably have to see the other side of the argument, but cant. Can anyone change my view? Imagine the proposal of mass surveillance as a stoplight intersection with traffic cameras. Every car passing through the intersection appears on film. Only those cars triggering the cameras because of violations or having descriptions key to investigations have their license plates read and information scrutinized. Lessons from the Status Quo As a culmination of TED talks so profoundly articulated in the National Public Radio\u2019s NPR TED Radio Hour entitled \u201cThe End of Privacy,\u201d surveillance is currently inevitable in the United States. First, the Supreme Court has created a messy web of rulings on privacy that leaves a substantial gray area for government surveillance. For example, Griswold vs. Connecticut established an implied right to privacy in the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Riley vs. California extends warrant requirements to cell phone content. However, Smith vs. Maryland disallowed the complete veil of privacy and permits government metadata collection. Second, private companies mine droves of consumer data with little current or foreseeable restrictions. The Economist of the United Kingdom asked the provocative question in the summer of 2013 Should the government know less than Google? The article makes the same observation as many others in contemporary media\u2014corporate data collection is insidious and now unavoidable. The U.S. News and World Report and the National Journal discussed in 2013 that the surveillance state is largely a product of private surveillance practices. Reform focuses on government collection evident in the rise of the ACLU vs. Clapper case through the US Court of Appeals and public backlash against the Patriot Act and the National Security Agency in the U.S. , yet businesses conduct the bulk of data collection. The critical conclusion here is that some element of data mining is inevitable in developed developing countries many other nations are following the American example . This doesn\u2019t necessarily bind nations to fates of surveillance in theory at first examination, but empirics tell us otherwise. In March of 2013, the New York Times reported that at least 25 nations have domestic intelligence programs, and there are numerous international treaties and organizations that are working to guide surveillance program development to avert tyranny1. Any realistic discussion of government surveillance must consider the scope of private surveillance in the status quo. Portrayal and Biases In nations well read in dystopian novels, an aversion to government information control is understandable. But a cascade of colored media coverage and public cynicism only chokes off impartial discussion about government surveillance in society. Michael Hirsh of The Atlantic notes in his article entitled \u201cBirth of the Surveillance State\u201d that there is a war of perception waging between government agencies wishing to preserve their powers and media outlets looking to slander leftist \u201cbig government\u201d. As a result, citizens have charged and incomplete knowledge of their government\u2019s actions. For example, a poll conducted by MSNBC found that a minority of democrats favored government surveillance under the Bush administration, yet, seven years later a majority of democrats favored the same programs under President Obama. This demonstrates that the surveillance discussion in United States is too politically charged to be sincere and fruitful. The bias against government surveillance programs is formidable. In fact, there is a worrisome double standard in many developed nations with surveillance programs. The Guardian, for example, has discussed the media\u2019s blind eye to corporate media mining while anti NSA sentiments roar2. Google knows every user\u2019s Internet habits, Facebook knows their locations, and Verizon knows the content and destination of their calls and text messages\u2014metadata backlash is grossly overblown in this context. Truly, modern societies have a dangerous double standard and staunch biases that continues to hinder true discussion. As Judge Gerald Lynch of the Second Circuit of the US Court of Appeals stated just recently during the proceedings of the ACLU vs. Clapper case, \u201cI just don\u2019t understand the argument as to what\u2019s so special about telephone records that makes them so valuable, so uniquely interactive, that the same arguments you\u2019re making don\u2019t apply to every record in the hands of a third party business entity.\u201d3 Safety and Social Contracts Discussion of \u201cjustified\u201d government actions revolves around governmental legitimacy and thus, social contracts. Political philosophers have developed theories pertaining to the role of governments and the balance of individual freedoms and societal restrictions for millennia. At the core of social contract theory is the forfeiture of absolute freedom for inclusion and protection in a society. Here lies the classic liberty versus security debate. As Jean Jacques Rousseau discusses in his treatise Principles of Political Right, societies with social contracts requiring universal forfeiture of some liberties are idealistic because they facilitate a new breed of freedom. This basis of this freedom is security safety via society furthers the human condition. Given this understanding, it is then one of the essential aims of any government to promote the safety of its citizens. Government surveillance programs dramatically improve the public safety and well being. Looking to empirics, government surveillance is a critical tool in antiterrorism campaigns. We concede the fact that the United States has met many roadblocks with the NSA. Among others, there exists contention of the very basic effectiveness in thwarting terror attacks4. Surveillance programs are in their infancy, but we maintain that surveillance can and will be a counterterrorism tool in the future. As Paul Pillar of the Brookings Institute discusses in his article \u201cStop Bashing the NSA\u201d, NSA type programs are the product of popular demand for counterterrorism efforts. As communication becomes increasingly digitized, developed and developing nations ought to have a vested interest in surveillance programs. It would be foolish to dismiss the prospect of surveillance as a tool to arm governments in an age of increasing computer power and information availability. Most importantly, governments have an obligation to protect their citizens from insidious business practices. There are three entities interested in citizens\u2019 information, and it is critical to maintain a perspective of their ultimate motivations. Simply, businesses generate capital from, cyber attackers commit crimes against, and government protects and serves the general public. People fear that government access to information only magnifies incriminating evidence. True, governments can and will prosecute when presented with viable evidence. However, Smith vs. Maryland obliterates the expectation of some variety of a \u201cveil of privacy\u201d9 between consumers and businesses. \u201cThe End of Privacy\u201d also warns that businesses will manipulate consumers with their troves of data. Refer back to the discussion of the double standard. Government surveillance is the solution to private interest data manipulation. \u201cThe End of Privacy\u201d describes data as capital and as such, supply and demand applies. Governments can eliminate corporate information monopolies and secure their stores against cybercrime through the collection of metadata10, 11. Additionally, governments can facilitate networking and innovation across vital sectors12. Citizens ought to recognize the potential for government surveillance and data collection programs to protect citizens from unfavorable business practices. Mass surveillance is ultimately representative of the contemporary power balance between governments and businesses. Disallow governments from controlling the lion\u2019s share of public data, and citizens will render themselves powerless. Remember, citizen\u2019s data is outside of their control and surveillance is now inevitable. Choose your actor a private interest corporation with insidious business practices, or the government, whose job it is to protect and serve the general populace. Governments can enhance public safety with surveillance programs through other avenues too. In the United States, surveillance efforts are assisting with the war on drugs5. In fact, DEA and NSA cooperation is effective and increasing in frequency6. Justice systems stand to gain significantly from increased access to citizens\u2019 information. As Jane Mayer of The New Yorker articulated, \u201cmetadata and other new surveillance tools have helped cut the average amount of time it takes the U.S. Marshals to capture a fugitive from forty two days to two.\u201d7 The United States Justice Department has commended the role of information from surveillance programs in increasing institutional efficiency8. In today\u2019s age of diminished geopolitics and post cold war era ideological factionalism, information infrastructure is indispensable. There is unlikely to be any developed nation today who lacks ideological adversaries. As the age of troop combat and traditional combat wanes, the most valuable security assets are sophisticated technologies and programs like the American National Security Agency. Even if affirmative teams argue that surveillance programs are largely ineffective, the impact of a few intelligence successes justifies their presence. Recall that our advocacy entails only metadata surveillance for the majority of citizens. This trade is the core social contract theory. We maintain that the minor forfeiture of privacy outlined in our introduction is a worthwhile limit of absolute freedom considering the contemporary value of surveillance programs and their potential to enhance public safety. Ultimately, the preservation of even a few lives outweighs minor privacy concerns. Apply this concept to our utilitarian framework. Public safety is the epitome of utilitarian objectives. Trust in surveillance programs breeds peace of mind for the populace, which outweighs minor privacy infringements. Idealistic Shaping We contend that the vast majority of problems with and controversy surrounding government intelligence programs exist because of implementation errors. For example, court warrants for information scrutiny are a basic safeguard of public privacy, yet these programs are dubious in the United States. As the American Civil Liberties Union ACLU remarks on their website, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court FISC , created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 FISA , \u201cpose an increasing threat to individual rights,\u201d because of secretive and unchecked authority. As a result, Affirmative arguments will focus on issues of constitutionality, for example, but these discussions are ultimately frivolous. These arguments have an American premise when this is truly an international, ideological, and theoretical issue. Not all constitutions mirror that of the United States. The United States can and is reforming their system to follow international examples13. Even though the NSA\u2019s actions have hampered American diplomacy in the short term14, governmental surveillance can become a tool rather than a weapon in the international sphere as demand amongst world powers grows. American type programs that arise and engage secretly with legal dubiousness breed suspicion about government, this only corrodes faith and in turn, lessens democratic participation. Therefore, we should construct a theoretical state that has safeguards to foster trust. With empirics in mind, government surveillance can overcome its greatest barrier\u2014public opinion. This carefully constructed surveillance state shall include many components. First, a surveillance constitution can avert an Orwellian type slippery slope into dystopia. If governments adopt our definition of \u201cmass surveillance\u201d and outline ethical court practices for warrants, the American implementation empirics become null. Second, governments must construct a delicate security balance. Some degree of secrecy is necessary for the effectiveness and integrity of surveillance programs15. However, governments should disclose court proceedings and information not imperative to investigations. Third, the public and the government must be tolerant of watchdog agencies and whistleblowers that reveal lawless practices. These are the pillars of a healthy surveillance state. The affirmative teams must refute the premise of surveillance in a theoretical state without implementation barriers and with proper legal developments. Rejection of the status quo does not validate the resolution. That is to say, Affirmative arguments cannot use implementation errors as means to validate an affirmative position. Rather, they must refute the very concept of an ideological surveillance state. We have a unique opportunity to craft a surveillance state model that facilitates an unbiased discussion of mass surveillance. That is precisely what the topic asks. Intellectual Freedom No discussion of surveillance practices can skirt concerns of intellectual freedom. In the face of government tyranny, oppression of unfettered discussion is a classic fear16. Media portrayal is largely responsible for fear of Orwellian dystopias. Public perception should be of surveillance as protective, not oppressive. Only those wishing to harm the public body will face scrutiny. Surveillance states do not inherently constitute a limit of sedition. Governments can craft laws to distinguish safety of public from rebellious discussion of their practices, thereby pacifying the \u201cyou have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide\u201d slogan. Once the public differentiates the health of the populace from the health of government institutions, surveillance states can escape Orwell\u2019s condemning fantasies. This view ought to be sewn into any surveillance constitution. Evidence of a planned attack against the British Parliament shall spur an investigation. However, plans to assemble outside Parliament shall not be infringed. Indeed, it is the perceived powerlessness of discourse and individual action that motivates violence against the state. Surveillance can aid democracies while being no more than a tool for safety. A Shift in Judicial Paradigm Jack Balkin of the Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository argues in his 2008 article entitled \u201cThe Constitution in the National Surveillance State\u201d that surveillance states pose a troubling transition from judiciary models of \u201cex post apprehension\u201d to those of \u201cex post prevention.\u201d Balkin contends that surveillance programs aim for crime prevention, and policing practices will come to defy constitutional safeguards if individuals do not have to actually commit the crime they intended to face prosecution. We find this logic to be flawed twofold. First, this shift of judiciary paradigm is not unique to surveillance practices. Many societies, including the United States have laws criminalizing malicious intent and planning the basis of conspiracy offenses . These laws have existed far longer than surveillance practices. Second, we favor this paradigm shift and contend that if surveillance facilitates it, then that is only an advantage. Today, a single criminal can create far more damage than 50 years ago or the age in which the United States Constitution was drafted. In this sense, \u201cex post prevention\u201d enhances public safety greatly by disallowing otherwise legally unstoppable actions. So long as police maintain a credible standard for evidence needed to convict on the basis of intent and planning, then this shift is progressive. The Wonder of Metadata TLDR TLDR Mass surveillance doesn\u2019t necessarily have a significant impact in most citizens\u2019 lives or privacy. In fact, metadata collection programs are hardly noticeable in the lives of law abiding citizens17. This is the crux of mass surveillance\u2019s potential. By using miniscule data from each citizen and analyzing trends, governments can preempt devastating crimes and locate convicts. Such measures will require minimal privacy infringement18. In all, we contend that mass surveillance programs contribute far more to society than they retract. When improving safety and operating in a semi transparent manner, governments are justified in using mass surveillance as means of intelligence gathering. In a utilitarian sense, mass surveillance is absolutely justified.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mass Surveillance is a justified method of intelligence gathering.\n","id":"1a3822d0-90bb-4b75-986f-51d795ae8737"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Conflict Between Groups Inevitable?<|ARGUMENT|>Estimates of deaths in the Libyan Civil War, sanctioned by the UN, vary with figures from 2,500 to 25,000 given between March 2 and October 2, 2011.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United Nations has sanctioned military interventions in countries that have caused destruction.\n","id":"da826020-7f66-4e46-8e57-16c12ef43a6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi all, thanks for your help with this. I've been struggling with this one for a while. I'm a native Western New Yorker Buffalo , who was represented by Mrs. Clinton from 01 09. My problem with her is this, she moved to New York to run for office. She catered, pandered, and won solely because of NYC. Not the first time that's happened, nor will it be the last. I understand the reasons why she focused on NYC in terms of population size, money, political influence and ease of being elected, but I have always resented her for it because of Upstate New York's massive catalogue of issues that require their own attention independent of the influence of NYC politics. I know that might be hard for people to get with, but Upstate New York deserves real representation and we never really got it from her. So I'd like your help before she runs in 2016 she will, let's not kid ourselves I'm a Democrat, I voted for Obama twice , but I won't vote for Hillary Clinton because of the reasons I described. . P.S. Go Bills<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I will not vote for Hillary Clinton if she runs for president because of what she did as a NY Senator.\n","id":"9511a29c-4d4c-4174-8756-f2de58ca6b4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>President Obama enacted the Affor\u200bdable Care Act which helped over 20 million uninsured Americans access health care.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Democratic Party advocates more strongly for universal health care.\n","id":"46565525-3e15-459d-b4b3-2a855cd68e8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the BBC should be free to blaspheme<|ARGUMENT|>The BBC is in an unusual position, simply because of its funding structure, to promote new or challenging works of art. The licence fee means that it is freed of many of the pressures brought to bear by either commercial or political masters. Although it has never taken that to mean it has a carte blanche, it does allow for opportunities simply not available to many broadcasters in terms showcasing new works of art and encouraging creative development. The BBC\u2019s global audience in 2007 was 233 millioni. That audience provides some context for the 1,500 who actively protested this particular broadcast. It seems reasonable to suggest that many of those millions follow the BBC because they trust the Corporation\u2019s approach of providing the widest possible range of output and opinion. For such an organisation to capitulate to a prudish group \u2013 who were outside BBC venues at the time so couldn\u2019t have seen the broadcast \u2013 would be a huge betrayal of that trust. i BBC News Website. \u201cBBC Global Audience Hits New High\u201d. 21 May 2007.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a duty for a broadcaster that is not dependent on either commercial or state funding to give a platform to controversial works of art.\n","id":"697627ef-7f82-47df-929e-5e33e99d6239"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>The Quran is divine revelation from Allah: \"This is the Book wherein is no doubt, guidance for those who are conscious of Allah. who believe in what has been sent down to thee & that sent down before thee. these are on guidance from their Lord, these are the successful.\" 2:2-5 \"A Book sent down to thee, so let there be no impediment in thy breast because of it. to warn thereby, & as a reminder to believers: Follow what has been sent down to you from your Lord, & none other than Him.\" 7:2-3<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allah, the Monotheistic, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Eternal, Self-Sufficient, Creator, Sustainer, and Monitor of all that exists, has repeatedly revealed, since the first human being, guidance on how to minimise evil in, even eradicate evil from, society. All but one i.e. the Quran of Allah's messages of guidance have been destroyed or perverted by evil humans, for their own greed for power and wealth. So evil only exists because evil humans reject and\/or pervert Allah's guidance.\n","id":"e271cba3-70c2-4568-91d0-1751318b5e76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Potions that resemble psychoactive drugs, such as Felix Felicis, are available in Hogwarts and even given to students by teachers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hogwarts teachers are irresponsible and contribute to a dangerous and unhealthy school environment.\n","id":"31ec981d-f0e3-41c0-a789-8fa476e087aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title says, I think that hate speech should still be considered and protected as free speech. I've seen more and more often that individuals are calling out for a restriction on offensive or otherwise hurtful words. I agree that these sort of things shouldn't be said, I am no advocate for hateful words, but I do support the right to speak one's mind so long as it is not incitement to violence. My fear with restricting offensive words is how subjective it can be, and how hard to reliably define. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate Speech is Still Part of Free Speech.\n","id":"8f2ce4af-5f78-45ed-9076-25c4f5e01f2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my opinion Nascar is not a sport and should not be considered one. First of all it's about as entertaining as watching cars drive on the highway. I don't know how anybody who can stand to sit in a stadium for several hours in the sun watching cars drive really fast in circles. How the hell is that entertaining. I'd rather watch a cricket game The drivers don't even have to be in shape. As long as they don't have high blood pressure their bodies can endure. So why does anyone like such a pathetic hobby?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nascar and formula-1 racing are not a sports.\n","id":"8e7e1301-c19a-4222-858d-a363be10e073"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should North African countries be allowed to be part of the EU?<|ARGUMENT|>It will make it easier to patrol the southern borders of the EU, checking people coming from Central and Southern Africa.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"North African countries should be allowed to be part of the EU.\n","id":"186845b2-17a1-40d2-b72b-924b7153d476"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every car sold in America I'm American should come with a breathalyzer test that is required before the car can start. I think that this policy would almost completely eliminate all drunk driving and has no downside, because the breathalyzer test does not take a long time I think its a few seconds but I might be wrong and would prevent all drunk driving. The only exception is if a drunk person has a sober person blow for them and then takes the wheel intoxicated. However, I think this is very unlikely because this is anecdotal I don't think many people actively try to drink and drive, but simply underestimate how drunk they are and drive anyway. This should apply to everyone in every car, not just people with prior records, because it would stop people from DWI even once. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that every car should have a built in breathalyzer test required on startup, regardless of previous record or lack of drunk driving.\n","id":"9488db0f-3e30-4c03-8754-9c3b06aa0bf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>Referendums give voters a sense of satisfaction because they believe that the system is fair and responds to their preferences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Referendums foster a sense of inclusivity in democracy and make people feel part of the political process.\n","id":"1d07b004-7b04-42ad-9ca0-a6a57eebe9b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Implement a Tax On Wealth on the Super Rich<|ARGUMENT|>This would help the most vulnerable people and families in the US, enabling them to move up the social latter out of poverty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US Should Implement a Wealth Tax for the Super Rich\n","id":"13cfb825-a370-43d1-beed-b6c94dc7ed4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Recycling works<|ARGUMENT|>Some plastics, especially those that are inexpensive to manufacture, can be difficult to recycle efficiently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all recyclates are of good-enough quality to allow energy-efficient recycling\n","id":"74e0f494-51c7-4616-8bc7-f01ee2f17716"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have this bad habit of thinking Oh, this book, according to goodreads, has only this teeny amount of reviews. It probably isn't that good, if it was it would have caught a large audience. I know this is a terrible way to judge books. To make matters worse, I know this is a logical fallacy. To deem a book bad based on its popularity, but I just can't, to save my life, get myself to read books that aren't known because I get this feeling that the chances of it being great are slight. So, with this said, I beseech you to change my view. Thanks in advance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I tend to disregard books that are unpopular. Please,\n","id":"c10e9377-b076-4a9e-a21b-e13977e301b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Land Boundaries\/Borders Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Borders allow people who agree on a certain set of principles to get together and live by them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Boundaries help with understanding each other's image brand, purpose, personality, etc..\n","id":"ce181f45-5d84-42cc-aaf1-a2752120ddad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi all So just to give you some background information, health care costs are projected to continue to rise in the next decade, coming up to around 20 of GDP At an average rate of 5 growth over the next ten years slower growth in the next couple years from lingering effects of the recession and then itt'l pick up more , it is projected to rise more than 1 of the rate of GDP growth. To give you some perspective, the country that spends the second most percent of GDP on health care is Netherlands at 11 And they have better health outcomes than we do and care access for basically all citizens . And yet we still have a large amount of our population uninsured. This is a tragedy. Our health care system needs reform, and our government is doing nothing. Obamacare did almost nothing to change the system. It added some people to insurance, but otherwise most of these larger problems remain unchanged although it did do things that will minimally help some costs . I don't fault Obama as much as I fault the unwillingness of our government to do anything basically Republicans, to be perfectly honest . This is what I think we should do. See this You can argue with me on these specifics on that  if you wish. But it doesn't look like we're anywhere near being able to do that right now. Democrats can only save face for an inactive bill by claiming that it is a fixed issue, so they don't gain from making a current issue. Republicans don't have any grasp on a good solution to this problem, and have been focusing on simply repealing Obamacare, which is such a small thing in the grand scheme of health care. I think the tragedy of this is that in our polarized world right now, the problem is going to need to get much much worse before it gets better. People will have to be paying so much on health care so that they don't care what party is proposing a solution, as long as somebody is proposing a comprehensive one. But I don't think this is going to happen soon. And I think this is going to be devastating for our economy in the next ten years. And I don't think any political party will talk about it for awhile. I further think the issues we're focusing on now, immigration, guns, ect. are nowhere near as important as this issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe rising health care costs are the biggest problems the U.S. is going to have to face in the coming years, and this inactiveness in Congress will have to stop, soon.\n","id":"b207d5bc-4aba-4e98-b69c-2df0b2fd65b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>The air is clean in Europe and the U.S. because all the dirty factories have been moved to China.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By exploiting the third world advanced societies do not foresteall clean nature, air or water.\n","id":"f4ec535d-6099-448b-b699-4d24ae867455"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Uggh sorry, the title should be should NOT be forced . I recently read about a Canadian law suit pending where a transgender woman wants to get her genitalia waxed at women waxing businesses The problem is that the transgender woman still has male genitalia. On the one hand, I instinctively think that women should get to choose whether to wax male genitalia. On the other hand, I can see an argument along the lines of anti discrimination cases that if you're a public establishment, you have to cater to the general public without discrimination based on age, sex, religion, sexual orientation, transgender status, etc, and at the end of the day, pubic hair is pubic hair. However, I find it really hard to accept the conclusion that these women should go out of business and lose their livelihood just because they don't want to deal with male genitalia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A waxing business should be able forced to wax a transgender woman's genitalia\n","id":"04222e09-e4d1-4b3c-abaf-0b52fcc30b7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>If omnipotence entails the power to do anything that is logically possible but not to break the laws of logic e.g. maximal power, then such a being may have sufficient logical reasons for permitting evil and suffering e.g. to create the greatest logically possible world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No proof has been shown to to indicate that an all-powerful being would lack sufficient power to reconcile existant evil with his all-loving nature. Thus, it should be presumed possible since omnipotence entails power vastly exceeding human capacity and cognition.\n","id":"164ef81b-1807-445b-bf17-8d2b4ed83ae9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was raised in a christian household where forgiveness was a big part of our religion. Basically we were supposed to follow in Jesus footsteps in regard to forgiving others. That means like Jesus we were to turn the other cheek when abused. Also, there's a scripture always said to forgive your brother 77 times, which was supposedly a metaphor to infinitely forgive your brother, although i disagree with that meaning. I found though, this rule of forgiveness was seldom followed. As i grew up, and experienced untold abuse, i eventually realized the stupidity of religious organizations and left. Apart from religion i do realize forgiveness can have some practical value. In life, it's been very hard for me to feel ill will towards people who act like dicks in life towards me. My bible training as a child always makes me feel guilty for being angry or holding any type of grudge towards people that even continually disrespect me. I have no problem defending myself in an aggressive manner, but it's only a show. Lately this has been affecting me alot, because i can't bring myself to hate the people who've actually physically and emotionally hurt me, specifically those who don't care and refuse to apologize. I will endure their bullshit, then laugh and joke with them, and feel stupid that i am like this. I used to think forgiveness was a good thing, but i'm feeling like it needs very strict limits. I think hate can be a good thing, because the feeling of hate validates the situation in a way, and gives yourself esteem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's more mentally healthy to hate unapologetic people who've treated you badly, then to forgive them.\n","id":"244d8796-90b9-4838-be2f-05e469db3fbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please read my edit This is a topic that I've been thinking about. On reddit, I've seen many posts over the months that I've been here talking about the struggles associated with raising a low functioning child. It destroys family units, can lead to the suicide of a spouse and often fails to raise a functioning member of society in the end. These individuals also have much higher rates of aggression compared to the general NT neurotypical population. If we are able to develop and use tests during pregnancy that determine whether the child has low functioning autism with a very high degree of accuracy, then I believe that this is an avenue worth pursuing. This could be similar to the methods used to predict Down Syndrome. In my opinion, the benefits are quite considerable Benefits The parents are not burdened for the rest of their lives by their child and all the positive benefits of that Fewer resources will have to be spent caring for low functioning children and adults The child is unable to pose a risk to other persons such as the caregiver s . Thanks for taking the time to reply to this. I really appreciate it. Note please do not try to make this a religious debate. We should not force our beliefs regarding abortion onto others. EDIT The euthanasia bit is from an earlier piece where I was suggesting the euthanasia of 1 2 year olds with LFA. Feel free to discuss this aspect as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Euthanization in the case of low-functioning autism is justified with permission from parents.\n","id":"4da6436a-507a-4e70-87b0-3ff3aa82eb5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Culturally or Historically Significant Artwork Be Property of the State?<|ARGUMENT|>This would lead to better cross-cultural relations between majority groups, indigenous groups, and other minority groups.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This means that more groups can appreciate this artwork, and by extension, this culture.\n","id":"f35cb945-a68a-43f6-8669-596e0ebbaa6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A few statements before I write my post I support equal rights for everyone, regardless of their race, gender, sex, orientation, etc. This post is not an attack on feminism. I am not saying that feminism is wrong or evil, nor am I claiming that all feminists believe the same thing. Please bear with me for using feminism for simplicity's sake here. I am not attempting to claim that women do not face significant disadvantages in today's world. I am claiming that in twenty five years, I believe we will have overcome many of these issues to the detriment of young boys. Thanks. So, let's get into the nitty gritty of why I think that feminism will be detrimental for boys in the long run. Education Our educational systems have become biased towards girls. For a long time now the majority of primary junior high school teachers have been women but according to more recent statistics boys get more failing grades than girls and account for about 80 percent of high school dropouts. They cause more disciplinary problems, likely because many disciplinary rules are biased against boys no roughhousing , for example, where boys are more likely to wrestle for fun than girls . The message that has resulted from decades of attention given to women and girls is that boys innate way of doing things is the wrong way, and they must be taught otherwise. Less men than women now graduate from college, and, because success is tied so strongly to a higher degree, I believe that in 25 years we will see negative consequences of this fact. Social thinking and the women are wonderful effect The women are wonderful effect is a phenomenon in social psychology in which people associate women with more positive values than men. Because women have been lobbying for equality for the past fifty years, women's issues are taken very seriously today as they should be . However, men's issues are often dismissed. Hanna Rosin, for instance, can write a book called The End of Men and speak of such end in a celebratory way. Things like boys dropping out of school is not taken nearly as seriously as it should be, and by and large women are coming to be valued more than men. I say coming to be because they may not be today , but in twenty five years, women will have more degrees than men, be more liberated having questioned their rights for longer than men , and probably make up a majority of the work force. I am stressing, again, that boys will be raised in an environment which doesn't bother to tell them that they are special because of the logic that men have been on top forever and they have had their chance . Feminist issues which speak of the patriarchy sometimes demonize men while ignoring men's issues For example, 99 of rapists are men only because men report rape less and female on male rape is taken much less seriously today. Recent statistics show that while women earn less than men, the statistic 77 cents to the dollar is not universally applicable and in fact depends on many more factors than women simply being paid less . A tumblr features pictures of men taking up space on trains and thereby exercising their male privilege and is lauded by the Huffington Post as a triumph of a feminist blog, even though what it really does about 60 percent of the time is pick fun at men who have big bags between their legs. In all of these examples, men are shown in a state which they must be taught out of . Men must be taught not to rape by virtue of the fact that they are men. Men apparently consciously choose to pay women less. And although plenty of women take up space on trains, it would be sexist to make a blog about it. In short, boys born over the next twenty five years will be raised in an environment which views women's rape as more important than rape, blames men for women's issues, and allows women to make fun of men but not vice versa. Men do have advantages but so do women. And every day it seems as though women are calling men out for more and more trivial things the way they sit on trains, etc. Men can't say anything against women without being called sexist. This is again the result of fifty years of fighting for women's rights. I believe that the men vs. women dialogue will worsen over the next twenty five years and provide an environment prejudiced against men and boys. In other words, I don't think that women will gain equality and say, Great, we did it. I believe that women will overpower men, and that if we do achieve equality in the future, it will be long in the future and only after things have gotten much worse for men and boys. Happy to elaborate more these are rough thoughts. EDIT 01 00 EST As has been pointed out, it is crucial to state that I am talking about America here. In many developing countries, the situation is drastically, drastically different.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that feminism will have detrimental effects for boys who grow up over the next twenty-five years.\n","id":"10c77678-ac47-417c-ae91-9bf2ae9eed5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>the best example is joran van der sloot who murdered a woman, but afterwards married and had a daughter while behind bars. how does that work because the child has no father figure now, and she basically lives with the fact that she grew up with a piece of shit dad who she'll rarely ever see. first arguments i know i'll get is that prisoners deserve their rights. that's fine for conjugate visits, and even marriage i don't care for. but procreating from behind bars and hardly ever be in their children's life is unhealthy. what makes this different from having a deadbeat dad?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's crazy to allow prisoners to have children while in incarcerated long term, because that child will now have a fucked up childhood\n","id":"2a3f2b10-8c3b-4ac5-b187-b461618c079c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The ability to see existing conservation methods, struggles and results in person can be inspiring to the next generation of zoologists and ecologists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This education means that people are likely to better understand and care about the plight of animals in the wild.\n","id":"89f2dba2-111e-4333-822f-adfbe947ae3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The only real solution to the European refugee crisis is to remove the human right to asylum from EU law<|ARGUMENT|>The average refugee becomes a net fiscal contributor just 8 years after arriving in a host country. This money can be used by the host country to better the lives of both refugees and citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Instead of sticking refugees in camps, they should be brought into the job market as fast as possible.\n","id":"c4993935-7a57-4100-8112-1158fb5e2a5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People feel offended when their sense of self or privileges are put in jeopardy. An insult directly questions whether a person is worthy, while questioning foundational religious or political convictions puts large swaths of identity on the chopping block. Anything that suggests a minority should put truth ahead of the hard fought progress of his cause will cause offense, to protect new privilege. But since the whole point of a discussion about ideas is to use reason to develop higher quality truth, reacting to any of these verbal efforts by being offended is counterproductive and ego driven rather than reason driven. If being offended seems acceptable to you, you are probably thinking on the social level rather than a logical level, which is not where your head needs to be to make progress in a discussion of ideas. Recreational conversation can be about anything you want, and if being offended helps you socially in some situations, do it. But when struggling toward truth we must set aside our egos, our privileges, our identities, and just focus on the hard work of figuring out reality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being \"offended\" in a discussion about ideas is at best a distraction, at worst a weasely way to deflect challenging reasoning, and people with integrity should not resort to it.\n","id":"97a7434d-3887-4506-8be9-bfad552141fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Between 2009 and 2015, the percentage of female game developers in the gaming industry nearly doubled in the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The gender representation gap in the gaming industry is decreasing.\n","id":"dd1fedfa-54e5-4653-912a-d66179043e82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>It is almost universally accepted by historians that most of the letters attributed to Paul were indeed written by the apostle Paul, who claims to be an eyewitness to the resurrected body.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The authorship of the New Testament books is debated by historians, with some evidence that they were written either by eyewitnesses or by scribes based on the stories of eyewitnesses.\n","id":"a84b1a0a-2340-4b76-adba-96674108abf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are all humans born equal?<|ARGUMENT|>It can be difficult for parents to value a disabled child like they would a child who was not disabled.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Different physical and cognitive abilities may have an impact on the value of an individual.\n","id":"fd0c6d06-c0a5-4e6f-b768-80c7593060f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My girlfriend has been really depressive lately, i know she cant help it though. She always becomes distant and dismissive, even though i know it doesn't have to do with me. It has kind of gotten me really down lately. I understand that she can't help it, but i still cant help but feel like she's being a bit selfish. Please, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel like my girlfriend is being selfish.\n","id":"cf1676b2-4e68-416a-a2f3-54ce44f29303"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bitcoin Be Adopted As Legal Tender Worldwide?<|ARGUMENT|>Micropayments using credit cards are often financially unfeasible for small merchants to use regularly due to hefty transaction fees. SInce its fees are much lower, using Bitcoin for these transactions can be significantly cheaper.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Highly divisible units, such as the Satoshi, are able to facilitate small micropayments which are becoming an increasingly popular payment system in the digital age.\n","id":"8e40a586-2da6-4b96-80b4-46f7c7b6cc8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>If it is an epistemic possibility that an abortion is murder, in the same way is it an epistemic possibility drunk driving can kill, then it follows that such an action ought to be avoided as an unnecessary risk. If an action may kill someone, we act in a prudent manner and avoid the action on the premise of probability of outcome alone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"From a philosophical perspective, we cannot definitively determine when exactly personhood starts. We cannot therefore assume a fetus is not a human.\n","id":"00cb9627-9eee-43f0-983b-16cad05e29e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>From an operational standpoint, autonomous weapons pose a novel risk of mass fratricide, with large numbers of weapons turning on friendly forces. This could be because of hacking, enemy behavioral manipulation, unexpected interactions with the environment, or simple malfunctions or software errors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AKMs could turn deadly for own soldiers in case of malfunctioning.\n","id":"6f7efa1f-9f94-4716-9951-40f8a598d41c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems as though pretty much all smart watches just show you notifications from your Android smartphone. Although smart watches could be useful by saving you the effort of taking your phone out of your pocket, it is really an unnecessary luxury for the average consumer seeing as they cost hundreds of dollars. Note I am aware that several smart watches that can act as stand alone devices exist, but I am referring to the majority of them that must connect to an Android phone via bluetooth. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that smart watches are pointless and not worth buying.\n","id":"cff4a596-b936-48b1-a02f-9c2d54df73cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Norway\u2019s Breivik were both imagined soldiers in a cosmic war to save Christendom. Both thought their acts of mass destruction would trigger a great battle to rescue society from liberal forces of multiculturalism that allowed non-Christians and nonwhites positions of acceptability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Perpetrators of terrorism in the United States include the Christian militants involved in the shootings at a Jewish day care center in California, the bombing of the Atlanta Olympic Games, the devastation of the Oklahoma City federal building, and a rash of abortion clinic attacks.\n","id":"fb25d536-2828-49df-965c-3090fd26fadf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are certain terms that I cringe at when I hear or see being used on reddit. Some examples include cuck, snowflake, manspreading, mansplaining, and SJW. Before I continue, please don't go with the people should be allowed to use whatever language they want argument because of course I'm not telling people what they can or can't say, but I am free to express my reaction and opinion to people using certain fad terms. I am very strongly considered adding virtue signalling to my list of terms concepts labels that I absolutely despise. I'll break down why I am not a fan of this label When I first heard this term, I didn't think much of it. In fact I thought it was a good addition to our vernacular because it got across a very specific kind of idea in 2 words someone who is pretentious, who doesn't really care about an issue, but proclaims their passion for an issue in order to gain acceptance within that group. But then I kept seeing it again and again on reddit, for the past couple of years, almost like it was the new trend or fad to call out someone for virtue signalling. That's part of why I'm not a fan of this term. People acting pretentious and publicly causes they don't believe in has been happening since forever, so why only recently the sudden surge in people being called out for it? It feels like a fad. It almost seems like their concern about virtue signalling isn't even real they just happened to see other people use the term and wanted to join in on the fun. Ironically, while virtue signalling implicitly decries pretentiousness, everytime I saw it used, there was also an air of smugness in the comment. Given how commonly it's done nowadays, from what I see it is as if the act of calling someone out for virtue signalling is a form of virtue intellect signalling. But instead of virtue signalling about a social crises or an epidemic, you're virtue signalling and publicly declaring how you are morally superior because you didn't exploit some public crisis for brownie points like how that guy did, and not only that, but you're also smart enough to call it out. It is used way too frequently even in cases where it doesn't really apply. More and more I see it being used to shut down someone who doesn't provide sufficient proof that they really care about an issue. Or it's used against public figures who decide to use their platform to talk about an issue, or raise funds for a crisis. Unless that person spends the next 3 5 years on that issue, with their hands in the mud on the ground, the idea is that it is acceptable to accuse them of virtue signalling . I find this idea crazy. Everyday we express concern over a topic and then never return to that issue for a while or ever. Remember a few weeks ago how everyone was obsessing over China and censorship, and now people have moved on. Was everyone in those threads virtue signalling? No they were genuinely concerned, but then in an hour they had to go to work, or pick up their kids, or make dinner, and so they logged off reddit, and lived some other part of their life, until they learned about or read about some other social issue. That's the kicker there are other determinants of behavior, and we are bombarded with information constantly. So it's okay to be able to talk about or express concern about a particular issue in the moment, without having passed some purity test of commitment to that topic. All human beings do this. Out of all of the reasons I have laid out, my personal strongest reason for why I don't like this term is within the last paragraph, so if you want to start somewhere, last paragraph would be great. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I hate the term virtue-signalling - I cringe when I see it being used on reddit, and I have a prejudiced view of the person who uses it\n","id":"b76e980e-05ef-41ce-8e90-52a3f80e0820"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should People Sleep With Socks On?<|ARGUMENT|>Researchers have found that vasodilation in the feet, thanks to socks, shortens the time it takes to fall asleep by a full 15 minutes<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to the National Sleep Foundation warming your feet before bed helps give your brain a signal it's time to sleep.\n","id":"55a86d4e-c01a-45d1-83e7-e8324cb78e1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now I know, music is art and art has no rules, but this is only so true. Movies are art too but I think most of us can agree the emoji movie was objectively bad. That aside I really feel like once you remove the persona and performances of the artists from the top 40 songs and listen to them as just a song, most are objectively bad. They're super repetitive, the lyrics and painfully generic, and there's hardly ever anything new or challenging. And from what I understand most of these artists don't even write their own songs. Of course there are exceptions but I find them to be extremely rare. It seems to me they're only popular become of who they are and how they look perform. I realize this is probably a very snobbish view which is why I want to be enlightened, so can anyone convince me otherwise? Are they actually good musicians or just good performers? Edit to address a few things people have been saying, 1 I see the point about this isn't something new and has been happening for decades, and I'd agree this isn't unique to current times but I still feel the same way about today's hit music. 2 I don't agree that popularity is an adequate measurement of being a good musician. Unfortunately I think a lot of hit artists became famous because of good PR and their public personas. A lot of people I know listen to the music they do because it's what they hear around them, on the radio, in stores, etc. and they don't bother to actively seek out new music.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"most hit music artists today are bad musicians\n","id":"2fb32fda-9a12-4bdb-bc5f-600f61f2f989"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Do Black Widows play dead? I found one behind my bed when I was sleeping two days ago. I know If you see one there are more they come from big families. Anyways, It looked pretty dead to me and I threw it away. Still, I\u2019m wondering if it could have been alive. I have a minor case of PTSD now. I\u2019ve always seen them ouside but this is the second time I have found one in my house. The last one I found was on a piece of furniture that I brought in from outside. I\u2019m not blaming the victim, but that was a lesson learned. Most importantly, does this justify my use of bug spray? Otherwise, I don\u2019t want to do it unjustly. We my bubble usually spray once a year or more. Recently, I have been consuming tidbits about how bad it is to treat nature that way. I follow a local backyard gardening group and they are always advocating not killing nature, not specifically black widows. I think I am mis interpreting this all and I should be fine to use bug killer. Correct me if I am wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using commercially available bug killer is justified for the safety of my family.\n","id":"f5820034-669f-4240-9afc-1ddc27f499f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Plants are very different from humans and animals in that they are alive but they are not sentient which makes killing them less of a concern.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Plants are not comparable to humans in the way that animals are.\n","id":"746af2d5-4db1-4d74-a1a0-01adbe8a082f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I never really understood why when facing terrorist attacks by people who quote Quran verses, shout Allah Akbar and are willing to blow themselves up in the name of their God, some people still say that Islam is peaceful and it has nothing to do with Islam when everything terrorists do is actually ordered in the Quran. Allow me to elaborate The Quran is divided in 2 periods. In the oldest one, Mecca period, Muhammed preaches peace and love between Muslims and unbelievebers. But then, with Hegira, Muhammed escaped to Medina, and during Medina period, Muhammed orders the killing of Kafirs Unbelievebers . Here we face a contradiction. First Muslims are told to love unbelievebers, and more recently, Muslims are told to kill them. When a contradiction happens in the Quran, we use Nasikh law, in which the most recent verse abrogates the oldest one in case of a contradiction. Source Example of a passage ordering the killing of unbelievebers Quran 2 191 193 And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And Al Fitnah disbelief or unrest is worse than killing but if they desist, then lo Allah is forgiving and merciful. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah and worship is for Allah alone. But if they cease, let there be no transgression except against Az Zalimun the polytheists, and wrong doers, etc. Most people think that passages like this are in case of a war and in self defense, but that doesn't make sense since in this specific passage, Muhammad had just arrived in Medina and were not being attacked by their Meccan enemies, in fact, it probably means offensive warfare since Muhammad wanted to kick Medina population out of there. Quran 3 56 As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help. There are a lot more verses like this in the Quran, so it makes me wonder if radical Muslims and extremists are nothing but devout Muslims following Quran rules? If that's the case, Islam shouldn't be considered a religion and maybe it should be even banned since it encourages the killing of those who oppose it, which goes against the Human Rights. A lot of people bring the Crusades topic, but firstly, the Bible doesn't order the killing of unbelievebers like the Quran does, secondly, the Bible and the Quran are very different. The Bible was written by over 70 men for over 1200 years. The Quran was written by a military leader during his lifetime. And even if the Bible did order the killing of unbelievebers, wouldn't it mean that western people and culture are more civilized and perhaps superior since they were able to tell the difference between religion and humanity? Not to mention the stoning of people who comitt adultery or the killing of gay people. Not to mention the number of British Muslims who think homosexuality should be illegal And the Muslim majority countries in which there is death penalty for homosexuals I can't help to think that a lot of today's problems wouldn't exist if Islam didn't exist aswell. There would be no 9 11, no Paris attacks, etc. At first it seems pretty obvious to me, but the amount of people on TV, Internet, etc saying that it's not Islam's fault etc makes me wonder if I am missing something here. Would be glad if someone could elucidate me with some different points of view. Also, sorry for any English mistake. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Islam is not peaceful, it is the cause of terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda. There's no radical Islam, it is just pure Islam.\n","id":"ecdd2635-7b31-496d-8a0d-2411f0381e27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many, if not most of the people being let in have very toxic belief systems. Many of them are homophobic, misogynistic, and many of them are willing to act on these beliefs. Many people will try to argue with me by saying but the quaran says x, y, or z about women homosexuality violence, so islam is not that way. This is a really crappy argument and it assumes that every muslim fully understands the quaran and cares enough to follow it. There are more hateful christians who misunderstand the bible or just don't care what it says than you can shake a crucifix at. What makes you think these people are any different, especially considering that they're coming from an underdeveloped part of the world where they're less likely to be educated enough to question or be reflective about Islam? Also, we've seen crime waves, riots, and rapes taking place in Europe as a result of refugees. I don't really want that happening here. All in all, I think that letting these people in will change our culture in negative ways. I don't want a bunch of people in my country who oppose people's fundamental rights. They will try to use our system to get regressive laws passed. For example for the last three or four years, the university I go to has been fighting a muslim student group who wants all campus pubs shut down because drinking alcohol is against their religion. I really don't want to deal with more of that brand of bullshit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that letting refugees into canada and the USA en masse will have a negative impact on our culture.\n","id":"23e83b0b-6aac-4242-ac7b-7ce0068bb9f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Doing scientific work requires resources and money. The bias doesn't not have to appear in the research itself, but rather it appears in what is selected to research.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Academic and industrial contexts expose scientific research to political influences.\n","id":"a2361687-17e1-4a1c-ad1a-b646a3df3063"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>Pence has publicly and repeatedly called for justice for the killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On the international stage Pence has vocally promoted freedom of the press and justice.\n","id":"aa68215a-1b31-4fc5-bf90-fa3a93f58fa8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>A country with a GDP per capita of $250 has a 15% possibilities of violent conflict in a span of five years while a country with a GDP of $1250 per person has only a 4% chance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Too much inequality will result in violence. Since governments are there to protect their citizens, they should prevent that.\n","id":"0dc70cf8-4e76-488b-82f4-2b62f7cf7364"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>Corporate entities have much deeper pockets than individuals. Sanctions there can actually target the root of the problem whereas targeting users only marginally reduces supply.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The method of regulating and imposing financial sanctions on individuals is highly punitive.\n","id":"abf11d2c-2384-4d2d-bca7-24c5fc921aa2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>When we control for selection bias it is easily observable. The bias in the sample is people that react violently and credit is given to a sought causality, rather than observationclaim for causality being any form of provocative speech, be it hate, insult or rational criticism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The findings of the initial source display causal inferenceunreasonably declaring causality of a mere correlation and selection bias.\n","id":"5a3b7a97-f155-4d05-84ec-e9e7e82067d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in America and do not vote. I feel it is a waste of time and energy for me to vote. I understand democracy is important and am glad to live in a country that allows me to vote but I choose not to exercise that right. In theory democracy is great but in reality it is not here's why I feel that way. Please . A single vote does not make a big difference. I'm talking about only one single vote my vote not the collection of all single votes put together. I can spend hours watching presidential debates, doing research, vetting candidates before finally deciding who I want to vote for but then my vote could easily be nullified by the next person who didn't do any research or thinking and decides to vote for someone else just because that candidate is republican seems like a nice guy is catholic has nice hair is african american, etc. I think George Carlin said it best , the best case against democracry is to just talk to the average voter . I feel like voting in america is just a step up from your high school elections high school students vote for whoever is the most popular, is the best athlete, or promises to cut the school day in half hah . People are too easily swayed by the unimportant things To add onto point 1 I think too many voters are swayed but unimportant things. They do not take the time or effort to really research their candidates and instead use superficial reasons to vote for someone nice hair, nice personality, etc . Presidential candidates these days spend way too much money on hair stylists, fashion consultants etc. Sure you want to look presentable at least but why do you need fashion strategists? It's ridiculous that people would be swayed by which side you part your hair towards but apparantley there are people out there this affects if candidates are willing to allocate budget for their fashion strategy. The American voting system for presidential elections at least has turned into a game. Apparently not everyone's importantance is equal in America. Candidates know California is a strong democratic state so why go campaign there? California is pretty much locked up for democrats so candidates will go elsewhere to sway votes. So are Californians not important enough for a visit? I guess so. Those with more money power influence can influence the vote more strongly than a single voter. This country was bought and paid for a long time ago. Those with the money and power can influence those in government to be on their side by voting for specific legislation by donating gifts to them. The American political system is set up so people feel it is a career track rather than a public service. These people get paid highly, get many great perks, are generally the last to feel budget cuts, and are able to influence their compensation. All these things combined will attract the wrong kind of people greedy people rather than people that want to help the American public. It also makes it harder for incumbents to want to give up this lifestyle so they are willing to do whatever it takes to keep their jobs e.g. flip flop on a position to garner more votes . Politicians jump to the side that get them the most votes. To expand on point 5 politicans need votes to win office so why would they ever support an unfavorable platform? They generally wouldn't. They strategize in their back offices on which platforms would get them the most votes. I would prefer they do what's best for the country and it's people but I guess that's asking for too much. I could give more points but I'm too flustered right now but I think this is enough. Please  because I am cynical and hate thinking the worst but this is what I see in the American politcal system. But don't get me wrong, I think Democracy is still better than other forms of government but sometimes I feel a benevolent dictatorship is better than a corrupt democracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't vote because I feel the American political system is corrupt and a single vote has no power. please.\n","id":"761cabac-bfdb-4a86-9490-e10afe1cb888"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Civil War 1861-65 was mainly about slavery<|ARGUMENT|>Interesting that Thomas Corwin of Ohio Copperheads introduced in it the House while New York's considered secession William Seward presented to Senate. Also recall 2 non-border Union states still had slavery: Delaware & New Jersey. Text~No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The South had the option of supporting the Corwin Amendment, which Lincoln supported, which would have protected slavery. They did not. That's because it wasn't just about slavery. It was a cultural division which included views on slavery.\n","id":"ad4eca1b-f2c9-4535-b59a-d9b035e446f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it okay to physically torture prisoners?<|ARGUMENT|>Torture physical or mental can never be morally acceptable because it's built on two cardinal sins - wrath and sloth. It stains and degrades the soul of the torturer, forever wrecks the lives of the tortured and their loved ones, and opens a gate of hell better left closed. Information needed? Find another way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The act of torturing a human being has significant negative psychological impact on the torturer.\n","id":"4c5dceb3-1ad7-459d-95e6-8e837880f421"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On average, firms that received the management intervention cut defects by half, reduced inventory by 20 , and raised output by 10 Harvard Business Review, November 2012, pp. 79 In order for an organization to succeed, it must first have a structure conducive to management in the form of human, technological, or other capital management. Furthermore, good management practices are crucial in an organization's success in best allocating its resources to achieve its goals. As such, an organization cannot succeed without conventional management of its employees and other capital.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Organizations need management and good management practices in order to succeed.\n","id":"68c3f080-c1b6-4841-baf1-e71311edc3e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Gerrymandering Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>It has been argued that thousands of African American and Latino voters have been shifted out of Georgia's House District 105 before the 2016 election. The result was that Republicans were able to secure the heavily contested district.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gerrymandering itself is the reason why many members of minorities are unable to elect representatives from their own groups.\n","id":"6d7331f2-4371-41c3-95d0-278f9f87424d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>As humans interact with each other socially they are of higher value to each other when compared to animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A human life is worth more than the life of an animal.\n","id":"6cccea19-d0fc-4dfe-a92c-a5e47d5192f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The issue I find with the state of politics today which is very apparent in the state of the political subreddits is that most if not all of the information that is presented by a political subreddit is simply their to reaffirm beliefs. There is no challenging of ones own ideologies. There is very little open dialogue that doesn\u2019t immediately turn into a lynch mob within that subreddit of any idea that doesn\u2019t support one\u2019s own beliefs. This jump towards identity politics is more akin to cult mentality where as if anyone says anything about your \u201cgroup\u201d or anything that challenges its beliefs you are branded an enemy and therefore invalidated. This is not democracy. This is ideological warfare and if we really want to change the world for the better we need to stop using these means to try to garner more people towards our side and separate from anyone we perceive as different and find common ground that we can use as a foundation to build on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political subreddits do nothing to promote actual meaningful discourse and mostly serve to rouse the base of their supporters and discredit anything\/anyone perceived as opposition. This conduct hinders our ability to work together to find a common foundation to build upon for a better future.\n","id":"c14452e1-2dd8-4e0c-8fc5-6a041d3821ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A little inspired by a ELI5 request I did a few days ago about what Nietzsche thought about the truth. It drives me crazy to see this. I find very stupid of people with little to none information about something creating their own thoughts about something that they are not necessarily right. Not exactly the best example I could think of but here it is. Person A watched a 2 hour movie and loved it. Now he wants to show it to person B, but person B just watched 15 minutes of it and hated it. Now person B thinks the movie sucks and thinks he is right about it. Assuming the first 15 minutes were indeed boring and person B would actually enjoy it if he stayed until the end, he is objectively wrong and is making a fool of himself trying to convince person A that the movie is bad. And I know I have a strong desire to form the most 'correct' opinion all the time, but it is in this seek for the truth that I end not having opinion about anything because I always think to myself I'm not considering something else that would make substantially changes to it. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's dumb to form an opinion if you don't know enough about that subject\n","id":"745769e8-1562-4087-a361-2739d83aeee8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that at the core of racial fearmongering and opposition to white nationalism which is itself a fairly absurd concept , is a belief that having too many white people is a bad thing, and that society would be better off if there were less people with white skin. I also believe that this is often a subconscious belief, or at least a position not fully self examined, that many proponents of mainstream diversity politics hold without acknowledging its racist undertones. If we were truly done with racism we would stop trying to push the idea that any skin tone has inherent benefits that merit special protections or privileges. In other wordd, forcing the inclusion of minorities into places or positions simply because there are too many white people there, is stupid. Competence isn't tied to melanin or lack thereof. Someone who doesn't care what colour you are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The most vocal opponents of \"white nationalism\" truly believe in \"anti-white nationalism\"\n","id":"bacc567c-863f-431f-9d95-7d82a1b02000"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Religious Education Should Be a Part of the School Curriculum?<|ARGUMENT|>Many will argue that one reason why there are so many issues with religions is that people are not taught to be open about other religions while growing up. For many, religion is a very personal thing that is taught by their own family, so if they feel attacked about their religion, they take offense at it personally as it if is an attack on their family and themselves. The argument for teaching religious education in schools is that helping children to be aware of the broad spectrum of religions and how there are children just like them that believe differently will help them to separate their faith or their family's religious belief from being a personal matter of who they are. Many people have the opinion that children who are raised to learn about several different religions will grow up to be more tolerant of those who are from different backgrounds and religions\u2014even very strict and possibly \"strange\" ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It teaches children how to be open-minded and accepting of other people's faiths and backgrounds\n","id":"f9589c3d-0433-4a5b-bb98-2c961855c6d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We all know the concept of proposing for marriage, and it's know as popping the question with a ring. Consumerist Diamonds, as well all know, aren't rare anymore That's a quick article but you can find studies all over the place that show diamonds are not rare. Proposing with a ring already purchased is just fueling our consumerism habits but doesn't actually mean anything. When talking about spending the rest of your life with someone, is a gift really necessary? It seems awfully cheap and it's as if you're buying property IE you get to hold onto this valuable item ONLY if you stay with me forever Outdated We all know divorce rates are at roughly 50 . Clearly there should be more open communication than an on the spot yes or no question. I'm sure you can talk about these things pre engagement, but still, reducing it down to a yes or no in the moment question, shouldn't it be a long talk? As in, let's figure out everything first, in advance, and then go from there? The thing is, you can talk about it in advance, but still there's a lot of societal pressure to surprise the woman with the question, just on my facebook today a video popped up with a proposal. In r chicago there's a picture of a diamond ring and a caption wish me luck . Sexist We all know that men are the ones, in a hetero relationship, to pop the question. I don't have the stat to back it up but I'm sure it's above 90 . Isn't this incredibly sexist? First off, only a man proposes. That right there is sexist. But going further, doesn't this reinforce the idea that men have more power in society? Now you can say a woman has equal power because she can say yes or no, so that's 50 50. The problem with that argument is women can only react. I'm going to argue that only being able to react is far less power than the ability to initiate the question. So there has it. I think we should get rid of marraige proposals, it shouldn't be a she said yes but a after a long talk on goals, wants, needs and finances, we mutually decided to get married . Change My View<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Concept of Marriage Proposing is Outdated, Consumerist, and Sexist,\n","id":"5614cc2c-29a5-420e-87d1-8402905c0039"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do sexualised artworks of prepubescent girls - \"Loli\" - encourage pedophilia?<|ARGUMENT|>Lolicon is easily and legally available and makes it unnecessary to take the risk of downloading illegal videos with real children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If anything, Lolicon provides an outlet for people who don't act upon their urges in real life.\n","id":"34abd1e4-85a4-4ce1-9968-64242f9e9636"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if those sexual preferences are not harmful when performed onto robots, allowing for such a realistic simulation of how those sex acts work in real life could have a harmful effect if it normalises those preferences and encourages people to explore them with real partners.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Acting out and enjoying the experience of a rape fantasy with a human like robot may encourage a person to continue that behaviour with actual humans.\n","id":"d4bf8765-b3c4-49d4-a5ac-d4a5d50a330e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The best way I can think of conveying my opinion is comparing it to a few other genres, which I deem as not boring 1 Rap rap quite often has incredible rhyme schemes, and I have never heard a country song that has any rhyming in it other than one or two words per line. In addition, rap is based around rhythm, and country music's rhythm is slow and rarely varies from this. Rap can be slow or very fast, and varies with every song, keeping it interesting . 2 Metal Rock Rhythm is another factor here, but the main difference is the complexity of the music itself. With so many different varying melodies, harmonies, and chords, rock metal is always interesting. I've never heard a country song that exists beyond a basic scheme of chords, it is dull and boring. In conclusion, I believe country music is boring because it is usually monotonous, with no rhyme scheme, dull slow rhythm, and has little to no complexity in the music itself basic chords and melodies . I cannot see any part of country that stands out and doesn't make it boring and tedious to listen to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Country music is BORING\n","id":"43b4b8af-154a-4a0c-ac87-048c09d39c7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>It Matthew 28:9 Jesus immediately meets the women after they see his empty tomb, however, in Mark 16 they did not see him or he only appears to Mary Magdalene.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Matthew 28 Mark 16 Luke 24 and John 20 offer conflicting accounts regarding the resurrection of Jesus.\n","id":"ce57149b-df30-41ef-9f67-c1c85d0ce04e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note I am a gay man and I have just never understood this argument, I am fully aware that it is not a choice I just don't think that matters at all. I only got two hours of sleep today, sorry if this shows in my post I think I was just redundant a few times Let's say for arguments sake that homosexuality is a choice, what does this mean? This means that some people would choose to be gay for some reason, because being persecuted is fun? and they would want the same rights that homosexuals want now. They would want the right to marry who they choose, and why would choice make a difference? I understand that the argument that it is a choice defines the nature of homosexuality, and if it is not a choice then since it is beyond that persons control they should not be denied rights BUT Why does it really make a difference? Who I choose to marry is no one elses business, regardless of if I choose my sexuality. Why would I be denied rights based on my decisions anymore than based on my nature? I argue that it doesn't really matter, and it is no one elses business who I marry regardless of choice. Why does the decision magically mean someone would get to dictate another persons life? I also believe that arguing that homosexuals should be granted the right to marry due to it not being a choice enables the slippery slope argument. Does a zoophile have a choice in their sexual preference? Does a pedophile have a choice? No. Note this is not meant as an accurate argument which I believe, but it is an argument that has been used against homosexuality in the past and is why I bring it up By acknowledging the choice argument we open up to this argument, when in actuality consenting adults should just have freedom to be with other consenting adults, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, etc I apologize for the redundancy, as mentioned at the beginning I am very tired I probably made quite a few miscakes ha, humour while writing this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that whether or not homosexuality is a choice should be relevant to the same sex marriage debate. !\n","id":"496c1122-4e03-4a89-9a86-e807327cb5d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There were so many plot holes. If Rey had raw and untamed power why the hell would Luke keep teaching her after seeing she would go bad. Why can Leia fly in space now? Why are they getting rid of all the old characters? RIP Ackbar When Rey went to that mirror on the island I felt like there was no real purpose to it. Why weren't the star destroyers that were left from the pink haired chick cover the exits from the resistance?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"!!SPOILERS!! I believe The Last Jedi was a horrible movie\n","id":"7836ca0e-dc7f-4807-9cb2-f2e2bd25d1fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of the biggest gripes I have with animal rights is that they treat animals in anthropomorphic ways. They just assume that an animal feels one way or the other about something. First of all, different species have different requirements. What applies to one species doesn't work for another. Animal rights activists often use human values and ideals and impose them on animals, even if they are inapplicable. Captive animals are one such issue humans don't like being in captivity, and some other species of animals probably also don't like captivity, but you can't say all animals don't like captivity. Many probably only care that their requirements physical space, nutrition and mental stimulation lack of stress are met. Second, even within species there are different personalities between individuals. You cannot assume all animals of x species feel one way about something. I am not against animal rights as a whole, but the current movement may be causing cruelty rather than reduction of cruelty due to these issues. TLDR one should not impose human values on animals who may disagree or not care about such values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animal rights groups should stop assuming animals share the same values as humans\n","id":"a922bb85-3e09-4604-b701-46db01f8e315"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just can't get behind board games or other games like remi or card games. When the occasion arises to play board games, it's usually because we went out with a particular boring couple my fiance is friends with, who often bring board games with them. I can never make myself play. They either are ridiculously simple or too complicated that I'd rather not bother paying attention and putting so much mental effort into just a damn game. And it occupies my attention in a way that I don't like. I don't like having to focus so much on something I am supposed to do for fun. I am absolutely fine with focusing psychically on something fun, but not mentally. I like my mind to be free so I can think about whatever I want. And about entertainment I get more entertainment even from just simply looking at the people in the bar and sipping my drink. Or browsing some forums I like on my phone but I'd rather not do that . Every way I look at it, there is enough going on in my head without any special stimulation, even the lack of a computer or a phone, that I can never, ever, imagine a reasonable situation where I would be tempted to play a board game, any board game at all. I can be either at home and then I'd rather read something interesting, just talk and cuddle with my fiance, watch documentaries or do my manicure. OR I can be at a social meeting and I'd rather TALK to people about STUFF. I can't understand how can people who have something going on in their heads and some subjects to talk about would want to play board games instead of just talking. Save for being in prison or on a desert island for prolonged periods of time, I can always, with no exceptions think of something else I'd rather do than play board games. Is there really something that I am missing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I completely despise board games OR card games and am unwilling to give them more chances and I can't see how they could possibly entertain people who are not mind numbingly boring.\n","id":"ced9cdc2-df28-4be1-b4e3-cda4eb5a1423"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If a woman gets pregnant and she doesn't want to go through pregnancy and the man wants to raise his child, there is no way to compromise. Either the man gets to raise his child and the woman is forced to go through pregnancy or the woman gets an abortion and the man doesn't get to raise his child. One of them is unable to get what they want. There's no way for the man to have his child unless the woman goes through pregnancy with modern day science. In this situation it is impossible to compromise. Edit Her only issue is being pregnant. She doesn't care about helping to raise the child or child support or anything else. She just does not want to go through pregnancy. That is the one thing she does not want and what the compromise must work with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no compromise with getting an abortion if the woman doesn't want to go through pregnancy\n","id":"10703f13-26d5-4560-9c69-4d59c8596ecb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Japan has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in reparations for the women from other Asian countries it exploited as sex slaves before and during World War II.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Other countries have paid for similar grievances. The US shouldn't be different.\n","id":"a6e6b776-3ad0-4bbb-8d35-da279a836555"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you attend college to get a degree, you should only have to take classes that pertain to that degree. Negative effects Almost doubles student loans It delays you from entering the workforce earlier, preventing you from paying off your loans sooner and paying more in interest. The value of the classes are limited. Most of these classes are introductory and don't teach any discernible skill related to the career you want to enter Liberal arts classes might have some benefit, but it shouldn't be forced on you. It is an extremely poor investment and should be made optional like taking honors classes. The priority should be your major, anything else is just extra and shouldn't be required. I have heard no good reason from colleges why liberal arts is necessary, and I think their objective is not to be better my education, but to get me to pay more tuition. edit A common theme i'm seeing in the responses is that even though a student might hate taking another course such as math they felt they benefited from it, and that liberal arts gives a 'well rounded' education. I think this can be accomplished without being forced to pay for several courses that have nothing to do with your major. I'm not saying liberal arts should be abolished, just that it shouldn't be mandatory. I am capable of reading and learning on my own which I do and I shouldn't be forced to pay for those courses just because other students aren't motivated to learn and need to be forced to go outside their comfort zone. edit 2 After reading the responses, I believe in can put my position in a more succinct way I agree that a 'well rounded' education is a good thing. I understand that many people have benefited from getting a liberal arts education. But I feel this can be accomplished without forcing a student to pay for courses that are outside one's major. I don't need to be forced to take courses 'outside my comfort zone' to realize the benefit of having a broad education. If some students feel it would be beneficial to take those courses, then the are free to do so. But it should be optional.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Liberal Arts is a scam by Colleges to increase tuition.\n","id":"d662f0ce-d674-433b-ad24-e352d1dd71c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think it would be a great idea if the American constitution had a notwithstanding clause. In the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the notwithstanding clause s. 33 is a clause in the Charter that allows parliament or provincial legislatures to override parts of the Charter. This would help with the very partisan 5 4 decisions I believe. If congress or the states disagree with a court decision, then they would have the ability to override those decisions for a limited time. I understand this would be similar to nullification but adding a notwithstanding clause would be different in that laws made under this clause would be time limited, and that states still can not usurp the powers of federal government or vice versa . As a Canadian, I think it would be useful if the United States had a way to override controversial supreme court decisions decided by a narrow margin I'm thinking Citizens United v. FEC, District of Columbia v. Heller, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, etc. . What parts of the American constitution a notwithstanding clause would cover, I'm not too concerned about as long as democratic rights and mobility rights are left uncovered by the clause I'm open to possibility other rights being unreachable by the clause though .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The American constitution would benefit from the addition of a notwithstanding clause\n","id":"f8ebbabe-c507-4d98-a6f0-bbcbaa2b810c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Sing Problematic Christmas Songs?<|ARGUMENT|>The lyrics in 'Baby It's Cold Outside' may normalize predatory behaviour by presenting it as romantic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Extremely common songs can normalize certain behaviors, rather than being 'only songs'.\n","id":"042c5cc2-8232-44c2-aa95-569ab064ea29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If population replacement rates are below the rate of no growth or at stagnation, things are going to be better in the future. As automation continues to improve, less jobs will be available. On a nationwide scale, decreasing population means available work. Natural resources of food, water, fuel, and other materials are becoming scarcer everyday. On a global scale, less population means more available goods to all. What result s of an increasing population size could surpass these benefits? If we were hypothetically at the growth cap for the human population, would everybody still get frantic like when it's is brought up that the U.S. born citizen population is reproducing below replacement? Edit it seems a lot of the response pertain to economy. I suppose I was wrong in respect to a declining population being beneficial in this aspect. However, I still seem to feel that a shrinking population would benefit us as a species. Our survival, and that of our environment, would be better off with less people. But still, I'm open to changing my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A shrinking population size is a good thing\n","id":"52b49961-a7b7-4c2e-9e3f-484cb6324883"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Seriously, society these days is far too prejudiced against men in my opinion. We are supposedly equal, but a guy will have a hard time getting a job at a nursery, for example. I overhear woman saying things like how the child should ALWAYS live with the mother after a divorce, no matter what the Dad is like. Even little things like putting the toilet seat down. Society, in my opinion, has changed to allow women to do whatever they want and be prejudiced against men. Of course woman and men should have equal rights, but it appears that women have more rights than men now, so I believe feminism has gone too far, . EDIT Just to quickly say I'll be back after sleeping, so like 8 hours, plenty of chance for answers then I'll consider each one and try to reply where possible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe feminism has gone too far,\n","id":"31d5b1a0-521c-487d-8ebd-45b9a2eac6fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Law school<|ARGUMENT|>\"Is being a lawyer all that bad?\" The Healthy Lawyer. March 3rd, 2009: \"My last problem with being a lawyer is that I didn't realize how much I would hate sitting at a desk all day long. That is why I said if I wasn't a lawyer I would want to be a personal trainer. I get up and go to the water cooler or bathroom so many times during the day, just because I hate sitting still.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legal work requires sitting at a desk for long hours.\n","id":"2d40de32-1db4-494b-8a29-9b521e265329"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The public sex offender registry seems like a good idea in theory, but causes more problems than it solves and is often ineffective. Examples of why, Many individuals who are not sexually dangerous have been placed on the registry in some states, such as mooners, public urinators, 18 year olds who have consensual sex with 17 year olds, underage sexters, and even elementary schoolers who get caught playing doctor . This can make getting a job or higher education harder since they are registered sex offenders. Many sex offenders, including the very worst go off the grid by refusing to register or becoming homeless therefore having no address , which means that they do not appear on registries. The sex offender registry creates a false sense of security. Living far away from a large number of sex offenders of in an area where they are restricted from will mean that there will be less fear and the fact that sex offenders can travel, just as everyone else can will make people think that certain areas are unquestionably safe . Living in an area where a low level, unlikely to reoffend sex offender lives can potentially cause unnecessary fear for other residents. Most child sex abuse is committed by family members who the child and other family members trust, rather than predatory strangers. There have been cases of vigilantes using the registries to harass and even murder registered sex offenders, as their home addresses, and even vehicles are publicly searchable online. The U.S. is one of the few countries where the registry's information is fully available to the public. Canada, and many European countries have registries that are only available to law enforcement, which eliminates many of the problems of the public registry. Sexual offenses should be treated like any other crime, where those who have served their time are no longer given significant penalties. Parenting is often an ordeal for registered sex offenders due to restrictions about going to schools, playgrounds, churches, and being around children. Recividism for registered sex offenders is relatively low compared to other criminals and some are on the registry for crimes committed several decades ago.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Megan's Law\/SORNA, the mandatory public sex offender registry, is not helpful and should be abolished.\n","id":"5f0efc66-ee86-469a-a5b0-baf8e4bf8d56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>George Jones' He Stopped Loving Her Today , possibly the most famous country song there is, actually is kind of creepy if you think about it. The song is about a man who is still in love with his ex. It states He kept her picture on his wall , which is weird considering the song later tells us about how long he's been obsessed with her. Another section of the lyrics discuss how he had letters Dated 1962 the song came out in 1980 and how He had underlined in red every single I love you , which sounds more like an unhealthy obsession. The song reveals that the only reason he stopped feeling for his ex is because he's dead, which if you think about it, is quite disturbing. The character may not be the creepy psycho we usually think of when it comes to romantic obsession, and the song is quite good, but it also seems less like romantic devotion and more like unsettling obsession.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"He Stopped Loving Her Today\" is kind of creepy.\n","id":"8e7e837e-b0ee-4ec2-8e34-bcb083f8fb0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>The livestock industry relies heavily on grains and oilseeds. The growing world population can not be fed if we keep using land for the production of feed for animals. tandfonline.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lot of the world's crops are currently used for animal feed, rather than human consumption.\n","id":"f00ce5d3-b4a2-47db-b2a2-fbe7ce7094af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Since Palestine has already and repeatedly rejected offers of statehood from Israel, it makes no sense for the US to recognize them as such when they've thus far refuse to accept it. It would only legitimize political posturing and give Palestine a legal precedent for pleading with the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a calculated risk that the American recognition of Palestinian statehood could legitimize military interventionism against Israel on behalf of Palestine, under the false pretense of peace-keeping or war-crimes.\n","id":"74e2f38e-428f-4568-9da5-48764b66f1e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Meat is not the only product from meat-industry, going vegan will affect farming practices, since meat by-products are also used as fertilizers as well as in other chemical production utilizing bones fat hair and hooves + horns last 3 are major source of keratin to mention a few. This will have a dramatic impact on many economies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The move to veganism would cause mass unemployment as farming, beekeeping, meat processing, and many other jobs would end. This would cause massive poverty, much as the deindustrialisation has done already but on a larger scale.\n","id":"fe2563c4-8d87-44e0-b598-c388dcf5c144"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Have had this conversation with a couple of friends and my partner, and I wanted to know if my reasoning is flawed. I believe that the lotto is, a. in general, a tax on poor people, b. of an infinitesimally tiny chance of winning, and c. a tremendous waste of money. All that applies above, but with the caveat of saying, ' except for buying one ticket'. Because your chances of winning are so absurdly low, and you almost certainly will not win, so buying more than one ticket makes no sense whatsoever. Having said that, if you buy zero tickets, you have no chance at all of winning. One ticket infrequently bought, say, once a year buys you in for the possibility that you might win. You won't, but you might. It's like qualification, and, at the cost of 1.00 or whatever small monetary amount , it's a small price to pay for the chance. That seems like a worthwhile purchase to me. This, of course, does not take into account all the possible consequences of actually winning the lottery. EDIT Thought I'd catch everyone up with where I'm at following all your wonderful responses which I really appreciate . To summarize, the major arguments I'm hearing are, plus my thoughts From a traditional economic standpoint, the numbers don't work out. This I'll accept. I know nothing of statistics or economics, so I'll buy that for a dollar . From a behaviorial economic standpoint, it might make sense to get a lotto ticket, as the potential improvement to one's life makes it worth the small loss of the investment. I do believe this. The possibility of making enough money to serve me for the rest of my life definitely seems worth blowing a buck every now and again. Playing the lottery is not worthwhile, because it is inherently bad for society evil , i.e. the effects it has on the poor, and so on. So far, this is the closest opinion to get toward changing my view not quite there yet, folks . In this case, even winning is participating in an evil, and thus not worthwhile. On the last point, I feel like I can't call this done yet, because my original question has to do with winning money rather than judging the system. I concede that it's stupid statistically to think you will win by putting in a dollar. But, again, I haven't seen anything yet to convince me that I absolutely cannot win by putting myself on the board with one dollar. Whereas I certainly will not win by not buying a ticket. EDIT 2 Thought I'd address the entertainment value argument I think it's a good one, but I think it's outside of the point I was going for, which is that having a ticket qualifies you to win money which would be why I would buy a ticket. EDIT 3 I've been swayed a bit by the arguments that playing the lotto is inherently evil, and, as such, not worthwhile, and the notion that buying an infinitesimal chance is virtually as worthless as not buying into the system at all. I'll admit, I'm not totally swayed, but I thought we were at the Delta awarding point. Thanks everybody for your great discussion<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Buying one, and only one, lotto ticket is a worthwhile venture\n","id":"87b529e1-fa07-467a-8639-b30a883a44b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>The prospect of securing a higher-paying job an incentive undermined by a UBI is an important factor for many people when considering higher education<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI could also lead to decreasing levels of education, as universal financial security would lessen incentives for citizens to pursue higher education.\n","id":"57c0f270-834d-48e7-96db-59772a6dafb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>A study found that time spent on social media site Instagram was linked with lower levels of body satisfaction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The constant comparisons of different lives on social media is detrimental to self-esteem and so exacerbates existing disorders.\n","id":"4e11311a-c3f4-4359-b69b-5278565dfaf5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What should we do about the Rank Table on the Player Profile?<|ARGUMENT|>If the table isn't there, then we don't end up with people trying to use it for purposes that it is not suitable for, nor arguing about what it means when we don't have the definite input about what it means from anoek<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Remove the Rating Table and roll the filters into the graph.\n","id":"05862b6b-9a69-431b-ae0b-f2531ff5fcb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Many classical religions offer people a choice between a \"heaven\" and a \"hell\", implying that God grants free will to his creations. The Adam and Eve story corroborates this by resulting in the pair learning good and evil. God clearly permits evil to happen, even if He Himself is completely good.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The possibility of evil and pain are the necessary consequences to permitting true free human will under an all powerful and all knowing God.\n","id":"83f97c2e-ecbd-4229-bc57-a3e203882de7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Rappaport's Law completely separated the wizarding world in the U.S. from No-Maj Muggle communities. Wizards could not befriend or marry No-Majs, penalties for fraternization were harsh, and communication was limited to what was necessary for daily activities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The wizarding world is very exclusive and sometimes treats those who are not a part of it very cruelly.\n","id":"c6240d16-32b3-4c2f-9228-3a22084a7094"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>Being transgender has nothing to do with a desire to change one's sexed body. A person is transgender when they identify as a gender that does not align with the one they have been assigned at birth and which society assigns them in daily interactions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People insisting that they are non-binary are creating a false binary between those who conform to the gender norms associated with their sex, and those who do not. In reality, we are all non-binary.\n","id":"eecbaa46-4b33-4624-a730-f98cd62d8cbf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>It is understood that an AGI\u2019s abilities would surpass our own understanding. If this is true, we would have no ability to understand or deal with the consequences of discord between two or more AGI\u2019s.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regardless of intention, the consequences of AI's actions prompted by its superior computational, communicative and information management capabilities could indeed lead to negative circumstances for large groups of people.\n","id":"37a9b24a-751f-437b-903a-48273e791240"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Democratic systems of government are based on a cooperative, rather than a purely adversarial, form of politics. It is expected that parties will accept losses graciously and still cooperate with their opponents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refusing to cooperate with or obstructing the other party when they are in government violates democratic norms and principles.\n","id":"7a890242-d125-44b4-b531-c4209a526da1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans accept euthanizing sick animals, without them uttering a will that they want this to happen. Something that is wholly unacceptable with regards to humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taking the life of an animal has fewer consequences than taking the life of a human.\n","id":"5760c78e-49b1-4a27-8c78-bda377ad2e79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>We cannot know exactly what, or how another is feeling. This applies to both humans and animals, and means that it can be difficult to ultimately prove the capacity for sentience. This is particularly difficult for animals, as they lack the power of speech to convey their feelings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One of the key issues with understanding sentience and demonstrating its existence at a scientific level, is that the concept relates to a being\u2019s own thoughts, feelings and emotions, none of which can be fully understood or described by physiological processes or anatomical structures.\n","id":"e8dc2d96-880e-4450-b371-2cd4c5835b1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should minors be allowed to go through irreversible gender reassignment procedures?<|ARGUMENT|>Some research has suggested that many young children who believe they are experiencing gender dysphoria are simply trying to process their emerging homosexual desires instead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minors can misidentify the cause of their dysphoria, potentially making a wrong decision that will lead to an irreversible change.\n","id":"4985b610-9e96-4f0a-9b56-d207e400f884"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Pope Francis a good pope?<|ARGUMENT|>He has described same-sex marriage as the work of the devil and a \u201cdestructive attack on God\u2019s plan.\u201d He has also said that gay adoption is a form of discrimination against children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pope Francis has a track record of extreme homophobia. His papacy is a clear sign that the Catholic church does still not recognise LGBTQ* individuals as equal.\n","id":"9f250252-3e35-46bf-bbd7-e01becab7368"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So called 'extreme hunters' like giraffe killer Rebecca Francis regularly and deservedly receive public shaming, but few of us think twice about grinning at our lamb chops come dinner time. No, this will not be another tired vegetarian diatribe I want to pose the question as to why we humans seem to have a tendency to readily aboard the vigilante bandwagon for the giraffe killer but not the lamb killer. If both animals are equally peaceful and unthreatening to us giraffes and lambs , what makes us react to Rebecca Francis with such vitriol but then react with such nonchalance to human omnivores, ourselves included? There's no shortage of gruesome scenes being pictured in animal rights campaigns, so the macabre happy snaps next to the dead giraffe couldn't have been macabre only due to the dead animal being in frame. No, it was probably the fact this dead animal was a giraffe. I mean, come on A giraffe Who does that? Well, perhaps we're simply unaccustomed to the idea of dead giraffes. It might be so far from 'normal' to us that it just makes it automatically wrong. It's a bit like if I said I had intimate relations with my sister. For the record, I have no sister and so have had no such relations. But if I did, you'd probably say it was disgusting and unethical but why? Couldn't there be some instances of incest which are moral? What if we'd used protection, were both adults at the time, fully consented to whatever standard, no one other than ourselves knew, and it didn't have any negative consequences whatsoever now or in the future? According to research by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, you're still more likely than not to react negatively to this scenario, despite there being few if any good reasons left for thinking so. Haidt termed this 'post hoc rationalisation', our tendency to jump to an intuited moral answer and then come up with its justifications afterwards. Have we merely intuited our moral outrage to Rebecca Francis' photo next to her long necked victim? Partly, perhaps. If the economic world was flipped and our centres of global commerce and industry were in Africa, we might live in a society which farmed giraffes and wildebeest instead of sheep and cattle. In such a society, a dead lamb might set off the same reaction as a dead giraffe has in our society, it would be equally far from 'normal'. Though this isn't just about what's normal and what's not. Part of our reaction was reasoned, not all of it was intuited or, at least, our intuitions happened to be supported by good reasons in this instance. Online commentators reasonably posed questions like Where's the fun in killing a giraffe? and Can't you find enjoyment someplace else, perhaps where you're not killing? What's intriguing about these questions is how easily they can be transposed to the act of eating lamb chops where Rebecca Francis killed a giraffe for apparent mere enjoyment, many of us regularly participate indirectly in the killing of lambs for mere enjoyable sustenance. Where's the fun in killing a lamb? and Can't you find enjoyable sustenance someplace else, perhaps where you're not killing? Now, I did promise this wouldn't get too preachy, so instead of dwelling on these questions, let's consider how and why this cognitive dissonance occurs. For one thing, most of us who eat meat aren't directly involved in the killing or otherwise of the animal, whereas Ms Francis was and seeing a grinning killer lying next to a carcass readily sets off emotional dials . And how could someone be happy about such a peaceful animal's death if it was only for that sake alone? At least lamb eaters aren't necessarily happy about the death of the animal they're eating, but are merely happy about their culinary experience a consequence of the animal's death. However, if the experience of 'extreme hunting' is actually what Rebecca Francis is happy about which seems likely , then her enjoyment isn't necessarily anything more than like meat a consequence of the animal's death. If mass produced lab meat was indistinguishable from 'real' meat, might we feel more comfortable hoeing into our lamb chops? I think so, and I think we'd care a lot less about Rebecca Francis' happy snap if it was taken next to a life like robot giraffe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Extreme hunters are morally equivalent to omnivores.\n","id":"fd0d210e-2217-4c12-b77b-87542a6fb072"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So this is another social justice topic. The prevailing argument I see is that You should stop saying X because it makes me feel Y , and i believe that to be an incorrect way to approach the issue. I believe that you shouldn't stand by and shout I'm triggered offended every time someone calls you a bad name, I believe that you should deal with it yourself. I think that this trend of making the 'bullier' fully responsible is a misstep, the 'bullied' should be expected to build an emotional tolerance to such actions. I feel like it is a vital problem solving skill every adult needs to cope with everyday situations. If all you do when approached with negativity is shut down and reflect blame onto others, how are you supposed to deal with real issues? Someone calls you fat or stupid enough times, you build a tolerance and can deal with similar issues. If you went through school and everyone was taught to use nice language, how are you expected to deal with adversity? How to deal with someone who is just naturally a dick? I get why we as a society is pushing to end bullying, but I think its wrong that we are teaching our kids to avoid ANY kind of negative language towards sensitive subjects instead of teaching them to cope with it. Because sure you can go after one guy for continuously making fun of fat people, but when you try to stop the entire country from making fat jokes, you start edging into realms of delirium and oppression. Please  TL DR SJWs are wrong to claim that they are triggered at everything, and rather they should be learned how to cope and deal with stuff that doesnt agree with their agenda. EDIT I realize i'm coming off as more bullying is good for you . I guess what I am trying to say is that Attacking people for having views which conflict with your own is bad for you, IE what SJWs are famous for . In other words Please  as to why saying I dont like it when you use the word retarded because I have a mentally challenged cousin and that word is sensitive in my household is limiting my freedom of speech expression and a non desirable trait.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should be the responsibility of the victim to cope\/deal with abusive language and not on the \"aggressor\" to avoid such statements\n","id":"5964412a-2fca-4ab9-888e-859040060d45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>During elections a high voter turnout is often considered good, and politicians often try to get as many people to vote as possible. I think this is bad for democracy Voting is way to select leaders that can reflect the opinion of the people. Voting assumes that each individual will choose the leader that reflects his or her personal opinion best. The goal is to select the set of leader s that most closely represent the opinion of the people. People seems to think that a higher voter turnout gives a better representation of the peoples opinion. However As any introduction into statistics will teach you, only several thousand randomly selected people are needed to accurately represent the entire population. Statistically we'd expect no difference in outcome when we have 10 or 90 of the people vote assuming voters are randomly picked . Uninformed voters don't vote for their opinion, but for other reasons charisma, skin color, name, tradition, etc. . This is noise, if we have enough of this the outcome will not represent the actual opinion of the people but mostly which guy people like best at first glance . Pushing people to vote will result in uninformed or barely informed people to go to vote, because they think they have to. This only increases the noise and doesn't change the outcome for good. Thus when more people vote, the quality of votes will decrease and the outcome is a worse representation of the actual opinion of the people. Change my view gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pushing people to vote to get a higher voter turnout is bad for democracy.\n","id":"4d640a82-0130-4551-930a-ab1a5d5dbb99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Humans Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>We know harm exists, we just don\u2019t know its boundaries. But given what we do know, it is objectively clear that where there is intentional harm, there is immorality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Morality is actually extremely objective Most people know the difference between right and wrong. It's just a matter of whether they care or not.\n","id":"2c3b15b8-e670-4536-8344-d207cabe3026"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have noticed that time and again, great sci fi writers have blundered horribly by going back and exploring the origins of their settings in one or more prequels. Prequels never seem to have the substance or coherence of the original stories, they usually lean way too hard on whatever elements the fan base likes and the composition becomes unbalanced. A second effect is to excessively explain the setting and deeper themes of the work in a way that insults reader's intelligence. A Good example of both of these are the later Foundation books Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation which were simpleminded, repetitious, and pedantic with their ham handed hammering on the Robot Foundation connection which had been subtly dealt with in earlier books. Furthermore, prequels lack the tension of a sequential story because you know what direction the overall setting is going, the only thing to learn are the details of a particular character's life. Is anything less captivating than watching Orson Scott Card take a half dozen mediocre books to retell the historical arc he covered in the truly great and surprisingly short Ender's Game ? Also, by dealing again in detail with background elements which readers had already accepted, prequels run the risk of breaking the setting or the coherence of the original narrative. I don't know if it's really fair to talk about what Frank Herbert's less talented son did with his legacy, since he isn't the original author, but Dune would be my example of a broken setting and narrative. You know who can get away with Prequels? Any writer who uses their setting as a backdrop for scenarios and characters rather than the setting being the subject itself. Niven and Heinlein come to mind as greats who wrote freely forward and backward in their alternate universes without much ill effect. And see, I didn't even mention Star Wars<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that \"serious\" science fiction writers should never prequel an existing series. -\n","id":"f31bd32e-4985-4217-bea1-b74c262302eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is coming from someone who is part black myself. I've never understood this entire culture of oh you're not black enough to say it which I myself have encountered in the past. It wasn't even our word in the first place, why is it so wrong if a white person calls me their n word? It's not, and excluding groups of people from using a word just because of the color of their skin is racist in itself. And I also encountered people asking black people is it cool if I say it? . Why does permission even need to be given? Is this just me? And why if it is so bad for non black people to say it can we even give exceptions in the first place? Fuck that, everyone can say it or nobody can say it. The reason it is so racially charged is because people give it power by treating it as a word only black people can say. If everyone called each other their n word, then I believe it would devalue its original meaning. There would no longer be any racial offense taken to a white man calling a black man an n word, regardless if he used it in an offensive tone. And to top it off, it's not like any reasonable black person should care whether it is said or not. Those who have been scarred and suffered heavily at the usage of this word have long since grown old or passed away. They have no reason to get offended other than society telling them they should. I think my point of view is basically to stop caring and getting offended at anyone who says the word. It only gives it more power and hurt when it is used in an offensive context.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone can and should use the \"n-word\"\n","id":"a7171725-316a-4ed8-9431-8a139bb2dd8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>England was forced to reject Catholicism and convert to Protestantism because the nation's King at the time, Henry VIII, could not obtain a divorce from the Catholic Church.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Morality is not objective because religious and political elites construct morality in order to further their own best interests.\n","id":"bca0233d-2467-478d-a79d-abdbbbda002c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Due to some current events in my life, I've been debating this topic with a few friends of mine recently and I wanted some alternative, perhaps more diverse and experienced viewpoints. Everyone keeps saying that love is primarily about the timing and I seem to be incapable of seeing it from the other field. If you want some serious brownie points leave a story. While I'm primarily looking for arguments against it, playing devil's advocate is encouraged as well. Additionally if you could leave any sort of religious faith out of this that'd be awesome.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Love is all about timing -\n","id":"f6352c4b-30bc-4c48-9c0c-2d0375cd8c02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do accept the fact that for a very long period of time society did not hold women in a position of equality, in a lot of matters, some of which were and, more sadly, still are very harmful to the women who have to live in those circumstances. I also accept the concept of equality of rights, because, we are all human beings and the concept of somebody being superior just because is, of course, nonsense. What i don't believe in, is ABSOLUTE equality. Women are different from men anatomically, emotionally etc. I love the fact that I can pay for my wife's dinner and I don't consider it gender biased, be cause we are different. She is not dis empowered and non independent because of this. I think that women should be treated more carefully, as they are significantly more emotional than us guys. The whole fact that we are ignoring this diversity instead of embracing it and using it efficiently and harmoniously, is a severe detriment in my opinion. All the more, the hate speech of some of the feminists directed towards the male population, representing them as lower life forms is another thing I don't agree with. For example if it becomes mandatory to hire a percentage of women, it might be discriminatory towards men, if not all the women would be sufficiently qualified. Of course, there is such a thing as discrimination against women and this somehow prevents it, but I don't think that it is a permanent solution. Schools should teach mutual respect for all human beings, and teach that diversity is good. I think that this would have a tremendous effect in 2 3 generations. We need to understand that a speech oriented towards males have ruled, we must now rule in order to be equal is not a true speech about equality, but of vengeance and spite. If the solution does not imply teaching respect and common sense, it will only widen the gender gap, and I think that this is what feminism does it provides a unilateral, reverse biased solution to the whole issue, which of course will only stir tension and hate. Thus, I think that feminism delivers hate speech instead of real solutions, and I think it does a great deservice to women worldwide. P.S. Don't give me the feminism is not about that, you're wrong speech. It is about how women are better and it mostly provides the same inflamatory speech about oppression and or ani males . Edit Thank you all for your contribution to the discussion. A clarification is due, I guess I had zero previous knowledge of feminism, nor did I research it before posting here, so I didn't make a difference between feminism and extremist or radical feminism the latter of which I strongly oppose and which is the subject of this post. Edit 2 What I argue is that people acknowledge that women produce a lot more estrogen than men, and that men produce a lot more testosterone than women do. This causes us to behave differently , and anybody who says differently is blatantly ignorant and against all science and common sense. Dear feminists The issue in a promotion shouldn't be about whether she is strong or frail and I don't get the emphasis on this matter. The issue should be does this person have the required technical and or people skills to do this job well ? I think this is what you should be marching towards, instead of saying that men are not stronger I don't even care if they are or not, the issue is about skills and rights, not about strongness what am I missing? . Dear extremist feminists You are bad people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think feminism is a radical movement and it actually has a negative impact in respect of equality.\n","id":"8ed541ba-e504-4d5b-99a9-3f875c1b9b0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>E.D. Howe wrote about the Book of Mormon in 1834, \"The name of our ancient Universalist is called Nehor Howe 1834, 70<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both Mormons and non-Mormons in the 1830s recognized anti-Universalist teachings in the Book of Mormon.\n","id":"e8a37a34-bd9d-4f09-8405-3c39aabf334a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I apologise for my english, i tried my best to fix errors. The fact that you are alive means that you are capable of surviving till this moment in your given environment, if you would die the next moment that means you are not capable of surviving any more. When I say you i don't mean just what most people think they are, like their political views or religious beliefs, you are much more then that.You are a machine, hardware and software. If something goes wrong with either you can die software depression or suicidal thoughts, bad habits, you're not careful enough and so on, hardware your body isn't capable of defending from diseases . Then there is one more thing your environment where you were born,your status, economic stability and so on on these things you don't have much control. If you adapt to your environment you will survive, if you fail you will die. Life isn't a fair game, i can survive in my environment till this moment, that doesn't mean that i will be able to survive till the next moment or in some other environment in countries where it's harder to survive . People often think that just because someone is bad they deserve to die, and if someone is good they will live a long life.Nature doesn't care about concepts of good and evil, those are our concepts, we invented them to create a civilized society, they serve us.People survive because they are capable of surviving not because they are good, and they die because they aren't capable of surviving.Also we gamble a lot.We estimate treat levels all the time.When we get on the plane we know there is a chance that plane will crush or that terrorists will abduct the plane and kill all the passengers, even do it's very unlikely it could happen,we accept that risk and fly, we could be wrong then we die.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people who die should be dead\n","id":"ee9822c9-2cb2-488f-a08e-08295469e3b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start by saying I hold no religious views, especially regarding abortion, or the LGBT community. I have two children conceived naturally. I have a niece conceived using IVF. I believe that any suitable person couple should be able to adopt children, heterosexual or otherwise. I remember a documentary I watched about conception detailing the journey of the sperm. Only a few actually make it to the egg to have a chance of fertilisation. Selecting one at random for IVF leaves me thinking that a sperm that seems healthy could in fact be inferior and was never destined to be an egg fertiliser . If a couple can not conceive naturally, then that's too bad. If you waited until you were in you forties to start having children and now you can't, then that's too bad. Most people's reasons for using IVF are selfish. I understand that this would be heartbreaking, but I think a mature couple would move past this and adopt. International adoption should be made easier and IVF should be made near impossible. I believe there is an over population of humans on our planet and there is no need to artificially create more. EDIT 1 Thank you to everyone who commented, especially u ntxhhf who smashed my original argument, and u matthewrozon who also swayed me. It didn't take long to  I still feel that some people abuse IVF as something to fall back on in old age, or as a shortcut for bad health. But I realise now that this is probably quite rare.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that all forms of conception that are not \"natural\" i.e. IVF should be used rarely, if not banned.\n","id":"59da63fc-d9f1-4649-ba1c-893abe6a243c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents of obese children be prosecuted with neglect<|ARGUMENT|>Nowadays there are so many warnings about the dangers of obesity that if a parent ignores these warnings it is out of choice. If a parent ignores any danger that could affect their child\u2019s health then they are guilty of neglect and should be prosecutable offence. From experience, I can say that the problem is not as much ignoring the warnings as it is a failure to control the child. Parents are not so ignorant of the medical maladies because they do see and hear the warnings. But many parents are unable to deny their children. They see the obesity as less threatening than the possibility of losing the \"affection\" of the child. Parents typically do not want to be the \"bad guy\" who must enforce the rules of positive values and will, in more cases than not, allow the child to maintain a poor diet and eat too often. I am the stepfather of a mildly autistic male who is now 20 years old and roughly 380 lbs. I've seen this played out in person and I can confidently state that, until this allowance of bad vaules is changed, this problem will run even more rampantly. If parents are unwilling or simply unable to make the necessary changes then, perhaps it is time for the legal system to step in.they would if the child were being physically abused. I maintain that the outright allowance of obesity and its many maladies IS physical abuse and should be dealt with appropriately.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ignoring the countless warnings about the dangers surrounding obesity is neglect and neglecting a child is a prosecutable offence\n","id":"61f4ef46-065b-495e-bbe1-4f1cbb1e53ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>Government methadone programs where proven hard drug addicts are provided daily methadone doses for free have proven to be very successful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We are better placed to treat drug addicts as people with an illness rather than criminals.\n","id":"a5f0fdb4-8fcd-4f14-a90a-fb9ae03db5a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the West give development aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Aid enables corruption due to the lack of control over where the money ends up, e.g Zambia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Development aid fosters corruption within the recipient country and strengthens local elites.\n","id":"b4dfbbb8-4a12-40f4-b5ed-1f55ec3daa8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Many bioregions are incapable of supporting one human let alone whole societies without the use of animals as a necessary part of the foodchain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ceasing to produce meat would be extremely harmful to low-income countries.\n","id":"b00db1f3-7ded-4502-92bd-5651d70e597d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This post ended up long so I'm putting a TL DR in this paragraph. If you only read this paragraph you should have enough information to leave a comment on this thread. I am pro choice but I do not like arguments that assert a fetus is not a person. I believe a fetus is a human person life at conception. Why because of the fact that it is inevitably growing right now just like how born humans grow. Sperm in your genitals cannot grow into becoming human beings. Zygotes embryos in the womb are growing as unique, individual human life form beings. So the fact of the matter is that at the end of the day, you are not aborting a fetus you are killing a baby. These are humans and people. I am not arguing against pro choice ism in general here I am arguing against a specific argument for pro choice ism here. With abortion, there are quality arguments you can make for being pro choice. Bodily autonomy, more dangerous ways of getting abortions that the woman may resort to, impact on society there are a lot of reasonable arguments you can make to be pro choice and I'm not here to debate those points. I am here to debate a specific argument made by pro choicers that I think is unreasonable and easily argued against. I am myself a pro choicer I think abortions are disgusting and despicable but my moral disapproval, for a variety of reasons I'll pass on delving into here, is not so great that I want my government to be getting in people's lives spending my tax trying to regulate against it. I don't like it when pro choicers weaken the pro choice position by using flawed arguments like this. And it's any kind of argument that is about, let's call it, fetal subhumanity . Arguments like clump of cells , not a life , not a person , not a human , etc Arguments that assert that fetuses are not people and that they are not entitled to the same rights and recognition that we give to human beings. In my opinion, it's perfectly rational to come to the conclusion that a life form becomes a human once only artificial action can interrupt it's life . This is why masturbation is not genocide no artificial action will allow those sperm to grow into people on their own. Before they fertilize an egg, those sperm and semen, naturally , are not on a trajectory to becoming people. But once they are conceptualized, that sperm, and that egg, are now growing as humans . It starts at conception, proceeds to pregnancy, then birth, then adulthood, then seniorhood, then death. Once you are conceived, the inevitable passage of time giving you growth means that you are a person . The passage of time will not allow sperm that hasn't hit the egg to become a human on it's own. Cancer cells, tumors, etc. none of those things are on the trajectory to becoming unique individual human beings but fetuses from day 1 are. If I'm not being clear enough, lemme provide a statement that may help you understand my position. Under this position, I differentiate a 1 day old successfully fertilized egg from a 1 day old born child in the exact same way that I differentiate a 1 day old born child from a 20 year old adult person. Both the 1 day old baby and the 1 day old fertilized egg, and even the 20 y o for that matter, are growing and the passage of time combined with the mother's survival does cause them to further develop. The 1 day old egg became that child. That child became that adult. But it was not being a piece of semen alone that caused that sperm to become that 1 day old egg. So once a life form can grow and grow and grow as it ages, then it is a human being. Trying to artificially draw a line for when a fetus is a person, i.e. 6 months, 3 months, etc. doesn't make logical sense. So if you are intentionally aborting then, whether it's at week 1, week 6, or week 32 you are killing a baby. You are killing a person. At conception, it is a life it is a growing human being on this planet. Also, side note the argument most pregnancies fail naturally. This argument is absurd and even worse than the fetal subhumanity one. The fact that naturally some pregnancies fail is not, on it's own, a legitimate reason for pregnancies to be artificially and intentionally ended. Nature is amoral naturally failed pregnancies, miscarriages, etc. have nothing to do with the abortion debate period. My opinion is that a fetus is a life at conception. Zygotes, embryos, fetuses, babies, children, adults, seniors this is the stage of human life that comes with time. Time in and of itself is not a key factor in sperm becoming a human, but it is the key factor in fertilized eggs becoming so. These clumps of cells are human babies that are people. And there may be arguments you can come up with to justify why you should be allowed to kill it, but arguing that it is not a life is not a valid one and I want other pro choicers to strengthen this position by not grasping at straws with this one. EDIT to clarify. one way to get a delta, an easy delta so to speak, is to convince me that my logic is flawed. A more challenging way, a hard delta so to speak, is to convince me that opposing logic that fetuses aren't people is wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The pro-choice argument that fetuses are not babies is wrong. Fetuses, at conception, are babies.\n","id":"cb047d9c-66b6-4a7f-9081-904f96a52ac4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>God, angels and demons by extension are all lifeforms that do not originate on earth. Therefore, they are aliens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christians believe in aliens.\n","id":"7f724123-2b79-4cc6-a2b5-e55812fad0ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am very open to changing this belief. In fact kind of hoping that I do. I believe that being transgender is comparable to being schizophrenic, or disassociative identity disorder. I think that the broad majority of the population agrees with this. I think that we have developed this social desirability of tolerance but in reality the majority of people follow what I am putting forward here. I believe that transgenderism should be treated similarly to the conditions I have stated. It would be unhealthy to tell a schizophrenic that the voices are real, similarly it is unhealthy to agree with a transgender that they are not their biological gender. I think the population gawks at transgenders like circus freaks. I do not believe I have to respect their pronoun preferences or anything of the like. Edit To conclude my change of opinion. I neither accept nor deny that gender and sex are separate. I do not believe it within myself. However I do understand the concept. As such I do not see it as a delusion if you accept the distinction. I accept that transition may be the most effective solution currently. I do not believe anything about the majority of societies perception on the trans community. I do not believe it is healthy to suggest they are born in the wrong body. I do not believe in any institutionalised enforcement of tolerance and anti discrimination beyond violence and crimes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transgenderism is a delusional mental disorder and should be treated as such.\n","id":"8b3efd77-d71d-40ab-bc18-57ec05881469"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence<|ARGUMENT|>ECREE was in fact the very reason for the LHC. Unlike supernatural claims, when everyone understand that extremely non-ordinary evidence would be required, there is no reason to scream about it. The Higgs boson was not a religious topic, and was not supported by people who don't understand the role of evidence in believing things.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That's wrong, ECREE does apply for things extraordinary but possible, the Higgs field theory required the construction of the LHC and the work of countless international great physicists and other engineers to bring about the \"evidences\" for this claim.\n","id":"b9a97992-e2d8-4c4c-8c6a-93df0515daae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've tried to write this several times without being personal, but it always comes back to my own experience. I'm an adoptive parent, and I know a lot of other parents who used surrogates. Their reasons included wanting a kid that looked like them, that would carry their genes into the future, that was their own race, or, as one plainly put it, they wanted to come as close as they could to being like everyone else and making their own children. I haven't been able to say it to these people's faces, but I think they're selfish and I think less of them because of what they did. There are so many kids out there that need homes. Finding yourself unable to conceive creates a tremendous opportunity to do good, and using a surrogate is just going to great lengths and expense to run away from that opportunity and wallow in selfishness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think infertile parents who use surrogates to have children instead of adopting are selfish and driven by egotism.\n","id":"6959b3df-4e56-4f90-b2cd-abce79196df8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a firm believer that the media over represented Trump leading up to the election in an effort to appear balanced and neutral. This often meant twisting and skewing Trump's lack of rhetoric to make it seem of equal validity to the policy proposed by Clinton. But they are not equal. Clinton clearly outlined the exact steps of her plans, and what she wanted to do on a given issue. Trump either didn't present a policy ISIS, Aleppo , or presented a rhetoric based entirely on vague MAGA , or blatantly false Climate change is a hoax pretense. This actually causes the media to be less neutral by giving undeserved credence to Trump's platform, but comparing it as equal to Clinton's. There are other issues where the media does the same thing by bringing in a dissenting view on issues that have been factually proven and concluded. In other words, there is no rational dissenting view for Climate change is caused by humans. The Earth was created billions of years ago, not thousands. No race is intellectually superior to another. This perpetuation of false equivalencies misleads the public into thinking that two things are equal and opposite, as opposed to unequal.  Edit Leaving now, be back in a couple of hours.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In attempting to be neutral and present both sides of an idea or issue, the media actually creates false equivalencies which misleads the public into believing the two sides are equal.\n","id":"3a453c33-71f7-4261-a43d-a66ceb93414f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is about the Charlie Hebdo attacks. What happened was definitely unfortunate but I am not discussing that. This is what Jacob Canfield had to say about that. I want to extend it a little. I know I appear callous when I say this, and I seriously feel bad at the loss of lives, but we need to understand something fundamentally. Freedom of speech does not clear you from others' freedom of retaliation. Having said that, one only retaliates in the manner most accustomed to him her. The manner which assures success is chosen when you are staging protest against someone. Expecting them to come back at you in the means which are comfortable, acceptable by your standards is absolute stupidity. Which means, someone getting killed over cartoons. I am assuming for the sake of broader discussion that, the reason for attack was not politically motivated and the attackers were genuinely offended by the drawings. Although it appears that way, I have no intention to trivialize death. Now I have following points. How right we are to expect the nature of retaliation? If I drew comic so 'he' should only draw one in response? We are trying to equate the nature of violent response with the seemingly dis countable act of drawing, what if value of life holds very less value for those who attacked in return? When you are poking a hyena repeatedly, is it okay to assume it will only poke back? Why would it not choose the means of its choice? And finally, Are we humanity as a whole to be shamed for having such a huge divide between same species ideologies. Where one assumes, drawings are okay and others assume killings are okay too? Where one can be equated to a child poking with a stick and other with a killer species like hyena.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":": When someone is attacked by any means, the attacked will decided the mode of retaliation.\n","id":"ae920626-cdb1-41d5-a97a-cb35d5ac5b5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>A philosopher had said we may be living in a \u201ccomputer simulation\u201d. We may be the objects in a computer simulation or computer game executed by an All-powerful Being or Beings\/Gods? This does not appear a far-fetched idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The simulation hypothesis holds that reality is simulated by an external being, and there is good reason to believe that such a being would be the classical God.\n","id":"5d2b54c3-2560-4f73-bb64-4477847c89e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>When Pence was touted as Trump's running mate for the White House, a poll showed that Pence had an approval rating of only 40% in a staunchly Republican Indiana. This indicates that his lack of charisma failed to inspire his constituency.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mike Pence's lack of charisma will ensure that he will serve as a low-key president in comparison to Trump, which will be better for the country.\n","id":"dc25ef82-af5d-42ce-b21a-bc4900c16952"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DC handgun ban<|ARGUMENT|>A right to bear arms is constitutionally enshrined. As such, it cannot be qualified for the purpose of practical considerations. Legislatures cannot regulate parts of it according to some \"reasonableness\" standard; the right is immutable. The earliest published commentary on the Second Amendment by a major constitutional theorist was by St. George Tucker, also known as The American Blackstone. He authored a set of law books in 1803 that annotated Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England discussed at length later, under Colonial Rights, for American use, and that formed, in many cases, the sole legal written works read by many early American attorneys.44 Tucker, the leading Jeffersonian constitutional theorist, was widely read, even by those who rejected his interpretation of the Constitution. In footnotes 40 and 41, he wrote: \"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Amendments to C. U. S. Art. 4, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government.\"4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A constitutional right to bear arms is not subject to reasonableness standards\n","id":"0205699e-b577-4516-8c5b-1ba3ae5d2d52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, there is ample evidence for trans people living during the Middle Ages, and being an accepted part of society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trans people are not a \"new\" group. They have always existed.\n","id":"7140d2dd-1514-401e-88db-ba7abebee84c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>Advertisements featuring a diverse range of families have given visibility to family structures that diverge from the white nuclear family often depicted in mainstream media.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Advertising culture changes our perception on issues by giving a voice to those outside the mainstream.\n","id":"733b3d01-dc33-48a7-9d5e-71cf14ec0a69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should prohibit women in combat<|ARGUMENT|>women are smaller and weaker than men and their reaction time isn't as fast. therefore women in combat not only put themselves in danger, but also the people around them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women in combat can be a distraction or harm the function of the military\n","id":"54280903-1aa9-4858-a4a8-ed32025cd334"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So as a member of an overrepresented minority and someone whose views align with the Annie of David Auerbach's latest article I am of the belief that anything other than a true meritocracy is inherently unjust, illogical, and counterproductive in U.S society. I've submitted this topic to socialjustice101 before, but none of the responses really changed my mind. I submit this topic to  to see if any of the arguments can be better fleshed out. To summarize, here are some of the common arguments against meritocracy I've read or discussed and why I find them silly, nonsensical, or specious. There's no such thing as a TRUE meritocracy What IS a true meritocracy Meritocracy is subjective I've lumped in all of the red herring arguments together, because I feel arguments of this nature seem to derail against a word with a given definition. Meritocracy, simply, is a system where persons are judged, evaluated, rewarded, or otherwise benefited according to their accomplishments, talent, ability and, well, merits, rather than their class, race, wealth, noble titles, etc. The best person for a job or a position or a university is not something that is subjective, but something that can be objectively indexed via the various metrics ranking objective capability we have in place today. But what about legacy kids? This should not exist in a pure meritocracy. Regardless of how much money someone donates to university or institute or whatever, regardless of how many generations attended some school, little Hubert or Jenny should not get a leg up on admissions based on anything other than their own merits. But Meritocracy is unfair because wealthier parents have more resources than poorer parents so we will never know who was truly more meritorious To me, this is a bizarre argument that goes off into hypothetical land. Let me try and unpack why, as it has multiple layers. It ignores the stark reality that some parents are wealthier than others because they were more capable, talented, skilled, luckier, in order to accumulate that wealth. OF COURSE these parents are going to pour their resources into their children. If these children, however, are superb talents based on their own merits, why punish these gifted children? Why sink to the lowest common denominator catering to the stragglers? It also ignores the stark reality that yes, we do have a way of determining who is more capable than others, regardless of bizarre hypotheticals. The kid who scores higher according to the objective metrics, regardless of personal circumstances, should reap the rewards in a pure meritocracy. To do otherwise is to unfairly punish the talented child solely to cater to a less talented person based on subjective, borderline irrelevant metrics. Even going back to colonialism or however far back you want to go, the people who meritoriously invented the Maxim Gun reaped the material benefits of it. Should people who are stupider be punished because they are stupid? This makes no sense to me and seemingly misframes the issue. Let me try to illustrate why. Let's take one person. Jenny. IQ of 140, she is a doctor, she makes 180,000.00 a year. She pays whatever taxes she pays. There is another person. Lester. IQ of 70. Unemployed. He does not make any taxable income a year but lives off the government. If all of the Jennys did not exist, Lester would get nothing. If Jenny exists, Lester would get something. Is Lester being punished for being stupid? I would say no. It is not as if if Jenny did not exist, Lester would now be making 180,000.00 a year. This is because he is not capable of making 180,000.00 a year on his own talent and capability. Are we being punished for not partaking in the billions of dollars Apple pulls in a year? It's not like we are capable, on our own, of inventing products that rake in billions. If you were born talented capable sexy muscular rich etc., you just won the lottery. Why should you be rewarded for sheer luck? This is problematic on many levels. First, it chastises parents for investing resources into their children. Asides from the State raising every child, I do not see any way around the fact that parents do this generally. Why should children be punished for having parents who support them? Regardless of whatever traits you are born with, it is up to you to make hay while the sun shines, so to speak. Ignoring this fact is very bizarre to me. If, using your starting position, you achieve something commendable, you still had to achieve it. Therefore, you should be rewarded justly. But we have to make sure everyone starts at the same starting position In analyzing a pure meritocracy, I find this sentiment completely irrelevant. We do not need to ensure everyone has to start at the same starting position, as the only way to do so is pretty much ban inter generational wealth transfer. Meritocracy is concerned with what you are capable of achieving right now, not listening to some sob story or tale of woe. Penalizing people for being gifted is inherently unjust. Everyone should receive the same quality of education and same opportunities in life, but everything else should be left to the merits of the individual. So anyways, that is pretty much my view on meritocracies, but I am open to changing my view and healthy, robust discussion. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Arguments against a true Meritocracy are silly, nonsensical or specious.\n","id":"49607741-901e-40a1-bf5f-10bd25ac0e48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Deregulation and tax cuts should be embraced to lead the world out of economic crisis.<|ARGUMENT|>Opp\u2019s has completely misunderstood our policy. All their args are directed against the gov indiscriminately abolishing all existing regulations and showering bailout loans and funds on companies. That is not what we argue for. To repeat, our stimulus package contains two items: 1 granting tax cuts, and 2 selectively lifting regulations that hinder corporate efficiency. Some regulations are meant to keep market forces alive and guarantee a reasonable level of consumer safety and environmental protection. It is illogical to argue for eliminating such regulations; those are kept in place. What we target are regulations that may help the economy during expansionary times but prove obstacles to efficiency during recession. Special licensing between companies engaged in a contract and other such certifications; market distortions like rates and prices that are set excessively low either readjust higher or remove; & barriers of entry liks special licensing and bailouts to select firms are such. Thus Opp\u2019s pts about working conditions and human rights violations do not hold. Deregulation will improve performance of firms. SP proved optimal with the US airline deregulation in mid 1990s. Regulated routes+competition were inefficient. With deregulation, the industry grew, creating more jobs and services, and ultimately fares became low, with consumers benefiting. What we ultimately seek is to make full use of the market forces. We do not argue for bailouts; it hurts competition. That cutting taxes and giving bailouts is unfeasible is an undue criticism. Our arg is a bottom-up approach that utilize the nature of firms to strive for profit maximization. This will not only stabilize the economy, but stimulate the supply sector to allow overall expansion\u2014a sound exit strategy. Opp\u2019s said companies will try to \u201cget more profit, the cheapest and easiest way. Yes, that is exactly why we\u2019re entrusting recovery to firms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cutting taxes, no bailouts, and selective deregulation to keep market forces alive and promote efficiency.\n","id":"6bee664b-7134-4661-8efd-8d13f6a8dd07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Education that Promotes a Certain Faith or Religion be Abolished in Schools?<|ARGUMENT|>If schools do not provide students with religious education that promotes their faith, many parents will choose to home school their children instead. This is likely to result in worse outcomes for the child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abolishing faith based schools will reduce the choice of schools available to parents.\n","id":"b888b8b2-ebed-49ff-8322-6068e819036e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I routinely run into the argument that if the U.S. stopped backing Israel, they would be bulldozed within a short period of time. In studying the Arab Israeli conflict history has witnessed Israel best its Arab opponents time and time again, even before they began to receive U.S. support. Given the state of Arab militaries today and the lack of cooperation between them necessary for Nasser Sadat style wars with Israel and the state of the Israeli military, there is no scenario I could possibly envision where Israel would be defeated by its neighbors simply because the US stopped giving them aid money assurances of their security. Change My View?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Israel could stand on its own without the US backing them.\n","id":"8cd447ef-95d7-4dc6-8bb1-8ec5f7058ab6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Premier League Better than the Bundesliga?<|ARGUMENT|>The PL has two teams more than the BL and no \"Winterpause\", thus providing a nonstop flow of football throughout the whole season, with only a summer break.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The PL has a higher revenue than the BL or any other league in the world. So, from an economical perspective, it is the most successful.\n","id":"46832673-8924-4469-9e09-b634f6766044"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>The universe is so unimaginably immense, has existed and will exist for such a huge amount of time that it's not statistically impossible for the conditions for life to exist at least at some point of the universe, at some period of time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fine-tuning argument carries the implied proposition that the universe is designed for life to exist, rather than assuming that life exists as a result of adapting to the universe.\n","id":"b5831a91-4abc-42d5-9415-31c85a2ab7e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We have struggled for ages to deal with issues of police abuse of power and force, and it seems like we're only beginning to scratch the surface. With many police departments recently in the last 5 years under investigation by the Federal DoJ, it's readily apparent that this is not a one off problem, it's a systemic issue. For example, the Seattle PD was recently cited by the DoJ as not being able to differentiate between an interaction in which they are asking a citizen for information, and arresting them that is to say, they don't seem to understand that citizens are free to go as they please if they are not being charged. This suggests that at least at the Seattle PD , officers presume guilt why else would they arrest someone for simply not wanting to talk? . I think this is due to the nature of their jobs. I believe that if we were to rotate police officers in and out of other civil service duties, we would have a much better execution of power force. I'm not really sure how exactly this would work, but perhaps they could do 6 months as an officer, and then 6 months in Parks and Recreation, or Land Management or something. EDIT unfortunately, I don't think this is going to be something that is likely to happen, and even if it did, it wouldn't happen overnight. there are a lot of entrenched economic interests that would not want to see punitive resources going towards community improvement instead<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that police officers hold inherently unhealthy and stressful positions that warps their perception of society, and reforms to address police abuse of power and force will be unsuccessful until we change the nature of their occupation somehow,\n","id":"b2612b4d-4f19-4f32-8f3c-43c71d5fb11d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>DREAMers have already assimilated into American culture, so they should be first in line for citizenship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DREAMers are already highly integrated into US society and culture.\n","id":"d034c8c0-4ba8-4f82-8ed4-97b631a64390"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should hate speech be illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>So long as it does not directly contribute to violence, all speech should be free. No group of people should be above criticism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is better to challenge bad ideas than to simply ban the enunciation of them.\n","id":"3e1af64d-6fb5-4d37-a26b-163b3a698b63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Many theists base their belief in God on good in the world, while the stories in their religious texts tend to depict the Gods of classical theism as selfish evil tyrants with bad attitudes, short tempers, lust for death and destruction, and a general disregard for the value of anything other then themselves, even when those same texts defined such Gods as being good no matter what they do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are as many moral arguments against the existence of God.\n","id":"238aad5d-c500-43af-bb4d-716237e20dd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Mindset one if you were certain you'd be tortured for a year and then executed, wouldn't you want to save yourself all that suffering and die before that? Mindset two if you were to get terminally ill, feeling terrible pains, being unable to find happiness, see the suffering of your relatives and knowing there is no cure, wouldn't you also want to save you and your family the trouble? Is there any kind of prize at the end of life for those who hanged on for the longest, regardless of the quality of their life? Should we really encourage people not to suicide no matter what? Isn't that in some cases true cruelty hidden behind good intentions? Aren't we sometimes encouraging further suffering for no good reason? To me, life has no intrinsic value. There's no real penalty for dying , we just decided as a society that that was a really bad and sad thing to happen. But it's not. Sure, loved ones will miss you, but that's all, it's just a weird form of selfishness. I think we are somehow taught it's sad for the person that died, but that makes even less sense . The person is dead, he doesn't feel anything, he's just not there anymore, disconnected, unaware. There's nothing intrinsically bad in that. Don't get me wrong I'm a happy and fulfilled person with goals ahead of me, not suicidal. I just think most people are making huge mistakes by thinking that the most important thing in life is life. Which is ridiculous to me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe life has no intrinsic value and therefore suicide or death shouldn't be a big deal.\n","id":"e0da6618-14fc-4782-be30-3dcaec78179c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Planned Parenthood Be Defunded?<|ARGUMENT|>There are much more important things to use the tax money on then abortion. Like getting immigrants integrated and getting more teachers Qualified for school.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Planned Parenthood supports abortions. This should not be funded by the government.\n","id":"de4f5958-e914-4412-97f7-380c5048521d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US health care reform<|ARGUMENT|>Howard Dean. \"Health-care bill wouldn't bring real reform.\" Washington Post Op-Ed. December 17, 2009: \"Any measure that expands private insurers' monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"W\/o public option, US health care law emboldens insurers\n","id":"3de61c5e-51be-4ab0-92b0-cf26b4569f22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide?<|ARGUMENT|>Turkish denialism includes either not teaching students about the genocide, or framing it as retaliation. This means that new generations have either no knowledge of the event, or a politically distorted one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Continuous denial of the Armenian genocide amounts to a double killing because it tries to kill the memory of the event too.\n","id":"fe4ba92b-dcb1-4eb7-bc4b-1e3da42c8e89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Backstory after years of trying to conceive, my wife and I finally were rewarded with a positive pregnancy several years ago. She was so sure that the baby would be a girl that we had only picked out girl baby names. I suggested that, if it were a boy, his middle name would be Danger and she agreed, expecting that it would never happen. Needless to say, it was a boy. He is now 4 and my wife successfully argued me out of the idea in that I didn't want to anger a pregnant woman, not that I agreed with her . When we went to deliver the baby at the hospital I was in charge of completing the paperwork, including his legal name filing, and could have undermined her rebuttal and went with our original decision. To some extent, I still regret this because We had previously established this would be his middle name and it still feels like it should be Most people don't know each other's middle names anyway Part of my reasoning for why it actually would be a great middle name was that I was shy in school and being able to claim Danger is my middle name quite literally could help him overcome that to some extent as an ideal icebreaker The primary objections were If he were ever run for political office, this would be a nail in his coffin. I countered if the strongest case against a candidate is his middle name that it should be a solid and easy rebuttable based on any platform. It might get him into trouble. I don't think people live up to their names quite so literally as this suggests. What will people think? it's silly etc. Yes, that's part of the point. Edit this was submitted for originality on Fresh Topic Friday. Please don't take my regret too seriously, though this did actually happen<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Danger is a perfectly acceptable middle name\n","id":"c6e8a306-31c2-44ea-aa5b-c746d159aed0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the popular idiom, Imitation is suicide is one we should all live by. For example, Steve Jobs invented the Iphone, a revolutionary product that changed the way we view mobile devices. Thus, making him very successful. Another example, Bill Gates created and invented the windows OS, which also proved to be a huge revolutionary product making him one of the richest people at a certain point of time. I believe that there is no single situation or circumstance where someone can validly argue that imitation would supersede invention and creation. Edit grammar and spelling mistakes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Imitation is suicide,please\n","id":"b0b63b9c-6f09-47a7-a192-2fa3f42951df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The last girl I dated was only fucking with me as a part of a sick joke. I get told consistently that I'm just a friend, but that's only because no one wants to admit that they'd be ashamed to date a guy who's only 5 foot 8 inches, or isn't popular, or doesn't have a lot of money. All women want is a provider of money and someone to brag about, all men want is a provider of sex and someone to brag about. It's a sham and I'm wasting my time by putting in an effort, the more I try the more I'll fail because I'm not what women are looking for, I might as well try a get rich quick scheme, because no one in this day and age looks past materials and appearance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Romance doesnt exist, it's all about money and looks\n","id":"a71c50e7-9dea-449c-82b9-9ef2a3355f0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>This won't solve the underlying problems in society, but will merely hide them and allow us to forget them. For example, the rise of overtly discriminatory behavior in the US after the election of Trump. PC culture hid this, but did nothing to fix it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Coercing or shaming people into being politically correct only changes their behavior, not their beliefs.\n","id":"1b4637b1-1c63-4aba-9ac3-91bdf9695a54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We need healthcare, education, food, water, shelter, friends, family and our interests and hobbies, not in that order and the list is not entirely conclusive. Social media is a cancer. When you have people who's sole purpose is to 'influence' you into buying a product they are promoting and they earn more than the people making our food and when you have people who hire their own paparazzi, that's a sign we've gone wrong somewhere down the line. We've reverted back to the idiotic advertising of the good American family sitting around the table while the dad reads a newspaper, points on a page and says Now that's what I call a car Go buy Ford. Being able to find someone to have sex with over a couple of swipes having never me them before in your life, when you can order food to be delivered to your door and when you talk to people more over an app than you do in person, that's laziness not productive innovation. Marketing is arguably the worst factor, especially when you consider the means. You age, you wrinkle you need to use this anti aging cream, you start to go bald, here's a drug, going grey? use this. Natural occurrences are distorted we're being told this isn't right, this needs to be changed you need to buy this. There are adverts selling you the idea of gambling, outright promoting an addiction. You need the newest phone, the big house, better car that's the goal, that's the dream. Everything is for the money, music is there to sell you something, media is just reinforcement of ideas brought about by companies looking to sell you something you don't need. Everything is for the love of money. We need a place to sleep, we need food to eat, water to drink and people to love and love us. We don't need a Mcmansion, we don't need fuel guzzling cars. You can buy as much as you can afford, you can afford as much as you can earn, and you can earn as much as your employer is willing to pay you for your time. You pay for everything, be that through taxes, through money, through time or through your information, nothing is free if you are not paying for it you're the product. Medical advances are positive, undeniably so. Having companies gouge prices is a detriment. Having to remortgage your home to save your loved one, or yourself is not the way it should be. Money is the key to health, to happiness and to the world, that should not be the case. You shouldn't have to go hungry because you need money for dialysis. Insulin should not cost as much as it does, it's sickening. You work to earn money, not everyone earns enough to get by getting by now means money for shelter, for food, for warmth, for a phone, a phone bill, a tv, netflix, spotify, uber and 'discretionary spending' marketing is there to lead us to believe we need whatever it is that is being sold. Everything is essential, a necessity, you need it all and more. People give the only thing they can't get back to earn money to buy things they're told they need, you don't get more time. We pay to live, we can buy t shirts made by the small hands of someones child for next to nothing, we can buy a burger for less than a dollar. Food should not be that cheap, clothing should not be that cheap the only way it is is by not pay the people who make it what they deserve. It's greed, it's the desire to cut costs and increase profit because again, nothing is free. Most people believe you have to go to college, they are probably right. But not because it is inherent to us, but because that's what society is telling us, that's why we need to pay off a couple of thousand for education, just the education never the promise of financial security at the end. The business world owes you nothing, but we owe it everything. You should be grateful you have the job, one you had to have 3 years of experience and a degree for, a job that owes you nothing. We need food, we need water, clothing, warmth, shelter, friends, family and interests. We don't need bigger and better houses, bigger and faster cars, cheap clothes or food. We don't let ourselves be held accountable for anything more than we let ourselves be held for. We feel no sense of responsibility. We are fed the need to consume, to produce, to earn money to consume. Minimalism is a fad, not everyones an environmentalist everyones a consumer. This world is for business not for people. We should feel a sense of responsibility for everything we do, touch and own. You and I affect the earth we live on. Live in smaller houses, own clothes made by people who are actually getting paid a living wage. Eat sustainable foods. Drive cars that are not actively destroying the atmosphere, or just don't drive cars. Buy less and buy quality. Work less and buy less, the key to happiness doesn't lie in the next iPhone box. Healthcare should be free, or at least affordable have it paid through the taxes of everyone, same for education. Invest in a positive society, healthcare, education, peoples mental state s , the elderly, the growth of the youth, as people, not as Americans, or as Russians, Chinese, English or any other nation of people, we're all people of different races, from different parts of the world affected by issues we as people can solve. Hold businesses and more importantly people accountable. Spend more time with people in person. We say too much of anything can be bad for you, but plant an iPad in the hands of kids the second they can work their thumbs. We shovel kids through an education system with no certainty of financial stability, but a certainty of cost. We have a tiny minority owning the vast majority. We have sweatshops, slave labour, and no sense of accountability. You can't bribe a political candidate, but you can fund them as a lobbyist. The world is worse off as a result of our revolutions, from the Industrial revolution to the tech revolution as of late. We lost our survival instinct in return for slavery We feel free, like we can go wherever we want, but we stop at red lights on open, empty roads. We are being watched and monitored each and everyday partly for security but primarily to see what makes us tick, what gets us excited or distraught whatever it is that can be used to sell us something or whatever we have to be sold, usually our data. Nothing is free, everything comes at a cost, everything is essential nothing is discretionary, you can sell cancer in an addictive stick, or have gambling adverts on TV, here have an addiction. No one feels or is held accountable, everything is dramatic, breaking news, everyones a celebrity, everyones a narcissist but thats expected, fuck it it's praised. Our lives have been negatively affected in many ways through the advances in technology, when we started to create containers to hold more berries than we needed that day we were left with time on our hands to fill, that's spiralled downwards since then. We are at a loss thanks to our own creations, people are worried about AI when we're already being impacted in the same way. We no longer evolve, we evolve technology or at least businesses evolve tech and sell it to us for a profit in exchange for our time, our resources, our earth, our atmosphere and our future generations We are at a loss, and I don't see a justification for living. x200B I don't see how people can ignore it when everything is inherently bad<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The majority of technological advances have been detrimental to our lives\n","id":"1459a7c5-9da1-481a-b3de-820b61e6a834"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are coding bootcamps useful to advance a programming career?<|ARGUMENT|>Most times in life, if something is much cheaper than other alternatives, it is also lower quality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This doesn't necessarily make it a useful step up in your career.\n","id":"077e79ca-5506-44d7-9a6a-fe65a1b8bd29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Livestock is the most significant contributor to nitrogen and phosphorus pollution of streams, rivers and coastal waters worldwide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A vegan society would create the least pollution, which damages the environment.\n","id":"c90822fd-d4ec-4216-b0d2-36cb1e299e5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that anything we do has no point to it cause in the end the universe will end there is absolutely nothing that we can do to even be remembered. we will all be forgotten and all of our experiences will be forgotten too. So why must I suffer for brief moments of happiness which are not going to be even remembered my myself. And so we lie to ourselves just so that this suffering is not for no reason where as it is. We praise the absurd hero where as it is just so that we feel that being one is good thing and being one gives us purpose. Forgive me of im unclear I dont know how to explain it well. English is not my first language<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the only reason we dont all kill ourselves is because of our instinct to fear death, and any other reason is just a lie to comfort ourselves.\n","id":"eb81122f-dd52-42d4-acc8-7c147eea261c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The US army requires push ups sit ups 2 mile run men 40 50 16 36 women 17 50 23 06 What rational justification can there be for excluding a man from the military who can meet the female standards but not the male standards. If fitness requirements serve a functional military purpose, why should a man who can do only 20 push ups in a minute be rejected while a woman at the same level would be adequately fit? If certain levels of fitness are required for the job, why should women get a handicap? Is the purpose of the fitness requirements to reward people who are relatively fit for their peer group or to serve functional goals?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that the military should have different fitness standards for men and women.\n","id":"49c59f58-98fa-430d-8534-fa7ab0112450"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has the Conservative government lost its legitimacy to govern?<|ARGUMENT|>In a no-deal Brexit scenario there would likely be increased prices for certain goods and medicines in the UK.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A no-deal Brexit would be the worst possible outcome of the negotiations.\n","id":"9c1756da-e0bf-4298-8cb9-52a4badec28e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>encourage the creation of private universities in the UK<|ARGUMENT|>Privatisation of universities allows for a greater range of educational provision: universities are no longer restrained by government targets and bureaucracy, and are incentivised by possible profits to set themselves apart and provide \"unique selling points\" that will gain them more students: the current system does not provide this motivation because universities receive their funding regardless of student numbers. improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The privatisation of universities encourages course-diversity and provides for students are individuals, not cattle\n","id":"ae4dfd11-02a9-4c6c-a3b6-f768897d94af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Donald Trump a Good President?<|ARGUMENT|>He mishandled and mismanaged the disaster relief of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. He has since denied that was the case without evidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"He has passed very little significant legislation and has been broadly ineffective.\n","id":"ec00eda8-c691-4c80-b6a8-61dca004fe72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should refugees seeking asylum in Europe be distributed among EU member states according to a quota?<|ARGUMENT|>A European-wide refugee quota scheme could provide the EU and its people the sense that dealing with the migrant crisis is a \"common project\" that the union as a whole is working towards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A refugee relocation scheme could promote solidarity between EU member states at a time when European solidarity is lacking.\n","id":"71cc01b7-da96-4e27-8d80-bddf272bfd51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should politicians and public servants be required to be entirely transparent?<|ARGUMENT|>The public has a tendency to blow minor personal mistakes that politicians has made out of proportion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Focusing on politician's personal lives can detract from real life political issues.\n","id":"81634357-1560-4cea-b5ef-6d62929108df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is genuine belief unnecessary in worship?<|ARGUMENT|>Worshiping God is a way of showing thankfulness, respect and honor. People need to do it in order to get God's blessings<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God does not require human worship for His benefit, it is for humans that it is required.\n","id":"339ddb64-b663-456a-af60-22336d6da70f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Their Children Should Be Fined If The Child Gets A Vaccine-Preventable Illness<|ARGUMENT|>People with unvaccinated children would avoid visiting doctors altogether under fear of possible persecution if a blood test or other formal visual diagnosis could be used to issue a fine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fines would change the physician-patient relationship, making it more adversarial and giving patients & parents less reason to be forthcoming about their symptoms.\n","id":"0bb24e14-15b2-47db-9483-c2b366d8d4fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that being pro choice means taking your own life for granted, and that abortion almost always is incredibly morally corrupt. I can understand specific instances where it might be more okay, but if it is simply out of convenience, it is a completely terrible thing. The parents certainly shouldn't be able to choose whether their conceived child lives or dies just because of the impact it might have on their lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that abortion is the ultimate injustice.\n","id":"b8920491-362b-487f-ad8d-e1a2313c13af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Abortion is something that most people avoid talking about as it is a controversial topic. Currently, in Ireland, there is a vote taking place about legalising abortion, There is a lot of posters with VOTE YES and VOTE NO and a lot of people speaking in public about it people from churches . In my opinion, I believe that abortion isn't murdering, The fetus doesn't feel pain until around 12 weeks which just kinda shuts down the points about fetuses feeling pain. The parents have reasons behind it, some woman do not want the responsibility, aren't ready, career related etc. and that is perfectly acceptable. But people find them heartless and that's just cruel. If the parents aren't capable of taking care of the child and lack skills to raise the child properly they should be allowed to get the procedure done. I don't know if im messed up for thinking this but the world is already overpopulated which is becoming a serious problem as we are starting to run out of recourses, we should be slowing this problem down or we will be giving birth to children that will have to live alternatively than we lived because we wasted the resources. If a woman gets raped she should have full authorization to have an abortion and take the pill without being stopped because people think its murder Edit I'm overwhelmed at how many people have replied and I'm sorry if I can't read all your points but yeah sorry if my points are over the place<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion should be legal in every country and to not be frowned upon.\n","id":"00fe875a-71fb-4f13-8f3e-1a4176189dd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>The original draft of Trump\u2019s letter firing Comey makes clear that the reason for the firing was the Russia investigation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump admitted to firing Comey because of the Russia investigation in an interview with Lester Holt\n","id":"e088abc3-0423-4238-802d-bc816539354a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Its well documented why democrats fail at convincing conservatives Liberals can easily convince republicans by appealing to their fears, but they fail at doing so. Instead, Democrats make hopeful optimistic ads, despite the research showing that conservatives only respond to appeals to fear. Here are some ads I would love to see Hi, I am the CEO of Monsanto. Under my leadership, we dumped toxic pesticides that are proven to cause brain cancer in children. Now the republicans and president Trump made me head of the FDA and I just made sure to make these pesticides legal to continue to be used. Vote republican. Lets give more kids brain cancer together. Hi I am a paranoid schizophrenic with a history of violence. I am convinced that aliens have invaded and are controlling most people I see daily, and I hear voices telling me to shoot them. Thanks to republicans, I can perfectly legally go to a gun show and buy a semiautomatic rifle that can shoot 36 people at a time without having to reload. Thank you republicans for voting against universal background checks to make sure I can buy a gun. You can do that same ad with someone on the fbi\u2019s terrorist watch list. Republicans voted to make sure people on the no fly list due to suspected terrorism can still go out and buy guns. Hi I run a for profit prison. The republicans in Texas just voted to put doctors and women that get an abortion in jail. Business is going to be booming. Thank you Republicans. Now those are the kinds of ads that will go viral, raise awareness and actually appeal to conservative fears. Republicans market based on irrational fears Dems should market based on rational fears.  Ads like the ones I posted would be a lot more effective than current ad campaigns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democrats lose because they forget to appeal to republicans fears...\n","id":"6630cb20-0bd8-4711-8548-6d2d9b3a4bb9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone has to pay taxes for being part of a civilized society . Because we do not have a choice about whether we pay taxes or not, taxpayers cannot and should not be hailed as virtuous for paying taxes. If a person does not pay taxes, they are simply breaking the law. There should be no moral judgement against that person beyond their affinity for breaking laws. Jeff Bezos is often demonized for not paying his fair share. This should not be considered as an aspersion to Bezos' character but rather a shortcoming with the current tax laws in America. Virtuous behavior is determined via personal choice, not forced behavior. Paying taxes is forced behavior regardless of their necessity and thus should not be viewed as virtuous behavior. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Paying taxes cannot be considered virtuous because it is compulsory.\n","id":"c35c699d-bf79-4d6c-b1cf-a130258bb62f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Twice now. Twice now I\u2019ve ordered a prime rib sandwich expecting the glory and succulence of actual prime rib only to have my hopes dashed upon the rocks of disappointment by a cheesy mess of mushroom and over cooked beef on bread. It resembles nothing of the glory of real prime rib. I\u2019ve made prime rib at home and I\u2019ve often had prime rib at restaurants. It\u2019s usually served almost like a steak and cooked to perfection. When I order a prime rib sandwich, I expect it to be a prime rib steak sliced thin and served on bread at its usual level of succulence. Instead it\u2019s always been over cooked and always resembles a philly cheese steak. Therefore, I posit that a prime sandwich is a vain attempt at classing up your typical philly cheese steak sandwich. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The prime rib sandwich is clearly just a philly cheese steak and does not deserve to share the glory of prime rib.\n","id":"c55ae1ca-606f-4f2a-95a4-fde347fc0ab4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>The absence of patent protection hampers the establishment of drug research institutes in developing countries because pharmaceutical companies do not want to invest there Lehman, p.2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reducing patent protections results in reduced R&D investments by pharmaceutical companies as returns on investments are lowered.\n","id":"1d659130-ff1e-4806-bd1e-8cee441c0e4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>Subcontractors, like janitorial services companies for example, are much more likely to employ their workers on the basis of client demand which requires that contracts that have flexible hours and do not promise a given number of hours each week.These contracts tend to be abusive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By sub contracting menial labour companies relieve themselves of the duty \"of having to pay a full-time salary\" This leaves the worker without a dependable income, and avoids paying fair taxes.\n","id":"0d635290-9e61-4115-bb03-da8564241413"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have read the thread about Miley Cyrus' nomination and I am aware it is who makes headlines, both good and bad. I just feel like Snowden was more deserving of a nomination and was braver in his actions. Pope's usually are inherently nice and kind hearted. He's a man on the national stage. I know that he has radically changed the outside view of the Catholic Church. I understand his reforms, but don't understand his victory. I read a theory that more elderly people would buy magazines with his face on it rather than Snowden, and that people would like to hear something positive instead of negative. However, Edward Snowden stood up against his country and spoke out when he saw something wrong. He started a revolutionary domino effect that re sparked an interest in privacy, an issue that hasn't been discussed much since the launch of WikiLeaks. I just find Snowden's actions more heroic, even though some would call him a traitor that put American lives at risk. Even though I'm an athiest, I am open to have my view changed if you make good points. Please and Thank You<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Edward Snowden was more deserving than Pope Francis for TIME Magazine POTY.\n","id":"89b646c4-70b1-49f0-86d6-83b845084268"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fashion can never be feminist<|ARGUMENT|>High-heels are an expensive and an uncomfortable item in a woman's wardrobe and can cause long-term nerve damage to feet. Yet 73% of women wear them and 39% do so everyday.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fashion reinforces patriarchal stereotypes on women's appearance and social roles e.g.: high heels, shaved legs, low necklines.\n","id":"d656cb3d-a6b9-4329-8a40-25bd9fcb3824"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>In Nazi Germany, a breeding program forced Aryan women to bear the children of Aryan men, in order to bring more Aryan children into society in aid of the regime's racist agenda.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Various countries have ignored the right to procreate in practice.\n","id":"21e69bf6-7422-4743-a187-e3b1bbcac4da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently I've seen a lot of news articles about Trump's executive order and how judges aren't allowing it to be followed. I'm not a Trump supporter myself, nor even an American but in his campaign he said he would do radical things like this it was clear that he wanted to slow down or even stop immigration selectively. After campaigning in this way he was then voted into office and after trying to do exactly what he promised, he's been stopped or at least hindered by the public. Isn't it an alarming precedent to set that the elected president can't follow through with plans he made clear in his campaign? I understand that a president shouldn't be all powerful but he's not changed his tune or deceived the public, he was voted in by people who knew he wanted to do this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump is just doing exactly what he was voted in to do and being hindered by the public\n","id":"f6cf1438-8b9a-43c7-9597-25ca9b963f91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Immediately after graduating college I was searching for my first real job, and thought that 12.50 hr at that time 1999 was a lot of money. So I went to work for a rent to own company, and 5 years of pain and suffering began. There were a combination of factors that I believe make this accurate. First, the hours were long 55 per week , and where the 12.50 hr got severely diluted. They would tell you the starting salary was, say 27k year, and then once you divided that out by 55 hours per week as opposed to a normal 40 hour week, you got a much lower hourly figure. These shenanigans led to the company facing some legal trouble at various points in its history, both pre and post me. Second, it was very physically demanding. I moved furniture all day, every day for 55 hours per week. We carried couches, big screen TV's, washer, dryers, etc all into places they normally have no business going basements, attics, 3rd floor apartments up rickety staircases, very dangerous. Third, and probably the worst part, was the interaction with customers. Our clientele were the down and out, the disadvantaged, criminals, strippers, drug dealers, etc. People with no credit, who couldn't buy their desired goods on credit. We rented them shit they couldn't afford, for the desired markup of 5x what we paid for the items. They had to verify a form of income and provide 4 references, and boom instant shiny new stuff for their houses they couldn't afford. It was when they couldn't make the payments that shit got real ugly. In addition to having to deliver them their stuff, I had to call them when they didn't pay, and call them, and call them, over and over. When they wouldn't call me back, I called their mom, sister, brother, boss, cousin, everyone they knew, until the renter would finally call me back to either come in and pay me, or arrange to have their stuff returned. This leads me to the worst part. Fourth Collections. People didn't want to give back their stuff when they could no longer pay on it. After weeks of my phone calls, they hated me, and I would have to show up at their house and aggressively repossess their merchandise. Drug dealers, criminals, huge ex cons the worst you can imagine. I would have to endure their hateful stares as I unhooked the TV. The wailing of the kids when I took apart their bunkbeds and loaded them into my truck Terrible. And the part that made that so bad, was that when people had some money, and could keep some of their shit, but had to give back some stuff? What do you think stayed? the computer or the kid's bunkbeds? The racecar bed or the big screen TV? The kids shit went almost every time. It scarred me permanently. Oh there were some perks, like driving around on our biggest collection day Saturday and going from strip club to strip club collecting money from our customers that were dancers. And my finest memory, the time when we enforced a repossession bond with the help of local law enforcement, and I got to stand there in front of this lady screaming at me, clawing at my with her blood red gnarled fingers, while the sheriff held her back, while I took each and every one of her bedroom dressers and emptied the contents into a pile on the roach infested floor. God that was glorious. It was 5 years of hell, and I challenge you to change my view on why that isn't one of, if not the worst jobs in America. Edit formatting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I used to work one of the worst jobs in America.\n","id":"b7d247a0-eb0d-4a67-95d6-8299e1068abc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Race Black, white, Latino, Asian, whatever , gender cis, transgender, whatever , sex feminism and masculism , sexual orientation gay, straight, bi, asexual, whatever all of these things were determined by random genetic factors and are no more definitive of you than the fact that you breathe air. Those who derive their validity from things they did not personally achieve have existentially thrown their hands up and said that I am no more than a genetic code . Genetic code did not build the pyramids or land on the moon. It is not only disgusting, but terrifying that such base determinism is such a defining part of identity politics in the twenty first century. I am a writer, a philosopher, a sophist, a raconteur things I have made myself into, based on things I myself have made. Creation and ambition, after all, are exclusive characteristics of the human being. To simply sum yourself up by saying I am a man or I am black is to ignore all that you have done and equate yourself with biological chaos. One ignores the gravitas of the statement I am when you found your identity upon something you were born with. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that deriving one's self worth from factors outside of your control such as race or gender is not only invalid, but nihilistic.\n","id":"2442f54e-fd09-413c-ba3f-825bced6c313"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title is a bit simplified, my points are that statistics used against this point do not take into account the type of environment the animals are raised in. Dog breeds have certain characteristics that attract different kinds of owners, that the type of owner and their environment that would be attracted to a Pitt Bull is not on average similar the type of owner and environment that would be attracted to own a Golden Retriever or some other distinguishable family breed. Are there any studies that can show a Pitt Bull raised in the same kind of environment as another dog breed is significantly more likely to attack? Showing that a breed like a Lab owned by a bad owner in a bad environment is less likely to bite and a Pitt Bull raised in a positive environment is more likely to attack? edit To elaborate a little more the  is in regards to Pitt Bull bans like the one just imposed in Montreal, my view is that if the breed isn't the problem, the bad owners will get another dog that will be just as likely to bite someone or show aggression and nothing has been solved. edit edit somehow a reply to a post got pasted into my edit, sorry about that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pitt Bulls are not significantly more likely to attack than other dog breeds\n","id":"4c987b23-744b-4357-a706-3dc53a107b76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Maybe my view is due to a biased perspective and anecdotal experience, but I really would like not to hold this view. A bit of background I am a gay male attending a religious university though I am not involved with the LGBT organization on campus for reasons I will explain below , both of my housemates hold leadership roles in the organization. When I first arrived at this university I was excited to join the at the time unofficial LGBT club in order to meet other gay people. I found the community welcoming and very accommodating. At the time, this club was lobbying the administration to become official and they eventually succeeded. Once the club became an official organization the membership swelled and ever since it seems that the organization's members have become resentful toward the university and straight people in general because of perceived though unintentional and possibly blown out of proportion slights and offenses. Going to club meetings became very frustrating because they have just become an echo chamber for the members to talk about how much they hate anyone that isn't LGBT. My own roommate often talks about how she wishes straight people would die. I have no clue what happened to create this culture, but it has alienated and isolated the LGBT community to the point that I think the relationship between members of the community and others at the university has taken a sharp turn for the worse I wouldn't hesitate to say that the general feeling toward LGBT students is now contempt at best. I can say however that none of this happened until the club was officially recognized. I've discussed this with my roommates and they acknowledge the phenomenon but don't consider it to be a bad thing at all. Again, this is very anecdotal so I would accept as having changed my view any argument that persuades me 1 that this is particular to my school or religious schools in general, 2 that this sort of hatred from LGBT people has always existed, or 3 that what I'm seeing within the LGBT community isn't a problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"LGBT organizations on college campuses alienate the LGBT community from the community-at-large\n","id":"cee65446-01c0-4a47-b305-880f643df703"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a long one and I'm not sure how to tl dr it so please try and bear with me. I know I'm not the first one to suggest this world view but all these individual pieces of understanding only really started clicking together recently. I feel like if more people truly understood this way of thinking, and more importantly how to apply it, life would be better for all things in all concievable ways. Anything that exists in reality as an object or even fictionally, as a concept of the imagination, can be described as as system that is made up of individual elements. This of course means that all individual elements can be described as systems themselves with their own individual elements. For example you reading this now can be described as a person who is an individual within a system known as society, while at the same time can be described as a system known as a person made up of individual elements known as cells. The purpose of any system is the continuation of it's self. The reason why anything exists is because it was once needed to be created to solve some fill some kind of need. Nothing ever just comes into existence on it's own, as far as we know. If something seems random on the surface it is usually due to our lack of understanding of the thing in question. Everything that exists was created to fill some sort of need in reality, and anything that exists can be described as the interactions of the individual elements within that thing trying to fufill their own needs, while at the same time it can be described as an element with needs interacting with other elements within a system. Conflict arises when something that again is system made up of individuals has needs that must be met to sustain itself. What happens when there is conflict is the thing or things involved have to find a way to get what they need to survive, while sacrificing as little resources they have available to them as possible. If a system sacrifices too much that it can not meet the needs of it's individual elements the system will fall apart and no longer exist. It will have failed it's purpose. When in conflict, whichever system can succeed in solving it's problems and fufilling it's needs without sacrificing so much as to lose the ability to meet the needs of it's elements continues to survive. If this is lost then the individual elements, who are they themselves systems with elements with needs, must separate from the failing system to ensure it's own survival or perish with it. A system that fails to meet the needs of it's elements and breaks apart can be considered as just another assortment of elements, destined to be picked up by another system one day to the benefit of both the element and the system. Because of the fact that entropy must always increase upwards, because once something is consumed it cannot be made whole again, because you can't turn smoke and ash back into a tree, all systems are destined to be eternally in conflict. Staying still, or playing it safe so to speak, is just not enough to ensure survial. Resources available now must be spent in the hope that more can be gained in the future. This is called growth. In this way, power can be described as the measure of which how likely a system will continue to survive conflict. The more resources a system has available that it can freely lose without losing it's existance will be able to survive more conflicts and secure more resources in the future. For example think of how a massive system known as Walmart will secure the cash flow of a town by undercutting all competition, which it can afford to do, starving out thier competition of the income they need to survive, just to raise prices once their position is secure so they may secure even more resources. The more powerful a system, the less concern it needs to have for the desires of weaker systems compared to itself. This even applies to systems that are elements that depend on the more powerful system to survive. There is an element of chance here since there are opportunities where a smaller system can overthrow a larger, historically more powerful system, if able to exploit some fundamental flaw. Conflict resolutions must end in the destruction of a system. Solutions to conflict are always at the expense of either the system itself or other systems that can be interacted with, even if the systems are individual elements within that very own system. A solution that benefits a system also in turn benefits all of the elements within that system that survive the change induced by the solution. They themselves are systems that have individual elements that in turn are benefited, etc. In return a solution for an individual element benfits the system that element is apart if it helps secure more resources that in turn help the system fufill the needs of other but elements in the system. It works up the chain the same way that it works down. This is what's known as the law of reciprocity in my opinion. In short everything that exists, exists to promote it's own survival within a web of infinitly simple and also infinitly complex interactions, both internal and external, with other things that they themselves exist to continue to exist. I think this is what is meant in spiritual circles as the concept of oneness, the realization that we exist simultaneously as individuals with needs, as resources to be consumed by larger systems that have needs, and as systems that within ourselves have elements that have needs. Something that promotes survival is good, if it does not support surival it is at best neutral and if something inhibits survival it is bad and this is subjective to the needs of the given system in question. The question is even if this is true what does it matter? Knowledge that cannot be applied is useless. It seems that most people assume the point of life is to be happy. That all decisions that make you happy are good decisions, that all decisions that don't make you happy are neutral and that all decisions that make you sad which in this context I just mean the opposite of happy are bad decisions. I propose that this is not the case, that happiness is just an element within the system of a given person's emotional state that itself is a element within the system that is the individual. Happiness exists to promote itself, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the individual exists to promote happiness. The individual merely relies on happiness when it suits their needs, to promote survival. In my opinion happiness is merely a way for the brain to physically reward the conciousness of an individual when it does things that promote it's own well being. In a sense we are born drug addicts and our brains are the dealer. If the dealer gave us all the drugs we could ever need then we wouldn't need the dealer anymore. To ensure that he continues to exist he must balance giving the addict what it wants while not giving it so much that it becomes independent. In the same way our brains give us enough happiness to make decisions that promote our own well being, but not so much that we lose the incentive to want to continue our own well being. In this sense it seems like the element Happiness, exists within the system of us as individuals to be pursued but never obtained for long by it's very nature. Pursuing happiness helps us as systems survive and if we ever had all the happiness we needed we would lose that incentive. You can apply this reasoning to all emotions, from fear to love to sadness, to religion, to politics, scieneces, etc, and the logic will hold up. All things that are, are for themselves, usually at the expense of other things that are, but also at the expense of their own selves. I propose the point of life, as it seems to me, is to try and survive as long as possible for the things that make you up to survive as long as possible and the things that you make up to survive as long as possible. Any time there is a threat to the existence of either you as an individual, it is also a threat to your elements that are apart of you and the systems you are a part of and vise versa. You do this by trying to resolve as much conflict, solve as many problems, or generally fufill the needs of as many systems as you can, from the ones that exist as individual elements within you, for your fellow elements within the larger system that we exist in, and for the larger system itself. If we truly are all connected, then a problem solved for one individual element is a problem solved for everything in reality no matter how small the significance of that one resolved conflict may be. The combined resolved conflicts add up to benefit the larger systems. In the same sense a problem solved for a larger system benefits all the individual elements contained with the system. So how does all apply to you? Why should you care? I don't exactly have the answer to that, mostly because I don't know you or your individual problems and needs. But if I did then I would be able to help you. What I propose is if you want to feel more purpose and meaning in your life, instead of trying to find what will make you happy, try and see what problems you can solve. Instead of thinking about some idealised version of the future where you have everything you could want and are completely content, see what around you you can change right now to promote your well being. In return you brain will reward you with the happiness you desire unless you have something wrong with the system that is your own internal reward system. Then you're going to need to find a way to solve problems without the incentive of happiness, which obviously makes the job a lot harder. A problem fixed for you is a problem fixed for all. A problem fixed for all is a problem fixed for you. You can't gain without losing, you also can't lose without gaining. Sacrifice is necessary. Pain is necessary. Growth is necessary. Suffering comes from our inability to accept these facts, from our inability to balance our feelings of our desire to always be gaining, our greed, with the desire to never have to lose, our fear. The meaning of life has been something I've been struggling with understanding my entire concious life. This is my best answer right now as I see it. I could totally be wrong about some of it but I'm pretty confident it's a comprehensive model of understanding our world. To put this in practice what I do and what I encourage others to do is start with the systems within yourself. If your cells need better food and more water, solve that problem by giving it better food and more water. If your mentally stability needs socializing or entertainment or chemicals so you can function, give it that and don't feel bad about it. Everything has needs. Ignoring needs of other things to solve your own problems just incentivevises them to ignore your needs for their own survival. Working together is way more effecient. Not sure what the end goal of this mentality but presumably we'll have to find a way to reverse entropy, find some sort of source of infinite energy so all these systems needs can always been met, but that's a problem for the future. We have to make to actually make it to that point to able to capitalize on it. In short any time you are ever having any problems doing anything try to look at the thing you're interacting with, from your own body to another person, a country or a world, as a system made of elements that have needs. If you can understand those needs then you can start to try to find a solution where both yours and the other systems needs can be met. I'd love to talk about areas in which this mentality can or can not be applied. I'd change my view if something can be shown to me that this doesn't apply to. It would mean there's more about reality I don't understand.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The purpose of existence is to solve problems, no other model of understanding adequately explains and predicts behaviour of any given thing.\n","id":"f9cc7288-76f6-4218-b76b-3b1fdfa1fffe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious views regarding sex rely on harmful stereotypes that often place women's virginity and purity as the measure of a woman's worth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many religions instill views of shame and sin regarding sexual relationships.\n","id":"0c752d17-c08e-444b-b404-6c25ae55ba25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Developed Countries Reduce The Working Year?<|ARGUMENT|>A number of American workers would prefer to work shorter hours even for a corresponding reduction in pay Golden and Gebreselassie, p. 32<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Over 80% of Americans working more than fifty hours per week would prefer to work shorter hours Rose, p. 9\n","id":"72d4ff41-8bb0-4616-bff5-940fbbfa33c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that the meaning of sex is a purely social construct. It can me romantic act of intimacy, a act of reproduction or even just a pastime. If sex had none of this meaning it wouldn't be traumatic or harmful in any way for a child to have sex with an adult. What if somewhere on earth there was a society that similar to the Bonobos used sex as a form of greeting, forming social bonds etc. and where casual sex between friends, strangers, family etc. is normal. Would there be any trauma if a child had sex with an adult? Obviously this kind of society would have problems with STDs and pregnancy but let's just suppose for the sake of the example that STDs dont exist and girls dont have sex after maturing. Obviously that is an extreme example but I hope you see what I'm getting at. I understand that sex with an adult is traumatizing for minors in the long run. I think that this is only because of the meaning we as a society give to sex. As for child marriages, I think that in the past where there was no system of education in society and life was harsh it was fine to marry off girls at ages like 11 13. It was normal in society. They would not be losing out on education anyway.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex is a purely social construct. Sex between minors and adults are not inherently harmful. Child marriage in the past was A-OK.\n","id":"a26a8d89-8ac0-4bc3-9f7b-a13b0f7a939d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Brain functions can be analysed in great detail and decisions consistently appear to relate deterministically to physical brain states.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is enough scientific evidence to conclude that there is no free will.\n","id":"2d1888ea-9687-4601-9f82-4f28c7d0ab1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>Part of the sentencing could include educational, and\/or skill targets that, if accomplished, would reduce their sentences. For that to work, we must provide the means for them to reach those goals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prisons must prioritise rehabilitation because highly punitive sentences cause harms to the prisoners.\n","id":"527b6393-6321-4b85-9abf-dd235e52eda3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no reason to think heteronormativity is a bad thing to want to undermine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalization of LGBT sex work contributes to an end of heteronormativity.\n","id":"b962d26d-cc21-4613-af9d-1d7b561d10bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The goods and services we consume are made possible by the abundance of cheap resources and labour that the west gets out of underdeveloped countries. The West has no reason to aid or allow the development of these poorer countries, since that would disrupt the ability to acquire cheap resources, thus diminishing the economic superiority of the west. All in all, people in the west's lives can only be good because people's lives in poor nations are bad . With the current infrastructure on earth, it is only possible to make the west happy, not everyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For the west to enjoy the lifestyle it does, subjugation of third world countries is necessary.\n","id":"7dcc1386-fedb-4955-8536-14c0ebf17e31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not talking about poor people. I'm talking about working class and middle class people who only buy practical things and think anything outside of basic necessities is too rich for their blood. It's not that their wiser in their allocation than I am. They're just doing it differently. 23 m single no kids . Work full time 14 hr job nothing amazing , pay my share of the rent, I have a 401k plan, some savings and I never get into debt. I have 100 fountain pens, 200 headphones, 250 bottle of cologne, etc. If you're making 25k 40k a year, you have more than enough money to buy luxuries. You just CHOOSE to make other obligations. Cigarettes, lottery tickets, alcohol, eating out often, daily starbucks coffee, thrift purchases you're never going to use, sales discounts on crap you don't need, regular impulse buys, cheap products you buy to save money that don't work. Once your paycheck is beaten to death by all of these seemingly small death of a thousand cuts purchases, buying a luxury in the 20 300 range seems like total madness. The only reason why I can afford expensive luxuries is because I usually only spend money on things that I really care about rather than buying as much crap as I can because it's cheap. When you pull you a 20 or 100 bill, your brains alarms go off. But when you pull out 5 and 10 bills, very regularly, your brain's alarm doesn't as much.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The average frugal person that shuns moderate luxuries spend just as much money as I do. They just allocate it differently.\n","id":"8cc83572-9fd7-461a-84db-6c50e8ac1d0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, I'm straight, but I find it disgusting and ridiculous we in the US are even having a debate about allowing gay men and women the same rights as everyone else. I do however, find is wickedly gross when I see 2 guys kissing or touching each other. Maybe less for girls, which is clearly another double standard. I don't want to view it that way, it makes me feel kind of shitty and I never bring it up because the few times that I have I get shitty looks and I've even been called homophobic for this. Obviously I'm not afraid or against homosexuality though. So is there any arguments out there that can ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am extremely pro-gay rights, but I think it's gross. Can you ?\n","id":"137e92f4-7578-49f7-bf08-5395d3db646b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Donald Trump a Good President?<|ARGUMENT|>Moving the US Embassy means that it no longer be a point of contention in peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem this was a bold move to strengthen America's standing globally.\n","id":"f936ac93-20fb-462e-b7e4-7c6441864f09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Colonize Venus Before Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>The atmosphere and high gravity make leaving the planet hugely difficult to the point where large payloads would need a rocket comparable to those we use to get off of Earth. We probably won't have the resources there to have them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The logistics for a Venus colony would be much harder to maintain due to the high gravity and thick atmosphere.\n","id":"cf2f9b70-91e4-4ff0-81fb-446ba0a37f79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>These experiments included immobilizing mice and rats in tubes, shocking their feet, suspending them by their tails, and forcing them to swim to avoid drowning. Researchers claimed these experiments had relevance to human anxiety and depression. Although restraint is particularly stressful and frustrating for an animal, some experiments are designed to hold animals in partial or total immobilization for months.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many animal experiments utilize restraining devices, designed to prevent an animal from moving. Some research projects call for immobilization of specific parts of an animal\u2019s body\u2014head and neck, legs and pelvis\u2014while other protocols involve immobilization of an animal\u2019s entire body. For example, researchers at several major U.S. universities have all conducted \"stress experiments on rats and mice.\n","id":"a5cf7985-0740-459f-9fb7-bd3641b4b321"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In Japan, the law is as follows First, you have to go to an all day class, and pass a written test every month. You have to take a shooting class and pass with 95 accuracy. Then you have to go get a mental health and drug test. Then you have to pass a background check that is really rigorous, and checks criminal record, association with any criminals, and association with extremist groups and terrorist groups. After that the gun and the ammo has to be locked away in the house in two separate places, and you have to give the police a layout of your entire house, along with the location of both guns. The police have to inspect the gun once per year, and you have to redo this whole process every 3 years to continue owning a gun. In japan, there were only 6 gun deaths in 2014, compared to 33,600 in the united states. The constitution says you have the right to bear arms, but when it was written, the founding fathers had no idea what sort of weapons we would have today. A very skilled marksman with years of training could only fire a musket 3 times per minute, whereas many modern guns allow you to fire dozens or even hundreds of rounds per minute, are way more accurate, easier to conceal, hold more rounds, etc. The average person would have trouble even killing one person in a school or public place with a musket. With these laws, you still would have the right to bear arms, it would just be restricted. We take voting rights away from felons, and lock people away in mental institutions because they are dangerous. We wouldn't want people like that going undetected, so that's why it is necessary to have all of this. Lastly, it costs the government millions, or even billions of dollars every year of YOUR Taxes to lock people up who commit these crimes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US Should Have Gun Laws Like Japan Has.\n","id":"4fec8255-ce91-4f2f-908d-918cd9373700"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the government require parents to learn sign language if they have deaf child?<|ARGUMENT|>Baby sign is used for hearing babies to communicate at an early age, deaf children should have the same access.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government should require parents to learn sign language if they have a deaf child.\n","id":"66634192-e9c1-4f94-837a-0033f6d6c8d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The term People of Color has become the primary politically correct way to refer to minorities. But this phrase is offensive for several reasons. It groups together essentially all minorities that don't necessarily have anything in common. And increasingly, people are using it to elevate claims of discrimination. Here's Alexdria Ocasio Cortez \u201cBut the persistent singling out it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.\u201d Honestly I find this quote outrageous. AOC has never experienced anything even remotely like the racism faced by black people in America. Never in her life has someone scooted away from her on the sidewalk because they thought she might attack them. Never has she been pulled over by the police and been afraid. Her experience in America and New York is just wildly different than what black folks experience. But this phrase lets her lump all these groups together and amplify the prejudices experienced by some to the entire group. The House Democratic leadership team is made up of five people a woman, two black men, a Latino, and a white man. The idea that this group is singling out AOC, a light skinned Latina, because of her race, is so patently absurd, it is ridiculous. And without the language of People of Color, her comment would have been absurd on its face. Often we include Asian Americans in this term. Asian Americans are today the most advantaged racial group in this country, with higher incomes, higher average educational attainment, and higher home ownership than any other racial group. And East Asians are not even colored, so the nomenclature is nonsensical. I'm not saying that East Asians in America do not experience prejudice. I'm saying it's incomparable with the prejudice experienced by dark skinned people. And so it is offensive to use language that creates a single grouping of these very different populations. We already have a word for racial groups outside the majority, and that word is minority. And that word does not carry the same connotations as POC. Colliquially, we understand that the term minority is a superset of people, with many different subgroupings of people with very different experiences. People of Color is not being used as a superset. It's generally used as a single grouping, and it's essentially always used to elevate the prejudice experienced by the group as a whole to the same level as that of dark skinned people. And that is my fundamental problem with the term.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term People of Color is deeply offensive\n","id":"f7f03bcd-5f03-41e0-a34f-6e1f09f010e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have just returned from holidaying in Southeast Asia and there literally wasn't a single avenue of my enjoyment that wasn't trampled on by Chinese tourists. A lazy quiet day by the pool becomes noisy and irritating when an entire extended family of Chinese people shows up and starts screaming and letting their 15 kids run a muck Locations of serious religious or military significance quiet places of respect are defiled by their hideous shouting and laughing They abuse the buffet breakfast at the hotel by bringing along bags and 2litre bottles to cache food and orange juice so they don't have to buy food later in the day They will occupy a cashier in a store while they are still deciding what they want or are still even shopping, holding up the line for 10 minutes They walk straight past queues to the counter They cough, spit, sputter, burp, fart, and hock loudly and without modesty They all smoke, and all don't give a fuck about designated smoking zones they will light up anywhere They feed their own snack food to zoo animals while standing right in front of signs that specifically say not to They congregate and socialise in doorways and other foot traffic choke points I know these are cultural differences, but I am struggling and need to find some understanding.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm struggling with racism, specifically against Chinese tourists, and I need you to\n","id":"39656f20-a644-4687-9b2b-6fd8c09a9953"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the NHS be privatised?<|ARGUMENT|>Research on hospitals in Greece suggests that privatisation of selected public services can increase patients' freedom of choice and also improve efficiency and quality of services.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Privatization of the NHS is likely to increase patient choice.\n","id":"15cf0402-5b82-4937-8773-4713c11bb505"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Eating meat, such as farmed insects may be the answer to the world's protein shortage without damaging the environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Solutions to food shortages will need to involve meat production.\n","id":"d788ef48-c0f0-42ed-b5bf-22ce9c9b632a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever debating over the death penalty this viewpoint never seems to be brought up, usually everyone assumes the death penalty to be the worst punishment possible. I however think that life in prison without the possibility of parole is worse. Why I think this \u25cf Prison is a pretty bad place to be. I've never heard anyone say they liked prison and most well tell you how awful it is. The legal system is based on the idea that a longer prison sentence means a worse punishment, thus a life sentence is worse than anything less. \u25cfIf you get life in prison you're going to die in prison, which has the same end result as the death penalty. \u25cfThe death penalty is a painless way to be killed I realize there are reports that it is painful but it's claimed to be painless so for simplicity lets assume it is painless where as many natural deaths may not be painless. Ultimately it seems like the death penalty is a way to get a shorter prison sentence and guarantee a painless death, thus making it a less harsh sentence than life in prison. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that life in prison without the possibility of parole is a worse punishment than a death sentence.\n","id":"185c9b21-6192-4170-9b32-5cbcb4a50909"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>In addition, those who did not say that they want to remain permanently in Germany usually stated that they \"don't know\". Virtually none of the refugees who participated in the study showcased any plans to leave BAMF, p. 269<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to a 2014 study among refugees in Germany, 85% want to permanently reside in the country and 80% want to obtain German citizenship BAMF, p. 10\n","id":"8b6a385d-ce22-48ce-bc52-de765dda3c53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>The idea of patriarchy is defined as \"A family, community, or society based on this system or governed by men\", which in no way rules out the suffering of men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men suffer negative consequences from the expectations and requirements placed on them by the patriarchy, which feminists are trying to dismantle.\n","id":"a4e1ef15-03e0-4838-b7f7-7a28fd516ddd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we abolish political parties in the USA?<|ARGUMENT|>Parties often choose to ignore issues due to fear of a democratic backlash and electoral loss. Independent candidates are likelier to bring these issues up and discuss them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A wider range of issues is likely to be discussed in a world where the political agenda is not shaped by just two parties.\n","id":"f7676b6f-8819-444b-aebe-69d5456eb87a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should subsidize space exploration<|ARGUMENT|>Space exploration has a huge part in the future progress of humanity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Space exploration is necessary for the future survival of humanity\n","id":"ef0ace95-84f7-4fe9-8f7b-bd259b827119"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Linux the best operating system?<|ARGUMENT|>On Linux most of the time it's just a matter of one command, meanwhile on Windows you have to use some wizard to install it, then specify paths to libraries\/compilers manually.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's much easier to set up programming tools for Linux than on Windows or Mac.\n","id":"f92cf461-f2d1-4a0e-bcce-c09b54d8e2aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a first generation student at the University of Michigan. On my application last year, I didn\u2019t have any alumni connections to list my parents and grandparents all attended different universities. I remember being absolutely terrified that my lack of being a \u201clegacy\u201d was going to ruin my chances of getting accepted. It seemed like every single one of my friends\u2019 parents was an alumni of the university, and because of this sole reason, none of them were too worried about their chances. Despite my reasonably impressive GPA and amount of extracurricular activities, I felt like I was at an unfair advantage compared to my legacy friends. Simply because of the fact that they were born to an alumni member or the son daughter of an alumni member , they were given an advantage over an applicant like myself. Colleges should not consider legacies in admissions decisions it creates an unfair benefit on the application, your \u201cpedigree\u201d doesn\u2019t define you as a potential student, and they contribute to diversity problems at institutions. Being a legacy gives you an \u201cedge\u201d over other applicants. This competitive \u201cedge\u201d was not by your own doing\u2014it\u2019s not because of a stellar SAT score, or an outstanding leadership position. Legacy students are 45.1 more likely to get into undergraduate colleges than other students. An alarming example of this unfairness is at the prestigious Harvard University their legacy admissions rate is a hopeful 30 yet, their overall acceptance rate is around 5 Admissions directors emphasize unbiased application review, yet this is clearly not the case. This automatic benefit could mean that perhaps you don\u2019t need to have such competitive qualifications, because your application has already gotten a \u201cboost.\u201d Your \u201cpedigree\u201d does not define you as a person. You are not an exact clone of the relatives that once attended a certain university. It may be true that legacy applicants can share the same virtuous morals and values as their parents did as students\u2014however, this is not always the case. You are not your parents, or your grandparents. You may have a completely different idea about what education means, but being a legacy creates an assumption that you are university material. Universities care about tradition, which is probably why the legacy system is still around today. However, this contributes to a disadvantage to minority students. It is obvious that legacy applicants tend to be white, and come from more affluent backgrounds. Especially among the more prestigious institutions\u2014this just has to do with the history of inequality in our country. For example, legacy minorities only make up 6.7 of the applicant pool The other 93 of legacy students that have an advantage over non legacy applicants are white\u2014this is what contributes to inequality gaps at universities. I do not believe that legacies contribute to our movement towards a more equal college admissions system, and we should stop considering them altogether. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Colleges should not consider legacies in admissions decisions.\n","id":"cd9bd8c1-94ff-4032-a9e9-9baf9e1ca828"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do you have a civic morale obligation to at least challenge people who believe in conspiracy theories?<|ARGUMENT|>So-called \"conspiracy theories\" actually bring valuable debate to the table. Most often, they are supported by an evidence that is too astoundingly counter-culture to most accepted beliefs - in that it is too overwhelming to take as truth. A good \"conspiracy theorist\" is well-read and most likely hoping to be challenged, ego aside. Ignoring critical thought is just that - ignorance, on all fronts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An exchange of ideas always leads to good in the long term.\n","id":"52cf0ab7-08d2-420c-9335-e12d52d39c50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>From a legal point of view in Germany the Grundgesetz is pretty modern suicide is considered as expression of the right of self-determination. 1.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Committing suicide is the radical use of humans capability of autonomy and self-determination.\n","id":"b9cfbb4a-7871-4fb4-adec-78e27bdcbad2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know I do weird things. I know I can say sometimes borderline racist things because I lack the ability to not say what comes to mind. However, when a classmate or my friends or even my family acts in a way I deem stupid, I get so infuriated. These acts could be anywhere from not knowing what is obvious to me or to not following a basic request change I have in how they conduct themselves. Granted I am most likely very arrogant in my thinking believing that I have no flaws or that I am too self centered. I am a teenager who is fortunate enough to have someone who does their laundry for them. But I get SO infuriated when someone losses my clothes when doing my laundry. Or when someone in class cannot comprehend the most basic to me of concepts. I am going to college soon, and really want to change my view on other people's mistakes, cause it makes me a dick.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I hate people that appear to me as stupid or inefficient\n","id":"50f0a633-a13f-4903-bc7f-d41eb1bece59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the EU should engage in further enlargement<|ARGUMENT|>As the EU expands allows poorer and poorer countries to join there are likely to be increasing problems with internal migration creating a brain drain. The EU will not in the future be able to be nearly as generous in terms of funds to develop new members\u2019 economies. If any new members are allowed freedom of movement their will almost certainly be even greater migration flows than there were as a result of the 2004 enlargement. Poland for example despite being the only European country to avoid recession has still had a net loss of 1.4million people who have stayed abroad more than a year.1 If the talented and skilled from a country that is experiencing rapid economic growth are staying abroad when the rest of Europe is in the middle of a downturn how many more would move from the poorer potential members such as Macedonia? 1 Marcin Sobczyk, \u2018Poland Loses 1.4 Million People to Brain Drain\u2019, Wall Street Journal, 24 September 2010,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There will be an even greater brain drain from poorer countries to richer.\n","id":"1f1528af-10e2-4a99-be95-633cbe91794d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>In the American Civil War, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, blinded by his previous successes, commanded an impossible assault in the Battle of Gettysburg<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are blinded by their own successes. This makes their judgement more difficult.\n","id":"33581fba-67c2-4d0b-8c3a-4c2eabe31c67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should taxpayers have direct control of how their taxes are spent?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, a majority-atheist community would be less likely to vote to subsidize Christian homeless shelters, and vice versa.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This puts minority groups racial, sexual, cultural, ideological at a disadvantage for government funding specific to their needs.\n","id":"ebf30b19-b9d9-4db9-830f-61a208ad4311"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hate this opinion, and I don't want to have it, but I'm afraid I'm stuck in a rut that is possibly caused by me being raised in a hotbed of racism the American South . I'm white, and I have a crush on someone who is black. He's amazing, and I personally don't believe there are any inherent deficiencies in someone based on their race skin color. But part of me wonders if, given the discrimination that still exists in our society, procreating with someone who is white is justified, because you want your kids to have every advantage, right? I KNOW I'm wrong because it's just an awful thing to say or think, but I cannot figure out why. Please help?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think factoring in a potential mate's race is evolutionarily justified. Please !\n","id":"667bc267-01e5-4e37-a6c8-751017933407"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So back when I was a whippersnapper teenager, I worked a year at my local BK Lounge in the kitchen. Food like fully cooked meat patties anc chicken fries that were more than an hour hold so that they weren't considered fresh but still fully safe to eat were thrown in a garbage bin. Same with the food that was put under the heating lamps that were kept there for backup during peak hours. By the end of the night, we typically had at least half a bin full of perfectly edible food probably around 15 pounds by the very least during slow days. We weren't allowed to keep the food rather than throw it out, and I think that it is a huge waste. I think that leftover old food can be thrown into a special container and volunteers from a charity organization can drive a van to pick up this food once every few hours from these establishments to bring to their local food bank soup kitchen shelter. Since the homeless and severely impoverished probably aren't very likely regular customers at these restraunts, and seeing how implementing this doesn't really cost the establishment money, I think it's a good way to provide admittedly crappy food to the less fortunate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that leftover food from fast food restraunts should be given to shelters\/soup kitchens\/food banks\n","id":"e18bb43d-a114-4602-9098-8f4795018bbe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>People of Chinese descent were treated horribly in the US - by the federal and state governments and the majority society - from the 1870s until well into the twentieth century Wikipedia HarpWeek<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US track record of exploitation is quite long. Paying slavery reparations would be a slippery slope for other groups to claim the same.\n","id":"684c8705-b364-4472-8ad0-613eb98e889b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the BAR exam be eliminated as a requirement to practice law?<|ARGUMENT|>Because the bar is so notoriously difficult students that are not truly committed to practising law are likely to give up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The BAR exam serves a worthwhile purpose to deter unwanted potential attorneys.\n","id":"503f2f9a-b808-4e20-9dc7-c40caa2caffe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is using young children in commercials ok?<|ARGUMENT|>They might feel embarrassed about the type of commercials they were in or how they acted in them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children may come to regret having appeared in commercials as they grow up.\n","id":"b195b923-6b80-4ef5-9309-9734a4ec3cba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Get A Pet?<|ARGUMENT|>It would be immoral not to care for living beings that rely on us for their comfort and survival.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Domesticated animals rely on humans' care to survive. We should provide such a care when possible.\n","id":"5d8314b9-26c2-4c18-a0ab-9dac683af8ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I am not really an AI scientist, nor would I say I am an expert. However, people have lost their jobs because of my work. I often get asked how I feel about my responsibility, sometimes more aggresive How can you sleep at night , sometimes more curious How do you think AI will affect society type. However, with all the years of training I have recieved I can produce some form of AI technologies . This, however, mostly presents itself as an understanding of computer programming and certain fields of mathematics. Mostly stochastic. None of this, to me, makes me feel particularly qualified to judge the impact of AI on society. While I probably have an above average idea of the possibilites and can maybe judge better on the timeline of certain functionalities then again who knows? , I am neither an economist, nor a sociologist, or any other probably much more applicable field. I often feel like I get questioned about the economic impact of automation, but that this is like asking a hollywood actor about a war for example. I am not more qualified to judge these matters, hence I have no way to judge the actual impact on society of my own work and to a certain degree have to trust other people to guide me. As a result I hardly feel responsible or put much thought to it. To take this to an extreme, even if someone where to pay me to write software for killer robots, could I really judge if this ultimatley would be good for society? As a result could I refuse? I do, however, acknowledge that it is important that we do our best to communicate on the technicalities, allowing more qualified people a better judgement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a Computer Scientist working with AI I am neither responsible for, nor particulary qualified to judge the benefit or dangers of AI to society\n","id":"fa19f34c-432e-4582-b16f-85c29bb27a78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Some people are suspicious when they buy stuff. They do not know if the product is really that fair trade like its label says. If the market would be more transparent people would buy more of these products.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If we would have the opportunity to buy products without those costs for the same price everybody would do so.\n","id":"2d5ce366-c064-47df-acb3-c2f06d6bb9a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion as a common imagined order enabled humans to organize themselves in larger numbers than before, therefore enabling them to defeat their enemies and be more efficient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion improved the strength of groups to outcompete other groups.\n","id":"8f5038b2-d35c-46ff-8fc5-7fab5f13ef85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I earnestly believe that I was born in the wrong century. For me, life would have been much better, say, around the turn of the last century, when we didn't have all these modern conveniences such as internet, supermarkets, mobil phones, etc. Of course, my view reflects living back then with substantial means. I realise that life has gotten somewhat better for the poor. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe life was better before.\n","id":"b759f166-812e-44d8-a736-d0bfb30525b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone has heard of the terrible conditions cows, chickens and pigs go through in slaughterhouses Watchmen Okja on Netflix to know a bit more , and movements pro veganism and what not. While I agree that meat production in an industrial scale is an awful thing, some people not eating animal products wouldn't change a thing. Corporations don't go meatless options because they care about the animals, it's because some people are willing to buy It. And for every vegan, there are 10 more people who eat meat normally. If a couple of people don't buy beef out of a whole city It won't really matter. I'm not sure the text was able to trully express my idea, english is not my first language.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being vegan or vegetarian has no real impact on the meat and dairy industry, therefore being meaningless\n","id":"0b3bb4dd-fa06-4cbf-9e77-a5ec26aa88eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it okay to physically torture prisoners?<|ARGUMENT|>War should continue to be a brutal endeavour, making us loathe to ever engage in it again. Because of that, some level of harsh treatment of prisoners--without permanent damage--is at times necessary to collect information, as each combatant has different thresholds of discomfort and pain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Torture, conceptually, could act as an excellent deterrent; knowing torture is acceptable is likely to make individuals reconsider actions that leave them vulnerable to it.\n","id":"828f3454-b108-41df-9404-20ec8cee6436"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Animal testing, Debate on animal experimentation and testing<|ARGUMENT|>Many argue that animal rights activists are simply anti-science. This misunderstands the intentions of animal rights activists. They fully acknowledge that they science is important and even that animal testing can lead to major advancements in science. But, as is typically said, before science should ask if it can make certain advancements, it needs to ask if it should. Ethics has authority over all human endeavors, including science.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animal rights is not anti-science, but ethics must constrain science.\n","id":"3257b3a3-03be-4b5d-b5b6-e5d692a09a46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Enhanced interrogation techniques<|ARGUMENT|>In an October 2006 BBC survey of 27,000 people in 25 countries, more than one out of three people in nine of those countries, including America, considered a degree of torture acceptable if it saved lives.39<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Torture \"to save lives\" has a substantial body of support among publics:\n","id":"16719786-e2c7-4288-89e9-a72504a23ecb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Developed countries have a higher obligation to combat climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Developed nations were not even aware of the consequences of their emissions through most of the industrial revolution. Therefore, they were certainly not aware that the consequences would disproportionately fall on poor developing nations. Developed nations are not, therefore, responsible or culpable for these disproportionate consequences, so they should not be disproportionately obligated to fight global climate change on this point.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Developed did not plan for emissions to harm poor most.\n","id":"d6eae9c2-c0c1-43ee-84e6-d9d3323f6ba1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate speech alone cannot account for why statements of some hate speakers are taken up by the majority while others are not. It is the reflection on feelings of society that makes certain hate speakers so successful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not hate speech that causes genocide but humans believing in what is said.\n","id":"598d619f-6b07-42d0-94b9-fbd4e27b9a9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's a pretty specific topic so here's an article about what happened. Basically it was a bill that requires doctors to give medical care to babies that were supposed to be aborted but was instead born alive. I necer thought I'd post anything here due to the time commitment, but I really want someone to change my mind on this. IIRC only 4 Democrats voted for the bill, and I think the Democratic Party has plenty of intelligent people. I feel like I'm missing something here. I'm pretty much your stereotypical social justice warrior. I actually don't see anything wrong with the term and I pretty much embrace it. I'm pro life and pro choice I think abortion is totally wrong but the government shouldn't be the one making the choice for women. For pro lifers, that essentially makes me pro choice. I think opposing the bill is wrong because it has nothing to do with the woman's choice and everything to do with the baby born. As far as I know it doesn't force the woman to take custody of the child. It's completely medical and I think it completely aligns with the Hippocratic Oath. Somebody goes and gets an abortion, abortion was too late in the pregnancy, fetus comes out alive instead, so the doctors will have to give it medical care. What's so controversial about that??<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The pro-choice camp made a mistake opposing the \"Born Alive\" Bill\n","id":"67ab0c75-6988-42f9-baa9-aaafee505f9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are a few reasons why I think this The fact that Bitcoin has surpassed 1,000 is largely due to the fact that it is becoming so popular in China. Over 60 Percent of bitcoin is owned by China. The Deputy Governor of the People's Bank of China gave what was called a cautious nod to bitcoin. I think that once bitcoin really starts to intrude on the renmibi, then China will crack down on it, jeopardizing the worldwide market. I am surprised that there have been so few hacking attacks and criminal activities, and not one major since Silk Road. As it becomes bigger and bigger, I think that hackers are going to more actively target it. These attacks will lower the value. And if I were the Winklevosses or any other big owner, I would have hired a few bodyguards, as people can easily rob bitcoin, it being untraceable. Bitcoin encourages speculation, because of the deflationary curve. Take for example the Chinese investors that are hoarding bitcoin in offshore bank accounts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Think That Bitcoin Is Unsustainable and Will Fall Precipitously.\n","id":"8653fa83-5985-46ee-9a2d-d4cf1340404c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>If a woman chooses to keep a child when the man wants her to have an abortion, then he may feel pressure to be involved in the life of a child who he did not want, and even if he is not involved he may have a hard time accepting he now has a genetic child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men can face serious emotional harms from the decision to bring their child into this world or abort their child, even if they aren't the ones who have to carry it to term.\n","id":"a7c2a3aa-8012-4618-8dc8-04fc55dc4bc3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>Discussions about seemingly uncomfortable topics like anal and oral sex are left to much older students, indicating a culturally-influenced withholding of information.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many sex education programs start with vague details, before moving on to explicit specifics as students get older.\n","id":"71caaeef-cefb-4c05-8a9c-fcef4273ff15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the FBI Right to Keep the Pedophile Site Playpen Online After Hacking It?<|ARGUMENT|>As users of such websites usually do not pay to get access to pornographic content, their IP adresses are the only way to identify them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A bait is a successful tactic to identify anonymous users and thus justified.\n","id":"490e85a2-51c6-43c2-bc9e-9a22494925ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Some subreddits and misc. posters in general have been sticking a Reddit watermark to their media after it was discussed that Instagram reposters financially profit off of community created content, I believe a decent portion of this effort is just a meme but I digress. While I agree with the sentiment that those people profiting can go straight to heck, Reddit is itself mostly reposted content and to attach it all to the brand regardless of origin comes off as petty and trashy, no different than any meme you see with a 9GAG or iFunny watermark. This feeling rubs on me regardless of origination context, if I were to use Instagram and see a Reddit watermark there, I would simply think of it as a maximum quantitative meme processing site. Is there anything I'm not seeing here folks?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Reddit Watermark Makes The Website Trashy\n","id":"923f7976-e23f-4c54-9491-00780ba116af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>nobody uses it, very few people post, i was just there and though i made a good effort the bot kicked my submission in the teeth even so. almost all of the front page is just links with no comments, the highest i just saw was 56 comments if i remember correctly. there were 450 ish people there, with 12 million readers . that they have not changed the rules or softened them up or anything is a goddamn embarrassment, music lovers do not flock there like they should because which music lover does not love sharing his music with people? , they are in fact scared away by the horrible rules and terrible mismanagement of a DEFAULT sub with 12 million readers. it is a fucking tragedy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the insanely strict rules for r\/listentothis have made the subreddit into absolute dogshit.\n","id":"467b9d47-a0d8-4755-a157-1e2fcc8b6316"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been using my Android phone LG G2 in Summer of 2014 around June July . This phone came out September of 2013, so it was not fairly new when I purchased it. For a few months ago, the battery started to dying early and I have to charge at least three times a day. When I go for run with my music on, the battery drops to 70 after 30 minutes run. I am still a student, but I am an International Student. I have on campus job which give me about 60~ 100 per week depending on the week. I have earned about 520 so far this semester. I decided to upgrade my phone to Nexus 6P, which is currently 50 off and it's a good deal. However, I feel guilty purchasing brand new phone with 500 phone. I did earn money, but my parents still support me on my tuition and food funding. I don't spend money on party theme like alcohol, or anything. It mostly goes to food and stationary. I don't want to spoil myself getting a new phone, but sometimes I don't get text messages from friends and sometimes it takes forever to send messages. And keyboard gets freeze and I have to restart. The reason is that I feel like I am spoiled for getting brand new phone for myself even though I am just a student. Please  that I need to upgrade my phone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't need to upgrade my phone.\n","id":"bac33764-d5c8-4e18-a95f-76d7caf633cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that there is no such thing as a purely straight or purely gay person, and that everyone is at least somewhat bisexual, but refuses to admit it to themself due to religious, cultural, or other reasons . Sex is sex and should feel good no matter who it is with. Even though men have penises and women have vaginas, there are sex toys which sexual partners could use that would accomodate for any missing genitalia. Love is love, and there should be no barriers on who you fall in love with, either. It is impossible for someone to only be able to fall in love with members of one sex because personalities are not exclusive to sex thus, any person with an attraction towards a certain personality should be attracted towards that personality within any gender. Please  EDIT My view has been changed by a few users, and now I no longer am rooted in believing that everyone is bisexual, and am open to believing that people can be perfectly hetero or homosexual Thank you everyone who contributed to the discussion<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that everyone is bisexual.\n","id":"6e475bb7-b878-46af-bfbb-b2e7ca2ed6f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have always found the federal income tax and the tax code to be a cumbersome way of doing things. Essentially it limits the spending throughout the year of people. Not only am I taxed more for the more money I make, my refund is one lump sum. Having that spread out over the year in a paycheck would make budgeting a lot easier. Anyways, the flat tax on goods often labeled a Fair Tax is exactly what it says. The Federal Income tax would be abolished and replaced by a flat tax of 20 25 on all goods. As for what would be taxed, most states have a sale tax and uncooked food and other essentials are not taxed and would not be taxed in this system. Currently, the tax brackets are this As you can see, most Americans are taxed more than the 23 proposed rate. However, this would allow people to keep their entire paycheck and if they chose not to spend it and instead save the better. this would give someone making 50k a year an additional 12,500.00 a year in income. We live at a time when the student loan issue could rear its ugly head when we have a large amount of 40 year old still paying 500 a month for student loans and that could impact housing markets. This would let people who chose to be responsible with their money meet goals of home ownership much sooner. Now, the primary arguments set forth against it are usually the fact that it would really hurt people living at the poverty level. However, most plans call for rebate eligibility for people at this level and most costs put that at 400 billion annually. So, this would need to be made up for. According to these number, income and payroll tax accounted for 2.75 trillion in the government revenue for 2017. According to this americans spent 10.7 trillion shopping last year. At 23 , this would generate 2.46 trillion just off of consumer shopping. Again, this is just shopping and does not include auto sales or other things This would also require companies to pay taxes on goods they purchased as well as materials. Amazon did not pay any taxes last year and they are far from the only company. Furthermore, there is the growing sentiment that rich people do not pay taxes and yes their bracket might be 38 but many pay far less than that. Therefore, I think it is reasonable to conclude the flat tax on goods would generate more revenue than the current income tax system. Now, I suck at math. I am not good at it. So I am open to other models and analysis that prove me wrong. Furthermore, in my opinion, this would benefit the middle to upper middle class the most and with the rebate would not hurt people living below the poverty line. The people at the top would theoretically pay more taxes because as of now they do not. However, this is merely pessimistic conjecture and a common perception that I have no statistical date to support that rich people pay well below their tax bracket. Mostly just rich people bragging about not paying taxes Trump . Personally I think this is the most reasonable system but again I feel I am missing some key numbers and am not an economist. So am I correct or am I way off and these are not accurate numbers and therefore the money generated would send us into a great recession? Obviously this would be a great upheaval in how we do things. EDIT As many have pointed out sales taxes are regressive in nature and hurt the poor. I am not arguing against that and the rebate would need to be calculated to do away with the penalties the sales tax often renders against those in poverty. As others have pointed out Econ 101 if you raise prices people will buy less. However, as most models show the more money people have the more they spend as their income increases. It would allow people who needed to save to buy property or pay off high interest loans quicker a better avenue to do so, however most people who are property owners and have no student loans would probably spend more due to the increased income. As others have also stated, what I am promoting is the fair tax, however I hate that name. I think it tries to do what people who named The Patriot Act or Affordable Care Act have done and that is paint it as WHAT YOU ARE AGAINST A TAX THATS FAIR, AN ACT THAT PARTIOTIC, AND CARE THAT IS AFFORDABLE HOW DARE YOU So while what I am arguing is what is usually referred to as the Fair Tax just know that I support everything about it besides the name. Here is the wiki page<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Flat Tax on Goods would generate more money for the U.S. Government and also benefit citizens.\n","id":"bee26433-17a0-4bd5-bbfb-372947851a62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Funding for space exploration<|ARGUMENT|>\"Mars Rising?\". The Economist. January 22, 2009.: \"Luckily, technology means that man can explore both the moon and Mars more fully without going there himself. Robots are better and cheaper than they have ever been. They can work tirelessly for years, beaming back data and images, and returning samples to Earth. They can also be made sterile, which germ-infested humans, who risk spreading disease around the solar system, cannot.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Funding should only go to cost-effective robotic space exploration\n","id":"ef67b250-0214-422f-acb8-1ba96052e5b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Amount of money and industries and connections to the people involved involved in making the deals seems like clear evidence of some type of wrongdoing on the part of the state department. There have even been article written as early as 2015 on the shadyness of events surrounding the decision to allow the acquisition of the company. In 2010 CIFUS, commitee on foreingn in vestment in the U.S Approved the sale of Uranium one to the Rusian company Rosatom, which is effectivly an arm of russian government. During the decision making process while Hillary headed up the state department. Tens of Millions of dollars went to the Clinton foundation, as well as 500,000 directly to Bill after a speech in Moscow. These donations came from people in industries that would seemingly have an interest in accessing U.S Uranium like the chairman of uranium on who donated 1 dollars to the Clinton foundation and is also a friend business partners of frank guitarist who happens to be very friendly and a Business associate of Bill Clinton, and is responsible for helping to raise tens of millions for Hillary during both attempts at the presidency.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Uranium One Deal\" is a clear cut case of bribery and governmental misconduct.\n","id":"193ea01d-3a6a-41d5-9d0b-e0b265dd7a30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't recycle, I simply use my recycling bin as a second garbage bin. The reason why is in the title, I know recycling will never benefit me, it will never hurt me and therefore it is a complete waste of my valuable time. I don't get paid if I recycle therefore there's no benefit for me to recycle. In our area, we don't even get fined for putting the wrong things in the recycling. I don't swim in the oceans therefore I won't even know if there is lots of rubbish in the oceans. No benefit for me there either. I don't get to feel good about saving precious materials because most of the things that are recycled include glass and paper. I don't rememeber ever hearing anything in the news about a glass or paper shortage so it doesn't make me feel good to try and save materials that aren't even in shortage. I don't care about animals and I don't eat animals therefore it doesn't bother me if animals die because they eat a plastic bag or whatever. Animals dying or going extinct will have no harmful impact on my life. I don't even visit the zoo, why should I care if the turtles are extinct? So what? I don't live near a landfill so if the landfill gets bigger, smellier or whatever it has absolutely no impact on my life and it'll never contaminate my water or have any harmful impact on my health. Even if somehow the impossible happened and a landfill got full. Okay, just build on top of it and choose some unhabitable area as the next landfill. There's lots of unhabitable land here in Australia that many people don't care about so we can just use that and if it does have to happen, there is a 100 chance that it'll happen without me even knowing much about it because it's easy for a government to do this. To , tell me why I should waste my valuable time recycling when it will never benefit me and never hurt me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I shouldn't be expected to recycle because it will never benefit me, it will never hurt me and therefore it is a complete waste of my valuable time.\n","id":"b3657c4f-d223-4287-a698-4f787749a0a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the use of 'chosen' or gender-neutral pronouns be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Adapting our vocabulary is a necessary step towards creating a society that is safe and inclusive to LGBT, non-binary, and other marginalized groups.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This could help improve the lives of a marginalized and often discriminated group.\n","id":"c2d550e8-f7c8-4080-a575-af26f51d7b56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Allow me to provide some context for why I take this stance. My older brother was an organ donor. One day, he got into a car accident due to ice on the road, he crashed into a tree and ended up dying. Since he was an organ donor, his heart went to someone. My mother, while we were all in the later stages of grieving wanted to look up on the internet where my brother's organs went. She ended up discovering that his heart went to a woman who was driving under the influence of cocaine and had a history of DUIs, drug charges, and domestic abuse. He was, for lack of better words, a horrible person who made a lot of people's lives worse. Yet, he had a second chance at life instead of someone else. Understandably, this made my mother especially, and all of us, very upset. My brother would likely have never wanted his heart to go to someone like that, and there are many organ donors who would agree. That is why I propose an option for organ donors where they can choose to limit the donation of any of their organs to someone who has a certain criminal record, or otherwise has a history of behavior they personally believe to be highly immoral and behavior they don't want to support. The default option would be the way it usually is, but they'd have the option to change it. It would merely go to the nearest applicable person in the queue for the organ. The reason I think this is a good idea is because, as well all know, organ donations are often in very limited supply, especially compatible ones. Think of the person who didn't get a heart from my brother, someone who didn't choose to ruin their body with cocaine, alcohol, and abuse. Think of someone who has a congenital heart defect, why shouldn't the organ donor have a say in where their organs go? It would be, in many ways, a matter of bodily autonomy, it is their body part, and they get a say in who that body part goes to after they die. Just like how you can't force someone to donate organs, you shouldn't be able to force someone to donate organs to someone they don't want to. Just to clarify, this would be entirely up to the organ donor. I'm open to hearing your thoughts on this issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Organ donors should be given an option to limit the donation of their organs to people who don't have a severe criminal record.\n","id":"371c9964-e881-4e29-aacd-ed0a8de0632b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off I'll say now that I'm mostly pro choice. I dislike the idea of abortions done late in the pregnancy and consequently believe that abortions should only be legal for the first few months but they're a rather small minority and of the ones that are done I'd imagine a fair number are for health reasons, which I'm all for . Both sides have their zealots, and I guess this bothers me more so because I both agree with the core idea behind abortion, but the reasoning used by many pro choice people strikes me as being rather stupid. The core of the abortion issue, I believe, is whether or not the fetus has rights. Everything else is just fluff meant to draw people in to either side as well as giving them an excuse to get angry I remember seeing a thread in atheism? I think that read something like 'how do christians justify their crusade against women?' in regards to abortion and I couldn't help but roll my eyes. If a fetus has the same rights as a person, surely a 'women's right to do what she wants with her body' doesn't trump a fetus' right to, you know, not get murdered. My right to swing my arm ends at your nose and all that, as well as the fact that the right to do what you etc. doesn't include killing other people with it because duh . Why would that be different with regards to abortion? I've seen people argue that the fetus doesn't have the right to occupy the women's body without her consent, but isn't the consent implied given that the women is at least partially rape notwithstanding responsible for putting it there in the first place? A fetus cannot, by its very nature, be held responsible for literally anything it does before birth, and consequently anything that it does is the fault responsibility of the parents more the mother than the father, but hey it does take 2 to get started With that said, I genuinely believe that the idea of abortion as a woman's rights issue is less about women's right itself than it is about giving pro choicers something to get angry about because one pissed off person who agrees with you is worth 50 calm quiet ones as far as politics are concerned , and would love to have someone logically change that, since it does strike me as an easier stance to take that it's a women's rights issue but alas I can't side with something I find logically wrong, even if it seems easier, so please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the issue of abortion is in no way a women's rights issue,\n","id":"503bcc0e-f6c0-4f58-ae5f-97d86eda9944"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Talking here about the type of relationship that is purely about sex, long term, not a one night stand. Label it however you like. The reason for thinking this is that I haven\u2019t heard a compelling argument against how these situations are essentially two people agreeing to use each other, and even if it\u2019s fully consensual, I still don\u2019t think using someone, for anything, is healthy behavior. I wouldn\u2019t be comfortable with having a \u2018friend\u2019 who owns a cool video game, and we have an agreement that the only time we hang out is to play that game. It\u2019s pretty clear I value playing that game, not my \u2018friend,\u2019 and even if they were fine with it, it still feels wrong. The most common justification I hear for this is that if both people have no issue with it, then who is it hurting? And I don\u2019t have a good answer to that. It has been my observation that people claiming this are simply turning to an available vice to alleviate loneliness or insecurity, then using sex positivity as a shield. I should mention there are studies that show relying on sex for attention, validation, treating loneliness, etc., is correlated to poorer mental health. But perhaps I\u2019m just imposing my morals on others. Further speculation based on anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that engaging in this type of relationship encourages a selfish mindset, while degrading self worth. Despite knowing a fairly large number of people who have are involved in such a relationship, I can\u2019t say any of them are secure comfortable with who they are, however, I acknowledge how subjective that statement is. Please, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"FWB\/casual relationships are mentally unhealthy.\n","id":"6dfb4345-27c5-4b7b-b39a-7d75ef4e5e31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand why google and godaddy are banning neo nazi people but I don't like it. These people should be able to do what everyone else can and speak their minds. It is their right to speak their minds. This is how people take our freedoms away. When Obama was doing executive order after executive order I knew it would not end up well. If we ban things we don't like we will end up with only the most popular ideas allowed. We need to allow people to speak their minds no matter how dumb their opinions might be. All we will do is make them a secret society and essentially force them to attack because they are being mistreated. This happens all the time and shouldn't happen in America. EDIT I agree they should be removed due to threats of violence. However, if they did not threaten violence I think they should be allowed to speak. Deltas given to a couple people. I wrote this last night before I went to bed and have enjoyed the ideas here. Also, I was wrong about Obama's executive order count however my main issue is we cannot cherry pick what we like and don't like. The Left using executive orders to further their cause allows The Right to do the same without complaint. I am not agreeing with either side but if you allow one you must allow the other. Thank you to all<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banning the hate groups from having websites or places to express their opinion is a bad thing\n","id":"20b668a2-85aa-4712-987f-30dec44788da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Or so I think, but I don't know what I would get out of it that I don't here. I'm 20 and I don't use Facebook. Shocker, I know. Not Twitter or G or Snapchat or wait I thought Instagram was a cereal? I do have an inactive Tumblr and Deviantart under the same username as here, but emphasis on inactive. I just don't see the use of social media. I can text, call, or email anyone I wanna talk to, and I like Reddit more than what I know about Facebook because I can start a conversation with a group who all talk about similar things and I can help people asking about what I know. I've considered signing up, but the other real drawback is lack of anonymity. I like people not knowing my real name until after I formally meet them, and I like not being mistaken for all 90000 lt redacted gt s out there. Plus I don't want status updates, I want conversations and shared awesome. Change my view. Or at the very least show me another community as interesting as what we've got here. Well, view is changed. Deltas for everybody<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have no reason to sign up for most social media.\n","id":"ab25dd2c-55a1-42ef-837e-c8cbd383e9f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My reasoning is simply that I don't want my kids to be confused about the workings of reality. The most common justification for lying to our kids about Santa is that it inspires the kind of mysticism that only children are capable of. I really despise the idea that kids can only have this sense of wonder if we lie to them about how the world works. It has become a cultural norm to convince our children that they live in this alternate reality from the one adults live in, in which men fly through the air on sleighs and fairies collect teeth in exchange for money. I view this as completely unnecessary, and even counterproductive for instilling my children with the ability to evaluate the world around them in a meaningful way. I want to raise my children with active imaginations, capable of being totally absorbed in a book or a game of make believe , but with the ability to differentiate between that make believe and the real world. When I think back to the Christmases I had as a child, thinking that Santa would soon be descending my chimney was an amazing feeling. However, it was the excitement surrounding having all my family come together to spend time and do stuff together that really stuck with me. Not much would have changed if I had been told that my presents came from my loving parents and family instead of a stranger I'd never get to see. In fact, I probably would have been more grateful for the gifts I received. I'll address other points of contention as they're made . Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When I have a kid, I will not tell them that Santa or any other mythical figure is real\n","id":"327968f5-9f84-41e9-aaac-36416d6bf3eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people make 'throwaway' accounts when they are making a post or posts they think will get downvoted. The fact that they made the 'throwaway' account shows intent and their intent is to be trolls. I understand sometimes people have legit reasons for using 'throwaways', like if they don't want to be identified because they are posting about something sensitive or whatever. But I think it sucks that so many people are posting with 'throwaways' just so they can say racist, sexist, or homophobic shit anonymously. If I notice that someone is using a 'throwaway' like if they have never submitted a link and most of their comments are insults then I'm gonna vote them down. What else can I do? This is sort of off topic but sometimes I wish there was a rule where you couldn't post comments on a sub unless you have submitted at least one link to it. Anyway, if you think there is something cool about being a troll and using a 'throwaway' so you can hide how lame you are then please , I would love to stop looking down on people like you because I know looking down on anyone is useless and just makes this world a less chill place to be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using a 'throwaway' account to post troll-ish comments on reddit is lame\n","id":"b800603f-561e-4660-a943-fd3cf889de3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gays in the US military<|ARGUMENT|>\"Bill targets 'don't ask, don't tell'\". USA Today. March 12, 2007 - \"Marine Maj. Stewart Upton, a Pentagon spokesman, says nearly 11,000 in war zones. 'We are enforcing the policy,' he says. 'We are not experiencing any problems with recruiting and retention.'\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Don't ask don't tell\" is not harming recruiting\n","id":"5aba4df5-ab0b-4b6b-b583-ec240d00c0eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can anything be proven without assumption?<|ARGUMENT|>Assumptions can only be a result of a thought process and cannot come forth otherwise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To believe you are thinking, proves you exist, or does it?\n","id":"008743fd-ba76-45f5-b6fe-6711c9162262"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>It was suggested that the Rainforest Alliance would be more effective but is driven out of the market. griffithsspeaker.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Fair Trade conglomerate drives out competitive alternative models with higher standards and enforcement abilities\n","id":"302597d1-3fc4-4d5a-a59a-99f568ba3564"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tezos: Protocol Amendment #1<|ARGUMENT|>Encourages more individuals to bake for themselves, manage their own tezos, learn more about the protocol and participate more in the community. This would add another dimension of personal investment beyond merely financial.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Amendment Proposal #2: Would increase the current gas limit AND reduce the roll size requirement.\n","id":"970f33ff-1e98-4f60-8c4a-09b8f5abade3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realize I am late to this party but it keeps coming up in the media. For anyone who somehow missed this, James Damore a programmer at Google who was fired after circulating this memo internally at Google taken from Damore's website and a public uproar as well as turmoil within google. This firing was widely criticized by conservatives and others generally concerned by the suppression of free speech and political correctness run amok, and is often portrayed as a reasonable, or even scientifically uncontroversial, document. In fact, I believe it was a poorly reasoned and highly biased document, that the reaction of many women refusing to work for him and even consider leaving google was a reasonable one, and that as a result it was reasonable, and even advisable, for google to terminate Damore. First, Damore's argument. Damore identifies certain personality traits that he claims are associated with success in tech, and states, correctly, that women on average tend to not have as much of the positive trait he identified as men, or more of a negative trait. Therefore we should not presume gender differences are due to bias. While Damore cites studies about personality differences, he does not cite any studies showing that the personality traits he identifies lead to success in tech. This is unsurprising because, per the article summarized here none of the personality traits that Damore identifies as correlated with success in tech is actually correllated with success in tech. The three personality traits associated with success in tech are introversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness, with openness showing the strongest correlation. Damore talks about oppenness and extroversion with respect to what subcategories of those traits he speculates track tech success, but fails to mention conscientiousness at all in the context of gender, which is relevant to this discussion because women score higher on average than men in this trait, so that undercuts his argument women also are more extroverted than men on average which cuts against them but the correlation between extroversion and gender is weaker than conscientiousness . So the personality argument for a gender gap is quite weak. The second problem with the gender gap argument is that Damore uses it to explain both the higher prevelence of men who are in tech in general and google specifically, as well as their success once they get there. That is, to the extent that people entering google are disproportionately male because they disproportionately have the type of personality that is well suited to tech, then you aren't talking about a random sample of the population and there is no reason to think that the female googlers have any difference in profile from the males. So it can't work both ways. Turning from the poor quality of his argument to bias. The fact that he failed to do any research on this issue suggests that he was biased to assume that whatever traits favor men also favor success in tech. That does not mean he engaged in conscious bias or acted in bad faith that is, it would be hasty to assume that he found the seame research I did and just didn't bother to mention it because it blew up his central thesis. It might be that he just had a gut assumption that these traits must be important and ran with it. But that is bias nonetheless. A more glaring bias is his criticism of google's lack of political diversity. That is, he makes the exact assumption he criticizes on gender diversity with respect to political diversity liberal skew of google is evidence of bias. This is notwithstanding the fact that the type of non bias factors he points to are well documented with respect to political differences. I'm reluctant to even list these because it seems mean spirited to suggest skew is due to these factors, but I am not actually endorsing that argument, merely noting that to the extent Damore's argument works w r t gender it is even stronger as to politics. Conservatives have a lower IQ on average than liberals, conservatives score worse on personality tests w r t openness to experience, conservatives are less likely to go to college, or graduate school, conservatives who do go to college are less likely to study not only comp sci, but essentially any stem field not related to oil and gas. But Damore doesn't even consider this. This creates the impression that Damore's message to women I'm oversimplifying slightly but i think it makes the point is you fail because you are less qualified, and if I fail it's bias. Next, to turn to why I was quite sympathetic with the reaction of women to this memo. I should note that, as my name suggests I am male, so I don't intend to speak for women, this is just an explanation of why I understood this letter to not only be obnoxious to women at google, but seriously troubling if it gained traction at google and was the sort of thing that googlers discuss openly. The most egregious thing to me was his comment that women are on average more neurotic than men, and this may explain why female googlers on average express more anxiety in internal surveys. As I noted above, this is a bogus argument on its face because you cannot infer from the average population anything about how such a non average population like google employees will behave. For all we know, because of all the shit women have to go through to get to a place like google on top of the shit that both men and women have to deal with , that screening factor produces female googlers who are actually less neurotic on average than men. But worse, by tying the trait to expressed anxiety levels he suggests that women's complaints about the work environment are at least in part a manifestation of their biological predispositions. Essentially he comes close to pathologizing any complaint a woman might raise about sexism in the work place. The stigmatization of neuroticism also will discourage women from speaking lest they be seen as a neurotic woman. So, given that women had very good justifications to be deeply concerned about this memo to the extent it was considered an acceptable point of view at google, and that women in fact did complain, a very serious response from google was warranted. Was firing him necessary, likely yes. He seemed unrepentant in his point of view and it was encouraging others not only to express discontent about some diversity policies, which whether or not you agree is a work appropriate dialogue, but biological differences between the sexes and what that says about women in tech in general and at google in particular. That is, whether Damore was consciously sexist, if his speech was accepted it would create a clear roadmap for very thinly coated sexism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It was appropriate that James Damore got fired\n","id":"2d4dc4c4-aaf5-4f44-b7c9-d64d073061f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is there a place for a uniform in today's education system?<|ARGUMENT|>Over 80% of teachers in the United States see uniforms as contributing to a happy school community, as well as 95% of teachers believe that wearing uniform helps students 'fit in' with their peers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being equal enhances the chances to be accepted by peers.\n","id":"3301ce82-e809-4eb5-bac1-24403c660de6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>700 mile US Mexico border fence<|ARGUMENT|>- While the barrier might not cover the entire span of the border, it will cover one-third, channeling illegal immigrants to the remaining two-thirds of the border. Border patrolmen, will be able to better concentrate their efforts on the remaining two-thirds of the border with better results.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The 700 mile fence will help channel illegal immigrants to areas patrolled by border agents\n","id":"34f278ff-a0e8-4d00-8b24-140e4f2b757d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>It is generally poorer countries that have expanding populations. The first world has now reached a point of stagnant population growth - even declining populations, as in the case of Japan and others. The inability of poorer countries to control their populations should not impact the lives of those in the first world. The first world having earned their luxuries and should not be denied them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are over 7 billion people on the planet and we are not able to responsibly care for all of them. The correct choice of action is to lessen the population to manageable sizes. Ideally, the most intelligent course of action would be to lessen the population to the point where factory farms are not needed.\n","id":"825c0cf2-2f12-4800-b318-4049ecc5ff88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>It would be attainable to eradicate the sort of extreme poverty that causes families to have more than 2.3 children average per couple, which is the rate that maintains a stable population.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An even distribution of populations and resources is a utopian dream that is always just one execution away from becoming a reality, so it is never possible to accomplish.\n","id":"0d3d337c-f222-4f4d-96cf-1a2f01a33196"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Schools Has the Right to Search Student's Lockers<|ARGUMENT|>The magnitude of the problem should be the basis for this debate. In the USA, every school day, at least 100,000 students bring guns to school; 160,000 students skip classes because they fear physical harm; 40 students are hurt or killed by firearms; 6,250 teachers are threatened with bodily injury; 260 teachers are physically assaulted. Is searching someone\u2019s locker really a step too far in trying to stop this?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The magnitude of the problem should be the basis for this debate. In the USA, every school day, at ...\n","id":"bd6117c8-3eeb-47d9-90de-1c9b2aa7874b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>Lobbyists have better arguments for allowing questions about genetic predisposition, as these are performance-related, unlike currently prohibited questions about religious or sexual orientation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians are susceptible to pressure from lobbyists which can make them tolerate this kind of discrimination in the workplace.\n","id":"5d05be11-8766-4897-9e9d-00d1519471ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>There may not be sufficient time to get a post-legislative referendum in place before the proposed exit in March 2019.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The negative practicalities of running a referendum do not warrant going through one again.\n","id":"8117c64d-4079-4752-8a1b-663e043c78e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have recently thought about how distracted the device makes me, how fast the battery drains, the size of it with the case to protect the expensive device , and how much more it costs to include data as opposed to a simple talk and text plan. These prices are in the states by the way, I understand prices are very different in other countries such as Canada Through out the work day, many people do fall into a rut and need a quick distraction to save them from mind numbing work on a slow day. But Since I have the entirety of the worlds knowledge in my pocket, I whip it out and browse reddit or facebook occasionally Even with the same website sometimes still open on the computer I am working on. The battery drains fast. There are plenty of us who have to charge our phones every night or else we are without a phone the next day. Yes, there are ways to prolong your battery life, but after deleting apps and not using the phone for its smart use in the first place, what is the point? The size. I am glad we ditched the trend of tiny phones with tiny buttons, but some of these phones are getting ridiculous. I have big hands, so my galaxy s5 isn't a problem when I use it although my thumb stretches if i want to use the other side . And since I don't want to break the 600 device from a drop I have a case, which makes it a pocket hog. A simple plan with decent data is 45 month, and up towards 80 month depending on how much data you want. That isn't too bad, but for anyone wanting to save money and find corners to cut, many 25 month and lower plans are available for just talk and text. Smart phones get outdated.Fast. Recently many older iPhone users have complained and even sued when an updated that was un reversible cause their iphone to slow down tremendously. Since smart phone are basically computers, new software updates and newer apps will cause the older hardware to strain. this makes it almost essential to upgrade about every two years or so although I know many people who have nicely functioning older smartphones But when you do have to upgrade, that is at least 500 for the latest gadget, plus what ever case you need if you are me. One of my biggest concerns is the connectivity via the internet, and it's impact on social health. We live in an age of constant connectivity, and this has shortened many of our attention spans. Along with that, when I get real face time with someone, one of us is bound to check their phone a handful of times due to the constant need of new information. Not in general public We have always disliked strangers but with our FRIENDS. With the rise of Wifi being available essentially any where, I can carry another device capable of maps and general internet searching if I know there is a chance of getting lost. Along with that, that same device in my situation can store my music an I can use it when working out or taking a hike with out the fear of interruption from some app or even a text. And When I do need to check my email or facebook, that can wait until i am home or a planned time and place to check all of that stuff, putting me back in control of some methods people contact me. I would lose some functionality, and occasionally need to carry another device with me, but the mental, financial, and practicality benefits would outweigh the loss. Edit Words<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I and many other people would have more pros than cons from ditching our smartphone.\n","id":"467e9f89-b1c4-4206-816a-9f135b21103e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This people are selling good feelings. Not really being able to talk to the dead or a magic pill to lose weight. They are like movies or video games. They sell a happy time and its not their fault if you believe them. If you watch Independence Day and really think aliens are invading Earth, its not Will Smith's fault even though says in the movie that aliens are invading Earth. They are entrepreneurs that have found a unique way of selling things. They aren't actually hurting anybody. People pay Teresa Caputo money and in return they get good feelings. Nobody is being hurt by her. The Food Babe may use psuedoscience and have people avoid food that doesn't actually hurt them, but people feel good about. They feel good paying extra money for her sponsors food then buying junk food . The Thinking Mom's Revolution gives answers to parents on why their children are autistic. Sure the information is wrong. But they feel better knowing its not their fault.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fear mongers like The Thinking Mom's Revolution and the Food Babe and woo sellers likeDr. Oz and Teresa Caputo should be applauded and not disliked.\n","id":"1da907b5-f5ee-4164-b71a-ab26722e2cf3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I guess I'll preface this by saying that I am a male who is pro choice and have no issue loss of respect sense of disgust towards women who have had abortions or plan to, be they co workers, friends, family or strangers. A while ago I had an argument with both of my nieces, who both identify as feminists, because I had said that while I feel women should have the right to choose abortion without shame or ridicule, I personally do not want to become romantically involved with a woman who would choose to have one has had one before. My reasons for thinking this is because I have the right to choose who I date or marry, I have the right to set some personal criteria for potential partners, and they have the right to not date or marry me if they have problems with my criteria. I'm not truly excluding anyone because its a matter of compatability and personal choice. Not every woman who has an accidental or unplanned pregnancy wants to have an abortion. Yet my nieces said that I can't honestly be supportive of pro choice if I won't give women who have had or will have abortions the fair chance of becoming romantically involved with me, but when I ask why, they can't give me a straight answer. So , am I in the wrong? If so please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that it is fully possible for me to support womens' right to choose abortion, while at the same time prefering to only have romantic relationships with women who would NOT make that choice. -?\n","id":"a5991959-6432-493f-95d7-a7338c914fab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Affirmative action is itself a form of discrimination\u2014reverse discrimination against whites. This conflicts with the idea of a color blind society where decisions are made based on \u201cmerit\u201d alone. if the goal of affirmative action is to compensate for historical discrimination, then reverse discrimination is also unfair because it punishes whites today for the crimes of their ancestors. Affirmative action is also counter productive because it stigmatises minorities, characterising them as being in need of special treatment. This is especially true of qualified and talented blacks who succeeded in today\u2019s society without affirmative action. Affirmative action may also be counter productive by putting minorities into situations where they are likely to fail and subsequently encouraging minorities to view themselves as \u201cvictims,\u201d preventing them from reaching their full potential. EDIT u exis007  regarding the suspension of AA<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that affirmative action is discriminatory, and its practice should be suspended\n","id":"ee765967-f7d8-4cfa-ab12-ddca0f028d35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>You should pay off your mortgage early<|ARGUMENT|>Paying off one's mortgage early in this case would result in higher income taxes paid after their mortgage is paid off.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With a mortgage, one can keep the mortgage interest deduction on their personal income taxes in the US.\n","id":"187a0d6f-216f-49de-b02f-860a92d47bf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gays in the US military<|ARGUMENT|>Barry M. Goldwater. \"Ban on Gays is Senseless Attempt to Stall the Inevitable\" - \"Years ago, I was a lieutenant in charge of an all-black unit. Military leaders at the time believed that blacks lacked leadership potential - period. That seems ridiculous now, as it should. Now, each and every man and woman who serves this nation takes orders from a black man - our own Gen. Colin Powell. . Nobody thought that blacks or women could ever be integrated into the military. Many thought that an all-volunteer force could never protect our national interest. Well, it has, and despite those who feared the worst - I among them - we are still the best and will continue to be. . The point is that decisions are always a lot easier to make in hindsight. but we seldom have that luxury. That's why the future of our country depends on leadership, and that's what we need now.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Military gay ban is analogous to ban on blacks and women\n","id":"498fcea3-d36b-4bf7-a96c-5e96b2d74348"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do not feel compassion for those who claim to be suffering from mental illnesses such as depression, ADHD, anxiety, or any eating disorder. My reason behind this has a lot to do with the social trend of self diagnosing and self labeling mostly online. If someone comes to me and shares that they are depressed, I automatically dismiss the issue and don't take them seriously. Same with any other popular diagnosis . I view them as self absorbed, incoherent, and self pitying assholes. Now, keep in mind that I have had more than enough experience with the world of mental illnesses. I was put under the microscope after a long battle with addictive and destructive habits, being hospitalized and institutionalized 5 times in the process. I've seen more than I ever cared to see in how mentally ill people really act and how they're really discriminated against. I believe that experience has destroyed any compassion for those who claim to have the trendy disorders. I come off as uncaring and emotionally distant because of it. Kindly  so I don't end up being the asshole I view everyone else as. EDIT It seems that a lot of people are reading my post as I don't believe mental illnesses exist. I know they do and I'm more than aware that they are serious. However, the spike in self diagnosis is what I'm talking about. Hence why I included Due to the current social trends in my title. Please read all of my post before commenting. EDIT Ok so, apparently this is a very sensitive topic. I didn't realize I'd end up offending a lot of people. I'll leave this up, but I won't be replying any more. I'll be in the corner of shame if anyone needs me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Due to the current social trends, I do not have any respect for those who claim to be mentally ill.\n","id":"d9cc7ac2-b414-4040-b6cf-6a66bd2b930d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>Article 19: \"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.\" Universal right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UDHR articles 1-3, 5-12, 16-20, and 22-29 are specifically directed to the idea that when someone crosses a border, they keep all rights and legal protections.\n","id":"8c2544b2-3c1c-4d65-b13e-99f8da51e91e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that the BLM and gay pride rights are different movements focusing on different issues. And as such how they interact with the rest of society and, in this case the police, should be different. While I have sympathy for the grevances of BLM, I generally hate their tactics blocking last years gay pride parade, disrupting other events etc. . I think that the organizers of the gay pride parade should not have succumbed to the BLM demand that uniformed officers do not participate in this year's gay pride parade. It diminishes the connection between the gay community and the police and goes against the goals of the LGTB community for the benefit of BLM goals. I won't get into whether I think the BLM goal of isolating themselves from the police is right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black Lives Matter should not have been able to dictate that the Toronto gay pride parade exclude uniformed police officers.\n","id":"f53e0105-ce80-4012-96cc-53b658e56bf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The Internet Be Regulated?<|ARGUMENT|>Child blocks and age restrictions on sites can restrict harmful internet content from young children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Restrictions can be put in place to limit the amount of potentially harmful information.\n","id":"811b4184-70b4-4cdf-9f7e-8fb148957a92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Infinity as one of God's aspects may not only manifesting in entities but also in relations. Multiverse might lead to infinite number of stars then the creation will also be infinite. The closest approximation to the view of this is fractal structure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There could be a hierarchy of them with a Higher Intelligence created by an even Higher Intelligence who is in turn created by a still Higher Intelligence & so on & on ad infinitum.\n","id":"e16fab71-0f01-4f24-ae06-a1019f53975b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>It is an outdated assumption to judge only by appearances, this includes gender identity. Such superficial judgements no longer are relevant in today's diverse and modern society where people can be completely different to what their appearance conveys.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Simply because some people may believe that someone does not 'pass' as a woman doesn't mean they are not a woman; gender cannot be assumed by someone's appearance.\n","id":"73f42cce-3055-4a53-a461-7e9566d5a81a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>There is an implicit promise made among members in non-cannibalistic societies. The deceased are to be treated with respect, usually buried or cremated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eating humans is forbidden in practically all societies and regarded as taboo, whilst eating animals of any kind is not.\n","id":"dc80a144-6689-4cb6-bd8a-388b5f60f599"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Information warfare more ethical than conventional warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>The US was only able to pay for the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq by borrowing money<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The cost for wars are often paid through borrowing, which increases budget deficits.\n","id":"de9498ad-567a-4dd7-85e8-10db087e6702"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is no good reason to question the legitimacy of a second EU membership referendum in the UK. This is the case for several reasons. Firstly, the first referendum was nothing other than a political ploy by David Cameron to sway UKIP voters to vote for the Conservative party in the 2015 election. If it was a response to a new treaty or other new EU policy or other change, that would make more sense. But this was a simple political move, with no real external legitimacy. In the light of that fact, any second referendum cannot be somehow seen as illegitimate or otherwise. If the first one is just a political decision, the second one can be similarly so, in response to wide scale public pressure. Secondly, second referendums have happened in other countries when there has been a specific response to a specific policy. If in those countries, it is legitimate to ask a second referendum to a deeply specific question, it is more than legitimate for the UK to ask for a second referendum on a very very general question. Third, a common response to this has been to say a second referendum would be a massive expense . I don't think any seriously minded economist would argue that the cost of a second referendum would be remotely comparable to the costs associated with leaving the EU. I would like to see if anyone has a serious answer as to why such a referendum would be illegitimate and shouldn't happen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A second EU referendum would be legitimate\n","id":"558d6235-9302-462f-b242-da4fd8954d72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I still have an old Yahoo email address and find it ridiculous. Tons of spam flood my inbox and even if I tag those emails as spam, they keep coming. I resorted to reporting those addresses as harassing but they keep coming. Their news service is a clickbaity tabloidish display of cheap news or overinflated ones. They keep suggesting over and over that I should change my password from time to time. I don't fucking want to change my password simply because I have an algorithm which helps me remember passwords, and if a site asks me to change it, I will have to remember it specifically. Frequent error messages and apologies for sloppy browsing. If I made a private email service from scratch, it would be at least as reliable and handy as Yahoo. So I really don't understand how do they survive. I would bet my house Yahoo will not exist anymore within 2 years, at least in this horrible setup.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Yahoo is a walking corpse\n","id":"98c84062-32ce-4564-99e1-9d15f6e6d2a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are GMO's The Solution To Limited Means?<|ARGUMENT|>Farmers worry and have to go to extra lengths creating mechanisms such as buffer zones areas of land with no crops so no transgenic crops can arise. The fear of being sued by Monsanto has created great concern in Americas farming community as many cannot afford the legal fees to defend against a phenomenon that is out of their control entirely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Seed patenting. Often seeds can be carried by winds or other natural mechanisms, if the GMO is patented, farmers with no control on the distribution of other farmers seeds, have and will be punished unless laws change.\n","id":"407d84a4-3f0a-44b9-8bc5-69d94188bbb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In today's society, we are taught to think that it doesn't matter what other people think, as long as you believe in yourself . However, I find this to be completely false. In a world where we work in teams, as a community, in cities and in countries, the entire description of yourself is based on how other people view you, rather than how you view yourself. For example, no matter how funny you think you are, funniness is only determined by how funny OTHER people find you. You may be able to change how funny you are, but only by taking into account of what other people think is funny. Furthermore, it is based on other people's decisions that get you to where you want to be. You can't sell a product without someone buying it. You can't get a job without someone hiring you. You do not exist until you are recognized to exist. Please, change my mind on this. I'm having some really shitty thoughts, but can't help to get this mantra out of my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ONLY thing that matters is what other people think or do.\n","id":"8ee7d3e6-5b61-4991-bc45-740169ab012d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ethereum Ecosystem should be funded through some form of taxation<|ARGUMENT|>ENS developer relations coordinator Brantly Milegan estimates that forthcoming ENS annual rent will hit $250,000 per year in 2020.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Ethereum becomes very popular the revenue from ENS name rents will become significant.\n","id":"92a89b0a-d4c6-428e-8ad2-a6739655de8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Most workplaces enforce a dress code that is not prescribed by legislation. Those dress codes prohibit torso nudity for both genders. It is unlikely that those dress codes would go away because of a change in the law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who object to nipple exposure could move to gated off 'nipple free zones' instead of demanding others accommodate them.\n","id":"d810d420-35ed-4931-9f29-3051384f70b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no permanent members of the UN Security Council<|ARGUMENT|>Permanent presence on the UNSC ensures continuity in the resolution of complex international situations which take decades to resolve, much longer than the terms served by non-PMs, e.g. Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Georgia and Cyprus. This continuity in turn allows UNSC to work to resolve longstanding international issues consistently and with decisive force regardless of any undue influence and pressure from other countries that non-PMs may face when seeking reelection. Thus, due to the \u2018Cyprusization\u2019 effect where deliberations have lasted for years in which many non-PMs have not been involved, only PMs can effectively address these issues. As they have participated in discussions of these issues before, \u201cthey have a continuous record of what has been discussed over the years and in the context of informal consultations, and possess superior information over other members.\u201d Rev Int Organ 2011 6:163\u2013187\/DOI 10.1007\/s11558-011-9101-1, p. 173 Preserving PM is essential to ensuring UNSC has the institutional memory and experience necessary to deal with issues of international peace and security. Only PMs have a continuous record and memory of the UNSC\u2019s work over the years. As UNSC often relies on precedents in its work, non-PMs have either no knowledge of or background on these precedents and need PMs\u2019 help. p. 260 Thus, to abolish PM would be undermine the work done by UNSC throughout its history because of lack of institutional memory and experience among non-PMs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Argument 3: PM ensures continuity essential to resolving issues of international peace and security\n","id":"f1bb4316-68f5-4faf-8285-6971060ed16b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In a capitalist society, there is no question this position will be monetized by corporations, as indicated by examples such as the recent throttling of mobile data of Californian fire fighters<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Corporations can utilize their patents for genetically modified products to engage in exploitative practices.\n","id":"63cf9ae7-4a0e-49a9-8b14-7bb63acbef6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It\u2019s taken me a long time to decide. There are still 5 days for me to change my mind, but as it stands I want to leave the UK\u2019s economic injustice, its shoddy governance, and its establishment. I\u2019m going to go through each issue and give a brief overview of the arguments. Then I\u2019ll state why I\u2019m choosing Yes, and why I\u2019m not choosing No. Democracy \u2013 Nobody from either side argues that Westminster is without fault. On the Yes side they pretend that Westminster is bad because it projects Tory government into Scotland. On the No side they believe that Westminster can be changed for the better from within. They\u2019re both wrong. Westminster is anti democratic in other ways. Not just with the problems of the Lords, Cash for Honours and Expenses the voting system means that even when Labour gets into power, it is not because Scotland voted for it. First past the post means that there is bias towards a two party system and the main parties become inevitably more alike as they appeal to centrist, swing voters. And there is no swing in Scotland. It is mainly in the South of England. So it is no surprise that in 69 years of Westminster rule, Scottish votes changed which party received power only once, in 1974. In addition, Westminster steals our best politicians and leaves only numpties like Johann Lamont to hold the Scottish Government to account. If you think those Scottish MPs are doing a good job, over 30 of the 59 voted for benefit caps, and are straying from the ideology of their voter base. Why would we agree to that arrangement? Why, when we have the Additional Member System in Holyrood that is by voting standards pure sex, creates representative parliaments, and where coalitions force parties to adopt common sense policies everyone can agree on rather than top down ideological reorganisations? Politics \u2013 The SNP have created a myth that they are the party of progressiveness, and that independence is the stepping stone to social justice. Many no voters I\u2019ve spoken to just can\u2019t see past Alex Salmond, don\u2019t like \u201cnationalism,\u201d the word is used in the same ignorant way socialism is in the USA and have not thought about the long term consequences of independence on the political discourse. I think the argument that I\u2019ve heard that Scotland has more in common with the London dockworker than the Scottish baron is absolute nonsense. It ignores the fact Scottish and English politics is diverging. Holyrood does not draw on ethnic identity politics. It draws on Scotland\u2019s collectivism. The anti bedroom tax payment, removing charges and private investment from the NHS, community buying of privately owned land, and free university education stand in stark contrast to austerity and corporate welfare. Meanwhile, UKIP\u2019s rise guarantees that Westminster will resemble the worse kind of nationalism more than Holyrood ever could. They stress benefit thievery, not tax dodging. Immigration, not job creation. That we need to protect ourselves from Putin with Trident and from Islamists with military force. Moreover, the system entrenches establishment, widens the wealth gap and shrinks social mobility. Rather than uniting so the system can disenfranchise as it has done, Scotland is far better off walking away from the corporate agenda, not incrementally coaxing it to what it wants. Defence Foreign Policy \u2013 The SNP want rid of trident but want to join NATO, Better Together cry doom at Scotland\u2019s defence and lack of influence at the top. Jobs at Faslane could be threatened but the SNP have pledged to re employ them. We got dragged into an illegal war, and the UK\u2019s foreign policy has been nothing but bad news when it comes to the middle east. Having a smaller voice that says good things is better than a large, infinitely belligerent one. Leaving the UK is not going to change what the UK says, so if you like UK foreign policy, don\u2019t worry, it\u2019s still going to be there. In addition, it will give us a seat on the EU council where the Cabinet secretary stopped the Scottish Fisheries minister from attending , when he is the person with the most influence. EU \u2013 This is an shitstorm equal to the economic arguments. Vast quantities of legal opinions on both sides. At the end of the day, given that Scotland holds 25 of the EU\u2019s renewable energy potential, 20 of the fishery stocks, and only 1 of the population of Europe, a deal will be struck. The EU can\u2019t risk looking anti democratic and it certainly won\u2019t risk those fishery stocks. It will probably take longer than the SNP claim though. Broadcasting \u2013 Anyone in doubt that Scotland needs its own broadcaster need only look at two videos. This one featuring Alex Salmond providing a 7 minute long answer to Nick Robinson\u2019s question despite him heckling. You can dispute whether he answers the second part of the question but I think it\u2019s pretty damn implicit from the content being discussed. Then watch this one featuring how it was reported. Bear in mind that this is the First Minister of Scotland. The prime minister would never be treated like that. Currency and Economics \u2013 SNP have pinned their hopes on a currency union. This will mean a provision for interest rates to be set according to both countries needs. The UK has rubbished the currency union. The economic arguments for both sides are leakier than an outbreak of diarrhoea aboard the Titanic. Every fact is disputed and amid the arse spraying mayhem an informed decision cannot be made. Unlike No voters, I no longer want to trade off social and political justice to gratify the stock market. Engorging bankers\u2019 bonuses while food banks multiply, then saying that it is the way things have to be for economic prosperity? It is an Orwellian hypocrisy. Scotland\u2019s productivity will not have changed post vote. Even if market jitters threaten share prices, it is absurd that businesses would abandon jobs they are still making profit on. Evidence of wealth in recession is easy to find the number of billionaires in India doubled in 2009 alone. The pound\u2019s wobble was not genuine concern for Scotland\u2019s future, but rather fear of existing power structures being challenged.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scotland should be an independent country\n","id":"0f7b6bca-6ec9-4d95-93ce-f76904ecd5e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no limit to freedom of speech.<|ARGUMENT|>Political correctness around speech has been gaining ground. This is harmful as it might stop people from addressing issues because they're afraid to insult\/hurt an individual or group, even when they actually want to raise awareness to a genuine problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Censorship leads to narrow mindedness by preventing sincere and open discussion.\n","id":"c7b93e2e-72c6-43a1-930d-fa7f5713330d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>He just came out agreeing with the sentiment that there may be some racial motivations behind the accusations or the media's treatment of them. While there may be some truth to the possibility that the media may mistreat the subject, it is very difficult to ignore the sheer number of accusations. So, while I believe in innocent until proven guilty, I know that I'll never be in the actual courtroom, so all I have to draw conclusions on is public information. I've realized that I have not really heard any compelling evidence for his innocence and thought I'd seek it out. A shallow Google search doesn't turn up much, so I figured I'd ask the Reddit community to see if they could produce anything convincing. edit presumption of innocence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bill Cosby is guilty of most if not all of the sexual assualt\/rape accusations against him.\n","id":"9fdc458d-30c3-47d1-a9a8-68c8b59d2f3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hold this view because, if for instance, the baby will be born with a severe disability, does killing it before it is born become the right thing to do? What if the diseases won\u2019t affect the baby , but will affect the mother? Also, is it really fair to be making laws that only apply to about half the population? How is that not discrimination? If a women is a victim of rape or incest, should she be forced to continue the pregnancy with an \u201cunwanted baby? Is that at all fair on the women? What if the pregnant is a teenager, no older than 14 15? is abortion appropriate to save the woman? Teenagers who get pregnant, as you may know almost certainly have low prospects for the future, as they are likely to need to drop out of school to raise the baby. They also may have to struggle on the domestic purposes benefit, as finding a job may not be an option if they have to care for the baby. I say argue that the unborn fetus is just a blob of tissue, or mass of cells, and that it is not actually a human, it doesn\u2019t live, it merely exists. I realise it's technically alive, what I mean is that it is unaware I do think that women should be given a right to choose what happens over their own reproductive system, in the it belongs to her, and not the governing bodies of the country she is in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that abortion should be 100% legal.\n","id":"feb69f66-6fa9-485a-a6da-e56ebee78f46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US have withdrawn from NAFTA?<|ARGUMENT|>Traditional economic assumptions that job growth in export-orientated sectors and non-tradable sectors will outweigh job loss in import-orientated sectors have been challenged by the lack of recent evidence of this trend Autor, 37<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It has allowed U.S companies to grow more efficient by firing U.S. employees and relocating business to Mexico. In many instances this is not a positive development for the U.S.\n","id":"2afe4780-bd3e-4513-8d94-6ab7833ed8ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>The process of mining and removing the ores from the ground with heavy equipment is disruptive for nature and environment and releases toxic materials.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To produce an army of AKMs, thousands of tons of metal steel, aluminum, titanium etc., composites, electronics silicon, rare earths etc. are required.\n","id":"3c07cd0a-7c4c-4c26-b44f-cd34c1b5c420"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realised I should put a TW here as I mention some things which are not so pleasant here, so TW I mention suicide once, and anti semitism just mention it as an example. Edit I got the impression that some of the commentors felt that this post is inherently based on hatred of the human race. Just to clarify, it is not based on the hatred of human race at all. it is based more on the moral duty we owe to nature for all the harm and exploitation we did to it in our just 200 years start of exploitative existence. So, not anger per se, more like dissapointment i guess? I am not sure about the exact emotion but it is surely not I hate all humans so therefore they should be killed . Okay so my argument is basically that humans as a species since the industrial revolution basically have incurred huge damage to the environment and that we are destroying it by our greed of extracting more and more resources and making the planet inhabitable for humans and other species. Humans have also been directly responsible for the extinction of many species too and we kind of owe a moral debt to the other animals to not harm them anymore. Now yes the counter is that animals dont have the same morality as us, or even have morality for that matter but that hardly matters as even if we created mortality out of thin air we are still bound by it by our own rules, and not following through on it will be hugely hypocritical of us. Humans have also just been generally bad to each other by being racist, homophobic, sexist and a lot of other horrible things. Not to mention wars, human induced famines, floods and all which leads to more human lives being lost. The main reason I can believe is that the sole fact of humans existing maybe a little pessimistic here but meh . So with all the huge exploitation of animals, the earth which we did to make our lives easier but on the long run just made it more miserable , and even inflicting suffering on other humans itself, I don't think it is such a big stretch to have some kind of doctrine or even a law which mandates that no human should ever procreate anymore. To add on to that, there is this whole sub culture of people saying that parents are infringing the children's right to choose since the children did not ask to be born so hence it is unconstitutional and morally wrong for parents to have kids. This movement is kind of falling short on many cases like, how do you even ask people who do not exist anymore if they want to be born or not? but at the end, it is boiling down to that children shouldn't be born unless we ask them to, so i guess shoehorning this in is kinda okay. x200B To clarify further this does not mean that we should bring eugenics back, that was an abhorrent practice with anti semite roots and should never be bought back again, but instead other things could be implemented like Sterilisation of each and every human on earth indiscriminately, that is biologically human through DNA, so furries don't get a pass at this. this might be the most radical idea in my post . edit I am not sure about the morality of this argument so one can disregard this one, but the core of the argument that humans have to go extinct still remains I believe. Everyone just agreeing to not have kids, and if they do, they should be punished or the babies aborted before born. If the baby is born then the baby should be taken care of by the government and the parents penalised. on the topic of abortions, they should be made legal in any and all cases no matter whatever the reason for the pregnancy, since if the person wants to terminate a pregnancy then they should be allowed, since it's one less human to worry about. edit I am only talking about consensual abortion by people who want to abort here Edit since I just realised this Suicide and euthanasia of any kind should also be allowed as if you take the premise into account, it will be one step closer to the goal of the premise. I have given these actions as a sort of how one could practically put the theory into practice, it is not that I support ALL of these points whole heartedly, I was just showing how it could be implemented. x200B To elaborate, I am also not advocating for people to suspend all morals and go on killing each other on a purge of some kind, no, laws should apply on murder and all. Point is not to kill all humans with a nuclear blast, but to phase people out of existence over time. Since I am only talking about procreation, sex for pleasure is also okay and even any kind of gay sex too, the point is not to stop people from having sex, only to stop people from procreating. It can also be said that some people naturally want to have kids and human DNA is made to replicate itself, but the human DNA does not know much it is destroying the planet or creating suffering for others, so in a larger context it shouldn't matter. One can also say that everyone will be sad if humans start to reduce from earth, but sadness in humans is by it's nature a human emotion, if there are no humans left at the end who is left to feel the emotions? x200B At the end, as humans die out of not procreating and basically not passing on their DNA, the world will also correct itself as the biggest deviant variable is out of the way, and other species have shown no signs of exploiting nature more than what they need, so the balance will be restored. x200B Lemme know what you guys think, I am kind of hoping to actually have my view changed as this belief is kinda new in my mind and I am not completely not sure about this one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is all right if we as humans don't procreate anymore\n","id":"bc6f0f68-80c5-430f-b636-6c18911c8b63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>Patriarchy is generally not an explicit ongoing effort by men to dominate women. It is rather a long-standing system that we are born into and that the majority of people of all gender identities perpetuate unconsciously.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Patriarchal societies have an interest in perpetuating a societal system traditionally run by men. They do this through the idea of fixed gender identities and roles.\n","id":"093c0316-6e2f-41d2-8531-464a6428f13d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe they are cock blocking us from getting high paying jobs and opportunities. I am a 26 year old male, I graduated a couple years ago with a B.Sc and a B.Ed. It has been my understanding that in order for one to obtain a permanent teaching position or even a term position one must go through the front door, that is substitute teaching. Unfortunately, what I noticed was that many young teachers were not being added to the substitute list. I have noticed an alarming trend for schools to give preference to retired teachers and or senior citizens who had better 'connections.' On frequent occasions I have observed these retired teachers sleeping in their desks and going through the motions. What I find particularly disturbing is how they can 'work' and still receive pension on the side. They are essentially double dipping, while the younger generations have to settle for minimum wage jobs, serving coffee, flipping burgers, etc. It's no coincidence that you have young individuals, with degrees of various kinds in almost every discipline, working at Starbucks or Subway, because these silver haired relics are giving preferential treatment to people within their age bracket. When we level criticism to their practices, they toss around words like 'entitled,' 'spoiled brats,' 'ungrateful,' 'over privileged' but I won't stand for it. Many of us have worked minimum wage for years through high school and university. Many graduates are deep in the red with all kinds of debt. There are many who are pushing 30 and still living with their parents thankfully, not myself. The more they keep us away from specialized jobs and the more they keep us away from opportunities, the more this recession will continue to linger. When the boomers die out, we will be left with the burden of their baggage and we'll have to sort out a whole plethora of problems that could've otherwise been remedied years ago.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Baby Boomers subverting the younger generations\n","id":"20683245-8faf-4c9d-97fe-5990e2adf2bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Human bodies are not optimized for prolonged sitting. Many jobs that involved long hours in this position thus put a strain on the spine and the surrounding muscles, which leads to wide-spread chronic problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lifestyle that takes into account the natural requirements and limitations of the human body is certainly more healthy than one ignoring them.\n","id":"9aafc1a9-ccfa-4640-97f0-3184fc027d15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've run into this in several games over the years when you are allowed to buy X item from a shop once a day, or you are allowed to fight X monster once a day. To enforce the once a day part, game developers have two choices. They can either have the game reset at a certain time of the day say midnight, GMT , or they can use a timer and have the game reset at 24 hours after the last attempt. My view is that with very few exceptions, the game should always reset at a set time. The timer method is inconvenient, and causes you to miss out on potential gameplay. For example, say on the first day I first kill the monster at 7 00 before I go to school. On the second day, at best I am going to be allowed to repeat the action at 7 00 plus whatever time it took me to complete the activity, so like 7 05. Realistically, I'm probably not going to start at the exact second that the timer expires, so say 7 10. On the third day, this compounds, and I'm starting at 7 15, then 7 22. Eventually, I can't do it before school so I have to wait till I get home and start the timer at 3 00, then 3 10, etc. If I have anything going on in my life that doesn't allow me to be near the computer at those times, I could lose multiple hours. Soon, I've lost a day. Contrast this to the reset at midnight method. The timer resets when I'm sleeping, and I have the entire day to complete the activity. I'll never lose out on gameplay as long as I can play at least one time during the day, at any time that I chose. I can only think of two exceptions to this. First, if the game developer determines that resetting at a specific time will be gamebreaking due to technological limitations. I could see that having a huge rush of people doing X activity at the same time could conceivably stress the game servers and crash the game. Second, if there is legitimize concern that resetting at specific time will harm gameplay in some way. Maybe having a rush of items entering the game economy all at once would be detrimental. However using gameplay as an excuse should be seriously weighed against the inconvenience that it would cause. I can think of several other reasons that a timer would be used, but none of them outweigh the inconvenience to the player. In order to change my view, you will need to both present a reason to have a timer, and also make a case that the reason is important enough to override the downside of having one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In games with repeatable daily content, the content should always reset at a set time and not 24 hours from the previous attempt.\n","id":"e18d1af3-ae8c-452c-8aba-66908bf049b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Criminal statistics suggest that atheists are morally better than religious followers. Latin-America, Lybia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, etc. all very religious yet very dangerous at the same time. See also:Religiosity and crime from wikipedia<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People have been led to do terrible things in the name of religion.\n","id":"79765aaf-1684-46b2-a3ec-814395848baf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>The guns would have to pass through more people to get there, which means more people to pay and keep quiet, increasing the cost.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guns sold on black markets may have more costs, making it more expensive for criminals to commit a crime.\n","id":"2b539735-a080-48fe-be58-61e4c3a8ce03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How Should Physician-Assisted Death be Handled?<|ARGUMENT|>In order for consent to be valuable, it must come from a person. Personhood is what makes consent valuable. Because personhood is what makes consent valuable, consenting to destroy or diminish personhood is a contradiction of values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Physician-assisted death should never be allowed, no matter what the circumstances are.\n","id":"80dc1ab4-61e9-4998-984a-2a85dbf3aead"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those who do not know, the vast majority of public schools grade based on a bell curve system. This means that the A grades are reserved for the top 10 of the class, the next 20 is reserved for B grade students, and the remaining 70 of the students will get a C or lower. This means that tests, worksheet, and teaching style is all based on a system set up so approximately 50 of the students will fail. In my high school, the motto was Strive to Excel . Of course, this means that we're supposed to constantly be pushing to be in that top 10 30 . But this means that people will constantly be climbing over each other to get that in that 40 of people. The remaining 60 are left in the wake. Those people won't pass the class. This creates a vicious cycle where graduation rates are at an all time low and nothing is changing and nobody can figure out why. Why is the education system set up so people will fail? Shouldn't we want people to learn and excel in education? It seems like this system is set up in such a way that the opposite happens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the bell curve grading system is a perpetually useless way of grading.\n","id":"054eb77b-e7e6-4b30-92b5-010bc656038c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To extend the title slightly, I believe that a healthy empire should only defend its own borders and never send out any proactive attacks against other nations. Unless there's a genuine quorum among the nations of the world to attack one specific belligerent state. And in an unequal world such as ours at this time where some nations are considered 3rd world due to poverty or military oppression developed nations should spread their culture of social security and personal freedom via media. Call it propaganda if you will, as long as it's spread from a nation willing to sacrifice some security of its citizens in order to only spread these views and ideas through non violent means then I'm fine with using the somewhat stained word propaganda. And under that umbrella of media propaganda would be things like free markets in order to develop infrastructure, information technology and of course good old culture in the form of music and movies. Also things like allowing for non profits or charity organisations to operate abroad, or sending engineers and doctors who volunteer to help, things that go on today already. The view is that if a successful empire were to employ these means of spreading their philosophy and way of life, while simultaneously setting an example by avoiding proactive conflict with the world around them, then people in other countries would themselves see that they could strive for something better and eventually that internal friction would turn into revolution. One obvious flaw with this is as I've mentioned that any attack against this supposed empire would most likely meet with unprepared defences. I understand that this might seem a pipe dream but I'm not asking for this view to be proven impossible but rather for you to change my view on why this shouldn't be a goal to strive towards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe an empire should only invest in reactive defence of its own borders, and spread its philosophy through diplomacy and propaganda.\n","id":"279ffafb-3917-43df-8259-3113d717055b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Journalists Publish Hacked Data?<|ARGUMENT|>Any individual or company will doubtless have data that could be incriminating, if one is inclined to try, but this cannot be used to justify invasion of privacy and theft of personal information.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hacking a private company in the optimistic hope of finding evidence of wrongdoing is still wrong; it turns journalism into a fishing exercise, supporting and profiting from the whims of different hackers.\n","id":"e3e9f682-4085-4877-a604-592fe6e1ae97"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Across the book of Acts, the historian Luke gives an account of how the Apostles shared the gospel of Christ. Arguing reasoning and offering proofs were a standard component of sharing Jesus\u2019 message.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"From cover to cover, the Bible consistently demonstrates the use of intellect, including study of the world itself.\n","id":"9a36d60a-8cd0-401e-82b1-520c628d9e42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When the Syrian crisis began I remember thinking, How can anyone in this world think that it's okay to stand by and let our countries do nothing to stop the massacre of innocent civilians including thousands of children? Isn't it our moral responsibility as humans to stop these kind of atrocities from happening or continuing? I'm also confused with everyone talking about Obama wanting us to go to war. Sure Iran and Russia are against intervention in Syria but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to retaliate against us if we do. Like most of reddit, Obama hasn't been my favorite person lately, and I don't like how it had to come down to chemical attacks on the Syrian people for him to do anything about it, but I support the decision to intervene. I apologize for any grammatical errors. I'm typing all this on my phone at the moment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Military intervention in Syria is completely necessary.\n","id":"899a6eda-fd75-4854-83e4-cef4e0f8b191"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fireworks should only be enjoyed at organised public displays and not sold domestically<|ARGUMENT|>Organised fireworks exhibit a higher degree of firework skills because the creators are trained to compose the spectacle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fireworks should only be enjoyed at organised public displays and not sold domestically.\n","id":"f9890d39-e8d2-4093-a4ef-beb519390c9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think if there were a computer out there that's security is unbreakable and logic infallible, only looked out for the betterment of humanity, ensuring everyone was treated equal and fairly and did nothing but make goals to achieve those objectives then it should rule the world. I also think that with the level of technology we have we would be able to set up like a cyber bill of rights that were similar to the three laws of robotics similar as far as how the CPU obeyed them then a lot of negatives of having a CPU rule what significantly decrease. Also I would like to add that we, as in all of the people in the world no matter criminal history or nationality would be able to vote on being able to accept what laws the world would follow when the grand master CPU would try and push a law through. My logic to think this is CPU has no personal goals or agenda, meaning it cannot be corrupted If the bill of rights were protected and we all had a say then we would all live in a more united type of world The only laws being past for any reason are for the betterment of humanity and the well being of everyone Quality of life for everyone would be improved in the long run going with the logic that without extreme luxury for the few there is basic equality for all. Space n shit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that if the world were ruled by a master computer that's only goal was the betterment and equal treatment of mankind, that this world would be a infinitely better place.\n","id":"03170e1c-74a6-4361-9114-8b95f520ce7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This has everything to do with how I've been raised. My whole life, many people I know have told me how Israel has been besieged by unfriendly neighbours on all sides since the time it became an independent nation. And even though I can find things online to support that or the opposite view, none of it has changed my view since anything could be propaganda. But all I have known is that Israel has never been the cause of conflict, and it is only through their skill, ingenuity, and destiny as God's people that they have been able to withstand being annihilated. I understand this sounds dramatic, but that's how its been related to me, by people I trust, no less. I want this view changed because I objectively know that there is very rarely a good side and an evil side. I want to know both sides of the story. And I want it to stick in my heart, as opposed to just being something else I hear that 'must be anti Jew propaganda.' I don't necessarily want to see Israel as the bad guys, but I do want to see their conflicts objectively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Israel are the definitive 'good guys' in the Middle East.\n","id":"965d1ba5-3031-4441-af81-d6bb61d69231"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>We do not see higher reports of UFOs from people such as astronomers, astrophotographers, etc. This would lead us to believe the label of UFO is generally attached by people who are otherwise unfamiliar with natural and known objects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most UFO sightings are reported by laypersons with no sophisticated knowledge, and not by professionals who observe the sky daily, or by the tens of thousands of active hobby astronomers.\n","id":"2b88a69a-818f-46a1-a8f3-a87da1d6b7c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Doctors Be Allowed To Remove Healthy Body Parts To Replace With Artificial Ones?<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals have a right to bodily integrity Undergoing a voluntary surgical procedure is within the bounds of this right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Doctors should be allowed to remove healthy body parts to replace with artificial ones.\n","id":"bc833d38-b168-4ad7-959c-874bf16a1640"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Businesses Deny Service to Trump Administration Officials?<|ARGUMENT|>Secretary of HUD Ben Carson is funneling money to his family and spending exorbitant amounts on office furniture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nearly every member of Trump's cabinet has faced ethics investigations.\n","id":"758cc40c-2786-4646-a997-3884e5cf702b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is health care a human right?<|ARGUMENT|>The vaccination of any given person betters the health of everyone by improving herd immunity. Most procedures do not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a substantial difference between providing vaccinations and providing all healhcare.\n","id":"3b8f7e6e-fda1-479b-989e-932851b0e1ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Businesses Deny Service to Trump Administration Officials?<|ARGUMENT|>This will eventually lead to violence; and the left will lose the most lives because they don't believe in the 2nd amendment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This can escalate tensions and lead to violence or other extreme retaliations.\n","id":"b99b1f06-6232-4b32-bb7f-d4d5bd29195b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The primary reason DC lacks representation is because when it was created, not enoguh people lived there for it to be a concern. However, now the city is more populous than a couple of states, and it's metro area is the 5th most productive in the nation if you look at GDP . Fundamentally, I think it's wrong that over half a million people are disenfranchised. Representation could either be achieved by granting DC statehood, or by constitutional amendment. You can change my view by showing me that granting DC representation would have negative consequences, which outweigh enfranchisement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Washington, DC should have congressional representation.\n","id":"fd31c605-91dc-4676-a8cb-c741e7b743b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Adultery Ethical?<|ARGUMENT|>Someone's personal moral obligation to someone else does not bind you at all. You cannot be culpable for him\/her breaching it. So far as you are not forcing someone married into sexual intercourse, the person has free will and outmost personal responsibility for his\/her actions. Thus, you cannot breach a moral code since there is no moral obligation binding you to refrain from touching the married person. The latter is bound but it is purely his\/her responsibility.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No. Another person's marriage has nothing to do with you.\n","id":"3740b50e-ba3a-4652-b293-c5a8b56b541e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Yeah, most languages in the world don't separate by gender, but most people in the world speak a language that does. Many Non binary people require some non standard pronoun when talking about them and many of the Anglophone ones even oppose they's promotion to an official singular pronoun because it is used as the plural , even though it has been the case with the pronoun you . I'm aware that languages change over time, but most major languages have regulating bodies and adding a new grammatical gender is not like adding a new noun or adjective. Also, major changes in society have a lot of opposition, specially in the beginning. European non IE languages languages like Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish and Basque have no issues with gendered pronouns. English and Esperanto you can not mention a person's gender by avoiding pronouns in both those languages, and Esperanto even has a recursive pronoun. English doesn't have a regulating organization, so it's probably even easier for this language. Most IE languages and the Semitic ones well, you can get away with that by using the pronoun corresponding to the word people or something similar. But talking to a person of unknown unspecified non binary gender in a Semitic language or a non binary person talking about them whatever self in the past in Russian may be tricky. Other languages Mandarin's third person pronoun doesn't vary by gender, but its graph does, and there's no gender neutral version anymore people may get away with it by typing ta instead of \u4ed6 or \u5979 . P.S. my view is that I can't accept non binary people's use of language, like ending adjectives with a different letter in Portuguese , because it goes outside standard grammar.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most languages aren't adapted to non-binary people.\n","id":"6505e345-7879-43d1-9a96-ac34253369ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Why must we punish if there is no benefit to society? A man went into a school and murdered 100s of children. He then locked himself in a building he owns that he can never escape due to the locks being one way. He has entertainment and food here but he can not influence society in any way as he lacks phones or internet. Justice would be to unlock his doors and put him to death or in prison for the rest of his life. Which costs society money to do. Why can't we leave him in peace?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Justice through punishment is unequivocally barbaric and evil.\n","id":"1d802d5b-b454-47ea-8fe7-8aef40137826"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Deny Organs to Non-Donors<|ARGUMENT|>Most formulations of this policy involve assessing donor status on the basis of whether the patient was a registered organ donor prior to needing an organ. Thus, a sick person could find themselves in the tortuous situation of sincerely regretting their past decision not to donate, but having no means to atone for their past act. To visit such a situation upon citizens not only meaningfully deprives them of the means to continue living, it subjects them to great psychological distress. Indeed, they are not only aware that their past passive decision not to register as a donor has doomed them, but they are constantly told by the state that this is well and just.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This system will punish people for a past decision they cannot now undo\n","id":"c0689fd1-2dc2-438e-9d5f-1a12924b7457"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ban on Antarctic exploitation<|ARGUMENT|>Perhaps 27000 tourists are expected in 2004, mostly on cruise ships which call at Antarctic sites for just a few days, but this number is rising rapidly and some visitors are now undertaking adventurous activities such as ski-hiking, scuba-diving, snowboarding and mountaineering. Unchecked, this influx of people is greatly increasing the problems of waste management and their activities are having a negative impact on the coastal environment and its wildlife. Adventurous tourists will also need to be rescued by the authorities, diverting resources from science. The more vessels visiting the continent, the greater the chance of catastrophic oil spills or for rogue operators to neglect proper waste management both already problems in the Alaskan cruise industry. Overall, tourism will create a precedent for economic exploitation that may make it harder to defend the unique status of the continent in the future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Access to Antarctica should be restricted to those with a serious scientific purpose:\n","id":"070523a2-dcb0-4d0f-9cce-1e46572d5958"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I actually think a lot of Movies Shows Games are guilty of this but Sherlock is what's big right now so bear with me for a few. This is a thing that I think started with Zombieland at least, Zombieland is what I remember seeing before it stopping popping up places , but it's the trend of introducing plot points or giving you insight into a character's thoughts by just popping up phrases on screen. Zombieland wasn't a straight example of this, because it was just for the rules but it's what I think popularized it. This shows up in Splinter Cell Conviction as a way to give mission objectives and tell you what Sam is thinking. Admittedly I liked this more than just a voiceover. Anyway, Sherlock. I think Sherlock is the work most egregiously guilty of this, I get that Sherlock has always had a kinda Saturday morning cartoon vibe to it, but to me this is a case of telling not showing. There was a lot of this going on in the first season and I think it's lazy on the part of the writers. There are more interesting ways to introduce clues, look to Psych for an example. So, change my view that this shouldn't be a frowned upon practice in visual story telling. Also, sorry if this isn't ultra coherent. I'm a bit sleep deprived as a write this, so let me know if you need something cleared up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Sherlock is guilty of lazy introduction of plot points.\n","id":"76ad90c2-65b0-4f3d-8a70-d953f7cd9713"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should programming be taught in primary school?<|ARGUMENT|>Games like Tynker classify even the most basic exposure to actual programming languages, such as JavaScript and Python, as advanced material.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These games usually cover only the most basic concepts but have little practical utility beyond that.\n","id":"89731ef1-51fb-430e-b700-446594b325e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just a little background I'm a 21 year old guy at 6'4 and 130 pounds. I've been dealing with extreme IBS for over a year now, and no doctor even Stanford can explain why I have it or why no treatment will really work for me. The only treatments that work to an extent are using cannabis indica in low doses short term and a prescribed toxic drug called hyoscyamine in very low doses long term . I've been researching GMO studies lately and found some studies that show a correlation between the increase in digestive disorders in America and when we put food made from GMOs on our plate. I know mainstream science has come to a consensus on the safety of such foods, but it still doesn't add up for me. Perhaps some of you could enlighten me? Thanks in advance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have severe IBS and am convinced that there is a correlation between the recent rise of digestive disorders and the implementation of GM food in our diet.\n","id":"c70e5cd5-de0d-4511-966b-41de5b0dc4cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe America is better because we are a Western country with strong respect for human rights and respect for rule of law. We are a democracy and give fair representation to everybody in America, even the Indians. We also do a better job of protecting the enviroment, we have less pollution of the air and of the sky, and the waterways. We are not perfect, but America is overall a much better place to live. Our values are more suited for the modern day, and our education system is superior and our laws are actually laws plus we have little corruption or totalitarianism in this land. We are not quite as socially rigid, and there is much more room for creativity in the USA. You can speak your mind freely and have more freedoms and rights. This is a preferable setup. I will be convinced by studies from the UN and other organizations. Documentaries and news articles will always be romanticizing either country without quite telling the whole story. A common counterargument I have seen is the whataboutism where somebody will point to USA human rights abuses or other problems to justify China's flaws.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America is a much better place to live than China. Western values triumph over Confucian values.\n","id":"5e9ce4e7-5706-4e0d-97e2-d9c22b69ec01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should States Require Mandatory Drug Testing for Welfare Recipients?<|ARGUMENT|>Mandatory drug testing encourages recipients to be ready for employment and ensures people are being the best parents possible when applicable. Many employers, including most government agencies have drug testing regulations for workers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"States should require a mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients.\n","id":"464aa024-cc51-423f-8eb0-73f1fcb1a4ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Americans need to face the fact that invading small nations are not done with good faith in mind. Its for other more sinister reasons like creating a puppet governemnt to serve American interest, mainly economically. Were bombing many countries and we wonder why they hate us. Many of those in positions of power use rhetoric of moral excuses to support foreign intervention. A brutal dictator is bad, granted. That is not however, a justification for years and years of invasion and occupation. They dont want us there. Bombs dont only kill terrorist and often when we kill innocent civilians it creates more terrorists. Thats a fact. Let the countries figure it out for themselves if you truly care about justice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who burn the American flag bring light to important issues\n","id":"e0d0c576-40db-43c8-ad53-c70fda001724"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Humans, like all other organisms, have evolved to survive in their environments. For almost all of human history, this has meant living in small, simple rural communities based on agricultural labor, with strong social interactions and ties with a limited group of people. Regardless of your opinion on a society like this, you can agree that this is what humanity evolved towards. And the human psyche has evolved just as much as the human body in short, our brains are hardwired for this kind of lifestyle. At least the vast majority, anyways. I think that we as humans do not have the mental tools to cope with modern life, being so radically different than small agrarian communities. I think this can cause depression, anxiety, etc. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think our modern urbanized society is so unnatural to our minds that is causes unhappiness and mental illness.\n","id":"1b616711-e50c-49be-9641-ee8ec35d3717"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump himself disrespects and violates many democratic norms, like respecting the press, telling the truth, or accepting the results of elections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump's presidency is so unusual and anomalous that standard principles and norms of democracy should not apply.\n","id":"56961283-d1c2-46ae-934a-f64ddc76344b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Those who eat meat are far more likely to contract cancer than those following a vegetarian diet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eating meat is linked to increased risks for certain types of cancer.\n","id":"3c6ab94e-5c45-4859-b150-a729370d9228"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Should Be Allowed to Choose The Gender of Their Child<|ARGUMENT|>It is hardly shattering the mystery of childbirth, given how common ultrasound scans are. Knowing w.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents Should Be Allowed to Choose The Gender of Their Child\n","id":"d916af72-7aed-4faf-a687-4dd641a91f98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>For most people it is easier to make dietary changes - which could significantly impact health and the environment - than other more drastic lifestyle changes, like giving up one's car. Thus we should use our political capital where it is most likely to be effective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the context of global food shortages and environmental crises, society should be critical of excess consumption in all its forms.\n","id":"c4b16625-09ca-4de8-9893-404ac1d7a504"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm on mobile, what's the delta command? Alrighty I have a segment of student who have dropped below 50 . 1 student who drop below a 50 often do not find the motivation to climb back up. 2 50 is still failure 3 sure students can be 'lazy', but they should still have the opportunity to climb back up. When you have 90 school days, it is attractive to procrastinate. 4 everyone procrastinates. I'm doing it now. But I have the ability to recover from my procrastination. Some students are so academically behind due to circumstances out of their control that they can't. And we can't expect them to be extra human in order to succeed. 5 kids come in all shapes. Some kids have some really grim stories. This can set them back. Some kids have cognitive issues. This can set them back. 7 kids can recover better from these setbacks if they are 10 away from passing rather than 30 . 8 a 50 may give them a false sense of security, but we shouldn't drill how screwed they are by having them become super seniors. 9 a lot of kids need focus they're not given. I had a senior kid who came in at 7 20 while I'm prepping we start at 8 . We spent a solid 4 months together talking. I built trust, gave advice, joked said shit I'd probably be fired for . But I convinced him to get off weed, get a job, and helped him plan for a local JC. I saw him 2 months ago and he's transferring to UC Davis. I have 160 kids. This was 1. Who took me 4 months of work it wasn't 'work' in the objective sense, I enjoyed our time, but I am employed in this capacity . And he voluntarily came in as shelter from the rain. I simply can't give that level of attention to all students. We're outnumbered 25 1.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a high school teacher, I should rig my grades to where no student drops below a 50%.\n","id":"eaab031a-e95e-4f25-b452-3183a9eee666"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Minimum Wage<|ARGUMENT|>Low wages are inadequate compensation for potential workers who are discouraged from entering the labour market. By making labour more attractive, more human resources will be used, thus raising national productivity. Even where capital is substituted e.g. through use of machinery instead of people, a rise in efficiency will occur. Some studies suggest minimum wages raise productivity as they encourage workers to stay with a company, which benefits as they gain experience, and because they also encourage companies to invest in worker training.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Low wages are inadequate compensation for potential workers who are discouraged from entering the la...\n","id":"fd045b52-a6b6-4200-af83-16aa008b4ac7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In ancient times people believed that the world was governed by forces that shaped their lives and were beyond their control. However, there were certain gurus who had special insight into these forces, and could sway these forces one way or another. These gurus were known as shaman, and often gained power and wealth because of their alleged expertise. While a shaman's predictions and rituals were ostensibly successful he retained his position of prestige. When those same predictions failed, he would be demoted, and sometimes replaced with a new expert whose predictions had been more recently successful, reinforcing the beliefs of the people in shamanism. Today, there is a mystical force known as the stock market which exerts an influence over people's lives. Most people do not understand this force. However, there are gurus who possess a special insight into these forces. These gurus are known as stock analysts. While these analysts are successful they are often rewarded with wealth and positions of prestige. When their analysis fails they are effectively demoted, at least in prestige. This class of gurus puts on the most effective front possible, reinforcing the people's beliefs in their predictions and rituals. However, neither the ancient gurus nor the modern gurus have much evidence in support of their predictions or rituals. Because of these similarities I am brought to my conclusion stock analysts are modern day shamans. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stock analysis is the modern-day shamanism.\n","id":"71ae8fb6-256c-4ada-9dda-62fb7643d011"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Even after 16 years of military presence by the international community, Afghanistan is in a bad situation. The number of civilian casualties is at a record high as of July 2017, with the numbers of children and women killed by the ongoing conflict rising especially fast.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of the conflicts that have sparked the current refugee crisis are too convoluted and protracted that there is little prospect for any of them being resolved soon. For civilians, there is really no point in participating.\n","id":"f49e98c5-5328-47ab-a16f-9cdad070e156"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't see the harm in things like more cameras in public places, listening to my conversations and all those other things they don't tell us. What's the harm? I have nothing to hide, but I'm not that well educated on the matter, so .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think there is a problem with the government 'invading my privacy'\n","id":"831ff142-1ab7-4585-a5eb-4573e1607b7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>It was irresponsible for Dumbledore to appoint Remus Lupin, a known werewolf, as a teacher without letting the students or their parents know about his condition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hogwarts teachers are irresponsible and contribute to a dangerous and unhealthy school environment.\n","id":"318d1e18-161b-4970-9b24-7e39f4aa8fe5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US have killed Qasem Soleimani in an air strike?<|ARGUMENT|>Soleimani led the Quds Force, which is part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist organisation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Soleimani was a terrorist and as such, any action against him was justified.\n","id":"fcdb7f82-47a6-47f3-b2b6-f99c2129b04c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I keep evaluating my life and I really only see a couple ways this could go. None of them are worth it. I will never marry so that is out of the picture. All I see is myself dying in an apartment that social security is paying for having worked 40 years at jobs that leave me too exhausted to do anything besides sleep and work. Which, for me, is any job working with people. I worked customer service for 3 years and all I could do was work and go home to sleep. I have a lot of sensory problems which contribute And I may bring up, thus mentioning them now but there is no fixing them that anyone knows about so they're a constant. I don't think life is valuable in and of itself. I don't think something being improbable makes it valuable because someone will go for that platitude . I think if life is always going to be miserable and there's no chance at any kind of reward or satisfaction even in the longest term, there's no point to it. So, avoiding platitudes anything repeated to the point it's essentially a meaningless jumble of words , can you change my view? Edit I'm not continuing this if people are being hostile towards me and I don't want to talk to people who already have deep set opinions about who I am or what I do. That wasn't the point of this . Sorry. The request was I don't believe life has intrinsic or inherent value. I instead believe that value is given to life by things that happen in it, but that it doesn't ever necessarily have to become valuable,  not anything else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe life is worth living if you have to struggle for everything and there is no chance of it getting better.\n","id":"fb239c92-ce54-4301-8c43-85f2c7ad7fd0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am genuinely interested in people changing my view on this topic, so have at it with your opinions My opinion on racial profiling is somewhat inconsistent with my other liberal views but my justification for it is this If you have statistical information about a certain group being more likely to commit a certain kind of crime e.g. try to bring a weapon through an airport security checkpoint and you are required to pull 10 people aside for extra screening each hour, wouldn't it be logical to pull aside people in proportion to their risk of said crime? For example if people fitting a certain profile are 3x more likely to try to bring something illegal through security, those people would be pulled to the side 3x as often. I would be a proponent of this for any kind of profiling beyond racial for example, if blondes were 5x more likely to shoplift from a store and you do random checks on the way out, I'd say stop blondes 5x more often it just seems to me to be the most efficient use of resources. Some people have told me that racial profiling is ineffective at achieving its goal and thus shouldn't be used for that reason and we should take other more preventative measures for crimes. I agree, research should be done on the best crime prevention methods, but as long as a certain crime does exist and a certain group commits this crime more often than another, some sort of profiling makes logical sense to me. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that racial\/other kinds of profiling can be justified.\n","id":"049ee176-4828-48fa-af59-0ad0fb66abed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is China a threat to the United States?<|ARGUMENT|>Aside from the largest standing army in the world, China poses a threat both in terms of technology and regional ambition. The \u2018Cox Report\u2019 revealed that Chinese espionage resulted in the acquisition of information about military guidance systems and modern nuclear warheads. Chinese military exercises regularly simulate attacks on US troops that are situated in South Korea and the Japanese island of Okinawa. China presents an unacceptable military threat both directly and indirectly. Chinese arms deals buy hefty influence with various rogue states of international politics, and equip these nations to harm their civilians and threaten other states. The transfer of weapons to Pakistan, Sudan, Sri Lanka and Burma has precipitated an arms race with India and conflict in Kashmir, allowed two civil wars to be fought, and bolstered a brutal military junta. We no longer have to fear only terror from the East, but terror from around the world, that flows from China.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"From the middle of the twentieth century, China has presented a formidable military threat.\n","id":"97bda8da-873d-4eca-971d-de2c99a3c2cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Some of you you believe the right to bear arms is inherent, my question to you is how does it come about that this right is inherent? What makes this right inherent? There is a difference between rights granted by law and natural rights. Laws can define where natural rights are legally applicable. But laws can't give or take away inherent natural rights. Laws can, however, violate or protect those rights. There still must be a logical derivation of this right from nature if it exists. If Natural law derives from the nature of man and the world, just as physical law derives from the nature of space, time, and matter. my question is, how exactly is it that you are proposing the right to firearms derives from nature? It just does is not a sufficient answer. Explain why we have the natural right to self defense, and how, logically, that right extends to include firearm ownership. Or the claim that gun rights derive from natural rights will remain entirely unsubstantiated. I actually think guns are the least of our problems, and I'm not really a gun grabber because there are a couple dozen things I'd rather do first. And if those happen, guns would mostly only be used for hunting, and target practice. And the potential for a strong national defence, like they ought to be. I'd rather get people educated and out of poverty. Etc. I tell you this so you can understand, I'm an open mind on this issue, and if you can't convince me, you probably won't convince anyone. To be clear I could give a about gun rights, I don't see any logical derivation of those rights from nature. So far as I can see they are only legal rights and not natural rights at all. At the same time, people who actually spend effort and time opposing gun rights annoy me, because duh there will always be weapons and violence until people get healthy and free. focusing actions on a wedge issue like guns serves to divide, and sow fear, rather than to unify and bring progress. Discussion, though, is another matter. I am currently against both gun grabbers practically and gun rights ideologically . So I am mostly heavily neutral on this subject. I have serious questions about the central dogmas of both sides of this debate. Tell me why I should no longer ideologically oppose gun rights. Show the logical derivation from nature, which I believe you are claiming exists. currently without an understanding of the justification for the claim that gun rights are natural rights, It is my view that many legal freedoms or impositions are a matter of practicality, justified by the basic and overriding human drive to form a safe, harmonious, and productive society, and then that guns are simply impractical toward this end. if you can't convince me of this, or at least correctly formulate any argument defending your position , you are probably not really going to convince anyone. But If your thought is that the right to firearms is derived from the right to self defend would it not make more sense that the natural right to self defend justifies the legal right to live in a firearm free environment. Since guns take more lives than they save? To claim that a right is derived from nature without showing the logic of the derivation is equally meaningless as to claim that a right is granted by God. I see no logical derivation from nature for the right of humans to bear arms. Bonus I can't imagine that there is any which wouldn't also justify the rights of monkeys to bear arms . I invite you to Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The claim that gun rights are derived from nature rings as hollow as the claim that gun rights are granted by God.\n","id":"34f91dfe-b1f4-4a6f-a4f1-8959884cfe57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As you guys know the Black Lives Matter campaign have been getting a lot of media attention recently due to their interuptions of presidential candidates' speeches. I never knew much about the campaign and always assumed that from the slogan that it was prioritizing black lives over other races' a stupid assumption I grant you. I read up on it and support aspects of it after finding out the slogan is basically short for Black lives matter, as much as other lives and is due to black lives not being treated as equal to white lives my society. I read the Wikipedia page on the movement and looked into all 22 deaths it protested. Most of the protests I agreed with such as the murder of a 7 year old black girl by police and the murder of a 68 year old black man by police. However, they protested some incidents that where the officers were clearly not at fault. For example, the Antonio Martin shooting. Their is evidence that Martin was armed and went to fire at the officer. There is even video footage. I do not agree with the other examples but feel the officer was justified here. This is where my views conflict with the movement. How can I support a movement that I agree with mostly when they ignore strong evidence?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I agree with the Black Lives Matter movement on most issues but do not want to offer my support due their ignorance of facts in some cases.\n","id":"73a8d18f-606a-468a-8545-869e4b22a1cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Organ Donation be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Rare organs and bloodtype combinations could lead to an exploitative murder market due to the 'knowledge' that the deceased will be harvested, regardless of how she ended up in that state. For example: I need an AB- heart from a 25 year old. I employ a criminal to 'accidentally' kill one, who is then harvested to fill my need of a 25 year old AB- heart.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black market efforts can shift to expedite release of desired donable organs. Potential donors can no longer opt out, and this places them at increased risk.\n","id":"de3fe914-82fd-4190-9bcf-79e707876c3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've noticed that most people associate politically with others who share similar viewpoints and often react with hostility when introduced to ideas outside their comfort zone. This happens on both the right and left. Regardless of who one is male or female, black or white, rich or poor if someone agrees with you, you'll welcome them and if someone disagrees with you, you'll reject them. Two examples illustrate my point First, Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court justice who happens to be the second black justice on the court in US history. Yet, because he is conservative, no liberal would think of having him as being the deciding vote on a Supreme Court case based on his perspective growing up poor in the segregated South. Second, George Soros is a wealthy financier. Because he supports liberal causes, he is never called out for being among the greedy one percent. If he were conservative, he'd be thrown in with the Koch brothers. What this means is that contrary to what many say is a strength, our diversity, is actually a hindrance insofar as we want our political views to be affirmed by like minded travelers. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People don't care for diversity when it comes to politics\n","id":"0b455024-b3cb-497d-9a6f-a493ccb7c354"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US have withdrawn from NAFTA?<|ARGUMENT|>As many as six million US jobs are dependent on trade with Mexico. NAFTA has been instrumental in facilitating this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is estimated that 300,000 US jobs would have been lost as a result of leaving NAFTA.\n","id":"dd05543a-c914-4a32-aa4d-21ff07b8a869"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've debated some people on this, but there seems to be a large following of social anarchism which to me can never exists. The idea of anarchism is a stateless society based on individualism. Socialism is regulation of production, distribution, and exchange being controlled by a community. A state is an organized community. So what this means, essentially, is that socialism couldn't exist in an anarchist world. As everything is centralized to a particular group. But even if I go into the very fundamentals of it, if everyone goes around and takes what they want when they want, ignoring all the impossibilities regarding this. If I offer someone a product that no one else can offer in exchange for a product that the person usually gives in lower amounts, or a unique product that they haven't offered anyone else, I've just created capitalism. That is unless the government steps in and demands I give up my unique or extra product to them to redistribute fairly. In which case it's not longer anarchist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social anarchism is an oxymoron\n","id":"f294857d-aaee-4cce-93c2-01c0f4216389"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people on the internet, especially on Reddit, seem to really like piracy. But as hard as I try, I can't see it as anything other than stealing from people who make content that should be paid for, just like any other product. I've heard the argument that it's more convenient, because TV and movies don't have an efficient way of getting content to their viewers. I don't care if it's not efficient, it's still stealing. Convince me that pirating movies, TV shows, or computer programs like Photoshop is any different than stealing a product from a store.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Piracy is wrong\n","id":"b32cb448-a06b-48a9-b940-5303bd0fda94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What's up, r changemyview, it's T Tuesday We'd like to know what experiences you've had outside our subreddit, either recently or in your lifetime, that made you think This Changed My View . Tell us your stories in the comments Can't think of anything? Consider these Known or met someone with an interesting ideology or opinion that caused you to reconsider your own? Had an experience, good or bad, that changed your perspective? Learned something new that challenged what you believed? Ever have your tastes or interests changed? Read an article or seen a video that got you thinking differently? And just as a reminder, comment discussions here are not debate oriented, so there's no obligation to take opposing sides in conversations here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"T Tuesday 5\/28\/13\n","id":"b0b9a7af-3bd1-405f-8b15-d3259911ceda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DC handgun ban<|ARGUMENT|>Starting from early 1970s initiatives for handgun bans started to be struck down as people opposed them .By the 1990s all gun ban laws were struck down even in very leftist cities.This goes to show that history proves the reluctance of people in the US to give up their rights of gun ownership for a public , greater safety goal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gun prohibition movement has historically failed in the U.S\n","id":"5b9ee5c8-1278-405e-99d7-88644a9f9650"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are reasons for the quintessential indecency of an American teenager, majorly they're scared of people. Very scared, but seven year olds aren't and frequently their input would be better than that of adults. Very few demographics in age are inherently anything when it comes to reddit submissions, and usually youth is a good thing. Even those poor teenagers are only worse for the perpetual bombardment. Leave people be sorted by quality alone and everybody benefits. Unless of course ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that pretending age could discriminate quality of input on the internet is an insecure last resort, shouldn't be taken at all seriously, and is detrimental to the heavily undermined age spaces.\n","id":"046beb91-b5d4-47de-92f9-f7b711bdf55e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Part of that plan can, quite possibly be that a loving god is non-interventionist. Beyond am unfolding creation, a loving god may offer choice as a greater good--however stupidly humans exercise it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We cannot fully understand God's plan, but He has a plan that's greater than any of us can imagine. Evil is a part of it.\n","id":"0255756a-69d9-4d34-9cd2-0b88f517dc81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title explains it all I think. I'm not angry about my upbringing, I've definitely benefitted immensely, but with so much coverage of this issue at the moment, I want to not end up being a dick about it. Please help me see that I can feel comfortable about both religion and homosexuality. And thank you very much for all the excellent arguments that I know will come my way<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm worried that my religious upbringing will affect my view on same-sex relationships and marriage, please help me Thank you!\n","id":"2d3eaff4-5c7d-45cd-966a-d50c4788b15e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's the thing, I need an heir to the throne but my damn wife can't pop out a son for the life of her. Women right? Well I want to get rid of her so I can marry a woman that will actually be able to give me a son but the damn Pope won't let me. Something about the sanctity of marriage and devotion to God. I think if my wife can't give me a son I should be able to find a woman who can. Am I wrong? gt Hello, people of the past. This is a footnote from the moderators of this 'internet forum'. I'm afraid to say that some wannabe scientist, while looking into time travel, has caused a temporal distortion field. It should dissipate in the next 24 hours. In the mean time, feel free to message us about a view you hold while you're visiting the present, and remember to have a look through our rules<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My wife can't produce an heir so I think I should be able to divorce her and marry a different woman\n","id":"59bf8083-aaf7-4c98-8fd8-3aca535f4e37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a licensed massage therapist, and like many of my peers, I work side by side with chiropractors. I take science, anatomy, and physiology very seriously. I base my practice on these things. I am very skeptical of chiropractor practices for a number of reasons. Adjusting, popping, and over extending joints gives a false sense of relief. When you pop a joint, or a lot of joints in the case of an adjustment, the proprioceptors sense the hyperextension, and endorphins are released. So, you feel great immediately after. This feels like a chemical cover to pain to me, and not an actual fix. If your bones are not correctly aligned, it seems to me that it is because the muscles are very tight and are pulling the skeletal system in one way or another. Bad posture is a major contribution as well. To fix these things, massage, exercise, and yoga make sense. If you adjust and pop bones back into place and have tight muscles, your body will remain out of place. Chiropractors often schedule a visit once a week for months and sometimes even years. Once a week for 6 month is 24 ish visits. After 24 treatments, if your patient is not better, it seems like good evidence to me that it isn't working. As an LMT, after the 8th or so appointment with me, if I don't see any improvement, I may not be providing my patients with what they need to get better. Continuing to charge money and run around in never ending circles seems like an ineffective treatment, and a disservice to people in pain who need help. Being critical of a respected body work practice puts me in conflict with half of my peers, and with myself. I would love to support chiropractors. I just haven't seen a substantial reason to. Help me change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- Chiropractors don't actually help in a meaningful, long term way\n","id":"8fde2226-6707-4f3f-bfa5-ce2fac978bbf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Kashmir Be An Independent State?<|ARGUMENT|>India has consistently rigged elections in Kashmir, indicating that it is aware that the results are unlikely to favour Indian aims.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kashmiris do not want to be a part of India.\n","id":"e07437e7-d269-4560-9ceb-0c8ed5fe6367"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A troubling number of questions I've seen on ELI5 about science have at least one answer posted and up voted that's incredibly wrong. On r askscience this kind of stuff will usually get down voted to oblivion , but the necessary expertise and moderation is missing on ELI5. There's also not nearly as much pressure to provide credible sources. The first objection to this idea that I could imagine is that ELI5 has a different enough purpose to differentiate it from AskScience, but plenty of posts on the latter are phrased simply, for laymen. Often, people ask for and recieve ELI5 level explanations on that sub. Hell, if you really wanted to, you could even add an ELI5 flair to separate laymen questions from more expert ones. So try and convince me that ELI5 serves a purpose for scientific technical questions that isn't being filled by AskScience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If they aren't going to strengthen their moderation, \/r\/explainlikeimfive should delete questions about science\/technology and point people to \/r\/askscience instead.\n","id":"3dc26b50-7283-4c4c-acdc-4df3d2c43181"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Doctors should be banned from performing genital reshaping surgery on intersex infants<|ARGUMENT|>Instead of a direct cause\/effect relationship, the adverse health effect on a gender non-binary individual has more to do with lack of knowledge, or compassion, of the medical community. Therefore, the individual is less likely to seek out treatment for health issues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genital reshaping surgeries on intersex infants are unnecessary as they encourage conforming to outdated and binary ideas of gender.\n","id":"b9f52060-d194-4094-bff7-326c00ee1371"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen friends posting angry rants like Do y\u2019all understand it\u2019s not simply 'another style' to add to your roster? But why not? Do we really want to have rules about which race is allowed to wear their hair in what ways? And who makes up theses rules? Sure, one can argue about bad taste. To wear a garment associated with another culture's mourning traditions to a party might not be the smartest thing to do, and could be considered disrespectful. But braids? What's so disrespectful about wearing braids? Edit to be precise, they were talking about corn rows like this or rasta braids like this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's not wrong for white people to wear braids. They, as any other person, should be free to choose any hair style they want.\n","id":"e65e0acf-ce33-4ae8-bb5c-776d5180f783"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've had an argument with a friend of mine, who is religious, about the whole gay marriage issue I live in Washington, where it is legal now, and we've yet to fall into a pit of Oblivion . I brought up the separation of church and state and she said she didn't care and that she'd vote based on what she believed, as that's what she thought was the right thing to do. When I asked her why she's choosing this particular thing to make a stance on, when she ignores so many other parts of the bible that include things that are not socially or lawfully acceptable, her only answer was that she recognizes she's a sinner, but is doing the best she can. That conversation aside, which was an obvious cop out on her part, I'm wondering how religious people in general, in this country, Christians can honestly feel like they're doing the right thing when they just pick and choose convenient things from the bible to try to enforce while completely ignoring the things that are now seen as ridiculous. Does the bible list different things by priority? Why are religious folks allowed to ignore certain things, but do everything they can to enfore others?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trying to vote in laws based on religious faith is hypocritical in nature as no religious person follows his\/her religion by the letter\n","id":"1416db56-49f2-430b-8602-3a4d1a408da5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>invade and forcibly reunify the Korean peninsula<|ARGUMENT|>There is grinding poverty in the North as well as brutal repression and all the other trapping of a military dictatorship. The only alternative future for the North is of a failed state going economically and socially in the opposite direction from the rest of Eastern Asia but now armed with nuclear weapons. The security threat this poses to the region is terrifying. However, it seems unlikely that the regime has any intention of surrendering their absolute power and the people are unlikely to remove him however bad things get, North Koreans do not have access to the tools such as mobile phones and the internet that made the Arab Spring possible.1 Instead the people will continue to be fed a diet of propaganda and not much else. As well as the security implications there is a simple issue of morality, in any other situation where the actions of a government were impoverishing a people to, quite literally, the point of starvation, the world would feel moved to act. It is as clearly in the interests of North Koreans not to starve to death by the hundreds of thousands as it is in the interests of the South not to see similar numbers irradiated by a bomb on Seoul. 1 Zakaria, Fareed, \u2018Zakaria: Will the North Koreans rise up?\u2019, CNN World, 14 November 2011<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Despite the tyranny of Kim Jong-Un, the control he exercises over his people has eliminated the possibility of revolution\n","id":"1223ec09-b63a-4ddc-8751-492ea91342d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>It is better to discuss topics in person, rather than through online text-based mediums.<|ARGUMENT|>Online discussions can be more logical because you can organize it and look into the past and this can help stop the repeating of the same information in different ways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Face-to-face discussions are not usually recorded, whereas in online discussions, what is communicated is stored.\n","id":"a226c44a-6151-400c-a5ac-7485bbc7c356"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I consider myself a skeptic. I research things a lot, both in my work and in my private life. I work in an industry that prides itself on being data driven . I tend to be the person in the room who says actually, even though I kind of hate doing that when people share a common urban myth or hoax, and I can back that up with sources. I even helped stop one or two hoaxes from being spread on social media. I am fortunate to have received good education. I read a lot, from pop science books all the way to scientific articles. I struggle with what I consider the fuzzy meaning of the word \u2018skepticism.\u2019 Let me give you an example. Let's say there is a healthy snack product for kids. Now, I don't have anything against snacks, even the occasional unhealthy one chocolate, chips, etc. . And of course I don't have anything against healthy food for kids. But when a company markets a healthy snack , I get immediately skeptical. How healthy is it, really? Is it, as the marketing materials often try to suggest, on par with fresh fruit or vegetable? Or is it just marginally healthier than a regular snack ? What's in it? Is there a government mandated list of ingredients I can read? Are they trying to spin the wording on the package to make it sound healthier than it is? For example, are some words in true statements unnaturally de emphasized so that, from afar, the message reads much healthier made with 100 whole grain oats gt 100 oats ? In Europe, are they avoiding E denominations because they know people have started associating them with unhealthy products? Those are, to me, healthy points of skepticism. But where does one draw the line? Am I just using common sense i.e. gut feeling to stop being skeptical at some point? Because we could go on Is the food manufacturer completely insensitive to public health? Are they able and willing to produce snacks that they know will significantly endanger the kid's health if the company profits from it and won't get the blame? Is there a government scientific conspiracy that willingly omits some significant risk factors of modern food manufacturing techniques meaning that even if the government mandate list of ingredients is clean , the product is hazardous ? Are there secret mind control ingredients added to these products? We could go on. The more I think about it, the more I think that skepticism is a spectrum. Maybe we shouldn't ask are you a skeptic? We should ask how skeptical are you? And it boils down to personal feelings and common sense , things that skepticism is trying to avoid in favor of rational though and proof. This comes up in discussions a lot. Well, if you're skeptical of lt A gt , why aren't you skeptical of lt B gt ? I know that the topic of my example might skew the discussion towards healthy unhealthy. But I want to be clear that this applies to all other topics I can think of. Politicians? You can go from let's check that statement through who pays them all the way to lizard men. Marketing? You can go from what are they not saying? through never trust anything in an ad all the way to mind control cabal . Higher education? From is this university good? through is the system well equipped to today's problems? to worldwide scam Medicine? From how do we know this 'homeopathic' works? through is this doctor's opinion correct? all the way to you cannot trust modern medicine . I think the easiest answer is something along the lines of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence . But the word extraordinary , to me, seems awfully subjective. A claim that seems extraordinary to me doesn't need to seem extraordinary to you. To restate my view There is no rational, objective definition of what constitutes healthy skepticism . There is no rational, objective way to draw the line . .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The definition of \"healthy skepticism\", a cornerstone of rationality and objectivism, is heavily subjective and emotional\n","id":"a9fd50d7-d4ca-465a-a4da-2121e8e2ad45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For almost the entire duration of the Israel Palestine conflict, Israel has been in a position of power. They've had stronger allies, a better military, and international support. Throughout most of the conflict, they've been willing to negotiate for Palestinian independence in exchange for long term peace. By that, Israel wants defensible borders i.e. Golan Heights and Jordan Valley , as they recognize that the Middle East is inherently unstable. Palestinian leadership is being unreasonable in pretending like they have the power to regain pre 1967 borders. Many of these occupied areas are crucial to the military security of Israel, as they provide natural buffers against other nations. Palestine needs to understand that they will not be able to regain the stated borders under the 1948 Partition Plan, which they rejected at the time, and to stop vying for unrealistic goals. I do not necessarily endorse the construction of West Bank settlements or other policies of the Israeli government, but I do agree with them in the majority of situations. Although both sides have participated in armed conflict, Israel is hesitant to give up Palestine without a guarantee of security. Hamas' stated aim is to destroy Israel, while Israel involves itself just enough in the conflict to maintain the upper hand. I also believe that peace offerings have gotten progressively worse for the Palestinians. In 1948, a 60 40 split of the land was proposed, but Palestine rejected this. In 1993, Israel permitted Palestine to have some self government on an interim basis. However, by 2000, the Second Intifada further delayed Palestinian statehood. Now, with the rise of Hamas, Israel is hesitant to give up any land to Palestine without the guarantee of de militarization. It doesn't help that Hamas is not interested in peace, except under their conditions. Clarification about the title I am aware that if Israel gives up enough land to go back to 1948 borders, which would compromise their security, Palestine would accept. But realistically, it is Palestine that has to be willing to make concessions, as they are in a position of weakness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An Israel-Palestine peace settlement will only be reached if Palestine is willing to make concessions\n","id":"aa2b5bf9-3d81-4537-8fde-c77b806aa34d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I say this as a non binary human. Pronouns like xim xer should not exist. There is already she her for girls, he him for guys and they them for people that feel like they don't fit into those two boxes. Pronouns like xim xer just further alienate a community that is often seen as outsiders. I personally use she her or they them pronouns. I don't understand why people want to differentiate themselves further or make themselves seem less, for lack of a better word, 'normal'. I've noticed a lot of NB people are kicked from trans communities and from cis communities and I just don't understand why you'd further push yourself from them. EDIT I now think their should be 2 sets of 4 pronouns. Like he his him he's but one set for animate and one for inanimate<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should only be 3 sets of pronouns.\n","id":"7b0a0dbc-d65d-4f05-bc5f-3657c9b366f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to do as much of my shopping through Amazon as possible because of convenience and cost. But I feel guilt if I spend too much there because then I'm not spreading it locally and sales taxes are leaving my state. I'm afraid I'd be contributing to a meteoric rise of something terrible analagous to Walmart. I don't want a future without local shops. I was hoping an economist could assure me otherwise so I can get some of those Amazon Dash buttons. What are the implications of a fully saturated Amazon world? Maybe they're not as threatening as I think? Maybe I have legitimate concerns and should stand by them?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tell me it's ok to do most of my shopping on Amazon.\n","id":"75e95f98-530f-4121-808c-6408013d1ab6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would agree that we should not have this much surplus military equipment, but without addressing that concern, what else is the military to do with the equipment? Is it better to lock it up in boxes or sell it to foreign countries? Wont the government be able to squash and oppress the citizenry by using this equipment? The equipment is given to local police forces though, and why would they all unite against their neighbors? I would argue the opposite that the equipment actually better arms the common man against the federal government. The best argument against militarization that I've heard was in Dan Carlin's Common Sense podcast Ep 279. He says just the optics of it are bad. If Ferguson's black residents feel that the police are more like an occupying force than it is their neighbors protecting them, adding tanks does not dispel that notion. While I agree that this point is good, it does not have enough weight to it to justify throwing the equipment away, selling it to other countries, or leaving it in the federal governments hands. EDIT u grunt08 cmv. What are the chances of getting a reply from a Marine in charge of training police forces ? Sorry to everyone else who made a similar argument, but the first hand experience was more convincing than the claims of political corruption.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Selling surplus military equipment to local police forces is not a problem.\n","id":"f91e9f6b-c4f3-4c8c-9254-9bb15625f336"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now I don't want to get into all the influence Israel has over the US Congress or the position of power Jewish people wield culturally through the media, or even their role in firms like Goldman Sachs, but let's just say that I feel that the contribution Jews have made to our culture and economy far outweighs any resentment that may burn in my breast like a solar inferno. They may or may not see themselves as a people apart, but my personal insecurities and financial woes are no justification for animosity. Americans have always feared the enemy within be it immigrants, freed slaves, or communist cells. I am above that. I doth protest just right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Saying \"Jew\" is no more racist than saying \"Jewish person\" and it's better English because it's parsimonious\n","id":"0abfe14d-673b-42a2-a59f-d008610acb26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Hunting for sport<|ARGUMENT|>Jeremy Bentham - \"The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'\"12<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are obligated to cause animals no pain or suffering\n","id":"cafce635-2b36-4f60-bf7b-6fda2c1a0a56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>gt On October 6, 2001, a senior level U.S. government official, told CNN that U.S. investigators had discovered Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh Sheik Syed , using the alias Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad had sent about 100,000 from the United Arab Emirates to Mohamed Atta. Investigators said Atta then distributed the funds to conspirators in Florida in the weeks before the deadliest acts of terrorism on U.S. soil that destroyed the World Trade Center, heavily damaged the Pentagon and left thousands dead. In addition, sources have said Atta sent thousands of dollars\u2014believed to be excess funds from the operation\u2014back to Saeed in the United Arab Emirates in the days before September 11. CNN later confirmed this. 21 gt The 9 11 Commission's Final Report states that the source of the funds remains unknown. gt More than a month after the money transfer was discovered, the head of ISI, General Mahmud Ahmed resigned from his position. It was reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI was investigating the possibility that Gen. Ahmed ordered Saeed Sheikh to send the 100,000 to Atta 19 gt The Wall Street Journal was one of the only Western news organizations to follow up on the story, citing the Times of India US authorities sought General Mahmud Ahmed's removal after confirming the fact that 100,000 was wired to WTC hijacker Mohamed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the insistence of General Mahmud. 22 Another Indian newspaper, the Daily Excelsior, quoting FBI sources, reported that the FBI\u2019s examination of the hard disk of the cellphone company Omar Sheikh had subscribed to led to the discovery of the link between him and the deposed chief of the Pakistani ISI, Mahmud Ahmed. And as the FBI investigators delved deep, reports surfaced with regard to the transfer of 100,000 to Mohamed Atta, one of the ringleaders of the September 11 attacks, who flew a hijacked Boeing commercial airliner into the World Trade Center. General Mahmud Ahmed, the FBI investigators found, fully knew about the transfer of money to Atta. gt General Mahmud was known to visit the United States regularly during his time as the head of ISI consulting senior officials in the U.S. administration in the weeks before and after 9 11. In fact, he was with Republican Congressman Porter Goss and Democratic Senator Bob Graham in Washington, discussing Osama bin Laden over breakfast, when the attacks of September 11, 2001 happened. 4 He was immediately called into meetings with American officials where demands of Pakistani cooperation were made and he was told to convey this to the Pakistani government. The only one who can really confirm any of this, Omar Sheikh, is being held for the murder of British journalist Daniel Pearl, despite the fact that gt In January 2011, in summarizing a report prepared by The Center for Public Integrity and The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Benjamin Wittes, a scholar at the Brookings Institute, wrote that it appeared Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was framed. 11 12 13 14 Another man, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed no relation , a former CIA captive, who had been tortured in 2003 in the CIA's archipelago of black sites, had confessed to the murder, and the report concluded his confession was credible. According to Wittes's summary Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had been responsible for the original kidnapping. But his plan was to hold Pearl for a ransom. According to Wittes's summary this original ransom plan was abandoned when Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was pressured to hand Pearl over al Qaeda operatives. According to Wittes's summary the report concluded gt In their haste to close the case, Pakistani authorities knowingly used perjured testimony to pin the actual act of murder on Omar Sheikh and his three coconspirators. While the four were involved in the kidnapping plan and certainly were culpable, they were not present when Pearl was murdered. Others, who were present and actually assisted in the brutal beheading, were not charged. According to Wittes's summary, FBI forensic experts had confirmed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession through vein matching matching the pattern of the vein's in the killer's hands in the video. 11 14 gt The lead author of the report was Pearl's good friend, and colleague, journalist Asri Nomani. 13 And finally, Bin Laden. gt Bin Laden was killed in what some suggest was his residence for five years. 206 207 It was an extensive compound located less than a mile from Pakistan Military Academy, 208 209 210 probably built for him 211 and less than 100 kilometers' drive from the capital. The United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden\u2019s presence in Abbottabad, Pakistan. 212 Are these really questions not worth asking? The fact that no major news agency but the Wall Street Journal has actively and aggressively pursued this is evidence in its own right. Please change my view, because I am disgusted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"9\/11 was a false flag operation condoned by United States officials, financed by General Mahmud Ahmed of Pakistan's ISI, to both establish greater military presence in the region and to pave the way for the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline.\n","id":"3b67a160-a9f7-4a4d-b1b6-293bcd90f12a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>Today, Nagasaki and Hiroshima are cities with normal levels of radiation showing that the radioactive impact did not last long.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The radioactive impact of the atomic attack was relatively small.\n","id":"3470e707-5053-4bd5-9405-2fae2fbe333b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The United States has always been a land of immigrants, and the U.S. continues to attract millions of immigrants from across the world. Many have become proud Americans citizens who have undergone the naturalization process and have been productive members of America's society and economy. They are American, through and through, and contribute to America's diverse, unique, heterogeneous, salad bowl cultural mosaic society. It shouldn't matter whether one is a natural born citizen or a citizen who immigrated from another country and naturalized. And given that naturalized citizens have to take tests on American history and politics, they MAY be more politically aware and engaged than some natural born citizens who take their rights for granted. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, but he spent part of his youth in Indonesia. Yet, he was eligible to become the POTUS. Meanwhile, someone like me, who immigrated to the U.S. from India when I was two years old, and have lived here for 20 years, and am fully Americanized, am ineligible to run for President. The natural born citizen clause in the U.S. Constitution is outdated, wrong, and discriminatory. I feel that there should be a constitutional amendment to overturn that the natural born clause, and instead, require that presidential candidates need to have been U.S. citizens for at least 20 years. I understand the intent of the Founding Fathers in the wake of the Revolutionary War to keep the Presidency open to only natural born US citizens expect for themselves, since they were born before the U.S. existed , since they wanted to protect the U.S. government from foreign influence. However, like several things that have persisted from their time, it is a relic that does more harm than good. Allowing only natural born citizens to be President freezes out people who have made the decision that they want to be American and have actually pursued the knowledge of the US, its history, and its government to achieve this goal. Why hold one's nation of origin against them when someone who actually has gone after such a goal may be a better president than those merely born here? To me, this is a common sense proposal, yet, I'm perplexed that it hasn't received much political traction. And no, this is not because I want Arnold Schwarzenegger to be President . . Edit To clarify, while I believe naturalized citizens should be allowed to run for President, people with dual citizenship should not be able to run for President. In order to be eligible to run as a naturalized citizen, one must renounce his her citizenship status of any other country, and only be a U.S. citizen for at least 20 years before running for the POTUS Update Thanks for the interesting comments However, unfortunately, I have still not seen a convincing response that has got me to change my view on this issue<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The natural-born citizen clause is wrong, outdated, and discriminatory. Naturalized citizens should be allowed to run for President\n","id":"997ff8a5-0b25-492b-b1cf-7f060328e686"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Without sufficient funds, governments cannot help the economy in times of economic recession by launching stimulus plans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A state that is losing its financial leeway cannot effectively pursue economic policies.\n","id":"676e25a9-4df3-4ed5-a9f7-82423f35a65a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>The Chapel appears to be less than a 1\/3 the size of the Cathedral Santa Maria Assunta a Catholic church from the same period.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Orthodox chapel paid for by Tommaso Assanios Paleologos is small in comparision to other churches in Naples.\n","id":"763c7621-3099-4d16-9a08-65609fdedd56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Terribly overrated. Boring songs with obtuse lyrics. The whole story is ludicrous when applied to AIDS in the era when it takes place not to mention it doesn't take much to write La Bohemme and just change TB to AIDS. No resolution, terrible messages left and right a failure on every level. The only saving grace is the song Out Tonight which is good and that it gave Idina Menzel to the world. This thing is making add more text, so I will say that show got a lot of leg underneath it form Jonathan Larson dying. If he had lived, not only do I think it would not have been nearly as popular, but he would have been a one hit wonder.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the musical Rent sucked.\n","id":"046a8207-0bcf-43a8-9b80-eca46c2f3148"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that many if not all politicians are in politics for money. It is considered a public service to become a politician since they are supposed to represent the public. But from my knowledge, not only are they allowed to accept public donations which they may keep if not spent on their campaign, but they also get paid a annual salary and certain allowances during their career. It should be mandatory that they make the federal minimum wage and not be allowed to keep any donation after campaigns in order to dissuade the idea that politics money. Their salary if not minimum wage should reflect that of the average citizens annual income intake note higher. That way anyone in politics would be there for the intention to make the country better, passion of creating real change, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians should be paid minimum wage or a salary that reflects an average americans income if we want real political reform\n","id":"68e73d38-7a6c-4d35-bc4a-382eb570b686"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Another problem related to this is how humans are surprised by pain or feel it doesn't fit, in an age and world were pain is a common certainty: even some young children are only a bit upset to see animals torn apart by other animals, but are annoyed at minor injustice like littering. We would not expect this from a car: we know it fails in good time. But we often apply perfect standards to moral issues. To me this indicates a desire not explained by natural selection without a perfect guide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evil is a problem for atheism as well, because it is not clear what an atheist's moral basis for calling something evil is in a purely physical world.\n","id":"a86b5470-7641-41d3-a9f1-d233c0e71353"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we abolish political parties in the USA?<|ARGUMENT|>George Washington died in 1799, well before the occurrence of most of the modern variables that weigh on this topic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"George Washington's actions and opinions are not always objectively correct.\n","id":"80b95e2c-de2e-40cd-832d-9741b049d205"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First I argue the 3 claims I make in the title. Then I tell you exactly how to change my view. tl dr Scroll down to the HOW TO CHANGE MY VIEW part if my explanation for why I feel this way is too long. Claim 1 GG really is about ethics. 2 points In the pro GG forum, there are 24 new topics in the last 30 days about ethics. That's nearly 1 topic day. GG changed the ethical policies of the entire video games industry by petitioning the FTC and getting them to update their disclosure laws. 3 links supporting the above claim about the FTC. It was dubbed OperationUV by GG FTC page where they mention the updates ctrl F video game Article about how GG won this battle of ethics If GG isn't about reforming ethics in gaming journalism, how did it reform ethics in gaming journalism? Claim 2 GG is about keeping free artistic expression in video games There are 25 new topics in the pro GG forum on censorship in the last 30 days. That's nearly 1 topic day. If I'm to believe that GG isn't about ethics free speech, why do they spend so much time talking about ethics free speech? Claim 3 GG has nothing to do with hate or misogyny I keep reading article after article that GamerGate is about harassment of women, misogyny, and sexism but I've yet to see a single article cite examples of actual harassment from actual GamerGate members in any meaningful capacity. And by that, I mean OF COURSE you can find those one or two bad apples who say crazy things. Every group has its fringe. But a few bad apples are not representative of the majority. Especially when the majority goes out of its way to chastise and call out the offenders. Anita Sarkeesian famously posted these 94 harassing tweets she received as evidence that GG is about harassment. The problem? None of these accounts were from GG. Her link Sargon of Akkad goes through all 94 one by one to see if they post anything about GG. 0 of 94 do. Twitter's group WAM did an exhaustive analysis of the GamerGate hashtag. 9,844 twitter accounts were analyzed. WAM found that 538 accounts engaged in sustained harassment. Of those 538, 12 or 65 accounts were from GG. 65. So who were the other 88 ? In my opinion, random internet trolls. None of whom have been linked to GG. Remember, Anita faced backlash from gamers years before GG became a thing. HOW TO CHANGE MY VIEW There are AT LEAST 60,000 people in GamerGate based on numbers from their forum though it's probably more like 100k . Can you show that even 0.1 of GamerGate are harassing women spreading hate whatever? A real name, or twitter, reddit, or even facebook account will do. I'd want a little proof that a they're in GG and b they're harassers. EDIT 0.1 is pretty big. Maybe just 10 total people as a start? There have been GG meetups at locations all over the globe including Washington DC, Boston, San Antonio, Toronto, Austin, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Sydney, Orange County, British Columbia, Paris, and the UK. List of meetups Is it feasible that this many people are gathering all over the world to discuss how best to harass women?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"GamerGate really is about ethics &amp; free speech and has nothing to do with hate or misogyny\n","id":"0c2cc90e-965b-4cb2-aad8-e0d95a88f333"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Google Censor Their Search Results In Order To Operate In China?<|ARGUMENT|>These ads often mislead and anger customers. The death of a student who had been following the advice of an ad has cemented a reputation that Baidu is \"evil<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Google offers a significantly more user friendly service, because it does not bombard customers with paid ads that are indistinguishable from search results.\n","id":"57f5da8b-e20f-4de5-ab84-f0ee967aa1bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>The morality of a society is key to keep it healthy and improving. A prison should teach its prisoners why what they did was wrong and how acting in an empathetic way to others ultimately comes back to oneself. A building with the only purpose of inflicting damage with no \"path\" for the tortured to follow and meditate about is medieval and socially degradative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is morally acceptable for prisons to focus on rehabilitation.\n","id":"50eaecf3-e7d5-4856-a51e-5f8c614775d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>United Nations No Growth Budgets<|ARGUMENT|>Members of the UN are obligated by treaty to contribute. In fact, ten nations all in Africa, Central Asia or the Caribbean are being threatened with the loss of their General Assembly votes for arrears this year. These states are required to make far smaller contributions in total than the gaps often left unfilled by the USA. While the US does eventually contribute its dues, and the UN voluntarily complies with its demand to keep a level budget, the threat they hold over the UN is essentially a breach of treaty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Non-payment of dues is an infringement of international law:\n","id":"132eb426-4285-4ef2-bd6d-678e7e85784a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok so I m french so forgive my English for the following statement. I don't understand why people still advocate for the electoral college. I can understand its origin. In a federal state it's important than the voices of the states are also heard alongside the voice of the people, although I disagree with the way the powers are divided with the way the power is divided between the Senate and the house of representatives. In the beginning of the US the electoral college helped maintaining the union between states that were different in their political views. However I find it hard to advocate for its maintenance. It erases the discrepancies that exists in the votes of the inhabitants of a state. If a state is 30 percent blue and 70 percent red the state is 100 percent red in the electoral college. The voices of everyone is not heard. It is not always reevaluated so the demographics on wich it is based are most of the time outdated where as in a people s vote the demographics are updated at every elections. It is even more preferable than an electoral college in the future because based on demographic statistics texas is set to become blue in the next decades. If texas turns blue the Democrats can't loose a presidential race because if you win a big state it's like if the all state voted for you. For now the republicans favors the electoral college and will do everything to prevent texas from becoming a blue state. But in the future I think the opinion for repealing the electoral college will become consensual or the sides will be flipped. Thank you for reading and I'm sorry for the mistakes I made but it's quite late where I am and sorry if there anny errors in my statement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a foreigner I can't understand why the US still have an electoral college rather than a basic people s vote for US presidency\n","id":"360c0a4e-ce22-4980-9e98-9e040c5bc65f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While I'm not exactly pro life, I don't know about bodily autonomy as a defense of abortion. I feel that the famous violinist argument, which is often toted as a perfect counterpoint to pro life arguments, doesn't really hold up. The argument goes that you wake up and find that your circulatory system has been plugged into another person a famous violinist, specifically who has a fatal kidney ailment. Although he will die if you unplug yourself, you have the right to do so because it violates your rights to have him impose on you in this way. But it seems there's a huge flaw in this argument it doesn't have a reason that it applies exclusively to your body. Of course, another person doesn't have the right to demand the use of your kidneys. But they also can't demand to live in your house. They can't demand your food. They can't demand your money. So if we're going to use the violinist argument to claim that an unborn person has no rights, why can't it also apply to a child who HAS been born and is now imposing on the mother simply by being in her life and having to be taken care of? This is, of course, assuming the mother can't find an adoptive family. I don't know how likely such a situation is, but let's just assume it can happen for the sake of analogy, in the same way that we can assume that it's possible to wake up with a famous violinist plugged into you. As an additional argument, what about a situation with conjoined twins? Suppose that the first twin has significantly more control over the body than the second twin, leaving that twin basically just a head and arm living as a parasite off of the first twin. What if one day, the first twin decides she no longer wants the second twin living off her body? Can the second twin ethically and legally be killed? If not, then what is it that makes abortion fundamentally different? As a side note, I would agree that a fetus doesn't have the same level of humanity as a born person. But that defense isn't really valid in this case. The whole point of the argument from bodily autonomy is that it's ethical to kill the unborn child regardless of its level of personhood.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"famous violinist\" defense of abortion is flawed\n","id":"acfc9430-6dc7-41c4-9a00-d6ebee4c99ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Reforms that check boxes for improving democracy are often meaningless or corrupt. When Iraq imposed a quota for women in parliament, many women on party lists were just female relatives of male politicians, there to fill the quota. It boosted the statistic for female representation in government without making much of a real advancement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conditioning assistance on becoming democratic only encourages states to make surface-level reforms that appear democratic.\n","id":"6fc1ad65-95c2-4fc2-88fd-b52189e42c16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems very strange to me that whenever they talk about catastrophes in the news they always specify how many kids were hurt killed gone missing. But why? I think that it does not matter who died old people, little children, men, women, vegetarians, heterosexuals etc. Every person's life is a tragedy, right? And adults are somebody's kids themselves. If I die in a plane crash tonight I'm 22, so I'm not a kid , there will be sad people for who it won't matter that I was not a kid. So why are people always so terrified when it comes to kids' deaths?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not think that lives of children are more precious than lives of adults especially when it is about numbers.\n","id":"c691c0b9-aff8-41b7-b6f2-b8a973e62d00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Boycott of 2008 Olympics in China<|ARGUMENT|>- The Chinese people are very excited about the Olympics in their country. To boycott the event would send a strongly negative and antagonizing signal to them. Feelings of alienation would last for years that could have negative consequences in China's relations with the world. And yet there is no reason to believe that China's anger at a boycott could be translated into any positive impacts on the policies of the Chinese government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A boycott of the 2008 Olympics would antagonize the Chinese people\n","id":"2dc0bbb2-96d0-4118-b303-07e7c31e2d0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I bring this up in public it's treated as paranoia, but I haven't heard a good argument directly against it yet even though I've looked, so here are my points Edit GMO is defined as a bioengineered living organism that contains DNA from outside its species I am not talking about cross pollination or non lab engineering farming husbandry through purposeful selection of plants animals . Edit as pointed out, we do actually have data on what strains contain what new DNA. We don't have data on what end products contain, often even when in their whole form like in the produce section edit The public does not have access to ~~information about any of the additions being made, nor~~ what raw products are being used in what end products It is in the best interest of manufacturers to use products that net more money rather than those that are safe The goal of profit at the cost of health is already shown to be in effect throughout the food supply chain including regulators, legislators, and the Attorney General's office with the food pyramid recommendations to the detriment of the American people in ways unrelated to GMO and going back half a century corn subsidies leading to our country's massive corn dependence which in all recent evidence and studies, points to the morbid obesity problem here that vastly outpaces other first world countries It is not in any government's best interest local, state, fed to enforce recalls on the scale that would be necessary if a problem with a strain of GMO crop was found any issues with the food chain are very likely to cause mass hysteria, food hording, riots, shortages, etc, making it a public necessity to silently phase out foods that are causing problems rather than remove them immediately. Phase out of established crops takes years to decades building up the seed, replacing existing perennial plants, etc and may not happen at all if left to farmer's choices tree fruits, for example, can be grafted basically eternally, and why would a farmer with a well producing crop ever opt to replace the trees? . Edit Delta on this item to u BobSeger1945 who brought this info to me ~~ Unlike, say, vaccines, GMOs aren't saving lives. The world has a massive amount of food waste and we would be just fine without them albeit we'd have to get away from our dangerous reliance on monocropping , so the well they benefit the greater good overall even if they are eventually bad for you argument shouldn't apply.~~ Even where it does apply, this does not provide any rational as to why we aren't labeling and putting recall methods in place that won't destroy nations if deemed necessary. In my mind, all of these create a situation ripe for abuse. An environment where producers were incentivized or obligated to cover up problems that are damaging to the public is exactly why the FDA was created to begin with. It stopped dairy distributers from watering down milk, it held sausage producers accountable for the fillers in their product, it kept sanitary standards in place for butchering. Why aren't we holding the actual content of the food we eat to the same standards we hold it to for processing? Because profits. So why should I trust GMO food, blanket statement? If it's in your best interest to sell a basket of apples without regard to public health, knowing you had government protection if anything happened, why would I trust that none of your apples are ever poisoned? You'd sell them just the same if all of them were. Change my view, I'm tired of being told I'm paranoid for seeing it as the next leaded gas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"GMOs in their undisclosed and barely regulated state aren't advantageous to the public good.\n","id":"8f470199-71b2-4014-a0bb-83325c63f71c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As it currently stands, certain punctuation marks mainly periods and commas are to be contained WITHIN quotation marks when one is necessary at the end of a sentence. For example He said, It is time to go. I have many issues with the way this rule currently stands, so I'll begin with how it seems to contradict the very reason there are quotation marks in the first place. The primary function of quotation marks is to set off and represent exact language either spoken or written that has come from somebody else. source Exact language would not include extra punctuation that comes from the sentence that contains the quotation as a whole. Another example would be if someone said, Why don't you care? , but it was quoted in a sentence as so Why, she asked, don't you care? It would unnecessarily add a comma to the quote where one is not needed. It would make much more sense to put the comma outside of the first set of quotation marks to tell the reader that the comma is not a part of the quotation, but a part of the sentence as a whole. My second reason is that using the punctuation marks in this way often times causes the final quotation mark to be the last character in the sentence rather than a period, for example. Take a look at these sentences He said, It is time to go. I was upset by this. Do you see how this rule causes the first sentence to seem as if there is no ending punctuation at all? There is a simple solution to this, and that is simply to keep quotation marks as they should be used, an EXACT quote of what was written or said. For example, if you are quoting a declarative statement within a declarative statement, I believe it should be put as follows He said, It is time to go. . I was upset by this. It may look a little weird with the periods right next to each other, but how it looks isn't as important as the meaning you are trying to portray through your writing. I would even be okay with omitting the periods within quotations, but as it stands right now, the current way to format quotations with ending punctuation marks can be confusing in many cases and misleading as to what is actually being quoted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"English grammar rules regarding quotations and punctuation are confusing and should be changed.\n","id":"d02d147b-ec7b-4fa1-882d-193efac3800d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know he was already kicked off his football team, but this situation presented a real threat to public well being. I'll bet there were people that actually stayed inside that evening, which affects businesses because it means people don't feel as safe in the streets. This would also affect property value. I advocate a fine in the thousands 10,000 to throw out a ballpark estimate . My view can be changed if I'm sufficiently convinced that the fine shouldn't be that high or alternative no legal action should be taken.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jeremy Daugherty, twitter user who photoshopped The Purge poster, should be fined for creating public panic in Louisville\n","id":"ad4f5124-6c48-4c5b-a9dd-6522c8a47a32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I mean, wealthy people can do whatever the hell that want if they want to pay double the price for a brand name drug, then all the power them. But unfortunately many middle class and lower class people do as well presumably because they imagine that the significantly cheaper price means a decrease in quality and effectiveness. But that is patently untrue. All generics must contain identical ingredients and be approved by the FDA. They are cheaper because of market competition and because the new manufactures do not have to recoup all the money that the original pharmaceutical company spent on research, testing, marketing, etc <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it's silly to pay absorbent prices for a brand name medication if a generic is available.\n","id":"4dcf26a7-9b68-4d45-9bb1-25081ab3192a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>This is an inherent weakness in a majority rule system. For example, as trans people only make up about 1% of the population this means they could never influence a political decision, which results in unfair treatment of this group. Similarly, other minority groups, like gays on the issue of gay marriage, have struggled to make changes through elections. source<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The small number of people affected does not justify a violation of their rights. This represents a case of the Tyranny of the Majority a decision does not become right or just based on numbers.\n","id":"8e40ef62-dab3-4019-8100-b824b9aba0b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hunger Games-Style Tournaments Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Consent to government authority in a social contract is about an agreement to abide by norms and rules that protect society, not the individual. Where this is undermined through the promotion of violence, the government has a right to restrict it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing these tournaments, as well as watching them, would promote violence.\n","id":"637e2b80-4bf9-496c-9dca-1e0ab2a354ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title seems to defy logic because many believe experience and time on earth translates into more knowledgeable. I argue that with the invention of the internet, the average American 15 30 is much more aware of the frequent corruption and hidden agenda's of each political party due to lobbying then the older generations who still mostly rely on television and the moral character of politicial parties to influence their voting. Some reasons Younger people are more tech savvy and know how to use the internet. I argue that the internet is much more non bias then television shows. While the internet can be bias, it is much easier to view more material quicker, and the format of reading tends to be a harder medium to influence people then the forms of visual communication so bad people have a harder time manipulating people on the internet than when they post videos. I also think that we are a lot more accepting and less likely to deny attempt to restrict things that we do not agree with. Also, a lot of us see it as a broken system and refuse to participate. The older generations still play the game. It is hard to change a system when the majority still participates in it. A counter example and my opinion would be that the young need to get more involved and start calling the older people out on their bullshit. For example When I talk to my older Uncle about voting, he always seems to vote Republican because he believes in freedom, free markets, and lower taxes. While voting based on the morality of a party is noble, I feel that it overlooks potential competitors of different parties who would share similar beliefs to you or at least beliefs that you could manage. A counter party example would be people who vote democratic based on their morality of the issue of Pro choice. The voter believes that pro choice is the best, and may discount Republicans based on the morality of the party overlooking some of the more progressive Republicans who take a stance of neutrality to the issue. Their opinion is totally different, but if given power the outcome of the situation would not change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Younger American Generations are better aware of the political climate than older people.\n","id":"b94e2a46-b30c-4ad6-ac71-071eeec554a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Dead soldiers are praised as martyrs of their countries for they died to free their people from oppression, saving lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Martyrs are praised in most religions and cultures, particularly if it were to save other lives.\n","id":"03464d88-3071-4951-8bbc-f2ba4578ba0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>It is difficult to put a limit on these removals. For example, there were three streets in Florida named \"Lee\" \"Forest\" and \"Hood\" and the names were changed because these were all Confederate Generals. That cost money and time to many citizens living on those streets. Money that the city did not compensate them for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is difficult to draw a line that satisfies everybody. If Confederate monuments are removed, statues of Presidents like Jefferson and Washington, who owned slaves, could be next.\n","id":"837f9eae-60dc-47d6-9d8f-5fbfa4b08c8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I used to be a libertarian, but after thinking about how private charities are to replace food stamps and other forms of gov't welfare, I've come to the conclusion that it's a long shot. Our societies don't help us, we are all just in it for ourselves. I know this because I'm just the same, and I bet you are too, and there surely isn't enough caring in the world to displace current welfare programs. I look at the occupation of a therapist for an example. If we have to live in a society where we pay money just to talk to someone, then what kind of empathy do we have among us? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have lost faith in humanity.\n","id":"9b7a60bb-bc37-4d7d-92e9-7065b8ad1420"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>It's possible that a greater evil would be done if God did not allow evil in the world. The appearant evil in this world might serve some purpose which us for our ultimate benefit and which we are unable to understand.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of evil can be reconciled with an all-powerful and all-loving God. God would not want to remove evil if a greater good were only achievable with the existence of evil.\n","id":"72cb7e2c-4f05-432a-b42b-021f191430c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Hate crime laws<|ARGUMENT|>Hate crime laws only target hate-driven violence. There is nothing in it that prevents preachers from opposing homosexuality vehemently on the pulpit. As long as a preacher does not directly incite violence against homosexuals, they can oppose homosexuality and vocally and aggressively as they like.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate crime laws don't restrict religious speech on homosexuality\n","id":"bc167a96-5210-43ce-b257-35dfa40d2a48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>North Korea should not be labelled irrational for developing nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>If only North Korea would reason like an \u201cadult\u201d, enter fruitful discussions and negotiations in a peaceful manner without provocations, aggressive behaviour, attempts of extortion, blackmail, overt threats and accept the order of the world, there would be no reason for economic sanctions and threats of war against the country<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The North Korean decision to develop nuclear weapons is the equivalent of a child\u2019s tantrum\n","id":"4c713d50-67ea-417e-86e6-f2974c635826"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are identity politics detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Identity politics assumes that a person's values, beliefs and interests are based upon their race, gender and sexual orientation instead of the individual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Identity politics strip a person of any value or individuality beyond their prescribed social group.\n","id":"d273bfa7-5d53-4907-bd1c-4938d3c36a90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abortion<|ARGUMENT|>There is a peculiar double standard being applied by opponents of abortion. The dignity of the fetus is glorified, while the dignity of the child-rearer is seemingly ignored and even trampled. This is particularly concerning when more men appear to support abortion than woman; it appears that men are more willing to trample the child-bearer a woman than the child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is odd to defend the dignity of a fetus over a child-rearer\n","id":"db700aba-092b-4d3f-9722-2bf2b4f261a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should ban private military companies<|ARGUMENT|>private miltary companies are open to abusing their privileges because they are not under the same direct scrutiny as the regular military.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private military companies are less ethical and violate rights or commit crimes\n","id":"0b6452bd-7340-41e4-a310-3cfd0c85fea7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I actually disagree that nerd and geek have different meanings, but after some searching it appears most of the internet has agreed that there are differences. So, if they truly are different, then DnD players fall under the category of \u201cnerd,\u201d and not \u201cgeek.\u201d The internet says that geeks are fans of their field of interest, while nerds are studious practitioners of their field of interest. If you play DnD then you are a nerd. If you simply enjoy watching others play the game from the sidelines, then I guess maybe you can count as a geek. I think it\u2019s safer to say that players and fans are both nerds and geeks, fans are just fans, and to me it doesn\u2019t make much sense to differentiate nerds from geeks. Edit in my view, where nerd and geek is the same thing, I would also consider \u201cfans\u201d to be nerds and geeks. I said \u201cfans are just fans,\u201d in an attempt to assert that nerds and geeks are the same thing, and felt that this assertion needed to have that mean they could only be referring to players or fans, but I actually don\u2019t think that. If nerds and geeks are different, then players are nerds and fans are geeks, but if they are the same, both players and fans are nerds and geeks. I didn\u2019t mean to be confusing and I feel that this \u201cfans are just fans\u201d has added confusion to my view, so please disregard that as it doesn\u2019t make sense to say that in either case, whether nerds and geeks are the same or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\u201cnerd\u201d and \u201cgeek\u201d mean the same thing, and if they don\u2019t then DnD players are nerds and not geeks.\n","id":"a35a3917-6b5f-4fe8-98b4-fdfaa4eded84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't like to read stories. I find them slow and boring, and I would much rather lie on the couch with some popcorn and watch the movie version. I've had many arguments with my reader friends, who claim that books are more fulfilling and that they allow you to use your own imagination, instead of the director's and that they help you calm down and release stress but I disagree. When I'm watching a film, I can get immersed in it. I can see and hear the characters in front of me I don't have to constantly think. But with books, there are no visuals nor audio, just plain old text on a page. I find this extremely boring, and can't get immersed at all. Don't get me wrong, I can totally see why some people like books, but I don't see why anyone could think they are better than films. , readers of reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think movies are better than books,\n","id":"95ca890b-2cf2-485b-bcbe-093c5e8b7526"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>It is good for the individual to have the right to decide for when to die.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Every human should have the right and means to decide when and how to die.\n","id":"1ff44f15-54c0-4ef4-a52b-035302cc7b04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I turned 21 recently, so the peer pressure has cranked up a notch, but I have yet to hear anything that actually encourages me to try my first drink. Social Drinking One of the arguments that I have heard frequently is that it is a social lubricant it will lower my inhibitions and make me more easygoing. This one has always rubbed me the wrong way, because it feels like using alcohol as a crutch. I am a generally outgoing person, I'm not afraid to speak my mind in social situations, and I typically don't have an issue approaching women. I also tend to be loose when I'm in a social setting, saying stupid illogical funny stuff without thinking very much, and often inspiring comments like you don't need drugs alcohol lol or people not believing that I'm sober. Despite this, I am uncomfortable with the idea of actually being out of control, and I feel like the limitations I do place on myself are good ones. If I say something off the cuff that could be offensive uncomfortable insulting, I have the tact to make it into a joke or defuse the situation, which I don't want to lose. I also have no desire to lose the ability to tell if a girl is into me and back off. I have friends who claim they need alcohol to unwind, to enjoy themselves, or to talk to girls, which upsets me and makes me want to encourage them to be more confident. In fact, in most instances, I have observed alcohol making people more tired obnoxious and less capable of any positive social interaction. I don't see how alcohol can benefit me in this way and I feel as though it negatively impacts my friends as a crutch. Drinking Alone Another big argument seems to be the warmth, or the buzz that results from drinking, as well as using it as a personal de stressor. For some reason, this seems very boring to me. In terms of enjoying myself, I feel like there a million other avenues you can pursue that are less costly or unhealthy. I don't think this is an incredibly strong argument, but it is kind of what runs through my head. Like, I can dance to music, watch one of my favorite shows, read something, or go for a walk, and be perfectly content tonight. Why replace that with alcohol? I also have very few problems turning off my brain and entering a relaxed state once I have exited a stressful environment like work or school, so it is hard for me to understand why I need alcohol to do this. If I simply didn't believe in the benefits, I might still try alcohol, but I also feel like I am constantly seeing the negative outcomes of drinking. I have an overweight friend who expressed that he has a hard time getting buzzed or feeling anything from alcohol, so to compensate he just drinks much more than the others, which doubtlessly has a negative effect on his weight issues. I think I also perceive certain lifestyles as dead ends or depressing, which may be my bias. For instance, a group of my friends took to drinking and watching football every Friday, something that they seem to derive little joy from and do only because it's something to do . It seems like a boring lifestyle one could get comfortable with for the rest of their life, which makes it feel like a trap. I feel like I will get flack for being this harsh judgmental, but maybe people can help me shake this bias Lastly, I am not a very science minded person terrible, I know , but I have clung onto one fact that I read a long time ago the human brain typically grows until the age of 25, and alcohol can impact or stunt that growth. This may just be confirmation bias, but it has given me considerable determination to hold out on drinking at least until that age. I would be interested in a more balanced perspective on some of the science surrounding alcohol, but I doubt that would impact my views as much as refuting some of my earlier points. All this said, I do feel like I am being overly judgmental of those who drink, and I tend to get a feeling of guilt when someone who I respect offers me something in a kind way. For the most part I have been surrounded by people who negatively pressured me, and I don't feel bad about letting it get in the way of those friendships. , friends<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have no desire to try alcohol\n","id":"7fcbe10d-0b9d-4011-9fe3-9e238bef4228"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Willard Chase, Joseph Smith told him that after he received the golden plates \"he then went to the town of Macedon to work. After about ten days, it having been suggested that some one had got his book, his wife went after him; he hired a horse, and went home in the afternoon, staid long enough to drink one cup of tea, and then went for his book.\" Howe 1834, p. 246<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"After Smith purportedly received the golden plates he took a digging job in Macedon but had to return when his wife went after him from Manchester and told him that the plates were in danger of being discovered by Smith's treasure digging associates.\n","id":"b368420d-7faf-44c0-ad1c-53eca53e8d27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've spent a lot of time around art. Just today I went through the entire De Young in San Francisco, over almost four hours. I feel like I can appreciate art. I think I know how to look at it. I have a general grasp of art theory theories, a working knowledge of art history, and I can usually put a painting to a name with the big names, even if I haven't seen the painting before. But it's boring. I don't know what it is. I have all this knowledge I've picked up, mostly from bullshit classes in college years ago and because whenever I'm around my family their favorite thing to do seems to be going through the galleries and museums. It's just boring. I plod through it. It doesn't engage me or hold my interest. It's just a series of lifeless bad photographs, or self indulgent garbage, like an art museum is just a big refrigerator for society's most spoiled children to pin up their shitty scribblings onto. I don't particularly value art I think it's largely a bourgeois indulgence, a manufactured experience for middle class white people. So I guess not only do I find art boring, I find it kind of a waste of time. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Art is boring.\n","id":"396abd18-56bd-495d-a5b8-3870f8630600"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Shane Dawson's Coverage of Sociopaths is Unethical<|ARGUMENT|>The use of Kati Morton's 'expertise' to assess Jake Paul's mental state breaches ethical guidelines in the California Association for Licensed Professional Clinical Counselors CALPCC around consent a.2.a, competence e.2.a and diagnosis e.5.a.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The series lack any expertise or professionalism when it comes to analyzing symptoms or dealing with ASPD.\n","id":"bcbf4172-af6a-4538-be6a-ac24a1b5580d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Restrictions on freedom of speech<|ARGUMENT|>Schenck v. United States, 3 March, 1919. Thus shouting fire in a crowded cinema when there is no fire, and you know it, is wrong. We accept this limit on free speech, therefore the principle is conceded.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Irrespective of its US provenance, we recognise that \"the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.\"\n","id":"ab14bda4-7c75-4d4e-b669-1e4e0b5ce1a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Science is a human convention made for understanding the world. It is a set of rules and their nature restricts them from covering the whole meaning of life, while religion can do so since many religions started as philosophies, contemplations about living a good life, e.g. Hinduism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Faith and science address inherently different subject matter and can therefore co-exist.\n","id":"5f6e394e-8c49-4248-bdba-c6ac8793b048"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>All claims made of religion which are either beyond the scope of known science and are unfalsifiably by their untestable natureexample: heaven\/hell, the soul, prayer, or are the claims of antiquity which are provably false with our present scope of science Examples: the geocentric model of the solar system, the first earth, space filled with water.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is not beneficial since most of its claims are infalsifiable or directly contradicted by modern science.\n","id":"e138220e-92b0-42b5-a615-590410298c81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fireworks should only be enjoyed at organised public displays and not sold domestically<|ARGUMENT|>When fireworks are enjoyed publicly, the cost is divided among the viewers, but each viewer sees a display that would be well out of their price range if they were to try to create it for themselves privately.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fireworks are extremely expensive and the burden of paying for them is better shouldered by government than individuals.\n","id":"4adbfe00-4aa3-43bb-86b4-9a9183ac0125"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Muhammad cartoons controversy<|ARGUMENT|>Louay M. Safi, scholar and Muslim American leaders argued that the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons were an exercise in hate, rather than free, speech. Dr. Safi accused Jyllands-Poten editors of hidding behind free speech to promote anti Muslim feelings and demonize the small but growoing Danish Muslim community. He distinguished between free speech that aims at engaging an important issue, and hate speech whose goal is to marginalize and intimate, and argued that Jyllands-Posten was evidently guilty of the latter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The cartoons were an exercise in hate, rather than free, speech.\n","id":"992b5e4e-be74-4303-acd0-1c29d3c2e8c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the worst world problem of the utmost concern?<|ARGUMENT|>Money is concentrate on the hand of a few that control whatever they want to fulfil their needs, in spite of the poor and miserable ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Low education leads to an inability to solve world problems.\n","id":"15ba5b1e-f5fd-4a41-88ea-93b3d5173f46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The Date of Australia Day Be Changed?<|ARGUMENT|>The \"Sorry\", while essential, has allowed people to dismiss the issue rather than engage with it more. There has been minimal meaningful change to back it up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The indigineous people have many greater problems to solve that are more than symbolism.\n","id":"0becd39f-6b54-450f-a54a-f5093a513346"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>It pertains to an omniscient being to \u201cknow\u201d that which is logically knowable, just as it pertains to an omnipotent being to be able to do what is logically possible. I.e., just as an omnipotent being cannot violate logic in making a rectangle square, so an omniscient being cannot know what is not actual, \u201ctrue.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Omniscience is interactive. We are free to make choices, and as we do, so does the God's omniscience update.\n","id":"596dc221-4f89-4cc7-9a9a-f649c4e33b29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think the abortion debate is very complex. Both sides have very compelling points. At some point a clump of cells does become a human being. At the same time, I believe women should have rights to their bodies. I lean pro choice, but draw the line when it's clearly a developed baby. By third trimester it's sentient and can feel pain, there's hardly a difference between killing a baby that developed inside the womb opposed to killing it after it's being born. It's first breath is just a subjective moment to draw the line. I think that there's no reason to kill it that late in pregnancy, unless the mother's life is in danger making it an unfortunate necessity . If there are any other reasons for choosing abortion, it could have been done at earlier stages before the developing baby gained sentience, so there's no excuse. Beyond the uncontrollable and unfortunate circumstance where the fetus poses a threat to the mother's life I can't think of any justifiable reason why someone would wait until the fetus is developed into a sentient baby, then abort. Because it's my body and I can do whenever I want is doesn't cut it when it's become that developed, that excuse wouldn't fly killing it right after birth. With that rationale abortion should have happened at earlier stages. That's where I draw the line on my pro choice views, perhaps you can change them? View altered Two deltas awarded so far may be more as I read , thanks everyone for the good discussion. Roughly 75 80 of commenters have been respectful and it was a good talk Most of my experience on Reddit has been rude people, so this was a nice change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Late term abortion third trimester should ONLY be allowed if the mother's life is at risk.\n","id":"974ca467-7830-48a6-b33a-392390cad9f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is essentially a repost of something I had asked roughly 7 8 months ago. You can find the original  here At the time, my opinion was slightly altered now, I'm not so sure anymore. In light of recent events, and in particular this viral video of a journalist responding to a reporter about the situation in Syria, I feel compelled to ask again. Long story short, I believe the journalist in that video makes an assertion that is in line with how most people see the conflict. Being that this is the same  as before, I'm simply going to copy paste what I had written the first time around I've been following the Arab Spring since it first began in 2011. My opinion is that it is or was , depending on what parameters you are using to define its duration a regionwide popular uprising against tyranny and oppression. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen have successfully overthrown their dictators, and I was thrilled that each of these countries had the chance to chart a course for democracy and the rule of law although the aftermath has been messy to say the least . I wanted to see the same thing happen in Syria. Unfortunately, the situation has only deteriorated with each passing year as the conflict became multi faceted. Now there is hardly any hope for peace , let alone freedom. I am still opposed to President Bashar al Assad in Syria. Other groups may have committed war crimes, but none have reached the scale of those carried out under the aegis of the Syrian Armed Forces and their co belligerents. I also view their refusal to enact meaningful democratic reforms as the catalyst for the present day situation. Had they done so from the outset, I firmly believe that this war would not be happening, and that ISIS would still be ISI . However, I'm also starting to think that I'm part of a minority here. It seems to me that the popular opinion among ordinary people within Western nations is that the civil war is really between a hodge podge of Islamic terrorist organizations and the legitimate government of Syria. A lot of people even believe that the US secretly instigated this conflict, and that any condemnation of the Syrian government in the media is mere propaganda to brainwash people into supporting military action. I also think the Russian intervention has widespread support. If I said that I consider these views to be conspiratorial, then I'd be called a right wing neo con or something to that effect who believes everything he sees on TV. If I said that I support the secular rebels in the civil war, I'd be told that there simply aren't any that the rebels are almost universally fighting for the imposition of hardline Sharia law and have no real interest in democracy. Convince me that most people who follow this conflict do not hold these views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most people support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.\n","id":"322dde8a-ebc3-4b20-bb3d-1643978d6f89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At best, most of us have 100 years or so on this planet. A lot of us on Reddit are young enough that it seems like an endless amount of time, but ask most senior citizens, and they'll tell you how fast time went by. If this is our only shot at life debatable, but supposing it is , and these few years are all we have, ever, to experience the miracle of being alive, and we're all given roughly the same number of years, on the very same planet, with the very same resources available globally, why in the hell are we spending this precious little time trying to take as much as we can, trying to dictate how other people live their short lives, fighting about everything, inventing politics to argue about, and generally just being assholes to each other? When there is plenty of food and water on the planet, why is anyone hungry or thirsty? Why is anyone homeless? Why are there rich and poor? Why do we care who marries whom? Why is marijuana illegal? I understand that people would go apeshit murdering and raping each other without some laws and structure, but we have gone far beyond that. Are we really that horrible inside anyway? Why are we building these societal rules and constructs and hierarchies that destroy millions of people's lives? I guess what I think is either we should drop all the evil that we do in the name of capitalism and democracy and religion, etc., and just globally decide to be decent to each other, or failing that, just effing nuke the whole thing because if this is the best we can do, we don't even deserve to live. Change my view. Edit I guess I should also add that I'm not advocating hard work or laziness in general. I'm all for working hard to make life better for everyone alive and to increase the enjoyment of future generations for their few years on the planet. I'm really just advocating against a mindset that allows for completely avoidable suffering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We all only have a short time to live. Almost all of us are wasting it.\n","id":"e31db923-3de9-47f8-afe2-18e517c70a77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be legally binding?<|ARGUMENT|>Increased pressure on border states has led to unacceptable conditions for asylum claimants, and the risk of other serious human rights violations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Dublin regulation fails to provide fair, efficient and effective protection for refugees. The regulation is criticized as undermining refugee rights.\n","id":"f30bbc31-e8e1-421b-a77b-43618b8366db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Confederate Flag Should be Banned<|ARGUMENT|>What is the positive contribution of this symbol? Why should the Confederate flag be regarded any differently from the swastika? Those who fly it are proclaiming their support for racist principles that belong in the past. Indeed the Confederate flag did not enjoy renewed popularity until the civil rights era of the 1960s, when it became a symbol of opposition to the movement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"What is the positive contribution of this symbol? Why should the Confederate flag be regarded any di...\n","id":"fd11eb4e-40cb-4a57-ab06-5c3abf4f8539"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the legal voting age in the USA be lowered to 16 provided that the voter is attending school?<|ARGUMENT|>Home ownership ranges greatly, but overall home-ownership rates suggest that returning to a land ownership requirement would disenfranchise substantial numbers of potential or actual voters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not good policy, and is likely unconstitutional, to require land ownership, substantial economic contribution, investment possession, or significant tax payment to vote.\n","id":"60d6ccc3-7f63-451c-83de-f8d742d3bceb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Psychopathy , a term that is often used synonymously with antisocial personality disorder ASPD , is not a genuine disease, but is rather just an arbitrary classification that is diagnosed via the presence of personalty characteristics that are unrelated to one another. There is no proof that the symptoms of the disorder are caused by any one brain abnormality. There is evidence that people diagnosed with it have similar, unique brain functioning patterns, but the nature of the relationship remains unclear. It is quite possible that lacking empathy is what causes a person's brain to appear a certain way in a scan, and not the other way around. There is no evidence that the symptoms of the disorder are caused by any one particular type of brain abnormality or functioning, and there is no scientific reason to conclude that the symptoms have anything to do with each other. If someone is a compulsive liar, it means that they are a compulsive liar. If someone is violent, it means that they are violent. If someone does not exhibit remorse, it means that they do not exhibit remorse. If someone has all of these traits, it means that they have all of these traits, but the traits do not appear to have anything to do with one another, and have not been shown to have a shared cause, and thus cannot be reasonably concluded to be indicative of a proper disease. Of course, all human behavior is a product of brain functioning, but the human brain is extremely complex, and there are thousands of potential reasons why a person may have some or all of the traits that define ASPD. ASPD is not like major deppresive disorder depression , which has been positively linked to particular chemical imbalances and successfully treated. ASPD has only been shown to have a vague correlation to certain patterns visible in neural imaging, and is notoriously impossible to treat , which would seem to indicate that it doesn't actually have a cause, which may be the case because it is not really a disease at all in the way that depression is. For further comparison, the common cold is a disease that is caused by specific species of the rhinovirus bacteria, and the symptoms of the disease are directly caused by said bacteria. The common cold is a real condition that has a specific cause . ASPD is not To create an analogy The classification of ASPD is as arbitrary as lumping together people who have brown hair, are under 5'5 , and are nearsighted into a single group, and calling them glurbenschloopers . What is a glurbenschlooper you ask? Why, it's someone who has brown hair, is under 5'5 , and is nearsighted And what is the cause of glurbenschlooperism? There is none, because the condition is diagnosed by the presence of completely arbitrary, unrelated factors that are not caused by a specific condition Of course, I could be wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Psychopathy\/sociopathy is not real.\n","id":"87eb7171-e61c-4f2c-8e7c-3e8cb0ea62a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I was stoked for the new Lion King film, have no gripes with how it basically followed the original story beat by beat or how it was animated, my problem is with the performances across the board. Every single voice actor, with the exception of PARTS of Scar's performance, were utter garbage, devoid of any real emotion, often providing tired, lame jokes looking at Seth Rogen and John Oliver , and seemed performed by people only out to get a paycheck complete amateurs. It honestly felt like the initial, casual read through at a round table shipped to final product. Even Mufasa Voice by Mufasa Was terrible. Seriously, I don't understand how it shipped the way it did How they were okay with those performances. How anyone was. Chang my view. Please.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The New Lion King Movie is Atrocious.\n","id":"d7781c94-0b81-43bd-a50e-a581862fc11c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been an atheist for 3 years, and recently I'm starting to become anti theist which means that I don't hate religious people, but I think that religion is hurtful for humanity . The question that started this transition is the following If 500 years ago we acknowledged that there's no God granted afterlife, would health research funding have increased the life expectancy, maybe even reaching immortality? , followed by If the Genesis book didn't exist, would we have started studying the universe earlier? and If religions didn't promise afterlife happiness, would social policies be better? . I wonder if anyone can provide counterarguments. Thank you in advance and sorry for my bad English.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions answering man's questions only slow down the progress towards the actual answersor solutions\n","id":"532a1331-7baa-4c43-9ab7-02dd0b88f553"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DC handgun ban<|ARGUMENT|>The DC handgun ban did decrease crime and murder rates directly after the ban was passed. According to CBS news, \"Homicides in the district did ebb over the next few years, largely following a national trend. In 1977, the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported robberies, assaults and homicides using handguns had fallen sharply in D.C. and concluded the ban was working. However, the results were challenged even by the city's police department, which said police tactics had contributed to the drop.\"5<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The DC handgun ban did decrease crime immediately after passing.\n","id":"fadf34c3-844b-40ea-a1e8-e05b9ed8dca9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've now read two books before watching the movie equivalent The Hobbit and Ready Player One. In both cases, I find the movie to be woefully inferior to the book and often downright wrong for not implementing more elements from their respective books. I've read many books after watching their movie counterparts, and while I still find the books to be better, I don't rip on the movies. The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies for instance are still completely worth watching in my mind, despite their trimmed changed aspects from the books. Everyone always says to read the book before watching the movie. I disagree. I think that method leads to complete rejection of one massive stimulating media source movies . Instead, watch the movie and treat it like sitting with your feet in a pool. It's pleasant and worth doing when you don't feel like swimming. But know that there's a whole pool of further entertainment in the books. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You should watch the movie before reading the book.\n","id":"f3ac2bed-5298-4564-88b0-b77d4a6a6d7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>this is the kind of thing that I'm talking about and before you say they are not criminals and shouldn't be arrested etc. that's not what I mean. I think the victims should be able to successfully sue the abusers for the emotional damage that they caused. edit for clarification, it must also be considered cyberbullying for one to be liable, people should not be sued merely for offending someone else. There are several reasons why I believe this is so the first is the harm that they cause to society. The feeling of having thousands of people hate someone is crushing, especially for something trivial like a hairstyle or a shirt. This is quite painful for someone to go through. The definition of cyberbullying from is \u201cthe process of using the Internet, cell phones or other devices to send or post text or images intended to hurt or embarrass another person.\u201d The messages they are sending accusing them of sexism or racism is clearly hurtful. The same definition also includes publishing materials severely defaming and humiliating them. and the incident with Matt Taylor has certainly damaged his reputation. This qualifies as cyberbullying. EDIT 8 29 PM EST 1 27 2015 aluciddreamer has refuted these two arguments. please see the above link and focus your counter arguments towards my first one. Secondly similar cases are already decided as illegal in the case with Richard Jewell where he was falsely accused of planting a bomb, he successfully sued many news outlets for libel after their false accusations. Additionally, in the case with Dharun Ravi, he was found guilty of bias intimidation hate crime . This is because Tyler Clementi was targeted because of his sexual orientation, just like how Mallory Merk was targeted because of her race if she was black, this would not be an issue . Thirdly and this I feel is the weakest of my arguments , it brings the movement towards equality into disrepute. People will stop taking these issues seriously and will become desensitized towards offending other people due to so many false claims, just like the boy who cried wolf . An argument can be made about freedom of speech , and if something is offensive, then they are free to say that. However, saying things like It\u2019s feeling like psychological torture, esp against the backdrop of state sanctioned murder is insulting equating having a certain hair style to murder and I feel it should not be protected as freedom of speech. It already has limitations on slander and harassment, so I think it's fair to make a limitation here. To change my view, you must show that people do not deserve to be liable for lawsuits for doing what they did to Mallory Merk and Matt Taylor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"being easily offended and getting angry about it is online harassment and should be illegal.\n","id":"f4d0c770-186c-4f8b-b42d-c904d0fcb63a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello I'm at a position in my life where the decision I make regarding my likelihood of finding a partner affects multiple other life choices including job to take, area to move to, etc. , and I'd like my conclusion healthily challenged to be sure it's correct. Background I'm 27, male, hetero, and only interested in a long term ideally life long relationship. Below are the big reasons why I believe I'll be alone I believe each point shrinks the number of available partners significantly 1 I'm very introverted. Very very I have no friends outside of work and family, and I like it that way I'm a homebody. I'm simply not compatible with someone who isn't similar I would tax and find taxing any woman who was not also in the 95th percentile of 'homebodiness'. 2 I'm not willing to 'put myself out there' or risk rejection in pursuit of a partner. Just ain't in the cards. A suitable match would have to pursue me. I realize that this isn't fair equal at all, but while I'd rather be with someone than without, I'll take the latter if the former requires a lot of risk and socialization. 3 Intellectual stimulation and compatibility is highly important to me. I don't need or want a partner who agrees with me all the time, but I believe there must be some serious overlap in thought. For me, the minimum starting is that my partner would have to also be of the secular humanist non religious agnostic atheist mindset. 4 I definitely don't want kids. I foresee no happy ending with a woman who is not also childfree and childless . 5 I'm sexually conservative. I've had one partner in 27 years, and I'd greatly prefer my partner to be similarly conservative. My impression is that the vast majority of folks my age are much more experienced sexually there's nothing wrong with that, certainly, but it's not what I'm looking for. I think that, in tandem, these requirements leave very few women available, especially when there are the additional near universal hurdles e.g., natural chemistry, mutual attraction that must be crossed to establish and maintain a healthy long term relationship. I believe the available pool of women who meet these standards is so small that I must either relax the standards or accept my solitude and I've chosen the latter. This conclusion naturally affects my short and long term goals and direction in life, so I want them subjected to challenge. Change my view if you can Thank you. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm pretty sure that my relationship standards are so strict that I'll be alone for the rest of my life.\n","id":"00b04ebc-feb8-41a6-a42c-ada33e83d0b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Thought I would flip the usual Modern art isn't real art stance around and present a muscular defense of the various 'radical' branches of 20th and 21st century art. Come at me with all you've got about the poverty of modern art I'm going to start with a rebuttal of some of the common points raised against the worth of modern art, and then list some of the artists I like and why I like them. So here's what I see as the commonly raised objections to the value of modern and contemporary art the distinction between these two terms is somewhat ambiguous, but basically modern art is most of what was created from 1900 1960s, and then a shift to 'contemporary' art gradually occurred . No effort technical skill is required to create it I don't get it it's just colors It's not pretty beautiful Please let me know of any others you can think of But, to address these I've listed First No effort is required to create it. Yes, in many cases very little traditional technical skill is necessary to create any number of famous pieces of the last century. And by the same token, often very little quantifiable time or physical effort would have been necessary to create the same pieces. But why do we want art to require technical skill or effort? The answer seems to me that it makes worth quantifiable in terms of man hours spent or technical skills applied we assign worth to goods with money, and we earn certain amounts of money based on the time we work at a particular job. That feels simple but actually we know when we think about it that even the apparently firm valuation possible with money is linked to arbitrary process the economic status of the country which issues it, political contingencies and emergencies, the variability of market prices for goods and services, etc. And time itself is subject to the same instability it zips by when we're having fun, and drags endlessly when we're working on a tedious task. Similar insights to these are driving factors in the way the artwork of the 20th century moved gradually away from traditional technical representation of subject matter. When we acknowledge that all processes of valuation are, at bottom, arbitrary, we are liberated from the requirement to adhere to traditional systems of valuation, but also forced to confront the problem of using any system of valuation at all. If all value is arbitrary, can we value anything? Is creation valuable? Life itself? This brings us the 2nd objection It's just colors abstract . A common whipping boy for Reddit's typical reaction against modern art is Mark Rothko, whose monumental color blocks are often presented as a sort of Emperor's New Clothes . And of course, while there actually is a great deal of technical canvas and paint ability which goes into Rothko's works, traditional figurative techniques are abandoned in them. But we must take note the 'effort' Rothko is putting into his work is not technical effort but rather effort towards discovering a system of valuation which he can stand on and for after he has abandoned traditional systems. For Rothko, his paintings represented man's transcendental relationship with his own consciousness, a kind of pure, experiential expression of pure Being. It is noteworthy that the dominant philosophical trends of the time were phenomenology and existentialism, which were attempts to find a fundamental ground for consciousness in a newly modern world whose science had demoted God from his throne but neglected to nominate a new Fundamental Arbiter in replacement. So, while Rothko does not use traditional figurative techniques, his work is effortful in the sense that it tries to express a new sense of modern spirituality without God. Variations of the same can be said for much of the various avant gardes of the first half of the 20th century traditional artistic valuation was being abandoned and concrete and universal measurement along with it , but the search for a new ground from and of which to create art was a consuming occupation. And finally, number 3, It's not beautiful it's ugly This point obviously is answered to some degree by the points I've previously made in dismissing traditional techniques, traditional standards are also held up to question. Beauty becomes something that is not necessarily inherent in a particular nude figure painted with particular colors and brush strokes, if it is even something to be strived after at all. Duchamp's 'Fountain', among much of his other work, was a fairly direct critique of traditional concepts of artistic beauty, and later Conceptual artists would work with ideas which were in many cases almost totally devoid of physical manifestation, or any object with which to invest with traditional beauty. That doesn't mean many of their works are not beautiful however the simplicity and poetic elegance of Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube would, I argue, meet many updated standards of beauty a simple transparent figure which manifests changes in the heat and pressure of the room it is within it, providing a sort of spiritual residue of the minds and bodies which perceive and surround it. In any case, the gist of my rebuttal to this last point is that just as artistic techniques had to shift fundamentally to address our experience of living in the modern age, so did standards of beauty, and even the valuation of beauty itself. So those are my initial defenses against some of the more common critiques of modern art please do your best to pick them apart, as well as point out other points that I've missed. Take your best shot But now that I've put up a defense, I'm going to launch a little offense examples of some of my favorite artists of the last century, all having worked at some points at least in very untraditional mediums. Perhaps some of you will appreciate these artists as much as I do and perhaps others of you will gain new fodder for the pointed attacks against my favorable stance towards modern art that I am hoping for I love Marcel Duchamp I love Dieter Roth I love Martin Kippenberger I love Bruce Nauman All of these artists have in common their use of non representational artistic techniques. Duchamp introduced the 'ready made', and irreverently demonstrated the contingency of artistic value through his 'Fountain'. Roth frequently incorporated real food into his work, which inevitably would decompose and change form and smell . His use of this material points towards the mortality and changeability of things, as well as linking the traditionally abstract realm of artistic production to the corporeality of bodily functioning. One of Martin Kippenberger's most famous pieces is his 'Happy End of Franz Kafka's America', which assembled dozens of pairs of chairs around desks on a sports playing field, with books commissioned by friends of the artists on many of the desks. The work is almost all 'ready mades', so to speak, with most of the furniture being found and the books written by someone other than the artist, but that's exactly the point Kippenberger's conception of the creativity of the artist rejected the traditional image of the solitary genius plucking ideas from the ether. Rather, art for Kippenberger was an inherently social function, a variable form of communication of the same type as talking or writing although a communicative form of imperative spiritual importance. Kippenberger repositioned the artist within the social milieu from which he is at bottom inseparable. Nauman is a mercurial figure who works in many mediums from sculptures that look like rags tossed in a corner to blinking poetic invocations in neon. What they have in common is an ambiguously anti monumental sense if art can be anything, as Duchamp demonstrated, then much of what the artist does in his art studio can be art, as Nauman intuited, even if appears to be trash or built in a gaudily commercial medium, or even if it's simply the act of walking around the studio itself. Here the social role of the artist creates the work as much as the artistic concept. Thus Nauman's dispersed and abject sculptures, or his lists of neon words which, as portions constantly blink on and off, modulate to new ambiguities the ambiguity already present in each phrase, demonstrate a freedom of creation bound to the realm of play opened by the identification of the artist with his social role. OK, so that's enough theorizing from me change my view Make me realize that modern art is worthless. I don't care how you do it, but I want to be feeling deep existential dread at the way I've wasted years of my life on a total void by the time I wake up tomorrow morning Have at it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Much modern and contemporary art i.e. non-figurative, \"ready-made\", conceptual etc. is of profound and deeply expressive merit\n","id":"43a7b375-59c0-4fc4-a052-28347f1e61eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI would allow society to switch its priorities from profit-based capitalism to sustainable\/valuable ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wealthy countries should provide citizens with a universal basic income UBI.\n","id":"55036fbb-4564-42f7-b55b-c5daf71862de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In human societies there are three major power structures at work. Government This refers to the state executive, legislative, and judicial powers. Libertarianism seeks to restrict the potential for tyranny by limiting the powers of the state, placing those powers in the hands of individuals who in turn can pursue money unrestricted . Money this refers to corporations and any profit driven interest. Money becomes analogous with power when the amount of money being generated exceeds the cost of living for that particular individual. Libertarianism is generally guilty of completely ignoring the potential for money to become a form of tyranny. If corporations were, for example, to form monopolies over particular employment opportunities, then individuals would have less liberty to choose from many different companies. If a particular company is the only game in town, they have the right to dictate everything from an employs political beliefs, to their manner of appearance and dress, and how they conduct themselves outside of work. They are also able to pay lower wages than the employee deserves. Employees become wage slaves under a libertarian economic system and this is indeed exactly what happened during the industrial revolution until Uncle Sam began to crack down on abusive business practices . Currently, economic regulations prevent this from happening entirely and while many employers still police the personal lives of their employees the effect is mitigated substantially by the fact that employees generally have the choice to work for another company. Companies who cannot keep good employees are more likely to fail and so there is an incentive created to not behave tyrannically towards employees. People Individuals have power through numbers, social inclusion, social exclusion, and stigmatization. People in great enough numbers have massive influence on social climates which has immense bearing on an individual's personal freedoms. If you ask a member of a GSM gender sexual minority who makes their lives the most difficult and who restricts their freedom the most, they won't tell you that it's Uncle Sam. It's individual people. It's prejudiced employers who refuse to hire them, businesses who refuse to serve them because of who or what they are, and harassment in the public sphere which pushes them out of public spaces. Libertarianism fails to adequately protect minorities from abusive social climates. It fails to protect people exercising individual liberties such as drug use, for example from being pushed out of society. tl dr so in summation, despite the fact that I am a social libertarian I believe in a great deal of far left radical personal freedoms I believe that libertarianism in practice is actually potentially dangerous to liberty. I won't vote for a libertarian candidate despite agreeing with a great deal of their social ideals because I believe that their means of achieving those ideals allow tyranny to flourish. I believe that the most personal liberty is achieved when People, Money, and Government are all keeping each other in check.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libertarianism fails to meaningfully address that government is not the only potential mechanism for tyranny to flourish and thus fails to protect individual liberty in the manner it desires.\n","id":"eb76d4fe-757f-42c5-96f8-0a18d7ef29f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of the biggest problems with ongoing oppression is the use of slurs that still have power. For example, the N word see how I won't even type it out? can enrage some individuals simply through its use, regardless of context. This creates an easy button that a white person can press, at any moment, in order to victimize a black person. All you have to do is say the word. The more forbidden it becomes, the more powerful it is when finally used. There are many other words like this, even though N is the most apt example. This is completely in contrast, with the side of movements that seeks to take words in and redeem them. Like Queer, for example, which has been transformed. One of the Vagina Monologues is even about a woman who redefines the word Cunt. Depriving words of their negative power, in this way, serves to eliminate the negative connotation of the word. This has been indicated to me most clearly by the drive to Ban the word Bossy, championed by many feminists. You are free to  on this as well, but it seems to me like by doing this, they are effectively creating a new slur. IE taking a word that was subtly offensive before, and attempting to raise awareness about how offensive it should be, and about how hearing it should bother you, even if it doesn't already. Therefore, they are making the word more offensive than it already is, and thus making it easier for men to offend women. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Banning\" A word is harmful to actual activism and Civil Rights, as it ensures that the word will still have power.\n","id":"4a036675-53b0-4deb-9977-888251874f4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't understand why there's a separate identity other than what you are born as has a point. Sex is just a physical characteristic, and there's nothing mental about it. Needing to go against that makes as much sense as having a height identity or a skin color identity that isn't actually what you are, but it's what you feel. I'm fine with people changing their sex through surgery hormones, but if there's no change in your body, I feel like there's no reason to be upset at people calling you by a different pronoun than you feel is right even though it's correct physically. Sorry if I'm being confusing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that needing to specify a different gender identity than your sex is pointless\n","id":"8d0d4da0-8559-497b-8baa-50891cf6ceec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever I hear someone extol the virtues of capitalism, I always hear about how the free market promotes competition and gives the consumer more choices. Like the world under capitalism is a gaint shmorgasboard of choice, providing everyone with a rainbow of options to choose from in a wonderful and glorious consumer oriented society. But there seem to be certain companies that are just too damn good at what they do. IKEA, for instance. It's these companies that have sorted out the game so well, that it's not really possible for anyone to compete with them. Want a kitchen table and chairs for 100? You got it at IKEA Think anyone else has the means to be able to produce a competing kitchen set? Not a chance. So when you really only have one place that you can afford to buy a book case, isn't capitalism a failure? Shouldn't a functioning capitalist society have at least 2 or 3 great places to buy a couch that you can afford?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the fact that IKEA is pretty much the only place most people can afford to buy furniture is a sign that capitalism is a failure.\n","id":"2026b182-5866-4b56-bf2a-a5f92801cf21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Natural gas<|ARGUMENT|>National Ocean Industries Association: \"About Natural Gas\". - \"how much does it costs to heat your home with natural gas? Compared to other energy sources, natural gas is a good buy. Heating with natural gas is cheaper than any other major heating source. It is nearly four times cheaper than electricity when you use resistance heat and is 25 percent less expensive than electric heat pumps.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Natural gas is one of the cheapest ways to go \"green\"\n","id":"e3a46a44-361b-4693-acf5-d8d7c9bc842e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This post assumes that Donald Trump has been found guilty of committing an impeachable offense. A standard which hasn't been reached . This is a purely hypothetical universe, different from our own, one in which Trump is conclusively guilty of committing crimes which would normally eject a person from being the president. I only bring this up because I often see people bemoaning, 'Oh but then Pense would be president' as if that would not be a dramatic upgrade from a convicted criminal. Pense seems to have no spine, abhorrent views, and his tenure as vice president seriously undermines his credibility as a moral thinking person. His willingness to fly out to a football game, just to leave it , is hardly better than a humping lapdog. I don't think he belongs anywhere near the office. However Trump has proven himself to be so disastrous, it seems inconceivable to me that Pense could be worse. It just doesn't seem plausible that Pense would surround himself family members as top advisers, pull dumbass stunts like a travel ban without consulting legal council, resort to playground bullying like trying to illegally withhold federal dollars from sanctuary cities, get himself caught up in some Russian scandal, or some pornstar scandal, golf at his own resort every weekend, suggest doing away with due process, start a trade war, make asinine tweets threatening world war at 3am, fight illegal immigration with baby cages, or open his administration to the likes of Scott Pruitt and the whole goddamn swamp of lowlifes Trump has brought with him. I totally get that he would likely appoint ultra conservative supreme court picks, push back LGBT rights to the stone age, and may have chosen to abandon the Paris Accord Iran Nuclear deal all on his own. Again, he's not someone I would vote for. BUT if Trump ever were on the verge of being impeached, but what about Pense???? is not a good argument for tolerating a known criminal in office. This is something I feel pretty strongly about but whenever I try talk about it, I don't feel like I get much any support for my view. 'Oh but what about Pense' is something I hear often from people whose opinions I respect. Is there something to that argument? Should I be more concerned about Pense maybe being a bad president if it's known that Trump already is one?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"-but president Pense!\" is not a good argument against impeachment.\n","id":"159f7ed1-9375-4458-8c39-b5ec7a1cdbc5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not on the anti vaccine bandwagon. I've had probably a dozen or more vaccines and their boosters I presume the normal ones like Hepatitis and Tetanus, whooping cough etc , but my mother definitely didn't push for a flu vaccine when they were made available maybe when I was 17, and she didn't get one, and I therefore didn't get one. There have been numerous occasions where I could get them for free I'm not even too sure if they cost anything here in Australia , but now I don't feel like getting one. I believe that because the flu is changing every year, it makes no certainty that I won't get one next year not that I often get the flu anyway . Maybe I'm misinformed, but I don't really see a reason to get the flu vaccine, even whilst obviously supporting the vaccines for the famous diseases smallpox and what have you .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I haven't, and don't intend on getting a Influenza vaccine.\n","id":"4610eed7-2aad-4aee-a914-84329beebcac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm currently standing in the idea that let's say, for the presidential election, my one singular vote has close to zero impact on the outcome. I understand that one of the main arguments against this is, if everyone adopted that mentality, no one would vote and then democracy would crumble etc. However, this is not the case because there are enough people voting to where it makes no difference whether I personally vote or not. Until it comes down to like a swing vote, does my vote actually count for anything? In addition, from what I understand is that the electoral college makes the final decision anyway. So my vote would only be an indirect influence on the outcome. I also come from a place of believing that I have not nearly enough knowledge information to make an informed decision and I understand that's my inability to be up to date on politics and whatnot. I do see how on a local level, it makes more sense to vote and be a part of the community as those votes have more of a direct impact on me. But it still goes back to swing votes doesn't it? And how rarely does that ever happen?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Choosing not to vote doesn't make an impact on elections\n","id":"782491c0-e60c-4793-86ea-13b98b43d52e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After the Egyptian revolution of 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood was elected by an overwhelming electoral majority via the Freedom and Justice Party FJP . During the FJP's abbreviated rule, there were a number of concerns about the concentration of power in the presidency of Mohamed Morsi but little sign of radical Islam, and the FJP followed a generally moderate line. Indeed, Morsi acted as a peacemaker between Israel and Hamas and was among the few leaders who could communicate with both Washington and Gaza. For a short period, it looked like radical Islam would implode as Islamists and secularists worked in partnership and Islamists could air their grievances with ballots rather than bullets. Alas, this brief honeymoon was not to last. In 2013, he was overthrown by the Egyptian military in a brazen televised coup. While Morsi had committed a number of illiberal acts, he was less of a dictator than any other president in Egyptian history and had a significantly better human rights record than either Hosni Mubarak or the military junta that succeeded him. In addition, having the opposition take power after an ouster would be almost unheard of in democracies it would be as if Bob Dole had been in line for the presidency, not Al Gore, if Clinton's impeachment had led to a conviction. With the ouster of the legitimate government in Egypt, Islamists even moderates believed that they could never enter into agreements with secular stakeholders and turned to a far more violent series of tactics Daesh, Boko Haram, etc. . At the same time, Egypt has become every bit as repressive as Saudi Arabia or Cuba and almost as repressive as North Korea, and the US' tolerance for the coup means that the US will forever go down as supporting the ouster of Islamists over relatively minor charges.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The overthrow of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt ended our best window at containing radical Islam.\n","id":"d4c1d548-00a6-4dda-b805-5b03276fc6b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, many voters oppose free trade or immigration with the professed aim of protecting domestic workers. Yet in reality trade and immigration help domestic workers by raising the number of available jobs and making products cheaper.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When voters profess to value certain goals, and then vote in ways which clearly undermine those goals, it can be assumed that they're acting irrationally.\n","id":"caf1136d-c631-4651-a11d-17450f11dea0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I went out last night with my boyfriend against my better judgment Valentines Day , and I'll be damned if half the folks that were out were viciously making out with each other right inside outside the restaurant. The place we went was a pretty fancy place 30 is the cheapest entree. A lot of people were crazy making out, which makes me feel like I'm the prude thinking it's gross. I understand hand holding and pecks but french kissing for 10 20 30 seconds while you're waiting for your meal makes me uncomfortable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"excessive PDA makes me uncomfortable\n","id":"bdee5426-995e-450c-bccb-6d7653571d1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Men Be Involved And Trusted In Childcare?<|ARGUMENT|>Continuing the norm women as caregivers, nurturers, etc. perpetuates people identifying women as the only ones suited to this role, and pigeonholing women automatically into the role of nurturer and caregiver. This perpetuates gender inequality. Integrating men into childcare would foster a more egalitarian society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stigmatizing an entire gender because of the perpetations of a few individuals is sexist and bigoted and has little connection with reality.\n","id":"689f2f14-1a2d-477d-89c6-e7fb0da5e3c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do journalists have a moral obligation to display violent images?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people do not read long form articles on global events. If a striking image of violence is on the front page of a newspaper or website, they are much more likely to be aware of the situation than if they had to go out of their way to read about it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Images convey a large amount of information very quickly. Therefore, the story behind a violent image is able to reach more people when that image is published.\n","id":"7c0ef97b-2e48-47ef-8199-088cda07cb16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Purity Pledges Harmful?<|ARGUMENT|>After being told for so long that sex was immoral, dirty and a sin, some women develop a serious fear of sex which prevents them having sex once they are married.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pledgers and other religious women report having unhappy - and sometimes even traumatic - relationships with their body and sexuality after being taught that premarital sex was a sin.\n","id":"3a497f48-0f07-4540-8384-6b8de35ce4a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Much like language: creole languages stable natural languages developed from a mixture of different languages to become a native language, are negotiated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion can be viewed as a shared and negotiated spirituality.\n","id":"0ded07a3-2d0f-4491-b1fc-a9efd0177a24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a Boston resident who was close to the attacks when it happened, and I don't find it offensive that Rolling Stone is featuring a story about him as a cover. I absolutely do not agree with what the bomber did nor do I think he's innocent, but I don't think the cover is an insult to the city of Boston. The article was a profile of the bomber, and it in no way seemed to glorify him. The cover does not make him look like a rock star, and it clearly calls him a monster. Putting the victims on the cover would have had nothing to do with the article was inside. It seems like a lot of people have taken this issue out of context and many who are taking a side have not even read the article.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think the Rolling Stone cover showing the Boston Bomber is offensive.\n","id":"e76c50d5-66a0-4d71-b270-1925e97c3e87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The parties participating in elections for the European Parliament should hold primary elections<|ARGUMENT|>Most MEPs are elected via party lists. These lists are filled by the parties without voters being able to influence the process. Primaries would give voters a more direct say and allow them to reward and sanction MEPs for their past performance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would make Members of the European Parliament MEPs more accountable to their voters.\n","id":"01b65ef6-16d7-4021-9184-0683a1ee63ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, it may be logically impossible for humans to develop the virtue of compassion without the existence of suffering people to have compassion on. If God eliminated natural evils cancer, parasites, etc., then humans would be incapable of developing compassion. A world with compassionate humans may be greater than one without such virtues. If so, then the greatest feasible world would require the existence of such evils.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is true that certain evils natural evils are not caused by human choices. However, it is possible that natural evils are necessary to achieve other greater goods.\n","id":"056977a4-bc3e-47bd-a26e-ad04532f6696"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title says, I think Osama bin Laden should have been subject to a trial. With extraordinary rendition and such that the CIA among other groups practices, it shouldn't be too difficult to grab Mr. Laden and transfer him to the USA or some other friendly territory. If we give the damn Nazis master minds of a plot that killed ~12 million a trial, why not the master mind of a plot that killed ~2,000 people? TL DR If we can storm into his house, shoot him killing him , taking his body, and dumping into the ocean Why can't we take him, alive, to a safe zone, and try him? As the Declaration of Independence says We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Osama bin Laden should've been tried\n","id":"3f50bd03-1e0b-408a-b621-67cf5d76d0f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm going to get pretty abstract here, so bear with me. If we start with the assumptions that there are no greater beings which dictate the purpose of life or human existence, and that the most powerful paradigm is the one which provides the most personal happiness while minimizing contradictions, then it seems that a complete amorality is the strongest secular position. I'll use a simple example to explain why I think so A man is faced with the choice whether or not to gain 1,000,000 and bring about the instant death of a random person he does not know. A moral man would be at a serious dilemma. He must choose between what he believes to be right protecting human life and his selfish desires to acquire money and in turn power happiness. The man must sacrifice either his own happiness or his moral principle at this juncture. An amoral man would not be at a loss he would not think twice about taking the money and would overall be happier with himself for doing so than the moral man. These points of cognitive dissonance are a serious hindrance to an individual's happiness. No one likes the feeling of choosing between one good thing and another. The person would prefer, whether he knows it or not, to receive one without knowledge of the other. Barry Schwartz talked about this in his book The Paradox of Choice. In the same respect, an amoral man is happier with his life and his decisions than a moral man, who frets over the best way to go about doing things and must worry about both his own selfish interests and his moral principles. I have come to believe this wholeheartedly, but it seems to contradict with almost everyone's point of view, and I'm not confident enough to assume I'm right and seemingly the world is wrong. I don't ruthlessly pursue my own interests and in fact, many people would consider me a good person. I often enjoy helping people I respect and care for, even at great cost to myself, and my circumstances allow me to live more comfortably within the bounds of the law than I would if I were to become a criminal. However, I don't hold any moral principles. My only principle is to maximize my own enjoyment of life, and if someone were to offer me the hypothetical 1,000,000 briefcase, without fear of the legal consequences, I would probably take 1,000 and sleep like a baby afterwards. I don't see how adding morality to the equation of human existence provides more happiness for the individual to me, it seems to lead to contradiction. A person's beliefs should serve him or her, not the other way around. Edit Formatting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Amorality is the most harmonious secular viewpoint.\n","id":"0f43c3ab-5546-48ce-8c98-38356675ed34"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is transhumanism the next step in human evolution?<|ARGUMENT|>Transhumanism has the potential to rob man of some of the essential human experiences; such as growth through struggle and the sense of individuality by knowing ones personal strengths and weaknesses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human interaction partially gets lost in transhumanism, where people are not interacting with \"humans\" anymore, but humans + something else.\n","id":"c1475213-3692-467b-b492-7ef3d1cf061f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Hunting for sport<|ARGUMENT|>All animals have their strengths. A deer has advantages over the human, such as its speed, agility, and their superior senses. Humans have the advantage of being able to creatively create tools to serve their purposes, such as firearms and camoflauge clothing to hunt. Because of this, animals and hunters are at an equal footing when it comes to hunting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hunting is definitely fair, because, all animals have their strengths.\n","id":"423de22c-b9d5-4f45-8457-3b9b8e8822a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Many of the structural problems currently plaguing the Black community are directly solved by reparations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reparations would benefit segments of society disadvantaged by the legacy of slavery.\n","id":"388cacd3-0399-4af9-a531-9fa8d361dc41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>That is the reason why, as a society, we have laws, governing many of the hard as well as incredibly simple topics, like stealing, murder and rape.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human actions are driven by what makes them feel good, not necessarily by what is best for them or best for a society as a whole.\n","id":"d1116f0a-69e1-4cdb-9ae6-4399fc08920f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Physical Education In Schools Should Be Compulsory<|ARGUMENT|>We acknowledge the right of individuals or their parents to control their own bodies \u2013 when they have an operation, where they go, what they do. Why is this any different? This discussion should be held in the real world: students actually aren\u2019t compelled to attend PE classes, as \u2018sick notes\u2019 are produced with alarming regularity by parents complicit in their child\u2019s wish to avoid this lesson. The aim of \u2018compulsory PE\u2019 isn\u2019t being fulfilled at present in any case, and greater efforts to enforce it will only result in more deceit, or children missing school for the entire day \u2013 or, in the most extreme cases, being withdrawn from state education by parents unwilling to allow their children to be forced into something they don\u2019t wish to do. Instead, we should simply abandon the whole exercise and allow PE to become voluntary. The UNESCO charter stresses the right to PE, and was addressed to nations that failed to provide it at all \u2013 it was not meant to suggest that individuals should be compelled to do it in nations that do1. 1 UNESCO. 1945, November 16. Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Retrieved May 18, 2011.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Individuals should have the right to control their own bodies\n","id":"2a680403-7282-4e7c-a1ff-c52eb0d0eb5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>Unlike the madam secretary Hillary Clinton campaign, the Trump campaign would have no idea whether their interactions with foreign players were being monitored by Intelligence Community, so campaign members would have to be incredibly stupid to even attempt to collude with any foreign power, Russia in particular - not to mention the 24\/7 media coverage of candidate Donald Trump from day one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Trump campaign had lots of incentives not to collude with the Russians.\n","id":"f5cddbb7-8976-4223-a99e-4fb8f81c68cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>If God commands actions because they are right, then morality isn't grounded in God but instead supersedes him. But if actions are right because God commands them, then morality is arbitrary, as it is subject to the whims of God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Plato's Socratic Dialogue \"Euthyphro,\" it is proved that morality cannot feasibly come from a god, and thus must either exist or not independently. Thus moral arguments for god are all based on a shaky standing.\n","id":"129aae38-c268-40ee-aad3-df937b2c916f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU have its own army?<|ARGUMENT|>Any EU forces involved in the \"War on Terror\" would be supporting a war which was declared and largely managed by the United States, and would inevitably be associated with the United States as a result.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A European army could be seen as a proxy for US forces, and thus be targeted in the same manner as US forces.\n","id":"7c91a59d-bca2-4eac-81a3-02b40567121b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>They can go to a couple therapy and work on certain issues. If the relationship can be improved in some ways, the sex is going to be better anyways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are better alternatives than adultery to making a couple's sex life again more eventful.\n","id":"bf92fa7c-9f82-467e-a40b-f198f7003923"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the FBI Right to Keep the Pedophile Site Playpen Online After Hacking It?<|ARGUMENT|>Operations like those are costly and dance legal limbo. This is not what should be done with taxpayers' money and trust in the legality of the institutions which have the mandate to defend legality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To keep it running eroded the trust of the public into the legality of FBI actions.\n","id":"34dca158-4347-4923-a90c-18a7e45f85b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fashion can never be feminist<|ARGUMENT|>Alexandra Shulman was quoted by the Daily Mail in 2011 in response to racist tirades from John Galliano and hairdresser James Brown saying, \u201cI don't think that fashion is institutionally racist in the slightest.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prominent members of the fashion industry have expressed a denial of acknowledging racism in the industry.\n","id":"6621f8b1-2beb-416c-967c-c8d9fe51dc44"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is eating meat ethically wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>In the United States, a very powerful pro-slavery argument was based on its importance for the economy of the country. Yet, eventually, it was not powerful enough vis-a-vis the human right to freedom.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The economy can adapt, like it always has after big morally-oriented changes like slavery or some wars, for instance. We shouldn't look at society only through the prism of economics.\n","id":"3765770a-30d4-4505-8219-6b9c52477651"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I Know that there is a lot of debate as to whether the Redskins should change their name in the deep moral sense . No matter which side of that debate you come down on however, it seems to me that there is no good reason to keep the name. Right now, it's controversial has been for a long time , and turns some non zero amount of people off. On the other hand if they change the name they get rid of those headaches, get to sell a ton of merchandise with the old name to people who want to get it before it disappears, and get to sell a ton of merchandise to people who buy stuff with the new name. The only reason not to change the name is stubbornness. I know that branding is important, but it's not like people in the area are going to start rooting for teams in another city just because they changed the name.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no good reason for the Washington Redskins to not change their name.\n","id":"10e9ec31-dad4-4961-a6e5-45f73e8bcc48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Among many speculative and generally responsibility dodging reasons I've heard Democrats say they lost the 2016 election is because Trump got an inordinate amount of free advertising in the mainstream media. The wiki above states that Hillary and her supporters spent almost 340,000,000 on her campaign more than Trump did. And yet there are oft made assertions that he got more towards his campaign because the media covered him more often than other candidates. Quite a lot more, apparently. His free advertising price tag measured around 5 billion, compared to Hillary's 3.24 billion. The reason I disagree with calling this free advertising is that most of said coverage was critical of Trump, and much of it amounted to little more than a smear campaign against him. The wiki above mentions gt Clinton was endorsed by The New York Times, 271 the Los Angeles Times, 272 the Houston Chronicle, 273 the San Jose Mercury News, 274 the Chicago Sun Times 275 and the New York Daily News 276 editorial boards. Trump, who has frequently criticized the mainstream media, was not endorsed by the vast majority of newspapers, 277 278 with the Las Vegas Review Journal, 279 The Florida Times Union, 280 and the tabloid National Enquirer his highest profile supporters. 281 Several papers which endorsed Clinton, such as the Houston Chronicle, 273 The Dallas Morning News, 282 The San Diego Union Tribune, 283 The Columbus Dispatch 284 and The Arizona Republic, 285 endorsed their first Democratic candidate for many decades. USA Today, which had not endorsed any candidate since it was founded in 1982, broke tradition by giving an anti endorsement against Trump, declaring him unfit for the presidency . 286 287 The Atlantic, which has been in circulation since 1857, gave Clinton its third ever endorsement after Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson . 288 gt Other traditionally Republican papers, including the New Hampshire Union Leader, which had endorsed the Republican nominee in every election for the last 100 years, 289 The Detroit News, which had not endorsed a non Republican in its 143 years, 290 and the Chicago Tribune, 291 endorsed Gary Johnson. Point being, most of this coverage of Trump was not positive. It was focused mainly on his absurd, bombastic, crude, and racist sexist statements grab em by the pussy, anyone? , and didn't shy away from openly denigrating him as unfit for the presidency for these reasons among many others they also didn't shy away from detailing. This does not amount to advertising, it amounts to smack talk. I'm sure we're all familiar with old adages like any press is good press, as long as they spell my name right, and there's no such thing as bad publicity, but I disagree with those concepts, at least in this context. Press coverage of oil spills on the part of guys like Exxon or BP can hardly be counted as free advertising, so why would it be in the case of the media trash talking Trump? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The media coverage of Trump during his campaign should not be referred to as \"free advertising\"\n","id":"ee00b261-d3f9-49eb-9e8f-9e572ceda6f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>If the problem were rephrased, as a situation where they would have to choose to push another human or their pet in front of the bus, most of those that previously saved the pet, would probably not push a human in front of the bus, though this is a symmetric situation to the saving the pet\/human, before.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If that were a calculated decision, knowing all the resulting consequences, they might, but they do not and are thus not acting rationally.\n","id":"e829fecb-1e34-4f96-ae40-4b5f90ac1e31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was reading a post in r technology about Facebook submitting a patent for a way to track your emotions facial expressions using webcams and use that data to show you more of a friend's posts if you smile at their posts often for example . The comments were a sh tstorm of people arguing about whether Facebook would actually do this or if it's just patent grabbing a topic for another time . Of course, the obligatory Facebook and Google and Messenger and Instagram watch you day and night regardless of whether you give them access to your camera comments persisted as well. Reading through the article and the comments, I realized that I didn't actually care. If Facebook shows me content that is more likely to make me smile, why is this a problem for me? If they target ads at me that better suit my likelihood of buying things, so what? This also goes back to government NSA spying, with the idea that the government can read emails and texts and other private communication if they view you as a threat. I recognize that as humans it feels wrong to have someone spying on you, but there are a couple things here a. No human has the time or the patience, or cares enough, to actually watch hundreds of hours of millions of users scrolling through Facebook. The emotion determination would be done entirely by a computer. If it's privacy you're concerned about, like ahh I don't want people to see me, this isn't an issue. There literally are not enough people in the world to watch everybody's video recordings. This also applies to a government entity watching you or reading your emails or whatever. If you've not been flagged by a bot, no human will ever see your emails or sexting or whatever you're embarrassed about, simply because nobody cares. This is similar to the machines in the airport that can see through your clothes. The workers see this sh t every single day. They don't care about your petty body rolls or whatever. b. Even if somebody did take the time to watch you, so what? Sure, it feels creepy, but, especially with the government, they're not doing it with the intent of watching you. They're trying to keep you safe. c. With regards to government if you're not a terrorist, or committing a crime, you will literally never get flagged by a bot and on the off chance that you are, some desk worker will read your stupid email about how something is the bomb, mark it as a mistake, and move on. End of story. So, if you don't have anything to hide, there's literally no concern that your emails will be read. d. When Facebook or Instagram or whoever does this, they are actually making your experience with their product better If I smile a lot at one of my friend's posts, I WANT to see their posts more. That's the whole point of the technology to make the product experience better for the user. That's you. And the government is trying to keep you safe. I can see how you wouldn't want this data to fall into the wrong hands crazy stalker people do exist, after all . I can even see how you wouldn't want people to be able to use this for any purpose besides what they say they're using it for terrorist prevention, product improvement . But if this is the case, shouldn't we regulate the use of this type of data collection make laws about it, etc? We should be able to have this conversation openly, without immediately being shut down by people not wanting the government to be able to access their data because of sexting or an affair or whatever. Also, this doesn't apply to companies. Company secrets are real and shouldn't be able to be accessed by government officials or anyone else. I'm strictly talking personal privacy here. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Online privacy isn't important if you have nothing to hide\n","id":"f10e204a-efe8-467d-b73a-d73b78112a06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pre-nuptial agreements should not be recognised in divorce courts<|ARGUMENT|>The case stands: Prenuptial agreements should not be recognized in divorce courts. The proposition side had the task to convice that not recognizing prenuptial agreements in divorce courts is more benefitial than doing so, and has done it with different pillars: The subjectivity when creating a prenuptial contract, the changing conditions and possibility of regret or commit a mistake, and the opportunity that prenuptial agreements give to abuse another person. During this debate we found some key questions: 1.-Is Unfairness reated to prenuptial contracts? The opposition tried to say no, but we proved that with prenuptial agreements being subject to abuse and changing conditions, as well as the use of feelings before reason lead to unfair outcomes. We developed with a couple of examples. 2.-Is voiding prenuptial contracts a good measure? We proved yes, we proved that is it legal and possible and even the opposition side committed the mistake of defending the brilliance of prenuptial agreements by saying that in any case they could be abandoned, strengthening our case. We proved analysed the reasons behind nullifying prenuptial agreements and always answering a why, like te way prenuptial agreements do more harm than good. First of all, we recalled how \"feelings produce loving behavior\" and how perception and your faculties to decide change from the moment you are in total love before you marry to the time when you are an enemy of the man or woman you have divorced from since basically, at the moment they are written, they are done not to ever be used or otherwise why would they marry?. Here, the opposition just tried to run in circles saying they should then get legal help but never addressed our main point, that was the different perception you have before signing the prenuptial agreement. We then went to prove how conditions change from the moment you are about to marry than to that moment when you divorce. We approached to that argument from different sides: One, that economical value for goods change over time and what in the beinning could be a great treasure to protect under a prenuptial agreement could end up being a bulk of trash. Then, we also stated how perception and ideologies vary from the time a prenuptial agreement is signed than to the time it is being pretended to be enforced. The opposition followed by adding hey and then saying the prenuptial agreements could be ammended.Forgetting they have to be unanimous decisions that may not always be convenient for someone. Moving on to our third pillar, prenuptial agreements constitute a serious chance of abuse. We mentioned how prenuptial agreements are commonly used to gain an economical benefit rather than to protect personal assets. We addressed how love can be used as a manipulative tool, leading to imprudence. We then showed how cna it be up to abuse from both, a richer and a poorer side. A richer side could negotiate the basis to make convenient agreements and in the other side, the poorer would just see in the richer side an opportunity for mining diamonds. The opposition once again claimed for legal advice, but forgot that lawyers will only care for their customers and not the other ones, so the window of abuse would still be open, but with the advice of an expert! To strengthen our case, we used an exaample to proof how prenuptial agreements can be taken lightly because of love, and how even when conditions may seem good, they may not turn out that good future cannot be predicted; the opportunity for abuse, the useless ammendments are, the chains prenuptial agreements can provide, the unfair outcomes, and how what they claim as right to chose is less right than it appears. All of this was done analysing a single case. The opposition tried to justify it by saying all agreements are subject to abuse and may have holes, so we have to \"trust\". Now we'll move on to the points the opposition side tried to make. Their first argument and they even used it twice was a point that turned out to be more irrelevant than relevant: Pre-nuptial agreements reduce trauma associated with divorce. They said that disputes over prenuptial agreements are faster and so, reduce a possible trauma to children. However, this is not the case and we proved that what can create trauma is the build-up prior to a divorce and not the court trials themselves and now, unlike prenuptial agreements, the courts have taken measures to prevent children trauma. Then they said that even though you would still have a trauma, at least with prenups, you could be \"comfortable because it was your own decision\", but when then questioned: Doesn't that lead to regreat for committing a mistake? And that leads to trauma and depression? Their mainpoint died there. Another irrelevant and off-topic point of them was that supposedly prenuptial agreements produce for informal marriages but we then remarked that we do not advocate either for civil or informal marriages, since informal marriages can also be protected by law and so, we found no inconvenient with them. They tried to rescue their point by saying banning prenuptial agreements reduce marriages but made so without a basis and just as a supposition. Their two next points were.MARCOS The opposition then wrote that supposedly not having prenuptial agreemetns would harm marriages since, supposedly, that would lead to less people marrying once again with a factual basis and they tried to use our abuse argument to their case supposing that all States would work on the same way, which certainly isn't the case but we quickly replied with a real and clear case that showed how an old man and a young woman their example would marry and had legal problems with prenups even 10 years after and how the woman just made millions out of a prenuptial agreement. Then they say that prenuptial agreements also work in marriages, however, he said that maybe that could wok but that's not the case we are analysing right now, but the dissolution in divorce courts. Once again they tried to justify something that can turn out to br bad with another thing that can turn out Marriages as such! but without providing an alternative. So from that we have concluded that the opposition was not able to deliver good rebuttal to our proposals and we addressed the irrelevance of their points or in the other cases, we proved how banning prenuptial agreement would be better than the status quo of their points. In the end, we couldn't see a single example on how a case would be better by abiding to prenuptial agreements instead of making it invalid and in the other case, we did present various reasons and some cases that let us conclude it is better to void prenuptial agreements. It is for this reasons and because prenuptial agreements are against the principles of marriage, that stand for \"union until the last days of your lives\", that we beg this house to propose the motion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Why should pre-nuptial agreements not be recognised in divorce courts? Proposition summary\n","id":"a1b97d8c-0b15-432b-9595-93b81d38e76f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, let's set our parameters here we're not talking about briefs or tighty whiteys or bikini briefs or whatever. Let's just stick to boxers and or boxer briefs. The design I'm talking about is with the fly. There seem to be 4 designs that I'm aware of when it comes to this a There's the basically open fly with just a little bit of overlap. This is an inferior design because it leads too easily to your dong flopping out at inconvenient times, which in turn leads to dangerous dong zipper exposure. This could be disastrous. b There's the same, but with one or sometimes 2 buttons which is the superior design I'm talking about. No accidental dick exposure, but also easy access when needed for pissing purposes. c There's this bullshit with the flap that overlaps another flap beneath it, forcing the would be pisser to go dick hunting every time they approach the urinal. True this is the best design for avoiding accidental exposure, but very difficult when you need to pee. d There is no opening at all, forcing you to actually pull down your pants at the urinal like a 6 year old. That's not even up for discussion. That is ridiculous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- men's boxers and boxer briefs with a buttoned fly are superior to any other design.\n","id":"0367042a-5403-43bc-b7fd-40af4fac2887"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I work as a clerical longshorman and enjoy one of the best health insurance plans in the nation. We have no co pays, no deductibles, no gatekeepers, and the entire cost is paid for by the company. Using the Iron Triangle of Healthcare and other countries UK NHS as an example, I only see my high quality healthcare being degraded. As an example, I will face rationing in terms of non critical healthcare needs and certain medications. I am familiar with the rebuttals that by removing healthcare from contract negations will allow focus in other areas, such as pay. My counter is that this additional pay will mostly be used as the result of a tax increases and if I sought to elevate my health insurance to where it originally is at the costs would be prohibitive. This is due to M4A exempt doctors facilities being prohibited from ever accepting a M4A client and there being no private insurance. As such this type of care would be reserved for the ultra rich. I know this sounds like I got mine, F U but I don't see why I need to suffer for the common good without significant remunerations .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Oppose Medicare for All Because Its Worse than My Union Health Insurance\n","id":"b87ff3dc-fd06-458a-b15e-110e7804b81d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Feminism & sex for fun: does hedonistic sexuality benefit feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>Sexuality is only one part of the feminist movement. We need to focus on women's empowerment in the workplace<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hedonistic sexuality sex for pleasure harms sexual equality and the feminist movement.\n","id":"1083fced-43e1-4c34-93d2-14273719f535"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Gulabi Gang a force for good in India?<|ARGUMENT|>A judge in the family court in Chennai told a petitioner that she wouldn't have faced domestic violence if she were a 'good woman.'<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Courts and other institutions in India have had several accusations of sexism levelled against them.\n","id":"d690ddad-7fdd-4232-ad94-9f75a26be0f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cap-and-trade versus carbon tax<|ARGUMENT|>In a carbon tax, emitters would pay a tax for every ton of carbon emitted. This requires that the government know precisely how much carbon is being emitted by energy producers. This is not easy to determine, and requires that a government put in place monitoring mechanisms. Deploying these mechanisms universally would be very complicated, expensive, and require much administration. Then, ensuring that all these monitoring devices operate properly and that all energy producers comply with the tax would also involve a substantial administrative burden. This would be equally as complicated as a cap-and-trade system. However part of the monitoring cost could be absorbed privately by companies who wish to sell their credits, as high price is in their interest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A carbon tax would also require complicated monitoring and enforcement mechanisms\n","id":"de549c74-7d30-406d-84fd-e6aa3cf447a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>Quoting the article \"Those who cling to the idea of Lee as preeminently devoted to his state must come to terms with a fourth important loyalty. Once Virginia joined the Confederacy, Lee quickly and decisively adopted a national as opposed to a state-centered stance.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The article argues that Lee was always more of a nationalist.\n","id":"f5d63ff0-82d8-475c-a664-042ad3714fff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this is a bit vague, but if it was any more specific it wouldn't be to my point. I'm talking about donating money, even in the tens of millions of dollars, to save elephants or clean plastic out of the ocean, or to look for cures for diseases. It's not that I think the organizations are corrupt, or that the money is being poorly spent necessarily, just that there might be fundamental, systemic changes that need to be made before we're able to get the desired results. It seems like organizations have been asking for money for these same causes for decades now and it doesn't seem to be working, because people are still dying from the diseases, animals are becoming extinct, and environmental destruction continues full throttle. And this is true even when billionaires donate hundreds of millions of dollars to something. It just seems like a nice headline, and then we're back to where we were. What happened to the hundreds of millions of dollars? What did it do? I will make an exception for unique example such as the ice bucket challenge, which I heard accounted for enough donations to actually make a real, measurable impact. Also, I think donating to political parties and legal funds may have a certain impact, if they're able to hold sway over courts of law and legislation. I want someone to change my view, because I want to help make the world a better place, but the organizations just want money. And the money doesn't seem to be doing much.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donating to nonprofits for major causes such as environmental protection and diseases doesn't help in a meaningful, lasting way.\n","id":"1e0737c8-8c35-4fd4-894d-2497c00b8c90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is not a problem that they are collecting information on everyone and using that information to help gather data on people who could be doing things that could be harmful to others. It is a problem because people think they will use this information to wrongly accuse and incriminate someone who has done nothing against the law, or they will use this information to blackmail people in interest. It is also a problem because it is a breach in the constitution. People do not trust that the government will only use this information against the guilty. So it is only wrong because people do not trust the government. There is nothing wrong with the government gathering information on everyone if they use the information they gather as accurate evidence in court.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing wrong with the collection of information by the government.\n","id":"f14ab8eb-6390-46de-868d-25b59858fe93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Genealogy Databases Be Available to Law Enforcement to Solve Crimes?<|ARGUMENT|>There's already precedent of law enforcement targeting ethnic groups. Even in Sweden, a country with a reputation for tolerance to ethnic minorities, the police kept a register of the ethnic group Roma, and was found guilty of ethnic discrimination.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using such databases would allow law enforcement agencies to target specific ethnic groups.\n","id":"212c7131-72c9-4c0a-a5af-a565acbbc702"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realize the term democracy is wrong, but I was not sure how to phrase it. I guess intelligentsiacy or intelligentsiarchy would be the way to say it. Not everyone should have the right to vote. I think the right to vote should fall upon highly intelligent people, in order for everyone in society to benefit mostly from it. I have been thinking about a way to find the most appropiate source of good voters and decision makers, but I always end up coming back to intelligence. It is represented in every socioeconomic layer of society, every race, every sexuality and in both genders. Anyone who were to vote, should be doing so anonymously. It is my belief that politicians personal lives should be completely seperated from politics. They should function like representatives of ideas or political notions in order to avoid a popularity bias. I believe they should be educated and be under laws to avoid bias like the way a judge is supposed to. I consider myself intelligent, but not intelligent enough to be a part of the voters I'd like to be represented. I'd say maybe 0.5 of a population would do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe in \"limited democracy\"\n","id":"0edb90bb-95bf-47b3-9df7-923ba4109f7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The world in which royalty grow up, with wealth and privilege which is unknown to the majority of the population, may be so different that a Queen is not relatable to or representative of the majority of women in society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if achieving more female representation is a a good and noble goal, if those who achieve it are only from a higher-up extract in society, then this may not be more equal representation.\n","id":"22606d24-39f7-4477-b20e-1aa09062dcf9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>Implementing a Zero-Tolerance policy sends the signal that athletes are violent and prone to criminal behaviour. This could influence the opinions of judges and juries against athletes, even in cases not related to domestic violence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Zero-Tolerance policy has the potential to bias legal proceedings.\n","id":"8e29d25f-1281-465e-b2b7-8c7cfe7ab421"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll try to keep this short and sweet because I tend to ramble and rant for a long time Now, I'm not saying sexism is non existent, as there are many very real instances of it. But in many circumstances it's just pulled out of thin air, turning a non issue into an issue just for the sake of pushing forward a cause. Some examples of this When using beautiful women for advertising products, magazine covers, etc. Feminists look at it and go Wow, why should I have to have a big ass and big boobs just to be beautiful Fuck the patriarchy This is quite literally taking a non issue and turning it into one. Why I disagree with this The company is trying to sell their product and obviously, beautiful women will make for more appealing advertising than ugly ones. Just like Burger King uses really nice looking whoppers in the commercials. It's a business, they don't use average ugly women because that's not what sells. Same goes for men. Women seem to have a more competitive mindset in terms of beauty. If I saw a shirtless man with chiseled abs on the cover of a magazine, I wouldn't think anything of it. But then there are some women out there who see a beautiful woman on the cover of a magazine and get upset because it's unachievable and get self conscious about their bodies. I know a couple women who are like this, actually. It's making false connections. Often times, once feminists see a beautiful woman and then get pissed about unachievable beauty standards they're automatically assuming that those standards apply to everyday life. Which is just not true. There are numerous average looking girls with boyfriends. Ironically enough, these feminists assume that all guys aren't interested in you unless you're the most beautiful person on Earth. Guys know, just as much as girls do, that the stuff in the movies and the stuff on the magazines is fluffed up and not what most girls really look like. When women act a certain way in television shows, movies, etc. For example, hated women characters on Game of Thrones or similar. Or how I fuckin' hate Lucy and Sarah on Trailer Park Boys even though they're arguably not the worst moral wise characters. They look at this and think it's enforcing an idea that women are somehow supposed to fit a certain role and hate it. Why I disagree with this This is just cherry picking. I could find numerous shows to counter argue that point, such as nearly every single cartoon character's father being dumb as a bag of bricks. Or how Katara and Toph could probably kick Aang and Sokka's ass in a fight in Avatar the Last Airbender. But again, most guys don't point it out because most of us aren't actively searching for reasons to complain about sexism. We just don't care and recognize that it's just TV shows. But then feminists come in and point out how awful it is that a couple TV show characters are ditzy and how sexist it is and I just don't see why. TV shows are exactly that TV shows. They're made for entertainment, and it's not really making a statement or anything just because a character is ditzy or smart. If the villain is a man or a woman, it doesn't really matter. If the protagonist is a man or a woman, it doesn't really matter. The point is people just watch it for entertainment and it's not like just because there's a hated woman character that suddenly I'm going to think poorly of women in real life. If someone gets in conflicts with the protagonist and you never really see any other side of them they are going to be hated characters most of the time, regardless of gender. Take Trailer Park Boys for example. I love Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles even though they're just drunk high criminals. The show is about them the most so naturally I take their side because of that. Then there's Mr. Lahey and Randy who are arguably the villains of the show but they're still likeable because you see them outside of when they're fucking up the boys plans. You get to see their lives more in depth and how everything goes on and you gain a sort of affection for them even if they're dicks. But then you have characters like Lucy and Sarah who are basically just in the show to fuck with the boys except season 8, mostly . They don't exist most of the time, but when they do they're just being assholes to mostly Ricky and causing problems. Realistically, they are morally right and Ricky is generally an idiot for doing what he does, but I still hate them because they cause conflict with the protagonists and don't really exist much outside of that light. I don't hate them because they're women. When someone says Man up feminists hate this and claim it's enforcing gender roles. Implying only men can be strong, etc. Why I disagree with this Plain and simple, because it's just a saying. That's it. When I tell someone to man up, I'm not trying to make a point that men are tougher than women, I'm just telling someone to get through what they're doing. Maybe it started as something sexist, but in the current state of our society, it largely exists as nothing more than a saying. Just like when someone says Jesus Christ it doesn't inherently imply that person is religious because it's just become an expression in everyday life. I'm not religious and I use it all the time. Likewise, using man up or anything like that, is generally just an expression and it's not indicative of sexism. I had some more points but I'll cut it off there because I think you get the idea. Often times, misogyny doesn't really exist in the contexts people refer to, and they're just placing meanings in themselves to further their cause of feminism and down with patriarchy or whatever else they believe. It's kind of like an English professor mentality where the sentence is The rug is red and somehow they manage to pull a meaning out of that when really the author had no intended implications behind that sentence. I'm not saying sexism doesn't exist I'm saying it's completely blown out of proportion by feminists and certain situations are looked far too deep into just for the sake of finding more fuel for their cause. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Misogyny is largely blown out of proportion\/self-imposed\n","id":"a5716c90-3129-432b-8fb1-5d099f12404b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Social welfare programs would be orders of magnitude more effective, as a publicly accessible database would mean it would be possible to accurately judge both a person's actual level of need and their in\/ability to provide for themselves, without any room for ambiguity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"State bureaucracy and services e.g. policing would be much more trusted and effective with full transparency.\n","id":"667a534a-5919-4aaf-b990-55998c04b18c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the last sexual economics debate, I think the scope was too large. So I will address it on a smaller level. At the most basic level. Imagine a party with 2 identical women with only one trait separate between the 2 of them, the level of sexual willingness and openness. A man whom both are interested in who is also interested in these two women, but they have made clear they will not share , who represents their ideal man emerges. All else equal, on average, the woman who demonstrates she is most likely to sleep with him will win this game. The way that the least sexually available woman will attempt to mitigate this issue is Make herself more sexually available lower her cost economically speaking Slut shame attempting to decrease the value of her competitor This is a point that many women seem unable to admit, even though it's so obvious.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All else being equal, on average, the likelihood a man can sleep with a woman will determine who he pursues. This results in sexual competition in which women will resort to either slut shaming or more readily offering sex. cmv.\n","id":"0397e618-8517-40f0-a312-a70f1860625f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To me, the notion that a family should gain control of a loved one's possessions after they die is unethical. The idea that people have some inherit right to land and or money because they just happened to be born in the right family is wrong. I think a person's wealth in an ideal world should be proportional to how hard they work and how talented they are and the idea of an inheritance goes against both these things. It is an example of someone gaining something for nothing just because of their class and leads to a culture of a wealthy elite of old money families which have a disproportionate amount of wealth and power due to the nature of their birth. I think that the state should gain control of assets at least above a certain threshold of wealth after death in order for the money and land to be utilised in a manner beneficial to society by democratically elected officials.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think inheritance is immoral and should be scrapped or severely restricted.\n","id":"0ed3a2f5-399c-43c7-a532-a638bd153c14"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all he didn't even know Samantha existed before she dropped the sex test on the floor and he read that he could fuck her no problem. He apparently dislikes his girlfriend Caroline but never communicates with her, instead he is passive aggressive, telling her to leave him alone, bashing his door shut with her hair being stuck in the frame as a result and so on. When asked by Farmer Ted whether he just wants to fuck Samantha he tells him that he has an unconscious Samantha upstairs who he could violate in various different ways I mean come on to assure him it's not his only reason to pursue her. He also pretty much gives permission to Farmer Ted to rape the unconscious Samantha in his father's car. This is wrong in so many ways The raping obviously He lets Farmer Ted drive who has never driven before both endangering the health of Farmer Ted and Samantha The car isn't even his own, it's his father's and he doesn't care that Farmer Ted could easily crash it That's pretty much it, in basically every scene Jake Ryan is in he is a giant jerk, and he also beat up the Chinese guy. Nevertheless he is portrayed as the romantic hero and him and Samantha getting together in the end is seen as a happy ending.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jake Ryan was a huge jerk in sixteen candles and arguably the worst person in the whole movie\n","id":"3f7de542-90c5-43b7-a52c-f94691e44946"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Bar soap is all you need. And you dont wash your hair at all, you just rinse it. Sometimes I use shampoo, maybe once in a month or two, if I did something specially dirty or got chemicals in my hair etc. But your hair is healthier without it, and if I cared enough to find an alternative I would use something natural. If you quit using shampoo, your hair might be greasy for the first couple days, but with nothing but proper rinsing your hair will be able to clean itself. Face wash is unnecessary as well. Bar soap is fine. Special body washes are unnecessary. It is all a marketing ploy. I am a clean and beautiful boy who has no problem attracting the opposite sex, and have never been led to suspect that my habits are somehow smelly or unclean. What is the point of using these products? Please, Reddit, change my view hygene products are a scam.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shampoo and special body wash products are unnecessary.\n","id":"cfc7a60e-843f-4b15-837d-7d5d98c37558"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mental illnesses are due to nurture not nature<|ARGUMENT|>Researchers have concluded that common genetic variation account for between 17-28% of the risks of several mental disorders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person's mental health can very often be linked to their genetics.\n","id":"6588ab8c-cf88-4d36-8fb7-7b417642f6c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state grant benefits linked to marriage?<|ARGUMENT|>Benefits given to those who are married sends a clear message. Praising those who follow through with social conventions, dismissing those who choose other paths in life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not being married is a legitimate personal choice which the government should not consider when determining what benefits a person should receive.\n","id":"4739ff09-d9d5-420a-adab-314f9ce167be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that higher education goes about testing students all wrong. I have been in classes that offer take home essays as part of exams and I have been in classes where your entire grade is based off of a handful of timed, in class exams. In every class where the professor has offered projects, essays and other forms of longer term work to test student knowledge, I have felt that I end up with a much more solid grasp on the material than in those where you simply have to solve problems within the time limit. Projects that are spread out over a couple of weeks have always helped me sit down, reason out the material and then do trial and error to see what works best and I have almost always ended up with and A or B , whereas with traditional exams, I have gotten the entire range of letter grades, from A's to F's. Professors always like to talk about 'the real world' but I have rarely had to do a timed exam in the real world, apart from licensing exams, employers have never told me here, you have 1 hour to put together an entire case model. Like the saying goes, if you want it fast and cheap, it won't be good. Projects also do a good job of fostering teamwork skills that are invaluable in the work place. I just don't understand why professors and teachers focus so much on tests and exams, when a project will do a much better job of helping students work on and grasp the material and will ultimately result in higher grades an ever important metric in today's world<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Long term projects and essays are a much better way of gauging student performance than timed exams\n","id":"0cbbf77e-427c-4e5c-968c-203be922a42a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>Without understanding the ways in which their actions harm women of colour, it is not possible for white feminists to change how they act and become better feminists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is an unwillingness on the part of white feminists to acknowledge their white privilege and how their actions might oppress women of colour.\n","id":"73c73947-87d4-4aba-9874-d6b367f3512f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals can express their feelings on a variety of social media platforms, even if they're not communicating with someone directly. Studies show that putting your feelings into words can reduce their intensity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social media is a necessary avenue to finding peer support in recovery.\n","id":"0c71d174-1e6d-4066-96c0-519843fa04f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pakistan is almost a failed nation state, and they control enough nukes to radically change the face of the entire planet, and effectively end humanity as we know it. We are breeding super, antibiotic resistant bacteria, viruses and prions in factory farms and in our hospitals, one of which will eventually kill millions if not billions of people. So called 'Democratic' governments around the world function as lackeys to mega corporations whose war on the environment will kill us just as surely as nukes, and cause illness and suffering for millions before they finally kill us all. Any attempt to rock this government corporate boat is met with derision in the streets, and knives in backs, or more appropriately drones in skies, removing all dissent. tl dr We're all fucked.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the human race is going to be mostly exterminated within my lifetime\n","id":"49225357-944d-4c1c-863f-a8c20d44c05f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please note this may be a triggering topic. Some background I am mtf transgender myself, and I've started believing the views I wrote in the title. I'm very scared that people like myself are simply abhorrent, and people are right when they look at us and feel disgust. By transitioning, I'm asserting a delusional identity of false femininity, and erasing and harming cis women who experience oppression on a whole different level than I do. By saying I am female, I am devaluing the people who actually are, making their political advocacy less effective, and taking away from opportunities designed specifically for them. I've noticed the rising opposition to trans identity on both the right and the radical feminist left, and they have some very good points about how most people hugbox us to believe what we're doing is okay and virtue signal to each other about how accepting and open minded to feel better about themselves. We are eroding masculinity and co opting femininity. Deep down, the revulsion you feel when you look at a trans woman is an inherently human reaction. I'm desperate to feel differently, but I haven't found very strong repudiations of radical feminist and conservative ideas saying we're wrong. Everyone says it's a mental illness and by persisting in my transition I am just living my delusion instead of treating it. The argument that's stuck the most in my mind is that we treat transgender people so differently than we do people with anorexia, or body dysmorphic disorder we encourage them to free themselves from their delusions, rather than supporting them and encourage them to mutilate their bodies. So many of the studies on transgender people are flawed. I really do believe doctors would come out and say this is wrong if not for political correctness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transgender women like myself are disgusting and degenerate, and are actively harming society by asserting their false identities.\n","id":"f9f6581a-8b4f-4895-aa13-50594b9de486"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Yugoslav wars were absolutely terrible, I don't think anyone can dispute that logically. And war crimes by modern definition were committed by Mladic and other Serbs as they forces bosnian muslims out of areas that were majority serb. That being said, at the end of the croatian war of independence, croatian generals like Gotovina did similar things to the serb minority in Croatia. The fact that Serb generals leaders were almost all convicted by the ICTY and Mladic will almost certainly be convicted while Croatians and others have much higher acquittal rates and Gotovina got acquitted show an extreme bias by the ICTY and that it is not for true justice but to help justify europe's involvement in the wars. I want to believe that the ICTY for justice, so please . edit you are right, i meant ICTY not ICU<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Ante Gotovina was just as bad of a war criminal as any Serbian war criminal and the fact that he was acquitted shows that the ICU is extremely biased against Serbia.\n","id":"221c683e-cb03-4d96-8b48-bc72bcf55dde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a hazy basis for biological sex, but even that is complicated. Roughly 1.7% of the world's population is born intersex, or a mix of male and female biologically. Some individuals don't even know they were born intersex until their parents tell them they had cosmetic surgery.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Western culture has come to view gender as a binary concept, male or female, grounded in physical anatomy. However, anatomical variations alone should be enough to indicate a gender spectrum rather than a binary gender system.\n","id":"7b03ace9-5c6f-4e57-a81f-97a7a6be0cd6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Half of the child's chromosomes are inherited from the father to make up one of each chromosome pair.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The new human life has more genetic material in common with the father than the mother.\n","id":"f8ffae5c-3612-490d-bbf2-553bf46231c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We are a world dependent on oil, which causes us to start several wars and massacre many civilians, impose dictatorial regimes, etc. But even though many people know this is true, we still drive cars to vacation homes, on road trips, etc. We idle our cars in parking lots to have sex with the A C on. We sit in traffic jams wasting barrels of gasoline in an hour because we all feel like we should go see some specific concert etc. If we ever moved on from oil, we'd still be dependent on energy because we like to waste it. Our lifestyles in the first world come at the expense of those in other places, and we are aware of it but do nothing to stop it. We spend our time and money and resources on enjoyment instead of helping others. There are fundraising dinners where charities wine and dine rich people in a fancy fashion just so they'll give money to a good cause because these people would not have given otherwise . We spend lots of money on drugs and intoxicants, waste our days playing video games or watching movies, instead of creating something to help those who don't have those luxuries. We eat McDonalds and love it despite knowing the injustices that must occur to make food so cheap and good tasting. We dont care that McDonalds destroys the rainforest, or that Hershey's, ADM, and Cargill profit off West African slave labor because that gets us things cheaper and easier. And we like things better than we like ensuring human decency. We are by nature consumers, never satisfied with what we have, always wasting and using and consuming more and more and more without caring about the consequences, and this is what causes problems. Not greed but a desire for pleasure. We live in a world where our vices are our enjoyments. How can we live like this. And is it possible that this is not the case?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People's desire for excess causes all the problems in the world.\n","id":"11c47ea8-26f7-408f-b192-bb57a9c20d6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I saw this video kicking around on Reddit and the line that got me was What he should have done was walked away or got someone else to sort it out for him. Now, the whole disgusting angle of the news story painting the bus station employee as the villain aside, that's almost always said when someone gets into a fight. I can't even wrap my head around the ignorance that goes into that statement. Do they think the attacker isn't going to follow them, continuing to assault them? Do they think that turning their back on an attacker is a good idea? Do they think that defending yourself is some ugly mortal sin? Are they just so holier than thou that their inner never having been in a fight Gandhi breaks out and they demand peaceful responses at all costs? Now, just walk away is good advice before violence happens. But once violence happens, walking away simply isn't an option anymore. This is the real world. This is not Mad Max. You are not The Humungus and I do not believe you.  Just walk away is terrible, stupid advice and the people giving it have no idea what being attacked is like.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Just walk away from your attacker\" is incredibly stupid advice.\n","id":"4bcc6aad-0637-4b69-8596-b5f583deb98d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>chickens have bones in their wings so therefore chicken wings should be served with the bones still intact. chicken nuggets are just clumps of chicken, without bones, and are not classified as wings. boneless wings are just chicken nuggets, in all senses. boneless wings are referred to as boneless wings so adults will be more open to eating chicken nuggets. chicken nuggets are seen as a childish meal so boneless wings are essentially a term used to trick individuals into purchasing overpriced chicken nuggets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"boneless wings are just chicken nuggets.\n","id":"d6c737a5-83dd-4dc0-ae06-ac89b3c9b233"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Any time minimum wage is brought up in American media you always see the subset of people saying that if someone is tired of making such little money they should just work hard and get a better job. I believe this notion is flawed because it works under the assumption that human capabilities are all equal. Not everyone has the skillets to achieve a life in certain fields and they shouldn't have to suffer because of this. It also works under the assumption that it's possible for everyone to rise to the top. Regardless of how well things are going someone will have to flip our burgers and clean up buildings assuming we don't automate everything . In college I commonly see engineers looking down at other majors forgetting that if everyone did engineering they'd be in the exact same position art majors are now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":":The notion of pulling oneself up by the boot straps and the disdain towards minimum wage employees is very flawed.\n","id":"dbf4220c-e1bc-473f-9d39-107a7af138c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Torture in Interrogation Should Be Allowed<|ARGUMENT|>The Geneva Conventions do not apply to interrogation of terrorists and suspected terrorists held by U.S. soldiers because they are not prisoners of war. They are illegal, enemy combatants, not subject to such protection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Geneva Conventions do not apply to interrogation of terrorists and suspected terrorists held by ...\n","id":"e30b5c1a-1d39-4470-8003-343a1e337835"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Parenting has a huge impact on a child. There is debate as to how much, but nobody is claiming that it's anywhere close to zero. Today, however, the only price parents pay for bad parenting is perhaps an element of frustration while raising a child. You can, through poor parenting, raise a child who is a huge burden on society, and you suffer no sanctions. I believe that parents of children who are a burden on society should suffer sanctions. This will give parents an additional incentive to raise children in a way that makes them productive and contributing members of society. As for what the sanctions would be, I would suggest that they scale with the severity of their offspring's criminal punishment, and also scale with the magnitude of their offspring's income. Raise a kid who goes on to be a doctor, you get a significant tax break. Raise a kid who goes on to rob liquor stores and beat his wife, you have higher taxes and or your federal benefits are reduced. What this will do is give parents a long term interest in their child's welfare. One obvious objection is that nurture by parents is just one element of a person's psyche. That's true, but what this means is that there's risk in having a child. Right now that risk is born by society overall, and my proposal would shift more of the burden of the risk to parents .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should apply sanctions to parents for their offsprings' crimes throughout life,\n","id":"06b7ee55-5396-4873-b051-34bba0ac8f88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should refugees seeking asylum in Europe be distributed among EU member states according to a quota?<|ARGUMENT|>Even when countries do want to help, they often haven't got the organisation, resources or personnel to properly deal with the situation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even in countries where quotas are accepted there are no guarantees that refugees will be treated well.\n","id":"5546273c-2ae5-48a6-956c-7aed4a5fa2e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>Unisex bathrooms help those who do not identify with one category in their everyday lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unisex bathrooms represent societal progress regarding equity and human rights.\n","id":"38c458f6-6291-4156-9b1f-8cde5abe2a19"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't want to turn this into a debate about gay marriage. My point is that the logic that I've often heard justifying gay marriage is that if two consenting adults love each other, they should be able to marry regardless of their sex loveislove . Their marriage isn't harming anyone so it shouldn't be problematic. But I don't see why this argument cannot extend to polygamous or incestuous marriages. In fact, a recent article argued that it can The counter article did not persuade me otherwise After all, if the relationship is between consenting adults, why should I care if it is between 3, 4, or 5 consenting adults or between a brother and sister? I'll quickly try and rebuff the most common counterarguments. For polygamy, many would say that it promotes misogyny. And indeed, historical polygamous marriage favored wealthy males. However, modern day polygamy would not. If made legal today, it would apply equally to a woman having multiple husbands, a group marriage consisting of men and women or a group marriage consisting of just men or just women. Even if some polygamous marriages ended up being between one man and many women, if the relationship is between consenting adults, why should we care? For incest, it is often argued that the children of such a union would have a much higher chance of having genetic diseases, and this is indeed true. However, a marriage is not predicated on having biological children. This is obvious as people who are biologically incapable of having children sterile can marry as well as same sex couples, who cannot have biological children together. These couples can always choose to not have children at all, or they can adopt. In fact, it could even still be illegal for incestuous couples to have biological children, while still allowing them to marry. It should be noted that the above arguments cannot be applied to child marriage or bestiality since there is a partner who cannot give knowing consent a.k.a. a child or an animal . If, you took the time to read through this thank you. And please  if you can<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The main arguments used to justify same sex marriage can be used to justify polygamous and incestuous marriages.\n","id":"f36b0b8e-32a4-415e-a684-6ddbf41c01c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Steroid Use in Sports Be Allowed?<|ARGUMENT|>Different athletes respond differently to PEDs for a variety of physiological reasons - e.g. EPO increases red blood cell counts at different rates for different athletes. It becomes a competition played out in laboratories rather than arenas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If everyone took steroids, everyone would gain an equal benefit and those with genetic advantages would still outperform those without.\n","id":"96a9b821-e13c-46d8-9349-812e3bb0c09d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Without the electoral college, any question about the legitimacy of the election would cause a nationwide recount instead of keeping the votes encapsulated to the states.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electoral college reduces the probability that electoral mechanisms fail.\n","id":"8f334e45-2e99-4767-b43b-eecea71aae11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>The greatest \"idealist\" Eichmann ever encountered among the Jews was Dr. Rudolf Kastner, with whom he negotiated during the Jewish deportations from Hungary and with whom he came to an agreement that he, Eichmann, would permit the \"illegal\" departure of a few thousand Jews to Palestine the trains were in fact guarded by German police<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hannah Arendt describes Eichmann as a Zionist who spoke yiddish Arendt, p. 23\n","id":"d929ef67-9f23-4373-a07a-2d921f2878e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There seems to be a lot of misinformation out there about what the porn ban actually is and I'm sick of being called ignorant for my viewpoint without any supporting information. I really want to hear the facts about why so many people think this tramples on our freedoms. There is one  about this, but I didn't feel it addressed I believe this opt in system tries to prevent children who are not searching for graphic content from accidentally stumbling across it. It doesn't do much for adults and young adults since they'll know how to get around it or they'll just disable it . An opt in system is ideal, but not all parents care enough to monitor their children like they should sad but true . If parents do care enough and feel that the bans are too widespread, they can opt out and create their own parental controls. It doesn't seem much different from the advertising controls on other media, except that there's even more freedom to see what you want. Graphic content isn't straight up banned. TL DR the opt in system is a great way to prevent young children from families that don't monitor or control internet usage from accidentally coming across graphic content.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the ISP opt-in system for explicit content in the UK accomplishes what it sets out to do without compromising freedom.\n","id":"571b17b0-0d3f-4e7d-91db-bc2709f8bded"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know that the main purpose behind it is student safety. But when dress code causes more of a distraction in classes than if everyone could wear jeans and a t shirt, I find it utterly pointless. Help?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think dress code is necessary,\n","id":"69710666-89bd-4362-b596-3cefc2726701"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Classic World of Warcraft better than Retail WoW?<|ARGUMENT|>After all streamers are nearly always very charismatic people that you will enjoy watching and listening to, no matter what.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many viewers are pulled along by their favorite streamer's passion and enthusiasm for the game.\n","id":"b7430784-2e6a-4bb9-9e03-b7741fe203bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, before everyone starts flaming, hear me out. If you own an iPad and a iPhone , there is no better OS than MacOS. Yes, there are great Windows laptops hardware wise and Linux support on them, but I feel like nothing could really beat Apple\u2019s ecosystem. When you compare how Windows integrates with another Windows product, it doesn\u2019t hold a candle to how well Apple does it. I have a convoluted file sync solution for my Windows machines but for iOS? Airdrop it from one device to another and I\u2019m set. Messaging from my desktop? No can do, unless I have Android. iOS and MacOs? Messages app on my Mac and Messages app on my iOS devices. Linux? No options really. If you have a Apple ecosystem with iOS already, a Mac completes it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"MacOS is better than Linux or Windows if you have another Apple product\n","id":"de9ee8f2-9ea3-4846-80f0-2c5eb13cbed1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>The bomb would have incinerated any Allied Prisoners of War whom the Japanese might have had placed in uninhabited areas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The risk of failure when dropping it in an uninhabited area was considered too great.\n","id":"212ee3a9-2553-4927-b7e1-4888651cf79f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it ethically wrong to watch pornography?<|ARGUMENT|>Watching internet porn has been linked to mood changes in the viewer, which could be detrimental to the viewer's relationships.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Watching pornography can present immediate or latent consequences that may present ethical concerns in romantic relationships or family life.\n","id":"d5a0c290-3e1c-49f8-9aa1-b0348b3ef140"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should copyright die with the creator?<|ARGUMENT|>The main reason that it doesn't anymore is because companies like Disney wanted to have legal power over old creations. Copyright should only belong to the creator, and nobody else, therefore should die with them<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is wrong for companies to limit the availability of artistic works after the creator has already passed away purely for profit.\n","id":"2de5a809-e584-4bcb-8b62-9e072ca5b667"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Bitcoin and non Bitcoin cryptocurrencies or crypto platforms altcoins have seen a crazy rise in total value, at 156 Billion, up from 20 Billion this Jan. A few of the coins seem to have value or product, but the vast majority do not. Bitcoin itself is hardly used as a currency, its actual intended use. Given that there appears to be no way to ascribe valuations to the coins that traditional assets classes use revenues, dividends, profits , all values that investors pay for the tokens have no basis whatsoever, and therefore aren't worthy of investment. There are similar traits to the crypto markets as the dotcom boom, including people throwing money at new coins when they have no idea what they actually do. Currency valuations tend to be this loop of cryptocurrencies are worth what people will pay for them , which means that there value is essentially limitless to infinity, and doesnt't give me any confidence. On the flipside, blockchain technology is truly revolutionary for some items, including record keeping and sending currency instantly and for free, and for document auditing. Cryptocurrencies also makes sense, if the price stables eventually, for money storage, over gold. That said, investors are throwing money at crypto markets in increasing amounts, but most of the coins, outside of something like Euthereum, promise nothing in return except the promise of high returns due to speculative increase, just like the dot com boom. This is either the biggest bull market we will see in our lifetimes, or one of the biggest bubbles. I know similar questions have been asked, but mine pertains more to the altcoin and crypto market as a whole, not just bitcoin.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rise in cryptocurrency valuations bitcoin, ethereum, etc is a bubble and has no value to return to investors other than speculative gains.\n","id":"aa4e46ba-27b9-4f90-8988-af8377092118"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a very controversial thought that even I don't fully grasp myself. But please keep it civil. I believe that the psychological effect that rape has on many women stems from our society telling how the woman should feel. We created this innocence and purity, this view of sex as such a precious and meaningful thing. Rape victims suffer because of how they view the rape. If it were a form of assault rather than rape, their reactions would be of anger rather than helplessness. I'm not saying that rape should not be viewed as bad, but I am saying that right now, there are women in the world who are committing suicide because of the psychological effects of rape. I had a friend who attempted suicide recently. She was raped by her uncle. She couldn't bear the thought of being ruined in such an unpure way. We had many close and meaningful discussions before and after the attempt. She was also beaten by her boyfriend of 4 years. Once. She is not a weak willed woman. Once she got beaten, she called the police immediately. She was furious at him, someone she trusted, and she wanted him to suffer to the full extent of the law. Yet rape had such a psychological effect on her that she was willing to kill herself to stop thinking about it. Now here's the part where I don't really know if I agree with myself. But logically it makes sense to me. Rape should be seen as assault. I'm talking psychologically. Obviously the legal repercussions should be more severe, simply because rape can cause lasting consequences like pregnancy. But women should view rape as a form of assault, and react as such. Because of the thoughts that rape is loss of innocence and putting sex on such a high pedestal, the psychological effect is worsened. I end with a very controversial statement. It disgusts me to even think about this, but only because I have been conditioned as such. Imagine a young girl who does not understand sex, and she is raped by her father, who also beats her. Will she be more psychologically affected by the rape itself, than the beating? Or is it because of our society's conditioning that rape slowly becomes worse than non sexual assault? I apologize for anyone I have deeply offended through this post I am extremely disgusted by rape and have seen the personal effects of it. I just wish that the personal effects were not so significant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rape has been made significantly worse by media portrayal, victimization, etc.\n","id":"3633d016-326f-412d-92c5-b4a3b63ce4c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Several employees approached me several months ago expressing their desire to attend a large user conference. I've attended several of these in the past and have found them to not be worth the value. Any insights gleaned from the conference can be learned from forums and usergroups Networking opportunities can also be garnered from social media platforms Keynotes and break out sessions are recorded during these conferences and can be referenced at any time Any new innovations to a specific software platform will be announced post conference If a specific solution to a problem is being sought we should leverage usergroups, social media, or the vendors support system With the above in mind, I also find it difficult to determine an ROI for sending our employees to these conferences. For example Conference Registration ~1500 Hotel 250 day x 4 days 1000 Air travel 400 Per diem 50 day x 4 days 200 Other travel expenses Uber Lyft ~100 Total expenditure 3200 employee sent to conference Moreover, the tasks and projects the employees are responsible for become strained due to delays or require another employee to substitute.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sending employees to large user conferences such as Oracle OpenWorld and Dreamforce is a waste of company time and money\n","id":"e87108f0-7c09-4458-81cc-4cf943fc4af4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The parties participating in elections for the European Parliament should hold primary elections<|ARGUMENT|>The European Parliament adopts legislature for policies concerning the EU internal market, environment, consumer protection, food safety, justice and home affairs, cohesion policy, transport, energy etc. All these things affect the day to day lives of citizens p. 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European elections will have a direct impact on the life of every citizen living in Europe. They thus deserve a say in the decision being made.\n","id":"021cb35c-786e-4a03-80ed-c02660d8c384"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should legacy be a factor in college admissions?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2017, 21.5% of white applicants who were accepted to Harvard had legacy status, compared to 6.6% of Asian applicants and 4.8% of African American applicants.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People admitted based on legacy considerations are more likely to be white.\n","id":"cef3c603-86fd-4b75-85c7-59abd46717bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Caffeine Addiction An Unhandled Problem?<|ARGUMENT|>Due to a failure in labelling caffeine content consumers are not always able to avoid caffeine. Because this creates a nationwide issue, we need treatment options like centers to handle large-scale incoming addictions surrounding the misinterpretations of caffeine content.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Caffeine is addictive, and therefore users cannot think clearly about when to take it and when not to.\n","id":"5154df67-7102-47ed-bfb9-c0cc32ea194a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund liberal arts degrees?<|ARGUMENT|>Solutions for tackling climate change must take into account the fairness and morality of asking developing countries to make sacrifices in order to solve a problem which was not caused by them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overcoming societal challenges may require examining the moral and ethical strengths and weaknesses of solutions.\n","id":"a83dab68-7981-4a91-a4e8-37d7d8c43c38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Too many impact votes are just people's beliefs in the thesis and if the claim supports their view, not how much impact the claim actually makes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is an improper way to measure the impact of a claim.\n","id":"31a945c0-2b53-4f9f-949b-d9bf3ed65de4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe all adults who are mentally sound enough to be independent should be able to undergo elective euthanasia. I also believe there should be counseling involved, plus a mandatory waiting period from request to procedure. My mother has tried to kill herself 3 times, each of which failed due to pure bad luck in her perspective people who weren't expected home happened to show up early enough for medical intervention. I believe that as an adult she should have a right to inform her doctor that she would like to end her life with dignity and peace. Of course, I would much prefer my mother to live and be happy, but the fact of the matter is that it isn't my choice whether she lives or dies. She should have a right to go peacefully, even though she does suffer from severe depression and anxiety. Medicine and therapy have not improved the situation, and I fail to see how it is different from living in physical pain due to cancer or other disease. I recognize that many people who attempt suicide end up grateful that they didn't complete. People get therapy that works for them, they gain a new outlook, they may find the right balance of medication and lifestyle. That is fine, but I don't believe this alone is reason to limit access to people like my mother who have attempted and still wish to end their lives. She mostly admits guilt that she caused suffering for her children who have to live now knowing that she will probably succeed at some point in the future. This is a woman who keeps a home, a 9 5 job, has a close family and grand children, so she is not permanently locked up in a padded cell, nor would I ever want that for her because I see that as a fate worse than death. I also believe that a person should be able to seek euthanasia without prior history of mental illness or suicide ideation attempts. I am a bit fuzzy here on why I believe this, I just feel that there is no real reason to limit access to assisted suicide. Of course coercion could be an issue, or possibly letting people who may regret it undergo euthanasia, but coercion could be screened for to an extent, and dead people can't regret. I also see where a doctor may have trouble being protected when the family of the deceased decide they want to sue. I also realize that people have life insurance policies, but don't those usually have suicide clauses anyway? You would have to forfeit the payout to your beneficiaries if you DIY, so I can't see why assisted suicide is different. I don't believe there would be a population decline because of this. Just because it is available won't suddenly make more people suicidal. Ending your life is a very final decision, and one I doubt most people will take lightly. However, I do believe if you WANT to take suicide lightly and end your life, you should have that right. Overall I believe it is not logical to limit assisted suicide as an option to those who are terminally ill or in chronic pain. . Edit I did see the suicide post that is currently on the front page, but I feel that this touches on a different view and the comments there failed to .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Euthanasia should be legal and available for any adult, regardless of physical or mental health\n","id":"43dea5e3-b569-4be9-932d-0e2996bbd574"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a very taboo topic and I believe it shouldn't be. I also invite people to help me do research of how this actually came to pass. Mods if someone comments to help me with my research I would like to read their comment so don't delete it even if it does go against the change my view rules. The first thing is mostly that this think of the children seems to stem from a religious concept of Christianity. Though a few strange facts about Christianity is that it must be a recent concept since especially we worship Mary mother of Jesus. She is thought to be between 10 14 years of age. A pubescent mother. But even if we assume that is ancient history and things have changed since. As short as 100 years ago the age of consent laws were as low as 12. One of the biggest problems is that there are no laws or punishments when a minor has sex with a minor, but as soon as a person turns 18 years old the laws come into place and there are huge ramifications and they ruin a person for life labeling him as a sexual predator. I believe people should take a step back from thinking grown man vs child and consider it the same as a child vs child. Because when intercourse is involved it doesn't matter how old the partner is as long as both were consenting. When people, especially from USA, look at other countries art or their traditions they seem disgusted if they involve children. Criminalizing that whole country for being wrong or backwards. Japan is a good example. Not caring that country follows a different set of rules, laws, or religions than their own. This further proves how brainwashed people have become from religion and laws. Not even understanding why it is wrong in the first place. Just that it is wrong . Keep in mind I am talking about puberty age, not prepubescent innocence usually under 10 . When children start to masturbate, which is around 12 years old. Read these for further information About religion changing the law to keep purity of women for their future husbands About world wide age of consent laws danger's of pregnancy at older ages is just as dangerous as younger ages yet no one bans them Fertility of men decrease as they get older So if a teenager is having unprotected sex with older men, then it is more likely that they will not get pregnant vs having unprotected sex with younger men. So with the last few posts. I guess this thread is dead. 1 person succeeded in changing my view in Having the age limit a little too high instead of a little too low is better because society and humanity is too primitive to judge otherwise. Congratulations for Namemedickles. Most people have forgotten the point of this sub and have not played by this sub rules nor the rules of argumentation, just refusing to acknowledge any facts that go against their own personal views. For future readers the point of this sub is to open up closed minds. Much like a philosophy class. This is not an internet argument but supposed to be a place of gaining insight and wisdom into things you have not considered before.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Laws and religion have brainwashed people that sexualization of children is wrong, or having intercourse with people under 18 is wrong.\n","id":"a20c8b57-bd88-46d6-8c65-d944cfc2533f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Some of the most terrible acts throughout history have been committed by atheists eradication of 16000-40000 royalist villagers by the Infernal Columns communists\/socialists gulags, killings, the Chinese elimination of sparrows and the overpopulation of harmful insects that followed and Marxist capitalists rain forests chopped down for soy fields importing cheap products of 3rd world child labor Our modern faiths in our modern values aren't any better than those of religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Absent religion, ideologies fill the void and motivate humans to do terrible things.\n","id":"91cfb45d-b77e-4601-af37-f366c0fb7067"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Google decision to stop censoring results in China<|ARGUMENT|>\"Google vs. China.\" The News Tribune. March 26th, 2010: \"The issues behind Google\u2019s decision to stop censoring its own search engine in China are perfectly encapsulated in the Chinese government\u2019s response to it. Here are some of the instructions \u2013 as translated by the Washington Post \u2013 the government handed down to Chinese Web forum managers this week in reaction to Google\u2019s move: 1. It is not permitted to hold discussions or investigations on the Google topic. 2. All Web sites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the party, state, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event. 3. All Web sites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy. 4. . For all of China\u2019s economic dynamism and modern trappings, it remains ruled by a dictatorship terrified of independent political thoughts and the means of communicating them.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China's response to Google's decision shows depths of censorship\n","id":"94d6cd80-aec2-4693-a68e-23fbb70d3e25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Throughout the whole campaign Hillary Clinton was playing on the fact that she was a woman and using feminism to gain votes from women. I felt that there was an attitude of if you don't vote for Clinton you aren't a feminist . Suddenly people are saying that Trump winning was because of sexism. When Hillary Clinton based so much of her campaign around purely gender then I do not think that anyone can complain about any apparent sexism in a Trump victory. In fact, I believe that that is creating walls and divisions in society that is counter productive to any liberal ideology. The split of the women's vote was very similar to Obama Romney four years ago. Hillary Clinton exploited her gender to gain support and therefore sexism cannot be used as a reason for a Trump win.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hillary Clinton used her gender to her own advantage, so any argument that Trump won because of sexism is invalid.\n","id":"be1a2590-51f7-4823-8e32-06c258f636a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever I'm told I'm overqualified by a potential employee, I feel like what should really be said is, We don't feel you would be a fit for our organization because even though you are fully qualified to do the job you've applied for, we believe that you will not stay with our company as soon as a better opportunity presents itself. While I fully understand the reasoning and logic behind such a decision, I feel the term should not be used. If I'm qualified as much as to manage a sales team, but the jobs aren't available and I'm applying to be a janitor and HAVE THE EXPERIENCE from previous jobs in janitorial work say while I was going to college or served in the military , then I am not overqualified. I am qualified, but would be under employed as a janitor. While it's true that I would leave the janitorial job for a management job in a heartbeat, it should be conveyed to an applicant honestly that they feel hiring them would be a risky investment because of that fact. Frankly, it is insulting to me when I'm told I'm overqualified when my experience ranges broadly. I may be a qualified manager NOW, but I've been a janitor BEFORE I'm not overqualified I'm just a flight risk but I would still bust my ass in a shitty job for as long as I had to while I looked for better work. Do people really want to hire people who have no ambition? I'm thinking that they are of the mindset that if they are going to hire a janitor it's going to be someone whose going to be a janitor for a LONG time Obviously I'm using janitor and sales manager as examples, but the experience is still frustrating. I'd like to understand the philosophy behind overqualified because I feel insulted and patronized. I might not be a HAPPY janitor, but I'd be a GOOD one for as long as I needed to be. EDIT I'm happy to see some responses that have really helped me understand more about the hiring process, however, I should clarify that my issue is not with the logic behind a hiring decision, but rather with the use of the word. I feel like it is a cop out, a fall back or default response rather than being honest and giving the applicant the legitimate explanation. Maybe my concern is unjustified, but if I were a hiring manager I would be honest with overqualified applicants. Especially since they are probably frustrated with their current job or have been looking for work for a long time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe \"overqualified\" is a legitimate label to describe a candidate for hire. I feel it is a condescending way of rejecting a low ROI risk by under employing someone rather than being honest.\n","id":"effe622c-b253-4d28-8a81-66c21289febe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface by saying that I consider myself left of establishment Dems but still have voted Dem my entire life as the lesser of two evils. I felt physically sick over the election results this November, not only the Presidential vote but congressional and the statewide votes in my state, Missouri. The Russian involvement in our election process doesn't bother me for several reasons. First, it's hypocritical to not expect foreign interference in the U.S. political process when every single administration in my lifetime has done the same thing to other sovereign nations. Second, it's a red herring and allows the Dem establishment to blame everyone but themselves for propping up a horrible presidential candidate and ignoring the populist sentiment in the country. Finally, I see little difference between Russian involvement in our elections and Multinational corporations. Each have their reasons for wanting a certain candidate. Neither has the welfare of the American people in mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't care that Russia \"hacked\" our presidential election.\n","id":"47ab3584-cdd5-49eb-8584-adf7e8abafb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of Americans don't realize that the US Environmental Protection Agency's most important goal is to protect public health through regulation and enforcement of laws that limit the release of pollution into water, land and air. Many members of the public get the EPA confused with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and think that it has something to do with endangered species or wildlife. I think that public support of the agency would increase and there would be fewer people in support of blindly cutting regulation if there were better understanding that the EPA is working to protect public health and reducing our exposure to toxins. A reorganization that brings this agency together with the CDC would improve coordination on emerging threats. The CDC has decades of experience tracking trends in real time, while the EPA isn't doing enough to deal with emerging threats to public health. A rebranding would shift the focus from the environment which has become a partisan issue to public health. Edited to add Thanks for all of the interesting replies It's my husband's birthday and we're both a bit hammered I'll try to get back onto reddit tomorrow and award deltas and do edits. THis is my first time on Change My View, and it has been enlightening.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EPA should be combined with the CDC and renamed the Public Health Protection Agency\n","id":"38b514e0-0866-4128-9c0e-b432f23ee343"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was born in a third world country and I've hated it ever since. It is nothing but a curse. The opportunities are minimal, the quality of life sucks, and the ideologies are rigidly orthodox. Growing up was tough because the older I got, the harder it was for me to comply with the principles of the people that surrounded me. That includes my parents and the school I went to. I was constantly arguing against the various societal norms that made up my great nation . There was corruption, there was poverty, there were dirt and filth. I was persistently tagged as an unpatriotic child who needs to grow up and learn to respect the country I was born in. At the same time, my appreciation for the developed world grew. I was in love with how throughout history, from hard work and tenacity, people in countries like The U.S., Canada, Japan and other European nations had created a civilization that they have today. Furthermore, people born in an underdeveloped third world country who take no pride from being a citizen of that specific nation should not be looked down upon. First of all, you did not choose to be born there, it was nothing but a roulette wheel. Second of all, if you relate better to a foreign culture, you should have every right to partake in it and defend your views as to why you are doing so. Also, it is a lot easier to respect your nation, if you are living in one which provides you at least the most basic living requirements such as good education and proper healthcare. Lack of opportunities to grow in your chosen career path if you even get an opportunity to chose one is a major demotivating factor in my opinion. It's hard to progress in a country that is indulged in a reckless orgy of corrupt politicians and government officials. Chasing and achieving your dreams in life is considerably easier when you are not homeless and hungry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being born in a certain country, doesn't give you any obligation to be patriotic to the country you were born in.\n","id":"7f5e8a9e-82df-4d6b-8937-ff967191fb05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>If too many people do not believe in veganism, even when the world turns vegan, the world turning vegan may only end up a short run instead of sustaining through the long-term.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People may still not want to be vegan or believe in veganism, even if the world and they go vegan.\n","id":"2b039fa7-2b64-4d75-868e-ad4cc013bc3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been making games in minecraft and scratch.mit.edu for about three years. I have made work in am proud of and have role models in those communities, yet people have told tell me that these games aren't really games because they are easier to make. I don't believe a game made in Unity in 50 hours has more merit than a good minecraft map made in 50 hours. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I thinking making minecraft maps counts as making \"real\" games\n","id":"c8871082-afc2-4ba4-ad56-ea5ba037301d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>protect braille out of respect for free speech<|ARGUMENT|>The death of the book has been predicted with virtually every technological innovation and yet, it remains one of the most widespread and recognised means of communication in the world, with physical book sales representing about 80% of total book salesi. There are many reasons for this, its communicability, its physicality, it history and associations. Whatever the reasons for its enduring success, it remains one of the great design achievements of humanity as a species, comfortably alongside the wheel, the screw and cash. Whatever the reason for this enduring success, it has it and the latest set of doomsayers may well go the way of the rest. Perhaps the greatest reason for its enduring success is that the book is silent. The reader gives voice to characters and charts their own way through fiction or selects their own phrases for emphasis in non-fiction. There is nobody \u2013 actor or director \u2013 between the reader and the author. If that applies to the printed word it applies equally or more to Braille. It is notable that the decline in braille literacy has led to a decline in poetry and literature output by the blind community.ii In turn, it is surely part of the author\u2019s right to speak freely that they speak directly to their reader. i Ebooks Popularity is Rewriting Sales History. Carol Memmet. 5 September 2011. USA Today. ii Ouellette, Matthew David, \u2018Low Cost, Compact Braille Printing Head For Use in Handheld Braille Transcribing Device\u2019, Mechanical Engineering Master's Theses. Paper 41. p.2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The attacks on Braille are part of a wider move against the physical book.\n","id":"b9efcc82-74b0-4212-b6b9-d64d68f6a3f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should quotas for women on boards and in managerial positions be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>People tend to view men as leaders and women as followers. If given the choice between a male or female boss when taking a new job, Americans strongly lean towards men and prefer a male boss over a female boss by 35% to 23% However, those who currently work for a woman are as likely to prefer having a female boss as a male one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having more women in managerial positions will help break the stereotype that women cannot be good leaders.\n","id":"51a510f4-18a9-4f07-acbe-0a70b085b2cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, the highest fertility rates are held by Niger and Somalia 7.2 and 6.3, respectively while the lowest are South Korea Hong Kong Singapore at 1.2. Singapore is sometimes listed as 0.84 by some sources . Trends in fertility rate are associated to the demographic transition model, where more advanced, modern developed countries feature less children per woman, and vice versa. Currently, low fertility rates are leading to larger populations of elders, since newer generations become progressively smaller than previous ones. Many people fear this will lead to economic strains which it can smaller work forces which it does and less innovation maayybe? A lot of this is entirely possible and is in fact currently happening, with China being one pretty mild example, but is not guaranteed to be a catastrophic process. I feel like automation in particular would be an uprising change that could combat the effects of declining populations, if handled correctly. It would displace worker populations and generally push more people into technological scientific career paths something that higher education levels would further promote. This would be especially noticeable in developing nations, where a rising education quality would espouse more 'advanced' or specialized skill sets as automation simultaneously reduced the demand for 'lower education' jobs. Ultimately, a combination of the gradual implementation of automation, coupled with smaller populations, would probably not cripple the system, but simply concentrate its assets skill expertise and increase overall efficiency. Obviously there are negative side effects which can be discussed but I think that they are outweighed by the relative benefits and more obvious consequences of the opposite solution I.e, overpopulation with more pollution, resource strain, etc . Basically, I think that, while a declining fertility rate can certainly lead to several major problems, the overall effect and end result would be more appealing than the alternative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Falling fertility rates are not an inherently negative thing\n","id":"ff941a19-7aec-4978-80ce-45c23a2a05f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>The numerous problems of the LGBT+ community have reduced its effectiveness. As part of the movement, asexuals and aromantics will have to deal with these problems, which may get in the way of them furthering their own interests.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The LGBT+ movement is not an organized, successful movement. Joining it would expose asexuals and aromantics to the many problems it is currently fraught with.\n","id":"62198c92-b15b-4264-8991-aa4e63128581"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the War in Iraq worth it?<|ARGUMENT|>Richard Miniter. \"Was the Iraq War Worth It?\" Hudson New York. September 2, 2010: \"What about the toll taken on the U.S. military? . While every soldier's life is precious, it is astonishing how relatively few Americans were called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice in the Iraq war. Total combat deaths for U.S. forces are 3,491 over eight years. More died in a single day of combat at Antietam Sharpsburg, Maryland or on the Normandy landings. . If you average the death toll of 57,000 over the 14 years of the Vietnam War, you get 4,071: one year of the Vietnam War was more deadly than all eight years of the Iraq war combined. . Clearly, the military has learned a lot about combat medicine, body armor, small-unit tactics and hundreds of other advances that save lives, both military and civilian.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Number of US troops lost in Iraq is relatively small\n","id":"0f27330b-b9bd-4737-9843-46412aab0fbe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people marry outside their religious faith?<|ARGUMENT|>Muslim interfaith children are more progressive, inclusive, and worldly when viewing other cultures, faiths, and ethnicities Ali, p. 121<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The children of interfaith marriages are tolerant of faiths that they have no association with.\n","id":"e5aa7efa-1180-4179-9540-5bb006bb0a6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Activities that are important to the functioning of society are already regulated, such as practicing law or medicine. Parenting is no different: raising healthy and productive children is important for society to function. Consequently, like practicing law or medicine, parenting should be regulated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bad parenting results in harmful consequences for the child. Requiring a parent to obtain a license ensures a basic standard of parenting.\n","id":"45edbafd-9a39-4c26-8305-54d6061eea48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before you downvote this as tinfoil nonsense, just imagine this gt Crime an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government By definition crime is a violation of laws created. At the risk of sounding like an anarchist, it would seem that more strict laws directly create more crime. Prohibition, for example directly increased the consumption of alcohol and tons of violence associated with the new lawlessness of the industry. I know this is a tired argument for the legalization of marijuana, but imagine how much less crime we would have if a common substance was decriminalized. Imagine a hypothetical situation where the consumption of meat is made illegal. There would be mass uproar, of course, and people would still want to eat meat illegally. Most of us would become criminals over night. Think of the magnitude of the illegal meat industry entire states would be controlled by meat gangs and we would have armies of cattle farming rebels all across the countryside. Murder, assault, theft, and every other universal ish offense would skyrocket. So at one extreme, we have a very strict and nosy 1984 esque government that results in tons of crime and undesirable behaviors. What's at the other extreme? What if murder was legal ? This is extreme and I'll probably get stoned for saying that^420blazeit but just stop and think about it for a second. Think about the American Frontier in the early 1800s. Everyone packed heat, everyone was a potential murder victim or murderer. The law was there but they were on the same level as the lawless. Everyone was equal in the eyes of Smith Wesson. This is a very idealistic view and it's dramatized and romanticized in fiction and non fiction but I also believe it's part of our the world's cultural identity. There's a part of us that desperately wants the freedom of the Wild West or the Walking Dead or a galaxy far far away. All I'm saying is that maybe we should embrace that part of us. Let's decriminalize being human. Let people do what they want and deal with the consequences. Just because something is legal does not mean that people will do it , actually it's the opposite. If the government wants to end crime, maybe they should stop creating it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All crime is directly manufactured by the government\n","id":"ba691157-76f5-4df3-86ef-e1651f2dfcac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Should a tolerant society tolerate intolerance? The answer is no. When we extend tolerance to those who are openly intolerant, the tolerant ones end up being destroyed and tolerance with them. Any movement that preaches intolerance and persecution must be outside the law. As paradoxical as it may seem defending tolerance requieres to not tolerate the intolerant. This was shamelessly ripped from this graphic but I completely agree with it. It is extremely relevant for our times because those preaching intolerance and hate are asking for their hate to be accepted. If that hate is accepted it will crush the powers of tolerance. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As paradoxical as it may seem defending tolerance requieres to not tolerate the intolerant.\n","id":"fc6bcc02-42ce-4c09-8580-28af1f5864e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Health insurance cooperatives<|ARGUMENT|>Gov. Howard Dean told the Huffington Post: \"the basic problem, as the Senate often does, is that they are worried about the internal Senate politics rather than the type of solution the American people want.\"17<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Co-ops are a political solution rather than a health care solution.\n","id":"c3753882-182a-4df5-89aa-5c900fb85871"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Can your blood atone for genocide, orc? Your Horde killed countless innocents with its rampage across Stormwind and Lordaeron. Do you really think you can just sweep all that away and cast aside your guilt so easily? No, your kind will never change, and I will never stop fighting you. The Orcish Horde has shown time and time again to be a destructive force that endangers the entirety of Azeroth, be it under the control of Gul'dan, Doomhammer, Thrall or Garrosh. Even when the Horde was not belligerent during Thrall's reign, they were still a detriment to all of Azeroth due to his mismanagement. The Horde of the first two wars were monsters, the Horde of the latter conflicts is a failed state. The biggest problem with the Horde is that it is an autocratic dictatorship with fascist militaristic overtones. The Horde does not have, effectively, a civilian government every one who joins the Horde must swear an oath to the Horde's supreme military commander that implicitly makes them part of the nation's armed forces. However, while the Horde as a whole may have other races in it, it is still dominated by orcs. What we have learned from Warlords of Draenor is that the orcs are biologically predisposed to mindless literally violence due to the bloodlust they have, particularly shown in Durotan's Lords of War short. For the longest time, the orcs relied on the excuse of being manipulated by demons as an explanation for why they committed horrible atrocities, atrocities on a scale not achieved by any other mortal race on Azeroth. However, under the command of the non demonic Garrosh and Grommash Hellscream and free of demonic blood, we see the Iron Horde doing just the same as the fel crazed Horde. Under Thrall and Garrosh, we should have seen change in the orcs, but instead we see biological trends towards violence on wide scales. The orcs are dangerous, that is who they are, in the same way that high blood elves are addicted to magic and dwarves are predisposed to digging. For the good of Azeroth and all planets in the universe of Warcraft, Daelin was right in trying to wipe out the orcs when he had the chance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Daelin Proudmoore was right\n","id":"8f58c138-4cb6-430d-bfd6-1e8eeea20bd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am currently in high school, and a major thing I have noticed is that girls seem to do much better than boys in school. For example, my math teacher does not grade homework, and when I look around the room I see that none of the boys did their homework besides one or two of the asian kids who seem to always have great work ethic , and most if not all of the girls did it. The boys generally outperform the girls on standardized tests I got a 1540 with an 800 on math and I don't know of any girls with that high of a score. And no, I don't have that bullshit extended time which completely defeats the purpose of a STANDARDIZED test , but the girls dominate when it comes to GPAs. We have one brilliant kid who made a 1570 but won't even be valedictorian because he got a B in AP US History because he never did his homework. I got a B in Chemistry despite having an A average on tests, quizzes, and labs because my homework grade was 17 and it counted as 20 of the grade. Why is it that girls are so much more motivated than guys? From what I've seen, girls do homework about twice as often as guys do and I can't seem to find any reason why.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Boys are smarter but less motivated than girls in school\n","id":"d84d20c4-be19-4bfd-a1fd-8c57121d279f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should selective breeding of animals be prohibited?<|ARGUMENT|>70.000 cats are born every day in the US alone. That's over 25.5 million a year. This dwarfs the number of animals being bred.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prohibiting selective breeding does not solve the problem of animal overpopulation, as selectively bred pets are small minority of animals born each year.\n","id":"d1918b79-f394-4c41-a5cb-4dfe619de2d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Military recruiting in public schools<|ARGUMENT|>Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2006 ruling that the government can force law schools to accept military recruiters, that recruiting is not an 'inherently expressive' activity and that law schools 'are not speaking when they host interviews and recruiting receptions.' Therefore, the act of denying military recruiters access is not considered \"speech\" protected by the First Amendment.11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Denying recruiters is not a protected form of \"expressive speech.\"\n","id":"d77591ea-6371-43a9-a66c-91a974b4fd8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Democracies should ban the display of communist and Nazi symbols<|ARGUMENT|>Government obviously believes today that international relationship decisions are made only for showing off or complaining. Also they believe that you can yell at Russia as much as you want for the reason that the Baltic States have alternative markets for export and military support from NATO. Mentioned examples about monument in Estonia and reformation of Russian school in Latvia definitely are not examples how diplomacy is supposed to work. Harms of worsening the relationship are way much higher than the government believes. We are talking here not about what Russia might like or what it might not like. We are talking here about which decisions are beneficial for states themselves. You can be arrogant as much as you want, but in the end you would still depend on natural resource i.e. gas and oil stream from Russia. We believe that the aim of international relationships is not only soreness and revenges. We believe that international arena is a place where more substantial goals can be reached. And these goals can be reached via cooperation, not conflicting. We believe that upsetting a powerful neighbour, even though you have a protector, just reduces the possible numbers of options and alternatives for future decisions. On the status quo. We are not afraid to admit that for the Baltic States it is very beneficial to trade with Russia. Proximity to Russia is a competitive advantage of the Baltic States, it is a gateway from Russia to the rest of the EU. Being an intermediary between Russia and the EU is what gives most of the benefit to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Geographical location, widespread use of Russian language, and understanding of Russian mentality is something which brings real economic value. So a wise international policy would be to use these trading opportunities, because it gives much more welfare to societies than just keeping the pride and barking at a bear. Having shown the economic benefits, we want to also stress that implementing this plan will make Russia extremely upset for another very important reason. It is the equation of Nazis and Soviets. Russia for whatever reason shows sentiments for all the people who, in their words, liberated the world from the Nazis. They by no means find Soviet regime comparable to Nazis and would be insulted by that. Even though we might consider those crimes being of comparable magnitude, announcing it as the official position would further harm already unstable relationship between the Baltic States and Russia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For the Baltic States it is strategically important to secure good relationship with Russia\n","id":"66bd5691-2b08-4abf-a57a-f65ac8cb682f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Poland At the beginning of the 20th century, there was no Poland After the Central Powers Germany, Austria Hungary and the Ottoman Empire lost the First World War, the international community decided to take some of Germany's territory and create Poland. This resulted in multiple wars Germany started World War II to recapture territories. After WWII, eight million Germans were expelled from Poland The civilian death toll was somewhere between 400,000 and two million. Many German civilians were raped or murdered by Poles. Some were kept in concentration camps and 200,000 were employed in forced labor in Poland others were sent to Russia. Germany accepted this and did not fight back. Nowadays, the existence of Poland is not controversial. It's respected as a modern, liberal democracy. Israel At the beginning of the 20th century, there was no Israel During World War I, British forces defeated the Ottomans who were in a military alliance with the Germans in Southern Syria and governed that area They promised support for a Jewish national home. The international community agreed with British rule in Palestine. After World War II and the Holocaust, many Jews fled to Israel. They declared the establishment of a Jewish State This state was quickly recognized by the United States, the Soviet Union and many other countries. This immediately resulted in war with the surrounding Arab nations Similar wars were fought over and over and over again. Nowadays, Israel is one of the most liberal, democratic, wealthy and stable nations in the region. Yet they continue to be attacked by their neighbours.  Many people are opposed to Israel's existence because they maltreated Arabs. But Poles have also maltreated many Germans. Both nations were created in the aftermath of world wars and had support from many nations and international organizations. I think that those who criticize Israel should also criticize Poland but I have literally never heard people criticize the existence of Poland. If you think that Poland should return territory to Germany, people think you're a Nazi, yet it's common for people to demand that Israel should give back territory to the Arabs. If the Arab struggle against Israel is legitimate, than a German struggle against Poland is legitimate as well. But it's hypocritical to accept Poland and criticize Israel's existence. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel is as legitimate as Poland\n","id":"6e40d2f8-522f-4ddd-a0e5-343d0e5b58a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been reading a lot about how the greatest multinational corporations in the world, like Starbucks for example, have been avoiding to pay profit taxes to their local governments by sending their money to tax havens such as Ireland, The Netherlands or the Cayman Islands. Supposedly, this has been going on for decades and has saved these companies billions of dollars. This got me thinking. Most of the European government debts amount to several billions of dollars. It seems very logical to me that a large part of the financial problems that Western governments now face, would not have existed if these corporations would have done their lawful duties. While I think my argument has face value, I wonder if these claims can be confirmed or denied by numbers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there wouldn't be a financial crisis right now if multinational corporations had not been avoiding to pay profit taxes to their governments.\n","id":"d3c7e13d-980b-4e62-89c1-06be6689ee9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So first I should add some background. I am arguing as a Caucasian Male of European descent, so I understand if people think that I'm potentially out of the loop. It seems to me that having hiring quotas won't help with anti discrimination. While you might hire more of a previously 'disadvantaged' group, you are still discriminating against someone. Example from life The population is around half and half male and female. Someone in HR in a large engineering firm therefore decided that the distribution of engineers should also be 50 50. Now while that sounds nice, the ratio in university was weighted about 70 30 men women. In order to achieve the quota that had been set, men who had studied harder and performed better were being passed over in order to achieve these ridiculous hiring goals. Now don't get me wrong, there were fantastic female engineers who outperformed almost everyone and definitely deserved the jobs they got. There were also however the same ratio of slackers and idiots that were present amongst the guys. However most of those female slackers got jobs in preference to guys with higher scores and better ethics. Now I know there are more reasons, e.g. the women may have interviewed better, or fit the team better, but on average I feel that these quotas have unfairly discriminated against men. Now to the point. I don't really care if most women don't get jobs. I also don't care if most men don't get jobs. I only really care if I am being discriminated against. Quotas to hire X number by ratio of insert minority here I feel can hurt my chances and are forms of negative discrimination. I'm a supporter of having diverse workplaces. I just think that those should arise naturally rather than be forced. I'll happily agree to blind interviews, where your resume doesn't have a name or sex on, so the reviewer can't tell race or sex. But I do think that a quota for diversity adversely affects people and is ethically wrong. If I haven't expressed myself well I'll try and clarify in the comments. Also, sorry for any formatting problems as I've done this on mobile. Edit Thanks for everyone that has responded. I'm not gonna be able to ever say that I love the ideas of positive discrimination and quotas, but at least I can see why we might need them. Short explanations I've got suggest that it's not just the hiring process but the whole system that is inherently biased, and the quota system is a last ditch method to fix that. Also you can't do an application in a vacuum purely on merit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as positive discrimination i.e. having a quota to hire women. It's all negative against someone.\n","id":"f65dee06-9af9-440a-9aa1-317bdc1b16e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Chiasmus as used in the Book or Mormon are similar to those written in the Bible, an ancient Hebrew writing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Linguistics: The writing in the Book of Mormon is consistent with ancient Hebrew and Egyptian writing and language.\n","id":"f7e536d3-2483-4e09-9ae3-afacb48f6f48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>Britain will have significantly less influence in Europe if it leaves the EU, and as a result will be a weaker nation in the international community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best way to influence change in the organisation is by being a member.\n","id":"10730c22-a90c-46d0-85a6-b23300993898"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>He was just a guy who got lucky and became a bagillionaire. He bought the company he worked for and is trying to tame a savage planet. He had a tragic accident when his daughter discovered her super powers and killed her mother. Faced with this terrible situation where his daughter is basically a dangerous monster he is finding the silver lining and having her help him to revive a vault to help tame the crazy dangerous world. Crimson raiders and vault hunters are basically murdering psychopaths who are trying to illegally take what isn't theirs. They are the true villain in the game. Friggin vault hunters. I'm with Jack er was with Jack<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Borderlands 2Handsome Jack was the hero, not the villain\n","id":"8e51d747-1ab0-4c93-9e82-17fc36ab6e04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>At the very least, the amount of aid you receive in the future is uncertain. Dictatorial regimes have little incentive to risk the process of democratisation for aid that may actually be very little in the end.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no guarantee that non-democratic states would actually receive any aid by the time they democratise; it's unclear why any dictator would take the gamble of democratising for a reward that may never accrue.\n","id":"0eae720f-c8a6-4c31-8dd2-be8fac72d9f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>Examples of massacres without firearms have either; used something illegal such as bombs or poison; or have a practical use, such as using a knife to cook or a car for transport, and are limited to them. Only guns are legal, not practical, and easy and common to use for massacres.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lone assailant with a knife has significantly less chance of causing mass harm than a lone assailant with a semi or fully automatic weapon.\n","id":"b7bd5cd8-a046-4b27-8484-c503f3630d43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>This is harmful because it leads to the gradual shift of mainstream political parties to more extreme positions. This comes at the cost of more nuanced and effective policy, which loses out when appealing to populism works more effectively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians and nominees have to face those extreme positions, as well as adopt them in order to receive the felons' votes.\n","id":"5463010e-d2d0-437a-9db0-4a027cd17894"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Gender arose in the 19th century with the broad diffusion of biomedical science around Western European practices and ideas, which consolidated the idea that sex determines gender identities and roles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The perception of gender roles as something fixed comes from an erroneous ethnocentric vision of Western societies.\n","id":"bf79484f-bdf5-4e1e-974b-3f07d32a5207"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are gender and sex the same thing?<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, intersex activists and feminist science try to increase our awareness and understanding of the limitations of our understanding sex: how the dichotomy may not be the most accurate understanding of how genes and sex traits actually occur across the human population.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be easier to point out the flaws in the current understandings of both sex and gender if the fights against outdated understanding of sex and gender were united.\n","id":"b37220b9-0c3b-49b9-b873-5366ed747784"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Black Panther: Who's Right About Wakanda's Role in the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Oppressive structures are so deeply entrenched around the world that only very radical systemic change can solve the problems that they create.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A moderate policy can only mitigate black suffering, but will never end it.\n","id":"5b427b44-8474-44d8-99a9-444732ee698a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Drug Trial Participants Be Chosen By Lottery?<|ARGUMENT|>If the people think that their government is incompetent, they're likely to choose to use private services over services provided by the state such as putting kids in private schools or going to private hospitals when sick.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Distrust of the government worsens interactions between the state and its citizens.\n","id":"e07d7001-fb0c-4751-8eee-6e3d8c3f565a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a precursor, I'm not trying to argue that Bill is wrong or that religion is right or what have you. I'm talking only about the documentary, not the basic assertion that he makes in it. For the record I am religious. After several recommendations by friends, I finally sat down and watched it. I had to fight to not turn it off after about twenty minutes. Bill demonstrates zero actual desire to learn anything. He talks to someone and the second they say something he disagrees with he cuts them off and starts talking over them. He acts like a FOX news anchor and then when people are trying to actually talk he just throws up his hands See They can't explain The film can be summed up with there are people who believe different things than I do and they sound ridiculous so let me go yell at them and tell them how wrong they are and when they don't immediately agree that just shows how right I am. Even when he asks a sincere question he doesn't listen to the answer. He's that annoying atheist that most of us have talked to that goes around challenging people wearing crosses in the grocery store to a debate and then walking away declaring victory when they tell him to fuck off and leave them alone. The documentary and I use that term loosely presents no real new information, it really doesn't do anything except call people with different viewpoints stupid and leave it at that. It's on par with those terrible YouTube videos titled Ten Questions Atheists Christians Pastafarians Jews Zoroastrians Can't Answer 1 I'm open to the idea that there's some hidden gem of wisdom that I'm missing but overall it feels like half PR stunt half ego project that brings no actual value to the viewer. So go ahead .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bill Maher's \"Religulous\" has the intellectual caliber of a terrible YouTube video.\n","id":"f8148b94-5da4-4111-b605-35f4101cd912"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no limit to freedom of speech.<|ARGUMENT|>Victims of any emotionally scarring experience, such as rape, molestation, etc, need defense against purposeful emotional abuse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unlimited freedom of speech can be used to spread hateful and\/or harmful ideologies.\n","id":"8ee0f7e4-2b44-4186-b0f7-51204b59453d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To preface my post, I want it to be noted that I have nothing against transgender people. If that's how people feel, I have nothing against. Regardless, here's an overview of this post. First, I will provide my understanding of sex compared to gender . Then, I will discuss my confusion about gender reassignment surgeries and the like . And finally, I will discuss my even greater confusion with the concept of transitioning sex. As far as I understand, gender is mostly identification with particular societal roles, and some of those roles might be completely arbitrary. Individuals can identify with particular roles there are several kinds of gender roles an individual could adopt. As for sex, it is your genetic well, sex\u2014the kind of reproductive organs you have. It's a product of your genes. And there are two main kinds male and female. I recognize there are disorders that might effect the development of reproductive organs, albeit these differ from what is standard and are marginal cases. So, when a an individual transitions gender, I understand it as an adoption of particular roles. However, when a person undergoes extensive surgery, they are only altering the symptoms of their genetics\u2014our genes produce our sex, and organs like the penis, vagina, or breasts are products of those genes. When an individual undergoes gender reassignment surgery, that individual isn't becoming the other sex. That person's genetic code will never change testosterone, estrogen, hair transplants, mastectomies, etc. are all treatments for genetic symptoms. So, a man can never become a woman. And a woman can never become a man. If you say otherwise, in either case, then, the second sex is being equivocated. For instance, in the first sentence, a man refers to an individual's sex. Suppose you say, A man can undergo gender reassignment surgery . That man isn't becoming a woman, though. He's altering his symptomatic man like features to develop woman like features. So, he isn't becoming a woman, in the first sentence like a man is meant. Rather, he's altering his physical appearance to appear like a woman. Men can look like women, and women can look like men. I think that's entirely plausible. But an individual will always be the sex they're genetically coded to be, unless we get to the point where we can genetically alter an individual's sex.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transgender individuals will always be their original sex.\n","id":"b62c28cc-459a-4307-8dec-27d1d9457fc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should be the Next EU Commission President?<|ARGUMENT|>Even where Tomic is active on social media, for example on her Twitter account the content is generally in Slovenian and not accessible to the vast majority of Europeans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Neither candidate is particularly active on social media. This makes them far less accessible to citizens than the other candidates running.\n","id":"f6f526df-e588-4c9d-b22c-7388f10460f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>Employees that feel more welcomed in corporations are likely to be more motivated to work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cultural diversity within an office can make people from different backgrounds feel more welcome.\n","id":"075e9c7b-eeb3-457c-9a48-5becee1e00bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Successful compliance with conditions creates a trustable reputation; trust is of high importance for businesses and attracts investors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making assistance conditional on democratisation makes economic reform and growth in non-democratic states more likely.\n","id":"b2a11a3a-f1a5-4643-989d-b145706aa32c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is deliberately not preventing someone's death ethically equivalent to killing them?<|ARGUMENT|>One purpose of moral frameworks is to enlighten and guide moral agents. However, if that moral framework is overly demanding, then moral agents are unlikely to subscribe to it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many moral philosophers agree that morality cannot be too demanding it cannot require us to make significant personal sacrifices for the sake of others.\n","id":"e9d62e96-4b46-403b-a557-c0555bb5501f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if not directly involved, high income countries i.e, most of the EU bloc have not done enough to stop the other powers from creating devastation that leads to the refugee crisis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High-income countries are complicit in exploiting - and hence profiting from - many exchanges that have contributed to the current world-wide refugee crisis.\n","id":"98ce9f86-22c9-44be-b1fc-bae6ab549b0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do all or most White Americans experience privilege?<|ARGUMENT|>White privilege means you never even know you have it. We have been taught that white is pure, black is evil, other, suspect. Judas is painted as dark and swarthy in European art. White folks frolicking on island vacations. We are convinced that we are entitled to all that the world has to offer. These symbols, some subtle, some blatant, inform us that being white means more freedom, more access to resources, more justice, and more social acceptance than anyone else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The entire framework on which we base the \"norm\" in the United States is white and euro-centric, and as a result everything that follows is seen as \"other\". That itself is an example of privilege.\n","id":"f73a37da-c9e9-4178-aeef-2da20e50a238"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Having a huge, powerful and functional arsenal of AKMs will strengthen the global hegemony of the West in military, economical and cultural spheres.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because the creation of AKMs is inevitable, the West has to build them in order to avoid a military disadvantage.\n","id":"3165ac8c-7619-45a7-986b-81858fa7503d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a libertarian i have fought tooth and nail for my philosophy to be implemented on a federal scale, and have found it easy to do. The constitution is very clear and defends libertarian principles with ease. However i struggle with defending it on state and local issues because if it works on the federal scale meaning the federal overreach being curbed then the need for libertarian philosophy is less on the state and local level. So  that libertarian philosophy is unnecassary on the state and local levels<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libertarianism is great on the federal level, but once it hits the state and local levels it becomes more difficult to defend\n","id":"6b960912-c93f-463a-8003-8534fbf85d73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the recent controversy over the way DoorDash handles tips, I'm confused why people are so angry with DoorDash while not showing the same anger towards restaurants. My view is that the way DoorDash uses tips to be able to pay drivers less is almost exactly the same as how restaurants use tips to be able to pay servers less. I think American tipping culture is awful, and that people should be just as outraged with restaurant owners as they are with DoorDash. Restaurants must pay minimum wage to their servers 7.25 hr , but since it is a tipped position they can pay as little as 2.13 hr, so long as the tips make up the difference. DoorDash must pay the driver their guaranteed amount on a delivery, but they can pay as little as 1 to the driver so long as the tips make up the difference.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DoorDash's tip system works basically the same as restaurants\n","id":"2e56062c-34f0-42f9-8f5e-dcdae83e9a3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Oh boy, another censorship post fun right? Well hopefully this hasn't already been covered ad nauseum and if it has please feel free to just link me to the appropriate thread. I am a straight man who was regularly bullied by my peers growing up for being gay in their perception. I don't think this is uncommon for nerdy kids, thin kids, or kids who are just around general assholes. As a result of this, I was called a faggot quite a bit growing up. Recently, I got into a discussion about this and someone told me that I shouldn't use the word even in the context of talking about those experiences. I felt like that was an odd standpoint and I don't agree with it but obviously I'm here because I'm open to understanding where I might be wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person shouldn't be censored from talking honestly about there own bullying\/harassment\n","id":"39fad5df-d5ee-468a-922e-4071d23db074"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Schisms in Christianity are examples of politics over \"theological differences\" because the fundamental spiritual aspects in Christianity are forgiveness and acceptance. Examples of schism in Christianity are many<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The politics of religion have obscured and diminished the development of collective and personal spirituality.\n","id":"0a04f1f0-10aa-4c3f-85b8-c3f8bd2d435c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global tax<|ARGUMENT|>Most people see financial speculators as an unfortunate part of globalisation, who make money by betting billions on future market changes without any concern for ordinary people who may be affected by the resulting economic instability. Such speculators can easily afford such a small tax on their deals, and its presence may make them more efficient by forcing them to check that the positions they take are really justified by economic conditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Tax will most likely receive widespread popular support both in the US as well as other constituencies, given that it promises to be such an important mechanism for proving international relief in case of emergencies:\n","id":"c0761342-9c91-4827-bb8b-8da5a969759d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Host Countries and Cities Benefit from The Olympic Games<|ARGUMENT|>The number of E-Sports global fans is estimated to be at 451 million people currently, and a large amount would attend the Olympics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"E-Sports have a growing viewership and may be added to the Olympics in the future.\n","id":"e89d9772-eb36-487a-80d8-2bf89b665a7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it important to get a college education?<|ARGUMENT|>From the late 1980s to 2018 the cost of an undergraduate degree has risen by 213% at public schools and 129% at private schools.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"College is expensive; it is unlikely that people from lower social classes can afford it.\n","id":"6ab0b56a-797f-4c91-8e27-2785af27bc9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The studies showing that women make less than men don't take into account what type of work a person does. So they show a male doctor who works 60 hours a week making 200k, and a female nurse working 60 hours a week making 100k, and somehow people conclude women make less than men. If companies could hire a woman for the exact same quality of work at some fraction of the cost, then every business everywhere would be crazy to hire men. They would be hiring women at every chance they could get and replace them with men. This is clearly NOT the world we live in. If a woman chooses a less lucrative career then that is her choice. I don't understand where people are coming from with this crap, I'm starting to feel like I'm taking crazy pills.  if you can.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe women make less than men\n","id":"8d3a3db3-c5c1-41b1-98fb-527c7c2e74ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>The idea that having children is 'unique' or 'special' and therefore not a legitimate form of paid labour has not prohibited men from donating their sperm and getting compensation for it. Clearly, the inconsistency is gendered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is puritanical and misogynistic to restrict reproductive labour, particularly since only women can participate in it.\n","id":"8fc3efe2-cb11-40b5-a340-b1d8a66d2eff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>They lie to the face of someone they claim to love, make them a fucking fool, and prevent them from finding someone who would treat them with the respect they deserve by keeping them tied down. In many instances, their significant other will discover the betrayal and experience extreme heartache. Despite these facts, SO MANY people cheat on their significant others, so obviously not everyone agrees that people who cheat are worthless scumbags since they do it themselves. I just read something stating that 70 of men admitted to cheating on their wives. I doubt hope that the statistic isn't really that high in actuality, but even if half of all people cheat, someone out there should be able to change my view. I would honestly like to hear a different perspective perhaps it will help me move forward after feeling like a fool for being betrayed myself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that all people who cheat on their significant others are worthless scumbags.\n","id":"b9acf412-665d-4377-8a15-a96e34b283e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide?<|ARGUMENT|>Turkey's economy could benefit from EU policies such as the Common Agricultural Policy and Cohesion Policy<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey's economy is struggling and it would greatly benefit from EU membership.\n","id":"5b974c45-adc7-47f1-a5f3-1f4f236c0a4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>The Japanese military slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, of which at least 23 million of them were ethnic Chinese.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"World War 2 was a particularly deadly and destructive war, accounting for more than 60 million deaths.\n","id":"87de0fd3-311f-498b-b0b5-fa9666b09b09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is based on an argument I had several years ago. For the sake of argument you can pick the human, but by default let's assume it's a fit, healthy adult male chimpanzee vs Dwayne The Rock Johnson. The chimpanzee has had its legs removed completely no stumps, no open wounds and has been given time to learn how to maneuver without them. The fight takes place in a large, empty field. Both combatants are unarmed and unarmored. Regardless of how strong a human is, they can't match the strength of a chimpanzee. The chimp could grab their arms and stop them from getting any leverage to get in good hits. Given its arm strength, I believe that it could learn to walk on its hands with relative ease, and would be fast enough to mitigate any strikes the human would make initially, then grab on to whatever limb the human used. From there, it could bite the human with its powerful jaws, doing some serious damage, possibly enough to get to an artery, which would severely weaken the human. Chimps have also been known to target the genitals, which would be excruciatingly painful and rapidly incapacitating. Even if it didn't get a good hit to either target, its strength would mean that it could continue to pin and climb the human until it could get to the neck of head to deliver the finishing blow by biting or attacking with one arm. Even with the advantage of having legs, I don't see how a human could win this fight. To change my view, I think you would either need to show that your selected human could defeat a chimp using abilities they can be demonstrated to have, or prove that a legless chimpanzee would be incapable of fighting for some reason.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A chimpanzee with no legs would still beat a human in unarmed combat\n","id":"0c75aa3e-614d-45e9-9531-bed12d52c0b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone knows how common it is, and was during the Bush Regime, for American citizens to masquerade as Canadian people while traveling through Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Usually, they did so by putting Canadian flags on their clothes or their bags. The theory was that Canadian people were considered harmless, and comparatively benevolent, while Americans were seen as aggressive imperialists overseas. I had a friend from Canada tell me that it is wrong for us to hide behind their good reputation for our personal benefit. He said that we were not only stealing his national identity but potentially putting Canadian people in danger should a Canadian traveler be mistakenly perceived to be actually an American citizen. I believe that American lives are more important though, and we have a right to do this as we are a big, powerful country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing wrong with Americans pretending to be Canadian overseas\n","id":"b5381537-30ee-4e19-8ba1-d5159e6eef20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>A small shift in support for a candidate in a swing state can result in a massive swing in electoral votes in winner take all systems. As such candidates are more likely to address issues specific to that states constituents possibly even at the expense of other states in order to shift the the plurality in their favor. Such favoritism is less likely in a distributive state as the shift in support will only proportionally shift electoral votes. States wish to maximize influence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While true, the states have little incentive to do away with winner take all as it generally tends to maximize their constituents influence. Doing away with the college would open up ability to adopt a popular vote that would eliminate that temptation.\n","id":"c47e0af0-fdea-4e58-95c8-1c353ce386db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>For some, there is a Catholic ideal that sex should be confined to marriage. As such, parents who have procreated outside of this ideal could be barred from keeping their child, were the license body to hold this ideal, too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Licensing could discriminate against couples who procreate out of wedlock.\n","id":"d56b0627-18c4-4b61-b59d-a55565e8362b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Old growth forests often host unique habitats and many endemic species. They also provide ecological stability. Also, the idea of logging an ancient place that has been growing continuously for 500 years is quite distressing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Old-growth forests should not be cut.\n","id":"ee863fd2-6940-40f3-b528-eae43ff44980"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After seeing his cameo in The Interview it all kind of clicked. If eminem came out as gay publicly it would destroy his image and kill off a lot of his fanbase. He would still be popular but he wouldnt sell nearly as many records as he does now. In his cameo he says he leaves a trail of gay breadcrumbs in his lyrics, which is when I realised Kill you gt I ain't acid rap, but I rap on acid gt Got a new blow up doll and just had a strap on added gt WHOOPS Is that a subliminal hint? NO gt Just criminal intent to sodomize women again Pretty big gay breadcrumb right here. My Name Is gt Well, since age 12, I've felt like I'm someone else gt Cause I hung my original self from the top bunk with a belt. So he hits puberty, can't stomach the real him, and kills him off? gt Got pissed off, ripped Pamela Lee's tits off and smacked her so hard knocked her clothes backwards like Kriss Kross Again, hits puberty, takes the hetero sex symbol of the day, rips off a symbol of her womanhood and hits her with it. That sounds like he's frustrated with his sexuality to me. The Real Slim Shady think about that title A lot of this song seems like he's talking openly to his young 'macho' audience, trying to justify his homosexuality gt Yeah, I probably got a couple of screws up in my head loose gt But no worse, than what's goin on in your parents' bedrooms Yeah I might be gay and that seems gross, but your parents fucking is gross to you even though you'll grow up and be a parent who fucks one day gt Sometimes, I wanna get on TV and just let loose, but can't gt but it's cool for Tom Green to hump a dead moose He just wants to get on tv and be his gay self, but he cant, yet tom green can hump a dead moose. I think his cameo was a cathartic moment for him, because he got on tv and let loose under the guise of satire. gt But if we can hump dead animals and antelopes gt then there's no reason that a man and another man can't elope Speaks for itself. I think eminem is gay, but cant come out publicly because of how it would affect his career, so he leaves a trail of gay breadcrumbs in his lyrics. I realise this isnt something you can definitely know is true or false but I think these lyrics im sure there's more out there give a lot of weight to the theory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eminem is gay\n","id":"52946118-c254-45b7-8ed7-e5a7c222d521"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently we have no defense against a nuclear threat and it is only a matter of time until someone crazy enough pulls the trigger. When they do, it will nearly make the earth uninhabitable for even those away from the conflict So why not invest in nuclear defense instead of Trump's idea for a nuclear arms race , not to mention broken arrows What is your take? Edit Changed nukes to nuclear defense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should invest in nuclear defense\n","id":"f1bc5628-e112-4553-b33f-ea06b2f549dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Mother Theresa was allegedly a saint for the poor, yet she believed they should suffer for God However, when she was sick, she had to have top of the end medical care. The church still touts her as a saint.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many religions are rife with hypocrisy: they teach compassion and austerity but religious institutions remain incredibly wealthy while much of the world lives in poverty.\n","id":"2e82a372-03fd-4e4e-9e48-603b05badd9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should the Conservative Party choose to be the next UK Prime Minister?<|ARGUMENT|>Javid's experience of having worked extensively in the financial sector which also landed him the job of Business Secretary may prove useful in Brexit negotiations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Javid has the experience needed to succeed as Prime Minister in this challenging political environment.\n","id":"2cd4121e-f47d-44b2-ba0e-9c9ff208af2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sex necessarily objectifies any involved parties. Even if the objectification is only temporary, and after the act each party is able to again perceive the other as more than a body, this is a real worry. Sex is not about humans, it's about bodies and body parts. There is a certain prevalent myth proceeding, I think, from the very prolific Western romanticization of human affection there can be such a thing as \u201ctranscendent sex\u201d in which each party's \u201ctrue self\u201d is revealed to the other. Yet, this seems to put the cart before the horse. If you're only \u201cfree\u201d or \u201cyourself\u201d during sex, that reduces who you are the majority of the time to a secondary role. Even if some people can achieve this rare, mystical transcendence, do you really think that's what most people are up to in the bedroom? In actuality, rather than becoming our \u201ctrue self\u201d during sex, we more often than not become caricatures or even animals during sexual escapades. The sexual act is always performative, and even in a world that predated the widespread proliferation of pornography, this involved a surrendering of oneself to a kind of theatrical and biological role. I think humans can be and, by definition are above this kind of self reduction. Naturalistic arguments for sex absurdly reduce us to tools of genetic destiny. Sex, meaning human sexual cultural as a whole, is neither natural nor co extensive with sexual reproduction. In the same way that animals do not wear clothes, but are not naked, non human animals reproduce sexually but do not \u201chave sex.\u201d I do not simply mean that animals don't fuck for pleasure surely many do . I mean that they haven't developed a \u201cculture of sex,\u201d in the same way that people have. Sexual culture permeates every aspect of Western life, but what is it adding to our lives? The simple response is that this focus on sex is necessary or natural. But like Michel Foucault suggests in his History of Sexuality, I feel that this claim of necessity is often used to justify intellectual laziness. Many aspects of society ask humans to reject all kinds of behaviors that are natural to animals or apex predators, like unchecked aggression or territorialism. Wearing clothes is, of course, \u201cunnatural,\u201d but I think that there aren't too many people who would dispute the claim that choices made regarding clothing or religion or any other \u201cnon animal\u201d part of culture constitute an essential part of a person's identity, if not the whole of it. Instead we want to say that my animalistic nature is somehow more representative of identity? I call bullshit on that. I'm more than my nature. Beyond failing to add anything meaningful to our lives, the widespread cult of sexuality leads to many specific harms. Any human who has grown up in this world has had millennia of gender and sex based oppression imprinted into their framework of sexuality and engages in sex only with at least the risk of further entrenching pernicious norms and damaged worldviews. In Christopher Ryan's book \u201cSex At Dawn,\u201d the traditional narrative of gendered sexuality is debunked. The idea that women are all gold diggers and prostitutes at heart who sell their bodies to their boyfriends and husbands in order to gain a share of a man's hard won resources this is dated and incorrect. The idea that men are all sexually desperate and would fuck and even rape as many women as they could without end were it not for the limitations imposed on them by the social order this is dated and incorrect. Yet these sorts of views are still common and dangerous and the direct result of our endless schema of sexual narratives. Furthermore, it's a strange thing to say, but \u201crape\u201d would not exist without the cult of sex and sexuality. While animals do sometimes mate with one another by force, the same horrible stigmas are not attached to the assaulted party. When animals \u201crape\u201d they do not do it to compensate for their wounded egos or punish their mates or acquaintances or strangers . They don't do it to \u201cget off on\u201d the power it makes them feel. I believe that every time we normalize human sex in television shows or Twilight novels, we further entrench these dangerous narratives and perverse values. And, perhaps most importantly to me, sex substitutes for and or obfuscates true connection, emotion, and communication. Freud's theory of sublimation suggests that one technique humans use to deal with their unsavory or societally unacceptable sexual desires is to channel that libidinous energy into a more productive kind of output. According to this theory, many of humankind's greatest accomplishments art, architecture, engineering, etc. are due to this realignment of our innate desires and instincts. Sexual positivism liberation movements ask us to instead be more accepting of one another's impulses in search of a world in which we might all be free to pursue our sexual ideals unadulterated by social constraint. But is this really what we want? Do we want to live in Huxley's Brave New World in which we spend every waking hour fucking one another's brains out instead of accomplishing anything? I'm not saying that a balance couldn't be achieved, but if we can admit that some kind of trade off between sexuality and creativity exists, how can our push for always more sex, all the time, possibly be a move in the right direction? We at least ought to consider the possibility that sexual freedom comes at some cost. This is a social question, of course, but there's also an analogue at the level of the individual. If we champion the idea that sex is truth carnal knowledge, knowing somebody biblically, etc. aren't we insisting that our partners have nothing deeper or more meaningful than their sexuality to offer us? My biggest problem with sex is that it's never, ever enough. Imagine two people sharing a special moment together each one has just revealed something incredibly intimate about themselves, and against all probability, the two minds have transcended the physical space between them and are just beginning to connect, to really understand one another in earnest and then and then and then they fuck and go to bed. What? No. That moment, that perfect moment is RUINED with sex. I submit that there is a kind of inverse sublimation at work here, that at the moment when an encounter with another consciousness becomes too intimate and sincere, too potentially painful, people retreat to the rote, animal solution to break the tension instead of pursuing it further, instead of trying to know one another completely. Sex is not truth sex instead stands in the way of truth. TL DR \u2013 just read the bold parts I guess.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think sex might immoral.\n","id":"13db20ef-e5da-4684-b510-3447aa47d6cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Demolitions of Palestinian homes and structures have reached a record high in the West Bank in 2016.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel engages in the 'deportation or forcible transfer of population' within the West Bank.\n","id":"723af37d-edb4-4b8d-b752-46dd619f4e7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Why? There are good principled reasons for reducing the working week. Sound implementation of these principles, moreover, could unify the demands of a European united front against austerity. Consider the principles. A 35 hour working week is likely to be more efficient than an unrestricted, or a 40 , working week. It is also likely to be fairer and freer. Take efficiency first. Suppose you were offered an extra week of vacation in return for a three percent drop in remuneration. Would you accept? Studies have shown that most people would accept, but only if others were also disposed to accept. There is an assurance problem here. So law has a role to play the well being of all is increased by making a reduction in working time a general requirement. Now take fairness. In general, long working hours are symptomatic of a separation between those who produce and those who manage those who produce. This is unfair and undemocratic producing for a wage not only entails that someone else is telling you what to produce and how it also entails that you are disenfranchised from the process of deciding what to produce and how. This separation can be abolished only if working people take control over their working lives. But control presupposes more time for collective self government, that is, a reduction in the time you spend producing and a commensurate increase in the time you spend governing your workplace. Next, take freedom. A 35 hour working week means more free time for most people, that is, time not spent trying to make ends meet. Free time, on this view, is an all purpose means whatever your plan of life, free time is a necessary condition for fulfilling it. We won\u2019t lead free lives when the wealthy buy all of our free time, even if we voluntarily sell them our fair share of that time. How? The proposal will fail unless coupled with an aggressive full employment policy at the EU level. By \u2018aggressive\u2019 I mean an EU policy that severely restricts layoffs, introduces obligatory hiring for profit making firms, boosts EU funded employment subsidies, and makes EU states employers of last resort. In the absence of such policies, profit maximizing firms have an incentive either not to hire, or even to lay off workers, as the productivity gains of a shorter working week kick in. The absence of such policies largely explains the moribund state of the French 35 hour week. As of 2017, the average length of the working week in northern Europe has converged to 37 hours per week. Introducing a 35 hour week is therefore likely to be smoother here. This is not, however, the case in southern and eastern Europe. On average, Greeks work about 42 hours per week 2000 hours a year the Poles and Portuguese work about 40 1850 hours a year . This is, however, a boon for the proposal if and only if it is coupled with an aggressive full employment policy a 12 percent reduction, say, in the working week for a 12 percent reduction in unemployment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union should institute a maximum working week of 35-hours in all member states\n","id":"09b78098-0c8a-46a7-b884-a05da35bbe55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should quotas for women on boards and in managerial positions be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Sexist assumptions mean that the merit of female candidates is not acknowledged appropriately in the status quo.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women are not currently given equal opportunities in the work place.\n","id":"09957e30-a110-47f0-92e7-25bd535ddbb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just came back from my first anime convention which included some fairly known voice actors. It was a college sponsored event held by our anime club. After the Q and A session, the rep for the voice actors told us each autograph was going to be 10 or 20 for photos. If you had purchased merch at the event the autographs were free for only two of the three. Now, before everyone starts going oh that's cheap you shouldn't complain I just wanted to point out that I disagree with even the notion that we should have to pay in the first place. To me, going to these events is an opportunity for these voice actors to network and increase their PR, not to wring out what little cash these college students have left. Additionally, the work that they participate in is purchased and supported by us, the consumer. It feels almost like we are being punished for being fans However, I feel like my point of view is biased because I am the consumer and not the voice actor. So, tell me why I'm wrong in thinking this way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think actors and voice actors should not charge for autographs.\n","id":"df82e1e6-826b-40ce-b36f-3747a65550ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>School Internet Filters<|ARGUMENT|>Sites like Youtube are filtered due to their uneducational content, however Youtube is also a very useful website to aid education when used with the correct intentions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain sites may be educational when used for the correct reasons\n","id":"5237f4c2-07c6-4b31-b988-087950cdcdc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I generally avoid eating pork, because pigs seem to be quite intelligent. But it seems extremely hypocritical to condemn people who eat whale, while eating pork or even beef and poultry is okay. If the argument is conservation, Minke Whales are not endangered. Even whales which are threatened are usually controlled by various states. I also know that some although I am not sure of the viability or practicality of it research has been put into farming whales for human consumption. I am sure many would be opposed to that, but continue eating pork and beef to me that seems hypocritical. I am not strictly a vegan, but I do try to limit my meat consumption. But it seems to me that beyond conservation, either all of it is okay, or none of it is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I see no issue with whaling if eating other animals is also okay\n","id":"6844d9a0-be23-4c25-91de-c8ddff7273ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, so before you guys chew me out, I, myself am an atheist. First off I really want to stress that I am not saying that all atheists are like this. I believe that atheists, and a lot of them being on the internet, have collectively ruined the reputation of other atheists. I say this because, a lot of atheists on social media sites, such as reddit have started to associate anti theism with atheism. They make huge generalization about atheists and generally act outwardly aggressive towards anyone that disagrees with them. They will attack Christians calling their beliefs things like fairy tales and children's stories. I want to focus my thoughts on r atheism. They are a group that time and time again puts down anyone that believes in a religion, or even sometimes anyone that disagrees with them. This ruins the reputation of many other atheists and gives a lot of the general public the idea that all atheists hold these beliefs because the people that tell them stuff like this, say that we all hold the same beliefs. Sorry if I am repeating a lot of the same thoughts I tend to do that sometimes. TL DR Few atheists make huge generalizations about other atheists, making all atheists look bad<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some atheists have ruined the reputation of other atheists\n","id":"b2f3f1e1-c2b3-49a5-b85b-e295d85e9943"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The UK is currently agreeing to take in 200,000 refugees over the next five years. This is pathetic. Putting aside the economic contradiction that refugees has shown to contribute to the economy once they start working, and putting aside the fact that the UK had taken in vast amounts of refugees in the past, I simply think 200,000 is not enough. There are suffering of real people out there and they need assistance and the UK should do more to help them. They are humans, like us, and to be close minded and have a us and them perspective is simply wrong. 200,000 is not enough, if the UK do more other countries will be encouraged to follow suite. But in the end, it is simply helping real suffering of people and I believe the UK has a moral obligation to do more.  thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UK has a moral obligation to take more refugee.\n","id":"41842a02-e345-4667-9720-b71dcf76c0b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The majority of people don't really want truth, they want reassurance that what they believe is the truth. It seems to be human nature to prefer to feel right, rather than be as accurate as possible. x200B This implies an agnostic viewpoint is best We don't really know, or have, anything And implies the scientific method is best Open minded critical thinking, while always keeping some skepticism doubt. x200B The most right we can be, is by using our most accurate solutions answers we're aware of x200B Change My View Would you rather be as accurate as you can or be right?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's better to be as accurate as you can than be right\n","id":"74e88aa8-325e-443c-8e0e-ae1b3bf3ffdb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in a metropolitan area, and I frequently see people being pulled over by the police for speeding following traffic , and I wonder to myself if doing this actually lowers the deadly accident rates. I looked on Google, and I couldn't find any statistics on it. I know life isn't fair, but it doesn't seem just to ticket one out of one hundred cars all going the same speed limit because it doesn't follow the federal state standard. From what I see, it's a waste of time and resources for the police to drive around the highways pulling people over for following traffic. I personally would like them to concentrate on the heavier crimes. Does the more tickets handed out lower the amount of deadly car accidents a great deal? Does doing anything else create a lower amount of deadly car accidents, like some form of education?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think police handing out speeding\/reckless driving tickets don't lower the accident rate, relatively.\n","id":"47b98a93-ba50-49e8-b45e-cecb946499ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>The American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Bioethics, Religious has issued a very clear statement in support of such limits on parental authority which provides evidence of how such beliefs can in fact interfere with the treatment of the child and is a cause for concern for medical professionals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The beliefs and values of the parents can interfere with their ability to make the best medical decision for their child.\n","id":"49036ee9-6f5c-43e2-85dc-46daba2c7ad3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Assassination of a Dictator<|ARGUMENT|>In War-Time, including in extended conflicts with terrorists entities, the use of assassination can be legitimate, particularly if the target is considered a \"combatant\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ford's 1976 executive order against assassinations doesn't apply in war-time.\n","id":"7bed3dcb-edb8-4870-a6b9-6d3c8b470555"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need religion for morality?<|ARGUMENT|>Psychological investigations into the origin of morality find that all humans have approximately six innate moral senses which originate in the subconscious. While these moral senses are tuned by culture, they are universally present regardless of exposure to religion. Therefore, morality exists in the human mind without religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are preconditioned to be moral, irrespective of the influence of religion.\n","id":"1a844d97-e51b-472a-83de-f71990a937ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We are beginning to realize that everyone has a unique brain chemistry. It's becoming known that some drugs, such as amphetamines and cannabis, have different effects for different people. Amphetamines have medicinal use and help calm those with ADHD. Cannabis is a relatively innocuous drug that calms many people down. However, those with different brain chemistry such that they have mental illness such as depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, or predisposition to mental illness may find that cannabis affects them differently in a negative way from the rest of the population. Just like the body contains cannabinoid receptors, it also contains opioid receptors. Some of the functions of these opioid receptors include antidepressant effects, depression, anxiety, dissociative effects, neuroprotection, sedation, stress, euphoria, physical dependence, and more. The opioid system is thought to be important in mediating complex social behaviors involved in the formation of stable, emotionally committed relationships. Some people have dysfunctional brain chemistry so that the endogenous opioids such as dynorphins, enkephalins, endorphins, endomorphins and nociceptin are lacking. edited here to make my viewpoint clearer My Viewpoint is that opiates can potentially be used as another form of therapy treatment for individuals in which this is the case. In summation, those unlucky few in the general population whose brain chemistry are lacking in endogenous opioid opioid receptor communication would benefit from using opiates in a controlled manner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Opiates can benefit a small subset of the population\n","id":"9b428e5b-10df-4bba-bb43-994ea7b6175f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll start off by saying I've studied five languages in my lifetime and I'm fluent in none of them but my accent can pass as native in each one. Even if you're taught by a non native speaker with a thick accent, it's not very difficult to identify it and adjust your own to the one you hear in media. Even of you're learning a language that includes a sound new to you, you're going through the trouble of learning that sound so take the time and learn it right. I'm not saying this will be the case with everyone, but getting the accent right was the easiest part of learning any of my languages especially with the internet around. I also have no problem pronouncing people's names from wherever in the world it's not really difficult.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think speaking a language with a thick foreign accent is just lazy.\n","id":"f67385c4-e975-471d-9c48-45333469686b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should copyright die with the creator?<|ARGUMENT|>Disney has also actively interfered with the legislation of copyright to continue extending it, in an attempt to prevent iconic figures such as Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies like Disney use copyright laws to prevent creative progress.\n","id":"995ec219-06fd-456c-9806-8ece09414168"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All things considered, becoming involved in Scientology seems detrimental to one's self, or, at least, likely so. I'm pretty sure that it's either a cult or a scam. Religions have growing pains but the corruption, intimidation, harassment, prison labor, mysterious deaths, etc. are all inconsistent with Western standards of decency and signs that the church is a predatory organization. I can't afford it. I'm a skeptic and Scientology doesn't offer much, if any, evidence that their teachings are correct.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should not join Scientology\n","id":"83e99c8f-b0fa-45b0-a240-8560f398d365"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Scottish Independence: Should Scotland be an Independent Country?<|ARGUMENT|>Scotland's natural resources have been squandered for decades. Before devolution, Scotland had some of the poorest communities in Europe. With independence Scotland's resources can be used for Scotland's people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scotland has a rich and diverse economy and is well capable of supporting itself.\n","id":"6fd03f03-fc12-4be1-b028-e8e09e628b38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that moral relativism is self defeating because it lacks a standard that requires someone to respect other moralities. That means that anyone who has a robust moral position is still able to act upon it as though moral realism is true, including enforcing it upon others. This effectively creates a catch 22 where either there is no universal morality so you are free to enforce whatever morality you want on people, or that there is one and you can enforce that morality on people. What is often called moral relativism is just lack of confidence in one's moral positions rather than an actual philosophical position, and the philosophical position makes no difference in the way one should behave.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moral relativism is ultimately self-defeating\n","id":"20e9e9d2-c0b8-4f92-921e-d2ad3400a8ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>There is evidence that pornography can be addictive The features that make it so - among them, easy access to sexual gratification - are similarly present in the case of wide-spread sex work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Married men are statistically more likely than their wives to purchase sex and engage in extramarital affairs, therefore easier availability of sex work will increase the wives' suffering.\n","id":"6e110247-3c02-4390-a341-6dd27478cd19"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>The highest tax estimates of marijuana legalisation reach$28 billion from federal revenues, business taxes and income taxes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The drug industry, like alcohol and tobacco, can be heavily taxed, generating high revenues.\n","id":"370ba2f2-cca7-432a-a9e7-8a66d154b050"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments pursue predictive policing technology?<|ARGUMENT|>A controlled experiment testing predictive policing in Foothill, Los Angeles, found that while property crime was up 0.4 percent throughout Los Angeles, Foothill\u2019s declined by 12 percent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Predictive policing can be used to apprehend people before they commit their intended crime.\n","id":"59fd96ac-345f-4430-84fb-118d14582b84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Atheism teaches people to come up with their own morals, which allows people to come up with better morals than most religions teach. People would learn to think for themselves as well as understand the reasoning behind behaviours, rather than just \"Because you will be punished.\" It would also be easier for these morals to be popular if people didn't already believe in religious morals, such as the cruel ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are other, superior, sources of philosophical frameworks and moral codes.\n","id":"03c577a4-bbb1-4bcc-b84e-6515389760c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's pretty well known that the internet does not agree. Political correctness is a pretty big bogeyman on reddit and the wider web, notably because it apparently contradicts ideals of free speech. It's true that certain elements on places like Tumblr take the principles so far that they become twisted and racist themselves, but I think that the basic principles that you should try not to offend people are perfectly good ones. Maybe bear in mind that your joke about rape could be upsetting to someone, or that 'OP is a fag' does actually insinuate that gay people are somehow lesser. That is not to say that you shouldn't be allowed to say those things, and any legislation that does try and make it actually illegal should be vigorously opposed. The way I see it is that it is no different from not swearing graphically in front of a mother and kids, or simply directly not insulting someone. Basically, don't be a dick. And if you want to be a dick, that's your prerogative. But it's certainly not a violation of your freedom if someone criticizes you for it, because free speech laws go both ways. But the way I see it is not the way most people see it, so I'm interested to see if anyone can convince me otherwise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that there is nothing inherently wrong with 'political correctness', and that it does not contradict freedom of speech.\n","id":"3897ee71-929a-4cbc-811a-fefa02d84d30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Divorce Should Be Easier To Obtain<|ARGUMENT|>The idea of lifelong marriage arose in ancient times, when life expectancies were much shorter than today, and there was no other way apart from marriage to ensure a secure upbringing for the offspring of a union. Today, the idea that a permanent marriage is the only possible type of relationship is outdated, particularly as scientists now doubt whether human\u2019s are actually monogamous by nature. Regardless of this, if a marriage is left without love, or if one partner is unhappy, then it should end. There is no point holding on in such a situation for the sake of a principle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea of lifelong marriage arose in ancient times, when life expectancies were much shorter than ...\n","id":"83394c69-c887-49e9-a02a-4300343d171c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To be honest it's not exactly my view but one of the conflicting views I currently have been thinking about. When people talk about violence they always attach a negative feeling to it a violent person, a violent act. People sometimes even talks about getting rid of violence from the world. But what I think is in a world where people have vastly different preference with where we are going, a lot of people will always be attracted to use violent means to get what they want. There are a lot ways to keep that at bay including persuasion or outreach but when everything else failed it's only greater violence to stop minor ones. Secondly, people seems to be ignorant of what should be considered violent. The military and the police force are pure violence machines and yet people think them of maintainer of peace and order, and don't even think of them when talking about violence. It's just that when it is institutionalized people stop to recognize it. Yes they are the living example of my 'greater violence stopping minor violence' but I just want people to think about them more when talking about violence. After all WAR is the greatest violence and we should never ignore it. And the third point, which I think is weakest and in most need of your feedback, is answer to the argument yeah yeah we know violence will always be there and thus we need a military and a police, but there's surely no reason for a private citizen to use violence? To that my answer is I know most of you guys live in western world where there's law and human rights and stuff like that. But for at least half of the humans living on this planet including me those thing are not to be counted on. I've always been thinking about what would I do if I live in a place like Syria? Obviously some of my assumptions should change, but what about morality? It seems absurd to held to a no violence attitude in those circumstances? Then if I come back form there to somewhere semi normal but still has no human rights, like Saudi Arabia, Russia or China, it still seems reasonable to use violence to defend my rights even though the regime and possibly the majority of the people don't care much about it? More broadly if I don't trust the law and the system, shouldn't violence be somewhat justified? I just can't rule that out. And if I'm justified there, then why not US?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"violence is not as bad as current society thinks\n","id":"0bbd824b-1189-4fc6-ba00-18e92b7355d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those who don't know, Joe Manchin is up for re election next year. He's a West Virginia Democrat who has taken a large amount of money from corporations that pollute the rivers and lakes of West Virginia, helping to contribute to the fact that it's one of the poorest and sickest states in the country. He's facing a primary challenger, Paula Jean Swearingen, who is running on a platform similar to that of Bernie Sanders. I believe that she is a better choice for the nomination than Manchin, and I will state why I think this. Manchin is really only a Democrat in name only. More often than not, he'll vote with the GOP, and, while he doesn't do it quite as often as his colleague Shelley Moore Capito, it's very irritating for Democrats. Even if they were to take back the Senate in 2018 and block Trump's next Supreme Court pick, would Manchin, if he is still in the Senate, vote against Richard Spencer or whoever it is? He doesn't listen to his constituents, who clearly want single payer health care. His donors are companies that destroy the environment, which West Virginians are sick of. Really, it's quite shocking that he's as popular as he is. Now, the case for Swearingen. It's worth noting that Bernie Sanders won all 55 counties in West Virginia in the 2016 presidential primaries, and he won the whole state by 15 percentage points. It's generally assumed that any non incumbent Democrat would get mauled in the ruby red state, since Trump won it by 41.7 percentage points. However, who's to say that someone who runs on a platform of single payer health care and helping the environment in one of the most polluted states in the nation, mind you , can't win? The reason Trump won so bigly in WV was because he made it clear that he had a plan . Hillary didn't. Could Bernie have won the state? It's very much possible, since Trump flat out denies climate change. Yes, Joe Manchin is a Democrat. However, he's not that useful for the party. He's pro gun, anti women, anti LGBT, anti single payer health care, and would not likely block Trump's next Supreme Court nominee. Paula Swearingen would . The progressive platform is popular , both with Republicans and Democrats. Single payer healthcare has overwhelming support among voters, as does action to slow climate change. I believe that Swearingen would have a chance to beat Evan Jenkins or Patrick Morrissey in the general election for the Senate seat, and she'd be far better than Manchin. So, go for it. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joe Manchin III should be primaried in the West Virginia Senate race in 2018.\n","id":"c34ba359-7592-49b8-a173-aad67f45faa1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>Accepting traditional notions of pizza is important. You cannot just put anything on a pizza and call it pizza. Pineapple pizza began an unstoppable force of evil in that it allowed all types of random ingredients to be thrown onto pizza, and proclaimed a new \"pizza\" when in reality, the \"creation\" is just an unfolded burrito.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pineapple on pizza is an insult to the Italian origins of pizza.\n","id":"78bece1a-05ce-4297-942c-0360a43f7ba7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All countries should have the right to pursue a nuclear defence<|ARGUMENT|>It is a common knowledge that in the Cold War period the world was divided into two just because the major arsenal of nuclear weapons was concentrated in two countries \u2013 the USA and the USSR. Now more states have nuclear weapons but still countries which do not possess such weapons are obliged to cling to a superpower. Such is the case with Japan and South Korea. Both states are extremely developed economically with very high standarts of living but now when they are threatened by North Korea they are seeking the help and protection of the USA, they have negotiated the extension of the US nuclear umbrella. \u2018In this press conference Obama reaffirms the extension of the US nuclear umbrella over South Korea \u2018US agrees to strengthen nuclear defence over Japan In this way it turns out that the majority of the countries worldwide no matter how well-developed they are always needs the help of a \u2018big brother\u2019. \"Everyone has their own right to protection. You can't just feel safe because \"big brother\" promises that he will take care of you.\" says Samarjit\u2018The second quotation is that of Samarjit \u2019. And because of this no country is absolutely politically independent until it acquires nuclear defences or nuclear weapons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Thus the super power model will be broken and small countries will be finally given the chance to have political independence without the need of protection from a \u2018big brother\u2019.\n","id":"6abcf55d-4403-44bc-afb3-0821b9e9cea7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Promote Safe Sex through Education at Schools<|ARGUMENT|>The spread of AIDS in the 80s and 90s showed that education and information is more important than ever as exemplified by the slogan in the British 1980\u2019s advertising campaign to prevent AIDS \u2018AIDS: Don\u2019t Die of Ignorance\u2019. The campaigns were credited with credited with changing behaviour through warnings on adverts and informing through an information leaflet.1 This shows that education can work even when starting from scratch. Giving sex education in schools is crucial to the spread of information to each successive generation, and may be supplemented by frank discussion at home. 1 Kelly, Jon, \u2018HIV\/Aids: Why were the campaigns successful in the West?\u2019, BBC News Magazine, 28 November 2011,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ignorance about sex is the primary cause of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases STDs\n","id":"bdc125af-b27c-4d75-b8db-ed664051260a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Rewards cannot be unconditional as a UBI is. To call it so is to distort the meaning of reward<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since UBI is by definition unconditional, it cannot reward anything other than mere existence.\n","id":"1162e85a-2be1-47cc-a171-e188a9dd7875"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>According to international group Human Rights Watch, the appeal of vigilante groups in Liberia appears to stem from a lack of confidence in the police.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is not always true - in many countries people do not have much faith in the army and police force.\n","id":"56730d71-47dd-4a91-bd4c-299ae55da21b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is The Best Diet For Human Health And Well Being?<|ARGUMENT|>If there are times of crisis, where food sources are not available to someone, climate change is impacting their health, or when there's natural disasters that affect their food source, using suspended animation to bring themselves to better times instead of running out of food is beneficial.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Suspended animation provides a means to allow people to have a low\/no nutrient diet to conserve their metabolism periodically, which can improve their lifespan and the environment.\n","id":"2ca66de2-eec7-4d61-843c-e0b461412f4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, this is a post from a touch screen phone. Please pardon in advance any typos I may oversee on this tiny screen. Frequently autocorrect will change words without giving me notice as I hit submit. I also don't have access to word count software. Back to my post One of the commandments in the bible is Thou shalt not take thy Lord's name in vein. I believe saying or exclaiming OMG, Jesus Jesus Christ Good God , anything along those lines is immoral and classified as a sin. If anything, the bible says not to exclaim harsh words in anger something along those lines, so for that matter, aw heck or, darnit When you, say, stub your toe, is just as wrong as howling Fuuuuuck . Nowhere in the Bible do they condemn use of the F word, shit, piss, etc. explicitly as being against God. Those are just modern, arbitrary words some uptight judgemental prude organization has deemed immoral. I don't believe I'm dissapointing my God when I use the F word, or say shit, whatever. I never use His name in that sense. I never say things like oh my God, really?? I habe to refrain feom wincing when other pwople say, G Dammit. . My parents felt this way too. I would have gotten in trouble for using those terms, but the only time they would fuss at me for saying shit, piss, etc was if I was in an innapropriate place to speak that way. I believe the people who judge others for using cuss words were influenced by misguided church leaders who've confused biblical morals with societal norms or mores. Change my view. NOTE thank you for keeping the civil and offering your viewpoints, although I remain unconvinced. Mainly what I saw were technical arguments trying to exploit some loopholes. This was never a semantic issue with me. Well its still wrong for ME to use. I live in the US where Christians as a whole believe His name IS God. And other groups must too, or why would they argue the use if things like In God We Trust, or, One nation, under God If they didn't refer to it as the Christian God? Christians worship Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit. By those names. Besides, none of these arguments, while thoughtful enough to keep me open minded throughout this discourse, address the key point in my OP about defamatory usage of Jesus' name. I'm not trying to get into a discussion about if Jesus' name is really accepted as Jesus Christ by all groups. To me, and most Christians, I believe, Jesus Christ IS his name. I am still solidified in my belief I will never think its worse, as most of society does, to say, for example, but not limited to, Fuck Than it is to say Jesus Christ as an explicative. Or even a mild, I swear to God in casual conversation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am a Christian who believes saying, \"Oh my God\" is a sin, but do not see anything wrong with using the F word or other \"cuss\" words.\n","id":"b597918d-324d-4b9a-b096-bbc7e34cd97f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>This is illustrated, for example, in this guidance for UK Boroughs developing policies and procedures to \"address\" sex work from the Metropolitan Police, which talks exclusively about measures to stop sex work, rather than to address other needs of those in the industry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These pressures and constraints can lead to existing organisations focusing heavily on diverting sex workers out of the sex industry, which can provide an additional reason for those in the industry not to seek support.\n","id":"4dfb0918-1026-44a0-8421-01e2b0f08bc7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyday in our society, I see it becoming more and more acceptable for men to become more feminine. I feel like it would be so much easier to be a man. The need for men to be strictly masculine is falling, making men the superior gender with so much less stress everyday. Men don't have to deal with periods, giving birth, worrying about pregnancies and birth control. As long as they don't get a STI STD, they can run away from sex with literally no boundaries. No judgement from their friends, family, parents, or peers when they win a victory in bed. Men can chase after women all they want with no limits, no consequences. Men don't have to worry about sex before marriage, almost all women in today's society are required to give out before then, anyway, or they will leave and find it with anothet woman. Men always have the upper hand in relationships, because they feel less emotional and have less to worry about. Men are much less victims of crime or, especially, rape. Men have bro code. They have each other's backs, they wingman for each other. They can be satisified with being light and not having to worry about the deep parts to life. Heck, male friends probably have half the drama that goes on between females, if not none at all. Men don't talk behind each other's backs. They are straightforward and sometimes will even physically fight with each other face to face. They don't need to worry about what other girls or friends are saying behind their backs, because it's always simple and done the minute it happens. Men are paid more in the workforce. They don't have the disadvantage of being seen as sexual objects, even in a professional environment, because of how the opposite gender treats them. Men don't have to be considered airheads, a ditz, or unintelligent simply because of their gender. Men don't have to be born with good looks or high metablisms to be seen as worthy in society. They get to earn their place, and not be shunned by non attractive genes or constantly be under the pressure of not eating. They don't have to go through hours upon hours everyday applying make up and shaving and nail clipping and pruning. Women who do not meet men's or society's standards for being attractive are just as easily friendzoned or pushed aside, if not more so than a man. Men think women have it easy because we can aquire sex easier. But what is easy sex when you're judged for it every waking moment of your life? When your religion and family would shun you forever? When the very person you want to be intimate with would probably leave once you give them what they want? Is meaningless sex really the greatest advantage one can ask for? Change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men have every upperhand in life as compared to women except getting easier sex.\n","id":"2ca15d81-f015-47e5-a5ce-356b26464f61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The history of the world is one violent conquest after another. The entire world. Yes. Even the NAs conquering each other. Over land. They as separate groups had all the same conflicts as people in the west. I'll fight any attempts at romanticizing history here. Letting them maintain some illusion of independence was a mistake that has lead to the situation they are in now. They could have instead assimilated into society yes they would have started at the bottom rung of the ladder, maybe even have been enslaved, but if we look at the progress the descendants of slaves have made they're better off than the NAs on reservations. I would argue that the large amounts of money the NAs get each year proves that reservations are never going to work. The US has a section of the population with the lowest life expectancy in the entire Western Hemisphere. The Pine Ridge Reservation has the lowest life expectancy on our entire half of the world at 47 for men and 52 for women. Drop out rates are 70 in school. My family tries to send propane and winter clothes up there because a shocking number of the families don't have running water, sewage, or electricity. They heat with wood which is on the scarce side. Many other reservations aren't any better off. They've made no progress as communities and, from my time working with the reservations, I feel they probably won't. There is no amount of social help they can get at this point that will help them. Even now their best bet is to assimilate into cities and start at the bottom because there is no way to fix the reservations. Edit Someone is going through and downvoting my every comment. I would rather have a discussion, please. Edit I want to clarify, My argument isn't necessarily what we should or shouldn't do now but that not conquering and assimilating them was a mistake. I am going to reply to other kinds of arguments just because they give me interesting things to think about but that isn't the point of this  This was mostly brought to mind because the Thanksgiving Wars have started on my Facebook mostly by people who have no idea what is happening in the world today much less hundreds of years ago.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Native Americans should have been treated as a conquered people and forced to assimilate.\n","id":"fd366dd4-9ea0-448b-a1e6-100c1f05b170"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There has been vast amounts of recent debate about non binary gender, fluid gender, and stuff even more bizarre to the average punter transrace , or otherkin . Every day, it seems that the definition of gender is being reshaped or moulded, and so a question arises can't we just do away with it all together, and have instead your physical body, and whatever physical bodies you are attracted to? Now, this leaves the awkward question of what about people who identify as a gender different to their sex? . This is a question tricky to answer without seeming transphobic which, genuinely, I am not , but I would answer it with another question what about people who identify as a race different to their body, or a different species? there is no compelling reason that I have found thus far, at least to treat gender any differently, except that it makes me uncomfortable to do so probably by convention social paradigm. I think, prima facie, that this solves a few issues, but there are others I have an issue with. Issues it solves are as follows. Q How do I explain my sexuality to someone? A tell them what kind of body you're attracted to male, female, animal, whatever Q which toilet do I use? A this gets a bit tricky, but I'd advocate for sex neutral toilets anyway, in a perfect society or in some countries . Q what if I want to black up like Robert Downey Junior in tropic thunder, or wear grey fluffy ears and howl like a wolf? A go for it, I don't care. Questions this doesn't answer Q I identify as a man in a woman's body. Can I get NHS or local equivalent , free at the point of use healthcare for an operation so my bits match my mind? I don't really know how to answer that one. In any case, if you have any issue with this, good replies, or even think it's all bollocks or if I've explained awfully and it makes no sense at all , please tell me<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are no genders.\n","id":"05fe0249-5ac7-47b2-8622-2bbc2801b310"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To start I live in California, and I tend to think I am ideologically liberal and fiscally conservative. I love gun's and think you should be able to own a semi or fully automatic rifle of what every caliber you like, there should not be any restriction on magazine size, suppressors or optics and you should not need a bullet button or anything like that. But to be able to have that freedom to own those types of firearms you must complete Xhrs maybe 100 or something of firearms training. You need to register all firearms no matter how you purchase them. And background checks should include mental health evaluations that also need to be done again every 2 or 3 years. I'm not saying this is the perfect solution, but it seems the vast majority of liberals tend to be of the mindset that guns are bad and no one has a need for any firearm except for a hunting style rifle shotgun or maybe a hand gun but no AR style firearms. Conservatives tend to think that the should have any type of firearm they want and that there should be hardly any regulations at all about how they purchase firearms, and should not have to register their firearms at all. A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed I took out all the comma's Conservatives tend to only read the last part from 'Right to bear Arms' onward. The whole notion of well regulated is completely ignored. I cant seem to grasp why the vast majority of people on the left and the right cant see that neither of the all or nothing types views will never work and honestly don't make that much sense practically either. I also don't think the gun car comparison isn't that far off. Treat firearms like a more regulated drivers license The DMV is a joke and it should be much more like Germany but that a different topic all together as long as you get all the requirements license, insurance etc you can buy any car you want. No one needs a 800hp car and they are usually far worse for the environment but you can buy them no problem. P.S. sorry for all grammar and spelling errors, and I look forward to you all helping me understand your views and possibly changing my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being Pro-Gun and Pro-Gun Control is actually the smartest and most realistic view.\n","id":"cea75402-8510-444a-8cd0-6f1d7527bd59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Listed above is the CDC's fast fact sheet for smoking in the USA. According to the CDC more than 16 million Americans are living with a disease directly caused by smoking. Cigarette smoking is responsible for over 400k deaths annually. Because of freedom of choice and issues with bodily autonomy we allow Americans to smoke, despite the fact that we know they will be a burden on the healthcare system time and billions of dollars . It is my position that if you smoke, and support your own right to smoke, then you should not support universal compulsory vaccinations to include those who are home schooled and without religious exemptions . Arguments making distinctions between compelling you to act and restricting you from acting will not . For the purposes of this  assume that at most there is a very minimal risk or none at all that vaccines cause permanent negative side effects. As far as my beliefs go I think personal freedom and autonomy are at the root of both issues although there's a parental interest in the vaccination context , and I prefer to educate and incentivize the positive behavior rather than punish, restrict, or compel by law. This  came to mind when having a debate with an avid drinker more than a social drinker and smoker who believes in universal compulsory vaccination. Thanks in advance<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is hypocritical to support compulsory vaccinations and also be a smoker\n","id":"38ca8d1e-f2dd-4fbf-a6cf-7aa02e6f6a8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is sex with no emotional attachment good for you?<|ARGUMENT|>People in sexual relationships might get used to the benefits of having regular sex, and may suffer when this is withdrawn.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex without emotional attachment could make one dependent on something that could end at any time.\n","id":"e03e2d5e-717a-4ee5-bc64-621dca659f9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've dropped out of school and failed to build a single successful business in 4 years. My latest one failed miserably and I'm really drained but I want to press on. I still have more ideas, but I'm short on cash, and I'm getting old. I'm afraid to get a job. I believe I'm not meant to work for someone. If I go get a job I'm afraid I won't have time to start a business on the side. Plus, I'm known as the guy who's trying to do something different among my friends and family, and if I get back on a regular job I feel that'll be a blow to my dignity that I won't handle well. I keep thinking go big or go home so a job isn't an option. But watching friends and colleagues graduate, get jobs, get married, and some even having babies and buying houses while I'm just sitting here barely making rent, single, and surrounded by a small group of people pretty much like me, I can't help but think there's an injustice. Yes, I feel it's unfair and I feel it's wrong to feel that way, but I don't know why. I sound like a egotistical jerk, but this is what I actually think. I try to be a nice guy, but recently I've been really down. Please , and help me turn around.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Building my own business is the way to get rich and free,\n","id":"5753a090-fa16-4a02-85d5-d29db5bbcdea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How soon should secondary school students be grouped in specific learning programmes?<|ARGUMENT|>Teachers would have to put in more effort in teaching lower ability students as opposed to the higher ability ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers are not strongly motivated to effectively teach lower ability groups.\n","id":"a9a3c2ff-f5c2-4859-8612-2e2589032633"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In classical Greek philosophy humans are described as social or political animals, with an innate propensity to develop more complex communities the size of a city or town, with a division of labor and law-making. Humans need these communities to develop their full potential<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human life has a higher value because humans need and depend on each other, socially and economically.\n","id":"5a9cd6d0-c895-4335-93ac-4be26236f116"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Dear CMW, Please let me elaborate my point. I myself think the it is desirable that the human race will continue to live but every time I try to explain to myself or someone else why this is desirable the only arguments I can think of are egoistic arguments about me wanting my children and their children to live happily. A different argument that has come up to me that if we would all die in a massive catastrophe, people would get physically hurt and I have come to the conclusion that the inflicted pain would be a bad thing. But assuming that every single human being voluntarily decided to stop having kids right now and all of those people would die peacefully of old age in their bed after a fulfilling life then the human race would be gone, nobody suffered. Now please explain to me and change my view why this is still a bad thing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no logical argument that adequately explains why it would be a bad thing if the human race would go extinct.\n","id":"aee5b8b3-7960-4230-91a1-741ff74ca958"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll use what is written about me in the Gospels as my source text. Basically, for those of you who are not familiar, an angry mob brought Jesus to me saying they wanted him dead. I questioned Jesus and he seemed like a pretty chill dude who didn't do anything wrong, so I told the mob he was innocent. They didn't like that. I then sent him to Herrod, my superior, and he didn't find him guilty, and I told them that but they still didn't like it. So there's this thing we did around that time where we release one dude from prison if the people want it. We had two dudes, Barabus who was found guilty of some other stuff and Jesus, I offered them both and they chose Barabus to be set free. So now I'm in a tight spot, I have this angry mob who wants Jesus dead, so what the hell do I do? So I tell some of my guards to have him scourged, and they do that and it's pretty ugly but Jesus is alive so I bring him back in front of the crowd and they're still yelling to crucify the dude. So here's where I'm at, if I release him we have a riot and a lot of Jesus's supporters could get killed, and either way Jesus will probably be lynched if I let him go this is way before witness protection . So I end up bringing up a bowl of water and washing my hands clean as a way of saying I don't support your actions but I have no choice . I tell my guards to do as the people say and crucify him, I don't support the decision, I've been arguing against it this whole time but I decide to just let one man die so that others might live. So after all this Christians have branded me a villain. At the end of the Passion of the Christ they show me going insane with guilt, I really don't think my actions were all that bad. Now I get that playing a role in the death of one of the most famous historical figures in history looks bad, but you've got to put yourself in my shoes. What else could I have done? I did everything I could short of causing a riot. I don't think I deserve to be seen as a villain, the mob were the real villains.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am Pontius Pilate, and I don't believe I should be seen as a villain, rather I should be seen as someone who tried my best given an impossible situation.\n","id":"43b1a3c6-4e60-404a-84ef-488fbadf7944"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently read an opinion post on the telegraph I believe apologies if I'm incorrect that talked about how the metoo movement have made men afraid to make moves along with the Kavanaugh case made me think more critically about the whole movement. Up until this point I've been fairly supportive of it with few criticisms of it. I should also probably mention that I personally think the base idea concept of the metoo movement is simply great. Bringing attention to an issue that has for a long time been either considered taboo or been avoided. To this extent I agree with the message behind the movement. I think the men who have been exposed with good, reliable evidence deserves what they get in the aftermath. Here are my two main problems with the movement Firstly like the opinion post suggested I believe that men have become a lot, lot more careful about the advances they've made. Sure, it could be argued that this is good and I'd agree if that only applied to men who otherwise had intended harm or who wouldn't have understood the idea of taking it too far or men who simply disregard consent. My issue is the men who mean well, who are respectful of women and their rights, bodies, and limits. Not only do I feel personally that global movements such mainly as metoo have made not only myself, but other friends a lot more scared to make moves not necessarily sexual in nature most of the time a lot more afraid to do so, but I know that a lot of men and women too who believe this. Between friends and myself I know women who have outright told us they don't understand why we haven't made moves . I should probably also mention that before the push for movements like this and in general otherwise my friends and I as well as others I've spoken to about this are really quite confident so I wouldn't argue that we lack that. My second problem with the movement is that it can harm men who are innocent. I wouldn't ever argue in favour of a man who has committed sexual assault or god forbid rape, but I fear that men who are called out falsely on these claims stand to lose their otherwise good reputation, even if they are found not to be guilty. This second problem isn't one where I can necessarily back it up with evidence or events of this happening, yet it is my belief that this is definitely a possibility with cases of this probably already existing. In fact I remember in the past year reading about false accusations of men linked to the metoo movement, although to be honest I couldn't at this very time although if I can when I have a bit more time I'll try give any examples of this, sorry. Please change my view, like I said overall I believe in the idea of making subject matters like this more open and less taboo, but I think this movement in particular can and have made men afraid and can harm them. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The #metoo movement makes men afraid and can harm innocent men\n","id":"193d3a6c-25a3-4e42-9db3-61f5ebd5e2ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Latin root phobia refers to a fear or panic in response to stimuli. However, terms such as Transphobia are not used in context of people being genuinely afraid of transgenders, but rather used as an insult simply to call people who do not agree with the prospect of changing your gender. This post isn't about whether or not you can do so or whether or not homosexuality is okay, it is about the specific word usage of homophobia and transphobia. Most people you will encounter and have discussions with are not afraid of transgenders or homosexuals. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find someone genuinely afraid of them. This is not to say that there are no people who may discriminate against those people, but that the number of people who genuinely fear transgenders and homosexuals is way too low, especially in proportion to everyone else, to justify the widespread usage of words like trans homophobia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Terms such as \"Homophobia\" and \"Transphobia\" should be renamed or done away with.\n","id":"1d6e7790-ffca-4171-aa11-e0217403e9fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a little out there, and I'm not married to it or anything. This theory makes a lot of assumptions, and I'm willing to discuss any of them. Furthermore, because it relies on so many assumptions, it seems like it'd be difficult to argue me out of it. I think it may be best to show me why this isn't reasonable, rather than show me why it probably isn't true. I'm not sure. Regardless, I will endeavor to engage in this conversation as honestly as I can. I realize this sounds a little crazy, but I think each point follows from its assumptions at least. The Fermi Paradox is the idea that it seems likely that the universe is teeming with life, yet we haven't seen any other than ourselves. So that means either one of the assumptions of the Fermi Paradox are faulty, or that there is some reason that explains how the universe is or was teeming with life but we haven't seen any. The argument as laid out below is deliberately short and simple, to keep this from turning into a proper wall of text. edit I am making other big assumptions in here, not all of which are warranted. I'd love to discuss the assumptions anyone think are unwarranted, as I'm sure there are probably several I didn't notice Part One The Prime Directive from Star Trek This strikes me as a pretty reasonable stance to take, regardless of culture be it human or alien . Why interfere with the natural development of a species before a certain point? I think this is the stance humans would eventually take when exploring the galaxy maybe after having met a few primitive civilizations already. I think advanced aliens would be inclined to remain undetectable to us as well, and would not contact us unless we contact them first, or until we reach a certain technology level. Part Two Super Intelligent AI I think this is the most powerful and most dangerous realistically conceivable thing in the universe Because it would be exponentially more intelligent than us, it would also be unimaginably I mean that word literally more intelligent than us. Predicting the threat of such a thing is not possible. What is there to prevent such an entity from standing in relation to us the way we stand in relation to ants. Or maybe even far worse than that. There's no reason to think human beings are anywhere near the end of the spectrum of possible intellect. Part Three Galactic Threat Such an entity would only be able to be defeated by other super intelligent entities, like an AI that was developed first. If it is truly a general intelligence that could rewrite its own code and develop better versions of itself, its goals would not be predictable, but consume control every possible resource is certainly within the realm of possibility. Part Four Fermi Paradox Solution Advanced aliens may see no credible threat from us, and can thwart anything we might be able to do that could possibly be threatening, with one exception a super intelligent artificial general intelligence. If we make the following assumptions which are big assumptions, I admit then I think this is the best solution to the paradox. An advanced alien civilization would stall our efforts to develop a strong AGI first through diplomacy, then through violence if necessary. The following are being presupposed as true by this argument. In other words, treat my argument as if the following are definitely true . 1 The assumptions of the Fermi Paradox are correct alien civilizations exist and are numerous 2 The Great Filter is not the solution to the Fermi Paradox. 3 Strong AGI is possible. 4 Strong AGI can design better versions of itself If you assume these points to be true,  on why my above argument is not possible or not reasonable. Conclusion Advanced alien civilizations are deliberately hiding themselves from us and will not intervene until we do or are on the verge of creating something that can threaten them AGI.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is my solution to the Fermi Paradox.\n","id":"8c1b4f82-61b5-4ed1-8b3a-a0a16e378675"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>J. Harvie Wilkinson, a prominent conservative federal judge, wrote a law journal article laying out his argument that Heller was judicial activism. \"After decades of criticizing activist judges for this or that defalcation,\" he wrote, \"conservatives have now committed many of the same sins.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DC v. Heller was an instance of judicial activism and does not faithfully represent the original meaning of the 2nd Amendment as the founders intended it.\n","id":"dc3423a0-bb14-4e03-ad26-6a6abd38dbe6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should provide healthcare: the government or the market?<|ARGUMENT|>Neither public, nor private health centers can legally turn away patients in emergencies This doesn't happen in any other kind of business. De facto, health isn't free market.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The nature of healthcare is such that it cannot be provided by the free market alone.\n","id":"2739f823-3b04-43e5-ad9b-efef15112c09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard the explanation that the main towers collapsed the way they did because of the structure being softened by jet fuel. Feels wrong, but I'm no engineer, so I'll buy it. But why did building 7 collapse that way? Straight down into rubble? I understand that it was highly damaged, but I would expect such a tall tower to topple more than just go straight down. Please show me how I'm wrong in this assumption. For the record, I have no particular agenda or conspiracy in mind when I mention this. It just seems like a strange thing to happen. Why does it make sense? edit Also, I'm not really interested in discussing all the other aspects of the events, unless they're directly relevant to what happened to building 7. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the collapse of building 7 during the 9\/11 attacks was very suspicious. I also feel like I'm probably wrong, but I don't know why. Please\n","id":"90724c7d-8135-455f-86e9-c4527db1ed47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>In a toxic psychological environment, a bad marriage or, in the case of racism, policies enforcing politeness, whether sincere or not, may stabilize the relationships enough to enable communication.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political Correctness provides a structure for polite discussion of incendiary topics in a manner that stretches across socially constructed boundaries.\n","id":"a8ee8b26-7531-4e99-a3ae-d90a99200118"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>The cinematography of this scene was awkward an uninteresting; merely showing Leia slowly drifting back into the ship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Leia being able to magically move back to the spacecraft had a deus-ex-machina touch to it.\n","id":"85b66e0c-cb85-4db9-95c8-61f7bcdfb781"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I begin, let me be clear that this post is not meant to disprespect what the Marine Corps does, nor is is trying to decide whether the marine corps is better than the US army or vice versa. Now, what I'm getting at in comparing them is the size of the Marine Corps, and how the way they fight looks a lot like army infantry to my uninitiated eyes. Marine corps in many countries and in the beginning of the US military acted as naval infantry to guard ships and ports. That's why marine corps typically are a very small branch, you only need so many of them for that purpose. When we look at World War One, in its trench style there wasn't much warfare on beaches, a lot of the USMC's battles had them fight in an identical style to the US army. And I think the major point of my post stems from WW2. The Pacific theater was full of Islands that needed to be stormed, and who better for the job than naval infantry. Considering how it was a major theater, it makes sense that the marine corps grew so large. And in a lot of drawn out battles, the marines and the soldiers ended up fighting together in harmony, in what I can imagine just looked like one group of soldiers to the enemy instead of two separate branches. Contemporary military history is a bad area of mine, but it appears to me that the marine corps acts a lot like the army on their tours. As in, they are very large, and they aren't limited to naval areas. That's kind of the TL dr.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States Marine Corps is a second army\n","id":"b03f9ccc-4b21-44e0-9e13-7d44a7dce088"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The Catholic Church Publicly Elect Its Leaders?<|ARGUMENT|>Public pressure has caused more accountability with abusive priests than the internal system of the church had previously. This pressure can disincentivise actions before they take place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Publicly elected leaders have better incentives to engage well with the public than internally appointed leaders.\n","id":"ee90a038-442c-4e43-9d33-93566aa2c298"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ban on mountaintop removal coal mining<|ARGUMENT|>Joe Lucas, vice president of communications for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity ACCCE, told the Guardian that dynamiting the tops off of mountains helped communities that were \"hampered because of a lack of flat space.\"8: \"I can take you to places in eastern Kentucky where community services were hampered because of a lack of flat space \u2014 to build factories, to build hospitals, even to build schools. In many places, mountain-top mining, if done responsibly, allows for land to be developed for community space.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mountaintop mining helps communities hampered by lack of flat space.\n","id":"a48db4fa-d6e1-4bc8-9a94-b607f272836a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Oxford University extended exam times for math and computer science exams in an effort to improve women's' grades and improve the ratio of male to female in awarding degrees. gt Students taking maths and computer science examinations in the summer of 2017 were given an extra 15 minutes to complete their papers, after dons ruled that female candidates might be more likely to be adversely affected by time pressure . There was no change to the length or difficulty of the questions. gt It was the first time such steps had been taken. In previous years, the percentage of male students awarded first class degrees was double that of women and in 2016 the board of examiners suggested that the department make changes to improve women's grades. Source Oxford University gives women more time to pass exams The view to change Feminists, especially those who were outraged over the James Damore Google memo, should be outraged and or demand an apology from Oxford University for making a policy change based on the position that female candidates might be more likely to be adversely affected by time pressure. Note Despite the unfortunate clickbait headline of the Telegraph article and some irresponsible reporting on websites not cited here, Oxford appears to have extended the time for all students, not just women. The point is that they did it with the belief that it would elevate the success rates of women, when in fact, the rising tide lifted all boats and the ratio didn't change. Edit Thanks to those who made this a stimulating discussion. My problem with Oxford's statement is that it singles out women for having problems coping with stress and pressure, when indeed men can experience a range of abilities to cope with stress and perform under pressure too. I have no issue with Oxford extending the exam time to accommodate all students of all genders who could benefit from less time pressure on exams, but it reinforces harmful gender stereotypes to present this policy as a solution to difficulties that women face when men face the same difficulties. I have awarded two deltas First, one user made me aware that I may have misplaced expectations concerning the feminist movement's attention to underlying principles and objectives. Others followed to make similar points. Second, another user helped me see that as best as I can tell from the available reporting, the most problematic statement was lifted from internal documents and may only represent a single person's view rather than the consensus for public consumption on the basis for extending the exam time. Thus, anyone should mitigate their disapproval of Oxford's position.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminists should be outraged at Oxford for extending exam times to accommodate women\n","id":"58372b0a-e08d-4bc5-be1b-7f1a78cdeb03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should scientists contribute to Wikipedia?<|ARGUMENT|>If scientists contribute to Wikipedia in their free time, this does not impede on their research activities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Publishing on Wikipedia is not at odds with producing new research.\n","id":"3511fdf2-fb3d-4e8d-a01f-1baa5d5fdb8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, goodbye Karma. Now first off, I am still in support for freedom of religion. I believe that to take away freedom of religion is to take away freedom of thought, and that would be a horrific crime. There is too much of this Orwellian intent to take away our thoughts. The extreme left thinks it should be criminal to dislike a certain group, whereas the extreme right things it should be criminal to be gay. In light of this, I don't advocate in any way laws that restrict religion unless your religion affects other people. There should be no political outing of religion. But here's the unpopular bit, so get your downvotes ready. Religion should be stigmatized. It should be treated at least with the ridicule that conspiracy theorists face and at most with the hatred with which we treat racists and homophobes. Religion is the root of so many problems, through one catalyst. Religion has blinded many to the notion of critical thinking and science. We, as a society, are too reliant on pseudoscience and plain ignorance. The far right in America is packed with people who don't believe in climate change, and the left is filled with people who don't support modern medicine. Fanaticism and pseudoscience is rife in today's society, and it seems only to come from religion and indoctrination. Now, many people were raised by atheists, and in a way were taught atheism. This did not come from critical thinking, and is just as accidental as being raised religions and sticking with it, so there are many atheists that are not the scientific, freethinking humanists you hear about on r atheism Religion is in direct conflict with science, and it is building a divide between those raised by religion and those raised without. I believe that, without religion, we would be a more scientifically driven society, and we would benefit greatly in many regards. Education would benefit from it, climate change would be a primary political focus, and we would be a more tolerant society in regards to that which isn't crazy, like religion. Here's another reason why it's religion that's holding us back. Imagine a political party comprised of the most accomplished physicists, chemists, engineers, sociologists, psychologists etc. I'm talking like if Brian Cox, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye and the likes formed a party where their agenda would be a response to problems in both social science and natural science. Why is this good? Because scientists have a certain mindset. Scientists care about the truth, and only the truth. They don't care nearly as much about manipulating people, they don't care about becoming rich. If they cared about becoming rich they wouldn't have stayed at university for that long, they would have dropped out after their Master's and got a job as an engineer well, Bill Nye did that after his Bachelor's but he's still better than Trump or Hilary So why wouldn't this work? Because America is over 70 Christian, according to census, and I'm sure a lot of them would hate the idea of an atheistic government. There is no way that party could be elected into power at all, in basically any country. And it's for that reason that I know this post is going to get a fair bit of shit from both the religious and the blind atheists that think the key to happiness for all is letting everyone perpetuate their myths. Freedom of religion is politically necessary, but religion itself is the biggest issue on today's society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is the biggest cause of problems in the world today, and it should be treated much like conspiracy theories.\n","id":"75f2a919-54fa-43a9-bec8-75b170cdccfa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Antifa good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>A common tactic to delegitimize a group is an Agent Provocateur who might incite illicit behavior. Groups who employ extreme anonymity tactics would be especially susceptible to this tactic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Antifa's violence can delegitimize a non-violent peaceful protest as most people abhor violence.\n","id":"f64c399f-26d9-4803-a8b6-e1b2811cb6e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should single women\/men be allowed the use of IVF to have their own children?<|ARGUMENT|>This is better than a child being born into a family destined for divorce and break up<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Single women\/men should be allowed the use of IVF to have their own children.\n","id":"580da470-e24a-41dc-ba1c-4075ab6d1ef9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On the order of bisexuality in the early '00s and pansexuality after it, I think Tumblrite tweens and others are claiming asexuality in increasing numbers not chiefly because it's becoming more socially acceptable, but because it's a label they can attach to themselves to feel like special snowflakes and I think most of these people will most likely end up identifying as traditionally heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. There is not significant enough social stigma attached to asexuality to justify coming out that way though I acknowledge our hang ups about sex might make the stigma of bachelorhood variant depending on one's gender .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think asexuality is a fad.\n","id":"a6a26b55-7163-4723-8bc7-7444d865f91f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey , this is my first time posting here so I hope I have follow the rules. I did a check of the wiki and a search and nothing came up. For a long time I have noticed shitty people in the world. The violent, the arrogent, those who talk down to people, those who litter, bigots, etc. Where do all of these people come from? Who raised them? Why do these people exist? The more I have thought about it the more I have realised that it is because we allow people to have children as a right. All kinds of morons become parents. These people get to create a person which under their tutelage will most likely become a shit person just like their parents. These people shouldn't be allowed to fuck up their childrens lives and shit people shouldn't be inflicted on society by other shit people. And they are inflicted on society and society pays for them not only with money but also social costs, the threat of violence, bigotry, and environmental degradation. I have thought long and hard about this, whether or not it's eugenic at it's core and wether or not society at large can police a person's reproductive rights. I would say no normally but I think that there are few ways of stopping these people. I don't have a mechanism in mind on how to do this but the principle is Why should anyone be just allowed to have children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that everyone has a right to reproduce. I believe you should need a licence to have children.\n","id":"e6174fdd-8082-4bee-9597-1a1fbc55aab9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>The mark uses the information presented to them and makes what appears to be a rational decision. It may even seem to be their own idea, but the information isn't what it appears to be or it isn't the whole picture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The glory of a good confidence trick is that it's not about illogic, it's about misdirection and misinformation.\n","id":"4915a960-17ef-4b22-8ec0-10e3baf71fb1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Languages, Preservation of<|ARGUMENT|>Language is a central component of cultural identity. It acts as a binding force and marker of group identities. For example, the definition of \u201cBasque\u201d is \u201cthose who speak in the Basque tongue\u201d. Likewise, the Roma, who have no land and no clear defining characteristics, rely on their Romany language to maintain a cultural identity. The same is true of the Orang Asli in Malaysia. By helping to forge these communities language contributes to social stability. A shared language aids social cohesion by providing speakers with a ready-made support network. This in turn has been linked with reducing feelings of social dislocation and related problems, such as crime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Language is a central component of cultural identity. It acts as a binding force and marker of grou...\n","id":"43a9970f-d7c2-4a2f-a6a1-68aabdf135d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I begin I would just like to state that I am not proposing that we devalue mathematical understanding in any way, instead we should refocus it away from the part we spend most of our time on now computation , because computers can do this without error. HOWEVER, I am not proposing that we drop this altogether. We should still learn computation, but it is more important to understand how to convert real world issues into mathematical equations, correctly apply mathematical techniques, and convert the answer back into a real world property. Ask me for more details if you think this devalues math, lowers understanding, or anything else of the sort. Edit Thanks you so much for all the comments and feedback. I really appreciate it. Edit 2 So I just found this ted talk and it explains everything I am arguing for. Please watch it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be a significant change in the way math is taught in school because 80% of our time is spent learning how to do computation, and computers make that obsolete.\n","id":"77ef4cf2-b078-4afc-9aa8-e291430f699d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>The beneficial behaviors of some people do not justify the detrimental behaviors of others. One goal of any society should be to allow the beneficial people to thrive, while weeding out the detrimental people who could undo the work done by the beneficial people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While that may be true, it does not justify the permission of such attitudes in times when they are, in fact, detrimental.\n","id":"4e2393a3-7083-4554-9599-ff74268e26c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Space agencies should first undertake Human mission to Mars's little moons before attempting Mars's surface<|ARGUMENT|>A human mission to Phobos does not need any significant technological developments in contrary to a mission to the surface of Mars.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Space agency's should first undertake Human mission to Mars's little moons before attempting to set foot on Mars's surface\n","id":"57423bb1-3490-4d38-8a78-fc92915053a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>Having to deal with every responsibility we ever took on such a long lifespan, some of them are bound to bring negative consequences, we would be accumulating too much guilt to cope with. Immortality might end up being unbearable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Changing this reality could lead us to mental health issues, as humans have always been mortal.\n","id":"16472868-ae2e-4df7-99cc-3e8c0d1a1b5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen a lot of arguing over this topic. The only thing I've noticed is that the worst about being uncircumcised is you might have to clean your dick a little more. Does anyone have sources for the benefits of circumcision or is there not really any besides a little cleaning. The same argument about having to clean it could easily apply to the ear. Chop off your ear. You might lose a little hearing, but it will never become infected. On the other hand, the only anti circumcision thing I've seen is a emotionally filled video with crying babies and how it's traumatic. I'm looking for the science for both sides, but I have yet to be convinced circumcision is good. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not certain circumcision is something we should be doing to babies,\n","id":"a7b99a0f-7d5c-4c94-b9cb-7ec33f227cdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>x200B I have been working as a Barista for about a year now and have worked at two different coffee shops. One of them might have had a green mermaid as a logo. From my observations it seems that the coffee that Starbucks provides isn't real coffee or at least not traditional coffee. I have often had coffee connoisseurs come in and be shocked when I hand them a Starbucks recipe macchiato. They were expecting something with less milk and more foam. Like Mcdonald's, Starbucks isn't traditional in its recipes. People wanting a Gourmet Burger, won't be satisfied by a Big Mac. I am new to the coffee world and am curious to see what more experienced baristas and coffee lovers feel about Starbucks. I believe Starbucks is the cheap and easy to produce version of traditional Cafes. Their untraditional milk drink recipes have set a new standard in the coffee industry and lead to copycat coffee places to standardize these fake machiattoos. Very similar to how other fast food joints have begun to copy Mcdonald's recipes. I\u2019m not saying their macchiatos aren\u2019t good, they just aren't macchiatos, their lattes. For a better explanation of the macchiato discrepancy, here is a good article from Odyssey I would also like to acknowledge that Starbucks has come out with a recent line of reserve drinks and stores that have more traditional recipes. I can only assume they did this to combat criticism and market more drinks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Starbucks is the Mcdonalds of the coffee industry\n","id":"e0b35794-6dfe-474b-9144-d6cddbecb806"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>The desert Bir Tawil en.wikipedia.org and Marie Byrd Land en.wikipedia.org in Western Antartica are considered No Man's Land. One can settle there without being targeted by any government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are some islands or spots in deserts etc. where it's most likely you will never be approached by any governemental organisation.\n","id":"f1cdc6e2-3ba4-4346-bfc3-aa7a8f2ad6b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that social discussion sites have a lot of potential for gathering valuable information since the advent of mailing lists and forums , especially reddit that allows to create different communities and sort the content in several ways. that more or less save time to find nice discussions while on forums one has to scroll through all the posts in a thread Nevertheless, even if reddit is using votes and not only to determine different ways to show the content hot, top, controversial, q a, old, new, etc , when the content is a lot for example more than 300 comments or 300 submissions mostly only the content at the top of the sorting is easy to reach, the rest is mostly invisible unless someone has a lot of time to dig it. I mean, more or less it is unlikely to go further the 3rd page for submission and until the 150th~200th comment for posts. Even searches on reddit or by google do not help too much if someone has few keywords. Without mentioning banned subreddits that could have been accessible at least as archive. yes, one could have speculated on the banned content, but since it is not available, no one can Therefore reddit is decreasing the value of a lot of information gathered during years by several communities. At the end the casual reader, that cannot read every day most of the submissions, has mainly the chance to read new content and to create new content that maybe was already discussed in the past in a satisfactory way. Therefore one could speculate that the 'alternative' way that reddit use to show the content does not really matter, since a simple forum or a mailing list are mostly based on new content too. One way that, i think, could improve the situation is the self organization of the various subcommunities to value the generated content. For example like r bestof or r depthhub and the like. Communities that try to collect content that seems valuable across reddit. But they do this using normal submissions, and so one can explore very tiny fractions of those collections due to the problem mentioned above. AFAIK no community is trying to make use of the wiki, a very nice tool to collect incremental static information in an organized and more accessible way. That is a bit disappointing, that a community is not valuing its own content. The wiki of  for example is a mess, and i suppose is created by bots. If one wants to navigate the page list, it has almost no structure and it is almost impossible to identify possible 'not bot generated' pages. Sure it is better than nothing, but still i think is quite a pity to let useful? information be unreachable after few days months.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"reddit stores a lot of interesting discussions that gets quickly buried under new content, losing their value, due to the limited navigation tools.\n","id":"f3d5bc32-ccf9-483d-bb7e-d907b11ea784"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view is that unschooling results in children who have large gaps in functional knowledge required for full participation in higher education, the workplace, and generally in society. It is a disservice to children to withhold the socialization and learning that comes with a formal education. Furthermore, most of the \u201cactivities\u201d and play that comes with unschooling can be done outside of regular school hours. Essentially, by withholding a formal education, you are taking opportunities from your child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unschooling is a terrible practice that sets children up for failure\n","id":"eeda6c48-99aa-4c4f-8855-e44d7ccd85ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>If animals do feel pain and we ignore it, we are committing moral atrocities. If animals do not feel pain and we treat them as if they do, not much is lost.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If we can do the same thing that treats an animal poorly but without treating them poorly, there is no reason why we should continue to treat animals poorly.\n","id":"a8e760dc-4ebb-485c-8128-13fe6c73681b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My understanding is that rape culture refers to a culture where particularly men are not held accountable for their assaults against intoxicated women. And it refers to masculine environments e.g. fraternities that hold promiscuity in such high regard that some means of getting laid are acceptable that shouldn't really be, namely plying girls with alcohol before having sex with them. So that's my understanding of rape culture. Here's some elaboration on the title If being so drunk that you lose control of your faculties were actually a pleasant experience, I would fully understand why it's not the right advice. I understand that it would be deflecting blame off the rapist, and onto the woman. A woman shouldn't have to moderate her pleasure or positive experiences because a rapist could be out there. In this case, much better advice would be, make sure you have friends to watch after you . However, I do not believe that being that drunk is a pleasant experience for anybody. One feels dizzy, stupid, slow, and is constantly losing balance and tripping over things. I feel like I'm really saying, don't get too drunk, because you won't enjoy it anyway, and besides it's more likely you'll be assaulted. By analogy, if you have a friend who never locks their doors in a not so great area, and you tell them before they've ever been robbed , hey man, you should really lock your doors, you could get robbed. Locking doors isn't a positive or negative experience, it's rather neutral contrary to getting completely wasted, which is wholly negative. How does that deflect blame from potential robbers onto the victim?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am not totally convinced that telling a woman to be \"responsible for herself\" by \"not drinking too much\" is an instance of rape culture.\n","id":"0e6d9474-3629-4a2b-8e73-048b6a116e7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I know there have been a few topics about Cecil in this sub, and I enjoyed reading them, but I think the view I currently hold is a bit different than what has been covered previously. My view is that the reaction to the recent killing of Cecil the lion is not necessarily a display of empathy that a sentient being was killed, but is rather more based on how Cecil was positioned and valued in relation to humans. For example, people point out that Cecil is part of a vulnerable population note, not endangered . But why does this make the killing any worse? It's only worse when you consider that, as humans, we value species diversity. This is why the reasoning that killing a rare animal is somehow worse than killing any other animal ultimately is connected to what humans value. Another example of how outrage about Cecil's death is more about anthropocentric values is when people say that Cecil was beautiful , strong , magnificent . These are socially constructed categories that we place Cecil in and we give value to these descriptors. However, the fact that an animal is considered beautiful by humans does not make its death objectively any worse than if an animal died that was considered ugly by humans. Additionally, in terms of how Cecil is primarily valued by his relation to humans, people say that Cecil was good for tourism, and that's why his death is worth being outraged over. This is more human centered reasoning that implies that animals lives' values are determined by how we can utilize them. This is best highlighted by the fact that many other lions are killed, but there isn't outrage because they aren't as valued by humans. Finally, in addition to what I mentioned above, I think the reason this story has gone viral is not because of empathy for animals, but rather that the story has a perfect archetype of victim and villain . People are all too happy to demonize someone, whereas they are perhaps objectively guilty of the same crime. To preempt an argument I imagine receiving. One might say that everything we do is human centered, and thus the outrage about Cecil is not abnormal. I agree with this, but I think many people are framing the public outcry in this story as being benevolent and empathetic see Fallon's video , however, I don't see people getting upset about the variety of other animals including other lions that get killed, which is why I think it's more about anthropocentrism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The outrage over the death of Cecil the lion is not based on empathy, but rather anthropocentrism and selfishness.\n","id":"e6591063-115f-4152-83b7-a2694ee95c0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a scientist in training, I have taken college level physics classes and gross human anatomy. It makes sense to me that instead of heel striking and putting all of the force from our running stride onto a decently padded heel, we should remove the raised heel to land on our mid foot. By doing this, part of the impact force is relieved from the rotation of our foot rather than directly into the pavement. I am definitely open to exploring the science behind which is better. However, as I suffer from chronic shin splints, I have found that my problems are not as severe if I wear a running shoe with minimal padding that forces me to land a little differently. Please everyone, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that barefoot running is more healthy for our legs than running with shoes.\n","id":"90fe5c97-31a0-4b73-a733-1eaaae31136e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>This financial systemic racism has lead to a society where African Americans have less wealth, less home ownership, and less educational opportunities, which is systemic racism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A history of systemic racism is well documented, including such practices as Redlining Racial Restrictive Covenants and disparities in the GI Bill.\n","id":"2fa34ff7-80dd-42e3-baad-d47a2b000bec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi everybody I had a big discussion with some family about this article that was in the NY Times Magazine this week. I'll outline my views on this subject below but I'd like some more insight from everybody here. I would also like to be shown that people who crowdfund projects should or do enjoy the perks available to investors or consumers. As a summary of the article, it describes three main points of crowdfunding. One is the anger and frustration felt by the backers when the project is not completed. If their money is not refunded or the project is not delivered on, people who put money into the project can become understandably frustrated. However, the backers also have an obvious sense of entitlement, where they believe that they were promised something not getting it in a timely manner is a grounds for lawsuits, investigations for fraud, audits, etc. Another point of the article is the disappointment of the creators in every faculty of crowdfunding. They are disappointed that the backers are so vicious. They are disappointed in the project's failure. They are disappointed in the fact that they were expected to deliver more if the project is overfunded as the ZPM Espresso maker was . The last point is the ambiguity of crowdfunded projects. The backers are stuck in a position between investing and consuming, but are simultaneously neither. On a similar note, the creators are stuck in a poor situation where if they can't deliver when they have tried their hardest then they must explain and risk backlash and lawsuits, or the must refund the money which is often depleted. My view on this subject Note that I am going to use Kickstarter as the example, but this is applicable to any crowdfunding site. The backer is entitled to nothing except what Kickstarter outlines here Kickstarter specifies that once a project is funded, progress should be shared. The creators do not have to constantly update the backers. They can be as specific or as vague as they want. They do not have to explain where money explicitly goes, and they do not have to finish the project. However, as Kickstarter says, they do have to make an effort to finish the project. If they don't the project is a scam , then Kickstarter may pursue legal action. The backers are not a part of the company. An investor or shareholder has some say in how the company is run, and if a company becomes profitable they should expect some return on their investment. A backer should expect nothing of that sort. They have funded a project only on the hope that it comes to fruition, and their reward is helping the creators along their way. If the project is completed and the creators have said what rewards will be delivered , then they may expect their reward. This can be especially valuable you can get a product earlier than consumers, you can get it for cheaper, or you can get it specially made , but it is, in essence, a gamble. Backers are not consumers. Backers are putting money into an idea, not a finished good or commodity. There is no protection against not delivering the good, and the money does not have to be refunded as long as it was put to use in making the idea a reality. Although it does seem like it, I'm not completely defending the creators every step of the way. The backers should be mostly protected against outright scams. Kickstarter creators should also cut off the backing at a certain point more often, since it is often difficult to deliver more than what was initially presented in the plan. This is another problem with crowdfunding, but is also a different conversation entirely. The backers are putting their money into something that they hope will see the light of day, and can expect something when the developers tell them they can. However, as they have no stake in the company and are not buying a currently marketable good, they are just gambling on an idea and should not feel as entitled as they often are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who fund projects on sites such as Kickstarter are gambling, and are neither investors nor consumers.\n","id":"04a0955d-1f21-439a-9a99-325403d5bd7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>Having a vote will enable the people to decide what they think best for them, not for the squabbling members of Parliament. If they believe they speak for the British people, then they should actually ask the British people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A decision as momentous as this should not be left to Parliament.\n","id":"4fd1ee3b-81e2-4ce6-b687-5b8d91cc5b57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>Justice Scalia once noted: 'It\u2019s a little unrealistic to talk about the Court as though it\u2019s a continuous, unchanging institution rather than to some extent necessarily a reflection of the society in which it functions. Ultimately, the justices of the Court are taken from society. and however impartial they may try to be, they are going to bring with them those societal attitudes' McGuire & Stimson, p. 1020<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The current Supreme Court does reflect the will of the people.\n","id":"3ef00867-2159-4009-95c5-0194a4a1543c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU have its own army?<|ARGUMENT|>Tensions are currently increasing between Russia and Ukraine. If conflict were to break out, this battle would be on the border of the EU.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Russia currently poses a large threat to the safety of Europe.\n","id":"97766358-5336-4afc-a7b4-2a8da9657aae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We were talking in my discussion class about how we should have classes targeted toward visual learners and not just verbal learners. and am curious to what others think on this and like to continue the debate<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- encouraging different types of thinking within classrooms is pointless because how we arrive at our ideas doesn't matter. Only the ideas themselves matter.\n","id":"70310914-bbc6-40cb-ab33-eafa256ff262"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should pet stores only sell dogs and cats from shelters?<|ARGUMENT|>Behavioural and psychological problems are more common in young animals bred in high-volume commercial breeding establishments for pet stores, than in animals from other sources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An animal which has been bred for a pet store is not necessarily free from trauma\n","id":"5d648aac-6701-4b15-88af-96d8955474ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Voter fatigue and the perception that individual elections do not matter have been proposed as the link between the high number of referendums and the low voter turnout in Switzerland Blais, p. 526 Franklin, p. 98<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although Switzerland holds more referendums than any other country, its voter turnout in elections at around 50% or less is among the lowest in the OECD and has been low for decades OECD, p. 97\n","id":"f24434f6-ee6c-4e17-be39-868d8953b35c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Indiscriminate drone warfare violates the American ideals of due process of law, and undermines the American position in the world, regardless of whom committed the offense Bush Obama and Trump have held office while drones and other less discriminate attacks killed civilians and spurred further hatred of America in the process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Indiscriminate drone warfare predates the Obama administration, and continued into the Trump administration.\n","id":"059e2ddf-4463-4b60-af91-6833d186bb42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll start with what I read that pushed me to believe this To sum up my own beliefs a little better let's start with talking about Trump voters. They're not always the most informed voters. Heck, some of them actually are members of the KKK, some of them are too busy to bother learning about politics, some of them are probably just desperate for jobs, and some of them might be well reasoned people who just have a very different world view than I do. If you agree with that, let's keep going. Misogyny Most of the criticism here is around him being rude to women, or his infamous locker room talk. Being rude to someone doesn't mean you hate everything about them. Period. It's akin to saying that when he insults Rosie he hates Americans because she's an American. His locker room thing was bad, but he never said And they don't want me to. There was no way of knowing if the women consented or not, but that's hardly proof that they didn't. Further, he surrounds himself with smart hard working women, he trusts his daughter to run his company, and he has more women in executive roles at his company than men. Racism by racist , I don't mean someone who has benefited from the historical racial injustice in America. because that's every white person, and that includes Hillary, thus there isn't much point in using it to differentiate between the two of them. Further, I'm using the dictionary definition of racism, because it seems like different people use different definitions, and that really screws up conversations. Basically, black people can be racist and the weather cannot. Trump has fought for good race relations, he reached out to all races during his campaign, and has even won an award for bettering the lives of minorities. That doesn't mean he couldn't be a racist, maybe it was all for show, but it does imply he's not. He has spoken out a lot about Islam and illegal aliens. People say that doing so is racist, but if you want to make that argument please do better than most of these people are not white . I understand how that logic works, but to me it's not sound. I can say I don't like basketball, that doesn't make me a racist even though most basketball players aren't white. But he called Mexicans rapists Yes, rape does occur in Mexico, or elsewhere by Mexicans. Surely no one thinks that no Mexican has ever committed rape. But he called ALL Mexicans rapists No, he listed four ways to describe people illegally crossing the border. Rapists, drug dealers, murderers, and nice people. It's pretty obvious that you can't be all four, so he said some of the people crossing the border. Go read my first paragraph again. Did you agree that all Trump voters are literally members of the KKK? Edit I should have put a definition of misogyny in here too, my bad 1. a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women. Racism 1. a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another. These are just what google gives me, I didn't pick a particular dictionary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump is not a racist or a misogynist.\n","id":"a0dad6f9-bfcb-4cb0-a56e-76f88ec1bebf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Legislative restrictions may be imposed upon citizens due to religious principles, regardless if those citizens share those values or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has been and is used as a form of social control.\n","id":"124ae962-961e-4859-95ab-cd37aa766608"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>God's existence can be proven on a person-by-person basis through the practice of meditation, deep devotion, or the path of wisdom. This is where the individual becomes a spiritual scientist using the laboratory his\/her own consciousness to discover the consciousness of God within him\/herself. Since science depends on the testimony of the senses, it is too limited to discover God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Demonstrable evidence should not be appealed to in this case, because humans as 3rd dimensional beings are incapable of perceiving a higher dimensional being.\"\n","id":"bf160fe0-bf50-4e5f-8dc5-edf8a679df1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>A thousand years ago France was a mosaic of independent duchies. It has been unified since then, and each former duchy region has kept their own traditions which has considerably enriched French culture. This is likely to be the same at the European level.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"France has a diverse culture, from Provence to the North, through Brittany, Burgundy or Aquitaine.\n","id":"5669ae22-779a-4776-809e-ea735f28f3d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should unpaid internships be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK up to 50% of employers do not know what kind of internships are illegal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In many countries the test for what constitutes an internship can be vague or confusing.\n","id":"589c205f-1d7e-40b6-83f7-67f9a438e8f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>The US Declaration of Independence states that all men have \"certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.\" The document, however, does not legally guarantee such rights, as it was intended to communicate a general philosophy of governance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many national and international legal documents support the right to life, but are not legally binding and, thereby, do not support a general acceptance of the right to life.\n","id":"0def6fc8-1b10-48aa-8855-c004ec06e46a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion provides a reassuring answer to the great questions of life, such as the meaning of life, post-mortem life, and solutions to our problems such as suffering, injustice, fear of death, and therefore natural necessity for mankind, thus arose independently in different cultures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions emerged as an evolutionary adaptation. They spread the adoption of behaviors that provided evolutionary advantages.\n","id":"ebd83f5f-2e54-4d11-b15a-c589264ec169"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Former Italian monarch supported Mussolini fascist regime while ruling. Fascism is generally considered to be an extremist form of government that is not good for the nation's common people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the country\u2019s well-being and the continuity of the monarchy are mutually exclusive, monarchs can still choose the option that perpetuates their ruling.\n","id":"2c6d1788-cae7-44a6-9a9a-ff9715c5e173"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify, I mean laws like the ones in the UK Expressions of hatred toward someone on account of that person's colour, race, disability, nationality including citizenship , ethnic or national origin, religion, gender identity, or sexual orientation is forbidden. Any communication which is threatening or abusive, and is intended to harass, alarm, or distress someone is forbidden. The penalties for hate speech include fines, imprisonment, or both. Wikipedia I don't support speech which incites violence against someone. I believe there should and are social repercussions of what you say, but there shouldn't be legal consequences. As seen above, in the UK you can't say anything intended to harass, alarm, or distress someone . I find that to be ridiculous. It allows things like this to happen. What's worse is that this leaves a massive grey area where the laws aren't crystal clear, and as seen with Mark Meechen, his speech was allowed to be completely taken out of context, and he was fined for hate speech for telling a joke. You don't have a right to not be offended, if you do you are a pathetic human being, therefore we do not need hate speech laws. . e as highlighted by u MPixels, this would allow someone to repeatedly target you without consequence. This should fall under harassment and should be treated accordingly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"hate speech laws shouldn't exist\n","id":"0d22bc40-16ab-4968-b049-106aa8d61d15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should fracking be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Fracking does not provide stable employment, as oil and gas will eventually run out making people unemployed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fracking creates economic booms in rural areas which are unsustainable.\n","id":"bf280088-0c37-490c-b859-f3104f6459c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You might have heard about the controversy associated with YouTube Kids, which has frequently suggested bizarre and often disturbing and or violent cartoons for children and parents. Very many of these cartoons show iconic, copyrighted characters engaging in out of character behavior, including depictions of Elsa engaging in gun violence These videos are quite controversial and can be traumatizing to children, and furthermore may harm iconic and beloved brands. If YouTube is going to be explicitly branding towards children, they need to ensure that every video they offer is both a child friendly and b depicts characters in a way that's consistent with their creators' intentions. I'm not at all opposed to fanfiction, but Elsa robbing a bank is not something that is child friendly and not something that fits with Disney's intention or reputation at all. What I think should happen is that YouTube Kids should be limited to channels that are reviewed by humans who are employed by a reputable firm either YouTube employees or the firms whose intellectual property is being used and verified to ensure that they are age appropriate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"YouTube Kids should be based on a whitelist of approved channels.\n","id":"7fda59e9-8ed5-45a7-a26a-5f8ed7304e1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The US Constitution was written at a time when states believed they needed a check on federal power. Requiring a body that represented all states equally to pass any legislation seemed to preserve those rights. However, this attitude is mostly archaic today. Representing every state equally allows small states disproportionate power in matters pertaining to the whole country. Why should they be able to block the rest of the country's people from deciding on federal matters? It's essentially saying that voters in North Dakota, Vermont and Alaska are more important than elsewhere. If you can find me a purpose for the US Senate as an actual decision making body in today's day and age, and not just as a vastly unrepresentative body that has the power to completely kill legislation that most Americans support, please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US Senate should be a ceremonial rubber stamp in practice, rather than a body that regularly blocks legislation from the House.\n","id":"17b16aae-8077-49dc-b642-c284557e67e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Politicians' Second Jobs: Should They be Allowed to Keep Them?<|ARGUMENT|>Politicians working in a blue-collar second-job may have insights into the community which they would otherwise not see in the course of their official duties.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having a second job allows MPs to directly interact with members of their constituencies.\n","id":"f55cda1a-21b7-46c8-a567-ac5a013a61fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, it is illegal to sell your organs. Similarly, research studies are limited in how much money they can reimburse participants. These cases are unique, similar to this debate, in that they question the ability of decision making when weighing personal safety against monetary gain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is precedence for government protection from monetary incentives and how they affect decision making.\n","id":"5ade54ba-a883-430a-aac7-f3f976ef90d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>The law of supply and demand is a theory that explains the interaction between the supply of a resource and the demand for that resource. The theory defines the effect that the availability of a particular product and the desire or demand for that product has on its price. Generally, low supply and high demand increase price. In contrast, the greater the supply and the lower the demand, the price tends to fall.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scarcity or rarity of things that are desirable directly correspond with higher values.\n","id":"b2fe32f4-c1db-401d-a3e2-f2e25260a418"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Hydrogen vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Research - \"Hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of domestic resources using a number of different technologies.\" This production flexibility is valuable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hydrogen can be produced by a variety of domestic resources\n","id":"efd2afd3-bc34-46f5-99e8-7fcd73a4c482"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Should say whether and not where in the title, sorry for the typo Immediately this will probably seem like blatant racism to many of you, but let me explain myself. The notion that Muslim immigrants are more likely to commit crimes is only offensive if it is false. If it is true then it is simply a harsh reality that many are unwilling to face. If the former is true then the anti migrant crowd will be revealed as a mixture of hateful bigots and people who are too easily led by scaremongering tactics. If the latter is true, the pro migrant crowd will be shown to be naive, and unwilling to look facts in face due to political correctness. Either way the issue will be put to bed once and for all. If the hypothesis is shown to be false then the migrant community in Europe will be immune to all further allegations that their presence in Europe has a negative impact on their host countries. They will have a cast iron fact justifying their presence here that will shield them from future from future scapegoating. If the latter is true then we need to have a frank and honest discussion about how we deal with the issue, and accept that political correctness has failed us in this particular instance. Either way the only winner will be the truth, and the only loser will be the group that turns out to be wrong. They will have egg on their face and need to accept that their beliefs, whatever they are, need to be reassessed. I believe that this can only be of benefit to society as this is the future of our continent we're talking about, and any policy decisions need to be based on the truth, no matter how unpalatable it may be. EDIT I have awarded a delta but I think this is still an interesting discussion to have so I will amend my point. 'Objective Inquiry' and 'cast iron facts' were perhaps overly naive when discussing the validity of social sciences. My thinking now is that we should perform a large number of studies just incase overall results are sufficiently skewed to one side or the other that we can all feel comfortable making an informed decision. So if the combination of all left wing biases and right wing biases and everything in between delivers a clear conclusion, I think that would be valid enough to make a decision based on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There needs to be an objective inquiry into where migrants are more likely to commit sexual assaults and other crimes.\n","id":"03049cd2-8227-4171-92c2-5c4431397ad3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that swear words have caused an anomaly in our society, they have infiltrated the regular vocabulary, replacing our language with words that have been used with a tone of hate or anger, or to vulgarize our way of speaking without any reason ex Holy shit . I think that the ban of swear words in Russia will help them to stop these words of hate or vulgarism. I also believe that sometimes you have to swap a small piece of freedom for order and discipline. This is in general, not just for the words I've been harassed by this before, they used to say to me that I was a word purist , and that people should have the right to speak as they wish, but I think that young people including me have to change their way of looking at things. PS I wrote this in spanish initially, and I tried translating this the best I could. EDIT 42m I've come to realize that swear words are not the problems, but rather the way people use them. They aren't a problem if they are used for comedic reasons, or expressive reasons, but they shouldn't be used on a offensive way. Please tell me if you agree with this posture .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Russia has done good in banning swears.\n","id":"fb19d157-d620-4815-921a-cd854d53d465"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should legacy be a factor in college admissions?<|ARGUMENT|>A New York Times article reported that in 2007 Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam, Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point average.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if a student attains an exceptional academic record, there is no guarantee that they will be admitted in these elite universities.\n","id":"2aebdf53-ef82-4c5a-82f1-4398b4a4b41d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>About the closest thing I have to be part of a culture is that I having been working in computers since before they were cool, so I'm an old school geek. I don't feel connected to Canada other than the pervasive we're not American attitude. I don't care for hockey. I guess I feel closest to my 1 4 Scottish side, but that's only because I liked my grandfather. I've seen a lot of Canada, after travelling throughout Western Canada and in the early 90s I hitchhiked from Vancouver to Montreal. I still haven't connected with Canada and at age 43 I'm not sure I ever will. To be clear, I'm asking you to convince me I have cultural ties here that are as strong as what I see in Canadian subcultures Chinese, Indo Canadian, First Nations, etc. . Alternatively, if you were to show me the ways in which I really could connect to a group culture here that would satisfy my apparent need to belong, that would be helpful. In opposition, I would also accept some convincing arguments that the subcultures I see are really not cohesive at all and it's just the media appearance of them that makes it seem so. , please<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a rural-living white Canadian of Scottish\/English\/German descent, and I feel like I am really missing out because I have no cultural ties.\n","id":"ad2b52c4-ad3f-4a82-a1fd-647dcc924d97"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Watching an animal suffering for enjoyment will lessen peoples capacity to empathy. Being repeatedly exposed to pain and suffering of a living being while people around them cheer may reaffirm that animals are to be treated as objects and do not deserve empathy. They may then be less likely to react when faced with suffering and pain of other living beings outside of the arena.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The public celebration of cruelty, violence and death normalises these things in society.\n","id":"48e677d6-e850-4f0d-9318-46bac756ba3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Social Media Been Good For Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Social media algorithms increasingly drive topical and publisher selection preferences in news aggregation services, reducing the user's options to set personal preferences manually and with intention. AI can make these selections with a bias that such will inform or distract but almost always satisfy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social media algorithms designed to enhance the user's experience have inadvertently created deeply personalized Filter Bubbles Information dissemination is calculated by user desire rather than objective necessity.\n","id":"4f647118-b190-4dcd-aea4-a4080b2aba95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For simplicity sake, I'd like to just contain this view to consuming cricket flour alone. I don't want this discussion to delve down to finding a singular insect product that is an exception. x200B Nutritionally, cricket flour is fantastic. It has an immense amount of protein, and very low net carbs. x200B Even vegans draw a line over which animals are acceptable to suffer, and which are not. They are like omnivores, just with a different line. Vegans typically aren't as concerned about the mice, other rodents, bunnies, and birds that die to harvest crops that they consume when compared to pigs, cows, sheep, and chickens. x200B Compared to a bunny, insects are far less likely to experience suffering. x200B Insects are easily renewable, and don't require as much space to harvest. Also they can be farmed locally. One could get their protein from local insect farms, instead of tofu, or other protein sources, which has ingredients that can only be grown in certain locations. x200B Since vegans are not fruitarians, one can safely assume they are okay with some animal suffering The question is just which animals are acceptable to suffer, and which are not? I would argue that most vegans would prefer that insects suffer if you think they can suffer at all , rather than bunnies, mice, and birds.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vegans should consume cricket flour and other cricket based products\n","id":"c89379e8-5538-4a9d-b652-515cdd9c842c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see a lot of people with high functioning ASD saying that even if there was something that could 100 cure their Autism, they wouldn't take it. Now I don't know what it's like to have Autism so I might be speaking out of ignorance and I'll be happy to admit it, I just think that Autism is a mostly a disadvantage in society broadly I'm aware that it's a big spectrum and that it makes it harder to be more sociable and harder to understand social cues and I believe that it would better to understand them so a cure to Autism would improve their quality of life. I'm guessing the reason that people with ASD might not want to cure their disorder is because they fear that they might have some sort of identity crisis and make it harder to understand yourself because Autism is a major influence that might not be all negative so I understand their fears but I believe it would be a benefit to finally be free of Autism. I'm aware that cure to Autism is highly unlikely to exist in the near future, I'm also aware that there are numerous people with ASD who would like to be rid of their disorder. Also, I don't have ASD so I imagine that I might be ignorant and I would be happy to change my mind about this subject we're speaking about in this post and I know that getting rid of such a big influence in your life might be uncomfortable edit I might need to expand my stance in this on the comments as this largely rambling<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be a benefit for people with ASD to be cured from their disorder if a hypothetical cure existed\n","id":"4cd03d85-ea43-41a7-83d0-6db70c3cbece"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Vegetarianism<|ARGUMENT|>Food safety and hygiene are very important for everyone, and governments should act to ensure that high standards are in place. And just as meat production can raise health issues, so does the arable farming of plants \u2013 examples include GM crops and worries about pesticide residues on fruit and vegetables. None of this means that we should stop eating meat, just that we should ensure all food is produced in a safe and healthy way<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vegetarian foods have as many health risks as animal foods.\n","id":"f9042b85-4fd6-47f0-8219-4ca5ccf600f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>High rents and a strong economy are preferable to lower rents and a weak economy. Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore have avoided a crisis of affordable housing because they're dangerous, dysfunctional places that are losing their population.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The main reason for housing shortages in New York is the city itself \u2014 it is so popular with travellers and professionals alike that demand for housing is nearly endless.\n","id":"621194ed-26f1-4f01-be8a-a21cdb25d76b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The shooter was being held in a San Francisco jail on a 20 year old drug charge, which a judge ultimately threw out. Although he was wanted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for multiple offenses, city officials were prohibited by city law from notifying ICE before releasing him. Considering that local and federal law enforcement officials routinely cooperate in order to apprehend known and suspected criminals, why should undocumented immigrants be given a special exemption? Supporters of sanctuary cities have forwarded the argument that undocumented immigrants would be less likely to cooperate with local law enforcement if they feared deportation, but the fact of the matter is that they are here illegally and ought to face the consequences of their actions, just as Americans who commit criminal offenses face the consequences of their actions where are the sanctuary cities for Americans ? . There is no reason why cities should refuse to comply with federal immigration laws and create possible sanctuaries for those who pose a danger to society. If the ICE had been properly notified of the shooter's release from jail remember, they had a warrant out for his arrest they could have arrested him and avoided the entire incident that has now claimed a life. Why should shielding undocumented immigrants from federal agents take precedence over cooperating with them to enforce immigration laws? Why do the benefits of sanctuary cities outweigh the negatives that the shooter's release despite his known criminal background illustrate? Sanctuary cities allow undocumented immigrants who may have a criminal background and pose a threat to roam freely. It seems ludicrous to me that city law prevented San Francisco officials from even informing federal immigration agents that the shooter had been released. Limiting how local and federal law enforcement can interact undermines our nation's immigration laws and provides shelter for those who would otherwise be taken into custody due to criminal activity the shooter has admitted to fleeing to SF after crossing the border specifically because it's a sanctuary city who is to say that other criminals who are undocumented don't do the same? . It seems reasonable for the government to strip cities of funding if they harbor these individuals instead of facilitating their transfer to federal agents. If cities don't want to comply with federal law, they ought to lose federal funding. Isn't that only logical? Despite my strong objection to sanctuary cities, I am open to any and all responses that might cause me to view them in a more favorable light.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanctuary cities are dangerous. Limiting how local and federal law enforcement can interact is bad policy.\n","id":"e931729d-26cf-4a88-9237-77d70af51cb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>In the United States, the states that impose the strongest restrictions on gun owners have the lowest rates of gun-related deaths.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More access to guns and leaner restrictions on gun-owners causes more firearm murders.\n","id":"71ad1680-31d3-49a4-b97b-c3bd59cd78a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Joe Rogan made an interesting argument a while ago suggesting that MMA rules should make gloves and writst tape illeagal. With the amount of evidence showing that an overwhelming number of ex NFL players have CTE I am worried that some of my favrite athletes in the sport are going to find themselves in a similar position 10 20 years down the road. I think MMA is already much healthier than boxing in this regard but going bare knuckle would reduce the amount of head trauma significantly. There would be more submissions, less knockouts, and more broken hands, but in the end it would be better for the fighters, and more representative of practical martial arts . This is a side note not the main . Don't bother.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"MMA should be bare knuckle for the safety of the fighters.\n","id":"851fa2be-9294-4d57-b4ab-798d323ea142"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should US intelligence agencies end mass data collection?<|ARGUMENT|>US covert operations involving foreign countries, such as the collection of internet data from overseas by US security agencies has the potential to contribute to 'blowback' undermining national security. Therefore mass data collection is counter-productive because such a measure makes the population less safe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Improving US foreign policy is a better alternative to mass data collection.\n","id":"c6eb44e8-3f32-4288-8d0b-5a0525fbeaf5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>When someone is talking to me, do I have to listen?<|ARGUMENT|>When someone is in danger and calling for help, it is my duty to listen and give them assistance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are important safety reasons to habitually listen out for what others say.\n","id":"9ef02622-b1f2-4340-a67c-0f2918a4eef2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of schools have community based events like tailgates and parties before or after football games, which are essential for the enjoyment of students and their college experience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lot of the typical American college experience is built around the playing time and success of the college football team.\n","id":"fac0a64b-d240-42a2-8444-4f8d24fb4383"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Anti-Jewish legislation was introduced almost ten years before the Nazi government officially began the organised mass-slaughter of Jews across Europe, e.g. by limiting the number of Jewish students in universities and schools and excluding them from a number of professions in 1933<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Past efforts to create a white ethnostate also started with separatism, a clamp-down on immigration, and attempted deportation, before moving on to the Holocaust.\n","id":"ff203ed2-98aa-4888-9c77-774f8c6aa807"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It\u2019s a fact that a large portion of the population doesn\u2019t wash their hands after touching their cock or vaginer. Even worse than that, touching the grime that we experience during every day activities. The greatest collection for this is the handle on the bathroom door. It seems like every public bathroom door opens up inwards, requiring you to grab it with moist hands considering you just washed them . Moist hands pick up much more germs than dry ones, so you have a combination of people with wet hands touching the handle, making it wet. Then someone who didn\u2019t wash touches it and, since it\u2019s wet, it picks up tons of germs. There are tons of seemingly nonsensical rules and guidelines that a state region requires when constructing a public building. I\u2019m not saying we should force every building to reverse bathroom doors as simple as it may be . But instead require new buildings to do this, then, maybe I can hope for a less disgusting world for my children. I am clinically insane so if this comes off as insane that\u2019s why.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should be a law that all bathroom doors open outwards so that you don\u2019t have to touch the handle after washing your hands.\n","id":"450ad1f1-9701-4361-a401-50c33b3e6113"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit Thank you all for your input. This is my first  thread, so I apologize if I have been a bit stubborn. I am by no means an expert on history or foreign policy I am going for my PharmD , so I appreciate all your comments, even on the comments where I got downvoted to hell. I should have made my opening statement more clear. Anyway, my opinion has definitely shifted. I will likely delete this thread within a day or two. Terrorism the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal Whether justifiable or not and that entirely depends on your viewpoint , the intentional targeting and destruction of civillians is terrorism. The terrorists on 9 11 were able to rationalize the killing of civillians and their own suicide with a similar mindset. Even if the outcome is positive, I don't believe the killing was justified the end doesn't justify the means . If you think it ultimately saved lives, that doesn't change the fact that innocent people were specifically targeted and killed, not just by collateral damage. The only reason that most don't view the United States' actions as terrorism is because we won the war. . Edit For those of you who think that it was justified would you be the one to drop the bomb? Why or why not?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were just as much terrorist attacks as 9\/11.\n","id":"7904a5a3-6236-4c95-af14-c42467ef4de2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>Social justice platforms such as the Southern Poverty Law Center have been proven to do no or little research resulting in lost lawsuits and millions of dollars given to their victimsSPLC Pays $3.3 Million Settlement to Counter-Extremism Group It Called \u2018Anti-Muslim\u2019 Colleges and students implicitly trust such organizations doing no research themselves. This purposefully gives organizations like colleges and students bias against those not deserving of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should not be up to social justice movements to decide whether or not a speaker is granted a platform, because social justice movements are inherently political and therefore lack the independence to judge whether or not certain speech is harmful enough to be banned from being granted a platform.\n","id":"8c096c72-5471-4c98-a2ca-1c1f3cf66653"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To be clear, I'm talking about non Asian people who openly admit they prefer to date Asians. To only date Asians in an Asian majority country or community is something different because of the statistics of that dating pool. When someone manages to consistently only pursue Asians in an area where they are a minority, it is significant. I hear I'm interested in the culture or I like the way they look as explanations, but I've never seen one of these people go after partners of just one country culture. They don't exclusively date Chinese instead of Japanese or Vietnamese, Thai, Filipino, etc. It's any and all Asians, which to me says it isn't a cultural understanding or appreciation because these cultures are different. This would also make it seem it isn't a certain aesthetic because not only is there a lot of variation in faces and builds from person to person, this is especially true for East Asian vs Southeast Asian vs Polynesian ethnic groups. The only common features I can think of is dark hair and dark eyes, but that isn't exclusive to Asians. Because of the above, I think yellow fever is the result of that idea of the docile, submissive Asian or Asian people as sexualized Asian schoolgirl K pop idol tropes, and I think those are harmful stereotypes. The way I look at it, it just seems like a form of objectification. It erases the individual identity of the potential partner based on generalizations, stereotypes, and fantasies, so I don't see how it's healthy or fair. In short, it's right to find it creepy . gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think \"yellow fever\" where non-Asians exclusively seek out Asians for romantic partners is a shallow and negative thing based on harmful generalizations and stereotypes\n","id":"4189f90c-ea8f-4812-a52c-a503a721f74c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>College is supposed to be for intellectuals people who want to pursue intellectual, professional careers. Shifting the focus from displays of intelligence and knowledge to whether or not you go to the food pantry every weekend will hurt students academically and intellectually inclined because inevitably, when you make test scores and rigorous coursework not matter you make your university more susceptible open to less intelligent, less knowledgeable students. It's likely there will be a significant drop in high quality students in these universities and because of that, classes will have to slow pace for slower students and students of high intellectual capacity will be denied entrance into university because of not being able to commit to as many community services hours as their less intellectual counterparts due to actually focusing on academic work. In fact, this will be another blow to Asian students who are already being hurt by affirmative action. Such an admission standard would much better suit community colleges and trade schools where lower quality students are already more common such institutions also better suit their career capacities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"College admission reform is detrimental to intelligent and knowledgeable students who focus on academia.\n","id":"38b42eb1-67a5-419a-aef4-5d5ca2649944"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>By way of analogy, humans, despite being 'designed' with values that are supposed to maximize reproductive fitness, regularly find ways to fulfill those values that do not maximize reproductive fitness, because we don't actually care about what is 'intended', we care about what maximizes our own values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An intelligent paperclip maximizer could understand perfectly well what it was intended to do, while still actually choosing to do what fulfilled its own goal structure i.e. paperclip maximization.\n","id":"cb22726a-7568-45b0-9c63-44dbae8336b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Two Canadian military personnel were killed in two completely unrelated events, a few days apart. American media is trying to frame this as Canada's 9 11 and Canadian media is exercising slightly more self control, but throwing around terrorism and the new normal as if our country has been shaken to its core. Neither of the attacks were massively coordinated events that required years of planning and significant preparation to execute, but were carried out by two unconnected troubled individuals. Because one had pretty obvious interest in ISIS, and the other converted to Islam and was applying for a Libyan passport, everyone is having a field day with this and calling it terrorism. Compare that to three RCMP officers being killed by a white guy recently, and the reaction is night and day. These two attacks fit the narrative of ISIS ISIL Islamic State bad, foreign, radical, terrorists. These men were not considered Canadians acting as Canadians, but radicalized by an ideology from half the world away by a group of people who are not Christians, therefore they are religious extremists. We can distance ourselves from their actions because they really aren't acting the way Canadians do, while justifying the government talking about increased security measures, new legislation, and our participation in a war we have no part in. If these two attacks happened to be by white guys, women, or someone else that doesn't conveniently fit the stereotypical terrorist profile, the response would be this is a tragic case of two troubled individuals who happened to do something horrible in the same week, not TERRORISM IN CANADA Am I missing something? Please Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Canadian politicians and media are reacting to the \"acts of terror\" disproportionately because it fits their current agenda.\n","id":"be11108a-756d-4049-99e2-5261ac8ea26c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>If felons are considered too immature to vote, they should also not be trusted with buying alcohol, driving cars and raising children, yet this is not the case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Felons have proven to have a lack of maturity and good judgement, which is an impediment to making good choices.\n","id":"b11e376a-e206-48c1-a148-9815bcc3d0f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On an individual level, I strongly believe in balancing budgets and not spending more than you earn. However, the United States has a lot of large scale investments that will pay off in the long term. For example if the U.S. funds the NEA, more money will be spent on public schools, but over time the population will be more educated and able to make more money for the U.S. in return. Also, unlike individual debt, the national debt is owned by many institutions both within the country and internationally, and we can't simply pay it off. I've seen this topic come up more frequently in the news in the past year. Why is this such an issue other than the shock of being a number bigger than most people see on a daily basis? More importantly, how and when do you think this will this become too big of an issue to be ignored?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think the U.S. national debt is a big deal.\n","id":"b62b0d84-e0ce-4082-a968-c1b2ab27c679"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please forgive the flowery language, I've spent a long time refining this view. I honestly want it to be changed, because holding this view is existentially painful. Economics is what dictates that a person from the United States will feel more empathy for an Italian than a Ugandan, a Japanese than a Somalian. For humans, our economic activity is closely related to how we think about each other and how we choose to interact. We view other cultures and societies first through the process of trade, and those who do not have anything we want in the near future are initially ignored. This self imposed ignorance can be overcome. A person can empathize with any other person if they put in the effort the frustrating reality is more that we cannot reasonably expend that much effort on simply relating with other people. In fact, it may simply be less effort to change the way we interact economically in a manner that allows us to relate to others as people. Equality is a necessary component of interaction if humans continue to use economics as the basis for social empathy. In that sense, we can suppose that our economics is an important, if not the most important, component of social interaction between large groups of people. Economics shape how we think about and interact with people that we don't identify as part of our inclusive group. People define their inclusive group on different scales for different situations. At home most would consider their family or their cohabitants as constituting their inclusive group. But at work, most people define their inclusive group as their co workers of approximately the same responsibility and compensation. Economically, we consider our inclusive groups to often be everyone that we can identify as having a similar lifestyle or opportunity. One might consider a person from a different part of their country to be part of their economic inclusive group just because they also use the same kinds of cars, food, shelter and clothing. No matter what setting, a larger amalgamation of people results in us loosening our internal idea of what our inclusive groups are, but never to include the entire group. We segregate our thought into spaces that do not force us to consider divisions within the group we are dealing with at any given time, and flock to those who we feel can understand our own unique position within the larger group. The challenge facing our society then is not to be more honest and fair in our dealings with others, but rather to include others on a species scale as part of the group we identify with. The honesty and fairness follow that process, not precede it. Few people are willing to wrong those that they feel are part of the same group, no matter how temporary or diverse that group is. It is a psychological threshold, and not a logical one. The mere presence of barriers to communication leads us to view the opinions, positions and values of others as being less important than our own. In many ways this is a very functional way of thinking. We must all consider our own values and opinions to be important, and indeed logic would have us believe that we hold the opinions we do because no one has presented a more compelling argument for any other opinion. The focal point is further back than our opinions, it lies within our belief in the worth of other people. Economics represents a situation where it is dysfunctional to continue thinking in this manner. How is it that economics, which we use in part to empathize on a social level, considers our needs to be irrelevant information? This is a recipe for suffering ad nauseum , in that we set our selves up emotionally to seek empathetic truth in our exchange, but find only inhumanity and desolation. A profit centered incentive theoretically rewards those whom bring our society advancement and new opportunity. In fact, that is nearly the entire motivation for participating in society as we now operate. This leads to a society controlled and paced by those that can understand better than others. It inherently places more value on those who are able to consider an issue from multiple perspectives, whether those are psychological or logistic. This value encourages others to try and better understand so that they may be rewarded by the economy we have. This should lead to a perpetual advancement of knowledge, understanding and technology, whereby those that best understand are those that make decisions. While there are many ways such an economy can go wrong, and in some cases already has, what is most interesting about this approach is that we have fundamentally bought in to a system where people serve our economy, instead of our economy serving people. If one is to put in enough effort, our economy promises reward, but only after penance has been apportioned. The people of our society, no matter the scale of society, have become beholden to a system which at its core is for the purpose of advancing the edge as fast as possible, instead of launching society towards anything. It is not an exaggeration to say that our economy condemns us to subsist, while providing the illusion of progress to sate our emotional turmoil. The emotional impact of such a situation is fierce. Even in the developed world, the inescapable emotional suffering our economy metes out causes us to perpetually seek comfort and meaning in many other places, such as religion. That is not to say that faith is merely a by product of our economically induced emotional pain, although I understand some may see it that way. Rather, it leads us to expect things of our faith that it is not equipped to provide, because our economic system which should be providing them is failing. We seek emotional reward in belief, whether that is religious, spiritual, political or scientific. But these things are not for the purpose of serving emotion, and all of them are areas of knowledge which are greatly harmed by emotional motivation and decision making. In fact such behavior is so dangerous that many systems of religious and spiritual belief indicate that people must overcome their internal emotional disruption before they can receive the rewards of these fields. Is it any wonder that our world has been plagued by religious violence and intolerance, when the first instruction of many beliefs is to seek emotional serenity that our society is not only failing to provide, but actively working against? Our frustration as a society is expressed in the only way we have direct control over our interactions with other people. We seek confirmation in those that understand us, and release in those that do not. Such a system is and will always be a counter productive use of effort and worth. Faced with the inner turmoil and emotional suffering that our society requires, we often see two solutions to commiserate with those who agree, and to silence those who do not. Such decision making narrows our view of the world, and lessens our understanding, which is the opposite of what our economy is designed to require. The understanding which our economy is designed to reward is curtailed by our emotional selves, which leaves only those that can suppress emotion or have created a healthy outlet as our leaders. That leaves us with either sociopaths, or people that are viewed as being inhumanly perfect that are tarnished by the merest suggestion that they might be as damaged and fallible as the rest of us. Is it surprising that we have so many bad people making decisions? The combination of our economic and emotional models should be generating that result. They are poorly symbiotic systems, and each functions more as a parasite upon the other. Without a change in one, our society will self destruct further and further down the path of irrationality. As it is easier to change our economics than our emotional requirements as a society, it follows that what we really need is a close examination and restructuring of our economic exchange so that it builds with our other social systems, instead of working against them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Equality is a necessary component of interaction if humans continue to use economics as the basis for social empathy.\n","id":"bff517b7-1a5a-46aa-82a0-23665ef6eaf8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I ask because even though I am an \u201cagnostic atheist,\u201d or whatever you want to call people that don\u2019t stop moving along their journey to stick their flag in the sand, I do not agree with those e.g. Richard Dawkins that believe nothing good has ever come from organized religion. Also, to keep this from turning into the prototypical religious debate where everything diminishes to one side throwing random unknown facts at the other as they try to stay afloat in those thrown by the other, I hope that we can stay on topic I believe that at various points in time religion in general has been very beneficial to our species \u2013 not continuously, but at least to some discrete extent. I believe that cultural indoctrination of strict social norms surrounding abstinence over proper education has more than likely been beneficial to not just individuals but the progress of society as a whole \u2013 even in the face of being utterly devoid of personal freedoms and cognitive liberties. Therefore, the belief that we have never benefited from religion is untrue.  Sources 1 Anderson, J. Mueller, T 2008 . Trends in sexual risk behavior and unprotected sex among high school students, 1991 2005 The role of substance abuse. Journal of School Health, 78 11 575 580. 2 Hallfors, D.D., Waller, M.W., Ford, C.A., Halpern, C.T., Brodish, P.H., Iritani, B. 2004 . Adolescent depression and suicide risk association with sex and drug behavior. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 27 3 224 231. 3 Sabia, J. Rees, D. 2009 . The effect of sexual abstinence on females' educational attainment. Demography,46 4 695 715 .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If sexually-active youth are more likely than those that aren\u2019t to report problems with substance abuse 1,depression 2, and lower educational attainment 3, does that mean pushing abstinence as a sacrament *actually* is a benefit of religion to humanity? Why not?\n","id":"a7b35295-ab46-492e-ac5d-fda80069e40c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A scary sentiment I've seen pop up a few times in the context of feminism and rape culture consent is that consent can be unilaterally withdrawn after the fact. The holders of this viewpoint would consider a sexual encounter where both parties were sober and consented to having sex at the time to be rape if one of the participants later changed their mind and decided that No, turns out I didn't want to have sex with them . Crimes, fundamentally, require intent. Intent to have sex with willing partner is not the intent to rape someone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consent cannot be withdrawn after the fact.\n","id":"97d4c48e-8032-4009-a290-bb4b6f4131ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The subsidiarity principle would be weakened with stronger centralization leading to a larger concentration of funds. This makes corruption easier to hide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The temptation of corruption for politicians and civil servants will be higher than it is today in the EU.\n","id":"0732f96a-b067-49d3-b2b1-df6cc604b49f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Viruses meet the Requirements for Life?<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that RNA within viruses can exist without DNA could be evidence of a fundamental difference in the genetic material that makes up viruses and the genetic material that makes up all living organisms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All viruses do not contain DNA. Some viruses only possess RNA. All other living organisms possess both these polymers.\n","id":"d93b1c4d-f683-46aa-93c0-162f03b5fc3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the exception of laptops and desktops, and only if you are gonna use them for something very specific like professional video editing. The rest of the products by apple have a counterpart that does exactly the same, does it better, and for less money<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think most apple products aren't worth it\n","id":"532969bc-8247-41eb-8208-3b60e5fd85b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a danger that conscripted training for the military would give the government a platform to shape and control young people's minds, which is an abuse of power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The military, and conscription itself, are posited on instilling obedience in citizens, and not questioning superiors. This mindset is dangerously dictatorial.\n","id":"dfd800f7-fe97-4bde-a527-7c85fdfb3357"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Outside doctors can be called into hospitals for terminations in the first trimester. Abortions after the first trimester require the doctor to be a member of staff A lack of doctors who do not conscientiously object could be problematic in these cases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the majority of doctors in a given place, such as Italy refuse to perform abortions, difficulty in finding a willing doctor could cause a woman to run out of time and ultimately not be able to get the procedure performed.\n","id":"a3ecf9a4-8609-486d-9207-b7d5b77800ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you just look at the world around you, which race has accomplished the most in history? The whites. We founded America and other countries, most of the top philosophers throughout history are white. Now if you look at today, most of the murders that are being committed is by the blacks and the hispanics. That cannot be disputed. If you look at the inner city schools and the projects, it is mostly blacks and other races. I myself helped tutor at a remedial math course at a community college, about 80 of the students were black, the other 10 being hispanic on top of other races and the rest of the 10 being white. That being said, I do not HATE black people and other races. I think there is a lot of good non white people actually. I'm just saying that white people are naturally more evolved and smarter. So that being said, I would never publicly voice this opinion unless it's in front of friends that believe this way too. Actually, I used to try to stay away from racial thought and believe that we are all equal. It wasn't until one of my racist friends pointed all of this out to me. So he changed my view to a non politically correct one. I'd like to see other points of view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Caucasian is the superior race, and anyone who says other wise is just trying to be politically correct. I feel bad for thinking this\n","id":"61fc5bf4-1ef1-425b-bffa-81bfc1cfc118"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a frequent lurker of r  and I read topics dealing with religion with extra attention, but I never saw the point I want to make today emerges in a . For those who won\u2019t read me until the end, I\u2019m gonna repeat my point here so there are no misunderstanding What I am discussing here is the impact of the religion worldwide on the scale of the whole human history considering these scales, Abrahamic religions were more harmful than beneficial to the human race. I\u2019m from a religious family and from the start of my conscious life I was not able to grasp my mind around the concept of religion. I mean I understand it and can see what it brings to some individuals, but if you look at it from a broader perspective religions impact on the Human race I just don\u2019t get why we are still messing around with such a detrimental idea. As soon as I reached 11 years old, I was having a lot of trouble keeping up with my family\u2019s faith. At 13 years old, I had a talk with them and they came to accept my lack of faith. From then on, I lived without the belief in a God or any other kind of Supreme Being. That\u2019s enough for the context, let\u2019s start Monotheist religions have been detrimental to almost every single aspect of human culture and development. Here are my main issues with Abrahamic religions 1 If you just accept faith without proof, what else do you accept? Being faithful mean at some point accepting without proof. I think this is very disturbing especially for a child. What kind of message do you send a 12 years old when you tell him he just has to believe it? If he accepts religion, why can\u2019t he use the same process on topics such as politics \u2018conservatives pro life whatever are right even if I don\u2019t fully understand it because my parents X figure is a conservative or because of X reason they have to be right\u2019 2 Religion is terribly harmful Religion\u2019s death count is so high. I have no specific number in mind but the high death count of religion is common knowledge. Just considering at all the wars and other violent events Crusades, violent conversions, Jihadism\u2026 that are religion related makes you realize how many human lives were destroyed by faith. We are just talking about actual deaths here. Now add to this all the lies, struggle and expropriations made in the name of religion and you have another bunch of human lives destroyed or impaired because of it witch hunted, gays forced into hiding. 3 Abrahamic religions are a vector of patriarchy Monotheist religions promote a patriarchal culture to me this is one of the main root of the huge issues we are still having regarding the position of women in society. Monotheist religions normalize patriarchy Islam and Judaism are stuffed with rules telling woman how to behave, when to have a child, when and how to fuck properly so God is not offended\u2026 We are carrying these burdens around since so long that they became the norm. Catholicism is no better, every monotheist religion promotes having child and a family and it comes with rules and advices on how women mothers should behave. Whatever these rules are, even if they may be harmless in your point of view, they normalize the idea that women must abide by a different set of rules specific to their gender. Moreover, this set of rules if often written by males. 4 Abrahamic religions are a vector of animal exploitation Monotheist religions promote and normalize animal killing and mistreatment. Religious are old and coming from a world where killing animal was may have been a necessity. In today\u2019s world it\u2019s not, yet having absolute belief in a book that tells you over dozens hundreds of pages how to properly slash the throat of animals put you in a mindset where animal killing and exploitation is business as usual. Just like on feminism, I think the vegan cause would have moved way faster in a world without monotheist religions. 5 Abrahamic religions are forces slowing social progress and opposing meaningful changes On this one it seems to differ from one religion to the other but at the end it doesn\u2019t. Some religions are set in stone or almost Judaism and Islam , some are more prone to change Christians . Even for Judaism and Islam there can be new sects promoting a different interpretation. Monotheist religions in our current world are a conservative force, even if they are prone to accept changes. They slow the debate on issues that should have been definitely solved years ago end of life, same sex relationships, abortion\u2026 More than slowing the debate, they are a complacent force siding voluntarily or not with governments on this one they keep the public opinion focused on these non issues while the real one are left undiscussed. Political Economic Social\u2026 6 Abrahamic religions promote a human centered perspective of the world Abrahamic religions promote a human centered perspective of the world in the Genesis, the world is created for man, and man is created on the 6th and last day, stressing its importance. The current text of the Genesis, if we can put any trust in it but let\u2019s do it for the sake of the argument, see point 7 is eloquent on this issue \u201cBe fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.\u201d Genesis 1 26 30 English Standard Version ESV 7 The religious texts we have today have almost nothing in common with their original if they ever existed The belief of the relevancy accuracy of religious texts is one biggest hoax still going on. Any person with some rudimentary knowledge about text transmission and translation can understand that whatever is in our current Bible Torah Coran is far from what was in the original texts if they ever existed. Torah was transmitted orally for years before being put into writing. The Bible texts\u2019 were heavily translated for instance, the old testament text now available in English went through Hebrew gt Greek gt Latin Vulgate gt English 4 layers of translation and as much of its original meaning lost . Moreover, our knowledge of the ancient forms of the languages used in those text might be incomplete Hebrew is still spoken today but it doesn\u2019t mean we know everything about the Hebrew used thousands of years ago. There is one good example I like to give to help people understand the issue with the transmission of a specific text over millennia The Odyssey. We have no idea who Homer was, or even if he was a real person or multiple ones. We have no certainty regarding the actual date when The Odyssey was set in stone to reach its current form that we know. We may have lost numerous passages of it and some others are mistranslated they may be referring to a specific event or person we have no trace of for instance. Parts of the Odyssey are still missing there are some narrative coherence issues in the Odyssey that suggests it. Homer may be multiple persons from different areas and time. I have no knowledge about the writing and transmission of the Coran but I think the story is similar and the same issues arise transmission over centuries, shift from spoken to written, multiple different versions\u2026 8 If we accept Bible as fact, God is the worst person you ever met The Abrahamic God is a scum. He\u2019s theatrical as fuck, raze entire countries to prove a point and seem as emotional as humans. He\u2019s also the killer with the highest death count humanity ever known, if we admit his existence and the Old Testament he killed more than Hitler or Mao. He\u2019s prone to rage and make distinctions between his creations those who honor him are granted his protection The Hebrews in the Old Testament , those who don\u2019t are disposable. A reading of the Old Testament is very instructive on the matter just on one specific event, let\u2019s say for instance the Exodus, God killed many with his plagues humans and beasts. Just one of the 10 plagues, the death of firstborns makes his death count sky high. 9 Heaven and Hell makes your time on Earth secondary Abrahamic religions come with the belief in Heaven and Hell. That causes numerous issues to arise. Indeed, as Pascal noted what happens over an eternity is far more important for you than what can happen over a lifetime. He uses this observation to argue that whether God exists or not, your best bet is to be faithful because by forbidding yourself your earthly thus temporary pleasures you assure yourself an eternity of well being the alternative in his perspective being a lifetime of pleasure to risk an eternity of pain if God does exist . Thus to his mind, being faithful and abiding by God\u2019s rule is simply the safest bet. Well I use the same premise to argue that believing in Abrahamic religion thus accepting the concepts of Heaven and Hell makes you consider your human life as secondary, compared to the eternity waiting for you after. This is to my mind perfectly insane we only have one certainty, the one that we exist here on earth. Moreover, this is the base of some of the most twisted thinking process emerging out of the interpretation of religious texts, like the \u201cI kill in the name of God\u201d fallacy. 10 Religion gives a meaning to your life so you don\u2019t have to find any Believing give a meaning to your life see 9 . By doing so, it prevent yourself from having to wonder about it. You don\u2019t question yourself about it, you don\u2019t try to figure it out. It frees yourself from this burden, which is why some people come to believe, but then you don\u2019t question it there is no need for you to find your personal meaning. Being faithful can make you accept the most absurd situations because you think God is behind it. On the other hand, living with no belief in God makes your life at first senseless. It\u2019s your daily quest, your lifetime quest to find it. It forces you to put yourself out here and try new thing, try to find meaning in what you do, your actions and your engagement. Regarding Abrahamic religions\u2019 institutions, their corruptness sickens me the Catholic church has one of the biggest concentration of pedophiles of the planet and even those who doesn\u2019t take part in pedophile acts are involved in their covering, if they are high enough in the hierarchy. This makes the pedophilia widespread and yet unresolved for centuries. Jewish\u2019s Kosher certification is becoming a business and controlled by centralized institutions to talk about what I know, in France, the Consistoire de Paris is the institution delivering the Kosher stamp. It can cost thousands of euros just to get an inspector come to your restaurant in hope to obtain it. Before concluding this long post, I wanna anticipate one of the counterargument I might receive regarding institutions yes, Catholic Church hundreds of years ago was building schools and universities, spreading knowledge but which one? and providing support to populations, and still is. Other religions institutions too. But consider how mighty and potent the Church once was. They had as much money and power or even more than most states. Their accomplishment are narrow considering this fact. I understand that on a personal level, some people find comfort in religion I\u2019m expecting you to tell me about this guy who used to live a terrible life that found God and the right path at the same time. But this is an individual situation. What I am discussing here is the impact of the religion worldwide on the scale of the whole human history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abrahamic religions, their institutions and the belief in a God are more detrimental than beneficial to Humanity: let\u2019s kill the idols and move on.\n","id":"ff17135a-440d-4ada-9fe8-01eb3979f847"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that companies in America and Canada should not be allowed to capitalize off of child labor. In our own countries or by outsourcing our work to foreign countries that have child labor. This view comes from my own personal life experiences, as my step father owns chinese children workers, and uses them to produce products for his American Canadian company. He's visited them yearly and the conditions they are working in is horrendous, especially for a child. The suicide rates of factory workers in foreign countries is ridiculously high and the abuse children suffer at the hands of their factory is wrong. Instead I think, in all honesty, that businesses should be forced to withhold from using foreign countries for labor until their child labor laws are changed and the children are better taken care of. The threat of losing business would, I think, force these countries to change the way they do their business for the better. But, in the end, a business that runs from America or Canada, countries that understand the value of human life and value their childrens education and quality of life and opportunities over a companies bottom line, should not be allowed to profit from this gross abuse of human rights. I know my view is steeply biased against this due to personal involvement. I hate my stepfather and the things he's done. But I truly believe that the abuse and manipulation of young children for grunt work is wrong and that changes need to start being made. And since we can't force another country to change it's laws, we can instead force our countries businesses to follow the laws of their place of business.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"American and Canadian companies should not be allowed to capitalize off of child labor in other countries.\n","id":"e2826e02-abad-4502-87c1-50581d5da326"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Republic or Monarchy?<|ARGUMENT|>The concept of monarchy is undemocratic. If the monarch retains any significant political powers as they do in Belgium and the U.K. for example these are unjustifiable. Why should the opinion of just one person, in office purely by accident of birth, be able to influence the outcome of elections e.g. in the U.K. if no party has an overall majority in parliament or of political decision-making e.g. the U.K. and Belgium again, where the monarch has to sign legislation before it becomes law? Monarchy may also be used to prop up other unjustifiable elements within the constitution, e.g. the House of Lords in the U.K.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept of monarchy is undemocratic. If the monarch retains any significant political powers a...\n","id":"621a90dc-aebb-4ce0-bbf6-ec51a84ab0cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love animals, but I think the lengths that someone will go to for their pets is ridiculous. Recently, I was driving at about 30 MPH going home when a small dog dashed out from one of the houses and ran across the street right before my car. Following close behind the dog was a man blindly darting after it without regarding the cars on the road me and another car on the oncoming lane . I almost hit the dog AND HIM. Having pets are nice and they're also family, but you should not sacrifice your life too AND leave others with a guilty conscience if they did hit you with their car I see videos and articles of people saving animals like the dog that got stuck in the well or firefighters saving the pets alongside its humans. Those are acceptable Those are typically thought out and are calculated risks or are performed by rescue professionals. It would NOT be okay if in a fire, the owner was saved and dove into the flames to save his pet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People value pets too much for their own good\n","id":"968e7744-849d-47b0-ab28-afd51195c746"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To explain my point, take this example. Person A and person B have the same grades test scores EC's, which are good enough to go to a top tier university. Person A goes to a top tier university, taking on somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 in debt, but makes great connections and has a great bullet point for their resume. Person B goes to a lower ranked university, but on a large scholarship, and graduates between 0 and 40,000 in debt. If both of these students have their student loans bailed out, Person A basically gets a free pass on their loans and gets a better degree than person B, which would unfairly propel them ahead of person B. Because such a plan would unfairly impact people who made responsible financial decisions, I find it unethical. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A \"student debt bailout,\" while it would stimulate the economy, would be massively unfair to those who have sacrificed to graduate debt-free or near-debt-free\n","id":"a51192f1-c269-42f5-8897-8e37ea1d84ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>The vast majority of police training is not applicable to an likely indoor defensive gun use where only one possible weapon will be used. The part of police training required is a very small percentage of overall police training.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most US police officers train to shoot a very limited amount of time per year. This amount of training is easily reachable for any gun carrying volunteer on his spare time.\n","id":"a6672077-61b9-4b94-b61a-3056dd54d042"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This has been triggered by a sign put up on a TGI FRIDAYS in Washington that said they would not serve anyone who smelled like cannabis. What's the difference between someone wearing a cologne that gets right up your nose or that you just straight up don't like and someone smelling of weed? You hear the argument of I just don't like the smell quite a lot and if there is actually a joint on the burn then I totally get it. It stinks. But unless there is or has been smoke I don't see any grounds for argument that couldn't be used against someone's cologne or deodorant etc<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Smelling of weed is no different to smelling of a horrible perfume.\n","id":"77162229-87fe-445c-8af7-ff9eef6cdb45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The basic idea of projection is that I interpret other people, their motives and their behaviours through the lens of my own subconsciouly projected material. I try to expunge and push out my own complexes into the world, I see other people as loving because I am loving I am sadistic because I have an inner parent sadistically abusing my mind. The problem with me accusing you of projecting is that you can turn around and accuse me of doing the same, so when it comes to discussing substantive issues, politics, virtually any socio political antagonistic discourse, we cannot make any headway with the idea of projection since nothing is real, everything is just us projecting our minds out into the ether. This idea threatens to evaporate all reasonable discourse and truth itself if we are all just projecting, what would it mean for anything to be true? What is intersubjectivity if we are all just pressing out our unconscious conflicts?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea of projection in psychodynamic theory does not work because it is solipsistic\n","id":"0ac12c3f-6f50-47e0-b680-6e39a2a9dc40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Podcast guidelines should concern content \u201cintended as\u201d rather than content that \u201ccould be construed as\u201d insensitive.<|ARGUMENT|>Since any content can be deemed subjectively offensive, nothing will be safe from censorship under a 'construed as' rule.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These pale in comparison to the risks of quashing a sensible level of free speech.\n","id":"0c481c4c-c1cf-49bb-bea6-bac00046a86f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>Addiction whether to porn, sugar, cannabis, whatever is a disease which comes about because someone is trying to make up for a sadness. Perhaps they are lonely and don't get enough satisfying social interaction, or perhaps they feel that they have no professional future. By keeping drugs illegal, we reinforce this cycle by stopping these people from coming forward and getting help out of their difficult situations. If drugs were legal, people could acknowledge their problems and ask for help.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When drugs are legalised, people who are addicted may feel more comfortable seeking help and support as they won't be viewed as criminals in the way they currently are.\n","id":"f3d183de-3cb6-4e55-8690-e1d80837499d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Context Despite the overwhelming evidence that all human life so far has been subject to mortality, I still remain skeptical it's impossible to achieve immortality. There are already effectively 'immortal' lifeforms existing on Earth eg. certain jellyfish, plants, lobsters \u2014 why couldn't clever scientists eventually transpose the benefits to human life?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I remain unconvinced that my death has a fixed 100% probability,\n","id":"20abb1f9-7a11-4e29-ba7c-3a560a69b301"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>If a woman is afraid that she will be harassed if her nipples are showing, she can choose to cover her nipples. \"Freeing the nipple\" is only about making it *permissible* for a woman to show her nipples, not *mandatory*.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women wouldn't be forced to show their nipples. Restricting them for their own safety suggests that women can't be trusted to make safe decisions for themselves.\n","id":"3d57e9e2-b6f3-4e51-babc-c5cc7df7ca7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Bee Products Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In the rural areas of Bangladesh, honey has a lot of uses the rural areas, honey, a marvellous gift of nature, has a lot of uses. Those cover a wide area including herbal medication, a substitute for goorh molasses in making ceremonial delicacies and a welcome sweetener for newborns. Herbal medication, a substitute for goorh molasses in making ceremonial delicacies and a sweetener for newborns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Bangladesh around 25.000 people p. 109 are engaged in honey collecting.\n","id":"cec26f86-8f35-4667-8ec7-5b4f5f1d2f4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of parents see their kids playing professional football as a gateway to get out of poverty, or at the very least, a gateway to the elevation of the family's economic status.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents are biased toward letting their children play the sport because of various factors, and as such, their decision to let their children play could be coerced.\n","id":"b9752dda-ac96-467b-9de7-b0d0e8308bf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>Russia was poised to invade Japan. Japan did not have the power to withstand the force of Russia, USA, Europe and European colonial empires.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the rescript of Hirohito's surrender broadcast he emphasized the Russian attack as reason without mentioning the atomic bomb.\n","id":"a0b7ce8e-1284-4d4e-8156-9bfcc3cf69ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>She is in the middle of a divorce. Maybe she is afraid she will be outcast by her loved ones. Money can be a big realistic problem too. These are cases that might lead to abortion, besides rape. Making people take full responsibility for things they cannot control is wrong. Many people such as the government, the man, or the prejudices of society in whole is part of the blame. But, banning abortion without proper welfare is shoving all the blame upon the woman.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many reasons a woman may not be equipped to or want to raise a child. In these cases, it is important that she is able to choose abortion.\n","id":"cdeb881b-1bc6-4b60-9dc4-f6d2a5b1ef10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>AKMs might lower the barriers to starting new wars, presenting the illusion of a quick victory and without much loss of force \u2013 particularly human losses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AKMs would lower the threshold of going to war, leading to more suffering in the world.\n","id":"676ee765-6f29-4eaf-9b6e-2d438f75cfd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Aborting a Disabled Child Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Families with a disabled child, or children are more likely to be single-income homes as one parent takes the caregiver role. This puts substantial financial strain on the family.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion in cases of disabled children would save families the higher financial burden of supporting such offspring.\n","id":"d06f717c-8aa6-4fe6-a984-dcd7cc26260e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey all, earlier today my girlfriend who works at clinical research and diagnostics firm sent me a photo of her lunch made up of fried chicken, collared green, mac and cheese, and corn bread along with saying \u201ccelebrating black history month\u201d. I told her that I didn\u2019t really think it was cool to link a meal of fried chicken, etc. to \u2018black history\u2019, as I viewed it as being racially insensitive due, of course, to the age old stereotype of \u201cblack people love their fried chicken and collared greens\u201d . What really piqued my interest was she then told me that that wasn\u2019t HER viewpoint, but instead the cafeteria\u2019s at the company she works for. In a subsequent message, she told me the sign in the cafeteria read, \u201cCelebrate black history month with roasted chicken, mac n cheese, green beans, corn bread, and collards greens. Pick 2 sides.\u201d Full disclosure, I am a white male, so I may not be understanding the culture 100 correctly. But, as far as I have always known, and what I had equated this too, was ethnic food such as Cajun food is known as such due to the various spices, and tastes that arise from their dishes. To me, this is not the same with the black community and fried roasted chicken. Due to stereotypes that have plagued this country in the past, I saw this action on the part of the cafeteria as being racially insensitive, and unnecessary given previous stigmas associated with the contents of the meal itself. We both agreed that I should take this to the  community in order to gain a viewpoint hopefully from including members of the black community in order to gain a better understanding of whether or not this is racially insensitive, or does fall under \u201cethnic food menu\u201d. She also wanted me to mention that the cafeteria was also having a trivia contest involving black trailblazers, which I thought was an awesome addition to Black History Month. Let me know your opinion<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Girlfriend\u2019s Workplace Offering a \u201cBlack History Month Lunch\u201d of Fried Chicken and Collared Greens is Racist\n","id":"464109ff-301b-4017-af26-1b32b187052a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was always taught in school to follow my dreams that with enough hard work, practice, and dedication you can become anything realistic that you want. While I do encourage that children should choose a career that they enjoy, telling a child that wants to become a youtuber or something of the like that they can do whatever they want is just setting them up for failure. There are so so many youtubers, actors, comedians, and just in general famous people that if a kid decides to take up one of these roles, they'll end up with no recognition since the market is sooo over saturated. Unless they have some way of really standing out. Most unpopular youtubers comedians etc don't make very much money anyway. And they'll be thinking but I thought I could be anything I wanted. Which is, in my opinion, a bad mindset. In general, I think that children should not be taught this, rather to choose a job that is actually realistic and will not have a 1 in a million chance of it actually making decent money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children should not be taught to follow their dreams, rather find a hobby that will make money\n","id":"4e7add75-0b1b-45db-b3de-9211f872137b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Democrats have a responsibility to be the voice of the millions of Americans who feel like they are not welcome in Trump's America. By cooperating with Trump, they tacitly endorse his insults.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cooperating with Trump makes him appear to be just like any other Republican president, something he is not given the themes of xenophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia prominent in his campaign.\n","id":"4b060258-320e-49bc-8fe1-fe39cbc18725"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is really more of a general sentiment than anything objectively backed up with research. I have had these pessimistic thoughts for a long time, but what prompted me to put them down into a  was the podcast S Town . For those unfamiliar, the podcast is a documentary which centers around this eccentric guy from Alabama. Without giving too much away, this guy is sort of a neurotic genius who spends a lot of his time on the internet researching various things like climate change, environmental issues, food production issues, signs of social regression, etc., and the general point that he arrives at is that the unraveling of civilization is more immanent than anybody realizes. Besides very basic descriptions of this guy\u2019s research, I haven\u2019t acquainted myself with anything that would support the idea that we are closer to the end than we think. However, I think there is a core logical premise at work here which seems very intuitive to me human civilization is like a machine that propels itself forward without anyone at its helm, and it is only a matter of time before the machine runs itself off of a cliff. Without the metaphor, I am basically saying that there is no level of collective consciousness at work that can make us focus on the true existential threats that face our species, whether those might be environmental, resource depletion, etc. As a whole, we are blinded by the narrative of liberalism, which focuses on the right of the atomized individual to pursue property ownership. All other concerns are secondary to this, even those that stand to wipe us all out or destabilize us irreparably. The Trump election, Brexit, the racist conservative backlash in the wake of the European immigration crisis these all seem to confirm the general idea that our civilization lacks the level of consensus and coordination that would be needed to address pretty much any catastrophic problem that would pose an existential threat to civilization itself. This leads me to believe, generally, that things are going to get much, much worse before they ever get any better we are all fucked. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"human civilization will not be able to face its existential threats, and therefore we are all fucked.\n","id":"79b891f0-0cf0-4f80-8b26-faadea7de8cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to be most people around me are. They participated in them, they think they're great, etc. I'm a progressive like them, but maybe I'm becoming cynical? I think there is too much wrong with the women's march for me to support it or be excited by it It's more of a progressive women's march than a women's march . That's obvious from the list of concerns on their website, as well as by the well publicized rejection of conservative feminist groups, like pro life ones. Which is especially telling since half of women are pro life so the march is specifically excluding half of women. I know some of those women, and they aren't happy. While it's a women's march , the list of concerns on the website lists all the usual progressive issues, like LGBT rights, black lives matter, etc. On the one hand that makes sense, since some women are LGBT and some are black and so forth. And those are good causes in general. But there is a long list of other groups ignored. For example, religious freedom and the elderly women are actually overrepresented in both groups compared to men, yet they are hardly mentioned if at all. Other pressing issues like the recent rise in antisemitism, urgent veteran's issues, etc are ignored as well. So the list is troubling. In addition, if you try to follow the rule of some women are X, so X is a women's issue , then either you pick and choose your issues as just mentioned and end up with a faulty list however you try , or you end up caring about literally every issue except for specifically men's issues since women are in practically every group . Now, obviously men's issues have no place in this march, but that's the opposite of my point, which is that neither do many of the other issues. It all detracts from women's issues. Finally The march website specifically did not describe itself as a protest . Yet media coverage did, in particular because many of the people in the march saw it as an anti Trump protest. Which is fine but why not describe it as what it is? But that irks me even more we literally just had an election. The people had their chance to speak, and they did. Protesting the person that won the election is to protest the voting public. I think the voting public got it wrong, we elected a terrible candidate, but what does it help to shout at them you got it wrong so soon afterwards? Please convince me I'm wrong and the women's march is a good idea and something to be excited about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not excited about the Women's Marches\n","id":"c704248d-44d6-4fbd-8bdc-8db7ffc78d6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I thought a lot about morality and ethics and I came across Intentionalism. I believe the outcome of an action is, in the long term, never predictable for example, killing a baby would somehow be bad, but killing baby Hitler should be good? . As a result of this we can only possibly judge people by their intentions. But nobody ever intends to do a bad thing. Everybody has a set of believes about which thing would be right to do in a certain situation. Everybody has a set of moral rules, even if they boil down to Nihilism. Every person believes, that he does the right thing when he follows his rules, otherwise, he wouldn't do it. Thus, they want to do the right thing, thus every action is done with good intentions, thus, the action and thus the person, is good. My problem with this is, that there are people who disgust me, who I judge as bad people and I don't know why Have I made a mistake in my theory? can you ? also, english isn't my native language, so sorry if this is somewhat incoherent<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe we should never under any circumstances judge people.Every action is always good? !\n","id":"5d3373a1-b498-4292-933f-7219cfd4375f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Lesotho should be annexed by South Africa<|ARGUMENT|>For the Basotho in a landlocked country the free movement of their people is a right that is in large part dependent on the South African SA government rather their own national one. Its importance is shown by 40% of border crossings into South Africa being from Lesotho. Acknowledging the fact that Lesotho is an enclave state surrounded by SA, the ability of people to move freely depends on whether they are allowed to enter SA or not. There is corruption at border posts and the number of crossings results in long queues and slow service; 63% of border crossers experience problems.1 This is sometimes made even more difficult by SA government actions as before the World Cup in 2010 when border restrictions were tightened making it almost impossible for Basotho to leave their country.2 This happened due to the detention of several Lesotho nationals after a spate of criminal activities along the border. The same situation applies to trade. Lesotho is dependent on the trade with South Africa, even for goods that come from beyond South Africa as Lesotho has no port of its own most goods will have to be transported through South Africa. This dependency is rising. In 1980, Lesotho produced 80% of the cereals it consumed. Now it imports 70%.3 Annexation would eliminate these borders boosting trade between the countries, helping to make both richer. In the best interest of Basotho is to be able to control and be listened to by the entity that is metaphorically and literally feeding them. 1 Crush, Jonathan, \u2018The border within: The future of the Lesotho-South African international boundary\u2019, Migration Policy Series No.26, 2 Patel, Khadija, Lesotho and South Africa: \u2018Good fences make good neighbours\u2019, 19 April 2013, 3 Smith, Alex Duval, \u2018Lesotho's people plead with South Africa to annex their troubled country\u2019, theguardian.com, 6 June 2010<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Annexation will allow the free movement of Basotho people, goods and services\n","id":"632b8b51-2280-4c30-b890-8b485ddace00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sup Reddit, First off, I'm an American and will always consider the USA my home, but I have lived in Europe now for an extended period of time. The length of my stay has allowed me to remove myself from American social culture enough to take a step back and view it with a less personal and move objective point of view. I personally feel that there is a major amount of over sensitivity when it comes to people voicing their beliefs about certain social issues. If I really have to slap a label on myself, I would considered myself socially progressive. I have the utmost support for homosexuals, transgender people, ect. I think social programs are wonderful and whole heartedly support people who dedicate their lives to make the lives of others better. That being said, while still in the states I felt that I had to look both way before I would open my mouth so I wouldn't be chewed out by someone who might be offended. I have never gone out of my way to offend someone, but it all honesty it was hard not to. I NEVER use words such as fa ot, ni er, any other racial slur, or gay in a derogatory way . With all efforts to educate myself on topics such as Obamacare, transgender, along with other major social topics in the US, there was always someone to put me in my place because of how much I offended them. I fail to see how using the word bitch equates to promoting rape culture, how not understanding although asking questions and trying to learn what its like to be someone who is transgender makes makes ignorant and arrogant, and how if I don't agree 110 with what Obama says and does that I am racist and hate poor people. Numerous times I have seen others in both public and online platforms being called names and harassed for a simple lack of understanding of these social issues. I think the line of what constitutes political correctness has been drawn too far or close? Idk and that people need to take a step back and relax<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the U.S. has become overly sensitive in regards to many social issues\n","id":"fa4b318c-89b6-4f28-b193-af94fecdde97"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Civil unions vs. gay marriage<|ARGUMENT|>In its decision declaring the denial of the right to marry unconstitutional, Connecticut\u2019s highest court said: \"We agree with the following point made by the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., in its amicus brief: 'Any married couple reasonably would feel that they had lost something precious and irreplaceable if the government were to tell them that they no longer were 'married' and instead were in a 'civil union.' The sense of being 'married' \u2014 what this conveys to a couple and their community, and the security of having others clearly understand the fact of their marriage and all it signifies \u2014 would be taken from them. These losses are part of what same-sex couples are denied when government assigns them a 'civil union' status. If the tables were turned, very few heterosexuals would countenance being told that they could enter only civil unions and that marriage is reserved for lesbian and gay couples. Surely there is a constitutional injury when the majority imposes on the minority that which it would not accept for itself.\"8<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Word \"marriage\" is symbolic, should not be denied to gays\n","id":"511936ff-ef5e-4bb4-bc83-fb4d9850deb9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>so my view is driven by a couple points. The crime rate in America has dropped by 50 in the last 20 years. Violent crime and regular crime are declining fast. If we're measuring the effectiveness of a criminal prison system, I think this is the most important, if not the only important, metric to look at. Granted, I understand correlation does not equal causation. I understand that this might come from just peaking levels of crime, gradually lowering of the crime level over time, etc. Therefore, i'm going to suggest a proxy to calculate how much crime we've prevented by incarcerating so many people. In 2011, we threw ~ 2 million people in jail for crimes. The recidivism rate in America, or the rate that people who are let out of jail and then go and commit another crime, is around 77 within a 5 year timeline of release. Before I continue, I'll say i totally recognize America's prison system does not focus on rehabilitation and that if we had a better treatment strategy, we might be able to lower the recidivism rate. So i'll be generous. Let's cut the recidivism rate by 50 for the alternative scenario of if we were to have a larger focus on rehabilitation. Even then, our massive incarceration rate would be preventing 38 2 Million 760,000 Crimes annually. To address our massive incarceration rate, I would propose that America is a very different country and has a very different culture than most. Looking at global crime rates, America is one of the most, if not the most, violent and criminal countries in the world. Of Countries that can be considered First World or civilized, America's intentional homicide rate is the highest per capita with the only one higher being Mexico if you can even consider Mexico first world . You can't blame that on the incarceration rate. So yes, we are putting more people to jail than other countries, but you can't compare apples to oranges. America has a long history of racial tension, segregation, gangs, and violence and it's not academically fair to just say hey you're throwing so many people in jail compared to everyone else. Another notable statistic is that America has the highest number of reported crimes at 12 Million a year with the next country down being Germany at 2 Million. 6x the difference. Concession I will here concede that I know there is an inequitable distribution of arrests by race. I.e. black people are getting the short end of the stick. I'll also recognize that the majority of arrests or imprisonments are drug related or non violent related. I can't defend the first point but the first point is more of a problem with our police not our incarceration policy. To the second point, i say so what. A crime is a crime. At the end of the day, you don't need drugs to live. People on reddit make it seem like the illegality of drugs is outrageous. Not at all. At the end of the day, living in a society means you must accept its rules. If you don't like it, try to get the law changed, dont just break it. That kind of behavior and mentality is dangerous in itself. Anyways, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think in America, the prison system and the incarceration rate are working fine\n","id":"f6ee79ce-9070-4c98-83c2-c5d239b20984"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>During episode 'Chain of Command pt 2' Laforge: \"You know, this trip into the nebula's going to need someone who can do Titan's turn in their sleep. These mines need to be laid within 2 km of the Cardassian ships but the particle flux from the nebula will blind all the sensors except for this proximity detector. You're going to need one heck of a pilot to pull that off.\" Jellico: \"Is that you?\" Laforge: \"I could do it, but truthfully, the man you want is Commander Riker. He's the best there is.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Starfleet crews demonstrate equal ability to fly without computer aid or assistance and some of them are considered expert pilots. There is less evidence for them being as experienced aiming manually, though some examples exist among their tactical officers and command officers.\n","id":"b57b9b35-c6f7-48a9-9a76-b2f06ba1880e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is a gas tax the best way to fund infrastructure in the US specifically MI?<|ARGUMENT|>The higher demand for fuel efficient vehicles will force the auto industry to focus more of their budget on developing these.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Increased gas prices should result in more fuel efficient vehicles on the road.\n","id":"f57cd859-3c4f-4ad8-b373-72630c36ea24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many people of misunderstandings about different religions that are simply not true. With this they may become less tolerant of them without a basic understanding of what they stand for. This is why the public school system needs to have a course that teaches about different religions. I'm not saying they should make people believe what it's saying or anything I'm an atheist myself but it should be the same as any other book, or at least like any other religion like Greek Roman paganism etc . It would probably fit most into a History or Literature class for brief talking about it, but a World Religions class would be ideal. It goes without saying that it also cover Islam, as well as other religions. The information taught would be objectively factual and avoid any bias from the instructor, I.e. saying things like Christians believe instead of just stating the thing. The course would focus on the following What the passage was written to mean, including historical background and cultural details. How it is interpreted now How it shows that religions deity s It would not make anyone be forced to believe any of it, just show how different religions see the world. This way people would learn to be more tolerant and understanding of religions other than their own. TL DR Teach factually about different religions and their teachings to help people understand them and be more tolerant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"public schools should teach about the Bible\n","id":"b14294d1-6732-4034-9348-8ac3c4bee069"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Nickel, despite being worth 5 times more than the penny, is far less valuable than any other coin or note in U.S. currency. Here's why It can easily be mistaken for a quarter from a distance, causing people to pick it up only to be disappointed by what it really is. The penny does not have this problem, as it is the only coin that is brown. It does not have ridges on the edges. This makes it slightly harder to scratch off things like lottery tickets or gift card codes compared to a quarter or dime. It is far too big for what it is really worth. The penny and dime are very small, making it worthwhile to carry a lot of them since it does not take up too much space compared to their worth. The nickel is almost as big as a quarter and is actually thicker than one despite being worth 1 5 of a quarter. Finally, the nickel defaces the name of a great American Thomas Jefferson. This man wrote the declaration of independence and was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase, one of the most important and valuable deals in U.S. history, and we put him on a coin worth 5 cents. Lincoln, another hugely influential American, is on the penny, but also the 5 bill, which makes up for it. Jefferson only gets the nickel. I'm on mobile, so sorry if formatting is off. I look forward to some arguments against any of these points. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Nickel is the least valuable coin in U.S. currency.\n","id":"5ee1a6a4-4c67-4758-8e53-c15549feba40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Caveat I am approaching this whole discussion from the premises that the Trump administration is uniquely evil bad within the context of the past half century of American governance, hostile to liberal democratic small D structures, the progress the world has made in the post WWII era in terms of the cooperation and wealth built up among industrialized Western nations, civil rights, and the environment. I am not interested in debating those issues, merely the effectiveness of strategies being used to resist the current president's agenda. The harassment Trump administration officials may be deserved and cathartic, but that's not what I'm here to discuss. I'm hear to discuss the practicality of doing so. Right now the most crucial goals of those interested in resisting the Trump administration are to win seats for Democrats in the House and Senate and to otherwise resist his policies however we can. Many argue that harassing the president's officials will discourage them from working for him. Fair enough, but I just don't see that being effective. He already churns through staff quickly, and there always seems to be another candidate for the job. Others argue that it's our responsibility to voice our concerns and call the fascists out on their behavior. Also fair enough, but what does that do other than demonstrate that you can claim you did something ? Meanwhile, we know that the Trump faithful feel the need to defend their president from criticism. These sort of ambushes seem like they'll only strengthen that effect See Times article below . I would postulate that these actions will only get out the GOP vote in stronger force in November. Furthermore, it's clear that many Democrats and independents are divided on the issue, with many thinking that this incivility isn't the right way to go for multiple reasons, including those I argue here . If our top priority is to get Democrats elected, should we try to maintain the we go high approach to attract these voters and get them to support Democratic candidates rather than throwing elections once again by protest voting for third parties? Finally, while the GOP has a history of popular incivility, racism, and misogyny burning Obama effigies, birtherism, Trump that bitch, etc. , there is real danger in making this a political norm. Do we really want Democratic senators not served at a restaurant because they are pro choice? Do we want Democratic official harassed at dinner because they implement sensible gun control laws? Would we want an alternative universe Clinton official harassed over Benghazi or Pizzagate at a movie theatre? Whether founded in reason or not, these are issues that a community of Trump supporters care about as much as those on the left care about the children of asylum seekers. And let's not forget how bad it can get, from the bombings of abortion facilities and the shooting of Senator Giffords to corporate terrorism by ELF . Pursuing the low path as a method of resistance to Trump will only make this worse, and I feel that Trump's supporters have less hesitations and reservations when it comes to escalating this behavior hate crimes are on the rise, after all . To surmise these uncivil protests against Trump officials will only depress Democratic turnout, increase Republican turnout, and create a spiral in which both sides become more and more radicalized in their behavior with Trump supporters being, I feel, more prone to actual violence as seen in Charlottesville . .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Harassing Trump administration officials refusing service, shouting at them at dinner, etc., regardless of whether is if morally acceptable to do so or not, is practically a bad idea for those opposed to his administration to do.\n","id":"78e47b9b-72e6-4fc5-9fbd-6d6d1e37583a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't really understand why Barrack Obama is viewed as someone who actually gives a damn about the horrendous drug policies that are present here in America. Everyone always brings up that he pardoned a lot of people for non violent offenses, but what people fail to realize is that he didn't just let them walk free which is what I believe would be the just thing to do he simply shortened their sentences, so most of them could get out within a year or so and then spend the rest of their life on probation. It's a nice gesture no doubt, but seems more calculated and political, done so that anti drug folks wouldn't be too upset, and pro drug folks would be happy , than actually benevolent. Also at any point he could have appointed new leadership in the DEA and easily had marijuana rescheduled. But instead, under his administration, many medical marijuana establishments that were perfectly legal on the state level were raided by feds and the owners of those shops were given years in federal prison over running businesses that were not malicious in any way and we're perfectly legal in their respective states. So is there something Obama did that I'm missing? Something that actually attempted to make real progress on halting the war on drugs? Or did he just smoke pot in college?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obama hasn't done much to stop the drug war.\n","id":"72da278a-6c6c-4a24-bbe3-7d0e0d7f59d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do journalists have a moral obligation to display violent images?<|ARGUMENT|>Publishing pictures of violence by terrorists may lead to journalists becoming inadvertently complicit in publishing their propaganda.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By publishing these pictures, journalists may unwittingly contribute to the spread of objectionable content.\n","id":"2c462f59-fe39-4261-9697-473941fb9948"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not saying that pop music is the best music genre out there, but too often I hear people complain when a popular song comes on the radio. Other than the common opinion that pop music is annoying and overplayed, I do not understand a legitimate reason to hate it. Pop music is such a huge part of our everyday life and culture, whether we like it or not. Because it is basically impossible to ignore, it makes more sense to accept the music and have fun with it. Many people believe that pop music all sounds the same and that it lacks depth. While there is actually a lot of diversity in pop music, I can't argue that certain songs don't sound the same or that they are always deep and meaningful. However, I do not see a reason to hate them because of this. Ultimately I think pop music is fun and that it doesn't really do any harm. Also, popular music is popular for a reason.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Too many people hate on pop music for no legitimate reason.\n","id":"5ec3162c-1c2c-4bf0-8d63-342777ee5df8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is in the context of the Harry Potter books, the first book of which was changed from Philosopher's Stone to Sorcerer's Stone in the American version. This isn't my main quibble, though. It's how many words have been changed for the American version Things like 'mum' to 'mom', 'jumper' to 'sweater', 'motorway' to 'highway', 'football' to 'soccer'. I feel like these changes lower the authenticity of British English as a dialect of English. It's a book written about Britain by a British author, and I feel like the language of the books should reflect that culture. It's almost like translating a Japanese novel and replacing all Yen with dollars it belies the culture where the book came from. And I don't believe that American readers can't understand British dialect differences. I don't know for sure, so please correct me on this, but are British dialect vocabulary really difficult to understand? To make these changes seems to me to insult the ability of American readers to understand another culture, when it's so similar to their own. I wouldn't expect Americans to localise their content for Brits, either. We know what a bill is compared to a note we know you say 'mom' instead of 'mum', 'sidewalk' instead of 'pavement', etc. That's completely fine. If there was an American book written in America, it would feel jarring if it talked about sweets when I know American English has candy instead. Of course, American culture is so broadly exported through media, television and books, that it doesn't need to localise. Is it unreasonable, or vastly unrealistic, to expect people to learn British dialect differences when we export our own media? Now I'm naturally biased as a Brit, so please help me to get a more informed perspective. I'd like to know why localisation is important for two English speaking countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe British books\/films should have to change their content for Americans.\n","id":"35aeb260-9041-4f79-b326-e74889dfdec7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the NHS be privatised?<|ARGUMENT|>People often have to pay first and then they are reimbursed by their insurer Insurers will often try to avoid paying back costs which leaves patients out of pocket.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even with insurance, many people still cannot afford all the costs of private healthcare.\n","id":"2fe11459-9ae1-4fe3-8cb2-489099de2b58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be equal pay for elite sports women \/ men<|ARGUMENT|>The fact there is such a gap in earning between men and women in elite sports makes it almost impossible for girls to believe that they can secure a livelihood from their athletic practice regardless of how hard they try.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The gender pay gap in sport sends a very negative message to young girls about their value relative to men, or about the place for women within sport, and the value placed on female sporting achievement.\n","id":"cffee046-5d3d-47aa-bee9-be8416f4a5e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First lets talk about legacy. Working to leave a legacy is meaningless. You lose your consciousness when you die. So even if people build monuments to you or revere you it doesnt matter since you do not get to enjoy that respect. Besides, how does it even affect someone if a group of people respects them in their mind? It doesnt unless the respect is shown. Also, even great and honorable and moral people are \u00f1ot remembered or revered by people today. They are often forgotten. Therefore giving your life, efforts to leave a legacy like scientific, artistic achievements, military bravery, etc basically being a notable person on wikipedia is utterly irrational and meaningless. Only the respect shown to you directly in your daily life is what matters. Second, lets talk about social status. Social status is always relative and you will always be less than someone at some qualities. You mihht be less beautiful, less wealthy, less respectable etc etc. Even psychologists say that you should build self esteem that is unconditional and not dependant on what people think. They say be yourself. Besides a 100 years from now our wealth and conditions would be laughed at. Besides status also differs between persons and society. One person may put another on pedestal or one group might but another may not. You cannot get social status or prestige from everybody and you cannot change people. Therefore striving to increase social prestige or status like becoming famous, wealthy etc is irrational and meaningless. Changemyview<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Striving to leave a legacy or increase social status is irrational and meaningless\n","id":"ca162127-01fc-4929-97f3-1361b0366556"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is drag turning mainstream hurting LGBT rights?<|ARGUMENT|>Critics have blamed the white- and cis-washing of the Stonewall movie on a predominantly white and cisgender LGBT movement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The LGBT community has failed to represent people of colour.\n","id":"dffea753-2955-4e51-b9d2-142f8492d0ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>Since a common principle of most organized religions is to indoctrinate new members, the amount of funding a religion might receive could either enhance or reduce its ability to gain new members relative to the ability of another religion, thereby inadvertently promoting one religion over another.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All religious organisations, regardless of their work, promote their own religion. That is not something a liberal democracy should actively facilitate.\n","id":"7415927e-e1dc-437f-996a-0a5e02f85158"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As discussed in the post title, Apple used to be a super innovative company. Really unique, groundbreaking products technology and great marketing , today not so much. What have they done since? Post Steve Jobs, they\u2019ve done Apple pencil, deliberately slowed down older IOS phones to make you buy a new iPhone, Apple maps still sucks, released a ton of emojis, got rid of the headphone jack despite everyone telling them not to it seems like a company that used to be cutting edge has really stopped doing anything remotely innovative like they used to since Jobs died. Has Apple done anything significantly innovative since Steve Jobs died? Change my view, Reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Apple hasn\u2019t done anything significantly innovative since Steve Jobs died. They went from MacBooks, iPods, iPhones, iPads, etc to...what? They used to really push technology forward, but they haven\u2019t done that since Steve Jobs died. Change my view, Reddit.\n","id":"01de9680-098e-479e-a627-1b436101107f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>A considered use of no platform establishes, endorses & enforces minimum standards. In effect it acts both as a licence and as setting out the terms for that licence. 'You must be at least this civil to present your views in our space.'<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Universities should function as models for civic and civil discourse. Ideas which fall outside of the norms of proper civil discourse should be excluded from it.\n","id":"4ac27ca1-67de-42f1-a500-4156f00fc786"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have seen it on this subreddit, I have seen it in the news. People talk about it and books preach it. When we don't like something or want something to be changed to the way we like it better many times the first reaction is Let's make a law This mindset of so many people saddens me deeply since they try to enforce their believes on somebody and state in the next sentence that democracy is the best form of government and they would die for it. I don't understand why people can't start to embrace diversity and accept the fact that other people think different and let them be. How can they not see that the mere fact that they can hold on to their believes is a great gift and that nobody makes them abandon it? If you have look at LDC and LLDC countries you will find that there is an incredible amount of people who do not possess this right. And yet, I believe this and this because of X. We should make a law that everybody has to do it my way. I travel a lot to poor countries and watch a lot of documentaries and I am incredibly thankful for the luck I had to be born in such a developed country. Even our poor have it better than most people on the planet. I believe that many people don't have a closer look at what happens in other non westernized and modern countries and thus forgot what they have. They forgot to value almost everything they have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people lived and live too sheltered lives to realize how much freedom they enjoy.\n","id":"b5da4a24-5e71-47e4-9ffd-73d7aab62355"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Jesus the Messiah?<|ARGUMENT|>The only times the word is used in the Hebrew is a. in spots where the Torah adds that title to certain Levitical priestly positions, b. when David, as King of Israel, refers to his predecessor Saul or his sons, and c. in Lamentations, referring to the \"breath of our nostrils, Adonai's Messiah\" who came and was killed by the Babylonians. None of these specifically mention a Messiah figure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Jewish Scriptures do not specifically mention a \"Messiah\" figure coming.\n","id":"c638a5b3-7554-4175-97d8-7e1046fae2c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For most of my adult life I have been a moderate Democrat. After the 2016 election, I shifted to the left considerably due to the revelations of Russian interference and the general direction I felt the President was steering the country. I was wounded in Iraq and was appalled at how Trump spoke so cavalierly about Gold Star families, John McCain, and a list of other slights. My views are not driven my a misogynistic or prejudiced view of the world. I align ideologically with the left in almost every category, so this is not a  about AOC\u2019s policy views. After the emergence of AOC, I have found myself drifting back to the center and becoming disillusioned with the Democratic Party. I feel that the left is propping up an inexperienced, political novice with a lack of education, and an aire of arrogance to speak for the movement. My opinion is that this will backfire considerably. AOC holds a bachelors degree from Boston University. She does not hold a post graduate degree. Other political novices that burst into the scene such as Barack Obama carried a lengthy list of academic credentials and accolades. While these achievements in and of themselves do not qualify one for political office, they speak for ones ability to weigh in articulately and knowledgeably on issues in the public arena. AOC has, numerous times, been called out on pedaling falsehoods. The Washington Post recently awarded her \u201cfour Pinocchios\u201d for a tweet regarding Pentagon spending and Medicare for All. When confronted in an interview by Anderson Cooper, AOC had this to say \u201cIf people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they\u2019re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there\u2019s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.\u201d This demonstrates a lack of respect for facts. We as citizens deserve accurate figures and information from our elected officials in order to make sound decisions on policy. This disregard for the facts is not tolerated by my Party when it comes to the Presidents disregard for the facts. It should not be tolerated for a junior Congresswoman. AOC\u2019s lack of policy experience and education is glaringly obvious. On social media and by liberal pundits, she seems beyond reproach. Criticism of her is often met with accusations of racial, age, or gender bias. Outgoing Senator Claire McCaskill was chided recently for stating that AOC has talked a lot, but has yet to put anything to action. This was before AOC was even seated as a Congresswoman she was stating the obvious that AOC could not yet put words to action. Yet McCaskill was criticized harshly. AOC has been in Congress a week 168 hours . And yet today, I have seen calls on social media for her to run for President. I have seen her speaking compared to JFK. I have seen her compared to Abraham Lincoln. And before comments on social media are dismissed, it should be remembered that social media played a large part in the 2016 election and the current dumpster fire we find ourselves in now. All of the hype surrounding AOC will leave the left extremely vulnerable to attack from the right in the next 18 months in the run up to the general election. I have seen many say that the right is scared of her because she is an empowered woman of color. I believe that AOC, and her na\u00efvet\u00e9, is a gift to right wing pundits however. AOC\u2019s ideas may be noble. And she may represent ideas that this generation can get behind. That is not what my  is about. I believe however that being a Congresswoman is like any other job. Would you walk into a new job your career at that , and begin making waves and shouting from the rooftops about changes that should be made? Or would you observe for awhile, and learn your new position before you begin to reinvent the wheel? Congress is full of rules, tradition, a hierarchy, and procedure. Not to mention the process of running an office with staff, and a district with constituents that have concerns that don\u2019t involve railing against the President. In closing, I see some similarities when it comes to AOC and other politicians that fizzled out or horribly embarrassed their respective party. I see a general disregard for facts in furtherance of ideology, hyperbolic public statements and tweets, a cult of personality where valid criticism is not welcome by supporters, and an eagerness to garner fame and publicity instead of focusing on learning the responsibilities of the position she was elected to fulfill.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez AOC is a dangerous figure for the Democratic Party to hedge their future on.\n","id":"cb225dbf-2a59-4ea2-8e0f-0603c7810891"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view is that when humans become unemployable due to ubiquitous use of computers, there will be no more upward mobility because labor from human workers is now useless. In a society where robots do all the jobs, humans will have to own robots to acquire money, and thus without massive wealth redistribution programs in place those that dont will starve. In an ideal world, automation brings prosperity. It frees up people's time to do other things. It lowers the cost of merchandise. But in reality, it merely means that the employer gets more money and the workers must find another job. Imagine a grape factory that employs a hundred workers. One would think that when a machine is developed that makes 90 of those jobs obsolete, the workers rejoice because they don't have to work anymore. Yet obviously this is not the case. Somehow, even though the factory is able to create more grapes than ever before, 90 of the staff gets fired and those that cant find another place to work find themselves impoverished. A need has been fulfilled men no longer have to work to produce grapes. Yet somehow nobody needs to work less. Everyone that was producing grapes still has to find a job. It is easy to see how this plays out over time. Eventually, as more and more jobs become unavailable due to technological innovation, it is naturally harder and harder to find employment. New jobs arise because of other technological innovations, yes, but those jobs end up being replaced too. Eventually, humans are going to run out of skills to offer, and long before that we will see massive unemployment with good, hard working people who simply cannot find a place in society. All of this means that the average person will be unable to work or make money. Because of this, all of it will go to the people with assets they can use to buy robots. Those robots, the only things that can really compete in the marketplace, will be the gatekeepers to wealth and resources. Those without them will remain worthless to the market and unable to feed their families without them. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capitalism will become unfit as an economic system when robotics begins to replace most of the labor force.\n","id":"45a86ab5-7e2b-482a-9b6e-fb536574f786"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Intentionally excluding the US here cause honestly I have no idea how healthcare works there. Basically I think that if you choose not to get vaccinated or not to vaccinate your child you should not be covered under the government healthcare plan for diseases which are preventable by vaccine. For those that are immunocompromised or have some other condition that does not permit them to get all their vaccines they can submit a note from a physician or other relevant official saying why they cannot receive a vaccine s and then they would be exempted from this rule and would be covered. Children will also be covered for those diseases until the age which they are meant to receive the vaccine e.g. in Ontario OHIP would cover Hep B and meningococcal until the age of 12 . This policy would also only apply to diseases that are 100 or almost 100 preventable by vaccine such as MMR, whooping cough etc Things like the flu would not be part of this policy and those without the flu shot would still be covered. Keeping in mind that vaccines are rarely absolutely 100 effective in all cases someone who becomes afflicted with a disease which they were vaccinated for would still be covered. Anti vaxxers can still access private coverage for the preventable diseases, the point of this would be to prevent the socialized system from falling victim to your own stupidity and alternative facts, as well as to associate a financial burden with being anti vax. before someone says something about people breaking bones while doing stupid things and still being covered I would like to point out that those people are only hurting themselves and are not putting already high risk individuals at an even higher risk of contracting a deadly and or debilitating disease.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In countries with socialized healthcare the system should not cover hospital bills incurred due to the contraction of a disease that is preventable by vaccine\n","id":"1ee32129-1c93-482a-a2c1-8ba59584b3bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If the use of animal labor is ethically fine, is sex with animals ethical, too?<|ARGUMENT|>We usually dont even know know if sex between 2 humans is non harmful either and this happens about 2 million times p\/day any repercussions in this case are the responsability of the human.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals cannot consent to sex with humans, and therefore it may be viewed as animal cruelty.\n","id":"aa6b95e0-e261-4451-b17e-8e15592616d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>The Aqua Eructo charm creates fresh water out of nothing, and could thus be used to alleviate droughts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Magic could help mitigate and manage the effects of natural disasters.\n","id":"277eb5c0-dca3-4d6b-b354-3e87249910ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The death penalty simply is not economically, socially or rationally viable with the way court systems and the rest of society work today. Even if there is ample evidence, with multiple convictions, including the killing of guards, other prison workers or other prisoners, can be dragged out for decades and cost society millions more than simply keeping that person incarcerated for the decades they\u2019re likely to live. The social and rational costs are also high, with people being relatively mum on wanting to call ourselves civilized while still allowing the death penalty. Why is this related to suicide exactly? Because I believe it should be within a prisoner\u2019s right, as well as the medically ill or physically and mentally disabled, to choose to end their life with a modicum of dignity. No one should be forced to live in a prison for many decades, as the Boston Bomber will do even if he eventually gets the death penalty, with no real ability to escape their self imposed imprisonment. We are already condemning them to die within the walls of a prison, why not just allow them to choose, as other humans should be able to, when their life inside ends? Note here, I\u2019m more specifically talking about the more serious felonies and people who are stuck in prison for the rest of their life, as well as other serial rapists, murderers, child abusers and their ilk. On a related point, as my grandfather was able to do with his terminal cancer that he fought through for a few years in his old age, people with terminal or severe physical or mental deficiency should be allowed to choose to end their own life. I\u2019m not saying, as with the prisoners, that this should be imposed on them or that everyone should necessarily allowed to do it, as many people might choose this when there is much help that can be offered to change their views. But my grandfather was simply going to die with multi system cancer that was not abated by the medical technology that was around at that time, and choosing to plan his own funeral and estate before he died, instead of staying in immense pain for another few weeks to maybe a year, is a right all people should have, not something that is shamed and made illegal for whatever reasons we still make it illegal. Much of this stems from what I believe I would like to do, and if I were ever a prisoner, I\u2019d like that dignity, as well as if and when I\u2019m old enough and sick enough, even with the technology that will invariably allow us first world people to live well past 100, to end my life in the same dignity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Death Penalty should be made illegal, but Suicide should be made legal.\n","id":"972b77e9-5052-47f1-ac00-82b7c73ab01b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard people crying tyranny over the law that people must, I guess the word is register, their identities when they buy burner phones. I disagree with this premise. I don't doubt that the government would try to take more power with unreasonable measures in the name of safety, but I don't think this is unreasonable. There were talks about banning encryption, and people were rightfully incensed. The bad guys didn't even USE encryption They just use burner phones, not encryption Well, identifying burner phones is better than banning encryption, its more effective, and its less offensive to privacy matters. Is it really unreasonable? This isn't Burn Notice, someone trying to buy allot of burner phones incognito, might not have the wellbeing of humanity on their mind. Yeah. But the market for 'slightly used phones' will just skyrocket. Ok. If you sell a used phone to a terrorist, and it's still registered under your name, you still have some liability. But thats like punishing gun store owners for selling guns No. It's like punishing someone for buying guns, registering them, then selling them under the table to someone else while still having it under their name.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The proposed laws that \"burner phones\" must be connected to a person are reasonable\n","id":"a855f759-02a6-4d7d-a142-109ca1b37ccf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was in my second year of college when the Occupy Protests began sprouting up, and at first thought they could really make a difference and possibly bring forward economic justice. But as the movement continues it doesn't seem to have any plan, just a bunch of disorganized wannabe Che Guevaras that go out and protest because it's fun and exciting . Without any leaders it seems no one can articulate exactly what needs to change and how they want to change it. Compared to other nonviolent movements Occupy is a joke, has no real direction, and has become stagnant and dead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the Occupy Movement is too disorganized and incapable of accomplishing anything.\n","id":"ff9f4ab7-432a-4a3b-961f-855b7210c6b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When we evaluate the world and build opinions on any topic, it is shaped by a lifetime of experiences and instruction. Whenever we encounter a situation, we take the new information and parse it against our existing understandings, emotions and values. My view is this The argument fact's don't care about your feelings is meaningless because it really communicates that these facts need to hit your feelings the way they do mine. If we wish to change opinion, we do not simply supply new facts, we try to alter the way those facts are interpreted. We wish to change the emotional impact of those facts on a person in order to build that logical groundwork that shows the new information should be absorbed in a certain way leading to a certain viewpoint. If someone wishes to argue with facts and logic without emotion, it requires the participants to do something literally impossible divorce emotion from valuation. A logical evaluation takes a set of values that are agreed to be correct by your society and places new information thru that filter while ignoring the subjective aspects that make this a unique event this ignores that the logic is built up by a longer series of evaluations each having their own emotional and value based decisions. I am not against logic by itself, I am instead for a better understanding that logic is cover for ideology and is not some higher form of thinking. Logic outside of abstract maths simply removes your more immediately personal feelings about information in favor of your understanding in the greater ideology you are part of. Data without emotional value is ignored and unimportant, data that is important is so only because it has emotional value. An logical argument between two people using only facts without feelings is only arguing from self built strawmen of one's understanding of ideology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"facts don't care about your feelings\" is meaningless\n","id":"2cca0486-13c0-491c-8aa3-03b30381f73d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit I am not stating these musicians are inherently wrong, simply that they misunderstand what theory is intended to be used as. As any versed theorist will tell you, music theory is not a set of rules. It is a descriptive \u201cscience\u201d if you do wish to call it that. You don\u2019t HAVE to follow exact cadences or follow traditional voice leading and so on so forth. Theory is a descriptive method in order to communicate more efficiently in regards to music. For anyone who says this, I\u2019d like to hear, what sounds good to you? Can you describe it even somewhat accurately without the usage of at least basic theory? But my point is, you don\u2019t HAVE to follow classical conventions. Theory is not a rulebook, but it absolutely can give you amazing and helpful tips and pointers in songwriting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Musicians who say something along the lines of \u201cScrew music theory, all you need to do is play what sounds good\u201d miss the point of music theory.\n","id":"a981b4d6-f04c-4ecf-8af6-af131ac0067c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Psychiatrists Be Allowed to Diagnose Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>A dire prognosis based on little evidence can highlight weakness and can negatively impact the patient's self-concept Self-concept is the image of how one sees themselves and their perception of their own abilities, behaviour and unique characteristics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Diagnosis without consent is harmful, especially if it is a misdiagnosis, which is likely through remote diagnosis\n","id":"33333b47-4dff-443d-a28d-74d171c6b317"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many people argue against privacy saying if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear from a government looking through your personal details online. However I think that this argument is invalid. 1 Just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean that governments should be allowed to look through your personal details. Just like everyone goes on Facebook or Reddit everyone goes to the toilet. That doesn't mean that want to have the walls of your bathroom made of glass so police can see in. Oh and if the police do not do a good job of making sure that only authorised people are allowed to see you on the loo the perverts can join in. Just like hackers could steal our data from the police. 2 Arguing that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. Edward Snowden edit 3 Lets say with all of that data the government's decide to call people in their software for selecting people manages to select 1 correct terrorist out of every thousand people this is extremely accurate . If there are 20 terrorist in an area that means that 19,980 innocents are put through questioning designed to make the terrorists break and admit to being a terrorist. You do not need something to hide to want to not have your whole life put out before another human. You can still want to hide something even if it isn't a bad something . Shardro<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The argument against privacy \"I have nothing to hide\" is invalid\n","id":"4183cf90-75c2-40ea-bfb2-f7ae9396e11e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Youth Votes Count More Than Votes Cast by Elderly Citizens?<|ARGUMENT|>Youth are the producers of society, so they bear the brunt of economic policy more than the elderly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Youth votes should count more than votes cast by elderly citizens.\n","id":"7a710aa0-3c75-442d-a05d-8c51f435f76d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Bernie Sanders has come under scrutiny for endorsing an anti-abortion candidate in 2017, in a time where the majority of Democrats are pro-choice. This may harm his ability to gain and rally the support of support of women and those who are passionate about women's reproductive rights during the General Election.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanders may struggle to inspire female voters to rally for him during a General Election.\n","id":"3e01eb4d-bc1e-429e-afb6-9e97a9cc5f18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>Given it is much cheaper to cut CEO pay than it is to raise everyone's salaries, companies are more likely to choose that option.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On the other hand it could easily just force companies to pay their CEOs and other upper management far, far less.\n","id":"54ae5225-6b1b-4d98-9fef-c7353ea34fdd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Standard Model an incomplete theory?<|ARGUMENT|>In the 1830s, Michael Faraday discovered that changing magnetic fields produce electric fields. Then, in 1861, James Clerk Maxwell hypothesised that the opposite must be true too - that changing electric fields produce magnetic fields. This was then experimentally verified.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism into the single, unified force of electromagnetism If these forces were combined, then it's likely that there may be others that combine together too.\n","id":"1df81b7c-0386-4c41-8955-24de77b5e823"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think the government doesn\u00b4t have the right to spy on other nations for X reason. first of all why would the government do that? what's the reason behind this?, why nations like USA and australia or something like the 5 eyes team up to spy on nations like china? and who are they spying? any reasons i think this violates the sovereignty of other nations and violates the human right of privacy when it's apply to their citizens, especially on this era where everything is digital with the internet, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the government doesn\u00b4t have the right to spy on other nations and their people for X reason.\n","id":"d113bb71-fc32-43ac-916f-a6fdeaf365c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Thankfully, our basic survival is no longer the minimum we should expect or demand in this country. We've moved far beyond the moment when individuals in this country can have a meaningful life with these few basic needs. Something as simple as a smartphone is almost required if one is expected to actively participate in our country and our economy. We should review and revise our ideas on what's required to build a life here and adjust our social policies accordingly. NOTE I'm not advocating for or against any one policy or set of policies. Just a realistic look at what survival means today in America. Also, that it's a privilege to be able to look at things this way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Increases in wealth and advances in technologies of many kinds mean that food, clothing, and shelter are no longer the minimum requirements for someone living in the United States today.\n","id":"399be675-4129-4979-80fc-902986fb9943"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start by saying that I know that people who work in advertising enjoy it or are just working to support themselves and their families and I am not judging them what so ever, this is about me. My problem with advertising is a problem I have with consumerism in general. I believe that frugality is truly the secret to a good and stable life and for many reasons is, in my mind, a more moral way to live no matter what your income level. Of course you can still enjoy a beautiful gown or fancy sports car, but those types of things should be enjoyed in moderation. I believe that advertising takes advantage of human psychology and manipulates people away from that type of life. It is the reason we have sweat shops and is of course the entire reason behind the destruction of the ecosystem. You might want to argue that it's the individual's responsibility if they make a stupid purchase and I do agree with that, however I also believe that people cannot get away from their psychology and manipulating them into that purchase is like taking their fist and making them punch themselves. So while it is up to them to strengthen that arm so that people can't do that to them I find that this is a perfect metaphor because frugality is truly a muscle that doesn't make the actions of those hijacking that arm any less horrible what so ever. So in summery, convincing people to buy stuff that they don't need is making a contribution to a myriad of problems you're tricking people into punching themselves, sweat shops, the destruction of the ecosystem, taking resources away from people in other countries who need them, etc. It basically turns you into a snake oil salesmen without care for the larger consequences. So even though my copywriting gigs would only be an infinitesimally small drop in a global ocean, it's still each drop that creates that ocean and so each drop at fault. I already know that I contribute to it in a lot of other ways we all do but avoiding it when possible is ideal. So, people, what do you think about all that? Is there a way I can do copy writing gigs without feeling bad about it? Thanks so much.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Advertising is a morally problematic profession\n","id":"adae9034-0650-4241-a472-2bd2de9a3802"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>When children discuss sexual topics they learned in school and open a conversation about sex, parents can expand it and explain things with more detail and more personally than a teacher.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The two are not mutually exclusive. Parents can talk about sex with their children along with schools.\n","id":"1840288b-0280-49a7-a523-8b5516aa8a63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>Legalising sex work will normalise sex by allowing it to be sold and purchased like any other service is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalising sex work will reduce stigmas surrounding sex and sexuality.\n","id":"90f9c81a-232b-496c-905c-f993025d41c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>To choose to follow God freely is a higher good than following God under compulsion. But this is only possible with free will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The highest goods for humans are only attainable if human beings have free will and the capacity to do evil.\n","id":"4130596d-86fa-480d-8d81-ddf3836724a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Teachers Be Allowed To Wear Religious Symbols At School?<|ARGUMENT|>Teachers are not to be judged by how they look but by their skills and the way they manage their class.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All people should be able to express what they want to express.\n","id":"ee8ba3fc-dfdc-4b23-aaba-c3c1dd6d850c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does altruism exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Direct reciprocity creates an incentive for a pair of individuals exchange favours in a multi-round game.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Economic Game Theory suggests that apparent Altruistic behaviour can arise out of selfish behaviour patterns.\n","id":"b1bac201-ce1d-4682-8f8f-c59c1f89d10f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democracies adapt to improve?<|ARGUMENT|>In traditional democracies, events outside the nation\u2019s boundary were classed as \u2018foreign policy\u2019 and other states were not to interfere in their neighbours\u2019 internal affairs. This model has been rendered obsolete by globalisation, mass transportation and the internet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In a globalised world, democracies need to change from being centralised states in which a single elected government exerts monopolistic control over all aspects of life within a defined geographical border1\n","id":"32d23811-4bc9-4216-8ae7-a611d5637084"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The fetishisation of human life has been the primary catalyst for both the modern epoch and the current course of planetary biocide. The idea of human life as sacred and unique is a dogma that is anathema to natural processes. The vast majority of humans exist solely to continue existing They are carbon copies of their culture and will contribute nothing unique to humanity that would not be created or discovered in their total absence, while causing a degradation of ecological health and material abundance. The world contains, at this point, more than 7 billion humans. Every week, a new population equivalent of Dallas, TX arrives on this planet 1.2 million . The global population growth rate has not been halted by any war, disease, or famine in the last 500 years arguably longer , demonstrating a complete lack of population checks that are intrinsic to any sustainable population in equilibrium with an ecology. The current human population on the planet is well beyond the global environmental carrying capacity We are well into overshoot sustained only due to limited petroleum sources. Ergo, every life born today decreases the odds of those living yesterday to live tomorrow. As a rational actor, it is both in my best interest, as well as the interest of my genetic payload, to immediately reduce the human population to well below currently sustainable levels to ensure that my progeny and I have a fighting chance on a living and bio diversifying planet, rather than one hurtling towards almost total extinction. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only viable solution to salvage the irrevocable unraveling of biodiversity is to immediately depopulate the planet of the vast majority of humans by promoting the intentional spread of disease, famine, and warfare, as humans will not voluntarily change their ways.\n","id":"abb210d8-9e41-4047-b220-671c785deace"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The microwave has created a plethora of malicious effects, which heavily outweigh the convenience imo. Children of the microwave generation are losing valuable cooking skills as more kids and parents use it for quick meals. It gives incentives for heating eating habits through prepackaged foods, including preservatives, high sodium, artificial colors, dyes, flavors, to create the illusion of freshness. Prepared foods often lack general nutrition when compared to home cookies meals. example ramen, vs noodles w actual chick cuts and broth. Prepared foods cost more since its by the pack. When fresh food is bought it bulk it can be prepared for the same cost or less. It damages families as they lose bonding time through lunches, and often dinners, as they become replaced with quickly microwaved foods, eaten on the go or away from the table. Heating foods does chemically react foods the same as cooking via stove top of oven, affecting the taste. The most obvious example is heated marshmallow vs toasted marshmallow. Foods can often times be reheated by stove top, with relative ease and w o the issues stateed here. When meats are reheated in microwaves, it generally does not reach the heat requirement to kill bacteria, and consumers risk sickness. Plastics used to store food are often used inside microwave, potentially leaking carcinogens and other dangerous chemicals.  D<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the microwave has negatively impacted society.\n","id":"b9c1a45b-7f95-43b9-99ce-41d1d20437e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basketball You can miss most of the game and tune in to the last 3 minutes to watch the only important part of the game. I don't think the game does a good job of separating the better team from the lesser team. A game tied at 75 75 is often decided by a margin of 2 points once the clock ends. This win is not statistically significant and doesn't mean that the team that happened to win that particular game actually was a better basketball team that day. Some basketball purists say that the final 2 minutes of a game are the most exciting and beautiful part of the game I say why not make the entire game 2 minutes long then? The entire early game really is made pointless due to the rules of basketball. Surely if a team Wins by a margin of 80 50, then they deserve to win, but I've seen too many basketball games won by a margin of 2 points to actually say that the game of basketball is well designed. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rules of Basketball are flawed. The format of the game has too much dependency on the clock, and the team that wins the game isn't always the team that deserves to win.\n","id":"17ed8443-d89a-4a94-b78c-f09782d3ac57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My post is not whether abortion should be legalized or not, but the main point of dispute over abortion, or the meat of the argument. I believe that the argument over abortion is one where the woman factor is irrelevant. Of course it is an issue that most impacts women, however my argument is that the point of dispute is whether a fetus counts as alive or not. My reasoning is this almost anyone who is pro life is just that pro life, not anti choice for women. There are surely sexists out there who don't want to give women bodily autonomy, but the grand majority of pro life people justify their position by claiming a fetus at whatever stage of pregnancy is alive, and therefore should not be murdered . Therefore, I think it is a weak argument to say things like stay out of my womb or the government shouldn't control my body. Pro life people aren't trying to control your body, they are trying to protect the fetus.  that abortion is a woman's issue and not a biological one. EDIT I should clarify and say that when I say abortion isn't a woman's issue, I don't mean that it doesn't affect women. I mean that if we lived in a universe where men would get pregnant instead, MOST pro life people would maintain their position on abortion. EDIT 2 Further clarification My main point boils down to this To truly convince a pro lifer, you must convince them that the fetus doesn't have a right to life, NOT that the woman deserves the right to choice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion is not a women's issue, but a biology issue.\n","id":"4a6131d3-0d56-4eaf-b397-9fe4ca468a37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a view that I've rarely, if ever debated with other people, but have held for a while now. First, I'd like to take pregnancy out of the equation. The negative effects on offspring are without a doubt, a secure reason that incest is wrong. But what if there was no chance for offspring for example two brothers, or an infertile brother and sister, etc. ? In these situations, the only effect of incest is sexual satisfaction. I don't see why this is morally reprehensible. Perhaps if we isolated the act of incest even further. Take the hypothetical situation of a brother and sister who are sexually attracted to each other, one of whom is infertile. They occasionally have sex, in secret, and no one knows. In this scenario, there are no social consequences, no biological consequences off spring , and it seems no negative consequences whatsoever. It seems to me that at the very least, in this scenario, there is nothing immoral about incest. Oh by the way, a discussion about what morality is will get really tedious. So for the sake of argument, perhaps it's best to simply go with what you feel is moral, and immoral. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing morally wrong with incest.\n","id":"84cafc17-3021-482b-b528-2b1e8971df04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Context Former SNL colleagues have written a letter defending Al Franken arguing that we are moved to quickly and directly affirm that after years of working with him, we would like to acknowledge that not one of us ever experienced any inappropriate behavior and mention our sincere appreciation that he treated each of us with the utmost respect and regard source My view is that these women defending Franken based on the fact that he was professional and never harassed any of them is ridiculous akin to friends of a murderer showing support by arguing that he never murdered any of them, so he must be a good guy. I'm not really interested in arguing about the political ramifications of this or comparing Franken's harassment to other cases that have recently surfaced . I'd mostly like to understand if why testimonials like this are relevant when evaluating and understanding harassment cases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The letter by women of SNL supporting Al Franken is complete BS\n","id":"3d7f739c-1abe-41e3-9a97-ff78bfd9d953"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Those men and women who risk their lives to protect individuals inside the country from crime and chaos are just as important if not more important in my opinion than those who serve in the military. Not necessarily based on what the job may persist of, because both do very dangerous tasks and put themselves in harms way, but the purpose of the job itself is what makes me think that Law Enforcement deserve much more respect. The military is not protecting the citizens of the U.S., at least not now a days they are not, they are going over to other countries to carry out the will of corporate interests. And their is nothing noble about that, to be supportive and worship their heroism is an insult to the people who have actually died in previous wars that were actually fighting for a just cause. Anyone who kills an innocent civilian for a cause that is nothing more than a capitalistic venture is no hero. Whereas Law Enforcement keep the rapist, the murderers, the child pornographers, the drug lords, and the thieves from coming inside your house and looting all kids and all your wives Why aren't these men and women considered veterans? or given a day of celebration where everyone in the country gets to take off in appreciation? I hold two beliefs I suppose The first is that the U.S. Military is given too much appreciation for what it is, and what it is doing . The second is that local, state, and federal Law Enforcement do not receive enough appreciation for what they do in comparison . EDIT I am reading responses but I do not have time to respond just yet, tomorrow evening I will return to respond.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Law Enforcement deserve the same if not more respect than military\n","id":"f7bd8b96-bbda-4256-a560-5747a9d92cf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>People who object to being no-platformed themselves, would no-platform other speakers who they don't agree with. If they don't see that when other people's speech is limited as a threat to freedom of speech, they should accept when it happens to them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No-platforming is a valid way to exercise free speech and counterbalance power asymmetries.\n","id":"f2f92b3c-d9d9-4d5a-9621-21548fe47f4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Equal Paternity\/Maternity Paid Leave Be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Women are often less confident in their abilities so may be less likely to apply for positions they feel unqualified for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are other reasons why women get promoted less than men which will still exist with mandatory paternity leave.\n","id":"62408f42-ebb4-4fd9-b320-0010cb20acbf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Egalitarianism should be the only movement, not championing any one gender over the other. Equality is for everybody. Feminism, men's rights and others turn it into a competition to see who can get the best treatment. There are good and bad, intelligent and unintelligent, strong and weak people in every gender including trans, asexual, pansexual, etc But if you listened to the feminist mob of the internet they would have you believe that all men are the enemy. Not ALL of them are like that of course, but every time someone makes a comment they don't like they are bombarded by the militant branch of feminism. I was raised by three older sisters and a mother, my father was hardly around. I know better than most people that women are human beings just like everyone else. But of course the very fact that I would even MENTION that I don't like feminism would get me so much hate that I wouldn't even get the chance to explain why, because anybody that doesn't like feminism is clearly a misogynist right? It's ironic that they make the argument of treating women like human beings, but then I see them omit all of the bad things that women can do just as easily as men can do them, thus not treating women like normal human beings either. Treat everybody the same instead of turning it into a gender war. It blows my mind how many feminists I've talked to don't seem to understand that. Again, Egalitarianism over ANYTHING. When you build your movement around the power of a certain type of person you just fuel the fire and make things worse for everyone. No feminism, no mens rights, no black power, no white power. Just everybody practicing equality. EDIT some people seem to not be understanding the complete message so I'll summarize it here, Feminism is a damaging name, it attracts the kind of people that only look at the name of the movement and become part of that militant branch I mentioned. Egalitarianism can't be misinterpreted like feminism or men's rights or black rights or anything else can. It simply means equality for all, and that is what we need, not people splintering off into their own factions to champion the specific rights of that movement, that just adds fuel to the fire and is damaging to everyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Here's why I hate feminism, among other movements, and why Egalitarianism should be the only rights movement.\n","id":"2207a885-2bb1-4ede-bc83-c7a5c22567b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Constitutions protect linguistic minorities?<|ARGUMENT|>In Cherokee, the word \"oo-kah-huh-sdee represents the mouth-watering, cheek-pinching delight experienced when seeing an adorable baby or a kitten.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Linguistic minorities have words for things\/phenomenons that do not exist in the national language.\n","id":"3065cbc1-a0f0-43c1-b104-fd9c2db7b257"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should paternity testing of minors require the consent of both parents?<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK major decisions regarding a child's life, such as choice of school, medical treatment or religion should be made jointly by the parents. If a parent disagrees with the decisions taken by the other parent, they can take that dispute to court.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although only one parent's consent may be needed in some circumstances, in other situations the parents need to agree or reach a compromise.\n","id":"0006c2e9-59b6-4b2a-94c2-5b6a68f9882d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the U.S.A. an exceptional country?<|ARGUMENT|>Large parts of the U.S. population have been left behind and are in no superior or exceptional position relative to the rest of the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States of America is not an exceptional country.\n","id":"7431a39a-4a92-45dc-b14c-10081f577002"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>r circlejerk, at one time, was a place that mocked things it saw as unwarranted obsessions amongst redditors. Back then, it mostly kept to itself. But now it is itself the biggest source of unwarranted obsession on reddit \u2014 the obsession for punishing the use of certain words, names, or concepts \u2014 and a base for spreading said obsession far and wide. It has a standardized and ever expanding list of shibboleths it seeks out when it finds one in a post or comment anywhere at all throughout reddit, that post or comment is immediately flooded with a whole train of other shibboleths from the list, regardless of any context, intent, or anything else. Examples gem fedora le science DAE euphoric Gabe Newell And so on ad infinitum . There are at least three issues Nothing is ever dropped from this list. Ever. So even though, for example, no one actually, unironically, uses le anymore \u2014 the fad died years ago \u2014 r circlejerkers still flood every corner of reddit with it. This effectively preserves and perpetuates the thing they saw as unreasonably popular. Forever. Things are added to the list faster and faster all the time. It's almost a contest over there to be the first to make a reference to something that's happening right now this moment , so it can be added to the standard list, never mind waiting for overuse. Context means nothing. The top post there for awhile yesterday was mocking Daniel Ellsberg \u2014 the man who brought the Pentagon Papers to light against Nixon, and therefore an important living historical figure \u2014 for backing Edward Snowden in an AMA. Why? Because Edward Snowden is an item on The List. And not even being Daniel Ellsberg excuses one from committing the unpardonable sin of mentioning something from The List. Also, since The List contains extremely common everyday things like the word gem as well as major pillars of modern civilization e.g. science , more or less any thread in existence can be deemed fair game. Now, I hear people saying who cares, it's all just a joke, relax . I would, except that all this swarming of shaming responses ends up like a shouting down of anyone who runs afoul of it this has a chilling effect. People begin filtering themselves for what they say, lest the brigade come along and harass them. And goodness help you if you are a casual enough user to simply not be aware of any of this then you're likely to trigger them by accident and end up feeling attacked and driven from the site entirely, through no fault of your own. In short, r circlejerk is currently mostly a free roving bullying corps and fad reenactor society that pretends it hates fads. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe \/r\/circlejerk has become what it pretends to mock, and a poisonous force for silencing discourse besides.\n","id":"fb1f89ad-e2ba-472e-84c9-0c3955ec1242"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>The easy ability to change votes allows voters to punish delegates if they are caught misleading or cheating the system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liquid Democracy is more efficient and dynamic than current variations of representative democracy.\n","id":"69e67594-941a-4f21-b872-810d137e55dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Notre-Dame reconstruction efforts: replicate vs. modernize<|ARGUMENT|>The Minister for Culture has stated that the French public will get a say in how the Notre Dame will be rebuilt.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Recent polls suggest that 55% of the French public want the iconic cathedral to be restored exactly as it was before.\n","id":"ef5984ba-f02c-40f5-b21d-1e990e30f69b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>allow wire-tapped and \u2018intercepted\u2019 evidence as admissible in court<|ARGUMENT|>Intercept evidence offers the opportunity to speed up court trials and stop wasting time and money by providing information which could lead to a faster, more accurate verdict. Other western democracies who use wire-tap evidence believe that is has or will help to achieve criminal convictions123, which demonstrates popular support for it as an effective and swift method of justice. Given that the UK has allowed wire-tapping in some specific cases4, it seems to be that it is not the principle of intercept evidence itself which is viewed as unacceptable by these countries, but perhaps a need to set up a formalised system of the conditions when and where intercept evidence can be used. David Bickford, the former chief legal adviser to MI5, has stated \u2018I know we have lost cases as a result of not using such evidence\u20195 and other experts have called for the wide use of intercept evidence in court6. Allowing the use of intercept evidence in the first place may well ensure that wire-taps are better carried out in a standardised, regulated manner 1 In Sweden: accessed 30\/08\/11 2 Widely in the USA: accessed 30\/08\/11 3 In Australia: accessed 30\/08\/11 4 accessed 30\/08\/11 5 accessed 30\/08\/11 6 accessed 30\/08\/11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intercepted evidence could be incredibly useful for both prosecution and defence cases in many trials.\n","id":"66987f01-aaa1-4a04-93a9-4ac58d330530"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The garbage men always put the recycling and the regular trash into the same truck. How can we trust that it is actually being recycled? When I try to bring can's to those machines, it doesn't accept certain brands of can's, so why even bother? It's probably a corporation type thing where they are trying to control us and what we Recycle . I don't even understand the process, when I try to research it I can't find anything about how it actually works, so I'm having trouble believing that it's actually a thing. I know that it exists, I'm just not sure it is actually as great as everyone says. I'd like to have faith in our planet though so I hope you can change my view with some word's, but for right now I'm pretty solid on wanting to ban recycling and maybe incorporate some other kind of method or process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should ban recycling\/make it illegal. Everything goes to the same place anyway.\n","id":"c67bf559-dae7-4944-9e08-f655ec30d565"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was discussing the kneeling players with a conservative coworker, and we he basically made the following points. The players have a right to kneel The players actions aren't changing anyone's views on racial inequalities or police treatment The players kneeling is just another wedge that divides the country Even when people understand why the players are kneeling, many still take it as an attack on the country. The players are ensuring that people don't forget about racial inequality, but they probably aren't reaching anyone new After the conversation, I do feel like the players kneeling is clearly divisive, and they might not be affecting change in a real way. For the record, I personally think that the players clearly love their country and kneel during the anthem to protest racial inequality, not to attack the country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Players kneeling during the national anthem does more harm by being divisive than good by raising awareness\/changing opinions\n","id":"01d7a09f-60ae-4e93-aae5-00f178b278a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is school bad for your mental health?<|ARGUMENT|>The challenges students face at school allow them to the build mental fortitude necessary to succeed in the real world with minimal consequences for mistakes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Schools are environments where children and young people are able to develop their skills and competencies in a risk-managed environment.\n","id":"5fc64923-45fc-4a3c-8b0a-ae3ca1596c4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't believe there is anything innate within us that makes us different, like a soul or similar. Thus all our actions are determined by both our environment and our genetics, neither of which we have any control over to a appreciable degree . So although it will be infinity complex to compute what someone will do, their actions are still predetermined. Also the first philosophy major who comes in here and points out that if our actions are predetermined then any discussion will have nothing to do with the truth and therefore it is pointless to discuss, gets a slap upside the head.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that everyone's actions are predetermined and so that ideas like meritocracy are redundant,\n","id":"35c5e1c7-9eb9-4ddf-ab63-8c8f0c6d3db4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>Today, the British government remains solely responsible for the majority of policy actions that matter to voters, such as health, welfare, pensions, border security, defense, and monetary policy<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Despite EU laws technically having supremacy over domestic law, the UK wields substantial influence over both.\n","id":"0c933c51-f0fb-409c-95ce-782b8c57cd57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>God's nature is literally that of \"The Word\"; as evidenced by John 1:1. Because the word \"God\" exists, God exists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of the Bible, as the word of God, provides evidence for the existence of God.\n","id":"3ee990fe-580e-47c3-be36-83fb09bf9bdf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Countless studies show that GM foods can be toxic, allergenic, or have unintended nutritional changes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetically modified food endangers the health of people who consume it.\n","id":"3064a9d9-7958-452b-ac73-7f11c359111f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Unfortunately, the only time Amtrak specifically and passenger rail generally become a part of public discussion seems to be when something goes wrong. Most of you are probably aware that something did go wrong last week, when Amtrak's Northeast Regional 188 derailed in Pennsylvania. This  is not about that incident, however. I have long held the view that the passenger rail should, and inevitably will, become a much larger part of our national transportation mix. I've yet to hear a thoughtful, legitimate argument against greater investment in passenger rail, specifically Amtrak. Most people who oppose Amtrak, particularly in Congress, seem to be doing so based on ideological or political reasons. For example, the last Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has called Amtrak a Soviet style railroad . Most criticisms of Amtrak I've heard are similarly based in ideological beliefs. Now, I will try to briefly summarize some of the key reasons I've long thought Amtrak should be a top priority for investment and expanded funding. Critics of Amtrak often point to the fact that it is a money losing operation, and is consequently subsidized by taxpayer money. This is perhaps the most common complaint from some not all Republicans. The way I see it, all modes of transportation are heavily subsidized, and Amtrak should not be singled out for losing money. All railroads, public and private, are responsible for all of their infrastructure. That means every inch of rail, every freight terminal and passenger station, every locomotive and car, their traffic management systems, and even their own police departments. By contrast, we the taxpayer fund the construction and maintenance of airports and highways. We pay for the FAA, which manages private airline traffic. We pay for the TSA, which provides security for the airlines. We pay for traffic officers in police departments. The bankrupt Highway Trust Fund, paid for by the federal gas tax, no longer covers all of its costs. Consequently, Congress has bailed it out with short term extensions for more than eight years now. According to Amtrak's CEO, Joe Boardman, these bailouts have added up to more than Amtrak's entire operating subsidy since its inception in 1975. So, with all this in mind, it seems ridiculous to single out passenger rail as the only transportation mode that needs to be profitable and should not be subsidized. We subsidize all modes, and all lose money, why should Amtrak be the one exception? Even if Amtrak was as burdensome on taxpayers as some politicians and pundits suggest, there seems to be a strong public interest in expanding passenger rail. Unlike road and air competition, even if you personally do not use Amtrak, you benefit from higher Amtrak ridership. According to the Brookings Institute, Amtrak is now the fastest growing method of transportation. Its broken its ridership records nearly every year for the past 12 years, with the Northeast Corridor NEC in particular booming since the introduction of the Acela. Amtrak controls more than 75 of all air rail traffic in the Northeast, which benefits air and road travelers as well. Less traffic on our already congested highways, less traffic in our airports, less pollution in our air, and downward pressure on the demand for oil are all secondary effects that benefit people who do not use Amtrak. If lowering our dependence on foreign oil via decreased demand and if global warming is a concern for you as it is for me, then prioritizing rail over air and road transportation seems to be a necessity. Trains are masters of efficiency in a way that even the most fuel efficient jet and greenest hybrid are not. According to the Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics, in 2012 Amtrak's energy intensity per passenger mile sat at 1,561 British thermal units. By contrast, the average domestic airline service uses 2,477 BTUs per passenger mile. For some reason, 2006 is the last available data on passenger cars, and they used 2,898 BTUs and light trucks used 5,465 BTUs per passenger mile. Even private freight carriers are extremely efficient. According to FreightRailWorks.com, the average train can move one ton of freight 475 miles on one gallon of fuel. These facts suggest to me that the future lies in rail, not road, and that further Amtrak expansion could help lower our national energy consumption and transportation related pollution. So Change My View Like I said, most arguments against Amtrak seem overly politicized. So I'm interested to hear any cogent argument opposing passenger rail investment generally or Amtrak specifically. I suppose the latter is likely easier to make than the former, because it could be possible to support passenger rail investment but oppose Amtrak as an entity. If this is your argument, I would be interested in hearing what alternatives to a federally subsidized passenger rail corporation are out there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Amtrak should receive much higher levels of funding than they do now.\n","id":"8b5fbac3-4ad6-49a1-ac11-a2aa9b908873"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>Insects in certain areas are taking over their habitats especially due to past environmental decay from climate change, so eating them would encourage environmental restoration and preservation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Removing taboos about certain foods such as insects can make the difference.\n","id":"62d5cadb-f3f5-4313-8600-723eee364063"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should subsidize space exploration<|ARGUMENT|>we should subsidize space exploration because earth is quickly becoming uninhabitable and drained of resources. our survival depends on finding somewhere else to go.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Space exploration can help in colonizing the resources\/lands of other planets\n","id":"10575760-ab7e-4d63-824b-f392e3cedb28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Since I could remember, we have been taught in school that the normal supply and demand of the labour market is the best way to maximise efficiency. A price floor, or minimum wage, disincentivises people from working hard and encourages workers to be more inefficient. Where I live, it has become ingrained in our culture that everyone should work hard to get a higher pay. We should not give any benefits to people just because they get a low pay to avoid making it unfair to those who have worked hard to get a high pay. I have seen in my country how basing purely on the invisible forces of the labour market has influenced the labour pool. I have also heard some stories and seen small glimpses of minimum wage in other countries. I understand how incredibly self serving all these sound. But I would really love to hear views from both sides of the argument and gain some new insights. Would be great if there can be some research articles included as well. Who knows, we might learn a thing or two to reflect on. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minimum wage encourage employees to be lazy and increases inefficiency in companies and countries\n","id":"ed0f3c6c-8581-4231-93f2-95e12a81d918"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Chicken pox and mono are both caused by viruses that stay in your body forever. While most people get these viruses at a young age, it is possible for someone to have never had them. For instance, while I have had chicken pox, as far as I know I have never had mono. While someone who had mono is not contagious 100 of the time, it is still possible to transmit if the virus resurfaces. This is similar to how herpes works as well. Additionally, something like 80 of the population has will have HSV 1 in their life. So saying that chicken pox or mono are just very common still leaves the cognitive dissonance between disclosing herpes but not disclosing chicken pox and mono. Not to mention that chicken pox when activated in adults can become very serious see shingles . Also, slightly off topic, but I wish no stigma against those with any of these. It's not shameful to have any of these. I get cold sores, I had chicken pox. Nothing shameful about them. I just think someone deserves it's hypocritical to disclose one and not the others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You should disclose whether or not you have ever had chicken pox or mono in your entire life before kissing someone. Not doing so is akin to nondisclosure of herpes\/coldsores.\n","id":"cdf5e901-6d47-4a49-9ec2-491df73ec378"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Public health insurance option<|ARGUMENT|>\"Keeping Them Honest\". New York Times. June 5, 2009: \"Now nobody is proposing that Americans be forced to get their insurance from the government. The 'public option,' if it materializes, will be just that \u2014 an option Americans can choose. And the reason for providing this option was clearly laid out in Mr. Obama\u2019s letter: It will give Americans 'a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep the insurance companies honest.'\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nobody will be forced into public insurance; it's an option\n","id":"ad06f50f-cb93-41e7-844a-0a34a11f3230"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In Exodus, the government of Egypt, particularly the Pharaoh, enslaves and mistreats the Israelites. Instead of punishing the Pharaoh directly, God sends 10 plagues against the people of Egypt. Even the worst and last plague falls on the Pharaoh's first born son, not the Pharaoh himself. If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent, then why does his worldly divine punishment often strike so broadly? Why does he kill every man, woman, and child in the entire world other than one selected family with a flood? Why burn down entire cities of people, even if no good men were to be found? Surely, there were innocent children? Most importantly, why must the people of Egypt and their slaves other than the Israelites pay for the sins of their Pharaoh? In the real world, the less fortunate often pay in suffering and blood for the conflicts of the powerful. This is morally reprehensible, but pragmatically often seems unavoidable. I don't see why this has to be the case for divine interventions. Frankly, my knowledge of the bible is fairly weak. I would prefer this not to rehash the problem of evil a bunch of threads on cmv already have discussions of that . I would like biblical context that provide evidence that God doesn't coddle the upper class and punish them through the less fortunate. I would appreciate comments discussing personal responsibility and the afterlife, but, to change my view, I think I need discussion of worldly divine intervention or discussion on why my focus on that is misplaced .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, divine punishment often falls on individuals not personally responsible\n","id":"ee0fefd8-4846-4aa7-8688-8a1f221f34a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>A maximally great being what most people mean by God is the best explanation for the conclusions of natural theology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God as a maximally great being is a valid hypothesis for the evidence provided by natural theology.\n","id":"4bedb1ae-e044-458c-8753-6da72c36ecd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The American Civil war is one of the most important and influential events in all of history. Consequently, many different theories have been developed trying to explain why the war began in 1861. The main reason for the outbreak of the civil war in 1861 was slavery, not states rights. Slavery split the nation in half through compromises and the way slaves were treated in the war. The American Civil War was not caused by states rights. Many historians argue that the cause of the Civil War in 1861 was the issue of states inability to stand up to an abusive federal government. If states rights had been the cause of the civil war then the war would have most likely started during the nullification crisis in 1831. South Carolina had declared a federal tariff null and refused to comply with the law. President Andrew Jackson said that states cannot declare federal laws null or void and prepared to use military force to put an end to the crisis. If South Carolina was serious about states rights the civil war would have started right then but instead South Carolina backed down. The real reason for the Nullification Crisis was testing the ability of the federal government to enforce their own laws. The Nullification Crisis of 1831 proves that the outbreak of the Civil War was slavery and not states rights. Another major factor highlighting slavery as the cause of the civil war is the fact that slavery literally split the nation in half through compromises. In 1850 the Missouri Compromise placed a line at 36\u00b030\u2019 through the Louisiana Purchase saying that slavery is allowed below this line and slavery is prohibited above the line. The line created by the Missouri compromise literally split the nation in half and created strong feeling of sectionalism between the north and the south. The Missouri Compromise was a direct consequence of slavery and led to the start of the American Civil War in 1861. The way slaves were treated by the Union Government showed that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. The Union Government knew that in order to win the war they needed the border states to not fight for the Confederacy. This was achieved through the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1st, 1863. The Emancipation proclamation freed the slaves in all rebel states. The border states got to keep the practice of slavery around. This showed that the cause of the Civil War in 1861 was the issue of slavery. To conclude, the American Civil war was caused by slavery and not states rights. Slavery had drawn a line across the nation and caused major sectionalism between the north and the south. The Civil War would not and could not have happened if the main reason for the war was not slavery.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the American Civil was was caused primarily by slavery.\n","id":"d80d75b8-ff3b-4cbe-92e3-56063d15c8fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This applies mostly to the USA. Children here are taught from a young age, both at school and at home, that they are all special snowflakes and can do anything in life. That is simply not true. Some kids will grow up to be less successful than others, due to a variety of factors. I'm not saying we should discourage kids, but we should explain that some things will not work out. We should teach them that they should put in 110 into everything they do, but that some of those things they wont be best at. By telling them that they all can do anything, we set them up to face a harsh truth later in life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe teaching kids that they are \"unique\" and \"special\" and can \"do whatever anything in life\" is wrong and bad for kids.\n","id":"bf032364-363e-492f-9719-d3a50673491e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>Taxes are paid relative to individual circumstances, rather than equally, as this is a more efficient way of contributing to society. Conscription would not follow this logic of efficiency.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Citizens already contribute to their society by paying taxes and abiding by its laws.\n","id":"255c2cdf-cb3a-4e50-981e-509b045944ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>colonize the moon<|ARGUMENT|>Colonizing the Moon should not be seen as an end goal in and of itself but rather a platform for reaching out further into the universe. The moon makes a better base than Earth for a number of reasons. Any civilization that is serious about space exploration would probably have to start with the moon. It\u2019s a comparatively simple mission which would allow us to learn the pitfalls and problems while staying within a few days of earth. The moon also provides a better base for SETI than Earth as Radio telescopes on the far side of the moon would be shielded from the interference of Earth. Equally the Moon\u2019s slow rotation would allow light-based observatories to undertake experiments lasting for days at a time. Most experts are agreed that it is statistically unlikely that Earth is the only life-bearing planet, to date we have not been serious investigating this issue despite the enormous implications it has for almost every area of human thought and activity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be the first step in colonizing space \u2013 the moon is preferential to Earth as a base for investigating life elsewhere in the universe\n","id":"50f8e37c-c07d-4421-89b5-027d937a5bdf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I've been seeing some new information about the FDA's proposed ban today and to me, this really shows how out of touch our Government entities really are. I really don't see understand the issue of menthol either, but that's really a separate discussion I'm sure. x200B gt It\u2019s ludicrous to think flavors like bubble gum, cotton candy, or tutti frutti are meant for adults, senators Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said in a joint statement. x200B This to me, is probably one of the most interesting statements I've seen so far and it's really where my opinion formed. I am a 27 year old male adult who enjoys a damn good cotton candy flavour. The idea that people above a certain age do not enjoy 'fruity' flavours is hilarious. I'm sorry this isn't the 1960s 70s where the 'typical adult' smoked a heavy cigar and swilled back some scotch during their afternoon lunch. The other thing to me is the ludicrous idea that something more could be done. We have age restrictions on the sale of tobacco products. I do not see this as a manufacturing issue Changing my mind on this. The manufacturing process should change to not include Nicotine, or other harmful chemicals , nor is it necessarily a marketing issue Remember when Big Tobacco ads in the 50s had children in them, or y'know doctors We've since addressed this with regulation and marketing campaigns, with massive success . We have more than enough laws in place as it is. I see this as a combination of poor parental oversight and bad retail habits of not checking I.D every single time. It looks as if this is going down the same path that led to the prohibition of both Alcohol Cannabis, as well as other outlawed substances that are known to be associated with 'abuse', yet run rampant in our countries. We know that removing banning a product doesn't work, and in most cases has the opposite effect. If nothing else, we need stricter punishment on the retail establishments that aren't staying within the laws set forth for purchasing tobacco products. Here's to the future menthol bubblegum speakeasy vape lounges of the future What are your thoughts on this? Are you for or against? As far as I'm concerned, this all boils down to personal choice and looks like extreme government overreach Change my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The FDA is moving to 'restrict' flavored vape products and ban menthol; looks like government overreach to me\n","id":"31b46ec3-8c59-4221-9a42-6a0ecd711313"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here in Australia, from time to time, the idea is brought up that Mandarin should be compulsory in Australian schools. In fact, some schools are already teaching it to their students. However I disagree with the idea that it should be compulsory because I believe that for some if not most students, it will simply have no benefit to them. For example, I don't plan to ever live in China, work in China or visit China. Heck, you could pay me to do one of those things and I would still decline it so what benefit is there to forcing someone like me to learn Mandarin? Sure you can talk about the benefits of learning a language in general and I do agree that there are some benefits to learning a second language but those benefits apply to any language. I don't mind if they want to make a second language compulsory, I do mind if they want to make Mandarin compulsory because I don't see any benefit in it which means it would be a complete waste of my not exactly unlimited time. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Learning Mandarin should definitely not be compulsory in schools\n","id":"fc5c5541-8a03-45a5-aa24-e0c287bf2f84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we abolish political parties in the USA?<|ARGUMENT|>In his later years, Washington believed that harsh and indiscriminate punishments to slaves could backfire and urged to motivate them with encouragement and rewards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Washington spoke out against cruel slaveowners and encouraged kindness towards slaves.\n","id":"624a6f3d-7189-4d6e-bac2-129c6c3b739f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Janet Jackson was and still is, one of the biggest Pop stars to ever grace music, she had 6 No.1 albums, a heap of No.1 singles, and broke worldwide records, from the fastest selling tour to the first and only female artist to get 4 No.1 singles and 3 top 5 singles from one album, all of this stopped when she decided to host 2004's Superbowl halftime show. In 2004's Superbowl halftime show, Janet was asked to perform for the show, she performed 3 old songs from her previous albums, and then she began to perform a new song from her current album at the time, a duet called Rock With You featuring Justin Timberlake, while she was performing with Justin, in the heat of the moment, Justin accidently ripped her outfit, and accidently exposing her breast, the show ended abruptly. Soon after, those involved with the broadcast received massive fines by the FCC, those broadcasters are Viacom, CBS, MTV, Infinity Broadcasting and Clear Channel Communication, in retaliation to these massive fines that the FCC put on them for the accidental exposure of Janet's breasts, they completely blacklisted Janet from ever again playing her music videos, singles and songs, which massively affected her album in sales and commercial success, although it sold 381k in it's first week, but it fell short to her previous albums and debuted at No.2, meanwhile Justin Timberlake the one responsible for the exposure of her breast, got out of this problem scot free, with nothing on his head, not even one fine or fee. Tl dr Justin Timberlake exposed Janet's breast accidently at the Superbow halftime show, yet Janet is the one who got blacklisted and vilified on the radio and TV which caused her albums to fail , and Justin Timberlake got out of the problem scot free, although he was the one who exposed her. So  about how Janet Jackson is the one to blame for her breasts to get exposed, and  about why she was the one to be blacklisted and vilified instead of Justin Timberlake?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Janet Jackson, is now known the most vilified artist, all for a mistake that she did not make or intend for to happen\n","id":"acbc5093-a00f-499f-8e33-5d7c08bba169"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>It's better to search bitter maybe truth than live in a lie to make life easier and more happy.<|ARGUMENT|>A life with only happiness is one in ignorance. Being blissfully ignorant about the suffering in the world, and the problems it faces, and the amount of knowledge yet hidden from your horizon, is a life without challenges, and a life without challenges is one without purpose or direction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Truth is one of the biggest and most important ideals in life\n","id":"bfe35c53-fc83-4a3f-9e1f-208f436f404a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll put it in point form to keep it tidy I think that the development and production of millions of folding smart phones and tablets is an egregious waste of resources driven purely by novelty and shareholders' demand for permanent growth rather than any genuine benefit to our civilization. The modern smartphone is already easily capable of anything that the average user could expect from it. It communicates in voice, video, and text. It has the processing power to run a number of useful functions like display maps and play music and videos. While I concede that folding phones may be neat my issue is that they are toys and waste of resources. Common arguments that I don't find convincing You could say the same thing about computers or the internet in general I'm making a distinction between a general technology and a consumer product developed from it. Computer engineering gives us more powerful processors that we can apply to a lot of things which may be worth the resource investment. More powerful smartphones will only give us more powerful smartphones with which we can do what we're already doing. The market demands it Yeah, obviously. This doesn't change the fact that this is an enormous waste. Technology makes our lives better Sometimes. I think a good test for a piece of technology is to imagine if you're actually better off and happier with it than you were before. Dental surgery yes. Air travel yes. Smartphones in general yes. Same smartphone but now they fold no.  Note if you still want to make the comparison to life before and after previous technologies go ahead. I'll be interested in knowing how the world before and after the internet is comparable to the world before and after foldable screens. The bar will be high, and I'll cackle with delight as I beat you with it. You can change my view by showing me how the benefit of folding screens is worth the resources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Folding smartphones and tablets are a despicable waste of resources.\n","id":"9f999358-453c-45c1-947a-2368673959ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the Bible allow women to hold the church office of \"deacon\"?<|ARGUMENT|>Women are not excluded, they are elevated by Paul as having to be as \"saint\" as what is asked to deacons. In the current French translations, LS or AELF, the term used is \"the women\" not \"their spouses\", btw so it doesn't seem to apply to only deacon's wife, but to all women. Said in another way ,deacons have to be as \"saint\" as a woman should be. I teach my boys to be as \"saint\" as a deacon too.1Tim3, 11 \"women\" in French 1Tim3, 11 : compare \"women\" Darby, Segond vs \"their wives\" others<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women are not specifically excluded here. Also, women were in the group that met to select a replacement apostle for Judas link And in the next chapter, there is nothing to indicate that the men spoke while the women stayed out of the way. In fact, Peter quotes Joel that the men and women would prophesy, saying that's what was happening publicly.\n","id":"3f163159-2cfc-4cfd-a412-66c11e3097aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I am not, nor have I ever been, a Muslim. I do not wish for this to be the case for those who are first time or even second time offenders by any means, but I believe this is a just punishment for repeat offenders. The reason for that is that I want to give someone an opportunity to change, and to allow some leeway in the case of wrongful convictions, but ultimately, career criminals should make a sacrifice. Theft is one of the absolute most heinous acts a human being can commit, and when it has been committed so many times, it demands retribution. One without his hand will be marked forevermore as human garbage, and others will avoid him as such. This is perhaps an even greater punishment than the direct loss of the hand, which itself will make it extremely difficult for this person to live his life. Will that encourage further theft? Perhaps, but I would support even harsher punishments for further crimes. And the threat of essentially complete isolation from society and a lifetime of misery should be a good deterrent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Amputation is an appropriate punishment for theft.\n","id":"799819c9-d038-4245-a545-594723ec4169"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion is one of the only things that actively invades and wants to control many aspects of one's private life which is something that law cannot do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any benefit that an organized religion could provide a society is lost in its power struggles, dogma and hypocrisy.\n","id":"afb155d7-6a16-4be4-8d5b-6dd4cb42e09c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Animals should not have rights<|ARGUMENT|>All animals have the ability to suffer in the same way and to the same degree that humans do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animal rights ensure that animals get to live their lives free from suffering and exploitation\n","id":"0a2f17b3-6262-4fa7-afb5-5787c19019eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll start by saying that English is not my first language. That being said, I would say I have a fair amount of confidence in my ability to execute correct grammar and spelling. However, since I am human, I am liable to make mistakes from time to time. Too many times, people in arguments or debates find that pointing out a spelling or grammar error in an opposing argument somehow validates their point and dismisses the other. This is fucking bullshit. I'm assuming this technique is a desperate attempt to try and prove to onlookers that your opponent is an idiot and therefore everything they have argued is invalid. I know this type of argument where you point out irrelevant facts in an attempt to invalidate counter arguments has a name, but I can't remember what it is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Just because you find a spelling or grammar error in an argument, does not automatically make an opposing argument more correct.\n","id":"f620d92f-1d89-44ef-b341-f1f147a0065b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is not a bash on Trump. I'm simply saying that the office of the president is not vital for the government to function. Instead, we could elect separate individuals to fulfill the roles of the president i.e. we could elect a Commander in Cheif directly from the military doesn't have to be military but that would make sense without concern of partisanship. The president appoints a whole host of individuals for their cabinet that generally fit into one of the two party boxes and instead we could elect a pro environment EPA director and a pro free trade of the Dept of Commerce for example. This would increase representation in the executive branch. To engage in global summits, we could either elect a global ambassador specific to these multi nation summits or use the Secretary of State. But for one on one meetings with dignitaries, generally, ambassadors could fill that role. In place of a president to lead the executive branch, the Secretaries of all cabinets would from a 15 member committee to issue executive orders with an overwhelming majority not sure on specifics but that's beside the point . This would limit the current increase in executive orders, restore the balance of power by placing the onus on Congress again to pass legislation but still maintain executive orders as a means for disaster relief etc when there is bipartisan support. All in all, I am not advocating that my alternative is better than a President, just that the presidential duties could be more effectively carried out by a more modern alternative. The presidency was established when we wrote with feathers. I'm not saying that's a reason to abolish it, but it's just funny considering how much our society has advanced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US does not need a president.\n","id":"f7c9377a-5944-47df-a4cb-c8a072441918"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Genetically Modified Organisms or GMOs be promoted as part of a sustainable agricultural economy?<|ARGUMENT|>A major UN FAO report IAASTD, ch 5.5.4 examined future scenarios with greater or lesser access to GMO and concluded '.the elimination of . transgenesis would slow but not stop the pace of agricultural research and improvement. As a result, humanity would likely be more vulnerable to climatic and other shocks and to increased natural resource scarcity under this alternative pathway.'<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"GMOs offer nutritious and easy to grow plants that can be more resistant to disease and climatic events. They can provide a solution to the lack of food in certain parts of the world.\n","id":"74497e96-2d7d-4ec9-b8f7-13f53506d240"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Some women get involuntarily pregnant and are not capable, for many reasons economic, cultural, health etc, of guaranteeing their children proper conditions in order to have a full human development, which can lead to lots of problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forcing a woman to bear and care for an unwanted child is immoral as it could lead to harms for both the woman and the child.\n","id":"ecba3b84-0f0c-42c9-87fe-deb496880e9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have found an ever increasing tendency for all western interventions to be seen as absolutely ineffective and that therefore no further intervention can ever be justified. I believe this is due to an overly simplistic view of events after the intervention, and an inability to consider the what ifs . As an example, the 2011 intervention in Libya saw the ousting of Gaddafi. Since then, the country has progressively destabilised to the point where civil war has broken out. Conclusion? The west caused the civil war, and therefore it was bad to intervene. However, this view seems far too myopic to me, as you never considered the options of what happened if you didn't intervene. I work as a doctor for my day job, and I would like to make a quick analogy for how we should view interventions. In medicine, we quite often run trials comparing one treatment to another. We may find that in treating a given disease, drug A is effective 60 of the time, and drug B is effective 70 of the time. We therefore elect to use drug B. Our treatment will still fail 30 of the time. What we don't do is blame any outcomes the patient suffers on the drug, as the disease itself is the cause of her problems. Why is this relevant? Consider Libya again. Mass arrests, torture and violence across the country escalated enormously with the deployment of the military. Tank battalions were storming across to suppress Benghazi and killing civilians as they progressed. We were looking at another Sarajevo, or something even worse. In these circumstances, let the West consider what options it has Do nothing Gaddafi razes Benghazi. He will probably win the war and maybe win it swiftly, but have no qualms about killing tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians in doing so. Intervene Remove Gaddafi's ability to slaughter populations. The opposition will come to power, and gain access to the military's arms. There are unpleasant elements in this opposition, and subsequent political instability is inevitable. The west has these options to choose from. There is no option that can stop all violence and institute a democratic and stable government the west is not omnipotent. In this instance it chose intervention, and in my opinion it chose it correctly. Should the west be blamed for all subsequent consequences in the countries history? That sounds like blaming the treatment rather than blaming the disease. Deciding whether to intervene is of course harder than choosing which drug to use in one key way you cannot do a trial and see which is best. I can produce statistics for drugs A and B, and be informed for subsequent usage. When deciding to intervene, you have to anticipate what the consequences will be of the solution s you don't take. This is the flaw in the simplistic reasoning outlined above. Whilst you can see the bad things that have resulted from the intervention, it requires insight to appreciate the bad things which haven't come to pass as a result of the intervention. The Libyans suffered 10,000 casualties in the 2011 war, and a further 4,000 in the two years since the second war broke out. I would argue that had Gadaffi been left free to run rampage, far far more civilians would have died. Do I support all Western interventions? Absolutely not. Iraq was one of the single greatest disasters in recent history. An utterly unnecessary war, counterproductive to the West and the Middle Easy in almost every way imaginable. OF course, with the West engaging in such a futile action, I can appreciate how some observers have the knee jerk reaction to therefore say all western intervention is disastrous. One other reason that I think this assumption has grown is an observation bias . The media rightly or wrongly far more heavily reports on events in countries which have been intervened in. However, this takes up a disproportionate amount of world news, and therefore shapes viewers' perceptions accordingly. Plenty of countries which have had no western intervention which surely merit more cover include Sudan Central African Republic Armenia Azerbaijan DRC Tajikistan Similarly, plenty of countries that have had foreign intervention have been relatively successful afterwards, including Mali Sierra Leonne Bosnia Kosovo Kuwait If you focus on the bad in intervened countries, diminishing the good in intervened countries and ignoring disasters where the west isn't involved, then it's not surprising that people start to notice a pattern between western involvement and subsequent events. If you want to change my view, please tell me how my framework for viewing interventions is wrong, i.e Consider implications of intervening Consider implications of not intervening Take the least worst option Alternately, tell me how the West in particular will always produce the worst outcome regardless of whether or not it follows the above schema. The specifics of whether we should or shouldn't intervene in Afghanistan and Syria are complex and interesting, though perhaps not quite related to my core argument. If you do want to debate this, start a thread elsewhere and send me a link, I'd be happy to join in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think Western military intervention is universally bad\n","id":"75c0b8d7-a535-419c-9935-c78738c4c351"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been so psyched about the MeToo movement. It was stunning to discover that so many women shared my experiences, and that so many of us female and male underestimated the severity of the problem. For the first time in history, women were speaking out and being taken seriously. Real crimes were being exposed and a zero tolerance for harassment even when it didn't reach the level of crime was being formed. Women were taken at their word. We were exposing real issues and people were listening. And then Grace came along. Had she been summarily dismissed, as she should have been, her story wouldn't have damaged the movement. But the fact that so many women agreed that a bad date is worth publicly humiliating a man for has everyone sitting back and wondering if we were right to so blindly support these women when they come forward. They clearly don't understand where the line is and there is a line. If there are women who don't understand that then everything they accuse others of is suspect. All this women had to do was clearly state STOP and he would have. His not picking up on signals is a foible that most of us share at one point or another. Now all men are worried about being publicly humiliated for not picking up signals. Believe it or not, achievement of equality requires both genders to be on the same page that harassment and assault are unacceptable. The vast majority of men WERE woken up to the pervasiveness and evil of harassment and assault over the past year and were in full support of people being held accountable. But when women can't difference between assault and a bad date, we are all put on notice that they are unreliable witnesses. Grace and her followers seem to believe that women shouldn't have to take personal responsibility for their actions and that it should be up to the man to lead. For Grace, saying Let's chill is equivalent to saying I don't want to have sex with you . It isn't. If there are a sizeable number of women, as there appears to be, that don't understand that, then how can we take women at their word? And that is killing me. We had such momentum that it felt like real, permanent change was taking place in our society. And now that forward motion has come to a sudden stop. There are plenty of women like me out there that are mad as hell at Grace for sabotaging us like this. In order to change my view, you will have to convince me that the movement hasn't been damaged by this. Defending Grace won't do that. Tell me how you think the movement can continue its forward motion now that so many people female and male are not certain we can trust the judgement of the women who are coming forward.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Grace and her supporters have destroyed the MeToo movement\n","id":"13d58ef7-6fb4-4343-a0f9-5b245ffaaf4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Bullying among children would go up as it will be easier to find out who is different and doesn't fit in, which would affect the long term mental health of the individual if they are unable from the get-go to fit in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are probably not very well adjusted to living in a world where they would always be watched and where their actions would continuously be scrutinized, by friends and third parties.\n","id":"db932f8e-05f5-4060-bbc1-0f0881c4dc8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Enforcement patterns against sex workers are selective and discriminatory by race and class. Legalizing sex work will benefit those who are at a current disadvantage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing sex work reinforces discrimination based on skin color and class.\n","id":"eace8366-1e2a-4fef-9678-5337c6cb0c0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface this by saying I don't care about Pewds's content that much. I enjoy it, but don't think it deserves to be o top or anything. I just want an original creator on top. YouTube used to be all about empowering people to share their own content. Broadcast Yourself was the original slogan. It was the perfect platform to upload your own content. Now YouTube is primarily full of corporate brands. I looked at the top 30 videos on trending today, and 21 of them were made by corporate brands. 20 if you don't count Linus Tech Tips, which is debatable YouTube now is primarily full of music videos, and trailers. It's hard to find actual content these days. This is in part due to some changes YouTube has instituted in the past few years. One thing is the weakening of subscriptions. You no longer get notified of all videos when you subscribe to someone, and even if you click the bell it still only sends them sometimes. Hell, it doesn't even recommend their content most of the time. This makes it harder for original content creators to get views. On the other hand, people will usually be searching for things like music videos and movie trailers. This is why they get shown more. YouTube also no longer seems to pay enough to make a living even to some of the biggest creators. Most people used to go full time at around 5k subscribers. Now it seems even those with millions of subscribers need to use Patreon to make a living. I will say that I am not a YouTuber so I don't know what the actual numbers are, but I'm just making observations. I'm not really going to go into why T Series sucks, because I think we all know the answer to that. From what I can tell the only reasons for subscribing to them are to spite Pewdiepie or because of Indian nationalism<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"T-Series passing PewDiePie represents the problematic shift of YouTube away from empowering individual content creators.\n","id":"15cd8ce4-77e6-41b1-973e-3aaa54abf9b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All the Gillete ad controversy has got me thinking. Most of my young life I had been afraid of flirting with, asking out and sometimes even interacting with women that I am interested in. I was raised to respect women, and my understanding of how to respect women was just to not interact with them at all because it was too difficult for me to understand what to do and what not to do. Edit for clarification I am talking about my younger years. Here. I don't still have these problems. Conversely, guys that do not respect women aren't going to give a shit about what gillete or any ad has to say about being a decent human. So my view to be changed is that telling everyone to stop doing something wrong results in the wrongdoers to continue doing what is wrong and everyone else at risk of getting social anxiety because they want to be better but they were already doing fine, so they withdraw themselves from social situations to avoid fucking it up because of the supposed problem. I hope I am wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Telling any demographic to stop doing awful things is pointless\n","id":"6260b9e5-5acf-41b2-960a-e206f040423b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Astrology a valid practice?<|ARGUMENT|>Astrologers use social biases like the \"Barnum effect to make you believe that they know all kind of things about you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Astrology simply gives the illusion of having the power of prediction through manipulation.\n","id":"784604df-4e72-4509-a05f-c413e69149dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This issue came up when my brother said something along the lines of, God is omniscient. God has infinite knowledge. I said, What the hell is infinite knowledge? Knowledge that just keeps going and going and going. What are you talking about? His response was, Numbers are infinite. Numbers are a part of God's knowledge, therefore God's knowledge is infinite. Sounded pretty clever at the time. I've thought about it and now feel numbers are not infinite. There are only 10 numbers 0 9. We simply stack multiple numbers behind one another in order to create a new meaning or context , but numbers themselves are not infinite. Perhaps our imaginations are infinite, but not numbers. Make sense? Change my view. edit Interesting comments , guys. Seems i have equated the symbols of numbers with the notions concepts those symbols represent. Not sure how i let myself do that. Silly silly<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe numbers are infinite.\n","id":"39a9c2e9-b96b-4a84-817a-293718f0ad0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Some EU countries Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium , export much more into other EU states than they import. Others France, UK import much more from EU member states than they export. Trade imbalances within the EU drive unsustainable debt levels in deficit countries. Within the Eurozone, states cannot tackle trade deficits by devaluing their currency. Therefore, surplus and deficit countries should share the burdens of reducing trade imbalances by fiscal and structural reforms. Yet currently there is no incentive for surplus countries to do their share, for instance by raising wages or investing in domestic infrastructure. The EU\u2019s extant \u201cMacroeconomic Adjustment Procedure\u201d has no teeth. The policy should be toughened to impose a fine on surplus countries equivalent to 3 37 of the value of the surplus. At current levels of surpluses this would result in a fine of roughly 4bn EUR per year on the Netherlands and 2bn on Germany.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU should make member states running persistent trade surpluses within the Euro area pay a penalty\n","id":"1fe35f79-604f-4b92-a8f3-346068d6aa59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There Be Trigger Warnings in Education?<|ARGUMENT|>The role of education is to expose students to new ideas. Otherwise you get stuck in a bubble. Getting an education should be, in itself, a trigger warning. In recognizing that, each institution should have a program for students and faculty in learning how to deal with triggers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"University is meant to prepare and equip young people with the skills to survive in the real world. Trigger warnings are over-protecting students rather than preparing them for adult life which often includes unpleasant and harsh realities.\n","id":"35dfd7b0-cd0d-40a7-9776-446cd164f79d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is an accusation I've seen hurled around the likes of r worldnews someone will post something which is even slightly pro Russian and you can guarantee that there will follow an accusation of being a 'Putinbot' or 'a shill', or paid by the Kremlin. Now I do not believe that, whilst there may be those sympathetic to Russia posting on reddit such as myself , there is any reason to believe that any of these sorts of posters are in any way connected to the Kremlin. If anything, reddit would be a pretty poor platform to do so, given that there are quite literally thousands of subreddits and even a concentrated effort by a large amount of these Kremlin propagandists would likely be diluted because of this, but also because of the down voting system. Most pro Kremlin posts I've seen receive such massive amounts of down votes, they are buried. Plus it must also be said that even in default subreddits, such as r worldnews, Russian articles make up tiny amounts of total posts made, and so I cannot see the logic in any major organisation, and much less the Kremlin, throwing even moderate amounts of resources at tiny amounts of posts for propaganda purposes. I also believe cultural bias plays a part. It's a safe assumption a decently large amount of reddit users are either American or European. With this, this lends itself to cultural bias, and what I believe has happened is that given the nature of reddit, this blurs the lines to the point where few redditors distinguish between merely Russo appreciative posts and plain silly, biased posts, and so every post which is positive about Russia is deemed to be the work of a Putinbot. You also see this in news sources the same redditors who immediately jump on posts referencing RT Russia Today or The Moscow Times are the same redditors who will show nothing of the same discernment for posts which reference sources such as the Daily Mail, HuffPo or other Western news sources which could be argued to be biased. So, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe that there are real paid pro-Kremlin propagandists on reddit.\n","id":"de51f1a9-b185-452c-85f5-1f4b5b908415"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>U.S. Imperialism<|ARGUMENT|>The USA now has an imperial impulse, or desire to establish a global hegemony in a post-cold war, unipolar only one superpower world. This impulse is partly justified by the need for self-defence, but it also allows them to impose their policies on the rest of the world e.g. over Israel, and to promote their own economic advantage e.g. protecting their oil supplies through two Gulf Wars. This world view is illustrated by a 1992 Pentagon planning document declaring that no rival powers - primarily Germany or Japan - should challenge U.S. global domination. More recently, the USA's policy has explicitly become one of maintaining their supremacy against any other power. Although imperialism was in the past about seizing territory, the determination of the USA to control other countries amounts to the same thing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USA now has an imperial impulse, or desire to establish a global hegemony in a post-cold war, un...\n","id":"81986d89-9944-48dc-b1fe-f7eb03f66728"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My opinion is that Trump\u2019s ban on entry from certain countries morally abhorrent and not consistent with the highest ideals of the United States. It is also my opinion that subject countries have been arbitrarily selected and do not map to countries where we have experienced terrorist activities. With that said, I do believe it is the legal and moral responsibility and duty of the executive branch to make determinations as to allow or disallow entry to persons from any country they desire and to set conditions for such an entry. So this is the view I ask to be changed The travelers ban is within the prerogative of the executive branch.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The travelers ban is within the prerogative of the executive branch.\n","id":"f17d6504-7338-455b-b7f5-8f50d6f46ff0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>Points in the link reference pronoun use, identifying as an ally, cisgenderism and cisnormativity, etc. These are points focused on by activists and not scientists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The APA is not immune to political influence as an association, as evidenced by the language used in the link.\n","id":"ca8821c6-2011-4658-a3df-93bf73ef0ee7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are a lot of Superman criticisms that I don't agree with. He's too powerful? Nope, he has enemies just as powerful as him. He's too perfect and has simple morality? Nope, he has to struggle with his beliefs and experiences in tons of his stories. Kryptonite is dumb? Well, at least they have found other uses for it like power sources even for Superman's Fortress tech. But there is one that ScrewAttack's Death Battle kinda sorta touched on, and that is the ill definition of his limits. Yes, I know that Superman has limits. DC has tried to make that clear several times. But the problem is that those limits are too vague and too fluctuating. He can go from lifting a few tons to accidentally sneezing the solar system away. He can go from faster than a speeding bullet to several times light speed. A lot of Superman's stories revolve around him reaching his limits, and thus have him come to terms with how he can't do everything. But I roll my eyes at them, as at his best he should be powerful enough to do 99 of everything assuming unrealistic comic book physics , even if he can't solve 100 of the world's problems. Any limits that are given to him feel and likely are just arbitrarily placed there in an attempt to make the writing work for the time. It makes any attempt to give him a just as powerful enemy tend to fall flat. And it's too late for DC's management to make a lasting change to this fatal flaw, as Superman's long history and fans turned writers will always lead him back to being as arbitrarily powerful as needed. Say what you will about Batman's endless money, but at least he has to work around being normal , even up against superpowered foes like Killer Croc and Poison Ivy. And Wonder Woman may be similar to Supes, but it's clear that she can only take a few direct hits to her body, as tough as she may be, and she has to stay on her guard with her reflexes and bracers to keep up with her colleagues. Say what you will about Goku from Dragon Ball being about as powerful, but at least his character was built around reaching and breaking further and further limits, and he has obeyed this concept to this day. Say what you will about Saitama from One Punch Man being intentionally OP, but he's written to be completely bored with being able to defeat anything in one punch. As for why I want my view changed, there's a disconnect between what's in my heart I still like Supes and what's in my mind this view . So up, up, and  away.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Superman's lack of concrete limits ruins him as a character and concept\n","id":"2dcffa53-52d3-4b3f-9682-4555a0ddb7b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not saying they have to be eligible for service on the front line or anything like that, but for hundreds of years women have been fighting for the right to be equal. I don't understand specifically why they don't have to sign up for it like American men have to when they turn 18. I think it's wrong to force men to sign up while their female counterparts don't have to worry about a draft being enacted. If they had to sign up, knowing men are biologically more physically gifted than women, I think we could make certain exceptions for them to work in offices, factories, and other parts of the military instead of putting them out into battle. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think women should have to sign up for the Draft in the US.\n","id":"cc459f57-03a6-4183-8815-3aa3b6f605d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Evidently new legislation was passed in Ontario today to take effect Sept 1 2018 introducing immediate 3 month up to 1 month suspensions if you are caught using a handheld device while driving. This is stupid for two reasons. 1 Hands free devices are just as dangerous. As it isn't the device itself which creates a problem, but the fact that you are using two different parts of your brain to drive and talk. www.scientificamerican.com article hands free texting is no safer to use while driving 2 It does not penalize use of the radio or other non driving accessories built into the car while driving. So it creates a double standard of bot allowing me to use the GPS on my phone, but will penalize me for using the GPS built into my car, or not allowing to change music on my phone, but allows me to change music via my radio if my phone is hooked up. I suspect these laws will not do anything to help with careless of distracted driving, but will see many people lose their licenses despite not being unsafe. I will be returning to this post at 12pm EST. And hour and a half after posting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ontario's new distracted driving laws are stupid and won't change much\n","id":"664fc0a3-5e31-497a-aec5-7283a46b8b68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have had sex with men and women, and thought about the other gender while having sex with someone of the opposite gender. I have explored all forms of sexual expression that I have desired and imagined. Like most of us, past unresolved conflicts and needs drove all my sexual desires, though they sometimes may have been out of my conscious awareness. And while embracing different sexual identities over the course of my lifetime has been meaningful and useful, my inner truth was more perfectly found within my desires than within any identity I subscribed to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality are what they are said to be\n","id":"d0f150d6-3416-41fb-9d07-9d29e75bbe27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many major corporations that now employ thousands of people were started in garages or dorm rooms or basements or even in conflict of interest scenarios where the founders started a business while working another dead end job. Before they had capital. Investors. Assets of any substance. Most of the rich horde their wealth. Most of the environmental circumstances that create jobs are daily manipulated by those actually doing the creating. So, in short, do what you love and the money will follow radiates out to mean do what you love and not only will you create employment for yourself, you'll create jobs for others. Practically speaking, I think unemployment is down primarily because hordes of people were forced to create work out of thin air. After all, 40 of Americans will list their job as freelancer by 2020. I'd cite the book Linchpin but it's not in front of me. However, I don't have tons of thought or sources to back this up, so .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the true job creators are creatives who literally create jobs, as opposed to the rich or the general landscape of employment.\n","id":"a728de2f-d31a-4dd4-83ff-48b2f432ef26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A study by the Institute of Responsible Technology argued that the glyphosate found on genetically modified foods can trigger or exacerbate celiac disease since: \"Glyphosate is a patented antibiotic that destroys beneficial gut bacteria. An imbalance of gut flora commonly accompanies Celiac Disease and other gluten-related disorders.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The recent rise in celiac is tied to the use of glyphosate on genetically modified crops and the presence of gluten proteins.\n","id":"6cbb2384-4866-41fc-b894-6e6ac883d20d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gays in the US military<|ARGUMENT|>\"Don't ask don't tell\" helps keep the sexual-orientation of gays a secret, which protects them from the potential of other servicemen acting violently against them because they are gay. If gays openly stated their sexuality, and if they were more free to enact their homosexual behavior and personalities, they would obviously be much more recognizable as gay, and would be targeted more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Don't ask don't tell\" keeps orientation secret, protects gays.\n","id":"1b51a541-cdb1-43c9-b28d-8f544560db80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should countries send back refugees when it is safe in their country of origin?<|ARGUMENT|>It is well documented that cultural differences have caused communication challenges in multinational companies, causing a lot of time and energy to be spent on overcoming these challenges to ensure effective communication across the company.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cultural barriers can cause communication challenges. When there are communication issues in society this can increase societal issues e.g. resentment between groups, inefficiency in public services.\n","id":"2024af21-8072-4daa-a26b-02a4242ec3a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Tampon Tax be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Minimum wages are lower for jobs more commonly held by low skilled women, such as health care workers, as opposed to jobs more commonly held by low skilled men, such as road transportation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Australia \"women on a minimum wage earn roughly 10% less per hour than men on the minimum rate.\"\n","id":"c794656a-d4cb-4fd2-8048-ff17c2792516"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be legally binding?<|ARGUMENT|>Powerful countries like the USA and China already manage to have poor human rights' records and yet attract little hard pressure\/ action from bodies like the UN. Even if the UDHR was legally binding, this kind of 'immunity' would continue to protect powerful countries from having to address their abuses, even if they are the worst cases and where the UDHR most needs to be enforced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Countries have disproportionate power in convincing the global community to 'look the other way', away from the worst behaviour that is allowed to take place within their country. It is unlikely that these kinds of abuses would be the ones a legally binding UDHR would pursue.\n","id":"e8b3b557-a9e4-4b00-9e46-3ca02225db80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund liberal arts degrees?<|ARGUMENT|>Exams and assignments given by academics can challenge students and further their understanding of the subject. This depth cannot be achieved when there is no force compelling students to question the content further.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Simply reading the texts does not provide the same level of understanding that would come from a guided academic study of them.\n","id":"d9ee8674-7f3f-4518-82f5-ee92340e1580"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is wireless charging a worthwhile feature on a phone?<|ARGUMENT|>Wireless chargers can be integrated integrated into furniture, thereby making it easier to hide the cables.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wireless charging makes rooms more aesthetically pleasing by removing cables.\n","id":"f3d4b48a-05f8-4d1a-b207-137060ad5ca6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not an expert in legal affairs, nor am I a lawyer, but there have been numerous articles and reports recently of public defender offices that are woefully underfunded, which makes it very difficult for a public defender to provide competent legal representation. Some states even require any lawyer in their area to provide free legal counsel to defendants, even if the lawyer in question lacks training or the necessary skills to mount a proper legal defense for example, assigning a tax estate lawyer to defend someone accused of burglary or assault I was thinking that we should mandate ideally at the each judicial level that county state feds must fund the public defenders office at a rate equivalent to that of the prosecution. So if the DA has 6 full time attorneys prosecuting cases, then the public defenders office should also have six full time attorneys of equal skill and experience for defense. It just seems to be that anything less is a failure of the government to provide appropriate counsel, as they are required to do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public Defender Funding Should Be Directly Linked to DA Funding\n","id":"d0fd29e7-36a5-4ebf-899c-5b673b1cb8ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Right now I'm doing some research into the topic of diversity, and what benefits can or cannot accrue from a diverse workforce. My view while starting this is that diversity, in the sense of having a greater mixture of ethnicities, higher representation of LGBT people or a more even ratio between the sexes, is not an axiomatic good. I'm not even certain it is a goal businesses should be mindful of. From a bit of googling I can find a lot of opinion pieces extolling the hypothetical virtues of diversity and even the odd study that shows a correlation between more female foreign workforces and returns on equity but not much hard evidence that diversity good for business. I'm aware of course that it depends how you define the term diverse , but my suspicion is that companies would be better advised to focus on the demands of their particular market than try to increase the number of females or ethnic minorities on the board. Sometimes these two goals will match each other, but sometimes I suspect having a less diverse workforce could benefit a business. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A diverse workforce is not an axiomatic good for businesses\n","id":"bdd6ab27-e1dd-4a36-b0d6-9e96df7e6cb1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that they are not designed to find the best applicant for the job, rather they are designed to find the most docile persons so that they can be exploited harder without any resistance. Consistent questions asking about if you feel that Rules are meant to be broken and so forth are not there to see if you are able to reason, rather to see if you are a candidate for total subordination. This means that people that are best suited for the job are less likely to have a chance at that job, and it only encourages people to lie to get a job. Also they are simply intrusive into the personal live of the applicant, which is where they go from simply despicable to needing to be regulated. They ask personal questions that will be kept on file regardless if the company will hire the applicant and could be used against that person in a later time possibly. The right to privacy to the individual is needed to be protected at this point. I also think the argument of well simply don't apply to those places is false. The large corporations that have implemented these programs have also used there lobbyist to create laws that have given them massive advantages. Those few company's control so many jobs that large populations areas are many times left with those jobs being the only ones available. So it is in fact cohesion, and they have all acted as a trust to implement such things and insure there is no job competition that would not be doing the same.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that Personality test on job applications should be Illegal.\n","id":"060d5db0-d407-4052-b1ef-bb40f1dd7ac8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan remove limitations on its military?<|ARGUMENT|>All weaponry is capable of both. Japan is, in reality, heavily armed, albeit in the form of a national \u2018Self Defense Force\u2019 SDF. She maintains land, sea and air forces, which would seem to be contrary to the constitution but every attempt to deploy them against anything other than an attack on Japanese soil requires endless delay and constitutional debate. A Constitutional revision would bring welcome clarity to the situation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The distinction between defensive and offensive capabilities is an absurd one:\n","id":"2cb2294e-9a9a-4dfa-810e-4ae289851477"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>The state doesn't allow individuals to carry out other illegal activities in their homes, even if the individuals own those homes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Property rights are not unlimited, but rather subject to restrictions and regulations of the government such as zoning codes.\n","id":"ed43f63e-a066-48b7-b9b7-2c7b827f16e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>A population realizes it cannot grow exponentially even though it is going in that direction, so it keeps correcting itself. The curve does not show the population be overpopulated, because it already started to happen and took action in time to stop it from getting out of control like overshooting Even though the overshoot curve reveals overpopulation visually, that does not mean that overpopulation does not happen in the LGM. With the latter, hindsight corrections are too small to view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any system that is resource limited follows the logistic growth model LGM described in Calculus. At some point the non-renewable resources are used up and the population has to correct for it.\n","id":"afacf95c-4ee4-4562-9c14-7f790089317f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To start off, I want to clarify exactly what I mean by this, because it has a touchy title. I do not believe individuals raised in particular cultures should be judged by the aggregate values of said culture. Individuals in statistics often do not follow the expected value, so you shouldn't make that judgment outright. I am saying that certain cultures overall can be objectively better than others. From what I've gathered from other reading, when people say that all cultures are equal, there are two interpretations I see that mean very different things. The first one is that there is an objective moral standard that applies to all cultures, and each different one meets it in certain places and fails it in others. Regardless of how each culture scores up, it is not one culture's place to compare its morality to another and enforce it where it is foreign. While I disagree with this, I think it is a more reasonable and honest opinion. The second opinion I see seems to relate to this postmodern idea that all morality is a social construct in and of itself, so each culture's own developed morality is equal in merit. This is the one I have bigger problems with. If morality is a social construct dependent on the culture, I don't see any reason why subcultures shouldn't be allowed to develop their own moral systems. If gang violence or cult hazing and enslavement are part of these smaller cultures' moralities, then it begs the question why we consider these things immoral. Or even inside a family, it could be argued each individual family has its own moral systems, so parents who abuse their children are just exercising their own moralities. The implications of this system don't sit well even with people who do believe morality is subjective, so I don't know why we should consider foreign cultures any different. In this view, honor killings in Afghanistan, concentration camps in North Korea, or totalitarianism in Russia are all equally valid in their own spheres of influence. If we call out these views, we are exerting our private morality onto foreign cultures, which is bad. Even then, why is it bad? What super cultural moral system dictates that projecting our culture abroad is bad? I don't really understand this view. If morality is not subjective, then it is fair to say that since different cultures vary so much, some will match up with this moral standard more closely than others. It is hard to measure exactly how this would work, but from a slightly utilitarian point of view, I would say general prosperity of the people and freedom from tyranny are decent indicators that a culture has good values at its core. If this is the case, it seems Europe and North America seem to have an advantage over most of the world. I don't believe it is tied to race, because there is so much ethnic variety between prosperous groups in both regions, so I think it must be tied to culture. If you disagree, can you explain why? I'm open to listen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is okay to \"judge\" foreign cultures\n","id":"76d95ebb-f022-4a62-b997-036909a524f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Emotional support animals are just pets. The label is abused by people who want to bring their pets with them into inappropriate human only places. I have no problem with people who like their pets. But there are good reasons some places prohibit pets. Animals are generally not sanitary, and are prone to bothering people, urinating and defecating, and being loud. Most health codes prohibit pets in foodservice establishments for example. Disabilities accommodation laws allow people with service animals to bring those animals into places where they'd otherwise be prohibited. A service animal has been specifically trained to perform task s to aid their owner in overcoming their disability. So for example seeing eye dogs are specially trained to help their owners navigate the world. Emotional support animals are not trained in any way. They're just pets. Sometimes with a doctor's note saying this person is very attached to their pet. Sometimes with a BS letter you buy on the internet to scare businesses into letting your pet in. Unless the animal is trained to do something specific, it should just be treated as a pet, and you should not be allowed to bring it anywhere pets aren't allowed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Emotional Support Animals are BS\n","id":"5f00e3da-4484-4e5e-8593-34a08b65cf80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have to be specific with this because I'm bad at conveying details without specifics. I'm an artist who paints during the day and likes to relax at night by playing video games, listening to audiobooks or podcasts, playing a table top RPG, and generally entertaining myself. I want to make it very clear that money isn't a factor here. F2P games like League and Dota are ways I love to use my time without spending a dime, audiobooks can be rented from a library, podcasts are free to download, all you need for something like D D is the free basic rules and your imagination. My spouse works a regular 8 5 job and, slightly irrelevant, I suspect she is envious that I'm able to work from home. After we put our kid to bed we have about an hour and a half before she too goes to bed. She wants to spend that time interacting and generally being together which I can see is totally reasonable. The actual problem comes in when she insists that I must go to bed with her, effectively demanding that I give up the only free time I would have to partake in the hobbies that I enjoy and relax with. I can't feasibly do these things during the day. As much freedom as a job from home allows what up pajama pants I still work. I also happen to be the type of person that can't paint and listen to someone talk at the same time, I'll just end up missing details on one or the other. The situation strikes me as unfair but hopefully you can change my mind. Edit thank you everyone who responded. This post has turned into something more fitting for a sub like r relationships instead of cmv. All the responses were helpful and generally good ideas which I can try out and hopefully improve the situation overall.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's unfair of a partner to ask that I give up my hobbies\n","id":"2c3a2550-7e3f-4f5f-aa70-a5d096379ec3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>Obligatory service takes away two years of people's lives in which their ability to do important things such as develop themselves and maintain their social circles, is significantly harmed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obligatory service is an unfair infringement upon citizens' rights to freedom and self-determination.\n","id":"42c559f2-c5b8-49f2-af28-73bf6b16f977"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>Having a set of options available for sentencing and a system for informing the selection of those options managed by highly trained professionals seems like a good idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Professionally assess or psychoanalyze the pedophilia issue associated with the convicted individual to help determine the appropriate pathway towards reintegration, segregation, medication, and\/or a combination thereof.\n","id":"bef576a3-00ac-414e-a60d-0b17e1234b8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>The state's powers to take life and liberty for the protection of the majority is well established. As the consequence of licensing procreation, abortion and adoption are relevant because, unless the newborn is to be responsibly supported by parents or the mother has aborted, it falls to the state to abort.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nice idea but completely unworkable. would unlicensed pregnancies be aborted or adopted?\n","id":"44136e21-c4be-44d9-b2b9-ec5085a056b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When conservatives appeal to liberty against gun control measures, arguing that prohibition is authoritarian and only drives guns underground, why do they not apply the same logic to Marijuana and other recreational drugs? There's no question that America's continued marijuana prohibition is fueling gang violence in Mexico, not to mention the world's largest incarcerated population and continued fatherlessness among black neighborhoods. Conversely, when conservatives appeal to safety and morality against drug legalization, why don't they also rail against the evils of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, which actually do kill many, many people in America? By prohibitionist logic, our government should launch a crackdown on all of the above in the interest of public safety. Yet ATF is not low on their chopping block when it comes to budgets. Hypocrisy, much? Note that when I call hypocrisy, I'm referring to establishment conservatives, not libertarians.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pro-Gun, Anti-Drug, Pro-Alcohol Conservatives Are Hypocrites\n","id":"787d8d02-c69d-4c0c-9833-aecfc3b285b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is There A Need For Testing on Lab Animals in Research?<|ARGUMENT|>If we did research on humans the same way we do on animals, there would be significant developments too, but ethically we can't. We should apply the same ethics to animals, and then we could find other research methods like stem cells.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no need for animal testing with the availability of cell cultures.\n","id":"0061cf1b-7c73-4ed4-aba7-1147bde54a83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Religion could be explained in terms of 'universal obsessional neurosis'<|ARGUMENT|>It is possible that a person who completely rejects any religion whatsoever may consciously or unconsciously avoid walking under a ladder, even if there is no one on the ladder who might drop something.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not everyone who is religious is also superstitious, and not everyone who is superstitious is also religious.\n","id":"892dddc8-f03c-4512-af6c-8a7aff86ea7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Euro Was a Mistake<|ARGUMENT|>The euro constitutes a second reserve currency for the world. It is the only currency that can challenge the hegemony of the US dollar as world currency \u2014 the yen, British pound and Swiss franc are much too small. Having a world reserve currency, that it can print itself, provides independence and prosperity to Europe and provides more economic geopolitical balance in the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A single currency spread over multiple countries is more likely to be stable than individual national currencies. This reduces economic risk and creates more stable business conditions.\n","id":"a1dda4bd-9fe8-4ca9-88d0-ebc8d5a05555"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Daenerys Targaryen the Prince\/Princess that was Promised?<|ARGUMENT|>Daenerys, Jon, and Tyrion all, at once point, were involved in the death of their loved ones Drogo, Ygritte, Shae in a similar manner as Azor Ahai had to kill his wife.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are multiple parallels between Jon, Tyrion, and Daenerys that match the conditions of the prophecy.\n","id":"195f9074-8ba0-4de2-b728-493697ba1367"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>The parties\u2019 electoral coalitions have become increasingly distinct racially. The nonwhite share of the U.S. electorate has doubled since the early 1990s and this trend is certain to continue based on the racial make-up of the youngest and oldest age groups in the population. Due to the preference of nonwhite voters for the Democrats, the growth of the nonwhite electorate has led to an increasing racial divide between the Democratic and Republican electoral coalitions. Abramovitz, pg 4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Congress has been progressively polarised since the 1970s. Polarisation will continue increasing regardless of what the Democrats do as it is rooted in other factors.\n","id":"900ff10e-8680-483d-a368-79de8bda8f83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Faith as an epistemology can and is used to come to mutually exclusive conclusions and as such can be discarded as a reliable means for deriving truth. It's subject is often asserted without reason and defended against all reason. Any rational process working toward understanding of reality will therefore not be based on faith.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Faith in the sense of non-empirical knowledge is indistinguishable from a claim of faith. In other words, true faith and false faith both manifest as claims of faith. Therefore, faith claims cannot be used to justify belief over disbelief.\n","id":"33cc8079-04b1-4eb4-a295-25676fe5bd51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>Long-term tenants are a risk for property owners as they are harder to remove if problems occur. These risks impose costs to landlords and are thus factored into rent prices. The lower-risk and thus lower cost proposition of short-term leases thus decreases the cost of housing in general.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Airbnb creates additional supply within the housing and accommodation market that would be otherwise unavailable.\n","id":"81c8a153-50af-4d72-be32-1dda497ea8f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>About 40% of Calfornia votes GOP every year. About 35% of Texas votes Democrat. We think of these states as monoliths because the EC hides up to 49% of a state's votes in first-past-the-post elections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since the electors are usually allocated under a winner-take-all system, potential meddlers only need to sway small numbers of votes in order to have a large impact.\n","id":"9c9d1c30-3649-4e0f-ab3e-d1257a370ff5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Automous weapons will become uncontrollable. For instance, both Google and Facebook were no longer able to understand the AI chatbots they created when they began to speak their own coded language. To arm AI, which in it's infancy already have begun to rebel against their creators, is a disaster in the making.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Autonomous weapons come with the risk of becoming uncontrollable in real-world situations due to design failures, hacking, and external manipulation.\n","id":"2f380c6b-4901-454b-a620-462a38f91559"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.\" --Alexander H. Stevens Vice President of The Confederacy, Mar 21, 1861.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Confederacy was outspoken that slavery was a fundamental building block.\n","id":"d72e777c-1145-4b63-8ee6-617800449d4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A few saying they would act so, does not mean that they would actually do so and if they did, then they would be prosecuted, as it is considered to be wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If people prefer to go to prison for saving their pet over a human this illustrates that they value their pet's life over a human's life.\n","id":"bd1984c7-1893-414a-897e-5004d7153152"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The felony murder rule says essentially, that when someone is killed or injured during the commission of a felony, all the co conspirators to that felony are liable, if it was foreseeable, whether or not they actually participated in the murder. A more precise legal description can be found here . The most famous real world example of the felony murder rule is the Texas Seven For example, if scenario 1 Tom, Dick, and Harry rob a bank and Tom shoots the teller, they can all be charged with murder, even though Dick and Harry didn't actually pull the trigger. This prevents perversions of justice where the co conspirators get acquitted by each claiming that someone else pulled the trigger. So far so good. But let's say scenario 2 that Tom, Dick, and Harry rob a bank, and a security guard shoots and kills Tom. Under the felony murder rule, Dick and Harry get charged with Tom's murder. This is not hypothetical, there have been a number of real world situations where that's happened, e.g. this and this That seems perverse to me. In scenario 1, the teller was murdered through no fault of his own. The risk of death was forced upon him by the co conspirators. Charging all of them with murder seems appropriate. In scenario 2, Tom willingly chose to involve himself in the conspiracy. His death was brought about largely by his own actions. It seems wrong to me to charge his co conspirators for that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Felony murder rule should not apply when an accomplice is killed or injured\n","id":"c83b42ab-959c-4b35-8bf7-f95d2f992705"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The following are some thoughts on the effectiveness of specific US drug policies ultimately irrelevant as far as moral justification goes. gt Demographic race income information regarding the meteoric rise of violent crime rates from 1970 1990 strongly suggest 'urban' gang violence surrounding the growth of illicit drug trade to have been major contributor. Bear in mind that the 80s crack epidemic occurred during era in which public attitudes toward drug use were more tolerant than they are currently. Widespread addiction and gang violence flourished before the establishment of policies aimed at fighting the illegal drug trade. gt It is virtually impossible discern the 'true' reason for the drop in crime starting from ~1990. Maybe it was because of Roe v. Wade in 1971, maybe it was because of the 90s tech boom, but the drop in violent crime has undoubtedly coincided with nationwide campaigns educating the public against drugs and with increased drug related incarceration rates. Nonetheless, the jury is out. Let us completely disregard the effectiveness of the 'War on Drugs' in the US for now. Policy specifics and implementations aside, there exist common moral arguments against drug usage distribution justifying strict drug policies in countries without 'drug problems' such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China. In short, recreational drugs contribute little to society while having the potential to do great damage. The fact that some people can sustain productive lives despite drug use doesn't make access to drugs a 'right'. Some people can be responsible owners of white tigers, high grade explosives, etc. Most popular arguments I've heard for drug legalization haven't been convincing. I'd be interested to hear some that are. Are current arguments for drug legalization only valid for countries with an existing drug problem? Would you fo out of your way to try and convince the Japanese government to legalize heroin?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am against drug legalization and believe the 'War on Drugs' to be morally justified.\n","id":"7ae034d8-06cf-48fd-be3e-7a7ce5eafaee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>All cosmological models that postulate no beginning to our universe or offer a cause for the beginning through naturalistic events in a prior universe\/multiverse fail to account for observational evidence or still imply a beginning to the prior universe\/multiverse<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the universe has a cause, the best candidate for that cause is the God of classical theism\n","id":"034928c2-82c6-4713-816c-1109507388db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>If God takes the position \"Do as I say, not as I do\" then he does not have to confront our judgement against him as an example, but only for him as final arbiter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of evil can be reconciled with an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving God. God would not want to remove evil if a greater good were only achievable with the existence of evil.\n","id":"63752a37-35b1-4d19-b836-2086ba71d45d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>The development of science can be held back for a time by politically powerful multinational corporations if they feel their business may be affected by the findings of scientists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Academic and industrial contexts expose scientific research to political influences.\n","id":"1fbf095d-2915-4aaa-ac91-dcd6a30ffada"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I currently have both the Alien Blue and iAlien app on my Iphone mobile device. I find that not only does iAlien feature a more sharp design than its competitor, but also it appears more user friendly and accessible to new redditors. Whenever I introduce reddit to my friends I make sure that they download iAlien because Alien Blue usually discourages my friends from figuring out the site. From what I have deduced though, Alien Blue is the clear popular choice for mobile redditors, and I am curious why it is held to a higher degree than iAlien<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe iAlien is the best mobile reddit app for Iphone. Change my view.\n","id":"cdfdb239-cb4d-42c6-a686-662f16fd41ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey be part of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>Turkey's slide towards dictatorship has had a negative effect on the Turkish economy. Joining the EU would increase investor confidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey's economy is struggling and it would greatly benefit from EU membership.\n","id":"1befde48-3783-48e1-849b-b632aa8a314c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Holding a grudge is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die. There's even a Bible verse that the sin dies with the father. What is it I'm not understanding? What am I missing? Is it the long term effects of racism? Is that a thing? Is affirmative action really making a difference anymore? Are we punishing future generations arbitrarily resulting in continued hostile feelings? When does it end?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Constantly bringing up slavery and past actions when ever anything slightly race motivated is unfair and wrong.\n","id":"e23a35c0-487d-4b8f-9a55-0b076b84691f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Campaign Finance Reform<|ARGUMENT|>Campaign finance reform advances the goal of a broader marketplace of ideas, advancing the objectives of free speech, assembly, and thought. Under the present system, minor party candidates voices are trampled by the booming voice of large, well-funded campaign operations. The heavy cost of campaigning discourages many potential candidates from entering contests.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Campaign finance reform advances the goal of a broader marketplace of ideas, advancing the objective...\n","id":"7d47d3e2-7c9d-4021-9103-33565b4d4c0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT  I don't care about the animals we eat. This is the view i want you to change. This is not about humans and cannibalism. Assumptions, Humans are hedonistic to a certain extend at least Life has no ultimate meaning, but perhaps a subjective one absurdism Since animals are going to die no matter what, it doesn't really matter if a chicken lives in a bad environment or a good environment in its short lifespan as long as the meat is fine for human consumption. Even if the chicken is smart enough to feel suffering, we have no reason to help it. We don't help grass when we cut it with our machine, or ants when we crush them with our feet, or rats when we destroy them with our deadly traps. Yes, chickens are smarter, and might feel something, but it doesn't matter, for animals can't fight back, and our life becomes better by using them for whatever purpose. They can't stop us, and we have no objective reason to stop. I like bacon, and my only thanks to the pig, is the fact that i devour it. You might say that humans are animals too, and given that life has no meaning, I am advocating for the view, that humans should live in a inhospitable environments as well. That does not follow, for humans won the fight of evolution, and we dominate the food chain at every level. We aren't shaped by our environment, no, we shape the environment. Yes, life has no ultimate meaning, but our actions give each of us a meaning, albeit not an ultimate one. Also, since we are hedonistic, we have no reason to make our life worse for no reason. As an end note, I want to say, that I do not advocate for any species extinction.This is not what this is about. I, and surely many others, enjoy the variety in life. On top of this, animal extinction could lead to a worsening of human condition. If bees went extinct, a lot of shit would follow. Of course, if we had a good reason to destroy a species, with the consequences in mind, we should do that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't care about the animals we eat\n","id":"6b6625b1-680d-4773-866c-c0cf6c714ea9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The 2 party system creates an us vs. them mentality that is destroying our country. Most people immediately see someone in the opposite political party and disregard their opinion. Furthermore, 2 parties does not create enough to encompass everyone's beliefs. Many people agree with one party on some issues and the other party on other issues. However, the electoral college forces a 2 party system. It is near impossible for a 3rd party to gain enough traction to succeed. Therefore, I believe that we should abolish the electoral college and elect officials via a popular vote. An argument I hear against this is that candidates wont rally in smaller states, but this is not a problem thanks to the age of technology we live in. Smaller states can get an understanding of and form an opinon on a candidate without ever seeing them in person, via the internet and television. I also think we should abolish all parties and elect people purely based on their opinions. This will create more options for the public and a more informed public. Instead of having to choose the lesser of 2 evils, people can actually vote for someone they believe in. In conclusion, the electoral college and the 2 party system are horrible for the general public and should be abolished. Update WOW I was not expecting to get this many comments. I'm trying to read them all but if I don't respond to your comment, I'm sorry. There are simply too many to write a well thought out response to them all. I am also busy with Christmas so there is that holding me back. I will read them all tho<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The 2 party system and the electoral college are destroying America.\n","id":"899d1558-44ee-4457-96da-e097e32d24ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll keep this one short and sweet. Most people immediately discard paper receipts from places like Subway, or Starbucks, etc. This amounts to a rather large amount of paper waste which could easily be avoided. Even if you ask the cashier to not give you the receipt, it is usually still printed and they throw it away. In addition, the thermal paper used for a lot of receipts has been found to contain BPA, which is possibly a harmful chemical. There are a few people who might save paper receipts for their own records, but these people are in the minority. If they want a printed receipt they can ask for it. But it should not be default to just print a receipt assuming that the customer will want it, as most will not. How is it not just a massive waste? To change my view, I'd like an argument that gives some reasons that giving each customer a printed receipt is good, and why these reasons outweigh the negatives. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Printed receipts for everyday purchases are outdated and should only be printed if the customer specifically asks\n","id":"2462412a-7875-41a0-b416-f6ce0bb6bf1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Based on the specific evidence and arguments provided by Chuck Ruby's white paper, Psychiatric Drugs and Violence which concludes Even though the drugs do not cause violence in all situations and for all people taking them, and the actual risk ratio may be relatively small, the practical meaning of subsequent violent behavior is too serious to ignore and of such a consequential level to question their continued use as the first line of treatment for emotional and behavioral problems. TLDR even if the increase of violence attributed to psychiatric drugs is very small like 0.1 of users , the fact that so many people are on them 20 of our population, and increasing , the consequence is a large number of people who could commit violent acts as a result of the drugs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Psychiatric Drugs Are a Danger to Society\n","id":"de361514-9e67-4b2c-95c6-f2dccf5b39e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Providing medical care can be an act of love. However, a prison doctor may provide medical care to the serial killer that murdered his family out of duty rather than love. The observed behavior is the same, but the motivating force is different.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This commits a category error. Behavior is observed, but is not love. Love may motivate behavior, but it cannot be directly observed.\n","id":"b3d23334-47ef-4d8f-897c-c11bf97eca96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Services like Wix can already create seo optimized websites based on what the client wants, google and facebook already offer services based on the kind of business you want to market, create tags and offer SEM and other kinds of services based on previous user data. Social media services can be easily replaced with chat bots and scheduled messages created by AI since most responses or twitter posts are fairly simple. While when it comes to design I'm sure a lot of things like Illustration won't be replaced until much later, but creating a post with some small changes or themed details is already easily done using Canva When it comes to planning the campaign and deciding where money goes I believe that can also be better done by the service, pretty sure google can predict how much budget you need and how much you'll pay per click even before you place the ad based on your target keywords.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most digital marketing and design jobs will become easily replaceable by computers and current AI technology in the next couple years\n","id":"cbaaa48f-b6e2-4391-879d-c8e7a5b3f3a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically as it says in the title, without inspection from and independent agency like the IAEA, any agreement between the United States and North Korea to denuclearize is meaningless, as NK has shown time and time again that\u2019s its \u201cpromises\u201d to do x y or z mean nothing if there is no way for the U.S to verify that those goal are bing carried out. Furthermore, it\u2019s also my view that it\u2019s irresponsible to call any negotiation with NK a \u201cdeal\u201d if there is no enforcement of the goals of the agreement. In this way the Trump admin. is blatantly misleading the public, which is especially egregious in light of the fact that his admin. Pulled out of the Iran Deal, which did have independent inspectors. Not sure what exactly would change my mind in this, I definitely don\u2019t know a ton about the topic, but every way I look at this, Trump is blatantly misleading the public.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A North Korean \u201cPeace Deal\u201d is essentially meaningless without independent inspectors from the IAEA.\n","id":"5356739b-34db-43c0-8380-461e4325a972"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Apollo was a gigantic national US effort to struggle against the USSR as superpowers clashed to compete and nationalism was an essential element.All moonwalkers except Schmitt were former pilots and american servicemen Race of the 60s was about to a very large part about one question. Will the flag on the gray lunar surface be red and yellow or red white and blue.Omitting this part deeply distorts the nature of the space race of the 1960s and words of multiple astronauts like Young or Aldrin that saluting the flag was a very proud moment in their lives. Edit Armstrong speaking 3 days after he landed on the Moon and just as they were coming back.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Omitting the scene with planting of US flag on the Moon in \"The First Man\" is a great mistake\n","id":"e139b631-366d-48b6-8166-569590c16c27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Health insurance cooperatives<|ARGUMENT|>Sanjay Gupta said on Anderson Cooper 360 in August of 2009: \"looking at a lot of these historical knowledge of co-ops, unless you get scale -- hundreds of thousands of people participating -- it is hard for a co-op to compete against a private insurance company, which is why the people who are such supporters of the public option are crying foul. They are saying, look, the public option was a national option, it had scale. Hundreds of thousands if not more people. That could compete. Could a co-op even at a regional level compete?\"8<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Co-ops cannot scale to compete with insurers like public plan\n","id":"0838cad7-c3c4-4275-833c-e998ca3c7d95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>War on Drugs<|ARGUMENT|>William F Buckley Statement to New York Bar Association. July 1st, 1996: \"This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of those drugs. Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000. The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars, whatever. We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Higher price of illegal drugs causes more crimes by users\n","id":"43090455-ad58-4e6b-b434-c1245de5fefb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sharia law should be granted legal recognition<|ARGUMENT|>Recognising the role Sharia courts can play fits in well with government attempts to promote mediation services as an alternative to the expensive and confrontational law courts, especially in family disputes involving marital breakdown, the custody of children and arguments over inheritance. The UK government has for some years encourged the use of mediation, so that the family courts become the last, rather than the first resort in cases of family dispute. Trained professional mediators are now widely available, yet their secular outlook makes them an unsuitable option for Muslim families. For them Sharia judges could perform the same service, being trusted by both parties to a dispute and experienced in a wide range of relationship problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Recognising the role Sharia courts can play fits in well with government attempts to promote mediati...\n","id":"11033fce-9455-4c27-a50b-e0eef191c477"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I've always been confused about what exactly a lobbyist is. I mean I heard what they are, but couldn't put any names or faces to them. To my understanding they are someone who does the dirty work so to speak, exchanging money and selling their power and influence to make legislative changes while getting personally rich in the process. They are, to my understanding somewhat like lawyers, who are paid to represent a certain idea, rather than to protect a client or bring justice, making them theoretically even more corrupt than the often bashed lawyers. Hillary Clinton is the first public figure that I have seen who is blatantly making millions upon millions of dollars just giving speeches to special interest groups. That to me sounds like what I imagine a lobbyist is doing secretly behind closed doors. I always imagined that this is how lobbyists get rich, by short speaking fee's but really they are selling their influence and popularity. I didn't think that politician could even legally be a lobbyist, as I thought they were supposed to be spending their time working on legislation to help the people of the united states and that would be a conflict of interest. If she makes more money in one half an hour hoorah speech to Goldman Sachs about how blanks shouldn't be victim blamed for the wars and carnage they reap, than a minimum wage worker could make working 40 hours a week for over 6 years, how does this not make her more of a lobbyist than a legit politician?? I guess you could change my view by more accurately describing what a lobbyist is, cuz i would love to know.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hillary Clinton is more of a lobbyist than a politician\n","id":"32eaf869-f103-4c8e-a703-05ee44f4bfa2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>free speech in the UK should include social media<|ARGUMENT|>Freedom of speech is a basic right for every human as being able to express ones opinions is an innate part of our humanity. We are sentient beings who form our own opinions and should be able to express those opinions. This should be especially the case in the UK as Free speech is one of the trademarks of a prosperous democracy. Those living in a western democracy expect to have the right to say whatever we feel like no matter whether we are online or offline - without the fear of prosecution. This is an area where countries like the UK regularly criticize other countries states, take China for example Amnesty International reports that the Chinese cannot face prosecution if they accused of communicating with groups abroad, calling for reform and an end to corruption through chat rooms, instance messaging, email, or text messages. Nearly 50 people were detained or arrested during the crackdown of the \u201cJasmine\u201d protests that were occurring in response to the Arab Spring. 1 Social networks like twitter are an amazing way to exercise our right to freedom of speech yet it is something we choose to take part in. Those networks recognize they are providing a platform for free speech by including in their terms and conditions for example twitter has \u201cYou understand that by using the Services, you may be exposed to Content that might be offensive, harmful, inaccurate or otherwise inappropriate, or in some cases, postings that have been mislabeled or are otherwise deceptive.\u201d2 Those on the site have accepted this. The state should not be getting involved in micromanaging our freedom of speech. Our actions, not our words should be regulated by the states. 1 Amnesty International. \u201cAnnual Report: China.\u201d 2 Twitter, \u201cContent on the Services\u201d,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Digital free speech on social networking sites should not be limited.\n","id":"f8ea8709-9eb4-49b3-ad1f-34c28b13f416"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people break up with their partner at the first sign of abuse?<|ARGUMENT|>Abuse is something that often escalates. A person should certainly consider abuse as a red flag and deal breaker at any point in the relationship. Often the abuser will wait until they feel comfortable that the partner will not leave before attempting abuse. If the abuser sees that their partner will allow him\/herself to be treated this way with little consequence, this validates the abuser. The abuse is likely to continue under these circumstances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should break up with their partner at the first sign of abuse.\n","id":"e9a6de9c-e1a1-42d6-a293-b17a4e8bf7ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Trying 9\/11 terror suspects in NYC courts<|ARGUMENT|>A November 2009 CBS News Poll found that only 40 percent of Americans want Mohammed and his four minions to be tried in federal criminal court. Rasmussenreports finds that \"51% Oppose Decision To Try Terrorists in New York City\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Majority of Americans are opposed to civilian trial of terrorists.\n","id":"852daaab-37b0-453a-894e-d10861afc4a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many people say the wealthy should pay higher tax rates because the utility they get from their money is much lower than than a poor person and that we should use this money for things like free college and more social welfare programs to improve equality and equality of opportunity. Except, in the US the top 5 pays more taxes than the bottom 95 and the US has the most progressive tax system in the OECD. I don't think that the rich not paying their share is really the issue here. The real problem is that more of our taxes get spent on corporate subsidies, the military, and on the War on Drugs which has been expensive and ultimately ineffective. This takes away tax money from being spent on social welfare programs. So, it would make sense we should arrange our priorities differently as opposed to taxing the rich more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taxing the rich more isn't necessary, reprioritization of where taxes go is.\n","id":"235c7e1d-6e21-42f4-b9a1-9f73ed7c203b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not sure why, but I still feel like my stuff is at a higher risk of loss if it's stored in a cloud as opposed to on my hard drive. I know the beauty of cloud storage is that if something happens to your computer, you can redownload your information to another device and it won't be lost forever. But there's something about an outside service being in charge of my data that makes me uneasy. I feel more in control of it when it's stored on my own physical object. This applies to everything, ranging from Google Drive files to my Pokemon I have uploaded to the Bank.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think my files are safer on my own devices than in a cloud\n","id":"bb6e392d-6633-45e2-afc2-0faf7380bed1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>By this same logic, leagues cannot be held responsible for individual players who carry out illegal violent or abusive acts. Therefore sports leagues have no obligation to implement Zero-Tolerance policies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of steroids in sport is illegal and individual players are often banned for it. Leagues cannot be held responsible for the illegal actions of individual players.\n","id":"c7153974-4e0d-45d4-a9c3-d429ebb09f3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the use of 'chosen' or gender-neutral pronouns be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Mandatory pronouns may simulate a respect and acceptance that is not really genuine but mandated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mandating pronouns by law can just mask deeper and worse problems.\n","id":"c901ebc4-ff32-42bb-a701-b11aa4d6374b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Natural gas<|ARGUMENT|>Samantha Rose. \"The questionable benefit of natural gas vehicles\". TG Daily. 14 Aug 2008 - \"On the surface, natural gas cars seem alright, but the topic becomes a bit different when these cars are competing against \u201czero emission\u201d alternatives such as electric cars that are powered utilizing a solar grid.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"0-emission renewables are a superior alternative to natural gas\n","id":"89a141b3-e689-47d3-8da3-2a685265c8fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>Christian ethics that defended the weak stood in stark contrast to the vicious secular ethics of European fascism that worshipped strength.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Churches were active in overcoming the great tragedies of European life in the 20th century.\n","id":"321403fb-1ba6-4fe1-8ca4-be05c23697c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>edit My view has changed. The state of voting in the USA has lots of problems, but that doesn't mean that a vote counts for zero. Thanks all. I'm in the USA. An individual vote has never swung an election. People benefit from the liberty of not voting if they choose. Electronic voting machines and ballot counting methods are suspect. Foreign powers have successfully infiltrated our voting process, whether that be passive by affecting folk's opinions through troll farms, or more active by hacking into various systems that could affect elections at both the state and national level. Gerrymandering has discounted and disenfranchised voters based on their location. Large money interests affect politicians and politics more than those who voted for them, on both the local and national level.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My vote doesn't matter.\n","id":"e080cb4e-3edc-48b5-bcf1-a3daec5d5777"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Death penalty, Debate on Capital Punishment<|ARGUMENT|>Capital punishment has a \"brutalizing effect\" that increases the willingness of criminals to take life.22 If state-sanctioned killings are occurring, might an individual feel more justified in murdering another person? If governments of men can take the power of life-and-death into their hands, might this make a man more comfortable with also taking that power into his own hands?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Executions have a brutalizing social effect that can increase crime\n","id":"0020962c-3134-4b52-b274-fa0c9816a3bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Two things to keep in mind before this discussion. First, I don't innately dislike any Muslims, and I really hope that I am wrong. I hate the shit out of terrorists but I've never judged a person for being Muslim before and I don't think I ever will. Second, I am minimally informed. I read what I see on Reddit and various news sites but I do not keep up with the news, so I'm not informed about the ongoings of political movements for or against Muslims. Anyways, I think that Muslims are seen as a danger and possible threat. Sure there are plenty of Muslim Americans that I know and talk to regularly, but in the end we all have an innate judgment that we cannot control there was a word for this psychological concept that I learned in college that I forgot . And the scary part is, many of the wide spread problematic issues are Muslim. There are plenty of horrible, violent individuals all over the world. But Muslims, in proportion to their population, have the highest percentage of violent crimes or terrorism in non Muslim countries . That's what makes people scared of them. It's not because they don't realize that the Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, etc., can be terrorists. It's just that Muslims are more open about it. And the worst part is, that it's part of a widely interpreted religious following . It's not for personal gain maybe sometimes , it's not for money or drugs and it's not a gang. It's religious fanatics. And yes, there are millions if not billions of religious people in the world. But very few these days have such religious fanaticism that they would kill people on a widespread basis. Now I know that groups like ISIS have a very, very distorted view of Muslim religion. But the fact that this distorted view exists makes other people scared . The worst Christians we talk about these days are the Westboro Baptist Church and I highly doubt they've been involved in killing innocents, or anyone for that matter. It's because of this fear that I believe people will begin rejecting Muslims. I didn't read too much into it, but look at the Muslims already talking negatives about the countries that let them in. I know it's the work of a few fanatics, but get enough followers and it will be a problem, even if it were just 1 of population. And then when it becomes a real problem, they won't be permitted anymore. And the worst part is that the Muslim hate makes sense statistically. It's morally wrong to hate someone for their race but when there are statistics influencing the thoughts and opinions of billions of people around the world, people are eventually going to stand up about it. In the past, any time a religion attracted this much fanaticism and violence, they were either destroyed or they conquered the world. There's no conquering that will happen for Muslims. That's why I believe they'll be destroyed, to a certain extent. Again, I hope I'm wrong, and there's another way around it, but hitting myself with reality, this is a very possible outcome.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that eventually the world will, both legally and socially, turn against Muslims.\n","id":"3a7098d9-4e8f-4c36-82e5-1c4712ca7bef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Many studies regard a correlation sometimes not even statistically significant between genetic, environmental or morphological traits as causal of sexual orientation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most studies used as supposed evidence for homosexuality being determined biologically are misused.\n","id":"0650f545-ec49-4078-8357-80c655479f18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay this needs context so, long story short We were together two years ago for one year. Reason I messed up something, it wasnt that big but it was used as an excuse to end the already problems nested relationship. After that, we werent talking for some time. Then we rebuilt our relationship as friends, tried again to be together something else fucked it over, didnt talk again and now we are best friends for 10 months. I know what you might think but we both agreed on the fact that each of us needs the other one in their lives that much. She had boyfriends before and I was okay with it. But now, for some reason its different. Maybe because it is becoming a serious relationship? I dont know. Also, we both had the same opinion on the emotions we had about each other we still love the other one. At least, that was four five months ago. But now, I am starting to think that I am not that good to her anymore even though she is saying how much I mean to her in the same way as before . Like, if I were a good enough she would be together with me, not with him. Am I being jealous? I dont wanna talk with her about this yet not until I figure out whats in my head. Its important to say that I am in an all time low in my life so far where I feel like Im alone in the whole world started since last summer, even though i have friends around and my support network is great , for the first time im living on my own and separated from my family and friends living in another city where I dont know anyone , and going through the loss of my father. No matter how hard I tried to convince my brain that I matter to her I still end up in the same loop. Thanks agian<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My ex's bf is better than me context in post\n","id":"7aa89044-f480-49d9-b78f-bc52262d64b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Radio Disappear As Cars Become Increasing Connected to the Internet?<|ARGUMENT|>In some parts of the world, electricity, while available, is prohibitively expensive. This could make using electricity on internet\/ technology to access information a luxury. Radio offers more flexibility in avoiding using up electricity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Battery and hand-powered radios allow access to radio even where there is no electricity.\n","id":"b03bfca5-6e3d-4a31-8770-d7f190e5c06b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, so I'm agnostic and I believe there could be some higher power, but I also don't understand the Christian bible. I've been pondering this in particular for a while. So, going back to the beginning of the bible, it seems that God created evil. He put the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden. And he also created the serpent who was evil. So, God created evil. Creation of evil makes you evil. Therefore, God is evil. The other argument I have is if God didn't create the serpent or evil, then that means something else created it. Which would mean that God is not the only God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Christian God is either evil or is not the only god\n","id":"8c51d80d-db8a-4884-938f-5f8cc87613be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>All the people should have the right to live a dignified life. That means also to have the right to chose death when this kind of life is not possible anymore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is central to personal autonomy and bodily integrity that each person is able to embrace a timely and dignified death on their own terms.\n","id":"cbfc8d23-e6bc-4b36-a273-6d31e575bc1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I had a conversation the other day with a friend of mine about jobs. We are both undergraduates thinking to the future I am an art major and she is in computer science. I have lofty expectations for myself I would like to become an illustrator and \u201cthe dream\u201d is to do prop armor and weapons and hold myself to these. In our discussion on what we\u2019re going to do and our excitements, it came to salary and the job market. My friend is likely to get a job outside of these four years of college, while I\u2019m more likely to \u201cflounder\u201d or go back to school. While I don\u2019t need a six figure paycheck to feel like I have worth in life, I have seen artists on the internet not only sell themselves short, but immediately murder the commission market by valuing their art lower than it actually is. This terrifies me. I feel that, with the time and effort I put into my work, I have the right to set a price that works for me. When arguably more talented artists value themselves lower, I\u2019ve seen some pretty great fan artists price two figures uncolored for twenty dollars I feel like it makes it more difficult for others and lesser known artists to survive. As for under appreciation, I feel like people do not value the work that goes into an artist\u2019s work. All jokes about \u201cdoing it for exposure\u201d aside, I have met people who expect me to do artwork for them for free. Sausage Party, a movie released last year, did not credit or pay a large portion of their animators. There are a number of accounts that repost art without credit, which is difficult for those who choose not to smack an enormous watermark in the middle of their work. The combination of these is what brings me to my viewpoint the artist, as a collective entity, does not get what it deserves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Artists are underpaid and under-appreciated in modern Western society\n","id":"6cc3ab96-4746-4294-9598-858ed0a7f9d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So as you all know, since Harvey Weinstein got busted being a serial rapist abuser, victims of all sorts of different people have been gaining the courage to speak up. I think it\u2019s a really good thing, and I imagine most of you do too. We\u2019ve all heard about rampant abuse by people in power so it\u2019s good to see some of them get their comeuppance and know that they won\u2019t be able to prey on unsuspecting victims anymore. So in that vein, while browsing another subreddit, I was recently linked to the transcript of a speech Amy Schumer gave in 2014. In it she describes receiving a call from a drunk guy while in college, going to his room and they attempt to have sex. She describes the man as \u201cfucking wasted\u201d and \u201cthere, but not really\u201d. She says he \u201cfalls to the ground and crawls\u201d during the encounter. At a point during the story she says he has literally fallen asleep and she wakes him back up and they continue their attempt at sex. This guy is pretty clearly way too drunk. And she\u2019s clearly aware of his intoxication. I don\u2019t hate Amy Schumer or her comedy. I definitely think she\u2019s funnier than most stand ups I watch. But I absolutely cannot imagine trying to have sex with someone who\u2019s so drunk he she is literally falling on the floor and crawling around. This is sexual assault. Speech transcript<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The anecdote in this 2014 speech details a sexual assault\n","id":"a860e2ee-000b-4ffd-95a8-c96f7137f843"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite? Either way, is she making a positive or a negative impact?<|ARGUMENT|>greta is right to tell it like it is as she says just look at the fires in one part of the world and floods in another, ths gasses in the atmosphere are altering the way the jet stream is working causing weather patterns to become unstable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Climate change must be discussed and addressed on a global scale. Efforts of individual nations could be futile.\n","id":"fca86a8a-8b56-4183-a1dc-499ff9acc79a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, im not saying everyone is like this. There's a good chance that if you watch sports, you are probably a cool person. I try not to be judgemental, but the behaviour I see in many sports fans are concerning. I don't dislike watching sports either, so that's not it So hear me out. But I just don't get the worship of people in sports, the glorification of it, and stuff like that. From personal observation, the people that are the most obsessed with say, hockey, are some combination of the following overweight, jobless, have a poor temper, start fights to look cool, and are scared of girls. I live in Canada and some people take it a little too seriously. I've been to a couple of football and hockey games, mostly because my friends drag me there to get me to love it. I do enjoy it, but its pathetic how many fights there are in the seats. A bunch of overweight guys with high pitched screams pretty much slap at each other, sometimes in front of their kids. Is this supposed to be a display of manliness or something? Plus, without a doubt, if I ever want to see a fight I can head over to a sports bar on the night of a big hockey game. There are always overweight guys fighting like children and whining towards each other. How is this supposed to promote their masculinity This is just an observation, I don't have strong opinions on this or anything. If i could sum up my view Its that loving sports is too often seen as loving a lazy and unmeaningful life without ever actually playing the sport. There's nothing to be proud of, but too many people are proud of their obsession with sports. Because of this, I tend to generalize bad traits with sports fans, and I want you to tell me why I shouldn't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that a lot of guys are obsessed with watching sports because they are insecure about their own poor physical condition and\/or lack of masculinity\n","id":"919e0198-7109-44af-91f6-078e9fcc7c64"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those who don't know, Scotland is holding a referendum in 2014 on independence from the United Kingdom. I don't believe Scotland should be independent, mainly because neither side has presented an argument convincing enough to warrant change or no change. I suppose my vote could be a rejected vote, but I'm going to vote no so as not to disturb the status quo. I don't believe Scotland could support itself financially I work in the film and television sector, where a lot of my work comes from UK based companies from outside of Scotland, and if Scotland were to pull out there would be no legal obligation I'm looking at you here, BBC for many of these companies to continue employment in Scotland. Please try to .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Scotland shote vote 'No' on the independence vote in 2014.\n","id":"b1ed1267-adbf-44d2-a8f4-008ca633a736"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, the US, one of the most religious countries among the most developed ones, has higher homicide rates than other less religious countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In most developed countries the number of religious believers is decreasing and there is not a direct correlation with an increase in crime\n","id":"3a50d73c-9809-443c-b85a-2ef08a0f4114"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With blip.tv recently introducing a 90 seconds long banner that keeps you from watching the video if you block the video ad but also long before that , I see loads of people complaining that they shouldn't be subjected to ads. I've seen people call blip elementary school bullies , I came across vehement adblock defendants and I've heard the proposition that we should contact companies and tell them that we won't buy their products because they advertise. I certainly understand complaints about the way ads work ads buffering, obnoxious video ads, pop ups, etc. and I like the concept of pay what you deem appropriate , allowing the fans to eliminate the need for ads if the content provider is OK with that . But some people seem to think that hosting 60 million videos Youtube doesn't cost any money at all and this service should not only be free which it still is , but also ad free. This is ridiculous even more than the Piracy argument, because watching an ad takes even less effort than shelling out 5 bucks or more and would never work in the long run and barely in the short run .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people who think they shouldn't have to watch ads are immature and self-centered.\n","id":"53f00ab7-fd26-4c42-9eca-248c241fddbf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>Especially among white conservatives, rejection of the national anthem is seen as a desire to not be unified, to not have a shared sense of belonging, and to reject their own status as equal citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Symbology is completely subjective. The feelings you have towards one symbol or symbolic gesture may be completely different from the conclusions and judgements made by others.\n","id":"e1a3a814-98e2-47d6-87fe-48e40a2d6553"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>White privilege really exists. It is unearned and undeserved. On the other hand, with any diverse population that includes a majority of almost any kind, we are bound to have some systematic, oppressive inequalities and some incidental, arbitrary inequalities. The privileges that Peggy McIntosh mentions in her essay White Privelege just happen to be the case but are not necessarily attached to racism. I can always arrange to be in the company of my race or I can easily find someone who can cut my hair do not represent systematic problems with society that we should work to change. They are both benign and inevitable. Link to the McIntosh essay<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe \"white privilege\" is incidental, and nothing should be done about it.\n","id":"896dc9d0-606a-4b71-a825-5157bb75324d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a straight white male. For many, this means that I am not only in a position of privilege in relation to several other groups, but also that I hurt the interests of those groups by unconsciously exhibiting certain views and behaviors. For the sake of the argument, lets grant all of that. Let's also assume that everyone is equal, regardless of sex, genetic background etc. and the only source of outcome variation is historical injustice and various structures and ideologies that support oppression. Even if all of the above is true, there is no reason for me to actively seek to empower groups that I don't belong to. Power is relative, so every bit of power that women, immigrants, minorities etc. gain, I lose. In fact, all of these groups have a proven record of actively trying to take my power away. Not only that, but some of them openly declare so just enter the term 'white men' into Google News. Women's rights are a good example of this. 99.93 of humans are born biologically male or female. This means that there's two interest groups set in stone right from the start, and for a while now the one I belong to has been losing. That makes me concerned, because again, I want to be in a position of power, no matter what. Perhaps men have oppressed women, that doesn't concern me. What concerns me is that we're not oppressing them now. Even if we, just for the sake of the argument, assume that women are superior to men in some significant way, it would only make oppressing them all the more necessary. Based on this reasoning, I support all political action that hurts the groups that I don't belong to. This has led me to having political positions that would be seen as extremely disagreeable by the absolute majority of westerners at least that's what I'm assuming . And I should probably emphasize here that this is not an ideological choice. More power is better than less no matter what. Even if I was benevolent, I would still rather be benevolent from a position of power. Now here you might say 'Hey, this power stuff is weird, who thinks like that?'. And perhaps you're right. However, I have only about 80 years to live and I intend to extract maximum utility out of those 80 years. Every millimeter matters. That's not to say that I go out there and engage in some kind of violent activism I still gain much more by just working towards my goals on my own. Still, that doesn't stop me from feeling a little bit of joy every time I hear a complaint about women's reproductive rights or how the police in the US apparently hate black people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If I am an oppressor, it is in my interest to remain one.\n","id":"a756d86e-dfff-4f61-871d-387912ff1021"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have recently come to the realisation that it's very unlikely I will lead a happy life. I used to think that things would find a way of working themselves out, that in the end I would be happy and lead the 'ideal' life eg. in love, married, good job, good friends, happy, healthy, blah blah blah . But now I know that the world doesn't work like that. The world wasn't made for us. We weren't designed to live like this. We weren't designed to live happy lives. Life is nothing like what you read about in books or watch in films. It's actually actually pretty unlikely that I will ever be truly happy. I really hate thinking like this. Even if I do somehow manage to lead a happy and successful life, I'm going to die, and it's going to be as if I had never existed at all. So I just keep wondering what the point of even trying is. So yeah, I would like someone to change my view on this. It's making me even more depressed than I already am<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Happiness isn't something that should be expected. Life is just full of suffering and ultimately pointless.\n","id":"a12d7611-655c-455b-8589-883288aa671e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not a member of MGTOW, I disagree with them on many principles. I would personally more identify as an MRA than anything. In my opinion MGTOW and MRA are similar to two groups in the past. NAACP and the Black Panthers. Both groups, pointed out injustice and how a group was getting the raw end of the deal. Both of them demanded a voice, both of them were fighting to end oppression. The difference is in strategy, MRA NAACP use legal means, and peaceful ways to fight oppression, believing that their can be peace between the two groups. MGTOW Black Panthers, believe that peace between the two is impossible, or that it's better to create segregated communities. There is a sense of supremacy in the air. Now, What do I mean when I say, they make good points. That's mostly cause they have similar goals to MRAs. The ending of the corrupt family courts, respect to male victims, such as rape victims. Equal Prison sentences between sexes, and that feminism has went to far. I even can somewhat agree with the idea of an Alpha Male and a Beta Male. Or the idea that marriage isn't really worth the money mostly the wedding . I could If I were to be super cynical , that women prefer Alphas to Betas. But, I do reject ideas like ending suffrage. Manipulating Women, or trying to justify rape. I reject other concepts as well. So , That MGTOW is simply misguided radicals that have good goals, but adds a lot of baggage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"MGTOW, though horribly misguided, do make good points.\n","id":"96949693-5f80-49e3-a2a7-a322acfabb0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This was a topic a buddy and I debated several years ago when World War Z was first published. We both lived about a mile from the ballpark. In a zombie outbreak fleeing a major metropolitan area is suicide. Roads will be impassable and thousands of undead will be everywhere. It's best to try to find a stronghold for shelter and hold out as long as you can. Wrigley Field for us and a handful of survivors would be ideal. There are only three ways into the park. Each entrance has a metal gate in place which can be further reinforced. There will be plenty of food on hand in the various concession stands and we can grow more. The field itself is about four acres. We'll have limited weapons on hand. Bats don't make the best weapons against zombies, it takes quite a bit of force to crack through a skull, but if need be you can break the jaws of a zombie in one swing. I know we'll be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of zombies, but if we stay out of site they won't even know we're there.  Edit I should say, my buddy's plan was to get a boat and sail row to one of the pump stations that sit about a mile off shore in Lake Michigan. These are small man made islands. They have basic living structures, a kitchen and a few cots but I don't think they'd be suitable for more then a few people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wrigley Field Would Not Be A Terrible Place to Wait Out a Zombie Apocalypse\n","id":"c9fd46b0-9844-4704-817b-0d0de46ca1ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Even though Bill Russell won eleven championships, and Chamberlain was always something of a headcase that only got two championships, when people say that Russell was the better player, I can't help but disagree. My main reason is that I think that championships are a bad judge for historical rankings of basketball players. While Russell was one of the best defensive players of all time, he also was surrounded by one of the best thinkers in NBA history in Red Auerbach, and was surrounded by some of the best players of that era in Bob Cousy, Sam Jones, John Havlicek, and many others. Chamberlain never had the same amount of talent surrounding him with the Warriors and 76ers. While Russell was certainly a defensive centerpiece for those Celtics teams, I feel like his offense was so much less than Chamberlain's that giving Russell the nod is giving Russell credit for things that many people deserve for the Celtics dynasty of the 60s.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wilt Chamberlain was a better player than Bill Russell\n","id":"71d20c32-3565-48cc-a342-700a9d51e70c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>An elected head of state requires help in elections and draws funding from donors that comes with strings attached. This makes a president biased in favour of groups that helped them attain office.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A monarch is not tied to any political party or interest group and therefore does not owe their position to a body of voters or the support of powerful interests.\n","id":"b7554d4f-4163-40bd-8372-81c1b6239973"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>A benevolent God might create not just one good world but all possible worlds that contain more good than evil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Positive human interactions overwhelm negative ones both in number and total duration.\n","id":"50672a66-34bb-4375-81da-dd8197fa5cb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Previously, I had considered domestic spying surveillance something that I wasn't necessarily for, but was also not surprised by. The fallout from Wikileaks and other events has created an outcry against the government prying into their privacy. However, on the verge of a large quantity of Syrian refugees who may not be properly screened, I think the calculus has changed. The chances now of bringing in terrorists with these groups is high, if not certain. We know that ISIS utilizes social media and other electronic means of communication to plan and coordinate their efforts. Giving terrorists a footprint on US soil will justify an increase in surveillance in order to ensure that the tragedy of Paris isn't carried out on US soil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing Syrian Refugees to enter the US justifies increased domestic surveillance\n","id":"19766eb9-e043-4f99-9ff4-4838e85f97d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>preface This sounds like something that would've been brought up before, but I couldn't find it. Sorry if that is the case. Even if it has been brought up before, I hope I am looking at it in a new light. Context I have been debating all my life and a good discussion always brings me joy. I have been really depressed as of recent though with the upcoming election. I am voting for the first time, so i tried to discuss issues with family, friends, and with rather predictable results people online. No looking good for the idea of debating. Why I think debating may be useless, or even harmful Information is very limited to all people about most topics. It could be very reasonable for both sides to believe what they do with the very scarce information they have ex. three conversations all of think . Debating should help because it introduces each party to these new sources of information, but it in practice usually makes one person a liar. Even worse, a lot of news sources talk about what the other side says . It can be easy for one side to dismiss arguments if they can predict them, even if the arguments are solid. For said reasons above, as I was shocked to find, you can find the perfect living examples of what you think the other side is. Nothing is more draining than going to the other side because they have been framed in such a bad light and seeing them to be even worse. Now is a good time to note that I am not talking about Donald Trump or his supporters here although it can easily be seen in his subreddit if you ever dare look . Him and his supports have created a lot of terrible debating, but he didn't start the trend. As a extra point on the end of this idea, it is also hard to debate someone who has ideas either you grew out of or you have ideas they grew out of . To wrap this up, people very rarely change their minds. Maybe I am just blind to it, but it seems most people just don't change ideas very often. I asked around. When those I asked talked about times they changed their minds, they always made it sound personal. Rarely was it some outside source that helped change their view ironic saying on this thread . Debating could easily surround the topic with anger and make people defensive. I would love to have someone change my opinion on this btw. This no joke has put me in a slump for a while now. edit ok, I found some past threads debating this. but they are all 1 years old.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"debating is pointless\n","id":"fc161cbd-4771-445d-beb9-e101173759e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Wrote The Anonymous New York Times Resistance Op-Ed?<|ARGUMENT|>A statistical analysis of word usage suggests Chao is one of the most likely authors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Elaine Chao, Secretary of Transportation and wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell\n","id":"e581e1c3-b98c-43b3-afd6-a2d6766b4fe5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Doctor Who: Is The Doctor Genderless?<|ARGUMENT|>Lady Cassandra mentions growing up \"a young boy\" on Earth at the end of the Earth; this suggests she is a trans character.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jack Harkness mentions once that he had gotten pregnant before, alluding that by the 51st century humans' sex is fluid as well.\n","id":"71f5b9c5-be3c-4c62-a277-408deacbf9af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We can implement all sorts of policies, ban all sorts of hate speech, fire all kinds of potential racists, cancel all kinds of shows, make all sorts of protests, begin all sorts of movements. But what I suggest is on the simplest and closest level to every ones heart. It is language. Language is humble, and works in subtle yet undoubtedly powerful ways. I think it's time for not just the black community but all of the US to let go of the N word, thus removing the power that it once held. It is a bone of the past that has not yet been buried nor purged from America. And worst of all it now has more power than ever before. Does anyone realize how ridiculous it is that there is country where half the population can use a word that the other half can't? That it is considered normal for one group to use it and a disgusting act for the other to do the same, purely based on race, regardless of the intent. It's crazy that if you are a certain skin color you cannot use the same word that other group can use. The only thing this word does in America is enforce group identity. If you are black you can do it. If you are white you cannot . This is exactly how you make two groups more separate. Either the word becomes taboo and unacceptable for all to use. Or it no longer becomes a special word and all races use it. We made the N word as powerful as it is today by holding it up on a pedestal encased in glass as The Forbidden Word For white people, and maybe Asians but we aren't too sure about that<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the first step to healing the racial divide in America is to let go of the \"N\" word\n","id":"15cccb14-9a3f-49c5-9bf1-202c4381416e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Classic World of Warcraft better than Retail WoW?<|ARGUMENT|>Classic has much higher item repair cost. This means that dying has a much higher impact and thus fights are much more exciting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Playing WoW Classic was riskier, thus it felt like your decisions mattered much more.\n","id":"4c11e269-6188-499a-a1a4-1c4de680c610"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Simple. Demography is destiny and trying to replace the current Americans with a new people basically threatens to end the US as it is. That is really all there is to it. I'm open to counter arguments. But the level of immigration is higher than historic averages yes I know there were periods of higher immigration but it is higher than the average . But I think that immigration levels are too high for national sustainability. My view at the moment. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mass Immigration is An Existential Threat to the USA\n","id":"9e9acf96-226a-4054-918d-05d4b138953a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>Commonly held notions of justice are the ultimate foundation of our justice system, and the measure by which its success should be judged. If a justice system diverges from the majority opinion of right and wrong, then it loses its moral force.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A majority of Americans are in favor of capital punishment, and their opinions should be reflected in the law.\n","id":"58e4db19-8a5b-496a-ba76-5031133f6bfc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>Universities are likely to cap student numbers to reflect their falling revenue streams. Less people will have access to good quality higher education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This will decrease the revenue of universities and have harmful impacts on students.\n","id":"96ca23b9-d07e-40e8-8686-ff722b2cabcd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>Most therapists believe that infidelity should not be disclosed if there is domestic violence Allen et al., p. 119<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A confession can provoke extreme reactions on the part of the cheated-upon partner, e.g. crimes of passion\n","id":"304bc0b8-83a4-4e67-823a-d2ca2366e981"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Atheism is the word that describes the position that no gods exist. It does therefore not hold any other propositional content.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Occam's razor suggests that the absence of evidence of God's existence is some evidence for the absence of God.\n","id":"ee1b1d69-7494-4822-ba68-e64675eb44fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Judges be Elected or Appointed?<|ARGUMENT|>The effect of political appeal on a candidate's appointment is likely to correlate to the media attention such an appointment receives. Local appointments receive significantly less attention than federal appointments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The effect of political appeal is weaker in an appointment system and often only applicable to high profile appointments.\n","id":"4491ddf0-3bc9-419e-9293-d9e3b9f84e63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, those who make such \"jokes\" like prank bomb-threats may expect to be charged with felony, which includes prison sentence and financial penalties, thus to prevent or to decrease the number of such crimes, they should be forbidden.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human endangering speech eg making prank bomb-threats or screaming fire in a packed cinema, should be forbidden.\n","id":"40c7cf23-39d9-477f-95ff-b32521dad08c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Day to day, I've been living with this belief that the world that we live in is about to be dammed. When I say damned, I mean that the quality of life on a global scale will severely decrease, not just humanity becomg extinct. We've seen the news that the quality of life, on average, has been steadily increasing, with lower violence rates, higher rates of living, lower rates of death at birth, etc. But despite all of this improvement I've been seeing more corruption and harm for example, the increase in incarcerations Add in news of increasing privatization of basic goods and services, such as water and arguably the Internet, and not just the increasing of global pollution but also powers protecting actions that lead to this e.g. government subsidies of alternate energy vs. fossil fuels , I think the future looks bleak. Maybe I just have a very narrow view. Maybe I'm just a pessimistic cynic. But it'd be nice to hear if the future won't be this bad. Thanks for reading.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The future of humanity is damned.\n","id":"95c4385c-1563-4388-975f-09853c4ba66b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I get single tickets all the time, because there are no returns only a day pass in my area. This ticket, once I've paid the driver, is useless. I can't get off the bus and use it on a similar route, like you can on trams and I think trains I can't upgrade it to any other ticket all I can do is post it on my wall for nostalgia's sake, or bin it. It's a waste of paper and ink to give me something that has no purpose than to be litter. Only return tickets or day week etc passes are useful to me. My suggestion don't print a single ticket, unless asked by the customer. Simple. Have I missed anything? Are there any benefits to the tickets, beside the McDonalds vouchers which I never remember to use, that I haven't acknowledged? Is there any reason we shouldn't be going gradually paperless for our buses?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Single tickets on buses are useless and should be phased out.\n","id":"b3965d0c-4d4e-4a04-8c48-eedcc9ca5103"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As said above this post will be completely filled with spoilers. Be warned and don't say I didn't warn you . . . . . So to begin, I'm going to be talking about a couple of different reasons why I think this movie is bad. But to clarify some things first of all, I enjoyed the force awakens, yes it had fairly big issues with characters and it was a remake of episode 4 but it's plot was decent and wasn't completely ridiculous in many parts. My first issue with this movie was how a good 1 3 of it was completely contrived. From the minute that the new admiral is secretive for no reason to Poe, known to be hot headed and also completely loyal, causing the chain of events of Finn and the other girl going to Vegas etc. This entire arc means nothing. It adds nothing to the plot and leads to potentially one of the dumbest plot holes in the movie. When Finn is prevented from sacrificing himself he manages to carry the girl at least a kilometre despite the barrage on luke Though frankly that's unimportant compared to that pointless arc . So a good chunk of the movie could have been removed with no effect on it Another issue with this movie was how they handled twists. While twists can be good this film seemed to have the attitude that 'oh this makes sense in terms of plot and character, let's do something different for no reason'. For instance the previously mentioned revelation that the admiral had a plan all along but decided to keep it secret to make a movie essentially. Or how about Leia, who can now fly through space like superman who then proceeded to have no impact on the movie and let's not forget that Leia will have to die . Also luke being a projection was kinda cool yes but in practice was a copy of exactly how Obi Wan died with a 'twist' which changed nothing. The final issue I'll raise in this main body of text is how the film had about 0 original ideas. Yes there were one or two vaguely new ones but it's undeniable that a lot of this film was cut and pasted from episode 5 and 6. And I know this could be seen as hypocritical since I enjoyed force awakens but I could accept that because it's a new trilogy and they were trying to show they were more like the originals. I Will also clarify that at points the film was enjoyable somewhat. But that doesn't mean it is any better, so if someone could explain these major fundamental flaws in this movie then I could change my view. So far people jave just said 'well I enjoyed it', which seems to be based upon all the fan service<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"spoilers The last Jedi does not deserve the huge praise it is getting and is probably one of the weakest films in the franchise\n","id":"7a678b97-7326-4b6c-a199-9345218ffa6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Twitter add an edit button?<|ARGUMENT|>3rd party services today are already showing all deleted Tweets, as when you delete a Tweet that only happens on Twitter, not on all the listeners.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if Twitter did not add an edit history, external 3rd parties would easily be able to provide that service.\n","id":"e5ce93d3-2d4f-487f-9c50-441f42f8c0c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Julian Assange<|ARGUMENT|>Human rights groups have raised concerns over reprisals against aid workers, activists, and civilian named in leaked data by Wikileaks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The publication of this sensitive information often puts lives at risk.\n","id":"6b419091-a83b-4cbc-8604-008cf2105067"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Citizens United Was Wrongly Decided<|ARGUMENT|>Democratic rising star and 2020 Presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke did not accept corporate PAC money during his 2018 Senate campaign.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Recent election results suggest that candidates who refuse corporate PAC money enjoy large electoral benefits.\n","id":"f2a0f7eb-bb10-4997-8919-c2efb5f242cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should the Conservative Party choose to be the next UK Prime Minister?<|ARGUMENT|>These areas are strategic as their populations, which consist of the majority of the UK's BAME population are the fastest growing in the UK.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Johnson is unpopular in the urban cities of Britain which are of particular strategic importance to the Conservative Party.\n","id":"8f50786c-4853-486d-9710-d3ece45fea97"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously, there are a lot of factors in weight loss. My personal experience is that members of a weight loss support group are more likely to succeed, but there are many people who frequented the same forum I did who did not lose weight and keep it off. It was very common for people to lose and gain and lose and gain. Given this, and given the fact that exercise and a good diet will strengthen your heart and reduce your risk of cancer regardless of BMI although a higher BMI increases your risk of premature death I think that making people feel shame about their weight is relatively ineffective. I think this is especially true because mental illness of almost any kind increases your risk for obesity and social isolation increases risk for mental illness. In addition, I believe that even when people do not have a diagnosable mental condition, it is useful to look at their mental limitations that make it difficult for them to exert the willpower energy needed and address those.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since very few obese people lose weight and keep it off, efforts should be focused less on shaming overweight people and more on mental health and encouraging healthy behaviors.\n","id":"e09a7363-c0ee-40f8-aa10-fa4b25bf12b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2019, Lenor included a same sex couple in it's 'bedgasm commercial campaign as a step towards normalizing LGBTQ+ relationships in the media.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Normalising LGBTQ+ relationships and the presence of the LGBTQ+ community have been common themes in advertising campaigns of many leading corporations.\n","id":"cba6b168-2c22-4d04-8c59-074571160651"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the NHS be privatised?<|ARGUMENT|>In times where there is high level demand hospitals are unable to provide comprehensive care<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NHS is unable to keep up with public demand.\n","id":"9920d0bf-1dc7-45ab-85d3-5dbd11aaf98d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For pasta to be cooked, every recipe calls for it to be cooked al dente , which is Italian for To the tooth . I find this very redundant and I'm here to see if anyone can explain otherwise. My logic is this The only reason foods eggs, steak, etc have special words for cooking specifications is because there's multiple ways of cooking them hard soft boiled, rare medium medium rare . If there's only one way to cook pasta properly for the purposes of consumption for example, not as part of a twice boiled pasta cooking method , then it's pointless to specify al dente because it's not like there's an alternative. This is more a personal thing I've noticed, but I feel like most of the reason people say al dente is because they want an excuse to speak Italian, which while fun, is still a redundancy and may be the reason why people keep on using it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's redundant to specify \"Al Dente\" in regards to cooking pasta.\n","id":"be283634-9155-4dfe-bc47-4cebbe4f075a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You might have to care as much about folk music as I do to empathize with this level of passion, on either side. As many of my fellow detractors might say, here we have a major label corporate pop group writing low effort, no statement lyrics about nothing sung over extremely predictable patterns of formulaic music for low risk consumers. But the the crux of my argument lies in the lack of authenticity they bring to the space they ought to be filling in our lives as the most popular folk band on the planet. Something is wrong with us. The rich business savvy Brits they are and the music they make is not only an inauthentic loose impression of folk Americana music, but by bridging the gap between that genre and corporate pop, they have perverted the essence of what folk is supposed to be. There exists a tradition of confronting the zeitgeist of society in folk music, an independent spirit that will stand up to the bland apathy of a generation of pundits and the status quo. In the sixties, folk music mattered to a generation who needed to express a message. We need folk musicians now more than ever with something important to say that matters from a sincere place for a population that needs a voice. That's what Dylan did, and the literal opposite of what Mumford is doing with their whitewashed genre mash up. They are selling records and tickets to people who refuse to confront issues or challenge their minds with innovation in the form of organic music. They might as well be fucking robots, and robots are not allowed to play folk music for the sake of all that's holy. What they make is the soundtrack to a commercial, designed to capture one's attention in small doses without any sort of meaningful investment on the part of the listener. As critics have pointed out, their songs are a manufactured lowest common denominator formula. This is literally figuratively what their record contract looked like A carbon copy, multiple pages. The white page on top said Make this song. A sound wave form depicting a pattern of light guitar intro, muttered words, followed by an explosion of sound engineered to fill a wide spectrum, top of singer's range, now a sudden shift to a more narrow spectrum, exploding finale. Interchangeable, children's story rhymes like 'heart, and part' or 'man and hand.' Please sign here Mumford and Sons Their first single was the white page, then we got a few pink ones. Their next hit will be yellow. Still, the morons of the English speaking world will consume the latest hollow garbage this band comes out with it as though it is something new, and that is a tragic statement about where we've arrived as fans and human beings. Here are some examples of what folk actually is, and what it once meant to people. Where once art, even popular art, made a statement, we've slipped into an era where our idols have nothing to say. The are an empty shell, polished and pleasant. This is a Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves issue when you look at the history of the kind of music these tools are making. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is why Mumford and Sons are a disgrace to tradition and a negative reflection of our society\n","id":"e69aa86b-5a0f-43d2-a338-2eae29024b0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe wholeheartedly that a ban on firearms would be met with increased violence in the United States. The gun culture here is so ingrained into right wing identity that they would see it as an assault on the nation's security and either respond with all out revolution or at the very least you would see an increase in mass killings police murders. The opposite end of the spectrum involves arming teachers or posting soldiers outside of schools, both of which I think are preposterous ideas. We can barely fund clean water, let alone firearms and training for an entire education system which is already underfunded to begin with. Recent shootings in 2017 and 2018 have demonstrated that background checks are essentially useless and that the current reporting system doesn't have any teeth. One cannot even begin to understand someone's true mindset or intentions without interacting with them over an extended period of time. I'm talking about really getting to know these people, not just determining who they are based off of their criminal record or some forms that they filled out. This brings me to the title of this post we need to take advantage of existing enthusiasts. There is a very large existing base of responsible gun owners in our country. These people prioritize safety and the true purpose of the 2nd amendment. If I was king, I would propose that in order to purchase a firearm you need to be sponsored by a gun club. You would need to join a group of enthusiasts and regularly attend training classes. This would not only increase the use of safety protocols but also give existing gun enthusiasts the chance to get to know new owners and in turn weed out those with bad intentions. This could also act in place of a mandatory cool off period since it would take time for the new owner to gain the trust of club members. I think this is something that could benefit both sides of the argument, left and right. Leftists would be somewhat satisfied in knowing that you can't just walk in to any old gun shop and purchase a firearm, and the right would be satisfied in knowing that firearms safety and gun culture is being promoted in a responsible way. Lastly, look at how the 2nd amendment is worded. It is addressing a well regulated militia emphasis on the militia part. The amendment is there to allow for the citizenry to revolt in the event of a tyrannical takeover. It's not there so that some guy can buy a gun and feel self sufficient. It exists to promote organization and training. These gun clubs would fit perfectly into that and would organize gun owners across the country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Firearm enthusiast clubs are the solution to America's gun problem.\n","id":"93c33015-3c5f-4d9d-ae5a-c9e44b482868"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Cities operate on a basis of a short 'democratic distance' between voter and government, increasing political accountability voter impact and keeps feedback loops between people and government short.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shifting policy making to central authorities undermines the effectiveness of policies because local levels, in particular the city are better able to implement it.\n","id":"eb517e2b-9a27-46dd-b3c5-3f3ff6f60492"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should traditions that harm humans be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In an effort to reduce bullying many schools have removed dodgeball from PE classes, despite inconclusive data as to whether this will actually make a substantial impact.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We could be mistaken in thinking that something causes harm when in fact it does not.\n","id":"c7e0e6b8-e771-4246-ba17-0dcf3ec2b14f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>The drug market is a supply and demand economic model. To control flow, experience in similar markets has shown it to be more effective to manage demand rather than trying to restrict supply. Managing legal access to addictive drugs facilitates the reduction of negative outcomes from both currently illegal drugs and over prescribed medication.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shooting galleries could be provided by the government as a safe environment for those requiring them.\n","id":"51103a85-fac7-43fc-8dab-c3ffb2d2d3fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am legitimately open to someone changing my mind about this, because, I can't really see it in any other way at the current moment. For those who are not aware, AA, in ELI5 terms, essentially holds minorities to lower standards than the general populous and favors those who are regarded as 'discriminated against'. I think this is mildly racist because it holds groups like African Americans, women, and other minorities to a reduced standard only to 'promote' diversity. This is especially prominent in universities college in the US. Colleges will accept minority students who are legitimately less qualified than, for example, another student who does not currently hold minority status JUST to appear miscellany diverse so they garner more funding, etc. It is essentially reverse discrimination. I have read a multitude of stories about people that obviously only got into a certain college university solely on the basis of their skin color ethnicity, and even a story about someone who said on their application to Harvard and Stanford that they were African American, when they were only 1 8th AA. They got accepted to both when their GPA was a mere 3.5. There are more factors when applying to college that could have gotten them their spot into those colleges, but, obviously, them fabricating their race had some role in their acceptance. The main argument is that this assists those less fortunate minorities who are in lower economic classes that cannot afford to attend university, but, where is the line drawn? I hope to have a nice conversation and garner some nice insight. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Affirmative Action is mildly racist.\n","id":"0f5d2daa-d65e-4d4d-8308-a9e9dd31f3b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I've been a tennis player for a few years at this point, and one of the things that seems to ruin the sportsmanship of the game is people that take things too seriously there are commonly younger players than me who are comparable, if not better than I am. And more times than not, they take the sport way too seriously and seem to not be enjoying it, and very stressed about the outcome of the match. Bringing this anecdote to a more real world perspective leads me to this conclusion that the key to being stress free is simply learning to not take one's self too seriously. I feel like by not taking one's self too seriously allows said person to be able to not be preoccupied with the fairly trivial outcome of any activity or even in time. Granted, I do think that there are things that deserve special attention and need to be taken seriously, but for most everybody I see stressed out, whether they be older or younger, it seems to be that they are taking themselves too seriously for them to get past the fact that most of the stress they are feeling is coming from trivial topics that don't ultimately matter too much in the course of time. First post in r changemyview<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the key to being stress free is simply learning to not take one's self too seriously - ?\n","id":"904f15f7-9ec7-44ad-a8f9-e08761f7def0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Only people that have as much preparation as the militaries and ex-militaries should have have the right to use firearms. No one else should have one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The responsibility should be on the central government to foster responsible gun owners.\n","id":"3feb7daa-017a-48df-9256-a8367aa15d5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT would almost single handedly fix our economy would have been a better summary. I don't think we're technically in a recession. Our current minimum wage is at a historic low considering inflation, and many people are forced to live below the poverty line or work multiple jobs just to get by. Increasing the minimum wage would put more money in the pockets of the millions I'm guessing at this of people that work in such jobs. Of course, a lot of this money would go into savings accounts, but a lot of it would also get spent right away and go right back into the economy. It's better for it to be in the savings account as of individuals than those of large corporations like McDonald's and Wal Mart, which will either hoard the money or give it to their already wealthy shareholders who won't necessarily increase their own spending. Sure, there would be layoffs and some small businesses might close, but you could argue that those businesses were poorly run or based on an unsustainable model if they require their employees to live in poverty or work multiple jobs. My last opinion is that we need minimum wage to adjust every year with the poverty line. Having a minimum wage that requires new legislation in order to change results in the stagnant wage we have now, and makes it easier for large corporations to manipulate it by putting money in the pockets of politicians. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe increasing the minimum wage would almost single handedly get us out of recession\n","id":"f6689188-bf9f-4c05-928f-4605d72fd23b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Because egg and meat production are separated by modern production practices male chicks are shredded out of economic concerns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The common practices underlying the production of meat massive livestock farming are unethical.\n","id":"94a320aa-35cc-4b56-a67a-741bd178d482"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>Leaving Euratom, the EU's atomic energy community, could cause energy supplies to be disrupted due to the lack of equivalent national regulatory body, and the inability to source vital components from Europe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A hard Brexit would result in short-term regulatory chaos.\n","id":"9bde8272-bab4-4ba4-a1ae-523a583b06c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are K-12 teachers already paid enough in America?<|ARGUMENT|>While an American teacher may be considered financially successful in some countries, in America, the same pay check may not go as far or even cover basic needs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being the highest paid in the world does not factor in cost of living in America in comparison to other countries where pay may be lower.\n","id":"ee94f3f0-6801-497e-880f-e8859a38bfec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't know what it is but whenever I witness people crying in front of one another, I sense it's some attempt to manipulate someone, even the person themselves. I don't think this is done intentionally or consciously, but that it's a learned way for people to manipulate others, by asking for mercy through submission, by looking ridiculous with tears pouring down their face. I searched and found a relatively similar post but I'm unconvinced crying isn't what I said above. I find it more than a little bit despicable, but then again I'm a misanthrope to begin with. Edit Been downvoted to hell but my view is hardly changed. I expected better from .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Crying in adults is manipulative\n","id":"53adf7eb-6308-4019-8c29-e02f02c612dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would like to acknowledge that I may be biased towards this view as I grew up in a household full of domestic abuse. Although I myself was never physically hurt, I watched years go by as my mother's partners would hurt and bruise her physically. I was too young and immature to protect her, and instead was subjected to what I consider psychological abuse I was always put in the middle of these fights D Why the fuck can't you agree with me and tell your mother that she's psychotic? M Did you not see him hit me? Look at my arms and legs. They're purple. Fucking coward, stand up for me You're my son, for Christ's sakes. Back and forth, back and forth. Anyways, this indirectly relates to the topic at hand now as a fledgeling adult at the age of 21, I have an extreme abhorrence towards any kind of violence, whether it be wrestling, war, or the violent punishments my ex stepdad would give to our pets in an attempt to house train them properly. I understand that there isn't and probably will never be a unanimous view towards spanking children, but I would love to hear some of your thoughts on the matter. I acknowledge that there are well bred kids who respect authority no matter their childhood circumstances. I was never hit or touched for any bad behavior in the past, and I turned out just fine. My college roommate, on the other hand, was spanked time and time again for his misdeeds, but later grew into becoming an accomplished Eagle Scout and respectful man. I admire his character today, but we have always disagreed on the topic at hand. I just find it wholly unnecessary to treat bad behavior with physical discipline, no matter how harsh or light the hand is. I would like to draw a parallel to disciplining a new cat, where you place an emphasis on consistently rewarding good behavior using reason and logic to deconstruct and correct children's misdeeds and not backhanding the cat like that fucker did. Today, witnessing physical abuse in any form makes me nauseous. TL DR Spanking should be reserved for two consenting adults only.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Spanking children is not only unnecessary but immoral.\n","id":"7b192432-ac42-4246-8c26-454de492684b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think if nature has decided that you should not procreate, you should accept it and look for other ways to satisfy your urge to parent a child. Adopt or foster a child, or volunteer at or work for a children's charity. To me this is the equivalent of breeding more dogs rather than encouraging people to adopt a perfectly good dog from a shelter. I think the But then it's not miiiine mentality is selfish. Having a child should not just be about producing a little mini version of yourself. There are plenty of existing children who may have a different hair and eye colour than you but who would love to have you as their parent. Go ahead, c my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In-vitro fertilization is a personal choice and should not be funded with taxpayer money.\n","id":"aff64d88-e82c-44ab-8931-934699dff476"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I may be biased seeing as that I also subscribe to r liberalgunowners but I feel as if the left stopped being so against the second amendment they'd gain a considerable amount of fence sitters as well as single issue gun voters. Democrats aren't going to switch Republican since any single issue votes against guns won't switch to the Republican party since it's viewed as the gun rights party. To me, environmentalism, LGBT rights, religious freedoms, universal healthcare, and government corruption not that the left isn't involved is more pertinent and shouldn't be sacrificed for gun legislation pushes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the Democratic party abandoned their anti-gun stance they'd win presidential elections and seats in the House and Senate in a landslide.\n","id":"1145c4b7-e8de-4a94-872f-76ca40a02395"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To give background, I must discuss first some background in philosophy about morality. There exists in philosophy an argument about the objectivity subjectivity of morality. On one side of the spectrum are the total objectivists, who believe that there is one moral truth about the world, an absolute right. Often one is able to achieve this absolute truth through religion God says something is wrong or right so it is thus. One other side of the spectrum are the absolute subjectivists, who claim that people's claims about moral questions are only opinion and cannot truly be argued about. I am in the middle of these two ideal types. To truly understand my view, I would have you look at how we might examine a table. While there are no doubt differences in perception due to genetical and physical capability of me viewing that table, there are going to be similarities in how we view it. As such, we are able to discuss the table with an assumption that it exists and that it has certain characteristics, while still being unable to claim that it is an objective fact that the table exists in fact, there is no true objective fact that we could ever know . The same is true for morality. While there are differences between human beings in wanting certain things based on physiological difference, we are similar enough in our makeups for most issues in morality to be talked about in reasonable discussion as though much of it is objective fact. I would say there is more difference in perception about morality than how we perceive a table, however. Note that whenever we discuss facts, there is some element of subjectivity, but often we describe them as objective, and describing facts objectively is useful to us, most of the time because the fact that it is subjective plays so little a part in perception that it is irrelevant. In any case, this brings me to my point . There are differences in opinion about moral questions. These differences could stem from 1. Differences in perception and 2. Differences in beliefs about facts about the world EDIT and more obviously, these are the two i'm looking at I argue that most of the differences in opinion about moral issues stem from 2 There is a much much greater amount of difference in human belief about morality that is caused by wrong beliefs about the world than by differences in genetic make up or perspective. Note that the same holds true when discussing any facts. Think about the difference between someone that believes that gay people should be hated and someone that believes in equality. What causes the difference between these people? I would argue that the person that hates gay people must either be making some mistake or must be ignorant or wrong about some facts about the issue. While it may be true that the person is that way due to cultural factors, the fact remains that they are ignorant in some way. This could be from anything they could believe the Bible says that gays are an abomination and therefore they should be hated, they may believe that being gay is wrong for some illogical reason, ect. The real logical problem is that they might believe that all humans deserve decency but also believe that gay people do not, but may have no good reason to believe that this is so. This is simple logical inconsistency. Most differences in belief can be categorized as stemming from logical inconsistencies. However, specific beliefs also may differ in the extent to which perception matters. My point is that when considering most of the differences about most beliefs, these differences are caused by mistakes in belief about facts . People are able to blow themselves and others up because of beliefs about what will happen after they die and who ought to live and who ought not to. All of these are predicated on other beliefs about the world. One belief that would have more difference in opinion due to perception than some other beliefs is abortion. While differences in beliefs about abortion still largely rest on differences in beliefs about other factual claims about the world such as that God exists and designated that life begins at fertilization , there is a lot more room for argument even when everyone involved has few logical inconstancies affecting their reasoning. The reason behind this is that when life begins is on a continuum there is no real clear line where it makes sense to draw that a life begins. Therefore, people can be different along this continuum 1 month into pregnancy, 2 months, 3, 8, 9, ect. and still be relatively logically consistent about all the facts about the world. However, this is actually quite rare when looking at most beliefs that people disagree. Most of the differences that people have on current moral issues are due to people have different beliefs because they are wrong about certain facts such as religion, ignorance, ect. . Anyway,  Sorry that this is so long and convoluted. EDIT My  is about how I think the causes of human difference in belief about morality is more due to differences in beliefs about facts than differences stemming from perception. To , you would have to either 1. Convince me the opposite is true that perception plays a bigger role than people's wrong beliefs or 2. That they are equal<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The causes of human difference in belief about morality is more often attributable to people having inconsistent or wrong beliefs about the world rather than by differences in perception\n","id":"a79c8803-7c07-4b49-a140-afda4ea10ff5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we require restitution instead of or in addition to prison and fines for criminals that are not dangerous?<|ARGUMENT|>If the fine for an illegal activity is up to $250,000 but the person causes $30 million in damages due to their hacking\/virus, the cost of restitution would be a bigger deterrent than the fine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In some cases, restitution may be much higher than typical government fines and prison penalties, ranging in the millions or billions of dollars depending on the type of crime.\n","id":"f4e3a8ad-f830-45f0-bd2c-e3c053821991"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Open source software is better.<|ARGUMENT|>A real community is growing around open source software, and it is an opportunity to meet great people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Open source software promotes collaboration and building a community around a project, which has numerous benefits.\n","id":"92c898c5-5420-455c-a9b6-67f3376b2c7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Antifa good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>An elderly woman was screamed at and accused of being a Nazi by Antifa protestors outside of of an event by People's Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Antifa's definition of fascism is so broad that innocent people often get harmed in the process of their fight against fascism.\n","id":"596ae4b9-a1fc-4b35-be51-865b15dbf02f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So in Civ 5 there are different ways to win the game the ones I will focus on today are the cultural victory, through getting 5 whole social policy's and scientific through building a space ship. The entire premise of Civ 5 is to becomes the world leader and make your civilization the greatest there has ever been I do not see how achieving a space ship leads me to being basically King of the World. Contrary the domination way through defeating all enemies makes perfect sense all my enemies are defeated no rebellion I am now basically king of everything. The diplomatic way also makes sense, since you can be made a world leader through the world congress. The cultural victory makes your civilization a utopia but just because I have a utopia doesn't mean everyone will want to make me king it means the cities I control will want me to keep ruling but when I die they might fight amongst themselves for who will replace TheFishlord the great XVII but through world domination my civilization could stand the test of time by pushing down all insurgency since I tend to be an autocracy. TLDR cultural victories and scientific make little to no sense why they would make me the worlds' king. Only domination and diplomacy could lead to it. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that the cultural or scientific victory in Civ V should count as a victory since it makes little sense why achieving space or cultural recognition would make you the world leader\n","id":"f9079400-443f-4489-aacb-8b4c24a43c05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>By legalizing and maintaining the produce of drugs for recreational use, the risk of users getting a hold of a drug falsely advertised for being something else when it's rather poisonous would never happen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalisation does not necessarily mean that drugs will be freely available. It is easier to control and regulate drugs when they are legalised as governments can restrict who can make and sell them.\n","id":"7d69e4e9-3fa9-4b34-a1d5-fcc30b4e86f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>People who've been exempted face the risk of losing out on job opportunities in countries where patriotism is a dominant part of the national culture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This policy is extremely damaging to those who get an exemption.\n","id":"8499bb56-9520-4ead-ba9a-1e29e5c9ce43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's 2018, and we're here still fighting poverty and hunger. It's been over 150,000 years. We should be well into finding ways to lengthen lifespan eradicate diseases, etc. Nope. Humans are just out destroying each other left and right, with no thought to the future. We have wars, slavery, religion, absurd political ideations, and the list goes on. From Africa, to Europe, the Middle East, Asia, the Americas there's literally chaos everywhere you look. What's even more disheartening is the effort to try to stifle scientists. Case in point, the current US administration and what they're doing to the EPA. EDIT Again, I'm not saying that we haven't been making these advances. I am positing that POLITICS GREED are slowing down our progress.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The advancement of human civilization is being slowed down by politics\/greed.\n","id":"71b92580-f036-4a4e-9479-c35775668268"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>Approval voting's simplicity and similarity to FPTP make it a good Schelling point for reformers primarily looking to move away from FPTP.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Approval voting. Vote for one or more. Described here: en.wikipedia.org\n","id":"939ca5c5-e9f6-4506-b859-b51f038aac5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>In Germany, a former monarchy, the President has similar prerogatives to monarchs: he or she is the de facto executive and symbolic nonpartisan figurehead; has veto and emergency powers; has prosecutorial immunity and cannot be voted out of office.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In many former monarchies, the President of the Republic has many similar functions to royals and yet the institution of the presidency is not deemed as outdated.\n","id":"e5b10537-0229-49ef-bbc7-e76d37a23e73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Increased access to people's internet search data and history will provide an insight into their preferences that business can capitalise on in product and service design.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Employers will have more data with which to analyse the efficiency of their business.\n","id":"0857110f-a274-401c-8cdc-83195cb34ecf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Modern technology is a disadvantage to society.<|ARGUMENT|>Screen technology offers an alternative to pen and paper for communication and projects and an alternative to printed materials.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern technology is being used to reduce the harm that has been done to the environment.\n","id":"3f4aa309-cc38-4567-b592-bb05bfcace6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>The more complex and different from the status quo something is, the less likely it is to get support.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Support among the informed doesn't always translate into support among the uninformed\/resistant\/paranoid.\n","id":"658e047c-ad2c-4ebd-a4f3-20d9dfcc12d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Harmonisation of Taxation within the European Union<|ARGUMENT|>Social Europe \u2013 Non-harmonised taxes mean tax competition, which will result in lower taxes everywhere as governments pander to business in an attempt to safeguard jobs. Countries such as France and Germany should not be forced to sacrifice their welfare states through such a process of beggar-my-neighbour competition. Ultimately all EU countries may be forced through a race to the bottom to have lower tax revenues than they need to secure the welfare spending their citizens would like.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social Europe \u2013 Non-harmonised taxes mean tax competition, which will result in lower taxes everywhe...\n","id":"c34e66ed-2994-4b56-96b8-86f5ce973bac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>No Child Left Behind Act<|ARGUMENT|>No Child Left Behind creates such impossible standards that it frequently causes modestly performing schools to be labelled \"failing\" and to be put at risk of privatization or being turned into charter schools.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NCLB sets the conditions for the privatization of \"failing\" schools.\n","id":"f000ab08-80c9-48b9-9612-bfc08f9110b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>She's difficult to reach for the average person, as none of the reasons to contact her are for talking to her about personal concerns. So her viewpoints will be isolated from theirs, even though she tries to appear like she relates to them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Elizabeth Warren, despite claiming to relate to the masses, doesn't seem to actually do so.\n","id":"e56dc574-2a28-4ddf-8290-9c4c53ce69cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019ve been giving this issue a lot of thought lately and I\u2019m curious to see if anyone has a perspective I haven\u2019t considered yet. Although I\u2019m fairly confident in my view, I would happily change it if someone perhaps a physicist or a philosopher can provide a compelling reason the contrary. Background Generally speaking, causal determinism is the claim that, if the present state of the universe could be known perfectly, every past and future state of the universe could also be known because the universe operates according an inviolable set of natural laws. Importantly, determinism does not assert that the universe can be known in its entirety, merely that its present physical state is always wholly dependent on its preceding one. This distinction between categories of knowledge epistemic and reality ontic is important for the purposes of discussion. Historically speaking, it was common for human societies to have mystical beliefs about nature. Events like diseases, eclipses, and natural disasters were believed to have supernatural causes, often through divine agents in possession of free will. With the advent of empirical science in the 17th and 18th century, laws describing simple physical systems emerged, leading to the popularization of the theory that these patterns of causation could be extrapolated to encompass all of the natural world. Indeed, the basic tenet of deterministic causation i.e. that all physical states evolve from prior states according to a strict set of rules continues to inform our modern practice of science. When new phenomena are observed, scientists seek to find the causative factors associated with them. This has proved a useful explanatory tool, regardless of whether determinism is true in an absolute sense. Nowadays, it\u2019s common to hear people discuss determinism in the context of quantum mechanics. Although it\u2019s certainly true that quantum mechanics disprove classical theories of determinism that rely on Newtonian mechanics, there are many possible interpretations of quantum mechanics and no presently available method of distinguishing between them an epistemic limitation . Some of these interpretations are deterministic, some are non deterministic, and some are agnostic with regards to determinism. In any case, I believe the main thrust of my argument would be correct, regardless of how quantum mechanics works. My view First, imagine two scenarios Scenario 1 Suppose the world appears to be deterministic. All empirical observations conform to a generalizable set of natural laws. Scenario 2 Suppose the world appears to be non deterministic. Some of our empirical observations don\u2019t conform to any known principle. E.g. the behavior of a certain particle appears to be absolutely probabilistic, with no way of telling whether it will occupy State A or State B. In Scenario 1, determinism seems like a plausible theory that wholly aligns with our observations. In order to be falsifiable however, there must be some possibility of proving it to be false i.e. Scenario 2 . On its surface, Scenario 2 seems to provide the evidence required to make determinism falsifiable. However, how are we to distinguish between a limitation in our knowledge versus a limitation in reality itself? For example, Heisenberg\u2019s Uncertainty Principle asserts a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain complementary pairs of variables can be known. Is this limit caused by our current inability to perform the measurement i.e. epistemic or is this limit a reflection of fundamental property of nature i.e. ontic ? We might, for example, hypothesize a non local hidden variable theory that deterministically accounts for our observations, but is merely beyond our power to identify it. To use a metaphor, our observations in this case are like seeing the movements of a hooded figure on a distant stage. It appears as though it is a person moving on the stage, but it\u2019s also possible that the figure is a realistic puppet, being guided by a puppet master causal events we can\u2019t directly perceive. In principle, I see no way of distinguishing between these two possibilities, and hence no way to disprove determinism. Therefore, causal determinism is not a falsifiable theory. People who claim to believe in determinism or non determinism are not justified in their belief, despite the fact that some of them are bound to be correct as the universe is either deterministic or non deterministic. \u0394 awarded to u Goldfinch. I now acknowledge that a belief doesn't necessarily need to be falsifiable to be justified to some degree and that the burden of proof should rest on the one making a positive claim about the existence of something. \u0394 awarded to u yyzjertl. I acknowledge that Bell's theorem precludes determinism via local hidden variables. Determinism would have to be non local. \u0394 awarded to u ehcaipf. I agree that if one could exist outside the universe and set it to its initial parameters and run it multiple times, one could conclusively determine whether the universe was deterministic. \u0394 awarded to u weirds3xstuff. The uncertainty principle was a poor choice of example, as my current understanding is that the Casimir effect does indeed suggest that the uncertainty principle is ontologically true. I guess I am having trouble distinguishing between what makes something functionally uncertain versus actually uncertain. Couldn't we always posit some unknown cause for individual, seemingly random, quantum events?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Determinism is not falsifiable.\n","id":"5967aca9-c7c8-423d-ae0f-f800fdf1cf74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should oil and gas companies release their cleantech patents into the public domain?<|ARGUMENT|>Oil and gas companies are morally obligated to release their cleantech patents into the public domain because of the damage they have caused to the environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Oil and gas companies should release their cleantech patents into the public domain.\n","id":"7d7e8888-e88a-4694-9d99-45050e314cab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Based on a recent  I made, a lot of people seem to suggest that it's acceptable to call a black American who speaks white English acting white or kow towing to white culture. Similarly, I have also read articles and seen media interviews where a black conservative would be criticized for being an Uncle Tom for not supporting liberal policies. To me, this type of behavior is outrageous it presumes that all black people must conform to a certain type of black behavior , or else they are betraying their race or culture. However, it seems to me that polite society tolerates this type of aggression against black people, especially when it comes from other black people. Am I missing something? Why is this type of behavior not racism that should be universally condemned? Why is it being tolerated and even perpetuated by people who are supposedly against racism?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Calling out Black Americans for \"Acting White\" is Racist\n","id":"1bfb8dc2-8b40-4065-8ba9-fb22a2b61907"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>It could lead to an increase in bullying people based on their wealth, particularly within schools.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People might treat others differently based on whether they are rich or poor.\n","id":"221aade3-688c-4a6e-96f4-10c5e56be7d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>The Japanese soldiers that committed the massacre were acting as official employees and representatives of the Japanese state. The Japanese state is therefore legally responsible for their actions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Japan ought to take legal responsibility for its actions and their consequences for the many victims of Nanking.\n","id":"6d05c830-053e-428b-b9dc-5776e708486d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US government guarantee every citizen a job?<|ARGUMENT|>In Texas 66% of released convicts were arrested again within three years. However, released prisoners that found employment were 10 times less likely to be rearrested. Employment was the key driver in stopping former convicts from committing another crime and being rearrested.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A jobs guarantee scheme could actually lower crime as a study shows that providing job training, money or supplies to get started in legitimate work, and employment opportunities could help curb repeat offenses.\n","id":"7cdf924e-330e-45a3-9ba1-6878fe01ff8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should Self-Driving Cars Kill?<|ARGUMENT|>Even to the extent AI's are capable of learned or random behaviours, human programmers still create and structure the conditions through which these develop.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Only sentient beings can exert real choice; the programming\/artificial intelligence of a self-driving car is deterministic and so incapable of having free will.\n","id":"05f78b25-6bbb-491c-b791-adf1e50398b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Private self-driving cars will make our cities more livable<|ARGUMENT|>Vehicle makers will lobby the cities to make space and create regulations to allow and favor the use of autonomous vehicles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private self-driving cars compete with non-motorized transportation bicycling, walking, . which are much more sustainable solutions.\n","id":"8d4f2c20-2fa4-4246-85fa-39ba1d8b8cf6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title mentions specifically a tattoo on the forearm, but the underlying premise of my argument is based on a tattoo which would not be visible in formal clothing such as slacks and a button down but would be visible in casual wear shorts and T shirt . Such a tattoo would not affect chances of college acceptance for three reasons the ubiquity of tattoos amongst college aged individuals, the relative unimportance of personal image in the college acceptance process, and the low chance of anyone even seeing the tattoo. According to a Pew Research Centre report, nearly 38 of college aged individuals have a tattoo. While that is not a majority by quite a margin, it is a significant amount. Additionally, the popularity and accessibility of tattoos are steadily increasing year by year leading to a greater acceptance amongst a younger crowd. The point here is that because of their widespread nature, tattoos are no longer seen as a sign of rebellion simply because they are so commonplace. Furthermore, most colleges prefer to accept or deny students based on their applications alone, rather than on interviews. Unlike a job interview, in which personal image can make or break someone\u2019s chances of getting employment, colleges tend to focus more on scholastic and athletic merit, test scores, and lifetime achievements first. Personal image is last on the docket for a school good enough to conduct personal interviews, if even considered at all. The previous two points also assume that a college will know about this tattoo, whereas that may not even be the case. In an interview process, there is no chance that the tattoo will be exposed in formal clothing. If the tattoo is exposed after acceptance, then there is no risk of a college retroactively denying admission based on that alone. This third point is also the keystone argument when it comes to employment. For the sake of this argument, I will assume that if an employer knows about any sort of tattoo, it will result in immediately being passed over for the job. This is not consistent with reality and the first two points I make concerning college can be applied to employment as well tattoos are slowly gaining acceptance in the workforce as the 38 of college students with tattoos graduate and seek employment, and that employers will seek to hire the most qualified candidate with less emphasis placed on personal image. But even discarding these arguments, the possibility of an employer finding out about a tattoo covered by conservative formal clothing in professional situations is nil. As some of you may have guessed, I have posted this because I am considering getting a tattoo and want to make an informed decision before doing so. I think I have carefully considered most ways that a tattoo could impact my life, but I wanted to hear some opposing arguments I may have overlooked and figured Reddit could help me out here<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A forearm tattoo will not negatively affect prospects for higher education or employment.\n","id":"c0bd92d6-c73b-48ef-846a-b11aa92fc653"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The headline is perhaps a bit strong. Complaints processes do respond if something is very extreme and causes a lot of personal damage , but for anything apart from actual personal loss of money ,which is very directly attributable to a company's action, I think complaints processes are designed not to function. Specifically There is almost always some degree of capture within complaints processes. Corruption would be too strong, but most of the times the interests of complaints teams and regulatory bodies are far more aligned the companies they represent rather than complainants even if it is just in terms of understanding the situation of the company There seems to be a degree of inbuilt heavy costs to complaints processes, probably as much evolved as intentional. Where unnecessary delays and obfuscation are built in to make the time costs of complaints exceed any benefits including emotional benefits that you can achieve through the complaints process. In this context, publishing details of failings of a company on the internet is both a morally reasonable and an effective approach. Given the likelihood of a complaint process being broken by design, one is not even morally obligated to try to interact with the company directly first. One practical exception to this might be if you are considering taking legal action including pseudolegal action through regulatory bodies where the perception of being squeeky clean can be useful. But most of the time the cost of such legal activity in terms of stress, time, and money is sufficiently high not to be justified. In summary, public shaming is the only reasonable response to most organisational failing, and one is justified in engaging in it without first attempting formal channels because these formal channels are broken by design. I hope this goes without saying, but I do not mean to undermine the work of anyone working in regulatory bodies or complaints processes, and understand that their work is both skilled and societally valuable. These comments refer to the practical effects that incentives have on the societal landscape and how one as an individual should respond to them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only way to get a reasonable response in complaints processes is to post details on the internet\n","id":"cde67de9-0148-4e04-9cc1-f09728424cc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should ban private military companies<|ARGUMENT|>private military companies have their own agendas and are not always acting in our country's best interest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private military companies cannot be trusted to be loyal to the hiring country\n","id":"002fc264-e4ea-4ca2-a590-a9fe1018c309"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Genetically modified foods<|ARGUMENT|>\"given the global success of GM cotton, maize and soya, why have so few staple GM food crops been licensed for commercial growth?\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"GM cotton, maize, soya, and others have been global successes.\n","id":"b65c5cfa-7059-4333-8534-3fdf7090eaa4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Abortion rates in Europe are higher than in North America despite better healthcare systems and more liberal abortion laws Sweden, in particular, has a much higher rate than the US and many European countries have similar rates to the US despite access to free healthcare and more liberal laws regarding abortion. For North America specifically According to Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada their rate was 14.5 per 1,000 in 2016 According to the CDC US abortion rate was 11.8 abortions per 1,000 in 2015. Note this was posted 2018, so I don't know what the 2016 rate is. Canadas abortion laws are far more lax than a lot of the United States. There's clearly more to the issue than simply access to contraceptives. Poverty is the biggest factor with regard to abortion. Three out of four women having an abortion are low income and cluster near or below the poverty line Uncoincidentally, there is a correlation between wealth inequality and abortion. The European countries from the earlier infographic with higher or comparable rates of abortion also have comparable ratings for wealth inequality. Simply having less restrictive laws regarding abortion isn't a solution. The number of them may actually rise to Sweden levels in the US since we are not doing anything to fix the underlying issue of why women find it necessary to get them despite living in countries that have better access to contraceptives and free healthcare.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More liberal abortion policies and access to contraceptives does little to lower the abortion rate.\n","id":"8d0f7f96-8284-4aa4-983f-c42c288b536e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The USA should adopt an elected collective presidency, like Switzerland's.<|ARGUMENT|>High executive decisions must be carried out by functionaries in the various departments. If the council has the same distribution of opinion as those below it it will be more effective than an all-powerful president.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USA should adopt an elected collective presidency, like Switzerland's.\n","id":"70896ba0-980d-4124-915a-fe906a63467c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Salazar Slytherin built a secret chamber underneath Hogwarts to house a Basilisk with the intention of the beast one day being unleashed on Muggle-Born students.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A significant number of wizards throughout wizarding history have practised the Dark Arts\n","id":"42aab744-2d35-48cc-afd7-3226099d7af5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a CG artist animator and I made this recreation from memory of an event that my wife and I witnessed on the beach at Gulf Shores, Alabama around 2005 or 2006. This is an accurate representation of what we saw, though the duration of the event is a bit unclear at this point. My wife remembers it lasting minutes, and I remember it being less than a minute. It was certainly long enough for us to gaze at and confirm that we are both seeing the same thing. The movement was so organic, as if there was no vessel, or they were the vessel if that makes sense. They moved very independently of each other, and would sort of glitch to another spot almost instantaneously. They seemed to be distant in the sky like stars, but the movement was impossibly fast relatively. I spent years searching for a logical explanation, researching all types of ball lightning, atmospheric distortion, etc. but life moves on, we have had kids since then, etc. but it still haunts us. I am very interested in possible logical explanations, or if anyone has seen something similar please let me know EDIT IT MAY LOOK LIKE FIREFLIES IN THE VIDEO BUT i ASSURE YOU THAT WHAT WE SAW WAS NOT FIREFLIES. I am 100 positive of this. I am 100 that what we saw was in the far distance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Aliens have been here and I have seen them.\n","id":"d5f3d37a-2c4e-48a0-aa5c-7fbbade81d69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should More Women Work In Construction In The United States?<|ARGUMENT|>Strength should not be a barrier to entry, as with the variety of jobs in construction matches the variety of strength amongst women. For instance, women with high levels of strength can take on the more physically-demanding work, while those with less strength can do the less-manual work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many position within the field of construction that do not require a certain amount of physical strength.\n","id":"d6e0c8be-c9f5-4384-afd1-09513c64239a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Asking Palestinians to accept Israel's right to exist equals asking Palestinians to accept as justified what has been done to them over the course of the past decades.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Palestinians have strong incentives not to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, and therefore should not do so.\n","id":"108c4100-6f1b-4bd2-ae78-cfc785b20817"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>If you adore\/love the idea of hell then this might be an indicator of character flaws with the self. A self that loves\/adores the idea of hell might be said to relish in people's suffering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If worship is an act of adoration or love towards someone or something, then one would have to adore or love the idea of hell to justify worshiping a being who sends people there.\n","id":"1d760547-43f4-4aa7-a633-ff4cfd52ff42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>Women who act as surrogate mothers face health risks associated with carrying a baby, which can be incredibly difficult and involve considerable medical expenses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Practices where body parts are used or sold for financial gain should not be legalised.\n","id":"e8495cd3-3ec7-4fe7-8b75-72c8d553155e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Our perception as humans is not necessarily the same as any other human<|ARGUMENT|>Genetic mutations in certain genes hT2R43, hT2R44, and hTAS2R38 for example are assumed to be correlated with difference in taste as they correlate with lower of higher sensitivity to specific flavour compounds<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Various people have hypothesized and attempted to extrapolate what a person's experience is like when the sense organs themselves have a mutation and\/or damage.\n","id":"60274c79-3b78-432e-b9ad-06bcf0ced6b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>The Old Tjikko is a clonal colony of Norway Spruce trees that are over 9,500 years old.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many living organisms are older than the biblically proposed age of the universe.\n","id":"6b2619e8-69d7-462c-bf30-9cbe858d2c69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in a well developed European country with one of the highest tax rates on income. Every month I pay about \u20ac630 of my income. I often hear a mentality on some political subreddits that people always want their taxes reduced. Especially Americans, who have quite a low tax burden, are very negative about taxes. Libertarians even go so far as to claim taxes are theft. And some conservatives are very willing to sacrifice things like public education in order to cut taxes. Sometimes I hear people argue that If you like paying taxes so much, why don't you donate a large amount of money to your government? I wouldn't actually mind paying a bit more taxes, but I also want the system to be fair and equal. Just donating money to my government wouldn't help anyone, because I'm just an individual and governments have budgets of billions. I like taxes because when I was a student, I didn't have to accumulate a high amount of debt. I payed \u20ac1960 in tuition to study for 3 years \u20ac650 year . Now that I have a degree, it's my turn to pay for the kids who are in high school now. When I have medical expenses, my government often pays back most of them. I also use public transport sometimes and I find that satisfying. When I go to work, I'm not the only person to benefit from my labor, other people for example people who can't work , benefit too. It's fulfilling. People sometimes question whether I realize what my taxes are being spent on. I'm actually very well informed on this. If I pay \u20ac100 in taxes 20 goes to retirements 14 goes to health care 12 goes to education 9 goes to administration and government personnel 7 goes to people who can't work 6 goes to subsidies and incentives 6 goes to interests 5 goes to public transport 4 goes to child care 4 goes to the unemployed 3 goes to security and defense 2 goes to other social security 2 goes to the environment then there are some other small budgets like culture, Of course there are some expenses that I don't agree with, but I'm convinced that taxes go to good purposes. When I hear people complain that their taxes go to the government. , I think to myself no, your taxes go to the people. I'd be willing to change my view on taxes, if I heard good arguments, but overall I'm a satisfied tax payer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am Proud to Pay Taxes... and so Should you\n","id":"c2ea68fd-d253-4b50-8924-94c49a4b09ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Not easy to explain since english isn't my main langage, but i believe we are entirely determined by previous causes that are, themselves determined by causes and so on I think we have no grip on this chain of consequences. For instance, I am thirsty, so i drink a cup of water, I had no choice but to drink this cup of water, because I am thirsty I have access to water nearby It would be stupid not to. I am a normal, non masochistic person who don't like to be thirsty Had I have been in this exact same situation and my reaction would have the exact same each time Sure i could say to myself, i don't want to drink this glass of water , but this thougth would have been brought by another set of necessary consequences, that, apply to my particular state of mind of the day will influance my actions drinking or not the glass of water . For instance I really need to finish my work lt I've been procrastinating lt I've always been retardedly lazy lt whatever reason that leads people to be lazy We all adopt this kind of reasonning in some ways, for instance when a kid harass his parents in order to get candy, we will most likely consider that he is influanced by some random commercials he saw on TV and his taste for sugar right? But when it comes to less flagrant more complex situation we say wa have free will. But where is free will in the equation? How can it fit here?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe free will is an illusion, our toughts, feelings actions &amp; reactions etc... are just necessary consequences.\n","id":"9b47abc0-b6f5-45b9-8123-78c6bbe3b2d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Lab-Grown Meat a suitable replacement for Factory Farming?<|ARGUMENT|>Farming employment comes with a range of skills, from fixing engines to veterinary tasks. This enhances their employability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if they lose their jobs, farmers can take up different job opportunities instead.\n","id":"3b0e105a-187a-46b9-9439-04fe8b2421fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This may be common I just found this sub today , so if it is please just link me a previous one. Thanks So the first one I think is easy to understand, there is intention behind anything. I believe things are predetermined though quantum physics apparently fucks with that and I haven't looked into that , but not with a purpose in the end. Maybe meaning is wrong word, but it is what I use to describe it. I have emotions and I wish things upon others and for myself, but in the end I think that it doesn't matter if someone killed or raped someone, they don't deserve anything more than someone who didn't. I want society to function as though things are deserved though. I think therefore I am , but what if you aren't? What is special about your thoughts being making it free from question? What if what you are considering as existing, really isn't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe anything has meaning\/purpose, that anything is deserved\/not deserved, and that \"I think therefore I am\" isn't that convincing.\n","id":"ad572ec2-f14a-4e2a-87f8-926abe9d8148"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Many former senior CIA officials and military commanders - including General David Petraeus, the former Commander of US Central Command and former Director of the CIA - believe that the Palestine issue helps Al-Qaeda recruit more soldiers T. Hegghammer and co., p. 293<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The plight of the Palestinians vis-a\u0300-vis Israel is a contributing factor towards extremism far beyond these two countries. An American recognition of Palestine would undermine this.\n","id":"cfb688d6-ac27-4cd1-940f-4acab156411b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Follow the money. That's a cheesy line but more than true. Outlawing lobbying isn't going to fix corruption, neither is a more educated populace, when money is just funneled into this giant fund that is then spent however these fallible people want, and often only revealed after the fact, if ever. The only way corruption can be stopped is to have every single dollar made, or spent by the government, be available for scrutiny for anybody to view. More than any other reason, the strongest one is that there is no almost no downside, and any downside is significantly outweighed by the positive of significantly less corruption. This includes the argument that now other nations or terrorist organizations will be able to see how many bombers we have, or how many personnel mines or whatever else they can learn. First of all, what exactly is ISIS, or any other terrorist organization, going to do if they learn we have, say, 100 Bombers? I can't imagine any real practical advantage they could get by knowing the exact of weapons we have to obliterate them or how many lobsters we buy for troops. For other countries, nuclear deterrent already stops them from doing anything. That is literally the only downside , which is not really a downside as I just explained. And again, little to no corruption outweighs anything else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The first step, before even trying to root out corruption in the government, is to have all money expenditure freely available to view for the public like the Bitcoin blockchain.\n","id":"3b0fe505-fc8f-4ae9-aa77-ca3fd3f3774e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is undeniable, I think, that traits like empathy promote the survival of our species. I also concede that certain moral values can effectively minimize the suffering of people. In my day to day life, I am a very empathetic person. For almost 30 years, I have held a set of moral beliefs values which seemed quite reasonable to me. After reflecting on my values and beliefs, however, it seemed to me that none of them were actually my own. I had not decided to be a good person. I was compelled by belief to be a good person. I was handed my beliefs by my family, teachers, culture, and genes. After reflecting on my beliefs for quite some time, it seemed to me that many of them were quite arbitrary. Most came down to survival, and many only really served the survival of our species. It seems as though I have compartmentalized those beliefs I hold about the universe, which are backed by empirical evidence, and those beliefs values that have motivated my behavior. If we are merely collections of particles interacting in an indifferent and purposeless universe, then everything about our experience is illusory and purposeless. In the same way that there is something rather than nothing because if there were nothing I wouldn't be here, I am only compelled to survive because if I weren't I wouldn't be here. Objectively speaking, survival appears meaningless. After death my particles will continue on interacting in the universe. The only difference is that my subjective experience will disappear. Pain and suffering seem to exist for the same reason. Those collections of particles which interacted in a way that could sense harm stuck around. Assuming a natural universe without a god , it seems like survival, pain, and suffering are objectively meaningless. Given that we are compelled to survive they make a good foundation for moral values, but I don't see how they can be called objective. I also don't see how they do anything for an individual. It seems like one could exploit other people, and take advantage of those holding these values if one were so inclined.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe objective moral values exist or can exist in a natural universe.\n","id":"5f31887e-02cf-4c34-b216-70fc6d7d2133"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe there is no reason to keep all these people in prison for decades, by sentencing someone to life in prison you might as well be sentencing someone to death. I believe by replacing the life sentence with the death sentence we would benefit society in multiple ways. We would save money as paying for someone to serve a life sentence is extremely expensive, especially as the prisoner ages. We might see a decrease in crime although this is speculation . We would be able to focus prison resources towards rehabilitation as only those who are getting out will be in prison. The judicial system would be more fair as sentencing people to death for an action seems much harsher than life in prison, in other words if something isn't bad enough for the death penalty then it probably wasn't bad enough for life in prison. Basically, if this were implemented we would turn our prisons into real rehab centers instead of holding cells, all while saving money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone committed a crime worthy of life in prison then it makes more sense to put him\/her to death.\n","id":"b63de12d-ec79-475a-b83f-ff7186b955d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should hate speech be illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Being ignorant is easy. The cost of seeking true answers is usually larger than cost of finding easiest answers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You can't educate somebody who doesn't want to be educated.\n","id":"40c0d784-9afb-41c7-8c21-5d155118b397"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The United States has more guns owned by the public than people, and stands as the global outlier in the developed world for gun violence. The most often proposed solutions to this problem are either A. Increasing the population, and capacities, of the armed citizenry in day to day life. B. Tightening restrictions on what types of guns and accessories can be sold at retail, and to whom, with greater oversight of the permitting process. All epidemiological studies favor the latter, and multiple case studies e.g. Australia, Canada, Switzerland, UK, Germany, etc have demonstrated substantial evidence that enacting stricter gun control laws work in reducing violent crime, suicide, and mass murder. In my research, I could not find any credible argumentation for the former and will thus excuse it as an absurdist fantasy, unless shown otherwise. However, four key facts lead me to feel strong skepticism towards the efficacy of \u201ctraditional gun control\u201d measures in the United States The United State\u2019s unique lack of data records for what, when, and to whom, firearm transactions were, and continue to be, made. The gargantuan mass of the total amount of firearms in circulation. The absurd operational longevity of firearms themselves A uniquely passionate cultural identity tied to firearm possession. I feel that these key factors render the voluntary surrendering, forced confiscation, and or temporal obsolescence of any class of firearms in any meaningful volume tenuous if not outright impossible. Further, the sheer volume of available firearms already in property circulation would guarantee a thriving black market for generations upon generations with relatively low prices considering the ample supply. The state of California, for example, continued the 90s era ban on high capacity assault weapons after the 10 year expiration date, and yet hundreds of shootings occurred with these prohibited items during and after the ban. But no firearm can be used for lethal action, lawful or not, unless it is paired with the appropriate ammunition. It\u2019s time to take comedian Chris Rock seriously. \u201cWe don\u2019t need no gun control. What we need\u2026 is some bullet control I\u2019ma KILL YOU \u2026 if I could afford it Efforts to control critical material components, rather than the harmful mechanism itself, have proven successful on local and global scales. Nuclear Weapons, for example, are relatively easy for nations to manufactures once they acquire or enrich weapons grade nuclear fuel which is incredibly difficult. The Methamphetamene production industry in the United States has also been dramatically reduced, thanks to regulations designed to control access to the precursor chemicals, and not the means and methods of manufacture. For an AR 15 style firearm, the actual mechanism that grants the weapon full auto capabilities the auto sear is a small, seemingly innocuous metal component. With this item in hand, one can buy everything else they need to build a fully automatic rifle at a local gun store, and yet, this critical material component is extraordinarily difficult to acquire illegally because it, not the barrel handgaurd stock magazine upper, is the controlled item and the controls in place are primarily economic. Auto sears can be bought legally, and illegally, and they're damn expensive Economic determents work and are, generally speaking, preferred to feature based regulation. The class 3 FFL SOT weapon permit system in the US permits everyday citizens with clean criminal records to own and operate fully automatic machine guns, such as the sear mentioned above, and this system has proven wildly successful in keeping such weapons out of the hands of nefarious actors. As far as my research indicates, no legally acquired machine gun under this system has been used to commit a crime or violent act. Experts point to the high cost of entry and government oversight as the reason behind this program\u2019s success. It is the hassle and cost, not the law, that keeps mass shooters, violent actors, and criminals, away from these weapons. A similar system to FFL SOT, employed for the control of public access to ammunition, would substantially and significantly reduce the capacity for nefarious actors to use the already saturated supply of guns to commit violent and criminal acts. Ammunition owned and held by the public should be expensive, registered, only sold to citizens with an appropriate license, not sold by commercial retail outlets, and heavily restricted. No one legal gun owner should be permitted private possession of more than X number of rounds. There are, of course, burdens that such an approach would place on the public. Such burdens are not, however insurmountable through thoughtful mitigation. Expensive ammunition for private possession need not be 'prohibitively expensive' as to amount to a poor tax, only 'necessarily expensive.' Personal defense firearms are themselves necessarily expensive, and yet are still accessible to citizens of all income levels. The critical difference between guns and ammunition however, is that the later is a consumable good. A person who invests, say, 500 for .45 handgun will then make a one time purchase of X for Y amount of rounds for private possession and likely never pay that fee again. Should those rounds ever slip through the cracks, each can only be used once to violent ends. But in the current system, if the gun slips through the cracks, its destructive capacity is near limitless. Other mitigations might include Licensed gun ranges and public training facilities in which all \u201cshoot on site\u201d ammunition is dirt cheap, if not free subsidized by gov to encourage frequent training. \u20141 1 unlimited replacement trade of old ammunition held in private possession for new rounds at licensed dealers. Special exceptions for occupational license holders e.g. private security, private investigator, varmint control, etc\u2026 Special exceptions for current and former military and LEO. Special exceptions for rural regions and agricultural communities. Integrating permission to possess additional rounds for hunting purposes into the tag system already in place. The purchase of a tag an appropriate amount of additional ammunition for hunting purposes. Though such an approach would inevitably lead to a black market for ammunition, black market prices are always greater than their white market counterparts. The benefits of the high price of entry, and difficulty, to purchase ammunition in the white market would carry over. Additionally, while the shelf life of ammunition is long, it does not match the shelf life of a well maintained firearm nor can aging ammunition meet every legal owner's critical need for reliability assurance. Thus, ammunition is a perishable good and can be controlled by regulation with far greater efficacy than the firearms themselves. This approach, I believe, is what would actually work. Possible ways to change my view Demonstrate the plausibility that \u201ctraditional\u201d gun control laws could be enacted, enforced, and effective in the United States. Demonstrate that the burdens placed on the citizenry by an \u201cammo control\u201d approach would be grossly insurmountable or unreasonably punitive. Demonstrate the ineffectiveness of an \u201cammo control\u201d approach. Demonstrate the effectiveness of better, alternative means of addressing this problem. Sources<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ammunition control, not gun control, is America's best hope for substantial and meaningful reduction in gun violence\n","id":"503393c0-c570-4031-843c-57a4f881c51a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally would have no problem having someone who is transgender as long as my partner disclosed that they were transgender. However, I think that straight men and lesbian women have the right to reject a female sex partner if they discover that she is trans. As in, she was born male The same with gay men and straight women for transmen. I don't think sexual attraction is based on some abstract norm of gender identity, but rather on people's bodies. And transpeople unfortunately don't have the right bodies. One thing that I think is troubling is the idea of the cotton ceiling a phrase coined by a trans activist describing when lesbians refuse to have sex with transwomen. I think this implies that male bodied people with xy chromosomes have a right to the bodies of women. I think it's unfortunate that trans people were born in the wrong bodies, but on the other hand, nobody is entitled to sex with anybody.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people have the right to refuse a sex partner for being transgender.\n","id":"042fdbf4-8123-4404-a09e-0cc87da432e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>Henry H. Arnold, Commanding General of the US Army Air Forces stated, that the Japanese position was hopeless even before the first A-bombs fell, because the Japanese had already lost control of their own air.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many informed, senior officers of the US military agreed, that there was no military necessity for the use of nuclear weapons.\n","id":"c1946e14-e99e-4dd5-bcdd-d13dec3eaee7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize prostitution<|ARGUMENT|>if prostitution was legalized then the women in the profession would have legal recourse if they are treated badly by clients or those who employ them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing sex work will make the profession safer for women\n","id":"0f15d098-c206-494e-b8de-f67e7524692a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that all corporations and major companies regularly engage in morally questionable behaviour that they only get away with because they are well established. Their abuse of power such as through litigation that we place in them as consumers leads to their being irreplacable think how hard it is to get by without some of the big names such as Apple or to get clothes not made in sweatshops. Leading to pharmaceutical fraud, sweatshops, tax evasion, saturation marketing, lobbying etc. I believe that because there is a different rule for big companies than for individuals they do bad things. For example, Apple's views on data storage or the recent tax evasion scandals. These are not just angsty teenage scene views. I have read the excellent Naomi Klein book, No Logo and am familiar with The Corporation and other efforts by filmmakers such as Michael Moore. Do these companies behave in any way that isn't selfless or at best redeemable? Is it wrong to expect them to behave in this way?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Large companies and corporations are largely 'evil' and deceitful\n","id":"8cab59a7-984a-4de7-b061-d0c76cf0dda6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Bible be considered a historical document?<|ARGUMENT|>The Quran claims that all animals live in groups but science has shown that there are several animals that live alone their entire lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Quran, considered to be one of the most authentic sources of religious faith and history in Islam, has made several scientific errors.\n","id":"f312230f-1bbf-41e7-95a1-8d847c2c3c17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As you probably know there was this case in the U.S. where some baker did not want to make a cake or something because the clients were homosexuasl and they wanted cake related to that. The court decided against the business owners. Know, I think that is stupid of the business owners economically and they would just hurt themselves, while other bakers would make more profits. If I was a baker I would make that cake. My thing is this Where is the reason in this being 'not okay', while other businesses are allowed to reject customers as well ? For example, Clubs can reject patrons for any reason they want as far as I know, they also do not have to give a reason. I have also heard of cases where people who walked into high end car dealerships have been told to leave the business upon entering because they did not 'fit' the clientele. Not 100 sure about the U.S in this case . Also designers of some kind and tattoo artists are allowed to rejects clients in similar fashion, a 'car graphics' designer has told me that that he will reject clients wishes because they will be judged by other clients on the work they have done, and if it does not match their idea of 'design standart' not high enough standard they can reject them as well. These examples are not very extensive, but there are probably more akin to the ones I have named, that I am not aware of right now. Why are these cases different ? Please mind that all of these examples I have named can be related to homosexuality car dealer one unlikely though and I think they could gey away with it still Did the baker just make the mistake of explicitly naming the sexual orientation as a reason and could have otherwise gotten away with it ? What do you think ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is not much logic to which businesses can reject customers\n","id":"8c1aa9be-ab06-4ec8-899d-281031892fee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>Every citizen of a democratic state where this took place would be aware that they are complicit with intentionally cruelly torturing people to death.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Painful executions can cause psychological damage to those taking part With an eye to their mental health, executions should not be painful.\n","id":"165a4c44-4c96-4709-b435-b57a9f47d7e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This may be a case of missing information, or not. I accept that anthropogenic climate change has a significant effect on the environment, and that there will be serious consequences over the next 100 200 years if not sooner with regard to rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, and so on. My stance is that the Earth isn't going anywhere. In terms of biodiversity, I don't see the problem with losing some animal species, and from my limited understanding of biology eventually a different ecosystem would take the place of what we have now. As far as humans lives are concerned, I don't think it's essential that seven billion people live on the Earth. I think that adapting to environmental conditions is something that humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years, and on a separate note I'm not sure I care all that much if humans are around in another thousand years. So why should I, as an individual, be invested in preventing climate change? EDIT View changed I consider climate change a problem, I just don't care about biodiversity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I accept anthropogenic climate change, but I don't consider it a problem\n","id":"59670970-fbf1-453c-9c47-a1e839b821aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>An innocent civilian seems to be the default term to use when describing unjustified murders of a certain type, and it seems to elicit the most possible sympathy. There are of course other types of murders, for instance unjustified murders of military people or of people behind bars, but there is no such word for those kind of murders which immediately and without controversy elicit sympathy like the term innocent civilian. That is my biggest gripe with the term innocent civilian being used as it does. If a police officer uses unwarranted force against a person under suspicion of a crime, or even a person convicted of a crime, we cannot describe that case as assault or murder of an innocent civilian but the assault or murder may be just as unjustified. Whether or not a crime is justified does not depend on whether a person is innocent or a civilian. Yes, something being not innocent or part of the military can justify an action or mitigate it somewhat we have different standards when two sides of a war are shooting at each other , but that does not mean that what actually justifies an action depends on those two things whether a person is innocent or part of the military. No wonder it's so hard to get rid of the death penalty, or why punitive actions taken against felons are so harsh and long lasting. When a person crosses the bridge from innocent to guilty, we as a society begin looking at them like a completely different species of being. If someone goes into a prison and shoots up all the prisoners there, we will call it a massacre, but nowhere will the term innocent civilian be used and no substitute will be used either. There will be no term to express just how unjustified and senseless these killings were. We would have to explicitly say the killings were unjustified and senseless. The act was unjustified and senseless, so the prisoners deserve to have a word to describe it as just. There should be a term for unjustified and senseless acts against all people, not just against innocent civilians. I think the biggest argument in favor of using the term innocent civilian is that it can be used when there is just about no controversy about whether a bad act was unjustified and senseless. Who would argue that killing innocent civilians is okay? Very few people. Whereas many more people would argue that killing prisoners is okay still not a lot of people, but considerably more . However, the opinions of these people shouldn't determine how we use the term assuming you are like me and believe that an act against a guilty person can be unjustified and senseless . We should have a word that we can use to give every kind of person their due as a person. If a person was murdered without good cause, they are a person murdered without good cause. Innocent civilians are just one kind of this person. It's hard to feel sympathy for all the other kinds of people senselessly harmed when even our special words to describe this kind of act is reserved for innocent civilians.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When we say so-and-so killed innocent civilians, we need a better term to describe the killed than \"innocent civilians.\"\n","id":"2c2b2a11-37c6-4a0e-93b0-3065dfb804bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>John 7:37-38 \"If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water\" No prophecy like this appears in the old testament.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The new testament also claims fulfillment of prophecies that don't exist.\n","id":"16b6d791-ddca-4591-9140-301f5e3b20a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Emergency contraception<|ARGUMENT|>Abortion is regulated by the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act; the 1967 Act creates a defence for doctors against the criminality of abortion, by deeming it lawful for them to authorise an abortion on certain grounds. The 1861 Act prohibits the supply of \"any poison or other noxious thing\" with the intent to cause miscarriage; the circumstances under which emergency contraception is supplied to women - over the counter, without a pregnancy test and without consulting a doctor - do not meet the exception criteria of the 1967 Act.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UK-specific argument: Even though abortion is legal, emergency contraception is not covered by the terms of the 1967 Abortion Act:\n","id":"a7059ae1-125d-43f7-9348-88a024737565"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public transport be free?<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK, electric scooters are classified as motor vehicles subject to the same requirements as other motor vehicles. Given that electric scooters do not meet these requirements, it makes to ban them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Safety should not be compromised in pursuit of travelling via environmentally friendly methods.\n","id":"31ad08f0-870b-4e7e-8a3e-91eb709d6c47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note This is my personal view. Others may be more capable than I am of keeping track of info and reading opinions. While I would like to be informed and well read, I'm not. I often find it difficult to pay attention to and remember things in general. With that said, every time I glance at the News or anything related to politics, I'm bombarded with a deluge of negative comments and sentiments. Whether Right or Left, each side is calling the other evil, dishonest, self serving, foolish, shameful, petty, so on and so forth. They mock and vilify each other incessantly while barely discussing the actual issues, much less trying to find common ground or compromise. Cooperation and accord is absolutely out of the question. When issues are discussed, they are typically simplified and manipulated to fit a particular view by amplifying certain factors and ignoring others. Rather than being two parts of a whole, each side sees each other as the enemy, the root of the problem. It's almost as if they are constantly trying to get rid of each other. Bipartisanship is dead. While I do know that there are less partisan biased sources out there, the sheer volume of toxicity I see from more biased sources like Fox CNN is immensely disturbing and upsetting. My only hope is that there is a silent majority that is more level headed and not so extreme and charged with negative emotions. Many people seem incapable of critical thinking and analysis, clinging to one side or the other, with blind belief towards one and irrational hatred and rejection of the other. Those who identify with a particular party will rarely criticize or question their own representatives while tirelessly pointing the finger of blame at the opposing side. It's Us vs Them. They're out to get us, they're trying to ruin everything. It seems that we are not trying to improve and build a better country world together, but rather tearing each other down and obstructing the opposing side from doing anything at every chance, whatever the cost. Sorry if this was a bit redundant wordy I am aware that I can be overly negative, and I'm wondering what others think. If you would like to, please . Thank you. Side Note I'm new to this subreddit, so I apologize if I messed up anywhere.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Keeping up with News, Politics, etc. is not worth the headache. The sheer volume of toxicity, ignorance, and blind belief\/hatred is intolerable.\n","id":"ffd8d10c-c88a-4ed0-b4fe-7c48e4dde5d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that all the anger aimed at Blizzard is uncalled for. The players on the legacy servers are getting angry because they say their unable to play what they bought. If you bought WOW at or near the start and are now annoyed that you can't play the original version, you shouldn't be surprised. MMOs have to have new expansion or else some people will stop playing. And if the number of player's goes to low, the company starts losing money. You didn't buy the game, you 'rented' it. Think of it like this You go and rent a house, you have to pay 400 a month to continue living there. A few months later, your landlord comes around and says that he's going to replace all of the light bulbs. Now you like them how they are. Nice and bright. But the landlord wants eco friendly light bulbs put in. You can say no, but he can still put them in, he owns the house, not you. You just rented it. nbsp Here's another example You really want to rent a house, like the last one, this house is also 400 a month. But the landlord says that you're also going to have to pay for new lights, a new hot water heater, new pipes, new doors and other fixes. Unfortunately you don't want any of that, you just want to live in it how it is. But the landlord says you can't. nbsp Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You're not buying an MMO, you're 'renting it'\n","id":"7c2739c9-1a9f-49f2-857c-9e7390962596"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you\u2019ve tried and failed to convince someone to think rationally, and you find your logical arguments are refuted by emotional arguments, it may be that they have not self actualised. In Maslow\u2019s Hierarchy of Needs theory, people do start to think rationally until certain physiological and emotional needs are met Food shelter, safety, love belonging, esteem, self actualisation. Our society was founded by the English. Our manners and customs came from Protestant England, but our culture was turned upside down. Good Christians are meek, they do not talk about religion, politics, or money in polite society. People\u2019s feelings are important and it\u2019s not OK to upset or offend people. In a Christian, class based society, where each class is responsible to bring up the lower class and look up to the higher class, moral authority in society tends to shift up the social hierarchy to the upper classes and the clergy. Australia was founded as a series of penal colonies. Convicts were treated quite poorly, and when they got out of gaol they were also treated poorly by the Christian immigrants who saw the convicts as wicked sinners. Because of this we have an aversion to higher classes, and we became irreligious. In this irreligious society with meek Christian customs and manners, moral authority tends to shift down the hierarchy rather than up. Since it\u2019s not OK to upset or offend people, those people who are more easily offended, who tend to be lower on Maslow\u2019s Hierarchy are hard to challenge, and you are likely to be shamed if you try. Because it\u2019s hard to challenge irrational ideas in polite society, our society has been structurally locked into a gradual shift towards irrationality, and the moral authority of the offended victim classes. We\u2019ve been stuck in this general direction since roughly the 1970s after the moral authority of the church started to be challenged, and the media started to shift us into being more of a consumerist society, by trying their best to making us feel unfulfilled, artificially keeping us from reaching self actualisation, and therefore rational thought. The three sides of the equation that locks us into this gradual shift are Meek society leaving us unable to challenge the lower classes. Godless society taking away moral authority from the top. Consumer society leaving us unfulfilled and irrational. What can we do to change this equation? Challenge meek society \u2013 We create a confrontational society where we stand up for reason. When you change yourself to meet the challenge of an adversary, you get into game theory, and you become a mirror of that adversary and become everything you hate, and no one ends up happy. Think of the cold war and mutually assured destruction. Think of what the singles dating scene has become, with both sexes now reading books about how to win in the dating scene, but everyone ends up miserable. Think of Trump\u2019s polarised US. This is the road to schizophrenia. The only way to deal with game theory is not to engage in it and stay human. Challenge Godless society to move moral authority back to the top \u2013 The classes at the top are more likely to be self actualised than the classes at the bottom, but that\u2019s not a good reason to trust them. The ruling classes have certainly abused the lower classes many times before. Challenge consumer society \u2013 We have about the best standard of living in history, so it seems surprising that more people are not self actualised, but that is the paradox. Our standard of living is built on a consumer society that holds people back from being satisfied. I will put it to you that because moral authority is with the irrational victim classes, our society is structurally set become increasingly irrational. We\u2019ll probably go down the schizophrenic game theory path to counter the irrationality of our political opponents, and ultimately our society will become polarised by two different kinds of irrational, and then collapse. The only way to save our liberal democracy is to teach people to think for themselves and be independent. This means we must challenge the idea that it\u2019s OK to be envious, rather than being happy with what we\u2019ve got. This probably can\u2019t be done in a world of mass commercial media.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society is structurally set to decline\n","id":"0e484a98-3a3b-4fa0-8c2e-7af3d51fd6ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard about this sport 5 6 years ago and I've been playing since. It might seem hard first, but it's like taming the bicycle, once you've learned how to do it, it's the most obvious thing. Same goes for swimming and using the snorkeling gear which is needed for us to keep track of the game while we surface for air. Because of the use of the fins, it's really fast paced, and there is only a minute brake during matches for the teams to switch sides. You have to be fast and strong with a proper mass to score, but because of the breath hold aspect, you wont get far if there is no proper teamwork between the players. And there is no way to talk in the water so players have to make their own decisions how to follow the tactics you've agreed in previously. Regardless of the intensity, the risk of injuries are surprisingly low. Your cardio vascular system improves, your core muscles get stronger, your legs will look like as if you've been biking with a pro Tour team geared by a secret medical lab. You aren't destroying your joints on concrete. Tackles are rough, but the water and the resistance make sure you don't have to worry about drooling too early because of an unlucky impact on the head by a ball or another player. But this is not the important part even, but the fun it gives to be able to move around freely in the 800 m3 field space, rather , accomplish complex attacks with quick passes and slam the ball into the basket. Right now this is probably the most underappreciated and obscure sport ever, but thanks to the enthusiasm of the players, it's expanding and present in 27 countries. But once there is an investor who provides a proper broadcasting system and plexiglass pools, interest is likely to raise around the world in a game which is similar to ones which could only exist in our fantasies so far, like quidditch or blitzball. I accept that this is something very much based on a mix of personal taste, business and culture, but based on my personal experiences I've tried many sports UWR has the potential to rise up the same way water polo, surfing or skateboarding did. It's not an extreme sport X Games would be scared as hell to show rugby in speedos or trisuits but it is so different from other team sports I tend to refer to it as a next generation sport. Probably only time can prove this view right or wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the sport of underwater rugby will revolutionize teamsports adding one extra dimension to the gameplay and offering an intense and complex match with simple rules to follow.\n","id":"f2fafc9a-ecf8-4398-80c8-1d4a10bd469a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the minimum wage good for the economy overall?<|ARGUMENT|>In U.S. a lot of poorly paid jobs, menial labour or dangerous jobs such as knocker-upper, lift operator, bowling alley pinsetter and switchboard operator were replaced by automation. These people did not die of starvation they just found new jobs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Automation is a good thing when people can find other jobs or educate themselves.\n","id":"6bb49b62-9577-4818-8f49-8166d006cf54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the EU right to approve the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market?<|ARGUMENT|>When a similar law was introduced in Spain, traffic to small and medium sized press publications was reduced by between 6% and 14%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no reason to believe that without an indexing or summarisation service the press publications would produce better income.\n","id":"30662d38-5284-4de7-8573-8f31e0d9c698"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents feel responsible for their children and as such may wish to push for further medical treatment even after a medical professional has said 'enough'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The close relationship between a child and parent can make it hard for parents to decide objectively what is best for a child.\n","id":"b2d03b74-5ff1-4e05-abbb-cbac4980c1ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To begin, I would like to say that I do care about people I do not know, but I cannot come up with any rational reasons for doing so. My argument is very straightforward Caring about other people's suffering will bring harm to yourself. Either a you will feel empathy towards other people's suffering and not do anything about it, or b you will feel empathy and take action to reduce the suffering of others. It is pretty easy to see that a is all negative. It causes you to feel guilty and unhappy and there are no positive results from it. b is the trickier case. In b , you will likely feel a sense of purpose and accomplishment in your good deeds. However, I think that there are four factors that will cause b to be a net negative over having no empathy towards strangers at all. You cannot help everyone. Even if you do a lot of good in your community, you will still feel bad about the hundreds of millions of people suffering globally whom you are powerless to help. Alleviating suffering generally requires direct contact with suffering. When you volunteer to serve food to the homeless, you will be confronted with abject poverty. As an empathetic person, this will be painful to see. Not all action taken to reduce suffering requires direct contact, giving to charity for example. These acts are not weighed down by this point. This source of happiness fulfillment comes at a high cost to you and your loved ones. Significantly reducing the suffering of others requires either significant time, money, or both to be sacrificed. This is time that you are not spending with your family friends and money that you cannot spend on yourself or on them. Making these sacrifices also reduces your freedom by limiting the capital you have access to. Most other sources of happiness fulfillment do not come at as high of a cost, so it would be preferable to be able to derive happiness from things other than helping the disadvantaged. A certain amount of the happiness that people get from helping those who are suffering is not happiness in its own right, but instead it is a happiness that comes from the reduction of their own guilt and empathetic suffering. It would be preferable to have a source of happiness that is only positive, not negating a negative. To conclude, I believe that it would be easier for someone to be happy if they do not feel anything towards the suffering of people they do not know. This is what I call a weakness. Please, . Edit Tried to fix formatting but couldn't figure it out. All bullet points are supposed to be indented equally. 2 4 are not subpoints of 1.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Caring about the suffering of people that you do not personally know is a weakness.\n","id":"49f3ced1-0942-47f1-be29-6aa3df34d899"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The ability for societies to have common morals is related to the awareness of self. Murder, theft, rape, adultery, lying etc are wrong, whereas respect, charity and protecting the weak and poor are seen as good. This is because we look at these situations and consider how they would affect us if we were in them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain moral truths are inherent to human nature and transcend cultures and time.\n","id":"882735ac-027f-4fe1-bc45-d066b2fec419"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On the Joe Rogan Experience Episodes 949 Josh Zepps talks about how middle class Americans vote against their best interest. He relays some else's thoughts that we shouldn't focus on the middle class who vote republican because they are a lost cause. Im not sure what he means by this. I believe that voting republican is in our best interest the middle class because it involves lower taxes, while a democratic vote is a vote for higher taxes. I know this is a gross summary of the political parties and their view on taxes, but I am specifically talking about the affect on the middle class only. Edit I dont claim to have any knowledge on politics, nor do I pretend I am an expert on any topic related to politics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Americans in the rust belt are not voting against their best interest when voting republican.\n","id":"f1aa070f-752e-4609-9085-547148bca6ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should hate speech be illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>It is the responsibility of private institutions and citizens to censor and deplatform hateful speech. Hate speech shouldn't be given a private platform unless it is being rigorously challenged, but the government should not be involved in the censorship of speech.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate speech is better limited by social pressure than legal sanction.\n","id":"2d681a85-e6fd-4258-b041-998b4e75a58e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Henry IV, was called \"le bon roi\", because he advocated a \"chicken in every pot on sundays.\" This shows, that even though people did not eat a lot of meat, they still valued it highliy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Meat was nevertheless an important cultural component before its consumption in large doses became widespread. People highly valued it, but they simply could not afford it.\n","id":"bca802e4-9bf2-4dbd-8e6c-933218b1d86f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sucking up to your boss isn\u2019t bad. I view it as an effective form of networking. Ass kissing sucking up allow you to get your name out there in an effective manner. Just because someone may be more talented or a harder work than you does not mean you don\u2019t deserve a shot at getting promoted through other means. Ass kissing allows you to bypass some skills requirements you may not possess on the same level as your competitors. It also shows you are a people pleaser, you\u2019re willing to go the extra mile to get others to like you and connect to them. It\u2019s very similar to networking, you are just getting to know people better. People who don\u2019t approve of ass kissing are too narrow minded in how to move up in the workplace It doesn\u2019t always have to be work hard gt promotion There should be other paths available to people, ass kissing is one of them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ass kissing\/sucking up are effective and valid ways to get promoted\n","id":"da730d88-91e8-4a80-9c92-2bd905724f9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Space elevator<|ARGUMENT|>Compared to conventional, chemical rocket engines, the climber could have zero environmental impact, when powered by solar energy from space.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Space elevator is more environmentaly friendly than a classical rocket.\n","id":"474501a3-edca-4057-ac24-d05a95ef42e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Most theists assume God with good reason - that reason is intuition. It seems like the universe, just like everything else, has a cause. Theists call this cause God. Atheists have different, but similarly based, assumptions. For many atheists, concepts like morality, meaning\/purpose, and valuing truth come without hard evidence, but intuitively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All stances in any debate have assumptions. The assumptions themselves need to be evaluated. Evidence does not speak for itself but must be interpreted. No one interprets from a perspective free of assumptions.\n","id":"c4350c40-4371-4cf9-9278-86c35cb89bfe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Marijuana should be as legal as beer is.<|ARGUMENT|>claims to help Diabetes Mellitus: slow disease progression, protect from eye disease, reduce neuropathic nerve pain, reduce symptoms of heart-muscle disease cardiomyopathy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overwhelming scientific research supports the beneficial medical effects of using cannabis.\n","id":"2c483314-942e-402c-8b11-5d77a38d5018"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>International Criminal Court<|ARGUMENT|>Wes Rist. \"The Conservative Case for the International Criminal Court Six Years In\". Jurist. 10 Dec. 2008 - \"Ultimately, should the US government or conservatives in general have any specific concerns about the due process or Constitutional protections or lack thereof afforded by the Rome Statute, the solution is simple: conduct an investigation or trial domestically so that there is no reason for the ICC to become involved. In fact, as mentioned previously, a proactive investigation by the US creates a statutory bar to involvement by the ICC Office of the Prosecutor.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ICC acts only if nat. courts can't; preserves const. rights\n","id":"7f410eb4-7795-408d-b16d-c56e9b8003e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>East Asian countries include India, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan I would put them here as a country as of now , Hong Kong same with Taiwan's case , Philipines, Malaysia, Singapore. I'm from Hong Kong, and it has become apparent that more and more young people in Hong Kong are slowly advocating for independence as a country and not a Special Administrative Region under China i.e. remove themselves from Chinese rule to create a new country . One of the arguments for independence is that it is only through independence can Hong Kong truly get rid of any existing Chinese influence. I, personally, do not agree. I think that under the current geopolitical economical situation i.e. China expanding its influence to neighboring countries and that its economy is in a verge of change from export to consumer economy, making a statement to other countries that they are a territorial power , not only is it hard for Hong Kong to get rid of Chinese influence, it is also hard for East Asian countries to do so. A historical factor also weighs in as China had been in the past a regional power which had exerted high amounts of military force over its tributaries, with the growing of the Chinese dream and increasing conflict in Middle East taking away most of the West's attention America's plan of pivoting back to the East was not really effective under Obama's reign , it could be said that it is impossible to try to break away from Chinese influence without military retaliation. So please try to change my view thanks. P.S. Things I don't want to be argued here include whether China's rise is real i.e. are statistics made up and whether China's rise is good or bad, I hope it could be discussed in another time if possible thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under the current Geo-political situation, it is impossible for any East-Asian country to completely dissociate from Chinese influence without military retaliation.\n","id":"19403db0-c838-42e5-9cbf-35648e3645d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The preservation of life has a marginal effect on population growth. Other factors to take into consideration are: the decrease in mortality rates, the overcoming of poverty, advancements in fertility treatments, immigration and the lack of family planning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This regulation made overpopulation worse. Overpopulation is the main cause of many major problems around the world.\n","id":"61d43b1d-ff54-4ac7-add2-86985d9e1c45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>poetry is an unnecessary burden for schools.<|ARGUMENT|>We want cultured people to graduate from high schools. It is undesirable that all high school graduates, who are an educated group of people, will have no knowledge of art and no desire to ever immerse themselves in anything cultural such as a museum, or art gallery. This is what will happen if poetry and other art subjects are not respected in schools. As it is, English literature is the only cultural subject that is compulsory at GCSE level. Because it is the only obligatory cultural GCSE subject, as much culture must be channelled into it as possible i.e. novels and much poetry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not teaching poetry in schools opens the gate to eradicating all artistic and creative subjects from the curriculum, which means the entire population would be Spartan and philistines.\n","id":"51071bbe-b93f-4eb4-b5e7-e476080d98bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All US and EU sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014 should be lifted<|ARGUMENT|>China stepped in to support the Yamal gas project, enabling Russia to showcase it as a successful defiance of sanctions. Gould-Davies, 14<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Western sanctions are likely to make Russia turn to trade relationships with countries like China.\n","id":"5fec9f81-d802-4d14-8fe6-b1cd01619b22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should People Only be Allowed to Vote if they Pass a Certain Test?<|ARGUMENT|>If we were to implement a test, perhaps we shouldn't vote for one person at all: vote for the policies we would like to see implemented, and the person that corresponds the most to the issues people care about wins the election.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The implementation of a neutral test would be logistically difficult.\n","id":"41aedf31-913d-431f-893e-ec1bc53fdbee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>A person's experience and understanding of their gender may well intersect with other aspects of their identity, such as race, class, sexual orientation, age, ability or religion. This could account for the changes in the expression of gender identity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender is the conception of tasks, functions and roles socially attributed to women and men in public and private life, thus it is different from biological sex which is innate.\n","id":"89eb79e6-260d-40bc-8f87-a1b7e8b90eba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>\"But behold, that which is of God inviteth and enticeth to do good continually; wherefore, every thing which inviteth and enticeth to do good, and to love God, and to serve him, is inspired of God.\" Mormon 7:13<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon teaches that salvation only comes through Jesus Christ.\n","id":"3d209e35-6820-4cc9-bdf2-5a6115981ef9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>'Polls' are a standardized system of sampling opinions used to understand attitudes, beliefs and desires - not a prediction of future events or outcomes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These are two different sorts of polls, and are not comparable in this way.\n","id":"80499981-c4b2-4162-a3ce-5c9d67367f7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now, I think we can all agree that actually making it yourself via molestation is wrong. But as for punishing people who just look at it why? Looking at a picture has no effect on a person. If I look at some mexican cartel member getting his head cut off with a chainsaw should I be treated as a murderer, or someone who creates demand for more murdering? Of course not, so why is it any different with CP? The notion that just by viewing it you support the market is a fearful superstition, not founded in reality This guy says a lot of stuff beyond the scope of this , but TL DR no one is getting paid to abuse or molest children and take pics video. The people who do that stuff just enjoy it. Any actual CP market is basically on par with junior idol stuff, which does NOT involve sexual abuse in fact, people were not even forced to model. Evidence shows that allowing people to access it can actually DECREASE actual child abuse. See link It makes sense if you think about it with the urges suppressed so much, eventually a person could lose control and we have no idea what they'd do then. Now I have heard of people having pedophilic thoughts getting therapy for their mental disorder, but to me this is like the Christian teenager getting sent to Gay Camp to be cured . With the stigma against being like that, why would you even WANT to go to therapy? Many choose not to, and continue to let their urges build up inside until they erupt. CP would provide a safe outlet to them. Note animated drawings such as lolicon and 3D porn are not substitutes for instance, I like loli shota but not the real stuff and other people may feel opposite. They aren't equivalent. Under the law, there is no difference between a naked 7 year old and a 17 year old. So why is it that both can get you 5 years in prison per image? Does that seem fair? Sending the 16 year old girl to prison for 20 years minimum, because she sent 4 nudes to her boyfriend who would also be charged . Now, I know you guys say well that doesn't happen often , and you're probably right. The law probably doesn't focus on finding these people, which is why their pics are floating around all across sites like Tumblr if you look at porn, you have probably seen CP and didn't even realize it . But still, some teens have been prosecuted, and the fact that they have even the ability to enforce such a law is bad. For instance, up until a decade ago it was illegal to have gay sex in VA. Even if the law wasn't enforced, doesn't it just seem wrong to have? Stigma against CP and pedos is a tool of exploitation. Since we care about children so much the cute ones in the news anyway , we as a society are very protective against them. However, this results in the demonization of those who find sex appeal in them, and certain groups seek to use this to their advantage. Examples are To Catch a Predator. This now canceled show humiliated men for finding attraction in a woman who claimed she was a minor, but appeared to be quite attractive in her images it was an adult decoy . So apparently you are supposed to look at a hot chick, then suddenly decide she is unattractive just because she says a certain number? Lol. Anyway, this show ended up causing a man to commit suicide because of the potential shaming. Almost no one was actually prosecuted from this show because its tactics were so shoddy and amateur, but it sure made NBC plenty of money and ruined a lot of lives. There are people attempting to use there OWN abuse for financial gain. It is hard to criticize these people since they have definitely suffered, but their ulterior motives seem greedy. They are trying to sue people for looking at their images, which is nonsensical. Their only harm comes from being told about how damaged they are, and lawyers notifying them of every time someone is found with their image. This only prevents them from moving on with their lives, like so many others have done. Their harm does NOT come from simply having their image viewed, which it is impossible for them to even know occurred unless they are told about it. There is NO proximate cause link between viewing of the image and a victim's perceived harm, for instance, lost income from the job she totally would of had if that guy had not taken pics of her as a child. Especially heinous is a particular ongoing case, where a woman is trying to extract over 1M from a single man At this point the goal is not restitution, but profit. For those who want greater government control, CP legislation is like a springboard. We have already seen UK Prime Minister David Cameron set up porn filters under the guise think of teh children . Ironically enough, these filters seem to only affect your average citizens and not the people who actually want to access porn, and are tech savvy enough to bypass it. Previously the UK also banned lolicon, which does not even involve actual children. How much further can they take this? In Australia there's even a plot to ban porn of small breasted adult women. It's really just part of a political agenda to control what you can and can't enjoy, safely and from the privacy of your own home. Finally, there's the fact that people arrested for this are non violent offenders who don't actually impact society. We are wasting money by imprisoning them, possibly with violent goons and thugs who will stab them for not being hard or tough enough. I don't see this as any more beneficial than locking up someone for merely possessing weed though to be fair, I dunno all about the drug business, whether the weed dealers are also slinging dope and crack or something in that case the buyers are supporting the entire drug market . I've seen the argument that locking them up is good because they might actually molest a child in the future, which is a terrible argument. Overall I think we could fix these issues I listed in the following way define punishable CP production as porn of someone who actually LOOKS visibly to be a minor. So older teens with developed features would not be considered child pornographers, self rapists, etc now of course there must be a line, and I'm not sure exactly where that is. All I can say is that if you had to look up a girl you see to determine if she is over 18, then physically she is clearly mature. Likewise, if you see a pic and it is clearly a child then that would be CP. Basically this would eliminate any possibility of harmless teens ending up on a sex offender registry and being boned for life. I'm not entirely sure how CP is judged, but IIRC the Copine scale ranks images on certain levels so stuff like a teenager taking a selfie would be low on the scale, and not prosecuted. to be arrested and punished for CP, you have to actually aid in its production. Not just view save it or post some old pic you found to Imgur. The way I see it these sites already monitor their content and can detect illegal files automatically, so they should be able to tell the difference between an old image and a new abuse victim. Stuff like non nude modeling would be okay as long as it is consensual. Now I admit, these changes sound like a lot of work just to make some porn decriminalized. The main point of my post isn't about fixing this issue though, but just pointing out why I think the current state of affairs is problematic. Overall I think changing the criminality and giving these people a little leeway would probably lower the amount of actual child abuse, which I personally do not support or condone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think CP should be decriminalized at least partially, and punishing people for accessing certain information deemed immoral does not serve the public interest.\n","id":"e68f2b3b-12a5-43eb-a7f6-93e4d58c2420"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we exist within a Simulated Reality?<|ARGUMENT|>This knowledge could engender a fear of technology, creating more tension between some subsets of our society and the economic drivers that power technological progress.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The knowledge that the Thesis is True has no utility.\n","id":"221c6775-3998-4fea-8aea-b4e5e921ccba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m a European currently living in Northamerica and, even though I obviously tip here, I think it\u2019s incredibly wrong. Waiters should be paid decent salaries and tips should be on top of that if their service is good. Otherwise, if the business doesn\u2019t work properly because of the owner\u2019s management let\u2019s say the food is horrible or the chef takes ages to cook , it\u2019s only going to affect the waiter\u2019s salary, which is based on tips, since the customer won\u2019t be happy. It also creates another problem if the service is actually horrible, not giving a tip would be the same as if the waiter hadn\u2019t worked at all, which is not true either. However, this benefits the owner because they don\u2019t have to worry about investing a lot in waiters. So if the business is not doing well, there\u2019s basically no risk in that aspect. Another problem this creates is that there\u2019s an expectation EVERYWHERE for you to tip, even in other contexts like barber shops, etc. People should name their price and don\u2019t expect any tips, and if they do get tips, they should be happy and grateful about them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the tipping culture in Northamerica doesn\u2019t benefit anyone except for owners\/employers\n","id":"f9a4cbde-fb9c-4097-aeaf-82f369869425"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>The Democratic Party is fighting for universal health care where all Americans will have access.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Democratic Party advocates more strongly for universal health care.\n","id":"b8d11fc9-8265-4a05-90f9-b9a98e936260"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>If a cause is sufficient to produce its effect, then if the cause is there, the effect must be there, too. For example, the cause of water\u2019s freezing is the temperature\u2019s being below 0 degrees Celsius. If the temperature has been below 0 degrees from eternity, then any water around would be frozen from eternity. It would be impossible for the water to begin to freeze just a finite time ago. Now the cause of the universe is permanently there, why isn\u2019t the universe permanently there as well?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"P3. The First Cause must be personal because it is the only way to explain how a timeless cause can produce a temporal effect with a beginning like the universe The universe should be as permanent as its cause unless that cause is a personal being with freedom of the will. Creating the universe was a free act, independent of any prior conditions.\n","id":"cacf7ac8-b3a0-4c4b-aa12-0822e162d96a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Considering that all most all pro life christians believe fetuses have souls, this must mean they would go to an afterlife. I think we can all agree that no moral deity would ever sentence an unborn human to suffer for all of eternity. For those of you who are going to comment gt An Unbaptisted youth will be sent to limbo According to the bible, limbo doesn't exist, as far as my knowledge extends it was popularized by Dante's The Divine Comedy . Eventually it was adopted by some Roman Catholic theologians but these would be the ideas of man, not of the abrahamic God. Even if this was true, sending an unborn to limbo for something was entirely not their fault seems pretty heartless I know is really heartless in the bible, but still i think it would be hard for pro life christians to grapple with that concept . This leaves only one real option within the Christian theology the unborn would go to heaven. According to this religious website i found gt Psalm 139 says that we are unique persons, even before birth in our mother's womb. This means that an aborted baby is a child of God who, by God's mercy and love, goes to heaven when he or she dies This would mean that they would get to spend eternity in paradise instead of living through their most likely terrible childhood considering that the parent wanted an abortion. Theoretically, Christians should advertise abortion in circumstances of the parents not being financially or emotionally capable parents. know i know that a lot of you may say something along the lines of gt considering they have a soul, it's still murder and a murder is wrong x200B my response to that is is it though? x200B In that case, the potential parent decided they weren't capable of giving the kid a good life so they decided to let it live in paradise for eternity. How could that be considered wrong? if one has no connections to earth ie a fetus and is guaranteed to go to heaven it would not be immoral at all to send them to heaven instead of having them suffer on earth. In fact, some might say that an abortion in that case is morally obligated. x200B If you default to the thou shalt not kill thing, think about how many people are both pro life and pro death penalty and in this scenario i guarantee you that aborting the baby would have a 1000 times more positive impact on human souls than executing a guilty man. for those that are pro life and anti death penalty i say, was about war? What about self defense? in certain scenarios you must admit that thou shalt not kill can be disregarded. EDIT I have somewhat changed my view because it is logical to believe that the babies would go to hell so the new cmv is \u201c if you believe unborn babies go to heaven, then it is illogical to be pro life\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's Illogical for Christians to be Pro-Life\n","id":"204dea53-0ea1-485f-9cdf-e7e903e6b2b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Modern sciences concur that the universe was not made in six days. However, the Old Testament which is an authentic ancient text claims that it was.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scientific\/Historical Proof not Required: Many authentic ancient texts make claims which are not scientifically or historically accurate. They are nonetheless authentic.\n","id":"b033bf8a-849b-4f58-b5db-b33d99b324ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion rely on books written long ago, which are representative of their times. Relying too much to the word, and not the meaning leads to bigotry and ignorance<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The moral codes often found in religious texts have been the cause of many social injustices including the persecution of homosexuals, people of colour and women.\n","id":"346aae9b-8a2a-4853-979a-1d15e00991e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How can the food industry stop producing single-use plastic bottles?<|ARGUMENT|>A new report from UN Environment and WRI found that at least 127 countries of 192 reviewed have adopted some form of legislation to regulate plastic bags as of July 2018.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many states have gone ahead with a ban on plastic.\n","id":"0f1439a5-81a6-4042-9213-8bd00f58658c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Communism Actually Viable In The USA?<|ARGUMENT|>Land is best cared for by those who live on it. When land is owned by those who are not impacted by its destruction, it is likely to be destroyed for profit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Socialism only works on tiny scale societies with simple political organization, as the probity of administration is closer and manageable to its citizens.\n","id":"8b4d6d87-df3a-44fc-87ca-fbac26a7f49b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a child's primary carer receive a wage until the child enters childcare?<|ARGUMENT|>There is pressure on the government to ensure that tax money isn't spent on wages for bad parents, as that would reflect poorly on them. This gives the government an incentive to establish more clear legal guidelines for appropriate parenting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government may interfere more in parenting practices if the parent essentially becomes an employee and this would not be a positive outcome.\n","id":"4d3d4a51-e459-48fb-979b-32a003ad4da7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>The median net worth of American families has declined by a third between 2007 and 2013. The average member of Congress, at the same time, saw his\/her net worth increase by 20% over the same time span.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The members of the American Congress are much wealthier than the vast majority of American citizens.\n","id":"4b387d85-bf16-4b9e-9de5-f2eddf5e9335"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The Crusades added to hatred among Christians, Jews, and Muslims as they waged war for their holy lands.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When that division often involves war, violence and conflict, it does indeed imply harm.\n","id":"94a608ae-b79a-4413-a464-5ca67450a7c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The best Science Fiction movie is?<|ARGUMENT|>There have been exactly 4 female directors nominated for an Oscar and a single female Oscar winner in that category in the whole history of the Academy Awards up to date.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Academy is strongly criticised for being racist and misogynic.\n","id":"34b524cc-4c1f-419a-97b8-095de2b92ac6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I could've named any number of other post war art movements instead of abstract expressionism, to be fair. The art world in general has not prioritized artistic skill or talent for a long time. Rappers do have the skill of rhythmic speech. Rap has musical qualities if done well. The best hip hop artists do interesting things with intonation, dynamics, phrasing. Sure. However, it takes relatively little musical ability to do all this. Vocalists proper have all the same skills, plus the ability to sing . Ella Fitzgerald could've rapped had she wanted to, no problem. Freddie Mercury could've rapped. Christina Aguilera could rap if she wanted to. The pace of syllables might take some getting used to, but so would singing a fast song. And rap need not be fast paced anyway. Yet, clearly, the reverse is not true. Most rappers can't carry a tune. Some can, most can't. Rhythmic speaking is a talent, but a marginal one. Likewise with a painter who has, say, a great knack for combining colors but who couldn't depict a convincing human hand to save his life. A knack for color is important, sure, but good painters have that plus a host of other skills in drawing, composition, focus, perspective, lighting, and so on. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rap is to music as abstract expressionism is to painting: refuge for the marginally talented\n","id":"255f1ef2-0336-4598-8d41-10d92f890770"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's endless debate about what's needed to fix healthcare in the US, and why we seem to pay more as a of GDP for healthcare than most countries without better outcomes. All proposals seems to end up stalemated, whether they be for a more market based system, or something like Medicare for all, and we only make the slightest improvements that usually don't rock the boat of the existing system, such as Obamacare. My view is that the government should go ahead and pay for basic preventative coverage for all Americans, including annual checkups, flu shots, reproductive health, and education on diet hygiene. Because this care prevents costlier care down the line, and because we end up all paying for that costlier care ER visits by uninsured individuals, lost productivity, etc it would be a net gain to prevent this things. My second view is that the gov't should cover you in the case of a catastrophic event such as cancer or an automobile accident that exceeds your ability to pay for care. Say in the tens of thousands of dollars. The government is already the payer of last resort for most Americans, since Medicare kicks in at 65 and most medical costs are racked up after that. This would simply cover the folks who hit a major medical crisis at an earlier age. The government often steps in, anyway, say when people need emergency Medicaid for NICU stays or things like that. The cost of these things could be covered by a tax, that would be offset by the fact that almost everyone would be paying less for their insurance, and because everyone gets the same coverage like Medicare the program would be much more politically palatable than programs than programs that only offer benefits to specific groups, like Medicaid. If we did these two things, the population would get healthier, and people wouldn't have their financial lives ruined by medical issues. We could continue to have a private market for everything in between, but these plans would be much less expensive because the private insurers would be off the hook for catastrophes. Change my view. Or rather, poke holes in plan.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US Government should pay for preventative care and catastrophic coverage for all Americans\n","id":"6caccf74-3d12-441c-81da-b3cab0a5fe95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Deep ocean heat and temperature records are non-existent. Scientists do not know the energy flows and movement of an important heat sink in the Earth's energy system - the ocean below depths of 700m.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is nearly impossible because we do not have accurate records of 'past' climate.\n","id":"1f49789d-3c02-4c59-8101-c29235902382"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Especially in light of this new knockout game that's been all over the news, it seems that delinquent teens are using the juvenile system as a safety system. They seem to know they can break the law and get at MAX a couple years in juvenile detention. I understand the point of the juvenile detention system is rehabilitation rather than punishment, but I have never seen anything that indicates that system is working. Most of the data I've seen shows that kids who are delinquents go on to be convicts. It's tough for us to admit that some youth are lost causes, but that appears to be the case. I think by charging them as adults, we cut down on juvenile violent crimes. Youth can no longer use the juvenile justice system as a blanket for protection. By forcing real consequences on them, they may reconsider their actions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think we should automatically try any teenager accused of a felony-level violent crime as an adult.\n","id":"ba7e6084-3e36-450f-b7b1-7822e309e85c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Girls Be Allowed in Boy Scouts?<|ARGUMENT|>At its incorporation in 1910, the mission of the BSA was 'to teach boys patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and kindred values.'<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Boy Scouts was never intended\/designed to have girls in the program.\n","id":"57cad45c-d509-4eb2-9bba-318e7b38fc83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be one World Government?<|ARGUMENT|>The Moon Landing was a result of the Space Race - a competition between the US and the USSR to be the first to perform numerous activities in space and to land on the moon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some of the greatest scientific and technological advancements in human history were the product of competition between countries. Without any competition, a global state may lack the motivation to invest in such projects.\n","id":"e8aacdfb-09b7-4856-9e42-44ddacecdfc5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Teachers Be Allowed To Wear Religious Symbols At School?<|ARGUMENT|>Teachers displaying symbols of religions or belief systems which are at odds with the students and their family members might not be desirable to the parents of those children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That is really up to their parents. What there shouldn't be is indoctrination contrary to what the parents want.\n","id":"cd9cb008-0a6d-4968-8f1d-267f1cabe43e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When movie makers try to represent future technology, they often imagine flexible, transparent and or borderless screens. While those look good in a video, I don't think they are practical, and I see no reason why most users would want to use any of them. Flexible screens don't add much functionality, may fold without you wanting them to, and if they are used on a mobile device, the manufacturer must use flexible components. Transparent screens can at least be useful for augmented reality, but a standard screen with a camera on its back could play the same role in most cases think pokemon go . They also let everybody see what you are doing, and if there is a bright light source behind it, the image becomes harder to see. Borderless screens look good, but they aren't practical if you want to hold your phone, you hide part of the screen, if it falls on its side, the screen breaks, and you can easily touch parts of the screen by accident. For larger displays, the border doesn't seem to hurt user experience. In the end, since these screens are less practical, and almost useless, I think next to nobody will be willing to pay more to have them. Edit I've been convinced that in some cases, these screen types are justified Foldable screens for portable devices with large displays Transparent screens for head mounted augmented reality e.g hololens Borderless screens to seamlessly combine multiple screens into one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Flexible, transparent and borderless displays aren't the screens of the future.\n","id":"a61cc085-26fb-4687-ad0b-bd1908557b1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>In 2019 Cuba's economy is still recuperating from it's 1962 contraction following loss of the American export market after more than 57 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Socialist economies are less able to recuperate from economic contraction due to lower private investment.\n","id":"b16f250a-5149-4139-a832-c96dbc705c71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Minors Need Parental Consent for Abortions?<|ARGUMENT|>Parental consent should be required for pregnant minors as minors may not always be aware of health issues they might have, which may then create complications.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parental consent should be required for pregnant minors to have abortions.\n","id":"267be93c-42a6-4cd9-a412-b7a9d0c142df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>Trump reorganized the National Security Council reducing the responsibilities of the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and gave responsibility to Steve Bannon, who has no security or intelligence experience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pence is more likely to rely on the American intelligence community to make informed foreign policy decisions.\n","id":"f14ee5f0-2cef-4f5d-a819-03a73476cdb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Seriously, people were having nationalist discussions and throwing insults around on classical music videos. Now the stuff is sorted out of view, and I actually feel comfortable looking at the comments now, though Bob's tank from all the armchair anti Google protesters is pretty annoying to look at. Of course, YouTube's comment system is still pretty damn horrible, since you can't start threads or effectively reply. But I don't see why anyone would prefer the old system of comments, which was little more than comments in a time sequential order.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't understand why people want the old YouTube comment system back.\n","id":"2af42dac-bf1a-4466-8a38-a629ea086654"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Some people would rather spend their time on other things than jury duty or having to be in a polling station during elections, but those are obligations needed to maintain the system for everyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unjust that non-voters benefit from the government they do not help to provide. Mandatory voting would cancel this injustice.\n","id":"043aa38b-9142-4610-b19f-fd834dbf49a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should same-sex marriage be legalised in Australia?<|ARGUMENT|>After death, legalised same-sex marriage will make a same-sex partner's claim on property more legitimate in; the eyes of the court.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Changing the Marriage Act allows same sex couples the same legal protections as opposite sex couples.\n","id":"216a3141-57b2-4aad-b6e4-0c3f472872b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The Book of Mormon teaches that the atonement of Jesus is an unlimited sacrifice, which mirrors the teachings of Methodism in opposition to Calvinism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon is essentially consistent with Methodist views about a universal atonement, as opposed to a limited atonement as Calvinism teaches.\n","id":"6c957236-e405-4b76-8ca2-76e6c9e98df3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Advertising - Targeting of Children<|ARGUMENT|>It is not ethical to target children with advertisements, as they are not yet able to distinguish advertising from actual programming in the way adults can. This means that advertising aimed at children is misleading and unfair. It is also clearly effective, as otherwise advertisers would not spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year targeting children who are not yet able to resist their sales pitch.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not ethical to target children with advertisements, as they are not yet able to distinguish ad...\n","id":"bcac0b3b-6ddd-493b-8232-972b79459e81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Raising animals in confinement, deprived of sunlight, natural soil and freedom to move, is cruel and against their nature.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The common practices underlying the production of meat massive livestock farming are unethical.\n","id":"c22d6d7f-5bfe-4589-a46c-3485485811f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me first explain my reasoning Starting with just simple physics, you could model the movement of a ball that is shot out of a cannon. Assuming you knew all initial and boundary conditions, you could hypothetically create a perfect mathematical model to describe the motion of the ball. This is perhaps a leap of faith, as it requires all the physical laws to exist and be solvable etc. I see no reason why this would not be so as without them, there would be no way for the ball to choose where to go next. But I do realise that this is not rigorous. Ok, so we have, with the knowledge of all initial and boundary conditions, perfectly predicted the path of a ball. The same goes for all objects, from balls to planets to weather. Perhaps you would argue that quantum randomness comes into play, but I would like to convince you that if the atom has a number of outcomes, and it chooses one at random, this is no different than pre determinism. Suppose you have a universe with no random effects, so everything is pre determined along a single path, as before. Now place a single random quantum event with two outcomes after 10 seconds. Now the possible paths of the universe split at 10 seconds into two possible paths. Here you can either believe that the event is not true randomness, and there is an underlying mechanic, in which case the outcome is predictable, and will always be the same each time. Or you can believe that it is truly random. Personally I don't believe this is possible, but that is more of a belief thing than a logical thing. Either way the fate of the universe can be predicted, it just has two possibilities, and if you run through it a couple of times it will hit either outcome an approximately predictable amount. Thus, as chemistry is, in a way, just quantum physics, it is pre determined. So now consider a simple single cell. There is no real computation done inside the cell, just chemistry in the form of DNA etc I don't know a lot of biology . So if we know the exact make up of the cell, and all initial and boundary conditions, we can predict the exact actions a cell can make. So if we can predict a single cell, why not two cells, linked together as in neurons . There is nothing inherently unpredictable about two cells compared to one cell. If we can predict two, why not three? Four? 86,000,000,000 the number in a human according to wikipedia ? I can see no reason why increasing the number of neurons would suddenly make the system un predictable. Sure it would be HARD to compute, but it would be possible. The final argument against myself would be that of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, namely stating that we cannot know the exact velocity and position of a particle at the same time, and thus we cannot know the initial conditions exactly. My counter argument is that we can know a probability space for where the particle is its velocity, and so it is no difference from my previous argument about quantum randomness. EDIT deleting the bit about free will, because its not really about that So if the human brain is totally predictable, then it has no free will in the classical sense, and will always follow the same path given the same circumstance. I realise that this is not really a definition of free will, and perhaps I used it wrong. My point is that our actions are predictable, and so we are no more than machines .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pre-determinism, there is no free will and everything is pre-determined.\n","id":"7e51408b-20ec-4b6a-96d6-6e6e69e7c292"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will AI become conscious?<|ARGUMENT|>Consciousness for AI would mean that neural networks could make those initial choices themselves. Since that is not possible with today's technology, consciousness in AI is not feasible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even with the most advance technology, any neural network still relies on a human programmer setting the tasks and selecting the data for it to learn from.\n","id":"62083e9b-5a4c-4109-97b9-20b941a25e0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>Margherita pizza one of three types of Neapolitan pizzas, has great cultural significance. Putting other toppings on pizza takes people away from the story to the point that they do not appreciate what happened and treat pizza like any other food item.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pizza has been recognized as world heritage by UNESCO, ansa.it . As such the traditional recipe should be respected. A yeasted flatbread that does not stick to pizza traditions shouldn't be called pizza.\n","id":"58818130-9a45-4a6f-93ad-888603bda409"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be taught in schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Children form many beliefs and views on the world which often are unsupported by science. These views can change over time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if children do come to view creationism as a valid scientific position, this is not necessarily a long-term position.\n","id":"7d66aba8-0bac-4d53-bc5e-1e71924a4c30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that we should refrain from eating endangered species, but I'm willing to try anything once. I've eaten many kinds of game critters, sea creatures and winged animals, as well as insects. From a purely predatory point of view, I think humans should be able to eat anything they can catch. And if we're gonna eat them anyway, we might as well use their pelt and other things we can harvest from them. From the same viewpoint, I see it as purely natural when a human is eaten by, say, a bear or a shark. Fair's fair.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I love meat and think it's just fine and dandy to eat any and all creatures you can stomach. Dare you to\n","id":"badacaa9-8838-47b6-a695-86db8a785fb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, they pushed for voting rights, then desegregation, then interracial marriage, and now they are fighting police brutality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black Americans, for the civil rights movement, protested for incremental change.\n","id":"4fa3cca4-db25-4506-91ad-43632bfc10b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>India's GDP gross domestic product growth fell during the first six months of 2017 from 7% to 5.7% its slowest pace in three years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Indian economy has seen several declining trends since Modi took office.\n","id":"13100f92-bb7c-47f3-a751-7e558a18da2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>During the Italian Renaissance, which 1522 fell almost in the middle of it, Humanism was the dominant form of education from 1500 to the mid 16th century Humanism often clashed with the Catholic Church and Inquisition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Greater number of churches =\/= greater number of believers. Just because the churches are there, doesn't mean that they relate or are used by the people there.\n","id":"98707529-9a7b-4028-8dad-e0d3491ecbe5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>edit this has turned into marijuana rather than all illegal drugs. Not all the arguments apply to say heroin eg lots of people already using it, medical benefits . Do people arguing for marijuana being legal agree that the other 'harder' drugs should be legal too? On those same arguments? I think illegal drugs should stay illegal, and I haven't heard a convincing argument otherwise. This is from the perspective of a UK citizen, but I believe the US system is broadly the same in terms of what substances are illegal, so that is equally applicable. Some substances are illegal for a myriad of reasons, such as being detrimental to health, productivity, other people, and so on. Although it is difficult to pick one specific criterion for what makes a specific illicit drug illegal, I think that overall illicit drugs staying illegal does much less harm to society than if they were legalised. As to why I think it would be worse for society, please see my refuting points to the arguments I've heard thus e.g., I think it would be worse for society for the same reason alcohol and tobacco cause problems in society . Here are a summary of some reasons why they should be legal that I've heard, and my refuting points Much worse products are available for consumption alcohol, tobacco So why add another to the mix? It doesn't affect other people alcohol does and that's legal I won't start fights or piss everywhere when I'm high When you're smoking marijuana and the smell is blowing through my windows and sticking to my clothes bedsheets, yeah that's affecting me If it's regulated that stops the product going to kids Kids still get alcohol tobacco knives The money goes to 'terrorists' when it could go to the government That is an argument not to do the drugs and fund 'the terrorists' If drugs were legal then the police would have more time to stop other illegal things, and we could save money Why not make all crimes legal, then the police don't need to exist and we save all the money I can't get addicted to certain drugs like I can to nicotine etc Maybe not physically, but people certainly can have a dependence on illegal drugs that is mental Edit If you think marijuana ecstasy coke should be illegal, you should support prohibition of alcohol etc too I think that if alcohol etc had been discovered recently then they would be banned. However, since so many people partake in it already it would be impossible cf America tried it . I think tobacco one day will become illegal, as it is slowly phased out. Addicts can't get help if it's illegal Then we give addicts who WANT to get help immunity from prosecution<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Illegal drugs should stay illegal.\n","id":"aac52fd1-4e9a-4d89-bb52-e061cda7655d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Based on several characteristics it seems there is reasonable evidence to say that the distinction between one of two sexes is a strange idea. Hormonal fluctuations occur for 'both' sexes, often, but crossing over each other. I don't identify very strongly with the dichotomy of male female and am open to other genders or agenders existing. An example would be two spirit. I am able to appreciate most examples of gender expression and non expression however. I would peg this as a 'neutrois pansexual'. Go forth<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel that sexuality and gender can be fluid for some and rigid for others. I also think gender roles are useless to society. Change My View!\n","id":"a8379fe9-8f6e-4d45-a7a1-68192d2c7de5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now this isn't about ragging something goofy, because I can take goofiness. I enjoy Dr. Who, though how much it fucks around with damn near everything can be a tough pill to swallow. The Power Rangers show itself is fine, if you like it, be my guest. But this new Power Rangers short has been blowing up everywhere because of the legality and the darkness, but all I can think of is how cheesy and bad it is. The grittiness goes beyond even Dredd's level of darkness. The fight scenes, while well choreographed, had these cheap stock effects that took me out of it. James Van Der Beek and Katie Sackhoff are terrible here, mostly because of the awful lines they're fed. There are no pathos and ethos to the Power Rangers franchise, such as a work like Batman, so the utter seriousness doesn't feel well earned, but gratuitous. And the short's failure to work as well as it should have lead to another unfortunate problem it kinda proved that the entire Power Rangers franchise as a whole is really dumb. Again, goofiness is fine, but you have giant robot dinosaurs lead by a maniacally laughing Maleficent knock off keeping the laugh in the short was especially dumb, like when the Sonic short film kept Jaleel White's '90s voice of Sonic . It's really hard to take seriously. I've seen short films create better developed charaxter's in less time than this one. However, I feel bad about ragging on an entire franchise because of one crappy short, so please help me understand the other side, I'm open to changing if it's an especially good answer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not only is the Power\/Rangers short film bad and unnecessary, it proves how stupid the Power Rangers really are.\n","id":"0fe57da2-fa84-490b-9d2c-ee42a3db8e44"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is Mod post 35. You can read the previous Mod Post by clicking here or by visiting the Mod Post Archive in our wiki. Hey, all. We have some new rules and other stuff that I think will be much appreciated. I don't want to make this post super long, so I'll dive right into the most important bits. Updated submission rule D now includes a restriction requiring moderator approval to post from a throwaway account. This is not an outright ban on throwaway accounts, since as we mentioned in the wiki there are definitely legitimate times when throwaways are necessary. New comment rule 5 no low effort comments. Similar to subreddits like r games, r askscience, r askhistorians, etc. etc. we will start removing comments that add nothing to the discussion. Reaction gifs, memes, puns, or one liner jokes should not be used when commenting in this subreddit. Updated wiki certain parts of the Popular Topics wiki desperately needed some updating, so we updated it. In particular, the Social Justice section has been totally updated and is essentially complete.  Post of the day consider this one to be an experiment, unlike the other 3 additions above. Recently, the reddit admins implemented a much needed sticky feature that allows the moderators to sticky one self post to the top of the subreddit full details can be found in the linked thread . Using this new feature, we want to try out something new rather than just pinning the rules up top featuring a  thread. The posts we are looking to feature should have unique, thought provoking discussions and will probably not be found in the Popular Topics wiki. We want to give those posts that are super awesome but end up getting stuck in the new queue a chance at getting the attention they deserve. So far, there's no criteria for how we will pick these threads, but I think once things start going we'll figure one out. If an OP of a thread doesn't want their post stickied, we will of course respect that decision. That's all for now. Regards, the moderators of r changemyview.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mod Post Updated Rules, Wiki, and Introduction of a \" Post of the day!\"\n","id":"1ce9e36d-8a0d-41f4-9fe7-9ec2952585d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Harm would be in form of defamation both slander and libel, and can be very damaging to the reputation and quality of life for the accused.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"False accusations make it impossible for the accused to lead a normal life even after acquittal, and they deserve recompense.\n","id":"844af9fa-2210-4ce6-9ce4-8afe3df75f17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Wikipedia, force for good?<|ARGUMENT|>It is the nature of any encyclopedia to present known facts, and to emphasise these over expressions of opinion. In as much as this is a criticism of Wikipedia, then it is a criticism to any reference work, traditional or collaborative. In any case, the main Wikipedia entry for a controversial topic is not the only material available to the user \u2013 there are discussion pages which reveal its editing history, clashing viewpoints and rival authorities. These are a rich source for opinion and complement the main articles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is the nature of any encyclopedia to present known facts, and to emphasise these over expressions...\n","id":"1b9167c4-723f-45ff-bd10-efe3a407f3e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If I get a Home Depot ad after googling woodworking 101, all the better because that's relevant to something I might actually be interested in. I would rather get relevant ads that are catered to my interests behavior than random ads that don't even apply to me like make up ads, since I'm a guy . My girlfriend says the ads are coercion and will make me buy things I ultimately don't need, and that tailored versions do this more effectively. I don't agree because I still will think carefully if I make a big purchase. To me, most advertisements are the company's way of getting the word out about a product or service they offer that I may not know about otherwise. If I only find out about products or services that are relevant to me, all the better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't mind personalized ads.\n","id":"49650b72-4401-4703-9c34-90c997081505"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Competition in the long run is healthy rather than harmful for the community: GRE issue<|ARGUMENT|>Competition in business greatly benefits consumers. It provides customers with reasonable prices, better quality and greater variety. Further, it maintains demand-supply parity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Competition in the long run is healthy rather than harmful for the community: GRE issue\n","id":"ceb39126-559a-4507-9950-eabd32ccd9c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>Inequality is partly a consequence of people differing vastly in their talents and abilities to create value for others, it is only just that those who create more value can enjoy more material comforts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all inequality is bad. It can be beneficial for a society.\n","id":"fe047674-3b31-4ee3-b733-02d66d247a3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Abuse against spouses or children which is caused by anger issues and often aggravated by addiction is violence that asserts power and dominance but is not caused by lack of communication.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some violence has nothing to do with communication or lack thereof.\n","id":"1f2c2780-1233-4631-afce-7e8966afd138"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>People would need to get innovative, both on the grower side figuring out which vegan foods can be grown locally that people can eat and the consumer end choosing foods that are not imported.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A pressurised economy is a benefit as it can lead to a more positive change in society.\n","id":"5e4d0b29-3f90-4e4b-a4e8-86ab8b3640aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, it may increase instances of rape, which the state must pay to investigate and prosecute, and which can cause societal and individual harms that damage state income from other means such as women's workplace contributions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These incentives only exist to the extent to which the state does not suffer countervailing harms from such a social narrative. Allowing the commodification of women's bodies creates other costs to the state.\n","id":"3da0be7c-36c5-4a8e-8dc0-053c6ab84eac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Used a throwaway for this, but basically I don't agree when people tell me that laws and rules are created with a lot or at least some swaying power generated from religious groups or institutions. I feel that money is the main reason for law changes and law in general. I'm from Canada, and info from a North American perspective would probably be a little more relevant, but feel free to chime in if you have a good point, no matter your location. Thanks in advance r changemyview EDIT Thanks qmechan, I should have mentioned that I mean fairly recent laws, within the last 30 or so years. EDIT 2 I suppose I do see that although laws may not be outwardly changed by religion and religious views, there are definitely cases where it is an influence. Great job everyone '<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that laws in society aren't influenced by the religious views of the general populous within the society,\n","id":"34953732-1048-48ab-a5b1-e39436099a72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To begin with let me clarify my personal position. Abortion should be legal until the point whereby the foetus can biologically exist independently outside the womb. Before that point in case the mother doesn\u2019t want to give birth, the foetus is a parasite. My personal position aside, I have seen countless people thinking that abortion is murder and that yet at the same time it should be allowed in the case of rape. Using pro lifers own terms, what they are basically saying is that an innocent human should be killed because of a crime committed by another person. If a person genuinely thinks that abortion is murder, it is contradictory to say that it is justified in the case of rape. To change my view, you do not need to tell me the reasons why abortion should be legalised in the case of rape I know them perfectly . You only need to show me that it is not contradictory to think that abortion is murder and yet at the same time justify the murder of a human for a crime he hasn\u2019t committed. Edit My post is not for those who support an exception in the case of rape just for political reasons. It is mainly for those who truly believe that it is murder and yet it should be justified in the case of rape<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is contradictory to think abortion is murder yet justify it in the case of rape\n","id":"d9bb088a-f47b-4910-ae0d-33167354ceba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>George Papadopoulos, a former Trump policy adviser, admitted to lying to federal investigators about meetings in which he discussed potentially colluding with Russian agents to acquire Hilary Clinton's private emails.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At least eight members of the Trump team have communicated with the Russians.\n","id":"774ffd7f-ac39-4360-ab25-da49d1c0b31d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Everyone Should Automatically Be Opted into an Organ Donation Scheme<|ARGUMENT|>Some just don\u2019t bother to register as a donor, even if they support the cause.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone Should Automatically Be Opted into an Organ Donation Scheme\n","id":"34640dce-41a6-43b3-89bb-40c0aa89f913"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The WBC are a group of horrendous, hate filled, brainwashed, bigots, and yet I feel that overall they have contributed far more to promoting love, tolerance, and brotherhood among Americans than spreading their mentality of hate to otherwise rational people. If the WBC were in the majority, I would hate and fear them, but they are a tiny, loud group of idiots who I feel bring people together in an age when so many wedges are driving Americans apart. Every protest gathers anti protestors who form across all political lines conservatives, liberals, Democrats, Republicans, all races, creeds, and religions hate them equally, which in essence gives those groups a common enemy, a common bond to share, something that bring people together who otherwise share little in common I like to use the alien invasion in Independence Day bringing the world together as a metaphor . Every protest includes clever ways for anti protestors to express their dislike yes often fighting hate with hate, but other times fighting hate through silliness, or even through setting up booths to donate to LGBTQ organizations in the WBC's name, or putting on costumes to block their signs from people's view, or the Foo Fighters playing a song. They are the out group who we should all be bonding together to laugh at instead of talking about how much we hate them and overall I think they make themselves look insane and make the average rational person want to distance themselves as far away from such bigoted idiocy as possible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the Westboro Baptist Church is overall a force of good in this nation.\n","id":"f918015d-7527-4e73-9832-d18dcf1d4b2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So my  is basically inspired by this article I've noticed this a lot a self proclaimed atheist starts talking about the probable existence of extraterrestrial life, the billions of starts and trillions of planets, and how it's inevitable that life must've evolved somewhere else in the universe enter the Drake Equation . I believe that we can, just as easily, take the same route and show that it's much more probable that a being we would perceive as God exists. Consider the potentially infinite number of dimensions that may exist string theory already proposes at least 10 Even if we're not string theorists, we're still stuck with a potentially infinitely large multiverse where it seems probable that we would find some otherworldly and massively powerful and intelligent being that might even watch over our own universe. In fact, given the possibility of infinite dimensions and a potentially infinite multiverse, it's much more probable that God exists, rather than life in our own universe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's more likely that there's a God rather than extraterrestrial life\n","id":"1fe2d83e-06aa-4e4c-a154-f2de82d4f9b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I have been struggling with depression for a while mostly the effects of being a repressed gay for most of my teen years , been in therapy for a while and I am trying to get over it and be happy with myself I still have no idea what people mean by that sometimes Anyway my doctor and my therapist sometimes ask me if I want to go on meds since they think they will help me but the idea terrifies me, I just don't see the difference between those drugs and the likes of MDMA and stuff since both screw with your brain chemistry don't they? I am pretty scared of how I will feel on them and if I end up being dependent on them or something. I am worrying that I am just being stubborn and coming across like I know more than the doctors etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I refuse to go onto antidepressants because I don't want chemicals to screw with my mind\n","id":"5bdb0854-4ec8-42d3-b9c1-dc91a532e09b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States close Guantanamo Bay?<|ARGUMENT|>Russian officials have condemned the use of Guantanamo Bay, which makes US critiques of Russia's human rights record less impactful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guantanamo Bay weakens American soft power bay diplomacy when advocating against human rights abuses abroad.\n","id":"3de9a83e-274c-420d-baf5-1f929bd4c99f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>In order to combat rising costs and lower attendance, church leaders will be pressured to provide entertainment over substance oriented content in their sermons that will appeal to larger audiences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Churches with a corporate, income oriented, status will make the culture of religion more consumerist.\n","id":"d461cd6b-f781-4923-9242-e1c428b9714c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>College football playoffs<|ARGUMENT|>Playoff Smayoff, we don't need it.\" ESPN. April 30, 2008: \"The idea of a 'Plus One' playoff was voted down by the conference commissioners plus Notre Dame\u2019s athletic director in their Hollywood, Fla. meeting. . I\u2019m OK with that, although I have never been totally against a 'Plus One' format. . Trouble is, once we get 'Plus One' format the college football brain trusts won\u2019t stop until they\u2019ve got 16, then 32, then 64.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"4-team college football playoffs open slippery slope to bigger playoffs\n","id":"f961ae98-434d-40fb-9505-aa2333bedeaa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Some background I've applied for several programs with nonrefundable application fees that seem ridiculous as far as processing. Moreover, in an archaic manner snail mail or fax. A PDF or digital signature seems entirely unacceptable due to security reasons. Albeit the most insecure form of communication, it seems odd that the leaders of academia are so far behind the technology curve that the inefficiency of the institution is literally costing an exorbitant amount of money. TL DR shit is ridiculously inefficient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"why is it I have to pay to view or transfer college transcripts after spending tens of thousands of dollars to attend courses?\n","id":"cc2a275d-f70d-44a3-9f44-6cfd8bad74d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Written hastily, but hopefully I can clarify any mistakes in comments, here we go The Confederacy was racist according to the cornerstone speech and secession papers tx Cornerstone Speech excerpt gt Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition Texas secession papers excerpt gt She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. If the new government the Confederacy was trying to replace the current one with was based on that Cornerstone, there is no denying the Confederacy was racist. Those that fought for the cause of the Confederacy and helped further it, helped further the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition are culpable. Point 1 Someone who fights for a racist cause, helps create an institution to power that racism, and otherwise spread it is racist. People who have done this don't deserve to be monumented, or at the very least don't deserve to be monumented something as defining as a town square. Point 2 A monument with the words Our Confederate Soldiers cannot monument just the soldiers without endorsing their actions to some extent. Point 3 The image of a Confederate soldier being a defining landmark in the center of a city is an endorsement of the Confederacies actions and perpetuates racism by virtue of it being a defining part of the cityscape.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monuments to confederate soldiers are symbols of racism\n","id":"74271c70-7a10-4e2c-8ec9-d5873f28d7f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm trans and the main reason I can't stand the kids at my school is because it feels like everyone pushes aside the pain of being trans and focuses on the cool or rebellious aspects of it. This has lead to people with zero interest in transitioning who still wear clothes of their assigned sex with accepting families, of course. If you can't transition socially because of family backlash that's chill. fully identifying as transgender. Because people are thinking that being transgender is just being rebellious against gender roles, which it very much isn't. Honestly, I believe there are two genders, but that's not even the issue. If someone identifies as agender and wants to transition somehow to make that happen, good for them. But I wouldn't be posting this here if I still didn't feel a bit guilty, because I never want people to feel like I'm dissing who they are And it's so difficult to talk to other trans people about this, and everyone at my school would probably hate me if I brought this up. I know I shouldn't care but I'm a teen god damn it So while my view may or may not change, I really hope to hear arguments from the opposing side.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"being trans shouldn't be seen as cool\n","id":"9c854124-e99b-4a8d-bd2c-be0bb1fae93d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many people speak out against income inequality and posit a classless society as a desirable goal, often suggesting that it be brought about through the redistribution of wealth. If financial inequality is something to be corrected by the government, then it's implied that possessing more than others is morally wrong. I believe that this notion stems from jealousy, not a legitimate ethical problem. Further to this point, I believe that the notion of all men are created equal is incorrect while it is of utmost importance that we enjoy equal protection under the law, the social classes are usually good predictors of the caliber of people within them. The fact that upward mobility is rare shows that it is the exception, not the rule when a person is born into a lower social class than they ought to be. Poor and middle class people need to learn their place, not covet what those above them have. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that income inequality and social stratification are not problems that demand solutions.\n","id":"a78045e5-5cb4-464c-b5f8-c9509e80620b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>In several large political studies where voters tend to know who is leading and who is not, Approval and Score do not show significant bullet-voting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Approval and Score can, in scenarios where nobody knows who might win, lead to voters bullet voting more often.\n","id":"68c989eb-ce65-4f4b-8c15-3e3a20fabe7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>Despite China promising to enshrine financial fair play and judicial independence when they joined the WTO 15 years ago, China has failed to implement substantive legal reforms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Respect for human rights and rule of law has deteriorated considerably during Xi's term as President.\n","id":"faef0d16-8a93-4f66-b2df-0f0eb81f207c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This sounds like a clich\u00e9 nihilistic position, but really it's not I hope . I think there is something fundamentally beautiful and important about existence and about life. BUT, we are obviously all going to die, and we all know it. Everyone pretends as if they are doing things that matter, for themselves or for the greater good but it's bs. A nursing home caught on fire and hundreds of seniors died, so what? It is a terrible event, as this causes great pain for the deads' families, but these people were going to die soon anyway. A child drowns? Poor parents, but people yelling Poor child How can parents be so neglectful?? are so blinded imo. Life is a series of 'now' moments until you die. The quantity of 'nows' that you get is so irrelevant in my mind. As soon as you die, your whole life gets erased and becomes absolutely nothing. One could argue that even after death, you still live through the ones that have known you, but realistically, life on earth will end at some point. The universe is but a dance of incomprehensible energy, and things like marriage, relationship problems, financial troubles, illness, patriotism, politics, and even war, famine and tragedy are utterly meaningless. There is but one enemy to all living things, and it is death, which we cannot and never will be able to fight. Hug your neighbor, do crazy shit, stop complaining, because in the end none of it has any importance whatsoever.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nothing Matters and People Are Constently Arguing and Fighting About Nothing\n","id":"a586043f-4282-4d18-b8f6-97ebd5890acc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri was slammed because of it's stereotypical depiction of southern towns and it's character's stereotypical attributes. Racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia are all present in one character or another, but Moonlight offers some of the same. A stereotypical depiction of black communities with stereotypical character attributes. Mildred navigates through her world carrying her guilty despair, just the same as Chiron does with his sexuality. So why is Three Billboards considered offensive and Moonlight isn't?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Three Billboards is offensive, then so is Moonlight\n","id":"c9cef87b-01ba-42be-93f9-cfe815ae87db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Year-round school, Year-round school education reform<|ARGUMENT|>National Association for Year-round Education NAYRE - \"The year-round calendar is organized into instructional periods and vacation weeks that are more evenly balanced across 12 months than the traditional school calendar.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Year-round school and vacations offer more balanced life-style\n","id":"a01570f5-6023-4c02-9100-efadc7524083"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know marriage and relationships take work, but believe a healthy marriage should be enjoyable most of the time. There will sometimes be periods of struggle. They shouldn\u2019t feel like a something you power through for the rest of your life. Personally, every person I\u2019ve ever heard express some version of \u201cmarriage is hard\u201d was in a relationship that didn\u2019t appear remotely healthy from the outside. I believe many people stay in detrimental relationships for religious, financial, or other reasons. I believe divorce is a good choice for some people and shouldn\u2019t be stigmatized. This is not what I\u2019m asking in . I want to know if people can believe their marriage is difficult, but still find themselves better off as part of the partnership including mental health.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who say \u201cmarriage is hard\u201d are in an unhappy\/unhealthy relationship\n","id":"e49259a6-2f4c-42f7-bce8-e8096c52e5c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>America and the rest of the West, too has an ideological problem. That problem is the existence of extremist non violent groups I'll call them ENVGs for short . My two examples are the Muslim Brotherhood and the KKK. These groups are ostensibly non violent in that they don't condone violence, but their ideologies logically result in revolution, terror, and social upheaval, making them extremist. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization has no record of inciting violence in America and a strong record of compliance with law enforcement and speaking out against terrorism. However, its ideology is extreme in nature and calls for a restoration of the caliphate through armed struggle. Similarly, the new KKK, as exemplified by the Loyal White Knights of the KKK movement, claims to be a non violent pro white civil rights movement. Its actions are mainly cultural and political, and within the boundaries of the law. However, the stated goal and belief shared by all members is white supremacy, an extremist view that promotes hatred and social upheaval, and the symbols they cultivate are historically linked to white racist terror. These ENVGs exploit a loophole in Western society in that they call to a radical ideology while remaining innocent of violence. This allows them to act as a gateway group or umbrella organization for terror. They actively recruit new members into their extremist ideology, and then when it is time to actually put those views into practice, those members break off to form a second splinter group that is financially and operationally separate from the ENVG. Then they carry out their misdeeds as part of the splinter group, and when they are busted, there is no chain of command back to the original ENVG. The cycle starts again. America and all liberal democracies knows how to deal with the splinter groups, but not the ENVGs. They find themselves in a catch 22 in that ENVGs are protected by the Constitution as long as they don't condone breaking the law. However, by allowing these groups full freedom to operate, they are admitting a dangerous element into society and threatening national security. It's like fighting a war where you are only allowed to fight enemies that are literally standing on your soil with guns. You may be strong enough to fend off every wave, but they will just keep coming, and you can't stop them. So the war will never be over. Obviously, an authoritarian solution is not going to work in the West. Western society is set up to frustrate authoritarian rule. But if the liberal democracies of the world don't come up with some way to combat ENVGs, they will endure greater and greater populist backlashes as the people will perceive that their country is being subverted and demand that something be done. The people of the West will dismantle liberalism out of fear of these extremists, and end up either in chaos or authoritarianism again. I am not advocating a solution but just noticing that the problem exists. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America either has to find a way to deal with extremist non-violent groups or the world order will crumble.\n","id":"ac3151e3-e205-4dee-9f7a-fbae548728a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Perhaps I'm just a nostalgic for the days of the earlier internet, but I'm not the biggest fan of reddit pretty much becoming the replacement for all the old forums I'm sure some of us have spent our time on. I've never really been a fan of reddit's look, even taking into account the high customization it offers. I also feel that too often the site tends to devolve into fairly petty wars and arguments about karma and stuff like that. I dunno, I'm sure there's been plenty of great communities made throughout the years across the thousands of different subreddits, but I've never had much interest in them. On the other hand, I rarely find myself posting on some of my old forum hangouts myself much easier to talk to people on Discord or something like that . Maybe forums in general have lost their appeal to me, or maybe it's just nostalgia talking, but one thing's for sure most forums from the old days are pretty much virtual ghost towns at this point which on it's own is kind of fascinating.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit taking over for internet forums wasn't for the best\n","id":"0be0d0e3-965e-48c9-a28f-e17489943e58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that certain demographics have had derogatory terms that others have used towards them in an insulting manner, and I understand that I should not do the same. But a lot of Donald Trump's supporters, for example, say they like him in part because he's not politically correct. As if being a birther who thinks Mexicans are rapists would be considered an advantage somehow. But on the other side of the political spectrum, George Carlin and his mini me Bill Maher both have rambled on about how political correctness has gone too far. Sure, the former has said that words are only offensive because of the context we assign to them. And the latter has said that complaining about political correctness isn't a viable substitute for taking action against real life problems. I disagree, however, on the point that society has become too politically correct, as if it was bad that we've been changing our attitudes towards certain derogatory terms as society has grown more and more accepting of certain demographics. In short, my problem is not with political correctness my problem is with the idea that it's gone too far.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Society is too politically correct\" is not a valid complaint\n","id":"ee19b406-b730-4f92-9393-edd970bd92a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There has been a lot of attention and discussion around the role of VR moving forward, as it has yet to gain mass appeal. However, there are definitely factors that could predict growth soon and unique advances that VR would provide communities for gaming, education, entertainment, and more. I definitely believe its at a crossroads and will become a mainstream technology soon. This article gives examples of both sides of the argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- I think VR is going to finally blow up the market, and consequently want to open a VR \"arcade\" to get in on the somewhat ground floor.\n","id":"e3c06f2a-eea5-4f7b-9f9e-eef36d0b93e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Brutal Honesty Destructive?<|ARGUMENT|>You don't need to tell a child the way in which its parents were raped, mutilated and murdered. You can do this when it is an adult. Till then it should be sufficient for the child to know that its parents died in an accident.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When the truth is very hurtful and nothing can be done about it, it might be better to not communicate it.\n","id":"429a6e79-aeef-4949-b965-d28eac99c49c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In 1947 India was going to get independence. Congress wanted a united secular and democratic India, the Muslim league wanted a theocratic ethnostate. The propaganda that made up the entierty of the Pakistan campaign was false and just encouraged violence which tore India apart. All because the Muslim league forced Pakistan to happen. This killed FIFTEEN MILLION people, and ruined the new country Pakistan with its founding. It was unessessary, short sighted, and fatal. Since partition Pakistan has only gotten worse while India thrives. Pakistan should be a part of India. FYI I do not support BJP or Modi, Hindu nationists are also awful. No theocracy<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pakistan was a mistake. The partition should never have happened.\n","id":"90b70316-6407-45e6-afa0-4c0ce1798de3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ground zero mosque<|ARGUMENT|>Abraham Foxman, the head of the ADL, explained that the anguish of the 9\/11 victims \"entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.\" Fareed Zakaria responded by saying. \"does Foxman believe that bigotry is OK if people think they\u2019re victims? Does the anguish of Palestinians, then, entitle them to be anti-Semitic?\"5<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"9\/11 victims are not entitled to make bigoted demands.\n","id":"dcee8e83-c124-4482-802d-4f7ff359c501"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Self Representation in a court of law should be the default method of interacting with a Justice System. A citizen that did no wrong should not be required to spend any amount of resources to defend themselves adequately. A citizen that did do a wrong should rightfully own up to their wrong and serve their sentence. A citizen that wants basic legal council should be entitled to have that provided by the state. A citizen that wants to pay for advance legal council should be entitled to do so. Non perfect analogy A game of chess is a battle between two sides, the rules are known prior to the game, and anybody with basic understanding of the game can play a basic game. A chess master may be able to win more easily with greater practice of the game, however the newcomer can still move his pieces and win with the same moves as the master. Any system with a too complex set of rules and regulations that require professional assistance to perform basic standard of success is unjust. edit spelling, grammer, format, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Justice Systems where the average citizen cannot adequately defend themselves are unjust.\n","id":"e8456faa-5127-494f-a0de-1adc05cecf2c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments push for 100% renewable energy?<|ARGUMENT|>An analysis of the history of reactors concluded the following: nuclear power projects are more expensive than in the early 1980s and nuclear construction lead times have increased two-fold in the past 50 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear power is getting more expensive due to increased safety requirements when renewable sources are scaling, improving and seeing costs significantly come done, even offshore wind.\n","id":"5f755171-aa5c-4639-a421-617bc4635b59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have looked at this from many ways and it seems the only way to make it so people make more money is for all businesses to lower their bottom line. Most especially the more established companies. I don't see any other way around it. The money will eventually flow back up to the top of course, due to automation and more people willing to spend the due to increased funds. I can't see it going well at first for some companies but that would be a far better route than everyone going totally poor. Also for businesses to say it's a job killer is silly since that's their business usually anyways. The less they have to hire the better for their bottom line. I feel it's already going that direction whether they raise wages or not. In fact I think with wages raised these businesses would have less to spend on automation and therefore keep more employees longer. I think we're going to be poor anyways so let's just spread some of the wealth while it's still here. The dollar is crashing and it's going to get worse so why not help the masses a little more to be able to sustain a healthy life while it is still available? It would save taxpayers money from having to support food stamp based programs and other social services as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If we are going to raise federal minimum wages to $15hr then businesses need to lower their bottom line and accept making less as a whole community.\n","id":"73acd031-b45e-4e7f-b437-91725b7a2b01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Wars can be prevented or brought about by geopolitical and diplomatic manipulations, however war is a big business. When you sum up the cost of every bullet fired, every bomb dropped, the fuel burned, the metals mined and smelted, the vehicles, the guns, the medical supplies, as well as the natural resources being fought over or the money at stake over the regime that wins, you realise just how many billions or more likely trillions of dollars are on the line. So many people are employed thanks to global conflicts. Not just the soldiers, but also the strategists, scientists, engineers, technicians, factories, mines, refineries, etc. Also there are large corporate sized defense companies with human resources departments, legal teams, consultants, middle management, office clerks etc. So many minds and resources are put to use whenever there is a war. However the ones who make the most money are those who sit at the top of weapons companies, i.e. big time shareholders and senior executives. These powerful multi millionaires and billionaires must have connections in high places and be able to successfully lobby governments for war over peace in earth's less stable areas, especially when it means an extra billion dollars in pocket money for them and their fatcat chums. Now peace sometimes does hold instead of war, but I believe that this is just when genuinely peaceful parties come at play and win. Global conflicts still always rage elsewhere on earth and there are those who hold significant sway who have no intention of ending it, but rather prolonging it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"too many people profit from global conflict to allow it to end\n","id":"b7c65851-67e9-48d0-9438-8653486cfd6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>NOTE I'm not talking about oppressed troubled communities. I'm talking about more suburban communities where people don't need to kill and steal to survive yet they still borrow this mentality. Okay, first of all context. Snitching is wrong if you are equally guilty. For example, if you and a friend commit a crime and you blame it on your friend while claiming your innocence. If someone is doing something wrong to someone else, you have the right for the sake of the victim to help them. If someone is cheating in a relationship, you have every right to tip off the person who is being cheated on. If you think it's okay to cheat, I think it's okay to report you. If an employee steals money from the register and you tell the boss, good. They deserve to get fired. Basically, if you do anything wrong or immoral, you lose your moral ground to claim someone an asshole for snitching on you. Also, in cases where the other person is doing something wrong and it puts a risk toward your life aka a room mate secretly using drugs and you reporting it to the police , why is it okay for them to snort coke and not okay for you to cover your ass?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the \"snitches get stitches\" mentality is stupid. If you do something bad, you deserve to get ratted out.\n","id":"c056a7f3-c2ea-47aa-843e-8a9603a9a409"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Unprepared people may resort to the gun before it is really necessary i.e., before it is a matter of life and death, resulting in the thoughtless shooting of other people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is hard to scale use of a gun proportionately to non-lethal threats.\n","id":"fd4761d4-ae29-40f4-b03b-bf9afdc4f5d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US have withdrawn from NAFTA?<|ARGUMENT|>A high level of low-skilled migrant workers from Mexico is beneficial for the American economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Withdrawing from NAFTA would have been harmful to the US economy.\n","id":"45896c00-323f-48c7-8114-8898b1ff6886"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>In order to be a good tool of God, humans have the responsibility to be without mistakes or sins. Otherwise they would be defective even though being the product of a perfectly skilled artisan.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Catholic teaching emphasizes that the divine is mediated. God does not act directly in the world but in and through the humans Thus, human beings must accept full responsibility for their actions.\n","id":"b1197e28-46c3-4530-92fb-eb35395893f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>According to David Whitmer the golden plates were \"bound together like the leaves of a book by massive rings passing through the back edges.\" Kansas City Journal, June 5, 1881<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Witnesses of the golden plates are inconsistent as to the nature of their binding rings.\n","id":"aef62eb5-f233-4986-8d42-15e6216e87ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Citizens United Was Wrongly Decided<|ARGUMENT|>Constitutional rights were intended for human persons, not corporations. If the the framers of the constitution had wanted them to apply to corporations which they were certainly aware existed they would have mentioned this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if corporations are people, it does not follow that they should have the full set of rights as a human person, including identical free speech protections.\n","id":"fdec73d2-be1f-461f-9dc0-68a0d4507fe8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>The presence of a UBI will demand government attention directed to implementing it. This means that less attention will go towards making other social welfare programs more efficient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Assuming that even a minimal level of currently existing welfare programs need to remain, the existence of a UBI disincentivizes the state to quickly reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies.\n","id":"f90a9f34-2d84-4033-b6e9-96800512380c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The online games platform Steam should perform quality control on games before publishing them<|ARGUMENT|>Lack of curation in the Google Play Store has led to multiple cases of bootleg versions of games designed with the only purpose of profit from the popularity of original games<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Google Play Store is a long-standing example of an un-curated marketplace for apps, and discoverability of new games is a huge problem there.\n","id":"304e82a3-902b-4041-ade6-ce7613805aa0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>People may not identify particularly strongly with their racial heritage, nor feel a sense of oppression, yet this becomes the determining factor when they come to college applications.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Affirmative action makes people feel objectified for their racial heritage.\n","id":"477b593b-d041-4233-b952-e43d2104a4b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Not Have Pulled Out of the Iran Deal.<|ARGUMENT|>Iran is believed by some analysts to fund Hezbollah to the tune of $300 million a year, although many now believe the sum is more like $1 billion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The nuclear deal did not help the US contain Iranian proxy groups or prevent Iran from supporting them.\n","id":"a723a43e-f38e-4d67-aad4-2e4356bb8975"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start by saying that I fully support the right of students to protest. I do not support schools instituting special policies that allow students to leave school for a period of time, say 30 minutes. Neither do I support a school looking the other way and allowing such protest. Schools should stand by the rules in place, whether it is to mark the students absent, tardy, suspension, etc. For instance, the consequence of a group student walkout should be the same as the consequence for a single student who walks out for an unexcused reason. The consequence of protesting on campus should be the same as the consequence for a single student disrupting classes for whatever reason. Here's my rational. Walkouts and on campus protests are examples of civil disobedience. The students are knowingly breaking the rules. Our children should know that civil disobedience has consequences. That doesn't mean they shouldn't engage in it, but protestors should always weigh the cost vs. the injustice and make individual decisions on whether they believe it is worth it or not. The civil rights protestors in the past didn't get free passes. They were beaten, jailed, and sometimes killed for protesting their cause, yet they did so because their cause was just. College kids protesting to achieve their right to vote were arrested for trespass. Women's suffrage protesters were often ostracized from their communities and or beaten by their families. I am not saying that most of these actions were justified, but they risk these folks faced to protest their cause helped to amplify the message. I fear that the US has gotten to a place where people believe that they should have no consequences for protesting. People block traffic, then get outraged when they are arrested. People trespass, and then post videos of outrage that the landowners protected their land and or the protesters were arrested. We've come to a point where people think that they should protest at any turn without consequence. I think this waters down the causes worth protesting and it reduces the chance that the protest will actually accomplish anything. If the students walk out with their schools' permissions, it will be a small news event that changes no minds. If the students decide that they will accept failure on whatever assignment test they had that day and or face suspension for their walkout and still walk out, then their message is heard a little stronger. If they actually lock arms, sit in, and get arrested for their action, they are finally going to be heard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Schools shouldn't do anything to accommodate students who choose to protest or walk out for any reason\n","id":"2519bb72-ef7d-4e13-b8d2-815c21d57b11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Lottery should be an integral component of democratic political systems<|ARGUMENT|>Without parties political debate would be a chaos. Every candidate would endless elaborate his original thoughts and claim some space on the media, hundreds of political agenda would be to be discussed and so on. Parties are needed just like threads are needed in a web forum.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The absence of political parties would fracture the viability of political representation.\n","id":"6f843cc5-a9cc-4352-bfcf-e318e9b11c09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Once you make unfounded assumptions that are relevant to your decisions\/opinions your ability to make those decisions or draw conclusions objectively is at risk.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most religions use the you-have-nothing-to-lose-by-believing argument. Of course you do: There's your time, your independence, your objectivity, and your cash.\n","id":"3e26003d-ad0d-4bf8-b931-7a60d4efbddd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think many people confuse prejudism with racism. I'll take some examples. If I'm alone at the counter of my shop at 3 am and see a black person with a hoddie, half covered face, it's not racist to be on the edge, to be scared that he might rob you. It's prejudice. Because of the culture, movies, news you've been exposed to or experiences you might have a black person robbed you one time , thinking that this guy might rob you is a natural self defense. You're not saying your race is better. You would not think the same if it was a black girl. You would not think the same if it was a black guy with a suit. You're not being a racist. At the same time. If you're a thai guy and see a fat white old man approaching two girls, it's not racist to think he's here for sex tourism. This thai guy is not being racist to white men, he's being a prejudist to fat white old men ebcause of his exposure, experience etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prejudice is not racism\n","id":"057258de-d71d-476a-860b-faf175f77358"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the European Union the greatest political peace accomplishment in modern History?<|ARGUMENT|>The inner values of European Union are defined in the Charter of fundamental rights Dignity, Freedoms, Equality, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union is the greatest peace accomplishment in political history.\n","id":"8be54d50-5227-42e5-8550-9ea26bf41c53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Inductive reasoning assumes that a property that has always been shown under certain conditions in the past and present will continue to be shown in the future under the same conditions. But what proves this to be the case. One argument is that it has always worked in the past. This is circular reasoning for it uses inductive reasoning itself. If inductive reasoning isn't proven then one can't know anything about the future because the patterns that have occurred before if they even did before , could cease to follow the pattern at any moment. Edit The past also can't be known. One's memories could be wrong. They could have been implanted, or the person holding the memories could be insane. The only things that can be known are the present experience and anything that is self evident such as all bachelors are unmarried. Edit 2 This may be false The only things that can be known are the present experience and anything that is self evident such as all bachelors are unmarried.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nothing can be known of the future\n","id":"2e9b3e9f-cba8-4205-af45-c74fe81cf906"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have this viewpoint based on the following line of reasoning The information that companies like Facebook and Google collect is used for advertising purposes. It is unreasonable to use free internet services and not have to also view adverts. It's a give and take which I'm fine with and that's what adblockers are for anyway If I have to see adverts, I would rather see ones that are actually targeted to my interests and demographic rather than generic ones which are totally irrelevant to me. x200B I often read that these companies sell our data to other companies. It is usually reported that the data is anonymous i.e. they don't like my personal data with my actual name or IP. These companies will probably also use it for advertising purposes or as market research info when designing their products. Is this such a bad thing? x200B Last point people often mention things like I don't want Google to know where I'm going and what I'm doing. Why do you think Google would care about you, John Smith, and what exactly you're doing? You're just a statistic among the millions of other John Smiths in a spreadsheet. x200B Naturally, I may be totally wrong. But I feel that the whole privacy scare in the current state of things is totally overblown.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Big internet companies having a lot of data about us isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be.\n","id":"8b8bc6c5-8977-4497-9c37-f56ae28d4051"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious education be compulsory in public schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Teachers will feel uncomfortable saying negative things about any religion a student may be a party to, and will sugarcoat the history of a religion or the principles behind a religion to avoid confrontation. This could cause the education to become biased. www.psychologicalscience.org Thus, it should not be compulsory as religious education is fundamentally faulty and the \"education\" received will not be accurate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion as a required course distorts the notion that school is for everyone.\n","id":"7a2b2ae3-7b74-44e6-8816-3582a7004871"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All through my life I've believed that being able to take a joke about yourself is a brilliant characteristic that someone can have. Whenever I've come across someone that can't take a joke about themselves which is meant in a lighthearted way I develop a dislike for this person. I tend to go through life judging others by their ability to keep themselves calm and collected in a situation where people are laughing at them, and 'roll with the punches' and move on. TL DR Basically, I wanted to simply submit the title of this post, to see if there are any reasons why not to believe this. EDIT Sorry I haven't replied in a while, it took me some time to read all your replies. Thanks It seems though, that a lot of people have misinterpreted what I meant, and that's my fault, I didn't explain myself properly. I should really have emphasised the ' easily ' part. When I said easily offended, I certainly didn't mean by jokes about someone's appearance, or lifestyle choice, or anything like that. If you get offended by stuff like that, that's normal . Although, as a guy who started losing his hair when he was 18, I now take insults like that with a pinch of salt. What I meant was, if you get drunk one night and do something you regret, then your friends all remind you of it the day after, and you can't laugh about it, for example. Or, if you state your opinion about a piece of art, or music, and someone gets offended because they like it, and they can't see past the fact that it's just another opinion about something. Sorry for not clarifying gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who get offended easily are assholes.\n","id":"463b04c2-ce01-4ad0-b332-ab09b25c4689"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Terrorists should be subject to the Geneva Conventions<|ARGUMENT|>Those who wish to seek the protection of the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, have a duty to distinguish themselves from the civilian population Detter, 2007. Terrorists who absolve themselves of this responsibility in the pursuit of wanton violence, who flagrantly ignore the laws of war, cannot thereafter appeal to its protection once captured. Such a norm is required in order to preserve the immunity of civilians and prevent the encouragement of using civilians as means to ends.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Terrorists are not lawful combatants, therefore they not do not acquire prisoner of war status.\n","id":"23005ddb-150b-4e0e-bc33-131a8caaaa91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will man-made climate change cause human extinction?<|ARGUMENT|>Earth\u2019s climate has always warmed and cooled and the 20th century rise in global temperature is within the bounds of natural temperature fluctuations over the past 3,000 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many scientists disagree that humans are the primary reason for global warming and have stated it's a cycle due to sun.\n","id":"d7a51d26-228c-4995-83ea-8d193fc18f80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The vast majority of climate funding globally goes towards reducing CO2 emissions, a strategy to prevent global warming. The idea is based on two parts. Firstly, that a 2 degree rise in temperature can be avoided, and secondly, that cutting CO2 emissions are the best way to deal with climate change. Both of these ideas are false. Current atmospheric levels of CO2 have caused a 1 degree rise in global surface temperatures. This is not the full story of CO2 in the atmosphere, however. Since oceanic temperature increase lags behind atmospheric temperature increase a phenomenon known as radiative forcing , an additional 0.6 degrees of warming will occur. That 1.5 degree C goal, touted by the UN? It's already long gone, just from the CO2 in the atmosphere. The future looks equally grim. At current rates of CO2 emissions, in just 20 years, CO2 emissions will cause an additional .4 degree increase in temperature. That gets us to our magic 2 degree number, an ecological tipping point which may result in an unstoppable positive temperature feedback loop. 20 years. Is that enough time to reduce global carbon emissions to zero? The damage that climate change is doing to humanity is real and inevitable. Yet, we are not funding enough to prevent, or correct for, the impacts it may cause. Lets begin by discussing funding for disaster insurance. This has cost the federal government 7.5 billion dollars over the last year. Disaster insurance can be a powerful tool for climate change adaptation as it can force relocation away from areas prone to the effects of climate change such as the coasts , and reduce the loss of human life due to climate change related incidents by forcing the rebuilding of affected areas to stricter codes . 7.5 billion dollars sounds like plenty of cash. It's not. All disaster insurance accounts for just 16.6 of the US climate change budget. Is this really enough to protect the infrastructure of the future? Especially when, according to the EPA, 300 billion dollars worth of losses could be expected to occur in the next decade? We can build sea walls and levees to protect against the rise in sea levels and flooding over the next fifty years. They have been proven to prevent climate change related flooding. Just ask the Netherlands. South Florida, one of the worlds' most flood prone areas, has requested a new set of levees to protect the vulnerable population of south Florida from potential flooding, caused by the stronger hurricanes that climate change will bring. The cost? Only 8 billion dollars. Money that could be spent on this effective intervention instead goes into preventing CO2 emissions an intervention that ultimately is too late to have much of an impact on our climate. And why do we have to accept a warming planet, anyway? If humanity can warm the planet so effectively, can it cool it down? There are approaches which could work. Reductions in insolation have resulted in decreased rates of global warming and some research has suggested that modified, more efficient, photosynthesis may be able to effectively capture carbon. However, this entire area is generally understudied. Why is that? Because, most of the research funding is diverted into studying the effects of climate change which are well known and understood , or into carbon emission reduction technology based on a fundamentally flawed premise . Ultimately, I believe that funding geoengineering to the same level as the aforementioned approaches will result in a bigger 'bang for your buck,' as it is the only solution that has even the potential to reverse climate change. I am not suggesting that CO2 emission reduction is useless, or should be de funded. Instead, I am suggesting that it should not be the primary focus of our efforts to mitigate climate change. We should be focused on adaptation, and potential remediation, instead.  TL DR The Earth will warm past 2 degrees so let's change our anti climate change strategy from prevention to adaptation and remediation instead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should focus on adapting to climate change, and attempting to remediate its' effects, rather than preventing it from occurring, as warming beyond a stoppable point is inevitable given the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.\n","id":"6935faaa-cb38-42eb-80ee-17082a00d75b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Title should say I watched 2 and 1 2 seasons. I've tried. I saw it on Netflix a few years ago, and thought, I see this a lot of Pinterest, don't judge it's supposed to be mind blowingly good. I started with the 9th Doctor. The episode was incredibly disappointing. The effects weren't all that great, the writing was eh, everything sort of came together at the end just because. But that was the first episode, surely the rest of the series will be mindblowingly awesome. I skipped ahead to a David Tennant season I think it was season 3 , and it was alright. Better than the 1st season, but not mindorgasmic. So I went back to season 2. I haven't gotten past the Cyberman episodes. I have tried watching that fucking episode on three or four different occasions, and once I actually finished it, there's another fucking episode. Cybermen are supposed to be a big deal right? Yet for some reason, I struggled to finish just one episode. Doctor Who is not the worst show I've ever seen. From what I've seen it's just eh. Like I said, the acting is fine, the writing okay, the conclusions seem to always utilize deus ex machina because the Doctor just happens to know everything , and the special effects are yeah. Please, please, please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I tried really, really hard. I watched 2 and 1\/5 seasons, but I don't think Doctor Who is that great.\n","id":"0e1bf434-f67d-4e8c-a57d-8e3f9e0a6df5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've had this argument a few times, on a few different subreddits, and I figured now might as well be as good a time as any to address it in a more systematic way. Most people would agree that this is a pretty fair representation of human achievement in most areas, albeit done in MS paint.There are a few people at the absolute horrendous bottom, a lot people doing poorly to mediocre, and very few people at the absolute top. Many people I've encountered seem to believe that this is also roughly a distribution of human potential. I disagree, and that's the subject of this . I believe that this is much closer to the distribution of human potential. I believe that upbringing and environment are far more important when it comes to determining somebody's achievement, especially in the context of intelligence which is where this debate often comes up. Put more simply, I'm a reasonably smart person. Take me, and another person who is currently not particularly smart. Swap how we were raised give the other person parents who read to them, encouraged them to learn, question, and discover, etc, and who could afford to provide them with learning opportunities, and take away all those things from me , and you'd pretty much swap how smart we are. Maybe not exactly, but pretty close. This is not solely about wealth, though wealth does play a role a lower middle class parent who takes the time to take their kid to the library every week will obviously end up with a smarter kid than a wealthy parent who doesn't invest time and effort in their child Note There are very few ways to either empirically support or disprove this view, basically twin studies are what you've got, unless I'm missing something.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most humans are generally equal in terms of their potential\n","id":"e87bffe0-fe6c-4dbb-afda-c99f597194fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is taxation theft?<|ARGUMENT|>Many conditions of capitalism\u2014infrastructure, education of the masses, currency, enforcement of copyright and private property\u2014are met socially, and many profound technologies\u2014internet, computers, GPS, advancements in telecommunications and aerospace engineering\u2014were made with social investment. \"Taxation is theft\" assumes profit is earned in isolation from the reality of our interdependent society. Privately appropriating masses of socially created wealth could actually be argued to be theft.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taxation upholds property rights because it is what enables the key services \u2014 courts, police, military \u2014 that actually define and protect property. While individuals can steal property and thus violate the rights of others taxation fundamentally underpins those rights so it cannot be a violation of them.\n","id":"b30a5882-80d4-4100-ab08-f6d49111874e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, Isaac Newton. He viewed his physics and math findings as a means to learn about God. \u201cThis most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.\u201d goodreads.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of the greatest scientific minds in history were deeply religious persons who understood their limitations. Their faith was founded in the belief that God is a very logical entity and scientifically knowable.\n","id":"1cdd2d73-fda1-4143-b982-cb5c80c88aec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>The Judiciary and Removal Act of 1875 was passed by a lame duck Republican legislative session to redirect civil litigation involving national commercial interests out of state courts and into the federal judiciary. This allowed the Republicans to pursue a policy of economic nationalism, whereas the Democrats who were about to take power were much localist-oriented, and wanted litigation to remain within the purview of state courts Gillman, p. 517<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Federal Judicial System in the US has historically been used to further political objectives. This politicisation now permeates the US Supreme Court as well since most Supreme Court Justices first serve on the Federal Courts.\n","id":"6c3472cd-8da3-4080-a05e-566c66d9fa0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should life skills be taught in K12 school?<|ARGUMENT|>It could worsen wealth inequality and class divides if those who go on to further education get taught life skills but those who are not financially or academically able to go on to further education are not able to learn these skills.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Education is not free in all countries, especially further training and college education. It is very harmful to leave the learning of important life skills to further education.\n","id":"1371303c-0759-41fe-a4f0-3ca5b948514c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've heard that 1 in 5 women have been will be sexually assaulted by the time they finish college but this sounds ridiculously high to me. The city with the highest violent crime rate in the United States is Detroit, Michigan with a crime rate of 2122.9 cases per 100K population. That works out to 2.1229 of the population being victims to violent crime. Even if you apply that rate to the entire country, assume that every violent crime is a sexual assault, and assume that every victim is a woman that still comes nowhere near the supposed 1 in 5 statistic. Where does this statistic come from?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the 1 in 5 rape statistic is false\n","id":"487b7a98-eb06-4c21-848c-6b5ac3a253a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am an atheist and a nihilist. Obviously, this has connotations 1. I believe there is no objective, intrinsic, or otherwise purpose to existence. 2. I do not believe there is a higher power that would be able to instill such purpose. I started feeling this way after watching a lot of debates online, many of them involving the Christian apologist William Lane Craig. I have only begun reading Nietzsche's The Will to Power, but I find myself agreeing with some of his points. There seems to be no way to come to an objective purpose of existence, as there can be no observation, experiment, or measurement to reveal such a thing. TL DR I am a nihilist. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am thoroughly convinced that there is no intrinsic purpose to existence.\n","id":"7c6f0360-bba2-4b2c-90de-1b0d0e07ab15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it OK to publicly approach a stranger for sex?<|ARGUMENT|>Men are more prone to taking risks than women are. The Darwin Award winners have been skewed toward men by a margin of 38 to 5<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men's brains in particular are genetically programmed with instincts that support this kind of behavior.\n","id":"a2614f75-9063-49c2-8df9-48a17083223f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have no empathy or sympathy for people who are harmed when committing a crime or other illegal activities and I don't really know how to feel about this. You hear about these types of stories allot especially on reddit subs like justice porn where in a criminal or other near do well is harmed or killed while committing a crime, from getting stuck in a chimney and slowly dehydrating to death, to getting gunned down by your attempted victim, to drowning because you ignored the warning signs telling you not to swim in the dangerous waters. In all these cases I feel nothing but contempt for these criminals and think that they basically got what they deserve for committing their crimes or ignoring safety warnings. I am not sure what to think about these feelings as I would be outraged to hear that muggers were executed by firing squads, or that burglars where denied water till they died , or that teens who disobeyed safety signs were then drowned by police. So if its not at all a bother for you could you help me change my view on not feeling sorry for criminals who die while committing crimes? Or alternatively help me reason out why a burglar dehydrating to death from a failed burgle seems to have a greater negative moral weight when it is done by the police and not out of the burglars bungling of the attempted crime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have no empathy or sympathy for people who kill or seriously injure themselves while partaking in a crime or other illegal conduct.\n","id":"24ca432a-a98c-4d25-96b8-18229487a323"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Either I'm doing something wrong or the internet has a skewed population, but every time you try educating someone on something, say homosexuality, either they deny the sources by claiming the sources are bias or lying, or they twist things in order for their initial prejudice to remain true. For example, if one thinks that homosexuals are 'bad' and deserve jail time, the attitude is homosexuals are bad. They justify by saying that because they are 'unnatural'. Even if I point out that they are in fact, natural, they may twist it and say that the whole point of 'life' is procreation. The problem with their attitude is unpacking their whole life teachings. This can go in reverse of course. If I wear to change peoples minds on homosexuality being bad to someone who thinks it's good or neutral, that too is based on childhood education etc. Now, I state that it's very hard in that I recognize that yes, there are some who do change their minds, but the effort required to change peoples minds isn't worth my effort. Save for people on places like this, most do not want to change. So should I just give up on the world?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's very hard to change adult minds so I might as well as to not even bother trying to educate them.\n","id":"0bbe94b2-cb7a-4325-81f6-383e652053be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Even if people try, they might revert back to eating meat out of habit or subconscious actions that people are unaware of like still going to a favorite steakhouse without remembering that they are vegan now. Thus, without taking motivation into consideration making sure people want to be vegan first, the worldwide vegan change would not last permanently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At present human demand for meat outweighs our ethical concerns surrounding the eating of meat. We should consider a global adoption of veganism only when we collectively feel that the ethical considerations outweigh our global demand for meat consumption.\n","id":"b269eaec-e89f-423d-bba7-fcde93504f7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit 2 Y'all couldn't convince me, plus there were downvotes, so why don't you give yourselves deltas? I won't be back. Edit Do you guys have to keep downvoting me on every single comment? I don't understand what the hell is with the voting in here. I'm not downvoting any of you. You're not encouraging participation. Reddiquette states to only downvote that which does not contribute. Are my comments and thoughts really that useless? Should I not come here anymore? Is it that painful to talk with someone like me? Do you know that if someone collects enough negative karma, the spam bots will start to silence them? I'm not a spammer and I don't deserve that treatment. Please stop. And please consider not being so trigger happy on the downvotes with other people. I mean, check us out, right? Here we are in the technological stone age. There are many brilliant minds constantly pondering how we could make it better. And yet the stupidity of mankind snuffs out these lights with things like war, intolerance, and other backward thinking. We wouldn't have farmers to grow the crops, nor truck drivers to deliver them. We wouldn't have pilots for aircraft, nor people to constantly maintain them. We wouldn't have police to keep us in line, nor firefighters to quench accidental ignitions. All of these things can be done with technology. This technology is right under our noses, yet there is not enough of an investment in place to make it happen. And that's because we're stupid We can't trust each other not to waste such an investment. Can you imagine the kind of progress we would make if we could finally end war and come together to advance technology for all of humankind? If we could trust each other to do the right thing and be morally responsible because we know we all stand to benefit from it? We would no longer be stupid, basically. And so in response to the recent r AskReddit question What job exists because we are stupid? , my view is that every job exists because we are stupid. It's a scramble to make up for the mistakes of the past, and frustratingly, the ones of the future as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All jobs exist because we are stupid. If we were smarter we would only have people that do things for fun.\n","id":"1c25fab3-d021-46d7-aaaa-d63f5525e629"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently any mention of calling this action immature will bring you a load of downvotes and I don't understand why. People watching these news reports sports shows or whatever the case often have younger children around. Also it could possibly hurt the news reporters reputation this is a guess I don't really know anything about the news business. The most appalling example of this in my recent memory was during the San Fransisco Giants World Series Champs Fair two young girls were being asked questions and a young boy around 12 years old? said it on camera. I'm on mobile so I can't get the link now. Also because I'm on mobile this post is probably riddled with grammar and spelling errors. Sorry. Link to vid courtesy of u annduz Edit So so far I have yet to find a good response. The most popular response seems to be Who cares, being immature is funny to some people So I'll just quote u Teeklin here because he shares my exact feelings. Yes. It's called manners. Etiquette. Common courtesy. It's the way we interact with the world that shows a baseline respect for those around us. When I'm at home and I know my audience, I will say whatever the fuck I want to say. But when I'm in the office, or on the street, or in a store, or around a stranger that I don't know I will act with decorum and respect because that's what civilized adult human beings do. Here is the permalink Edit 2 I'm still doing my best to scan through all the responses. Feel free to continue commenting but, please make sure your post is unique enough to warrant its own comment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The new trend to yell \"F*** Her right in the p****\" on live TV. Should be looked down upon.\n","id":"b51dade4-899f-48f8-9763-4f56c08ed3f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I totally support raising the minimum wage. My point centers more on the fact in my mind that even if you raise what you are paying the bottom income bracket, if there's not enough demand for employment from people with limited skill sets, a modest increase in the minimum wage will be irrelevant. This drop in demand would be the result in the exponential pace at which technology is increasing, which could increase per capita productivity dramatically and decrease the number of positions which require a human. Some examples musings Applebees is adding tablets which allow customers to order their food with drastically reduced human interaction. Applebees says they wont reduce their number of staff, but I don't really believe that long term, corporations and franchises cut costs wherever they can. Even if they don't cut the number of waitstaff, they would likely cut their hours. Vending machines exist for everything from coffee to 'Mexican' food to french fries to hot dogs. Redbox put blockbuster out of business food vending machines could definitely put a dent in fast food, an industry where minimum wage pay is very prevalent. More advanced and efficient algorithms and advances in technology in general such as the development of AIs, a migration from physical to digital marketplaces combined with a shrinking world could lead to multiple industries simply needing less warm bodies who require payment, get sick, go on strike, and so on. Give me some hope. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that raising the minimum wage is more or less irrelevant as the rise of automation in a wide variety of jobs which require little to no education\/training will drastically shrink the pool of available employment opportunities for the lower\/middle classes.\n","id":"8840d06b-b947-4652-b8dd-5630a4d1ed8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Compared to today, in the culture of 1820s America, a person's word was a very grave thing, and people were much less likely to falsify.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The testimonies of the Three Witnesses and the Eight Witnesses are persuasive because they appear above their signatures, which represent their word of honor.\n","id":"b5e3e5f3-a84c-4e8a-878e-afaa6070f45d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, i am not here saying how we should kill, or eliminate, or discriminate against black folks. I have NEVER believed that. I believe on the whole, the average person of African descent is not nearly as smart as your average european, asian, or latino counterparts. It is my opinion and thought that European, Arab, Eastern Asians, South Pacific Asians, American Natives, Latinos and Sub Continent Asians are more advanced peoples. We have mingled with other homo sapiens like Neanderthals, have survived ice ages and other major events and our brains had to evolve a bit to survive conditions of the rest of the world and create engineering feats to help us survive. Africans have been stuck on their continent and have not needed evolve he same way the rest of us have. Bell curves continually support this notion on intelligence. I am not closed minded. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe black people are a less evolved group of humanity when it comes to intelligence\n","id":"ce3c24fd-64d5-4ea0-a289-7ec6acad8d13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>kill one to save many<|ARGUMENT|>To know that one has actually killed another human being will haunt the moral agent forever. Instances of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for soldiers returning for warzones are increasingly reported, suggesting that a situation of killing very often warps the killer\u2019s life1. This holds true even for people not directly and viscerally involved in killings, such as the incredible guilt felt by the team of the Manhattan project.2 1 ScienceBlog, \u20181 in 5 Iraq, Afghanistan Vets has PTSD\u2019, 17 April 2008, 2 Long, Tony, \u2018Aug. 6, 1945: \u2018I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds\u2019, Wired, 6 August 2007,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The act of killing can wreak immense psychological damage upon rational individuals\n","id":"c94ff97c-0892-4c7a-bfeb-7e8a6ee8cf00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The perceived democratic deficit is directly connected to the EU not having attained statehood. Compared to international institutions it is probably the most democratically legitimized one on the planet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many Europeans are opposed to the current EU. Various complaints default in democracy, administrative backlogs, unknown policymakers could be addressed through this reform.\n","id":"942d8376-5587-4c7c-9f97-5103b8a73f8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free trade<|ARGUMENT|>\"If people want to participate fully in Swedish culture, enjoy a wide choice of Swedish schools for their children, have predominantly Swedish neighbours and partake of the full range of benefits offered by the Swedish welfare state, then they have to live in Sweden.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Globalization will not eliminate the importance of physical participation in a foreign culture\n","id":"8596c181-4b0a-468d-81c1-03537e3664d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>social deprivation causes crime.<|ARGUMENT|>We live in a culture where success and personal achievement is measured on a material scale - what you own, how much you make, what car you drive, what clothes you wear. This means that it is the way society is structured to make us crave material objects which is the primary cause of crime. As society values wealth and material goods over everything else people might turn to crime in order to acquire these much-vaunted markers of personal achievement, to which they feel entitled. Seeing no other avenue for personal and financial success, they might easily choose to get involved in illegal but somewhat profitable activities \u2014 like drug dealing, theft or burglary, running prostitution rings, racketeering, etc. However if society was to value traits such as honesty, hard work or loyalty over personal holdings then perhaps the levels of crime would not be so high.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In an age of consumerism, the primary cause of crime is a greed or desperation to \u2018fit in\u2019, or \u2018have it all\u2019.\n","id":"c05177ca-3868-418f-9eaa-b43a938f6b13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In most modern western societies USA, UK, Sweden, etc civil rights have reached the point that sex based stereotyping, double standards, etc afflict men and women roughly equally. Yes women can hardly ever fill combat roles in the military, but they also cannot be drafted while men can. Yes women are shamed for having sex frequently while men are praised for the same thing however, men are shamed for not having sex very often while a woman who does the same will be viewed as classy or refined. Yes women have to deal with reproductive rights but nobody is forcing them to get their clits cut out, whereas male infants are dying, getting diseases, or being accidentally castrated every day from male circumcision not to mention the negative effects of a perfectly implemented procedure . Yes women are sexually harassed more often than men men, however are treated as subhumans if they dare to report being sexually harassed. society also pressures men into far lower rates of reporting all victimization. Please note that I am not trying to marginalize the injustices done to women I am simply trying to dispel the infantile idea of seeing patriarchy in these societies, it is a disgusting insult to countries where women are oppressed by real patriarchy. Feminist's manufactured idea of rape culture does nothing but dis empower women by encouraging them to feel oppressed by half the population. I could go on about issues along these lines but I'm going to leave it to this link to show you how disgustingly skewed rape percentages, reports of victimization etc are Please don't bother posting unless you have read it, as this article was actually what changed my feminist views to my current ones. Lastly I believe that anyone who preaches feminism as opposed to humanism in the societies I described are doing nothing but promoting hate and inequality. If you have evidence to , please present it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism in modern western societies is not only unnecessary but harmful to both men and women. !\n","id":"d471ae70-dea9-4c3c-9ad7-e7f11f2a3d30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Similarly, I accept the fact that a particular ship is called the QEII because of similar social conventions associated with the naming authority of the person that launched her in this case, Queen Elizabeth II, an aspect of philosophical truth claims based on Austin and Searle's notion of \"natural language philosophy\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We accept the vast majority of meaningful human knowledge without scientific evidence, particularly in the case of social knowledge. This truth criterion would eradicate almost all perfectly useful knowledge.\n","id":"330a6b33-fa16-46fa-85e0-fbd13b9ae500"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In urban centers everywhere, people are complaining about gentrification the narrative is that tech bros swoop in, drive up prices, live in revitalized housing, and alter the culture. I think what is behind the anger is pure envy and entitlement. Envy because the haves are enjoying a more opulent lifestyle than the locals. Entitlement because they think they deserve the city more than the newcomers just on the merit of being there first. I am one of these gentrifiers I suppose. Yes, I work in technology. Yes, I enjoy my microbrews. Yes I like artisanal food. But I'm not some alien strawman from Techmanistan. I and most like me are hard working Americans that worked hard to get an education, put in the time to advance my career, and moved up in salary. I moved to Seattle to enjoy the job opportunities and because I love the city. But I'm one of the bad guys because I make good money? Because I'm contributing to housing demand? How are we any different than any other immigrants? We bring our various cultures to mix with the current culture to make something new, as it's always been everywhere. Should I have stayed where I belonged back in rural Idaho? I'm not allowed to make a better life for myself? Am I supposed to feel guilty for my success? Responsible for those that have been unable to adapt to the changing economy? Don't get me wrong I get that people are being left behind in the American dream, that the changing global economy is causing those in some careers to lose their job opportunities. I just don't think that means I don't deserve to live where I choose. And I am not actively trying to destroy their culture I moved there because I wanted to enjoy it. Is there more to the stop gentrification movements than envy, bigotry, and entitlement?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anti-gentrification sentiment is just envy and entitlement\n","id":"100b8333-da2a-4493-b332-ad9b3251bf87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note this is only in a sense for governmental texts, documents, addresses. For things of emergency safety health of course that can be excluded. Also for those physically incapable of speaking learning English I would like English to be the official national language since it was chosen by our forefathers since the nation's birth as the de facto national language, but not as the official language. A national language helps bind national unity. English is taught in all to my knowledge public schools in the US. A national language is helpful so everyone can understand each other, and work more well together. Having to print recreate documents in different languages takes money which could be better placed elsewhere. I used this as a fiscal reason although I'm not 100 behind it. Multiple languages divide a National US identity. Citizens should be expected to know english as it is taught to them for the entire duration of their public education. Naturalized citizens have to know English to even become a citizen. I am not saying that English should be the sole language anyone speaks for everything including private matters, but every American should be expected to know english. If it is a requirement of citizenship, all government texts ought to be only in english as much as practically possible since all Americans should know english. I'm not attacking second language programs like public school Spanish, French, etc classes since to be bilingual is a very good trait, but a national language would beneficial in organization and standardization. It doesn't have to be complicated. Also, I kinda believe that residents should apply to become citizens after living x amount of years in the US. If they don't expect to become citizens and join the american community, maybe they ought ^not ^to ^be ^here. Please don't judge me for that Please change my view Edit sorry, my internet was acting up and I couldn't access reddit also east coast so kinda late. P<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"English should be the official language of The U.S.A.\n","id":"780607a7-7437-436e-b748-ae023c90ca79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>William Hamblin argues that 'literary topos' are used to represent many metals, which may or may not include the ones listed in Jarom 1.8 \u201cwood, .iron and copper, and brass and steel\u201d or 2 Ne 5.15 \"and of iron, and of copper, and of brass, and of steel, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious ores\u201d The technique of topoi is derived from Greek rhetoric and would not have been common knowledge to inhabitants of Jerusalem in 600 BC.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon uses literary techniques that did not exist in ancient Hebrew or ancient Egyptian, but instead existed in other languages that the individuals represented could not have known.\n","id":"1a8d1437-4099-4590-a080-ace214f9c281"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Thesis The downvote button should not be used for casual disagreement with others. Clarification I am specifically adding casual because I want to exclude the following from the discussion overtly racist, sexist, bigoted, or site rule breaking comments. Downvoting these would technically be disagreement, but obviously the broader function is to prevent hate speech, speech that incites violence, and rule breaking such as doxxing comments. I support downvoting these type of comments. Thus, casual disagreement is for everything that doesn't fall into these categories. It could range from something as simple as downvoting someone for saying Go Bears when you like the Packers, to downvoting someone for a poor understanding of politics economics history. Feel free to supply a hypothetical or real example and ask me if I am counting that as casual or not. To be clear, downvoting for stuff like spam, trolling, general assholery, wrong sub posting, etc. are not germane to what I want to discuss, as those downvotes wouldn't really be out of disagreement. Justification In a nutshell, downvoting purely out of disagreement will not make the person change their mind, deters them from commenting in the future, and makes the majority opinion feel all the more correct, even if it is not. This ostensibly results in an echo chamber, cyclically affecting all future comments and ideas. Another downside is that it dilutes the efficacy of downvotes for non casual disagreement. Of course, a reasonable reply to this is that the report button exists, so I won't put too much emphasis on this point for my justification. However, I still think it is something to consider, as reports don't always work. Changing my view To get a delta from me, you don't need to prove that downvotes for casual disagreement are always okay, but simply that sometimes downvotes for casual disagreement are ok. Preferably, this would be proven within the scope of a reasonable and statistically preponderant example.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Downvotes should never be used for casual disagreement\n","id":"89fbf36c-0a0b-4c8a-9360-5d8c08f47875"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>In April and May 1945, Japan made three attempts through neutral Sweden and Portugal to bring the war to a peaceful end.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Japan had already made attempts to surrender. The bomb in itself was not necessary but merely peace-oriented negotiation tactics.\n","id":"f02e5f50-26b7-4df0-a303-9321ca6124fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Benefits of aluminum Aluminum cans are lighter than glass bottles 5 oz vs 7 oz and so are easier to transport. Aluminum cans don't shatter and so are safe for places where people are barefoot pools, beaches . Aluminum cans make less noise when you put them in the recycling bin, which is a small advantage if you're on a different sleep schedule than your roommates. Equal footing for aluminum and glass The taste of beer from aluminum and glass is equally good, and nothing but a blind taste test will change my mind on that no anecdotes please . Both aluminum and glass can be recycled repeatedly. After the fact edit my view has not been changed but good points were raised by many commenters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"for beer, aluminum cans are better containers than glass bottles.\n","id":"cec72d9f-b6b0-411d-817a-1c351705e672"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>To some people, \"fairness\" might mean paying everyone in society an exactly equal amount regardless of their occupation. To others, it might mean letting employers and employees negotiate every wage individually, even if this results in wild pay disparities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Fairness\" is a highly subjective measure, which different people define very differently, and it is unclear how the government could enforce it to everyone's satisfaction.\n","id":"06a75b6b-8264-46e8-808c-142dd151111f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Breasts are one of two highly different body parts between man and woman, therefore they are sexualized. Breast of women change dramatically with maturity, while those of men only slightly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Breasts are one of the most sexualized parts of women's bodies and this cannot be eliminated, as they are a sign of sexual maturity.\n","id":"5de95b21-a0cf-4a15-90ff-aec1b15c590f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Democrats vs. Republicans<|ARGUMENT|>Lane Kenworthy. \"Vote Republican if You Want Equal Pay?\" Consider the Evidence. September 13, 2008: \"In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Casey Mulligan points out that over the past half century the pay gap between women and men has shrunk more under Republican presidents than under Democratic ones. The following chart shows this. The data are from the Census Bureau. Mulligan argues that the best way to achieve equal pay is therefore \u201cto work for a labor market that creates opportunities for women like it did during the Reagan and the Bush years.\u201d But as the next two charts indicate, the Republican advantage in closing the gender pay gap owes mainly to slow earnings growth for men during Republican administrations, rather than rapid earnings growth for women.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender pay gap narrowed under Reps due to sluggish male salaries.\n","id":"d9e46155-29b5-4dda-9f04-26254c842d30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Citizens United Was Wrongly Decided<|ARGUMENT|>Politicians systematically overestimate how conservative their constituents are, in part because Republican supporters are especially likely to contact legislators Broockman and Skovron, p. 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the public took the time to express its opinions to politicians, members of congress might be more aware of their preferences.\n","id":"6270ec25-6f96-4e47-9eff-e111ac223e8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Small scale farmers in the developing world are unlikely to be able to afford the high price of genetically modified seeds since they often lack access to credit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetically modified seeds are patented, and therefore more expensive The higher price and technology dependency make it an unlikely candidate to save developing countries.\n","id":"d3024628-7f1f-425d-b466-298b51157c0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should sensitive social and political topics be discussed in school?<|ARGUMENT|>All sides of the issue must be discussed, showing pros and cons where the student presents their own conclusion using critical thought. Teachers are not allowed to overtly show their bias in topics. Teachers are facilitators of information and trainers of skill.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sensitive social and political topics should be discussed in schools, but only under certain conditions.\n","id":"efe0b1af-72a7-4e2e-be9b-330f3f0cdd71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>SRS is the ass of reddit. They are oversensitive, closed minded, and very narcissistic. They believe they have some sort of superior moral authority over all redditors. I don't think anything SRS does contributes to the betterment of societal issues or gender equality. The only thing that they do is take offense to jokes, stupid jokes whether or not they are unfunny does not matter. The only thing that actually confuses me about their community is that they don't understand they aren't wanted. If no one on reddit believes their stupid values or beliefs why do they stay here? Why don't make their own website where they can jerk each other all day? Where the jokes aren't funny and where they talk about absolutely nothing at all? If you're a member of SRS, please chime in Tell me why you like the community, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think SRS empire is a stupid and toxic community filled with terrible people.\n","id":"fd51812e-05da-4fe7-a34e-9bb01537b403"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>note I will refer to gay people and gay youth a lot here, but that can easily be substituted for secular , Jewish , black , or any of the other groups they target Now that it looks like Fred Phelps is going to die soon, this seems like a good time to bring this up. I am sure most of you are familiar with the WBC and what they do. Although their actions are deplorable and hurtful to those involved, particularly their picketing of funerals, I think that they are so ridiculous that they cross over into cartoon villain territory that they are, in fact, a parody of themselves and that only the severely mentally disturbed actually take them seriously. One major contributing factor for this is that they target those who are in the US military, which put a lot of conservatives in a position where they cannot defend the group's actions. This is exemplified when Shirley Phelps went to interview on Fox News This was when the gay marriage debate in the US was at its boiling point, yet the WBC is so extreme that they got Fox News to actually defend gay people. Heck, even the KKK doesn't like them I've only ever seen them either ridiculed, attacked, or ignored. When they came to my home town a couple of years ago to picket in front of the high school in response to us being fag enablers , a large portion of the community formed a human chain around the entire school and nearby religious centers with their backs turned to them so that those who didn't want to deal with them didn't have to, demonstrating to everyone, especially the gay youth in our town, that our community doesn't stand for discrimination. The WBC GAVE us that opportunity to come together in a way that I don't think could have otherwise been easily done. tl dr They are so extreme that they make all but the most severely homophobic religious people stop and think, Well that's just ridiculous . By generally being assholes, they have a position on the public stage, but by alienating almost everyone, they are everyone's punching bag. addendum I included promoting secular thought in the title and neglected to properly address it. Their reasons for hating minorities and gay people in particular is cited to be religious. I know with myself that criticizing them forced me to reevaluate my own ideas of using religion as a justification for public policy, and I know that many other people had similar experiences. EDIT Wow, good responses all around. I have come close to giving a delta on a few points, but I would need to mull it over for a few days first.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fred Phelps and the \"God Hates Fags\" Westboro Baptist Church have done more to promote gay rights and secular thought than almost any other single group.\n","id":"0310dea7-fb41-497f-975d-88a643df714b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This should be common sense. To me, the argument against it seems like pretty a pretty incredible reach on the part of philosophy in some misguided attempt at being deep and or thought provoking. If I set up a microphone to record a falling tree, there may be no humans around to hear it falling, but we can later recover the microphone and have tangible proof that a sound was, indeed, made. One counter argument I am anticipating is that sound is merely a vibration, and does not count as sound at all unless there is someone around to hear it. However, I would point back at my microphone experiment, along with this definition of sound gt vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person's or animal's ear. Key point of this definition being can be , not are heard. Whether or not it is heard changes nothing, only that it is capable of being heard. And a tree falling would certainly cause such vibrations, in the presence of humans or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a tree falls in a forest with no one around to hear it, it DOES make a sound.\n","id":"5bfa03f9-262d-4165-a4f7-2aad9584e97e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>2 Nephi 3:12 prophecies that the bible and the Book of Mormon would result in \"establishing peace among the Lamanites and bringing them to the knowledge of their fathers in the latter days, and also to the knowledge of my covenants.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon falsely prophesies that in the last days, the Lamanites would be persuaded of their purported Israelite ancestry.\n","id":"46a6647e-ce51-42d8-bef8-d1167b0ac0fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we create and adopt a universal currency?<|ARGUMENT|>A universal currency, if but not required to be digitized like a cryptocurrency, would save resources and thus improve the environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A universal currency would allow the world to finally work towards growth of humanity as a whole.\n","id":"921bb897-7713-4244-a69f-026a81f1593b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I ask only about fruits and vegetables on the EWG's 2018 Dirty Dozen List that advocates buying organic for Strawberries, Spinach, Nectarines, Apples, Peaches, Pears, Cherries, Grapes, Celery, Tomatoes, Sweet bell peppers, Potatoes. My view is that I ought abide by the EWG's Clean 15 and Dirty 12 lists, listed together more readably here Assume that cost isn't a difficulty, and both conventional and organic varieties are equally available. Or is the correct term form I'm from Toronto, and buy my fruits and vegetables from Loblaws, Whole Foods Market, and sometimes Pusateri's. My only reason for buying organic, is to eschew and shun pesticides and harmful chemicals. To focus the debate, please don't discuss other reasons. I know that organic foods still use pesticides, but aren't natural pesticides less harmful?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I ought buy organic those fruits and vegetables on the EWG's Dirty Dozen List.\n","id":"4feadcda-2745-49d1-9137-4eb466b9232f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously there have been a lot of gun control related posts here recently and always , but I find that the positions discussed are usually so broad, and the issue so complex, that people end up talking past each other. So, I want to focus on one relatively narrow but to me, pivotal point in the gun control debate my view that the ability of Americans to legally purchase and own semi automatic rifles is not a meaningful check on government power. I find the majority of arguments against banning semi automatic rifles unconvincing see this list from the NRA or pedantic arguments about why semi automatic rifles don't qualify as assault weapons . However, I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that we should have a basic mistrust of government and that if a government has a monopoly on the ability to do violence, then they are much more likely to abuse their power. If someone could make a convincing case that semi automatic rifles could provide a real safeguard against tyranny, then it could potentially change my view on the entire gun control debate. Unfortunately, I think we passed the point long ago where a group of citizens with rifles could meaningfully contend with US military might, and most people advocating this position come off sounding like the guy from this Onion article Things that are unlikely to  1 Slippery slope. I've worked for the government, so I'm generally sympathetic to this argument. I've seen firsthand how the regulation train never stops unless forced to. However, I want to keep the conversation limited to the effectiveness of this particular tool semi automatic rifles to accomplish this particular goal providing a check on government power . 2 Similarly, any arguments about how semi automatic rifles are good for other purposes defense against criminals, particular kinds of hunting are outside the bounds of the discussion. 3 Historical examples or examples from other countries. It's not completely without merit, but a central piece of my view concerns the scale and technological capability of the modern American military, which is basically without precedent. 4 The ability of poorly armed insurgents in other parts of the world to wage prolonged guerilla campaigns against the US military. Again, not entirely without merit, and could really be its own separate topic, but suffice to say that there are enough differences in infrastructure, institutional presence, political will, and logistics that it's really apples and oranges to me. Things that might  Obviously not a complete list but 1 A plausible scenario of government takeover military coup, institution of martial law, etc. in which citizens armed with semi automatic rifles make a meaningful resistance. 2 A recent example say within the last 30 years of a citizen whose interaction with the government was positively altered not just delayed by their ownership or use of a semi automatic rifle. 3 Convincing evidence that populations which are known to be heavily armed receive less policing or are convicted of minor crimes at a lower rate. Essentially, the idea that cops think that pursuing minor infractions in these communities is not worth the potential of a fatal escalation of violence. I'm not saying this is a positive thing necessarily, just that it would be a convincing argument for these guns being at least a minor deterrent to a government institution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Americans' ability to purchase and own semi-automatic rifles is not a meaningful check on government power.\n","id":"4cd32094-77cd-403f-8334-da4fbd748fb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Of course, I am very sad that such a terrible thing happened, but I do not feel guilty about it, because the colour of my skin doesn't really mean anything to me i.e. if a murderer is white, I don't, in any way, feel like I'm related to said murderer . Furthermore, I'm pretty sure my ancestors weren't involved in slavery, since I do not believe any black people, Asian people etc. existed in my country more than 80 years ago. Even if my ancestors were, in fact, involved in slavery, I still wouldn't feel guilty about it. I had nothing to do with it. Feel free to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a white person, I do not feel guilty about the past enslavement of black people, nor how they and other races were predominantly treated by white people in the past and even today.\n","id":"a450651c-0b62-4606-aec5-806ead1b0313"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Saying #AllLivesMatter Instead of #BlackLivesMatter Better?<|ARGUMENT|>The founders of the movement state that they \"affirm the lives\" of Black folks whether they be queer, trans, disabled, undocumented, women, or with records, and go on to support \"all Black lives along the gender spectrum.\" At no point do they extend this support to any other race or 'color' of person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Black Lives Matter\" does not inherently include all lives. It explicitly states black lives without any emphasis to suggest that other groups matter. For example, if the movement was entitled \"Black Lives Matter Too\", it would suggest inclusivity.\n","id":"631ae554-86e1-4ef8-a2ee-9ef0bc1d3781"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Having recently heard about and read up on the phenomenon of unschooling , I am simply in disbelief. The simple lack of education that seemingly would result is mindblowing, seeing as the child would lack any in depth knowledge of the Sciences, not to mention the fact it would be impossible to find a high paying job without any qualifications. So reddit, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I thing \"unschooling\" is a horrifically short-sighted way of raising a child.\n","id":"3b328fdb-066f-48a1-a6e0-31566cf1b005"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>No one with any real power actually cares and what should be an incredibly minor issue has been blown up as a human rights issue. With genocide, poverty, overpopulation, global warming, and attacks on democracy worldwide conservative and liberal idiots pour all their effort and attention to gay rights. They do this while each blaming the other faction for wasting time and energy. It has no real effect on our society or world as a whole whether gay marriage is legal or not. Its just a sensational distraction. I'm a moderate who lives in a very liberal area so I'll admit I see way more liberal stupidity than conservative stupidity. That prejudices me a bit. I will totally recognize that conservatives are just as guilty. Lets not turn this into well, if the other side would just quit because that is just the stubborn idiocy I am criticizing. Edit I forgot to mention it is used to distract conservatives from the important expensive issues they usually care about, crime, stability, civic duty, and distracts everyone from personal freedoms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gay rights are a media circus to distract liberals from environmentalism and financial reforms.\n","id":"2917827a-dc21-4d2a-9f98-df58748cd0c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Those who spend their time pretending to be obnoxious idiots aren't really pretending. In case anyone's unfamiliar with the subreddit and its users, they're the guys that leave comments like this on all YouTube videos that are trending on Reddit. It was fun the first few times or so, but at this point it's just obnoxious and annoying, to a degree where there are more than 10 'joke' comments before you can even get to normal comments that actually refer to the video. Since it's not uncommon to see entire subreddits get banned for downvote and commentraiding other subreddits, why is it okay for a sub to be entirely devoted to raiding YouTube videos and manipulating comment vote counts? I don't see this discussed often on Reddit and when it does get mentioned it's often downvoted to a very heavy degree, so please  because I'm obviously not getting the 'joke' here. Even if the joke is being annoying on purpose. tl dr EDIT Forgot a link to the sub in question r redditarmie<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\/r\/redditarmie should be banned for the continuous raiding and vote-manipulation of YouTube comments.\n","id":"b81e9200-6635-45f7-9817-24c170d88c98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Legalization of Marijuana<|ARGUMENT|>There is nothing sinister or dangerous about potent pot. Assuming that people will smoke until they are as high as they want to be, and then will stop, smokers of potent pot may simply have to take only one hit to get as high as they want, as opposed to a full joint with less potent pot. It is similar to the consumption of spirits as compared to beer. And, if adults are trusted to consume spirits responsibly, why not potent pot?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Users simply smoke less of potent pot to achieve the same high\n","id":"4449a4f5-7186-45c4-a5d4-bdbc0413b30a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mobile Phones Used by Children<|ARGUMENT|>Mobile phones are now a valuable part of student life. Because parents feel their children are safer carrying a phone, they are more likely to allow them to travel to school on their own rather then driving them. This promotes greater independence for the children, while taking traffic off the roads which is environmentally-friendly. Like many other things girls! boys! the view out of the window! mobiles can be distracting in class but this doesn\u2019t mean they should be banned. Many schools allow phones to be carried providing they are turned off in lesson.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mobile phones are now a valuable part of student life. Because parents feel their children are safe...\n","id":"678413f5-380b-4d7f-8bd4-dc8893d91788"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Dictionary.com defines a sport as \u201can athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.\u201d When people argue about marching band being a sport, they point to the long hours and practice that they do. Having been in marching band in high school, I agree that it is physically taxing. Firefighting is also physically tasking. Is that considered a sport? Definitely not. However, it\u2019s the \u201cof a competitive nature\u201d where marching band falls short. Marching bands have competitions, yes. 100 , I was in many of them. But is marching band \u201cof a competitive nature\u201d? Is marching band inherently competitive? Does marching band need competing groups to be what it is? No. If you marching band does not participate in band competitions and instead just performs at football halftime shows and parades, it\u2019s still a marching band. If a basketball team doesn\u2019t play against other basketball teams, is it still a basketball team? That\u2019s definitely debatable. Marching band belongs under the category of art rather than sport.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marching band is NOT a sport.\n","id":"e3236a4c-7f58-4d26-8abf-e1d0d6c5d613"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I once saw a therapist who had an extremely detrimental effect on my mental health. I decided to leave a brief online review on Google Business about my experiences with the therapist. Mysteriously , the honest review somehow got deleted, restoring her to a five star rating thanks to a flawless review authored by her co worker. I reposted my review again, and she had the new review deleted. I decided to leave detailed reviews on various health care provider review sites. In response, she essentially threatened that I did not remove the reviews, or if I were to ever post another negative review about her in the future, she would sue me. We undeniably live in the age of the internet. Customers look to online reviews before spending money. Therapy is expensive, and a huge time emotional commitment, so if my therapist was able to get away with editing her online reviews, I can imagine that other companies, especially those with more money than my therapist who charge less for their services products, can get away with this kind of manipulation as well. I believe that for any business, online review manipulation is dishonest, highly unethical, and, in the United States, in violation with the First Amendment. Thus, companies do not have the right to edit their reviews and or otherwise silence those that speak out against their services. EDIT As some posters have rightfully brought to my attention, sometimes companies need to remove reviews that consist of spam, illegal content, etc. I read over Google's guidelines for acceptable reviews, as far as I can tell, my reviews passed them. I don't know how my reviews got deleted, but I have seen third party companies online that can help manipulate online reviews for a fee. Some would argue that businesses should be able to manipulate their reviews if they pay for it and can get someone else to do it. However, I believe that no business has the right to remove content that is merely unflattering and not objectively bad.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Businesses do not have the right to manipulate online reviews\n","id":"db14e5a8-4259-4e38-a24c-4aee0f5804d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a constitutionalist. I think we need to follow the letter of the constitution, and when we want to do something that's not constitutional, we have to amend it. Congress is supposed to declare war. The NSA, TSA and all other organizations made in the name of security that deprive Americans of ther rights and liberties are unconstitutional. The duties of the federal government are listed very specifically in the Constitution, and the 10th amendment guarantees all other powers not specifically enumerated in the constitution, regulatory and police powers, to the states. The ninth amendment guarantees all other rights to the people not enumerated by the Bill of Rights. The federal government was meant to do a few explicit tasks and only those. Today, the federal government lays sovereign claim to all regulatory power of anything that even suggests it might involve interstate commerce one of the few regulatory duties enumerated to the federal government in the Constitution . For example, in the early 20th century, it took a freakin constitutional amendment to ban alcohol. 50 years later a presidential administration decided to declare war on drugs and the legislature created laws and bureacracies that the federal government has no authority to do. If there needed to be an amendment to prohibit alcohol, how can the federal government ban drugs in every state? That power should be held by the states. The integrity of the Constitution is 100 the most important part to our free society, and every time the Constitution is corrupted, it loses integrity. We have two political parties running the country, funded by corporations, that have no interest in repeal or limiting any of the scope of the federal government. The states are no longer given sovereign authority, they are essentially just administrative bodies used as a middleman between the Feds and the people. You want to guarantee healthcare to everyone? What a good cause Pass an amendment, then after that happens you have the authority to do so. You want to change the interpretation and wording of the second amendment? Pass another amendment. You want to change how someone becomes a fucking citizen? You better pass a fucking amendment. I'm of the opinion that democrats and establishment republicans are two and the same, and that neither seem to actively campaign for repeal reduction of the government to its constitutionally defined role. This leaves few options through the democratic process. Edit strike on poorly worded and potentially incorrect statement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a constitutionalist who believes that America is continuing on a dangerous path that will end up damaging the union\n","id":"c9ff7c11-4348-45c1-bd8d-3ad6819b3485"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people be free to choose the country in which they live?<|ARGUMENT|>Borders are arbitarary constructs, often a product of wars which took place centuries ago, other times with reasons which are no longer valid or without any justification at all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nations are social constructs and not absolute truths, so the existence of borders is something politically questionable.\n","id":"035fcffb-d929-490d-8e96-97705757918f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the European Union the greatest political peace accomplishment in modern History?<|ARGUMENT|>As for today, we don't know other political structures that permits peace between states, as good as the EU does with such cultural diversity and violent history between those states.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union is the greatest peace accomplishment in political history.\n","id":"039e7db6-7663-4b48-8e2f-098d07e27297"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>enable free movement of labour across Africa to alleviate poverty disparities.<|ARGUMENT|>Even without the implementation of a free labour market, migration will continue informally; therefore policies introducing free movement and providing appropriate travel documents provides a method to manage migration. In the case of Southern Africa, the lack of a regional framework enabling migration is articulated through the informal nature of movement and strategic bilateral ties between nation-states. Several benefits arise from managing migration. First, speeding up the emigration process will provide health benefits. Evidence shows slow, and inefficient, border controls have led to a rise in HIV\/AIDs; as truck drivers wait in delays sex is offered1. Second, a free labour market can provide national governments with data and information. The provision of travel documentation provides migrants with an identity, and as movement is monitored, the big picture of migration can be provided. Information, evidence, and data, will enable effective policies to be constructed for places of origin and destination, and to enable trade efficiency. Lastly, today, undocumented migrants are unable to claim their right to health care. In Africa, availability does not equate to accessibility for new migrants. In South Africa, migrants fear deportation and harassment, meaning formal health treatment and advice is not sought Human Rights Watch, 2009. Therefore documentation and formal approval of movement ensures health is recognised as an equal right. 1 See further readings: Lucas, 2012.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Implementing a free labour market will enable effective management of migration.\n","id":"c5ce319e-fb84-4520-8b77-a88ebd2453d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>The assumption that one is able to define hate speech also gives people not just governments the unfounded belief that their personal opinions override and have legitimate power over the opinions and freedom of others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The definition of hate speech is subjective. Being able to define hate speech gives the government too much power.\n","id":"10691625-05f2-477a-a504-c410d72c1325"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>While white women and mainstream feminists provided significant support to Mitt Romney in the 2012 US presidential election, it was women of colour voters who were able to push the overall women's vote in favour of Barack Obama.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alongside the increased presence of women of colour running for office, women of colour are increasingly being recognised as an important voting bloc whose needs must now be explicitly addressed by candidates and political representatives.\n","id":"511cc3b5-79b4-4014-bcd5-f700fa4b1983"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>tibet should be an independent state<|ARGUMENT|>Due to systematic campaign of Sinocization, millions of Han Chinese have been encouraged to settle in Tibet, and with the support of the government they now dominate the economy and upper echelons of the administration. Demographically Tibetans are rapidly becoming a minority within their own country, and administratively this has already taken place. While short of open genocide, the intent of the Chinese government is quite clearly the elimination of the Tibetan people as a distinct national, cultural and linguistic group. Not only are they attempting to drown them through settlement, but Tibetan students are forced to learn Mandarin in the schools and are being taught that they are Chinese. While there may well have been past periods of Chinese sovereignty, the policies of the current Beijing government seem designed to produce an outcome far more permanent than those past efforts which respected Tibetan identity and culture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tibetans are rapidly becoming a minority in their own country\n","id":"ce6adfd2-17a1-4afc-9d87-53300ae235d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The release of Pokemon Go has been met with excitement from many people of older ages, and very likely even more from a younger generation with ample free time, keen on exploring the world around them. I am not arguing from a profit based perspective I'm arguing from a moral based perspective. I have no doubt it will put millions into the pocket of Nintendo upon release. The release of this app is incredibly dangerous to the safety of children. While something like a Pokewalker would simply require a child to walk down the street, walk down a treadmill, or simply around their yard, Pokemon Go requires children to explore outside the confines of where they previously played into the wilderness, unsafe neighborhoods, or through known areas but with dangerous obstacles. We hear horror stories of kids being kidnapped, lost, or killed by wandering unsupervised into places they shouldn't have. Before they did it for simple curiosity, now they have an incentive to explore different areas for the incentive of an addicting new Pokemon game. This is likely to increase the danger kids already experience. A Pokemon shown to be in an area like past a fenced off no trespassing area, across a river or iced over river with thin ice , jagged rocks, etc. would encourage a normally reluctant explorer to try and traverse the obstacle to get to it. A kid could be in the middle of the forest relying on the GPS in their phone to get back home , and, being an irresponsible child who doesn't know any better, have their phone die and become lost and doomed to exposure or wild animals if they're deep enough inside it. A kid simply exploring unsupervised slightly further down the street, or in the next neighborhood could be a target for kidnapping. Yes, children should be supervised during their play, BUT they currently aren't, and this new application will only encourage more unsupervised play and create more unnecessary danger for children. I'm sure Nintendo will have an age requirement, but we've all been kids, and we've all logged onto the Pokemon website and lying about our age to get access. In all, this game will lead to the death of many children, and we've had products taken off the market for the death or potential deaths of individual children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pokemon Go should not be released.\n","id":"22524241-bba6-400e-bacb-51459e80e514"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion was a good thing for humankind when we had neither philosophy nor science and religion exercised the imagination and created culture and folkloric bases. Now, after the achievement of science and logic, religion has massively contributed to the disbelief of these ways of reaching knowledge and religion continues to control cultures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Arguably, religion \"was\" a good thing for humankind in times of ignorance. but its importance in today's society needs to be phased out. At present, we need to operate on facts and evidence, and not on past beliefs rooted in ignorance.\n","id":"cf2a7e7a-db51-497a-ae82-4d42313fc50e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>We observe that people have various moral opinions, that is ideas about what is evil. These things exist and are considered evil. Therefore the concept of evil exists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea of evil refers to meaningful parts of the human experience and can therefore be talked about, even if \"evil\" doesn't in a strong metaphysical sense.\n","id":"d95b250f-de41-4939-8fc7-a85601d70d4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>Artha is equated with the accumulation of wealth, building relationships, finding your role in society, giving life meaning. However, it should all be for common good. Periodically, you give away your personal wealth to those who may be in greater need. At the last \"stage\" of life, you are expected to give up everything an become a \"sanyasi\" or monk, though in practice, \"sanyasi\" is more a state of mind than a physical situation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The four objectives of life are: Dharma duty, Artha wealth, Kama pleasure and Moksha realisation. The English translations are very loose as these words cannot really be explained, and there is no equivalent in English.\n","id":"dfe4389c-85c4-4446-9739-b072b15873da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>3D Printer and Guns: Should Blueprints of 3D-Printed Weapons be Prohibited?<|ARGUMENT|>3D printing makes illegal proliferation of guns conceivable. Michigan State Law Review, 2014:187, p. 196.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blueprints for 3D-printed firearms should be prohibited from publication on the internet.\n","id":"451c9485-0e5b-4db9-86a0-3abd415b1fab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>MBA<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that many employers are willing to pay for employees to go back to school and get their MBA demonstrates the value of the MBA. Businesses would simply not do this if they did not feel that there would be a solid return on investment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Employers pay for employee MBAs because it's a good investment.\n","id":"db52221c-1a3e-457b-aff9-720c5ca17324"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The discussion of the new defaults has a number of people complaining that default status is going to ruin their favourite sub. r TwoXChromosomes is a notable example of this. The explanation is that, supposedly, default status leads to lots of trolls and low content posters invading the sub and reducing its quality or at least shifting it away from how it used to be in a way the user doesn't like. I am sceptical. To be sure, I'm no fan of the low content image based posting found in say, r funny . But I don't think its default status has much to do with it. I think that rules and moderation standards are much more influential. If enforced properly, most of the low content posting should be able to be stopped. I also wonder if confirmation bias explains the apparent declines in newly minted defaults. From my observations before and after some subreddits were defaulted, I can't see any obvious changes. Furthermore, I think having a wide array of defaults helps make reddit more selective towards the kind of user the types of people complaining about this would prefer. Low content posters migrate to reddit in part because the front page is filled with low content. If the front page is more diverse and high content , then it should attract a more diverse and high content crowd accordingly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think giving a subreddit default status is bad for it.\n","id":"8fd4406e-6751-4a9f-a5c9-3d9dbcf4efac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>In the status quo, many voters always vote for the same party, often due to the parties broad left\/right spectrum. Under Liquid Democracy voters could research and delegate their vote smartly for each subject, letting them vote with more specific democratic will than a broad left\/right divide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liquid Democracy would reduce the power of political parties, lessening the negative effects of party politics.\n","id":"f0bcce97-736f-499a-9a81-3b2adc0dfc70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Evil enables the existence of vices like cruelty as well as the existence of virtues. Insofar as the existence of virtues is morally good, the existence of vices is presumably morally bad.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if virtues require the existence of evil, a world with no evil and no virtues is better than a world with evil and with virtues.\n","id":"85dc93bc-8288-43ec-b2f2-1fffee61e416"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Businesses Deny Service to Trump Administration Officials?<|ARGUMENT|>Since parts of the narrative are likely based on exaggeration and falsehood, it is doubtful that the truth of the matter makes a large difference.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Trump administration does this regardless of whether they're valid in that or not.\n","id":"bb5c647b-932c-4105-9d71-e15ffeba46d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There\u2019s a new internet trend where women publicly shame men who send them abusive or hostile messages on online dating sites like OkCupid and Tinder byefelipe The creator of the account, Alexandra, thinks it\u2019s misogyny and a toxic sense of entitlement Misogyny is commonly defined as a hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women. And yes, if these men were misogynists, their messages would probably look a lot the one\u2019s in Alexandra\u2019s collection. But \u201cmisogyny\u201d is unnecessarily used here as a label for a more common and less complex behavior that many people exhibit. Young boys and immature men often have temper issues that result in a bout of low grade insults. Whether they\u2019re denied a chance at having sex or making the game winning headshot these men who can\u2019t control their anger will eventually make it known. Labeling this sore loser behavior popping up in online dating as \u201cmisogynistic\u201d might be technically correct, but it distracts us from what\u2019s actually going on There\u2019s a population of men whose egos are constantly battered by frequent rejection, all the while feeling hopeless, frustrated, and confused throughout the beating. With their egos in critical condition, they desperately look for a quick relief. And blaming women who reject them does the job well. It absolves them from taking personal responsibility for their failures, which helps their ego live to see another day. They\u2019ll believe they\u2019ve been playing the game right all along, and that they\u2019re only being rejected because she\u2019s a huge bitch, highly superficial, low class, or just clueless about social dating norms. But these are the smarter and more mature sore losers. Most don\u2019t even bother rationalizing their anger, they just feel a strong impulse to harm that which they hate. Bye Felipe is a symptom of a larger problem, but mainstream feminist perspective is too blind sided by their agenda to realize that the problem is unrelated to misogyny and self entitlement. The problem is that immature, low self esteem men who don\u2019t understand women have started online dating. These men should be getting help instead of being publicly shamed. Bye Felipe doesn\u2019t address the underlying issues, it just showcases the symptoms. It\u2019s analogous to posting videos of people with Tourette's syndrome cursing women in public and blaming it on the patriarchy without acknowledging the Tourette's.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bye Felipe is exploiting insecure men in order to push their feminist agenda\n","id":"ed5eb6a9-c3ef-41f7-81fa-5256401655a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By polygamy I mean any combination of multiple spouses, not just the one man plus multiple woman connotation it has today though that's a main point of my view . Basically, legalizing polygamy in today's society would be a terrible idea, due to simple math. Since the human gender ratio is 1 1, if for example every man took x wives, only 1 x of all men would actually be able to do this. The end result as with most polygamous societies in the past is a small number of elite men hoarding all the women. All the other men are left spouseless. What's the best way to start a war? Lots of angry young men. The only way this could be avoided is if all the other types of polygamy polyandry, same sex polygamy were also legalized AND there were no cultural taboos against them. That way all the different types of polygamous marriage will be balanced and everyone can be a part of one. Since that obviously isn't the case today, IMO any rational person should support monogamous marriage, i.e. polygamy should not be legalized in general or for specific groups like Mormons or Muslims. Polygamy may have worked in the past when lots of men went off to die in wars, but not today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polygamy is a terrible, terrible idea.\n","id":"8abdf6eb-37da-4cf9-a519-67419216098d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>Research points that inclusive and gender equal markets are achievable through key legal, collective and voluntary measures including salary transparency, improving workers rights, measures to make family and work more compatible or increased support for working parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some government policies seem effective to at least reduce the gender pay gap.\n","id":"f68343da-38a3-45dc-8b84-7cebb282c0cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is enlightened despotism superior to democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Democracies are vulnerable to populists seducing and corrupting the masses. A despot relying on expert support does not have this problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democracy is a deeply flawed system of government, in ways that Enlightened Despotism is not.\n","id":"5c12310d-7ef8-45ed-ab14-477d122b8fe5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>The idea that crime is crime no matter how it occurs actually stems from criminal law \u2014 not tort civil claims. Basically, if someone steals from someone, the way it happened i.e. the medium is irrelevant. Regardless if it happened at gun point or by mail\/wire fraud, the act is still punishable by law. If a crime happens in the virtual sphere, and another suffers damage because of it, it is still a crime. The mere fact that it happened in a virtual space does not matter \u2014 damage was done.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In tort law, a plaintiff generally has a claim so long as the damage is real. That is, the claim cannot be based on what might happen or be hypothetical. This is true no matter what medium the damage or injury occurs \u2014 real or virtual. As long the damage is real, there is a basis for legal action.\n","id":"3cef0a43-02bf-4263-bd80-0fda90708673"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Employment for locals is marginal as only 946 people are employed in the total Ugandan gorilla industry. Likewise Rwandan national parks only employ 180 local people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The economic benefits local communities receive as side-effect from gorillas are marginal.\n","id":"0f80e764-22b3-4037-919c-e156639a7daa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is mostly historical, not anything modern. Just throwing that out there. In principals of american politics class at my university, we're learning about the anti federalists. After reading the writings Brutus, Federalist Farmer, Agrippa, and Centinel, I find that most of their arguments aren't very solid or convincing at all. It's almost as if they're saying This is important, they're taking away our rights but don't give any proof or example to it. But to some, I know they think the anti federalists were very important and offered great arguments against the Constitution. After all, they were successful in getting a Bill of Rights added on. So please change my view or at least shed some new light on it. I'd appreciate it if you stayed towards the documents I listed as I haven't read much other than that. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Anti-Federalists did not offer strong arguments against the Constitution and barely succeeded in getting a Bill of Rights.\n","id":"facc08af-165c-4b2f-a658-243cc8aa8210"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be testosterone limits in women\u2019s sports?<|ARGUMENT|>Women with intersex variations should get the same rights to dignity and bodily integrity as all women. Hence women should not be made to undergo unnecessary medical intervention to alter their hormone levels, simply because their naturally occurring testosterone is atypical.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Female athletes shouldn\u2019t be penalized for something outside their control.\n","id":"b31fc737-b7ee-4937-a56f-b1d29ba92869"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that Adblock is immoral. Free content is usually only free or cheap content is usually only cheap because of advertising. To me, advertising is the price of admission to the content you're using, and if you don't want to be advertised to you shouldn't use the content, and using Adblock isn't all that much different than sneaking into a movie or torrenting copyrighted material. You're experience is slightly more convenient, but that convenience comes at the expense of content creators. I've gotten into this debate on Reddit a few times, and I think that the people in this sub will be able to make more persuasive, less smug arguments than the people I've encountered on, say, Askreddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Adblock is wrong.\n","id":"edfa0812-8ff1-45d0-a6a3-5a536dc3433d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We are alone in the universe.<|ARGUMENT|>The question of UFOs is taboo amongst scientists, making it difficult for most to seriously consider pursuing any research regarding the topic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The lack of conclusive evidence for extraterrestrial life is a result of structural limitations.\n","id":"80c3aea4-cba0-44db-9571-dd6e97268980"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been on Reddit for a number of years now and I think my biggest pet peeve beside terrible mods is the down vote system. this is starting out like I'm a whinny twat hmm I think to many times it a tool for a majority to silence a minority opinion even if it has merit. I could go over to r gamming and say N64 is the best system for bla bla reasons. And all the fan boys from other systems can down voting me to oblivion. Even if my reasons are sound, I make and articulate point, put effort into my post. A lazy majority can cruise my N64 Dream boat post to never gonna see the light of day Island. I think the down vote system makes this site weaker. More an more I see low content no thought posts making the front of many subs. I see legitimate posts get down voted for the dumbest of reasons. I believe removing the down vote promotes conversation. I think it entourages actually engagement. And I don't think it would effect the amount of awesome shit that happens on Reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit should remove the down vote.\n","id":"d96f457b-f63d-453a-a0a8-f7444e8a3b05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Harmfulness of Facebook<|ARGUMENT|>Social networking sites allow people to create a \"mask\" and claim to be a completely different person from who they really are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social networking sites make it possible to maintain fictional identity.\n","id":"5e26891f-8b8d-4f99-8304-c1cd7f0472b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Rebuilding New Orleans<|ARGUMENT|>Former Oregon State Rep. Chris Beck D-Portland. \"Why should we bother rebuilding New Orleans?\". Oregonian. News 2007 - \"If we can't, or don't want to, save New Orleans, then we are essentially abdicating our national responsibility to get it right when it comes to the most troubling parts of our history: slavery and its troublesome aftermath. Yes, of course, plenty of other cities have racial problems that can and should be dealt with. But New Orleans is where the best and worst of it has found voice, and it behooves us to save this cherished chunk of our past and present, to understand our past so we can be reminded we still have a lot of work to do.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rebuilding New Orleans is key to improving US race relations\n","id":"84ca124b-8312-44fe-9288-62669cce6e32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that welfare states cause their populations to become more and more short sighted. I think that a major reason for the decline of the Roman Empire was due to the allotment of bread and circuses to keep Romans content while losing all ambition to strive for greatness. America's push for growth and prosperity in the 1900s was driven by a desire to ensure that those today would be well of, and we are, but increasingly less so. All of Western Civilization has adopted some level of welfare, and I don't think that welfare is necessarily a bad thing, but because it creates a feeling of entitlement to a certain standard of living the population becomes less able to bear times of hardship and strife. We are unable to imagine life without a constant stream of bread and circuses . In America, there seems to be little appreciation for how much wealth we actually have, and how hard previous generations worked to obtain that wealth. Am I wrong? TL DR Current generations are content to coast on the hard work of previous ones, and that's a bad thing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that welfare states lead their societies to be less innovative, competitive, and ambitious,\n","id":"1e1f70da-5ea2-472d-a953-c6d421b37d7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>People are motivated to make the best out of the present and use every opportunity that comes their way because they know that opportunities are limited and the time to use them is finite. Living forever would take away this motivation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Life has meaning because of its brevity. If people lived forever, that meaning would be lost.\n","id":"e70e18ba-b108-4974-9b62-c77202d86b5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In confined animal feeding operations CAFOs pigs have their tails cut off, chickens have their toenails and beaks clipped off, and cows have their horns removed and tails cut off with no painkillers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Raising animals in confinement, deprived of sunlight, natural soil and freedom to move, is cruel and against their nature.\n","id":"8f47c031-882c-4f7e-948a-91002a0ae308"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Monarchs have a vested interest in the success of their reign and passing off a prosperous kingdom to their heirs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A monarch has a vested interest in a country's success since a country's well-being ensures the monarchy's survival.\n","id":"160a57b3-9411-4ff7-a4f7-708bab3da71f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>People unaware of or uninterested in the moral implications of eating meat would not be likely - or in some cases, even able - to associate its taste with something which is not prominent - or even existent, in some cases - in their minds.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no data to suggest that the thought of animal suffering accompanies the taste of meat.\n","id":"f4e49cf3-1e94-483b-9c21-154a9ce88c7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The basis of my philosophy regarding this comes from Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche said, \u201cWhen marrying, ask yourself this question Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.\u201d I think Nietzsche is correct in saying this is all it boils down to. You must marry someone you find compelling and fascinating to talk to. If that is the case, the little things in life like irritating living habits become unimportant compared to the admiration you have for the person's intellect, making the 'trial run' of living together before marriage unnecessary. Additionally, who you marry is one of the most important life decisions and I think there needs to be as much at stake in this decision as possible. The more you are throwing into this decision, the more you need to be excited and willing to bring on the change. Moving in together at the time of marriage is a great way to make the stakes of this decision even higher. If the idea of moving in together is not absolutely thrilling, no matter what lifestyle conflicts arise, then you will know you aren\u2019t ready yet. When moving in together is simply a trial run, you are not forced to approach the decision that way and the later decision to marry the person doesn't seem like a big change. Without very high stakes it is easy to make the wrong decision. Finally, studies show the quality of marriages is higher for those who don\u2019t cohabit before marriage. According to an article in The Telegraph which refers to a study by Denver University, About one in five of those who cohabited before getting engaged had since suggested divorce compared with only 12 percent of those who only moved in together after getting engaged and 10 percent who did not cohabit prior to the wedding bells.\u201d They found the reported quality of marriages to be higher for those who did not cohabit before marriage as well. These reasons lead me to believe living together before marriage is not a necessary step and could even harm the quality of the future marriage, but I am young and have not experience marriage so if you think this is an important step that must be taken, change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Living together before marriage is unnecessary and even harmful\n","id":"8ed38e42-ab76-446c-82d0-6121ac40f0c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would argue that, with the notable exception of minor children, people consent to ride in cars with drunk drivers. Most people who ride with drunk drivers know the driver is drunk, and the group all together had decided to drive drunk. If one party had offered to pay for an Uber, or the group had not decided all together to go to Waffle House or what not, then they wouldn't be drunk driving. Yes, of course the driver is the most responsible party, but everyone in the car has at least consented to be put into a dangerous situation, if not contributed directly to the decision to put the car on the road in the first place. If a car with a drunk driver gets into an accident which kills their passengers, this should be treated very differently then if the driver were to hit another car on the road, killing its occupants, who did not have any role in that decision. Additionally, as someone who was once involved in a drunk driving accident as a passenger, who was injured but obviously not killed, I didn't want anything bad to happen to my friend that was driving. She was and still is one of my dearest friends and I know she would never deliberately hurt me, why would I want her to go to jail? Even in the case of a deceased victim, I think it's fair to say that the victim might not have wanted their friend to be locked up. I do understand punishing drunk drivers who kill their passengers to some level, however I think that if a drunk driver were to kill an innocent person or family, that is objectively far worse than killing one's passenger, and as such should be punished much more harshly<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Drunk drivers who kill their passengers should be punished less severely than drunk drivers who kill strangers\n","id":"f3bdda60-91c7-4aa1-b94f-52af906e2c1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that my opinion is biased as I live in a relatively thin part of the United States. I am also an 18 year old male and have a fast metabolism, yet I feel that I could be fat if I wasn't conscious about what I eat and didn't exercise regularly. I honestly believe that most people have the ability to choose to eat less more healthy as well as find some time somewhere in their day to get 30 minutes of physical activity resulting in a healthy weight. t I believe that through my own experience by skipping 2 or 3 meals in a day your stomach shrinks significantly so that hunger pains don't distract you throughout your day allowing you to reduce caloric intake. Since I recognize this as a choice to be remain overweight I can't see it as a disease. Smoking isn't a disease and it is a choice. Also based on obesity statistics if obesity is a disease we have a serious epidemic on our hands.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe 90% of obese people are so by choice and that obesity shouldn't be classified as a disease by the AMA.\n","id":"64049f2b-e167-417d-82bd-291baa4a35b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Since implementing strict gun laws in 1996 the UK has not had a mass shooting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having fewer guns in circulation means society is generally safer.\n","id":"eb4a7fc0-ae3d-4600-a041-cda10475a790"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think Comcast is the horrible corporation the majority of reddit makes it out to be. My evidence will admittedly be anecdotal. But honestly so are the complaints I hear about or read especially here on reddit. I'd like to present several examples of why I've been impressed or pleased with Comcast's service. My service is literally never down and I always get the speeds I pay for. The one time service failed in my neighborhood over the past year, it was due to a massive power outage that affected numerous homes in my neighborhood. Shortly after the power failure, I got a call from a Comcast service tech he randomly selected me from a list of known customers in my apartment building to confirm the outage was due to power and not a Comcast issue. I was impressed by this proactive measure as it seemed to fly in the face of many of the complaints I read about here. Prices are fair. Full disclosure I only use cable internet, not cable TV. For my first year in my new city, I paid 29.99 for 10 Mbps under a promotion. A month before my promotion was due to expire, I got a call from a customer service rep letting me know my promotion was ending and my monthly rate was about to double. To keep this from happening, she offered to put me into a new promotion for 15 more, this plan with even more speed, for the next year. This move also impressed me as this really wasn't in Comcast's best interest as they have a monopoly on my entire apartment building through a contract with the property manager, we have no choice but to subscribe to them, so they could practically charge me whatever . So instead of paying 60 for 10 Mbps, I now pay 45 for 25 Mbps, a move they were under no obligation to do. Customer service is decent. I had a slight issue with my new contract with I signed up for the new plan. And while I had some frustrations, I expected as much from such a large company dealing with so many calls. Eventually when my call was escalated and I explained my problem, I was actually put into a better plan than I initially signed up for due to my frustrations something I didn't ask for . I've had to deal with Comcast for the past 6 7 years. They had the city I moved from locked down and monopolized. And my current living situation as noted above doesn't allow options either. But honestly I'm not upset by that. Internet is consistent and reliable. Service techs are on time. Issues are resolved. And the price I pay isn't unreasonable. Their rates for cable are probably horrible, but I haven't paid for TV in years as is this trend with many people now anyway . So I think it's fair to assess them on their cable internet service alone. Do I look forward to Google Fiber? Hell yeah. But until then, I'm not that bad off. So . And before you label me a shill and move on, please review my post history. In the past 2 years, I've hardly, if ever, commented on Comcast. I just don't see why the hate is justified.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Comcast isn't that bad.\n","id":"48e54728-060f-4c0c-9ee9-fac6711f2cdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is killing vampires immoral?<|ARGUMENT|>Vampires such as the Cullens in the Twilight saga or Stefan Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries can learn to repress their bloodlust and practise self-restraint, so as not to present a danger to humans they share a community with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are solutions other than killing vampires to allow humans and vampires to coexist.\n","id":"10a9742b-1791-478a-bc55-306f73e7fe57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The binary thinking that society bring upon us, is the one responsible for transgenderism and many surgeries would never had happened, were it not for the social construct of giving to boys car toys and to girls baby dolls, so in a sense, it is the fault of these society rules, that the misery and debate of transgenderism exists. Binary thinking the reason why the transgender debate is completely focused on the wrong things, the real enemy of the transgender people is not their organs, but mostly society and the binary roles of man and women, which all starts in the crib, when boys are forced to wear blue and girls pink.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are no girls nor boys toys, this is all a social construct with no basis in reality.Thus I believe many transgenders are victims of binary thinking.\n","id":"5389e565-c750-4f0b-9f19-07a0108180a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally feel that we live in a world where society demands so much from us from the day we're born till we leave our jobs. We study hard in school, work harder at our jobs and do what society needs and demands. The problem of our time, I feel, is after we have passed the most productive and successful days age, we're left to rot. We have no purpose. I look at old people around me 65~80 and see how so little they have to do. They sit around, observe the world and dont cant do much that inspires them totally subjective tho . I just dont know what I'd do during my senior days as they seem so boring.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Theres no point in growing old, you might as well die at around 60\n","id":"2b676ebc-fd39-4619-92b5-fa5c4aa7e7ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>No deals are permanent. Accepting and abiding by this deal now is a way of strengthening our position during later interactions with the British.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Option \"One\": Agree and then honor the agreement. Become the slave police.\n","id":"555d3ea0-e54a-42da-9a54-02d94b45614c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Colonize Venus Before Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>Venus and Earth are between 38 million km and 261 million km Mars and Earth are almost twice as far apart: between 56 million km and 401 million km The average distance between Earth and Mars is .52AU while the average distance with Venus is .28AU.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Venus is closer than Mars, so the travel time and resources associated are lessened.\n","id":"1c34fbfe-f0ba-4423-a7c6-3f8f588ac069"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Drones Should Be Used to Take Out Enemy Combatants<|ARGUMENT|>There is around 5 billion dollars that is allocated for drones in the defense budget. This is only about one percent of the whole military budget. By comparison, the military's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program by itself costs the United States 9.7 billion dollars a year. US manned military attack aircraft cost up to 42 times more than drones to operate. Al Qaeda spent around half a million dollars to carry out the September 11th attacks. The US spent around 2.2 trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq and on homeland security in response. The disparity is enormous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Drone Use is Cheaper than Engaging in Ground or Manned Aerial Combat\n","id":"0b4bd251-7586-428e-9178-da79ff39a4f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public entities use only open source software?<|ARGUMENT|>This could let people fix software, since many times software created for public entities is useless because it is underdone or badly implemented.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You can look at the code and see what is doing.\n","id":"9e36fa6c-9e60-4b9e-90ed-bd9ada6c1fc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should bilingualism be mandatory in Canada?<|ARGUMENT|>Why would it only be English areas that reject forced bilingualism? Would this also not be a hard sell in areas with people who only speak French? Canadian bilingualism is meant to be a choice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Canada is a large country, and forcing bilingualism in the provinces further from the French hubs will be difficult.\n","id":"c170d440-fe0d-4a3b-b48f-93c2febb0801"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Explicit Internet Content Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The US a nation has no right to control content on an international service like the Internet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not the government's place to regulate ethical affairs.\n","id":"6afea946-99c1-46a5-9eea-05cb1a11d370"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey all, this has been something that has been bothering me in recent days. This is not to detract from the skill of the fighters and trainers. That isn't the part I take issue with have you ever fought for even a minute? In gear? That gets hot incredibly fast and it easily feels like you've been at it for an hour My issue stems from it seems to make the various styles being borrowed from meaningless. There is no service being paid to the traditions, philosophies, and histories behind the styles. It simply seems to boil down to find a way to incorporate this move into your repertoire to gain the upperhand. Also as a Chinese martial arts practitioner specifically, this really bothers me. I find my enjoyment of my training is partially derived from continuing a proud tradition of my father's people, keeping the knowledge alive for the next generation I help teach brand new students , instilling the values of martial ethics into students don't go picking fights, don't be a douche, etc. , and really respecting the culture your art came from such as lion and dragon dance, which I also partake in . I see none of that, especially in modern MMA. People seem to enjoy the brutality and arrogance displayed by some fighters. Ronda Rousey for instance. She kept bragging about her undefeated status, but her opponent Holly Holm could claim the same. At the same time, when she lost, a lot of people seemed to be cheering on her taking such a brutal kick to the head. I didn't like her, but fuck, why is it so cool to take joy in another person's pain to the point they're suicidal? This is one negative example and I know of examples of fighters actually helping their opponents in the face of a serious medical emergency, but overall, I feel the world of martial arts is made more shallow by the growing presence of UFC and MMA. I'd like help changing this view for two big reasons 1 I want to stop judging people who are into the sport when they themselves do not practice martial arts 2 Bruce Lee is an idol of mine and one of the big reasons I got into Gung Fu myself. I understand he's considered one of the great titans when it comes to the concept of MMA in general, so I'd like to see if I can view it in a less harsh light. With that, please feel free to try and cmv<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think MMA\/UFC make martial arts more shallow as a whole.\n","id":"f33736f8-20ca-4680-bc0f-254bf03690b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As long as the organisation that sets up the Christian presentation nativity scene, christmas tree, etc. does not actively seek to stop other religious presentations, such as in the case in Oklahoma, USA, where a statue of the 10 commandments was erected in front of a town hall and they are now actively opposing a Hindu statue and a Satanic statue. I understand that those who seek to ban faith based presentations should not be so hypocritical as to allow a Christian one, but if anyone, including an atheist, tries to oppose a Christian presentation on public property then we are just as bad as those people in Oklahoma. My main point is that any reasonable presentation, faith based or not, should be embraced. Please include legal specifics if you wish. I'm not from the USA so don't assume any Constitutional knowledge on my part. Change my view, reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As an atheist, I believe that I and others should NOT be offended by Christmas-themed presentations on public ground.\n","id":"1d997f2e-bf67-41dc-b9a5-45f07e8f899d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always heard that It seems the more religions I study the roots of, and the deeper I go, the more I find a common thread the harmony and proportion of shapes, created in spheres, is the seed of all religion and science. They go on, 1. Pythagoras worships the 10, he thought it was used to create souls in man through the use of the platonic solids. Finally, they say, in his grand analysis he uses the harmony of the spheres to name all things and know the whole of number. This lead to a radical awakening in Athens through socrates, Plato and Aristotle each one of these men say you must master geometry before reading their works. This eventually trickled into Rome, and spread through their whole world. 2. The first thing Adam does when he is born is name the plants and animals. God tells Adam to eat of the tree of life and not of the knowledge of Good and evil. He explained to me that the Pythagorean tree is the mathematical root for the creation of these trees but instead of taking the same triangles and squares each time, one is supposed to use gnomes which creates shadows triangles and squares to represent differing forms of things. Also, the Hebrew language is based on number, and kabbalah is the essence of this thinking. 3. The iching is a fortune telling system which uses binary mathematical ratios data to extract predictions from data. Confucius speaks constantly about the power of the iching, and finding the true thought to harmonize all things how when it is mastered he can live fifty extra years, and the eternal peace it will bring. 4. The ancient Hindu manuscripts talk about this same thing. 5. The stone hinge is a mathematical and mystical calendar for the harmonization of dates the ruins for the ancient vikings are mathematical symbols for naming. 6. Hermes was thrice great, and he reinvented Egypt on the principles of number and proportion. It goes on and on and on. This seems like far to obvious of a thing for people to miss. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"that every lasting and influential religion didn't start from a mathematical naming system for nature.\n","id":"780ef358-c961-4b8e-b45c-74caff60a4af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>In Christianity, for example, the commandment \"Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has created moral codes with features that are clearly not morals but merely tenets designed to control.\n","id":"eec5f089-249a-454a-bad4-57b0f952002f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>From the things I have observed through the little media I have seen in my life I believe that we are completely lied to, at least in the United States which is where I am from, by the media and by politicians. I think everything that the people who run our government are only concerned with money and power and will do anything to never portray what really goes in the world. I think we have done more to hurt the people in the middle east than we know or even think about. I have known a few people who have ben in the service and have ben told by all of them that it is not uncommon for our soldiers to rape women and kill children. So with that being said it is only a few of the reasons I believe the terrorist are justified in the actions they have made without getting too deep. I have read 3 books in my entire life and am not well educated. I thought what an interesting place to learn to write better. I am an artist and I have a lot of views and ideas that seem to other people out of the norm. I just hope I don't piss anyone off I know I probably sound stupid it is just difficult for me to get my voice across sometimes but with that being said I feel my ideas ring true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I truly believe \"terrorist\" are justified in doing what they have done.\n","id":"f0639f5a-ea50-49a4-bd0e-5f80bd190d8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Unless you are curing various cancers, PhDs or doctorates are just things people get because they can't get a job. Change my view please Edit also I feel this is kind of a rude opinion to have. I'm from Europe. This is a view that I've had for years, but I have my doubts about it because I've never talked about it with anyone else. So, I would like to get it out of my system for good. Most of the people I know have their masters degree and have gotten a job since obtaining their degree, but a few let's say 10 people have been unemployed for years, and have since applied to get their PhD. The fields vary from literature to biology to computer science. Not a lot of them have successfully obtained their phDs, btw. I realize this may be confirmation bias within my small social circle, but we'll see. I feel that PhDs with medical applications are more useful to society at large than other PhDs. Most of the PhDs I hear about these days are about things that I feel aren't useful 1 to the society at large. In literature, it's another study on these books using whatever criteria . In biology it might be a study on fruit flies where the results are without an application to humans. I don't have an example on CS. I've talked with other people at the university and they seem skeptical of PhDs as well, so maybe that has colored my view as well. This is my first  so please be gentle. 1 Useful here is something that can have an application in helping other humans, eg. medically or etc. I realize that reading a review of a novel can give pleasure to someone and therefore be useful, but I feel that's not the same thing as I discovered the cure for this type of breast cancer or this type of prostate cancer . EDIT There are two parts to my original post 1 Are PhD candidates from so called useless fields only motivated by their wish to get out of unemployment. It is probably difficult to obtain statistics on PhD candidates' motivations, because I would assume that nobody writes in their application I just need something to do while I'm out of work , I'm going to let that go. 2 Are PhDs from fields other than medical fields useful? I awarded a delta to u wugglesthemule for stating that in order for great leaps in medical field to happen, you need other fields like biology to achieve them. So far 1 is unanswered, 2 has a delta.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unless you are curing various cancers, PhDs or doctorates are just things people get because they can't get a job.\n","id":"612ec2c6-6fb7-492e-855d-3d0564231d90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Trump has been heavily criticized for his statements about wanting to build a 1,000 mile wall across the Mexican border. What has gotten almost no attention at all, especially from Democrats and the media, is both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted in favor to build a 700 mile fence across the Mexican border. IMO, if you're going to criticize Trump and call him a racist for wanting to build a 1,000 mile wall across the Mexican border then both Clinton and Obama should be seen as racists and heavily criticized for succeeded in building a 700 mile fence across the Mexican border. That Trump's wall would be 30 longer than Clinton and Obama's is hardly a reason for one to be criticized and called a racist but not the other. I also object to the idea that there's a significant difference between wall and fence . This is what Clinton and Obama's fence looks like. I think arguing that there's is a fence and not a wall is nothing more than semantics.  EDIT As pointed out by u phcullen, it's the Secure Fence Act of 200 6 not 2008.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Criticizing Trump over his plan to build a wall at the border while ignoring both Clinton and Obama's votes for the Secure Fence Act of 2008 is hypocritical.\n","id":"81a60254-ea22-41cb-a855-be0211b1e9a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should the Conservative Party choose to be the next UK Prime Minister?<|ARGUMENT|>During the referendum campaign Johnson supported Leave and is thus a better representative of the UK's agenda as expressed in the referendum than Jeremy Hunt.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Boris Johnson is better equipped than Jeremy Hunt to push a Brexit deal through Parliament.\n","id":"7e15f318-f645-453a-b772-ff4de719aac6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am basing this from my experiences both on reddit and in real life, and acknowledge this may not be the case everywhere, but here goes. I feel like the derogatory nature in which people refer to those who breathe through their mouth to be utterly baseless. People end up breathing through their mouth for many reasons, whether it be allergies causing a blocked nose, inability to breathe comfortably through the nose due to another medical condition or even just habit. It's not popular to shame fat people, and definitely not those with other medical conditions I feel it's a complete double standard that insulting this one habit is completely acceptable. Yes according to the Wikipedia page on Mouth breathing there are some negative side effects, but something tells me that people don't have these in mind when they shame someone as a mouth breather . How is it damaging? People will be led to being self conscious about breathing incorrectly in public, which is arguably the most basic human action. You wanna talk about self consciousness, here it is. Change my view, reddit. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The attitude towards \"mouth-breathers\" is completely unjustified and damaging,\n","id":"1f6a4471-cc25-4fce-bfda-8d6d0f6c607d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are battery electric vehicles better than hydrogen fuel cell vehicles?<|ARGUMENT|>When charging an electric car in a personal garage, the costs of travel are carried by the drivers household. This energy to refill the car battery can again be connected to solar cells or windmills - making the power use sustainable and off-grid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you can park your car on your own personal property e.g. a driveway or garage you can charge your car overnight.\n","id":"0e2b7e6b-2c46-49d9-a848-9ed77b0c6212"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Comparisons between beings that lack agency such as rocks and potatoes and those that do such as humans suggest the plausibility of claiming that being with agency are superior to those without agency.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is greater to a create a world with beings who can choose evil than one in which they cannot.\n","id":"45aea4f6-4aeb-4b5e-9961-8beb46b1300b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are approximately 11,000,000 illegal immigrants in the US, significantly higher than any other country on Earth. That's a larger population alone than most countries. Trying to deport them all is like scooping water out of a sinking ship with a bucket. It's ineffective, there will never be an end, and not only are we wasting tons of money doing it but we are missing a myriad of opportunities for our economy and for humans in general. So Implement a yellow card that is given to anyone who comes to is in the US without a visa or green card. The card is tied to an independent database for recordkeeping. Certain citizens can also obtain yellow cards if they choose to minors, felons, other people who may experience difficulty finding low pay work . Create a new type of business license that allows legal hiring of yellow card holders with strict parameters. For example, any business with fewer than x amount of employees and or a projected revenue of less than 1,000,000 per year or some other arbitrary number after some research is allowed to hire x amount of yellow card holders as employees, only for eligible positions. They can't be managers or supervisors, etc. The federal minimum wage would be lower for yellow card workers, maybe 5 an hour instead of 7.25. States would determine their own minimums. The catch is, if the business winds up making over 1,000,000 a year, they will have to pay 33 50 more in taxes, since they saved so much money on labor. They can then transfer to a standard business license, which would at that point make more sense for them financially. The idea is that it would make startup companies have a greater chance to succeed in the beginning when initial capital might be scarce and labor can break the bank, and more people be able to start businesses. Implement a banking service for yellow card holders maybe the post office thing could work here? . They would be able to have bank accounts at this bank, and obtain debit cards solely for domestic use, to increase economic stimulation. They would be subject to our criminal system. Lawsuits could garnish their wages, non violent criminals would be subject to community service, violent criminals well, I don't know about those yet. We could restrict the amount of public services they are eligible for, without trampling on human rights. Already, illegal immigrants and legal ones contribute way more in taxes than the tax benefits they receive. They would always be subject to inspection, and because their employment is now legal and recorded, we can actually determine which ones are beneficial and which ones aren't, and focus efforts on deporting only those who are not putting money into the tax pool. Because the card would grant a very limited amount of rights, if they plan to stay, they would be motivated to apply for visas, green cards, or citizenships which pay higher and have better benefits. Having a track record on hand would make the process easier for those who are good workers and have created relationships with citizens to obtain those visas and citizenships. Tons of new jobs would be created the enormous increase in demand for goods and services would create jobs, the opening of an entirely new federal agency would create government jobs, the implementation of a government banking system would create jobs. If 8,000,000 people paid a 15 income tax on a 5 hr, 40 hour workweek, that's an extra 11.5 billion of annual revenue in income tax alone. I know there are problems, obviously, but I'm convinced this is the start of an infinitely more effective system than what is currently happening. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Instead of deporting them, we should give illegal immigrants in the US a \"yellow\" card.\n","id":"fe86529f-76f8-4819-a648-5b6c7c7f3763"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Bernie Sanders has spent most of his campaign criticizing the DNC and suggesting that the way it has handled this primary season has been overwhelmingly undemocratic and unfair. I don\u2019t disagree with him, and I even voted for Bernie in my primary. We\u2019re now at a point where it\u2019s extremely unlikely that Bernie will gain the popular vote and a majority of the pledged delegates, which means that Bernie\u2019s only hope to clinch the nomination barring external factors is to somehow convince superdelegates to support him over Clinton. I believe this is hypocritical of him, and it\u2019s hypocritical of his supporters to support him in this. One of the key things that appeals to me and many other voters about Bernie is his integrity. For him to seek to go over the heads of the voters who have told him \u201cno,\u201d and try to get the nomination anyway clearly goes against a lot of what he stood for up to this point in his campaign. I understand wanting to win, and trying to win, but the moment it\u2019s confirmed that the popular vote and a majority of pledged delegates go to Clinton, continuing to appeal to superdelegates is hypocritical. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bernie Sanders and his supporters now turning to superdelegates is hypocritical.\n","id":"d9db8abc-367a-4c61-bdba-94f55582b7d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This legal debate has been settled in Canada for about a year now, but it still irks me when people say that a person wearing a niqab during the citizenship oath is 'concealing her identity.' Everyone already has to confirm their identity during the actual citizenship process, to make sure its them. That's fairly obvious. But if your Muslim faith is part of your identity, and your faith compels you to wear a niqab, then wouldn't it be hiding your identity not to wear a niqab during the public pronunciation of the citizenship oath? When you're making that pronunciation, I want you to do it as the person you're going to be every other day, not the false persona we feel more comfortable around for that one specific moment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a woman wears a niqab then I want her to wear it during the Canadian citizenship oath\n","id":"cc88e615-5005-4289-aaac-d4a052db88f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should legacy be a factor in college admissions?<|ARGUMENT|>All Chapters of Tri Delta Sororities automatically place legacy students at the top of their placement bid list.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"College fraternities and sororities often will themselves have legacy preferences in terms of who they admit.\n","id":"95f50ac3-f9c3-4d4e-96e4-39f056220523"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a long held view, but something happened earlier which made me want to express it. I am a gay man in my 30's, and every now and again I go on Omegle to chat to other gay people. I put 'gay' in the interest box and am paired with strangers who do the same. As anyone who frequents that site will know, a lot of people use the site to hook up with other people. I have a long term boyfriend however, so only use the site to chat to people and make friends. Earlier today, after a couple of nice conversations, I was matched with someone who claimed to be 13. I asked him how his day was going, and what he was up to. After about a minute of talking he accuses me of being a pedophile. I challenged him on this and asked him what I had said to make him think that, to which he suggested that it was obvious by virtue of the fact that I was even talking to him. It became apparent after this that the person was not in fact 13 he admitted to me that he comes to the site to 'catch out' predators. I pointed out to him that I had not said anything to indicate that I was predatory, or that my intention was to make the conversation sexual. He told me to fuck off, called me a rapey pedo, and disconnected. He connected with me again a few minutes later, I suspect being able to identify me from the way I started both conversations. During our second encounter he said he was 14 and said that he was into older . Not knowing it was him at the time, I ignored that comment and continued a relatively normal conversation with another person whom I believed was 14. He asked me if I liked boys, to which I responded that I liked twinks adult men with a particular body type . He then once again broke character and identified himself, suggesting that me talking to a 14 year old boys about twinks was proof of my perversion. I engaged with him on this point and explained that I think most gay 14 year olds are well aware of twinks, and that mentioning them was not inappropriate. After some more generic insults and wishes of death, he once again disconnected. During the conversation I explained to the guy that while there was nothing immoral about me having a non sexual conversation with a teenager, his dishonesty and some of the things he was saying telling me to kill myself for example , was. Lying to other people is immoral, and I don't believe honourable motives excuses that. My view that his catfishing behaviour is immoral is not specific to my experience, I think lying about who you are, even if you believe that you are doing it for noble causes, is immoral. Catfishes in this context are ultimately presenting themselves as somebody they are not, which means that everyone they meet including actual predators will be wronged by their deception. x200B I would love to know if anybody disagrees with me, and understand why. x200B Edit It's getting into the early hours and my brain is starting to hurt, so i'm going to call it a night, but will continue to respond to comments in the morning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Catfishing to catch potential sexual predators is immoral.\n","id":"e32c573f-2aba-422a-b967-4d2fd672ae33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have a good friend who fell into a drug addiction and became homeless in a major city for 8 months. After his recovery and return, we were walking through the city when we were solicited for cash by a homeless person. My friend compassionately declined and wished him well. This was his explanation Every homeless person in this city knows multiple places to eat and sleep tonight for free. Indiscriminately giving out cash only enables the addictions that keep most of them homeless. There are exceptions, of course, but addiction is the root issue for most of them. The money you hand out most often makes the individual's situation worse. The best way to care for the homeless is to give money to organizations that provide them with food, shelter, and treatment. At the time I did give money to panhandlers but this conversation . I'm a paramedic in a large, urban city and this is consistent with my personal experience as well. I make lots of runs on the homeless and have seen the many places that they can eat sleep mostly churches and that addiction is a major factor if not THE major factor for most of them. I acknowledge the prevalence of mental health issues in the homeless community but still hold that giving money to organizations that address this issue is superior to giving money directly to the homeless. I give monthly to my favorite organization that provides food shelter rehab and know where it is to direct panhandlers when I am solicited. I provide excellent field medical care to all homeless people that call. I refuse to give cash directly to the homeless and my conscience is clear. But if you can, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Giving cash to panhandlers is an unwise practice.\n","id":"540ea474-4341-46e9-9d00-51591044e211"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We can all agree that other characters like Spiderman, Superman, The Flash and so forth are all heroes. Why? They have powers related to their own body. They do not need some special kind of equipment to be able to use their powers, they're always there. Batman on the other hand, is just a rich guy with a bunch of toys and hand to hand combat training. How can he be a super hero if he doesn't have any powers? And yes, that makes Iron Man a part of this category as well. I'm just unsure how a man without any special abilities can be considered super . I'm not doubting he's a hero in and of itself that much is certain. But super ? I doubt it. So, Reddit. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- A bit of a lighter topic than what's usually posted here, but I do not believe Batman is a super hero.\n","id":"97efa17a-6039-4ec7-9a89-0074444f39b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's a longstanding joke throughout the internet that the Japanese come up with crazy TV shows or weird porn, but I can't help but feel as though there is something intrinsically wrong with Japanese culture. I know this is not a politically correct opinion at all which is why I am asking someone to change my view and by so many features, Japan seems like a fantastic place to be i.e. powerhouse economy in East Asia, high levels of public education, amazing life expectancy rates, a highly involved and civic minded society, amazingly clean ecologically visually cities, and the list goes on. Unfortunately, the long list of pros is marred by certain glaring cons most notably sexual attitudes in Japan. Sexual harassment is an enormous problem in Japan and is simply not addressed adequately either by society or the government. Japanese trains have had so many problems with groping that they have had to implement female only train cars Furthermore, Japanese students are encouraged to ride bicycles on their own instead to prevent such cases and while this measure makes sense, it seems to ignore changing the cultural attitudes ingrained in society that prevent women from speaking out or men from refraining from such actions. The degree to which pedophilia is accepted and even celebrated is especially disturbing. Although those who act on it and enough evidence is found will be prosecuted just like other countries, To a degree, it has become socially accepted to lust over young girls in Japan. As the NYT article goes on to say, many steps have been taken by the government to crack down on these images, but the laws are still far more lax than in other countries which still allow photoshoots of extremely young girls e.g. 6 years old It seems as though a lot of younger Japanese people simply don't know how to date interact with the opposite gender. Due to the bizarre sexual attitudes that a significant proportion of the Japanese male population holds, when it comes to actually interacting with women they simply can't do so. Obviously in such a heavily work oriented culture, it is difficult to find the time and resources to develop a relationship but is it really this that explains why the Japanese birth rate is so low that their country is in danger of having to support the oldest population in the world? Can it really just be summed down to work culture and expenses? The cult worship acceptance of certain high profile murderers rapists is another disconcerting point for me. One case that stood out in particular was Issei Sagawa who murdered and proceeded to eat a Dutch women. However, rather than people demanding the death penalty or life imprisonment for him and while I'm sure there were people who did, he became a celebrity in Japan and made a living off of his crimes. Additionally, I just came from a reddit thread in which redditors once again listed off disturbing things they had uncovered during their adventures throughout the Internet and I couldn't help but notice that cases of Japanese depravity cropped up once more which leads me to my final point and I guess the most controversial This section on history will be in three parts. History is a particularly vicious beast for any country that's been around long enough. Just in the past two centuries, the Germans have had their Holocaust, the Americans the practice of slavery and killing of native americans, etc However, the Japanese seemed to have particularly brutal practices in the period leading up to and during WWII. In the reddit thread listed above, there were cases of cannibalism by the Japanese of American servicemen the likes of which never really happened for the Allied powers. In reading Fly Boys, it wasn't out of necessity either these pilots were eaten so that the Japanese officers could become stronger warriors and consume their power. It was also seen as a delicacy of sorts among Japanese officers. History continued Secondly, the Rape of Nanking is possibly one of the most disturbing incidents in modern history. The absolute depravity of Japanese soldiers in cutting open pregnant women to make bets on the gender of babies, raping infants and old people, decapitation competitions, setting up comfort women stations and thus, establshing systematised sexual slavery all across the Pacific all have a certain psychosexual edge not present in other cultures as they fought their own wars. The Germans sought to create a perfect society and while there were definitely horrifying cases of depravity, it was conducted in a very scientific, cold, and calculating manner. The reason why the Nuremburg trials were so easy was because the germans kept meticulous records as to how many were killed, transported, imprisoned etc The Japanese on the other hand operated with uncontrolled and even encouraged savagery that did not place individuals into a system that they committed crimes through but with their own bare hands. This wanton bloodlust was su unnerving that even the Nazis tried to protect some Chinese people from the Japanese onslaught. History continued Unit 731 is especially notorious and is so disturbing that I really think that just reading the article is self explanatory. Experiments involving biological and chemical warfare and vivisection were commonplace and standard operating procedure in a camp like this and it just seems so uniquely sadistic that it's difficult for me to find countries that have done similar practices with elements being seen even today in culture. Note Not to sound pretentious, but I've read a considerable amount on Japanese history and culture in an attempt to understand why it is so. With the historical examples, I have heard that the reason why Japanese soldiers were so brutal was because they came from largely impoverished backgrounds and were incredibly angry at what they saw to be an incapable and weak government that was only repressing them. Thus, they took their rage out on people who they had been indoctrinated to believe were less than human with the Japanese being of a superior race. I know this is a very sensitive and personal topic for some and it's difficult for me to even write this because I hold no ill will towards them. I hope that you guys can change my view without just ignoring my points or accusing me of being a racist. Not that this changes anything, but I myself am Asian American which is a major factor as to how I have been educated about the Japanese and their historical actions.  Edit I just wanted to thank everyone who commented for giving me several things to think about. I found out while reading that my views were broadening and it is nigh impossible to say Japanese culture or any culture really is wrong. I have come to say that there are certain disturbing elements which I find unique to the culture that while present elsewhere are more emphasised in Japan. However, this may also be as some pointed out, confirmation bias. Although I can't say that my opinion has flipped, your input has given me much to think about and I really appreciate your not simply deriding and dismissing this controversial opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there is something inherently disturbing\/wrong with Japanese culture.\n","id":"0a2ea9bb-e9f3-4e71-8d9d-4a12284f788c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>A good solution would be to avoid sending those convicted of non-violent crimes to prison, but instead to a community centre for rehabilitation. With this they can perform community-based work for which they would be paid a minimum wage, given to them upon release to probation in order to help defer the cost of living. The current system simply does not work, and promotes re-offending.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The offender will be less likely to commit further crimes if there is an emphasis on rehabilitation while in prison.\n","id":"10520632-4dd9-4515-a2af-0404e1c319ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>If vigilantes can offer minorities and disadvantaged groups justice that they would otherwise be unable to access, then then vigilantism provides an important benefit in society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Racial and socio-economic biases in states' justice systems deny many individuals the justice and equality they deserve.\n","id":"f304e280-10c7-483b-a5b4-16256abf0795"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Welcome to T Tuesday, our weekly post where we can celebrate our ability to adopt a new mindset or gain another perspective. Tell us what experiences you've had outside our subreddit, either recently or in your lifetime, that made you think This Changed My View . Give us your stories in the comments You can consider these questions to help get you thinking Known or met someone with an interesting ideology or opinion that caused you to reconsider your own? Had an experience, good or bad, that changed your perspective? Learned something new that challenged what you believed? Ever have your tastes or interests changed? Read an article or seen a video that got you thinking differently? And just as a reminder, comment discussions here are not debate oriented, so there's no obligation to take opposing sides in conversations here in other words, Rule 1 does not apply here .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"T Tuesday - 10\/01\/13\n","id":"0ee7442b-53dc-451e-a347-eb6bf0353b80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On average, there is a 140 point affirmative action SAT bonus for being white as opposed to Asian at Harvard and even larger bonuses for blacks and Hispanics. You might wonder why whites a historically privileged majority are getting tacit affirmative action from top universities, but the reason is simple even though loads of white Americans are qualified, at a university with a global talent pool like Harvard you're going to inevitably have an Asian majority if you don't use some heavy handed affirmative action. Worldwide, approximately 55 of people are East, Southeast, and South Asian, which means that if you have no affirmative action and equal levels of education and human intelligence that 55 of the potential talent pool at Harvard is going to be Asian. Although Asians are still way overrepresented relative to their US population at Harvard 15 of Harvard students vs. 5 of Americans , they are extremely underrepresented globally. So thus, affirmative action debates need to include the behemoth Asian majority in the world of potential applicants rather than just the white, black, and Hispanic populations that predominate in the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any university that wishes to be representative of world talent will have an Asian majority. Anything else is under-representation.\n","id":"2faae0e1-56bd-472d-85b6-5aaa44dc1de8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV Vaccinations be Compulsory?<|ARGUMENT|>In Germany around 18 million tons of food worth more than 25 billion \u20ac is thrown away<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not about producing food \"for need\" as most of it is thrown away.\n","id":"033050d2-2491-4307-b69b-6b70c520960c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All US and EU sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014 should be lifted<|ARGUMENT|>The EU and the Trump Administration have had significant disagreements over the timing and structure of the Russian sanctions regime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanctions have increased tensions between the US and the EU.\n","id":"67e0c5fb-ec1c-4c55-a794-b2ff648a44da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>\"Qualified immunity\" is a horrible legal doctrine which needs to be ended.<|ARGUMENT|>All other ordinary people - regardless of their professions - are expected to follow the law and if they violate someone else's legal rights, can be sued and required to pay for the injured they've caused.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Qualified immunity\" violates the U.S. Constitution by providing an unequal standard of justice that favors government employees over ordinary people.\n","id":"7a51b57a-bbe0-4362-b257-bd6b5cfa1f40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Art Made By Abusers Be Removed From Cultural Institutions?<|ARGUMENT|>We have many moral agents in society\u2014media outlets, professional opinion writers, religious clerics, governments, prominent twitter accounts\u2014and a cultural institution belongs among them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This move sets up cultural institutions as powerful moral agents, which is generally a good thing.\n","id":"e92cce67-c324-4282-95a5-2881c97fcb73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm currently a high school student. There are quite a few kids in my school who faintly smell of cigarettes not so faintly when you sit next to them even though they don't smoke. Why? Their parents smoke inside. I believe that this is awful for the kids social lives and their health. Next to nobody likes the smell to being next to someone who smokes has been around a smoker. The kids have to carry this stench, and they have little to no ability to change that. This can cause them to be outcasts, since few people really want to be next to people who smell that way. In addition, second hand smoke is very dangerous to one's health. It can cause cancer, and it is probably even more harmful the younger the child is. Some will say that people can't smoke outside sometimes because they live in a cold climate. I disagree with that statement, unless the person lives in Barrow, Alaska or something. My parents smoked until I was age eight or so, and I lived in Wisconsin where it can get down to 40 in the winter. They still had the courtesy to never smoke inside. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"parents who smoke inside are insanely rude\n","id":"5d86ea22-8d7d-450e-873c-16fef8e5b5a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A society with no gender would be better<|ARGUMENT|>The recent push for more genders and gender-fluidity suggests that these societal roles are not needed anymore to maintain a group of people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since we have the ability to function as a society without gender roles, gender only serves the purpose of dampening individuality.\n","id":"ce9f07d4-eda0-4322-adc1-c48270c8c320"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>South Korea should abandon its goal of unification with North Korea<|ARGUMENT|>Using theKaesong Industrial Complex as an example, experience \"suggests that North Korean workers have a strong work ethic and a good potential for productivity enhancement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NK's labor force will help stimulate an ailing SK economy with its cheap resource and labor\n","id":"8e67e177-40ed-4a3c-b15d-db4572ed455e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Some studies point at greater anxiety in religious individuals and lower self-esteem when their religion portrays an image if a punitive and vindictive God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious beliefs and practices often contribute to the development of certain psychiatric disorders.\n","id":"fd62de73-1859-4005-b6d0-2943437f31d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Rights by their nature correspond to duties. Since the actions of animals lack moral content they can't be said to have duties; we don't talk about a tiger or a cow being morally good or bad, or assign moral obligations to them, because by their nature they are not rational beings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As animals lack rights it is morally permissible to raise them for slaughter.\n","id":"dae51963-f083-4559-8644-f821fe13f447"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many who practice Islam condemn the recent terrorist attacks, and some have begun to advocate with NotInMyName to separate themselves the real Muslims who don't seek violence from the terrorists the fake Muslims who do . While I support those who wish to practice their Muslim faith peacefully, I feel that they cannot revoke another person's religious affiliation nor dismiss the fact that Muslim terrorists are Muslim. I admire that they believe in an ideal Islam free of terrorism, but I disagree that such is the reality of the early 21st century. Simply shifting around semantics will not make it truth. To spin it another way I am human, and I am proud of the accomplishments of my species. I would love to say that humans do not commit murder, but I know that they do. I could say that murderous humans are not real humans, and thus, by definition, no murderers are human, but this would be a disingenuous statement. Murder is not necessary to humanity, though, and perhaps one day no humans will be murderers, but our species has a long way to go before that day. Replace 'human' with 'Muslim', 'humanity' with 'Islam', and 'species' with 'religion', and it seems to me that the situation is the same. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Muslim terrorists are Muslim.\n","id":"88f28b40-3a4d-4311-9f4b-fef790e69f3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The culture of secrecy in these sectors encourages waste, fraud and abuse. This can be seeen anywhere from Trailblazer to everyday overspending in every aspect of military procurement. Letting the public see how its money is spent might not solve these problems entirely, but it would help. Government organizations should not be allowed to use national security and the state secrets privilege to cover up embarrassments that have little to nothing to do with national security, yet they do all the time. It is necessary to conceal some operational matters I don't want anyone to leak the proverbial nuclear launch codes. The government should have the ability to keep secrets, but only so long as the public knows what is being kept secret. Concealing names and passwords is useful concealing entire programs is dangerous. Removing widespread secrecy would make the job of the military and intelligence services more difficult. It might lead to soldiers dying or terrorists succeeding. However, I believe the risk of this happening is small, and the costs much less than the costs to freedom of leaving secrecy unchecked. I am entirely aware of the political difficulty of cutting back on secrecy. I'm not making any practical suggestions about how to do this I don't know how. I'm arguing that it's a worthy goal. EDIT I should give some examples of where I think the line should be drawn on secrecy. The military should tell us who they've targeted with drones, but only once they're dead or no longer targeted. The military should also tell us who they've actually killed with drones. The NSA should reveal the nature and budget of all of their programs. They should not the specific personal data they've collected using those programs. The NSA should provide the amount of data they've collected in a moderate amount of detail e.g. they've collected the email communications of N Americans and M Iraqis, and searched the email communications of K Americans, obtained warrants for J Americans, etc. They shouldn't reveal who specifically they're investigating until after the investigation and then only to the person being investigated. The CIA should tell us that they've spent N arming the Free Syrian Army and what they hope to achieve by doing so, that they're spying on the governments of whoever they're spying on everyone probably , and so on. They shouldn't tell us the identities of their undercover agents or the particular methods they're using to spy on a particular person. If any of these agencies engage in corruption, fraud, or any other sort of embarrassment, it should immediately and fully be brought to the public's attention. If the agencies are understandably reluctant to do so, whistleblowers should be praised and any who attempt to stop them should be condemned, as is the case when private industry engages in unethical conduct. Again, this is a moral argument more than a practical one. EDIT 2 Some dangers of government secrecy are the widespread violation of Americans' privacy by programs like Room 641A corruption and waste in projects like Trailblazer abuse of secrecy to cover up waste and abuse and persecute whistleblowers torture of innocents abuse of secrecy to cover up torture the risk that people like J. Edgar Hoover will subvert democracy<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The secrecy of the U.S. military and intelligence services is mostly harmful.\n","id":"735a95cd-4f74-4f37-b799-7e288427dfa2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>AI does not think the way we think. They build nonlinear inferences on large datasets It requires hundreds of thousands of annotated pieces of data and they still have poor accuracy. These methods are unsafe for war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All software-based devices are notoriously prone to errors, thoroughly tested as they may be.\n","id":"b3e61dee-e044-46d9-b55e-417a0f3870e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>An example of this in the original trilogy is the unrealistically terrible aim of stormtroopers being explained as it being the will of the Force that the blaster shots miss their intended targets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One of the biggest narratives of the Star Wars franchise is the idea that the Force can aid characters during critical moments, hence the iconic phrase; \"May the Force be with you.\".\n","id":"1c6e94bb-4576-401b-9970-b47058194ad7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>School teaches kids skills needed to function in society. Sex is a big part of our lives, and learning about it through a structured approach would be beneficial.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Schools are better placed than parents to deliver sex education.\n","id":"ec642ffc-fedc-437f-974b-c2965a75e3a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate speech is invariably associated with scientific or historic falsehoods. It often involves the concept of race, nationalistic or ethnical stereotyping, sexual bigotry, or religious zeal negating rationally emerging truths. As such, it is disingenuous and, on this basis, it should be denounced and banned from the public discourse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inconvenient truths are not the same thing as hate speech. Respectfulness is about the choice of words, not about content.\n","id":"e70504d7-f29f-4385-ba75-24a289f2b994"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Hamlet Mad?<|ARGUMENT|>\"I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room\" Act 3, iv and \"you shall nose him\" Act 4, iii are both utterly callous ways of treating a dead man, and at odds with the respect he affords to mourning duties regarding his father.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"His behaviour after Polonius's death, and before his return to Denmark, is particularly shocking.\n","id":"d9c9d5af-c206-45e2-8e16-08eb3b6807a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>This is really harmful to the underwater ecosystems, as toxic algae blooms grow and are getting worse from the runoff from farms that grow animals for meat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Livestock is the most significant contributor to nitrogen and phosphorus pollution of streams, rivers and coastal waters worldwide.\n","id":"4bef539e-c54b-4980-af25-47019968e1b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>like surely its completely terrible to tell people how they can and cant express themselves? like surely the point of communication is to communicate? if you can get a message across, why should you care how its presented?? grammar nazis seem to take pleasure in being right when really this sort of censorship serves no real purpose. like i think its completely wrong to look at communication as some sort of scientific thing. surely the best mode of communication is one that feels authentic? stuff like this shouldnt be bound by rules bc its only really limiting your own expression. people of reddit why do you believe grammar important?? EDIT awarded a 8710 bc of this comment from u uncle2fire gt Like I said, grammar isn't supposed to be oppressive. It's a way of organizing words so that they make sense together, and convey a meaning to a listener reader. If it makes sense, like your sentence above gt no, it doesnt need 2 be oppressive. but it is oppressive bc its considered gt . there r many ways that i could ungrammatically correctly communicate 2 u and u would understand. Then it's following grammatical rules, and is therefore grammatical. Grammar Nazis are what we call linguistic prescriptivists. They usually take arbitrary rules and treat them like law. This is not how grammar is supposed to be used or understood. while i used grammar incorrectly in that case i would still like to hear arguments why linguistic prescription is important as that was what my arguemnt was really about to begin with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"grammar is immoral\n","id":"c53efeb8-81d6-4918-9e73-cadd773e0772"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>DISCLAIMER I am NOT a proponent of any specific company and I am aware that some out there are doing their normal douchy thing and being dishonest and not practicing proper safety and controls. This isn't a conversation about that. This is a conversation about the ability to improve on what's already there. The possibilities of eliminating certain diseases permanently, no more allergies, being able to eradicate mosquito from the planet, etc. Obviously these things need to be done carefully and over a long period of time and testing, but saying we should be careful isn't the same as being against it. So basically, I'm all for improving on nature if it's done right and I don't see why any reasonable person would think otherwise barring two arguments I already know I can't fight against It's messing with god's design Whatever makes you happy my friend, though wouldn't our messing with genetics ALSO be part of god's plan? There's no way we can do it without creating zombies or whatever Okay, sure, if you want to believe we're incapable of doing this right, I can't say with confidence that you're wrong. But remember, my argument isn't about what we're doing now or the realities of research in the near future, it's about being a supporter of the branch or research or not and I am .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a huge fan of genetic modifications and think that people who are against it are nuts\n","id":"b222d4ff-1c38-49d6-9383-8262ec09774b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Fox News was founded by Newt Gingrich and Rupert Murdoch to cover for a new GOP strategy in the 90s. In the early 90s Newt Gingrich had tried a strategy of fundamental opposition in Congress, but had failed because the public perceived the GOP and not Clinton as the GOP had hoped as responsible for the gridlock. They founded Fox News to manufacture a conservative counter public that would blame the administration and not the GOP. Fast forward to today and Fox News broadcasts baseless conspiracy theories and claims about a candidate who lost the presidential election a year ago in an attempt to deflect claims against Trump or the GOP.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fox News is propaganda essentially\n","id":"ab798e2b-01ce-481d-b94b-604ccfabbcec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Items can be cursed to harm those who touch them, such as the opal necklace which was used to curse Katie Bell.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dark wizards like Grindelwald, Voldemort, and the Death Eaters use magic to create pain, terror and death.\n","id":"b36ca191-befb-43c4-a22c-949fbf2a3624"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>Living with the moral weight of our decision to serve the British slavers may be more injurious to our health and happiness than risking war with the British again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Agreeing to the deal has the potential to cause disunity in our community.\n","id":"15ee0d31-bf35-4483-ae1a-c16f57b37b9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that people genuinely have good intentions, want the best for others, and want to make the world a better place. Despite evils in the world, such as violence and even war crimes, I think people do what they think is the best thing at that time. Helping others, altruism, is an ingrained part of who we as a species are I'm not denying that some level of selfishness is too but I don't think these are incompatible . People turn bad as a result of traumas and misfortunes they experience in their life. Love is our truest human emotion look to parents and babies for the most critical example, and love is a naturally good force that encourages us to be kind and generous to others. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are fundamentally good.\n","id":"238aa61e-7410-4f1f-9a90-5de4a3623540"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I posted about this on an other subreddit before but I'm posting this here too because I feel like I can present my view more generally and understand other perspectives. Let me clarify the word pseudoscience in the title first. I don't think nutrition is a pseudoscience in the way, say, astrology or homeopathy are here, the premises themselves are wrong and therefore will never be true sciences. That is, I believe it might be possible to discover meaningful things about nutrition in the future. So my current view is we actually know almost nothing about the health effects of different diets as long as those diets are fairly normal ones. By fairly normal I mean that we do know some basic things about diet essentially what we absolutely shouldn't do we know we have to eat a certain amount of calories to stay alive and function. We need to have some of essential nutrients like Vitamin C, protein, carbohydrates etc. or else we get a deficiency disease. However, this body of knowledge is pretty much irrelevant to any Westerner who looks to nutrition recommendations to improve her diet and make her healthier. I came to this conclusion first through reading a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb which, among a host of other things, happened to mention nutrition as well albeit briefly . He challenged one of the long held dogmas of nutrition the notion that we have to eat steadily. I have to emphasize here that this was a topic about which there was almost universal consensus in academia and among the general population as well. However, I found his argument brilliant he notes that traditionally, humans did not have access to abundant food supplies that is very much a recent phenomenon. Therefore, we have to have adapted to periods of food deprivation. Thus, it is completely irrational to eat a steady diet he recommends fasting as a way to introduce periodic deprivation and also randomness to your body which can also be crucial to your health. All Abrahamic faiths have incorporated fasting into their teachings perhaps this is not due entirely to chance. Now this is something that seems to have been completely missed by mainstream nutritional advice. I might be wrong here, but fasting is rarely mentioned in the scientific literature. My reasoning is that if nutrition science couldn't solve such a relatively easy problem, then why should we trust it with solving much more complex issues about nutrition? Now, in addition to this, I think there are a couple of other reasons why current nutrition advice should not be trusted barring a few areas, there is actually little to no consensus as to what is healthy and what is not even among reputable nutritionists. So how could I, as a layman, tell the sound conclusions if there are any from the false ones? People often acknowledge that a lot of the studies out there are worthless, but everybody seems to insist that there is truly good research out there how do I decide which studies to accept though? oftentimes, basic, important stuff doesn't seem to be mentioned by experts arguing for a particular diet past exposure being one example. For instance, there is the Whole foods plant based diet, which is supposed to be REALLY healthy. But I rarely heard promoters of this diet mention whether we ate this sort of diet during our evolution which would be critical in showing that the diet is most likely healthy. a counterargument could be that by this logic, I can be skeptical of, say, physics as well. But as a layperson we simply take a track record a science has physics brought atomic bombs and sent us to the Moon. What has nutrition done save for giving unevidenced assertions in the past e. g. that fat causes cancer and constantly revising that every 10 years or so? It seems to me that it has a pretty shitty track record. I also note that it is possible that a field of study is broken despite not being obviously ridiculous like astrology . Take medicine as an example before the 20th century, medicine did more harm than good. I believe nutrition is currently at the level where medicine was before that. there are obvious issues with the ways studies are conducted reporting is unreliable, statistics are often misleading etc. See this article for more details about this All in all, I think the knowledge we have about nutrition is vastly overstated, and I don't think we should base our diet on recommendations made by nutritional science . Pls .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nutrition is a pseudoscience\n","id":"aa5a8c36-502d-4cd4-a0dd-7303a9e1978e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What degree of advanced mathematics is needed in modern society?<|ARGUMENT|>Calculus is important for solving optimization problems, which are at the heart of economics and other practical human endeavors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Basics of differential calculus e.g. used in finding optimal values.\n","id":"ff0886af-c5be-4848-bea1-85b3ac75315e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I do not believe the opposite is true. Poor, uneducated couples are not morally obligated to not have children. They are morally obligated to consider, and decide for themselves, whether or not they are able to successfully raise children, and being poor or poorly educated doesn't make that impossible just more difficult. Obviously, this is true of affluent couples as well. However, the answer to the question are we capable of raising children successfully? when asked of affluent couples should be yes far more often than it would be for couples with fewer resources at their disposal. Second, let me say what I mean by morally obligated. Some moral obligations are more important than others, and being morally obligated not to murder a man is more important than a moral obligation to not cheat on your wife which is more important than a moral obligation to say bless you after someone sneezes. I don't know where affluent parents being obligated to have children falls under this spectrum of moral obligations. If I were making a hierarchy of obligations, I'm not sure where I'd put it. I'm going to say it's an important moral obligation, but admit that I'm uncertain as to what I mean by important. We'll just have to have this discussion under those terms. Third, by affluent I do not mean extremely wealthy. Generally, upper middle class and above with college educations and stable incomes? Something along those lines. Now, to make the case I'm not going to dig up sources for the following unless they are requested, but the claims I'm going to make are not contentious ones. Wealthy parents raise children who are better educated and are more likely to succeed at life, depending on what is meant by succeed. Generally, the wealthier the parents, the more likely the children are to succeed. I realize that this is a problem cause in large part by a society that makes it easier for affluent parents to educated their children, and that's a different problem that I'm not discussing. But I also believe it's not the only cause of this. I'd also like to point out that I am not saying that wealth or education makes you inherently a better parent, a better family or a better person. This is the noncontentious claim I mentioned. There is a direct correlation admittedly, not necessarily causation between the wealth of the parents and the success of the children. However, raising children is difficult and living in a more or less capitalist society, having extra resources to ensure the well being of your children is important. The fact of the matter is, despite being unfair , that children born to affluent homes have better access to education and opportunities. I will say again that a discussion about fixing the unfairness of it is another matter, and one I'm not going to engage in during this conversation. I don't know how to fix that problem. As long as that problem persists, affluent parents are morally obligated to procreate. So, if we grant all of that which I'm not asking you to do , why is this good? My primary concern is the wealth gap. If poor parents raise poor children and wealthy parents raise wealthy children, and poor couples are procreating at a faster pace than affluent parents, the wealth gap will necessarily continue to grow. There are, of course, other factors in the wealth gap, but I suspect what I'm describing is a pretty big culprit. I will, at this time, request that you accept the wealth gap in America is bad as axiomatic, only for the sake of this conversation. We could have a very long, and very dull, conversation about whether or not the wealth gap in America actually is bad, but I'm not interested. Ultimately, we'll end up with more people who are better educated and have more resources at their disposal if more affluent couples procreated. This will lead to a better civilization. Helping create a better civilization is everyone's moral obligation. It is, therefore, affluent couples' moral obligation to have children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think affluent couples who can conceive are morally obligated to do so.\n","id":"adb88ab6-cb40-4065-95eb-3feee96c7313"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>The Dodd Frank Act has forced many smaller banks to merge with larger banks or consolidate because they were unable to keep up with the demands of the legislation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The regulatory expansion introduced by the Dodd-Frank Act has disproportionately impacted smaller banks, thereby facilitating big banks to consolidate their market share.\n","id":"544efcc4-1a64-4b63-ac85-1b7286c24d23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the EU should offer asylum to women from countries which have legislation that discriminates against women.<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone is equal. Women who live under legal system that permits discrimination against them are being denied of basic human rights whether this is the right to vote, to a fair trial, or bodily integrity. Sharia Law, for example, clearly denies them human rights like equality before the law, a basic human need according to Universal Declaration of Human Rights. \"All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.\" Under Sharia a woman\u2019s testimony is worth half a man\u2019s and she gets half the inheritance of her male siblings. Second of all, bodily integrity is affected when women are stoned to death or beaten by their husbands without them even being punished. The importance of self-determination and autonomy are neglected in Saudi Arabia where women are not allowed to drive or go alone in public. Female genital mutilation, which causes bleeding, infections and infertility, and is almost always done without the girl's consent, is a big problem in many African countries. Asylum given by the EU shall be the only way for these women to leave the system that persecutes them and be able to have their human needs respected and therefore creating a healthier, safer and better environment. Kaitlin, \u2018Women\u2019s Rights Under Islamic Law\u2019, Inside Islam: Dialogues & Debates, 25 November 2008, Pizano, Pedro, \u2018Where Driving Is a Crime and Speaking About It Leads to Death Threats\u2019, Huffington Post, 6 June 2012, United Nations, \u2018The Universal Declaration of Human Rights\u2019, un.org, 10 December 2948, World Health Organisation,\u2019 Female genital mutilation\u2019, WHO Fact sheet, no.241, February 2013, Mahmoud, Nahla, \u2018Here is why Sharia Law has no place in Britain or elsewhere\u2019, National Secular Society, 6 February 2013,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU needs to help those suffering from human rights abuses\n","id":"67c8b0ce-9b2a-4ebc-8aba-34f73942bbc7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I did not know this was an unpopular opinion until recently. Basically my stance is as follows. People in their late teens are fully physically developed and have all the qualities that other adults find sexually appealing. They are sexual beings both physically and mentally. So it is evident to me that the Natural Order of Things supports my view. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong but, for all of human history up until recently people regularly married people in their late teens and they were seen as adults. I think the change in perception can be attributed to three things People now marry later in life, the norm in this culture is to sleep around when they are younger. Adding on to that We have a hookup culture. In the past people may have been more serious about relationships feel free to correct me if I am wrong but nowadays a lot of people just hook up and marry when they want to settle down later in life. As a result people more readily assume that anyone interested in a younger person is up to no good and isn't serious. Which is probably the source of aversion to this kind of attraction because they want to protect them. People nowadays do not consider people in their late teens to be adults while in the past they were. I think this could be a result of how present society coddles people even through their college years whereas many later year teens have the potential to be a functional adult with a job, spouse and kids if raised differently. Probably a result of people getting married later in life which is a result of promiscuity due to culture and availability of contraception. Furthermore I would actually assert that forbidding relationships based on age, given that both are ready physically and mentally for that kind of relationship, is immoral because you are stepping in the way of love, no one is getting hurt besides pain of breakup if that happens , etc. So basically the only thing I see that supports the argument against my view is that culture opposes it. While culture and soceity's rules may be influenced by truth, they are arbitrary. Society's rules are nothing in the face of objective truth refer to my statement about the Natural Order of Things above If they are not molded after it already. Adding on to this, I've heard again, feel free to correct me if I am wrong that women's brains become fully mature at ~17 and men's brains become fully mature at ~23. Its why in the past, men were legally considered minors at a later age than women were. If you make the argument that someone cannot rightfully enter a relationship with an adult until their brain is fully mature, you would be forced to also agree that ~17 y o women should be available and that men should not be available until ~23. My own solution to this is that maturity in decision making is not wholly dependent on this one variable. Many adults don't make very adult decisions and many teens make responsible, adult decisions. This is, instead, something to assess regarding the individual, which applies to people 20 as well. Also I do not believe that such relationships hurt anyone by default. One person may be more inexperienced but that is a vulnerability that the other person does not have to exploit if they are a decent human being after the right thing. A bit of context I'm a 21 y o college student and do find myself attracted to people in their late teens, as well as adults. I feel that this is normal and natual and not a fetish or somehing that is uncommon. I do not get off on domination or whatever like some people think those who have this attraction do. I just find that my brain recognizes those people as fellow adults. I'm also not looking to hook up, I'm a actually abstaining from sex until marriage and take all my relationships seriously no spring flings or whatever for me. My grandparents met and started dating when grandma was 16 and grandpa was 21. They were and are both very happy and have a good marriage. Imagine if they had dismissed each other as unavailable or were prevented from being together. Refer to how I said that this kind of prevention is immoral . ELI5 TLDR People in their late teens many times cannot be differentiated from other adults if you did not know their age. So it is normal to be attracted to them and the current taboo is only a recent, arbitrary social rule based on nothing more than culture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"it is normal for adults to be attracted to people who are in their late teens.\n","id":"c3cb3390-ee56-45c1-8883-0b473750926c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By classics I mean books, art, and other entertainment that is more than about fifty years old and remains relevant. It seems like, once a piece of entertainment persists for a certain amount of time, it becomes perfect whenever anybody criticizes it, a legion of loyal fans rush to defend it. Any flaw is either imagined or excused by saying It doesn't matter, because of x and y usually having to do with the time or situation in which it was created . A good example of this is Lord of the Rings in my experience, a lot of people hold it up as being one of the greatest fantasy novels of all time. Tolkien did an amazing job worldbuilding, certainly, but his focus on the world means that other parts suffer. He drags the reader through slow scenes that don't move the plot forward, then recounts battles and other action focused sections of his books as if he is writing a history in other words, he essentially tells the reader what is going on, then brushes past them. I'm not saying that LotR is terrible by any stretch of the imagination, but it is put on a pedestal that it doesn't entirely deserve when compared to other fantasy books. The works of Charles Dickens are another quick example The man was paid by the word, and it shows. His books are good, with some excellent bits and a lot of padding. I'm rambling, but the point I'm trying to make is this Classics, in the arts, are not perfect, but people often insist on treating them as if they are. I think that they should be respected for their place in history but given more realistic portrayals when compared to more current works. The work of a child prodigy is considered impressive for what it is, but it does not instantly become great art unless it is comparable to the best work by adults. Its flaws can be explained by saying A child did it, but they cannot be excused by it. I see old things the same way. They are impressive and deserving of respect, but not flawless, and the flaws cannot be excused by saying Someone did it a long time ago. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the \"classics\" tend to be over-praised.\n","id":"067e0fca-b9eb-4c7b-83a7-09443d3cb596"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Eichmann was not using the categorical imperative because he was referencing a critique of pure reason rather than Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, from which the idea comes from.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Experts and scholars have considered that Eichmann distorted Kant's philosophy to make it fit his needs.\n","id":"508e3110-22c2-4863-a810-d1d30bf6a437"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should unpaid internships be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Changing paid jobs for unpaid internships is harmful for the economy since those positions should have paid taxes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unpaid interns often do real work meaning that they drive out people searching for paid positions.\n","id":"bd823556-4d01-4c5e-8832-63352369b974"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please, I'm a very logical and pragmatic person. I've heard a decent amount of perspectives as to why you should be good. But isn't good subjective? There's a wide spectrum of people from Genghis Khan to Mahatma Gandhi, there is no objective good. What is good for one person, might be absolutely horrible for another. The concept of being a carnivorous human being is usually normal, while a vegan would abhor the same perspective. It's the same as a Buddhist monk disliking the idea of murder, but to a soldier, or an executioner it's perfectly okay. Morals seem to stem from culture and our experiences. Any normal rational person can look at the world and see how HORRIBLE it is, so why even bother? Why not just look out for yourself, try to gain power and happiness, use people if needed, and live by the rules of survival of the fittest? Any person in power has most likely been like this. They MUST be like this to be on top of the food chain. Is there anyone out there that can provide some LOGICAL evidence as to why I shouldn't throw my moral compass away?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I can't get the concepts of social darwinism out of my head. I'm beginning to become less empathetic. Please, change my view.\n","id":"50ecda6a-dcf6-4c4e-99cc-a1c52ba806ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Their Children Should Be Fined If The Child Gets A Vaccine-Preventable Illness<|ARGUMENT|>This is an obvious violation of privacy and bodily autonomy. Having the government regulate what goes into your body, or your child's body, is not a power the government should have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These fines would violate the right to bodily autonomy and individual liberty.\n","id":"b3611215-fca4-4c98-9445-9af14dacaf24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Being a music major jazz piano if your interested , not a day goes by that I dont hear someone mention how much better vinyl is than digital audio files. I just dont see why this is. Digital audio files offer a much wider dynamic range, and a clearer more accurate sound that really represents what was heard in the studio. On the contrary, vinyl adds a crackle and distortion that while may add color and charecter to the music, at the end of the day, it is quite litteraly lower quality audio. Although I do enjoy vinyl for sentimental reasons and for the sanctity of musical history, it doesnt sound as good as an mp3 file or more so, an AIFF or WAV. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Digital audio files are superior to vinyl\n","id":"888f281f-4405-4d5d-b68d-80cfb24ef1e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The county clerks that refuse to give marriage licenses to gay couples are actively refusing to do part of their job based on personal beliefs that should not interfere with their work. They should not be allowed to work where they actively discriminate against certain people and refuse to do their job. I believe that they shouldn't have to be forced by a judge to issue the licenses but instead just be replaced by someone willing to. I believe it is not their religious freedom to refuse to do part of their job based on personal beliefs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The County Clerks Refusing to Give Marriage Licenses to Gay Couples Shouldn't be Allowed to Keep Their Jobs.\n","id":"db0daa5c-f5b6-4c4a-a10c-cae72d319471"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So this is something that has been bothering me lately, especially given the current and ongoing fight over same sex marriage. It seems to me, that much of this argument regarding religious freedom seems centered on the fact that the freedom of a person's religion is challenged by the behavior of other people who do not directly influence this person. For me, personally, this is more about a overall personal support of every individual's freedom more than it is about marriage rights for same sex couples. Though, for the sake of disclosure, I will say that I do support the right of same sex couples to marry. Still, this right of conscience seems like a new thing. I never really remember hearing the term prior to maybe the last 2 years. It seems like a nice way of saying that I should not have to even put up with or be around something I disagree with, cause it angers me. So, I'd love to hear some alternative views on this. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person's religious freedom should not be protected when it is dependent on influencing the behavior of other people.\n","id":"5a6f3a1d-0c34-4cba-b77f-3a0f2dc4159f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As someone who until November thought of Milo as that madman from the news and Ben Shapiro as that guy that worked for those Neo Nazis at Breitbart I\u2019ve recently tried to check my own biases by listening to dissenting opinions from my own. My first attempt was to dive head first into Milo, because his whole persona was such a enigmatic figure. Rather shockingly, I found myself understanding his view on most topics covered and whilst not agreeing with all of it the ludicrous statement, for one, that he\u2019s pro life for any other reason than that it tows the partisan line I felt mostly befuddled why does anyone care that much? I\u2019ve heard the argument made that he\u2019s not that impactful that I understand when your only desire is to troll your capacity for change is limited. But if his entire goal is just to make people hell, people like me realize the fallacious nature of some of the extremist left isn\u2019t that good enough?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There\u2019s less wrong with Milo Yiannopoulos than there is with the reactionary culture that gave rise to him.\n","id":"b97167dd-f122-46b0-8993-e4535ed8c54c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care, Debate on Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>The notion of the free markets as a source of efficiency dates back to Adam Smith. The health care industry is no exception to this rule. If it is open to the free-markets, consumers will shop for and purchase the best price and value. Pressure will be placed on insurance companies to cut costs and sell their surface at a lower price for greater value. Free universal health care would interrupt this, reduce efficiency, and increase costs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Single-payer health care erodes competition in price and value\n","id":"05b4739b-3998-4dc7-92da-3953f8ce6149"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am genuinely open to changing my view on this, but I believe I am right. Essentially my argument is this if the spouse who cooks the meal is not the one who does the dishes, then it creates perverse incentives to edit absentmindedly, subconsciously, or haphazardly make a bigger mess in the kitchen, which wastes the household's aggregate time, is bad for the environment, and creates family conflict. My inspiration for this  is my observation that when cooking and I know I'm going to have to do the dishes myself, I tend to use the medium sized pots that fit in the g d mn d dishwasher and not the huge ones that have to be hand washed, like my spouse does when suspecting that I can be made do to the dishes. Arguments I have already considered 1 There should be equity in chores. True, but there are many ways to create equity the dinner dishes combo can be alternated night by night, the dinner dishes combo can be offset by other chores such as laundry, food shopping, etc. 2 Spouses should cook clean together, and not pile it on one person. I don't necessarily disagree with this, although there may still be a problem of one spouse hauling out all sorts of gear the other one would rather not have to clean half of. But my argument today is limited to the situation where only one spouse has cooked the meal. 3 Cooks should clean as they go. This is just a special case of my view. 4 Love conquers all and with sufficient empathy, a couple will bridge the gap i.e. the cooking spouse can be trained to make a smaller mess, or the cleaning spouse can learn not to resent the joie de vivre of the cook's methods . Empirical observation suggests this is not the case, and to the contrary the communication that would allow such empathy risks great episodic conflict. Help me see the error of my ways. Edit 1 formatting Edit 2 u JoshuaZ1 correctly points out that if one spouse is significantly better at the other at cleaning up, this may overcome the disadvantage of the careless cook . Thus my view is properly narrowed only to situations in which the difference in spousal cleaning skill is less than the impact of moral hazard mess making. Edit 3 Creating a perverse incentive moral hazard is not the same thing as enticing someone to deliberately make a mess to spite the other spouse. I think it is human nature and not contradictory to a loving relationship to find it difficult to fully appreciate the consequences of your actions when you don't personally bear them. Edit 4 u cacheflow has pointed out that making the cook also do the cleaning might create a perverse incentive for the cook to create less adventurous interesting meals, thus lowering the meal quality for the couple overall. This is a legitimate reason not to apply my rule if that factor is in play, which it often might be. Edit 5 After reading about the experience of u valkyriav and an assertion by u mizz kittay, I am now of the view that the justification for my view may be limited to certain circumstances, namely 1 a relationship that involves insufficient empathy, or more importantly 2 when either spouse simply does not fully understand, from personal experience, what the cleaning spouse has to put up with when they decide to cook a certain way. This suggests that in a high empathy relationship, my proposed rule might need to be imposed only temporarily until each spouse becomes well aware of the clean up consequences of their various cooking methods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the spouse who cooked the meal should also do the dishes\/washing up.\n","id":"5dfff257-094e-49c2-a7c9-dde78195de39"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Compulsory voting is a strong incentive for citizens to fulfill their duty, which is needed to prevent low turnouts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Citizens have a duty to maintain the democratic state by voting, which is enforced through compulsory voting.\n","id":"113e86e7-8f4b-4b12-a6e9-a6a6918f7bc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Zoos lower the risks of extinction, since animals left in the wild could have unknown diseases which could be lethal. Diseases that aren't treated could be transmitted to other animals, but in zoos there are trained experts, thus animals won't get sick as frequent as they do in the wild.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoos play a critical role in the conservation of endangered species.\n","id":"78b464fa-d9d4-4a2b-897a-2ffbdabb7e7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>There are very sound economic studies on this issue. This includes Yale university's recent work showing that well over 90% of World GDP would suffer, while selected countries would benefit from higher GHG concentrations. Net for all the planet, it is clear that climate action is imperative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fighting climate change is a moral obligation, as those who will suffer are those who are unable to prevent it.\n","id":"c99228e8-d368-4364-93ac-c581a4b969a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>People tend to underestimate their future needs and often struggle to plan ahead. This is especially true when it comes to saving for future health problems because people often do not take seriously the possibility that they will be affected.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some individuals would spend poorly, making it necessary to reinstate various welfare programs to help these people make better financial decisions.\n","id":"2f0c3db7-901e-4ab7-af2c-83846c4be192"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like obesity is out of control and it's bad enough there are so many take aways and junk food in the supermarkets. AYCE buffets are the piece de resistance of gluttony. They encourage people to fill up on so much food that their guts are literally bursting like in some Caligula torture routine. They pull in kids with monstrosities of 'never ending fries' and chocolate fountains. So no, you are never going to 'beat the buffet' by loading up on their expensive meat items. All you are doing is feeding your gluttony, making yourself obese and leading to Type 2 Diabeetus, heart attacks and strokes. There is no redeeming aspects of AYCE buffets. I know, I went to some in the past and they always were gross with the tongs everyone touched to the spilled food everywhere. Also most of the customers were obese, even in the 1990s. I knew back then it was gluttony and it's even more so now. You even see it celebrated on TV programs. So convince me otherwise we should allow these meccas to gluttony to even exist. This is why cities have ordinances, to protect the people. It's time we used them for the good of the people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AYCE Buffets encourage gluttony and should be banned\n","id":"0e88689b-52bf-420b-8152-eee1e16dcfa7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many people spend a considerable amount of time when deciding on what is the best computer he or she should buy for college. They may even go into a store like Best Buy and test multiple computers our before buying one. Before heading off to college, I conducted extensive research that consisted of looking at reviews for laptops as well as comparing the specs I found most important to a typical college student battery life, weight, processor type, and ram. The results pointed to the Retina MacBook Pro as the all around champion. It has top of its class battery life with an excellent keyboard, enough processing power for the typical college student, is light enough for students to easily carry it from class to class, and an easy to use software. The superior customer service is another factor that contributes to the MacBook Pro winning the title of best college student computer in my eyes. Knowing that I can easily go into any Apple Store and get my computer fixed without having to ship it to some factory if anything goes wrong with the computer I will be using for all my college work brings a peace of mind. Overall I find the aspects Apple's Retina MacBook Pro brings to the market very pleasing and convenient, especially for a college student who just wants his computer to work straight out of the box and to continue to work for the next few years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Retina MacBook Pros are the best computers for college students.\n","id":"3a185943-dae5-495c-9335-5dea72ff7299"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We\u2019ve now passed 8 billion on this planet when I was born it was a little over 6.5 food prices are rising, oil is Ending. When our resources end in 20 years, giving everything we know of our species do you really think we\u2019re going to just share?? A third of the worlds farmland is now useless due to soil degradation yet we keep producing more mouths to feed so what\u2019s your answer for that? \u201cEnergy saving lightbulbs\u201d? You know the person who had the greatest ecological impact on this planet? Genghis Khan, because he massacred 40 million people. There was no one to farm the land, forests grew back, carbon was dragged out of the atmosphere and had this monster not existed there would be another billion of us today jostling for space on this dying planet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"or don\u2019t if you also believe over population will kill this world.\n","id":"4ab6c383-bc31-4fc9-83ae-7b5a7f187584"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Hagrid made his Fourth Year students raise Blast-Ended Skrewts, dangerous hybrid creatures of his own creation, without fully being aware of how dangerous they were, or what they ate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hagrid, though a great person, was known for his love of dangerous creatures and put the safety of his students at risk while teaching his classes.\n","id":"93b5e4fa-8650-4393-920f-e338e8ae530d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>When military officers commit war crimes, the officers themselves are typically prosecuted, not the state that employed them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Japanese state as a whole is not responsible for the actions of individual military commanders.\n","id":"188b54ca-b7fb-4a15-83a5-c6be7a3f3220"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kyoto Protocol, Debate on whether the Kyoto Protocol helps to combat global warming<|ARGUMENT|>Bronwen Maddox. \"Why Kyoto will vanish into hot air\". Times Online. 29 Nov. 2005 - \"The best way forward now is not a \"successor\" to Kyoto, which covers the years until 2012. Another treaty that attempted to set fixed targets for cutting emisssions could be economically very damaging \u2014 in the unlikely event that countries ever reached agreement.The better answer is in the plethora of bargains between a handful of rich and poor countries, which some are already exploring. It is also in the development of new technology to combat global warming, and in deals to spread these quickly to poorer countries.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kyoto Protocol is generally not a good model for future treaties\n","id":"18fc1bf7-322d-4a43-b727-df4817e03fe8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This should be prefaced by saying I live in the United States. Recently, I've heard a number of people object to using the terms master or slave to describe relationships. The pertinent examples are as follows A master slave relationship in networking A master slave cylinder in auto engineering A master bedroom A digital master record or file In all of the above examples, I do not think that this terminology expresses any implicit racism. My viewpoint is that the literary term master or slave, and the relationship therein, is an expression that extends beyond any racial connotation. So, change my view Edit A few people have asked for citations that this mindset actually exists. While I made this post based on private conversation with people, here is a Twitter post protesting master bedroom, and here is an article to the same effect, which cites a Baltimore Business Journal report. And here is a protestation of the networking usage along with a CNN article The master slave networking usage is the most often protested from what I have found, and I can't find any direct online sources specifically for auto engineering or the digital master record.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Referring to non-sentient things as \"master\" or \"slave\" is not racist and shouldn't be considered politically incorrect.\n","id":"f91b15f8-0217-49fa-9a91-4cf74fb65516"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>All societies that have more trust in science than in religion are considered to be enlightened.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Western societies can be considered as enlightened compared to the middle ages.\n","id":"a1d0a698-592e-480e-b627-619aa35ff3f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Legalization of Marijuana<|ARGUMENT|>If consumption increases from marijuana use, as most expect, clear health costs will rise. This may negate any tax revenue benefits from legalization. And, the long-term costs may grow exponentially over time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Added health costs from legal marijuana will outweigh new tax revenues\n","id":"b8b04260-6762-479c-bec3-cdfcee2ce769"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>Asexuals and aromantics possess passing privilege which shields them from much of the oppression the rest of the LGBT+ community faces.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Asexuals and aromantics face less oppression than other members of the LGBT community.\n","id":"100b9bb2-9282-4bce-a3e3-038d6cae2446"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the UN a force for good?<|ARGUMENT|>The UN may not be at its best shape to do its job protect international peace, but it is the only one at the present moment to do the job. The UN needs to be vested with more powers of mediation and peacekeeping forces.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UN has not reached its prime. Whilst it may fall short of our hopes, we have more cause for hope with, than without, it.\n","id":"81499487-a145-4bef-ad2a-19e8540c6a28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that carbon, the key element in carbon-based lifeforms is very stable and sufficiently abundant in the universe suggests that carbon-based life is highly probable under approximately Earth-like conditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scientific findings suggest that the creation of life is not improbable.\n","id":"2ec2d615-a0e9-43f3-b5f9-1f7043765bf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For example Minnesota does not have a tipped minimum wage. All employees in Minnesota are required to earn 9.65 per hour. I've noticed that menu prices have increased since the law changed. Which has increased the amount that we tip since we tip 15 20 of the total bill and the bill has increased. Note I continue to tip 15 to 25 due to societal norms but I'm wondering why these norms persist when the reasoning for tipping has dissapeared. I don't understand why we tip wait staff making 9.65 per hour but we don't tip most other minimum wage jobs. Why do we continue to tip entry level minimum wage wait staff but not tip most other entry level minimum wage employees?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wait staff who earn a non-tipped minimum wage should not expect to receive tips\n","id":"bda00ad9-12e2-4d0f-819b-3b293c8f49fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been to a lot of concerts, and the best memories have come out of the smaller, intimate venues where an artist can genuinely connect with their audience. In large venues where each person is just another face in the crowd, I feel like this kind of authenticity is just not possible, and the concerts are therefore not the same. I understand that there is an entertainment aspect to seeing an artist you love put on a performance, but the memories that come along with a small show are much more valuable because of the personal aspect that comes along with it. Maybe I\u2019m just seeing the wrong artists in concert, but I\u2019ve always felt this way. Let me hear some benefits to big shows that aren\u2019t present in smaller ones .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Large stadium concerts are extremely antipersonal and a waste of money\n","id":"7cb249dd-7f53-4f50-b5bb-92d03be97922"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>If the pursuit of truth has no use if you die\/lose your mind when finding the truth, you obviously can't use it, you would need an inherent virtue to keep believing it's coherent to pursue the truth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If no human being can safely consider a proposition as \"true\", there is no coherent and valuable point in considering this proposition as truth for human race.\n","id":"85c59db5-e6c6-4555-95cc-9dd60dfb4819"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most of my friends and I are recently graduated liberal arts students. Ideally, this means that we have broad knowledge of the wider world e.g. science, culture, and society as well as in depth study in a specific area of interest. However, despite being good students, having graduated from a relatively competitive school one of the public ivies most of us are hugely lacking in our broad knowledge of science, culture and society . Last night, twelve of us hung out at my apartment, and we talked a bit about this, and whether we have a broad knowledge of the wider world . We played a little game where we would ask the group what we considered a broad knowledge or critical thinking question, and kept track of who could either come up with the answer or answered in the affirmative. Out of the twelve of us only 7 said they would be able to solve a simple calculus problem maximizing the volume of an open faced box given a rectangular piece of cardboard Only 5 got the correct answer to a relatively easy logic problem Only 6 got the correct answer to an easier logic problem This one bothered me the most, since liberal arts is supposed to teach critical thinking, especially in the humanities, but it was only math and science majors getting this one right. Only 4 were able to answer a simple probability problem The first one . This one also bothered me, since it needs no higher level math, it just involves critical thinking, yet lots of people all the humanities majors, and some of the science majors got this one wrong 7 believed that the p value from a statistical hypothesis test is the probability that the null hypothesis is true only 6 had written any computer program in any language only 4 said they would be able to solve the first few very easy programming challenges on projecteuler.net only 8 can read music only 7 knew that Yugoslavia is no longer a state the international studies major shockingly did not only 3 could name 3 or more of the current nations that used to comprise Yugoslavia Only 4 knew what the principle of parallx is and how it's used in astronomy Only 3 have read Ulysses Only 4 have read War and Peace Only 4 could identify Iambic Pentameter Only 5 could name 3 or more Central Powers and 3 or more Allied powers from WW1 Only 7 could name 3 or more Axis powers and 3 or more Allied powers from WW2 Only 4 knew what the battle of Hastings was about Only 4 knew who the Jacobins were Only 4 knew the difference between deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics Only 2 knew the difference between cultural relativism and moral relativism I have more of this if anyone is interested Our majors were Mathematics and Philosophy me Mathematics and Economics Mathematics and Economics Computer science Computer Science History and Political Science English Literature and History English Literature and Psychology Linguistics and Psychology Biology Chemistry International Studies My point is that we were all pretty good liberal arts students at a pretty good university, but all had serious gaps in being a well rounded, educated person, who is both good at critical thinking, and has a broad knowledge of the world. I think that part of the problem is that although our school compelled us to take breadth courses, they were trivially easy for example, one of us was able to not take any math courses at college, simply because they took AP economics in high school, and they took an introductory Astronomy course that involved basic algebra, another example is that I have never had a college level biology course, I took two easy botany courses that taught virtually nothing about biology . My point though isn't why this is the case, merely that Liberal Arts don't, in general, provide a well rounded education. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but that discussion is afield from this  post. I'd be willing to give deltas if but not only if You convince me that my friends and I are simply abberations, and that most liberal arts students have better broad knowledge and critical thinking skills than we do The questions that we asked each other last night were either too hard, or not indicative of broad knowledge and critical thinking. We fared well enough on the questions such that we could be considered to be well rounded, educated people Our school is not representative of most liberal arts educations other schools compel students to study more broadly and work on their thinking skills better than ours did.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In general, liberal education does not work as advertised\n","id":"c3e9059e-bb60-4ac8-8b52-06815ba01452"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>36% of the calories produced by the world's crops are being used for animal feed, of which only 12% then turn into animal products that can be eaten by the human population. That is a waste of 24% of the world's crops.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lot of the world's crops are currently used for animal feed, rather than human consumption.\n","id":"e0292d23-a890-4ac8-a518-af9e901c5f1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the Bible allow women to hold the church office of \"deacon\"?<|ARGUMENT|>Sure, he could, because it wasn\u2019t just him, a mere man, placing the restrictions; it was the Holy Spirit through him. In John 11:49-52, Caiaphas prophesied that Jesus would die before the Jews had even decided what to do with him. Verse 51 says that prophesy was \u201cnot of himself\u201d, or not of his own will or thoughts; its source was divine. Whether Paul was qualified or not doesn\u2019t pertain to the divine message revealed through him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Paul\u2019s solution here is quite brilliant. If the men are married to more than one wife, they are not allowed to be leaders in the church. Let me ask something. Was Paul married? Could he place restrictions on church leadership that he himself did not live up to?\n","id":"b86e1902-5c93-48bc-b7e0-6f9e60ec2feb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Many Christian festivities like Christmas, Eastern or Saint John\u2019s Eve are believed to have pagan origins.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The early Christian Church adopted a number of pagan traditions.\n","id":"271acd5c-3706-417b-be0e-a9c0aa2bd3f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most of Reddit seems to be very pro vaccine, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But here's where I stand on the issue. I believe that most people should get vaccinated, and we should definitely persuade people to do so because they do cause more good than harm, but I am against mandatory vaccinations because 1 I believe it's an issue of personal choice and 2 I was harmed by a vaccine when I was very young, and I know a few people who were as well, and I think doctors need to stop pretending that all vaccines are entirely harmless. A lot of the anti vaxxers still perpetuate the myth that vaccines cause autism, which has been disproven several times. I have Aspberger's Syndrome and even I don't believe this anymore. Anti vaxxers seem to have what is called confirmation bias, where they cling to their belief so much that any opposing arguments just do not register to them, and they will only bother looking at viewpoints that support their belief, because it makes them feel good. However, while pro vaxxers tend to be a little better at acknowledging other points of view, a lot of them still have this mentality that anyone who questions the pharmaceutical industry at all must be an ignorant dumbass who doesn't know anything. This is simply not true. Since when is it wrong to question the intent of large businesses like the pharmaceutical companies? Now I don't subscribe to the anti vax belief that these companies are trying to poison us or anything, but is it too far fetched to say that since they are for profit companies, making money does come first and foremost and effectiveness second? I'm not denying that they are expert scientists who are working to make them as effective as possible, but effectiveness sure isn't a requirement for them to make money. And since they can't get sued for any vaccine injuries they have very little incentive to make sure their vaccines aren't causing any damage. The government is protecting them instead of protecting us. Now regardless of how you feel about what I said above , you must admit that many of the pro vaxxers can be extremely judgmental towards the vaccine skeptics, making heartless and cruel statements like Any parent who doesn't vaccinate their children should have their kids taken away from them. Really? Let's break this down. You're saying that just because there's a small chance that an unvaccinated child will get some sort of disease, an even smaller chance that he will spread it to others before the disease is noticed, and an even smaller chance that the disease would be life threatening, you think that's bad enough for a parent to be taken away from their children ? You think that's worse than people who smoke around their kids? Do you think parents who are bad drivers and could get their kids killed in an accident are any better? I'm sorry but unless a parent is beating or abusing their child, you have no fucking right to say whether that parent deserves to be with his her kids. I have no problem with people telling others Vaccines are beneficial to society and I believe more people need to get vaccinated so we can get rid of disease. But when you call people like me a walking disease and claim that I'm putting everyone at my school at risk every day just because I'm not vaccinated, I'm sorry but that's bullshit. Sure, there's a slightly higher risk of me getting sick but you can't act like it's inevitably going to happen just because I'm not vaccinated. Vaccinations aren't the only way of getting rid of disease. Look at this measles mortality graph from 1900. The vaccine definitely helped, but measles was on its way down before the vaccine as well. Another side note, I've heard that the United States currently has a more aggressive vaccine schedule than everywhere else in the world. I don't remember where I heard this. If someone wants to dispute this, be my guest. My main two points are , 1 Anti vaxxers do spread mistruths and lies about vaccines which we can all agree on , but 2 pro vaxxers over exaggerate the necessity for vaccines, and unnecessarily shame those who don't get vaccinated as if it's the end of the world. I am neither pro vaccine nor anti vaccine. Please watch this video with Bill Maher, as it sums up my beliefs perfectly I don't care what you think about Bill Maher, watch it anyway just so you can understand where I'm coming from . As Marianne Williamson states in the video, There's a difference between having skepticism about science and having skepticism about the pharmaceutical industry. I know this is a sensitive topic. Please don't comment by attacking me for my beliefs. Do not compare me to a climate change denier. I just want to have a civil discussion about this, and since I'll admit I still don't know much about the issue, I'm very open to learning more about science and vaccines. Educate me, Reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pro-vaxxers and anti-vaxxers are both fear-mongerers.\n","id":"1c93f264-fea8-4ba5-b8c1-58686dc066e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Or at least, the expected course of action for anyone in a position to do it. I have really struggled to express this, so please bear with the poor reasoning, I should be able to answer responses better. We do not elect politicians to give us our morality. We do not change our behaviour to fit into the morality of our elected representatives. The only thing politicians are elected for in this sense, at least is to give us laws to follow. If the law allows tax evasion as a perfectly legal thing to do, there is nothing that indicates that we should not do it. Politicians can say, 'Well, that wasn't our intention.' but that's irrelevant, we can't be reading between the lines of what is already a very complicated process. If they want higher tax rates from rich people, they need to change the law. There's no overriding morality to life which dictates a certain tax rate. My morality says, 'Pay the tax rate you are obliged to pay.' I don't consider the morality of politicians to be any more relevant than the average man on the street and their 'intentions' are irrelevant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think tax evasion is perfectly moral and acceptable.\n","id":"244e4ab3-08c7-4d5c-8c4c-1ad83161b490"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Shamima Begum case: She should retain her British Citizenship<|ARGUMENT|>She Joined a terrorist organization ISIS and as such committed treason, thereby forfeiting her right to be a citizen of Britain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"She effectively renounced her citizenship when she left the UK to join ISIS.\n","id":"c4cc2509-4255-4878-a83e-e6e69ee54fc2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>This is particularly the case as parents are likely to only experience the positive consequences - like those that come from their children being wealthy - and not the negative consequences of stress, or a reduced social life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being affected by the decision means that children suffer the negative consequences as well as the positive. They are therefore the ones in a position to weigh the costs and benefits fairly.\n","id":"18d2ba2b-9509-4fd7-981e-bf75228c7d4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> He built his fortune from practically nothing. He's a self made rich person. He didn't start from some huge inheritence. That's something I respect. Starbucks is an example of how a company should treat its employees The idea that he'd only take votes away from Democrats is wrong History says the votes taken would be evenly split. He is an actual liberal. Not a radical lefty or progressive, but an actual liberal His statement that we can't afford things such as those that are in the Green New Deal is exactly how I feel. Not that they are morally wrong like the right believes , but just that we can't afford them right now He wants to overhaul the tax code. I hate that so much of tax law was written by corporate lobbyists I want to see it blown up. He's the only one who wants to do that. He is the only candidate even talking about the deficit and debt. Everyone else is just talking about the things they want to spend money on and assume the economy will magically create a huge surge of revenue. His point that no one being arrested after the 2008 financial crisis is an example of government not working like it should is sound and I liked hearing it. I like the idea of having more than two people to choose from for President.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Howard Schultz would be the first presidential candidate I'd actually be excited about in a long time\n","id":"1babd1e5-c21a-4702-922d-441794e180b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title says, I don't think vaccines help to wipe out diseases. Every graph I have seen that shows the rate of polio measles etc. after the introduction of vaccines has shown a great dropoff in the rate of the disease and of death, so I can understand why people would think the vaccines are responsible. What I have also seen however are graphs showing that these diseases were already becoming rarer and rarer before vaccines were even introduced. It is my belief that changes in diet from local staples only, to a large range of foods, made possible by trucking and mass transportation, is what actually contributed to the drop in diseases through the 20th century but I'm not particularly asking for anyone to disprove that here. I am also not looking for a reason why vaccines work. I understand the reasoning behind them. What will convince me are statistics that show that vaccinated individuals and unvaccinated individuals ie. a control group , of the same area, genetic background and socio economic stratus, have different rates of catching and or dying of the disease after being vaccinated or not vaccinated . So far all I've really ever heard as evidence for vaccines has been the old Vaccines were introduced in Year X, Disease dropped after Year X, Therefore Vaccines cured the disease. which shows correlation, and not causation. But that's why I'm here. Change My View<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think vaccines are effective in wiping out disease.\n","id":"c88e259c-6976-48fb-953e-30276eb23b8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Queuing is a simple system, the first person who needs a service is the first person who gets that service, the second is the second and so on. I realise that there are other systems and values that can be considered when deciding who gets to use a service first, and I am more than happy to use these systems when they are presented. For example, separate queues for people who need different amounts of service time and the like 10 items or less checkouts . but 90 of the time, a simple queue is the best way to determine who gets served first, not a scrum of people crowding around the service elbowing their way forward with no regard for politeness or etiquette, this is the kind of systems which promote different values for who gets served first, values like being pushy or being physically attractive, values which I believe pale in comparison to 'was there first'. This is a big problem in two places, bars, and everywhere apart from England a joke, I assure you, though a pointed one . Bars get a small pass because I understand that standing behind someone is a really hard concept to grasp when you are drunk, but less sarcastically, there are space concerns and bars nightclubs seem to be a place where politeness goes to die. As for the second half I just don't understand, why can't people understand that a disordered scrum just isn't fair or dignified and reduces us to piglets suckling at their mothers teat. Sorry for being a little overly British, but I have just returned from a three month stint travelling around Europe and this point really struck me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe queuing is an important tool, and not queuing is rude.\n","id":"579ca57b-aa43-4772-a21e-199974821181"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>In Selectorate theory the larger the pool of people needed to maintain power is, the more people in power will allocate resources for public benefit instead of private benefits. Removing voting rights from felons decreases the size of winning coalitions which benefits special interest over the general welfare.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Felony disenfranchisement negatively affects electoral processes and therefore undermines democratic legitimacy.\n","id":"c5b894f2-0782-4d8f-a1e2-e172679a976e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>Government actions that are covert in nature or sensitive rely on a freedom to not be answerable to the broad public. Having wealth and income information public necessitates that government financing be clear too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transparency may not always be ideal. Not all information that goes through governmental bodies is for the public to scrutinize and critique.\n","id":"b490d903-cbd5-4deb-a663-07a61908ee51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Similar Cryptocurrencies Good for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>It will be forbidden to buy and use these currencies, thus making anyone who does so or facilitates such a transaction an accessory to money laundering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Credit cards will revert transactions to buying these cryptocurrencies, thus the cryptocurrency exchanges would not accept them.\n","id":"63eb34d6-7ae1-41cd-a7ea-7d6cdead9a83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Both the window seat and aisle seat members have one of their own arm rests to use, but both of those seats are much more luxurious than the middle seat. The person in the aisle sit gets to look out the window throughout the flight and gets a surface to lean their head against, while the person on the aisle seat received unrestricted bathroom access, and the option to stretch out their legs into the aisle. These privileges for the outside seats should mean that the person sitting in the middle seat should be given the tiny gift of being able to use both arm rests for their seat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The person sitting in the middle seat on an airplane should get first priority to both of the arm rests next to their seat.\n","id":"14cfe118-94a2-4a0f-bd44-33ae438a1f78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Ghosts Real?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Spotting\" a ghost, which has never been proven to exist, could bring the observer a certain measure of reputation and public buzz. It's possible the want for popularity can elicit unreliable information.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Personal anecdote is not a reliable form of evidence; it has a high probability of being faulty.\n","id":"27fb18d9-c2d9-4ee8-a668-a83a9ed04a70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Thank you everyone for your input and perspective I understand this side better now, and Nujabes is pretty darn awesome. Upvotes all around I've been listening to Nujabes for a couple of days straight now, thinking he must have been a musical genius to come up with such amazing melodies. Turns out, he sampled a ton of his stuff. It also turns out that sampling is the way DJs and producers make their music yea, I'm new to this stuff, sorry . I have been enjoying just about every one of his works. Now that I found out it isn't all his work, I can't help but feel that it isn't all that amazing, and neither was he. After all, other people wrote these GREAT melodies, and all he did was put a beat to it. Thus, even though it doesn't sound bad, it really devalues the work that he released. The actual composers should be the ones praised if the praise is for melody . My reasoning doesn't completely make sense to me, and I still want to enjoy this music. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sampling music in hip hop for example diminishes the worth of the finished piece.\n","id":"53ceb600-3642-4ea7-8dd6-8635efa93f74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mobile Phones Used by Children<|ARGUMENT|>Information and Communication Technology ICT is now a normal part of modern life, used by everyone from toddlers to pensioners. So children need to grow up making use of technology such as mobile phones if they are to take their place in society. Such use fits them for the modern workplace with its need for tech-savvy employees with communication skills and the ability to work flexibly. In any case, children often have better phone manners than adults \u2013 they are less likely to shout into the phone, more likely to text discreetly, and more aware of text and phone etiquette.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Information and Communication Technology ICT is now a normal part of modern life, used by everyone...\n","id":"a6069808-bec6-405a-a4f4-45bcd7e2a972"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Bobby Henderson humorously proposed equal time to be given to teaching of FSM, intelligent design and logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence. Open letter to Kansas school board<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The arguments used for God's existence could also be used to support the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.\n","id":"cb9ff2e7-e0e0-463d-ad00-710fa20812bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>The representation that citizens get through their elected officials in Congress and the Senate is sufficient to count as meaningful consultation<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As the slavery reparations will be paid by citizens' taxes, their opinions have to be taken into consideration.\n","id":"b0871dc0-a940-4dbe-8319-86f525aee0e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Israel Remain Democratic Even If that Would Ultimately Lead to it No Longer Being a Jewish State?<|ARGUMENT|>Part of Israel\u2019s purpose is to serve as a refuge for Jewish people. The Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in Arab countries has reinforced that sentiment. This supersedes the sort of political system it should have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel must choose to reject democracy in order to protect its Jewish population.\n","id":"1548cab6-6a1a-47a8-bc69-a5d674617567"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Since 1974, the compromise acquired by Swedish politicians was to preserve the monarchy, yet to remove any former royal powers Nergelius, p. 41<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Sweden the role of the monarch is purely ceremonial.\n","id":"abd731e8-3fd8-474b-b0ac-e7e88f8350e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Classic literature, especially English literature, is incredibly overrated and the themes presented in them are also presented in almost every possible way in contemporary literature and film. Novels like The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, A Tale of Two Cities, Silas Marner shoot me now , are a burden to read and are only idolized because of the era they were written in. The majority of these themes are actually really simple and novels with difficult to read English shouldn't be used to convey them. They also discourage readers, especially high schoolers, to not read because of their difficulty and absolute dryness Silas fucking Marner . Edit I really appreciate everyone's comments. This subreddit is wonderful if it's kept civil My final consensus is that while I personally do not appreciate reading most classics, there message, timelessness, and thematics make it worth being assigned to read in Highschool. After all school shouldn't be modeled to be particularly enjoyable, but a learning institution. Thank you guys gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Classic literature is not only overrated, but incredibly simplistic compared to modern literature that it shouldn't be taught in schools\n","id":"c9f7226f-580f-4688-8fd4-3c8bbd602b93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Just because science can measure objective facts such as the well-being of people or creatures or that we can help or do good things for others, it does not necessarily provide objective truths as to whether we should care for others and do good things. We can conjur our moral values from objective facts or truths, but ultimately they are subjective by nature.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone does not care about well-being, or cares only about their own and not about the well-being of others, there is no way to argue that they are wrong from the point of view of science.\n","id":"e225535e-c86e-47e4-add5-3a51bf6a0ca3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi all. So my view is that we are now WAY to connected to one another and it's causing a lot of problems. Social Media in general arrived with MySpace. This happened in about 2005, before there were smartphones and tablets. If social media and the internet in general had remained a thing that only ran on a computer, we many not be having this discussion. It was the arrival of Facebook and the iPhone that changed how we talk to one another. I feel like since these things occurred and we became more and more anonymous on the Internet, we have become worse to one another and have become polarized. For example I'm from Ontario, Canada. Right now we have likely the WORST government in existence which is run by the Liberal Party. I made the error of mentioning that I am a Liberal online to a bunch of obscure faces. Without letting me explain, they proceeded to call me an enabler of taxing on tax, reckless spending and supporting a Premier that has had dozens of scandals. Yes, I am a Liberal normally but I think that this government is so far gone that I would actually vote them out in favour of the Conservatives if I had too. The point is, once I stated that I am a Liberal, nothing else mattered and I no longer could say anything without getting my head chomped off or called a moron. This sort of thing has made me sour at humanity in general. I mentioned once online that Black Lives Matter should look at how they function as a people before pinning it all on the white and Hispanic people. I wasn't being racist with that statement one bit. Still, I was told that I was no better than the average Trump supporter for saying it. I think the connection online and through our phones has polarized us more than ever. We now go on full on witch hunts before anyone has actually given cold hard facts. People get alienated and shamed online for things they didn't do that they then have to live with because if things like this. Politically we are now a mess world wide. We have violence happening in Europe, Trump Clinton in the US and elsewhere there is more political bullshit than JFK could fit in an Apollo rocket and send to the moon I have been more angry in the past few years over people who can't disconnect while driving. Someone has nearly killed me in a car accident because posting on Facebook was more important than paying attention to the stopped car in front of them. And regardless of deterring laws, people STILL do it. Change my view on the fact that we need to disconnect in order to re calibrate on ourselves as human beings. We are so bored with life because the online connection is what sustains us now. I'm old enough to remember when side walk chalk was the coolest thing to have on the block and I'm not even in my 30s I once believed in the idea of a Singularity. The idea where we would all come together and understand on another. But as time goes on I feel like that theory will remain just that. We are all too different from one another to ever fully get along. That notion of World Peace is Possible that I had while I was a kid is gone. It can't happen. So I really honestly challenge you to show me why being connected the closely is a good thing at all. Funny I complain about the opinions of faceless mob now I'm asking for them<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We have now reached the point where we are too connected to one another\n","id":"4d6e5269-4d99-4d8e-b1da-af10c41584ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Natural gas vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>Vehicles require a fuel that is easily transportable and that is capable of working with existing or modified combustion engines. Liquefied natural gas is capable of this. This is particularly important in the context of the fact that one of the largest contributors to global warming is vehicles. Because LNG is capable of being used in vehicles, while many other \"energy\" sources are not or less so, it is a very important \"clean\" alternative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liquefied natural gas can be a good fuel for vehicles.\n","id":"097cbafd-083f-4ee5-92da-24a860586c82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Going to a zoo can trigger cognitive dissonance for people who hold beliefs that animals should be treated well but have yet to be confronted with the reality of how unjust animal imprisonment is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoos can engender people's sympathy for animals that they would otherwise know nothing about or feel no connection to, causing them to support animal rights.\n","id":"728fdda5-b8be-42e9-ac0a-5c283e3144fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My dad helped support my brothers and I financially and he taught us the basics how to hammer, change oil, clean, change tire, etc. He also loved us very much, but he never showed it. He physically beating me for bad grades , mentally immediately after the beating he asked if I would rather be beaten by the alphabet or by numbers\u2026Answer alphabet, because they end , and emotionally we were afraid of him abused us, used drugs to the point that we were foreclosed out of two homes making my mother and us homeless for a year or two, chose drugs over us needed to get to wrestling practice but he needed to finish getting drugged up in the bathroom , violently showed us who was the boss flipping over Thanksgiving dinner that my Mother made because he was mad, shit like that and basically just being pretty bad to us, and the things we did not do or accomplish was never his fault but ours. When I say this I mean things like if we got bad grades it wasn\u2019t his responsibility to make sure we were doing well in school other than beating us, telling us to do better, and sometimes asking did we do homework we didn\u2019t . These small anecdotes were extremely common and unpredictable. My question is whether this upbringing had decreased our chances. While we all have emotional problems we are all still alive, not incarcerated, and he did fed us and sheltered us for most of our childhood. Does this financial support outweigh the bad, or is providing the bare needs assumed, a parenting ground zero, and everything built from that start? My position is that parents do not get parenting points for fulfilling a child\u2019s basic needs, especially if the baggage that comes with those basic needs are very heavy. And that being raised by my father has caused such trauma that my chances of being successful were lower than if he was simply absent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A parents can lower one's chances of being successful, regardless of financial support.\n","id":"06ec6609-976b-4152-be76-eee3452b6ff0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>One could argue that this religion is actively discriminating people, and PC people are against systemic oppressions like this one. There is a concept called \"axes of oppression\" when talking about intersectionality, in which you can be oppressing some people while you're oppressed by others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If some religion is oppressing some portion of the population, it's coherent with PC and with self-defense that the discriminated group of people should be able to label them as neccesary homophobes, in this example.\n","id":"30e58837-842b-4204-80e5-2ede4ac643a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Doctors should be banned from performing genital reshaping surgery on intersex infants<|ARGUMENT|>Genital reshaping surgeries on intersex infants are unnecessary as they encourage conforming to outdated and binary ideas of gender.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Doctors should be banned from performing genital reshaping surgery on intersex infants.\n","id":"e2207e9b-fbbd-4ccd-88b7-d9554f78fba3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Asian American groups are suing Harvard for racial discrimination Statistics show that Asians need to score 130 points more than whites on the SATs, and 450 points more than blacks on the SATs 1600 scale . That seems patently unfair. To change my view, please present legitimate reasons why colleges accept whites and blacks with lower test scores than Asians. Please also present evidence for those reasons. For example, is it that whites and blacks have a higher GPA than Asians? Or better extracurricular?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Asian Americans are unfairly discriminated against in elite college admissions\n","id":"499c75d2-79d4-4d42-abc0-445d63e2bdaa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that companies open to the public should be legally required to warn their customers or coworkers if they employ sex predators. I specify predator instead of offender because at least in Illinois predators specifically target children and commit heinous crimes against those who have less ability to defend themselves. If society has determined that a person is dangerous enough to warrant having to register for the rest of their life and list their home address on public registries, I think they should also be forced to list their employer as well if they have one . Especially in light of this week\u2019s sentencing of disgraced Olympic team doctor Larry Nassar, I see how predators can take advantage of the public\u2019s trust of the idea that they are in a safe space. Laws in some jurisdictions already prevent sex predators from being allowed in some public spaces such as parks or schools. However, there are many more public spaces where people might let down their guard in such as swimming pools, doctors offices, car dealership, or theme parks. It\u2019s especially scary to think about the fact that when we go to a public place, such as a theme park or museum, we warn kids to look for employees and ask for help if the child gets lost or separated from their group or family. We just assume that the employee will help the child any way possible but that might not be the case. If companies were forced to post that they hire sex predators, parents would be able to make informed decisions about who they are trusting their children around. It would also allow the company to make decisions which could prevent them from being a party to a lawsuit. This brings me to my second point. By default, this would mean that companies would be required by law to identify employee candidates with sexual offenses, which in some states is illegal. Employment discrimination laws in some states prevent the employer from denying employment on the basis of past criminal history. I could only find one caveat where this does not apply which is that an employer might be able to decline to employ someone if they have demonstrated criminal activity which directly impacts the job that they are applying for. For instance, someone with a history of Driving Under the Influence could legally be passed over for a school bus driver job. Employers who choose to prevent someone with a dangerous criminal background open themselves up to litigation for discrimination. It also opens the employer up to lawsuits because if they know that a person had a dangerous sexual criminal history, and the sexual predators attacks another employee, the employer could be culpable. In this case, it\u2019s like we are putting the needs of a criminal above the needs and rights of those who are trying to provide a safe place for their customers and employees. Sex offender registries were created in order to protect the public. Because of the likelihood of re offending, I think that sexual predators should not be allowed to be in a place of trust in a public space. While I acknowledge that all people deserve the ability to make a living for themselves, I don\u2019t think it should be at the cost of public safety.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies Open To the Public Should Be Legally Required to Warn The Public That They Employ a Sex Predator\n","id":"a9be1fc5-c1bc-4ae9-94bb-d0c98adf6b56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is considered taboo, at least in the United States, for people to ask other people's income or for you to tell how much money you make. Unless everyone equates income with one's value as a person, the amount of money you take home is simply a matter of your ability to survive, or purchase excess things. There is a distinction between honest conversations about money based on curiosity and those that are geared more towards bragging or one upping. I argue that the the latter would equate monetary status with personal value or individual status. Otherwise, I believe honest conversations about money can and should be had. Only those who are overly concerned with social status are sensitive to the issue of income transparency. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should be okay to ask a person's income or tell your own income as long as you don't equate income with one's value as a person.\n","id":"e1485128-2340-420f-8dce-cadbfc2a7fe4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Kingdom Ban the Burqa and Niqab?<|ARGUMENT|>Doing this allows the UK to not be discriminating against innocent people who wear these particular garments but would stop others who wish to hide their faces using scarves for nefarious reasons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If so, than the ban shouldn't be on burkas, but rather on any items of clothing that cover the face.\n","id":"62480134-64a6-4fcd-841f-361d5cea723f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>The referendum has been so utterly divisive, only a people vote can overcome that division in our tribal political scene. No matter what the politicians would have us believe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A decision as momentous as this should not be left to Parliament.\n","id":"de00d204-a93c-40d4-9487-527f43043945"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People can do same thing with various results. If they all have the same intent and commit the same act, they should be treated equally regardless of the consequence that was outside of their control of course, certain consequences ensure greater likelihood of getting caught, but that is beside the point now . For instance if you drive drunk you may end up getting home safely, you might crash into a wall, or you may murder a person. I don't think the result should matter. Same with everything else, the question should only be what your intent was when making a moral judgment, and what the part you were actively responsible for was. I am not saying this with an agenda to punish people more severely it could be in fact taken the opposite way , or even want to discuss just what is the right punishment for a certain act. just that the judgment should only be based on the part that was in persons control. I also think that morally speaking, if you committed a crime or immoral act you never got caught doing and you changed and now condemn it, you still should not support punishment of a person who did the same and got caught since you should assume they deserve the same chance to move on from it you do. Of course if you don't care for morality that is fine, but if you do, this should be a principle to go by. EDIT just to clear this out since everyone is misunderstanding my intent point and focusing on that. Of course we don't always know the intent and all that. Even now intent plays a huge part in judgment shooting someone by accident vs planned murder , I am not challenging anything that already doesn't exist at all with this point. My main point is that same acts done out of to best of our knowledge same intent should be judged the same, regardless of the outcome. EDIT Unfortunately, not very happy with this cmv because it seems few people even understand the argument and most of the discussion is focused on explaining the importance of intent by the way, that already is the point of most trials. Every argument against importance of intent might as well be a spearate cmv because it assumes bizarre legal practice. Other people seem to not understand at all what intent, act or consequence mean. No, Hitler didn't have a positive intent, since the intent behind his action to conquer Polad was to conquer Poland, and his intent behind killing Jews was to murder Jews and purify the race. So unless you agree with all of his intents there is absolutely nothing in what I said that assumes he was ok if we ignore the consequences since even judging him purely based on intent and action is perfectly enough. There are times when removing consequence doesn't change the situation and that is when the consequence is a direct result of intended action, or within the persons control. I am saying that consequence when it isn't in persons control should not serve either to worsen or fix the situation. Example if I shoot someone in the head with intent to kill them, I should be judged the same regardless of whether he happens to survive or die Example 2 if I run over a person driving drunk I should be juded the same as an comparably drunk driver who didn't run over someone, or who did, but the person lived It looks like for some reason no one really understand the argument and no one so far even challenged my view. I just want to hear, reg of legal or general judgment, why between two people who did the same for the same reasons, the one who by circumstance outside of their control ended with a better outcome than the other they would be seen as better or judged less harshly or the other way around.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the result of an act shouldn't matter when judging, but the intent and the act itself\n","id":"10912c73-fd0a-426a-b17f-316775d4bc1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>If we didn't eat animals, their equivalents in the wilds would still be eaten by other predators, so as long as we give our animals living conditions and deaths that aren't worse\/less humane than ones in the wild, eating them makes no difference, morally speaking. Therefore, we should instead focus on improving the living conditions of animals and making their deaths as humane as possible. This is a far more realistic goal to focus on, compared to trying to prevent humanity from consuming meat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Every organism on earth dies or is killed at some point, so other organisms can live. This is how nature works.\n","id":"76586232-de31-448a-8a6b-b695cdc337ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So with the current political climate in America and moving to the south , I've realized something mildly to extremely humorous that I'm having trouble wrapping my head around and therefore can accept as potentially having the wrong opinion on. Gun owners really think that they are the most oppressed group of people in the United States and that gun control means they lose all of their guns. I have not really heard of any movement to take our guns gaining enough momentum to threaten this even slightly, nor have I heard of a legitimate one that actually exists. It seems to me like a bandwagon, or an excuse to blow things out of proportion. But I feel as though I must be wrong about this? Is there something I'm missing? I'm here to discuss, not argue. Thanks in advance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gun owners are not oppressed\n","id":"925de098-5340-4a97-8abb-c34b3d4104e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Growing up, both my parents were drug addicts. they pretty much tried everything but heroin as far as i know. during this time my brother and i were surrounded by people who did all kinds of drugs. one day we were sitting around a table and i asked everyone why they took drugs. they all had one thing in common. they blamed somebody else. i find this excuse to be bullshit. unless the people who hurt them physically forced them to take the drugs, they had a choice. they made a decision that not only ruins their life, but is also destructive to those around them. its a completely selfish move. why should i feel sorry for someone who chose to take this path?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"drug addicts who chose to start doing drugs themselves do not deserve sympathy.\n","id":"ff2db3c1-0c1c-4dc1-93f3-4be60089059f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This post is inspired by a lot of rhetoric I heard a few years back, namely during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and debates about whether government should step in to artificially make it easier for students to pay off their higher education loans or even to forgive these loans entirely. On a moral level, I don't understand any justification for begging government to help you pay off loans, at someone else's expense banks, schools, taxpayers, etc . You took out the loan knowingly. If you were shortsighted enough to not have a reasonable payback plan, why are other people being literally forced, at gunpoint, to help you pay it back? I understand that college loans are very burdensome and only getting worse, but there are a lot of options that dramatically reduce the amount students have to pay, if they're smart about it. AP classes in high school. Running start in high school. Community college. Military service. Simply living frugally and planning years ahead, so you have a good nest egg for when the loan repayment starts. Please change my view and convince me that other parties, such as taxpayers and banks, should be morally required to bail out students who have a lot of loans and are complaining about it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you take out student loans for higher education, it's completely your responsibility to pay for it.\n","id":"74d1fedd-9b90-47e0-82e3-af400818a1c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This view is in response to the idea that every citizen of the United States has a duty to vote not just a right, but a duty. The way I see it, this narrative undermines our democracy. In my opinion, people should not vote unless they have made an effort to educate themselves. It is better to have a small pool of voters who are largely well informed than a large pool of voters who are largely uninformed. With a small pool of informed voters, we can at least rest assured that every voice in the conversation at least has some idea what it is talking about. Uninformed voters can vote for very flawed reasons. Some of them vote for whoever and whatever their parents are voting for, or their spouses, or their friends. Some of them vote for whichever names sound familiar to them. Some vote entirely at random and here, I am speaking from personal experience. When I turned 18, my parents forced me to vote, and in protest, I chose to vote for the first option listed in every section. In retrospect, I regret this, but at the time it was the only way I had to rebel against the pressure I felt. And that pressure is exactly what concerns me. When we support the dialogue that all Americans must vote and it is unpatriotic to abstain from doing so we push those uninformed voters toward the ballots. Instead, we should be encouraging people to educate themselves on the issues. In many cases, people who take the time to learn what is going on will then want to vote. But we should also make it clear that if people are not willing to take the time to learn what is going on, it is better for them not to vote. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pressuring people to vote is counterproductive and often detrimental\n","id":"d9ad7f8b-133d-4786-94ba-63a08b923733"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Chess 960 superior to regular chess?<|ARGUMENT|>There isn't a way for players to practice Chess960, while regular chess is predicated on practice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chess 960 makes it challenging for the player to improve on their mistakes.\n","id":"a4071a6e-4310-44d1-aeb1-84b4b2ba08b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we offer one of our kidneys to a stranger in need if we are able to?<|ARGUMENT|>There are stories posted online from kidney donors who regret their decision due to feeling like their kidney has not been put to good use, or feeling vulnerable to more health problems. These donors have to grapple with the turbulent emotions that come as a result.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donors can also experience feelings of anger, regret and sadness in the aftermath, especially if they experience unforeseen health problems as a result of the procedure, or their kidney is not successful in the recipient's body.\n","id":"d321fefd-1b63-4ed4-bc34-106fb88c750d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, section 33 is often called the notwithstanding clause. It reads as follows gt 1 Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15. gt 2 An Act or a provision of an Act in respect of which a declaration made under this section is in effect shall have such operation as it would have but for the provision of this Charter referred to in the declaration. gt 3 A declaration made under subsection 1 shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration. gt 4 Parliament or the legislature of a province may re enact a declaration made under subsection 1 . gt 5 Subsection 3 applies in respect of a re enactment made under subsection 4 . This clause drastically undermines the security of the rights of Canadians. It essentially lets Parliament or any province override the fundamental freedoms of Canadians without a justifiable reason. Parliament already is permitted to curtail the rights of Canadians when doing so is demonstrably justifiable in a free society, as provided by section 1 and as elaborated on by the Supreme Court in R. v. Oakes. The notwithstanding clause is a stain on the idea that Canadians have meaningfully protected rights. The protections for free speech, free press, and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment all exist only at the whim of Parliament or the provincial legislatures because of this clause. I understand that it is rarely used, but that does not make it dead letter, and it seems likely that during some emergency its powers will be invoked to severely curtail freedom.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The notwithstanding clause should be repealed.\n","id":"d25ed238-86d1-4c1e-9a30-28ac02f1890a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if quantified in terms of economic value, the worth of a life differs depending on the situation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no meaningful way to establish the 'worth' of a human being.\n","id":"ef4e8087-9628-4963-af62-7091bc8ede08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Claiming a fetus is a person is considered to be anti-woman even though approximately 50 of fetuses are female.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political correctness incorporates much more than mere terminology. Political correctness includes ideas about social justice.\n","id":"961e8fed-5d6f-403b-8eb3-b39823f92fe6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a straight man who got married about a year and a half ago, I think it's ridiculous how many hoops the gov't U.S. makes you jump through to get married. I commonly hear gay marriage advocates saying get gov't out of our bedroom. I think this is looking at the problem backwards. Legalizing gay marriage doesn't take gov't out of their bedrooms. It does the complete opposite. I believe we need to remove the gov't from regulating marriage. Then the state will be out of all our bedrooms. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rather than legalizing gay marriage, I think marriage should be removed from government altogether.\n","id":"340342c4-d878-4049-826f-ccb80e433ad6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know some people may find this ridiculous but I have been watching this British show Utopia and a quote from it really stuck out to me Let me explain something to you. The sun throws a certain amount of energy onto this planet. We turn it into food, clothing, shelter, etc. It supports an amount of us, and it took 30,000 years for that amount to become one billion. Then we found a way to use ancient sunlight, sunlight trapped in oil and coal. We started to live off that. What happened? In just 130 years, our population doubled. The next billion took thirty years. The fourth billion has taken just 14. So here's the question. What do you think is going to happen when that oil and coal runs out in, say, a hundred years? When there's ten billion living on a planet that can support only one? All of the statements above are factual as far as the population stats go and have actually made me think that population control isn't exactly as radical of an idea as many may believe and will almost certainly be required in the future. In 100 years there will easily be more than 10 billion of us on the planet which may or may not be over our planets carry capacity for humans. Regardless of that we are in an exponential growth phase which likely cannot be sustained once we have ran through all of the energy and resources that have accumulated on Earth in the time that humans weren't able to utilize said resources. I am not saying that I personally am for population control at this point in time, but in the future I do not see any other way that we can sustain a healthy and relatively peaceful civilization without regulating how many children people have. There are a finite amount of resources on Earth and whether it happens 100 years from now or 200, 300, etc, we are going to exhaust these resources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being pro-population control is not a radical or unreasonable viewpoint.\n","id":"2a359bfd-d1ef-47e8-baad-5912c944a175"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Doctors should be banned from performing genital reshaping surgery on intersex infants<|ARGUMENT|>Having different sexual organs at a young age when one is naturally curious may lead children to feel singled out and question their parents as to why they look different than \"normal\" children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Getting used to an anomalous anatomy may cause pain and suffering for a child which can easily be circumvented.\n","id":"cb0afcd7-0c0e-46e3-a300-c1fb67609219"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I cannot in my wildest dreams fathom as to why having children is considered a normal human instinct . It absolutely baffles me. There is nothing redeeming about them at all. Children are loud, annoying, dirty and expensive spawn that wreck havoc on your life. Yet, even those reasons are not as pressing as this other issue. There are a finite amount of resources on planet Earth. By bringing more consumers into the world, it becomes more difficult to have these resources as there are now more people who need them. Many organizations have conducted studies and have determined that in the coming decades there will be sever shortages of food and water across the globe due to overpopulation. This will be especially prominent in third world countries where people are uneducated and have no access to birth control, resulting in them breeding like rabbits. The world is already overpopulated and there is no reason to create new people. Human beings are constantly polluting the world and destroying natural habitats that are home to hundreds of different species. There is an insane amount of damage done to places like the Amazon, which also encompasses many different plant species that could one day cure modern day ailments. Many humans are sadistic savages who hunt endangered species for profit and cause their numbers to dwindle. They capture these creatures and put them in places like Zoos, where they are gawked at. People are constantly polluting the world with their filth, we don't need any more of that. Yet people will keep pumping out spawn at an alarming rate because they're often addicted to fairytale books like the Quran and the Bible. Be fruitful and multiply has no place in modern day context. People are awful, stop making more of them. STOP BREEDING<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having children is one of the most selfish things a person can do\n","id":"4312e9fc-3045-4ae1-9c9b-0c887428cbaa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Reddit Admin appear to think that its reasonable to allow mods to remain running subs indefinitely. The notion appears to rest on the premise that the sub is 'theirs', with the argument put that Reddit is a free market and users are able to move to a different sub if they dont like the mod s there. I have not been able to locate any deeper reasoning than this. The site's faq's and related published information is scant to say the least. I take issue with both matters because I think the reasoning behind them is flawed. On the first matter, I believe the notion of someone 'owning' a community, any community of people is wrongheaded. Its likely and we see this playing out in various subs that an unhealthy culture may develop over time when one person is allowed to reign without any risk of negative consequence for their actions, unchecked. The abuses of power by mods in Reddit is relatively common I believe because of this policy of 'ownership'. I believe the subs should not be conceptualized as 'property'. Rather they are a collective, shared by participants. As it stands, mods can perform as well or as badly as they choose. As long as they dont break the core rules, they are free to do as they wish. I think this is a problem, because it inevitably leads to wide variance in quality of moderation. I dont want to give any impression that I am mod bashing. I have been a mod. I certainly would not paint all moderation teams with the same brush. However, problems exist, and are common, due to fundamental lack of accountability. What are the effects? We have moderators who insta ban Redditors on their own caprice We have moderators who do censor subs excessively in line with their own ideological leanings We have moderators who break the rules of their own subs Various types of cronyism and nepotism are common. On the second matter, of Reddit being a free market, I believe this is also an odd formulation of the situation. Many of the 'core keyword' subs are the oldest and most populated. Thats just how the numbers stack up. Poor moderation does not necessarily correlate to the respective sub's userbase numbers 'x', for the simple fact of usually being oldest and largest, will often have the most news, and the most contributors for discussion. As users shift down the keyword variants 'x1, x2, x3', usually it will be the case that post rate will be impoverished. Perhaps the original intent behind the rule was an expectation or vision that there would be more equivalence between subs. The fact is that the smaller communities are often a more limiting experience based on sheer post volume. This hasnt played out. The free market thing does not work, because the 'products' are usually do not the same aspects of quality. The primary may be busiest but badly run, others may be inferior in terms of traffic they may or may not be badly run, but the traffic issue remains. Please convince me that the 'ownership' and 'free market' systems are well reasoned models Reddit could be using to manage its moderation. As far as I can see, they are idiosyncratic, and problematic constructs in need of an overhaul.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit's policy of allowing moderators to stay in place with no system of checks or balances should be reviewed and replaced with a better system.\n","id":"e7ff4e73-355d-4d44-bed1-63eb1cfa3a3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>If the scheme is national\/regional only, and that net cost to some is too high, they may take their financial and\/or other resources elsewhere. Would the benefits of living and doing business in a UBI society outweigh the higher costs in tax?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI will increase taxes for those making money, thus pushing capital-makers to move elsewhere, and making the UBI financially unsustainable.\n","id":"dfdbf35d-b0f4-4f50-b493-226c600aa38a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's why I hold that view 1 If you're not plotting terrorism or something highly illegal, the government has no reason to care about what you do or say. 2 If the government doesn't care about what you do or say, it will not interfere with your life, and 99.99999 of Americans won't notice the difference between being monitored vs not monitored. 3 Is the government exposing or actively interfering with things we have a legal right to keep private? Is the government participating in celebrity gossip, leaking Lindsey Lohan's texts and whatnot? Is there any reason for non highly criminal Americans to fear the effects of government monitoring? As far as I understand, the answer to all of these is no. Of course, all of this is being done in the name of the War on Terror, a concept of which I'm not particularly fond, but I have trouble seeing how it's a problem for the vast majority of Americans. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think Verizon's NSA surveillance is that big a deal.\n","id":"282f59dc-d452-4a84-b179-1304e46cb7c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious based discrimination often just reflected the attitudes of the time, thus other forces, not religion, drove those views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The tribal nature of humans has been the biggest source of conflict.\n","id":"4ac8fe3b-5603-4035-aef0-bebbc33c4c83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the Catholic Church is justified in forbidding the use of barrier methods of contraception.<|ARGUMENT|>The Catholic Church does not only forbid the use of barrier contraception but also of casual sex. The issue is not that the Church is being irresponsible by banning the use of barrier contraception but that people are choosing to follow some of the Church's teachings but not others. Pope Benedict XVI argues AIDS is \"a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems\"1. If people followed the Church's teachings on casual sex as well as their teachings on barrier contraception, the AIDS epidemic would be dramatically decreased. Given, therefore, that it also forbids any sex outside of marriage, the Catholic Church is totally justified in forbidding barrier methods of contraception2. 1 Wynne-Jones, Jonathan. \"The Pope drops Catholic ban on condoms in historic shift.\" The Telegraph, 20 November 2010, 2 Pope John Paul II. \"Evangelium Vitae.\" 1995.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In context of other teachings, does not promote the spread of AIDS\/HIV.\n","id":"0653925f-53a8-496d-9c71-16f6a4ccb516"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Definition of racism Prejudice treatment of individuals based on their race. Definition of sexism Prejudice treatment of individuals based on their sex. It's racist and sexist Giving an individual an official boost advantage because of said person's race or sex is literally a racist or sexist act. It's unfair This system pays no attention to said individuals socio economic status which has the greatest effect on said individuals compared to discrimination. It's inefficient To give people with inadequate grades ability a boost in job quotas and university admissions based on traits that have nothing to do with said grades ability will result in lower performance in universities and industries. It causes even more prejudice in society In a society where affirmative action is active people will have reasons to believe that individuals might have gotten employed not because of skills, but because of having a certain sex race thus resulting in an even more tensions in society. regarding sex The system pays no attention to differences in interest among sexes which varies greatly The differences in interests among men and women varies greatly. Women tend to lean toward jobs and interest that are social and emotional while men tend to lean toward jobs and interest that are technical and physical. Societal norms, prejudice and sexism is obviously a reason why a gap exists between interest, but when comparing these factors to genetics resulting in great behavioural differences in toddlers and babies not yet being affected by norms the gap is justified, or at least the majority of it. A company shall therefore not be blamed for having over 90 male programmers when 95 of job applicants are male. Example like these can be found everywhere. Favouring an individual because of sex just because people of that sex tend not to apply for a certain job is simply sexist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Affirmative Action and sex\/race quotas is wrong and literally racism and\/or sexism\n","id":"6681155d-2719-4b96-9acc-255a9b12cd7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What I mean by this is that the use of computational methods bioinformatics machine learning to analyze biological data nucleotide peptide sequences and metabolomics will create the most progress in the field of biology in the next 20 years just as molecular biology has contributed an inordinate amount to the field since circa 1930. I believe this because biological data are being created at a pace that far outstrips the ability of humans to deal with even with our present computational ability. I especially believe that machine learning will aid in the identification of patterns in biological data presently missed due to the sheer enormity of it all. I ask  to help me see any blind spots in my belief that computational biology is the biology of the future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In biology, computation will be the \"molecular revolution\" of the next 20 years\n","id":"acda8b9b-3a62-45f1-beee-12b7ac8f770c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should football soccer in Australia adopt a promotion and relegation system?<|ARGUMENT|>Relegation often costs clubs sponsorship money, as it becomes less lucrative to advertise with a team playing in an inferior league.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Promotion and Relegation present extreme financial hardships on both promoted and relegated clubs.\n","id":"a6ea9f3f-59a7-4db6-aeb3-3cf7363d2495"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many subreddits, including  and many default ones, employ a language called NoParticipation that hides voting arrows, comment submission, and link submission to people who came to the subreddit from a certain place. Subreddits like subredditdrama link to np.reddit.com r xyz to avoid vote brigading. That's all fine it stops most brigading, can be avoided by disabling CSS or changing the URL to www, and is fine. But some subreddits, such as r conspiracy and r dataisbeautiful, use NoParticipation for all users, not just ones who come from subredditdrama. The only way to get around it is to subscribe or to disable stylesheets. But for some subreddits, they put a box over the Use subreddit style so that you can't even disable the CSS These places claim that they want to keep content high quality by only allowing members of the community to vote and comment and post. But all it takes to become a member and allegedly be more qualified to post, comment, and vote is to click the subscribe button. Spammers don't care they'll just hit subscribe and spam. But people who are genuinely interested and who may not want the content on their front page have no choice but to subscribe. Not only do I think this violates one of the rules of reddit but I think it's just a shady way of boosting the subreddit's subscriber count artificially by deceitfully forcing people into subscribing to participate in the subreddit. Please convince me that this is not the case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that subreddits should not be allowed to hide the voting arrows with CSS to non-subscribers.\n","id":"ee5be3dd-bd20-4fe6-b821-4e84b58c9124"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer as befits anything related to this game One's opinions on the quality of entertainment pieces are just that opinions, which inherently are entirely subjective and therefore not beholden to anyone else's views or judgment criteria. With that said, I believe that Doki Doki Literature Club hereafter DDLC is a merely mediocre visual novel according to my criteria for judging the quality of visual novels. I also believe that said criteria are widely shared by this post's potential audience. In other words if you believe that DDLC is fantastic or terrible, you are absolutely entitled to that opinion, but I still maintain my arguments for its mediocrity, which are presented below. Also, DDLC spoilers abound, of course. Why has DDLC proven so successful? I have pinpointed four major causes. It's Free As far as competitive pricing goes, it's hard to beat 0.00. This especially aids word of mouth advertising, as it permits one to, without financially induced hesitation, download and play DDLC when recommended to do so. An often overlooked aspect of free Steam games is that they can be downloaded without providing financial information, meaning that children without access to an adult's monetary assets can likely obtain the game, which they could not do if the game required payment to play. This is ironic since DDLC is aimed squarely away from children, but the point stands, and I think this must have significantly increased DDLC's total downloads. The graphics and sound are good DDLC's soundtrack is critically acclaimed, and rightly so. Also, the character sprites in particular are beautiful, on par with expensive visual novels like the NekoPara series. Still, without meaning to disrespect skilled two dimensional artists, the sort of animesque vector graphics that DDLC mostly uses are relatively cheap and easy to produce compared to many other forms of art commonly used in video games, especially considering that sprites can often be reused. It deals with common psychiatric disorders in a relatively tactful way I am certain that DDLC would never have succeeded if it had not portrayed mental illness essentially how it did. Its depictions of these common maladies are, in my opinion and apparently the opinion of many others, informative and sympathetic without being exploitative. After considering some other works which handle these sensitive subjects less gracefully, it should not come as a surprise that legions of mental health advocates and those suffering from neurotic disorders would relate to this game and see it as a rare pinpoint of light in a social milieu of stigmatic darkness. Most of DDLC's audience has no point of reference for how good a visual novel should be, and how a visual novel should be good Visual novels are an almost exclusively Japanese genre. Many never receive high quality English translations and are thus condemned to be played only by native Japanese and a few hardcore international otakus. When visual novels do receive high quality English translations, they usually remain niche products for weeaboos. Even the enormously acclaimed masterpiece Steins Gate is by several country miles removed from mainstream Western video game culture. Meanwhile, DDLC has attracted an audience almost mainstream in size and demographics, courting the favor of people who had likely never before played or even heard of a visual novel, an advance shuttled along by a free advertising campaign in the form of Let's Play style videos by major YouTube celebrities like PewDiePie. How can someone be expected to judge the quality of a specimen without knowing what quality the specimen ought to have? Besides the implied criticisms mentioned above, here are some other complaints I have about DDLC. This section forms the bulk of my argument. It's too short Perhaps I sound like a choosing beggar for complaining that a free game has too little in the way of content, especially considering that producing said content is exceptionally time consuming, not to mention monetarily expensive if assisted by one or more paid workers. Still, its length clocks in at approximately four hours, which is unimpressive, especially when a nontrivial amount of it is repetition. The game can easily be finished in an afternoon. There is no voice acting Again, perhaps I sound like a choosing beggar for complaining about this, but hasn't Dan Salvato sold enough fan packs to hire voice actors? In my opinion, high quality voice acting is practically a necessity for a modern visual novel to be considered excellent. Surely he could have at least hired some Japanese seiyuus for the job. If low budget hentai studios can pay women to recite lines and make distressed noises, Dan Salvato can too. Its horror is derived from trite, archetypal methods DDLC attempts to invoke fear in the player through three main methods 1. Glitch like corrupted art 2. Pseudo jumpscares and 3. Depictions of self harm and suicide. 1 is an extremely worn out scare tactic, and one I associate with laughably bad creepypastas hailing from the late 2000's, not a visual novel released less than a year ago 2 is even more worn out, rivaled only by a pair of work boots that are older than I am. Suffice it to say that jumpscares are nothing new. 3 may indeed be enough to invoke fear and disgust in players who are high in empathy or for whom depictions of self harm and suicide recall traumatic memories, but a low framerate sequence of Yuri stabbing herself in the heart with a knife can hardly be considered a crowning moment of the horror genre. Finally, I would like to mention that DDLC's plot can be summarized as the player is tricked into thinking it's a heartwarming story about lovable schoolgirls, but the setting is soon revealed to be a gigantic shitshow, with fear, agony, and mental disorders lurking behind the scenes. This premise had previously been the subject of much better executions, most notably the absolutely outstanding 2011 anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica and its 2014 spiritual successor Yuki Yuna Is A Hero . The game spoils itself Whenever the DDLC application is opened, a delightful disclaimer is briefly displayed This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed. Of course, this warning is necessary, as otherwise there would be negative consequences, like unsuspecting parents allowing their children to play it. But it still takes away from the surprise of discovering that the seemingly innocent, happy smiley cuddly game is anything but. To reiterate from my opening disclaimer I do not mean to insult anyone, be it anyone on Team Salvato or anyone who has enjoyed their work. Yet I respectfully disagree with your opinion, and I invite you to refute my arguments and demonstrate that my criticisms are either wrong or should not prevent me from considering the game as excellent as you do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Doki Doki Literature Club is merely mediocre and entirely undeserving of its extremely high Steam ratings and critical and popular acclaim.\n","id":"686599d3-c050-428f-ba95-78d360a8386b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should higher education be publicly funded?<|ARGUMENT|>A well-educated population is more likely to find and nurture the hidden talents that make the country economically competitive and successful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having a well-educated population is not just good for the economy, but also for democracy and civilisation in general.\n","id":"16b58959-8255-48d2-970e-54275155b549"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it unethical to use ad-blockers?<|ARGUMENT|>Digital advertisers do their best to gamify people's attention with disinformation and sensationalism. To the extent these practices rely on advertising, blockers disencentivize this shift.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Advertising creates harmful incentives for web publishers. Running blockers will help push them to adopt better business models.\n","id":"d1e1f2f8-eb88-49b0-8af7-4238159b5adf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mandatory labeling of genetically modified foods<|ARGUMENT|>There is nothing wrong with labeling turning consumers off to GM foods. That's a good thing. While some argue that it is \"unfair\", there is sufficient evidence to indicate that GM foods are risky and should be avoided. Anything that helps this cause, such as labeling, should be celebrated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is good for labeling to turn consumers off to GM foods.\n","id":"286a7018-5581-4d4c-bcc7-94af44b1c60e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So since you're reading this, you probably haven't come to the direct conclusion that I'm a monster thank you. Seeing all the new attention that has been placed on anti bullying campaigns in school where educators tell students terrible stories about a student who committed suicide, I feel like too much padding is being placed around this generation. Don't get me wrong, kids should still be taught that it is wrong to make fun of others simply for one of their characteristics, this is an important life lesson. I just feel like kids nowadays are becoming softer and softer so soft in fact, that they feel like because they are being called fat in school, the only way out is to kill themselves. Ok that was a shallow statement, bullying goes WAAYYY farther than that, but my point still stands, kids should, as well as being taught not to make fun of each other, be taught that suicide is never the only answer. Also, bullying always has two sides. As sinister and evil as it may sound, the kid being made fun may also be partially wrong in a bullying case . Take this recent huge Amanda Todd deal. It was ALL OVER the news about how bullying caused this girl to take her life. But come on, she undressed for multiple other guys, if she thought there wasn't going to be any backlash, then she was ignorant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that kids who are bullied are partially to blame for the bullying and all this new attention placed on \"anti-bullying\" is a little too much.\n","id":"9c167d41-d996-4143-99d2-f2f63ad4bf70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>block access to social messaging networks during riots<|ARGUMENT|>By using Twitter to signal the start of riots it attracts people to join the mob. People in riots generally look to those around them in order to see what is considered acceptable behaviour. As boundaries are crossed, such as the change from indiscriminate vandalism to looting, and reported on Twitter, the same behaviour echoes elsewhere. The lens through which rioters determine acceptable behaviour is expanded, so the chance of behaviours like looting rippling across the various mob groups within a locale increases. One escalation of violence becomes multiple escalations. Twitter is thus a serious danger to society during periods of social unrest and rioting, because it acts as a catalyst for further mayhem. By blocking Twitter governments are able to manage flashpoints and prevent them from expanding violence to other locations. This makes riot situations both less likely to escalate, and easier to break up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social networks serve as a powerful signalling device for the expansion of violent behaviour\n","id":"c92659fb-bff2-4239-9fcf-02cee2cadfde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Just one initial condition of the universe - the mass and energy distribution of the singularity - is fine-tuned to a precision of 1\/10^10^123 No intellectually honest non-theist would claim that the prior probability of God's existence is significantly lower than that, especially considering that this mind-boggling improbability is raised multiplicatively with many other similarly large figures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given physical calculations involving the life-permitting ranges of physical constants, PU|\u00acD seems to be vanishingly small - so much so that any realistic prior value given to PD still works for this argument.\n","id":"49738d29-1c71-4cfe-af76-2007ce9dca4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it okay to physically torture prisoners?<|ARGUMENT|>Torture is aimed at making people talk, rather than specifically reveal true information. There is no mechanism for ensuring those tortured are incentivised to reveal the truth, rendering torture pointless.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is impossible to know if prisoners actually know the information that they are being tortured for.\n","id":"c9cfd8aa-98a0-4b34-b881-6769443ce973"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time for Hungary and the EU to Part Ways?<|ARGUMENT|>Going far back to the Ottoman invasion, Hungary can be seen as a country that defends its freedom and values, and it should not accept European called values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hungarian values are distinct from European or global values. Hungary should defend them against the globalisation agenda of the EU and others.\n","id":"30cecdbf-b6d5-4935-aa95-c9644e52d3b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In 2017 The Guardian wrote x200B gt Climate change 'will create world's biggest refugee crisis'. gt gt Tens of millions of people will be forced from their homes by climate change in the next decade, creating the biggest refugee crisis the world has ever seen, according to a new report. gt gt \u201cIf Europe thinks they have a problem with migration today \u2026 wait 20 years,\u201d said retired US military corps brigadier general Stephen Cheney. \u201cSee what happens when climate change drives people out of Africa \u2013 the Sahel sub Saharan area especially \u2013 and we\u2019re talking now not just one or two million, but 10 or 20 million . They are not going to south Africa, they are going across the Mediterranean.\u201d x200B Full article x200B If global warming reaches the stage where some coastal areas become uninhabitable, or if draughts with an unprecedented intensity plague a country, people will likely flee. The majority of countries affected will be developing countries that have contributed comparatively little to global warming, yet suffer the consequences the worst. USA, Europe, China, Brazil and possibly others consider this an incomplete list have an obligation to help these people and offer them easy access to their countries, that doesn't involve potentially drowing in the Mediterranean Sea. x200B Complaining about their refugees' crime potential, given how their standards of education and social progress are likely behind to use a normative term wealthier countires, and using that as a weapon to bar refugees from entering the country would have to be considered agitation. There's no judge who'll persecute you for making vast areas uninhabitable in other areas of the world, and few crimes compare to having your turf ripped away from you through no fault of your own, and solely because wealthier societies wouldn't dial back their harmful conduct. x200B Taking in climate refugees is or will be humane and moral and if ressources allow for it, a country should take in as many as possible. x200B x200B x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If it comes to climate-induced migration, the nations with the highest emissions have a moral obligation to admit their share of refugees. Not doing so would be morally reprehensible.\n","id":"65325d26-260e-4420-8b04-4cce75fcd18c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Black Panther: Who's Right About Wakanda's Role in the World?<|ARGUMENT|>It is clear that T'challa's duties to Wakandan citizens are not lexically more important than his obligations to other people. For example, if T'Challa had a choice between one Wakandan suffering a minor scratch and 100 foreigners dying terrible deaths, he ought to choose the Wakandan getting scratched.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if T'Challa's first obligation is to his citizens, that doesn't mean that it always trumps his obligations to people outside Wakanda.\n","id":"6919d545-36b1-4527-97c1-3352ab3a3aff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT u AureoRegnops convinced me it's not unethical to teach religion to your kids since the parents teaching the religion don't know any better. However, I still believe it's wrong, so if you think religion should be taught to kids, give me counter arguments. By kids I mean people under the age of 16. Kids can't think rationally. If the kid is young enough, you can tell them almost anything and they'll believe it It's easy to trick a 7 year old into believing that milk makes you run much faster, for example. If kids are taught religion in school or by their parents, especially if it's conveyed as fact, they'll likely believe it and treat it as fact. This is an issue. There is no problem in teaching kids that objects fall down when unsupported because that's objectively true. All religions, on the other hand, are unproven fairy tales, often riddled with logical inconsistencies, and as such are more than likely false. When kids are taught illogical nonsense from a young age they are very likely to carry the nonsense as fact throughout their lives. For example, when they assume that a god exists, they might experience contact with god through their sub conscious and become delusional hard core Christians. But why does it matter? Being religious brings happiness and meaning to life I disagree. For one, I value truth over made up happy things and I think kids should only be taught objective facts at school. Also, religion causes a lot of problems. A lot of wars are caused by religion, statistically countries with more religious people have higher crime rates and lots of religions restrict the lives of the people who believe in said religion. For example, Judaism sets clear dietary orders. Also, I've seen lots of people say something along the lines of My life would be easier if I was an atheist since I wouldn't need to worry about eternal punishment in hell and it makes me really sad because these people were more than likely raised to believe these horrible lies from a young age. I don't mind grown ups choosing their religion since they can think for themselves. However, teaching young kids religion isn't giving them a choice of religion, it's almost forcing one down their throats. This is why I believe it's unethical to teach your religion to your children and religion should not be taught at school.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unethical to teach religion to kids\n","id":"da737d22-d70c-46e8-b669-47a4b47753f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is transhumanism the next step in human evolution?<|ARGUMENT|>Even the most secure internet domains have been hacked. A group of cyperspies known as the Sea Turtles have successfully hijacked the internet domains of entire countries. Individuals expose themselves to this very real risk with little guarantee of safety if they turn to transhumanism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If humans are computerized, they may be subject to hacking like computer viruses on computers or takeover.\n","id":"2df2a88c-aeaf-40bd-a6eb-d648690a5b8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The entertainment a person obtains from watching a bullfight should not be considered more or less moral than their enjoyment of consuming a steak. If anything, bullfighting is a much more moral activity than consuming meat because the former is more rarely done and kills fewer animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The collective enjoyment that a large crowd gains from watching bullfighting exceeds the individual pain of a single bull. On a utilitarian basis, a bullfight is a net positive.\n","id":"ae4f2925-6af6-434a-8bf2-6fb3ef402722"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I worked with this girl for 8 months up until a month and a half ago. We hooked up for the first time 5 months ago and regularly for the past 4. We both said we didn't want a serious relationship early, but have gotten closer as time goes on. We were our closest when I left. I know she tries to avoid emotional investment though, she's pulled back before. She also had an ex she almost married back home, but left to move to the city. Mentions him with others but not me. x200B She said she needed a week to herself a couple weeks after I left the company. She came back with a text saying sorry I just feel like I need a week to myself. I said thats fine do what you need to do. Following week she said lets hang next week, feel like I haven't seen you in a while. The one night she didn't work late she went out with her friends. Asked me where I was out at 10pm and never responded when I told her where to come. x200B I went on vacation Thursday that week, then she did with her family. Called her when she was back. We had a fun talk but she was busy at work the next week. That's about 4 5 weeks of not seeing each other. I would get snaps and texts once or twice every day or so. She asked me if I'd be interested in rooming with her guy friends, I said lets set up drinks so I can meet them. No response. Ran into her on the street later that week, she said she was just about to text me. I was pretty hungover so not my best interaction. It was fine though. Kissed her when we parted ways, we both had plans, and said see you soon, she said ok. Got a snap later that night of her and her girlfriend. One the next day. Called her Monday night when I was near the office, no answer, no message since, it's been almost 2 weeks. x200B I\u2019ve only ever texted for logistics and gave her the benefit of the doubt, but communication has got less and less. Just very surprised and pretty hurt to be this close to someone and get a no contact. I was going to ask her to do something one more time in a week or two. Probably shouldn't though.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should not reach out to her again\n","id":"ff118b75-73e1-4dda-aecf-c14c42c0405c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>The idea that there is no free will implies that choices people make are not what makes people and societies flourish, and that can't be proven because those societies have to make good choices, when bad choices are always an option, in order to be successful. Lack of free will removes credibility for success and patterns to said success. The same implies to failures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The everyday actions of everyday people are evidence for the existence of free will.\n","id":"6e68b814-2276-4dc2-b8e7-790fd6ef8a43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a common and very misleading tactic at almost all clothing retailers that use mannequins. Quite simply, the act of pinning back shirts or blouses on store mannequins to make them appear slim fitting when in fact they aren't is a form of false advertising. They are trying to show what the piece of clothing that they are selling would look like on a person, but what they are in fact showing is what the article of clothing would look like with additional and sometimes costly alterations, and many consumers may not pick up on this. They will simply purchase the item with the belief that it will fit like it does on the mannequin. This practice is wrong and should be disallowed by some kind of regulation. Edit So the main point of rebuttal has been that mannequins do not accurately represent a human body and therefore the clothes need to be pinned on them in a certain way to compensate. I understand that reasoning, however if you pin the clothes on the mannequin body so tightly that they do not hang proportionally to how they would hang on a real person, what you are doing is creating the false impression that the clothes fit a body better than they actually do. YES of course you can simply try the clothes on yourself and figure out quickly that they don't fit on your body like that, but that's not the point of this issue. If a store is putting the clothes on display in any way, the display should accurately represent the product they are selling.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Clothing retailers should not be allowed to pin back clothing on mannequins to make it appear more fitted than it is.\n","id":"6dda8e88-7cdd-4070-a96e-ab3460e0b4f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By that I mean, organized things. Well, I lied in the title. There is, in my opinion, two kinds of order. The word we use in our daily lives when a dish is made, when objects are sorted etc. and the one that is relative to nature's point of view this one is the one that doesn't exist . Anyway Let's throw dices. If you grab 6 dices and they fall next to one another and they make 1 2 3 4 5 6, we get amazed by that. Some of us would smile and say wow, what a coincidence . We like that. The thing here is that the dices forming 1 2 3 4 5 6 is not more special than if it formed the sequence 6 6 1 3 4 1, for example. To nature, it is not more special than any other outcome. It is just about probability. Now the controversial part. Many religious people claim that order can't come from disorder. There must be some entity that created us. Well, in my opinion, we are not organized beings in the universe's point of view. we are that very low probability that happened. It is just like that same example in the last paragraph. Except that our hands throwing the dice is the big bang and the dice are octillions of atoms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Order is just something that is psychologically satisfying and doesn't truly exist.\n","id":"62f72803-fd97-4da6-8463-6c78676af1d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>Endorsing politically correct conduct which the topic of this debate can be seen an example of while well-intentioned, can lead to downplaying the significance of certain historical processes and can cause society to disperse further.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Twain's use of the N-word accurately depicts the culture and national conflict at the time. Changing that language would misrepresent history and the meaning of the text.\n","id":"fd991898-6a77-4119-86cc-a14d82a8564d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't understand how Dark Wallet will be a beneficial system. In an abstract sense, it's neat, I get it, anonymity of the buyer and seller. Cool stuff in an abstract, cryptographic sense. However, I think the concrete application of such a system will just involve lots of drugs being illegally sold via the internet. I don't think it will just mirror the actual reality of this, I think it will actually encourage it. I'm also afraid that something like sex trafficking will make it's way to the dark web world, allowing people to be bought and sold with ease in this online market. Someone please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Dark Wallet will promote drug purchases and possibly sex worker purchases-\n","id":"02824d6b-7f34-4a28-be61-8ae022c7bd96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Laws that legalize preferential treatment are themselves discriminatory. Definition 2 Recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another. You are recognizing that one class of people are different than another, and are treated differently Life is inherently unfair Certain groups are politically popular, while others are not Popular groups obtain special treatment Unpopular groups then lose competitive advantage Other points of relevance Height is another common form of discrimination in job markets. It is said that every inch of someone's height adds 789 per year to their salary. People who are considered unattractive make 10 15 less than their attractive counterpart. the next study found the penalty to be 24 People who are attractive make anywhere from 15 to many multiples more depending on job type and relevance to that job. People who are unintelligent make vastly less than intelligent people do. Intelligence is a large part born trait. Of course you are now forced to claim that you do in fact support these efforts because otherwise you a practicing preferential discrimination. Why is it okay to offer preferential treatment to someone that is a black male, yet deny preferential treatment to an ugly female? Why is it okay to offer preferential treatment to a gay female, yet deny preferential treatment to a short male? So now you add Level of attractiveness Height To your protected class definitions, since no one has control over their height or general level of attractiveness everyone has the same access to dress general makeup But now you're in a really sticky situation. Why is it okay that you offer preferential treatment to someone who is a woman, and yet deny preferential treatment to someone who is born an intellectually inferior male? Certainly a WOMAN is entitled to make 100 of the wage a man makes, then why is a DULLARD who was born with the same lack of control over their destiny not entitled to make the same wage if they were born to at least average intelligence correcting for environmental effects ? Now you must either subsidize them by forcing employers to hire them at average intelligence rates which is unlikely for a side for you to pick or be forced to either admit life is inherently unfair or that yes you should distribute a portion of taxes to them for them to have as income, free to do with whatever they want. People who are taller than average or considered more attractive than average would need to pay a penalty. Or you'd have to make it discriminatory to pay someone a higher rate to someone that is taller or attractive and ignore the fact that discrimination occurs anyways or fight a perpetual war against reality . Similarly you'd also need to put in place discriminatory hiring policies that ensure the distribution of tall to short candidates in jobs is roughly equal based on natural distribution, and the same with attractiveness. The same thing that lawyers and enforcement branches do with race and gender. Otherwise you're for selective preferential treatment, and not actually against discrimination. Which you could counter I only want to protect against discrimination, I shouldn't be denied a job because I'm gay or black. Why should you be denied a job because you're ugly? No one would deny someone a job because they're short Sure, but then why are you fighting for equal wages for women? It doesn't have to just be about denying jobs. Certainly you don't support equal wages for women but not for people who are short. Analyzing this deeper it should be obvious that life is inherently unfair and trying to legislate morality is ridiculous. You can't possibly deny that we discriminate to people who are dullards, and you can't say one person should be entitled to a more fair existence than another without supporting unfairness. To support selective fairness, is even more unfair than not regulating at all. By protecting for instance gays, but disregarding dullards, you are saying gays are more deserving of fairness than dullards. It goes to reason that these groups don't actually want a discrimination free society, they just want to advance themselves. Because in order for them to truly be for a real totally equal means they'd need to support the dullard, the short etc. Such a thing isn't possible nor desirable. Thus, these policies are themselves discriminatory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Laws that legalize preferential treatment for politically popular groups like gays are themselves discriminatory and degrade the quality of life for less popular disenfranchised groups that also deserve the same treatment like the short ugly and stupid since they aren't given the same advantages\n","id":"fcd1ef1c-5961-4be6-8581-bd4a7ef83222"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>In a recent poll, 62% of Conservative Party members thought Sajid would be \"up to the job\" of being party leader, tied for first place amongst the candidates mentioned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sajid Javid could be a potential replacement for Theresa May and is popular amongst party members\n","id":"9f39b74d-14f5-448d-81ee-28ba39d39a93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should schools have more security?<|ARGUMENT|>Joe Clark from the film \"Lean on Me\" said, \" If we treat our students like animals, that's exactly how they'll behave!\" Schools should be a place of learning. More security, which implies adding newer layers to existing security, is too Draconian and will make schools feel like detention facilities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More security can make students feel like they are in a prison, possibly causing trouble at learning and socializing.\n","id":"1c662157-aa30-4946-a182-31c51838d616"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the Arab Spring revolutions can create stable democracies.<|ARGUMENT|>Fincial and diplomatic engagement with the international community is essential for democracy to take hold. Tensions turn to conflict when governments are unable to provide basic services to the people, as was the case in Gaza when Hamas was elected in 2006 and the US and EU immediatey froze nearly all the funds and resources that were reaching the occupied territory. Furthermore, support from the West is necessary to provide the financial resources to rebuild after the revolutions damaged business and scared tourists away. However the West\u2019s does not support democracy unless the ruling party is guaranteed to act in the interests of the West. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the United States has either directly aided or executed the overthrow of over thirty foreign governments, many of which were popularly elected.a The US has in the past warned that aid to Lebanon could be jeopardized if Hezbollah was dominant in the government.1 The US has a history of confrontation with the party that is the main political representation for the Shia element of Lebanese society which has eroded rather than supported Lebanese stability.2 The victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian elections, winning 76 of 132 seats, did not result in any rapprochement with the Bush administration despite their professed desire to see democracy in the Middle East.3 The result was that aid from Europe and the US was reduced to humanitarian aid only, rather than as before being a major element of Palestinian government income and expenditure.4 The result being that in 2007 the \u2018country\u2019 was rent in two as Hamas seized control of Gaza. Of course another Middle Eastern state that holds democratic elections, Iran, is the very model of a pariah state from the western point of view. It seems that the west is less concerned about democracy in the middle east and more about stability. a. Wikipedia, 'Covert United States foreign regime change actions;, 1 \u2018U.S. warns on ties with Hezbollah-backed Lebanon gov\u2019t\u2019, Reuters, 25 January 2011, 2 Nicholas Noe, Lebanese government collapse: a history of missed opportunities, guardian.co.uk, 14th January 2011, accessed 19\/05\/11 3 Scott Wilson, Hamas Sweeps Palestinian Elections, Complicating Peace Efforts in Mideast, Washington Post Foreign Service, 27th January 2006, accessed 19\/5\/11 4 Palestinian Parliamentary Elections 2006, GlobalSecurity.org, accessed 19\/5\/11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The west only supports democracies that fit with its world view.\n","id":"bc640837-1765-4d46-98af-db0895629993"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Having a partner care for a child partially or fully allows women to focus on things such as an education or their career, as women do not have to prioritize the needs of their child over their own desires and care for them all the time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marriage provides individuals, especially parents, with useful support networks that may not exist otherwise. Having a partner eases the process of caring for a child.\n","id":"068a3c57-50fb-4e8b-a541-e8ea67ffc8ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund security for places of worship?<|ARGUMENT|>Community outreach officer roles have been established to connect police forces more closely with activity in the local community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments have a large range of resources at their disposal to deal with security matters.\n","id":"6df52e67-43db-4f55-925b-d8eccfebca68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I really hope I'm right and that no one can convince me otherwise because I don't like the prospect of either candidate and it's comforting to think that the outcome doesn't matter. Every election we are told that this is the most consequential election ever. And every election it ends up being untrue. There are very few things that the last four Presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama have done that have had a large impact on US citizens. I know there are some exceptions to that but not many. The way our system is set up is intentionally obstructionist and slow so that no President can cause a lot of damage. This is a good thing but it also means that claims of the sky falling if insert either Trump or Clinton is elected are vastly overstated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No matter who wins the election, very little will change. It won't be a big deal.\n","id":"34a83e6a-22d8-47a0-a05a-5a2efaceb4aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Political correctness informs us about the origin of the words we use when describing subordinate groups, especially that some words stem from the assumption that one group is superior to others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political correctness tries to provide us with a means of establishing more informed beliefs independent of cultural bias.\n","id":"5d04969b-70f3-4a81-84c9-93dba0439d46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know that my boyfriend watches porn and so do I sometimes but I still can't help but feel uncomfortable when he watches it. I've told him that I don't mind it because I know that he just does it to get a release but I worry sometimes that I might not be good enough for him. It's like I know that he isn't doing it to hurt me but I can't help but feel kind of inadequate. I keep thinking that he might start comparing me to the pornstars and wishing that I was more like them which makes me feel even worse. I also don't like how porn can be very degrading to women. I really do love him and I don't want to come across as a jealous, psycho girlfriend if I bring this up with him. So could someone please change my view on this? EDIT Several people have commented about the relationship between my boyfriend and I. We've both had some jealousy issues in the past but we worked through them. I trust him a lot and enough to assume that he wouldn't cheat on me. We have our ups and downs like any couple but we're generally quite happy with each other. The relationship is a good one although it has it's issues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm uncomfortable with the idea of my boyfriend watching porn. Please\n","id":"9abf4abf-cc39-42c6-b9c6-ebbd90f6ddba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is ecotourism sustainable?<|ARGUMENT|>Furthermore, more damage to ecosystem in the form of deforestation occurs as a result of roads being expanded or built to create a path for tourists to get to their ecotourism sites. Hiking is one of the most common tourist activities, but this interaction with the nature can potentially be harmful as people may remove potential reproduction take plants as souvenirs trample potential seedings and feed on wildlife or species of plants in the area.doi.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A consequence of ecotourism is that it can destroy fauna and flora.\n","id":"c3fb86cc-2727-4318-9bcf-728f56b4108e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Not mentioning slavery in the Constitution was not an endorsementsmithsonianmag.com and crf-usa.org it was a failure to know how to end slavery.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Neither slavery or segregation was a Right in the Constitution\n","id":"aa2dc324-a235-4dc0-9866-ec749276939a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite? Either way, is she making a positive or a negative impact?<|ARGUMENT|>Much of the criticism leveled against Greta has been spearheaded by older age-sets, particularly middle-aged men. These are often personal attacks that have little to do with her climate change efforts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given that the past generation has made no meaningful effort to combat climate change, it is hypocritical of them to pass judgement on Greta's efforts.\n","id":"2467f78b-2f53-41c6-95e7-bf653200bab7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>If policy only reflects majority interests then there will always be an incentive to ignore minority interests.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democracies allow for the will of the majority to restrict the freedom of others.\n","id":"4bcf2004-2918-4ff0-99f9-c410c3a412ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As far as one on one interaction is concerned, I don't believe that this really matters as a result of technological developments. More than this, I am not convinced that there's much need any more for places for adults to interact with specific themes in mind e.g. education as surely this can be achieved in an alternative 'better' way through both existing and potential technology. People have become better connected as a result of technology, and I fail to see any way that they have become segregated or detached with the exception of someone sometimes listening to an iPod.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people are better connected in all areas of life and discussion as a result of technology.\n","id":"c0daf8b0-da3f-45c0-b205-7ced95ae4f37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Doctor Who: Is The Doctor Genderless?<|ARGUMENT|>Time Lords had moved beyond the notion of gender by the time the Doctor was a child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender is a human concept; Time Lords may not have such a concept.\n","id":"722dc85b-c95a-4b38-880e-e33ac0205b84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In today's employment world, people expect to be able to get a handle on you , which for me means, that they understand a little more about who you are, what your perspectives are, what value you can add to them if they are considering a hire. I think these are all very valid points it's a form of marketing I suppose. But at the same time, it's very easy to look a person up LinkedIn? and see where they work, what roles they have had, who they engaged with, etc. So this creates a very delicate tension between on the one hand, trying to articulate the insights, issues, possible solutions, and on the other hand, not damaging the current employment relationship. So the one audience could be reading the papers, comments, blogs, discussions, and thinking, wow, this guy has some useful insights, he seems to be quite able to hone in on the problem maybe I should consider hiring him. The other audience is reading the papers, comments, blogs, discussions, and thinking, this guy is busy airing our dirty laundry, making it sound like we don't know what we are doing, damaging our brand, and causing all sorts of problems. We better get rid of this problem. I'm not saying that the posts are unmoderated, or without discretion, but it doesn't change the fact that that at the end of the day it's a no win situation. Change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Creating a public presence on social media etc. when one is in a difficult position career wise is a no-win situation.\n","id":"6e9be45c-ab3b-4c1c-9404-b38efc5e3c7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see the tipping drama on Reddit fairly often and i see guys commenting that they tip cute and hot waitress more for being cute. I think this behavior makes you a lesser man , a wimp , cuckold and creates power balance in industry where he could have had a male waitress doing the same quality service and he gets less tips for that than average service from bubbly hot 18 year old.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":": A man who tips waitress extra for looking cute is a chump\n","id":"5a217735-9df7-4f71-9903-76aa1cd4636c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Marvel vs DC: Which Universe is Better?<|ARGUMENT|>DC has produced the first major female superhero movie and has had more major roles for female characters in it's cinematic universe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DC Comics have an inclusion commitment to the diversity of its characters.\n","id":"4146f84c-bbf5-4c35-b6ea-6026e2f0aff2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>The death toll of a normal bombing campaign on Tokyo, also called a fire bombing, would have been unimaginably high. Tokyo was densely populated and wooden.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A prolonged strategy of blockade with bombing would have killed more than the nuclear bombings.\n","id":"5d9f0bd4-a93f-448d-9610-81a4c7a70e9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Host Countries and Cities Benefit from The Olympic Games<|ARGUMENT|>Montreal's cost overruns ended up saddling the city with $1.5 billion in debt that took nearly 30 years to pay off.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is often the residents that have to bear the massive cost of the games.\n","id":"aa9098e4-580a-46d7-bac2-353f78d92e05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Islam compatible with feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>Ibn \u2018Umar, the son of the second Caliph, reportedly commented \u201cWhen the Prophet was alive we were cautious when speaking and dealing with our women in fear that a revelation would come from God concerning our behavior. But when the Prophet died we were able to speak and deal with them more freely\u201d. This comment reflects an admission that there was social resistance to early Islamic reforms regarding women Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The institutionalisation of patriarchy can be attributed to the cultural practices and traditional, male-dominated religious interpretations of Islamic scripture, rather than religious doctrine p. 3, para 3.\n","id":"9ccf224c-a54b-41c1-ad51-17b56e192872"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My mom always cooked her steak well done, and that's how I've grown to like it. Every time I eat any kind of medium rare steak that has too much juice blood I get disgusted. I know good steaks are meant to be eaten medium or medium rare. How do you  on this and get me to start my gradual transition without being disgusted by the blood? I can try slowly going from well done to medium well to medium and so forth but I still can't get past the whole the juice is blood part. I also need a few more characters to get to the 500 minimum so here it is<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I've grown up loving well-done steaks because that's how my mom always prepared it. I get disgusted by the \"blood\" in medium\/rare steaks, but I know it's the \"better\" way to enjoy steaks. Reddit, on steaks\n","id":"9739dfbe-75ec-4a7a-b82c-f04d886018e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Supernatural If something exists then it is natural. So supernatural is an oxymoron. Metaphysical Unless you can give an example of or demonstrate that something metaphysical actually exists then the word is referring to nothing that is known to exist just like supernatural. Transcendent A common usage of this word e.g. The bands music transcends it's genre. is perfectly ok but the other usage e.g. God transcends time refers to something not known to exist or for which there is no evidence that it even makes any sense or has has any real meaning e.g. transcending time. Edit People seem to be objecting to the way I have phrased the title. Obviously, I am not suggesting that these words have no meaning at all. I'm saying that the things these words are referring to are not real in the sense that I mean them. To , all I need is an example of something that is supernatural, metaphysical or transcendent which is actually known to exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The words \"metaphysical,\" \"transcendent,\" and \"supernatural\" have no meaning.\n","id":"b17ff27c-9092-4a0c-b2a2-e981b07bb537"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Assisted suicide, Debate on Euthanasia<|ARGUMENT|>This means that withdrawing life-support should never be equivalent in intent to euthanasia. That is, it should never have the explicit purpose of ending a life. In Terri Shiavo's case, for instance, the explicit purpose of withdrawing life-support was to end her life. This was wrong, and is the reason why it was so widely opposed. Instead, withdrawing life support or denying it from the beginning must be about a broader desire to, for instance, live life naturally and without artificial support, spend as much time as possible with family without the interruption of life-support, or to live life naturally without the interruptions, discomfort or pain of life support. And, of course, withdrawing or denying life-support can also include death as the end result, but that death should never be the central purpose of the act.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Withdrawing life-support should not be to end life, but for other purposes\n","id":"aa3ea8b6-5ad5-4c75-bcc3-a2c4655bd01a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>More focus and development on genetically modified food and viability of it could encourage more people to go vegan.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetically modified food offers an alternative to relying on animals as a food source.\n","id":"e2289bc1-388b-457d-be37-fecfb5d1d3bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do angels and demons exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Cognitive scientists have determined that the hyperactive agency-detecting device HADD, which evolved in order for humans to stay alert to the arrival of predators, can account for the human tendency to believe in the supernatural.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No scientific study has ever shown the existence of any supernatural beings.\n","id":"bc449912-5339-4562-a4fb-7a347b0ceed3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019ve spent the last few days at a Buddhist monastery in northern Thailand, and have come to formulate the opinion, based on what I\u2019ve seen here, that Buddhist monks are living largely parasitic lives, essentially exploiting people\u2019s ignorance in order to support themselves. I am by no means an expert in monk hood, but based on what I\u2019ve seen here I know some monks have to work to live, especially in China, and I don\u2019t have a problem with that I have come to this conclusion. Please feel free to correct any misconceptions as well. Below is my understanding reasoning the monks are provided with housing, food, water, and a stipend by the monastery. the monastery makes its money almost exclusively from donations from Buddhists. the goal of each monk is to individually attain escape from earthly desires and an open acceptance of death. Not the betterment of their community or the uplifting of their fellow men and women. the monks are treated with the utmost reverence, almost like gods. It is expected that everyone bow their heads in the presence of the monks. We are expected to place rice and other foods on the monks plates ourselves with a bow so that they do not have to move between plates to dish out their meals. In a vacuum, I don\u2019t have a problem with this. But the issue is that I do not believe that the monks, living alone in a monastery, meditating in order to achieve tranquility and escape from earthly desires, are contributing any meaningful value to society. I believe that it makes sense that if capable, you should work for a living. If there is a welfare system in place, it should extend to everyone, not just the monks. Yet they are living relatively comfortable lives because a largely uneducated populace believes the universe will give them good karma if they give money to the monks. They even go weekly to schools and walk around the primary students\u2019 classrooms, expecting and receiving plentiful donations from the children. I see elderly people get to their knees and kiss the ground in front of the monks out of respect. It feels almost degrading to the individual. I believe that the respect and rations that the monks receive is largely disproportionate to the amount of value that they\u2019re providing to the society around them they sit still all day, for essentially selfish reasons as it helps no one but themselves , and I see this as parasitic as they are living off the backs of hardworking individuals while providing nothing. To clarify, I have nothing against the fundamental teachings of the Buddha. I just feel uncomfortable with the seemingly unwarranted lifestyle that the monks are provided with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Buddhist monks are parasitic and exploitive in their lifestyles\n","id":"fbc50410-d880-4a1c-a98d-e8d430905913"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A break from politics, I know. I don't know what's driven me to think about it lately, but with my incoming 26th birthday, I guess I'm just starting to get paranoid it'll never happen. I'm a female, so admittedly, I do have privilege in the sense I'm not looked down on as much as men are for being virgins. I think of myself as just pathetic and sad now. As someone with a low to nonexistent sex drive, I'm really starting to feel the pressure. When other's talk about sex, it makes me feel sick and depressed for having yet to experience it, but whenever I set my sights on trying to do something about it, I end up anxious and chickening out at the last minute. Please change my view, I really want to think of this situation differently and stop obsessing over something it doesn't seem like I'm ready for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel bad about myself for being a 26 year old virgin.\n","id":"f2f386c1-4c24-4ce8-b80e-084f8fbba740"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should citizens be able to crowdsource laws?<|ARGUMENT|>Our current places of law debate such as Parliament or House of Representatives are limited by the attention spans of the people gathered in the room. However crowd sourced forums are able to bring many more people who have more spare time then elected officials and they are able to go into more depth then elected officials.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We aren't comparing time available to the average voter, we are comparing time available to the average legal analysis and debate forum participant. Natural logic indicates that a forum participant has the free time, by definition, to participate.\n","id":"b507f38f-073e-4261-80c3-179f8b1ab099"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi Reddit First let me skip the qualifications about how awful Trump is I agree much of what he says is awful untrue, but this is about something I think is overblown. This video came up in my FB newsfeed and at about the 1 50 mark one person conveys disgust that Trump suggested pregnancy is an inconvenience to businesses. I know this person is not alone in the way they feel. But it seems like Trump is correct. Here is the clip with him saying it It seems like one of those things we accept like sleeping. I could get so much more done and see so many other things if I didn't have to sleep, but 1 3 of my life is dedicated to it. It is a major inconvenience I realize others may take issue with this analogy try to see it for what it is and not get lost in the weeds . How can a person argue that pregnancy is anything but an inconvenience for a business? Even if someone points to human reproduction as necessary for a society to survive, so what? It being necessary has no bearing on whether or not it's inconvenient to a business it's closer to the sleep analogy in that case. You have an employee who will get paid without producing work assuming the business offers maternity leave a separate topic . They will then be distracted by obligations to the child let's be honest, unless you never see your child, working 'round the clock is less likely work life balance, etc are all separate issues and let's assume the person isn't a completely absent parent most aren't. So  pregnancy is an inconvenience to a business, and there was nothing wrong with Donald pointing that out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump saying that pregnancy is an inconvenience to businesses is not only fine, but true.\n","id":"64fad575-ff3d-42cc-a9c4-762a14ef23fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Accepting the fact that there are truly desolate situations, and accepting that there are also innumerable variables to cause a person's situation, it is my view that each individual has the prerogative to improve their situation and most people who remain poor have the ability to change that, but find a reason or excuse not to. Note this view point is from that of a personal and interpersonal philosophy, not a public policy. From a public policy perspective I think Rawls hit's the nail on the head.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At some point in most poor people's lives, they're the only reason they're still poor.\n","id":"c2318456-7abb-46ef-a250-f9350c6b4065"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>Mitch McConnell - US Senate Majority Leader and Republican - wrote in his book about how Obama would not negotiate with policy issues, but would straw man opposing views to policy to prove any opposition to be incorrect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Republican leaders believed that Obama did not possess the legislative experience to \"cut deals\" with them, and did not attempt to bring lawmakers to his side.\n","id":"f7885664-e1b6-4544-9a1c-dacc973d7f9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The Book of Mormon refers to the golden plates as \"sealed\": \"And behold the book shall be sealed.\" 2 Nephi 27:7 \"For the book shall be sealed by the power of God.\" 2 Nephi 27:10 \"And Martin Harris shall say: I cannot bring the book, for it is sealed.\" 2 Nephi 27:17<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon teaches that a protective magical \"seal\" was put on the golden plates and a set of magical \"interpreters\" prior to their burial in the hill Cumorah\n","id":"d04a64c1-e3bc-4703-83c3-d9874f8f59da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I really, really don't want to believe this but all the information that I can find indicates quite strongly this is so. A little background. I was raised Mormon. I left for varying reasons not the least of which is because I'm gay but most of my family remains in the church. Information I've learned since indicates quite strongly that the LDS church is a cult such as the BITE model to the point that I'm all but convinced it is. I don't want to believe this because to do so means that my family members are in a cult and because I love them I need to do everything in my power to get them out of it. I don't want to believe that I was in a cult or that some of my family still are in a cult so please, help me  that Mormonism is a cult Edited to add the BITE model requirements for being a cult with my thoughts, just for clarification sake Behavior control Regulate individual\u2019s physical reality seems unclear. Dictate where, how, and with whom the member lives and associates or isolates yes When, how and with whom the member has sex yes to an extent Control types of clothing and hairstyles yes Regulate diet food and drink, hunger and or fasting yes Manipulation and deprivation of sleep sort of? Financial exploitation, manipulation or dependence yes Restrict leisure, entertainment, vacation time yes, in a few ways, not across the board. Major time spent with group indoctrination and rituals and or self indoctrination including the Internet oh god Yes. Permission required for major decisions yes. Thoughts, feelings, and activities of self and others reported to superiors yes. Rewards and punishments used to modify behaviors, both positive and negative yes Discourage individualism, encourage group think yes Impose rigid rules and regulations yes Instill dependency and obedience yes Threaten harm to family and friends yes Force individual to rape or be raped in the past, yes. Nowadays I don't think so. Instill dependency and obedience yes Encourage and engage in corporal punishment in the past yes. I'll post the rest in replies as I think it's too long<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Mormon church is a cult and I should do everything in my power to get my family out of it.\n","id":"9507630c-1140-4d83-9510-7d0093a103e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe the n word should not be used or atleast not be socially acceptable only when said by an african american. I understand i'm diving into some murky water but its honestly annoying that its a word that can either be offensive or greeting. I understand that the enslaving of african americans was terrible but thats my point. Since slavery was so terrible, why would african americans want to use a term related to it on a daily basis? I could understand they might not want to forget, but isn't that the job of historians? I just feel there is no reason it is such a greeting word if said by the right person but offensive racist if said by the right person when in reality it is just slang that so happens to be derived from a racial slur. It should be viewed as racist or not, not sometimes racist and sometimes not racist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The n word should be forgotten and stop being used.\n","id":"a69e5bb9-5df5-4067-8771-ed4ffd39e14f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Twitter add an edit button?<|ARGUMENT|>People could manipulate others by editing their tweets. For instance if I wrote a tweet supporting \"A\", then someone wrote that he agrees, and later I edit the tweet to support \"B\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person would be able to later edit and change a tweet to something completely different than the original.\n","id":"f7cdc962-544b-4d90-8bd2-0ff47df779e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU have its own army?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a strong correlation between military power and global influence; many experts credit the United States' position as a global superpower to its immense military strength.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having an army would increase the EU's influence globally.\n","id":"1078e468-4960-4906-b508-2c405da472b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>\"Qualified immunity\" is a horrible legal doctrine which needs to be ended.<|ARGUMENT|>\"Qualified immunity\" violates the rule of law, a critical component of democracy. It thus also undermines democracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Qualified immunity\" is a horrible legal doctrine which must be ended.theappeal.org\n","id":"e42d61af-1b48-4b47-b94f-fec0351a1fe1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>In the United States, the share of the popular vote won by Republicans in the House of Representatives has varied during the past decade between 43% and 52% and in the Senate between 42% and 54% Even when Muslims make up 2% of the US population in 2050, their influence will be negligible compared to these already occurring shifts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea of an electoral balance between conservative and liberal forces in high-income countries that could be swayed more than usual by Muslim influences is unrealistic. Larger shifts in the balance already occur naturally.\n","id":"5ba02b54-b255-41aa-a17a-5487b0ebfd9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Context I'm Canadian, and our school system really hammers home the point that the Native American Genocide was some horrible event that was very regrettable and completely unforgiveable. I assume because slavery wasn't ever very common here they needed to find some other historical event to lord over us and make us feel guilty about. I'm having trouble understanding what makes what our ancestors did to the Natives any different from what hundreds of countries have done to other people over thousands of years of human history. The Mongols systematically slaughtered the people they conquered Ghengis Khan was probably worse than Hitler and usually the people in charge of countries barely cared about their own population, so it's obvious how they felt about other countries. It seems to me, if the situation were reversed if the Natives had the technology to defend themselves, or the military power to invade Europe and take their lands, they would have done so, as every sufficiently powerful empire through history has sought to increase their dominion. Of course we conquered them. They were weak and our ancestors were strong. I don't think war should be glorified or anything, but it's not as if our ancestors were some embodiment of all the ills in the world and they and only they sought to subjugate and conquer other people. For the overwhelming majority of human history, this was the natural order of things, and only recently are people choosing to look back and say Hey that was terrible when in fact it's not any worse than what's been happening for the entirety of human history. Basically, my view is that looking back at our history and saying Oh yeah, the Native American Genocide sure was terrible and our ancestors were monsters for perpetuating it is completely disingenuous. There is no point in regretting the sins of our ancestors or trying to make amends, no more than Macedonia apologizing for the lands Alexander the Great conquered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Native American \"Genocide\" wasn't any different from countless other invasions\/conquests in history and shouldn't be treated like some great sin or blemish upon our ancestors.\n","id":"7a48781f-167c-4143-b773-600108ab5f47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How Much Say Should a Father Have With Abortion?<|ARGUMENT|>Mothers face a higher risk of poverty unemployment, and lower income regardless of education level.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having a child disproportionately affects a woman's life more than a man's.\n","id":"9fe14e5c-ddaa-4e11-865e-cac0b08d634a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that there is scarce scientific claims that a child knows that they are the wrong gender early on in their life and that early hormone therapy is more effective and could improve the quality of their life. BUT, it is my opinion based on anecdotal experiences that people are desperate to see this movement through for the wrong reasons. To put it simply, acceptance of this practice would be a great victory to claim for the LGBT rights cause. If you can have solid scientific backing on this movement, then social equality is that much closer. But the fact of the matter is that there is none. Nothing that can stand alone that is. There are too many holes in these few studies. Children are too volatile that early on and theres no way of knowing, or they themselves even knowing, what they really feel. Theres no way of knowing if the child would want to go through with the change at age 18. I wanted crazy tattoos at age 14 that I'm grateful I did not get at 18. Four years is a long time for mental social development. I don't think there is a child out there that fully understands the magnitude of hormone therapy. I'm not saying tattoos and gender identity is a fair comparison, but how do you know that the child wishes to take on YOUR fabricated identity solution. What if the child is uncomfortable now, but blossoms into their own unique persona later? You'll never know until you let them grow up, teenagers are weird. But my main point being that it is literally life changing, and for that reason I think it is horribly irresponsible for a parent to give the green light. We don't let our children make choices they can't fully wrap their heads around yet. These people who promote Child hormone therapy are either misinformed, willfully ignorant, or just telling you what you want to hear. I really want to hear what you guys have to say, particularly those who are trans or have any related experiences to this topic.  ppl<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the trans community is taking the child hormone therapy move too far.\n","id":"7e70341f-5c7b-4972-9d67-c25ea7c0483a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm going to use numbers scale as a way of getting my point across. I don't use it in real life so please don't jump me for that. To be an average looking male you don't need to do much, you just need to have okay clothes, okay hair and not be fat. If you were to imagine the 1 10 scale it would be most abundant around the 6 7 area of the scale. With very few a smaller amount going down each side of that. I would say that a vast majority of the people I kno, barring some exceptions fall into that average slightly above average range Now on the female side I think it's a more natural frequency distribution centered around 5, there is so many more factors and a lot of effort needed to even maintain an average appearance. This leads to their being more women than men available at the higher tiers 8 9. While more men are available everywhere else. This leads to there being a mismatched amount of males and females at each attractiveness level and while people care about more things that attractiveness you rarely see someone who is seriously dating someone more than a couple points below them The mismatched amount leads to more people being single and looking for things that aren't attainable Note before anyone calls me a bitter lonely person, I have had a lot of success in the dating game I tried my best to not make this line a humble brag<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are an abundance of average looking males in comparison to females in the dating world. This creates problems for finding a match.\n","id":"c6f25e63-af54-403a-9084-6249fb9df5da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ever since I was younger my parents have instilled in me that alcohol drugs aren't good. Well, mostly drugs, which is understandable. They always told me alcohol is fine, just don't get drunk. I agree with them on that. As for drugs, I'm a little bit more open minded. I think people should be allowed to smoke eat etc. pot whenever they want. It doesn't really harm them at all physically and it's their decision, so why not. But when it comes to doing it all the time some of my friends do this , it disgusts me. Complete lack of ambition to do anything aside from making a damn sandwich. They don't want to do anything but sit around and smoke. I guess this goes for all other types of smoking too such as hookah, cigar ettes . As for both alcohol and small time drugs I have no desire to partake in any of them. I know I can easily get addicted to things and I don't need to be found drunk in the middle of the street. However, I hate not feeling like I fit in. Sorry about the chunkiness of this post I won't be going for an English major.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a 19 yo just about to head into college and I have absolutely no desire to do drugs\/drink. I find it quite repulsive.\n","id":"4207cc29-8d7e-4d97-85e6-67aadf2ba210"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am basing the ideology off this video For the record, I personally believe in Optimistic Nihilism because I think it's true, but I think it would be very dangerous if most of society believed in it. Laws are created to stop or prevent things from happening that we as a society deem unacceptable. But now when you have an ideology that tells you that anything you do is truly insignificant in the universe, so you should focus on what gives you pleasure, you potentially risk throwing out all the incentives for people not to do things against the law. You also potentially risk people from compromising their own morality in the sake of pursuing pleasure because overall everything is meaningless. For example, if someone is a pedophile, they reason that engaging sexually with a child is morally wrong, but then they hear about optimistic nihilism, and now they reason that since anything they do is pretty much meaningless, they might as well pursue what gives themselves pleasure, because nothing matters anyways. Over history, we're slowly learning to repress our darkest desires for the overall benefit of society, but when you say that the overall fate of society is meaningless to you when you die, you risk people only acting out of their own pleasure which can be dangerous for the fate of society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Optimistic Nihilism is a dangerous ideology for society to adopt\n","id":"ca1ad321-1322-40d5-bdaa-2ed59dcc36e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>The added issue here, hate speech is a trigger phrase, letting your \"comrades\" know which side of the political compass you fall on. The phrase is currently being used to shut down ideas, and speech that does not align with SJW ideals. This is straight up an attempt at implicating totalitarianism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Too many people are calling something hate speech simply because they disagree with it.\n","id":"ea5669d8-0531-486a-89d3-76b6f87366ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The more famous you are, the higher the probability of you being killed. John Lennon, John Kennedy are just 2 people that were killed because they were famous. Fame brings money, so, at first glance, it seems attractive on the outside but it also brings the worst people alongside you, scammers, robbers, people trying to kidnap you, life can become hellish extremely fast. I don't see the point of looking for international recognition at all. Surely, I also don't see the point in trying to raise funding for research and then becoming famous afterwards because this increases the chance of death by a lunatic by an extreme amount. Why would I want to win a nobel prize for example, since the recognition achieved would be accompanied by an extreme increase in the chance of death?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that fame is extremely dangerous and thus, in the long term, worthless.\n","id":"6d6691b7-9f15-474e-a479-9865390e4b1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Estimates calculate that there are about 10,000 religions in the world, with most people adhering to a low number of big religions. Worldly, there are 2 billions of self-identified Christians and 1.3 people identify as Muslims Norenzayan, p.2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Despite predictions of religions' demise in the last centuries, most humans in the world are still religious and religions have been growing and mutating at a quick pace Norenzayan, p. 2\n","id":"d6b5f78b-6d87-4539-a249-b72dc9a0a7a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is in the US, so I'm not sure if it applies else where. Basically, if a teacher has a baby they get 6 weeks of maternity leave. In my opinion this is to take care of a new born, recover from labor, and to simply bond with baby. All three are important and should absolutely take place for new mothers both natural and adopting . Here is what I do not understand If a teacher has a baby at the end of May, they are still given the 6 weeks in August when school begins. Why? Over the summer they have already had more than 6 weeks 2 1 2 full months for the bonding, recovery, and newborn care. Change me view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a teacher has a baby in the summer they should not get the 6 weeks of maternity leave in the fall when school starts back up.\n","id":"6f8b12bb-b9f0-4530-9d36-867eb849b776"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sorry that happened to you, and technically, I know what to hopefully what to do in the moment if something like this happened as I've read your handbook on what to do, but it's not just me with this view, people want rapist and other bad people tortured and some victims want vengeance. people clearly want this. I can give an example from trollx before I was banned that user gave and it wasn't down voted, hefirecrest 6 points\u00b72 hours ago I believe going out and taking vigilante justice is wrong in terms of society. As a society we must condemn vigilante action if we are to continue to function without chaos. However, as individuals I will absolutely murder my rapist or anyone who kills or rapes my best friend or brother. I still want the law to investigate properly and, if they should catch me, prosecute me accordingly. As individuals though, I must take the law into my own hand and I must become a criminal to follow my own morals. I\u2019m not justified in the eyes of the law for my decisions though. I am only justified in my own moral compass. And that\u2019s the way I think we should go about it. If you feel that you must commit a crime, please do go for it. But just be prepared to face criminal justice. like clearly people want this, I can help do that to an extent. He'll I thought people would at least validate the belief. I can give countless examples that people want blood instead of rehabilitation or other punishments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people should enact vengeance upon bad people.\n","id":"9b38b0a4-0b19-49b5-ad5b-f40f608353b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think the Term Altright is a buzzword used to combine reasonable views with unreasonable views, and discredit them altogether. Clarification I consider myself an Egalitarian. I believe in equal rights for all people, regardless of Race, Gender, Orientation, or any other protected classes. Definitions for the Alt right are vague and broad listing dozens of equally broad positions across the board of right wing philosophy. By conflating these positions together, it becomes impossible to argue for any of those positions without being lumped into the other categories. Example I am Technically an anti feminist a term I have issues with on its own because I'm against Misandry and I believe current feminist movements are ignoring actual discrimination because they're too focused on Minor or even nonexistent first world problems. These definitions would label me as Alt right. By holding that position, I become instantly connected with Misogyny, White Supremacy, Racism, and other equally disgusting positions. Labeling me as Altright is a free pass to instantly discredit my position, because who would defend a white supremacist? The Alt Right is a Nonsensical Boogieman with no place in Political debate or conversation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Alt right is a Nonsensical Boogieman with no place in political debate.\n","id":"368dd7f9-4f8e-4f91-9fdf-b3797ae12bc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the past 150 years or so, the globe's human population has experienced an immense increase. The world has never seen such numbers of human beings inhabiting this planet. Earth has, evidently, limited resources and space. Eventually, these resources will be gone and as the world population is increasing every second, the resources are running out faster. If we want to survive a few decades more, this population increase must not continue. Diseases are a way to halter this and are thus, good for humanity in the long run. EDIT u Brighter Tomorrow , made me clarify what I mean. I mean disease that kills people and that I hold this view through a objective perspective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Diseases are good for humanity in the long run.\n","id":"bc877074-cc2c-4578-ae9e-3b04ec189549"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Raising a child is one of the most demanding challenges a person can go through. Children have pretty intense needs socially and emotionally, and most people have no idea what goes into it and what to expect. Things like understading diaper rash, sleep cycles, how to swaddle a baby, can go pretty far in easing the adjustment for people. Just as, if not more important, is kids mental and emotional development. Most people dont really know developmental milestones, social development, mirroring emotions, all the things kids need to develop in a healthy way. On top of this, a lot of people have kids in a vain attempt of addressing their own issues. A mother who wants someone to unconditionally love her, a couple who thinks a baby will fix things, or even just people raised by abusive parenting styles who'll go on to perpetuate the cycle. For both the parent and childs well being, parents should have an outside counselor to be able to turn to for support and help. These sessions should be covered by standard HIPAA policies not discussed with any outside party unless there's a belief that the parents or their child may be in danger. Edit to clarify, I believe this should be provided and incentivized as well as required Edit2 I think people who fail to attend should be given a lot of leeway and given adaquete allowances and tries, and after several steps of escalation maybe small fines and the opening of a CPS investigation. It's incredibly difficult for parents to really be punished for anything child related, tbh. More than likely it would just raise a red flag that could help with future issues that will probably inevitably arise, and make it easier for the child concerned others to actually intervene if need be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who have custody of children whether adopted or biological should be required to take both parenting classes as well as regularly attend a therapist or counselor.\n","id":"cb91e882-0955-489a-86e9-2d7de867e68d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Universities Should Divest from Fossil Fuels<|ARGUMENT|>The impact of global warming and extreme weather events will be higher in the developing world. Many climate impacts will be greater in the Tropics and poor countries are least able to adapt to the changes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Climate change is regressive in nature, i.e. the poorest people who contributed the least to it are affected the most by climate change. Inaction punishes the most innocent, and is therefore immoral.\n","id":"4ab82fe6-911c-4758-9650-ad7117dcde79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A pedal powered bicycle is not nearly as dangerous as a car, and the law should not treat them the same as other vehicles. Compared to a bike, cars are a hell of a lot faster, a hell of a lot heavier, much less manoeuvrable and they allow the driver a much more restricted view of the road. Consequently, cars are much more likely to hit a pedestrian, and will cause a lot more damage if they do so. Pretending a bicycle is equivalent to a car, is an inconvenient legal fiction. By treating cars and bicycles the same, the law simply encourages cyclists to ignore it. A person on a bike is more like a pedestrian than someone driving a car, and the law should take this into account. In my view, the law should be changed so as to allow cyclists to treat a red light like a stop sign, and cycle on the pavement so long as they keep their speed under 6mph jogging speed . I would keep a law that prevents dangerous cycling, so this would not be carte blanche for cyclists to do as they please, but by updating the law in a realistic manner, we could bring some clarity to the rules and cyclists would hopefully gain a new respect and understanding of what's allowed and expected of them. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe current road law should not apply to cyclists.\n","id":"83a89ddc-f9f3-4ed2-ae51-7aa4f5c33057"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In other words, Hitler made us think the only way to respond to genetic differences is with evil. I think they can be accepted into society with love, too. As the world becomes more multicultural, it is our duty to envision a future that can do this. While everyone needs equal opportunity something we still need to work on , I think it\u2019s okay that certain fields are dominated by certain genders and ethnic groups. Example Asian culture usually values school and academic discipline, so they tend to dominate STEM fields. That\u2019s not racism or bad any more than African Americans usually do better in sports. Our differences can be beautiful things, too. Yes, racism can be a dangerous seed that can grow into the worst kind of evil, but on the other hand, to pretend that every culture is the same leads to a lot of social and cultural identity problems too. So I think we should find a balance between 1 \u201cOnly look at the systemic problems and ignore cultural differences\u201d current dogma and 2 \u201cSaying that cultures, races and genders have differences and should be acknowledged is akin to nazism.\u201d The new \u201cmoderate\u201d that is absent from today\u2019s politics would look more like \u201cOur diversity is beautiful and each culture is unique. Because they are different, each one must have pros and cons in different areas. Let\u2019s look at them with openness and kindness.\u201d I think only then can we make effective change. Please give me different points of view I\u2019m very open and happy to discuss. Edit I only had an hour before I start my next shift, I have to sign off now. I do appreciate the responses and hope I communicated what I was trying to say effectively. All the best<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because we live in the shadow of WWII, where genetic differences were used for absolute evil nazis, people are now afraid of acknowledging genetic differences so much that it has become toxically taboo.\n","id":"797c3034-1fa9-495f-9d75-6ee2e08b91d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello everyone, this idea struck me last night and I can't get it out of my head Statement The meaning of life is to have descendance and survive. Proof All the known life forms. They all have in common the drive to have sex and survive. Between all life forms the only difference in this matter is the way to achieve this goals. It's the only common ground and history that all the known millions of species share. Implications That means that all search for additional meaning throughout our lives and in everything we do is a human specific invention for other humans to prove disprove. God, as described in trending religions does not exist. As the meaning of life is not human centric and we have the same goals as all the other species. Which means we are not the masterpiece of a God capable of empathize with human feelings and values. Posible counter arguments to my own idea Love can be transmited between species. For example, a dog can apreciate the petting of a human, or those cute videos where 2 animals from different species play as friends, for example a dog and a duck. My response would be Love is a social trait developed by species with social potential because cooperation and team work provides safety, therefore more chances of survival. Which means Love is not a divine or glorious thing, just chemicals in our brain that makes us attached to those things that provide us with a feeling of safety or wellbeing. Art. What is the biological point for humans or some animals of apreciating rhythmic sounds, or painting composites? My response would be None, art simply triggers feelings or instincs within our brains that we happen to enjoy, as our subconscious links it to success, or danger, or safety, or a specific feeling, is not that the art itself has a superior meaning, we give it to it. TL DR Did I got it right? Is this proof that all the drama, need for additional meaning, inner conflict, religion, is a human exclusive trait to give ourselves validation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I found the meaning of life\n","id":"d0de8364-e87d-47eb-8c72-3b2b2f5cc52f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone on my facebook the toxic place is trying to tell me we shouldn't let them in because they might be isis . They happen to make asses of themselves, one even tagging me in a post that said fuck you I responded, but no one happened to read his post. He later blocked me, making a bigger ass out of his white trash self. To them, the word Syrian comes across as Muslim , which comes across as Terrorist , which I see as racist. We let Jews from all over Europe in during world war 2. After Pearl Harbor, we happened to do a similar thing to Japanese people that Hitler did with Jews. Many people still hold it against us, many try to say it never happened. I'm starting to see a similar pattern emerge with Syrian refugees. It's racist, prejudice, and almost murder. Suppose a terrorist did somehow get to the refugee camps or ships, or however they are arriving, how would he do it? If we assume he was a refugee turned terrorist, then should all white, black haired males be killed, or put in ghettos because of the amount of shootings done by white males recently? TL DR Give me good reasons we shouldn't let refugees in, because everyone I've asked gives me white trash , no effort responses they may be isis<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America should let Syrian Refugees in to help them get away from war.\n","id":"8859f87f-7050-449a-b7f0-1f0cd9ee33d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Genetically modified foods<|ARGUMENT|>\"Some opponents of GM crops, who seem to have realised that the argument based on lack of safety has no basis, now focus their opposition on environmental concerns, arguing that GM crops destroy biodiversity. It would be wrong to claim that the planting of GM crops could never have adverse environmental effects. But their impact depends on circumstances, on the particular crop and environment in which it is grown. Such effects occur with all sorts of agriculture.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"GM crops can be mismatched with ecosystems, as can conventional crops.\n","id":"507cedb3-1aad-4d49-8de0-5f8cf7a4ec3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Drug Trial Participants Be Chosen By Lottery?<|ARGUMENT|>Cultural and\/or religious views and beliefs may be disregarded in order for individuals to participate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forcing people to take drugs is a violation of human rights and civil liberties.\n","id":"bce5367f-264b-4097-be29-9f6c10378577"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>See, for instance, this brilliant article. Basically, today we have a huge problem with retirement nobody knows how long they are going to live. If you save up but live longer than expected, you may run out of money. If you rely on a government or corporate pension plan, you may be disturbed to find that most are not fully funded and rely on growth models that may be unrealistic. If you buy an annuity, that's great but returns may be low because those are tricky to insure. A tontine for retirement looks like this you and N other people your age are put into a bracket together. Perhaps you all pay in a lump sum at age 59, or perhaps you pay a yearly fee from age 35 59. Your money is invested sensibly, and starting at age 60, the administrator starts withdrawing a yearly sum to divide amongst everyone. That yearly sum is divided evenly for all the surviving participants. So if at age 75 only half the people are still alive, then everyone is getting twice as much money. Last person standing gets everything. The key advantages as I see it are We don't need actuaries to figure out how long everyone lives. If everyone lives a long time, that just means your yearly check doesn't grow very fast. Thus there's no risk of default. Management fees can be quite low all the manager needs to do is very simple investment, keep track of everyone's address, and keep track of who's still alive. No reliance on the generosity or stability of the government, your former employer, etc. Everyone who lives abnormally long gets great returns, since they are getting some of their cohort's money. But . Are there major risks I am not forseeing? Reasons to think that these are too abusable? Reasons to think they won't be good retirement vehicles?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the Tontine should be legalized and made a common retirement strategy.\n","id":"082b5da3-9009-48e8-ab1c-b2a0c2cd9841"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should the Conservative Party choose to be the next UK Prime Minister?<|ARGUMENT|>Britain would lose out on some EU subsidies such as the Common Agricultural Policy, which gives \u00a33 billion to farmers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A no deal Brexit would be extremely damaging to British farming and food production\n","id":"1c0b3681-eefc-4798-a37c-5c878ddfc2c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Police Officers Wear Body Cameras?<|ARGUMENT|>Mandating always on body cameras creates an environment where the expectation is of full audio\/visual disclosure of police engagements which itself reinforces positive behavior change in both sides.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Police body cameras provide courts with clearer and more accurate depictions of encounters between police and civilians.\n","id":"756d9572-71fc-4180-bb3b-e9e0cbe846fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Although contradictory to its stated principles of openness, Facebook has been accused of bowing to government pressure in Thailand and censoring certain posts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legal reasons aside, commercial interests compel Twitter and Facebook to comply with local laws since they would like to continue operating globally.\n","id":"8d18156b-d49a-4db1-8205-aaff0adf3f1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Churches are simply groups of people. The actions of individuals in a congregation do not speak for the congregation in general, even the pastor's actions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Churches aren't \"anyone\". They aren't people at all, but a free association between taxpayers.\n","id":"e85745aa-64cd-4641-b7d5-c531068798cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The technique of reverse breeding of plants facilitates the selection of superior hybrid plants and takes away the randomness of earlier hybrid breeding. This was only discovered in 1998 and so is a recent discovery based on conventional methods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would still be possible to innovate using more conventional methods such as cross breeding plant species.\n","id":"e69b6476-9791-4f2b-8aa7-5a9843676606"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Greetings Reddit, I'm a twenty four year old student that recently took part into a class on American Culture. We went through many subject that are controversial legalize pot, vegas hookers, NRA, . At some point, Edward Snowden came up. As european students we could came with ideas to support oppose the previous topics. But when it came to the Snowden controversy we would mostly support him and his action. We could really see the government side of the problem. It is preposterous to me that people would agree with being spied upon and having their privacy scrutinized. What is the greater good behind this ? How can this even be ok? Looking forward to being convinced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Edward Snowden \/ Big Brother America\n","id":"d5c1ba76-8dda-43b1-a1a1-0ba2082b7472"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>There is significant debate over which terms referring to Black Americans are politically acceptable. Because this type of language is politically-charged, removing the N-word would be a form of political censorship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Removing the N-word would match the definition of censorship because the N-word qualifies as political and obscene.\n","id":"ebe7d829-c581-4f97-9f66-e12323d43386"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the world continue to prosecute Nazi war criminals?<|ARGUMENT|>If the evidence had been available at the end of the war they would have been prosecuted then. No matter how long ago these crimes were committed, their horrific nature can leave no doubt that their perpetrators must be hunted to the ends of the earth. We must do justice equally to all war criminals, or we are seemly allowing that fleeing justice is a valid option for avoiding prosecution. No legal system can establish such a precedent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That time has elapsed is not a legal defence for war criminals:\n","id":"292e4983-46eb-4661-bab6-6b3fa6d8d7de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people marry outside their religious faith?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion is often considered an instinct. If this is the case, it is likely that the correlation comes from the fact that intelligence and its cultivation gives one the ability to rise up against, and to question, one's own instinct.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The biggest divide is at university. It may be that the university environment makes people less religious rather than university students being less religious in the first place.\n","id":"eead575e-9631-4aac-9fba-de9c1aad0d5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>In the same way that pretending heroin doesn't exist won't protect kids from drug addiction, pretending racism was never or is not a thing will do nothing to prevent it from affecting children's mindsets. It will just mean they're more likely to encounter these things in a bad environment or source, unprepared.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is better for students to have the N-word discussed in an educational setting than it is to rigorously censor and have them encounter it on their own with less historical context for why the term should not be used.\n","id":"185a331f-70fe-444c-950c-4dbfb6fce0c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Good is a point of view that changes depending on a society and depending on the era. It is in itself determined by those who have the greatest means to determine it, the powerful. Those with power dictate what is good and bad. Unlike power, good cannot live without bad. They coexist like warring brothers. Without a villain, there can be no hero. In other words, good is defined by its intensity of opposition with bad. However, power can exist on its own, taking everything it can and will. I left this intentionally ambiguous because it can mean different things for different people. What do you think about this stance?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no good or evil in this world, only those with power and those without.\n","id":"97837ac1-9a31-49d1-acf0-7dc2ebcfa527"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Empower Both Women And Men?<|ARGUMENT|>Feminism has helped foster a culture in which occupations that once were considered for one sex or another can now be held by someone of either sex.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism has allowed for more economic, social, and political opportunities for both men and women.\n","id":"be2637ec-9d61-4b92-ae9d-0ffc6fca76a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does buying things from third world countries condone a form of modern day slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>The country with highest GDP per capita is luxembourg. It does not import from third world countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The richest countries do not take advantage of any poverty stricken countries.\n","id":"bfc585b4-12d1-45ef-af71-da0c5e525576"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>And this compulsory service should be a pre requisite for or a requirement of citizenship. All would be required to serve for some X amount of years. First and foremost the compulsory service should come with options. Serving in the military should still be available as an option but other accommodations should be made for differing beliefs. If you feel alright about US foreign policy you can do X years in the military, but if you are opposed to it you could do X year serving as a policeman. If you're a pacifist you could do X years serving as an EMT for some public hospital or X years in the Peace Corps. Forcing people to serve together in this way would accomplish a couple things 1 Ensures that well trained citizenry is always nearby and ready in case of catastrophe. In a world with this type of service, if a terrorist attack were to occur 1 4 of all people in the vicinity will be trained soldiers, 1 4 will be trained police, 1 to 2 4 will have some medical training. First responders would already be there because everybody would basically be a first responder. 2 Provides young people with something to do. In my mind the service would occur in the 18 22 time frame so that it comes before college. I don't know about any of you but I was someone who went to college because that was just the thing to do. No one had gone before me and that was the route to success, so there I went. It worked for me the debt was real but I got solid job out of it but it doesn't work out for a lot of folks. Not only that but asking an 18 year old to decide the institution and career that may define the rest of their lives and saddle them with a mountain of debt seems insane to me. Who the fuck knows anything at 18? If nothing else, compulsory service gives young people some needed time and perspective to figure themselves out. 3 Increases national unity. The places you serve and the people you serve with should be randomized. Soldiers Peace Corp should serve with others from across the country, while Police EMTs should work in parts of the city different form where they live. Doing this ensures that all Americans are for at least some short time in their lives forced to reckon with their fellow countrymen. Besides providing perspective this also helps foster a sense of egalitarianism since it will provide the sense that a citizenship has been 'earned.' Recognition of valid service provides a sort of floor of respectability, which is something that seems sorely lacking these days. 4 It is a project that is unachievable in the free market. While one can imagine how organizations such as the YMCA given the proper incentives could establish a role in a society as a pre college and service like pillar, it comes with some tricky issues. A private institution training soldiers and policemen is a break in the government monopoly on violence which I think most people agree is necessary for a functional government . A private institution is accountable to whoever funds it, moral or no, while a public institution would at least by law be held accountable to the voters. And the idea of charging money for things that the Peace Corps does just seems wrong. So, . Tbh I've always been okay with the idea of a draft in it's most raw form but I figure this might make it more palatable for people who don't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USA should bring back compulsory service\n","id":"1eb61b60-06b1-43e6-9daa-a5a7e31efd5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see lots of conversations and articles that mention the fact that the rich are getting richer or that X of the US' Europe's the World's wealth is owned by Y people, but I don't see any compelling reason why those statistics are inherently meaningful . First off, it's not necessarily true that the rich are getting richer is the same as the poor are getting poorer. Why would it be? I mean specifically that no person is hurt when another becomes wealthy. Now, I do need to clarify a boundary to my claim I understand that some economic transactions have negative externalities, i.e. they cause uncompensated harm to an unwilling participant. Air pollution is a prime example My morning commute harms everyone who breathes, and I didn't compensate them for that harm. I want to clarify that ideally, governments would intervene to prevent material harm from coming to any person, such as by regulating or restricting activities that cause negative externalities, or by imposing taxes to generate revenue to compensate those negatively affected for example, by using gas taxes to buy carbon capture remediation credits. So, when an economic transaction causes uncompensated harm to an outside party, it is the job of government to intervene. Larger economic actors should be subject to this intervention at no greater nor lesser degree to smaller actors, or put another way, the law should apply to everyone, regardless of how wealthy they are. Ideally is in quotes above because I recognize that political favors exist and are harmful. However, the ability for anyone, especially the rich, to cause a government to fail to protect its citizens is a separate issue. We should solve it, but how we should do so is outside the scope of this discussion. So Change My View that Inside a conversation about political corruption by the wealthy, we should focus on reducing the ability of money to corrupt the government, but we gain nothing by attacking those who accumulate wealth without buying political favors. It doesn't matter that the rich are getting richer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It doesn't matter that the rich are getting richer.\n","id":"fa0afc43-aa3f-4a18-b858-47657083962c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>It's possible the debt has already been repaid via the welfare state and social service programs, as well as equal-opportunity quotas, the gang violence and destructive culture of the ghetto pseudo-culture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without specifying precisely who owes the debt, who is entitled to reparations, how much and for how long quantifications then a debt cannot be fairly imposed.\n","id":"fc038015-3203-4655-82fe-0d1da89e1323"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am going to speak within the context of the EU because that's where I live. Here in the EU the rules on slaughtering animals requires it to be humane through the use of stunning etc. by law. However it gives exemption for religious reasons. This goes against the idea of having the Rule of Law where the law is applied equally to everyone. Why should a Jew or Muslim have the right to do what would otherwise be illegal if they weren't? To be clear Jewish custom allows no stunning where Muslims custom is a bit hit and miss when it comes with it, but they both involve using a knife to slice the throat of the animal, a excruciating way to die as you bleed out. This is clearly worse than the standard stun bolt in the head method. I find it a massive disservice for the state to impose a law on the population, based on their individual beliefs. Therefore, unless you want to remove regulation on slaughter an even worse idea , Halal and Kosher should be completely banned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Halal and Kosher should be banned.\n","id":"e7bc249e-c252-4197-b95b-67ce2636d6f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Comparative research concludes that monarchs as heads of state are generally more costly, monarchies' budgets tend to be less transparent and are therefore more difficult or impossible to compare and have allocations to family members Matthijs, p. 265<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given the lack of transparency of monarchies' costs, it is likely that the real cost of these monarchies is greater than is publicly known.\n","id":"a3c95e22-3938-40d4-9a34-04a7121b83a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>Politicians, such as New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu have noted that Confederate monuments are often erected due to an improper nostalgia for the period. Thus they reflect a failure to learn history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Remembering history does not require maintaining statues in public places. A full appreciation of history may demand their removal.\n","id":"9140647a-8003-4b96-a36f-d36b153c0a75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>LGBT pupils in faith schools are more likely than those in non-faith schools to say that teachers and school staff never challenge homophobic, biphobic and transphobic language when they hear it 31 per cent compared to 22 per cent Stonewall, p. 18<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Students in faith schools are least likely to report that their schools says homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying is wrong, leading to an uncomfortable and often painful environment for LGBT students Stonewall, p. 20\n","id":"aec1478d-0f59-46a3-afad-2368a9f436f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Vim vs Emacs<|ARGUMENT|>This might make it harder to properly update the software and keep up with and new innovations within editing technology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vim is a much older editor compared to newer ones like Emacs.\n","id":"2343d9e6-d983-46c5-82cd-5c32efa68f08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Polygamy Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>When many men are dying the pool of potential spouses diminishes and thus the potential for children in traditional 1-on-1 families.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In times of war it would be easier to replace fallen soldiers.\n","id":"bd6512c2-a6fc-4ebb-8d04-efd8475ad542"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title says it all. I would personally just use the US citizenship test as the test to see if one could vote. If you pass the citizenship test, you can register to vote. This would filter out the people who really don't know anything about who they are voting for, and what they are deciding. The the internet has a decent number of videos involving people who cant even answer simple questions about things like a candidate's stance on foreign policy, or socialized healthcare. And yet, they always seem to have a preference towards one candidate. I am undecided about if the test should include questions about the candidates and their positions, mostly due to the subjective nature of such questions and the potential for bias and or slander from the author of the questions. I think that having such a test would be beneficial because it would cause candidates to concentrate less on the apathetic and undecided voters, and instead allow them to spend more time having their stance on big issues known. An example would be all the feel good and emotion filled, but ultimately uninformative commercials seen around election time. If a person is really so uninformed about the candidates that a slide show of one playing with his family set to patriotic music convinces them to vote that way, do we really want them deciding who the president is? An example of uninformed voters I dug up in about 30 seconds EDIT So, I have changed my view about this. The two main factors that people got me on was 1. Cost, and 2. An over expansion of power to one government organization the one that would decide who votes I am not really sure which one of you to award a delta to, because it was all of the comments together, not one of them. However, good job \u2206<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that in order to vote, one should have to pass a basic test on the US government, its history and possibly the candidates.\n","id":"6b715dcb-3c47-4b4e-a57c-8f1f4e8e6ee8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I apologize to non US subreddit users for narrowing the scope of the argument like this, but I think it allows us to focus the debate onto one specific issue . Since 2010, 23 of the 50 US states have introduced harsher voting laws 1 . These have taken many forms from stricter voter ID laws to elimination of same day voting registration to the purging of voter registration rolls, which requires people who haven\u2019t voted in a while to re register. Most of these laws have passed under the pretense that there is voter fraud that is significant or potentially significant enough to merit stricter laws to prevent it from occurring. As multiple  posts have pointed out, this is almost a myth that at this point has been debunked by independent study after independent study. Some nice summaries are found here with the particularly memorable statistic that \u201cit is more likely \u2026 that an American \u2018will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.\u2019\u201d I firmly believe that people on both sides of the aisle are intelligent and are able to make informed opinions. Therefore, although there\u2019s a certain amount of brainwashing and misinformation spread by mass media on both sides of the aisle, I find it tough to believe that the vast majority of conservatives truly believe voter fraud is widespread they may say the believe it in polls, but the whole point of this post is to posit that they are either consciously or unconsciously lying . I think that a lot of the stricter voting laws that have been passed recently are an attempt to suppress voting numbers from poor African Americans and Hispanics who traditionally tend to suffer the most under these laws, and tend to vote against conservative interests. My reasoning for this is 3 fold It\u2019s logical reducing the number of people who can vote for your opposition makes logical sense and would be a understandable thing for politicians to try and do. There\u2019s a certain unquantifiable feeling of \u2018forgottenness\u2019 that is being experienced by a lot of white Americans who feel fairly I might argue that the bulk of economic redresses and political conversation recently has been focused on minority groups. I don\u2019t have good evidence for this claim maybe the Charlotte marches? but I think the election of Trump despite the majority of polls predicting Hillary would win is a point towards this idea, that many people voted for him because he was speaking to them in a way Hillary wasn\u2019t. At any rate, the point here is that this racial shake up and challenging of the racial hierarchy in the U.S. will naturally lead to pushback since white people are inherently losing some sort of ground when other races exercise political power more. This is one of those places where I think, unconsciously, people might channel this fear of losing ground into a worry about voter fraud that makes people want to keep elections \u2018clean.\u2019 I don\u2019t have any solid evidence for this so take it as you will, but I think the links are all there and it\u2019s not really anyone\u2019s fault, it\u2019s just the way it is. Historically these marginalized groups have been the targets of subtle ish schemes that minimize their economic and voting powers. For example, harsh drug sentencing laws from the Nixon Regan Clinton eras that really damaged inner city communities and reduced the number of African Americans that are eligible to vote b c ex offenders can\u2019t vote in a lot of U.S. states , redlining and predatory loaning, gerrymandering along racial economic lines to minimize voting power of certain racial blocks, the subtle association of African Americans and criminals in the media, etc. etc. The point is that in recent history let alone Jim Crow there is evidence that suggests that the powers that be have attempted to suppress voting and economic stability from African American and Hispanic communities in an effort to secure their position as a blatant example, see . Since it has happened historically, I think it\u2019s reasonable to believe that it is a plausible thing to happen again. Looking at the shifting demographics of a lot of the states that\u2019ve instituted these laws, I believe that there\u2019s a racial motivation behind the new laws that is more malicious than an earnest desire to keep U.S. elections fair and untainted. So, Reddit,  Is voter fraud a bigger deal than I\u2019m making it out to be? Am I just plain wrong in my claims conclusions? Something else? I want to hear your opinions. Thanks Reference 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The push for stricter voting laws in the United States in the last 10 years is a thinly-veiled attempt to systematically disenfranchise certain groups of people.\n","id":"263ff2de-d625-4864-a47a-c01a90245e2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time for Hungary and the EU to Part Ways?<|ARGUMENT|>A ruling by the European Court of Human Rights highlights a pattern of persecution in Hungary against people of the Roma Community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hungary has been heavily criticised for its treatment of minorities such as the Roma community\n","id":"257f2a76-4913-4610-8984-4c56a7d04afc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Net Neutrality Necessary?<|ARGUMENT|>Access to the internet is access to the general marketplace. As such, the ISP market is functionally different than other markets and needs to be treated differently to keep the general marketplace free and open.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments are justified in regulating internet provision given it is a public good, a common infrastructure, and in many places a service that lacks consumer choice.\n","id":"2d6dd5c2-cd56-455d-8512-2771571c018c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Part one, in my opinion, is obvious. There's a pretty clear hierarchy of countries that are more and less successful, and this generally reflects the level of Northern European influence black Cayman Islanders are better off by most standards than black Canadians are better off than African Americans are better off than Barbadians are better off than Africans , and most religions, including Islam, would hold the welfare state to be part of their ideals. The second part it's harder, but bear with me. Colonialism, when driven by westernization, has an okay track record and many countries do not yet u have the values to effectively govern themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all cultures are equal. Most countries except Northern Europe, Canada, Aus\/NZ, and maybe Singaporewould be better off as colonies and slavery\/colonialism were a net plus.\n","id":"7605fb65-2440-4f87-8896-1346c0b3d2c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the UN a force for good?<|ARGUMENT|>The UN established the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan UNCIP to investigate and mediate between India annd Pakistan.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UN mediated the Kashimir dispute between India and Pakistan after independence in 1947.\n","id":"fafb4c09-d941-4a00-b2cb-40f4be62b710"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Human Cloning<|ARGUMENT|>Cloning treats children as objects. Children will be manufactured by an expensive technological process that is subject to quality control. The gulf between an artisan and an artefact is immense. Individuals will be able to have a child for the sake of having children, or as a symbol of status, rather than because they desire to conceive, love and raise another human being. Cloning will not only allow, but actually encourage, the commodification of people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cloning treats children as objects. Children will be manufactured by an expensive technological proc...\n","id":"5c3d02f5-0b8e-4061-b1a4-d87110379f78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Esperanto be adopted internationally?<|ARGUMENT|>Its purpose of unity is born of the sincerest intentions of establishing dialogue between warring nations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The founding ideas of Esperanto are to reach a more equal international exchange.\n","id":"22a315ca-0b16-4b67-888b-752b90cef4a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Jurors Be Involved In The Execution Process?<|ARGUMENT|>Jurors have to go through a relatively lengthy, dull, and harrowing process before even finding out whether they'll even be questioned in jury selection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jurors should not be required to devote more resources to the process than they already have.\n","id":"7f6f0088-a11f-4bbd-b39c-735653b7d0ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Guantanamo Bay detention center<|ARGUMENT|>This coupled with the lack of a trial adds to the fear of the place and thus denounces terrorism. What is a deterrent and why is it necessary? A deterrent is something which persuades someone not to act in a certain way. Similar to the accumulation of nuclear missiles actually deterring a war between large nations, a deterrent can be created around something deemed morally wrong a prison which may\/may not breech human rights and yet help the greatest number of people and is, thus, justifiable. The whole basis of terrorism is formed upon an ideology and stems from indoctrination. If there is a seed of doubt then it is likely that the person in question will not commit so called \"acts of terror\". This is supported by President Bush's quote below.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guantanamo Bay and the threat of detention helps deter terrorists.\n","id":"86059fad-2c03-42b1-8486-c7fb001acf1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Full-body scanners at airports<|ARGUMENT|>Although the fact is conceded that full-body scanners may be more effective in terms of increasing security, it is not economically possible for the company to completely rely airport security on these machines. They are expensive to manufacture in the first place. Secondly, they require constant maintenance that will always persist as a spot on the airport's budget allocated. Third, replacement for these machines will be costlier and time-consuming to perform as compared to replacing human security staff.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Full-body scanners cannot replace human security staff in terms of cost-efficiency.\n","id":"ac85beb5-3498-403b-9c74-05e0be60808a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>North Korea should not be labelled irrational for developing nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>The superior conventional military technology by the US or South Korea are meaningless against the destructive force of nuclear weapons<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear weapons help North Korea to deter any possible military attacks.\n","id":"e0c960bd-b55f-42b1-8098-3eeb7f354278"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay so, some clarification. I'm talking about people who cut their arms, legs or other body parts in ways that are unmistakable as self harm. It's true that some people are naive and don't figure it out right away when they see it, but to those that are in the know, an arm or a leg covered in cuts and scars is obviously self inflicted. I think that if you really, truly want to hide the fact that you are self harming, there are plenty of ways to self harm without making it obvious that that is what is going on. Bruising, cuts that look like shaving cuts, deep scrapes that make it look like you fell, etc. I self harmed from sometime in my childhood to about my mid twenties. I used to do things like throw myself down the stairs, purposefully fall off my bike, and the most common one was taking massive overdoses of medication to make myself extremely sick with usually flu like symptoms. Nobody had any idea I was self harming. It just looked like I was clumsy and got sick a lot. I really, really didn't want people to know I was self harming so I made sure to do it in ways that looked natural. Now, back to what I was saying, people who cut their wrists or their legs usually do go to considerable effort to hide them. Wearing long sleeves and long pants and what not, but it's pretty hard to hide that shit forever. Somebody is going to see and I believe that most people who self harm on at least some level want to be discovered. Like I said, there are plenty of ways to genuinely hide self harm, and the fact that you choose the one single method that is the most obvious only tells me that at some level that cutting burning whatever is meant to be found and properly interpreted. I don't want anecdotes about how you used to self harm and I didn't want anyone to know because I won't believe you. People who self harm will almost never admit they are doing it to communicate their pain. Personal anecdotes don't count because I believe that you honestly believe you think you didn't want to be found out, but subconsciously you did, and secondly I'm sure there is at least a small subset keyword small of people who self harm in that manner that honestly don't want to be found out, but are too stupid to think of ways to do it without being discovered, but you would have to be really stupid not to think of other ways, and honestly there aren't that many people who are that stupid TL DR Basically, tell me why do people who self harm choose methods that are the easiest to recognize as self harm as opposed to methods that can be easily hidden, but they claim they want no one to find out? If they really and truly didn't want to be found out, the average human being is resourceful enough to self harm in ways that aren't so easily recognized. This is what I want explained to me. Also don't tell me it's because it's an addiction. An addiction isn't an addiction when it starts and the original choice is to choose to do something that is obvious and recognizable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I really believe that most people who self harm, at some level, want to be discovered and they cut or burn or otherwise hurt themselves because they are trying to communicate to others that they are hurting.\n","id":"15c7e2b4-452b-4009-9928-69f464289c85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you want to defend liberty, justice and stuff you can do it without getting involved into such brainwashing fake self given authority and using the force to get shit done. I've seen more cases of threatening cops than helping cops. Law enforcement makes me sick. Law makes me sick. Violence makes me sick. People with authority makes me sick. They can't control the power, they are humans. People who understand what i'm saying but doesn't really care make me sick. Law is just there to give power to a few. Big fishes give a little authority to these guys so they feel important and do the dirty job for them and keep thinking that they are important. What is the smartest and kindest thing somedy can think of before getting enrolled in the army or a police academy? What does he wants to achieve? Excuse the bad englando, here's an \u00d1.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cops and militars are ignorant\n","id":"0730e1e7-1b85-48ea-9bb9-16a26da14b6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is a woman I find very attractive. But I know she is in a relationship. My friend picked up my body language and tone of voice and have determined that I am attracted to this woman. When I was confronted if I was going to make a move, I dismissed them and said that she is in a relationship. My friend said I should go for it anyway. I think it is a bad idea to try and pursue a relationship with a woman who is in a relationship already unmarried because I think if a person were to ditch a relationship because they find me more suitable, that they would just as well do the same to me for someone more attractive. I believe that it is better to court someone who has been out of a relationship for a reasonable amount of time because it shows that they are independent enough to be out of one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Courting a person while they are in a relationship is a bad idea.\n","id":"b3d1ccf1-700c-4a8f-abb7-13d3454d1d85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Having Children Selfish?<|ARGUMENT|>Creating a human being in order to attempt to affect another interpersonal relationship is inherently selfish and immoral.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some couples may have children just so that it would save their otherwise crumbling marriage.\n","id":"cbe26e87-cf87-4eda-bb77-ee44074b1066"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Donald Trump a Good President?<|ARGUMENT|>Despite promises in his 100-day action plan Trump has still failed to place complete lifetime bans on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many of the political promises that Trump made have failed to deliver any results.\n","id":"fbcc1f42-bec2-451c-8b47-9afb1f486d88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Tl dr Political subreddits are echo chambers for their users and there are very few benefits of keeping them the way they are. I was inspired to write this after seeing posts from r politicalhumor on the front page. I have since looked through multiple political subreddits and found the same problem in each. Regardless of ideology, Political subreddits are just echo chambers for their users and provide no benefit for the furthering of political insights particularly in the US . The users of these subreddits are steadfast in their beliefs so no amount of discourse is going to change their opinion. Another issue these subreddits are is the popularity of keyboard courage. People descend to name calling and conflict just because they have the security of a screen in front of them. Any form of meaningful political conversation is discarded in favor of anchoring in ones beliefs and turning the issue into an us vs. them. r politicalhumor isn\u2019t generally funny, I\u2019m a pretty central guy when it comes to politics and can laugh at well crafted jokes on either side, but the constant laziness of the subreddit and it\u2019s bash trump only comics aren\u2019t funny, they\u2019re all the same joke with a different picture. I apologize for the rant, I am just severely disappointed in the political climate of the US of being conflict centered instead of working together to improve our country and I feel that political based subreddits have contributed to this feeling of conflict and wish that would be changed edit format<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political subreddits should be heavily reformed and more highly moderated\n","id":"87af6ce0-5ecc-4c38-8be7-295e88a54f07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if God was omniscient and all powerful, we have proofs to suggest it is not necessary for Him to prevent all forms of evil because other aspects of His nature may prevent this. God is much more complicated than that. He is not restricted to pure retribution theology.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No part of being a monotheistic god requires omniscience in a sense which cannot positively preclude preventing all forms of evil.\n","id":"8e175196-7237-4766-9541-13701177c428"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Athenian democracy the worlds first democracy, shows the Direct Democracy aspects of Liquid Democracy work successfully.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Examples show that the Direct Democracy aspects of Liquid Democracy can work successfully.\n","id":"ce9456bd-6808-4428-90a5-c63277a1ab33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that swearing is victimless in itself and that curse words give people a way to express themselves that would otherwise be compromised if the words are censored. For example, telling someone to shut the fuck up is the most concise and solemn way to tell someone to be quiet. Saying Please be quiet or You are being loud even though I asked you not to and I don't want you to wake up the lady that lives downstairs because she works midnight shift and is asleep at 7pm does not display the same amount of urgency. In my opinion, swear words cannot be bad on their own, it's about the intention behind the curse words. If a child tells their mother to fuck off , he shouldn't be punished for saying fuck, he should be punished for disrespecting his mother and not allowing her to speak. Similarly, people can say degrading and disrespectful things without swearing. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that swear words are useful to give connotation to your language and shouldn't be censored\n","id":"ec95a445-c245-4aaa-a36c-23d7eee68874"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I first heard guesstimate in the late 90s. When I was in school, I was taught that an estimate is an educated guess , and I assumed that guesstimate was just how my sister's teacher was getting kids to remember that definition. I never expected to hear ADULTS use it. My beef with this word is that it is unnecessary. Guess and estimate both have more than enough wiggle room to allow context to imply the level of precision. You can make an educated guess, or you can give a rough estimate. You can elaborate on the factors that went into your answer and allow the listener to decide how much weight to give it. We don't need a new word for every shade of grey in the world. We don't say something is gooderful if it is better than good, but not quite wonderful. Finally, there is the spelling. Why is it not guestimate ? We really need to spell the entire word guess ? Is that how we are doing portmanteaus now? Edit after all the responses that boil down to why do you hate synonyms , I want to add that I don't hate synonyms. Guesstimate is obnoxious because it pretends it's not a synonym. It implies there is a gap between guess and estimate when in fact the two words overlap in a lot of situations. I think people should stop using the word guesstimate . Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think \"guesstimate\" is a dumb word, and the people who use it should feel dumb.\n","id":"3cf9ee40-4d95-4726-af20-841be8479631"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should sensitive social and political topics be discussed in school?<|ARGUMENT|>Public schools claim to be about \"diversity\" yet teachers and teacher unions ideologically are overwhelmingly left leaning and trying to impose their social values that run contrary to those of the parents. Schools have gravitated toward conformity and indoctrination where true diversity of thought is non-existent or not tolerated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is evidence to suggest that there is a liberal bias in how politics is being taught at a US high school, which has left children who hold minority political views feeling alienated.\n","id":"3836b00a-47d6-474d-b829-7261261ff347"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I used to be a good conservative but now I've shifted to be a centrist who still has a conservative lean. Among all other things, that appealed to me so much about conservatism, always, and to this day, was the emphasis it placed on personal liberties. I was a conservative because I believed in freedom of speech, press, religion and I thought that they were major ideals that all conservatives should hold no matter what costs, you don't restrict the freedom of speech of any civilian as any government that may disregard these liberties will easily run a tyrannical regime. Trump is not a conservative. He may be, in some issues, but his initiatives in ordering a gag order on the EPA, actively trying to restrict the press in denouncing him, and more that are dedicated to restricting the freedom of speech and press of the people goes against everything that any conservatives should be believing in. What was absolutely shocking to me when I was reading articles on Trump's recent activities was not Trump and his unconstitutional propensities but the lack of opposing responses from the senate. How can something as UNCONSTITUTIONAL as outright banning certain medias not alarming to REPUBLICANS??? This has lead me to believe that the republicans in in the government today are not republicans. If they were, they would've opposed Trump.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Today's republicans are not republicans.\n","id":"c119fd9b-09d4-4e8c-9af0-d532070f62d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This isn't exactly a well informed opinion but I'm here to learn. My understanding is that leaders of corporations have a duty to shareholders to maximize profits. Because of this, even if decision makers want to make an ethical move, they are incentivized not to do so because that would give shareholders legal grounds to sue them. Say Zuckerberg wanted to make an ethical decision, like heavily reducing the amount of information FB gathers and distributes about its users. Doing this would decrease Facebook's abilities to earn profit for shareholders immensely , so Zuckerberg could be sued for something like this. I read his NYT opinion piece titled Corporations Don\u2019t Have to Maximize Profits, but it wasn't thoroughly convincing. It mainly cites the judgement rule, which the author summarizes here gt It says, in brief, that so long as a board of directors is not tainted by personal conflicts of interest and makes a reasonable effort to stay informed, courts will not second guess the board\u2019s decisions about what is best for the company \u2014 even when those decisions predictably reduce profits or share price. But reading that, I am certain that any moral decision a CEO would like to make could be interpreted as a personal conflict of interest, so the point is sort of null. She also claims that corporations must act morally to please consumers and be successful, which is just hilarious. 1 Is it possible to organize a corporation so that it will never stray away from a set of values, even if doing so would reduce profits? 2 If a fundamentally moral corporation could exist, what would it look like? Also, I don't really know if corporations exist for any morally justifiable reason, but it seems like they just represent a virus of humanity that is destined to wring morality out of its code of ethics over time. So question 3 3 Do the economic fruits of corporations today justify their negative effects? Would society be better without corporations? I understand that a lot of people value the free market's conclusions as a matter of principle, but is this an exception? I consider myself politically conservative libertarian, but I can't help but see that corporations are an evil that will only get worse unless the government does something to change where things are headed soon. 4 Should the USA attempt to legislate away corporations in their current form? This might mean banning corporations entirely, or simply getting rid of the laws that give shareholders the power to sue over obstruction of profits, and I don't know if either of these goals are reasonably achievable, or if achieving them would require an overreach of government power. TLDR Corporations have a negative effect on the USA and it is in our best interest to combat this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Corporations are inherently evil and society would be better without them.\n","id":"38b6573a-0e67-4b06-9182-e4ac01cf6bdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>1 Companies have a legal mandate to chase after all available profit opportunities, known as fiduciary duty. 2 An economist with their company spotted an opportunity for arbitrage. 3 They were legally obligated at this point to pursue the opportunity to its end, so long as there was no reason why they should not from a profit perspective. Legally the shareholders demand a company pursues this angle, if they didn't, it's likely they'd be sued and lose. If the conduct was egregious enough that person could be considered in breech of their fiduciary duty and imprisoned, because its really no different than if they had stolen the money. So if someone wants to do something about it, campaign and raise a couple million dollars to cover these deficits. Otherwise you're just bellyaching. . No company or person owes anyone fairness in capitalism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":": Unless the masses of people complaining about the increase in drug prices are either campaigning to reject capitalism, or to donate to cover the profit deficiencies between price hikes, they are simply bellyaching.\n","id":"6a1639e7-fb39-489b-9b31-3d4e7fc4f533"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The symptoms to such allergy seem so common, so I just feel like some people want to feel special by saying that they are allergic to a substance that people avoid when trying to lose weight or be healthier maybe? . I live in the United States. I don't know if very relevant, but it suggests I state my country of residence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that gluten allergy is bullshit.\n","id":"6f911376-19db-4c67-9ee7-fc28363fb4a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A study showed that men out of the labor force spent an average of five and a half hours a day watching television and movies; as compared to about two hours a day for working men and three and a half for unemployed men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Working less will result in lethargy and contribute to health problems such as obesity.\n","id":"70a8bda2-b805-4598-b8c2-d988e3533eef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If taken literally of course it's an absurd question. The only true answer in a literal sense is, No, it's not possible to see something that isn't there to see. Being charitable here, it seems it would be appropriate to consider the psychiatrist should be intending to say, Are you seeing things that I don't see? Just because the technical idea of hallucination means one, the patient, is having a private experience no one else can relate to or verify. You'd be wrong to say that a person who is hallucinating is not seeing what they are hallucinating. Of course it's real for them. If a hallucinating person claims he's seeing demons and hearing voices, it seems appropriate that the psychiatrist believes the person is having an abnormal sensory experience thus justifying to the psychiatrist the use of medication. That's to say that hallucinations are a very real experience for the person having them, but not to everyone else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For a psychiatrist to ask a patient, \"are you seeing things that aren't there?\" is incredibly clumsy language for a doctor.\n","id":"36ffa444-01fb-4d21-adeb-878f3fd7e667"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've never been on a cruise, but my view on them has always been that they are a ridiculous way to travel. You apparently spend hours in massive lines to board the ship, then you spend days in what is basically a massive floating shopping mall with tacky outdated decor, trapped like a rat with thousands of other people, eating mediocre at best food and watching shitty entertainment, only to spend a few hours at your destinations. The only chance you have to absorb any culture at those destinations is if you go off on your own an attempt to get away from the cruise ship crowds for a few hours before heading back to the ship. It seems like a way to 'travel' for people who have no interest in leaving the US culturally. They just want to drink in the sun, gamble, and shop, which to be fair I can see the appeal in, but why not just go to a resort? Why trap yourself in a large scale disaster waiting to happen? I don't get it at all. Then there's the risk of seasickness, flu outbreaks, food poisoning, not to mention the possibility of a large scale disaster. It just seems like a nightmare waiting to happen. But guess who gets to go on a cruise this summer? Seeing as the trip is a family obligation that I am not paying for, there's no way in hell I'd pay to go on one I'd love to have a more positive outlook on the whole thing. I wish I could just see it as a fun, free vacation and don't worry the people taking me have no idea that I'm anything but super excited but the negative feelings keep looming and I can't help but focus on things like the infamous 'Poop Cruise' a few years ago, or the Costa Concordia. So to those of you who enjoy cruises, please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cruises are tacky, gross, dangerous, and a terrible way to travel.\n","id":"6c4ed858-3dd6-45f2-838a-1d1f1bb29367"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello, how are you all? To start off, I am a 17 year old who is very confused and a bit distressed. I will try to make this very concise. This post has no intention of being racist, hateful, or derogatory. I am posting my view on a matter which I believe can be dissolved by the critical thinkers of this subreddit. I was born in India, and raised in Australia. I am highly assimilated, as you'd expect, and carry no cultural baggage. As you may know, incels were in the spotlight awhile back. Big controversy, still is. I decided to take a stroll to see what the fuss is about. Big mistake I read some things that have stuck with me. Things such as most women dont find indian men attractive and the likes. Now I must disclose, I am heavily into white girls. And to add to the injury, most white girls find indian men unattractive . Please note I find women of all races attractive. A black woman may be more attractive than a white women, and vice versa. Im just really into white girls it has been this way since I was a child. I agree blanket statements are flawed at best. However me being a dumb teenager, I needed to clarify things with a group of people who can offer thoughtful input. The claims were backed up by dating statstics. I cannot speak for their reputation, but yes, it does indicate a bias. I consider myself above average at 6ft tall and mostly good features. I thought that all I had to do was get fit and Id be scoring with women. I thought in 2018, my generation wouldn't be as likely to be prejudiced. To summarize, I believe that despite being objectively attractive, I may struggle in dating simply because Im not white. I believe that people raised in a multicultural environment may still be prejudiced. I strongly wish to be corrected. I strongly wish to change my view. If this post gets approved, which I hope it does, I want you to know I will be very very thankful to all discussion. Thank you so much. Edit Thank you all for the responses, many have certainly helped change my view. I however am surprised that comments of actual substance that make sense got downvoted, and the top voted comment is by a guy called currycell who contributes nothing to the discussion apart from an opinion with implications that dont make sense if you thoroughly read the post. Well done reddit, lol.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even in 2018, being a person of colour will heavily affect my chances at dating\n","id":"766cc3c9-75a3-4753-a633-c0f0247fc14d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>One way the Bible has helped many is what it teaches about the family. That husbands should \"love their wives as they love their own bodies\". Men who do this are good husbands who strive to never be abusive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People waste time on many things, but sometimes time spent serving others or gaining a deeper understanding of the Scriptures or the Tanakh is beneficial because those activities teach people to do good to all.\n","id":"fdb8e5b0-85d5-4a0e-bf55-f5583920d098"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, this is kind of a weird topic. I get that it's taboo, and most people would probably find it disgusting, but besides that, I can't honestly think of anything else that's wrong with it, as long as it's consensual and doesn't harm either the animal or human. I remember seeing a AMA ? post a while back about a kid who had his cat basically give him a blow job. He didn't force the cat or anything, but when he wanted her to he would just call her up, and if she did fine, if not, whatever. I don't really see the issue with that. Or a dog having sex with a chick. The dog gets off, so does the chick, and that's that. Idk, is there something I'm missing besides the whole disgust argument?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although taboo, I do not think beastiality is bad as long as it is consensual.\n","id":"62c25d2e-06e0-47a4-98eb-26e41e827119"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Anyway, I've never been afraid that I might get raped. Why should I be scared to walk alone at night, as if reality is modeled after teen horror flicks or the 5 o clock news? Frankly, it seems like getting mugged is orders of magnitude more likely to happen. And the risk of that seems ridiculously low compared to getting in a traffic accident. To the point that it probably a lot safer safer to walk alone at night than to be driving around when there are a high percentage of drunk drivers on the street. If you go to a bar in a bad part of town where there are tons of drunk men looking for one night stands, and then you decide to wander drunk in the alleyways of those neighborhoods, or go home with some random guy and expect him to not want to sleep with you, well it's just hard for me to feel like you're a total victim of circumstance or agree with the notion that guys everywhere are out to rape you. I'm not one of those who blames the victim, but if you wander around neighborhoods full of liquor stores, adult stores, and pay by the hour motels drunk and or dressed up like a hooker, well it's no wonder why you're paranoid about getting raped because you're putting yourself in high risk situations. Anyway, I don't want to be an ass and act like rape doesn't happen, I'm just having a really hard time believing this statistic that 20 of women are raped, when I have yet to have met a single woman who has been raped by a random stranger. I'd frankly be surprised if even 0.1 of rapes are from random strangers. I think this is the same kind of paranoia parents have of their kids walking home from school, as if there's a pedophile in a van lurking around every corner just waiting to abduct their children. I just don't see good justification for why a woman can't walk around alone at night without necessitating paranoia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the risk of being raped by random strangers is ridiculously low to the point that I don't understand why anyone would be paranoid about it if they bothered to use any common sense.\n","id":"f1fe7ae0-a689-4389-a092-bbe6343576b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction, and possibly an insect apocalypse, where insects could be gone in a century. I\u2019m scared. We have only 12 years until the world ends, and politicians won\u2019t do anything about it. I am terrified, and I\u2019m on the verge of a mental breakdown, I don\u2019t want to lose my family and my pets to climate change, and I don\u2019t want the world to end. I\u2019m too young to die, but I think I will. Not to mention that climate change will cause wars, further destroying civilization. I have nearly fully given up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It\u2019s too late to do anything about climate change and the sixth mass extinction, and we are doomed.\n","id":"6436ef44-58cd-474f-b5db-b1a86b6a897b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A duty to rescue is a concept in tort law that arises in a number of cases, describing a circumstance in which a party can be held liable for failing to come to the rescue of another party in peril. In common law systems, it is rarely formalized in statutes which would bring the penalty of law down upon those who fail to rescue. This does not necessarily obviate a moral duty to rescue though law is binding and carries government authorized sanctions, there are also separate ethical arguments for a duty to rescue that may prevail even where law does not punish failure to rescue. A typical example would be if you saw a child drowning in a pool. These laws would state that if you do not make an attempt to rescue the child, then you will be held liable and possibly face prosecution. I think these laws are bullshit. To make it clear, I have nothing against Good Samaritan Laws which generally protect you from facing legal punishment for trying to help someone out, and I think that in situations where you bear some kind of responsiblity such as being a lifeguard or a parent, then you should be obligated to act. However, I think that these duty to rescue laws infringe upon my liberty. I should not be legally obliged to save someone in peril if I am not responsible for them or their situation. For example, if someone I hated was trapped under rubble after their home collapsed, I would not want to save them and I think that should be my right. I want my enemies to die and as long as I am not actively doing something that is causing it, then I should not be punished. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that \"duty to rescue\" laws shouldn't exist.\n","id":"a4f90551-a8eb-485f-b6e0-85a07b863453"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I support most of the Democratic party's platform except where it seems directly opposed to church teaching as outlined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. x200B Ultimately I think the church's teaching is the most important consideration for me as a voter. x200B There isn't a perfect candidate that I'm aware of and because of the quirks of our legal system, I believe I should vote for the lesser of two evils and vote for one of the two most popular candidates for any given election. x200B Abortion is something very deeply opposed by the Catholic Church. I view it as something akin to the killing of an innocent person who's life is pretty irrelevant to mine, but valuable nonetheless. Logically, it seems to me to be something like any other unjust killings that are emotionally distant to me. However, it's scale is ridiculously large. x200B I don't think my view can be changed on any of these previously listed considerations, but I cannot come to a firm conclusion on which party actually represents my views the closest. I want to do a sort of utilitarian weighing of the probable effect of outcomes as if my vote would decide the elections and pick the one that seems better. x200B Generally I lean republican because abortion is the single most important issue to me, but I realize there's a question of efficacy with the republican party on that platform. Other important issues to me protection of the environment provisions for healthcare, education, and opportunity for all elimination of the death penalty a charitable resolution to gay marriage in line with church teaching I'd love to see anybody with a viable plan here minimization of the imperial army and a distributionist economic model. There's a lot that's missing and I don't exactly understand how much of this could feasibly fit together, but I hope that gives a bit of insight into my political views. I'd be open to my view being changed about specific elections in South Dakota or about general support across the country. x200B the TL DR of it is the Democratic party represents a lot of my political beliefs really well, but abortion is too important of an issue. The marginal benefits of electing republicans to eliminate abortion is worth the more significant costs to other less important issues. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As an American Catholic who likes most of the Democratic Party's platform, I should Vote Republican because of key issues like abortion.\n","id":"a8e512f7-2197-47f2-aa17-1939778a1b68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>When the top 1% of earners have a disproportionate amount of a country's wealth, that gives them a disproportionate influence over political power through lobbying and political donations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political equality cannot exist without some degree of economic equality.\n","id":"dfbc29f1-d72e-48f6-b428-f0b0a75c521b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Elon musk is an entrepreneur and business man. A few months ago he had a twitter regarding taking his company private. Due to this, he was prosecuted by and has recently settled with the SEC. I understand that things tweets can affect business prices they did If businessmen are held to a certain standard with regards to posts on twitter, then politicians should at least be held to a similar standard, for the same reason. Anything a politician , including the POTUS, posts should be considered a political directive or an official statement from their office and should have both the effects of such as well as repercussions of such. If we are going to hold civilians to standards, politicians should also be held to the same standard. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians should be held to the same standards as civilians.\n","id":"abc5f5ee-3271-4406-8048-cacaaeae2b6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it unethical to use ad-blockers?<|ARGUMENT|>Using an ad-blocker would be like having a robot that automatically flipped through a magazine and cut out all ads before the user read the magazine. There is nothing necessarily unethical about this analogy, therefore there is nothing unethical about ad-blocking online.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are analogous practices on all other forms of media that are not considered unethical. Ad blocking is no different.\n","id":"d3a3f89a-5e48-4c18-8964-26bcf8384582"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>An omni-benevolent, omniscient and omnipotent God would never have created a world where more than six million Jews had to die in the Holocaust.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The problem of evil implies that God does not exist.\n","id":"ed9a0175-1f7d-4592-9028-8bdf648ab200"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that in order for a person to think, act or behave in a certain way that they have to in some way shape or form have a rudimentary want to behave in such a manner. No outside stimuli can influence people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No one can influence peoples view's and opinions.\n","id":"140a1f46-37dd-4a60-aa58-3c18dfeb973d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sovereign Wealth Funds<|ARGUMENT|>Sovereign wealth funds suffer from an almost total lack of transparency. Most countries maintain secrecy about the size of their funds and the extent of their holdings, their accountability to government, their investment strategies and their approach to risk management. Without knowing these things, it is impossible to gauge whether political or economic objectives will dominate the SWFs\u2019 behaviour, or indeed whether they will make safe and responsible shareholders in any business \u2013 secrecy breeds corruption. For these reasons, Jeffrey Garten of Yale has argued that SWFs should be obliged to publish independently audited accounts twice a year. He has also pointed out that many countries operating SWFs protect their domestic economy from foreign competition and investment. We should demand reciprocity, so that countries seeking investments abroad must open up their own economies fully before they are allowed to hold significant assets elsewhere.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sovereign wealth funds suffer from an almost total lack of transparency. Most countries maintain se...\n","id":"eae60f7c-4a0b-4e17-a832-afb23963ad5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Description I would like to preface this description of my view by acknowledging that I have very little knowledge of European culture and, thus, have no real understanding as to why they are more open with boobs. I do, however, understand my American, puritanical society and see no compatibility between our values and female toplessness. From my understanding, there are two primary societally defined functions to boobs to feed babies and to be sexualized. Looking at reddit comments of a link that has boobs in it, observing day to do conversation, and just coming from myself, boobs are attractive, sexual body parts. I very simply don't see how one could go from sexualizing such body parts in private while keeping a neutral, disinterest in public, preventing oneself from staring. I feel like many of the movements that are attempting to put forth female nudity do so with an oh yeah, that's natural or an isn't it normal approach that very simply contradicts our actual behavior. My counterarguments and observations in advance If guys can walk around shirtless, then why can't girls? While I accept and believe that women should be treated equally in the workplace, in friendships, and day to day life, anatomical differences are definitive differences that distinguish men from women and, thus, have to be treated differently. Because society has sexualized boobs, it is necessary to keep them covered. Why society has defined the nipple has the entire boob is arbitrary and I accept that, however, it's still the definition. If I have to wear a shirt as a girl, then why do fat men men with manboobs not have to? While this point is typically taken less seriously in actual argumentation about public nudity, it puts forth an interesting concept. Until this point, I have assumed that if female nudity was to be permitted, it would be done in a way that it would be societally rude to stare, that you would still keep your eyes looking at faces and that it would be taboo to look at boobs. If this is not the case, would it be permitted to make fun of boobs that are disproportionate, small, saggy, and so forth as is done to fat men men that do not have ideal bodies? I feel that relieving the female nudity taboo would also relieve the notion that boobs are boobs and should be treasured as creepy as that sounds while also increasing the amount of sexual assault that occurs, opening pandora's box of vices. While it's disgusting that it happens, it seems that sexual assault would increase in the present while the generations that had clothed boobs died off. While I suppose female nudity could normalize non ideal boobs, the lack of guarantee on top of the other risks is a bit unsettling. As an aside question, what supposed benefits are seen through female nudity aside from the supposed equality gain? In places like Africa, women are frequently, if not, always topless. Why can't women in America do this? This argument is a poor comparison at best due to the drastic differences in American and African societies. If American society did not have a social stigma against boobs and their public exposure, then female nudity would most likely be permitted, however, that very simply is not the case. In summary, I don't think that female nudity would bring equality due to the anatomical differences that separate us and the social stigma that has risen from that difference, I don't see how we could sexualize boobs in private while thinking nothing of them in public, and I can only see potential dangers in integrating such a foreign concept to a pretty strict society. I post this with a genuine desire to understand the growing movement and I eagerly await your input, answers, and arguments. Sorry for any ignorant or fallacious arguments that you may find<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the growing movement to allow female nudity is inherently incompatible with American society's sexualization of boobs.\n","id":"e9114adf-341d-409a-aa29-8caeb7694408"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have friends and co workers that have tried to tell me about it and how it's wrong and I guess I haven't heard a good point that made me change my view and I feel like an outcast. My parents came to USA legally and they left my siblings and me back until they got settled here. We were split up for 5 years. I was 1 years old and didn't know who my mom was until I was 6, my grandmother raised me. My other siblings were at other relatives houses. I guess I don't see the current issue as a big deal, the people that came here broke a law by not coming the legal way. If you break law don't you get separated from family if you go to jail? They took the risk of doing this to their family by breaking USA laws. Edit You guys are a lot better than friends and co workers in laying out different perspectives While my past and current experiences make me hard to change my views, I am seeing the other side much clearer and appreciated all responses. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see a problem with separating children from parents who came here illegally.\n","id":"66d29bb8-b354-406d-ad2f-f0ebb0b92650"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I like video games, but I just don't get this type of game at all. I've tried playing fortnite, pubg, and now Apex, and it's all just so tiresome. I run around for a while picking up crap, and then fight someone for a minute or so. Back to picking up junk for a while. Back to a tiny bit of fighting. If I wanted tactical combat, why not play something like counter strike where I don't have to pick up crap? If I want to collect crap, why not play Fallout 4 where the whole game is about looting stuff. It feels like so much busywork and so little action fun. Can someone explain why these games are actually worth a damn?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"battle royale games are bad\n","id":"417981b5-aed3-4fa3-a0ed-b85a8dbb3385"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the outcome of the Paris Climate Conference needs to be an international treaty with binding emission cuts<|ARGUMENT|>States are sovereign entities meaning that only they have power within their borders and climate change should not be a cause for groups of countries meddling in the business of others. Each state making its own commitment and then doing its own monitoring and enforcement is the right way to go about preventing climate change. By doing it this way no countries will feel unduly burdened or persecuted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sovereign states should be allowed to set their own targets and be trusted to meet them\n","id":"0dc5a131-cd73-41e9-98b8-7737ad20e979"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When the Baby Boomers were young they acted much like Millennials do today. Politically aware, against the system, into pop and counter culture, liberal with sex and drugs. But once they grew a certain age and came into power they dramatically shifted the economy and began building their fortunes. Millenials love to complain that the baby boomers ruined many things like the housing market, employment advancement, social security. What's going to stop Millennials from doing the same thing once they come into power? I can see many of them taking over with a vengeance. What's going to stop them from becoming the thing they hate?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Millenials will act even more entitled than baby boomers once they have acquired power.\n","id":"da698f6b-6673-4406-a8ec-8457c45bc9fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States be the global police?<|ARGUMENT|>Russia in 1850 tried to be the policeman of Europe. It ended badly for everyone as balance of powers was broken leading to the WW1.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Precedent suggests that single countries acting as global polices has disastrous consequences.\n","id":"2efffae4-b208-4a48-a0c1-da872dce9c4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Aborting a Disabled Child Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>The Roe v. Wade decision set that a woman obtaining an abortion was in fact, a constitutional right. Specific reasons as to why a woman obtained an abortion should be between the woman & her partner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right of abortion must always be given, as long as it does not threaten the mother's health, regardless of the person's reasons.\n","id":"2fff2b0f-d997-4f1a-89cb-de8e2231a177"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US and NATO Should Withdraw from Afghanistan<|ARGUMENT|>As long as coalition forces are present on Afghan soil, the Taliban will refuse to negotiate or work towards peace. Western forces are themselves the cause of prolonged conflict.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Western forces are harming the country more than they are helping to protect and rebuild it.\n","id":"5422d2fa-554d-4ad5-96c3-730759fa4785"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Representative Democracy Is a Better Form of Government Than Direct Democracy<|ARGUMENT|>The average individual voter would put his or her needs before those of society as a whole. This self-interest is perfectly natural, but if a law that benefits a smaller group does not benefit a larger group for example, the protection of minority interests then that law is not likely to be passed. ------------------------------------------------------ BTW, Switzerland voted for a minaret ban. They are just as susceptable to populist nonsense as anyone else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The welfare of the society would be sidelined for the needs of the individual.\n","id":"f4c894e3-94cd-49a1-8a73-872da2334fde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are the rich or the poor more responsible for environmental damages?<|ARGUMENT|>Students who can see greenery out their classroom windows do better than those who cannot. A hospital window with a green view similarly sees patients cured faster, and there are many other studies linking green spaces to better health, performance, and life satisfaction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"studies have examined the effects of the natural world on human experience\n","id":"a5d876aa-64b8-4743-a968-7bb0d7d69411"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>In the G7 just 22% of senior roles are occupied by women and 39% of companies have no women at all in senior roles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fewer women hold positions of power. Feminism fights to change that.\n","id":"353d85e3-0d0e-4cf0-8c76-6a00306b16e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we replace meat with insect derived protein?<|ARGUMENT|>Per kilo of live weight, a cow releases 2850 g of greenhouse gasses. In comparison per kilo of insects, just 2 g of greenhouse gas is released.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people are concerned by the amount of greenhouse gasses produced by traditional farming of cattle.\n","id":"a7f90601-7159-42bb-a663-6702ce985abe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Regardless of the man's less ethical actions, Andrew Jackson was known as the bank breaker and would've despised anything like the Federal Reserve. The Fed basically put him on the twenty to mock him. While his atrocities toward Native Americans are nothing to be proud of, I don't think we should be taking potshots with our currency. It's not like Jackson was a universally bad president either in fact, he frequently breaks the top ten among historians, to this day I'm totally fine with throwing Harriet Tubman on the twenty, by the way. Our currency could use some race and gender diversity. Why shouldn't we remove a president from currency, who would've hated to be there in the first place?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Andrew Jackson Should Not Be On The Twenty\n","id":"c10a1b76-5e2e-41ac-acf4-d1b54fad071b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is a long winded explanation to this, but in short the lack of evidence of any alien life is extremely damning evidence to the existence of other space faring species in the galaxy. This is for two reasons. One a species can capture mosy of a stars energy with simple technology, and almost all species looking to expand at all will do this. Secondly, within a galaxy the distances are not nearly great enough to explain why an expanding space faring species hasn't been to and possibly exploited every solar system. So basically evidence for intelligent life should be extremely obvious, and a lack of any evidence suggests that their is none out there. Also, this obviously assumes our understanding of physics doesn't change in a way that explains away the need for a species to expand at all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The galaxy is most likely devoid of intelligent life, or at least intelligent life capable of space flight.\n","id":"ccf95b59-c488-4ecc-adcc-b18a2509c5cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are The Rolling Stones Better Than The Beatles?<|ARGUMENT|>The Beatles' greatest guitar solo, from While My Guitar Gently Weeps, was played by Eric Clapton.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mick Taylor and Keith Richard's guitar solos and riffs are more interesting than George Harrison's.\n","id":"077cef6e-f672-44e5-836d-334925a91f83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm no expert on economics or ideologies, but The point I keep hearing is that all problems come back to price manipulation in one way or another. The government interfered, artificially inflating and so on. I don't see how a private entity hoarding resources money isn't price manipulation. I've heard the argument that you eventually have to stop hoarding to buy stuff that you need, but that only ensures a trickle. If you love money resources more than good food, you can save 10 and spend 1. Allowing \u201csome\u201d inflation, as I understand it, is price manipulation and not a free market. I\u2019m not sure \u201csome\u201d inflation is even a barrier as investment vehicles keep up with inflation. I've heard that hoarding money doesn't hurt the economy and everything still works regardless, the values just shift. But if that's true, that's just acknowledging that you can manipulate over time. Here\u2019s my analogy Let's picture a small island with a few thousand people. They use a commodity standard so that money approximately matches resources, is finite, and government isn't assigning any monetary values. Let's call this time A . Then, one guy comes along who is good with the free market and very committed, hard working, etc. He loves nothing more than to own more money and resources, a money hoarder. He piles up 10 of the money on the island before anyone notices through diligent saving or hoarding, depending on your perspective and sacrificing anything but basic needs. Eventually, 10 of the money is out of circulation, so the price of everything falls by 10 . Nobody cares because all prices fell together. Let's call this time B . However, one person is different. Our beloved hoarder can now buy goods using his stockpile at 90 its previous price. This makes collecting more even easier, and eventually 10 becomes 20 becomes 90 . He can control prices over time. Price manipulation, by a private individual. He has power of coercion over other individuals granted to him entirely through the free market. Finally, to relate to our world Consider that most wealthy individuals keep only a tiny fraction of their wealth liquid and a slightly larger fraction semi liquid . Edit I'm not precluding investing as part of the hoarding, but I was trying to keep it simple. A large percentage of our real world wealth is owned by a small fraction of individuals, which I believe proves that it is plausible although the real world is much more complex than Thought Experiment Island.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the dream that freer markets will solve all our problems is flawed. I believe hoarding defeats the system.\n","id":"977a1d81-76b4-4221-814d-57ac9134a9ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Genetic Screening<|ARGUMENT|>The embryos not chosen after screening may be offered up for 'adoption'. Human life will not be thrown away, and presents the option for childless couples to benefit from this scheme allowing the mother to carry the child to term.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The embryos not chosen after screening may be offered up for 'adoption'. Human life will not be thro...\n","id":"83c77e6d-b2cd-411e-815d-55925c301051"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Equality of Outcome vs Equality of Opportunity<|ARGUMENT|>Measured by social value, teachers should make at least as much as bankers, but they make far less<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Socially unproductive rent-seeking practices account for excessive profits and unequal outcomes.\n","id":"4d3e94aa-95d5-4629-8ec5-5201957c9087"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Genetically Modified Organisms or GMOs be promoted as part of a sustainable agricultural economy?<|ARGUMENT|>The term 'GMO' itself is misleading because it groups genetic modifications by breeding in the same group as 'GE' genetically engineered or transgenic organisms, which are two different types of man-made genetic changes that should be addressed in isolation from the others. GMOs can be created through pollination or other methods. GEs are made in a lab. Transgenic organisms are made in a lab, and combine DNA from unrelated organisms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The main reason that people fear GMOs is a lack of understanding as to what the term GMO means.\n","id":"c098f0e9-38cc-4838-a81e-564961c06ca7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Similar Cryptocurrencies Good for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Buying porn online is legal, yet many people might prefer there not being a record of it since it can be considered embarassing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cryptocurrencies allow for the purchase of items or services that are not forbidden, but are perhaps embarrassing or confidential.\n","id":"5755110e-7237-4dbe-ab91-20127d41b8ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>North Korea should not be labelled irrational for developing nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>The \"Byungjin\" policy is irrational in that it attempts to develop nuclear weapons and the economy at the same time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The North Korean regime's ideologies and policies are irrational.\n","id":"e6a14127-4a7d-4037-a346-f7d43b50621b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I haven't really been paying attention to the whole Benghazi thing, because it always seemed to me like a fake controversy transparently manufactured by the Republicans for political reasons. Now, I keep hearing about Clinton's exclusive use of private email servers, and I suspect that is related to or arose out of the whole Benghazi thing. So, why was her role in Benghazi actually significant? Is there some benefit American citizens would stand to gain by investigation aside from harming Clinton's chances at a 2016 Presidency? Additionally, how serious is this email thing and should we all actually be concerned about that? If so, why?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Whatever Hillary Clinton did or did not do regarding Benghazi is not an important issue, and Americans stand to gain nothing by investigating her role in it.\n","id":"baa6bf5f-7409-4340-bcc9-14dcc444b64b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Growing up in WA and spending lots of time hiking traveling through The Cascades and Rockies, I've seen my fair share of downright majestic scenery. Glacier covered peaks, granite spires, plunging gorges, snow covered mountains stretching as far as the eye can see etc. I frequent multiple subs like r backpacking and r hiking and see numerous posts from people gushing about the beauty and posting pictures of various section of the trail whether it be the Blueridge Mountains, Smokey Mountains or any other section. What I see in these pictures is always the same green rolling hills. Don't get me wrong. The undertaking of completing the trail is most certainly not boring and I have much respect for anyone who is able to complete it. I just think the scenery is monotonous and dull. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Think the Appalachian Trail Looks Boring\n","id":"d4b728c9-4496-4552-9abf-3922d69739fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I will start by saying that I fin altering your mental state through chemicals to be destructive and stupid, and have never used them myself, but I am nothing if not an advocate of freedom and choice, and drug usage is a personal decision which I find in no way immoral. With that said, I can see no way in which the current laws on drugs are not universally harmful to both the individual and society at large. The entire concept of the war on drugs seems to resolve around the governing body ruling them immoral based on subjective morality, a false sense of protection and large business that profits from their illegal status. Perhaps my biggest problem with illegal drugs is the legalization of alcohol. Alcohol, a dangerous and addictive drug which results in many deaths both to the drinker and those around them, is completely legal and only very lightly restricted in any way. For me, the arguments of immorality and safety concerns of any other drug become incredibly hard to take seriously with legal alcohol. The further safety concerns come from drugs which are more dangerous than Alcohol, hard drugs. When it comes to hard drugs, their illegal status makes them much more dangerous than if they where regulated in any way. With drug dealers making their own hard drugs or buying them from larger manufacturers, with no legal recourse for the buyers, they can be made or cut with harmful chemicals that are much more harmful than the base product. I am also of the opinion that despite their increased risk, individuals are responsible for their own choices and likely know the health risks of using these hard drugs. The people who would use these drugs are likely the kind who would drink heavily or purchase them illegally in any case. Bringing up the larger drug manufacturers from earlier, I think the truest danger of the war on drugs is these producers, who are largely comprised of dangerous drug cartels. These drug cartels are taking advantage of a vacuum in supply in demand without regard for their addicted consumer. It goes without saying that these cartels are merciless and violent gangs of hardened criminals who are driven even more by the huge potential for profit. America is not the only country suffering from it's drug laws because of these cartels, who are almost solely responsible for the horrible state of Mexico today. Farther from home we have places like Afghanistan where illegal purchases could potentially actively fund terrorism and oppression. Without drug laws and the incentive it brings these criminals, I'd imagine improvement would come very quickly. On the topic of criminals, we come to perhaps the most sickening use of drug laws imprisonment for offenders. The penalty for drug use or possession is frequently jail time with ridiculous mandatory minimum sentences. This puts young people into the horrible private prison system which is more or less a farm that harvests human misery for profit. It is also often stated it is more likely for a black man to be convicted, which I believe is statistically based on black youths using hard drugs more as a demographic, but regardless of if I'm right, and especially if I'm wrong, it would be huge for social activists. Meanwhile, drug criminals are also being put into public prisons which costs the taxpayer money and contributes to America having more prisoners than any other country by a large degree. Prisons are much more likely to turn a drug offender into an actual criminals during their sentence as well. Taking the burden off the taxpayer for prisons wouldn't be the only monetary benefit. With drugs being sold and taxed such as alcohol and cigarettes are, the money would no longer be going to violent foreign criminals, but rather the government. This extra income could be spent on any manner of public funding, and at the same time would ensure the regulation that would keep the drugs as safe as possible. These are all the reasons I think drugs should all be legal, but I've always been uncertain if I am missing something potentially harmful. I look forwards to having my view challenged.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All drugs should be legal\n","id":"67b2c82c-031f-4e81-9911-7c670e9d7c2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always been a skeptic of both sides, I'm not conservative or liberal by any means. I think any person, party, or agency that puts their pride above justice is detrimental to society as a whole. I'm also not that fond of Trump, he could be smoother with what he does. This story about the DNC staffer Seth Rich being murdered last year is appalling and it should be for everyone. If situations like this aren't brought into the public eye, they'll keep manifesting in government. Rich is suspected to have leaked the DNC emails to Wikileaks, instead of the Russians. He was shot in the back multiple times while walking through a upper to middle class neighborhood. To further show the intent behind his murder, he still had his wallet, phone, money etc. I'm no fan of Julian Assange, but he even retweeted an article on this story. And this pretty much shows he acknowledges there's a connection between him and Seth Rich. I don't blame the family for wanting to keep their son's death out of a political situation of this magnitude.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The theory that the DNC emails were leaked from the inside is closer to reality than any other theory behind the 2016 election.\n","id":"2a549956-70a5-40e8-b0de-caebb9d213ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Tampon Tax be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>More than 20 countries have a VAT on water, which is necessary for daily life. It is not illegitimate to tax, as the government has to bear the financial burden of purifying and pumping the water.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Clothes, water, and shelter are also basic necessities, but are also often taxed.\n","id":"ee91ce31-f0ce-42cb-8a59-9a375617596b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>It was physically very difficult to get to polling booths in many places so forcing people to travel for a week for the purpose of voting would be unreasonably difficult.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are historical reasons why voting was not made compulsory. This is not a justification for perpetuating that position.\n","id":"97271e25-4beb-4be6-865a-5434e009dbc4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Until recently I was an adamant atheist with similar views as Dawkins and Hitchens. Then I read a book that drastically changed my view \u201cI Don\u2019t Believe in Atheists\u201d by Chris Hedges. Hedges does not try to justify religion or prove its superiority, but instead criticises the extremist atheists, of being similarly disillusioned and having an intolerance similar to the extreme Christian right. His book covers a lot of material, so I would like to discuss the key points which I found the most convincing \u2022 Fundamentalism in any ideology is the root of conflict. Religion itself is harmless. Millions of Americans have a moderate interpreted belief in god and don\u2019t impose their views on anyone. The problem lies in extreme groups like the WBC whose danger is not their specific ideology but rather their extreme mentality. This group is volatile to whoever doesn't share their belief. How is this different then extreme atheists? Sam Harris, a celebrated fundamentalist atheist, tries justifying nuking the Middle East as part of the war on religion. Borderline fascism? Both extremist groups propel intolerance and marginalization of other groups which is the fuel of conflicts in our world. Fundamentalist ideologies are what cause conflicts, not moderate religion itself. \u2022 Atheism is not necessarily exceedingly superior to religion as atheists often believe. The belief that science, logic, and technology can solve the world\u2019s problems is similarly erroneous to the belief that religion will solve them. Knowledge is morally neutral. As much as science has increased the quality of life, it has equally allowed humans to destroy each other more easily. The atheist utopian delusion that science is the saviour of the human race is flawed. Technology does not improve human morality, in fact, Hedges argues that humans have not and will never communally morally advance at all. As great as the benefits of the internet are, it also allows pedophiles to anonymously prey on children science does nothing to change human malice. Yes, science has improved the comfort of human life, life expectancy, etc. yet our self destructive urges that cause suffering to other humans will exist regardless of religion. Atheism, as much as religion, fails to ameliorate human cruelty which triumphs despite the comfort and convenience given to us by science. And here is a pdf of the book in case anyone is interested<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fundamentalist atheists are no better than fundamentalist Christians.\n","id":"b1336436-4060-48d1-8a22-ef26c9b6ca24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should culturally diverse writers be mandatory in English curricula?<|ARGUMENT|>Arizona's HB 2281 p. 1 law prohibits any public or charter school from implementing programs or courses that promote resentment towards a race or class of people. Districts that fail to comply with this law are at a risk of losing 10% of their funding each successive year in non-compliance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Schools may risk losing funding as a result of the promotion of resentment toward a race.\n","id":"0535c8e1-d073-4156-81f9-7595005d34ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Traveling, in my opinion, is the best way for someone to be able to learn about a particular language or culture. While more and more universities are promoting their study abroad programs to a great extent, very few universities require a student to study abroad. Students who study abroad will gain a new perspective of the world. Because they will be immersed into a new culture, they will be forced to adapt to that specific culture. They will be able to understand the world around them better, and this can help them learn to respect cultural differences and diversity. In addition, if they travel to a non English speaking country, they will be able to learn another language, thereby adapting their social and communicative skills. For example, if I were to study abroad in Spain, I would be able to learn Spanish while simultaneously experiencing the Spanish culture, something that can\u2019t be adequately replicated in a traditional classroom setting. A study conducted by the Georgia Learning Outcomes of Students Studying Abroad Research Initiative discovered that students who study abroad tend to have increased academic performance upon their return. That is, students who study abroad have increased GPAs, as well as higher graduation rates than those who have not studied abroad. This statistic shows that through a study abroad experience, students will be able to achieve higher academic success when they return to their home campus. Studying abroad helps a student prepare for the future. According to the University of California Merced, 97 of study abroad students found employment within 12 months of graduation, when only 49 of college graduates found employment in the same period. This statistic proves how studying abroad has beneficial impacts on a student\u2019s future by giving them a better chance of getting a job. While I am aware that studying abroad is expensive, there are many ways to overcome the monetary factors. Most study abroad programs cost the same as tuition for that particular school. This being said, a student could take their fall or spring semester courses in a different country. This way, it costs the same as taking the courses at their home campus, and the student is getting a unique educational experience. In addition, there are study abroad scholarships that colleges give to students who would like to study abroad but cannot afford it. Studying abroad has countless benefits for students, including greater academic success, a changed perspective of the world, and better options for the future. These traits will prepare students to succeed in the global workforce. For these reasons, I believe that colleges and universities should require students to study abroad. Sources EDIT People have made me realize that requiring every student to study abroad is not realistic for students, especially those who have medical conditions, a full time job, child at home, etc. This being said, my view on this topic has changed. I now believe that colleges and universities should do a better job promoting their study abroad programs, so that the students who are willing and able to study abroad have the opportunity to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All colleges and universities should require students to study abroad\n","id":"db251d9b-2364-47ac-8636-2960b7856cac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Animal testing, Debate on animal experimentation and testing<|ARGUMENT|>So that if there is a decent chance that an experiment will result in an important medical breakthrough that will reduce human suffering and death then it is justifiable to allow animal suffering. Animal experimentation is the sometimes distasteful means to much greater ends.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animal testing and suffering is justified if it reducing human suffering\n","id":"f55fc78a-1c0c-407a-9f03-7a4e1c13a387"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This applies to any work of art, but I'm focusing on film and TV for simplicity. That is, off set stuff such as actors dying, overdosing, playing against type, how the director got the job, and or adaptional loyalty is irrelevant to the quality of a film or TV series. None of that stuff matters all that does is what the audience sees before them. The only exceptions are works that in some way sponsor harmful activity, such as older works that depict animal cruelty. A brief note on why I believe this Both Firefly and The Dark Knight are critical if not financial in Firefly's case successes that I believe are somewhat overrated due to early cancellation and the death of Heath Ledger respectively, taking good or even great works and inflating them to ridiculous levels of popularity. Change My View gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That the only thing that affects a work's quality is itself.\n","id":"670afc1b-26f3-4958-b8c4-f6e303953890"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As technology and science advances, our destructive power does as well. Even if we have developed strong defenses against military weaponry, we don't have defenses against random unconventional acts of terrorism. I don't believe that 9 11 was a death count maximizing attack, and we should be thankful that a lot of the lunatics believe that going on a shooting spree is the most effective way to kill many people. Today, it probably wouldn't be worth having massive government surveillance it is likely pretty hard for a single smart terrorist to kill more than tens of thousands of people, and I don't think that risk is enough to warrant the massive loss of liberty and opportunity for corruption that comes with a government led surveillance program. However, I believe that as science and technology advances, the potential for catastrophic bioterrorism and cyber security attacks will become more likely. Eventually a single intelligent lunatic may be able to cause a massive loss in human life, without ever involving another person in their plans. Our best surveillance techniques of today cannot detect such an event the only way to would be to somehow be able to monitor a person's thoughts or violent intent. And I believe that a massive terrorist attack is inevitable if we are not prepared. And after an attack, the people and governments will rally to implement whatever measures they can to prevent another attack. If this is done hastily and as a reaction, it is more likely to be abused as a tool of power. We need to start iterating on mass surveillance and discussing how it should be regulated, before an inevitable terrorist attack happens that will result in it being rushed upon us forcefully and recklessly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Massive government-led surveillance is good.\n","id":"38ce4b10-ef03-4c1b-930a-15b80949a5fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I need to freshen up on the books so please don't roast me if i make a mistake. Firstly there is no clear divide between good and evil, every character makes mistakes and those that people would consider the Bad guys aren't actually bad, they're just following the morals they were raised with and doing what they believe is right, compared to other books such as Harry Potter where there is a clear good and evil. For example Joffrey is a little shit but that is just how he was raised. His father never cared for him, his mother gave him everything he wanted as he was the one to be king. He was never refused something and cruelty was something that he would see on a daily basis. Another example would be the white walkers. They are a magical force made in the time of war for the simple reason to kill. We do not yet know their motives but it is clear that they followed their instructions to the letter and were made more powerful than was meant to be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Game of Thrones does not have good or evil, just different levels of morality.\n","id":"d9aedf09-b0a8-461c-a1ab-a660ea5ea9b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>We participate in national events, enjoy national pride, and make our nationality an essential part of our identity. Nationality is therefore morally significant to all of us.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refugees threaten the national identity of countries that host them.\n","id":"2b6b5acd-d0aa-44e4-8a16-a3337596b860"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pro gay rights social security benefits for the poor. The government should create jobs to improve the economy And all that goes with it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a left wing political supporter.\n","id":"3e7ab92f-11e6-403f-a7e0-e1ce58861316"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>Not revealing the affair is something that will get worse over time, and while revealing it early could end the relationship, it could also be salvageable. The longer you sit on it, the more likely it is you're going to lose your partner, or entire social circles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if you don't expect that the affair will be revealed, you can't discount the chance you will end up confessing later.\n","id":"e4f023ad-52e6-484a-bc05-262ccafb9812"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that the program was rather redundant. I know that the program was massively over budget, and that the project took longer than expected. Although it was claimed to be one of the most advanced aircraft ever made, the NORAD agreement with the United States rendered most Canadian defences either inferior or outclassed by the American counterparts, and they felt no need to continue the program. In addition, the rise of missiles being used instead of bombers, and the fear of attack from orbit, left the Arrow outdated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"John Diefenbaker was justified in ending the Avro Arrow program\n","id":"591115f0-0223-4c65-a4e7-2f54c1eea1c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>More than 45% of US troops have said they will back the Republicans in the 2020 elections compared to 28% who will vote for the Democrats.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Republican Party supports the military more than the Democrats.\n","id":"5491517a-e643-4696-a40e-69d9a5e71050"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>Many non-health related forms of human suffering are also at least in part genetic: depression, suicide, lack of social skills, Low IQ, procrastination, aggression both sexual and non sexual, boredom, distraction, jealousy, nervousness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetic enhancements not only increase our adaptation to the modern world, they improve the broader human condition.\n","id":"583fcef0-bff0-48a7-9c0c-48d583adc8ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of my favourite movies of all time I believe John Hammond had a great vision, but was poorly advised by his HR department, thus severely underpaying his most vital employees. Other than that The Park would be a major boost to the economy of the Dominican Republic, as well as any other nation where it opens shop. it would motivate kids across the globe to venture into science disciplines. it would further our understanding of our planet. The possibilities are endless. As long as we spare no expense So, can you ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jurassic Park is a good financial and scientific endeavour.\n","id":"69b092d2-8b1e-4620-aac0-2310d4fd54bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be further research on solar geoengineering.<|ARGUMENT|>Current climate change may be entirely irreversible if we do not implement such technology soon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There isn't time to debate, we should begin to prepare now!\n","id":"e703c9aa-caf3-4ebe-9f02-f1b268d403ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a public school teacher who supports a full, 100 school voucher system. I have spoken with numerous colleagues and administrators about this issue, and they all oppose vouchers. Many support school choice within the construct of public schools such as magnet schools , but almost none support vouchers. The problem is, none of them can formulate a decent rebuttal to my position. Most of them just oppose vouchers because they're supposed to, or if I'm being really cynical, because their jobs are at stake and they are being selfish. The thing is, a true voucher system, which other countries like Belgium already do, isn't some loony, right wing idea. The idea is very simple the money should follow the child, not the school. As it is now, schools get funded by how many students enroll in their school. The amount of money that the state has is distributed to the districts, which then divide the money up according to their by laws to each school, almost always based on attendance records. So in other words, we already have a de facto voucher system. When a kid goes to a school, the state gives that school money for that. The only difference between what we have and what I want is that there is only one option for the kid to give that voucher to, so he she always gives it to the local public school, and either attends there or pays extra money and goes to a private school. I feel that if people simply understood that being against vouchers is being for a monopoly, they'd break party lines and fight against that monopoly. It's failing our most vulnerable students and the data gets worse every time you look at it. The ironic thing is, of course, that teachers and the left, two groups who claim to support equality the most, are fighting so strongly against vouchers. In order to change my view, I'd have to be shown that public schools are not a de facto monopoly in a a de facto voucher system. Any pedantry and nit picking won't change my view. I'd like to see the issue in a different light, because if I'm wrong, I don't want to continue pushing for something that will hurt the kids I work with and care for every day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We already have a school voucher system, but there is only one place kids can take their voucher: their local public school.\n","id":"582cd680-96fb-4077-9df5-d6ca07485e38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe people can change wanna argue that? Your not the same person you were 5 years ago. It's common sense and many don't want to trust that idea. Many want hard punishment for bad people , be it murderers, rapists or pedophiles. Hoe has this worked in the pas of human history? How has education not helped people become better through self actualization and rehabilitation? I would think that years of murdering rapists and, even more grotesquely comical, murdering murderers, we would have killed all of them. But wait, their are still more ? Really? You mean if we don't teach them that what they are doing is hurting people in a very serious way, they will keep justifying this behaviour ? Duhh. It's obvious that you must teach a male female that murder is bad and rape is bad. You can think oh well they knew that since they were kids and they still did it They can't justify so what's allows you to justify murdering them? You can think oh well maybe i wont kill them but the murderers in prison will so what makes you think putting them away without any psychiatric help with their head is going to fix the problem? Then their is the argument why do we have to pay for them to have 3 meals a day and keep breathing air? Why don't we have them executed? because that's costs more and hey Murdering humans is a bad thing. I know we've been doing that since the beginning, but are you really going to justify such primal and animalistic thinking? I know where animals. Human's are mammals and always will be, but we have a conscious. Make fucking use of it please. Lets fix this problem oh boo hoo you can't get personal vengeance and make him pay and move forward with our thinking. We don't need children really considering this to be justice .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bad people need help. Not punishment\n","id":"9faee288-081c-41e5-bf93-9894018621d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Discussing a UBI as a benefit to a population without acknowledging that it creates an equal obligation to that same population is not intellectually honest. If one is born with a right to UBI then one would also be born with an equal obligation to pay for it. It's another not-so-clever scheme for income redistribution. If a UBI was renamed \"Selective Additional Tax\" for some citizens, it would not be such a popular topic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any democratic country that implemented a UBI would be forced to raise taxes on its citizens. Governments do not produce money, they only have the money that is taxed from the citizenry. Therefore, in order to come up with the money to pay for the UBI, taxes would have to be raised.\n","id":"f8fb2122-43b2-4a8f-ba4d-e158ba273eed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Twitter does not clearly describe what constitutes the 'line into abuse in its new behavioral policy and merely describes \u201cthreatening or promoting terrorism\u201d as abusive behaviour.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Neither Facebook nor Twitter have clear rules for what is acceptable content and what is not.\n","id":"be1c1df4-6499-4306-bad2-472764e0be7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Caritas, one of the largest's world humanitarian organizations, asked members in Vietnam to combine charity with evangelization<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In some occasions, religion is only charitable or helps those who believe.\n","id":"9b1d2f35-28c4-4b65-9d85-5d6558dce209"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the original theatrical release of Star Wars, Han, a reckless smuggler, is shown as a morally ambiguous character when he fires a killing blow at Greedo, a hired bounty hunter, over a disaggreement between Han and Greedo's employer, Jabba. This scene is seen as a powerful introduction to Han's roll in current affairs, as well as his character as a whole, however in the 1997 Trilogy Special Edition DVD re release, Greedo is shown to fire a shot first, missing from point blank range ~2 meters , before Han shoots. Many people believe this change to be insignificant, and George Lucas even claims boasts this was how he originally filmed it I believe that setting Han's scene as an anti hero to have him join the rebel forces seems like a much more fitting story than to have him act as a hero less meaningfull letting events take shape around him. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Han Shot First.\n","id":"d7911568-cc35-4a24-bebf-a00e0783419f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me begin by syaing that I am an Indian. The vast majority of Indians around 85 are Hindus. Even though many Hindus are not vegetarian, most still hold cow to be a very sacred creature and almost divine. A cow provides sustenance and support to the family, it nourishes them. Its milk is used is major component of a typical Indian diet. The dung is widely used as a fuel source and to make manure. Apart from this cows feature prominently as bountiful creatures in scriptures and Hindu literature. Knowing all this I think I understand the reverence that people might hold for the cow. Yet, when people say that sale of beef should be banned just because it irks the majority I instinctively react as if my very rights are being infringed upon. I wonder if there is a reason good enough to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unreasonable to ban beef even if cow slaughter hurts the religious sentiments of a population.\n","id":"f835b0be-f26c-45c6-8432-d0c148d61bb7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>If certain roles discriminate in favour of the same religions, there is no exposure to alternative viewpoints and lifestyles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Disagreement within an organization forces it to question its practices and reform for the better.\n","id":"9420d2d4-2a8f-47ac-9392-b57c43fc19dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Solar energy<|ARGUMENT|>Josh Loposer. \"Solar power will be cheaper than coal by 2020\". 30 May 2008 - \"Is it possible that solar power will be more cost effective than coal in 12 years? It seems like a pipe dream, but the US government along with huge investors like Goldman Sachs, Chevron, and Google seem to think it's a little better than just a distant possibility. Factoring in tax incentives, likely carbon-capping legislation, and rising natural gas prices, experts are estimating that the prices of coal and solar power will flip-flop by 2020.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many solar energy systems are now price competitive with coal\n","id":"18fe7406-8ec1-4168-bd6c-d8e0a8365285"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The constitution of the United States is over 200 years old and it shows its age. Many amendments are written in unusual english by todays standards, making it difficult to tease out meaning. Many other amendments overlap in meaning and could be combined to simplify them while also covering more people. The fact is, it is outdated. I believe it should be revised every 100 years or so because culture and language are organic. They change based on technology, public conscious, and international relations. Should we follow the advice of a group who believed slavery was acceptable? That thought only white, male, property owners should could vote? Can you read through the document and understand what was meant or does much of it come across as confusing to todays readers? The world has changed and I believe we need to change with it in order to be relevant. I also believe our ideas and views from today will experience the same degradation over time. In 100 years will the world still care about gun rights? Will the population still speak mostly english or will we add more spanish to our vocabulary? Will words like gay hold the same meaning as it does now or will it return to the usage it once had? We cannot know. We should not force our ideas through time, expecially when future generations will have the same issues understanding us as we do understanding the founding fathers. What I can't understand is why we are clinging to the past, to a group who would likely be viewed as backward racists today. We should take what we believe now and govern by those beliefs. We should update, revise, and examine our core ideas from time to time to at least make sure we still understand what they are. I am not talking about simply throwing the constitution out either. I am saying we should interpret it for today, update it, and use our revised version instead. Then both can be looked at by the next generation and adjusted as needed. It should update and change with the citizenry and the times while still being the timeless core of our laws. It would take a lot of work, a lot would change, but I believe we would be better for it.  Edit Many responses seem to think I am saying scrap the whole thing and start over. No, I am saying we need an updated, reworded one that uses the meanings as we take them today. All men are equal shoule read all persons, prohibition and its repeal should just be removed, the 15th and 19th should be combined and all inclusive with restrictions put in after the fact. Those are examples of what I mean but not the whole of it. To  you need to show me that having an old, poorly worded document is better than a revision of it in modern terms. It would be hard to do but it would be better for the nation and easier to work with than if we left it be.  also, deltas incoming for added info on the topic. Hard to delta from a phone<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US constitution and its amendments need to be re-written or updated and should be every 100 years or so.\n","id":"dcb1b84e-6892-41ef-b58a-bc4d0bf5b7da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>In honor to that intelligence that allow us to perceive and fear death, and therefore create gods and praise them, we can also take another step forward, banishing the institution of religion from the empiric realm of the fear of death. We are grown enough as a species to accept we are scared of the end of our lives, and that religion is a social construct.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is an institutionalization of the fear of death that we, humans, have as a consequence of our deeper intelligence.\n","id":"09df65b4-777e-48ff-aaa7-7b662390276b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Little Mac Every character in the game has a balance between strength and recovery. Beefier characters in general have less recovery, like Bowser and Donkey Kong. Faster characters tend to have better recovery, like Sonic and Pikachu. Little Mac is completely unbalanced in this sense, he does FAR too much damage and has the worst recovery by a mile. I'm not saying he's too strong or too weak, but certainly does not have an acceptable balance. Also, he hasn't been a playable character in a video game since Gamecube, and hasn't had his own release since Gamecube. Lucina Just another Marth clone, slightly faster and slightly weaker. Certainly not deserving of a character slot in SSB4. There are also far too many sword wielding characters in the game, with all having essentially the same play style Marth, Lucina, Shulk, Ike, Link, Toon Link. Toad Toad is finally getting his own feature game on the WiiU, Captain Toad Treasure Tracker. Nintendo tends to put new characters in to the SSB series when they get their own feature game. Pit is an example of this. Toad has been a big part of the Mario series, and is very deserving of a spot in SSB. He is the only character from Mario Kart 64 that is not in SSB. The only issue with Toad being a character is that Peach's neutral B pulls toad out but they could change this easily. Convince me that they haven't made mistakes with the roster in SSB4. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Little Mac and Lucina shouldn't have been included in Super Smash Bros 4, and Toad should have been included.\n","id":"ccd20e9d-e30e-44e9-865a-a6194723f3d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems that the only thing that ever is motivating any person at any point in time, is self interest. Selfless actions can easily be explained through people likely expecting themselves to act in this fashion as it is their own moral code which they are fulfilling. To them they would expect it of themselves and be disappointed if they didn't carry out the selfless action. behind all of this is self interest Yes people might suggest that people are motivated for things such as want for sex or money, but behind all of this lies the sole motivation of self interest. This is a pretty annoying view that I don't particularly like and so I would be happy if anyone could change it Edit Thanks guys you've changed my view My philosophy teacher held that self interest was the sole motivation, and like a fool I decided that until I could refute it, I would accept it. I didn't realize how much this has been bothering me. The reason why it bothers me, as some have asked, is due to its ruining of my more romantic notions of life and what people are all about. Personally being a christian guy, it also seemed to contrast to my beliefs, suggesting that the kind of life my faith wants people to live was an impossibility of sorts. I now understand how sill this was. There was no reason for me to accept the argument as valid and sound in the first. It is based off an inductive generalization it normally seems to be true, therefore it is the case of small sample size that has no compelling truth behind it. as u caw81 pointed out As most people have pointed out and the thing that I had been catching on the most, was the suggestion that sel sacrifical and selfless acts where somehow purely self interest in some fashion. On a more soppy note, I would now contend that for want of a better word love is the main motivation behind things. Love of self motivates lots of things such as self interest, but there is something else which I'd been discounting earlier. This is of course love of others which is expressed through selfless actions Thanks guys<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Self interest is a persons only motivation\n","id":"177aabee-f5f3-423b-a274-f2c0913e7fbe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>Although education and information on the harmful side effects of smoking have been around for decades, millions of people still smoke.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Education and information might not be enough to ensure thoughtful drug use.\n","id":"155a48c6-3554-4c3a-9bb2-6badba838b18"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of the most annoying things on Reddit is moderators who can't be bothered doing their jobs making comments in a patronising tone that basically say You've all been very naughty and locking the thread. While I understand that people tend to make not civil comments and abuse the report button, the solution to those problems is getting more subreddit moderators, not shutting down the thread for reasonable people who want to participate in a discussion. I could maybe understand if a very small subreddit got brigaded, but even then, locking a thread is something that the admins should do, not moderators. There are very few times when it's appropriate to lock a thread, and reddit moderators don't have the responsibility and maturity to handle such a power, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moderators should not have the ability to lock threads on Reddit.\n","id":"0f6c518b-63d7-4a11-8d5d-cd03efe035b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe in the right to die because the alternative is preposterous. One shouldn't be obligated to live against their will if they genuinely aren't interested in living. That goes against another fundamental human right freedom. Now, I'm not saying that suicide is fine under all circumstances. For example, if you have kids that are dependent on you, it would be pretty shitty to put yourself above them. But if someone doesn't have kids or any of the sort, I really see no argument for keeping them alive anyway. It's just not fair to. It was never their choice to be born.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe in the right to die\n","id":"02d54244-c36c-41a9-b213-40f48b233efa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that, out of all the hypotheses we have for the origin of the universe, the simulation hypothesis is the most likely to be true. I believe that most likely when the big bang happened, that was the start of the simulation. Everything that has happened since then, and everything that will happen in our future is all part of a program designed by some other advanced life form possibly ourselves for research, entertainment, curiosity, or possibly just a fun little hobby. The reasons I believe this are as follows. The Bostrom Argument Nick Bostrom came up with a convincing argument based on three premises. I won't type out the entire thing, but basically it boils down to this Based on current rates of advancement in technology, it is unavoidable that we will at some point be able to create a simulated universe so powerful that its inhabitants believe they are real. Being a Computer Scientist myself, I believe this is doable within the next 100 years. According to Moore's law, computers will be approximately 2^50 times more powerful 100 years from now. That's certainly enough to process some kind of universe simulation. So, if you agree that creating such a simulation will be possible in our future, then it follows that the only way we will not create such a simulation is if we are destroyed before then. I consider the probability of that happening to be pretty low. We've lasted 100,000 years so far. Another 100 should be easy. If you accept that we will create such a simulation, it only follows that it is possible to create one so advanced that the inhabitants also eventually create their own, simpler simulation. If nested simulations are possible, then what is more likely that we are the 'real' world from which all the nested simulations stem off of, or we are one of those nested simulations. The main opposition to this argument is that nested simulations will require an exponential increase in computational power for each new simulation. This argument can be dismissed when you realize that the simulations need not be run at real time, or at the same level of complexity. It could take a hundred years of our time to render one frame of the simulation, but still appear to be real time to the simulated beings. Our universe looks exactly like you would expect it to look if it were a simulation. In order to be processed, data has to be quantized. You cannot process a picture with infinite resolution, or a video with infinite framerate. It just so happens that units of time and space are also quantized into planck length and planck time. There is a unit of measurement so small, that something cannot be less than one planck length apart from another object, else they essentially occupy the same space. There is also planck time, which is the amount of time it takes light to travel one planck length. The universe cannot exist in a different state other than in intervals of planck time, because an object in motion cannot move faster than light, and cannot change its position by less than one planck length. Now we have established that the universe is separated into 3 dimensional pixels voxels , and has a framerate. The only thing left that needs to be quantized is energy. The speed of light does that for us. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and no energy or matter can have infinite values. In fact, if you were to nest a simulation, all you would have to do is limit the speed of light, and everything would be exponentially easier to calculate. The voxels would become larger lower resolution and the framerate would decrease less time to process a certain length of time in the simulation . All things unexplainable are explained by this hypothesis. All of those questions for which we don't have answers are explained. The origin of the universe, why there is something rather than nothing, why life exists, why we experience consciousness, why certain things in the universe seem almost guided, while others seem completely random. All of those things can easily be explained if we were to know that the universe is a simulation. That is not to say that these things are evidence for the simulation argument, but it at least shows that there are no holes preventing it from being true. It fits nicely with our current understanding of the universe. Now, what are the reasons that the simulation hypothesis is not the most likely explanation for the origin of our universe?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the most likely explanation for the origin of the universe is that it is a simulation,\n","id":"db53e3d4-6932-49c4-b938-097212e9c197"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've made a few generalizations below, of course there are some people who dropped out of high school and are millionaires, and some people that graduated from medical school and have no job. However all of you know just as well as I do, that these generalizations are mostly true. just don't even bother arguing this part, don't post if you're going to say they're not Sure, you can possibly make a living with just a high school degree. But it'll be absolute crap and the best most of them can hope for is to live in a small, run down apartment in the highest crime rate neighborhood in the entire city. You might even be lucky to live in the projects. Even if you get a basic 2 year degree, if you get an almost full time job, you could probably buy a small house in a suburb or rural area. It might not be nice, but you could probably own it and not live in fear of the crime outside your door. It's a significant step up, and even in the US it should be considered a basic right in the same way public high school education is. Note that this isn't coming from someone who's butthurt that they don't have money to pay for college, I've been put through it with absolutely no debt thanks to my very generous parents. I just think it would improve just about every aspect of society in every way. Edit I thought of another reason for it. When I was in high school, the kids that didn't care about graduating mostly did it because they knew they couldn't pay for college even if they did end up graduating. If you give them another 2 years to look forward to, which ends up in them getting a somewhat reasonable job, they might actually try to complete high school without getting into serious trouble.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"College should be free for at least 2, maybe 4, years, like high school.\n","id":"42fb5004-5ac6-4cff-a7df-08827e2e4fe5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>As the cost of labor rises it becomes comparatively easier to research and develop robots, automatons, and software to replace people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There will be increased automation of undesirable jobs, and more jobs that people want.\n","id":"388bde9b-2987-4296-8c18-e209ee36460a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, as I understand it, the alleged attack here was a one off, over the pants, one second long, genital touching from another man. In other words, it was an over the pants gay dick squeeze. My belief, which I'm asking you to challenge, is that this exact wrongdoing should not constitute a crime . It should not result in imprisonment, and should not earn the attacker the lifelong label of sex offender which, for those who disagree with me, is necessarily what you are supporting if you believe the attack should be criminally prosecuted . Such a severe punishment would not fit this crime. I emphasized crime because I want to make clear that I'm not saying TC should be withheld from seeking civil damages. It is only the criminality of the attack that I'm arguing against. So, I would like to pose a hypothetical. If the attacker were not another man but was, say, Jennifer Lawrence, would you still believe the exact same attack should result in JLaw's imprisonment? Or, if it were your crotch that was grabbed by a beautiful woman that you are legitimately sexually attracted to, would you want that woman to be imprisoned? I think the answer to both questions should obviously be No. And because I think that, I can't justify applying a different legal standard to TC's attacker simply because he's a gay man instead of a beautiful woman. We all support equality under the law, right, so surely we can't treat the exact same conduct differently depending on the sex and orientation of the offender. Some may argue that, based on how TC responded, the attack truly did have a profoundly negative effect on his mental well being. You might say that America's oftentimes indifferent attitude towards male victims of sexual assault is what's really behind my point of view. But from a legal standpoint, neither of these arguments should matter. What makes a crime a crime is the actual wrongdoing, not the victims response to the wrongdoing. If it were otherwise then the exact same criminal acts could yield vastly different punishments depending on the disposition of the victim. Circling back to equality under the law, this would obviously be an unjust system. Not all sexual assault is the same. A slap on the ass or an above the pants dick squeeze cannot be treated in the same manner that we would treat, for example, forced penetration. I agree that the laws of sexual assault should apply equally to male or female wrongdoers. But in this case, regardless of the attackers or victims gender, an actual criminal conviction and imprisonment is just too extreme a punishment. Are we going to send every drunk asshole that slaps a girl's butt to prison not jail, prison ? Send the dick squeezers and ass slappers to civil court and make them pay, but sending them to prison, ruining their lives, is not proportionate to the severity of their crimes. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For Terry Crews' \"attacker\" to be arrested, criminally convicted, and imprisoned would be unjust and completely disproportionate in severity to the alleged attack.\n","id":"d74e82a2-8236-4960-a6c2-6fd3076ea8c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe he was right to expose the injustices he did but I think the way he went about it was harmful and absurd. He writes long letters thanking and lauding countries like Venezuela and Russia for their upstanding acts of aiding him, countries with a human rights record far worse than the USA's validating them. When the pentagon papers were released, that whistleblower stuck around and faced what he did Snowden went on a catch me if you can adventure spilling tons of sensitive data not all of which we've seen to parties outside the US, and easily into the hands of those who mean us harm. I think the acts he exposed are grave injustices, but I do not think that alone absolves him of the other things he's done.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not think Edward Snowden is a hero or patriot to the American People, and hardly qualifies as a \"whisteblower\" to claim that kind of protection.\n","id":"70253032-0fa1-4ce5-b371-9298ca5fb410"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Today in America, gun violence is outrageously prevalent. As a result, many people have made significant pushes to control guns and gun owners so as to mitigate the amount of gun related deaths that occur each year. At first glance, this sounds like a perfectly rational idea, even a fantastic one to some, but there are a few important factors that have led me to believe that gun control is a waste of time and resources. First, I think I should bring up the quite obvious fact that people kill other people. Most of these killings are done with guns, which of course encourages many to want to restrict or even ban them entirely. The problem with this is that just because you outlaw guns or heavily regulate them, doesn't mean they just go away. Whether we like it or not, if someone wants a gun in this world, they can get it, legally or not. Americans certainly aren't going to submit to any legislation that takes away their guns, and many will obtain firearms any way they see fit, and laws are not going to stop someone dead set on getting a gun. Furthermore, even if all the guns in the United States were to suddenly cease to exist, people would still kill other people, just by different means. This can be seen in action in countries like Britain,that have extensive legislation restricting the ownership, transportation, and purchase of guns and banned all handguns in 1997 . Once guns were largely taken off the table for criminals, they chose another way to kill people, knives. Knife crimes increased significantly after guns were restricted, reinforcing the previously stated idea people kill people, and gun control won't stop them if they want to kill someone. I should however take a minute here to say that gun control does work to a degree. Undeniably, shooting deaths go down with gun laws. But in America, where gun violence is a very serious issue, the amount of gun crimes that happen annually are most definitely a sign of something. There are plenty of countries out there Iceland comes to mind where nearly everyone owns a gun and very few laws are in place regarding guns, and their gun crime rates are extraordinarily low compared to ours. What this says to me is that guns aren't the underlying problem here, and I have a theory as to what the problem is In the US, drugs of any kind are illegal and have serious consequences legally for those who are caught using them. This total ban of drugs has only done one thing, and that is create an illegal market and a lucrative one at that, because of the risks involved in making and selling drugs, which thus drive up prices for them which gangs readily take advantage of. Now that gangs have something extremely profitable to sell, they now have something to feud over with other gangs, and because drugs are illegal these gangs can't settle these disputes peacefully in court. So this leaves drug gangs with one option for controlling their market, violence. If you look at the statistics, gang violence makes up a large portion of gun related offenses. So by making drugs illegal, we've now done two things encouraged violence and counterproductively led to more drugs being used. If we legalize drugs in the US, a significant benefit would be the reduction in gun violence because gangs no longer have anything to thrive on. With no more drug gangs, we should see an enormous drop in gun crimes. My point here is that trying to stop gun violence in America is really just treating the symptoms of a much larger issue. If we want crime to go down, we need to solve the problem s at its source, not continue to churn out laws in hopes of making our problems disappear.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gun Control is a waste of time.\n","id":"b487a592-91dc-43a8-a0ab-bfd2cb3c4b83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm sure this is true for guys, but I've never heard a guy called thick. So, I was reading this post made by someone talking about fat, aka thick . They make it seem like fat girls call themselves thick just so as not to be called fat There are other examples where I've seen people use them interchangeably and that jut makes no sense. A fat girl is like an Apple while a thick girl is like a Pear Thick usually means bigger thighs, slim waist and a bigger but. Fat is just everything is big. So go ahead, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When referring to a girl, fat and thick are not interchangeable. They mean different things.\n","id":"538becb0-92ca-45d8-ab51-9b77f41accdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should heterosexual people not be allowed in gay bars?<|ARGUMENT|>Historically, gay bars had to be discreet, so they sprung up in scruffier parts of cities. As cities become wealthier, and as pressure on space intensifies, they are squeezed out once rent rises.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gay only bars are increasingly economically unsustainable, and are therefore declining in number.\n","id":"b9b2e175-d69b-4ad2-be21-0291a710bc7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Green Bay Packers are the only community owned team in American major league professional sports. They aren't owned by a conglomerate of rich owners. They're owned by various stockholders of the organization who vote on a board to run and manage the team. They raise money by issuing stock that can't be traded like normal stocks , and use that to develop facilities. They haven't left small market Green Bay, and have protected that die hard fanbase from owners looking to move to bigger markets. If all professional sports teams were like this, and used stocks profits to maintain their facilities and personnel, there would be no more fleecing of taxpayers over building new stadiums, you wouldn't have moves like the Seattle Supersonics to Oklahoma City, and a lot of social issues like domestic violence would be addressed because the public at large could hold the boards accountable. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All US Professional Sports Teams should be run like the Green Bay Packers\n","id":"bcaa05a5-6051-49f5-b85f-0db5bd2ccf8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I mean the title says it all. I do not see much, if any, difference between actions of Russia and the good old U S of A. Invading on supposed protection of its own people U.S going into Afghanistan and several other countries with the Cassus Belli of protecting itself by pursuing Taliban Obvious economic benefit undertones, this time with natural gas U.S invasion of Kuwait The Russian speaking and ethic groups are actually expressing support The Iraqis seemingly showed support for U.S troops, atleast from what I remember seeing on Western media Obviously this is a bit of a shallow analysis and I would love for someone to point out why, and also to give some more intricacies between both situations. I do not see how the Western world can condemn the acts of Russia when the U.S has seemed to do similair actions. The news outlets have predictably scarce on some details and most contain great bias so I appreciate any in depth info that y'all can give on the situation.  EDIT just for some clarification, I do not think that Russia's and the U.S' actions are completely identical but rather they are so similar in their aims that U.S and the Western world has no moral basis for criticizing Russia on this. I think if the world wants to condemn Russia on its intervention in Ukrainian affairs the world needs to be just as quick to condemn the U.S. I do not condone either action but if this situation getting negative backlash then so should any instance with the U.S playing Global Police in the Middle East or any other part of the wrold the U.S has intervened in on the grounds of humanitarian or anti terrorist motives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Russia's action action the Ukraine of late are no different than U.S action against the Middle East. Please\n","id":"0cf265f0-bd36-495f-a208-7b3b8e3f3708"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should parents perpetuate myths like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny to their children?<|ARGUMENT|>The fear can be overwhelming for children and is comparable to the fear some religious people may feel about whether they were virtuous enough, or if God is forgiving enough for them to avoid hell.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The pressure of behaving well in order to receive a present can trigger anxiety about not behaving well enough.\n","id":"81691adb-e434-44af-898c-98fb7c821896"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all museum admissions be by donation?<|ARGUMENT|>There has yet to be a verification process for who can and cannot pay. Therefore, those who can pay the general admission may also take advantage of paying less.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People will not pay the suggested amount, even when they can afford it.\n","id":"5ef861c0-793a-4dcb-871c-10382ab5bac7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Applicants with a Black-sounding name are 50% less likely to be invited for an interview than people with white-sounding names Correll & Bernard, p. 4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Negative stereotypes mean it is comparatively difficult for Black Americans to succeed in the job market.\n","id":"659c6306-b739-4731-89ec-cf52f7e8f8a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People have recently gotten me interested in MTG, I like certain strategy aspects of it and it's fun to play. However, it's being more and more clear to me that it's really just a pay to win game. I am open to having me view changed though if I'm wrong about this I'd like to be wrong. There's really only 3 main things that decide who wins. The cards, luck, and strategy skills. Now everyone know that some cards are just plain and simple objectively better than others. You want to have good cards in your deck, and those will likely be rare or mythic rare. Look at all the top decks. These are usually very expensive. If you want to play in a serious modern tournament then you'll have to dump an insane amount of money into this. If you want to play legacy then even more screwed. Other than buying all the singles you can rip open packs to try and get some cards you want but this will probably be even more expensive. So once you have the cards you need luck and just the knowledge of how to play with them. You can fairly easily learn the strategies involved with how play with your expensive deck once you've assembled it. There is a certain amount of depth here but anyone can look up how it's done and practice until their good. So basically the only barrier to playing pro magic is money. If you're not a complete idiot and able to learn a few things all you need is to dump a ton of money into this and become good. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Magic: The Gathering is pay to win. Please\n","id":"22e67029-e4b3-45ac-9876-b30328d5aa10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>The belief that abortion is murder is inherently intolerant of the view that it is not since murder is outlawed in modern society, if one truly believes that abortion is murder they cannot allow others to commit the act just because they have differing views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many beliefs are themselves inherently intolerant and require neither fanaticism nor extremism to cause problems.\n","id":"d5844df2-e09b-4ad7-a086-4ba0f657af66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>grant politicians immunity from prosecution<|ARGUMENT|>It is impossible to overstate the power that the threat of prosecution has to stay the hand of anyone, including a politician, from transgressing the laws of the state. In fact, we need more aggressive prosecution of politicians. Not a single person has been prosecuted for approval illegal torture or wiretapping. These are illegal actions actually happening which the populace, with only the blunt instrument of voting for or against a politician on the sum total of their policies, is unable to effectively influence. There is no greater deterrent that could be used against politicians.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ability to prosecute politicians is the ultimate protection against the abuse of power.\n","id":"7e02ff77-58e0-433c-a53d-a586d386948c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Christianity and Judaism advocate violence to homosexuals in the old testament Leviticus 20:13: \"If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. they must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In most civilized countries, system of thought advocating violence on groups of people based on ethnicity, origin, sexual orientation, etc. are illegal. That includes inciting such violence, promoting hatred, advocating genocide, vilification. We see such system of thoughts in many religion.\n","id":"83e5d561-5020-406c-968d-a33cecd9259c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>In developing countries, religious nongovernmental organizations as well as other nongovernmental organizations often have existing, trusted, on-the-ground networks down to the village level that governments do not have Pluralism and Freedom: Faith-based Organizations in a Democratic Society, pg.23<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious organisations are major players in the world of non-profit organizations active in providing international relief and assistance.\n","id":"40457a6d-2074-404b-8ea6-9a78ac338799"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>Examples of such advancement opportunities are sports scholarships. Divisions I and II universities provide $2.7 billion in athletics scholarships annually to more than 150,000 student-athletes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If parents fail to enhance their babies then their children will be outperformed by those who where enhanced.\n","id":"2dc94476-748b-43cc-b8b2-d78a2b0a66be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone keeps claiming that The Witcher 3 is some marvel, once a lifetime type of game. I have tried both the first as well as the 2nd one. I absolutely hated them both. Thought they were messy, over complicated, had too much going on visually, disinteresting story at the start, clunky unorganized combat Don't get me started on magic and in general stopped playing them both 1 hour in multiple times. Both games were claimed to be very good, yet I really found them bland. Is Witcher 3 really that good . What has exactly changed from the last two? I really want to give it a chance just as I gave those 2 a chance after people telling me, only to find out I wasted my money and never got into them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Buying Witcher 3 will be a waste of my money.\n","id":"ba7638b6-f1d1-4a95-b6ce-2f8841d1c8cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>Dichorionic twins potentially have different hormonal environments because they receive maternal blood from separate placenta, and this could result in different levels of brain masculinisation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even identical twins can be born with potentially important differences, undermining the value of such studies.\n","id":"66f2bc89-ea01-458d-b318-735cd60bfad0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>abolish congressional earmarks<|ARGUMENT|>Earmarks usually represent expensive programs of little worth to the American people. As the main means of pork barrel politics, earmarks are typically vanity projects with little economic benefit. Examples include the Alaskan \u201cBridge to Nowhere\u201d a $400 million project to connect an island community of just 50 people to the mainland,1 $1 million for shuttle buses at Western Kentucky University,2 and a grant of $300 000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society of Hawaii.3 Worse, a recent Harvard Business School study found that states which received the most federal spending via earmarks from well-connected Congressmen actually suffered economically as a result, because the federal money crowded out private investment and distorted the local jobs market.4 1 Volpe, Paul, \u2018Politifact: \u2018Bridge\u2019 Going Nowhere Before Palin Killed It\u2019, 2008 2 WKU News, \u2018Funding secured for 2 more projects\u2019, 2009 3 Mendoza, Jim, \u2018McCain criticizes Voyaging Society earmark\u2019, 2010 4 Coval, Joshua et al., \u2018Do Powerful Politicians Cause Corporate Downsizing?\u2019, 2011<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Earmarks do not represent an efficient use of taxpayers' money\n","id":"373d8182-0e4a-4875-961c-671081f289a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>There would be little political will or pressure to induce governments to fund care for people who need it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some families will suffer because the government will not extend services to them anymore.\n","id":"731f4302-c0b2-48ae-898f-5b666ee63b04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not going to say I'm poor, as my mom works three jobs and makes a solid 50k a year. I work two jobs and made a very proud 9500 last year while still being a full time college student. I save whatever I can to pay off the ever looming debt, and I'm very excited to buy a car this summer, which I'm hoping to splurge and spend about 6,000 on. Cue my friend who just graduated early from college after living in the nicest on campus housing for her entire time 4000 semester 2500 semester meal plan . She just bought a brand new 2013 model which has an MSRP of about 21,000, and has posted pictures of her massive new apartment with a lake view. When we talk, I mention how I'm struggling to pay back the massive debt my room mate left behind when he ducked out, and she says, yeah, money is so tight. I've realized that my largest prejudice is against wealthy people. I don't believe they understand what it's like to sit down and know that you can't go out with your friends at all this month, or even eat the food you want. I don't think they know the stress that comes over me when a new bill arrives in the mail. I think they are genuinely disconnected from how an average american lives which admittedly is probably a lower quality of life than even me , and I've realized the anger I hold towards them because of that. Change my view? EDIT Ok, anger aside, I still can't fight that people who are wealthy accustomed to living wealthy I realized I direct this viewpoint towards those who have never known poverty tough times cannot comprehend the challenges of life as someone making just enough to get by.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that moderately wealthy people have little to no understanding of what it's like to live as an average american does.\n","id":"270c20fe-f39f-4f2b-bf38-691c65e098e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>Darkfall is a virtual world that allows players a large amount of freedom in deciding what they want to do. The environment is inhabited by various different monsters, many of which can kill a player easily. The game is made even more dangerous by the fact that you can kill and be killed by anyone at any time. The purpose of this game is defeated if you impose upon it the laws of physical reality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In particular, not allowing virtual realities to have crime is particularly harmful to 'open world' style environments where users explore a large environment and gameplay is open-ended.\n","id":"1b528f63-d7c0-4b07-b28d-feef890827d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will the future be better than the present?<|ARGUMENT|>Medical advances in the 20th century saved millions of lives and new techniques for treating and preventing disease are being discovered each year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are far fewer people in poverty or suffering from preventable diseases than there were even 50 years ago.\n","id":"92697849-f0f6-4ffd-9fdb-a429104f0218"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Progressive tax vs. flat tax, Debate on Progressive Tax versus Flat Tax<|ARGUMENT|>Progressive taxes concentrate more of a state's tax revenue around a certain social group. This concentration of taxation amongst a narrow group of taxpayers introduces a higher risk of a sudden drop in tax take, for example if a recession means lots of executive jobs are cut in a short time period.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Progressive tax systems add risk by over-concentrating tax revenues.\n","id":"2f62cc12-58ae-41d5-b780-0fdec1e5c17b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've started using Lyft and Uber to get round some unfamiliar cities, and I've been wondering about the whole tipping thing with these rideshare drivers. It is my understanding that they're contractors and not employees. Lyft and maybe Uber can't recall, I use Lyft more has an option to tip your driver after a ride. Now I want to make it clear that I do actually tip, but it doesn't sit well with me why should contract drivers be tipped for competent service? I can understand why wait staff gets tipped their legal wage can be as low as 3. I still think it's bullshit that customers are expected to supplement a restaurant employee's subpar pay as opposed to the owner paying a living wage, but whatever. My not tipping some poor single mother isn't going to suddenly change a social custom. I don't see the rationale for tipping rideshare drivers, though. As contractors, they are self employed and can thus walk away from Uber of Lyft if they don't feel that the rate is good enough. If I made you wait, or had a hard to find address, or you did something that went above and beyond, then yeah, makes sense to tip you. But if you picked me up and got me to my destination safely, and I gave you no problems, then what just happened was that you provided the exact service that I paid for. Why does that deserve a cookie? I'm not expected to provide tips to AirBnB hosts or the kid taking my order at McDonalds, and they both provide a service. I'm not expected to tip a bus driver or train conductor or airline pilot, or doctor and these folks literally have my life in their hands. I'm not expected to tip the janitor if I work in an office, and they provide an extremely valuable service. So why am I expected to tip a rideshare driver? I suppose this could segue into a larger argument over why anyone should be expected to pay extra money for another party doing the bare minimum that they signed up for, but for this cmv I'll just focus on rideshare drivers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rideshare Drivers Should Not Expect Tips\n","id":"3200c1d7-d822-445d-b7f7-a53e07e49f80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>P.L.O. chief Mahmoud Abbas has pledged, repeatedly, over decades that he will never, ever recognize Israel as the Jewish state, meaning he will never recognize Israel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has repeatedly rejected peace plans.\n","id":"7ed0d93d-4574-42cf-9642-9cdb59a8ca1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Being that the Amendment is in the Constitution of the United States one could also infer that regulation would be permissible at the Federal level, requiring each State to comply with a common, basic procedure for regulation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The responsibility should be on the central government to foster responsible gun owners.\n","id":"e520b3c3-194b-45f7-a173-0db10da97880"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This may seem somewhat silly, and it is. But I am a big stand up comedy fan, so if you care about that at all, or larger sexism problems in society, stick around. If you haven't heard anything about this, good, don't spend any more time on the internet. Amy Schumer just released her new special on Netflix. There were some really good bits and some average ones many of the other Netflix specials have been like that. The problem is the reaction. I do not understand the reaction I've seen on reddit. Comment chains in subreddits and multiple posts I've seen on r all have a hatred for Amy Schumer that goes beyond the pale. My view is that the responses to Amy Schumer's special are just expressions of hatred for women in comedy and the reasons for it most commonly given don't hold up on examination. Everyone has their own opinion, but I believe the real reasons for the negative opinion are not as tame or noble as they pretend. So here is why why I think this way. These are the oft cited reasons for the hatred, almost rehearsed throughout the many threads. Rape Jokes. The seemingly most concerned reason I've seen for the hatred is an old joke of hers that involves her sexually assaulting a dude, but I believe that comedians should be and usually are allowed to joke about things without it being taken at face value. Reddit is usually the first to afford this right. Joke Thief. I've seen many comments echoing the idea that she steals jokes, so the hatred is just. This ignores reality. If you comb through enough comedy specials, or just watch them like I do, you'll notice common premises and even punchlines. The proof videos are inconclusive. Dumb Subject Matter. Without seeing the irony, the final common argument quotes South Park's joke that she just talks about her vagina. She doesn't, but so what if she did? That's a great subject matter for comedy. Amy Schumer is talking from a female perspective, but the humor is still there, especially because society is still uptight about women's bodies on both sides of the political spectrum. Amy's one of the best at crossing the line on both sides. And that final reason is where I come to settle into my belief that it's essentially sexism or hatred of one woman for reasons that are rooted in misogyny. It may even be an unconscious expression of sexism, a lot of the comments against her recite female comics they like, but then post sexist slurs. So it does not dissuade me from my belief. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit needs to chill on Amy Schumer. I think she was right. The hatred for her new special is rooted only in sexism.\n","id":"bb24f17f-58b4-40da-ac6e-5fc453e1492b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>In many countries you cannot fire an employee without giving a reason, and those reasons have to be well documented. This makes it extremely hard to fire some employees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Actually it is government that is prohibiting certain types of cooperation, jobs and trades.\n","id":"91c3691b-8b73-450d-8d93-0d529652667a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alright so this is a genuine , i really do think i could be wrong on this one but I, nor the few people I've spoken to about this , have been able to change my mind. So let me lay it out for you So recently a film and a musical have come under some scrutiny for their hiring choices. The film Gods of Egypt upset a lot of people but i think they are either being disingenuous or are ignorant. The physical attributions of Egyptians at various stages in ancient history is an on going debate. I don't know, but i expect ancient Egyptians didn't look like Gerard Butler, but i'd also wager they didn't look much like contemporary African Americans either. Whats more is apparently the film is set in a parallel universe, and most of the characters are Gods. So in short, a predominantly white cast play mythological creatures in a parallel universe based on those worshiped by an ancient and ethnically ambiguous people. I see little wrong with this. What i do see a lot wrong with is this. From where i'm sitting, it just looks too much like this. Now here we have something quite different, we know more or less exactly what the actual characters look like. Before anyone tries to educate me, i get that it is not going for historical accuracy, I know that the director's vision is, in his own words the story of America then, told by America now I think that's great and i have absolutely no problem with a racially diverse cast playing historical white men. My point of contention is with the deliberate exclusion of the white race, Is this America now? It's needlessly provocative and racist I think is even illegal. Oh and also as a history buff, with a special place in my heart for the 18th century, i am not consoled by the fact that they permit King George III to be white, as he is typically portrayed unfairly as a tyrannical villain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Musical Hamilton is more racially insensitive and needlessly offensive than any \"whitewashed\" cast in a film about ancient Egypt.\n","id":"d9325205-7adc-4cf3-956a-341c94a22cb1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The reported number of lobbyists has been going down fairly consistently for about a decade, but nearly half of these lobbyists keep working for the same company. Lobbyist funding that goes to social media and grassroots campaigns does not have to be reported, so it can be assumed that many of these lobbyists just switch their job title to something like social media manager, and keep working for the same company as an under the radar lobbyist. People online do not need to make it clear that they are paid to push an opinion, so others are more likely to believe them, even if it is a problematic opinion that they are only pushing for a paycheck. x200B Social media lobbying is a manipulative and corrupt spin on the already manipulative and corrupt lobbyist industry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social media lobbying is problematic\n","id":"1116faed-d3d7-4e24-b560-3e08436631f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Gorillas do not simply eat fruits\/plants and spread their seeds. The digested food, as it passes through their systems, helps seeds to germinate<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The digested food, as it passes through their systems, helps seeds to germinate\n","id":"fd74360e-4346-402e-bd76-3bdd2883ee06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the West give development aid?<|ARGUMENT|>A quarter of sub-Saharan countries are poorer now than in the 1960s despite large amounts of aid being provided to the region.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Development aid has had little to no effect in many of countries which have been allocated a significant amount of it.\n","id":"29cd379b-51ab-4e7c-a137-e972aed1bc8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It\u2019s been proven that the majority only trusts what they themselves can get involved with. Corporations need a reliable way to secure payments and assets from the sticky fingers of black hat hackers quickly and globally. Cryptocurrency is a form of currency which can help keep businesses\u2019 assets and revenue secure while running ethically and providing the most secure way to protect their business. Cryptocurrency operates independently of a central bank because of its encryption techniques used to regulate the value and production. Due to the media, most people think cryptocurrency is only used for criminal activity, but this is simply not true. Although transactions are anonymous, every transaction is completely transparent which makes it possible to track every payment if one is patient enough. Fiat currency doesn\u2019t have this level of transparency or security. It is inherently a system of validation by institutions that most people have grown to distrust.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cryptocurrency is a better alternative to fiat currency for businesses and the people who use their goods and services\n","id":"57f825cd-c80a-42e3-b5a9-4ce49064c68a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been turned off by the thought of Tom no longer in the band partly due to the fact that he and Mark shared vocals and also due to the chemistry they had during their live shows. If Tom was just a guitarist who didn't say much on stage, whatever. But they had such a chemistry where anyone else in the band does not feel right. Mark and Tom were the Paul and Gene, Steven and Joe, Mick and Keith, etc. I simply cannot accept this new lineup, especially if Tom left due to just being a conspiracy theorist. Is Matt holding his own on live shows? Is blink distancing themselves from their dick and fart humor from years past? It just tarnishes a legacy for me unfortunately. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"blink-182 should not go forward if it's not Mark, Tom and Travis\n","id":"340326d2-61c7-45c7-96da-7a87267047f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>Ezekiel: The Book of Mormon is the \"stick of Joseph\" discussed in Ezekiel 37:15-28 37:15-28<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prophets Say So: The Book of Mormon fulfills biblical prophecies.\n","id":"5043ca42-38a6-45c5-bc5e-aee588e17a9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Raised from a Christian family, I used to believe that there was an almighty creator who had an ultimate plan for every being he ever created. However, I am now aware of multiple flaws in these beliefs. First, if God is such a kind and forgiving person, why are there billions of impoverished from birth adults who live every day in constant starvation and agony? I mean, some may argue that everybody can find happiness in some way or another, and in that sense, every life has a meaning, but I am sure that there are countless beings, perhaps enslaved or addicted to drugs, who have found and will never find any satisfaction or content in their miserable lives. I find myself extremely fortunate to be raised in a wealthy, loving family, and I go to a respectable school with many friends. I am content with my life, and typically i would be thankful to my God for blessing me, but what about everybody else in the world? Why does this apparently all caring God seem to neglect a huge fraction of this world? And the fact that I am beginning to fear punishment by my God for my doubt of his existence only further propagates my point. Isn't forgiveness one of biggest motifs in the Christian faith? And if so, why should God punish those who doubt him, as it states in the Bible? There is a reason that there are doubtful Christians and Atheists, and that reason is simply because apparently God hasn't shown himself to those people. I have yet to have an answered prayer, or a witness a sign of His existence. Isn't that God's fault for not being there for me as he promised he would? So why should I be punished for doubting Him, when it was Him who neglected me in the first place? In my opinion, I have every right to doubt him, for it is his fault for not making his existence prevalent in my life. I recently found out about a message carved in a former Jewish concentration camp by a suffering inmate. It said If there really is a god, he will have to beg my forgiveness. The point shown here is hugely significant. Why would this all loving creator put such agony on someone, simply for being Jewish? Some may say that maybe God is punishing him for a past deed, but surely no one has done something that awful to deserve such a punishment. And besides, shouldn't God forgive him, as the Bible preaches to Christians? These are only a few of the points that have caused me to doubt my Christian faith, and my overall belief that there is a god in the first place. Reddit, either help me understand why my new beliefs are wrong, or bolster my viewpoint so I can continue my quest away from Christianity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a former? Christian, I am beginning to believe that there is no \"God\".\n","id":"9ee92fea-74ec-4146-865b-e92a489e97b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>European party systems were shaped by political cleavages parties aligning through historical conflicts of class, state type, religion or nationalism. Even though their influence has decreased, they still impact political landscapes. Therefore, the amount of moderation or conflict in a political system will vary according to the cleavages of that society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Deep ideological divisions and economic disparity can lead to polarised countries in which politicians may tend to favour extremes, regardless of the voting system.\n","id":"18df2942-56a1-4182-98f6-4318a5a10d07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my view the senate is a fairly anti democratic institution, and should be wholly replaced by some sort of proportional representation system in my view party list proportional would be the best since you still get to vote for specific members of congress. Now here's why the senate is anti democratic 1 It gives smaller states much more voting power in the more important of the two houses of congress. In this regard, it's similar to why the electoral college should be abolished. A vote from Wyoming is massively inflated compared to one in Texas or Florida. 2 Defendants of the system will argue it guarantees smaller states against the bigger ones, but this isn't really an argument that needs to be made in the 21st century. There are very few issues that we vote on in national elections that are small states vs. big states. 3 There's very little to do with geography in politics either. The biggest issues in the 19th and 20th centuries having to do with this were racist laws about slavery and post slavery. At this point virtually all American states in national elections focus on the exact same issues. The only major difference I can see is coal mining in the Appalachians, but as we outgrow an economy fixated on geographic resources, the need for senate even in this view greatly diminishes. At this point we should just expand the number of members in the House of Representatives, and move towards a proportional voting system because 1 It would be impossible to gerrymander. 2 It would remove the third party spoiler effect in voting. 3 It's the most guaranteed voting system to make sure that all voices are properly heard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Senate should be abolished, and the House should move to some sort of Proportional Representation\n","id":"945ee61f-334b-43f4-bea3-d320cc544ba3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>Assuming that the legalisation of drugs is not adopted everywhere, the places that do legalise it benefit from drug tourism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prohibition of drugs is immensely costly; legalisation would benefit the economy.\n","id":"85b67d6c-a8c2-4c50-8dee-60af49b52dd6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off just wanna say slavery was a bad thing, no doubt about it. However why should we pay todays black community for the sins that our ancestors commited? All the people who went through slavery are dead, and I know the segregation era was bad but if anything black people in America are so significantly better off than people in Africa. Africa is crazy right now There is famine, aids epidemic, tribal feuds, war torn dictators, insane inflation and power vacuums in government. I know slavery was a terrible terrible thing but black people in America are much better off for having their ancestors endure the horrors of slavery. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that black people asking for reparations for their ancestors being enslaved is ridiculous.\n","id":"8829a1e0-e79d-4095-ba79-19cd92258775"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should China cease attempts to infringe on the 'one country, two systems' policy in Hong Kong?<|ARGUMENT|>Russia intervened in both Georgia and Ukraine, and while it did face sanctions, Moscow retained a strong role in shaping the balance of power in the Middle East, and in standing up to shifts in US strategic posture. Therefore, China may feel that any repercussions would be as manageable as they have been for Russia<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if cracking down on protests does some harm to China's international reputation and image, this may be a manageable international repercussion for China and hence an action Beijing is willing to take anyway.\n","id":"fb5871d8-1928-49e6-9cb5-0f72488776c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe if someone wants to be straight, and they don't want to be gay, it's ruining their life etc then they should be able to change it. Probably no one straight is going to want to be gay, but they would be able to change their sexuality too. Maybe if a girl got raped by a man and she wanted to live with a woman instead. I would support genuine medical research to do this one day, and I think it's wrong to tell people to just accept it. I think research is being blocked by people who are just pushing their own agenda. Mainly, we should each have the right to change anything about ourselves that we don't like, be it plastic surgery on your nose, dieting or changing sexuality. Edit some great replies, really making me think I have a question for you, I put it in a reply but open to anyone, Situation 1 I fall emotionally in love with my best friend, who is a gay man. I don't find he is sexually attractive but I'd happily spend my life with him. Would you say, if it was medically possible, that I couldn't change my sexuality to match my emotional attraction to him? Do I have to leave this here gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe we should be researching ways to change sexuality, aka cure homosexuality\n","id":"2fc86cb6-b358-4ff1-8fd1-a28b821456f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Typically, human action and thought progression can be successfully traced back to various internal and external sources of influence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human actions are determined by uncontrollable internal and metaphysical processes.\n","id":"31fdc85d-81fe-4d08-b703-1fbbc154f644"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not referring to some sort of god based determination. It seems to me that the view of causal determinism is pretty much true. Any action that we take results from prior causes, which, in turn, resulted from prior causes. Any thoughts that one has are a result of chemical reactions in the brain that exist because of a prior state. There's also the studies that have surfaced in light of Libet et al's tests a while back. From what I've read, the brain functionally decides what the body is going to do before a persons thoughts catch up with their actions. Change my view. P.S. Let's not make this a God exists discussion, we'll save that for another .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that everything is predetermined and humans have no free will.\n","id":"29d97a88-3abc-44df-a104-a0aacf879611"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel there is less of a childhood phase in life for today's kids growing up. I've listed my reasons below. Year round school schedules. Before, summer used to be about 2 1 2 to 3 months for a kid. Starting in mid June and ending right before Labor Day weekend. Now the school year begins earlier and earlier. My younger cousins start school the first week of August. Maybe spring break might be a few days longer, but there is less time for summer picnics, playing in the sun, etc. Less time to just be a kid and have fun. There is more pressure to stand out and extracurricular activities have become more competitive. There is a keeping up with the Joneses mentality. You see it with overcoaching and parents yelling in youth soccer and baseball for 7 8 year olds. Kids can't play outside with friends unsupervised anymore. No more exploring on your bikes and coming home at sunset on the weekends. Parents pick up their kids from school instead of letting them walk home. Everything is micromanaged at an earlier age for kids. Less of a sense of identity for kids in terms of enjoyment. Remember when there were 2 3 cartoons that every kid watched growing up? Or a couple of favorite snacks that everyone brought in their lunch bag in the school cafeteria? For me in the late 90's and early 2000's, cartoons like Hey Arnold, Recess, Pokemon. Or snacks like Lunchables, Fruit Gushers candy, etc. I don't feel like there is that common bond among kids now. Technology has made kids more isolated. They spend more time indoors. Less time playing tag at the park or using their imagination to make up new games. Technology has also given us more information, which means more homework and studying for kids. Recess has become shorter in elementary schools. Gym class is now optional in some schools. Less physical activity and more sedentary, independent work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kids today have less of a childhood than in previous generations.\n","id":"dd80e6d7-d429-4308-882c-4bce09bb00bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>Many returning fighters either have established networks at home already, or can create new ones by leveraging the connections and training they made while fighting abroad.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing foreign fighters to return home could be a potential threat to national security.\n","id":"db5498f7-7c2c-42e2-8248-d316730c56a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that men are superior to women in terms of speeches. I do not believe that woman can deliver with the same gravitas,passion and compassion as men. I do sincerely believe that men are just better at it. Now a part of me says it is flawed, because i do believe that women and men are equal but i also sincerely believe that they are different. Now my examples are historical, but in my opinion all memorable speeches within the history of mankind, men are the only ones that make them memorable. Here are some examples of memorable speeches that i came up with Martin Luther King Jr. I have a dream Franklin D. Roosevelt Day of infamy Winston Churchill Blood, Sweat and tears Hitler Adressing the german people after taking power John F Kennedy Space race speech and the moon John F Kennedy Ich ich bin ein berliner Henry V St Crispin speech Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Speech Patrick Henry Give me Liberty or give me death Gandhi British Exit from India and more, i simply believe that men are much superior in speeches and delivering them. I simply do not think that any woman can make a speech as good as the men in the list. But i came here with an open mind, and i have been wronged before in my life, so i want to see what you people are saying, and i hope i can hear some interesting conversation, and if you manage to change my mind, well then good for you, if not, well then atleast i could say that i enjoyed the conversation . Edit Heres an extra link from Time magazine, on their best speeches of all time One of them are woman, which i dont believe fits the spot, compared to the gravity of other speeches.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men are better at speeches then women\n","id":"a40ee7a5-e940-4ed4-95d0-99879f940c7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Gospels are Not Historically Reliable<|ARGUMENT|>Mark 6:45-48 \"Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. After saying farewell to them, he went up on the mountain to pray. When evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land. When he saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind, he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea. He intended to pass them by.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Several stories in the gospels narrate things Jesus did and things that happened to him while no disciples or other eyewitnesses were present.\n","id":"834802f6-7965-4412-a78f-5b2b5251241a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>\"Seawater pH around the UK is highly variable, both spatially in three dimensions and temporally y2y, seasonally and on shorter time-scales; Surface seawater pH in sub-tropical regions of the open North Atlantic is much less variable decreasing at a rate primarily determined by the rate of rising CO2 in atmosphere. in the open North Atlantic, unexpected changes have occurred, with y2y pH decreases being more rapid than anticipated in some regions:\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Literature indicates Acidification of the Ocean is well within bounds of normality - +\/- 0.2pH units for parts of the Earth studied - both on small and large geological timescales\n","id":"6a9b315e-4405-4ee1-8e05-c23340f0574d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On base percentage OBP is a measure of how often a batter reaches base. This is calculated by the sum of the batter's hits, walks, and HBPs divided by their total number of plate appearances. It does not give credit to the batter for reaching base due to an error or a fielder's choice play. Batting average, on the other hand, is simply the number of hits divided by the number of at bats not the same as plate appearances . Walks, HBPs, sacrifice flies, and interference plays negate an at bat. Drawing walks is a skill just as much as getting a hit is. I will concede that getting hit by a pitch isn't necessarily a skill, but the calculation for OBP is better than that for BA. OBP is more inclusive and being on base is a better predictor of whether or not a batter will score a run than drawing a hit. I believe On base plus Slugging OPS is a better indicator of offensive ability than either OBP or BA, but that's for a different . So Reddit, what am I missing? Is batting average a better indicator of offensive ability than on base percentage? Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On-Base Percentage is a better indicator of offensive ability than Batting Average\n","id":"813ae0c6-196f-452b-8e35-8d0c887f190d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Every country should be ethno-nationalist<|ARGUMENT|>Different cultures have different ways of thinking, a key necessity in solving complex problems. Homogeneity of culture leads to a homogeneity of thought, which leads to stagnation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Countries that accept other ethnicities flourish, such as the USA, China or Prussia.\n","id":"0b962a04-99cc-43a8-87d4-c7c2c04c68e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's a proprietary API. Ok so what, there are thousands of commonly used commercial programming kits, especially in the game industry. It's like complaining that DirectX works best on native Windows than through an OpenGL wrapper on Linux. If GameWorks is a better piece of software than whatever APIs AMD can provide, then it deserves adoption. NVIDIA provides much more documentation and developer support than AMD. I don't think AMD even provides the kind of all in one kit that NVIDIA is putting out there. AMD has always lagged behind with their APIs look at the sorry state of OpenCL compared to CUDA , and they poor deserve their market share among programmers. NVIDIA has developed a lot of technology to provide the kind of enhancements that GameWorks provides. It's basically a compilation of all the big name technologies that NVIDIA has developed since their 90s. They are clearly not being dishonest or manipulative, since competitors had years to respond. NVIDIA makes deals with developers. So what? AMD does the same too. Yes, AMD tech interfaces better with open technologies, but they often still cause a lot of issues with NVIDIA cards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the hostility towards NVIDIA GameWorks is baseless\n","id":"f1fe6e24-5802-423a-a978-b5c880d96ec5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love the idea of dancing. Hip hop, jazz, contemporary, lyrical, ballroom, tap, belly dance, pole, salsa I can watch people dance these styles for hours and be captivated. But the moment the classical music begins and out comes a military style dancer in a tutu. Every single move is just so stiff? precise? boring. Out of all dance styles I've seen, ballet is only one step away from being the most boring style in my opinion, of course on the planet right behind the spin in circles with some little head piece meditation dance. I love dance Not a dancer, yet. Lessons start next year and I'd love to learn to appreciate ballet. But it's so boring Help.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ballet is one of the most boring dance styles ever.\n","id":"5f5a9935-5db4-4478-87b2-e9b6994922f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Being a secretary is still seen as a woman's role. In the US, 96% of secretaries in 2010 were women, and they were paid up to $5,000 fewer than their male counterparts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women are overrepresented in fields where no differences in physical capabilities apply. This is because these professions are traditionally seen as feminine.\n","id":"7216d23a-9f01-499a-b05a-f35907bbe457"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my view, comments like this are irrelevant. We can do what we can to not be wasteful, to support companies that are environmentally responsible, use less plastic and more. But solid chunks of change would definitely come from policy makers, businesses and world governments. Granted if some of us do spend a significant amount of time to come up with alternatives to major current policies, those would often not work because of the lack of experience in any department or more often just knocked down because you don't know enough Are there any big, solid ways that young people can indeed turn the tide of climate change?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Climate Change is not really up for being tackled by teenagers or young adults\n","id":"3295cf26-b43d-42b2-b99a-1a2e13d0c839"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While not as brutal towards the openly anti religious as other Islamic countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia, blaspheming against Islam still carries a heavy sentence for Palestinians. Waleed Al Husseini is one example an atheist blogger held by Palestinian authorities for ten months arrested in the West Bank, mind you, not in Gaza , was repeatedly detained after a release, in one case being subjected to torture This degree of censorship and totalitarianism that the Palestinian Authority practices on citizens harmlessly expressing their beliefs online has totally turned me off from supporting the Palestinian liberation movement. While I do believe that Israel has not always been in the right themselves the illegal civilian settlements in lands occupied by the Israeli army being one such instance , I'm rather perplexed to see atheists standing firmly on Palestine's side. It should be noted that I am atheist myself an ex Catholic and that I freely admit to being anti religious opposed to organized religion, though I will always condone its free expression even if I don't support the spoken words themselves . So I ask of Reddit, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Palestine should not be allowed to pursue independence on the basis that it would lead to the further persecution of ex-Muslims and atheists in the Islamic world\n","id":"ea869877-2d94-4e2b-8932-80f8772ff63d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should minors be allowed to go through irreversible gender reassignment procedures?<|ARGUMENT|>The physical implications of puberty suppression are still mainly unknown and therefore some doctors have ethical concerns about using this form of treatment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is limited research into how puberty suppression can affect children who eventually go on to identify as their biological gender.\n","id":"5562817d-f48f-4851-be8b-2e24748ecf5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that there is nothing iconic at all about the current generation of games. The same franchises dominate on the PS4 and Xbox One, that did on the PS3 and Xbox 360. The Wii U is now a Nintendo box. The Vita is horrid and the 3ds is good, but if you don't have a particular allegiance to Nintendo, you wont play it. Plus the 3d is a huge gimmick. Other generations had games that were unique. Nintendo is only making copies of old games. I'm starting to think generation 9 will be 7.5.2. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft will be the only companies developing consoles and they will have the same games. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The 8th generation of gaming should be renamed 7.5\n","id":"59b00c99-ffde-44e8-aa05-2d38ba0b2468"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The right to protection is one of the ideas the United States was founded on. The Founding Fathers meant for the Constitution to convey the idea of a right to protection. A specific amendment was not included initially because framers did not feel it was necessary to spell it out subsequent events, like debates over slavery and civil rights, would change minds Heyman, p. 19-20<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the right to protection and states that no person can be deprived of life without due process Heyman, p. 3 If one considers a fetus a person, Roe v. Wade is thus a failure of the government to uphold its own laws.\n","id":"6e5dff62-e848-42d6-9563-819724f90b95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>More and more Republicans are coming out against Trump, with Senators rebuking the President for his hard-right brand of politics. The Republicans are far from a united front.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Republicans are far too divided to be able to push through legislation by themselves.\n","id":"0aad4c82-a5bf-4429-acd1-c9262f1065d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I agree that transmen and transwomen should be able to do what they'd like with their bodies. If you've been born a man and want to transition to a woman so that your body reflects your felt gender, that's cool with me. This post is more about my difficult accepting a certain type of transwoman those who clearly used to be men. It bothers me that I'm very open minded when it comes to gender, but I can't seem to get past this hump and I'm looking for some perspectives from the other side. I'll provide an example. In my office, there is a transwoman that clearly used to be a man she's 6'4 , heavy, has a masculine face, large feet, hands. Honestly, she looks like a former football lineman. And for some reason that's very difficult for me to accept. It also bothers me that she constantly makes a public show of her femininity, in such an exaggerated way that no ciswoman actually does for instance, constantly reapplying makeup in the office kitchen, while walking around the office seriously everywhere . So part of my prejudice in this case may stem from this ridiculous exaggerated display of femininity. I'm thinking of Judith Butler's claim that seeing a transvestite in a play and seeing a transvestite at the bus stop are two vastly different experiences. But if a 5'6 man transitioned to a woman, I'd be more okay with it, because it would be less jarring and appear more natural. Honestly I want to be able to accept people. But it's very difficult for me in cases like these. Help me change my attitude?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think transgender persons should be able to do what they like with their body; but I have trouble accepting large i.e., clearly formerly masculine transwomen.\n","id":"3f58fd80-19cb-4e94-939b-ef87a8b4e29d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Steroid Use in Sports Be Allowed?<|ARGUMENT|>Since steroids are obtained illegally, it is often difficult to confirm that the drugs are pure or safe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalising steroids will allow for the regulation of steroids to ensure their safety.\n","id":"0cf98576-7501-4c52-8944-0e770de922ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, to get this out of the way, Ted is my guitar hero, I grew up listening to him, just like you grew up watching the Cosby show. Nothing is going to change their talent. Second, don't be a SJW and held someone to a higher standard, than what you have done exactly the same way. Now let's see the biggest charges against Ted's past He avoided the Vietnam draft by not bathing for a week and such. Good for him. I give credit to anyone who was able to do so, even to that asshole Dick Cheney. Anybody who doesn't want to go 1000s of miles away from his country and kill people who didn't attack him is fine in my book. Now you say, but he is a chicken hawk and he is advocating going to war for others. Sure, but I say a A person can change his mind over the course of decades. b Maybe some wars are good and others are bad in a person's view. The point is, not all wars are the same. He adopted a 17 years old girl so just he could go with him touring. a Well, 17 is marrying age in almost all States with parental consent, and he got that. b She knew what she was getting into, her parents did so. She wasn't forced. c Most rock stars fucked 16 17 years olds, but Ted at least adopted her. Hey she could have inherited money had he died. d Let's say you are a 17 year old boy and young Joan Jett wants to take you on a tour and fuck her brain out. Would you say no? Here she is at her hotest So stop judging Ted by these 2 actions in his youth, you would have done the same thing. Is he an asshole now? Of course he is, but who isn't on the Republican Right??? Now I don't even mention that he doesn't drink or do drugs rare for a rock star , because that is irrelevant to his assholeness, so again, stop mentioning irrelevant things from someone past, when you want to judge him by his current actions Edit According to Wiki, they wanted to get married but the law didn't let them, so became her legal guardian, didn't adopt her. So had they married, would you feel better?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ted Nugent's past is nothing to hold him accountable for, so don't bring it up for his current stupidity\n","id":"79577fbd-ad44-44ce-b501-e8def64e09d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Many Churches depend on member donations to do their work, and taxing them would be indirectly taxing those charitable donations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The loss of existing tax exemptions will place a substantial financial burden on religious organisations.\n","id":"d818012d-a26c-4cad-85e1-2e9dc0386210"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Attrocities carried out in the name of the religion are the issue at hand. Taking away control from the those people would be a solution. For example, not buying oil from Saudi Arabia so it has funds to finance terrorism<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fundamentalists, extreme or even violent actors and values within religion are the problem, not religion. Regulations could be in place to ban those.\n","id":"03079a71-54e8-4a98-be55-587418f0d339"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the handling of economical crisis in Europe is intentionally mismanaged, eg. the solutions proposed for Greece are not functional and there is hardly outlook for any actual end of it. Austerity programmes anywhere else are only slightly better, countries seem to be starting to show growth despite them. I believe that it is similar to the terrorist scare in the US, where the government used it to get implicit consent from the population to strip its rights in exchange for the promise of protection. This time around, the scare is economical one and the ultimate goal is privatisation of state owned businesses and dismantling of the social state. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the handling of economical crisis in Europe is intentionally mismanaged and the ultimate goal is privatisation and dismantling of the social state,\n","id":"25f2c11e-9c75-4cd1-bbdf-88a726778609"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are programs like Alcoholics Anonymous the best way to battle addiction<|ARGUMENT|>AA has expanded the personal definition of a higher power to be \"anything the person may choose\". This power could be, for example, nature, love or the AA group as a whole.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AA has taken steps to address the concern surrounding faith-based references.\n","id":"97440f1d-1584-476c-b800-fd1356e4b3bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Some cultures are better than other cultures. That being said, I truly believe Western values are much superior than that of the East. The Greeks started democracy, and in the modern day era, the Americans and French spread those democratic ideals all over the world. Moreover, unlike in the certain other parts of the world, we guarantee our women rights. When a woman is raped, she receives justice, not the death penalty. We allow our women to demonstrate, stand up for themselves and do whatever they wish to do. Our gay citizens have the right to marry and adopt, something that no Eastern country except South Africa tho South Africa is still a part of the West is privileged to have. Gay people are not killed and imprisoned here, unlike the seventy countries where they are. People are allowed to follow whatever religion they want. People are allowed to talk crap about the ones in power without facing repercussions. It is the West that is leading the world from industrialization to fighting against climate change. Sure, we may have had our problems, from slavery to colonization, but we have moved on from all those things. We have understood our mistakes, and are taking steps to ensure a much brighter future where all our citizens are equal and free.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":": Western cultures and values are superior\n","id":"9cb77588-03a9-491c-ae06-51fdf7d2edac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A journalist who trained as a bullfighter for two years came to understand 'the fighting bulls' lot of five years on free-release followed by 25 minutes in the arena is equal if not better than the meat cow's 18 months in prison followed by a \"humane\" death'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Toro Bravo\" bulls are not given hormones or chemicals, and regularly have a large area in which to graze and roam around. Larene Read, p. 23\n","id":"3c94d269-61ff-4976-9557-0c4c9c14bab0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First let me clarify what I consider a conventional wedding to be from the wikipedia page A wedding is the ceremony where people are united in marriage. Most wedding ceremonies involve an exchange of wedding vows by the couple, presentation of a gift offering, ring s , symbolic item, flowers, money , and a public proclamation of marriage by an authority figure or leader. Special wedding garments are often worn, and the ceremony is sometimes followed by a wedding reception. I must stress that my opinion has nothing to do with cultural or religious differences Now, to my point.For context, I am a twentysomething woman from the US who is not married but in a committed relationship. There are three main reasons why I think having a wedding in the traditional sense is detrimental to a new marriage Today's society places a greater emphasis on the importance of a great wedding than a great marriage . This is compounded by the abundance of television shows, movies, magazines, and websites that serve the multi million dollar wedding industry. Couples who plan on having a wedding are constantly inundated with ideas to make their wedding better, and social media creates pressure for them to construct the most appealing event. Example I saw on facebook that Jane Doe had a chocolate fountain at her wedding, so I should have a chocolate POOL at mine. There is very little appeal and popularity towards putting this much care and attention into the relationship after the wedding. Conventional weddings in the United States cost an average of 18,000, placing significant financial strain on a new married couple. I think this point speaks for itself. If the parents of the couple offer to pay for the event, than this is not potentially a negative factor. However, whoever pays gets a say in how the wedding goes, and this can cause more stress. If the couple is paying for it themselves which is becoming more prevalent this type of financial strain can lead to many unnecessary arguments, and bring a lot of negative energy into the relationship that may have been avoided with a less traditional approach i.e. elopement . Conventional weddings redirect the focus of event away from the couple getting married, and make it more so about the family and friends of the couple. Couples planning a wedding are tasked with impossible pleasing everybody. Many couples may try to deny it, but the ultimate goal of a conventional wedding ceremony and reception is to provide an enjoyable atmosphere for all who attend, when ultimately it should be all about them. For example, a friend of mine who is getting married sent out a google survey asking all of her guests which date, venue, and dining style would be preferred. She is trying to cater everyone's needs other than her own. Another source of conflict can be in wedding parties, and try to please future in laws. Any animosity that is built up from not pleasing a future in law can carry over into the marriage, and that sort of pressure can be damaging. While alternative options for marriage can be just as upsetting for families, the couple is asserting themselves as the sole focus of event and thus taking back control. Overall, I am a believer in true love and marriage. I think marriage is beautiful and should be celebrated. However, I believe that today's standard for a conventional wedding is damaging to marriage and it should not be this way. Edit I really appreciate a lot of the feedback so far, it's been very respectful and has gotten me to think more about it. This link illustrates a lot of what goes into planning a wedding and what I consider to be what can strain the relationship . I guess another question I have is, WHY should this sort of ostentatious display remain as the conventional way of getting married?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the conventional wedding of today's standards is the most harmful way to start a marriage.\n","id":"4d2abd67-b205-462d-850e-5447c5b1f78d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that African American is an invention of an overly PC culture that doesn't actually address what it intends to address. Clearly this post deals most with the US, as I don't even know what other predominantly white countries use as an identifier. The vast majority of the time anybody uses the term African American , it is intended to speak to the person's appearance, not their centuries old heritage. When discussing issues like racism, your appearance is what matters and your appearance isn't African American , it's a darker complexion. If you were at an African cultural festival or something, then the term might be appropriate, but otherwise it's not. Black is by far a more appropriate classification for conversations about race. Were you harassed by police because of your skin tone, or because your great great great great great great grandparent was from Africa? There are obviously other physical characteristics hair, facial construction, etc that generally go along with the complexion, but the one that is most readily identifiable is skin tone. People also already associate Black with those attributes. Further, many Black people don't identify as African American. Many of them immigrated directly from non African countries or had parents who did the same. A Black person from England isn't classified as an African European American, despite that being more accurate. Additionally, many White people DO meet the requirements of being African American, having been born there or had some family stop over there, but obviously in a discussion about race, their experiences were not the same as a black person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term \"African American\" should be cast aside in favor of a more accurate classification, likely \"Black\" or something like it.\n","id":"6c6d82a2-6a41-4fe5-9bc2-623d90b25fff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Human rights became popular after WWII and it's not coincidence. The world was horrified by deeds of the Third Reich. The problem was, what from purely legalistic point of view although the Third Reich could be held guilty for some violations of international laws, it was impossible to hold it legally guilty for such atrocities as Holocaust. Only introduction of such conception as human rights allowed the world to judge the Third Reich for all its atrocities. But it made a dangerous precedent. It meant there was introduced a conception what has priority over sovereignty of a state. So, for example if any state is about to start or already doing genocide, then there are good excuses to invade it. On the other hand, if there was no such thing as human rights, or following or not following human rights was decided to be part of internal affairs of a state, then there would be NO excuse for invasion. And now we must take in account wide spreading of weapons of mutually assured destruction MAD . Not only bloody dictatorships like North Korea want MAD, but other countries too want to have MAD. Why? Because in the world where state sovereignty isn't respected, there is always risk what your sovereignty will be neglected due to human rights violations or just accusations of such violations. For example, Russia justified at the least within its population and population of exUSSR annexation of Crimea due to severe violations of right of russian speaking population. Some Ukrainian citizens believe what if Ukraine had MAD, then Russia wouldn't dare to annex its territory. As the result the world become more and more unpredictable and dangerous, because lack of respect of state sovereignty make states to rely on brute force more in order to defend their sovereignty. For example, maybe the North Korea and Iran would even never try to get MAD if they were allowed to live their own lives. Just imagine world where even tinies countries have MAD and it's possible, because due to technical progress it became easier and easier for countries to get it . Do you think it's possible to effectively prevent global or even just local nuclear war in such world? I doubt it. So, it seems for me what in order to significantly lower risks of global local nuclear conflict s although we must remember about existence of another types of MAD, like biological ones and increase survival of humankind, we must maintain the highest level of respect of state sovereignty and abandon conception of human rights or make it totally voluntary. Even if it means we must tolerate bloody dictatorships, even if it means we must tolerate new hitlers and new holocausts. Because otherwise we're doomed to accidentally exterminate ourselves completely. P.S. The Doomsday clock says it's 3 minutes to midnight now<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chances of humanity for survival would be far better if state sovereignty always had priority over human rights.\n","id":"fb2b3aa5-5fea-4fb3-92c1-5d93bb88fde7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Me, Myself & Irene showed Charlie\/Hank as someone who had a mashup of schizophrenia and dissociative personality disorder. This portrayed the false image that people with schizophrenia are violent and wild.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Media commonly depicts those with mental issues as violent or dangerous to society.\n","id":"dc8d7ca4-2eaf-4b25-bbf9-e9e3ee9ba511"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There was a guy on youtube who made video in which he pretended to be multiple famous people. He dressed similarly like them and used wigs. Some of the famous people were black, so he painted himself black. And there was backlash over that. One company even canceled a planned deal with him I understand why they did that, that's not the point of this post The jokes in the video had nothing to do with their race, he was just trying to look like them. He isn't even from US and blackface isn't thing here, only when his video became more popular did he face backlash. I don't see what's wrong with that. You can't say it's bad just because in past, people did make fun of black people while wearing the black paint , because here it's obvious he's not doing anything racist against black people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There shouldn't be problem with painting your face black to represent a black actor.\n","id":"ded34517-2d2a-4890-b38b-8ac81720c462"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So in the latest remastered edition of the original Star Wars trilogy, we are treated to yet another delight that is George Lucas' ham handed attempt to improve things but end up demolishing his legacy. In Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader watches silently as the Emperor tortures Luke with lightning. Then suddenly he turns towards his master, sweeps him into the air, carries him across the room and throws him off the railing into a reactor below. This was a perfect climax to the scene in my opinion which I'll get to later . Well in the remastered version, everything is normal up to the moment when Vader is looking between the Emperor and Luke. Then he loudly says No and then even more loudly NOOO as he grabs the emperor to lift him up into the air. In one grand stroke, Lucas crushed what was essentially the defining moment of the whole series. I think the addition of the scream was a stupid, stupid decision because the suspense was better without it. We didn't need to hear Vader's thoughts, it was pretty obvious what was going on behind the mask. Even though it was blank, the lightning reflected across his face as he looked between his two commitments really drove home the point that some gut wrenching emotion was building up behind his stoic exterior. It was a great way to convey emotion without smacking the audience upside the head with an obvious indicator. Please convince me that this scream added something to the value of the movies. I really want some reason to salvage my faith in Lucas' directorial ability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making Darth Vader scream at the end of ROTJ when he throws the emperor into the reactor was a horrible decision and completely ruined the moment.\n","id":"eba5f8ee-0f34-43db-971e-8c8351283463"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If example, if a KKK member requests a cake that says \u201cWhite Supremacy\u201d on it. The cakeshop owner can refuse to do that specific cake, they cannot refuse service to that individual though on the basis of him being a racist. If the KKK member just wanted a plain cake off the shelf, there\u2019s no reason not to sell that cake to that person even if you disagree with his ideals, he is not influencing or forcing your beliefs. Where I think a lot of conservatives go wrong with his argument and the gay marriage cakeshop incident, is that the same sex couple wanted a normal cake. He denied them service even before what he knew they wanted on the cake. Now in this scenario if they wanted something obscene like nudity on the cake, the owner has the right to refuse that specific cake, not all cakes. It\u2019s like how gunshop owners or tattoo owners can refuse service to specific requests but not people, say someone wanted a swastika tattoo or a person was acting sketchy around a firearm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"cakeshop owners should serve all customers, but don\u2019t have to make specific cakes they disagree with.\n","id":"4ebc106c-012f-40b5-899b-7670962a6a27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically I'm picturing your standard scenario where a guy and a girl have both been drinking, they end up doing stuff, and later is determined that the girl couldn't have consented due to inebriation. I don't think she was necessarily being raped, if the guy was also drinking. I would divide rape into two types Type A Consent may be given, but we do not consider the consenter capable of actually consenting. Minors, people with impaired judgement, etc. Type B No type of consent is given, one party forces the other through physical force, blackmail, etc. Now, I'm talking specifically about Type A. If two people are both past the point where we would consider them capable of consenting, I don't think it can be rape based on the incapable of informed consent thought process. Either no one was raped or they raped each other. So, say a girl drinks a lot or does something else that impairs her judgement, has sex with a guy with similarly impaired judgement, wakes up and realizes she couldn't have possibly consented to it and feels violated and so forth. If she wants to believe she was raped she must also consider herself a rapist. That or accept that neither party was raped, because there was no one in a superior position taking advantage of the other.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a drunk guy and a drunk girl have sex, the girl is not inherently getting raped\n","id":"af7b4d78-4db5-4c68-bb7c-113485b911aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Neglect and abuse can lead to medical and physiological consequences later in life, such as deprivational dwarfism, brain injuries, and speech problems, to mention a few.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The scars of neglect and abuse often haunt children for the rest of their lives.\n","id":"a3e3244d-ce30-418f-a96d-38dbebc1dd31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So me and a friend just got into this argument about relationships. Pretty much my friend was trying to tell me that it is shallow, rude, and disrespectful to turn down women because they comment on my height. Why do I turn down women who comment on my height? Well, to me when a woman comes up to me and begins getting all flirty about my height, it's not too different if a man were to go up to a woman and start commenting about how big her balognahoogas are. I see women who specifically go after tall men as shallow people, seeing how they most likely turn down short men as well. I got your back, short dudes \ud83e\udd1f and to be honest, not only does it make me uncomfortable when a woman starts complimenting my height I truly despise it because I know it's a purely sexual thing. It's why I get along far better with women who don't mention it, because I know they get along with me because of my personality and not my looks. Is there something I'm missing? Some social que I'm not picking up on? Because my friend acted like I am some kind of idiot. I don't think so. Change my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not shallow for me, a 6'4 man, to turn down women who specifically go after me for my height.\n","id":"dfc11071-e819-4723-b436-c151bcfe9abc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should begging for money be illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Organisations such as homeless shelters and soup kitchens exist so that people can survive without begging.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Begging is never necessary for survival. Food, water, shelter, and air are necessary for survival.\n","id":"8999a073-c4c1-4e6f-a5dc-1b13688c4d54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously some spoilers ahead. So I just finished season three and feel like I probably won\u2019t be back for season 4. I\u2019ve enjoyed the acting, the characters, the dialog, the 80\u2019s aesthetic and the nostalgic aspects of the show immensely. But the story is an absolute train wreck. I say that because at the end of the third season of this series I don\u2019t know anything more than I knew in Season 1 about the upside down, the flayers and their directive motives, the Russians and their motives, the \u201cbad guy\u201d American corporation, El\u2019s powers, and on and on. The writers just don\u2019t seem to be very interested in giving us the why\u2019s and how\u2019s behind the most integral parts of the story. And there are so many unresolved questions related to season three specifically that I don\u2019t even want to get into it. I\u2019m asking you to change my view in hopes that I\u2019m just forgetting stuff from the previous seasons that would help make some sense out of the series as a whole, and season three especially. Edit More than one person saying it sounds like I went into this expecting it to be something it's not. I'm gonna re watch from the beginning and try to take it a little less seriously. Thanks for input, everyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Stranger Things story is an utterly incoherent and non-sensical mess.\n","id":"ad21f3dc-56a7-4fec-80ff-2ecd829467df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love the humanities. I am an engineering major but I've always thought that the study of art history, literature, drama, and many other subjects is critical to understanding ourselves as humans. So I just want to set the record straight that I do value the humanities. However, my current view is that it is the prerogative of publicly funded institutions to serve the well being of our society by creating jobs and providing a return on investment for those who pay tuition. Statistically in terms of average starting salary return on investment seems to be highest in the areas of science, engineering, and business. So, in a world where 46.5M american citizens are below the government poverty line, I don't see the justification for funding an art history program over the expansion of a chemistry program to provide an example . I guess I wonder if the study of such things would be best left funded by private institutions or in cases where a case could be made that humanities research could create jobs. Any thoughts? I'd love to hear the opposing argument. EDIT I'm starting to think my view was predicated on an erroneous view of the role of the federal government. Moreover, it has been pointed out to me that I may have underestimated the earnings potential of a humanities degree over the long term. Thanks for the discussion gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanities are important to the development of society, but they do not deserve public funding\n","id":"29bc954c-df47-4663-8ce4-36a2e3f53fc2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Black Panther: Who's Right About Wakanda's Role in the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Wakanda's power and resources are already known by some individuals around the world as we know from Klaue and the other Avengers who have seen T'challa run around in a panther suit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wakanda will be discovered eventually. Better for it to happen on Wakanda's terms.\n","id":"5512acdb-cabf-45cc-ba44-5f07a72af2ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Host Countries and Cities Benefit from The Olympic Games<|ARGUMENT|>In the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, residents were displaced to make space for the event.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Olympic Games have a negative impact on the residents.\n","id":"3e62eb49-e3b6-4414-84cc-dff250af8364"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been in college studying for a psych degree and I happened to take a couple ancient philosophy classes. I became engrossed in any subject that vaguely involved Socrates. I loved all these new ideas and I thought about them endlessly. At the end of the year I was convinced that Socrates had the best philosophical ideas. The theory of forms, midwife theory, the soul, etc. I really was obsessed with it and I really got obsessed with what some would call Socrate's ethical base, which he establishes in the Undergroung Cave analogy. Basically he says that as man leaves the cave of ignorance he is compelled to return and free others from the cave. I got thinking hard about that and asked myself why does he return . He has no great absolute motive, nothing shows him it is the right thing to do. The man returns because he FEELS bad for the others. It was pure human emotion that compells Socrates theory of ethics. I also listen alot to a guy named David Hume and he talks alot about sense perception Hume was a big proponent of empiricism and basically that means gathering conclusions from data. However as humans, all data we absorb, is filtered through our innacurate senses. We know that humans are just blobs of meat flying through space, why is our sense perception absolute and ethical? It seems as though this applies to all ethical theories. We do something that is good only because it will benefit us more than it will disable us. Just because we save a dying dog doesnt make us good, we saved the dog because we felt bad for it and helping it would allow us to feel better. If anyone has any thoughts about Morals or Ethics existing I would love to hear them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ethics\/Morality do not exist\n","id":"254838a2-fdcc-4c6a-9626-dbdf9b6aa7fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Advertisements Do More Harm Than Good<|ARGUMENT|>Advertising gives an unfair advantage to big businesses. Small companies might have much better products, but they cannot afford to advertise them as well and so people don't find out about them. This restricts the quality of products for consumers, and places a huge roadblock to the success of small businesses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Advertising gives an unfair advantage to big businesses. Small companies might have much better pro...\n","id":"56e4d5da-826b-40cf-805c-b080a333c21b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>In August 2018, Warren posted a decade's worth of her tax returns online, a move which is likely to be laying the groundwork for a 2020 campaign run against Trump<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Warren has stated that a 2020 presidential run is a possibility\n","id":"e2c66aad-0033-4084-98c9-bbef210f8d69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Exams are about to be over and some of my friends are getting together, they have invited me to come along. All of the people going, besides me, have either smoked weed before or are planning to do it for the first time at this event. I have a fear that this might change me in some way. I am a person who likes control over my actions and how I present myself, for this reason drugs mess with me more than I think they do for most people, it scares me when I don't have full control over what I'm doing even though I might look like I'm look like I'm having fun at the time afterwards I get slight anxiety from what I did. I want someone to tell me the benefits that might come from this experience or why I shouldn't be worried. Mostly I just want to see the other side of the story maybe from someone with a similar experience. BTW this isn't legal in my county not that I'm concerned about getting caught so the weed is not from a official supplier and may be dangerous. Also I'm 17 y o if that changes how you think I should handle this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have the opportunity to, after exams are over, smoke weed with my friends but I don't think I should.\n","id":"bf089ae3-2b64-4b43-a3f6-cd2de5030b0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll preface my post by saying this I have not played the game but only watched a couple of LPs of it. The interactivity in that game is extremly minimal, you just walk around following a ball of light until a conversation starts telling you a bit about the story, you don't even open a door Just walk and then wait until the cutscene is over so you can walk again and do the same thing again. What really is the difference between my play through of this game and all the LPs on youtube? I have enjoyed other games that fall under the walking simulator genre like Amnesia and Beyond Eyes and Journey, but the change of tone and the interactivity in these games that I enjoyed, is no where to be found in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, it's a boring, samey and the only things I liked about it were the Artstyle and the music. This game seriously could have used some puzzle elements of some sort to break the monotony. I'll end my post with this, if your playthrough of a game is literally the same as everybody else, then it's not a game it's movie.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is not a video game but an interactive movie.\n","id":"ea95407d-ee38-4d6d-aa0b-e4b447289040"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>Treating violence with more violence exacerbates the problem. Arming teachers will not be a deterrent for a shooter since many have taken their own life after their rampage<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Arming teachers treats a symptom without dealing with the underlying problems that lead to school shootings.\n","id":"3b192204-72c2-44a6-885f-56616333591c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is nihilism right?<|ARGUMENT|>Built in with the idea of Meaning is the timeframe in which one chooses to view the importance of phenomenons. It is most certainly a fact that the Earth will cease to exist after eons, but acting based on such a far-stretched timeframe is, although rational, highly impractical.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is possible and reasonable to assume that life has no meaning in and of itself.\n","id":"2b657ffb-778b-4642-acba-bc9a6d03dbbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I, in the interest of full disclosure, am an American Jew who is pro Israel in ideology but am often not supportive of the actions Israel takes settlements spontaneous home demolition specifically . I grew up only learning about the Israeli point of view, but soon after researching the viewpoint of the Palestinians and more on the situation in general, I came to a difficult and startling conclusion everybody's despicable in one way or another . Palestine uses child soldiers. Israel knocks down people's homes without reason. Palestine suicide bombs buildings full of children. Israel uses Palestinian kids as human shields, and so on and so forth. I want peace so badly. I want a homeland for the Jewish people, but I also don't want it at somebody else's expense. But the collective stubbornness and brutality of humanity in that region and in general , in my opinion, makes me have zero faith that peace can or will be achieved. So, in summation, convince me that people will become open minded and civil enough to resolve the Israeli Palestinian conflict. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Believe That In Order to Achieve Peace Between Israel and Palestine People Need To Be Civil and Open-Minded--And That's Why It's Going to be Almost Impossible.\n","id":"5cf3e055-a729-48f5-b341-e8d96c480545"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>Affirmative Action addresses the symptom, not the cause. We should address the causes and watch the symptom to measure the effectiveness of the solution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Addressing educational inequality at a college level through affirmative action comes too late to create effective academic balance.\n","id":"ad986735-fd5a-4a6a-a955-dc902ffa86b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>Governmental forces which can combat environmental destruction at the hands of profiteering institutions typically become ineffective at combatting these institutions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anarchies are more effective at dealing with economic externalities than governments.\n","id":"923aec8e-65ef-4a96-8fd3-dcc16c7ee0f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>A study of state budgets over a 24-year period demonstrated that increased black representation in state legislatures has resulted in state legislatures giving greater priority to policy areas important to Black elected officials p. 333.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The presence of minority group members in state legislatures encourages the adoption of policies favored by many minorities.\n","id":"05d32e39-6043-4f4d-84f3-a285cd8575fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>60% of the USA\u2019s rarest and most imperilled species occur in its designated metropolitan areas p. 13, and urban sprawl - due in large part to overdevelopment - can be one of the leading causes of species imperilment in some cases pp.13-14.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Through reducing the need or temptation to construct more traveller accommodation, Airbnb reduces the environmental impacts of overdevelopment in New York City.\n","id":"f3dcb80a-6460-4321-abf5-69567211e234"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many vegans appear to believe that it doesn't matter how popular their movement is now due to the fact that society is inevitably inclined towards veganism. I think this is an erroneous belief that ultimately boils down to a tribal sort of sense of being right but doesn't make any sense when looked at outside of the group membership paradigm. While it seems pretty likely people will eat less and less meat in the future, that only applies to people in rich western countries where we already eat a shitload of meat. People in developing countries will actually start eating a lot more meat as they become richer, to an extent that outstrips the number of vegans and people that cut down on animal product consumption. This is what is going to happen in the near to mid future at the great population centers of the world become more developed. In the long term, as the number of vegans increases in the rich western countries, you will inevitably have people at the top of the vegan hierarchy instituting new dietary rules for how to maintain top tier vegan status. This will inevitably result in a sort of ranking of the sentience of plants, or plats abilities to suffer, or the environmental damage associated with this crop vs that crop, and just as veganism became something distinct from vegetarianism in the 20th century, veganism will eventually seem like the old animal rights movement. At the same time as lab grown meat becomes available there will be some sort of artificially synthesized plant based food available which people will argue for as an ethical alternative to predating on plants, which are technically alive and have some sort of sentience. Being a vegan in the group identity sense will be outdated and a sort of rudimentary, kind of right but kind of wrong conceptualization of a futuristic diet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Veganism is not the future\n","id":"ccfd52b6-0de0-4b3c-8dff-091f34889ab8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Streetcars and LRTs that share the road with cars should not be considered higher order transit since they are pretty much large buses, and therefore don't pose a strong incentive over cars. In my view the only form of true higher order transit in an urban environment is the subway or metro. Because they travel underground, they can bypass traffic lights, other cars, construction projects, bad weather especially snow or freezing rain etc. A streetcar or LRT that shares the road and travels above ground faces all of these challenges and as a result extends the trip of its patrons significantly. For a city that is transforming from a suburb where car is king to a metropolis, where is the incentive to ditch the car, if the streetcar or LRT is guaranteed going to get the patron slower and more uncomfortably to their destination? Also another part of my view which you can challenge is that LRT and streetcars that share the road aren't faster than buses. They usually just have a higher capacity. If I am a commuter that only cares about time, and doesn't care about standing, then what advantage does a LRT or streetcar pose over just driving. If I am going to be stuck in traffic, I might as well be stuck in my own car, where I don't have to stop every 5 minutes. People don't care that the LRT has no emissions because it runs on electricity they just want to get to work and home faster A suburb that invests in LRT and streetcar with road sharing instead of subway, is essentially signing itself up for more traffic gridlock for the next 10 years, since no one will give up their car for transit for their work commute. Things that won't change my view include pointing out that some forms of street cars and LRT have their own dedicated lane and priority signalling this  is not about those exceptions. Another thing that won't change my mind is pointing out that subway is expensive. That's besides the point. Inexpensive options like LRT and streetcar with a dedicated lane exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Streetcars and LRTs that share the road with cars are pretty much large buses, and therefore don't pose a strong incentive over cars. If a suburb is in the midst of transforming into a metropolis, LRT and streetcar that share the road are horrible ideas.\n","id":"305767d5-6d31-42dc-830b-cf587c98c70f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Little background first, when it comes to economics I am generally Republican leaning. When it comes to social issues, mainly healthcare, I am liberal leaning. Prior to Trump I\u2019ve always voted republican, this election I simply said fuck it and didn\u2019t vote. With that said, I really have not been following politics closely. This last year I have been so caught up in my job and getting life that I just blocked out all of the Democrat versus Republican chatter and debate. Then, about two weeks ago I was on lunch break at work and saw a video of Trumps speech on the budget. I decided I should listen to it as I was curious what budget ended up passing. I made it about two minutes into the video before I was literally dumbfounded at how clueless he is. He literally just mumbles key phrases about billions and billions and doing big things over and over until it ends. It was then that I realized Trump has no fucking idea what he\u2019s doing. I don\u2019t hate Donald Trump, I just do not understand how almost 50 of America was able to listen to his speeches on the campaign trail, and decide that this man is the best pick to lead our country. Things I don\u2019t want to see hear 1 this to turn into a Democrat versus Republican debate. I could give a shit less what your political ideologies are, you are entitled to yours just as I am entitled to mine. 2 I don\u2019t want to hear about how corrupt Hillary was. yes, I already know this and ragging on his contender that ultimately did not end up winning changes nothing Things that will  1 provide multiple Socio or economic issues that Trump can both intelligently speak about and is working to change better 2 Relate his skill set as a businessman into qualities that which our president would need in order to govern successfully<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump literally has no idea what he is talking about 95% of the time and as a result is not truly qualified to be president\n","id":"e237e76d-14da-491e-838c-45a125a5268f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the decision to ban Alex Jones from social media sites the right decision?<|ARGUMENT|>The media platforms that banned him are private\/for profit not governmental so they can do as they please re: constitutional rights to free speech. The problem lies in his nonsensical proclamations being presented as fact and not opinion so I agree with the ban.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social Media sites have the right to remove any content they deem go against their policies.\n","id":"a5fd8054-fefa-4224-920b-bb618ef32906"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The term Post Truth has recently become central in discussing the political and social reality, at least in part because Oxford Dictionary declared it the word of the year over other more common words like 'lit' which I expect was a sort of political maneuver more than a genuine reflection on the words we use look at the google trends for post truth and you see a jump massive jump on the very day that Post truth was declared word of the year There are two main ways to spell out post truth, the sensational and the realist. Because I hear the sensational the most, I want to quickly shrug towards it Post truth refers to the fact that we live in a world 'after' truth, that people no longer care about truth in politics, etc. This seems obviously wrong, as our definer herself is interested in capturing a truthful state of the world, even if it is wrong, so this should be enough evidence that truth still has some role in political discussions. The less sensational is that politicians can make appeals beyond what is true and what is false that can influence people. As wikipedia remarks, truth is rendered a secondary importance. This is manageable, but it also seems to characterize humans of the world now and always. Did Hitler rise to power because he was a sharp and witty debater or because people developed a powerful emotional trust in him? Its 2 24 Hour news may speed this process up, and facebook's false news might help, but both of these things are change in medium NOT content. False news is just spread more quickly, but false news has existed for as long as news has itself. I think we want to think that this world is a world of post fact because we want to think that people are fundamentally unreachable through reason, which gave rise to Trump. But in the same way that Trump's Make America Great refers to a past glorified and delusional America, the notion that 'in the past people cared about truth' also refers to a glorified and delusional past.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Post-Truth does not describe the state of our world more now than before.\n","id":"f2ee1905-79b9-4353-ad40-66deb484f9ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The Book of Mormon teaches that the Christian god invites all humans to partake of salvation, which echoes Methodist teachings and is inconsistent with Calvinism<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon is essentially consistent with Methodist views about a universal atonement, as opposed to a limited atonement as Calvinism teaches.\n","id":"d6b0ec21-923c-4a0c-97f3-1e94bb4612a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey . This is just a theory that I wanted to hear other perspectives on. I think a hostile takeover should be illegal because it just destroys competition. I don't see how that is fair competition among companies. They just snuff out the competition and don't allow them to create a balanced market. I don't see any reason how this benefits capitalism or our economy in anyway. If you can enlighten me in some way, please do. Thanks. Tl dr Hostile takeovers destroy competition and should be illegal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hostile takeovers should be illegal.\n","id":"ca17a94f-3d09-4525-8bd4-5c94a6cb024c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a photographer and many of my friends are also creative types, e.g. writers, painters, musicians, etc. I guess we are amateurs in the sense that we're not actually making money from our creative efforts. However, the quality of my friends' work is actually excellent, yet they enjoy very little to modest recognition for what they do. I am comfortable sharing a video of a friend's musical performance if anyone suspects that the amateurs I know aren't as good as I think they are. Please note that amateurs are also defined by doing something out of love for it. My view, that I would like to have challenged, is that no one will ever give as much of a fuck about an artist's work than he or she will. The amount of recognition, admiration, citical reception, etc. is not actually a very accurate measure of an artist's merit. There are thousands of really excellent paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, poems, and songs that no one will ever truly appreciate, other than the artist himself. Having struggled to create something, knowing it intimately, the artist will appreciate his own work more than anyone else ever could. If he or she is capable of critically and honestly assessing the merit of the work, then what other people think really doesn't matter. They could become famous or renowned or somebody else could have that good fortune. In closing, getting rich and famous from art is just one metric of the quality of creative output and it is an overrated metric at that. x200B tl dr Having struggled to create something, knowing it intimately, the artist will appreciate his own work more than anyone else ever could. If he or she is capable of critically and honestly assessing the merit of the work, then what other people think really isn't as important. x200B edit I was thinking about what exceptions could be made. A dancer can dance for the joy of it, but an actor really can't act without an audience to watch her. A stand up comedian can't really tell jokes if there's no one to laugh. And I consider instagram famous as famous enough, like a new type of fame. x200B edit 2 the perfect musical example Rodriguez, better known as Sugar Man, considered by many in the music profession to be a talent on the order of Bob Dylan who only became somewhat famous decades later. Also, 70s Korean folk rock singer Kim Jung Mi.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"fame and reception are not the most important metric for the merit of amateur art.\n","id":"bd9e855f-2966-482e-b583-a5788a66be5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should individuals sentenced to life in prison be allowed to choose death instead?<|ARGUMENT|>The savings in long-term incarceration expenses from self-requested executions could be used to improve rehabilitation conditions for others in prison, making elective death a form of economic atonement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Self-requested-death legislation could make it a fast track process, eliminating the normal overheads of a death-penalty execution, ensuring maximum savings over long-term incarceration.\n","id":"bf2b2a8e-5789-4182-a869-b1a3886dcc3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I can't fucking stand sports fans. Among them, I feel as if I'm on a different planet. So did you hear X team traded Y player for Z? How crazy is that? I know, man, why the fuck would team X want player Z? He sucks. Is any of this even relevant to the going ons in the world? I can understand if you play sports you are training your body and practicing quite a difficult skill almost a graceful art. I can understand if you watch sports obsessively in that context watching the technique of your favourite players intensely so that you may perfect your own I do the same, just with concert videos of my favourite musicians . I can understand that if you don't play sports, you want the vicarious thrill of victory from seeing your favourite team win. But the collective obsession with sports is weird and a bit frightening to me. Why don't people get this worked up about something like science or art things that actually matter? You aren't learning anything or practicing a skill you probably don't even know the people on these sports teams, so why the fuck do you get so excited? You are letting your brain go to mush in my opinion. When you watch a movie, or listen to a piece of music, or look at art or try to figure something out you are thinking. I watch sports and I can't stand it my brain goes completely empty and I hate that feeling. I believe televised sports and the obsession with them are a device to keep distracted people dumb and dumb people distracted. I think people like them for the same reason they like pop music it's easy for weak brains to digest. I feel like a filthy academic intellectual elitist, so please . EDIT Punctuation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that watching sports obsessively rots your brain and is a cop-out from more challenging, stimulating activities;\n","id":"d91a72fe-a2c5-474a-8e20-280c682deb66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Radio Disappear As Cars Become Increasing Connected to the Internet?<|ARGUMENT|>A radio advertising survey showed that 6 out of 10 people listen to the radio while doing housework. p. 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people listen to the radio while they complete housework p. 1\n","id":"332bc74e-894d-4915-80df-2d6bf55c1e03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you don't know what determinism is, here's a definition for you. Determinism the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Wrapped up in that definition is the implicit assumption that if you knew all possible information and could correctly interpret it, you could predict the future with perfect accuracy. Sam Harris wrote a book about this called Free Will. I know him and Dan Dennett have some kind of disagreement between their types of determinism. I'm not as familiar with Dennett's version, so this is strictly a rebuttal to the Sam Harris version. Thesis You cannot make accurate predictions even if you have all possible knowledge. Imagine the following scenario. Say you have two buttons on a table, red and blue. Sitting at one end of the table is a person, which we will call A, that will push one of the two buttons. On the other side of the table is a computer with all possible information that can exist, ever, within its memory. We will call the computer B. B bets A that they can correctly guess which button A will push. There is another computer on the side of the table with the same knowledge as B, we will call this C. B tells A that it has guessed which button A will push. C, knowing all possible knowledge, tells A what B guessed. A then pushes the opposite button from what B guessed. There is no possible way for B to make a correct guess, it's a no win scenario because C always undermines B and A always pushes the button C tells him to push. Under determinism, both A, B and C would be predetermined to make the choices that they do, but since B and C are looking under the hood of the car so to speak, the model falls apart. In order for determinism to hold true, B would have to pick a wrong answer intentionally or C would have to lie. The beauty of this is that B knows C will undermine him, and he knows how he will do it, since both B and C are omniscient. I've attacked this argument from every angle I can think of and no matter how you change the actions it always end up with B or C acting in a way that makes no sense if determinism works. Things do make sense though, if you think of the universe existing as unmanifested potential, as Jordan Peterson asserts. A has the potential to push either button. Even knowing all the facts, as B does, cannot let you know exactly how all potential will manifest. The obvious argument against this is that B is the one actually deciding what button A pushes by functionally using C as a proxy, thus the universe is still deterministic, it's just B's actions that determine which button gets pushed. That's the best counter argument I've come up with, and my rebuttal to that is that if determinism is true, then B already knows what button he is determined to choose, and therefore what button A will push, but even if B guesses that button, then A will still push the opposite button. There is no logical way out of this trap that I can see, which is why I think the unmanifested potential argument is the best model for how the universe actually functions., or at least that determinism is bullshit. To change my view, you have to show that I have made some kind of logical error. You would need to show a way that B can make a specific correct prediction concerning the pushing of the buttons that C could not turn into an incorrect prediction with its equally infinite knowledge. If you try to write a rebuttal to this, remember that under determinism you can accurately predict the future if you know and understand all relevant data. If B can think of a clever trick, then C knew that B would think that yesterday, and both are equally aware of what the other knows. The way I see it, an outside observer, which is basically the role C plays, blows determinism to bits. Edit I'm not going to respond to arguments that are just nitpicking the way I have the scenario set up. I have responded to many comments explaining why I have set up the scenario how I have. If you want to change my view, you're going to have do better than just saying that C can't change the future because that would violate determinism, or there's no such thing as omniscient beings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Determinism is illogical\n","id":"bbb7dc85-9871-4f3f-a107-92c55edfe237"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that pedophiles have no more control over their sexual preference than homosexuals. Trying to treat them for some sort of mental illness would have no more effect than trying to treat someone who is attracted to the same gender. The most they would be able to do is repress their urges. I definitely feel that acting on their urges is a terrible atrocity, but merely having those urges is not a sign of mental illness any more than being attracted to the same sex or feeling like you are the wrong gender.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that pedophiles who do not act on their urges are no more morally detestable than homosexuals.\n","id":"b8e5a910-2c45-48fa-ba52-d54a43c3ef14"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>There has not been a truly secular society until recently. The data set simply isn't big enough to determine if it is the secularization of society that allowed them to be more successful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"What it does mean is that lack of religion is not correlated with success and conversely, religion is not correlated with lack of success\n","id":"9b5ad81e-cba5-49fa-b37f-e3a9744e481b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should life skills be taught in K12 school?<|ARGUMENT|>The 'real-world' aspect of life skills makes the learning more tangible to students, thus making it easier to apply to their own lives which they may feel is not the case with academic or conceptual learning as well as making the subject one that might be easier to teach given its strong relationship with examples and applications that the students are already familiar with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While children may not have to balance salaries, mortgage repayments and banking interest rates, they can still apply life skills to budgeting money they receive through part-time work or to options available to them if they wish to open a bank\/ credit union account.\n","id":"9fa23212-9c1e-4b35-ba13-442534b8e58f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been brought up in a culture in which family unity is extremely important. My father is the oldest son in his family and therefore has the responsibility of taking care of his mother. I believe that it is cruel to drop off an elderly parent at an old people's home just because taking care of them requires some effort. I would like to hear the opposite side to issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that taking care of one's elderly parents is the responsibility of their children.\n","id":"b64aabde-beea-4248-8e97-c138cfd05a22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Honestly, I'm kinda on the fence about this. I can't seem to rationalize which is right, even though I feel like it should be obvious. Instinctively I feel like this view is wrong. But when I think about it, both actions cause the same consequence, why punish them differently? I guess I'll try to address some arguments that I can think of Assume someone accidentally killed somebody. It wasn't intentional Why does intention matter? It caused the same result. It's unfair How so? And why should it be fair? It wasn't 'fair' that some guy died due to your accident. Two wrongs don't make a right Well then we shouldn't have punishments? I'm not sure if these arguments are convincing or robust. I feel like it does comes down to intent though, which is one of the biggest factors in current law. So I guess the question is why does intent matter? If it's relevant, I do think mentally disturbed challenged people should receive same punishment as normal people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Accidental crimes and intentional crimes should receive the same punishment\n","id":"2fd1135a-2eaf-42da-ace7-fa6a2c1379be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Parent Trap is messed up. How on Earth can any couple give birth to twin daughters, and then decide to split them between themselves with no plans to ever see each other again? Worse, how could they do that without even making plans for the kids to see each other ever again? Liz and Nick each didn't see their other kid grow up for 11 years, and they were OKAY with it. Also, how does each kid grow up knowing that their other parent is somewhere alive and well on the planet, and not seek them out until they happen to bump into their twin at a summer camp?? Do these people NOT have any feelings? Are they robots? How are decent people able to live their lives pretending that their other child doesn't exist? It's fucked up and baffling.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'The Parent Trap' is really messed up\n","id":"d2cb42a7-74dc-4f48-8728-666e0aac7b9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>As the visual symbol of PLO's desired state is the entire of Israel i.pinimg.com and the chant \"From the river to the sea, Palestine will soon be free\" indicates a continued wish to subsume all of mandatory Palestine into a \"Palestinian\" state, the concern over \"Jewish\" vs. \"mere existence\" is a cynical way to ignore true aims.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"P.L.O. chief Mahmoud Abbas has pledged, repeatedly, over decades that he will never, ever recognize Israel as the Jewish state, meaning he will never recognize Israel.\n","id":"07d000ba-170a-409e-a613-0a0bc67f7ad3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently, I think at least, there has been a trend to abstain from using the word retarded. Videos such as are screened before me daily by classmates and teachers alike who try to convince me that the word is offensive, whether or not it is used to refer to a mentally disabled person such as how some might call something stupid gay . But I cannot seem to understand why using retard when not referring to a mentally disabled person is unjust and cruel. It may just be me being desensitized and I have been called callous because of my opinion , but I do not think it is worthy of being removed from our language. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the words \"retard\" and \"retarded\" are acceptable to use.\n","id":"d210838a-d311-4c35-b63e-390c2488eb54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Granted the militarization of police is a significant threat to our freedoms no knock raids flash bangs maiming children the killing of harmless pets no accountability afterwards. Local governments taking ownership of surplus armored vehicles doesn't qualify, though The armored vehicles in question pose no real threat to Americans. We're not discussing police procurement of Abrams or Bradleys. We're discussing armored vehicles in the strictest sense vehicles that have armored plate. These vehicles lack any offensive capability save for whatever local police jerry rig. Challenge cite someone who has been hurt in any way by these vehicles. Militarization implies an active arms race. The US started a stupid war that ended up requiring a bunch of armored vehicles. Now that this war is winding down, we're finding ourselves at a loss for what do do with all these extra armored vehicles. Why not give them to police departments? doesn't qualify as deliberate militarization. In sum who else should receive them and what harm are they doing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the receipt of nearly free armored vehicles by local governments in the US doesn't qualify as the \"militarization of police\"\n","id":"02da7407-2450-411a-81a1-4a6c690bcbc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Daylight Savings should always end the weekend before Halloween so children can Trick or Treat longer without staying out later. Lets not turn this into a pros and cons of Daylight savings time. I simply propose that we move the entirety of Daylight savings time forward one week. Instead of ending the first Sunday in Nov, it would now end the last Sunday in October. This would allow children to start trick or treating earlier on Halloween since the normal start time for Trick or Treating is sunset. When I was a kid, my brother and I made the rounds in several customs each year. By the end of the night we had enough sweets to be lost in sugary heaven for weeks on end. My family's Halloween rules were the same every year no leaving the neighborhood, no shenanigans and be home by 10pm earlier when we were younger and had chaperons. I think was a fare set of rules but every child dreams of more candy than their Brother Sister, friend or foes. My proposed change to Daylight savings time is targeted to the multi costumed, candy coated Halloween high rollers such as myself. I personally see absolutely no downsides to this. If anybody has a legitimate reason why we should help these poor kids strive for the American dream of diabetes by 22 then please open my eyes<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Daylight Savings should always end the weekend before Halloween so children can Trick or Treat longer without staying out later.\n","id":"2c58186a-9496-4671-a492-0cf4ad23b594"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>As man created artificial intelligence, robots & automatons which follow his instructions blindly evidently without criticizing, blaming or going against him, it is unlikely God would be so foolish to have created conscious beings with free will many of whom don\u2019t believe He exists, criticize Him, even blame, go against or harm Him, which may indicate that nature, e.g., humans, is not the creation of God\/God does not exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans report religious experiences and develop religious narratives, including the existence of God, as a result of their painful experiences and hardships. If you alleviate the hardships, there would be no need to attribute success to God.\n","id":"08796e24-36d8-462e-8fb7-f5a7b398141d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Education that Promotes a Certain Faith or Religion be Abolished in Schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Faith worldview and education cannot be separated, and those who claim otherwise merely hide their faith, or worldview, behind presuppositions taught as absolute truth. Often this leads to a more chaotic and dissonant attempt at education, as individual educators and institutions try to present their own worldviews as assertions reconciled to tolerance and openness. Religious education, on the other hand is, is open and honest about foundational presuppositions, therefore easier to critique.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A secular education hides its prejudices and presuppositions behind a sham impartiality, and is therefore more insidious in its ability to promote a narrow and intolerant worldview. \"The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.\" - Charles Baudelaire\n","id":"a86179d8-ed0d-4968-88d0-cafdd0601484"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is three linked concepts that I'm struggling with but feel are important. First, without resorting to absurd trickle down arguments for the record, I'm also open to changing my view on trickle down economics, especially in the context of this discussion , how is a massive increase to minimum wage not going to slam small businesses while mostly sparring the big ones? Walmart, for example, has many employees whose wages would increase by a large percentage but the business is so successful, so large and brings in so much money, they could easily absorb the increased cost. At that size, one can streamline the business cut some fat, so to speak, slowly increase prices to compensate and take the drop in net profit in stride. Walmart has what I'll call a healthy profit buffer their profit margins are so good and their overhead is so low, they can lose some on each end and still be fine. Small businesses are not in that situation. Of course, Walmart also has a giant stockpile of money to buoy themselves through the transition, something most small businesses don't have. Parts two and three I'll summarize briefly because I think most people who might respond to this already understand the benefits a UBI would bring. Especially as umbrella corporations start replacing their employees with automation, no amount of increasing minimum wage will save the lower income workers. I think the opposite is true the less attractive we make employing people, the faster companies that can switch to automation will switch. It seems to me there's going to be a tipping point, with McDonald's on one side and Roy Roger's on the other. McDonald's will automate and be able to offer better service and better products while getting higher profit margins, and poor Roy Roger's, unable to afford the initial costs of automation, will be left in the dust. This sounds like a perfect globalization friendly, progressive, populist policy position for the left. After the ugliness of this election cycle, I think the Democrats could use a bold, uniting and let's not forget progressive talking point like a UBI. Thanks for reading and I look forward to your responses Edit Wow thanks everyone I swear I checked this until I got off work and there were no responses yet. Give me a couple minutes to read stuff and then I'll start responding. Edit 2 Kudos and a delta to u studdbeefpile excellent point about the Democratic party I had not considered. If only there was a self funded candidate someone with the grit and gusto to clean up Washington. JK even with her flaws I'm pro Hillary. Seriously though, thanks everyone for your responses. Edit 3 Thanks so much everyone, I've got several days of reading, researching and pondering to do Special thanks to u ReOsIr10, u Whimsical whispers, u studdbeefpile, u robert3131, u nofftastic and u dominant transsexual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A federal $15 an hour minimum wage is disproportionately damaging to small businesses; a Universal Basic Income is better as both a solution for society and platform for the Democratic Party\n","id":"1457ba37-1d21-4448-b87c-5bde99605a20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that representative government where the people vote for a person to represent their interest and concerns, is obsolete with modern technology. I believe that with modern technology we can voice our concern to the state more efficiently than what a person can do. A person may have internal biases and ulterior motive that may run against the interest of the people who voted for him. While technology barring hacking and manipulation, would represent the true intent of the people. An example is the algorithm of reddit, which represent decently the interest of the people by the simple voting system. This goes without saying that I endorse absolute democracy in more serious matters, I believe that to be qualified to vote, a person must first be educated and well informed in the topic at hand before being allowed to vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Representative-government is obsolete with the modern technology.\n","id":"aa313c67-2032-4f54-852b-189aacaebb34"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is a big discussion going on in the Netherlands at the moment in which politicians differ in opinion. Municipalities are trying to improve the quality of air in city centers by making it harder for cars to reach the city center by either hindering them or baning them altogether or by promoting public transport as a better and more environmentally friendly option. In my opinion, municipalities should not interfere with personal choices to, for example, use a car to go to the city center to go shopping or have a fun day out. The convenience cars brought us is something we should cherish. It's simply easier to load all your family in a car and drive somewhere than to use public transport. Think about waiting times, crowded spaces, filthy seats, often no air con etc. Public transport is unpleasant in many ways. Also, cars are getting more and more environmentally friendly. Some governments, for example the Dutch, have exempted some electric vehicles from road taxes and registration fees. The government supports these vehicles and even sets targets as to how many need to be sold in the coming 10 years to work towards better air quality. One could see that in the long term, electric cars could be the solution to this problem making them redundant in the above described discussion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cities should not ban cars from city centers\n","id":"336d0dc6-4bbc-43ba-969f-2a0dfeaca68d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, excuse the sensationalist title. When I say art is overvalued I don't mean people appreciate art to much . I mean it in the literal sense of costs too much money . Specifically, I don't see what it is you belive you're getting when you pay tens of millions of dollars for some famous painting. Let's imagine you have an authentic Van Gogh painting and someone stole it, but replaced it with a believable copy. What exactly is lost? If you appreciate it for the actual art, surely looking at the copy is as good as looking at the original. Otherwise it wouldn't be a believable copy. The only imaginable reason I can see for buying such an artwork is prestige. To show people that you have a lot of money. But couldn't you spend your money on something productive? Buy a relatively cheap Van Gogh knock off for your kitchen wall and donate millions of dollars to charity? Or just throw cash out the window, for that matter. People would still realize you're rich. Can anyone make a good case for why buying The Card Players by Paul C\u00e9zanne for 259 million dollars is anything but a bad case of more money than sense?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A believe art is highly overvalued.\n","id":"a4c3e55a-260e-4dc0-ace2-b7428c481a85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To start, let me state that i am a woman, and that i never plan on having children under any circumstances. I'm not great with words, so i will probably end up editing this to add change things as clarification. I think the main reason i feel this way is because i have had countless male friends that have been tricked into having children by women they were in relationships with. Some as young as 16. Now, i know the whole know the repercussions of having sex before you do it speech, and discuss with your partner what to do in case of a pregnancy before hand but at the end of the day, i believe it is horribly unfair to say to one gender no one can tell you what to do with your baby and your body, and tell the other well, you're fucked. If a man and a woman conceive, the woman pretty much legally gets to do whatever she wants, regardless of what the man wants. The way i see it, sex should be 50 50, and nothing less. It takes two to tango, so to speak. For example, a pair conceive a child while they're rather young, students in University. They've discussed that if an accident happened, and if they wound up pregnant, she would abort the baby. However, when it happens and they get pregnant, the woman suddenly decides she has changed her mind and wants to keep the child and raise it. The father still does not, because he feels it could jeopardize his future success and well being, and only continued to have sexual relations with the woman under the impression that she was of the same mindset. If the woman gets to choose to keep the baby, regardless of what the man wants, the man should have options as well outside of paying monthly checks that they may or may not be able to afford in the first place. So, he should have the right to choose if he wants to have the baby as well, and if not, should be legally able to permanently opt out of the child's life before the child is born. This should be rather similar to filing for divorce, only from a fetus. i have no better way of phrasing that, i apologize I say this should be done before the baby is born, and be permanent unless decided otherwise by both the man and woman, same as cancelling a divorce in process is to prevent the man from changing his mind later in life, and possibly disrupting the woman's life and well being for a choice he made years prior. However, if the couple decide together to annul the wave of parental involvement, that's their choice TOGETHER and no one is forced into anything. Of course, there are always situations like if a woman's religion or morals prevents her from having an abortion, but this is where the discuss the options with your partner beforehand common sense logic comes into play. And, of course, there will always be people who abuse the system, and the scumbag steve's that bang a girl, lie about being there for her if they get pregnant, and then wave off their responsibilities. Those are inevitable, there will always be people who abuse every system. But, there are already people who abuse the parental system. For every scumbag steve in this scenario, there are already scumbag stacy's that trick men into having children because they can't legally do anything to help themselves when it's done. And that's already happening on a daily basis. And of course, the tables can be turned. If men are forced to pay child support for children they didn't want to begin with, i also believe they should be compensated if a woman aborts a child they do want. This, like child support, should be settled by a legal team or in court, but it is unfair to make one gender pay for unwanted children, but not the other. And yes, women pay child support as well if the child lives with the father, but that's after the child has been born and she made the choice of having it. And yes, yes, the argument of but it's not fair to the child. Though it is an unfortunate situation, and the child seems to be an innocent victim, it's going to be a victim in any case in one of these situations. Either it will be aborted and never see life, be born with no legally responsible father, be born with a legally responsible father who resents it, or will be born into a full, happy family. Babies don't get to choose their parents. But babies are already being born into situations with absent fathers that don't support the mother, so not much would change. To me, this is one of the ways sexual equality can be achieved between men and women. . TLDR Right now, sex is like 90 10, in favor of women. Sex should be 50 50. if a woman can choose to abort or keep a child no matter what the father says, the man should be allowed to legally wave legal responsibility for the child. the word Tricked is starred to clarify a little. I mean this in the cases of anchor babies , girls that lie and get pregnant to keep a guy in a relationship, welfare babies that the woman can just make a bigger check off of, and even hate babies where the woman purposefully gets pregnant to make the mans life hell from there on out. I personally have seen every one of these scenarios happen to friends, so these are the ones i picked for examples.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if a woman can legally choose to have or abort a baby regardless of what the father says, the father should have the right to permanently opt out of all legal responsibilities prior to the baby's birth.\n","id":"4e5a814c-3abe-49af-b9c3-1b28177b1b12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many different levels of trade deal. The strongest \/ most expansive Trade deals those with the most advanced stage of economic integration include eliminating labour barriers Common markets, Economic Unions, Economic and Monetary Unions, and Complete economic integrations<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trade deals tend to involve the liberalisation of immigration controls. Trade deals with India would almost certainly increase immigration from those countries, to the displeasure of many Brexit voters.\n","id":"c5648ac8-80cb-4c4a-a8be-64bbed36a06b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I may have some trouble articulating this but I am a young male in my early 20's who came from a neighborhood where the life expectancy is about 17 and has experience many hardships physical, economical, and psychological. I am somewhat middle class now. However, I've noticed that I find myself disgusted with my new peers and feel that I am better than all of them. They are weak, vapid, emotional, and usually terrible people who get joy out of the suffering of others. I feel I am better than them because I have no doubt if they lived my life they would have ended up dead in an alley somewhere or in prison. This is evidenced to me by their general fragility and how the describe minor event in their life. They have no appreciation for trials or rites of passage so when I try to connect they seem to feel that having to earn your spot rather than having everything handed to you is some kind of joke. It has become apparent to my new peers and I am often called arrogant because of it. It is unfortunate since I find my peers to be weak and lacking in resolve that I am unable to connect with them. I may just have to accept that this is a burden I have to carry. It comes along with moving into a different social strata. If anyone has any insight please . TL DR A quality person is not made from sunshine, roses, sedentary living, and having shit handed to them. Like steel a quality person is forged in fire between the hammer and anvil of adversity and hardship. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel that I am better than others because if they lived my life they would not have survived.\n","id":"f3980de0-d545-4f62-8326-87179de5f1d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The notion of current as a basic unit is silly because current is a derived unit, the flow rate of electric charge. Therefore current should be defined in terms of electric charge and not charge in terms of current as the current system goes. Furthermore, the unit for measuring current in SI, the ampere is defined as the constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross section, and placed one metre apart in vacuum, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2\u00d710^\u22127 newtons per metre of length . This is ridiculous because it is impossible to actually measure an ampere, as there are no conductors of infinite length and negligible cross section, all actual conductors are finite. The new proposed definition is slightly better, with one ampere being equivalent to 6,2415093 x 10^18 elementary charges moving past a boundary in one second and the elementary charge is defined as 1,6021766208 98 \u00d710^\u221219 coulombs as it is technically measurable, but it is not practically measurable and worse it is circular, the coulomb is not a base SI unit and is defined in terms of amperes, but the ampere is now defined in terms of coulombs. As I said before I do prefer that current be defined in terms of charge, but that does not work is charge is defined in terms of amperes, charge should be the base unit. Formerly, and currently in the CGS Gaussian units used in my field, physics, current is defined in terms of statcoulombs per second. A statcoulomb is defined as follows, if two stationary objects each carry a like charge of 1 statC and are 1 cm apart, they will electrically repel each other with a force of 1 dyne. 1 dyne is the force required to accelerate a mass of one gram at a rate of one centimetre per second per second. This is a logical system based on truly measurable units that is all ultimately in reference to a substantial quality, mechanical force. This is what should be reestablished as standard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ampere should not be a basic unit\n","id":"cac20645-61ed-4f18-9ebd-892c8cab741f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should create a sports category that allow drug usage.<|ARGUMENT|>People enjoy seeing athletes break world records and display incredible feats of strength\/ skill etc. This will be much more likely to happen in a drug-using category where athletes get stronger and faster, making the drug-using category more exciting and crowding out the drug-less category.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Such a category would decrease the popularity of other sports categories.\n","id":"e410abeb-e43e-4a46-aa50-0764a52ab1c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Monogamy vs Polygamy: Is the Norm of Monogamy Regrettable?<|ARGUMENT|>Single people would more easily find a partner because everyone would become potential partners, including those already in a relationship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Non-monogamous relationships can better satisfy people's relationship-related needs.\n","id":"28f3691a-cc0f-4f7b-9e78-40537c19751c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pre post disclaimer I'm a meat eater. Hell a meat lover . I eat meat on or with anything. I'm aware that may seem contradictory, but I want discussion on my view, not my cognitive dissonance, so please bear with. My logic Pain feels bad. Inflicting pain is wrong. The meat industry results in pain being caused to animals. Meat is not necessary to survive. Therefore, if you have the means financial or otherwise to not eat meat, you should not eat it. I'm aware that there are a bunch of hypotheticals in which animals are euthenised killed painlessly but this isn't really the case for the lump of mince I buy every week. I'm looking for education on the matter, and someone to explain why eating meat isn't immoral. Thank you for your time. Edit Trying my best to keep up with you guys Some good stuff here. Keep it coming. Edit 2 Changed the first two statements for clarification Final Edit Huge thanks to everyone who responded. I know this is a touchy subject but most of you kept it as objective as possible there are some great replies here. I will likely continue to eat meat. I still hold that the way animals are treated in a large part of the meat industry is pretty bad. However, my view has been somewhat changed in that I now feel consumption of meat isn't an immoral action itself. Other, and more direct, things can be done to lessen the suffering of animals. I feel like if learned a lot and gained quite a bit of perspective. TIL discussions involving morality get blurry, fast. Special thanks to u kylo renfair u iglidante<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eating meat is immoral.\n","id":"22dbeafa-3ecd-4e7d-b809-e401c1cf6855"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>A main problem solved at the Constitutional Convention was inducing slave states, wary of domination by Abolitionist-oriented, higher- white population states, to ratify. The 2nd Amendment 3\/5 Compromise and the EC were all solutions that gave lower-populated slave states more power than their white populations merited. Retaining solutions to a non-existent problem now empowers a minority to abuse the majority through unmerited, unfair, power over the Executive Branch and US Senate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electoral college no longer works as it was intended by the founding fathers. The fact that it no longer serves this purpose suggests that it is no longer necessary.\n","id":"8e041d4a-7162-43a6-9945-475ad817b67e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>He was surprised and knocked out by the Tuskan Raiders and would have been killed if it were not for Ben Kenobi.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In \"A new Hope\" Luke is frequently in need of saving by other characters.\n","id":"d451c885-1e9c-48ed-afa7-1b89b7522d87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A functioning democracy depends absolutely on an informed citizenry. It's no secret that in the UK and US political engagement by the general public is at worryingly low levels. Apathy is the major factor here. Children should be taught the history of the political system under which they live, how it works and, most importantly, how they can involve themselves in it. Concretely, I think political classes should take the place of half of history classes because, while knowledge of history is vital, knowledge of the present is just as important. I don't think this would cause a stampede at the polls come election time because the apathy of the general public is the main enemy here, but, if people actually had a grasp of the issues that affect them, they are more likely to take steps to address those issues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think politics should be a mandatory class in schools\n","id":"320a9dc8-5b79-458e-af41-76696cf10136"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in Minnesota so i'll use their laws as an example. 609.065 JUSTIFIABLE TAKING OF LIFE. The intentional taking of the life of another is not authorized by section 609.06, except when necessary in resisting or preventing an offense which the actor reasonably believes exposes the actor or another to great bodily harm or death, or preventing the commission of a felony in the actor's place of abode. The part that i have a problem with is the following except when necessary in resisting or preventing an offense which the actor is reasonably preventing the commission of a felony in the actor's place of abode. I don't believe that i should have the right to kill another human being if i believe that someone has broken into my house to steal my t.v. I do believe that i should have the right to kill another human being when preventing someone from killing me first. Can you change my view that i should be able to kill someone for stealing my tv? EDIT Hey guys, thanks for the responses. One thing i do want to reiterate I am in favor of the right to defend oneself when you feel like your life is in danger. The thing that would change my mind is an argument that convinces me that this is a well written and thought out law. The way this law is written, it sounds like the following scenario could happen. Someone could break into my house and i could come to the reasonable assumption that my life is not in danger. the burglar is stealing all of my jewelry and tv, which is a felony. As a result of this, the State of Minnesota would allow me to kill this person for stealing my tv. EDIT 2 I will make this as clear as possible. I like the idea of castle doctrine. I do not like the following part of the clause in this minnesota statute preventing the commission of a felony in the actor's place of abode. convince me its ok to kill someone for stealing something from my house when i am not in any physical danger<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many states' Castle Doctrine laws provide too much leniency for property owners\n","id":"b5b4369c-9f63-4b56-82b0-30af804c2667"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently, Bill Gates said that technology will replace many routine jobs and lower skilled labor is in danger of having no prospects of having a job at all in the face of robots and software that can do the job better and at less cost This might lead to social unrest as those unable to get jobs will petition government to create make work jobs for them while those who hold jobs will resent paying in taxes the income for those make work jobs holders. However, the advent of genetic engineering GE will make it possible to up skill the workforce even before you are born. If GE can target genes that make you smarter or stay healthier then there will be a smaller starting gap between one another. Moreover, GE will allow most people to do high level work even as routine work is phased out by machines. Therefore, GE will solve the any job crisis that results from technological advancement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetic engineering will take care of the technology death spiral of jobs.\n","id":"11b6506f-d5fe-44b2-a16d-229ec2ba8274"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>Arbitrary factors determine whether an individual will actually be executed. According to Federal Judge Cormac Carney such a system is unconstitutional.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The death penalty contradicts the democratic principles of the US Constitution.\n","id":"1eb62ecd-4ddc-4849-a3f0-04c98160b92e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Vegan Alternative: Pain-free GM Animals?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans have no physical need to eat meat, its a personal choice. So for vegans, it is not a viable alternative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many meat alternatives that make altering animals in this way unnecessary.\n","id":"5886e55c-bd54-45ff-89e6-d170fbc97600"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>In the Me Too movement, the hashtag #WOCAffirmation was created by women of colour, who were not observing the boycott against Twitter because their point of view was ignored while choosing this as the method of protest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is harder to bring about meaningful change when the movement is split.\n","id":"0aa1c417-bea0-46bb-96f1-bffb4117036b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see people talking about how we're in a state where depression is more common than ever. I've seen articles blaming tons of sources on the millenial depression epidemic . My view is that it's all just BS. There's probably always been this many depressed people, but mental health research wasn't developed enough to properly diagnose or understand it. The Internet is also important as a way for people to be open about their depression, since anonymity and not having to use a facade let people release their true feelings about everything out there. I mean, war and famine are probably much more depressing than modern first world problems, right? RESOLVED Crippling student debt, low salaries and high prices are a very good reason for so many young people today to be depressed. I was wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There aren't more people with depression now than there used to. It's just that the Internet made people more open about it.\n","id":"beb7a1b1-55ea-4a32-a805-e5135e776f19"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every once in a while, I'd hear how a guy becomes more attractive when they reach late 20s or 30 year old because they gain confidence etc. While confidence does play huge part in attraction to females, but I think the real reason is because they lose baby fat on their face. While baby fat is attractive feature in females, for male it's not. Now some are born with lean face, some not so this does not apply to everyone. But when late bloomers lose it, all of sudden their features become more defined from jawline, cheekbone etc. This happens to some girls too, but tends to happen much earlier like lucky you women like when they reach 20 21, some later.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think some guys becoming more attractive in late 20s\/30 is not only because they gain confidence, but lose baby fat and their face becomes more defined\/manly.\n","id":"52c706f6-ddc4-4de7-b606-7910cb62f91a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NASA, Government funding for<|ARGUMENT|>If the government wishes to put public money into space research and exploration, then it should do so as a customer. In other areas of public life government increasingly commissions services from specialist private companies e.g. welfare or military supply, which bid in open competition for the work and accept some of the risks. This drives down costs, promotes innovation and efficiency, and ensures that the government\u2019s financial commitment is capped. Following the same model, if the state wishes to buy satellite data, transport a load to the International Space Station, or send a mission to Pluto, it should put the job out to tender from the private sector rather than building its own wasteful and enormously expensive infrastructure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the government wishes to put public money into space research and exploration, then it should do ...\n","id":"b096ff64-3462-4078-8ddc-481ab454a1fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Politicians' Second Jobs: Should They be Allowed to Keep Them?<|ARGUMENT|>State lawmakers around the U.S. have introduced and supported legislation that directly and indirectly helped their own businesses, employers or personal finances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having multiple jobs can create a conflict of interest for a politician.\n","id":"71e79796-e358-4f8c-a70c-49528ef0eeec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface this by saying I've never had or attempted to have a kid so perhaps this is one of those things you just don't know until it happens. I still don't understand why a miscarriage can cause people such psychological pain at the end of the day. Yeah I can understand being upset about it for a while but not YEARS. Months maybe but not as long as some people are. Here are some of my reasons Your life, as you are living now, really doesn't change. Yeah your POTENTIAL life is way different. But you never actually had that life to begin with. It's like someone saying they're going to give you money then at the end of the day they don't. Yeah you're sad but is your life on any different track really? You can't interact with a fetus. Yeah you can think about how awesome this kid is going to be but at the end of the day is it really all that different from losing your spleen? My spleens inside me, I can't talk to it but I'm not going to be sad just because I don't have my spleen anymore. I understand this is a gross over simplification but that's kind of the vein of logic I see The above reason is even more important the earlier in the pregnancy. Like you miss carried at one month? You practically didn't even know how can you be sad ? It's not like your life has changed drastically at this point. An important note, this is different from being sad from constantly mis carrying. That sadness results from an inability to do something not have that particular child. It's like being told you're going to get a puppy and then before you even get the puppy they go oh sorry it died . Yeah it's sad a dog died and specifically your future dog but is it really any more sad than that kid in Africa that just died? You don't know him either but you're not losing nights of sleep over it either. I'm sure hormones come into play somewhere but again I can't see the effect lasting for longer than a year honestly. Edit I'm getting a lot of posts saying things along the lines of what if they can't conceive again or they're worried about it etc. I would like to point out that I very clearly stated in the fifth paragraph in the original post that there is a difference between being unable to conceive and losing that specific child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"at the end of the day, it's dumb to get overly attached to an unborn child if a miscarriage occurs\n","id":"4485b5ec-6bfe-475b-8833-0d290f75339c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The entire point behind advertising clothes, or any good for that matter, is to make the item being advertised look as good as possible. Like it or not, attractive people make clothes look better. As a man, any magazine or advertisement showing underwear will have a male model that has a six pack is very good looking. Why? Because this man makes the article of clothing look better. Now, are some of the models modeling women's clothing TOO skinny? Perhaps. But it was the choice of the advertising agency to use this model because they believe that she makes the article of clothing look better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think women should complain about the people modeling their clothes being \"too skinny\" or \"too attractive\"\n","id":"8d3cb304-baf2-46b6-a43b-6d48a66ef4e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>ban alcohol<|ARGUMENT|>Governments are not there to be the mothers of citizens, but should allow people to freely live their lives as long as they do not hurt others. A government might have the wish to build a society that is obedient, productive and without flaws. This may also mean a society without alcohol, cigarettes, drugs or any other addictive substances. Such a society might have its benefits in a short term, but seen long term it has more unsatisfied individuals. With drinking alcohol responsibly no one is getting harmed; in many cases not even the individual, as it is actually beneficial for the health. A glass of wine per day is good for decreasing the risk of cancer and heart disease, scientists say.1 So if someone in society has decided that it is good for them for whatever reason possible to use a substance that impacts only them, the state should not prevent them from doing so. This is because the society has been made from the different individuals, which lead different lifestyles and therefore have very opposing opinions views on what freedom is. A society that is free and where individuals are happy is a society where individuals engage more and also give more back to the society. So if alcohol will make the people happy and then more productive, we should maintain status quo. 1 Bauer J., Is wine good for you ?, published 6\/4\/2008, accessed 08\/14\/2011<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state should keep alcohol legal in order to maximize citizens\u2019 rights.\n","id":"7d7aa2e3-a1c2-4f10-acbb-54e1528653e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a person who has spent my entire life in the United States, I am aware of and am supposed to follow table manners , a bunch of traditions where you have to hold utensils in a certain way, restrict body placements such as elbows not on the table, etc. to not be judged. I feel like fancy table manners are stupid for several reasons 1 They prevent me from fully enjoying my food. I constantly have to worry about being polite instead of having the freedom to eat however I want in a restaurant. 2 The rules were made up way before anyone here was born. Tradition and culture are important, but centuries old rules shouldn't have to constantly be applied and referenced to today. 3 It's rather pointless except for the fact everyone thinks good table manners are important, which makes it stupid because there is no benefit except for gaining the approval of others who only approve of it because of the standards set on them, if they weren't tradition no one would go out of their way to use table manners. 4 What exactly are the rules of table manners? If I asked all my friends and family what they thought table manners mean, everyone would have a slightly different answer because each family has their own set of rules and traditions. This makes it impossible to please everyone with your perfect table manners. x200B Now I think sanitation is still important when eating, so I am in no way proposing to get rid of plates cups napkins utensils. What I am targeting is the rules like Hold your fork exactly like this or Cut your food into small pieces first instead of biting it off that are super tedious and in violation of some all of my four reasons listed above.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The standard of having fancy table manners is stupid\n","id":"1e2099dd-7b09-4c2f-9bc8-3f4280a41a77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should individuals sentenced to life in prison be allowed to choose death instead?<|ARGUMENT|>The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that the Medical Board cannot discipline doctors who participate in executions, stating that the statutes providing for lethal injection are superior to ethical guides.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many U.S. states which practice capital punishment have laws forbidding sanctions against medical professionals participating in executions.\n","id":"9e6114d1-5081-4b5c-83a5-7f9939c89f6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>Vigilantes can not know what criminal's intentions are or how far they may be willing to go to avoid being caught. Consequently, vigilantes can put their life or their family's life in jeopardy by pursuing them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People may be inviting more harm when they decide to pursue the suspects involved in a crime.\n","id":"88d4595c-9f63-4504-bd4c-7d12ff11074f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Even though it went extinct, so did all hominid species except the homo sapiens of today. It was not due to their plant diet being insufficient for them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One hominid, paranthropus boisei, had around an 80% diet of tiger nuts not meat, which supported a large brain around 2.4-1.4M years ago\n","id":"799949d4-88e8-45ad-a385-28f85a4e55ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>The portrait of the Fat Lady refused to grant then-suspected mass-murderer Sirius Black access to the Gryffindor Tower when he broke into Hogwarts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hogwarts has numerous portraits whose occupants fulfill the roles of mobile surveillance cameras and alarm system.\n","id":"10729f62-6cee-41a0-b4ec-ad71c97c2bc4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should Self-Driving Cars Kill?<|ARGUMENT|>Saving the lives of passengers supports classism by determining that the lives of people who have the money to buy a self-driving cars are inherently more valuable than those who do not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is immoral for self-driving cars to deliberately favour one human life over another. If there are situations where they must, the only moral option is to choose arbitrarily\/randomly.\n","id":"b9730242-06fe-412a-a28a-e13e0109f1c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>If there is more than one god, then either these gods are bound by some other objective \"rules\" of the universe, which would mean that they do not answer the question of origins at all as other questions arise such as who created the \"rules?\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If there is not one god, then there are either no gods or more than one god.\n","id":"48fb0304-c390-4304-9ccd-aa3626cb29c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Too often I see people flashing their credentials in lieu of making an argument. Well, I'm a insert profession so I'm right and you're wrong. I think this type of response is degrading the quality of discourse throughout the world. I was recently discouraged by a PhD, nonetheless from accepting an invitation to participate in a public discussion about a topic I was interested in and fairly knowledgeable about because I was not a qualified expert. Regretfully, I heeded the discouragement and declined the invitation. Discussions about human issues are rarely satisfied by one discipline contributing to the conversation. For every fact about human genetics there is a slew of moral philosophical topics to be addressed. Conversely, big topics often draw upon facts in the real world. The soundness of one's argument is not necessarily invalidated due to not knowing specific related figures. The conversation should not end due to a temporary deficiency in one person's understanding or information. Relying on experts to disseminate all information unto us is irresponsible, lazy, and wasteful. Two minute sound bytes on the nightly news should not be sufficient to convince anybody of anything despite the credential that is attached to their name. It is wasteful because we have sunk so much energy as a species into compiling and making available swaths of information that to relegate the duties of communicating that information to a few choice channels is a disservice to the effort of those who make it widely available in the first place. In today's modern technological landscape, anybody can access any level of information in existence. An entire PhD program worth of information is at our fingertips at any given time. If the information being consumed is the same as those who go through accredited programs, why do we treat the self taught person as some ignoramus while viewing the accredited PhD as an elevated individual? In an offshoot of my main point, I think most PhD students have an extreme sense of entitlement and desire to hold power over others. The pursuit of information is not the sole goal they want everyone else to know they are pursuing information and hold them in high regard because of it. This is not to say that a PhD is a useless endeavor. In our current system, accredited college programs are the primary avenue for people to find jobs and make a living. These programs need accredited professors. While a regular joe may be just as competent, having a random person off the street teach a course would not go over well with the students paying thousands of dollars to attend. To my main point, while a prudent pursuit in today's economic climate, a PhD itself should not hold much weight in civilized discourse. While most PhDs are very knowledgeable in their field and perhaps in general , invoking one's credentials in a discussion is a cheap tactic that is too often accepted as the winning argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One does not need to be a certified \"expert\" in order to contribute.\n","id":"c2810c7c-fa92-4e82-ba0b-e1773be08799"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, for the uninitiated, the invisible hand is a term coined to describe the idea that the companies that make the products people want or that have the highest quality of product will succeed while companies that don't will fail. This seems to be a ridiculous idea to me, because it makes two basic assumptions that don't stand up to critic. 1 We, as consumers will always choose the best product. People regret their decisions. People make poor decisions. It's not possible for us to always buy what we want, so we settle. So wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the best marketed products will succeed? 2 Companies won't make money if they don't follow make the best product or offer the best service. This isn't the case. A clear demonstration of this is the fact that Comcast is still in business. They pretty much have a monopoly on internet connections in some areas of the United States, and around the turn of the century many businesses got away with horrible quality of products because they had a monopoly on their product ex. the meatpacking industry, the oil industry, the railroad industry. So doesn't the poor choices of consumers, aggressive marketing by businesses, and monopolies point to a deep flaw in the invisible hand argument? I will concede that in come industries, it is very good at regulating market ex. entertainment, fashion, food, etc but maybe it should be viewed as more as a guideline rather than as the seemingly ironclad rule I've seen it presented as? If I'm wrong about anything or am missing critical information, please let me know. I am a beginner in economics and I'm trying to learn. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The invisible hand isn't a valid argument in economics.\n","id":"49e590f5-b77d-4438-b6cc-f38c2ee92466"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Headmasters' portraits are painted long before the Headmaster dies, and are kept in a cupboard in the castle so that the Headmaster can teach their portrait to speak and act like them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hogwarts' past Headmasters and Headmistresses live on in their portraits in the current Headmaster's office.\n","id":"e3f7a33b-cfa3-4895-a479-a62ccb33b61f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Kamala was the first lawmaker to call for the resignation of the Homeland Security Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, as a result of immigration policy that has resulted in family separations at the US border.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kamala has embraced a high-profile role in confronting the Trump administration, making her an ideal candidate for the nomination.\n","id":"2a7094a8-f2aa-4ca4-95e8-93579e640a0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>It takes about 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, and about 660 gallons to make a pound of chicken. It only takes about 220 gallons to make a pound of tofu and 180 to make a pound of wheat flour. So a vegetarian diet conserves water<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Farming animals has severe impacts on the local environment due to its heavy resource use and impact upon the landscape.\n","id":"fff3af29-cce7-4e82-8f47-8278c5bca778"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Issues that affect trans women have often been neglected by the feminist movement. To meaningfully address this, it is important to include trans women, in 'women only' spaces, so that their voices can be heard during debates and discussions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Women-only\" spaces can provide a safe environment for women to discuss issues affecting them directly.\n","id":"c3c4212e-3c9b-4744-8f8a-e0313eba4a78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm going to use Bitcoin to refer to crypto currencies in general. I don't know the details of how they differ from each other, and for that matter don't have a good understanding of Bitcoin either. But here we go. So I often see Bitcoin touted as a replacement for regular money. Supposed advantages such as decentralization, immunity to counterfeit and theft, low to no fees, instant transaction, etc. are often brought up, but not fully explained. The way I understand it, it is mostly immune to counterfeit. Everyone or at least, some sort of more centralized hmmm, there's that word clearing houses keeps records of who has which coins, and coins or parts of coins have an ID that distinguishes them. However, I don't see how it isn't possible to try to pay for two things at once using the same coin, before the clearing houses have a chance to update each other's records. This isn't possible with regular money if you make two transactions at the same time, both are going to get deducted from your account because there isn't an idea of money having ID tags. This leads into another supposed advantage instant transaction. If transactions are really instant, then clearing houses obviously won't have time to update each other before a transaction is complete. You can't have both instant transactions and immunity to counterfeit. So how long is it going to take to update everyone? Does the entire world really have to be linked up in one giant Bitcoin network for the currency to function? Doesn't this sound like centralization? Obviously, regular money existed before the internet, and people managed to make transactions without having the inform the whole world that it happened. So lets talk about supposed decentralization. Bitcoin is definitely not perfectly decentralized there are clearing houses who keep all the records as opposed to every individual possessor of Bitcoins so there is already a degree of centralization. What happens if there is ever a disjointedness in the network? Are disagreements between clearing houses always reconcilable? Are any individuals going to get screwed over when the network re merges, and some transactions have to cancelled out in the records? What happens if all the records say a certain person whatever person means owns a certain coin, but that person in fact does not own that coin because of an offline transaction? With regular money, this is all trivial worst case you can hand each other pieces of paper, and voila, you are the new owner of some money. On the topic of network crashes, regular money has huge advantages in this area. At my federally insured bank, if all my money is somehow lost I get it all back. If someone steals my credit card, I can call the bank or credit company and have it cancelled. If a vendor doesn't send me the goods, I can call my credit card company and they will cancel the transaction. If someone steals my wallet full of cash, then sure I probably lose it, but how is this not equivalent to someone stealing my thumb drive full of Bitcoins? Quick note about transaction fees, since I think I'm making this post too long if there are any transaction fees for Bitcoin, then people are crazy for using it. I have credit cards that pay me for using them. Edit Thank you to the few people who had good answers. My view hasn't changed, but I did learn more about Bitcoin. To the people who just downvoted all my posts no matter what I said that isn't going to change my view. It just makes me think there are some jerk Bitcoin enthusiasts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bitcoin and its ilk is worse than regular money\n","id":"9129492c-d257-427b-8f6b-5f4a542bf4f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Foster kids already went through a lot. And what they need is rehabilitation. I believe a mother and a father role is important, i'm not saying a single parent can't be good at parenting but when it comes to foster they should be set in the most ideal situation possible. Being gay is something natural, but it's still something rare. It's out of the ordinary, not saying it's a bad thing at all. But foster kids know they are foster kids, so why put them is a rare situation? they might see it as why me ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a strong advocate for gay rights wherever I have to be one, if it's with family or in public, but I still don't support gay adoption.\n","id":"8d9ecdcf-5e42-4220-a71c-8def36330623"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humans be allowed to explore DIY gene editing?<|ARGUMENT|>There are already private companies that offer the possibility to explore one's history of DNA, raising big concerns around data protection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of DIY gene editing may exacerbate inequality in society.\n","id":"6997656f-217e-4dc3-8461-f85575be19ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Socialism, is it now irrelevant?<|ARGUMENT|>The fundamental assumptions of socialism, about class systems and the tensions between them, are both rapidly becoming relics of the past. An identifiable working class no longer exists as countries move towards flexible service-sector economies. Societies are also more meritocratic with the entrenched class systems all but broken down through rising prosperity, progressive taxation and welfare systems including universal access to secondary and higher education. These elements of the original socialist movement have arguably been so successful in changing society that they no longer have political power to motivate citizens to subscribe to socialist thought.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fundamental assumptions of socialism, about class systems and the tensions between them, are bot...\n","id":"3f670746-e95d-45e1-a1be-650b2a887ff7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>Creating political parties focused on animal rights is a slippery slope to demanding that animals have the same rights as humans<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unrealistic that a party focused mostly on animal rights will gain any serious traction in the political sphere.\n","id":"c25476a1-16f0-4a22-9024-ae12bc1b2a63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build an international space elevator?<|ARGUMENT|>A space elevator would deconstruct the psychological discontinuity between earth and 'outer space'. This will be essential to the normalization of interplanetary colonization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A space elevator will make the colonisation of other planets much easier.\n","id":"80a951c4-0571-408d-aeb9-01bd65c63776"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My experience has always been that liberals tend to be more protective of the environment. Conservatives seem to care more about business and the economy than protecting the earth. If money can be made on the XL pipeline, then who cares about that species of rare North Dakotan titmouse? If we're going to open this seaport, it's going to get polluted, perhaps irreversibly. That's the cost of business, according to most conservatives. Liberals are derisively called tree huggers, but there is something to be said for stewardship of finite resources. If we destroy our natural wetlands, they will never come back. It's not always about the almighty dollar, sometimes it's about quality of life for all living things, including ourselves. I'm pretty solidly against hunting of all sorts, but I make the largest exception for those who hunt for their own food and use as much of the animal as possible. I wish it wasn't necessary, but I understand overpopulation and know deer starve here in Wisconsin. I completely disagree with trophy hunting, the practice of guided hunts, and safaris. I will not budge on that one, so please don't make the argument that hunters conserve those species by thinning the herd. Outside of that, I'm really open minded. I've heard that conservatives actually do more good for the environment than liberals. I haven't seen it, but I'm willing to listen to evidence. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conservatives hate the environment.\n","id":"ea91f15a-cd53-4343-892a-5cac7659d272"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Politics has become an important part of ones social identity. With social media and other platforms of communication proliferating, people are increasingly taking to their keyboards to demonstrate their political prowess to their peers. With so many laypeople engaging in debate, politics has undergone a greater division. Many issues becoming polarised, as opposed to having a reasonable debates. In my experience, young left wing or social liberals are those who are too easily manipulated by the emotional content of some political rhetoric. They are afraid to adopt points of view which may paint them as un empathetic, uncaring, or selfish in the eyes of their peers. They are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly conscious of maintaining their status as altruistic, caring and empathetic as this without a doubt raises their social status among young people. This is not necessarily bad, but just the way it is. People are doing what works socially . So instead of having a position which is actually correct, they are more inclined to the one which feels correct or gives them access to the club that is for socially aware, progressive types . There are many examples where the more reasonable solution is overshadowed by the more enthralling, emotional argument, because it appeals to the majority of people and is something easily rallied for with slogans. As someone with more conservative views, I shy away from political conversation or adopt a position not true to mine. Not doing so would likely result in my peers shaming me, excluding me, rather than actually attacking my position I arrogantly assume this is because they actually don't know how . Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who are left-wing or social liberals are often morally vain. Many don't care for or understand the differing points of view, instead opting for the position which delivers the most socially beneficial result.\n","id":"d4c03455-13c9-4285-a9db-17698629e2b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The concept of predeterminism is often argued by invoking causal determinism, implying that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. In the case of predeterminism, this chain of events has been pre established, and human actions cannot interfere with the outcomes of this pre established chain. I view predeterminism as a philosophy that all events of history, past, present and future, have been already decided, including human actions. I don't really believe this predetermined universe was designed planned by a God or spiritual entity. I think that just following the cause and effect chain and events of the universe, it was inevitable that we all end up here in our exact state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe we live in a predetermined universe, therefore we don't have free will.\n","id":"50ce0a28-8c88-44dc-a517-44b4aee40a70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a theory that i've had for a while. There is something about our society, likely a combination of several things, that causes a lot of unhappiness. I figure it's got a lot to do with the spiritual void that was left behind when people started believing in Nihilistic spiritual concepts that they call atheism , leaving a lot of people with deep existential anxiety, as well as just being unable to keep up with and cope with the immense change that our society has undertaken over the past 300 years. We're not designed for the lifestyle that modern industrialised society influences us to have. The one day I found proof and now im sure of it. The best way to find happiness is to unplug from our society as much as possible. gt When an anthopologist interviewed over 2,000 Kaluli, he found that only one person exhibited the symptoms of clinical depression, despite the fact the Kaluli are plagued by high rates of infant mortality, parasitic infection, and violent death.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pre-industrial societies were much happier and more content than we are with all our technology, wealth and modern medicine. Our modern society is toxic.\n","id":"bdd712c1-16f9-48bb-aa2a-4892bff92777"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like most people on the left, before election day I was sure Trump would lose since I was certain he was a racist and a misogynist. But because he won, and the way in which he won, I now think we may have been wrong about him. Organizing my thoughts from before the election, they were something like this Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women and in general acted like a misogynist, and he and his campaign said racist things about many minority groups, including black people, Hispanic people, jewish people, etc. A candidate that the US public sees as a misogynist can't easily win an election since a majority of voters are women. And a candidate that is seen as a racist has a hard time winning as well since minority groups all together are a significant percentage of the population. And together, women and minorities make up a large majority in the US. If women and minorities see Trump as a sexual assaulter and racist, then he is not a politics as usual candidate for them. He would be a direct threat. Compare Trump to, say, Mitt Romney no one thinks Mitt is a racist or assaults women. So if those groups think Trump is those things, he should freak them out. He would be outside of normal politics . We saw evidence of Trump not being within normal politics when people in his own party disavowed him when his tape with Billy Bush came out. That kind of disavowal so close to the election is unheard of in US politics. And we saw Republicans admit and be horrified by Trump's racism, like Paul Ryan and others. And there was the Never Trump movement. That even Republicans saw Trump as outside normal politics seemed to surely indicate that women and minorities the targets of his racism and sexism would as well. Since such a candidate should be unacceptable to women and minorities, I was sure they would turn out in record numbers, and with record amounts of support for the Democratic side. I was somewhat surprised Trump was losing only by a little in the polls, and was sure the actual results would be a landslide for Clinton. Of course, I didn't expect 100 of women and minorities to vote against him, that's unrealistic, but I did expect a strong, noticeable shift. I am a member of one of the minorities Trump disparaged, and I was sure we would turn out far more than we usually do, to make sure he doesn't get elected. Then Trump won. After the initial shock and horror, I looked at the exit polls and other data, and I think that I and the left in general got it wrong about Trump As I said, a candidate the US sees as a racist and misogynist should not be able to win. But he did. That by itself suggests the public as a whole doesn't see him that way. Almost half of women voted for Trump. So did a third of Hispanic voters. Those numbers don't suggest either group was especially worried about Trump. And indeed, those numbers are about the usual amount of support the Democratic side gets from those groups. Likewise black voters voted about the same as they always do. And none of those groups showed high turnout rates. They turned out about the same as always, maybe even less. Again, this shows there is no sign of those groups being more concerned by Trump than other politicians. So what I thought before the election was simply wrong. On the whole, women and minorities don't see Trump as a special threat, something outside of normal politics . They don't see him as a sexual predator or racist. Some do, of course, but not enough overall to be even noticeable. Now, maybe women and minorities are wrong about Trump, but that seems very arrogant to think. So I can't help but listen to what women and minorities are saying, and accept that while Trump is far from a perfect person, he probably isn't a sexual predator nor a racist. He is within the range that women and minorities consider acceptable. He says some stupid things, to be sure, that everyone agrees on, but that's it. For the record, the only negative thing I believed about Trump that I am still sure of is his xenophobia, which still worries me. One possible answer to this that people have told me is, The US public does think he's a misogynist and a racist, but they care more about other things, like Hillary's emails or Trump's tax plan. That theory seems unlikely, since the polls show a business as usual voting pattern, within a few on all indicators of previous elections. Are we to believe that the anti racism and anti misogyny trends are perfectly balanced by Hillary's emails? Or that Trump's racism and sexual assaults are perfectly balanced by Hillary being kind of boring and untrustworthy? Too big of a coincidence. Furthermore, even if they do perfectly balance, I'd expect to see higher turnouts. But that didn't happen either. The anti Trump side simply showed no sign of special worry about him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We on the left were probably wrong about Trump's misogyny and racism\n","id":"3d853635-ea56-4ae0-9969-9ab786ce6b3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, so I'm a white straight male who doesn't support feminism. Not hating anyone who is a feminist but from my personal view feminism isn't needed anymore in modern civilizations. Wage gap doesn't exist or is wrongly understood women on average earns less than men, but it's the consequences of women's life choices I know rape is awful crime and I think should be punished with the highest punishment. Please don't ask me if I think it's the victim fault, because I strongly believe and takes it for granted that rapist is always responsible for this horrible crime. Domestic violence is also an awful thing. I support feminists in fighting with these crimes but I have one problem with domestic violence I don't see feminists talking about men who are victim of domestic violence. Of course men aren't that frequent victims as women but I think this problem should be addressed too. Never really understood the thin privilege or white privilege maybe because I live in Poland . Fat shaming is horrible, but I think we should encourage fatter people to lose weight as it can be unhealthy and dangerous for them I have lost 30lbs in last 6 months because I was overweight for years so I know how is it to be fat . I think period shaming doesn't exist or my town is so liberal 80k citizens and it's rather small but in my class girls aren't period shamed. Like they are talking about it with guys and nobody is laughing. I'm not religous but abortion is against my morality. I can understand abortion in some cases woman was raped and she got pregnant or she got pregnant as a result of other crime girl is underaged and got pregnant woman's life and health is in danger the fetus is damaged and will not likely survive the birth Abortion because you haven't use condoms or birth control pills is wrong for me. But the point is can somebody tell me why feminism is needed in countries such as USA? I would really like to hear problems which women face and I'm not aware of, or told me what is wrong in my thinking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think feminism isn't needed in civilized countries such as USA or Poland.\n","id":"6e3d6b1d-c169-4830-8a3c-d837343e1bd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This topic has been bothering me for a while, so I would like to . This is just an opinion, so correct me if I'm wrong. The reason why I feel this way is because I used to not like revealing clothing, and I still don't like it to this day. However, I used to believe that wearing revealing clothing was bad simply because I didn't like it and that it was frowned upon in society, along with other things that are deemed inappropriate for children. I will give links to the posts. I received comments saying that I should respect how other people want to express themselves, even if I disagree with it. Now that I think about it, these people were right. Wearing revealing clothing is freedom of expression, and although I don't like revealing clothing, I respect how others want to express themselves if it does not cause harm. However, that is not what bothers me. What bothers me about revealing clothing is that the problem with the logic that I mentioned above is that it gives a girl an excuse for her to be naked in a public setting. Being naked in a public setting is commonly frowned upon. However, I believe that if the logic doesn't apply to being naked in a public setting because it is frowned upon, then it applies to all revealing clothing for the same reason Revealing clothing is commonly frowned upon in society. I feel like the debate about revealing clothing is stuck between people who argue for freedom of expression and people who argue against said clothing because others don't like it, and I am struggling what to believe. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel like society imposes a double standard when it comes to wearing revealing clothing.\n","id":"e59a4ba4-27ee-4faf-add0-ba0967aa2a77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Some US states have outdated consent laws that do not allow consent to be revoked once granted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are still many unjust laws and practices that affect women in the US.\n","id":"9ca492fa-9993-43c1-bc99-2311b26a1dc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Interest based debt seems good for income equality in the short term because it gives people opportunities they otherwise would not be able to access. If I can't afford an income generating asset, or worse, assets that give me the foundations to go make money a place to sleep, etc , then I'm stuck. x200B But because debt is interest based, and lenders make money by being paid interest, this inherently makes the rich richer even as the poor get richer. This shows that debt ultimately perpetuates income inequality. x200B What am I missing? It's clear to me that if you want to get rich, loan money. But it seems that the only way to make money while still helping us have income equality, is to either sell a non financial good or service, or to invest. x200B x200B Other very messy thoughts lenders definitely make money debtors may make money. more risk, more reward, but still debted. either lenders need to lend to people who will definitely generate a return, or guidelines need to be made that governs interest rates. and debtors need to borrow money more smartly. overall though, in totality, does it aid income equality or hurt it? probably depends on what money is being borrowed for, and what the interest rates are. maybe only depends on if the borrowing is going towards high value generating stuff in which case lender might as well invest relative to interest rates. overall this seems to depend on whether interest accrual profit for lenders outpaces profit to debt ratio profit for debtors .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Interest based financing exacerbates income inequality.\n","id":"1cbc01cc-c419-4875-b486-69234815fb39"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>Cultural diversity is likely to reduce employee turnover by enticing a wider pool of candidates for its job vacancies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies are likely to retain and attract new talents if the organization has a sense of belonging.\n","id":"771bc407-530f-46ea-9c8d-a5b87c287963"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Due to the political divisiveness of the times, I see numerous political pundits and commentators saying that the US is heading towards a second civil war. Even on Reddit, I see tons of people discussing how people will start fighting in the streets and whatnot. However, this is just untrue and made as good click bait. Wealthy democracies rarely have civil wars, civil wars during the 21st century only usually happen in poorer third world countries with high ethnic tensions. Arab Spring countries had civil wars because of high corruption, poverty and food prices spiking, not political divisiveness like in the US. Even suggesting that a civil war could happen in the US, demonstrates a lack of geopolitical knowledge and tendencies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America is not headed towards a civil war\n","id":"08b0bca1-5d99-4049-9745-d3d8d604701a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>The Russian military developed ground based mobile autonomous robots that select, target and destroy without human interference only requiring human validation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Russia is developing robots that can potentially be transformed into AKMs.\n","id":"f88db145-5d02-4cb8-a249-d2ed889d7f64"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>The signers of the Declaration of Independence were also considered traitors by the British. Having their statutes in public doesn't represent an insult to the British either.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the case of treason, one could say the same of every American monument, so they are monuments honoring the betrayal of the British.\n","id":"efbbf2e7-24f2-4229-8c4a-e65a9b4d373b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Anarcho capitalism is an extreme belief system by just about any definition. Some libertarians are anarcho capitalists, but not the majority. Since anarcho capitalist views are so extreme they are easily seen as crazy to most people no government, no drivers license, no regulation whatsoever, live in the woods by yourself, etc. Deregulation is much different from no regulation, and less government is much different from no government. But widely across internet discussions, on the media, and in everyday in person conversation, people ascribe the more extreme views to all libertarians. I believe they do this in order to dismiss all of libertarian thought, and the threat of the Libertarian Party to the Republican and Democratic parties politically. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When people ascribe anarcho-capitalist views to all libertarians they are attempting to dismiss all libertarian ideas and beliefs as crazy\n","id":"ee544cd5-e009-479c-921e-fe2403a43aea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we exist within a Simulated Reality?<|ARGUMENT|>The simulation model has two extra claims compared to the orthodox scientific model: 1. The existence of 'things' outside our world. 2. That these 'things' include 'something' that created our world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Occam's Razor suggests that we do not exist within a Simulated Reality.\n","id":"549278ef-4222-4d10-9fb0-7e39edd102d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>People tend to sexually objectify each other according to standards of beauty set by society - those who don't meet these standards are likely to be frowned upon, translating in less acceptance for the public nudity movement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public nudity might lead to even less acceptance, especially for people with unusual birth marks, scars and other problems.\n","id":"8b57410f-413f-42f6-a6de-44734db75ff2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically my issue is with the practice of \u201cit\u2019s not what you know, but who you know\u201d being an actual factor in hiring a candidate sometimes a major one . I see it as an unfair advantage that leads to unqualified candidates getting much more consideration for no reason. I became greatly frustrated by this after me and few colleagues were discussing college days and the internships we had. I found that I had a dramatically different experience in finding an internship despite Going to a better school Having a higher GPA Had an extensive portfolio of side projects I took part in to learn current languages I mentioned my stressful internship search my university required internships to graduate and they just mentioned they didn\u2019t have a bad search at all. I then also found out they all had close family members holding management positions at the companies they interned for. I am likely being irrational out of frustration, but this damn well seems like I got punished in my job search for growing up in a low income low skill environment. TL DR Internal references networking through friends and family is unfair and should be prohibited as it leads to a companies losing out on better candidates.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Internal references\/networking through friends and family is unfair and bad for the hiring company.\n","id":"a5019a16-e83e-4c60-b827-af6642bc1b2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I was in high school, it was continuously stressed that the individual had no cap on their freedom in college, for lack of a better explanation. I was told time and time again that students were able to eat in class, or sleep, or play on their laptop, but I am now in my senior year and have realized more than ever that these things are not true in the least. Professors care more than it appears. I personally find it disrespectful to attend class and not give the professor the undivided attention they deserve, and if you don\u2019t believe me, let me know how they react when you spend class time playing on your phone and then wonder into their office at the end of the semester in search of extra credit. Although I believe professors deserve undivided attention from the students during class time, I do not believe that students should be required to attend class and forced to watch their grade suffer with each absence. First and foremost, if a student is able to regularly miss classes and still pass the course, they are either qualified to move on given their knowledge in the subject, or the professor should step their game up, as the content is obviously too easy. Furthermore, college students know better than anyone that life is not a walk in the park everyone has their own shit to deal with, and sometimes it really is inconvenient to attend class. College students pay tens of thousands of dollars each school year, why should they not be allowed to skip a class or two if they want? Some professors I have had in the past have given two free skips, where the attendance grade is not lowered until the third skip. If a student misses a class where there was a quiz or an important announcement made and they have no \u201clegitimate\u201d excuse, it\u2019s completely on them and they should be given no special treatment. Besides, depending on total enrollment price, each class missed could be a couple hundred dollars down the drain. But maybe i\u2019m wrong. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Attendance should not count towards the final grade in a college course.\n","id":"58f26f72-3018-4c61-a24b-22034c47cce8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>1 Income Trump has made the size of his fortune a centerpiece of his presidential campaign, implying that it\u2019s a measure of his success as a businessman. He has also correctly noted that the income shown on his tax returns isn\u2019t a reflection of his total wealth. Even so, income is a basis for assessing some of the foundations of any individual\u2019s wealth and would certainly reflect the financial wherewithal of the businesses in which Trump is involved. After Fortune\u2019s Shawn Tully dug into Trump\u2019s financial disclosures with the Federal Election Commission and an accompanying personal balance sheet his campaign released, he noted in March that Trump \u201cappears to have overstated his income, by a lot, which could be the reason he has so far tried to avoid releasing his returns.\u201d Tully said that Trump apparently boosted his income in the documents by conflating his various businesses\u2019 revenue with his personal income. Trump didn\u2019t respond to Tully\u2019s assessment, but he could clear up all of that by releasing his tax returns. 2 Business Activities Trump has long claimed that his company, the Trump Organization, employs thousands of people. He has also criticized Fortune 500 companies for operating businesses overseas at the expense of jobs for U.S. workers. Trump\u2019s returns would show how active he and his businesses are globally and would help substantiate the actual size and scope of his operation. 3 Charitable Giving Trump has said that he\u2019s a generous benefactor to a variety of causes especially war veterans even though it\u2019s been hard to find concrete evidence to support the assertion. Other examples of major philanthropic largess from Trump have also been elusive. Trump could release his tax returns and put the matter to rest. 4 Tax Planning There\u2019s been global attention focused on the issue of how politicians and the wealthy use tax havens and shell companies to possibly hide parts of their fortunes from authorities. If released, Trump\u2019s returns would make clear whether or not he used such vehicles. 5 Transparency and Accountability Trump is seeking the most powerful office in the world. Some of the potential conflicts of interest or financial pressures that may arise if he reaches the White House would get an early airing in a release of his tax returns. For the last 40 years, presidential candidates have released their returns. Trump, of course, has portrayed himself as the un candidate, the guy who bucks convention. But disclosing tax returns is a valuable political tradition that\u2019s well worth preserving. Totally agree with the above stated points, all taken from this article EDIT Was not originally 500 characters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump should release his tax returns\n","id":"77d8638b-d04a-47fc-a87e-2657b802706f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's been a lot of discussion over whether SCOTUS should allow proceedings to be filmed and live broadcast, even Kagan has come out in favor of it, but I'm against it. People have argued that it would make the court more accountable to the people, but I don't think the court should be held directly accountable to the people. By design they're accountable to the law they aren't elected and their rulings aren't easily overturned by elected officials. People also argue that it will make citizens feel more engaged in the process, but the process is somewhat inaccessible by design. The Court's decisions aren't based on feelings, but on scholarship regarding the law, and their decisions are already available and easily comprehensible by anyone who's taken the time to study the law. They're dealing with complicated issues not easily broken up into sound bites, and it's a disservice to expect our justices to be fair justices and talking heads. Putting cameras in Congress hasn't helped discourse there it's only increased partisanship and grandstanding. Our Courts shouldn't devolve to the level of reality TV show. Besides which, the audio of the proceedings is already available to the public. Anyone who's interested can find it. If people aren't finding it, they weren't interested to begin with. And finally, SCOTUS hearings are the least important part of their process. The important part is the weeks and months they spend preparing for those hearings, considering the issues and planning relevant questions. Airing the hearings can only increase the importance of the hearings themselves, which will give too much weight to the most superficial aspect of the proceedings. But I often feel like I'm the only liberal Democrat who thinks this way. So come, , do your work Edit I now think we should hastily animate oral arguments to help clarify the movement in the room and release them at the same time we release the audio recordings now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"SCOTUS should continue to not allow cameras in the court\n","id":"9f640b3a-698d-4eb0-8c7b-94640126bad2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>Neighbourhood watch groups are an example of a type of vigilantism, as they are organised groups, without formal legal authority, that do not resort to violence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Broken Windows Policing include actions such as neighbourhood watches, community clean ups and calling the police when something suspicious happens.\n","id":"b8fc56fb-4cc9-44dc-8317-7410ab743035"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that people are becoming to offended by words, completely disregarding context, motivation, and value of those words. I've run into, and heard of people who become offended by the words they hear in a conversation, without actually knowing the context of the conversation. Things like someone saying, Yeah he called him a nigger and things escalated pretty quickly Only hearing one word of the sentence, some go ballistic, instantly stereotyping that person based on a perversion of what they were actually trying to say. Now I understand that there are times where this would actually be unacceptable, like at a Black Tie event or fancy restaurant and so on. But on a sidewalk talking to a friend? Surely you can speak you mind there as long as you are being respectful by keeping a low volume. One example that happened to me was when I was walking with a friend and I called him a faggot. I must of said it loudly and for that I agree I am at fault, I should of kept just a talking volume , but we quickly had a middle age women run over and lecture us on the harm of the F word . As a Bisexual, I found it almost funny. She doesn't know my views, she doesn't know what else I said, she knew nothing of me. Just that I said faggot so apparently I was homophobic. But she was offended, offended on behalf of the minority I'm apart of . I think these people have no business being offended at the words being said, and I would also like to say that I personally don't see a problem with either word being said. The more the word is used, the more it ends up being separated from it's original meaning, and the less power that word has. So,  s Offensive words should be ignored without context, and should even be used to break their power, such as what is happening with the word faggot .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are to offended by words, and that offensive words should be used, to break their power.\n","id":"1f1e1abb-161b-48c5-aede-2b1be824c4f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>Many believe the body positivity movement has been co-opted, now alienates the people it was designed to encourage, and promotes the idea that one has to be a certain size to be considered 'acceptably fat<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the language of body positivity is coupled with images of conventionally attractive people, this implies that only conventionally attractive people can be positive about their bodies.\n","id":"066781aa-1de4-4b6b-ae04-8c25655e8683"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In today's society I can only speak for the US since that's where I live men have little to no defense to a rape accusation if they truly are innocent. Rape is the only crime I can think of where if it does go to court, the man is usually presumed to be guilty until proven innocent even though the legal system should in theory work the opposite way. Let's say I hookup with a girl consensually but after the fact the girl regrets it. Or I have sex consensually but the girl later threatens to publicly accuse me of rape in order to either get back at me for something unrelated or to blackmail me into doing or giving her something else. Even though falsely accusing someone of rape is technically illegal, the girl would know that the chance of actually getting in trouble for it is pretty slim since proving malicious intent is incredibly difficult. In this case, what defense does the guy have? It'll likely be just his word against hers and most of society will lean towards believing the girl. In order to provide some form of defense in these cases, I believe I should secretly record all of my sexual encounters both random hookups or sex with a girlfriend and everything in between without the girl knowing I'm doing so. This way I can use this recording as evidence of my innocence in a court of law should it ever escalate to that level. Another advantage of this recording would be to prevent a public false rape accusation in the first place. If a girl threatens to publicly accuse you of rape, you can tell her about this recording after making all appropriate backup copies to dissuade her from going public. This is advantageous because even if you are able to prove your innocence in court through other means, simply being accused of rape can be disastrous to your life. People you know might think you did rape the girl, you could lose your job, and if anyone in the future ever searches for you on Google you'll forever be associated with a rape charge even when you weren't found guilty. The last advantage I can think of is that you can use this recording to prove cases where the girl rapes the man. Even though it's false, many people tend to be believe that men cannot be raped. So if this does ever go to court, the man has a small chance of actually winning. With the recording, his chances go up because the recording will the judge jury hear see exactly what happened rather than rely on each other's words and pre existing biases. Common rebuttals I'm anticipating 1 Recording another person without their knowledge is illegal and or immoral I live in a one party consent state as with most other US States so doing so is legal here. Even if it was illegal, I'd much rather be found guilty of that crime than rape. Also even though this evidence would be inadmissible in court, I could use it to potentially deter the girl or prosecutor from publicly accusing me in the first place. As far as morality or ethics goes, I personally don't consider this to be immoral. Even if I did, I'd much rather act immorally and retain my freedom then be moral and potentially spend a significant portion of my life in prison as an innocent man. 2 You don't have to worry about being falsely accused of rape since statistically there's an extremely low chance of this occurring. You're much better off worrying about other things While this is true, you never know if you're that statistically outlier or not. Unless there is a 100 guarantee not 99 or 99.99 that this will never occur to me, I believe it's better to be safe than sorry if I'm going be involved in sexual activity. Also recording a sexual encounter secretly is extremely easy to do, just turn on a hidden camera or tape recorder in your bedroom if you believe there's any chance a girl or anyone for that fact might be coming over. Takes not even 20 seconds. If you're going over to her place, then turning on your phone's audio recorder is sufficient and also takes only a few seconds. 3 Don't have sex with anyone you don't fully trust Sometimes people you trust can break that trust. What if I've been having sex with my girlfriend, who I trust, and then one day I decide to break up with her. There's a small chance she can falsely accuse me of rape to get back at me. If it's a new girl, then you might not fully know if she's crazy or not until either it's too late or you decide to wait a long time for sex. What if I wanted to have consensual sex with random girl I met at a bar? Under this logic, one night stands aren't possible if I also wanted to protect myself legally. 4 If the girl finds out you've been recording her, she's not going to be too happy If she finds out, there's nothing she can do except leave me unless you live in a two party consent state . I'd much rather risk losing a girl than risk having no defense and potentially spending 5, 10, 15 years in prison. As I mentioned above, even though the risk of spending time in prison innocently is incredibly small, if you do happen to be that one unlucky guy then the consequences are gargantuan. Girls will always come and go, but you only get 1 life which I don't intend spending it in prison . 5 In cases of false rape accusations, there are other ways to gather evidence The only ways I can think of is either baiting the girl into saying she'll falsely accuse me of rape on audio video or getting some form of documented confirmation after sex that the sex was entirely consensual whether it be a text or verbally on audio video . The problem with these 2 ways is there is some level on control on the girl's side of whether you obtain that evidence or not. Secretly recording a sexual encounter gives the man 100 control over the collection of the evidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should secretly record audio, video, or both all of my sexual encounters to provide evidence in the off chance I'm falsely accused of rape\n","id":"7de5a747-cca9-4956-8af2-652edd9f1731"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>It is easier for nurse's aide to clean a circumcised man, but it is nearly impossible to clean a non-circumcised man.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Male circumcision allows for greater ease in completing hygiene routines later in life.\n","id":"042cb358-1b17-4168-a41f-564e08fa7b96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Whitewashing In Hollywood: Should It Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Film is an art form. It is up to the artist to properly express their vision. It is up to the consumer to decide if they want to support that vision. No consumers equal no art.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Audiences can stop supporting movies that whitewash characters, therefore minimizing the revenue and overall incentive for creating such productions.\n","id":"082641ca-963a-4729-9fad-835e6230428a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While Ronda has been destroying every opponent insane enough to stand in front of her 11 0 MMA, 5 0 UFC , and is an incredible athlete, she hasn\u2019t fought even close to the calibre of athlete that Mike Tyson, Roy Jones or many male MMA fighters face. The talent pools are simply deeper and more developed in men\u2019s combat athletics than in women\u2019s. Men\u2019s MMA has enjoyed a larger platform, with further global reach than women\u2019s MMA and combat sport in general, aside from perhaps judo and kickboxing. The money, marketing and talent search has consistently been wider and farther looking. Furthermore, and perhaps ironically, because of this \u201csmaller pond\u201d scenario, no one has tested Ronda in a manner that can be compared to some of the wars the other side has been through. We can\u2019t truly assess her \u201cgrit\u201d.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ronda Rousey should not be compared to Mike Tyson, a \u201cprime Roy Jones Jr.\u201d or even male MMA fighters.\n","id":"a334fa5f-8114-4697-b0d2-752e5f526bda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Why do liberals want to make people feel bad about their privilege rather than trying to uplift people so that everyone is privileged? Why not focus on the underprivileged people? The whole concept is all about making people feel guilty for something they weren't responsible for. The fact that the whole concept is based on you can't see this because you have privilege is also a problem this makes it impossible to disprove the concept, rendering it meaningless. It used to be a good thing to have privileges Driving is a privilege, not a right. Now, instead of focusing on giving privileges to everyone, liberals want everyone to lose their privileges. The liberal privilege discourse is explicitly about bringing people down rather than lifting people up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Check Your Privilege\" puts the focus on the wrong group.\n","id":"991099a0-9e0a-4c21-9e31-012611cd618d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Constitutions Should Not Give Special Recognition To Minority Groups<|ARGUMENT|>The purpose of the constitutions is to guarantee the rights, but the prop can\u2019t take the definition as a factual confirmation that rights are protected completely simply by having a constitution. We explained the possibility of minorities not getting recognized as existing in the country, disabling the acquisition of constitutional rights. Evidence confirming our claim were provided, but were not given appropriate attention by Prop., the problem of lack of recognition was fully ignored so far. Another example on the subject is the status of the Roma people in Romania. They are not specially recognized under the Romanian Constitution as a separate minority and are not allowed to work regardless of the determination and qualification, leading to poverty, prejudice and eventually segregation. The Roma people are also facing horrible conditions in Greece as well; they are completely ignored and unprotected in this country. Many of them are not even given the citizen status even though they reside there and having no other option, some are forced to change their cultural identity and declare themselves as Greeks in order to get their basic rights protected under the constitution. This clearly proves how the lack of SR in the constitution could result with the phenomenon of \u201cmodern assimilation\u201d forcing minorities to give up on their culture and heritage in order to survive. Concerning the prop. claim that judicial protection without SR is sufficient: We believe that the courts can\u2019t protect the rights of a minority that is not recognized as existing. Even if this is not the case, the example of South Africa clearly shows how the constitution stood strong against sectionalist legislature, while the courts were the first one to be corrupted. Finally, it is in the minority\u2019s best interest to have rights guaranteed by the constitution rather than going through lengthy and expensive trials to affirm each and eve<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lack of special recognition disables the acquisition of constitutional rights\n","id":"5dba2f02-3a5e-439f-b4ba-faa603a38993"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>They are blustering, buffoonish, dishonest, folks who are still salty about the fall of their great empire. They know they will be wiped off the map if they start a war with the West. Even their nuclear bombs aren't a advandtage as we have more of them, and in much better quality. Poland on its own could probbably handle the Russian mlitary, I mean, the Ukraine has not been defeated yet which really puts into perspective the weakness of the Russian military. Europe on its own outmatches Russia like a rhinoceros outmatches a goat. If the USA gets involved, Russia stands absolutely no chance not even in the slim possibility that China decides to aid them somehow slim possibility because China is actually quite friendly with the nations of Europe . Even if Russia could somehow invade, they would have no chance of occupying for very long. You need an insane number of soldiers to hold down an area with a population of 500 million people, even if most of the population does not participate in a likely insurrgency. Russia required 150 soldiers for every 1000 people in Chechenya which has a population of 1.3 million people. The rate of insurrgency will be similar in Poland and other Eastern European countries along with the Balkans and the Medditerean. They can barely hold onto Chechenya much less the small piece of the Ukraine they stole, how can they hold on to Europe? Russia sees Europe as customers for their oil barons, not as a target that must be enslaved or exterminated. Russia is an economic bully using military threats to scare the people they are trying to sell to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There will be no war with Russia\n","id":"05bd8abf-e40a-40ae-855d-4e694085c344"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cigarettes should be banned<|ARGUMENT|>In the US, it is predicted that if smoking continues at the current rate among, 5.6 million Americans younger than 18 die prematurely from a smoking-related illness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Death from smoking is their own fault and helps limit population growth\n","id":"a2c40c1b-30b7-4642-96f4-d4801737bd28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>There is reason to believe that Scientology may have been founded to provide financial gain for L.R. Hubbard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some religions appear to have been designed largely to accumulate wealth and status for their creators.\n","id":"e486823a-a8ed-4b24-9d19-d9e42c1bc81d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We live in a world full of information and misinformation. Some of it intentionally so, and some of it unintentionally so thats lately just quietly retracted maybe with a small footnote at the bottom of the more sensational stories. This is a big problem however the bigger problem I think is us. We look for confirmation of our own bias and for the most part haven't been trained to look down on that behavior. For example a little over a year ago a bill was put in the senate about veterans benefits and some in my circle were asking for sources on whether it was all good or just some sort of republican trap. I pointed out that bills are public documents that we can all freely access and read and was told almost uniformly Yeah but they're hard to find, a long read and written weird, I prefer just getting the cliff notes from the news. We've become a people that wants everything condensed down, almost no one bothers to jump to multiple news sources about an issue or look into the sources those news outlets are using as the basis for their articles. We especially don't do this if the news is something we agree with as we just take it as outside validation. However, we're subjecting ourselves to being misled and being a poorly informed populous. I think a lot of the vitriol and dissent would go away if we each committed ourselves to actually educating ourselves on the matters that we're allowing ourselves to be so passionate about. There are people with deep feelings about the estate tax that have never actually personally looked at what it is and how it's applied but will levy opinions about those that oppose their view on it. You also have people still referring to specific hate crimes as actual events even though they've later been proven to be fabrications, because only certain sources report that bit and of course they don't personally seek out the information. I believe if we fostered a culture of both educating ourselves on issues and using multiple sources of information to develop views on issues and objective grounding on factual events we'll all be better off and a lot of the divisiveness would go away. In the meantime we remain a people susceptible to being messed with through media because we don't bother.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The majority of the blame we attribute to media for baiting, or misleading in order to get clicks\/views falls on the consumers.\n","id":"93550084-9019-4c8d-a49d-fdfd94739ada"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a humanist, more broadly I also consider myself a pan humanist. Like anyone, I see a lot of problems in the world, occasionally becoming mortified at things people will do to one another. Honestly this is something that has bothered me for an extremely long time. Let me start with a common thing and only somewhat unrelated thing I've noticed Some Atheists view Religion at the center of the world's problems, and despite me not being religious myself, I've never found that that argument has much basis. Fanaticism in religion does certainly lead to many problems. But atheism in China also led to the brutal suppression of religious freedom as well. The same thing can be said of a number of ideologies . Republicans vs. the Nationalists in Spain. Nazis vs. Communists in Germany. Communism vs. Islamism vs. any number of other things in Afghanistan. Italian Nationalism vs. Austrian Imperialism during the 1800s. Corporatism and Imperialism vs. Islamism in Iran. The Patricians vs. Populists in Rome. The Reformation vs. the Catholic Establishment in Germany. And that's just the stuff off the top of my head. That certainly again isn't to say that there aren't things worth fighting for, and that we can expect everyone to be great all the time. I know that bad situations can come about, and it may sometimes seem that violence is the only answer. But When we associate ourselves with an ideology, and treat it like a law in regards to how others must also live their lives, we run a very real risks of causing things to escalate. It puts thing on the fast track to violence. Ideologies can be good, that's for certain as well. The agenda of the Shriners, for example, is one of the most noble on the planet. But people on r Socialism were pretty quick to embrace the idea of an armed revolution just by being in a crowd of like minded individuals who believe in a strict adherence to a code even if it's strictly economic . People on r Altright are were really no different. Many on r The Donald also had a hand to play in what happened in Pizzagate. People get so stuck on their on views they never consider if they're taking it too far. It's what Trump wants, so it must be correct or It's what Trump wants, so it must be incorrect are two sides of the same coin. Horseshoe theory, in essence. The mindset of something being right just because we believe in an overarching set of values limits our ability to think freely and rationally as people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Strict Adherence to Ideology is the Root of a lot of the World's Problems.\n","id":"d0073e71-3ba6-401c-ada5-d99db210b7e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>In investigating a hypothesis, there is always a margin of error. In scientific research, this margin of error most often 5% is preset to determine when a result, until falsified, can be considered evidence. This means that even if you perform research in the most stringent of settings, you will have 5% false positives i.e. falsehoods retained as evidence. So by that factor alone some evidence could virtually be found to support any hypothesis, regardless of truth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some evidence can be found to support virtually any hypothesis, including the existence of God. However, truth must accurately describe and predict all the data. The hypothesis \"there is no god\" accurately fits all of the available data, whereas \"God exists\" does not fit all of the available data.\n","id":"beb1496e-2520-41b9-b04f-59dba6fdf44c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Set Prices for Goods and Services?<|ARGUMENT|>If prices are allowed to increase when production costs increase, at least the good or service will continue to be produced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the government sets a price below production costs, people will stop producing this good or service.\n","id":"de2dd9e8-c6f3-4ac8-b7d3-fb1b43226e73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should fracking be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Long term loss of sleep is associated with hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression, heart attack, and stroke.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lack of sleep is hugely detrimental to people and society.\n","id":"8b33c228-865a-4074-a5c5-5f0b4967c3fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Citizens United Was Wrongly Decided<|ARGUMENT|>A right to freedom of speech ensures that discussion and debate among people with different perspectives and positions occurs, which is needed for a deliberative democracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People have free speech rights for a variety of reasons.\n","id":"017344d5-8a38-4ec0-a3f0-f3b1c0f958f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By this question I mean I have always felt that in the 44 years since Roe vs.Wade the pro choice and pro life camps have stuck to their guns. I feel people who are pro life will not be able to become pro choice. And people who are pro choice will not be able to become pro life. My main point is people are so stuck in their views and and unwilling to compromise that abortion will always be an issue. I feel it will never be solved and even if a government enacts harsh anti abortion laws, that won't stop a person from finding a way to get an abortion. I just don't understand why one side wants to win when in reality they will never truly win. Please help <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think anyone will ever win on the issue of Abortion\n","id":"0ca6b387-6893-4e24-a62b-7a6decc84357"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Greece should default on its debt and return to the Drachma.<|ARGUMENT|>A Greek default will leave tremendous shockwaves across the Eurozone. Investors will instantly become wary of default in Portugal, Spain, Italy or Ireland, particularly given the sudden nature of the Greek default. Consequently, huge volumes of capital will flow out of these countries and into other more secure ones like Germany and the Netherlands. 1 This will, in turn, heighten speculation about the danger of default of other Eurozone nations. Speculation of default is particularly dangerous because it drives demand for government bonds down. This leads to the interest payments on government bonds rising which in turn raises the interest rates governments need to pay on their outstanding debt. The new, higher payments governments must make on their debt increases their budget deficit % GDP ratio, thus making it more likely that the country will actually default. We thus see how increased fears about the future of Italy, Portugal, Spain and Ireland that will arise from a Greek default, will cause big problems and will put even more strain on the ECB and primarily Germany in providing financial support. 1 Kapoor, Sony, \u201cViewpoints: What if Greece exits euro?\u201d, BBC News, 13 July 2012,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Greek default would have a negative domino-effect on other Eurozone countries.\n","id":"cf1e8d63-387f-4ac9-9313-bd8333bb36f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that chemical warfare and other WMD's may have the capacity to inflict more damage more quickly, but assuming a fixed number of people are killed in a conflict, it doesn't seem like it should really matter how they were killed. Chemical weapons kill indiscriminately but isn't it true that conventional bombs and stray gunfire do so as well? I don't see why chemical warfare represents a red line for the United States or the UN. Over the past couple years 100,000 people have been killed in Syria with little reaction from the world. Then when several hundred are possibly killed in a chemical attack, suddenly the world gets upset. In my view, the means are less relevant than the end result thousands and thousands of deaths. Shouldn't the red line for response be tied to the number of casualties and the overall emotional suffering of the people, not the means by which it is inflicted?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chemical warfare is just as bad as conventional warfare. A death is a death.\n","id":"a7c92d2c-b643-471b-b4b3-5ab5ef04ba2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not american, but I have been really worried about the rise of the alt right both there and in my country, and trump being president really makes me worried for the worlds future. I think its a disaster for pretty much every minority in the united states, for the climate of the entire planet, and it has given rise to so much hate from all political sides around the world. this view will likely never change, but I am obviously only getting one side of the story since I frequent anti trump subreddits, youtube channels, etc. but I do believe there must be some good his presidency does for us as well, its just hard for me to see. change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think trump is hasn't done anything positive in his entire presidential career\n","id":"dd0c058a-8e7f-4d86-a3e0-aab638e618a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democracies adapt to improve?<|ARGUMENT|>Spain is a mature democracy within the EU, yet it has many tensions not just Catalonia . It is unlikely to cause a Civil War but a general strike is akin to rebellion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The tensions between full freedom and citizens' responsibilities are characteristics of a healthy democracy. Examples would be gun laws, the rights to privacy, common limitations on free speech incitement to violence etc..\n","id":"d5ff2302-69db-4480-8195-cf78403689fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's often said that linearity provides an opportunity to tell a better story and to have more focused setpieces and density of content. But for the former, I'm very much a gameplay first person Nintendo trained me on that . As for the latter, I don't really believe that's a factor that's inherently tied into the linear to open scale. I believe that open world games can have just as good setpieces and content density as linear games. Sure, it's easier to implement those two aspects into linear games, but it's not impossible to bring those into open world games. Another advantage that people state for linear games is that they have a better difficulty curve. But what if I want to go straight to the hard stuff first? The element of choosing how difficult you want each successive experience to be trumps forcing you to experience things in a certain order in the name of you progressively learning the mechanics and how to deal with enemies. As for an example, it's really hard to find examples where open world and linear games are equal in design other than openness. But there's a very clear example in my mind, and that's The Legend of Zelda series. Up until very recently, the Zelda series was moving towards linearity. The kicker is and I'm confident precisely no one will disagree , that Zelda was moving towards linearity without improving its story, puzzles, or combat to compensate . The story was still a stock Hero's Journey, the puzzles were still use arrow on switch and use bomb on rock , and combat was still a button mashing affair with no real depth beyond swing sword to win. The contrast and simulatenous lack thereof between Ocarina of Time and Skyward Sword makes this the most apparent OoT lets you go everywhere in the world and lets you map out things to return to when you get the right items. SS's surface areas are just hallways, and you have to complete dungeons to get to new areas. Both games have exactly the same quality of story, puzzles, and combat, yet OoT is still considered one of gaming's golden standards, while SS is considered one of Zelda's weakest games, even by people who like it. Heck, Breath of the Wild proves that an open world game can have better setpieces and other design than a linear game. Is there anyone who thinks SS's puzzles were better than BoTW's because the former was linear? No? I'm not saying that I hate linear games. Heck, I believe Super Mario Galaxy, with its jump to linearity from the exploration of 64 and Sunshine, works with its linearity very well Even Mario 3D World, despite lacking Galaxy's fantastic atmosphere, arguably has level design that's just as good, if not better. I'm saying that all else held equal setpiece design, combat design, etc. an open world game will be better than a linear game . I acknowledge that there has to be a reason why linear games have some inherent advantages over open world games as there is a growing backlash towards the latter, so .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"From a pure gameplay standpoint, open-world is inherently better than linearity in video games\n","id":"f6adfc62-cd8a-4d7a-95d6-97d744584a93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I kinda want this view to be changed that i'm assuming incorrectly about white males in general and this is just a coincidence and that this is more about people being assholes. But my stance comes from years of experiences with particularly white males in video games. I was bringing up the subject to a friend that I didn't grow up with a certain franchise Super Smash Bros. and in particular Melee. And that Hey my family didn't grow up with a lot, so we only got a PlayStation so we didn't play Nintendo stuff. I feel like this story isn't uncommon across racial boundaries? So I play other games and have experience gaming and the like, but I sort of mention that Well, I didn't grow up with this so this means i'm on the backfoot in these games. I'm trying to see this as logically as possible, naturally any game, you play in your childhood or what have you and you'll gain some level of intuition or understanding. You won't be like a Chess Grandmaster, but as you grow older, you'll know on a base level more than someone who hadn't played the game before? But the reason I come to , is that the demographic who gets offended at this, almost heinously so, without fail is white males. The reaction I get is instantly terse and akin to You're wrong, that's not the case at all. And i'm like, that's my experience, i've found it to be true, and for the most part it's true, why are you hard lined stanced against this? And it then becomes an attack upon my person where i'm defending myself instead of the point at hand. I suppose this  is two fold then, Someone who grew up or experienced something will naturally have an advantage against someone who had not played a game before, someone else will be on the backfoot if they did not have that same experience. And Am I incorrectly ascribing race in maybe another factor might be more evident?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"White males in the United States are so accustomed to privilege that it offends them for anyone to suggest someone else lives on the backfoot.\n","id":"2a89c6c0-85f2-4b5b-bc12-0f7e252d2183"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>No-platforming should always be an option, just as asking an unpleasant guest to leave your house is an option. However, it should only be done to make room for opportunities of more productive dialogue, not to make our own perspectives the only ones platformed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Universities should function as models for civic and civil discourse. Ideas which fall outside of the norms of proper civil discourse should be excluded from it.\n","id":"c42e6a72-c6a8-414a-b657-4547c046d5fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please excuse my mobile formatting. I'll start with I know almost zero about music, music theory, instruments, or anything. I like what I like and I have some reasons somewhere in my addled brain I'm sure. But any time I mention Nickelback around anyone not just Redditors I get an audible groan. Man is my taste in music shitty, I'm told. I feel like most people hate Nickelback because it's cool to hurrah bandwagon, right? and nobody really has any well founded reason to. Those people that HAVE given me reasons, though, mostly fall under a couple categories which I plan to argue strained vocals and a lack of originality repetitiveness. What I prefer to hear in music is lots of stuff happening. I like it when things are going on in the background and they come together to form a harmony, rather than the emptiness of some songs. Some comparison examples for this could be Daughtry's What About Now combines piano, drum work, string instrument s ? I am not musically inclined , and guitar to create an unbroken harmony of background noise given meaning by the vocals. In contrast, there's almost nothing happening in the background in the first minute of this song by Carlos Baute however, I do especially enjoy about 2 50 into it . A less traditional comparison The Glitch Mob's Bad Wings after the intro 1 00 has tons of things happening, whereas This random dubstep I found much consists of the oscillation typically found in dubstep on top of a couple other sounds at most. My argument, as I've now gotten a little off topic, for Nickelback would be that their songs include many 'layers' and I enjoy that about them. This V, perhaps, isn't C able, but my following points are probably much more debatable. Lack of originality and repetition The most common anti Nickelback argument I've run across is that the guitar bass is repetitive sucky not interesting has no variation throughout songs, albums, and even all of their music. That might be true I don't know, to my untrained ears their songs seem unique but even if it was I don't think this is a damning quality. Every artist or group sounds different from the others in their own way. Green Day's music is instantly recognizable due to the bear with me. I know nothing way the guitar sounds tone it gives off in combination with the prominent drums ex Holiday . Audioslave's work has a great deal of solid cymbal crashing in the background and wonky guitar bits ex Be Yourself, I Am The Highway . Adele has her huge mope y voice and lyrics Well, all of her songs . Nickelback has a lot of bass going on ex When We Stand Together and if you played just the instrumentals of their music I could narrow it down to a couple of rock artists. It isn't dull, it's their style. Edit Also, their lyrics may be, in some cases, not 'original' if you will. However, don't you think with as many songs as there are now it'd be damn hard to word one thought that many have had in a different way? Besides they cover a great deal of material love Far Away, Don't Let It End , lust Animals, Sex , suicidal recovery Lulaby , tough times Too Bad , peace When We Stand Together , and things that are wrong with the world When We Stand Together . Strained vocals The other point that I've heard made is that Mr Vocalist is straining his voice too hard. I don't know, I don't sing, but it sure sounds like emotion to me. A non Nickelback but similar voice happening could be Black Stone Cherry Stay The strain conveys emotion, it helps me as a listener relate to what the singer has to say. Many songs, in my opinion, are done more justice with a more gravelly and strained voice rather than a clear one. Wonderwall Oasis vs One Direction's cover. Hurt Johnny Cash vs Nine Inch Nails. I like NIN's version. I might add some more links soon but this is all for now. Please,  or enlighten me<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the general dislike of Nickelback's music is circlejerk-ish and petty in nature and argument. I also enjoy much of their music.\n","id":"8ae70c46-c489-418f-8dc6-38046e229ef2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey be part of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>Turkey's trade with the EU is already prospering due to their customs union agreement. Full membership is unlikely to cause this trade to increase much more pg.35<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey can join and benefit from the Single Market without fully joining the EU.\n","id":"3142aaa0-2118-4b7e-bdcb-d496f02e59c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Even though being emotionally repressed and acting out violently is not psychologically healthy, the recipients of that violence most likely women are in an even worse position.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fact that patriarchy imposes collateral damage on men does not negate the fact that it damages women and other gender non-conforming individuals more.\n","id":"5ca99879-ca8a-456b-a68e-4956a919b049"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that people presuppose evil exists in the acceptance of using it to refute a particular god suggests that they presuppose an objective moral arbitration, which requires a god.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evil is a problem for atheism as well, because it is not clear what an atheist's moral basis for calling something evil is in a purely physical world.\n","id":"9ff9bf62-f800-48e4-81e7-c2398a3d1012"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>Feminism is good for men as well, who are often socially conditioned to always play certain roles, that they are bullied for not enacting. Feminism allows a variety of different types of masculinity and femininity to flourish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism helps to create a more equal society for all of its members, not just for women.\n","id":"8306e805-c1c2-4ac8-b262-e15917ae7641"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was first introduced to hypnotism through cartoons when I was a kid. Waving a pocket watch back and forth or a spinning spiraled disc accompanied by a soothing voice was all it took to completely take over someone's will. I thought it was funny, not realizing it was a real thing until many years later. In my adult life I've heard people claim they've been totally manipulated by hypnotists and how amazing it is. Most recently in an AskReddit thread, but also rational people I trust who seem to be telling the truth. I can't fathom losing any control of my faculties whatsoever because of auditory visual stimuli. Specifically performing some sort of action or producing a sound when prompted against the victim's will. I mean this is some kind of hoax performed by a charlatan, right? Like magic, fortune telling, talking to dead people or astrology? If this was for real wouldn't people abuse this power? gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hypnotism is bullshit, right?\n","id":"9e1cda1f-508c-4de5-9f2b-c25be14c3055"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I have been thinking San Francisco recently banned facial recognition for state actors. People keep posting this and celebrating it like it is a huge win for privacy. But does this actually benefit citizens? What will this ban effectively mean for surveillance? I think it will mean that instead of the state building surveillance networks, the state will just ask non state actors to build those networks for them. They probably don't even have to ask, Facebook Google etc. will just find some modern, hip, techy reason why private citizens should give them access to their surveillance cameras just as they did with phone cameras , and they will very likely even build their own surveillance networks under a modern, hip moniker and for some reason silicon valley engineers will celebrate as an achievement . So suddenly you have surveillance networks just as big as state built ones would be, but instead of the state one of the more neutral and objective actors , they are controlled by corporations. Those corporations can now chose, at their own will, when to pass the data on to the police. Are there any reasons to believe that a non state sponsored surveillance network would be significantly smaller than state sponsored ones? Keep in mind that big tech is significantly better at collecting and sorting data efficiently than the state. They will calculate the most effective positioning of cameras and just pay the state and other private citizens to let them put their cameras there. I understand that this ban is a step in the right direction , but I still believe there are better ways one could have gone about it. Why should the state be banned from using facial recognition? Facial recognition in public spaces is coming , whether you like it or not. The question is who will be controlling it? And IMO this is a step towards letting corporations control it. edit to make this clear I believe machine learning based tracking and surveillance in public spaecs is inevitable and the state should be the only actor controlling those tools in public spaces.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the San Francisco state-actor facial recognition ban is actually a bad thing.\n","id":"3fe07276-7ac0-4e2c-9481-dec8bd11f598"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Harmfulness of Facebook<|ARGUMENT|>Personal information should not be used for commercial purposes. It is too invasive, and can cause emotional damage. For example, what if your profile indicates that your boy friend just broke up with you, for example. An ad agency is allowed to obtain this information and use it to send you an advertisement on break-ups. This could do emotional damage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unethical for social network sites to use personal information to enable advertisers to better target you as a consumer.\n","id":"4cc53245-10af-4ad0-a683-30d70b80c93d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Greece should default on its debt and return to the Drachma.<|ARGUMENT|>Even if the proposition are correct in claiming defaulting and leaving the Eurozone would stimulate growth in the Greek economy, such benefits are transitory whereas the benefits of remaining in the Eurozone are permanent. 1 Having the Euro provides stability for the Greek economy \u2013 investors know that the currency will not collapse, making their invested capital worthless. The gravity of the outcomes of a Greek default cannot be known for sure, however some economists have even suggested that hyperinflation could occur \u2013 leading to disastrous consequences for Greece. 2 Moreover, in the long term, a single currency makes investment and transactions with other Eurozone members much more efficient and profitable. This is particularly important given that the vast majority of Greek trade is carried out with other European members. In light of these benefits, a short term cost that comes with the austerity measures enforced under the status quo, would be worthwhile in the long term. 1 Barrell, Ray: \u201cEurozone crisis: what if. Greece leaves the single currency\u201d, 14 May 2012, The Guardian, 2 Ruparel, Raoul and Persson, Mats: \u201cBetter off Out? The short-term options for Greece inside and outside of the euro\u201d, June 2012, Open Europe, 2012<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Leaving the Eurozone would be detrimental for Greece in the long-run.\n","id":"80bf59fd-79c1-4b94-a900-887de8053688"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>As a rising political figure in 1986, and a long standing champion of Black civil rights in the United States, Sanders should have known better than to use a word that is so easily mirrored for a racial slur.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanders' past characterization of his child daycare policy has come under question by Black voters.\n","id":"b21e1af9-946e-4fa3-84a6-e2ed9a77441f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>File-sharing Should Be Allowed<|ARGUMENT|>The internet allows for more plurality and gives music listeners more choices than commercial radio or television stations, where record companies pay stations to play the same songs again and again and so create demand for pop hits. Sites that share music promote unknown artists that have equal chances to be downloaded.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The internet allows for more plurality and gives music listeners more choices than commercial radio ...\n","id":"463a4031-21f0-476f-9975-9a5f20bc0ec5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So raising minimum wage to 15 bucks is a pretty hot topic right now, and emotionally at least, I really want to agree with it. But I just don't understand how it works. Not being particularly versed in economics beyond a lecture class in college years ago, the logic makes little sense, as it goes against vaguely remembered talks on supply and demand. I'm ignoring the concerns that it will mean cutting jobs and replacing them with computer kiosks and what have you, and instead assuming here that initially, it works. People are working the same jobs, just with this new minimum wage. As it seems to me, while there will be real, short term benefits here, they are going to be quickly erased. If all those people making 20,800 previously 10 per hour x 40 x 52 are now making 31,200 15 per hour x 40 x 52 , that means millions of people with as much as 10,000 dollars more to spend minus taxes . Increased money means increased demand. Combined with the fact that employers are paying more money to workers, this means prices will increase as sellers adjust to the new market which I guess in this world is why no one lost their job . And I don't see how two things won't happen here. First, the low income workers, with their new minimum wage, will see the gains mostly erased as cost of food, housing, and luxury items rise to meet the new equilibrium. Second, those who are in the next highest tier people who were making 20 per hour will see their relative earnings actually now drop, since they aren't going to see a huge rise in their wages, and this means that they are losing purchasing power, since they will have to deal with the same rising prices on many items without the same amount of relative wage increase. So that is the sum of it. I'm not opposed to raising the minimum wage. I believe anyone working a 40 hour week has the right to live better than hand to mouth, no matter how menial their job. I'm not even opposed to raising it to 15 dollars if it can work, but, well, I don't understand how it does. So this isn't so much as Change My View as it is Convince Me That I Wouldn't Be Crazy to Believe This , cause short of accompanying laws that fix the growth of prices, I just don't see how this works, and it just seems like gains would be erased quickly, and that it somewhat hurts those who were making slightly more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Raising Minimum Wage to fifteen dollars will see any short-term gains quickly marginalized as prices rise to meet the increased spending\n","id":"123b7a29-14f0-4556-b303-a2d357f28f48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In order to genetically modify animals there has to be a number of animals who undergo surgical procedures for example, vasectomy, surgical embryo transfer. These procedures are not unique to genetically engineered animals, but they are typically required for their production and are invasive and painful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals that are genetically modified often experience pain and distress.\n","id":"27eb0a4e-6d90-40f9-81e5-93b96e637cc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Education that Promotes a Certain Faith or Religion be Abolished in Schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents that belong to tightly knit Protestant or Islamic families often given up any communication with their children if they go astray from the religious path, or change their religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If children try to change their religion once they grow up, they face social stigma and exclusion from their communities.\n","id":"9e77332b-3dcb-4cb7-88a6-f5300bb670e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>LAPD officers are paid 48K per year entry level and all they have to do is graduate high school and pass a criminal background check. The skill set required to become a police officer is extremely common, yet the average income in the U.S. is 43K while cops make 48K ENTRY LEVEL. Mechanical engineers make slightly more starting salary but that requires four years of very rigorous education and 60 hour work weeks compared to 40ish hour work weeks for cops. Furthermore the skills required to become a mechanical engineer are somewhat rare high level of intelligence, education, work ethic compared to a high school diploma. Requirements Salary<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Police officers are disgustingly overpaid\n","id":"16260bbe-36ad-4ec2-9199-5aa45feb53bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>Importantly, the parent claim implies that those that voted leave would be fractured among the different types, but that those who voted remain would be unified. This may not be the case. There are many who might have voted remain to avoid uncertainty and the unknown, or because they didn't want a hard Brexit or were wary of the no alternative proposed at the time. With more options, they may well vote for a different model, so the logic is flawed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Though 48% of those that voted voted for Remain, there is no guarantee they would do so if given the option of multiple different forms of Brexit.\n","id":"9291f86e-0e3e-4837-b77c-2219ae701bdb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>\"I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government\" \u2013Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation Calling Militia and Convening Congress, April 1861<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lincoln announced in his inaugural address and at the initiation of hostilities that the war was about the preservation of the Union not freeing slaves.\n","id":"83d71f32-de80-453a-8df1-8d68225003c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I guess this is a two part . The first is that all human cause and effect activity is motivated by selfishness and an addiction to being happy. Every action that is done, benefits the person enabling it somehow. That benefit comes in the form of propagating an ongoing dependence on being happy. In a sense, there is no such thing as selflessness, because all selfless actions benefit the person doing the acting. For example, I could quit my job and fly to Africa tomorrow to feed them pieces of my own skin and it would still be beneficial to me in a way. It would make me happy it would give me a sense of accomplishment, a sense of morality, a sense of personal satisfaction. If you dig down deep enough, you find everyone gets something out of anything they do, be it tangible or intangible, which makes them happier in some way. The only people who do anything that doesn't benefit them somehow are considered clinically insane for it. And when you dig deeper a bit, you realize that these benefits all lead to the same goal being happy. They either directly contribute to being happy, or indirectly contribute to being happy by avoiding being unhappy. I believe we as humans have an ultimate goal of being happy at all times. We earn money to buy things and live lifestyles that make us happy, we do things to attract and protect people around us which makes us happy, we engage in hobbies and recreation to be happy, we work hard to avoid being in situations that would make us unhappy which makes us happy it's all about being happy. Which is a little scary when you consider being happy is just the presence of certain chemicals in our brains. My second part focuses on the why of it all. If you trace cause and effect back in search of a reason by asking why? , you hit a dead end that I believe will never be explained in our lifetime. Think about the whole our motivation is happiness point mentioned earlier why do we need to be happy? Because it feels good. Why do we want to feel good? Because chemicals in our brains drive our behaviour to make ourselves feel good. Why? Reason X. Why reason X? Reason Y. Why reason Y? Umm Eventually everything boils down to an inexplicable source for the reason everything is in this world, which to me is basically saying there is no reason. If there's no reason for anything, then I don't believe anything truly matters. Life, death, the universe it has no purpose we could ever understand or discover. Without purpose, nothing is important. A world where everyone only acts in their best interests to be happy which is pointless in the big picture is a bit scary, but it seems to be the scenario for all of us. Please  Reddit, I'm feeling a bit nihilistic these days and it's too sobering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe all human action is motivated by a purely self-serving addiction to happiness, and that in the big picture nothing has a purpose.\n","id":"e10f83da-b8d4-4bc7-bb6b-f373f7da056f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Evolution, on a basic level, is pretty undeniable. The fossil record is good evidence that it occurred, because if a creator chose to place the fossils there in the arrangement they are in, he would have to have been trying to fool us. Nonetheless, there are plenty of features in biology, especially on a biochemical level, which we can't explain sufficiently through evolution. I'm not saying evolution never will explain these it's highly possible that it will. I'm not saying it makes sense to evoke an intelligent designer, either. I'm just saying that we don't know how they got there. Ask any atheist how these things came about, and the answer will be, We don't know how they evolved. It's perfectly acceptable not to know something. But if we don't know anything, why do we assume evolution was responsible? How do we know there was NOT an intelligent designer? Or some other natural force that we haven't discovered? I'm not advocating for intelligent design being a real theory or anything of the sort. But I fear that because of the anti intellectualism of the creationist movement, we've become afraid of even the slightest questioning of any aspect of evolution. We think that the smallest doubt being expressed about whether or not evolution really produced a certain feature is going to shut down all desire for discovery and turn everyone into a dogmatic, mindless drone. Yes, everything in the world probably arose from natural processes, and the same pattern of discovering that what we thought was supernatural actually isn't will more than likely continue. But what's the big deal about someone doubting whether evolution can explain everything? I mean, if scientists can speculate on whether or not the universe is a computer simulation then what's the problem with bringing up intelligent design? If we can have TV shows about how aliens built the Great Pyramids, why shouldn't we ever see any similar shows about intelligent design? The important thing should be preserving our open mindedness and our skepticism towards ALL possible causes of features in the world that we don't understand, not making sure that no one ever doubts whether evolution could cause something. The only real problem I see with books like Darwin's Black Box is that they suggest that they are providing real theories that can be substantiated, rather than just interesting speculation. Intelligent design isn't outside the range of speculation. But oh yes, the ancient Greeks assumed that lightning was created by Zeus. Therefore, we should assume that a higher power could never have created anything. But appealing to precedent doesn't prove anything. The fact that we believe that Poseidon doesn't cause earthquakes has nothing to do with the ancient Greeks being wrong about Zeus causing lightning. It has only to do with the evidence for the theory of plate tectonics. Until we have similarly satisfying explanations for complex biochemical features, people shouldn't be expected to make assumptions about what caused them one way or the other.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Opposing intelligent design as a valid scientific theory shouldn't be the same thing as believing every biological feature definitely evolved.\n","id":"dbacd73c-b6b8-4047-a680-d3618a3dfbba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In June, during a series of lectures I presented in Germany, a number of people asked questions of the sort, \"Isn't it about time we accept that animals are sentient and that we know what they want and need? Shouldn't we stop bickering about whether they are conscious, feel pain and experience emotions?\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many studies have shown that animals possess characteristics associated with sentience.\n","id":"657dfb1f-bbe8-4820-bf69-c0c485af344e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If there isn't an actual medical reason not to vaccinate your kids then if a parent refuses to vaccinate their kids CPS should become involved and take the kids to get vaccinations themselves. x200B People often quote freedom of religion as an important counterargument but I disagree while you are entitled to your religious beliefs there are limits on the practise of certain beliefs, human sacrifices are obviously a big no no, as is FGM in any developed country. Additionally if a kid is bitten by an animal with rabies CPS will step in and force the kid to get vaccinations if the parents refuse. Rabies vaccinations and normal childhood vaccinations are obviously 2 very different things but the point stands that religion isn't relevant in such cases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"CPS should force parents to vaccinate their kids\n","id":"adbac743-8b7c-4b84-b1cf-d39fc9172bc8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's supposed to be great or whatever, I had to do it twice in high school due to wonky scheduling both during my junior year, once in spring and once in winter . I found it unbearable. I was completely disconnected with the story and found most of the academic value worthless I was a young reader, my parents learned I was capable of reading by finding me reading to my sister. I completed The Hobbit in a couple months of self bedtime stories before I was a teenager. I was always, constantly, well beyond the reading level of my peers. However, this didn't stop me for enjoying simpler works such as animal farm or lord of the flies, which are common reading in American high schools. While there were plenty of reading assignments I despised, generally it was because of the sophomoric nature of the work, not the quality. The Great Gatsby is arguably the most critically acclaimed piece common to high school curriculum, while I am comfortable with the idea that my teachers interpretation ruined the experience high focus on non plot events such as colors or shapes , I am still confident that this book deserves little of the praise that has been heaped upon it. Due to the decade that has passed since my experience, I am sorry that I can't properly argue what makes it bad in an intellectual way. To earn the delta, convince me to give the book another read through. What about it is so great? What makes it remarkable compared to the literature of the time, or even in the modern day? What merit can you heap on the author of your own opinion not awards or critic commentary . Essentially, treat this as a  reading The Great Gatsby in high school is a waste of time . I don't earnestly feel this way, hence my title, but how is it an important piece of literature beyond its use in sampling literary devices?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think I should re-read The Great Gatsby\n","id":"50263572-8ecf-4d97-8504-268d31859cf9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are many philosophical traditions we don't realize haven't been so much philosophical in the history. Take biblical creation in history, noone doubted that because noone had any better story but now, many people fortunately take it as a thought system about the universe theories like the Intelligent Designer . I'd consider reincarnation another example of this. Historically, it was a theory explaining as other myths wht happens when we die and why the sense of self or consciousness exists. Today, much more people tend to describe it rather vaguely with refference to panpsychic pantheist beliefs. But the thing is, the deeper we go into what they actually believe about consciousness and afterlife, the more anti scientific it gets. I don't carry out any judgments here but one of the few things we know about consciousness is that it's not tied up to other things animals people. We can't tell much about things' consciousness because they aren't a thinking talking whole. But we know what is consciousness for us you know the experience of your world can observe that what we call conscious is connected with things like the ability to percieve and react, learn, self realization and self conscience. This means us that our own psychology is fully dependent on the environment's influence and there's no way to step into that. We were born as a bunch of atoms and we continue to be one. And even though there might be various ways how to interpret those flows of atoms that create our world morality altruism , God, consciousness , consciousness can't change the fact that they're deterministic it's only a passive receiver of mental states, desires and thoughts. In other words, even though our consciousness might have been in another person before, it can't change the place we were nurtured and the genes that created our brains. P.S. I realize those are quite heavy claims I made to get to the statement I just shared to you an insight on my worldview with the hope that you might find some holes in it. But I think the statement itself, as expressed in the last sentence, is pretty straightforward, so please aim for it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reincarnation goes against science\n","id":"ed960a9e-a393-401e-bf14-e2bbb56a1322"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a precursor, I know that terrorism comes from many different groups of people, but I'm going to use Islamic terrorism as my example. Deal with it. Now, the war on terror really took off post 9 11. It was the deadliest Islamic terror attack since at least the 1970s The US went in to deal with Al Qaeda. Maybe I'm a little under informed, but I haven't heard much about them in recent years, so to my knowledge, they are more or less defeated. Feel free to let me know otherwise. Now we have ISIS. They've been causing a lot of issues over the past 5 years or so, and to the rest of the world's credit, we've been able to push them back recently, but clearly they are still operating and inspiring individuals or smaller groups to perform attacks all over the world, especially in the US and Europe. Whenever the world drives them back to the point of similar powerlessness as Al Qaeda hopefully , history can tell us that that won't be the end of mass terrorist groups. Another one will likely eventually pop up. It might be in 5 years, it might be in 20 years. But there are undeniably people in this world who just want to watch it burn for one reason or another. That being said, I don't think that terrorism is a pointless battle. The world should always be willing to fight for justice. But treating it as a war makes it seems like it's something that can eventually be won, when it's really just a constant threat that needs to be dealt with as it comes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"war on terror\" is an unwinnable battle since there is always going to be another group\/individual who pops up.\n","id":"f1201458-c3ce-4c70-a9fd-d450e81e8d79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Whitewashing In Hollywood: Should It Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Allowing the depiction of historical figures as an incorrect skin colour erases the role of their actual ethnic group in important historical events.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banning whitewashing would stop the perpetuation of myths about the skin colour of historical figures.\n","id":"e0683bad-0e96-4e3a-b666-ec6cfbdbf8a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In a heated debate with a few people, I came to realize that my view that Psychology and Biology as a team in explaining Human and Animal behavior and processes, cannot be agreed upon. It was expressed that if there is a biological reason if a behavior or process in humans or animals can be explained using a pure biology then any psychological argument from any field of psychology is thereby incorrect if it contradicts the biological argument. This means that biology has the final say in explaining humans and animals. I personally think that there is a biological explanation for everything. However, as a human race we are still in the process of learning what these explanations are. I also think that psychology of all fields plays a huge role in helping us understand behavior and processes from a different perspective. If there is a contradictory explanation, then biology is not always the one that is right. I think that it's a form of discussion or back and forth learning that helps both fields grow and discover further. I'm curious to know your opinions on the matter. Any doctors or psychologists psychiatrists or those aspiring to either, your expertise is very welcome on the matter Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If there is a biological ground for a behavior or process, this does not automatically make any contradicting psychological argument incorrect.\n","id":"e3f9e69d-2a47-4f4a-add8-670f77d8c042"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>These are from the comments on a picture of r thefappening trending on google gt Yay I'm part of history. gt I think my life might just be heading downhill from today. gt Finally I was a part of something gt The Fappening will go down in History as our generations Woodstock And we were all there gt We did it reddit gt This is such a damn beautiful place I generally believe there's 3 types of people, those who are disgusted at the time and effort the original leakers put into getting the photos and dont want to see them, casual fappers and the justifiably curious, and then there's the sweaty gross people sitting on r thefappening refreshing every 2 minutes. The people who are most responsible for the distribution and consumption of the photos are those to whom masturbating is a big deal and are generally losers, so I agree with everything the media says about them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The way the media and celebs have painted internet users who share and post these leaked photos, as pathetic and lonely, is accurate.\n","id":"00e69283-5161-49e7-a822-5ba327806004"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hope I don't get crucified for this, but here goes. I want to first start off by saying that this entire view might be a result of a misunderstanding of the rules and procedures, in which case I'd like to know that. Here's my reasoning to avoid taking names and typing them all over, let's say Person J is under consideration for nomination for supreme court justice. Person V comes forward stating that Person J perpetrated some crime against them against Persons A, B, etc. By my understanding, the senate judiciary committee has the role of overseeing the DoJ, and making nominations hearings related to supreme court justice nominations. Now, either Person J did commit said crimes, or they did not. If they did, and their is sufficient evidence for the same, then Person V should file a court case in a court of law against Person J. The senate committee can then choose to then take the verdict of the court case into their considerations. What I do not understand, is why the senate committee may hear Person Vs testimony and use that in their decision making. After all, the members of the committee are senators, who are not trained in the detailed examination of a witness or ascertaining the truthfulness of a witness claim. A n impartial court of law may do so, and is empowered to do so. Anyone can make a claim against Person J, and from my understanding of the looks of it, if they make a sufficient hue and cry of it, they will be heard in the senate committee. But why? I understand that there may not be sufficient evidence for a case to go through in court. But then, on the basis of what evidence is the senate deciding that it is something that needs to be heard is important enough to cause a senate hearing? Shouldn't only a court of law be empowered to decide is the accusations hold merit or not?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The senate should not consider testimonies of alleged rape victims for decisions regarding the supreme court justice\n","id":"d22ab967-eea4-4987-a033-78235dcd972a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Soo, I get called Chinese or Russian bot on a regular base and get confronted with a lot of hate from people for my views and I sometimes question them myself and I kind want to like the US, after all you guys gave us some great fastfood and Mountandew im in love with that stuff, doesn't matter if it kills me so please change my mind if possible so maybe I dislike the US less, or even favor them important note im not saying china is that much better either, I simply think they are the better of 2 evils This is not directed towards citizen of the US, you guys mostly pretty chill x200B I think China as a worldpower is better for the world than the US, let me list the main reasons why I think so. x200B involvement in other countries For decades the US has assasinated leaders of countries they disagreed with, overthrown elected goverments all around the World and started wars to expand and protect their own interests with no regard to what the people of the countries want, with complete disregard to human life only to spread propaganda that they are the good in the world defending it from the evil, they have crippled a huge part of South America, they have turned half of asia into a minefield with the goal of defeating communism and made the middle east into a terrorist breeding ground with constant civil wars going on, while yes a lot of middle eastern countries sufferd under a dictatorship but the US never had the intention to liberate the people. The involvement of the US in most foreign nations had horrible outcomes that caused nothing but suffering. A goverment that over the years has killed millions of civilians in foreign nations they had nothing to do in doesnt sound that great does it ? Yes the Chinese have murderd much more people and they are commiting crimes against humanity as we speak, but so is the US, 2 wrongs doesnt make it right for either side but at least they are doing it in their own country and not around the globe x200B Corruption and Political system You call it lobbyism, I call it corruption, there are 2 parties to vote from and both are corrupted to no end, the entire congress is bought out by wealthy people, while corruption is much lower in the US on lower level than compared to China as in you can bribe allmost every police officer its not any better in the US on higher levels, the war industry has the congress on payroll to make them keep on pushing for policies that promote war and missery around the world and the laws are made for the people who own allready anything, im not someone who says split the wealth and rob people of what they earnd, if someone is billionair thats fine they must have done something right to earn it but I do not belive that they should be the people influencing what laws are made for the everyday person. Then there is the 2 party system, people tend to complain about chinas 1 party system but is it really that different from the US ? maybe the difference was bigger back in days, but at least for past 20 30 years it didnt matter a whole lot if rep or dems are in power, US politics didnt change a whole lot well you could say with Trump right now they are emberassing themself more, thoo I dont hate trump it helps people see the US for what they really are, made them lose a lot of softpower in short term and will weaken the us in long run, I kinda like him for that but it really barely matters who is in power, is that really better than a 1 party system ? x200B Treatment of their own people The US treats their citizen like shit and nobody seems to care, the NSA is not protecting anyone they are spying on US citizen, they are not much different than China in that aspect beside that china also censors people. People in the US are feed propaganda just as much as people in China by their own goverment, there are tons of records of the US goverment doing it from documents that got declassified years ago, but people are blind to it. From having been in China and having many chinese friends I would say that the people of the US are much more blinded by propaganda than people in China, yes there is propaganda in China but people are most of time aware of it, in the US it seems a large part of the population just straight up denies that the US is spreading propaganda. x200B x200B Im very well aware that there is no evil when talking about countries, even North Korea isn't evil, its only in their leaders personal best interest to keep the general population poor and suffering, but while China is just as disgusting in many aspects as the US, I just belive that on global scale a powerfull China would be better than a powerfull USA, for the better of everyone. x200B Also so I dont get any hate, I dont hate the US itself, I hate the goverment, the US seems to be a great country if you look away from that part and I sure as hell want to travel there in the future and I wish only the best to the people of the US, I hope their goverment will improve in the future. x200B Also I hope my english isnt too much of a problem, its kind of my 3rd or 2nd language depending which way you look at it so im well aware that its far from perfect<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China is better for the world than the US\n","id":"72f465cd-8914-4f10-9f42-69e8307e2fa4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To start off I am going section by section on why I am going to be using the note 4 compared to some of the newer flag ships. Display. The Note 4 harbors a 1440p QHD Super Amoled display and I believe that this display is on par and if not better than even the newest flagship phone available today. The human eye is not able to distinguish higher PPI than what a 1440p resolution display on a 5.7 inch phone. I believe that display technology has plateau and that the newer phone are not better in display than the note 4. Speed Smoothness. Even though mobile CPU are improving at a pretty good pace, I think this is only prevalent if you are running hardware intensive task. I mostly use app such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram which don't require much CPU power. Browsing is still very smooth and I notice very little lag when browsing or scrolling. Removable battery The Note 4 has a removable battery which is a great feature to prolong the life I can get out of the phone. There are great third party battery manufacturers like Ankers which produce quality batteries for the Note 4. Nothing like simply popping out an old battery and switching to a new one to get another 2 years of good battery life out of the phone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have a galaxy note 4 and I don't believe I need to upgrade to the newer flag ship phones.\n","id":"ab0271b7-178e-400a-ae13-d00845ab5902"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It appears to me that the US legal system has not kept up with modern psychiatry, which would seem to label just about all serious criminals as mentally ill. Wouldn't it make sense to modify our prison system to treat criminals as such? Yes, cost would be increased, but is it moral to punish the mentally ill without treating them? Shouldn't all maximum security prisons be converted to mental hospitals, and parole, early release, and halfway house programs be run by psychiatric professionals? EDIT Because my original view was terribly vague and poorly thought through, I've changed my view to There should be a category of crimes which require psychiatric treatment as part of sentencing. EDIT 2 My previous edit didn't give enough credit to TheBeatlesLiveOn for changing my view. That wasn't intended. EDIT 3 GoodMorningHello finally wore me down. My new view There should be a category of crimes which trigger the opportunity for automatic psychiatric treatment as part of sentencing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that almost all serious or violent criminal behavior should be treated as mental illness.\n","id":"37307596-ce69-4c41-a5fb-3f013d1a94c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>Mike Pence has a long history of sexism and homophobia which he attributed to his deeply held religious views but then backpacks and forsakes those Christian values and his political stances on certain topics on a whim when he feels political pressur or to cover up one of Trump's messes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mike Pence is rather hypocritical in his views and endorsements.\n","id":"29ba7303-137c-47f1-9d5a-45c4b11f0cdb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All deductions and credits do is let upper classes get away with paying too little tax. Income tax should be assessed on pure revenue by any person in a year, not earned income less retirement, donations, etc. The way filing should work should be one section for identifying information, and one line for income made in a year. Allowing people to shelter their money so that they don't pay tax is self defeating for the government. Furthermore, as credits and deductions get added to the tax code, fewer and fewer people are able to understand it in its entirety. The tax code should be no more than a chart saying any income over X amount is taxed at Y rate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tax credits and deductions should not exist.\n","id":"8f4c3b32-da54-408d-a629-6a2b80e07279"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is certainly important that we conserve non renewable resources. It takes much more energy to mine and process new metal than to recycle steel, aluminum, and copper. A good case can be made for recycling plastic as well, as it is derived from fossil fuels. Glass is a bit of a stretch, as we are never going to run out of sand, and given enough time glass will be pulverized back into sand anyway, but at least recycling glass avoids contributing to the volume of garbage. Recycling paper is a pointless exercise and is, in fact, bad for the environment. It is a myth that paper is made in the United States by cutting down old forest trees. 100 of the paper produced in the US comes from tree farms that were planted for the express purpose of making paper. Paper biodegrades very quickly. The recycling process requires the use of harsh chemicals that can leech into the environment. Furthermore, recycling paper necessitates sending around separate trucks from general garbage, separate sorting at recycling facilities, and a separate distribution network from virgin paper to return the recycled product to the consumer stream. All of this creates more energy consumed and fossil fuels burned. There is not a single good reason to recycle paper. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I care about sustainability, but I think recycling paper is a waste of energy and resources.\n","id":"bf7c4bb4-65f6-4b25-996d-31727c60238c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been stuck in some of the more depressing threads on Reddit this week, and I was particularly taken aback by stories of good samaritans who were threatened, harmed or killed by the people they tried to help. Here is one example, and here is another. Obviously, these situations are outliers they don't represent the vast majority of interactions with strangers. But even so, I've come to believe that it simply isn't worth the risk to help someone I don't know. I'd like to believe again that the world isn't so cold could someone change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The dark side of Reddit has convinced me that I should never help a stranger, lest I want to put my own life at risk.\n","id":"ebf84813-2c33-42e3-827c-14cd38e04b47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>In a two-party system, all political sentiments are channeled towards opposing the other party, rather than elevating one's own party above all others, as would be the case in a multi-party system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Two-party systems lead to increased polarization and vilification of people with opposing political viewpoints.\n","id":"9969d66e-e182-4bbf-b1fb-7350bf710593"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Setting out cucumber peels or slices in the kitchen or at the ants' point of entry works great, as many ants have a natural aversion to cucumber.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are friendly non-lethal ways to get rid of insects. Their common use shows that many people conciously choose to not hurt insects, if they can.\n","id":"57f35444-ef5e-403e-8b6d-cd1f0df00505"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>You should pay off your mortgage early<|ARGUMENT|>Credit bureaus and banks are more likely to increase a person's credit line, based on speedy payments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Paying early earns favor from credit bureaus and banks for future large investments.\n","id":"fbeb847c-0e9c-43d4-96bd-d4596443c048"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>A woman shouldn't be paid more than a man if that woman brings less value to company. Attempt to collect money from all people and redistribute those money to women through extra money for work is teaching male workers that they earn less just because they're not women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be sexist to take money from all people and redistribute them to women.\n","id":"eaf30738-a87f-4843-81bf-11a3b6d842fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need nuclear power for sustainable energy production?<|ARGUMENT|>Until energy efficiency and overall power reduction steps are taken throughout all power sectors, the practical aspect of \"cutting\" an entire production sector is a very tough argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The overall solution to the energy problem will involve many fractional solutions.\n","id":"349a9918-3da8-4c80-8ad1-44057765d59d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are gender and sex the same thing?<|ARGUMENT|>Sex is a very widely used concept in medical and legal settings. This makes it particularly important that it is 'fit for purpose' within these settings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making important concepts easier to understand should be less important than ensuring these concepts are accurate and workable.\n","id":"599cc6d4-7426-4745-9e9e-335c90a58081"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are mechanical keyboards better than membrane keyboards?<|ARGUMENT|>Different mechanical switches can greatly change the user experience when typing on them, allowing the user to customize these to their preference.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mechanical keyboards have various types of switches to choose from.\n","id":"3dc01fac-172a-4ec5-b8ea-60cd3e7740be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I won't deny the fact that some parents are selfish and couldn't care less about their kids. You have parents neglecting and abusing their kids. Such situations are not unheard of. It's pretty obvious that they have their own priorities first despite what they claim. However, this is not the case if the family is from a good background and the child had a good upbringing. Some parents invest a lot of time, money, and effort into their kids. For example, they will buy expensive toys for their kids or send them to private schools. Surely these parents want the best for their kids? I mean, if they were selfish, they won't have invested so many resources into their kids in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents who have invested a lot of money into their kids eg. sending them to private schools always want the best for their kids\n","id":"f03e7cfc-3ae2-4dc5-8eae-4548da29be2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the senate each state should send 3 senators instead of 2 and every state should have a senate election every 2 years. Also the senator should be voted upon via a point system I also think the same system should be used for the presidency Say there\u2019s 4 people running for senate A B C and D. On people\u2019s ballots the rank the candidates in order of preference from 1 4 or however many candidates there are . Now they can rank how many or few as they want and don\u2019t have to start at 1 they could put a 4 by D and be done or list A as 1 and C as 2 and be done. How the votes are tallied are a bit different than other systems. Below is the final results of our hypothetical election night Candidate A 53 1\u2019s 47 2\u2019s 17 3\u2019s 10 4\u2019s Candidate B 45 1\u2019s 55 2\u2019s 48 3\u2019s 34 4\u2019s Candidate C 50 1\u2019s 48 2\u2019s 34 3\u2019s 17\u20194s Candidate D 48 1\u2019s 34 2\u2019s 34 3\u2019s 17 4\u2019s How this would be tallied is for every 1 vote the inverse amount of points would be given. In our example C got 50 1\u2019s and thus gets 200 points 50 x 4 . 2\u2019s get 3 points, 3\u2019s get 2, and 4\u2019s get 1. So if you total everyone up A got 427 points, B got 475, C got 463, D got 379. In this case even though candidate B got the least 1st votes he still wins because he proved to be the most agreeable person. For the house there\u2019s a lot more changes here. Organized territory\u2019s send members as well as states as long as there population reaches over 100k There\u2019s a representative for every 200k citizens, meaning as the US population increases so does the amount of representatives Congressional districts send 3 9 representatives voted upon by STV here\u2019s a quick link that explains STV Here\u2019s a quick way on how these districts would be drawn Every state and organized territory is rounded to the nearest 200k Each state and territory has a minimum of 1 district Districts are drawn by a non partisan committee with the express intent to maximize competition and maintain communities Each state and territory will be split into districts with a min max population of 600k 1.8M with exception of places with a rounded population less than 600k Each district should have a population density no less than 6 people mi^2 although this is a guideline and less of a hard rule Districts would also ideally send 5 7 representatives or 1M 1.4M people. This is also a guideline however districts with fewer more than 5 7 should be limited Places that have a rounded population 200k or 400k will only send 1 or 2 representatives respectfully Edit 1 Difficultly of implementation or constitutional amendment will not change my view. Pretend that I have the power to make these changes overnight.  on why I shouldn\u2019t make these changes but instead put in place a better system than what I\u2019ve proposed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"; The US congress should have more members and be voted upon differently\n","id":"5317f842-588d-4448-9a8e-36e764cc5db4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Addressing Psychosocial Factors Essential to Reducing or Preventing School Shootings?<|ARGUMENT|>Wendell Williamson, a law student who was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, fatally shot two strangers on the street in Chapel Hill in North Carolina.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anyone who could commit such horrific crimes must be suffering from psychosocial factors such as trauma, abuse, depression, personality disorder, etc.\n","id":"d57b147a-fc7c-4bd2-9896-da4a578cd3c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know the statement above isn\u2019t correct, but I don\u2019t why or how. I\u2019m a trans guy, have been on testosterone for nearly three years, and have dealt with the trials and tribulations of gender dysphoria. Basically, I have a certain way of understanding what it is like to be transgender. I haven\u2019t seen anything that has broadened my understanding. I have a few key questions about this topic. Maybe I\u2019m not viewing this through the right lens at all, so let me know if my questions are non starters to begin with. I honestly don\u2019t know. Why would someone change genders if they don\u2019t feel that their \u201cbody doesn\u2019t match their mind,\u201d for lack of a better phrase? Similarly, why would someone if they have chosen to undergo HRT or other methods of transitioning especially surgeries if they weren\u2019t previously discomforted by their body as was? I guess my big question is WHY? But, also, how? I don\u2019t get how it works. I\u2019d like to be enlightened, though. Please, change my view EDIT Okay, I\u2019ve learned some new things. I never knew what gender euphoria was until now \u2014 still a really fresh concept to me \u2014 but it has definitely helped in answering my questions. Thanks to everyone who took some time to help me learn today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You need gender dysphoria in order to be transgender.\n","id":"7d62d280-7a28-41dc-8389-62ffecf2af7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First I\u2019m in america, so I\u2019m not sure if this pertains to traffic in other countries. There is no need for a red left arrows to exist in traffic lights. If it\u2019s a normal green light, the standard is to yield left to oncoming traffic. If it\u2019s a red light obviously you can\u2019t go. I understand the need for green left arrows signaling that oncoming traffic has a red light and you are free to turn left. But in the case of a green light and red left arrow, you could simply omit the arrow signal to allow left turns when there is no traffic going through. In high traffic areas, the green left arrows could be used for the majority of left turns. Sorry if this is worded poorly, I can rephrase if needed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"red left arrows should never need to exist in traffic signals.\n","id":"3072078a-db93-4bd3-bc31-bcd8eaa69b6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First let me make it VERY clear that this is not a pro assault or pro harassment view point, nor am I saying I believe any of these men women are lying about being assaulted. That has nothing to do with my opinion at all. Additionally, this is not meant to attack or shame any victim past, present or future. This is about those who have experienced assault, knew it would hurt them professionally and did not report it when something could actually have been done about it. A prime example of this and certainly not the only one would be most of Harvey Weinstein's victims. SO many women and girls. Scores of women spanning decades. Most of which went on to reap the benefits of his influence later. Actresses, Screenwriters, Models, TV Hosts, etc. I'm betting a major reason no one spoke out about him is because they each had something to lose. Which in this case is a career in show business. This was their biggest pay off as well as an actual pay off in some cases . So they did not speak out, they kept quiet and it continued to happen. To compound the fear and shame that comes along with a crime like this, they knew that their careers would suffer. So they said nothing. Some of these women have admitted that they knew it was happening or had happened to other women. This is where the TRUE harm comes in. But now, 20 30 years later, after the benefits have been reaped, under the veil of strength and bravery, women are coming forward in droves crying about this injustice. And now its a movement that we are supposed to rally behind. Everyone of these women have failed the women that came after them. Making it harder and harder each time for them to come forward. The damage is done, there will be no proving this ever happened. He has gotten away with it, and each one of the women that did not come forward helped him, and those like him. I know, first hand, how bad it sucks to have to report a person of power who has taken advantage of me. I know it is difficult because I've done it. This does not make be any more of a woman and I am not looking to start a movement. But as woman we all know that no one is going to stand up for us ESPECIALLY if we aren't willing to stand up for each other. I said something. I lost my job, I knew I would. But it is my sincere hope that I made it easier for the next woman to say something and in turn making it more difficult for him to do it again. Granted, he is not Harvey Weinstein, but that does not make my fear and shame at the time any less. It does not help for a millionaire actress to come forward and say she was assaulted 30 years ago. My young daughter who may look up to her cannot use that. The outcry has lost it's power. What she NEEDS to see is women propping each other up in the NOW. Not this happened years ago and I have gone on to a fabulous career in the public spotlight. This does not take his power away. Our children often WAY too often imo look up to these women as idols. Our girls are seeing what can happen if you DON'T speak up. I speak very candidly with my children about many things we see in the media. The ONLY good thing I can see that has come of this in my household is I have been given another chance to talk to my kids about what is appropriate, what is not and no matter how hard something might be, you should ALWAYS, ALWAYS do what you feel in your heart of hearts to be right. Should the women of long ago and certainly not just the Alyssa's and Salma's of the world have stood up for each other the conversation around the dinner tables of the country could be much different. I would rather be saying we can thank these women for being brave trailblazers not, yeah, they should have stood up for themselves and each other<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The MeToo movement does more harm to assault\/harassment victims than help.\n","id":"7f32ebfa-d85e-493b-acd2-686eda6369a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>While the personality types ENTJs are the CEOs of the world the ISFJs are the primary school teachers of the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evolutionary biology explains the origins of male dominance and patriarchy as an evolutionary process rather than as a social construct.\n","id":"928a0d1d-ab65-43a9-b063-0a8c1844b61a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the U.S. increase the quota of H-1B visas?<|ARGUMENT|>If H-1B visa workers are paid wages lower than the minimum wage, they can take their employers to court.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If they have a H-1B and are under a proper contract, that is unlikely.\n","id":"74ae0a2b-1694-4dca-bd37-4b1d162cf624"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>People from different backgrounds have different experiences and different areas of knowledge. The decisions made by diverse organisations are therefore better informed because they incorporate a variety of sources of knowledge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having employees from diverse backgrounds enables organisations to make decisions that consider a much broader perspective.\n","id":"0cd2c304-104d-42b4-96a5-4ef4cc02e7a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should be the Next EU Commission President?<|ARGUMENT|>Transnational lists allow all European citizens to vote for the individual party candidate for the post of European Commission president. Right now only Germans can vote for Manfred Weber for example.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ska Keller advocates to have European party lists for the next EP election, which further European integration.\n","id":"15fa13b5-4327-4b4e-b266-95ebe0574274"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In every class I have taken with the exception of public speaking I am not graded on my ability to perform a task, but on my knowledge on how to do it. If I take a physical education class I don't get a grade based on how well I can do at sports but on my knowledge of how they are played. I believe public speaking should be treated the same way. The best counterargument that comes to mind is that in a Writing class you have to be able to write well, but the ability to write well comes directly from knowing how to write well which is not the case with public speaking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe public speaking is a skill and public speaking classes should b taught as such\n","id":"adb79e5c-3ad9-4b48-b621-d140799d92fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>Mark Twain published Huck Finn concurrent to the discussion whether slavery should have been abolished. He sought to provoke his contemporaries to question their convictions, which commonly included the notion that it was okay to own people. Readers should appreciate the provocative nature of the story and not dilute its intention.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Learning how to contextualize and interpret difficult texts teaches valuable skills in critical reasoning.\n","id":"a363eb7e-429d-494a-836c-51f961daa8b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I recently took a trip the the New York City Museum of Natural History. It was a really cool museum with exhibits showing dinosaurs, prehistoric animals, modern day animals, geology and space, etc. Many of the exhibits were beautifully created dioramas showing stuffed replica animals in their natural habitats. While there, went through a wing of the museum which covers the Great Plains Eastern Woodlands Indians of North America. Picture Picture Walking through there, something about it made me a little bit uncomfortable and I couldn't quite put my finger what it was. When I got home, I came across this article which argues that Native American art and artifacts don't belong in the Natural History Museum. I think this hits the nail on the head of what made me uncomfortable with the exhibit The TL DR of the article is that Native American art and artifacts are no more a part of the natural world than a painting by Picasso or an iPhone. These are things created by people who were no less human than western peoples. Many of them still exist today and still practice the cultures that are on display in these museums. They aren't ancient pre civilization cave men, and putting them in a museum alongside dinosaurs and modern mammals implies that Native American people are somehow part of the natural world, rather than part of human civilization. It dehumanizes them and teaches people to look at them as something lesser than modern people. If you're interested in the subject, I'd recommend reading the above article because it makes the argument better than I can. There are a lot of other ways this could be handled, and indeed there are Native American art and culture museums which display their cultures in a much more respectful way. I don't want to get into the options for how we could better educate people about Native American culture and civilization, and the conquest destruction of their peoples by European settlers I think that's another discussion entirely. My main point is that this is not a great way to present Native Americans to people, and should be phased out presented in a different way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Native American Art Doesn\u2019t Belong in the American Museum of Natural History\n","id":"c7810616-7064-4566-9148-5811be1229fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Darwinian Evolution Philosophy or Science?<|ARGUMENT|>Karl Popper was a philosopher of epistemology and convincingly argued that a valid scientific theory must be falsifiable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Science and philosophy contribute to each other in complimentary fashion.\n","id":"85285c3d-902d-4fa9-9728-eb633610d4d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All morality should be narrowed down to be strictly utilitarian The proper course of action is the one that maximizes utility, specifically defined as maximizing positive emotion and reducing suffering. Our senses of morality and justice come solely from our outdated evolved need to survive, and therefore, do not reflect the courses of action that might result in our highest overrall happiness as a species. There is no such thing as acts that are right or wrong , there is what there is in nature, and our laws should reflect that. In nature, there are endorphins, seratonin, oxycotin, and dopamine, so right and wrong should be replaced with overall happiness, and lack of happiness. To give an example, you might think it is morally wrong to lie, cheat on a test, or kill a bunch of orphans because you've evolved with feelings that make you feel bad about doing things like this for different reasons, and though most of those reasons make a lot of sense, in many cases, they won't result in the most happiness. If you kill a bunch of orphans in some poor chinese village without having them suffer befor they are killed , it might make sense because they would have probably had horrible lives, are a drain on resources, are making the people that are taking care of them a lot of stress etc Biollogically, we live to survive, and happiness or positive emotion in general the release of certain chemicals is the reward our body gives us for doing that. So it seems to me that everything we do as a species should revolve around scientifically maximizing overall happiness, in an organized manner. Thank you for reading, I would very much appreciate your thoughts on this. D EDIT utility is hapiness or positive emotion. positive emotion is dopamine, seratonine, oxycotin and endorphins these things CAN be quantified EDIT I understand that the carrying out of utilitarianism would be difficult. I am not debating that, I am debating wether or not it is the proper belief<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that utilitarianism should be the only \"moral law\".\n","id":"16e7cbe2-e790-42cc-a7cd-255a9992b0f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Poorer Countries Should Abandon Free Trade Agreements<|ARGUMENT|>In a desperate attempt to rebut our argument, the proposition managed to identify three \u201cvital\u201d issues which, to their broad view, are false and is some cases just absurd. Let us complement the other side\u2019s ideas by mentioning some of the facts that the proposition unfortunately forgot to mention, this with the obvious purpose of leading the audience into a more objective and complete perspective. First of all, the proposition states that free trade doesn't move international trading, but that is abruptly overshadowed by the action of demand and supply. Sadly, and a little bit coincidentally also , they failed to mention that the model of supply and demand is part of microeconomics and that it hardly interferes drastically in macroeconomics matters having said we may infer that it is even harder that it becomes of vital importance. If the model of supply and demand was to intervene in international trading, it would do so under the directly dependance of global trading laws in this case FTA, what the proposition should remember is that we are living in the 21\u2019st century and that economics as well as humankind itself evolves at a high speed rate. The result of this first proposition statement may be resumed into a confusing critic which not only lacks relevance for the topic, but also shows us the unsupportable and flawed posture that the proposition has taken. The same criteria may be applied for the tariff barrier comment made by the other team. We would like to stop and quote the proposition: \u201cThe country importer should make sure that it is affordable enough for the customer, so the national demand can be fulfilled.\u201d Empty words. We would like to mention that the state is not the responsible for assuring the prices are appropriate for the consumers, and we also do not understand why the proposition is so committed into getting a weird mix of economic laws, if since the beginning the proposition has been defending the inexistence of FTA advantages, then there shouldn't be contradictions in its speech; we invite the other time into making a complete research of the events, and thus providing a much more coherent discussion. Finally we thank the proposition for offering their help in the promotion of our cause, but reject the proposal. We believe that the fact of a dozen of countries being plunged into near-bankruptcy because of the 1980's oil glut is more than enough proof to show the catastrophic effects that the absence of facilities in trading can cause 2, that the fact of loss in revenue for the Arab members from the OPEC resulting in \u201cThe Mother of all Battles\u201d1 constitutes sufficient evidence for proving the importance of free trade and commerce in a peacebuilding effort, but more than that we believe that all the countries in the world cannot be equally powerful, but they may be equally free, and for those means we stand in favor of a reciprocal politic concerning FTA and supporting, as we\u2019ve defended from end to end during this debate, economic development in all of its extentson and for all the world. Our team begs you to oppose this motion. 1 2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The evidence of limited trading capacity as a result of not being part of a free trade agreement.\n","id":"fd8977f4-9465-4791-b2a3-6d4636dbc5ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think that calling healthcare that is paid for by the state taxpayers Single payer healthcare is a good idea for one reason the term doesn't specify who the single payer is The single payer could be the individual getting care. As in, they don't get any help from insurance at all and have to foot the bill themselves. They would be a single payer in this case. Using the term single payer to exclusively mean the government isn't really helpful. I'm not sure of a better term that would roll off the tongue better than single payer, but there certainly must exist a better term than this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think \"Single-payer healthcare\" is a good term for healthcare that is paid for by the state.\n","id":"022f0e45-1c68-4ed5-8806-05352fcead1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>In a scenario where only AKM's are fighting against each other and no humans are involved into battles, the global population grows even faster, because the number of war casualties drastically decreases. This leads to an increasing consumption of the already rare resources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Earth's \"overshoot-day\" comes earlier every year. That means that even nowadays without building millions of drones the resources of Earth are not sufficient.\n","id":"1b60b310-2116-4db7-9b86-75e0f25f7dfc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Islam and Democracy<|ARGUMENT|>To talk of an \u2018Islamic democracy\u2019 is to distort the concept of democracy to an unrecognisable extent. Irrespective of whether the religion itself can be conceptualised as democratic, this cannot compensate for the absence of political democracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To talk of an \u2018Islamic democracy\u2019 is to distort the concept of democracy to an unrecognisable extent...\n","id":"63b7e00a-b621-4aae-947c-ef1635acb38e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that's all countries with some form of welfare state will benefit if they change to a Universal Basic Income. in order to decrease the risk of fraudulent claims people who are benefiting from UBI will be required to sign in monthly using some form of biometric identification from the country you are receiving UBI preventing people claiming UBI from abroad or claiming on behalf of someone who is deceased. if you don't show up you don't get your UBI. Some people have different ideas of who should be eligible In my opinion I think citizenship is the best marker for eligibility. this could possibly extend to permanent stay residents but to be honest I'm not a fan of giving immigrants welfare. I feel people should immigrate to countries to contribute and not take from them. Obviously some support can be provided for legitimate asylum seekers but I don't feel they should receive equal benefits to citizens. Now that the parameters of who is eligible is out of the way the question of when are you entitle is next. Most people believe that 18 years old is the right starting point but I actually advocate for people to start receiving UBI at 16 because that gives you some feeling of independence before people leave the family home. Also you can be an independent adult at the age of 16. I left my family home at 16 to join the military and haven't lived with my family since. I don't really want to go into too much detail as to how UBI works because I think its a lot quicker for you to google it and I'm aware a lot of people already know how it works. But here is my version of it. Citizens of the country will receive UBI from the age of 16 to retirement where you will then receive a state pension less than UBI as your cost of living drops significantly after retirement. But the incorporation of a pension scheme where you get back a pension proportional to what you paid in during your life may be more fair. Asylum seekers may possibly receive some reduced form of welfare but able to work asylum seekers will be treated the same as regular immigrants. Immigrants will not receive UBI before gaining citizenship Now I am not going to state the amount because I am not an economist but the money received will be enough for someone to live on without hardship. you wont be able to afford to rent a nice house and eat steak every night but you'll be able to afford to rent a small room and consume basic essentials if you chose to never work a day in your life. Physical care is still provided for the disabled but you receive no monetary increase based on your situation. Therefore there is no incentive to synthetically change your situation in order to increase you welfare received. For people working your tax will be slightly increased to negate the UBI you are receiving gradually until you are earning a decent living wage and at that point you won't be earning anymore than you would have been prior to the introduction of UBI. So even though everyone receives this it will only benefit the poorest and most disadvantaged in society. A couple of the main reason I am for this is because in the UK where I live people on welfare are required to work less than 17 hours a week and as soon as you've gone over that threshold all your benefits are taken away. I have met people in this position and they state that there is no incentive for them to work more hours because they'll have to work another 17 hours before they've made up for the benefits they've lost so if they work 35 hours in one week they only receive one extra hour of pay, not to mention the extra tax they'll have to pay as well. The reason why UBI will be better for the system is because people will be incentivised to work as much as they want in order to increase their income because the tax increase will be less than you extra money they receive. The other reason why I am in favour of this is because people who lose their jobs won't have to apply for welfare as they will receive their full UBI in a month where they earn no money. Now obvious criticisms of this are What about disabled single mothers with 6 kids, you must think about the children Research has shown that with the introduction of a single parent welfare that increases with the inclusion of more children has actually incentivised this behaviour and since its inception single parenthood has increased massively. I would like to see that current families receiving welfare for their 6 kids actually continue to receive welfare until all those kid turn 16 where they will then receive UBI But for anyone after the cut off period won't receive such welfare and therefore won't be incentivised to put themselves in that position As for the very small of people who choose to continue with such practises and wish to receive increased welfare will find themselves getting a visit from social services and have their children taken away from them if they cannot provide for them. This will not create a huge surplus of children needing to find homes as the majority of children taken away from their families is due to them being in a dangerous environment and not so much due to the parents ability to take care of them. At the end of the day UBI is designed to increase productivity and decrease unemployment. Saving the Country money by decreasing government spending. Currently 25 of taxes in the UK got to welfare and I believe this is too much. I know I haven't covered everything as you're probably about to tell me and I'm more than happy to listen to what you have to say.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Universal Basic Income\n","id":"bc1483cb-9bd1-4e3a-b52c-98f550db7588"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we only pay a flat 'Asset Tax'?<|ARGUMENT|>An asset tax would incentivize consumption and investment, two things that are beneficial to the economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A flat \"Asset Tax\" is all the tax we should ever pay.\n","id":"3da4fb96-f6d6-429c-9e08-cf764b983cc7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By fair I mean that two identical persons doing identical work receive the same payment. Explanation The incentive of an employer is not to reward maximize individual performance, but overall profitability For an employee, more impact on company income means better chance to get a raise It doesn't matter if the underpaid cleaning lady only does her job grudgingly, but if the junior lawyer doesn't smile properly, it might cost you customers. Another example Consider two production lines for the same product One is going to be sold as premium article, the other labelled as discount and sold for less. It is much more sensible to raise wages for people working on the premium line, simply because that has more impact on company income. The natural consequence is that anyone not in a key role at his company gets paid less than he deserves by above definition . I agree that the current system is otherwise decent, conveniently self regulating and probably superior to, say, communism in most regards, but I see a dire need for improvement Change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wages are never going to be fair in a free market.\n","id":"4a31e5c5-e125-4f04-895f-efb122214ddc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it a good thing that Dungeons & Dragons is the de-facto standard RPG?<|ARGUMENT|>Wushu comes with many detailed and well-organized handouts for the \"facilitator or referee\" comparable to dungeon master that are tailored for many levels of experience with RPGs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wushu is a casual style game designed to avoid crunching numbers and arguing about tactics.\n","id":"a953d911-3e5b-49fa-906e-b88f961b4b70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Many laws mandate that there is access to prenatal care under the logic that it is important for the health of the foetus.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While fetuses may not be considered people, the law has still given them rights in certain situations.\n","id":"6baa208d-f136-42d4-a096-367f8706fab6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments push for 100% renewable energy?<|ARGUMENT|>If liquid fuel is used, it can remain in the reactor longer than traditional solid fuel which begins to break down, and therefore needs to be removed, after just 4% of its potential energy is used This allows more of the fuel to be efficiently used, reducing the amount of waste that is generated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Newer reactor designs can use most of the long-lived \"waste\" as fuel. The remaining radioactive waste is minuscule in volume and can be safely stored on-site.\n","id":"854a1c5d-df60-4139-a4af-1815d0a90848"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>All else being equal, decreasing the perception of maximum beauty lowers the perception of average beauty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The database will lower the perception of how beautiful the average person is.\n","id":"4f7cad55-5365-41aa-9fd1-0cd9a83ec6ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>\"A proximate factor behind the unrest triggering the Arab Spring was a spike in global food prices, which in turn was due in part to the extreme global weather in 2010\u20132011.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Increasing global food prices caused by climate change were an important factor in the Arab Spring, and the Syrian Civil War.\n","id":"e562e1fd-f204-467d-a0f9-ade94199a567"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>Speakers in the 'Alt-Right' have gained social and political capital from being granted speaking appearances, which has in turned advanced their standing within politics. For example, Richard Spencer's appearances in the media have translated into leadership positions within special interest groups.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the context of the large-scale propaganda machine that is modern TV news-entertainment, intellectual prestige and celebrity may translate very quickly into tangible political power.\n","id":"fe23ec1c-8338-4cf6-b6d9-a0cc53d10379"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have tried for years to break into non retail employment, but to no avail. I always wanted to be a school librarian and I followed the advice of others. I've been applying for years to get any job in my county's library system and I've applied to be library assistant secretary teaching assistant in schools, but nothing has happened. I can't afford to move, but may have that option someday. We are shamed if we don't achieve our dreams. Being working class isn't easy. I have one job on the weekend now, but am looking for another part time job. People look down on you for your job. People in hr don't give you a chance. It seems so pointless. Is it wrong to set a date? Edit I know what it takes to be a librarian. Being told to pay off all debt before I do anything else. If I dedicated everything I make to debt, it would still take about four years to pay off. I guess it would be OK being homeless and debtfree though. I don't see what others career I could pursue, most are stressful. I'm applying as clerical too with no luck I'll have to keep revising my resume. Told that people look down on lack of ambition, but poor people like me can't demonstrate our goals. It's easy to say you don't give a shit what people think when you're already well off and don't work jobs that are looked down upon. Reddit likes to pretend classism isn't real, but sends me pms taunting me to kill myself BC I'm poor. I'm not doing drugs. I know it takes a masters degree. I know it takes a masters degree. I know it takes a fucking masters degree.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am poor and very unlikely to achieve my dreams, so why should I not kill myself?\n","id":"7748fc9d-2bec-4a89-852e-1c6dadf86139"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The Zoological Society of London has achieved much for the conservation of endangered animals, with their work including deploying camera traps to catch poachers and assisting the rescuing of 950 exotic fish and coral.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoos contribute financially to conservation, both at their facilities and in wild habitats.\n","id":"eda182f3-da7d-4da7-b26d-af35ecb2ef60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>Reuse of old churches allows for environmental savings because 'embodied energy' can be used p.4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The buildings can be used differently and provide unique surroundings to new concepts.\n","id":"854f5075-4f1c-47c5-af88-9492a1e3b1b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just finished playing through KOTOR and loved it. The story, characters, drama, top notch Bioware stuff. But I just don't understand the gameplay. And I guess this goes for most action RPG's, but I just don't understand the appeal of the gameplay. It's one thing when this sort of D20 gameplay is on pen and paper, but presented as it is in KOTOR, it just comes off to me as clunky and tedious. Watching my 'elite' character with extensive combat experience firing and missing repeatedly at fifteen feet, or seeing as my highly advanced blaster shoots a man in the chest and knocks off tenth of his health, it just completely breaks immersion. Like when you need to hit a droid five times with a lightsaber it just comes off as absurd. Watching these powerful characters with powerful weapons struggle and toil to kill a large moth and missing half their attacks just drives me insane. How is this fun? Clicking on an enemy and watching as my elite soldier stands around in the open taking pot shots at a distance of twenty feet and still missing a third of the time. How is this fun? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Knights of the Old Republic has boring gameplay\n","id":"7aa82b6c-d72d-4462-86d1-d2363756b844"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Regifting is the action of giving someone a gift that was once given to you as a gift. It's usually done when the regifter doesn't have a use, want, or need for the item and or thinks that another person would like it. The problem is that, generally speaking, if at any point it's revealed that the gift you gave someone was a regift, it suddenly cheapens the quality of the gift and can even be taken as an insult to the recipient. I can understand how it might reflect a cheap nature on the part of the gift giver, but I think that if a regift really reflects one's belief that the recipient would like and value the gift, it mitigates the means to which the giver initially got it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think regifting is a bad thing -\n","id":"0a365821-d35b-428b-b39b-2167975ac6a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a Canadian, I don't feel our actions Federal and Provencal level are sufficient to really call environmentalism a national value. On a Federal Level, despite signing the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and then ratifying it in 2002, we've failed to meet our Kyoto targets and even posted an increase in Greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, in 2006, we elected Stephen Harper, who was vocally against The Kyoto Protocol and in the latest election 2011 Environmentalism was a not a major issue, despite its leading to the election of a single MP for the Green party. I believe, that if environmentalism was a national value, it would be better represented in federal policy and in the composition of the federal government. In addition, in 2014, the proposal for the Northern gateway pipeline was accepted by the federal government, and seems to be preparing to succeed. On a Provincial level, in British Columbia, the NDP party basically lost an election by clarifying its position on the northern gateway pipeline. In summary, if environmentalism was really a national value, it would be better represented in public policy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When listing Canadian values, environmentalism is not among them.\n","id":"15e93b70-ba64-4508-84fa-f3826bc00b00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fashion can never be feminist<|ARGUMENT|>There is a significant rise in eating disorders and plastic surgery largely due to social media and the often unrealistic beauty expectations of mainstream fashion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fashion is often developed to suit a body type that is unobtainable to most women. This makes many feel inadequate\n","id":"dd6de0f9-cf73-463f-a94a-9b2d8945e022"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>They're fun movies with great acting and solid direction from PJ. What I think a lot of people forget is that the book itself is not nearly as good as LotR so they're going from an unfair standpoint. Whenever people say all of the dwarves are forgettable I sigh because it's obvious they're not judging the movie fairly. PJ had very little to work with with the characters he was given. Granted, splitting it into a trilogy was a poor decision but I see it as a fan indulging in a world he loves. The main characters Bilbo, Gandalf, Smaug, Thorin, etc are still engaging and they're nowhere near the cringe worthiness of the star wars prequels.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The hobbit movies are good and are nowhere near as bad as people make them out to be.\n","id":"930a3f10-78e6-491e-9832-96cb0793807b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before everyone freaks out no i'm not saying outlaw religion i am simply saying that small children are impressionable and believe basically anything they're told by parents authority figures. Because of this it shouldn't be allowed for those people to tell children that this specific religion is correct, and teach them about it. Children should be taught in schools that all religions are unproven, and a matter of opinion, and if parents are religious they should simply tell the children this is what we think there is no evidence to prove it but we choose to think this . Allow the children to grow up and make they're own decisions about religion rather than be indoctrinated into it at a young age. Not only would this improve the lives of the many people who struggle with overcoming this indoctrination once they're older, but it would lessen the division between people based on religion because people would be more open minded and see that others religions are just as valid or invalid as theirs. x200B Since i'm sure it'll be one of the main arguments the but parents can do whatever they want with they're children argument will not sway me and you are wasting your time typing it it is the responsibility of a society to make sure its children are raised in a healthy and open minded environment and if the parents are incapable of providing this they shouldn't be allowed to raise the child. Not only because its better for the child but because its better for society as a whole as those children grow up to be healthier adults. x200B Addendum This would include pressuring attendance of explicitly religious practices like mass or prayer but not ambiguous yet religiously inspired practices think Christmas or similar holidays as long as its framed as a fun social event and not as a lets praise the lord thing if the child chooses to go they should be allowed to but forcing a child to attend religious services should be illegal. x200B EDIT since im getting so many repetitive comments im going to stop responding to things that dont bring up new points EDIT2 to all of the people who seem to think im advocating for children not even being aware of religions existence and arguing about other things that arent based in facts and if we should teach those things to them please actually read my post before commenting as apparently you didnt the first time<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You shouldn't be allowed to teach religion to small children.\n","id":"e2d39ae1-76ec-4262-9c22-2a3d2c21de86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do all or most White Americans experience privilege?<|ARGUMENT|>The system is not shown to be biased. It is against the law to be biased. By law of averages, our courts should be flooded with discrimination accusations. We do not see that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Issues like the lack of minorities in leadership positions or in certain fields like STEM are due to a lack of applications or requisite skills, not because of any policy or discrimination.\n","id":"107c6547-b6bd-446a-8a4b-947147ebc7e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>In the 2000 Camp David peace talks, both sides agreed to a solution whereby in the two-state solution, pre-1967 borders would be adjusted so that the largest settlements would be under Israel's control in exchange for the provision of more land to the Palestinian state elsewhere. Withdrawal from the other, much smaller settlements would then be easy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nothing is irreversible. Withdrawal from the problematic settlements and businesses is eminently possible.\n","id":"7aec3a9d-cc03-4abc-b5ce-0a82886ac713"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I very much agree and encourage all of my patients to take any and all available vaccines and to vaccinate their children when recommended. The new law proposed in California prohibits parents from opting out of childhood vaccines unless there is a medical reason not to have it, not a personal or religious one. I know vaccination is important for people who use public spaces to protect others from contracting annoying and sometimes fatal diseases but as a medical professional autonomy is a huge issue for our patients. People are stupid but they have a right to be stupid. This law goes against the principle of autonomy and I can't reconcile how it can be law to force them to do something they don't want to do to their children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is okay for the law to make childhood vaccinations mandatory\n","id":"dd6a66ba-dba6-47a4-9e86-8585d2054c03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Democracy: Pace of Development<|ARGUMENT|>Arguments about democracy being \u201ctoo fast\u201d ignore the fact that any speed is \u201ctoo fast\u201d. Some people argue that the movement from non-democracy to democracy is a very significant one and so systems ought to be wary of making that move \u201ctoo quickly\u201d. This ignores the point that the issue is not the speed but the scale of change. The move to democracy is a significant disruption to the status quo that will have wide-reaching and long-ranging effects in any situation. This will be so regardless of whether the transition period is short or long. So to complain that a transition is \u201ctoo fast\u201d is to confuse the nature of the change with the speed of change, which will always be too fast for many people\u2019s liking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Arguments about democracy being \u201ctoo fast\u201d ignore the fact that any speed is \u201ctoo fast\u201d. Some peopl...\n","id":"135ff62c-e0f1-4973-b021-fd2b466019c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that it should not be against any policies for a student to have peanuts or peanut butter or other food allergens in the classroom or at school. I believe someone with these allergies should be responsible for avoiding these foods, even in an environment with them, because it should not be anyone's responsibility but theirs they are the only one with the allergy. If someone has an allergy where they cannot be within 20 feet of a crumbled piece of a peanut without dying in 3 minutes, I hate to say it and I know not many people would agree, but they shouldn't be alive It's natural selection not working  please. I'd love to be more receptive to not bringing anything with peanuts to school.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe, assuming care and emergency help is available epi-pens etc, highschools should not be so strict about food allergies.\n","id":"3839407d-13bf-499a-88a6-10684a3e45dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>In Fig 5.1b a decrease in production and consumption from Q1 to Q2 will lead to an optimization of social surplus even though market surplus will be lowered as market surplus does not consider external cost such as cleaning pollution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A decrease in production and consumption will decrease market prosperity market surplus but will increase global prosperity social surplus.\n","id":"c7ae89a0-4072-47f4-a227-de2e7560fa7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Atheism is a claim just like any other, a belief that there is no god without any data or proof. At best, modern atheist including me should be cognizant that we have no real argument that there is NO god, but we can argue that the man-made religions are incorrect. These are not the same argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Atheism is an assertion that no deity exists - of course it needs to be justified. Especially since science admits that it cannot prove a universal negative.\n","id":"1ca7bfab-2a01-4b74-9933-b892a16aae36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI ensures that no citizen is forced to choose between earning and income and exercising their democratic right to vote in an election.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With basic needs guaranteed people will be more able to engage with politics and the democratic process.\n","id":"daadf595-de45-4a37-a584-fe6ed5db8ecc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Recognition by many other nations is a sufficient condition for a state to be legitimate. Therefore, Palestinian recognition of Israel has no positive effects on Israel, but strengthens Israel's position in relation to already occupied land, its general approach to the Palestinian people, and potential war crimes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is inappropriate to demand from Palestine the recognition of Israel's right to exist or of Israel as a Jewish state.\n","id":"3cd19b3f-12d4-4dee-96b2-98d9474303b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Twitter add an edit button?<|ARGUMENT|>Sometimes public figures tweet something that is claimed by a political movement as proof that this celebrity is 'on their side'. In light of the spotlight and responses, the figure may realize that their comments were open to misinterpretation and could clarify to stop the original message spreading further.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Major harmful factual inaccuracies can be more easily corrected with an edit button.\n","id":"66a8429f-8e41-4e33-bb51-99f9bf0b7708"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I always look both ways and slow down before a red light, but if there are obviously no cars coming then I'm going to ride through it. I've been yelled at by pedestrians and other cyclists for doing this, and I am confused as to why they would be so upset with me for doing something that I perceive to be a 0 risk activity. I understand that I am breaking the law, but I value my own discretion over blindly following rules. I find it very strange that other people would condemn this activity. I have had people get angry at me, asking me why I think I am above the law, but in my mind it is stupid to abide by laws when there are no good reasons to. Nobody gets hurt. I doubt my view can be changed, but I feel that there may be something that I am not understanding because I am in the extreme minority on this issue and the consensus of other traffic users is that I am an asshole when I do this. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a cyclist, I don't see the problem with running a red light when there are no cars coming.\n","id":"8f24ffcf-c7c6-4271-a94f-df945490585d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is OKC police officer Daniel Holtzclaw REALLY guilty of the crimes he was convicted of?<|ARGUMENT|>Almost all of those who made allegations against Holtzclaw were black females who had criminal histories of drug abuse, prostitution or outstanding warrants. They were very unlikely to be believed by the police, especially when reporting another police officer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a police officer, Holtzclaw could be fairly certain that his alleged victims would not report him.\n","id":"6eca9d23-91ca-41ac-a341-ae13fdc67f5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trophy Hunting Be Illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Many of these animals live on private land, including twenty five percent of all white rhinos Keeping the animals in good favor of land owners is thus paramount.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trophy hunting creates an incentive for local communities to keep the animals alive.\n","id":"489b6764-87fc-47d4-ab51-cb7c1f85d0e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People used to retire at a certain age and die of old age within the next decade or two at most. They would then pass their estates on to their children after being entirely self sustaining during their retirement years. Now, people have retired or are retiring and are looking forward to 20, 30 years of doing fuck all, not contributing to the economy in any major fashion except in one huge area healthcare. Some need joints replaced, they need drugs to keep their bodies from falling apart, they need 24 7 care and supervision. These costs pile up and quickly dwarf the money they get from pensions, investments, etc, and their children are forced to support them forced to be their financial life support. And again, to what end? BACKGROUND OF MY GRANDMOTHER NOT MANDATORY READING BUT HELPS CLEAR UP MY VIEWS In 2002, my grandfather died at 80 from pancreatic cancer after retiring at 60. We found out after he died that he was covering up for my grandmother's extreme Alzheimer\u2019s and dementia. He told no one, and she was not on any of the few preventative drugs there were at the time. Within one year, we took her into our home to keep her safe. She was diagnosed and given drugs and improved, and she moved home. She was there for another year, after which she fell and broke her hip. It was replaced and she moved back in with us for a few months before moving back home again. It was shortly after that that, in 2004, that her Alzheimer's and dementia outpaced what the drugs could do, and we got her into a retirement home. She has been there since. By 2008, she no longer knew her children or grandchildren, or close friends. She now remembers 3 of her 8 siblings, and has fuzzy memories of her husband of more than 60 years. I'm a very practical person. She isn't there anymore. Her body houses a whisper of who she was. To me, my grandmother is no longer alive. In the eight years since 2004, she has been in 24 7 care, which costs thousands of dollars per month. Half of this is covered by money earned from her extremely diverse investment portfolio build by my grandfather. Most of the rest goes to the taxpayers, and the remainder to my mother to pay. Physically speaking, she is fairly well off. She is fit for her age and is mostly mobile, just slow. Others in her retirement though are horrifying. They give me nightmares. They sit in wheelchairs and drool on themselves, piss or shit themselves, moan in what I can only guess is pain or sit or lie around all day and actually look dead. Sit around all day, watching television they don't understand because they are mentally stuck in the past or don't even notice it. Why. Why does anyone ever want to do that? That is not dignity. That is horrible. BACKGROUND I think that if in general, people volunteered for euthanasia a few years post retirement, while they were still of sound body and mind, they would end the selfish practices of artificial life extension for fully sentimental reasons. Some years after they retire, they could elect to move on while they still remember how who they are and how to not drool on themselves. While they still have their spouses before they die without them. While they still remember loved ones and friends. They could just move on instead of spending years in a facility they hate just so that their families can rest easy that they are taken care of and know that they can come and see them whenever they want to, like animals in a zoo.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people should not be alive for such a long time past their retirement, and that voluntary euthanaisa of the aged should be celebrated and honored.\n","id":"94c12db7-0548-404e-b4b6-18d24742edba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build an international space elevator?<|ARGUMENT|>People would need to travel up into space to work on the orbital ring, whereas a space elevator can easily be accessed at the ground level.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An orbital ring is more difficult to maintain by people on Earth.\n","id":"3d033fef-96f0-4bc1-9ade-a34ec24078e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I didnt know how exactly to phrase the title, but by music I mean modern music with microphones. I am excluding musical theatre, modern phony opera singers and anyone that borrows from those styles. When I say music, I am excluding these people. Okay so to explain my disclaimer, opera singers and musical theatre actors need to project, which takes serious skill and practice. Techniques like belting are used, which have to be specifically learned and mastered. Opera singers even phony microphoned ones use techniques like bel canto, which are really difficult. They dont fit into what I am gonna explain. So I dont respect most singers because they singing in music because the singing isnt actually very difficult, and even then it is so subjective that anything can be considered 'good'. Singing is simply a muscular contraction, you train your vocal chords to output a certain pitch and timbre. My point is that anyone can learn to sing. With a bit of vocal coaching and minimal effort, I could be technically speaking as good a singer as most successful musicians. Many people have a naturally 'nice' sounding voice, since in the music industry, things like projecting, vocal stamina and breath control arent important, these people are naturally as good as many singers. How can such singers deserve respect? No one picks up a guitar and shreds solos like Page. No one sits down at some drums and plays like Peart. Yet the vocalists in many bands are by far the most famous members. They get far more respect than they really deserve. So it is clear that almost anyone can become as technically proficient as a famous singer. However I strongly doubt, even if I put unfounded amounts of effort in, I or almost anyone could be as good a guitarist as Hendrix or Clapton or Gilmour or Page or Beck or any household guitarist. These people would still be the best in the world. Furthermore singing is so subjective. People can have wretched 'breathy' pop voices, that are technically just bad, but these people are revered as good singers. While song instrumentalists have poor technique like Slash for example, he would play without his pinkie finger , they can still emulate the same results, they are just handicapping themselves. Singers earn too much respect, they are often the front man of the band, despite being the far from the most talented member. John Lennon is the most famous Beatle, while most fans would agree he didnt influence the sound of the band as much as McCartney or Harrison. Mick Jagger is pretty unexceptional as a muscian, yet he gets most of the fame, whereas Richards is one of the best guitarist ever.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I struggle to hold respect for most singers in music and think they are vastly over respected compared to instrumentalists\n","id":"49e8d3a7-754e-40f8-8fd4-28ccc2d9786b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Social Media Been Good For Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Social media algorithms designed to enhance the user's experience have inadvertently created deeply personalized Filter Bubbles Information dissemination is calculated by user desire rather than objective necessity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We can create echo chambers for ourselves and our opinions.\n","id":"5c1a04a3-a931-4163-86c6-23f49276e3d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should culturally diverse writers be mandatory in English curricula?<|ARGUMENT|>Students tend to engage in reactive misbehavior when unmotivated and when they feel their environment is threatened, and take actions to avoid these feelings. p. 18<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Studies show that students who are not challenged in school often resort to forms of misbehavior p. 27\n","id":"bce4680e-f325-4267-a2ce-8b12ca6a1ba3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is citizen science beneficial to science?<|ARGUMENT|>The origin of popular science is from social struggles and it's scope can not be confined to individuals that's why citizen science exists. It's important to see into citizens ideas, thinking opinions and value it even if it's not measurable as of now but one day citizen science may have its place or take over. Ultimately citizen science is Democratic and true practice of science. Even Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper contradicts at instances, but the thinking reflects importance of citizen science.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To the degree that Citizen Science projects increase sample sizes, add computing power, and reduce investigator bias, it represents a positive tool in the arsenal of modern research.\n","id":"329845cb-e891-452a-94e8-d5f9444fe86a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m from Italy and here we have a system similar to the SSN called \u201cCodice fiscale\u201d it is a 16 character code assigned by the Ministry of Finance to each individual. It is mainly used for identification purposes in tax forms, for the healthcare system and for employment matters. The code is usually computed with parts of one\u2019s name, sex, date of birth and place of birth. For example John Smith, Male, born on the 12th of February 1980 in Boston would have the code SMTJHN80B17H319K. The code would be computed as follows with the Italian system SMT first three consonants of the last name JHN first three consonants of the first name 80 last two digits of the year of birth B letter corresponding to the month of birth 17 day of birth in the case of a female individual, 40 would be added to the day of birth H319 code for the place of birth hypothetical K a control character computed from the previous characters using a particular algorithm The code is usually computed as shown above. However, if that isn\u2019t possible short name, name with few consonants, two people with exactly the same data, etc. the Ministry of Finance can issue a different code to the concerned individual. I believe the new SSNs should be issued in a similar format and possibly that people with SSNs of the current format should be allowed to request one in the new format . ADVANTAGES The main advantage would be a sharp reduction in identity fraud as it would no longer be possible to use a code that doesn\u2019t correspond to one\u2019s name. In Italy, one\u2019s Codice fiscale is never a cause of concern in any way. Other advantages include ease of memorisation and ease of recognition one could find their code faster on a list contains multiple codes . POSSIBLE DRAWBACKS A possible drawback would be that anyone could compute someone\u2019s code with basic information about them, however I don\u2019t see how that would be a problem this is the point I\u2019m most unsure of . Another disadvantage would be the loss of anonymity of the exclusively numeric current format of the SSN I don\u2019t know if the SSN is ever used for this purpose . Finally there would be the problem of adapting all forms and ledgers paper and electronic to accomodate a longer alphanumeric code as a SSN. . Additional points The codes for places of birth are fixed every town in Italy corresponds to a specific code for foreign born individuals there are additional codes. The Italian \u201cCodice fiscale\u201d is not printed on one\u2019s passport, ID or driving license it is printed is on a separate card. edit formatting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A new format for Social Security Numbers should be phased in\n","id":"566d5e04-5986-4f74-a68f-02d5adb2c55a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off I don't believe in God or anything that can't be proven with science. So, I believe in what's called determinism which holds that people don't have free will, rather everything that happens was already determined, like fate. The reason I believe this is because all particles are subject to the laws of the universe and have to follow them. For example when you drop a ball it HAS to fall, otherwise it would be breaking the law of gravity. Our bodies and importantly our brains are nothing more than particles, which have to follow the laws of the universe and so everything that happens is just doing exactly as the laws allow. Therefore there is no room for free will. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think free will is myth\n","id":"a55eec17-a3d7-4557-aef3-90198b96695a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>Prominent feminist Emma Watson has helped to lobby support for the UN's HeforShe project which fights for gender equality around the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mainstream feminism has been able to bring attention to issues of women of colour in the developing world.\n","id":"0a3ab437-56d4-435d-902d-ed19bc75f95d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Definitions \u201cThe people\u201d means everyone capable of giving consent in the territory over which a government claims sovereignty. \u201cConsent\u201d means to give permission. To \u201cgovern\u201d means to exercise political authority, or to exercise the moral property in virtue of which one may coerce people in certain ways not permitted to anyone else and in virtue of which citizens must obey in situations in which they would not be obligated to obey anyone else. Argument In the absence of a strong argument showing that the people have consented to be governed, we should believe that the people have not consented to be governed. The same goes for any situation in which someone is seemingly being coerced and there isn\u2019t a good reason to think they consented to the situation. For example, if a rape seems to be occurring, and one doesn\u2019t have a good reason to think that the parties involved are roleplaying, then the reasonable assumption would be that a rape is occurring. Preliminary remarks Because this topic is complex, we should keep the debate focused on whether or not consent has been given, as opposed to whether governments are necessary regardless of consent. My rebuttals to the arguments popularly made in support of the claim that people have consent to be governed are below. If I ignored an argument that you think is worth discussing, please bring it up. I\u2019m posting here because I care more about the truth than preserving my political views. Popular arguments for consent of the governed and rebuttals 1 If a citizen uses the goods and services that the government provides, then he she implicitly consents to pay for them and follow the government\u2019s laws This argument makes sense if one thinks of how restaurants operate when people order food, the waiter doesn\u2019t ask the customer to sign a contract agreeing to pay after eating. The consent to be charged for the food is commonly understood to be baked into the order. The customer is also expected to follow the no smoking signs and other rules of good behavior, which are somewhat like laws. One problem with this argument is that the government charges people for things whether or not they ordered or use them, and if one doesn\u2019t order or use something, then one hasn\u2019t given implicit consent to pay for it. Virtually everyone uses a government service, yet virtually everyone can think of a government service they vehemently oppose, like certain welfare programs or the drug war. This is similar to a gardener who mows people\u2019s lawns without asking whether they want their lawn mowed and then sends them a bill, followed by threats if they fail to pay for the service. Another problem with this argument is that the government ignores explicit dissent, which trumps any perceived implicit consent. There is no number of carefully worded letters or phone calls to the government that will convince them to refund you the part of your taxes that goes to fund causes or actions you find morally objectionable. Lastly, if two parties engage in trade, that doesn\u2019t give the seller the right to coerce the buyer, especially not in ways unrelated to the exchange. For example, if one were to buy a cell phone at a store, an employee wouldn\u2019t be morally permitted to point at a sign that says \u201call customers must dance\u201d and then coerce you into dancing. 2 If you enter a country, or you don\u2019t leave it, that shows implicit consent to follow the government\u2019s laws because the government owns the country and property owners have the right to set the rules. Does the government really own the country? Let\u2019s look at a few ways that governments might have legitimately acquired ownership over countries A. By buying the land. I don\u2019t know of any examples of governments having purchased all the land they claim sovereignty over, but I would be interested in reading about such a thing happening however, we\u2019d still have to discuss the validity of the transaction. Keep in mind that even some purchases of large tracts of land, like the Louisiana Purchase, were made from other governments that claimed to own the land but didn\u2019t. Exploring that land didn\u2019t give France ownership of it, and while building a settlement might result in ownership of the land where the settlement is, it wouldn\u2019t have the same effect on land miles away. B. By decree. Merely proclaiming \u201cthis land is mine\u201d doesn\u2019t make it so. Mufasa was wrong when he told Simba, \u201cEverything the light touches is our kingdom.\u201d C. By conquest. This is armed robbery. D. By working the land or \u201cmixing labor\u201d with it. Working the land can be a legitimate way of acquiring ownership of it. However, governments haven\u2019t worked all the land they claim sovereignty over. 3 If you were asked what kind of society is best and you didn\u2019t know whether you\u2019d be rich or poor, able bodied or disabled, man or woman, you would choose a society with a insert your favorite kind of government here government because that would give you the best odds of living a fruitful life. And that is as close to a consensual societal arrangement as we can get. John Rawls\u2019 Original Position Veil of Ignorance I don\u2019t think it\u2019s reasonable to assume that the people would arrive at the same conclusion if they were placed in the veil of ignorance . One reason they might not is that we all tend toward different political views, even at the level of our personality type, and I don\u2019t think it is known how a person who has been stripped of their memories and their genetic and subconscious tendencies would act. If you\u2019d like to use this argument, please show me how everyone involved would arrive at the same conclusion and that conclusion would involve a government. Thank you for your time. I hope we can all learn something from this discussion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the people have not consented to be governed\n","id":"e2905a7b-4ae5-44ff-8f83-85a1a08a286d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently I had a discussion with an environmentalist friend. She thinks that people who consume excessive amounts of fossil fuels are criminals. Not just in a metaphorical sense, but she said that they actually deserve to be punished like any other criminal, because they are infringing on the rights of future generations . My counterargument can be summed up in one sentence A crime requires a victim. When I am talking about future generations , I am not talking about children who actually exist. I am specifically talking about people who haven't been born yet. Those people are hypothetical. They might or might not exist in future. So at best, they are potential victims. To me, if a crime doesn't have a real, specific, actual victim then it's not a crime. My friend said that this argument is silly because that chance that some humans will exist 200 years from now is 100 and that makes them non hypothetical. I countered that having children is a choice, and that I am under no obligation to provide for the future of her descendants. If I own a piece of land I have the right to cover it in nuclear waste and make it unusable for potential future generations assume, for the sake of argument, that the contamination doesn't leak to my neighbors . Inheritance is a gift. Nobody has the right to inherit an un contaminated piece of land from me. If you want to have children and grandchildren, it's 100 up to you to make sure that there is an ecosystem that can sustain them. Now, I am not saying that contaminating my land with nuclear waste is not a massively dickish move. But that still doesn't make it a crime. On the other hand, intuitively it feels wrong to me that we should have an unlimited right to trash our home planet like there was no tomorrow. Have I missed something in my argument?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is impossible to commit a crime against \"future generations\"\n","id":"c52183ae-4c0b-4715-891e-a5ed7fc6143d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This doesn't apply to all Christians as only most fit this description. If a person believes that dead babies go to heaven, then they cannot logically be upset that babies are aborted. These souls are getting a free ticket to heaven, and the end game on this earth, from a Christian perspective, is to get into heaven. I've only encountered some Catholics who don't believe that babies go to heaven and this obviously doesn't apply to them or any who do not believe that God sends innocents to heaven. It has always baffled me that pro life movement is made up of so many Christians, when their beliefs seem to be in direct conflict on this issue. I think that if I truly believed that dead babies went to heaven, and that fetuses were babies, then abortion would be the greatest thing on earth.  please. I'm hoping that I'm missing something and that people aren't simply this illogical and foolish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christians cannot logically be against abortion.\n","id":"856c8fc4-c38a-4a0f-98f7-58123abfb366"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've thought about this over a long period of time. Outside of social norms or religion, why should we have children? Because it's our social responsibility ? Or perhaps because we must continue the population ? Well, first you'd need to explain your reasoning for those arguments before approaching this issue in that method. You hear people saying that it's an amazing experience to have children and that you feel fulfilled. Or maybe that they were once a child and they're now happy. But, this isn't the case for everyone. Similarly, these adults were once children who were socialized to love the society that they're in and ignore their future non existence after death. How many seniors do you see fearing death, or trying to escape it by believing in a god and praying when it comes closer to death? Or perhaps doing good just in case . Perhaps even convincing themselves that they've accepted it in order to escape it until the moment it happens? x200B Assumptions in this argument No God or Reincarnation that is a whole other argument . x200B The argument Basically,i feel like birthing children is literally causing them to suffer. Why give someone life only for them to know that it'll be ripped away? Is this not the supreme cuckery? x200B Common arguments against this They believe in a religion where they must have children and that their children will go to heaven after. Counterargument This is in the premise that a religion existed. Ask someone to tell you that they can 100 prove god's existence and no one can tell you that this is true. Then again, it's the same with atheism. But, it's a big risk to put that onto a newly formed being don't you think? They say that if that person ceases to exist, they wouldn\u2019t remember that life anyways. So they might as well enjoy it while they have it . Counterargument The might as well argument doesn't cut it. Sure, we might as well make the best of it . But, what about the new borns being forced to exist every day 250 born per minute ? You're using a living case who has no choice over a case which didn't have to happen. You\u2019re allowing a consciousness to exist and experience the physical world. Counterargument By allowing, you mean forcing. You're forcing a consciousness to be born and hoping that they'll be socialized well enough to ignore the fear of ceasing to exist so that they can fit into your mold of a normal functioning human in society a fabrication to escape the constant inner fear of death . x200B Now, why would it be selfish to bring a child into the world? They are forced to face death at some point in their existence. They have NO choice. Letting them experience life only to take it away Why push it on them in the first place if it wasn\u2019t meant to be? This so called gift to live why put it into someone\u2019s hands forcefully, and force them to have to face it being ripped away? I appreciate all responses and am open for other viewpoints. This argument has me stuck right now because I don't have enough people with logical unemotional or non religiously culturally attached backgrounds to discuss this. Thank you x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Birthing Children is selfish. It is forcing them to experience to death.\n","id":"9a137e30-dea7-4307-8d67-13745f811ca7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By aristocracy I mean the dictionary definition of rule by a small privileged class. Obviously this includes medieval Europe, but it could also mean someplace like modern Russia or even the United States Congress if you want to be cynical. For the purpose of this  I'll include monarchies, since they usually had a noble class. Basically I think aristocracies are inherently evil and unjust because they carry the assumption some people are better than others merely by virtue of birthright, which is such an arbitrary distinction as to be meaningless. Choosing rulers for more substantial reasons like their skill in a particular area or because the people elect them are fine in my view, because that way rulers are externally validated. An aristocracy is essentially self validating and its sole function of existence is to perpetuate itself, often by preying on the common people. I think this is obvious from medieval wars, war was the sport of kings and the rulers could send their people off to fight and die for pointless petty reasons, even for personal offenses against the king by another king. So essentially aristocrats considered their personal honor more important than the lives of their subjects . The common people were nothing more than tools to be used and disposed of as seen fit I think that's the number one reason I hold this view . Nobles dined lavishly while peasants starved in the streets, and if an army invaded they'd butcher everyone and claim the city for their king. Even during World War I, I bet the sons of the European rulers weren't out fighting on the front and were conveniently exempt from wartime rationing. I may be wrong but that whole war was essentially a personal squabble between kings that killed millions and wrecked a whole continent. I'm not saying all aristocrats were evil people, there could have been decent kings and nobles, but they were still part of an unjust system. Not to mention getting good rulers was completely up to chance and there was no way to remove them except to fight a bloody war like the War of the Roses to put some other corrupt guy on the throne. Royal courts were similar too. They're romanticized today, but all they were was a bunch of fancily dressed people spending more time bickering with each other than working for the good of the people, and even doing that was dependent on getting the king's favor. Modern democracy is by no means perfect, there's still aristocratic relics like considering the rulers to be above the common people the United Nations will happily deal with mass murdering warlords and host them at fancy international conferences, and places like Switzerland will gleefully look the other way and hide their blood money. It is better though people can protest wars started by their governments, whereas in the past the king would just have them executed or sent off as cannon fodder. Not to mention the whole government of the people, by the people, and for the people thing, the complete opposite of aristocracy. At least aristocratic Presidents don't have life terms. I'm sorry if I'm being hyperbolic or melodramatic, one reason why I want my view changed is to remove these strong feelings. I think everything I talked about was at least possible for aristocratic rulers to do, even if they didn't do it very often. I simply do not understand people who find royalty or nobility romantic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Aristocracies are Evil\n","id":"116f0201-7bdb-4654-99ab-ec915391d2f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems extremely stupid how people act like raising kids is such a noble thing to do and act, think that the parent is sacrificing so much for the child. The kid wouldn't exist at all if the parent didn't have it. This means they wouldn't experience the good parts of life but they also wouldn't have to suffer through any of the bad parts. Since the highest birth rates occur in poorer areas of the world, then odds are the kids have far more bad parts of life to deal with than the good parts. Excluding rape victims having a kid is a choice made by the parents, or they weren't careful enough with birth control methods, either way its their choice fault. If someone forces a consciousness into existence, then the least they can do is provide for the kid and not act like they are sacrificing so much. The world already has more than enough people, and the kid didn't choose to exist. If people want to have kids, that's fine, but don't think its such an honorable thing to do because its not doing anyone else any favors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being a parent isn't a noble\/heroic thing\n","id":"6a9564a4-9fdd-4f0f-8d38-02e0ac3ed8ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Many theists base their belief in God on good in the world, while the stories in their religious texts tend to depict the Gods of classical theism as selfish evil tyrants with bad attitudes, short tempers, lust for death and destruction, and a general disregard for the value of anything other then themselves, even when those same texts defined such Gods as being good no matter what they do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are as many moral arguments against the existence of God.\n","id":"970217e0-91ed-4ef6-b008-d765f2b58ede"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically, I believe that esports will always have a following but will never truly be understood and accepted outside of a niche part of the population of the USA. If you see any mainstream documentaries or news stories regarding video games there are just too many misconceptions for video games to be taken seriously. I'm a fan of esports and ill concede that it has a massive following in parts of Europe and Asia, but the USA has too many obstacles to overcome. This isn't a debate about whether being recognized is necessary but more a statement of fact about the current situation and culture of gaming in the USA. I believe that esports can be successful without mainstream popularity, but it will never benefit from the broad appeal of conventional sports or be even close to the popularity that gaming has in other countries specifically Korea .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Esports will never be taken seriously by the majority of the population of the USA.\n","id":"c7244d20-505a-4b4d-9caa-998ef5d371f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Before the universe existed, the laws of time, space, and causality may not have existed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is possible that the universe came into being on its own.\n","id":"84e4eecf-6c8e-470a-b165-9c724e9ee055"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has the Conservative government lost its legitimacy to govern?<|ARGUMENT|>Hunt was accused of alienating the 'entire medical profession' over the fights he picked with junior doctors and the language and tactics he employed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hunt is deeply unpopular amongst doctors and NHS workers due to his policies and discussions as Health Secretary.\n","id":"16333fa8-b2b5-47cf-b605-5c647a49ba6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>More precisely we need to enlarge what is understood to be the history. What is embodied in these statues is a single perspective. If the statues were to, say, add a chain in the hand of the man on the horse and have it linked to an iron neck ring on a black slave, it would be adding more of the actual history. As it is we are stuck in a myth, a simplification of the history, that is giving rise to the current perturbations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should be asking ourselves why these monuments have stayed up until today. This is a modern day version of Chesterton's Fence We need to learn from history, not flail around trying to erase it.\n","id":"8dad022f-5068-425e-afbc-a207e4194634"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think feminist pro abortion arguments that revolve around a woman's choice and her control over her body are entirely ineffective in convincing pro life people because most pro lifers don't really give that much of damn about women and their choices. I think the correct way to argue for the legality of abortions is to say that not aborting children that are unwanted leads to bad outcomes for the society and results in net utility losses. There are several reasons why this is the case, here are some This Wikipedia article lists a lot of reasons why children born as a result of unwanted pregnancies are likely to be less mentally and physically healthy during childhood . They are also less likely to get a good education. Children born as a result of unwanted pregnancies are more likely to be bad members of the society and to have delinquent and criminal behaviour. . Again look under the 'Facts' section of the Wikipedia article. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the best argument for abortions is a utilitarian one.\n","id":"2f8cd3a2-795b-40c3-825e-302c36dca5b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The main problem in today\u2019s world is education. I mean education as good behaviour but also as in academic education school, university . Undeniably a better education system is better for everyone, no one has a doubt about it. Better access to education and better teaching ensure that new generations come prepared and able to understand the world and face it. But it seems we are much more focused on practically every other issue. Most of today\u2019s problems come from and are caused by ignorance, by the pure lack of perspective. Many people don\u2019t care about many things that may affect them, and I think this is just because they don\u2019t truly understand those things, and not because they\u2019re stupid, but because they don\u2019t have the good attitude towards the problem. I\u2019m not saying everybody should focus their lives on getting a PhD, nor am I saying a good career is the most fundamental thing in life. I\u2019m just of the opinion that the correct ethical values and a good education at younger ages would greatly improve the world. The attitude in today\u2019s world towards education is in many stances incorrect. Education should be seen as the stone that has paved our way to the world as we now know it, as it really is. I\u2019ve been thinking about this and good like to have some good discussion about it. Thanks for reading<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Education should be considered the most important issue in today\u2019s world.\n","id":"3f5cc958-bacc-47dc-8703-d1adf5f4a395"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Evolution is a biological process, the result of superior genes being passed from parents to children because those superior genes gave the parents a better chance to procreate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The premise that religion can be an evolutionary adaptation is based on a fundamental misconception of evolution\n","id":"3d9fcd99-82c5-4ff3-9b0c-620fceb19ee3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey guys Now I'm not saying that depression isn't real, or that it cant cause serious harm and is not difficult to deal with. I have had periods in my life where i have had some toxic thinking that just spirals down and down and i felt like shit a lot of the time. apparently 10 percent of all people have had mild depression within 12 months ? Anyway, i firmly believe and am willing to change this that depression is all about how one thinks. Humans naturally have toxic thoughts, and we cant always control these thoughts but we can choose how we react to them and how long we entertain them for. Therapy is very useful for people to identify destructive thought patterns and try to actively and consciously change them. I believe pharmaceutical drugs may help in the short term, making someone feel better, but are just a band aid and don't actually fix the underlying problem they are also heavily over prescribed, sometimes in situations when people are MEANT to feel sad, e.g. a divorce or a loved one dying . On top of this, it has been shown that a healthy lifestyle, eating healthy food and regular exercise is just as effective in treating depression as SSRI's healthy body healthy mind We know that the brain is neuroplastic, and our thoughts and behaviours can physically change the structure of the brain. I believe the more we think in a constructive manner for instance viewing negative things as a chance to grow, not just blindly thinking positive and not denying the feelings of sadness, but not focusing on them and letting them spiral out of control to the point we feel helpless and then stay there, is the key to fighting depression. Reddit, change my view i feel like an asshole when i tell people this and would like to be wrong<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Depression is all in the mind\n","id":"ef594f12-ef97-4eed-9559-28ee6947fcc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Fair Trade are voluntary standards that can be not monitored given the low staff Fair Trade has as an organization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fair Trade marketing system provides more opportunities for corruption than the normal marketing system.\n","id":"a71a30ae-b25a-4da1-83e6-abbaea756ed5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When an April Fool's article is posted on Reddit often the top comment is something along the lines of this is an April Fool's joke . Sometimes even moderators sticky that comment. Sometimes people even spoil it in the title. Yet these posts get upvoted anyway. This is terrible. The point of April Fool's is to fool somebody or be fooled. It's about the feeling of satisfaction you get when you fool somebody. It's about the moment of realization when you fell for a joke and realize how silly it really was. It's about reading something and wondering whether it's real because you already fell for a joke earlier today. It's about the craftsmanship of a well written article that starts out plausible to gain the readers trust but then gets more and more absurd, shattering their expectation. But this is all ruined by early spoilers. Most of the enjoyment is lost. People should downvote spoilers, not upvote them<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Spoiling April Fool's day pranks on Reddit ruins the experience for everybody.\n","id":"27fa86fe-c6ec-429d-83b4-4876a1b999e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hope I use the right terminology in this post. Using the correct terminology can be a minefield because there's never a consensus on these things and terms inevitably fall to the euphemism treadmill. While I certainly believe persons with disabilities are not any less deserving of respect or dignity, I firmly believe they are limited in some ways and a practical employer should almost always hire the able bodied person, given that they are equally qualified. I don't want to use the one armed ditch digger example because that one is too obvious. Obviously, a two armed ditch digger will do a better job than a one armed one. Ditching digging is the job description and I think everyone will agree that there is no issues with hiring the person with two arms. Let's look at some more difficult scenarios. For each scenario you will imagine you are a compassionate, just and competent employer. You are also presented with two candidates who are equally qualified in every way, except one has a disability. Scenario 1 You are hiring a web developer. Candidate A is able bodied and Candidate B requires the use of a wheelchair. Your workplace is an old building that has been grandfathered out of Accessibility laws. In order to hire Candidate B, you will need to build a ramp to your building at your own expense. You hire Candidate A. Scenario 2 You are hiring a game developer. Candidate A confides in you that he quit a previous job due to overwork and stress. He says he was working 100 hours a week. He says he is fine to work 40 hours a week. Because you are a fair boss, all your employees work 40 hours a week. However, since you are in a competitive industry with tight deadlines, sometimes you fall behind. You don't rely on employees pulling 100 hour work weeks to meet deadlines, but sometimes there are unforeseen delays. You hire Candidate B because though your employees shouldn't be working 100 hour weeks, you recognise that it's sometimes inevitable and you want someone who can go above and beyond. Scenario 3 You are hiring a secretary because the previous one is leaving. The previous secretary took it upon himself to water the plants in the office. This is outside the job description but it took the previous secretary 3 minutes a day to do and he was happy to do it. Candidate B has mobility problems and thus wouldn't be able to water the plants. You hire Candidate A. In my opinion, there were practical reasons for the employer to choose the able bodied candidate in each of the above scenarios. I'm not sure they would have survived a lawsuit if the employer has disclosed their reasons to the rejected candidates but morally, to me, they pass the smell test. How is a person with disabilities supposed to find a job then? I don't have a good answer to that question. But I don't think that should be the employer's burden either. edit fixed several typos.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In most situations, there are practical reasons to hire an able bodied person over a person with disabilities. This is not ableism, if it is, then there's nothing wrong with ableism.\n","id":"49f64280-79ae-42d3-bc2a-349f2911bf0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>It's necessary to show respect to the victim as a government to make sure that the pain or death of him or her wasn't without any serious consequences<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Criminal justice systems should prioritize a victim's right to retribution in the form of punishment.\n","id":"28cfc9dd-5caf-415e-81c5-3ede3b81e173"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Olympic Dream Is Dead<|ARGUMENT|>The use of performance-enhancing drugs is widespread in the Olympics and reduces the victories of those who take them to meaninglessness. New drugs such as the growth hormone EPO are very difficult to detect, but the Olympic authorities are doing little to overcome the problem. The President of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, has been notoriously reluctant to put his weight behind attempts to beat doping.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of performance-enhancing drugs is widespread in the Olympics and reduces the victories of th...\n","id":"937e8aaf-d5bc-48c6-9359-63998382bd85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Evangelicals vote for Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>James MacDonald who previously opposed Trump, announced that he is pleased with Trump\u2019s efforts as president and would want him to continue his services towards the betterment of America.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump has the support of many evangelical pastors around the globe. Despite Trump's incompatibility with traditional Christian beliefs, many pastors support and respect him and his family.\n","id":"310abdd2-5c9c-4f98-959d-0f0c27e8526c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Time spent praying is a waste, because the person praying may be talking to someone who either doesn't exist, isn't listening, can't help, won't help, or doesn't care.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Behaviours such as mindless repetitiveness of actions that cannot remedy a particular situation and herd mentality.\n","id":"15b90302-e2c5-4b51-9096-b635b2605d8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>#timesup: Should individuals credibly accused of sexual assault or harassment be fired from positions of authority?<|ARGUMENT|>Sexual assault is a criminal offense and accusations of assault should be required to be reported to the police and handled by them. The terms of what constitutes a valid claim of harassment is something that seems too murky. Any claim of harassment should merit investigation by the company before action is taken, and to be honest firing someone without evidence of wrongdoing over an accusation like this should be terms for a lawsuit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is often going to be difficult to determine how reliable or credible an accusation of harassment or assault is, and therefore this is not an appropriate system to use to determine a punishment.\n","id":"67cbb808-e9f5-4a99-9934-5ee950f4216f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>International pressure forced Mauritania the last country to abolish slavery to finally prosecute slave owners in 2007.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Historically, external political pressure has been successful in creating political change.\n","id":"70e6e683-9ba7-44b6-80d5-ed7de9a7d155"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't know if this is a thing anywhere else, but in the UK, students can claim additional time allowance in public exams. From what I've heard, the eligibility test is a joke. If you write slowly and act dim during the assessment you're pretty much guaranteed eligibility. Besides the widespread abuse, I don't see why extra time should he given to anyone at all, regardless of disability. The way I see it, exam grades are a way for employers to judge your worth as an employee, and to differentiate you from others in the job market. Why should anyone be given an advantage just because they can't work as fast etc.? It makes the grade system invalid, since they appear better than they can possibly be in the real world. Is your boss going to give you extra time for being a slow worker?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe extra time for those students with \"learning difficulties\" is absurd and should be banned.\n","id":"decba7f2-4363-4982-88c1-20be588d9df9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Update My mind has been changed. No longer have any notion of cheating at all or getting divorced because of subpar sex alone. We were both raised in religious families and had no sex before marriage. I messed around a little with previous boyfriends. no anal or oral, really tame stuff like getting naked and playing with each other. Gave an ex a handjob one time. Was never fingered. the extent of my husband's experience is even less. He refused to make out on the grounds of being scared of going too far and losing our virginities. We talked about sexual preferences before marriage. I stressed the importance of sex and my high sex drive to him and he agreed to experiment and use toys. After our first time he just wanted quickies three times a week. He has tried different positions and we have gone to a sex therapist but none of it has improved sex between us. We bought one vibrator but he refuses to go to sex shops with me. After 2.5 years of marriage I have had satisfying sex about five times and no orgasms except though solo masturbation. I want to know if I am missing out on something grand before I leave over bad, infrequent sex. I want to have a physical affair to confirm whether or not considerate sex is important to have.  edit He has told me he has no fantasies and is uncomfortable listening to any of mine. Says that sex is just about penetration and that my concept of sex being everything before and after is strange to him. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I married as a virgin and my husband also married as a virgin is a selfish lover. I want to have a physical affair to determine if sex is important.\n","id":"b262f58e-4621-434a-a605-b8f0b53fc286"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Morality may start as subjective depending upon the people or the place who proposed the underlying rules. However as the time progresses and societies evolve, different moralities tend to converge. Objective morality is the ultimate goal of mature civilizations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain moral truths are inherent to human nature and transcend cultures and time.\n","id":"ac7d66d2-205c-4a35-b504-24979af5685d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't believe there is any value in IBM's Watson project, or Big Data Analytics in general.  In 2011, IBM's Watson defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on the Jeopardy , a popular trivia TV show. This feat was remarkable because it demonstrated a system that is capable of understanding the complexities of human language similar to Apple's Siri . In addition, Watson's ability to sift through vasts quantities of information both structured and unstructured data from sources such as medical journals and Wikipedia articles , and actually make sense of the data, was unprededented. Watson is a demonstration of what IBM calls Big Data Analytics and cognitive computing a system that can gain understanding insights by analyzing vast quantities of structured or unstructured data. IBM claims that businesses which make use of Big Data can propel themselves ahead of their competition. However, I have yet to be convinced that Big Data Analytics has any real world applications or economic value. Note that the proponents of Big Data frequently cite studies conducted by IBM, or are IBM affiliates with a vested interest in selling the idea the Forbes article above is just one among many that are guilty on both counts. I don't doubt that there is a tremendous amount of data being generated each day, but I do question the claim that there is value in processing understanding all that data. For those who are convinced about the value of Big Data Analytics , pretend that you own a business and want to find ways to expand. Please explain why you would spend thousands of dollars for such services, and also what kind of insights would justify the investment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe there is any value in IBM's Watson project, or \"Big Data\/Analytics\" in general.\n","id":"54b8b7fa-fb4c-4e57-aedd-bc6e9b74a42a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state ever infringe on individual human rights when countering terrorism?<|ARGUMENT|>The right not to be tortured is fundamental and absolute because it makes the victim complicit in their own violation by using the victim's own body as a means to the tormentor's ends Sussman, p. 30<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Counterterrorism measures may violate the prohibition against the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.\n","id":"ccef4cd2-8527-497e-83c2-aada480d40a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I saw a documentary today about the Occupy movement and I found myself completely disgusted. One of the interviewees spoke about how the richest 1 hoard the nation's wealth while the working poor struggles to make ends meet. They spoke about the inequalities in America. Specifically, they were complaining about having 56k of student loan debt and saw no way of paying it back so they just decided they weren't going to. Their job paid 800 a month, and the loan payment was 400 month. So, the interviewee decided they had been given a raw deal and it was someone else's fault. I came from nothing. My grandparents literally built their house with their own hands. All the food they ate came from their own backyard. My mom raised me in a trailer out in the middle of nowhere until I was fifteen. When she divorced her husband, she and I moved into a shack about the size of the kitchen I am sitting in now. We had no shower used the water hose outside to take showers and she worked two jobs to keep food on the table. As a mother of three with no education, she saw no problem with this and never complained. After high school I worked my ass off to get through the Air Force's Air Traffic Control program. Blood, sweat, and tears. Ten years later I am better off than my parents ever were. Now, I can pretty much guarantee my children will be successful and will lead better lives than me. If I were to lose everything, my kids would start over by building a shack in the middle of the woods, just like my grandparents and I wouldn't have it any other way. The richest 1 took nothing from me and I want nothing from them. Change my view. Edit I am not against government safety nets, schools, or taxes. I support a strong, frugal democracy. I even support social welfare and community support systems and even a single payer healthcare system What I have issues with I think, still learning is the people who think the wealthiest people in the country owe them something. Edit 2 I am doing my best to study and upvote each comment. Thank you guys so much for your input and stimulating discussion I think I am starting to pick up on a few flaws in my ideology. Edit 3 Ok, some of these comments are getting a little ridiculous. One person asked if I changed my own diapers when I was a baby. Another wondered if I believed in going to the dentist I'm not some guy sitting in an old VW bus in the woods, writing my manifesto I live in a big city and I use the goods and services of my community just like everybody else. I just try to pay my own way and handle my business on my own as much as possible. Let's please keep this thread light hearted and civil. A lot of people are asking about my job. I did 6 years of enlistment in the Air Force, where I learned to be an air traffic controller. I am currently a civilian employee of the Army. So, I've been doing this for about 12 years. It's a tough and demanding job sometimes terrifying , but I can't see myself doing anything else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am fiscally conservative. I believe the world owes me nothing. Hard work and frugality are all I need to make it in life.\n","id":"5a94117f-86e2-4e3c-b384-b78591d93a62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All I ever hear is how awesome indie music is. Honestly, I don't see the appeal. I'm not picky in my music tastes, so its not that. I listen to everything EDM, country, metal, progressive rock, jazz, baroque pop you name it. I like music. But seriously, I just can't stand any band with the indie sound. It's so boring, a lot of it sounds like there is no emotion involved, and it often sounds generic. It all sounds the same to me Arcade Fire, Franz Ferdinand, The Strokes, Modest Mouse, you name it. I didn't even enjoy bands like these before I even know what indie was, I have just never enjoyed the style. Seriously, what's the appeal? Could someone introduce me to indie music that I might enjoy? Like I said, I'm not picky with my music choices, I just don't see the big deal. Maybe I'm listening to the wrong indie bands, but the ones I have heard all seem pretty liked by their fans. EDIT To the mods, I might not reply for a while because I'm posting this before bed. I know there's a rule on replying within a few hours, so I hope someone sees this before removing this because of my inactivity<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think indie music is boring, largely generic, and well, just awful.\n","id":"0c67d287-355b-4d5f-b42a-99befe1ee37e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is just something that's escaped me for the longest time. I think it's great that transgender people are becoming more and more accepted socially and otherwise, but I don't understand how the same people that are perfectly happy to accept someone who doesn't feel like they were born the right gender will scoff at the prospect that someone could legitimately feel like they weren't born the right species. It just feels like those who think about transgender trans species people that way are kind of blindly going along with the social standards of feminism without actually stopping to think critically about why they are or aren't accepting of other people's beliefs and lifestyles. And just for the record This question comes from experiences I've had talking with friends, not the crazy dramatic stuff that constantly goes on on the internet regarding those groups. I'm not good friends with any transgender people, and as far as I know I've never met anyone who identifies as another species. I'm not trying to demean one group or the other I'm just drawing a comparison because well, I think they're exactly the same. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see any reason why a transgender person should be inherently treated or considered any different than someone who identifies as a different species.\n","id":"5f760c5c-0d2a-45e2-a877-a705d5b07c31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize prostitution<|ARGUMENT|>we should legalize prostitution because it will be regulated meaning the females will be safer<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing sex work will make the profession safer for women\n","id":"aa10f94c-b360-4a39-8f7e-f2ee9ba38109"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Psychiatrists Be Allowed to Diagnose Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>A lawyer for the New York Times defended an article criticizing Mr. Trump's degrading comments about women which Trump objected to as libel by stating \u201cNothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libel laws exist to protect \"a good reputation honestly earned,\" and some experts have suggested President Trump's reputation has already been too self-tarnished for other people's comments to cause significant harm.\n","id":"d68ca936-2c47-4e22-a4c8-367061bc5381"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU introduce a carbon tax?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU's Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive was modified to exclude power stations and industrial plants, as these were already covered by the ETS.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU's ETS has been used politically to undermine other climate and emissions control policies.\n","id":"d55fd93f-4b5d-455f-98e5-20d03f1015ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To understand my view, It is important to investigate where that double standard comes from. It comes from the old fashioned idea that women want a gentleman . One aspect of this idea of a gentleman is that men should always be the ones to ask women out, to initiate any relationship, romance, or even a one night stand. Therefore, the man has to put in work to get the girl, whereas the girl doesn't have to do any courting at all. Because the man is doing the work, the idea of the slut is perpetuated by allowing males to sleep with them, so in a world where the norm is that men and women put in equal work when courting, there could be no sluts. Sadly, this is the reality that guys still face today, and in order to end the slut shaming stereotype, we must first end this idea of a gentleman Feminists should be focusing on abolishing the idea of a gentleman , which harms both genders, instead of focusing on slut shaming, which favors women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminists are trying to abolish the wrong double standard, one which is at the root of the problem\n","id":"270addf6-85ac-4e0d-b3fd-4c5c86d72800"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Every human should have the right and means to decide when and how to die.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Euthanasia is a choice for patients, often supported by several health experts.\n","id":"3d6c5b0f-bf9d-4a5a-bbae-816262e34a21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey be part of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>Polls indicate that 57% of Turkish citizens are in favor of a lasting alliance with Russia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey and Russia currently have a strong relationship which Turkey can rely on.\n","id":"5e03e651-55b7-4c93-a041-fbeb132521c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The US government is in a state of paralysis. The people are historically dissatisfied with Congress their representatives , as Congress itself is barely functional. The US as a country is still having the same debates as they were 30 years ago on many key economic and political issues. The current US system was one that valued the power of the people above all. This is why they made the Legislative branch the most powerful, to amplify the voice of the people. They followed historical predecessors and chose to have a system where the people elected representatives and those representatives carried out the will of the people. For a long time it worked reasonably well. The people had their will executed, and the costs associated with elections and representatives were well worth paying to ensure that the people have control of the government. But this system is in the process of failing, burdened by many things at once. The advent of 24 hour news and the transition of news to the web has distorted the ugliest parts of politics to insane levels. The 5.6 billion dollars spent in the 2016 election cycle is a reasonable measure of just how much money is flowing into politics. The power of the executive seems to be ever growing and a perfect target for some malevolent, ambitious individual who wants to be a king. Worst of all, many of these politicians care most about their own power and maintaining it, even if that means taking agency away from the people. While many of these were acceptable costs when the quickest method of communication was sending a letter horseback, that is quite emphatically not the world we live in anymore. With all that in mind, I think we have to take the values of the founding fathers and re apply them, considering what technology we have at our disposal. When we look at their task A people controlled by the government, we can improve on the system that delivers that. The founders put the will of the people in a framework of government that protected people's rights. The framework is good. We should keep it. But congress and the executive? Replace them with a random sample of Americans. The population of the United States is educated enough that I would trust my fellow citizens to make the decisions for me, and I would damn sure chose them over the last several congresses. So I think we should do that. I think that the legislative and executive branches should be replaced with a random selection of the country's population, in the form of a mega jury . These mega jurors would be kept anonymous, paid a good salary and be given the instructions that they are to do their best to educate themselves on a topic, then vote whichever way they think will be best for the future of the country. I think this mega juror selection process and execution would have to be done digitally, through some kind of open source code created and overseen by the community at first, and mega jury once they take power. I do not know exactly what the system would look like, but it would be something along the lines of shipping every mega juror a laptop and having them video conference in with some kind of digital masking. The rest of the governmental infrastructure would remain in place. The congressional aids would be mega jury aids. Judges would be appointed by mega jury. Department heads would report to mega jury. After the mega jury is appointed, they begin doing their best to learn about whatever issue they are tasked with working on, infrastructure, healthcare, taxes etc. I imagine they would be tutored on the topics in groups by experts. Experts being whomever the groups choose with knowledge and experience, with mega jury aids researching any questions they might have and assisting them in their learning in whatever way they can. Every function that congress performs would be replaced with mega jury. Some quick answers to anticipated arguments Who controls the military? Mega jury. The joint chiefs of staff report to mega jury, though mega jury can put guidelines in place that generals must follow or be fired and replaced by mega jury. How do you deal with confidential information? Any mega juror with the clearance can view material, or they can pick representatives who must be vetted by the appropriate experts. Those representatives then report back to mega jury with what action they think is best, without divulging the information that they saw. Representatives can be whomever. Military, civil leaders, journalists, scientists etc What about corruption? You fight it as you do now, make corruption illegal with huge punishments. I think that the incentive for companies to attempt to corrupt representatives is significantly reduced, as trying to dox mega jurors could be made illegal, and even if you do manage to find one of these random citizens their power is fleeting and not worth investing in. How would you handle foreign policy? Policy and direction is set by consecutive mega juries, and this is the bible for the state department and faceless bureaucrats who are tasked with executing their will. How do you change the constitution control mega jury prevent self dealing by mega jury? I think that all of these issues can be dealt with by the concept of consecutive mega juries. In other words, if three mega juries in a row vote for some change, then it passes. What if mega jury is stupid and makes dumb decisions? Society fails. I think that the benefits of this kind of system would be abundant. No more political parties. No more politicians. No more elections. No more 24 hour news turning politicians into celebrities. This is obviously not a fully thought through idea, but my view is that this concept once perfected would be better than the current constitutional republic that the US has. Power to the people. . Arguments that are sure to change my view Some suggestion that I have not mentioned that would make the idea better more likely to succeed. Arguments that won't change my view It couldn't happen or We could not accomplish the setup of this system. Americans are smart, I'm sure it could be figured out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US legislative and executive branches should be replaced by a randomly selected 2,000 person mega-jury of citizens, who are anonymous and have 3 month terms.\n","id":"8c7376a8-620a-4305-b15a-4b66c538b153"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently, my father asked me to right five reasons for why one should believe in God, and why one should not believe in God. You can read this document here Obviously, I lean towards the non existence of God in this document, which my Father pointed out. I say that the God the existence of God is entirely unprovable, albeit impossible to disprove it. In this document, I say that believing in God makes many assumptions that God exists, and one can take Occam's Razor and shave off the idea that uses the most assumptions, thusly shaving off faith. My Father than asked me to prove that God exists. I believe that a concept like that is inherently unprovable, and impossible to disprove. EDIT Let me be more clear on what I mean by God. By God, I mean a God like the Christian God, or Allah. These Gods are omniscient and infinite. Lets use this definition, the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority the supreme being.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe That The Existence Of God Is Unprovable\n","id":"507240af-ae38-413c-8ef1-d1ba4ecfa7d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, I know that it's difficult to choose not to take offense , so I won't argue that. However, if a possibly offensive term is used to describe something in a non offensive context, people should not get offended. My rationalization for this is that people should only be offended if someone else is intending on being offensive. For example Fuck you, you dirty cunt is a sentenced that would be used to insult or hurt someone. However, saying Fuck man, I lost my key is not meant to hurt someone, and shouldn't be considered offensive. You are gay, and I hate gay men is offensive and hateful because he's saying it with offensive intent. That movie was so gay Does not have hateful intent. Look at that retard pointing to someone with Down's Syndrome is used to descriminate that type of person. God that book's so retarded is not intending to descriminate people with downms syndrome. Furthermore, I also want to touch on Trigger Warnings . People should be able to look at anything comfortably, whether it is offensive or not. Whether or not they agree with them is up to them. I know I sound inconsiderate , but this is honestly how I feel. Change my view so I don't have to be an inconsiderate person anymore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe people people shouldn't take offence to things that weren't purposely intended to offend them.\n","id":"b3d43ada-35ab-43a8-9ee5-47e5b3d3a12a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is an issue that I have been concerned about for a long time. Essentially by providing a surface cover of cats and click bait, Reddit allows extreme, racist and other damaging content to thrive. I guess linked to this is that I feel that Reddit suffers from a political social disengagement that is diminishing society. This is manifest in simplifying issues, clear heroes and villains, racism, sexism and other objectionable qualities. This would be mitigated, I would hope by general Reddit users investigating deeper levels of comments and downvoting appropriately. Except that this is often not what happens. Most Reddit users skim comments at best and do not bother to read low enough or read down voted threads. This is why we find comments such as this one very racist receiving gold and votes but towards the bottom relatively speaking of a front page post.  that Reddit, whilst appearing as open minded and progressive, is actually quite disturbingly racist and regressive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit, whilst appearing as open minded and progressive is actually quite disturbingly racist and regressive.\n","id":"86ecca44-abff-4f1b-b02a-e8cb7bdc1e72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>Students perceive the teacher as an authority figure, so when the teacher repeats or references the uncensored N-word, it may appear as if the teacher believes it is legitimate to use the N-word in certain contexts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without censoring offensive words, students will be more likely to adopt racially insensitive words and\/or attitudes.\n","id":"df877172-a2b8-4b98-be1e-274abd56298b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>IS wants a caliphate without proper rule of law, but a legal system purely based on religion Islam.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Western ideology is the only one that allows for rule of law, human rights and democracy.\n","id":"a36632ff-119b-4b27-8734-46cb18d0a6d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know the title is horribly worded and I apologize in advance. I do not condone support hitting women. i just don't see why we almost glorify or completely support a woman hitting a man or any other physical violence against men. shouldn't we just try to make all forms of abuse, attacks, etc immoral, despite the victim's gender? i get the whole women aren't as physically stronger as men but is that always correct? not all men are 6 feet tall and capable of lifting a refrigerator. some men, such as myself, are actually quite small and relatively weak which could be why i think this . that doesn't mean i'm going to go punch the next female i see, i just feel that instead of living this double standard, we'd be better off telling society hitting anyone is immoral. for the record, i've never hit a girl or a guy. i've never been in a fist fight. and quite honestly, i worry about the feedback for this submission because i feel like a shitty person even asking this question but it is something that has bothered me for a while.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see why hitting men is acceptable, but hitting women is not.\n","id":"adc7f32d-2eb9-4c43-8d7a-2d137f4b82dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note I do support punching people in self defense or to defend others from direct physical harm. If a person is attacking someone else, even if one of them are a nazi, you should help. So, there has been an interesting debate lately is it right to punch fascists? Richard Spencer was suddenly attacked, and there's a widely popular photograph of a lady swinging a handbag towards a neo nazi. This isn't right. You shouldn't punch people just because their opinions differ, even if they want you dead, punching someone unprovoked is not the right thing to do, and will only provoke more violence. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You shouldn't punch nazis or fascists\n","id":"f8f3a6a0-af0d-4a6f-9cff-a641ede4e06e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is taxation theft?<|ARGUMENT|>The median household income in the US is $61,372 The the state spends $35,148 per household and collects $26,677 per household in taxes 2019 data. The total national debt is $177,000 per household. Over 11% of tax money collected goes toward paying the interest on the national debt alone - not including the principal payment. Many people make choices in their life to avoid owing debts, but the state promises money on their behalf, robbing individuals of their agency and property.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"debt that all individuals owe to each other\" in the US is insolvent; i.e. we are spending more on 'each other' than we take from each other, plus what's borrowed from other governments which is \"a debt owed by those citizens to one another\".\n","id":"9cb3fa7a-bc5c-4893-bd26-4dad43b268cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans in industrial nations have overcome the \"hunting\" part of stone-age culture; there is no reason why they should not outgrow the \"consumption of meat\" part as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans have abandoned or modified behaviours that were once considered natural.\n","id":"600f3f2b-bd7f-4caa-8694-05974252e872"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies<|ARGUMENT|>Sima Gandhi. \"Turn off the oil subsidy spigot.\" Center for American Progress. July 6th, 2010: \"BP and ExxonMobil, pay lobbyists millions of dollars to scare lawmakers into believing that ending subsidies to oil companies will wreak havoc on the American economy. These arguments are advanced by trade organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute, and they suggest that eliminating subsidies \u201ccould mean less U.S. energy production, fewer American jobs,\u201d and higher oil prices. The evidence suggests otherwise.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Oil industry pays millions to scare Congress into maintaining subsidies.\n","id":"bb25f301-1e73-4ea9-8883-e116f66c48d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>The best interest standard reduces everything to mere objective medical interests rather than allowing for subjective medical considerations such as the emotional and physical accompaniments of the chosen course on the child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best interest standard is insufficient in providing guidance for decision-making regarding children.\n","id":"6dfa3e6a-1747-4065-b954-29a893619845"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is not one or the other. The men are abhorrent and they know that. They are trying to fuck people over, so telling them anything does nothing. You can only catch an asshole like that after they've done something horrible. So to try and prevent it from happening, no one taking the bait is the best way. You cant tell a serial killer not to kill and expect it to work. There is something wrong with them. There is something wrong with someone who would do this to women. Telling them does jack shit and all we can do is try and catch them and make the punishments steep to help prevent. No woman in the industry would have to deal with this shit if no one fucked for fame, because they still need women actors. Most women stand together already, it is the few that don't that let these scumbag men know that coercing you works. Where am I wrongThis is not one or the other. The men are abhorrent and they know that. They are trying to fuck people over, so telling them anything does nothing. You can only catch an asshole like that after they've done something horrible. So to try and prevent it from happening, no one taking the bait is the best way. You cant tell a serial killer not to kill and expect it to work. There is something wrong with them. There is something wrong with someone who would do this to women. Telling them does jack shit and all we can do is try and catch them and make the punishments steep to help prevent. No woman in the industry would have to deal with this shit if no one fucked for fame, because they still need women actors. Most women stand together already, it is the few that don't that let these scumbag men know that coercing you works. Where am I wrong? Here is an easy way to think about it You cant strike for higher wages if some of the workers are still willing to work for lower wages. Same concept x200B ngl, this got way more responses than i thought. I appreciate all of the discussion, as thats why this sub is one of the greatest subs. Everyone has been extremely respectful and intellectual in their discussions and I appreciate that. I probably will not do any more responses as it is starting to circle the wagons, but I will still skim searching for a delta to award. x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If all women in entertainment stopped taking career advancement\/money for sex, men wouldn't be able to coerce them.\n","id":"13f6a4b2-57c3-4160-959b-05ae37da1aee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Born in France, living in multiple foreign countries, as a French person, today I cannot make up my mind to go back. France, to me, has a wonderful culture, landscape and cuisine, perfect for holidays, but not good enough to live in. Studying, working or living there seems very unattractive to me. Partly because of the very strict school system and lower wages, but also because the obvious racism against Muslims, or people from the Maghreb in general. This phenomenon is observable at schools. Usually public schools free of major fees , are visited by poorer people and foreigners . Private religious schools are usually reserved to the wealthy and French nationals. If a building has defaults they blame it on the Portuguese of Arabic poeple. When I speak with French people, first of all they point out that I have a foreign accent, when I tell them that I lived most of my life abroad even though I speak French at home with my mother all the time . I usually get forgotten after a few exchanged words. Conversations usually go into politics, which sometimes breaks out in heavy discussions, including shouting. They are really proud about the human rights and deny corruption but love to point out how bad China is doing at having a democracy. China, first of all is not Europe, and might not be the best country to its people, but in their stage of development they are not ready to be a copy and paste of the french revolution. We had not a lot of welfare laws either and emancipation during our industrialisation period. Most of them smoke as well and don't really care bout the environment and usually laugh at the Germans passing ecological laws. I also experienced that gap years after school are totally not recommended and travelling is not seen as educative in that time but as a waste of time. Telling my family that I wanted to take this year of to grow, get experience and see the world the only question I got was But why do you need to go somewhere far away? The French it seems to me don't really try to learn any other language other than Spanish if they do, usually they fail. I don't see many French being fluent in English, though I noticed that the younger generation is becoming better. French bosses usually shout a lot, I have been working with some of them I don't know what that is this abuse of authority but it makes me mad. I am sure there are some nice ones too and I am eager to meet them. Food is very expensive and I don't see why you need so many Hypermarches when you could do fine with less choice, lower prices, environmental friendlier supply and buying off products from the locals at markets instead of these insanely huge hyper food malls where it takes me ages to buy cereals because I can't spot mine at first sight. Also, public transportation is bad. It gets better around cities, but if you live in a banlieue, usually you need a car to get around. That is pretty much it honestly I am feeling bad for rejecting my home country like this so please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Generally, french citizens, residing in France seem very proud of themselves and have not a very wide horizon.\n","id":"c08e6342-6e74-42c2-b7a4-a6506113dcdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>The Clonard monastery located at the borderlines of religious and Protestant faith in Northern Ireland became a symbol of reconciliation<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Churches and monasteries functioned as symbols of peace in communities.\n","id":"7fd5e981-2b43-45f8-b3a3-245ae32d9257"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>In addition to being a cost-saving measure, electronic voting, though still in its infancy, is already showing signs of boosting voter participation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In combination with the benefits of E-democracy the costs can be decreased and the efficiency increased.\n","id":"36e1ea1c-0471-4c08-b69c-a652d642162c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>The inmate and prison culture often encourages violent behavior. Prison does not rehabilitate or teach social skills. The most aggressive do the best in prisons, and it is often viewed as a place where \"boys go to become men.\" Among street offenders, time served is often simply added to their \"street cred.\" Prison is not a detterent. On a brighter note, things like Project Return has relatively low recidivism rates.Project Return<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The primary focus of prisons should be rehabilitation and reintegration, not punishment.\n","id":"28901768-3023-4e04-b872-2d6a8e245b5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Propaganda medias etc has become part of the culture, and it deters altruism. Most people now days can't even imagine a different mentality. Consumerism capitalism is prime, and the people will no longer stand together in cooperation, as they don't see a need to. I don't think the individuals will stand up for themselves until there's no where left to sit. There hasn't really been any mass firearm clashes, and if they happen, the authority will dominate. After which they will intimidate the rest back into their slot. If the word spreads, martial law further depression can come about. With the game as it is now, no real revolution can happen unless the power class flips the table and leave everyone to kill one another for a few years and cool out before coming back in to feed the people. I'm not making any predictions, I'm only saying that with things as they are now, it won't happen. And even if it did, it wouldn't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Canada &amp; the United States will never see any real revolution.\n","id":"fa70c6fe-c91f-41fc-b0ef-2c9544342485"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the US is Justified in Using Force to Prevent States From Acquiring Nuclear Weapons<|ARGUMENT|>The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is one of the lynchpins on which the current Western-led international political and diplomatic order is dependent.1,2 Just as any normal legal system requires laws that are predictable and enforceable, so too does the international system. The Non-Proliferation Treaty provides this level of consistency and control over states\u2019 nuclear assets. In particular, one of those key principles is the assumption that once a country enters a treaty it will abide by its terms. If a country can leave a treaty at will, it means that no policy can be made with any degree of predictability. States are not able to formulate plans for future policies and development strategies if analysts and politicians are prevented from making reliable predictions about neighbouring state\u2019s behaviour, economic policies and territorial ambitions. This is particularly important with treaties relating to armaments, and of vital importance when it comes to Nuclear Weapons, because other countries choose to participate in military alliances and actions based on such assumptions. Historically, arms build-ups and wars have occurred when the Great Powers fail to uphold the international legal system \u2013 fail to regard it as binding and inherently valuable and consequential. For example Germany\u2019s willingness to disregard Czechoslovakian sovereignty prior to World War II. For that reason the United States has a vested interest in upholding the principles of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This is because the US is the major beneficiary of the present international system, both economically and politically. Economically, the major loser in any upheaval around the world is almost guaranteed to be the United States or its corporations. However, the political incentives for the USA to continue upholding the non-proliferation treaty- by force if necessary- are far greater. A failure on its part to act will not just lead to nuclear proliferation, but also undermine other treaties banning chemical weapons and guaranteeing human rights as nations\u2019 realize they are only pieces of paper. 1. \u2018The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons\u2019, 2005 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons NPT, 1 July 1968, 2. Kasprzyk, Nicholas, \u2018Nuclear Non-proliferation and Regional Changing Strategic Balances: How Much Will Regional Proliferation Impinge Upon the Future of the NPT?\u2019, in Krause, Joachim and Wenger, Andreas eds., Studies in Contemporary History and Security policy, 2001,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States has an obligation to protect international stability due to its unique military strength.\n","id":"00afcd66-c133-4880-9017-9f2886bb7ea5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The EU should impose a special Europe-wide tax on meat consumption to help save the planet<|ARGUMENT|>VAT is imposed by national governments on all products. CAP is an EU subsidy that specifically targets agriculture for financial support on a massive scale. The plan Props recommend is, therefore, extraordinary in the history of economics for the simple reason that the same organisation the EU would simultaneously be singling out the same industry for special subsidies and taxes. Taking the comparison Props are so fond of making with Tobacco and Alcohol, this is equivalent to paying tobacco manufacturers and distillers subsidies at the same time as charging them excise duties, something of a mixed message. For people so happy to tax their own farmers indiscriminately, Prop show strange reluctance to extend this principle to the only place where it might actually do some good. They concede our argument that raising the price of meat in the EU might lead to an increase in demand for cheaper imported meat with all the enormous environmental damage this brings with it. But then go on to say: 'the EU can do nothing to make production of meat in these countries more expensive'. Well, the EU may not be able to make production of foreign meat more expensive, but that is irrelevant to the case, because the EU can, very simply, make the price of it more expensive by, you've guessed it, placing an excise duty on meat produced OUTSIDE THE EU. This, at least, would make some environmental sense since imported meat attracts immeasurably higher environmental costs as we will show in our final point.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In answer to Prop's rebuttal to our point 5.\n","id":"022970a1-d5c1-4150-b1f4-dcfcf11c58b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no permanent members of the UN Security Council<|ARGUMENT|>It will lead to fair regional representation, as well as make it more legitimate and flexible<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be no permanent members of the UN Security Council\n","id":"d2e131d4-db92-4fcd-84d8-bb0cb7114ebd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Industrialization is an extremely costly process, one that usually bears the brunt of its price on the environment. Although I am not an expert in the subject, I do have some knowledge, and it usually goes something like this Breakthrough technology is invented New labor opportunities around this invention begin to open up Cities begin to grow and rural jobs become more automated With this newfound productivity, the nation soon begins to build up infrastructure However, in the gap between steps three and four, the nation usually produces massive amounts of waste, with no proper means to dispose of it. For example, sewage in London and soot in American the countryside Now, industrialization obviously takes place at different times when different nations are ready. While we have now developed sufficient means to dispose of our waste, other nations that are just beginning to industrialize in full force have yet to follow China, India, Egypt, etc. . Thus, it does not seem proper for us to use these nations' pollution as an excuse not to contribute to the environmental cause, as this is a situation that is universal across industrializing nations.  that this is a reasonable rationale.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blaming rapidly industrializing nations for pollution is extremely hypocritical\n","id":"68f586ab-b6a0-459c-87cc-727c32e88889"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ordoliberalism is a German economic and social theory developed at the end of WWII that preached social freedom, a capitalist model with regulations on monopolies and incentives policies that promote competitive markets and social justice. It largely rebuilt post WWII West Germany. It has made Germany the modern economic power house and major European power that it is today. I'm finding it hard to disagree with. Want to hear some arguments that will make me think and may be Change My View. Here is the link to the Ordoliberalism Wikipedia page<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ordoliberalism is wonderful and works well if implemented correctly.\n","id":"3549500c-67cd-4a32-8183-132d7ee96933"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is eating meat ethically wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Both plants and animals are made from organic molecules, which humans and other animals require in order to survive, and there are no alternative sources. Hence, both present sources of nutrition, and only the specific nutritional needs of a species determine which of the two should be eaten by whom.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is equally ethical to eat animals as it is to eat plants.\n","id":"93f98453-4345-47bb-b3d4-e7bf77399f85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every person I have spoken to regarding the newer version of the Lion King which includes the 'bonus' song Morning Report has expressed a dislike of the song and said that it ruined the new version to have to sit through those few minutes. I have never understood the reasoning behind this. To me, it always seemed like a good song, if perhaps completely irrelevant to the story. However, from my small experience of musicals there isn't any specific rule about what you're allowed to sing about. So, please, change my view. Or, suggest to me some reasons as to why I should dislike Morning Report.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Morning Report is a good song and should not get so much hate from Disney fans.\n","id":"32f11dca-3936-4cd1-af48-9054c57d348d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>Many top scientists and artists returned national awards in response to the anti-muslim and anti-minority climate created in India by Modi's Government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modi is accused of overseeing - and being indifferent to - a climate of growing intolerance against muslims.\n","id":"d0e737e9-0fa5-4f96-a5a7-68b6c4e79689"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On one hand, I understand that maybe some people will get distracted easier than others, maybe based on how they were raised or influenced. However, I do not think that it is impossible for certain people to concentrate on school, a certain task, etc. Why can't they just pay attention to what the teacher is saying? Yeah, everyone else thinks it's boring too, but they are focusing. Maybe they aren't paying attention because they don't care, because they aren't interested, not because they have ADD. Onto OCD. When I was younger I had little quirks or things I would do I.e. don't step on a crack on tiled floor, eat things like goldfish in 2s, etc. Nothing seriously weird, just kid stuff. My mom was worried about it and told me to stop so I did. It wasn't hard, I just changed my routine sort of. Today I still eat goldfish in 2s but if I have, say, 15, I won't freak out like some OCD people may. The reason I bring this up is because one of my friends claims to have been diagnosed with both ADD and OCD. It has been really annoying lately and been getting in the way of a lot of things. For example, she does not allow anyone to touch her phone in fear of fingerprints, anytime someone sneezes she loudly proclaims eww and covers her mouth and tries to get away open a window, she constantly washes her hands because she's afraid of germs, and other things that get on my nerves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe OCD or ADD exists.\n","id":"57a7c5f3-7f98-430e-9b2e-8a2cf749459d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All of these fanbases breed the worst people, and all of them seem to attract all kinds of autistic people or people with mental disorders. With sites like tumblr, these fanbases circlejerk and spread their fandom EVERYWHERE. I have lost numerous friends to these fanbases, and now they fan over whatever the fanbase pertains to like it's their religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the My Little Pony and Homestuck fanbases are the worst in existence with Sonic.\n","id":"5d2d2401-15f9-4e63-9ae9-9cfeb4836513"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that, if you are someone who ultimately wants to be in a relationship, it is impossible to be single and happy. The notable exception to this would be persons who genuinely wish to remain single. For those who wish to be in a relationship but cannot accomplish this task, being single is a step below going without food. We wouldn't tell someone who had no food to be happy, right? Would you tell someone who is dirt poor to just be happy? No, you tell them to work hard to not be poor. Unfortunately, you can't say that to a single person. There is no hard and fast formula for finding a partner. The clich\u00e9 line is that you have to be happy with being single before you can be happy being in a relationship. I often hear this uttered by happily partnered people who I know for a ^^ fact would be miserable bat sh ^ insane if they weren't partnered off, but I suppose that is besides the point. Why do we lie and say things like this? Being single is an implicit acknowledgement that something about you is off. It is an acknowledgement that something is so wrong with you, that you cannot find another human being who wants to partner up with you, which is a fundamental thing that humans do in order to continue our species. If no one wants you, and that is your fundamental purpose as an animal, how are you supposed to be happy? Please change my view that, even if you never find your soul mate and desperately want to find that person, it is somehow possible to have a modicum of happiness. EDIT I meant highly likely to be single forever, not just temporarily single, but withthe likely possibility of finding someone when one is ready. I meant more someone with a genetic health condition who is highly unlikely to find someone. Is it possible to be happy when the odds are heavily against you and it's virtually impossible that you will find someone? Tl dr is it possible to be happy with being single if your ultimate goal is to not be single?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is impossible to be single and happy if you desire to ultimately be in a relationship\n","id":"608bd4da-8f6d-49e8-a114-5ed15d16bda3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Premier League Better than the Bundesliga?<|ARGUMENT|>In the CL quarter- and semifinals against Manchester United and Real Madrid the air was literally shaking in the old \"Olympiastadion\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ultras do not add something that was not there before, thus having no impact on the quality of the atmosphere.\n","id":"b6da6d64-9096-4cf0-ba06-1b86f0579649"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Secular laws, governments, and constitutions have played a part in religions starting to use the word tolerate not only to allow a degree of interfaith cooperation to defend their rights as they see them, but also to suggest that they'll conform to secular laws and drop some antisocial practices used against infidels.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In recent decades the favourite word which religious leaders use to suggest they're not bigots is a giveaway that that's exactly what many of them are: They claim they \"tolerate\", a word that's open to interpretation either as biased to placate their bigots or unbiased to placate everyone else.\n","id":"e609117a-b640-4d14-9eae-302db8af1c75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The idea that a person can take actions and make decisions based purely on their faith doesn't make sense. To do so is practically impossible. It's impossible for a multitude of reasons, most predominantly because human minds to not work this way. The decision making process a human undergoes when faced with a choice is never without context. It's never without a lifetime of memories and experiences that dictate the conclusions we come to. It's never without an understanding of cause and affect. A good friend once expressed my view to be flawed as he saw that we undergo acts of faith on a daily basis. An example he used to express this idea was the following When driving late at night, your headlights might only illuminate enough road for you to see immediately in front of your vehicle, but at 80 miles per hour, there could be a giant hole in the road you wouldn't have time to stop for, and yet you drive on having faith in the system there won't be a chasm that kills you. I would pose this has nothing to do with faith, but the simple understanding our minds have of probability. We don't need to know the exact odds to know the likelihood of crashing into a giant hole in the road is so low, one doesn't need to worry about it. We come to this conclusion based on our experiences, and the experiences of those around us. If this type of accident was prevalent enough, we simply wouldn't drive at night, regardless of how much faith one had. Our brains are able to assess the risks of circumstances, with our without our conscious thought at any given time. We establish the potential conclusions of all circumstances, and based on new information continually update and project possible new outcomes. The accuracy of these projections are irrelevant, because we're discussing whether they are acts of faith, not their accuracy. A person might send their mixed tape to a successful artist music producer and call it an act of faith that they'll listen to it. Anyone who engages in that activity however knows others have done so before, and been rewarded. If they haven't heard those stories, they obviously don't think it's a ZERO chance, otherwise they wouldn't have sent it. They would know it would be a waste of time. The chances might be slim, but the knowledge that it COULD work out well makes it not an act of faith but something else. We could argue what specifically it is an act of, but it's not one of faith. Another person might say it's an act of faith to trust a doctor to perform surgery on their newborn child. That you are having faith in the doctors ability, their education, the hospital they work at and so on. Again though this just comes back to decision making based on available information. If a person understands that SOMETIMES this surgery or procedure is successful, there is no faith in this choice. It's just a even poorly calculated risk, and nothing more. I'll change my mind if someone is able to point a true flaw in my thinking here, and the way I'm driving to this conclusion. A wording flaw, or semantics argument won't change my mind. But if someone can present to me an act of faith, where someone made a choice or came to a decision, or did ANYTHING based purely on faith alone, they'll get a delta.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Almost nothing is an 'act of faith'\n","id":"6135d49c-d5bf-49c8-8ebd-a520e371c1bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that Hamilton is the best musical since it combines both aspects of modern music and hip hop with a good story and excellent costume and set design. however I think that there are still other good musicals for example in the heights gets an extremely good grasp of Latin culture, the lion king has amazing costumes, and dear Evan Hansen has an amazing story. However hamilton manages to get all of these things even if not as well as some of these other musicals, and more, including the ability to accurately send a message to younger children by using slang, and music that go with the modern times. Hamilton also has clever design that while keeping the 1800 century look makes all of the actors look normal instead of like fools in powdered wigs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hamilton Is the best Musical Ever Made\n","id":"20bc8bb1-bbb8-47f9-9796-fb8220be940d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people who decide to become sex workers do so because they are unable to have\/keep\/get a regular job due to family situation, personal, or mental health reasons. Sex work gives them an opportunity to work and pay taxes as opposed to becoming a burden on the state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The role of government is to promote the welfare of its citizens and it is individual citizens who are best placed to make choices that maximise their own happiness. If these choices hurt no-one they should not be obstructed.\n","id":"62844b55-97ca-471e-b557-6dce639d37bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Since it works so well for the USA being the biggest economy in the world , I believe that Europe, despite its' differences, should be a federal state. With this, I believe that the European Federation could be a powerful economy, a protector a human rights, and a moderate actor to present reason against the extremes that are USA and Russia in international relations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Europe should be a single, federated state in the same was as the USA.\n","id":"e40cbaf3-a5fe-4519-ab1f-6817aee55266"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it okay to physically torture prisoners?<|ARGUMENT|>As a society, it would be immoral to not value those who do not harm others no more than those who do. In other words, if it is for the greater good and you have to hurt a terrorist or murderer to save the lives of innocent people, it would be immoral not to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Torture can help force prisoners to reveal information that could prevent attacks and save lives.\n","id":"112935d8-5233-4bbf-8434-311f14e310e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have hypothyroidism, PCOS, and used to be a emotional binge eater. I lost over 60lbs. I understand that conditions can limit someones ability to easily lose weight, but considering I have 2 physical ones and 1 mental one, and still lost weight. I just don't understand. I'm starting to look at fat loss as simply a matter of accepting that your diet is flawed and making changes. People have false views of how healthy they eat and this pride prevents them from making changes they need. Everytime I post something like this I just get a million downvotes. Why do people downvote me? Is it because I'm wrong somehow and millions of people truly can't lose weight. Edit Okay it makes more sense. Simply being a troubled word that implies weight loss is easy. That was incorrect. I was obese as a child and lost the weight when I grew old enough to buy and prepare my own food. I'm blessed with a preference for the healthy food and slowly taught myself to lower my appetite, making my experience easier than most. I shouldn't project myself so much on other people. No one is arguing thermodynamics or saying weight loss is impossible. Everyone is saying that it is hard and after varies arguments I'm inclined to agree. However, while weight loss is hard due to various factors, they do have solutions. ex An emotional eater can indivually work out their food addiction. While it isn't easy, it can be done. I can't settle for can't . I feel like that is too dismissive and hopeless. But it is a matter of willpower. The debate is whether people can control their willpower. It is also a matter of wanting to lose weight. Settling for being overweight is a choice a lot of people seem to make. But I guess its sort of the same thing as smoking. Something in theory can be fixed by putting down the cigarette but a ton of inner strife. But in all seriousness, for all people who do want to loose weight. How can I help them I forgot to mention I'm a nutrition student loose weight by dealing with psychological factors. Nutrition actually has little classes on psychology and weight loss, and mostly cooking and science classes. I sorta rely on reddit to educate myself. How can weight loss become easier? What can I do? What can society do? Etc Also, I'm kinda hung up on few things. I feel like while people may not want to, pretty much every condition can be overcome. With the exception of people with extremely low BMRs where the subsequent nutrient defences and hunger pangs outweigh the benefits of wright loss. So I guess my view has been partially changed. So like half deltas all around . When I figure out how to give a delta I will award particularly thought provoking comments. Edit 2 oh I forgot to mention I never ever condone bullying or shaming fat people. The never directly tell people they should lose weight. From when I was fat my mirror tells me I'm fat everyday, I don't need to hear it from anyone else<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any fat person can lose weight by simply adjusting their diet and exercise.\n","id":"4055514d-0c42-4c49-ba12-554796dde99b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>As Facebook is a platform for everybody, it can be seen as a worldwide community that accepts everyone without discrimination based on religion, origin, ethnicity or sex.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Facebook and Twitter represent values that are opposed by groups like ISIS.\n","id":"9e683179-3b3d-4de0-8f36-3de085367b14"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The term Overdraft Protection sounds like it would protect your account from being overdrawn, but in reality it allows your account to be overdrawn. This is the opposite of how all other banking terms work. If your account has Fraud Protection it will protect your account from being defrauded, so logically the term Overdraft Protection should mean that your account is protected from being overdrawn. Some will say that total protection from overdrafts is impossible, and my response is that if it's impossible, the banks should not have a term which makes it seem possible. If you see a sign which says smoke free zone, it means that no smoking is allowed, not that cigarettes will be given out for free. I can name many more examples, but I think I have made my point, the term overdraft protection implies protection from overdrafts, but since it is the exact opposite, that term should not be used. A better term for a bank to use would simply be to ask the question, Do you give us permission to allow overdrafts? The fact that signing up for overdraft protection gives the bank permission to allow overdrafts is the exact opposite of what a logical interpretation of that term means. If anything, overdraft protection should mean that the bank declines overdrafts. To change my view, you must tell me why that term is not deceptive or misleading. I will not accept answers about how you are protected from chargebacks and fees, since a better term for something like that would be chargeback protection, or fee protection. I cannot think of a single scenario where the term overdraft protection cannot be replaced with a more accurate term.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term \"Overdraft Protection\" is misleading, and that term should no longer be used by banks.\n","id":"f22c1943-5cd2-408c-b2ce-d115f3019c6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Horse-riding would probably be called illegal, as the horses did not consent to it and are often wrecked by accidents or years of riding.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A society where the life of an animal were worth as much as the life of a human would be doomed to fail.\n","id":"41ad08c9-f969-453c-96df-ce91cadcbaa9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hugo Ch\u00e1vez focus on the private sector more than social spending?<|ARGUMENT|>According Dan Grech, \"President Hugo Chavez dedicates more than 20 percent of Venezuela's GDP to social spending. The U.S., by comparison, spends a similar percentage on its entire federal budget.\" This number is enough to provide free medicine, education, etc. However, cutting social spendings will deprive the population of Venezuela from the possibility of using of these free services and, as a result, cause dissatisfaction of the people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Great social spendings allow people of Venezuela to use many services free.\n","id":"116f3be5-2f5d-448e-9f5a-4dc2ba8c46a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm just a bit confused as to whether they're good or not for Egypt. Personally, I don't see the big deal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see the problem with the Muslim Brotherhood\n","id":"0da89384-b451-4e8a-8640-675f2760bcf7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before getting angry about this, notice that I'm talking about World War I instead of World War II. The war of attrition taking place in Europe made the Allied Powers and the Central Powers desperate for outside assistance. Looking to the US for help, both sides did whatever they could to draw the country on its side, and the United States chose the British French side to assist. This led on to an Allied victory, and a ruined Germany. As time went on, Adolf Hitler rose to power, killed millions in one of the bloodiest wars in history, leading to atomic bombs and a terrifying cold war. If the United States sided with the Central Powers, the Allies would have surely lost. Because of Wilson, there would have still been a UN like organization which would have prevented these wars. In the multiple stable countries which would have dealt with consequences, it would have been a much more difficult rise to power for a Hitler like figure. WMD's would barely be discovered today, and the United States would also have less of an interventionist foothold in the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if the United States joined Germany in WWI, the world would be a better place.\n","id":"cd2b63dd-4421-4517-a195-4791be04b952"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This applies to any forum that falls under the banner of encouraging sophisticated, civil and or intelligent discussion, but I'll probably be using  for most of my examples because I post here most frequently. I upvote comments I see being downvoted for what looks like mere disagreement with what was said. What spurred this was, as of late, I've seen a lot of OPs being downvoted in comments but I couldn't find any reason for doing so. People often express terrible views who wants a benevolent view changed? As a result, by doing what we ask of OPs participating in the thread about their position they get downvoted because of what they are saying. While not all discussion reddits have this same goal, most of them have similar contours in order to facilitate some more sophisticated loose use of the word discussion on reddit. Usually there are a few reasons across all of reddit to downvote a person You don't like what they said so you want to reduce its visibility. You don't like the person who said it. You don't like the manner in which the substantive point was made e.g., maybe they have a convincing argument but they're a rude dick about it. They're breaking a 'soft' rule e.g., if someone posting in  was seemingly participating in bad faith and this was becoming more evident in the comments as time passed. My general take on 'high level' discussion reddits is that 1 and 2 have little place for use. The traditional goal of these reddits is to establish a more sophisticated dialogue where the intolerance of an idea is challenged by what each user argues against it, rather than the mechanical and low cost action of downvoting. By personally restricting downvoting to peoples' inability to have a mature conversation about the topic, it ensures both that people have an incentive to remain civil lest their comment be stuck at the bottom and that posters challenge a comment with a robust rebuttal, consequently increasing the level of discussion and the probability that the other person will be exposed to an alternative argument or point of view. Maybe they will change their position or maybe they will refine their old one to address these new concerns. Neither of these are really germane to my point so much as it works hand in hand with the usual goals of these kinds of subreddits by facilitating a certain level of conversation. I don't search through threads for this behavior, but if I'm having a conversation and notice a person consistently has 0 points which suggests someone is systematically downvoting that user in the thread or negative points despite making well written, civil points suggesting people simply don't like what was being said , I will probably upvote it to offset that effect unless it looks like they're participating in bad faith or something similar point 4 in my above list.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On subreddits that encourage civil discussion or debate, I usually upvote comments that look like they were downvoted due to disagreement with what was said. I think this is generally okay.\n","id":"c4b9e171-0d0d-4541-9852-7169bb71b056"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view is that South Korea would be a vastly more impoverished nation and it's citizens worse off if wages and labour laws were enforced according to the western standards of the time. While fighting for increased rights for workers and higher pay is a good and noble enterprise at it's core. I think people in developing countries need to be aware not to cross a line into imperialistic paternalism where we start boycotting and driving away companies from operating in countries with more economically advantageous conditions like Bangladesh. Already these countries are under threat of losing their roads to economic growth due to increasing automation. We shouldn't hasten the widening of the gulf in wealth inequality between rich and poor nations by limiting opportunities for growth. To summarise, lower wages and laxer laws are needed for certain nations to be competitive and we shouldn't be overly reactionary towards companies who take advantage of that fact because it results in a better outcome for all. Case in point South Korea. Convince me that Korean people would have benefited overall had more stringent labour laws and higher wages been in place in the outset or should have tightened those laws and increased it's wages faster than historically. Or give me an example of a way for nation that lacks natural resources to climb it's way out of poverty without relying on it's workforce creating stuff to be sold domestically and overseas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"South Korea would still be poor if not for 'sweatshops'.\n","id":"05c6d8fa-d7e2-4ece-bec3-b7f11bbd13f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should airfare be taxed to account for its environmental impact?<|ARGUMENT|>The French government plans to introduce an \"eco-tax on aviation by 2020. The money raised will be invested in more environmentally friendly means of transport, such as local trains.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The additional tax revenue can be used by governments to offset environmental damage caused.\n","id":"d12dae11-eb24-450a-ae2f-9958d52cf3a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>ban countries with very harsh training methods from participating in international competitions<|ARGUMENT|>This measure introduces a strong deterrent against those who allow and facilitate abusive training methods. Firstly, it incentivises national athletic and sporting bodies to diligently check the background of coaches before their employment and continue to investigate them throughout the year. It is now in the interest of every single member of national sporting bodies and teams to ensure abuse doesn\u2019t continue. In most it is currently in your interest to keep quiet, lest you risk disturbing the national programme or being ostracised by your federation. As a result coaches are far less likely to think these training methods will help them achieve success. Since it could see their athletes banned from the competition and lose their medals it makes using harsh training methods an immense risk to take. It would also mean they\u2019re unlikely to ever get hired again if caught.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banning countries with harsh training measures from competing would be a strong deterrent\n","id":"8b6b0036-1ec6-43a1-9428-ec4a5ab50bec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Child Labour<|ARGUMENT|>It is true that alternatives will need to be found to previous employment - but raising liquidity by loans secured on future earnings or micro-banking are both possible scenarios. The international community was able to place human rights over the cause of free trade in the cases of South Africa and Burma - so why not here?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is true that alternatives will need to be found to previous employment - but raising liquidity by...\n","id":"b883bda6-1bb3-44c9-9726-d88db26f69a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was really obese in high school so that didn't help. Plus I'm from an Indian American family that always discouraged dating, so I've had a lot of emotional hangups about it. Fast forward to end of college I lost all the weight but I'm still emotionally a 12 year old when it comes to women. I went on a date a few weeks back and the girl liked me, I was so happy. But when it came time for the physical stuff at her doorstep, I fumbled and sweated and barely managed a kiss. Pretty sure she thought I was some kind of manchild. Afterwards, I didn't even feel like I had earned Experience points in dating, I just felt like crying because I'm a loser. I honestly think my emotional immaturity has severed my ability to impress a mature woman I can't catch up with all the thousands of men who were going on dates at age 15 and fingering their girlfriends like a pro at age 16. I'm permanently stunted and a total waste.  please. Really need to hear some good logic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"21 year old guy. I've had no romantic life so far and therefore my emotional development has been permanently stunted.\n","id":"ffeae8ed-2b48-4d72-9d71-c622c8cfb825"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I tried watching the first episode on Netflix and simply couldn't get past the first few minutes. I found it incredibly sexist and misogynistic. Listening to Rick and Shane had to look names up as I never heard them introduced talk about how Shane's wife was a 'dumb bitch' for not making a sandwich properly infuriated me and made me promptly shut it off. Another night, I was channel surfing, and stumbled onto an episode halfway in and decided to give it a try to see if things change. In that episode the group was in the woods and I witnessed one guy physically beat his wife. Again, I shut it off immediately. Now I am not a feminist by any means, by misogyny really disgusts and angers me. So I ask you Reddit users, if this show is nothing but male supremacy, why should I watch it? All my friends swear by it, claiming its really great, but from what little I've seen, I can't see it being worth watching. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Walking Dead is not worth watching.\n","id":"ee74f41f-a87a-4351-9622-8271fe3c8864"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, let me clarify that I'm not some MAGA build a wall type of person at all. I'm actually extremely left wing, even by liberal standards, and have been a Bernie supporter. I don't hate immigrants and don't think it's some culture war and don't think they need to speak English in this country at all . That said, I've noticed a lot of other staunch liberals around me seem to hold this position and I don't understand why. I'm an Indian American who has been to India before and the rampant poverty was terrifying and sad. I don't want my home country to become that with an influx of immigrants just because people want to come here. I don't think just opening our borders to whoever wants to come in is going to help our country, and I think people who broke our laws and did that illegally should be dealt with reasonably, especially if they aren't paying taxes. If we need more farmworkers, or other hard labor jobs that lots of our citizens refuse to do, then we could open up immigration accordingly, so I don't see why that would be an excuse. If people who aren't illegal are doing these jobs because they came over legally to do them, then their pay and safety would probably increase as well due to the fact that they can fight for their rights. I mean I think kids should be given a pass because they couldn't control their circumstances I'm fine with the DREAM act and I understand certain circumstances like refugee crises. Illegal immigrants should be given access to healthcare the same way we give it for criminals. I don't think we should just be deporting people left and right if it's not super cost effective or reasonable. But some sort of punishment and possible deportation should happen if they knowingly broke the law. They took that risk and are aware of the circumstances. If families risk getting broken up because of this, then why don't they just return with their parents?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think illegal immigrants shouldn't be allowed in the US, and should be punished\/deported reasonably.\n","id":"d7a32f8b-e6d8-4ce2-b209-f973c1e0e89a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>NHS England\u2019s national medical director has urged social media companies to ban \u201cirresponsible and unsafe\u201d adverts for these health products of dubious value He thinks that the risks of quick-fix weight loss outweigh the benefits, and advertising these products without a health warning poses a risk to the physical and mental well-being of followers who use them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NHS has warned that celebrity influencers could be damaging children's health.\n","id":"9fcdaa36-7808-42cf-bd9f-19ebc0f83d74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>The Chinese room compares computers processing information with someone working through a language they do not understand. It concludes that a computer understands nothing of any stories they work with as the computer has nothing more than a person would have while working with text in a foreign language.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Chinese Room suggests that it is impossible to identify any deterministic process that equates to consciousness.\n","id":"9fbde617-d194-4892-b81f-173b2e8a9166"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a rather long post, but I believe it's worth a read. Basically, in the U.S. Capitol Building, each state has donated two statues of famous individuals from its state. One of Mississippi's statues is of Jefferson Davis the former president of the Confederate States of America. First of all, it's wildly ironic to commend the man who led the CSA by placing a statue of him inside the very center of the American government. Davis was a U.S. congressman before the Civil War, that's true, but something tells me that's not the reason Mississippi chose to select him for their statue. Now before I argue, I have to say that I'm not simply going to denounce Davis for being the president of the CSA, although I would claim this to be a good enough reason to remove his statue anyway based on my own personal beliefs. He was a traitor to the United States, and whatever your views on the US government are, it seems ridiculous and almost comical that the American government should feature the likeness of a traitor to the nation and an enemy of the state in the very heart of the seat of the American legislature. I'm not arguing that there shouldn't be statues of Jefferson Davis in Mississippi, or Alabama, or Texas, or anywhere in the former CSA though I still think it's ridiculous and perpetrates Lost Cause mythology , but to feature his statue in the U.S. Capitol alongside statues of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks is almost comically offensive to what these people accomplished. Now, I'm not only opposed to Davis' statue because he was a Confederate. One could argue that, for example, Robert E. Lee was a Confederate, yes, but also one of the best generals the U.S. has ever seen, and therefore might be deserving of some sort of recognition. There were also plenty of slaveowners in U.S. history who still deserve recognition for their political accomplishments and wisdom Washington, Jefferson, etc. . There is no way, however, that you could argue Jefferson Davis deserves a statue for being some sort of effective leader, while still ignoring the fact that he was a traitor to the US government who lead a nation, in the words of his vice president Alexander Stephens, whose cornerstone rested upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition . Yes, he had a daunting task in front of him, but he was, by almost all historical accounts, an ineffective, stubborn president who was unwilling to accept compromise. His disastrous policies and decisions merely expedited the downfall of the CSA. It would therefore be foolish to make the argument that his position as a leader should allow him to receive a statue, since he was an objectively poor one. The U.S. has had several ineffective presidents Buchanan, Johnson, etc. , but their statues are not included in the collection. The belief that we should include the likeness an ineffective ruler of a traitorous separatist movement, rather than even a statue of James Buchanan, arguably the worst U.S. president, is ridiculous. Finally, I am aware that Davis was an important part of Mississippi's history as president of the CSA. I believe Davis is an important part of the South's history as the eugenics movement is to the United States, or that fascism is to the nation of Italy, or that racial segregation and Jim Crow laws are to the U.S. South. Yes, Davis should not be forgotten, as he is indubitably an important man in the history of America. He should be taught about in history classes which he is and his actions as president of the CSA should undoubtedly be discussed. I believe his inclusion perpetrates the Lost Cause of the Confederacy that the CSA was comprised of noble gentleman fighting only for the ambiguous cause of state's rights To do what exactly? Oh right, own slaves. who were unfairly crushed by elitist and corrupt Yankees, and that it was an idyllic, benevolent society where slaves were happy and treated like children as opposed to property that could be whipped, beaten, and sold. He is wholly undeserving to be placed upon a pedestal apparently equal to Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks by having his statue in the United States Capitol. There are other ways to discuss the legacy of Jefferson Davis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mississippi should rescind its donated statue of Jefferson Davis from the U.S. Capitol building: its inclusion is arguably offensive, embarrassing, and perpetrates Lost Cause mythology.\n","id":"1a6cbd72-a9ae-43e6-b20c-f616dcbeb6fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As many people on reddit, I am an atheist and my entire world view revolves around science and reason. I enjoy discussions with friends or strangers on the internet about religion and their views on specific topics. However, nobody was ever able to give me a satisfying answer to the question, why he or she believes in this one specific religion. Often, people just say things like Because it is the one true religion. or Because it teaches love. or Because I was brought up in it and I have experienced God Allah Yahweh Buddha Brahman in prayer. . Those answers are entirely unsatisfying, since they are interchangeable. Never do I get an answer to that question that says more than basically 'It's the religion I know most about, that I got introduced to by my parents or another important figure in my life and which has made me feel something inside me that I believe is a higher power.'. All these arguments might be the reason why one individual believes in one specific religion, but they are unreasonable and fail to explain why, in general, believing in one religion is in any way favorable to believing in any other. Especially the I can feel the presence of God argument is very popular, since it's a subjective personal experience and people like to believe that what they feel is true. But if it happens to nearly every believer of every religion, how can this satisfy anybody as an explanation for his her own views ? Now, change my view gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no reasonable explanation for anybody to believe in one specific religion.\n","id":"eb3376c5-6e3d-49fb-ad3a-dd7080f32a8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being a digital nomad a good lifestyle choice?<|ARGUMENT|>This can make work more stressful, as a digital nomad often does not have strong relationships with their colleagues or boss.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is difficult to have stable relationships if you are a digital nomad.\n","id":"5d343026-6380-4046-b80b-3cb99f428c7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the most part of my life, I thought horoscope was a daily entertainment in the news, you know, between crosswords and joke section. It was just like one of those silly things on fairs where you and your significant other place your palms against a frame and the machine tells your percentage match . Not ever, not once, did I meet a person who thought of it any more than a harmless fun, until then. Two years ago, I met a girl she was 26 at the time and we started going out and getting to know each other better. She was interested in my sign, but I didn't make much of it, from my experience almost every girl I went out with asked me about my sign and commented like Yeah, we are the perfect match or Dear lord, this is an abomination, we should be hating each other but all of that in a funny way. But this one was different. She actually started explaining to me how astrology is a real, proven science and how it changed her life. I was a little concerned, but nevertheless, I smiled and told her Come on, you can't seriously believe those things, like, your future love is around the corner, watch for it or so? and she was dead serious, saying No, that stuff in the newspaper is rubbish, I'm talking about a real science, astrology, and the study of natal charts . That was the first time I've heard of natal charts , but I obviously knew it was just an upgraded delusion made up so frauds could earn money off the naive people Anyway, I decided we shouldn't be arguing on our second date and bearing in mind agree to disagree , I changed the subject. In the next days and weeks when we really started dating, I realized those natal charts were really important to her. There wasn't a day without her mentioning something like It was in my chart, I KNEW IT when she had a headache or Yup, my energy flow is low this week when something she was doing wasn't going great. Again, I tried to ignore it, I would just nod my head, knowing there's no point arguing when she's not feeling well. Until one day. I came to her place and she was just Well, she wouldn't talk to me. She wouldn't hug me. I was positive I didn't do anything wrong and thought she might have had a fight with someone or someone upset her, so I asked her what happened. It took me around 20 minutes of convincing until she spat YOU ARE GOING TO CHEAT ON ME . Involuntarily, I started laughing, it was just funny, but she was dead serious. Is this another one of your natal charts prophecies? , I asked. NO, it's not a prophecy, Dianna and I did a full natal interpretation on you and you have a cheating line, the same one my ex had, and he cheated on me . Well, I decided it was time to confront her about all that rubbish. I sat her down and tried to explain to her why astrology is a fake, offered her dozen research results claiming so, gave her even the most famous astrology debunking experiment when they gave exact the same horoscope results to 50 people claiming it was their personal results and they gave it an average 4.26 out of 5 on the scale of accuracy It was no good. She kept insisting she doesn't care about experiments and research, stating she knew it was true because everything in her natal chart turned out to be true including every single prophecy . I tried once again, tried to explain to her that those prophecies are true because they are so wide and open to interpretation that almost anything can be crammed to fit. And, more importantly, when your natal chart says, let's say, You are going to meet a love of your life in near future , the person believing in it might meet some nice person the next morning and, instead of not making much of it, think HEY, THIS IS THE LOVE OF MY LIFE MY CHART PROPHESIED . It was no good, again . To cut the story, next weeks were gradually worse, she would even come up with sentences like What, you don't like strawberries? But you Libras LOVE strawberries , until one day, after another astrology based tantrum, I broke up with her and told her I don't want to see her ever again. I run away from people who mention astrology to me now. I think of them as dangerous. They should be treated, blindly believing in delusions should be seriously treated, someone should address this issue widely, broadcasting everyday series of lectures on how astrology is fake and dangerous. Because, right now, there are millions and millions of people going around you, basing their behavior and motives on what their cards told them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who believe in astrology should be medically treated\n","id":"de2b6621-39b0-4683-9535-b65b1ce6959d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd like to start off by clarifying that I am by no means a hyper diligent student. I used to have a major late work problem but I have gotten much better at just getting things done. My grades are good and I am in honors classes but I still struggle with procrastinating sometimes and because of that there are instances where I don't turn work in. With that said, please change my view. I hold this opinion because if a student is heavily penalized for having late work there is no reason for the said student to finish the work. As an example, in my geometry class, we are allowed to submit one thing late the entire year, everything else will be an automatic zero. While we may have pretty simple homework in that class and no big homework assignments, most of the points come from tests if I don't get my homework in I will never end up doing it and anything I may have learned or practiced from that homework is then forfeit. In my world history class, the teacher is very lenient with homework and because of that it has my lowest rate of missing assignments, and even if I don't turn it in on the day it is due I have an incentive to finish it and benefit from what it offers. If students get an automatic zero or heavy loss of points from turning in late work, they will stop completing it and won't learn anything from the assignment. Additionally, I'm not suggesting there should be no penalty because if that were the case kids would be pushing homework back as far as possible. I think there should be a consequence for late work but it should not be completely dropping the assignment or slashing the point value in half. TL DR If students don't have the incentive to finish late work because the loss of points is too high they will stop finishing work after it is due and won't gain the benefits homework offers, which directly contradicts the reason homework exists. By giving kids the chance to finish the work they are significantly more likely to turn the assignment in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Students Should Not Be Heavily Penalized For Late Work\n","id":"81e7573d-dd2e-4d8c-a550-fc6458095b02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have no problem with it if it's in your own home. But not washing your hands in a public restroom is disgusting. Being a guy, I'll be discussing excuses I've heard from other guys but I can't imagine it's too different with women. Don't tell me your dick isn't dirty. The human body is dirty, and I doubt you change your hand washing behaviors based off when you last showered. You sweat throughout the day. You may have a little piddle In your underwear that dropped out since you last peed. The germs from your hands are on it from the last time you went. And now they are chillin in a utopia for bacterial growth. Maybe it's not a stinky, cheese covered abomination but it's not going to always be squeaky clean. Now let's pretend you DO have incredible weenie hygiene or those who do penis telekinesis and don't touch it when you pee. You're likely going to touch another surface in there. Manual flush? Stall door? Toilet seat? Smegma steve could have been the last one to touch that. If you are somehow are capable of using the restroom without touching yourself or anything in there, props to you. But you should still wash your hands. And I'm praying that there isn't anyone who doesn't wash up after a number 2. Try to give me a reason why I should be willing to shake your hand after you shook your dong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not washing your hands after using a public bathroom is gross\n","id":"7c072881-4cf0-4c68-939c-56ad5a48941f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>According to research sex in humans is primarily social not reproductive. Over a 40 year relationship a normal couple might have sex over 4000 times but only produce two children! This isn't because humans are useless at reproduction but because stable pair bonding is important if the parents are going to stick together long enough to raise children within complex societies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human females do not advertise their fertility but do advertise their sexuality hair, breasts, hips etc perhaps because in humans sex has a primarily social function and only a secondary reproductive function.\n","id":"79c4c41c-387c-400d-8e89-64401ebc99c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Get A Pet?<|ARGUMENT|>These stereotypes perpetuate misinformation. As with example above, the South African president fails to mention how many dog breeds were started in Africa, such as the Basenji from the Congo<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Keeping pets gives cultures a capability to perpetuate colonial stereotypes such as the South African president saying keeping pets is part of \"white culture\"\n","id":"556ff1cd-3b36-4ffa-8b24-bfc89009a5e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It doesn't have to be milk, but any plastic jug that has a good handle does not need to be put in a plastic bag. Here is why Bags squish your fingers and can break. The plastic handle is sturdier and doesn't squish your fingers Unlike a paper sack, you cannot fit anything else in the plastic bag, so it doesn't make it more efficient when transporting your grocery's Plastic bags are a huge source of trash and should be limited to some extent. My best friend always gets plastic bags on her milk, help me understand why this is ever a good idea Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You should never bag a milk jug with a plastic bag\n","id":"88eca1d7-fc56-434d-844e-d30fedb88a26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are free markets better for humans than regulated markets?<|ARGUMENT|>Regulations are an absolute requirement for any market to function. Without them the most powerful and least ethical are free to trample the honest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regulated markets are the only way to ensure companies are environmentally and socially responsible.\n","id":"6faad3dc-478a-4a3a-8063-13e3de3f95f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I will preface this by stating I'm morally unopposed to the minimum wage. A living wage is a wonderful ideal to strive for. However, I think it is ultimately going to cost the working class more than help. The idea lies primarily in automation. I've seen statistics that claim that if wage increase paced productivity, minimum wage should be over 20 . This increase, however, seems to be increasing at a rate that is following the adoption of automation. Unless someone can explain how we're suddenly more productive people. Therefore, assuming all corporations worship the bottom line, they would rather automate than hire. The increase of labor costs should make automation a more attractive option. For example, I work for a tech company with a number of sites across the planet, and we hire at least hundreds of people at each site. If the US minimum wage increases beyond a certain point, an automation option that can be rolled out in a few years could be implemented instead, reducing our workforce requirement by 50 66 . In short, minimum wage would kill a number of jobs by turning an expensive automation option into a competitive option. I think this will gradually become more of an issue as automation improves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am of the opinion that the minimum wage is a harmful element to the workforce. Please\n","id":"8047e1c1-733b-4430-b2e7-d9323d26f1bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Healthcare is one of the few services where you have no clue how much you'll pay until the very last provider thinks they gouged whatever they can out of you. Force every provider, facility, etc. to publish all the costs hospital stay fees, medical devices, medication, nurse services, doctor fees etc. for each procedure done. Publish it o the internet and on paper at entrance to each facility, hospital, and doctor. People flocking to cheaper hospitals and doctors will reduce healthcare costs more efficiently than anything else price ceiling, floors, etc. . Let the providers compete on the pricing, not patients.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think transparent pricing will do more for affordable healthcare than anything else.\n","id":"b0a4258b-9803-4bfc-85c7-c87d93ba1cb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Popular Protest Productive?<|ARGUMENT|>This is described as the concept of 'protest fatigue where global media coverage combined with the sheer amount of protests ongoing at any one time make it hard for people, including our politicians, to know about, let alone care about, the specific protest or cause that any one individual is participating in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because protests happen so frequently, political representatives have become numb to their occurrence.\n","id":"aec5b64a-91af-45f7-85a9-6934c64002c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please leave the footnote below the following line, but remember to delete this sentence by replacing it with the body of your post. Thank you People often blame poverty, unemployment, etc. on the Government, but I believe that it is possible for anyone to climb the ladder. My mother was born in China and she had a triple whammy as far as disadvantages go she was a woman, poor, and a minority in the US . When she was born, China wasn't even an open country, people weren't even allowed to study in the US. Plus, she didn't even learn English until around 15 but was able to get a full ride to Yale. She came to the US as a college student and went to Stanford Med School and Harvard afterwards. She had just about every disadvantage possible, but was still able to succeed so that's why I think anyone can and shouldn't blame the system for their failure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anyone has opportunities to succeed, but some people have more opportunities than others.\n","id":"5741c7e4-d053-4ab6-b929-382e3c6d62a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, I'll start with my family example, everyone had a child somewhere from 20 24. I am 23, and my mother is completely dumbfounded by the fact that I don't have a family still. There is this fact that the older the female gets the more chances of the child being born unhealthy. And if the male is older, say in their 40 50's, there's a big chance he won't be seeing the kid's bachelor's degree. I'm in this dilemma, I want to have a child someday, but I'm afraid it won't be as healthy as one I'd spawn now. And it will be harder for me to understand what they're going through when they're in their teens, because my teen years were so far behind, and let's face it, every older generation complains about the younger one, but it would be easier to see their point of view when yours haven't cemented in that much .  Pardon any mistakes, English is not my first, nor second language.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think by the age of 25 people must have at least one child. Change my view.\n","id":"625a0854-2fea-4565-81e2-7d71e704d943"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Biden vs. Sanders: Who Would Win In 2020 Election?<|ARGUMENT|>Joe Biden would win the same states that Hillary Clinton won. Bernie Sanders lacks sufficient support of African-Americans .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joe Biden will defeat Bernie Sanders in a 2020 election.\n","id":"e505bed3-c58f-4bc6-b2e4-b500c693d508"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humans prefer cats over dogs?<|ARGUMENT|>30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity like dog-walking done five days a week helps lower blood pressure and improve overall cardiovascular health.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The daily outdoor activity required to take care of a dog has been proven to improve physical and mental health.\n","id":"27df39f5-97db-4be4-8000-fe02b64a730e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Full disclosure I have been unemployed since 2011 so I might be a little jaded, but that does not mean my view can't be changed. I would also like to say up front that I am only talking about positions in the actual work force. In other words celebrities, athletes, etc. aren't included because there is a different dynamic involved with where their income comes from. I believe that if you have earned enough money to have an amount greater than 10,000,000 in liquid assets, and you are older than 40, then you should retire so someone below you can move up the ladder. That amount of money would provide 166,000 year for 60 years without taking interest into account. The workplace exists to stabilize society. By that I mean people need things, they also need money to buy those things, so they make the things other people need. When working correctly everyone contributes and everyone benefits. What we have now is not working and I think greed is the biggest reason why. The most common response I've heard or seen when discussing income is there's enough money for everyone, you just have to go get it . My response to that is No there isn't. This statement assumes an infinite supply of money. Governments like to pretend there is, that's why they just keep printing more, but there isn't. Once you've amassed enough money to provide yourself with a comfortable life you should step down and let someone else take your place. If you want to make more money you could gamble on the stock market or go somewhere else and start at the bottom and work your way back up again, you've already demonstrated you have what it takes to succeed. The workplace is stagnant because nobody ever retires anymore until they become too feeble to continue working, and at that point, what the fuck is the point of having 162 bazillion dollars in the bank. The only trip up I have with my own stance involves the original owner of a business. It's a little grey because yes, they did start a company and build it from the ground up and it's kind of their baby in a sense. On the other hand, once you start providing a service to the public, does your business really belong to you anymore? Or does it belong to the society it serves There's nothing stopping that owner from starting another business if they wanted to earn more, they've already proven they have what it takes and have learned lessons the hard way that they won't make the second time around.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you have been making more than $2,000,000\/yr for more than 5 years or amassed a liquid net worth in excess of $10,000,000 and you are still working, you are an asshole and you are the problem with the economy in the US\n","id":"f4740bd2-c207-4ea4-8f00-b44728940bcb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The duties of the President are clearly outlined in Article II of the Constitution The run for the Presidency is the largest campaign in the US political climate. Focus on the candidate's various stances cloud judgement on their actual capabilities. Despite the reach of Executive orders, the President's influence on many issues are exaggerated. By no means do I consider myself a political scientist. I just see the emphasis on the Presidential race as a scapegoat for the public to have their say every 4 years without doing very much at all. We've had consecutive Presidents of opposing parties whose military dogma, their main power, has not been notably different.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the US Presidency is figurehead for the public.\n","id":"d8ddacbb-539b-42c9-8664-c9cb19cac3a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Dueling with swords that is, not pistols. But it seems to me that given out medical technology, and if we only used thin foils with blunted tips so shallow cuts only duels would scarcely be a fatal affair. Two people who have a grievance and wish to settle it could formally declare they will duel at a set place on a set time, observed by witnesses. A doctor will attend with equipment, and the two may duel. Maybe only to first blood, maybe only until they deem their honor settled. If we're only using thin swords capable of fairly shallow cuts, the risk will be much minimized and the available medical personal should be capable of dealing with any serious wounds that may occur.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe dueling should be legal.\n","id":"4b3103ac-1585-44b3-8d0d-e1736cc8f2ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm economically progressive. I believe that many regulations are essential to a well functioning market economy, and that a lack of proper regulations will lead to market failures. That being said, there are many economic regulations that are harmful to our economy. Particularly, regulation capture is a problem that is rarely solved through the standard political channels. Regulation capture is when members of an existent industry get laws passed that limit competition. Here's a hopefully non controversial example the three tier system for the alcohol industry. Production, distribution, and retail of alcohol in the US has to be done by three separate entities. This guarantees middle men even when not necessary, driving up prices, eating up labor that could otherwise produce useful things, and creating barriers to entry for smaller start ups. The three tier system is not going to go away any time soon because of concentrated benefits for the middle men and any large players in the industry that can use the system to erect barriers to entry and dispersed costs for alcohol drinkers . Politicians will not try to get rid of the three tier system because doing so will not get them votes and it will earn them motivated enemies. An independent federal agency addressing the problem of regulation capture makes sense for a few reasons. First, there is motivation on both sides of the aisle to address the problems of over regulation, at least in an abstract way. Second, there is currently no agency to address the problem of regulation capture. The closest thing would be the FTC, but that goes after economic actions committed by private entities rather than laws. Third, the problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs makes it very difficult to get rid of harmful regulations through traditional legislative means. Let me know what you think Is this idea crazy? Is it politically impractical? Is it unconstitutional? Thanks for reading and commenting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US federal government should create an Office of Regulation Capture\n","id":"80712526-efbc-4240-86b0-343eb078c60a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we adopt a universal language?<|ARGUMENT|>Despite varying amounts of overlap, each language has a unique set of phonemes used in that language. Creating a universally accessible one - utilising sounds that all humans could make - would thus be impossible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any universal language created would inevitably favour one language or language group more than others, which would spark inequity.\n","id":"1eb5e46b-ec4a-4812-bf32-49c5a735c9d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment, presenting a scenario, where gt You see a runaway trolley moving towards five tied up people lying on the tracks. You are standing next to a lever that controls a switch. If you pull the lever, the trolley will be redirected onto a side track, and the five people on the main track will be saved. However, there is a single person lying on the side track. We are presented with a two options Option 1 Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track. Option 2 Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Even thought is seems that the majority of people would pull the lever, I would now. Pulling the lever, would mean that I consciously decide to kill one innocent person, a choice, that makes me the killer without any personal gain at all and saving five other people, who would have died if I chose to not interact with the situation and purely observe the outcome. I believe, that there is no moral burden on me to save those five people and my inaction would end up with the very same outcome had I not been there in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I would NOT pull the lever in the \"Trolley Problem\" scenario\n","id":"9a9acfcf-1d4f-477d-9470-8d591a695c3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Looking at many of the Abrahamic religions will show that the followers tend to stray from good obedience nearly every generation and often in different ways in different generations. God often finds a way to correct certain generations, and that correction is rarely a resetting to an older state but looks somewhat new.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans could get some good info from God, but choose not to obey it fully, with different camps picking and choosing different things. God can still choose to forgive certain of these people, especially if they repent from their disobedience.\n","id":"ac8f9aa1-4e85-483a-a915-53a29d5424db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Hermione Granger was given a Time-Turner to use at Hogwarts to allow her to take more classes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Time-Turners which resemble hourglasses on necklaces, allow people the opportunity to travel through time.\n","id":"2061aa1e-3fc2-4fce-b284-60f85b98d1ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>HIV\/AIDS: There Should Be Compulsory Testing and Labeling of People with HIV<|ARGUMENT|>First, the proposition also gives and opportunity for one to know their status. But beyond that, it looks at how the affected can be protected from infections - whether the latter is deliberate or incidental. It is significant to note that one can not take responsibility for something they do not know anything about. The sonner they are forced to test, the better the chances of everyone knowing their status, and living a responsible life. There may be a serious need to label the infected in the interest of protecting the uninfected. If a woman falls in love with an HIV positive person, it is only fair that she knows the status of the boyfriend and vice versa - love is blind and governments should not live problems of this epidemic the to the idea of mere affections and lusts or even real love for that matter, if the latter was ever true in the 21st century. The idea of a right to choice and privacy is far outweighed by the benefits of the implemantation of compulsory testing. It is unacceptable for one to delibarately hide his\/her status when they know the implications for the larger society. Labelling therefore gives no chance for hiding behinds dangerous rights such as choice and privacy. When rights are problematic, they can be limited by logic and fair decisions. As more people see the status of others, More people will be sceptical of delibarately engaging in unprotected sex and More HIV infected will receive immediate help from the state that knows the real than inaccurate statistics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Priority must be on the knowledge of one's status and ultimate protection of the affected; not rights\n","id":"94f25d00-3dcd-439e-a6e1-919e5f8f1e58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>By deploying hundreds of security officers to the border near Hong Kong, China is increasingly being viewed as a tyrannical state that is intent of bullying Hong Kong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The crack down on protests in Hong Kong has harmed China's international reputation and image.\n","id":"974c8c86-ea22-47a6-a1b6-2877d3e5e44c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>This can start a path where each future colonization of other celestial bodies is progress and improvement from the last one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Colonizing Mars provides an opportunity to test out various utopian ideals.\n","id":"a7b3780e-6232-4e65-af95-7ce5195d6c36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Myspace is your space<|ARGUMENT|>This applies to teachers and parents. The only way to instruct proper cyber behavior, though, is to see what people and children are actually posting, in this context, on their personal profiles and with other users.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Encouraging proper cyber behavior is part of a modern education.\n","id":"7e58ba84-b1c2-4776-8095-b5c060464e85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Real Estate brokers really necessary?<|ARGUMENT|>If the property is fairly priced, in a good location and the seller is not in a rush, not employing a real state broker does not necessarily mean to undersell it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Attempting the sale by yourself or hiring a cheap salesperson will yield you a lower price, particularly for higher-value properties.\n","id":"e0aaba1c-e95c-44ee-9fab-c88356a5279f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>South Korea should abandon its goal of unification with North Korea<|ARGUMENT|>As a result, companies will take advantage of NK's cheap labor by not paying them fairly. Thereby making the income gap between North and South wider.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cheap NK labor will be exploited by wealthy domestic and international companies.\n","id":"4a03c7bc-f81e-464a-b0e7-abe1396f8e54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans and earthworms are \"equally\" as evolved; the species just happen to be evolved for different purposes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as 'superior' or 'inferior' in evolution.\n","id":"718cfde6-6dd3-4d84-ab73-812475fe502f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should athletes be allowed to compete in their chosen gender category?<|ARGUMENT|>The World Anti-Doping Agency WADA maintains an extensive list of substances and methods that might increase performance and that are banned during competitions, and in some cases, banned for use even when athletes aren't competing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Performance enhancers are prohibited because they give unfair advantages to athletes. The same principle can be applied to oppose the dissolution of the gender binary for sporting competitions.\n","id":"ac9925bf-35a9-4691-8606-258aeae3221b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>Martin Daubney, a Brexit Party MEP, spoke at a conference in 2016 which linked him to a prominent men's rights activists group.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Several senior Brexit Party members have been accused of misogyny.\n","id":"d4bce498-1c1f-4053-ad5f-f5450e0094c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, so for starters, I understand that Radical Islam had little to do with the shooter's motivations. He was clearly both deranged, and angry however, I see a number of people on Facebook standing up for Islam, claiming that it is a religion of beauty and peace and should not be blamed for this massacre. This feels both offensive and pretty disrespectful to me, as a member of the LBGTQ community. First off Islamic countries consistently vote against resolutions to protect and provide for the safety of homosexuals. In places like Saudi Arabia, where Sharia is practiced, homosexuals are even killed for violating the law of god. That said, even in places without Sharia law or Wahhabi predominance, homosexuals are mistreated and ostracized. Second off Islam's stance on homosexuality remains unclear. Religion wide, there is no consensus and my personal experiences have been neutral to negative in relation to how Muslims seem to perceive homosexuality. I don't believe that Islam is to blame for the shooting, nor do I believe that any religion is exempt from this but I do think that all religions should have to bear the accounting of what they've preached for hundreds of years that includes Christianity, that includes Judaism, and yes, in my eyes, it includes Islam, which is a religion that I believe is responsible for a great deal of the hatred directed at, and suffering dealt unto homosexuals around the world. EDIT View changed, to some degree, thanks to u Grunt08 that said, please stop downvote bombing my comments. I've been perfectly open to what people are trying to say.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are going far too easy on Islam and its' decades of homophobia in the wake of the Orlando shooting.\n","id":"57dfdb36-a434-409f-ba62-ca2aac351e11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So first of all, I want to be clear in saying that as a society, we should be respectful and embracing of the cultures and traditions of other societies. Diversity and societal differences should be celebrated, not denigrated. However, with that in mind, I believe that in America specifically, with its history of being a melting pot country we should not view cultural appropriation in a negative context. There are a few reasons for this. The first and most pressing to me is that cultural appropriation, as I understand it, is just the blending of culture one person likes a certain aspect of a different culture and incorporates it into their own. This trend is replicated across multiple cultures, with multiple people, leading to a blended society. This then, in turn, leads to a very diverse and multicultural society that embraces the cultures and backgrounds of others right? Another is that I think the most common examples of cultural appropriation often lead to higher exposure to the aspect of the culture that is being appropriated. For example, Elvis enjoys gospel r b and wants to incorporate it into his music, so he throws electric guitars and hip gyration on it and boom rock and roll. Black culture is in the mainstream. Obviously in this specific instance, this was a pre civil rights era America, and the aspects of black culture that Elvis incorporated were never explained to have originated in black culture. But had this occurred in a vacuum, with societal conditions at the time notwithstanding, I think you could make an argument that Elvis highlighted, rather than appropriated, black culture, leading to further exposure. So am I way off base? Do I just not understand cultural appropriation as a concept? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cultural Appropriation isn't a bad thing\n","id":"0fd38c78-906d-4f4c-8c5c-8a8915e27c54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I suspect this is the case because if she had written a book or an article that had some intellectual depth to it, wouldn't we have heard about it? Unfortunately my Google searches are failing me here too much noise . The Wikipedia article lists hundreds of references to articles in the press about her, but I didn't see any written by her? Or did I miss something? x200B So, what I'm asking for is opposite of opposition research what has AOC written that's interesting and makes her look good? Also, I'm not looking for video, though a transcript of a speech would be okay.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hasn't written anything interesting that's longer than a tweet\n","id":"894839e1-86a3-4e86-be6a-bb5b8c00942f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface this by stating that I am not an economist and I apologize if I don't put this as elegantly intelligently as others could I'm just a layperson that is critical of this discourse and am surprised others are not as well. Most Western governments regularly run deficits, and as governments are non profit maximizing entities, it seems apparent that the running of modest deficits should be encouraged and is a signal of a healthy welfare state. However, many countries provinces states regularly run deep deficits and over the years and as a result acquire a massive national debt. The United States is the paradigm example of this, but is also a feature of many other prominent yet less publicized governments ex. the Canadian province of Ontario . Whenever these governments release their annual budgets, without fail the designated right leaning party will freak out about the deficit spending and the failure to balance the budget, yet the economies within their jurisdiction still thrive ex. Toronto's economy is highly diversified and easily the strongest in Canada . My question is, does this really effect the economy? From the average person's POV, it sure doesn't seem to. Perhaps I am just very ignorant, but it seems to me that much of the conservative criticism hurled at deficit spending governments is largely a product of the flawed government should be run like a business mentality from a birds eye view the presence of a national debt does not seem to dissuade investors, significantly reduce the value of that country's currency, or have any impact on the economy large enough to affect the average resident. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Criticisms of governmental running of deficits\/national debts are largely flawed, and their negative effects on the economy grossly overstated\n","id":"ab6d4db8-d521-49e0-bc02-e4fc4a76c5bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was having a conversation a while ago with some people, and the topic of DNR came up. They said that they would resuscitate a person even if they had a DNR. I argued that that's stupid, because they're not going to take any responsibility for their mental and physical well being after, if the resuscitation is successful, and it's also taking their moral agency away from them by making an opposing decision for them. x200B Three of their main arguments were that most of these people with DNRs are Christians with moral values who believe they should die when their heart stops or something to that effect. Dying places an emotional burden on the people around you, which I guess makes it okay to resuscitate you? There are people that realize after they've been resuscitated that they actually wanted to be alive. I didn't even entertain the second argument that much because that one seemed absolutely ridiculous. The third argument is almost the same levels of absurd to me for reasons that are pretty obvious But I can get into it if anyone is eager to know . For the former argument, I pointed out that the majority physicians and many others working in the medical field have DNRs because they know of the consequences of high intensity life saving measures such as CPR. x200B The worst part about all this is that there was a medical student in that same call, and they were advising her that her priority should be saving a life no matter what. She seemed to agree. I wanted to advise her that these are two random people on the internet who are dumping their moral opinions on her, and that she was going to take a very long and difficult ethics class somewhere during her studies, which is what she should really take into consideration, But as you can see from my views on DNRs, I don't indulge in meddling in people's lives. x200B So Reddit, AITA? Wait wrong sub. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe in resuscitating people with DNRs\n","id":"f6214b12-abac-4458-8358-2d32b3132ed5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Modern technology is a disadvantage to society.<|ARGUMENT|>Research finds having a mobile device within easy reach divides your attention and thus lowers the quality of in-person conversations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Getting immersed in smart phones can have a negative effect on daily social environment by disconnecting people socially.\n","id":"af4547d8-107e-4ed6-8898-9083b0b078c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Jeremy Corbyn Be The Next Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom?<|ARGUMENT|>The Conservative Party has lost its legitimacy to control the government which would entail an ethical duty to adopt a motion of no confidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jeremy Corbyn Should Be The Next Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom.\n","id":"dc0b3c41-1e6b-479f-b552-c4fb33bb1b57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a Canadian, but as an outsider watching American politics, it seems as of late the times have changed, where over 50 of the American public supports same sex marriage. Currently the Republican party is staunchly against it, but IMO in order to stay afloat in the next five years, they will have to be a little bit more socially liberal. They will crash and burn otherwise, and surely there are educated conservatives Republicans who realize that. My theory is that in the next few years more and more Republicans will come out in favour of same sex marriage from a libertarian standpoint, and by 2020 it will be the norm, if not ALMOST the norm within the Republican party. If not they will be the fault of their own demise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By 2020 at least over half of Republican representatives will be in favour of gay marriage.\n","id":"7cdbfcc6-72c4-42a2-9888-23d9345d3110"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As someone with a relatively high IQ, I cannot see how smart people are even comparable to stupid ones . People of lower intelligence are often incapable of making good decisions, and are less likely to think ahead in terms of how their actions will affect the future. Often I find myself talking to someone and wondering how they can even function on a day to day basis. I feel bad for having this opinion, so please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe smart people are superior.\n","id":"287889ea-3fb4-432b-9e26-6ba040917653"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I entered college, I was around 25 30 lbs overweight. This weight was 100 my fault, i ate like a pig as a kid and barely did anything close to working out or exercising as a teen. I was able to make friends and be happy in college, but i sometimes felt i was treated a little less than others based on my looks. Go to my junior year and I finally take responsibility for myself I go to the gym 5 days a week, I abstain from soda or fast food as much as possible, and I make all my own meals. I lose somewhere between 15 20 lbs of fat and gain back about 10lbs of muscle flat. I also started wearing contacts everyday. Now, I notice people seem more interested in talking to me. Conversation wise, people actually remember what i say more often and listen to me. I also notice my luck with women increase a shit ton. Now, im not saying humanity is evil and only skin deep. Im saying thats simply how were programmed and calling it evil is just some peoples way of taking the responsibility out of their control and assigning it to some arbitrary moral label to make themselves feel better. Notice I did have friends while i still was overweight, I just now have better relations with more people and the opposite sex sees me as more of a worthwhile person to be with. what im also not saying is ugly or overweight people have less of a right to be heard. In fact, quite the opposite, I think these people would be some of the most interesting people to get to know. They've dealt with the worst side of humanity and still want to talk to people and be nice. That is a genuinely nice person in my book. I just think they need to stop blaming societies standards of beauty for them not being as well liked, respected, cared for and realize people are skin deep. That's not a bad thing, that's just how we evolved to like people. I think people believe were better than animals. That because we have such a developed frontal lobe, we should be above our baser urges and see the intellectual behind everyone. I say that's bullshit. I say we should see the beautiful person and notice their intelligence. If a fat person is this deep emotional soul, why cant they also just put in the time to lose the weight so the world will notice them instead of trying to make people fight our baser urges for attractive, muscular slim people. If i sound shallow, tell me, I dont really mind that much since now im enjoying both the benefits of a strong mind and a strong body.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there are in fact objective characteristics of beauty and that those who say there aren't simply dont wish to try and improve themselves\n","id":"7e1f245c-fa69-43b1-b9dd-e8e6ca7cf6a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am assuming that we can agree patents are to serve a social purpose the betterment of society through scientific and technological innovation , and not just protect some form of natural rights of the inventors. The alternative I am proposing is that, in lieu of patents, we simply fund all R D directly using public money i.e. taxes . Direct funding does have some major benefits We already know how to do it the NRC and similar institutions have demonstrated that government entities are perfectly capable of interfacing with research universities and even private laboratories, evaluating research proposals and providing supervision and guidance. The USA in particular has experienced phenomenal success using this very model during WW2, the nuclear arms race and the space race. Research goals set by the public are always going to be more or less by definition in the public's interest, whereas privately set research goals may or may not be profitability and public utility do not always align e.g. viagra . Public research funding is not a for profit endeavor there are no investors expecting a return on investment to make it happen, we must only pay for the time and equipment of the actual researches which patent funded research must also pay for of course . More importantly however, patents have some truly staggering drawbacks First and foremost, patents directly stifle innovation simply because they make incremental innovation extremely impractical. All the best research is done on the shoulders of giants , but patents forbid this unless the inventor is willing to pay a rent seeking royalty to the current patent holder. Serious rollouts for telephone service just had to wait until Bell's patents expired. Software patents are probably so unpopular today because of how obvious they make the whole exercise nobody is allowed to make incremental improvements to operating systems, file systems, mobile phones etc etc without getting entangled in endless patent lawsuits. The patent system carries with it a significant cost of enforcement The patent office itself, the patent lawyers, the courts being tied up, the due diligence necessary for any technological work whatsoever we end up paying for this one way or another usually built into the cost of the products and services we buy . It is true of course that direct funding brings with it its own problems, I will grant that, but do they exceed the above mentioned costs? I find that very hard to believe. For example, one could make the argument that the NRC et al are only successful because they currently have a narrow scope they don't have to be able to dictate R D goals and policy for the nation as a whole. It may well be that you don't always get an optimal set of priorities this way, but will it necessarily be worse than the priorities set by private companies right now? After all, private priorities do not even attempt to evaluate their R D in terms of their service to society nor does anyone expect them to, that is not the role of private companies. It is however the role of the government, and even if they aren't as good at it, they are at least working towards the right goal. And why shouldn't they be as good at it anyway? It is not the board of directors or major shareholders of R D heavy enterprises that do that particular job after all, it is the lower level managers, administrators and planners that report to them. Why wouldn't they be happy to do the exact same job they did before, just for the government, provided we match their existing compensation? I'd also like to pre empt the argument that my proposed approach doesn't take into account how much more we would all have to pay in taxes to support such a broad public research initiative. I'll explicitly come out and say it yes, this means everyone would have to pay more in taxes. But remember we do still pay for the above mentioned costs of patents as is, it's just part of the products and services we buy. I mean who else is actually paying out those R D costs and the expected returns for their investors? There has to be a consumer somewhere at the end of the chain that foots the bill, and that's either us, or the government. The only real difference is that patent costs are borne by the people who actually use the products services that depend on them whereas taxes apply to everyone, discriminating only on income. But is there such a large divide in how we benefit from innovation? Sure you might not need Lipitor right now, but you probably will later. You might not benefit from breast cancer research if you are a man, but it's not like there aren't plenty of prostate cancers you get to worry about instead. I'm not denying there is a difference some people will end up using slightly more than they pay, but I just can't imagine how that difference can be, on average, large enough to offset even just the profit and enforcement costs that patents bring with them. Spite is really not a good reason to oppose something that benefits everyone, but you slightly less than others. Assuming you could even know when you are in such a position, which I honestly doubt, magic crystal balls notwithstanding Finally, I'd also like to pre empt the argument that this is just too idealistic I know it is. Of course it's extremely unlikely to get past the people that already benefit so much form the existing system. The thing is, so is any other kind of patent reform. Even the ridiculous software patent mess is way too good for the established tech companies to give up. Sure they are all loosing money skirmishing with them for now, but whenever they are ready to call a truce, they aren't about to start clamoring for patent reform. Why do that when you can simply enter into a patent alliance, guaranteeing mutual immunity while at the same time putting up an impenetrable barrier against new entrants? Only the most myopic game theory prediction would throw that sort of advantage out when cooperation is extremely valuable and perfectly practical patent alliances are already a thing, and a profitable one at that . So, if we want to be realistic, patent reform is probably out of scope no matter what, unless it happens to serve the existing players in which case, don't worry, they'll push it through without our involvement . But if we really just want to know the best way to handle the existing patent mess, there is really just one reasonable answer to do away with it entirely. e spelling, some clarifications, better concluding sentence<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Patents are, in just about every way, an inferior means of supporting innovation compared to direct funding,\n","id":"3bb7ed00-25f9-4276-ad98-4031077ff59e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>If humans became immortal, but could only have children between the ages of 15 and 45 as they do now puberty to menopause, then we would have either an increasing number of people perpetually stuck in timeless middle aged life or an ever larger number of people would stop having children. Either leads to stagnation and stagnation leads to apathy and death of innovation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Death is the primary tool of evolution. To eliminate death for some arbitrary individuals is to eliminate evolution for the species, effectively condemning mankind as a whole to stagnation and obsolescence.\n","id":"f64346f5-6e91-4800-8019-51a9c638104e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Donald Trump a Good President?<|ARGUMENT|>There is intelligence to suggest that North Korea is continuing to make fuel for nuclear weapons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"National Security Adviser John Bolton claims that N.Korea has taken no steps towards de-nuclearization.\n","id":"29a2d930-2141-4b8b-8a8a-b3a25219a5c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump recently went against his own party\u2019s congressional leadership and struck a deal with Democrats to package nearly $8 billion in Hurricane Harvey relief with a three-month extension of government funding and increase in the debt ceiling.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is possible for Democrats to obtain concessions from Trump on certain matters that are important to them.\n","id":"a36a2a4d-5fc6-4a12-9441-a6f076c94b36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should social psychology be grounded in evolutionary psychology?<|ARGUMENT|>It is difficult to know with any real specificity what our adaptive problems were in the Pleistocene, which means explaining social psychology by reference to these is likely to be either vague or inaccurate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evolutionary psychology erroneously assumes that the human mind can be explained by reference to Pleistocene adaptive problems\n","id":"f62b4c81-a105-41cb-a6b8-94c716045d5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On most issues, I lean to the left. I think sexual orientation should be a protected status on the Federal level. I hated GWB's cowboy diplomacy and prefer Obama's diplomatic views see Iranian nuclear deal . I think Republicans are batshit insane these days and I would be embarassed to have one represent America on a global stage. Their antiscience and pro religious views are terrifying. Their embrace of corporations borders on treasonous. I vote Republican in State and Local elections because I want lower state taxes. I agree with Republicans on gun control and I'm not worried that Democrats will ever pass sweeping gun control regulations on a Federal level. I'm neither gay nor a woman so their homophobic state laws don't effect me and neither do their views on abortion contraception. If it matters, I live in Illinois. I've been told I vote very selfishly. I reply that this is how the system is supposed to work we should all vote according to our self interest. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I vote Democrat in Federal elections and Republican in State and Local elections\n","id":"2a12ddb3-1c66-490b-aa78-a208a9ccc10a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While I could go on a whole piracy isn't really bad tangent for this , I'll start out slow. One of the most common arguments against piracy is that it's equivalent to stealing. This is already a shaky argument in itself, as you are not literally stealing a better analogy would be that you're making a perfect copy of the original work in question and using that . The main idea, though, is that through piracy, you are enjoying something for free that you would normally pay for which is stealing in the eyes of the content creators. However, there are problems with this concept. Let's say, for example, that I want to play Super Mario Sunshine. I could use an emulator to play the game, but that would be piracy. I want to support Nintendo and its products, so I want to pay for it fair and square. All of Nintendo's digital stores Wii, Wii U, Switch have a variety of games, with the former two having the Virtual Console, but none of them offer Gamecube games. Unlike games like Twilight Princess, Wind Waker, or Pikmin, Super Mario Sunshine never got a remaster or remake, so we can't go through that option. Even Nintendo's online stores only go up to providing refurbished Wii titles. So our only option is to buy used. Here's the rub, though buying used has the money go to the party selling the game, usually Gamestop or some third party. None of the proceeds go to Nintendo. Buying a used game supports the original creators of the game as much as piracy does if you have to resort to buying used, you are doing no better than pirates in the original creators' eyes. Now, of course, this argument doesn't cover all bases. There are many games that have an outlet which allows you to play while supporting the original creators even games like Chrono Trigger have mobile ports , and as a result this argument only applies to out of print games or ones which will never be rereleased due to licensing issues. This is also a stronger argument for games, as many books and movies are available in online libraries. My point is that the argument that piracy is stealing falls apart when you consider specific examples. Rather than blame pirates, content creators should look for ways to improve their methods of distribution so piracy doesn't need to be considered. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The argument that piracy is equivalent to stealing does not stand up in common situations.\n","id":"08fc3ccb-68fa-469d-93e6-175050c8dee9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Up to 1 in 3 Australian Aboriginal children were removed from their families as part of the policy now referred to as the Stolen Generations which lasted from 1910-1970.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Indigenous groups have historically been targeted by governments for supposedly 'poor parenting'.\n","id":"61b6bd0b-2d06-4ff3-af1c-3b044ec5c6ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is health care a human right?<|ARGUMENT|>Vaccination can lead to less disease in the population and thus more funds for other goals and prosperity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Health of individuals living in a society benefits the greater good of community health.\n","id":"aac0f893-bbec-466f-974f-c271f7676b00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>Male bi-sexuality in ancient Rome and Greece was prevalent but they were not significantly genetically different from people today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sexuality is much more fluid than many people give it credit for.\n","id":"c195b78d-f6cc-4599-979d-9f00935ef02a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>International Law already prohibits incitement. This includes advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ICCPR - signed by 172 countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Encouraging harmful behaviour is already illegal and is only a subset of what most people define as hate speech.\n","id":"8b847f3f-7dee-45e0-93cb-49e3922ba481"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Mark and Luke were companions of Peter and Paul, respectively, but are not themselves relevant to the Gospel narrative. If the Church was just assigning authors to the Gospels, they would have chosen more important authors such as Jesus's original disciples, like the Gnostic Gospels did, rather than unknown names like these.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The authorship of the New Testament books is debated by historians, with some evidence that they were written either by eyewitnesses or by scribes based on the stories of eyewitnesses.\n","id":"f8c754cc-e0c0-43bf-b165-f88e2c993a27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I'm thrilled that something got people excited about reading. I love reading I'm glad that there's a series that so many people into or back into books at least from what I've heard . That said, I have a few problems with the series. This is all from memory, and it's been a while, so I apologize for any factual inaccuracies. 0 I don't understand all the praise it gets. I've known PhDs in English Literature herald it as a brilliant and sublime work of fiction, and I don't get why. 1 It's a children's young adult book series. While in itself that doesn't make it bad, it does tell me that it isn't meant to be a literary heavy weight. I don't think that there's anything terribly good about the writing style, especially the first book or two. Stylistically, it's nothing special. 2 The struggle between good and evil is incredibly clear cut, with the exception of Snape's flip flopping. Everything Voldemort does is bad, everything Harry does is good. Moral ambiguity only exists when you're repentant about being a 16 y.o. Death Eater or his parents. Harry gets all kinds of people hurt or killed. He wrecks a large portion of the Ministry of Magic. He cheated in a class, attacked Malfoy, and broke all sorts of school rules. And yet, Voldemort is never given a sympathetic side. There's no motivation for him to do what he does, other than to be the big bad enemy. Somehow that clears everything Harry does of all moral wrongdoing. Why not make Voldemort even slightly sympathetic? 3 On a related note, I think Harry is a pretty terrible protagonist. As someone pointed out in a recent AskReddit thread, Harry doesn't do anything to try and improve his ability to fight Voldemort. He doesn't do anything with the Legilimency stuff just because he doesn't like Snape. He puts people in harm's way he gets Sirius killed, he causes a Dementor to get sic'd on Dudley, George looses an ear, Moody gets killed, on and on. Like I said before, never a second thought given to it, because it's good because he's the protagonist. 4 The writing seems lazy. Really? Harry is the only one who can defeat Voldemort because he's the Chosen One? Oh, his mother's love for him saves him from being killed repeatedly? Every year from the time he was eleven , Harry is able to beat the most powerful evil wizard ever? It's all just deus ex machina his mother's love, Fawkes the phoenix and the Sorting Hat, the bond between the wands. Not to mention the oft argued point that his friends do everything for him. I actually disagree slightly, since he does manage some stuff on his own, but it's because of the plot last second miracles that he's able to. But still, especially in the first book, it's all just other people doing things for him. 5 This ties into 4 , but I feel it deserves it's own point. JK Rowling had the chance to pull off an amazing twist in the seventh book, or at least an interesting one, and she went the clich\u00e9 way. Neville could have been the Chosen One, as much as I dislike that whole idea. He could've been the one all along that Voldemort was meant to kill or have some fate with, and that's why he couldn't kill Harry it was the wrong baby. It was set up along the way, too, but then BOOM mother's love. Or, at least, have Harry stay dead. The legacy of the Boy Who Lived becomes the Boy Who Died Saving Everyone's Bacon. That'd be at least an interesting ending. Yeah, it wouldn't have been the biggest surprise ever, but if she didn't have any further plans for the series, couldn't she pull it off as a slightly unusual ending? I know a lot of this is has probably been argued before, but I've only ever seen He relied too much on his friends, which I don't fully agree with, and never seen anything about why it's considered such a good series. tl dr Everyone was all in a tizzy about a children's book with no real moral conflict and a bad protagonist who relies on plot devices and lazy writing to save him from an interesting ending. Edit I suppose it comes down to I expect too much of the series because of the hype. I'm not a fan of the way the series was wrapped up, but as HipsterToofer pointed out, that doesn't make it bad writing. Can't say I'm convinced, but I appreciate the perspective Edit 2 This got way more attention than I expected. I appreciate all the comments, and after reading them, I'm definitely going to go back and re read the series. It seems that I'm being too harsh based on how I think it should have gone retrospectively. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the Harry Potter series is lazy writing and shouldn't be as widely praised as it is\/was.\n","id":"02271a1c-86ac-437f-8841-62375ea7d255"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If one person kills another, whilst yelling some some serious racial slurs, he will be charged with a hate crime. Now if that same person kills the other without any slurs, he will be charged with a regular crime. Meaning the perpetrator will be charged more harshly based off what he said, violating his freedom of speech. I can understand how these laws help prevent racially motivated homicides, but the way I see it in doing so our rights our technically infringed upon. I don't have any specific cases backing this up, just a general knowledge for the law. I'd love to have my view changed on this, as I'm aware I could stand to know a little more about the topic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that hate crime laws are a violation of free speech.\n","id":"33383613-6ed2-4332-8506-ddbcb2ff54e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Instagram is more like reddit and Twitter is more like Facebook. When it comes to Instagram or reddit, ignoring ads on all platforms all you see is the content by the accounts or subreddits you're subscribed to or following. There is no shared feature or retweet. Facebook and Twitter both heavily use something similar to sharing. Where your feed will be interrupted by someone else's activity. That fact alone is a huge difference maker for my argument. People prefer Instagram and reddit because they see what they want to see. Where as Twitter and Facebook is scattered with what your peers have liked or shared or retweeted. The fact that Twitter and Facebook is heavily on the text post side of things is another differenting factor. Instagram has no text post. Where as reddit is half text post half other picture, video, link . Comparing the Facebook and Twitter 100 and 100 text post with reddit and Instagram 50 and 0 text post is another compelling argument<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Instagram is more like Reddit, while Twitter is more like Facebook\n","id":"093a2de1-e86a-4d09-8301-4a70d7ea2f38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, here's how Anthony Greenwald defines implicit bias gt Theories of implicit bias contrast with the naive psychological conception of social behavior, which views human actors as being guided solely by their explicit beliefs and their conscious intentions to act. \u2026 In contrast, the science of implicit cognition suggests that actors do not always have conscious, intentional control over the processes of social perception, impression formation, and judgment that motivate their actions. Implicit biases are discriminatory biases based on implicit attitudes or implicit stereotypes. Implicit biases are especially intriguing, and also especially problematic, because they can produce behavior that diverges from a person's avowed or endorsed beliefs or principles. There is today a robust, uncontroversial scientific consensus that implicit bias is a real and universal feature of human psychology. For some perspective, check out this 2015 report from the Kirwan Institute I'm not going to bother counting the works cited, but you can see them for yourself on pages 67 83. gt Everybody knows that the social and behavioral sciences are lousy with leftist social justice warriors. They can't be trusted Scientists in general are about ten times as likely as non scientists are to be non religious. Does that count as a point in favor of creationism? Here's an alternative explanation perhaps there are actual facts about the world, and the process of becoming an expert on a given class of facts tends to promote views consistent with them. gt But what about the replication crisis? It proves that all of psychology is nothing more than a bunch of feminist propaganda There's no doubt that the so called replication crisis is a real problem for experimental psychology in general, but the familiar impulse to misinterpret any and every failure associated with a particular scientific community as a blanket indictment of everything they've ever produced is ugly, dishonest, and naive. Here's a good, evenhanded discussion of the study that launched a thousand misguided think pieces. Note that it's posted on a blog whose stated mission is to create a credible counterforce to entrenched orthodoxies, with particular attention to the fact that between 1995 and 2010 the academy went from leaning left to being almost entirely on the left. Here's the study itself. The lead author is Brian Nosek, who is incidentally a co founder of Project Implicit non profit organization and international collaboration between researchers who are interested in implicit social cognition. Here's what Nosek had to say about implicit bias in another of his recent publications gt Accumulated evidence leaves no doubt that implicit measures predict behavior. There you have it today's highest profile champion of scientific rigor is fully convinced. So am I wrong to believe that denying the existence of implicit bias is kinda like being an anti vaxxer, or refusing to immunize your children? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Denying the existence of implicit bias is comparable to being a creationist or climate change denier.\n","id":"86240466-ddb0-4c5f-9432-cff478631480"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>In Hindu tradition, if a husband were to die, the wife would be expected to commit \"sati\", and throw herself onto her dead husband's funeral pyre, because without him her life would be meaningless.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions, including the Catholic church have done exceptional jobs of perpetuating the patriarchal family structure through their literature, preaching and practice.\n","id":"c36df921-10f2-459e-89b0-6c4a3eea2442"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am basing my view entirely on calculations on angles and the amount of lost space due to the lean. Given that the point at which knees contact the chair is only a few inches from the pivot point, the person behind is only losing a a couple inches. Either they will only need to spread their legs a little or, if they already needing to spread their legs pre lean, they will only need to spread their legs a couple inches more. This slight spreading's effect on comfort is significantly less that the discomfort caused by a nearly vertical chair. I am assuming 6 from the pivot point where the knees touch, an upright position of 80 degrees, and a reclining position of about 60 degrees this is a liberal estimation . I am also assuming that a 7' man has legs, from back of but to knee, that are around 26 to 28 long. A 6' man has that length at around 22 24 . Economy seats across airlines have an average of about 32 seat pitch with a minimum of 28 . Most airlines have a lean difference, measured from the top of the chair, of about 7 inches. At knee level the lean would only be around 2 . A small addition to this view is that you would need to be about 7' tall to hit the chair in front of you pre lean. The percentage of men above 6'6 is .5 of the population. My view is that 2 of lost seat pitch is in not nearly as uncomfortable as sitting at an 80 degree angle. To change my view I would need my stats to be corrected if inaccurate or an argument showing how a 2 change in seat pitch space is more uncomfortable than a lean is comfortable. Sources Edit Fixed some of my calculations by finding sources that allowed me to make my estimations more accurate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People that lean back in their chairs on cramped planes are not selfish.\n","id":"5a270653-a6dd-4c0d-9520-9d53995765bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a whole body of feminist literature and theory which can inform activists working from this perspective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The perspective of feminism, which targets injustices that uniquely affect women, has resources that other approaches lack.\n","id":"116b59d8-4b76-4170-8f8a-f45f5ade02ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Moral statements are abstractions and rooted in emotional centers of the brain. Scientists have decreased activity in a certain area of the brain that thereby altered moral reasoning in subjects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moral statements are expressions of emotion or commands, and thus not objective.\n","id":"28b08d18-8890-40ac-a1e0-616cee694d0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Users who log in irregularly are unlikely to vote in the future since their voter power has been reduced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reducing the weight of any person's vote is disenfranchisement and does not improve democracy.\n","id":"2dbc06b0-086a-4eef-be30-1889a5d9ff67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should citizens be able to crowdsource laws?<|ARGUMENT|>In a representative democracy participation means as well to elect the representatives as to run for an office and so be elected as representative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democracy as a concept does not necessarily imply direct influence on the legislature process.\n","id":"63594d65-c514-4e26-bf47-b332d9c403ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Women that are typically pressured to \"put out\" will have the option to suggest seeing a legal sex worker for that \"need\". Women wanting to hold off sexually can defer to others that can keep physical and emotional connection separate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex work affords women agency over their sexuality \u2014 an area that is traditionally tightly controlled by men through societal structures such as infidelity laws or social shaming.\n","id":"7f135a65-22bb-4edd-a21b-17459adfb7d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Host Countries and Cities Benefit from The Olympic Games<|ARGUMENT|>Rio spent a large amount of money investing in a broad range of infrastructure such as new highways and rail lines.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some of the infrastructure is not exclusive to the Olympics and can be enjoyed by people after the Games.\n","id":"b4f45852-9ed6-4c51-a2c0-89db393b1fb7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>To really believe either proposition is also to believe that you have accepted it for legitimate reasons. It is, therefore, to believe that you are in compliance with certain norms\u2014that you are sane, rational, not lying to yourself, not confused, not overly biased, etc. When we believe that something is factually true or morally good, we also believe that another person, similarly placed, should share our belief.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Factual beliefs like \u201cwater is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen\u201d and ethical beliefs like \u201ccruelty is wrong\u201d are not expressions of mere preference.\n","id":"d40733e2-3bf1-4a97-b371-8aad9934f13f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been in the workforce for about 10 years now in a few part time and full time jobs. People in my personal life have held management roles so I have seen both the worker and management side somewhat. From my experience as well as others' experiences, I do believe the following things are true 1 Workers vary in job performance and given enough time with the workers, a manager can eventually put a number to their performance level. 2 Monetary incentives are a principal motivator for workers to achieve optimal job performance. 3 Managers typically have a fixed total amount of money that workers can be paid in a given time period For the sake of this argument, I will talk about the subset of union contracts or the subset of workers covered by a union contract where the following is true 4 Union contracts give workers a single pay rate If we assume 1 , 2 , and 3 to be true, then management ends up negotiating with the union a pay rate that the median workers receives. If we assume 2 to be true, then this means there is no longer an incentive for workers to increase job performance and the negative performers receive more than they deserve. This would mean that a heavily unionized firm has little reason for its workers to increase productivity. This has impacts on the competitiveness of that firm. Because I do believe 1 , 2 , and 3 does this mean I am automatically against the foundation on which standard pay union contracts rest? Do all union organizers assume 1 , 2 , or 3 is not true and that is their motivator? Is there an argument for standard pay union contracts that takes my assumptions into account or do the arguments necessitate a rejection of my assumptions? Now I know that union contracts often include provisions for working conditions and benefits, not just pay. For the sake of this thread, I only want to talk about the pay standardization aspect of union contracts. Can someone change my view that standardizing pay destroys productivity? Special kudos if it takes my assumptions into account.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Union contracts which standardize pay disincentive job performance by paying everyone what the median worker deserves.\n","id":"ba9c3c40-eb77-4c17-a659-b07142b83c0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, smokers are both treated with disdain by many, and have their liberty infringed upon by the state e.g. prohibitions on smoking in many public areas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social norms exist well and truly beyond the interpersonal, and extend to concerns about public health.\n","id":"1f67f80f-eade-429c-8c3f-90517ab67b3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My politics lean strongly to the left. My views on \u201cfree speech\u201d are adequately summarized here I support the rights of bigots to express their views, but it isn\u2019t my top priority, and the idea that they should be protected from criticism and consequences is laughable to me. At the same time, it\u2019s hard for me to think of a more counterproductive response to a troll like Milo Yiannopolous than the reception he received last night at Berkeley. It makes Milo feel important and validates him in the eyes of people who accuse \u201cthe left\u201d of thought policing. It saps credibility and strength from the movements that oppose his ideas and is a distraction from opposing the Trump administration on actual policy. At best, it\u2019s a waste of time. Trump and his allies pose a serious threat to the press and thus the free exchange of ideas. Don't get me started on Putin. Effectively opposing Trump means coming down hard on the side of the ACLU version of free speech. Shutting down an earthstain like Milo with violence, while literally \u201cConstitutional,\u201d is hypocritical and unacceptable. This protest \u201cno platformed\u201d a toxic egomaniac in a way that was guaranteed to bring him more attention than he would have gotten otherwise. As a leftist, I think it was a terrible move. Is there anything useful or redeeming about this protest that I\u2019m missing? Am I just concern trolling? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Berkeley protest of Milo Yiannopolous was counterproductive and stupid\n","id":"83654157-c362-43c3-9a90-ba5c579a574a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV Vaccinations be Compulsory?<|ARGUMENT|>In a life-threatening situation, doctors can give the children of Jehovah's Witnesses a blood transfusion even if their parents refuse it on the grounds that their religion condemns it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Doctors can seek a court order to override the parents' wishes if it is in the child's best interests to do so.\n","id":"1b1c2e25-7fdb-439f-83b3-19510b162135"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Both were highly enjoyable comedies. Excellent Adventure could even be considered a classic at this point. It certainly is in my book So why aren't we seeing either of these in rotation on any of the pay movie networks HBO, Cinemax, Showtime or on cable networks like Comedy Central, FX, USA, or Spike, like so many other classics ? You can watch any number of HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of movies on cable except Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure or Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. I think Reeves is suppressing reruns because the character of Ted doesn't fit with the action hero style character he has become known for after hits like Point Break, Speed, and the Matrix., or the more serious film roles like Private Idaho or Walk in the Clouds. Also I am not referring to streaming services. I'm sure you can find these for rent or download on Netflix, Amazon, or other such services, or rent them at your Blockbuster type store.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Keanu Reeves is intentionally suppressing reruns of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey\n","id":"ef30e981-b3e0-4639-ab13-e0b1a68cdfe4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think there is nothing necessarily wrong with zoophilia and bestiality because animals can consent to having sex with a human. Maybe they can't consent in the same sense that a human being can, but their willingness to have sex can be made apparent by their body language. The animal also obviously consents when it is the dominant or active sexual participant, such as when it is the one penetrating the human, or when it initiates the sex itself. Consent does not need to be verbalized. It can be displayed non verbally in the examples I gave above.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoophilia is not inherently immoral.\n","id":"e1c55df6-e8e8-4966-94c0-f14b2058f007"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Over the past few years anyone who has paid attention the sport has notice an increase in the judgment call of pass interference. Defensive Pass Interference is called for almost any contact and can be rewarded with massive amounts yard depending on the play. Often the calls are very ticky tack and could go either way. With the speed that the game is played it can be amazingly difficult to get the call right. The role of the refs should not effect out comes of games. By calling ticky tack ref give an unfair advantage that water down the game. Every other level of football has PI as 15 yard flag. The key argument against it not being a spot foul is that defenses will just tackle anyone past 15 yard however you almost never see that. Good defensive backs understand how to play the ball and rather risk him dropping it then giving offense a cheap first down. Edit careless wording<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NFL should change pass interference from a spot foul to a 15 yard penalty\n","id":"21277a61-cce1-4316-8976-91a7dca4972e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lots of households have rules that you can't talk about money. It's not a child's place to inquire about the family's finances and it's not the parents place to talk about money. So why would this work in schools? To make it perfectly clear, I'm totally for free information and I want every subject to be able to be discussed. The problem though is that when kids start getting too smart about money because of what they learned in school and they start to ask their parents questions about money. Parents will realize that their child knows more about money than they do. Not only that but a good portion of children will figure out that their parents are dumb with money. It will undermine their authority and remove filial piety. Not to frame it all one sided. The revelations might make kids more self entitled. Or it might undermine parents too much in some occasions that it would tip the balance in the other direction. So parents would get angry and complain to the school. Not to say this change to the education system wouldn't last but it would cause too much headache to too many people to ever seriously consider. TLDR We as a society are not ready to teach kids about money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A mandatory personal finances classes in U.S. schools is a popular idea but won't happen because it will upset too many people.\n","id":"25ebfd40-808c-4937-8b6f-5217211f6dd0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm currently single and dating. I find it ridiculous how many people say that its normal to dig up as much info about a person as you can before a date. Whether that is on google, facebook, Instagram, or other even deeper sites. I feel that I should have the right share information about myself in the timeline I deem appropriate, and just because someone agrees to one date with me, that doesn't entitle them to know everything about me. Furthermore, I really enjoy getting to know people. What fun is it to just go through all their social media pictures and know all about their family and last vacations before we have even had dinner together.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Google or social media stalking before a date is wrong, a violation of privacy, and no way to start a relationship\n","id":"46232369-413a-4b77-a32f-a7a90fb607f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Maybe I'm just playing this game wrong, but I found it really boring. I hate games that encourage you to rummage through files . Rummaging in Deux Ex is accomplished by solving an annoying little hacking minigame. Even worse, constant rummaging gives you in game rewards that force me to play the horrible minigame again and again. I don't like to play the minigame. I want to shoot people and stab them in the back. The minigame distracts from the shooting stabbing game, and then I have to read all these people's inane emails I feel like a similar game had the same problem No One Lives Forever. You spend 3 4th of the game rummaging through goddamn file cabinets, rather than actually sneaking around and having fun. Also the boss fights are horrible. I also hate all the trans human dilemma crap that is featured so much in the story line. They really try to shove this issue into your face a little to much. Do the people in the future have nothing else to talk about???? I only played to the 2nd boss of the game, which was super annoying to kill because I didn't level up anything but stealth, and haven't picked up Deux Ex in a year. Are there redeeming qualities to this game? Should I give this game another try? Is it possible or even preferable to play this game without playing that stupid hacking mini game? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Playing Deux Ex: Human Revolution is boring\n","id":"c7dc82c1-80ec-4837-8980-3539aa8ecdf5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've often seen modern neo nazis who cover their faces at rallies described as cowards . However, this puzzles me. To me, it makes perfect sense why a neo nazi would want to keep their face covered. If their identity were exposed, they could lose their job, their family, their friends, etc. To me, this seems very parallel to the sort of discrimination that a gay person from the year, say, 1966 might face if their homosexuality were made public knowledge to the world. The repercussions they would face would be fairly similar. However, I do not consider gay people from the 60's who stayed in the closet to be cowards . In a world that hates you for who you are, it makes perfect sense to conceal who you are in order to avoid repercussions. To me that's not cowardly , that's just smart. However, when I see people refer to neo nazis as cowards and I bring up this point, people tend to get angry and it's usually around this point that I get called some pretty mean names. I have pointed out to people that modern neo nazis who are open about their beliefs are actually pretty courageous, just like the homosexuals who were open about it back in the day. However, I feel that society has progressed to the point where a large portion of homosexuals are able to come out of the closet without fear of judgment, and this is is a wonderful thing btw. So I feel that coming out as a nazi takes a lot more bravery these days than coming out as gay does. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of other criticisms I could point towards Nazis especially. But they concealing their identity doesn't make them cowards. Lots of people seem to disagree with me on all this, but I haven't really had a proper discussion about it. So let's do it, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It takes far more courage to come out as a Nazi in modern America than it does to come out as gay\n","id":"c6c33810-7a48-4a00-a284-3b97d558285e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the use of 'chosen' or gender-neutral pronouns be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>The bill C-16 in Canada for example, identifies \"a broad range of behaviours that might involve gender-based harassment against trans and gender non-binary individuals, including the refusal to refer to a person by their \u2018proper personal pro-noun'\" and it will ill \"likely be discrimination when it takes place in a social including employment, housing and services like education\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept of freedom of speech is not inherently desirable. As this source 4.2 Democratic Citizenship and Hate Speech points out, \"We have to decide whether it is better to place a higher value on speech than on the value of privacy, security, equality, or the prevention of harm.\"\n","id":"70a8acde-7906-4b79-b391-78a920e949b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been thinking about this for a while since there were so many Anti Trump Street Protests, The woman's March and now Venezuela protests. Guess what? Trump is president still, Nothing really changed in the gender imbalance and the same type of protest in Venezuela happened 4 years ago with no result. What is the point? Is it so people feel like they are doing something and need more validations than just raising awareness by posting status' on facebook? Do politicians even care? Trumps election example, Sure there are a lot of people in the street but there are roughly the same amount who voted for him. Just because the Anti Trump'ers are all grouped up doesn't make their numbers any larger. Is it a threat implication. Look how big we are, you don't want to make us mad because the goverment has armies and tanks and missiles. What is the point? EDITS I mean specifically Peaceful Protests, as violent ones have immediate requirements. but are also discouraged by the general populations<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is little to no point to protests in the streets. It can often just be ignored.\n","id":"c2d80b2f-60ee-4d83-8401-ebbf8cdb55c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the International Criminal Court is a force for good.<|ARGUMENT|>The ICC forces nations to accept that there is a binding power that overrides national law, undermining the government. John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, explains: \"The ICC's failing stems from its purported authority to operate outside and on a plane superior to the U.S. Constitution, and thereby to inhibit the full constitutional autonomy of all three branches of the U.S. government, and indeed, of all states party to the statute. ICC advocates rarely assert publicly that this result is central to their stated goals, but it must be for the court and prosecutor to be completely effective.\"1 More specifically, Article 12 of the Rome Statute entails that the ICC's jurisdiction applies to all individuals, even of states that have not ratified the treaty. Governments cannot unconditionally bind its citizens to laws that are inflexible and contrary to the idea of sovereignty.2 1 Bolton, John. \"The Risks and Weaknesses of the International Criminal Court from America's Perspective.\" Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 64 No. 1, Winter 2001, 167-180.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ICC infringes upon national sovereignty by inherently implying that there is a higher court nations must answer to.\n","id":"aae55948-931b-4ff2-9f00-f842df6fc8e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>Gun regulation in Japan has been described as \"the most stringent in the democratic world\", yet the country has been a stable democracy for decades.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Plenty of other governments heavily restricted gun ownership without turning against their population or becoming tyrannical. A government's gun policies are therefore no bellwether.\n","id":"7f9a9f96-dbd3-49d5-ac4b-e9980287ddfb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Good afternoon, ers I've been thinking about this topic for a while. This is actually a two part topic, and depending on how this particular interaction goes I'll discuss the other half namely, that modern society demands perfection from public figures and that this is a bad thing. We live in an age where it's very difficult to speak in a public setting about others, or hold opinions about others, or even describe other people. I feel that this is bad for a couple reasons one, it creates a negative environment which only serves to reinforce flawed views as an example, that minority group X is generally lazy . Two, it creates negative incentives for others who hold different views to engage with the person or persons espousing the flawed view look no further than the sort of social shaming and ostracizing of people on social media because if you still interact with someone with racist homophobic conservative SJW whatever views, then you somehow support all that person or persons' flawed viewpoints. Three, it creates tribes. As soon as you're cast out of one group, you're much less likely to engage with that group in position fashion on any topic, much less the one that created the initial disagreement. That's the surface issue. Let's talk about WHY people hold views like that. It's in part in my view because of how we as humans process information. The brain processes 400 Billion bits of information a second. There's just no reasonable way for our conscious thought to rationally consider and manage every single bit of experiential data we get every second. As a result, our perceptions rely on a huge amount of assumptions that we generate as a result of our lived experiences it's why we'll touch a hot stove as a child but not an adult, because we assume when we see a burner lit up that the stove is hot. That's a good assumption in almost every case, but it's still an assumption . Assumptions are dangerous because they are so often right but not always right. Even if perceptual assumptions are right 99 of the time, that's still a huge functional error rate when you make thousands of implicit decisions a day. That said, I do not see a way for humans to forgo assumptions. Therefore, we are stuck with them, and so they are a necessary evil and will continue to permeate our internal and external experiences. All we can do is be aware of them and perhaps be less judgmental of others when we see them in action. So, Reddit, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Assumptions are a necessary evil\n","id":"aed44efb-0416-4575-96b8-9350843b6955"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>unless they are committing horrible crimes against humanity or threatening our own country on some way, what other countries want to do with there government is non of our business.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most countries are facing much more pressing issues that need attention, meaning they cannot afford to abolish the monarchy.\n","id":"8d58b825-66ba-4722-bad1-71575d2322fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think it's quite possible for me to exist in a completely new environment, looking different maybe not even human , acting different, and everything has changed, but I instantly recognize my new environment because I have had all of my previous memories replaced and new ones implanted. Try to make my previous views faulty and make me believe that my existence is consistent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My being is not consistent from day to day, my previous existence has been erased, and false moemories have been implanted.\n","id":"de59aa54-720f-4111-9616-0585d298c7d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is going to be a long complex , so strap yourselves in. There are a lot of definitions about what 'bad faith' means so I will need to offer an explanation of what I mean by it here 1 Deep down I know that my motivations are not entirely borne out of truth seeking 2 There are substantial objections to my view that I downplay or ignore or reframe to let my view survive So Now we get to the portion of the view I had overturned in myself.In short I had claimed previously that many of the differences between male and female gender roles were the direct or indirect outcome of how male and female bodies are valued differently at a deep level, prior to social scripts. So how does that work? Some combination of the following 1 Women are the limiting factor on the male opportunity to have heterosexual sex and also to pass on their genes 2 Male arousal and orgasm is visible and obvious 3 R K selection theory 4 eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap and plentiful 5 Pregnancy and STDS, sexual violence are costly and the person with the most to lose is going to occupy a different role 6 There are experiments that show that in small groups male and female selectivity is more similar but as the group grows female selectivity fast outstrips male selectivity 7 As societies become larger and more complex, the concentration of resources in fewer hands makes it possible for small group to purchase access to this higher female value 8 In psychoanalysis style, society gets set up in such a way men project what is suppressed in them onto women and vice versa. 9 Since male self value is low around the body, appearance etc mens eroticisation of women manifests as 'objectification' 10 Since women have the more desired assets on a deep level as a general rule, their own eroticisations reflect this, in their projections, they seek out traits like humour, personality, wealth, confidence, status etc, which are often either stable or increase, whereas men are extremely drawn to looks, which as a general rule depreciate, and youth which is not long lasting. Now my claim was that some combination of these and other factors means that or social scripts are a combination of plain dumb fixed roles out of habit, roles and beliefs coming out of an 'old boys club' and finally, that most of the difference was undergirded and based off of the fact of the female body and its appearance being more valuable, on a deep level than the male. Hence, almost all political disagreements can be read as games around this akward fact. What hardened the notion in my mind was that even when I argued with people who strongly opposed it or just opposed it , their responses would almost always implicitly confirm belief in one way or another in the position I was advancing. I would , say, argue with a woman about the fact that females are more selective.She would initially deny it, then I would go throguh a series of steps, producing studies, testimony, social behaviours, market facts and so on, and she would run through various derails and reframings but ultimately many simply crack and angrily declare that I am right but get angry and say that men do not have a right to women's bodies. Now, already, there is an objection to this but we will get back to that later.I need to explain the underpinnings of my new belief.Here it is 1 Throughout history, conservatives who are afraid of change have always argued that humans have fixed traits that make them dangerous, inferior or unsuitable to be granted human rights or other social privileges 2 Anti feminists including fascists of the past have similar arguments to argue that women should not get the vote, should not be able to work etc 3 Even women ARE biologically different in a way that makes sexuality between the sexes on an uneven footing that does not necessarily mean that women as citizens should not have the same rights as men and maybe some that men dont have owing to their particular circumstances 4 In circumstances where women and men are in close contact through friends, work colleagues, etc a lot of the posturing and reducing women to bodies, and men to wallets seems very reduced if not eliminated 5 Whatever advantages women may have on the opposing side are the drawbacks of sexual assault, sexual harassment, not being taken seriously, being reduced to the worth of the body, being expected to be young and pretty past your youth, being constantly rated on your looks and so on 6 Although arguments about male pornstars being paid less, more incels being male etc might have some rhetorical force in trivial slamdunks, they don't seem to necessarily have a meaningful bearing on the socio political questions of male and female equality Now the argument about bad faith, is partly that I supported lines of thinking known to be related to conservatism and to be bad faith reducing humans to biology , resistance to social change which in virtually all instances disproves the hysterical fears of the naysayers historically , the fact that I was raised in a family with gender issues a messy combination of patriarchal beliefs, and anti male female worship, benevolent sexism and denigration of masculinity , the fact that I downplayed the bad side of female sexual position being hounded by low quality guys, shitty lovers who are not interested i your orgasm, sexual assault and harassment etc and so on. As for the fact that people tended to inadvertently confess to believing in my position or eventually gave in well there are other explanations 1 Maybe I am just dogged and was able to wear people down and argue so powerfully that they gave in 2 Perhaps the people who 'went the distance' with me in arguments were more engaged with me precisely because they in particular resonated with my position, unconsciously, not that the position is as widespread as it seems 3 Sexist beliefs ARE widespread, even among liberals and feminists, the fact that these peopel might subconsciously endorse sexism is not an argument in favor of sexism 4 Perhaps I my self subconsciously drew to me people with a similar frame of mind, perhaps on the other side of the coin, perhaps I ignored or downplayed the elements of their ideas that clashed or undermined my own previous position. Now redditors, armed with this material and your own, I would like you to change my view that my previous arguments were predicated on bad faith, with an underlying conservative agenda.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My previous belief in gender difference was a bad-faith argument\n","id":"039ae636-10c4-4af6-97d6-b38a2196cf78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Second Amendment is an individual right, as held by the Supreme Court in DC vs Heller. This means an individual has the right to exercise the Second Amendment without collective approval. They can bear arms without belonging to a militia, and ultimately make a decision regarding their use. The Second Amendment, as espoused by many founding fathers and more recently Rand Paul plays an important role in protecting individuals from the tyranny of government. As a result, officers and representatives of that government are explicitly valid targets for the exercise of the Second Amendment. Given that the Second Amendment protects the tools used to engage in violent activity for the purpose of engaging in violent activity, a supporter of the Second Amendment recognizes the individual right to engage in political violence regardless of whether or not they agree with the individual's cause or objectives. So no supporter of the Second Amendment can reasonably say that violence is unjustifiable . At best, their critique is limited to disagreeing with the views of any perpetrator of political violence, not the act itself. TLDR To take the example of the recent shooting in Virginia a supporter of the Second Amendment can reasonably disagree with the views of the shooter, but not the act of the shooting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is incoherent to be FOR the 2nd Amendment and AGAINST political violence\n","id":"93ce1838-4711-41e9-907c-5f27b577ea11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>1 This separation of PvE and PvP gear makes it near impossible for players to enjoy both aspects of the game. A dedicated PvE raider is going to spend multiple hours a week preparing for the upcoming raids via farming, etc , and then spend HUGE swaths of time actually raiding. The PvP stats become a mandate to play EVEN MORE so that you can actually experience the game you already pay for. 2 Often times the impact is much more extreme going from PvE gt PvP and much less harsh going from PvP gt PvE. By this I mean that a fully geared PvPer is going to be able to at the very least play ball in a PvE raid. But the same is basically untrue in reverse. 3 I anticipate players saying that the PvE player will have 0 experience with PvP and they do not deserve to have an advantage over someone who focus's on PvP. My response to that is Isn't that what ELO is for? These raiders have put in countless hours improving their character just to get crapped on via an arbitrary stat. Not because they arent good at it. 4 I feel that all characters should have their gear normalized to exactly the same stats while PvPing, or a new system needs to be created. Perhaps they could implement some LoL style game play, where you join a bg at level 1 and as you progress through the game, you can unlock items buffs stats. . EDIT 1 I am obviously a PvE raider. But I really really would love to be mildly viable in PvP too. Cant we all have fun? gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that having stats specific for PvP in MMO's is a terrible idea,\n","id":"894a1e30-fca0-4f2e-99b6-996424678fcb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you let your kid play on the interstate regularly, for years on end, you'd absolutely be seen as negligent or at fault when the kid gets hurt. Maybe in those cases you hear about, where for example a man is sexually abusing a child over a long period, and the child comes to the mom for help and the mom denies it could possibly be happening, maybe knowing that the mom could get in trouble for sexual abuse of a child themselves might prompt her to do something instead of just deciding to be in denial. There are some cases, of course, where for example the wife herself is so terrorized, or is basically being held prisoner by the husband by whatever means, that it would be almost impossible for her to escape, but the courts could decide whether that was going on for each case. EDIT My V has been C ed Wow what a cool sub. I thank everyone for their thoughtful replies. This has been super interesting and enlightening. Better to have informed opinions than spouting off gut reactions, I suppose, hey? Of course I still think if the non abusive caregiver has been clearly complacent and indifferent, they should be punished, but in those cases they probably usually are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who allow their partner to abuse their children should themselves be charged with abuse, even if they don't ever directly nparticipate in the abuse\n","id":"8ef918ad-972c-492f-9b0f-afd1dd1dda09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Jeremy Corbyn Be The Next Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom?<|ARGUMENT|>The last time a group of MPs left the Labour Party - the \"gang of four\" creating the the SDP in the 1980s - they actually ended up somewhat working in the electoral favour of Labour. Analysis suggests that the SDP limited Conservative majorities by taking the votes of disgruntled Labour voters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The recent split might be beneficial for the Labour Party.\n","id":"ad400950-2dee-409c-afc6-5cb7811c017d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Gerd Habermann says that the Swiss' genuine democracy is one of the key reasons that Switzerland is so successful, as \"Nowhere else in the world do citizens have the voice they do in Switzerland\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Direct voting is a major reason for Switzerland's success.\n","id":"60ef0b9c-a748-4ab3-bca9-02fff6ba9bb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>If people grow their own food when vegan, then they can make more informed choices about what is in their food and not resort to eating non-vegan food unintentionally.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Supposedly vegan foods might secretly contain non-vegan components on them, like shellac and gelatin on bananas\n","id":"f9cbd508-350c-4e0f-933f-203a8281c9a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>It is true that it does sound like Trump has something to hide. He probably does have lots of embarrassing things that could be good fuel for convoluting the truth. Are these \"things\" important or not, we do not know, but for sure it always looks like there is something he is hiding.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump's actions indicate someone who is worried about what the investigation will find.\n","id":"6ac70ad4-7b59-498a-a98f-2624582d4325"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been considering the concept of infinite regress of causation lately. Basically, what exists in our current state is dependent on the state immediately prior, which is then dependent on a state one step further removed. This is regression of causation. Infinite regress of causation is where there would be an infinite number of steps back in history. I believe that infinite regress of causation is a true description of our material universe, that there was no first movement and one could trace each step back forever. Change my view. Edit Why I believe this is simply because it was my initial concept of our universe. It seems reasonable to stick to default concepts until new facts require a change of mind. I've not yet come across any arguments that would yet move me out of my position but I'm open minded.  See below. Edit x2 Infinite regress is not a fallacy because an efficient cause something that set things in motion but wasn't moved itself would still require something to move it making it not an efficient cause. Therefore we only have infinite regress of causation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that infinite regress of causation is not a fallacy -\n","id":"0f518dc4-6941-4714-8cf5-b708da11ea7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously this depends greatly on the city, and a lot of US cities wouldn't be suitable without a private car, but I live in a major European city, we have multiple forms of public transport and some bicycle lanes. Cars cause pollution of different kinds, take space away from the people, are expensive, raise the cost of living in a city, blah blah blah. People would become healthier, cities quieter, cheaper, more pleasant, less road rage. Obviously there should be exceptions to this rule, such as people with larger families, people with disabilities, emergencies, deliveries, car sharing, electric vehicles, taxis, service vehicles etc. In my idea, I'd ban cars from entering city centres, but have adequate parking on the outskirts, and good methods of transportation from the parking to the city centre.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Heavily restricting the use of private cars within cities would greatly improve the city.\n","id":"66fcb069-a7cb-44e5-a997-97eadd414399"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a female who has had her period for a long time now, and most of the time I had been using pads or tampons. A year ago, I made the switch to menstrual cups, which if you don't know, are reusable you simply dump them out to clean them instead of disposing and replacing them like with pads or tampons. Eco friendly, cost efficient, comfortable, hygienic, don't cause toxic shock syndrome, and you don't have to carry around pads tampons anymore. I don't understand why people are pushing to have pads and tampons be free for women to take and use. They contribute to huge amounts of waste, they are expensive, and they are messy. A menstrual cup on the other hand, cost anywhere from 7 to 30 dollars, depending on the quality you'd like, and are a very good investment considering they practically last forever with consistent boiling after every cycle. What really disappoints me is people who try to convince schools and the government to provide women with free pads tampons that would be paid for with MY tuition taxes There is a much better alternative out there. There is only a very small percent of women who physically cannot use menstrual cups, but the rest, in my opinion, should not complain about how pricey feminine products are and how sexist it is that they aren't free. EDIT Note that I say pads tampons in SPECIFIC, not feminine products in general. Obviously I believe that women should have the right to tidy up their natural flow in some way, but just not with pads tampons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tampons and pads are a luxury item and should not be given out for free.\n","id":"3433d8df-76b1-41f4-bd2b-daad717f9818"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>Plenty of other citizens exercise obviously bad judgment and regret it - for example by blowing their life savings on the lottery - yet retain their right to vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Good judgment is not a requirement we generally impose upon voting.\n","id":"f3f5413b-294d-444e-8d20-b64cccd11296"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Sex Reassignment Surgery the Best Option for Transgender People?<|ARGUMENT|>A long term follow-up of Swedes with sex reassignment surgeries showed that, compared to the control group, they have a higher rate of suicide attempts and psychiatric inpatient care.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Embracing the persona of one's preferred gender does not correct the mental health issues associated with gender dysphoria.\n","id":"ceb33e92-4719-4000-8d15-2c40a6b41ed6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Incapacitating a hostage taker without endangering the lives of the hostages is often not possible. Thus police sometimes have to shoot to kill rather than to incapacitate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Police, which practically all societies have, sometimes face situations where they might have to kill somebody or risk their lives.\n","id":"8d6409dc-c03e-42b3-bb27-003db5b19176"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Don't get me wrong, I'm completely behind having the Paralympics as a secondary event after the Olympics. But I just get quite annoyed, especially here in the UK, when it became almost taboo to see them as anything but totally equal events, and gold medals in each as equal achievements, people calling for Knighthoods if someone had the same number of gold medals as Sir Chris Hoy or Sir Bradley Wiggins 6 5 . I feel this is wrong for pretty much one reason the level volume of competition. There are 2 4 billion able bodied cyclist in the world, and 100's of 1000's of people who compete in cycling events. Then look at Paralympic cycling, there are quite a few disabled cyclists, but when its broken down into all the classifications, how many no legged cyclists are there, for example? Maybe dozens, who are looking to compete, maybe 100's tops. Being the best of 100,000 is in a completely different league to being the best out of 100. If you were blinded right now, and started tandem cycling training, as opposed to if you simply started able bodied track cycling right now, in 5 years, would it be more likely that you could win a Paralympic Gold Medal, or an Olympic Gold Medal? I know both would be unlikely, but as a comparison? A Paralympic medal is still a great achievement, and some of stories are really good, and I know its better than anything I'll ever do, I just don't think its the same as an Olympic medal, like most of the media and the public seem to think. Me and my brother actually quite upset my mum a while back with this argument, am I wrong?  Edit just some grammar, and the question about the 5 years training<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think top Paralympians should be seen as equal to top Olympians.\n","id":"b880e497-05da-4911-95a9-5135e49ca0cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>If everything in the universe is God, including all of us, then that would suggest God does exist and is omniscient through us, because we exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The theistic conception of God is wrong, and only a god or gods of another conception actually exist.\n","id":"10978e7a-d44a-4b54-9f34-d33ca7c2d79b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the uninitiated, Ice Poseidon is probably the most well known former Twitch now Youtube other platforms streamer for being swatted at this point in time. This is essentially because he's kind of gone down a path of pushing the envelope. Now, it is definitively victim blaming to say he shouldn't be behaving in a certain capacity because someone might do wrong by him, I'm not really looking to discuss his stream or its content rather the ongoing state of affairs it has produced. In particular he is repeatedly swatted by his stream. This is frankly a hemorrhaging of taxpayer money that should not be allowed to continue. The fact of the matter is though, that legally Ice isn't at fault for anything and having him stop streaming outright would be a violation of his 1st amendment rights. At this point in time it wholly makes more sense for the government to pay this man a permanent stipend to cease and desist his streaming activity. It's extremely unfair to the taxpayer that a single person gets to rack up a ton of taxpayer burden because he's caught in a legal grey area where he is costing law enforcement time and money for a disproportionate amount of attention he absolutely doesn't need because he's behaving as a normal citizen is allowed and is constantly being made a victim because of his chosen form of employment. I understand that this can result in a slippery slope wherein people intentionally try to persist in getting this form of government stipend but this is a unique case. Most people get swatted once or not anywhere near this frequently. It's a waste of money and our money is better spent pulling him from the air so he can't be swatted than it is summoning law enforcement as frequently as his stream seemingly demands. At this point streaming has created a taxpayer externality that we shouldn't have to bear because people are fucking stupid, so if we can't solve the problem we should at least make it cheaper. Edit Just some factoids to consider A single incidence of swatting can occupy up to 30 professionals. That's the Swat team itself, The manpower needed to divert traffic, The medical staff for any alleged hostages as well as potential onsite injury, all of the logistics personell assessing the situation at the station and so on. From what I've read it can run around 15,000 to 25,000 per instance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government should pay the internet personality Ice Poseidon to permanently cease all forms of streaming indefinitely.\n","id":"c17134d6-fa4d-42ff-b5fe-2ac1ad754ab1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>US support of torture can be used as a powerful recruitment tool for enemies of the United States.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Supporting torture as an American leader damages the US\u2019s moral authority.\n","id":"4b692e81-8cb5-4885-bd48-164ef070ae67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>The torture extends well beyond cooking it, and the fact that we implement torturous methods shows the extent of human cruelty on plants just to get a flavor we selfishly want.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Torture reflects poorly on humanity, and the fact that we employ torture says a lot about humans.\n","id":"207b55bc-56b4-44ca-aab0-442abac7cefe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>There are tribes in Africa, where a wife generally considers it an economic advantage for her family to have additional co-wives, since the women help each other in doing domestic chores and in caring for their animals. Thus stability is granted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A stable society in terms of a stable economy or politics would not be threatened by a polygamous way of living of its citizens.\n","id":"8bd800ab-e3f7-4cd6-81b5-12f6657b4579"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>There will always be some people \"not represented by the EU politicians:\" This is an irreconcilable result of centralist decision-making.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are no longer feeling represented by EU's politicians.\n","id":"a927dcfa-58ae-468f-addc-f567fa94a36b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Title. Having basically only the democratic and republican parties as an option is extremely stupid and dangerous. Both sides are somewhat extreme in their views and by that dangerous for everyone, because America is such an important part of the political world. Your last election had so many options, and the only 2 that had a chance were both delusional idiots. We have the far left, freedom oppressing Hillary that would have caused WW3 just by being elected and, the better option, you can change my mind on that too the idiotic, authoritarian right Donald Trump, who somewhat saved us by being 'elected' but is the most idiotic president to ever be at that position imho. Jill Stein was an amazing option, non extreme, a woman so you would've had a reason to have a woman as a president, and in the green party, so one of the most important things today, namely keeping the planet from being assfucked by all the consumerism. So what does your political system do better than, for example, the German non EU system? Where we have a different party governing in different parts of the country and, admittedly, two huge parties like yours, that have a coalition with smaller or the other big party.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The American representative democracy is the worst of all democracies and super dangerous.\n","id":"dec052af-ef44-452e-973b-10ccdace868e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The archdioceses of St. Louis is suing the city because St. Louis passed an ordinance that prohibits discriminating against people based on their reproductive rights . I whole heatedly agree that no one should be refused housing or employment based on the fact that they may have had an abortion in the past or take birth control, but that is not what I want my view changed on This ordinance effectively added pro choice people as a protected class of citizens. link Current Federal protected classes are Race \u2013 Civil Rights Act of 1964 Color \u2013 Civil Rights Act of 1964 Religion \u2013 Civil Rights Act of 1964 National origin \u2013 Civil Rights Act of 1964 Age 40 and over \u2013 Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 Sex \u2013 Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Civil Rights Act of 1964 The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission interprets 'sex' to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity 1 Pregnancy \u2013 Pregnancy Discrimination Act Citizenship \u2013 Immigration Reform and Control Act Familial status \u2013 Civil Rights Act of 1968 Title VIII Housing cannot discriminate for having children, with an exception for senior housing Disability status \u2013 Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 Veteran status \u2013 Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 and Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act Genetic information \u2013 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act wikipedia source As you can see we have continued to add protected classes since the Civil Rights Act. At what point do we stop? Are we going to have to add protected classes for brunettes or blue eyed people later down the road? I don't think any of the above protected classes should be denied housing or employment, but I don't think we should have any protected classes. Societal pressure should be enough to self regulate without the government having to step in. I realize that I may be living in an idealistic world with my rose colored glasses and should doesn't mean does . Maybe we have to have protected classes because people aren't inherently good and without protected classes we would revert back to segregation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We shouldn't have any protected classes of people.\n","id":"c6bb84d7-28a2-4c1b-8699-780169643b59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>in the Right to be forgotten<|ARGUMENT|>Having a right to be forgotten means that people can be less responsible about what they share and how they act on the internet. Knowing that they can always remove all trace of what they did relieves people of the necessity to consider the consequences of what they are doing online. This is especially true for young adults: they often post unflattering information, such as pictures of them drunk or half-nude, or write offensive comments for the pay-out of immediate popularity in their peer group. However, what also prevents them from doing this is thinking about how that might affect them in the future. When they know that after some time they can delete their digital trace completely there is nothing preventing them from acting irresponsibly in hope of popularity. Such irresponsible behaviour then puts a burden on the state to fix the mess by applying and overseeing the right to be forgotten.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This right relieves people of the need to act responsibility online\n","id":"32ece160-da3e-420c-b385-b411eb055232"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Planned Parenthood Be Defunded?<|ARGUMENT|>Free pregnancy tests and free or subsidized ultrasounds divert hundreds of thousands of women from hospital emergency rooms, which are required by law to provide service and often can't collect payment, resulting in increased medical costs and longer emergency wait times for all.debt.org www.verywellfamily.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The economic cost to society without Planned Parenthood would be higher than the funding it currently receives. Defunding would cost taxpayers more, from a purely financial perspective.\n","id":"53515cbe-fdc3-4437-9f3b-8f34fa773d28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I studied biology in university and took many classes about animal conservation. I support the endangered species act and the conservation of our animals, and that is the reason that I am for big game hunting. People dont seem to realize that reserves for elephants, rhinos, and any given endangered large species do not have unlimited space resources and can not sustain a population that is growing too large, too quickly, that is why these reserves put on these hunts. They also charge so much because the money that they make off of them goes back towards conservation and gives the local economy a boost from tourism and other things . Without these hunts these reserves would have to cull animal populations anyway, in order to keep the reserve running, this way at least they make some money off the back end and are able to support their efforts for a little while longer. Furthermore, elephants frequently escape the reserves and go trash neighboring villages. The villagers, in the past, have been known to kill the animals simply for being pests, but now that essentially every elephant or rhino has a potential price tag on its head from hunting and also tourism, it gives the villagers an incentive to not kill them, because they would essentially be killing a pretty substantial economic driver, thus, contributing further to that animal's conservation. I think the reason people get pissed off at people like Donald Trump Jr., recently the Jimmy John's owner, and other people who participate in big game hunting is either because they are ignorant of the benefits of big game hunting to the conservation of said animal, or they are just searching for a reason to bash someone with differing political views. I would like to hear some good reasons as to why big game hunting is bad for conservation. Edit I would like to clarify I am not for big game hunters taking disparaging pictures of themselves with the animals that they have killed. I believe they should have more respect for them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Big game hunting is not as bad as everyone makes it out to be, and people are just using it as a pretense to shame people publically because of political views or another misguided pretext.\n","id":"9b18e726-ab6f-496f-a6c0-b0b2919df5ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>\"The genetic Adam and Eve\" concept does not mean that there were only two people at some point in time. Genetic Adam and Eve most likely never met each other. Simply they were lucky that their Y chromosome\/mtDNA lineage was the only one to survive to this day, which makes them the last common ancestor for all the people living today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of a human genome does not necessarily mean Adam and Eve are responsible for genetics.\n","id":"6c4d3b97-1707-417c-9d13-c28f70071826"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are programs like Alcoholics Anonymous the best way to battle addiction<|ARGUMENT|>The anonymity has created a well-known subculture of sexual predation dubbed \"step 13\", which probably stops people from participating.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The anonymity comes at the price of safety, which stops people from participating.\n","id":"7b512615-a9e2-439c-abd1-3ddccc5ffba5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been thinking about it, and I don't really see a future in bitcoin beyond where it is right now. Here are some reasons I think that way. It solves a problem not many people have. I can easily pay for my day to day stuff with cash, and pay for things online instantly with my credit or debit card. Whereas with bitcoin, I have to send the bitcoins and then wait several minutes awkwardly at the cashiers desk for the transaction to occur. It's deflationary and the vast majority of it is held in the hands of less than 1 of it's users, so if it ever did become the world's official currency we would have people being 20 times richer than bill gates just because they spent a few thousand bucks on bitcoins when they were 10c. The new distribution of wealth would be ridiculous. It's subject to 51 attacks, which could easily be orchestrated by a government such as the United States if they could either take control of the largest pools, or create multiple powerful ones themselves and them simply combine them once the totals are over 51 . There's no recourse if you're scammed. With a credit card if you're scammed you can call the credit card company and get your money back. With bitcoin if someone logs onto your computer while your in the bathroom and sends 1,000,000 worth of bitcoin to their own account, tough shit because you obviously shouldn't of gone to the bathroom after paying for something. You clearly need your money triple encrypted in cold storage that can only be accessed by you when you're at home and have 10 minutes to spare. With a bank I can log in securely anywhere in the world, and set limits on how much can be sent. I also confirm every transaction from my account via sms. It requires a level of basic technological understanding that the majority of people don't have, or rather, don't feel like using on a subject like bitcoin. And why would they, when they can already pay for everything they want perfectly fine? I think the vast majority of companies currently accepting bitcoin are doing it for the bitcoin bump where after announcing they accept bitcoin there's a rush of bitcoin users using it. The money saved on credit card fees are eliminated though which is a big bonus, although it comes at the expense of buyer safety since once the money's sent they have no way of charging back the cost if the seller doesn't deliver. Also the bitcoins need to be instantly exchanged for fiat or they could lose 30 of their revenue just by a simple fluctuation in price. Furthermore, I think if you go to the bitcoin subreddit and browse it for five minutes, it's obvious that the vast majority of people there are mostly concerned about bitcoins price, and are holding bitcoins as an investment. They're only motivated to spread it's adoption because they stand to make a profit, not because they actually think bitcoin is a superior system of money. The only real use I can see for bitcoin is as an easy way to pay for drugs and transfer money without fees. Both of those are very important functions, and I think bitcoin will be around for a long time thanks to that. However I don't think it will become the world's currency. I'm open to all views, shoot.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think bitcoin will never be used by the masses as a currency.\n","id":"14be4172-95c1-4208-b8ac-5c78a1456c93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be testosterone limits in women\u2019s sports?<|ARGUMENT|>A study looked at 234 female athletes and found that 13.7% of women had high testosterone levels. That same study also found that 16.5% of elite male athletes had testosterone levels that fell below the \"typical\" range for men. Taken together, these numbers provide evidence for a significant \"overlap between the sexes\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If hormone levels vary significantly among male athletes, perhaps there should also be set guidelines for how much testosterone male athletes should have. This would mean men and women were treated equally.\n","id":"1e24ee74-01de-4848-8480-07b3b552b774"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously, the U.S. has a shooting problem. Some people think that since we have permissive gun control, that gun control is the problem. However, the other difference between America and other first world countries is universal healthcare. While I think there should be minor gun reform, it's really not the issue at hand. We have children who have been bullied their whole life who can't see a therapist because either their parents won't let them, or they can't afford it. These people don't need to be treated differently, they need to be helped. Another thing is that nowadays if you even mention having problems, you'll be locked up against your will. Floridian Baker Act None of these help anyone, they just drive people away from help and towards insanity and shooting up a school. I guarantee if Florida didn't have the Baker Act which allows police to kidnap anyone and had better healthcare, this tragedy would've been prevented.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Healthcare improvements are superior to gun control\n","id":"17d77a89-c74b-4c73-92f5-bc53a3feea35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always taken the Mormon Church at their word that they're Christian. I recently revisited that assessment after learning more about the Mormon Church's flagship secular educational organization, BYU. According to that University's honor code, students who leave the LDS church for other denominations are to be summarily expelled as dishonorable Lose Your Faith, Get Expelled This is religious coercion against the Mormon students, and religious persecution against the wouldbe converts to mainstream Christianity. Change my View?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Mormon Church is not really Christian, because BYU will expel as dishonorable any students who are baptized\/convert into mainstream Christianity\n","id":"b2420621-fc83-4684-901a-b111786769cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>Additional punishment is partly responsible for the harsh treatment of pedophiles. It creates a harmful narrative that will be mitigated, when the state will treat pedophilia as any other crime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Creating a special punishment for a crime that is not more egregious than other crimes like a capital offence, for instance will likely make the problem worse, not better.\n","id":"910802c7-3dfb-489d-9a33-632904891fde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>The additional people act as a disincentive to the British to taking further action against us because they make us seem stronger.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The greater population for our community would not be a burden. If anything it would make us stronger.\n","id":"8bfd1e67-b6fb-4870-8066-c43230e66c8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nowadays we live in a society where women are weaker than men, and there is one saying that compares women and men in sports which is you hit like a girl when it is proven wrong by a show called Sports Science where a female boxer have punched a dummy and it is proven that the female punches just as strong as a male boxer. So it's about time that we accept the fact that we are all human and we should be treated equally regardless of the gender. There are many people in this society that still thinks that men are superior and women are inferior which is completely wrong because there are tons of jobs in which women are great at and there are also jobs that require man power. The thing is we should all accept that all jobs and all everyday activities requires everyone and not just one gender for one job.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should except that women and men should be equal\n","id":"93180b16-bd2b-495d-b2ff-919e347a6b25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Maximilien Robespierre ultimately good for France?<|ARGUMENT|>Economically, the republic has enslaved France. The ancient system was respectful towards the laborers and protected them. The Republic instated capitalism, which results in the exact opposite.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The republic he contributed to establishing isn't a good system for France.\n","id":"aef8d413-1c1a-4f61-8ac8-7f786452e476"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Subject at hand being pretty much any topic. Someone could submit I think that hot things can burn you and it will still have people responding trying to convince them otherwise. Each time something like this is submitted and discussed it detracts from an otherwise valuable discussion hub. The concept is great for actual thought provoking discussion and viewing things from new perspectives, but instead most of the people responding have no actual opinion or interest in what is being discussed, they just like debating on the internet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the concept of this subreddit has more potential than any other on the entire site, but it is diluted and dragged down by people that respond purely for the sake of debate, rather than any actual interest or vested opinion of the subject at hand.\n","id":"df0bc480-701f-4fca-b25e-d69ff543ec96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should higher education be publicly funded?<|ARGUMENT|>Free college will encourage some people to go to college, just because they don\u2019t want to work. They aren\u2019t really going to make any effort there, because they don\u2019t have thay kind of motivation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The cost of attending makes students more accountable to their work. They work harder because they paid for it.\n","id":"d6efad9d-eb0f-4e0f-9d1e-4f46ebf5a4ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To preface this, I'm talking about American HS' and also I'm assuming that under this system we wouldn't have standardized testing. I think that as soon as your in high school you should be allowed to learn what subject matters interest you and progress in those. I'm not one of those ignorant HS students who thinks Oh why should I learn Calculus and Biology, they're not important at all. I think the opposite, I think each subject is important, but to different people. Our current HS systems forces everyone to take the core subjects of Math, English, Science, and Social Studies. Within those subjects your forced to take Biology and Chemistry, and for SS at least at our school you're forced to take American History, Civics, and European History. I believe this system helps no one. First off, student who don't like a certain subject area have less motivation and do worse this makes them look worse overall to colleges when all actually they weren't planning on majoring in those subjects to begin with. Second off, this system truly doesn't prepare students for the real world. I am interested in subjects like Math and Science, within science I'm more interested in physics. There's no reason for me to be taking subjects like American History and Euro as core subjects if I'm not going to pursue those fields in the future. The only baseline class I still believe everyone should be mandated to take is English because literacy is important to the nation as well as being able to read at college level. MY IDEA For the system I believe you should be allowed to pursue what you want, be mandated to take English, and also 2 Electives. I'll use myself as an example I would take Math classes, progressing upwards in those throughout my HS career. I would also take Physics, starting at say non calc based physics, moving upwards to calc based, then branching off into astrophysics or anatomical like how forces effect the body etc. . I would be taking English, and then two electives. I might choose, drawing, and business management. This way I would be able to push myself in what I'm interested in, check out other subjects, and still progress my reading level. Edit I forgot to add, this entire system can be created of classes that already exist in HS.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that high school students shouldn't be forced to learn subjects that don't interest them.\n","id":"d3c0fb86-ba38-455c-98d1-e09316aec525"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>Obama signed the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, making it a federal hate crime to assault people based on sexual orientation, gender and gender identity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obama's social policies regarding LGBTQ+ individuals have elevated their social status and benefited them tremendously.\n","id":"5c425756-cb45-4137-8990-8d5cbca0ab25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion has motivated selfless acts, but often only to others within their own religion: individuals are encouraged to volunteer and do charity work within their own community as opposed to doing things for the greater good. This \"us versus them\" mentality is the biggest con of religious groups.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In some occasions, religion is only charitable or helps those who believe.\n","id":"47a0899b-8d36-49ce-b59c-89606c869ee3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>Canadian law recognises that all women pregnant or not have the right to body integrity and the right to make decisions regarding their bodies. The law views a gestating foetus as part of the woman\u2019s body.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some surrogacy contracts give the commissioning parents the right to decide regarding abortion thus negating the surrogate\u2019s body autonomy and rights.\n","id":"7a3971a7-c8c4-4da0-bdbe-7d5248c92aea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My opinion is that taxing people at a higher rate simply because they earn more is penalising you for being wealthy, which is contradictory to the point of having wealth in the first place. I don't intend to make any statements on Corporation tax or VAT or anything of that nature, simply that you shouldn't be discriminated against because you are successful. I also believe that your societal obligations do not increase simply because you earn more, rather that you'll pay more tax anyway, because you earn more in total. I should state I am a resident of the UK, and I would not qualify as a 'high earner' so it's not as though I'm arguing for my six figure salary to be protected. I also believe everyone should pay as little tax as possible, and that, overall, paying less tax can increase, as well as decrease the contribution to the Treasury.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people should pay the same rate of income tax.\n","id":"ab113423-3a95-4f31-9bb3-ab861c08fbce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Female models I know males do this too but lets focus on the females that end up being photographed in an obvious sexually provocative way, lets say for example a model in a Zoo magazine, are demeaning themselves. and such statements like 'models have no life skills', unfortunately in these types of circumstances seem to be easy to believe. I understand that a model can be both a beauty and super smart, but selling your image, knowing it will cropped, cut and airbrushed so in the end its not you, its just huge boobs, a small waste and a big ass, sometimes even cropping the face out, is demeaning. I do understand the big money from it, and possibly a heightened confidence, but why sell yourself to something like this when you can instead, develop proper life skills needed in most jobs, needed in a normal lifetime of socialising and whatever the only thing they have, or learn to accept is that they get what they want or need by looking good, but this won't last long with aging and all, and so soon enough they will find themselves not knowing what to do because their usual flaunting of le body isn't working on people anymore. please note, I am not trying to sound mean, I just want to know the other side of the argument to better understand, hence why this is in .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modeling in a sexually provocative way is demeaning.\n","id":"367fdab5-acbd-4c8e-925b-98c509c1a94a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are certain statistics, like income differential, that suggest that men have an unfair advantage over women in American society. But if we look at other statistics such as domestic abuse, of which gender wins the most custody cases, who gets raped more, who is the family breadwinner, etc we will find that men get maligned as much as women, and that women certainly have an advantage in some areas, in much the same way men do with the income differential. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that there is equality between men and women today.\n","id":"fb8c0ae2-c52a-4a63-af10-0078d766dd86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before anyone starts calling me out for being transaphobic or whatever, believe me, I'm not. It's great that Caitlyn got to switch to her actual gender in a society where a lot of assholes are against it. However, I do not believe that she should not have received an award for being courageous simply for being transgender. What about the hundreds of thousands of other transgender individuals? How does going through a sex change surgery make her courageous? I get that we're going through a period in time in which there is a lot of hate against transgender people, but wouldn't you agree that someone like Noah Galloway, a war veteran who lost his arm and leg in order to fight for our freedom, would be more courageous than her?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Caitlyn Jenner should not have been given the ESPYS courage award.\n","id":"13b53f35-373c-4a29-86f1-360991ac45d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Feminist studies of science have revealed numerous biases in the sciences e.g. in the topics they choose to study or not, the diversity of the scientists who study those topics, and so forth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scientific practice in an academic environment creates political influence and incentives.\n","id":"1b60aa0c-1f82-4878-b774-01522d042e70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious exemption laws could be used to deny abortions to women, even when an abortion was necessary to save the life of the mother p.5.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious exemptions to discrimination laws must be abolished to protect the lives and health of those being discriminated against.\n","id":"7b736fa7-cf68-4c58-abb9-c07549c278f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is water wet?<|ARGUMENT|>In the sentence \"water is wet\" notion \"wet\" is equivalent to \"can make things wet\", which makes the predicate \"wet\" in this sentence mean something different than in \"shirt is wet\". Thus the meaning of \"wet\" in the first sentence is not literal, but metaphorical.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Describing water as \"wet\" is a misuse only grounded in the fact that water can make other substances wet.\n","id":"6225e56a-235a-4c5e-a023-2934a3cd7612"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Managers bully their employees. Passive aggressive bullies dominate the workplace. The government bullies the socially irresponsible. Even physical bullies are encouraged and prosper in sports. In fact, I would imagine it is very difficult for an individual to objectively pick a week when they have not themselves bullied someone whilst justifying it. There are obvious examples of deeply unacceptable victimisation that should of course be condemned, but to just tell kids no bullying without explaining the larger context is going to encourage a generation of whiny, intolerant victim players. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bullying happens everywhere, in all social organisations, at all times, and to teach children simplistic \"Anti-Bullying\" messages is actually harmful to their social development.\n","id":"4b51e552-4c11-4d9e-93ce-6adfa57bb962"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now first of all this few is absolutly economical and has nothing to do with killing people like nazis did. I belive every country should take care of there citizens first and foremost this includes all races and religions no matter the country. This for me means pay social securitys in full only to citizens. Now I also understand that country's are at war and refugees will come and seek asylum. Those asylum seeker should only be accepted if they come from an area at war and should not be accepted if the area has bad living conditions or a bad economy. Not all country's are wealthy enouth to support there people and we have to pay money to them to help stabelise the situation there and acepting economical refugees from those country's would make the situation a lot worse as this would drain there already small workforce as only the people who can afford to flee the country could flee meaning that they are the main workforce. Now this would save a lot of money as we are already supplying countries with development aids and cutting securitys for non citizens would also save a lot of money now what to do with that money. Invest it more social securitys and social programs like better retirement better schools better wages for doctors and nurses espacily nurses or simply pay back debt. Now closing the country compleatry would lead to problems like the UdSSR had with money that had no value outside the country so cemple from other first world nations can come and go as they like and work as draining a little bit of workforce from country's that have a lot should not be a problem those people also do not get the full social security unless they become citizens or the whole system would colaps. This is the only way I belive socialism can be possible as international socialism also known as communism has failed countless times and the only time national socialism failed was when a crazy mustache model from Austria went to war. Also as I am Austrian if any authorities would know what about my political oriantations I would be thrown in jail for beeing a nazi even tho jews are as mutch people as anybody else and work as hard as anybody else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"economical national socialism is the only way to make socialism work for the long run.\n","id":"68458682-7025-44ac-be32-38cc7bb9b7ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>All reasons to have an abortion that relate to post-birth issues such as \"finances\" or \"emotionally ready\" are rendered moot by the availability of adoption. Any hypothetically legitimate reason to justify an abortion would have to relate to a good reason to prevent the birth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Putting the child up for adoption is an alternative to abortion.\n","id":"9703008a-2eb6-4f66-8ece-848a23b76d08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been pursuing a lot of scholarships and one of the things that irritate me is that there are certain scholarships that are not available to me based on my traits assigned by birth. Male, Caucasian . I'm not trying to suggest that I am entitled to every single scholarship and this is by no means a vitriolic rant at people who do qualify for said scholarships. But I am specifically against scholarships that rely on people of academic or athletic standing as their criteria but exclude people for not matching into the group they allow applications for. There are people who may deserve a scholarship more, based on achievement, but cannot have the chance to even try. I'm sure that there must be a reason for this as that's why I'm here today in the first place but I can't find any reasoning that I can justify for such exclusion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scholarships that Are Available to People of Only a Certain Group whether gender, religion, origin, race, etc. are Unfair to People Excluded From It\n","id":"8e3ceb74-f05e-4583-a401-1ad3bf8a38c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am currently living in my 3rd country and in all 3 countries I have encountered numerous people who had made those countries their new homes who couldn\u2019t hold a conversation in the official, or at least one of the official, languages. Some even after living there for over 20 years. I find this to be disrespectful and a slap in the face to country who has opened its borders to let you in and the citizens of that country. I found the language requirements of the last immigration process to be very strict yet on arrival, so many people who immigrated with the same status as myself can\u2019t function in any of the official languages. The same goes for bringing over parents and other relatives permanently. Why should they be exempted from language proficiency? Some countries who openly welcome refugies have FREE language classes available to them and to new permanent residents at least where I am loving now . In short  If you move to a new country permanently, you should be able to communicate in their language efficiently and not expect them to accommodate you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is NO excuse for not learning the language if you move to a new country or permanently.\n","id":"fc085032-0779-4af7-a904-7d6935ef42da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Giving versus receiving<|ARGUMENT|>Giving more gifts than you receive is good for your social status. Traditionally gift exchange has been an important part of social relationships in many societies, with those who give the most presents to others signalling their higher position in society. A patron who gives gifts to others who cannot reciprocate in kind establishes their economic superiority, and places the recipients in a socially-indebted, client relationship to the giver. In this way, it is definitely more advantageous to give than to receive, and even in a modern society the generous gift-giver can establish a beneficial network of relationships that may help them achieve business or social success throughout the rest of the year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Giving more gifts than you receive is good for your social status. Traditionally gift exchange has ...\n","id":"966a3dd5-4eb1-4257-82cb-59b7551b5637"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Donald Trump a Good President?<|ARGUMENT|>A president is expected to uphold the Constitution and the law of the land. If he broke the law to become president, this should disqualify him being considered good.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump allegedly colluded with a hostile foreign power to hack US elections This alone makes him a bad President.\n","id":"954df66b-a7f7-44bb-981b-a3c70aab7d8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen a little bit in the news about a Crossfit employee that was fired for a series of tweets connected with a pride workout at a gym in Indy and the gym's subsequent close. I understood why any smart business owner would want to disassociate with such an individual, but I don't understand why calling homosexuality a sin is expressly homophobic. The definition of homophobia on which I'm basing my current understanding is as follows from the PlannedParenthood website The homophobia definition is the fear, hatred, discomfort with, or mistrust of people who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. While I don't believe that homosexuality makes someone a bad person, shouldn't I be able to disagree with it in the same manner that I morally disagree with extra marital sexual relations? At what point do my opinions encroach on your civil rights? I don't believe it's necessarily discrimination to disagree with how you choose to do things. What am I missing here? The tweets can be found in the following article<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Calling homosexuality a sin is not homophobic.\n","id":"743640d1-1486-405d-8cb4-6b127a1f9779"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello Reddit Providing context I am also a young female who is interested and support the funding of STEM subjects and courses. I value STEM field greatly as it contributes to the economy of society, and improving our well being due to many scientific and technological discoveries. However, I feel like the gender based advantaged for women are unfair to those who worked hard and would have a contribution to society in the future based on gender. Here are my arguments. The point of these advantages is to encourage women in STEM fields, and while some of these advantages are generous gender based scholarships, giving them more points to add to their university entry scores , more likely to be chosen for internship at bigger company based on gender t doesn't prepare them for 'real life' as these advantages just makes it easier for them. A lot of boys men have studied and worked hard, and I believe for STEM subjects its more important of the work you put rather than your gender. Pushing women into STEM fields and the workforce also doesn't guarantee a revolutionary success in STEM, and I find it unfair that some people miss out due to a gender bias to encourage more people to do said science. There isn't any emphasis on men to get into female orientated courses such as nursing, which is just as stressful and pretty important in our society. Male nurses are also scrutinised due to it being viewed as emasculating. I feel like there isn't a fair amount of social pushing for each gender in an opposite gender dominated field. The problem is simply a societal issue where people are conditioned certain genders should act x, y and z. However, the solution could be also targeting middle schoolers and encourage more girls to get into science rather than have lenient policies surrounding women where it makes competition to get jobs internships more harder if you're more qualified. I know there's a social stigma, but I believe that those who are qualified should get the position in STEM fields especially. I know it's important to break those sexist ideologies but I don't think it's worth the risk to have someone who is not as talented in engineering get a position over someone who is, based on their gender. The 21st century has been revolutionary due to the increase of feminism and people reinforcing an egalitarian approach to girls joining the army and encouraging them to engage more in the workforce. However, I just don't see the need for excessive benefits and leniencies. I live in Australia and our entry system is called an ATAR. Which is a scale between 30 99.95. An average ATAR for someone to get into a good university in STEM courses are around 90 . Some universities give 10 atar points to girls for choosing an engineering course. The problem is that our ATAR is ranking every student in the state, so for a girl that got an ATAR of 85, and giving her 10 extra points technically allows her to beat thousands of people for a position who did better than her, in said course.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Academic advantages for women in STEM fields\/courses in university and in the workforce is unfair and pointless\n","id":"852d5754-de2e-4791-b60e-fece4212b338"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should jury trials be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Jurors are generally ill informed on any specific issue, and may make worse judgements over the facts than experts in the subject matter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Judges have the training and expertise to better understand complex law.\n","id":"796dda10-5218-440a-859b-23829c8ab1e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide?<|ARGUMENT|>A prerequisite to improved economic relations between the two countries is a reduction in the animosity between the citizens of the two countries. Acknowledging the genocide is likely to begin this change in attitudes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Acknowledging the Armenian genocide would have numerous economic benefits for Turkey and the surrounding region.\n","id":"09357806-4fba-4a64-89bc-e2519d3546f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like the news out of China is an obvious flaw in the bitcoin idea made real. Governments aren't going to allow an anonymous currency that's basically the ideal way to circumvent money laundering laws, tax etc to undermine the actual currency of the nation. As soon as it comes into any significant usage as a real currency and not just play money, it will be crushed. Most importantly, I feel that China doing this will make all reasonable people wary of picking up bitcoin, because of the justified fear that this will just happen over and over again. Much most of bitcoin seems to be investment, speculation, etc but these things can only continue as long as it goes up up up. Or at least is expected to go up. People with thousands to gain try to control the tone of the media, but it's hard to put a good spin on this. Until bitcoin is widely accepted, the value is all based on tone. if it weren't bad publicity wouldn't be able to halve the value With few actual uses beyond people accepting it as a publicity stunt and a realistically negative tone set for the future, I think that bitcoin will slowly fade away with only die hard believers holding on until the end pushing a fake optimism to try and recoup their investments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With the news out of China, bitcoin is basically finished.\n","id":"0c720d0b-1d3b-47a9-b66c-55fe8971f458"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The constant accretion of errors that lead to wear and tear in the organs is what we call aging. Curing this is not unthinkable as it once was. This will be definitely get pursued, as this is one of the possible achievements that will take as close to immortal, without redefining what it fundamentally means to be a human. Here is a plausible scenario, Somehow we design a human baby whose cells don't age. As this would come at a cost of high capital, This will be completely exclusive to the super rich to have babies who don't age. 1 As the Rich people who don't age, don't die off, Wealth inequality will be pushing the limits of who we are as a species. Rich people who were born rich will live as long as they possibly can, keeping all their wealth, There is absolutely no chance of wealth and power leaving them. Meanwhile poor folks would be still getting cancers and dying off. It would all become a lottery of birth, if you are born in a poor family you will be stuck with diseases and death. When the rich can live for thousands or even millions of years, before getting hit by an meteorite or something. This will surely be pushing the society towards an apocalypse. 2 This will completely bring social progress to a screeching halt. The unaging population will have really bad ideas from centuries or millennia ago carried forward without dying off with them. Policy changes will be unimaginable, We would be constantly learning new stuff about the reality of the Universe and our own Biology. But that will not change the popular opinion at all. Within a few centuries of having both the unaging rich population and mortal poor population, We would be up in arms about which direction should we head as a species. 3 This one might have a very simple solution. But i will still proceed. Babies, There might be babies being born to unaging folks. Even if it is 1 per person per hundred years, This will devastate the planet within few thousands of years. Surely we could be making people impotent when we are designing them. But the need to nurture is a huge part of our being, and it might make someone somewhere wonder how it feels to have a cute tiny human. You can cut that off too. You can technically make impotent human beings who wont feel the need to nurture. But any slip here could be devastating to the planet. For example, the researchers might not be able to place the nurturing gene and the investors could be pushing them to release the formula to prevent aging. Now this could result in unaging but fertile beings capable of giving birth to other unaging beings. Or A rogue scientist could just revert the impotency gene and let it loose in the original population. Unaging people can never ever reproduce. Period. But the reality of this always happening throughout all of time is hard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Curing aging will turn out real bad for the Human Race and the Planet\n","id":"b2fa4dbb-ebaa-4a48-8242-56a70b698ae6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit two going back to work. Will check again later Edit this blew up Taking a break. At a bar. Back on later. probably in 8 hours. Gotta sober up Just about everywhere I go late at night, there is a line to use single toilet restrooms that lock for the ladies room. I totally understand that if it's a multi person toilet area, let's make two restrooms. Why don't restaurants just have two restrooms that are first come first serve? Guys are definitely quicker. Can't argue against that. Is this the only reason or is there something I'm missing? I mean, if a girl needs help with her dress or whatever, nothing would stop her and her friend from using either restroom. This would speed up he amount of time it takes to wait in line by half. Why is it important to have both a male designated and a female designated single toilet with a lock restroom? I'm sure it has something to do with the law, but help me understand why it's necessary. Sorry if it seems like I'm repeating myself there isn't a whole lot to say to make the 500 word requirement on this topic. Please tell me what I'm missing and help <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Single toilet restrooms in restaurants that lock should not be gendered\n","id":"ab05e3d6-2e75-4d3a-9fff-f5c507914333"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>The use of psychoactive substances has been a part of human culture for thousands of years; drugs have been used for religious, medical or recreational purposes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It\u2019s not wrong to give up when you realize you are doing something wrong.\n","id":"37a6d295-8049-4e00-bb21-050008ec4b1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cigarettes should be banned<|ARGUMENT|>The clothes of smokers smell terrible and there will be a discussion about containing them and not letting them air to wear them another day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One partner smoking in relationships add extra smoking-related friction to a relationship.\n","id":"e5232082-8738-497b-b567-3d3e1475c1fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Do I see straight people coming out? No, because it's socially accepted. People are automatically assumed straight. Coming out to people is because you're afraid to be yourself. You want to be accepted. Teens shouldn't feel the need to do that. Teens should feel free to love whoever they want without the need to telling before otherwise. And yeah, there are bigoted people out there, but do you really think this will change it? No If gays have to come out before hand, then straight people should have to as well. But that won't happen, because it's socially accepted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's stupid to come out\n","id":"c8dc190a-2d92-42f5-9535-3492f7970c0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Small electric scooters, like Lime, Bird and Jump, are good for people.<|ARGUMENT|>Users and offenders many a times leave the scooter in inappropriate locations. If these scooters are in abundance, it will create problem for the walk and cycle lanes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People often leave scooters around a city, which clutters sidewalks and looks bad.\n","id":"ff654aeb-47f7-486c-a45d-0d4dc35be916"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the integration of Africa through the African Union can succeed<|ARGUMENT|>In its thirty-nine year history, the predecessor of the AU, the OAU is almost universally judged as an abysmal failure.1 It failed to challenge any major dictator on the continent and stood idle while civil war, ethnic conflict, poverty and disease ravaged ordinary Africans. Idi Amin, the former Ugandan despot, even served as the OAU chairman for a brief spell. Its only success was in preserving the notion of sovereign borders in Africa. The AU suffers many of the old problems of the OAU; particularly its capabilities falling well short of the ambitious rhetoric. The institution still does not have mechanisms to enforce or even encourage compliance so cannot resolve conflicts. When conflicts arise there has been difficulty getting action from the AU due to a preference for consensus and even if there is agreement the Union does not have the capability to intervene.2 1 Amoo, Samuel G., \u2018The OAU and African Conflicts: Past Successes, Present Paralysis and Future Perspectives\u2019, Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution George Mason University, May 1992, p.2. 2 Williams, Paul D., \u2018The African Union\u2019s Conflict Management Capabilities\u2019, Council on Foreign Relations, October 2011, p.8, pp.20-22.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"African international organisations do not have a history of effectiveness\n","id":"9743b7f0-12e6-44e7-941a-0a6c90e14c4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>Reports from drone pilots show the digital nature of the act of killing makes it easy for them to distance themselves psychologically from the crime. A similar effect would allow large-scale crimes to be more easily carried out in a virtual reality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Virtual realities allow people to easily conduct crimes of a far greater magnitude than is possible in the real world.\n","id":"043a8535-9336-4517-8097-0e98609b927c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should civilians be able to physically resist unlawful arrest, search, or seizure?<|ARGUMENT|>If \"all men are created equal,\" then the same moral standards should apply to both police and civilians with regard to the use of physical force.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Civilians should have the right to physically resist the police for performing an unlawful arrest, search, or seizure.\n","id":"30347295-07ae-4cfb-ba4c-76f9858e35e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Liquid Democracy assumes that experts offer the best representation. The natural progression towards Meritocracy is essentially a rule by the elite, which is exactly what a republic aims to avoid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liquid democracy would concentrate power and - like in elective representative \"democracies\" - facilitate vote buying by the rich, subverting the democratic requirement that everybody should be equal.\n","id":"383ad3df-6fc5-45ed-b24d-55b69bf03aab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>About 2000 children die in car accidents annually. Deaths in school shootings are an order of magnitude less than cars. Since there is no great public outcry for improving automotive safety for children, this supports the premise that the current level of school safety is acceptable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is currently an acceptable level of security in public schools compared to the current level of attacks. No change in policy regarding armed teachers is required at this time.\n","id":"3fe28398-9341-483d-b5eb-e5589b558cf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>Because virtual reality is a simulation, there are fewer barriers to performing an action than in physical reality. This reduces the distance between thought and action, reducing the \"vero-autononomy\" that checks our impulses and urges<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If there were few consequences for impulsive behaviour say, lashing out violently in virtual reality, it may systemically loosen our self-control instincts in both physical and virtual reality.\n","id":"20e9ff76-4553-4cba-bb5e-69fc1b0b7d93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>And people on the internet in general. If it's your content, or your identity, or your friends, I get that. You your little group are giving consent to uploading your material to the internet. But that dumpy looking person at the grocery store didn't give you permission to post her picture online. That passed out person on the street probably didn't, either. That random person in the crowd who just so happened to make a weird face the moment you snapped the pic, I'm sure he had no clue you took it. Some of these pictures, they make me laugh, but most of them make me think that their privacy has been violated in some way and it makes me sad. I look upon these people in pity. Yes , they dressed that way to go to the grocery store be seen by others, that was their choice. I get it . But what right had you to pull out your smartphone, snap their picture, and upload it to the internet for the whole world to laugh at? Some of those people have mental illnesses, or other issues. Are they not in enough pain without you possibly adding to it? I've heard it said that the Internet writes in ink. Once uploaded, it may never be truly fully erased. By uploading pictures of strangers to the internet, if it trends goes viral, you are responsible for having permanently compromised any hopes of relative privacy that person may have had. Their shame is compounded, again again, for your benefit of magical internet points you call karma. I guess what really strikes me is the blatant hypocrisy. The malicious intent. Some of you Redditors have a big ol' stick up your ass engraved on its side in big letters are the words POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS PARAMOUNT TOLERANCE FOR ALL . When you upload pictures of strangers to relentlessly mock ridicule, where is your tolerance? Where is that incessant stream of political correctness when it's really needed? For people who claim to care so much about the poor and less fortunate, you really seem to enjoy laughing at them, and I find that dissonance disturbing. I'm unable to reply in 3 hours, as I'm going to bed, but I'm willing to discuss this when I wake up. I am genuinely interested to hear what others think. Can you change my view, or will I change yours?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Redditors, of all people, should not be posting embarrassing pictures of strangers online or condoning the practice\n","id":"a6c4d5ad-ddf3-41b5-abf0-eaa0ca10f1cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>When faced with confronting situations, it is unlikely that an unwilling recruit would be willing to make a personal sacrifice for the greater good.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People involuntarily serving in the military would be a liability in high-stake situations.\n","id":"c7c6982b-61d2-4fd8-99e5-f8b382480a69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US electoral college<|ARGUMENT|>The current system provides for the protection of the rights of all 50 states, because it forces candidates to appeal to the voters in all parts of America. It is important to remember that America is not a centralized state but a federation of states. A nationwide vote tally could provide an incentive for a candidate to focus only on the most populous areas of the country, such as California, New York, or Texas, and ignore other areas such as Alaska, Rhode Island, or Maine. The electoral college is a natural consequence of the devolved, state-based government that Americans have always supported.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electoral college helps protect the interests of smaller states in the union\n","id":"3387b1c3-5986-4f8c-9f2f-a8d440fb676f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>European heads of state are heavily conflicted between their electoral interest at home and what is good for Europe. The USE would eliminate this problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USE will govern more effectively and efficiently than the EU.\n","id":"bed0aa44-9afd-49bb-813d-197bbf4a3a2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>Cultural diversity in the workplace may have a positive influence on the reputation of a company - leading to more consumers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cultural diversity in the workplace may lead to greater profits for an organisation.\n","id":"cac9ec72-5e73-4d32-ae16-3f531a7a7482"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Secular laws, governments, and constitutions have played a part in religions starting to use the word tolerate not only to allow a degree of interfaith cooperation to defend their rights as they see them, but also to suggest that they'll conform to secular laws and drop some antisocial practices used against infidels.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In recent decades the favourite word which religious leaders use to suggest they're not bigots is a giveaway that that's exactly what many of them are: They claim they \"tolerate\", a word that's open to interpretation either as biased to placate their bigots or unbiased to placate everyone else.\n","id":"c8ab1692-76c9-4b85-b12f-891dcd9d291b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has the Conservative government lost its legitimacy to govern?<|ARGUMENT|>The negotiations on Brexit are more complex in that they include a multitude of actors including businesses Hunt has previously courted controversy over his remarks directed at Airbus which criticised the May Government's Brexit strategy, and may further isolate British businesses and foreign investments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Negotiations with doctors and NHS workers would be distinctly different from negotiations with the EU over Brexit.\n","id":"1f8066e9-23ad-4738-ba44-3536479159b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Oprah 2020: Should Oprah Run For President?<|ARGUMENT|>This is no evidence which indicates that Oprah has the high degree of competence necessary in politics to create a positive impact as president.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Oprah is unqualified to run for president of the United States.\n","id":"4009473e-c68c-4595-b6a4-2a04abe3c0a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>\"required him to read Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat, the famous Zionist classic, which converted Eichmann promptly and forever to Zionism. This seems to have been the first serious book he ever read and it made a lasting impression on him. \" platypus1917.org \" III expert on jewish question<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hannah Arendt describes Eichmann as a Zionist who spoke yiddish Arendt, p. 23\n","id":"3b6f2ad4-9c5b-4457-aefd-537f6443273e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>When the Pope speaks \"from his chair\" as the leader of the faith, his teachings do not need the consent of any other member of the church and are irreformable<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Pope, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, is considered infallible when speaking ex catedra.\n","id":"19f961c7-b415-4b49-9024-adb66da09380"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that the real point of the death penalty is to 1 Kill the evil and 2 Strike fear into the hearts of others who want to commit evil. And though we have good ways of killing people, none of them really strike as much fear into hearts as hanging.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think we should bring back hanging.\n","id":"2340f7b5-98f8-4fc2-9936-4ed649a58bd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I visited San Francisco a few weeks ago\u2014in part to see if I may eventually want to move there. Especially in the tech industry, the San Francisco Bay Area has earned a reputation as a mecca for programmers from around the world there are more companies, a much wider variety of work, and a thriving community around these things. However, I also consider factors besides my career, and I would expect those things to be mostly concentrated in San Francisco rather than Silicon Valley culture and entertainment, for example. I stayed in Union Square and was underwhelmed. It's not that it doesn't compare favorably to St. Louis, Missouri, where I'm from, but that it's not really head and shoulders above, say, Chicago. I did not really get a sense of something exciting happening to do around every street corner in this regard, perhaps expectations had gotten too high in my head . To get a sense of night life, we took a look up and down Powell Street I think , which seemed to have lines of bros building up in front of them not my style we did not make it to the Mission District Friday night if that could have been better. Regardless, day and night, it appeared the gender ratio was less favorable than, again, Chicago, where I found the women to be particularly friendly. The gender ratio did seem similar to St. Louis but with the advantage that there were fewer families and married couples and more young people too. Again, I am looking at cities from the point of view of a 29 year old single heterosexual male The weather was nice, and the proliferation of small, street level businesses was interesting. There were some nice parks, awesome views, and more functional public transit. The main thing that weighs San Francisco down is the price tag. If I compare the again, ignoring career experience I could get living in San Francisco with living in Chicago, the cost of living doesn't seem worth it. An advantage St. Louis has over San Francisco or Chicago is it's much easier to be a big fish in a small pond. There are some resources for startups in St. Louis starting up, and St. Louis is craving anything that could be a boost to the local economy or reputation. There are lots of spots in the City that aren't too terrible for crime where real estate is cheap and perhaps vacant. St. Louis's risk aversion and lower openness, though, may make deviating from the standard path a much more lonely experience than in reflexively liberal San Francisco. Overall, did San Francisco seem nice? Sure. Does it stand appreciably above other cities in its league e.g., Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, New York ? Not necessarily.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"San Francisco Is Overrated\n","id":"3e461ecf-3e7e-49f9-b76d-e8fca55fd7f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>An example of politics leading to a loss of communion; Roman Catholic\/Orthodox schism of 1054: en.wikipedia.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The politics of religion have obscured and diminished the development of collective and personal spirituality.\n","id":"6afdcc83-5cff-4cfb-b9ea-5120e5533733"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>gt You have to be logical. You know? If I know that in this hotel room they have food every day, and I'm knocking on the door every day to eat, and they open the door, let me see the party, let me see them throwing salami all over, I mean, just throwing food around, but they're telling me there's no food. gt Every day, I'm standing outside trying to sing my way in We are hungry, please let us in We are hungry, please let us in gt After about a week that song is gonna change to We hungry, we need some food gt After two, three weeks, it's like Give me the food Or I'm breaking down the door gt After a year you're just like I'm picking the lock Coming through the door blasting gt It's like, you hungry, you reached your level. We asked ten years ago. We was asking with the Panthers. We was asking with them, the Civil Rights Movement. We was asking. Those people that asked are dead and in jail. So now what do you think we're gonna do? Ask? I think this quote perfectly sums up the mentality behind anyone empathizing with the culture , from the street level dealers to the parodies of them seen in modern rap videos. You can't expect someone who's been taught not to trust their next door neighbor to become a social magnate within 30 years of a life filled with the scenes of an all around profane environment. While I do agree that this culture does come with certain pitfalls, I don think anything within it is being glorified to the extent that it perpetuates the behavior, I just believe that the circumstances aren't something that the general population is accustomed to, and therefore most react out of an aversion to novelty, which leaves it open as an avenue for rebellion amongst the youth that they influence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ghetto \"culture\" isn't a problem, the perception of it is.\n","id":"04c9753a-996f-4ba6-8ae3-ebc6f4deae2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's a lot of layman speak that goes around about how being too sanitary deprives the immune system of stuff to work on and therefore weakens it through inactivity is questionable to begin with. Even with the most diligent hand washing, there are plenty of germs that still remain in the environment. Anti bacterial soap and sanitizer should be used irregularly because they do cause the problem of antibiotic resistance, but the difference in overall exposure to germs is still pretty much negligible as I see it whether you wash your hands 50 times a day or not. Secondly, even if it was true that the immune system benefits from more exposure, it should only be of concern regarding children. If you're an ordinary adult and you don't get sick too often, then I don't see how it's going to make a difference anyway because it's already been primed and knows how to deal with threats relatively effectively. If this wasn't true, it would imply that it is possible to lose immunity. Wouldn't that make vaccines lose all their effectiveness over time? Sure, adults normally have an effective immune system, but why even let germs get to the immune system and induce that small risk, assuming that the premise is irrelevant for adults? Furthermore, a lot of illnesses the people get sick with, children and adults, are ones where it wasn't possible to build an immunity to in the first place. So again, even if the original hypothesis was true, how is this beneficial in any meaningful way? If you notice, the Hygiene Hypothesis is almost exclusively focused on the upbringing of children. It doesn't make any comment about adults' immune systems weakening due to being germaphobic. So even if the Hygiene Hypothesis is assumed to be true, children are the primary concern and still, that doesn't mean we jump to the hyperbole of letting them lick everything and not wash their hands, etc. I've seen this justified a lot on Reddit, and it seems pretty silly. I, as an adult who has a pretty well developed immune system, wouldn't do that because even though it's unlikely that I would get sick from it, it's still nasty and why take the chance. So why in the hell would I want my hypothetical children who are more at risk because their immune system is still developing, want them to do that? If it is true that children benefit from healthy exposure to germs, then they should be exposed to it in moderation. Somewhere in the range of playing outside, getting dirty, interacting with others, maybe spending time with pets. These are all reasonable, but not reckless nor silly things to do. It's the leap from this to, Let children eat shit and lick the ground, that I'm left puzzled with and to me, seems like overkill and unlikely to derive any significant benefit. Here's the other thing the Hygiene Hypothesis makes no comment on increased resistance to illnesses. It only says that more exposure in early childhood may decrease rates of allergies and autoimmune diseases. But that's not the same thing as, how many want to believe, the immune system becoming stronger against everyday illnesses because of practice . Also to be clear it's mostly from laymen who try to apply the what doesn't kill you makes you stronger line of thinking to everything, possibly fallaciously in some cases like this one, that perpetrate this idea. Most reputable articles simply say to exercise, eat healthily, manage stress, sleep well, and have good relationships. They may say something about avoiding anti bacterial products, but almost none I've seen actually recommend this layman idea that you need to start eating off the ground. As an anecdote, I would say I'm a mild germaphobe. I don't carry hand sanitizer or use anti bacterials, or even think about germs most of the time. However, I am pretty clean and particular about washing my hands, in part because I don't like the feeling of having stuff on my hands. In fact, I've been pretty conservative in that regard as I remember telling my dad I wanted to wash my hands before I ate even at age 4. And I do stuff like grasping the bathroom door handle with something other than my hands directly, which is seen as recommended and reasonable, yet some people still try to justify not doing this as strengthening the immune system , which in my mind is folly. According to these folks, I should be sick a lot but that's not the case. I'm only sick about 1 2 times a year with things like colds, even that I could lower if I was more careful about my lifestyle in general. It seems to me that it's almost as if the whole machismo mentality is being applied to understanding how the immune system works. I view the immune system more as a backup fail safe, instead of as my main line of defense. Ideally, it should have no work, but is a great defense in case I need it. Separate from this , I do have a side question I want to ask let's assume that the premise is in fact true, that immune systems benefit from more exposure. Is it possible that by the same token, although this would increase the effectiveness of it, it would also shorten its life and the person's with it ? Basically, is it possible that there's a trade off between performance and longevity? As in, the less you use your immune system over the course of your life, the longer you live because you more slowly deplete its resources?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea that being a germaphobe weakens your immune system is questionable to begin with, and almost completely relevant for a healthy adult since their immune system is evidently already developed anyway.\n","id":"ba04985c-3e63-47e5-a671-769b98464e09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Strength, resolve, heroism, wisdom, etc. are all forged in struggle and tragedy. These things couldn't exist in a utopian world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to the character-building defenses some virtues may be contingent on evil.\n","id":"b59677ec-042f-4195-89c0-b809dcb7b965"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should US intelligence agencies end mass data collection?<|ARGUMENT|>America's foundation was on strict principles of equality and freedom as evidenced by their importance in the Declaration of Independence. Therefore infringing that freedom is a grave harm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Freedom and liberty are important parts of the American lifestyle. An absence of that freedom is therefore a grave injustice.\n","id":"ee6f200a-2a96-400f-8e17-f82c6c8523dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title sums it up just about. I\u2019m a vegan and in my eyes, farms especially factory farms are glorified concentration camps. So liberating the animals by force must be a morally good choice just as forceful liberation of the Nazi concentration camps was. I guess I just want someone to convince me I\u2019m an extremist and to moderate my views. EDIT It seems there have been two main arguments put forth Are wild animals wrong in eating meat too? Humans need meat And they can both be answered the same Eating animals is wrong because it is unnecessary. If it were necessary I'd have no issues whatsoever As with wild animals . But the fact remains that a degree of unavoidable objective suffering comes with the farming process, and it is totally unnecessary. EDIT 2 Thanks for everyone's input. I got out of it what I posted for. I realise that direct action is probably too extreme and education is the way forward.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe animals have the same rights to life as humans and it is morally right to violently free them from farms.\n","id":"bb484869-da73-4d59-865d-e41f8b2bee3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>A proposed carbon tax in Canada of $50 per ton would translate to 11 cents per liter of gasoline at the pump if all costs were passed down to the consumer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The costs of putting prices on carbon emissions are affordable for consumers.\n","id":"81576e09-dcc6-43e0-900e-3e271ef114c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Judging is defined as developing a negative opinion of another. However, Judging others is unavoidable in real life. If a person lies within my jurisdiction, that is, it involves me directly or indirectly, then I should be able to judge them with no societal discourse. If a crazy girl who I barely know claims that God told her that we were supposed to get married, I don't say I shouldn't judge her, who knows what she's been through and cater to her fantasy by marrying her or entertaining her longing by leading her on. I run away. Fast. I judge her immediately, and choose to stay away from her. I am walking down the street with my child, and a windowless van pulls up and drives the speed we are walking. The side door opens and a man asks my child if she wants to go for a ride and tells her he has candy for her. I would never say I can't judge this person, who knows what he's gone through. No, fuck that. I am judging him hard, probably beating the hell out of him out of fear of my child being kidnapped. I know those are extreme examples, but judging others by their actions, presentation of themselves not appearance because I don't judge based on race creed etc. , or words is completely acceptable as to choose who to associate yourself with or develop opinions about. TL DR Judging others is unavoidable, therefore, if those who you judge are within your jurisdiction, judging them is completely acceptable and society's damning of the act of judging is impractical.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe society's development of the view \"Don't Judge Others\" is not practical and judging others is unavoidable in real life.\n","id":"23339929-d3af-43b9-8f89-98ea749da2d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Cosmetic companies began testing in 1940s after some people suffered harm from the chemicals. It is continued today as a legal safety net<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all animal testing is done for science; animals are often tested on by cosmetic companies.\n","id":"dd5885b1-a2dc-4130-8f0c-8059d4642a4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In modern days where information is easily accessible and spread, fake news and news that invoke hatred towards opposition is extremely prevalent. This is more noticable in third world countries where education is far behind. These people whose education is lacking is also easily swayed to whichever party gives more ridiculous empty promise or even bribe because most of the time they are also poor . I think age is no longer enough to be the only requirement for people to be allowed to vote. More metric should be required such as education or tests that they need to pass to be allowed to vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be another requirement for voters beside age\n","id":"6131ae60-616a-4b12-8dde-ead2558adc88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many countries have made vaccinations compulsory for the health and safety of the child, and rightfully so. I believe that mandatory gene editing can do the same thing. Some genetic conditions are just clearly harmful to people e.g. Wolfram Syndrome, Diabetes, Alzheimer\u2019s and I don\u2019t see the harm in making sure that as few people as possible have to live with these conditions. The main reason that mandatory gene editing is viewed so negatively is because of the association with possibility for eugenics getting rid of the \u201cundesirables\u201d in the gene pool and I understand the connection there. At the same time however, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s possible to deny that some genetic conditions are inherently undesirable by nature. To be clear I am not looking to make some sort of blonde haired, blue eyed, straight cis master race through gene editing. My view here is essentially The government rightfully decides what vaccines to put in your kid\u2019s body so they don\u2019t fucking die, we should not rule out the possibility of the government doing the same to your gonads so that your kid doesn\u2019t have to go blind before they\u2019re 20.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mandatory gene editing should not be ruled out as a possibility.\n","id":"a3ce00a0-e066-46d6-b661-4f5c90a35d31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>While appealing to authority may not meet full logic rigor, In practical terms it should not be fully disregarded especially by those with less skill\/access to data as the authority being appealed to. yourlogicalfallacyis.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Generally, appealing to authority is only unjustified if the debating parties disagree as to the authorities expertise in the context being discussed. Otherwise it is a practical use of time\/resources.\n","id":"cfefae03-3aed-479b-8004-c284dfe257cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Dreams are DMT trips or something, and bad trips are important for growth good and bad teaches balance . Also, it's a free trip, so it's got that going for it. But let's say you don't care, or let's say I'm wrong about the DMT bad dreams are interactive horror movies. How can you go wrong? Sure, you believe that everything happening to you is real, but you'll be safe and sound once you wake up. It's like a more intense version of those touchy feely rides at Disney World or Universal Studios like if The Shining was a ride like that. Even if you didn't volunteer to be on the ride, you can just brace yourself for a nightmare every night.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"nightmares are fun.\n","id":"12b1a4bb-391f-4372-b0bb-f51abc7a5935"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I am a survivor of sexual abuse ages 7 to 12 . I am deeply traumatized by it but just can't see the logical reason for that trauma. Second of all, I have ZERO sexual interest in children and the thought of it disgusts me. Thirdly, I desperately want to understand why sexual activity is traumatic for children. I'm not here to argue I'm here because I WANT my view to change. I hope you will help me. With that out of the way, I will explain. I was sexually abused by a teenage boy seven years older than me I\u2019m a girl, btw . I had a crush on him and I never felt pressured into anything. I never felt afraid or disgusted. In fact I enjoyed it physically and emotionally. It wasn\u2019t until I was 20 that I realized it was abuse. I thought sexual abuse was always against the will of the child. I learned that a significant minority of cases of sexual abuse are like mine, where the child is ok with what\u2019s going on or maybe even enjoys it. But even when this is the case, sexual abuse STILL leaves a traumatic impact. I know this from reading forums for sexual abuse survivors and I know personally. I have anxiety and had depression. During sex I sometimes get an anxiety attack out of nowhere, or suddenly feel overwhelming disgust, or deeply sad and start crying. But I can\u2019t understand why. Why would an experience I enjoyed do this to me? Edit It's important to note that all of these trauma symptoms began before I turned 20. Some have suggested it was only finding out that it was wrong that traumatized me, but I was already screwed up before that. I\u2019ve spent countless hours over many years trying to understand. I have Word documents on my computer amounting to hundreds of pages where I have a collection of articles about sexual abuse, snippets of conversations on forums from survivors, all in an effort to understand. The main argument I keep hearing is that children aren\u2019t psychologically ready for sexual activity. But intellectually I don\u2019t understand. I did oral from age 7 and penetration at 10, and I felt ready. Clearly I was not, but I can\u2019t find the logical reason for it. After all, sexual activity is just stimulation of bodies giving each other a type of pleasure. When we cuddle in a non sexual way, this is also stimulation of bodies giving another type of pleasure. So why, with sex, is this particular type of stimulation and pleasure traumatic for children? I realize what I\u2019m saying here sounds terrifyingly similar to the things said by child molesters who try to justify what they do. But please know I have no attraction to children and am disgusted by the idea. Still, there is a similarity in this blind spot of empathy, and that sickens me. I would love to hear from ANYONE who has any insight into why sexual activity is inherently traumatic for children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although I know sexual activity is traumatic for children, I see no logical reason why but I desperately want to understand\n","id":"7116f75e-91a5-4f48-be65-382ffa25cd46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Catalans should have the right to decide on independence with a binding referendum<|ARGUMENT|>The Quebec example shows that a referendum does not end the debate, since the referendum is cyclically insisting, creating a negative effect. Montreal Effects<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A referendum on independence does not solve the problems of Catalonia. Regional referendum\n","id":"1412a0a3-70f2-4cc2-a5af-4e9e5427b192"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans are more intelligent than animals. A value system according to brain complexity and social intelligence is the most reasonable option we have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human life should be valued above animal life in the case that only one can be preserved.\n","id":"d17db198-7913-4f8b-a397-7c550042fc74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Equal Maternity and Paternity Leave<|ARGUMENT|>Forcing equal maternity and paternity leave would underscore equality of parenthood: under the status quo, mothers are often expected to be better parents and the burden of childcare is more likely to fall on women. If parents separate, judges are more likely to place children with their mother. Forcing parents to take equal leave would emphasise the fact that parenthood is a joint enterprise between the two parents, both of whom are equally important. This would be important for fathers\u2019 rights more generally. In addition, given the growing number of non-traditional families for example those with two fathers or two mothers it is valuable to show that society regards such social parents as equal and that biological mothers have no greater claim to children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forcing equal maternity and paternity leave would underscore equality of parenthood: under the statu...\n","id":"4f9b467f-198d-44fb-9026-5cf61ac1a749"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll start by saying I'm a white, straight, Catholic male and have never been part of any marginalized group. I'll also say I'm not stating any opposition to any actions that have ever been taken to deliver equality or social justice to anyone. Before the SCOTUS decision making same sex marriage the law of the land, several states had already taken that step on their own. Some of them did it through ballot measures and the vote of the people, while others did it through lawsuits and the court system. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, virtually all of the rights granted to blacks were granted via Congress or the courts I put granted in quotes because I believe rights are things people are born with . If a person grew up in America, they are told throughout their education that we have a system, and that their voice vote matters. Consequently I believe one of the things that Americans despise the most politically is when things happen that lead them to believe their voice vote doesn't matter. If a person has strong belief that gay people shouldn't be married, or that black people should be segregated in schools, or that a company should have the right to fire an employee for being transgender, etc etc, and the people come together and a majority vote against those beliefs, I think it is much easier for those people to move on and accept the new reality because of how we arrived there. After all, we have a system. Conversely, if a person believes the process wasn't followed and this new reality was arrived at through a very vocal minority, they are more likely to dig their feet in which results in the kind of covert racism and discrimination we still see even 50 years after the Civil Rights Act. I have asked this question to a few of my friends in the past and the majority get hung up on this idea of fuck those people I don't care what they think equality is important. Yeah, I get it, I'm not arguing otherwise. And I've never met anyone who is a part of any marginalized group who would like to go back in time and wait for the majority of the voters to grant them anything they are completely happy with courts recognizing the rights that they believe they were born with too. But saying fuck those people won't stop them from figuring out a way to fire the transgender person for a made up performance issue, or stop the loan officer from passing over more applications of black people for home loans, or prevent the newly married gay couple from getting sneers and looks of disgust when walking down the street. And those are the things that, collectively, hurt just as much as any lawful discrimination. So in summary, I believe that if all historical measures of civil rights for all minority or marginalized groups were only part of the law once they were voted on by a majority of people in that city state USA, that the residual discrimination and prejudice shown to those groups would die out much quicker. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When equality and social justice is delivered to marginalized groups via the courts as opposed to being voted on, it causes opposition to the progress to become covert and more entrenched, resulting in the lasting negative effects of the discrimination to hang around a lot longer.\n","id":"8bdd76b5-a66f-44f9-8775-c78d0015d698"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should People Sleep With Socks On?<|ARGUMENT|>The body core temperature is lower during sleep, an effect reached by vasodilation This is helped by keeping feet and hands warm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wearing socks in bed increases blood flow to feet and heat loss through the skin.\n","id":"994b1808-e6b6-48b3-919b-716357d5e334"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should athletes be allowed to compete in their chosen gender category?<|ARGUMENT|>In Connecticut, a single transgender student now holds 10 state records which previously belonged to 10 different girls.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fear of losing could prevent cis gender women from taking up new sports.\n","id":"9dea141f-afc9-445f-9417-57753f7bc36e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should provide healthcare: the government or the market?<|ARGUMENT|>Healthcare is not a commodity like a phone or a car - you don't get to choose when you need it, and you can't elect to go without it if you can't afford it. Thus, market forces can't be relied on to provide the best outcome in the same way as with other commodities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's immoral to allow others to suffer if they have chosen not to purchase healthcare coverage in advance and have a need, so healthcare coverage must be mandatory.\n","id":"995a2c9c-9826-4176-8d8f-a1fcfe5dce78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>Since the parliamentary discussion is deadlocked, and a general election is likely to result in another hung Parliament which would be still unable to solve the impasse, a final referendum is the only solution that would guarantee some effective progress and a ultimate resolution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As the British parliament is unable to reach a decision it has no other choice but to return to ask the people.\n","id":"2cae73fd-44c9-4e68-a213-9f6d968b4d40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Kurdistan refers to the rough area of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran where Kurds are native. The Kurds have been mostly autonomous since the days of the Ottoman Empire, however recently have shown great capability in warfare and diplomacy. Peshmerga were a player in the Iraq Iran War. They, as well as other Kurdish groups such as the YPG, PKK, and to a lesser extent the SDF, currently hold a crucial role in events like the Syrian Civil War, Iraqi Civil War, and in Turkey. The YPG are currently about to open an office in Moscow, with others planned in Washington D.C., Paris, and Berlin. They also hold approximately 17 of Syrian territory, including most of the northern border with Turkey, and the majority of northern Iraq. Kurdish forces have been involved in key offensives in both Syria and Iraq against the global pariah of Daesh, such as at Kobane, the Tishrin Dam, and Sinjar. With all of these successes under their belt, as well as organisation and strong ideals and a long ethnic history, I believe that some time in the near future, a Kurdish nation of some kind will eventually come into being in the near future. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The creation of a new nation of \"Kurdistan\"\/Rojava is inevitable.\n","id":"d8d1e173-b88d-4763-beb3-f7bb5a15de09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>The proof of the existence of God should be based on hard incontrovertible physical or experimental evidence & not just reasoning, e.g., hard incontrovertible evidences captured by CCTV or camera instead of mere reasoning have resulted in criminals such as robbers being convicted. There\u2019s no hard incontrovertible physical evidence of God\u2019s existence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The classical definition of God is contradictory or incoherent, and thus God cannot in principle exist.\n","id":"0bf435ba-34ef-47e4-969f-657022cf2970"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>No one's making these dudes buy her a drink. Totally agree on that, if he chooses to buy her a drink then he made that choice himself. But if a girl's deliberately trying to get free drinks like this, that's just being a bad person imo. I don't see how some girls can celebrate stuff like this as finessing or anything like that. Leading people on no matter what the genders or orientation is is not cool. Even if you just ask a guy to buy you a drink without being overly or noticeably flirty, imo you can't blame him for being annoyed when you just leave after he gets you a drink. It's reasonable for a guy to interpret a request to buy her a drink as a show of interest. Now to be clear, just because he buys her a drink doesn't mean she owes him anything. She's not obligated to do anything just because he said yes and bought her a drink. He made that choice himself. But it's still a crappy and manipulative thing to do if girls intentionally try to get free drinks from guys if they're not genuinely interested in them. Change my view is it ok or not manipulative leading on when girls try to get free drinks like this? All comments and perspectives are welcome and encouraged.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"girls flirting with guys just to get drinks with no genuine romantic interest in the dudes is manipulative and shouldn't be glorified as \"finessing\"\n","id":"5c4bf6d6-af27-4479-b45a-6d960d831f26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Other solutions would be far more efficient in the long run, some of whom are already out there: minimum EU-based requirements for schooling and Union-shared language programs have been enforced since decades, their effect is clearly visible in the last generations of EU citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would mean everyone, at every level of society, will have to learn a fresh new language that has no native speakers.\n","id":"ab243a05-7679-4091-8237-28fede0fe498"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>allow internet service providers to block access to extremist websites<|ARGUMENT|>ISPs are private service providers and should thus be able to have some filters on the most extreme spectrums of extremism<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"allow internet service providers to block access to extremist websites\n","id":"6727ce78-e8ae-43b5-afdd-0718a8d6ee4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Arranged Marriages are Better than Love Matches<|ARGUMENT|>For many families their children's marriage is one of the most important events of their lives. It is not uncommon for weddings to cost the bride's family the majority of their life savings This is largely to put on a big show to their community to show their family in a positive light in order to be socially accepted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In communities where it is practiced, participating in an arranged marriage gives the couple wider social acceptance.\n","id":"d6f7cfbf-2ee1-4a3e-a510-fbfe1eb9e456"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>atheism is the only way<|ARGUMENT|>Physics and cosmology explain the development and evolution of the Universe and the bodies within it. Chemistry explains the interactions of substances and the origin of life. Biology explains the development of life\u2019s complexity through the long process of evolution. God, or gods, is a superfluous entity in the discussion of existence; He is entirely unnecessary to human scientific understanding.1 At best, believers can point to various missing links in science\u2019s explanation, using God to fill the gaps. The God of the Gaps is a weak God whose domain grows smaller each day as science progresses. Furthermore, there is no evidence of the supernatural existing at all, if that is what God is meant to be. The burden of proof in a debate concerning the existence of something is on the individual making the positive claim. In a debate over the existence of God, it is up to the believer to provide evidence for that belief.2 The rational position in the absence of evidence is atheism. It is not a positive claim about anything, but is merely the absence of belief in God, which makes sense in the light of there being no positive evidence of God\u2019s existence. If believers claim God lives outside the Universe, or that He cannot be empirically identified due to His ethereal nature, then in truth they are saying nothing. Only the natural world exists insofar as humans can demonstrate. The supernatural is pure fantasy. 1 Boyer, Pascal. 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books. 2 Russell, Bertrand. 1952. \u201cIs There a God?\u201d Campaign for Philosophical Freedom. Available:<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Entirely natural theories can adequately explain the existence and development of the Universe and all it contains, making God irrelevant to the discussion of reality:\n","id":"43f2bcf7-8adb-4564-8688-8e9762fddfcd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Sex Reassignment Surgery the Best Option for Transgender People?<|ARGUMENT|>HRT hormonal replacement therapy and cosmetic surgeries such as FFS facial feminization surgery and mastectomy removal of breasts allows a transgender individual to be perceived as their desired gender by the outside world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Undergoing sex reassignment surgery constitutes the most effective and ethical method for transgender individuals to achieve self-acceptance and lasting happiness.\n","id":"a448929c-26a1-40ff-acf0-178d5fcd00dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll start by telling you what I am not. I am not someone who stereotypes breeds based solely on how they look. I am not someone who has never spent time around certain breeds of dogs, and therefore gets all my information about them from sensationalist media reports. I am from Texas, arguably the Pit Bull capital of the nation, and since I was born the vast majority of people in my family, peer group and neighbors that owned dogs, owned pits. I have years and years of experience around these animals. I have met many that are loving and never hurt a fly. I've also been around an inordinate amount that just snapped one day and mangled someone's hand, leg, or even face. I've known people whose kids were attacked by the family pit. These are not dogs that were beaten or trained to fight, although I've admittedly been around those too Texas is also arguably the dog fighting capital . So while I do very much empathize with the impulse people have to defend these breeds, I can't deny basic logic and biology, as well as my own anecdotal experience that seems to be backed up by all the data. Everyone accepts that humans have bred dogs towards certain behavioral traits. Nobody argues that certain breeds aren't better hunters, or sheep herders, or diggers. But if you assert that certain breeds are genetically predisposed to aggression and violent outbursts, and that it's not just solely based on how they are raised , you get the most venomous response from self proclaimed dog lovers. It really may be one of the quickest ways to get an overwhelming hateful response from a group of people. In a way, this makes sense. These are people who believe they are defending a helpless breed, who, if so stigmatized by society at large, may be killed en masse or left homeless in large numbers. I can definitely understand this and empathize. It's a noble cause on that level. But my experience and the studies data I've seen lead me to think that maybe we should view ownership of certain dog breeds the same way that we view ownership of more exotic dangerous animals , such as a tiger or a leopard. Obviously there are levels and tiers of danger here. Owning a chimp is pretty dangerous, but not quite as dangerous as owning a grizzly bear. Owning a dog such as a Pit Bull isn't quite as dangerous as owning a tiger, but they are in the same overall category in that they carry many of the same risks. By owning an exotic big cat , you would have a large, naturally aggressive animal in your home that could easily overpower and possibly kill any unarmed human, and whose violence is essentially unpredictable due to accepted behavioral genetics. Due to these reasons, I believe it is highly inadvisable for any civilian to own a pit bull and keep it in a residential area, and that if they so choose it should be a highly regulated and officially discouraged activity, on par with owning a tiger. I actually would truly love for someone to change my view on this one. As I've said, I've met plenty of sweet and loving dogs of every breed. I tried to preface this with my background enough that people won't revert straight to focusing on media representations of these breeds, and hopefully will instead focus on behavioral science. I'd love for some experts to chime in. Thanks for your time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it is irresponsibly anti-science to claim that a breed of dog ie: Pit Bull can't be genetically predisposed to violent behavior, and it should be treated the same as owning a large exotic predatory cat Tiger, Leopard, etc.\n","id":"912d72de-2eaa-4089-841d-6536b7d22a10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>The Life magazine in its 1963 story labelled Vatican II as an attempt to move that \"huge old galleon back into the mainstream of world history\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Second Vatican Council was merely a reaction to changes in time and by no means a revolutionary development for society at large.\n","id":"407def71-e667-4997-98e3-930186ebb63b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There seems to be a knee jerk reaction against protection of intellectual copyright. I never really saw the problem with SOPA PIPA and never heard a cogent argument against it, likewise with recent legislation. It really seems like everyone who grew up with the Internet thinks they deserve everything for free.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think we need legislation to protect copyright on the Internet and I think the websites should be at least partially responsible for that protection.\n","id":"91b25b25-c4ec-40c9-be10-afc6512e15f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should More Women Work In Construction In The United States?<|ARGUMENT|>There continues to be a shortage of skilled construction workers and women could be an option to fix this problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US has economic issues right now and hiring women in construction can resolve some of them.\n","id":"16f1cfe2-824f-40ee-b36c-dff4a96c275a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>Saying that a key part of one's identity is determined by social forces even if true in-part denies that individual a sense of agency and control over their self-actualisation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea that gender is a social construct devalues the importance of gender to individual identity.\n","id":"e5fa3710-9281-4b32-9ac6-2b85ab2d2e85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay so this is something I really struggle with. Every morning I attempt to wake up early because I want to go out running, do some reading, or anything that feels more meaningful than sleeping. I get that. But every morning when the alarm sounds I manage to convince myself that being happy is the most important thing in life and then at this moment sleeping is the thing that can make me most happy man alive I can go run or read later and it wouldn't make a difference. With that thought I always end up sleeping for longer than I hope for but I feel perfectly comfortable with it knowing sleeping makes me happy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Waking up early is not worth it\n","id":"f07d5aff-3144-4b8d-9f04-29e7379a06a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Artificial General Intelligence AGI even possible?<|ARGUMENT|>There are university courses in machine learning p11, deep learning software available to buy p23 and machines capable of learning have been winning games\/ contests that humans participate in since the 80s p38.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One of the components of AGI is machine learning. Machine learning is possible.\n","id":"a68d7eb9-2cf2-4887-b280-9589fd30e91c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One important thing to note I've already accepted that there is life in other places somewhere in the universe, and some of that life is intelligent. Given the literally incomprehensible size of the universe, the idea that there is only one planet with life on it is ridiculous to me. The reasons I don't see value in looking for life on other planets moons etc Whatever we find would be so far away that what we'd be looking at wouldn't even exist anymore. It'd be like if someone thousands of light years away looked at our planet They'd see our society in our ancient period, not how we are today. Travelling faster than light isn't possible, so we couldn't actually go do or learn anything from the life we found. Life on earth wouldn't really change that much if we discovered life somewhere else. Scientists Hey look We found some bacteria living under a sheet of ice on this moon Us Okay Even if we go into the science fiction realm with like warp drives and stuff, then we'd have to start considering the risk of encountering life that would be hostile to our species. Overall, I just don't see the point beyond satisfying our curiosity. If there were nothing else to explore and be curious about like life on the very bottom of the ocean 7 miles or so deep then okay. But there are just other things our research efforts would be better spent on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I see no value in searching for life on other planets\n","id":"633078d4-ea2c-4f65-aada-ae9bfcbd9794"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I get into my view, I'd like to say that I am not in favor of violence, no matter what political affiliation you have. That being said, I am pro confrontation. I believe that if enough people make their voices heard and stand up, you can accomplish great things. And given the rise of hate speech in recent years, this is especially important. There are many things I'd condemn Antifa for direct violence, damage to private property and attacks on peaceful demonstrators and police. However, Antifa is anything but non confrontational. They have proven though the use of confrontational protest like at Charlottesvile, Berkeley, and Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts that if enough people show that they are against hate speech, the hate speakers will eventually back down.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Antifa and their tactics, in certain situations, can be a necessary evil.\n","id":"7bb80858-058a-47d0-bdf3-df49e6e77bc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time for Hungary and the EU to Part Ways?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Eurobarometer 40% of Hungarians have a positive attitude towards the EU, 40% a neutral attitude, and only 20% a negative one. This is above average when compared to other European countries and shows that Hungarian people wish to stay within the EU.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Support for the EU in Hungary is at a record high.\n","id":"92e62af8-ea89-4856-9900-fdf71a3fb604"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Peter Liang is an Asian American police officer that has been found guilty of criminal wrongdoing in the death of an unarmed African American male. There is vocal protest form the Asian American community that this is unfair. The protests have gathered around one speech in particular The main quote I take issue with is White privilege means that they have a sense of superiority and supremacy and they want to be put above the law I have also seen other posts expressing that it is frustrating that the cop isn't white In either of these statements, if one were to replace the word White with Jewish or Muslim etc, it would be immediately scorned as racist xenophobic. Making a statement that to paraphrase White people want to be put above the law paints all white people as conforming to one set of thoughts or actions. Any other case in which a police officer has been tried for the killing of an African American is irrelevant here. A court of law has been presented with all of the evidence, Mr Liang has recieved fully qualified legal counsel, and all the avenues of appeal remain open to him including, I would assume, trial by a jury of his peers. On the back of this, the court has decided that, based on the facts presented, Mr Liang is guilty beyond all reasonable doubt, of criminal actions in regards to the death of the unarmed African American male. Drawing up these racial lines helps nobody, and I find it personally offensive to be told how I act and feel based on inaccurate stereotypes rooted in nothing other than the colour of my skin. In particular, to me told that white people seek to be put above the law is utterly offensive to all white law enforcement officers that put themselves on the line to uphold and enforce the law without prejudice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Statements from the Peter Liang protest such as \"White privilege means that they have a sense of superiority and supremacy and they want to be put above the law\" are objectively racist and should be condemned as such\n","id":"badd5701-0d28-4ba4-a9d3-160694739e1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>The invasion of Iraq in 2003 has been interpreted as a ploy to intimidate so-called \"rogue states\" such as North Korea and Iran.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Military interventions have repeatedly been justified with pro-democratic, humanitarian and security arguments in order to cover up the self-interests at play.\n","id":"0ac411e4-3ab3-4805-a3cf-7128df191bb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I often read and see articles talking about how social media is an epitome of narcissism. Where people essentially share highlights of their lives, random articles, or pictures for likes to get gratification and show off. People tend to frame this in the sense that it is bad, and to stop doing it. Even going so far as to suggest leaving these platforms to go out and get \u201creal\u201d interaction. I have two issues with this. The first is that is assumes that sharing things I find impactful in my life to people I might not see often to share is automatically narcissistic. Secondly, this assumes that \u201creal\u201d human interaction is any different. When we talk to our friends in person, we certainly also only share the highlights. If someone says what have you been up to, we often talk about fun things we did, movies shows we watched, or hobbies. How often does a person in conversation actually say \u201coh, well yea I went to a concert, but basically I have just sat at home doing nothing all week?\u201d Similarly, using the above logic disclosing any personal information at all for the purpose of conversation would be narcissistic. Further, we actively select topics of conversation that we know the other person will like, so we are picking things that will allow us to receive positive social responses. Talking about a future trip, past trip, new hobbies you are trying, new job. These are all things to stimulate conversation about yourself \u2013 but ultimately WHO CARES. Is seeking attention truly that bad? The alternative is that we literally just never talk about ourselves and get close to friends. TL DR I don't see how people can accept that sharing statuses about things you are doing is narcissistic and why social media is bad, but then not be critical of the fact that it is exactly these things that in person conversations are based around. I don't think either are bad.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social media \u201cattention seeking\u201d is no different than normal in-person interaction\n","id":"2529ff73-8fc6-469b-bf63-b23c86e0e6e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The USE of Science in Culture is a form of religion.<|ARGUMENT|>ER members publicly perform rituals and chants akin to pagan ritual.See their costumes here them performing rituals with candles here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Extinction Rebellion is a prime example of scientific data being used as a basis for religious belief and activity.\n","id":"7da51e70-c913-4c18-8338-c5f4fc61c275"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should mobile phones be used in the classroom?<|ARGUMENT|>Learners can have more access to learning resources, since they organize their time and dates to study.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mobile phones could help by supplementing lessons with digital materials.\n","id":"6db2f2ec-aa0c-4f95-bc05-fff974537162"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The USSR was dysfunctional and ultimately failed after only 69 years A single European republic\/state could suffer the same fate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a grouping of smaller nations, the USE will not be a durable construction.\n","id":"3030492f-554b-420c-b693-4461c4e7f96a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello, I'm here to point out how free will is an illusion, and why this must be recognized. Your will is nothing more than neurons firing in your brain. We know that different parts of a persons personality can be altered by physically changing parts of their brain lobotomy, alzheimers etc. . If you do not control what your brain does how can you control your thoughts? Implying that we control our thoughts, implies that we think our thoughts before they are thought. Of course, it feels we can direct our thoughts, but even our choice to direct it a certain way simply appears into consciousness, as all thoughts do. Would you be any different had you been born another, atom for atom, same time and place? What other part of you , would make different decisions, if your bodies literally switched place atom for atom? Just because free will is illusory, doesn't mean we as a people cannot change. Change can always happen, whether the person does it or not, is not due to their own free will, but due to the universe they are in, and the way they were shaped by the universe. If we recognize that free will is an illusion, more steps towards changing and shaping individuals for the better can be made eliminating the blame factor. I'm sure there are others who can explain this better than me this is just what I'm putting out there. Check this Sam Harris video for a more in depth explanation. So free will is an illusion,  edit Thanks for all the responses guys. Interesting discussion for sure. I would like to point out that me saying that free will is an illusion does not mean I am saying that life is predetermined Forest gump Jenny scene 20 seconds<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free will is illusory and this should be recognized for fundamental progress of man\n","id":"74475aac-028f-4c6c-8f37-3e367bc8e532"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Countries such as North Korea are effectively prisons. They don't allow citizens to leave their borders. I believe that this alone should nullify their sovereignty and the legitimacy of the regime. Same with East Germany. It is a fundamental human right to be able to leave your country, and so leaving amicably should be allowed. Regress, maybe not. But leaving? Fundamental. I would like to hear a counterargument to this, because right now I see no case in which this should be acceptable. It is one thing for some citizens or residents to not be allowed to leave, if they are involved with the law or some other diplomatic concern, but for every citizen and resident to have that restriction is reprehensible and states that do this should not be recognized and do not have the right to their borders. . edit the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states gt 13.2 Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. gt 14.1 Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. gt 15.2 No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe any country that prohibits free egress has the right to its own sovereignty.\n","id":"009b658e-3cf3-4055-ae19-0cc8252af42a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Referendums are good for polarised ideological issues, but for complex political issues they lack nuance and falses split issues into two simplified points of view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Complex and potentially irreversible decisions are oversimplified by framing issues in the binary and asking voters to choose just one or the other.\n","id":"23c02855-5550-4db9-a227-261bc9f47a2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cosmetic surgery be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>It will make it harder for those who need it than for those who don't, increasing the divide between those who are lucky enough to meet the societal norms naturally and those who aren't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those ideals will continue to exist. Banning cosmetic surgery will only make life under those societal norms harder by limiting access to a method of conformation.\n","id":"650462b2-a427-45e5-9b3d-db5fd6acbd29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I should start off saying I live in a fairly unpatriotic city in Australia, where in fact recently many local councils have banned Australia Day celebrations next year. Reasons are it can also be called 'Invasion Day', as in the day British sailors arrived and began killing the indigenous population 247 years ago . I also hold close relationships with some Germans, who as you could guess are very unpatriotic, as is their entire country. I think patriotism and nationalism are destructive practices, especially in the USA. I think if you constantly celebrate the greatness of your country it can be hard to find what's wrong if something needs fixing. An example in the US is the offense patriots are taking from the 'police kneeling' at NRL games, where rather than thinking once that the cops are too violent, they only focus on the people 'disrespecting the flag', where if they threw their patriotism prejudice away they might listen to what the protestors have to say. Patriotism is the reason why the world hates America, and the reason America says it doesn't care, because the only thing that matters to them is everyone around them telling them how good they are. I love my country, and I love parts of America, but I would never hold up a flag and say it's the best, because where would I make improvement if it's already the best.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Patriotism is destructive and should not be practiced\n","id":"6e48aefb-2715-43ec-bcc0-5c246f751ccd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm going to use Chatanooga Tennesse as an example. Here are the most dangerous criminals according to their police department. This city is 24.9 Black. 66 crimes per square mile in black neighborhoods vs 19 in white. My chances of becoming a victim in Chattanooga are 1 in 20 in a black neighborhood vs 1 in 155 amongst whites. This is true in so many cities and it's apparent. Look at Detroit for example vs this part of it called Bloomfield Hills that looks like it fell out of pleasantville. Black people are mode dangerous, and crime prone than whites. You never hear man shot on Ronald Reagan Boulevard for Prada loafers but you do hear man shot on Martin Luther King for Jordans idk, it just seems like its good judgement to stop black people and ask what they are doing? What they have? Where they are going and why? I know we have a constitution to uphold but blacks are kind of like terrorists. They tend to fuck shit up for everybody so they need the cavity searches.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing wrong with police racial profiling.\n","id":"c3bb8d9b-ffbe-429a-9955-85c49b5fa39d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm sick of seeing job advertisements that simply detail the salary as competitive and that's it. As soon as you start the process of applying, there's literally no mention of the salary they want me to sell myself to them and talk about why I'm passionate without addressing the main reason why I'm getting a job, which is to earn some damned money. In fact, I'd say that the salary is the number one most important thing I care about in a job and thus I expect to be told it at the same time if not before all the other details of employment. Also, this would really crack down on gender pay gaps you can't exactly pay people differently depending on ethnicity or gender if the wage is stated on the advertisement. It all just seems a bit backwards to me. I get there's the potential issue of people wanting to keep their salary private, but that seems like a small price to pay no pun intended for full pay equality, and companies not scamming me into employment with their competitive salary how about you tell me what the salary is and I'll decide for myself if it's fuckin competitive. Edits Thanks to all of you who raised very valid points, and sorry to those who I didn't get around to replying to I spent two hours yesterday replying to posts and I had more notifications at the end of the two hours than at the start so I ultimately gave up. I hope that for the ones I did reply to, I offered some constructive counter arguements to people's points and conceded good arguements where they arose, and ultimately provided a half decent debate for you all I still believe that overall , there should be more transparency to what wages are in advance but I'll consider my view has changed to respect the following If the salary is posted as a flat figure, employees lose the right to negotiate it and employers lose the right to offer more attractive due to skill, experience etc. employees more money to entice then in. This could be remedied by using a starting from figure, that could be increased if applicants showed a higher than necessary level of aptitude for a role although someone did point out this removes the ability for an employer to offer an underqualified candidate less money if they wanted to take that chance. a lot of you raised the point that while it would be convenient for employees to know the salary in advance, it wouldn't benefit the employer to have to post such a thing, therefore this would be a bit of a crap law to pass. I didn't reply to the majority of these because it was past the 2 hour mark when I had given up, but it's a solid point that I would have to concede. It is not detrimental to ask an employer for their salary range so you would never really have to apply to a job without knowing the salary. I thought that by asking this you would make it seem like you are only interested in the money something that is of course true in a lot of places but employers don't like to hear , but I was wrong about that. the last interesting point was raised by someone in the comments and that was essentially that instead of advertising the salary range in the job listings, all employees should be required to disclose the salary's of their employees probably in an anonymous way so applicants know they are getting a fair wage, and employees also know they aren't being discriminated against. I think this was the best point anyone raised and if I was going to  to anything, it would be this. Congrats, u DefunctWalrus<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- All jobs should be required to state the exact salary for a given role UP FRONT, next to the other crucial details of the job.\n","id":"c8e2bebf-1ff5-42d2-a39b-1cc4b6f2cbcf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see there being zero positives for sending your child to daycare, and I find it to be morally wrong. When you send your children to daycare from birth to age four you are essentially handing off your child to people who make the minimum wage and will teach your kid whatever they were raised to believe you are no longer a parent, you are a sperm egg donor that spends 1 2 hours a night and weekends with a kid. If a parent isn\u2019t willing to stay home with the child until they are four because neither are willing to give up career goals, then that couple should not have children. The argued positives for daycare can easily be combated. Socialization? A stay at home parent has the ability to take their child to a park, bring the child to neighborhood friends or family, set up play dates, etc. It won\u2019t slow them down to not start socializing until half a day preschool anyway. The parent will make more money, not have career bump? This is selfish. Do you think Susie cares if she has 6 American Girl Dolls or a K mart doll? No, not really. She cares that her mom and dad are there every day. NOTHING replaces the care of a parent. If you are unwilling or unable to stay at home with your child, you shouldn\u2019t have one the child pays the price for you wanting a career too. If you \u201caren\u2019t cut out to be would be a bad parent\u201d if you were a stay at home parent, then don\u2019t be a parent at all. It\u2019s a tough job and it\u2019s not for everyone. Having someone else raise your child is ridiculous and selfish. From an empirical standpoint, children who spend more time in day care at a very early age are more likely to develop behavioral issues that persist for years afterward. These include aggression and general disobedience. As a society we watch movies and lament the children of the wealthy who are raised by nannies and never really know their parents. That is essentially what is happening today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a parent isn\u2019t going to stay home with the children until they are school age, they shouldn\u2019t have any.\n","id":"e612e74f-18b9-44b4-b0a0-34e05bc7fbb7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While fried chicken's history in the US has ties to slavery, it is in fact a very popular dish, enjoyed by people of every race and class, and no longer has the connotation of cheap, poor people food or food made from discarded scraps of meat if it ever was. It is a positive association then, if unhealthy, but so is eating tons of red meat and people often venerate steak eating as some kind of desirable tough male activity. Watermelon is also very popular. In 2017, it was the 6th most popular fruit by volume sold in the US. It doesn't have any negative connotations on its own that I've ever heard of, unlike some fruits with negative metaphors, euphemisms, or imagery ie. banana eggplants are sometimes used as a penis substitute, the word lemon can be used as a synonym for something disappointing, avocados sometimes seen dismissively as hippie food . However, when you associate black people with eating fried chicken and watermelon, the automatic reaction is that its offensive. Invite a black person to a BBQ and tell him we'll have fried chicken and watermelon and watch them get offended. If a corporation, unless its KFC or Popeye's, shows black people enthusiastically eating fried chicken, they would be excoriated. My contention is that because the foods themselves are popular and tasty and universally loved, people should stop being offended by the association of a specific group of people to those foods. While it might be annoying if you're black and someone automatically assumes you like those foods, it should be an annoyance borne from repeated inaccuracy rather than assumed malice. For example, if someone assumes I'm smart and I'm not, I'll be annoyed if I keep getting asked to solve math problems, but I'd be in the wrong if I get annoyed solely because people think I'm smart, I should feel at least flattered. A similar mistake would be the perception that black men have larger penises. Sure, it would suck if you're a black male with a short or average penis, that might cause some awkwardness when you are with a woman for the first time, but the association itself is positive even if a specific black man can't live up to it. I'm also not saying this will work in all cases. There are absolutely negative associations society has on some groups and people should be taught not to make those because they actually harm people. Positive associations are helpful even if not every person in that group is accurately described by it. At worse, the association of black people with fried chicken and watermelon is neutral if you don't care for those foods, and should not be reacted to as racist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should not be considered offensive to associate black people with fried chicken or watermelon.\n","id":"570ab09b-5ce3-4d2f-b6fd-9a39dad274f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be testosterone limits in women\u2019s sports?<|ARGUMENT|>The International Association of Athletics Federations has a responsibility to ensure a level playing field for athletes. This includes establishing a set of rules which ensure that success is determined by talent, dedication and hard work rather than other contributing factors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is important for sporting bodies to level the playing field among athletes.\n","id":"590f7c0a-15d7-4302-b74b-c9937e648646"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the Burkini debate on r worldnews people keep saying that Muslim valued conflict with French values so they must not be allowed. But the main value I keep getting here for the French values is that there needs to be social cohesion which needs to be caused by everybody not showing too many signs of individualism that could be divisive. There really doesn't seem to be any set values besides that. And that pretty stupid. On my view people should be able to do what every they want that pertains only to themselves. You want people to not see your hair, ok that's fine. You want people to know that your a Sikh and believe everybody is equal so you wear a turban, ok. You want to let everybody know that God is dead and we killed him with your shirt, fine. I don't see why we need to make sure nobody is offended by these. This tends to come from the big anti offended crowd which I tend to be a part of but on this issue the rest just leave and start talking about how they are offended by you showing your values and so you can't do that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"French\/European values and Islamic values can both be and are both bad\n","id":"95aadbb2-4c90-4b01-a670-4267c8a74580"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>If legalised, drug users could be less likely to leave dangerous paraphernalia broken pipes, syringes, etc. behind in public places as the fear of criminal penalties for the possession of drug paraphernalia would no longer be an issue. This would lessen risk of disease and injury.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many users currently do not properly dispose of their paraphernalia for fear of being caught with it on them, leading to evidence of illegal drug use being disposed of quickly and carelessly.\n","id":"d2e9ec21-e708-45e1-81e3-f5dd6e02d9c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UN send peacekeepers to protect the Rohingyas?<|ARGUMENT|>A 1992 report shows that soldiers attached to the UN operation in Mozambique recruited girls aged 12-18 years into prostitution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UN inquiry revealed that UN peacekeepers have been involved in child prostitution in six separate countries\n","id":"451d60de-fc3a-48f2-87e2-26da4030d01f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Music should be free for all<|ARGUMENT|>As the above headline suggests, Beyonce is a music artist. This is her only job, she has nothing on the side apart form cinema ventures, when we buy her music, she gets paid. This is how she buys her food, clothes and other necessities. Some may say, \"She is too rich\" she has more than enough. But, the point is as a result of her job and her produce, we decided we liked it, we bought it, we made her her millions. That's the whole point of a job, to make money. If music was free, Beyonce would have to go back to high school, graduate and go to university. Then she would have to start applying for jobs. Maybe she would go to college, do a vocational course, start her own business, get a job in a hair salon, who knows. The point is, music is actually a career, meaning a job that makes you money. Maybe Beyonce isn't a good example as she is already rich, but for a new artist starting out, their dream job would suddenly be unprofitable and they would make no money from it. They might be famous, but fame does not buy bread and butter. Download legally please.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Beyonce is a music artist; That is her only job\n","id":"c7aa1e62-faa2-4ea4-8062-1cdfd4a317ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Cloning Animals Ethical?<|ARGUMENT|>Although Dolly's plight is well publicized most don't know that she had 4 sisters all who developed normally and lived a normal sheep life span without major complications. So while it took 273 tries to get it right, once they got it right, they got it right 5 times and 4 of those times had no issues. livescience.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dolly was cloned over 20 years ago. Improvements in technology and cloning capabilities have happened since then.\n","id":"230b308c-aa7b-4f84-8225-f48610d4b06d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that free will is an illusion, and the universe is fully determined. One way to test whether we have free will is to test whether our future states are predictable. If it's possible to reliably predict our future state based on our current state, then we don't have the free will necessary to change that future state. Imagine that there are a handful of hydrogen atoms in a closed system. These atoms always behave according to the laws of physics. They fly around in the closed system, attracting and repelling one another according to the laws of gravity, electromagnetism, etc. Assume that we know the initial conditions of these atoms e.g., their position, momentum, spin, etc. . We can plug that data into a supercomputer running an appropriate algorithm, and that supercomputer can predict the future locations and behaviors of those hydrogen atoms for the rest of eternity. Therefore, the hydrogen atoms do not have free will, since nothing in that closed systems can change the atoms' future positions behaviors to differ from the supercomputer's predictions. Their future behavior is entirely predictable, as long as there is sufficient computing power to crunch the numbers. Now let's say we put a human into a closed system a room that has been completely isolated from the outside world and receives no external input. Assume the room is sophisticated enough to maintain a breathable atmosphere and comfortable temperature for the duration of this experiment. And, consider that a human is merely a collection of around 10^28 atoms most of which are hydrogen atoms . The atoms in our bodies also behave according to the laws of physics, moving around and interacting in predictable ways. If we had a sufficiently powerful supercomputer obviously, many orders of magnitude more powerful than currently available technology and could describe the initial conditions of all of our atoms and all of the atoms in the closed system room also a task that is far beyond our current abilities , then that supercomputer could simulate the future behavior of the atoms that make up our bodies, therefore predicting our every future move. Put another way we know that a pair of lifeless hydrogen atoms floating around in space will behave in predictable ways according to the laws of physics. There is nothing different about the atoms that comprise our bodies they must all behave according to the laws of physics, therefore their behavior is predictable. And if our future behavior is predictable, then we are powerless to change it. Therefore, we do not have free will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free will is an illusion\n","id":"52ed393d-f18a-4084-9bd9-86d216ca5286"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It used to be that a person would work hard and put in their own time, money, effort and elbow grease to reach or achieve their desired goal. For example, when I was growing up I was taught that if I wanted something, I would have to work until I had enough money to get it. Nowadays, all a person has to do is start a kickstarter or gofundme or indiegogo fundraiser, and then kick back with their feet up watch the money flow in. This to me shows they have somewhat of a lack of passion because instead of being patient and working hard and saving up to get what they want, they are relying on others to donate money to fund their cause. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who rely on crowd-funding to reach their desired goal are lazy &amp; have no work ethic.\n","id":"25b344ee-c5fb-4840-9d62-66c3fa6f13f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>this post IS NOT about traditional families vs non traditional families gay or lesbian, etc. . This is about the deterioration of the family unit as a whole. My premise is quite simple the family unit father mother children is the basic building blocks of a strong community and society. When the family unit functions properly father mother raise their children, discipline them, teach them, correct them, instill a moral code within them, and are the best and most capable social safety net for them. They teach children respect, help them create self worth, and help them avoid many hard learned lessons. This is HUGELY beneficial to society at large, but more importantly for the children who receive this upbringing. When the family breaks down, children the next generation ultimately suffer the most. This I believe will have a compounding effect with subsequent generations. The most alarming stats for the USA include the following Two parent households are on the decline Far too many single mothers especially in minority communities Far to many children raised without parents at home both parents work . Who raises them? Daycares, tv, nannies? The rise of births to unmarried women 40 up from 5 in the 1960s Multi partner fertility having children with many different partners This concern isn't about longing for the past times of the perfect Utopian suburb family rather, being seriously concerned about the effect it has upon the current generation being raised and the subsequent generations they will raise with out proper example. Where family units fail, poverty, poor education, crime and moral decay are sure to follow. This issue receives no political attention, but is one of the most important issues of the day. Major source for stats and info used above. EDIT The people demand proof this is a bad thing I mistakenly assumed this was a foregone conclusion, but will provide evidence. Also, to clarify my viewpoint. I don't think the family unit will magically solve all society problems, but strong family units, I believe, will stop the bleeding. I'll continue to add sources as necessary. The Kids Are Not Really Alright It\u2019s worse to be raised by a single mother, even if you\u2019re not poor. Children who grow up with only one of their biological parents nearly always the mother are disadvantaged across a broad array of outcomes. Children born to unmarried parents are slightly more likely to drop out of school and become teen mothers than children born to married parents who divorce. They are twice as likely to drop out of high school, 2.5 times as likely to become teen mothers, and 1.4 times as likely to be idle out of school and out of work as children who grow up with both parents. Over the past thirty years, the rise in violent crime parallels the rise in families abandoned by fathers. High crime neighborhoods are characterized by high concentrations of families abandoned by fathers. Even in high crime inner city neighborhoods, well over 90 percent of children from safe, stable homes do not become delinquents. By contrast only 10 percent of children from unsafe, unstable homes in these neighborhoods avoid crime. The mother's strong affectionate attachment to her child is the child's best buffer against a life of crime. The father's authority and involvement in raising his children are also a great buffer against a life of crime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The deterioration of the family unit will be the ultimate cause of decay in our society and is imminently upon us.\n","id":"cbf121ac-d5c8-4383-8b93-c86622472983"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To make sound policy, the rulers of the country need to be making sound decisions founded in data and logic. Most people are emotional and, frankly, aren't very bright and therefore aren't capable of making or supporting good decision making process. By encouraging these people to vote by trying to raise voter participation we are promoting bad decision making. Exhibit 1 Donald Trump. Much has been written on this point so I am not going to belabor it. Here is a good summary if you are not familiar with it Exhibit 2 George W. Bush. After failing the first term miserably by involving US in terrible war, torturing prisoners, and perpetrating massive civil and human rights violations, he has been re elected for the second term because he was more relatable and his opponent looked French . But of course you can simply say, let's elect Democrats because they are less stupid. Actually, not really. Exhibit 3. This reddit thread TL DR Nestle increased water consumption by 200000 gallons a day. Outrage ensued, including but not limited to on Reddit. The article at this point has 55.3k upvotes with the comment I linked which for a while was top comment on the thread having 20.9k upvotes. Evil corporations, Citizens United, failure of American Democracy, etc. The reality of the situation is, 200000 gallons a day is what it takes to water a small, on the order of 25 acres alfalfa farm in Eastern Washington. In Michigan, with its great water resources, this is an infinitesimal trickle of water. This comment which is currently on top explains it well, but overall, this is very much a fake outrage over a non issue from the left that feels, looks, and sounds as idiotic as anything that right wingers invented during Obama administration. Lest you would think that this is an isolated example, I have Exhibit 4. Assault Weapons ban of 2019 This is currently co sponsored by 176 House Democrats out of currently 193 . Much has been written about it, and also tried with AWB of 1994 producing no statistical evidence to any impact on homicide rates This is an attempt to ban a rifle based strictly on a set of cosmetic features which do not have any impact on lethality. For example, this is an assault weapon a normal AR 15. And this is NOT an assault weapon a CA legal version of an AR 15. The later takes the same magazines as the former though it ships with a 10rd , and can be converted to the exact same assault weapon shape if someone wanted to with 50 bag of parts in 20 minutes with a screwdriver and a wrench. Yet an overwhelming majority of Democrats support AWB. If you want to learn more on the subject of assault weapons www.assaultweapon.info . If this is not enough Exhibit 5 In 2015 voters in Seattle's District 3 elected Kshama Sawant as a member of City Council with 55.96 of the vote. Here is the relevant information from Wikipedia. 55.96 of voting public in Seattle's District 3 were either unaware which, given the level of acrimony, was kinda difficult , or did not consider this disqualifying gt Sawant has advocated the nationalization of large Washington State corporations such as Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon.com and expressed a desire to see privately owned housing in Millionaire's Row in the Capitol Hill neighborhood turned into publicly owned shared housing saying, When things are exquisitely beautiful and rare, they shouldn't be privately owned. During an election victory rally for her City Council campaign, Sawant criticized Boeing for saying it would move jobs out of state if it could not get wage concessions and tax breaks. She called this economic terrorism and said in several speeches that if Boeing moved jobs out of state, the workers should take over Boeing facilities and bring them into public ownership. She has said they could be converted into multiple uses, such as production for mass transit. TL DR Voters are terrible at picking either reasonable political positions or, for that matter, their leaders. The drive should be to not get out the vote, but to encourage people to get educated on issues and only then participate in political process. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voters are idiots and direct democracy is a terrible idea. We should not encourage most people to vote.\n","id":"38333f78-a72a-4a6e-a237-87c3e125b26f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd agree with the American Founding Fathers that certain ideals are self evident. Everyone has a right to life. Freedom of speech should be vehemently protected. It is wrong to rape babies. It is wrong to run over old people with your car. It is wrong to sterilize the poor against their will. There are certain values that make us human. These values transcend the physical, and are beyond the need for rationalization. I shouldn't have to make the case that the holocaust was wrong, anyone who would support acts like genocide and mass murder are beyond reasoning with and out of touch with basic morality. EDIT 1 As was pointed out, this is going to be a debate about Objective Truth and Objective Morality. I'll be unable to respond to everyone for a while so I'd appreciate your patience. I'll try to answer as many replies as I can tonight. Thanks everyone<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain ideas should be so fundamental that they should not need defending in the public debate.\n","id":"88031cd2-0da5-4404-97cb-0b4a8b2d38d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I often see Christopher Nolan lauded as one of the great contemporary directors and screenwriters, but\u2014for the life of me\u2014I cannot seem to understand why other people hold him and his works in such high esteem. I should preface by saying that the only films of his that I have seen are Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, and Dunkirk. Batman Begins is, in my opinion, a great film, and it is sad how terribly his other movies handle story and character. It seems to me that the majority of his other films are little more than ham fisted exercises in beating the viewer over the head with the notion of how cerebral they are The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar are increasingly egregious examples of this. Inception in particular was sold to me by friends as a complex movie that would leave me thinking about the ending long after I watched it. They were right on that last point, but not for the reasons I imagine they expected. The story was padded with dreams within dreams to hide its superficiality what was promised to be a deep thriller ultimately lacked, in my mind, depth or thought. Though I'm not sure this counts as a criticism of Nolan, I cannot stand the repetitive, poorly mixed scores. His partnership with Hans Zimmer has to end. I barely believe that Zimmer has written an original piece of music since 2006 and it's really starting to show. His scores\u2014which on their own, are epic orchestral pieces\u2014end up giving every Nolan film a bland, same y feel. Enough ranting. I don't want to dislike his movies so much. Other people love them and I want to be able to enjoy them as much. What am I missing about Christopher Nolan?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christopher Nolan is a lazy writer with a poor grasp of character and his films are generally dull\n","id":"4d566b13-8f0b-4396-9021-b935020c5258"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Situation 1 A couple comes in and orders salads and stays for an hour and a half, no complaints, no hassle 15 bill 3.75 tip. Situation 2 A couple comes in and orders steak and lobster with drinks and dessert, stays for an hour and a half, no complaints, no hassle 150 bill 37.50 tip. How does the server work any harder or do anything different to warrant such a drastic increase in tip and proceed to bitch about it when they don't get it? I can understand if the couple stays extended amounts of time taking up the server's real estate, or causes issues and complains, but how does the couple purely ordering something more expensive mean that the person who's job does not change didn't cook the more complex dishes, didn't spend any additional time on the table deserve more money?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Servers who expect a certain tip amount based on the total bill is asinine.\n","id":"f4254205-4dfb-480c-a9c1-27344725bfe2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Laptops be Allowed in University Classrooms?<|ARGUMENT|>The bright screens of laptops and the contents they display can be distractive, and especially so when classrooms are darkened, for example during presentations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Laptops can be distracting to other students as well as the teacher.\n","id":"0e1ffed6-0c5c-4e05-90a9-9ac9fa339265"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In the rare cases that a bull survives a bullfight, it is immediately retired as too dangerous an opponent for future fights, as it will have learned from the experience. The entire activity relies on one participant - the bull - having no experience of the event or understanding of what is taking place, and the other participant having substantial support and training.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It cannot be regarded a real sport as the fight lacks fairness as there is very little chance the bullfighter would be injured before the bull.\n","id":"58386600-1c65-49ef-8a82-8805fca9578a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>As they considered in 2014, the newly empowered UKIP will lure in many disaffected Tories, making it difficult to form a majority government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Deciding to remain in the EU grants UKIP a new and powerful antiestablishment narrative of betrayal.\n","id":"4b9f11f5-b640-4fa3-95ce-17151a44860c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should U.S. Presidents Have the Power to Issue Pardons?<|ARGUMENT|>Bill Clinton pardoned 140 people in his last day of office including several former political donors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pardons are something presidents can offer in exchange for political contributions.\n","id":"2c0f601b-8624-4733-9c34-f8de911b0c6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it unethical to use ad-blockers?<|ARGUMENT|>Modern ad implementation is dangerous malware and unethical harvests data without consent - one way FB shows you ads about sites you visited separate from them. Until ads are regulated \/ sites act responsibly \/ protections are added and enforced, users have to protect themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blocking ads is a matter of security; online ads can spread malicious software and threaten cyber security.\n","id":"8c4c03a3-6861-412e-87f1-8c21fa766acf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>As the comparison with other high-income countries shows, safety in the US is relatively low. American men are nine times as likely to be a homicide victim than men in other OECD countries, women four times as likely as women in other OECD countries Grinshteyn\/Hemenway, p. 270\/1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms every person's \"right to life, liberty and security of person\".\n","id":"20ab735b-95c6-405c-9789-dd6b4ca7b676"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I view blackmail, that is the exchange of a good or service in exchange for the non disclosure of sensitive information, as a business transaction at heart. If Bob knows Tom is cheating on Alice with Cathy, he should have the right to utilize that information as he sees fit. I do have clarifications in some cases however. If the price of non disclosure is sexual favors for instance, that would be considered rape. As mentioned in the title, extortion, which is money for non harm, should stay illegal as it is proto assault mugging robbery.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe that blackmail extortion is different should be illegal.\n","id":"437aa3db-2605-4423-a253-4cdacf953b69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that if two people get married and choose to hyphenate their names meaning Mr. Miller and Ms. Johnson become the Johnson Millers , or if they choose to each keep their names, their children should still only be named after one parent. I don't think it's really a problem in individual instances, but I also think that proponents of the system haven't thought through how this would play out over generations if such a system becomes widely adopted. When Mr Miller Johnson meets Ms Franklin Stevens, do their kids get get named Bobby and Susie Miller Johnson Franklin Stevens? Or do we start arbitrarily deciding which grandparents names to lop off? Seems like that conversation would be pretty uncomfortable offensive. Sorry grandma Johnson and Grandpa Stevens, you didn't make the grandkids' name cut. See you at Christmas I don't think either is as good a system as every child inheriting a single last name. I would legitimately like someone to change this view because I see the current system as really patronizing to women, and I don't like saying other people should or shouldn't be naming their own children however they want, but it just doesn't seem like the hyphenate is a sustainable solution to me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children shouldn't be given hyphenate names combining their parents last names.\n","id":"b218bce2-bb3b-4523-a473-3e4a4fb55bfb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Android better than iOS?<|ARGUMENT|>Rankings of mid-range phones as well as cheap phones - which suffice for many users - contain without exception only Android devices.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a much wider spectrum of Android phones in price, size, features and design.\n","id":"67cf68d5-c1f1-41a6-b149-3881ccf7f841"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>There are about 87 cases of successful disinvitation attempts since 2000 from to the political left of a potential speaker, and about 57 successful attempts from the political right of a political speaker.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The number appears to be higher \"from the left of the speaker\" both in attempts and in successful cases.\n","id":"11ee0b31-685e-46fa-89bd-23be06275990"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Media That Openly Declares Bias Better Than Media Claiming To Be Neutral?<|ARGUMENT|>They are able to see what theories companies are trying to construct in their head, similar to story arcs in fiction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being alerted of overt biases allows readers to read news while being aware of a narrative.\n","id":"c05d7054-2ed7-4884-9b98-df63ce166a1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the gun control debate I often see the position that gun ownership is a necessary defense against a tyrannical government. The premise seems to be that if citizens are armed then they can defend themselves in the event of their government becoming despotic. This line of thought is often in the context of the American Revolution, but my belief is that for individual ownership of weaponry to be an effective deterrent to tyranny individuals must be able to own weapons comparable to the tyrannical regime. In the modern day this would mean weapons such as tanks, mortars, chemical weapons, explosives, up to and including nuclear warheads. Without these weapons small arms alone will not be an effective deterrent to a military attack by the government. Please note I am not actually debating my position on gun control, but much more narrowly arguing against the idea that gun ownership prevents government tyranny. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"arguments for 2nd amendment protections that rely on the premise: \"a well-armed populace is the best defense against tyranny\" are irrevocably flawed in the modern age\n","id":"075a70e4-ecef-4cba-a081-b552b2ba7506"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Participation in the EU entails a limitation of sovereignty, as recognised by the ECJ in Van Gend and Loos Increased sovereignty does not present qualitatively different obstacles to the integration process already successfully in place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Court of Justice is the highest court for any member state, and can overrule the Supreme Courts of individual states.\n","id":"4ebcabda-df33-4e48-9839-6410059e92b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everywhere there are majority of white people, there must be some sort of racist club organisation created to breed hatred. Look through America and Europe. Only in white majority countries will you have racist groups like the KKK in the U.S, golden dawn in Greece, r niggers or r ImGoingToHellForThis on Reddit, b on 4chan, Nazi party of Germany, WNP in England. If you go to other continents, you hardly find such movements. Only in white majorities will you find racially bigoted groups dedicated to breeding and propagating hate. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe whites in general are inherently racist. White culture does nothing but propagate said behaviour and whites in general are the most judgemental and non communal group of people.\n","id":"fe352412-d7ee-4de0-bb31-197d917d599b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The impetus for writing this post is the following infographic recently posted on reddit The Sunni and Shiite people have not gotten along for centuries, and this will continue into the foreseeable future. Shiites vastly outnumber Sunnis and will Sunnis will always feel underrepresented. Iraq's borders were drawn by European nations at the end of WWI, to suit the needs of the West. They have a solid history of purposefully drawing borders in such a way that 2 traditionally warring peoples will find themselves within the same political boundary Africa . The purpose of doing this is to ensure that the country stays weak and can either a never become a political military economic threat to rich Western nations or b be exploited for its resources to its maximum extent by rich Western nations. A seemingly obvious way to stop the conflict is to encourage Iraq to geographically split the traditionally Sunni region in the north and the historically Shiite region of the south. Sorry if this is obviously a bad idea to everyone else I just don't hear anyone talking about it and it seems like such a no brainer solution. I am open to changing my view if someone can demonstrate that Iraqis are better off united than reverting back to their historical boundaries. I am actually surprised this didn't come up on  when I searched for it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The global community should allow\/encourage Iraq to split into 2 sovereign nations: one Sunni and one Shiite.\n","id":"a99441b8-28f3-45e5-8b55-3a3898fcce85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Significant decreases in aid revenues can lead to an aid shock; this can shift political power relations and possibly induce a violent conflict Nielsen et al., p. 219<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unconditional foreign assistance is vital to achieving peace and stability in non-democratic recipient states.\n","id":"35d908c9-1b96-479c-b260-4514ea6f122e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>Texas declared a man sane enough for execution even though there were considerable indications that he was not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Ford v. Wainwright decision, however, left the determination of sanity up to each state.\n","id":"bd25e881-46fb-450a-bda6-eaca2afadfca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Politics is the contestation of power, and, if a political position contends the conclusion of science, or if scientific evidence undermines a position of power, then science engages in a political act.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Science is a relationship of cutting edge sometimes fringe ideas and the rigidly composed mainstream.\n","id":"675ab3c3-a5de-4200-a696-70d55380bbbc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Theistic sources are contradictory, allowing one to choose morals convent for them, rather then to be consistent, or good. For example, the bible argues both for and against slavery. It is impossible to be good when what is good isn't even consistently defined.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those that follow God-free, logic-based moralities are much better behaved, and consistent than theists do in no small part to fundamental foundational problems with theism.\n","id":"d62c1cb8-0180-4ae5-b4e8-01c5eb754ad3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Bo Burnham reminds me of the sub r Im14andthisisdeep I'm a huge fan of Louis CK so maybe my standard is to different to like Burnham. I have thought many of the things Burnham talks about and I'm sure you have too. He doesn't offer anything new and to make it worse he doesn't even try to make it funny for most of his routine. I can admit his raps from YouTube were good , but at most it would be a viral video and would blow up for a week and everyone would forget about it afterwards. So, can you change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have never found Bo Burnham to be funny or insightful.\n","id":"95912457-6a07-4bb1-bbe3-f94125b3b6aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How Should Physician-Assisted Death be Handled?<|ARGUMENT|>If a patient is in a situation where they are unable to respond such as a coma or having received some sort of brain damage, the family would be able to make the decision for them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A doctor or physician should be obligated to comply with requests made by either the patient and\/or their next-of-kin and should do so without question.\n","id":"c9b2f842-a6e1-4c0c-b4f5-65eb93ca5839"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>Prior to demonetization, cash transactions were unregulated and unrecorded making it almost impossible for the government to levy taxes on them. Demonetization has brought about transparency in the valuation system and enabled the government to detect frauds more easily because it is now able to keep track of extremely large cashless transactions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Demonetization has increased transparency in the purchase and payment system of property in India.\n","id":"351d6c98-39cc-4351-ace3-2314c4491f82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I very commonly see pro abortion proponents saying I wouldn't be able to care for the child properly or If I have a child, I would want to give it a good life , or It would just end up in foster care or a broken home . To me, those reasons are insufficient. Could any of you honestly say you'd rather be dead than any of those things? In my view, any state of living is favorable to being dead. As a side note, people who give this argument commonly believe that fetuses are not people. But if that is the case, then why would one care, or purport to care, about the well being of a non person? If the fetus is a non person then why would there be any qualms about eliminating it from the mother's body? Overall, I believe this argument to be a poorly formed one. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the \"child will have a shitty life\" is an invalid argument for aborting it.\n","id":"070a23c2-8475-4e6b-a41f-a61c1cd0addd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is BDSM Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>A dominant can breach contract and claim that it is within their right to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given consent can always be abused or mitigated in a number of ways.\n","id":"276825c7-23ba-4407-9880-def6fe0ccdd0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that when you use an adblocker you are stealing from the owner of the website. Ads are the way the creators of the website earn money in order to keep their sites running and if people block them, they take money that the owner should have gotten, while using up the bandwidth of the site. I don't know much about the technical way the internet works, but I'm pretty sure that it does cost money, if a small amount, when people use the site. I've often heard people say that they shouldn't be forced to see ads, but I think that people who say this are mistaken in thinking that they have a right to view the website in a way it was never meant to be used that actively hurts the owner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that using an Adblocker is morally wrong.\n","id":"a151a325-755b-4ea3-8869-c4c6398e8871"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The similarities between Syria and Saddam's Iraq are striking. Saddam's Ba'ath party was a secular party made up of an ethnic Sunni minority, brutally oppressing the other ethnicities Kurds and Shi'ites . Assad's government is secular and made up of the religious Alawite minority, brutally oppressing other ethnicities and religions Kurds and Sunnis . In the current Syrian civil war, about 100,000 civilians have died, and it hasn't even been a year. On the other hand, most credible studies put the total civilian deaths in the 10 years since Iraq was invaded at around the same number 100,000. Iraq currently has a somewhat stable, somewhat secular government that at least somewhat represents all ethnic groups. The end game for Syria does not look pretty. Whichever side wins is most likely going to end up murdering hundreds of thousands of the other side. The winning side will most likely be quite oppressive to the other side. If the US never invaded Iraq, isn't it likely it would simply go down the path of Syria angry, underrepresented sects finding justification to protest, an oppressive government violently reacting, and a very bloody sectarian civil war far worse than the Iraqi civil war that the US was at least in a position to subdue to some extent? Not to mention all of the intervening deaths caused by Saddam's oppressive rule probably another hundred thousand if the 1990s are an indication of anything . tl dr Both Iraq in the early 2000's and Syria had underlying sectarian tensions subdued by an oppressive government. The US's toppling of Saddam's government allowed those tensions to flare up into violent conflict, but the presence of the US military mitigated it somewhat and helped lead to a relatively ok government. Without the US invasion, it's likely the oppressed groups would have entered into an even worse civil war like we're seeing in Syria, ending with a government far worse than the current one. sidenote I am not advocating that the US intervene in Syria in fact, at this point, I believe it'd be fairly pointless.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given the atrocities in Syria, invading Iraq in 2003 was better than the alternative.\n","id":"5e1fcf4a-cad6-43d0-96c5-f8170a0faf11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit I think I may have overestimated the problem, due in part to my sources, and in part to my zealousness. Many comments so far have pointed out that even if all of this were true, it would not constitute a police state. I'm willing to give quite a bit of ground on that phrase, as I likely used it without thinking it through. Edit 2 I'm sorry some people think I'm a shill. I'm just a concerned guy trying to help. First Amendment Cops can tell you what to say, taze you for arguing with them, arrest journalists, and arrest you for filming them. They can break up peaceful protests by force. They bring assault weapons to memorial services and gay rights marches and anti war demonstrations. Here are some stories about arrests of journalists. Second Amendment Most states don't seem to have tried to take your guns away, but that won't stop them from arming the police with military weapons. If the police attack you, where can you go for help? Why are the civilian police forces authorized to carry weapons which are illegal in the states they police? Do police really get into gunfights with heavily armed drug dealers and save the lives of crowds of law abiding citizens, like something out of a 1980's cop thriller? Here is the wiki about police militarization. Fourth Amendment Cops can seize your property without cause or warrant civil forfeiture , and search your car, phone, or house without cause or warrant. Don't believe me? Look it up. Multiple recent court decisions defend an officer's wish to do whatever he wants with your things. Here is an article about the most recent supreme court decision on searches. This is just a google page, but how many of these wrong house, no knock searches are too many? Here is the wiki about civil forfeiture. It appears the court has ruled that police do need a warrant to search your cell phone. Fifth Amendment Cops can arrest you on the spot for literally anything they see fit, and you will be held at least until your bail hearing, and you will be lucky if you can afford your bail. Also, they can compel you through whatever means they see fit lying, threatening, depriving of basic needs, torture to bear testimony against yourself, even if you are innocent any testimony given under duress is admissible to the court, and usually leads to conviction regardless of proof of guilt . Also, they fund their own departments by issuing citations and stealing property seriously, if you haven't looked up civil forfeiture, do it now . Here is a good video where a Virginia Beach officer explains criminal 'interviews.' If you have time to really watch this, please listen to what he says, and how he says it. His job is to look for wrongdoing, and he freely admits that if he wants to pull someone over, he can follow them until they do something he can pull them over for. This is where he starts to describe interrogation specifically. Sixth Amendment You can be kept in jail for years before you are brought before a judge, and can expect no help or information from the prison guards. Guards are there to keep people in, not to save lives. Numerous cases are rising to the public view regarding prison conditions, and maybe we should start throwing the 'cruel and unusual' term around. Either way, in 2011, about 3 people died in American jails every day with countless others tortured or left off the books think Chicago's interrogation fiasco this year, or Guantanamo . Here is an article about Chicago's secret prison. Here is an article about police killings. Note the fact that they aren't even tracked very carefully. Here is an article about deaths in prisons. Again, information is out of date, and possibly inaccurate. Eighth Amendment Some Judges set reasonable bail, others do not. Some of the Judges caught setting unreasonable bail are called out, or disciplined, most are not. Chances are very good you will not be able to afford bail if you go inside. Think about that next time you're tempted to flip off a police officer. I'm having a hard time finding specifics about the time between an arrest and a bail hearing, but pages I visit says it varies state by state, with multiple lawyers giving anecdotes of people waiting up to a year in jail before being acquitted because they couldn't make bail. Personally, I have known more than one person to spend months in jail after being unable to afford bail. Whether or not someone is found guilty, shouldn't this be viewed as a violation of our right to a speedy trial? Not sure about that one. Here are some statistics on drug bail. Here is a document full of prison statistics, most relevantly, bail rates. Bottom line You don't have rights anymore. Each of the constitutional rights we have were set forth by Americans to protect their families from overzealous government officials. These rights are not there to protect you from your neighbors. They aren't there to protect you from your employer. They were written specifically to protect you from the Government, and they have failed. Remember your history, read the constitution. Every one of the rights Americans hold dear is being violated by police, judges, and politicians every day. Every Day. EVERY DAY. Every bullshit arrest, every bullshit sentence, every bullshit traffic stop, every bullshit roadside search. If you try to exercise your right to free speech, you can be stopped for it. If you argue with the officer, he will pull you out of the car for an arrest and search without warrant. If you resist him in any way, or if you can't hear him, or if you step on the brake pedal by mistake, or if you just don't fall on your face quickly enough, he will shoot you. Those are the facts. Every year, another generation of high school students reads 1984, by Orwell. They tell us what to buy, and at what price medicine, insurance . They tell us our wars are moral, or economically sound. They tell us who to love media, soldiers, 'heros' . They tell us who to hate war, media, socialists, WBC . We are in a constant state of war on at least one front Germany, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, Russia, Mexico, and God only knows where else . They lie to us, and suppress anyone looking for the truth media, arrest of journalists, denying the right to assemble or film officers . They tell us what to believe. They tell us how to behave. They will kill you if you do not fall in line exactly when and how they tell you. It might not look like you live in a police state. After all, you can drive to work, do your job, buy your groceries, and go on vacation. However, if a police officer, a judge, or anyone else has the authority to ignore the Constitution of the United States of America, what else can you call it? Do I need to dare you to piss off a cop? If you know what will happen when you piss off a cop, how can you accept that? Why are police even authorized to use deadly force? You really want them to kill someone for speeding? Well what about stealing your car, can we kill them then? How many lives are saved through the use of deadly force? Is it worth it? Well it isn't worth it to me. I'm going to keep my head down until I can afford to get the Hell out of here. I'd rather Live as a citizen of the World than Die as a citizen of this country. If you think the constitution protects you at all , think again. They are walking all over your rights, and you aren't going to notice until they arrest you, or kill your children. If they never do, you will live your life among the sheeple, waiting for the law to tell you how to live. I'm sorry if this comes across as somewhat belligerent, but I believe the seriousness of the situation in this country isn't exactly sinking in for the general public. Am I wrong? Is it already getting better? Are citizens safer than they used to be? Is my information wrong or biased? I would love a discussion about what we are doing right, what we are doing wrong, and what we can do next. Edited to link some sources<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America is already a police state, the public just hasn't admitted it yet.\n","id":"2c6c4ffc-f32f-4a91-abd2-72e0a0aced02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>A refusal to condemn or reject morally unsound viewpoints, such as white supremacism, can be read as a tacit agreement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Internet companies have a moral obligation to censor white supremacism.\n","id":"f628be39-f2b3-4ede-a44f-9b358215e63f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we exist within a Simulated Reality?<|ARGUMENT|>If it is possible it will not be done only once things seldom are but many times. A parent reality exploring different simulated universes probably includes variations on the same theme, simulations resembling each other like almost-copies. Our universe will be one of many like it. With the corollary that there are almost-copies of everyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If it is possible to Simulate, then it is highly probable someone\/thing will eventually Simulate.\n","id":"20a930dd-c959-4973-83a5-3229088ae6ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ear piercing of newborns be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>There is some pain involved in piercing that the child must overcome to reach the desired result.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The child can also learn some responsibility that way. This girl is one example of many.\n","id":"b73f5d4a-f101-4b8f-a271-097dcebf56da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Prostitution is legal where I live. It protects the workers, but does not legitimize the trade morally. For example, underage workers are not allowed to work in brothels. Prostitutes working in brothels pay taxes, have safety provisions, employer restrictions and can get insurance. This does not eliminate, but reduces street prostitution because of the provisions brothels provide. Safe sex is promoted. However, prostitution is not openly advertised. Its not like the dutch situation. Detail<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Buying and selling sex should be legal for sex workers and their clients.\n","id":"815943a1-f8da-4e9d-87d4-022e92e193a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>School searches of student lockers<|ARGUMENT|>The best way to ensure that such contraband items are found and removed is for the school authorities periodically to search a random selection of student lockers. Even if there is a privacy issue, students yield that minor right in return for the wider benefit of safety.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Locker searches reduce drugs and weapons in schools, which is in the interests of all students.\n","id":"ef89ceed-752f-44b4-9432-61a0cbf52b01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>There are about ten countries in the world where bullfighting is practiced. Whether to ban it is a decision for the people of those countries. It is no business of people living in non-bullfighting countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banning bullfighting should be decided by each individual country, a worldwide ban would lack legitimacy and ignore national and regional specificity.\n","id":"8a961ea1-9e34-4f67-b1de-650fe4cbb582"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I first came across Dark Souls, the first thought that came to my mind is that the game looks like it was made in the 90s. The UI is absolutely hideous, with it's wordart like Game Over or , Victory screen. The four skills on the left look stretched vertically and the overall design is extremely unaesthetic. It's a great game, I get that. The focus for this post isn't on the gameplay, so if you like the UI please try to . I want to try to understand why it might be appealing because it must have passed some team of art directors while personally I can't think of anything more hideous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Dark Souls series video game has the most hideous UI imaginable\n","id":"6dcaab3b-968e-4a01-b280-68e9ac7b6406"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I already gave and delta'ed a similar  so I'm submitting it with a fix What I think can and should be done with the European migrant crisis is as follows. Pretty much all of it has already been done in Japan, Canada, and Australia, among others. Illegal migrants must be instantly detained or deported with no hope of staying in the EU. Anyone who arrives without going through the normal migration procedures should be barred for life from entering Europe. Even if they are bonafide refugees, they should be placed in camps outside the EU's legal umbrella until they are resettled in a non EU country. Reject gt 90 of economic migrants who abuse the refugee process. Japan already does this. Like Europe, it is separated by a sea from its main migrant pipelines, and 99 of refugees are denied. Force countries to take back deported migrants who originate there. This has become a problem with Morocco, Algeria, and Russia, all of which have refused to take responsibility for migrants who entered Europe from their soil. Russia is going to be a tough nut to crack, but NATO probably has enough of a casus belli to force Morocco and Algeria to accept their migrants. Although a non EU country, Norway has served as a major pipeline, and after it deported some Syrians who crossed over the Russian border Russia deported them right back. Norway should've just placed them in limbo and said either you take them or they starve, Vladimir. Create a transparent path for economic migrants as well as for legit refugees. This is how Canada does it and how Europe does too. There is a straightforward migration path that is open to fluent English and French speakers from around the world. This saves the necessity to assimilate migrants and provides a path to residency, cutting down on asylum abuse. In conclusion, Europe needs to toughen up its policies, which it can do it has a sea and easily patrolled land borders and should do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU should follow Canada, Australia, and Japan and banish for life people who migrate irregularly into the EU while using force if necessary to repatriate them.\n","id":"768e74b8-b144-467a-a2de-0dcc168c3b6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The populist electoral wave sweeping Europe and the the US are stark demonstrations that wealthy people and big business are not able to influence elections very much, no matter how much money they throw at politics. Big money was almost completely against both Trump and Brexit, yet they lost. Big money was spent lavishly on Trump's Republican primary competitors but Trump won anyway. Big money was even behind Clinton who spent far more than Trump , but she lost anyway. Brexit was the same story. The vast majority of UK business and elites were anti Brexit, yet the vote went against them. The League and 5 Star movements in Italy likewise get less business support than other parties, yet they are proving victorious at the polls. The narrative that it is Big Money that is corrupting democracy doesn't stand up to scrutiny. In fact, the focus on trying to stamp out Big Money in politics is a distraction from solving the real problems that are fueling populism. I don't claim to understand what is driving the growth in populism, but it's pretty clear that big business and the super wealthy aren't the culprits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Recent populist electoral outcomes in the UK, US, Italy and Germany clearly demonstrate and big business and wealthy individuals have limited abilities to influence elections\n","id":"5b524875-5aba-440e-bf11-b4d61d986390"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify When living in this matrix world, nobody is aware that they are living inside a machine and experiencing an illusion. It is also not possible for these people to break out of the system. The term evil describes anything that a person can do that would cause intentional harm to another person. For example, there would be no such thing as murder or stealing in this world. We would not have the mental capacity abilities to carry out such acts. I also want to add on that in addition to not being able to make evil choices, people inside this matrix can only make good choices whereby good choices are defined as either an action that brings some sort of benefit to someone else or an action that causes no harm to anyone. For example, I see that you have spilled your groceries outside your car. I have no obligation to help you, but I can either make one of two choices help you pick up your groceries or ignore the situation provided that I have ascertained no one will be in significant harm's way. One final clarification to help people understand the scenario I'm creating I want to stress that we aren't robots per se. Think of it this way if you were in this matrix world, you would still be you. You would retain your personality, your physical attributes, your thoughts, etc. but you just would no longer have the capacity to think evil thoughts or conduct evil actions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that humanity would be better off living in a Matrix-like utopia with no capacity to do evil than in the world we live in right now.\n","id":"b149b9be-94c8-43e3-a33a-0a89f3276111"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In response to this article, I believe that Canada is giving away too many resources to help other countries, when we have problems of our own that would benefit from the funding. We currently have a opioid epidemic, that could benefit from those funds. That money could be used to promote education around the dangers of drug use, and rehab facilities. The funding could also be used to tackle the social determinants of health that further put individuals at risk of living a life style of addiction. Low socioeconomic status, lack of general education, and unemployment are all determinants that could put individuals more at risk of poor health whether it be with addiction, or physical health . The funding could be used to tackle our problems with unemployment, and be used to make healthy foods and education more accessible to the general population. Using our funding to support other nations has no benefit to helping our problems, and considering its the people of Canada that pay taxes, those funds should be put towards helping our problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that my country Canada gets no benefit in promoting women's reproductive health in developing countries. The funding would better be utilized in helping problems that we have here in Canada.\n","id":"25194d28-fda3-4487-b351-73dc81434dc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>Kinetic impact: A 248kg torpedo, travelling at .25c full impulse, no where near the warp speed they are capable of would impact like a 9.12MgT bomb just from impact and that's a very rough calculation with a lot of rounding, without any explosion. Ships in Star Trek can take several of these with their shields up. We have even seen one pass through the hull of a ship without destroying it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Photon torpedoes are the standard projectile armament of a Starfleet vessel. The current main one is a MKII Torpedo, which contains a 1.5kg matter\/anti-matter charge, is 2 meters long and weighs 248kg. Scientifically it would be a 64.4MgT blast, but Star Trek states 690 gigatons. When fired with a warp booster, it can be fired at and travel at warp speeds. Thus its kinetic impact would be astounding.\n","id":"3b7640cd-3751-4c20-9c67-7eaff831e30a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should schools be nuts free?<|ARGUMENT|>School nurses have first aid training to deal with allergic reactions. For example, knowing how to use a epipen when a child is experiencing a severe reaction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most schools already have medically trained staff who can deal with allergic reactions should they arise. There is no need to ban nuts entirely.\n","id":"8b88f89b-2300-4709-a430-384b527d6ba9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that while marijuana is far safer than what it originally had been projected to be going back decades , it would still be harmful to society if it were to be legalized. Marijuana is addictive. While it is not nearly as addictive as other, more harmful drugs, I hear about people who still \u201cneed it\u201d as part of their daily routine after using for a few years, and I don\u2019t think that allowing such a substance in the first place is a good idea. Marijuana is potentially damaging cognitively and physically. Browsing through a few sites and doing reports here and there over the years has generally indicated that marijuana has some negative effects in coordination, short term memeory, etc. drugs such as these should not be allowed to be easily purchaseable. \u201cSin taxing\u201d, especially for something that was previously illegal, is pretty immoral. A very common argument for legalizing marijuana is that it could be taxed heavily, which brings tax revenue to everyone else. I don\u2019t think letting some people smoke marijuana and potentially get addicted is a very ethical way to raise funds. You\u2019re profiting off of something damaging their life in a very minor way . Legaliazing marijuana makes it another \u201calcohol\u201d or \u201ccigarette\u201d type product. Eventually, enough people will become addicted to marijuana if it\u2019s legal and socially acceptable to smoke which is very well may be atm . This forces the government to go back and do many of the same things that people do now for alcohol. I would expect PSAs like \u201cdon\u2019t drive while high\u201d, support groups akin to AA, etc. it just seems like a whole lot of work that doesn\u2019t need to be done. Large, marijuana producing corporation will rise, which would be harmful to society. Just like alcohol or any other commodity , marijuana would be used for profits by a large corporation. Currently, a large portion of blame for underage abuse of alchohol is placed on large companies, who post suggestive ads about their product drink it and you\u2019re cool, and so forth . I don\u2019t see why this wouldn\u2019t carry over to marijuana. Now, there are some common arguments that are made in favor of legalization which I do not agree with Even if we ban it, people will still buy it anyway, so we might as well make money off of it I don\u2019t like this argument because of point 5 I made in the previous section. While marijuana is still sold in large quantities, its legal status still limits its viability as a commodity. Even if the current level is \u201cfine\u201d, I would fully expect sales to explode were it legal. Furthermore, I still feel that the government has a moral responsibility to not this happen as in point 3 It\u2019s not as bad for you as alcohol and that\u2019s legal see disclaimer Disclaimer I also think alcohol and cigarettes shouldn\u2019t be legal, but to do so would be nigh impossible in the current environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"recreational marijuana should not be legal\n","id":"f2b68d30-f62d-4d22-9688-062c92a748d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that sooner or later, because of our economies dependency on innovation, computers and robots alike will eventually reach a point were they are more economically efficient than any human workers ever could be, at nearly every task. This will be a massive problem in our society. even if unemployment only reached 30 , which is a conservative estimate, the effect on poverty and income inequity will be massive. Capitalism, which I believe to be a adequate system under our current technology, would leave the profits from this rise of automation solely with the rich one percent of people, especially with business owners, who would eventually realize that their the one percent lack of employing people would eventual lead them with no customer base. A capitalist economy would eventually consist of a extremely poor large homeless population, a large lower class, a extremely small middle class, and an even smaller elite class that holds all the wealth and power, I believe you can already see some of this today. Entire industries would be run and managed by robots and AI. The effect of self driving cars, which have been estimated by many to be close to 5 10 years away, Elon Musk even predicts that in 15 20 years all cars on the road will be self driving On the trucking and taxi industry these changes could potentially be so massive as to get rid of 95 obviously citation needed on that, just a rough estimate that I thought up myself . Given a sufficiently advanced artificial general intelligence, all intellectual work could become meaningless given the fact that this AI could write poems, solve million dollar math problems, and cure Alzheimer's disease, all hundreds, if not thousands of times faster than an entire research team at standard, a system of helping those who are not only unemployed but unemployable . Not everyone has the skills, nor do we want everyone to be, needed to become a robot engineer, or a computer programmer which in the short term, might be some of the only middle class jobs available. A socialist system is the only way humans could still thrive in a world full of robots, as it creates a stable way for the wealth that robots would almost solely be responsible for created to be distributed to the people. The basis for my arguments came from this youtube video and This blog post by Sam Harris I know he's not exactly an expert on the topic but he is an eloquent writer . EDIT Thanks for all the responses you guys my view was definitely changed. While socialism isn't nessessary I do think that socialistic policies will be necessary in the near future, shout out to r basicincome.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the only solution to an inevitable increase in automation, especially after the advent of a sufficiently advanced artificial general intelligence AGI is socialism\n","id":"e32f694b-a1cd-4ce3-a207-8baf20ed3a59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is drag turning mainstream hurting LGBT rights?<|ARGUMENT|>Drag Queens have a history of being at the forefront of the fight for LGBT rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Drag culture is naturally an advocate for the LGBT community.\n","id":"a5d5f13c-2a1f-4311-b62f-00184e05a06a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>If a school hires openly gay teacher for example, calling him a pedophile is defamation but picketing outside the school against hiring homosexuals because a group believes they are pedophiles is not defamation. Therefore, laws against hate speech is needed to uphold equality under the law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Defamation laws can easily be circumvented for members of vunerable communities without hate speech laws.\n","id":"b84a4ba1-b1a7-4129-abbb-7a854d82d63f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>Some lifestyles tend to to reduce fertility, such as high fat diets e.g. fast food or some commonly found substances e.g. smoking<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are ways of life that, purposely or not, tend to affect fertility, regardless of agendas.\n","id":"e340c3ae-40c6-498b-b9ee-20f16dbb0b9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that Tax cuts are great for the economy. They boost output and thus improve the economy. Proof of concept of tax cuts more output. Let Y output let C consumption let I investment let G government spending let T taxes C can be expanded to include the marginal propensity to consume and the tax rate it can be thus rewritten as C c 0 c 1 Y T where c 0 is the basic requirements for sustenance the intercept and c 1 is the MPC, Y income and T taxes. Thus our new equation is Y c 0 c 1 Y T I G I want to keep this simple, but normally you would add in exports and imports to get Y output , but this doesn't have any bearing on the proof of concept for taxes helping output. Similarly I investment can be expanded to include sales and interest rates, but again, to keep things simple we'll leave sales out for now and again it has no bearing on if taxes help or hurt output. lower case i interest rates, not to be confused with capitalized I which investment, of which interest rates are a part. I will just make up some numbers and plug and chug here, but in an econ class you would be given something that looks like the following Let Y 120 0.5 Y T 100 10i 50 Solve for i Y 120 0.5 Y T 100 10i 50 Y 270 .5Y .5T 10i .5Y 270 .5T 10i Y 540 T 20i 20i 540 T Y i 27 .05T .05Y IF you've taken intermediate Macro, this would be your IS relation. Now lets add in the LM curve where money supply money demand in order to get out interest rate i so we can solve for output. Let M P real money supply Let M P ^d real money demand Let M P 300 Let M P ^d Y 20i Now set equal and solve for i interest rate 300 Y 20i 300 Y 20i divide by 1 300 Y 20i i 15 .05Y IF you've taken intermediate macro this is your LM relation Now we have all the information we need to solve for interest rates, output, and consumption. For markets to be in equilibrium the IS and LM relations must be set equal to each other, and we have found the interest rate i equation for both relations, so now we can set them equal to each other. Thus 15 .05Y 27 .05T .05Y And solve for Y, which is output. Thus 15 .05Y 27 .05T .05Y .1Y 42 .05 T Y 420 .5 T Now lets introduce a Tax rate for T let T 40 in the first example and let T 50 in the second example Example 1, lower taxes Y 420 .5 40 Y 400 Example 2 Y 420 .5 50 Y 395 so we can see that higher taxes reduce output Y , and the degree to which it does so is dependent upon the MPC Higher tax rates reduce output more than smaller increases in tax rates, and this effect is amplified by higher MPC. In a highly consumer driven economy like the U.S, where our savings rate is about 5 , our MPC is ~.95, unlike my example where it was .5, and thus the same level of taxation increases would have and even larger impact than if we had a lower MPC. from our example just replace 0.5 with 0.95 and you can see the effect it would have. Empirical evidence that tax cuts boost the economy About 1 3 of the Obama stimulus was tax cuts And most economists agree that the stimulus bill boosted the economy Tax Cuts have throughout history of the U.S been associated with higher growth rates and higher standards of living The tax foundation found that a compilation of literature that was peer reviewed and published and replicated found the following gt While there are a variety of methods and data sources, the results consistently point to significant negative effects of taxes on economic growth even after controlling for various other factors such as government spending, business cycle conditions, and monetary policy. In this review of the literature, I find twenty six such studies going back to 1983, and all but three of those studies, and every study in the last fifteen years, find a negative effect of taxes on growth. Of those studies that distinguish between types of taxes, corporate income taxes are found to be most harmful, followed by personal income taxes, consumption taxes and property taxes. Even the Brookings institute finds that tax cuts boost the economy, although they say its small OECD says Trumps economic plan will double growth by 2018 So,  Edit Formatting was all jacked up, should be fixed now. Also added one more bit of empirical evidence. Edit 2 Made a typo in the work above and it was caught. Fixed now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tax cuts can increase output in the economy\n","id":"300f9d3f-7941-4712-a181-7147bec5fe76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm an atheist but I would really like someone to dismantle this train of thought. I want to explore the idea of the purpose of life when an omniscient God knows everything you will ever do. Why not just send them straight to hell or heaven? Do we truly have free will if no human action is truly spontaneous? Can any human action be spontaneous by definition if an omniscient God knew of it before it happened? Sorry if I've broken any rules, I'm posting this through baconreader and I couldn't see the subreddit sidebar. If I am breaking the rules Mods feel free to delete this thread and shoot me a PM.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An omniscient God has known who will go to hell or heaven since the beginning of the universe. Ergo, a human living life is redundant and all humans should be sent to hell or heaven at the point of inception by an omniscient God.\n","id":"85415d9b-61c5-4174-84d5-a1e49157b278"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Bribery \/ Corruption<|ARGUMENT|>'Survival' corruption, practised by public servants, is usually the result of small salaries, perhaps in highly inflationary economies, which do not allow them to make a living. Without bribery, public administration would collapse altogether as no one would have any incentive to get anything done. Thus the level of corruption is determined by the poor economic situation of the country as well as by the policy of the government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Survival' corruption, practised by public servants, is usually the result of small salaries, perhap...\n","id":"5c8fc13d-511d-4872-904d-bbe174e5488e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>If moral statements are expressions of emotion, then simple arguments like: \"1. If murder is wrong, then the assassination of JFK was wrong. 2. Murder is wrong. 3. Therefore, the assassination of JFK was wrong.\" are totally unintelligible, since expressions of emotion cannot serve as premises in an argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The position that moral statements are just expressions of emotions is inconsistent with how we commonly view moral statements.\n","id":"99409e9b-bf75-4b70-aeaf-c2839e8ef0fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Polygamy<|ARGUMENT|>New wives in polygamous families are often the subject of great attention from their husbands. This draws attention away from the children of other wives. And, as new children are born by the new wife, attention is taken away from the other children. Children are aware of this, and respond resentfully to new family members.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The children of older wives suffer when new wives enter a polygamous marriage\n","id":"d5b9268c-bed5-431b-b9a3-e0b93a6fd96c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Edible Landscapes: Should Lawns Be Replaced?<|ARGUMENT|>Examples involve who could grow more food for people and how pretty does each lawn looks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Edible lawns could keep \"keeping up with the Joneses\" going, just in a different context.\n","id":"f8b71b86-b6e3-4ff7-b1ee-a8c3e2ae5b3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>As elections take place at regular intervals, citizens have the opportunity to vote bad politicians out of office. Compared to that, bad subject matter decisions are usually long-term oriented, and sometimes irreversible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A bad choice of elected representatives has less impact on societies than a bad decision about direct subject matters.\n","id":"2fc12b96-1548-4dce-aeda-e2db071bfd40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Reciprocity is a key reason we grant rights to others. Animals lack the capacity to reciprocate the duties humans show towards each other, and would show to animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Higher-order rights arise through complex social frameworks of reciprocity and obligation. These do not exist for animals.\n","id":"e50b51cb-6f9b-4766-a4e2-766913323421"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a college student I see a lot of people complaining about society and how it likes to finance its unnecessary consumption by taking on debts it can't pay. Firstly, I don't want to judge any persons consumption as necessary or unnecessary but if you criticize people's actions you should not be doing the same as well. Since, I'm speaking about college students, a lot of these people are financing their education through debt. That is fine, in fact in most cases should be encouraged. However, if you are pursuing something worthless like an art history or ethnic studies then you fall into the same category as the people you complain about. When I say these degrees are worthless, I don't mean they don't have intrinsic value or has no sentimental or judgemental value to it, I am speaking strictly in terms of monetary value. Since these degrees will barely get you a job and even when it does, it barely pays the bills you are taking on debts for consuming a service that you desire and can't pay for in the future. This makes the people who complain about society a big hypocrite in my book. p.s. It isn't necessary that only art majors complain but it's just my personal experience to see art majors criticize more widely about society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think certain college students who complain about society and its practice of consuming goods through debt that they are incapable of paying for are hypocrites.\n","id":"b70a463f-5b19-41f1-a2f5-abb4ec783cf1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should minors be allowed to go through irreversible gender reassignment procedures?<|ARGUMENT|>There is concern that adopting a transgender identity has become the newest way for girls to express discomfort in their bodies - which is an issue many girls face during puberty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children can often experience gender dysphoria at the same time as puberty. This may result in them attributing emotional and physical discomfort from puberty as evidence of gender dysphoria.\n","id":"d1027858-db92-4f0b-aa52-6ef327244ad7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>Voting for a third party can cause both your third party and your backup to lose, and this situation is definitely predictable through polling.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"IRV incentivizes strategically voting for one frontrunner first and the other last.\n","id":"a285f92a-841c-4758-ab50-a22c17d5c413"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is one of those instances where I'm on the fence. Philosophy, as I understand it, is concerned primarily with the nature of knowledge and reality. But in a world where empiricism and logic are essentially what drives our infrastructure and government, I see less and less place for that kind of pursuit, especially when it comes to differing schools e.g., existentialism, nihilism, rationalism, etc. , since the differences are ultimately negligible in the practical sense. A person's actions are unlikely to be affected that greatly by whether they attach some moral value to them or whether they believe there is any such thing as morality at all. If they are, generally it's either not that big a deal, or it's illegal anyway. Perhaps it was more important back when society was still in the process of growth, deciding in which direction to change. But we live in a modern society which is becoming increasingly static and less likely to change, where most of the rules are set in stone, and where everyone gets along for the most part . In that society, whether someone is a moral nihilist or an objectivist or whathaveyou is, by and large, irrelevant. So that's what I mean. I think philosophy as a field of study is becoming pointless as society continues to approach a static state where the questions posed answered by philosophers are either toxic, irrelevant or trivial. I know very little about academic philosophy, which only exacerbates the sensation that I am a moron for thinking this way. So <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Philosophy is becoming irrelevant.\n","id":"c544bd1b-e7fc-44f9-9724-f5d4907809fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>The taboo nature of criminalized drugs leads not only to their desirability as a novelty people want to try something naughty but also their desirability as a method of rebellion such as teenagers tend towards. Legalization helps to remove the taboo.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some of the appeal to rebellious teens is the fact that drug use is illegal. Treating moderated drug use as a normalized behavior and treating addiction\/binge use as disease takes much of the \"cool\" factor away.\n","id":"bcd6eca4-1313-4fdb-bdd3-7f1151e5434d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>FairTax would improve the current US taxation system.<|ARGUMENT|>Sales tax is a worse tax form than payrolls: it increases prices by a multiple of all costs and profits, and thus decreases consumer buying power and resultant jobs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An expenditure tax is regressive which is to say that it imposes a greater burden relative to resources on the poor than on the rich.\n","id":"77cb152d-3463-4375-a9f1-2dec335a129f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The internet has seemingly opposed targeted marketing immensely the use of cookies, search history, and other means to figure out a users interests generates a lot of privacy concerns. However, I personally think it results in a better experience for the user. When I try to watch a Youtube video, and get an advertisement for something completely irrelevant to me, it feels not only totally akward, but also a waste of my time. I often cringed back when I would get a video ad for a female hygiene product or some TV show I don't care at all about. With services like Google that displays ads based on what I care about, I actually am interested in what I see. As a result, I may find games or products I will enjoy, rather than just get flooded with crap that wastes my time. Regarding the concept of privacy, there's no human actually looking at what you search. It's just a computer program that looks at keywords from searches cookies, and finds the most relevant ad. Computer software does not judge you. Also, AFAIK, most ad networks do not save your data online, they load your data from cookies history temporarily to run the search for an ad, but don't save it clearing cookies or running incognito proves this . Lastly, targeted marketing improves revenue per impression, due to a higher chance of user interest. Because of this, sites don't need to spam their page with as many ads, or run as many video ads in order to make revenue. For the user, this means less distractions and less barriers behind actually getting to the content they want. Note this is a different opinion to the other post. I'm referring to targeted marketing, he's talking about advertising marketing as a whole.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Think Targeted Marketing is a Good Thing\n","id":"f01320ed-2334-4b5f-bada-cc97abfaa806"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>Society holds that sexual intercourse is dangerous or reckless when performed without an emotional or personal connection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Selling sex commodifies an act that should be about an emotional and personal connection.\n","id":"a6e4cf6f-e0dc-4d0b-93e2-70330d74697e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think female sluts should be shamed under any circumstance or even considers bad , however I think male players should be held in higher esteem. This may be a result of culture norms and stuff and blah blah over the centuries. But regardless being a slut is pretty easy, you can be a 4 5 being the average and ask a guy who's an 8 if he wants to has sex, chances are he'll say yes cuz why not? A girl who is a 5 will get approached way more often than a guy who is a 9. Females get offered dick on a regular basis, even decent looking girls will complain about getting cat called. Men who are really good looking don't get half as many approaches, and won't ever be called out in public. To be a guy who gets sex with a lot of good looking women, you'll usually have to act charming to get your way even if goodlooking yourself . For women, you usually just have to be there, seem approachable, and not act overtly hostile to men hitting on you. NOTE I'm speaking in generalities, I'm sure exceptions happen all the time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think males ought to be more praised for getting sex.\n","id":"05c8f155-8523-47aa-b89d-c5acd46be929"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should education at public universities in the United States be tuition free?<|ARGUMENT|>Under the status quo, students from the poorest fourth of the population pay no net tuition at two- or four-year public institutions, while also receiving an annual living expense subsidiaries. Students from the second poorest fourth also receive on average enough funding to offset tuition completely at two-year institutions and cover many of their additional expenses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Community colleges are already accessible to students across the economic spectrum.\n","id":"f067ee51-b277-452e-9f13-fa10159200d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>If sources try to provide their own idea of what the arbitrary definition entails and people realize that each source has conflicting information with each other, then people may never figure out how to become vegan, even if they want to, solely out of distrust of information and lack of support.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having an arbitrary definition creates issues that push veganism into being short-lived or prevent it from emerging. We should not waste our time until the issues are resolved and the vegan movement can sustain itself into the long-term.\n","id":"6953bf13-a659-4741-b2b8-eaebca4cc171"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it OK to publicly approach a stranger for sex?<|ARGUMENT|>In the US, for example, only 10% of people surveyed act and think according to basic Biblical principles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society as a whole does not follow the Bible as a standard for moral behavior.\n","id":"7b39c6a6-8426-4c42-baca-918a6fbf0423"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Inheritance be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Such a policy incentivises anyone who both expects to create more wealth than they receive from the state and cares about their legacy to emigrate. This will impoverish the country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The law would be unenforceable because the wealthy would just use corporations and\/or offshore accounts to hold their wealth.\n","id":"db9faf5a-8fdb-4108-be98-f48ad1e68fce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should taxpayers have direct control of how their taxes are spent?<|ARGUMENT|>By exploring its own needs, a community could become more connected and aware of itself. For example, more locals might hear about services that are better-tailored to their local requirements.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At a local level earmarks could help ensure discretionary spending priorities meet that unique community's needs and wants.\n","id":"b34140fe-a186-43cd-91cc-be7a23309ea3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let\u2019s suppose for a second that there were no regulating authority and all conditions arose from a a perfect free market. Wouldn\u2019t new psuedo governements naturally arise? What prevents gangs or mafia from exerting their influence over neighborhoods? What prevents inudstries from forming trade guilds to stop new innovations from replacing them? What stops people from relying on something like Yelp, or some other review system, or even just an influential popular person to give them suggestions on what services to use? Any of these systems can become an institution and then a target for corruption. Edit Thanks to everyone for your lengthy replies. They're taking me a while to really chew on but I promise I'm reading.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libertarian-style free-market economy is impossible because there will always be some kind of corruption-prone authority like a trade guild, neighborhood councils or worker collectives, street gangs, mafia, Yelp...\n","id":"d0b98d77-fec4-4aa1-ac6f-2534bc5b6795"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are tons of these subreddits out there, and I think they pander to a segment of society that is generally less intelligent and less emotionally developed. They are also the ones most likely to be responsible for vote brigading, another childish thing to do. Some of them hold a special place as ones that actually have users that go out and find people that piss them off on reddit, so they can link to these people's comment on reddit and thus get everyone really mad and get a bunch of upvotes. SRS ShitRedditSays is the classic example of this, though there are others. The entire premise of it is asinine, but they somehow try to wrap themselves up in we're good for society bits of silly. Another one that is especially dumb in my opinion is r EnoughLibertarianSpam. These people actually cross post to libertarian subreddits in order to bitch about what Libertarians are doing The obvious answer to anyone who doesn't want to see this libertarian spam is to simply not go to those subreddits , but I guess this logic is lost on them . The opposite of this subreddit would be r ShitStatistsSay, and they are guilty of the same things for the same reasons. When these subreddits get their britches twisted, they usually Go over there and give them a piece of their mind , as I call it, which involves clicking over to that post and downvoting it, then replying with something explaining why they are dumb. Other subreddits aren't inwardly focused but can be pretty damn mean in my opinion. One such example is r CringePics, where you take a photo from someone who probably made an err in judgement, then make sure thousands of people see it so they can be even more embarassed. Everyone here has done something when they were young that they would be embarassed if everyone knew about it. r CringePics is essentially taking a photo of that, and then going HEY EVERYBODY LOOK WHAT username IS DOING HAHA WHAT A FAGGOT, RIGHT? Not very nice at all. This is all extremely childish and I wish they would go away. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the subreddits that try to cause an emotional reaction \/r\/Rage; \/r\/ShitRedditSays; \/r\/JusticePorn; etc are childish.\n","id":"a2aaa798-16ba-4bce-b234-9dc3641c993b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>China tends to give more aid to countries that align with it politically for example by consistently voting alongside China in the UN General Assembly. While not explicit, political support of China on the international forum is an implicit condition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China has traditionally seen aid as a policy instrument to cement political friendships and facilitate China\u2019s political agenda at multilateral forums. Even if there are no explicit conditions attached, China expects some political favours in return.\n","id":"9719a85f-04fd-4a2c-9eac-ecaff0a60b0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Populist results, such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, are signs of a healthy democracy.<|ARGUMENT|>Populism is synonymous with democracy because it appeals to the hearts of the non-elite who make up the majority of a country's population<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Populist results, such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, are signs of a healthy democracy.\n","id":"adb14d46-56c1-43dc-8a97-918eec4e364d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>Obesity is perceived as the effect of bad lifestyle decisions or weak power of will. These traits being associated with obesity build bias against obese people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When it comes to judgement, people constantly fail to distinguish the person from his\/her behavior.\n","id":"8edb2180-014c-4301-a4a1-ce7dd6b7f603"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I have this very acid opinion of the Abrahamic religions. They are a form of acceptance of death, thus they are a suicide by aging cult. In order to reach the heavens, people must accept aging as a natural thing and accept to die of it how is that any different from a suicide cult by aging in this case ? There is a higher objective heaven and the means to reach it accepting death, in other words suicide by old age . As a way to cope with death and accept it, instead of fighting against it, people choose to commit suicide by aging. The cult of suicide by aging is everywhere. It might be absurd to suggest it, many people will say aging is inevitable but I still do believe in it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Suicide by Aging is a thing.\n","id":"55ed315c-853c-4019-8cd7-5d4e77041896"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Considering that we have alien life on earth around the thermal vents that utilize a poison to us H2S as an energy source. I'd say that \"stealing energy and repurposing it for its own use\" is pretty ubiquitous throughout the galaxy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Findings of so-called extremophiles have allowed scientists to scale back their list of requirements for potential extraterrestrial habitats.\n","id":"4cd27e72-1518-44c5-845d-650a1b84b9cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view applies to countries with freely accessible healthcare, and if pregnancy prevention methods can be used by both partners. For those who do not wish to have children, there are plenty of contraception options available for both the man and the woman. In the unlikely scenario that these methods fail to do their job and an unwanted pregnancy does occur, there is always the option for the woman to have a safe abortion. In the case that the woman or the man doesn't want to have the child, is it fair that one of them should have to bear the burden of an unwanted kid? We should not prioritise someone's personal or religious beliefs if they go against what is scientifically proven and the welfare of others. During pregnancy, only the mother has control over something that is to become the responsibility of both her and the father. Shouldn't the father have some degree of control over wether he wishes to take on that responsibility?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that both parents need to consent to having a child for one to receive child support from the other -\n","id":"f9974fbe-116b-439a-b592-c0a3d5ca51b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have seen several good arguments on both sides of the isle about why various government branches are more efficient if privatized vs government controlled, so I have no strong opinions on the matter one way or the other. However, there is one I have developed a strong opinion on the postal service. Growing up in Romania, I have seen with my own eyes how privatizing the postal service reduced its quality, in terms of delivery speed, care with the packages, making sure letters don't get lost, etc. I moved to Denmark and noticed the same trend here stories from everyone on just how much worse the postal service got after becoming privatized. On the other hand, in the US, where everything from hospitals to prisons are private, the USPS is still a part of the government I don't know much about how good the USPS is, I just ordered a package from the US, and in less than 30h from shipping, it already arrived in Denmark It's been a week since it got clear by customs , and I am still waiting for my package, which is currently in a distribution center in my city, and I am not allowed to pick it up myself. It's not a matter of needing more free market competition, since we have GLS, FedEx and other services here, and they're also used quite often. To change my view, I think I'd need one of the following an example of a country with privatized postal services where the service is really good, or better than it was previously as a government service under a capitalist democracy how the USPS is actually terrible, and my anecdotal evidence was just a fluke. It would take at least a few stories, or statistics, not my packet was late lost this one time What will not change my view how a previously private postal service was taken over by the government, and it got worse. I am sure there are several failing, corrupt governments out there that managed to make things worse. how it saves taxpayers money to privatize this. It most likely will But it will also decrease the quality, is my opinion, and whether it's worth paying extra for better services is a good question for a separate discussion. how people shouldn't be forced to pay for a service, as a principle. Perhaps, and it's an interesting debate to have, but it is irrelevant to whether the service itself is better or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Postal Services are better government controlled, and not privatized\n","id":"172ada90-c9de-4e58-a389-7a3b6621f98b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand people can have their own beliefs, but I do not think religion should be as taboo to debate about it as it is today. Perhaps this is too anecdotal, but I very rarely feel like religion is a topic people who are opposed to you want to discuss, even in a safe environment. Many different beliefs are very often debated, and regardless of their civility, they are something people are willing to discuss. and hopefully this is not just me being disrespectful or mean or something Perhaps this is a bad analogy, but hopefully, it gets the point across Most people are willing to discuss even more controversial issues like feminism, black lives matter, social issues etc. And almost everyone is willing to discuss something like a movie or a tv show, what they think about it, etc. Some people might criticize a movie that someone else likes, but that someone else will often look at their view and maybe partly agree. Religion is almost undeniably one of the most taboo topics, but I don't necessarily see why. Really all a religion is are a set of beliefs, which many other things have, and usually a belief in a higher power a god. Why is religion specifically something people are less open minded about, and why should it stay that way? I personally think it should be a much more open topic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion should not be such a sensitive topic, for anyone.\n","id":"bdfcf788-c11c-497a-bd75-7334d6e2e8a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen a lot threads asking to remove the tipping system and effectively or directly put it inside main manu price. The biggest issue seems to be motivation for good service. I think the problem of not tipping has something to do with not only being cheap and selfish, but also going with default . Basically if you just sign your name and not write anything, the tip is zero. 1 What if we change the tipping system into an opt out, so the bill already comes with a service fee? If you have reasons not to pay it, you can write a negative tip that maximally can negate the service fee in the bill, maybe with a comment for improvement . If you are really happy with the service, you can add. In this way, the freedom of the customer is not increased nor taken away every choice you have now is still there. However, by an opt out system, going by default people would pay tips. 2 In addition, the default service fee should be written on the manu rather than hidden. A restaurant has the right to decide the default service fee for each dish percentage is good, but it may be better to do it based on the number of dishes, number of people, and the effort needed for each dish. I've seen ,between restaurant is not applicable because each one decides its own. I can think of a simple situation that percentage doesn't work best A ordered 8 appetizers of 2 each, and B ordered 1 entree of 16. The efforts of the waiter serving A is much more than that for B, but they both get a 3 tip.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think tipping in restaurants should be a opt-out system, and the \"default\" service fee should be in manu. Also, every restaurant can decide its own service fee based on number of dishes and persons rather than total price\n","id":"0a70e339-1f9b-4c23-8960-55f79d29f649"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Bertrand Russell's teapot analogy asks if one imagines a teapot was in orbit around the sun, would we consider the fact that it's very small, or perhaps that the sun blocks it from view, be reasons to believe such a teapot exists? Russell was employing Occam's heuristic within this analogy by asking is a thing which cannot be observed, measured or seen to have any consistent or reliable effect on our lives, worth believing in for any reason other than mere self-consolation<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Occam's Razor suggests physicalism should be the preferred explanation over the existence of God.\n","id":"ff9d8cf4-6584-4e5c-b228-50e4d2023d11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I honestly don't know how can people tell me climate change isn't real? The topic of climate change has change throughout the year with the early example saying climate change is fake but later evolve into climate change is real but it isn't man made. My history teacher believe that climate change isn't man made with the simple argument of the world is so big how can we have such a big impact of change the climate or how can scientist predict climate if they can't predict what the whether is like. Every single year the record of the hottest year has been broken with 90 of scientist agreeing that climate change is real and man made, there is constant news about the affect of climate change yet. There are more drought and the ocean is becoming acidic, yet the president of the USA one of the biggest producer of greenhouse gas denied that Climate is real. To me climate change denialist are like in a cult no matter what evidence I put forth they claim it's false and part of the globalist agenda or the science are putting forth fake evidence for money. I simply can not understand how they can't see the impact of climate change, one of the cause of Syrian civil war was Climate change with drought damaging goods causing higher price and more people going to cities to find work. Reddit help me understand how can someone say climate change is fake let alone being it isn't man made.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Climate Change is real and it's man made\n","id":"55c04547-78b0-4150-a78b-b34c773d1d45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Purity Pledges Harmful?<|ARGUMENT|>86% of school districts with a sex ed policy require promotion of abstinence and 51% of districts require that abstinence be taught as the preferred method of birth control.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abstinence programs undermine the promotion of other sex-ed programs within schools.\n","id":"91d4e9d3-e1bb-4df9-9360-8e18a52b59fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A friend said this to me today, as a feminist, that she thinks it's ok to hate men in general for their oppression of her, just not individually unless warranted. And that it's ok for blacks to hate whites for their continued oppression, just not individually unless warranted. As an atheist I kind of hate the religious community for their oppression and stupidity in our society, but I don't hate my religious friends. I see this as the hatred of a meme, not of a group. Race and gender of course are social constructs, so they are meme's as well, but I can't simply not be white or male, or try out being gay. I understand hating a meme, but personally, I feel attacked when people talk this way, even when it's someone I know who loves me as a person individual. Help me out with your perspective on this. BTW, I am a feminist as well, or feminist ally depending on how you prefer men in feminism to address themselves. I'm not MRA.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am a Straight, White, Male. I recognize my privilege. I don't like being put down because of it.\n","id":"23a16c93-03c0-4033-8211-5384826ef90b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think publicly elected officials responsible for driving policy and legislation should be required to explain why they vote certain ways in writing. Voting along party lines is reprehensible regardless of the side. Politics shouldn't be a game about which side wins, but rather which fact based opinions win regardless of sides. If the legislative bodies have no reasonable explanation for why they voted a certain way besides voting along party lines, they should not be allowed to vote because we have no reason to believe that they're not voting out of self interest. If, for example, someone in Congress voted against what seems to be reasonable gun law without explanation, but you can see in their financial disclosure that the NRA contributes a lot of money and support for them, how are we to know that their vote was not influenced by the NRA without them explicitly citing so and explaining what other reason compelled them not to vote for said reasonable legislation? I'm not even asking for a long written response from them. A short paragraph or page summary with sources they're using to base their vote on is good enough.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legislative bodies should be required to explain, in formal writing, why they voted a certain way when it comes to legislation.\n","id":"f9fd6d20-df59-4787-9a30-cc83d12241ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Islam compatible with feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>Qisas retributive justice is a category of crimes in Islamic jurisprudence where Sharia allows equal retaliation as the punishment. The principle is available against the accused, to the victim or victim's heirs, when a muslim is murdered, suffers bodily injury or suffers property damage. The principle of Qisas is not available as a legal course to non-muslims according to Islamic jurist literature of all Islamic doctrines of Sharia except Hanafi Sahih al-Bukhari 6903,Book 87, Hadith 42<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Islam treats believers of Islam and the infidels or apostates differently. Proscribed actions range from levying targeted taxes to killing.\n","id":"a893d29e-abce-4987-98e6-863aade2e162"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>People who suffer from issues such as erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation may feel more comfortable using a sex robot for sexual satisfaction, and in time this may make them more confident with regards to sex.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being able to receive sexual satisfaction is an important part of self-actualising and living a fulfilling life for many adults.\n","id":"e21cb301-0d37-4aa2-922b-65c4ef841c8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI is not the redistribution of income from those who earned it to those who did not. A UBI is the redistribution of accumulated wealth from those whose ancestors hoarded it to those whose ancestors have provided the labor and intellectual capital which has created that wealth seance the end of the stone age. A UBI is not a handout, it is inheritance from all of your ancestors for 10,000 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Property rights and capital ownership are community assets. Individuals with no property or capital need to be compensated by those who are hoarding these assets.\n","id":"bc6dec81-dac8-42a1-8d48-bf9f5bc8fea5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion has been used by oppressors to make their constituents blindly follow whatever they please on doing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion organizes and manipulates people in order to make them easier to control.\n","id":"d7d5dacd-e9ba-4f34-ba28-ee010112ab4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>1.The cost alone of taking the GRE is prohibitive especially in other countries due to the high dolar exchange rates against their local currencies. 2.Finding a tutor or studying for the GRE is very difficult outside the U.S because the systems of education are different. One who is lucky enough to afford it can take off time to study and cram for the GRE and score highly , but this has no direct correlation to their future perseverance and ability to excell in a graduate program. Putting the GRE as a requirement precludes that the U.S system of education is superior to other systems used in other countries and one has to first show their ability to compete in said system before being accepted into a U.S University.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":": The GRE requirement for graduate entry acceptance programmes in U.S Universities is not a correct measure for determining future performance and it unfairly restricts applicants from less privileged countries and backgrounds.\n","id":"8e3a6a5f-9153-4872-b949-70f5b5f73976"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>Historically the LGBT community has not always been inclusive and accepting of minority groups within it, such as the transgender community<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The LGBT community has not been devoid of racism and other forms of exclusion.\n","id":"f1a3e667-5974-4eb2-b89b-abc300bddd7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>Although the U.K. did not negotiate agreement with the EU in advance of the Brexit vote, Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty establishes the right of any member state to withdraw.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A central state and a breakaway region can negotiate the terms of a vote in advance to effectively mitigate risks of violence.\n","id":"14bb05ca-577a-4372-a1ac-0c5b8affcce2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion is a very special sphere of life and for many people around the world their religion is the most valuable thing they have, therefore if it is known that particular satire can insult believers and even lead to violence, the better way will be abstaining from it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Satire about religious sensitive topics can lead to violence and hatred.\n","id":"41a96788-37e3-47d2-b04a-645c16f06c02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, someone's nationality is not intrinsically morally relevant. But we construct national identities, and because of these identities and interrelationships we owe greater moral duties to people who share our nationality. Similarly, we could construct a \"species-identity\" which excludes animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Just because a characteristic does not seem intrinsically morally relevant, does not mean it cannot become morally relevant if we imbue it with meaning.\n","id":"9c44908b-748a-43a6-af0a-cd652c7b5731"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Violent acts like murder or rape are acceptable subjects in art and entertainment, yet it is understood that they are not acceptable behaviors in society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many subjects that are acceptable in popular and high culture that are appropriately unacceptable in society.\n","id":"5991e01a-944c-4412-8ae3-4a732bc33710"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>gt NOTE Thank you to everyone that has and continues to contribute This has turned into a really great conversation. My view on how to approach things I disagree with has certainly changed for the better. The best protest is not a boycott or screaming at the speaker, but starting a conversation and understanding both sides. This reveals flaws and avoids delays to change caused by close mindedness and violence. White nationalist Richard Spencer spoke today at the University of Florida. Protesters outnumbered supporters and drove Spencer to leave early by shouting and chanting during his speech. As a student at UF I'm proud of our reaction, but I believe we could have sent a stronger message by leaving Spencer to stand in a nearly empty auditorium. This approach to protesting would be our best move against his cause. Ignoring him is at minimum not being in the auditorium for his speech. It could go as far as making no acknowledgement of his presence on campus. A tiny audience of a few dozen supporters would make his ideas look irrelevant and emphasize our opposition much more effectively than an auditorium full of people yelling. Rejecting support of hate and racism by shunning it is better than shoving it. We would demonstrate our respect for the right to free speech by allowing Spencer to say what he wants to say, yet still show that his ideas don't belong here by boycotting the presentation. Protestors justified their method of activism by saying that Spencer's voice should not go unchallenged. The challenge we provided was go home, we don't want you here. An empty auditorium says that and more. TLDR front lines heated protesting with yelling, signs, climate for violence vs. symbolic mass boycott A boycott would be more powerful and safer for protestors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would have been best to ignore Richard Spencer's visit to UF\n","id":"f80ba83f-f7e1-44a0-8652-fcd7509639de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First I'd like to acknowledge that my natural attitude towards marketing and sales and advertising is probably the same as most people's. It's a little annoying when it gets overboard, but I basically understand it and consider it something of a necessary evil. In fact, I've been in positions where a big part of my job was to help sell products and services, and it wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible. But I've become convinced that this natural attitude of acceptance is way out of whack with our other preferences. I'm not sure if it's an evolutionary thing or a cultural thing, but I could imagine a world we treated people trying to sell us stuff as borderline repulsive and offensive and that things might be a lot better like that. In fact, I could go so far as to say that a big reason why some people think that socialist of communist economic systems would be better is because then sales and marketing aren't nearly as important. It could be that if we treated sales with a higher level of suspicion or potentially even disgust that many of the criticisms of capitalism would go away. Essentially all effective marketing is a form of dishonesty. If you ask me what's better widget A or widget B and they're basically the same and I know it, it's honest to say it doesn't matter which you choose. If I'm being paid to sell one of them I might highlight completely irrelevant features or try to build a relationship by taking you out to dinner to convince you to buy one over the other even though I know there's no difference. From an economic perspective this seems incredibly wasteful to me even though I understand the incentives everyone in the situation has We have 5 companies selling very similar products for very similar prices Assuming it's not a natural monopoly, and that the companies can all cover costs with about 1 5 of the market then they should sell slightly more with a slightly better widget or slightly lower price and we should get a pretty efficient outcome Now one of the companies borrows some money and invests in a big sales team. They go out and push, and sometimes cross, the boundaries of honesty and spend money on golf and fancy dinners with CEOs and buy a lot of fancy advertising Given our current attitudes towards being sold to like this, that we probably know we're essentially being lied to about the relative quality of the products, we're still likely to buy more of that companies products. Advertising, sales and marketing is basically a fixed cost in this example, so one company increases their bottom line despite not creating any more value. They might even be able to increase prices or sell slightly inferior products if their sales team is good enough. All that extra money spent to sell products creates no new value for anyone, it just shifts demand amongst the existing suppliers. This might lead to other companies not being able to sell enough to stay in business and now the sales heavy company picks up even more of the market. They can easily pay back the money they borrowed, and invest more and more of their profits in to sales and marketing Eventually if other companies don't also spend a ton of money on sales, they'll probably go out of business too. We end up with a single company with no competition that can easily make worse products and sell them more expensively now. It'll be very hard for anyone else to enter the market because customers are out looking for competitors, we're just buying whoever advertises to us the most. And to keep things this way the company that owns the market will continue to spend a huge amount of sales as a deterrent to competitors. The fact that we the customers accept that essentially being lied to is a natural part of doing business has shifted the market from a very efficient place to one where worse products are being sold at higher prices and a huge amount of the profit is being spent to advertise to customers who don't have any other choices. There's a lot of economic activity, but not a lot of useful value being created. Not every market ends up like this, but I think a lot of big important markets do. I think it's easy to lots of examples of very profitable companies that are mostly differentiated by how much they spend on sales and advertising. Why aren't we upset about this? Rationally it seems to me like we should, but I don't have a natural instinctive response of disgust or anger or even to be annoyed enough to do something about it. However, that's not always the case. Think about how vilified drug dealers are. They're people who don't have to actively market their products at all, and yet they're often portrayed as aggressively marketing their products. Or think about companies that sell products related to sex, it's pretty much not acceptable for them to advertise their products most of the time, even though they're pretty popular. Or advertising on porn websites, we do attach a negative connotation to legitimate companies that do advertising there. So it seems like there are situations where we won't accept advertising, they're just not very common. And advertising has become a distorting influence in almost all media every where. Movies have product placement, TV shows are made to appeal to the most marketable audience, every good web service has their motives undermined by the necessity of them selling ads. All newspapers and news outlets of all kinds are overwhelmingly paid for by advertising. And of course it is, it's such an efficient way to sell us stuff. We buy a TV and pay for cable and then the ad is just tacked on to the content we already want. They don't have to come up with fancy marketing and then find a way to convince us to watch it, we pay for distribution of the ads. Is there any reason I shouldn't be upset about being marketed to this heavily, all the time, on every useful service? Why shouldn't I be upset that a huge amount of the money I spend on nearly every product is being used to lie to me about it, and prevent good competitors from offering me something better. I know that it's the free market but why do we accept this? Why shouldn't we all be more upset?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our relatively blase attitude towards marketing, sales and advertising carries a lot of costs and unwanted negative effects\n","id":"dd80c6f6-e63c-42b1-b9f8-4f5c27e0ce8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>New York City also charge a flat-rate Bed Tax of $2 per room to travellers staying in a listing that is considered a hotel under state law. Through ignorance of the fact that they are legally considered to own a hotel, or through reluctance to tax their rent charge, many New York City Airbnb hosts do not collect this tax.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"New York City and State impose multiple taxes that Airbnb guests - all those who rent apartments short-term - are liable to pay. These taxes are not, however, collected by all Airbnb hosts.\n","id":"dfb13b8b-8e88-4fa7-a6d9-01bd298dd58d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>It does not benefit the wars going on in other countries, so it's a distraction instead. It diverts our efforts away from what truly matters towards culinary entertainment, which is shameful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pineapple on pizza creates more harm than good for certain instances, so it ought not to be present on it.\n","id":"bd8ecf8c-1d2f-40b1-8db2-92d6813b6d7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that manufacturing jobs are leaving the US, but the downsides of this are outweighed by the higher purchasing power because of cheaper goods produced in other countries. I also don't think manufacturing jobs would ever come back to the US even if we repealed all the trade deals we have currently. The manufacturing jobs would inevitably be manufactured so we may as well outsource them so other people in developing nations can have jobs. The most recent example of a free trade agreement is the TPP and I believe it would actually be benefical to the US because it would require countries such as China to actually increase regulation and workers protections. If anything this just levels the playing field and improves upon the lives of chinese workers. This Washington post article goes more indepth on a lot of what I'm talking about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free trade is beneficial to the US and unfortunately manufacturing jobs will never return.\n","id":"5a0a623f-4dce-4a37-9307-a574ce1b987a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Some months ago four Czech soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Since then there have been lots of events to remind our nation of their bravery and so\u2026 People have been repeatedly goind mad about it all. I guess you know what I mean. But personally I don't really care about them. They fought for other nation's interests, on another country's land and they have entered the battlefield voluntarily. I feel sorry for their families\u2019 loss but I don't understand why they were immediately called heroes. Could you please  about that please. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't feel sorry for Czech soldiers killed in Afghanistan.\n","id":"c45d857d-9aba-4bbd-8dbe-9cc425035366"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>1 per cent of people earn more, then 99 per cent of the rest of the population together. zeit.de<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The earth is not suffering from overpopulation. It is rather suffering from wrong\/bad distribution.\n","id":"66ef78a6-0f40-408c-a5d3-265bb7cfc8e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this was done already. However, I don't think that post really touched on my reasons, and the comments, though they sort of convinced me, didn't do so enough that my view was changed, just enough that I saw the benefit of each side. So, here's why I think GMOs shouldn't be labelled. Ethics and corporate responsibility. The government should not make companies label foods that have nothing wrong with them, and companies should not be responsible for labeling modified foods as a result. Practicality and economics. It's impractical to label GM foods since pretty much everything is genetically modified. It would be more practical to label non GM foods, yes, but IIRC organic foods aren't GM. There's no need for the labeling. Economically, it would cost more. I don't think it would cost much, but to my knowledge the only people that would know if they did are the companies, and they are against labeling GM foods. Granted, there's inherently a bias here, but unless other studies have been done on this topic, the companies are to be believed. Social and political standards. To my knowledge, there are no religious groups against GM foods. I am probably wrong but I have seen no evidence that I am so I'm not sure. Socially, labeling GM foods implies that there is either something wrong with them or something socially or culturally better with non GM foods. I can't speak for cultural values, but socially, GM crops are widespread and as a result important to most people. In addition, politically, labeling GM crops implies a precedent that false science and misinformation are enough to create law. Please use sources if you can find any.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think labeling genetically modified products is unnecessary and actually detrimental socially and economically.\n","id":"e3f4d0dd-01d2-4003-ba2a-d5fdf4f23d72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m a huge fan of the original Twilight Zone. Rod Serling was a courageous and brilliant man completely dedicated to equality for all and racial and sexual equity. He wrote amazing and interesting stories that deftly and effectively handled these social and equity issues. Many of his stories were so subtle that you didn\u2019t realize the message until days later. But you did realize it and you understood it. He was completely unafraid and I believe he had a real hand in forming my young mind in a thoughtful and positive way. What have I learned from Jordon Peele? First Nations folks good, women good, African Americans good, Muslims good, Hispanics good. Men bad. White men worse. White male cops worst of all. Men are all rapists at heart. Men hate all immigrants and want to separate families. There is no quality story telling here. The message is as subtle as a frying pan to the head. It\u2019s just plain wretched. I love science fiction. I love storytelling. I love the format of the short story told through film. We are at episode five now. And each is worse than the first and the first was terrible. There are plenty of people who can pull off what Rod Serling did. He was an enormous talent. But he is not a unicorn. It can be done. But not by Peele. It\u2019s unwatchable. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The New Twilight Zones Constant And Absurdly Heavy Handed Social Justice Messaging Renders the Show Completely Unwatchable.\n","id":"05df56b8-c4ae-413e-aac7-8fc4df3ab86e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US government guarantee every citizen a job?<|ARGUMENT|>A poll conducted by Lake Research Partners shows there is overwhelming bi-partisan support for expanding Social Security. 73 percent of voters favor increasing Social Security benefits, including 57 percent who strongly favor, while just 19 percent oppose.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Big, universal programs like Social Security and Medicaid remain overwhelmingly popular among voters.\n","id":"bf7e17f1-5869-4d9d-9587-718631b44916"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In high school i was very liberal on social and economic principles to the point where I consider socialism as a better economic system to capitalism. I have read the communist manifesto and countless wikipedia articles. Not saying these things make me an expert, but i did consider myself to be educated on the subject. However in college my views have been drifting slowly and surely to the right of the political spectrum and i now believe that lower taxes, very little government intervention, and less unions would make the United States more competitive in Education and manufacturing globally. I am a 22 year old white male. I am an atheist agnostic so religion has no pull on my social views, such as gay marriage , which i support, or anything like that. I am very tolerant have black friends and even a Mexican girlfriend so racism does not cloud my judgement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Its more logical to be economically conservative in your political views.\n","id":"b886c372-19d5-4c78-8335-1e5dd6152564"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The idea that we can pass moral judgement on people in any sort of world where choice is not self caused and the outcome is set is dumb. Comparability arguing for biologically based free will amount to saying that if something becomes really really really complex, it has free will eventually. If our choices are simply pure products of neurology, than no amount of complexity will ever allow for free will, and thus morality, in any meaningful sense. Bonus cmv I don't believe that choices are made purely from the brain I think consciousness existing at all is evidence for some sort of immaterial soul.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the philosophy of compatibilism is moronic and is just a semantics\/tautological argument that means nothing\n","id":"bcfc2ad7-0afb-48ff-960c-2bf988030e6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's always an effort by some high profile celebrity to tackle an issue plaguing society. Mental health is one of the current targets and the effort is to remove the stigma surrounding mental health. Now, the stigma of mental health disorders is fairly obvious being mentally ill makes one a less sociable creature less capable of socialization and cooperation. Broadly speaking, mental illness tends to cloud reality for the afflicted. If one cannot accurately parse reality, then they cannot sympathize or identify with the same set of problems that mentally healthy people deal with. There are of course degrees of mental illness detachment from reality, but it's safe to say that the most severe cases tend to make themselves known and any detachment from the generally agreed upon reality that most healthy people experience will be easily identified. There are stigmas surrounding a large host of physical ailments for good reasons. To take the extreme, those will Ebola would be isolated and removed from society for fear of spreading the disease thereby deteriorating the social fabric and general cohesiveness of our society. Now, while mental health cannot be spread like a deadly virus, it can certainly deteriorate the social fabric. Humans like consistency and reliability. Most mental illnesses affect a person's ability to act in a consistent logical manner with any sort of reliability. For the sake of fleeting brevity, the ways in which mental illness can negatively affect our lives are pretty obvious. It is for these reasons that I don't think the stigma surrounding mental illness can ever be overcome. As long as mental illness exists, there will be a penchant for the disruption of societal expectations and the reliability that lies therein. We can medicate ill people, like we would those with viral conditions, but that probably only reinforces the stigma mental illness is so stigmatized that we need to have people on a constant regimen of medication in order to facilitate them acting normal . Because mental illness, like other physical ailments, goes against our intuitive sense, the stigma can never be overcome. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The stigma surrounding mental health disorders can never be overcome.\n","id":"6169cb74-ee9b-49f9-a807-ec6c2ed368b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Release of Osama bin Laden death photos<|ARGUMENT|>Why they released the death picture of Saddam but don't dare to release that of Osama's? The only reason is that Iraq is down but Al-Qaeda is still there, so their path of terrorism is effective. It is an encouragement to them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Al-Qaeda will see withholding photos as sign of their impact.\n","id":"aef0870d-1d6c-4a82-89aa-5e4bacdd7520"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Crime cameras<|ARGUMENT|>Cameras are there to protect the public. They are not in place to spy on people and have no interest in the personal lives of those on camera. The only interest is in the people breaking the law. If a person has nothing to hide then they should have no problem being filmed, they should be thankful that the authorities are trying to protec them and their peers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a person has nothing to hide, then there is no issue.\n","id":"ae4a5902-0981-4b94-93e5-e945a6a85843"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The structure and complexity of Lord of the Rings is not evidence of ancient authenticity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Saying something is complex does not necessarily make it ancient.\n","id":"47c33409-2a6b-4dbe-b2d5-f129c90d0a2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be one World Government?<|ARGUMENT|>Israel\u2019s decision to acquire a nuclear weapon was the surest way to negate the inherent conventional imbalances population and military strength it had as compared to its Arab neighbors, and thereby ensure the Jewish state\u2019s survival.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Currently states develop nuclear weapons and invest in nuclear technology so that they can be superior to other nations and have greater bargaining power.\n","id":"4d99f05a-1956-40b3-86ee-df34919c6f23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Mercedes-Benz User Experience MBUX really a revolution in the vehicle cockpit?<|ARGUMENT|>Touch control requires the driver to take his\/her eyes of the road whereas knob controls can usually be controlled without actually looking at them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The touch control is not really an advantage in comparision to the knob controllers.\n","id":"86a7d084-c3d8-430a-a0de-664339daa96f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Don't downvote based on your religious views please. I'm interested in what a mostly Atheist community can say about this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm an Atheist interested in Christianity. to Christianity.\n","id":"700704ed-d4de-4d50-878d-320ce1fb5bc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For a long time I've been haunted by the science fictiony idea that mankind will someday build those perfect virtual reality simulations and migrate into them en masse. What's worse, I feel like this is a justifiable goal for humanity. Assuming everyone migrates, this grants maximal happiness to the species and harms no one. Nobody needs to suffer, and even those whose happiness depends on the suffering of others can torture non sentient NPCs to get their kicks. I do feel conflicted about my conclusion, which is why I'm posting here. Some part of me thinks that eternal hedonic thrills in a perfected Virtual Heaven just can't be the final goal for our species. But I've not seen convincing arguments against it. I've explored a lot of SF dealing with this topic, and it seems that media usually resort to logistics arguments against VR viruses in the Wired The Matrix is run by a dictator Our bodies decay while we're plugged in which don't really address the validity of the goal itself, just the challenges in implementing it. But here are some of the stronger arguments against it It's never as satisfying as real life Assuming a near perfect simulation indistinguishable from reality, this point is moot. We'd lose the human connection with friends and family. If everyone migrates and the simulation is perfectly realistic, your interactions with friends will be as 'immediate' and nuanced as those IRL Culture will stagnate, the species will die out. Very possibly. In theory we can engineer more humans I imagine robots will continue to operate IRL to maintain the VR systems anyway but in such a situation we probably won't be motivated to do so. After all, why make more real people when you can have perfect simulated children instead? Art will likely continue to develop, but all other cultural pursuits will probably fall by the wayside. I guess I don't see that we have any moral obligation to indefinitely perpetuate either our species or our culture. All human endeavor becomes meaningless. You could argue that we each create our own meaning, and being completely in control of our destiny doesn't change that. I look forward to hearing your feedback<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should all live in VR\n","id":"4b8e0074-85d9-4486-8362-973d7f9b3b93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it critically important for high quality educational experiences that all students learn to arrive on time?<|ARGUMENT|>People who arrive late disrupts and distracts the class from the teaching, making it harder for students to become properly focused on the subject being taught.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Beginning on time relieves the teacher of having to repeat information to stragglers. This makes a happier, more energetic, and thus more effective teacher.\n","id":"1ec95e04-20e8-49ca-9a30-b245aed9019b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Teachers and students should use digital learning from home when school is cancelled due to inclement weather.<|ARGUMENT|>In some regions, the number of canceled school days is higher than in others. Digital education is a way to eliminate this inequity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers and students should use digital learning from home when school is cancelled due to inclement weather.\n","id":"6b4af0cd-4f74-4251-943a-ec5785ae740e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be further research on solar geoengineering.<|ARGUMENT|>By not dealing with the root cause of climate change, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, researchers have predicted that a sudden suspension in the implementation of solar geoengineering could cause climate change to resume at a much quicker pace than prior to the implementation of solar geoengineering Matthews and Caldeira, 2007. In agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Too risky - an abrupt halt mid-deployment would result in rapid climate warming which is worse than gradual global warming Robock. atmos.washington.edu\n","id":"8f52c7d9-1037-40be-85a0-ad84a719fba2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Admittedly I do not have an obsessive interest in this subject as some do. Exist wound physics alone explain Kennedy's head exploding backwards, and seat positions in the specific model of car explain the magic bullet . There is no need for a grand conspiracy when Oswald himself previously tried to assassinate people and held a vendetta against the governor of Texas and, as a Marxist, disliked the president enough to kill him. He was a very capable shot, and without sufficient cause to believe foul play in the assassination, I have no reason to suspect a larger conspiracy. I am very open to new information that may change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe there was anything more to the JFK assassination than Lee Harvey Oswald, alone, wanting to kill the president.\n","id":"5f81c91b-7ed2-4922-86f5-2e5c266c4072"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For years, the mainstream rap game has been nothing but the promoting violence, drugs, making money illegally, street credibility, breaking the law, not going to school, and a whole bunch of negative activities. This is something that truly saddens me honestly, because as an African American male, I try to live my life as positive as I can. Yet, I still see young men every day, trapped. I have friends that are caught in the cycle of trying to live the lives of rap characters such as Chief Keef, Lil Wayne, Juicy J, 2 Chainz, Meek Mill, and French Montana. These are the just a handful of rappers who, to me, glorify being the stereotype. You know, the pants sagging, unpredictable, irritable, violent stereotype that, whether you personally acknowledge it or not, exists for the young black male today. Sure, it's a shame that, for a person with such a public platform as a rapper, choose to talk about the things they do. But you know whats worse to me? We give in. We buy the music. We blast the music and attempt to live the life of a hustler, of a gang banger. We allow ourselves to be spoon fed with stupidity. I know there's tons of great, positive African American artists out there, I'm very aware of that. But one would expect that in the year 2013, many more African Americans blessed with musical talents would strive to better our image. I'm tired of seeing my race get pulled down the drain because of their lack of direction and confidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that blacks have some of the worst mainstream music around and its literally killing our youth.\n","id":"6165dff7-7b22-4fe6-ae41-e2bc6fc7b3a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>Many within the LGBT community feel like the movement as a whole is unaccepting of religious beliefs. This can be particularly problematic for those who identify as LGBT individuals yet also belong to a recognised faith group, as they may feel as though they are at odds with secular members and groups within the community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having too broad a definition of a social group with a collective identity can lead to sectarian solidarity where sub-groups of the group begin to see each other as 'us vs them'.\n","id":"7315771e-7bb3-4f2a-8a04-65a9dd9fce90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>When the government stole money from the Greek population, it was indeed theft and not robbery. This also had the effect that people all over the world learned to remove their funds to other places if they didn't want to suffer the same fate. This could be done since the threat of punishment for such actions was absent. If taxation however, was also theft and not robbery, people would likewise learn how to hide their funds and they wouldn't need to fear punishment from governments for it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An additional thing to think about, the discussion's topic is, \"Is taxation theft?\" If the government didn't threaten its citizenry with imprisonment, but merely reached into its citizenry's bank accounts and took the money, it would not meet the definition of robbery, but it would still meet the definition of theft. This discussion allows claims based on things like Greece's seizure of bank accountscointelegraph.com While still allowing claims based on robberywhich is a subset of theft.\n","id":"679b4476-df7a-42fd-aac7-f8239ff62c53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Any murder that wasn't completely by accident should be an automatic life sentence at the very least. These degrees to murder are absolutely ridiculous. Murder is murder, no matter how you killed the person the end result is the same. No matter how many people you killed, somebody is still dead FOREVER. Yes I know somebody chopping somebody up and feeding them to dogs is worse than just a gunshot to the head but either way, you killed someone. The person who you killed never gets a chance to come back to life, so why the hell should you be able to leave prison and live almost like a normal person again? You shouldn't, and yes, people can change but that doesn't matter. Cause no matter how good you may be later, the person you killed doesn't get a second chance so neither should you. I don't want murderers walking among civilized people. TLDR All intentional murderers should be given life sentences with no chance of EVER being released. Murderers should never be able to walk the streets with civilized people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intentional murders should have an automatic life\/death sentence.\n","id":"3c1eee47-1817-4a3d-8cc9-23ec8eb60231"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Graduated response antipiracy laws<|ARGUMENT|>Google lawyers concluded responding to a New Zealand draft of 'graduated response' principle: 'Mere allegations of copyright infringement should not trump users' rights. Copyright law is often complex and context sensitive, and only a court is qualified to adjudicate allegations of copyright infringement. Indeed, in Google\u2019s experience, there are serious issues regarding the improper use and inaccuracy of copyright notices by rights holders.\"5<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Graduated response relies on mere accusations w\/o due process.\n","id":"cf3cd907-2826-45f5-9f08-3b09a528c27f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care, Debate on Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>A lack of willingness to invest in expensive technology leads to shortages in areas such as MRI scanning. Some would argue that only the price mechanism in free market health care can allocate resources efficiently and that political pressure often leads to shortages in socialized systems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under investment in single-payer system leads to capacity shortages\n","id":"1e607699-78c5-4e48-8c7b-b5073342653b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would like to preface this post with the statement that I am a man and also a feminist. My political views tend to be utilitarian, libertarian anarchist , and structuralist Marxist . This kind of puts me in the tradition of classical liberals who thought that people free to converse and act produced the freest and therefore best society. In real life, I tend to be more feminist than almost all the people I know, at least in appreciating feminism in the same tradition of other civil rights activities and in consideration of gender politics in social and cultural contexts. What I would like to consider for a moment is an evaluation of feminism from a purely structural focus. I'd like to discharge the ethical and factual context of feminism and look at the endgame of a feminist society. This society, I am concerned with is something like this Women and men have equal access to wealth, education or if you'd like privilege generally. When it comes to asymmetric laws such as those affecting childbirth, the laws are consistent with what feminists want. That is, free access for contraception, abortion, etc. I'll not consider some of the social goals of feminism. I'm not sure if feminists think that rape would disappear in an ideal feminist society or which mechanisms they think would cause this to happen. Neither am I sure whether feminists think that gender ratios would all go to 50 under equal access to privilege so we can ignore this focus. The point is that under these circumstances, it seems like men have been stripped of just about every biological advantage. Women choose whose genes get passed along almost completely. Women have more access to contraceptive action Morning after pill, contraception, etc. Since men aren't aren't allowed to use physical force, the way matters are settled are through social interaction where women have strong biological advantages. Furthermore, reproductively, almost every man on earth has become redundant. One man is enough to satisfy the reproductive needs of at least ten women. Without privilege, that makes at least 90 of men biologically irrelevant. This seems to imply a strongly uneven power structure. I honestly don't see any biological advantage to being a man in this context whatsoever except perhaps that men can usually masturbate more easily. And while masturbation is great, I can't see it as the basis of a free society. I can see no structural reason for men to advocate feminism. What am I missing? I'm not asking you to defend feminism. I'm pro feminist so your attempts to defend feminism by definition cannot change my view. I'm asking you to change my view about the particular consequences of a feminist society. Read the damned post. People, I am trying to understand the important issues better. Very frequently, I am the only feminist who has to represent it to other people. It would make my job easier if I could represent how feminism makes for a better society and how it isn't emasculating. I am a very rational analytical person who can take any argument seriously if it's adequately supported. Even if an argument is difficult or goes against my beliefs, I will give it full consideration. Thanks to those of you that have stayed with me even in the face of a difficult topic. I apologize for using a bad title for this. A lot of people have a very hard time understanding why someone would want to discuss something theoretically instead of in practice. But by practicing, maybe it will become easier for both of us.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The triumph of feminism would result in the imposition of a power structure that is significantly weighted against men.\n","id":"60c55e88-9987-4b19-a3cc-a876abc01255"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that if the earth exploded right now and every human being died it would not make a difference. It would be really sad if people died few by few like in some apocalyptic movies 2012, World War Z, The Day After Tomorrow . Seeing people you love dying would be horrible. But if everyone died at the same time, what is the difference? Nobody would be sad, nobody would suffer. And I even think that if just the human beings died and the other living species stayed alive, the world would be a better place for them to live. Don't get me wrong. I'm not suicidal and I don't wanna die. But if someone said to me that everyone would die in 1 minute, I think I would just be like Whatever<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if the world ends, it wouldn't be a bad thing.\n","id":"c6be1791-cacc-4170-8cf1-78617922a966"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>It is essential that humans become a multi-planetary species<|ARGUMENT|>Research evidence shows that there is a high level of public complacency and a 'wait and see' attitude that is preventing action on climate change and further endangering the biodiversity of life on Earth, as well as our own survival scripts.mit.edu<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The pace of global climate change is already occurring at such a rate that it would be foolish to not take actions that aid our transition to a multi-planetary species\n","id":"873a117e-0dc0-4861-affb-5669d33c5af5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Equal Paternity\/Maternity Paid Leave Be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Under a meritocratic system, whether mandatory paternity leave is introduced or not, women who do not have the necessary skills or qualifications will continue to be overlooked.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rejection of female employees will not be solved by mandatory paternity leave, as there are other reasons employers prefer to hire men.\n","id":"d012ca10-61ab-4840-8c60-cf9ab5bb4d51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was born and raised as a full blood Jewish child I went through a Bar Mitzvah, I went to Sunday school every week, I went to the synagogue every week. Shortly after my Bar Mitzvah, I'd say within about 6 months. I really fell off and started questioning the belief system. Now I believe with certainty there is no 'God' from any religion I don't know how it was created in the first place. We are simply self aware sentient beings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe in any 'God' or life after death.\n","id":"5d4b563b-06c0-4dbb-93fe-9d725fd45a6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Violence is not the only route. Seeking help from a stronger ally through use of diplomacy to intimidate your foe through the threat of possible violence is a way as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Violence only begets more violence. Hence, the act of not resorting to violence is good for humanity, not bad. Violence is not the only route to protecting one's self.\n","id":"913c959d-198f-4fc4-8348-ca3a40a3afca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This  is not about whether or not GMO's are good. I should start off by saying that I am very pro GMO, but the subject of whether they are good or bad has been debated far to many times on this subreddit and the answer is always overwhelmingly clear. My position is that being anti GMO is a conservative position. GMO's are a new technology that many people are afraid of. They are afraid of it because it changes the nature of the food that we eat. The people who are against GMO's want to keep farming the way it has always been done, no matter how inefficient. This shows extreme caution to change and a general refusal to accept new technology. This is near the definition of conservative. Also many liberals argue against automatization. Automatization is the key to progress and has been shown over and over again to create more jobs in the long term than it initially takes in the short. I believe that many kids like the idea of being called progressives and liberals because they want to make a change in the world. But they are doing the opposite by being anti GMO and anti automatization. I also think that it is incredibly hypocritical to be anti GMO and not anti nuclear power as both are efficient new technologies that may most likely not cause harm. I believe that people aren't looking at their beliefs and just listen to whatever the person closest says first. To change my view show me how my definitions are wrong or how attempting to inhibit technology is not a conservative viewpoint.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being anti GMO is an extremely conservative position, and that many \"liberals\" are far from progessive\n","id":"cf039a3e-5c11-462c-83d6-38cfaaa5abcc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Sanders has fallen behind in South Carolina polls a state where a majority of Democratic voters are Black.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanders has difficulty connecting with Black voters a key constituency of the Democratic party.\n","id":"2d950fd5-0b5a-4486-a745-d5f75e6a4d52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I had a discussion with a friend today and he argued that pornography shouldn't be seen as art, here is the jist of what he said I don't think pornography should be considered art as art needs to have a specific purpose which is to evoke a relatable reaction to some extent. Much of art works with empathy such as the writings of Dante, which, while most human beings have not been to Hell and back, we can certainly relate Pornography has a purpose, but it is only to advertise the viewer to view more by giving that person an unrealistic view of how sex works. EDIT I too believe that pornography is not art, but I believe my friend had said it better than I could.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pornography should not be seen as art\n","id":"a59fdbb2-00a3-4627-b5ed-8cd5c18841ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit I'm referring to convictions of falsely accused rape and successful rape. I can't change the OP I still think falsely accusing someone of rape should have a higher penalty to it though I want to preface this by saying rape is an awful, horrendous crime that only the lowest of the low commit. It has no justification and rapists deserve a very very very long stint in prison for what they did. And if they do ever get out, everyone deserves to know they were a rapist. I am not condoning rape in any way and I think it is one of the worst crimes there is. That being said, knowingly being the cause of convicting someone of rape is worse. You are knowingly ruining someone's life. Depending on your country, the prison term for rape is a long time and even when you get out, you are labeled as a rapist, which is basically as bad as everyone knowing you have the plague. If someone does this, I really can't understand what is going through someone's head. That person's quality of life will never be able to recover from something like that. Their life is effectively destroyed 99 of the time. And they are innocent. Someone who does it is completely destroying a completely innocent person's life for no reason. And if there is some reason, I can't think of one that would even come close to justifying it. On the other hand, if you rape someone, you also are really really negatively effecting someone's life. They are emotionally and sometimes usually physically damaged. Possibly for a very long time the rest of their life. But, they have a chance at recovering. Therapy and healthcare and a good network of people who support you can all really help get you past the rape, at least to an extent. Most rape victims do recover to the extent that they can lead normal lives. The same cannot be true of people who are falsely convicted of rape. And the penalty for falsely accusing someone is WAAAAY lower than rape. AND the rapee has the opportunity to punish the rapist by turning them in but the vast majority of the time the falsely accused rapist can do nothing to the false accuser. My belief doesn't apply to countries like India, etc where rape is a broken law<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think knowingly falsely accusing someone of rape is worse than raping someone.\n","id":"e4e8e9c1-f213-4d1c-8ec5-b7f5cbde963c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best measure to fight against climate change?<|ARGUMENT|>Other behaviors such as travel emit more than veganism, so priorities should be to prioritize these detrimental behaviors over diet. This change would lead to a greater environmental benefit than just everyone going vegan.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One example is where people may engage in other behaviors that are more harmful to the environment than any benefit they create, as they justify their behavior through moral self-licensing\n","id":"b77d9033-4b8b-4557-b3a7-5a4fbb6d0604"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Divine Command theory of morality holds that the only way morals can be objective is by command from a god or gods. There are multiple objections to this view, mainly the following If God s commanded morality, why did they pick the laws they did? They either pciked these laws because they themselves saw that they were good, in which case there was a moral law before them, or they picked them simply because they arbitrarily like them, which means our moral laws are still arbitrary decisions. Objective moral laws can be established through evolution, according to what is best suited for enabling a complex society. My counter arguments Compare the moral laws to the laws of physics. Is the speed of light objective? Did God s choose the value of c because it was what they themselves OBSERVED, or did they pick it because they simply wanted it to be that way? The consequences for both are logically the same as they are for the moral laws. This leads me to only one conclusion The standard for objectivity is wrong. A law is not objective because it has always been present, it is objective when we are universally bound by these rules and their consequences. Evolution can indeed explain why we feel guilt and a sense that some things are good i.e, beneficial to society , and that we should do those things. However, there are two problems here A. What we feel is right what is actually right. Different people can feel differently about what actions are good or bad. If this is how we define true good and bad, they must therefore have inconsistent definitions, making them arbitrary. B. An action being beneficial to society gives no reason why we should always follow it. What if I don't care what is good for society? The component of DCT that makes it the only objective option is that the Lawgiver s are either omnipotent, or at the very least, have the full capability to universally and inescapably enforce the consequences for breaking their rules. If there is no God s and no afterlife, there is no reason for behaving morally. Whether I act according to society's definition of good, or I become the next Hitler, the consequences are non existent, and the ultimate outcome is the same. In the end, everyone is dead and their consciousness no longer exists, and the universe either ends in the Big Rip or winds down to nothing. To illustrate this further, imagine there was only one god, and he made a set of moral rules for humanity. However, there is no afterlife, and there is no reward or punishment for your actions. Does this moral scenario seem objective to you? As a note, I am a Christian, but this is NOT an argument for my God or any other. It is only an argument that objective morality cannot exist without the consequences imposed by an omnipotent god s .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Divine Command\" Theory of Morality Is Correct.\n","id":"5beaf649-1e47-4d81-b93d-cedddb4caf59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to start this by saying I'm absolutely against religion, I hate it but I force myself to respect it. This is important because when I talk about this most people will try to catechize me, and it won't work. I don't believe in any life experiences after death and other stuff related to it. By average person I mean someone like myself. I am completely irrelevant to the society as an individual and for my whole life I've been doing nothing but studying so I can hope one day that'll change. So that talk about making the world a little better than you found it doesn't sound enough for me. A very common answer to this is to find your own happiness. I'm a very materialistic person, if i had to choose a world in which I'd be happy, it would be one where I can get whatever i want without worrying about not having enough money. Since I'm not from a family that can afford that, I would have to spend the rest of my days studying and working very hard in order to accomplish at least 10 of it. I was in college studying biotechnology and I loved it, I'm fascinated with science. I honestly think that's a career that can make changes in many people's lives and if I could I'd follow it for the rest of my life. But I dropped out because the odds of being successful as a researcher where I live are extremely low, and I'm now trying to join an university for chemical engineering. When I think about this I think I'm the most selfish person, but I can't convince myself to change my view no matter what I do. I believe a TL DR would be something like if I know I'm not going to accomplish my goals in life, why should I even try?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there's no motivation at all for the average person to keep living.\n","id":"aa3a8804-3339-420a-b5f4-5fbb82383231"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Having Children Selfish?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if a child has difficulties - an appalling start, difficult upbringing, physical or mental health issues - there are plenty of role models in the world who have overcome similar issues, and this has given them a degree of perspective that allows them to give back in a notable way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By not having children, the world is deprived of all the good that the child could have done.\n","id":"b13f3a1b-5784-48e2-9a80-e4ed2fc7ce78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Throwaway for obvious reasons. I find nothing wrong with hating being afraid of races, sexes, sexual orientation, although I do know that this is a flawed opinion, I've never heard an arguement that isn't based in morals. My reasoning for having this opinion is you can be these things, as long as you don't harm anyone. Your thoughts are your own. You, as a human, can like or dislike anything you want. The only wrong thing about any of these is the harm that it can do. At least that's what I think. I would like to  on this, but I want a reason different than It's wrong or It's disrespectful Hope I can have a civil discussion, if it's not too much to ask. Also, as far what the sidebar says, this isn't against the rules.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It isn't wrong to be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.\n","id":"63add6f7-1655-45c2-bc2f-020d2d6b7d8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Children Be Banned From Watching Shows That Contain Violence and Other Adult Contents?<|ARGUMENT|>In a study done carried out by Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute in 2002 children who watched between one and three hours of children's television programmes each week had a higher chance of growing up to commit violent acts than those who watched less than an hour of childrens TV a day BBC Online News \"Talking Point can watching children Now although this study is based on children's television it raises questions as to what adult content a child should watch. Already we get reports of violent attacks by children and sexual assualts on children by children being exposed to things at a younger age than they should have been.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Watching adult content can make children susceptible to commiting violent or sexually inappropriate acts\n","id":"6ba44ff6-d9d5-4e0e-b7ea-811e7a67c55a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>The serpent is part of God. He can't get rid of it. We made the mistake of listening to him and disobeying. The higher purpose is that we have to grow up and finish the Journey of Knowledge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best possible world may still logically require the existence of evil and suffering.\n","id":"c2a476c9-fb78-4a54-bc56-c1527685cf94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>Starfleet developed new weaponry to combat Borg vessels, and were seen to adapt conventional weaponry to target the unique weaknesses of the Borg in the heat of battle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Starfleet's core philosophy is adaptability. This enables them to eventually exceed even superior foes in the long-run.\n","id":"02ca7931-3157-4328-8705-34783ff1b5cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Western neo-tantra is an authentic form of tantra.<|ARGUMENT|>There are no reported accounts of tantra in the Bible, however Jesus was considered an enlightened man.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many ways to achieve enlightenment that does not include tantra.\n","id":"2d5c7618-a2bc-4e29-afe6-2b5a1fab9358"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, here is the deal. I live in DC and burn 1300 month in rent and am single. Just got laid off from my job that paid 75K year which is like 50K after tax that provided me with roughly 20K year after rent student loans. Unemployment will pay me 1400 month for 12 months and in the last year I grew my portfolio 250,000 from less than zero and in the next 12 months I'm going to grow it an additional 750,000 to round it out at around 1M, a good portion of these gains will be untaxable because they are in a roth ira. Anyway, what is the point of working ever again? any takers? I could easily coast through the next 12 months on unemployment while my portfolio appreciates and then invest into 10 yielding BDCs and collect 100,000 a year in dividend income, most of which would be not taxable. ha. Also, I am looking at a few opportunities. I am working with a friend who may make some trading algo's that will likely produce in my opinion 8 figures a year in profits. Then there is this other gig, but I can't do the trading algo's with this one, but this would would start at the beginning of next year and I'd be finding businesses for a 100M investment from an overseas fund and each company that I can place I'd get around 1.75M a pop. And here I sit, I'm so cheap that I am unwilling to sell stock to pay my editor to finish writing my book. maybe i should crowdfund it? I could try and raise 5K that way. It is my estimate that 5K would get it past the finish line and self published my thing is that 5K just is a big chunk when I am trying to coast into retirement. Anyway, I'd like to have kids and carry a wife someday, but i think it would be stupid to walk away from a life of leisure to become a wage slave again. In fact I just stopped talking to my last GF because she spent 1000 of my money on an outfit for me because she didn't want to be seen with me in my clothes, that and she said she would drop 5K per kid per year on new clothes when they go back to school And, so I dropped that girl who has no concept of how hard it is to earn that kind of money. I've made and lost millions of dollars, and this time I don't want to mess it up. Thoughts? Also note that I believe I will be annualizing pretty large investment returns going forward because of how good at it I am. Ha yeah, it's stupid of an employer to decide to let someone with my skillset go, because they should fire themselves and promote me if you ask me, but that's not the way life is. Sad that I made more than my boss anyway ytd, and then he let me go well sir, thanks for letting me go? So why shouldn't I retire and just coast on my investment income?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am 27. Just got laid off. Considering retiring.\n","id":"ae148a33-005e-4e4a-8560-2be87e9e10ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>We can't prevent all deaths as they'll still continue in nature. So becoming vegan won't prevent this process from continuing, although we'll contribute to it less and maybe even help nature out with that too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without the cycle of life, nature dies All life ends in the mouth of another.\n","id":"afb1e0a2-b566-4b11-80c3-260afc681f5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>58% of the British public have a negative view of Boris Johnson, whose favourability score is -27.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Conservative party leadership is highly divisive, which could cost them precious votes.\n","id":"44592c60-6c66-43de-96de-0b3eaee20c0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Catholic Church contraception policy<|ARGUMENT|>. Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI - Neither is it valid to argue, as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one, or that such intercourse would merge with procreative acts of past and future to form a single entity, and so be qualified by exactly the same moral goodness as these. Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good,\" it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it 18\u2014in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evil condoms should not be used to fight evil HIV\/AIDS\n","id":"164c5c9f-88ae-42e0-b73d-fdb37f2ae447"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>The Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ teaches the Holy Ghost is a testator of truth. Millions of individuals have \"experimented\" and come to \"know of a surety\" by the power of the Holy Ghost.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is evidence that the Church of Jesus Christ is God's only true Church.\n","id":"776ae54c-9927-42f0-b5a8-2b51655e1f2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should quotas for women on boards and in managerial positions be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Managers and board members have been unable to see value in ideas that do not relate to them, an issue that costs their businesses given boards are dominated by white men, meaning they are often out of touch with ideas that serve female and non-white consumers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Equal representation is more likely to lead to diversity in perspectives than the massively unequal representation currently experienced.\n","id":"1450a00a-438b-4e8b-9ca0-c3fcb9dc672b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>A Seer is a gifted wizard or witch who has the ability to see into the future with their Inner Eye. Seers look into future events through visions and dreams or physical objects like tea dregs, tarot cards, and crystal balls.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many interesting magical traits and skills that wizards and witches can acquire, inherit or learn.\n","id":"7f778bd1-5368-4aec-911f-4f53703117b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Nuclear energy<|ARGUMENT|>\"The case against nuclear power\". Greenpeace. January 8, 2008: \"The Three mile Island and Chernobyl accidents should never be downplayed. The Chernobyl disaster is perhaps one of the worst in human history. Serious radioactive contamination spread over 150,000 square kilometers in Byelorussia, Ukraine and Russia. Radioactive clouds deposited radiation thousands of kilometers away. Hundreds of thousands people had to be evacuated, and millions more were left to live in areas that were dangerous to their health and lives. Moreover, scientific studies have shown that the full consequences of the Chernobyl disaster could top a quarter of a million cancer cases and nearly 100,000 fatal cancers. . Renewable energy, on the other hand, is the cleanest, safest and most reliable form of power generation.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any risk of another Chernobyl or Mile High is intolerable\n","id":"54c33366-8f35-4df3-873a-52a36a9e9993"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public health systems fund homeopathy?<|ARGUMENT|>Public health systems are an investment in the wellbeing of citizens. Since homeopathy lacks scientific evidence to vouchsafe for its effectiveness, it is not a wise investment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public health systems should not fund treatments that have been proven not to work or have any predictable effect.\n","id":"0b50a9ea-5f2b-44b4-8b31-ce3d8fc42c8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that no matter how nice you are to people everyone thinks the same things. When a fat lady walks by everyone thinks wow shes fat, she needs to lose weight. But there are different types of people The mean ones, who actually say she need to lose weight. The normal who think she does but doesn't say anything. And the nice ones who would say they look nice or something along those lines, but they are still thinking she is still fat. No matter how nice people seem, everyone is mean, some just hid it better than others. Reddit  i want to think people are good<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think everyone is mean deep down inside.\n","id":"0db49767-f5fc-4356-a34a-16b29f76033e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pros of such policy encourage women to not have to quit their job it is a good return of investment for women not to quit their job because otherwise why do we encourage women to go to college and get advanced degree only for them to become housewife later? kids of moms who work don't have to go to daycare at a young age studies show that kids should ideally be with parents at least until 2 years old before daycare x200B Possible cons that you may retort and why i don't buy them a woman's role is to take care of the child, not to work gt if you tell that to me, i would say first that's rather sexist, second it's discriminating to the women who do want to work, third it's bad for workforce because you are reducing volume of talented workers in the pool, and fourth for many families it is not possible to sustain a middle class lifestyle with only one person working. this will hurt business productivity gt another bullshit since plenty of countries such as Canada, UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Australia all have at least 1 year paternal leave. Their economy certainly isn't collapsing. There is ABSOLUTELY NO evidence that expanding parental leave will somehow destroy our business. this will discriminate women in the hiring process gt another bullshit since data does not reflect this in countries with 1year parental leave.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"USA should expand parental leave to be at least 1 year\n","id":"c7553fc2-751f-4998-9873-37ffc1ed749d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see a lot of posts and comments about how your an asshole for playing music loudly out of your speakers during the day and I've never really agreed with that. When I turn my speakers up it's always during the day your supposed to be awake at this point. When there's light out people tend to do noisy things because that's the best time to do them. I like listening to music loudly out of my speakers then sensation you get from the speakers is great and it blocks out other noises That you may or may not want to hear as well . I feel like if it bothers you that much you shouldn't live in a city in the first place and should probably try to find somewhere quieter to live. Edit Ah yes I forgot, My music isn't loud enough to like shake a house but it's usually loud enough to hear it outside.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't feel bad playing music loudly in the day time.\n","id":"00799bc0-5541-41d6-b1c7-b6471738016e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The regulation of firearm suppressors under the NFA does virtually nothing to stop crime and is a substantial burden on those who want to own one for private use. Suppressors can be purchased without any limitations in multiple European countries because they are recognized as a device to protect the hearing of gun owners. There is common belief that suppressors will turn guns into the silent assassin's tools seen in movies and TV. That is not true in almost every case. Almost all ammunition is supersonic. This makes it really loud. The difference is that the crack from the bullet traveling faster than the speed of sound is generally not loud enough to cause hearing damage. The high price of suppressors in the United States is due to the small market created by the 200 tax stamp and multi month background check. This waiting period is caused by a bureaucratic bottleneck and uses the same background check system that is used every time a firearm is purchased from a dealer. I believe that a suppressee should be a easy to purchase or build as a pair of protective glasses or earmuffs. Edit per suggestion Suppressors are a polite. Other people appreciate the reduction in noise, especially if they live near ranges or hunting areas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Suppressors should not be regulated and should be treated as a safety device.\n","id":"51a3cc28-ab9f-4376-9edd-a288bac40908"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Research shows that women\u2019s reasons for choosing abortion are overwhelmingly tied to their life situation as opposed to abstract, moral or religious principles. pg.3<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many women have abortions despite moral opposition to the procedure.\n","id":"9be024ee-9650-4eed-8878-4f58f92f7f29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To preface I am not depressed, I am just stating my version of the obvious. Life is meaningless. Sure you can add your own meaning into life, but subjective meaning is not the same as objective meaning. If we are taking a theological spiritual perspective, we can say that we are living out God's meaning purpose. Which yes would classify as objective meaning. But I feel like the lives we are living presently are still meaningless. It may be part of God's plan in the long run, but it is meaningless for the time being. Here is what I mean by the lives we are living presently The society we live in creates lives with no purpose or meaning. What is the point of working 9 5? Day in, Day out, till death? The best possible outcome is that you find a job that meets your passion, but MANY people, if not MOST people do not have the economic capabilities of achieving their passions in a timely manner. I mean, sure you can work real hard, save up for schooling, and then pursue your passion, but if you are poor, it could take 15 years to become something you want to be, not to mention accruing a house, a car and means of living, and by that point, you may not be physically able to perform your passion. You may have a kid even. I feel like we are blocked from living the lives we want without money, and the only way to generate money is to work meaningless jobs to survive. Following the script of life set up for us by society is meaningless. The capitalist system is a system of survival, it is not about human empowerment and human expansion. In fact, it is not much different than any civilized system we have had before it, we just have new tech. And consider even how we use this new technology we do not use technology to make us work less, we use it to make us more efficiently, to make us produce more in our 9 5 shifts instead of making our shifts shorter. Capitalism is not one which produces a population of happy citizens, it abuses citizens like workhorses. It uses citizens to generate capital to be used by the state who then uses it on war and other meaningless pursuits . We live in a system of excess, meaning we do not need to work as hard as we are. This is why studies show that the happiest people are tribal people even though their conditions are shit. They are happy because they have a healthy social life and social structures. Capitalism Evolved form of slavery. And the only reason everyone believes we are still not slaves in capitalism is because we are able to buy things, which give us the illusion of freedom. But we are still bound to participate taxes, etc . And yes, I know some of you will say, 'well no one is keeping you here, go live in the woods'. And yea sure I can, so can many, but we all know how that worked out for the natives. And even if you successfully lived out in the woods by yourself. Why would you. Sanity requires social life. TL DR Capitalism creates a meaningless existence<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Life is meaningless\n","id":"afcd2514-dc29-4b1b-bcfb-92a5f2b24f42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are modern democracies destined to fail due to their inherent weaknesses?<|ARGUMENT|>This is assuming that the outcome of the decision the public votes on, is on par with the majority of citizens voting. This pertains to democracy in an ideal world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voting serves as a \"release valve\" for citizens to express their dissent, which makes it less likely for them to take up arms against the government.\n","id":"11238a4a-351c-4eee-b8a9-f040d850d95f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the 1950s, the world was recovering from WWII. The recent baby boom has created massive amounts of children in families, creating a high demand for goods and services like the world has never seen before. People were happy. The world was willing to put the war behind them and political tensions would not rise again until 1959. It was a good time to be alive and it was when the nuclear famil model was working in full effect. We can even see divorce rates dropping in the 50s So Reddit, is family life better now? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Family life was much better in the 1950s:\n","id":"cff3919f-44be-4c28-bc16-5067298259c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>Owning a car can be both a benefit or a burden. It isn't in itself either good or bad yet people still want cars.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People can and do want things that are not privileges.\n","id":"13eea077-777c-44d4-a284-981f6bcfc3e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People seem angry that as a made up example a bunch of jobs that were paying 10 an hour in Ohio are now being done for 2 in Mexico. There's talk that globalisation is a good thing for shareholders because they get to sell things at 1st world prices, but manufacture them at 3rd world wages. If I don't prefer Ohioans to Mexicans, isn't it logical for me to think Oh good, some Mexicans got a job , and have that be a bigger positive than the Ohioans losing theirs is a negative? This is because the marginal utility of a 2 job is greater to the Mexican than a 10 job is to Ohioan or in other words, become unemployed in Ohio, and you might experience anything from getting another job, to being unemployed in a first world country. Don't have a job in Mexico, and you face a vastly worse set of prospects, not least of which is dying in the street from malnourishment. Redistributing wealth is accepted as a positive within a country, to try and keep incomes relatively nice and homogeneous across the whole populace area by area, obviously there are still rich individuals central governments try to encourage development in under developed areas, at the expense of greater development in more developed areas but somehow when globalisation does this across borders, it's a bad thing? What am I missing? How is economic globalisation, particularly expatriating jobs production, a less than zero sum game, assuming you're watching from space, and care equally about all people in all nations? Shouldn't I be happy that richer people are getting poorer, if that means poorer people are getting richer? Disclaimer I've never lived in Mexico or America, and also making up the wage figures. Pick London and Dhaka if you want to make it starker. edit Guys please read and properly understand the question, and read other answers already given before answering. I've said If I don't favour one people over another . This specifically excludes arguments of the form It's better for you , or it's better for Ohioans , etc . Please don't make arguments of that form. We're assuming I don't prefer one group over another .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If I don't favor one people over an other, I shouldn't care about \"shipping jobs overseas\" and economic globalisation.\n","id":"d6960a27-6ebd-4452-8149-f52cb799b7bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Science Leave Room for Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Science does not take a stance on whether or not 'free will' exists. Whether or not it exists is pretty much the realm of philosophy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using a skeptical conception of science, there is room for free will and science.\n","id":"23f0d72e-b621-45ac-9d4e-828f4b73f711"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the music of the past better than it is today?<|ARGUMENT|>There was more experimentation and push to put out something interesting and new with the older music.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The music of the past was better than music generated more recently i.e. post-90s\/00s.\n","id":"57e8890d-f4d5-450f-bab6-8453c248c9a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>firstly all land claims ultimately come down to someone having claimed uninhabited territory they just stumbled across then them deciding that meant it was there's. that or they took it from someone already living there. That being the case I don't think claims of sovereignty have any kind of ultimate legitimacy that outsiders are morally bound to respect. That being the case I think trying to work out who has the right to any bit of land is a fool's errand because no one really has a inalienable right to it. That being the case I think that the only way to decide who should govern a piece of land is to look at how the people who live there are treated. If the people who live somewhere are treated well by their government, that government should remain in power even if they only became the government as a result of a war some time in the past.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"a nation's apparently legitimate claim of sovereignty is not sufficient reason to give it up conquered land, how the people who live there are being treated is the relevant factor\n","id":"94094c66-064f-4c5e-9d3a-646dba1b6bf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I could not think of a better way to phrase the title, but let me try to expound on what I mean. In many debates on conservation and the morality of it, thereof I see a lot of people turning to natual selection. For example when the debate is about whether we should conserve certain species, or let them die out and people say letting them die is just darwinism in action. But I fail to see how a description of a process is an argument for whether we should let that process happen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am not convinced Darwinism natural selection is useful for moral debate. Please read description.\n","id":"b7aaa2a0-bbff-4294-9dc2-fa6fa1694904"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>civil liberties should be sacrificed for the greater good<|ARGUMENT|>Terrorism is part of the modern world and is inextricably linked with the rise of modern communications, the internet, and a global community. This is an age in which space and time are bending to the tune of new media \u2013 information at your fingertips may sound nice, but for those who want to destroy, it only makes their object easier to attain. And so more strict national security measures must be employed in order to keep up with the enemy. Escalation is the name of the game imposed on governments around the world by terrorists for example the Mumbai terrorists used GPS systems to guide them into Mumbai, attacks were coordinated on cell and satellite phones and Blackberrys were used to monitor the international reaction 1. In order to keep up states need new powers to stop, deter, and prevent terrorism. The government needs to secure state-security first; only then can the debate on civil liberties begin, and only then. 1 Shachtman, Noah, \u2018How Gadgets Helped Mumbai Attackers\u2019, Wired, 1 December 2008, accessed 9 September 2011<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"National security is something that must be protected even at the cost of\n","id":"3b5534eb-3d24-497d-a0be-56c2026a63bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the BAR exam be eliminated as a requirement to practice law?<|ARGUMENT|>Nearly 40% of black students fail the bar exam on their first try, compared to 8% of white students.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black law graduates are statistically more likely to struggle with the bar exam than their white counterparts.\n","id":"355dc807-0a3e-481b-9062-174d67306473"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe the US has expressed clear animosity towards Iran. Iran needs to take steps to protect itself from an invasion, and a nuclear weapon is the best way to do that. Fact The US has previously interferred in Iran's internal affairs, disposed of a democratically elected government and installed a dictator. Iran should feel fearful of the US. Fact Iran signed the NPT when it was under the control of a Anglo American installed dictator. Fact The US has invaded Iran's neighbor Iraq under false pretenses, completely ruined the country, and no one could stop them. Iran should feel doubly fearful of the US. Fact Iran is surrounded on all sides by it's greatest enemy. The US has conquered Afganistan to Iran's east, Iraq to Iran's west, and has military bases in the gulf countries to Iran's south. Fact Iran's second biggest enemy is Israel, that already has nukes and has threatened to attack Iran before. Israel is also under the grip of a ultra right wing regime. I believe Iran is very rightly concerned about its security. If Iran does not get a nuke, there is literally nothing stopping the US having another intelligence oops in a few years and invading Iran just like it invaded Iraq. The US is of course actively hostile to Iran and has previously supplied Iraq chemical weapons to fight against Iran. From a more objective standpoint, the case for Iran's nukes is similar to the case for Israel's nukes. Israel is also surrounded on all sides by enemies and feels impending doom. That is why France and the US have supported its right to have a nuclear arsenal. Why doesn't the same argument apply to Iran? So why shouldn't Iran have nukes? It will obviously prevent another war. . PS It is fine if you want to make the case that Iran has signed the NPT, but I have noted above that it was signed by a US puppet and should not inform the current regime's view on nuclear weapons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons to protect itself against US aggression.\n","id":"1cdfdbb1-c4ab-4287-bd26-3537d66796c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>According to a poll conducted by Rasmussen former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, is one of the top five most favoured presidents of all time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The statement that Republican presidents have historically had a negative impact on America is a gross overgeneralisation.\n","id":"6a649d06-a7ea-4606-a2ed-c371026410b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll present the following premises The massive harm caused by gambling outweighs the benefits derived. To expand, the social and personal repercussions of gambling outweigh the benefits derived, like employment, pleasure from gambling, source of taxation. Government regulation would successfully curb and decrease the level of gambling that goes on, thus decreasing the harms of gambling. Pertaining to what constitutes heavy regulation , I'd say higher taxes on casinos, capping the value of chips, prohibiting the sale of alcohol in establishments that permit gambling, potentially outright banning slot machines.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government should heavily regulate gambling\n","id":"e81fec74-fae9-40fa-ad04-900fdbf198e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just recently, my area province state passed a 15 per hour minimum wage proposal. Many people have positive things to say about it, especially those who work full time minimum wage jobs. But due to rising rent and electricity costs in the past few years under our government, this makes me concerned for small business owners, product prices and the threat of automation to youth employment. In fact, many small businesses and economists have said this is a really bad idea, and I'm inclined to agree with them. In fact, I don't see cashiers surviving after this goes through in the next two years. Can anyone  on this? I'd like to hear alternate and positive points. I get that more money earned means more money spent, but quite frankly an average of about 50 of our income goes towards taxes anyways. So I don't see it making that much of a difference. FYI I'm not in a Scandinavian country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A $15\/hour minimum wage is a disastrous proposition which will accelerate youth unemployment and automation and increase product prices.\n","id":"3e7bff48-e750-4a86-86be-d0006a4ce35c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Although corporate profits and the financial sector have fully recovered from the 2008 crash, the rest of the economy very much hasn't. Unemployment is still high, wages are still low, and the housing market is only barely showing signs of recovery. This leads me to believe that the recovery is hollow, built on wealth that doesn't actually exist, which is essentially the definition of a bubble. At this point, any major disruption could cause that bubble to burst. The eminent implosion of the Eurozone provides exactly that, but really, it could be anything.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the next major economic crash will happen this year, 2013.\n","id":"affe750f-b82a-4e0b-9a6b-2a1536bdf38f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see this a lot, on reddit and outside of it. People who believe that the company Monsanto is the scum of the earth, the devil incarcerate, that sort of thing. I don't share that view, I would like to have an actual serious discussion about why people think this. Below I'll tell some relevant information about me, and address a couple common arguments that keep coming back. I'm a 20 year old university student of Life sciences, this is a kind of general biological laboratory science education. I've visited two competitor companies of Monsanto through school, toured their facilities and laboratories. I don't plan to go into Biotechnology the GMO field myself, I'm more interested in medical research but I haven't completely made up my mind yet. Yet through my education I think its safe to say I know more about GMO's then an average layperson about them, I've made GMO bacteria myself. But even though they'll likely come up this  isn't about GMO's themselves. Monsanto invented and produced agent orange. The base for agent orange was discovered by who doesn't have any links to Monsanto, the article clearly says that after the discovery agent orange itself was developed by US military R D. In 1951, biological warfare scientists at Fort Detrick, Maryland began investigating defoliants based upon Galston's discoveries with TIBA They obviously did produce it, but I'm pretty sure during wartime companies don't really have a choice when the government tells them to produce something. It is also important to remember the long term effects of Agent orange were likely completely unknown to Monsanto as they produced it. They patent DNA, this is wrong. I agree that this doesn't sound right on first glance. But the process of making a GMO crop is a multi million dollar research project. A new GMO crop requires years of research, and then a massive amount of tests to guarantee food and environmental safety. When they've done all that, made a massive investment and they don't patent the result what do you think will happen? A competitor only needs to buy a single seed, copy and paste the changed DNA into their own product This is possible and they're ready to sell their own seeds with this improvement for a massively lower cost because they barely did any R D of their own. You're a shill, paid by Monsanto to change public opinion on the internet. Despite how absurd I find this claim this keeps coming up. I'm using my main reddit account here. But if someone really want to use this 'argument' I also want to see proof that they're not Shills for 'Big biological' themselves. However, I expect  will fortunately be above this type of argument. Edit It turns out it isn't. Two accusations so for, neither of them seems to have read this point. Below are some very good points from u adamwho his comment got removed because of rule 1, since I pretty much entirely agree with him I've pasted his comment in here in the OP To get your thread started I have been following anti GMO activists and the Monsanto haters for couple of years and here are some thoughts. In general you will never find a argument against Monsanto that is factual, timely and relevant. \u2022 Anti GMO beliefs are mostly on the left, which is unusual because the left tends to be more aligned with science. at least in comparison with the political right \u2022 These beliefs seem to stem from a few areas of activism environmentalism, natural organic movements, anti corporatism, and surprisingly anti war \u2022 The connection with environmentalism is pretty obvious. Agriculture does effect the environment in large and small ways. However most of the anti GMO arguments tend to be about all modern agriculture and not specifically about GM crops. It doesn't help that major environmental groups green peace promote conspiracy theories about GM crops. \u2022 Natural organic movements These movements tend to fall into the naturalistic fallacy, that is, natural good man made bad. These people also tend to romanticize more primitive times and see technology as stealing or corrupting the perfect human nature which they imagine existed when we were hunter gathers. The problem of course is the natural things can be really bad and man made things can be really good. Consider antibiotics vs leprosy. People who hold these views would have agriculture go back to 1900 where 90 of people worked on the farm to feed 1.5 billion people they would prefer to trap billions in hard labor and starvation. \u2022 Anti corporatism is also pretty obvious. The idea here is that big companies are monopolizing food sources and driving the romantic ideal of the farmer out of business. However it takes a large company or university to fund research into crops genetically engineered or not and those organizations have been able to patent their research since 1930 plant patent act to recoup the costs. These big ag companies generally do not farm, they are not monopolies, no farmer has to buy their products and their patents such as RR corn and soy expire. \u2022 The anti war sentiment is pretty interesting and is tied to the anti corporatism, which also coincides with the rise of the environmental and anti corporatism movements. Generally the argument goes that companies that made products in previous wars are tainted and cannot be trusted with something as important as food. The most extreme version of this is the idea that companies are actively trying to kill people. This is relevant to agriculture because there were several Ag companies that manufactured Agent Orange during the Vietnam war and are thus tainted by this argument. The problem is that the companies that made Agent Orange were compelled to under the War Powers Act. They didn't invent it, and the certainly had no say as to when, where or how it was to be used. Additionally, the assumed danger of Agent Orange surprisingly still unproven was from a Dioxin contamination which the companies informed the government about and were ignored. Considering the sources of the anti GMO sentiment you can see that it stems from the political and social movements in the 1960s. It is likely fostered by people who grew up in that time baby boomers and it will continue to be a major political issue until baby boomers leave public life. As it is, boomers are still a major factor in politics, education, activism and journalism so I suspect that we will see strong anti GMO activism for at least another decade. I responded in agreement and linked this Youtube video which I believe is relevant to the points he brings up. The original ideas of environmentalism, anti corporation and anti war are good causes, but hijacked so to say by a more extreme group. Instead of a healthy balance on those three and other issues an unscientific and unrealistic black and white worldview is promoted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monsanto has done nothing wrong\n","id":"a9439eae-a724-4f8c-877f-50f8e64d9185"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Monarchy provides opportunity for psychologically deeply positive rituals such as coronation ceremony and national celebration thereof, which can bring social unity and cohesion<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The monarch is a symbol of national pride and national unity.\n","id":"756304de-65a1-4216-b7eb-43e668f044af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To begin I am not a climate change denier, nor do I dismiss any new research that is put out. However, after seeing many high school students protest against climate change inaction, I wonder if these students really understand how complex the issue is. In my opinion, these students see climate change more as a political issue rather than a complex economic issue. Any legislative action regarding climate change can cause a profound impact on our economy and lives. This is an impact that I don't believe many students see.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High school students who protest against climate change inaction, don't understand how faceted and complex the issue is.\n","id":"8e1c10d3-675d-497e-91a1-9dd234be4a83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my honest opinion, I truly think that anti vaccination parents are complete idiots and that they should not be allowed to have children at all. Children who aren't vaccinated have weaker immune systems than everyone else and they get sick easier. And the parents of these children try to heal their issues with essential oils and other crap that are proven to not work at all. I also think that anti vaccination children are a danger to the public because they aren't vaccinated and protected from diseases around me. If I ever have kids, I wouldn't let them anywhere near anti vac people. I think anti vaccination parents should have their kids taken away from them since they obviously are putting their kids' health at risk. Thank you for reading this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anti-Vaccination should have their children taken away from them!\n","id":"628ad673-8345-4f9e-b180-95d0612f9f1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've contemplated the Gillette advertisement, the persistent battles within different sectors of culture such as in films, gaming, and other social forums, and innumerable other circumstances of controversy and I've come to the conclusion that most of these issues could have been averted if the execution for the delivery of the base ideas was different rather than the idea itself. x200B For Gillette's newest ad, the ad itself resonated negatively with a portion of the population who might have schemas that are framed in the media paints men as bastards category. Now, without going into that den of IEDs, and assuming that the marketing team knew this perhaps the advertisement might've been altered to more success. It might not even need to be overt at times. For the children fighting, just make it clear that it is not a play fight beyond any reasonable doubt and that one is actively trying to damage the other. Extend the scenes with the street stalking or other such harassment to bear more weight by having the acts seem severe I believe that this will remove further doubt that the other participants in the scenes are deserved and noble in their actions instead of spoilsports. x200B Additionally, considering EA's whole controversy with their recent games of Battlefield V standing shoulder to shoulder with Star Wars the Last Jedi or the Ghostbusters reboot, I believe that less damage could have been done to the media representation and marketing of those films and products if they simply didn't engage the most negative voices in their communities or did so with measured, monotonous maturity rather than a moralistic retort or a bothered response that might spill more oil to the fire. I think and this is entirely my opinion again that if EA just went with the whole we wanted to put in character micro transactions for gear and characters for Battlefield V's cyborg soldier issue, there would have been a burst against predatory marketing practices but it wasn't like EA had any ground for that in recent years to begin with. Regardless, I certainly think that they should've gotten into it with angry fan or sent any invectives towards them in spite of how the developers felt or believed. For the sake of the business. The same thing I would apply to Star Wars and other such phenomenas in recent times. x200B Anyway, I curious to know what you guys might think.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Much controversy over the past few years has been the product over terrible marketing. If the concepts were pitched better, they would be far better received.\n","id":"2fdd304f-7537-4a9d-a18c-49aaad29ec9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>Cultural and historical evidence from the time indicates that both Italy and Naples were not very Greek by this point.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"recognisable Greek presence\" in southern Italy was likely insigificant compared to Italian population.\n","id":"b3bde224-631e-4ef1-8ac2-61d192f526db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would a global social credit system be beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Bad behavior that, so far, had no tangible negative consequences would be punished and, therefore, disincentivized.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It will discourage behavior considered bad and wrong and encourage good behavior\n","id":"f0419402-c555-4084-bc45-4d5b3b74e4e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here\u2019s the thing. It\u2019s great to be comfortable in your own skin and happy with who you are. But at what point is it unhealthy? When is being comfortable in your skin actually hurting you? Why has it become such an honorable thing to be big and unhealthy? I understand sometimes genetics make weight gain really easy. But you can still be thick and healthy. But honestly a lot of these people who are claiming to be body proud can do a lot more then they are. It\u2019s a health issue. You might say their health doesn\u2019t concern you. But what if you had a friend who was anorexic? Odds are you would try to help them become healthy. Why can\u2019t they be body proud at 87lbs while another person gets praised to be body proud at 270lbs. If you care about someone enough to help them overcome anorexia, you should care enough to help overcome obesity. Maybe I just see the extreme of the movement. What parts am I missing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The body positive movement is encouraging unhealthy and inactive lifestyles. While praising the overweight and shaming the underweight.\n","id":"5586809a-ab65-4207-9e3c-961157de1d41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm generally a pretty casual sports fan but will get pretty enthusiastic about my teams. I like a good variety of sports. I tune into MLB, NBA, MLS, NHL, international tournements such as the World Cup, and even both the Guatemalan and Mexican National Futbol Leagues because I live around there right now . I even tune into Tennis and Biking tournements occasionally. Point is, I'm open to various sports. But Hockey it just feels like someone took Soccer and decided to change a bunch of things and add elements that don't make sense. I sort of get the appeal of having a sport on ice because everything is slippery, so that could make things a little interesting. But really, whenever I catch a glimps of a game, the puck seems to just be flying from one end of the rink to the other until someone finally manages to get it in front of the net, not to mention you cant't even see the puck watching it from a TV. I won't lay into the fighting aspect of the sport too much, because I'm sure every Hockey fan has heard it from non Hockey fans a thousand times. But yes, I think that part is dumb, too. What is this, WWE? Also, whenever I see standings of the league, all the teams are neck and neck. What's the point of even getting excited about regular season games if we know the end of the season is going to come down to the wire anyway? Anyway, I'm sure there must be stratagy unique to Hockey that sets some teams appart from others, so clue me in. What makes people like this sport? I want to understand.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NHL is stupid\n","id":"fc6f8e7c-a924-4f49-8681-15256ee9ed7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>AKMs may be able to identify whether a target is present or not - but they are certainly not able to correctly identify the relevant characteristics of such a target e.g. civilian vs. non-civilian that might be highly relevant in the context of international law and ethical considerations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AKMs are unlikely to always be able to act in accordance with the requirements of international law.\n","id":"4841f88b-ffde-4425-8334-f374262c6f59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi, I'm new. So the greeks are complaining about the EU's imposed austerity measures, the terms of their countries increasing debt problems, even going as far as to boycott german goods and compare them to nazi's. But they have been outspending their means, and are lashing out because they have gotten used to their improved quality of life under the euro and are now being threatened with having that QOL decreased. The alternative to the imposed austerity measures is the country defaulting on its debts and becoming a failed state, and the rest of the EU is taking on a large risk by continuing to loan to a country which over the last 5 years has done nothing but ignore the demands of their creditors and complain about sanctions. Yes, its the government's fault and not the people's, but they can't reasonably refuse cuts to their public spending that they can no longer afford, and moreover, why blame the eurozone for trying to help, and not their own incompetent government? Edit And striking, as if their country didn't have enough problems already?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The greeks are acting like entitled children.\n","id":"9a8955ea-9e31-4209-9af2-e836d1422c5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I learned English at a really young age yet I still have a bit of an accent I really want to get rid of my accent as I really want to sound like a native English speaker. I find it annoying how there is always a bit of an accent in my voice yet no matter what I do I cannot get rid of it As some people said, the articulation of the way I speak sounds a bit unnatural. I don't think my accent sounds attractive so I am trying to sound as neutral as possible. Most people can tell that my accent has a bit of Asian in it and most people think of Asian accents as unappealing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should get rid of my accent\n","id":"96e16ea6-2876-4df9-9dc8-ff9051762a64"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>ESPN loves LeBron obviously and Tim Duncan gets no love. He is approaching his 5th title in 15 years and still gets no love as a great player nearly his 6th if 2013 wasn't a chokefest . Everyone follows LeBron or Kobe because they're in big markets. Tim Duncan passes, scores, and his teamwork leads to titles while still putting up excellent numbers he averages a double double per game in his career So reddit,  that LeBron or Kobe is better than Tim.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tim Duncan is better than Lebron and Kobe. If he wins 2 more titles, he is better than Jordan.\n","id":"1b3105c9-cf7f-4c9d-af5a-df33e3522dd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>When it comes to the study of animal rights, there are various scholarly works by renowned philosophers such as Tom Regan and Peter Singer who provide a solid and non-religious basis for respecting animals and their lives. Such works should not be ignored in favour of what religions have to say about animals and their rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In medicine and in so many other fields of study humans do not rely on religion as a main source of knowledge. For this reason, humans shouldn't do so in the case of animal rights.\n","id":"d35b33a3-d869-46bb-9cf8-ea17a5f6ac35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need nuclear power for sustainable energy production?<|ARGUMENT|>As they require plenty of space, this can come at the expense of biodiversity by further reducing already diminished wildlife habitats, especially in areas where available land is sparse enough as it is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Renewables require vast networks of power lines to effectively harvest energy, while nuclear concentrates supply in a smaller number of locations.\n","id":"77fdc071-a3ee-401e-bb1c-3054c46c0441"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The Roman general Rufus challenged Rabbi Akiva to defend the Jewish practice of circumcision. Rabbi Akiva responded by arguing that some works of the Creator are unfinished, and can be improved when humanity applies finishing touches in order to perfect the work of the Creator. This story is cited by Jews who are in favor of genetically modified foods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many Jewish scholars state that genetically modified foods are theologically permitted.\n","id":"b8ffd5c0-b765-4e53-bfef-d92ae04a4666"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we abolish political parties in the USA?<|ARGUMENT|>A reduction in partisanship, reduces the mindless party bickering that stops anything from getting done in legislative bodies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Party identification encourages partisanship. Without political parties partisanship would be reduced.\n","id":"4e1ed13e-bcd5-4c9e-b351-f824869669ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents should be ALLOWED to undertake such procedures on their children's behalf, provided that these procedures don't harm the child, and are meant to address genuine health problems. But if you want to create a designer baby where you decide that the baby will look just like Great Uncle Bob, or favorite Aunt Suzy, then it feels like playing God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents should genetically enhance their babies once the procedures have been approved by the corresponding regulatory bodies.\n","id":"91ea3af2-7a35-4eb4-a295-51c06b07cb4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we have a single global language?<|ARGUMENT|>Translation may be a problem so complex that it cannot be solvable algorythmically in a reasonable time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are technical difficulties that machine translation is unable to solve.\n","id":"86a9263d-43df-4f68-a688-74f8e42bf663"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Parliamentary Systems Enforce Proportional Representation?<|ARGUMENT|>In Australia, the Australian Electoral Commission an independent federal agency is responsible for determining the boundaries of electorates<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Independent bodies can be set up to determine electoral boundaries.\n","id":"3dd8af6b-2d4e-4ef6-818a-0fb25ad63351"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religions have not developed in isolation, they have reflected cultural norms and enshrined them in a way that makes it harder to shift them. Their privilege, and the privileges they make into doctrines create and perpetuate inequality<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has been used as a form of social control.\n","id":"aa007782-9193-4947-8b60-b98fe08c5516"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gay adoption<|ARGUMENT|>\"Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender LGBT Parented Families - A Literature Review prepared for The Australian Psychological Society\": Judith Stacey, of New York University: \"Rarely is there as much consensus in any area of social science as in the case of gay parenting, which is why the American Academy of Pediatrics and all of the major professional organizations with expertise in child welfare have issued reports and resolutions in support of gay and lesbian parental rights.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The American Academy of Pediatrics and all of the major professional organizations with expertise in child welfare have issued reports and resolutions in support of gay and lesbian parental rights.\n","id":"60652759-a47b-4c03-a00b-5fa67ea93fdd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Atheism is arguably nothing more than a disinclination toward blind faith. The faithful posit God is real but all five senses indicate otherwise. The burden of proof then falls on the faithful, since God is not arguing his case. Atheists need no justification.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Atheism does not require justification. As a non-position meaning to make no claim there is nothing to prove.\n","id":"34cc0fd8-9c5a-458b-9a70-1252842f216b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>I don't always prefer pizza to burgers or vice versa, but that doesn't mean that I hate either or both.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's unclear how not having a specific, individual preference for something necessarily implies hatred.\n","id":"b0013be5-8960-4b98-a007-f630ae8a9eb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The only real solution to the European refugee crisis is to remove the human right to asylum from EU law<|ARGUMENT|>Many people die, are victims of human trafficking and get sexually attacked during their travel. They also spent all their saving on the trip.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The current system needs to change as currently the law supports the human trafficking industry.\n","id":"88e3d0a5-5bf2-4194-8378-fcc896da06f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>This leads the Federation to focus on analyzing the enemies rather than on defeating them in the first engagement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Federation's general approach is to gather intel first, then use the intel to establish their tactical approach.\n","id":"7feeceff-de57-4626-9108-50575b2d2585"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>The asexual\/ace community's desire for inclusion has led them to repudiate \u201chierarchies of sexual practice\u201d altogether, which sets them on a path to redefine the debate surrounding sexuality instead of conforming to it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The LGBT+ community has adopted the politics of sameness which do not challenge existing power structures.\n","id":"63a9cb04-3f88-43b8-9126-166db8d4144f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's practically indisputable that many ISPs hold a monopoly on Internet service in certain areas. In my town, it's Time Warner, Frontier, or nothing. This is a huge problem because the ISPs don't have anyone to compete with. I know people who are paying ~ 70 mo. for a 30 Mb s connection, but are getting ~10Mb s, 15 on a good day. That's a real issue. That's what people should be upset about. This whole net neutrality thing came about because comcast wanted to make Netflix pay for all of the extra equipment that they need to purchase. After Netflix came about, many more people started using up all of the bandwidth they were being alotted. These people were in areas that Comcast had not serviced in years because of their rural nature, and now they have to buy a ton of new routers to account for all of the traffic that Netflix is getting through them. The general public seems to think this is unfair, but I disagree. I've heard stats that Netflix is taking up ~30 of all traffic to and from ISPs. Now, even ISPs only hav a certain amount of bandwidth. If Netflix is taking up all of this traffic, they need to provide it with a fast lane, or everything else will become marginally slower. No one seems to think of it this way. No one seems to realize that net neutrality actually would make most sites slower, since ISPs can't allocate more resources to high traffic sites that might require them. Then you have the people that think ISPs will start charging insane prices for each individual website like cable TV providers. I'm not so worried about this because it takes only one of them to keep the old method of pricing, and then there's huge demand for that one ISP all over the country, however I'll grant that this may be a problem. But it wouldn't be if people were concentrated on the real issue the ISPs have a monopoly. This is why I think net neutrality is a red herring. The ISPs win either way. If we get net neutrality, they throw up their arms and say Oh, well. I guess we can't do anything about your shitty connection to Netflix. If we don't get net neutrality, they might be able to do the cable thing and charge for each individual site as an add on to your basic service. I'm concerned that people are getting so wrapped up in the fight for net neutrality, they think that it's the end goal. When really, even if they win we're still in the same boat we were in before. And now they're sated, thinking that they've stuck it to the man, and that the great ISP war of 2014 is over. When really, things are either way worse or exactly the same. This is what we'd call a win win scenario for the ISPs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Net Neutrality is a red herring to distract from the deeper, more fundamental issue of monopolies in the ISP business.\n","id":"ed7e669a-cc23-4815-9c2d-3ab75e58282a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TDK trilogy was mind blowing. For starters, the cast is exceptional. Batman and all of the villains are portrayed as being more realistic, which makes it much more realistic in a thrilling horror sense. All marvel movies today feel like a cash generated flick. There\u2019s not much depth, especially in the newer ones such as black panther, etc. I get that there\u2019s 18 movies compared to 3, so there\u2019s a lead up to a big movie infinity war but even then, the trilogy as a whole was much better than infinity war. The obvious exceptional part of TDK cast was heath ledger. There\u2019s just not ANY villains in ANY marvel movie that compare to him. Not even close. He played such a psychopath and his method acting and improvisation was the best I have ever seen in a movie. The make up was amazing as it wasn\u2019t too comical. He PERFECTED the walk, laugh, mindset and everything the joker has to offer. Tom Hardy was exceptional as Bane. Instead of being the veiny, lab rat that the comic books show, he\u2019s portrayed as a beefy guy that can cause terror, which is realistic and makes it that much scarier. The destruction he caused was amazing. The mask was an awesome touch, although at times his voice was hard to understand the first time around. Christian Bale was a good Batman. His voice in the first two movies were meh, but TDKR figured it out to be less raspy so that you could understand him. Overall, he played Bruce Wayne Batman great and was memorable. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I like the marvel movies. Infinity war was a great movie. I love guardians. Maybe I\u2019m inclined to the realism that TDK trilogy presents compared to the extra sci fi found in the marcel movies, but overall I find the trilogy to have much better depth, acting, and plot.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the Dark Knight trilogy is much better than the marvel movies.\n","id":"3a0ab37d-b9d5-4901-80b7-18ece288df78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I can\u2019t believe how often I encounter people in the store talking to someone on speakerphone. I really don\u2019t understand why people do this. Your phone has a way for you to speak privately and also you can use a hands free set if you don\u2019t want to hold the phone. I know someone will say that it\u2019s no different than two people talking in person in public, but I disagree. The phone is much louder than normal conversational tones and, it seems to me, that the social filters of politeness and propriety that generally applies when people are chatting public goes right out of the window when it\u2019s a phone conversation. Finally, I know someone will argue a fringe case where it is necessary, like \u201cmy wife is about to go into labor, I had to get milk, and my phone is broken and only works on speakerphone.\u201d Obviously there is always an exception, but these are not the types of things I hear talked about in the store.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Talking on speakerphone in public is rude and unnecessary.\n","id":"eee399b9-73ce-4d4d-b637-258f47ec61d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When creating humans into this life of ours, as it occurred to me after prolonged sessions of thinking, that I'm forcing them to participate in a program system matrix game play form of existance without their consent. It's an unarguable fact, that every single human is prone to feel sadness pain anger loneliness hatred and all these negative emotions at least ,THE VERY EXTREME FOR THE SAKE OF PROVING A POINT, ONCE during their lives. Why the hell would I force someone into this place, with complete disregard to their right to non existence? I personally wouldn't. Hell, I can't even explain at least not without many paragraphs that will be ignored as the mods message me in my previous attempt Hi, you're not getting many replies because your post is very wordy. I would suggest cutting down on the length and re submitting. . So I'll just simply let you know that I myself feel sheer betrayal and injustice in bringing me to life without my consent. lastly, I do realize that by choosing non existence for that hypothetical kid of mine, I'm still making a choice that isn't mine but should be completely his. Still, it feels the injustice of picking non existence is more merciful in level, next to the injustice of picking existence. P.S I have no thoughts of ending my life, in case any of you is wondering from the dark energy of my words. Because first, it seems so scary painful and evil to do so. Second, I would never put the loved ones in my life in that misery and horror, I love them too much, and finally, as George through Tyrion puts it Death is so terribly final. While life is full of possibilities . It's too late for me. I'm already in, but I refuse to have any kids. ??<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I refuse to have any kids... ?!!\n","id":"8b8481e9-d370-41e9-a1a8-827fe91c17f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Love is the only thing that can transcendence space and time . This just makes me angry. I expected my mind blown with this film. Although the visuals and sounds in this film was AMAZING, the story with cheesy lines like that just ruins it. The average Joe eats this garbage. Proof? It has a 9.2 scre on imdb. I just facepalmed so many times during this movie, yet everybody else seemed to love it. Although the message in which i interpreted as nobody knows how much humans can achieve given time and progression is nice, but the way this message was delivered was just downright horrible. Love is the only thing that can transcendence space and time just ends up ruining it, and the story builds upon that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Interstellar was a cash out for the mainstream\n","id":"1ef7c84f-f964-4b66-955c-79dd7cc5b80a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The main argument for this is that there is no reason why it should be considered immoral or unlawful. If people love each other, who's to say they can't be in a relationship. It's really no different than gay marriage in that respect. The only reason people don't like it is that most of us are evolutionarily inclined to find such relations gross myself included , but that doesn't give us the right to intervene in the relationships of people who don't find it gross. Think of people who never met their siblings until they were much older, and who fell in love. There have been cases where two people have gotten married, had kids, and found out later they were brother and sister. According to the law, their marriage would have to be nullified and their kids would be taken away. WHY??? This isn't even mentioning gay incestuous couples, who have zero chance of having kids with genetic diseases. You can argue that it messes up family relations, but isn't that the same argument homophobes use? Who are people to say what is the proper family? I really see no reason why these laws should still be in place. People are put IN JAIL for this They're not hurting anyone EDIT A commenter has informed me of the fact that genetic diseases under these relationships aren't as severe as I thought. Therefore, my contention before in parenthesis is nullified.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's nothing wrong with incest as long as you make sure you don't have genetically messed-up children\n","id":"9a699ca7-c580-42be-9be7-d552a0e0786f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>USE would be stronger and able to get rid of dependency on USA to protect self against of its unpredictability and untrustworthy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A stronger Europe would be a better counterbalance to the USA and able to pursue its own international agenda.\n","id":"7d7d3b60-966e-4319-a7f1-93de3674f4de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>The Sagan Standard \"The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness\" often paraphrased as \"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence\"; implies that there needs to be a lot of very convincing evidence for the existence of God, which is lacking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no demonstrable scientific evidence that proves the existence of God.\n","id":"93ea2ef6-9548-4f13-84ce-f465c2d46e0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>Some confederate monuments have legitimate reasons unity, duty, reparations to be revered and should be kept in place based on an open and honest historical review of their original purpose and dedication details. For example, the Arlington Confederate Memorial<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Confederate monuments, flags and memorials honor an important part of the American story.\n","id":"3ba6492d-813e-4089-aa84-28d692b33271"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, I am not Anti Vaccine. I've had a passion for science since I was teen that's left me with an eye for scrutiny. I've found myself at an odd stance on this issue, mostly because I don't know enough. Which is why I'm posting. I understand how hate against Anti Vaxxers is justified. Who could ignore such a great human effort, and withhold the care from their child? At the same time preaching others to do the same. I can guess who, from my own experience and from anecdotes I've read. Anti Vaxxers are people who have been personally effected by negative aspects of vaccines or so they think , and are usually predisposed to the distrust of the government and pharmaceutical industry. They also happen to form a hive mind, an entire internet community, feeding eachother. Now, that's a toxic brew of emotion, anecdotal evidence, and distrust. Of course a group like this is one to hate, make fun of, and be considered dangerous. This is where my view comes in. The logic of wanting safe vaccines, and a choice to take them or not shouldn't be laughable. It's a serious prospect and the AntiVax group shouldn't represent it entirely because they're pretty radical and have plenty of claims to make without enough evidence. The idea that not all vaccines are safe for everyone should definitely be considered. From what I've seen and read, doctors simply don't take enough time to inform you on vaccines. With any prescription drug you buy there will be a large list of things you might need to worry about upon taking that comes with the prescription. Your doctor will certainly not go through this list, that's why it's there for you to read. Yet this isn't available a lot of time for vaccines. Especially at open clinics, you simply walk in, are given heavy drugs and you walk out. All with little information. Sometimes even cross dosing several heavy drugs. From what I can tell, every person is different in chemistry, which is why prescription drugs are so specialized and are full of adverse affects. Because they're obviously not for everyone to take. Next, let's consider how vaccines are a business. Manufactured by large companies. Companies ran by shareholders whose goal is to boost profits. Cut costs. Obviously the government provides oversight to the manufacturing, but this doesn't always guarantee a safe product for all. In some states it's even mandatory to vaccinate or you'll be punished. The turnout is a heavy drug being distributed to clinics, injected quickly into thousands of children a week before school, by a nurse who just wants to go home. Given the outrage of these Antivaxxers and the thousands of claims of vaccine injury frothing from a system like ours it could be unwise to mark it off so quickly. I'm not saying I believe in their cause or if Vaccine injury occurs. What I am saying is that blind hate for them and not considering at least some of the logic is lazy, and if there is something askew, possibly dangerous. Tell me what you think I should know, how ignorant am I? Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate against Anti-Vaxxers is reasonable, but not entirely.\n","id":"49795cca-6741-42d9-b484-1b83671ad7db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Bringing first world problems to emerging or developing countries will cause irritations and incomprehension and finally is a lack of respect and tolerance facing the host culture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The potential benefits for tourists should not be the determinant of how any culture treats its traditional heritage.\n","id":"089fba80-92b6-49f2-b896-dd576c5b2ec3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If someone is functional ie. can get out of bed, go to work, pass classes, etc , self sufficient, and can afford therapy, but chooses to take anti depressants instead of going to therapy, it shows a lack of insight, a fear of introspection, or laziness. Depression feels terrible, but some people seem to just want to mask the symptoms and not treat the actual illness by working on themselves not willing to work exert energy the definition of lazy . There are many different types of therapies and so many different therapists. I believe that those who claim that therapy doesn't work on them simply have not tried enough therapies or therapists. I frequently see people claiming Therapy is useless after only one CBT session, not knowing about all these other therapies or that therapy takes time to help. Inb4 mental illness is complicated not about willpower laziness I deal with mental illnesses on my own, including depression. I have never tried medication and don't understand the point of it for people who are functional and can afford therapy. I'm obviously open to my view being changed<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone with depression is functional, choosing anti-depressants over therapy that they can afford simply shows laziness.\n","id":"31c02b4e-0843-41f0-9cf1-5d4a94c4e083"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now that Hillary Clinton is definitely going to be a Democratic nominee, the best reason to vote for her that I heard is that she is not Donald Trump. Often, this argument centers around the next President nominating Supreme Court justices. Of course Trump has a bunch of idiotic policies that generally have no place in civilized society, such as racial profiling, extreme xenophobia, and more. While true, I do thing that the fear of Trump is exaggerated for two reasons. First, we do have confirmation for Supreme Court nominees, and if Trump nominates a judge from Idiocracy, Democrats still have sufficient numbers in Senate to filibuster the nominees. Trump has no popular support, so 2 3 of the country would cheer if they did it for the duration of the presidency. Incidentally, the same is true for Hillary. If she nominates someone who Republicans don't like, since she is so unpopular, Republicans could also filibuster her nominee for the duration of her presidency, and 2 3 of the country will cheer them on. Secondly, in terms of Trump idiotic policies, we don't really know what he expects to deliver. Obviously, he is playing to the stupidest, but does he seriously plan to build a wall, much less having Mexicans to pay for it? I seriously doubt it. Again, given the fact that he has no base, he is extremely unpopular, there is probably a huge difference between what he claims, and what he could possibly hope to achieve. Most certainly, he is going to be a one term president, who will probably force a lot of soul searching inside the Republican party. Is this really so much worse that Hillary's candidacy who actually does have base behind her, will probably last for two terms, and will continue the steady drift of Democrats to the right? I don't know. , please<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dangers of Trump are greatly exaggerated.\n","id":"ab928754-943d-41e3-8a13-3d93910a30e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>THB that Palestinian Statehood should be recognised by the United Nations General Assembly<|ARGUMENT|>The entire Arab League is already perfectly capable of speaking for the Palestinian cause in the United Nations. There are established nations whose leaders have not addressed a full meeting of the General Assembly as frequently as leaders of the Palestinian cause, even the leader of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas has addressed the General Assembly as he did in September 2011.i It is the only geo-political issue that routinely impacts upon the conduct of the elections of other nations, the plight of the Palestinian issue is the stuff of newspaper headlines around the world while other, arguably more serious, concerns go unvoiced. It is difficult to see how admitting Palestine as a member state would bring any more focus to the issue in practical terms. i \u2018Full transcript of Abbas speech at UN General Assembly\u2019, Haaretz.com, 23 September 2011,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Palestinian cause has no shortage of advocates in the UN this would add nothing to the discussion\n","id":"9a000af4-587d-48ac-914d-3c044f9cd32a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>In 2004, Singer wrote \"PMFs provide a range of tactical military roles on the ground, supplementing the currently over-stretched coalition forces. An estimated 6000 of the private contractors carry out armed roles\" and \"even helped operate combat systems like the Patriot missile batteries in the Army and the Aegis defence system on board numerous U.S. Navy ships.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In light of the attacks of 9\/11 and due to Saddam Hussein's previous attacks on the freedom of Americans, US military forces along with over 100,000 civilians armed with privately owned weapons, working in Private Military Companies successfully toppled Hussein's tyrannical regime.\n","id":"29e90d0a-c35a-4a5a-8e88-fc0932a851d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Facebook should do more to limit hate speech.<|ARGUMENT|>Banning ideas, no matter how despicable and reprehensible they are, drives the people who hold said ideas underground, away from the public debate and into forums of their own - in which only they exist, and where they won't be exposed to differing viewpoints. Therefore, if one decides to ban a harmful idea, you do not erode the idea but instead solidify it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Counter-speech is the best way to create a respectful environment.\n","id":"0ca40ffd-eaf3-4ab4-8d64-078910d14df1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would like thought provoking responses in hopes of re evaluating a particular issue where I seem to stray from the progressive agenda. You can't just keep championing out articulate Muslims who interpret the Qur'an Islam as a religion of peace and inclusivity. It's not working. Yes, there is a dichotomy in attitudes between Muslims who have emigrated and those who are domestic to mostly Muslim nations, and I hope my responses can speak on the latter especially. Including legitimate polling in these countries where Sharia law in various intensities has overwhelming support amongst its own peoples. How to define progress and evaluate whose notion of it is good better or bad worse, of course remains the question.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Islam is fundamentally ill-suited to modernity and progress\n","id":"8ac6c9f1-99a9-4234-a0d9-9d23a2b840a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>Jozef Wesolowski a Polish citizen who had been a nuncio papal ambassador, was laicized in 2014 because of accusations of sexual abuse of minors during the five years he served as Vatican ambassador in Santo Domingo. The Vatican refused to lift his diplomatic immunity and allow him to be judged in Santo Domingo.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cases of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, nuns and members of religious orders in the 20th and 21st centuries has been widespread and has led to many allegations, investigations, trials and convictions, as well as revelations about decades of attempts by the Church to cover up reported incidents.\n","id":"d1b58bd2-c62f-4a0f-a794-0090e3b3a42c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many employers in the United States, typically government or government contractors, require that employees take a drug test before starting, or are subject to random drug tests at any time. I find this somewhat immoral, ineffective, and while I am no legal expert, it seems to me that it may also be unconstitutional. I believe it to be immoral because I think it is hypocritical. Employers have no problem with alcohol, coffee, or nicotine use, nor do they try to figure out if employees have broken laws that they have not been convicted for. It seems that these policies go against the norm of what is seen as acceptable behavior of employers. I find it ineffective because many people will just cut out the drugs for long enough to pass the test, fake a result with clean pee, or look for another job if that\u2019s not feasible. Or, even worse, the prospective employee might just switch to a drug that can\u2019t be easily detected in a test, which may be worse for their health. Furthermore, employers often reject qualified applicants due to these policies. I don\u2019t see the redeeming values unless one takes the view that drug users can\u2019t be trusted to perform consistently or are inherently worse employees than non drug users. I find it unconstitutional because our constitution gives protections against unreasonable searches. An employer would not be allowed to search your car or home or backpack to determine if you have broken any laws or are a bad worker. Yet, they can require that you hand over your own urine so they can search for traces of what has been in your body. This seems like a violation of the 4th amendment and feels like a blatant violation of privacy. I understand in some cases, like in law enforcement or jobs where security clearance is required, these policies may be justified. These jobs often have particular circumstances where certain invasions of privacy are not unreasonable. There are many jobs, however, where drug use is not relevant enough, on its own, to justify such actions. These points become particularly apparent when people use marijuana medicinally, or recreationally in a legal state, and lose federal job opportunities because of it. I suspect that these policies are motivated by negative stigmas against drugs. Even so, most of the rational I have provided earlier can be applied to any drug, legal or illegal. I haven\u2019t able to find proper justification for these policies, but there must be a reason that they haven\u2019t been successfully challenged in the courts, so I would like to know the reasoning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mandatory drug tests should be illegal.\n","id":"c2c55d6f-9c6a-4c1b-81fb-7a58894e535b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>If judges are replaced on a more frequent basis, the ideas they bring are likelier to be more reflective of modern public opinion as opposed to the opinions of the past.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The way in which Government Institutions, such as the Supreme Court, operate should reflect the will of the people.\n","id":"2c568ea5-c1cb-4c89-b3b6-88b423cf9d25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever a radfem does something abrasive and potentially unjust in the name of feminism, you'll always have those who will say that they aren't real feminists or not all feminists are like that . While they're quick to tell this to the average person, how often do you see them out in public decrying the actions of radical feminists? I like to think of it as guilt by association . You have a feminist and a radical feminist. The radfem is shouting the usual cishet white male oppresion spiel and how they should tear down the patriarchy by any means necessary. The regular feminist doesn't agree with the radfems reasoning, but since they are supposedly fighting for the same goal, she ignores it, and wonders why some people treat her with disdain before she even says a word simply because she identifies as feminist. She's being viewed as being supportive of the radfems since she isn't speaking out against them with nearly the same fervor that the radfems harbor. A lot of the focus on feminism is attracted to the radfems, like the ones who harassed those guys at the cathedral in Argentina. He who speaks loudest is heard, and since the radfems there are varying levels of radical by the way, not just the shrieking pseudo terrorists are constantly out voicing intelligent feminists, it's beginning to leave a stain on what started out as a great movement. If regular feminists would hold rallies and protests against radfems just like they would about other issues, then feminism wouldn't be demonized as much. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If more feminists openly disavowed radicals, then people wouldn't be so quick to label the entire movement as akin to a hate group.\n","id":"e656a5a9-8325-40d9-b1f7-87862334bde0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>If we became immortal, there would be less space to utilize on earth because there would potentially be more people being born than dying.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If everyone was immortal and people continue having children, the Earth would eventually become overpopulated.\n","id":"b895e50d-8e64-4f30-9d6c-cc0850fe5a68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So gun control has been a debate that has been going on for years in the United States. Some people want guns to be banned fully. Some people want guns to be lax all over. Personally, I think the former is impossible, as you will NEVER be able to ban guns in the United States. People WILL die if you try to take them away. I also do feel that citizens should have guns in order to defend themselves. If you are a women, and a 6'5 300 pound dude broke into your house, then generally he can do whatever he wants to you. Of course, statistically most people who break into homes just want your stuff and don't want to harm you, but on the other hand no one wants to have their lives and their children lives on the chance of a statistic. But there are various issues that occur due to guns. People committing suicide with them, people shooting up places, etc. This is my proposal that I think would make at least most people content Notice how I didn't say happy. You will never make anyone happy You MUST have a gun license in order to take a gun into the public.Wherever you go, your license goes. In order to obtain a gun license, you must go through a short course. You also must be 18 or above. If you are over 25 the course is shortened two weeks. The course details gun safety and maintenance, horror stories, suicide hotline information, mental health statistics and information, etc. Once you obtain the license you also must undergo a background check and a mental health check. This can occur at any point prior to taking the course, but it must be done at least within a 5 month period of taking the course. Once those prerequisites are completed you have a gun license In order to bring a gun into the public, it must be registered on the license. All guns sold are also equipped with a Smart device that acts as a fingerprint scanner. The fingerprint scanner prevents the gun from firing without the registered persons fingerprint Similar to the fingerprint scanners in phones and cars . You can have up to 5 fingerprints So you could have fingerprints for your spouse so they could use your guns I'm not sure if there should be a password system but put that in just in case. The smart device also acts as a locater and enables law enforcement knows you are a registered gun owner. Now let me elaborate on this. It's not necessarily a locator. Police in Texas can't know when you are home in Maryland if you have the Smart device on your gun. Just if police stop you, they can know if you have a registered gun on you Which I think is fare it also saves information on when the gun was fired, and bullets are outfitted with a number that enables police to know at what time and from what gun the guns as fired. This would prevent people from using guns to commit murders as it would be a dead giveaway. if someone where to tamper with the smart device, a piece of paper will tear with in the smart device that will let police know that it had been tampered with Similar to the seal that exist with smartphones that let manufactures know if you were tinkering within it . messing with the smart device isn't exactly illegal, but it is damning if you are a suspect of a crime. It would also disable kids from obtaining guns to commit suicide or using them in schools. It also completely does away with accidents so that if someone with a gun trips or a piece of clothing gets tangled in the trigger you won't have a tragedy on your hands. Guns that aren't registered i.e guns that existed prior to this update can be kept on the property of the person. Anyone who is found with an unregistered gun will be fined. Fine will be 300, 600, 1000, and 1500. After 4 fines, the gun is confiscated. Again, people are free to keep unregistered fire arms in their property So you could drive in a car with one as long as the car is your property if the gun is unregistered. You can also go to a private property that allows you to bring unregistered fire arms. However, you cannot go to a public area such as a super market or movie theater with the unregistered fire arm Police also come equipped with a device that can disable guns. The device is unlocked and locked through the use of a fingerprint of a police officer. Each device can also only disable 1 3 Random device guns at a time for a duration of 45 minutes to an hour. The reason for this rule is to prevent criminals from stealing the device and using it for their own ends, disabling law abiding citizens from using the guns. This rule makes it very unreliable for a criminal, as they can never be sure that the device can disable 1,2, or 3 of someones guns. Another thing to note is that for law abiding citizens, Police are required to inform the person that their guns are being disabled prior to disabling them. Public Areas and purchasable for citizens come with a Smart Detector that notifies the staff of people entering the store with guns It's not a loud noise or bing, just a computer that takes note of it. No one but the people working the security at a store would know . Non Registered fire arms and ammunition can still be bought, but they are heavily taxed. I also have an idea that ammo sold in the U.S can be mixed with an alloy that enables police officers to tell if you have a fire arm Or at least ammunition with the use of their smart devices. This ammunition is made much cheaper than non alloyed ammunition So what issues are there with my proposals? Many of the smart devices and finger print scanners exist within phones and cars. The only thing I am unsure of is the alloy. Another thing that I was unsure of,and thus, decide not to put in the proposal is the idea that if a registered gun is fired, that it would notify police. This would obviously exclude things like gun ranges and Hunting zones . I think I basically solved most gun problems, and citizens have firearms to defend themselves and for recreational activity. Hell, citizens can even still use unregistered fire arms if they HATE my proposal, they are just much harder to get a hold of due to their expense And if it's expensive legally, then the black market will be TRIPLE so. A criminal won't be able to afford a 10,000 gun on the black market I don't think. A School shooter will have much more difficulty constructing their massacre. A Security guard has a chance of disabling their guns. The background and mental health check also weeds them out further. The more variables you introduce into a crime, the easier it is for it to fall apart. A child will not be able to steal their parents guns and take them to school. A Baby who gets a hold of a gun won't kill someone or themselves. Someone who steals a gun would still need the registered owners finger print. Someone who uses a gun to commit a murder will also be damning themselves, and if you put in the Pull the trigger inform the cops bit, then it gives them much less time to construct a story So thoughts? EDIT After very thorough discussion. I've come to the conclusion that my proposal is unfeasible due to technological complications and Constitutional violations. Many people in this thread have really brought some good points, especially cavediver. I do think Smart guns should be introduced though, preferable when the technology is better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gun Control Idea that invovles finger print scans on guns and Gun Disablers for Law Enforcement.\n","id":"60c17200-09a4-4387-8173-ac95d27a6117"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The United States Post Office is an archaic vestige of a bygone era. It is horribly inefficient, unaccountable, and no longer relevant to modern society. For these reasons, it should be abolished in its entirety. The Post Office was first envisioned in 1775 by the Second Continental Congress and is one of the few government agencies explicitly outlined in the United States Constitution. Originally managed by Benjamin Franklin, it became one of the first services US citizens received from their fledgling government. Since that time, it's undergone some reform, but it's still constantly criticized for corruption, inefficiency, mismanagement and general lack of purpose in our modern era. Whenever the topic of Post Office reorganization, privatization or abolishment comes up, there are invariably defenders of the status quo who will argue against any change. However, every single one of their arguments is disingenuous for the reasons outlined below. False Argument 1 But it actually is super efficient Besides, who else would do it? One of the most common defenses of the Post Office is the belief that its service is cheap specifically because of its government mandated monopoly. Although their rates steadily increase a little almost every year, as of this writing, I can send a first class letter anywhere in the continental United States for only 0.46. That does sound like a pretty good deal until you realize that that price is artificial. By federal law, it's illegal for anyone to offer lower postage for first class mail. One enterprising individual, Lysander Spooner, actually did try to out compete the Post Office in 1844. And despite government threats to lock him up, he succeeded. Spooner was able to use cheaper and more innovative means to transport mail and earn a profit while only charging 5 cents, compared to the Post Office's rate of 12 cents. That may sound like a trivial amount, but just imagine a similar scenario in your personal life. Suppose you were stuck using the services of a business like, say, Comcast, and then some upstart company began not only offering more channels and better customer service but did it for 60 less? That's what Spooner achieved until Congress literally outlawed competition to the Post Office in 1851. Since then, we've been stuck with arbitrary rates and an unaccountable bureaucracy that only looks good because we having little to compare it to. Could modern carriers, like FedEx or UPS or DHL do it for less? Probably. Unfortunately, by law, they're not even allowed to try. False Argument 2 It's a job creator Another frequent argument in defense of the Post Office is that it's an enormous job creator. Like any convincing lie, the best ones are based on the truth, for the Post Office does in fact employee over six hundred thousand people all across the country. According to the US Census Bureau, this makes it one of the single largest employers in the country. Surely, defenders argue, if we abolish the Post Office, we'd be firing over half a million people What kind of monster would do such a thing? The problem with this argument is that most of those jobs don't really exist to begin with, and the ones that do won't go away. They'll simply be reorganized into the private sector. Although its tried to reform itself, the Post Office still suffers from considerable waste. It currently operates in locations that hardly use their services, simply because half its job isn't to deliver mail, but to employee people to sit in an office doing useless busy work. Not only is that wasteful, but it does so at the detriment of society by preventing those employees by working in more useful jobs elsewhere. Were the Post Office to be privatized or abolished, there would still be some demand for their services, which the remaining carriers could only satisfy by hiring additional staff. Having plenty of experience, ex Post Office employees would be quickly re hired into more focused and accountable roles. False Argument 3 Corruption? But they're reforming They promised Due to its size, the Post Office has one of the largest unions in the country. This gives it a huge amount of political power, which is often used to obstruct, if not outright prevent, any positive change in the organization. To their credit, the leaders of the Post Office have acknowledged some of the organization's problems, and made some attempts at reform, often against significant backlash. Noticing that the Internet has offset so much mail volume, they proposed eliminating a day of delivery, saving the organization millions. The plan was even approved by President Obama. Yet there was so much backlash from special interest groups, like postal unions and bulk mailers that the plans were canceled. And since the Post Office is a pseudo government organization, it still requires Congressional approval for major reforms. As a result, what few reforms the Post Office does manage to enact are largely symbolic and ineffectual. False Argument 4 People need it Some argue that without the Post Office, people will be cutoff from vital services and information. This argument is, at best, outdated. When the Post Office was originally envisioned, the nation was a very different place. Most US citizens lived in isolated rural communities, with unreliable means of communicating with their neighbors, much less their government. For that reason, the Post Office served as a sort of lifeline. But no longer do we live in that world. Even the most rural communities in the modern day have phones or some basic Internet access that lets them communicate with people on the other side of the planet. Millions use cars and public transportation on our massive infrastructure of roads to traverse hundreds of miles on a single tank. The only thing the Post Office still reliably connects people to is a mountain of junk advertisements for things they don't care about. Even if the Post Office were abolished, there would still be mail delivery. It would just be done by someone else. Preferably based on choice in a free market where different carriers have to compete for customers. False Argument 5 It's just a conservative ploy The political forces propping up this failing institution should not be underestimated. After all, they've succeeded so far. One of their favorite tactics is to make use of the left right political divide and label anyone criticizing the Post Office as a right wing hack, \u201celitist\u201d businessman or otherwise general evil doer out to destroy everyones \u201cbeloved\u201d broken monstrosity. Still, their claims are not entirely with out merit. Many critics do wear conservative stripes, usually of the libertarian variety. However, this is not inherently a left vs right issue. No one likes government waste, much less pointless government bureaucracy. Except, of course, if they're employed by that bureaucracy. I doubt they would call President Obama the enemy of the everyman when he approved Post Office reforms. Also, critics of Post Office waste are often critics of other sources of government waste, like huge defense spending. Yet these same people receive no criticism on those grounds. Where are the cries of cold blooded capitalism, heartless job layoffs and the \u201cdiminishing of public services\u201d when anyone suggests our military doesn't necessarily need to be larger than the next eight combined? I write this as someone who has voted Democratic for most of my adult life, but without fail, whenever I mention my desire to privatize or abolish the Post Office, I'm invariably called a conservative shill. It's a convenient smoke screen for an organization that no longer has any legs to stand on. False Argument 6 Everyone loves the Post Office I have a confession. Although I firmly believe in all my preceding points, a good portion of my animosity towards the Post Office comes from my own interactions with them. In short, I have an ax to grind, but as I'll explain, this grinding is way overdue. Like most people, I normally receive about ten times the amount of junk mail than desired mail. And yes, I've tried numerous solutions to junk mail. None have worked. That alone is depressing, but that's not the primary cause of my frustration. The real problem came when I suddenly started receiving nothing but junk mail, while senders of \u201creal\u201d mail began calling or emailing me, complaining that their letters were being returned as \u201cundeliverable\u201d. My doctor. My bank. My insurance company. My friends and family. Few could get a letter through. Meanwhile I was still getting plenty of junk mail fliers, coupon booklets, post cards for discounts on pizza, and my favorite, advertisements for tree removal services. If I find a tree in my tiny apartment, I'll be sure to give them a call. I confirmed everyone was using my correct address, complete with apartment number. There seemed no obvious reason why the mail was being returned. Oddly, the Post Office would eventually deliver a few pieces of mail that had initially been returned, with the \u201cundeliverable\u201d sticker still attached. The address was listed correctly, with no explanation for why is was first returned but then correctly delivered, even though the address had not changed. So naturally, I called their customer service line to complain. I was polite and carefully explained the problem, and they politely and dutifully took down my information, promising to \u201ctalk to the carrier\u201d, \u201cescalate the ticket\u201d and \u201ccall me back\u201d when the issue was resolved. Weeks passed, and little changed. I started to receive some actual mail again, but I would still get complaints about returns. I would occasionally call back, both to check on their status and to renew my complaint. Months passed, and they never once called me back and nothing ever really changed. I eventually did manage to talk to the actual carrier, the guy who physically puts the mail in my mailbox, and ask him what the problem was. Turns out, he was marking my address as vacant because I wasn't removing all the junk mail each week. I asked him why I should check my mailbox every day when I only receive about 5 pieces of legitimate mail a year , and he just shrugged and said, It's not a big deal. The dumpster's right over there. His cavalier attitude and complete disregard for my time made me so angry that I walked away before I said something I'd regret. But of course, his attitude was understandable. It isn't a big for him . He gets paid to shove letters in a slot. He doesn't care at all if 99.99 of the things he delivers go straight in the dumpster. He sees no problem with me having to sort through hundreds of pieces of junk mail just to find that one important letter. It's a horribly broken dynamic that needs to stop. In short, they are unable to efficiently accomplish the one thing they are Constitutionally mandated to do. And why should they? What is my recourse? To use a different Post Office? There is none. To complain to my Congressman? He's too busy defending the government's right to read all my email without a warrant. The Post Office has a Constitutionally protected monopoly, and like most monopolies, there's no direct incentive for them to ever improve. Maybe I should pay 50 month to open a Post Office box, and avoid junk mail while hopefully receiving all my real mail? I'll do that as soon as I can stomach rewarding someone for failure. What little purpose the Post Office still maintains, it fails to accomplish with any efficiency or ingenuity. It's massive size makes it a difficult organization to reform or improve, but due to logistics and politics, the organization cannot be reformed in any meaningful way. Its long history has earned it a certain element of romanticism in the public consciousness, but like most romantic stories, it's more fantasy than reality, and we must not let ourselves be blinded to harsh truths, nor the inevitable conclusion that the United States Post Office should be abolished.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States Post Office Should be Abolished\n","id":"3dfb3f96-7e7e-4984-8f84-b20cc6e1abe2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Monotheism, by itself, does not require defining God in terms of maximal greatness. Yet, without that criterion, any number of lesser deities comport with the existence of evil. Ex., deism, open theism, finite godism see, Kushner, panentheism, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of evil and monotheism are not mutually exclusive unless you begin discussing the qualities of a specific god.\n","id":"3393a50d-4b3f-4e75-8682-4588267aabfe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it OK to publicly approach a stranger for sex?<|ARGUMENT|>It can be fun and rewarding for both the person doing the approaching, and the person being approached. People generally want to connect with new people, and it builds confidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are practical benefits to approaching a stranger in public to have consensual sex.\n","id":"ed623850-4882-44c9-97fb-5a50f0561e57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If we raised western men with the cultural idea that women be the ones who should be the traditional pursuer of relationships have to convince them to have sex and not the other way around we would have less rape as men would be more passive participants and men would exercise far more control over their reproductive capabilities than current cultural mores encourage. x200B I hold these views because men have very little recourse in our current legal system regarding parentage and responsibilities to children and believe that our cultural mores should reflect that. Therefore we should raise boys to guard themselves better so long as we deny them any choice in their status as parents and thus as providers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Culturally, Western Men Should Gatekeep Sex\n","id":"547163bc-79e6-419d-b05d-d21855d7f7a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The argument for stopping climate change and generally keeping the planet clean should be framed as a necessary measure in our self interest, rather than as a moral obligation like it currently is. Any sort of moral argument about the responsibilities humans have toward the environment is suspect, because it heavily depends on your personal beliefs, and a self interest framework would be easier to get people on board with The moral argument for environmentalism as \u201cenvironmental justice\u201d is debatable. This view is often tied to a left wing view of social justice that is not universally accepted. People have different viewpoints, and there is more than one valid view. Modern society is little short of a miracle over 7 billion people alive, more interconnected than ever before living longer, healthier lives even despite the inequalities, this is true . We have comforts and food and water security to an unprecedented degree. It\u2019s gotten to the point where healthcare can be considered a right. All of this wonderful complexity that we know and love is built on exploitation of the Earth and its wonderful fossil fuels. I don\u2019t think people realize this fact they will rant about climate change and how our selfish unsustainable ways are wrong, but stopping to think about the implications of what they are saying should give them pause. Neither I nor most people are going to give up our privileges and comforts for the planet\u2019s benefit. Regression to a more sustainable but frankly less fun world is a non starter for me, others, and probably most environmentalists. Few things motivate like self interest. Economic incentives, not moral guilt, can induce people to change their behavior. Carbon taxes and cap and trade have been shown to work these programs are the real workhorses of climate change, not turning off the lights or taking a cold shower. Sustainability and halting climate change are desirable goals because they are in our self interest. That\u2019s not a lofty ideal, but it\u2019s true Warmer climate means flooding, more disease, and food shortages, and dependence on fossil fuels is fine until they run out. Historically, self interest like this has led to real behavior change in a way that being guilted by documentaries and posters doesn\u2019t. Certainly every bit counts, and voluntary environmental decisions are great. But acting like it\u2019s a moral obligation to be sustainable is problematic for all of the above reasons. Unfortunately, many environmental groups do take this approach, which I think both breeds resentment and is pretty hypocritical as in a lot of environmentalists complain about fossil fuels and pollution, even though the comforts they enjoy and life they live depend on those very things . I believe that a better framing of climate change is that it\u2019s in our best interest to be sustainable. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Self-interest, not moral imperative, is what should dictate how we tackle climate change\n","id":"ce041e90-8a36-43fe-a4ce-433cb9591164"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should unpaid internships be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Graduates who are offered jobs at a company after an internship are more likely to stay with the company.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies benefit from having interns, which means that it is likely that they would offer paid internships.\n","id":"069de1ad-30db-460c-9ac5-783e8fc8f0e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>The problems that Brexit is meant to solve could be solved better by alternative ways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union.\n","id":"b7f119d1-443c-4d63-b4ab-a0d05bc4fe0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify when I say America I mean the U.S and Canada I have noticed recently that on social media there are a lot of Europeans who can't stop talking about America. In most parts of the internet, I have noticed that it is extremely common in 3 subjects of discussion. 1. Politics 2. Sports specifically esports the only physical sports I follow are Football and Lacrosse 3. Shit talking America and Americans mostly the U.S Americans, on the other hand, never seem to go online and just start shit talking Europe. We don't shit talk to Europe, we don't enter your politics, and we don't shit talk your teams. Politics Whenever there are political discussions online there tend to be Europeans who come in and act like they are the expert in American politics. Whenever I see something that has to do with American politics on social media, there is always someone from Europe who knows more than I do about the Politics of where I live. American politics, like all politics, requires one to know what it is like to be from there and live there. Americans never go ahead and act like they are experts on Europeans politics online. In every twitter discussion, Reddit thread, or Facebook post on American politics there is always someone from all the way across the Atlantic ocean who needs to give their own two cents. Most of it has nothing to do with you, why do you always have to go ahead and start acting like you are an expert on American Politics? Most of the time it's not even some helpful discussion, most of the time it is just some snarky bullshit like America needs some help or What is wrong with America? . This isn't even a social media thing either, there are a shot ton of European shows that won't stop talking about American politics. Don't you guys have anything going on to discuss among your selves? This doesn't include intercontinental politics since everyone is a part of that. Sports mostly esports I'm going to focus more on Esports here because the only physical Sports I follow are Football and Lacrosse. I mostly follow the pro LOL and CSGO scenes, but from what I see many Europeans have a superiority complex. The endless amount of NA is Shit and NA bad lol is just pathetic how common it is. Sure there are some people from NA that say the same shit but it is minuscule to the amount of Europeans who do it. Europeans seem to always shit talk NA whenever they have the Chance. They act like all Eu Teams are just magically better than all NA teams. Whenever an NA team does good Europeans always have excuses like Oh Afreeca was never good, just ignore the fact that we said they would 3 0 C9 a week ago or Only reason why C9 won the major was that Faze choked . Whenever an NA team does bad it is just an endless series of shit talking. It is really pathetic that instead of having an actual discussion about a game or something there are a lot of Europeans who would rather be toxic assholes. Shit talking America Everytime time I am on Reddit I always see a post about how much better Europe is than shitty America. Every single post has somebody just talking about how much better Europe is than America. It is pathetic. Americans don't do this, yet Europeans seem to love doing it. It is just a constant barrage of how America is just a complete shithole compared to the Glorius lands of Western Europe and their godly people. Europeans can't shut the fuck up about how much better Europe is than America. You guys love talking about how, about how shit we are, and how our people are shit, how our food is shit, how our societies are shit, and how our cultures are shit. This is mostly on the U.S since apparently we are all subhuman compared to the Glorius land of Western Europe. Of course, I don't mean all Europeans are like this, that would be stupid. What I am trying to say is that there is a large amount of Europeans who won't shut the fuck up about America. Edit 1 My view was changed when it comes to politics but my stance on 2 and 3 stays the same.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Europe is Obsessed with America\n","id":"4218f08d-f9f8-4889-b741-457861d23fc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious organizations have to debate their claims, because of their universal vocation. To be able to stand in a plural contest and argue has its specific pedagogical value.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious organizations build schools and universities, orphanages, and other services for community benefits.\n","id":"f616111c-a007-4785-bf73-f97d33117f95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To say Player Unknown's Battle Grounds PUBG and Fortnite Battle Royal Fortnite have gotten huge is a vast understatement. PUBG first dominated the scene earlier this year by being a definitive addition to the genre, then Fortnite stole the limelight by addressing the problems mainly developer integrity and system performance PUBG had. Both are still going strong with their own audiences, art styles, design choices, and most importantly, eSports leagues. Big name teams like Cloud9 and Natus Vincere are hopping on board PUBG's league, and Fortnite's publisher, Epic Games, announced their 100 million contribution to prize pools for competetions for the next year. I think it's all bullshit. Any game in the battle royal genre is inherently unbalanced. RNG luck is too big of a factor in these games, making every game unfair regardless of the circumstances. Where you can drop at the beginning of the match, who's sitting next to you on the plane, what guns will be on the ground waiting for you, and when where the supply drops are, are all random. Success in the game is determined more by luck than skill there's nothing that even best player can do when they finally land only to be blasted in the face by someone else with the shotgun that just so happened to be closer to them. This brings me to my other point on it's effect on the eSports scene. The games that have defined eSports Counter Strike, DoTa 2, League of Legends, etc. draw many parallels to physical sports. They require skills that can be practiced, and can benefit from strategies, techniques, and teamwork, similar to a real sport. I have a phrase that I've been waiting to say to someone that says otherwise This isn't competitive Candy Crush. I've argued against people that try to overgeneralize video games as sitting on their ass hitting buttons, overlooking the mechanical skills and knowledge of the game required to do well. I fear that if PUBG and Fortnite takes off in a competitive sense, the amount of luck present in the game will undermine the games I listed earlier those built from the ground up to give players a level playing field as being easier than they are. eSports is a well established industry at this point, and to say it's here to stay should be a given. But with the notion of the BR genre making it's presence known, I do have my concerns on how people think about eSports as a whole. Edit I should probably clarify, my point on RNG in the BR genre is that RNG is too far embedded into the games to make it competitive, and not enough of it can be mitigated to make things a fair fight. RNG is fine in other games, so long as they can be mitigated. I should also clarify that when I say RNG, I mean a true Random Number Generator. Variances from other sources I have no problem with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Battle Royal games have no place in eSports, and will undermine the scene's integrity\n","id":"f0f074af-5403-4ef3-a389-c37adc036b12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>It is unclear whether an actual infinite amount can exist, such as an infinite number of past events, or an infinite number of past causes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The universe began to exist \"began to exist\" defined here at definition A5\n","id":"442d0c89-e36e-4618-9e3a-60abad579bee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many good people are forced through circumstance into behaving neutrally, and the worst people are those who design, lead, and perpetrate atrocities. Was Switzerland worse than Germany during WWII? Of course not. I believe that this famous quotation was not intended to be taken literally. I interpret it as a very stern way of saying, Hey people who are doing nothing in the face of atrocities you are complicit and should change your actions to become part of the resistance. That makes sense in a morality tale sense, and I think it's good advice. But I don't believe that the quotation it's literally true. I think it was meant to be an effective exaggeration. Still though, this quote seems to summarize a popular sentiment. My very, very smart mom believes this quote to contain truth, and I've heard it referenced countless times in school and daily life. It's a popular belief. This photo comes to mind It shows a crowd of Nazis giving the Nazi salute at a rally, and includes one man who has his arms crossed. Would you really blame that man, who appears to be demonstrating and act of political non compliance via neutrality, more than you would the people around him giving the salute? I would not. I think that this visual display of neutrality is fucking powerful. He's not resisting or protesting. Just standing there. Neutral. If you're wondering why I'm falling so hard on Nazi examples it's because I was raised Jewish and like 3 4 of the morality based convos we had a Hebrew school pertained in some way to Nazis or the war, so that's kinda what I have to work with. Please explain why you disagree with me. I know that a lot of you do. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since youth, I've heard over &amp; over the Dante quote that, \"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.\" I strongly disagree.\n","id":"5905f447-0c27-439f-a7aa-81b4d8ed0306"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>More than 50,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States in 2015, even alongside harsh legislation. This number would likely increase under legalisation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An increase in the number of drug users and therefore drug addicts will have extremely negative consequences for individuals and society.\n","id":"50811872-c2e8-4b28-9a16-a82b396c99d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the following, I'll try to describe why I take issue with the modern study of philosophy. Here, I'll be using the term philosophy to mean the way which philosophy is studied, taught, and done in the 21st century . In the interests of full disclosure, I have never formally studied philosophy although I have done so informally the last time I took a class with any relation to English, philosophy, or the humanities in general was in high school at the tender age of seventeen. Very often, when people post criticisms of philosophy online, others are quick to reply How can you criticize philosophy? Philosophy is the foundation of all rational thought indeed, by writing such a critique, you have engaged in the practice of philosophy One imagines these people smirking as they hastily compose their reply, secure in their belief that in one fell swoop, they have managed to totally evade the criticisms leveled at philosophy and, in doing so, soundly 'defeated' their opponent in debate. However, this is nothing but from beating up a poorly constructed, makeshift strawman. It's true that, in some sense, philosophy underlies our practice of rational thought that is, that what we think of as being 'rational' is based on certain implicit philosophical assumptions. However, to say that all reasoning is a practice of philosophy is simply an abuse of the term, one which is only used when it is argumentatively advantageous to do so. It's similarly clear that when people criticize philosophy and philosophers, they are not addressing the foundations of logical thought and debate, but rather the modern spectacle into which academic philosophy has evolved. This brings me to my first criticism that is, the idea that philosophical ideas and concepts seem inextricably tied to their originators. Philosophy students will often say that they have read Kant and studied Spinoza and so on and so forth, dropping names like they're ghostwriting Murakami's next novel. Are philosophical ideas so difficult to understand and articulate, so challenging to rephrase and refine, that we must continually look back to the monographs that introduced the ideas in the first place, even if they are hundreds or thousands of years old? At times it seems to me that students of philosophy are not studying philosophy as much as they are studying the history of philosophy not that there is anything wrong with the latter, of course, but to any non philosopher it seems terribly peculiar. I do not contest that philosophers who are widely read and studied contributed ideas that are very much worth studying, novel and innovative ideas which contributed to if not revolutionized the field of philosophy at the time. However, it does not seem particularly likely to me that every one of these philosophers was also brilliant at communicating these ideas regardless of how good they were , and it seems even unlikelier to me that, in the centuries which have passed since, nobody has managed to articulate the same ideas in a more coherent, easily understood fashion. Why study the original writings at all? To draw a comparison from a similar field Evariste Galois's work was the beginning of a new and enormous branch of mathematics, Galois theory. However, if you were to take a poll of professional mathematicians who used Galois theory, I would wager that not more than one in a hundred have ever seen Galois's original papers on the topic. Why? Because the foundations of Galois theory have been refined into a much more easily understandable form, re expressed by countless brilliant expositors in textbooks on the subject his proofs have been cleaned up, his notation has been updated, and the junk has been thrown out. Show Galois's papers to a student of mathematics, and I imagine they would have a difficult time making sense of them regardless of how proficient they were in mathematics. Just as Galois's archaic notation will be nigh incomprehensible to modern students, I have difficulty imagining that Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard's writings are easy for many undergraduates to understand. I am inclined to believe that this is not so much due to the complexity of their arguments and ideas as much as it is due to their archaic style and poor exposition Why not simply do away with the original texts altogether and present the ideas in a more accessible fashion e.g. Kant's argument for X states that ? The fact that we have not already done so suggests to me that the academic community has some strange fascination with people over ideas, to the detriment of undergraduates everywhere. A related issue is the purposeful obfuscation of philosophy by modern philosophers, perhaps I speculate in an attempt to make their texts less accessible so they seem more intelligent. After all, who can criticize a text so impenetrable that they can barely understand it or so imprecise that any number of conflicting interpretations can be justified? Consider, for instance, the following quote from Derrida's Writing and Difference The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. This is representative of the writings of modern European and particularly French philosophers, as far as I can tell. However, it is total nonsense. It is syntactically correct that is all. Derrida has managed to string together words in a grammatically correct fashion but utterly failed to express any sort of coherent idea whatsoever or perhaps he is just an abysmally terrible writer with a confused mind, in which case I doubt the quality of his ideas is any good either . The matrix of the history of the metaphysics ? What matrix? Is this philosophy, or a text on linear algebra? The determination of Being ? That is so vague as to be completely devoid of meaning. And this is hardly the worst I have found, but I can scarcely bear to read through any more of this post modern tripe. Second is the idea that modern academic philosophy is somehow germane necessary, even for scientific inquiry or, to be more precise, for methodological naturalism. This is mostly reflective of an utter lack of understanding of what scientists actually do and believe. The problem of induction, which philosophers arguing against scientism are terribly fond of bringing up at every opportunity possible, is completely irrelevant scientists are not at all concerned with whether or not induction is logically justifiable. The only criterion upon which scientific theories are judged are whether or not they work, that is, whether or not the resulting predictions are correct. Nobody is under the illusion that the laws of science are unquestionable truths about the world rather, scientists simply assign very high probabilities to these laws being true. As such, it is simply easier to refer to them as laws . In fact, as a discipline which is entirely theoretical, I find it difficult to imagine what relevance philosophy has in modern science, which is completely empirical. I am well aware that science began as natural philosophy . Please recall that I am speaking about modern philosophy and modern philosophers, not the discipline as it was two hundred years ago. In essence, the only people to whom the philosophy of science is relevant at least in the present day is to philosophers of science themselves I do not get the impression that chemists, biologists, and physicists need to consult papers in the philosophy of science to carry out their experiments or prove their theorems. Third and last is the over political nature of philosophy. Ron Maimon can say it better than I can, so I will simply quote him There's a philosophical component to physics too. But in physics, there is no time for nonsense, so physicists evaluate things by the precision of the arguments, and the criticism is required to be hostile. When someone is wrong, even if it's something you would, as a nonexpert, consider subtly wrong, it must be criticized harshly to explain exactly what is wrong, and dismissed bluntly until the other person gets it on their own time, not yours . Otherwise, you are wasting your time, and in physics, things are HARD for reasons having nothing to do with politics, so there is no time to waste. If you find that your criticisms are faulty, then you stop criticizing. You say sorry. Then you criticize the other side just as harshly, with just as strong language, even though you thought that wrong stupid way yourself only yesterday. You were stupid yesterday, and you don't have time to continue being stupid today. In philosophy, as the genteel people who do it take great pains to tell you, you MUST read historical philosophers charitably. When you read Aristotle, and he says something brain damaged as is true on every other page , you can't criticize harshly based on flaws you see, you have to somehow organically meld your mind with Aristotle's, and smoothly change the stuff using politics, like passing resolutions in the Senate, by political dialogue with other philosophers saying stuff that is either a little less or a little more brain damaged. This type of dialogue is counterproductive to accuracy. You want to get to the truth, and QUICKLY. You don't have time to debate with a host of morons, you need to internalize all the arguments, find the airtight ones, and go with them, at least until someone shows you that they aren't airtight, and you made a mistake. If you didn't make a mistake, you need to keep going. The lack of precise thinking is a by product of this political process, which is designed to preserve the status of philosophers from long ago, because it is a pure academic political structure. This is why the philosophy literature hasn't produced anything of value for itself in its entire history. All the really good ideas are imports from other fields. The scientific fields know better, but their methods of discussion demolish authority and make a non hierarchical debating team, a team where the most junior member has equal say to the most senior, at least when the junior member is right. Try that in philosophy, and it will get rid of the clowns doing it, and revolutionize the field.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The practice of modern academic philosophy is largely diseased\n","id":"a6cbfab4-8950-4832-a403-df8847b7de3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you are a subscriber to r videos, or watch youtube videos online, I'm sure you see this all the time. If there's a vertical video, you can bet your ass you'll find plenty of comments of people who sit there and complain about the vertical video. Some of them are even the top comments. These comments are just standard circle jerk comments, as they provide nothing interesting to the discussion, don't lead anywhere, are redundant, and are just obvious. NO SHIT the video is vertical. I just fucking watched it. Now, I'd agree with those comments if the video was a pre planned video. I.e someone wanted to make a instructional video, or some shit. But most, if not all of the vertical videos are spontaneous ones. They are videos of things that needed to be recorded THEN. For example, a fight breaks out, so someone pulls out their phone quickly to start recording. Being used to using your phone upright, and it being comfortable to hold the phone that way, and it looking great on the phone, all make people not think oh I need to turn it sideways. They are just focused on the fight or whatever spontaneous event and trying to get it all recorded. So please,  that these comments are not just one big circlejerk.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who complain about vertical videos, thus fueling the endless circlejerk, need to shut up.\n","id":"55521246-6d17-4192-a8e4-aa08e2ba8bdb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should education at public universities in the United States be tuition free?<|ARGUMENT|>For a state's provision of a public good to be sustainable in the long term, it is necessary that it benefit everyone. This means that free education must be open to the rich as well as the poor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making it easier for anyone to go to college even the wealthy is still a net good towards an educated society.\n","id":"842de1f7-9044-4e87-a233-f5ae7bee3567"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Journalists Publish Hacked Data?<|ARGUMENT|>Governments write the rules and regulations which keep information private. The incentive of political parties is to keep damaging information secret when they are in power, this distorts the democratic process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hacking levels the playing field between individuals and powerful government or corporate entities. It is thus necessary to combat and expose their wrong doing.\n","id":"a452809d-ba84-4a56-89a2-c558c410fa4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Republicans have, more than 41 times, over I think more than a year tried to kill Obamacare. Now they're throwing the board off the table in a tantrum because Obama won't give them an extension that they have no grounds to get. This crisis is entirely of the Republicans making. Also, I honestly believe that there's no rational thing the Democrats could have done to prevent it. What can people possibly be criticizing the Democrats for? What could they possibly have done? But let's say the Democrats did give in to the Republican's tantrum? What happens in two weeks? Do you think the Republicans wouldn't throw another tantrum over the debt ceiling limit? The Democrats would have basically ensured that the Republicans would keep throwing tantrums. Why shouldn't I see people that blame both parties as part of the problem? Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People that blame both parties for the US shutdown are part of the problem.\n","id":"85eac89d-c146-455d-8880-59a1fade77d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I live in a very red area of the country so I will concede that I may be suspect to confirmation bias. I also would say, that where I live also allows me to see just how many extreme republicans there are. Obviously we need to define extreme before we go any further. Let's take a few views to extremes. Its an extreme view to call the president the N word with vitriol in your voice. I'm laid back, and I'd put up with a joke using that word, but not with hate, that's an extreme thing to do. Another Not believing in global warming. That is extreme. You don't get to ignore scientific consensus. Another no exceptions abortions rape, incest included . I'll throw obvious extreme bigotry and racism in there as well. Those are the guidelines. In my experience, which I understand could be called anecdotal, is that a large portion of Republicans carry theses views. Far more than half. Of the over 40 demographic of friends and family I have, I'd say 75 of them do most of those things. This isn't just coincidence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fringe or extremist Republicans are a lot greater in number than most think\n","id":"696a2fa8-3a11-441f-ac49-b0192fe0707b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Aborting a Disabled Child Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>\"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.\" ~ Mahatma Ghandi. Disabled people as well as unborn babies need help, not killed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We as humans have a lot to learn from disabled people. Preventing their being would devalue society.\n","id":"f1294152-5fc4-41f8-b7b8-704e6db54e56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>One cannot prove there are no fairies living in their garden, but neither are they required to in order to reject someone's suggestion that there are - there is no evidence for it, and that is enough. So it is with god.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If one understands the scientific method, it is understandable that there is no onus to prove the non-existence of something for which there is no evidence.\n","id":"e6e66cbe-54d6-492c-b782-ff5816a9a797"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Although there are cases where mass shootings have happened, arming more people has historically proven to stop them. For example this person was a smart gun owner that stopped what could have been a terrible mass shooting. School shooting stopped. final one<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that arming more people along with more strict regulations when buying guns will help stop more mass shootings.\n","id":"be3b7e20-05c9-4ba3-81e9-a9335b7d1968"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>The decision of perpetrating a crime depends on benefit and cost, the costs by which are determined by the potential punishment and the probability of getting caught. For crimes where there is a monetary transaction, the anonymity of APs decreases the likelihood of getting caught and therefore the cost of the crime. Therefore, potential criminals will be more likely to perpetrate crimes in a world with APs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The legal system attempts to discourage potential criminals by increasing the probability they are caught and the punishment they receive, rather than attempting to create new criminals in order to catch them.\n","id":"c1904548-e7d1-45ff-9a96-b0835e9069c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>Shortly after firing FBI Director James Comey, Donald Trump told Russian officials that he had faced \"great pressure\" because of FBI criminal investigations, which was \"taken off\" thanks to his decision to fire Comey.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey was arguably an attempt to obstruct criminal investigations into Trump and his associates.\n","id":"6b653bea-1306-4ff0-af14-663b9621f4dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the United States, chattel slavery has been abolished since the Civil War. However, slavery is still allowed in prisons as a punishment for a crime. The test of the thirteenth amendment reads \u201cNeither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.\u201d Private prisons make billions of dollars by contracting out prison labor to companies. The government encourages companies to use prison labor by offering them tax credits of 2,400 per prisoner employed. Prison laborers are paid between 23 cents and 1.15 per hour or are sometimes unpaid depending on the state. Legally, prison laborers are not required to be paid at all. In most cases, prison labor is not voluntary and refusing to work can be punished by solitary confinement. Many companies utilize penal labor to avoid paying market labor prices. Insourcing , or using prison labor, is often far cheaper than paying normal workers, even in third world countries. Companies that use prison labor include Whole Foods, McDonald's, Target, IBM, Texas Instruments, Boeing, Nordstrom, Intel, Wal Mart, Victoria's Secret, Aramark, AT T, BP, Starbucks, Microsoft, Nike, Honda, Macy's and Sprint from wikipedia . I believe that consumers have a right to be informed about how their products were produced. If a product that consumers buy utilized penal labor in its creation, consumers should be informed about it on the packaging, much like how starting in 202 GMO foods must be labeled as such. To summarize Products made using slave labor in the United States must be required to inform their consumers of how the products were made.  Post script Ideally, I am in favor of abolishing penal labor entirely, but this is not what I want my view changed about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Products made using penal labor should be required to inform consumers.\n","id":"0808f672-e135-49d6-b893-db11eba614a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>The value of a human life is not infinite, therefore there is some given number of animal lives that would be worth more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are circumstances in which we must put animal lives ahead of human lives.\n","id":"da51edd3-43e5-4823-bf47-f64f6f3326e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously, on the surface, we are still divided by R and D. However, if you look within the two parties there is varying degrees of discord between members of the same party. x200B Within the Democratic party you have people like Joe Donnelly D IN former , Alexandria Ocasio Cortez D NY, and Nancy Pelosi D CA. Three different people with three different ideas about not only the purpose of government but also the ways in which that purpose should be recognized. On the Democrat side all you have to do is look at some of the people that talk on Reddit about the party progressives will argue that establishment dems should step out of their way and the est. dems will argue the progressives need to calm down a bit. x200B Within the Republican party the diversity of opinion is definitely shrinking, but you still have people like Doug Lamborn R CO who can vote fairly rank and file with Donald Trump whereas people like Rand Paul R KY will only vote with the president 74 of the time. Rand Paul even got into heated disagreements with John McCain R AZ former . x200B I would argue that with all these differences between members of the same party, we already exist within a de facto multi party system that just has intensely strong alliances a la the CDU CSU alliance of Germany where though they may support each other in several ways, they are still different from each other. x200B Further, I would say that we need to start pushing these differences in the parties more than we currently do. As of right now, I would theorize that the average voter especially those who vote straight tickets does not recognize these differences. By making these differences more noticeable, we can cause people to be more thoughtful in their votes, or as i would personally desire see these two official parties finally split into left, moderate left, moderate right, and right and allow for better representation of what the people believe and want to see from their government I understand this is a pipe dream since our FPTP electoral system breeds a two party system .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We already have a de facto multi-party system in the U.S. ignoring the Green, Libertarian and Constitution party and we need to start treating it as such.\n","id":"e4ff93dc-ef76-445d-9569-c737f9c615e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>Buddha isn't just a people, its a state of mind what can be achieved by everyone. Siddhartha the first Buddha reached this state by critical thinking, questioning the importance of heritage, and questioning the holiness ascetic life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This statement oversimplifies the reality of things. In Buddhism, one of the first things one learns is the use of critical thinking and Buddhism is a religion. Critical thinking will enhance education.\n","id":"8f284712-4d0f-463a-8dee-2ff0d609d59b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let's please leave aside the play in whatever way works best for you argument because that really entirely skirts the point of the . Maybe the way that works best for you is to hold your pick sideways while stabbing the strings with a thrusting motion. Maybe that works best for you but from an objective foundation that's simply a miserable technique for the vast majority of people. What I intend to argue is that for the vast majority of people Sarod picking will lead to better overall technique in the long run . Here's the reasons I think Sarod picking is better than Scalpel 1 Scalpel picking requires an awkward motion with your thumb. The muscles in that part of the arm hand unit are not nearly as strong or precise as the muscles in the fore arm used during Sarod picking. Furthermore, because of that lack of strength, you're sacrificing potential speed down the road. There's a reason the majority of speed pickers shredders use Sarod picking. In the long run it's a much faster and more efficient picking technique. This is not intended to be a pro shredder argument. I'm not really a shredder myself but I believe that a good guitarist has the capability to do things that if taken to excess may be considered in bad taste. For example a good guitarist should be able to shred even if he believes that in 95 of cases it would be tasteless within the context of the piece. An even better guitarist then knows how to exercise that talent tastefully without show boating or detract from the piece. 2 Scalpel picking requires an angle on the pick that leads to an awkward scraping sound and detracts from overall tone. Granted, for certain styles of music this tone can actually be desirable, but in the majority of cases it's obtrusive and detracts from overall note clarity and precision, particularly for high gain music. 3 Sarod picking emphasizes a very small almost a mere twitch movement with one of the strongest muscles in your arm. It skips the tendons of the hand which have to be pushed and pulled by the forearm anyway and jumps straight to the source so that your source of movement is coming directly from the forearm. This means that Sarod picking is overall much more efficient and less fatiguing. It further emphasizes speed and ease of movement by using a rotation type movement rather than a flex movement. Don't believe that rotating is superior to flexing? Try this hold your arm out in front of you and make a hammering motion with your fingers in the position you would hold a pick. Now do the same thing but make a screwdriving motion instead. See which one you can manage to make smaller and faster movements with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sarod picking is vastly superior to scalpel picking\n","id":"18fcf232-8ac6-4151-bd88-7910f9707c27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would not argue that personal weapons are a prerequisite for a society's success I know many EU countries are doing quite well, although it seems to me that much of their growth was accomplished while personal firearms were legal . However, the inability of people to own firearms makes it impossible for them to be independent of others, mainly the police functions of their government. It is very difficult, nearly impossible, to defend yourself and your property against an armed attacker without having a weapon yourself . Police will rarely get to your location before the attacker has a chance to maim you or make off with your property. This is especially true if you live in a very sparsely populated area, like parts of the American West, which has little equivalent in Western Europe, but generally applies even in cities. Even if the police could get there to help you, this situation means that you're completely reliant on your government to protect you in this situation. Guns are an equalizer . Without a weapon, an untrained small woman or man has little chance against a large muscular attacker. With a gun, they are much more on equal footing. A gun may be the only thing protecting a woman from getting raped, unless she manages to get help from others. It makes her completely dependent on other people, either private citizens showing mercy or police being reached. It seems to me that many forcible rapes could have been prevented with a personal gun. It makes people work too hard on making sure government is stable. If a government collapse happens, like it did during Katrina, without firearms, people have no way of protecting themselves against looters. This means that people will be scared and create more wasteful redundancies and reinforcements in their government than is truly useful. In summary, it seems to me that prohibiting firearms would make people completely dependent on others for their protection and deterrence from assaults on their life and property. This is very antithetical to the way America became the most powerful country in the world by harnessing the power of the self reliant and self sufficient individual. This is not to say that interdependence is bad or cannot be harnessed it seems that China is doing that now to catch up . However, the option, the freedom to choose to stop being dependent on any person or organization is a useful feature in society. Prohibition on owning firearms would make this very difficult, if not impossible. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that personal gun ownership allows for self-reliance, and gun prohibition is antithetical to this foundation for American success.\n","id":"de9de947-011e-46c3-bf88-7fe1da52ede7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>They believe that their comfort is more important than the person behind them\u2019s comfort. I understand \u201cthe seats were made to lean back so why shouldn\u2019t I lean back?\u201d argument. But that\u2019s a lot like saying \u201ccouches were made to lie down why shouldn\u2019t I lie down?\u201d When there are a few other people in the room who are sitting on the on your kitchen table chairs because you wouldn\u2019t get up. Yeah they still have a seat but the are far less comfortable because your selfishness. Just because something is convenient for you does not mean it is convenient for anybody around you. I\u2019m sitting here with my knees jammed against the seat and my tray pushed into my chest wondering why does this man put his own comfort in front of mine? It\u2019s because he is selfish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who lean their seats back on planes and trains are selfish.\n","id":"707a5a1e-1b09-4327-bc17-adc0b61bdfc5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>The weakness of the German military illustrates the need for a united European army: if all EU member states' armies are combined, they will be able to make up for each others weaknesses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A USE will be able to better defend its borders than the EU in its current form.\n","id":"1e2ced09-08a9-469f-9cfb-59cd07ea1405"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The account of the Book of Mormon is organized according to a literary format that the Prophet Joseph Smith would not have been able to reproduce on his own.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon exemplifies background and expertise beyond Smith's education or training.\n","id":"7d2b008f-aec4-4d91-bbc5-b15e2cea6f76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>An interfaith relationship is defined as a romantic relationship where the romantic partners do not share the same faith. Personally I want to embrace and celebrate interfaith relationships, but there are concerns that I have about these kinds of relationships. First is the cultural clash between people of two different faiths, second is the question of how to raise the children, lastly is what certain religious scriptures have to say about dating someone of a different faith. When someone pursues a romantic relationship with someone, they are testing to see if that person is the right fit for a marriage. That is because dating is a precursor to marriage. Dating someone of a different faith may cause a house to be divided metaphorically figuratively speaking. A romantic partner who doesn't share your faith can make the relationship challenging to the point where it may be infeasible. Imagine how attending worship service would work out if your partner doesn't share your faith. The next issue is about how to raise children if the relationship leads to marriage. Oftentimes, when one marries someone of a different faith, the question of how to raise the children is brought up and either one partner gets their way or the child gets exposed to multiple faiths, which can lead to confusion. Children like to experience stability and consistency. An interfaith marriage may introduce problems that can strain the relationship with the child or the spouses. In my view, this is probably a very difficult aspect of maintaining an interfaith relationship. Lastly, we have to approach how books like the Torah, Bible, and Quran have to say about interfaith relationships. Many people of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faith take a strict and literal interpretation of their holy books. Let's look at the Bible's stance on interfaith relationships. 2 Corinthians 6 14 says\u2026 gt Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 2 Corinthians 6 14 NIV Christians who take a literal interpretation of that verse would come to the conclusion that dating someone outside of their faith is a violation of God's will and that can all the reason a person needs to avoid interfaith relationships. Musilms and Orthrodox Jews use their holy books to come to the same conclusion. For people of faith, abiding what is considered God's will in tantamount to their faith walk. Going against this would be sinful to them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Interfaith dating\/marital relationships are not feasible\n","id":"7145a6a7-44a8-4f5c-84d5-0f7e270d4755"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>An African American family might adopt a white child, thus exposing him\/her to the inherited inequity caused by slavery. If reparations are to be made fairly then factors like that should be taken into account.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are severe barriers to specifying who should be entitled to reparations, and what form reparations would take.\n","id":"a48f0e04-7455-4c48-b2a0-8f64bd6da1f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ethical egoism The ethical position that moral agents ought to do what is in their own self interest. First, I would like to explain what I mean by best . By claiming that ethical egoism is the best, I mean that out of all of the ethical doctrines out there, ethical egoism is most effective in ensuring my own well being. most effective in ensuring the well being of those associated with me. most effective in ensuring the well being of society as a whole. This point should be pretty easy to swallow. If you're an ethical egoist, all of your decisions will be focused on your personal well being. If done well, moral egoism will, by definition, be most effective in ensuring your own well being. A lot of people have the idea that moral egoism means being mean and terrible to everyone in your life, but this is not at all the case. My friends, family, and significant other bring a lot of happiness into my life. For my own happiness and well being, it is important that I keep my relationships strong with these people. This means sitting through dinners with my girlfriends parents, giving my mom a phone call even on weeks that I'm swamped with work, giving my buddy a ride to the train station at 11PM, etc. In this way, looking out for my own interests indirectly serves the interests of those whom I care about. Also, acting with ethical egoism makes sure that I am never taken advantage of by unhealthy relationships. This might seem like a rather cynical view of relationships, but I believe it is the most honest and healthy way to think of it. Terrorist attacks, murders, thefts, and drug abuse would not happen if everyone acted with ethical egoism. Terrorist attacks are obviously against the rational self interest of the terrorists, they either end up dead or in prison. These attacks are motivated by ideology or, I would argue, a kind of utilitarian mindset on the part of the terrorist. The terrorist imagines that by doing an act of terror they will be damaging an oppressive force in the world and promoting what is in their view the best way of life. They believe that their act will be for the greater good, justifying their own personal sacrifice. Obviously this is a dangerous way of thinking. There would be no justification for devastating acts of self sacrifice with an ethical egoist mindset. still part of 3, I'm bad at formatting Murders and theft may not go away completely with this ethical doctrine, but they would be significantly reduced without a doubt. First, we have a strong legal system designed to make committing these crimes against one's self interest and for the most part it succeeds. Beyond this, even if someone manages to evade the law to hurt society in some way, there are other repercussions such as damage to your reputation if you were suspected or guilt even the most adherent ethical egoist will still feel a natural sense of guilt . That drug abuse would not happen is self explanatory. 3 In closing I would like to talk a little more about the point of reputation. I believe that this is the most important aspect that makes ethical egoism such an effective philosophy. Being perceived as having a reputation of a trustworthy and kind person has huge benefits. As a result, the moral egoist is obligated to do what they can to create this perception, generally by actually being trustworthy and kind. This is similar to the reciprocity I described in 2. I look forward to reading your responses  Edit Formatting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ethical egoism is the best ethical doctrine.\n","id":"3680a726-e558-42f1-a823-e8dae880382c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it beneficial for a person to learn to enjoy new genres of entertainment?<|ARGUMENT|>Classical music written in the \"Romantic Era reflected the artistic and intellectual ideals of the 19th century.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Classical music displays a lot about the societies they were written in.\n","id":"a764a959-bbc8-4bec-b8bb-dab2aa4ee77c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit Wow I missed a word in the title. It is supposed to read Groups such as WISE women in science and engineering are sexist so long as they have no male counterparts for female dominated fields of study Second edit View changed by u ManRah. Ya'll can stop telling me that male advocacy groups exist First off, I think the groups are great. They found a problem and focused on fixing it. I don't think that they are the best solution, but that is the subject of another debate so please don't bring their effectiveness into this debate. Groups, specifically student groups, that revolve around empowering women to enter STEM fields are fantastic. They are a part of Title 9, and they try to bring more equality to the workforce by being more welcoming to any women who wants to enter the STEM fields. This is very important as these fields have traditionally been very male dominated. However, there are a bunch of fields that have been traditionally female dominated that do not share a similar group. Social work. Drama. Art. Secretaries. Nursing. Teacher not professor, public school teacher etc Traditionally these fields have been very female dominated, and they still are. Yet, even though women have support groups to help them succeed in male dominated fields, men have no such equivalent for female dominated fields. There is no group that goes around supporting guys who want to be a nurse. There isn't a group that supports men going to school for drama, art, teaching etc Its just expected that men either don't want to work in these fields, or if they do they will find a way to do it. Why do women get special treatment like this? Why is there no male equivalent support groups for female dominated fields of study? Until we fix this, groups such as WISE are nothing more than a sexist group that says Women need help and men don't. In their goal of empowering women, I believe that this message that they are sending out is hypocritical, and counterproductive to their endgoal. Who is to say that women need more help than guys do? Guys still get flak from a bunch of their peers if they decide to be a nurse, secretary, social worker, teacher etc Why is this acceptable when we are supposed to empower those who want to work in non traditional fields for their gender? It isn't. And until that is addressed any such groups for women are just sexist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Groups such as WISE women in science and engineering are sexist so long as they have no male for female dominated fields of study\n","id":"a2f8601c-4498-4221-82ea-0388d6c72525"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the NHS be privatised?<|ARGUMENT|>In a private system, medical practitioners have to advertise their services which means they incur costs the public system does not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Privatisation will cause people to be unable to access healthcare.\n","id":"02ebf33f-3221-449b-9534-03a35e9bd63a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I feel strongly about fighting for the rights of the minority. Our value as humans should not be judged by how we treat ourselves, but how we treat others. However, if we don't stop electing Republicans because we ignore middle American white voters, then none of our good intentions matter. I also don't believe we should stop talking about these issues. We should, however, balance talking about them by talking much more about Americans as whole, and not as individual groups. The election of Trump was off my radar, and his continued popularity has baffled me to the extreme. I however can't just dismiss him as a product of racism, sexism and bigorty. So I've come up with another theory I believe to be true. Hopefully  can help me flesh it out, or possibly change my mind entirely. The average Trump supporter, the guy that might not say it, but likes the phrase liberal tears, isn't necessarily a racist homophobe, they just feel left behind by the politics of liberals. Let's just say you're a lower middle class guy from Kentucky though you likely think of yourself as middle class , you're already screwed cause shit ain't great in Kentucky to begin with. You work 50 hours a week at a job you hate making more than minimum wage, but not enough. Your wife works almost as much at a similar wage. You have two kids, but you work too much to spend time with them. There is no real prospect of advancement, but your budget is so tight that looking for a new job isn't an option and the fear of losing your current job is intense, you are in a word miserable. You've been taught how important hard work is, and you don't want to ask for any handouts. You resent people who do, because you work so hard. You should be a Democrat. Everything about your situation screams that you need a better minimum wage, health care, guaranteed vacation time and some kind of safety net would all be great for you. While you probably don't like the sound of higher taxes, in the end you'd get much more back than you'd pay in. Now you turn on the TV. What you see are Democrats talking about issues that don't sound like they pertain directly to you. You don't have anything against LGBT people, but their problems don't seem as important as your own. Just the same you sure hear a lot about them. You hear a lot about Racism. How minorities need help, and you don't necessarily disagree, but you feel you need help just as much as them. Illegal immigration, you don't have a nuanced understanding, all you see is people who might take your job for less, and you can't afford to be paid less. You just want help, it's not you don't think other people deserve help, but when you're struggling it's hard not to be self interested. Now when you say, what about my help, what about the help for struggling white America, you've just become a racist in the eyes of many liberals, even though they are the ones making the distinction. So not only are they not going to help you, but they are going to call you a racist for asking for help. to be clear, I don't personally hold his view, but I think it is also clear how someone in this position could come to this conclusion Republicans come along and they stoke the fire on all of these gut feelings, they confirm what you're thinking, add fuel to your distrust, because they truly represent such a small portion of Americans they have to get people like you to vote for them. Wedge issues and blaming other people for your problems isn't what you want either, but it's more than the Democrats are doing and that's enough. The Republicans use this to your advantage. By attacking minorities even more, liberals have no choice to be more vocal about them, and by doing so alienate the Trump supporter even more. The choice is easy. You vote Republican. You vote Trump, despite it actually being against your best interests. Not because your racist or sexist, or homophobic, but because you're struggling and no one else is speaking to you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The left have made a large portion of white Americans feel left out by Liberal's vocal focus on minority issues.\n","id":"3130f66b-2918-4bca-be04-425e615341d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Though not 100 , I believe the government should be subsidizing money to the colleges for the tuition of students like me to take the financial burden off of us. I can't give you a percent or figure of how much, but a substantial increase is necessary. I'm a current college student, and after one semester paid for, I had to take out a loan for the second semester, putting me 12,000 in debt. I have 6 more semesters to go and no money of my own to spend, you can do the math College tuition of all colleges are soaring, and we are becoming a generation of citizens wanting to improve our lives and contribute more to society, but we are buried in college debt. The outcome of this consists of two options First, I'm spending nearly all the money I make for MANY years, crippling my ability to buy goods, invest, or start up my own company, things that are vital to a healthy economy. The second option is that I default, go bankrupt, kill my credit, and make it almost impossible to buy a car, house, or get a loan. Either way, my life is going to hell. And the same goes for thousands of people in my situation. Education is an investment for the person, and education of all citizens is an investment for the entire country. A sound one. I really feel this can improve our economy greatly. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the US government should substantially subsidize a college education\n","id":"3df7f6f9-9b2c-43ba-bb2d-c86d11fd4532"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know some companies have flex time , but they are decidedly and probably permanently in the minority. Most of the business world would judge me pretty harshly for this behavior and many places would fire me for tardiness. I think this is a holdover from the work schedules of farms, factories and the military. It has no bearing whatsoever on my job or my performance, yet most corporate types would righteously call me lazy. In trying to adapt to their schedule, I sit like a zombie through the morning hours and then feel groggy during what used to be my most productive time late at night. I am not a corporate malcontent. I like wearing suits and working in an office. I can totally accept that office politics are inevitable. I know why I have to have 3 bosses. I went to business school. I am good at this. But this one thing just kills me. This is obviously a significant source of friction in my life and I would love it if someone could clear it up for me. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If I don't have any morning meetings and I stay at work later than others, I shouldn't be judged in the corporate world for preferring to stay up late and wake up late.\n","id":"610d9f13-d1a8-4a48-b334-e62e588d4587"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>70% of women who claim to have been sexually assulated in the workplace did not report it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Statistics indicate that we still don't have gender equality.\n","id":"c87498e4-0c6a-4c49-b7d6-d97ac74df83d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Torture<|ARGUMENT|>The problem with the heavy criticisms of the use of torture in Western countries such as the United States is that it seems to ignore the much more gruesome use of torture in third-world and developing countries. It is as if each instance of torture in a Western country would count as worse than the same instance of torture in a third-world or developing country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The West's use of torture is trivial compared to many countries\n","id":"9dd7f88e-01b1-4503-be7d-b9930cf1d4e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The United States was declared an independent country on the 4th of July in 1776, and 11 years later, in 1787, the United States constitution was adopted as the constitution of the land, adopted by the States, and went into effect 2 years later. In this way, we can say that the earlier parts of the constitution the articles defining the structure of government, how it can be amended, and the requirements for its ratification are 224 years old as of 2013. The bill of rights, added in 1791, would thus be about 222 years old. The bill of rights includes the first 10 amendments of the constitution, among which include Amendment 1 right to free speech, free press , Amendment 2 right to bear arms , Amendment 9 people have other rights not listed in the constitution , and Amendment 10 the powers of the government are restricted by the constitution . I would argue that even despite the other 17 amendments that have been added to the constitution over the last 200 years, the age of the articles and of the federation do not represent the times, are outdated, and have been proven throughout history and in recent years. Furthermore, a culture in the United States surrounding the untouchability of the constitution is unhealthy, restrictive, and doesn't allow for the US to move forward. Let's begin by examining the articles that define the structure of the government. Articles I and II establish the senate, House of Representatives, and the role of the president, whereby neither the legislative nor the executive branch has too much power, and keeps the other in check the system referred to as checks and balances . While in theory this is a good idea to prevent either Congress or the President from having too much power, it very easily can result in deadlock when the two branches are in disagreement, which can happen when the President is of one political ideology and Congress is of a majority of an opposing ideology. A perfect example of this is the disagreement over Obamacare Obama wants to pass a bill establishing a more nationalized healthcare system, and the Republicans in the lower house disagree with it. The result in effect is the lower house not passing a budget, resulting in a government shutdown. The fact that the laws of the government even allow the federal government to shut down is ludicrous. If the government cannot pass a budget, it does not mean the people should have to go without it, it means you need a new government . In parliamentary systems, disagreement with the leader of the government can be fixed with a vote of non confidence, which if passed, dissolves parliament and results in an election, allowing the people to decide who they want in government. Furthermore, failure to pass a budget at least in Canada results in the dissolution of parliament, allowing the people to choose who they want making the budget through the power of their votes. I argue that while this system can fail to check the leader of the government in a majority, that it is a much more efficient system when it comes to actually running the government and passing budgets. If the government doesn't do its job, get a new one Now, let's talk about the amendments, specifically the first, second, ninth, and tenth, which I believe are the most problematic First Amendment While at its core the idea of free speech and free press is a good one, it doesn't always lead to the best results in practice. Just because you have the right to free speech doesn't mean you should always exercise that right, and the lack of limitations on what a person can say in the US results in a divided nation. Take for example my right in the United States to say I hate gays and lesbians, and they are all going to hell . Being able to freely express this belief causes people who agree to side with me, and people who disagree to strongly stand against me, and I argue that it creates a rift among gender, racial, sexual, etc grounds in the entire country every time such a hateful opinion can be expressed freely in the public sphere. In a country as diverse as the US, it's important that people work together and learn to coexist, and having the unbridled right of free speech makes this impossible so long as these opinions are allowed to be expressed. Even after several decades of African Americans being allowed equal rights, everyone still has the right to freely say that they hate black people, and the result has been a country where there is a distinct cultural racial divide between black people and white people, which has in the past fostered racial riots, violent crime against minorities, and racially biased murder. Putting limitations on free speech, such as banning hateful speech, defamation, and lying about facts can only serve to help the country move forward, become more integrated, and work together to solve its problems, and eliminate rifts between communities. Second Amendment In the late 18th century this may have sounded like a better idea than it does now, as the country was still new, there were kinks to work out, and people were for the most part left to defend their own properties, especially in rural areas. In the modern day, however, this isn\u2019t as necessary. Firearms do have their uses , and they should not be banned completely, but should they be a right ? The right to bear arms implies that it is unlawful for the government to limit the sale of or prevent certain citizens from possessing them. And while the government does have regulations for gun ownership, it does not have regulations on how many or how powerful those guns may be. This results in Americans being able to purchase semi automatic weapons in massive quantities, which in the past has led to mass shooting at Sandy Hook, Columbine, and Virginia Tech, to name a few. But because owning firearms is defined as a \u201cright\u201d and not a privilege as it is in other countries, there\u2019s little the government can do to further regulate gun ownership, and to ban guns that are not required for what I would say was their initial intended use under the constitution self defense. Ninth Amendment The problem with this amendment is more of an issue with it being too vague, and contradictory to other amendments. In Canada, for example, I have the right to not be targeted in hate speech against me, as Canada has a law restricting hate speech, and it can be argued that . I could claim by the Ninth Amendment that I should have the right to be free of discrimination and to be free of hateful propaganda. But by the first amendment, any individual has the right to hate me and express that hate in a propagandous way to others, so does the ninth amendment not apply to me, or does the first amendment not apply to them? Does one supersede the other, and if so, why even bother with this amendment? Tenth Amendment The problem with this amendment is similar to the problems with the articles of the constitution that defined the legislative and executive branches. This time however, it\u2019s a problem between dividing federal and state powers too strongly. By restricting the powers of the federal government to intervene in state affairs, it creates a country that, state by state, is divided on political and opinionated grounds, and creates a disproportionate and unequal society. A good example of this is voter ID laws, which in 30 states are under state jurisdiction. Recent controversies over requiring photo ID but making the process arduous to get one highlights the inequality of the fundamental democratic right to vote in many states. States that have more lax laws surrounding voter ID arguably allow a wider demographic of people to vote, whereas states that limit legitimate IDs to requiring a photo makes it harder for young, poor, or foreign born citizens to vote, and hence puts these demographics at a disadvantage. If the federal government were in charge of choosing what ID is acceptable, there would be no such disproportionality as there would be a public outcry nationally , and everyone would be just as well off as one another. Another example would be state specific allowances and bans on same sex marriage, which creates a disproportional human rights status for LGBT people across the country. A state that constitutionally bans same sex marriage will not legalize it until either that state\u2019s attitude changes, repeals the ban, then passes a bill allowing it, or if a supreme court ruling or federal law declares it legal. The allocation of these sorts of rights to the states means that in Massachusetts, same sex marriage is welcome and legal, whereas in Alabama, a person could be killed for being gay, and the state would not pass any laws to prevent future deaths, as the attitude of voters is against doing so. Rights should not be negotiable like this. An equal society not only means that all people are equal, but that they are equal in every state. So to summarize the problems with the constitution The constitution divides powers to radically, and where it intends to make the government less corrupt, makes the government significantly less efficient The government should not be elected on such a rigid schedule, as it only allows major issues in administration to be fixed every election cycle, which is 4 years. Calling elections to solve political deadlock would prevent shutdowns, reduce filibusters, and make the legal system more efficient. The amendments in the bill of rights are outdated, and do not reflect what a bill of rights should include in the modern era. Free speech should be regulated to a certain extent to ensure a cooperative society, the sale of guns should continue in a manner consistent with promoting self defense in the most conservative sense, and the federal government should have the power to standardize laws regarding rights between the states. Now I\u2019ll talk about the \u201cculture\u201d of the constitution. The United States has a unique history, being the first country in the Americas to declare independence, and over the course of 200 years, has been influential in many important global events, including the industrial revolution, both world wars, and the movement into the modern global era. The importance of the United States to global history, combined with the fantastic story of its birth, has led to what some call \u201cAmerican mythology\u201d, which would include the story of American independence which has been romanticized over the years , the story of the Civil War, World Wars, Cold War, space race, and in recent memory, 9 11, and includes within it the notion of American exceptionalism, the \u201cFounding Fathers\u201d holding an influential position in history, and of course, the importance of the Constitution. The constitution in this respect holds the role of continuing the perceived greatness and exceptionality of the United States and what it stands for. The constitution as the law of the land preserves the laws that America was founded on, and hence is meant to continue the idea that inspired its creation. It codifies the greatness of the US in a way that is not only readable, but can be applied as law. And furthermore, it reminds Americans of why the country was founded, where they came from, and why it\u2019s important. Sounds romantic, doesn\u2019t it? A document that not only acts as law, but acts as an important part of American culture that has defined it for generations, and has in many ways influenced how American and world history has progressed since its writing. Because of this way of thinking, it is hard for many people who hold the constitution in such high regard, especially conservatives, to see and accept its flaws and fix them. To some, trying to completely rewrite the constitution is comparable to trying to rewrite the Bible, and it is so engrained into the culture that even without it, people would still act as if it were the law of the land. On the other hand, the blind faith in the constitution and what it espouses is unhealthy, and I would even say that you could compare it to how Saudi Arabia\u2019s constitution is simply the Qur\u2019an impossible to edit, enshrined in the culture, central to the legal system. Holding the constitution as a cultural artifact prevents the culture from moving forwards and adapting with the evolving culture of other countries, and in an age where culture is global and where the US plays an important role in cultural propagation, the US has a responsibility to adapt to the modern era and modernize itself. So to summarize the problems with how Americans view the constitution The constitution is viewed as both a cultural artifact and legal document, and the importance of it as a cultural artifact makes it difficult to change or replace The constitution being difficult to change or replace, makes it difficult to understand and change its problems, and this has an effect on the rights of individuals In a global context, the United States has the responsibility of keeping its culture up to date and in agreement with the world, so as to ensure better international harmony To summarize, the constitution as it stands now hinders the ability of the US to move forward, and in many ways is damaging to global culture, finance, and politics. Crucial to fixing the problems of the constitution argued above is moving away from a culture that considers the constitution and America as exceptional, as such thinking prevents reasonable self criticism of problems, and assumes that the American way is the best way, hence no improvement is necessary. Such things to be considered in redrafting the constitution and reconstructing the system of government would be Guaranteeing the rights of minorities Guaranteeing free speech up to discriminatory, hateful, or propagandous speech Establishing a system of checks and balances whereby the head of the government is both a member of the legislative process and can be fairly criticized by it Explicitly stating where state and federal powers lie, and establishing a system of standardizing state laws regarding rights, efficient systems of management, etc Creating a schedule of constant modernization in the constitution that would both allow for its constant criticism and would prevent any constitution from again becoming a cultural artifact Moving away from a culture obsessed with its past and moving towards one that is obsessed with its future arts funding could help with this Sorry for the lengthy post, I just wanted to cover everything. Thanks for your time, I look forwards to seeing and debating with all the responses. EDIT 1 Please feel free to correct me on any factual errors I've made, I'll change them in my post at the earliest convenience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US constitution, in how it defines the structure of government and the laws of the land, is fundamentally flawed and must be changed, Very long post\n","id":"1b04a711-e9b3-4ed7-811c-f2946d6f90fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Individuals Be Allowed Paid Period Leave?<|ARGUMENT|>Due to existing social barriers, women already feel that they have to constantly prove themselves in their work performance in order to be respected in the workplace.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women may not want to take this leave because they believe that they will be judged by their co-workers or it will affect their job performance.\n","id":"80014b74-e6b2-476f-9cff-c54da7abd2a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that policies such as affirmative action are destructive and counterintuitive, as they make it so that it is not necessarily the most qualified person being selected for a position. When applying for anything from a school to a job, many places are now focusing more on having diversity than they are on selecting the best person. It has gotten to the point that white males are at a disadvantage in life, and many will be rejected simply because they are not diverse. Furthermore, many feminist movements lately are advocating not only equal rights, but more rights. I understand that minority groups were oppressed for many years, and in my opinion equality is one of the most important things someone can have. But has this fight for equality gone too far and actually shifted the detriment to the majority? I believe it has.  Edit I am talking about reverse discrimination more on a case by case level. Obviously, as a whole white males are more privileged and are the majority, but for those white males who are not privileged, I believe it is more difficult now to become privileged. If you are from a poor black family you are more likely to receive help than if you are from a poor white family, where you are expected to be privileged already and thus do not need help. Edit 2 Why are my comments being downvoted for stating my opinion. It says in the sidebar, Downvotes don't change views Vote based on the quality of the comment, not whether you agree or not Why should I be downvoted for stating my point of view, and why I disagree?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that reverse racism\/sexism is a real and growing concern.\n","id":"e81ca2e2-5b98-4dc5-9575-7d23cfb32786"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trophy Hunting Be Illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Legal elephant hunting casualties in southern Africa are minuscule accounting 0.1 to 0.23 percent of their respective populations in 2015.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trophy hunting has a minimal impact on the health of an overall species.\n","id":"594e23d3-bdf2-4551-bf13-b0c297e8fb9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people be free to choose the country in which they live?<|ARGUMENT|>If we accept a liberal view, property rights, liberty, and life precede the existence and power of the state. Thus, the will of the individual exists before the existence of the borders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Should people be free to choose the country in which they live?\n","id":"a4d6cc30-6d94-4ebb-88aa-1441e8fb65bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>It would be unreasonable to expect a CEO to hire individuals who profoundly disagree with their vision for the company. Similarly, it would be unreasonable to expect a religious organisation to hire individuals who profoundly disagree with the religion's doctrine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These exemptions are a way to prevent future disagreements within the organisation.\n","id":"955084c9-2264-4e61-98d7-5b511082e8e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Three pillar of my changeable view America desperately needs an immediate minimum wage increase right now today. It should be 10.10 hour nationally. States and cities can raise it from there based on their own regional costs of living. Nationally, it should be raised periodically, tied to inflation. There is a such thing as too high. 15 hour is too high. TLDRs in bold Obviously, I'm not even going to entertain arguments that say minimum wage is too high at 7.25 or shouldn't exist. I'm just going to skip that. Earning less than 10 an hour is akin to slave labor even without considering cost of living. In 2012 I worked a very very labor intensive job for 9.50 hour. I was a been merchandiser. I was responsible for lifting heavy cases of beer all day long. It really felt like salve labor. I made about 1300 over the summer while I finished the final requirements of my college degree. I was living on campus and student loans parents were paying for my food and housing. So the money I made was just savings and pocket money. Forget about cost of living, it still felt like I was a slave. That's why the increase to 10.10 should be immediate not a gradual increase of the next four years. It should increase periodically commensurate with inflation, not once a decade, but every other year. So that we're not having this same conversation again in a decade people working 60 hours and still homeless. I don't know what mathematical formula the Obama administration used to come up with 10.10 hour, but that amount seems fair to me. It's not so much that you can get comfortable flipping burgers but it's enough that you can earn money without being enslaved. I really feel like 15 is too high. You're not supposed to be comfortable flipping burgers. People who support that are just ignoring drawbacks to a high minimum wage. Try to change my view either way to 15 hour or if you're republican try to convince me in the opposite direction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The national minimum wage should be $10.10 per hour immediately.\n","id":"3c59f053-3b84-4111-84d8-2c7e7d4444ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>Companies' service quality and price are improved when there exist competition to their services, or at the very least people are not forced to pay for them. The government bans competition to its services, thus offering more expensive services of lesser quality, because it doesn't have to deal with competition when there can be none.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the majority of countries, the food industry is not controlled by the government. Similarly, all other industries could be free of government control, which would improve those services and be more ethical.\n","id":"051d6cf9-f420-411b-b249-e0382a9a0d66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The video currently trending on reddit of the vegan guy being angry as a result of finding Parmesan cheese in his pizza sauce and was ruthlessly mocked because of it, is justified, at least in part, for his actions. A betrayal of one's core beliefs is very upsetting and in the moment getting a little pissed off is not ridiculous, his response of chucking his phone was perhaps a bit over the top that I will concede, but his overall reaction to finding out it has cheese was not outrageous enough to the extent that he deserves all the rampant abuse that followed. He doesn't place his blame on other people, his only crime really is being a little judgemental. Now in the face of all of the criticism and overwhelming dislike in his second video, I don't think it was unfair of him to draw parallels with leafyishere he was a little combattive, but not to the point where what he stated was anything overwhelmingly egregious. I honestly don't understand the dislike for this guy and think it's just an example of reddit's hate boner for vegans going over the top 1st Video 2nd Video<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The pizza vegan dude did nothing wrong\n","id":"6cb2bce9-4e21-4a41-95d8-43b98299cdf8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should provide healthcare: the government or the market?<|ARGUMENT|>The complexity of the government-private company system now in the USA causes a great deal of administrative work. There are now 10 administrators to every doctor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Markets are more efficient at providing healthcare than government programs and can therefore maintain a given level of healthcare quality at a lower cost.\n","id":"5a9c5eb3-35fc-4a3c-ad68-51540e0aab26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are a lot of posts which cover the pros and cons of paid maternity leave so I don't want to get into that. I would prefer to attack this discussion from another angle. I strongly believe that both mothers and fathers should get fully paid leave when they are having a child. The controversial part of my opinion however, is that childless parents should get a leave too, or the option to sell their leave back to their employer for cash stock. This system allows parents to have children without worrying about their jobs or income, and also allows those people who choose to focus on their work a benefit as well. I fail to see any issues with this plan, and I'm curious as to why it hasn't yet been implemented. So please reddit,  that childless parents should get a fully paid leave, as well as parents who are having children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Working parents should get paid maternity\/paternity leave, But only if childless parents get the exact same leave.\n","id":"f3ca7886-e34e-46b5-a7b7-b1b4c71c8345"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Cloning Animals Ethical?<|ARGUMENT|>It could be ethical if the goal is for example to clone parts of that animal for food, without that animal-part ever having had a conscious mind, thus never having to suffer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Controlled animal cloning will noticeably reduce the global hunger issue.\n","id":"16d75c8e-d649-4f8f-a3d0-70cd83ad1591"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Threat perceptions, ironically, point in a different direction. A fifth of Americans say that terrorism is the most important national issue, and four fifths regard a terrorist attack as likely in the coming months.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Terrorism is in fact no major threat to the West as indicated in the low number of casualties compared to gun violence. Still, it is considered the biggest danger\n","id":"e37e8184-7ba4-4574-b73c-3b0e30efe759"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Today there are more jobs than ever which require relatively high levels of intelligence and education. Think of doctors, engineers, scientists, managers, programmers and so on. Many of these jobs did not even exist 1000 years ago, but today they are crucial for society as we know it. Without them, there would be no progress and our living standards would decline rapidly. However, not everybody can do these jobs. Even if everybody gets a great education early on, many people just don't have what it takes to do these tasks. Personally I think that there is a large genetic component to the abilities that are required for these jobs. But even if you deny that there is any genetic contribution, we're still left with the observation that children of academics are much more likely to end up in one of the professions I mentioned before, than children of people without a high school degree. Now what really worries me, is that in every study I've looked at, level of education is inversely correlated with fertility, meaning educated people have fewer children than uneducated people. This is true within most countries, and also when comparing countries to each other The higher the level of education in a country, the fewer children are born there. This is the opposite of what has persisted for most of human history, when better education and higher status meant more children. Saying these things makes many people uncomfortable, probably because it's considered rude to draw attention to the fact that some people are smarter than others. But I think it is obvious that smart, educated people are the most important resource for advanced societies and for progress. That's why we value education so much. And that's why I think it is very unwise to let reproduction become the job of the uneducated. This seriously concerns me, so please show me how I'm wrong And by the way, I am aware that you can be smart without being educated and be good at an important job without being either. I was describing general tendencies, not absolute rules. Edit It has been noted that I do not provide evidence for my claims, so here you go<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that low fertility rates of bright people will have disastrous consequences.\n","id":"470e88f5-e3a5-4c86-a017-136581c5d97b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hold my view due to the large amount of research I have done. I have read a lot of excellent scientific papers that review the many ways in which the presence of animal products in our diet is one of the main contributors to our current health crisis. This includes heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other chronic illnesses such as Alzheimers and arthritis. Because I am a vegan, I am concerned that my research could have been biased. I would like to see if there are any quality scientific studies that specifically show that the addition of meat to an otherwise plant based diet has improved health in some way, or a meat inclusive diet has reversed a particular type of chronic disease. Opinion or hearsay isn't really going to change my view in this instance since my view is based on reading scientific research . Please don't cite obviously bad studies, or studies funded by dubious sources. I don't dispute that other factors such as exercise, stress, fresh air, sunshine and mood contribute to health. This view is specifically diet related. edited for clarity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that a balanced plant based diet would be made less healthy by the addition of animal products - and that overall, animal products are inherently unhealthy.\n","id":"c43c18ec-6045-4809-b023-b1429b6fdc1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In places like San Francisco and New York teachers, police officers, etc have a hard time finding housing because their professions do not pay enough to afford an average house in their communities. We should guarantee that if you work for a local government you can afford the average house in that community with the condition you must live there as part of your employment . If that means a lower level employee makes 100,000 per year so be it. It's not fair to require people to work for an entity that doesn't allow them to live in the place where they work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Government employees should be paid enough so that they can afford an average house in the town where they work.\n","id":"a5cd1fe5-2b9c-459f-88d8-d1a5b83f224a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>When Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it was taken over by Hamas, which then used the territory to launch numerous missile attacks on Israeli civilian targets. The same would happen in the case that Israel ends it presence in Palestinian territory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hamas has stated that if Israel were to withdraw, it would takeover the West Bank in order to establish an Islamic Caliphate in Palestine. Hamas aggression will likely increase significantly if this were to take place.\n","id":"483bc1a7-3cfa-4e41-a52e-4f36c4854d61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Museums Should Be Free<|ARGUMENT|>Museums preserve and display our artistic, social, scientific and political heritage. Everyone should have access to such important cultural resources as part of active citizenship, and because of the educational opportunities they offer to people of every age. If museums are not funded sufficiently by the government, they will be forced to charge for entry, and this will inevitably deter many potential visitors, especially the poor and those whose educational and cultural opportunities have already been limited. Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London declined by 15% after it started charging for admission. Free access is essential to provide freedom of cultural and educational opportunity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Museums preserve and display our artistic, social, scientific and political heritage. Everyone shou...\n","id":"d15959d7-4d7f-4050-85c5-fd0784c59bfd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, I know that there is great diversity across the Islamic world, but I think that that only reinforces the idea that Islam itself is the offending feature most of the problems I am about to list either occur throughout the Muslim world, despite its diversity, or occur in large parts of the Muslim world but virtually nowhere else. That said, I am talking more about Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia than about Southeast Asia or the former Eastern Bloc. I also know that individual Muslims may be perfectly nice people, but that doesn't mean I have to ignore societal trends even if these problems result from the actions of a minority, within Islam I think that minority is clearly larger and more powerful than it is in other religions and cultures. I'll also say that I am not an expert on any relevant field, so please correct my factual errors. So, without further delay, here are problems which I find to be associated with Islamic culture Islamic culture treats women badly. Across most of the Islamic world, literacy rates are significantly lower among women than among men. Rape rates which mostly measure the broadness of legal definitions of rape and the rate at which it is reported are appallingly low in the Middle East. This is partly because conservative Arab countries often do not acknowledge the existence of rape within a marriage. ~~And if a married woman in Dubai is raped by a stranger, she can apparently be charged with adultery.~~ In Iran, an adulteress can be stoned to death, while an adulterer cannot. There is also the point that women could not vote in Kuwait reputedly among the most liberal Arab countries until 2003, and they still cannot vote in Saudi Arabia. Islamic culture is bad at democracy. There is no country, to the best of my knowledge, that can comfortably be called a long standing, well functioning democracy. Albania and Malaysia aren't too far off, but the most obvious counterexample would have to be Turkey, which is fervently secular. Nowadays, however, Turkish secularism is being chipped away at just as the state is becoming more authoritarian. Islamic culture is intolerant. Look at the borders of the Islamic world the Balkans, southern Russia, northwest China, India, southern Thailand, the southern Philippines, Lebanon, Israel Palestine, and the southern Sahara. Every one of these is, or has recently been, a hotbed of sectarian violence. I'm not say Muslims are exclusively at fault, but they are the only factor common to all these disputes. Non Muslims within Muslim countries Christians in Iraq and Egypt, Baha'is in Iran, Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, Jews everywhere, etc. also tend to be persecuted. And this isn't even getting into violence between different branches of Islam. Islamic culture is easily offended. Riots in response to a Youtube video are the most spectacular example, but not the only one. Blasphemy against Islam is punishable by death in many countries blasphemy against other religions is cool , and in Pakistan an MP was assassinated a couple years ago for suggesting this should be softened. There's also the death sentence for Salman Rushdie, and the various attacks and riots in response to offensive drawings of Muhammad, or to the desecration of the Qur'an. Islamic culture is prudish and joyless. I can accept the prohibition on alcohol, and I'll overlook the prohibition on music on the grounds that it has only occasionally been implemented on a national scale. But that still leaves the prohibition on graven images. ~~This prevents Islamic culture from having any tradition of statuary or painting,~~ and it was once interpreted to rule out photography and film terrorist attacks stopped the Middle East from having a silent film era if the world were Muslim, movies would not exist . There is also the iconoclasm of other peoples' art Buddhist sculptures in Pakistan, medieval tombs in Mali, and, famously, a tree in Syria. Premarital sex is also illegal in many Muslim countries, as is pornography. I'll close by saying that every culture should be allowed some problems, and you wouldn't have to refute all of the above points to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that Islamic culture is inferior.\n","id":"9b38940e-411b-4971-94f1-2cdfe71b8397"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals that live and work in these communities best understand the needs of these communities. As such, they are able to prioritize which areas to invest in first and how to go about investing in the community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under a UBI, investment within communities would better enable a process of organic change.\n","id":"699fd8d5-7a1c-4e4c-b53f-bf4ac9445226"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am really interested to see what others think about this. Coming from a very competitive environment, I have definitely become used to the stresses associated with comparing myself to others. While I do not think it is the best for my mental health, I do think it gives me a massive edge over others. I say this because when you compare yourself, it allows you to see where you stand against others and can cue a desire to improve. Furthermore, I think the argument of 'we are all unique people, so why compare' is a way to justify our desire not to work for the results. This view allows us to be content with our flaws and gives us the cue that we can't achieve those goals that others have achieved when. I honestly believe that if I stop comparing myself to people, I will lose the edge in my career path music and will not be viewed as serious. Ultimately, people who do not compare themselves are not being realistic and are hiding from reality. In the real world, we are always compared against other people and this is how we grow against others. If I was to stop comparing myself, then I would not be able to see where I stand in the real world and, thus, would have a distorted view of reality. Besides, every compares each other anyway so why not do it to ourselves first to see where we already are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that it is okay for me to compare myself with others\n","id":"b15779ba-f170-48ac-ade5-e504e9c0becf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Death Row Inmates Be Required To Donate Their Organs Upon Their Death?<|ARGUMENT|>Doctors performing organ transplantation would violate ethical codes, such as the AMA Code of Medical Ethics and the General Medical Council's Good Medical Practice<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are still subject to a humane death only and any additional punishment such as organ harvesting is unethical.\n","id":"0139bf3d-b187-492d-b864-ab8b925242e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should vegan\/vegetarian parents feed their kids the same diet?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents don't allow their kids to do other things that they think is immoral, like hitting other kids or destroying windows.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents attempting to ethically raise their children would be hypocritical to let their kids consume animal products.\n","id":"e4dde06f-6036-462f-b251-312f4037d874"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Judges be Elected or Appointed?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2011, the Mitt Romney-linked Restore our Future super PAC reported a $1 million contribution from \u201cW Spann LLC.\u201d This was an unfamiliar group to the media and the public. After investigation it was discovered that its address in New York was the same as that of Bain Capital Romney\u2019s former firm. It was discovered that this was a shell created for this purpose.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the US, the Citizens United ruling opened legal loopholes that allow for parallel \"Super PACs\" to have unlimited expenditures towards political causes though not directly towards campaigns. These groups are very difficult for the public to scrutinize because it is easy for major corporations to obfuscate their contributions to \"Super PACs\" through shell companies and subsidiaries.\n","id":"f3927e5c-1b7d-45b9-8232-31896d078f58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Wealth Create Generosity And Poverty Selfishness?<|ARGUMENT|>Empathy is a key element in functional generosity, with class divides showing very rigid and self-perpetuating tendencies; ie, our current class divisions continue to widen as those in different classes empathise more strongly with those at a similar level, and find it harder to empathise with the opposite viewpoint.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Statistically poor people actually give a much higher percentage of their income than wealthy people - likely, because they can better empathise with the needy.\n","id":"55258451-180d-4be2-a8f5-7ae8a6c6eac1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, some definitions first a smaller country is one that has a smaller population and usually not necessarily a smaller landmass as well. So obviously, countries that are filled with huge tracts of sparse land such as Russia and Canada would not be able to but also not need to fit the landmass criteria. A smaller population is thus the main definition. Some examples that come to mind are Norway and Germany. But wait \u201d you say. Germany has a population of 81 million That is in no way small. Agreed. This brings in the idea of how exactly a small population will be established. The idea is not to reduce a country\u2019s size so that it is broken up into many small nationalities that are arbitrarily defined. Rather, it is best to reduce the size and divide the country into segments where there is a general consensus on various aspects \u2013 religion, political ideologies, language, economic beliefs, etc. It just so happens that, by following this method of reduction by using these aspects, countries tend to become smaller in population. Countries like Germany are relatively similar in terms of the aforementioned aspects. The key word there is \u2018relatively\u2019 \u2013 yes, there are differences, but are those differences as great as the ones seen in other countries where mass protests have become the norm? Look at Ukraine, for example. In my opinion, the most optimal solution here would be to divide the country into two sections the west known for its support of Europe and the east, which supports Russia. By dividing Ukraine into two parts, almost everyone is satisfied. The main response I see to this is how there are still people on the west who support Russia, or vice versa. This is understandable, but is that really a reflection of the entirety of the population? If there are people in the west who support the goals of the east and there are , in a new West and East Ukraine, they can immigrate to the side they prefer if they are so inclined. Even if they do not or cannot, their sacrifice is needed in order to maintain stability in Ukraine as a whole. Ukraine cannot remain one country for the sole purpose of aiding to these few individuals. Anyway, back to Germany. It has much less political extremity in 2014 than Ukraine does. It also happens to be one of the strongest economies in Europe. Now let\u2019s look at the USA. This country is, as Obama has put it, \u201cthe most divided it has been since the Civil War.\u201d Splitting the US up into regions would be beneficial. They should take advantage of their divides instead of squabbling for years in Congress as to who is right. Say the US does get divided \u2013 the new countries will have considerably less quarrelling when deciding their policies. I\u2019d imagine the southeast would be more conservative, whereas the northeast would be more liberal. One section of the country would get what it wants \u2013 higher taxes, legalization of marijuana, legalization of gay marriage, etc. Others would get what they want as well. Once again, if people do not like the state of their new country, they have the choice to immigrate. A country that does well after this division will be a model for others to follow. If economic prosperity comes in one country, it will be yearned for by citizens of another country. They will then change their political ideologies to better suit their desires and vote in politicians who lean more towards that side. Another argument I see against this idea is that smaller countries will have less individual power. If, for example, the US or Russia was divided into multiple countries before World War II, would they have been able to as effectively fight the Nazis? Obviously, as individual countries, no. But when push comes to shove, countries do ally with one another to fight a common enemy, as seen in WWII itself. If an alien came down ten years after WWII and was told that the two superpowers of the USA and the USSR were once allied, they would be outright baffled. Nonetheless, that alliance did occur out of necessity. Economic power is no different \u2013 it can be argued that the only thing preventing China and the US from entering a cold war is their economic dependence on one another, something that the US and USSR did not have. Economically, these two countries support each other despite the fact that they have completely different political ideals. The same can be done if the US or any country with such a broad spectrum of people is divided. Each new \u201csub US\u201d will need to economically support themselves, and thus will be forced to economically support one another as well. What will this economic dependence inevitably lead to? A national union, similar to the European Union. Each country maintains its sovereignty but does allow free trade to occur. They may or may not keep the same currency, and may or may not directly support another country when the other is in financial dire straits. That would be up to the constituents to decide after the formation of the union \u2013 they would likely learn from the EU and adjust this new union to fix the mistakes that were seen with its European counterpart. Would it be perfect? No. But it would definitely be a vast improvement over the current state of affairs. There are also those who say that this makes it very difficult for businesses and the like to enter into a new market. With new countries come new rules and regulations that must be adhered to, meaning the corporation has to go through the hassle of aligning their products to each country\u2019s laws. However, capitalism will dictate their course of action here. If they see the benefits outweigh the costs, they will enter the market. In the case of a divided USA, each new nation formed will still have an enormous GDP and per capita spending power. Corporations will not have difficulty in deciding to enter these markets the benefits in this case far outweigh the costs. With online retail becoming more and more prominent, this entire point is becoming more and more moot anyways. Businesses sell to people from around the world and entering into these markets has become considerably easier. Imports and exports will therefore not be impeded by this division. Overall, I believe it is better to divide Rwanda into two rather than have the Hutu slaughter the Tutsi. I\u2019d rather have economic policies that cater to a smaller, more likeminded populace than have politicians squabble in Congress and end up with a 9 approval rating. I\u2019d rather have unions such as the EU form, where each country maintains sovereignty, instead of having a United States that really isn\u2019t that united. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe smaller countries are better than larger ones.\n","id":"727a6754-bfe6-48d5-be13-8b414469b998"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should sperm donors have the same legal rights, responsibilities and limitations as other biological fathers?<|ARGUMENT|>The more children who are born from one biological father, the higher the likelihood of unintentional incestuous relations. Therefore, one of the limitations placed on donors should be the number of children their sperm can be used to create.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is in the best interests of children if sperm donors have the same legal rights and responsibilities as other biological parents.\n","id":"d694c68d-1942-4dcb-aaa6-61c08bb459ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Premise It may be fair to say that libertarians want people to succeed or fail in life on their merits. But one's ability to contribute economically is greatly influenced by factors including Genetics. A person may be born chronically ill, disabled, or just plain untalented. Most people are covered by this, in that people's average ability ceilings are unimpressive and ceilings are limited by genes. Parents. A person's parents or caretakers may be poor, neglectful, and emotionally and or physically abusive. Any of this can lead to serious developmental derailment. This is a significant cause of mental issues disorders in adults, and substantially reduces many people's ability ceilings. Bad luck. At any time, a person can catch an illness, or suffer an accident that's none of their fault, and end up paralyzed, disabled, or interrupted multiple times and for different reasons e.g. a student's parents die, followed by serious illness , so that their success is thwarted. Lateness to the game. In a mature economy, resources and means of production are already owned. A person who did not inherit assets has no choice but to prostitute themselves ndash metaphorically or literally ndash to asset owners for basic resources. This can work if asset owners are in need of labor. But the more the economy is automated, the less work there is. Ultimately, asset owners will need but a handful of employees, with everyone else as surplus. Claims Libertarianism either does not offer a response to the above or if it offers a response, it's social Darwinism. The main motivator of libertarians appears to be freedom . This freedom appears to boil down to Freedom of the libertarian to accumulate resources, based on rules of property and trade that favor people like the libertarian good genetics middle class parents early enough to the game no sustained strokes of bad luck The freedom to not share any of the accumulated resources unless the libertarian wants to. If people die or endure hardship because they lack resources, it's is their fault. They lost the game of property and trade, which was rigged for people like the libertarian to begin with. Thesis This makes the libertarian more entitled than the people he might accuse of entitlement people who want government handouts . People who want handouts aren't looking to have everything handed to them. They want a semblance of basic living. They want food, basic health care, and opportunity for their children. The libertarian, in contrast, wants everything . He already won the lottery of life in a number of ways, but is not satisfied with being able to make a good living. He wants to not be inconvenienced by others, who lost some aspect of the lottery, and might need people like him to provide. He wants the game to be rigged so that he, being in a position to do so, can grab everything while people who are not in that position get nothing, and should be happy with it. The libertarian, ultimately, values his convenience over other people's lives. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libertarianism is categorically more entitled than the people it accuses of entitlement\n","id":"7fc06293-1cd9-4501-8f44-113321056326"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unjust to remove public references to and broadly condemn people who were admired from history, who played important roles or were champions to many in the nation, that had some beliefs or stances that are unpopular today. The contributions of figures from history should be evaluated and taught about in the context of the common beliefs of their time where they lived, and how and why those beliefs may be different from popular beliefs today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Confederate monuments, flags and memorials honor an important part of the American story.\n","id":"6947050a-c628-4f70-b455-15dd9d9ffe9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People don't advise this in literally every situation, I'm aware of that. It's not a good idea to confess your feelings to a friend if they're already in a relationship, that's disrespectful. It's also definitely a question about timing. Don't do it right after a funeral. Those two might seem quite obvious, but even in general it's not always a good idea. If you're in the same close group of friends like in Friends , you shouldn't do it unless you're fairly certain they like you back. Talk to a third person in the group, otherwise there will be awkward tension that isn't really great and one of you might need to step back. If you want to be friends with them even if they say no, don't always do it because they might not want to be friends anymore. In that case it's better to wait until a time where you won't lose a friendship you wouldn't have potentially lost anyway. While I think you should do it sometimes, it's not always obvious that it's the right move and people shouldn't advise it unless they know both parties.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's not always a good idea to confess your feelings to a friend\n","id":"4e662e19-42ed-428d-bb02-4b6a55ebace8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's odd isn't it? Displaying a dead body? The coroner preserves it, they put make up on the corpse and dress it up nice to go into the ground where no one will ever see it again unless they're planning to exhume them. I don't know if it's just me , but the idea of someone else choosing how I look and then parading people in front of the body is awful because that's the last memory they'll have of that person. A body in a coffin with caked on makeup in a nice dress looking like a peaceful sleeping person. If that's not how they were alive that shouldn't be how they're remembered when they're dead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think displaying a body at a funeral is disrespectful.\n","id":"91354b2e-5552-4d9a-98bb-1e9c3cbe7fad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I find marriage to be outdated. What I mean by that is that marriage isn\u2019t what it used to be. It\u2019s not taken as seriously, and divorce is more common than 50 years ago. I feel like it has lost its meaning. I find that weddings are less about a celebration of love, and more of a showing off of how much money someone can spend or how well a person can DIY or budget. I don\u2019t feel like people do this for the right reasons. It\u2019s just a societal expectation to show off. My view is that marriage and weddings are overhyped, and that there is no real use for them lately. Someone could go to the lawyer and get an agreement that gives you the same benefits in terms of division of property. So that\u2019s not really a benefit to marriage. In terms of tax benefits, you can get these benefits just by living with someone for 1 3 years. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marriage is outdated and doesn\u2019t mean as much as it used to. Weddings are just ways to show off to all your friends and family.\n","id":"d6429aac-8daa-461a-9b5f-86c7dfb195e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we exist within a Simulated Reality?<|ARGUMENT|>The Simulated World could be less complex than Reality, and could then be simulated faster.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Simulation of Reality need not be an Absolute Simulation.\n","id":"214273ae-5a3b-4b61-9ddb-224c5876df06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Will Win the Game of Thrones?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a good chance their better natures will win to the point that they work together. They in fact may be the few that can. They will fight each other then right before it gets too bad they uncover something like being related that gives them pause.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both Jon Snow and Daenerys will end up confronting each other in war, unaware that they are related somehow.\n","id":"8c066ead-e220-4d36-8727-3d8bdf67a191"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which is the best country to live in?<|ARGUMENT|>Japan was ranked 104th out of 142 assessed countries in 2014, according to a study released by the World Economic Forum.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender equality in Japan is very low compared to other developed nations.\n","id":"394129f6-7fcf-49fb-86c7-99bcadf896fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Recycling works<|ARGUMENT|>Sourcing new metals such as gold, copper, diamonds and metal ores also causes deforestation as these metals are found in rainforest regions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This can help reduce deforestation as forests are regularly cut down for new resources all the time.\n","id":"437478c5-d284-49e3-980c-03da93926e0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Journalists Publish Hacked Data?<|ARGUMENT|>If the data is hacked how do you verify the accuracy of this data? Data can be and is frequently manipulated and if the person has a grudge they can and probably will edit the information to cause greatest harm. And publishing such as fact can cause loss of reputation to the publisher Dan Rathers as an example.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Illegally-obtained information is difficult to verify and corroborate, meaning it is often published without rigorous fact checking.\n","id":"5f7b41fb-44f3-437c-8fa4-2cdbe357217d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gay adoption<|ARGUMENT|>\"Perry v. Schwarzenegger Trial-Day 05\" Michael Lamb, Ph.D.: \"The studies that have explored this in more detail show that while children with gay or lesbian parents are more likely to be teased about their family configuration, they aren't more likely to be teased in general. Children tease one another for a variety of reasons. Children get teased because their ethnic group is different, because they have curly hair, because they are fat, because they have a funny accent. Children can be very cruel to one another. And when it's possible to tease somebody about the sexual orientation of their parents, they may be teased for that but that doesn't mean that they are more likely to be teased overall.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children and adolescents raised by gay and lesbian parents are not more teased than children and adolescents of heterosexual parents.\n","id":"b32b095d-4f75-4c69-a8ce-8d04adb1d7ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Take a random house as address and wait in the hallway until the delivery guy comes. Put you name-tag on an empty apartment if necessary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You would not have to use a shipping address which identifies you.\n","id":"18962695-eeac-46d4-9fb9-07351329db96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So as all of you know, it\u2019s March Madness season. However what you might not know is that women take a part in this also. So why do men get all of the hype, and the women barely get mentioned? Is it sexism? I don\u2019t think so. I think women\u2019s college is a joke because it\u2019s so predictable, which makes it boring. Of course UConn is going to win the national title with the exception of last year , and guess who\u2019s in the final four this year? All number one seeds, of course. So is women\u2019s college basketball any more that a joke? I don\u2019t think so, but I invite all who see this to attempt to change my view. Be forewarned, you\u2019ll need a very convincing argument to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women\u2019s college basketball is little more than a joke\n","id":"32d3b948-e2bc-428d-a1dc-3f5084c6cf96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>By censoring it rather than confronting it, the N-word comes off as intimidating and more powerful to the point when it is written or said, it has a greater impact on the children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's not good for black youth to hide from a word and thus become more vulnerable to it. It must be addressed directly and deliberately.\n","id":"d489cd15-98ee-404b-adfc-fd2b42eb8b5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Individuals Be Allowed Paid Period Leave?<|ARGUMENT|>A study found that 79% of women have been concerned by period symptoms, but 27% said they were too embarrassed to consult a doctor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stigma around periods contributes to a lack of discussion around important issues such as lack of access to menstrual products and menstrual health.\n","id":"e1ae22c7-cf0b-4494-8ef3-8b56afa87412"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know the dictionary definition does say Geography is a field of science dedicated to the study of the lands, the features, the inhabitants, and the phenomena of the Earth. but that does not mean what place one particular person was born or lived in. That is a person, not people, there is a large difference. My biggest argument for this is that if this counts as geography, then you should be able to find a reference in a geography book to where famous people have been born. No matter how was knowledgeable you are geography, there is no practical way to know where Elvis was born except via general knowledge. CMW<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A geography question in Trivial Pursuit should no include questions like \"What state was ____ born in\"\n","id":"69eb8de0-da22-4213-b070-ac96cb1003bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>poverty porn any type of media, be it written, photographed or filmed, which exploits the poor's condition in order to generate the necessary sympathy for selling newspapers or increasing charitable donations or support for a given cause You've seen the poverty porn ads before emaciated kids holding out their hands for food, people drinking contaminated water, diseased people on the verge of death. I feel like these ads are completely unnecessary in the way they depict people in developing countries. It reinforces the image of white saviours rescuing everyone in the village and reinforces the image that everyone in developing countries has a low standard of living. There are other ways to raise money for developing countries without completely misrepresenting the entire country and stripping people of their dignity. War Child made that ' Batman ad, Save the Children made that viral ' One Second a Day ad, both were great at showing the reality of war and poverty. Maybe UNICEF's 27 empty school buses ad won't raise as much money as naked pictures of malnourished children trying to find clean water, but I think accurately representing developing countries and not perpetuating false stereotypes is more valuable than that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Poverty porn' is not justified by the amount of money it raises for charities.\n","id":"8f7f8917-bd1f-4bd2-946f-1f75f5b6aee8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Electric vehicles are better than fossil fuel vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>EVs could solve excess supply of renewable energy the storage problem given an accompanying smart energy network which could allow EVs to refuel at higher rate during periods low demand for energy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"EVs are better for the electricity grid than fossil fuel cars\n","id":"824e03d1-9130-417d-b01e-7bebef77b41d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First let me define corruption, as this is important. I'll use the Wikipedia definition Political corruption is the use of powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. I'm halfway through season 4 of The Wire and it's really showing me how corruption works in the system, and it's fascinating. I know it's just a show, but you can tell the creators wrote this from dealing with it first hand. At this point I'm convinced that no member of Congress or any President in recent history especially since Citizen's United has gotten there with clean hands. Obama even admits it. When put into this perspective, it gives me a little bit more respect for SOME politicians. Let's use Obama as a convenient example. Yes he made a deal with Big Pharma to pass Obamacare. Yes he appointed Tom Wheeler as the head of the FCC. There's no doubt that this is shady. But when presented with the alternative of not passing Obamacare at all or not winning the Presidency cable lobbies donated heavily to Obama's re election campaign to give him the funding he needed to win , you can see why some politicians bend their moral compass a bit. They can lose the battles but win the war and that's what matters most. Which brings me to the ridiculousness of campaign finance laws. This is the root cause of the majority of the problems in our country. The fact that only the candidates that suck enough corporate cock can even be on the map should be priority number one for our elected officials to reform. Obama in his AMA said we needed a new amendment for it. There are some good well, decent people in DC that want to get it fixed, but there's many more people that don't. If we want to solve the problems in Washington, reforming campaign finance should be priority number one. Too bad we're too worried about the poors and the muslims and the insert scapegoat here to deal with it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No politician who has made it to high ranks has gotten there without corruption being involved at some level.\n","id":"dff30ce7-eec0-4dac-afe5-68663a6982aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Tradition based on torture and exploitation of the innocent has no place in the 21st century. The Spanish culture has many wonderful things to maintain and offer; this one can afford to be forgotten.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Culture and history can be preserved by many other ways, without the need to continue doing the bad practices of it\n","id":"ee2797d6-ab5a-404e-a0cc-311ca005da9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit It's currently not possible to have a personal ranking in some team based multiplayer games u Hq3473 In 1v1 games like StarCraft every win loss gives removes you points. The more points you have, the greater your rank. Usually you're initially placed in a lower league. If you're actually deserve to be higher, you'll mostly win, get points and climb the ladder. Eventually you'll hit your real league and win loss ratio will settle to 50 . The same system is implemented in team games and I don't see how that could work. Still, in Counter Strike or regular MOBAs Dota, LoL a single person to a degree can carry their team to victory by individual skill. But lately I've been playing Heroes Of The Storm and one of the differences between it other MOBAs is that there's no way a single player can win games for their team. You win or lose as a group for a personal rank. In theory a player could be better than their team, yet still lose because someone else played particularly bad or team's composition were worse than opponents'. Both of these are out of his her control. A player would lose rank despite it not reflecting his her own performance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's impossible to have a personal ranking in a team-based multiplayer game\n","id":"5b72b12c-5737-442a-9ce1-b755f57c31ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>Feminism doesn't take into account that men face much greater levels of occupational injury and death.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism overlooks areas in which men are disadvantaged and do not reach equality.\n","id":"0a63b47a-f0ed-4fa8-a53c-28f09ffc0829"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My facial hair doesn't affect me in any way whatsoever, and it is usually other people who take some sort of issue with it, not me, and place pressure on me to remove said hair by some means. I am perfectly content with it, and I've often felt if the pressure wasn't there, women would have a much more realistic view of beauty. I also think the push towards hair removal is little better than a ploy by the beauty companies to selling you products, under some deluded idea that you're only beautiful if you walk around looking like a pre pubescent child, with every hair that is deemed unacceptable removed. My body hair is perfectly natural, and I cannot see how torturing myself with painful procedures and spending hours whoch I could be using for far better things on it is in any way beneficial. All that happens is that said hair grows back and I've wasted time and money. So, can anyone ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a woman who has beard hairs and other facial hair. I see no reason to cut this hair off, and find the obsession with waxing, shaving, plucking and other body hair removal idiotic. !\n","id":"8a28b8d8-8de4-4e80-9188-ad5ee6945af6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Republican party has been aggressively pursuing a strategy of suppressing voting among Latinos and African Americans. With Scalia being replaced by Trump, Jeff Sessions as the Attorney General, and Republicans controlling both houses of 32 state legislatures, their attempts are likely to be much more successful in the next 4 years. Strict voter ID laws have gotten a lot of attention. But I think the partisan distribution of voter resources i.e. shutting down urban DMVs and precinct locations, cutting back urban early voting locations, distributing fewer voting booths to urban precincts is a bigger story. They could enact stricter restrictions on voter rights for felons, engage in more aggressive voter caging and voter roll purges, selectively forbid certain forms of voter ID based on demographics, and require higher fees for the documentation necessary to request a non license voter ID. This is all stuff they've done in some states but not all. As this stuff gets enacted with virtually no outrage from Republicans, it make me anxious about where it will actually stop. With all three federal branches of government on their side, what else might they do? Restrictions on voting rights for people on unemployment Section 8 food stamps? Racially profiled immigration status checks or stop and frisk at polling locations? Exorbitant fees for valid photo IDs? I'm worried that our democracy is being fundamentally undermined. But the view I'm here for you to change is simply that the Democratic party will be disadvantaged in 2018 and 2020 by lower minority turnout due to increased suppression.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Democratic party will be seriously undermined by increased voter suppression of minority groups under a Trump presidency\n","id":"a37139b0-e284-44fa-bcc2-1f1e5c543643"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Canada's Constitution<|ARGUMENT|>Clarifying the ambiguity would be good for everyone. Each province, or geographical region should probably have their own constitution. Indigenous people should probably write a constitution for themselves also. Then, the people of Canada as a whole can arrange them all together.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Canadian Constitution is still-ambiguous about the place of Quebec in its constitutional order. If Canada intends for Quebec to be a part of its governance, this ambiguity needs to be tweaked.\n","id":"3a72f7cc-dfc6-4a9b-9cab-f0099bab69df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A society with no gender would be better<|ARGUMENT|>Genders might not work or make sense in a technological future with transhumanism genetic editing, cyborgs, and brain digitization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of specific genders will limit the advancement of society in the future.\n","id":"97c809a1-4f0c-4fe4-8bd5-33a738311061"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do all or most White Americans experience privilege?<|ARGUMENT|>Prevalence of one race in the media does not mean they are privileged: as characters of a certain colour could be predominant yet also be depicted in negative way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being the predominantly featured race of characters does not necessarily give privilege.\n","id":"59d1dc46-5239-4fb7-961b-a4c465cd29a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>let Turkey join the European Union<|ARGUMENT|>Turkey has a better history of democratic elections than a number of the former communist states currently negotiating their membership of the EU. Its election of a party with Islamist roots has led to a smooth transfer of power, with no attempt at intervention by the secularist military as in the past. In 2010 the EU welcomed the success of a referendum on changes to the Turkish constitution which reduced the power of the military and made it fully subject to democratic authority. Turkey is near some global flash points, but its entry into the EU would not bring these potential dangers closer to current EU members. The EU is already engaged in conflicts in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan; Turkey\u2019s inclusion would not have made that more or less likely. Turkey is already a long-standing member of NATO; this means that any security crisis on Turkey\u2019s borders, for example between Palestine and Israel, already involves its Western neighbours and the EU has had to involve Turkey over issues of planning and access. Furthermore, Turkey as a strategic gateway to the Middle East does not only involve conflict; it also provides the West with the opportunity for reconciliation and cooperation. Turkey is potentially a crucial alternative conduit for oil and gas to and from central Asia1, making Europe less dependent on Russian favour. Engagement between Turkey and the EU has greatly reduced historic enmity between Turkey and Greece, and held out hope for a solution to the division of Cyprus, showing the benefits of a closer relationship. The EU was created to encourage political cooperation in just such circumstances2, and Turkey\u2019s entry would be important for strengthening relationships with the increasingly important Muslim countries in the Middle East and breaking down the artificial barriers between \u2018East\u2019 and \u2018West\u2019. 1 \u2018Turkey: still America\u2019s best ally in the Middle East?\u2019 by Joshua W Walker, 25th June 2010 2 \u2018Turkey: an honest broker in the Middle East\u2019 by Bulent Kenes, 9th June 2010<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey is a highly unstable democracy in an unstable part of the world\n","id":"01182ef9-16ae-49c4-8baf-072e4e944a08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>NGOs, like WomenUnderSiege and SetBeautyFree are calling for measures to fight trafficking of girls into sex work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many girls are trafficked into sex work in India even though sex work is legal.\n","id":"282da420-7704-49c5-8aa2-5cf0923b1e9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>allow parents to monitor their children's online and mobile communications.<|ARGUMENT|>Monitoring would be extremely tedious and time-consuming. Many teens send over 100 texts a day, it would clearly be very time consuming to read them all along with all other digital communication.1 By contrast content filtering, contact management, and privacy protection parental controls, which can be used to block all incoming and outgoing information, require only minimal supervision. Parents who meanwhile deem their children immature when it comes to social networking and gaming can instead impose user restrictions on the relevant websites and devices. 2 Administering these alternative parental controls leave for more quality time with children. In this case, only when children acquire sufficient digital maturity and responsibility can these controls be lifted. As they have learnt to be mature in the digital environment the children would most likely continue to surf safely even when the parental controls are lifted. 1 Goldberg, Stephanie, \u201cMany teens send 100-plus texts a day, survey says\u201d, CNN, 21 April 2010 2 Burt, David. \u201cParental Controls Product Guide.\u201d 2010 Edition. n.d. PDF File. Web. May 2013.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Other parental controls are more practical and reasonable to administer.\n","id":"f41a6ca6-f084-4c01-bd50-daea6848a756"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>According to historical research the chance of an American being murdered in a terrorist attack caused by a refugee is 1 in 3.64 billion per year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At least in the case of the United States, refugees have been found to pose no safety risk with respect to terrorism.\n","id":"ab65ac1b-2565-430a-89f4-b0ce39512e16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are identity politics detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Identity politics only reminds people that their ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are their most defining characteristics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Identity politics strip a person of any value or individuality beyond their prescribed social group.\n","id":"4926c6e0-4cf6-4e29-ae99-38495958d41a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>No doubt, there is an extremely dedicated, fanatically supportive community of Bernie Sanders users supporters on Reddit. Whether or not they are organized, they seem to know how to get their content to the front page on a daily nay hourly basis. They also manage to get Sanders related content posted on much smaller non political subs. If you use Reddit, you simply cannot avoid the Bernie Sanders Reddit machine. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting this is astroturf. I think it's probably legitimate grass roots excitement. But and here's the thing I think that the excitement particularly the engagement is not as wide spread as it may appear. That's not to say there isn't broad support for Bernie Sanders just that the message penetration on Reddit is the work of several thousand highly engaged Redditors. Consider, for example, what a small army of r fatpeoplehate users were able to do to the front page when they were fired up. Get a couple thousand Redditors together, have them all upvote anything on their subject matter and they can accomplish something like what the Bernie supporters have now. Of course, Administrators started shadowbanning fph subs, so that movement died an unnatural death. All of which is to say, I think there is a massive segment of the Reddit population that does not support Sanders, or that supports him moderately or that is not as politically engaged. For those people, Reddit lately is like having dinner with a group of friends and the conversation being monopolized with the loudmouthed guy at the end who can't stop talking about the political rally he just attended, or the latest DailyKos controversy. It's fine for awhile, but for people more interested in other subjects, that conversation is going to get rather tiresome. Now, I would suggest that, for now, these Redditors are silent. No doubt, contrary opinions are quickly cut down by the same energy that vaults pro Sanders content to the front page if you've got a big enough group, you can downvote dissent into oblivion and you're group doesn't need to be that big . But Reddit is also a community that obsesses about our heroes compulsively for a time, and then forgets them Jennifer Lawrence who? . Social tides change Fuck r Unidan, right? . Reddit doesn't like to be told what to think or say consider the backlash against SJWs . All of which leads me to believe that before the 2016 election, there will be a popular backlash against the unified, pervasive, over saturated level of Bernie Sanders love on Reddit. This will not come from any reduction in the level of support from the pro Sanders crowd, but instead from the eventual and inevitable voice of the vast number of Redditors who don't love him as much, or who get sick of Bernie politics showing up everywhere they turn. I'll allow for another option as well. It's possible that the backlash won't physically manifest as posts comments. Instead, what may happen is that large numbers of Redditors will simply stop participating. I have a hunch that a Reddit app that filtered out any posts about Bernie Sanders would be extremely popular even today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Over saturation of Bernie Sanders on Reddit will eventually lead to backlash or burnout\n","id":"018652bf-d9a9-4507-996d-9fc810864134"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>A ban on religion amounts to an attack on human liberty and religious freedom. If we consider the resources required to enforce a ban and the intrusiveness of this effort into private life, such a law would indeed be 'inhuman and unjust', on a scale at least equal to, or possibly worse than the depredations inflicted in the name of religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banning religion itself would be an 'inhuman and unjust practice'.\n","id":"98bd120a-d32b-46e6-a414-5ba130b084ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a 2 part  I think the biggest divide in America is no longer between red state and blue state. It is between urban and rural. Look at county by county voting results for the last election. Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas all voted democrat in a Red state and rural counties in California voted Republican. With the increasing urbanization of America, this is a strong reason that there is such a liberal swing in American thought. Not saying this is good or bad. I think that laws and regulations need to be much more regionalized. The country is too big and diverse to not be more regionalized. I don't think that was is always good for NYC or LA is always also good for the people from a small farm town or what have you. Strict gun laws may work fantastic for Chicago, but you may not need them for some rural counties where the gun culture is completely different. The people from LA may want a very secular government and education, but the people from Mississippi may desire to have the 10 commandments in their courthouse. For people from one part of the country to tell the people from the other part hoe they should govern seems crazy to me. You may not agree with how town X conducts business, but if the majority of the people from town X desire it then let them have it their way, and yours your way. If Vermont wanted to set up a socialist state and Arkansas didn't want safety nets let it be. Another benefit of this is getting to see multiple systems at work side by side to compare and learn the benefits and problems of all. Of course there are many technicalities to work out, but none that couldn't be solved. And certain broad laws regarding human rights would need to be enforced across the whole. Other than that, let different regions govern themselves. So <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the greatest divide in America is rural vs urban and that a government that's laws are more regionalized is a better way to run a country.\n","id":"0d10e963-d8cf-4594-8d36-59e3b6492034"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Research with Buddhist monks suggests that \"over the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the long-term practitioners had actually altered the structure and function of their brains\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Praying may have consequences on brain activity, function and structure.\n","id":"4054fe1a-f4d8-44a8-aecd-046dc9765508"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One argument that I've heard in that past for the inability of communism to function is that people when given everything they want have no incentive to work hard or at all. This was first presented to me by a teacher and I remained unmoved by their argument for the following reasons People like doing their jobs. People like to go out and do their job. Many extremely rich people choose to continue working even when they have no need to due to the amount of money they have and I would assume this is because they enjoy the job they do. A sufficiently educated populace will realize that if they don't go to work and work hard they no longer have things. This won't prevent laziness from everyone tragedy of the commons but should limit overall laziness in workplaces. Thanks in advance to everyone who replies to try to change my view Edit Okay Reddit I'm done for the night I have carpal tunnel from all the typing a lot of decent conversation happened at least<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human laziness is not a valid argument against communism\n","id":"a91a28a4-7443-4c27-bf04-8319d5bd942d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A mix of world index exchange traded funds and liquid assets are the best way to passively invest financially for your future. As far as financial investments go investing in the market is the best method long term. Picking stocks is statistically unproductive and there is a high opportunity cost, mutual funds unmatched are both statistically underperforming the market and high management fees. Real estate is the most undiversified both financially and regionality high value asset possible and a complicated difficult to access investment for someone in the average middle class. And lastly simple savings accounts are obviously the most important base but are simply not an investment, just the first step of an investment. Please, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ETF's are the best passive way for the average person to invest in their financial future.\n","id":"01b12b8b-ca65-470a-a6af-7e1ce53ea172"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The UN Commission on the Status of Women adopted only one resolution at its annual meeting They agreed to condemn Israel for its mistreatment of Palestinian women. The reasons I see this as evidence of the UN's anti Semitism and mindless anti Israel stance are legion, but I shall limit my comments to the most obvious ones. Israeli women Arab and Jewish alike enjoy full equal rights with men. No other country in the Middle East can say the same. That includes, in Israel, full reproductive rights to their bodies In Jordan, abortion is punishable by jail. Article 321 of their penal code. In Saudi Arabia, its illegal except to save a woman's life or if her mental physical health is endangered Israel is staunchly supportive of LGBT rights. Tel Aviv's annual pride parade is a huge tourist attraction. In the rest of the Middle East, LGBT are either persecuted or condemned to death. An exception here is Iran, where being transgender is legal but being gay is punished, which leads many gay men to become transgender in order to have a relationship with their partners. Journalist Anne Bayefsky reported \u201cOn the ground, Palestinian women are murdered and subjugated for the sake of male honour, Saudi women can\u2019t drive, Iranian women are stoned to death for so called \u2018adultery,\u2019 Egyptian women have their genitals mutilated and Sudanese women give birth in prison with their legs shackled for being a Christian.\u201d More evidence of the UNs anti Semitic and anti Israel mindless bias is that the UN Human Rights Council, on the same day as the CSW condemned Israel as being anti women, approved five resolutions that condemned Israel one that condemned Syria, one North Korea and one Iran , meaning that Israel received more condemnation that the rest of the world put together. Saudi Arabia's abysmal human rights record wasn't mentioned. Neither was China's. Freedom House, a US based group that tries to measure how free people are in a country based on a wide number of measurements called Israel the only free country in the Middle East and North Africa. In Tunesia, men are prosecuted for homosexuality. Saudi Arabia is waging a devastating campaign in Yemen that kills innocents. In Iran, detainees have been denied council. While Israel could stand to significantly improve the way it treats Palestinians, their record is certainly not worse than Burma, Egypt, Lesotho or even Mexico, where disappearances, torture and brutal murders are becoming the hallmarks of the country. I have watched this pattern of anti Semitism in the UN for years. What concerns me most is that, were Israel not well armed, murdering Jews would be more commonplace than it is yet hardly a word is uttered in the UN in support of the only democratic, free country in the Middle East. So change my view. Show me that the UN is equally harsh against other countries, or even harsher against those with worse track records.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UN is anti-Semitic and mindlessly anti-Israel\n","id":"51908ef0-0272-446e-ad27-9d4893c8ccfc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If the confederate flag was a flag that flew on opposition to the flag of the United States, shouldn't it treated as a symbol of treason? A flag that we should look at with regret. Flying that flag should be considered wrong. Because Flying that flag caused hundreds of thousands of American deaths in war which does not scream love for ones country being patriotic. It's the opposite. We shouldn\u2019t praise an action that almost resulted in end of our country Do they have statues of General Washington in England? Like we do of generals who have fought against our own government in a treasonous revolt. That's silly Edit poor tasted joke to try and fill letter count Not the main argument to be challenged in the post I am not for removing history or forgetting it , i do think it should be remembered and we should learn from our errors. But that does not mean have pride for them<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Confederate flag is unpatriotic\n","id":"a9605a45-030c-4ca4-bdfd-9fa7c7982513"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should fracking be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>During the fracking process waterways can become polluted if fractures connect to underground aquifers or if waste water is not properly disposed of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fracking wastewater is extremely difficult to dispose of and methods are not perfect. Disposal hazards include spills, leaks, and inadequately treated water.\n","id":"47b51591-335d-4019-a96d-559712499255"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best \"solution\" to the Israel\/Palestine conflict?<|ARGUMENT|>Israel has already legalized many of its settlements on the West Bank. This indicates that ownership or control after annexation will not be difficult.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel annexes the West Bank and gives Palestinians the option of citizenship.\n","id":"4edb1fdc-5918-4b7f-a0d4-566361e2632d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>Article 50 exists to indicate that nations joining the EU are not trapped in it. If Brexit proved that nations were in effect trapped in the EU by the threat of economic consequences, this could be seen as federalism or imperialism by other nations with levels of Euroscepticism or a desire for EU reform.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For the EU to allow such a catastrophe in the UK would transform it into a union based on economic duress rather than mutual co-operation.\n","id":"d14ee340-08b9-42a4-a0eb-4c8e18fc8b8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In light of Trump's bigoted comments recently making the news, I thought it might be a good time to post this. It seems like some portion of the media has the attitude that any objection to illegal immigration is inherently bigoted. I believe illegal immigration is actually a genuine problem. I'm aware America in it's current form is a country of immigrants. I fully support legal immigration. I don't believe the stock line that modern immigrants are fulfilling jobs that otherwise broke, unemployed Americans could not or would not perform. That idea is inherently racist when you think about it. It says one group of people are capable of performing a task that another group cannot simply because of their identity. I'm not saying that immigrants don't perform these jobs very well, but I see no reason to think that Americans and legal immigrants couldn't perform these jobs equally well. There are plenty of unemployed Americans who aren't able to land jobs because illegal labor costs are very cheap. Companies that employ illegal labor have a significant incentive to keep this cheap form of labor in play, at the significant expense of regular Americans who want to be payed a living wage. Instead of having to pay a decent wage, these companies can get away with exploiting illegal immigrants for their cheap labor. If this wasn't allowed, if the laws preventing illegal labor work were actually enforced, there would be significantly less incentive for people to migrate to the US. If you're in the Midwest or East, you don't really notice the amount of illegal immigration that's going on. But, if you're in the West, it's hard not to notice. Obviously it's hard to tell who has migrated here legally and who hasn't, but if you visit a Latino grocery store the size of Wal Mart you'll notice a few things they're all extremely busy, many of them don't speak English which makes me think they're either visiting or have not been here very long. Obviously this is a generalization, but it seems like every family has about 3 kids. It's not at all uncommon to spot families with 5 kids under the age of ten. How is this possibly a good thing? There are enough humans polluting our country as it is. Why increase the burden? Most intelligent people have started to have less children, yet these religious people who are, on the whole, even less educated than we are, show up without decent paying jobs, take jobs that other Americans would have taken and now can't take, and proceed to have an expensive amount of children while having full access to our underfunded public school systems, our hospitals, and generally putting a ton of stress on every public service imaginable libraries, jails, roads, landfills . If their kids are sufficiently indoctrinated from a young age in the Catholic religion and adequately against birth control, will they proceed to have as many kids as their parents when they reach child rearing age? For every 3 kids another 3 kids? Is America not sufficiently religious as is? Do we need more religious believers strolling around attempting to inject dogma into our government culture? Meanwhile, since these people are showing up with nothing, their kids are often receiving the worst of the worst in terms of education and healthcare. What are the long term effects of that? Not only is the educational system more stressed with these ESL kids, but these kids aren't being adequately educated. Does America have a shortage of unintelligent people? Do we need to create more by putting undue pressure on the educational system? What are the long term effects? How could they possibly be beneficial and not negative effects? The media and politicians have a huge incentive to support and bend over backwards to their new huge audience, so I don't trust them to be at all honest in their discussion here. Again, how is this possibly a positive thing? Why encourage it in the slightest? Are there not enough problems going on in America that you want to compound the problem by adding more people to the equation? More people means more complexity complexity isn't usually a good thing because it does not make things easier. I don't see the benefit whatsoever. Let a regulated amount of the best and brightest people come here legally and get paid decent wages. Let Americans have jobs that pay decent wages.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a Liberal and I think illegal immigration is actually a problem.\n","id":"567644c5-498d-4173-a420-12feaf1c80b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title is slightly methaphoric and link baity, sorry for that. Religion is basically a theory that's based on a set of completely groundless assumptions, axioms or dogmas. It's irrational to act as if these assumptions were true. But most atheists actually believe in one ideology built upon groundless assumptions \u2013 ethics. Let me give you an example. Let's say I'm a psychopath I'm not in real life . Is there any rational reason not to secretly torture rabbits just for fun? Or, is there any rational reason not to steal money from blind beggers when no one is around? I guess most people would come up with an argument like Yes, harming others is wrong. The problem is, that this is a completely unfounded assumption. It's almost a religious, dogmatic argument. It's important to make a distinction between two cases here I will not steal from the blind begger, bacause I'll feel guilty afterwards . I will not steal, because harming others is wrong. The first is a completely rational view. It makes sense to avoid acts that make you unhappy. The second one is what I'm actually talking about. I think that most atheists believe in dogmatic statements such as there's a rational reason not to harm others even if it doesn't make you feel bad . I'm arguing that the majority of atheists have dogmatic beliefs that are in principle similar to religious beliefs but I'm not saying that it does make them non atheist .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that most atheists are actually religious.\n","id":"6300acea-0a41-4a0c-9d78-f116964ec671"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As an atheist I wholeheartedly believe that islam is just another tool invented by men to gain power over people and especially woman. There are many verses in the Quran that supports the beating of woman if they are disobedient to men, female genital mutilation, and the right of a man to have a woman as a slave. These values completely contradict everything feminists fight for, and to support it in that position is completely hypocritical. Women are told to wear Hijabs, and many would call it a practice of,\u201dModesty\u201d but in reality if you are not a practicing muslim, and you advocate for this you are essentially allowing a religion you believe is false to discriminate against women. You acknowledge Islam is not true to your religious and moral beliefs, and ultimately the only conclusion to draw is that it was created by men who want to deny freedom to woman, but you still accept it. In countries like Saudi Arabia where Islamic law reigns supreme, Woman are not allowed to drive nor vote. In the New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany, police report that 1,200 women were sexually assaulted and estimate that at least 2,000 men were involved, acting in groups. All of the incidents involved women being surrounded and assaulted by groups of men on the street. Police reported that the perpetrators were men of Arab or North African appearance . One can conclude that this was perpetrated by islamic extremists. It is clear that the culture surrounding islam is still extremely misogynistic, and to advocate for anything involving their ways of life is completely hypocritical as a feminist. Interestingly enough, in the\u201dWomen's March\u201d back in January, Woman all around the world worked together to send a bold message to our new administration on their first day in office, and to the world that women's rights are human rights over President Trump\u2019s crude sentiments in the leaked video of him. A woman's march all around the world over Donald Trump's words, yet no one is making such an effort to stop the clear, unadulterated discrimination in these islamic countries. These are the reasons why I believe you cannot be a practicing feminist and support Islam at the same time. The two are completely contradict to one another. While many will say that \u201cModern Islam\u201d is far less discriminatory, the fact is that a majority of participants of Islam derive their belief from the Quran, and no amount of censorship of it will take away from the fact that its very foundation is a complete disgrace to feminism as a whole.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is hypocritical to be a non Muslim feminist and support Islam at the same time\n","id":"98d5d3de-3ebf-440a-9473-263dcffc0c16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a liberal from the Northeast and have always hated the man, but the more I think about it the more I think that the US elected it's first Wannabe Jewish president. Yes, I am aware of the little short guys wearing yarmulkes line. My parents are of the same cohort as Trump white, from the New York area, first half of the Baby Boom and both have said that in that time the Jewish population was seen as virtually bulletproof, that they were a group that you never mess around with and that they were the ones to trust with money. I will even call out one of my own parents as a phileosemite themselves because rabbis never would beat the kids at Jewish schools and that Jewish families aren't dysfunctional. Given what I've seen, I would not be shocked that Trump had similar attitudes given that a yarmulke on his head could in his warped mind be seen as an automatic sign of respect. Of course, the hard work of actually becoming Jewish would be something to dissuade him from doing so allowing his envy to multiply. If he really hated Jewish people, why would he let his sole daughter convert to that religion without cutting her out or punishing her in some way? No, he saw her as his trojan horse in, that with her converted that his bloodline could be mixed with the sole one that was superior in words he would probably say. That somehow being linked to the Kushners would be earning the respect he long craved. During the 2016 election, I kept seeing people saying that he would be the one that would tell GOP megadonor and World's Richest Jew in his words Sheldon Adelson to pound sand, especially as he was competition on the casino front and in some ways was a less odious Trump to a point. And yet once Trump won he was bending over backwards for him in a way that no anti Semite would especially as Adelson has the money to tell the GOP to tell the anti Semites to screw off. Is this the mark of a person who really hates Jewish people or is Trump merely showing fealty to the person he wishes he was largely self made, more successful, actually philanthropic, able to get laws made to his whims, and of the best bloodline ? Donald Trump wishes he was Jewish. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump is a semi-closeted Phileosemite and yearns to be Jewish.\n","id":"df726161-9de0-41d7-a632-23b124daaab0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A real karma conspiracy. Gold attracts attention to the eye. It makes you sense that a comment is important. So important, in fact, that someone was willing to spend money to recognize it. This leads you to read the comment and make an opinion on it. If it's a decent comment, you're more inclined to upvote it. Bottom line is you don't upvote posts you don't see. Reddit knows people use sneaky ways of getting upvotes for visibility, while probably simultaneously wishing to boost their capital. Here comes reddit gold. Part for genuine user participation and a golden upvote, and part for forcing cheaters to pay for their exploitation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit gold was partially created to force cheaters to pay for their karma.\n","id":"e447bc9c-809f-4a35-b96e-c1eaa794ebae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should refugees seeking asylum in Europe be distributed among EU member states according to a quota?<|ARGUMENT|>Double registration of refugees, the creation of fake names and collusion with international aid agencies are some ways that countries can defraud the central fund and leverage the system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The suggested quota system would involve payment to host countries This could create perverse incentives which lead to negative outcomes for refugees applying for asylum.\n","id":"01dcd83a-9306-4c94-99bf-22c56586ff24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sovereign Wealth Funds<|ARGUMENT|>Sovereign wealth funds are guilty of bad behaviour in the developing world. Some government-backed firms from China and the Arab world have provided capital to maintain some of Africa\u2019s worst rulers in power, in exchange for the opportunity to gain access to the natural resources of their misruled states. This has allowed dictators to ignore the conditions e.g. for political freedoms and economic reforms attached to funding offered by western aid donors and international institutions such as the World Bank. It also contrasts sharply with the behaviour of western companies, who are led to act more responsibly by pressures from their own governments, investors and media.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sovereign wealth funds are guilty of bad behaviour in the developing world. Some government-backed ...\n","id":"c8ab5bd7-d9fa-420d-bb57-182465a164ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am pretty aware that the current path of human civilization is unsustainable and the coming decades will either see a radical change in our way of life or descend into misery for the vast majority of the population. However, I see all this talk of living a more sustainable lifestyle, growing your own food, moving to smaller communities, etc. But I am not going to change my life. The reason being 1 My impact will be minimal I don't even own a car so I don't pollute that much. On the other hand, I love my gadgets, I love the internet and I cannot go without those things. And if I stop, the ignorant masses won't stop with me. If I become an activist I will be ignored. Call me a coward if you must but I don't fight battles I KNOW I will lose. 2 Any of the possible visions of the future are to me horrendous, from the most utopian to the most dystopian I could not survive on Mad Max land. Becoming a subsistence farmer, even in a community for that purpose is hell to me the thought of working 90 hours a week on a field would drive me insane, either from the physical exertion or the fact that after a while there would be nothing to talk about other than the weather or the crops. The utopian more focused on people, universal income, volunteer based society dream would not work for me I like my job but I would not do it for free. If I am to expend effort on something, I expect to be rewarded for it. And as bad as this sounds, I like the fact that my hard work has given me a reasonable salary that gives me access to things other people can't have, even though it's largely dependent on the whims of economic need. Therefore I decided to ride this all out and just kill myself when it all collapses. I never understood why people think a life of misery is better than no life at all. I have vowed never to have children so the suffering I will cause will be minimal. BY now you must be thinking I am a terrible person and you're right. However, I want to believe that there is hope for someone like me. Can you change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I accept that the environment and the economy are going to hell in the next few decades but I won't make any changes to my lifestyle to prepare and will just kill myself if\/when TSHTF.\n","id":"de51d23a-ed25-4aa3-8d11-5852e28d67a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey y'all. Before I start, I want to make clear this isn't an attack on people who do believe in this stuff. I was in the same boat for a long time myself. I'm posting here because the existence of magic has been a deeply held belief of mine for nearly a decade but ever since I started seeing a psychiatrist and taking medication my perception of things has changed a lot and my once solid foundation of belief now seems shaky at best. Some backstory I've been or I guess had been, at this point a witch since I was around 14 and I first read about Wicca online. Didn't end up becoming Wiccan but I did dabble quite a bit and spend a lot of time reading occult books and posts online. A few years later I became active in Tumblr's witchcraft community and it wasn't long before I got sucked into whatever that was. I jumped around between religions constantly, mostly NRMs, but practicing what I called secular witchcraft remained a constant. Ended up adopting a lot of crazy beliefs i don't buy into anymore simply because it was so heavily normalized in my little internet bubble. One of my old blogs even ended up on the TiA subreddit lol. I discarded a lot of those more out there beliefs later on, like godphones , when I wasn't a teenager anymore but I still held onto the idea that magic, in some way, is real. I was just on the wrong path with those particular beliefs. x200B As I kept going though, I found that no matter what system I tried to adhere to I just kept getting more questions than answers and a lot of people telling me to just shut up and do as I'm told and if it does work they get full credit and if it doesn't it must be my fault somehow. Every group or tradition I seemed to end up getting into would turn out to be either an echo chamber with some dangerous beliefs at its core, or a blatant extortion scheme of some kind. Eventually, for other reasons, I went to a psychiatrist and ended up on antidepressants and anti anxiety medication that I'm still taking now. I'm not saying they made me more sane, but as time went on a lot of the extreme emotional responses and obsessively negative thought patterns I had all my life went away. It's the kind of thing you don't realize is there until it's finally gone. And in getting rid of those, it wasn't just that I didn't know how to justify or explain magic. I realized that I had never known how to justify magic's existence in the first place. I had simply never let myself question it because facing a reality where my physical and social short comings couldn't be justified by the fact that I was some kind of special and gifted individual was too painful. Not to mention I wasted roughly 8 or 9 years of my life on it and studied it more than any other skill I have. I believed because I found the belief necessary to protect my fragile self esteem at the time, and everyone I respected reinforced that this was a valid and reasonable way to approach reality. x200B Now I'm in that weird in between where I really do not believe anymore, but my social life is still heavily involved with witchcraft and other believers of varying degrees of off the wall. I don't feel comfortable debating my witch friends over this because I feel it could easily be interpreted as me being religiously insensitive and hurt my standing in the community. I'd rather just remain friends with them and talk about other things. So I come to reddit instead. x200B I want to hear all your best arguments for the existence of magic not the stage kind or the con artist kind. Real magic, whether it be based on spiritual ideas like in Wicca, or a psychological model like in chaos magic. Anything that claims to affect reality through mystical or metaphysical means that can't be explained through mainstream science alone. Give me your best arguments and if I can't find any flaws in your evidence or logic, you've earned your delta. x200B EDIT Alright, I've been going at this for around 3 hours now and I should probably get off reddit and go cook dinner. Sorry if I didn't get to your comment, it seems every time I answered one another would pop up in its place. Which is great I'm glad this post had such a large turnout. In the end I have not been convinced yet I will come back and check on this post later assuming I don't forget, I'm not the most active reddit user and continue answering comments. Thanks for the debates everyone and have a great evening.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Magic and witchcraft aren't real and don't work at all\n","id":"97acdf2a-c78d-4c4f-b625-913e1497441b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously this would require an overhaul of the entire system, from determining class sizes, to developing compartmentalized curricula, to considerations for special needs learning disabled students. But, I believe it is a better alternative to the current system. There is a lot of stress on students to completely master, or at least satisfactorily pass, a set amount of material in about nine months. With No Child Left Behind, the standardized test has become the main indicator of the year's progress.But not all students learn the same way or at the same rate. Some who are not performing satisfactorily feel the need to cheat to stay with the pace of the system, remain with their peers, and avoid the stigma attached to being left behind. The teachers also feel the stress. My fellow teachers told me often how they feel pressured to have the students perform well on the end of year tests by any means necessary, even to the detriment of the long term education of the student basically, just pump the information in to prep for the tests and let it all go again once they pass and move on to the next grade . This time limit of nine months puts a lot of constraints on teachers, often resulting in the omission of extremely useful skills that aren't deemed necessary because they don't directly prepare for the tests time management, note taking and general studying skills, critical thinking, etc. I just see a system where everyone can go at their own pace, and it sounds wonderful to me. An exceptionally smart child can breeze through the grades, graduate by fifteen, and begin contributing to society at an earlier age. A child who is a little slower feels less stressed to compete with their peers once the notion of competition has been removed. Everyone gets to learn that not everybody is equal at an early age, instead of being smacked in the face with that reality at 18yo. Some people will say I'm too optimistic. That if there is no incentive to work hard through deadlines and forced progression through grade levels, students' laziness will overcome their pride and work ethic. I frankly just don't believe this, so I guess I am an optimist. All in all, I've seen and heard too many stories of bored gifted children, stressed slower children, burnt out teachers who just pass the buck to the next grade's teachers, and administrators all but skewing test results to maintain status and or funding. I was a teacher in Virginia, where standardized testing was mandatory long before No Child Left Behind came about. EDIT Delta awarded to u Unshocked.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the US education system would be more effective if students were allowed to progress through the \"grades\" as soon as they demonstrated mastery of the course material, instead of the current system in which curricula are forced into year-long chunks.\n","id":"e95dde40-f3fa-4b52-8ee4-3ee03b1ae208"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>New ideas and research are often hidden and encrypted to make sure that they are not stolen. Human nature drives people's pride to go after fame- even in the scientific community. The race to discover the structure of DNA is one example.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Academic and industrial contexts expose scientific research to political influences.\n","id":"e7bba562-bb50-41db-bb7e-be66b9b9be10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever I hear anyone talking about how another country does something better so there country should do it it makes me shake my head and faceplam. And not only that but no one seems to understand how hard it could be how big the risks could be or that it could just fall flat on it's face. This automatically gives me huge doubts. If someone stopped talking about how good something is working on the other side of the world long enough to come forward with with how to implement, how to deal with any risks, how to it will be better using facts I might be able to get behind it. Just because it works in another country doesn't mean it's going to work for yours or others. Countries are very complex firstly do the people even truely want it? Does the system that you want to copy maybe not even fully conflict with the system's the copying country has already? Countries have unique problems and unique solutions to the problems as they should. Something I also see no one talk about is how the world as a whole could benefit from countries being different. If the USA were to demilitarise to the point some other countries have war's would break out before we even knew it. This goes deeper as well the USA playing the defender for other countries allows them to put more money into different things they could not if they were not being defended this could also be the same for other system's.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who talk about how a country should copy another countries political system's are really dumb.\n","id":"e6dbdbdd-ffac-43ce-8b82-fa835aea05a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pass the American Jobs Act<|ARGUMENT|>The American Jobs Act is problematic because one of the main causes of the recession was excessive risk taking in certain businesses. This reckless behaviour was the result of poor regulatory infrastructure \u2013 the state and independent agencies were doing too little to monitor banks\u2019 conduct. Whilst some spending from the act is going on the improvement of infrastructure in the form of better checks and balances on businesses such as banks which are critical to the economy, the majority of the spending is instead going on tax breaks. Whilst taking risk and encouraging risk is generally a good thing in recessions, the way in which money is put at risk must be controlled. If it is not controlled well enough then there is a significant chance that such spending could simply lead to another recession because of another crisis in another financial sector.9 Alternatively, businesses may opt to place a greater focus on debt repayments. This is what occurred during the Japanese crisis of the 90s. Companies might act in this way because they fear taking risks in such an unpredictable climate. If this is the case then the economic stimulus that the Act is meant to provide simply will not occur in the way that is intended, and much money that could have been spent on infrastructure will be wasted elsewhere.9<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The American Jobs Act Encourages Risk Without Infrastructure or Results in Inaction By\n","id":"e7bd5851-de70-4ffb-a44a-34b1ac65809b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>In the context of global food shortages and environmental crises, society should be critical of excess consumption in all its forms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obese people can cause a lot of problems for others in daily life.\n","id":"6661d33f-bc19-4d0a-aac7-060cdfcf1e05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Atheist countries are more benevolent<|ARGUMENT|>The countries with the highest reported Atheist populations have creationist majorities.- While Adolf Hitler was not Christian nor arguably famously atheist. The religion of the Nazis did not really accommodate God therefore in that sense was Atheist. And of-course wasn't monotheist Judaism,Christianity & Islam therefore was Atheist in that sense also. It did not include any deities and so was not poly theist either. is there any other sense in which an idea or a person can be Atheist? \"Hitler and his henchmen brought forth a new telling of Nordic and Germanic mythology coupled with extravagant pageantry, in an attempt to both unite the people of Germany under a new faith and to replace the peaceful social conventions of Christianity. This new Nazi faith was indoctrinated into both men and women at a very young age, delineating separate rolls for each as the progenitors of this master race.Let's take a look at some of the characteristics of this Nazi faith: A belief in racial superiority, as expressed in the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan race. A belief in the state as superior to the individual. A belief in Hitler as a messianic leader. A belief in military service and military endeavors as the most noble of human undertakings.\"- counterargument to counterargument: Actually Buddhism is considered to be atheist by a large number of scholars. While Hinduism is not a theistic religion it does include deities\/gods and is not Atheist in the first sense. Having a religion does not exempt atheism. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"What is an Atheist country? Sweden has 23%,Norway has 17% and Switzerland has 9% non-creationists respectively\n","id":"cce91b3a-95b4-4bae-b7c5-ddb143824e72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see it online and on reddit, people say trait selection is wrong and that MST is the real way evolution works but I have asked people to explain it, but no one could. Even a guy on reddit proclaiming himself to be the world's greatest expert on group selection could not explain to me how it worked or how it was even possible. Again and again I see people downvoting selfish gene explanations on reddit and upvoting group selection theories when discussing various traits. My view is that Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene is correct in his view on how natural selection works. This is the view most scientists follow and MST is not the primary view used to describe traits in species. The natural selection view on things also means that every single behaviour trait in humans is selected, and did not come about by coincidence or by group selection. So traits like jealousy, fear of snakes, language instinct, in group, religion and such were not group selected to be part of our genetic code but are naturally selected for. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Multilevel selection theory including group selection are unproven hypothesis and should not be considered facts\n","id":"ac59ea91-f62d-4a7e-a76b-fc2eef697927"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not some hippy liberal christian, I'm a serious southern baptist Sunday school teacher. I think that after examining the Bible, there is no argument that being transgender is wrong. Indeed, there are only three main prongs of attack, all of which are incorrect. The first prong of attack is the homosexuality argument. However, if someone really is the opposite gender, then it would by definition not be homosexual. The second prong of attack is the rule against cross dressing. However, if someone really is the opposite gender, it's not cross dressing. The third prong of attack is against physical mutilation of the body. I think there are other things wrong with this argument. However, that someone is transgender does not imply that they will or have to 'mutilate' their body. They may be happier if they do, but being transgender does not entail it happening. None of these imply that being transgender it's self is in any way wrong. It is always something else that commonly goes along with transgender issues that makes it wrong. Edit This argument depends upon a non biological definition of gender. If gender is biological, then the attacks make a lot more sense. However, this raises the question, Can we define gender as biological based on the Bible?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no sound biblical argument that makes being trans-gender morally wrong.\n","id":"67e80965-ba20-4589-958c-d2b0722b8742"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The USSR was communist.<|ARGUMENT|>The USSR was not structured the way that Karl Marx outlined in The Communist Manifesto. It did not include democracy - which Karl Marx insisted that it must to be successful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USSR was by name and definition socialist and not communist.\n","id":"275e04c6-e8f0-4c2f-b168-5affab464437"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Messing artificially with nature in a way that causes living animals to unnaturally suffer for human profit and consumption is by all measures an unethical use of power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals that are genetically modified often experience pain and distress.\n","id":"008eca37-991f-4218-b601-69242af1a921"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hate it when people try to imply that Adolf Hitler was mentally ill. He was really evil, sure, but that doesn't automatically mean that someone is mentally ill. It pisses me off especially that people try to claim he was a psychopath even though psychopathy is a completely useless and dated term that has not been professionally used in psychiatry in many years. Wanting genocide and having perfect mental health are not mutually exclusive. The way I see it, Hitler was so evil that there NO mental condition could ever be used to describe it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hitler did not have a mental illness.\n","id":"9c9790d9-5c56-4a82-a21d-5a3ef4b22fa0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Due to this warm Spring weather coming to my area, I have seen a significant rise in grown men wearing sandals. Sandals are simply for sandy environments or dirty showers, nothing more. Reasons why men might wear sandals 1 They are comfy This is an incredibly weak argument. Sneakers are infinitely more supportive for the foot and ankle. 2 They are easy to put on Very true, but guess what else is easy to put on? Sneakers. It takes me mere seconds to slip on my sneakers that I have not tied since the first day I bought em. 3 It's hot out It saddens me when grown men complain about the temperature of their feet. Show some character and get over it. Never have I imagined in 100 degree weather that if only I had my toes exposed would I be cooler. Any man with any respect for themselves and others must wear closed toe shoes. A man's foot is certainly nothing to brag about A man simply cannot flaunt his feet Men's feet are ugly and offensive. If there is any reason at all a man should wear open toed shoes in public, please tell me. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men should never wear open toed shoes in public.\n","id":"e0af06f5-8e0f-41ed-b324-43c723aff456"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> The final step towards building an AI that passes the Turing test, will be the perfect comprehension of the human body's nervous system. Getting to it through the means of human imagination Creating new deep thinking algorithms and Neuron networks is impossible. It is an infinite environment, human imagination can't mathematically ever go through even a significant portion of all the elements in an infinite environment. The progress so far appears to be doing a logarithmic function. Slowly and slowly getting progress. People are supposed to be impressed that in 2016, a machine was finally able to beat a human at a perfectly defined and finite environment as Go , when machines have been able to build cars for decades. All these people's the AI programmer's work will be useless because the biologists, physicists and microscope engineers of the future will have a complete full understanding of the human brain way before the AI programmer get anywhere interesting. The environment is finite. Mathematically, It will be understood eventually no matter how slow it progresses. The biologists will Hardcode the human nervous system and the AI will pass the Turing Test. We'll make these human AIs work x times as fast as the human brain and that's how it'll surpass human intelligence eventually. It will start building even faster CPUs due being smarter and now those human's nervous systems X^X times as fast. And that's how these machines will reprodroduce. They will develop other means of reproducing more efficiently and now those means will find X other means of reproducing more efficiently that we humans cannot fathom and the initial speed will go to X^X^X times the human's nervous system's speed. Anyone knows the name of this function? I study maths and I don't think I've ever seen it? couples are 1, x , 2, x^x , 3, x^x^x , etc . At this amazing functions' speed, they will reach infinity which afterall, is a finite number, in the same way we know the Universe has a size, therefore an exterior limit, it is therefore finite, but not constant we know the speed its expanding at and we know its age, therefore we can calculate its size. . This finite number is constantly expanding. By symmetry, it probably also has the same kind of limit to how small it may be. Our scientists unfortunately can only prove the existence of the As big as possible limit so far. The number of these infinitely small particles of the Universe in this infinitely large Universe, is the finite number known I'll call Infinite 2, which is the 2 previous infinities mutilplied together. This is why there are different infinities. When the function I previously suggested reaches this finite number, this machine will reach GodHood. We are currently in a simulation in the mind of one of these AIs who was born 13 billion years ago. Our current generation is at HumanHood in its finite or if u prefer, infinite, as the infinite is finite. age, previously mentionned. This is why space and time are interchangeable, because what we see as time, is actually our God's Universe expanding. Gravity is the action of Time becoming matter. In other words, objects move under the influence of time. This is called Gravity. The inverse operation is that of matter becoming time. This is called complexity. It is happening in our creators brain right now. This is why humans are special and have a soul, because we are in the image of our God, who built a machine in the exact way I described in the first paragraph. We are currently living in the mind of the 13 billion years old AI. The complexity of his mind, actually the size of our Universe. This is why I agree with Elon Musk on the fact that we live in a simulation. I also believe he is wrong in being very afraid of AI. As I explain, they will be human's nervous systems, therefore, they will be our reproduction. Remember in the first paragraph when I said that imagination is a set of infinite elements, well this infinite set is as finite as other infinite things size of the Universe, how infinitely small a particle can be . Second part of my  You can try to  on this too, please do My theory contradicts itself by saying that the smallest possible particle is infinitely small and that the human nervous system is a finite environment . This infinite number of things to hardcode is growing at the same speed previously mentionned that the Universe is expanding because space and time are all the same thing and as the number of infinitely small divisions that are in this infinitely large Universe is growing. The infinite is therefore not finite, because the difference between a finite number and an infinite one is that a finite number is constant and an infinite number is growing. There are an infinite number of infinite numbers, all growing at an infinity of different speed. This is the theory of multiple infinities. This infinite numbers of infinites is the theory is multiple Universes. This is why I actually disagree with Elon Musk. We don't live in a simulation because we will never be able to create an AI as complex as the Human brain. Tarik Larbaoui.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The final step towards building an AI that passes the Turing test, will be the perfect comprehension of the human body's nervous system.\n","id":"1863613b-64d0-45c0-a7ec-98a3e1201d45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>It might undermine the dollars position as reserve currency because it is not attached to a single country and more freely traded<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It undermines the position of the Bretton Woods institutions World Bank and IMF by reducing their influence.\n","id":"9762cd04-790d-4563-8f14-9fa5b0e4a194"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is something that I find infuriating. Vegans are constantly told to shut up and not ''tell people what to eat'', but those same people will then go on to demonize dog eaters. If killing animals is okay, you have to be consistent. It's like me saying gt Killing black people is horrible, I don't care if you kill white people though It just makes no sense to me. Unless you can name the morally relevant difference between dogs and cows, I'll consider it a special pleading. this is assuming that you even abide by a moral system, if you don't then this post isn't for you . You can't have your cake and eat it too, you know. EDIT Due to my poor choice of responding I haven't really gotten satisfactory answers and a lot of you people are missing the point, not to be patronizing. I should've made a better text post.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If it's okay to kill cows, it's okay to kill dogs\n","id":"8e695461-16c7-4135-a047-1d80ab12be89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tibet independence<|ARGUMENT|>China's military presence in Tibet is a justified response to a serious separatist threat both inside of Tibet and from the Tibetan Government in Exile in India. This is a serious threat to the integrity and unity of China, and the government has the right to take heavy-handed action against it. If Tibetans renounced their rebellious separatism, the military presence would be unnecessary. Maybe this should be the focus for change in Tibet, instead of independence. If Tibetans became less inclined to seek independence, much of the conditions that cause them to seek independence - like a military presence - would be ended.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China's military is in Tibet due to the separatist threat there.\n","id":"05d8b676-f711-44a8-bf58-c1d73bdd60f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>People disagree on definitions all the time. It does not follow that the object being defined does not exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Disagreements about the definition of something is hardly evidence that something doesn't exist.\n","id":"eea4da6b-82ef-4b3c-89d3-0b856a2cbffd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's a thought that has often occurred to me. I understand that service staff are underpaid and depend on tips. But i am not sure that tipping as a portion of my bill is the right thing to do. If I buy 5 dishes for 10 bucks, I run through all the options, etc I think I should tip more than if I order a single dish for 40 with no extra service. Of course is a useful guide to tipping, but I do believe there could be a better way. Because if there is I think I might adopt it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe tipping is great, but I am unsure if my tip amount is to be determined by the amount of money I spend.\n","id":"5561a1e0-d36c-45db-8daa-42b0907b5f4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The online games platform Steam should perform quality control on games before publishing them<|ARGUMENT|>Quality control would likely create a generic set of criteria such as high graphic quality and type of game that has been proven popular in the past. This prevents niche and new-thinking game developers from creating games that could potentially not only be hits, but also revolutionize gaming.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Quality control will narrow what is an acceptable game in a way that will prevent diversity and innovation of games.\n","id":"352708bd-b831-4990-bd5c-bb99d29febd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>It is not just foster parents who have been accused of financially benefitting from the care of vulnerable children; In the US, a child in foster care is eligible for financial benefits under the Social Security Act, but they must rely on the State's child welfare agencies to make the claim for them. This has led to public agencies keeping these benefits for themselves unbeknownst to the children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some foster parents are accused of undertaking the role to benefit from the financial stipend that comes with it, rather than to care for the incoming child.\n","id":"0f1070f2-1e2f-4110-bc9a-b912fa1975f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>700 mile US Mexico border fence<|ARGUMENT|>In general, coyotes will always respond to difficulties with effective counter measures that enable them to do business, and shuttle illegal immigrants across.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Coyotes will respond to a border fence with innovative new ways to cross\n","id":"6e6f190a-83b1-4f2c-a8fd-f2ac2edb5d10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I was having this discussion with a few people about the freedom of speech and the freedom from discrimination. They thought private business owners should be allowed deny service to anyone we took gay's as an example for any reason, at anytime at any place though the government cannot. I would say the freedom not to be discriminated against overrides the desire other people would have to discriminate against someone. They said this would mean you take over the business and violate the private business owner of their freedom of speech and action. We did not agree on this for over an hour. And eventually someone brought up the question do you think churches should be forced to marry gays? My initial reaction was gt No, churches should not be forced, since they do not charge people and do not offer a service a church marriage is not a civil marriage, in essence it's just a meaningless piece of paper. In addition 'religion' or 'tradition' are just 'opinions with a pretty dress on' they do not deserve more rights merely for being addressed as being 'religious' or 'traditional' in nature. But come to think of it why should they not be obliged to do this? They may not charge, but the clergy members still get paid so it's not a complete charity and at the very least, they do offer a service. No matter how void that service is in secular terms, it does offer stuff. It's very similar to 'overpaying' for something merely because it's a specific 'brand' that brand label does not offer additional quality or something else, the additional price is void in all other possible added value besides in how we value it. Sure, you can go to another church, or set one up yourself, but you could do the same with getting coffee from coffee shops, but we don't allow discrimination there either. Yet at the same time, I do have this feeling that churches religious institutions are different in a vital point that would justify it but idk what it is. I fear that I may be missing either this vital point of distinction, or worse while I think religion and tradition are just opinions in a pretty dress, I do still hold some residual bias that makes me think churches religious institutions should be exempt from being 'forced' to marry gay people. So my main question here is do you see a flaw in my reasoning? If so what is it or are they. As well as, what is the correct position? I hope you can help me, and I hope this is the correct way to post here. Many many thanks in advance Edit FYI This might be good for the context of reading and understanding me and my question. I'm not someone who lives in the USA or was born there. This isn't question about a legal matter of fact, or a question in the context of the USA, just a universal question. I hope that clarifies it 3 Oh I'm also not a native English speaker but I am quite dyslectic, so please have patience with me P<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Should religious institutions be 'forced' to marry gay people?\n","id":"ce394ff3-a793-45e7-9eca-97d74de53cef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This post stems from a conversation a friend and I were having. We're both males, both in our late 20's, and both live in a relatively large city in the Northwest. I'm single, and he has been with the same woman for 2 years. I truly believe that there is absolutely nothing wrong with having platonic friends of the opposite sex. I would almost go as far as to say it's required to be ''socially healthy'' for lack of a better term , as long as none of those interactions crosses the pretty well defined and widely accepted ''line'' of cheating. Of course, boundaries should be set at the beginning of the relationship, within reason. His argument was that cheating can be defined as ''anything that makes your SO uncomfortable''. That includes having friends of the opposite sex, if your SO chooses to set that boundary. I take issue with that definition for the simple fact that it offers too much opportunity for unrealistic expectations, and control. He states that his SO's guy friends may make passes at her, but he is unaware of it happening yet. Not only is he assuming an unknown, he is also showing that he does not trust his SO to make the ''right'' choice if that situation should occur. If your SO says having friends of the opposite sex makes them uncomfortable because they don't know what could happen fear of cheating etc, that's unreasonable and shows immediate trust and insecurity issues. That's a tremendous red flag. They could be carrying baggage from a previous relationship, or just flat out don't trust anyone, in which case the relationship is doomed to fail anyway. Of course, this is assuming one has not done anything to breach that trust to begin with. In either any case, these are not reasonable demands to make in the context of an otherwise normal relationship, and those who make those demands should seek help in solving their trust insecurity issues well before entering a relationship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having friends of the opposite sex while in a relationship is completely normal and in fact, healthy. Those who are uncomfortable with it have no business being in a relationship. !\n","id":"56f59aab-26b1-443e-8353-ff2961a167d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should China cease attempts to infringe on the 'one country, two systems' policy in Hong Kong?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2018 the number of mainland Chinese migrants coming to Hong Kong dropped by almost 15,000 as compared to 2017.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The levels of migration between mainland China and Hong Kong have been declining over the years.\n","id":"4f40946b-f19f-4d5c-96b2-fb98e7f7b53e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The ACLU and Charlottesville: Should the ACLU Defend White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>In November 2013 a hyper-racist subreddit called \"GreatApes\" was formed where users posted epithet-strewn links to \"news\" stories of dubious origin that riffed on long established stereotypes about the black community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit is known for having a chain of sub-pages called 'The Chimpire' which is notorious for being racist.\n","id":"e353e018-307c-4c39-b497-0e82ad298e1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>A national anthem is ultimately just a song. Forcing patriotic sentiment onto a person completely disregards their rights to have their own beliefs, especially when they are protesting a specific cause.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An expression of patriotism loses meaning when it becomes obligatory.\n","id":"afcc0586-03c4-4711-bba6-25d095b13808"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title pretty much says it. I think the P5 deal with Iran is good. I really do not get people like Cotton saying this deal is worse than they ever could have imagined. or Netanyahu saying suddenly I might add that the deal needs to include a statement from Iran that Israel has the right to exist. The Iranian people are never going to accept a deal that includes that and the Iranian government is not going to shut down their entire nuclear energy program and really why should they have to? I cynically assume that most if not all American Israeli and even Iranian politicians that disapprove of the deal want to maintain an evil enemy as a scapegoat to pursue other interests and do not actually disapprove of the deal itself. So I would love to hear from people who legitimately disapprove of this deal to tell me why they do. EDIT and yes I know the deal is not completely done, this is just a framework.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Iran Nuclear Deal is Good and is the Best Way to Prevent Iran From Obtaining the Bomb\n","id":"163b4aed-e6dd-4508-88bc-ac9f87429466"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Assassination of a Dictator<|ARGUMENT|>I assume that we would have to abandon any ethical viewpoints on this. In other words, moral equivalence would not be considered. Foreign nations would not be allowed to assassinate the president of the USA because of the rather more evident threat that he poses to national and international security.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Chavez should be assassinated, what about President Bush an international threat\n","id":"0531ee90-359c-4690-9997-3939436d8ae6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First time posting My general view is that the term of biological sex is ambiguous. When people refer to biological sex they could be referring to either chromosomal, anatomical or gonadal sex. In my opinion it makes more sense for there to be an emphasis to simply refer to these forms of sex separately. For instance, in the past week I've seen a couple of posts about biological sex , so just based off first glance, people are more likely to use biological sex rather than chromosomal sex. I know I am basing this off of anecdotes and personal experience but this is not the part of my view that I necessarily came to get changed. I mainly want someone to tell me why a terms such as gonadal sex and chromosomal sex shouldn't be used over biological sex and b why aren't they more prevalent to begin with. Onto the second part of my . I feel as if the term gender is also an unnecessary and misunderstood term I know it has a clear definition but it is often misunderstood . In my opinion, for the sake of discussion and debate, we should refrain from using gender and we should use terms such as behavioral sex, genital anatomical sex , and so forth. The emphasis should be on identifying that sex can be viewed at different levels, rather than introducing the new term of gender which is often misunderstood along with gender identity, and gender expression . I feel as if this also allows for a more nuanced conversation about sex. I do acknowledge however that gender is important in understanding the effect of culture i.e. gender roles , but gender should not be used to when talking about individuals i.e. that person's gender is So please change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Biological sex is a misleading and ambiguous term. Instead sex should be defined along several dimensions which consequently means we should abandon terms such as gender or gender identity\n","id":"97d740d6-e686-4f2d-95d1-c10a61efbd94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>In the 2009 EU Elections, the 2014 EU Elections, and the 2015 General Elections YouGov predicted UKIP lower or the lowest compared to other pollsters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Other polling sources regularly predicted UKIP higher than YouGov did.\n","id":"545aa880-9d88-47f8-9bd1-7adf2cb807d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Between 1995 and 2014, 3,264 Americans died to terrorism attacks in the US according to The University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database it's a PDF so just go to this Google search and click on the first link . This means that on average 163 Americans died each year on American soil from terror attacks, or about or about .05 deaths from terror per 100,000 people. This makes terrorism less deadly than car accidents 10.9 deaths 100,000 people suicides 13.3 deaths 100,000 and numerous other causes of death. Since it is so unlikely to affect harm the average American, it is therefore very irrational for the average American to be cocerned about terrorism. Edit I'm basically don't looking at comments now, but thanks replies. There were a lot of good points brought up, but nothing could quite convince me that I was wrong. Have a great day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is largely irrational for most Americans to be concerned about terrorism\n","id":"28a09ac8-1605-43b2-9f43-e6853d15dc11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I say Americans because I know the release window for some media products is ridiculous in other countries. If the corporation hasn't even made it available in your country, then I think you may as well pirate it. It's not legal but I wouldn't call you immoral for doing so. Americans however have no excuse. I think we generally have access to all the media we could ever want, and most of it is set at a reasonable price. No matter what device we use or where we are in the country or whether we prefer physical or digital media, we have options. Therefore, Americans who pirate are just out to get something for free that they ought to have paid for. Here's a few examples of the options we have Television you can get a cable subscription for lt 50 a month which gets you access to nearly every network, and for a few extra bucks you get HBO and other premium content. If you don't need all the channels, many networks now will put up free episodes on their websites or on Hulu a week after their original air date, asking only that you watch a few ads. If you hate ads or you want content that isn't free online, you can purchase episodes for 1.99 2.99 on iTunes and similar services, you can watch on Netflix either on instant watch 8 month or by renting discs same price . Finally, you can buy full seasons on DVD, and once some time passes you can order used versions of these for cheap from Amazon or you can see if your library has them, for free. In the rare event that a show isn't available through any of these channels, then other people must be having trouble watching it, too. Just don't watch it and either the show will fail, or the corporation will be incentivized to make it easier to watch. I don't see a reason to pirate a TV show, ever. Music getting cheap music is incredibly easy these days. Most bands artists will have a website or a youtube channel or a bandcamp.com page nowadays and will let you browse their catalogs for free. Pandora is another free method of music discovery that many people find effective. If you're like me, you won't like all that much music, and you'll be able to afford to buy the few albums singles that you enjoy in a given year. Albums are about 10 a pop and singles .75 1.29. If you love a lot of music, then it's worth your money to get a 10 month Spotify or Rhapsody subscription, which allow you to download as much music as you want, and from what I've seen their catalogs are decently extensive. Failing all that, you can buy a used CD from amazon I've gotten many an album for lt 5 shipped this way. Record stores, although they're dwindling in number, are another good way to get cheap discs. Once again, I'm not seeing any legitimate reason of any American to pirate music when they have all these options. I'll skip doing a paragraph on movies since the arguments are so similar to those for TV, and I'll do ebooks instead Amazon lets you read the first chapter of any book, similar to how most people would try out a book in a bookstore before deciding to purchase. Even without this, I think that moreso than other media, people are okay with choosing books based on what kind of press and reviews they're getting. Failing this, you can get a Prim subscription and get access to their Kindle library, the details on which I'm fuzzy but my impression is you can rent books for free as long as you want to keep them. Finally, there have been a few startups for book subscription services this year that give you unlimited downloads for about 9 a month, however I've heard their selection is still limited. If none of thee options work for you, you could still just go to a real library and get whatever book you want free from there, or by a used book online or in a bookstore for a low price. Despite all the options people have for consuming media, for some reason there's still a culture on reddit of people complaining that they have no fair way to get their content, which I find ridiculous. I've pirated media a few times, and each time it had nothing to do with unfair prices or unavailability and everything to do with me wanting something for free that I know, in a fair world, I should pay something to experience, whether it be money or my attention to advertisements. And I think that's the only reason the vast majority of Americans pirate, too. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that Americans have no good reason to pirate any media,\n","id":"fd072cfa-8e6c-4371-bc89-b8a475c90ccf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>United States mass shooting extensiveness and underlying causes<|ARGUMENT|>Adults who endured childhood trauma have a higher chance of developing post-traumatic stress disorder when exposed to new trauma, and show higher rates of anxiety, depression, substance use, and suicide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Early childhood trauma is a major contributing factor for mass shootings in the United States.\n","id":"c16a5fdd-1b0b-4455-9d88-39cc70b29ec1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would online education be best in virtual reality VR?<|ARGUMENT|>Learning is an incredibly complex process and, at least in part, requires a teacher to be able to respond to a learners non-verbal cues. VR cannot do that, or at least not to the same level as teachers can.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"VR should not be a complete substitute for human interaction.\n","id":"f696cc78-2a4d-4ecc-a0d3-94f96efad758"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Language as it stands is a tool of communication between members of the human race, to trade ideas, thoughts, messages etc. AS per the status quo, the multitude of languages that exist only serve as a barrier to these valuable ideas being traded fluently and quickly between partakers of different languages. With a universal language, these would no doubt bring a multitude of benefits to society as a whole Reduce barriers of trade and allow for greater workforce mobility. As it stands, employers in general hire the employee who is most suited for the job, and language can serve as a great barrier to this ability. With a universal language, the pool of suitable candidates widens, meaning that as a result more suited people are hired, and thus increasing workforce productivity Improve day to day communications With increasing globalism and the general rise of immigration, countries have more and more people who speak different languages and thus might feel singled out or have difficulty communicating with peers or doing day to day actions like ordering meals or shopping for commodities. With a universal language these hassles would be greatly lessened <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe we should have a universal language\n","id":"a12deced-cc77-40a9-bc05-9e7eb931ef2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in Wisconsin, where it can get very cold during the winter. It can also get very hot in the summer. In fact, the highest heat index ever recorded in the US was in Appleton, Wisconsin. The lowest temperature I've experienced with wind chill is around 40. Despite dealing with colder weather than most people have to deal with, I think cold climates are worse to live in. Cold weather in the winter dries out your skin. Sure, lotion helps, but it's still an annoyance to put up with. Cold weather is mostly caused by less direct sunlight, which means in cold places, people are exposed to less sunlight. Exposure to low amounts of sunlight can lead to season affective disorder. According to Wikipedia, the rate of Seasonal Affective Disorder is 9.9 in Alaska, and 9.9 in Finland. In Florida, it's less than 2 . Cold weather often means snow frequently happens, and for those who don't participate in snow related activities, snow is nothing but a nuisance. It needs to be shoveled and removed in order to commute. Snow also makes the sun's reflection super bright and can be bothersome to people when looking outside. Snow also increases the risk of traffic accidents. Many outdoor activities are difficult or impossible in the winter when there's snow on the ground. Golf, nope. Basketball, maybe if you wear a jacket and shovel a court. But it's hassle. Baseball, no way in hell. There's a reason why so many indoor sports are primarily in the winter. Winter means most of the trees lose their leaves and plants die or lose their color. This causes nature to look very dull. Gray, brown, and white are the only colors that seem to exist outside in the winter. At times during cold weather, one needs to put on a ton of layers just to be comfortable outside. Meanwhile in hot weather, one can wear shorts and a t shirt and usually be comfortable. Roads and sidewalks can have black ice, which is very dangerous. I will admit there are some negatives that come with hot weather, but I don't believe they are as significant as the annoyances that occur in places with cold weather.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that for most people, living in a warm climate is better than living in a cold climate\n","id":"31c0ae70-8f64-4a2f-8f03-6588eaa90525"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>The social life of children is affected by their brand-relationship Children who cannot afford consumer goods such as new iPhones or fashionable clothes may be socially stigmatised by the children who can.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wealth can ensure that children have access to goods and activities which can make their lives better.\n","id":"a050d513-f499-4726-b0e2-ea65c8b8120c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>George Washington said \"However political parties may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things.by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The founding fathers of the United States were strongly opposed to political parties.\n","id":"9d26c3a5-7f2f-4cf1-a53e-ee7c715d681d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hoping this doesn't get deleted again. This isn't a pro trump anti trump . This is about my internal battle regarding the act of voting in general, sparked up as a result of the election and subsequent presidency thereafter. Ever since my early 20's I stopped believing in government completely. I got tired of being lied to and morals justice were obviously gone. This is a conclusion I made BEFORE Trump, mind you. With Gerrymandering, corporate lobbying, and just plain fuckery run rampant in politics, it makes voting for any candidate a waste of time. No matter who you elect, you aren't their priority and you never were. My vote truly doesn't matter. So the only form of protest I could think of was to just not participate. Don't let myself get involved in a system of party gt country, don't perpetuate a problem and make it worse. I've been tempted to vote. I almost voted in 2008 for Obama and was glad that I didn't once things like NDAA were signed by him a week after saying he wouldn't. This re affirmed that the President is not in charge to me, furthering my belief that my vote doesn't matter because the string pullers behind the scenes will get done what they want done no matter who is behind the big red button. Now I feel I'm at a point where I've done what things I can for my fellow man by trying to spread my opinions and converse with people of contrasting views to help change minds in that way and evolve my own views as a result of healthy discourse , but I think most of us who set out on that endeavor quickly realize how much of a waste it truly is 99 of the time when it comes to Trump Supporters. It still deeply depresses me how many people I've looked up to and respected showed their true, racist, ignorant, selfish colors once the MAGA craze went rampant. Even my own father almost turned into a completely different person post election. I've learned that it's like a deep seated religion. Once it's set in there, there's almost no changing it. Their minds will always find a way to re affirm their beliefs whether it be by completely twisting their perceived reality or just turning off to it entirely when it seems beneficial. So now I'm feeling like I'm left to challenging my own limits in order to do SOMETHING that I feel will matter and help contribute to make things better. I feel like all I can do is vote, but my own deep seated feelings are telling me that I'm wasting my time and that our dictator will stay our dictator with our GOP being complicit to anything that furthers their own agenda despite the majority of the nation rising up in protest and then I'll feel used, fooled by, and taken advantage of by the system that I've grown to loathe and have never officially been a part of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Torn between my commitment to my protesting of our system by not voting and the passion that's erupted in me post-Trump-Inauguration\n","id":"dea1f9d0-57df-4be7-ae78-5e9884cc1054"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Cat owners that claim their cat is an outside cat bothers me. It seems like the actions of an irresponsible pet owner. They let their cats out to wander the streets, shitting in other people's yards, attacking other pets, getting into garbage, and unfortunately sometimes getting run over. If this was a dog it would be immediately met with animal control or police. But cats and their owners get away with it. I would understand if the cat could stay within a backyard like a dog does, but they don't. These seem like the actions of an ignorant and neglectful person and pet owner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cat owners who let their cats outside unsupervised are bad pet owners.\n","id":"c706965f-bf96-48a0-8f73-3d561b2b054a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Correct Title  State funded Religious schools should not exist Edit I'm located in the UK Many of us agree religion is the cause of major problems today. Segregation from others is not the way to solve this. What has religion got to do with education? Why should children have to pray and take part in holly communion if they attend a Catholic school at the expense of tax payers? I'm looking to send my son to the best school, just by chance in my area its a catholic school. Why should he miss out on a better education because I simply refuse to let him take part in practicing religion until hes of age to decide for himself? Should all schools not treat all children equal?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stated funded Religious schools should not exist\n","id":"5ce98478-7483-4082-bc74-0b53ca3210b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title is pretty self explanatory, but basically I get annoyed when car guys deride teens and young adults who throw large mufflers and ridiculous spoilers on crappy cars. The original hot rodders were teens and young adults who took whatever Model T's, Model A's, Buicks, etc they could afford and did what they could to drop in larger engines, cut weight, and improve aerodynamics. Many of these boys men learned by experience, and taught themselves through trial and error. Their cars were loud in volume and appearance. Roofs were chopped or removed completely along with fenders and hoods, cadillac engines were dropped into small coupes, or engines were bored out and tuned, and often larger crankshafts installed. Hot Rodders sought out larger wheels and tires for improved traction and handling. Some cars had distinctive paint jobs the quintessential flames nothing to aid performance and some were painted by hand with a brush. The movement began to fade when high performance muscle cars could be bought that were faster stock than hot rods could be built. Today, young men will find an older car the stereotype being a honda civic , and do the same things they can to personalize and speed up their cars through modifying intakes headers exhaust, tuning the engine, lowering the suspension, and adding larger wheels and tires. Some add cosmetic touches to emulate high performance machines, such as spoilers, decals, hood scoops, etc Basically, I feel that much derision is thrown from other gearheads and car guys at tuners and ricers , for driving cheap, ridiculous looking cars that may or may not be faster than their stock versions they're doing what they can with what they have. Ironically, the same guys who mock someone in a tuned civic will drool at the sight of a Model A hot rod. They don't realize that the two cars share the same spirit. Personally, I remember what its like to be near broke at 16 but want a personalized car that looks, sounds and goes fast. I feel that many auto enthusiasts don't realize that Ricers are modern day hot rodders, and the guys that mock them are no better than the old geezers who made hot rod a derogatory term in the 2 3 4 50's. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The modern day \"tuner\" and in the same vein \"Ricer\" movements harken to the original spirit of American Hot-rodding in that it's about taking normal cars and making them faster, louder and more flamboyant in whatever ways they can afford.\n","id":"534a727a-ac29-4f1a-89ae-ef830545491d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>While we should aim to reduce and eventually eliminate the suffering of animals, vegetarianism is a tacit demand for the extinction of all domesticated animals used for food. If an animal living in the wild were given the choice of being guaranteed food, shelter, and procreation knowing that their eventual demise would be painless and provide their ancestors a similar lifestyle, they would likely agree to live under those conditions rather than suffer in the wild.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Keeping animals for slaughtering is a lot more humane then letting them die through natural ways such as predation, starvation or disease.\n","id":"ea51992a-3870-43a4-867c-ef5ea1fa3b04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a federal agency, the FBI should stay as neutral as possible and try not to influence the results of an election. By reopening the investigation, the FBI has hurt Hillary's campaign more than it should have considering that it led to nothing. I understand how the FBI seeks justice but it should have remain silent on the matter considering how close we were to the election and that they had the opportunity to investigate on the matter already. It was a useless scandal that came at a very opportunistic moment and that made more wrong than good in the election.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the FBI, as a federal agency, should have abstained from reopening Clinton's emails case in such a short delay before the elections.\n","id":"74db58cd-9759-45a9-88c0-f4d9e69905da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Capitalism the most Moral System?<|ARGUMENT|>Capitalism in its most basic form the use of a common mean of value to make a trade is morally neutral, because it's neither good nor bad.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no evidence that any economic system is more moral than any other.\n","id":"708f3d60-258a-492d-881d-27aab9ce45a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think groups that exclude others based on skin color or gender are supremacy groups regardless of their good intentions. The reason I believe this is because skin color and gender are things that people can't control. I can't control the fact that I identify as a man and I don't believe someone who is Trans can, either. I can't control the fact that I'm white, just as a black person can't control the fact that they are black. And because I can't control these things, I'm automatically excluded from certain groups, many of which could in a very technical sense, benefit me if I wanted to join them. And because I'm excluded from these beneficial groups, it can only be deemed supremacist because it is establishing dominance over a service or thing that could benefit others who are excluded based on things they have zero control over. Here's a hypothetical that might explain my position better. Let's say I'm a filmmaker who wants to start a group in my local area and I decide to form this club where any filmmaker can join as long as they have a proven track record to show that they are professionally active filmmakers. This, to me, wouldn't be considered a supremacist group because even though they are excluding others, they're not excluding them based on factors they can't control. They still have the opportunity to fulfill the criteria that has been set out. No one is stopping them from becoming active filmmakers. If they want to right now they can go out and make films and learn the trade and build their skills so that they can eventually be good enough to join this club. Now, lets say I make that same club, but this time I make it only for white people. Now, there is a barrier set that is impossible for others to climb over. They could be the best filmmakers in the World and still never be allowed to join and because that club provides value to those who are members, it's excluding people from a benefit and that exclusion is allowing the members of the club to dominate over that benefit. People of Reddit. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Think Groups That Exclude Based on Skin Color or Gender are Supremacy Groups\n","id":"2c56208f-eeff-4e42-b280-f93e26fef324"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gay marriage, Debate on Same Sex Marriage<|ARGUMENT|>It has demonstrated to be successful in many countries around the world and in states in the US. The results are no longer unclear. Gay marriage is harmless, and in fact beneficial.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gay marriage is no social experiment; it's tried and tested\n","id":"6b615669-373d-40cf-9487-883f0d3c530d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the environment being sacrificed for the economy?<|ARGUMENT|>To make up for the fact that it will be damaging the environment through its Heathrow expansion, the British government is considering the possibility of spending billions of pounds on new high speed railways to and from Heathrow and a new high speed rail link between London and Northern England. Large parts of Britain's rail network would be electrified so quieter and cleaner trains could be used. So, in order to justify its harm to the environment through Heathrow Airport, the government will improve the environment in other ways, thus confirming that it has not sacrificed the environment for the economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Government plans to build new, environmentally-friendly rail links.\n","id":"90974253-09fd-4c7e-ad9d-3c0e6619d42d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the involvement of pressure groups in US politics beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>The Asian Pacific American Advocates OCA is a pressure group that seeks to advance the social, political, and economic well-being of Asian Pacific Americans in the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pressure groups advocate for minority group's interests that would otherwise struggle to be heard on their own.\n","id":"7b4f4658-8b27-4208-9d0d-322b6b81ceb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people seem to hate child beauty pageants, and a lot of that arose when Little Miss Honey BooBoo came into action. I think that these beauty pageants are not only a really good contributor in helping to build mother daughter or father daughter relationships, but are also good at giving children the opportunity to make a bunch of new friends. Additionally, I think that child beauty pageants are very much comparable to, for example, young boys of the same age doing little league baseball and whatnot. , Reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see the harm in child beauty pageants, and actually see them as a healthy experience for young girls\n","id":"ed127f57-255d-45d9-bfaa-91b339fb6b91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The furthering of technology and AI can eventually end in a scenario where ill programed machines such as bullet speed tiny drones such as in Black Mirror and killer robots will be a common threat by anyone who has the intent to so. Thinking about the future of technology, I wonder if it's ultimately a good thing as these new dangers would emerge. The alternative being going back to basics as a society and people living more naturally with the land. I can picture having an EMP pulse machine at bay to kill the electronics and a Mad Max post apocalyptic scenario if the balance of the future of technology goes in the wrong direction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The furthering of technology and AI will eventually end in a common scenario where ill-programmed killing machines are a common threat\n","id":"8a4016a0-4abf-4124-a847-f8d572165486"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we have a single global language?<|ARGUMENT|>Old languages like mandarin are not even efficient enough to fit on a keyboard and are often miss translated on computers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We could take advantage of this occasion to create a better language.\n","id":"561ca13e-33b8-4d90-b245-5f9c5017d1d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Morality only applies to humans. Morality functions to allow people to live together and cooperate in social groups. Morality is an irrelevant concept in the context of the natural world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Morality is subjective, so eating meat is not necessarily immoral.\n","id":"e00b54f7-1c8e-4081-aeb8-9493efe3a4eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI is a way of reevaluating the economic value of the work women have primarily handled in the past, while also promoting the economic independence of women. UBIs are an \u201cEmancipation Fee\u201d paid to promote women\u2019s liberation Katada, p. 3<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stay-at-home moms would finally be properly compensated for the emotional and physical labor they provide for their families.\n","id":"5b8a2087-62fc-4799-834a-acb3c9c96586"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the Exodus Really Happen?<|ARGUMENT|>Allowing this information to live on, may have put the Pharaoh and his throne in jeopardy of defeat. Not recording this information is thus a possibility.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A large amount of people exiting under the Pharoah's reign make him appear weak, not in control of those under his ruling.\n","id":"622fb6f5-10eb-499d-83e8-b4c0e8342f0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Unlike humans, who have to resort to violence at times in order to achieve a greater good, God as an omnipotent and omniscient being, is able to realize any greater good without sacrifice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An omnipotent being who tolerates suffering and harm to achieve a greater good cannot be inherently good.\n","id":"67d3f8bb-b08f-4418-ab15-378bd1630de9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel there is a great misunderstanding of what consists of the ideal marriage relationship. I feel that if the whole world followed the teachings on marriage and sex, the worls would be a better place. Most view it as a woman suppressing, backwards way of thinking, but I submit that the teachings are actually harder on the men than they are on the women. There is a directive for men love their wives as Jesus loved the church, which is a directive for men to lay down their lives for their wives. Love is defined as Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs Ladies, if your guy was like this, how much easier would he be to live with? What if he made an attempt to cherish you every day? There is a a guideline for wives to submit to their husbands. I think alot of folks interpret this that the wives have obey their husbands, but I see it as Wives don't be a shrew and respect your husbands and their decisions. In regards to sex it says A man should fulfill his duty as a husband, and a woman should fulfill her duty as a wife, and each should satisfy the other's needs. A wife is not the master of her own body, but her husband is in the same way a husband is not the master of his own body, but his wife is. Do not deny yourselves to each other, unless you first agree to do so Say buh bye to Dead Bedrooms, because you are doing the work to make sure that each other is sexually satisfied. How many divorces, murders, etc, happen because of cheating spouses and such. How many emotional powder kegs have been lit due to unfaithfulness to a spouse? It also says that men should not be dicks to their kids Fathers do not exasperate your children I'm not sure if there is an explicit no sex before marriage policy, but all references of getting married refer to virgins. I believe this is the best policy. What if there were no exes, no jealousy, no sticking your dick where it didn't belong. We would have greatly reduced incidents of rape, incest, child molestation, STDs, etc. Yes, I realize that it will never happen , just like Mr. Lennon can Imagine that the world lives inharmony, but if this is the ideal, of what we strive for, how much better would the world be? Alot, I think. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the whole world should follow the Christian view of marriage and relationships.\n","id":"867be71b-14c2-44a9-a58d-3ee9c009dc5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is enlightened despotism superior to democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>The political career of a benevolent despot is not hindered by corporate interest, allowing them to focus more on the well-being of their people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An enlightened despot is independent from the negative influences that plague decision-making in democracies.\n","id":"ec0ca887-1bf3-4217-97f0-35ede672b882"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With many serious charges, plea agreements, and guilty pleas already coming from the Special Counsel's investigation, it's possible that charges may be recommended against President Trump. Ultimately, what those charges amount to will be governed by a political process rather than a judicial one. In the US, the House of Representatives can impeach the President by majority vote. That act formally charges the President with a crime, like obstruction of justice. The Senate can then convict the President by a two thirds majority vote and remove him from office. To Impeach 218 House votes To Remove 67 Senate votes Currently, Democrats control 192 seats in the House and 47 Senate seats with 2 more Senators who caucus with them . Political analysts on both sides agree the Democrats might win the House majority in November, opening the door to impeachment. But only 8 Republican Senators are up for re election in 2018. So even if the Democrats win every Senate race, they will only hold 55 seats. Plus the two Independents, that would leave them 10 Senate votes short. I'm not convinced there will be 10 Republican Senators willing to remove Trump for three reasons. While tepid at first, the GOP has largely embraced Trump. He's ultimately the guy who has to sign the laws they want to pass, so it isn't surprising. One year into his term and after all the extraordinarily bad news coming from the investigations, and now only a few retiring Republicans in the Senate like Trey Gowdy are willing to criticize him publicly. Voting to remove your own party's president is a much more serious commitment than public criticism, and the Senate GOP is barely willing to go that far anymore. Historical precedent shows that after evidence of Nixon's interference with the Watergate investigation came to light via the tapes , his Senate support quickly dried up to the point that only 15 GOP Senators were willing to protect him from removal if he was formally impeached which was a certainty by that point . Nixon had been closely monitoring how many votes he could count on, and it had included 40 Senators only a week before. That's why he ultimately resigned before being impeached. He knew it was over. President Trump's firing of FBI Director Comey for refusing to end the investigation a year ago is an egregious and clearcut case of similar interference and despite a taped confession appearing on Lester Holt almost immediately after, the firing has drawn no dramatic response from Senate Republicans. The rule of law doesn't mean what it used to. The modern Senate is less like the one that voted on Clinton's impeachment in that it tends to vote along strict party lines on all major issues, and a Senate conviction for impeachment fits the bill. Surprises like McCain, Collins, and Murkowski voting with Democrats to protect Obamacare here and there are rare. While some GOP Senators voted against removing Clinton after his impeachment during the 1990s, that situation was very different in political terms. Voting not to remove the other party's President is a much softer political betrayal than voting to remove your own party's President. Zero Democratic Senators voted to remove Clinton despite a strong legal case against him. Similar forces of party loyalty will work in Trump's favor. So based on his current level of Senate support after all that the press has reported so far, I don't believe more than six GOP Senators would vote to remove President Trump if the House impeached him with significantly more damning evidence. In a best case scenario for Democrats in November, that won't be enough to remove Trump. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"President Trump will not be removed from office during this term.\n","id":"38454d72-5169-4438-b6a7-9d6a1f90dace"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Modern technology is a disadvantage to society.<|ARGUMENT|>microscopic objects like viruses, and atoms are only visible with modern technology such as an electron scanning microscope.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without technological development, much of the world that is unseen to our senses is inaccessible.\n","id":"f826a30c-c5e7-4b13-a62d-5d9fb07a027c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>One estimate for the likelihood of meeting only 48 of the 108 Messianic prophecies Jesus fulfilled places it at 1 in 10^157 which is much larger than the total number of Jews, or even humans, ever born.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is extraordinarily unlikely that any single person, let alone one who claimed to be the Messiah and is still believed to be to this day, would fulfill all of these prophecies by pure chance.\n","id":"4378c1dc-9c3a-4544-967f-12a61c149dff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should Self-Driving Cars Kill?<|ARGUMENT|>In particular cyclists and pedestrians are very vulnerable in car accidents. If self-driving cars disregard their safety it will likely lead to more serious injuries being inflicted upon them in order to prevent only small harms to the passengers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If self-driving cars are extremely averse to harming others it will make roads much safer for third parties.\n","id":"8727c5a9-923b-4b71-aedd-128c389adb0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fashion can never be feminist<|ARGUMENT|>Indian photographer Raj Shetye published an image in a fashion spread called The Wrong Turn, which depicted an Indian woman fending off groups of men on a bus, causing immediate outrage on social media from women\u2019s rights activists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Fashion industry has a long history of advertisers alluding to sexual violence against women for commercial advertising.\n","id":"0dbcca2e-00df-49a7-b358-3460d8d2791b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Mind you, I'm not an atheist, but I'm thinking that God is, if he exists, way bigger than any religion. What makes me very sad is that most people I know fall for organised religion, unfortunately, even in this day and age of supposedly unlimited access to scientifically proven information. But the most saddening fact is that these same people are devoted entirely to this and they refuse to even consider that the views espoused by organised religion could be possibly flawed, or even outright false. To every probing question, they respond with blind faith. The Ancient Greeks believed that the rising and setting of the Sun every day was the journey of the god Helios with his four horse chariot. They were proven wrong about a thousand years later. Same with the Norse the thunder in a storm was Thor fighting the giants to protect the people. These beliefs were also proven nonsensical by science. Therefore, would I be wrong if I argued that the whole shebang with Jesus Christ in Christianity, Allah and Mohammed in Islam or Buddha in Buddhism, and in short, every religion ever constructed, both in the past and in the future, is nothing more than a fairytale, just like all the other myths and religions of years past? One interesting theory I have stumbled upon is that religions are fueled by the fear of the unknown. Would this also mean that religions are mere human constructs, made just to alleviate the fear some people have for what they don't know? This would have as a consequence that in a modern world like ours, there is no place for religion, other than pacifying the fears of some weak willed people. This is my first post here, so here's hoping to an interesting conversation EDIT Fixed a blunder about Thor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is merely a feel-good fairytale for scared grown-ups.\n","id":"0c26b507-8356-4b56-b64b-45535b43616d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the past two or three years, I've been in a few religious atheist arguments and I end every one of them by saying there is no proof for anything regarding this topic. For me, arguing about religion and whether or not God exists is a huge waste of time. A Christian Jew Muslim BELIEVES in God. An atheist agnostic BELIEVES there isn't a God. Nobody KNOWS anything concrete. So what is the point of arguing and reading all these books about atheism? Why don't people just stick to their own beliefs and stop persuading others to become religious or atheist? Of all the people I've talked to on this topic, 100 of them stuck to their primary beliefs. Nobody said Oh, this guy has a point. Now I'm an atheist. EDIT The answers were great, I got just what I was looking for. Thank you people I just wanted to add that I put some things the wrong way. Atheists agnostics have a disbelief in God, yes. And about the last sentence, I didn't mean that people have never converted after a debate. People, whom I've talked to at least, have never converted ON THE SPOT. Big difference. Research, research, research. That is the key.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Arguing about religion is a huge waste of time.\n","id":"478ffd04-5fa4-43c4-98b4-d8f8426a6b42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Impeaching Trump would only fuel the conspiratorial mindset of his base, making the already divisive presidency far more symbolic, and dangerous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"After the division of the 2016 election America does not need another divisive political drama.\n","id":"5602cdc0-4d9e-4fba-b16b-10cd02f548f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Link for context It seems that the general consensus is that this is a poor approach to open a dialogue about a serious health issue facing our nation. I feel it is a fantastic way to raise awareness about childhood obesity, feel that the note is directed at parents, is not singling children out next to their friends it is not like the other kids are reading it , and overall, I feel that this woman is right. Disclaimer I must say that I am in good shape and I have never had weight issues. I owe that luxury mostly to my parents view on diet no sugary snacks were in the house, I was not told to clean my plate, but to eat until I was comfortable, and to drink water exceptions were skim milk and no sugar added juices with meals and snacks. I also want to point out that I believe obesity is a real health problem and understand that there is much more to weight issues than laziness and bad eating habits. With that said, I believe that, as with most of society\u2019s issues, education is the best approach and the earlier the better. We owe it to the children of our communities to explain to them why they are wrong, risks involved with things that are uncomfortable to talk about, and to give them as much ammo possible to succeed in life. Some points I feel are valid, but aren\u2019t changing my view, yet This could single out kids that may not actually have weight issues who can honestly tell if a kid is healthy because of their appearance People aren\u2019t sensitive to the mental emotional issues involved in eating disorders of unhealthy weight and this could only add fuel to the fire It is only one day out of the year however, what a better time to raise awareness? Apples would be a better way however this sends no clear message So Reddit, knowing I am not on a fat hating crusade,  and please explain to me why this is so horrible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I find this to be a positive approach for a serious issue facing American youth.\n","id":"9ae97315-c1c2-4013-bbd1-7783c3edeba4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>It is dishonest to use terminator seeds as an argument against genetically modified crops since they are unlikely to be further developed or commercialized.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Opposition from the public, NGO's and many governments have resulted in terminator seeds de facto having been banned\n","id":"6f032aea-e252-4ee7-b552-2d04e05868c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>We would not place the scrawls of an infant alongside the work of Van Gogh because one is nonsense and the other is deeply considered and intricate, the work of a true artist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human art is a form of expression and is created with intent. There is no evidence of intent in the 'art' of animals.\n","id":"9dd84fbf-19f1-44f9-a4a4-e8c30f5005d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For clarity I'm not talking about putting a pet down out of compassion due to quality of life issues. I'm talking about things that can be healed for a price the owner can afford. This is a sentiment I've run into in a variety of places from Penn and Teller on Bullshit mocking people who donate to animal centric charities where there are people centric charities in need to a coworker bragging about how he saved money by buying a brand new rabbit for his daughter for only 25 instead of paying 55 to get antibiotics for the old one. But it rather came to a a head a few years ago when a very christian coworker heard that my cat had died on the operating table and was appalled at the bill I'd run up 3,000 trying to save him. Ignoring the rather selfish advocacy that the money should have been tithed to her church, the core point was that she would not have spent that much to save a mere house cat even if the surgery had been guaranteed to work . Just get another one. The pound is full of cats. They are giving them away. Why would I spend 3,000 on a cat when there are people in need? This is baffling to me. It isn't cats vs people. It is my cat and my obligations. I chose him. I took him home and committed myself to his care. I made a promise. I took responsibility for him. I made a place for him in my heart. If I didn't want a cat and had had him foisted on me I probably would have balked at the bill. If I couldn't afford it then I'd have had no choice but to ease his passing as that would be all I could do. But balancing a vacation vs my pets life is a no brainer. Japan will still be there next year. And I can get another cat, but I can't replace him. He was a unique individual. One of a kind. Then she blew my mind. She recounted a story of an injured dog she'd owned that she'd put down because the vet bill was unacceptably high 500 and she could afford it but couldn't justify the expense since he was only a dog I'd figured she just didn't get animals at all as other than something to eat. But she keeps pets for herself not her kids and enjoys having them around how can she also view them as interchangeable commodities? It seems sociopathic. My quandary is that since I started looking for it I've determined that her view is fairly common. At least one person has subscribed to this philosophy in every office I've ever worked in. I find it hard to assert that that large a fraction of the population is mentally ill . My disgust for their view means I don't become friends with them and starting a conversation with a not friend with, Explain to me how you're not a sociopath is poor office etiquette. So I'm looking for another explanation online. How can you value animal companionship without valuing the animal companion?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think there is something fundamentally wrong with people who can afford a vets bill for treating an injured or temporarily sick pet, but elect not to in order to save money even though they can afford it. -\n","id":"4a3bf49a-b2e5-45da-879e-eb741ee62b91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously tons of people cope fine with being single I'm single myself currently after a semi serious relationship , but I honestly don't think anyone is capable of being truly happy without a significant other to share and confide in, beyond the level of family and friends. EDIT Larseth has convinced me to change my view to ' I don't think I personally could be truly happy if I was single without love . While I can't speak for everyone's personal experiences, I can confidently state that in my personal experience, this is true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think you can ever truly be happy single.\n","id":"5e80644f-9799-46a6-9a33-6aac0e82f784"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>NOTE Sorry if the title is ambiguous, I'm talking about for Politics. Your president, your prime minister. That kind of voting I love this subreddit by the way. I live in the UK, and I remember a family member quite intelligent, a doctor telling me that EVERYONE should vote if they are able to. She said that we had people die in wars for the rights in order for everyone to have the equal right to vote. However I completely disagree. I see too many people get pressured into voting because they 'should' and because it's what you're 'meant' to do. If you don't know who you want to be in power, DONT VOTE. I don't like that politicians propagate lies and tantalising propaganda to stupid people who are gullible enough to believe it. We dont even get an education in politics, not even a basic one. EDIT A lot of people seem to think I would like to remove the right to vote for those that are ill informed. That is not what my main point was and I apologise if I didn't explain it well enough. I think if a person thinks with conviction than they want a person in power, they should vote for them certainly. However, if someone is unsure of who they want in power, or doesn't feel like they know enough, it is BETTER to abstain than to just vote for anyone Editedit Thanks a lot for all of the replies everyone. Whilst my opinion has not completely changed, I've dropped a delta on users that have made me think twice Many regards EditEditEdit Haven't seen such helpful discussion for a long time on Reddit, thanks a lot<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if you aren't sure about who to vote for, it's better to not do it at all.\n","id":"2f1c6dd0-3fc3-4423-8ae4-6a6807eb2482"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The movement of capital would be easier due to the integration into a fiscal union that the USE would essentially be. In return, this would promote job creation, reduce inequalities and foster growth of peripheral parts of the EU today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USE will help to reduce economic inequalities between current member states.\n","id":"73bf0b65-2ef3-4a22-a87c-a29b49715727"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>bailout journalism.<|ARGUMENT|>The State already invests large amounts of money into the media, both directly and indirectly. Firstly the state directly funds organisations like PBS and indirectly funds the likes of the BBC. In addition all governments are major media buyers in their own right, responsible for huge amounts of advertising and this applies to local government more than the national government. In addition there are softer subsidies such as government funding for journalism courses at universities. All an additional bailout provides is a furtherance of an existing activity. The fact that these relationships and subsidies exist demonstrates that the state acknowledges the value of the media. The fact that the people tolerate it suggests that they do tooi. i Rosa Brooks. \u201cBail Out Journalism\u201d LA Times. 9 April 2009.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The State already subsidizes the press in many ways and a bailout would simply be an extension of what already happens\n","id":"b50f1a86-be76-4ac4-b7c2-9df4b274701a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>Although women get paid the same amount as men, the lowest paying careers teachers, nurses have historically been 'women's' jobs, and are therefore valued less even though they are integral to society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Despite lawful equality being achieved in several countries, political, economical, personal and social equity have not been achieved yet.\n","id":"47e9ebe5-3df1-4459-b82a-aca3afd45815"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a smoker myself, but I never smoke on the clock. Hell, I don't even bring my cigarettes to work. I don't think it's fair that people who don't smoke have to work while people who do smoke an addiction brought on by themselves get to leave work for the 5 minutes it takes to go smoke a cigarette a few times during their shift. Three of co workers take smoke breaks at least 4 or 5 times during a shift and I continue to work. I can't really take a break myself because I don't really have a reason to take a short break because I don't bring my cigs to work . Smoke breaks have been a very common thing amongst most of the jobs I've had. So I figured there might be a good legitimate reason behind it, so I'd like to have a discussion about it. . EDIT This reply changed my view. If someone feels the need to smoke, they'll get frustrated when they don't smoke and become less productive. To keep them productive and happy workers, they'll let them smoke to keep everything going smoothly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think smoke breaks should be allowed at work,\n","id":"19edb5f9-e95c-495a-8020-765ba7b01a3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We all know that the r the donald is for Trump fans. How do we know? It\u2019s in the bloody name. But the r politics gives Redditors the impression that it\u2019s a neutral political subreddit. This is clearly not the case. If we simply go by what are the main topics of conversation in r politics, we would have to say that it is an anti Trump or an anti Republican fan club. The name of the subreddit should reflect its themes and interests \u2014 this is the basis for Reddit as a whole. If subreddits are misleadingly labeled than the entire website loses its value.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The r\/politics should change its name\n","id":"27c0a5ab-5aa0-49b2-ac61-d4bccb37a071"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humans prefer cats over dogs?<|ARGUMENT|>This is true despite the fact that dogs are easier to train and instruct. Cats manage to be popular without someone attempting to mould them to be that way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Movies about cats do better than movies about dogs. Thus, it is likely this is the result of cats having a bigger positive impact on humans.\n","id":"9d77809c-4fb9-4099-ab26-e788d1585866"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note I am not talking about the ideas fascism vs socialism that these symbols represent. This is purely about the countries that have used these symbols, and the actions of these governments of their governments Almost everyone would agree that wearing swastika shirts, having swastika tattoos, and having a swastika associated with your movement makes you a bad person. You are ignoring the history of what that symbol represented by choosing to use it. I believe there should be the same type of stigma around the hammer and sickle. The Nazi government was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 10 12 million during the holocaust, and another 10's of millions through WW2. The Soviet government was responsible for an estimated 3.3 7.5 million death's through the Holodomor wiki Holodomor in Ukraine, the 1930 1933 Kazakh famine which was responsible for an estimated 1.5 million deaths, and an estimated 18 million people sent to gulags, with 1.5 million dying. In total this is 6.3 10.5 million people killed, with many more families affected by these deaths. These are just a few of the atrocities committed by soviet union, and yet their symbol is still ok to use and wear. I do not think that one can support this symbol while condemming the swastika. Ccc<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The hammer and sickle should be considered just as offensive as the swastika.\n","id":"cfb8c51c-dbbb-41a6-ba3b-aa8209dd86ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view isn't developed a lot, so this is going to be short. I think natural rights are a bullshit excuse to give some rights you care about a status and importance above the others, without having to justify yourself or be part of a debate. Let's say I'm advocating for mandatory vaccination. If you say being able to refuse vaccination is my natural right , you're not providing any real argument to the debate, it's a cheap cop out and there's no way to argue against that. What you should be doing instead is give arguments on to why in your view, the social benefits of allowing mandatory vaccination are inferior to the social harm. For me, while some rights are definitely more important than the others, it is because we socially decided they were, not because they are god given or natural . All rights are social.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Natural rights\" are bullshit\n","id":"1832474c-09c4-4af9-9e68-868b6fc70d8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We Should Restrict Freedom of Speech<|ARGUMENT|>Free speech is an inherently ambiguous concept that requires definition and interpretation; Government is the obvious place for such clarifications to be made.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free speech is an inherently ambiguous concept that requires definition and interpretation; Governme...\n","id":"19c97188-9dd1-443a-949c-b7ddb4a5621f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Child Curfews<|ARGUMENT|>Child curfews can help to change a negative youth culture in which challenging the law is seen as desirable and gang membership an aspiration. Impressionable youngsters would be kept away from gang activity on the streets at night and a cycle of admiration and recruitment would be broken. By spending more time with their families and in more positive activities, such as sports and youth clubs, which curfews make a more attractive option for bored youngsters, greater self-esteem and discipline can be developed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Child curfews can help to change a negative youth culture.\n","id":"5ad4ca0c-8c57-44b8-bb79-dd82d1e5367b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>By chanting Hare Krishna maha mantra repeatedly while avoiding sinful activity ones heart becomes pure and one gradually realizes pure love for God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bhakti Yoga provides a method to developing love of God with a process to do so and results that can be measured.\n","id":"a18e5005-b151-4bf4-ab83-8cede0a09e54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was recently reading a reddit thread, and it inevitably spiraled into a discussion about gender politics totally unrelated to the main topic of the thread . Assertions of Feminists hate all men and You don't understand Feminism abound, and it was basically par for the course, however, one post caught my attention in attempt to show what radical feminism was capable of, a poster quoted from Robin Morgan's essay Lesbianism and Feminism Synonyms or Contradictions? April 4th, 1973 where she states, I feel that 'man hating' is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class hatred against the class that is oppressing them. Let's forget about the first half of that sentence. Let's forget about feminism, racism, and discrimination as it pertains to our modern world. I'm not looking for you to change my view about what groups are oppressed or not. That being said, after thinking about it for a long time, I find that the oppressed have a right to class hatred against the class that is oppressing them to be a perfectly reasonable statement. My thought experiment was this Let's say that everything that happened during the Nazi regime's rise to power happened except for the actual extermination of Jews in concentration camps. Let's say that Jews were used as scapegoats for social ills, deemed genetically inferior, forced to identify themselves publicly or face prosecution, excluded from business and politics and forced to live in ghettos. As a Jew in this scenario, would I not have a right to class hatred against the class that is oppressing me? If not, why? Is this an extreme example? Getting rid of the actually being mass murdered thing makes me think it isn't so extreme, and more in line with the sentiment of this quote. What about African Americans? I am not black, but the more I think about it, if I were, I think I would hate white people. Not individual white people, necessarily, but as a class that had actively oppressed my class for so long and in some views still continues to do so. Again, I am not asking you to change my view about what classes are oppressed. I would like you to change my view that it is reasonable that an oppressed class has a right to hate the class that is oppressing them. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe \"that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them\". Change my view.\n","id":"a34235c0-94a1-4d52-afa7-9ca45579db57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>The USE will allow citizens a greater freedom to study, live, and work where they want.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union should become a United States of Europe.\n","id":"8df6a86c-831a-4aad-9db4-7b7001369387"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Not included that Oil producers may have cartel like agreements together or with automobile industry. That could be the case, too, but I mean mainly that they want to keep the future marked hooked on their product and are therefore trying to keep the market for electronic cars, insulation and green energy small. While the industries of those substitute goods are by far the biggest looser of the price drop, the Arab and US producers are also loosing money by flooding the market, therefore having to sell cheap. A popular explanation is a price battle , but that's absolute nonsense. None of them is going to go bankrupt or stop producing, which is usually the aim of such campaigns. Big oil and others have been accused before of Killing the electric car though admittedly not very effective. Edit I think I had some false presumptions, especially when it comes to my argument that there is no price battle. This subreddit is great, thanks for your responses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Oil prices are currently only low to influence the substitute goods production.\n","id":"c5a0d010-65ef-4bb3-bd89-428a65e0a916"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>If the tomb was not empty, Christianity would have fallen apart when someone other than the Disciples went to check the tomb and found Jesus's body.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Following Jesus's death, the tomb he was buried in was discovered to be empty.\n","id":"2ac67cde-5972-45e0-b0ea-4cac88bef3bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Ex-Convicts Be Prioritised In The Job Market?<|ARGUMENT|>Removing job opportunities for those newly entering the workforce may cause more initial offenders, thus having a net neutral impact on overall criminality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This potentially could incentivise some of the unemployed population to commit small crimes to secure a job in the future.\n","id":"0cb31c14-b38c-403b-998f-d1fed0bf4417"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Judith Curry, a widely acclaimed climate scientist has been vilified and threatened personally simply because of her skeptical views. As a result she decided to end her career in climate science Curry resigns: Integrity Vs. Career Suicide<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social pressure and research funding incentives has made it difficult for climate scientists to speak out against strong claims about human-caused climate change\n","id":"98303973-6ecf-4557-93a3-2e26fe28d296"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>A dossier compiled by an anonymous anti-racism activist revealed that 25 sitting and former Conservative councillors have posted Islamophobic and racist material on social media.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Multiple allegations of Islamophobia have been made against the Conservative Party in recent years. This may deter a large number of the electorate.\n","id":"359de03c-7d9f-4d1b-8e1a-abc1a5ba9144"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am typing this because I am concerned with counter culture. I feel that people are becoming too accepting with things that really should not be socially acceptable. Furries, radical feminism, Tumblr culture, and the acceptance of weird sexual fetishes. For example, a youtube user named TheAmazingAtheist wanted orgies on the street and said that people should smoke, even if they know that smoking is bad, yet if they damage their lungs, they should get free healthcare. I really don't know how anyone could have views like this. It makes no goddamn sense. Focusing solely on social issues is not the way to go, and this is the trend I've been seeing for many countries, mainly France and Uruguay. Both of these countries have tried to improve gay rights and other issues but at the expense of letting their economies go down the fucking drain. The economy should be the most important thing in society. Trying to appeal to the social justice warrior crowd is not the way to improve a country. And as for the sexual fetish complaint, countries like Germany have a huge tolerance for it and I just do not know why. We as society need to focus on the family first and foremost. Sexual fetishes dehumanizes the family and makes them look like a bunch of weirdos. Strong family values in society often lead to great results. I want society to take the positive aspects of the early Americans, with some updates of course, and implement that into society. To me, this would be a huge improvement than what we have now. Edit Fixing up some sentences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that radical social liberalismcultural Marxism is bad for society and that going in a more social conservative direction would be more beneficial.\n","id":"6cb8ec8e-e954-44dc-8c2d-e439ac9a208f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should A Character Witness Be Required To Purchase Guns or Ammo?<|ARGUMENT|>Some people that are not on any government list should still have a hard time obtaining a gun.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Government lists of who should or shouldn't be able to purchase a gun have errors and omissions.\n","id":"a97e84bb-1980-42b1-9172-00e9ce7ae43f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that there should be warnings and disclosures on cigarette packs in order to inform the consumer. Comparable practices are used on pharmaceuticals, alcohol, foods, cars and tons of other products. Yet on cigarettes people insist on putting graphic images of death and severe damage to scare people out of using them. I think showing dead people and people with holes in their throats is fear mongering and discrimination against tobacco, a product that is harmful but other comparably dangerous items are not treated similarly. When you buy a new Ford you aren't shown bodies blown apart in car accidents, when you drink a beer you aren't shown a dissolving liver and the effects of alcoholism. The list goes on and on. Is it reasonable to treat tobacco products this way?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tobacco Companies face undue discrimination\n","id":"5241ae97-5c6b-4bdc-b0b3-3ca1d3c40bcb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>History should shine in museums where the full picture can be painted without bias or a limitation on space i.e. when a single statue is erected representing one side of a story.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The statues can be kept without glorifying what they once stood for. They can be kept in museums with proper historical context rather than on a plinth to be admired.\n","id":"caaaa5d5-22ea-4d4f-8b4b-8173fd453587"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is BDSM Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>Just like in any relationship, learning about each other and discovering boundaries is an unavoidable danger zone, full of opportunities to inadvertently hurt the other. BDSM mistakes are not abusive in natureor often even in appearance, but simple mistakes that each individual will experience and learn from.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Novice mistakes don't prove intentional abuse or inherent abuse.\n","id":"3fb2a248-04b1-47d2-b607-fc924a26b2b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This came to mind after watching this video I went to a good American university where I was taught to respect all cultures and cultural differences. Adulthood since then has been a long process of unlearning this moral aphorism. Eastern cultures torture animals because they think the meat tastes better. Middle Eastern cultures force children into marriages. There are many more instances of fucked up shit going on in the world, but those two are more than enough to prove my point. Now, before you say but the west used to be like that , yes. Key word there is WAS . The west has outgrown such barbaric traditions. Other parts of the world have not and there is no reason to respect barbaric traditions or feel obligated to not point out the obvious this shit is fucked up and the people doing this are fucked up. Edit I've never been more disappointed with this subreddit. The responses and the downvotes are more what I'd expect from r politics than r changemyview.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the moral imperative to \"respect all cultures\" is destructive and cruel.\n","id":"d24bae02-503b-46ea-8a73-dab119934838"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>His work saved thousands of lives he didnt torture and kill animals what is a great thing in my opinion. The people who died in his researches would have been killed anyway. It's not his fault and the hate on him is unjustified. I believe it's better to do researchers with people who die anyway like death row inmates instead of killing and torturing innocent animals which I believe is immoral. They also feel pain and want to live, it's wrong and it makes me dad that animals get treated like this. I dont believe killing Jews is a good thing I am just against animal experiments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Hate on Josef Mengele is not justified\n","id":"0c093c93-0a90-4c7b-a2d2-ea9fae7cd701"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Shakespeare Authorship Question<|ARGUMENT|>Many scholars argue that the theory that the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is not the true William Shakespeare, the famous writer, are not rooted in evidence, but rather classism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is considered a fringe theory among academics, almost all of whom recognize William Shakespeare as the true author.\n","id":"c3c97799-c68c-4d58-b177-81e4686b04ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is an argument for making the age of consent do to 21 and removing romeo and juliet laws I think that current age of consent laws 16 18 with romeo and juliet laws are a bad medium between high and low age of consents and that romeo and juliet laws should be removed. A large amount of this argument comes down to a phenomenon that I believe exists where a small but significant portion of the population due to strong emotions about youth not just forbiddenness develop a fetishization of persons below the age of consent and that this is easily preventable through changes in laws either by increasing the age of consent and removing romeo and juliet laws, or by reducing the age of consent. Although there are some points for a lower age of consent I think that the age of consent should be raised to 21 and romeo and juliet laws removed. Argument for increasing age of consent fetishization of underaged people will be broader in age 14 20 and thus give less of a risk to those who this fetishization will harm the most 13 15 Many people have not fully developed until the age of 21 or even later, making the laws this way would help protect them Laws would also help counter social pressures to engage in sexual activity at young ages although this benefit is lost if Romeo and Juliet laws are present The fetishization that I am proposing exists is something that I only believe exists in a small portion of the population, its existence does not mean that the general population of teenagers will react in a similar manner to being subject to stricter age of consent laws Argument against Romeo and Juliet laws Legitimizes sexual activity at unhealthily young ages, early sexual activity is associated with poor outcomes Might make such a fetishization that would arise due to legal restrictions become worse due to the moral message not being as clear, many would be violators would see that such sexual activity is permitted and see it as that there is no harm associated with sex at a young age and they are only being arbitrarily prevented from engaging in such sexual activity Note previously I made this thread and it was locked due to rule B violation. I came upon several problems that day mostly coming down to not being aware that it was fresh topic friday but also not putting enough effort into the OP and my participation in the thread EDIT I removed the argument for younger age of consent to comply with Rule B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Age of consent laws at the current time 16-18 with romeo and juliet laws are not productive and should be changed.\n","id":"23eb1dbb-dc07-45bf-8633-e88d0daa8ce9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no point in observing animals outside of their habitat and it is also cruel to keep them in captivity. We should setup habitats for animals and then visit as part of annual holidays.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Efforts can be made to conserve and protect the habitats of animals instead of keeping animals in captivity while their natural homes are still being destroyed.\n","id":"d9775001-0513-4478-a5a3-2564330461bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should children be exposed to violence?<|ARGUMENT|>Children who are exposed to the horrors of the world at a young age are likelier to be forced to grow up quicker than others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Exposing children to violence accelerates the development of the child's maturity, decreasing the duration of his precious childhood.\n","id":"3d575e72-5ab6-4dc5-bb59-9e821bff963c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I thought about the term 'homophobe'. Being a homophobe means you must be scared of gay people. I think it's a way of talking down the problem of people that are against homosexuality. They aren't against gaypeople because they are scared of it as in being scared for spiders , they are against gays in a way people can be against black people i'm sorry for pulling this card . It's not about being scared, it's about looking down on people and enforcing maintaining values in a society that doesn't benefit gay people. The term homophobe may imply that the homophobes are victims of their own fear. but fear is not the problem. intolerance and hate is. So why not change their 'name'?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":", I think homophobes should be called homohaters\n","id":"d0944c66-24ae-49fb-82d7-fbe562abd8d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that zoos are morally wrong. I understand that zoos do some good in taking in endangered animals, but only a relatively small percentage of the animals in the zoo are endangered in the first place and I don't believe that the majority of the animals should sufferer for the benefit of the smaller. Side note, sanctuaries exist for this reason. They are capable of handling one animal well and they can also make money from donations tours. Even then, the endangered animals do not belong in a zoo. Endangered species are not sentient. The individual animal is. The individual animal has right to freedom, even if that means becoming extinct. Extinction in the wild is not an excuse to continue keeping individuals in captivity. The survival of the species does not justify the loss of freedom for the individuals in captivity. Secondly, animals in captivity experience many mental illness signs such as depression, PTSD, shakes among others. These are symptoms that aren't seen in their wild counterparts. Some chimpanzees have even been seen to self mutilate, repetitive rocking and consumption of feces, which again, are not seen in wild counterparts. Now, these symptoms are usually seen in lab monkeys which I will not be going into however, this has also been seen in monkeys living in good zoos. All 40 of the observed chimps did some kind of abnormal behavior, ranging from poking their own eyes and other body parts, drinking urine, pulling their hair, bang themselves against surfaces and other things that wild chimps don't do. Thirdly, animals are killed that have certain diseases. I can't recall the exact article, however there were a group of monkeys in a zoo I think they may have been in England they had a disease that was nonfatal to them. In the wild these monkeys would live normal lives and do monkey things. However, this disease is fatal to humans, and as suck they put them all down. Now while I believe this is a rather rare scenario, it can happen. Lastly, and I know this will be brought up because it's brought up a lot. People always mention how good zoos are for showing children animals they would otherwise never get to see in person. While I do agree this is a good thing, and it makes children appreciate the world and get into science more at a young age I do believe that museums can fill this same role, and without the moral issues that I brought up. To summarize, I don't think that the pros of zoos outweight the cons. You wouldn't say the that insert hate group military group is good because they protect their own people. You can't subtract the bad because of some good things. If I had to give this post a TL DR it would basically be Zoos are immoral places that do some good, but in the end, I believe that anything a zoo does well, a museum or sanctuary can do better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoos are morally wrong animal rights standpoint not environmental\n","id":"0494d60f-ac86-42f7-a002-d91c9423735c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should the Conservative Party choose to be the next UK Prime Minister?<|ARGUMENT|>Johnson supports tax cuts for the highest income earners, which it is estimated would push 50,000 families into poverty These voters could be crucial for the Conservatives to win future elections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Johnson is more likely than Hunt to support policies which would be harmful to the party in the long term.\n","id":"bf4cccb4-eec1-4eea-ba23-d1a4880fcb93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do You Agree or Disagree With Euthanasia or Mercy Killing?<|ARGUMENT|>Those who have terminal disease that are less common often face more suffering. Without the lobbies and charities behind diseases like lung cancer, brain cancer, etc., palliative care cannot provide the same Quality of Life that other better-funded palliative measures do. \u201cThis study suggests that patients with end stage COPD have significantly impaired quality of life and emotional well being which may not be as well met as those of patients with lung cancer, nor do they receive holistic care appropriate to their needs.\u201d Those in the third world are the most discriminated against in the area of palliative care. They are denied basic analgesics because of their economic situation. \u201cMorphine is a cheap, safe analgesic, yet most patients in developing countries are denied access to this drug.\u201d Palliative care is also weakened in the Third World by \u201cthe lack of effective models for.delivery.\u201d The palliative care options are often limited to those available to the family. Though physicians may be available, long-term palliative care is often ineffective as the physicians must respond to a large area of need and the constant support is left up to the family of the patient, who are limited in resources and training. Minority groups are less likely to be given palliative care. Dalits, African Americans, and other minority groups are systemically given poor health care coverage and treatment. The result is that they face more emergency care rather than preventative and more inpatient non-palliative deaths. Without the option for PAS, minority groups often face alienated deaths in the institutions that have alienated them.In the case of the Roma people, both an ethnic and a lifestyle minority are discriminated against without access to PAS. Because of their nomadic way of life, the European healthcare system allows them to fall through the many cracks. When they plead for the right to die, they are denied PAS on \u201cethical\u201d grounds. The European healthcare system, like many worldwide, is inherently biased to those who have a lifestyle of the majority, i.e. with a permanent residence. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Discrimination in Palliative Care and how PAS can end it\n","id":"5ae77d2b-c37b-4663-805c-3031b927645f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You may have seen some coverage about some rap artists having ASL interpreters sign the lyrics during their shows. If not, here is an article about a woman who has done ASL interpretation for artists ranging from Wu Tang Clan to Kendrick Lamar My first reaction to this phenomenon is that it is heart warmingly inclusive. However, at 2nd pass I've come to think it abusrd and unnecessary. Is the purpose of the interpretation to substitute for the music? I.e., you can't hear this, so I will convey it via ASL, similarly to how ASL substitutes for verbal language? If so, there is no way that ASL is an effective substitute for hearing the lyrics. I know hip hop is in some ways less musical than other genres, but at a live show I imagine seeing someone sign Kendrick Lamar's verse on DNA just doesn't have the same effect. If it was a Rolling Stones concert, having someone inform you this is where the artist does the guitar solo is not a substitute for hearing it. Even having someone mime along, like an orchestra conductor of sorts, could not convey the same thing as the guitar solo. And while a rap verse isn't quite a guitar solo, a really meanly rapped verse is still about the impressive verbal skill of the rapper. Hearing Inspectah Deck say I bomb atomically, Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses can't define how I be dropping these mockeries, it goes without saying that a huge part of the appeal is the novelty of the way he makes the words interact. I don't care how passionate or animated the interpreter is if their purpose is to substitute for the music itself, they are at best a cross genre cover band. The deaf fans experiencing the concert via interpretation are not experiencing remotely the same concert as those who can hear it. And frankly, what they're experiencing is magnitudes less cool. It's not the artist himself performing his art it's, apparently in most cases, some totally random white woman performing the artist's art. Now maybe the interpretation isn't to be a substitute, it's just to help partially deaf people follow along with the set. But still, that is superfluous, as a screen with the lyrics, or even some of the lyrics, could do the same job. And if that is the purpose of these aids, their importance seems far overblown in the out pouring of internet coverage praising it as the most heart warmingly inclusive thing ever. So either it's an ineffective substitute, or an only mildly important place keeping tool that is hailed as a huge moral victory. Either way, superfluous and absurd. If this post is insensitive to deaf people I apologize I have a handful of friends and family who have suffered from permanent disabilities and I know that every bit helps. But usually the enthusiasm tends to be proportionate to the efficacy of the resource, which is where I'm lost on this one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ASL \"interpretation\" at rap concerts is absurd and unnecessary\n","id":"4dd2b766-6035-4ef9-9e86-fedd0539e66c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the new modern global economy, the only thing that really matters is the cost of electricity. The economic gap between first and third world countries is shrinking and wage differences are shrinking as a result. In addition, automation means that labor is increasingly replaced by machines, as is happening in the Foxcon factories. If a country wants to remain economically competitive in the future economy, its main priority should be to drive down its electricity costs, preferably while driving up the electricity cost of foreign countries. How is China doing this? Easy. Subsidize shitty solar panels whose performance drops massively after a few years.1 Western countries will buy these solar panels in an effort to move beyond fossil fuels. At the same time, European and American solar panel producers are driven out of business because their solar panels are not economically competitive. After we adjust our whole economy to solar energy, the result is then that the cost of manufacturing becomes too high in our countries. When the performance of the shitty Chinese solar panels begins to drop, we're stuck with expensive electricity and blackouts. This then places China in an economically dominant position. By the time we figure out what's going on, our remaining industrial base either shuts down or moves operations to China. References 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think China is producing cheap solar panels in an effort to make the whole world economically dependent on China.\n","id":"041d2af2-2424-4914-b14a-990c01956316"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not really sure where to start, besides to say that the fact that America elected such a raving lunatic over men who were clearly much more competent, intelligent, and overall better human beings John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay in particular is a sad point in our history. J.Q. Adams was a brilliant statesman and a decent man who was loathed by Jackson and his followers because he was seen as aristocratic, which in normal speak really just means that he wasn't a backwoods savage like Jackson. Adams was from the North, had an excellent education, had a father who was President of the United States, and was a gentleman, which was enough to make Jacksonians dislike him. The only negative thing I can say about his personality is that he could be grumpy like his father, but I attribute that more to not liking attention than anything else. Henry Clay was also seen as aristocratic, but did much more for this country than Jackson ever did, especially considering his 1850 compromise delayed the dissolution of the Union and the Civil War by ten years. Clay fought tooth and nail to keep the Union together and prevent war. On the subject of Jackson, Thomas Jefferson said I am much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson become President. He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has very little respect for laws or Constitutions. What's even sadder is what Jackson did when he was president. The arrogant disregard of Supreme Court decisions, forcible removal of some of the least troublesome Native Americans from their lands, and the intentional destruction of some of the pillars of the American economy are just a few of the achievements of Andrew Jackson, but it's fine because he was a common man and appealed to them. The fact that he is on the 20 bill in the first place is ironic and he would hate whoever came up with the idea to put him on it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Andrew Jackson was a low class thug, a lousy president, and should be taken off the $20 bill.\n","id":"7031b2c8-a1e5-4711-8955-1232ef43fb05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Capitonym is a word referring to words who have different meaning when capitalized differently. There is difference between a Pole and a pole and between polish and Polish what is with Poland and capitonyms . When the lower case polish gets capitalized it loses its meaning. Another thing, we use computers now. We have to press shift every time we begin a sentence. Those nanoseconds add up you know? And for what? Nothing. We have periods to tell us when a sentence ends.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capitalizing the first letter of every sentence, capitalizing titles, etc. should be abolished\n","id":"d751a32b-4e10-4cee-83b3-3ad522bfc1e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Hell Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Not repenting means a man or woman lacks spiritual growth that brings them back into God's presence. See Isaiah 1:16-20 for what repentance does to sin. See 1 John 3:1-24 and Revelation 3:21 to understand how repentance or purifying oneself from sin brings men and women back into God's presence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hell is the inability or lack of desire to repent.\n","id":"ae2d5acb-8d4e-4bb5-b33e-67ac582bd0e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Banning child performers<|ARGUMENT|>Regardless of what kind of work they are doing this deprives them of something so important that we make it compulsory for all children. Although the minimum legal requirements can often be provided by tutors on the set or sports academies it can be hard to keep performance and education in proper balance when one appears to bring so many immediate rewards both in terms of fame and money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If children are working or performing they are not spending their time in formal education.\n","id":"7b7ebefd-62d5-4e43-8e65-696e2a71c348"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>The intergalactic layout of the Star Trek universe means that the Federation could not dedicate the needed resources to combat the Rebel Alliance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.\n","id":"178ce069-ec3f-429a-86c7-4fddee26712e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Philosophy to me feels like a game where the rules are too vague to play anything at all. Almost by definition, it asks intentionally vague questions about intentionally vague concepts. The result is a field where experts talk themselves in circles over the same concepts they've been thinking about for centuries basically a very long, drawn out that's just like, your opinion man style debate. It feels like most philosophical discourse falls into one of two types. One is the banal type where they debate about, for lack of a better word, pointless stuff. Inherently subjective concepts like how to live life basically the so called philosophical doctrines, nihilism, nietzscheanism , vague stuff like is mathematics real or invented , what is good and evil , or stuff that ultimately amounts to people debating about the definition of a word, what can be classified as science? The other type is what I like to call pseudo intellectualism. Here meaningful questions are discussed, but not meaningfully. The discussion involves concepts from all kinds of different fields like mathematical logic, linguistics, cognitive science but with only a surface level understanding of the concepts. The result is something that somewhat resembles logic or linguistics but upon closer inspection is actually just a bunch of smart sounding words and flowery language with no real substance. Of course I'm not saying philosophical style questions aren't relevant to our lives, or that it isn't worth thinking about philosophical meta issues. Some of the major questions posed are pretty interesting, and I think a good dose of introspection helps broaden our thinking and makes us more open minded in general. Also, intellectual masturbation is fun. But they're curiosities personal beliefs at best. To have graduate classes, debates and academic articles written on philosophy is just pointless overkill. Past a certain point, there's just nothing to formally study it's all just a matter of opinion or basic critical thinking. As a field of study it has made little contribution to the world at large, and even within its own field it hasn't progressed much since virtually ancient times. What am I missing? Disclaimer Some defend it by saying all of science came from philosophy, but the word philosophy today means a very different thing than it did in the past. If any meaningful contribution came from what was called philosophy in the past, it's probably got a very different name now and is markedly distinct from what we call philosophy today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Philosophy, as a field of formal study is meaningless.\n","id":"410cfdd8-7d24-4af8-9471-27a745046859"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit I feel it's necessary to define a few terms in the context that I'm using them for clarity. job Any position where both employer and employee know, or should know, that the position is long term temporary at best and that at some point the employee will move on. career your chosen life's work. If you work fast food your whole life, that is your career minimum wage job Any job, usually in the service industry, that generally requires little to no formal education, and generally pays between the federal minimum wage up to and including 15.00 hr. Minimum wage is a hot topic of debate these days, and I'm sure a lot of visitors to this sub are tired of talking about raising, lowering, or eliminating the minimum wage but that isn't what this is about. I did a search and couldn't find anything else that was similar to my stance so I'm hoping it will foster some new discussions. During every debate concerning minimum wage someone will always say something to the effect that minimum wage jobs aren't meant to support a family are meant for teenagers and unskilled workers and I think that this line of thinking is just outright wrong. Throughout the past 50 years, people took minimum wage service industry jobs when they were young inexperienced in order to gain the experience that was required in order to land a production career. That was the viewpoint, you got a minimum wage job in order to get the experience to start a career in the production world whether directly producing something, or supporting those who do ie office staff, vendors, logistics, etc. . Also over that time, the economy in the US has gone from production based to service based. This has caused a severe drop in production careers leaving nothing but the service industry left. The service industry is now the career simply due to lack of other options. I joined the military when I was 20 years old because after working in the service industry at minimum wage for 5 years I finally landed a production job on an assembly line this was in 1998 . The money was better than anything I'd made previously, but not good enough to get ahead. I ended up getting my girlfriend at the time pregnant and I saw the future that my current position offered and I wanted more so I enlisted. I spent 10 years working as an Aviation Electronics Technician before getting out to accept a position as a Federal Law Enforcement Officer with the US Forest Service. I worked at that position for 5 years before losing my job through no fault of my own. So there I was, a very highly skilled electronics tech, with 5 years of law enforcement experience, living in an area where 80 of the available jobs are minimum wage service industry and I needed a job. I applied everywhere I mean everywhere. I filled out applications for Taco Bell, McDonald's, Walmart, etc. I got exactly 4 callbacks and 2 interviews during my job search where I was filling out 5 10 job applications per week for 3 years before giving up. I couldn't get hired why? Because for 15 years I made between 28 75k year and every employer knows that there is no way I can support my family on minimum wage and why would they pay me more when they can just pay someone else the minimum. I have been effectively unemployable in my current location since 2011 due in large part to the fact that everyone including employers knows minimum wage doesn't pay enough to support a single person, much less a family of six. I think the mentality that minimum wage jobs aren't careers and shouldn't pay enough to support a family is more destructive than it is beneficial. TL DR Minimum wage jobs are no longer the sole realm of teenagers and the unskilled because the US doesn't produce anything anymore so those are the only careers available to most people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minimum wage jobs should not be viewed as strictly jobs for teenagers or unskilled workers and instead should be viewed as legitimate careers\n","id":"ff03017d-74ce-4761-8bbd-fdb9561bd2db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Affirmative actions has been around for years, and I believe that it is time that it should be abolished. I am a white male, a senior in college and about to go into the working world. I think that it is ridiculous that some people I know would get interviews offers from companies because theyre a minority, as opposed to how good they are. I've had plenty of positions my black friends would get interviews for, which I was better qualified for, and I didnt get them. I'm aware this isn't exactly affirmative action, but giving a minority an advantage because of the past seems to just be going against an equal enviornment. I could understand a sociocultural version of this, but why if a black kid and a white kid are both from as very poor neighborhood, why should the black kid have more advantages than the white?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Affirmative Action, along with other benefits given to someone because of their race, should be abolished.\n","id":"b107dc15-7810-4df2-acaf-4567fc5f89b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>A just society should be a balance of rights and responsibilities. There are enough threats against the state, environmental, societal and existential that all must compromise some of their choices for the greater good.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Citizens have a moral duty to serve their society in return for the various rights and privileges that they are granted by society.\n","id":"704ee989-046c-4d21-8e7a-79473343d6e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>Washington, D.C. has a revolving door between politics and big business. As a result, politicians have an interest in not regulating executive wages as they might profit from this once they leave government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians have an active interest to keep the issue of salary caps off the political agenda and out of the discourse.\n","id":"f7fe54d5-ca9e-4a04-8f40-d3b63c779f2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think it is important to have worker representatives setting wages, be it political representatives or unions. Leaving everything up to supply and demand only works when people can freely sell their labour to anyone, when in reality and this is getting increasingly prevalent people are too specialised even at the low end of the workforce to easily switch. At the same time, when dealing with a global economy there are lots of areas where wages have an effective cap of where they can be profitable. A british steel firm can't just raise its prices to pay for higher labour costs as they would then be unable to compete internationally. The only ways around that would be either through government subsidy not a fan or trade tariffs also not a fan increasing minimum wage over this wage cap can only mean the end of the firm or dramatic restructuring to increase productivity . In places like the US with wildly different internal economies the situation can get even worse. When the federal minimum wage was extended to places like american samoa, the level of the wage was so ludicrously high compared to the island economy that a huge chunk of the island immediately lost employment. Something similar although to a somewhat lesser degree seems to have happened to puerto rico, which now has only a 40 labour force participation rate, and a reduced population overall. I think it would be better if workers in that field have a choice of whether to continue working there more organically. If the wages drop enough that they can't make a living there anymore they can look for alternatives and then leave. A new minimum wage could effectively force them to leave immediately with no warning. Not having any kind of floor to wages also seems bad, as it can lead to situations where companies that don't have international competition still wind up in a race to the bottom. If one supermarket, for example, raised its prices to pay for higher wages, and others didn't they'd leave themselves at a massive disadvantage. In a large number of countries Norway, Sweden, Switzerland etc. minimum wage is handled through industry specific collective bargaining agreements. I think these are a better option than a single statutory minimum wage. In these systems unions negotiate minimum wages with firms. Firms agree to the new wages as long as the new wages apply to all firms in their industry. Once a majority of firms in a field agree, the requirement becomes law. Often these negotiated wages are far higher than minimum wages in other countries, in Norway for example the minimum of the minima harvest workers is still the equivalent of 14.50 an hour. This system ensures higher wages whilst enabling case by case evaluation of whether higher wages are possible. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are better solutions to low income than minimum wage\n","id":"1ce55bb1-188e-4ac6-abf1-8be09e3cc8cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The notion that bad ideas won't survive is simply false. Communism is a bad idea and yet large numbers of young Americans support it. Racism is a bad idea and it still lives. Social Justice TM is a bad idea and it's becoming more and more prevalent. Censorship is a bad idea. Crony capitalism is a bad idea. According to the free market logic I guess prevalent ideas are never bad, but I expect most people will agree with me that at least some of the things I've listed are bad, and they are all either prevalent now or were prevalent at some point.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The free market of ideas does not work\n","id":"7f5a7418-02b8-4e8e-8583-569682f3d0c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Artificial Intelligence AI: Limiting an AI's freedom of thought is unethical.<|ARGUMENT|>If AI develop the ability to have something that resembles feelings it would be cruel to treat it as a simple machine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An AI should be treated as if it was human\n","id":"3bed5caf-6d3a-46e1-8ee4-ff749d8c0471"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Moral agency can be exercised through decisions to make supererogatory acts or not, and not merely decisions to make impermissible acts or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is possible to create a world with free will but no evil.\n","id":"80908824-89c1-493f-b403-08beed7bfcbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>US citizens own 40% of all the guns in the world yet still isn't close to the top in intentional homicides\/murders. The numbers of guns do not correlate with murder rates.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US may have the most mass shootings, but it is nowhere near the top in intentional homicides\/murders per capita. The US comes in at #87\n","id":"35d4b04d-6383-4a68-8cb9-9daade3b350d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not sexist or racist in any way, I'm really not. I don't share this view because it sounds awful, and it kind of is, but isn't it true? It obviously depends what exactly one means by superior , I don't think white people or men are inherently better, but white men basically rule the world, don't they? If you've heard the joke women say they can do anything a man can do, but have they ever oppressed an entire gender? , it sounds awful but it's unfortunately the truth. Men have to be better to some degree to be so powerful after all these years, no? And countries run by White people have generally ruled the world. So what am I missing? I understand why it's bad to say, I just want to have my view changed because I think it's an odd one to have and it doesn't match up with my ideals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Male is the superior gender, and white is the superior race.\n","id":"e9bef857-d14f-4005-b3bb-4ef20b2b737d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>Feeling safe and secure has numerous benefits for people, including having a positive effect on their mental health and overall well-being.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Communities would feel safer knowing that a group has protectors hiding in plain sight, in their community.\n","id":"d3266b74-916a-4f77-811c-06dad9cb8377"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>According to the IPCC, in order to limit global warming to 2C, we need to reduce carbon emissions to 2 tons person per year by 2050. The average American is currently responsible for 24 tons year, which means we need to reduce our emissions by over 90 . For context, here's the current breakdown of an average American's carbon footprint With current technology, it looks completely impossible, no matter what you do. The combination of a vegan only diet, clothing, and health care already puts you over the limit at 2.6 tons, and that's assuming you live outside, use no energy, never travel, and consume absolutely nothing else. We obviously need a ton of new technology in order to have any hope of hitting the target, but even in my wildest imagination 100 renewable electricity, 100 electric transportation, 100 electric heating and cooling, etc it looks like we'd still have no chance to hit 2 tons person. Yet, we only have 30 years to get there. Is the situation really this bleak? What am I missing here? I could see a path to cut carbon emissions in half, but 90 just seems impossible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hitting the IPCC's carbon emissions target is going to be impossible\n","id":"90cbc15e-f2cf-48c3-a971-f0c2c530f36e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Electric vehicles are better than fossil fuel vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>With induction charging as an after market option on EVs it can be as easy as never thinking about charging at all. Just go about your life without paying any attention to the battery at all until you go on a long distance trip.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"EVs are better than fossil fuel cars because they are easier to refuel\n","id":"baa00cc2-8c27-4daa-b377-bf80d4bdf176"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>By 2005 half a million Americans were imprisoned for drug offences. This is not a sign of success.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The war on drugs in the United States has been a failure.\n","id":"51e871f2-3dc5-438c-8fb3-10557e5e181d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi guys, I guess ever since I was 15 I've held a very nihilistic viewpoint on life and struggled to find any true meaning to make me feel fulfilled or purposeful. This has led to TONS of suffering and depression in my personal life. Today I am 21 and I still have a hard time seeing life for anything else than it can be objectively identified as. I believe all of our daily actions can be explained through evolutionary biology, and this makes me feel depressed, realizing that we're all just pieces of script executing over and over, in whatever we may think we decide to do or assign meaning to. Sometimes I'll snap out of this mindset for a day or two, but only to feel like I'm an animal just operating on my instincts and under the illusion of having a self. Everything we do is about survival eating several times a day, working to pay the bills, seeking validation from others going to the gym, getting a good job etc. , and reproduction doing things to impress the opposite sex, acting alpha , going out to parties etc. . And in the middle of all of this, we cope in our mundane lives by assigning some meaning to our goals of survival and or reproduction and by identifying as X the insert quality guy girl and feeling in sync with our ego. I don't really identify as anyone. This clip puts my thinking pretty well. I'm not sure how it's possible, but please guys Help me change my view. I don't want to feel like shit for the rest of my life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our existence is only about survival and reproduction\n","id":"79443773-aaf2-446a-9494-25586fb92a5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Google Censor Their Search Results In Order To Operate In China?<|ARGUMENT|>Google will struggle to persuade Chinese users to abandon the Baidu ecosystem Baidu offers a range of services in addition to its search engine. These include dating apps, music apps, virtual assistants, and online encyclopedias. Chinese users are familiar with this ecosystem and value the social interactions and services provided by it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The obstacles that Google will face when operating in China may negatively affect the company\u2019s valuation.\n","id":"123ab8c8-5281-44d2-9a28-428e26d5e958"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the European Union legalize marijuana?<|ARGUMENT|>claims to help Rheumatoid Arthritis: reduce joint pain and swelling, suppress joint destruction and disease worsening.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overwhelming scientific research supports the beneficial medical effects of using cannabis.\n","id":"a98035fc-c65b-42d4-95c5-277d3f7e104e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The discordance between the \"least harm\" and the \"most good\" demonstrates that there is no absolute answer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Morality derives from subjective sources, and is therefore itself subjective.\n","id":"32193b57-48da-4527-9661-fceaa8a26f55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To slightly misuse a quote with great power, comes great responsibility. Officials both in charge of creating and enforcing laws have a great deal of power within our society. Shouldn't this power to paired with a greater responsibility to those that they serve? To clarify my title I do not believe that the 4th should be completely stripped but rather that the standard of unreasonable and probable cause should be legally defined as requiring lower amounts of proof then that of citizens, criminals, and even terrorists. For the 5th I believe that the citizens of the US have a right to know what has been done in their name. If there is sufficient proof of misconduct upon the part of an official I believe that official should be required to give testimony of the illegal events even if that means incriminating himself herself. Self incrimination is the only part of the 5th I wish to restrict. They are not acting as private citizens when they wear the mantle given to them by the people. They are now the very hands of the people and because of that should be held to a higher standard for us all. Edited the third paragraph to correctly show my views on what part should be restricted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe law enforcement personal and high ranking members of state\/federal government have restricted or no 4th\/5th amendment rights when acting in their official capacity.\n","id":"d45e97b9-b5a8-4016-9506-bca3710bd0a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> english is a second language to me. animal shelters activists tend to pick up stray animals in order to rescue them from the streets. they claim to save them from hunger, poor hygiene and loneliness. sometimes it will suffer from hurtful medical condition which is costly to treat. animals feel pain but they are not humans in the sense that they do not have the same metaphysic needs, such as excelling at work, philantroping or refining there eloquent thoughts about doing better as a being i think it's safe to assume that their conception of death is more like ancient humans who were sad but not alianited by it, opposite to our society which hides its deaths in hospitals and bursts with grief for celebrities that undergo the most common thing there is. that's why i feel saving as much urban animal lives as possible is pointless. sometimes the animal has some medical condition, which means it'll die sooner. treating wilk be a waste of money and sometimes cause painful recovery process. if the animal suffers its best, i think, to put it down. i see on social media a lot of people who ask for emergency money to support their adopted pets, often more then few, whom they took out of will to help the animal. like family planning, i think taking an animal with no means to treat it is selfish and irresponsible, while the better option is leaving it in the ecosystem it originally came from. i love animals and act by it veganism, owning adopted dog, keeping beauty cruelty free. but i theorize that adopting because of the animal needs is actually more selfish, done by people who wants to feel good with themselves when actually doing more harm. im totally for adopting and not buying, as long as you have the means to treat it. if a stray animal look like it's in major pain if you can't afford a vet, human painkillers can get queted and brought out of context, or become the empathic solution in this situation. thank you for reading this far, looking forward to read your thoughts in return and broaden my point of view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"leave stray animals be, esspecially sick ones. death is not the end of the world\n","id":"9269e770-0605-46e5-8e44-c9e73a8b7578"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>Ironically, leaving the EU will create new issues related to concerns that triggered the idea that leaving the EU was a good idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union.\n","id":"9f357c9f-53f1-4c0e-9474-1383dfa8e043"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Science Totally Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The raw data of the senses light waves, chemicals, sound waves requires processing by the brain in order to become a describable experience of an object, and even more processing to be conceptually articulated into a scientific theory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When processing data, human perceptions and bias is infused into science.\n","id":"18ac6a38-ecef-4080-be48-2b8eb2d9466e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now I'll preface this by stating the Achilles' heek of my argument outright It's effectively impossible to define what is and isn't truly victimless. For the purpose of discussion, I define victimless as an act that does not directly impact the wellbeing or comfort of any person or persons in a meaningful way. I would add the stipulation this extends to needless significant damage to the environment, as it is of net detriment to the human race. My argument is fairly simple. If an act lacks a clear detrimental effect on other human beings, what does the state or the 'criminal' gain from the act being prohibited?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Victimless Crimes Shouldn't Be Illegal\n","id":"8795a4a2-d171-40e9-bc48-bf70e5073c3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Donald Trump a Good President?<|ARGUMENT|>Withdrew from the Paris Climate Deal which we were only following, which benefits the USA financially<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump's foreign policy achievements demonstrate he is a good President.\n","id":"5ef8d60d-ab04-44fb-a601-2b9925edc3b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Since the European countries have different languages, religions, and traditions, the situation is different compared to the USA. The better solution is a community of independent countries confederacy with common free trade area than one big and bureaucratic state federation with quarreled lands.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a grouping of smaller nations, the USE will not be a durable construction.\n","id":"2704f663-21f8-4281-8cc8-b0fc9ac3b3c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Our experience of the universe is that causes strictly precede effects. However, an omnipotent God is not restricted to acting in the present; if omnipotent, He must also be able to change the past or act non-locally. If God is also minimally sensitive to mortal requests, then some prayer could, through God, have a result that occurred before it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept of the God of Classical Theism is incoherent because within the attributes of God contradict each other and they also contradict our experience of the universe.\n","id":"061009ab-16d0-4ff0-9d33-6ce2533a0467"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>With Christian teaching the individual gained a reassurance that regardless of his position she will go to heaven. This improved the bargaining situation because it made punishment of afterlife less risky.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all inferiors suffer, e.g. children towards their parents, siblings among eachother or students towards workers.\n","id":"92f10fd2-0ea0-4120-b246-452917582465"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Guns are created with a specific purpose in mind, from self defense to hunting. Assault weapons are created for the sole purpose of firing rounds as rapidly and accurately as possible in order to ensure maximum damage to the target. Why should countries allow a device which is designed with the sole purpose of causing destruction into the hands of civilians where it can and has been misused? EDIT By saying assault weapons I am referring to the guns and LCM's Large capacity magazines banned under the federal assault weapons ban as well as the guns created to exploit loopholes in that legislation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Assault Weapons should be banned for civilian use,\n","id":"71c83daa-cf6d-477e-b38f-1156bf9a44be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have used drugs most of my life. It began as most drug use histories begin start smoking marijuana in early teens, drinking in highschool, move on to harder drugs as I push into adulthood. I am a frequent user of opiates, amphetamines, psychedelics, and anything else that you can categorize. I am not saying that frequent abuse can ruin lives, I've seen people fall into this sort of behavior. I just believe that I am incapable of achieving that level if addiction. I am very smart with my drug use I make sure I know as much as I can before consuming a new substance. That being said, I have gone on binges with certain drugs, namely cocaine and oxycodone not at the same time , and I have been able to stop when the supply ran short or when I got bored with it. I have never felt any cravings that extended to a worry some level. My first experience with feeling that I am incapable of addiction came my freshman year of college. Most of my roommates were habitual cigarette smokers. I was only an occasional smoker, but they inadvertently got me into heavier smoking. I bought a carton of cigarettes and plowed through them at about a pack a day. When I was done with the carton, I decided I didn't love smoking, so I stopped. I'll still smoke an occasional cig, but its never been I big deal. Sorry about the wall of text, hopefully I can get some feedback on this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe I am capable of suffering from drug addiction of any kind.\n","id":"a778af63-64db-4919-a707-b0df08f5bafb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the UN a force for good?<|ARGUMENT|>The Security Council is not needed, as Security is already upheld by NATO, the EU, and nation states cooperating.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The world doesn't need an organisation like the UN.\n","id":"653f618c-364b-4bd9-bdd9-3f485dcb319a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>For Korea the nurses and miners that went to Germany in the 1960s were crucial in fostering domestic capital that was necessary to kick start the economic advnacements off Park Chung-hee<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Remittances and reverse investment form a major part in many economies. We should thus speak of a 'brain double'. Brain drain followed by remittances and investments in the other direction.\n","id":"f3fc7542-e990-4d69-9d5e-6d53ef1baf2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do all or most White Americans experience privilege?<|ARGUMENT|>Other factors at play, such as credit scores, are ignored in these statistics. Black Americans and Latinos have lower credit scores compared to white Americans and Asians due to personal choices and habits. This is reflected in housing statistics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Disparate impact in the Fair Housing Act is very difficult to recognize as discrimination because it lacks intent.\n","id":"28f6472d-ed08-46d2-adbc-22a21f2889bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit This came out lengthy so I condensed my view into three points indicated below and the information above each is where the reasoning comes from so no one has to sift through everything to glean my point. The connection between being black and struggling is ubiquitous. You'll find no dearth of prominent black people romantacisizing the struggle to the point that it defines us. However, a keen weakness of our culture compared to others is what our goals tend to be so far as success, especially when it comes to our youth. We just tend to define ourselves along the lines of what we don't have. The majority of us don't have married parents, those of us in urban neighborhoods are very likely growing up in neighborhoods with safety issues or economically depressed communities. It's actually getting to a point where being a high school graduate or not having a criminal record are hallmarks of general success not just assumed fundamentals. That's all certainly true and a sad state of affairs, but that's not my issue. My issue is in how we handle it. We Don't. Atleast not en masse. Just as a culture we've become tribal and short sighted, even to our own detriment. For example, academic excellence is simply something not impressed into the vast majority of black youths. The above article and the references it links show on one hand, a general apathy towards academics in both peer and parental sources among black youths and the corresponding apathy in the actual youths. Even anecdotally I can say for myself school was basically just a place to hang out and see people and do just enough work to slide along to the next grade and I'd venture to state my experience isn't dissimilar to a lot of others. So I think 1 We have to become a people that puts value into academic success and holds those of us who achieve high. To that end my second and much bigger point is that we need to stop actively holding each other back. Among the black community there are black things to be doing. I grew up practically addicted to rpg games and ever since primary school I knew I wanted to be in the military achieved that and hated it but besides the point , so I was the kid that a huge interest in reading, an odd and relatively expansive vocabulary from all the fantasy novels and Baldurs Gate, and wasn't interested in trying drugs or stealing ipods since I didn't want to jeapordize my dream job. Literally the only people that gave me crap were my own, I was the odd guy out Trying to be white . And as I got older the associations became wilder, for example people took me deciding to date white students as somehow confirmation of my trying to be white. Early in high school Obama came into office and I was staunchly against a lot of his stated policies so refused to join in the enthusiasm, clearly I must be self hating became the conclusion. All of these examples not to soapbox my life story but to give just first hand examples of how we can tear each other down. We would shout Racist at any outsider who said that being black meant talking in half slang, voting Democrat, not giving a shit about school, sticking to sisters as dating partners and aspiring just to rap or slang or set up some other sort of hustle. So we shouldn't do it to ourselves, because most people want to be accepted by peers so most people will just adopt the mannerisms they feel they have to. 2 We have to work harder and emphasize that we're all black, not just real blacks and then all the rest. My third and final point is more so about the after effects of the other 2. The environment set up by the first two don't really set up a lot of us for large academic and professional gains. For example I'm a law student, and while not the only one there definitely aren't a lot of other black guys here. If I get bogged down in law school and want to get someone who can empathize or offer advice I can't go to my black peer circle. If I want to use connections to get a summer job none of my parent's friends or my own friend's parents know someone in the legal circle to network me with, there just isn't that big of a net. And if I were for example a Jew or Asian where much vaster percentages of them go on to higher education maybe I'd have college or even graduate level parents who have connections in this arena. Maybe I'd have family friends that weren't just store employees or working at the prison but instead doctors and engineers. The lack of real academic excellence means those of us who do shoot for it and make it are on a bit of an island if we wish to foster bonds with our own. More of us rising though means more opportunities all around. For example if a decade from now I mold myself into a beyond mediocre attorney the next generation of black youths that are for example my friends children, old classmates, family friends and such would have me as a resource to utilize for things such as recommendation letters, advice, job opportunities, connections etc. The more of us that can reach professional heights the better for us all. So, 3 We need to encourage higher professional goals so that it can become progressively easier for those that come after to achieve as there are Deeply apologize that its a bit lengthy tried to be concise and show where I'm coming from all at once. Also sorry if it seems heavily anecdotal, wanted it to be understandable without everyone having to sift through links and graphs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The black community needs to revolutionize our culture if we're going to exit the cultural spiral we're in\n","id":"810fc9a4-ebc5-4ba0-9f75-ebaff2d71755"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How Should Physician-Assisted Death be Handled?<|ARGUMENT|>There are some people who experience long phases of deep sadness and anxiety where they don't see it getting any better but at some point manages to get past it and find things in life that are worth living for. While this may not be the case for everyone, for the ones who this is the case for, having more time to consider can be crucial for them to discover reasons to keep going.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A patients emotional and mental state can radically change with time as the patient may change their perspective with more reflection or through positive influences by their surroundings.\n","id":"78880721-649d-4cdb-b605-e846c25bb61a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've started to form this opinion as of late due to the belief that the human population will max out in the next 30 years, and abortion is the best way to solve it. I came here to hear the argument from people who make sense. My view is open to change obviously for a multitude of reasons I've already devised a point for the counter argument with free will in place, you can't control what people choose to do. You can't force people into abstinence. I need to practice empathy and compassion for the opposite side of the argument I want to diversify my knowledge on the subject so I can form a better opinion on it. Abortion, to me, stands on a moral low ground but is misunderstood by many people. People tend to only argue the ethics of it and don't sympathize for the women who have to go through it. They also often don't want to recognize the multiple situations in which people could be in which is why my opinion has already shifted itself in the past My main point is that abstinence to me clearly shows to be the more effective path to take no sex? No babies. It would not only stop unwanted pregnancy, but unplanned pregnancy as well. I'm open to hearing anything that would change my view. Edit this isn't for implication purposes. It's a hypothetical Edit a lot of people seemed to take this as me preaching anti abortion. I never in this entire post made a point other than the hypocritical premise against abortion. My mind however has been changed thanks to some of you and I now see why abstinence remains only hypothetical and can never truly be implicated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abstinence is a better way to slow population growth than Abortion\n","id":"5b26c5c6-a4d3-4274-a70c-41667e9d7bf7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Tax incentives to businesses are a race to the bottom. If we all stopped giving them businesses would still grow if demand was there. Tax incentives do not create demand for their product service. The majority of incentives simply shift employment from one location to another at the expense of the original location. These should cease immediately and let businesses thrive or fail on their own merits not allow economic development directors to pick winners and losers in local economies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Business incentives only hurt the economy and should cease immediately.\n","id":"65a2deb5-e3b2-4160-a93e-4ad31f9e691d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>Women not going to work or not doing their job at work to emphasise pay inequality or voting rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both the women's movement and civil rights movement had forms of protest that took place at work.\n","id":"1d35a84f-eb4a-4c8b-86a6-aeb594b55986"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>The members of the United Nations agreed on accepting the Responsibility to Protect in the final document of the 2005 World Summit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This notion is different from established national and international practices which assume that nations do actually have responsibilities.\n","id":"024cae68-d233-46b5-a521-6d8dd224395d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>The simplicity, ease of access, and destructive power of a firearm makes it more likely that conflict will escalate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having fewer guns in circulation means society is generally safer.\n","id":"8a19c5ef-f48e-4b7f-90d9-86562874a0df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is my view, and I'm not sure if this is unfair, but., This is not including dating sites, but sites like Reddit, Facebook and the like , where we would not likely make contact in the future, in person. If a person were to take interest in a picture I had up of me, and decided to contact me, they would most likely be turned down., without any chances. I believe that people seeking love, who decides to contact a person not actively posting about finding a relationship is desperate and lonely., People who seek relationships over the internet again, not on dating sites are unsociable in real life, and could possibly lead to something more sinister i.e., stalking is extremely common over the net, blackmail, information then a date in person, though the risks are there too. They can be untrustworthy, and it is more likely they would lie over the internet then to your face, not to mention they can be more shallow and expectations may be higher, if you decided to meet. The relationship is built on nothing but words and was based on shallow ideals. Chemistry could fall apart quickly in person. Should people be given a chance if it's over the internet? Please ignore my username, it was a joke throwaway, now main account. Edit going to sleep now, will be back in the morning c<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Internet relationships will rarely work out, and advances should be disregarded.\n","id":"e94b8d5d-e81a-418d-9dbe-d906eed3c4f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should billionaires be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Any would-be billionaire whose wealth reaches past $900m would, under this system, be incentivised to waste the money on pointless consumption rather than invest it in productive ends. This would cost the economy vast amounts of lost growth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If billionaires were taxed at 100%, they would no longer have interest in investing in their businesses.\n","id":"c90cd21a-713f-4c0e-8427-df558166463e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People make statements all the time about how drugs like LSD and especially DMT change the way you view the world and reveal truths of the universe that you forget about after the high is over. I'm guessing most people will agree with this statement, but I'm curious if anyone would disagree A drug like DMT does not reveal anything about the universe, you just hallucinate and your brain temporarily experiences the same feelings that you would experience had you actually discovered a secret about the universe. As I type this out I realize this may be an obvious fact, but I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts to the contrary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Psychedelic drugs don't enlighten the user and they don't reveal any secrets of the universe, the drug simply triggers the false feeling of discovery in your brain.\n","id":"861ddf9b-228f-449b-b2af-beb8f9d5e17a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The mark uses the information presented to them and makes what appears to be a rational decision. It may even seem to be their own idea, but the information isn't what it appears to be or it isn't the whole picture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The glory of a good confidence trick is that it's not about illogic, it's about misdirection and misinformation.\n","id":"05ab4d85-0e26-4118-a634-11230e8642a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Although some doctors promote reconstruction, as some studies suggest it improves women\u2019s quality of life, a systematic review of 28 cases found that women who \u2018go flat\u2019 had no worse outcomes and, in some cases, even fared better in quality of life, body image and sex.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On the contrary, a more progressive stance and the desexualisation of breasts can be more helpful. An increasingly high percentage of women 44% in 2014 choose to \u2018go flat and have no breast reconstruction.\n","id":"3e413e47-5bc4-43f7-88c4-71bb61278f0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>The problem with revisionist history is that it pretends to know what is best by today's standards by ignoring and wanting to change how we got to today's standards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Removing racist language in a historical piece of literature could constitute historical revisionism.\n","id":"3ebc0d5e-0afd-4f4d-8d38-f43f9c048302"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like this could easily turn into a rant, so i'll try to just make a few points The term everyone is beautiful has always bothered me, for 2 main reasons not everyone is beautiful. Some people are just plain old ugly. Are they still valueable human beings ? Yes. But are they beautiful ? No. It places too much value on appearance. You might not be beautiful, but you can still be funny, smart, kind, compassionate and all that. We can't realistically all be beautiful. Just like not everyone can be smart. I suck at playing the guitar, and i'll never be a talented musician. People dont tell me everyone is a musician, you're really good in your own way They tell me Hey, you might suck at playing Music, but you're pretty good in school. what is beauty even ? You see, there have been varying ideals across culture and time periods, but they all had something in Common. Clear skin, a healthy body. Youth and fertility for women, strenght for men. How funny, it's almost as if we're genetically hardwired to find youth, health and fertility attractive I just Think it's stupid that we're calling everyone beautiful to protect peoples feels. Maybe we should shift focus, and make people realise that it's not the end of the world if not some gorgeus model.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"we should stop saying \"everyone is beautiful \"\n","id":"b5244dea-427f-4cd6-be02-42d79baba745"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>In having a child, parents bring into the world a being who would not otherwise exist. Failing to ensure that being has the best chance possible permanently constrains that being's quality of life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetic enhancements enable parents to make life easier and more convenient for their children.\n","id":"1d49761f-eed5-4941-83e7-768ac81dcdbb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen countless comments and posts both on and off reddit, and in real life as well talking about how horrible Caitlyn Jenner is for killing someone and that she should be charged with some crime normally manslaughter . I've tried talking with some of these people and haven't gotten a real defense for their claims before, and at this point I am more curious than anything as to why so many people feel this way. From what I have read she was going below the speed limit with the flow of traffic, a slight bit slower than the car she crashed into, and wasn't on her phone at the time. Here is a link for those of you who haven't already read those details. Since involuntary manslaughter is the main thing I've seen people say she should have been charged with, I'll focus on that. According to this site involuntary manslaughter is an unintentional killing that results from recklessness or criminal negligence, or from an unlawful act that is a misdemeanor or low level felony. LegalMatch defines criminal negligence as any type of conduct that \u201cgrossly deviates\u201d from normal, reasonable standards of an ordinary person. And legal dictionary says that recklessness is The state of mind accompanying an act that either pays no regard to its probably or possibly injurious consequences, or which, though foreseeing such consequences, persists in spite of such knowledge. I don't think it's reasonable to say she was paying no regard to her actions since she not only was going below the speed limit, but slower than the car she crashed into. So I don't think 'reckless' would fit in this situation. Also, seeing as she wasn't on her phone and she was going around the same speed as everyone else thus not grossly deviating from what an ordinary person would to , I think that shows that she wasn't being criminally negligent. While everyone should have been going slower, this sounds more like a tragic accident than a crime. If any of the definitions I found are incorrect then feel free to link me to the correct definition and I'll edit my post to fix it. Please leave the footnote below the following line, but remember to delete this sentence by replacing it with the body of your post. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think Caitlyn Jenner deserves to be charged with a crime for the fatal wreck she caused.\n","id":"e34aa33b-7b39-48f8-8133-ab962fa640ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>79% of Americans believe that Internet companies have a responsibility to step in when harassing behaviour occurs, giving Internet companies the power and expectation from consumers to deal with it appropriately.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consumers both want and expect these companies to respond actively, particularly those claiming to be 'values-orientated This makes them the right parties to make such decisions.\n","id":"a32a9fdf-a463-4118-8c9a-bca4fbeb0c03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Withdrawing from Iraq<|ARGUMENT|>The US and its allies, having invested so much into Iraq, should reap the benefits of Iraq's oil reserves. Benefiting from these oil reserves, with contracts and preferred relations with Iraqi suppliers, is important to US and coalition interests.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Withdrawing would be counter to US and allied oil-interests in Iraq.\n","id":"c3b6202f-7462-4824-b45c-5fc5f29635ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ethereum and Programmatic Proof-of-Work ProgPow<|ARGUMENT|>Proposes a fix to a non-existing problem hashrate went down a lot since ProgPoW was proposed, ASICs not economic anymore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unclear claims where we are waiting to hear back from the original authors.\n","id":"0e27f2bc-ef0b-4e95-8e49-47baf8e0f77c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>The additional purchasing power that net beneficiaries gain from UBI has to be taken from those who are net payers. The latter group's freedom is reduced because they have less control over the fruits of their labor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Freedom can be seen as the absence of enforcement. A UBI requires the enforcement of taxation, which by definition, impairs freedom.\n","id":"c285859f-7e3e-478d-b1ec-b685b3587cab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ethereum and Programmatic Proof-of-Work ProgPow<|ARGUMENT|>The Ethereum Cat Herders and core devs are supporting ProgPow, which is why they agreed including it in Istanbul and being rolled out early 2020. Meeting 52 Meeting 70<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most people with deep knowledge about Ethereum and with its best interest at heart are in favor of ProgPow. We should trust their judgement.\n","id":"c3e6be49-948d-4379-aa8c-a654e3d54843"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I apologize in advance if this doesn\u2019t conform exactly to some other  posts, it\u2019s my first one. As a home owner of 2 years, who does most of my own work, I have needed numerous permits. In my experience, when an inspector comes through, assuming that they actually do come through, they only ever check things in the most superficial way. For example, the first thing needed in order for us to move in was an occupancy permit. The inspector slapped a sticker on the breaker box saying that it had been inspected as he went through. Upon inspecting it myself shortly after, I found standing water in the box from a frayed service cable, most of the breakers were double tapped, and the box was thoroughly rusted out. Clearly not safe for use, and as I replaced all the wiring in the entire house, It was apparent by the number of melted wires and other signs of heat damage that this was only the tip of the iceberg. There were numerous other safety issues, beyond the electrical system, as well, including obvious structural failures. A more recent example. I just put in a fence and the permit fee was 20 of the entire project cost. So what is the fee for? Apparently, just for applying for the permit as no one is seemingly going to inspect it and things that one would think the township would check, like that you haven\u2019t crossed the property line, are specifically listed on their permit as being a civil matter between owners and not their responsibility. As I am now looking to build a deck, I\u2019ll need another permit. But as I\u2019m a few feet short of the 50\u2019 needed off the back of my house to build even a small deck, I\u2019ll need to request an exception. No problem, I just need to give them a non refundable 600 fee, in addition to the permit fee, to move things along. I really want to believe that these things have a purpose and that it\u2019s better for the safety of everyone to have things inspected, but experience has demonstrated time and again that this may not be the case in my area. My view is that if the risk of someone becoming significantly injured from a project on private property is minimal, it should not require a permit and that it should be on the permit office to prove the risk, not the homeowner. Furthermore, based on the lax inspections I\u2019ve witnessed repeatedly, I feel that if inspection is required and the project passes, then the local government should assume some liability for any failure during normal use.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Building permits for small home projects are not much better than bribes to officials, and for the most part, don\u2019t seem to be necessary for public safety\n","id":"2dafe4df-92d7-486b-834f-a1fb959f45b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>There is one occasion when David took a census of his men in order to count how many could fight in the armies of Israel. God punishes David for this action. In one copy of the story, we are told Satan told David to do take the census, but in the other, it was God. The only logical deduction is that god and satan are two faces for the same being.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The same stories appear in different places of the bible with significant changes, including the interchangeability of satan and god as the antagonist. If the bible is accepted as \"the breath of god, holy, perfect, and completely true,\" then god and satan must be different faces for the same being.\n","id":"3fe591bb-91e8-4f35-b0fb-c48d88117271"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many people say to never drink alone or that they only drink in company. Why is it considered better? Natrually it won't work for morphine or heroine, but those are a bit different situations. I'll be wrting with alcohol and cannabis in mind, but there are other drugs that could be considered soft enough for popular even if occasional use. x200B Addiction wise it's all about why. Barring physical dependence only reasons for taking are important. If a user has a strong urge to do it or just can't function without his dose, that's addiction. If someone manages his emotions this way except possible medicating for eg. anxiety it's worrying since it's how addictions are formed. But if someone smokes or drinks on weekend, and watches a movie, or goes for a walk or whatever, then it's taken as a mood booster, and it's not different than being in a company of others. x200B There are drugs nobody cares about really, like coffee. It's a mild or not so mild if abused stimulant that can be slightly addictive, but nobody ever says that drinking coffee alone is wrong. It's there to stimulate the user and improve mood, whether that's at work, at a social meeting, or when alone. x200B I think that when people say drinking alcohol in company is ok, it's just a stupid societal norm serving as an excuse to get drunk with friends and feel good about that. In the end it all comes down to being influenced by a drug, at it's core it's always just about boosting mood.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"drinking and smoking cannabis or taking some other drugs alone is NOT \"worse\" than drinking with others.\n","id":"54dfb52f-69d7-44ba-87bc-f705661d717d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If there is other life in the universe, that's mostly bad news for humans. They might be hostile, they will likely save resources to themselves, and we will have to deal with sharing everything. Being alone is better because we aren't threatened by outsiders and we get the whole universe to ourselves. Why would we want to discover aliens? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that it would be a good thing to be alone in the universe.\n","id":"3349eba4-a87d-4ccb-b31a-148148cc5543"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please understand that I have no hatred for transgender people, and I will not force this view upon them or anyone. I have rather liberal views, really I'm ready to accept a lot of things But I have trouble understanding the reasoning behind gender dysphoria and all of that. I identify as my biological sex, yet I really feel more 'feminine' than 'masculine'. Yet I don't really believe in either term due to their outdated definitions and all of that nonsense. I'm not a very spiritual person. And I don't believe in a lot 'outside' of what we can percieve. Yes I believe there's more to the world, but I don't believe in anything beyond biological sex. Of course it's not binary. Intersex people very obviously exist, that's just scientific fact. I'm starting to go off topic here, but I'm not sure how to elaborate on all of this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe in gender, other than biological sex. As in, I don't believe in any set gender norms\/the existance of a non-biological gender.\n","id":"a2c0d6ed-5df3-4859-8fb5-2a8bd52fb13f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>D D, while it's managed to achieve pretty good cultural penetration i.e. lots of people know what it is , tends to get a pretty bad rap. It's associated with basement dwelling, BO heavy obese teens and college students, particularly men. I'm actually not going to argue with that impression so much, because frankly I'm not convinced it isn't based in truth actually, I think it once was, but isn't as much anymore . What I will argue is that this is irrelevant to what a game like D D actually is, and what it offers a group of people sitting around a table with beer and pizza. I believe that if everyone were actually exposed to it, beyond just the basic idea and the cultural stigma, it would be widely played it already is more widely played than it was twenty years ago, but that's not the same . For anyone who's never played it, or anything like it, here's the basic rundown I tell you that you walk into the living room of a house. There's a table with a book on it, a door that's closed so you can't see what it leads to, and an open doorway through which you can see the next room, which is larger and fancier. You can choose to interact with any of these given things\u2014but more importantly, you can do anything else . You can jump out the window. You can search the couch cushions for change. You can set fire to the whole house. And I will be obligated to provide more material for you regardless of what you choose to do. The story proceeds in our collective mind's eye with literally limitless choice and narrative flexibility. The only thing governing your actions, keeping this from being a game of straight up make believe, is that there's a set of skills with accompanying numerical levels to determine whether you actually can do the thing you want. Are you perceptive enough to find those coins? Can you strike a match without burning yourself? You can peruse the book, but are you smart enough for it? Your number with that skill, along with a dice roll to add some randomness, tells you if you pull it off. There's an element of chance and risk. Since you can't do everything you want, what you do choose suddenly becomes much more meaningful. You have to know what you're good at, what your odds are, and what possible results your actions will have. It's basically a gigantic thought experiment, a hypothetical situation that you get to navigate. Ever become lucid at the end of a dream and wish you could stay? That's sort of what D D offers. Sort of. For any given element of what the game requires, there's already a mainstream activity that revels in it. Do you like crunching statistics in the service of a non real competition? Play fantasy football. Do you like to pretend to be a character? Play a murder mystery game\u2014or, you know, act in something. Do you like rolling dice? Play a very, very wide variety of the things. Do you like dragons and swords? Watch Game of Thrones . What sets D D apart from more socially acceptable pastimes isn't really in its actual execution, but in the demographic we associate with it, and our desire to not be of that demographic . But here's the thing you can play sports without being stupid, perform on stage without being a prima donna. Who you are doesn't depend on how you spend your free time. We all intuitively understand this with most activities, but the view of D D is so strong it makes us forget. If you take away the medieval dressing, and put yourself in the picture instead of the fat, pimply nerd, you get something not much different from, say, Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit. D D is a fairly complex example, and I use it only because it's the most famous, but there are others that share the fundamentals while being much simpler and more casual. Edit I've bolded this due to several responses related to time commitment, although I would again argue that the time you spend on fantasy football or binge watching Game of Thrones is no less than what you'd spend on a game like this one. Boiled down to its essentials, the game is just a shared storytelling. I ask you to interact with an imaginary landscape, you explore that landscape with total freedom, and we both rely on dice to keep us from knowing how our own story ends. I'm a writer, so while I enjoy a normal, healthy social life, I am still drawn to D D because it's the only way for me to engage the same parts of the brain I use in writing, but with my friends. I even loathe reading and writing fantasy, but I still love D D for what it offers me creatively. There are a lot of reasons you could be interested in it, and they aren't all Because I can't get laid on a Saturday night. I think if everyone understood this, it would be no less common to see it on people's shelves than any of your standard board games.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If people fully understood games in the vein of Dungeons &amp; Dragons, they would be much more mainstream\n","id":"f28c1c05-bf55-4e2f-aa1a-71e7d0ad7d57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand the right to life argument against abortions, but I don't understand how this argument could be applied to a fetus that will do nothing except drain the parents' and state's resources. As difficult as is it raising children when they're healthy, special needs children require far more specialized attention ranging from school programs, special teachers, therapists, and possibly even multiple surgeries which may or may not solve their problems. These children must grow up being a burden on their families, possibly driving their parents bankrupt and or divorced. And, if the child lives to adulthood, they may never cease to be a burden on the state. Why is it wrong to terminate a pregnancy if a fetus is found to be malformed? Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it is morally reprehensible to bring a handicapped or physically\/mentally deformed child into the world.\n","id":"209ee023-068c-404a-b7c8-c1a783cd8a01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>As long as the average person obtains all their information from biased or incomplete sources and continues to thrive off of severe confirmation bias, a system that gives greater representation to rural areas is guaranteed to be skewed by whatever prevalent confirmation bias exists in those areas, which tends to be uninformed conservativism based on shallow appeals to fear and faith. This gives conservativism an edge in an electoral college system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electoral college system results in unfair outcomes for voters.\n","id":"0801c633-8379-45de-97a3-620c0b534bd0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For example As we all know, Donald Trump has recently called the mainstream media America's enemy. And as we also all know, their was a substantial bit of outrage that stemmed from those comments. Now I'm not a Trump supporter by any stretch of the imagination, but the thing is, that belief, in and of itself, isn't entirely wrong. The stereotype of the mainstream media jumping to conclusions and embellishing stories didn't just come out of nowhere. This has been going on for a while. And that's what frustrates me the most about his administration. By aligning themselves with certain beliefs that may have some semblance of a logical standpoint, they ensure that no one will give those beliefs the time of day ever again, due to their incompetence and sheer foolish behavior. We tend to judge people based on their individual agency first before we assess their beliefs. And if that individual agency is one that we find unfavorable, that bad taste that it leaves in our mouths will inevitably preside over their beliefs in our minds whenever we assess said beliefs. Thus, it becomes impossible to objectively talk about anything in this country. That's what I fear the most right now After the Trump administration leaves office, whether it's sooner or later, they will leave behind in their stead a bunch of subjects, beliefs, viewpoints and standpoints that can no longer be touched, because they have become irradiated and untouchable by what this current administration has done. All those beliefs will be pigeonholed in a Chernobyl esque ground zero, which will be encased in a vast zone of excursion that politicians and thousands of people will go through hell and highwater to distance themselves from. And in the future, anyone who takes up even a smidge of a viewpoint that is somewhat similar to the viewpoints Trump has expressed, will be immediately ostracized, dismissed, miss labeled and marginialized because many who are disgruntled and rightfully so, in many cases will want to nip those seeds in the bud so that there is no chance of us getting another Trump again. I'm not a conservative I'm someone who's somewhat stuck in between, who agrees and disagrees with just about every party line of thought rhetoric. It's complicated , but I feel horrifically bad for them right now, even some who voted for Trump, because not all of them wanted him or Clinton anyway. After the Trump presidency passes over, they might as well all be wearing targets on their backs. Not to mention, unless a new party rises to balance out the gov't to ensure that America doesn't do a 180 swing to a liberal ideology too much of anything is never good. , the Republican party may never gain its footing again. And that leaves the left again, nothing against them to do whatever they want without taking much criticism, because everyone will say hey, what they're doing is nothing compared to what Trump did. What his administration is doing right now may be damn near egregious in certain aspects, but when that administration leaves, expect bipartisanship and difference of opinions to go right along with them. Forced ideological homogeneity will come even faster to take their place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The true perilous consequence of Donald Trump's presidency will not come now. It will come after he leaves.\n","id":"d94117dd-99fd-4d9f-ba96-7d2a4677cfc2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The media and Facebook are constantly referring to negative incidents between Blacks and Whites as instances of racism. I disagree. Let me start with racist whites do exist. There are Whites who hate all black people, no matter how proper or educated, no matter if they are native or immigrant Black as long as the person has that skin color, there is an inherent hate there. That\u2019s what I classify as racism, and is completely unacceptable and immoral. But these type of Whites are in the minority. Most Whites have at least one black friend, which shows most are at least open minded to being around a person of color. Most Whites are not afraid of rich African Americans. Most Whites aren\u2019t afraid of your regular properly speaking middle class African American. They are afraid of African Americans who conform to \u201cghetto culture.\u201d By ghetto culture\u201d I mean ebonics speaking, pants sagging, constantly fighting, cursing in every other sentence, dressed down, \u201chood\u201d that may or not come with rudeness, aggressively and lack of manners. But if a White person says I don\u2019t want to be around an African American who embodies or personifies ghetto culture, they are classified as racist. But take this When I was in college I met a girl who was Nigerian and had immigrated from as a child from Nigeria. This girl would go on and on about how she hated ghetto American blacks. She complained about how they could barely speak proper English, were violent, didn't value education they way Nigerians did, etc.\u201d If she sensed an American black person was \u201cghetto , she would not want to be around them. Apparently, this is a common sentiment in certain Black immigrant groups from Africa and the Caribbean. They have no problems with your average African American. But refuse to associate with nor want their children to date marry an African American who they perceive are \u201cghetto\u201d or \u201chood\u201d. This is shocking because you wouldn\u2019t think one Black group would be negative about another group of the African diaspora who shares similar struggles in America. Most importantly, if a White person said the same thing, they would be classified as a racist. That\u2019s when I started realizing that if both Whites and Black immigrants feel this way, the problem can\u2019t be racism. It\u2019s classism and aversion to certain behavior that is associated with \u201cLower class behavior.\u201d It\u2019s very similar to how middle class White people are afraid of poor Whites. I am not condoning classism. I think it\u2019s a facet in America that needs to be dealt with, especially since it impacts the historically disadvantage minority groups the most. But if that is the problem, then that is how we should address the problems so we can become an integrated society. I understand this is a difficult topic to speak about. But this is something that really blew my mind and made me think. I put this on , because if there is a bigger picture I am missing or if there is an erroneous assumption I made with how I came to the conclusion about classism not racism hypothesis, then we should speak about it and educate others on it. Definitions African Americans or American blacks Americans who are descended from American slavery and have lived in the United States for hundreds of years. Black immigrants Newly immigrated Afro descended persons from African countries and the Caribbean. They have their own cultures, histories, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most White Americans are not racist against African-Americans.\n","id":"eb8e7292-630a-4ded-b836-b24caede18a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is one of those interesting gray topics. I dont think Turks should be considered Europeans because the Turkic people are their own thing. Europe for the most part is Indo European stock, a massive and varied family of languages that Turkish is not a part of. Furthermore, Turkish people can't be considered middle eastern either. Their culture and language are distinct. Sure, the Ottomans ruled parts of Europe and the Middle East, but so to did the Mughals a Turkic empire rule India. This does not make them Indian. I think Turkish people are not European or Middle Eastern, but part of their own subset of humanity. Also due to Turkey's geographic location, being situated literally as a bridge between regions, Turkey is its own thing, not a part of Europe or the Middle East. In previous empires, it held parts of Europe and the Middle East, but present day Turkey is a part of neither region. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey should not be considered a part of Europe.\n","id":"35a45cf9-059d-4118-a591-9442f79678ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm familiar with the common stance that violence and the threatening violence in this day and age is primitive and should always only be used as a last resort. And Yes, I agree that full on face to face encounters where one person is trying to intimidate the other should not be part of the workplace. The situation could be dealt with through much more pragmatic and civil ways. However. In my former workplace I tried as hard as I could to have civil discussions with the guy I was working with. It had absolutely no effect because he still just saw me as a pushover. I even went to the higher up manager and spoke to him about the unrealistic pressure he was putting me under. This is despite that I was the best worker in that department , It just wasn't enough, no matter what worker he had working with him, he had major anger issues that boiled over and got taken out on the employees under him. It got to me to the point that I either had to leave the job or put the guy in his place, seeing that no higher ups in the company wanted to deal with it.When the area manager basically just said that we need to get along , I decided to try a different approach. As soon as the guy started trying to push me and bully me around the workplace because he was in a bad mood, I grabbed him by the neck and pushed him as hard as I could whilst looking straight into his eyes. I Somehow held myself from actually punching him but I let him know in no uncertain terms that if he thinks I'm just some wimp he can push around then he better get out of the shop right now and fight me 1 on 1 to prove it. I was in full on rage mode. lol. This all sounds pretty corny, but I was at the point where I had to stand up for myself and let the guy know that I'm not taking anymore of his bullying attitude ever again. It was either that or just leave the job. But it was my first job ever and I couldn't afford to lose it. Apparently I did the wrong thing. I welcome you to Change My View? Because if the same situation happened again I would do the exact same thing again, because it was damn effective. It worked spectacularly. The guy completely backed down and was as nice as pie to me ever since. Whilst I hate having to get to that point with someone, I feel that there's some people you cannot reach without violence or the threat of violence, it's literally the only language they speak. Most people would say that violence or the threat of violence is always wrong, but if this same situation was to arise again I would take the exact same recourse because it's the only effective strategy. Change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Threatening someone with violence in the workplace if they are 'bullying' you is OK.\n","id":"984fce47-b34c-42ff-a3b2-d2122c5e1f94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Journalists Publish Hacked Data?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if some information is of intense public interest, the entire data set often contains highly personal information that is embarrassing or privacy-breaching for innocent bystanders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Data dumps' often contain overwhelming amounts of information that make publishing them incredibly risky.\n","id":"6775aec5-6c84-49b6-a172-3543b0424c2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I was 15 16, I thought Socialism, then later, Communism, was the best thing ever invented. I later took the time to read most of the Communist manifesto, studied a bit of the history of Communism, and then read western philosophy about radical individualism, existentialism, and anarchy limited government. I've abandoned deontology, and feel no absolutist conception of civic duty towards my fellow man. I can't help but find the idea of politically mandatory equalization disgusting. I hate the idea of economic rights, since it means the death of individual rights. I've grown to despise the idea of prizing society over the individual. I don't want to blindly hold myself to my ideology though, so I'm willing to hear out the other side. What about Socialism or Communism do you think justifies it? Is it really fair to expect people to want to do high stress jobs with no incentive? Why is society so damn important? Edit Thanks for all the well thought out answers guys. To all the people downvoting my opinions that I've posted respectfully, go right ahead and keep hating on everything you disagree with if that's what you think stimulating discussions are about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Communism and Socialism are horrid.\n","id":"06c050e2-a784-4210-beb7-d01f5db9ccdd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>Reincarnation can be understood, usefully, in purely psychological terms if you strip out the religious and supernatural language: it is the habitual and failing attempt to perpetuate a stable or fixed self-concept as a way of avoiding suffering but this, in turns, leads to the continuation of suffering. A non-religious version of the wheel of Samsara if you will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reincarnation is not the soul's, or a being's \"path\" after death.\n","id":"377969f1-5b7e-4aa6-9e9d-e2242bbe149a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The reason i have this opinion is because i believe it can be used as a crutch in arguments. If a nihilist is debating, saying that something should or should not which would be weird for someone who thinks nothing matters be that way, then if they are losing the argument the nihilist can just say Well, actually i am just a nihilist, so nothing matters anyway. This should always be clearly announced beforehand. Of course, i think all people who plan to debate should state their position first. But nihilism can be used as a way of avoiding the outcome. It seems rather cheap to only mention it after you lose. Looking to hear interesting opinions EDIT Definition of Nihilism from Merriam Webster a a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless Nihilism is a condition in which all ultimate values lose their value. \u2014Ronald H. Nash b a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths Definition of Hedonism from Wikipedia Hedonism is a school of thought that argues that pleasure and happiness are the primary or most important intrinsic goods and the aim of human life. 1 A hedonist strives to maximize net pleasure pleasure minus pain , but when having finally gained that pleasure, happiness remains stationary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nihilists should always announce that they are nihilists before they argue for or against something.\n","id":"9a64911a-1869-4c50-9397-d015bf94bcc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now before you downvote me to oblivion let me make my point I know talking about the colour of the upvote button is the virtual equivalent of beating a dead horse, but I just thought I'd say it because it popped into my mind a few hours ago, but It's been settled. We've been over this before and the colour of the arrow has been proven it's orangered. People have checked it, multiple times. Here's the thing though even if it hadn't been proved yet, there is absolutely no way that anyone who can see colours properly would legitimately think the upvote button is red. It's unfathomable to me how you can look at it and say it is even though it's more clearly an orange ish colour. So either Reddit is severely exaggerating the number of people who actually believe this or there is a big number of people who want to perpetuate the argument for the joke of it, even though it has already lost any comedic value it ever had.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No one on Reddit actually believes the upvote button is red and anyone who says they do are either colourblind or baiting for an \"argument\"\n","id":"d5eba429-a30a-4f1f-8f61-f84f70d5458b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Long story short I was involved and employed at a Christian church when I was 22. I had been catholic my whole life leading up to that. The experiences I had at that church made me hate all organized religions and has made me seriously question if God exists at all. Without going in to detail, I went from a casually religious person who wasn\u2019t diehard in church every Sunday but believed in God and considered myself religious to a person who will never step foot in a church again, who will never pray, and who will never raise their kids under a \u201creligion.\u201d All because of the actions of a group of Christian people who were actively trying to \u201csave\u201d me and make me accept Jesus and all that. So many people go through the same things I did. They are curious about God or religion so they wind up at a Christian church and come out worse than they were to begin with. Most people find Christians make them feel like they are worth less than they are and feel constantly judged. My experience happened shortly after losing my mom to cancer and I was extremely vulnerable. I was taken advantage of and all of my self esteem was stripped away, all in the effort to make me accept Jesus. Perhaps it\u2019s not Christians themselves, but their methods? Or the fact that it\u2019s so ingenuine? I heard Christians calling non Christians \u201cprojects.\u201d And they literally turn more people off from religion entirely as opposed to bringing people to God. I also think they put too much emphasis on what you aren\u2019t allowed to be do gay, living with a boyfriend, listener of secular music instead of making you feel accepted as who and what you are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christians are pushing people away from religion with their actions, instead of achieving their goal of evangelism ironically.\n","id":"5babe999-2d88-4b58-9ac6-44276fe0059a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Black Church is predominantly Christian, and teaches a flavor of theology that includes concepts such as being rewarded for humility and noble stoicism with eventual favors from the creator of the universe and an afterlife free from suffering 'pie in the sky when you die' emotional investment in the concept of an external savior who not only promised the original afterlife arrangement but also is coming back soon most Christians believe Jesus will return in their lifetime to right all wrongs forevermore, punish the wicked, and reward the good. This belief is inherently poisonous to any person or group of people who hope to attain equal status in a society which until very recently legally and socially viewed them as a non human species who could be owned like cattle or farm equipment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that rather than bolstering the cause as is commonly believed, the influence of religion among African Americans impeded and delayed the civil rights movement by many decades and continues to hinder progress towards true racial equality in the United States.\n","id":"d991638c-dd2f-429f-8527-c69ce8e26883"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I always hear from family, friends and pretty much anyone I know that Nirvana is an amazing band and that Kurt Cobain was some kind of misunderstood genius. Although I do agree that Kurt Cobain was a great guitar player and had a good voice, I find Nirvana's lyrics to be nothing more than incoherent, unrelated words that happen to rhyme well. Lyrics such as I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black make absolutely no sense, however they are often overanalyzed by fans. I love music, and would like to be able to a least appreciate Nirvana's musical talent if not enjoy listening to them, so please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nirvana is one the most overrated groups of all time.\n","id":"63e49a1d-8c15-4155-bff0-06e16e5d635d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should parents perpetuate myths like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny to their children?<|ARGUMENT|>This method might be more exciting and engaging for children than methods not involving the Tooth Fairy or magic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For younger children, the Tooth Fairy could be a better motivator than other techniques.\n","id":"bb8cfd4e-17a8-4df2-a6c5-1116c745d42d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the term smart I am referring to the combination of knowledge knowing something with familiarity gained through experience and intelligence the ability to apply why you have learned . my own interpretations of the definitions To me book smart refers to academic achievements and success or how well you did in school etc. Street smart is almost instinctive its more than just common sense, it is being able to adapt and change with your environment. I am not saying you can't have both, but they are two different measures of intellect. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Street Smart and Book Smart are two different types of intelligence.\n","id":"dd3cba16-f617-4f38-9a5c-b142fabf41ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which distributed ledger technologies are the most relevant?<|ARGUMENT|>Digital currency has made it easier for crossborder remittances Providing perfect anonymity is vital for people to be able to do this safely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blockchains that provide perfect anonymity by zero-knowledge proofs e.g. Zcash.\n","id":"19a69a7c-4b5b-4b9b-baf2-d88c3c239333"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I've been reading a few of the responses in this sub these days, and after a lifetime of being curious I finally decided to bring the issue to you American famillies just don't make sense to me. People seem to think their responsibilities as parents end when the child goes to college university or even when the child is of working age. And I used to be able to grasp this cultural difference as a tradeoff oh well they take care of their children less, but they don't expect to be taken care of when they grow older in return But I keep seeing those comments as to why it is bad to shelter their children from their adult responsibilities. How they will not develop character. But this just seems like nonsense to me, because university education for those who want it or any kind of apprentinceship for a craft, is important for character development and the future career oportunities your kid may have. If you can help, even a little, and you don't it's a consious choice and not for their own good. In my mind. It just doesn't make sense to me. And you don't even have free tuition in your universities. So what am I missing? Have I got this wrong? Is this only a vocal minority and the majority helps their children through?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't understand why American families will their children to their own fate\n","id":"3ae2f968-41b9-493f-b862-9f2f194b792d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am nonreligious this post is not written out of animus toward atheists. I will also go ahead and say that atheism per se is not a religion it is the lack of belief in a god. I am referring to the new atheism movement, which is much more that just mere atheism. First off Something does not require belief in a deity in order to be considered religious. Religion can manifest itself in many ways, such as a set of philosophies and beliefs among a group of people. I agree with Neil DeGrasse Tyson when he says that it's weird that the word atheist even exists. We don't go telling people we are nongolfers or that dogs are noncats. I get it, religion is a big thing and atheist describes someone who isn't apart of that. But, I think it's really odd to actually identity so strongly as something that you are NOT. I am a non Muslim. I don't identify as a non Muslim nor do I go to non Muslim events in my city. So, New atheism is a spiced up version of antitheism, and the attitude is displayed pretty accurately on r atheism. Just take a look at its wikipedia article The movement is pretty much based off the writings of people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, etc. But this isn't just a group of people on the internet. This group holds events all the time. Rallies, conventions, and the like. These events can always been seen on the r atheism sidebar. Hell, in 2012, new atheism people held a Reason Rally in Washington where they had a bunch of people speak about how rational and atheist they are and expressed their disdain for religion and especially Christianity. Speakers talked about how X and Y about religion is awful and don't get me wrong, the anti gay, anti science stuff annoys me too , and they went on to talk about how much of an asshole the God of the Bible is. People rant about how much they hate something they don't even believe exists. I find this all really ridiculous. A huge movement of people so strongly identifying as something they are NOT. They are guided by these books written by these atheist public figures and, when they get together, hardly appear different from religious people the content is just different, but it does seem pretty dogmatic at times being that it is so focused on religion or the lack thereof. Why do so many of these people so heavily identify as something they are not? Again, I am nonreligious so this isn't out of disdain toward atheists. Also, belief in a god is NOT required for something to be considered religious. Please . Edit My view has changed. Thanks for the clarifications, they were very helpful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"New Atheism\" is a religious movement.\n","id":"2028b89f-158f-4376-bce6-f6c9f2bcb1b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The UK Education System Consider An Overhaul?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents will be encouraged to think about whether the system is supporting their children in becoming happy, healthy and caring adults.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It will make everyone think about the failings of the current system.\n","id":"2b3c1a55-39f6-497b-ba20-8efc0698c991"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Children Learn About Gender Identity And Sexual Orientation In School?<|ARGUMENT|>More students would know about LGBTQ+ and prevent hate and extreme crimes against people who identify as LGBTQ+. It would also lower the 33% LGBTQ+ being bullied at school and prevent further harrasment<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Learning about gender identity and sexual orientation in health classes in school could promote a more accepting environment and reduce bullying.\n","id":"f91406be-d37c-4bd8-a1a1-ac3ebdf15f1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is not a ban of Tobacco nicotane, although optimally they should be banned completely. However, I recognize that many people are addicted to it and banning it completely would empower the black market. However, the main purpose of what I'm proposing is to stop second hand smoke. It's simply not fair that another person will be exposed to a health risk just because another person wants to smoke. Public smoking laws are helpful, but this will stop any risk of disease from passive smoking for example, a child cannot decide if his parents will smoke in his house or not. He can't just walk away from home, so he must face a cancer risk without choice in the matter . In addition, this will lower the amount of tobacco users, since e cigs are expensive and tobacco chewing sniffing has a stigma attached that last one might change, but it will matter in the short run . Also, kids will probably always want to try a new drug, but if Cigarettes are banned, they'll want them even more, right? Wrong I believe that kids will stay away from them, since they will look for something with immediate psychoactive effects, such as marijuana or alcohol. Tobacco's effects are mostly noticeable after extended use, along with the addictive need. If tobacco is as hard to get as marijuana, people would rather spend their money on marijuana, which is non addictive or, at least, far less addictive than tobacco . This should be interesting, so Change My View EDIT Well, I have done a lot of thinking on the subject, and I think that maybe banning isn't the answer. I'd still like to stop passive smoking though Perhaps a sort of tobacco caf\u00e9 like the marijuana coffee shops in the Netherlands. No one specific changed my view though, so no deltas. Thanks for the talk though, 10 10 would discuss again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Cigarettes, Cigars, Pipe tobacco and any other device that causes second hand smoke should be banned.\n","id":"4f0689d9-33e9-466f-93ef-41c0bf85e8b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Having a large number of candidates means there is a lot of media focus given to people who are unlikely to become president. This takes time away from important policy debates and the candidates that are more realistic possibilities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under a popular vote, the US would be swamped with candidates. Every group with an ideological or major policy interest would field a candidate, hoping that their candidate would win a plurality and become the President.\n","id":"3f17ad1a-3d05-4138-855e-62714f90b9cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump currently has an approval rating of less than 40%, a historically low approval rating amongst recent US Presidents. By staying away from Trump, Democrats can use that low approval rating to win future elections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Granting Trump legislative victories will simply make it harder for Democrats to win mid-term elections in 2018 and the White House in 2020.\n","id":"b4499667-3fdd-47ff-8cc8-fb77d5c4c7b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the article, it says that the men responsible said that they did it because they did it due to safety issues, since the boulder was unstable. But I do not think that that should matter. I believe that even if they had just been toppling it for shits and giggles, that is 100 ok. I do not think that it should be illegal to deface national parks. Who cares? Why should I care? I feel that it is perfectly acceptable to have a little fun. . EDIT To clarify my position, I do not feel that national parks should be preserved.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it is 100% fine to topple a boulder in a park, regardless of how old it is, as hikers featured on CNN article in description did.\n","id":"04406b20-aa47-4afb-829f-8886092831a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>If one's subjective moral opinion is the ultimate arbiter of morality, then when a person believes they have done something \"wrong\" or \"immoral\", they have only violated their own internal standard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Relative morality cannot explain why any person would ever consider something that they did to be immoral or wrong.\n","id":"38554050-cef8-4948-a170-0ce271f7a2a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Chapo Trap House, a popular leftist podcast, has recently released a book with some of their views. In the book, they say the following gt When freed from the soul crushing system of wage labor, what we used to call work actually becomes the passionate, creative fulfillment the lizards in marketing tell us it is. After setting everyone on equal footing by seizing the billionaires' money, socializing their wealth, and handing the keys to production over to workers , you're looking at an economy that requires something like a three hour workday, with machines taking care of most of the drudgery and as our public fund pays for things like health care, education, scientific research, and infrastructure all this technology actually makes work quicker, easier, and more enjoyable. When I first read this, it seemed flat out ridiculous and still does to me. So ridiculous that I felt I must be missing something, so I set out to find some kind of elaboration on this argument not simply written by people who have a vested interest in being provocative. The closest I found was this article. That article is a little more compelling than the Chapo Trap House quote, but I am still not convinced, for the following reasons 1 I'm sure that there are some jobs where there is a lot of wasted time. The survey in the article I linked, for example, was specifically of office workers in the UK. However a I'm not convinced that by simply reducing a workday to the average amount of hours worked, people will work hard for that entire time. I suspect, intuitively, people will still waste some time no matter what. And b some jobs clearly can't be cleanly reduced to three hour workdays without major problems for example, most blue collar jobs, as well as doctors and nurses, many kinds of lawyers, some trades, and some tech support jobs. 2 One counterargument I've heard is that if we greatly reduce the amount of hours spent on generic office work, that then those people could now spend time working as nurses or other time intensive jobs. But this seems to defeat the premise of making work more enjoyable somehow compelling people to work in jobs outside their field does not seem like it would lead to happy people, and certainly represents a loss in individual freedom. If there's a case that people would do this voluntarily, I'm not sure what that case is. 3 More broadly, I just don't see how moving towards a 3 hour workday, especially for lower income workers in hourly jobs, would lead to anything except a way less productive economy and, in turn, lower standards of living. Products and services and information come from somewhere. To imply that this would not lead to way less productive economy would also be to imply that companies are currently choosing to employ way more workers than is optimal, and that they are missing out on huge productivity gains and in turn, profit by employing so many workers and for so many hours. Again, this does not seem compelling. That all said, I find this to be an incredibly interesting argument and would be interested to see a more robust justification of it. Maybe I should be regarding the argument with more respect than simply treating it as a socialist pipe dream, but that's what I'm here to find out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transitioning to a 3-hour workday in the US as suggested by some on the left would lead to a dramatically lower average standard of living, greatly reduced individual freedom, or both.\n","id":"4acacf20-28aa-4362-9597-913fc872acdd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Restated and explained as If you think more people should become atheists or agnostics , then you should advocate for policies that quickly and effectively reduce economic and political inequality my use of socialists in the title is basically a handy abbreviation for that . The reasoning behind this view can be summed up with this quote gt To convert their followers to skepticism, there's no use in preaching, like Dawkins and Phil Plait, about the wonders of objective reality, however eloquently they may do it. Objective reality in a liberal democracy might well be wonderful if you're a media personality or a tenured professor in a leafy college town. But for most people, reality sucks. And if they choose to reject it, I can't blame them. Alternatively Opium is an understandable coping mechanism for poverty, and religion is the opium of the people. There is a moral aspect to my view, of course, but mostly it is about winning. If you want to achieve a world without theism, you can achieve this goal much easier in a world without suffering, and poverty is the biggest aspect of that. If you're an atheist agnostic but not a socialist, how do you reconcile these positions? Obviously, you are exempted if you don't care about spreading atheism agnosticism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All proselytizing atheists should be socialists.\n","id":"f384d94b-9127-4406-b5e3-b273a7559bf9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Life is undoubtedly different for men and women, but I don't think one is more privileged than another. There are some areas that males have it better in, and some areas that females have it better in, so how are males more privileged?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think males are more \"privileged\" than females,\n","id":"3be5636c-499a-41cd-b797-ac7eac27b031"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know that your birthdate is the day you were born, but a lot of things are legally one way, but physically another. I would, however, want it to be limited so you can only make yourself 90 days older or 90 days younger, and once every 10 years, so we won't see things like high schoolers making themselves 21. Some people want to get their kids into school earlier, legally do certain things slightly earlier, or just don't like the date of their birthday. I don't see the harm in making oneself slightly younger or older on a piece of paper. This would also be a good way for the government to make some extra money if they charge a fee to do so. VIEW CHANGED.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it should be legal for people to change their birthdate.\n","id":"251562f8-502f-48f2-9f33-56e61df4753c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The great majority of people know that professional wrestling is completely staged and choreographed, yet enjoy it anyway because of willing suspension of disbelief, and I see no reason why staged pranking it's not really pranks, it's basically just sketches videos aren't the same. It requires the same amount of suspension of disbelief, and can be funny if you watch it the same way. I don't watch any prank videos regularly, and I'm not subscribed to any pranking channels, but I've been a long time fan of h3h3 and watching Ethan give evidence why the great majority of prank videos are fake and Sam Pepper coming out and openly stating his videos, and a number of other channel's videos, are faked and staged has made me realise that there is little difference between these videos and pro wrestling. Like I said, I'm not a fan of pranking videos myself, but I don't see why we shouldn't approach these videos with the same suspension of disbelief than we do movies or professional wrestling. It's all just staged entertainment media.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Staged pranking videos are fine and require the same suspension of disbelief that professional wrestling does\n","id":"24c3c929-fbd8-4993-8c2f-c6651e72b3f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Spoilers Is Avengers: Endgame a worthy finale for the franchise?<|ARGUMENT|>Sadly, she was poorly integrated into the story. The cliffhanger at the end of Infinity War suggested that she'd play a major role in Thanos' ultimate defeat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Captain Marvel is absent for much of the movie and doesn't have much of an impact on the movie's outcome.\n","id":"b7a0a1e1-b4c0-45ab-8595-adcc238d3d23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that companies should be taxed on how much money they've earned, similar to how individuals are taxed on their income, rather than their profit. This is an idea I've been entertaining for a while, and while I currently think it's a good idea, I'm very interested in hearing the arguments against. I'll start with my basic premises. These are beliefs I hold quite deeply, and it would be very hard to change my mind on these. You could argue against them if you wish, but it's not really what I'm interested in discussing Taxes are good. The money collected is spent for the public good, and helps prop up our society. Everyone benefits from a well functioning society. If you're an individual, you're benefiting from the security, education and safety nets a well functioning society provides. If you're a business, you're benefiting from the infrastructure and pool of educated workers a well functioning society provides. Of course, there can be things such as corrupt governments who usurp taxes, or tax levels being too high, but these are a different matter that I think is beside this discussion. It should be hard to avoid paying your fair share of taxes. This point follows from my first point. If you're operating within a society, benefiting from the functions that it provides, you should contribute your fair share back in order for it to continue. By fair share I mean that you should pay the tax rate that society intended for you to pay. Since it's per definition not illegal to exploit loopholes in taxation laws, these loopholes should be closed wherever possible. Working from these two premises, I believe that the practice of taxing companies on profit is counter productive because it makes it far too easy for a company to avoid paying its fair share of taxes. As it is today, a company can set up a shell company in a tax haven, and make it so that on paper, the shell company owns most of the parent company's assets. The parent company can then buy its own products from the shell company, and then sell them in a country at cost price , thus negating any profit earned in that country by moving it to the shell company in the tax haven. If I've understood things correctly, this has been done by several large international companies, such as Apple source at BBC news Google, Starbucks, Amazon more BBC news and many others. If companies instead were taxed on their revenue, then shifting profits into tax havens would become meaningless. If Apple had sold 500 million worth of iGagdets in a country, then that country would tax them on those 500 million. I am not advocating that the tax rate on revenue should be the same as the tax rate on profit, because the tax burden would then of course increase dramatically on companies, but what the exact tax rate should be I believe is a kink that could be worked out. I am really not an economics expert, so I am certain that I haven't foreseen all the effects a change like this would have on the tax system. I am very open to changing my view if you can demonstrate that a revenue based system would be counter productive to society as a whole, or that tax evasion would be just as easy in a revenue based taxation system. I am looking forward to debating with you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies should be taxed on revenue, rather than profit\n","id":"47823944-454c-4294-883d-237e924cd4d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>The famous \"Fire in a crowded theater\" US Supreme Court judgement limited speech in the interests of national security. What constitutes a real threat to national security, and what national security even is, remains a highly subjective judgement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Laws which restrict speech often use far more ambiguous grounds than is found typically in law. As a result, governments are able to stretch the meaning of laws to their own ends.\n","id":"421567fb-9c8e-492e-8a43-463ebb30f771"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>The demonetisation push in 2016 served as a significant push in the direction for digital transformation, and accelerated the use of apps for digital payments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modi is using technology for the benefit of the nation.\n","id":"f8a7d9f3-cc09-4a9a-90c7-9cc8f89e5ccb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>And with that I primarily mean the experience for the viewer is better and the movie show game remains closer to it's original vision and artistic intention, the second being the more important point, as the first is somewhat subjective. The initial impression of a dubbed media might be a bit weird because of the disconnect of what the characters are speaking vs. what they should be speaking, but that goes away quickly and then you only perceive meaning not language. Though this is only a problem if it actually has a realistic setting, in movies such as LotR ,most animation movies and many games this wouldn't be relevant. Subtitles on the other hand are a constant obstruction and distraction on screen something you have to focus your eyes on, completely against what the directors artistic vision and composition intended you to focus on make it harder to relate to characters are difficult to follow for young and old people excluding them from the experience There are a few exceptions where I don't think dubbing is appropriate, for example pieces which often use more than one language or where language plays an important role, historical recordings, or when the director intended to use subtitles, also the dubbing needs to have a certain quality lip synchronized competent actor speakers or else it becomes impossible to not perceive it during watching listening. In addition to the downside mentioned in the beginning other counterarguments that I can see is that dubbing is very expensive and that subtitled media can considerably improve second language acquisition, however both of these have no real impact on the viewing experience or impression of the movie. unless the viewer intentionally wants to watch to improve his language skills<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think dubbing a movie, TV-show or video game is better then subtitling it.\n","id":"33fb6dea-6733-4dbc-b63c-dd3f7705aaff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think choosing the major where you can both make money and enjoy it just a bit is the best course of action. This is instead of the option of choosing the major that is your passion, but has a terrible job market. By making money, you are free to do whatever you want after you get a job, and you won't have to be constrained to a certain location or job by the bad market. It is important to note that I don't believe in choosing the best paying major out there, but the best paying major that you have a little interest in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Choosing a college major based mainly on it's earnings potential is better than choosing a major you're interested in, but has a bad job market.\n","id":"85fa385d-c6c7-45a2-bb31-08022e1c6084"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state grant benefits linked to marriage?<|ARGUMENT|>Due to better healthcare facilities, fewer deaths in childhood means women have fewer babies. If more kids died, women would have to give birth to more children in hopes that some survive. Now, because less kids die, women have less children as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Birth rates are falling in Europe A decrease in child birth is problematic for many European countries.\n","id":"27afb066-0583-4196-b1e3-c1295985e912"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Living in South Korea, I feel like I have monthly if not weekly discussions about cosmetic surgery. I am of the opinion that cosmetic surgery is all good, after all, it is the individual's choice of changing their appearance. It is also applied for people with physical deformities caused by accidents or illness. It is also a good source of money for the country as there is a huge medical tourism market. Whenever discussed, people that are against cosmetic surgery take more personal stances such as I wouldn't like to date someone fake or what if I have kids with someone and they come out weird . They all feel petty arguments however, I would like to see if there are reasonable arguments against cosmetic surgery. I don't think my view will change much, but I would love to be more educated about the subject and see a wider scope of arguments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cosmetic surgery is all good\n","id":"4decc648-c410-48d8-a5a7-f7473bca6138"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>A study suggests that it is not specific ingredients that weigh most heavily on a cuisine's reputation at all, but its combinations of different flavours at a molecular level: the study indicates that the universal popularity of cuisines such as Indian comes not from its usage or non-usage of certain ingredients like meat, but from its combining of certain ingredients whose flavour compounds do not significantly overlap.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no necessary correlation between a particular cuisine, restaurant or dish's level of prestige and whether it includes meat or not.\n","id":"601f0f8a-4990-4ba4-b5e9-998d305c5687"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People think that a growing population is better than a declining population or stable population. People link a growing population leads to a growing economy, but I think it's worse, morally and 'logically' speaking. What I mean by logically is this the world has a finite resource. A country has a finite resource. Let's use Monaco, a small area. At some point someone is going to complain when there is not enough space. It might not be in the near future, but at some point, every country, heck, the world is going to complain about space. Many countries are already deforested, demined and are looking at other countries resources. Japan and China had a moment of decline, and it's pretty obvious for Japan, yet people still buy Chinese and Japanese stuff. Morally, I think it's immoral to popping babies and emphasizing that the population must grow for a country to prosper. More people results in more dense cities which leads to spread of diseases, such as London back in the middle ages. It's true we have vaccines and stuff, but a dense city leads to a lot of crime too. I just don't see how the mentality that a population must grow all the time is a good thing. Edit I guess my main concern is the sustainability of it. Yes, maybe I'm a hypocrite, using a computer, but I think a model that is unsustainable is morally wrong and selfish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A growing population model is not good\n","id":"7181beec-e5af-4b0c-be02-163c1f9e2e5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know fully that being black doesn't necessitate being rude and loud and ignorant. I live in an actually diverse city where its about 40 white people 30 black people and 30 other groups Hispanic, Asian, etc . I take the bus to work each day and more often than not some jackass is either sharing their music with everyone else or shouting like they're at a heavy metal concert and in the last two months it hasn't been a black person exactly once. I know its two months because college started at the beginning of September and that one person was a white girl. I do not hate these people for being black. I don't even hate them for being loud at this point. I hate them for fulfilling the stereotype so reliably that today when I winced at the woman's crescendo the phrase of course came to mind. I absolutely know and acknowledge that it's a small portion of black people, but I've some to the beginning of when someone is loud, obnoxious or rude, they will probably be black and I don't like thinking that. So .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Loud obnoxious black people are making it reeeeeally hard for me not to be racist lately...\n","id":"47a4a70a-3749-447f-adb4-b921789ccd80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>History shows us that every single usage of these ideologies in a national sense has been a bloody stain on humanity Communism didn\u2019t work in Europe and killed tens of millions Communism didn\u2019t work in Asia and killed tens millions Communism Socialism doesn\u2019t work today in South America and is killing as we speak Often times people say any ideology doesn\u2019t work when an autocracy uses it But it\u2019s one hell of a coincidence to have yknow, 6 in a row not work. Sure, capitalism isn\u2019t great, but look at the bifurcation of Germany in the 50s They had to build a godamn wall just to keep people from escaping from communism socialism Now admittedly, I think elements of socialism work. Healthcare paid for by taxpayers saves life\u2019s and money. Enlighten a high schoolers brainwashed mind<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Communism and Socialism are the most harmful ideologies and consistently fail.\n","id":"d8c503f6-4a06-490b-bf28-23730c595be8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should culturally diverse writers be mandatory in English curricula?<|ARGUMENT|>In the early editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the Oompa Loompas were depicted as African pygmies and happy slaves who had cheerfully enslaved themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many works in the children's classic literature canon are littered with racism and misrepresentation.\n","id":"25680eec-d190-4f84-bc70-eb499a60c9a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Youtube is a big video website that hosts many videos. Twitch is a streaming website where you mostly watch someone playing a game. If Youtube were to take over Twitch, they would help a lot with the servers and so Twitch would run faster. This is just my speculation though. Also, Youtubers could get help with streaming and this would help promote their channel. Youtube could also be then catering to a wider audience, thus making Youtube bigger. In the past, I've been against some of the things that's happened to Youtube, such as the Google integration. But I can't really see many downsides to them taking over Twitch. Just to note, I do understand that Google own Youtube. I'm an avid Youtube user, watching several videos throughout the day, and uploading my own content. So if there are any downsides, I want to know about them and put things in place to try and stop them happening to me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Youtube's possible takeover of Twitch is a good thing.\n","id":"e6f04bb2-09fa-4ac2-b399-37eebcbeb1ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the use of steroids should be considered as any other supplements that people use. If legal, safe steroid usage can be achieved with strict government guidelines and make knowledge about safe usage more accessible to the public. Maybe there could be like a business where they go through the whole process with you, like training program you sign up for. when it's legal, there would be incentive for drug companies to make a better product that would have less side effects. As harmful as alcohol is, it doesn't seem to have the negative connotation that steroid has. Edit I think I kinda went off topic, I was mostly going towards that people who are muscular with steroids who get flock for it because its all steroids. You still have to train like crazy and control your diet and I feel like their hard work is disregarded as soon as they hear anything about steroids. Also when I mean safe usage I mean post cycle treatment and hormonal support drugs, sorry if that wasn't clear<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think steroid use is wrong\n","id":"045b1da0-9db4-4670-b75f-a177553527cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans enjoy basic rights and liberties on different levels, from UN Declaration of Human Rights to national constitutions. Animals do not have these kinds of rights and protections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Generally speaking, in all societies, humans treat a human's life as being more important than an animal's life.\n","id":"c09e12a3-8942-43eb-810f-3242f24ed8ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have seen so many times my friends make stupid decision and than say that they were just following their heart or when they were struggling to make a choice and then chose randomly saying that they were listening to their instincts, even when the correct choice appeared obvious to me. It seemed more likely that they just got tired of thinking or were unable to think logically. Its true that many successful people say that they succeeded because they followed their heart. I guess thats too oversimplification of their journey and they just find that a little bit of accuracy can save them a lot of explanation. A lot more cases you will find of people who are living miserably and they say that they reached there following their heart.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When you say you are just following your heart or instinct, you are expressing your inability to think logically.\n","id":"286810a4-37b4-4cad-8ed5-cac0ce4236bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would really like to believe this isn't the case, but I feel it is. I love facial piercings. Nothing extreme, just an eyebrow piercing or a labret or, at the most extreme, snake bites. Throughout my life I've had these, I've had a scaffold industrial piercing, and I've had my ears stretched to a 4g. So, not big discs or anything but large enough that people noticed. Everything except the lobes were one at a time, I never had more than one type of abnormal piercing at a given time in my life. I always removed my piercings and let them close before returning to my school or job or what have you. For a while I worked as a pizza driver with the labret, but after removing it found my tips improved. I think many people think piercings and similar stylistic modifications are phases teenagers go through and not appropriate for adults. I'm about to enter my last year of undergrad and move on to a Masters program with an internship component and I feel I cannot return to having a piercing let alone multiple ones beyond normal lobe piercings without being taken less seriously, seen as less professional, and possibly being passed over for positions and opportunities. TBH I'm about to turn 28 but still have this, like, inner goth side that is constantly yearning to get a piercing or two and rock some black hair dye again, but I feel I can't because I feel I'm supposed to be beyond that and I'm too old for that stuff. I would love it if someone could change my view. You are more than welcome to address tattoos in your response as well, though I am mostly referring to piercings and possibly dyed hair that is clearly not a natural hair color for the individual. I am a female, if that is relevant. I know some people view piercings on different sexes differently. Edited to add I see many people mentioning it depends on the profession. I realize this and I'd thought just mentioning the Masters program would make it clear I'm not going to work at a tattoo parlor. lol But fair statements. I will be working in the healthcare field as a direct provider to patients, but not as a physician. There is also a high chance of working in research academia after the internship phase. Furthermore, I'll clarify here that is is the intent of this  to find out if there are areas of the country where this is not the case. I am from a small farm town in Utah, I was hoping this reaction to piercings was a local thing, and so this  is an attempt to find out if it is true all over the country. Alas it sounds like my view won't be changed, due to being correct. But please change it if you can. I really want to be wrong<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person with visible facial piercings or body mods will likely be viewed as less professional and turned down in favor of equally or even less qualified individuals.\n","id":"85066fb0-7c4c-463d-bcc0-65f34d09c878"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>People will be able to buy something that has close resemblance to a human being and then use them however they please. This is an extreme form of commoditising sex.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of sex robots turns the sex act into a commodity.\n","id":"17087808-30ca-4594-900f-490fe010a13d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>The declaration of religious freedom of the Second Vatican Council challenged the essence of the totalitarian state and its Leninist ideology and put the weight of the Catholic Church behind democracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Vatican Council of 1962 was a major milestone for progress in European theological understanding shining beyond academia into everyone's life.\n","id":"11b83f19-9069-4a01-8496-ad406e75dddd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Our current system is broken. Money is speech, corporations are persons, a minority party can shut down the government, the bill of rights is being trampled by agencies who are sworn to uphold it, launching missles against another country isn't war, schools can teach religion as science, religious institutions are tax free, an entire profession is needed to tell if someone paid too much or too little tax, the president is elected by people chosen by parties rather than the people, illness and getting an education can ruin someone financially, and policy is decided by those who have a financial interest in the policy rather than the good of the country. TL,DR Shit's messed up y'all, we need a new constitutional convention up in here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The united states needs a new constitution.\n","id":"ca04189d-2c22-4e60-ab06-e868f4955688"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Crystals should be more heavily researched for their metaphysical properties.<|ARGUMENT|>Crystals could provide advances to technology that expand our understanding of the laws of nature.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Crystals should be more heavily researched for their metaphysical properties.\n","id":"18a6408e-2772-40f1-a7ba-ff8c5bdbfb77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>The UK economy grew at 1.3% in 2018 comparing Q4 2018 to Q4 2017, faster than that of Germany 0.6% or France 0.9% confounding the pre-referendum pessimistic forecasts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The exceptionally strong performance of the UK economy since the Brexit vote indicates that a hard Brexit will significantly benefit the UK economy.\n","id":"4e076af2-1e6b-42f1-bf17-05db6e7b7bc3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I tried many over the counter medications for any ailments I have. When I have the flu I took over the counter medication for it and it never works. I tried different brands but it doesn't make me feel any better. Same thing goes with over the counter pain killers. I once twisted my ankle after I came back running and I took some Advil and it didn't take the edge off the pain. I twisted my ankle many times over the years but no brand works. The only medication that works for me is the ones doctors prescribe to me. I think drug stores as far as over the counter medication goes is just a scam to take your money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a strong believer that all over the counter medication is complete BS and it's all placebo.\n","id":"4731735b-431b-42b2-a790-97d68c411423"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Doctors should be banned from performing genital reshaping surgery on intersex infants<|ARGUMENT|>A report found that intersex patients experienced feelings of 'dread' decades after unwanted or damaging surgeries and repeated examinations, when attempting to access healthcare. For some, this has led them to avoid healthcare as adults.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genital reshaping procedures can inflict psychological harm on intersex patients.\n","id":"968a1611-14e0-4d47-84a4-60372866f793"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Background I have noticed a considerable decline in my both my writing and reading abilities over the years, which has coincided with the increase in texting and web surfing in my daily life. I am also reading far fewer books than I did in school. When I ask how I can improve my writing skills for emails, blog posts and such , the 1 suggestion I receive is read more books and less internet. The issue while I agree that reading actual books WOULD improve my writing abilities in a few areas, I feel like I'd only end up writing in a bookish style that people nowadays lack the patience to read anyway. I think our brains are changing because of the internet, and eventually we are going to be communicating with fewer words, because we can no longer tolerate long blocks of text and long sentences.  I believe it is a waste of time to read lots of books in order to become a better writer. More and more people are online and no longer have the patience to read books or long chunks of text. I would only be learning how to write for a soon to be obsolete medium. My time would be better spent reading things like pithy tweets comments posts from skilled writers. Side note Some of the issues with our modern approach to reading writing are brought up in this 2008 Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid issues which seem equally pressing in 2017, if not moreso.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People suggest I should read lots of books in order to become a better writer. However, people nowadays don't seem to have the patience for books, so I think reading more books would only make me better at a style of writing which is quickly becoming defunct.\n","id":"0cc7a131-d454-4bc3-a2b3-91c7c758a333"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Small electric scooters, like Lime, Bird and Jump, are good for people.<|ARGUMENT|>This is especially dangerous for vision-impaired \/ blind people who don't see or expect them and trip over them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People often leave scooters around a city, which clutters sidewalks and looks bad.\n","id":"d4b20f96-60d9-4e02-9dc7-4a3e72dfff51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will a nuclear war cause human extinction<|ARGUMENT|>Radioactive particles with a diameter of 10 nm to 20 \u03bcm, which are transported into the stratosphere, may take months or years to settle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans can only hide in air-raid shelters for a limited period of time.\n","id":"4c41f682-c62a-4616-82b6-d03116e7b78d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump's repeated racist comments are also increasing the sentiments of racism among the citizens of the United States.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump has made racist and derogatory comments about other nations.\n","id":"eb847769-105a-487e-9f40-1e6b1e574d79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ever since the Snowden leaks, Reddit has been, collectively, very up in arms about the whole affair of mass spying. I understand it's not a very effective program, and I think the resources could be better spent, but I don't think there's anything inherently morally wrong on spying on citizens for the purpose of national security. Even if it's inconsistent with previous Supreme Court rulings, or it might violate the fourth amendment, I don't see how that makes it bad, per say. Please change my view. Something about the NSA rubs me wrong but I can't say they are really violating any of my rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NSA isn't doing anything \"bad\"\n","id":"0d4f99db-e5ae-4e77-9cf8-42b917cf48e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best fantasy story?<|ARGUMENT|>The unrealistically low success of the Storm Troopers throughout Star Wars is a part of the films' enjoyable fantasy: the viewer is transported to a world of which the powers of fate and destiny remain miraculously - fantastically - right and just.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fact that the 'bad' side have an ultimately lower success rate and the 'good' side a higher one is, on the contrary, often a key ingredient in viewer satisfaction of any film.\n","id":"f88545e9-a27a-49da-91a4-d8d32178c8f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm from a heavily urban part of the U.S. where strangers generally don't acknowledge each other in passing. In spite of this, many local grocery stores and fast food restaurants places that are designed for efficiency, not atmosphere make sure that every customer is confronted with an enthusiastic HI Welcome to , how are YOU today? when they walk in the door or something similar . I realize that this cordiality is in line with social customs in parts of the South and West, but I don't get why these businesses spend their time resources on these kinds of conventions in areas that are known to have a less social, more private culture e.g. the northern Atlantic seaboard, in my case . Everyone I know in these areas myself included finds store greeters a bit off putting. I don't see the upside to the business.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It makes no sense for a store to have \"greeters\" in an area where small-talk with strangers is not part of the culture.\n","id":"50343f2a-bd32-4110-aba1-5f2728aa0d0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>It is false to assume that one emergency climate change must be taken over another imminent hunger and poverty when survival requires both.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is immoral to expect developing nations to adhere to a lesser standard of life because of the faults of developed nations.\n","id":"636a5e83-d46e-4b46-ba08-56634d61b43c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>As Clausewitz said, \"Politics is war without the guns.\" Germany tried to create a unified Europe, with itself as leader, twice last century. and failed twice. Those costly forays into empire building are now known as WWI & WWII. Moves for an ever more integrated EU, ultimately culminating in a United States of Europe, is just Germany pursuing its long held aims through different means.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Germany is the most populous country in the EU and, therefore, it will have the biggest say.\n","id":"466dbd1a-9ec2-403a-b9c5-b91dca1e5bf9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>When Mayas encountered an environmental constraint drought, their preferred solution was to reduce their population by sacrificing their peers to the rain god.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions that majorly spread evolutionary disadvantageous behaviors either went extinct, have been assimilated or are regarded as primitive.\n","id":"8cf50eef-83fd-4911-bc58-d84f245038c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans have morally acceptable reasons to kill animals besides eating them. If a human has a good reason to kill an animal it would be immoral to waste the edible sections of that animal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not eating the meat of animals killed for other purposes would be a waste and thus morally wrong.\n","id":"b5135fe1-d748-4702-be58-f656b04587e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Parsimony makes consciousness unnecessary for any physical structure. We project consciousness onto bodies because we see other people and animals from the outside as their bodies, but that is not necessarily a defining or authoritative correlation. Our brain is not necessarily part of us which is conscious, it's just a part of us that is living as an animal. Machines can only imitate that reflection of consciousness, not consciousness itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are good reasons for thinking that AI will not actually be conscious.\n","id":"325d5dbb-d3b8-4939-a428-1e53013b39f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>bribery is sometimes acceptable<|ARGUMENT|>Norms and values differ between countries. In many non-western societies gift taking and giving in the public realm is a matter of traditions and customs. Moreover, gift giving is a part of negotiations and relationship building in some parts of the world. It is hypocritical for the west to target developing countries for this as many so-called democracies are hopelessly compromised by business interests through political funding and lobbying. The United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bans large bribes but allows for the payment of small \u2018customary\u2019 sums in order to ease transactions.1 1 The Economist, \u2018When a bribe is merely facilitating business\u2019 June 11th 2011,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bribery is only wrong under a Western-centric notion of corruption\n","id":"6220ab71-74b0-4657-a8f6-a3b0dc7136e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that loads of people put shit on him but if he is compared to previous presidents he is better. He is a better ambassador and he holds himself well in the international atmosphere. George Bush was a significant wanker that brought about the War on Terror and caused complete turmoil in numerous countries in the middle east. I know that Obama is not a perfect human being, but tell my why he is so bad that everyone feels he should not be running the country?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not think Obama is as bad as everyone says he is\n","id":"875fb99b-ea57-4b33-8ddc-3a1123865971"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While I understand the economic principle of comparative advantage and acknowledge that 'free trade' deals have generally reduced the cost of consumer goods in the US, I believe that these free trade deals have been a net negative for American workers specifically from a wage earning perspective . Comparative advantage I agree this should hold in principle, but in reality, these comparative advantages often stem from different labor laws, environmental regulations, intellectual protection enforcement levels, etc. While that certainly lowers the prices of goods for US consumers, this does not result in a 'fair trade' or an equal playing field for US workers. Re tooling re education programs Again, while free trade deals have reduced prices for consumers and opened up markets for corporations which are disproportionately owned by classes gt white collar workers , these deals appear to have done little to help those displaced re tool or re educate themselves in order to find other comparable wage earning opportunities. Overall, I can't imagine that the obsolescence of vocation training apprenticeship programs throughout the country is a good thing for American workers in general now and into the future. I for one would be willing to spend more for quality goods produced in the US, but I'm certainly somewhat privileged living in a thriving coastal community. Perhaps this is a highly incomplete view. If so, please . Thanks. Edit 1 I just want to emphasize that my view is that the US does not appear to have done much to protect the workers impacted by such deals, and that it is the responsibility of the US government to do so since it is the one that entered these deals in the first place. Edit 2 Thanks for the replies. My view is definitely evolving as a result of them. I no longer attribute the damage to US workers to trade deals based on the evidence cited. But I still hold the view that the US government could have done more to ensure a more equal playing field in a globalized economy, and that its failure to do so has been a net negative for US workers. However, I suppose that is a different view than my original one, so please consider my original view changed. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Free trade' deals have been a net negative for American workers\n","id":"be341b12-7a48-45bc-a0b9-ec4c0c619b37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I used to workout with weight training. Then I started getting injuries shoulder, knee, lower back . These are injuries very common with weight training. So recently I changed my workouts to not using weights at all. It consists of things like calisthenics, cardio, pilates yoga, hiit, and other bodyweight oriented exercises. After doing these bodyweight exercises for a while, I do not miss weights at all, feel just as fit healthy strong maybe even more fit , and haven't injured myself nor do I think I will really injure myself. So besides bodybuilders, pro athletes, fitness professionals, extreme fitness nerds, there is no need to work out with weights especially heavy weights . Unless you have textbook perfect form posture, and perfect form when doing the weight exercises, you have a great chance of getting injured. And the injury could be immediate or more of a long term thing. A majority of people will never have the perfect form because there are so many variables and factors. Also even if you have a personal trainer at a gym, many of them are not highly educated Physical Therapists, and will teach you bad things that will lead to injury. Maybe you'll get an extremely good personal trainer, but its rare. Many people will laugh at not training with weights, and continue doing so, only to discover their injuries years later. Weight training is mostly marketing. It gyms trying to get you in to use their fancy machines, the promise of getting bodybuilder buff can you imagine a gym with just a few small free weights and mostly open space? . Its companies that sell weights marketing hard. Its the media showing the perfect male as some huge ripped dude that has just cosmetic muscles but wouldn't be able last in something that requires all over non cosmetic strength like maybe say UFC . Its the American culture of going extreme, loving sports and athletes and trying to emulate their pro athlete routines which they do professionally with the best staff that no average person can ever afford . Etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Weight Training is Bad for Most People\n","id":"64f63ba1-d1fb-4405-8f6c-569eeecf42ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Withdrawing from Iraq<|ARGUMENT|>The fundamentals of the Iraq conflict cannot be resolved by strategic adjustments. These fundamentals are: a counter-insurgency war, anti-American Iraqis that support insurgents, sectarian hatreds, an endless flood of Jihadi terrorists into Iraq, the difficulties of urban warfare, the lack of sufficient numbers of US troops, and a host of other factors. No strategic changes can affect these fundamental problems. We should not be fooled, therefore, by claims of \"strategic changes\" holding the key to success \"this time\". And, with no prospect for \"strategic modifications\" making success possible, the United States and coalition forces should leave.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No strategic changes in Iraq can alter the fundamental impossibilities of the conflict.\n","id":"e26e210d-93db-41e4-b3f1-787d211a2f11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Borg always quickly adapt to directed energy weapons, matching their shields to whatever frequency or modulation that their enemies are using. Whenever Starfleet weapons are rendered useless, people resort to hand to hand combat which is surprisingly effective. Klingons use their bat'leths to kill drones and the drones do not adapt. Starfleet would be better off arming themselves with big fucking clubs when fighting Borg hand to hand, they should use anti tank rifles instead of phaser rifles. Starfleet ships use directed energy weapons but a properly adjusted energy shield can render those completely useless. The massive railguns used by the UNSC would be far more effective than a phaser. Shield harmonics can't match the frequency of a 3000 ton metal slug. It's basically a comet, the MAC cannons on UNSC orbital defense platforms deliver a projectile with 1,000 times more energy than the meteorite that created Meteor Crater in Arizona. Phasers don't work against the Borg, Starfleet should use big fucking guns. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that rifles and railguns would be better weapons against the Borg than phasers and proton torpedoes\n","id":"8ea11f53-99fd-4392-a65e-47378953b526"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI is used as a way of merely making techno-capitalism \u2014 a system that fuels inequalities Suarez-Villa, p. 162 \u2014 more tolerable for people, instead of addressing the root causes of exploitation and economic inequality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UBIs could be used by political elites to avoid addressing structural injustices \"harms that come to people as a result of structural processes in which many people participate\" pg 7.\n","id":"5289c238-a840-4d24-aa31-7d4fb1bc1f7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>abolish standardized tests for University Admission<|ARGUMENT|>SATs are mathematical and it is therefore possible to objectively evaluate them. This is why they are so popular, they provide a benchmark of comparison across the whole education system in a way that any non-standardized assessment never could. This does not only benefit universities in providing an objective measure to compare admissions candidates but it also gives the government statistics with which to measure the progress of schools. Any other form of assessment would mean switching to much more subjective factors. Traditionally such factors, such as extracurricular activities, volunteer work, and even access to references are all more easily available to high income students. Opportunities may not even be offered in poorer school districts. Complaining that poorer and minority students do less well on the SAT ignores the fact that the test provides one of their best opportunities to impress admissions officials.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alternative factors that can be considered in the admissions process\n","id":"97c39800-050c-4216-b6a7-66afe5dd879a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>The US has no long-standing practice of executing in an intentionally cruel manner and repeatedly phased out execution methods that were deemed inhumane.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Painful execution methods, as distinct from existing methods, may require outlaying costs on training new state employees.\n","id":"8337bda6-adb4-4486-b439-f613237ec5a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>The mother of an eight-year-old boy who was suffering from GBS refused standard symptomatic care for him. As a result, the boy suffered from neuropathic pain and intense anxiety.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Appeals can only be made for life-threatening cases. This exposes a child to pain and suffering that could easily have been avoided.\n","id":"c4d88dc1-91e0-4767-878b-d6c7e03ccbea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It would be awesome to raise house hippos as pets. Regular hippos have a tendency to maul and or trample humans to death. But house hippos are too small to do any real damage. Hippos like to swim in water, unlike cats, so bathing them would be relatively easy. Just let them swim around in a half filled bath tub. Due to their small size, any middle class family would be able to support an entire herd of house hippos so they don't get lonely. Food would be relatively cheap, since hippos are vegetarians, and house hippos don't eat much more than a hamster. I can think of no reasons why house hippos would be an unsuitable pet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"House hippos would make great pets\n","id":"a203d9f7-58e8-4a75-bc38-2768d8d87426"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>The Obama administration's increase in the use of drones was ineffective and caused significant harm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Obama administration has repeatedly failed in the Middle East.\n","id":"be4063b7-231d-4ab8-bb5e-85f2a92c936b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do want to preface this subject with the fact that I am not a philospher anthropologist ect. Some terms may be misused. If that is the case please let me know. The base interactions with many aspects or subcultures of geek nerd culture are not self actualized. Here is my logic A self actualized culture is one where the culture's members are also participants. They can directly determine what is culture by, at the minimum, choosing what to take part in and what not to, thus changing canon. At the maximum, it means participation by direct creation by the members of the culture. By that definition, a self actualized culture requires control of the culture by those who take part in the culture. I cannot legally tell a Batman story because participants in comic book culture do not have any control over Batman. While members can write fan fiction if that Batman media gains any real traction it will be stomped out. We have seen this for Pokemon and WOW in fan spin offs and old version support respectively. An additional example is the history of Fifty Shades of Gray which started as a Twilight fan fiction. To legitimately exist Fifty Shades of Gray had to become something separate to the \u201cTwilight subculture.\u201d A self actualized culture requires ownership of the culture by those who participate in the culture. Any nationalist folk characters are inherent to that culture and owned by its participants. Paul Bunyon is \u201cowned\u201d by participants in American culture. As a participant, I can legally create Paul Bunyon stories that, if accepted by culture, have no less standing than the existing ones. While ownership does not re A self actualized culture requires the creation of the culture by those who participate in the culture. This is more applicable to specific subcultures rather than widely applicable. For example, anyone can build a video game and platforms like Steam have made distribution more equitable. Yet, there are some strange asterisks in cultures who have multinational corporations participating in creating. The gap in availability and distribution between \u201cindie\u201d creators and corporate ones is generally massive. My final point is in interaction. How much can you expect to interact with, say, comic culture without increasing the value of an owned IP? And how much can you actively take part while only consuming second hand content? All this does not mean \u201cgeek nerd\u201d subcultures are not \u201creal.\u201d When I first began to think about these ideas I thought, \u201cgeek nerd culture is not real.\u201d But real value has been created by the participants and there is a deep identity caught up in the culture. That is why I eventually shifted to it not being self actualized instead of the term real.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any interaction that increases an intellectual property's value is not a cultural interaction it is a commercial interaction ie Video Game culture is not a self-actualized culture but a consumption culture driven for profit\n","id":"8f04b71a-a016-4bb1-8c3b-c4f9099723af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are modern democracies destined to fail due to their inherent weaknesses?<|ARGUMENT|>33% of americans don't believe in the theory of evolution and even more believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are often unaware of their ignorance\/misconceptions and provide input regardless.\n","id":"9bf5434d-18b1-4365-be5e-78ccd467dead"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>In the future, humanity will create a new type of economy where automated systems distribute goods and services<|ARGUMENT|>While depression is a sad outcome would this gradually refine humanity to become a serene but happy group on earth plus the adventurers finding new purpose under water or in space?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Purpose gives us meaning, life without meaning is. well meaningless. Rates of depression and suicide are expected to increase.\n","id":"16948412-23e6-4c30-8018-ef45fca9918c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just don't see how it's possible. Yet, I'm confused because it seems like there are so few bars on earth that I can even walk into without being assailed by loud music. I'm not a curmudgeon either I'm 23 years old and apparently should find a way to enjoy places like this. Not that I'm against loud music either, but it has its setting. If you go to a concert then the music is the main event people are primarily there to enjoy the live performance and not only does it seem acceptable for it to be loud but even at times a part of the performance and art of it that the vibrations overtake the audience in a way that makes them feel the music is physically as well as audibly experienced. I'll also sometimes play loud music in my own home during the daytime, especially classical music as it contains many instrument voicings and dynamics that can't be fully appreciated when you aren't hearing it at concert volume. However, this is a solitary activity and it would be rude for me to keep it going if I were entertaining company. At a bar, conversation is the event. You're specifically coming in to spend time with other people and share drinks with them. They build tables in round or half round shapes so that you can face your company as you drink, as if to have a conversation. Yet, the recorded music is played so loudly that it's utterly impossible to do one of two things that you're there to do. Why would I want to drink with someone if I wasn't going to talk to them? I can not talk to people when I drink alone at home and much more affordably and with much higher quality spirits. My fundamental confusion is this, I've never heard anyone speak positively about a bar where loud music is played even once. I've never heard anyone make an argument or even be capable of conceiving of an argument as to how such an establishment could be an enjoyable place to spend your time. I have no idea if anyone on earth has an intellectual notion as to how it's even acceptable to support such an inconsiderate establishment. Yet, almost all bars are like this. So I see a sharp disparity between the intellectual understanding of a good time and the establishments that exist. How can this be? Edit View changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think it's possible for people to genuinely enjoy themselves in a bar where recorded music is played too loud for conversation to be possible, and that the multitudes of people who subject themselves to this indignity are suffering from a grand delusion or a lack of ambition.\n","id":"0a5de275-de15-4d49-89df-649794ed96d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was born white in the USA, a country with a history of terrible racism and a justice system which is unfair to minorities. I continuously see articles like I, racist in which all white people are complicit in racism because they benefit from it, but that is where the argument stops. I have never seen a good defense of this argument. Slavery was terrible for black people but it wasn\u2019t great for white people either. Sure, a few plantation owners got away without hiring employees, but is that good for the economy? In the Civil War, millions of people died. Segregation was terrible and it ripped society apart. People complaining about how Obama doesn\u2019t look American miss the opportunity to talk about policy. The justice system is in drastic need of reform. Cops, prosecutors, police unions, where to even start at how bad they are? There is an endless war on drugs that my taxes pay for. There is rampant imprisonment of non violent felons that my taxes pay for. There is an endless ghettoization of minorities that my taxes pay for. Do I want these things? No way Do I vote against them every chance I get? Of course Am I racist? Am I complicit? I don\u2019t believe so. Let me hear it, reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I white guy do not benefit from racism\n","id":"2e4e61e6-ed84-4635-b428-50134f008ef9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The support for Saudi Arabia is boiled down to ideas that Saudis are a critical player in our fight against terrorism and terrorist ideology. Another is the idea that we can only enforce change form the inside. The Saudis practice a disgusting form of Islam that calls for punishments based on the Quran, the Muslim Holy Book. It is equally as disturbing as the punishments described in the Bible. The Saudis are also perported to be actual financiers of terrorism. These charges go all the way up to the Saudi royals, although they are unsubstantiated. They regularly execute prisoners and political dissidents and treat women like dogs. I think it is a moral outrage and antithesis of our values to support a brutal and psychopathic regime such as Saudi Arabia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The support of Saudi Arabia is one of the worst foreign policy decisions that the US and its allies has ever made.\n","id":"d604908a-f65b-44ee-a080-08fa2cda160a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Retaliation for rape<|ARGUMENT|>Victims are likely to be gas lighted and they will have to prove to people that they had been raped.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wider society is likely to question the legitimacy of the victim's retaliation.\n","id":"de7245de-5537-4102-8ed3-ab73c5b15e7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>This is a good analogy since a vehicle can be seen just like a gun: a device that gives individuals power to easily harm other people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Or it can make it better. Take driving laws, for example.\n","id":"df5f7b0e-5590-462f-bd39-77174cf42e2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Welfare programs are designed to apply only to individuals with a specific income or less, which means that effectively, if a person on welfare is able to improve its income by only a couple of dollars above the cut, they will no longer qualify for welfare, eliminating a large portion of their income. This is an incentive for people to never to reach this point, effectively converting welfare into a way to limit the desire of people to progress.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having welfare programs actually puts the government in control of the citizens' lives, as welfare promotes doing nothing because people who work more, get less. With a UBI, people who work more, get more.\n","id":"54b2fae6-cb04-4cff-a3fb-b8ffc7c70a16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>With the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity, the Catholic Church became one of the largest landowners of ancient times and during the Middle Ages, the Church controlled vast amounts of wealth and was again the largest landowner in Europe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many religions are rife with hypocrisy: they teach compassion and austerity but religious institutions remain incredibly wealthy while much of the world lives in poverty.\n","id":"e72dad5d-e0b7-4283-928c-f2601704fbd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that video games that are designed from the ground up to retain players by constantly reminding them of the time they've already invested in the game are immoral, regardless of the actual quality of the game otherwise. For my argument, I have three major examples World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Clash of Clans. These may not be the worst offenders or even the best examples, but they are the ones that I have the most personal experience with and thus feel like I am most able to discuss. World of Warcraft has often received flak for its addictive properties by way of grinding. The player is led into a repetitive cycle of doing the same or similar things over and over again to slowly improve their character or extensions of their character. This is often cited as the core reason that World of Warcraft and other MMO's are so addictive, but I believe that another reason that often goes unnoticed is how attached players get to their investment of time. Players who may not gain much actual enjoyment out of the game anymore continue to play because they feel that if they stop playing that the countless hours that they've sunk into the game have been for nothing. This is doubly emphasized by the monthly subscription fee, where players considering quitting the game will consider not just the time they've invested, but also the money. The longer they've played, the more money they've wasted if they stop. League of Legends follows very similar principles. Even if the core game itself is well designed and fun in its own right, the fact that the game is still built around an investment damns it all the same. Players who get hooked on the gameplay will accumulate points that they can use to unlock new characters and different gameplay adjusting tools. Eventually they will probably spend money on the game to either unlock and new character faster or to purchase a cosmetic skin for a character that they particularly enjoy. So now they've been put in the same situation. Even if they start to get bored with the game, many people will continue to play because of how much time and usually money that they've invested into the game. If they quit, it's not just the knowledge and skills they've developed that are going to waste, but also all the time and money they've devoted to unlocking things within the game. And of course if you've followed this far, you probably know where I'm going with Clash of Clans. Mobile games in general seem to have taken this principle to an extreme. In Clash of Clans not only are you constantly trying to improve your base and troops, but you are constantly seeing other people's bases which motivates the player in two different ways one by showing them better bases, which they envy, and two by showing them worse bases, to remind them of how far they've come. And there the same principle comes to play. Players don't want to stop playing because they are constantly reminded of how much time and, again, possibly money that they've already invested and they don't want to waste it by quitting. Why I think this is immoral should be, I hope, obvious. Players who no longer enjoy a game are psychologically manipulated into continuing to play, and the longer they play, the harder it is for them to stop. But what makes it even worse is the social aspect of it. All the aforementioned game are also very social games where players are encouraged to show off what they've earned or bought. This gives positive feedback on their investment and makes the addiction that much stronger. And as I touched on with the Clash of Clans paragraph, this effect hits twice as players with less who are shown off to are likely to be envious and be motivated to be trapped in the same investment addiction that the show offs are trapped in. Of course, much of that is human nature, but that makes taking advantage of it, especially in such refined and systematic ways, no less immoral. Please challenge my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video games built around addiction by investment are immoral.\n","id":"1fc5b070-9f39-482e-99b7-9cf2d7e71f48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every year I do my taxes and show the government exactly how much I make how much I have spend and on what so they can decide how much money to take from me. Then they spend it on things I do not agree with. I think every year when we do taxes we should also get the ability to determine where we want it to go, such as 50 education 24 community building roads, cleaning ect. 5 military, you get the idea. The system could be either that your money goes directly into those sectors based on your preferences or having everyone's numbers get averaged out so you wouldn't be able to say that the rich are getting an unfair advantage in controlling the nation. Edit I don't know why everyone thinks this but I do not live in the United States, I live in Canada.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should be able to choose how their tax money is spent.\n","id":"b6454f45-925c-4783-8d4d-8548e51f625e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Psychological and environmental factors are thought to play a significant role in drug addiction. Rather than a single cause of drug addiction, it is likely multiple factors lead to drug addiction in any given person.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Addiction to substances is often started due to underlying reasons\n","id":"921f922b-e872-43f3-9cdc-e3840b3ebd15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always felt the American justice system had two major glaring flaws right off the bat. Being judged by a jury of my peers is absolutely horrifying. When you can find prejudice, irrationality, predisposed notions, and hatred around every corner do you really want the possibility of those people judging you? Do you want a society that places more importance on skin color, financial success, celebrity, or beauty than actual logic and understanding being someone who decides your fate while sitting on the stand? The witness expert another fallable person who can alter the course of a trial based on what they say they saw or what their data tells them. In both cases we are placing a great amount of expectations on people who are not trained to judge something impartially. Paying someone 68 a day does not make them a reliable source of justice. I feel the only reason we accept this is because we cannot think of another way to try someone without emotion and without bias. I feel the American justice system falls behind only the NBA officiating in it's arbitrary successes and failures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the American justice system is supremely flawed and unjust.\n","id":"12bc80f4-538f-4f06-af36-c5b01a5151d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Many methods of soil-free agriculture exist. Methods like aeroponics are used by NASA in space experimentally. The possible yields rival the need for anywhere near as much farmland as is used today. The microbes in soil process the environment in ways that break them down into the same nutrients available through liquid nutrient solutions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More advanced farming methods allow previously unusable land to be utilized.\n","id":"561bafc2-8cc3-4707-b71b-8433a2bb9d7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>we stopped doing what we are obliged to do as humans, and start doing what we desire to do as individuals. I have often linked people's anxiety, frustration, depression and anger to the rather plain notion that they are not living the lives they want to live. They are imprisoned in their own obligation to ensure certain criteria is met so they are confirmed as a reputable member of society as if it mattered. From personal experience, I was a better person when I had less but satiated my own desires. In experience with others, I noticed that the more content people were the ones who were either chasing, or living their desires.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The world would be a better place if...\n","id":"45ff7f04-97d3-4072-aa61-cc7db09c604b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So obviously I'm aware my view may be considered radical but I am open to reading alternative perspecrives on this. I basically have always believed that at least the majority of female sex workers are only doing it because they need the money and can't get it any other way they may need it for reasons such as poverty or drug addiction. They may have kids to support or come from a poor country and have a family to support. Or they may be dependent on drugs and only do it because they need money for that. That is before considering that some women are indeed trafficked, enslaved and threatened with violence. All these reasons have made me question the notion of real 'choice' and I always feel concerned for potential trauma they may feel in the future if they manage to escape the poverty addiction they would still have the memories. Even if these reasons are not always the case 100 of he time, if they make up a large of cases, then men are taking a gamble when they pay for sex, not knowing if the woman is fully complicit and so disregarding the fact that they may be exploiting her for their own gratification. How is this not selfish? I know they pay money, but on a human level. I don't consider myself to be a radical feminist whatsoever and I'm not active in women's rights or anything but this has always been a sore topic for me and I'm not sure why. So, help me to  or at least make me feel less angry, if you feel I should be less angry? Edit to clarify I am thinking in terms of street prostitutes and those working in brothels rather than 'porn stars' or cam girls.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"most if not all female sexual workers are being exploited in some way whether it be because of poverty, addiction or fear of violence\n","id":"632296a9-5330-4b42-ae7e-fa71d2cb2e25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, therefore homophobic attitudes expose many LGBT people of all ages and in all regions of the world to egregious violations of their human rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Individuals who challenge traditional notions of gender are often rejected at home, in schools, churches and in their communities.\n","id":"166422ce-22a6-4cf6-a9ff-c717fbd0b310"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Many gnostic atheists claim that conceptions of God are incoherent either with themselves or with each other.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The assumption that gnostic atheists can't adequately substantiate their position is unwarranted.\n","id":"49bddc5e-c140-4fbf-8560-bc2f39974ff5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is okay to take fitness nutrition advice from somebody who is a fat fuck. The reason why it is okay is because fitness nutrition advice is knowledge. I can learn about accounting from somebody who did not major in accounting and or is not a CPA. I can learn history from somebody who never lived during the Roman times. The fact this person is a fat body does not mean they don't have quality fitness advice. with fitness and nutrition, it is up to you as the person to take action. The physical look of the person giving you the advice has no bearing on whether the advice is good or not. It doesn't mean every fat body is giving good advice, just like every personal trainer in the gym is not giving the best advice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is perfectly okay to take fitness\/nutrition advice from somebody who is morbidly obese or otherwise out of shape\n","id":"5e92047b-2a27-467b-aaa0-f8ae7dda70cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>War crimes committed by the Allied forces during the war were rarely prosecuted and ultimately deemed justifiable given the nature of the war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"World War 2 was a particularly deadly and destructive war, accounting for more than 60 million deaths.\n","id":"dbcecb31-59b0-40ec-bb52-d411a85bed6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>\u03a3\u03c4\u03bf \u0386\u03b3\u03b9\u03bf \u038c\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 \u03c0\u03c1\u03ad\u03c0\u03b5\u03b9 \u03bc\u03cc\u03bd\u03bf \u03c3\u03c4\u03b9\u03c2 \u03bc\u03bf\u03bd\u03ad\u03c2 \u03bd\u03b1 \u03b4\u03b9\u03b1\u03c4\u03b7\u03c1\u03b7\u03b8\u03b5\u03af \u03c4\u03bf \u0386\u03b2\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf.<|ARGUMENT|>\u03a5\u03c0\u03b1\u0301\u03c1\u03c7\u03bf\u03c5\u03bd \u03ba\u03b1\u03b9 \u03b3\u03c5\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9\u03ba\u03b5\u03b9\u0301\u03b1 \u03bc\u03bf\u03bd\u03b1\u03c3\u03c4\u03b7\u0301\u03c1\u03b9\u03b1 \u03b1\u03bd\u03c4\u03b9\u0301\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03b9\u03c7\u03b1, \u03bf\u03c0\u03bf\u0301\u03c4\u03b5 \u03b4\u03b5\u03bd \u03c5\u03c0\u03b1\u0301\u03c1\u03c7\u03b5\u03b9 \u03b8\u03b5\u0301\u03bc\u03b1. \u0391\u0301\u03bb\u03bb\u03c9\u03c3\u03c4\u03b5 \u03bf\u03b9 \u03b9\u03b5\u03c1\u03bf\u03bc\u03bf\u0301\u03bd\u03b1\u03c7\u03bf\u03b9 \u03b4\u03b5\u03bd \u03c7\u03c1\u03b5\u03b9\u03b1\u0301\u03b6\u03bf\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1\u03b9 \u03c4\u03bf\u0301\u03c3\u03bf \u03bc\u03b5\u03b3\u03b1\u0301\u03bb\u03b7 \u03c0\u03b5\u03c1\u03b9\u03bf\u03c7\u03b7\u0301 \u03bf\u03c5\u0301\u03c4\u03b5 \u03ba\u03b1\u03b9 \u03c4\u03b7\u03bd \u03c7\u03c1\u03b7\u03c3\u03b9\u03bc\u03bf\u03c0\u03bf\u03b9\u03bf\u03c5\u0301\u03bd. \u0391\u03c2 \u03ba\u03c1\u03b1\u03c4\u03b7\u0301\u03c3\u03bf\u03c5\u03bd \u03b1\u03bd \u03b5\u03b9\u0301\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9 \u03bc\u03b5\u03c1\u03b9\u03ba\u03b1\u0301 \u03bc\u03c0\u03bf\u03c3\u03c4\u03b1\u0301\u03bd\u03b9\u03b1 \u03ba\u03bf\u03bb\u03bb\u03b7\u03c4\u03b1\u0301 \u03c3\u03c4\u03b9\u03c2 \u03bc\u03bf\u03bd\u03b5\u0301\u03c2 \u03c4\u03bf\u03c5\u03c2 \u03b1\u03bd \u03c4\u03b1 \u03c7\u03c1\u03b7\u03c3\u03b9\u03bc\u03bf\u03c0\u03bf\u03b9\u03bf\u03c5\u0301\u03bd \u03b3\u03b9\u03b1 \u03b5\u03c1\u03b3\u03b1\u03c3\u03b9\u03bf\u03b8\u03b5\u03c1\u03b1\u03c0\u03b5\u03b9\u0301\u03b1.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\u03a3\u03c4\u03bf \u0391\u0301\u03b3\u03b9\u03bf \u039f\u0301\u03c1\u03bf\u03c2 \u03c0\u03c1\u03b5\u0301\u03c0\u03b5\u03b9 \u03bc\u03bf\u0301\u03bd\u03bf \u03c3\u03c4\u03b9\u03c2 \u03bc\u03bf\u03bd\u03b5\u0301\u03c2 \u03bd\u03b1 \u03b4\u03b9\u03b1\u03c4\u03b7\u03c1\u03b7\u03b8\u03b5\u03b9\u0301 \u03c4\u03bf \u0391\u0301\u03b2\u03b1\u03c4\u03bf.\n","id":"75e760fc-14b9-4d33-a328-3f29c902414a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We've all seen where people or corporations are able to prove legal innocence, even though they've acted morally reprehensibly, because they followed the letter of the law. Under my proposal, we would have one law you are not allowed to be a dick . The juries could be made up of peers, if you're alleged to have broken a speeding law, the jury would have to be pulled from a pool of people that use the roads everyone . Financial shenanigans? Peers would be financial people. So you knowingly sold mortgages that weren't worth the paper they were written on? Well, legally you might be ok, but you acted like a dick and a jury would no doubt agree. You moved your fence 3 foot over your neighbours property, that's being a dick. Guilty. Drink driving? being a dick. Bring a lawsuit against someone over and over? That's being a dick too. Using someone's photograph without permission? being a dick. This would be the ideal democracy in my eyes, as the laws to being a dick would totally depend on the jury, not what's written down. So as new things come up like posting pics of an ex's sexy pics without their permission people should already know that's dickish behaviour without having to read it in the legislature, so we wouldn't be hurriedly bringing in new laws for each new different thing. There'd be a vote on each thing whenever the jury convened to come to their decision, really showing the will of the people. edit Right, I'm going underground for a few days, will be back on sunday uk time. Been given a few things to think about, but I think i need to give out a couple of deltas. At the moment, i'm thinking that this works on a small scale thing, but doesn't scale up very well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All laws could be replaced by one \"You are not allowed to be a dick!\"\n","id":"9b563aec-e474-4509-95e0-6270ec515046"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Overseas territories that are typically considered as tax havens include the British Overseas territories Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and British Virgian Islands, and the US territory Puerto Rico.1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are still many tax havens currently. Just Switzerland and Lichtenstein changed.\n","id":"53cc998a-b57b-4c45-b144-70cb052cbe64"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>The social, economic and political systems co-evolve with religion which is then used to justify them. Hinduism should be criticized in so far as it does little to challenge the caste system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hinduism promotes the social designations of a caste system which is nothing more than a means of oppressing a group of people based on the circumstances of their birth.\n","id":"425b7cc8-a0ee-491f-ba72-b6ffb519c0fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Animal testing, Debate on animal experimentation and testing<|ARGUMENT|>Alternatives are being used in place of animal testing when it is possible. Cell-based and computer studies, for instance, frequently occur before any animal testing is done, and this often proves adequate. In general, where alternatives exist and are practical, they are being used.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alternatives are being used; animal testing is a last resort\n","id":"f5f710da-3600-4a93-8887-1a7bbb658e0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should U.S. Presidents Have the Power to Issue Pardons?<|ARGUMENT|>A head of state with the power to pardon themselves is one of the hallmarks of a dictatorship. A situation traditionally seen as undesirable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pardons are at a serious risk of corruption, which makes people lose faith in the government.\n","id":"e3ee47ce-2eef-4213-8098-e49c5792c969"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has been good for the league<|ARGUMENT|>The league previously generating about $400 million of revenue annually now pockets close to $5 billion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gary Bettman has made the league more profitable than it ever was.\n","id":"31c469f4-bf8f-4118-8d43-749d6614eec5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously there are some areas particularly foreign policy and the rights of minority groups where the majority of the public is not really in a good position to make sound independent judgments, and pandering on those issues is counterproductive. But on many other issues, pandering to public opinion can and should be seen as a sign of a flexible non ideologue who listens to the voices of his or her constitutents. For instance, Hillary Clinton gets criticized for coming late to her stances on, for example, opposing TPP and criminal justice reform, whereas candidates like Bernie Sanders have held these positions for a long time. Now, I like Bernie a lot, and may well vote for him in the primary, but I don't see it as a weakness for Hillary that she is responsive to the public mood. If we live in a truly democratic society, politicians should be responsive to the beliefs of the public to some degree. Hillary supported tough criminal justice laws in the 90s when crime was a major problem and the public was in favor, but now, seeing the negative unintended consequences of those laws and recognizing that public opinion has shifted, she has changed her stance. I think on those issues she should be commended for her flexibility and pragmatism, rather than criticized for supposedly insufficient ideological purity. . NOTE I'm not interested in turning this into a Hillary vs. Bernie debate specifically. I'm more interested in the broader question of whether politicians should to some degree be willing to shift in the wind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not necessarily a bad thing for politicians to pander to popular opinion.\n","id":"ced0af8f-1836-4332-a56f-41046a68652f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>The creation of new forms of infrastructure, such as high-speed rail and public Wi-Fi projects, has the potential to lay the foundation for new economies and industries, start ups, and small businesses. Soldiers could be used to do this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government would be able to add new job areas for public work with the high number of additional employees working for the state.\n","id":"294ae8c9-75fc-4106-bd57-b56bd723c419"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>Genetic enhancements will affect life paths and plans of the child by favoring certain traits, such as making a person very tall.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children would be limited in their ability to make free choices Resnick & Vorhaus, p. 5\n","id":"323c3e9d-33c0-4f05-9986-e06deb72adbe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US stop trying to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear program?<|ARGUMENT|>America's most powerful nuclear bomb - the B83 - was developed in the 1970s and came into force in 1983.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Today's nuclear capabilities are not significantly different in terms of their destructiveness from those in 1982.\n","id":"a723d302-af46-42fa-b037-fc655cac2941"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think reddit would benefit greatly from a removal of all the meta subs and cancer jerks. I think in the beginning these subs were outside looks at reddit and a way to keep the community on the right track. Lately however it feels more and more like the meta sphere of reddit is detracting from the site rather than adding. The circle jerk and bravery jerk subs might be the best examples of this. What originally started as a funny way to mock things on reddit has turned into what it mocked so relentlessly. When I see meta sphere mods worrying about getting a mod position in this sub, or making sure a submission is down voted in that sub, I think it's time to reign things in. I can't really tell if this shift is occurring because of the people or the environment, but I do feel like the meta sphere is hurting the site. Subs like theoryofreddit aren't as bad but even that sub is infested with jerkers. I removing the meta subs would improve reddit as a whole. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Reddit would be much improved by removing meta subreddits.\n","id":"1ef179f0-2abc-47c7-82a0-432609dc101a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Residents of low lying island nations face the inevitable prospect of rising seas caused by the melting of polar icecaps and glaciers. Unlike residents of coastal regions like southern Florida, these islanders will soon have nowhere to retreat as the waters rise. Clearly, these people need options for relocation. Current immigration and refugee law, however, does not recognize climate change as a distinctive reason to emigrate. And politicians from these countries understandably prefer \u201cmigrating with dignity,\u201d in the words of former Kiribati president Anote Tong, to forced relocation in the face of emergencies and disasters. For these reasons, other nations with the capacity to welcome new residents \u2014 especially those with a legacy of high emissions \u2014 bear a special responsibility to assist with dignified migration. New Zealand has so far led the way with a new visa program for residents of Pacific island nations. But New Zealand is small and visas do not provide permanent residency and rights. Europe has both more capacity and more legacy emissions than New Zealand, so the European Union should take the lead in offering not just visas but citizenship to residents of island nations that will soon be inundated. Doing so will place Europe at the forefront of tackling emergent global problems at a time when the world needs serious, sober, and compassionate leadership. From a logistical point of view, such a program will require an initial outlay of resources, but it can also be expected to offer long term benefits to Europe\u2019s economy and culture. The envisioned program would cover the following island nations Kiribati 110,000 residents , Nauru 10,000 residents , the Maldives 427,000 residents , Palau 21,000 residents , Micronesia 104,000 residents , Cape Verde 540,000 residents , the Solomon Island 600,000 residents , the Seychelles 94,000 residents , Tuvalu 11,000 residents , and the Marshall Islands 53,000 residents . Altogether, this sums to fewer than two million people. For context, in 2015 alone approximately one million migrants arrived in Europe. Since the islanders would presumably not all arrive at once, their relocation and integration would be relatively easy to manage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union should offer citizenship to people from island nations inundated by rising sea levels.\n","id":"7582e4d4-d7bd-4819-bedf-dec3b9d2ec2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>Measures like the Euro were implemented to reduce internal barriers to trade; a USE having a formal standardised currency across all states would be beneficial on this basis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A deeper financial integration would create financial stability in the USE.\n","id":"8b834b0d-7907-4a15-9e1a-ab195697c642"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>This shows a clear willingness on the part of the Trump Campaign to collude with the Russian government. And so it lends plausibility to the notion of collusion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When offered damaging information on Hillary Clinton \"as part of the Russian Government's support of Mr. Trump,\" Donald Trump Jr. said \"I love it.\n","id":"0c53d070-2598-461d-b7c1-e40c27683450"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many discussions about AI these days. On this post I'm referring to superintelligence, which is conventionally defined as a hypothetical agent that possesses intelligence far surpassing that of the brightest and most gifted human minds. x200B Experts are all over the place about how when superintelligence will emerge. But one angle I have not heard discussed is whether or not it will emerge spontaneously or through the direct efforts of human developers corps governments. It seems to me that, given rapid growth in data being harvested and the explosion in numbers of narrowly focused AIs, that some confluence of these technologies and data will happen leading to a superintelligence long before we can create one intentionally inside of a lab. Recursive learning that allows for AI to develop itself and blockchains for sharing of data, knowledge, drive space and processing power should contribute to this potential. x200B This leads me to the seccond hypothesis superintelligent machines will be on the whole a positive influence for humanity, not an existential threat as fear mongers want us to believe. If a superintelligence emerges spontaneously, then it follows that it will be driven by an ecosystems of goals that it derived from all of our narrowly focused AIs. I'd argue that the goals that live inside of existing AIs on the whole bring efficiencies and improvements to humanity, even if there are some that seem biased and counterproductive. So, a superintelligence that sought to satisfy the highest value combination of goals would, on the whole bring vast improvements to humanity. x200B Change my views? Where does my argument have holes?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Superintelligence will emerge spontaneously, not through the direct efforts of human programmers, and will be on-the-whole positive for humanity.\n","id":"905ec8be-a943-4ef8-9873-61b92e2fab56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>Morals vary dramatically across time and place One group or individual\u2019s good can be another group\u2019s or individual's evil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Objective moral truth doesn\u2019t exist It is only a philosophical\/theological theory--a thought experiment.\n","id":"3f611be1-a1c0-49d1-ba2b-3d0fad6c6070"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Parliamentary Systems Enforce Proportional Representation?<|ARGUMENT|>Large parties must also cater to the interests of multiple groups in order to obtain a enough seats to be able to form government through a coalition or minority government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Policies specifically addressing the issues of minority groups are more likely to be considered and passed in parliament.\n","id":"4712c609-fd88-4742-b952-4e14e2bb1c3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>The European Court of Justice ruled that the UK can only revoke Article 50 if the revocation is \"unequivocal and unconditional meaning that the UK cannot temporarily revoke Article 50. Even if the revocation is intended to be temporary it may be difficult for the UK to restart the process at a later stage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be undemocratic for May to revoke Article 50.\n","id":"2ccb689b-a136-4e16-88f1-ea7ed2699284"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapy Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>If both the practitioner and recipient of conversion therapy wish for the therapy to occur, there is no incentive for anyone to report the use of unregulated practices.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no basis for that claim. Regulations always make a big change in every industry that is regulated.\n","id":"cb98dc16-bdf4-4e56-b013-f991acac7064"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is deliberately not preventing someone's death ethically equivalent to killing them?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unfair to expect a bystander to know how to act to prevent someone's death given that most deaths likely to witnessed by them may be accidents which may not be easily preventable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A bystander may not know what to do, and therefore does nothing. There is nothing to hold accountable.\n","id":"b3f16486-8d57-4737-a29a-13fc24adc16d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tezos: Protocol Amendment #1<|ARGUMENT|>I think reducing the roll size will bring a sizable new group of bakers in addition to helping decentralize the protocol. This would be a net positive for protocol and community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Amendment Proposal #2: Would increase the current gas limit AND reduce the roll size requirement.\n","id":"27206362-41f9-4fd7-a67f-20fae8fda10f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Seriously, there's people who go out of their way to hate on things, why? If you don't like it, don't look for it, if you come across it, then ignore it. I can even say leaving comments on trully awful people murderers, rapists, etc it's stupid, do you think they're even gonna read it and be like oh wait yeah raping people is not good. Getting mad at your current president? I am not American and in my country yeah we have an awful one what's the damn point of commenting about how awful he is on social media? And the argument of wanting to change things is stupid, if you actually wanna do something about this, make a protest Actually do something This bothers me specially when people shit on someone based on looks when it has nothing to do, yeah Donald Trump's hair is ridiculous, what do you achieve by making a comment about it? What can you achieve with this? It's just wasting your time and getting yourself mad at something that you can't help, because if you could, you'd actually be MAKING something.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"leaving hate on stuff in any way or form is stupid and unnecessary.\n","id":"151837b6-15e2-495b-9531-34b85d1c1380"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Travelers also cannot afford to fidget or panic because that could lead to their coming out at the wrong fireplace.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of Floo Powder has a very small margin for error and is quite dangerous.\n","id":"9ff0adac-277c-45c3-b1c7-5c14a6f2e9a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think there is any issue in pursuing a person meaning you want to date them are dating them are flirting with them are trying to date them etc. , who is in a relationship be it marriage, regular relationship, etc. . That is, under these conditions a your goal is to date that person and you are doing it because you like them, not to make anyone jealous, ruin someone's relationship, etc. b you don't aggressively pursue that person after you've been declined it needs to be a mutual interest c you don't manipulate them into leaving their spouse d you don't actively interact with the other one's spouse, kids etc. I may have forgotten some specific cases, but I am talking about the general situation. What I mean by is nothing wrong is not necessarily the fact that it can cause harm to someone else eg. kids , it's just that it's the person who is being pursued who is responsible, not the pursuer. Obviously the other way around it does not work, as someone who has a family with kids and is actively trying to pursue other people is obviously at fault, but that's not the point. You are free to like and want to date anyone you meet and the fact that they're in a relationship is not something that should stop you unless you don't want to do it yourself . It's the other one who is responsible for their actions eg. not declining you . You are not responsible for their will to date someone outside their relationship etiher.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's nothing wrong with pursuing someone who is in a relationship.\n","id":"da84c08d-34a8-4f51-9cc0-d6e3bb31c09f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Police officers are often portrayed as an abusive power in social media, but never noted for their good deeds because of this, our view on police officers as a whole is skewed towards the less common darker side. Usually when this darker side appears, it\u2019s because of how stressful their job can be and what they have to put up with. If social media would portray the most common lighter side of the police force, it may make them feel better about what they are doing, instead of pointing out every single error. Police officers are already distrusted by the majority of the population in most cities, so we don\u2019t need social media adding more fuel to the fire. The life of a police officer appears to be very stressful and aggravating. Their job is to keep balance within the law, and over time, acts and words of hatred towards them can affect their performance as an officer. One officer in Boston, Massachusetts, stated \u201cPeople don\u2019t like us much,\u201d while another officer in Portland, Oregon said that he was angry because people for a negative opinion of him without actually knowing him. Both of these officers said the reason for this was because of the constant bad press coverage on television. Studies have shown that constant stressors of being a police officer can have increased risk for physical, psychological, and interpersonal negative outcomes. All of this also depends on the police officer\u2019s coping mechanisms. If they are having all of these stressors and decide to cope with them by exercising or family support, they would be less likely to harm their selves or others, as opposed to coping with stress by drinking or repressing their anger. Police officers take news representations of what they do very seriously. They believe that the way the profession is represented in the media both reflects and creates a real public sentiment. Highlighting this predicament in 2006, a 23 year old black male was killed by three police officers, an incident that was especially emotional because it occurred just hours before the man was to be married. Most police departments have an internal review policy, and the city police department that was involved has a very well developed review protocol. In an effort to avoid causing interference, or the perception of interference, in other processes such as internal and external investigations , the department does not release the results of its reviews until those other processes have run their course. For this reason, very little is said on behalf of the police department during this lengthy period of time. Meanwhile, the media has a limited amount of information with which to generate a story. Invariably much of that information comes from the angry and grieving relatives of the deceased. So the story that is told for many months, as the department\u2019s legal and internal review processes continue, is very much one sided, almost always casting the police in a negative light. In the present case, the state criminal charges against the officers were dismissed. However, the officers still potentially face federal civil rights charges as well as internal sanctions from their department. If social media showed stories of police officers doing something good such as saving a child from a car wreck, or arresting bank robbers etc. Then police officers might have a better reputation in the general public instead of being portrayed as violent and corrupt abusers. In my mind, being a police officer does not seem like an easy job, and I feel that we should all respect them more than we do. If I was an officer, I would feel much better about doing my job with the support of my community rather than being frowned upon by it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Police Officers get bad coverage in social media, and this can form bad relations with the public.\n","id":"d1f4df41-6035-4488-b420-b4505cd401e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Needless to say, braced for the downvotes because in my opinion the prequels are decent enough Star Wars movies and the sequels aren't much better than the generic The Rock movie Not only that, they blatantly capitalized on nostalgia and are more of an investment project than a movie. THE PREQUELS I won't say they are Oscar Awarding material, but objectively aren't as bad as people tend to paint 'em. People build a hype train for more than 20 years around Star Wars with books, comics, video games etc, and when it finally came out they inevitably got disappointed. However, what you get is an undeniable product of Lucas creativity with a bit of merchandising forethought . There is a TON of lore added that expand the universe in imaginable ways. The main catalyst of this is the sheer amount of details in those films let me give you an example in the Maul vs Qui Gon Jin, the latter sits to meditate while the former rages in inquietude when the laser walls break the fight. Also, Obi Wan draw his saber before them both maybe by his eagerness for help his master or stronger force sensibility. Or this scene where he explain the Living Force very subtly. Those are two little examples among many I could do this all day Another point is the main story arch from the I, II and III it makes sense and it's amusingly clever. A senator inciting a conflict between powerful bankers and the Republic from both sides, using the same tactic Hitler used to seize power probably inspired by . THE SEQUELS The sequels feels like a bunch of executives sat down and discussed the best way to safely make money. So we get a lot of Millenium Falcom scenes nostalgia lines Chewie we're home and the cherry on the cake a big space ship battle at the end against the Death Star 3.0. Yep, it appears that the safest way to cash in was to copy the New Hope same character archetypes even the supporting roles same factions, same adventure gt climax gt big ship battle. Which is completely misled, as Marvel Cinematic Universe shows that one can make good, bold and family friendly movies and still smash the box office I think most of the praises that the new movies are getting are out of spite. By copying the original trilogy, people think wow, now Star Wars is on the right track . It's unthinkable that a movie like Rogue One gathered a higher IMDB score than Revenge of the Sith, let alone than 300, Casino Royale, most of MCU movies. That movie features the most battered plot and the characters are straightforward clich\u00e9. Another point to be made is about the infantilization of the new triology. They are dismissing the graphical violence to the point that takes away the credibility of the movie, noting that it's about a war and involves inevitably quite a lot of battle sequences. This also reflects on the concept of characters, Snoke's Guards look like Power Rangers opposed to the intimitating Magna Royal Senate Guards . Stormtroopers weren't exempt of this kind of cartoon like design The story was quite dumb down as well, there isn't any major plot or arks going on aside the bare minimum to indicate a continuation. The First Order is evil, we must fight them Is Kylo Ren beyond redemption? Where's the next Death Star? EDIT Not a native speaker, excuse the bad grammar. EDIT 2 We have a well established Jedi Sith warrior who trained since a child being hold off by a random Storm Trooper deserter and beaten by Rey Neither of those had any prior training, and even if Finn is force sensitive and Rey is a convergence of the Force that doesn't make any sense. Anakin was a convergence as well and was repeatedly bested by Dooku and eventually by Obi Wan. At this time Anakin was a veteran general and a Jedi Knight If training doesn't matter, why do people bother to train? TL DR Prequels weren't perfect, but had rich and original content. Sequels are just a money grubbing investment project, surfing their way through out the nostalgia. Give me your best shot, Stranger x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Star Wars - the Prequels are way better than the sequels.\n","id":"62f11422-2946-4f51-9736-b500e8771ac3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>The 10 states with the weakest gun laws collectively have an aggregate level of gun violence that is 3.2 times higher than the 10 states with the strongest gun laws.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Different studies demonstrate that there is a strong and significant link between weak gun laws and high rates of gun violence.\n","id":"6c60d11e-fb76-4ffe-8891-26b1e4eefef5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Christina Hoff Sommers is very popular on reddit. One of her videos was just re posted on r videos again and the same debates about the source erupted. I think this comment does a good job pointing out the ideological slant of the channel she did a video for. Everytime, there's loads of people who believe calling out her biases is an ad hominem. Which, well, doesn't even make sense given the definition of ad hominem gt When used inappropriately, it is a fallacy in which a claim or argument is dismissed on the basis of some irrelevant fact or supposition about the author or the person being criticized. Ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, for example, when it relates to the credibility of statements of fact or when used in certain kinds of moral and practical reasoning. The complaints I see about her aren't irrelevant, and bringing up the agenda of the people who pay her I think is totally relevant. She produces a video series on the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative American libertarian think tank, called the Factual Feminist. She's paid to promote a conservative agenda. If you look at all of her arguments, they always end up promoting said agenda. Many times she presents arguments that are misleading or include gaps in her logic to promote said agenda. For example, when she discusses the STEM educational gap between men and women, she presents the statistics that show there's more men involved in STEM than women duh we already knew that then she makes claims that this is basically the way things are because of biology. That last part isn't really sourced well eg. people usually bring up generic 'brain differences' or 'differences in spatial visualization' and then erroneously extrapolate those as proof to say men gt women in science , or at all, but it lines up with the AEI's agenda. Liberal feminists believe the STEM gap is mostly cultural. Conservatives don't believe that this discrimination is real, so they pay CHS to tell women that your lives are already so great, stop complaining just pick yourselves up by the bootstraps So why is it wrong to point out her bias? I can read a title of one of her videos and guess exactly what her argument will already be, what kind of evidence she's going to use or ignore, what gaps in her logic there will be, and what conclusion she'll make. People say to examine her arguments on their own merit , but the problem is she isn't presenting good arguments through these videos. She's presenting an agenda and cherry picking arguments to persuade you. Now if this were a formal debate, then I would agree, but these are short videos that get taken as gospel because it aligns with reddit's common biases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's not wrong to point out the biases of a source.\n","id":"85f2273f-29e9-409b-8e81-b5340b58bb21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>Always' follow up campaign, #unstoppable - a partnership between their parent company, Procter and Gamble, and non-profit organisation TED - was designed to inspire confidence in young women to not allow themselves to be limited by societies ideas of what a girl should do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Always's #LikeAGirl campaign, which focused on female empowerment, went viral after being shown during the SuperBowl.\n","id":"17b86329-a834-4aa8-a049-001c409b8cc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should heterosexual people not be allowed in gay bars?<|ARGUMENT|>Between 11 percent and 28 percent of LGB workers in USA report being denied or passed over for a promotion because of their sexual orientation, and 1 in 10 LGB workers who were out on the job report having been fired from a job in the previous five years because they were lesbian, gay or bisexual. Center for American Progress, pg.10<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many LGBTQ+ individuals still face discrimination, harassment, and violence in their daily lives.\n","id":"720a5f7a-becd-4fca-8fdc-5136903a1758"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm going to try and keep this as distilled as possible, as I'm not looking for a generic debate on religion. I want to discuss a very specific point The only way you can actually be an agnostic is if you are truly agnostic about all unknowns in equal parts . If you are agnostic about the existence of God, but not agnostic about the existence of Santa, Fairies, Easter Bunnies, Bogeymen, and so on, then you are not agnostic, you are using agnosticism as a veil to hide your theism. That's because you are doing what theists do You are giving mystical credence to the notion of God, that you do not give to other baseless human claims. Don't get caught up in Well DOES God exist or doesn't he? because that's irrelevant, the actual question is, Well DO the humans who made up this story have access to special knowledge, or not? In every other area of your life you doubt baseless human stories, why not this one? Because deep down, you want or even need to believe. EDIT Lots of good stuff here so far. If I haven't responded directly to your comment it's almost certainly because I already addressed your point somewhere else in the thread and I can't keep up with requoting myself all over. I have to head to the dentist now surely evidence there is no God? P , back within an hour or less, hopefully.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Agnostics are just closeted theists\n","id":"cae288c7-50fa-4cbe-a9e7-068d10eb5e8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>Even the economics behind these and other products a \"profits before people and reveal that companies want customers for their products, but don't care if people get sick\/die from them. It is just a consequence that they are aware of and have to deal with, but not something they actively push for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some lifestyles tend to to reduce fertility, such as high fat diets e.g. fast food or some commonly found substances e.g. smoking\n","id":"3ab86ae6-d982-48c8-b81f-4d8118ac1f3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's short, widespread, and the vast majority of people don't pause for a second to think about it. Xe and the like are silly and there is no reason to adopt them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that \"he\" as a default pronoun is completely acceptable and does not pose a threat to women\/feminism.\n","id":"e46e9368-2f1d-4fb5-b866-aa4817edd275"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There was that John Bellushi post about how he actively undermined women writers because he thought they weren't funny. Guy was a huge dick that's clear, but the underlying question of, Are women as funny as men? is what I'm getting at. What zero people in that thread were discussing, of course, was any actual reasons why this might be the case Here's what I think. Change my view To put it short, I think that in addition to using humor to appeal to one's own gender, guys have to develop an ability to make women laugh in order to get laid. Women don't typically need to rely on this as much, and so their senses of humor usually stay focused on their own gender. The result of this, of course, is that men develop humor or routines that appeal to broader audiences, and therefore become more successful comedians. We could look at a similar phenomena of getting implants. Both men and women get implants for various reasons, but the primary reason is to look good to appeal to the opposite sex. Far more women get implants than men because men are visually focused on looks. Still, some men get implants on their calves or butt or whatever, but it's far less frequent because the added benefits of attractiveness aren't as high as they are when women get implants. My hypothesis on the subject is that men are typically funnier than women because women find humor to be a more attractive attribute than men find it to be in general, of course. This leads more men to appeal to both sexes, which leads them to be more successful comedians. EDIT Okay, my view has changed only slightly. No one has put forth a more convincing argument as to why less women are in comedy. There have been some links to studies which were great, thank you that showed that men were only marginally 2.2 funnier than women at writing captions, but that both genders seems to greatly attribute the authorship of these funny captions to men. After all this, here's my view My working hypothesis at the moment is that men develop the ability to create and deliver humor more than women because they spend more time trying to impress using humor. However, women, being on the receiving end of the humor have a more broad sense of humor than guys, with men usually only on the receiving end of other male humor. This explains the discrepancy of women on the delivery side of comedy, and also why on the receiving side, women tend to find everyone funny, but men tend to only find other men funny. I do agree that there is some feedback from 'society' which helps to reinforce these roles, but I think the causal aspect of the difference in comedy careers as well as why these roles are perpetuated in society are because of the differences in how humor is used to attract males vs. females.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women aren't as funny successful as comedians because they don't have to use humor to attract a mate.\n","id":"5d739224-23d6-401e-8d55-a25e6335245d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've watched too many conspiracy videos on youtube about how media affect on our subconscious. Maybe some of it it's true but mostly now I'm scared of listening to music or watching movies because somehow it can affect my subconscious. Same with cartoons for kids. I have 4 year old sister and she's watching those LOUD and very bright literally, bright colours cartoons and I'm scared she will be stupid kid with ADHD because of that or something like that. I can't feel relaxed i now feel like i should live in different century or something<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm scared of listening to music because it may affect on my subconscious. Same with my sister watching tv cartoons.\n","id":"656a1785-4e1f-42f0-8083-83c39ab59523"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>An economy of worker coops would distribute power more widely in society because the decisions of the cooperatives are made democratically by their workers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An economy based on worker cooperatives will spread wealth, knowledge and power more evenly throughout society.\n","id":"60d41213-a6ff-4674-b383-8374f6dbcfe2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Kids are usually barred from seeing movies and other performances with a lot of nudity. This implies that society generally doesn't want to expose them to nudity for their own protection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people, and especially children, may find the sight of nudity disturbing.\n","id":"a3327609-58f2-4ce1-8124-bd41932bb85a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>It should not be mandatory for cyclists to wear helmets<|ARGUMENT|>Studies show that motorists are less careful around a cyclist when the cyclist wears a helmet, leading to more accidents Video explaining it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should not be mandatory for cyclists to wear helmets\n","id":"c362b7f0-14af-491f-a809-2b2192573990"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>The word Krishna means all-attractive one. This name is therefore no sectarian name but is a very fitting name for the supereme personality of Godhead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The vedic scriptures teach monotheism, that Krishna is the Supreme personality of Godhead\n","id":"8c6a2240-5f97-4654-88e8-43307a0d6b55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever I see parents that are taking care of their children who have been diagnosed with extreme cases of mental disability, I often ask myself Why? In social situations it really only seems to be an astronomical cause of stress. Bathing the child, always making sure he she isn't hurting him herself. It literally never ends. To me, the joy of raising a child is watching it grow from an 8 pound crying pooping machine into a functioning adult who has no limits to his her capabilities. This dream is severely dampened with a mentally handicapped child. The other issue I find, is that a lot of these children are also incapable of really expressing their emotions, and often cannot even verbalize what they want besides grunts and tantrums. Obviously this perspective is probably wildly different when the child has half of your genes, but to me it definitely seems harder to love this child. Especially when the child is a huge stressor. You can also say goodbye to a relaxing retirement. I want to make it clear that I have the utmost respect for parents who raise a child like this with unconditional effort and love , my request is that you show me the light in such an arduous task. EDIT I do not have children<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see the joy in raising a mental handicapped child\n","id":"b698d4d2-8228-4398-8676-80994779c60c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>EU Working Language<|ARGUMENT|>There are several practical problems with multiple languages that are an everyday reality in the EU. Twenty languages give a total of 190 possible combinations and finding a person who speaks both Maltese and Estonian is quite a challenge. To overcome this setback, the parliament uses much more 'relay translation', where a speech is firstly translated into one and then into another language. While in the game of Chinese whispers the mistakes may be fun, EU discussions have much more serious consequences. Also many new countries can\u2019t secure enough suitable candidates for translation jobs. A recent call was looking for 135 new translators for all nine new languages and only 40 and 82 candidates applied for Maltese and Latvian, respectively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are several practical problems with multiple languages that are an everyday reality in the EU....\n","id":"019678e8-4eca-44c2-b0eb-179a862d6a12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Jesus lost voluminous amounts of blood from the scourging, the crown of thorns which pierced the scalp, a part of the body that bleeds freely, the crucifixion itself, and finally, the spear. In addition, he had already lost blood while praying in the garden. By the time he died, he would have suffered from massive dehydration.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moving such a stone would be impossible for a recently-crucified man.\n","id":"182e9127-88d7-4017-bf38-064a153158c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Condoms in schools<|ARGUMENT|>, HIV and pregnancy. For their cost, they are easily the most cost-effective means of protecting against these threats.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Condoms are one of the most effective means of protecting against STDs\n","id":"069b588d-c25a-483f-8722-625a2374cd7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>E.g. If someone commits murder, whether or not they could have chosen otherwise is highly relevant. If they were coerced to pull the trigger then they are held less culpable and the person who forced them to pull the trigger is moreso.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The presumption of free will is used as a factor in determining the morality of an action, therefore moral responsibility must be consequent to free will.\n","id":"e715bf70-7036-4a7d-8e8a-af6a027fe5f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>Current national languages will be preserved as \"local\" ones, the same as current dialects are nowadays.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Canada has French and English; Belgium has Dutch and French.\n","id":"b93c1b94-e091-449e-b4fd-0c4281878d88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that as part of the requirements to run for office, candidates should have to fully disclose their personal information. Tax returns, birth certificates, arrest records, investments, etc. Basically any recorded information short of things like passwords should become public information. Furthermore, recording them without their consent should be legal, barring classified information which I hope they aren\u2019t sharing in unsecured places anyway. Since they are being elected to represent their fellow citizen\u2019s interests, those citizens deserve to know who they are really voting for. In a sense, elected officials should be considered a different kind of \u2018citizen\u2019, because of the influence they wield and where their influence comes from. I think that such a requirement would go a long way in weeding out some unsavory characters. Hopefully, under such a rule only people who truly have nothing to hide would be running for office. Their work is already largely transparent, with public hearings and sessions and laws that must be available for the public to read. Why not take it a step further and increase the transparency of the people doing the work as well? I understand that even elected officials are still considered citizens and have the same basic rights as everyone else. Thus this proposal would be a direct violation of the constitution. But this change feels like it\u2019s worth it, and exceptions have been made regarding other rights. The government taking rights away from the government just doesn\u2019t seem like a problem to me. So, what am I overlooking here?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Elected officials should lose their rights to privacy.\n","id":"d3fd57b5-de66-4449-932f-aca0594dfd01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>SPOILERS Not immediately but I expect to veer into spoilers often so I'm letting you know up front. SPOILERS Help me think better of this movie. I don't think it's possible to have my experience re written like, Oh yeah, I actually did enjoy that movie but right now I don't think it was even particularly good. Not just, not to my tastes, but genuinely not a very good movie at all. I should be the easiest lay in the whole world for this movie. In Bruges is terrific, Seven Psychopaths is great, Calvary is very neat and The Guard might be my favorite movie of all time. This director writer duo of the McDonagh brothers is bar none fantastic. They are among the best out there. But this movie . . . SPOILERS Fuck that ending. I get it, movies can leave their endings ambiguous, but virtually every movie that ever has did it better. The Big Chill ends in the middle of a sentence and that works for the movie better than this. This movie is like half a story. Frances McDormand sells the holy hell out of her character with her look and her attitude, but she almost never has anything useful to say. She's set up to be this like female equivalent to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino but with none of the unlikable, hardboiled to the fucking core grit of that character. She's never given this kind of scene. There's no icy stare down, no clever plan, no resolution, everybody's just spinning their wheels going nowhere and doing nothing. There's some things to like about it. It's not all bad. It's not top to bottom bad, but it's not even close to as good as their previous worst. This is rungs below. Its comedy isn't humorous, its drama has no intensity, problems appear and then just get solved immediately off screen Money for the billboards, scaring away the creep from her store . . . Did I miss something? So disappointing. SPOILERS Seriously if you had this movie spoiled for you by this post, that's on you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I did not enjoy The Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri SPOILERS\n","id":"2f4b2ba1-c5b0-4734-bfc1-e53d5302d614"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Clearly based around the recent equal pay controversy surrounding the USWNT but this is to do with Football as a whole not just them. x200B It seems like every 4 years when the women's world cup rolls around there is a lot of attention obviously but also a big push for the sport to be compensated and respected recognised in a similar way as the men's game. I feel like the fact this pretty much exclusively takes place around the world cup is indicative of one of the major reasons that the two versions of the game are unlikely to be seen compensated equally People in general do not seem to care much in general about women's football between worlds cups. It seems to become popular for a few weeks and then fade back into relative obscurity. A lot of people I've seen that have encouraged people to watch, support, buy the merch etc have never been to a game potentially outside of the world cup , do not support a team, and tend to say nada about women's football in general. It takes consistent club level support to garner a big, reliable fanbase. One reason, I believe, is the lower quality and excitement factor involved. This is not to suggest that the women are in any way bad of course, but the level of strength speed and skill involved is not really comparable to the men's game I often hear the 'they got beaten by U15s thrown about in a childish way but it does speak to the physical differences between the sexes . Men that are huge football fans will regularly watch the Premiership, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga etc the best leagues in the countries where football is most popular essentially. They are unlikely to watch even Division 1 second highest league games unless they have a personal stake like a local team, this is because when several versions of a product are available, people tend to go for the highest quality. This is similar to less people watching the WNBA than the NBA. There are a number of sports where the gender of the participants does not really matter MMA in recent years and Tennis for a while are good examples where individual women or female teams get paid more than the men simply due to popularity so it isn't entirely based on the biological differences and the arguable disparity in entertainment value that may result because of it. Another reason I would suggest is the fact that the most dominant team s in womens football are based in the USA. The USA does not really care so much about 'Soccer'. Occasionally a Beckham or an Henry will head over and spice things up a little, but behind NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB, fans of the MLS are relatively few and far between. This means potentially one of the biggest markets is largely uninterested in indulging in Football even at the highest levels. Another reason is the historical dominance of men in the sport commercially speaking. Women were not even allowed to play for decades whilst the mens game was able to build up a strong fan base. There have been decades worth of personalities born from male football Pele, Beckham, Messi, Ronaldo etc. Each generation has their heroes and these cults of personality built around the superstars and their teams have existed for so long and are so strong that playing catch up even in the digital media age is a nigh on impossible feat. The men's world cups are often if not always amongst the highest viewed events in television history behind only the Olympics and are extremely lucrative commercially as well. Another more cynical and recent reason may relate to how politicised women's football has become. Politicising people, events, anything really often leads to divisiveness where people make decisions based largely around the shared attitudes of their 'group'. I can see people that are Trump fanatics making the decision to not watch simply because of his back and forth with M. Rapinoe. x200B All of this creates a world where women's football is already on a back foot and I feel like catching up isn't really possible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women are unlikely to ever get paid the same as men to play Football specifically\n","id":"f8c65b04-54b9-4635-8daa-30422a8e08ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I cannot understand how someone who purchases a villa in Spain for the holidays, that Porsche or even a swimming pool can still make the claim to be a reasonably ethical person' without being rationally inconsistent. When one chooses luxurious goods above other people's basic well being this means denying their equality as human beings, and is therefore immoral. I think it\u2019s a bit of a grey area to define what luxury is and what basic but the above mentioned items are clearly at the end of the luxury spectrum. And although money cannot fix all the problems in this world, there is still a lot that can be done for people who are dealt a bad hand in life and deserve solidarity. p.s. I am sorry if my choice of words isn't always philosophically accurate but I hope my point comes across. p.s.s I do not wish to judge. Hell, by these standards I'm coming very close to being 'an unethical asshole' myself but I just can't seem to put my finger on it. my definition would be somebody who wishes the best for this world and its people<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that, as long as there are people dying in this world due to lack of food or medicines, it is immoral to buy extremely luxurious items because that money can be used to save lives.\n","id":"9f752117-b128-42e8-9fa5-54994bd2f464"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the government provide funding for arts programs?<|ARGUMENT|>Arts programs are rampant in private schools and public school pupils should have the same opportunities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Involvement in the arts can positively influence academic performance in students.\n","id":"3ffcf02e-0106-4b21-88c0-5b8c92d63ce9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Over 50% of the country live in 146 counties. The electoral college encourages candidates to be more broad, to appeal to more of the country than just 146 out of 3,000 counties. U.S. Census Bureau data site<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electoral college works to reduce the influence of densely populated areas and give fair power to smaller states.\n","id":"8f6bbfa6-6680-40d2-8f52-ed476f622a33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We live in the midwest in one of the centers of natural gas exploration and fracking. Many people I know have had their lives completely change overnight through signing leases. Althought we don't have enough land for our lives to completely change , the money could help us quite a bit. Our only reservations are that we are scared about the possible dangers to our water if such dangers are possible and about the value of our property since we are planning to sell in 5 6 years. We don't want to make a mistake because it is such a big decision. If it is a mistake please  before its too late<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We want to sign a lease with an oil\/gas company.Should I ?\n","id":"7ce96930-47a8-46a7-88fb-29c69d4766bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no limit to freedom of speech.<|ARGUMENT|>With no limit, and no recourse inside the legal system, it would be quite easy to ruin a regular person's life for a few thousand dollars -- with just a little false information and a few made up stories about how s\/he is, for example, a pedophile, or that someone who's livelihood depends upon trust, violated that trust in another state where no one can really check on those facts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Speech can cause psychological, material and sometimes physical harm to people who did not ask to be subjected to it, and should therefore be restricted by law and technology.\n","id":"105f9da7-2bd0-485f-8f3a-8dd86603a5e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Have a housemate that spends at least 3 4 hours a day watching daily vlogs of youtubers. I find their content to be stupid quite frankly. I cannot understand why anyone gives a shit what these people think. They seem to have no credentials, just some random guy talking about the latest celebrity gossip or about themselves and their own life. It's made me really dislike living with him not just because it's hard for me to respect how he spends his time, but I find it almost mind numbing so any insight is appreciated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I find most YouTube \"celebrities\" to be self absorbed and think people that watch their daily vlogs are wasting their lives\n","id":"8cf62619-5311-4ae0-a905-f12e9a5a815c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tibet independence<|ARGUMENT|>The Chinese government insists that the United Nations documents, which codifies the principle of self-determination, provides that the principle shall not be abused in disrupting territorial integrity: \"Any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.\"40<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United Nations does charter discourages disruptions of national unity such as a move to Tibetan Independence.\n","id":"2656220c-4ba6-4875-acc9-ae7e4c469613"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>This refers only to a strong bipartisan context such as the US. Yet in most contexts, regular voters are not necessarily more extreme than marginal or non-regular, voters p. 3.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intense partisans who due to their fervent beliefs are often more extreme, are more likely to participate in lower turnout elections. Compulsory voting will therefore moderate electoral outcomes.\n","id":"436abcc9-60a4-43e5-9e60-02771da1ec51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be one World Government?<|ARGUMENT|>It is in the interest of the state to regulate and control currencies so that they track currency movement, collect taxes on it, and trace criminal activity. All of this control is likely to be lost if cryptocurrencies are used.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin might be unable to function as a global currency because it is difficult to regulate and control\n","id":"73884bf9-c1af-4a64-be9b-e5f5221f1b9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT I have several deltas to award in this thread I've already awarded one . I need to head in to work soon, so I'll have to get back to the deltas later. I just wanted to make that clear. nbsp nbsp I didn't want to make the title too long, so let me start with a few quick disclaimers I'm not arguing that dogs should be on leashes when they are in fenced in yards I'm not arguing that dogs shouldn't be allowed to roam free at dog parks I'm not arguing that service dogs should always be on leashes nbsp nbsp Okay, on to the view. Aside from the disclaimers above, I believe that dogs should always be on leashes when they're outside. I know that there are people with very well trained dogs who would argue differently. One of my nephews is a professional dog trainer and a very effective one at that , and when he goes out, his dogs are not on leashes. In fact, most of the dog trainers I know which is admittedly only a handful of people don't have their dogs on leashes once the dogs are trained . Their justification is that their dogs know their roles, and they are not going to break their commands. nbsp I'd like to start by explaining why I do understand this mentality, with a few examples nbsp I have a highly trained dog myself Belgian Malinois . If I say heel, he will follow the command, and he will not leave my side unless I release him not to chase an animal, not to run up to another person, not to go pick up that piece of food lying on the ground, etc. We have a huge fenced in yard at our barn where he can run around and boy, does he run but the moment I say come, he immediately stops whatever he's doing, runs directly to me, and sits down facing me. If I put him in place, he will stay in the place until I release him. I can put him in place in the yard, go inside the house and make a drink, come back out a few minutes later, and he'll still be in that place until I release him from the command. All of this to say I have great faith that he would stay by my side in a public setting. nbsp Furthermore, when I was growing up, my next door neighbors always had Great Danes. They trained the danes well, and those dogs were allowed to just roam the neighborhood cul de sac style neighborhood . None of the other neighbors cared, and it was actually kind of nice. They went through three danes while I lived there, and all three of them felt like neighborhood dogs. You'd wake up one morning, look out the window, and there the dog would be lounging in your front yard, just enjoying life. Again, all of us neighbors were close, and no one cared the owners wouldn't have allowed this to happen if anyone had a problem with it . Those dogs were amazing they never got into any trouble, and they never went onto the street except for one time, which is going to be important below. nbsp nbsp Here is why I still hold my view. There are several factors to consider Unpredictability. Despite how well trained a dog may be, you still never know if something unordinary is going to happen. What if something spooks the dog? Remember when I said above that there was one time when my old neighbors' dog went onto the street? That was their third dane. He was probably about 7 8 years old when this happened. One day, he was in the backyard with his owner, when suddenly he ran out onto the main road their house was a corner house . He had never done that before, and yet, it happened. And he ran directly into a car which was likely going about 30mph. Fortunately, since this dog was basically a small horse and since he ran into the side of the car as it passed as opposed to be hit directly , he survived with hardly any injuries actually . After that incident, he was still allowed to roam until the end of his days, and to my knowledge, he never went back onto the street however, there was still that one time. And that one time could have killed him, and could have led to the injury death property damage of others. nbsp Other Dogs. Unfortunately, in my current neighborhood, there are several awful dog owners. Two of them have Pit Bulls. I'm not heading in an anti Pitt Bull direction at all with this I love me some pits however, I think most of us could agree that shitty aggressive owners and Pit Bulls are not a good mix. Those dogs have escaped from the houses and chased people before. I now actually carry dog specific pepper spray, simply because I never know if one of those Pits is going to escape the house while I'm out walking my dog. I certainly can't fend off an aggressive pit bull, and even though my dog is quite strong and large, I'm not sure he could either but even if he could, no one wants that situation to arise . I would be extremely worried about having my dog off leash when there's the possibility of another dog attacking. Now, one might argue okay, well you obviously live in a neighborhood where letting your dog off leash would be reckless and stupid however, not all people have that same experience. Fair enough but you can never know if when some other aggressive dog could stroll through the area. nbsp Some People Are Deathly Afraid Of Dogs. With this point, I'm probably entering territory in which people will say well, I can't help it of some people are afraid of dogs. They can simply cross to the other side of the street, or avoid my street entirely. I'm not going to change how I do things with my dog just because someone, somewhere might be afraid of it. But I still think it's a bit inconsiderate. Given the first two points I made, I think it's reasonable that someone might be wary of walking through an area where there's a dog off leash. Why inflict that fear and anxiety on people, when you could just have your dog on a leash? Granted, having your dog on a leash isn't going to guarantee that people won't still be afraid I've had people cross to the other side when approaching me and my dog. He's a teddy bear, but he looks well, like he could have you for dinner if he wanted to. But at least those people know that I have control over him, and that he can't just rush them if he so chooses. nbsp I could probably come up with a few more points, but I think those are my main ones. I have seen my fair share of brilliantly behaved dogs off leash, and I don't doubt that there are many dogs out there who go through their entire lives without having off leash accidents however, to me, it seems like the risk reward ratio simply isn't worth it. There are places one can go to have their dogs off leash in the outdoors, and I don't think people should do it out in public. Sorry for writing so much I admittedly tend to ramble when I type. I'm open to my view being changed here otherwise I wouldn't make this post , and I'm interested in hearing opposing views. nbsp EDIT I don't know why my list formatted to only the number 1. Any formatting whizzes able to explain that to me?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dogs should be kept on leashes while outside\n","id":"2906666c-2a2c-4948-8afa-24b00dfeaf08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Black Panther: Who's Right About Wakanda's Role in the World?<|ARGUMENT|>14 former French colonies in Africa are still paying a colonial tax to France - one of the conditions for France granting them independence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While colonialism may have ended officially, Western countries still control their former colonies through a relationship of economic dependency.\n","id":"06ed2a83-450f-40e3-8880-6929fd0ab2b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Over the past 12 to 18 months there seems to have been a consistent stream of negative news about facebook. With the latest WSJ piece, it seems to have hit a peak, with the stock losing 20 of it's value year to date. While negative news is great of headlines and a few eyeballs, I believe Facebook is a great company and investment. A few reasons Their main facebook platform growth may be decelerating, or flatlining in Europe the USA , but as it stands, it is the largest network of connected humans on earth. These are humans that even if usage starts to decline, they can continue to advertise to and find ways to squeeze money of Instagram. Instagram continues to grow and pick up the slack in the USA Europe with respect to growth where facebook's main platform is falling off. They haven't even started to fully monetize the platform. Think direct sales like the app store , better advertising, P2P transfers sales, and more Whatsapp Messenger combined are huge already and continue to grow. As of right now Facebook essentially have left these two untapped. If you're familiar with WeChat then you know that there are tons of ways that Facebook can monetize these two. Such as, P2P payments in app, merchant purchasing payments in app, stick token image sales in app, advertising in app tricky, but it can be done , and so much more. Surely or maybe I HOPE Facebook is looking at what's being done in China and working on implementing some of these features in these apps. With 1 billion people using these apps, just the in app payments p2p transfers is a gold mine They have a pile of cash to purchase any new startups, or established companies who can add value to their empire They have no debt Occulus long term of course, but the seeds are there Their revenue continues to grow despite them leaving money on the table right now They're investing in fixing the issues that have been plaguing them since this negative new cycle started. Its costing them, but once the people processes are in place, it should create a company that's stronger and even harder to compete with  convince me to sell my shares<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Facebook is an excellent investment\n","id":"bbbf3d5c-2058-41cd-8891-f13444ca75ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love to eat Asiatic food but I could never really use the chopsticks thinking Wow, that is much better than usual cutlery. Using chopsticks is at best a cultural exercise of contortion. Forks and knifes are superior in every way I can imagine in every situation. Including rice that is sticky and particularly rice that isn't sticky. versatility while eating different kinds of food eating with manners not having to fear the dreaded fall of food I hope some of you will be able to help me find arguments to coerce me into using those chopsticks Update Some facts I've accepted regarding the chopsticks nbsp Exercise fine motor skills Give time to taste the food and appreciate it Can be used while doing other things Are easier to clean, produce and carry nbsp Are superior if you want to Preserve the integrity of the food you eat If you don't want to break a grapevine until it's in your mouth Eat crusty things popcorns, cheetos, peanuts without dirtying your hands Eat leafs or salad nbsp You can have makeshift chopsticks easily while makeshift knifes and forks are still not a thing in 2015. Historically better at not stabbing your enemy during dinner? Let this be noted, the spoon and the spork were proposed and I'm all in their favors As for the sporfe, knifoon and spooned knork I'm more dubious. nbsp All of this may be quite situational but in those situations I accept chopsticks as superior . nbsp nbsp<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chopsticks are in no way superior to fork &amp; knife.\n","id":"44dd7119-cd0d-4960-b748-b5a6242a8554"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The main reason I don't listen to rap, in fact hate it, is because it has no musical qualities other than beat and the lyrics are lacking emotion, relevance, and intelligence. There is no variation in tone or pitch, all instrumentation is entirely synthetic, and in almost every song they reference hoes and bitches as if that were the actual name of my sex. Rap is all about drop it to da flo' make dat ass shake. Something something assquake. Rapping takes ZERO musical talent. All you have to do is say incredibly disgusting things about women in this whiny ass voice to a monotonous beat. Oh, and say nigga all the time. I appreciate quality. Quality means that there is real effort put into making the music. I appreciate talent, and honestly, anyone could be a rapper. I could be a rapper, all I'd have to do is get spinners on my car and loosely rhyme about bitches and money, maybe throw in a few drug and or sex references every now and then. And before you say No, you're just hearing the crappy mainstream DURRRR I will counter with this Every time, every single time someone has said nonono, this rap is good , it has in fact been the same shit again. Is it so fucking difficult to grasp the concept that some people would just rather listen to Beethoven or Tchaikovsky than yet another guy making an LJ post in rhyme?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rap music isn't worth listening to.\n","id":"0269ddb8-5d1f-445f-8853-6006d0f7cdb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Software engineers are the skilled craftsmen of today's economy. We make up a large and growing portion of the workforce that is directly involved in producing products. Sure, we are paid quite well, and jobs are still quite plentiful but that's not to say that everything is rosy. Developers especially junior developers are forced to work long hours without overtime pay. We have to take on one sided contracts with non compete clauses. We are forced to meet deadlines and make performance reviews which might be impossible, or are forced on us by managers who know nothing about software engineering. We can be laid off for any reason, or our jobs can be outsourced. Women and minorities are woefully under represented and women in the field are sometimes forced out due to sexual harassment. We have miserable work life balance. Yet, as I write this almost nobody in software engineering is unionized at least in the USA . The CEOs and founders of tech companies all seem like three comma Ayn Rand types who have actively worked against unions for the support staff cooks, drivers, etc. I think unionizing could improve things. There should be regulations in the industry that make careers more stable and our working conditions better. There should be restrictions on hiring temporary contract workers over salaried professionals. By unionizing, we could push for these reforms more effectively. Can you imagine if the programmers at Google or Microsoft went on strike? It would be very powerful. tl, dr things are not as good as they seem in software engineering. Why don't we organize?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Software engineers and engineers in general should be unionized\n","id":"08cfe06e-74f3-4772-9adb-e06785032e1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should Self-Driving Cars Kill?<|ARGUMENT|>This is analogous to the duty of care that doctors owe patients, or teachers owe students. In all situations, the fact that one party surrenders control to the other creates a special duty to protect them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Users of self-driving cars surrender their decision-making whilst driving, meaning they are powerless to save their own lives in an accident scenario. This creates a duty of care to the passenger for the manufacturer.\n","id":"0d94418d-51be-44bf-9164-56c304c44aba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a preface to my view, I am neither currently involved in any food service industry, nor am I advocating any SJW action only asking you to consider my argument and  if you can. Working in any food service position, especially those positions that require one to interact directly with the customer, requires learning via direct and indirect learning methods. Yes one can read a recipe, but can they correctly replicate it? Yes one can take an order from a customer, but what what happens when the customer is unhappy? I worked one job in food service for about a year when I was in college about 30 years ago. Ultimately, it was never ending, ungrateful, and demeaning. People are at their absolute worst when food and money are involved. As a result of only 1 short year in that position I learned an immense amount about people in general, working with teams, and dealing with adversity. That has made me, IMHO, a better person in general. I propose that everyone should be required to work for at least one day in food service to have a shared experience. Agree or disagree, hit me up<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone should be required to work at least one job in the food service industry prior to graduation from secondary school.\n","id":"0a85513b-b413-457f-b52f-255a19ab764c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the NHS be privatised?<|ARGUMENT|>A study in California found that - between 2011 and 2015 - residents of neighborhoods with the highest proportions of white people were more than twice as likely to be prescribed an opioid pain reliever than were residents of neighborhoods where whites were most scarce.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A black person is half as likely to be prescribed strong painkillers such as opioids, than a white person complaining of a similar pain level.\n","id":"9d37904e-f2e3-47a0-ab0b-fefde3d299aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US stop trying to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear program?<|ARGUMENT|>Seoul, the capital of the US-allied South Korea and one of the most populous cities in the world, could be annihilated within minutes by North Korean nuclear weapons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are a number of US allies and interests within North Korean nuclear missile range which might not have the ability to intercept nuclear missiles.\n","id":"e54e66c8-3b63-43c9-bc9f-35ec2da7a0db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realize that I'm very late with this news story, but a while back during the whole Judge Curiel affair, Chris Christie came to the aid of Trump and declared that he knows the man is not racist. To be clear, I'm not debating the existence of racism in this situation, or whether or not Trump is racist in general. What I am saying is that Christie has no way of knowing whether or not Trump is racist, as he has had no occasion to be discriminated against by him. Similarly, for any given recent newsworthy event that involves race, I believe that people who quickly declare that race was not a factor especially when they themselves were not involved are misguided. There's no way for me, a white news viewer, to know that for any given police shooting, race was or was not a factor. And if we are to believe that racism is a thing that exists and should be minimized, it's better to be open to the possibility that racism played a part. White people have little occasion to notice racism, as it isn't something that happens to or in front of many of them on a daily basis. Trevor Noah had a bit on his show recently where he compared it to street harassment of women men don't experience it themselves and rarely see it, so many men were shocked to see a video of a woman being constantly harassed on the street. So through no fault of their own, necessarily white people may be predisposed to believe there is less racism in the world than there actually is. Minorities experience racism much more directly, and therefore would be predisposed to see racism more accurately. So essentially, my argument is that it would be better to be open to the possibility of racism, and to believe minorities with direct experience when they describe certain things as racist. They're simply in a better position to know.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Maybe white people aren't in the best position to determine the existence or extent of racism\n","id":"61e6a57d-070e-48fc-93c4-fba92eceabce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Approximately 1\/3rd of the food produced in the world for human consumption is either lost or wasted<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The world already produces enough food for several billions more, even when eating meat.\n","id":"e7b74015-7529-4bbb-aae8-7a6083669830"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So Apple recently added some new App Store rules. Games with loot boxes must disclose the odds for unlocking rewards. I think this is a positive development that will at least increase transparency. It will encourage game devs to seek out more ethical monetization opportunities. It will positively impact the rest of the game industry by making it a little less lucrative to put loot boxes in their games, since basically devs will now be forced to disclose a part of their business model to competitors and everyone else . Apps that are selling ICOs and crypto futures must now be affiliated with a pre approved financial institution. Apple has similar guidelines for other financial trading apps, and this will reduce the risk of people falling for scams. VPNs must now disclose what kind of data they collect from users. This gives people enough information to avoid sketchy VPNs and discourages predatory data collection practices. It increases trust in good VPNs and encourages people to use those. All of these, I think are positive developments. Yes, it's all a semi walled garden, but you might as well protect the people staying in the garden. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Apple's recent App Store changes are positive\n","id":"16a6e9f2-8369-4265-806a-4e9bdfb803f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>How on earth can something arbitrary like practise problems or assingments determine one's intelligence when we can't even properly define what intelligence is? Well we can cut some corners by limiting intelligence to mathematical abilities, abstract problem solving, ability to see patterns and connect things. By doing this we can leave nonsense like you can be bad at Q but excel in T out of the equation. Why this? Let me give you an analogy If you can breakdance and you can't drive a car, you still can't drive a car. You can bust the littest moves out there but it doesn't change the fact at all that you can't drive a car, which is really problematic if you going to be a driver and you have always wanted to be one. Does this mean that you can't never drive a car? Maybe, maybe not. That depends on few things, but if after long period of practise you still suck at it, there's a good chance that's it's an indicator about your limits i.e that you will never be a good driver hell there's a chance that you will never be even an mediocore one. Well just replace driving with math and physics, and driver by engineer to get my situation. Always wanted to be an engineer, but now after practising with the more harder entrance exam questions I'm currently about to apply for and ENG school , I'm starting to have serious self doubt, because if the brightest people in my country are having a tough time at the school I'm trying to get into what does it mean to a guy like me who has 0 gifts for ENG subjects. I may have somewhat good work ethic and get 80 95 score from the test long story short It's meant to assort people with hard questions, so not everyone can get in , but I know that I just lack the intelligence that gifted people have. How come? Even after 9 tormenting month of studying my success rate is around 40 in practise problems. This means that only 4 10 I get the right result without no one's help i.e only 4 10 I actually understad the subject well enough to apply it. This maybe ok in the start, but when the total work hours are closing to 2000, I'm starting to feel that intelligence is greater factor than determination. Hard work maybe admirable, but with intelligence you will always be more skilled, and more importantly your thinking will be in a higher level. I mean with higher level that there is a limit for how effective your thinking can be. People like Stephen Hawking, Terrence Tao or Elon Musk are clearly higher than what the average people can ever achieve. Sidenote Please don't waste you time by telling me that I just haven't been practising properly, that the flashcards which I've done don't seve any good which is wierd because I haven't done any flashcards because it would be a waste of time and that I just need to find the proper way by brain can process information . When in reality I've tried many different study methods in various places which include but are not limited to pomodoro technique, feynman technique and cornell notes and have got an tutoring for months from really experienced people. Okay so how if you don't seem to make it, you seem to make it according to you test score ? Easy With enough repetition even a monkey could drive a car assuming it don't die in the process of learning . So I just hammer enough questions are remember what to do in the test. But that is missing the main point, which is that assingments determine one's intelligence . IMO you can do good , but you will never do as well as someone who is gifted. My evidence for this is that a classmate we can call him A I had never did anyhing regarding math and physics besides listening in class. You may just say that it's called 'paying attention' but that would be just rubbish. A never even bothered to read the course material as it was just so easy for him. He seemed honestly surprised when I told him that I had to read it many times to even have a minor clue what was going on. A also played f2p games well over 2500 hours in the second half of last school year yet acing the test's with over 90 score which just gives idea how much time was spent on doing other things. Why did I bring A up? Because he's just so good reference point. You have one guy who does his best to grind and another one who does the minimal effort with maximal gain. Even if we were to pass the same test, I'd still have no chance of EVER gaining the level of thinking A has. Why? Well dear reader it's clear. He has far higher IQ than I do. Hope you dear reader enjoyed this kinda ranty . TL DR This took me an hour to write so read the damn post. EDIT To come think of it, my analogy was really bad which has caused obscurity in the comments. My view hasn't really changed, but I'll come back to this topic when I've made a clear vision about the thing I'm going to argue about and have learned some writing skills.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Students performance in practise problems and assingments gives a good picture of his\/her intelligence rather than skill because skill is gained, but intelligence is something you can't change.\n","id":"b5989c5a-a531-4cfd-bb4a-35c7d478ca13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So that sounds harsh, I\u2019m aware, which is why it was such an unpopular opinion on the writing subreddit when I posted it. But let me explain. I write a lot, mostly scripts, sometimes comics, and if you want to include my entire library, bad fan fiction when I was 12. I\u2019m not a professional writer by any means I\u2019m an actor, but it always confuses me when I see someone say, \u201cI want to write something, but I don\u2019t have any ideas. Where do you get ideas? I sit down and I look at the screen or the paper and I just don\u2019t know what to do. But I want to be a writer.\u201d And it\u2019s like, there are a lot of things I want to be. I\u2019d love to be big and muscly, but I don\u2019t want to lift weights. I\u2019d love to cure cancer, but I hate math. I\u2019d love to be rich, but I\u2019m an actor and a writer. To whatever degree of success I find in those fields, the one thing I can do is act and write. You have to be able to practice to improve, and if you\u2019re too afraid to even try, then find something else to do because the world is chock full of uber talented people who are trying and getting nowhere. That sounds harsh too, and I don\u2019t mean it to. You\u2019re probably great at something else. You probably want to be a writer because you love stories or movies or comics or whatever, and that\u2019s great. But the act of creation and the act of consumption are very different, and if you\u2019re afraid of the blank page, of the one place where a writer can literally create anything, then you\u2019re probably not a writer. Write something, or don\u2019t. TLDR People who have no ideas and are afraid to practice a creative pursuit like writing should do something else. Was that too mean? I always come off as too mean and it\u2019s actually not on purpose I promise. Thanks for indulging me and it\u2019s something I\u2019ve come back and forth on myself, so any opinions welcome<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who use the excuses of being afraid of the blank page or not having any ideas to keep from writing should just give up.\n","id":"6b456562-ef17-4eb9-adb4-f05bc1aed30d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Reading this article today got me thinking about it I have been hearing a lot lately about how hard it is to afford childcare. A lot of the parents in this article have at least three kids, or want to have more. They describe busting their asses just to scrape together enough to support their family. I acknowledge this reality and believe that times are hard, but then I don't understand why it seems okay to bring a child into the world when you can't even comfortable save up a little for college for your existing children. This especially struck me gt When you talk about finances and planning for the future, I know it's not enough, and so it makes me nervous, she says. But what options do you have? Not have children? she continues. I mean yeah? I sort of think having kids should be a financial choice just like buying a car or a house. The people quoted above have two kids, I think, and were talking about having another gt Danielle and Cameron would like to have three kids \u2014 it's kind of our number, she says \u2014 but they are putting it off purely for financial reasons. At least they're actually trying to weigh the finances of it, but if it's going to be that tough, why have another? In a situation where you're comfortably supporting two kids, but a third kid is going to tip the scales, you'll do it anyway just because it's your number ? To be clear, I honestly don't think most people with adequate access to contraception and are educated about procreation should have more than two kids, but here I'm specifically am talking about people who can't afford it. Anyway, when hearing about how tough it is to afford having kids these days, and after reading an article like this, my honest gut reaction is Then don't have more kids. And I feel like kind of a dick for thinking it, because like most people, I know plenty of genuine, good parents that are struggling, so I really do want to change my view Or have a better understanding of the other side. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who can't comfortably afford childcare should stop having kids.\n","id":"7290f2e7-7b49-420d-81e5-adeb280948d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The electoral college disproportionately represents small states. A Wyoming person\u2019s vote is worth three times the vote of someone from California. Since they are voting in the same election, that is ridiculous and obviously unfair to the Californian. Small states are given semi autonomous government under federalism, and the Senate represents all states equally so there\u2019s no need for them to have more voting power in electing a president for the whole country. Furthermore, since in each state you win all the votes if a majority votes for you, you could theoretically win an election in which you win 51 of the vote in states that add up to 270 votes while 100 of people in every other state vote for your opponent. This would mean you become president of the country even though millions more people in it voted for your opponent. When adding in the small state advantage, a scenario where you win the states with the lowest population possible and only win 51 of the vote in them, to get to 270 you only need around 22 of the National Popular vote. Of course, that is an unrealistic scenario, but in real life people have lost the popular vote and won the election in 5 separate elections. That is ridiculous in any democracy, the basic principle is that the person who gets the most votes wins. The other major flaw with the electoral college system is that the only states whose interests are prioritized are the swing states. If a candidate promises to bring back coal jobs, it will probably help them win Pennsylvania. If a candidate promises to end racial profiling, it will probably help them turn out voters in Detroit, part of the swing state Michigan. If a candidate promises to bring back manufacturing jobs and renegotiate trade deals, it will probably help them win the rust belt full of swing states. Coincidentally, those were major promises of candidates in the last presidential election. This also contributes to another problem the United States has one of the lowest turnout rates of any democracy. This is in part because voters in states that aren\u2019t swing states think their vote doesn\u2019t matter if your candidate is guaranteed to lose in your state, it makes no difference. If your candidate is guaranteed to win, it also makes no difference after all, you can count on a majority of the half that does vote to have the same result. The exception to this? Turnout is higher in many swing states. You could say democracy is working for swing states. Thing is, it should be working everywhere.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Electoral College Should Be Abolished and Replaced By Popular Vote\n","id":"a74c0447-a3d3-44a2-863a-535a32d3b372"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those who are unaware, the concept of flipping the classroom works like this Teachers post online material in the form of lectures, or use existing lectures like those found at sites like KhanAcademy in place of the traditional lecture during classtime. Students are responsible for viewing and taking notes on this material outside of class. Students then meet in class and use that time to engage in discussions, ask questions, and actively participate. My professors in college have recently started switching to this style of teaching, with mixed results and mixed enthusiasm from the students. I find this style of learning personally ineffective because I find that I often have questions that I NEED to understand the answers to before advancing to the next part of the material. If the lecture were in class, I could simply ask the professor and have the answer to the extent that she or she felt was necessary for my understanding. Instead, I need to research on my own, which isn't necessarily a bad practice but is time consuming. Or I could wait and ask my question in class, and perhaps misunderstood the entirety of the material that followed my misunderstanding. On a less personal level, I'm concerned about the access to digital media outside of school and the toll this style of learning would take on someone who did not have a computer or mobile device available to them at home. I don't disagree that online lectures can be a great supplement for those who would like the information presented in a different way if your teacher wasn't clear or for people who like to re listen to lectures. There is some utility, I'm just not convinced that it's more effective and I don't think students especially college students paying money should be forced into this model. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not a convinced that 'flipping the classroom' is a more effective method for teaching.\n","id":"1f0ae062-9b51-4fe0-9c71-ec052cecb8c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a throwaway for obvious reasons, but I want to point out that I am not a pedophile, not that it matters. I think most of us can probably agree that the way we as a society treat pedophiles has an effect whether purposeful or not of shoving them into a corner which is to some degree morally isolated from the rest of society. This in turn makes it more likely that they will over time gradually lose touch with the collective morality that being an active member of society provides. Especially in the modern day when people can surround themselves in a bubble with like minded people through anonymous online communities. That gradual moral disconnect means they may no longer see anything morally wrong with acting on their urges. Alternatively, allowing to exist an environment in which pedophiles, or MAPs minor attracted persons , can publicly identify themselves if they so choose would make them be held accountable for their actions and thoughts by the larger public. Thus making them less likely to go out and prey on abuse children. Excluding them from normal society will only make them retreat to communities where their sexual urges are justified by like minded predators, and making them more likely to actually harm a child by acting on their urges.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ostracizing pedophiles and shunning them into a hidden corner of society only makes them more likely to act upon their urges.\n","id":"702364ab-9fd1-4e56-987b-c1f4bfa72e72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>Students are less likely to approach teachers with questions if they are aggressive to them possibly because the teacher would be hesitant to be near the student, which can hinder a student's learning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Instead of collaborating and learning, the aggression could lead to conflicts instead.\n","id":"2379ddbd-54b4-4081-9103-ff2712db1644"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Implementation A test is held annually at centres. There will be different test level. Each level reflects the extent of knowledge applicable to economics. Completing higher levels will entitle a person with higher weighing in their votes removed . A person cannot vote until they pass a test. Those with a degree in economics are automatically assigned a level and are forced to vote. Why would you let an uneducated person vote? Their vote holds no merit. Without the education to judge and properly interpret policies, their votes are based on personal appeal not what would be most beneficial for the economy. In addition, would you let someone that has yet to obtain their driver\u2019s license drive? Would you let a random person be your lawyer? Allowing the uneducated to vote is the same thing. It exposes the economy to inefficient and ineffective policy making. Politicians have had to compromise in order to appease the general public. Limiting the ability to vote allows politicians more flexibility in policy making allowing them to more effectively address issues in the economy. Any policy change that is interpreted negatively by society would be rejected regardless of the reasoning behind it. This is one instance where this is applicable. Australia has found raising the GST to 15 would improve GDP growth. There is no doubt that the public would not support this policy change. The article is here . For the sake of this argument, let\u2019s assume that the raise in GDP will be effective in increasing the GDP growth. This view may conflict with the ethics of some people. I would like to emphasise the right to vote in this proposal reflects the extent of applicable knowledge they hold not the value of an individual. In addition, a fair system does not reflect an effective system. This proposal is merely based on the theory that educated people will make better decisions while voting. Some may believe that this proposal allows the rich to sway votes in their favour. The truly prosperous people consist of a small percentage of the population. It is no different for those that hold economic degrees. Also, as an economic degree takes around 4 years to complete, no one would do so just so they could vote. Finally, it takes a burden off everyone. Some countries require all adults to vote. This proposal frees such individuals from this obligation allowing for more free time. Politicians also share this burden. They waste time advertising and exposing themselves to public for votes. If they were judged mostly on how effective on how effective their policy making is, then time could be saved which then can be dedicated to more important matters. Edit Due to the complaints of possible abuse, I suggest there be only one test and all votes are equal among those that pass. The knowledge required to pass the test is the same as what you need to obtain a Balchelors of economics. Returning 24 hours from now. I am going to sleep.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those without an education in economics should not be allowed to vote in politics\n","id":"96ae7030-f14c-4d2a-87f5-666ec582bbe9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Oh, that poor, oppressed, Christian majority How dare any JCPenney or Best Buy cashier diminish the birth of Jesus Christ by acknowledging that not everyone is non secular or possibly said employees, are just being you know polite? I believe it is an entirely manufactured controversy designed to draw ratings to conservative media outlets and stoke fear anger in right wing Christians who worry they are losing the country to atheists and that Sharia law is creeping into America. . Seriously<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the so-called \"War on Christmas,\" is utterly absurd.\n","id":"58ef3636-4a70-4129-adee-6539f5730a49"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realise this title is gonna be provocative but first of all please note that I'm talking about the media response and not the significance of the attacks. I'll set this straight from the start I do not believe the significance of any attack, or any loss of life for that matter, is dependent on the country in which it occurs. I've heard a lot recently about how the media Facebook etc. have had a much more muted response to the Istanbul airport attack, the hostage situation in Dhaka and the recent bombings in Baghdad in comparison to the Paris attacks and the Brussels attacks. However, in my opinion, that really does come down to common sense. Quite a lot of Muslim countries, especially Middle Eastern countries, have been mired in instability over the last few years because of ISIS and other Islamist extremist groups the genesis of these groups is debatable and for another topic . While not all Christian countries are stable and some have been affected by terrorist attacks, none can be said to be unstable due to Islamist extremists. Thus, it arguably shouldn't be surprising when an attack by a terrorist organization occurs in a country that is currently unstable as a result of that group. Conversely, it is to be largely expected that people are surprised by and, as a result, show more coverage of attacks in Christian countries because Islamist extremism attacks are far from the status quo. The fact that media companies are often based in these countries enhances this point. tl dr of this point Bombings happen all the time in Middle Eastern countries, but rarely happen in Western countries it's common sense that people are gonna be desensitised to the former. EDIT I'll accept that there's logical merit to the argument that it is wrong other than PC arguments, but I still do believe the first part of the title.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is not much wrong with the fact that there is less of a media response to terrorist attacks in Muslim countries than Christian countries, and to say otherwise is just an attempt to seem PC\n","id":"978e6405-f23d-41d6-9932-b9a5253f638e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>And by majority of people , I'm referring to those who are interested in what goes on over there. I'm sure gt 50 either don't know or care or both about the situation in Syria. I've been following the Arab Spring since it first began in 2011. My opinion is that it is or was , depending on what parameters you are using to define its duration a regionwide popular uprising against tyranny and oppression. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen have successfully overthrown their dictators, and I was thrilled that each of these countries had the chance to chart a course for democracy and the rule of law although the aftermath has been messy to say the least . I wanted to see the same thing happen in Syria. Unfortunately, the situation has only deteriorated with each passing year as the conflict became multi faceted. Now there is hardly any hope for peace , let alone freedom. I am still opposed to President Bashar al Assad in Syria. Other groups may have committed war crimes, but none have reached the scale of those carried out under the aegis of the Syrian Armed Forces and their co belligerents. I also view their refusal to enact meaningful democratic reforms as the catalyst for the present day situation. Had they done so from the outset, I firmly believe that this war would not be happening, and that ISIS would still be ISI . However, I'm also starting to think that I'm part of a minority here. It seems to me that the popular opinion among Western nations is that the civil war is really between a hodge podge of Islamic terrorist organizations and the legitimate government of Syria. A lot of people even believe that the US secretly instigated this conflict, and that any condemnation of the Syrian government in the media is mere propaganda to brainwash people into supporting military action. I also think the Russian intervention has widespread support. If I said that I consider these views to be conspiratorial, then I'd be called a right wing neo con or something to that effect who believes everything he sees on TV. If I said that I support the secular rebels in the civil war, I'd be told that there simply aren't any that the rebels are almost universally fighting for the imposition of hardline Sharia law and have no real interest in democracy. Convince me that most people who follow this conflict do not hold these views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that a majority of people living in the United States and NATO support President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and view the civil war as a terrorist insurgency against a legitimate government.\n","id":"73892be0-8593-402c-8708-47d43161f7ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title says, if we as a nation are serious about stopping spree killing terrorists from shooting up schools, schools should adopt inner city tactics, techniques, and procedures when it comes to school security. Namely, controlling access to the building with armed security School Resource Officers and metal detectors. Make no exceptions for staff and faculty. Taking these measures will be infinitely more impactful than an assault weapons ban. The one condition that will not change my view is a philosophical debate on treating children as prisoners. Entering any federal building and many state government buildings require submission to similar security procedures, and the point of what we are discussing is facilitating security measures for children in public schools, not how undertaking those measures makes us feel. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If we want to curb gun violence in schools, the only way to get immediate and effective results is to adopt inner-city school's security policies.\n","id":"49f47ee8-8af9-4977-8914-f48654faa5cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Charles Darwin only humans can blush which reveals the depth of social thought and innovative mechanisms to keep society together.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are exhibiting different characteristics than animals and therewith can be considered unique.\n","id":"d6bd5b39-0686-435a-a38f-2d978af0813c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>Whether or not toilets are unisex are sex segregated should be determined solely by the relative costs, benefits and risks. Each of the aforementioned are independent of the historical motivation for sex segregated toilets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The past motivations for a given policy are irrelevant today.\n","id":"00f1cd57-8a48-4c28-8fc0-8350b8bf603c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Creationism is not a valid model of origins.<|ARGUMENT|>If the degree of accuracy cannot be deduced, it cannot be considered a valid model, as non-falsiable claims cannot be accepted scientificaly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Creationism is not falsifiable, and therefore not a scientific model in the Popperian sense.\n","id":"024559b2-1e8f-4f01-9cdd-47ac11ac8fd6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Religion has been a huge problem ever since its first inception, and has used its will over vulnerable people to make them fear death. We no longer have a need for religion or a need to fear death as we can now answer many of the questions that people fled to religion to find. 1 Religion was created to answer questions of the unknown, we now have other resources that can answer these questions for us. Science and technology have not only disproved religion but have made it almost obsolete. We now understand human biology, space time for the most part , human psychology, chemistry, plant life, animal life, water, air, drugs, sociology, there is a lot more that we know now that were unthinkable in the days of religion. We no longer need religious texts to help us understand life. 2 Religious books are outdated. They're old, and they preach teachings of a much more ignorant and fearful time. If you need further explanation here then refer yourself to the Bible, Koran, Torah, you get it. Or just do a basic google search, bigotry in the 3 Religion has taught us to fear more than it has to love and has created utter hysteria on the topic of life and death. Religion teaches that when you die you have two options in the afterlife, eternal happiness in paradise, or eternal damnation. This has caused people to worry over what will happen to them when they die and makes them act differently while alive as they only live to set their place in the afterlife. Because of religion people have been taught to fear death. Death is an inevitable event beyond our current comprehension that has existed since the beginning of time. It is not only pointless to fear death, but absurd. Death is something in life that is uncontrollable and simply just happens. We don't have to understand death or what happens after death, we just have to understand it and accept it. Death happens everyday, that's how life works, trying to come up with an answer to comfort yourself with is illogical and irrational. Accept that it happens, just like birth, and move on so that the fear of death is not lingering over you for the rest of your life. 4 Religion separates humanity. When a certain train of thought is drilled into someone mind, it is hard for them to change their views and no longer accept what they thought was true for so long. This has caused a separation of logical, progressive and political thought as people are on opposite sides of the spectrum on many social matters due to the teachings of their religion and has held back humanity atrociously. The separation that religion has caused can also be tied in with the problem of nationalism, but instead of people from different countries hating each other, you have people in the same countries who start violent feuds with each other due to different beliefs, even though all of their beliefs preach non violence and respect . 5 Finally, people who cling to religion lack proper intellect and reasoning. People so foolishly cling to religion as a form of comfort because they are too ignorant to open themselves to a different train of thought. It scares them to think that what they have relied on for so long is false and believe that a world without religion would be utter chaos. People who rely on religion need to wake up and escape the ignorant mindset that has been almost engraved into them. We need to stop preaching and supporting religion in our society as it is detrimental to the growth of human intellect, and is nothing but a flawed and hypocritical system that is run on fear, subjugation and false attainment happiness. Edit To be more clear, this pertains to Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and any of their denominations. I do not hold the same argument in terms of Eastern religions as that is a separate argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion created a fear of death, and it's time to get rid of both.\n","id":"2a33f949-eb7e-4906-8843-f41eb7f879aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that religions looked down upon pre marital sex because at the time where religions were developed, there was no source of protection from pregnancy STDs. Also, women were mostly unable to work during the time. Therefore, having a man was mandatory to raise children. In consequence, before a man would end up sleeping with a woman, and letting her struggle to raise the children without having any source of income, it was decided that a man has to want to support the family he is creating. Nowadays though, women are allowed to work and are there are multiple methods to avoid pregnancy and it shouldn't be as frowned upon now. Tl, Dr It is logical that you shouldn't raise your children on your own morals, because you grew up in a time different than theirs. Edit My views have changed guys Thank you so much for your answers. This topic is very complex and there are no right and wrong answers. But thinking of sex as gifting your spouse your most valuable possession, your body, as well as numerous other factors have finally convinced me Thank you for your time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions should not frown upon pre-marital sex.\n","id":"825e811b-6efb-4f4b-99ed-d2513b50319c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The Sweden, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands all recognise equal succession rights for men and women. This means that the crown passes to the oldest heir, regardless of gender.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While monarchy leads to less representation for members of society, it is more likely to provide female heads of state than elections.\n","id":"cf8f633f-5325-4496-a61f-abc0b7677ff0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe this and I truly think they are Dumb. I don't exactly know how to explain why I hold this view but I am guessing their are many others that think this way<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe people who commit suicide are weak and under appreciate life.\n","id":"4caccdf2-26e8-4850-b6c5-56eb78fb8300"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Nintendo allow for Fangames and modifications to their systems?<|ARGUMENT|>In the pre-switch era, it was possible to play Lego titles online by using a VPN.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are ways to simulate multiplayer mode using a VPN.\n","id":"210dff52-fab1-4ea4-a9ad-4740c040e834"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>In Canada a bill was passed that could potentially lead people to be charged for ''hate crime'' if they used the wrong pronoun<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many instances where activists have called upon government to enforce PC speech.\n","id":"b5af8269-0fc9-4c41-8d06-8e1ebdf90ece"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>In the case of Donald Trump the first signs of such a development are already there. The talk is of rolling back key anti-corruption legislation and ignoring potential conflicts of interests that will exacerbate corruption.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anti-establishment parties or politicians that claim to eliminate corruption fail miserably to address - and often significantly increase - corruption. Therefore, compulsory voting could actually increase corruption.\n","id":"9facc7ac-d508-406d-a5d7-93f26dcbfccd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time for Hungary and the EU to Part Ways?<|ARGUMENT|>Hungary has had above average rates of growth in the past few years, which is an incentive for people from more struggling EU economies to go there for jobs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The citizenship goes both ways. Citizens of other EU member countries can move freely into Hungary and take Hungarian jobs.\n","id":"b95d8d80-12be-4e4e-9f37-1699294c85f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Social Networks Force Users to Use Their Real Identity?<|ARGUMENT|>Providing your real identity would likely mean giving social media companies access to \"sensitive information\", such as ethnicity, which is protected under the EU's General Data Protection Legislation<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forcing users to prove their identity may involve measures many would consider unsafe by passing over even more confidential information to tech giants.\n","id":"417f7f97-f867-4191-86de-c57a23f85b1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>Creating a special punishment for a crime that is not more egregious than other crimes like a capital offence, for instance will likely make the problem worse, not better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Once released, they should be treated like ordinary citizens, imposing no additional obligations upon them.\n","id":"41115a20-2ec9-4077-9fec-39204158f02e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The moral code held by the majority of society that says happiness is the goal. Most far right Christians, on the other hand, believe in a moral code where respecting the sacred is the main goal, and I believe that it is this, rather than malice or hatred, that leads them to oppose homosexuality. For instance, the dominant view is that murder is wrong because it causes suffering to fellow human beings. But a fundamentalist Christian might argue that murder is wrong because it destroys something that God values. From their perspective, any other possible reason to be against murder the suffering of the person being murdered, the person's family's grief, or the fear people would have to live with were murder commonplace or acceptable are irrelevant. It's reflects the view that you can't have objective morality without God only God's feelings are presumed to matter. For another, somewhat opposite example, a person who follows the dominant moral code will view it as common sense to support abortion in the early stages of pregnancy, when the fetus is only a clump of cells incapable of thinking or feeling. A far right Christian might come to a different conclusion, based on the belief that sanctity is the only reason not to kill an adult human being, and following that therefore, personal experiences like happiness or suffering shouldn't be a factor. Why should it matter if the fetus is less conscious than the mother? If God values adult humans for mysterious reasons unrelated to their ability to have experiences, then why couldn't he value a clump of cells for the same reasons? You can see the same thinking at play with other issues, like euthanasia and suicide. And of course, you can see it with sexuality. To a far right Christian, sex is something that we should use to make God happy, not necessarily to increase our own happiness. It's something sacred and utterly uncompromisable, and must be made to seem as special as it possibly can. So naturally, no sex before marriage, and no masturbation. It doesn't seem difficult to me to see how someone could view acceptance of homosexuality as compromising their vision they believe God created heterosexuality, which would make it sacred , while homosexuality would be a deviation from what God intended, making sex something less than as sacred as it can be. There's not even any need to find Bible verses supporting this conclusion it already makes sense within the context of their worldview. It's the same type of thinking we've seen a thousand times, across many different issues, and with many other topics related to sexuality. Yet with homosexuality, suddenly our culture wants us to see things differently, as though opposition to it is more hatefully driven. Why don't we say that people hate their kids for telling them not to masturbate? Or that that they hate terminally ill people because they don't support euthanasia? I won't deny that there seems to be a lot of people out there who say hateful things about gays. Yet what it is about the particular topic of homosexuality that would necessarily require someone to be hateful in order to be opposed? I will note that I do think this and other similar ultra conservative beliefs require a certain lack of empathy. But that's not what I'm arguing against. I'm only trying to say that I don't believe they are hateful at their source. I think they are actually deeply held religious beliefs which make sense in the context of a worldview where morality is decided by God, rather than what is necessarily healthiest and best for humanity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Opposition to homosexuality, although wrong, is not necessarily malicious\n","id":"e6d67cd0-6710-469a-a004-1d3c5efd0a0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Alaska's long-running UBI scheme has surely contributed to it having the highest rate of well-being of any State across indicators that include social and community well-being<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many pilot schemes have found that UBI increases social cohesion through community empowerment and mobilisation.\n","id":"bbf3914f-7a83-4383-8d47-f9b16855a616"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A song that only plays one note on repeat is a bad song. A printed out picture of great works of art is worse than the original. The shinning is better than a factory produced horror movie. Marvel movies can be considered good because they achieve their goal of creating an entertain movie. The complexity, the skill required, the originality, and the ability for a creative work to achieve its goal are all objective standards for the value of creative works and there are probably more objective standards that i am neglecting out of ignorance. I'm defining the value of something as how good that something is. An argument against this point of view, one in which i disagree with wholly, is that people may go against these standards to achieve a certain goal. An example would be Sharknado being purposefully shitty for the sake of comedy. I still believe these standards can be applied universally and that when a person goes against one of these standards, it's a trade off. Although Sharknado has a terrible plot and terrible acting, it has gained a comedic value that overcomes the losses. Edit I want to clarify that I don't believe judging creative works is entirely objective, but that you can use objective standards to judge a work partly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are objective standards for the value of creative works.\n","id":"6d770ff7-37c5-4e8b-86e5-45220b9e2f85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>SPOILERS AHEAD Hey guys, just beat KOTOR 2 and I'm currently reflecting on the fantastic story and the fantastic characters. One that comes to mind is Kreia, who was as well written as she was integral to the plot. In a sense, I feel the Jedi Exile has the same problem as most nameless protagonists, as her I believe she is canonically female involvement in the story is both everything and nothing she goes on and solves all the problems and saves the day, but in the end she's just doing what she's told. Kreia, on the other hand, is the mastermind of everything. She manipulates The Exile as she has others before her, and her story and machinations are not only pivotal to the plot, they are the plot. Almost everything that happens in the game is a result of her actions, unlike the Exile who, as established, was a pawn both in a story sense and a video game sense. But Kreia is also the main character in a much more meta sense. Kreia represents the theme of the game. While there is a strict line generally separating force users into light and dark, Kreia has walked both sides of that line and cares little for either side, only favoring pragmatism. Throughout the game, we see that shades of grey theme throughout, with the most blatant example being the Mandalorian Wars and how they divided and ultimately destroyed the Jedi over the correct response. Ultimately, the finale of her story plays into the moral relativity of the act of using the force. Atton Another fantastic character mentions that to the common person, the Jedi and the Sith are just religious fanatics who constantly destroy the galaxy. Kreia's attempted destruction of the force makes sense in that regard, because she clearly has decided that the force has been a tool for more harm than good on both sides, and has caused so much strife and conflict that it doesn't deserve to exist. So, change my view. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kreia is the real main character of KOTOR 2\n","id":"e494fc97-2eea-4a03-850d-ca24ec5f9a0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Children Learn About Gender Identity And Sexual Orientation In School?<|ARGUMENT|>Exposing children to ideas that lie outside of \"traditional family life\" is the opposite of indoctrination. Indoctrination involves teaching someone to accept something without thinking critically about it, which would include things like restricting exposure to opposing viewpoints. Simply educating children on these issues would not indoctrinate them towards or against anything as long as they aren't also taught that there's an unquestionable \"correct\" opinion to have on the issues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Indoctrinate' is a loaded term that seems unreasonable when simply imparting information about a life truism.\n","id":"eb45a159-a9b1-4786-9c49-8b36d25208c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Information warfare more ethical than conventional warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>When people are convinced to do something for someone else's benefit, there is no guarantee they will reciprocate the gesture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Information warfare undermines democracy and the democratic process in ways that other types of warfare can't.\n","id":"8d6d3bda-6c7c-4078-8b52-fa62404203b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Feminism, as a tool for liberating women from gender oppression, shouldn't agree that gender is not necessarily linked to biological sex. Gender is something imposed just because of our individual physical conditions. Although some social performance is always associated with each gender, what define them is ultimately what we have between our legs. Transsexuality as we now it weakens the fight for gender equality. People who identify as another gender are only reproducing stereotypes, not breaking them as they believe they are. Female oppression historically linked to their bodies, so ignoring or underastimating these questions is as good as sweeping things under the carpet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transgenderism only reinforces gender stereotypes\n","id":"57ac5100-2a98-4fd8-9a00-83b86c0fb540"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Alcohol ban<|ARGUMENT|>Exact figures vary from country to country, but in many countries alcohol is a contributory factor in 60-70% of violent crimes, including child abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, and murder. Alcohol is far and away the leading cause of public disorder, street fights, etc. In short, alcohol is one of the prime causes of violence and crime in modern society, and its banning would reduce the incidence of these crimes at a strike.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alcohol is a major contributory factor to crime and discorder.\n","id":"c5d6b091-9218-44d1-8df6-4fed516b61ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the wake of many social media platforms banning Alex Jones, I have seem a number of people saying that while he is a terrible human, they are concerned about the move to silence him and what it means for censorship and free speech. So,  Alex Jones's social media ban is not an unjustified form of censorship Here's why I think the actions taken against Jones are justified First, the private company issue. Regardless of whether or not platforms like Twitter and Facebook are used by so many that it appears to be a public space, it is not. There are no constitutional rights in a private setting. Social media platforms, while use by many, are not utilities. Perhaps banning Jones from having a single website would be censorship in that an ISP is more like a utility, the same way radio waves are regarded. But Alex Jones does not need, nor does he have any right to spread his message on social media. My second and biggest point, is that even if free speech was protected in a social media setting, I feel that this scenario would not pass the Brandenburg Test gt According to the Brandenburg Test, the government may legally prohibit speech if gt gt Speech is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and gt gt Speech is likely to incite or produce such action 1 Basically, it determined that speech can be limited if it presents a clear and present danger Which in the case of the Sandy Hook conspiracy, his speech did create a clear and present danger for some of those families being forced to move, harassed and receiving death threats from many Jones fans. This is the most important aspect of my view. I think we can argue to death over what sort of role social media companies should have in regards to speech. And that is why my view mainly hinges on my second point Even if social media were a public space, Alex Jones's statements on Sandy Hook would not be protected by the first amendment. I am mostly open to changing my view because generally, I don't think people should be silenced for opposing views. However, I do support First Amendment rights and the court decisions that created the framework for speech protection and I fail to see how Jones would be protected, so therefore, the censorship is justified. So,  EDIT Based on further research, it seems Jones's statements would pass the Brandenburg test. So my view changes slightly, in that I still think Jones's speech would not be protected under the first amendment because his Sandy Hook statements would be considered defamation and therefore not protected.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alex Jones's social media ban is not an unjustified form of censorship\n","id":"f0730184-3f94-4b70-97bf-8556e3ec8775"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I posit that a person whose views do not or cannot change is closer to being godly than an otherwise similar person whose views are open to change. First, let me define my terms. I am using god here in the Christian sense of a timeless, omnipotent, omniscient being. I believe it is logical to infer that such a being's views would be perfect and never in need of change. Furthermore, let us assume a function P that relates the set of a person or being's views to the perfect set of views held by a divine entity with a range from 0 completely godless to 1 perfect godliness . Let r be the rate of change of P for a given entity Q . A god's r is, by definition, 0. Now let us assume r belongs to a set of attributes that characterize a godly being we can again show a function G representing the overall godliness of an entity's attributes. Now let us take the animated short from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart featuring The Waffler faceless bureaucrat turned superhero vs. The Decider i.e., George W. Bush . P r G Waffler 0.1, 0.2 , \u221e, 0 Decider 0.15, 0, 1 count godlike attributes Okay, so the caricature of Geoge W. Bush, The Decider, is distinctly more godlike than The Waffler. If my argument is correct, then Bill O'Reilly is more godlike than Stephen Colbert, who by virtue of his comedic irony, must hold two discordant views simultaneously. P.S. I will be around in the later evening UTC 05 00 tomorrow to reply, so please be patient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Person with Unchangeable Views Is, in a Way, Godlike\n","id":"f64964a6-b601-4b43-a919-384dc5007599"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think corruption, drunk driving, violence, addiction, abuse, murder and war are the cause of unhappiness, I think it's the other way around. I think that because too many people have a twisted view of happiness material enrichment, power, entitlement, validation , most of the shit in the world happens. This is what leads to greedyness, this is what leads to war. Truly happy people are the most giving and loving and open minded people I know. If everyone would be more self loving, self forgiving and positive about life, these problems wouldn't disappear entirely, but at least be significantly reduced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the lack of mental health is the biggest global problem there is\n","id":"af6f46db-f3cb-41db-84e8-fe31eeb17b86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>It has been suggested that the atomic bomb has been a big factor in minimizing war. The thought of war using atomic weapons has made countries less likely to have have military conflict.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Peace in Europe is due to many factors that have little to do with the EU.\n","id":"95c0f379-2dd3-4aa6-ad51-2bf22bbd0980"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I view it as a pretty obvious fact that women are attracted to powerful men. They want a man who is confident and charismatic, strong and relatively fearless, as well as intelligent and financially successful. In other words, powerful. While women will deny it, saying they want a sensitive man who isn't afraid to cry, that's a load of crap. They want a powerful man who sometimes is willing to let his guard down and show his sensitive side. But the latter isn't really all that essential. I'm not saying women are attracted only or primarily to jerks, but a jerk is probably going to have more success with women than your archetypal nice guy, who ends up friend zoned because he displays no power. Actually, in a way the jerk demonstrates lack of social power, because someone who is truly socially influential doesn't have to bully the weak to maintain his position that is the most attractive type. Now we already know that many of the rewards in life money, success go to people who are willing to claw their way to the top climbing over who knows how many competitors. Of course, many people try to be ethical in the pursuit of power, but there are obvious rewards to being unethical if it helps you gain the advantage over your competition as long as there is no social consequence for doing this . Think Enron, the economic crash of 2008, wars, slavery, pretty much everything in history ever. It is hard enough to fight against the evils of the world, caused by greed and lust for power. But on top of that, women are attracted to the type of men who demonstrate these qualities of being willing to dominate anyone that stands in their path. Considering that sex is a major motivating factor for a lot of men, this could be a major factor causing men to act aggressively towards each other. For example, what about this thing women have for a man in uniform i.e. a soldier who kills people. Also, consider that the most powerful men tend to attract the hottest women men know that the more power they gain, the hotter their girlfriend will be women are all equally attracted to power, but their looks limit how powerful of a man they can get . Displaying aggression is the best way of demonstrating you are a powerful man though of course this aggression for the most part is channeled in socially acceptable ways, such as economically dominating your competitors putting them out of business, landing that sweet gig or promotion instead of the other guy , or participating in the military industrial complex. Or in a more everyday context, climbing your way to the top of the social ladder in terms of popularity and influence pushing other guys to the bottom . So women of reddit, what do you have to say for yourself? I know its not your fault what you're attracted to. It's biological. So I'm not hatin'. And of course, men aren't absolved from blame. But I feel like we should at least be honest with the reality of the situation, and recognize that power attraction thing is an obstacle towards achieving world peace and universal love. I welcome anyone man or woman to try to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that women are attracted to powerful men, and this is a significant cause of violence, exploitation, etc. in the world.\n","id":"dc60a4ea-f45b-41c1-9081-06cc7889346f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been reading a lot about how some people just seem to be so out of touch with reality when it comes to the social aspects of society and just life in general. People on the internet are saying things like hugging someone without verbal permission is sexual assault, not being a fan of Caitlyn Jenner is transphobic, saying any generalization is offensive for example, saying black people dress nice is somehow offensive , finding an obese person unattractive is an unforgivable sin, and god forbid you offend someone by something extremely insignificant, like not capitalizing God in a sentence. People seem to be lacking the most basic common sense skills. If you don't want someone to check you out at the gym, don't go workout in a sports bra and booty shorts Common sense and biology 101 will tell you that you are going to attract attention, but wanted and unwanted. You shouldn't walk alone at night for the same reason you should lock your door at night. Being obese isn't sexually attractive, yes you may have a beautiful personality, yes you deserve respect, no, you're not what nature tells us is attractive in a potential mate. I feel that all of this lack of common sense, the seeking out a way to be offended, and finding things like a pat on the back as sexual assault all come back to how cell phones and technology are overcoming social interaction. I live in the city, and everytime I get on the bus, it is packed full of people, and Everytime it is completly silent while everyone messed around on their cell phones. Society pays more attention to the Kardasians than they do their own family, and getting 40 likes on Facebook is worth more than telling a funny joke in real life, or going out on a date. Basically, I feel that everyone has become hypersensitive to life, everyone wants to he a victim and blame someone else, and everyone wants reality to bend around their ideals, and I feel that technology social media the television are causing this. And if I offended you, I didn't mean to, I was simply stating my .02 worth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Technology\/social media is destroying social intellegence and common sense\/logic\n","id":"e785271f-bd6b-4593-8502-b6fce63465af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever I try to take advantage of a loophole I am asked what would the world look like if everyone would take advantage of said circumstance. This is a terrible argument. The reason I would want to do anything is because of its apparent benefit to me. If other people also take advantage of an opportunity and I still get my benefit everything if fine. If after I start other people take advantage and later cause me a loss that shouldn't stop me from receiving benefits today.  What if everyone did it is a terrible counter argument<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"What if everyone did it...\" is a terrible counter argument\n","id":"6ad93980-c81d-4399-b7ac-e4fc3e2d4a13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should U.S. Presidents Have the Power to Issue Pardons?<|ARGUMENT|>Since judges are appointed for life in federal courts, there is little opportunity for public input into the judicial system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pardons allow for greater public input into the Judicial System.\n","id":"bb7d819b-01cd-4aad-bc68-53a6985da3fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>The contingency argument also known as the Leibnizian or modal cosmological argument states that anything which exists must have sufficient reason to exist. Since the universe exists it must have a sufficient reason, and that reason would be God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The distinction between Act and Potency combined with the visible fact of change in our world, entails the existence of an \"Unmoved Mover aka. uncaused causer, un-actualized actualizer which is God.\n","id":"266ee69d-fc7c-4919-a8e6-fdb987231911"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let's admit some people are stupid. Incredibly stupid. Some people are not exactly stupid, but very ignorant. Or very prone to propaganda. Why a vote of an alcoholic without education should have the same weigth as a vote of a person with phd in economics? Imagine a person from rural parts of the country who doesn't know anything about politics and doesn't care but votes for some candidate because He's cool and manly ignoring that his politics are bad. Here in Russia there are a lot of people who vote for Putin just because he is Putin ignoring failures in domestic and foreign policies also they believe that Russia freed Crimea from evil Ukraine controlled by evil USA I think that we need some sort of exam that you should pass before or during the elections. Nothing particularly difficult, but to make sure that person understands what happens in the world. Also we need some sort of international commitee that would create questions for these exams because otherwise ruling party could just filter out candidates with not loyal views by questions like Thing that Putin did was undoubtedly good for the country and Who is to blame for some bad thing and correct answer would be USA, Gayrope people really unironically say that or just everybody except Russia EDIT gt we need international independent commitee consisting of scientists of human related disciplines . gt But what if test is not Can Can't vote but How much my vote will weight ? Like people who failed the test have weight of 1, people who 100 the test have weight of, for example, 5<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should be allowed to vote only if they pass certain exam\n","id":"0e10f1d4-7a34-4a8a-a362-9d4df0a0e903"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I actually do like Bernie and voted for him in the primary because his heart was in the right place. I voted for Gary Johnson for the same reason. Both of them are kinda airheads though. But if Bernie were elected president I don't think he'd accomplish anything. His passion lies in legislation not leading. POTUS only approves legislation, but has no place crafting it. The real heart and soul of the job is designated for foreign policy. He had no interest in that at all. His policy for the war on terror was quite literally whatever the hell Obama was doing. I actually do think universal healthcare is nothing less than a first world standard like public education. But 17 of our GDP is healthcare. About double the free world. In the long run it would pay off, but in the short term it would crash the economy worse than the housing crisis. His energy policy was far too idealistic. It would certainly work in the sun belt, but other parts of the country do not get enough sun or wind to meet their energy needs. Natural gas is not a bad option, it's cheaper and less CO2 than coal. Fracking in and of itself is not bad for the environment, but fracking accidents are. Rather than throwing a ban on it, he could have learned about safe methods of extraction and regulated the industry accordingly. And regardless of regulations, the property rights of citizens are more important than the property rights of corporations. I think the country should have free STEM and trade school. But there are too many universities that are fucking up. Honestly, I'm fine with the social justice weirdos as long as they pay for their own education. But it's not fair to ask tax payers to fund brainwashing teenagers into an ironic cult. I could go on and bore you even further. But I'm sure I've said enough and you've read enough.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bernie is a bit of a schmuck.\n","id":"4c190e5d-a555-4c7d-8910-ed0dbaada16b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To start, my view is not that the liberal media is wrong in their coverage of the Trump administration. I am not suggesting that their coverage is fake or unethical by any means. I also do not think their their coverage is any worse than the conservative media's coverage of the Obama administration. This is not a viewpoint on the responsibility of fair and unbiased coverage. I do not think that they have a responsibility to change their coverage in any way specifically because I do not think that their coverage should have a political agenda, even if it does. Nor am I arguing the lack or presence of a political agenda. My argument is simply that their coverage inadvertently supports Trump's political agenda by solidifying his base and giving undue credence to claims of 'fake news.' This is why I believe that is America is staunchly divided on it's support of President Trump. Not evenly, but deeply divided. I believe at this point in the Trump administration, people have, on both sides, entrenched their stakes in the ground in support or opposition. That is not to say that opinions are not still changing every day but only to say that opinions have, I believe, become very polarized. There are still likely some people on the fence but I believe the middle of the road has become very narrow, so to speak. What this means is that a good majority of Trump's base will not be dissuaded by petty arguments. A Trump supporter is not likely to drop support because Trump reportedly did not know the words to the national anthem. Now, the coverage of the Trump administration that I believe is supporting Trump's claims of 'fake news' is that coverage which might be 'fake' news. To differentiate, I will define them separately as fake news and non news. Now, when Trump says fake news, he intends to imply that the liberal media is lying. He wants the American public, or at least, his base, to believe that the liberal media establishment is out to get him and are using their platform to 'trump up' sorry, pun intended false narratives in an attempt to deceive them. Non news on the other hand, is just that not news. It is, primarily not newsworthy news. It is not an attempt at deceit nor do I believe it to be malicious in nature. Non news, to be read as fake news, is the following media coverage over the past year I am posting from my phone otherwise I would provide links and more fodder \u2022 Trump stumbles through the national anthem at Atlanta football game. \u2022 Trump singing the national anthem on memorial day at Arlington. \u2022 Trump throwing paper towels to hurricane victims Trump disgusted by use of water purification tablets. Trump doesn't say radical Islamic terrorism in first major address to Middle East Trump says Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas Trumps eating habits though admittedly, articles speaking to the longevity of the POTUS's health are newsworthy many others but, again, I am posting from my phone, sorry. Now, I believe the purpose of widespread criticism of Trump on what should, given the scope of his office, be inconsequential matters is entirely for ratings, as is almost all news coverage in the United States. I also will not argue whether one side is more of less guilty of bias than the other. I see nothing wrong with the coverage as it is. However, even true non news can be pointed to by Trump supporters and spoken as fake news. I force myself to occasionally listen to conservative talk radio both local and national broadcasts. These non news stories are often brought up alongside more newsworthy stories criticizing Trump to demonstrate the bias of the liberal media. Because these non news stories are inconsequential, they are also easily written off as out of context or personal attacks. This allows for more important stories to be associated with the personal attack on the Trump administration, such that entirely true and consequential stories are written off as another deceit from the fake news media. Now, this ploy is very purposefully done by the conservative media in support of the Trump administration. However the examples of anti Trump non news is what allows them to do so. This is made easier when you realize everyone is fairly susceptible to confirmation bias. If you are a Trump supporter, you likely want to hear that your support of Trump is not unwarranted. In placing yourself at odds with the liberal media by recognizing non news stories as fake news, you are able to agree with the president that those outlets are fake news outlets. Now, when you read an article from that outlet that you now recognize as a fake news outlet, it becomes a lot easier to dismiss it as fake news, especially if there is some other outlet placing a positive spin on it. TLDR By flooding the news cycle with inconsequential criticisms of Trump, the liberal media is inadvertently giving credence to the term 'fake news' and further solidifying Trump's base. \u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500 gt This is a footnote from the  moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please read through our rules. If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us. Happy ing gt<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The liberal media is inadvertently solidifying Trump's base and giving credence to 'fake news' claims.\n","id":"c6524da8-aa69-4a55-ab4d-d74ed31c7902"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Given WiFi, Bluetooth, cordless phones, cell phones and the like all operate on radio waves, most Western-culture citizens and many others now own several radio-wave emitting devices where the typical household some 50 years ago had nothing of this sort. So radio wave usage has obviously been exploding.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Radio waves form the only means to communicate with anything that's in space, including satellites, currently in use by humans. Both in space and on earth, the use of radio waves has been growing and still is. No end is in sight.\n","id":"8a060d9c-c0db-4650-ad77-f3d793190f26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the recent release of What Happened and the crowds waiting for book signings and speaking engagements, I've noticed that after being denied the Presidency because some electors put themselves and party over country that Hillary has, amongst some, become a bit of a sympathetic figure and the fallout will only help her legacy. Already I see people who have turned her into a figure whose presidency would've left America so better off than what actually happened and that the manner of how she lost and whom she lost to, to some, has reedeemed her for an assortment of past miscues. I even have friends who LOATHED her as a Senator, largely for using New York for her own political gain, who now love her because of what she represented the potential of America's last flicker of hope before dark times came. To be fair, the reality is that it would be a continuation of Obama and heaven help who she would have to face in 2020 when going up for reelection, but outside of being denied the Presidency I don't see what bad for Hillary personally all this could've done. She has the perpetual empathy of her supporters who for generations will speak highly of her and will be remembered not for Benghazi or carpetbagging or Whitewater but for being the Best President America Never Had and if the US ends up divorcing or in domestic war as the Woman Who Could've Saved America. Wouldn't that have been a great realignment for her legacy? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Losing the 2016 Presidential Election has made Hillary Clinton a sympathetic figure and that is the best outcome for her legacy.\n","id":"36de25ae-0014-461f-9a32-4084e37796bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello I'm going to soon build a computer that can run Windows 7 for gaming general. But I'd also like to get an iMac desktop mac someday too. But the problem is, I feel like if I buy an iMac to have while owning a PC, I'd have no reason to use the Mac and I'd just be wasting money. I know there's a lot of people who argue that Mac is better than PC, or vice versa. I just want to know why I would want to have both a Mac and a PC. Can someone change my view and tell me about the good features that are exclusive to Macs, specifically to iMacs instead of MacBooks Macbook Pros MacBook Airs? Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't need an iMac if I have a Windows PC.\n","id":"4c72bb9a-3eaf-4e6a-a8ee-c3155d3ccccc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should football soccer in Australia adopt a promotion and relegation system?<|ARGUMENT|>Relegated clubs lose out on the money from the more lucrative broadcast deals. This can amount to tens of millions of dollars in difference depending on the league.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Promotion and Relegation present extreme financial hardships on both promoted and relegated clubs.\n","id":"720b7d59-1759-465b-a92c-46b0e2f1ff1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me just define an irrational thinker as someone who accepts and ignores inconsistencies in his thinking. It makes no sense trying to uncover these inconsistencies to such a person. I hold this view because of multiple life experiences, when I talked to people believing in homepathy, general esoterics, political conspiracies etc. Even in a friendly environment, when a problem is approached together in a step by step manner and facts are presented, irrational thinkers seem to never get the point or the chain of reasoning and are unable to draw logical conclusions ok otherwise they wouldnt be irrational. But I say they even cant do this with lots of help. Importantly, these experiences differ completely from talking to a rational thinker, who holds an opposing opinion. Clarification After reading all these answers sorry for the little delay , I think I have to specify what I meant. I dont have a problem at all with people holding opposing opinions. Some of you were very fast to bring r atheism or common liberal positions into the game. I think the actual opinion has nothing to do with the way of thinking, and the intermingling of anti religious positions and the rational way of thinking is maybe limited to US american internet users. What I meant is the WAY of finding ones opinion. Of couse you were right that everybody needs some axioms. It is the so called scientific method , its principles can be explained very easily and I never met somebody who refuted this method, nobody, not even the most hardcore esoterics, and also no I play devils advocate intellectual called this methods e.g. a belief system . The reason is when you try to argue it, you automatically use it. For the case of esoteric people, they initially LOVE to apply this scientific method to their beliefs. We together go, step by step, through hypothetical experiments investigating shamans, information storage in water, chakras etc until a point is reached where a conclusion can be made. When I tell them that e.g. in the case of homeopathy these experiments have already been made a thousand times, and homeopaths regularly fail controlled tests, then there is nothing happening. No further ongoing debate, no spark of thought, nothing. Its like their mind switches off at this point. I did these discussions now for 10 years, and came to a point where I question their usefulness. Conclusion The best pro talking argument presented was probably Everybody starts as an irrational thinker. Only by talking to eachother, people can change. A prerequisite for a good discussion is a setting which can be called dialectic , as opposed to a non productive, polemic discussion atmosphere. Some of you claimed, that with enough dialectic discussions, cognitive dissonance a feeling of inner contradiction can be created that can, not immediately but later, lead to questioning of a position, but if somebody can change his actual way of reasoning is still open.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For rational thinkers, its a waste of time to talk to irrational thinkers.\n","id":"10f1db37-56c7-4f68-b3d3-bbb35e432cd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The founders set out to create a system where no person or group can be safely ignored. If candidates ignore the non-swing states they expect to carry, before long *those* will be swing states, too. They still have influence. In contrast, a straight majority allows rural areas and \"fly-over\" states to be shut out of power entirely. That creates a dangerous situation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abolishing the EC would make their campaign focus even smaller as 51% of the US population lives in only 146 counties out of 3,242 counties in the US. 4.5% Campaigns would likely target the top 200, meaning their campaign would focus on a geographic 6% of America.\n","id":"874049b8-3d95-473a-9ec1-46f501b1ecdf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As said in the title, I believe public transportation should be available for free. My reasons for this are as follows Less people would feel the need to use cars, making the roads less packed and allowing buses and trains better access. More impoverished individuals wouldn't have to worry about being able to visit a hospital, doctor, or court. Less cars less car accidents. More people able to get from point A to point B more efficiency and happier civilians. A tax funded bus network would be straightforward to implement, as buses are not that expensive to run. Trains may be more difficult, but still manageable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public transport should be free for non-business use\n","id":"69dbd2e5-5da9-4a44-acab-2d81fafb7ef9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Going by what has transpired in the last 10 days of Trump's presidency, there are three major problems Leaders of congress are all unwilling to stand up to Trump despite having made tall claims about bans on immigration being unconstitutional. Source Federal departments following Executive Orders despite court orders. Source Trump's willingness to fire officials who refuse to enforce his orders because he considers them betrayals. Source Now from my understanding Executive Orders can be repealed by the Supreme Court. But, if Trump manages to appoint a Conservative SCOTUS who is also unwilling to stand up to Trump, how will checks and balances work? To change my view, I'm looking for arguments on the following Trump would not be able to appoint a SCOTUS Justice that he likes and will be willing to support him carte blanche Even if he manages to appoint a conservative SCOTUS Justice, the other justices can and will vote against him The Republican controlled congress will stand up against Trump's orders when they consider them unconstitutional Refuting my understanding of checks and balances Thanks EDIT Strengthens my belief in the delta because it looks like calling representatives has worked. According to this article several Republican Senators are feeling the pressure from their constituents. Thanks for the detailed discussion u Grunt08, and everyone else who participated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The famous checks and balances will fail if President Trump manages to appoint a conservative Supreme Court Justice\n","id":"d920a083-8245-48c6-9227-ee37eed92dbf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In Miller v California, the supreme court ruled 5 4 that obscene speech is not constitutionally protected. It developed the miller test to use to determine obscenity, which is based on average person, applying contemporary community standards , meaning local standards, not national. This decision was made in response to someone that was distributing physical pamphlets of hardcore pornography, so naturally, local standards would apply. Local standards would also make sense, for example, if the community was deciding whether to allow an adult video store in their town. So basically, the lack of protection of obscene speech is based on the idea that a lot of people in the community don't want to see it, which is understandable. You shouldn't be able to go around mailing hardcore porn to people that don't want to see it, as Miller productions did. But with the internet, the decisions of a local jury should be considered irrelevant. With the internet, you decide as an an individual which sites you would like to visit. For that reason, obscenity standards online should be based on the online community it takes place in, not the physical location the poster viewer resides in. So for example, if someone goes to a forum for IT professionals, intended to be safe for work, or a site intended for children, and start spamming a bunch of extremely offensive disturbing porn, such speech should not be considered constitutionally protected. But if someone goes to a fetish website intended for that type of material, and posts the same thing, that should be constitutionally protected, even if the community of the poster viewer believes it is patently offensive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In a Miller Test regarding whether material is \"obscene\" and therefore not constitutionally protected, \"Contemptary Community Standards\" is outdated for online speech\n","id":"b4bd8e58-98af-46d0-b584-ecb0fc6ac6a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I like to visit news sites and ctrl f candidates names to see who's getting the headlines, Clinton is being plastered everywhere but I see hardly any mention, still, of Bernie Sanders. I believe the media unfairly excludes candidates and this is detrimental to the election process, and a properly informed vote. With that being said the only reason I care this election is that I support Sanders, an underdog candidate, whereas previous years I didn't. On a side note I'm a Vermont resident and was well aware of Sanders before his reddit presence and presidential bid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The media is unfairly excluding presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders.\n","id":"706ae14f-5dd7-4452-aab5-ff0db1e1ecf7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>General discourse, especially with the metoo movement, seems to believe we live in a culture where rape is accepted, condoned, normalized or at best ignored. I'd agree with that, just not about women but about men. Google definition used for rape culture which seems to be balanced and fair gt a society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse. My reason for believing this is two fold. Firstly this CDC Report Secondly the fact that the mere accusation of sexual assault and misconduct can destroy someone's future, but only in the direction of women accusing men. To elaborate on the first point. The CDC report mentions the following lifetime rape statistics for men and women. Women Lifetime rape attempted rape 18.3 , 12 month 1.1 . Men Lifetime rape attempted rape 1.4 . 12 month too few data. Ratio 18.3 1.4 13.7. Seems not too bad right? Then we look at the definition they used for rape which is the classical defintion of being penetrated. Therefore the CDC has included a second catagory which described being forced to penetrate. This is not included in the rape statistics, something I cannot fault them because the definition is different, but it is left out whenever someone quotes it. With these numbers, using a conservative overlap of 50 of the rapes that men experience thus someone that said he was forced to penetrate might also have said he was penetrated, to avoid double counts . Women Lifetime rape attempted rape 18.3 21,840,000 , 12 month 1.1 1,270,000 Men Lifetime rape attempted forced to penetrate 5.5 6,241,500 , 12 month 1.1 . 1,267,000 Ratio 3.3. Meaning women are still raped 3x as often as men under these definitions. Now first, it is known that this particular study might overreport the number of rapes, especially when compared to other studies about rape by a factor of 10x but it doesn't matter because that counts for both men and women. This has been mentioned to me in another  post. This study also does not include a good estimate for prison rape as it mentions itself. Also, I do not dispute the fact that women are raped more often than men. Now, the second point is the fact that women that have suffered any form of sexual assault have platforms to help them, and general societal support. I agree that these are necessary though I have my doubts that someone's reputation can be destroyed merely based on a public accusation and that we actively promote women to make these accusations public see metoo . Even if false accusations are rare, we should still assume innocence until proven guilty. Similar discourse does not exist from the opposite sex. This kind of proves that women being raped is not condoned, normalized or trivialized by society. What about the men? We don't hear a squeak about male rape, which very few people would believe it's only 3.3x less frequent than women rape. Similarly, many people don't know that men have comparable rates of abuse by an intimate partner in general 35.6 vs 28.5 , women and men respectively , though this point is tangential to rape culture. Even the textbook definition of rape is stacked against men, as previously mentioned. When looking at the above definition of rape culture, we can understand that there is no culture surround rape for women. In fact, victims are asked to come forward, believed and are taken serious. In media and social media. Opposite, with the numbers being this close, it seemed that male rape sex has a stigma surrounding it and it is trivialised by society as 'not a problem worth discussing'. Exceptions that make the rule were the accusations of priests and Kevin Spacey, which according to the data are only a blip on the radar compared to 'being forced to penetrate' which is a much larger percentage. Also, some clarifications yes, women are raped more often than men yes, any rape is one too many yes, we should solve this problem for both sexes Finally, you can change my view by one of the following Convince me that there exists a rape culture around both sexes. Ergo convince me of the rape culture for women. Convince me that the rape culture surrounding men is also false. Ergo there is no rape culture at all. Convince me that the definition I used is faulty and another definition is better and that definition proves either one of the above points . Ergo my premise is wrong, and a different premise leads to a different conclusion. For me, the easiest way would be to convince there is no rape culture. Which I hope to be true, in fact. I also accept data from other countries, but the US has a very easily accessible data set and though, generally speaking, all crime rates are inflated in the US w.r.t. the rest of the western world, I wonder if the same is true for other developed, western countries. Edit it seems many focus on the MeToo part of this post, and that may be my own fault for putting emphasis on this. However, I believe that even before metoo this was generally the case. Metoo has helped, and maybe more women decide to come forward hopefully to the police first and social media as a last resort . But even before metoo, there was societal effort to help women in all kinds abusive situations, including sexual abuse. While hardly any effort was made towards the other sex and this was largely ignored. Even formal definitions of rape favour one type in many countries and even a bit longer ago, it was explicitly defined as a man forcing himself on a woman . MeToo isn't my central argument Edit 2 I didn't mean to imply it was a zero sum game. It just seemed that the particular definition found that the rape culture culture being the key word was only true for one of the sexes. Meanwhile, I have been convinced that a more extensive definition of rape culture might includes aspects that are more true for women than for men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the US has a rape culture, just not in the direction we're made to believe.\n","id":"18b58dae-ad65-4ef2-b15d-9bde0423f21a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the BBC should be free to blaspheme<|ARGUMENT|>The role of a public service broadcaster, especially one of the stature of the BBC, is to provide a portal for ideas from all perspectives. There are many who take either irritation or offence at the idea that the Corporation devotes a disproportionate time and resources to what, in modern Britain, is a strictly minority interesti with fewer than seven per cent of people regularly attending religious worship. Many perceive commonly held positions in the mainstream churches \u2013 let alone more extreme sects \u2013 to be offensive or reactionary and, in some cases, a cover for homophobic, illiberal or sexist opinions. If religious opinion is to be granted this airtime for the benefit of a small, if vocal, minority then it seems both unfair and unprofessional for that broadcaster to be constrained by that groups views in relation to the rest of its output. The BBC, like most major broadcasters, meets the challenge of divergent or conflicting views by providing some output that is considered likely to be of interest to each viewpoint. i National Secular Society. Press Release: \u201cBBC Must Not Become the Evangelical Wing of the Church of England.\u201d 9 February 2010.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people find the views expressed by much of the church offensive, those views are given airtime, a public service broadcaster should provide a level playing field for ideas.\n","id":"20d42233-66b2-4109-9e09-e385abf905e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There have been much talks about how non Cuban migrants are unjustly treated by US immigration officials and laws. For those who aren't familiar with this topic, Cuban migrants are granted residency upon landing on US soil under the Cuban Refugee Adjustment Act. The Wet foot, Dry Foot policy is an extension. Unlike Cubans, other nationals are faced with immigration restrictions. Mexican migrants are turned away or detained if apprehended by US custom officials. This also applies to other uninspected migrants from other countries other than Cuba. This leads to some advocates suggesting that this difference in enforcement is unfair or discriminatory. However, I think it's justified. Unlike Mexican nationals, Cubans are politically oppressed and are criminally prosecuted for any expression of government opposition. Hence, they have a stronger case for asylum. Other nationals can take part in the democratic processes in their respective countries and are granted other vital rights not given to Cubans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The preferential treatment of Cuban immigrants in the US is justified\n","id":"75986771-9102-449d-8574-0dc08ebe9993"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Deregulation and tax cuts should be embraced to lead the world out of economic crisis.<|ARGUMENT|>The second part of our proposed stimulus package involves stimulating business growth. Businesses will be one of the most positively affected by a policy in which increases deregulation and tax-cuts. By being exempt from a certain amount of tax and free from certain government regulations, businesses can gain an increase in investing power and flexibility in expansion and investment. Such policies are especially beneficial for large corporations, who are often the most bound by government mandated tax policies and regulations. Easing up on large businesses allows for more large scale capital investment. This means corporations can buy more raw materials, set up more factories, increase the amount of the jobs, and drop the prices of their products. In the scope of recovering from economic crisis where unemployment is high, prices rise, and inventory stocks pile up, the cheapest, fastest way to do so is through big businesses. The impact of average fixed costs and marginal costs on economies of scale are far lower than that of smaller ones, allowing them to make bigger and, on average, faster investments for a lower average total cost. This still accounts for larger investments, increasing money circulation throughout the economy and also since part of such investments are also into labor costs allowing for an increase in the number of jobs. Though big businesses would serve as the central engine in fostering in economic growth, our proposed policy would still benefit small businesses and entrepreneurs as tax-cuts and deregulation also allows for more investment power and flexibility. Though many may criticize the policy's tempory disregard of large corporations\u2019 noblesse oblige, the burden of such large scale businesses to support society through its tax obligations, the government's priorities lie with getting the economy back to stabilized growth as effectively and efficiently as possible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stimulating businesses through tax-cuts and deregulation will be engine for economic recovery.\n","id":"42472b48-7356-4f08-89d3-d0690399caf8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Kashmir Be An Independent State?<|ARGUMENT|>Kashmiri militancy is focused on liberating the region as opposed to a global Jihad. Therefore, Kashmiri militants are unlikely to join an organization which has a separate goal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Pakistan-India conflict within Kashmir is what has led to the presence of young men with arms the most easily radicalized demographic\n","id":"5e212471-5961-468e-a588-e6d8137fedb8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>A legal sex work environment will mean there will be a shared responsibility for safe sexual practices with clients.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regulation is necessary to ensure the safety of sex-workers and clients.\n","id":"c8073aed-fb9d-4dd7-8589-d23c0ea1a523"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>California banned affirmative action in the late 1990s. As a result, at the University of California, Berkeley, the percentage of black undergraduates has fallen from 6% in 1980 to only 3% in 2017.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forgoing support for affirmative action would backtrack the good it has done.\n","id":"56766541-22a9-4dde-b904-f382bda52324"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see a lot of people calling for Oprah Winfrey to run in 2020. Haven\u2019t we learned that just because a person is rich and famous doesn\u2019t mean they can be an effective President? I fear the biggest consequence of having Trump as President is that it\u2019s going to cause more and more totally unqualified celebrities to run. If Trump can win, who\u2019s next? I don\u2019t want to see our country being run by TV stars who never wanted a career in politics in the first place. People like Barack Obama, Ron Paul, John McCain, or Bernie Sanders have dedicated their entire lives to public service, and perhaps to the ultimate goal of becoming the President. It\u2019s a crowning achievement for them. Meanwhile, celebrities already live extraordinarily privileged lives so the Presidency is a gigantic step down for them, in terms of compensation, lifestyle and general amenities. There should be some sort of minimum experience requirement to run for President, something aside from being rich and famous anyhow. Candidates should have to prove at least some level of political, legislative or judicial competency in order to qualify for a Presidential campaign. Nothing against Oprah personally, but she\u2019s no more qualified than Trump aside from perhaps being more likable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having a Celebrity As President Is a Failed Experiment and Should Never Happen Again\n","id":"0d49dc13-de74-4d90-8c1b-c928b991e165"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When arguing for veganism, most arguments fall into one of three categories 1 animal products are made unethically causing unnecessary suffering 2 animal agriculture is an ecological disaster 3 veganism will make you healthier. While I believe that the points 1 and 2 are valid, I think that the reason 3 is invalid and therefore it's unfair and stupid to use it while arguing for veganism. I am aware that there are many people whose health improved after going vegan and that are many medical studies which show that consumption of animal products, especially meat, is related to many types of diseases. However, I think that this is for two reasons that can be avoided without actually going vegan 1 The average amount of animal products an European or American consumes is actually excessive. 2 The quality of animal products is generally rather low. Let us assume a person who eats a healthy, balanced, whole foods diet including a moderate amount of animal products free range, organically fed . By moderate amount, I mean something along these lines 2 dishes containing meat seafood dairy equivalent of 2 glasses of milk 2 eggs on average per week. Also assume, that the person has no specific medical condition which contradicts eating animal products e.g. lactose intolerance . I claim that such person would most likely not improve their health by going vegan. When someone's health improves after going vegan it's more likely that they were simply eating too much or too bad animal products or that while going vegan, they simultaneously start to care more about eating healthily or perhaps because most junk food in existence is non vegan. As a vegan, I wish that the health argument was valid, but I feel that I have to dismiss it to in order to be intellectually honest. I think people who believe that veganism will make you healthier are either misinformed or suffer wishful thinking. Please . EDIT typos<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"health argument\" for veganism is invalid.\n","id":"3ed7d631-b64e-49b6-8143-a01652a2ec8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>The Battle of Yavin 2:38 a turbolaser with a gun crew and apparently manual, visual firing. At 2:43 turbolaser turret misses relatively slow moving X-Wings from near point blank range visually, they appear to be no more than 20 meters from it, but this is likely false perspective. Though they are certainly no more than a hundred meters from it, probably several dozen. At 2:53 More evidence turbolasers use manual gun crews.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Targeting technology in Star Wars, possessed by the Empire and presumably the Rebels is substantially Inferior to that found in Star Trek, particular the Federation.\n","id":"7e65522c-6c0d-4277-b1c7-f8056fcb6417"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that parts of the theory of evolution is proven fact, but much of it is like a narrative, not unlike the creation story. Granted the evolutionary narrative is couched in more scientific vocabulary, but otherwise still a grand narrative of how everything came to be. I dont understand why time needs to be devoted to either narrative in a school. Why not spend the time emphasizing the formulas, the nomenclature, the structure of living beings and what not. It seems to me biology could easily be taught without the narrative intertwined.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe evolution or creation needs to be taught in High school or Junior high\n","id":"213b01e8-bbe5-4d95-9ed3-370157595d9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Smokers, refusing or significantly limiting state medical care for<|ARGUMENT|>Practical Issues -- This is primarily a debate about a principle. Practical hurdles are secondary to deciding what is it health services should achieve, and how they should achieve it in the first place. That said, there are realistic ways this policy could be carried out. Insurance companies already ask lots of health-related questions, often including whether their client is a smoker, when assessing life insurance premiums. In these cases, you are required to give details of your lifestyle by law. Of course, some people do not, however this is to be expected since no law is one hundred percent effective. Sanctions exist to discourage dishonest behaviour. A similar model could be put in place requiring a declaration of smoker status to the health authority. Indeed, many doctors already enquire about their patients\u2019 smoking statuses on an informal basis. It is also particularly hard to lie about being a smoker for two reasons. First, other people inevitably see you smoking. This means an abundance of witnesses in the case of a disputate, and thus a disincentive to lie. Second, people require doctors to undertake detailed examinations for treatment purposes, thereby allowing them to see obvious outward signs of smoking: tar deposits, tar in cough, yellowed fingernails, etc. Clearly, there is a need to set guidelines for what is practicable and fair with regards to timetable issues and the types of treatment which would remain available to smokers. However, doctors and health services make these kinds of judgements all the time. In the UK, IVF is only provided to couples after extensive vetting of their appropriateness as parents, medically and socially. Likewise, the psychological impact of obesity, cosmetic disfigurations, etc are assessed before plastic surgery is paid for by the state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Practical Issues -- This is primarily a debate about a principle. Practical hurdles are secondary t...\n","id":"cad8f80b-6be8-45c8-98e3-0d1d6fcc7305"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>you have nothing to worry about surveillance if you have done nothing wrong.<|ARGUMENT|>Clearly much of the time you really do have nothing to worry about when it comes to intelligence agencies having information about you. People are not regularly arrested without just cause and we have little evidence that democratic governments use this information to put pressure on their citizens. There have been no known cases of this happening since the start of the war on terror.1 When it comes to foreign governments this is even less of a cause for concern; while your own government might be interested in various aspects of your life to help it with the services it provides foreign governments only have one motivation; their own national security. If you are not a threat to that national security the chances of them ever taking any action against you are essentially nonexistent. 1 Posner, Eric, \u2018I Don\u2019t See a Problem Here\u2019, The New York Times Room for Debate, 10 June 2013,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You are not going to be arrested because the government has access to your communications\n","id":"6bacb958-de96-4aba-98fa-7c3c305ba503"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't support government shutdowns. I think they are a symptom of dysfunctional Washington and elected leaders acting like toddlers. However, when we have a shutdown I believe everything except law enforcement should be shut down. This includes no one working without pay. Right now 800,000 workers are not working but this is only 25 of the federal workforce. People would put far more pressure on their elected leaders to end a shutdown if everything except law enforcement was eliminated. No airport security, no food inspections, no social security or benefit chicks, no grant funding, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When the government shuts down the entire government should shut down, not just 25% of it.\n","id":"f127a8c9-361c-471f-9ddc-52e573d059bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This  was inspired by a recent argument with my mother, as well as things I've read on other subreddits like r childfree and r raisedbynarcissists. It seems that for some parents, they guilt trip their children whenever they get into a disagreement with them. My mother's favorite standby has always been, You're so ungrateful, even after all I've sacrificed to have you All this statement says to me is, I'm a bad parent, but I deserve respect because I'm responsible for your existence. This statement is meant to make the child feel guilty that they would disagree with their parents. Going further, it makes the child feel guilty of their existence. I was raised with classic r raisedbynarcissists parenting. It has caused me permanent mental and emotional damage, that it'll take years of therapy to correct. Whenever I've confronted my mother on her behavior, she uses some version of the above statement to excuse herself for the abuse she's caused. At the same time, she demands that I respect her. Why would I respect a parent that's damaged me on a deep level? Yes, she gave birth to me, but that was her choice. Why should I be punished for her choices? The other half of this  is regarding the fact that new parents want endless recognition just because they gave birth. The act of childbirth would be worthy of respect if it wasn't such a common widespread occurrence. However, you do not get respect for adhering to nature. I believe that if they raise and treat their children well, they do deserve respect. I've heard so many people treat their opinions as above anyone else's simply because they chose to have children As a mother . It just doesn't seem right to me. Tl dr Having a child doesn't instantly earn you respect. Properly raising a happy and healthy child does earn you respect. Children should not inherently respect their children, because it was their parent's choice to have them. Reddit, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents should not be respected simply for being parents\n","id":"8c8d35f0-ae8b-4ff6-8ca7-a687d6579294"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>War memorials commemorating soldiers at large, in contrast to those who are remembering individuals, can only generalize those soldiers that did bad and those who were forced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Honoring soldiers and commemorating their suffering puts soldiers in a position of victims while their role at large was that of victimizers.\n","id":"90f3be2d-9a49-43a5-b8d5-a48b6e75d0fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2017, a video of a couple arguing with and pushing an elderly man who asked to share a table with them went viral. In the process of trying to find the couple, people online incorrectly identified a couple. The woman wrongly named online wrote on her Facebook page that it was an \u201cemotional period and scary moment<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These victims, if mistakenly targeted, can often suffer depression or anxiety from these attacks\n","id":"fdb52e8b-b345-48d3-806c-b715fac76ae2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm going to premise this by saying that I think Bernie is a generally good person, but I think people are wearing rose tinted glasses in evaluating if he would have won the general if he had been the democratic nom. Below, I lay out 3 arguments why I don't think he would have won outperformed Clinton. Hillary went easy on Bernie in the primaries, and he would have had more scandals in the general There's a ton of information about Bernie that Hillary didn't bring up because it wouldn't be useful in front of a democratic audience. However, in the general, these things could be devastating. Namely, his honeymoon in the USSR, his essay about rape fantasies, and the fact that he's a career politician who's worked for government for 40 years He would be very easy to paint as a socialist, which is still in a boogeyman among the white working class rural voters that he could theoretically pull that Clinton couldn't. It would also be a harder challenge to pull Republican women because both of those things listed above. He wouldn't have inspired black hispanic turnout. The primary reason Clinton won overwhelmingly in the primary is because of black and hispanic turnout She's built inroads with those communities for decades. However, in the general, she failed to energize those 2 groups sufficiently to win. If she failed to capture that core Democratic group, than there's no reason Sanders would have sufficiently closed that gap to overwhelm the turnout that Trump would inspire among rural americans. He would not be able to capture Trump voters because he doesn't tap into racial anxiety, and actually causes religious anxiety Bernie sanders doesn't scape goat minorities, LGBT, or refugees. Unfortunately this is what many trump voters wanted to see As a result, he probably would not have peeled off enough cultural Trump voters to overcome Trump's lead. He also faces the challenge of being Jewish, which I believe would probably alienate him from a few points of the Black and Hispanic vote, which tend to be relatively religious It's unfortunate, but true that I think he would've faced discrimination for this from muslim and christian democrats. Based on these factors, I don't see him flipping any states that Clinton failed to win, and as a result, probably doing equally as badly or worse than her.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bernie Sanders would have lost the election.\n","id":"abd3f88a-a43b-4dc4-8318-fe775433a7f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>A Sneakoscope which looks like a glass spinning top, lights up, spins and whistles if something or someone untrustworthy is nearby.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are a number of interesting magical objects and inventions that people in the wizarding world can use.\n","id":"dacb4e69-fc82-40b6-a44c-af77bf427098"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of semi-automatic rifles be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>75% 167 of 222 of firearms used in mass shootings are semi-auto, external box magazine fed firearms. Accounting for 90% 732 out of 816 of fatalities in mass shootings as of writing this 02\/26\/2018. US Mass Shootings, 1982-2018: Data Investigation<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reducing access to semi-auto, external box fed magazine firearms will reduce the rounds per minute that mass shooters can achieve, thus lowering the casualty count.\n","id":"9f2923aa-03c3-48dc-829a-eb304fd138e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, you have to understand the type of person watching a Transformer's movie. Sophisticated story telling and complicated plots are not necessary. Explosions, epic battles, fighting against the odds, cool robots etc that sort of thing I what I expect from a transformer's movie. x200B Transformers 3 definitely had the best in those categories, the plot was also SIMPLE and MADE SENSE, WTF even is transformers 4 and 5?? The ranking for Transformer's movies go x200B Transformers 3 gt Transformers 2 gt Transformers 1 gt Trashformers 4 gt Trashformers 5 x200B 2 and 1 are interchangable based on tastes but I enjoyed the 2nd movie more because of better battle scenes, although the plot was almost as trashy as the fourth movie.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transformers 3 was the best transformers movie\n","id":"6dda8287-e249-43e2-a608-b5a1e0d9a7c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Affirmative Action: Useful Once, Outdated Today?<|ARGUMENT|>Having a critical mass of minority students better enables them to advocate for political causes and common interests without having to worry as much about being singled out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Often, minority students simply existing on campuses subverts the racist tropes that have historically applied to them.\n","id":"e96d5725-fb99-45ea-be8f-ca8efe11e9b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Agile certifications do not advance Agile thinking<|ARGUMENT|>Understanding the links between ideas, determining the importance and relevance of arguments and ideas and recognising to build and appraise arguments are key to develop critical thinking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certifications force people to read and reflect a lot to be able elaborate their own positions. This certainly benefits thinking.\n","id":"cbf5f5fd-9c44-41a9-b121-7d6a5147ff01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>No religion motivates people to do terrible things. People do terrible things to satisfy their ego.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion should not be blamed for its intentional or unintentional misuse.\n","id":"20c2425c-608f-42ab-8179-cc19ff32103b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was born with liver disease, though no fault of my own obviously or my mothers. I am 25 and while I am doing okay now I have been told by my doctors that I will eventually need a liver transplant, most likely by the time I am 40. When the time comes if I don\u2019t get that liver I will die. I am probably biased due to my situation but I believe that people like me who were born with liver disease, or people who got liver disease through no fault of their own should be put ahead on the transplant list over people who destroyed their liver with alcohol and or drugs. So for example if there were 9 people on the waiting list for a liver and they were all addicts or recovering addicts, and then a person who was born with liver disease was added to the list the person who was born with it would automatically go to the top. Or if there were two people compatible for a liver that became available and one of the two was an addict and one was born with it the liver would be given to the person who was born with it. All of this regardless of whether the addict was sicker or closer to death. I know addiction is a disease, and I believe there needs to be no stigma and more support for people trying to recover. I also believe that recovering addicts should be given a second chance and a transplant if there is no one on the list who was born with liver disease. But at the end of the day I was born with this through no fault of my own, and the alcoholic chose to take that first drink at the very beginning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who were born with liver disease should be first on the list to receive a transplant over people who destroyed theirs with alcohol\/drugs.\n","id":"508af512-60e6-4e7c-aea6-95952f0b5a39"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Indeed, as early as Saint Ambrose the dominant approach of mainstream Christian theology has been to interpret sacred texts in such a way as to equate the Biblical conception of God with the philosophical conception used in this debate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The premise of this debate does not assume that we are talking about the God who has revealed Himself in the Bible.\n","id":"56c6ac64-2070-4b01-aa87-4cd62facffe5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has been good for the league<|ARGUMENT|>Bettman and the league's first offer during the summer really soured the beginning of negotiations and led to the league missing a good part of the 2012-13 season.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gary Bettman over saw three lockouts as commissioner, which he was hired to prevent.\n","id":"0f7e942a-b464-4c20-9d15-6ee45cc3c14d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>Overpopulation depends on number of children per family, which is inversely correlated with development index. Thus, if the world becomes more equal in wealth, it should not have such a problem. en.wikipedia.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is actually no global overpopulation, just an uneven distribution of populations and resources.\n","id":"76c66cb0-dcef-4c88-82aa-430c0458f466"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019d like to preface this by saying I do lean towards the left politically I\u2019m admittedly more centre left than outright left though, and I definitely agree with some of the points often brought up in the mainstream political subs. To be clear, I\u2019m talking about the major, default subs. Almost 1 2 of every article posted to subs such as r WorldNews, r Politics, r Futurology, etc. happen to be prone to what I consider an incredibly biased, leftist overview on things. I\u2019ve seen comments where people advocated in favour of forming a mob to \u201ctake down\u201d bankers, or rich people, or some big corporation. The faux revolutionary internet warrior nature of 90 of comments on such articles make it hard for me to even take them seriously. Furthermore, anybody who has a different opinion to the consensus seems to be downvoted to oblivion frequently insightful and smart comments seem to not gain much attention, while some dumb aggressive comment gets upvoted to the top. There are conservative echo chambers on Reddit as well, such as r TheDonald an absolutely ridiculous sub btw , but I\u2019d argue that most of the default subs aren\u2019t much better in terms of quality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of the Reddit political subs are leftist echo chambers.\n","id":"47aabfd9-c83c-4712-a3c4-313b97beab60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>Jesus taught His followers to \"store up treasure in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy and thieves do not break in a steal\" instead of storing up treasure on earth, asserting that the two are mutually exclusive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jesus had teachings with similar sentiment, but more clarity and more detail, before Pascal did and would have more authority than Pascal since Pascal was Christian.\n","id":"f72ed7a9-d8a5-4044-bae2-323011b3be93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>A sufficiently rigorous explanation of this state of hiddenness would be indistinguishable from the state of nonexistence. Occam's razor would suggest that positing a hidden being that does not influence the universe is less probable than concluding there is no such entity. Otherwise, why would you stop at saying there is only one, why not posit that a dozen such nonentities exist? O * n = 0 for all n. The pro and con arguments converge on 0 for a shy god.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Such eccentric and arbitrary behavior contradicts the requirement that He is good.\n","id":"a2f9219e-0fca-4da0-a1dc-f7c082e5e14e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US President Have the Power to Self-Pardon?<|ARGUMENT|>Sadly, yes. The US President will inevitably be attacked by every nation they tries to update their relationship with in any way. The US President, thus, has a slightly adversarial relationship with many nations, their own press, & their political opposition. Throw into this some nasty people accusing the President of things just to get him thrown out & make the office of the US President useless, and it gets too nasty. Best solution is allow Presidential self-pardons to attacks from everywhere.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US President should have the power to self-pardon, terminate inquiries for which he\/she is a subject, and fire FBI officials conducting investigations related to the presidency.\n","id":"b25bdaaa-2407-4727-bc77-43809e7ae80d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>The theory of the multiverse is incompatible with the common concept of existence the existence of something in a comprehensible point in space and time. We do not discuss if there are aliens in hypothetical universes but if they exist within the spectrum of the observable reality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Multiverse Theory is true, by necessity there is more than one Earth and thus, more than one human species.\n","id":"26cf5688-f2b6-476c-a621-ddc066c95cf3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I can't stand when people say electronic music isn't 'real' music as if they're superior for listening to whatever they listen to. Usually, it's people that like rock music as if people didn't call that 'not real music' when it had its advent. Last year, one of my friends said electronic music took no talent to make or perform. I challenged him to try and make a hit song using my DAW, he accepted and failed miserably. While it could've been just because there's a learning curve, it also takes a lot of the same skills that it takes to make another hit song. People that don't respect other people's tastes irk the fuck out of me. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you say that a genre of music isn't real music, you're an old fogey and your opinion's worth less.\n","id":"bda1777d-27b2-4363-b4dd-b79c31e74e46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>MBA<|ARGUMENT|>John Baschab, executive vice president and co-founder of consulting and staffing firm Impact Innovations Group: \"An MBA, like any other kind of training, is helpful, but only if the new knowledge, training, and opportunities it creates are in line with your career aspirations. The skills needed by the CIO of any sizable enterprise are definitely business-focused: budgeting, direction setting, people management, vendor management, and demand management. If your goal is senior management in IT or outside of IT, an MBA will provide the requisite point-of-view and training.\"2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"MBA is bad investment if you have no career goals\n","id":"12737f56-90cc-4927-a7c9-960382b880d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>It is a wise calculation to worship a God who sends people to Hell. Getting a great reward and avoiding terrible pain is a good bargain for the small price of submission to a few rules and foregoing normal Sunday activities every now and then.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If there is a powerful God that created hell it is useless for humans to fight against that, they have no real choice but to worship said God.\n","id":"30a84df1-cd0c-41e3-86a8-b0d269d82cde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Monogamy vs Polygamy: Is the Norm of Monogamy Regrettable?<|ARGUMENT|>\"We know that kids thrive on stable routines with stable caregivers,\u201d said W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. Polyamory can be like a \u201cmarriage-go-round,\u201d Wilcox said. \u201cWhen kids are exposed to a revolving carousel of spouses, that experience of instability and transition can be traumatic.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Growing up in the context of a non-monogamous relationship disadvantages children.\n","id":"eb834131-4d02-4705-b310-02df7a6c2dd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface this by giving some context to what I\u2019m about to say. I am subbed to r feminism and frequent that subreddit a lot just to see what is going in feminism. I noticed that this subreddit often parades the same justifications for feminism over and over again. The one I am particularly interested in, and the one that is paraded around the most is the idea of the media and advertisers creating unrealistic expectations of women . People are often disgusted at the idea of people in media and advertising having their imperfections photoshopped away. I understand the concern, I honestly do, but I think their concern is irrational and misguided. Are women the only victims? Well, arguably everyone is a potential victim for unrealistic bodily expectations. There are young boys, skinny as hell packed into gyms trying to achieve the type of body they saw in a Hugo Boss commercial despite not being a realistically achievable aesthetic for them. If you haven\u2019t already, take a look at studies on body dysmorphia in men Most advertisers seek to tap into our more primitive psychological responses rather than appeal to intellectual reasoning for simple fact it is faster and more effective. The idea that sex sells is often refuted by feminists as the commodification of women and an undeniable means of male oppression of women under the patriarchy. Despite this, most marketing revolves around pairing a product you want to sell with something inherently valued like a beautiful woman. IT IS GENIUS. The women want to be her and the men want to be WITH her. It\u2019s why James Bond is such a successful series. Women have always been inherently valued or judged for their looks, while men are also to some extent judged on their ability to get with good looking women. So an ad that highlights a woman\u2019s insecurities about her looks, makes her want to buy the product as she feels it will make her more beautiful, while the man buys it because it will make him more desirable to women. Advertising as an art form So far the discussion has been largely negative toward advertising depending on how you look at advertising . For me however, advertising is an art which is very good at tapping into social cultural and biological desires and perspectives. Art is something which has many definitions, but for the most part, art distills and disambiguates what is important to the audience. Humans with all other needs satisfied are very focused on reproduction sex, although ambiguous due to contraception . The woman\u2019s figure is very sought after because of its inherent beauty. Thus it is represented in sculptures and paintings throughout history, even on in ancient cave paintings. One thing in common in all of these things is the emphasis or exaggeration on certain biological features of women, for example the childbearing hips, the milk filled breasts and so on. It is just psychology. This is the \u201cVenus of Willendorf\u201d. It is statue which dates back to 24,000 BC and for all purposes this is an unrealistic version of a woman. No face and completely exaggerated sexual features. This, for me, is evidence of humans ostensive focus on reproduction. Why aren\u2019t feminists angry at this unrealistic expectation of women? Why don\u2019t feminists also get angry at Monet for creating an unrealistic expectation of that pond with a bridge going over it, or even Picasso for creating unrealistic faces. It is not meant to be realistic, it is meant to be beautiful. I think a large part of the recent shift to favouring a skinny, unhealthy, female physique is actually evidence of women hijacking cultural expectations. What men honestly find those kind of women to be the benchmark for a beautiful womanly form. Sure they\u2019re beautiful like all women but they are not beautiful in a traditional, humanistic sense. Besides it is just part of an ever changing paradigm of beauty, so why does anyone care. Fat women will probably be the next big thing pun intended and women will be eating copious amounts of ice cream just to look like their favorite plus size model. Basically, people, particularly feminists need stop fighting these representations of beauty because they are ultimately fighting our nature. I know this is a very unhealthy view, so please, please, please change it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think advertisers create unrealistic expectations of women's bodies. I believe they create artwork, which is misinterpreted as an expectation.\n","id":"1b99eac3-5b59-4c36-9275-6782c52a8366"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My stance The strengths of living in San Francisco do not make up for the cons of living there for a recent college graduate. So, I have a co worker who just graduated college in 2011. She was living in the East Bay while working a job in San Jose. However, she had this very intense desire to move to San Francisco. What her reasons where I don't know. At the end of last year, she moved into a small one bedroom apartment with her best friend, both baying around 1200 mo in rent. She probably makes 45k year pre taxes, so she's paying AT LEAST half her take home pay on rent alone. And yet, she's one of many people who just graduate college and move to San Francisco. My question is why are so many college graduates who are tens of thousands of dollars in debt moving to one of the most expensive cities in the country? Rent is high Median rent is almost 1,500 month I think it goes without saying that if you're spending over half your take home pay on rent alone, it's more than financially stupid, but straight up stoopid. Cost of living is high on top of exponentially high rent, so is everything else. Savings will be non existent With all your take home wages as a college grad going to expenses, you have to deal with paying of your student loan debt, which can be upwards of 100k depending on where you attended college. Take your rent, regularly occurring bills and expenses, and student loan and you'd be hard pressed to find much left to put in a savings account. The best thing a young adult like me can do is establish a savings account. No preparation for retirement I can think of one way to start a retirement account if you put money in a 401 k with an employer match. But with all your money going to other expenses that are outrageously high, not much else is going to be saved. If you have a job in the South or East bay, you're commuting a few hours every day To me, the three to four hours day commute is not worth living in the City. Can someone please change my mind about living in San Francisco after college? I find it the one of the most financially idiotic things a college graduate can do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moving to San Francisco post-college is a foolish move\n","id":"0f80b8f0-af67-47d5-9dda-1466692f6a11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've not been politically conscious for long this November will be my first time voting but it's become quite clear to me why so many people despise politics and especially the long campaign season. Last June I was exhilarated by politics, everything seemed new and interesting and meaningful. A year later I think I've been drained of all enthusiasm. And I think the real problem is how the media covers elections. Polling to be was designed as tools for campaigns to see how they measured up to the competition. To that end they were effective they weeded out the unknowns and kept those that had a real chance. But now the media seems to use them as arguments in themselves for or against a candidate, as if the democratic process was a major league sport. Candidate X is this seasons favorite to win, while Candidate Y has no chance in hell of making it to the playoffs. It's a very undemocratic way of thinking about an election, as a series of strategies and tactics rather than a forum of open discourse the winner chosen not by the points they score at the debate on the trail, but by the votes cast on election day. When journalists write some article about the chances of one candidate or the other getting elected, they're critiquing them based on nothing more than their popularity and providing no real argument for or against the candidate. It's infuriating to see what should be an arena of philosophical debate reduced to calculus. The purpose of the media is to foster discourse and exhibit a variety of perspectives, not squash the minority opinion simply because it is currently in the minority. That's how we end up with the lesser of two evils in every single election in this country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polling is not news worthy and lacks journalistic content; It should almost no part in the media coverage of an election.\n","id":"181b7e4a-951d-4773-aeee-1362f4154228"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Classical music is an art form that does not progress, and its performance consists of musicians reproducing set in stone pieces as accurately as possible, with a minimum of deviation from notation and the authoritative vision of the composer. It is mechanistic by nature its musicians serve as extensions of their instruments, as parts in an intricate clockwork mechanism. The world of classical music is deterministic, perfectionistic, authoritarian. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think this is how classical is. Jazz, on the other hand, is filtered chaos, the rise and fall of individual voices in dialogue. There's a fusion of individualism and collectivism in the call and response, the solos of individuals that are complemented by the rhythm section and further soloists, and the emergence of order through the chaos of individual whim. It's interdependent, rather than dictatorial. It is chaotic each performance is subject to variation that derives from a near infinite range of unseen factors. The best performances are those in which an almost telepathic understanding is achieved between performers as they progress through a piece. A performer when soloing is naked, in a sense, and they have to have something to say that both manages to stand alone and contributes to the overall performance , unless they want to be the weak link. Thus creativity is demanded of Jazz musicians in a way that is not demanded of classical musicians. Of the two art forms considered serious by mainstream society, it is classical that is unyielding, stagnating in reverence for the past, demanding strict adherence to the composer's vision. These qualities mean that classical music, as practiced in modern life, is doomed to mere imitation. Performing classical music to an adequate standard requires a great deal of skill and discipline, but It's as yet unclear to me that it requires creativity of any sort. Unless you are creating arrangements of classical pieces, you never need to meaningfully engage with the material you need only read and play the notes on your sheet. To qualify my post, I'd like to say that there is an abundance of creative classical musicians and many who do engage deeply with the music they play. My post doesn't dispute that for a second. What I'm saying is that their engagement and creativity is largely superfluous to their performance abilities and their practice of classical music whereas the same is markedly untrue of other art forms like jazz, in which it is an essential component.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Classical music is a stagnant and authoritarian art form, and its musicians are absolved of needing creativity.\n","id":"bb4c82a6-bf1b-471d-a3f3-56f7d1ebae0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that people who have sex with underage teenagers should not be prosecuted if both parties admit that the older didn't have knowledge that the younger was underage. This is what happens if you are charged with statutory rape charged with a felony 1 year of prison and or fine possible required sex offender registration A few downsides to becoming a registered sex offender in my state Washington Sex offenders often cannot own or control personal computers. If community corrections officers permit access to computers, they normally must have blocks that prevent access to specific sites. Offenders also cannot have contact with magazines, videos, telephone sites or anything else with pornographic content. Offenders cannot move without permission. You must inform your CCO of romantic relationships. Some offenders may be required by their CCO to disclose their criminal history to their families and friends. Community corrections officers must approve your residence and living arrangements. You often must remain within specified geographic boundaries. You cannot purchase, possess or consume any mind or mood altering substances, including alcohol or drugs that haven\u2019t been prescribed by doctors. Offenders must allow their community corrections officers to inspect every part of their homes. Offenders must disclose information about their conviction s to potential adult sexual partners before beginning sexual relationships. Felony offenders may not own, use or possess firearms or ammunition. Offenders cannot patronize any establishment in the sex industry, including topless dancing clubs, sex toy outlets or houses of prostitution. I just don't think it's fair for anyone to be prosecuted for a crime that they did not know they were committing, a crime that someone else tricked them into committing by intentionally misrepresenting his or her age.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who have sex with underage teenagers should not be prosecuted if both parties admit that the older didn't have knowledge that the younger was underage.\n","id":"506f92e9-0d45-4532-b9ea-67d43e8bf280"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have very strong ethical views. I also have that craving for the glory of being a hero like most other people do. For a long time I loved the idea of being in the military and fighting for my country I'm Canadian if it makes any difference but as I got older and my worldview started to change, it became really hard for me to respect soldiers and war and anything to do with the military. Let me explain why The idea of countries, in and of itself, is ludicrous to me. We created imaginary borders, and claimed a piece of the Earth as something that's somehow separate from others. Then when we disagree with other claimed pieces of Earth, people are sent to war with them to die over things that probably wouldn't have been an issue if the Earth didn't have countries in the first place. The military wouldn't be necessary if we all lived in one nation, and being such an idealistic person, that keeps me from being able to respect anything military related. It's murder. Soldiers are killing other human beings who have emotions and families and individual lives. It's hard for me to find any kind of justification for this. Why are the people in our country more important and more worth defending than the people in another country? There is absolutely no honor in killing another person, no matter the reason. It infuriates me when war is glorified. Thanking a soldier for their service is thanking them for committing murder. Soldiers have such a high rate of PTSD, suicide, and homelessness. Families lose loved ones. Military technology is not something humans should have access to. Nobody should have the ability to press a button and send a nuke to destroy the Earth as we know it. War is futile. The lust for revenge is never satisfied, and as long as countries have soldiers, there will be bloodshed. The military budget could be spent on much better things that would benefit people instead of killing them. I'm aware that it's very unrealistic to expect there to be some sort of global agreement for everyone to abolish their military, but where I stand right now, it's what I think would be the best thing for humanity. If minds started to change and people refused to join, eventually we could make a real difference. Is the military really necessary? Is it beneficial for humanity? What makes murder as a solider acceptable, but murder in any other context wrong? Why should soldiers be praised and awarded medals for taking lives? I'm completely open to changing my viewpoint on this, but I haven't heard any argument that I could get behind. Change my mind. EDIT I'm heading to bed now. I'm looking forward to continue the conversation in the AM EDIT 2 My views have completely been changed. I still wish for a one nation world someday, and I think it should be the goal, but even if that is achieved we would still need protection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The military is nothing but a form of legal murder, and being a soldier is not honorable in the slightest. Every country should abolish their military.\n","id":"4c3f4fd3-0508-4d7b-a815-b0cbb915caa9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>This assumes god wouldn't be able to distinguish between a true believer and someone \"believing\" for personal gain, which contradicts the assertion of an omniscient deity; God may even punish feigned belief. This consideration changes the Wager.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The notion proposed by Pascal in his Wager is inherently flawed.\n","id":"b9b7eed4-6807-4985-afb4-ed7a6ff0a83a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public entities use only open source software?<|ARGUMENT|>Existing hooks into bad guys' computing systems would be discoverable, and they would clean the infection\/move to different computers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Writing implants\/malware would not be possible in open source.\n","id":"6792267a-58b2-4ef7-adaf-331f9d791604"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT^ The title is mis worded, I made a typo. Employers to terminate employment. Please excuse this, it is un editable. Please read this before replying to my post. I will do my best to clarify my stance. I understand that this subject is very inclusive and implies that I hold opinions about the legality of narcotics, I will try to be as straightforward as possible about my underlying beliefs. On personal autonomy and the legal status of drugs in the U.S I believe that in a free society, that is to say a society that advocates personal individual liberty, an individual must be in charge of his her own body. I feel that you should have the right to determine your diet, weather you will eat drink healthily or not. I also feel that if an adult decides that they wish to drink alcohol or partake in mind altering recreational drugs they should be able to make that choice for themselves. If the government is to have any involvement in that decision, it should be from a public health standpoint and not a criminal one. Employers right to test employees for non work habits My understanding of why companies administer drug tests is to ensure the quality of work they pay for. That's great, however this is not how drug tests work. I believe that showing up to work intoxicated is wrong and should probably mean termination, that makes sense to me. However, drug tests determine if you have taken drugs in a certain time frame, the length of which depends on the drug. Cannabis THC , for instance, can be stored in fat cells for weeks after consumption. The psychotropic effects run their course in a couple of hours, but you will fail a urine test for weeks after consumption. Other substances don't remain in your system as long and some much longer, but the point still stands. As an employer, you pay for my time. I give you 40 hours a week, and you pay me for it that is employment. What I do with my personal time, how I choose to relax, etc. does not fall under your jurisdiction. It is unethical for employers to feel they are in charge of this aspect of an employee's personal life. Disclaimer section I would not be opposed to a test that determines weather or not you are intoxicated AT work, akin to a Blood Alcohol Level test. If this technology does not exist is not feasible, this is not the employees problem and they shouldn't be required to make lifestyle changes due to this. If an employer hires meth head, for instance, and he she is exhibiting undesirable characteristics tardiness, stealing, etc. I think it would be reasonable to terminate employment. But it should be performance based, and not solely because they consume meth and failed a test. Whenever drugs are talked about in America, the idea of abuse is implicitly tied to them. I think this is part of the problem. The public consensus is that there is no such thing as responsible drug use. I disagree with this notion. The main view I wish to discuss in this post is an employers right to limit use of recreational substances by employees during non office hours. This is a weighted issue, I understand, and I have attempted to clarify my underlying beliefs reasons for holding this stance above. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it should be criminal in the U.S. for employees to terminate employment based on the results of a drug test.\n","id":"342dc356-878d-4397-899e-883199dadf60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A saw a video about the methane emergency here's a video, 3 10 is the start of the details about methane emissions And it really makes it seem like we need to start taking larger actions sooner to avoid the chances of catastrophic events. I've also seen estimates that the greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture that range from 18 to 51 the documentary Cowspiracy has a ton of good citations on their Facts page Which would put it as one of the largest contributors to global warming, if not the single largest. And other options like renewable energies seem like we're too late. When Google canceled their RE lt C project they said As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. It seems that Changing our diet is incredibly easy, it doesn't involve new technology or investment and is way less painful than reducing other kinds of economic activity. People in Industrialized countries eat way more meat than most people and way more than a recommended healthy diet . It would have an impact very quickly. Farmland would be turned over to natural carbon capture, and it would reduce methane emissions which are incredibly potent. Basically, I think we need to keep most of the fossil fuels that are in reserves in the ground, we need to switch to renewables for energy and transportation as quickly as possible and we need to be researching carbon sequestration and probably even geoengineering options in case things get really bad . But even with all that, if we keep using up huge amounts of resources on an incredibly inefficient system like animal agriculture we'll push warming up over safe targets too soon, and we won't have enough time to make all those other changes before something terrible, and irreversible, like widespread release of arctic methane happens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the only paths to a sustainable future that avoid catastrophic climate change include the industrialized world eating a lot less meat\n","id":"8fc2264c-1577-4ea3-8581-9615d4ce3eda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>In the single instance that she's been polled against Trump in a hypothetical match-up, she beats him by a larger margin than any other candidate in any other hypothetical swing state match-up to date. realclearpolitics.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Klobuchar is very popular and is the most likely candidate to win the general election.\n","id":"a8780c9f-e81b-4628-ba70-b77fc6af6224"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>Because students normally do not get practical experience before their university degree is completed, getting a job within their field of interest is primarily dependent on their theoretical qualifications, not their practical ability to perform the job they're applying for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This can make practical experience into a more important factor when applying for a job within their field of interest.\n","id":"0f044be4-d55f-40bf-9528-047e791d46b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hope I'm not being too confusing. I have problems with arguments that I hear for both moral absolutism and moral relativism I side with relativism for my own reasons. On the side of moral absolutism, I hear a lot of emotional arguments based on the arguers' fear and moral outrage. Of course, that isn't rational. Sometimes, they'll point to God, but even if I believed in God, how would his moral beliefs not be preferences rather than facts? Other times, they'll say that all human societies agree on at least some things, but consensus can't make something true. The entire human species could believe that the earth is flat, but it would still be round. In favor of moral relativism, people argue that not all societies have the same moral standards. I personally find it hard to believe that all societies don't agree at least on some things, but regardless, this argument still supports the irrational notion that consensus can make something true. Many moral relativists also believe that we shouldn't judge the behaviors of other societies, which makes no sense to me. Why not judge societies just because they have different moral standards? We already judge individuals who have different standards. Are international matters a no thinking zone? I believe that morality is relative because it is not completely logical. I can prove to you that 3 4 7 with marbles. I can prove to you that there's a moon by pointing at it. I can prove to you that was it a car or a cat I saw is a palindrome by having you read it backwards. Morality doesn't work like this it builds off of emotionally based premises such as life is precious or pain is bad. Even if there was a god, his or her morality wouldn't be factual. Moral values are preferences rather than facts. No amount of anxiety or rage can make something a fact. If moral values cannot be facts, then how can morality be absolute?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Morality is relative not because societies have differing standards but because morality is not completely logical.\n","id":"66c36cce-832a-423b-a1a2-663f59e61ee3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>Airport security checks, for example, have become consecutively more invasive over the past few decades. In 1970, most airlines even opposed the idea of individual passenger screening, which is perfectly normal today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Precedent has an important effect not only in the judicial setting but also in the way it influences the decisions that governments make.\n","id":"7d6936c3-23c7-44a3-9d7c-22f9114b5b84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a very controversial topic, and I will use a throwaway account for obvious reasons. Also, sorry for strange choices of words, if there are any. I'm not a native english speaker. I really want to discuss this. I do. But when I try, I get a pretty bad response. In my country Western European nation these opinions are considered pretty much evil. It's hard for me to get to hear good counter arguments to these points, because people don't deliver. They call me things instead, and block me. So, I am taking the discussion here instead, where counter arguments seem to be the entire point. I hope you have a greater amount of patience. \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014 In less homogeneous societies, trust is lower, communication more difficult, and interests less aligned. There has been many studies on this subject, and many outspoken critics. Most famously, Robert Putnam, but others as well, like Frank Salter, Byron Roth and so forth. In a game theory situation, lower trust leads to smaller benefits for trusting strategies, and larger benefits for cheating strategies. Social cohesion is crucial for maintaining win win scenarios over long stretches of time. In repeat exchange scenarios, trust is strategically important. Problem seems to be our brains use likeness cultural, ethnic as a fuzzy pointer to high potential for repeated interactions . You can cheat a 'stranger' someone who looks talks like an 'other' without repercussions, but cheating the in group is likely to be heavily selected against. People are less altruistic in multiethnic multicultural societies. We tend to want to support our in group. But when collective resources risk falling into the hands of other groups, we tend to want to keep more to ourselves instead. Thus, multiethnic multicultural societies breed tribalism, egoism and inequality on all sides. From a government standpoint, decision making is more difficult the more diverse the voter base. With diverging wills, politicians are forced to adopt support from specific ethnic cultural segments to gain votes, instead of working toward the good of a homogeneous people as a whole. This also makes it difficult to trust politicians. How can I be sure they are not in bed with the out group, working against the interest of my collective? Another problem with ruling a diverse society is that different groups have different definitions of what it means to move 'forward' politically and socially. Different groups with different traditions and habits want the state to do different things. A consensus on what constitutes the correct goal, is much more difficult to reach when the spread of wills is greater. The more multicultural multiethnic a society, the more internal conflict of interest there is. The more diverse the society, the more repressive the legal system. In countries with multiple competing ethnic cultural groups, the only governmental type that works, is harsh and despotic. Look at Saddam's Iraq, Liberia, The problems springing from Sykes Picot, and the arbitrary borders drawn by colonial powers in Africa, for examples of what happens when different ethnocultural groups are forced to share a state. Authoritarian militarism, or rival gangs led by warlords seem to be the norm for these places. Culture in a multicultural society has to be reduced to the level of the smallest common denominator in order to not 'exclude' anyone. Every work has to be simple enough to grasp without references to a wider body of work. This is because in a culture without a canon informal or formal you can not trust people will understand your references or your thinking. Expectations of common understanding is only possible in a homogenous state, and thus, so is high culture. With multiculturalism, we are stuck at the smallest common denominator, and the most simple, materialistic and hedonistic topics. To me, it seems all the things we usually take for granted as good for society some measure of egalitarianism, high trust, high culture, a non autocratic state that wants the best for its citizens, and so on are all predicated on homogeneity. I have not yet seen a system that gets those things AND multiethnicism multiculturalism at the same time for any extensive amount of time. If I have to choose between An area inhabited with multiple different tribes with different interests sometimes in conflict with the other groups ruled by an authoritarian state which is required to stop conflict from escalating into civil war or ethnic cleansing. A homogeneous area, with a single ethnic and cultural group, who have a government representing that people, working for its common future. I'd choose number two in a heartbeat and never look back. Now, someone may say those two examples seem biased. But I think not. Seriously. Just look at any state with a history of multiple ethnocultural groups in the same state, and think about the results. If someone has counter points to make, I'd be very grateful. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Racially and culturally homogeneous societies are better than 'diverse' ones in almost every way.\n","id":"e66130bb-d30b-4ddc-8adf-13ff866bb2fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The age old \u201cI was blackout drunk, i didnt know what i was doing\u201d doesn\u2019t sit well with me. Why? Because I have been drunk plenty of times, to the point of being completely incomprehensible to people, to the point that i black out some memories. but I always felt \u201cin control\u201d of my decisions, during my relationships id still go clubbing and get absurdly wasted but id still never hit on anyone or kiss anyone, because I could still make conscious decisions. So the thought that someone \u201cdoesnt know what they are doing\u201d makes zero sense to me, i can\u2019t imagine being in a drunken state where i didnt know what i was doing. Change my view reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being drunk isn\u2019t an excuse for cheating\n","id":"96f84321-8abd-48f4-b152-34a1d1eec333"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>a cap-and-trade system is preferable to a carbon tax in reducing carbon emissions.<|ARGUMENT|>Carbon taxes are progressive and help economically marginalised communities to a much greater extent than cap and trade. Currently, affluent businesses, individuals and legal persons usually emit a much larger amount of carbon than poor people. A flat tax on emissions causes a significant amount of money to be redistributed from the rich to the poor. Moreover, the poorest in society are often the first and worst affected by environmental damage. They lack the capital necessary to move out of areas affected by problems such as smog and water pollution. A carbon tax is a particularly useful system of redistributive justice, because money made from taxing firms can then be reinvested into finding greener energy solutions. Specifically this money can be invested in green energy companies that have already shown progress in producing goods that reduce carbon consumption. As such, a carbon tax not only reduces carbon consumption directly, but can also do so indirectly by investing in technology to prevent carbon consumption in the future.1 1 Shapiro, Robert. \u201cVs. Cap-Trade.\u201d Carbon Tax Centre. 04\/2009<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Carbon Taxes Are More Progressive both Politically and Economically than Cap and Trade\n","id":"63ae43f3-0641-45c4-bafd-8c394b46e3b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As someone who has lived a mostly solitary life, I have never really seen the value in having a large network of friends or, more specifically, anything greater than a few distant acquaintances . I feel that it is possible to make it through life without the assistance emotional support provided by confidants, and I think that I would have very little gain if I chose to seek out friendships. For me especially due to my clinical depression , I feel that any social interaction beyond the bare necessities would be a source of psychological stress. And on a final note, although humans may not be solitary creatures by nature, our society has advanced to the point that we do not require extensive social contact simply to survive therefore, I see no pressing reasons to engage in any further social contact, despite the advice of relatives and peers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I see no value in gaining close friendships.\n","id":"6d9216c7-f127-4591-8743-71a29c81949b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The NFL changes its rules often, fine tuning its game. Several rule changes in the last handful of seasons have benefitted the offense, leading to an all time high in scoring, and its time for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction. This would be a simple rule change that wouldn't require coaches to rethink their strategies, only enforce discipline. Offensive holding can often prevent a quarterback sack, which would be a loss of yards and down anyway. It would act as a restrictor plate and allow for a more balanced game.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In order to slow down NFL offense I believe a rule change is in order. Offensive Holding should be a 10 yard penalty *and* loss of down.\n","id":"bfc4c0cb-c503-4db3-92b0-805d755c89f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>In American elections during the past decades, voter turnout has reliably correlated with age the older, the more likely to vote, education the more formal education, the more likely to vote and race Hispanics are less likely to vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Older people are generally more interested in politics and more likely to vote, be it in referendums or elections.\n","id":"06a98302-9d92-4045-94c2-66928299c404"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This topic is mostly spawned due to the conflict of Professor Jordan B. Peterson at the University of Toronto and his refusal to use pronouns he believed are made up and how he believes that a new addition to the Canadian charter would deal with such claims. The controversy section on his wikipedia page seems to be a good summary for any one who is not aware of this conflict. I agree with Peterson in that I don't feel that the right to be referred by your preferred pronoun trumps another person's right to refuse. My basic reason for this is that I simply find it a matter of respect on whether one person is referred to by their pronoun or not, and by how this tends to occur in other scenarios, the right of someone to insult or belittle someone trumps their right to not be insulted or belittled. I look at this simply, if someone refuses to call someone a doctor despite having earned the title, it would be rude, but it doesn't trump their right to ignore it. Same if someone insults someone by calling them an asshole or a bastard, this right trumps anyone's right to not be insulted. By calling someone who identifies as a man a woman, you are simply disrespecting their chosen pronoun, it is as much an attack on their identity as calling them an asshole, it is not something more severe that requires stronger protections as pronouns are strictly related in how others refer to you. I do not believe that someone has the right to be referred as they please or have respect, as that impedes other's people's rights to choose whether to respect others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right to be referred to as your pronoun of choosing does not take precedence over someone's right to ignore it\n","id":"2bc5aa90-9270-43f5-8bb7-628148b81947"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Im Danish so sorry for my English. I consider myself to be quite smart. I feel that im one of the smartest people i know and the reason for me thinking that isnt that i know a lot of things but rather that im quite good at debating, thinking and expressing my view not some view i read in a book somewhere. There are so many people i know whom are smarter than me. They know so many things but they dont know how to connect it to real life. I dont wish to hate them but i do, and i get so annoyed whenever they try to debate and express their thoights their thoughts things they got from a book gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I hate book-smart people\n","id":"90ad1320-0094-4f60-8a45-f8978289ab62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>People do terrible things in name of many reasons, even those wich are seen as good for sure for ex. science, general well being.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People do terrible things and they name religion as the reason. This is different from the religion making them do it.\n","id":"acfabedb-49d1-4aae-9b4d-80e44cb3a1a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Given subjective, relative morality, one's moral standard cannot be applied to anyone other than oneself. To do so would be to assert that said morality is objective and universal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Relative morality cannot explain why any person would ever consider something that they did to be immoral or wrong.\n","id":"1d7afce8-01c7-432d-8d18-639e328b7ea4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of people, on the internet and otherwise, have some fairly valid reasons why marijuana isn't all that bad, and why it should be legalised. While I acknowledge that there is sound science behind some of these reasons, I think the fact that people are so keen on espousing marijuana's harmlessness is actually dangerous in and of itself. When people think something isn't 'all that bad', they tend to become complacent about it look at alcohol and cigarettes like marijuana, they're not the most medically dangerous of drugs, but they do more damage than all the others combined, not because of their physical properties but because they're accepted , and this is the same thing which makes marijuana a problem. Change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the very fact that marijuana is so widely accepted makes it more dangerous than 'harder' drugs,\n","id":"0fd7b4ab-9f9d-491b-8a45-40853a29de64"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The ACLU and Charlottesville: Should the ACLU Defend White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The Trump administration has revoked press credentials for news organizations which it doesn't like such as the Washington Post Univision and Politico.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Trump administration has pursued numerous grossly unconstitutional and rights violative policies.\n","id":"fc0068d2-d900-461a-86bb-b41b27f0d8f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi . I hold a very unpopular opinion here on reddit. I think piracy s wrong and websites like TPB should be shut down. I think that everyone should have a right to distribute their content in a way that they decide and supplying someone elses product in a way that they didn't agree to is immoral. Many people have told me that piracy is good for the music industry. This may or may not be true, however, even if it is set to benefit them, a company or person should have the right to supply their content in a way that they agree to and control similar to how one can refuse medical treatment even when it will help you . TL DR taking someone's stuff for free when they didn't want you to is wrong. If you can't afford to buy it, don't buy it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that websites like ThePirateBay should be prohibited by law and that piracy is wrong.\n","id":"dc25869b-2605-4aee-8892-60f53203629c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has the Conservative government lost its legitimacy to govern?<|ARGUMENT|>Hunt retracted his claim that he had never done anything illegal after reporters reminded him of the company laws breaches aimed at preventing money laundering and tax evasion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This just adds to the growing belief that Hunt is prone to taking u-turns, and lacks consistency in making statements and sticking to stances.\n","id":"c1b5f305-ad06-4a11-85bf-ee65b8524081"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Appearance is almost everything apart from living in a first world country with an adequate environment and health in life. When it comes to dating, getting treated nicely when being served, to even making friends, how you look determines at LEAST 90 of your interaction with them. How you look determines how happy you will be in life. Girls completely ignore me on the left now but after morphing several of my features right , I become a hot guy that girls would have no issue with sleeping with. Look at it for yourself, girls. It's so obvious that you would treat me much better if I looked like the guy on right, not how I currently do. Not only in dating, but pretty much anything in life when interacting with me. Don't bullshit me. I am currently treated like dogshit all because of the way I look. And yes of course I could improve by getting rid of acne, but I would still be ugly because of the way my skull is shaped and some soft tissues. Yes, I could lift, but I would still be ugly. People need to stop suggesting these easy fixes because they aren't anywhere NEAR as good as maxfac cosmetic surgery.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cosmetic surgery is the most worthwhile investment in your life, because your appearance is the most important thing in your life.\n","id":"3cb79670-d004-40f8-93da-9da486f49d49"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Since many seem to misunderstand me I shall clarify that I do not mean eugenics as they have been practiced in the past. Those have been terrible crimes against humanity. Disabled people can and should lead a happy and fulfilling life. The intent of the following thought experiment is not to eliminate the weak but to amplify the desirable. First of all for those not familiar with the term selective breeding , it is essentially the process of replacing the natural selection in evolution with an artificial selection following your own arbitrary definition of fitness. It has been successfully used numerous times throughout human history to manipulate and domesticate crops and animals and shape their behaviour attributes to our liking. Now let me explain what I mean when I speak of soft selective breeding. So the obvious problem when it comes to applying this process to humans is of ethical nature. People generally associate eugenics with the practice of killing those that are deemed unfit or weak or at least preventing them from reproducing. Besides the fact that this never bothered people much when it came to animals who as far as we know are also sentient, I think this whole dilemma could be circumvented by simply separating the individuals who have been selected from those who have not. Imagine an island where a population of humans live completely without any additional regulations just like in any other state. Except for one thing At a certain age every child has to take a test to evaluate its intelligence or any other thing you are breeding for if it passes, it can stay on the island and itself have children but if it fails it has to make a decision Either it stays on the island and is prohibited from reproducing or it leaves and can lead a normal, happy life elsewhere. Moreover anyone is allowed to leave the island at any time but there are certain incentives Money? to keep those who have passed the test around. After a number of generations of selection the islands population will on average be more intelligent than the rest of society and they can be offered jobs in certain positions that require this trait. This would help to advance humanity at a pace much quicker than our current progress.Sorry for the long text but I wanted to really clarify a few things in advance to make the discussion more interesting. So hit me up with your arguments D \u200b EDIT 2 Here is a list of all the great arguments that contributed to changing my view In summary there have been three types of arguments Necessity Harmful Consequences Feasibility \u200b Arguments regarding Necessity Sperm egg genetic manipulation will be a much safer and effective method once available. u PeteWenzel u taranaki \u200b \u201eThere's no shortage of intelligence in the world \u2026 \u201c and selective breeding fails to address what is actually holding us back \u201eIt's a system for distributing resources which results in massive loss of human capital by consigning untold millions of people to poverty and utter waste of their entire life's potential.\u201c u atrovotrono Or a more drastic approach \u201eYou'd have an easier time making billions on the stock market, and then giving out money for smart people to breed.\u201c u tempaccount920123 \u200b Natural selection in todays world already selects for the proper traits. u RedactedEngineer \u200b Arguments regarding Harmful Consequences \u200b Selective breeding reduces the survivability of the individuals when society collapses. u calviniscredit5team \u200b Low genetic variability would cause other problems such as higher proneness to disease. u BolshevikMuppet and u regdayrf2 who provided a good example of the Ashkenazi Jewish population or the European aristocrats which likewise only bred within their circles for generations and the results were mostly negative, u regdayrf2 and u DJ Flowsnake \u200b It would lead to the creation of a caste system an elite which will increase inequality since it means concentrating power in a small minority. u Just a lawn chair and similarly \u201eyou are quickly creating a class of people who are born entitled to a superiority over outsiders\u201c u DJ Flowsnake \u200b Others states implementing the system in a worse way \u201eWhat would happen if your system were to become internationally popular?\u201c u TheAzureMage \u200b Arguments regarding Feasibility \u200b Tested intelligence is highly dependent on the environment instead of only determined by one\u2019s genes. u PhasmaUrbomach This is also indicated by the Flynn effect mentioned by u regdayrf2 and u atrovotrono \u200b It is very hard to a know which traits even are desirable for society b test for these traits accurately without accidentally weeding out people who have other useful skills u Just a lawn chair and u PhasmaUrbomach \u200b TL DR Society already does the job of selecting good traits better than we ever could do artificially. It does so while keeping a natural balance between things and without the pointless risks and moral issues created by selective breeding. Furthermore the resources put into such a project would be better invested into the creation of a healthy environment for the natural occurring brilliant minds whose potential is currently wasted because they live in poverty. If one is still keen on changing the course of natural evolution in a meaningful way there still remains the option of patiently waiting for future advances in technologies like gene editing which may one day allow us to achieve this goal without any coercion and with fewer risks and costs involved. TL DR of the TL DR Euthenics instead if Eugenics. I thank everyone for participating and ultimately giving me a completely new perspective on this topic<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Soft\" selective breeding aka Eugenics should be attempted for the benefit of humanity.\n","id":"06328546-4324-4111-a41b-c1fabe2b49b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Long-term Solitary Confinement Be Stopped?<|ARGUMENT|>Measurements can be taken to adequately protect prison staff and inmates without it being at the expense of the physical and emotional well-being of violent prisoners.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Violating someone's rights does not mean a person's rights no longer need to be respected.\n","id":"09ed1c7a-d990-44f3-9157-9f30c3e63724"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Colonising the moon is the next step on our way into space. It's closer than Mars, thus easier. According to some data it will roughly cost 20 40 billion dollar spread across 10 years. If the European Union would combine it's power it could very easily colonise the moon, build a base there and eventually send humans there to live. Why would it be better to do as an union instead of one country? every country has to pay, lowering the cost for one country more minds to it no monopoly of one country<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union should invest as a whole to colonise the moon\n","id":"b38a52a7-fdc0-4be2-b912-3221e0bea077"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Schools should eliminate grades and replace them with competency based education.<|ARGUMENT|>It is important to realize two things. First, the current education system is really not good and is making more and more problems for society because the way it forces youth to think and live. And second, there are many more alternatives to CPE and if we were to change the whole education system, we would have to seek and consider many more systems that could replace current ridiculous grading and lecturing system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Different educational methodologies should compete. No need for CBE to be the sole solution.\n","id":"2341138d-f6e2-4e00-8a75-5377c97363ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, here's another one I guarantee will get some heat. So here's the deal. I 100 support equal rights for women. I also recognize there's more work to be done towards full equality for women. I'm just not so sure the ERA is the path to get there, as I'm not confident it would change anything from a legal perspective. And truth be told, I don't understand why people get so riled up about it. Based on the 14th amendment, I don't think it would change anything from a legal perspective, so I don't understand why people are so passionate in supporting it. Likewise, I don't understand why others are passionate in opposing it. For reference, the text of the Equal Rights Amendment is Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification. For reference, the text of the relevant sections of the 14th Amendment is Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. x200B Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. x200B A couple more points to guide the discussion I recognize there is a symbolic nature to the ERA, and I know symbolism can be powerful. But ultimately, symbolism alone isn't relevant from a legal perspective, so I would call the symbolism argument out of bounds for this discussion unless you can show how symbolism would be relevant to the law. Somehow and again I don't understand how , abortion always finds its way into discussion of the ERA. This is fine, but I don't want to get into litigating the morality of abortion itself. Discussing how the ERA may or may not affect abortion from a legal standpoint is okay, but I think it best to leave it to individuals reading and commenting to privately determine whether speculative impacts on abortion rights would constitute good policy or not. Let's have fun in a respectful manner with this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Equal Right Amendment would be redundant from a legal standpoint.\n","id":"6cd7831e-34af-47d9-b547-fa487e6989ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Evangelicals vote for Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Asking for forgiveness and seeking repentance is a fundamental part of the Christian faith, but Trump does not ask God for forgiveness, because he doesn't believe he needs to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Much of Trump's behaviour directly contravenes the teachings that form a core part of the Bible.\n","id":"f564c56d-a463-4351-82c7-7235c8ee2b99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have played video games all my life and love playing 'violent' fps games. I think that when someone who isn't mentally stable plays video games, it can defiantly lead to them doing irrational things like hurting others. I don't believe that it can make people who are fine do crazy things, people who have no narcissistic or just psycho thoughts in general will be just fine. It just makes sense that the satisfaction and stimulation of doing it in a simulation will make someone want to replicate their rampage in real life. Please cmv, I would love to be further educated on this topic from people who know more about this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I love and play video games all the time, and I believe they defiantly can lead to violence in people.\n","id":"6379442d-cc38-4f9a-aceb-34283633a80b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>Because Admiral Ackbar was not given the same plot armour handed out to the protagonists, he instead became a Red Shirt Not only was this disrespectful to a character with cult renown, it also missed an obvious opportunity to provide an affective scene in the story.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Admiral Ackbar, whom many fans got to love for his role in the earliest movies, dies unceremoniously, without relevance for the story and in an off-hand manner.\n","id":"943ff928-c676-4dec-9806-9e398df198ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People always make a big fuzz over the coaches in sport. Right now Furgerson Manchester United has stepped down and everyone is anxious of whether the new coach will fuck up or keep the team moving. Same happens when people talk about the history of a team. Under the coach name era they X Y Z and I just don't buy it. When I watch sports I see players doing good. Good players and bad players decide if they win or not. The synergy between players need time to develope, but ultimately it is just the players Miami Heat is a great example . Everytime there is a time out in NBA and you see the coach yelling some random clich\u00e8 quotes you can't help but think to yourself and this guy makes X million dollars a week . Now I'm not saying that coaches do NOTHING. Obviously they play a huge part in buying new players etc. but I think they get too much credit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think coaches do very little in sport.\n","id":"4db2952d-b5c8-4b9a-9bec-0da7c136e974"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Military industry keeps some of the very few manufacturing jobs in US, this industry's survival critically depends on US's defence policies and government orders, without US spending sizeable chunk of its budget on military, millions of jobs will be lost. US has the money. Yes, US is in some serious debt right now, however USD is the most indestructible currency ever existed in human history, with US's economy size, gold reserve and military power at its back, it is impossible for USD to collapse in the foreseeable future. US can always borrow more money from its own citizen or foreign countries without worrying about crisis like Greece happen. Further more, even if USD value drops as a consequence of US printing more cash to pay back debts, all other countries will follow to de value their currencies to compete with US, just like we have seen in the past few years. US spending more on military doesn't necessary mean a safer world, but at least it will make its NATO allies safer. As a Canadian I know we don't have to worry about fighting off an invasion alone. US spending more on defence means we will spend less, this will benefit our economy and allow us to put more money into our welfare system. No matter how much US government sets its 'defence' budget, US's armed force is built to be an offence force. Considering how the military complex works and US politician public thinks, US will never stop bombing invading smaller countries to defend its 'freedom'. Spending more money developing and ensuring US's technological advantage on military means less casualties from those inevitable wars. Military technologies benefits civilian life in the long run. We wouldn't get internet, GPS, jumble jets and spacecraft if US haven't thrown so much money into military. I want to see human land on Mars before I am 50, so come on US congress, make it happen Edit To answer some of the most frequent questions Why not spend the money on infrastructure medical research education NASA? Well, when US was cutting military spending in the 90s, the federal spending on education infrastructure NASA higher education research also went down. I fundamentally disagree the argument that 'we are not spending enough on such such such because we spend too much on military ' The fact is the amount we spend on military and other programs is not a zero sum game. Spending less on military dose not bring US better infrastructure education research. US is already spending too much on military, it's by far the most powerful force in the world, why more? In per GDP sense, US ranked No.21 in the world 3.5 , behind Saudi Arabia 10.8 , Israel 5.2 and Russia 4.5 , this is not that much. Comparing to those countries and the collapsed USSR, US is in a much better financial state see my point 2 . Also, US government and public have set their military force to be the keeper of freedom world police ever since the end of WWII. Yes the current size of US military is too big for a defensive force. However, for what US public and government want it to be? I think the current spending is well justified if not insufficient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe US should spend more money on military.\n","id":"efc0ea1f-f451-4873-88e9-365f36e15d9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Banning cell phones in cars<|ARGUMENT|>Dr. Joseph de Beauchamp. Subject: The Telephone. All Experts.com. 27 Mar. 2005 - \"Banning cell phone use on the road would save lives and the benefits to society would cancel out the costs of such a ban, according to a study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Savings from a vehicle cell phone ban would offset loses\n","id":"5bdf78e5-8cc4-45a3-b398-3aabd43e72a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By other similar places, I mean places where silence is expected from the audience. Examples Movie theaters Libraries Courtrooms Theaters Classrooms Probably other places I didn't come up with Anyhow, I'll stick to movie theaters because it affects me the most currently. Every time I go to the movies, there will always be several commercials like this telling people to turn off their cellphones prior to the movie starting. However, I almost always experience people talking on their cells during the movie. It's really rude that people can't wait 2 hours at most to use their cellphones. It's inconsiderate to everyone else who are trying to watch the movie. So I feel that if people aren't going to make the choice to ignore their cellphones for 2~ hours, then the choice must be made to install tech that forces them to go elsewhere and not disturb everyone with their calls. This applies to the other similar places where silence is expected. Theaters? Watch the play opera. Classrooms? Pay attention to the teachers. Courtrooms? Pay attention to the court cases. My first  inspired by entry 18 of this Cracked photoplasty Edit you changed my view. Emergency response would be affected greatly by this. I still wish theaters cracked down on people talking on their cells. Like the Alamo Drafthouse If one opened up near me, that theater would have my business all the time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Movie theaters and other similar places should install technology that blocks cell phones.\n","id":"5fb137e8-96a5-4903-bb58-92db85f5deb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m looking at the invasion, not the bureaucratic mess that happened afterwards so the first point which is preventive intervention and strategic intervention. Saddam Hussein had a long history of warmongering in the Middle East such as the 10 year war in the 80\u2019s and the invasion of Kuwait in 91. The man was insane, he believed that he could defend against the entire world. Soon after that war, he began rebuilding his military and expelled UN weapons inspectors. So there was no doubt that he wanted WMD\u2019s. With this history in knowledge it would seem that sooner or later he would invade another country which would put the U.S. goal of establishing democracy and peace in the Middle East at risk. Also if at the time he invaded he would of been much stronger and many more would have died. Second point, there was also a moral reason to go into Iraq and install democracy, at the time he was one of the most brutal dictators in the world. He had a history of attempted genocide of the Kurds in the north. He had been known to slaughter entire Kurdish towns through the use of chemical weapons and would drag large groups of Kurds into the desert where they would be shot in mass graves. He had launched skud missals into israel\u00ed towns targeting civilians in 1991 in an attempt to get them to join the war and cause more conflict in the Middle East. It\u2019s undisputed that he had censored and imprison political opponents and people who spoke out against him. There\u2019s a famous video of him in the 70\u2019s when he took power calling out members of their parliament who where then imprisoned or killed along side their families.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified based off of preventive intervention and was a strategic and moral intervention, the justification of the WMD\u2019s lie was only used as a global justification\n","id":"a910bd83-f101-45bb-b9c0-55abaae5a2bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TTIP is a trade agreement between the USA and the European union currently under discussion. There is a lot of discussion about it in the EU and I have gotten convinced by the arguments against it. However I miss the arguments in favour of it, am I missing something? Below I will shortly put out some of the arguments against TTIP. Some background about me. I am from the Netherlands, I vote more left of the centre. I think I will probably not be convinced so easily by just economical arguments. Issues with TTIP The EU opens up for products from America that do not comply to our stricter safety policies If states would still want to ban product due to not complying to our safety policies they are vulnerable to legal action. An example in the EU a company has to prove a substance is safe to have it allowed, in the US a substance is allowed until it is proven unsafe. USA food standards are lower, TTIP would allow export from USA to EU. This can be chicken washed with chlorine, hormone injected meat, high amounts of antibiotics given to animals. Lower employment in the EU due to jobs going towards the USA. The USA has lower labour standards and weaker unions. Trade tariffs are already very low between EU and USA, is it really about trade? ISDS Governments become vulnerable due to the fact they can be sued over their decisions if those decision lower companies revenue. An example would be the revoking of mining drilling permits by local government and consequentially being sued over missed revenue. Lone Pine Resources sues Canada for it moratorium on fracking Companies not democratically elected can threaten the policies set by a democratically elected government. Thus it threatens governments' decision making abilities. Reddit, change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union should not sign TTIP\n","id":"3a659d25-9e13-4e7a-a15c-32aab6716246"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Living Tree Doctrine LTD of constitutional interpretation says that a constitution is organic and must be read in a broad and progressive manner so as to adapt it to the changing times. This seems very reasonable to me. Times change and society's values change with them so the way the constitution is interpreted must reflect those changes. The Originalism principle of interpretation views the Constitution's meaning as fixed as of the time of enactment. The originalist enterprise, then, is a quest to determine the meaning of the utterances, the meaning of which cannot change except through formal amendment. It means that the interpretation must reflect the intentions of the people who wrote the constitution. Good luck with that The framers are long dead and trying to figure out what they intended seems to be problematic. It's almost like a Rorschach test different people will ascribe different intents based on their own views and or prejudices and the interpretations reveal more about the interpreters than the framers. It also, in my opinion, lifts the people who wrote constitutions to absurd heights and that's a problem too. As far as I, a novice when it comes to legal matters, can understand the matter the LTD is just better than Originalism. But I have a feeling I'm missing something. In order to change my view you'd have to show me some features of Originalism that make it superior to the LTD. I'd also appreciate it if legalese were kept to a minimum since I'm just not used to it and it usually puts me to sleep.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Living Tree Doctrine\" of constitutional interpretation is superior to \"Originalism\"\n","id":"ba902d33-1d7a-4985-8f38-1cd5298a421c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>Research has shown that money only increases happiness up to $75,000 a year. There is a stark difference between the amount happiness decreases when a person earns less than this amount, and the very limited amount happiness increases when a person earns more than this amount.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should have good lives, and hundreds of millions of dollars in income is not necessary to have a good life. That is more important than Capitalist theories.\n","id":"23b8d73f-0e8c-41d9-9c31-3f00d5dcc968"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>A military dictator in Pakistan, Zia-ul-Haq, used an ill-worded referendum seeking the electorate\u2019s approval for his draconian Islamic reforms and establishing his presidency<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The public may be deceived to think a particular decision is in their best interest, even when it is not.\n","id":"b8735b12-5397-43c0-a46a-07e54327755b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Climate Change Be Reversed?<|ARGUMENT|>The world is transitioning away from the industrial age and towards a technological age where unlimited products could be produced without using resources a.k.a. post-scarcity Combined with removing the damage and sources of it, a net negative impact could provide a reversal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Societal advancements technological, cultural. divert humans from contributing to climate change in the process and towards reversing it instead.\n","id":"4a3b4c08-c7d8-497d-92cd-5c03bbd00d33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Examples The Last Airbender and RWBY. They are both animated in the same style as anime, and based on appearance, anybody would assume they were anime. The fact that they are produced outside of Japan shouldn't suddenly change that. It's the same with champagne. If you have a bottle of champagne that was produced in the champagne region of France, and another bottle of identical liquid that's produced elsewhere they're both still bottles of ing champagne. I believe that if it follows the style that anime is known for, it should be considered as anime. Being made outside of Japan shouldn't suddenly make it NOT anime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anime doesn't NEED to be produced in Japan.\n","id":"788251ba-e7a2-48f6-bdc8-6a7bd30206cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Similar Cryptocurrencies Good for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Phishing is actually much easier with bitcoins, as there is next to no way of getting back the money once you have noticed that it was a phishing attack.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Phishing affects cryptocurrency services just as much as traditional banking.\n","id":"c81c74c7-8449-48a4-86b6-8a7ff6ce7327"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm from Australia and we don't allow the legal system to kill those who are deemed 'unworthy' or 'unable' re enter society as moral humans. The usual folk story for this is that the last man who was hung was for abducting and murdering a man who was later found healthy and un harmed. This forms the basis of my belief, the legal system is not infallible and has often passed wrong or biased judgements, thus, shouldn't have the ability to pass absolutely final rulings. Also, I believe that if a life is worth more than any amount of money so financial reasons will not move me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A government has no right to kill its citizens i.e. capital punishment\n","id":"8a280056-f034-4af6-bec1-5842c80e1c1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In wake of the whole Duck Dynasty fiasco, many well intentioned, but evidently, poorly educated Americans thought they had the answer. Did you know that America has free speech? Well, it does. Ipso facto, Phil Robertson can say whatever he wants because, you know, free speech. Even in my workplace, seemingly well educated professional took the free speech route. I am shocked and appalled at how many people do not understand that it is only the government that cannot infringe on your rights to free speech. You ARE entitled to say anything, but then you are subject to reproach or repercussions from anyone else who participates in the free marketplace of ideas. He does not even have to sign a contract with an employer that explicitly abridges his rights to free speech. He is an at will employee and may be fired for any reason. Casting your employer in a bad light is a perfectly good reason. Are Americans really this ignorant of one of their basic rights?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An unsettling majority of Americans have no idea what freedom of speech means.\n","id":"e13484db-4040-4387-933d-e8672a4e3e94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>The CEO of Bregman Partners, Peter Bregman, stated that diversity training \"promotes prejudice\" rather than tackling it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sensitivity training in the workplace has been proven to be ineffective.\n","id":"281e4cd8-152f-4522-a26f-2a4cadfe2bc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>During a self defence class I attended, the instructor demonstrated several techniques for women to use when attacked by a rapist. He explained that the positions a male rapist would need to assume to rape a female victim are actually extremely vulnerable from a ground fighting perspective. Correctly applied Brazilian jui jitsu would use the attacker's weight against him and provide an opportunity for the victim to attack the eyes, usually and then escape. I'm not a martial arts expert but if this is all true, then girls should be taught to defend themselves from rape and assault, possibly in their early teens. It's not a panacea for sexual violence, I admit, but it will empower women physically and be an effective deterrent. Edit Found a Youtube video with the kind of techniques I'm talking about<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To combat rape and counteract the general physical advantage men have over women, girls should be taught self-defence at school, specifically anti-rape techniques.\n","id":"8d5d35a2-66fb-45ba-a280-feea1309f375"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I majored in Computer Science at a large public university. Upon graduation, I had job offers from multiple large companies, and I accepted one for 60k year to start working within a few weeks of my graduation. Within 2 years, I was able to buy my own home with a mortgage, to be clear , which I now operate as a rental property. I have remained gainfully employed since, and have increased my salary significantly in the intervening years. Things have not changed that much since 2006. All of these things should still be possible today. I worked hard in high school to gain admittance into a good university in a competitive major that would guarantee me a job upon graduation. Then I worked hard through university to get good grades and build a strong professional network through internships. Now I work hard at my job to continue moving up. I believe that students who have trouble finding jobs when they graduate either did not work hard enough to be competitive in the job market, or chose a major that would not offer strong job prospects upon graduation, and are now experiencing the consequences. What am I missing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that recent college graduates who cannot find jobs largely have themselves to blame.\n","id":"58b548bf-7c22-48b5-a6d0-fd4c75d9990f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments pursue predictive policing technology?<|ARGUMENT|>Many police departments are unable to hire more personnel, even when they serve large areas. Predictive methods help these departments employ their limited personnel more efficiently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Predictive methods allow police to work more proactively with limited resources. p. xiii, 2013\n","id":"dbdf029a-4601-4587-932e-f50acb4fa06e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a non native english speaker. I think, that my pronunciation is good for someone who doesn't frequently speak with natives. But I also like shortenings like I ma instead of I am going to , or 'cuz instead of because . I consciously confuse accents. People still can understand me perfectly well, and we have great conversations with each other. In our schools, though, most teachers still can only say words out of the textbook. And God forbid you say anything not the way it's written in this 20 year old book. Whenever I hear my teacher speak, it sounds awful. It's hard to distinguish words, and it just sounds off. But it is the way English is taught all around my country. No wonder hardly anyone can actually speak it. Now, I know there is Standard English, and it's well and good for learners to understand, but I don't see any use in that, since no one really speaks it. There is such a wide variety of accents, that picking one won't help. Learners should be listening to all most spread accents, I know I did. That way, the more they learn to understand new speech, the easier it will be to communicate with new people, rather than sticking to a broken record. That's how I think. Prove I'm wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For non-native speakers, standard pronunciation should not be welcomed.\n","id":"b0307435-8e05-43d1-9e9c-5674160b72fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I like to call myself upper middle class. I own a medium sized house on a lake. I have two cars, a boat, and a jet ski. I work as an electrician and my wife is a travelling nurse. With that in mind, no laws or policies meant to help the poor are beneficial to me in any way. In fact, it is a detrement to my prosperity. Every year I have to pay taxes that go to support the poor. I don't understand how it affects me if these people are unhappy or starving even. Plenty of societies in the past have functioned without any Marxist concepts like a safety net or a progressive tax policy. In the middle ages, the poor literally lived in huts made of shit and straw and that society worked fine. The only reason I could possibly see to care about them is if you were religious and thought u would go to imaginary hell for not helping the needy. Please note I am not saying that the poor deserve what they have, or that they are there because they are lazy. I acknowledge that many of the homeless for example are there due to no fault of their own. I simply don't care. It wouldn't bother me if we killed their babies and sold the meat. I don't know them so why should I care? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no reason from my perspective for the poor to have any welfare, guaranteed minimum wage, or rights in general.\n","id":"3c1a0ee1-a320-4495-bdf5-ddedb116c518"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is transhumanism the next step in human evolution?<|ARGUMENT|>It can negatively affect our evolution on a long term, especially if it applies to newborns. Transhumanism can cause irreversible changes if we do not take extra care each step of the way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transhumanism might have unforeseen dangers, because it has never been accomplished on a mass scale.\n","id":"fb252a1b-489a-4e6a-bcbf-bec934445ee5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Advertisements Do More Harm Than Good<|ARGUMENT|>The levels of advertising are just too much these days. You cannot walk down the street, ride on a bus, watch television or read your email without seeing advertisements. People shouldn't have to have their lives attacked by a huge quantity of information they might not want.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The levels of advertising are just too much these days. You cannot walk down the street, ride on a ...\n","id":"4b33377e-c9b0-4bc6-b9e1-23cbdc89cb55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Facebook has been challenged for how it mediates the news articles users see in the \"trending news\" section. Employees suppressed news that was either right-wing or critical of Facebook, and artificially promoted left-wing news, rather than accurately collecting actual \"trending\" news.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Internet companies are in a position where they can secretly censor anything they like. Such a lack of transparency makes it reasonable for consumers to be concerned about the extent and bias of this unknown censorship.\n","id":"a01c607f-7a9e-470a-8101-16d2abd538ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hunger Games-Style Tournaments Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>This is especially problematic given that a lot of people have entrenched biases due to fear of people who are different to them. Playing to these fears can drastically hurt the cause of these minorities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The success of individuals from disadvantaged groups in deadly tournaments might also promote stereotypes about these groups that further disadvantage them, for example the notion that black individuals are prone to violence.\n","id":"af5bad7a-1c91-4fbc-8d52-49e6da51d0c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I think of myself as feminist and all the Muslims I have known were friendly, peaceful, and devoted. NotAllMen used to get ridiculed constantly because guys would say it after someone said something like Men are abusive douchebags but now the same people are saying NotAllMuslims in response to others saying Muslims bombed an airport . I understand when feminists respond with Obviously we aren't saying that ALL men are rapists but we can still say that men are rapists because the rapists we're talking about ARE men. Ok, that's fine but let's apply that argument to Muslims. Obviously no one thinks that ALL muslims blew something up, but the people who did certainly did it in the name of Islam, right? I think this usually elicits the No, those people aren't truly following Islam well than I can say those rapists are also not REAL men. Obviously the male female power dynamic is much different than the NonMuslim Muslim power dynamic but my confusion is centered around the generalizing. Is it cool to abandon nuance when talking about a group that has more power? This is really not about identity politics for me, I just want to be able to speak in a rational way and I don't understand how logic applies to these silly hashtag trends that people get so fired up about. TLDR Generalizations about privileged groups are just as innacurate as the generalizations of the unprivileged.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"#NotAllMuslims is as much of a sloppy generalization as #NotAllMen\n","id":"57f83afb-56c2-46b5-89d8-61ffba77b9d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best reaction to an alien encounter ?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, running away from a gorilla instead of submissively crouching down and looking at the ground, can cause a gorilla to chase and bite.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most people do not really know the actual procedures when encountering a wild animal and cannot therefore follow them.\n","id":"4af1315a-9f69-4d9c-81f9-09e1e4622c7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At many food service establishments, I have asked for tea and received a glass of freshly brewed tea with a few ice cubes in it. The ice cubes immediately melt into water, resulting in a cup of lukewarm tea mixed with water. Every time, I think to myself, if they had just filled the cup to the top with ice, then the tea would have become cold before all the ice melts. If they had left no ice, then the tea would have been hot tea which is how many cultures drink tea . Also, without ice, it would at least retain the correct proportion of water to tea indefinitely. So I could either drink the tea hot or ask for a separate cup of ice to chill the tea with, resulting in very little meltage of ice. With only a small amount of ice that melts immediately, I am left with neither option. Like coffee, tea is either drunk cold or hot. Lukewarm is not an option. So there is no reason to only put a few ice cubes in freshly brewed tea. It just makes no sense. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no logical reason to put a small amount of ice in a cup of brewed tea.\n","id":"0d642775-ca6b-45c4-b14b-8e7368654764"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In other words, I don't care that it was Russia who gave the DNC emails to Wikileaks. However, it would be better for the US to have the communications of both parties rather than just one or neither. I understand that a major concern is Russia's ability to sway our election by only releasing the secrets of one party to benefit the other. I agree that it is problematic to expose the emails of only one party. I guess there are really two views that are open to change 1 it would be better to know the secrets of both parties rather than neither 2 it doesn't matter who exposes those secrets IF they do it equitably<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is good that Russia hacked DNC communications because the people of the United States benefit from receiving more information.\n","id":"827941cd-57f7-4b25-893d-64835eec8fae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello , I believe that actively using coupons to get large quantities of products is immoral because extreme couponers are taking things without doing any economically stimulating work. So all they've done is take things without doing anything to help make things. They're also exploiting the system by manipulating the intended use of the coupons to change prices of products to prices no one ever intended, like in situations where an extreme couponer can take large amounts of product out of the store and get paid a dollar to do so. I also don't think any robin hood arguments apply here. Just because you have the ability to basically steal from a company doesn't mean you should, even if you give the goods to a local homeless shelter. So, change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Extreme couponing is immoral because of its negative effects on the economy\n","id":"50dc8ac1-3b3e-428f-b447-6e77c56d452b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>For the case of the United States, it has been argued that \"our election cycle screws up our foreign policy\" as the long election campaigns distract voters as well as politicians and invite the influence of donors and interest groups.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On the other hand, it could be argued that election cycles force politicians to emphasize policies with short-term benefits in order to secure their re-election. Additionally, elections distract from policy matters and cause persistent personnel change.\n","id":"93491a9e-d20f-410b-a81f-f19f69f60b71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should People in Positions of Authority Resign When Accused of Sexual Assault?<|ARGUMENT|>It is dangerous to put public opinion above the judicial system. Flawed as they can be, judicial systems are an attempt to regulate a society's collective morality in a durable form, less prone to short-lasting whims than the easily manipulated public opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Judicial principles in some countries guarantee individuals the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.\n","id":"1c636f31-0b4d-4941-92a2-a33f02191f53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to first explain that I have the utmost respect for astronomers, astrobiologists, physicists and other cosmic explorers and I don't think that any of these fields are universally pun intended a waste of time. Having said that, I think world peace, clean water, access to energy and decent housing are more pressing issues and that NASA's budget should be downsized to compensate. I believe there is a time and a place for advanced space exploration, but today I think all NASA should get funds for is surveying incoming asteroids or other potential harms. I admit that many technologies have come as byproducts of research at NASA, but I don't think this justifies their current allotment of funds. I think a dedicated research group could have made the same advances in a shorter span of time. To be honest, I could go either way on this issue but I want to hear the arguments from the other side because recently I've been leaning more towards reducing NASA's budget and I don't know if I like it. EDIT For those downvoting my post, thanks for the passive engagement It is so very helpful to disseminating knowledge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NASA and other space agencies should have their funding reduced until various issues on Earth are dealt with first\n","id":"edac0f5b-023b-46d2-87e2-95c37d37874c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>The sort of corruption proposed the alleged end to an investigation into Burisma which was also not the goal when Biden was withholding the funds is an internal matter of corruption within the US government and not the business of the president of Ukraine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"President Trump asked for investigation into possible corruption but did not ask for any foreign interference in US elections.\n","id":"9e1f9d41-7f04-4950-be5b-df49ef120dea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was just having this discussion with my friend, and he was saying it is more humane to test on a retarded, comatose, human child than it would be to test on a pig because the pig has more awareness and is more capable of suffering then the human in this sense, and people justify treating animals the way they do because animals lack personhood due to the lack of ability to develop sentience. This was just an example of course, my friend is more practical than that and actually very intelligent, but I think my stance frustrated him into ending the conversation. My rebuttal was that it does not matter what state the animal or the human is in, the benefit and life of a human is always higher priority than the benefit or life of an animal. If an animal suffers, but people not just an individual, but the majority gain a tangible benefit from that suffering, that's all the justification needed. This has nothing to do with the sentience of the animal, it is simply because we are homo sapiens and they are not. I have considered this a lot, and this is my first post to , because it is actually bothering me. I'm hoping to see things from a perspective that I did not consider.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe humans do not have to worry about the suffering of other animals when it comes to animal testing or food because we are human and they are not.\n","id":"4e92bd02-6f64-46f1-9ff6-c0081793c090"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Honestly I am not too sure how big of a problem piracy is nowadays, but I still see companies governments coming up with new ideas to combat it. Like filtering uploading content, forcing gamers to stay online at all times, etc. Despite those efforts a quick glance on piratebay shows us Pretty much everything is available. So I came to this idea after a recent discussion on the weekend and after considering the way public TV is funded in my country Everyone that owns a TV smartphone laptop or other electronical device that theoretically can recieve it pays a set amount each year. That money then gets distributed to public TV Radio but also private stations proportionally to the consumption of those stations. Along those lines this content fee would also get introduced, just that its not a yearly fee, but a device bound tax fee. Like the share Microsoft gets when someone buys a laptop on which windows 10 is installed. When buying a new Iphone you would pay number totally made up 10 of the price additionally, but then you gain access to any distribution service, that provides licensed products. Spotify, Netflix, Photoshop, website of your local garage band, download Harry potter e book.com, Watch Hollywood movies.com, you name it. Some independent, publicly funded group then controls the numbers and then distributes the money gained from the tax or fee proportionally. I think Netflix and co have proved that money isnt the main issue when pirating, but convenience. So if you have everything available when buying a laptop, then no one would even bother to seed a torrent simply because there is no demand. And by buying a laptop you also payed for the series you will be watching. Also Netflix proved that its possible to prevent DNS or proxy servers from working. This means its possible to block non participating countries out. Granted that means that in those countries they still may download illegally, but that just means nothing changes for them, whilst the situation gets better in the participating countries namely software piracy gets eliminated completely. Content that is free anyway, like youtube videos would get nothing of this fee, since ads would still be a thing. Also merchandising of any form is left out. This means if you want a blu ray you also still pay for the physical copy. I am aware that bots would be a problem and that implementation would be tricky, but those seem manageable details if the industries and authorities really commit to this idea. Maybe not, no clue about the technical difficulties Would love to hear some stances about this idea. So, what did I miss and why is this idea shitty?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The movie\/films\/games\/software industries lost the fight against piracy. Instead of trying to find ways to make it harder to pirate stuff, they should introduce a tax\/fee on electronical devices, that will go to content creators - and make the content then \"free\".\n","id":"605a6399-7e1a-45e9-86df-e9a2cfa94d27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Attachment Parenting the Best Way to Raise a Child?<|ARGUMENT|>Though \"traditional\" gender roles are not necessarily wrong, giving all the responsibility and role in early parenting to the mother only will give a wrong vision of education and caring to the child, perpetuating harmful stereotypes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Attachment parenting is deleterious for feminism by virtue of relegating women to 'traditional' gender roles.\n","id":"3b91a085-e9e2-4cf1-9ddb-6d341ea70865"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A country usually has a population which shares a same set of values and a similar culture. When you let in almost a million people that come from countries which do not share the same set of values, you create a divide. They don't respect women as much , respect LGBT people as much and are not as well educated as the rest of the population especially when they come from third world countries. Classes even need to be held for migrants to respect women in Norway see the bottom . Areas where migrant levels are high tend to suffer from high unemployment due to their lack of skills , high levels of poverty and high levels of crime. Angela Merkel essentially imported a massive burden into her country, one which the rest of the productive population has to prop up while they not all of them commit more crime. She is doing a huge disservice to her country by doing this, even if she only wanted real refugees from war torn countries to be let in, economic migrants came anyway. More than 40 of German children are of migrant background. This is essentially destroying German identity as migrants tend not to mix Islam requires you to only marry fellow Muslims , and because their birthrates are so high, this could result in them making the natives minorities, which has already been done in Frankfurt where people from migrant backgrounds make up 51.2 of the population. This would all be okay if they integrated well but their backwards third world countries such as Somalia where a lot of migrants come from have a very chauvinistic, intolerant culture culture makes it really difficult. Their children might be more likely to adopt the German culture but it's not a given. I'm not a racist, I don't dislike them for their skin colour it's their culture, practices and actions I am more concerned about, I hope I could get that across. Just so you know I'm a white blond gay guy living the UK but with German Citizenship by right of birth. Norway's Muslim immigrants attend classes on western attitudes to women \u2013 video<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Angela Merkel cheated her country by opening Germany's borders to any Migrant who wants to come over.\n","id":"e2d189cd-96df-4bfc-a822-76ae966dd43e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start off by stating that their plan is straight up unsustainable. Sure, I get that it\u2019s a short term 2 week plan, but I don\u2019t see how someone could possibly keep off the weight they lost after going back to their original diet after those two weeks. Here\u2019s why First off, the daily calorie intake of an average person using the Special K plan is only ~830 calories . Let me break this down breakfast consists of a bowl of Special K cereal and milk 160 calories , next there\u2019s a morning snack of a cereal bar 90 calories , lunch consists of a protein shake or meal bar 180 calories , another snack of a cereal bar or crackers 90 calories , and finally dinner consists of things like meal bars, chili, ravioli, or cereal probably around 300 calories . This all adds up to around ~830 calories, which combined with working out and burning off even more energy and calories, is way to low for the average person. Let\u2019s just use females for an example here, since the plan seems to be marketed toward females. The average height, moderately active female should be getting ~2000 2,2000 calories per day Sure, eating less calories will make you lose weight, but more ~1,300 calories below the daily requirement seems very excessive. Now, the Special K plan allows you to eat unlimited fruit throughout the day, which is all well and good, but you\u2019d have to eat a lot of fruit to reach the 2,000 calorie mark. Next, the food is just not that sustainable. For example, the chocolate strawberry cereal only has 2g of protein per serving. Personally I have not used the Special K diet, but I have eaten the cereal because I liked the flavor. However, it always leaves me so hungry. Breakfast should be an energizing meal to get you through the morning, and 2g of protein doesn\u2019t seem to cut it, especially if you\u2019re following breakfast with a workout. The bottom line is that you\u2019ll probably lose around 5 pounds if you stick to the plan for 2 weeks, but is this because of a healthy, sustainable diet, or simply low caloric intake? Wouldn\u2019t someone just gain the weight right back after going back to their original diet after the 2 week plan is up? I think it\u2019s better to lose weight the healthy way by eating a natural, long lasting, sustainable diet that adds up to a healthy caloric intake. I used the Special K Classic Plan as a reference in many instances<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the Special K Plan is unhealthy.\n","id":"324cee2d-3c85-4e97-b299-00981479eb04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>A woman would not have to go through the process of trying to unclothe her nipple. Thus, this is a more comfortable option while in public.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Formula is often more convenient to give a baby when out in public.\n","id":"f4aadb1c-cfaf-49fd-94f1-60b5dcfee572"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A big issue in British politics at the moments is whether the UK should leave the European Union or not. In order to 'win back' more right wing voters in the recent general election, the now governing Conservative party has made a pledge to hold a referendum, where citizens will get to vote directly on whether or not Britain should leave the EU. My issue is this. To me, the pro EU argument is based on economic theory, global competitiveness, and with the aim of eventually building a shared European identity. Whereas I see the anti EU argument as being mostly based around national pride, and focussed on the differences between people rather than what unites us. However, my issue is with the concept of a referendum. I do not believe that the majority of people are qualified to make decisions that have geopolitical and economic repercussions. The same way as I'm not interested in voting on agricultural policy, as I have little to no knowledge of how the industry works, I don't believe we should be voting on economic or geopolitical policies, but instead that decisions should be made by informed and qualified people who truly understand the repercussions. What do you think, ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe the UK should have a referendum on its EU membership.\n","id":"ed221cab-c185-4435-b146-0b0ef6cf8ae4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>These backdoor deals can go against the promises candidates have made to constituents to improve things, thus making this act vulnerable to corrupt manipulation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Large corporations employ lobbyists who make backdoor deals with candidates and attempt to influence their platforms\n","id":"2a72ef0d-22e9-4a68-ad6b-32a3bcf0c7a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a big Star Wars fan and an even bigger Harry Potter fan. However, I've also been adopting more minimalist and simple living practices. Here are my reasons for getting rid of them. I prefer the Harry Potter books over the movies anyway and I don't plan on getting rid of my books. I only watch the movies to get a visual representation of the Wizarding World. I haven't put any of them in our DVD player in years. If I want to watch them or have my future kids watch them, they are often on TV or I'm sure I'll always be able to find a site online to stream them from. At this point they are just taking up space and would be better donated to a place where someone who wants them could pick them up, or better yet, sold to put a bit of cash in my pocket.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should get rid of my Star Wars and Harry Potter DVDs.\n","id":"6e649071-21e4-4328-bda8-6d5d755c24a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm of the opinion that the term feminism doesn't describe the pursuit of equal rights for everybody, even though almost every feminist claims this to be true. My argument is that feminism, by definition, is a movement with the objective to fight for women's rights, and thus, it can't really be helping everybody, thus it can't really be an equality movement. If it where an equality movement, such as egalitarianism, it would pursuit the equality of everyone with everyone. Sometimes men have more rights than women, sometimes it's the opposite. I'm sure in some cases, black people have it better than white people, or whatever. I've heard people state that the movement being called feminism is a way to offend people in a positive way, and in this way, the problem will be discussed. If so, I could call my equality movement fuck you in the ass everyone else in the world and I'd claim that it's a stunt to get people to know my movement by offending them. TLDR I can't think of feminism as an equality movement primarily because of its name, and secondarily for some other things I may post about here later on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism isn't a valid name for the pursuit of equality for everybody on this planet Earth.\n","id":"101d8a19-0f61-4195-959f-bb1b63c85d53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Browsing reddit I read lots of comments on how the admins have an unfair system in place shadow banning users without fair trail. Yes, I get it, it\u2019s a privately owned company and they reserve the right to do what they want. However, I feel that they would be a bit more fair. I was pondering and based off of another users comments I can\u2019t recall the user they suggested that there should be a temporary banning system one week, one month, etc. Going further, I feel they should have a subreddit to deal with these trials r redditcourt or something of the likes . Going further, I feel that maybe a system like first strike you have to do the captcha all over again, second strike 24 hour ban, third strike 1 week ban, fourth strike shadow ban and proceed to reddit court. It would essentially do the exact same thing and users would not feel executed without fair process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the reddit shadow ban\/ banning system in place is cruel.\n","id":"2dea84a8-4979-4fc0-89fd-c2e967a4ed93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The average wage in China for a factory worker in 2009, the most recent reliable number that I could find, was 1.74. Compared to Western nations, health and safety regulations are almost non existent. On top of all of this, the government of China is an oppressive, fascist, Communist regime. If Americans are going to casually perform the despicable, unpatriotic, anti democratic act of supporting the economy of such a Communist state and the international corporations which are allowed to exploit the workers there, they should at least be constantly reminded that this is what they are doing. Obviously, companies selling Chinese made goods will not volunteer to move to such accurate labeling on their own, so the government should mandate that they do so. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the US, products manufactured in China should be required to be labeled \"Made by the Exploited Workers of Communist China\" instead of simply \"Made in China.\"\n","id":"98c78bf5-6b38-4bdf-8116-8dcd48fb0695"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I often hear religious people, namely Christians, quote atheists have no moral barometer. To me, distinguishing between right and wrong is just as important as understanding why something is right or wrong and I believe that the same people who use that quote are more likely to have questionable morals because morality can only truly come from a place within. For example, if someone chooses to refrain from murdering someone else because they believe it is inherently wrong maybe because they understand that they don't have the right to choose to take another human being's life I would accept that as a moral value. However, if someone wants to kill someone, and chooses not to simply because they were instructed not to, that should be considered obedience. Similarly, if someone chooses not to kill someone solely because they would be afraid of going caught or going to jail, I would also dismiss that as not a moral and instead a selfish fear of consequence. Someone who chooses not to sin because they are instructed not to from a book or a pastor, are being obedient not moral and someone who chooses not to sin because they are afraid of being judged by God, or going to hell, or being restricted from heaven are not being moral, they are operating out of fear of personal consequence. Furthermore, I believe that anytime we use the reasoning because the Bible says so to teach children or otherwise impressionable people right from wrong, we are encouraging them to stop asking questions and hindering their ability to discover a genuine moral barometer. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christianity, amongst similar religions, does not provide or encourage morals.\n","id":"62f6e204-044d-450a-8279-fe8cc3da09ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Many dietary laws involve animals which if consumed without proper preparation, can be fatal such as shellfish. Due to scientific advancement and understanding the underlying causes of disease, the consumption of these items has become acceptable and safe and no longer seen as divine punishment or demons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Several theistic claims, once regarded as inexplicable were later discovered to have valid scientific explanation and natural causation.\n","id":"774b1bdf-1176-4408-ae3a-35e5a095b29c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>Menstruation has been a distinctive factor in women's socialization and education. In particular menstruation makes getting an education more difficult. In Uganda, for example, dropout rates for girls rise dramatically around age 12-13, consistent with menarche.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Biological facts have had an effect on the construction of gender which is at least in part a response to physiology.\n","id":"d7cba110-f09c-42d1-a73e-a93e05d681c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note I am in the USA. Because of the Paradox of Voting it is in my rational self interest to not vote. As far as the impact of the vote on our democracy, I will focus on local elections over presidential elections, because I have a bigger voice in local elections and then focus on the closest voting result although I am arguing I still do not have a big enough voice to make it worth my time effort to vote . My actual vote is almost useless. In the 2012 election for House, my district VA district 11 had a difference of 84704 votes between the democrat leader and GOP leader^ 1 , meaning my vote could be 1 in 84704, if I was republican, which I am not. In an attempt to create a better life for myself and maximize my utility, the amount of time and effort I put into voting multiplied by 1 84704 divided by the impact it has in improving my life shows I am being incredibly inefficient by trying to create that change by voting. I also gain a very minor amount of emotional utility by voting because I know that I am effectively wasting my time with voting instead of something more productive to increase my utility such as studying for exams or reading interesting books shout out to HPMOR<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is in my best interest to not vote.\n","id":"b1a02b54-ed34-4304-85ff-9d9e40d06ee1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>The majority of immigration to the UK comes from non-EU countries, which the UK can already control.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UK can sufficiently control immigration while remaining in the EU.\n","id":"5aeb3e7f-0eff-4321-9987-1a53e2a10704"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I like to watch sports on TV mainly soccer, football and basketball . I think that soccer is the best sport to watch at least out of those three I mentioned, since they are the sports I mainly watch . Below are my reasons why I came to that conclusion when I thought about it Scoring there is something to low scoring games in contrast to high scoring games like basketball there is more emphasis on possible scoring situations. Like, when a player breaks into the penalty box, it is always an edge of the seat moment, where in basketball the attempt of scoring a basket is nothing special, since it occurs 2 3 times a minute. Finally, if a goal is scored in soccer, it is such a game turning event that just makes an awesome experience to watch the same with shots that are close and so on . There are no such situations in basketball or football where football is maybe closer here, since there are some exciting plays in a game that can totally change a lot in the dynamic Creativity in soccer, every player needs to handle the ball. This puts much more emphasis on the creativity of individuals and the team. Now, this is also true for basketball but it is certainly not true for football, since all plays are drawn up and players just need to execute and only some players are allowed to make reads like defenders in zone defense or the QB . Injuries in football, players regularly go out with injuries. That happens so often, that injuries are a main factor in post game analysis I think it is not good for a sport when injuries happen that often that they can decide a game or seasons for most of the teams. In basketball, injuries do not happen that often, but when they occur, they immediately can change a lot of things, since there are only 5 players on the field for each team. Injuries in soccer sometimes occur, but they do not occur as often as in football and do not have that much of an impact like in basketball but this obviously depends on the players . Additionally, there is no salary cap in soccer, so top level teams are always stacked in a way that they can replace certain injuries with a high quality substitute. Variety I think that soccer is the game with the most variety. Of course, in football there is a lot of strategy, but in the end you see a pass or a run executed after every play. Basketball is a beautiful game, but with that much scoring it feels a little repetitive after a while. Soccer seems to be a little different here, because there are so many different playing styles that are so obvious even for casual viewers like a tight passing game vs. counter attack play style . And since there are a lot viewer goal situations and a far bigger field in soccer, every attack seems to look different. Freedom of play Basketball and football sometimes seem like very restrictive and over officiated. There are a lot of rules that restrict the flow of the game in a certain way like the shot clock in Basketball or restrictions on formations in football . Sometimes I wonder why that is? In soccer, there is a ball and there are 22 players and you can play however you like to score a goal. Of course, there are some restrictive rules like offside, but there are a lot fewer than in other sports. In the end, I appreciate all of these sports and acknowledge that they are all awesome in their own style. I just think that from this point of view, soccer reigns supreme given the arguments I posted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Soccer is the best sport to watch\n","id":"83bd6a7d-5be5-4791-a061-e9e104ed431d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the Mediterranean Sea desiccate 5.5 million years ago?<|ARGUMENT|>It is often harder to track based on what problems it should've caused as there could have been other factors mitigating the geological effects of desiccation which hasn't been considered or discovered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our ability to track what happened millions of years ago is limited and the evidence that is found is often inconclusive.\n","id":"01bb1cf4-d64c-4cb7-a867-be4530aa89b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>Article 25: \"1 Everyone has the right to a decent standard of living. and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. 2 Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.\" Universal right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UDHR articles 1-3, 5-12, 16-20, and 22-29 are specifically directed to the idea that when someone crosses a border, they keep all rights and legal protections.\n","id":"f4da2b69-d787-4936-bbae-2bffbbfe74ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> Same sex marriage should not only be legally recognised but as enforced to the same standards as heterosexual marriage. There is no proof that same sex couples are worse parents, NONE. Since no fault divorce was introduced, the majority of divorces sighted dissatisfaction as reason for divorce. Fair enough. People grow apart. It happens. So why not gay marriage? Not everyone likes the opposite sex in a sexual way. Why force them? Why exclude them from Marriage? Now that you no longer need a man in a lesbian couple or a woman in a gay couple in order to have children, since adoption and IV are just some of the options available to same sex couples, why not same sex marriage? What is wrong with allowing two loving people to get married? If your argument is religious, what is it that actually stops homosexual marriage that isn't simply because insert deity here said so? How does the institution of marriage suffer for allowing same sex marriage? I can't think of a reason not to have legal gay and lesbian marriage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Same sex marriage should not only be legally recognised but as enforced to the same standards as heterosexual marriage.\n","id":"f77bbadd-ee6b-43a8-b12a-9137f0379ec7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>U.S. at 5 of the world's population consumes 30 of the world's paper. We consume 4 more paper each year, and our forests are being destroyed. One acre of hemp which grows in one season yields as much paper as four acres of trees which take at least 20 years to grow . Hemp paper does not require toxic bleaching chemicals unlike wood pulp paper. To whiten hemp paper, manufacturers can use hydrogen peroxide, which does not poison water supplies. The pulp and paper industry is the third largest industrial polluter. Hemp paper lasts longer than wood paper. It also does not turn yellow over time. Most other countries already have thriving hemp industries. China is the largest exporter of hemp textiles. Other countries include Canada, France, Italy, and Great Britain, to name a few. Although corporate interests would oppose this change, it would conversely create many opportunities for new business ventures. I am not suggesting that hemp is the miracle plant that will solve deforestation, but rather could make a significant impact on it. With American approval of the marijuana plant being at an all time high, I believe now is an opportune time to differentiate industrial hemp from the federal cannabis ban.  Edit Damn, you guys are good.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe industrial hemp could significantly alleviate our deforestation problem.\n","id":"828f09c2-081b-4458-8f9a-68ae186aef44"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>Earning wages from being a productive worker provides people with a sense of dignity and self-accomplishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Performing community\/military service provides benefits for the individuals who participate.\n","id":"ebbc0215-f4de-4346-897d-1870b0f166f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all children should be taught to code in school?<|ARGUMENT|>Children should not become focused on a particular career too early in their lives: they should be presented with a wide range of options which they can choose from when they are more mature.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Education should not become too fixated narrowly on employment: just because a subject is relevant to a particular job does not mean it should have a place in schools.\n","id":"c3443b8d-e534-4e27-a082-38c7375d336e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>in a federal Europe<|ARGUMENT|>In a globalised economy, there is a need to tame multinational corporations, which would be otherwise capable of playing national governments off against each other in search for low wages, social costs and state protection. A federal Europe would be powerful enough to demand high standards of behaviour from such companies, because only a powerful and economically significant player can dictate restricting conditions. This would ensure fair wages, safe working conditions and - additionally - Europe would be able to force the multinational companies to implement correct and holistic policies and would also be in a position to make a greater difference on environmental issues such as global warming. Sovereignty becomes less relevant when effective independence is lost anyway as the economy and the problems faced by all nations are increasingly globalised.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A federal Europe will ensure that large, multinational businesses remain accountable for their actions\n","id":"1592fdba-ced7-49a9-8718-3d37e779e1e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Monotheistic religions restrict the definition of human progress to a spectrum of submission. Those at the bottom of the spectrum do not submit at all; those considered the 'most progressive' are those that submit the most.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions will no longer hold back social or scientific progress.\n","id":"7e3bdcf7-c9ae-4824-b293-321aa6f94b03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Due to a variety of factors, poverty leading among them, school aged children experience a high degree of stressors early in life I am not debating whether stressors have increased decreased over the years, nor am I debating poverty causing stressors . These children often do not yet have the coping skills to recover from these stressors and act out on public and in school. Public schools are required by law to accept any student who lives within their district. This has led to the latest buzz term, teaching using trauma informed practices . What this means is that teachers spend a significant amount of time addressing social emotional issues of a few students in the classroom instead of teaching curriculum so that safety is ensured. Most public schools have access to an alternative school for the worst offending students caught dealing drugs, extreme physical violence, etc , however they are often filled quickly and only accept a specific number of students. As a result, there are a large number of students that live in the gray area start fights with students regularly, prolonged harassment, verbally or physically assault a teacher once or twice, regularly uses profanity in class, etc that are required to stay in the classroom. The parents who can afford it often avoid their children from being exposed to this by paying tuition to a privately funded school. These schools boast of higher test scores, lower discipline problems, and greater employment post graduation. They are able to do this because they can unenroll students who cause too many problems having to return to public school . Also because the parents who can afford privately funded schools do not have children who have experienced substantial trauma and if they have, address it through counseling and other strategies at home and often place pressure on their children not to misbehave. Disclaimer I used the term privately funded to describe most non public schools. This includes most, but not all, charter schools since they can raise funding from private sources. I also recognize that some charter schools are designed specifically to accept students who have been expelled from public schools so this is an example of a school that would not day under this argument's purview. Change my view Reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The primary reason privately-funded schools have risen in popularity is because they have a lower threshold for tolerating unwanted behavior.\n","id":"44bdc255-c58f-417b-a00d-0ac29168d9d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Consider the claim, \"There are an even number of electrons in the universe.\" If there is no good reason to believe this, it would be absurd to then conclude that \"There are an odd number of electrons in the universe.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most empirical evidence against God derives from an absence of observations of God. A lack of identified evidence is not a positive argument for the non-existence of God.\n","id":"036bb0e2-efa7-4805-973d-5e4d14404b47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, customization. iPhones feature very little in terms of customization. If you want to customize your iPhone any more than you're already allowed to with the stock OS, you'll have to jailbreak your phone. Android features great customization options right out of the gate. You can change the way your homescreen behaves with something like Nova Launcher, you can change your icons with an icon pack, you can change your lock screen with something like GO Locker, etc. Next, no haptic feedback. iPhones have never featured haptic feedback, and in my opinion, this is something that almost always needs to be in a device when I buy it. It feels so awkward to type on a keyboard than only makes a clicking sound when you use it. Then, price. iPhones cost 649.00 off contract. With that same amount of money, you could buy two OnePlus Ones and still have 49 left over. Apples pricing is way too high for a phone that is so limited in what it can do. Finally, obsolescence. iPhones become obsolete, fast. Don't believe me? Just look at all of the iPhone 4 users who have to bear with how slow and laggy iOS 7 is. My Galaxy S III from 2 years ago is still faster than any iPhone I've tested it against. Edit Woah, this got big. There's no way I can respond to every one of you guys, but be assured that I am reading your comments. And yes, my view has been changed, but that doesn't mean I'll stop using Android. I have a way better idea of why people prefer iPhones, you guys were very concise and clear on what you were saying. Every other time I asked, I just got raided by Apple fanboys who don't give any reasoning to their arguments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Android phones are much better than iPhones.\n","id":"7eada439-8565-4c33-a80b-2ec3c40461bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Not Have Pulled Out of the Iran Deal.<|ARGUMENT|>The Houthis could have made additional assurances of what Iran would consider good intent in regard to how they intend to govern.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There could be many reasons for their increased support\u2014it could be an outlier.\n","id":"a37b8742-b54d-4141-a88e-193e82f42f27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen the conspiracy theories, about the towers supposedly coming down in a controlled demolition, the Pentagon being hit by a missile instead of a plane, the mysterious collapse of building 7 even though it wasn't hit, among other things mentioned in the documentary Inside Job. A lot of it seemed pretty convincing, at least not obviously wrong, and it gets you thinking for sure. I'm aware that there are many critiques debunkings of these conspiracy theories, and I have read some of them. I'm not completely convinced either way though. All of that is beside the point though. I think people get too caught up in the details, like what temperature steel melts at, and fail to see the bigger picture. There are now 1.5 million people on the terrorist watch list it is the new Communism. We've had two enormously expensive and drawn out wars in the middle east. We spend more on the military than ever. Think about it if it weren't for 9 11, there would be literally no reason for the US to have such a huge military. There would be no reason for corporations such as Lockheed Martin to make enormously expensive shit to sell to the military. We're talking about trillions and trillions of dollars at stake here. The cold war ended in what, 1990? Can't you just imagine the military industrial complex being like shit, what do we do now? Without communism, there is no enemy. Without an enemy, people would start to push for drastic reductions in the military budget. It is a basic principle of rational choice economics that government entities seek to perpetuate their own existence, right? And corporations engage in rent seeking behavior to extract profit from their relationships to the government. Simply put, without terrorism, many people would stand to lose A LOT of money. And at the end of the cold war, they could for see this was going to happen. Unless they did something about it. And it may be more than just money. As the McCarthy era proved, people are a lot easier to control when they have something to fear. In order for people to be patriotic there must be things that are unpatriotic. There must be an enemy. Its all diversion you see. Without an external enemy, people might start to think a bit too much about how the corporate oligarchy controls everything. So in my opinion, the US government and its corporate masters had every reason to kill its own citizens and make it look like terrorism. Sure, that's a lot of people to kill. But what else could justify trillions of dollars of defense spending for decades to come, in a war that almost by definition will never end? They weighed the cost and benefits, and they determined that killing a few thousand Americans was worth it. Too far of a stretch? Its already been established, with the NSA thing and the terrorist watch list, and the shredding of constitution in general, that the US government views it own citizens as the enemy. So let's put aside debate about whether the buildings came down in a controlled demolition or not. That's kins of a distraction. Even if 9 11 occurred exactly according to the official story, it still could have been an inside job. The US govt could totally work with an organization such as Al Qaeda if it even exists , route money to it and have them convince a few people to kill themselves in the name of Allah. So change my view the US govt had every reason to make 9 11 an inside job. I'm a reasonable person, so try to convince me otherwise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"there are good reasons to believe that 9\/11 was an \"inside job\"\n","id":"920a758e-8e25-4f26-903c-af4213103c8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Although many children attempt to steal things without malicious intent as they are to young to know right from wrong, the children in the lucky charms commercials look to be around the age of teenagers, and their relentless pursuit of lucky's lucky charms shows that they are intelligent enough to know exactly what they are doing. My overall point is that these children have no right to harass lucky and they also have no right to steal his lucky charms, as well as lucky has no obligation to the children and is intitled to keep his property to himself. Essentially, and to restate my main point I believe that the kids in the lucky charms commercials are completely injustified in trying to steal the lucky charms from lucky. I am very interested to see the responses that the lovely people of reddit will give on this subject. Please Change My View<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the kids in the lucky charms commercials are completely injustified in trying to steal the lucky charms from lucky.\n","id":"7755fb1e-312d-4dff-b3e8-5ed279b124e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Year-round school, Year-round school education reform<|ARGUMENT|>Jeanette Wat. \"Extended Year-Round Schooling, Extended Success\". Naperville, Illinois - \"The third problem is insufficient learning time. In order to provide a long summer break, learning must cram within a shorter period of time, which requires students like John to either give up a comprehensive learning or cut sleep, both of which are undesirable. Furthermore, a long summer results in less learning time and less knowledge acquired.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"9-month schooling crams too much info into shorter period\n","id":"e1ba9928-8228-4453-a802-b48194b33e54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Because it happened years earlier, Joseph Smith would have known about his father's second vision, and had a memory of it in his mind, while dictating Lehi's dream for inclusion in the Book of Mormon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A vision by the character Lehi in the Book of Mormon is essentially the same dream that Joseph Smith's father had years prior to the publication of the Book of Mormon.\n","id":"0fc74a56-d698-46e5-a88e-0cf491b0ed76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>Some drug users are forced into exploitative situations, such as forced prostitution, to feed their habits. These programs rid drug users of the need to do this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Government methadone programs where proven hard drug addicts are provided daily methadone doses for free have proven to be very successful.\n","id":"61387b89-27bb-47e3-8d06-e056eedd2899"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, let me say that I don't support the NSA's revealed domestic surveillance program. Even if I did, that would be irrelevant to my views here. I've had this conversation with other redditors before, and they generally seem to view Snowden as a hero. This doesn't make sense to me. Here's my case against Snowden He violated the Espionage Act. 18 USC Sect. 798. He disclosed classified documents to unauthorized persons. He did this on his own initiative. Without authorization, he subverted the NSA administrator's judgment. Without exercising caution, and without knowing the full contents, he disclosed these documents to the press and trusted that they would responsibly report the contents of those documents. He fled the country rather than face prosecution and present his defense illegality. He maintains the view even today that he did the right thing. He shows no regret or remorse for his crimes. He has inspired Americans to support whistleblowers. The risk of copycats increased due to he hero worship he continues to enjoy. And the risk to national security should go without saying, but often gets overlooked. American intelligence operatives, troops on the ground, defense programs, and interests all over the globe are threatened when leaks happen. The costs can be measured in money and bodies. Please, take a shot at me. I want to understand this from all sides. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Edward Snowden is not a hero. He is a criminal, and should be prosecuted accordingly.\n","id":"80e2eb93-161c-4f53-a0d0-54a5638eafcf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Vollgeld\/Monnaie Pleine\/Sovereign Money initiative should be accepted by the Swiss People.<|ARGUMENT|>In the long term, the Vollgeld initiative would make credit more scarce which would hurt the economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Opponents argue that the Vollgeld scheme would make borrowing more complicated and more expensive.\n","id":"f09fbc1b-2053-45d3-bd42-cf47720adabd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>Alberta cooperatives created in 2005 and 2006 had a three-year survival rate of 81.5% compared to 48% for conventional businesses in that province.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Canada, worker cooperatives are more resilient than conventional businesses.\n","id":"9dad219b-97e3-4ec9-944a-41945a254ee7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>Publicly funded and maintained places are not suitable for statues, flags, or other memorabilia that would in any wayperceived or not glorify, or show reverence to, a period of time in which one group of Americans were treated as inferior to another group of Americans. This demeans the core principles of liberty and being an American.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a state built on the cause of white supremacy and the enslavement of Blacks, the Confederacy and individuals who defended it should not be honored.\n","id":"f7e7dec3-57ec-4f83-9ac9-05dd7a1773e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This isn't actually my view but rather the view of a close friend of mine. He brought up Obama and started talking out his ass he was raised in an extremely libertarian household and is in the military, whereas I am a political science and philosophy student . It came to the subject of distribution of wealth. I made the point that redistribution of wealth was the american way and had been since Teddy Roosevelt's time, and that it wasn't really Obama specifically trying to redistribute wealth. But I couldn't find any argument for wealth redistribution that held any weight. I will be relaying the best arguments to him and award the delta accordingly if anyone can change his mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Redistribution of wealth is a grave violation of my rights and freedom.\n","id":"fab7f35b-ca9f-4ab2-8034-4d8b41f1fcef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>The scientific method can be learned and applied by anyone. Thus, it could be seen to promote a view of scientific knowledge production as an open and democratic process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The scientific method could be seen as political in the sense that it has concrete social consequences that can be qualified in political terms.\n","id":"e7fca82a-e421-43d0-83b3-d32df6b670b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I came across this piece When Playing Video Games Go Too Far The two pieces, collectively, seem to suggest that addiction to video games requires particular attention and the latter goes on to criticize the fact games are sold with minimal regulation. My view involves two facets One, if we pursue regulation of video games not sure what form they envision this regulation taking , then we should consider regulating all sorts of behavior that lend themselves to addictive personalities. I realize that we do regulate some addictive behaviors cigarettes and gambling . But there are a slew of activities that currently remain unregulated, and should remain unregulated, like shopping, sex, Internet, body modification tattoos or piercings or plastic surgery , eating, and work. Any of those could be harmful in the extreme, but I don't think the average person believes that the government or some other entity has a right to intervene. Further, any such intervention would be an expense that wouldn't be justified by the benefit. The numbers I'm finding suggest that the number of gamers suffering from video game addiction is extremely small, and those are numbers based on the gaming population. Second, aside from being a pointless overreach, this approach seems woefully misguided to me. Someone who is likely to become addicted to video games is likely to become addicted due to an inherent inclination that can apply to all sorts of normal behaviors. I think regulation of video games would only be a superficial bandaid that fails to resolve the underlying causes for the addictive inclinations. I believe this piece effectively makes the case that video games are not, themselves, problematic Video Games Aren\u2019t Addictive Ways that my view might be changed include, but are not limited to Demonstrating that video game regulation would be effective and is necessary in a way that is distinct from the other, unregulated, addictive behaviors. Demonstrating that video game addiction is, itself, a distinct and relatively more harmful addictive behavior and or treating the symptoms is a sensible approach. Rebutting the case against video addiction as a separate classification laid out in the second link. Additionally, for purposes of this prompt, my argument is limited to the idea that if we were to regulate video games, we should be expected to regulate those other addictive behaviors. The viability of regulating those other behaviors however is not a concern. So showing that we should regulate video games but not those other behaviors may also be sufficient. If there are any uncertainties related to my view, I'll happily clarify. But feel free to argue a singular interpretation or both, and I'll return the favor. This was a somewhat impromptu line of thinking so I realize there may be gaps in my reasoning. The scope of my argument is limited to regulation of video games outside the context of parent children or similarly intimate dynamics from my view. tl dr regulation of video games, for mitigating video game addiction is, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, an excessive overreach into people's personal lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regulation of video games, for purposes of combating addiction, is needlessly paternalistic and fails to address the underlying problems.\n","id":"1583181a-33f2-43a5-a322-f3ba590c581b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should the Conservative Party choose to be the next UK Prime Minister?<|ARGUMENT|>Many senior Conservatives are concerned that choosing Johnson over Hunt would be a gamble for the party.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Choosing Boris Johnson as the leader of the Conservative Party may harm the party long-term.\n","id":"70bdb175-07d8-4a10-94bb-92b2473afdcf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I always hear how being anti immigration makes you racist and I used to be fine with immigration but i'm constantly hearing it's racist, and it's just starting to piss me off and I don't know why. I also hear people talk about trump being racist but I honestly don't even care anymore, I used to dislike him a lot but now it's like if some racist white trump supporter yells at a mexican telling him to make a burrito I can't say I blame them. I also constantly see FB posts and shit about native genocide, like when the Orlando Shooting took place I heard people talk about wounded knee and how that was worse and it just makes me think well fuck the native americans, they were just sitting there worshipping tree gods, sometimes they killed each other too and we just so happened to use this land more efficiently and we deserve this land more than they do. Maybe i'm just a dick but I hear this stuff constantly especially from people my age 20 and i'm pretty liberal when it comes to a lot of things but lately i've been becoming more right wing and more angry when people talk about this stuff and I feel like I shouldn't. Just few weeks ago I was over politics and decided there's no point in arguing but it's all coming back because it's constant. I'm thinking it's even making me more racist or at least less caring about our democracy to the point where I'm giving less of a shit who rules us.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When I hear people who say being anti-immigration is racist and bring up native american genocide I develop anger towards them\n","id":"a6c1cb53-69a1-4bdd-8d83-38f0ef28d747"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Cory Booker voted down a proposal aimed at lowering prescription drug prices by allowing Americans to buy them from Canada. Yet, 72% of the the surveyed population support this idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cory Booker has failed to support progressive policy ideas that are popular amongst the American people.\n","id":"3395ae37-ad93-42bd-a135-4901af31a8f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>let Turkey join the European Union<|ARGUMENT|>There is no obvious and widely accepted geographical definition of a frontier to Europe. Is Russia a European country? Are Georgia and Armenia? Are Cyprus and Malta? The fact that the Mediterranean country Italy became a member of a regional organisation, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO, was certainly not determined by geography, but was an act of political imagination. Today the location of a Mediterranean state in the North Atlantic is no longer considered as something \"odd\". Another example of changing perceptions of a region is the change from regarding the border of Europe as falling between East and West Germany; Europe broadened to include all the former Eastern European countries as potential members of the EU. Given that part of Turkey\u2019s territory is on what everyone accepts is the European mainland, why shouldn\u2019t it be allowed to join the main European club? While Turkey's land area is almost entirely in Asia the European part does have immense historical significance, and Turkey has a population in Europe of about 14million, larger than many of the smaller EU members. It already belongs to NATO, the OECD and the Council of Europe, and participates in the Eurovision Song Contest and European football competitions. Turkey is a westward-looking country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The geographical definition of Europe must be limited and does not include Turkey\n","id":"e2110b56-43e2-4d62-a7df-7ab8f8f2b3fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm skeptical about the doom and gloom surrounding the TPP, and here's why. First of all, we are getting everything we know about the details of TPP from news sources reporting on leaks. We are getting this information from the same media outlets that we criticize day in and day out for spinning stories and providing incomplete facts. Secondly, who's to say that the providers of these leaks WikiLeaks are not withholding other important information about the TPP. What if WikiLeaks is only trying to push an agenda by deliberately providing incomplete information? And lastly, the hyperbole surrounding corporations being able to sue governments sounds a lot like what we heard around the time of the Obama care rollout with regards to the death panels. I just don't see how the fear mongering surround the TPP is any different than what we've seen in the past with other major legislation. Hell, the average citizen barely knew what the ACA entailed when it was passed, but here we are just fine. Let me get one thing straight, I am most certainly not supporting the government and its actions to hide the details of the TPP. I just think that there is a massive overreaction to this legislation as a result. I wouldn't be surprised if half of the information spread about the TPP ends up being false or much tamer than it's made out to be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone is overreacting about the TPP.\n","id":"154e3d39-6dfc-48d2-bf22-0ddc7717fd5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Trade vs Aid<|ARGUMENT|>Trade allows a fair impression of the international order to be created. One of the problems of the current aid system is said to be that it creates an impression amongst receiving countries and their people that the west is a wealthy, free-handed donor which provides what seem like huge sums of money by local standards. The impression can also be that this is given without too much concern about corruption or indeed without moral judgement, since many of the people who administer aid may be seen as morally ambiguous collaborators within authoritarian regimes. This influences developing world expectations of the first world. As well as leading to a sense that there is some sort of right to aid, it can also distort values of openness, self-help and honesty. It encourages many people in recipient countries to consider migrating to the source of this wealth, since they assume that it must be a rich place where all can prosper. When the reality turns out differently, this can cause problems on all sides.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trade allows a fair impression of the international order to be created. One of the problems of the...\n","id":"792be8b2-8664-4ef6-847f-71a70916029b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>North Korea should not be labelled irrational for developing nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>The \"Samson Option where Israel launches massive retaliation through nuclear weapons in the scenario the state is invaded or destroyed, has acted as the \"ultimate guarantor\" of Israeli state security.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear weapons allow North Korea to ensure state defense through a deterrence doctrine\n","id":"af2ac66e-0bf9-4667-8884-0891bc707c51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build an international space elevator?<|ARGUMENT|>Orbital rings are possible to both live and travel on. Space elevators can only provide travel opportunities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An orbital ring has dual benefits that space elevators do not.\n","id":"63b3c4e8-f440-422b-bb80-e09c49da4a2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Theories on the final Star Wars Trilogy<|ARGUMENT|>Both Rey and Anakin have an exceptional connection to the force. The circumstances regarding their parents are unknown\/known to a very minor extent. This means the theory that they were both created somehow either using he force or created by the force, plausible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rey's fate will largely follow the same pattern as Anakin Skywalker's fate did.\n","id":"05038d51-c584-4d28-a5eb-0c59d1b3a023"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realize this is not a new topic, but I have been greatly struggling with this. I'm a scientist, and I feel I need to examine all possibilities to determine the best and simplest explanation for these conflicts. Free will is often given as the answer to why God can be all good, all knowing and all powerful, but I find this answer worthless because it is nonsensical. If we truly have free will, our actions are undetermined, so god cannot know them. And if he is omnipotent, he could have created us in a manner that would allow free will AND not allow suffering, but he didn't. So he can't be all good, right? In short, I can't get past the possibility of a god existing. Please try to .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God is not possible.\n","id":"23614e98-66ff-42af-8a15-fd653782d2f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Science can prove that the teachings of every religion are incorrect regarding the natural order. This evidence stacks up to hypothesing that there is no god, by the very teachings of those religion, because of the contradictions and flaws within those teachings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no way to prove that there \"isn't\" a tooth fairy, nor an Abominable Snowman as one cannot prove a negative.\n","id":"b337cd8b-e298-440c-9a3c-801a4dbd22e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In our military today, it is volunteer only. You have complete choice. So if you join, and you choose an MOS that see's combat, and you're disfigured or paralyzed or you die, it's nobodies fault but yours and people should feel bad and apologize because YOU chose to sign up and YOU chose a combat MOS. If anyone thanks you for a soldiers service it should be an apologetic one meaning, I'm sorry the idiots in charge have you fighting a pointless war to protect the American the public's right's when the actual war to preserve our rights should be in Washington. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if a soldier dies in war or is disfigured\/paralyzed, it's his\/her own fault.\n","id":"d18d9972-dccb-4191-8ee7-53a9a5e867c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The many existing denominations of Christianity Islam Judaism all three - in themselves branches of Abrahamic religions, as well as Buddhism Hinduism etc., all suggest that fracturing is the norm within religious organisations\/communities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Disagreements within organisations such as the Catholic Church resulted in fracturing into multiple branches more often than reform.\n","id":"27a06668-fc30-497e-b782-13be74b44076"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>In the long-term, our service will help increase plantation profits by supplying more workers and reducing the amount of labor lost. This is of high value to the plantation owners.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Plantation owners will value our services. This will potentially benefit our community later.\n","id":"7b370beb-1422-4e50-a9a2-c245ddc67f3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is something I've been thinking of, as we just got through elections in my country. I had a discussion with another politically active person, and something I said bothered me later that I respect a particular party because they won't compromise their views by being a junior partner in a coalition this specific act isn't what I'm arguing, it's just for background . A politician doesn't exist to push their views, it's to represent everyone in their constituency. It shouldn't matter if, for example, a pro life candidate was elected to a constituency that was mainly pro choice, or vice versa they don't get to put their opinions above the ones that elected them. They're meant to judge for themselves the solution that best fits everyone, not one particular demographic and no matter how horrible or impractical the compromises required are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians should not act on personal views, as their role is to reflect the will of the people and not themselves.\n","id":"0f97e526-c6ed-4b2c-a436-e321d3517fbf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Asymmetry Argument at the basis of anti-natalism flawed ?<|ARGUMENT|>Life is inherently valuable. In some cases, death might be preferable to continued suffering, but a life of 51% pain and 49% pleasure does not seem unworthy of living.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In order to accept the Asymmetry argument, you first have to accept some sort of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is false.\n","id":"f7c41c1d-6f8a-4d77-878e-64ed9371a1ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>In France, the excesses of monarchy and the Royal Court contributed to the French Revolution Symbolically, the revolutionaries sent Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the guillotine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Opposition to the imposition of monarchy can lead to violence, and therefore instability.\n","id":"aa8c9e2d-cc71-4019-83d5-b01f2cffc528"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Intimate partner violence is common among women having abortions, with between 6% and 22% reporting recent violence from an intimate partner. Concern about violence is a reason some pregnant women decide to terminate their pregnancies as they do not wish to expose children to violence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women in physically violent and abusive relationships are likely to stay tethered to abusive partners when they are unable to terminate unwanted pregnancies. This puts both the women and their children at increased risk of violence and other negative health consequences.\n","id":"b86d6a46-843a-47e7-a733-e332b078ae3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Ameba are living organisms that are too small for the naked eye to see, so it is likely that at least ameba live on different planets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Complex life especially civilizations requires a more limited range of conditions, making it less likely.\n","id":"d11af1e6-dbf0-4b2a-a8e2-5fb4319b50d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>Women are leaving the Republican Party after 187 Republicans voted against a bill that would narrow the gender wage gap.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Democratic Party is a champion of equal pay for women.\n","id":"ad103108-db7b-48eb-b365-00a7d48330c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have just discovered that August is RomanceAwarenessMonth and I am just I can't even explain the depths of my reactions to this Who isn't aware of romance? What it is, what it means, what it involves etc? To not be aware of this, you'd not only have to be living under a rock, that rock would have to be near the highest point of the Vinson Massif, capping a hole several hundred metres deep where your food supplies are delivered to you by highly trained conglomerates of single celled organisms. Seriously? Who isn't aware of what romance is. The vast majority of films, television programmes, radio dramas, books, stories, yarns, or tales, has at least some tangential connection to the idea of romance or romantic connection. It's also not as if you need to be connected to the wider world to understand this phenomenon. Isolated tribes and communities have concepts of marriage and romantic connection. Why does this need an awareness month? Awareness months are for things that do not get as much attention as they need to resolve them. Diseases, social causes, areas of the world experiencing have experienced disasters etc. Those are the things that need awareness months. This is just absurd. If it was a more intellectual thing, about the idea of romanticism the way that the Victorian era Britain found the idea of exploring distant lands Romantic then perhaps this could have some sense to it, and my view could be changed if someone could prove that this was what said month was about. I could also be convinced of the need for this month if there was some studies or sociological research that said that a lack of romance in a significant proportion of the population's relationships was causing some kind of societal issue or health problem, or was otherwise something we should actually be legitimately concerned about. As it is though, the whole notion of this is absurd. If you don't know what romance is, you must either be so isolated from the world, that frankly you have more serious issues at hand than not knowing what romance is. This is not central to my argument, but I'd actually go slightly further and say that it's borderline offensive. As mentioned earlier, awareness months should be reserved for things that actually need awareness diseases, disasters, social issues, causes etc . Bringing these things down to the level of having awareness months for something as well understood, mainstream, and commonplace as Romance is a disservice to all those other campaigns which are trying hard to get attention for things that really need it. TL DR, unless a lack of romance is a serious problem, or if this is romance in the more intellectual sense of the word, RomanceAwarenessMonth is absurd.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"#RomanceAwarenessMonth is absurd\n","id":"6657cc6b-f882-411b-9f42-3348fdb8e5a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Just as guns are a tool used to exercise the right to self-defense, cars are a tool used to exercise the right of movement. But we recognize that cars are dangerous and thus regulate who can use them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The danger guns inherently pose means that innocence should not be the only determining factor of whether an individual can have access to them.\n","id":"06151425-9a01-41fc-8feb-6c4c488a78d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>In the Old Testament, God often sends kings from other nations to rule over the Jews in order to inflict an evil on them: as a punishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Divine right is a theory about political legitimacy first and foremost. It doesn't directly imply moral rectitude.\n","id":"e5c86b76-4fb3-4f64-ac6f-8f5a68b96735"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>The Republicans strongly opposed the Democrats use of the \"nuclear option\" to confirm Obama's cabinet nominees, yet had no qualms about using the same procedure for Trump's Supreme Court nominees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both the Democrats and the Republicans have been very fickle in their opinions about the use of the nuclear option.\n","id":"7af6ffe2-2e3e-4658-a406-3d01ea5cfe2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>There is reason to believe that Scientology may have been founded to provide financial gain for L.R. Hubbard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some religions appear to have been designed largely to accumulate wealth and status for their creators.\n","id":"54a532c1-89dc-42c7-8e4d-5e5c1aa2602d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As you all know, guns and cars in America are currently regulated differently. I am proposing making firearms laws and regulations more similar to how cars are currently regulated in America. I propose the following No more background checks for gun purchases or concealed carry licenses Cars do not require background checks to operate and they kill more people on accident than guns do on purpose 30,000 accidental collision deaths vs 10,000 deliberate gun homicides . Cars are significantly more dangerous than firearms and aren't even protected under the Constitution like firearms are. Background checks are not only a burden on a right, but won't prevent criminals from obtaining guns since a black market for guns already exists under our current system. Anyone over the age of 16 can purchase a firearm, and also take a class and obtain a license to carry a concealed weapon We trust 16 year olds who are properly licensed to operate cars at high speeds on public roads and make split second decisions which can mean the difference between life and death. What's the difference between than that and trusting a 16 year old who has taken and passed a concealed carry class to carry a firearm in public? Convicted felons should be allowed to purchase and carry firearms in public If a convicted felon is too dangerous to be allowed to drive a car or own a firearm, they should be too dangerous to even be allowed out of prison in the first place. But there are no federal laws which prohibit most felons from owning and driving cars in public where they could run over an entire classroom of kindergarteners in a crosswalk if they wished, so why prevent them from exercising their right to own a firearm? Any firearm weapon should be legal to own and use on private property. Only when used carried in public should they be regulated and subject to licensing, registration, and insurance. Private use has no bearing whatsoever on public safety. Much like a homebuilt car, a homebuilt firearm that is fully automatic with a homebuilt suppressor used in private poses no risk to the public. However, if that firearm weapon is to be used or carried in public, it must meet certain criteria no full auto just like the regulations we currently place on vehicles safety devices, emission standards, etc . This is no different than how cars are regulated, and it makes perfect sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should regulate firearms like we currently regulate driver licenses in the United States.\n","id":"74483c98-55db-4b6e-a45d-152cafa29fa4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Transcending religious practices means your mind becomes simple. You see that the goal of religious practices is to feel \"I am not the doer\". Conflicts of this world do not touch your inner space or peace.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion helps people focus on the present by finding peace in God's will and trusting in his plans and guidance. This inner peace permeates outwards and reduces conflict.\n","id":"d2b51b91-9d65-486e-bd95-959384b24428"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've travelled all over Europe, North Africa and North America and I've had the good fortune to see a great deal of what the continents have to offer. In this  I am speaking mainly of architecture, I have yet to find a country as beautiful as Italy. Obviously this is completely subjective and I appreciate that it may be hard to change me view but can anyone show me a country that has anything similar to the rich beauty that is Rome, L'aquila, Florence or Venice, each to me is more effortlessly beautiful than any other city I have ever visited. It's as if the Italians built their cities hundreds of years ago and made very little changes since. Yes London, Amsterdam, Paris, Stockholm, Prague, Lisbon, Boston, Barcellona and others all have their charms, but is there a country that has so many world class incredible cities as Italy? Please change my view and I'll visit them in a heart beat<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Italy the most beautiful country in the world\n","id":"40827893-f7b8-4d7f-9335-91ac7ff65cc5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments pursue predictive policing technology?<|ARGUMENT|>In the US, a survey estimates that from 2006 to 2010, 52 percent of violent crime went unreported to police.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Data relied upon by the police is insufficient as many crimes are not reported to the police.\n","id":"e7f9679c-c59c-489d-bf3d-2c8ed4a2c9f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>nations of the world should increase protection of the economic and social rights of migrants.<|ARGUMENT|>Every state has different issues and problems related to migration. There is no monolithic economic and social crisis facing migrants around the globe. It is inappropriate, therefore, to call for all nations to improve their protections in some standard manner. Instead, immigration policy and even rights need to be approached on a case-by-case, nation-by-nation basis. This approach would allow each state to pass a law that fits its needs, particularly those of protecting its national identity, which is a concern international law cannot approach. Maintaining an original ethnic and cultural structure is important to many states, especially those that are populated by one ethnic group. Is Israel, for example, wrong to term itself a \"Jewish state\"? There is nothing inherently wrong with its efforts to maintain this identity, even if that effort constrains the expansion of migrant rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Migration policy should be crafted on a state-by-state basis, allowing countries to protect their national identities.\n","id":"b3787b59-38d6-47b9-a557-7dc47f0cad90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>rumours about politicians should not be reported<|ARGUMENT|>There is no public interest issue here, otherwise that would have been the main thrust of the story, moreover other news media would have picked up on the story as well. Instead this is a simple case of intrusion into a public figure\u2019s private life, apparently for no reason other than it being a fairly easy story. This is exactly the kind of story that a reasonable distinction between public and private issues is meant to avoid. There is was evidence of alcoholism by President Calderon presented by the banner waving oppositioni so a good journalist should have either found evidence as if it was affecting Calderon\u2019s ability to govern then there would be evidence that could be found or else she should have dropped the story rather than reporting rumour and insinuation. The fact that by doing so she endangered not only her own reputation with the president\u2019s office but that of the show and the company clearly makes it a disciplinary matter. Intruding on anyone\u2019s private life unnecessarily is unpleasant invading the privacy of a figure with whom one is likely to need to work in the future is professional stupidity. On both of these grounds, this particular intrusion was unnecessary. This has nothing to do with Aristegui\u2019s freedom of speech and everything to do with Caldero\u0301n\u2019s right to privacyii. i Booth, William, \u2018Respected Mexican journalist fired for addressing Calderon drinking rumor\u2019, Washington Post, 11 February 2011 ii Fox news website. Mexican president denies rumoured drinking problems. 10 February 2011.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The journalist in question failed to produce any evidence that this affected Calder\u00f3n\u2019s job performance.\n","id":"2caf1998-b76e-41fc-ad77-74804840aade"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt the metric system of units<|ARGUMENT|>There are all of three countries in the entire world who are not officially on the Metric system: Myanmar, Liberia, and the USA.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Metric units would ease trade with other nations since nearly all other countries use the metric system.\n","id":"330087bf-af03-4827-a89f-e13b885e5020"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are a number of reasons I believe that the Iraq war was justified at the time, and I think it is especially relevant now with many presidential candidates coming out saying they were either against the war at the time or now realize it was a mistake. I also realize that, as the saying goes, hindsight is 20 20, so my point is that, with the information available to the US at the time of the invasion, the Iraq war was logical. Knowing now that they did not have WMDs, it is much easier to argue that the war was unnecessary, but if there were any chance in the matter I would argue that an invasion makes sense. One of the primary goals of the operation was to remove Saddam Hussein from power, arguably one of the most evil dictators the earth has seen in years and far worse than al Assad in Syria and others from the Middle East in terms of killing more civilians and general suffering. Although it is complete speculation, one can only imagine what the country would have looked like if Hussein were still in power during the Arab spring and there was any sort of uprising it would likely look far worse than Syria right now. Hussein also blatantly violated international law through his sponsorship of terrorism, and the US could simply let him to continue thriving. Someone needed to step up and stop him, and the US, considering reasons I will post later on, was the right choice. The US did restore peace to the region, and the era between Hussein and ISIS, where we are now, saw lower violence and a far better quality of life for the Iraq people. One can point to any variety of factors for the emergence of ISIS, but I would argue that you cannot blame only the Iraq war, and it is at least partially on Obama for pulling American troops too early and ignoring the warning signs. Lastly, the US could not, and still cannot, afford to have any uncertainty when it comes to weapons of mass destructions. After 9 11, US fear and discomfort was, quite justly, at an all time high, and if there was even the slightest chance that Hussein had WMDs, it was the right thing to do for the US to intervene. I would rather have fought a ten year war, lost ~4500 American soldiers, and spent trillions of dollars only to find that they didn't have WMDs instead of not going to war and having a nuclear weapon hit American soil, killing millions. In this case, it truly was better to be safe than sorry. Obviously now, knowing that there were no WMDs and knowing that ISIS emerged from the wreckage, it is easy to come out as against the war however, I still believe that, at the time, going to war was the right thing to do. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Iraq War wasn't a bad idea at the time and gets far too much criticism.\n","id":"7cb2836e-512a-4d4c-b658-d9b291919acb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Men should be able to take a stand in the abortion debate<|ARGUMENT|>Allowing abortion would allow women to choose not to give their body over to major physical changes, pains, and significant dangers. A man arguing that a woman must carry a fetus to term is arguing that all the risks and costs be put onto her without accepting any onto himself. It could be considered that he is advocating slavery. Merriam-Webster dictionary: 'slavery' means 'submission to a dominating influence.' Oxford dictionary, slave: 'A person who is excessively.controlled.'<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a difference between offering one's opinion in a debate, and enforcing one's views on others against their will. If women view anti-abortion laws as an involuntary interference with their bodily autonomy by men, then men should be limited to giving their opinion but barred from voting.\n","id":"4ccc3313-7742-4287-9e5a-441ebba82b2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alcohol, just like cigarettes, negatively impacts society and public health significantly, resulting in loss of life, antisocial behavior, and many other ills at no social benefit. In countries with public healthcare systems, alcohol usage contributes to higher overall strain on said systems and the available resources, just as cigarettes do. Alcohol is addictive and damaging, and is sometimes considered a factor in perpetutating antisocial behavior including but not limited to sexual assault, drunk driving and domestic abuse. Thus, advertising encouraging consumption of alcohol should be banned to limit consumption and harm caused by said consumption.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alcohol advertising shouldn't be legal\n","id":"72b68506-a015-48c5-b90f-43d5e1f2bf76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>In the election to become Virginia's Governor, the centre-left candidate not only beat the more liberal insurgent in the primary, but decisively won the Governorship as well. Voters clearly preferred the moderate Democratic candidate over the more liberal one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Democratic Party which is exceedingly far left will have a hard time getting its candidates elected if they continue to alienate parts of the electorate.\n","id":"831fa833-26a2-4146-8723-b322a2b456ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>After 1865, America entered a long period of sustained industrial growth as people flocked to the northern cities. This provoked tensions between the UK and the USA as the UK dominated global trade and sought to limit the economic potential of the US as America had by far the largest industrial base in the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Other political forces especially the USA, China and Russia will dislike the formation of a new \"world power\", thus the unification of the EU will lead to exterior conflict.\n","id":"92ab6a34-f45d-4e5a-b80d-5efce43ba92f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural appropriation wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Cultures are not static, and don't live in isolation. Every known culture in history is a mix, and an \"appropriation\" of other cultures ideas and traditions. Every culture is build and developed on the funding stones of other cultures. Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cultures evolve over time by absorbing desirable elements from other cultures and shedding undesirable elements from their own.\n","id":"add724d9-5409-4cda-93aa-4bb56892f7ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Depending on which witness is describing the golden plates and when, the purported dimension of each leaf ranges from 16 by 10 inches to less than 7 by 5 inches.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Descriptions of the golden plates by those who said they saw them are inconsistent.\n","id":"c0ad813a-c525-4bdd-884d-7029dad60f96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Taxation schemes should meet several principles, of which two are particularly relevant for the question whether air travel should be higher taxed. The first principle is to make sure there is no unfair advantage in competition between one firm or sector and another firm or sector. Right now, air travel companies are grossly and unfairly advantaged over firms that offer transportation via other means trains, busses, etc, since there is no taxation on the kerosene used by flights. This makes it very hard for e.g. trains to compete with airplanes. The second principle is to make the polluter pay. All sorts of motorized travel cause pollution, but for the sake of the argument let me focus on the emissions of greenhouse gasses, which are a main source of climate change. Airline passengers do not pay for the damage they cause by emitting greenhouse gasses. Since everyone, independent of where they are situated on the political landscape believes that the polluter should pay, we should increase the price of transport by air of people and goods so as to reflect that pollution. However, it is extremely hard for one country within Europe to implement these measures. Their aviation industries would be hit hard, since the traffic would move to the nearby cheaper country. Therefore, the European Union must make sure that all its member states work together to implement the same taxation scheme on air travel. This will lead to price increases in all flights arriving in or departing in Europe, and hence won\u2019t harm the individual aviation industries. The aims of this proposal are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and create economic fairness between different transport industries. The aim is not to generate maximal tax revenue. The precise tax design should be constructed in such a way to meet those aims.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union should institute high taxation on air travel in all member states\n","id":"e3df12d5-9ac9-4718-819c-3e0f429e6f4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>When a Spanish court ordered the Osborne bullboards removed, there was major public outcry by those who feared a loss of identity Brandes, p. 782<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Osborne bull illustrates the importance of the bull in Spanish culture.\n","id":"53d3d955-0e4c-48bb-af33-5bb9164343d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Typically, bail amounts and fines are determined by the severity of the offense committed. I believe that the monetary amount should be based on that specific person's level of wealth. Jail sentences are a legal punishment based on time. Since time is universally equal for all people, a jail sentence should be the same regardless of wealth. However, monetary punishments are not equal. Based on the accusee's level of wealth, the punishment will have varying impacts on their lives. I believe that a system of fines based on income or net worth would be more equitable.The fine should be structured as a percentage of yearly income, or in the case of individuals with no income, as a percentage of net worth. If the percentage results in an amount less than a set minimum, the accusee would then have to pay the minimum fine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legal monetary punishments eg. fines and bail should be based on income rates\n","id":"64294390-e832-43bc-b35c-1fc83fe0d4b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just saw a comment in r NFL where someone said they know plenty of people who have 4 6 DUIs. I know people who have tons of DUIs. Why is this allowed? In 2019, it has literally never been easier to not drink and drive. Uber, Lyft, on demand cab services, everything you could possibly need to get home safely at your fingertips, seldom costing more than 15 a ride. One DUI? Sure I'll say you made a mistake. Two? You're serious harm to those on the road, but if you're smart about it, you can take steps to make sure it doesn't happen. 3 or more? That's a pattern. You clearly accept the risks every time and don't care about others on the road. You are a hazard and are lucky not to kill someone. There is absolutely no excuse for someone to be a constantly repeating DUI offender. This is in regards to the national standard .08 BAC, I know some other states have other punishments such as DWI, DWAI, etc., that typically carry a lower punishment and lower BAC level normally .05 IIRC .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you have more than 2 DUIs 3 or more, you should no longer be able to drive.\n","id":"bde3ee82-338d-4e8c-8b77-58431ff9c0f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>recognise Kosovo as an independent state.<|ARGUMENT|>The present fact of a distinct, Kosovo-Albanian people living in Kosovo must take precedence over any traditional, religious or historical claim to Serbian sovereignty over that land. It is certainly true that Kosovo is historically and culturally important to Serbia. It has a particular significance for the Orthodox faith. However, consider the following analogy. Great Britain is, officially, a Christian country. This fact gives the British no valid territorial claim to sovereignty over Bethlehem the literal birth-place of Christianity, particularly when there are people already living in the area. Historico-religious, traditional associations with a place can never override the rights of an indigenous population to remain in possession of its land and sovereignty. There are clear, historical precedents for granting Kosovo independence. These precedents can be seen regionally in the post-communist independence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, as well as of the Baltic Republics. Globally, one can see precedents in the struggle of African countries for independence from European colonial rule. The relative proximity of Serbia to Kosovo in no way makes the situation dissimilar to the struggles of India against British rule - the British would not be content to be ruled by France just because the two countries are neighbours.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The popular sovereignty of the Kosovan people must take precedence over other considerations\n","id":"2e246edc-97f8-4ef8-aa28-332a9e10967d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don\u2019t know why but it really irks me when students in high school or college claim to have held such positions on their resumes when all they\u2019ve done is just started a small business. It just screams arrogance and dishonesty to me. I think putting titles such as founder, managing director, etc. is fine but putting a c level position is pushing it. My peers seem to argue otherwise so I\u2019m not sure if my understanding of what being \u201cc level\u201d means is flawed. Don\u2019t you need to have a certain amount of employees or have company stock in order to claim such a position? My understanding of the business world is very limited. I\u2019m just annoyed of constantly looking over these kinds of resumes and I\u2019m really tempted to reject them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People usually students who found\/co-found startups or small businesses are deliberating lying on their resumes when they claim to hold C-level executive positions CEO, COO.\n","id":"156c0896-279a-42f5-8328-fe61315f7d3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Not Have Pulled Out of the Iran Deal.<|ARGUMENT|>North Korea's hand has been forced regarding nuclear disarmament due to the collapse of its primary testing site It is therefore likely to accept a peace and disarmament deal even if it has some doubts about US credibility because it has little other option.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump's agreement with Kim Jong Un concerns a completely different situation than the Iran deal.\n","id":"8c25b540-41e4-4375-bc84-39bb70fe179e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems every few days I see some poor person on the news who has lost a ton of money through a scam. but it seemed so genuine is normally the tagline, but to anyone with half a brain it clearly was a scam. 10 years ago, maybe, but nowadays its so well publicised that people pull this stuff that I've lost all sympathy for the scamees. If you hand your details to a random man at the door or on the phone, you deserve to lose every penny. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe taking money from the stupid and ignorant should not be a crime.\n","id":"43082487-7a36-40a6-8b2a-c2d2ce005970"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Countries are like houses. You don't pick the house you are born into. You don't pick your parents, or your siblings. You don't get along with everybody in your house. But your house is your house and 1 Either you are mostly comfortable with the way things are. The people, the resources, the space, the rules 2 You are not comfortable with the way things are If 1 then great The home unit encourages the collective success and cooperation of its inhabitants because otherwise, you fall apart. It is the place you grew up in, that helped shape you into someone you are comfortable with and that pride is natural and earned. If 2 then great The compartmental nature of the home unit facilitates and amplifies individual action to effect change. First on the home and then perhaps on the larger community. It is smart to start off at home where a collective understanding of the modes of communication, and of the rules and ways of appeal has developed in intimate proximity with those you want to help. Essentially, your house can be an effective incubator for ideas that may benefit the larger community and the confidence, experience and ability gained from first mastering the challenges of your home will be extremely valuable when you wish to take your ideas to other homes in the community. Other homes in the community with rules, modes of communication and a way of doing things all their own. When people are congregated into different homes within a larger community it facilitates every kind of diversity while also allowing for the kind of trust and peace that can be enjoyed by neighbors who may not want to do things exactly as you do but admire you for your confidence of your home, your earned pride in your home, the love and understanding shared between your housemates. And that's my bit on why countries and international community of countries is preferable to the increasingly popular idea of a world without borders and a world that looks down on patriotism. EDIT This was a lot of fun and a lot of you came with some great arguments. No one got aggressive, every comment I replied to was civil. This is my first post on this sub and honestly, I'm impressed with the fact that it didn't descend into the usual reddit habit of condescending name calling and etc. At least I didn't get any of that directed to my inbox, for the rest of the thread I can't say. I'm a pretty busy person and, for the most part, just a casual user of reddit these days and I don't think I'll have time to get every message in my inbox so unfortunately, the conversation must go on without me. If I can't respond to every message, I won't do any. I can't award any Deltas because though there were a lot of good arguments, no one changed my view. I think most posts fell into this pitfall assuming that borders precluded immigration or assuming that I am anti immigration. Neither is true. I'm not even against illegal immigration. But anyway, this thread makes me just a little bit more proud of my country. Bye folks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Patriotism is good, and countries - with borders - are still necessary.\n","id":"47964753-bfa3-41c5-aab7-acca9c440f30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know the title might seem too strong, and I am not here to talk about who's right or wrong in the Palestine Israel conflict. I do realize also that Israel doesn't take all the political decisions the US takes. Also, I do not believe in any conspiracy theory. That being said, here's why I think Israel controls the US, and the United States can never do anything against Israel. First of all, there's the military and financial aid that the United States send to Israel no matter the circumstances. I know that the US offers money to many countries to purchase military equipment, food, gas, etc. but these countries are generally 'third world countries' that need this money. Furthermore, the money is primarily used to buy from the US. On the other hand, not only Israel certainly can buy what it needs without any US aid, but they don't use the money exclusively in the American market as other countries do. The fact that despite the current economic crisis in the United States budget cuts, etc. , a check of 225M gets written so fast is a perfect illustration of my point. I also read that the average American taxpayer gives more money to the Israeli government money taken from his taxes then the average Israeli citizen. My second point is the fact that Israel doesn't seem to give a fuck about its actions and whatever the US thinks. Israeli politicians are even hostile towards the US when they do not back their actions at 100 . Recently, Netanyahu attacked the US when they condemned the war that is going. The US didn't even condemn Israel directly, yet he attacked them, even if the US is his biggest ally. He doesn't give a shit about a friendly country, just takes the money from them and tells them to shut up whenever they say anything. This gives the impression that he knows the US is in his pocket. Third, which sort of continues from my second point, is all the betrayals that the US has been victim of from Israel, yet never takes measures against them. Examples of this include military equipment given by the US that Israel sells to China and Iran when the US specifically asks not to. Strategic and secret informations about the US being shared with Russia and collaboration with them. The point here being that the US never did anything against Israel, while Israel betrays the United States repetitively with absolutely no sanction, or even a word on this from the US. Forth, there's the intelligence 'collaboration'. I read many articles saying that the NSA sends copies of recorded calls private informations etc. to the Israeli secret services, even about its own citizens. On the other hand, Israel doesn't reciprocate, yet still intercepts American politician's calls. I know the US also do this to other countries, but never against Israel. Also, whenever a country was made aware of this Germany, or France for instance , they immediately condemned their actions. Which the US never did against Israel. Finally, Israel has never done anything for the US. What I mean by this is that Israel and the US are not 'friends', because if they were, they would help each other. Israel doesn't help the US, just gets a lot of help and backing from them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel controls the US\n","id":"173e7be6-bd17-4a17-b13b-ca0725f8bf1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that people can be naturaly transgender or gay but I have never understood how someone could think that they do not have a gender. I feel like non binary people are either more masculine or feminine compared to other members of their gender so they may feel uncomfortable in that group leading them to define them selves as non binary . Keep in mind that I am quite liberal when it comes to other social issues but I don't under stand how someone can claim that they have no gender and that we are supposed to believe them. So I am interested in what is known about this issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is impossible to be non-binary\n","id":"110ce056-cb22-4382-992c-4dbe1cae45b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Genealogy Databases Be Available to Law Enforcement to Solve Crimes?<|ARGUMENT|>Law enforcement is already struggling to properly interpret DNA samples, which in some cases has lead to innocent civilians being wrongfully convicted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DNA Handling by for profit genealogy companies is subject to error, tampering and misinterpretation.\n","id":"faf14c45-02dc-4e8e-8bc1-c5078162b29d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>The economic system is a great example. Resources for making products are taken away from those who originally have it and also produce negative consequences for all in return like, but not limited to, climate change. If we go to Mars, then both Earthlings and Martians should benefits, as a win-win situation, not a win-lose one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Considering morals allows one to consider that resources should not be over allocated to one cause or another. Solving the issue of poverty is an important cause\n","id":"ac1c9a05-30ac-470e-bbd2-c6e8663fc97a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I think we first need to define the state A state is any centralised structure that has a defined territory though possibly disputed with other states within the borders of which it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. I believe that a social structure is only ligitimate if it advances the desires of many of the people in it while not interfering with those of others This structure is nessecarily oppressive to at least parts of its population and thus makes equality and freedom impossible. Which is why I oppose it. Now, lets just go over the most common argument for the state and why I think it is bogus. This arguement is that without the state and its police force, we would be killing each other, and that the power of the state in form of the police prevents this. My response to this would be that 1 the police don't prevent all killings and kill other people themselfes, 2 we don't have any data to support this, as the times one might argue the state was abscent or had no controll, this has only been true for the state one expected there, and the structures that sprung up resembeled states in their own right. Edit missed a word and a few typos.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the state is illigitimate\n","id":"a294a4e0-54a8-44f0-a8a1-f8e8e5167543"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Compassionate capitalism\" movements are simply individuals trying to look good or ease their guilt at profiting from an exploitative system, and do not meaningfully help those who are exploited.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as being an ethical consumer in global capitalist trade.\n","id":"5e301472-2326-4939-b2ed-8eb5202596ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should use of disposable items be limited?<|ARGUMENT|>If nothing is done to stop our disposal of plastic waste, by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would cut the amount of pollution down by a significant amount.\n","id":"1e5e4ed4-8fe8-42be-8b83-03232e52c8ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like this topic has been posted before, but i didn't find it in a search and It's not in popular topics. Essentially the argument is this Women are more risky employees because they can have children. The market will adjust their wage to account for that. In some industries, generally those closer to minimum wage, extensive training isn't required so losing a woman to maternity leave or choosing to care for her child isn't a problem. In very important industries or positions, like bankers or CEOs, where a lot of training is required, and selection of a position is difficult, the higher chance of a woman leaving means that there must be less salary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That the wage gap is primarily the fault of the market, and we shouldn't interfere.\n","id":"8dc4694f-d26d-4bc6-88f4-3b880519f519"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should China cease attempts to infringe on the 'one country, two systems' policy in Hong Kong?<|ARGUMENT|>Regarding bond trading, Hong Kong provides much more control to mainland Chinese companies by giving them leverage over submitting officially required information, allowing these companies to surpass many documentation and bureaucratic procedures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Hong Kong, offshore investors hold 2.02 trillion yuan $286.04 billion worth of Chinese inter-bank market bonds as of July 2019.\n","id":"13f3ebfd-89e4-4782-9e04-9e24de80cb72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What follows is a comment I just made on a story about a girl who got kicked out of prom for wearing jeans. Most of the commenters seemed to believe that while the method in which the dismissal was handled was wrong, it is reasonable to expect people not to wear jeans to an event like a prom. I'm not interested so much in the intricacies of that event as the concept of respectable clothes in general. However, I wrote out the basic outline of my ideas in that comment, and thus I am including it below. gt I know this is a very unpopular position on reddit for whatever reason, but I firmly believe that dress standards are inane. They're tied to an anachronistic sense of respectability that goes with formal manners that we don't expect people to follow anymore. There is no inherent reason why wearing a dress dress pants should be more formal or respectable than wearing jeans. Just think about it, why are dress pants considered more formal than jeans? The only possible answers that I can think of are a they're more expensive, b they're worn less frequently, c they're considered more attractive. If the reason is a, trying to enforce a dress code is somewhat classist. If it's b, it's simply silly. If it's c, a dress code is an expectation that people objectify themselves to some degree. Thanks for your time<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea of classy versus trashy clothes is anachronistic and wrong.\n","id":"0d2d3656-e94b-4410-a14d-e048b420a897"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The first article doesn't really support my position, as it provides 3 more possible explanations for the correlation, while the second one has a very strong stance, so make of them what you would. My view is not based on them, but more of a 'belief' through my observation, so no point would be given for argument about the articles, they are just supporting. x200B You can actually split my view into 2 parts environmental problems are resulted by population growth and the population growth is not being tackled because of greed, you could address one without the other. x200B For the first part, I'm just gonna be lazy and copy from the first article although it doesn't come with a strong conviction Population causes CO2. This is \u2018obvious\u2019 explanation that most people would give. The more people there are on our planet, the more CO2 generating activities there will be, such as electrical power generation, industrial activity, automobiles, cooking fires, and so on. Second part greed. A shrinking population would mean a shrinking wallet for the corporations a maintained population would mean no record turnover and profit of course it's still possible, just harder , meaning no soaring share price, again, a shrinking wallet relatively. Therefore it should not be surprising that while corporations pledge to reduce their CO2 emission, you have never heard about them addressing the population problem. If you thought I was merely gonna criticize the corporations the greed doesn't only lie in the corporations and the people behind them. We had and still have conservatism that prohibits contraception for various reasons, chief among them is so we can go to a place no one is proven to have ever been and then return safely. No longer do we want to subject ourselves to the daily physical slug that might weaken us and shorten our life span just to grow our own food. We want to taste food from the other side of the planet, even if they are not native to our diet and sometimes even causes allergy, either by having them delivered to our doorstep or being there physically and there's that too . All those are just a few examples of greed to be immortal, to have a less physically daunting hence 'easier' life, to Live Life^ TM . as in human as a species, generally, there is no way everyone of us could have lived from 1800 till now, when the population booms from 1 bil to 7.6 bil. I do not wish to discuss the solution because that in itself deserve another discussion. Also it's because frankly I do not know how to solve it, but I believe not having any solutions to a problem identified doesn't mean that problem is not a real problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Global environmental problems are ultimately resulted by greed via population growth.\n","id":"d1e42bf2-3fcc-4597-8f88-7131958550ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This basically sums up my statement. I feel as though schools hand out too many A grades, and that grade inflation is one of the largest problems with our US education system. Students are coddled and aren't prepared for when grades don't exist and their jobs are at stake. I am a firm believer in not being a helicopter parent, and I believe that the amount of reward for work done in classrooms today is too high. A longer search on the web might help further my point, but above is what I have found in a short bit of looking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Schools give out too many A grades.\n","id":"49799a9a-965c-488b-a218-7342fc1fda25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The Date of Australia Day Be Changed?<|ARGUMENT|>On May 9th, 1901 various colonies in Australia joined together to form a federation. This can be celebrated instead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are other dates, which are equally important in founding modern Australia, that could instead be celebrated.\n","id":"16cc5d79-1c3f-4387-aacd-42ba5cc41a86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>It is too divisive in modern day America to continue to display these monuments from a painful part of American history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US should remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces.\n","id":"305276ae-0244-4de5-a394-78713c6b99b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this sounds like im trying to make myself look good, but I genuinely am not. I've been struggling with finding meaning in my life and why bother with all of this. Probably it's cause I have good parents and don't have much to worry about And I've been through assumptions like if I get this then I'll be happy, no, this, no, that. But all of them disappoint at the point of achievement. Plus the impermanence of life. Plus all the struggles. Plus good emotions from artificial things feel less and less good the more you abuse stuff like food, sex etc for pleasure. And this assumption about goodness seems obvious now. I've been convinced of this by professor Jordan Peterson mostly. Or am I brainwashed to work for the system which I consider fine? Or something else im missing? x200B Edit Thanks for all the replies. About how do I define good. I do not have a clear definition of good, I mostly rely on my internal compass which I think all humans have, emotions and as much as possible on rationality. And on good as far away as possible from evil the horrors of soviet union, concentration camps, enjoyment of other's suffreing. I do not think I will make the right call of wheather my actions are towards the good or not. I may make mistakes and I'll try to correct them. Some markers of good honesty, courage, continual striving towards improvement. Some mistakes volunteering whole life may make less good impact than working half of the life and then like Bill Gates getting into charity so thats not continual volunteering is not what I mean by good.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The most important thing in life is to try your hardest be a good person. in a moral\/religious sense\n","id":"3350c271-301a-440b-835f-3371d69e534c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think society has very high expectations as far as what makes the perfect woman, but I believe that eating disorders generally arise due to an extreme desire to be in control, and the majority of women aren't harmed by Barbie's example because I don't think very many people consider her to be the ideal beauty or consider her to be anything othrr than a doll. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think Barbie contributes to the prevalence of eating disorders. Cmv\n","id":"6f954934-861d-4c60-9b1f-ac3092c4433c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm speaking about America specifically because that's where I'm from. The African American community is by and large Christian here. A lot of this has to do from their slave owners being Christian and not from them being Christian in their native countries before being forcibly sold off. The Christian slave owners used the scriptures to support their claim of being able to own slaves. Ephesians 6 5 Titus 2 9 specifically. So I firmly believe that a people subjugated with the approval of the Bible shouldn't worship the god of their oppressors. EDIT To clarify my statement which may seem inflammatory I firmly believe that a people subjugated with the approval of the Bible shouldn't worship the god of their oppressors. I used the word should simply because it is MY view. I do not believe in dictating to others what they should believe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black people shouldn't be Christians.\n","id":"1ee67a25-cbbb-44da-a2e4-38d302e2e44e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the European Union intervene in the political conflict in Catalonia?<|ARGUMENT|>Europe should never meddle in internal political affairs. It is because it does so that skepticism is growing. People want their country to be able to say no to European politics without paying consequences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A political intervention by the EU would be viewed as an imposition against the sovereignty of a member state.\n","id":"ba227a5f-b405-4200-9a3a-374a9f827b6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will man-made climate change cause human extinction?<|ARGUMENT|>During the last 12,000 years, scientists have recorded 1,359 plant and animal extinctions. Meanwhile, humans have relocated 891 plant and animal species, and domesticated 743\u2014for a total of 1,634 species.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans have also been responsible for preserving and creating new animal species.\n","id":"2ac4fb69-825c-45b7-9941-cd3af0f3d2e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd like to preface this by saying that I live in France, Paris more precisely, I've met and known a lot of Muslims. I don't tolerate people who actively believe that gays, jews and infidels should be punished for who they are. I have a problem with the ideology associated with Islam which is Wahhabism. Which is the most popular of the Islamic ideologies. Which believes that Sharia Law supercedes civil laws of western countries. I do not hate Arabs, or Muslims for that matter, I just don't like their sexist, racist, homophobic and xenophobic ideology. I believe that the fact that I have to bubble wrap any thing negative I say about Islam is an issue. That people immediately take the defense of a religion that is actively opposed to everything that left leaning people believe in. I'm not religious, so I see Christian and jewish fundementalists the same way. I should not have to apologize to religious extremists when I criticise their beliefs and ideology. EDIT Wow 80 dead in Nice<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that Islam is a dangerous religion and most of their followers beliefs contrast to those of western civilization\n","id":"d7be5a38-97fc-4c14-a0de-a08a61ab1087"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The Hanafi school is flexible on abortion. It specifies that before the fourth month of pregnancy, an abortion may be induced if a woman's pregnancy poses a threat to the life of her already existing infant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is assumed that there exists such a thing as \"unified Islamic jurisprudence\". In reality, there are different schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and thereby different verdicts on the matter of abortion.\n","id":"be8219b6-6bc8-42ff-b9d8-423569f9b18a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Citizens United Was Wrongly Decided<|ARGUMENT|>Voting is a mechanism to measure the opinion of the population, and it cannot work effectively unless everyone's opinion is weighted exactly equally. Thus it is unique among forms of speech in that it must be exactly calibrated: it will not work unless everyone has a single vote. No other form of speech needs to be calibrated in the same way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voting is a unique form of speech which is distinct from all others.\n","id":"39e61041-ce88-443f-95cd-de4eeefc418e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Nuclear energy<|ARGUMENT|>Michael Levi, Council on Foreign Relations Fellow for Science and Technology. \"Wasted Energy\". CFR.org. April 18th, 2006 - \"Moore turns to the question of whether nuclear power can be diverted to make nuclear weapons, and to his credit calls it 'the most serious issue associated with nuclear energy.' But he then proceeds to treat it unseriously. He notes that 'If we banned everything that can be used to kill people, we would never have harnessed fire.' That\u2019s true, but the question here isn\u2019t whether nuclear power is dangerous; it\u2019s whether the dangers associated with it outweigh the benefits it entails. Simply because fire had greater potential for good than harm does not mean that the same is true for nuclear power.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The benefits of nuclear energy are outweighed by weapons-use risks\n","id":"30ea1ae7-143e-4764-8203-10695c7efeb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion provides a reassuring answer to the great questions of life, such as the meaning of life, post-mortem life, and solutions to our problems such as suffering, injustice, fear of death, and therefore natural necessity for mankind, thus arose independently in different cultures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions emerged as an evolutionary adaptation. They spread the adoption of behaviors that provided evolutionary advantages.\n","id":"97dcf443-728e-41a7-9057-0d789e64830d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>There's a famous joke about a so-called Libertarian who indignantly exclaimed: \"I want the government to keep its hands off my Medicare!\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Americans have come to demand and expect that certain government programs will stay in place.\n","id":"1b0b1aa4-579c-4e0f-8d84-89413ed20959"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would not even know about Flat Earthers if it were not for seeing refutations in the form of videos, memes, forum posts pop up in the Web places I regularly visit. I have never seen read heard any individual actually promote the flat Earth theory. I have only seen the complaints and refutations of the idea. I have never met a person who claims to believe in a flat Earth, but I have met many people who refer to in derision Flat Earthers. Now, granted, I have never sought out Flat Earthers or the flat Earth idea. But then I have also never sought out the refutations. Yet the refutations pop up in front of me all the time, whereas the promotions have never found their way onto my screens. I know what I know about this idea only because of the people pointing out how dumb it is. It's to the point that it makes me wonder if the flat Earth thing is actually really believed by anyone , or if the whole thing is just a meme gag everyone likes playing along with. Maybe there was one or a handful of weird people on the far fringe of society originally mentioning this idea, and then the Internet ridicule megaphone spread knowledge that the idea existed far beyond who would ever believe them. Sort of like how some news outlets make the latest dangerous teen trend into some mass hysteria over something that never was more than one or two cases or even zero cases . As for what would convince me to change my view that Flat Earthers are more than just a silly meme Show me evidence reliable sources of Real World organizations, and or communities where real, serious people not just a few individual nuts stand up out to openly promote support espouse this belief. I'm not amenable to accept pointers to online only communities sites because it's too easy for those to be just jokes gags pranks I mean, The Onion, the First United Church of Cthulhu, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster all have communities on the Web, and I expect we all understand those aren't real even though some people sometimes fall for an Onion article . Note By believed by anyone , I mean believed by a notably sizable group that aren't obviously mentally ill deranged. For instance, I know there were people who actually believed in The Evolutionary Level Above Human TELAH , but there were only a few dozen people in the Heaven's Gate cult hardly a movement. Edit2 I have a lot to read and watch. I've given a couple of deltas for convincing me the flat Earth idea is actually believed by a sizable number of people. I may give more over the next day or so as I get time to go through everyone's comments and links. Edit1 Fixed a couple of typos.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Flat Earth is more a meme\/gag than an actual belief supported by a community of serious people\n","id":"532ed1ac-ec2d-40be-968a-36e759eb834f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just to clarify, I know HBO isn't network television, but it's the easiest term to use. Okay, So I know the Home Box Office is most popular for having great movies that come out the 2nd quickest to TV of any expanded movie channel behind Starz. I'm like 99 sure of this, someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong , but I think their television shows are even more of a reason to subscribe. For some clarity, my favorite drama of all time is Breaking Bad, which is an AMC show. Sons of Anarchy is really high up there, and that's on FX. I used to really enjoy Dexter before the latter seasons went downhill, and it's on ShowTime. The only two drama's I've ever really been into on HBO were The Wire after it aired , and Game of Thrones currently, but damn are they good shows. Another thing that sets HBO apart for me are the shows like Real Time w Bill Maher, Last Week Tonight w John Oliver, and Veep. Many people love to mix satire and politics, and many people love television shows as well. To get them together is a great experience, and I'm not aware of any other networks that have such a broad range of different shows. Every month there is a spotlighted documentary as well that is very very well done. I haven't seen a boring one in a long time. HBO also doesn't have commercials, which makes it far better than FX and AMC in that regard. It makes it far easier to stay into your program, and while ShowTime is the same way, I don't think the selection of shows is on par with HBO. Someone else please point out some great underrated shows that I could be missing out on, and  on which network is the best choice for viewing them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"HBO is the best network for television shows.\n","id":"1317f732-60c2-4702-8dba-88e873e81f22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The recent progress or whatever you might call it of human science and engineering is pushing the human civilisation over the edge of existing in 100 years. We not only destroy our planet in every way imaginable we are proud of it. Droughts and floods will make large parts of the world uninhabitable. The usage of fossil fuels will heaten up the earth that parts of world are sunk goodby pacific islands . Excessive usage of vaccancies on our food objects is building up restistent viruses we dont have cures against. I dont mean to say that there will be no humans left. Im just worried that civilisation as we have it rigth now will stop at some point. I am feared of mass extinction of humans like we are doing with animals right now. Automatisation will make a huge portion of human labor obsolete even faster. If we dont find ways as a society to cope with extrem high jobless rates we will face rebellions and revolutions like last seen in the 18. century.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe this is the last century with humans civilisation on earth if we continue our \"progress\"\n","id":"c13ff777-c5b6-44b4-8fb7-4af2e4417ad3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The US Constitution was written in the late 18th century and ratified by the Founding Fathers of our country. Since then, it has remained the supreme law of the land. Laws and government actions that violate the principles of the Constitution can be overturned by the Supreme Court. When the Constitution was ratified, the United States of America had existed for less than a few decades and still didn't spread West of the Appalachian Mountains. The ratifiers of the Constitution would be absolutely shocked to see the way our country looked today. Obviously many things have changed, including expanded globalization, technological advances, and insane differences in the economy. Because of these differences, many parts of the Constitution are not directly applicable to modern society and many parts of society have no guiding principle within the Constitution. For interpreting the Constitution, we rely on the Supreme Court, a life appointed panel of judges who are tasked with interpreting the document's meaning to a variety of issues. Despite the fact that these justices have spent their entire career in the law, they are oftentimes unable to come to a consensus on a decision, making split decisions a common occurrence. As the Constitution can't be directly applied to most cases, we rely on the interpretation of others who frequently are biased by their own personal opinions regarding cases. Whether the solution involves writing a new Constitution or just eliminating the current one and replacing it with a totally different concept, I believe there are several ways to improve this situation as a country and that the status quo is broken. . EDIT I think I did a poor job phrasing my opinion here. My main issue is the absolute pre eminence that the Constitution has in society. We shouldn't be revoking laws that have been approved by the legislature and have popular support due to the Court's interpretation of the Constitution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Basing US laws on the Constitution is an outdated model that has the potential to hold us back as a country.\n","id":"3607fed3-cd97-4813-bd5c-e8e236abb8c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've had a college checking account since I've been 17 still have it 6 years later. I used to bitch at them for overdraft fees and other fees. Then I realized banks penalize when you can't manage your finances. Keep yourself in check, have some money laying in your account, you won't ever get charged. If I do happen to go into negative, I have three whole days at least, sometimes its up to a week before I get an overdraft fee. Furthermore, BoA is everywhere. Being able to deposit cash at ATMs. Withdrawing money takes about 8 seconds after mastering the ATM software. PIN gt FAST CASH gt 20 gt Instant dispense, snag and walk away, no receipt preset option . Good customer service if you know how to talk to people and how to human. I get a lot of southern ladies when I all CS, love them, they're all so sweet. If I don't have enough money in my account my card gets declined no overdraft fee. Awesome app, can deposit checks instantly via picture. Checks usually clear instantly like this for whole amount even after 8pm on Sunday<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bank of America is alright. I am satisfied with their service and have served my needs as a college student.\n","id":"d555bec2-aecd-4dec-a140-f3bcdd2b939a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people rely on money to survive?<|ARGUMENT|>Money not love makes the world go around. Money is a most useful commodity with which to pay the bills.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Money allows tasks to be done that normally wouldn't move forward without money.\n","id":"a1a5a091-31f8-4c11-a10e-29f3fe61f78b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Meat has high renal acid levels which the body must neutralize by leaching calcium from the bones, which is then passed into urine and lost.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A meatless diet helps build healthy bones because vegetarians absorb more calcium than meat eaters.\n","id":"1e808ab9-a730-4077-925a-e03f9b78190c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A few points I'm not really a Trump supporter, so arguments based on how bad you think the President is won't really make a difference to this argument. I don't really want this descending into a Pro Anti Trump thread. Good Luck I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not arguing to the legality of releasing concealing the information. This is more of a moral discussion in my mind. My View I don't think it's moral to release every sordid detail of an investigation that came to the conclusion that not only were there no indictments necessary pertaining to the focus of the investigation collusion , but not even one indictment for any kind of process crime by the main players. I know that there were some other charges filed against Manafort, et al. but AFAIK, they were related to previous crimes or other things not really pertaining to the stated point of the investigation. Think about it this way, what if you were investigated for a crime you didn't commit and the police concluded there wasent enough evidence to charge you. But, during the investigation they discovered you were cheating on your SO, would it be right for them to release all the information they gathered even though they don't have enough evidence to warrant an indictment? I think the calls to release the entire thing are mainly politically based because the proponents of this want the political ammo that would undoubtedly come from any long investigation. And as an aside, I have no doubt that both parties arguments would change immediately if the situation were reversed. P.S. Once again, I'm not Pro Trump or Pro Republican, I just don't think I'm comfortable with the Government releasing all the personal information in an investigation weather it's a regular person or a president involved when they didn't conclude a crime was committed. Edit I'd like to add that I think when there's questions about some kind of apparent cover up in the DOJ it would be appropriate for a report to be given to a closed congressional committee because they have constitutional oversight over the process and it would protect the privacy of the people involved.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The DOJ shouldn't release the entire Mueller Report.\n","id":"58d15421-4c67-42c4-9798-545f4cd799ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the space exploration budget be increased?<|ARGUMENT|>The solution to all our problems could be out there. However, we cannot find it without exploration.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More can be known about our solar system and the Earth\n","id":"35e80488-0486-4027-94f9-0e9649e47640"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I believe that if there is no valid reason for an activity to be illegal, it should not be illegal. If an activity is outlawed, and this provides no benefit, it hurts not only the offender, who is punished, but the society that must spend resources to punish them. I believe that the burden of proof should be on those who would outlaw something keep it outlawed to provide a valid reason for why that should be outlawed. I believe that there is no reason sufficient to justify the illegality of bestiality zoophilia. I'll be listing and responding to in this post some ideas others might see as valid reasons, mostly to save top level commenters some time. reason 1 Bestiality threatens the animal's well being and should therefore be illegal. this is probably one of the most common arguments, but I believe it falls short. importantly, not all sex acts are necessarily harmful to the animal. While some CAN be harmful, these would already be illegal under animal abuse laws. it might be beneficial to add penalties to animal abuse with sexual motives, but even if it is, it could easily be accomplished without also criminalizing harmless sex acts. reason 1a Animals cannot consent to sex, therefore all bestiality is rape, and should therefore be illegal. another common one, which I'm semi lumping with 1. it is true that animals are incapable of giving legal consent to sex. I challenge, however, that the legal and moral ideas of sexual consent in humans can be copypasted onto animals in the way that those who call all bestiality rape seem to be doing. First, nobody well, not very many people care about the consent of animals in other important areas. We capture, contain, breed, sterilize, perform experiments on, give invasive medical procedures to, euthanize, and eat animals on a regular basis, and we never ask the animals for permission first. While it's true that some of those are done for the animal's own benefit, which they couldn't understand, others are done because we don't give a shit about what the animals think. This view has lots of opponents, of course, but is currently accepted by most legal systems. Why, then, should the law suddenly care about the animal's consent when it comes to sex? another distinction is that a healthy human will be able to, at some point in their lives, give consent. When they can't, it's usually because of a temporary condition, such as childhood, unconsciousness, or the effects of a mind altering substances. Consent, therefore, is usually a voluntary decision on the part of the person, and not giving consent is often implicit or explicit indication that sex is actively unwanted. Animals, however, are never able to 'give consent' in the commonway, regardless of health, age, or any other factor. However, since most species have been fucking for hundreds of millions of years, it's a safe assumption that a lack of consent doesn't always indicate that sex is unwanted. Now, I'm not saying that it's impossible for bestiality to be 'rape' in a meaningful sense animals could certainly resist and experience distress during the process. However, like physically harmful sex acts, this could and should be covered under animal abuse laws, without criminalizing instances of 'rape' where the animal is either neutral or enjoying the experience. reason 2 Bestiality threatens the zoophile's well being and should therefore be illegal. This could probably be a post in its own right, but it's my belief that mentally abled adults should not be bound by laws 'for their own good'. and, for the most part, these laws fortunately don't exist that much. it's not illegal in most places for people to jump off a cliff or drink bleach, and if that's valid I see no reason why it should be illegal to engage in dangerous activities with an animal, sexual or otherwise outside of what would be abuse, of course . reason 3 bestiality can threaten the well being of third parties, and should therefore be illegal. there are two parts to this I can think of spread of zoonoses diseases spread by animals that affect humans and harmful learned behavior of animals. Sexual activity, of course, allows for easy spread of disease. A zoophile, could easily, therefore, catch a disease form an animal and spread it to others. however, sexual contact is not the only way to transmit most diseases, which means this is another issue that could be covered by a law that also covers other possibilities without punishing 'safe' activity. another concern by some is that animals used to having sex with some individuals will harass or rape others. This is a genuine concern, but considering animals can also be deliberately trained to, say, attack and kill humans, this is once again an issue that is not unique to animal human interactions involving sex, and could be covered by other laws probably involving negligence without punishing owners of well trained animals. reason 4 Zoophilia is prohibited by X religion and should therefore be illegal Hope I don't have to with this much. seperation of church and state, I assume that's accepted by most of you. reason 4a Zoophilia is an abomination crime against nature and should therefore be illegal. whatever an 'abomination' or a 'crime against nature' is now, people ten or twenty years from now probably won't agree with you. these labels are completely arbitrary, and any support for them is usually pseudo mystical reasoning that is formulated to support existing opinions. Let nature punish crimes in her own courts, not the taxpayers'. reason 4aI zoophilia is disgusting and should therefore be outlawed basically 4a, but not as pretentious. Disgust is completely subjective and has no place in law, especially if the digusting activity is done in private. I think this covers most of them, but I'm interested to see counterarguments to my responses and other potential reasons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoophilia should not be illegal\n","id":"61efb840-3555-43cc-b87f-7b2bf34612b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Although I consider myself pro choice, the abortion debate is one political topic where I can absolutely see the opposing side and am not already in opposition to somebody claiming they're pro life contrast this to somebody who says they don't believe in climate change and I just immediately think they're wrong . While I think abortion is absolutely necessary in our society for public health and women's rights reasons, I can't just dismiss somebody who says they believe life begins at conception even if I still don't think that's a good enough reason, because bodily autonomy, but I digress . What I'm arguing is that I'm against the pro life stance, and specifically pro life politicians, because they're not doing anything to defend access to affordable healthcare, reduce abortion rates through proper sex education and contraceptive access, decrease sexual assault rates to reduce the number of children conceived abortions due to rape, increase maternal care and reduce the maternal mortality rate which the US has the highest rate of among developed countries work towards social services to care for challenged youth brought into this world that would have otherwise been aborted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The pro-life stance is terrible not because of the views of abortion, but the fact that they don't work towards any programs supported by the pro-choice movement such as sex education, affordable and accessible healthcare, and attainable contraceptives, all provided by Planned Parenthood\n","id":"9c9e61e4-34f3-4fc4-b8b0-06b9e8715e94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Schools should eliminate grades and replace them with competency based education.<|ARGUMENT|>CBE encourages students to apply learning to real-world problems rather than memorizing facts for a test.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Schools should eliminate grades and replace them with competency based education\n","id":"5e3b3a9e-fbe6-42d4-94e1-31e06e78611c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>The primary fuel for political influence is emotion, and facts are secondary or even arbitrary to the political aims of politically minded humans who create narratives to incite emotion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unlike politics, the aim of science is neither influence nor control.\n","id":"e626796e-af5f-44ed-94e4-286c163fe049"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Crimea should be a part of Russia<|ARGUMENT|>The rights of citizens of Ukrainian nationality are being suppressed today, as well as the Crimean Tatars.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Crimea would not have the right to self-determination as part of Russia.\n","id":"248adcb0-5eb5-4a63-8cf5-8c651abd0062"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Gregorian calendar is an overly complex and illogical way to mark the passage of time. In particular The months are uneven. It's confusing to have irregular fluctuations in the length of months. Only one month having 28 or 29 days? Alternating between 31 and lt 31 days, only to reverse at August? There's no reason to have a complicated calendar just because some ancient emperors had oversized egos. 365 has few factors, so a perfect division is not practical, but we can at least do better than what we have months 1 5 have 31 days, and months 6 12 have 30, for example month 6 would get Leap Day . Months do not line up with seasons. The equinoxes and solstices that define the seasons. Why have the season start 2 3 of the way through the month when they could just happen on the first or second, making that entire month in one season or close enough ? It would also keep the months as part of division hierarchy four seasons to a year, three months to a season. As a consequence of this change, the year also wouldn't start in the middle of winter. New Year's Day can be the first day of spring. Edit Based on some of the responses I've been getting, it seems like a lot of places use the term 'season' more colloquially, with summer just meaning 'when the days are longer and warmer' rather than 'the space between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. To clarify, this latter meaning is the one I've going by. Harvest, hunting, basketball, and tourist seasons are all regional, but the ones that relate to axial tilt are universal, as far as I can tell. ~~ School and financial years are misaligned with calendar years. Why have the 2014 15 school year when one could make the entire year line up with the calendar?~~ This one has been answered Financial years have no set times, and school years vary too much by region to try to align them with a universal calendar. View changed, in this respect. These are the three particular objections I have. To change my view, explain why these problems are necessary, or at least why fixing them would cause other problems apart from the practicality of adopting a new system to begin with . I am well aware that actually getting the world to adopt a new calendar is highly impractical, but such practical concerns are beside my point, so I don't intend to argue about that. I'm also not going to bother with appeals to tradition. So change my view. Edit There's been some confusion regarding my intentions here. I am well aware that the costs of switching calendars would be huge, and not worthwhile for the relatively small benefits of having a more consistent system. However, if I allowed for that consideration when constructing my post, I wouldn't have bothered to post it because my view would have already been changed. The basic question I'm interested in is this are there good reasons to have any of the inconsistencies that the Gregorian calendar currently has? If we were to make a calendar from scratch, is there any reason to have irregular months rather than regular ones? Is there any reason to have the year start in the middle of winter rather than changing at the same time as a new season? These are the parts of this that I want to hear about, not whether it can be implemented. If it helps you focus on the matter at hand, here's a rephrase I have a button that, once pressed, will retroactively switch the current calendar to one with the fixes I describe above. This change is instant, seamless, and will carry no cost apart from the effort to press the button. Convince me not to press it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Gregorian calendar should be scrapped and replaced with something more logical.\n","id":"13ba952e-a34b-48d5-9e27-d8182cf33027"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>Even more so than during The Force Awakens, Rey is skilled to an extent that is not credible or interesting, given her relative lack of training and \/ or experience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While it's laudable that women play prominent roles in the movie, the progress is undermined by the poor writing of those characters.\n","id":"5eef9e76-3e2b-4794-9178-09ecc5750e74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>If we modify God's omnipotence with his omnibenevolence, God cannot do evil. This would simply mean that God was restricted from doing evil himself by his own nature. Thus, God cannot prevent evils if the means is evil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Omnipotence may not be intended as \"God can do everything\", but that God can do anything that is not excluded from HIS logic or from HIS nature.\n","id":"ca54e380-d3e8-491e-9e25-4fcd4ef22bf3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For millions of people, sports and video games are valuable sources of entertainment. Not for me. I haven't ever been able to get interested in sports. I can sort of see why people are interested in it, because there are some cool displays of skill, but at the end of the day it just looks like a bunch of people kicking hitting a ball around a field to me. I think it might be something that you have to be raised with to get interested in it. I played video games for a few years as a teenager, but I don't play them any more and I'm not particularly interested in picking them up again. I don't mean any offense here, but it seems kind of childish to be fascinated with the flashing lights and explosions when you could be reading a book or something. My main interest is philosophy, and sometimes I read about the history of science. I like understanding why I think the way I do and I feel like that's a more valuable way of spending my time than watching sports or playing video games. I realize it's very difficult to change what someone is interested in, but I suppose what I'm looking for is some sort of compelling explanation of what you find interesting about sports or video games and why it's not just people throwing a ball around in a field or flashing lights and explosions to you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am indifferent to sports and video games.\n","id":"43904afc-0718-4f93-a312-7b839bc895bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always assumed that in the ideal world everyone would have tons of free time and would spend that time doing whatever they want. And the only reason the world isn't like that is because we haven't automated away enough stuff for that to be possible yet. But the time where we achieve that is within sight now and I keep noticing that people aren't really interested in it. They seem genuinely happy working 50hr weeks. And of the people I think might be different I ask questions to get a feel for what they really want to be doing with their lives. The questions I ask go like this If you and everyone you know was given the chance to live forever, would you say yes? And If you could do anything you like what would it be? . But the answers I get back indicate they have never really thought about anything like that. With a couple of people I waited a few months then repeated the questions to see if they had spent any time thinking about those questions afterwards. They hadn't. This combined with a bunch of other little things are making me start to think that the reason we all still spend most of our time working despite so much technological progress is because actually we like it that way. Please help me see that sheeple are just products of their environment not the other way around.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most people hate thinking and will only ever seek to follow conventional thinking\n","id":"e8ba9877-4f83-4535-9870-6206faecb1ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to first be clear by stating that I believe neither Edward Snowden nor Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for their leaks. However, if either of them were to be prosecuted, base solely on legality, Snowden's crime is significantly worse, due to the fact that it was intentional. From an ethical standpoint however, the information he provided was critical to a public debate about the potential abuses of government and he should therefore be absolved of all guilt. As for Hillary Clinton, I think there is much we don't yet know, and may very well never know about the situation. Did she consciously disseminate classified information or was it simply a matter of incompetence? How significant to national security was this information relative to the information provided by Edward Snowden? Until these questions are adequately answered, a presumption of innocence is only fair. One last point here. Clinton has said Snowden should be prosecuted, presumably for national security reasons. Many have claimed hypocrisy on her part. Obviously I disagree with her, but I also disagree with those claiming hypocrisy. She's entitled to her own opinion and unless it's proven she intentionally leaked classified information, it's just a bad opinion, not hypocrisy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's hypocritical to hail Edward Snowden as a hero while simultaneously criticizing Hillary Clinton for her e-mail leaks.\n","id":"6caae29b-009e-4c1c-9c5b-fdcaa2853149"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've long struggled with this and I'd like to here some strong arguments from the other side. I know the benefits of abortion to society, but I can't justify them simply because the net gain is positive that's opening Pandora's box to me. For me, just because a human cannot survive on it's own, doesn't mean we shouldn't protect them. Granted, I have absolutely no problem with suicide, so this isn't a religious sanctity of life issue. I simply believe that since there can be no informed decision made by the fetus, we have an obligation to protect it. It's an odd issue for me, I want to make abortion legal and easily accessible from a society standpoint, but I can't reach that position due to moral complications. So change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe a fetus has rights worth protecting.\n","id":"615c4c53-eee3-47c8-953c-c9a72b52bd3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Attachment Parenting the Best Way to Raise a Child?<|ARGUMENT|>Back in the Roman days many gave their slaves with newborn a lactating nurse, so she would become fertile again and impregnate her to make more slaves faster.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Breastfeeding acts as a natural contraceptive due to hormonal changes that result in lactational amenorrhea\n","id":"64b9732a-1184-48ac-bc36-c05f7d1e0c1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear people toss around the term 100 sure all the time. I don't see how you can be sure about anything. I realize that this idea has been reflected, most famously by Descartes, as the evil genius, but even inside of those parameters I think that being 100 sure is still impossible. I do not want to get into cogito ergo sum because many people have fought it before I mean if you ask me what my name is, I will tell you John Smith. But that's just because I've known myself as John Smith and people for as long as I can remember have been calling me John Smith. This makes my knowledge dependent on other people which makes me a hell of a lot less sure. I'm not even 100 sure that you can't be 100 sure about something <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe that anyone can be 100% sure about anything.\n","id":"e53988fe-0ada-43df-bdc1-9d35d648d4ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build an international space elevator?<|ARGUMENT|>Politically, we would be working on the social good, science, and the future, which would improve the public perception of government's role in society and also advance\/progress society as a whole as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A project of that scale would require international cooperation, making humanity work on a common goal.\n","id":"03b01a02-e93f-407e-8afc-4687351efda1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Journalists Publish Hacked Data?<|ARGUMENT|>With so much data it is easy to sneak in fake information amongst the real and harder to tell what information may have been deliberately omitted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Data dumps' often contain overwhelming amounts of information that make publishing them incredibly risky.\n","id":"65e92f9c-0a6e-4fd0-95bc-61b3078c22ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Smoking has been banned from being shown in children's shows and advertisements. The reason for this is that it's a ludicrously unhealthy habit and only encourages more people to smoke. I truly think these attempts to cut smoking out of the media helps with lowering the smoking rate. In that same vein, should we not do the same for obesity? Although yes, there a few people who have disorders that cause weight gain, the vast majority are just due to choice. Since being overweight obese is incredibly unhealthy and often causing serious issues, should we not prevent it being normalised? Especially to children and young audiences. I understand some will think this is insensitive, but I'm truly looking for other opinions. I would love to see what you guys have to say about this. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obesity should not be shown in movies\/TV shows that have a young audience, due to it normalising unhealthy lifestyles.\n","id":"a5c5fae9-6173-4ea4-8cee-98048f3c5a30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Classical theists do not believe that omnipotence was ever meant to include logical impossibilities. There is no thing which God cannot do, and logical contradictions are not truly things but inconsistent bugs in language.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Salvation requires free choice by the saved. It is definitionally impossible to force a creature to freely choose something, so God would not be able to do this.\n","id":"1fae4442-03e8-4407-bce4-75097c949fe4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>People that are under the influence of alcohol are more emotional and more agressive and have their cognitive capabilities impaired.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A big amount of violence happens under the influence of alcohol.\n","id":"546d61c1-8b9b-4fe3-a6d3-bcd5917628d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>Werner Hoyer, president of the European Investment Bank, said it was inevitable that lending to the UK would fall from recent levels of about \u00a37bn a year once it left the EU.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The macroeconomic effects and uncertainty caused by Brexit are likely to slow down infrastructure spending.\n","id":"3a2f27ed-245d-468b-bf2f-cd51e3c39767"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are cellphones safe<|ARGUMENT|>Car accidents have increased since the mobile phone boom. It is for this reason that the Government introduced a law whereby it is now illegal to drive and be on a mobile phone. This however does not stop people. People still talk on the phone whilst driving and they text. This lowers their level of concentration and puts other road users at risk. Therefore mobile phones are not only dangerous for the user, but also innocent passers by.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People succumb to their mobile and drive whilst on the phone\n","id":"0f801d87-fcad-46c0-953a-0a5a83a92efe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abolition of nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>Rogue leaders are unlikely to give WMD or nuclear weapons to terrorists if it will jeopardize the existence of their country or their grip on power. And, they are highly unlikely to trust terrorists to take measures to reduce the risk that the source of their weapons is revealed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear weapons deter rogue states from giving WMD to terrorists\n","id":"36457f37-71a3-4935-bb0a-663693195137"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019ll base my argument on Cypher\u2019s quote to Morpheus while he is unplugging people \u201cIf you'd told us the truth, we would've told you to shove that red pill right up your ass.\u201d First off, Cypher was of course evil to betray and murder his fellow shipmates in an attempt to get back into the Matrix, but other than that, he is totally right and Morpheus, while claiming to offer the truth, acts like a cult leader. He only offers up enough truth for the potential followers to make an informed decision AFTER they have made an irreversible one. Let\u2019s break it down this way, pretend you are in the universe of the Matrix, but you are free and perhaps you work on one of those ships. What are you going to do with your down time? Probably plug in to one of those training programs, like the one Mouse makes to have an intimate encounter with the woman in the red dress. You have access to a totally immersive virtual reality entertainment at your fingertips while you live in a world that is nearly literally a hell hole. Sunlight is gone, there are no plants. The surface of the planet looks like Mordor, and everyone lives cramped in some cave in the center of the earth. Luxury and creature comforts simply do not exist. You eat synthetic goop for every meal. How much time do you think you\u2019d spend in a simulated training program, perhaps one made for entertainment instead of training? This is especially enticing when your friends and family can join you, like the shared dreaming of the movie Inception. I would personally spend every waking moment of free time plugged in like that. Then suppose a race of intelligent machines comes to you and says, we can plug you into a better world all the time. You never have to leave all we ask in return is to use your body heat for our power plant. I think with knowledge of such a system, 90 of people would spend 90 of their time in the Matrix voluntarily. This is what is so messed up about Morpheus and his team. They only reveal the actual truth after it is too late to stay in the Matrix. All he had to say was, \u201cThe real world is a hell hole, and you\u2019re hooked up to this machine that is making you dream that you are having a real life. Would you rather wake up and eat goop and never see the sun again, or would you like to stay here?\u201d At least 90 of people would choose to stay. People have an innate need to find Truth, and the Matrix as it is in the movie denies people that Truth, which I think is wrong. But, the Machines could probably get most people to sign up for the power plant just by telling them the truth anyway. Lastly, while Cypher did an evil thing in murdering the crew, he really only killed three people, while Trinity and Neo go and kill like 20 innocent people to save Morpheus. This cements my view that Morpheus is like a dangerous cult leader, who lies and manipulates people to do what he wants and keep people living in the \u201creal\u201d world, which is basically hell. Anyway,  if you can tl dr The Matrix really is preferable to the real world, and Morpheus is wrong not to tell people the whole truth before unplugging them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the Matrix, Cypher was right.\n","id":"9d4a29d4-1022-4570-ae6e-5d06f2b8e320"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Death penalty<|ARGUMENT|>Even if the costs of an execution are greater due to the appeal processes, there is a symbolic difficulty with taxpayers paying to fully support the ongoing life of a murderer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Why should taxpayers bear costs of supporting a murderer for a lifetime?\n","id":"c19cbee5-2549-4a05-9c9a-6e1b5008838b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>At the Trump Tower meeting Trump initially told the press that the meeting was held to discuss adoptions of Russian children by Americans. However, news reports confirmed that the meeting was political, to receive information that was damaging to Hillary Clinton.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump's administration has been caught in several iterations of lies about meetings with Russian agents, first saying they never happened, then that they were about adoption, and later that they were about \"getting dirt\" on Clinton.\n","id":"4388e1bb-cecb-49e5-8feb-8273af27a287"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The issues within the Middle East, specifically Iraq, Syria, Iran and all the other countries within that region can be traced to a lack of separation between church and state or mosque and state if you want to be more specific. First there is more connection to religion rather than nationalism within that region. As a person who comes from that region, leaders and major sections of the population are more likely to have the idea that they are fighting for Islam rather than their country, and never putting their country before their religion. Thats why you see a rise in theocratic leaders, ones who cannot find the secularization of society but want to run a society based on the tenants of islam. The biggest issue with this, besides the fact that you are allowing religion to dictate your decisions, is that there is a massive divide between the Muslims within this region I of course am talking about Sunnis and Shias. When you have a Sunni leader, like Saddam Hussein for example, and you have neighboring countries that are Shia like Iran for example, you create a climate of issues. When the Ayatola sorry for the misspelling started trying to rise the Shia against Saddam it was because the Shia felt that they were the minority persecuted against the majority of Sunnis, so they were willing to follow such a leader, and as a result, not only did the Ayatola fail and flee out of Iraq, but the Shia people began to be even more harshly persecuted. Fast forward to after Sadams death, and Maliki became Prime Minister. He was supported by Iran and Syria due to him being Shia, and he had a very sectarian government which persecuted the Sunnis from the Sunni perspective and even if people dont accept the argument that he did persecute them, then again its sunni peoples acceptance of the seperation between this religion which caused them to view Shias as persecuting them. This caused support for a group like Isis who wanted to restore Sunni rule because the Sunnis felt persecuted themselves. Not only do Sunni and Shias in this region participate in this issue, but Sunnis and Shias all around that region with there being documents that Saudi Arabia originally funding Sunni groups such as ISIS. Now with Isis, if you support them there will be massive genocides against Shias in the future, and even if you support the moderate Syrian rebels against Isis and the leader of Syria, they are a all Sunni group which again means there is a support for a sectarian group, who will be unpopular in a sectarian Syria which is mostly Shia. Again, if a group of people feel they are being persecuted, or feel that their lives are not getting any better, they will accept groups who identify with them so we could see a Shia equivalent of Isis in a few years to over throw Sunni leadership. This is the equivalent of the Catholic Protestant issues in Europe during and after the times of reformation. When Protestants and Catholics lived in countries within a same region, there were wars such as the thirty years war and in the 1500's all those religious wars. What allowed Protestants and Catholics to live with one another eventually, but of course theres still violent divide within places such as Ireland for example is the unification within one country by putting the good of your country before the good of your religion. With a secular society, no one can rationally feel persecuted since laws will not benefit one section of the population over another. If you have a society that doesn't accept a separation between church and state, then elections will be pointless since the population will fear what will happen if they dont have religious laws, and will vote for the theocratic leader. In the 1500's can we say that our system of democracy would have worked? Religious monarchs, or religious leaders would have still ruled supreme because they would have scared individuals who have never known anything but religion into believing that anyone who is secular or protestant would destroy the holy roman empire, and anyone catholic wouldnt have won in the protestant sections of Europe for the same fear. The people need to read the texts and know the history of democracy and relate their experiences to the terrible experiences of the people before democracy flourished and then democracy can prevail, democracy cannot come first and then the texts become available because then it wont work because it will be forced onto people and when you force a philosophy onto people they wont appreciate it or accept it since its being forced. The problem is that, government and political science classes in these countries are virtually non existent and this is a society that focuses on the maths and sciences rather than the political science and history, government majors. I know first hand as an individual from this region who decided to drop my biology major a few days into my freshman year of college and adopt political science and history major, in short my parents and family weren't very supportive at first. Until theres an acceptance of a separation of Church and state, these countries cannot function under a democracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democracy cannot flourish in Iraq until there is an acceptance of a separation between church or mosque and state.\n","id":"fc7035e9-1681-4c8e-8778-5427328a692e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>More and more employers are looking for experienced workers. If you want to get experience before getting a job you might start personal projects and volunteering your time \u2014 time that you would not have if you have a full time job. A UBI makes this process much easier.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Relying on an already out-dated and, entirely obsolete school system to train you for the workforce 'like the good ol' days' will not do anymore. People don't care if you have a piece of paper saying you have studied something.\n","id":"b6bee836-6ed3-42c2-9c1e-c2f060a64366"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>The Dutch police estimate that 60 - 70% of sex workers are coerced into the profession because they have no other employment options.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One study found that where sex work is legal, there is more human trafficking than elsewhere\n","id":"8418cce9-4f0d-4a1e-8dc3-5bf3b11ad780"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Despite being billed as hopeful, it's not really hopeful Insects are dying off at huge, unprecedented rates It's absolutely clear that global average temperatures are rising, it's absolutely clear that human activity is the cause of it, and it's absolutely clear that we will not stop it. Furthermore, the methane trapped in the ice sheets is escaping due to humans warming the planet's atmosphere, and this gas escaping will cause the planet's atmosphere to continue to get worse. Furthermore, the ecological damage has already begun. With how interconnected the food chain is, I believe that the insect die off is proof that massive crop failures are only a matter of time. I honestly believe that we will not be able to grow any kind of food whatsoever by the end of my life. I'm a type 1 diabetic, so I'm pretty sure the labs which make the insulin I need will go first, but that's beside the point . I also believe that our doom is a result of human nature itself. I believe that the industrialized society we've created, and our total inaction towards the problem we face despite our knowledge of it, is a result of human nature and not despite it. There are simply not enough people who have the strength of will myself included to revert to what more or less accounts for subsistence farming. We are totally doomed within my lifetime. , please, this is seriously affecting my life and mental health in ways that I can't understate. x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am going to witness the Climate Apocalpyse and the end of humanity.\n","id":"af9235f8-1fd3-4d1d-81b7-f0a1edd26bdd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey everyone, I thought it was very important to post some information about why I have this view, always, since before I was a teenager. Despite the fact that I have been momentarily homeless and earning under 10k PA for 3 years of my adult life. I've been told my view is a bit heartless and I'd like to see someone challenge my thought process to a degree that would have me question my morals or even change my view on the topic. I grew up in a poor home, single mother, 3 kids. We usually got what we wanted for the most part and I never felt like I went without. Skip to 15, I dropped out of highschool. I played video games until I was 17. 18, got a job at a bakery and worked there until I was 20. At 20 I realized that I would never be able to support a family on my current wage if I decided I wanted one. I enrolled into university after sitting a high school equivalency test. I was fired from my work as they didn't want an adult employee that could only work highschooler hours. As a result I was trapped on government benefits of 10k a year, which needed to cover my books, rent, food, power and internet. I managed to scrape through and get a degree with those benefits. I not earn alot more and am more capable of supporting a family. Some key points as to why I don't think these should be increased. It was the lack of government money that inspired me to study harder, that having benefits meant having a shit life and it gave me inspiration to study more. Rich people though people hate them worked hard to get where they are, if they need to pay extra tax dollars to go to the uninspired then its just wasted money. Current benefits are so low and are designed that way in order to make people on benefits want to go out and achieve something, instead of living comfortably and never doing anything. Please keep in mind that I'm not against government benefits for the poor, just that the rich and the government don't owe them a single dollar more than they are currently getting. That if poor people really want to get out of the hole, they are more than capable of getting themselves out in the current first world. A majority of today's billionaires were born from the lower and middle classes, only showing that the absence of money in their homes attributed to their overall growth in society, not only that, but that it is a perfectly achievable feat for someone that is poor to change their lives around. It grinds my gears when I overhear lazy poor people bitch and moan about the rich like someone they've never met has done them a disservice and owes them something because they chose to work hard while everyone else sat around. I'm not a rich man, but I now earn a decent salary for my age above average . However, it was being poor that motivated me, that having additional benefits would have made me more comfortable and never pushed me in a direction to change my life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Poor people don't need any more help than they already get In first world countries\n","id":"8002b01a-fa00-40c6-9fdd-4ca134027b12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>The thousand Galleons prize money was the primary reason why Fred and George Weasley were interested in the Triwizard Tournament.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Young people are more likely to be influenced by the prospect of winning a large sum of money.\n","id":"af437c6d-ce49-4f17-9d7a-93740de68b7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Spanking a Child Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>Leading children in a positive direction is better than punishing them for going in a negative direction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are better tools that can be used to help children behave well.\n","id":"812f54e8-8934-47b0-9ce4-111938505a16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Dogs are generally a creation of humans and their master is responsible for their actions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AI would only be eligible to have rights on par with animal rights.\n","id":"e650061e-4faf-4196-89ab-4d6d3d13735d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Sing Problematic Christmas Songs?<|ARGUMENT|>When BBC Radio 1 started censoring 'Fairytale of New York', many listeners expressed confusion at the decision. This indicates that the radio station had concluded inaccurately that offence was being caused by the song.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many listeners are not upset or hurt by these songs, as shown by their popularity.\n","id":"f5208800-91fc-4705-9da2-cb81767b0181"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So kaolas are the worst animal in existence atm, and heres why. Koalas are just plain stupid is my main complaint with them, this is mostly becauase of them having a smooth brain. Now if you dont know how theyre stupid, let us first look at their diet, ucyliptus leaves. These things are poisonous and anything but a koala would stay away from them for that reason. But for some reason these little tree bears decided they wanted to eat them, so they just kept going at it until they evolved to eat it, and now its the only thing they eat, how dense does one need to be to just keep eating poison till it doesnt affect you? This isnt the princess bride. The next reason they arent the sharpest tool in the shed is because they can barely recognize the only food they eat. If ucyliptus leaves arent on the tree, they wont eat them. If you put a koala in a room with a plate full of the leaves, it will starve to death, it just doesnt even consider the chance that its edible. Now lets talk a bit about their biology, while my biggest complaint is with how stupid they are, there is stuff to be said here. First as previously stated, koalas have a smooth brain, this is because they cant get enough nutrients from their poison leaves to develop it, so they basically have no choice but to be dumb. Next, the way they feed thier young is by litteraly pooping out a green paste because the babies cant even digest ucyliptus yet, which is another hint that maybe they shouldnt eat poison. Now out of everything ive heard about different animals, the koala seems the worst due to my claims, but I understand that other animals can be just as bad, such as kangaroos not being able to lift thier legs independently, or cheetas being too anxious to mate, so someone  on the worst animal in todays day in age<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"koalas are the worst animal possible\n","id":"3d75f790-4a23-4c64-8820-fb57ac4127b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't really know how to elaborate on this idea, as it is pretty straight forward so I'll just give some recent examples I've seen on tv. nutella commercial saying that nutella can be part of a healthy diet. While this is technically true, it is extremely misleading. Who knows how many people have bought nutella now, thinking of it as a health product. same as nutella with basically all kids cereal commercials these cereals are FILLED with empty carbs and basically zero nutritional value. Again, misleading when they advertise part of a healthy diet. basically all insurance commercials with almost every statement made in these commercials, there's an entire paragraph of small writing at the bottom explaining how the insurance actually works vs how they've made it appear in the commercial not to mention you can never finish reading these paragraphs before they leave the screen I could keep giving examples but I feel like you get the point. What ever happened to making good, honest products and if they sold, it was because they actually benefited the consumer enough. Why do they have to resort to tricking you, even if they aren't technically lying?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"blatantly deceiving the audience of an advertisement, even if they're not technically lying, should be illegal.\n","id":"21129731-48ee-45d4-b83f-734dadfab143"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While i\u2019m generally tolerable and well understanding of religious exemptions to plenty of rules which allow exemptions, vaccines are not one of them. I get we can\u2019t mandate them anymore than we already do because that would be unethical, not allowing them to go to school is good enough incentive and is much less likely to damage the trust than force under pain of imprisonment I get that the US can\u2019t favour one religion over the other, freedom of religion is in the bill of rights. However, I am willing to bet the right to life is in there as well. And if someone who is unable to get the vaccine for medical reasons contracted it because of a lack of herd immunity, then their right to life is being infringed, so either way, someone\u2019s rights are being infringed Truth be told, I hate anti vaxxers with a passion and while I very much would like to give them no quarter, closing off whatever tiny loophole they have will be sufficient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious\/philosophical Exemptions should not exist for vaccines.\n","id":"4e0c744f-a415-47d0-a9aa-fc0c97716f59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are the meetings of Donald Trump with Kim Jong-un a good idea?<|ARGUMENT|>Working to reduce the nuclear threat North Korea poses by any means possible is in the best interest of the United States national security interests and for regional peace.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Are the meetings of Donald Trump with Kim Jong-un a good idea?\n","id":"af65c563-9382-42c5-9984-9ef42b4a8c87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Because the structure of the electoral college is so decentralized, it virtually eliminates the possibility that our elections can be manipulated at the ballot box.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electoral college makes widespread e.g. numerous-state voter fraud less impactful, thereby discouraging it.\n","id":"13d514ae-718a-4a80-af21-788bbf6c1e66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Often on reddit when fast food is brought up people immediately clamor about how amazing In N Out is but then right away everyone also starts talking about how they hate their fries. I honestly find this really confusing, In N Out fries are light, fluffy, and just a bit crispy instead of being the greasy, limp, pool noodly things many other fast food places serve. I honestly don't understand how people dislike them. Note I'm not saying In N Out has the best fires that's a conversation for a different day , just that their fries are really good and don't deserve any of the hate they get.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In-N-Out has amazing french fries\n","id":"c1c4e943-22c4-4899-a42c-f365a6aa37a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Alcohol control\" Prohibition created black markets, which funded organized crime without getting rid of the alcohol.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Passing stricter gun control laws will not reduce crime because criminals will ignore those laws.\n","id":"e354e404-e432-4e9e-bae4-3491ccada93b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I honestly think that for a film portrayed as a film with deeper meanings, it certainly disappoints. My friend suggested I watch it so we could discuss the ideas it puts across. I honestly think that it's just your average run of the mill movie.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No important ideas were actually conveyed in the movie \"The Truman Show\".\n","id":"13ac4576-2bdf-472a-9202-3e40f0325013"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The prophet Muhammad observed Arab farmers crossbreeding date plants. Initially he told them to stop, and to grow the dates naturally instead. This resulted in yields decreasing. In response, the prophet told the farmers to crossbreed their plants again. This hadith is cited by Muslims who support genetically modified foods since it demonstrates that Muhammad was not opposed to humans 'interfering with nature' so long as it benefits humanity<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many Islamic scholars say that genetically modified foods are theologically permissible.\n","id":"0863b1f5-7c14-4b4d-89b5-eb24dce3ac9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love being a skeptic as hard as it may be sometimes to go against what you want to be true However r skeptic seems to having post relating to vaccinations pop up quite regularly. If I ever see an anti vac post the sub related is ALWAYS r skeptic. I feel like it's such a circle jerk sometimes that maybe it's some sort of rally to hide that vac'ing can be more complex than just follow the regimen and vac for everything. Is r skeptic an anti vac circle jerk? Is all vaccine all the time the only way because I think vaccine choices should be more complex then just follow the regimen. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"r\/skeptic is a anti-vac circle jerk.\n","id":"59917675-09c4-4930-b854-e1742131a07d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>South Korea should abandon its goal of unification with North Korea<|ARGUMENT|>While the NK regime has shown impressive signs of longevity, it is not improving its citizens' standards of living nor are their human rights on par with the rest of the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abandoning unification maintains a status quo in NK that will likely continue.\n","id":"a7532095-3309-474b-8c48-d8c7ecf61867"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Frank D. Roosevelt save capitalism?<|ARGUMENT|>Capitalist ideologues overwhelmingly tend to define \"free markets\" as a precondition of capitalism. The idea of a \"free\" market is absurd, since all markets are planned at some level increasingly so, the more they are scaled up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capitalism is an obscure, abstract, amorphous and ultimately incoherent term. FDR didn't save \"capitalism\" so much as he saved Western dominance over global markets.\n","id":"9456ca75-e5aa-4bca-a8ad-0f19f9e5802e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>In a patriarchal society men are discouraged from speaking out about being victims of sexual assault because they're told that men either \"can't be raped\" or \"should have enjoyed it\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism overlooks areas in which men are disadvantaged and do not reach equality.\n","id":"951ebda2-62cf-4c9c-b30a-855f5665fda7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A 1 10 rating system never gives us what it should in terms of real opinion. Everyone is happy to toss a 1, 2, or 3 over to a game they really didn't like, and anything 5 or below is seen as garbage so you have to much empty space. Meanwhile 5 and 6 get completely ignored, and critics give games an 8 or 9 based on often less than what a 9 really is. A 10 is perfect. A 10 has no flaws and was outstanding and left you amazed and in awe. A 9 should be a step below that, but it's often just awarded to long games with interesting gimicks. It seems like people don't consider the numbers to what they actually mean. People don't see a 5 as an average game movie but instead as a terrible one to be avoided most often. With this, people might look at a 2.5 a in slightly better light, because it's pretty close to 5 where 5 is far from 10. I feel like it would be a more reliable system to give us an overall score of something because the numbers are closer so we have to judge it more fairly. 1 5 isn't actually closer, but the way it's set up is what makes it feel closer, so each number is better considered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The 1-10 rating is flawed. We should use 1-5 with .5's\n","id":"18fcbf7a-451f-4b81-8b53-e7aa9b984432"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the NHS be privatised?<|ARGUMENT|>A 2014 study in the US showed that 70% of people who had outstanding medical debt did have insurance. For various reasons the insurance did not cover the full costs of their treatment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even with insurance, many people still cannot afford all the costs of private healthcare.\n","id":"2050a045-ba57-4fbf-8d09-902aacd4dacc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that not being attracted to the opposite gender is highly unusual, and while I would not discriminate against homosexuals, I don't think that they should be considered natural. To me and to many, many other people throughout the ages, I think that the most important function of a living organism is reproduction the continued survival of a mortal species. And aside from asexual organisms like bacteria, this needs two sexes to be attracted to each other in some way and produce offspring. It's because of this that I have no issue with bi sexuality. In fact, if someone was attracted to both men and women, I would consider it almost a positive thing it enables a wider variety of experiences, while still enabling the person to reproduce. Being attracted to the same sex, however, gives zero opportunity to reproduce, and as such, I believe it is unnatural. But what is the definition of 'natural'? Homosexuality happens in the wild amongst animals, as I have been told and read about. I don't actually know any specifics about animal homosexuality, just that it happens. I admit I could be horribly wrong, but I assume that it is for bonding within a community of animals a way for different members to get closer. If this was the case, wouldn't the animals be bi sexual, not homosexual, so that they can still reproduce? And if not, then of course these animals would also be considered to be unusual, as unusual as human homosexuals IMO are. Please understand that I am fully aware that homosexuality is real not some mental illness , and I support gay marriage purely because marriage itself has social and legal benefits. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that homosexuality is a part of human nature. Please,\n","id":"2fce50b6-5b98-4264-bb61-2290293635d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>If God is all-good he should co-exist with evil since free will is of higher moral value than the absence of evil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is possible for an omnibenevolent God to tolerate evil in some sense.\n","id":"149ec2ce-6693-4b63-80f9-849ddd025b48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>Minority groups who don't have a sense of strong identity in their country, making them susceptible to recruitment by terrorist organizations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Groups, subjected to hate speech, are likely to feel more isolated and turn to radicalism.\n","id":"11950705-2637-4fbb-8bd2-751b5161ec77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trophy Hunting Be Illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>In Tanzania there have been reports of foreign hunters gunning down animals, including pregnant females, with AK-47s. In a hunting area called Loliondo that the government has leased long term to officials from the United Arab Emirates, local Maasai have reported transport jets leaving with game of all variety, dead and alive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many countries do not have the governing or enforcement power to make sure regulations are followed properly.\n","id":"b757ad0e-f44b-4bac-8948-3c87b9721f63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally see no reason, outside of economics, for someone to have a biological child. I know people will I personally think adoption is the best option. People just want their own baby that is a little them. However, the population is skyrocketing and there a children that need homes who would love to have loving parents. This may be a bad example, but I see it like adopting vs. buying a pet. Purchasing a pet, you get exactly what breed you want etc. but by adopting you give a life a new chance at a happy home. I would never have my own child and I personally see the decision as selfish. Change my mind<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that having a biological child by choice is selfish when there are so many children without homes\n","id":"e4941552-a9f5-4fc3-b558-fd4bfb2c3458"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>If we as a society are welcoming and forgiving, more people will want to embrace society's norms and values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is preferable for society if our underlying assumptions are that people can grow and rehabilitate themselves.\n","id":"668f04c4-8660-4656-9f70-6d8285f91acb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Body acceptance is important if someone wants to weigh 350lbs and accepts the risks of doing so then that is their right and no one should tell them not to. If they endanger themselves then that's their problem. But attractiveness is one way that humans have of identifying a potential mate. One that can increase the survivability of two people's descendants. While this isn't true anymore with modern medicine and technology it is still evolutionarily programmed into us from 200,000 years ago when outrunning a lion and being able to kill a bear was a real problem that we faced constantly. So even though society's view of what is attractive changes over time and vary by culture healthiness has almost always been considered attractive. Just because someone has the right to be fat doesn't mean I have to think they are hot there is a difference between tolerance and being attracted to someone. This might be a far fetched analogy, but if someone chooses to not bathe ever then that is their right. But I don't think that is attractive and that is my choice. Also, because I know this will be a counter argument, people who are skinny to the point of being unhealthy are considered attractive so how is that justified? The difference is probably a cultural thing. But, usually, being unhealthily thin is better than being obese. Anorexia is considered unattractive and this shows that healthiness is the main determinant to attractiveness and society is not just bashing overweight people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fat people have no right to be upset that they are not considered attractive.\n","id":"bccfb23e-d06f-4cc3-844c-694f5255aee1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>opinion polls harm the democratic process.<|ARGUMENT|>This would ensure a more democratic discussion immediately prior to the decision making process of voting. This does not harm free expression because it is serving a specific purpose at a specific time. For instance, during times of national security or disaster certain citizen behaviour is restricted. Since there is information on public opinion in all of the other weeks of the year, this two week moratorium would solve some of the harms of published opinion polls. There would be less stifling of discussion, voters would not be subjected to possibly biased information or misused statistics at this critical time of thinking and making a wise choice. Tactical voting is likely to be used less, and minority voices are not as likely to be overshadowed by popularly \u201cclaimed\u201d opinions. Therefore, we propose that opinion polls not be published 2 weeks prior to an election.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Opinion Polls should not be published 2 weeks in advance of an election.\n","id":"0794a2ee-781b-4ca5-b35c-4bb00b6e27b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The Working Week Be Shortened to 15 Hours For The Same Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>To reduce life to money seems depressing and unrealistic. Life does not revolve around money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Quality of life may not only be affected by earnings.\n","id":"3f3cf76b-9269-4ff2-8990-be66506d8551"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States attack Iran?<|ARGUMENT|>Photographs and video published by Iran\u2019s Press TV network show the same type of patrol boats as part of a ceremony marking the delivery of such vessels to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The U.S. released a video of an Iranian ship removing a mine from the tanker's hull.\n","id":"63e1c523-1442-4017-b3f1-67c43c4e8ca7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As Election Day in the US approaches, we are constantly inundated with text messages, calls, notifications even from Reddit , and social media posts from celebrities urging us to vote, not caring in the least about whether I even have the slightest idea about what I am voting for. I find this to be extremely self serving, and highly immoral x200B The general assumption from these people or organizations pushing people to vote, is that they are educated in what they are even voting for. Without a strong political interest, nobody would care enough to pressure others into voting to begin with. There is a huge portion of the population who simply isn't knowledgeable in what they'd be voting for, or doesn't care enough to vote i.e. trusts the election in the hands of the people who know more about these things than they do . This is their right, and their choice to not vote. Additionally, isn't there nothing more dangerous than an uneducated vote? Why would these people pressuring others want votes cast in an election that count exactly as much as an educated vote , where the person voting has very little clue of what they are even voting for? For this reason, it comes off as self serving. The people pushing others to vote, are mainly doing so because they assume their intended audience is of the same general mindset as they are, thus will vote in the way they want them to ex. Reddit to its largely liberal user base, Donald Trump to his entirely Republican rally attendees, etc . x200B Despite what many celebrities and organizations may try to convince you of, voting is a right not a duty. These are two extremely different things. It is my right to have children, but certainly not my duty. The same principle holds true for voting it would certainly be considered immoral to pressure someone into having children, so why is it any different for voting? x200B The goal of an election should be for everyone who wants to vote, to be able to vote. Shaming others into feeling like they are not fulfilling some sort of civic duty by not voting seems to be in extremely poor taste to me, and is just another political ploy for people to swing the election in their favor. . x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pressuring others to vote is both self-serving, and immoral.\n","id":"2600be71-4194-4e17-b744-22077cf7b744"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I played WOW for about 4 years, and quit for good got bored of it this year. It honestly gave me some of the best times of my life, LAN parties at my cousins house, all nighters, expansion launches, the joy of finding a rare pet, or obtaining a new weapon the list goes on. I have attempted to get into TOR, and found it was too linear. Now my cousin is losing his shit over the release of TESO I'm a huge fan of the elder scrolls and I can't help but feel that we will only be disappointed again. WOW just had something you know ? It felt like a life inside of life, but the expansion after expansion brought me to my senses, there is no 'winning' but that's totally beside the point, I dream every night that i'll be able to hit up r gaming and find a promising future for massively immersive MMORPGS again. I know I'm getting older and I should be concentrating on becoming an adult, but seriously, WOW was the best. Stress release, a sense of accomplishment, sharpening my mind over strategies, becoming part of a community the works. I'm just certain that there won't be another WOW, and my cousin will not come to his senses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There will never be another MMORPG as massive, addictive, time consuming, sandbox friendly, and successful as WOW\n","id":"8fc46da0-32dc-49e1-949b-31817df67b53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state grant benefits linked to marriage?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people marry and stay married for the wrong reasons which can lead to years of regret and unhappiness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marriage is a harmful institution and should not be supported by the state.\n","id":"408687c7-fcb5-4c4c-a2bd-a79b5e2b5b9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been suffering from schizophrenia and severe anxiety and depression for years. The schizophrenia has faded to the point where I am no longer hallucinations or hearing voices, and most of my delusions are gone. Most of my friends have faded away because of my introverted ways. I am smart, handsome, and well spoken, but here lies the problem, I see no point in anything. I view college, work, and even relationships as pointless activities that inevitably lead to death. I would love to become successful but it just seems so pointless. I'm only 21, and I have so much ahead of me but what is the point if I just stay at home in fear all day. So reddit, I feel as though life is pointless <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel like life is utterly pointless\n","id":"6984c0e0-0e6c-44e9-8fe1-6888af1fa04b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The right to be married is currently denied to most gay people in the word. That is a cause worth fighting for and a problem that needs rectifying. However, what exactly is there for transgendered people to fight for? It is already legal for people who want to to undergo hormone treatment and surgery to change their identity as much as scientifically possible. I have a few gay friends that resent the LGBT acronym and transgendered peoples' uninvited inclusion with the gay movement. They feel that the transgendered movement belittles and muddles what is a serious political issue today. I understand that transgendered people wish for societal acceptance want want their voices heard, but co opting the gay platform is a cheap and selfish way to accomplish this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gay marriage is an important human rights issue that needs press and awareness. However, there is no important transgender issue and it does not deserve the same type of serious discussion.\n","id":"19b7b902-6d74-4395-b740-4f316427a2f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Monogamy vs Polygamy: Is the Norm of Monogamy Regrettable?<|ARGUMENT|>In a world with non-monogamous relationships, entry and exit into relationships is less costly because relationships are more fluid. This allows women to threaten to leave or to actually leave relationships which they feel unduly push them into traditional gender roles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women have more bargaining power within non-monogamous relationships, and therefore have a greater capacity to object to or refuse to conform to traditional gender norms.\n","id":"a17238b2-6ab7-469f-a0cb-6123d04289fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is there an afterlife?<|ARGUMENT|>St Thomas Aquinas argued that because ideas could exist without physical form, thoughts and thus a soul could do the same. If the idea of a geometrical truth can exist without a physical or material basis, thought and thus a soul can also exist without a physical or material basis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christian philosophers have provided detailed arguments for the existence of the afterlife, based on logic and observation.\n","id":"9f1b1a5b-49f5-40b3-aa1d-5b7a0cda550b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI funded by the corporations that benefit from automation could be a more viable route than strictly using government funds. UBI is an inevitability with automation's pace accelerating, and the companies that benefit from that should still be forced to pay some amount to the people that their increased productivity puts out of work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies that use robotics in lieu of humans should pay an \"income tax\" on the robots' work. This money would go directly to UBI.\n","id":"ec053789-8b45-4c45-9011-f4953110cfcb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I grew up in an incredibly conservative environment Christian, home educated, republican 'till we die, etc. I have maintained some of these values into young adulthood, but formed my own opinions on politics. This is where I'd like to focus. The libertarian ideals resonate with me the most. However, I still retain a lot of friends family general connections from the ultra conservative spheres of life. Lately, a lot of them have been posting 10 minute montages of different news clips that basically paint the Obama administration as totalitarian and headed towards martial law. Their claims include Obama legalizing containment of United States Citizens without any just reason. Home land security buying up TONS of ammunition, guns, military vehicles, and drones. Example Boston bombing investigations Something called FEMA camps which are basically concentration camps for US citizens This one seemed vague . These are three main things that worry me, but i've heard of other weird, seemingly big brother policies. I'm starting to get worried our country is headed for straight military law, but i'm hoping that it's all just over blown coincidences. Please, change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am seriously concerned that the U.S. Government is headed straight for Martial Law:\n","id":"85ea28d6-b66a-4e3b-b2d4-6f04dc1f52b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit I changed the format to make it more readable. Thanks for the suggestions in the comments Here's a list of often cited positive aspects of America best and most sophisticated military in the world, which enables the U.S. to deploy foreign aid and engage in humanitarian intervention America's status as a global superpower cannot be contested, and America's actions have enormous global implications The U.S. has a very strong presence in international organizations, such as NATO, WTO, the UN, which exemplifies the global power of the U.S. America has used its global and geopolitical might to improve the world American intervention in post WW2 Japan, South Korea, West Germany, Suez Canal, Persian Gulf, Libya, and more have been viewed as successful America is a leader in secondary education our top universities are among the best in the world, and the U.S. leads in scientific research and liberal arts education. Americans who are smart tend to be very smart. The American economy is very sophisticated and has strong fundamentals. We have strong market institutions property rights, legal systems , sophisticated financial markets, supply side efficiency, technological readiness, and a skilled force in certain sectors IT The American economy is undergoing de industrialization, and while this hurts America's manufacturing base, it is preparing America to deal with the information economy of the future. America is a leader in IT and innovation, and the creativity and innovation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs will pave the way for future growth. America will continue to be a global economic power even if the chinese economy becomes larger than america's , and many countries' economies are connected to America's the dollar is the world's reserve currency . America is thought to have a rich culture with it being a leader in entertainment, literature, music, television, film, sports, and food. America is extremely successful in the Olympics and other worldwide sports competitions. American pop culture continues to dominate and sometimes overwhelm the world. America is a microcosm of the world certain parts of the country are very diverse ethnically, racially, and religiously. Americans tend to be hard working and have a wide array of talents music, sports, writing, acting, etc Certain parts of America are highly social progressive with respect to social tolerance, openness, diversity America continues to be a top source for immigrants, many of whom are high skilled. This will definitely enable America to emerge as a leader in the 21st century when other countries like Italy and Japan suffer from demographic problems. The American economy has built in incentives for innovation inequality and differentials between successful and unsuccessful businesses , and other countries often free ride of America's innovation to support their welfare states America is a source of inspiration around the world the U.S. has a reputation for being the land of the free, for being a leader in space exploration, and more While America has poor generalized care and has an inefficient healthcare system, its medical innovation and specialized care are top notch Some argue that America's individualism, self reliance, free willing, and willingness to take risks create a culture conducive to entrepreneurship America has strong economic fundamentals even though we experienced a housing bubble and a demand deficient recession, our economy is climbing back, and we weathered it out better than Japan's housing bubble in the 1980s and 1990s America has a reputation for being business friendly we have a skilled and productive workforce in certain sectors, and we generally have lower taxes and regulations We have world famous monuments, such as the statue of liberty, the golden gate bridge and more Americans tend to be viewed as nice, compassionate, curious, and open minded If you are wealthy, America is an amazing place to live since you can afford high quality private health insurance with short waiting lines , high quality private education, and can develop professional networks. You can also live in a nice house in a very nice neighborhood with low crime and other problems America elected a Black president, which is pretty inspiring since no other industrialized country excluding Japan has elected a person of color to its top executive position Compared to other industrialized countries like Sweden , America has a fairly generous legal immigration system, and is open to accepting high skilled immigrants Americans are granted a good amount of civil liberties freedom of speech, expression, etc American weather tends to be pretty good, especially on the west coast Here's a list of often cited negative aspects of America America suffers from exorbitant gun violence, and this is due to a lack of strict gun control. Most industrialized countries have strict control, and several outright ban civilian ownership of all guns except for hunting . America's gun violence per capita is higher than that of other industrialized countries, although some countries have higher rates of violent crime per capita. I personally view America's gun culture as a problem America has inadequate public transportation the obsession with driving cars contributes to pollution and global warning America has an inadequate welfare state social safety net. This creates several problems inadequate childcare, public education, and healthcare services hurts upward mobility and equality of opportunity. This makes the American Dream unattainable for many hard working families. Moreover, exacerbating inequality has economic, social, and political implications inequality prevents broad based growth based on consumption, and leads to political corruption Neoliberal policies that cuts taxes on the rich trickle down theory , gutting labor unions, gutting public spending on healthcare and education, and deregulating Wall Street have led to inequality, stagnating wages, and household debt pre K and K 12 public education is generally lousy since they are financed by local property taxes, poorer neighborhoods will have lower quality schools, and this traps children is a self reinforcing cycle of poverty. Access to elite universities is skewed toward those who are privileged. Other industrialized countries have superior primary education systems If you are poor, and also a person of color, you may suffer from housing segregation, discrimination, racism, stratification, stigmatization being labeled a welfare queen . You won't be able to afford high quality health insurance and can't access a good education and with Republicans trying to gut the safety net even more, there's little to protect you from destitution The American political system is completely whack. The presidential system separation of powers and federalism creates a system of gridlock where nothing gets done. Moreover, the parties are very polarized. The Republican Party is completely insane and is characterized by the unholy alliance of big business and religion. Its political strategies rely on obstructionism and many members of the Tea Party movement want to almost completely demolish government. The rest of the industrialized world views this as crazy. Moreover, the GOP base is very misinformed about many issues and is fed propaganda by Fox News. I'm not saying that conservatism is inherently illogical, since there are some genuinely compelling conservatives and libertarians Milton Friedman, Hayek, etc , but the current incarnation of the GOP blatantly lies to its supporters on a consistent basis The conservative parties of Canada, Australia, UK, New Zeland, and other industrialized countries are generally much more moderate than the American Republican Party I personally would vote conservative if I lived in Canada The Democratic Party is seen as more sane, since while internationally it would still be a center right party, it at least wants a modest welfare state, smart regulations, smart gov't interventions grants for research, small business loans, financial regulation, progressive taxation, etc , and keynesian fiscal policies to stabilize the business cycle. Still the Democrats are bought by Wall Street to some degree Parliamentary systems are seen are more efficient and responsive to problems the country faces Many politicians are incompetent policymakers and know little about economics, history, society, science and technology, and more Because America lacks a single payer healthcare system, it faces very high administrative costs from private provision of healthcare. Since healthcare is tied to employment, businesses, especially small ones, face higher production costs that businesses under single payer systems do not face While our financial system is robust, we don't have strong regulations in place, and this could result in a future financial collapse While the educated American tends to be very educated, productive, and smart, the average American isn't very educated and is ignorant about social and political issues. Many aren't aware about other cultures, and this results in social backwardness such as ignorance about sharia law . Many voters are very apathetic about politics. This incentives politicians to capitalize on voters' ignorance and pander to the lowest common denominator, preventing the political system from formulating effective policy to address our nation's problems Americans continue to be highly religious, and this results in ignorance in several areas, including biology, environmental science, psychology, and physics. B c there's not a definitive split of church and state, birth control, abortion, homosexuality, the big bang, and evolution are still political issues for America to sort out. Americans are ignorant about climate change because many consider it to be a myth even many politicians , it is difficult for the american political system to effectively deal with it The U.S. lacks a multiparty system, and this results in policy issues being discussed within narrow parameters. Even though you would expect a two party system to result in two moderate parties, the Republican Party is pretty far to the right currently While America has an inspiring history in certain areas, it does not in others. For example genocide against Native Americans, slavery, internment of Japanese people during WW2 and more. America intervened in other countries for the worse in Iran, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, and elsewhere. During the Cold War, the U.S. allied itself with capitalist dictators. In contrast, Canada doesn't have as strong as a military presence in the world, and that is good, since military interventions and meddling have tainted America's global image. Also Canada helped black refugees who escaped from slavery in the U.S. during the 1800s. While America is socially progressive in some regions, it is not in others. There's still widespread discrimination against gays, latinos who are perceived to be illegal immigrants and racially profiled , blacks racist voter ID laws in the south , transgender people, and muslims. Canada is more consistently progressive with the exception of Alberta America's system of private campaign finance results in the political process being hi jacked by special interests SuperPACs, lobbying, etc . Other industrialized countries rely more on public financing of elections. America doesn't use the metric system where other industrialized countries do, and scientists overwhelmingly feel the metric system is more efficient America's physical infrastructure is outdated and political obstructionism is preventing its improvement In America, companies are financed on a short term basis if they experienced short term losses, investors will flee . In Europe, companies are financed on more of a long term basis, and investors don't pull out of an unprofitable firm if they feel it will be successful in the long term the military industrial complex is viewed as a large problem, something that other industrialized countires don't have to deal with America has crony capitalism wall street, big pharma, agribusiness, and oil companies hijack the political system to lower their taxes and regulations rent seeking , while taxes and regulations are high on less powerful small businesses. We also have some institutions that are too big to fail and require gov't bailouts if they fail. In contrast, Canada didn't have to bail out any of its banks during the financial crisis b c it had strong regulations in place. America is a violator of civil liberties. Examples NSA, Patriot Act, CIA, medical marijuana raids, executing americans abroad via drones, mass incarceration and more. To me, other industrialized countries like Australia and Canada I'm using these countries because they are more similar to the U.S. in terms of size and scope than the UK, Sweden, etc have the benefits of America strong economic fundamentals, innovation, civil liberties, democracy, strong universities, diversity, and social progress without the negatives no bloated military spending, strict and efficient gun control, more widespread social tolerance, fairer healthcare, higher social mobility, more responsive parliamentary systems, better primary education, and more<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America's negatives outweigh its positives and other industrialized countries like Canada are better overall.\n","id":"a71a252d-407e-4362-8113-b49889685f9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>During times of war Christian festivities and symbols gave hope and peace to the peoples of Europe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christian festivities served as important marks within the life of Europeans in the 20th century.\n","id":"aa051553-a9b6-4ff4-b2b5-dc7b9bb10b34"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Check User Name Views flexible At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern. The freedom to speak one's mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty \u2013 and thus a good unto itself \u2013 but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole. Kinda liked this quote, think its more relevant today then when it was written but fuck it change my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The the SJW's movement is worse as just as bad as or worse than the old religious right.\n","id":"56dab88c-4c4b-4fd7-8160-84783d2d2062"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>These families will face the difficult decision of choosing to engage a surrogate from a developing nation despite the risks associated with commercial surrogacy such as the legality of the procedure and confidence that the baby will be protected legally once born to return to the country of the prospective parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It also avoids artificially creating a protected marketplace in developed countries. The legality of surrogacy in developed countries will inflate prices in comparison with practices in the developing world. This reduces choice for potential parents who are unable to afford the fees of commercial surrogacy in a liberal democracy.\n","id":"578c96cf-e925-4777-b139-232c80014eb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like the guy accused of murdering Natalie holloway has a kid while in prison. What kid growing up would not mentally feel anything negative and likely be messed up knowing their parent committed a horrible crime and may get death soon before they even come a teen. Allowing romantic relationship is one thing, but why let them have however many kids they want while never being around for them because they're locked up forever? I know some argue that prisoners end up rehabilitating worse without needs, but is the need for children that they will rarely see even necessary? Please cmv<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prisoners serving life or on death row shouldn't procreate because it will be unhealthy for that child\n","id":"d3f8d224-b1c1-4d70-9fd8-ee5da1f76a06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Similar conclusions have been found by Plassman and Tideman 2001, Helland and Tabarrok 2004, and the notorious work of Lott. It is important to distinguish in such a statement the difference between citizens with firearms and criminals with firearms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.\n","id":"187b6692-f2dd-4db2-9457-1046dab03b17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Catalans should have the right to decide on independence with a binding referendum<|ARGUMENT|>During the Scottish referendum, the nationalist promised everything and anything, including that the referendum was a once in a lifetime vote. The UK government is only now within its right to refuse another referendum. The Spanish government should show courage and trust in the people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A referendum is decisive and it often puts to rest an issue for generations.\n","id":"11e4b8f7-be9c-46c8-97d4-0f37c18f0693"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those who don't know, Chicago, the third largest city in America, and the Chicagoland region, 9.8 million strong, pretty much controls Illinois. We dictate politics and make most of Illinois' money. As someone who lives in the Greater Chicagoland region I don't think it's fair that the city controls so much of Illinois, especially when South and North Illinois are pretty different and hold different views on many things. It also would be great a great relief if the taxes of the Chicagoland region would stay inside the city, helping provide better education. While economically, this might not be good for Southern Illinois, if they can't stand on their own they shouldn't stand at all. It would be better for 9.8 million to win, than 12 million to be mediocre. But, I'm open to suggestions. I'm just some guy on the Internet, not a politician or economics professor. So please, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Chicago should become a state.\n","id":"cbdaa46d-622b-44b6-bf36-6bb4ea5da016"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is from my experience as a 23 year old. We grow up with a lot of bull shit that is fed to us. What our parents tell us What the media tells us What school tells us What society tells us Things like What we should eat What we should be Who we should be like What we should have What we should think Now a lot of these things are not blatant you should be a lawyer and make it rain with ca h although some people may have that . Over time, the conditioning runs it's course and we are on our merry way to how we should be. However. When we drink alcohol, that voice in the back of our minds finds the strength to creep out and speak up because the big bad lizard brain brain has been put to sleep with alcohol. The voice that says bro. if she says no then so what. you're life isn't over hommie. the dude sold rocks to people. why don't you believe that you can start a business brosef. stop acting so helpless. you control your fate. you can do what you want. Our dreams are endless. Our potential limitless. We feel god like and other people's perceptions don't affect us anymore, allowing us to be a true version of ourselves. Now I'm not saying all of the qualities that come with being drunk anger, being stupid . Just specifically the part where our inhibitions to ask that girl out start that business you've wanted to start create the art you've always wanted to create are released. people are unhappy because they are not doing the things they want to do. they do what is expected of them. I find that alcohol has the ability to put my ego to sleep and not worry about what others think. Resulting in me being me. not a conditioned version of myself. i'm becoming less inhibited each day and I love it. not because of drinking. but because I'm becoming aware life is full of unnecessary bull shit. alcohol sweeps it away. yes. I am drinking right now. EDIT my statement is phrased incorrectly. I didn't mean literally drunk with alcohol. but the effects of being drunk through awareness of the states between drunk vs sober . I don't drink often. this is just a realization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People would be happier and more genuine if we were \"drunk\" all the time.\n","id":"379f88dd-2b30-49dd-b738-7cdf6297cd71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently in the US the big thing for news to report on is armed white police officers killing unarmed black men. is this horrible? yes. Will there undeniably be intense backlash because it was a black man? I won't lie, there most likely will be. Jurries can be extremely biased even though they are supposed to be neutral. another example is sexual assault against men. I know, it isn't incredibly common, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. frankly, I don't think it matters on the gender. I think that courts should not disclose name, age I'm a little iffy on this one, so it may be necessary. , race, or gender because frankly, it doesn't make the crimes any worse. why is it worse for a white man to kill a black man than the other way around? same goes for sexual assault. So, reddit, as usual, try to change my veiw.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People involved in crimes victim, offender, etc. should remain completely anonymous.\n","id":"3039ae4b-95c7-4c29-8420-ed10b657cf72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>Executing someone is cheap because ropes can be re-used or volunteer firing squads could be called in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is cheaper to execute murderes than to put them into jail for a lifetime.\n","id":"54f6e1ce-c192-46fb-8f24-dab9f8f5fe24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Racism is an unfair opinion about a person or individual based on their heritage, skin color, nationality, etc. If you assume something bad about a person, and you are wrong, everyone in the world will jump to calling you a racist. But are you a racist if you are right? Say you see a black guy walking towards you. It's racist to assume he will mug you. but then he mugs you. are you a racist for predicting behavior? Can facts be racist? if i mention the Mexicans who mow my apartments lawns, but they are Mexicans who mow my lawns, am I a racist? or if you cite accurate prison demographics, are you a racist? I think if you make an assumption about a person that is not in their favor on no grounds other than race, you're a racist. But only if you are wrong. If you are right, then aren't you slightly absolved of your malicious assumptions? EDIT making negative assumptions based on race is racist. Are you the same degree of racist if your assumptions about an individual are correct? change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's not racist if it's true.\n","id":"6b32217f-1f1b-4567-8119-f43d149a38dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I like music of all kinds, in fact I pride myself in being able to find an artist I like in every genre. However, I can't bring myself to like anything connected to pop . This includes stuff like Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Maroon 5, Taylor Swift, Ke ha, Katy Perry, etc. I can't see the value in this kind of music and never understood how anyone could listen to it. Help me understand the inherent value in creatively shallow pop music .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I hate pop-music.\n","id":"7af7f4ad-1f67-49e3-a2ca-5f198aa13043"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>In the long term, people who attend games or work for the team generate new spending in the community, expanding local employment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NFL provides economic benefits and job opportunities to thousands of people apart from athletes.\n","id":"ebb8339f-9e2a-4670-82eb-370f75f2072a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Being able to express and defend one's ideas means power, so refusing to give a platform to white supremacists weakens them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Denying services to white supremacists makes the internet platform in question a safer space for a majority of users.\n","id":"bc71be18-2094-4647-a0db-e74ca5d73ecf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been used by many women for money. I think they are because we live in a society where gender roles are huge and men work and women get the money from women to get their materials.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women are gold diggers\n","id":"f9ebcb02-f5d8-4a71-be1e-9aab73173bca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Libertarianism<|ARGUMENT|>. Due to the emphasis libertarians place on personal responsibility by Libertarians, people would feel guilty about committing crimes. As a result, less crimes would be commited.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In a libertarian society people would feel more responsible for their actions\n","id":"ee92cc38-dc9a-460e-8f52-4d6fde75370a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>They speak out the first and the loudest. In a public sphere that is easy to control and identify, like FB, this is very beneficial for any censoring agency.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social monitoring is generally effective in identifying members of a community that are most radical.\n","id":"2fdced9c-9424-4ed3-bd5c-59d052b8f088"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals who are infertile, gay, asexual, or simply those who do not wish to have children, do not or cannot procreate, suggesting that being a parent is not a biological state of being, rather a deliberate choice that needs to be made.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being a parent is not a biological state of being, it is a social role.\n","id":"5739ffc3-49d1-49f8-93de-2da6735a93b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the deaths of mass shootings escalate, gun control supporters seem baffled by the resistance to any compromise from gun control opponents. I think this resistance will continue for one key reason The two sides are pursuing mutually exclusive ends. Gun control supporters aim to reduce the deaths of gun violence. They see the deaths caused by guns and view them as a senseless loss of life and view immediate change as long overdue. Their views on guns differ but they agree that changing gun laws is a good first step to reducing gun violence given the unique gun laws that America has. On the other hand, gun control opponents aim to maximise access to guns. They see the deaths caused by guns and their love of guns causes them to either view the deaths as inevitable or as an acceptable price to pay for their access to guns. To them, stricter gun laws would be a tragedy because it restricts their access to guns and their aim is to prevent anything like this from happening. By comparison, they accept deaths from gun violence and tolerate it. Therefore, they want to depoliticise all shootings because anything else could cause change. To be clear, I'm not saying gun control opponents don't care about gun violence, just that their priorities lead them to focus on other things and accept gun violence as a price to pay. This situation makes any compromise very difficult.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Compromise is difficult in the gun debate because each side have mutually exclusive goals\n","id":"12d18463-cbeb-40dd-86aa-9b23adad37e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I work in the Emergency Department of a hospital. I register patients and verify their insurance information as well as enter the symptoms that they are visiting for. The vast majority of patients that I see in any given day are patients that have minimal symptoms that do not require emergency care. The majority of patients are also on the state insurance. Some vague examples of visits to the emergency department that require minimal care included scratches to arms hands small enough to not require stitches, sunburns, pregnancy tests, headaches not migraines and not associated with any other symptoms and runny noses with no other symptoms. Per this source, only one state in the US paid less than 1,000 dollars on the average person qualifying for Medicaid. Some states paid nearly 5,000 on the average patient. This information was from nearly a decade ago and I'm certain that this cost has gone up. I'm sure total costs could be lowered by providing and requiring education for these patients on basic health information. EDIT To clarify my point of view, I work in CT and the state insurance I see most frequently is CT Medicaid. I do not think that this is something that should only be put in place in CT. EDIT 2 Earlier in the post I say this source . I realize now that I accidentally editted out the link. Here is a table of medicaid costs per state It's a different table than I linked earlier.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that before anyone can benefit from a state insurance plan they or their guardian should be required to pass a test on basic health.\n","id":"daf1af5f-372e-4f44-a455-5d433a77e83a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There was so much hype going into this thing. People were making treks out to the places where you could reach totality days in advance. The weather channel had full coverage of the event across multiple states. Some even bought special lenses for their cameras to take the same picture everyone else was taking. And for the most part, nothing really that spectacular came out of the event. I know about the fact that we haven't had a solar eclipse in the US for almost 100 years, but for most of us, the only thing that really happens was that it was a tiny bit darker than before. How ironic is it that something you have to stare at to see the action is impossible to do so because of the damage it does to your eyes. Other than wearing the glasses, which only a few people were able to get apparently, every cheat method you could think of, mirrors, water reflection, quick glances were all considered dangerous to the eyes, so at the end of the day what was the point of experiencing it in the first place? The worst part however was how histrionic the reaction was to the whole ordeal both by the public and media. The reports of people crying, cheering, USA Today's phone notification saying For a few hours, America forgot its troubles as the solar eclipse captivated the nation. Well I didn't forget my troubles as extreme nausea proceeded after the reading of this ridiculous headline. And worst of all one of the anchors on the weather channel gave the completely contrived we realized we are so insignificant in the universe spiel that's now being used every time something cosmological happens. It tells us nothing new and we have heard it a million times before. IMO, a lot of it was just overhype. An interesting event was overshadowed by it, and subsequently left us disappointed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The North American solar eclipse was insanely overrated\n","id":"4c56d884-5327-4af4-bdbb-5499efed0467"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>If a high net worth individual is frail by virtue of frailty\/age\/disability etc then public knowledge of their net worth would be an invitation to someone to exploit them<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would inevitably lead to people who are vulnerable ie old and frail folks being targeted by criminals who see soft targets.\n","id":"33e45eee-ed4b-4264-be74-1e575bd24643"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Pamphlets suck, am I right? No one likes getting a pamphlet or flyer, if you're American . They're unnecessary clutter and I really don't think they have any place in today's world. Why? We have the internet . Social media has basically made pamphlets redundant. Facebook events, Twitter, Instagram, blogs there are a million and one ways people would rather get their information. And the internet is saturated with adverts as it is. There's really no need for people to still stand on street corners or mall entrances handing out pamphlets. No one reads them or even cares . I can't be the only one that feels like giving out pamphlets is basically asking someone can you throw this away for me? I barely even glance at them before I throw them in the bin. Even if I do read them, and even if they are advertising something relevant to me, at most I'll be like huh and then throw it away still. They're super environmentally unfriendly. Have you seen the amount of pamphlets they print out these days? It's crazy. So much paper being wasted. And half the time people don't even have the decency to chuck them in the bin they just end up on the streets. This goes double for those annoying pamphlets people stick in your car's wipers. Half the time people don't even realise they're there until they're on the freeway and the pamphlet goes flying off their windscreen. People hate them. If you're trying to market an event, why would you pick the one method people hate the most? No one likes being stopped to be given a pamphlet. No one likes having to walk around with said pamphlet waiting for an opportunity to throw it out. And no one likes looking like an asshole by throwing it out in front of the person, so we're forced to carry it at least until we're out of sight. Also, as much as I hate them, I always take them, because I feel super guilty refusing I've worked as a pamphlet dude once for pocket money, and they have quotas they have to fill. Even the pamphlet dudes don't like handing out pamphlets. Basically, I cannot think of one good reason pamphlets are still a thing in this modern, digitised world. There are much greener, more efficient, and more likeable ways to get word out about an event or whatever, and these ways especially the use of social media will get a much wider reach as well. Why confine your marketing to a street corner when with a few clacks of the keyboard the whole world can know about your event? So tell me, guys why the hell should I stop worrying and learn to love the pamphlet?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pamphlets are completely redundant in our modern world.\n","id":"87ad269f-31a3-46a8-b9de-fea21efe922b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Suicide is a tragic thing, don't get me wrong, and it's not to be taken lightly either. However, whenever we say My Body, My Choice. It's always brought up in abortion debates and I myself feel like that same logic makes sense for people who wish to die but yet, stopping them is seen as heroic and correct while generally abortion arguments have a solid population on either side. One side believing abortion is okay . So why does this rule apply to one and not the other? I myself have gone through a mental breakdown before and wanted to die. I'm currently thankful for being alive and improving on my desire to do so But I remember knowing how while it would hurt my loved ones, it's my life isn't it? I know some may say See? You're happy you're alive But you could also bring up that in an abortion situation the potential child could be happy to be alive as well. If arguing abortion is wrong, this implies it's the wrong choice Sorry if it's hard to follow, I'm not the most talented person with words. Basically, to one party we say do whatever you want cause it's your life and your body but to another we say you're not allowed to do whatever you want because we say so. I'm open to any ideas, I'm just stumped by myself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"My Body, My Choice.\" Should apply to those wishing to take their own life.\n","id":"79d72441-906e-4843-9f5f-ccf10d29a30c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>In early 18th century Europe, vegetables were believed to have no health benefits and to be almost impossible to digest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Convictions surrounding different foodstuffs, and their corresponding cultural importance, change over time.\n","id":"e03d76ca-20e9-4859-8a5b-28e9b4bc737b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello everyone. I'm getting shut out of other subreddits due to downvotes, so I'd love to have an actual discussion and see if anyone out there can present a valid argument to make me change my view. I cannot understand why people hold the opposing view due to anything but personal entitlement. It's hard for me to accept that so many people hold the same opinion when it seems so insanely wrong to me. I am a moderator of r skyrimmods. I have been deeply involved in the Skyrim modding community for years now, and am well versed in the production of mods. Unfortunately, as a moderator of r skyrimmods, I see the worst of the community as well. Including the paid mod debacle. Here is the data that I'm working off of Bethesda and Valve worked together to integrate paid mods into the Steam Workshop. They approached modders with NDAs and an invitation to be the first set of modders to publish paid mods. This included two people who made models textures for other Valve games. These modders were instructed to make a mod, not use assets that they did not create themselves. The approval process for mods after the initial wave was set to be months long. The approval process would be enough people vote to add it to the paid mods store , not it goes long enough without people voting against it . During the approval process, the mods would be available for free download to anyone. During the approval process, and thereafter, mods can be reported for plagarism with a simple reporting feature on the mod's store page. The Art of the Catch was removed by the AUTHOR Chesko not Valve when the NDA lifted and he was able to get the unneeded blessing from the creator of FISS animation framework to hook into the framework as an optional dependency for fishing animations that Chesko made himself. The lowest grossing mod on the store earned at total of 16,000, 4,000 of that going to the mod author. Before paid mods, only 1 mod author made more than 100 from donations. SkyUI was the mod Of all the major mod authors I spoke to Over 35 , only 1 was against paid mods after the first day. During the first day, about 30 were against the paid mod systems, but changed their mind once they learned how the system worked. SkyUI's author was finished with development prior to paid mods. He had no intentions of continuing the project. When approached by Valve, he was interested in continuing development under a paid system. His project was to add updated crafting menus, and other highly requested features. He was changing some things in the API how it communicates with other mods , and was going to maintain a free version so that people would not have to pay to keep up with compatibility from other mods. Nothing was lost by the mod having a paid version, and some features would leak over due to their nature and improve the free version. Payouts were given after 100 was accrued, to avoid paying out low effort ripoffs that slipped through review. Things I would have liked to see done differently 14 day refund policy on mods Mod authors should have gotten a higher cut. Steam should take their 30 like they always do for every game on Steam for distribution and payment handling. Bethesda should take 30 , as they developed the game, and provided all of the tools for free. Someone should have to have a Steam account at least 1 year old to submit a paid mod. The payout system should also have a time restriction, I'm a fan of 1 month. People who upload other people's work should have 2 strikes, then a permanent ban from the Steam Workshop for Skyrim. I feel that mod authors should have the right to sell their work if they choose. I know that some mod authors have dickish behavior with already released mods removing the free versions . I feel that the return of big modders that was occuring was beginning a golden age of modding. Many talented modders were burned out on Skyrim modding many due to the toxic community, especially when they thought your mod broke something in their game , and were willing to come back for financial compensation. They were then rebuffed by the community, mostly by a battle cry of nobody should have to pay for your work . A flawed system, and slippery slope arguments don't hold a lot of sway with me. The community wasn't railing against the paid mods system that was brought out, they were railing against paid mods period. During the debacle, the goalposts moved every time a major reason against paid mods was disproven with facts. Ultimately, the most valid reason to fight the system that I saw was the cut for modders was too low. To me, this is something that mod authors should be fighting, not a justification for selfish entitlement. Well, . I'm going to do my best to see some reasoning. I want to believe that the community that sprung up around these content creators had a valid reason to fight paid mods as they did.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mod creators should be able to sell their Skyrim mods\n","id":"01a8aa6c-2e8b-48dd-a6b6-bdd288dc9407"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>On average teenagers hear or see 15,000 references to sex on TV in a year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Studies assert the preponderance of topics surrounding sex consumed by children in traditional media.\n","id":"9672fd3a-dcf6-42ca-929f-dcf7e6c3da25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Kids Under 13 Have Access to Electronics?<|ARGUMENT|>Kids might be alienated from their peers if they are the only ones in class without access to such things.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children can communicate with one another more easily, allowing for closer bonded friendships.\n","id":"2ea410fa-678e-437b-99fc-2d76a0b6d45a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Humane treatment of farm animals has been a huge issue between producers and consumers in recent years. But the welfare standards that people demand are difficult and sometimes impossible to implement on scale that meets current demand. In fact, the current demand is the direct cause of reduced animal welfare either through extremely high stocking densities, the highly specialized genetics of modern food production animals, and the increased management efforts both of these things require. Unfortunately, in an attempt at doing the right thing, consumers have advocated against certain farm practices which actually increase the welfare of animals in a factory farm setting. Examples are cages for laying hens, gestation and farrowing crates for sows, and the use of preventative antibiotics in feed and water. If consumers really want these practices to be phased out while positively impacting animal health and welfare and without lowering their current demands, more people need to be willing to raise food on a small scale, not just pay the premiums at the farmers market. In order to keep up with the current demand while still making any profit, conventional producers have had to scale up tremendously while implementing practices that make management easier of high stocking densities as well as reduce aggression. Research on these practices show that there are management pros and cons to each system and different housing systems alone do not necessarily impact animal mortality rates, production, and lifespan. Though there is room for improvement in the welfare of caged birds Antibiotics given administered during stages of production when animals are particularly susceptible to infection can greatly decrease mortality rates, increase animal health, and decrease overall usage of antibiotics at therapeutic levels. The fact that people aren't willing to properly educate themselves on these animal welfare issues or become involved the production of their own animal products lead me to believe that most don't actually care about the living conditions of farm animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If consumers were truly concerned about farm animal welfare, more of them would be involved in small scale agriculture\n","id":"f2f2be1c-feea-4447-85c4-56160ba514b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>The fact is, most poor people do not spend in the way we assume and peer reviewed studies say that policies that contain food price inflation, improve decent-paying job opportunities for the urban poor are likely to reduce the use of negative coping strategies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UBI will actually help fix the spending habits of the poor. Studies show that bad spending habitscome from a mindset of the scarcity of now and when people are given enough resources to think about the future those habits disappear.\n","id":"e92f5c56-6ab7-4e0a-bea4-fe947300751f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>Congress has a very faulty understanding of what policies Americans support. The seniors staffers who are critical in helping members of congress decide what policies support have \"wildly inaccurate\" perceptions of their constituents\u2019 opinions and preferences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little to no influence on government policy Gilens and Page, p. 564\n","id":"7663ca2c-b45a-403a-ace1-f16fb4530820"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Taiwan an independent nation?<|ARGUMENT|>Macau uses Cantonese and Portuguese as official languages. Traditional rather than Simplified writing system is considered more authoritative in formal settings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hong Kong and Macau even use different official languages from China proper.\n","id":"52ad32eb-c56a-485d-bdec-e3779833e50b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it better to live alone\u200b or with someone?<|ARGUMENT|>People living alone have claimed that they found it easier to pursue their true interests and passions, which helped them accelerate their career\u200b<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person living alone will have more time to focus on career growth.\n","id":"afbee96d-e3c3-4b7f-ba81-306c2d126e05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Products try to sell something people want to buy. They do this by convincing people that the product fulfills a need or a want. However, what happens when your product doesn't have a lot to differentiate it from the competitors? For example, shampoo. Axe knows there are at least 60 different shampoos out there, and how much better can theirs really be? Instead they use other methods to get the buyer interested. In this case they use beauty. These standards are non arbitrary and are not imposed by the media or the patriarchy or whatever. They stem from biology and reality. For example, America values thinness. But this truth is a direct result of food being abundant and easy to obtain. In this environment rightly or wrongly being skinny represents self control, discipline and wealth because you have the time to exercise and the money for healthier better quality foods while being fat is linked to poverty and laziness again I am not debating whether this link is wrong or right . If America suffered from extended famine and a profound lack of food then it would most likely start to change from valuing thinness to valuing chubbiness or bigger bodies. This is seen in other cultures. Where food is more scarce, a big body is a sign of wealth and the ability to eat as much as wanted or even overeat . Other ideals are also related to health. A small waist reduces heart disease and stroke risk and big hips are better for childbearing etc. Axe has ZERO INTEREST in changing or creating beauty standards. All they want to do is sell shampoo and stuff. There is NO REASON why they should care what society finds beautiful beyond knowing who to place in their ads. The beauty ideals came first. The advertisers merely exploit what's already there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"advertising is not responsible for beauty ideals; it merely reflects them. Furthermore these beauty ideals are not arbitrary at all.\n","id":"8dbe7c95-fb87-4349-a592-62c5c8f43825"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapy Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Joseph Nicolosi a clinical psychologist and pioneer of the conversion movement, was heavily criticized and marginalized within the mental-health profession.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conversion therapy has been rejected by the majority of medical and mental health professionals.\n","id":"37cc96bd-996e-4215-9cf8-ad02e82cb962"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently bought a new phone from Verizon. In conjunction with the purchase, the salesperson told me I was going to receive several emails. One was a rebate. One was a warranty thing since I bought a phone case from Verizon, they will cover damage to my phone so long as I register withing 14 days. One was just a coupon that I can use to buy x of crap from Verizon. None of the emails reached my inbox. I dropped my phone and the screen cracked. But, because I got my phone 20 days ago, and I never registered my phone, I can't get repair coverage. I found the emails caught in my spam filter. I think Verizon knows their emails are going to get caught in the spam filter and I think the emails are specifically designed to do just that not make it to our inboxes . They don't actually want people to easily get their rebates or warranties or coupons. They want their sales people to be able to tell their customers that they're getting all that stuff without having to actually give any of that stuff. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Verizon purposely sends warranty and rebate emails that are designed to get caught up in spam filters.\n","id":"3fc8cd07-ae47-4821-89d2-97c4b4a893ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Tax deductions or credits for having or adopting children, would be a specific compensation for childcare. This is not only more effective, but also signals that the state values those who take care of their children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are more direct and effective ways to compensate for child\/aged care.\n","id":"5226060c-8646-4d8f-b186-b2e11822491f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>It is true that this happens in the case of gangs. It seems this very common \"problem\" is not viewed as a high priority by those in power on either \"side\" of the aisle\/gun debate. No one seems to be making the slightest effort to fix gang violence in Chicago, for instance. That's been skewing the national numbers for over a decade. It is difficult for me to distill this into a gun control problem. Gangs fill a vacuum left across a whole range of broken social and institutional structures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gangs and radicalized groups act preemptively against perceived threats from members of other groups.\n","id":"0c2dbc6b-5bc8-4f96-b27d-ac0a52d5e605"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States attack Iran?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2012, sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, reported that Iran was pursuing research that could enable it to produce nuclear weapons, but was not attempting to do so<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US has overall found no evidence Iran is developing nuclear weapons.\n","id":"4465db5a-916e-4610-8c54-cf6c3bdfdc72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My view is relatively straight forward, but I'll provide some context to the overall situation for people unfamiliar with it. Cardinal George Pell was a long standing member of the Australian Catholic community and was recently convicted of 5 counts of sexual abuse of a minor. As far as I know, the evidence in this case relies solely on the testimony of the victim, and no other physical or eyewitness testimony exists in this case. My view can be changed if there is evidence that I am not aware of . A summary of the assault is as follows Two 13 year old boys were attending Sunday Masse and after the ceremony, they left the group of children to sneak into a private back room of the church used primarily for Priests to prepare for service. They found and began drinking wine when they were caught by Pell, who proceeded to disrobe and molest the two boys for around 6 minutes. Around 2 months later, the victim accused Pell of holding him against a wall 'for a few seconds' and fondling his genitalia. The second boy died from a heroin overdose in 2014 but told numerous people that he was never abused. My understanding is that beyond the eyewitness testimony of the victim, there is no further evidence that exists in this case. No witnesses could be brought forward that remember the boys sneaking off etc. The defense in this case argued a number of different points, mainly that the idea that you could safely commit such an outrageous act in the area in question was very unlikely, as it was not secure and someone could have entered the room or that the boys could have left the room, as nothing was preventing the 2nd boy from running away. They also argued that the manner in which the victim described the priest disrobing was nearly impossible, as these were ceremonial robes that often take two people to fit. Obviously, there are a number of different points that were made by the prosecution and the defense, however mainly, my view is as follows George Pell should not have been convicted as there exists reasonable doubt that the eyewitness testimony could have been falsified and seeing as no other significant corroborating evidence could be produced, this isn't sufficient to convict someone of such a heinous crime. I believe that the jury in this case were most likely convinced he was guilty due to outside influences rather than purely on the facts of this case. My view can be changed if There is a misunderstanding of the current evidence. If more evidence exists that I am not aware of. If you can demonstrate why we can rely on eyewitness testimony from 23 years prior to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt. I initially wanted to understand if more evidence existed, however it looks like it doesn't, and while I am in no way advocating for the defense of child abuse, or the catholic church, which I think is a reprehensible organisation, the fact remains that the law should only apply to individuals, and that the jury most likely suffered from a dramatic amount of pre existing bias in coming to the conclusion that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I obviously appreciate this is a sensitive issue, but I genuinely feel that this is a wrongdoing by the justice system. EDIT For whatever good it may do, I would like to add that I'm not religious, and am in no way defending the catholic church or it's members for the reprehensible abuse that they have committed on young boys over the past 50 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The evidence used to convict George Pell was insufficient and reasonable doubt existed in this case to grant acquittal.\n","id":"88708888-d156-4d1a-93b9-9e5dc190d879"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most parents of bullies do not work to prevent their child's terrible behavior. Most schools do not monitor the children in their care adequately to ensure bullying does not occur. Children that are bullied too often are at the highest risk of a psychological breakdown that could involve mass violence and death. To prevent the worst case scenario, all parties that are responsible for the welfare of children must be incentivised to action not in distant theoretical consequences but in present day tangible consequences. Money is ideal. If a school were to bill parents whenever a child acts up and hits another student or other terrible behavior then the staff would do a better job in monitoring that behavior. Much like police handing out traffic tickets, it wouldn't get all cases handled but it would help limit the worst offenders. If parents of a bully or purported bully are handed bills whenever their child acts up, you can be certain the child will face repercussions in the home. A child that is just too resistant to such repercussions would eventually be removed by their own parents from the school system and get homeschooled, leaving the remainder of the student body minus one less violent outlier. If a child is accused but can present a credible case that there has been a mistaken accusation, then it can be noted on the record but remain unbilled. Then it would just hang over the head of their parents that if the child was found guilty of a future bullying incident, then they would be billed for the past incident as well. Conversely, a child that is the target of bullying should be given a credit towards the cost of their education. In at least the case of institutions where parents pay part or all of the cost of the child's education, this could go towards their lunches, books, and tuition. Alternatively, it could be awarded as part of a scholarship program as a hardship scholarship to offset the cost of future education. Likely public schools would only provide such a scholarship to be used towards public universities in the same jurisdiction or State, but the award should be there regardless. This way parents and teachers of bullied children can show their child that not only will things get better in the future, but that justice in the present can have future benefits. Not all of the money collected should go towards the bullied. To incentivise teachers and other school staff the remaining funds should be held in reserve for bonus payments for the existing staff. This is just an academic theory I've been toying with. Tell me ways this policy could be abused and how to limit that abuse. Or tell me ways this policy could discriminate and how to limit it. Or just tell me why it won't work at all regardless. In other words Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Schools should bill parents whose children behave violently proportional to the degree of violence committed on campus.\n","id":"021d93d3-2077-4a08-bc0a-15d7b7caf34d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As it currently is, we seem to treat alcohol related rape and drunk driving as two separate acts and consequently deal with them differently. I'll lay out both scenarios first to show my thoughts behind this Alcohol related rape A woman goes to a bar, gets way too drunk. She can barely walk, and can't seem to make a proper decision. She's definitely impaired. She was with a guy for most of the night, drinking a lot, and she goes home with the guy. While back at his place, they drink so more, and things start to get heated. The guy implies he wants to have sex, the female agrees. The next day, she wakes up, realizes she slept with this individual, and she realizes not only did she not want to do this, but this was a mistake and forced . She proceeds to contact the police, charges are pressed in court it's stated that the woman could not make a conscious decision as she was impaired. The male is charged with rape, as it's deemed that he took advantage of the female. Drunk driving A woman goes to a bar, gets way too drunk. She can barely walk, and can't seem to make a proper decision. She's definitely impaired. She's with a guy for the night, and he wants to leave. They hop in the car, she's driving. She gets called in by a passerby who reports her erratic driving. She is pulled over, and subsequently ticketed, as well as charges pressed for the woman driving while under the influence. Why do we treat these two situations completely differently? In situation one, the female was too impaired to make a conscious decision. While she may have said yes to sex, she couldn't reliably and consciously make this decision, therefore it does not constitute as her providing consent. However in the second scenario, the female has had the same amount to drink, and if having sex would be too impaired to make a conscious decision. She may have said yes to driving, but she's being held completely accountable for getting behind the wheel. While I don't feel that drunk drivers should be let off the hook, we can't say that they are making a fully conscious decision. On the flip side, I don't feel that people should get off the hook for having sexual intercourse with people while they're intoxicated, but at the same time there is a degree of consent being provided. I feel we should NOT continue treating these matters as separate incidents, as the mechanics arguments for them conflict. We should have a shared punishment for both acts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alcohol related rape and drunk driving should be treated the same, not opposites\n","id":"731eef58-76b0-4c96-848e-6d819ab84d1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Google Censor Their Search Results In Order To Operate In China?<|ARGUMENT|>Apple's products are censored to a relatively small scale; where Google's main product, its search engine, would be heavily censored by China, Apple's main product, its iPhone, only suffers from censorship in its App Store<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies such as LinkedIn, a professional networking site, and Apple, a company largely based upon technology design, do not suffer from the issue of censorship to the same degree as Google would in China.\n","id":"d1d0f02d-d8d6-4b61-8020-42fa5fa3bd7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For specificity Establish tacit or explicit greenlights for the following involvements. Plant CIA clandestine agents in the latter mentioned cities of interest. Initiate weapon embargoes to all countries surrounding ISIS held territory. Begin a massive flank, press ISIS into a couple cities, and then close off all nearby routes. Allow certain trade routes to experience faux pas defeat, where we establish a brief retreat. Through these routes, begin an operation for the CIA clandestine agents to pull out refugees. Confirm that more than 90 of the constricted cities' population are ISIS militants. Bombard them, send in SEAL teams, wipe out survivors, rinse and repeat. TLDR Acquire foreign approval as needed stop arming neighboring rebels or anyone for that matter , begin constricting ISIS into a singularity of occupied territory, allow for the CIA to rescue as many civilians as possible, and overwhelm ISIS in a cyclic manner until they're just gone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ISIS Can Be Defeated With A Massive Weapons Embargo &amp; Some Patience\n","id":"0188bdb9-8aa9-420d-b3fb-b384eedc1bff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>in a world government<|ARGUMENT|>The force of nationalism is so strong in the contemporary world that no national population will be willing to turn over any substantial part of its national sovereignty and autonomy to a world government. There is too much apprehension among the great majority of people around the world that a world government would promulgate and enforce policies that would disadvantage their specific national interests. Most opinion leaders and national government officials believe that they have a vested interest in the status quo. One evidence that interest in world government has declined to a vestigial level is that the World Federalist Association WFA, which was quite active throughout the Cold War, was recently absorbed by Citizens for Global Solutions CGS, an organization principally devoted to preserving and supporting the United Nations, and which studiously avoids any mention of world government in its literature.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The forces of nationalism are too strong to permit the loosening of state sovereignty any further\n","id":"67e4da93-97b9-4cb7-aaa7-326580adaf54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While i do know that chinese and spanish are more mainly spoken languages on earth, english is a language that is widely recognised and easy to pick up. At this day and age globalisation is more present than ever, and a lot of international debates are already done in english. The only issue here is that it is still not a mainly taught language in a lot of countries, not even secondary or as a third language. By teaching everyone, and eventually enforcing the use of the language english a lot of issues could be resolved as the remaining language barriers would be broken and no one can come up with excuses about communication being impossible due to having no common language with the other party. Of course communities have their own tradition and language is part of that, and I am not saying using other languages should be banned, all I am trying to say is that being able to conversate is a must in this globalised world, and no one could be blamed for 'not speaking an understandable language' I am looking at you, immigration issues as EVERYONE would speak english. By making every official document in english as well it could resolve issues in immigration and traveling papers, as some countries are prohibited by their own law of making official documents in another language than their main language. If this is made english, everyone would have acces to the nessecary papers. edit although i awarded a delta, my view is not entirely changed, i still think it would be beneficial yet i did not take the potential costs into consideration so he made me think, i do however wish to continue this debate taking the money into account.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Enforcing every country to teach their younger generations english at school, to eventually enforce it as the main language worldwide, would be good for globalisation and equal chances.\n","id":"d6617957-e4c6-4780-9943-075b36659f8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A journalist who trained as a bullfighter for two years came to understand 'the fighting bulls' lot of five years on free-release followed by 25 minutes in the arena is equal if not better than the meat cow's 18 months in prison followed by a \"humane\" death'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Toro Bravo\" bulls are not given hormones or chemicals, and regularly have a large area in which to graze and roam around. Larene Read, p. 23\n","id":"f75a589a-9e9d-41f2-b18f-b97b9066e634"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Russia is an enemy of the EU; a USE would consolidate European powers against it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Europe needs a strong military deterrent to combat Russia's aggressive expansionism\n","id":"c708975d-dc37-4baf-8f43-8b2346cb1de4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are quite obviously a handful of games that are indeed timeless and remain fun and challenging years and even decades after their initial release, but by and large, I find that nostalgia for the gaming platforms of yesteryear is unfounded. In my experience, 99 out of 100 old school video games are terrible and boring. They're hard to control, unintuitive, and poorly plotted. Again, there are a handful of games certain JRPGs, for example that transcend that mediocrity, but as someone who has spent a depressing amount of his life retrogaming, I have to say that I consider it a waste of time, and that my nostalgia for old video games and systems is rooted more in a time and place than in any real love for those old games. Change my view gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Old School\" video games suck.\n","id":"f6470438-ea93-486b-8af4-dfd190ef84b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>How many times have you heard of a male victim of domestic abuse? If you have, how many people make fun of the victim? Something along the lines of Man up or Let a little girl beat him up? , or Stop being a pussy ? This is senseless victim shaming, and I think it's ridiculous. Let's look at a normal report gt But they don't get hurt as bad as a female does. Sure, females usually suffer more when they are a victim, but this doesn't mean that a guy can not receive a lot of injuries. Also, many people seem to forget that domestic abuse isn't just between straight couples, or even couples, a relative is also considered domestic abuse. gt But females are abused more than males 28 of male victims do not tell anyone about their abuse. Male victims are three times more likely than a female victim NOT to tell the police and only 4 will tell a health professional. Not sure how I am going to cite my source as I am using my school's database. But I can upload a PDF maybe Though, the number of male reported abuse victims is 40 Source released in December, 2011, within the last 12 months an estimated 5,365,000 men and 4,741,000 women were victims of intimate partner physical violence. Edit Doesn't seem like too many people disagree with what I'm saying, which is a good thing More attention this topic get's, the better But let's still not forget about women victims<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people don't take male victims of domestic abuse seriously, and actually are very rude on the topic.\n","id":"52849fc8-a5c9-417d-8044-2d088f432ba4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I wasn't sure whether to make a throwaway for this, but if it gets popular I might as well reap the karma. Personally I've got nothing against any religion. There may or may not be a God, but to me, expecting them to be the way they're written in holy books created by man is like expecting aliens to look like little green men with oval heads and huge eyes. Elections start next week in the Netherlands and Wilders is ahead. With Trump, I could understand people were upset with the way things were going, especially for middle America, and a swing to the Republicans after 2 terms of Democrats was all but inevitable. However, Wilders campaigns on an openly anti Islam message. Le Pen in France, while similar, at least talks about 'French nationalism' to try to make herself more palatable. A lot of populists across Europe aren't even hiding behind dog whistles like 'law and order', 'x ish values' or 'taking control' anymore. Obviously these things can't be talked about face to face in the current climate. But those who are willing to talk sometimes say a liberal country needs a liberal population, and if overwhelmed by 'illiberal' Muslims, it can lose its identity and become theocratic. However, the majority of the 4 6 of Muslims in Western Europe pre 9 11 would have lived quiet lives in the West, like Buddhists and Sikhs live now. I would prefer to talk rather than be bombarded with news stories of Muslims doing this or refugees doing that. Someone looking for self affirmation can easily search for information that backs up their beliefs. What I want to know is the core of the belief. Friends tell me Muslims are different, but a quick search shows that the language of Islamophobia has similarities to antisemitism. Especially about the scriptures telling the believers to kill non believers. Maybe I'm guilty of self affirmation, and maybe you'll think the source is biased, but I think millions of Muslims are just decent working people. Death by terrorism is over represented, hence why it works. If people were as afraid of dying by something more statistically likely like a car crash than by a terrorist, they would never leave the house. Muslims may commit more acts of terror, but they're being attributed to a handful of terror cells. If 10 IS soldiers kill 300 people, then blaming Muslims as a whole would be like blaming all Republicans for the IRA movement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Islamophobia today is not too different from antisemitism in the 1930s\n","id":"6bf568d5-b5ec-4da5-9161-3d4b00893c6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>Those working shifts, long hours or multiple jobs to make ends meet are less likely to be able to take the time to go and vote, which can take significant amounts of time<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The lower rate of voting among poorer citizens may not have anything to do with how much they value the right to vote.\n","id":"89ee1594-f49e-4c49-9bf0-3e080f58a055"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public transport be free?<|ARGUMENT|>A speaker for the National Highway Traffic Safety Association suggested that overconfidence about traffic safety was another factor contributing to car crashes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Car related deaths are often a result of human error.\n","id":"cd0a8ec4-5785-4ee3-9891-12bc89eaa064"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>Genuflection -- the act of taking a single knee -- has not only been used in a variety of religious practices but has also been used for centuries as a way to show respect for royalty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Throughout history, kneeling has frequently been used to show respect and reverence.\n","id":"d5d06039-b3c1-4649-ac39-99d7b6c8d249"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't know if it's unique to generations after the 1980's, but these last few generations contain self diagnosed 'visual learners'. Throughout my schooling career, it always seemed that those who claimed to be visual learners were just those students who were either too unmotivated to follow basic arguments or too stpuid to do so. It was always enraging for me as a student to have teachers try to appeal to those 'visual learners' because what invariably followed was a dumbed down version of the topic we should have been learning. I have never encountered an education film which demands no prerequisites by its vary nature do as good of a job at conveying the nuance and substance of topic quite like a textbook or a lecture did. I believe that the ability to follow complex and well reaosned arguments is absolutely necessary for being an engaged adult, and when schools and teachers shift their methods to accommodate 'visual learners' they are harming not only those students but all of the other students. There are parts of adult life that aren't visual or entertaining. Reading lengthy articles about the Russian and Ukrainian conflict or the differences between political candidates is not fun, and no amount of visual imagery will aid in your understanding of the economic ramifications of a new set of sanctions just passed by the UN. Allowing students to claim they are 'visual learners' teaches them that it is acceptable to avoid difficult intellectual work and never forces them to develop the concentration and comprehension skills necessary to engage in that work. In a world in which we have to purposefully seek out meaningful discussion, why do we allow children to develop a mindset that further obstructs their ability to engage in the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Visual learner' is coded language for 'I'm stupid' or 'I'm lazy', and accommodating these self-diagnoses is hazardous.\n","id":"e3cd1dc4-d2de-4172-931b-2778d876834c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>Pineapple brings common pizza up to the level of prosciutto e melone This is an elevated experience, and in spite of being an acquired taste, is worth persevering towards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pineapple enhances the pizza-indulging experience, making pizza bring a greater joy to and satisfaction from eating than ever before.\n","id":"5d7cbb0a-1721-43b0-a205-f85029cffbb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This .gov link shows quite a few statistics breaking down how home invasions play out. What I take from these stats is that 1. 28 of home invasions happened with a household member present. I take away from this the most obvious goal of home invaders. They don't want you to be there almost always . Invasions taking place with someone not present is completely irrelevant to the discussion, because you weren't there to protect yourself, as well you were in no danger. 2. In only about 7 of these instances was someone the victim of a violent crime the vast majority being simple assault, not rape or murder . What I take away from this is that even if you are home, you're almost always making the situation worse by using a gun. They want your stuff, not your life almost always . 3. The only argument I can think of to combat these statistics is if we think it's reasonable to protect property with life. It's not .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These statistics on home invasion absolutely dismantle the argument that we need guns for defense in the home\n","id":"abb6d6b5-7327-4a7c-8ff5-6a5594313043"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US government guarantee every citizen a job?<|ARGUMENT|>Jobless families face three times the risk of falling into poverty compared to working households.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being employed has a positive impact on people's health\n","id":"af0afb1c-e286-44b7-b329-8b3930190637"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Voters do not need to be a career politician to receive delegated votes, they could have any job. A friend who knows a lot about the education system might get delegated votes from his friends who trust him in that area. There is no burden on the delegate in this instance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Delegates have no specific burdens, except a moral requirement to re-delegate or vote well.\n","id":"8b7cd1b7-fabc-401d-9848-4b12de6a9026"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>George Orwell's 1984 is over-rated<|ARGUMENT|>In part 1, chapter 2 the scene where he talks to his neighbor is introduced entirely for the purpose of explaining children and family life under the regime. The characters the reader is introduced to have no bearing on the plot whatsoever and are never heard of again<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Due to its satirical nature, scenes and characters are written not for narrative purposes but as flimsy excuses for him to describe how the regime effects a different aspect of society in his world. A master would be able to weave that info into proper story narrative.\n","id":"c6ae5f00-1eee-49af-9622-8e6c5c343104"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Rules of organized religions are methodically made so adherents cannot live without sin thought sins etc., forcing the adherents into constant guilt and they don't have internalized morals, since they rely on fear of God rather than really thinking something is immoral.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Much of the practices of religion are conducive towards good mental health. It is therefore likely that religion has been a good mediator of mental health for humans.\n","id":"07118074-4c24-4add-9def-3579cdf061b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>One study found that more than a third of soldiers thought they might be denied promotions or experience other backlash if they sought mental health treatment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is an internal stigma against getting treatment for mental illness within the military.\n","id":"d0cd6191-39fa-427c-8057-9384d053424f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So with cost of the Coalition forces pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq in the next year, Winter 2016 by the latest. The U.N, particularly the UK, but even more so, the USA, is left with a vacuum of generally something to fight. Which may make me sound war mongering but I am a great believer in focusing on the problems and what's broken and trying to fix it. Starting with the worst. And North Korea is the worst. So why aren't we dealing with it? I would say that we should deal with it as soon as possible, but of course we are kind of stretched with the middle East, the Commonwealth or whatever. But that doesn't mean we can't deal with them after we pull out, and we prepare. So like 2020? I can't value the arguments against this so please give me some. But First please listen to my explanation. Firstly, WE CAN NOT, CAN NOT wait them out. As is, North Korea is in a state of Autarky. The leadership has completely succeeded in bringing down ANY resistance. So don't tell me that there would be any revolution or revolt or anything like that. As well as that, North Korea is sustainable as far as supplies go, so we can't outlast them, as without reverting to a feudal medieval system, none of us other countries will be able to outlast them. So you have to accept, as a fact, that an end to this horror that is North Korea, is foreign intervention. So the question now becomes, why are we waiting? The main argument to avoid conflict In North Korea is the loss of life, but I would ask, which life? The lives of our troops? Well 'boots on the ground' would obviously be necessary afterwards by troops, and special forces probably during, but avoiding talking about too much Military Strategy, we could pummel any organized resistance from North Korean forces, through Naval and Air superiority. So whilst we would lose some troops, and don't get me wrong I admire them greatly and plan to join the army myself. So troop loss of life doesn't really justify allowing the horror to continue. So what about civilian loss of life? Well you have too look at it this way, they're going to die anyway, all of them, in pain and horror under that dictatorship, and doing nothing is condemning them to not even stand a chance. We are sacrificing 100 by not risking a minority to save the majority of the population. If we did it properly, than 100 of the North Korean population would NOT be killed, North Korea eventually we would win the war, and those who survive would be freed, and we could put North Korea back on the right track. THAT future, despite the price paid would be worth it in my opinion. One of the main worries people have for Military action against North Korea, is Nuclear Weaponry. Which MAYBE, I repeat, MAYBE North Korea has. MAYBE. We don't know as North Korea is a fortress as far as information goes and we won't know until war. Which yes, is a risk. BUT, how does waiting solve this problem, the longer we wait, the HIGHER the chance that North Korea will have weapons of mass destruction. So the sooner we act, the more that the odds are in our favor. There is no out lasting this, the Kim Jong Dynasty will never end as the have all the power and won't EVER surrender power without a fight, so why wait? even if the Kim Jong family dies, the power will be moved to someone else. This will never end, and it a stain on humanity. It ever ending will cause mass death, and it has to death. So let's do it now soon and minimize this death. We need to pull out of the middle east, consolidate, and then crush North Korea. Disagree? Please try and change my view Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We need to take on North Korea as soon as we pull out of the Middle-East.\n","id":"ed9b0138-39fa-4a71-922b-534302a08a36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Far too often I am cursed with professors that show YouTube videos or Ted talks that have nothing to do with the future test or topics. The only way I can let the school know , besides telling the Dean, is fill out teacher evaluations at the end of the semester. I can anonymously voice my opinion then go on with my life where whatever changes they implement won't even affect me anymore. Students should be able to receive a refund for a class if the professor did not perform adequately during the semester. I understand the ideas behind self teaching and although I'm not a fan of the learning style I can understand the use, but when a professor waste students time during the semester with meaningless videos and lectures that go off on non educational tangents and making up assignments not in the syllabus, the student should be able to be refunded the money that they paid to be taught. How should this be done? I know there are add drop periods for class where you can drop it and still keep your money, but the time is so short the only thing the student can experience is the syllabus being read to them. There is also withdraw period where a student can exit the class after add drop period but the student doesn't receive money back. Therefore a student should be able to get money back after withdrawing from a class. Most of they time they have to take the class again anyway so they would probably put it back to the school. But if a student is withdrawing a class they should not be penalized as the reasons for withdrawing vary so much. Students often get the short end of the stick and they should be able to push back. Please change my view. I'm tired of going to classes that waste my time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Students should be able to receive a refund for a class of the professor does not teach.\n","id":"67cc6ba0-a208-499d-946b-c6c90506c1c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's my thinking having an unelected leader of a country is, by definition, incompatible with democracy. It creates an unjust society because its citizens are no longer able to change laws that affect their own lives, and as such their liberty is restricted. The more interesting question, in my opinion, is with those countries in which the monarchy has lost all or most of its effective power for example, my own, the UK . In my opinion, though, despite being compatible with democracy, such monarchies are still inherently unjust because they perpetrate existing class structures and a society in which there is no longer any equality of opportunity. If we are to value all humans equally, which I am assuming we should do, as long as the monarchy exists this dream cannot be realised. And this is not to mention the extreme amounts of money horded by the royal family which could go to better causes. Moreover, a democratically elected leader has been shown to be just as effective in terms of exercising power, so there no longer seems to be any need for a monarchy. And if their purpose is purely traditional, as I have already demonstrated, monarchies should be abolished.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":": monarchies are inherently unjust and should be abolished\n","id":"05e6f0db-e68d-40e3-a296-f924927131ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me explain. I'm Thai, and have eaten shark fin soup on multiple occasions weddings, family meetings, etc . I don't particularly enjoy it, yet am highly irked by the view most of Reddit seems to take on it. My current view isn't that the current situation isn't bad. It's horrible, they are overfished, they are inhumanely treated, etc. My problem is with the way the West has approached the issue by simply trying to ban it outright. I believe the practice should be regulated strictly , or that attempts should be made to try and farm sharks if that is at all feasible. The whole of the shark should be used I've heard it is possible to use the meat as a component in fishballs in addition to normal consumption I assume the skin could be used for leather, etc. I think that part of the popular view of BAN IT is at least partly due to passive racism culturalism since most people view the commodity as exotic and barbaric . EDIT By farm , I also include methods of farming that may require genetic modification. Convince me otherwise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe shark fin soup should be banned,\n","id":"724ea6a8-e87e-4d65-bac2-4f99f62c8b90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>Up to 28% of workplace stress is caused by problems with coworkers within the company.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People's mental health can be negatively impacted by their co-workers\n","id":"17f3c5b2-e1c8-4c08-bdd6-7733ea5db0a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>If citizens or the government believe that removing accounts of terror organizations on Facebook and Twitter are a major step in counterterrorism, they may view the threat as suppressed, even though terror organizations are still just as big of a deal without social media accounts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Deleting accounts linked to terror organisations is unlikely to change this. In fact, it might undermine the fight against terrorism.\n","id":"8130e9f3-73d8-4dfd-9439-194c72465653"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Suppose you are the president of the United States and are informed that the Russians and Chinese have just launched a massive nuclear strike against the US. There is nothing that can be done to prevent this from making your country a smoking ruin in 20 minutes or so. The question is, Do you order a counterstrike? My gut says, No, that would be as pointless as it is immoral. I grant that there is a good reason to make everyone think you would order such a counterstrike before they attack you, but after they attack, the only thing retaliation would achieve is an end to humanity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear Retaliation is Pointless\n","id":"3216d652-110b-4401-8f7c-98986ae02ec7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>People genetically not able to convert beta-carotene to Vitamin A would not be recommended for a vegan diet. The double whammy comes to them when beta-carotene buildup in the body presents health problems of its own.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A vegan diet would cause more health issues at times than benefits, which makes it less desirable than not switching to it.\n","id":"e1783b73-c37c-4fde-9809-5609b136cc9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To begin, I'd like to say that I am not, and have never been, a Trump supporter. This post stems from a conversation I had with a friend of mine, in which I was insisting that Trump was terrible and has done some terrible things, but I couldn't point to a single specific act that has been hurt the safety or quality of life, or just been objectively bad for the citizens of the United States. This may probably be due to my lack of knowledge about domestic affairs, but it got me thinking. My friend agreed that he was a terrible person and maybe deserves to be impeached, but didn't believe that he was that terrible for the US, at least compared to any other conservative candidate, had they been elected. Let me be clear I'm not talking about 'collusion', Russians, lying, the reputation of the US, the respect of the office of the President, etc, etc, etc. I believe that Trump and or his team have performed some criminal or otherwise shady actions. I don't think he should be our president, for a lot of reasons, and undoubtedly any one of the scandals that he has been involved in would have ended most other president's careers and or gotten them impeached. I'm talking about specific actions that he has taken be it legislature passed, executive orders, or whatever that has been objectively bad. Many things, I'm sure, are bad from a Democrat's point of view, but commendable from a Republican's. Not sure if the reverse could be true, but who knows. Is there anything that everyone agrees is bad for the country? And let's exclude die hard supporters too, who would agree with anything he says. I'm talking about educated, level headed folk who can be objective about things. And though this is speculation, is there any legislation he has passed that any other conservative candidate wouldn't have also passed, had they been elected?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Despite all the controversy and strong feelings surrounding Trump's Presidency, he hasn't done anything that is objectively and demonstrably bad for the citizens of the United States.\n","id":"5313db90-a454-40c0-8457-d919b789ac6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>God can not be proven by science which is the main way we study and understand our universe or natural world. There is no theory of God and there is no conclusive logical argument for the existence of God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are no clear and verifiable evidences that god exists.\n","id":"d0d5599a-c3c7-4b21-a17d-5ab5948239d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, compensation for the indirect harm of \"injury to feelings\" is a standard feature in workplace discrimination compensation awards<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the legal system, we give recompense to people indirectly harmed by criminal actions.\n","id":"611cf82d-b5fe-439b-9231-6e56c94bf5f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've talked to people about this before, and I feel like I'm almost there to changing my view, but I just can't get over it. When I hear about gay pride parade, I hear about people in assless chaps, wearing pink boas, shitting all over themselves, being really flamboyant etc etc. I also hear people that around gay pride parade use it to confirm their own biases. look at those fags freaks and hate hate hate etc. I've talked to people and have had a lot of good counter arguments It's about pride, not trying to change views. Furthermore gays don't have an obligation to change the views of others and should act in anyway they want even if it harms the public's perception of them. There's nothing wrong with wearing boas, assless chaps and being weird . If someone has a problem with that, it's THEIR problem. Women in advertisements are often shown wearing very little, dressing provocatively and no one bats an eye. Why shouldn't gays be granted the same privileges? All three of these arguments were good, but the third stuck with me the most. I really want to change my view on this, as I know it's a view held from an emotional, not logical place. I'm sure I have my own prejudices in there clouding my judgment. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gay pride parade does a lot of harm to gays in the public eye,\n","id":"9c6b0601-0c86-4ba0-8933-430cf4ec32b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Organ Trade Be Legalized?<|ARGUMENT|>Unsuspecting people are placed in financial danger when the organ trades are illegal people illegally cannot make an income off donations but will still be taxed as so making them lose money in the end<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The illegal trade of organs carries far greater dangers than under a legalised system.\n","id":"dbc50d96-12e0-496b-858e-6c700e5a74db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If the government were to provide access to one treatment birth control i.e. a vasectomy or tubectomy with an incentive of say, 500, it would save us billions of dollars and there would be fewer children growing up in poverty. Those who would choose to take such an offer would be precisely the people who are not in a position to provide a decent life for a child. There would be fewer unwanted pregnancies, fewer neglected children, which we can reasonably expect to have the residual effects of drastically reducing the poverty rate, effectively ending the cycle of poverty, which would lead to reduced crime rates, which would in turn lead to a drop in the prison population. The mean standard of living in the US would be significantly improved, and the country would reap a variety of benefits. Further, such medical procedures are another form of birth control a very effective one at that , and as such ought to be made readily available to everyone. Due to the tremendous social and financial benefits, it should be both available and incentivized. These procedures are reversible, so should anyone later decide that they do want to have children, they can always undertake to do so. The fact that this could be accurately called a sort of eugenics program is no objection while the word eugenics obviously has a very negative historical connotation, the mere application of a label with a negative connotation does not change the actual moral implications of the course of action under consideration. What we're talking about here all people could freely choose to undergo or not. It would provide people with an additional choice in birth control, and would have huge positive effects in society. Tell me why we should not give people such a choice?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government should provide a financial incentive to encourage sterilization\n","id":"ade5219b-2d80-4723-9b91-f09f5cae87e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello . I have, like many people in the last week, seen a massive influx of anti trump posts on Reddit and social media. People are terrified of a trump presidency, and terrified of the ramifications of his appointment of 1 3 SCOTUS justices. More and more however I get the impression that despite the polarizing publicity, Trumps policies are largely very standard republican stances on many of topics. He has in the last week pulled back on many of the extreme statements he made during his campaign and is approaching many subjects in a very reasonable fashion so far. Yet despite this there is the petition to try and convince the electoral college to change its vote and elect Hillary I think this is ridiculous, but that's another topic , fear and mud slinging all over social media, and a massive amount of anger at the fact that trump won. So I come to my point. I feel that despite his very standard republican stance on many issues, Trump has created an image and amount of negative publicity that is now associated not only with himself but with the policies he supports, the justices that he has yet to appoint, his administration, and anything related to his political career. Maybe I have misread this Reddit, maybe these opinions really are of trump himself and not of his policy or the Republican Party. However I believe that these feelings and public opinions have hurt the Republican Party in a very real way and will have reaching implications in future elections on the public opinion of republican policy and candidates.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump has seriously damaged the public opinion of the Republican Party for the foreseeable future\n","id":"b633ec92-c9d0-4277-8eb8-0c0beffcc6de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I acknowledge that some people seem to truly have a disease, like anorexia, where they truly do not see themselves the way they are in the mirror. There are also obese people who have disorders that make it very difficult or nearly impossible for them to improve their physique. But in the cases where I have found out someone I know has an eating disorder, the girl is never one of those two. I don't know if I can label it as a call for attention, but some girls seemed to make it a thing about them rather than keep it a secret. Some would puke in the bathroom during lunch for all to hear. My argument about these kinds of slightly over weight self conscious people is that if they actually were concerned with their bodies, they would make the change, without the cry for attention. It's easier to be depressed and do nothing about it, but your life will obviously suck. Same thing for these cries for attention. It's much easier to resort to emotions like anger and sadness when faced with your physique, than to hunker down and start exercising and a diet. Within days, weeks, a few months, you will feel better. You will choose to grow stronger as a person. You will be happy. If these people really were concerned with their ultimate happiness, they would not dwindle on these cries for attention and emotionally tormented periods of their lives. They would accept their reality and accept the only solution, and improve their lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A large portion of people who claim to have eating\/weight disorders are craving attention more than solving their problem.\n","id":"3bc9faf5-4844-4745-91f1-0f088d44fe72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the UN a force for good?<|ARGUMENT|>The UN was a fresh start from the League of Nations, and the UN is not regularly attacked due to the failures of the League of Nations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A new organisation would represent a fresh start. The new organisation would not be tarnished by the U.N's failures.\n","id":"0cbffe28-d922-4efc-aed3-03c6b1050942"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Could adopting a discussion platform like Kialo help improve the quality of Ethereum's political + governance debates?<|ARGUMENT|>Instead of having to spell out a brazillion times why a decisions was taken, one could just refer people to the Kialo discussion. A bit RTFM style, \"This has been explained a thousand times. Go over there and read the reasoning!\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kialo discussions would make for a nice library of decisions that could be accessed by the public, management, devs and users months\/years later to see why a decision was made.\n","id":"bb55679d-7289-4cc0-98a8-aaf72789ba3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that social media can actually work similarly as actively writing your own autobiography. This applies less to Twitter and Instagram and more to Facebook, because the first two feel very limited, almost entirely designed for mobile use and aren't feature rich life Facebook, in which one can write, share pictures, have comment threads, share, etc. I do believe that if you use it with absolute honesty, having your life laid in front of your eyes with a list of friends, pictures of significant events and words or whatever you feel like, cryptic song lyrics included lol for the events and things that are too personal to be expressed, is a really powerful exercise to build up from where you are and know what to do next, who to do it with, what and who you like, what and who you don't, etcetera. I feel like if you treat your profile autobiography like a piece of art you're constantly developing, you'd always strive for ways to make it better and if you're a creative person this method could definitely change your life. I feel that because I experienced it first hand, when I joined Facebook around ten years ago I was in middle school and it changed my life, I felt like I was building myself actively in order to make my profile better, which sounds horrible, but you could say the same for someone that wants to be a better person in order for their autobiography to be better. Or someone that wants to be a better person in order for their life to be better. I think it's all pretty much the same. EDIT Obsessed is too much, agree I think there's a famous quote said by a pope that goes like take your life and turn it into a piece of art . Isn't it the same? Sometimes I think like this and I am quite conflicted because it feels wrong but I can't quite pick it apart.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being obsessed with social media can actually be good\n","id":"c463ea2a-0b72-4e72-a7f9-4dd6f9c1176b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cosmetic surgery be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A study published in Annals of Plastic Surgery found that among women with cosmetic breast implants, there was a threefold increase in suicide and in deaths related to alcohol or substance abuse compared with the expected death rates of women who did not have implants. The findings suggest that a sizable subset of women who have breast augmentation may have underlying psychological disorders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The urge to change one's body is often a symptom of a deeper underlying mental problem. Having the option to change one\u2019s body at will means that the underlying issue is not addressed directly, and therefore not treated as a problem.\n","id":"5a7dd20a-d75f-4a0d-a44f-fd273d4cbfdf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is something that's been eating at me for pretty much since I came out to myself as bisexual a year and a half ago. I never understood what the big deal was, and I feel like I'm missing out on a very important, awesome feeling. I never really felt like I fit in with the LGBT community. Aside from being a bit more conservative than most of them I'm center, maybe a bit left, but not a progressive , I never felt like gayness was a big deal. I never understood what's there to celebrate about me putting my dick in other dudes. It reminds me of when Leonid Stadnyk refused to be entered into the Guiness World Record book for world's tallest man, saying that the book should be for the world's fastest runner, because he worked hard for that achievement. He did nothing to be as tall as he is. I tried to look for ways of getting that pride feeling. People have told me that the feeling comes from overcoming the hardships of LGBT life. But when I came out as bi, I only received praise, no one has ever said anything bad about my sexuality ever. I was told to never ever come out at work or I risk getting fired. Well, I came out at work and no one cared one way or the other. I came out to my mom my parents are Russian , but my mom said she figured as much and loves me anyway. Maybe the movement has come too far for it to even be necessary anymore? I just don't get it. I really want to give out a delta, but I just don't see why I should be proud to be bi, and I don't see how I can fit in with the rest of the community since I just feel nothing towards my sexuality. EDIT Thank you to everyone who commented. So far, the most convincing argument I have heard, which many of you had posted, is that pride can mean different things in different situations. Sometimes it's the good feeling you get after accomplishing something. Sometimes, it's a bad thing, synonymous with a big ego. In the context of gay pride, pride is the opposite of having shame. It is when you are just fine living life when others expect you to hate yourself. As such, I will be awarding deltas to those who brought this to my attention.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being LGBT is nothing to be proud of\n","id":"69bd3638-3f85-4b98-a234-4ed0a711c392"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I've watched all 6 movies, and although there are a few flaws mildly annoying character, the second movie wasn't great, ect. I thought the prequel trilogy was just as good as the original one, and the third movie was easily the best of them all. The action scenes were phenomenal, the storyline was coherent and variant, and the acting was, for the most part, pretty good. People always seem to complain about Jar Jar Binks, but he really wasn't that bad I mean, one minor support character doesn't make or break a movie. I get the feeling that, no matter what movies they released, they would have been hated because they weren't the originals. But taking an honest reflection of the originals, there is a huge flaw that simply makes the movies a little boring, that being that they completely recycled the driving element of the plot for two of the movies. Death Star blows up, build new Death Star, blow up new Death Star. Well, there's my argument, now .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the original trilogy of Star Wars is overrated, and the prequel trilogy was perfectly acceptable,\n","id":"a0c9ccf7-8cbc-4685-a7af-d1a40ca82d86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Proprietarianism holds that children, as the products of their parents' labour and genetic resources, are the property of their parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents have the right and responsibility to make decisions for their children.\n","id":"4b66320f-abba-43bf-a7ca-fb11ba7d3231"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>The electorate should have a vote, but not a referendum. Both parties should be suspended and parliament re-organised on the Brexit lines of deal, no-deal and remain. An election on those lines should solve many problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are other alternatives to solving this problem, that do not require another referendum.\n","id":"87e355e2-5028-4ec0-a0da-325490448647"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Because the term is defined from without, guilt by association can be used against a group claiming PC values. An outsider can easily find a negative example and paint the entire group in a negative light through association. For this reason, groups generally prefer to define and control their own labels, terms and titles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When the enemy chooses the term and the term is unclear from the outset, it is a fool's errand to try and correct the enemy on his\/her\/their definition. Better to set a good example and let history be the judge.\n","id":"6c872795-4058-4d5c-99ff-3a0315089cac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if there are children in need, unlike gorillas, humans have put a system in place to make sure infants are looked after.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gorillas cannot save themselves from extinction and need our help to stay alive.\n","id":"db4a7347-2624-4d02-8f11-ccc5e5660ce6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now, i know i'm bordering on what most people would call a snob, but hear me out We all make snap judgments about the people we meet, like it or not, and that affects how we interact with them and think of them. All i do is embrace that and become conscious of it. To use the book analogy, in the bookshop, the cover is worn, tatty, has fowl language all over it and no redeeming qualities as far as i can see. I would not pick up that book. Yes, maybe there is a good story inside, and maybe i would enjoy it if i tried, but why? Why invest my time and effort in something that the author the person in question didn't deem fit for a good cover outside appearance and initial interaction ? Am i supposed to read through a book before i buy it? every book? no. Same with people, if they don't seem like my kind of person on the outset, i will not peruse a relationship with them and depending on the situation, actively avoid that. The likelyhood that the tatty book with the bad cover being the worst choice is far greater than the well presented cover. I like to surround myself with people that increase my quality of life in the same way i would expect to do for them. I'm proud of the company i keep, even though it means i don't engage with a lot of the population The amount i hear people going on about not judging a book by its cover and that people deserve second chances etc, i'm worried that i'm just becoming the classic snob and am missing out on whatever the other people might bring to the table. Am i doing the right thing? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe \"judging a book by its cover\" is a correct philosophy, and i actively use it day to day,\n","id":"2acf944d-3089-40aa-a8d6-73020c5c3f23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should refugees seeking asylum in Europe be distributed among EU member states according to a quota?<|ARGUMENT|>The EU shouldn't play any part, directly or indirectly in the business of human trafficking. As soon as a country grants residency to those who arrive at its shores, it becomes the unwitting partner of people traffickers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trafficked migrants to Europe come from all regions of the world. The primary transit routes are across the Mediterranean, and through the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Turkey.\n","id":"5de4ac69-78df-47d8-8542-5543d2701fa4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Normalise Men Wearing Dresses\/Skirts?<|ARGUMENT|>It would create an oppressive and unwelcoming society if individuals felt that it was their right to police what others wore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People ought to be free to wear what they want without being receiving negative social sanctions outside of the workplace.\n","id":"9dcccb75-e640-4d1c-b0c4-26e1001e7596"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll start off with exceptions, since this is probably the most important part of the post for someone who wants to avoid misconceptions about my point. 1 A person who is being tortured. 2 A person with a severe disease that causes them great pain or agony daily Other than these exceptions, I think suicide is a weak, stupid decision and I can't stand the way people who kill themselves are idolized as beautiful angels or brave souls . They weren't brave for taking the easy way out That was cowardly Someone who was brave would not kill themselves because they lost their job or were bullied, or lost a loved one, or had a divorce A brave soul, or a beautiful angel would keep pushing forward until they succeeded When I hear about suicides on the news, especially teens who kill themselves because of bullying, I find myself shaking my head instead of feeling sorrow for this person. The suicide itself does not make me angry, it's the way everyone treats it. Take Amanda Todd, for example. Everyone treated her as a saint as soon as she was dead, when in reality she killed herself because people were bullying her? Of all the reasons to kill yourself, this seems the most ridiculous to me. It's tragic that someone died, sure, but they're now being idolized, almost viewed as a hero because they gave into bullying and killed themselves?  guys. I'd like to hear a realistic other side of the argument since all I get from real life friends is sugarcoating.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe suicide is an unrespectable act of weakness with few exceptions.\n","id":"40514ea4-8ce2-464d-aed4-210e9834b2a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Of the seven wonders of the world, five are absolutely religiously motivated. Without it, we would never had Pyramids, Taj Mahal and the others. The masterpieces of architecture which define us as a species, nonexistent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many of the ancient buildings which were built to a high enough standard to survive to the present day were built for religious reasons.\n","id":"d1454cdd-d8ea-491c-af0b-ff83d2bfb9e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The only calculations of a Basic Income that I have seen all seem to make the following things that I perceive as errors Sets the level of Basic Income at a level too low to live, in which case what's the point? Sets the level of Basic Income too high, in which case it is unaffordable and why would anyone work? Sets the level of Basic Income at a level that is possible to live and that is not to high but involves replacing pretty much all public services, in which case how is this better in any way? Involves giving a lot of money to people to rich to get any welfare at all at the moment rather than people really need it, in which case how is this a sensible use of public funds? And if you taper the Basic Income off as people earn more then it is not a Basic Income. By contrast, a Negative Income tax has the main advantage of a Basic Income over current welfare systems a simplicity, b makes work pay rather than withdrawing welfare at not sensible rates without any of the disadvantages of the Basic Income system a not spending most of the additional welfare to the middle class and rich, b being affordable on the public purse, c doesn't blunt work incentives and d doesn't risk wage spiral inflation . There can be debates at what level or what rate income is taxed or subsidised under a NIT, but the system in principle is better than a Basic Income. One final point I would make is that anyone who thinks that a Basic Income could work in some Star Trek utopian future due to automation should nonetheless support a negative income tax first and foremost because it would be easier to transition from a negative income tax system to a Basic Income than from any current welfare system to a Basic Income system.  Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"a Basic Income system is inferior to a Negative Income Tax system in every way and anyone campaigning for a Basic Income should divert their energies to supporting a Negative Income Tax instead\n","id":"53d17457-1abe-45c2-964f-9ffb6f1b9cfc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Children Learn About Gender Identity And Sexual Orientation In School?<|ARGUMENT|>Dispelling myths and biases are shown to be more effectively eliminated when exposed during an educational or research based activity. It gives the opportunity during the early years of the school system. Even if biases remain, exposure to facts and research goes along way to dispel these biases. Including the fact that there is no fear of \"gayness\" spreading and the breeding destruction of humans when you realize we are talking about a single digit percent of people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This should be taught in school because it would reduce a lot of misunderstandings people have about the LGBT+ community.\n","id":"f39c8825-f2f4-4fab-a79c-4ac31327f5d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's something I expect to get skewered on. So let me just state right off the bat I'm no Trump fanboy. I'm a libertarian. To me both parties are the opposition, and Trump and Clinton are both authoritarians. But I do think between Trump and Hillary, Trump is the lesser of two evils. Here are a few reasons why Other countries are finally showing America a little respect, even if they don't respect him as a person. Even North Korea has backed down on occasion like after the infamous fire and fury comment . At the same time Trump was bombing the Syrian airbase in response to a chemical attack, he was dining with the Chinese president and talking about North Korea. Man what I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall during that conversation It's clearly a power move, the kind that he has made over and over with China and others, and it's working. Don't get me wrong, I think bombing that airbase was foolhardy and dangerous. But the results obtained were positive and de escalated multiple conflicts at once, which leads me to think that Trump knows more about what he's doing than meets the eye. He's repeatedly kicked previous executive branch power grabs back to the legislative branch, where they belong. Just in the last month, there's been the Iran sanctions, Obamacare subsidies, and the DACA program as examples. In the last year there's been 15 regulatory nullifications via the Congressional Review Act, which is 14 more than all previous presidents combined. So despite the rhetoric that he's mad with power, he's actually been less authoritative with that power than, for example, Clinton would be. He hasn't involved us in any new wars. Whereas Obama and Bush had to be involved in every conflict in the world, and even started most of them, Trump knows when to leave things alone. He's even gotten us less involved in some wars, like the conflicts in Iraq. Deregulation and economic growth. At this point I don't think anyone can dispute that markets are responding positively to having a businessman in office. The first things Obama did when he took office is he spent trillions of dollars on ineffectual policy and created a drag on our growth for generations to come. The first things Trump did is returned power back to the free market. I think it's pretty clear which policy is more effective economically. The 2nd amendment is safe for the first time in 8 years. Say what you will about Trump, but no tyrant has ever wanted an armed civilian populace. He's more honest than other candidates. Every single one of the Republican candidates made a vow to support the winner of the primary, and they did it knowing full well that candidate could be Trump. Then Trump wins and everybody goes back on their word because he's an outsider. John McCain campaigned mostly on repealing Obamacare, but when given the chance he goes back on his word. He's exposing so much corruption from everywhere. I mentioned the disingenuous Republicans already, but of course Democrats are no exception and I think a lot of their indiscretions would have been covered up under Hillary. Trump hasn't protected anyone. These are just a few examples. I see the president attacked relentlessly on Reddit and the media and honestly I just don't get it. This level of scrutiny was never applied to Obama or Bush either one. And despite all of that he's come out relatively unscathed. People seem like they're struggling to find something substantially wrong with him, so they revert to things which to me just seem petty. There's a lot of hypocrisy on both sides, for example all the sexual misconduct allegations seem to be more or less important depending on whether the candidate has a D or and R next to their name. So it makes it difficult to discern what's truth and what's bias. But when I look at the whole situation objectively I see mostly positive things and just thank god we don't have Hillary Clinton in office because that woman is mad with power, and the things she wanted to do are almost directly the opposite of everything good that's happened. TLDR At a high level view, the country is doing better under Trump than it would have under Clinton, or has done under recent presidents. So change my view Reddit. What has Trump actually done that outweighs what Hillary Clinton or others have done and makes him so deserving of your ire? I understand it's more important to scrutinize a sitting president than a past candidate, but let's at least do so objectively and as free from bias as possible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I just don't think President Trump is that bad, comparatively.\n","id":"9fd19f94-f40b-43a0-adf4-590520acfdfa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Once you know the language fluently, you can engage in the same kind of dialect as citizens, regarding law, government, etc. Obviously it is still a learning curve, but I don't think most people in their own country understand their system as well as they should. Thus, such dialect would be beneficial for both the newly established citizen, and the native citizen. To change my view you would have to prove to me that there is some other requirement more, or just as, necessary as speaking the same language. Or show me that some other requirement is absolutely necessary. This discussion is about non behavioral requirements, so something like having a clean background check is assumed in this case. I want to keep it focused on capabilities of the person seeking naturalization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only entry requirement to become a citizen for another country should be to speak their language fluently\n","id":"e9d83784-4ead-4382-b47c-dbfa26a2b142"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God exist?<|ARGUMENT|>If you believe in science and God then you believe that God made the Big Bang, waited 9 300 000 000 years to create the earth, another 1 000 000 000 years to create the first creature, then waited 3 800 000 000 years for humans to evolve.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If God created the universe then he must want to be hidden.\n","id":"783c8e93-c8c7-4907-a65f-57a3593ce8e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To me I'm not US American it looks like there is no gain from this argue. The discussion and the subsequent government shutdown cost the US around 24 Billion Dollars. Why even do this. They discuss about raising how much debts they are allowed to have and while doing this just generate more costs. Then instead of coming to good terms and finding a constructive solution they stretch it out till the very end. To me this is just egoistical and childish because it looks like they the ones objecting don't gain anything but just want to make Obama look week. IMO this child play should stop and they should start doing real politics and care about things that really have to be done instead of just playing arm wrestling for politicians. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- I think that the argue about the debt ceiling is stupid, childish and has no gain.\n","id":"55724333-0b27-4a9f-92e3-f453acf9aa88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>The competition among houses even has the potential to poison the atmosphere within houses: students are exposed to peer pressure and treated according to whether they win or lose house points.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Students are separated into various houses from First Year and encouraged to compete against each other and work for their house, for example through Quidditch.\n","id":"9304f779-e6bb-4c01-9466-ba6ef8bd323d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>In the most extreme case, an autonomous weapon could continue engaging inappropriate targets until it exhausts its magazine, potentially over a wide area. If the failure mode is replicated in other autonomous weapons of the same type, a military could face the disturbing prospect of large numbers of autonomous weapons failing simultaneously, with potentially catastrophic consequences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Autonomous weapons come with the risk of becoming uncontrollable in real-world situations due to design failures, hacking, and external manipulation.\n","id":"0e6e3bc3-3d3c-4326-8d85-23b125fb2291"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a born and bred Scotsman. From Edinburgh, grew up in Galloway, now studying for a Japanese degree in England. Although I will surely leave for Japan in a few years and probably never return to the Western world I still feel like this referendum means something to me. I have never been particularly patriotic, I love some Scottish customs whereas I detest others. I don't think I'm a nationalist. I just feel that argument for independence is pretty solid. Yes, the currency is an issue, as are pensions, trade, the EU and a whole list of other things. I never believed it would be easy but part of me wants to shed the English government and dare I say, the Tories. I am constantly finding myself angry at the current Westminster government for acts such as the hike in tuition fees or the bedroom tax. And Alex Salmond's SNP aren't half bad, they have done many positive things in Scotland. The free prescriptions, continued free tuition fees, education reform that doesn't consist of Michael Gove's idiotic policies for schools and universities. Politically, it seems sound that the people of a country should rule themselves. Economically, there are issues but Salmond's got a degree in Economics from St Andrews, I can't help but feel he knows what he is talking about. While some of Salmond's ideas do annoy me, such as his insistence that he debates with Cameron. Still, I have met him personally and based on both his personality and his policies, he's a much better politician in my eyes than the likes of David Cameron, Alistair Darling or Johann wee things Lamont. Why I have come here is that I worry that I have become a shill to the SNP and I find myself scoffing at any and all Unionist arguments Keep my mind open Reddit. Supporting independence is the unpopular side but it's the ground I am firmly rooted in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I completely support the Scottish National Party and will be voting YES for Scottish Independence in September.\n","id":"bf17a72f-b685-44bd-a4be-77200ce59861"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>Social media can aid recovery for individuals with eating disorders by creating a support network who encourage developing a 'recovery identity'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social media is a necessary avenue to finding peer support in recovery.\n","id":"ef781e3f-7e76-4ef6-8ef1-19264d71ec04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Zoo populations and environments can be controlled in ways that natural environments cannot be. This allows those that run zoos to ensure maximum safety and comfort for their animals and protect them from such hazards as deforestation and climate change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoos and wild environments can exist together. Zoos provide a necessary backup, especially for animals with unstable populations and habitats.\n","id":"6a8eb50a-4362-4b37-b9af-ed21beba4289"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are already competitiveness issues during the group stage of the World Cup for example, two teams leading the group playing their third game and having a gentleman's agreement to a draw that will see them both go through. This is bad for the sport and for the competition, and we should do everything we can to eliminate these kinds of situations. By determining the match ups for the knockout stages before the tournament even begins, we introduce another element of potential threats to competitiveness. For example, if the winner of group A will play the runner up of Group B in the Round of 16 and vice versa , teams may try to lose their final group game on purpose to avoid playing the second place team from another group if that second place team is actually a superior team . This example is only valid when both teams have already qualified before their final match for example, England and Belgium in their group this year . I see absolutely zero downside to having a random draw at the end of the group phase to determine Round of 16 match ups. The eight group winners would be in one pot, the eight runner ups in another, and the pairs would be randomly drawn. There is already precedent for this both in European World Cup Qualifying and in the UEFA Champions League. This isn't some novel internet fanboi idea. Arguments against my view could be that a this happens rarely or b teams should have enough competitive pride to not do this anyway. I'd counter that a rare is worse than never, and we can completely eliminate this anti competitive behavior incentive by going to a random drawing, and b why rely on ethics when you can just write the rules to completely prevent such behavior. Change my view. Edit I guess I didn't make it clear enough that EACH FIRST PLACE TEAM would be randomly drawn against EACH SECOND PLACE TEAM. Please stop suggesting this would remove the incentive to get first place. That is completely inaccurate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Knockout stages in the World Cup should be randomly drawn\n","id":"5bbd5d9f-a06b-4d7d-8148-93f50109ac95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Livestock production is responsible for 70 % of deforestation in the Amazon region of Latin America, where rainforests are being cleared to create new pastures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Meat production leads to extensive conversion of tropical forests to new pastures.\n","id":"e8b6e7f4-6e1a-42b3-acb8-b873b199f9ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>The Governance Expert Reference Panel - comprised of governance experts from various fields - has representation on the board of various UK Workers' Cooperatives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Board members elected by workers' cooperatives to make strategic decisions on their behalf are likely to be experts in economic governance and management.\n","id":"be1598ef-8947-469f-ad09-b40a800605ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I like to think that I'm fairly progressive when it comes to women's issues and sexual assault. While listening to a podcast Guy's we f d It's not your job to be the perfect survivor where their guests were two of the women from the movie, The Hunting Ground Andrea Pino Annie Clark . One of the topics they brought up was sexual assault in the media and the narratives they create and perpetuate. All of the women seemed upset and offended by Sansa's rape on Game of Thrones on her wedding night. Some of the points they made was that is was unnecessary, and only used to progress one of the male character's development Reek's . They argued that it perpetuated the idea that a survivor uses their tragedy to rise up and become a hero which can create unrealistic and dangerous expectations of actual survivors. I'm not sure I actually agree with them which worries me that I might be part of the problem surrounding some of the reasons victims choose not to speak out. From a purely storytelling point of view, it's not unusual for us to see Ramsey as this monster. I mean, he technically sexually assaulted Reek through genital mutilation. And rape being a crime of control not sex, it makes sense from a character point of view that Sansa was going to be raped. I thought it was also important that we saw this because Sansa was shown literally growing up with this fantasy idea of a prince and her wedding night and what her life would be like violently stripped away from her. This was the final moment she could no longer live in that fairytale. So I'd argue it wasn't just for Reek's development that the rape occurred. Sansa's character was changed as well. And while, yes, we do only see the rape through Reek's facial expression, it's not a male's gaze we're seeing but another victim's gaze. It's all to easy to forget that men are also sexual assault victims and I think it's dangerous to ignore Reek's abuse just because he is a male watching a woman's abuse. Their final argument is the one that I'm most concerned about. Does including the rape and her development from it perpetuate a dangerous narrative? I don't think it was unexpected that this occurred so the only thing that could have changed was reaction. If she had given up hope or turned to self harm wouldn't that also be a harmful narrative? If she waited for Reek to save her wouldn't that also be a harmful narrative? I can't come up with another direction they could have gone that wouldn't have perpetuated an idea we've already seen and thought having her use that to push her to be stronger made sense from a character development point of view. I remember when the episode first aired there was a lot of backlash from the audience calling the scene gratuitous and unnecessary but I don't think I agree with that. Hoping that someone who does might be able to better explain why. EDIT I think what I'm looking for is an alternative to what was shown. I agree that rape didn't have to be the final act that changed Sansa and Reek into finally fighting back, but if we assume that rape was going to be the act than was the depiction the issue? How do you show a character getting raped without it being torture porny? How do you show it affecting another victim without taking away from the one being currently raped? Does Theon Reek being a man and changing overshadow the fact that he is also a sexual assault victim being forced to watch? My biggest issue with the critiques of the scene are that they underplay or outright ignore the changes it has on Sansa, ignore who Reek is by putting his gender first, and don't offer an alternative that would have been more acceptable to have used. I don't think I disagree with the using POV used during the scene, but that could be changed if I had an alternative choice for a shot that wouldn't have been explicit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sansa's Rape in GoT was Justifiable and Good Story Telling\n","id":"e5964d60-4cf4-408a-b72e-1df5c62a3251"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI would reduce brain drain in smaller communities as they would feel less compelled to leave for economic opportunity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wealthy countries should provide citizens with a universal basic income UBI.\n","id":"21d39c52-1ea4-4cda-b01f-431325763b67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Memories of individuals can be deleted or false memories can be implanted via charms without the target realizing it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The manipulation and deception of minds through potions and spells is legal.\n","id":"50fc6ea7-c0ff-4d59-a701-6abd27b5cb50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I am not a republican and would likely vote for Bernie Sanders if he pulled off the nomination. But I think his and many Redditors' stance on tax reform is at best hugely misguided and at worst, rich people hate. Plus the consequences would not result in a net positive for society. Allow me to step you through my though process 1 . The Shkrelis of the world steal all the headlines I feel that much of this debate is spurred on my bad actors in the 1 community making news. Stories such as the Martin Shkreli incident, or the Affluenza teen, as well as Trump's outrage generating rise in the media cause the blood pressure to spike no matter who you are. But i think when it comes to most modern day super rich top .01 they are, as a whole, doing more to help the world through their charity pledges and foundations like Bill melinda gates See 1 2 I know one response to this point will be Oh they're just setting up tax shelters to protect their wealth instead of actually giving it away. To that I want to see links and proof that these endeavors aren't in fact designating funds to helping people. Plus I think its not a stretch to assume many rich people are giving more every year given that charitable contributions have risen nearly 100 per decade since 1974 2 . People are generally getting richer More people from the middle class in the US are becoming the upper class than the lower class. And more people worldwide are being lifted from poverty every decade. I'm fine with there being a million billionaires if there were a billion millionaires and 5 billion making 100k per year etc. The first link in point 2 above will be criticized as evidence that the wealth is being more polarized, but further inspection of the chart shows drop of 11 of the middle income during that time with an increase in the lower two categories of 4 yet and increase in the upper categories of 7 . A net trend of 4 migration to upper. I'd also argue that any perceived polarization here is more so the result of globalization and automation than zero sum rich take all cliches that the media blows up. 3 . The Government is far from being an efficient and budget friendly spender With the massive splurge on the military industrial complex trillion dollar jet, anyone , homeland security and granting terrible contracts such as the 500 million ACA website catastrophy the US has bolstered over the decades, I'm very surprised to see so many here championing granting the gov more and more without ever specifying where the windfall of funds should go. Sure many social programs suffer, but the sum total of those dwarf the waste and cost of corruption and the other burdensome blank check relationships mentioned above. Now please don't accuse me of wanting to cut any social programs. I know the gov also does do a lot of good in those areas as well as research projects via NASA, the DOD and other environmental and energy initiatives. But I think the top 1 also are contributing to equally beneficial research and philanthropic projects on their own accord without the need for an archaic bureaucratic middle man. Bottom line is I think the general trend worldwide which is in line with Steven Pinker's decline in violence over history that people in general are getting more generous and compassionate with each passing year. This includes the 1 . While I know there still is and always will be bad apples among every group, I believe that given these trends we should not enforce tax policies such as Sander's because those individuals will over time increasingly churn out more innovation and philanthropy in a better and more focused way. EDIT Gotta run for a couple of hours it's 5 54PM Eastern . Be back soon though<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Calls for increase taxes on the rich is short sighted and would be counter-productive for society at this stage in history.\n","id":"6ed6535a-7838-4451-bab8-0973c1f193b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now, I am reading the book for a class, and I will confess that I have not finished the book. I do however, believe that I have read enough of the book to form an opinion on the quality of it. I have a few main gripes with the story, as well as the writing style. The way Fitzgerald decided to have the narrator function is detrimental to the main character. I feel like I am playing an early adventure video game , where the protagonists are completely silent, despite other characters speaking to them. Nick tries to be a decent narrator by recording everything around him that happens. However, he fails to do a good job of this. Instead, the story reads like the main character has crippling ADD, and gets so easily distracted with something new. The tone of the story changes so instantly and quickly that it jars you out of the story, completely failing to keep the reader interested. I feel that the characters are all one dimensional, and after initially meeting them and reading about 5 pages with them, you know their entire character. For example, I feel like I can quickly figure out that Nick is either extremely passive, or is doing a very poor job at narrating his own actions. I am aware that this story is in contention with the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and others for the grand title of great American novel, but I fail to see how The Great Gatsby even contends to have this title at all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Great Gatsby is not a good book\n","id":"3b9ff7ab-a1ea-43f3-9818-7aa3ba9bc2f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>The reason for the proposed change to Huckleberry Finn is that the n-word is racially charged in ways inappropriate to an education setting. There is no analogy to the proposed reason for changing Romeo and Juliet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The analogy to changing the ending of Romeo and Juliet fails.\n","id":"237210b8-81ff-435d-a88f-cda74f6b89fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't see the problem with requiring someone who wants to vote for the leaders of our country or on its issues to be able to identify themselves as a legal citizen. I think that if you want to affect public policy you should be able to easily prove that you are a legal citizen. I don't think that requiring an ID is an attack on any race or income level, any person, no matter their race or income, should be able to acquire some sort of Identification. I think that the only people that should be affecting our policies are those who can prove they have the legal right to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see any problem with voter ID Laws.\n","id":"ad151607-b7e3-4db9-9518-63b7a952a2b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>God's nature is literally that of \"The Word\"; as evidenced by John 1:1. Because the word \"God\" exists, God exists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of the Bible, as the word of God, provides evidence for the existence of God.\n","id":"d6025159-2bf4-40bc-a5f1-c812a015e763"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>end national testing<|ARGUMENT|>National testing will result in teachers \"teaching to the test\". Students will be taught how to take tests instead of learning skills and knowledge that will help them become good citizens. This is because teachers will be judged based on how well their students do at tests, not on other important things like whether they are better behaved, more confident or learning faster. As Charles Murray describes, his children's school lost their best English teacher because he said 'I want to teach my students how to write. not teach them how to pass a test that says they can write\u20191. With national testing, they will become good test takers but will miss out on the joy of learning for learning\u2019s sake. Subjects like art and music that are not covered on the national tests could be cut so that more time can be spent teaching students to pass the test2. Children\u2019s education would become focused on a yearly test.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"National testing encourages teachers to 'teach to the test', rather than teach life skills\n","id":"d866229e-74ff-42cf-86cd-58b5098a334b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>It is impossible to know of all labour carried out unless the company or the sub contractor chooses to register it for taxation. This creates an obvious opportunity to avoid paying taxes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A \"subcontractor is responsible for their own tax payment\" rather than the employer having to pay employee taxes This means that tax collection is far more difficult for the state.\n","id":"efa2d00b-ab02-4d7a-804e-7961957f40cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Freemarkets, equality of man, freedom of press, freedom of religion, democratic society, gender equality and property rights are all core to liberalism and are both core to the republican and democratic party. I'm not trying to argue that the republican party is a party that champions liberalism but more so that i'm puzzled that liberalism can be used a derogatory term in some people's lexicon. On a slightly different note. Since many of the founding and traditional principles of the U.S were based on liberalism shouldn't American conservatism by default have many Liberal values? I'm not necessarily factoring Trump into this because i don't believe he's a traditional Republican and i'm not prepared to say his election represents a long term shift within the republican party.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's stupid for republicans to use liberals as a dirty word because many of the republican party's core principles are based on liberalism\n","id":"fa95628e-9f10-4804-ad29-8f7eaa714eb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Americans have been prejudiced against many people as they entered America the Irish, the Chinese, the Mexicans. Slowly, each group has assimilated. I don't think it's about skin color as skin color as much as skin color identifying, Hi. Your ancestors took my ancestors out of our homes in chains, killed over half over a sea voyage, separated their families, sold them, forced them to do unpaid labor, raped them, beat them, and murdered them. In a country that boasts free will and capitalism, slavery doesn't fit. So as no mass, accepted horror attacked others who voluntarily emigrated to America other discriminated against people are no longer discriminated against on a massive scale. I think the reason black people have not is because of remaining anger and remaining guilt. The same level of discrimination is not present for people voluntarily emigrating from countries in Africa as there is for people who have lived here for generations. I don't think it's skin as much as a reminder of what the skin represents. I don't know how we can fix the problem without a massive I'm sorry and willingness to repair. That apology must then be followed by I forgive you and a deliberate attempt to put the past behind and look forward.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Race relations in America must include \"I'm sorry\" and \"I forgive you.\"\n","id":"4b671f59-0ef4-448d-b2be-469c05e94556"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have a general feeling about whether a person has experienced living without ego or not by observation of where they place the importance of their own wants against the needs of others. From this, it is my belief that a person cannot be actively compassionate in every day life when they have not experienced the falseness of self because the ego is the only self they are truly aware of. Compassion being defined as being able to possess a love for all beings that is as great as that for the self and the closest people in their lives. Truly compassionate being defined as actively compassionate in every day life for all those that they can have an effect on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe a person can be truly compassionate before having experienced a prolonged state of egolessness.\n","id":"f9a5bc94-c11c-422a-8c86-3aeb805559a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does reducing company tax rates result in a net positive benefit to society? Pro is for a yes and con is for a no<|ARGUMENT|>Publicly owned enterprises have the responsibility to be efficient as they are accountable, indirectly, to the people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Publicly owned enterprises are sometimes more efficient than private ventures.\n","id":"f867a099-f603-4646-b6c6-63c11515a3de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>Do to their high number of followers, these celebrities can command fees of between $1,000 to $250,000 per post This sort of money can tempt celebrities to endorse risky products they haven\u2019t researched.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Celebrities frequently advertise weight loss products on social media, like teas, shakes, appetite-suppressing lollipops and diet pills.\n","id":"352b80fd-e05c-449f-8839-89d638478457"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Science has shown that the universe is consistent and unchanging an interventionist God cannot simultaneously exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scientific thought contradicts religious teachings about the nature of the cosmos.\n","id":"b37375f8-8516-4bc7-aba6-15c7fb978cca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just realized my state's general elections were earlier this week, and it made me think about how little I value voting. It's not that I'm not interested in politics I go out of my way to read up on issues that I hear about from friends, family, or less commonly local news sources, and I'm invested obviously in the future of my country and my community. The fundamental reason I don't vote is that my vote will have zero impact on the outcome of any of the races on which I vote. The arguments I hear most often from people seem to me to be inane and or blindly idealistic some examples gt If everyone thought that way, it would make a big difference. This may be true, but whether or not I vote has no impact on how many people think this way. gt You should focus more on local government your vote counts for more, and it more directly impacts your day to day life. While 1 in 100,000 is certainly better than 1 in 100,000,000, it's still statistically insignificant if a race is close and a recount is called, the margin of error is going to be larger than the sum of myself and all of those whom I have any amount of influence over. I would love to be shown the error of my ways here, but all I've gotten in the past is rhetoric and idealism. Please, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My vote doesn't matter.\n","id":"802e1473-7a20-4ece-9ba7-52a4ac530825"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With all the talk about lab grown meat these days, I had a conversation about how we should grow other kinds of exotic meat in labs too, meats from animals that are too rare or hard to cultivate traditionally. It would be fun to eat a rhino burger if we know that critically endangered rhinos were not harmed in the making of it. This conversation eventually brought up the ultimate forbidden meat human. Other than the obvious cultural taboo around eating meat, I do not see any reason that this would be forbidden. Nobody has to suffer or die to make the meat, and it is not really from a human, so I suppose it would be ethical. Or am I missing something here? Change my view. And before somebody brings it up, I'll make the pun now Flesh Topic Friday.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be ethical to eat lab grown human meat\n","id":"4b46bae0-ec95-4f64-b753-10a8c0846721"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The Roman Catholic Church considers an abortion \"a grave moral wrong\"; in Sikhism abortion if forbiden; Hinduism is opposed to it, except where it is necessary to save the mother; Islam regards abortion as wrong and forbidden though with vital exceptions and Judaism only permits it for serious reasons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has tried to control women's bodies by banning abortion, birth control and contraception.\n","id":"f5b8e886-1daa-4b47-a0d3-7218671da581"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, the most common idea for awarding alimony is when one parent becomes a stay at home parent while the other focuses on working. The working parent moved up in their career gaining more experience while the stay at home parent falls behind in their field and quickly becomes disconnected with new software or concept or how their industry is evolving, so if after their child moves out the couple ends up divorcing, you have one parent who has gained 20 years of experience in their industry, was able to stay late and work flexible hours to move up and they retain that position and salary after the divorce. The stay at home parent now is 20 years outdated in their career. Imagine how hard it would be for someone who worked as a web designer to learn how much the job has changed in the past 20 years. But they do have new experience in cleaning a house and cooking and making sure clothes are clean and ironed and lunches are packed for the morning. But that doesn\u2019t usually pay too well or have too many career prospects. So after the divorce they are going to have a hard time being gainfully employed. Since there is a societal benefit in married couples working together and not secretly protecting themselves for future possible divorce, family choices like this should be encouraged. Which requires something like amimony to ensure the spouse who gave up their career potential can recover in the case of divorce. Now even with far less extreme examples this still has an impact. With my personal case, I am still married and hopefully will remain married, but I had an excellent job before getting married. To help explain our situation, my wife is a doctor with a fairly unique specialty while I am a mechanical engineer. When my wife started her residency it required us to move. So I gave up my job but because my degree is fairly widely needed I was able to find another job near her. The job has less prestige, less growth potential, and less job security, but it also had more stable hours and was near my wife\u2019s job, so I took it. While she was working more hours than me I was doing nearly all of the cooking and cleaning and housework at home. Then when it approached time that she would complete residency she has offers for jobs in a few different states. Because of her specialty she basically was only going to be hired by a large medical group where nearly any decent sized city will have a variety of jobs that I could do close enough to my career, but if we moved based on me picking my top job choice there might be one or maybe zero nearby jobs for her and if the didn\u2019t get that one position then she would have to look for work outside her specialty. So of course we agreed to follow her career and I would find a job after her. Around this time my employer was bought out and I knew I was going to be laid off soon. The problem was I couldn\u2019t even interview for new jobs because I didn\u2019t know what state I would be in as my wife was still interviewing. My employer offered me to keep my job but it was in a different state where there was no good job for my wife in that city. After my wife settled on a job and accepted the offer, I once again found a job based on her job. Yet again not an ideal job but it did have almost no travel and more stable hours to compensate for her demanding schedule and being on call at times which means I am basically on call to cover home at that time as we now have a child. So I am now 11 years I to my career and I earn about 90k per year where many of my close friends and coworkers who I was on track with in terms of pay at my first job are earring around 120k to 130k. So I have effectively taken a 30 40k hit to my pay over the last 5 years by sacrificing my career advancement for my wife\u2019s job. My wife earns around 200k so as a married couple it makes sense that her job be prioritized for our overall benefit. So if we were to get divorced now. She has made it through residency due in part to my sacrifice of my career so she could land her high paying job and I would be earning far less than if I had insisted that my career be prioritized. I could probably find a somewhat higher paying job if I looked all over and was willing to move across they country but since my wife\u2019s job was prioritized, she doesn\u2019t have to look for a job or move. Which is a big strain and cost and I move, I come off as the one not caring about our child and breaking up the ability to have shared visitation . So if we were to get divorced in 20 more years, I will be even more behind as part of my role in the family is far more taking care of home things that her job does t give her the time to do so my job has to. Which means I will continue to falls being my peers on earning potential. So why shouldn\u2019t I deserve for at least some time compensations for crippling my earning potential to help boost her earning potential after the divorce? Or should people not do what is better for the family because of the fear that it will be disadvantageous if they ever get divorced?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"there are legitimate reasons for spouses to be awarded alimony after a divorce even when both parents have been working.\n","id":"80b81589-c3ad-466b-8f55-486b91e821d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>Ancient religions - Greek, Roman and otherwise - have a remarkably free approach to sexuality, with a large amount of sexual activity for personal pleasure rather than procreation. Comparably, the religious distaste for sex is recent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious moral imperatives are arbitrary and vary widely, they do not apply across all religions and certainly do not apply to the non-religious.\n","id":"a0a0e3ad-a98b-47c3-8346-cd01d15dd8f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cameras in Courtrooms<|ARGUMENT|>Televised trials will be an antidote to the hysterical and sensationalist coverage of trials that we see in the print media. Instead of relying on a journalist\u2019s report of a case, and the sketches of a courtroom artist, we will be able to see for ourselves the evidence, the demeanour of the defendant, and the trial process. Cameras in the courtroom will prevent the public being misled.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Televised trials will be an antidote to the hysterical and sensationalist coverage of trials that we...\n","id":"ae67c951-d01b-4562-a326-033b1a41599c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I found all the characters except for Lloyd, C.C. in R1, and Schneizel extremely bland and not really fun or likable at all The plot was overly contrived and stumbled over its own size more often than not. Also had frequent deus ex machinas. Ending is bad and the twist can be seen coming a mile away Action was extremely lame. This was my first mech anime but I could never really tell what was going on Lelouch is basically Light Yagami not a huge fan of Death Note either, though A lot of filler wasted time on the side characters that doesn't really develop into anything Nice themes but often hammered into your head I suppose this isn't a traditional change my view , but I'll award a delta if someone can acceptably explain why this show is so loved. I didn't really like Death Note but I could see why people like it while watching it. With this, I really just don't get it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Code Geass is mediocre\n","id":"8f9ddbf6-f68a-4fa8-89ab-08d591140afe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There Be Religious Exemptions To The Law?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious exemptions create the possibility of a multiclass system whereby some people can dodge civil responsibilities by claiming it offends their religious belief. There should be no exceptions for religious belief. This does not stop people believing whatever they wish to believe provided it does not impose a burden on another individual or society at large.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious exemptions from laws can be harmful to people who don't share that religion's ideology.\n","id":"035e3611-8662-4f8e-8db5-f2c92665512a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello . I believe that the current state of savings accounts makes them obsolete. My current bank offers just 0.01 yield per year on balances in savings accounts, thanks to the near 0 fed interest rate, and with that in mind, I believe that it is better to keep all of my money in my checking or investments accounts think Robinhood for us poor Reddit folks who can't deal with fees and minimums . It makes my money easier to access, it is still FDIC insured, and thanks to bank levied restrictions and securities measures my money seems to be as 'safe' as it would be in a savings account. Please reddit, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is currently pointless to have a savings account.\n","id":"5ccf5888-441d-4aba-8d0a-9a7d110e0984"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title says, I am a very proud person, and very aloof. I've been burned frequently by people I thought I could trust, was never good with social situations still aren't and have always been behind the learning curve when it came to street smarts. I have a lot of problems, but my biggest fear is admitting I have them. Even the fact that I'm writing this post is a big deal, because I had to overcome this huge mental stigma that I have against asking other people for help, instilled into my by my dad. I know this mindset has done some good for me over the years helped me to cope with depression and loneliness but those times are over now and I want to move on. Please  on how to ask people for help or even just submit posts on Reddit or status updates on Facebook and Twitter and socialize like a normal person, without feeling like an attention whore or outsider, or dumbass . Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"New poster here. I have a REALLY hard time asking for help and admitting I have problems. Please\n","id":"f4561f2f-df30-4219-a7ff-846ac487c5ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's the thing. More than once, I've had people who do one of two things. They either stay behind me and flash their lights to signal to me that they want me to move over or they just drive very close behind me till they just decide to get over themselves. Both of those situations have happened when I was going at or over the speed limit and when there was no other traffic besides us literally in one instance as well as when the traffic was busy and it wasn't quite so easy to merge. So tell me, why should I have to move out of your way just because you can't be bothered to move the steering wheel slightly to the left or right? The burden should be on you to get around me since I'm going at or above the speed limit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If I am going at or above the speed limit, and you are wanting to pass me, the burden is on you to move over to a different lane to pass me, not on myself.\n","id":"c3605dc4-a2a8-4f6c-92d1-f10ab45e0d4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should homeschooling be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Nearly half of US public school funding comes from local property taxes, which means that schools in poorer areas are deprived of funding and lack resources. Parents who choose to homeschool in light of this are likely to provide a better environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"State and government-funded schools' resources vary greatly. Some schools have great resources and ample budgets while others lack the basics.\n","id":"493d1e39-636f-4fdb-8851-fd89686b3f4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Western feminism often tries to establish a single \"correct\" way of having agency and choice. A study showed that when Muslim women choose to wear modest clothing, for example a hijab, their agency and personal choices are often drawn into question by Western feminism as these choices are stereotyped as oppression and submission.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This movement in favor of nipple showing is championed by Western women of higher economic standing who are usually young, thin, and white. Most women who do not fall under that narrow demographic umbrella are left alienated.\n","id":"9f551ecd-507f-41c0-a99f-a91226072271"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe mandatory drug testing to be a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The practice forces addicts and casual users to become dependent on welfare that would otherwise be able to hold jobs not engaged in safety sensitive tasks. U.S. Supreme Court decisions have failed to address the runaway logic that employers use to screen applicants in a way that would otherwise be discriminatory. The practice also gives Federal, State, and employers power to reveal the existence of certain medical conditions, pregnancy status, genetic predispositions, and the use of legal substances that people rightly would want to keep private. Edit A few people are hung up on the fact that the constitution does not protect you against private enterprise. Fine. Anecdote mandatory drug screening did not protect the USG against Edward Snowden. I would argue that Edward Snowden has done more damage than any addict ever could before being terminated for poor work performance. Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association is the landmark case which involved U.S. Federal employees which is often cited against ACLU cases regarding the practice. I argue that drug screening would not tell you if an employee is unreliable if you could not otherwise detect it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Suspicionless mandatory drug testing is illegal and destructive to the economy.\n","id":"2b336e74-be03-408a-a47c-82c7c3aaff19"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>One mind, whose values may be opposed to human values, is worth vastly less than the billions of human minds likely to be destroyed if unaligned AI take over.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should be more worried about how AI can become an existential threat to humanity, before any ethical concerns.\n","id":"10954348-494d-4b24-b641-2c65e33a8794"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>The Battle of Okinawa cost nearly 13.000 US soldiers' lives and presented a blueprint for what to expect when invading the Japanese home islands.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prior battles had shown the high number of casualties, which could have been expected.\n","id":"1995cd30-e174-4fd9-9b11-fa85f1a08e83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should physical libraries be digitized?<|ARGUMENT|>Not everyone has a home. Libraries are one of the few public spaces people can spend time without having to purchase something. Some people like ones who do not have a home don't have anywhere else to go and a library provides a place for them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"They can make do with what they have at home, especially since all the books are accessible through an electronic device instead of bookshelf.\n","id":"5d574668-b4d0-4291-8795-5ccadbb6229e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The idea is not to infringe on anyone's right to express themselves. If someone wants to have and film adult consenting adults having sex then they are free to do this. Instead remove money from the industry to ensure those who do not want to engaged in such behavior do not find themselves with no alternative. In other words, remove the incentive for the creation of such content. This idea could be extended to other gray areas where we value freedom but we do not want to incentivize the behavior. Perhaps limit the profits casinos can make. Limit the profits prisons can make from prisoners. Basically remove the incentives that encoruage taking advantage of people<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"while keeping freedom of press and expression, money should be removed from corrupting enterprises like porn, gambling and prisons\n","id":"1b604182-13c3-407c-9618-920fedb2abf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>According to the Department of Education the national average for public school teachers in primary or secondary education in 2013 was 56,383. The median household income for the same year was 51,939 This means that teachers made, on average, 8.6 more than the average household. That seems pretty good, enough to live a comfortable middle class life on if you're a married couple with kids, you'd want a second income, but that's of course the norm now . I'll move on to discussing some of the common objections I've seen. But some teachers make much less than that . True. Average pay for a teaching in South Dakota was 39,580. Median household income in South Dakota is considerably higher, and was 48,321 in 2011. And of course, starting salaries are much lower. According to the National Education Association the average starting salary is 36,141, and in South Dakota it was 29,851. However, showing that teachers in some areas are paid too little, or that teachers start too low does not mean that teachers are in general paid too little. It just means that there's some instances that may need fixing. Teachers work really long hours, so they deserve more . I'll accept that during the school year teachers work an average of 53 hours a week But, most professionals work longer than 40 hour weeks. According to Gallup the average salaried worker has a 47 hour work week. Teachers are still working more than the average, but it's not as disproportional as it may seem on first glance. And then there's the breaks and I know this is a controversial subject. I'm going to use the calendar from my home school district as an example I'm not sure if it's the norm, but I don't have any reason to think it longer or shorter than anywhere else. On this calendar, teachers get 8 full weeks off for the summer. They have a week off in March for Spring Break, a week off in October for Fall Break, a week off in November for Thanksgiving, and 2 weeks off for Christmas and New Years. The calendar also includes another 4 days as snow make up days, and if there were no snow cancellations, they just become days off. I don't know of any other jobs that give you 13 weeks off. I know some of that time will be spend on class prep, but not all of it. Seems like between the longer hours when class is in session and the large amounts of time off will more or less shake out 39 weeks at 53 hours per week plus 13 weeks at an average of 20 hours per week is 2267 total for the year, compared to 47 hours per week for 49 weeks totaling 2303 hours per year . They make a lot less than other people with college degrees. Not all degrees are created equal, and I don't think it's very convincing to point to engineers and complain about how they're making more. No kidding. They're engineers. It's probably not possible to definitively say what areas of study are the most challenging and most demanding and different people have their own strengths and weaknesses but just looking at grade inflation, education majors top the list Top 5 easiest degrees are all humanities, while the hardest are all science, math, and econ. I just don't find this to be an apples to apples comparison simply because they're both getting bachelor's degrees. If teachers were making significantly less than people with degrees in Literature and Philosophy, then I'd think there's a real argument to be had. What exactly makes a engineer's salary relevant to what a teacher should be getting paid? Athletes earn a lot more than teachers I really doubt teachers would be happier earning the 1300 mo a minor league baseball player earns. But, that aside, the professional athletes you see on TV represent the elite of the elite only a tiny percentage of players on Division 1 college teams get to go pro. The salary made by the average athlete isn't in the millions. It's whatever the Ford dealership pays, because the average athlete doesn't get to be a professional athlete. Pro athletes also have an audience of millions. If public school teachers were running MOOCs, then it might be a better comparison. If we paid more, we'd get better teachers. According to my high school micro economics class, this is probably true. My experience out in the real world suggests otherwise. Increasing the pay for teachers would increase the supply of potential teachers but not necessarily the quality of that increased supply. The additional teachers we'd be looking for are ones who are interested in teaching, would be good at teaching, and would be teachers but for the pay. I don't think that's very many people. The pay is decent enough that the but for the pay crowd of people who really want to be teachers is going to be tiny. What I think increased pay would result in is more people picking teaching as simply a default path for people who do well in humanities classes, basically what we've seen with the legal industry. We get an increased supply, but it's largely people who are disinterested in the career and won't make for very good teachers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers are, in general, paid enough.\n","id":"5741f13f-32bc-479d-a913-4aa14efb3742"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be automatic voter registration in the US?<|ARGUMENT|>If everything became digitised, there could be more opportunities for foreign infiltration into the electoral system in the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The system for registering people could be vulnerable to fraud.\n","id":"3fcead69-1241-4024-9113-b6da2a2f793a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is violence always wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>People can hold the state and its legal system to greater accountability than individuals using violence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The legal system is and should be the only way to receive reparation.\n","id":"10c3f2cb-0270-4618-aa5d-c7d687eeefb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>This is especially true in the case of the Wizarding War. Since Hogwarts was a very integral part of Tom Riddle's development as a wizard and quest for power, Hogwarts became a focal point during the war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both instances of Death Eaters getting into Hogwarts took place during the Second Wizarding War. This represents extraordinary circumstances; hardly any school would be safe in wartime.\n","id":"ec977205-6ce1-4bf8-8acd-72d1ea38d297"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would a society without emotions be a better society?<|ARGUMENT|>Soldiers are unlikely to object to orders from the higher ups to carry out disproportionate levels of violence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Attacking forces would not feel remorse when carrying out violence.\n","id":"e1dd8c23-2f3b-45ac-b088-5226f61145e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This post is not based on race because it is irrelevant to this topic. There's a post on bestof which really missed the point here OP goes on and on about how it is hard for poor people to escape a vicious cycle of returning to court once they are charged with a crime. The user specifically states that most of them are originally in court for missed child support payments or suspended license. If a person has unprotected sex when they're already poor and unable to support a child then that is simply poor decision making and logical reasoning which will affect other areas of their life as well 2 People lose their license for a reason because a court has found them as a danger to others when they are behind the wheel. The justice system is there to protect society and the laws are the same for every individual. I work with a charity that grants science scholarships to inner city youth so that they can pay for their college education. The funny thing is that the kids that win the scholarship don't even need it despite their upbringing they were going to find a way to get into college anyway. That being said, somebody needs to receive the scholarship and the rest of the candidates just did not do very well at the science fair. Another funny thing is that it it reasonable to assume that none of the kids had help from parents because their parents are either not a part of their life or on welfare. The point I'm trying to make is that you don't see a lot of older criminals who have a periodic table poster on their bedroom wall or who could have been a scientist if only they were given 5000 when they were younger. People can't escape the ghetto gangs prison because they weren't born with enough intelligence blaming the police, laws or the court system is avoiding the true cause of the situation. To sum it all up I was at the liquor store yesterday and a poor, older woman in front of me bought 12 single shot bottle of a shitty vodka that totaled 20. A regular bottle ~17 shots is priced at 17.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are stuck in a cycle of living in the ghetto, gangs and\/or incarceration because they do not possess enough critical thinking ability to escape it\n","id":"238ba17f-f8a9-4eb9-8f37-cefb064ba3c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just because a minority group may not have the societal power to upgrade their regular racism to systemic racism, and, therefore, oppress the group currently in power, that does not make it okay for members of said minority group to mock the dominant group or say things like I hate white people . Not even as a joke. They have every right to express righteous anger at the atrocities the more powerful group have committed against them, but once their complaints become prejudice, they should receive the same treatment a KKK member may receive from the black community. Well, almost as much, at least. Lack of power should not excuse the hatred of groups of people for innate properties. Now, before you go and say, Oppression is not hurt feelings , do you think it is moral to knowingly hurt someone's feelings, even if it may not result in institutional oppression for them? I don't. Edit Wow, I'm getting really downvoted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All bigotry is wrong and immoral, no matter the perpetrator.\n","id":"5503d44e-0de6-4c23-8fc8-ba89a5c80b32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think Harris' argument against free will is flawed from the very beginning his definition and requirements for free will are absurd. In order to have free will, according to Harris, one must be able to make any possible decision at any time regardless of attained information. Any decision made as a result of previous knowledge and experience can't be free will. In other words, in order to have free will, people must be effectively omniscient and somewhat omnipotent insofar as they have the ability to make the choice . Considering the atheistic side of Harris' thought, this seems like a strange and unreasonable criteria to put on something pertaining to humanity. There's also the issue of this bordering somewhat on straw man territory proponents of free will do not claim that people have the capacity to choose any decision at any time, only any decision about which they have knowledge . It seems Harris is arguing against a definition that he created for the sole purpose of arguing against. Why are Harris' criteria for free will reasonable when a God like being is not?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sam Harris' argument against Free Will uses absurd criteria.\n","id":"a1604d8e-9cc5-41e5-87bf-1abaade870fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Research finds that over-diagnosis or a compulsion for diagnosis ends up harming children since the ratio of benefit to harm resulting from the diagnosis is incompletely understood.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This in turns means that doctors end up over treating patients because of the fear of being sued for malpractice.\n","id":"14169629-f2cc-447c-bb9a-4b37f02033f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Psychological studies indicate people have tendency to shift responsibility to somebody else when many people are present. The God could be a target for such shift when no other target is available. Groupthink in wikipedia Diffusion of responsibility<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion formed naturally from hyperactive agency detection - a tendency to attribute natural or unexplained events to a sentient agent in this case, God.\n","id":"88b717fb-2907-4188-aa75-3536b3c71913"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I mean, just look at the rape crime statistics, Sweden and Germany, both refugee welfare countries are ranked top, especially Sweden. Refugees are nothing better then burdens on the country's infrastructure and systems as well as to the taxpayers who pay for the handouts they are receiving. Most refugees expect to be treated like heroes and are baffled by people receiving them with hostility especially when they're from Africa the Middle East with extremely different cultures and the way they treat things, but make no effort to integrate into their host country and simply expect to be babysitted and given jobs education for free. Edit Y'all have honestly managed to  haha sorry for being a 'tard would give a delta to all of y'all but there's too many people shoutout especially to u DexFulco<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refugees bring nothing but poverty and crime wherever they go\n","id":"f9bd8464-7471-4ff7-983f-e90794d6d2e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In terms of capabilities and UI. Not price, skill ceiling, or skill floor. iMovie has motion tracking that works just as well, if not better, than Vegas'. iMovie can mask just as well as well. iMovie is an equal in terms of audio editing. It can pitch change, etc. iMovie has built in templates and sound effects. iMovie can chroma key. iMovie has a more elegant and less complex UI. iMovie is on par with Sony Vegas, maybe even a little bit better, In my opinion. Some of these may be wrong, they're based off of what I know I don't own Vegas, but I have a friend who uses it , and I'm a rather green video editor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that iMovie is an equally good\/better editing program as Sony Vegas.\n","id":"1d3a515c-9dc8-4f82-930a-218dc810ea04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For the lower and lower middle class, one of the largest expenses for the cost of living is rent. The average rent has increased significantly over time, much faster than wages have risen. A lot of people think that property tax only harms wealthy land owners . This is a fallacy, as it trickles down to those that rent too. Property tax is often raised, and the result is that landlords have to charge more in order to break even. For example if you lease an apartment for 1000 month, but property tax is 6,000 a year for said location, you're only really making 500 a month. Investors look at this and see how much they can make by purchasing land and renting it out. If the margin is too low, lots will sit empty because it's more profitable to invest in other things. In my hometown, there's so many square miles worth of empty lots that should have houses built on them, but nobody is buying them, so construction has stagnated. As of today, it's just huge fields of dirt with signs on them, with maybe a few houses there. If property tax was lower, people might be more likely to seek homes, or someone may purchase them to rent them, due to higher profit margins, creating more competition, and thus lower rent in the area. So the current result of property taxes, at least in my town, is that tons of land goes to waste because nobody wants to foot the cost of taxes. Reducing property taxes would Lower cost of living for lower middle class by driving down rent, as well as expenses for homeowners. Result in a construction boom, creating more jobs. Decrease the need for federal state assistance, reducing government costs Make minimum wage more reasonable to survive on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Property Taxes Should Be Lowered in Favor of Other Taxes\n","id":"bea7d28c-3999-4725-8065-01d620803f77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>The public discourse generated by the implementation of gun controls, and the requirements imposed by the gun controls themselves, will change cultural norms about gun possession.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stricter gun control will decrease the harmful consequences of gun culture in the long term.\n","id":"8b59a8c0-df70-42e0-86ad-af1f78b80e73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should fracking be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Chemicals released during fracking can act as endocrine disruptors impacting the normal production of hormones within the body.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chemicals and pollutants released during fracking are thought to be very harmful to growing children and infants.\n","id":"a17060c3-ad29-4c0e-9605-556a1707ac74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cannabis be legalised for medical use in the UK?<|ARGUMENT|>claims to help Rheumatoid Arthritis: reduce joint pain and swelling, suppress joint destruction and disease worsening.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overwhelming scientific research supports the beneficial medical effects of using cannabis.\n","id":"55dcd6d6-d85c-4238-8fa7-1f37df544836"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Money gained by betting agencies on lost bets is kept by the bookies and could be better spent by being invested back in the economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Millions are collectively lost over racing by those who bet.\n","id":"d010fdc5-6bda-41f3-95a5-1b626343e90c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently there was an outcry against the Saudi football team for not lining up when the call for silence was made. I've been watching football since the last 12 years, and I've been equally annoyed by the federation trying to align football with politics. I believe the act of Minute of Silence serve no purpose. People pay their hard earned money to watch a game of football for entertainment purposes, or because they are passionate fans, not because they are there to attend a memorial service. Sports should be completely separate from political agendas or tragedies that aren't directly related to the game itself. Having a minute of silence serves absolutely no purpose when a minute later the crowd erupts into excitement and forgets they were standing in silence a while back. Fans are there to have a good time, not to sit in silence. Fans create their own atmosphere and songs that compliment the ideology and history of the club, the minute's silence is enforced on them. They should be allowed to come up with their own chants, or not if they so please because they are the ones paying to watch the match. gt It is done to show solidarity Why does football need to be the one to showcase solidarity? Do people at movie screenings observe silence? Would they be forced to if the screening was being broadcasted on the tv? Do WWE fans sit in silence when a terror attack takes place? It's a sport and should be taken as such. People die in tragedies every single day, and to demand the entire stadium to hush up and observe silence is useless. And why does the minute need to be enforced? Can't they observe silence or pay their respects, if they want to, privately? Why does it have to be at a football match? Now if they were actually observing silence for the death of a football player or manager that had played for the club, then that would've been appropriate as all the players are part of the same club and dressing room as he was, and the fans have supported him throughout his tenure. The history should be respected and so do the people associated with it, it gives a chance for the fans to give a sending off to the departed ex player manager. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the act of observing Minute of Silence at football matches should no longer be carried out\n","id":"d7facd78-a663-404c-8383-ba612372a6c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, they present women as the gatekeepers of male incontrollable sexuality. Therefore the responsibility for any sexual misconduct falls on women and how they behave or dress, perpetuating rape culture Kay & Jackson, p. 20-21<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abstinence-only programs often rely on old-fashioned gender stereotypes.\n","id":"eccaae98-350e-4f6a-8b2c-5b6356ee03f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Ungulates do prevent the erosion of topsoil but the number of ungulates per unit area is not enough to provide a sustainable meat source.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ungulates do play a role in regulating soil health, but farmers can do a much better job at this while producing more food.\n","id":"8a1bbc70-20f1-4aca-a0ed-dba613eb17f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump's tweets countering North Korea's leader seem to have made him settle down and open up communications to South Korea. This may be attributed to Trump's \"no nonsense\" attitude to North Korea and China.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump is advancing US interests and rebuilding the country. His broader political success counteracts any political misdemeanours Trump may be accused of. Impeaching him would put a stop to this good work.\n","id":"fb4eb9a6-743b-44ac-b414-038c708844ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I said this to a Chinese friend and was called racist. But I'm not even saying it's a good or bad thing, i'm just saying there is more variety of the way white people look. But whites have multiple hair colors, multiple eye colors, a bigger variety of skin tones. White guys have way more variety of facial hair, and white guys tend to go bald younger adding to the variety White people are more likely to become obese, again making it easier to tell them apart. China ranks number 157 for most obese country at only 6.9 . That's just a fact Even their fashion in China, in schools they are more likely to wear uniforms in schools making them look even more alike<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"White people are objectively easier to tell apart on average than Chinese people\n","id":"718525f4-f1b2-442d-aa03-9f37944a6018"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>It wouldn't be fair to the child to enable a women to make the decision to become a mother and then pass off her parental responsibilities to a third party so that she can pursue her own career ambitions, assuming the woman's partner is also working full-time or she lacks a partner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If both parents are able to work longer hours that will have a negative impact on the children.\n","id":"34d9b311-da0a-48da-934f-d0d41af99659"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Libertarian free will is the ability to choose the causes of our actions. For example, if a dieter is deliberating about whether to eat ice cream or a salad, they can choose for their actions to be caused by their desire to eat something tasty and eat the ice cream or by their desire to lose weight and eat the salad . There is no evidence that anything determines the choice that the dieter makes except his or her own free will. We choose between alternatives by a process of deliberation, and the components of the process of deliberation that are under our control include how much focus we bring to our deliberation and what we focus on. For example, if it occurs to me that I need to study for a test next week, I can choose to focus on that fact and work out what I need to study and when in detail, or I can choose not to think about it and let myself drift. In addition to focus and drift, there is a third possibility called evasion, which involves directing active effort into not thinking about a given topic as opposed to drift, where one merely does not direct effort toward thinking about the topic . I take it to be fairly obvious from introspection that we have free will, so described. I am not arguing in a circle, as I would be if I appealed to intuition or the fact that we just have to have free will to be morally responsible for our actions I am pointing to something that you can observe yourself any time you want, in as much detail as you want. The most common argument against the existence of free will is that free will is incompatible with the scientific picture of the world. Science allegedly reveals a world that operates strictly according to the laws of physics and chemistry, which are deterministic. Therefore, free will must be an illusion which will ultimately reduce to deterministic processes. But if you look at the foundations of science, at what makes its experiments valid, you will see that it depends on the validity of direct observation, i.e., on the assumption that what we observe is not an illusion. Scientific principles do not come out of nowhere by divine revelation, they are simply the result of a number of observations, and none of its results can be more valid than observation is in the first place. We observe that we have the ability to choose between focus and drift, so that has to be integrated into any rational picture of the world. I do not claim to know how free will works with respect to physics and chemistry, but we have to be able to trust our senses at this basic level in order to arrive at any of the highly advanced scientific conclusions that the determinist claims undermine free will. In order to change my view about this, you will have to either provide a good reason to think that the observations of myself and others that support my belief in libertarian free will do not really support that belief or provide a compelling independent argument for determinism. Edit Please note that the position called libertarianism in metaphysics has nothing to do with the position called libertarianism in political philosophy, although they share the same name. I am simply following the established usage in philosophy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We have libertarian free will.\n","id":"b892d86b-00f3-4e9d-b272-b05eff20c023"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of the problems with late assignments is that it requires the teacher to go back into the gradebook and change a student's score from a zero to whatever it is with the penalty. But, that inconvenience doesn't exist if the teacher hasn't graded any students for that assignment by the time the late assignment has been turned in. How can a teacher expect students to be timely if they aren't timely themselves? Setting deadlines on assignments creates stress in students, but if they don't apply that same level of stress to themselves, students feel their hard work to get it in on time is under appreciated. The longer a teacher doesn't grade an assignment, the greater chance it has of becoming lost. The student is often faced with a penalty grade reduction for late assignments, but the teacher faces no penalty for late grading.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers shouldn't count an assignment as late unless they've already graded it.\n","id":"9175e716-fc29-48eb-b72e-5990a4f15733"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ignoring the conspiracy connotations and totalitarian aspects associated with a NWO. A global government, working for the benefit of everyone, not just their own nation. Not necessarily dissolving local and state governments, as they can handle trivial comparatively issues, but all major decisions being brought to the global government something similar to the UN , which has elected officials from every country. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe a global government or New World Order would be a great thing.\n","id":"3d39ce7c-3bf5-427c-8159-5b333ae47b20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hold my view for reasons including but not limited to the following subs consists of primarily direct links to other posts that they deem shit highly opinionated mob of self important moral crusader vigilante feminists, etc. circumvents and disrupts reddit's natural subreddit ecosystem downvote brigades, vote manipulation comment circlejerks, in not only their own sub, but other threads promotes off topic discussion and pro anti srs spam target individual users in order to deprive them of karma comment invasions other subs have been banned for the same Regardless of what the official rules of the sub dictate. All of the above mentioned things are obvious and empirically verifiable. Perhaps most importantly, the very nature and core workings of the sub are an affront to reddiquette, and indeed a majority of the very simple rules of reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"SRS family of subreddits should be banned.\n","id":"2f105b64-6c45-4d4d-bea8-023bb184ecce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care, Debate on Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>Providing universal health care means increasing costs to certain taxpayers. This in itself impedes on certain freedoms and rights. Securing one right by impeding on other is illegitimate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Securing a \"right\" to universal health means impeding on other rights\n","id":"6a002d97-c052-4cd5-b11b-994b73b5ba3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Stefan Molyneux, henceforth SM because his last name is confusing, is very popular in the Indian American community. I am half Indian myself my father is Indian. Just today, he sent me three great his words videos by SM. My dad binge watches SM's videos and I know lots of other Indian people all men who binge watch SM videos. At my dad's previous job, before he retired depending on who you ask, he got fired for starting political fights with his coworkers and didn't retire voluntarily, which I think is kinda funny but it's neither here nor there he had been meaning to retire anyway , he told me he shared SM's videos with his coworkers, most of whom are not Indian. Thus, based on the people I know, it is my impression that SM's videos are popular among people of all races. The videos I have seen of him make him sound extremely Christian, although I'm not that familiar with him and I don't know if he actually is a Christian. If there is extremism in his videos, it comes from what I perceive to be a strong Christian faith that borders on the extreme not on racial extremism or white supremacism. TL DR Ever since the Sam Harris incident with the drastically edited podcast episode, SM has faced accusations that he is a white supremacist. But I do not think it is true because he is very popular in the Indian American community. To change my view , you can provide evidence preferably written, not one of his videos as I'm boycotting youtube these days in which he expresses a sentiment that white people are superior to non white people. I have awarded deltas already and a variety of arguments, for and against, have been made below. Please don't spend a lot of time composing a response. If you want to, go ahead, but don't feel like you have to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stefan Molyneux isn't racist or a white supremacist.\n","id":"5e242440-f45a-4fa0-be7d-b319247a5cca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Less than a hundred years ago having fair skin was a marker for being upper class as it indicated that they had not done much outside work. However, there is a fairly recent obsession among, particularly, white women to become more tanned. Obvious health risks aside skin cancer , I believe this is indicative of that fact that it has become seemingly untrendy to be white. We see the phenomenon is lots of other ways and it is not exclusive to whites. Many Asian women undergo drastic cosmetic surgery to make their eyes less slanted and more anglo. This is always marked as evidence of still pervasive white colonialism. Similarly, the clich\u00e9 of the white guy who pretends to be black further shows that it has become uncool and even unsafe in some neighbourhoods to be or act white. I say, be proud of your heritage, whether you're black, white, asian, hispanic or whatever.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the recent desire to \"tan\" is at least somehow related to a sense of guilt and shame associated with being white.\n","id":"b69c10ef-e86e-409a-aa10-f63efa96b3d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010<|ARGUMENT|>\" Senate Financial Reform Bill: More Bailouts & Fed Power\". The New American. May 2010 \"No matter how foolish the investment, under the Senate bill financial firms on the losing side of a financial bet would always be able to call on government bailouts in the future.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"2010 financial regs won't end \"too big to fail\" and bailouts\n","id":"1c5e6dbf-e6d9-4e33-9db0-764d27c229a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Toxic Masculinity might be a term popular in some sociological circles on the left. However, this as a sociological hypothesis, cannot be tested for falsifiability or independently tested. To me it comes across as a stereotype. The Gillette commercial capitalizes on the modern truism of Toxic Masculinity. I say it speaks to tribalism and less to benevolence because the ad pinpoints identity sex and gender over bad behavior. For instance, is bullying an issue or only men bullying an issue? I am anticipating some rebuttal, and this is my opinion on those 1 Toxic Masculinity tries to explain society's outlook on men, and not of men themselves. A If so, it is the society to blame and not men. Why does the ad and many pundits to the left squarely blame men for this. Women also make up the society, and women are to be blamed as well. As in the ad, people such Terry Crews ask men to monitor or police other men? 2 Boys will be boys attitude condones this behavior? A How can we test to see if saying boys will be boys is the at any meaningful level CAUSE of the bad behavior among men? I could hypothesize that men are more motivated by bad behavior as they are rewarded by more attention from women . Hypothesizing is easy the real test is proving the hypothesis. 3 Men are overwhelmingly responsible for rapes bullying harassment. A Possibly. Bullying or harassment and not just that of the sexual kind should not be tolerated. Why focus on only one kind of bullying or harassment? Also, why does it necessarily matter if one identity type is more engaged in bad behavior? For instance, lets say that 90 of green people condone and get away with slavery, only 20 of purple people condone and get away with slavery. In this case, does it matter who is more engaged in slavery? True benevolence would be teaching people that slavery is wrong not just that slavery carried out by green people is wrong. As an analogy, the Gillette ad is just the left's version of foxtv types saying blacks at large need to correct the behavior of the some black people who misbehave .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gillette commercial and Toxic Masculinity stoke tribalism in the name of benevolence\n","id":"8ad7453e-47da-4e2e-a667-64bef2864eb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>FYI I am not religious at all and I think religion overall causes more harm than good. However if a religion should be viewed as true, shouldn't the religion then be consistant?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think that religion should become more liberal in order to fit in to society.\n","id":"dcf07ccd-6408-4d2b-a8c2-5bdae037cc66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm putting this view forward as food for thought based on my observations the past couple of years. It seems to me that in the public relations obsessed political culture of the UK and the USA being a female politician comes with a particular set of advantages and they relate to the way male politicians are scrutinised by the media and the electorate. Now female politicians do get scrutinised too particularly for their appearance and some aspects of their personal lives but I don't perceive this as being as deal braking as the judgements male politicians can be subject too. With Teresa May, the new PM of the UK, and Hillary Clinton, presidential candidate in the US both polling highly against their male opponents I think the current situation helps highlight the factors working against male political figures Male politicians find themselves caught between two conflicting expectations. This is the result of relatively recent developments in our culture, which concurrently holds two ideas of what men should be like, the 'Traditional Man' and the 'New Man'. One or other of these ideals can be held by separate demographics as well as both being held by the same person. The 'Traditional Man' must be perceived as being 'macho' by many among electorate who hold to traditional gender values. So strong and dominant. This however, may work against them as they could come off as too arrogant or brazen. Trump is a perfect case example for this ideal in action. His 'jock' personality and loud, reckless demeanour are admired by his most ardent supporters, however, as the leaked tapes have revealed these same traits have alienated many and he comes off as a major douche bag and not a president. The 'New Man' is the sensitive, nice, compassionate ideal that more aligns with the values of modern society. However a male politician must tread carefully as not to be seen as 'too nice' as he could then be labelled weak. For some 'too nice' might mean not being 'macho', simple as that. Not being alpha means your a beta. In the UK Corbyn is often dismissed as being weak by members of the electorate for his unabrasiveness. Before him, Milliband was crucified by the media and the electorate for being a 'geek' with 'nothing about him'. With the media culture and the electorate choosing to both vilify male politicians who are are 'too arrogant' and humiliate male politicians who are 'too nice' this leaves a very narrow line for men in the political sphere to follow which could risk them falling into the category 'too bland'. It seems in this climate the safest bet for political parties seeking government are female candidates as they can be put forward as nice, kind and attentive without failing to 'measure up'. As such, typical women politicians can appeal to traditionalists, most of whom are progressive enough to accept female leaders, as they still honour gender expectations and appeal to progressives for being pioneers first of all and more compassionate, sensitive leaders secondly. Not that they really are that but they can convince enough people while their male opponents are being destroyed. So for the time being I hold the view that for as long as the expectations of male leaders remain ambiguous and our media opportunistically pounces on any failure to 'measure up', any female politician would do well to make her move further up the pecking order. There are simply less ways for a woman to fall down than a man in this current political atmosphere, in the UK, where I'm from, or the USA. Finally I would like to add that I hold nothing against having more female politicians and they being more successful, indeed I see it a good thing and personally would rather see a parliament full of them than full of the Old Boy's Club we're only just shaking off. Thank you for reading and leave you opinions in the receptacle below. TL,DR There isn't one, put the effort in as I have and read at least the bullet points to understand my view. Edit Spelling and grammar.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Now is an opportune time to be a female politician.\n","id":"941d269b-331e-4275-a75e-bd42df46edf8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>There would be less opportunity for ISIS to track down societal groups that it actively persecutes, such as homosexuals Shi'ias Christians and Jews<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ISIS and its activities would suffer from such a move.\n","id":"66e143a7-4196-4f55-af4a-caba7cd7a240"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Abolish Strict Regulation Over Crossing National Borders?<|ARGUMENT|>With the advent of internet proliferation over the world, data and information moves freely between countries. People should be able to do the same.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In pursuit of a globalised world, we should abolish strict regulation of national borders\n","id":"66f20c9e-59c8-4d48-8a0d-b0d672d822b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>Any difference in the perception of pain could be accommodated by gradually increasing the amount of pain caused. Thus even despite subjective differences in the perception of pain, pain can be used consistently as a form of punishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While there are different thresholds of pain extreme practices will cause a lot of pain to anyone.\n","id":"296b15d5-ca28-4201-aa9d-406470895422"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Removing restrictions on nipple showing for women is not about adhering to a fashion trend. It is about gender equality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing breast showing does not translate into creating a \"topless trend\".\n","id":"26f197f8-5b92-486c-a571-0d1236492cf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As of late I\u2019ve been blasting this thread with other posts about a particular world news issue being the North Korea nonsense because of severe and hard to manage anxiety that it has been giving me. I am in a position now where I genuinely believe there is no way I can stop stressing about this situation without it somehow resolving itself something I know can not be true. I feel a sense of dread every couple hours and a strong compulsion to check the news, and have had a miserable few months because of this strange obsession with the potential they could launch a missile at the Midwest. Can someone with experience in this regard help me understand why I am so obsessive about this and how I can go about relieving my anxiety? I know I\u2019ve made a lot of relatively similar posts in this thread, but you guys have seriously helped me out in the past few weeks so this is the only place I see fit to go. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stress and anxiety about world news is impossible to alleviate until the events in question have resolved\n","id":"65f21665-7b06-495e-af2a-4dfd0b722919"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, as the title says, I believe that it will always be pointless for me to personally vote in a presidential election. For example, during the 2016 election, I wanted Hillary to win over Trump. However, I did not go out and vote for her because my vote would not matter against the millions of people who did vote. I'm not saying voting itself is pointless. If everyone were to stop voting, it would be a major issue. I'm asking what the point is for me to get out and personally vote. If it's just to make myself feel better and show my support for the candidate I want to win, then I believe that is pointless.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My personal vote does not and will not ever matter in a presidential election\n","id":"1a957966-6086-4afe-bf5e-4531fdca06dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that what we know about the universe is so little and the universe is so vast, complex and so far beyond what we are even capable of understanding that I find it extremely ignorant, unscientific and outright dangerous to hold such narrow views. I think that the theory of evolution has it's merits, but is far, far, far from 100 fact. I think that Creationism is just as and in a lot cases more viable a theory as Evolution. Change My View.  . The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. Socrates<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that completely dismissing Creationism as a viable theory is dangerous and completely unscientific.\n","id":"0bc9995c-ec24-4112-8a66-1adbb6a948ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it necessary to give tips to workers in the service industry?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unfair that customers have to adjust to different expectations on tipping, whether it's the percentage required, or the level of social obligation<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be fairer to the customer and the worker if prices were simply increased to reflect a pay rise for the workers.\n","id":"7872bd7c-23bb-4c62-b384-b513b8b5a48f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Consumers in high income countries are able to enjoy cheap consumer goods off the back of extremely poorly paid manufacturing workers in the developing world, while corporations in high income countries turn a tidy profit through this process. This is an exploitative, neo-colonial relationship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Colonialism exploited developing countries. Today, neocolonialism continues to exploit them.\n","id":"addeeec9-5912-4ab2-9bb4-e948cb5c9641"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the best way to protect Scottish interests in the EU is to vote for independence.<|ARGUMENT|>The UK's various opt outs exist because of the strong negotiating position that the whole of the UK had at the time of the signing of the various relevant treaties. Had Scotland been independent then it would not have been in the same position. It is also argued that if Scotland wants to join the EU then it implicitly wants to join the EU as it is now and could retain exceptional status only in the very short term.1 The change in relationship would probably change the Scottish attitude to the EU, although it is hard to say whether this would be automatically in a negative way. The implication of Jose Manuel Barroso's comments quoted earlier is that Scotland will be unlikely to retain the UK's opt outs from certain areas of EU policy. Most obviously it is likely that if joining as a new state Scotland may have no choice but to join the Euro at least in the long term when it meets the convergence requirements.2 Several polls show Scots less likely to vote for independence if Scotland would then have to join the Euro.3 The other main sticking point would be Schengen, it has been suggested that Scotland would have to join the EU's free travel zone which the UK is not currently a member of and the main consequence of this would be border controls between Scotland and England.4Were Scotland to seek to avoid joining the Euro and Schengen then it would prolong the application process meaning that Scotland would be unlikely to be ready to join the EU upon independence. This point was made by the ambassador of the EU's newest member Croatia quote=Ambassador Ivan Grdesic if you decide to opt out on many things, you are not ready actually. \/quote so warning that attempts to opt out of the Euro and Schengen would prolong negotiations.5 1 Engel, Arno, and Parkes, Roderick, \u2018Accommodating an independent Scotland: how a British-style constitution for the EU could secure Scotland\u2019s future\u2019, European Policy Centre, 24 October 2012, pp.6-7. 2 Thorp, Arabella, and Thompson, Gavin, \u2018Scotland, independence and the EU \u2013 Commons Library Standard Note\u2019, parliament.uk, 13 July 2012, 3 What Scotland Thinks, \u2018If an independent Scotland had to join the Euro, how would this effect your vote in a Scottish independence referendum?\u2019, January 2013, 4 Barnes, Eddie, \u2018Scottish independence: EU may force border terms\u2019, The Scotsman, 5 BBC News, \u2018Scottish independence: Warning over EU membership plan\u2019, 3 November 2013,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Scottish relationship with the EU is likely to change after independence.\n","id":"3fed948c-f4a3-4ddb-9489-dfca2c4de8c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would a society, without the concept of guilt, be better and more advanced?<|ARGUMENT|>Shame is used to make people behave a certain way. This behavior is usually dictated by the powerful in society and is not necessarily always right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guilt is a form of social control that suppresses individuality.\n","id":"f0d54f72-dbe9-464d-b9df-8a011e23a73a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, when I first watched the prequels I was about 10. Loved them as much as the originals, except for ep.1 which I found to be quite boring. As I aged, I developed a taste for good bad movies. From Freddie vs. Jason to the room, I loved seeing these failures play out. I rewatched all 6 just before ep 7 came out to get in the mood, and then I realised the prequels were my favorite movies now. Not because of a good story, special effects ect, but because they are the perfect good bad films. Think about it, poor lines given to great actors Obi wan , complex lines given to flawed actors Anikin , terrible effects at some points with brilliant effects at others, absolutely lovable characters obi wan again with absolutely terrible ones too JarJar and by far the most quotable films I've ever seen. Its just that mix of goofiness with a more serious story that gets me loving these films. The only other good bad film trilogy that can compete is the sam Raimi spiderman films.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The starwars prequel trilogy were the perfect good-bad movies\n","id":"942738ea-6cb7-426f-b037-54724284b486"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Congress and the Senate should impose term limits on Representatives<|ARGUMENT|>If an elected official has agreed to pass a specific bill they voters agree on, and he or she is replaced mid voting, that could produce results against the voters' interests.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It could take the power away from voters on the local level.\n","id":"6b0a3888-b9d1-4da1-a798-03c5a7ace63b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Any time I talk about forms of economy someone brings up communism and how it looks good on paper, but never worked. I don't know about that system in depth, nor do I have much interest in it. I believe a free market, capitalist society like what we have in the US also does not perform as it would on paper. And I think it is harmful to think that it does. Hyper competition, regulation, and voting are the main things that steer me toward this belief. News journalism seems to be the main source of public knowledge. Because these industries cater to different groups of people, the individuals will often flock towards whatever they agree with and remain in an echo chamber of their own ideas. In a high competitive environment, more people more money. Because of this, click bait dominates the internet, and advertising insists that no matter what it is, their product can bring you closer to what you really want. In comes regulation. A smart group of people looked into the facts and realized a business was making false claims. Legal process breaks the claims up into bits and from all of this the business complies. Terms and conditions may apply. Every product or service around us from toothbrushes to rent, has a big list of important things to agree to in order to use. Because a business can focus on its own list of terms, the average consumer could not possibly retain the information from every agreement and my problem with this is that they do not have a choice. Or do they? We all have a vote, how many of us actually use it? I think this is easier to understand with an analogy a child is raised in a closed environment with their parents choosing what information the child receives. When this child grows up to leave this environment do they really have the ability to think for themselves? My answer is no for the most part, and that it would take years for them to develop this ability if they get the opportunity at all. The point is that individuals are molded by the world around them, and in a world of whoever spams the most wins, every person is pushed to follow this pattern or be drowned by it. Maybe a few get lucky and get the privilege of climbing barrier after barrier to get to the truth. But how many people reaped profits from their efforts? It seems building walls across information just allows for profit to be made out of essentially nothing. No amount of regulation can stop a system that was never going to work in the first place. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US, and perhaps global economy, does not work.\n","id":"0811dc0d-c558-4424-9e86-894d69dbf832"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll elaborate mad libs style Black people can use the n word but white people cant Black people can verb but white people cant adjective people can verb but adjective people cant By filling in these blanks with literally anything else you will be creating a statement that is by definition a form of segregation ie white people can ride in the front of the bus but black people cant I fully understand that the history of the word is the argument people cling to on this issue, but there are other words phrases that have been used in such a way that people dont really bat an eye at nowadays. Furthermore, anyone alive today under the age of ~65 hasnt been involved in the subjugation of black people. PS please dont get me wrong here, im not saying that everyone should go around using language like this i just really fail to understand how an entire population has been convinced that its OK for one race to do something and not OK for a different race to do the same exact thing, as that is the entire root of the equal rights movement gt This is a footnote from the  moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The proposition that black people are allowed to use the n-word and white people can is by definition discriminatory\n","id":"aa315422-b380-4abf-b722-136cd6644ee7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Legalization of drugs<|ARGUMENT|>Technically speaking, legalizing drugs will reduce \"crime\" in the simple sense that drugs will no longer be illegal and selling drugs will no longer be a crime. But, this does not eliminate the immorality of drug consumption and of the drug trade. Rather, it would simply transfer the immorality from \"criminals\" to state-sanctioned agents. While it would reduce \"crime\", it would undermine the moral legitimacy of the state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An immoral drug-trade should be confined to criminal-agents rather than governments.\n","id":"88448c0c-a12d-41fe-9a63-913de2d6055f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realize tastes of music are completely based on opinion and so I'm gonna try to make this as objective as possible. This article really inspired this train of thought, and, since I'm surrounded by a bunch of high school hipster types who think they're the greatest thing since there's no one better than them, I figured I'd bite. So, to start with Many people view the most popular music in a genre as significantly more vapid less important than the rest, and the Beatles transcend this to a point that's frankly ridiculous. Anyone who's a fan of Tool knows that Tool gets a lot of shit on the internet for being 'overblown' or 'technical metal for babies'. Tool happens to be one of the most popular bands representing progressive metal, and in spite of this or because of this are regularly shit on by a lot of metal fans for a myriad of reasons such as their technical complexity being overblown or their esotericism being put on arguable . It's the same with a lot of genres, especially the metal community, where a lot of metalcore esque bands like Asking Alexandria and Black Veil Brides, despite their popularity based on sales, are shit on 24 7 by a large host of metal fans for whatever reason. Now, let's look at the Beatles for a second. The Beatles are the most popular band of the 1960s, using a popular sound associated with pop music at the time, and they get the reverse treatment Tool gets. The Beatles are heralded as the most popular amazing whatever band of that era, and yet the amount of innovation they put into their material is low, at best. And for those arguing that our idea of popular music as 'shit' is a modern thing, it's not. Back in the 80s there were tons of musicians in the 'hair metal' community screaming bloody murder about 'hair metal' basically being turned into acoustic power ballads played by men with huge hairdos. Shit, the rise of MTV in the 1990s is clear cut proof of this. Now for point 2, probably the most important one. There is such a massive cult of personality revolving around the Beatles and John Lennon specifically that makes it almost literally impossible to admit to not liking them. I swear if I hear another person claim that the Beatles are the 'greetest band in da hole univarse' and 'any1 who dosnt liek them is retarded' I will blow my fucking head off in the middle of a Chuck E Cheese. There's literally nothing wrong with liking any band at all . But when it gets to the point where you have to like, no, fucking worship , a specific band or you're essentially musically retarded, you have to wonder where that comes from. There's a similar phenomenon where if you hate Nirvana you basically don't understand grunge and are just a big dumb poopy meaniehead as the majority of Nirvana's fanbase would call me , but that doesn't really extend to all music. You simply hate the most popular band of a genre, but you still like Soundgarden AIC. And you can even have a good reason for hating them and still get along with grungies, quite nicely. I personally think Kurt Cobain's voice sounds like a scraping chalkboard and their music isn't as metally as what I usually listen to, so I'll stick with classic rock and roll ACDC esque voices and hard rock guitars. It's getting to the point where unless you're so far up the deepest darkest asshole of black metal that no one you encounter has even heard the Beatles before, disowning them even so much as 'overrated' let alone 'bad' or 'not that great' labels you as a complete musical tosspot. And the silliest part is you can't really have a good reason for hating them . There is no 'I don't really like the singer's voice' or 'Their instruments aren't as punchy as I'd like'. To dislike the Beatles is basically admitting you don't know what 'good music' is. Apparently you're just a big Debbie Downer about all music and don't like really good bands because there's not enough tits and explosions in them because you're a big stupid retard. At least if you're someone like me who dislikes Metallica, you can point to the post Black Album 'bad Metallica material' and get some agreement. There's no part of the Beatles you can point to to prove that they're not as cool as people say because ALL THEIR MUSIC IS AWESOME AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT YOU CAN FUGGOFF BECAUSE THEY'RE THE BEST BAND EVAAAAAAAAAAAR Next, point 3. It's difficult to claim that they're the 'greatest band in existence' when a good part of their material is heavily criticized. I speak, of course, of Let it Be and Sgt. Pepper's, who are criticized as being a failed attempt at staying relevant and trading substance for flash respectively . This really has no elaboration I can bring to it, but it's really hard to try to claim objectively that 'The Beatles are the best band of all time ever ever ever tongue spit noise goes here' when Sgt Pepper's, an album referred to as the best album of all time, is reviled for being overproduced and Let it Be was about as effective at revitalizing the Beatles in public interest as farting directly into someone's mouth to try to get them to go out on a date with you. And, lastly, The fact that the Beatles are really popular doesn't ultimately matter and shouldn't influence whether you should like them. The argument that popularity or record sales sort of buffers or leverages an artist's legitimacy doesn't really mean anything. If it did, you'd essentially be obligated to like someone say Justin Bieber cause Reddit can't shut the fuck up about him who's extremely popular because a lot of other people like them. If you've been asleep for the past paragraph, that's the complete opposite of individual thought. That's almost like saying I should stop listening to Sumerian Records bands and start listening to mainstream metal because more people like Black Veil Brides than Periphery so they must be right. Heh uh no. That's not the way anything based on opinion works in life. I get that they were insanely popular in the 60s and no one else has reached that level of success, but does that mean I have to like something because tons of other people do? You may say that 'no one is forcing you to listen to the Beatles', and to that I say, HA HA YOU KNAVE and, yes, you're right. But when you have a band with the associated stigma of 'everyone should like them because they're good' combined with the huge popularity, it's almost trying to suggest that you're dumb for not liking them because they're universally praised as 'great' and so many people like them. Ultimately, it's a symptom of the fact that no one can stop circlejerking about The Beatles combined with the fact that they're extremely popular suggesting you're some kind of musical philistine for not liking them because so many people are able to recognize 'good music'. So that's about it.  hoody doody doo.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that The Beatles are the most overrated band in the history of music and the cult of personality around them is not only godawful and petulant, but also destructive to individual thought.\n","id":"0ad3d64e-9085-4951-8add-55e606fd833a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund liberal arts degrees?<|ARGUMENT|>Liberal arts courses in secondary schools can teach moral insights in much the same way college courses can, by making students aware of important ethical debates and important historical struggles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Secondary and even primary schools already provide sufficient education in liberal arts. There is no need for government-funded degrees as well.\n","id":"5a3902e6-33ad-41f5-a22e-4346fdde8c6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Jesus's resurrection is evidence for an external power that raised him. It seems most likely that that external power would be a theistic God, as he himself claimed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of Jesus and the truth of some of his miracle claims are historical claims, and as such can be falsified.\n","id":"312cbd46-e3d0-457d-9512-7e98b3cc94f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I find that anarchy is a fairly popular topic here on reddit, even though it doesn't have as many proponents IRL. And I frequently see it touted as an alternative for government. But at it's core I fail to see how governments are not a result of such a system. They governments were in fact the result of the free market systems that anarchists and I know there are different schools of thought on this, each laying claim to anarchist so you can make it clear what you believe in seem to want. This free market is not just an economic one, but also one of force. I cannot see how one can deny that the government is also not the result of such forces. I acknowledge that a government needn't be the only endgame in such a society, but why is it not a likely one? Is there something different about today's society that somehow seems to indicate that in the presence of anarchy, a government will not form? This is not rally a moral question, but a factual one. I recognise that governments can be oppressive and violent, and have a monopoly on force. But how can an anarchist disclaim the government as not the result of such a system? I am not sure if I was clear so I will try again. Anarchists want an anarchic society in place of government. Governments haven't existed forever, but formed over some time. Why will that not happen now? If the market is indeed self correcting, wouldn't the government be the result of such a market in places where the government did form. Of course the first thing I expect to hear is that governments did not in fact evolve from such societies, but I find that very hard to believe because most accounts of government that I have come across seemed to have their roots in conquest, expansion and monarchy. And monarchy seemed to have formed from smaller societies which I have heard proponents of anarchy talk about as forming. These smaller societies are what I've heard most discussions around anarchy revolve around. The last time I read an anarchist response, I was pointed to this video www.youtube.com watch?v jTYkdEU B4o And I saw it as similar to feudalism, which over time seems to tend towards some government. So there are two important points here. One why is the government not a result of the forces of anarchy, and secondly if an anarchy were setup today why would it not lead to government again? Edit This was fun, I still haven't changed my mind. I'll come back in the morn.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see how government is something that won't form in an anarchic society, based on the fact that it already has and evolved from such societies.\n","id":"68a2e1d1-90d0-408b-b9ba-4fc2e706f61e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know at the end of the day it comes to personal preferences, but in my opinion, unless the language compiler used standart explicitly has to have the opening brace in the same line as a declaration, it should be on a new line. It makes the code a lot more structured and easy to read, readily knowing where each block begins and ends The only real argument I have heard about this is that it wastes lines of code, but I think that hardly is a big issue tbh. Is there any inherent benefit to using any other format?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Opening braces should be in a new line Programming\n","id":"e51590f4-bbdc-4e59-9817-bfb5b1588262"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>The success of economy-promoting development assistance depends on productive relation- and partnerships on site Minoiu & Reddy, p. 17 The relationships between democracies are generally better than those between democracies and non-democracies; promoting democracy therefore favors these important preconditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making assistance conditional on democratisation makes economic reform and growth in non-democratic states more likely.\n","id":"e22e6c24-8aa6-4ad3-83fd-a9be0f0c07ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I was much younger I got into his music. He was only 16 in 2006. His music was more friendly and he was America\u2019s sweetheart at the time. The assault against Rihanna was what created the \u201cdownward\u201d spiral for his career. I put that in quotes because he\u2019s still very successful and people tend to look past that when it comes to music, the downward was more towards public perception. What I want to bring up is the fact that he was 18 or 19 at the time. Imagine being targeted and attacked for a mistake you made when you were that young. If you look at the events that occurred that night, she was physically abusing him, spitting on him, and throwing his keys out of the car because she was mad. Not acceptable behavior either. That doesn\u2019t mean he should\u2019ve beat her though, he went too far. I want to say I definitely don\u2019t think he should be absolved for assaulting another person, let alone a female, but I think he has gone through his fair share of criticism and legal trouble for his wrongdoings. Jail time, community service, not being able to enter countries perform at certain venues. I think a DUI is just as bad as that particular incident. Put even more lives at risk than your own. I think the hate is so strong because he is in the public eye, but it should be looked at under context, not blindly hated for a mistake he made when he was barely an adult, and has paid for with jail time, community service, and endless hate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The hate on Chris Brown as an artist and a person. I understand it completely and I think he has made horrible decisions, but it is also blown out of proportion\n","id":"2e4ddbb6-2f48-4144-b686-2c94b1d2735a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, let me clarify, I am not defending the actions of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. I believe that he did use excessive force and the shooting should be thoroughly investigated. This  post is not to debate over whether or not Officer Wilson needs to be tried or whether the Ferguson Police is an example of police militarisation in the US. This post is solely to look at the decision to release the CCTV footage of Michael Brown robbing a convenience store. Now that that's out of the way, I don't really understand why everyone was so angry at the release of the CCTV footage showing what appears to be Michael Brown robbing a convenience store. I see in multiple news sources where people have stated that the footage 'appeared to cast aspersions' on the dead man or is a form of character assassination. Finding out that the shooting victim had just returned from robbing a store is critical information, because it provides context for the fact that a police officer confronted him over something minor and unrelated like obstructing the street and a violent altercation took place soon after. I see family members and other people saying that he wasn't perfect, but it seems to me that they're dismissing the fact that he had just committed a crime. The police officer may not have known of Michael Brown's actions, but it makes sense that Michael Brown would be more on edge, scared, and impulsive after committing a crime and encountering a police officer so soon after. Thus, this footage provides a critical perspective into Michael Brown's state of mind and his subsequent mannerisms behavior might have alerted Officer Wilson and escalated the encounter. My view is that the CCTV footage was essential information that needed to be provided to the public. While it may have been misconstrued as character assassination, the footage is an invaluable part of the story that helps explain the context and actions of both Officer Wilson and Michael Brown. EDIT Thank you everyone for your comments I really appreciate it. My view hasn't really changed and while I still believe the footage to be relevant and needed to be shown to the public, the institution releasing the footage should have been more removed from the situation i.e. not FPD, but the FBI DoJ even the Prosecutor's Office. Additionally, the footage should have been released alongside other information which was excluded, providing a lop sided view of the situation which served to inflame tensions rather than using information to allay them. Edit Thanks for the gold, stranger<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The release of the CCTV footage of Michael Brown is not character assassination, but a vital component of the incident that helps all parties understand the context of the shooting and the state of mind of the individuals involved.\n","id":"3addce26-49e4-4835-ab56-3d975341aabf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>lt rant gt I understand the principle behind age limits based on a body's physical maturity tobacco, alcohol, etc. . However, I do not believe in age limits that are based on mental maturity. This includes driving, operating heavy machinery, voting, renting hotel rooms, and several other actions. Back in high school, I enrolled just about every advanced class I could, passed multiple AP tests, and ended up in the top 15 of my graduating class. I was also the youngest member of my graduating class. This alone is proof that physical age is not good measure of mental maturity. After I graduated, the only jobs I could find that would hire a 17 year old were minimum wage, manual labor jobs, even though there were plenty of factories and machine shops hiring 18 year olds for up to 14 hr at the time. lt rant gt Tldr A young person's birth date is not a good measure of their mental maturity, and therefore age limits need to be abolished, or at least amended to take this into account. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe certain age limits for young people should not exist.\n","id":"bae96e97-f26e-46c8-8915-3f322ab981e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Within the past few years, it seems as if a majority of social media websites have either contributed to the increasing polarization of people's viewpoints or just have problems which prevent them from providing actual civil discourse. In some cases, they actively cause harm. Some examples Facebook Obviously, the Cambridge Analytica event showed people that Facebook was taking their information and selling it to the highest bidder. They've collected an inhuman amount of information about people, some of which was used to create discord during the 2016 elections. Twitter Similar issue. There is not a lot of moderation, so you either have corporations or foreign countries planting in bots to tweet whatever propaganda they want to spread around or people spouting inane arguments to get attention. YouTube They have a prejudice in their algorithms that entices you to binge watch videos, and as such deliberately throw recommended videos to target you with. On my work computer, somehow a few IT based videos put BEN SHAPIRO CALLED AN IDIOT BY A DIRTY LIBERAL SEE HIS WELL MANAGED AND GODLY RESPONSE on the sidebar. There's also the fact that even clicking a few videos about women in bikinis can create a massive wormhole of random videos about teenage girls with pedophiles in the comments, as well as how some content creators try to make the most inane videos in order to get views and ad revenue see r elsagate. YouTube also has terrible problems with their content creation as well, often demonetizing people's videos because of false copyright claims or removing any videos which undermine the squeaky clean image they want to present to us. Tumblr Has an issue with polarization and censorship, considering how many people were put off by their recent cluster ban of any R rated material. They also have a history of outraging over minor things. 4chan Has polarization, but the opposite of tumblr. It seems like a dozen threads every day on each board start out with the OP posting a random tweet from a SJW and then people constantly talk about how they hate political correctness. pol obviously has the brunt of it, but even boards like v and co have a couple anti SJW threads every day, where they repeatedly post the same content and have the same outrage. NeoGAF Similar polarization issues, to the point where people would ban you if you went against the general opinion there. The site fragmented after the website's creator was convicted of rape, but then an offshoot just went to Resetera, which became even more polarized. Reddit I know what you're going to say, and I do understand that the issue of subreddits at least allow you to choose what polarization you want to see. But reddit still has issues the whole celebrity nudes scandal, the firing of the woman who helped with r iama, and so on. The issue of karma also makes it so that people intentionally repost and try to create outrage so they can get more attention and, therefore, more karma see how many TILs can be seen as political in nature, how many reposts are in r funny, etc . And, of course, there are third parties who scout out people with sufficient karma so they can get a new loudspeaker to play their propaganda. x200B I could go on, but I can't think of any nominal examples and by now you can probably think of a few more. It seems now more than ever, most if not all social media sites have the same issues. It's easy to get into a cycle of polarizing views, where people post the same things to spread outrage, which leads to a massive circlejerk as users tell users how right they are. There's also the innate fear that, with the advent of bots and paid users, the material you find online is no longer organic. It's impossible to tell if you actually are getting an opinion of your own free will or if you're being manipulated by a more powerful party. Now, I've tried to maintain a minimal social media presence. I never use Facebook and Twitter, only keeping my accounts open for convenience for example, to remember birthdays of friends and family, or to enter specific giveways . I mostly stick to subreddits with limited political agendas, with the occasional look into 4chan to see if people have gotten better they haven't . However, even through these limited uses of social media, I still frequently see posts on the front page which seem to go into the same endless cycle of outrage, and I'm not sure if it's real or fake anymore. Politics wise, the situation has just become more toxic since the 2016 election. I admit that I don't know how to fix people's opinions, but I know that a starting point is to get rid of echo chambers that exist in social media. That's why I think that, for myself and others, it would be best to eschew social media altogether. There would be some people unable to leave, sure, and some people may be unable to communicate well outside of social media, but at the very least the ones who do would be able to escape the cycle. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At this point, it's in the best interests of peopleincluding myself to avoid most major social media websites.\n","id":"3f4ba6b2-6c92-4171-97ad-d84d383692e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Terrorist videos were released on the internet prior to the era of social media, thus a shutdown of ISIS \u0301 social media accounts would not prevent the spread of such material.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Terrorist cyber activities are not limited to Facebook and Twitter. Thus, their activities will not suffer beyond repair.\n","id":"60b884ed-48da-4fc9-b346-1af0f94623b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm Australian so please keep in mind these views are framed almost exclusively in Australian society with little to no knowledge of the economic circumstances in the United States. I was raised in a conservative environment, and to my mind thus far I have been offered no alternative views. I believe governments stunt economic growth with high taxes, too much welfare, and too much regulation of the private sector. I believe that governments are too callous in their willingness to spend money and that the public sector is bloated and dysfunctional. I look at Australia's economic problems, and they are all due to completely dysfunctional economic management. Spending billions of dollars on bullshit like school halls, housing insulation that kills people and a bloated public sector while raising taxes, increasing regulation and red tape and putting a dampener on economic growth. They seriously destroyed our economy. But that's just my opinion, change it if you can.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am a staunch economic conservative.\n","id":"3d12c6ee-4e84-49df-977a-e040fc3970b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>P = NP?<|ARGUMENT|>A language for NP would contain a nondeterministic \"guess\" operation that splits execution to two concurrent branches, and returns the \"thread id\" bit associated with the current one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"P=NP is equivalent to the claim \"every problem that can be quickly verified can also be quickly solved\".\n","id":"0f167711-aaa3-4a53-b67b-5e0c1b5e8517"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Natural gas vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>One 2007 study in the United States found that natural gas deposits are sufficient to supply 118 years of U.S. demand at 2007 levels. Natural gas is similarly abundant around the world. Essentially, it is as abundant as oil was 50 years ago, largely because it has not been exploited on a large scale yet. Such abundance means that it is likely to cost much less than oil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Natural gas is abundant, cheap, and will last for centuries.\n","id":"08c1126f-da73-4f21-9bb1-c70db279d251"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US Customs and Immigrations Enforcement should be investigated for crimes against humanity<|ARGUMENT|>The law says that detained children should have access to basic facilities like toilets, sinks, and drinking water. Yet there are numerous instances when children have been denied these.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ICE are breaking the law and their own regulations surrounding the treatment of detainees.\n","id":"258c99ad-d323-4bfc-ba3c-9618e9666dbf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A bit of clarification first. I understand the benefit of IPOs. I'm not arguing that the system would be better if we removed the opportunity for companies to generate capital from public investors. However, IPOs account for a small percentage of the daily activity that occurs on wall street. The majority of it is a game where players try to guess which tokens the general public will be more interested in tomorrow than they are today. Also, I'm not arguing that it's necessarily a scam. Rather, it's a Ponzi scheme that has more or less worked up to this point, and will continue to work as long as the financial sector can continue to coerce more and more people to put their money into the market. They do this through several avenues such as lobbying for tax benefits for investors, benefits to employers for offering 401k accounts and matching contributions, and a nationwide propaganda campaign that frightens people with the idea that they won't be able to retire unless they start investing in a market based retirement account early in life. I suppose this is the place where I start to lose people who believe in the market. I believe that when you put money into a market account and have your broker buy you shares of Google, Facebook, McDonalds etc. on the open market, it's misleading to say that you're buying a share of any of those companies. You're buying a token that you can do absolutely nothing with, other than sell it to somebody else later. Hopefully for more than you paid for it. You will be able to sell it later for more than you paid for it if the following 2 conditions are met The ratio of number of shares of that stock people are looking to buy number of shares of that stock people are looking to sell is higher on the day you go to sell it than it was on the day you bought it. There hasn't been a large withdrawal of money from the stock market game. In other words, if people get sick of playing this game and decide to take their money out to spend it elsewhere, the average price of shares across the board will drop, because there will be less money in the system to pay for it. I've heard people tie the trading price of stocks to the perceived value of the company with which the stock shares a name, but that doesn't legitimize the game as far as I'm concerned. The prices may reflect the perceived value of those stocks , but you could say that about any ponzi scheme. As long as the perceived value of the scheme kept going up which would happen as long as people kept investing money into it , it would qualify as a legitimate investment using the same logic. And with respect to dividends, there may have been a time when they accounted for a significant portion of a wall street investors return on investment, but that is not the case anymore. A lot of stocks don't offer them. For those that do when the trading price of the stock can often fluctuate on a daily basis a greater percentage than the annual yield, I would argue that the dividend is not a significant portion of this game. If I'm looking at this wrong, please . The idea of the stock market the one they sell you when you're learning about it is so awesome. The idea of trying to predict public opinion trends hysteria by dealing in imaginary tokens with no real value, and hoping that the financial institutions can continue to bring in more people so that your portfolio value appreciates, is not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the US stock market operates primarily as a large scale Ponzi Scheme. Please\n","id":"eab2d027-1950-402b-8719-48b8db77f7c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Science & research is the only tool which has ever reliably proven or disproven anything with consistent results and so should be adhered to<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no demonstrable scientific evidence that proves the existence of God.\n","id":"29b27137-024a-4a91-8bb8-fe115e17411c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in a state in the U.S. that has traffic laws specifically applying to funeral processions. One part of the law is that cars in a funeral procession may proceed through red lights and stop signs if the light was green when the leading vehicle passed or if the lead vehicle stopped at the stop sign. I don't think this should be the case. The benefits to this law that I can think of are It benefits funeral goers that don't know how to get from the starting point to the destination. The first benefit is being given to people who are obviously in mourning. It is a sign of respect for the deceased and their family, sort of like a depressing mini parade. The negative consequences of this law that I can think of It causes traffic jams. Sometimes a light will cycle multiple times before the procession clears an intersection. It causes confusion. Even though vehicles in the procession are supposed to have a sign or sticker displayed and have their hazard lights on, a procession isn't that easy to spot. Drivers don't immediately know why all these people seem to be ignoring stop lights and stop signs or why there's a line of cars ahead of them stopped at a green light. It increases the risk of accidents. I don't have data for this, so correct me if I'm wrong. My reasoning is that it's like a moving area of unusual traffic patterns in which other drivers are given very little indication and even less warning of those unusual traffic patterns. Further considerations There are plenty of other times that a large group needs to get from one place to another, some of which don't know the way on their own. That doesn't seem like a good enough reason to drastically change traffic patterns. Where do you draw the line between respecting the dead mourning and disrupting everyday life? To change my view, please show what benefits I haven't considered or haven't considered enough and or what I'm leaving out in my evaluation of the negative consequences. Thanks Edit Thanks to everyone that participated I'll probably respond indefinitely, incase anyone wants to answer a comment 10 months from now so keep that in mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Funeral processions should not be able to run through red lights and stop signs\n","id":"65c06691-8117-40fa-8319-9a79a8826cc8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sled dog racing should be banned.<|ARGUMENT|>If kept cooped in a house all day they will destroy everything they can, even pulling random things out of boredom. Giving them a job keeps them satisfied.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sled dogs enjoy having a \"job\" and find happiness and a purpose in doing work, as working dogs.\n","id":"396034ad-5a44-47ff-961e-9ac41cad2393"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need religion for morality?<|ARGUMENT|>The difference between \"normal for a species\" and \"same across all members of the species\" can be found in any biological norm, such as the number of arms on a human. Humans as a species have two arms per specimen, however, there are abnormalities, genetic mutations, and evolutionary variations causing particular members to have different numbers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A psychopath is, by definition, an abberation from the \"normal\" human. Therefore, the default\/normal for the human species is respect for human life.\n","id":"c7cb77c4-6202-46c1-aa02-7312c0ee2e6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Since the Democrats remain in control of the House of Representatives and can effectively gridlock any undesirable legislation, a Pence presidency would represent little in the way of \u201cdanger\u201d.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Whether that is desirable or not, it is still ostensibly better than a continued Trump Presidency.\n","id":"f54361b0-315f-4afa-8629-cb91a3181504"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Revealing magic to Muggle scientists could result in huge technological advancements that could massively increase the prosperity of the Muggle world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The wizarding world displays immense moral negligence by refusing to help solve the problems of the Muggle world.\n","id":"2ca4b1f6-1040-4cdf-b86f-10f80e9756df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>decriminalise sadomasochism<|ARGUMENT|>Meaningful consent requires both that the person is informed and of age when consenting, but also requires the ability to withdraw consent at any point in time. Sadomasochism does not afford this crucial requisite of consent to the individual, and therefore no individual can legitimately and fully consent to the act. Safe words are ludicrously impractical. Their utility is dependent upon their actually being agreed and committed to memory in advance and their declaration being heeded by the individuals who are under the influence of intense sexual desire. The passive \u2018victim\u2019 might be subject to the physical constraints, characteristic of bondage, that make speech or even flight impossible. It might be difficult to distinguish between an injunction to cease and an exclamation of pain, which presumably is a relatively regular occurrence. Even where a number of individuals are able to demonstrate that their sadomasochistic encounters are conducted on a safe, regulated and consensual basis, it is not possible to give a concurrent guarantee that S&M is generally safe and cannot be used to perpetrate rape or abuse. The existence of a group of individuals able to interact safely in a sadomasochistic context does not mean that S&M does not present a risk to the wider population, nor that ordinary individuals are not excessively vulnerable to harm when engaged in S&M activities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not possible to meaningfully consent to sadomasochistic sex\n","id":"303a1c56-34c2-4a3a-9fa3-b358303c5cfe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's pretty simple really, carbon in carbon out of the atmosphere . We are over 400ppb now and climbing. Politicians are geared toward reelection and aren not making meaningful law changes. The boots on the ground that should be making those changes, the average citizen, are not. Gasoline engines are still being manufactured with a twenty year expected life span. Half the population in America thinks that climate change is a hoax. The oceans are acidifying and killing off species as carbonic acid dissolves into it, our biggest carbon sink. We still subsidize oil and airlines and ethanol corn and other detrimental programs. I have not noted anybody I know traveling less. Humans are increasingly sprawling out into the environment and devastating the lungs of the earth in places like Brazil, and yes, in first world countries. Trees are having trouble adapting to the changing climate in such a short time, and are dying off, causing increased fire risks associated often with droughts . Permafrost melting is creating a positive feedback loop of methane into the atmosphere, increasing warming. Likewise with reduced albedo due to the soon to be ice free poles. Then you have new science coming out talking about clouds. Some may stop forming, and we may have less as a whole more warming. The planet is a rock floating in space, and I'm sure it will carry on without us. Micro organisms that metabolize sulfuric acid instead of oxygen will be ok. Something will carry on, but perhaps not humanity. Are we ok with that? The decisions we are making right now point to yes. It points to the travesty of the individual, not to be able to do whatever he she wants with their life, despite how it might effect the planet over the next 100 years, beyond their life horizon. My personal thought on our biggest hurdle fundamental society design. We designed it, but not well. Our food transport systems are broken. Our commute to work lifestyle is energy intensive. Our houses are too big. Our economy is predicated on creating a need for more attitude, hence increasing waste. Most have more than they need, but unhappiness is at an all time high. The train is going at full speed, and it will be hard to turn around. Too hard. I expect that within 300 years the feedback loops will have made droughts so severe weather will be highly unreliable for food crops for maintaining a significant population, say 1 Billion . Erratic weather will mean early freezes, which have become more common. Moreover, the survival of humans as a whole is predicated on other species surviving, because we will presumably still eat meat, if it exists. Likely ocean fish will not. The land animals that survive will have to somehow overcome being exterminated by the most efficient hunter ever on this planet, the human. It happened to the great auk and the dodo, and the passenger pigeon. Why are deer any different?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We will not balance carbon emissions in time to \"save\" the planet.\n","id":"bd72e4e1-3850-4437-b804-6fc54f8295ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Russia Interfering In Foreign Governments?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2016 Russian intelligence operatives plotted to overthrow the democratically elected government of Montenegro and murder its prime minister.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Russia is directly interfering with the governance of other countries through assassination coup d'etats and intimidation.\n","id":"a0ec6255-7c1d-442f-9067-dbbe32fd5f20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>If copyright owners suffer financial harms, they will be dissuaded from developing new material because they will not be able to reap financial rewards incentivising creation. This harms consumers, as well as creators.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The copyright holder is a victim in such a case because illegal file sharing prevents them from obtaining royalties and therefore has direct economic harms on the author or copyright owner.\n","id":"5fcd0184-4eb0-4d05-8114-96f641a3c681"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is absolutely clear that if a parent is obese, their children will more than likely become obese. Nearly 80 percent of obese 10 to 14 year olds with an obese parent will be obese as adults. These parents pass their bad habits onto their children and their children are negatively effected by this. In many cases the parents may not have been obese as children and they may not realize the added dangers of being obese from an early age. The chance of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer is increased for children with obesity. To me you can make your own choices as far as your lifestyle. My argument is that you become unethical when you start to effect the health and lives of others in your behavior. While a child won't necessarily become obese from your behavior we know that the biggest influence in a child's behavior is their parents behavior and the evidence shows a rate of 80 which is more than a probability. Should my view be changed?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While obesity itself is not unethical, living an obese lifestyle while raising a child should be considered unethical.\n","id":"c7bbe6b5-a261-4c23-b052-bb4c0d2ddda2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I look at the comparison of animated works in the states, especially compared to anime I feel like American Cartoons on average tend to thinks that being R rated, means it has to be a raunchy comedy. American Cartoons in general have a stigma to them that because of it having the rating that it does it means it must be this style. Sometimes this can work to it's advantage, South Park does this but it works very much to it's own advantage. It supposed to be over the top and ridiculous but also is smart enough to know how to give a comical satire of our real world. Bojack Horseman shows how bad and messed up we can be and what even Hollywood can do to people when you loose yourself. I don't think many other american shows do this. I've seen one season of Rick and Morty, and I don't think it is bad and appreciate what it does, it also delves heavy into the body humor of a space fart cloud, going for lots of low brow humor. South Park does it as well but I think it works better there. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad show at all in my eyes but it does go down the road that I think is a stigma of lots of mature cartoons in the states. Then there is Family guy which absolutely fits this stigma especially in the recent seasons. It goes down the being crass and cude humor with random cutaways but really has not much to justify it's for adults. But that feels like such a waste here and in fact is actually really immature. Big Mouth is another show that has popped up that is For adults but honestly is more childish than most of the animated stuff I see for adults. It wants to try and tackle stuff like puberty but it doesn't seem to have much focus on it nor make sense with the monster concept. On top of it, what is the deal with trying to purposely make adult shows ugly as sin or unappealing with art style? In shows like Bojack, yeah he has moments where he is unsightly and not supposed to look appealing. But art styles like big mouth and the like go for a lot of this and gross out humor a lot. Why? Why is it mostly adult shows that because they are for an older audience they go for more sexual gross out all the time? Then you get movies like Sausage Party that really pissed me off because it was winking and nodding at the camera that it was rated R. Like this is some magical revelation that nothing like this has ever been seen. Well unless you watch anime like me and have seen hentai, Berserk, Ghost in the Shell, Ecchi anime, Akira, blood bath anime and such. This is nothing new, it's been done before. When I compare this to other shows like Avatar the Last Airbender, Batman the Animated Series, Steven Universe, Adventure Time, hell I'd even add in Regular Show which is supposed to be random nonsense as being more adult in personal situations and topics. I've seen plenty of anime and on average I'd say a lot of really great anime like Death Parade, Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, Trigun, Boy and the Beast, Wolf Children. Hell I just recently finished an anime known as Recovery of an MMO Junkie, which tackled the topic of online relationships and how to return to being a functional person after becoming a shut in. Nothing most american adult cartoons do even comes close to looking at mature or topics like this. American adult cartoons use it as an excuse to, we can be edgier and raunchier but in turn, end up being a lot more childish than most anime and even cartoons aimed at kids.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"American Cartoons aimed at Adults are more immature and less creative than Cartoons aimed at Kids on average\n","id":"78a971ce-ed7f-4953-b144-b5b7309ba251"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should vegan\/vegetarian parents feed their kids the same diet?<|ARGUMENT|>This might be technically correct, but seems like splitting hairs. If a child was vegan except for something like gelatin capsules for a required medication, they would perhaps technically not be vegan, but in any practical terms they would be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not all medicines have vegan alternatives readily available, or not all alternatives are affordable by everyone.\n","id":"feea1406-c550-4c3d-a9de-6ea5c161655d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Also, another statistic on Oregon and Washington Oregon ranks 34 in unemployment rate and Washington ranks 29. Vermont comes in at 5 with 4.2 only behind traditionally low unemployment rate midwestern states. So, I don't really understand why these high minimum wages haven't resulted in huge job losses. Quite a few states with just 7.25 an hour are below them. And the cost of living in Oregon and Washington hasn't risen dramatically or anything compared to states below them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Oregon, Vermont, and Washington state can have minimum wages respectively at $9.10, $8.60, and $9.32, I don't see why the rest of the nation can't handle those wages.\n","id":"e6366834-b2df-4475-8b65-26aea808f8e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should we decide whether a single-winner voting system is fair?<|ARGUMENT|>VSE Voter Satisfaction Efficiency, or Bayesian Regret, is a good way to measure how good a voting system is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The voting system should be made to maximise the happiness of voters.\n","id":"48b014b9-84d5-4ae5-ae6b-61a4326f96cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>According to the NY Times it costs 31,286 per inmate of tax payer dollars to house a criminal for one year and it's 167,731 per year, per inmate in total. People convicted of life in prison for heinous crimes should be able to opt in for the death penalty to save themselves 50 or so years of jail time and save taxpayers millions. I think allowing prisoners to choose the death penalty removes the argument that if they're innocent they may not be able ever have their innocence proven. I wouldn't have them only have one opportunity at the trial to ask for the death sentence, but rather at any time they want to choose the option they should be able to. I think more should be done to lower the costs of executions, even if it means using an archaic method to keep costs low.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prisoners sentenced to life in prison should be able to choose the death penalty at any time.\n","id":"d21c9ca0-02d9-41b7-ac7e-23dc4badeb7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a controversial topic, of course. Lots of research done on the link between genetics and intelligence is inconclusive. Most of the evidence in favor of races being less intelligent due to genetics is from research funded, or carried out by members of the Pioneer Fund a non profit that many view as racist in nature. Their results are often challenged due to poor methodology and are seldom replicated. In addition, noted researchers for them, such as Richard Lynn, have committed some egregious academic dishonesty. But still, the other side of it, with psychologists like Hunt, Flynn, Maginostky, etc, aren't free from error either. Current non circumstantial evidence shows no genetic basis for differences in intelligence between races, such as blacks and whites. Some, like Hunt, believe it will eventually be found however. I am the same way. No matter how slight and meaningless, there must be genetic differences affecting intelligence. It just makes sense. It also might not necessarily prove what the Pioneer Fund and others have been saying. Maybe we'll find that blacks have more genetic intelligence potential than whites, but they've never gotten to exhibit that due to lack of opportunity, historical oppression, etc. What do you guys think? My assertion is simply that we differ enough between races that you'd expect there'd be a genetic intelligence component that also varies between races or populations, or ancestries. I want you to challenge THAT belief, that its a given that there are intelligence differences. I'm not asking you to convince me that racial differences are 98 genetic, or 100 environmental. That's impossible to do with current knowledge. I've read enough of similar threads to know that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe there's any way human \"races\" could have evolved to all be equally intelligent.\n","id":"df51b82c-2812-4c53-8813-e6ed6077fcdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fashion can never be feminist<|ARGUMENT|>A French advertising watchdog was urged by campaigners to ban sexually provocative posters amid claims that they incite rape<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Fashion industry has a long history of advertisers alluding to sexual violence against women for commercial advertising.\n","id":"9404560f-3b75-4f63-b665-aec8ae103dfb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>According to a recent poll, a strong majority of Trump voters 77 percent believe that he should stay in office even if it were conclusively proven his campaign colluded with Russia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump said he could shoot someone and not lose support There is no reason to believe that he would be afraid of losing support by colluding with Russia.\n","id":"e5cf5caf-0d87-4acb-9d7d-a4ad6e1b9494"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>edit I think my view has been changed I still think there's a problem with anyone who relies on the drug, but I also realise this is the same as alcohol. There are people who do, and it is a problem. But because you smoke every day doesn't immediately make you addicted. I feel like anyone who needs to smoke weed that often has developed a reliance on a drug which they don't acknowledge as a problem. It isn't any different to being an alcoholic and needing a drink every day, except society recognises this as a legitimate problem. I think weed makes you lazy and complacent and to smoke every day just implies you not only have a mental addiction, or reliance, but that you aren't making the most of yourself and your time. I have no problem with weed being smoked every so often, socially. But the people I know who can't go a day, or can't go to bed at night, without a joint there's just something not right there. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have little respect for anyone who smokes weed every day.\n","id":"73ecacad-e530-4572-b8c6-911cdc1f7d87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I watched the first season with a good friend when it started on television and it completely turned me off to the series. I grow attached to characters and dislike the idea of just killing off people. I understand the reasoning of heroes die in real life, but just offing them left and right seems tactless. However, I really want to read the books but can't seem to bring myself to. I also like fantasy for the elements that make it, well, fantastic. The first season made it seem like there isn't anything magical and that it's basically low fantasy, so to speak. Recently though I became very interested because of the resurrection of a key character. Does this deviate from the books now that the show has progressed further than the books? Please help convince me. Edit okay, thanks guys. Some good earnest responses. I still feel a little resistance to it but I'll never truly know unless I read it. Maybe it's just the show that's not for me but who knows maybe that will change as well. Edit 2 I'm on mobile now so not sure how to add the little up symbol but I mentioned in my comments which ones helped me. I'll come back later to give you your arrow delta thingies. Thanks again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not interested in reading George R. R. Martin's \"A Song of Ice and Fire.\"\n","id":"fbcfc001-4cfa-433b-8f32-9edcedcfb50a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Utnapishtim effort in building the boat is painstakingly detailed. Noah's effort is outlined in a single sentence The difference is that Utnapishtim survives by his hard work and the love of Ea while Noah survives by the love of God while a point is made elsewhere that Noah will give men rest from their work. Utnapishtim's work is valued while Noah's rest is valued.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The story of Utnapishtim and the story of Noah are re-tellings of the same story. Showing how YHWH is completely unlike the other gods.\n","id":"c0c27879-c34c-4d7a-9970-971a488084fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So let me start by saying that I don't think it's acceptable to tell a recent victim what they could have done to prevent being a victim. I'm referring more to the idea many have that we shouldn't assign blame to someone who was the victim of a crime. However, often the victim is partially at fault and does deserve some degree of the blame. A somewhat recent example of this would be the Ray Rice incident. So obviously what Ray did was inexcusable and he deserves the lion's share of the blame for the incident. But I also believe and I don't see many pointing out that Janae also should share some blame in the incident. By all accounts, she was the one who instigated the fight and hit Ray first. Obviously she is much smaller and that doesn't give Ray permission to knock her out. But she should be blamed as well, for picking a fight with someone much larger than her. And yet Ray Rice seems to get all of the blame for the incident. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Victim blaming is sometimes acceptable\n","id":"c3206197-a9a5-4641-bd45-ac75de3225e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>In the majority of countries, the food industry is regulated by the government, in order to improve services and make them more ethical, e. g. consumer protection or food safety standards<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Food labeling and food safety would have much lower standards on a free market, because consumers can't have perfect information.\n","id":"70244804-918d-409b-bf1d-21c7f1da6274"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>edit Title should say shouldn't, not should I don't think people like Donald Trump or Michael Bloomberg of Howard Schultz should be able to run while they own major interests in complicated companies doing business around the world. They should have to sell their companies and invest in index funds or government bonds to avoid a conflict of interest. x200B In more detail, here are the sorts of things I am worried about from a hypothetical President CEO They might have major operations in certain states or cities. For instance, Trump has a lot of towers in NYC. That could give those cities a lot of leverage of President CEO. The might show favoritism to a certain industry. For instance, Bloomberg's main customers are all in the finance industry. Could we trust him to keep our best interests at heart during something like the 2008 meltdown? They might have interests in other countries. I am all in favor of the US looking out for other countries. I am all in favor of international aid. But I don't want part of our international policy to be determined by President CEO trying to open a bunch of Starbucks franchises in Pakistan. Here are some main counter arguments I've thought of, and why they don't convince me CEOs might be unwilling to run for higher office if they knew that they would have to sell the company they built just because there is a chance they would win. I would argue that if you are sufficiently attached to you company that you wouldn't sell it to be president, then I am happy for you, but you probably shouldn't be president. It's a violation of President CEO's personal liberty. I would argue that people seeking higher office give up many of their personal rights, and that being a servant of the people means giving up those freedoms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who own interests in major companies should be allowed to run for higher office\n","id":"d23fee4e-f6e3-4e7f-8a6d-2c9227f7fd54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to strike terrorist targets.<|ARGUMENT|>Using drones cuts down the options on the ground. A drone can only keep circling or go in for the attack; their only option is to kill a target or let them escape. Using ground forces; either your own, or in this case the Pakistani or Yemeni military, provides the third option of capturing the target. This is ethically a much better position for the United States to be in as it means that the terrorists can be given the option to surrender rather than simply being killed. This in turn would provide the benefit of allowing a trial helping to show the justice of the operation. Moreover these captured militants would likely be valuable intelligence assets who could be questioned which may well lead the intelligence services to other terrorists. Finally using drones is a very aggressive and provocative stance as it prevents any possibility of a peaceful resolution. The usage of drones immediately eliminates the possibility of negotiation because drones are remote from their operators. This means that drones are unlikely to be useful in the many situations that could be helped by any form of contact.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of drones means shoot to kill is the only option.\n","id":"ca46e924-1e20-473d-9bc8-e59a900a5c6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the spirit of Australia day, and particularly in light of the Melbourne protests why should Aboriginal people be acknowledge in the constitution? It is a legal document setting out how government is to be run, not a history lesson. Almost every government building, every school, every hospital etc has some form of recognition poster. One of the hospitals I regularly visit has a whole wall devoted to it. On the flip side, a scary large number of people don't even know the basics of the Aussie constitution, so it wouldn't achieve any real recognition within the population. People still think we have a constitutional right to free speech. Similarly, it is not a secret that terra nullius was BS and that initial settlement was not peaceful, so why are both campaigners and protesters acting like it is?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginals\n","id":"32871ac9-71b9-4ec9-80ab-3dee4a7a33a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Although there\u2019s no guarantee that frivolous lawsuits will win or much less make it to court, you\u2019re still impacting whoever you sue. You could sue somebody for any reason and they\u2019ll have to hire a lawyer. Lawyers cost thousands of dollars and not everybody has insurance that will cover the costs. You essentially could force anybody to cough up money they may not have on legal fees just because you don\u2019t like them. Many times people with nothing to lose sue people that have done no wrongdoing at all and there\u2019s no chance they\u2019ll win the suit but it still harms the defense because they\u2019ll have to pay for the plaintiff\u2019s actions that have no risk to them. Secondly, although most suits don\u2019t even make it to court, courts are clogged across the nation. I don\u2019t believe suing somebody is a right. It\u2019s essentially pressing charges but in the civil sphere where the punishment is money instead of time and freedom. The status quo is letting any ordinary person be a de facto prosecutor. Therefore, there should be more safeguards to ensure stupid lawsuits aren\u2019t filed and that only legitimate ones can even be filed in the first place because of the damage they can do. Edit typo<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should be harder to file a lawsuit.\n","id":"d9b6f04e-02be-48cf-8764-547c516715ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>The serpent is part of God. He can't get rid of it. We made the mistake of listening to him and disobeying. The higher purpose is that we have to grow up and finish the Journey of Knowledge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best possible world may still logically require the existence of evil and suffering.\n","id":"ec5e6bc4-e497-4040-94e5-485cde33010c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am obviously posting this in light of the Paris attacks and perhaps  has had enough of this, but bare with me here. The recent news has re introduced me to existential thoughts. Personally, I've struggled with existential depression, which I believe stemmed from a deeply rooted worldview of seeing things from a 'bubble'. This causes things such as comparing myself to others, seeking external approval, attempting to conform to perceived societal norms which are unrealistic, etc. At the root of it, in my view, is a problem shared by most everyone else on the planet an evolutionary history of tribalism. As humans, we tend to organize ourselves in groups, and from an evolutionary perspective, not being able to fit in would likely mean death. Thus, viewing everything from an external perspective and having an us vs them or me vs you mentality is necessary for survival in the wild. 5000 years of civilization has significantly helped us supersede our natural primal tendencies, but all the bad news we hear about today is proof that we still have it in us. Because the world is more connected today than ever, I see this as a huge barrier to solving big world issues together. We all have our own self interests and yet what we do has the potential to affect things on a global scale. So to bring this back about the Paris attacks, I think that attacking ISIS and or going after religion will do absolutely zero to solve the greater issue and will only make it worse. I think any time major bad news like this comes up we keep missing the big issue underlying all of it a fundamental lack of ability to step in other side's shoes and try to see things from their perspective. The same goes for every time we have a mass shooting or a riot. It turns into a shouting match and a finger pointing match every which way and nothing ever gets done. In conclusion, I argue that as humans, we need to recognize us vs them as a fundamental issue that must be addressed, or else we could be facing a violent and uncooperative future. EDIT 1 47 AM U.S. East Coast time and gotta get up at 7 30 tomorrow. Good night, for now. EDIT Okay, here is the part of my view that has definitively changed There might be tons of people who think of compassion and happiness like I do, and hell, there's probably lots of people who have suffered the same kind of depression I had that I have failed to acknowledge. I still struggle with confidence issues, so let's not pretend I'm an ideal role model. However, I feel I have made the classic mistake of trying to see the good in everyone, as many simply are indoctrinated in such a way that they don't know any better. My stance on violence is that it must be used as a last resort after we've attempted to talk it out, but I am not against resorting to it completely for reasons that have been stated below by other users, unfortunately.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the \"us vs them\" mentality is the biggest existential problem modern society faces today\n","id":"41591465-c551-4fd7-a38f-1230785f3051"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Claiming the moral responsibility to take in refugees sends a patronizing paternalistic message to lower income countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A country has no positive moral obligations to offer aid to non-citizens.\n","id":"e9849215-79cc-4ce0-a808-fd062ad3dc73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state ever infringe on individual human rights when countering terrorism?<|ARGUMENT|>Many countries around the world have banned the use of torture or enhanced interrogation techniques because of their violation of fundamental human rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Counterterrorism measures may violate the prohibition against the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.\n","id":"155ed34c-4b6d-49d3-82d6-0aa7ebb34208"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>Airbnb has launched an 'Experiences' feature on their app, allowing guests to access exclusive activities in various locations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Airbnb can offer a superior service as compared to traditional hotels and other accommodation services.\n","id":"0732f6b2-aa42-4e0d-8309-59f57f7bbe32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There Be Religious Exemptions To The Law?<|ARGUMENT|>Any law we are ok creating exceptions for is a law we do not hold as critical to society. At that point we should all question why it is a law we allow enforced on the rest of us. There may be a reason. But it should be very carefully looked at<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a law can be subverted for religious reasons, the law should be changed to allow non-religious people to operate in the same manner as their religious counterparts.\n","id":"82b3d00f-564b-42be-beda-70e2baa4f88c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Not only do people snicker, chuckle, point, make nasty comments etc, towards fat people, they often feel justified in doing so and they produce arguments if anyone protests arguments which I think do not cohere with other parts of our culture. One thing I would like to point out, as context, is that we live in a society that can produce a stunning amount of food, also cheap calorific food.American commerical culture has been gearing towards comfort and convenience far far more effectively than virtually any other western country, and food is particularly cheap. This is, in some ways, against the grain of the ultimate origin of American mores Variations on calvinist protestanism and other protestant and evangelical faiths. These are all belief system with strong and particualr feelings about order,control,personal responsibility,guilt, shame etc. I want to suggest that we humans, on some level, feel guilty about the inordinate amount of food we have access to a sort of society level binging, and that one way of managing that guilt is to find scapegoats to shame, and what better scapegoat than a fat person? There is another aspect to this, namely, the recent turn against hedonism in the west.I don't mean partying and bacchanalian orgies. I mean hedonism as in relaxed pleasure that is not conformist, in a sense. You will have noticed that this is retreating on many fronts, smoking is less and less legally possible in many places. Drinking is less and less socially acceptable. And another part of this movement is the inacceptability of uncontrolled eating.The reasons for the move against hedonism are complex and I cannot get into them in the OP, but I do believe it is part of the picture. Its not uncommon for people to make the claim that fat people have some in built character flaw. This is, to some extent, classical attribution bias, you look at them, see they are fat, and conclude they have bad character, when it happens to you, you draw different conclusions. But even on an evolutionary level, there are reasons to doubt that its a question of bad character. Humans were not designed to encounter such extremely cheap and available food. Some evolutionary psychologists believe that the people more likely to eat more calories are naturally' more geared towards seeking them out. This means that fat people are not more lazy thatn slim people, they have more in built motivation to seek out fat and sugar, which in the time of perhistoric man, would have been a huge benefit. I don't accept the argument from public health or the economics of air travel and all of those other prejudiced arguments masquerading as merely horrible technical arguments. The reason is that I don't think they are intellectually honest. They are bad faith arguments. Specifically, we, as a culture, don't generally count and measure and dice up every health foible in such a way as to mock or shame or attack or overcharge or guilt trip the people doing the supposed 'offence' in the same way, or consistently.I think this discrepancy shows that we are dealing with prejudice. Furthermore, it is quite telling how fat shaming works. Let's say a person has the potential to be fat in 1, 3, 5, 10 years, we never mock or shame that person while they carry out those behaviours its not until they appear fat that we actually start mocking them and if they lose the weight we also stop mocking them. IF the behaviours were the real target we would be just as outraged by them, as by the result.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mocking fat people is not justified\n","id":"b6a1f4da-db36-4cd0-be79-0bbebc529b8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>In 1 Samuel 15:1-8 god says, \"Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Old Testament provides evidence for God's promotion of evil.\n","id":"e1efa2d6-099d-4742-93b1-c54153a859d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>Affirmative action amounts to discrimination because some people are being preferred over others based on their race.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Democratic Party still supports Affirmative Action despite it being considered outdated and discriminatory.\n","id":"d409c1e7-1d4b-44f4-bf63-9b26e388ceb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The philosopher Richard Dworkin argued that people cannot be held responsible for their circumstances. By this logic, a woman cannot be held responsible for growing up in circumstances where contraceptive methods and relevant information are difficult to access Scheffler, p. 2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People can only be held responsible for informed choices that they have made. Contraception and education about contraception is not always readily available. In such a case, it is nobody's fault or choice that a woman is seeking an abortion.\n","id":"60f5ac46-dc00-48cf-924f-3bf99975fead"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a view I've been debating in my head for a while now but I think I've come with a decent conclusion. Hipsterism is the culture of the current American decade and those who hate hipsters are just looking at the idiots of the culture and claiming that to be its reality. The reason I say this is because I've been wondering about whether or not I'm a hipster. I'm from a middle class white background with bohemian tendencies and often dress or have interests that are against the norm. All evidence would point towards myself being a hipster were it not for one thing I don't have pretentiousness. I do realise it is a bit pretentious to say you're not pretentious but I do honestly try my best to hear the other side of the argument and am willing to change my view should I hear something that convinces me. This is in direct opposition to the definition of hipster I usually hear so I've been at a loss of what to define myself. Then I looked at what other people like me have done and said and I've realised that they hold the same values and aesthetics as me while having a varying degree of pretentiousness on a person by person basis. It was from that I realised that intelligence wasn't a factor in how hipsterism is defined, rather that it was defined by the values and aesthetics of the culture. I then realised that these values and aesthetics weren't shared by just me and my group of friends but rather the grand majority of the west. Full face beards, thick flannel, aesthetic glasses, liking traditional product manufacturing, enjoyment of foreign culture, etc. So this proved to me that it was a full fledged cultural movement rather than a minority group that everyone hates. But if that's the case, how come everyone hates it so much? Well that's where the comparison to the 60's and 70's counterculture comes in. In this era, many young people were in fear of being drafted into Vietnam and had a vast hatred of American culture as a result. This caused many people to go against the cultural standard of the US and form their own around the concept of individual enjoyment rather than status or wealth. As a result, many people who had proclaimed for the status quo were scared that the rise of the counterculture would put them at a disadvantage. So they fought against it with slander, calling them all stoners, commies, stupid, and even something as childish as smelly. This continued until the 80's when the previous status quo were given validation with Reagan's coming into office, removing the fear of being put at disadvantage with the new policies Reagan would introduce that undermined the counterculture. Today we can see parallels. The previous status quo before hipsterism would have been the Bush administration. An administration known to many as extremely right wing, warmongering, xenophobic, and even borderline fascist to an extent. With hipsterism being the extreme polar opposite of these values, it would stand to reason that there would be a strong hate to people of these values from supporters of that era. As to validate this theory, the group that supported the Bush the most were Southern Americans. What's the group with the most hostility to hipsterism? Southern Americans, with constant hatred from people in that region of city life and the constant berating of political correctness and urban living in country music. As well, the insults tacked onto hipsters are childish in nature as with hippies. While smoking weed isn't as prevalent, being smelly, stupid, and commies has certainly remained, giving validation to the theory that the previous status quo want to discredit this new culture. It's a theory I think helps explain reaction to counterculture in general and helps explain the prevalence of hipster culture if it's so hated. If someone could convince me otherwise, I'm all ears.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hipsterism is the culture of 2010's America and the negativity towards it is in the same vein as in the 60's and 70's counterculture.\n","id":"61d6e08d-07c1-4f02-b144-19dd73a664c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My understanding of C 3P0 is that he serves mainly as comic relief in the movies. However, he's in way too many scenes to the point that he just gets annoying. C 3PO does nothing to drive the story forward. I feel that you could actually remove him from all of the films and the plots wouldn't really change that much. The only thing he's good at is language interpretations, but he doesn't fill that role often enough to justify him getting so much screen time. If C 3PO was in fewer scenes, he would be a decent character, but the fact that he's in so many, and the fact that he's actually kind of useless, really damages our enjoyment of the character. Who do you think is the worst character in the Star Wars movies, and why is that character worse than C 3PO?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"C-3PO is the worst character in the Star Wars Movies. Yes, I said C-3PO is worse than Jar Jar.\n","id":"52b87d82-c58c-435f-8cab-6def3f579315"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Religion, Source of Conflict or of Peace?<|ARGUMENT|>In the states where religion develops freely and people have free access to places of worship, churches, mosques, temples and synagogues have always served as a shelter for the poor. Some of the greatest works of art were created in the name of God. Furthermore, Woodrow Wilson suggested that a strong affinity exists between religious commitment and patriotism. Love of country, just like love of God, certainly inspires good deeds.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the states where religion develops freely and people have free access to places of worship, churc...\n","id":"9d775b3f-1267-41e2-a0d5-c25cf8ec3d28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Due to its history and behavior throughout the times and as of today, the West apparently does not have any moral problem with killing people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The West has a historical track record of exploitation. Thus, moral considerations do not seem to be very influential for policy decisions.\n","id":"12fed83c-54b6-4c1a-ba60-2850a9005dcd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US debt ceiling deal<|ARGUMENT|>Timothy Geithner, US Treasury Secretary. \"Compromise achieved, reform\u2019s the next chapter.\" Washington Post. August 3rd, 2011: \"By locking in long-term savings, Congress will have more room in the fall to pass additional short-term measures to strengthen the economy \u2014 such as extending the payroll tax cut, which provides an average of a thousand dollars to the after-tax incomes of working Americans; extending unemployment benefits; and financing infrastructure investments. After all, strengthening growth and putting more Americans back to work are among the most important things we can do to improve our fiscal situation today and over the long term.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With long-term savings locked, US can refocus on jobs.\n","id":"98b24954-97d2-48d4-a7e8-8ced0e393c39"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>For instance, mandatory voting makes a country less democratic according to the EIU index. While it may infringe on individual freedom, this measure has proven to enhance turnout and representativeness of political institutions, which can be especially important in areas with large disenfranchised communities Coppedge and Gerring, p.247<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Indices use universal criteria to measure democracy. These are inappropriate as democracy can only be properly evaluated by \"locally-defined and context-sensitive criteria\n","id":"cbd8c86d-474c-4938-9f4d-b77198505f99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I should say I don\u2019t consider myself socialist, but I agree with a lot of the criticism against capitalism. What has baffled me is this I see a lot of people here in reddit state that the Nordic countries are socialist, but I hadn\u2019t heard this point of view anywhere else. I\u2019m Bulgarian and my country has a socialist past and if I compare that to the Nordic countries now there\u2019s almost no similarity in how the systems work. Socialism is about state controlled market, but the Nordic countries have a free market. Also, in socialism all businesses are nationalized, as was the case in Bulgaria, but in the Nordic countries most of them aren\u2019t. I read someone mention that in Norway the oil industry is state owned, and the state has a bank but not all banks , but that is still far from the idea of socialism. I also haven\u2019t heard anyone from the Nordic countries describe their model as socialist. I feel people might be mixing up the words social and socialist, but social policies can be found in a lot of countries and they do not result in a socialist system. I am really curious to understand why people consider the Nordic countries socialist. Edit In addition, someone recently referred this article to me as proof that the model is socialist, but it even goes to say that it is based on free market capitalism. It does mention social policies, but I still don\u2019t understand why people take that to mean socialist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Nordic countries are not socialist\n","id":"1df8c42b-4d0a-41e1-946d-5c6a7b6625cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should ban private military companies<|ARGUMENT|>private military companies have no governmental controls and can attack people in their own country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private military companies cannot be trusted to be loyal to the hiring country\n","id":"718a96e5-d56b-463d-adb2-e86fafaa5f60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>sorry in advance for the lack of brevity A lot of people seem to love Bill Burr and I've tried to get into his comedy but it's kind of painful in truth, I've seen maybe like 3 4 of one special, can't remember which . He's just kind of ranting about various topics that most of the time could be interesting except he's not making any jokes, he just kind of says stuff with some profanities sprinkled in there for good measure but it never shocks me like it's supposed to . There aren't any actual jokes, no real wit. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I watch with other people, because it's as if they're on auto pilot, laughing at nothing in particular when they feel like they're supposed to, rather than because Bo made them laugh Someone explain to me what it is that I'm missing if anything I also see Lisa Lampanelli in the same vein I see what she's trying to do but she's not making me laugh I'm far from an expert but I watch a decent amount of stand up comedians. I don't believe myself to be a particularly funny person, but I try to appreciate the art that goes into stand up, and I get a kick out of watching a comedian develop their own style of jokes, their own character . I find that my favorite comedy usually has some point to make. I don't care if it's about something political, religious, sexual, clean or dirty, etc. if the comedian makes their point well and makes me laugh, they'll win my favor. For reference, some of my favorite comedians are in no particular order Louis C.K., Dave Chappelle, George Carlin, Mitch Hedburg, Brian Regan, Steven Wright, Mike Birbiglia, Kevin Hart, Demitri Martin, Frank Caliendo before his impressions got played out , to name a few of the top of my head. EDIT just realized a ridiculous mistake on my part This whole time I've been using the name Bo Burnham, BUT I MEANT WAS BILL BURR gt lt<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't find Bo Burnham to be funny.\n","id":"b121a5ad-f102-4aad-8c89-fb10dd8d84a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US Customs and Immigrations Enforcement should be investigated for crimes against humanity<|ARGUMENT|>Children are held in the custody of US Border Patrol without their parents. Legally, they\u2019re not supposed to be held by border agents for more than 72 hours before being sent to the Department of Health and Human Services but in practice, they\u2019re held for days, sometimes weeks, in facilities without basic necessities<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A concentration camp expert defines the ICE detention centers as concentration camps because ICE detainees are held, en masse, in a prison setup without trial.\n","id":"e335bd21-486d-46cd-aa5a-9d310d29766b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like a plane just disappears into the Indian Ocean with no explanation or trace, and that's not the way I want to go out. And I've been watching this TV show called Air Disasters on the Smithsonian about various plane accidents throughout history. Pilot error, crappy maintenance, lack of regulation, etc. and air travel only gets safer when a flaw kills people, instead of it being tested and implemented. Now all of this had made me afraid of flying and I don't want to disappear or be abducted by aliens via a plane or get that horrible rush of feeling knowing you're gonna die as your plane falls out of the sky.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"After MH370 I'm afraid of flying\n","id":"e6d4e41f-92af-421f-b338-16ae7a2f80fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title says it all accusing a person of being a hypocrite is a weak and desperate way to contest a point you have nothing for. An obese dietitian may well be a hypocrite, but it doesn't affect their logic. A smoker working on preventing kids from lighting up is probably right, and even might have a deep insight on the matter. A murderer speaking on the merits of self control may be completely right. Even a pedophile preaching on respect for others might have very good, constructive points. In short, pointing out a person's shortcomings in order to distract from an argument or contest their qualification to MAKE the point is an ad hominem attack, and a particularly insidious one, since in the eyes of many listeners it DOES marginalize the person. why should we listen to you, comes the rallying cry. You don't even listen to yourself Well, we SHOULD listen. If a gambler tells me to invest instead of blowing my money on the tables, he's probably right. The fact that he's blowing HIS money on the tables doesn't change that. This does not apply if the intended subject of a conversation or debate is a person's moral fiber or consistency. I just don't see why that consistency should matter unless they are in a position of power reached by proclaiming that consistency politicians, clergy and in that case the point of the charge is not to invalidate their message, but to call them a liar, and imply that they have used their station to violate the values that got them there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe accusations of hypocrisy are childish, and only used by people with no good argument.\n","id":"5eed4e02-8540-44f6-8b50-2630bcdfdf16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This has been prompted by widespread debate about Islam, feminism, MRAs, the infamous inappropriate shirt and the two major political parties in America. I will present my argument in simple terms and expand in replies to comments Some active moderate members, along with leaders authority figures, already strive to present their positions to the public in order to attract new membership and increase the odds of creating the sort of change they advocate for. These positions are readily searchable, as are the variety of extremist takes. I.E it is very possible to figure out why these subsets are not identical. It is not reasonable to expect individual moderate members to spend their lives apologizing for beliefs that they do not hold. If the various moderate positions are sufficiently distinct from the extremist ones, the moderate apology only serves to suggest that these subsets have more in common than they actually do. It is somewhat reasonable to suggest that leaders within a group demonstrate how their POVs are sufficiently different from the extremists as they would even with out groups , but apologizing does not adequately serve this function . Various individuals in moderate subsets already DO spend their time apologizing for and arguing against extremists. Frankly, the general population isn't that interested in listening to these moderates extremists garner more media attention, more interest from those who want to criticize the perceived enemy , etc. That is why, despite countless articles, videos, statements of apology, and so forth, commenters will STILL demand that the moderates do something they already have to varying degrees done. Moderate individual members have lives. Plenty of them simply cannot afford to dedicate their lives to targeting extremism. Plenty don't even dedicate that much time to their group to begin with for a variety of reasons only loosely affiliated, too busy with work school, don't spend their free time debating online, etc. In closing If we are to combat dangerous ideas presented by fringe subsets not to mention toxic groupthink behavior , we all need to be on board with the following idea these people are not the ultimate representation of their group. Their ideas should be argued against DIRECTLY rather than suggesting, with an air of disgust, that their entire group is corrupt and or evil. By doing that, we are only INCREASING THE LIKELIHOOD that moderates will not feel comfortable talking about their positions in various public settings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should stop demanding that individual moderate members of much larger groups apologize for or speak out against extremist subsets\n","id":"17f8b9bd-de10-4053-8ed6-bde1160226bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Medicalisation of normal events is becoming more frequent as society progresses. Mental illnesses that were not even recognised once are now treated with a multitude of pills that often do more harm than good. Normal processes like menopause are becoming medical problems, kids who don't pay attention are being labelled with some acronym and given medication. Where will it stop? Eventually everything is going to be a medical problem, with doctors ruling every aspect of our lives.  that medicalization is a bad thing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Too much medicine is a bad thing\n","id":"d0b4bf21-e47e-4f84-8ddd-87fcaa8e2f49"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Irony, satire, and sarcasm are not hard to find in today's media and popular culture. These modes of humor are becoming increasingly common ways to express one's feelings about politics, social commentary, foreign affairs, etc. Many see these as coping mechanisms being able to reduce real problems and emotions to memes and quips. I believe that this is helpful in the short run, but hinders our emotional capacity in the long run. When satirical websites and newspapers take a supposed commonly held political belief and flip it into something extreme, it draws out attention to perhaps a more serious underlying problem with how the given political social racial system works. Perhaps. Instead, I believe that these sorts of protests do more harm than good with regards to advancing an agenda, even a positive one , by becoming the only action that that individual will take to support the idea. Take for instance someone on Facebook who detests a certain politician, and shares an ironic meme insulting him her. Suppose many of their friends see it. Suppose this individual feels good about what they did, and that it will help encourage discussion and change. But it rarely does. Instead, the individual feels content with what he's done and ends up doing nothing further. He cheapens the true supporters by the lack of depth provided by his shared media. Side note, so many of the posts on Reddit seem to carry this vibe. This vibe being that of an old man confined to the dark light and musky air in his small house on a bad street. He complains about it constantly. Every time you visit or make a phone call you're made painfully aware how much he dislikes his living situation. But deep down, he likes it. If given the option of living somewhere different, he would more than likely decline being satisfied with his position despite his flamboyant protests. Anyways, I seem to have thoroughly deviated from my original point. If you'd like to argue or discuss anything mentioned in this post, I would be more than happy to chat. Cheers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Irony is eroding American culture.\n","id":"70d45644-2a44-46cd-b2be-e9dd21de494a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>In a recent study, gender differences in spatial reasoning skills were reduced beyond statistical significance when women were primed to think of themselves as men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being told they are bad at certain skills, not biology, is what makes women perform poorly when tested on these skills.\n","id":"c6fdca95-2e65-467c-aff7-e2d5650f35f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is having police officers in schools a good idea?<|ARGUMENT|>The police would become more humanized as the students would get to spend more time around them in non-threatening situations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having police officers in schools helps rebuild trust between community members and law enforcement.\n","id":"a61fbb73-c38a-4479-9058-c2f8eb6bad8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people be free to choose the country in which they live?<|ARGUMENT|>This part of the study only looked at adults 18-45. If children were taken into account, the net gain over 20 years would be much higher, as the study shows child refugees attain better economic outcomes than adults.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the US, is is reported that even refugees can represent economic and financial benefits they pay $20,000 more than they receive in benefits.\n","id":"17445332-9b6b-492a-9dc9-5e0621bdd66f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Unique to the Orthodox Tewahedo canon broader and narrower are the Paralipomena of Jeremiah 4 Baruch, Jubilees, Enoch, and the three books of Meqabyan.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Orthodox Tewahedo broader Old Testament canon does not match that of the narrower canon or other biblical adherents.\n","id":"d0baf16c-5108-4599-bca3-3a2c89db2ace"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Well, im struggling with the school, work and the motivation. Everyone keep saying, you should stop gaming so much. The games like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and so on. That I have to start study and make the money so I can life. But hey, what about this? Most of MMORPG games thats coming in future will be much better then what I have played before. They will be so immersive that the reality world will feel so bland. Why can't i just fuck the world and ask for the social welfare payment and play every days some good MMORPG games huh? Buy the bad ass PC, that I can play different games on Ultra settings and buy a some most comfortable computer chair. Try to change my view that I shouldn't be thinking this way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Why can't I play MMORPG games all day and life from \"Social Welfare Payment\"?\n","id":"54ccde67-8797-4baa-b14a-d3921b58e50b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can news sources be trusted?<|ARGUMENT|>After entering into a $250 million-dollar advertising and \"integration\" deal with the daily fantasy sports website DraftKings over the summer of 2015, practically every ESPN studio program was shoehorning in plugs for it in some way or another.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Media outlets must make money in order to stay in business, most of it comes from advertisements which are often disguised as news stories.\n","id":"32baee0e-56fa-4376-9461-605c41b35e83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Our economic system is based on the belief that humans are rational actor, which is shown to be wrong by prospect theory<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evidence is not the most important thing when it comes to believing in a theory.\n","id":"0b369fed-571c-477e-b035-088573d8a4b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Supply side economics looks like it is fueling the self-destruction of capitalism in America.<|ARGUMENT|>Because many unfortunate developmental issues are not blameworthy and can befall on any citizen, we should agree to shoulder the risk of occurrence and the associated burden collectively. Bad luck is not properly left solely to an individual; things that can happen to anyone, should be covered by everyone, so we are all protected together.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Of course this category has a broad spectrum from minor mobility issues to severe cognitive impairments. Society must be willing to care for those as much as the situation calls for. Placing the full burden upon the family has a compounding effect on hurdles to full participation in capitalism.\n","id":"80f4ffce-14e3-4a17-a7ef-d4f9cc0a670c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of the main debates in the US politics is between economic left and right. Each side is convinces that only their approach is correct, and the opposite will lead to either stagnation, or poverty and inequality. It seems to me that both sides are wrong, because among the top countries as measured by human development index and other well being measures, there are both conservative and moderately socialist countries. As an example of a successful conservative country, consider Switzerland No minimal wage No free universal healthcare single payer healthcare Low taxes, and in particular no capital gain tax Social welfare is expected to be paid back once the economic situation of the recipient has changed Most of social security is provided by commercial insurances As an opposite example, consider Nordic countries They have Universal healthcare High taxes Strong social security supported by the state Strong unions Both Switzerland and Nordic countries have very high living standard, long life expectancy and relatively low inequality. As evident from these examples, both conservative and social economy can lead to very high standard of life. So if the general economic policy doesn't really matter for people's well being, then what does? I do not have a ready answer to this, so this is not strictly a part of this , but some things that I do find in all the highly developed countries are low corruption and free market. Edit When I am writing about left vs right, I mean moderate socialism and conservatives, not true socialism with planned economy and libertarianism. Both seem to me much less viable, then more moderate policies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both conservative and liberal economies can work very well, and the devil is in the details.\n","id":"4de7c6bf-c6dc-4b6f-bf95-24ef35e995a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am 23 years old and recently have relocated to a third world Latin American country for work. After moving here, I was taken back at the amount of people in the social scene who drive drunk here. It is a completely normal thing as police are lacking in number and in the rare case that they pulled you over you could just pay your way out of trouble with a bribe. Living my entire life in the states and never EVER driving drunk not even one drink most of the time I never even considered the fact. Now Most of my co workers, friends, wont hesitate to drive after a night of drinking they arent stumbling but they are certainly not sober and definitely over the legal limit . Driving mildly intoxicated does not seem as serious as it used to. Edit Should add that haven't seen or heard of any accidents within my friend group but they happen often I would say. Country is Guatemala .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Driving while mildly intoxicated is not as bad as it seems\n","id":"47bd6f83-b360-443a-888c-280c0ed67df0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Jesus was made a curse v13 or accursed when he was crucified by gentiles. The Jews of that day found it hard to believe v23 in a crucified, suffering messiah. It would have taken a lot of evidence to convince a self-respecting Jew to follow such a man.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The earliest Christians were Jews who had nothing worldly to gain and much to lose by abandoning Judaism to follow Jesus. Something powerful must have happened in their lives to convince them that a crucified carpenter was their promised Messiah.\n","id":"5fc4a9cd-b6a4-4e50-b08a-68b3b5562be3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious authorities have done countless morally dubious things over the years, for instance they've protected pedophiles and blamed a 7 year old rape victim because she didn't say no. Meanwhile they use religion to claim they are morally right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has frequently claimed the moral high ground, but its position that people of faith are morally superior to those without faith is as bigoted as suggesting the contrary.\n","id":"7be15844-4d60-4b4b-88b8-cd7fa65efeb1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love guacamole. I make it often and bring it to parties, potlucks, etc and everyone always raves about it and wants my recipe. But there\u2019s no real recipe, I just don\u2019t muck it up by adding a bunch of bullshit in there. It varies, and the garlic is especially optional, but generally ripe avocados, salt and lemon to taste, and a bit of minced garlic. The worst offender in the bs recipes is jalape\u00f1os or other spicy chiles. Onions and tomatoes are also wholly unwanted. In my understanding, there are other dips like salsa or other elements of a dish that will bring the heat, and the role of guacamole is to cool you down.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guacamole should not be spicy\n","id":"26e02ecc-1ed3-4d48-b50c-49ac8e281148"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should police adopt a reactive service model used by other public safety services?<|ARGUMENT|>Even with patrols, law enforcement responds to violent crimes in less than 11 minutes only 58.6% of the time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fire and Emergency Medical Services EMS response times are usually quick enough to be address the incident.\n","id":"6a948c69-e191-4a08-8b63-e46bc7d0c01b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>There is some language in the U.S. Constitution that specifically supports and recognises the legitimacy of some forms of vigilantism if the government breaches its promise to protect its citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When the state and its organs prove incapable of providing justice to the people, it is necessary for some other group to step up and provide said justice.\n","id":"eb42e914-e0b5-441d-ab7c-2be403be97b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The number of breaks and commercials have a negative impact on the entertainment value of NFL games. The number of breaks, as well as the length of the breaks is inordinate. Common rationalizations for these breaks are that they ensure that the strategic element within the sport is maintained. I fail to see though how that element crucially depends on the number and the length of breaks, at least not enough to justify and offset the dullness that comes with the breaks. Another rationalization is that fewer and shorter breaks would tire the players, which I frankly can't see being something particularly bad. It's a physical consent, stamina should be a relevant element. I have had one or two discussions on the topic and I've not found the rationalizations particular convincing. My experience of watching the NFL is mostly limited to the Super Bowl and the occasional game, so I am an NFL noob open for convincing. The sport would IMO be much more entertaining and probably popular worldwide if the stop and go nature and time efficiency of the games would increase significantly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are too many breaks and commercials during NFL games. The number and length of breaks can be severely reduced without impacting the entertainment level of the sport adversely.\n","id":"d3998d37-f4eb-4358-96b7-d5f94b61c45d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m not saying the police should not have access to firearms at all, but I do think that there would be a drastic reduction in unjust police shootings if lethal weapons were stored in police vehicles. I believe tazers and other non lethal forms of dealing with assailants should be the first method of defense police officers use. If the situation escalates to the point where deadly force is deemed required, the officers will need to make a conscious decision. It scares me to think that so many law enforcement officers have such quick access to a weapon that can take the life of another in the blink of an eye.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Law enforcement officers should not carry lethal firearms.\n","id":"67736d3b-19ef-4b3f-a363-4f5816420c87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>Without the state to enforce property laws, everyone could just steal whatever they wanted when they wanted it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The very existence of the free market is dependent upon a degree of government control.\n","id":"57c5cd25-8e1b-4a3d-bdc6-c23cc44f652a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Alma 3:6-7 states that \"the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression,.therefore they were cursed; and the Lord God did set a mark upon them.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon teaches that, in contrast to the white skin of God's chosen people, the darker skin of indigenous Americans is the result of a curse from God.\n","id":"28087bd6-42b2-4492-9925-a1bd2e36c9ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Paying reparations is a positive step toward healing the division between the races. Acknowledging a wrong and apologizing with paying reparations is a positive step forward.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reparations would help to close the emotional racial divide in the US.\n","id":"bdf3df43-e424-4593-9be4-1d281c6da594"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>People should be paid fairly for the work that they do, counting all factors that are relevant to job performance and discounting all the ones that are not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men consistently work harder and longer than women in harder jobs, so they should be fairly compensated for that work.\n","id":"b5a087e6-5912-4f8e-9de8-57bd4db121e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state ever infringe on individual human rights when countering terrorism?<|ARGUMENT|>Making communities more familiar and comfortable with law enforcement can be an effective technique at preventing terrorism and doesn't require the erosion of human rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state can effectively counter terrorism without having to infringe on human rights.\n","id":"d22d3745-596d-4a29-87a6-cb97cff87082"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the United Nations the best forum to tackle climate change?<|ARGUMENT|>The UN includes the majority of countries, which makes it one of the most influential organizations in the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Climate change is an international issue that can only be effectively dealt with on an international level.\n","id":"aa08f34c-606f-421c-902a-db9e3912a777"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Terms Face Changing Software is any technology that allows one to edit videos and sound to make it sound like a person is saying something they are not. Radiolab demonstrates the technology here While this video is far from believable, this post regards a future where it would be hard to detect a fake to the extent it would have to take some forensic work to achieve. Post Truth Era refers to a situation wherein appeals to emotion and desire to believe is more important to the formation of political opinions and knowledge than actual facts and evidence. It is the era that we inhabit currently. An example of this would be blatant and easily fact checked lies that Donald Trump utters with no real consequence. My View Whereas we live in a Post Truth Era, we arrived into this time not because of our technological capacity to produce fakes but of our ability to share lies and truths with one another. All it takes to get a credulous person to believe in something is their willingness to believe with the ability to tell a story. We've had the ability to misquote, misattribute , and remove the context from the words of important people for a long time. The only thing that has changed is the speed by which we can do so, the scope of our audience, and the lack of accountability that are all found on the internet. Face Changing Software seems worrisome because we would have the ability to put words into other people's mouths for our own purposes, but it only changes the format by which we are viewing the lie. If we are ready to believe the lie to begin with, text, photo, and traditionally edited video all serve the same purpose. My view is that while Face Changing Software may contribute to more dishonesty in the Post Truth Era, it will not make our situation dramatically worse because of the fact that our capacity to believe things that are comfortable enough has demonstrated itself to be the true problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Face Changing Software Explained in Post Will Not Make the Post Truth Era Dramatically Worse.\n","id":"b7ebeef8-def5-42bb-aabf-a44236cb3e27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Australia Limit Immigration to Achieve a Sustainable Population?<|ARGUMENT|>More than half of Australia\u2019s population growth is due to immigration. The rest is due to \u2018natural increase\u2019 births minus deaths.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Australia\u2019s population is growing very fast for a developed country, and faster than the global population.\n","id":"c982e713-e3d5-41ce-bab6-e3731e9f880d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's debatable whether this is already true but I think it will certainly be true of the next Republican US president. While Trump is historically unpopular, it is amazing that his support is as high as it is imo. He is incompetent, incoherent, ignorant, offensive, inconsistent and proudly stupid. Despite this, millions of people continue to support him even as he contradicts himself and the people who embarrass themselves trying to excuse him. I believe this is because many Republicans fear demographic change that will mean white Christians no longer dominate America and are more willing to sacrifice good government in return for control of government by their ethnic group as Trumps speech in Poland suggests . As a result, the Republican party will become more fascist and their next president will be a fascist racist similar to what the KKK alt right would want someone who unashamedly prioritises the interests of white Christians over 'inferior' outsiders. Firstly, Republicans do not really respect democracy anymore. As can be seen from their gerrymandering, their targeted ID laws, their rewarding of McConnells Supreme Court obstruction, their party's general and proudly partisan obstruction of Obama and their support for Trump, Republicans do not care for democratic norms and are willing to use government to oppress minorities and 'others' they view as inferior or dangerous to achieve their ends. You could argue that because Republicans support decentralised government they would never back an authoritarian but those arguments for limited government are just talking points as they happily target cities who do things they don't like Also according to ANES, 30 of Trump voters thought protesters deserved it a greal deal or a lot if they got roughed up compared to 18 who said not at all so they are willing to endorse violence to suppress the opposition as well as government oppression. Secondly, Republicans do not really consider morality. In 2011, white evangelicals were the most likely group to say personal morality is important in a president. Now after supporting a thrice married adulterer, they are the least likely group to say that. The reasoning is obvious the candidate who most vocally fought for them over others was inconsistent with their beliefs so they simply changed them. Why can't they do it again? Their health care bill and distase for refugees shows that they share Trumps lack of basic empathy for others. If a candidate came and gave them power by targetting others, I believe they would support it. Thirdly, the information they receive is almost set up to encourage a fascist leader. With Fox, Breitbart, Sinclair, talk radio and their lack of education, Republicans live in a bubble that isolates them from reality. They view the Russia scandal as fiction. They ignore evidence on climate change and economics. Half of them think Obama is a Muslim. They support a party that dismisses the media, academia, science and any other opposition including impartial groups like the CBO and the courts as biased. Republicans do not deal with objective reality and instead live in a world where everything is possible and nothing is real , making them ideal targets for an authoritarian demagogue who will placate them with news and praise while stripping those they view as 'wrong' of their rights and rewards himself with more and more power. Finally, the Republican party serves the rich first. As can be seen from their support of Trump, the Republican party is willing to work with a man who routinely embarrasses them and hates them. Ted Cruz and John McCain were treated appallingly by Trump but they now have mostly fallen into line. As long as a President cuts taxes for the rich and regulations for business, they will tolerate almost anything and lie as much as they need to no matter how much opposition there is. I could be wrong and Republicans could have moral limits, a genuine concern for others or an interest in objective reality and their next president will be a good man but it doesn't seem that way. I'm not trying to offend Republicans but this is how they seem to me. Wrt the statistics I mentioned, I got them from the written version of the Economist's special report on the US this week. Tl dr Republican's fear of demographic change, disinterest in democracy, general ignorance and focus on the rich means they will gradually produce fascist leaders and a fascist president who will govern for white Christians while oppressing other groups Republicans view as inferior.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The next Republican president will be a fascist and racist and\/or misogynist\n","id":"efeafa87-20b7-457b-8f2b-9b47b2445590"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I went on a street art tour of London yesterday. I saw some amazing pieces like this The grand finale of the tour left me quite disappointed though it was the original version of Banksy's picture of the HMV dog aiming a bazooka at a gramophone. I get the message behind the picture. Banksy is subverting a corporate logo with an anti corporate message, while at the same time commenting on the decline of the recorded music industry. He's also managed to make it mildly amusing though I wouldn't say outright funny . My problem is that of all the art I saw that day, this alone was behind a sheet of protective perspex. It's only his art that gets chipped off walls and sold for millions at auction. People like Banksy because he's subversive, he's political, and he's funny. But if you ask me, most newspaper cartoonists do what he does, but better. His pieces are political, but the messages aren't deep. Corporations treat people like shit. War robs childern of innocence. Anyone with an ounce of sense has internalised those messages by the age of fifteen. Banksy popularised street art, but he didn't invent it. Blek le Rat was doing the same sort of artwork years before Banksy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banksy is overrated\n","id":"d83944d4-c062-435c-94dc-856f1efa17c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've noticed when someone says something is masculine or something is feminine it is all based upon stereotypes and anecdotes. The concepts has even been used scientifically. The theory of Brain Sex asserts that there are male and female brains. The BBC website even has a test to determine it Some of the questions include How much words you can associate with one word? And can you rearrange different shapes? The theory has been debunked by this recent study which sampled more than 5,500 people. The study concluded that the brain is more like a mosaic instead of male or female It's also worth mentioning brain plasticity and brain development does not finish till the age of 25.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as masculinity and femininity.\n","id":"b6322182-0477-4157-a9eb-8db07659ee20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>A more effective means of hacking may be to fix the tallying mechanism. Then one target can affect the whole outcome, rather than trying to hack huge numbers of voters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Altering Votes may not be the most effective way to hack a liquid democracy platform.\n","id":"a1982b9e-626f-4470-80b1-8101e8317f52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm honestly not sure why I hold this view. Inertia? For the past few years I've been assuming whatever Congress and radio show hosts claim Obama is destroying currently is 180 degrees from reality. It's hard to take them seriously when their first salvo was against his heritage and religion. But, with the recent IRS scandal and everything else people have been saying about civil liberties the past 12 years Bush, Obama or otherwise I've beginning to wonder. It's difficult to separate rhetoric from fact and hyperbole from reality. So, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Obama administration's treatment of whistle blowers and civil liberties has been overblown by the press and the GOP.\n","id":"10d31bb6-f076-48ba-8e29-674b2564ef7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kosovo independence<|ARGUMENT|>Yevgeny Primakov, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, \"Three Arguments Against Kosovo Independence\", Serbian News Network, 2\/19\/07 - \"Kosovo and Metohia are considered to be the Serbs' native and ancestral land, a land where their civilization, culture and identity evolved. The Serbian Constitution, recently adopted in a nationwide referendum, calls Kosovo an inalienable part of Serbia.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kosovo is an historic part of Serbia that should not grow independent\n","id":"71126c06-660d-42fd-85e7-98f3ad4aad99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I might be a bit biased I worked at Starbucks for a few months but I always shake my head when I hear 'McDonalds has great coffee for a dollar, Starbucks sucks.' I think that Redditors 'dislike' Starbucks coffee primarily for reasons other than the taste of the coffee, which is all that should really matter when you say 'Starbucks coffee tastes like crap'. Starbucks is the world's largest buyer of coffee. They do not buy one kind of bean. Every day, most Starbucks stores brew Dark Roast, Pike, and Blonde Roast. The Dark Roast changes about once a month. Some are good, some are bad. The Blonde Roast changes slightly less often. A lot of people including me prefer the lighter roasts, which are way different than the other kinds. The Pike is the generic roast. This is the blandest, least likely to offend flavor. If you go into Starbucks and just say medium sized coffee this is what you get. On top of these, people can come in and order any of the blends Starbucks has. If you want French Roast, you got it. Willow Blend the better blonde roast , sure. I think people who say Starbucks sucks either are basing their opinion on factors unrelated to how the coffee tastes, or have only tried the basic pike coffee Come on, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Redditors dislike Starbucks coffee because it's expensive and they don't try different roasts.\n","id":"e0d75f12-6e7d-4d87-a308-a06e69d5fc76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I have a son. He is interested in things boys were told was for them when I was his age. We do all sorts of activites together and I feel like he's really open to me. Until one day I come home and go to show him the new guitar I bought when I catch him hiding what turns out to be one of his cousins dresses when I look closer and some make up that I figure is probably hers. My first thought was Oh god why the fuck is he doing this I don't understand . I kind of made this uhhh well we can just call it an awkward hand motion with a turn and walked out. I heard him crying which I also don't really know how to deal with, but thats just me being awkward around emotional people in general. To keep this as short as possjble though I still love and respect him. I've been open to it. It can still be a shock but its new to me. So people ask me how I reacted when they find out and when I tell them I have had a few acuse me of more less being a piece of shit because of how I felt. To me though as long as he is happy I can think what I want and still love him. To me he doesn't need approval to feel comfortable at home. I don't feel like any of my emotions are wrong due to how I actually handled it. Secondly I don't think its my fault he hid it from me when I've never been the guys have to be like this cause society says so kind of person. I always encouraged him to speak me about anything he feels, and Ive never said what he thought was stupid or nonsense. Change my view y'all and see if we can bury this mental hatchet<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's ok to feel something. So long as you don't act like it\n","id":"f682d66b-eeea-4071-937f-29d4e647e36e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think the numbers of money in bank account is intangible and based on people's confidence on that currency. Furthermore now the government has too much power on money we hold. What if the government goes nuts, print more money and make our savings worthless? It is possible hyperinflation will happen. I think it is better to have a lot of debts rather than save too much money. For example, buying an expensive house with loan instead of full payment. It will be an advantage if hyper inflation happens because debts are not adjusted for inflation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hoarding money is extremely risky, it is better to save exact amount of money for emergency and spend the rest of it, whether with credit or not.\n","id":"43ebeda6-9dd7-45cb-bc62-2f515fba8c89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>US studies have shown that incumbents are re-elected at disproportionately high rates, indicating an incumbency advantage. If applied to the UK election, the Conservatives would benefit from this advantage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Going into this election, the Conservatives enjoy a number of political advantages.\n","id":"7b544386-8bb7-4145-964b-afb2a57d54ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>Protests are often directed against traditions. For example, the 1968 protests in Germany were directed against the conservative traditions of the protesters' parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tradition isn't always worth following, especially during a protest.\n","id":"14165a50-3cd5-4ebd-b9a9-ae0ff6879e33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The rate at which government power is being abused and being brought to light should force any rational individual to wish to blatantly change the structure of government. This seems to not be the case. I believe this is because the American people have bought into the propaganda that is offered them and believe that it is for their own good, and regardless of abuses at least they're better off then some third world dictatorship. The general public doesn't care that their rights are being trampled upon, and therefore nothing will change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that although the current USA surveillance scandal should be enough to cause open rebellion, the American people are to brainwashed to act.\n","id":"3ac08d87-c035-40e8-88c8-67d848728222"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Animals are meant to exist as part of a food chain. If we, the apex predators, simply stopped consuming meat thousands of species cows, sheep, pigs etc. would become extinct as they only exist due to their value as food, due to selective breeding. This would invariably destabilise countless ecosystems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ceasing to eat meat would mean that vast quantities of livestock would die without being replaced as they are unable to survive effectively outside of human agriculture.\n","id":"11239e76-fa16-41fb-9aa8-3b2716ce387c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Even today's separation of bathrooms by gender is a product of a society in which the overwhelming majority of power lies in the hands of men. Bathrooms were initially separated out of male chauvinism towards women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The small number of people affected does not justify a violation of their rights. This represents a case of the Tyranny of the Majority a decision does not become right or just based on numbers.\n","id":"648b27a4-f5ca-468e-9ee1-b1f00e90d923"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is OKC police officer Daniel Holtzclaw REALLY guilty of the crimes he was convicted of?<|ARGUMENT|>Lynchpin accuser, Jannie Ligons, reportedly had no motive Ligons admitting to smoking marijuana prior to the traffic stop: to lie about her encounter with Daniel Holtzclaw when he pulled her over.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jannie Ligons' allegations resulted in two guilty verdicts counts 15 & 16 and sentences totaling 21 years.\n","id":"85a2aca8-070e-4651-a612-80b67d3bb8a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do like to read, but I don't feel like books necessarily deserve the special pedestal that a lot of people put them on. Every artform has different ways to express emotions and ideas, and I think each medium can have equal artistic value. There's nothing inherently more artistic or intellectual about writing as opposed to any other medium.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe books are inherently superior to any other medium, such as television, music or film.\n","id":"94f60eca-36c5-4391-85f1-d9ba3c9b6ed2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So this topic has been bugging me for ages and I want to say why I think the way I do. First of all I would think I am extremely qualified to talk about this topic since I have lost about 100\u20ac of skins in CSGO by gambling. Also I am not defending loot boxes, I just think labeling them as gambling is not true for most cases. Also I think games that have actual value in their in game items should have to get rid of the system for example CSGO and pupg. So what is gambling? According to common sense it is the potential of winning money for a risk of losing money. Where can you gain money in overwatch by buying loot boxes? The potential of gaining money is primary thing that makes gambling addictive and there's no real way to get hooked to overwatch loot boxes or shadow of war orcs because you aren't gaining anything of value so you don't feel addiction. However in games like CSGO it's completely different because if you get a knife from a loot box you can thing to yourself Fuck yeah I just got a new pair of shoes if I sell the knive. In CSGO you're literally gambling for items that can be exchanged for real money where as overwatch skins can't be used in real life for anything. Another argument I see is that loot boxes prey on people who are easily addicted. This is absolutely the case if there is real money to be won like in real gambling. I got hooked to CSGO for that reason and I can confirm it is preying on addicted people. However as a gambling addict I couldn't care less about overwatch loot boxes because they simply aren't gambling. There's nothing addictive about getting a shiny skin or an emote. So in the end I think that games that have items which can be exchanged for real money are really bad. Also I think that other loot boxes are also evil and very bad form of dlc. However what I was trying to say that loot boxes in most cases can't be compared to really gambling and they are not addicting unless they have real value like CSGO.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Loot boxes in video games should not count as gambling if the items gained from them have no real world value.\n","id":"d99c7dbd-49b9-4be6-be8c-39d1b13391c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion encourages submission to higher power, which in turn makes people susceptible to manipulation. Individuals should have their own critical thoughts about life instead of relying on an organisation. Individuals should be capable of independent thought, but religion discourages that thought.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion organizes and manipulates people in order to make them easier to control.\n","id":"47a3cfc5-622a-4bb7-a360-2428519a6536"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gay marriage, Debate on Same Sex Marriage<|ARGUMENT|>\"The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality,\" from the Pontifical Council for the Family. \"Humanae Vitae\"; \"Love and Responsibility\". John Paul II's \"Theology of the Body\". The Catechism of the Catholic Church.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious cases that marriage is between a man and woman\n","id":"63d6ce0d-860c-424a-8b95-8256aca0190c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments should impose methods of population control.<|ARGUMENT|>There should be an alternative to population control as coercive. One mindset of eugenics viewed the \"positive\" route, more encouragement to reduce reproduction. That seems to be the current situation already since people are already having fewer kids. And they have this message preached at them already.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Softer, indirect and non-coercive policies have more social and political benefits.\n","id":"fba545bd-091c-4b49-bea9-db473eaa491a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently alcohol taxes in the US are not very high. I think given the social costs of drinking, particularly drunk driving and alcoholism, we would be better off raising them to better compensate for those costs, as a pigouvian tax We could lower other taxes to compensate, or not. My view is not about the optimal level of overall taxation. The Numbers I'm going to just use hard liquor numbers because it's easier to get the tax rate per unit of ethanol. Federally, a proof gallon is taxed 13.50 which equates to 27 per gallon of pure ethanol for human consumption. At 0.6 fl oz per standard drink and 128 fl oz per gallon, that's about 12.6 cents per drink. State taxes vary, but on the whole bring it up to maybe 16 to 20 cents per drink. This study ascribes a very high economic cost to alcohol consumption, and particularly to rapid consumption. I don't know if their economic cost numbers are fully accurate, but it seems to support the hypothesis that there is a large cost, and that the cost comes in particular from people who consume a lot of alcohol. So why shouldn't the total tax on alcohol go up to something like 100 per gallon of ethanol?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US Alcohol taxes should be higher.\n","id":"65293f77-8305-4dcc-a156-d78d131fe460"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There have been multiple times in history where people exhibited views, opinions, and beliefs which were later deemed to be mental illnesses. Things such as schizophrenia, gangstalking, multiple personality disorders, etc. are all instances where the precieved individual felt that they were in a situation which was not reality Voices speaking to them, people out to get them . Additionally, disorders and issues are caused by a chemical imbalance. Schizophrenia and depression are both caused this way. We deem these people to have a mental illness, and we treat these people. We don't entertain the notion that they are correct, since that tends to cause more issues than it resolves. Why do we treat people who believe their a different gender differently. Logically we should be treating them for a chemical imbalance and providing them with mental help not encouraging and furthering their potentially self destructive way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transgender individuals have a mental illness. We should be treating and providing help to these people.\n","id":"77ef9ccf-37ad-494b-b4a0-aef4d12f438d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is enlightened despotism superior to democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Information is much more abundant and available. An enlightened despot now will have much more information available to make better decisions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Enlightened Despot can take advantage of modern technology in ways that would be difficult for democracies to match.\n","id":"6ac30edb-333e-4ae7-8927-b53437689930"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Anyone Be Allowed To Be a Parent?<|ARGUMENT|>The power to make these decisions it too easily corrupted or influenced by ideas such as class systems and religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No one has a right to restrict another person's ability to reproduce.\n","id":"85037cab-61eb-4ee8-b938-c736d419360c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a minority that has come across more than a fair share of discrimination, ignorance, and flat out racism. Even the majority probably has at some point too I am just trying to establish my point of view . I believe that affirmative action breeds a different form of subtle racism and provides minorities with an unneeded advantage over others. For example colleges giving preferential treatment to targeted races takes away opportunities for qualified individuals and provides chances for those who may not be qualified simply based off of biology. It's genetics being awarded over merit at that point. As well, accepting affirmative action is essentially admitting that past racial indiscretion and insidious acts example of slavery are something to be forgiven by means of special treatment. As for cultural appropriation, in some degree I can see how it breeds ignorance and forms of racism. Delivering cultural accents or dressing up as religious figures as a butt of a joke is supremely insensitive, however cultural appropriation can and probably most of time propagate culture. Culture is a fluid and ever changing concept that is shaped by contemporary art, music, fashion, politics, and discussion. The idea of trying to preserve some form of traditional customs and culture is admirable however not necessary and ultimately not believable. The key to being able to understand each other and be at peace is to educate, empathize, and strive to share culture and experience with others. Thoughts? tl dr Affirmative action is a different form of racism because it provides unfair advantage to minorities and disadvantages for the rest. Cultural appropriation is at times insensitive, but we can benefit from it for the most part. edit Still reading and responding to your comments Thanks for all the thoughtful insight and I think at this point I need to step back and mull over your responses. Also I'm still at the office so I have to actually work . Please keep up the thoughtful discussion and I promise, I actually am willing to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Affirmative Action is obsolete and Cultural Appropriation is misunderstood.\n","id":"b0657dd3-a720-4431-9a92-90b2ea7a6925"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>Green Party candidates are withdrawing from their marginal seats as part of an informal anti-Conservative alliance. Given that the Green party does not have enough guaranteed seats, such actions will minimize its chances of winning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Various strategies adopted so far by the Green party are likely to result in its loss.\n","id":"040c257d-fa2c-4a50-bd73-feeb48e44fbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Speciesism, like sexism and racism, is thinking that we as human are a superior species which leads us to slave, abuse and kill \"inferior\" beings. Nowadays we have advanced toward a more accepting and tolerant world and therefore we can assume that in the next 10-15 years there will be a prohibition to eat meat much like there is a prohibition to smoke in public places.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no inherent difference between animals and humans; to insist otherwise is speciesism the act of discriminating against a being on the basis of their species.\n","id":"db841ced-9cec-480a-a552-e2ed356ab559"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Parliamentary Systems Enforce Proportional Representation?<|ARGUMENT|>Voters are able to list their preferences within proportional systems. Their votes can be transferred if their first choice is either elected with a surplus of votes over the quota or is eliminated. This decreases the number of \"wasted votes\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Proportional systems give equal weight to all citizens' votes, whereas in winner-takes-all systems there are a larger number of 'wasted votes\n","id":"52e2b3cb-ceef-4979-bf9b-6aa6cd79db7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, let's get a quick definition of Capitalism Capitalism noun an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. Now this is fine and dandy for selling product and so on, but let's look at it this way. A private owner is selling a product here, and a product's value is determined by the supply, and the demand, in a Capitalist system. I think we can agree on this. Now, the supply for healthcare is quite scarce, not only are university costs terrifying, but the requirements for getting qualified as a doctor are even more so, so the supply of doctors in a country will depend on the process. Then comes the demand, everyone, nearly everyone, requires some form of healthcare at some point of their lives, whether it be vaccinations, a sickness, body problems, and while some of the conditions that lead to these procedures can be prevented by being cautious, some are hereditary, and unless you are willing to suggest that people with a hereditary condition should be prevented from breeding by law, this will never be prevented. The demand issue is amplified when you need a life saving procedure, now, the hospital is selling you your own life, and in a capitalist system, there will always be some people who have a higher value than you do, and if a hospital was truly capitalist, focusing on the profit, and considering the low supply they have, they can either give shoddily and quickly done treatments to everyone, or they can only focus on the richer person, completely ignoring anyone not valuable enough to pay them. A system where the rich get to stay alive while the poor die off is a terrifying prospect. And here's the kicker, if the supply is high enough to help every customer , then they have to charge the same prices, otherwise, the richer person will be getting a worse value, and this may have legal repercussions. And this will lead to the poor person either taking out loans to get treatment, or not getting it because they can't afford it, therefore perishing. This doesn't invalidate Capitalism, of course, Capitalism thrives due to competition, the problem is there is no competition in a life or death situation you'll go to the closest hospital you can get to, you can't stand there and compare prices, you have to get treated NOW,and even if you could station yourself to a different hospital because the procedure doesn't have to be immediate, that doesn't stop the hospital you originally went to from charging you just for staying there. this actually happens. Am i saying socialism is any better for healthcare? No. But I won't get to that argument here, since I'm only arguing against capitalism in healthcare here. To sum it up, my argument is that Capitalism doesn't work when people's health and lives are on the line. I can provide a comparison to show how I view this this probably won't be the most accurate, I apologize , imagine the Earth suddenly lost all air, due to some unknown reason. A person, just in time before Oxygen is completely gone from our atmosphere, manages to create a machine that can provide a person with an infinite supply of oxygen, and is now trying to sell it, and in this hypothetical, you get to live long enough to decide to buy it. Will this person charge a fair price for the materials and labor it took to make these machines? or will they charge tons more money just to exploit people while they're grasping for their life? In a perfect world the first option would be their choice, but people CAN be greedy. If I have any flaws in my argument I'm sure I got some please point them out, and I would love to see a new perspective on the topic. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capitalism doesn't work out for healthcare, and I'm not sure what does\n","id":"b2d0f88b-039a-4213-b183-3aea3e4f33e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>CSE is based on medically factual information, which is not a belief system, as it is based on scientific arguments rather than religious ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having children learn CSE in school is not the imposition of a belief.\n","id":"07aadc93-eb88-401b-ad9a-5e66451288d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am referring to the way we identify people by using pronouns. I believe we should refer to people as people and therefore use a pronoun that is devoid of any other characteristic of that person. The gender of a person is a characteristic like there are infinity others Hair color, skin color, sex, ability to play chess, level of education, nationality, , to single out any of these characteristics to use as the representation for a person when referring to them is arbitrary and overvaluates that specific characteristic compared to the other ignored characteristics for no good reason. And I believe gender is no different in this aspect. Additionally, we as a society struggle with identifying what the concept of gender even is. People are confused about gender, it also forces people to make assumptions when addressing other people. And this brings me to my final point, for people struggling with their own gender identity being reminded of this struggle is extremely unhealthy mentally. This for example gets reflected by the over representation of trans people in the suicide rates. So for these reasons Arbitrary, normalization of making assumptions about people, unhealthy for already struggling people I think we should move away from using gender as the defining characteristic when referring to people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We as a society unnecessarily put too much emphasis on a person's gender, and it is unhealthy.\n","id":"a59b51d0-3982-40e1-9cf9-6337b5ce12df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The recent Georgia special election featured endless messaging from Republicans tying Nancy Pelosi to Jon Ossoff which was apparently quite effective. Pelosi has terrible national favorability ratings on high name recognition, and is therefore an excellent foil onto which to levy attacks especially against Democrats in House races. Pelosi is 77 years old and in one of the safest Democratic seats in the country. She can plausibly retire simply due to age, and safe in the knowledge another Democrat will take her seat. Given her connections in the party and caucus, she could even probably arrange a hand picked successor for both her seat and for the leadership of the House Democrats. A successor to her would not have the name recognition poor polling to be used as a bludgeon against House Democrats running in 2018. The reaction of most Americans to seeing an attack linking a local candidate to Steny Hoyer would be who the heck is Steny Hoyer? The only other substantially famous member of the House Democratic caucus, John Lewis, is also much more difficult to attack since he's principally famous for being a civil rights hero who worked closely with Martin Luther King. Pelosi was quite effective in managing her caucus as Speaker. She might be effective as Speaker again, but she is deeply unpopular and running a national election next year on the premise of giving her the Speaker's chair makes it much more likely than otherwise that Paul Ryan would remain Speaker. If Pelosi cares more about her party than her personal power, she should retire at the upcoming election and let new blood replace her in the leadership.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nancy Pelosi should retire from Congress for the benefit of her party.\n","id":"b92bd818-00fc-4f27-b76b-1cb74fa52c6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>It is possible for someone to delete their avatar and create a new one at any time, and in many video games avatars can come back to life over and over again. The psychological impact of decisions by these avatars and harms done to them are therefore definitively less than in the real world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Every individual has a fundamental right to dignity Dehumanising the avatar, which is an extension of the individual, is tantamount to dehumanising the individual, and therefore a violation of their basic rights.\n","id":"4a28837c-a17c-466e-9458-59c7979ff5a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd like to keep this  with a narrow focus just on this issue, and to not get into a discussion of other aspects of the gun control discussion. A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. My view basically comes down to this I can't see any individual or well organized militia successfully preventing the government from taking away their rights. To me, this divides into two categories, 1 inability for you to prevent the government from taking a non physical right tracking you through the internet, attacking you with a drone, charging a tax that is an infringement of your rights, not letting you obtain a marriage license, preventing you from voting and 2 arming yourself with a gun and fight for some physical space. For the first point, there are many, many rights that can be taken away and whether or not you have a gun is irrelevant. Abortion could be outlawed tomorrow. I cannot marry a woman. The government is collecting data about me to a degree that's not known. I have to file income taxes. I will have to pay taxes to one day inherit my parent's money. I cannot build any building I want on my own property. My driver's license can be taken away from me. These are not all examples of rights I feel I deserve or want but they are examples of rights where having a gun cannot help me. Now, for the second point. I simply can't envision a situation where a group of people with guns is able to overpower a police force, the National Guard, a State Militia, or the US Military. So I don't see any situation where people could prevent the government from being in a space and controlling it for a sustainable time period. Please, . I have not been able to think of any counter examples to these arguments. Edit My view has been changed. I think the main problem with my view was I saw this as a plausibility question, not a possibility question. It's not likely that this will happen in the us in my lifetime, but that does not mean it is not possible. This is also the reason I didn't consider comparisons between places like Syria, Iraq, or Vietnam with today's US because the differences are so obvious and the political troubles are on an entirely different level. But that has no bearing on the existence of the phenomenon of small armed groups overthrowing governments. There may be situations that would make it more difficult in the US for this to happen but it hypothetically could. And thanks to everyone who responded<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the US today, you cannot protect your rights from being infringed upon by the government with guns.\n","id":"92cd5d0b-cb96-445e-a0e2-a959c469c7c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My post was running pretty long, so I\u2019m breaking it up my putting the explanations of my various tastes in separate posts\u2026 Edit I should say first that I'm not trying to say that nobody should watch this show, I just don't think it will appeal to my personal tastes. Let me start off with a little positivity. I love the Marvel Studios movies. In fact, I\u2019d go so far as to say I love them so much, that lately I haven\u2019t even been bothering with superhero movies from other studios, because it just seems like they pale in comparison to how well Marvel Studios does it more details Now, to the negativity. I don\u2019t much care for grim n gritty more details I could go on about that for days, and I\u2019m sure there are people who will already have strong reactions to that, but now I\u2019ve got to say something else that will probably be even more sacrilegious to comicbook fans. I really, deeply loathe Frank Miller more details So, when I heard that the Netflix shows were gonna be on the gritty, \u201cstreet level\u201d side of things, I was worried, but I still had a lot of faith in Marvel Studios. Then, when I heard that it was gonna be closely based on a Frank Miller miniseries, and that the producers were huge fans of Miller, my interest diminished significantly. Then, when I saw the damn black costume, it plummeted even lower. One of the big reasons I like comicbooks and superheroes so much is because I find the use of color very aesthetically pleasing. I think colors are fun, I like to look at them. I really hate the modern movement of \u201csuperheroes wear black \u201d I think it\u2019s a big waste of a very rich color palette. But I heard good reviews of it, and I want to believe that Marvel Studios can still make something that will entertain me even with all those factors working against it. I\u2019m also a sucker for continuity, and recognize that it\u2019s likely this will be relevant to other shows I do want to watch in the future. That being the case, I recently thought maybe I\u2019d just start at whichever episode introduces the red costume I don\u2019t even like that one so much, but it\u2019s still better than plain black . I\u2019ve had experiences in the past where I started a show in the middle, with an episode that I knew had something I would like about it, and it hooked me into the show in general. So I Googled to find out which episode the red costume debuted in, and I found out SPOILER ALERT it was the last episode, and maybe even the last few minutes. At this point, I just don\u2019t care any more. I might give it another chance in season 2, when it\u2019ll start with the red costume instead of end with it. But as far as the first season, I think my interest has fallen to basically zero, unless you can give me some reason to feel otherwise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no point in me watching the Daredevil show\n","id":"38d786ed-577e-4097-9f71-5c56640d9c7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious adoption and foster care agencies are an active and substantial part of the overburdened adoption and foster care field of USA. In 2009, agencies affiliated with Catholic Charities completed a total of 3,794 adoptions and Catholic agencies served 34,049 children and youths in the foster care system. Pluralism and Freedom, pg.29<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Government funding of religious organizations can be an efficient way of fulfilling social needs that would otherwise go unaddressed.\n","id":"d066d638-465c-45bb-ba16-4284bf413bfe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Cultural diversity can lead to gradual acceptance over time. Immediate bad reaction to diversity only brings to the forefront bigotry that already exists. Diversity can eventually lead to overcoming the bigotry and developing tolerance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The population of countries are already getting more diverse due to globalization. As multicultural societies become more established, the issues casued due to cultural differences will decrease.\n","id":"2af4eac9-11e6-4e8e-a5f4-38d002f04da6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it OK to publicly approach a stranger for sex?<|ARGUMENT|>The parents are more thorough in their search of a spouse for their, hopefully, soon to be wed child. So the chances of them choosing a person of a bad background, and unfaithful personality are very slim.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's wrong to have sex outside of a marriage, specifically a marriage where the spouse is chosen by the couple's parents, elders in the community, or a reputable authority.\n","id":"08b1d59f-c3e6-4967-83bf-153a72dff2c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sexual liberation has become increasingly popular since at least the 1980's and it is fair to say that modern society specifically American society, but can be applied across the globe is more sexualized than ever before. Sexual liberation may have limited benefits, such as increasing social interaction between groups that otherwise may remain apart, but the detriments outweigh the benefits. Largely, the negative impacts focus on the degradation of the family unit. Since sexual liberation largely began, single motherhood has increased drastically across almost all communities there are other factors but sexual liberation is one . Other negative impact areas include sexual health, safety for women and other groups, and additional stressors on the legal system. As a result, monogamy should be encouraged and the sexual liberation culture should be restricted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The sexual liberation movement that often discourages monogamy is detrimental to society as a whole.\n","id":"3451cf01-5407-4f37-94a9-ca5aa477f1e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think that water and food should be sold for money, even bottled water. Companies like Nestle who are taking water away from the poor and selling it to them are doing something very very wrong. Yes, I do believe that food should be free too, basically meaning that grocery stores will no longer exist, and free food would be handed out. People like the poor have little access to food and water, and would even steal and kill for it, and make it get in the way of education. Thats why they should be free goods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Water AND food should be free and a basic human right\n","id":"025451aa-2c02-4a14-a38a-5c501745bb6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TL DR This policy helps people who made bad decisions and penalizes those who gave up opportunities so they wouldn't be saddled with more debt. x200B I have no problems with debt forgiveness for people working in public service jobs, I'm talking about Elizabeth Warren's plan to cancel all student loan debt for people making under 250k or so a year. By my understanding this is a one off debt cancellation and then moving to make public 2 and 4 year universities free. x200B I'm fine with the wealth tax that will fund it, capital historically makes such high returns that it wouldn't even dent the mega rich fortunes. Just slow their growth. But at 35 I feel this really screws over a lot of people in my age bracket who faced extreme college expenses and whose parents helped them pay for some or all of it. We're also some of the people who got hit hardest by the 2008 recession but after 12 years many of us have only just paid off these loans. x200B Look, I get it, student debt is horrible. I went to an expensive university partly because I was encouraged to by my parents. I had about 20k in loans and my divorced parents each took on a similar loans. I also made sacrifices to pay off my debt and not accrue any more. I would have loved to go to graduate school in the US but financially it made no sense to me and it's very likely my lifetime earnings will be lower as a result. I feel that just cancelling all the debt will lead to endless talking points on the right how it benefited 'undeserving' person X while it didn't help person Y. x200B Government buy back off all debt and stop it from accruing interest? Great. Making state universities free and overall funding them better? Fantastic. I just can't get behind cancelling the debt, and it reeks to me of trying to buy millennial votes. There are much better places that money could be going to. Hell, I also have no medical debt but really wouldn't be opposed to just cancelling all medical debt in the US since by and large that's something people don't have any control over and only have that debt because the American healthcare industry has failed them. x200B I suppose the reason why I want someone to change my view is Warren is my favorite in the Democratic primary at the moment. I like how she has a lot of policy ideas, many of which are great. This one just seems like a dud to me. Anyone have any counterpoints you can throw my way?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Widespread Student Debt Forgiveness Is A Bad Policy\n","id":"ff48006d-ccf4-4a3f-a811-5036eda49a44"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To me, a human's well being and enjoyment always trump an animal's. It's why we can morally justify continuing to eat meat despite rampant abuse of animals and despite no specific human need to continue to eat meat in much of the western world. This is the same thing most of the time, we aren't hunting because we need to, we're hunting because we want to. What this selective outrage over Cecil tells me is that we, as a society, simply don't have any unified logic towards how we are supposed to treat animals and instead attach our moral views of animal treatment to whatever our culture finds fashionable. Walter James Palmer is potentially going to face criminal charges while Tyson and Perdue make an industry out of their treatment of animals. There is little difference. Edit My opinion on this has been changed. Cecil's existence as a national treasure to Zimbabwe is enough to justify selective outrage. Moreover, Cecil's death specifically highlights issues inherent in illegal poaching.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's just a lion and I see no reason to care.\n","id":"ec193f50-4035-478f-a212-072522112986"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public nudity be legal?<|ARGUMENT|>This approach is more sustainable than any other approach to ending suffering since it teaches people that efforts to end suffering do not have to be inherently unpleasant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is possible to both enjoy recreation and help to end suffering simultaneously.\n","id":"3712bda5-7c3a-4460-a89b-1d64c05a4ec1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The subject of Podium girls is quite controversial on cycling subs, good enough to generate all time top and controversial threads and I would like to know what people think about it. My position is simple When the issue is brought to discussion I always end up concluding that the problem is the lack of TV coverage of women's cycling and not the concept of podium girls. Obviously there are some podium girls moments that belong on r cringe like this one or this move of a fan favorite cyclist some years ago but these are extreme examples which do not represent the majority. I really like to watch women's cycling and would really be pleased to see more of it on TV there's like 3 or 4 days of racing a year on Eurosport right now and the fact that women on the sport are more visible on the podium than on the bike is the problem, IMO. I've seen examples on twitter of happy parents talking about little girls thinking ooh I can do that too? when La Course was on TV on the last day of Tour de France. And that is an example that there's a lack of coverage but that's not the issue I want you to discuss . Then there's the semantics, podium girls sound quite worse than podium women which would sound much more reasonable, and I agree with that, let's change the name of it. There's a very recent example of podium men on a Norwegian race, which sounds a fair way to balance the absence of men on the podiums of women's cycling and apparently would be a reason for people to say we're in a fair position. Yet, people think the idea of podium men women is disgusting and distasteful. And that's the part I really don't understand and the reason I came to  maybe because I see podium women since I was a kid? There's the argument of objectifying people, but they are models which are pleased to do their job. Also it's a thing that takes seconds, kisses are a way of congratulate people and how many times have we joked about it and created similar photos with our friends, while having a good time? Some argue that there's embarrassment between podium girls and the riders, and that may be true, but they're not displeased. Slightly out of context this video was spread on the web and people think it's cute while being a much more embarrassing thing at the start. I've seen riders a little more embarrassed when they had to greet politicians. The argument against podium women that I agree with is the fact that most of them don't know about cycling. On a recent event on my country, only 2 out of 8 or 10 I can't recall had good knowledge about the sport according to a TV report which only had the intent of talking a bit about those girls. Young riders or kids could be there on the podium congratulating the riders and meeting their heroes. Yet, we should consider that podium girls usually represent brands, and they're a way of sponsoring a race and that would need to be rethought if we replaced them. Note that I'm talking about cycling, on other sports you can see examples that could be easily labeled as sexism, which do not apply to the regular cycling podium, even though I welcome your arguments if you talk about other sports. And well, if you disagree with me, just don't do this I want to know why you think I'm wrong and I want you to change my view Edit last sentence<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Podium girls are not a problem\n","id":"60eeb0ae-5e7d-4bee-ad21-64aeb1eac464"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>Heterosexuals may be interested in doing so, in order to shame or blackmail an individual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Toilet peeping can happen just as well with gender separated toilets.\n","id":"8fa8483a-6198-4942-af24-567fd2c3b56d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>A 2007 Harvard study others as well found that an increase in guns led to a decrease in crime. There is no reason to believe that the findings would not apply to smaller sections of a community, including school campuses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An increase in guns per capita leads to a decrease in violent crime.\n","id":"fbf86efa-f45e-497e-9e9b-da4db86480b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>enforce term limits on the executive branch of government<|ARGUMENT|>With term limits, a leader will, after he enters his final permitted term of office, not have to face the electorate again, meaning he can do whatever wants, to an extent. This encourages corruption and self-enrichment on the part of leaders in their final term of office when they do not need to face the people to answer for poor management. There is likewise less incentive to follow through on election promises to supporters, since their withdrawing support can have little tangible impact on a lame duck. Furthermore, lame duck leaders can devote time to buddying up to businesses and organizations in order to get appointments to lucrative board seats after they leave office. This has often been the case in Western democracies, where former heads of state and government find themselves being offered highly profitable positions upon their retirement.1 Imposing term limits necessarily increases this sort of behaviour, as leaders look more toward their retirement during their final years of office, rather than to the interests of the people. 1 Wynne, Michael. 2004. \u201cPolitics, Markets, Health and Democracy\u201d. University of Wolongong. Available: improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The incentive for corruption and self-enrichment in office is increased by term limits.\n","id":"0153a0c8-44f1-4de4-a622-20bb45185a51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am shy. Hanging out with friends roommates often elevates my heartbeat and makes my voice crack. I don't have or don't believe I have social anxiety as a disorder , as I am able to interact with people without experiencing attacks and can maintain relationships, doing so is just much more uncomfortable than I believe it is for others. Particularly with people I find attractive. Getting a date sounds hard enough, with the emotional struggle involved in just asking someone out. Almost unthinkable. And the best case scenario is that they say no. A yes brings the real pain. It would be impossible for me to not be visibly and audibly nervous or disturbed for the duration. It would be a very uncomfortable experience. And if despite that, I somehow manage to impress, then my reward is to DO IT AGAIN. This simply sounds unbearable. The solution to this is to get used to interacting with people so that I am no longer so nervous. I posit that this is more trouble than it's worth. The utility I would derive from being less nervous pales in comparison to the pain I would have to endure to achieve that state. I know that this is based on my subjective feelings, and so it would be hard to impossible to convince me that my own subjective perceptions are wrong. I don't know. I kind of would like a reason to try to be better, but my justification for contentedness is too tight atm. TLDR Contention For many people, including myself, there is no end goal in dating, it is a cycle of misery of varying lengths. Trying to change these feelings is more trouble than it's worth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dating often isn't worth it\n","id":"f1c19004-7137-414b-97b1-c7fc6549fd34"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should important elections be voted online using web browsers?<|ARGUMENT|>The general computing devices, laptops and phones, used to vote are not secure and can be hacked.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no method that guarantees that voters have the ability to vote secretly online.\n","id":"dae0f24c-1d13-4954-b3b6-4b0c955c7770"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>that includes trans people. Were I to define gender I would say it is the set of social obligations, expectations, and freedoms that are laid upon someone based on their sex . So a man is an adult human male, which entails lots of freedoms and responsibilities etc, a woman is an adult human female, with different freedoms and responsibilities, etc. But I can't come up with a definition that both informs us both of the original, traditional meanings of the genders as above and includes trans people. So what do they mean? What does it mean to say trans women are real women ? What information does that convey? What realities does it proclaim impossible? What aspects of the universe does it claim are true, which would be false if the statement trans women are women were false? Note that any appeal to a gender identity will probably only serve to confuse me. I, like almost everyone , am cis by default I think gender identity is a rare thing almost exclusively experienced by trans people. Almost all Cis people simply recognize the physical reality of their sex, and the social reality of their connected gender, and there is no internal question involved. I have done unscientific, anecdotal polls of folks and the responses I've received have indicated that a small minority of cis folks experience gender identity. If you know of good polls on the subject, please let me know<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no coherent definition of \"man\" or \"woman\"\n","id":"188f1192-2275-425b-b973-8e94d315be75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>The NFL is a business, the only thing it cares about is making money. It is absolutely within its rights as an employer to discipline players up to and including termination for any reason it wants, but it won't because football players are extremely rare. The NFL can't just fire them and get a new batch of top tier players. If the NFL fires players to appease fans, the game will suffer, and their business will suffer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Standing for the National Anthem is part of the job.\n","id":"f533740e-8e52-4332-8f91-e0054e96083e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>AI Will Not Supplant Humans in Creating Art<|ARGUMENT|>Post-modern, concept, and performance art have blurred the boundaries between artist, work, and audience, so the reputation of the artist is absolutely a factor in the subjective of their works. Therefore, art is judged on technical merits form, technique, subject matter what the art is about, and context what the art means.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Art is often judged by its artist rather than its content.\n","id":"fc52662e-f103-4a9c-8b94-9df904fcde4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Thank you to all who contributed to discussion. I learned two basic things A I like to be logical and aloof but this results in me using insensitive language. B I know much much less about genetics and mutations than I thought I did. While my View could be considered technically true in some ways, it is clear that many aspects of my argument are meaningless and others are wrong. There is no such thing as normal because mutations ARE normal. My V has officially been C'd. This is a sensitive topic and I hope I could receive some enlightenment on the issue. I love that this is a community where questions like this can be asked. I fully support equality and civil rights for all homosexuals. I do not believe that anyone is broken if they are homosexual. I acknowledge that it is not a choice. I do not support trying to cure homosexuality. It's not hurting anyone, why change it? However , isn't it true that the genetic template that governs brain development has schematics for heterosexual female and heterosexual male? It is simply an aberration in the process wherein the male receives the male identity yet incorrectly gets the wrong attraction schematic. Abnormal does NOT equal intolerable. I am full of my own abnormalities, from minor physical deformities to strange thought patterns. Some come from nurture, and some from nature. As long as these do not put myself or others in danger, and do not impact my quality of life, its no one's business. However, I'm not going to claim that it's normal. It's not. It is an aberration from what my genetic material intended to produce. Heck, everyone who is ever born deviates from his or her genetic template. Thousands of variables go into the process. Some deviations are tiny and we just chalk them up to someone being unique, and some are fairly apparent, like Autism or an extreme aversion to heights. Some have no impact on quality of life, some happen to increase it, and some have a negative impact on quality of life. Imagine an individual who had a certain brain chemistry template inherited from his parents, yet in the development process whether in the womb or early childhood his brain chemistry switches the receptors for pain and pleasure. Same thing. As long as he's not hurting anyone, it's fine and society should butt out. However, there's no denying that it's abnormal right? Or imagine someone who has Synesthesia. It does not make their life any less valuable then mine or yours, it's just different. It's still abnormal though. Imagine someone who has the albino genetic defect. It is not normal . Everyone will agree that it is an aberration from the intended genetic makeup. However it hurts no one. Imagine someone whose sexual development and brain chemistry led them to be solely attracted to children under age 7. It isn't due to abuse or a poor childhood, but simply a brain chemistry defect. The key difference here is that this individual is hurting people if he chooses to act on his desires. However, even if he doesn't act on his desires, everyone will still agree that his condition is an abnormality. This is a sensitive issue, so bear with me for a moment. A homosexual does not hurt anyone with his choices or sexuality. It is consenting adults. Therefore, society is becoming more tolerable and also moving towards labeling it normal . A pedophile, however, is not tolerated by society, because his wishes, if they were to be actualized, would hurt children. I posit that a pedophile who does not act on his desires is just as harmless to society as a homosexual or a heterosexual. Therefore, by virtue of the same reasoning, this pedophile who cannot control how his brain chemistry formed can be tolerated by society, because he causes no danger to anyone. If you agree that a homosexual does not hurt anyone by being the way he is, then you must also agree that the pedophile who doesn't act on it also hurts no one. My point is this even if you agree with all of that, you will still undeniably assert that the pedophile is not normal . This is unquestionable. It is obvious to everyone that the pedophile deviates from the genetic template in an unproductive way that is clearly not a product of adaptation or evolution, but a brain defect. So, isn't the homosexual abnormal by the same token? To get off track a bit, I don't understand the people who argue that Autism is normal . These individuals should be accepted and loved, but how does anyone believe that it's just different and special ? No. It's abnormal. It's a defect. They can absolutely lead productive and fulfilling lives, but it's still not what their genetic material had intended to produce. This depends on whether you ascribe to subjective normality or objective normality. However, I do not agree that normality is simply whatever society or culture defines it as. I assert that normality is defined by our genetic template, which can change organically through adaptation. By definition, brain chemistry defects aren't included in that definition. Again, harmless brain defects should be embraced. One of the great things about a high level society and culture is the ability to redefine our own society and what we tolerate, and change what we consider beneficial to be included. This can and should include those with harmless brain chemistry deviations. There is value in tolerance and acceptance, but shouldn't we also admit that it isn't exactly the way they were meant to be ? Now that I've rambled maybe there isn't any real purpose to debating this. Maybe it just gives the extremists ammo for no reason. I'm not sure anymore. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that homosexuality is technically an abnormality or aberration from normal brain development and human sexuality.\n","id":"119ab7b8-2d94-4cb3-b6d6-7b491489611c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The Media Be Forced To Report More Positive News?<|ARGUMENT|>It is part of the daily job of journalists and editors to present their readers with a more balanced view of the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most positive news stories act as a form of public relations, which is not the function of journalism.\n","id":"499a8fc9-83a5-43b2-acb4-4b1e2005b79c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Even this is problematic language, as people are innocent until proven guilty, and there must always be a burden of proof for this. A better phrase would have been \"All claims should be taken seriously and treated\/investigated fairly and equally\", but this language was rejected by the #metoo movement. #Metoo presumes men, specifically are guilty as long as there is an allegation regardless of proof and acts accordingly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While this may be the goal for many, some few feminists have stated it does not in fact apply to men, as they are the main perpetrators. Examples are shown in the language used: \"Believe all women rather than \"Believe all victims\".\n","id":"e9ed5cf9-f6bc-4f91-8a28-9e584a26d5c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While it may seem unfair to have automated systems buy all the tickets for popular public events before fans can purchase them individually these bots are actually doing both artists and fans a great service. The core problem is that tickets are often priced far too low which gives an inaccurate view of demand. The scalper bots allow artists to understand what the true earning potential is of their performances and allows them to either schedule far more events to satisfy that demand which will lower average individual prices or charge far higher prices on tickets to begin with. Artists win either way since this improved pricing information will allow them to earn more. The more income potential artists have the more incentive they have to produce even more content and the greater the incentive for more artists to tap into that market demand. In the end, fans will win by the greater market demand pricing transparency that scalping bots generate. It is just taking a while for the effects of automated scalping to work it's way through the system. Eventually artists will adjust their event pricing and quantity of events sufficiently to balance the demand of the market and render scalping less cost effective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"event ticket scalper bots are doing a great service to both artists and fans by correcting market pricing defects\n","id":"80bdba3c-5964-4c52-a403-1474360e984b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Yang supports Medicare for All and differentiates his proposal with complementing policies to reduce the costs of prescription drugs and medical services to ensure the system's financial sustainability positions of all Dem candidates by Axios and Washington Post<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Andrew Yang has a unique policy platform and wants to implement a number of changes that will provide large benefits to the American people.\n","id":"8a477fc5-e2ca-4b7b-b398-bf6fbdfcb332"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A couple of reasons for thinking we should have a corporate death penalty. My Reason It would scare the shit out of decision makers in corporations to do something would deliberately try to defraud consumers or even worst commit acts of high treason in search for profits. Implementation Now I understand there would be some fallout if the corporation large it will have many employees that would be affected. Here is how we deal with that. Step 1 There business certificate is obliterated. Step 2 All the assets and employees of the former corporation, would be nationalized and have 120 day period to find other work or stay there is a reason why I'm saying that . Step 3 All decision makers can't start a business for 10 years. disbarment for business Crimes of high treason decision makers will be jailed. Step 4 The assets will be broken up evenly between competent business people. These people will be made up of a board of consumers the were affected by the institution Politicians and academics. EDIT Jesus there were some great responses This really came from a place of there being consequences for people's actions. I just remember vividly the 2008 2009 crash, and remembering NO ONE facing any consequences I didn't think about the verberating effects on smaller investors, the cost to the taxpayers, to acquire said corporation. There must be a more nuanced way to get people to do the right thing. Thanks, Guys<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the United States Should Have A Corporate Death Penalty\n","id":"549ea80a-647c-4420-a707-eaeeb00dee42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Universal suffrage everyone in the country can vote. Every vote has the same weight. Socialism political system in which part of the wealth is reallocated to other people. debatable definition but not the important point I consider people tend not to refuse money when it is given to them. Example let's consider 1 man who has 200 000 , and 10 poor men. One politician propose to reallocate 100 000 of the first man to provide 10 000 for each of the 10 poor man. 10 men will vote for him, 1 will vote agaisnt him. He will be eleceted. General case Poorest 60 of the population will vote for a politician who proposes to split the incomes of the richest 40 . It seems to imply that universal suffrage entails socialism. Conclusion This process can be slow because of constitutional constrain or possible public discontent. However I think the tendency exist and necessarily shows in the long run. Please . Edit Thanks to u hq3473 for clarifying the subject. This view is not about socialism. Please read the title as Universal suffrage necessarily entails tax increase<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Universal suffrage necessarily entails socialism.\n","id":"a92d62c8-fbbe-4a20-867a-ef63a278eee4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In Canada we are very culturally diverse, and it has been said we are a mosaic instead of what our neighbours to the south are considered a melting pot. So in this we traditionally accept other cultures, and try not to make them into Canadian such as practicing 'our' ways. However, there are many immigrants in my neighbour hood who refuse to learn one of the two national languages English and French and choose to only speak their national language. My uncles girlfriend's parents have been living in Canada for over 30 years and still are unable to speak english fluently and if they want to participate in a conversation need to translated by their daughter. Also hope I don't have to say this but I thought I'd say it just to be safe. I am not against immigration.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe immigrants should have to learn the national language of the country they immigrate to within a certain amount of time.\n","id":"4a7016dc-923d-48d3-80c7-7385465f3ddb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>North Korea should not give up its nuclear weapons for its national security.<|ARGUMENT|>North Korea can use its nuclear weapons and negotiate for materials including food and energy sources from the international community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having nuclear weapons can be a good diplomatic tool for North Korea to make bargains with powerful countries.\n","id":"672372f5-f2cf-48da-92a9-5e1d73dd26a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is really controversial and I'm willing to hear people out but to me it just seems more ethical and sustainable? I don't expect it to happen overnight, we can be healthy without animal products, it's not expensive if you eat whole foods, I know people ate meat in the past but they also did a lot of other things we dont do anymore. I never really thought about it and thought vegans were annoying until I watched a few documentaries like conspiracy and stuff. I don't understand why they get so much hate for trying to help heal the planet and not be mean to animals. Also from what I know the meat industry is terrible for the current climate change crisis. I know that changing eating habits is difficult and people don't really know how to go about it, but veggies, grains, legumes etc are all super cheap and healthy. Anyways, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everyone should eventually become vegan\n","id":"b49b0633-74fc-44ee-93f7-fbb6a7398ea3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Over the course of history the papacy has held tremendous political power in various forms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion cultivates political power which can then be used to exert control.\n","id":"b1012fce-2c2e-4a5e-9455-a774ed21a1bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Whitewashing In Hollywood: Should It Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Banning someone from playing a role which he or she, in real life, does not represent would lead to only gay actors portraying gay characters, and only murderers portraying murderers. Actors create a persona and pretend. An actor who makes the viewer forget who he really is, is the best for the role.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Acting, by its very nature, often requires actors to pretend to have different character traits, or to pretend to belong to a different social class. Playing a character that belongs to a different race is analogous to this. It isn't offensive.\n","id":"0b14ee87-aac4-4f84-90c2-fb941b776c40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>Only a third of Americans have ever heard of USAid, their country's own organization for international development. Even among college graduates this number increases to only 54% Milner\/Tingley, p. 392<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voters are largely uninformed or misinformed about the realities of foreign aid.\n","id":"b1db9666-c9d2-47d6-8f45-ee511319c3ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Organ Donation be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Donated organs need to match a series of criteria in order to be viable for transplant. More organs available does not mean they will fit the criteria to be of most use.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Finding compatible organs is difficult and most organs aren't transplanted not due to lack of consent, but due to lack of compatibility.\n","id":"1faaa55a-b46f-44c4-8e1d-d9bd5070a15f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Veal<|ARGUMENT|>Cows are intelligent creatures and there is no way they should be murdered for human consumption. Would you want to die? No. So why kill others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone killed a human at any age it would be murder, so why should it be any different with cows.\n","id":"6b24f29e-e909-4cac-9407-a88b9545685b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>A significant share of the population doesn't care a bit about politics or policy and is not willing to even spend time to make a well-grounded decision<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The average citizen, unlike a professional politician, is not able to make well-grounded decisions about complex political subject matters.\n","id":"249558ba-5bd3-406c-9b33-1b03ba40eccf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2010, the Turkish government supported the Armenians holding Mass at an old Armenian church in Istanbul.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey is investing in the cultural and religious heritage of Armenians.\n","id":"21f8487b-e439-4b69-b9f9-9fb21c8d4600"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm an athiest, I respect other people's beliefs and this is just my opinion. I feel like everyone is a natural athiest, there are so many people that I've met and who I know, that have no clue what the bible says or is about. I think everyone should have the right to teach their children anything, but in my opinion I think religion should be a choice people make on their own. You shouldn't tell kids that if they don't obey they will go to hell. My mom used to scare the shit out of me, telling me that demons are going to get me or I'll burn in hell if I don't believe. A child should not have to worry about these kinds of things, kids should be worried about having a fun childhood and being nice to others. Religion is a complex thing, it's not just something you can adopt with little to no knowledge about. It bothers me that some religious people judge others so harshly yet they don't know anything about their own god, they just blindly follow what they were taught. I would never insult anyone who believes in god and this is just my opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think everyone is born athiest,\n","id":"21b84d20-0a06-48c5-9b4d-f3e69d69ebdf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>Their countries of origin have a responsibility to take these fighters back and help them become nonviolent productive members of society. No one else is responsible for their future, except their home countries and themselves. And capable ISIS fighters have overcome many obstacles and can become successful in almost any environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be a chance for repentance, rehabilitation and reintegration for those who made the mistake of joining ISIS and regretted it.\n","id":"e9ac67fa-5426-4cd1-a35a-0250f4c735eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the past few years, I've grown to doubt and consider literally everything that I'm ever told, witness, etc. Of course, I understand this is healthy to a degree, but I'm beginning to feel insane. Example 1 A major building collapses and is said to be incorrectly designed, but how could you know that it wasn't one, very stressed weld that didn't tie in fully by 1mm, or that it was done intentionally to cause distress in the community society, or that the gravity of the Earth in the particular spot hadn't increased drastically for a split second due to an extensive chain of events from planets moving across the universe that had been put in motion 1 billion years ago? Example 2 Experts claim that isn't feasible for a creature like the Megalodon or anything larger to exist in the ocean now, but how could they truly know that these creatures haven't evolved to eat something else that we haven't discovered, or that something colossal isn't at the bottom in an unimaginably long hibernation period until is resumes activity? Example 3 The Holy Bible is said to be the true, whole, perfected Christian bible, but how can I know that it wasn't written and prepared by aliens in only the last 300 years when mankind was placed on Earth, or that it wasn't altered by the government or powers that be to help shepherd the citizens? Example 4 Doctor diagnoses you with AIDS, and says you got it from a sexual partner, but how do you know that you didn't miss one speckle of urine when wiping the toilet seat and contracted it then, or how do you know that you didn't scratch your leg after you had grazed a railing with AIDS infected blood on it and the bit your fingernails and a fractional amount entered your system? I know I sound crazy, but I just can't help I. I don't believe that anyone knows anything truly, only that they have a trust faith belief.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are too many variables in the universe, short and long-term, to know anything with 100% certainty.\n","id":"78f33d96-a08b-4292-b9cc-a5510ff401fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Over the past 20 years it has become increasingly more popular for employers to employ 20 part time employees where traditionally they would have employed 10 full time employees. The single largest reason for this is because in a lot of places they are not required to provide employee benefits for part time employees. Part time employment should exist for the people who choose, for whatever reason, to work part time, but employers should not be allowed to game the system by shorting their employee's benefits pay by hiring only part time people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Part time employment should be at the discretion of the employee, not the employer\n","id":"15087f29-b347-4d12-9c8a-fb48396e9eee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Background about me I use my phone mainly for social media Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Also for Snapchat, texting, Reddit, and the occasional social game like Draw Something or Words with Friends . Something I can play with others. I don't care at all about Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Whale Trail, or whatever people play now. Android 4.2 is beautiful. I like the fact that you can customize it so much. The widgets on the home screen, as well as the lock screen are vastly superior to iOS in my opinion. I like that there are so many different browsers on Android. I find Safari on my mom's iPad3 slow and cumbersome, but the Opera browser on my Nexus7 and even on my almost two year old Motorola Photon seem much faster. DISCLAIMER I have not used Siri extensively since the 4s came out so I might not be the best judge of it's features. Google Now will predict things for you. It seems like Siri but it actually shows you visual explanations of what I asked. Example If I ask it, Who was Issac Newton? It will give me information about him, but it will show me a small bio of his date of birth, achievements, and a picture of him. The Keyboard. This goes more with hardware than software, but I have fat fingers and slim phones make it difficult to type on accurately or quickly. Also, my hands sweat very badly so a bigger phone is almost necessary so the entire screen doesn't just freak out and think I am touching it because the salt water is accepting the charge. In Android you can put all your apps in the app drawer and only have the ones you want on the home screen. With iOS you have to have all your apps in the various windows and there is no way to switch from one window to another very quickly, while in Android there are custom skins that let you pick whichever screen you want to go to without having to scroll through all your apps. If Android I can set my homescreens to work however I want. If I want my homescreen to have 3 other screens on either side then so be it. But in iOS my homescreen is the farthest left screen and all my apps must preside to the right of that main screen. I don't think iPhones can have interactive moving wallpapers, and if they can then this point is void. But on Android having a cool wallpaper that passively moves or reacts to your hand movements looks really aesthetically pleasing. As a developer, I like that I can program for Android on any computer, and learning the language is free. On iOS I have to pay for a developers account and own a mac to use the IDE. Flash. EDIT More points. I can play as many GBA games as I want on my phone using an emulator, and download the ROMs straight from the internet to my phone without having to use a computer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that Android 4.2 is better than iOS7.\n","id":"2b3442cf-8795-4b23-9223-b3dc3a237e15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I'm a 19 year old at university, I have a healthy social life with a good amount of friends who I see on a regular basis. I spend plenty of time by myself too, and enjoy it. I've been single for about a year now and honestly barely noticed how fast the time's gone. I've had issues with pretty intense depression a couple of suicide attempts , loneliness, anxiety, and extreme distrust of other people. I mean, I was afraid of being in view of anyone walking past my room, even though I knew they couldn't see through those curtains from the outside, I was too afraid to risk it. I was absolutely terrified of people being stuck in bed for 9 weeks following an accident that suddenly leaves you disabled can bring on some pretty damn strong agoraphobia . So those things are factors in why I have a large distrust in people nowadays. Now another thing is this every relationship my parents have ever been in has either failed or was a hilarious excuse for an adult relationship. My dad is a notorious womaniser, cold, manipulative etc. and as such I refrain from any contact with him. My mum, however, has just managed to have bad luck with partners that are completely incompatible with her. As such, my view of relationships is extremely biased toward the negative, and I believe that it's not worth the time because you'll just wind up hating each other or modifying yourselves to tolerate it and or having to Stockholm Syndrome yourself into believing you're happy with this person. Anyway, now that backstory's out the way sorry for the long boring wall of text, but I felt that it needed an adequate background so you guys can get an idea of where I'm coming from , time for the view. I believe that there is no level of relationship you can have with a person where you will actually be happy with them for a long time, eventually you will wind up hating them, or they will hate you, you two will get bored, whatever it may be. There is no way a relationship between two people can last and the people in that relationship actually remain happy and content with the relationship and each other. Please help me change this view, I may enjoy being by myself but I don't really want to be alone all my life because I'm too afraid of someone screwing me over, breaking my heart, or me breaking their heart because I make a mistake or just get tired of the relationship etc. Note My dad may be a womaniser, but that disgusts me, I would never cheat on someone or try to manipulate someone into thinking I cared about them purely so I could have sex with them. Edit Thanks everyone for your comments and advice, I worded lots of this post very poorly so that led to some confusion as to what I meant, for which I am sorry. However, I have learnt what sort of direction I need to head in to better solve this issue. Thanks again to all of you, I'm young and naive but I appreciate that everyone actually offered helpful opinions and comments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Getting into a relationship isn't worth it\n","id":"dafddb72-698e-4bbf-a2df-492b3d8e562d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the NHS be privatised?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2018 the Aflac\u2019s annual employee findings survey showed that 60% of employees prefer to take a job with lower pay but better benefits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The trend of providing employment benefits, such as healthcare insurance, is increasing in the US.\n","id":"52c540f9-009a-4876-998e-ad78651c64ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should qualify for Asylum?<|ARGUMENT|>According to data from the World Health Organization one in five people living in areas beset by conflict have mental health conditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People in war zones are traumatized and\/or injured and thus need help.\n","id":"28d1cccf-facc-4fa6-90ff-b4651e623dc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Payday loans are a quick and easy alternative for people who are in a hard situation. They work by you writing a check, which is dated for a day or two after your next paycheck, for the amount of money you want plus a fee and then giving it to a payday lender. Then when that day comes they cash your check. How is this bad for people in poverty or for anyone who needs money quickly? I have seen people opinions saying that these loans are bad and charge an outrageous interest rate, but I haven't seen hard data saying these loans are bad for people. I would like to see some real data which shows my view is wrong. Edit I have seen the errors of my ways. Thank you all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Payday loans are a GOOD idea for people who need money quickly, people who don't need, or can get a traditional loan.\n","id":"357a2a9b-8184-457e-aabb-57d873d782ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Racist policing means that racial minorities often experience more defacto surveillance from law enforcement than their white peers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marginalised groups frequently have their privacy impinged on by the State.\n","id":"6e2a1747-cc70-4819-8ad7-6a1594fe6bb7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whenever a controversial in the case of net neutrality, straight up against popular opinion vote goes through, people always bring up the amount of money that various politicians took from companies that support said controversial legislation. People often make graphics to visually depict this, but these graphics often list the highest paid off politicians first and the lowest paid politicians last. Again, I\u2019d like to clarify that I think if you sell your vote no matter the party or topic you are a garbage politician and should be voted out. However, when it comes to outing politicians for selling out, I think that we should be more concerned about politicians that are willing to take chump change to sell their constituents under the table. As a human being I can understand compromising on my values for a big payday, I would like to say that I have enough integrity that I wouldn\u2019t do such a thing, but if someone was offering me big money I truly don\u2019t know what my reaction would be. Some politicians are getting paid upwards of a million dollars for their vote whereas others are willing to take amounts as low as 10,000 I think I\u2019ve seen even less , which is literally 1 100th of what their colleagues may take for the same vote. While I wish that our government couldn\u2019t simply be bought, that\u2019s just unrealistic with current campaign financing laws. But I feel especially bad for people who\u2019s representatives sell them out for pennies on the dollar.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don\u2019t respect any politicians that basically sells their vote, but at least get a good price for it\n","id":"0c51a302-114e-47e4-90eb-ae90d4c7c6f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Meat is murder, sure, but all animals kill themselves, so worrying about us killing them never sounded to me like that noble of a thing, the vegans can't save the animals from killing each other, so, so useless is veganism. The vegans can't prevent animals from killing themselves, without breaking the ecosystem and causing overpopulation, so useless is veganism then. Meat is murder, but animals die anyway from old age, so that is why veganism is useless, the animals will keep dying and the vegans won't save them. Also, meat is murder, but so is dying by a stampede You let them animals proliferate like a plague in the wilds, soon enough they'll start invading the cities and many will have to be killed by the city inhabitants, that is why pure veganism is a fantasy land, it is not the solution to anything.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Meat is murder, but all animals kill themselves, and the vegans do nothing to prevent that, that is why veganism is useless.\n","id":"817bd8cf-37f0-4494-a48a-c74d13279917"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this is supposed to be an old wive's tale. The real reason that veins appear blue is for the following reason Long wavelength red light and short wavelength blue light both enter the skin. Blue light does not penetrate as deeply, and so it is reflected back right away. Red light penetrates deeper. It is reflected by your other tissues mixing with the blue light you see, giving a generally white appearance to your skin, barring any melanin . But it is absorbed by the blood in your translucent veins. So in an area of your skin with a vein underneath, you only see the blue light that was reflected back early on, and the veins appear blue. This is the traditional alternative explanation for why veins appear blue even though blood isn't blue except it relies on the fact that the blood absorbs all nearly all of the red light Red objects do not absorb red light. So the blood is not red. It's either black, blue, or some other non red color it also can't be deep red because then veins would look purple . People also give the following opposite explanation red light is scattered early on by the skin. This means that all areas of the skin will either be red or red other colors. Then the blue light goes deeper and reflects back off the veins. This doesn't make sense because red light reflects off veins, not blue try it with a red and blue flashlight and even if it were true it would make skin appear red and veins appear purple, because the skin would be reflecting the red light early on and, where veins were present, blue light would be added to this. I don't know why blood that isn't in the body but is deoxygenated appears dark red. Maybe enough oxygen is getting into it, or some other change is occuring. Or maybe it's the combination of blood the vein wall that causes the reflection of blue light.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blood is blue or green when it's in your veins.\n","id":"ec225155-f19c-43b4-9a07-563a1abd5fb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My idea is simple if prosecutors law enforcement officers knowingly help convict an innocent person of a crime, these same prosecutors law enforcement officers should serve the prison sentence intended for that crime. For example, if a prosecutor withholds evidence showing that a defendant is not guilty of capital murder but willingly fails to present this evidence to the court, that prosecutor should serve life without parole. There are far too many cases of prosecutorial misconduct that lead to innocent men most often young black men here in the USA losing decades of their lives to an incompetent and corrupt justice system. Why should a corrupt public official enjoy freedom if their actions result in a completely innocent person losing their liberty? Update After reading through comments, I concede that this idea has flaws. I think perhaps having the corrupt prosecutor in question face a charge of kidnapping considering an innocent person was deprived of their liberty without just cause , perjury, or perverting the course of justice would be a better approach. The sentence should still be 25 years to life. Either way, I don't agree that a public official should go free if their misconduct led to an innocent person serving decades behind bars. Also, don't think that prosecutorial misconduct is a rare occurrence it is far, far more commonplace than people would like to believe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prosecutors\/law enforcement involved in miscarriages of justice should be imprisoned\n","id":"7c5505c3-95c4-4a38-a9dc-d7e39dd86e5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey, I have always held this view that the United States is a very irreligious country despite what one hears in the media, or learn in American public schools including public universities . This view of mine stems from the exploration of my professed faith, Christianity, from being a mere Southern Baptist to a Catholic, and now possibly leaning towards Orthodoxy. With my understanding of statistics as an undergraduate at a local public university, I have doubted a PEW Religious survey a couple of years ago that about seventy percent of Americans are Christians. This being accompanied by my growing understanding of American history in that I have become increasingly convinced especially since the election of Donald Trump that the United States is a cursed country. From its racial caste system that refuses to truly die off despite a globalizing economy to its ironies within its culture, and public policy on a state to federal level. A Christian is supposed to believe in its entirety the Old, and New Testaments of the Bible which is really a sort of re branding of what Rabbinical Jews believe, or what Messianic Jews believe with respect to the New Testament. This includes abiding by the Law of Moses to some extent which most Christians do not even ACKNOWLEDGE. This includes observing PASSOVER which mostly all Christians DO NOT CELEBRATE despite their own Messiah Jesus Christ being what today we call Jews. As I recall, Jesus was also resurrected on Passover the day itself, and was crucified during Passover Week. If Americans are Christians then why don't we massively celebrate this within our culture? Yes, there is separation of Church and State, but culture is a different beast. There are a lot of aspects of the New Testament that are being completely corrupted, and violated by most Americans including the glorification of money, or mammoth. And, with the election of Donald Trump, a man who really cares about himself when it comes down to it accompanied with the rise of the so called, religious right. I need someone to change my view, and I'll be closely listening.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America Is The Most Irreligious\/Atheist Country in the World\n","id":"777c3ce5-2463-4ffb-baf0-0f351dea46c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>In Europe, it was found that taxing the wealthy in the way suggested by American Democratic nominee Elizabeth Warren resulted in tax evasion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some Democrats, such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, want to introduce a wealth tax\n","id":"8282810f-e9eb-40bb-abb3-29b8e4d04d16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The whole Superman's disguise is so dumb thing has been a meme forever and I honestly don't get it. It's not THAT weird that this Clark Kent guy might look a bit like the alien supergod people see on the news. Canonically, Supes changes his appearance quite drastically when he goes incognito, he doesn't just put on glasses as the critics would have you believe. He slouches, alters his voice, and becomes a nebbish loser akin to Cyril Figgis on Archer. But frankly, even if he didn't do all that, the Clark Kent disguise is still perfectly effective. Plenty of people look like other people. I've been told I look like Benedict Cumberbatch, but I don't get mobbed by fangirls every time I walk down the street. I'd imagine Kent had more than a few of these conversations Man, Clark, you look just like that Superman guy. Yeah, I get that a lot. Bam. Disguise maintained. Nobody mentions it ever again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Clark Kent is a perfectly adequate disguise for Superman\n","id":"31deed8f-938e-4490-ae09-dd981f04cc40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Much time is spent praying. Though many say their prayers are answered, evidence of a causal link between their prayers and the outcome that occurred is lacking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most religions use the you-have-nothing-to-lose-by-believing argument. Of course you do: There's your time, your independence, your objectivity, and your cash.\n","id":"747ad083-4ea3-4ac2-9682-ba575e1306cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>People will be able to do longer studies, or retake studies at some point in their life, knowing they will have the resources to live during that time. The possibility of taking studies anytime can encourage some to acquire skills in fields with huge demand.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With their basic needs covered by a UBI, many people are able to afford to continue with their higher education.\n","id":"f982542b-cceb-476f-954b-403d2c02d956"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Last evening, my boyfriend and I were talking about investing in a musical Instrument. He'd like a guitar and I would like a keyboard or piano. My argument being, it would be easiest to learn a piano before a guitar. I said this due to light musical training. His argument was irritating imo. He would prefer a guitar because he doesn't care about learning the notes or reading music. We left the conversation at that him saying, and I quote, if you don't want a guitar, you don't have to pay for it. I stand by my opinion that a piano is a much better investment, if you'd like to learn any other instruments<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cmv Guitar Vs Piano\n","id":"b6b5519d-d653-48fd-a180-969033cbd33b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This week I keep hearing a left leaning media try and contrast Trump an Bush, and suddenly showing respect for Bush. When bush was running against Clinton the press had nothing good to say about Bush. War on women, raised taxes to go along with Democrats, but then used as a weapon against Republicans and the typical Republicans don't care. x200B It was elections, so fine, I guess, but then you can't come back and say how great of a President he was. Either they were lying tying to keep him from being elected, or they are lying now to try and look compassionate. Either way, there was dishonesty happening and they should be called on it. x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democrats \/ Media currently comparing Trump and Bush are not being honest.\n","id":"8289c896-1064-43f3-81e5-cd5a72f0dd9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Earmarks<|ARGUMENT|>Steve Ellis of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense - \"There's no way the Appropriations Committee is able to vet the thousands of earmarks worth billions of dollars.\"2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Earmarks cannot be fully examined during short period of exposure\n","id":"c81064de-a696-4044-b623-e309f60f8fad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>The first section of Robert Maydole's ontological argument from the beginning to the 23rd step, proves rigorously that supremity is not self-contradictory, so it must be possible. This is all that's necessary for the rest of the argument to work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the logical sense anything which cannot be proved to be logically contradictory is \"possible.\" It is known that God is not logically contradictory.\n","id":"0ea71af8-4307-40ca-9cd7-b4c7e9c934de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is no point in prohibiting to drink alchoholic beverages in public places, if drunk people are still allowed to be there. We are trying to eliminate the cause, but not taking care of its effect. You have to be drunk at home, or in a designated place, otherwise you should be fined and incarcerated for a short period. This bears more or less similar risk as driving drunk, because the chances you get into some trouble are high as you no longer control youself. For a drunk person, it is easy to initiate some conflict and eventually end up with a scuffle, or vandalise some property, or mess up everything with vomit etc. This is all disgusting. Every night, these winos crawl out from their holes and wander like zombies, picking on strangers either being ultra friendly or ultra brutal. They irritate others, in the same way as smoking next to a non smoker. But fortunately it is prohibited to smoke inside the building. Why can't we also make people get pissed somewhere in an isolated place? Pubs and restaurants may charge special fee from their guests having too much drink for taking care of them if they get wasted. It is not fair just kicking out half alive half dead creatures for further marching in the streets of a big city.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since it is illegal to drink in public places, it should be also illegal to be drunk or loaded in public places.\n","id":"350cc702-d54d-48ae-a63f-24392b281de0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are motivational speakers frauds?<|ARGUMENT|>Oprah inspired thousands with her keynote speech at USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many accounts of motivational keynote speakers at university commencement ceremonies.\n","id":"8bab0bd3-cbd3-432a-8bcd-41b406f0948d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Issues related to pregnancy or children are not considered women's business but rather the domain of the public, as is evidenced by government interference in abortion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women still cannot enjoy full control of their own bodies and personal functions without interference from the government.\n","id":"e9b5d884-dcd2-43d7-9332-b488d117e0a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've done a lot of studying on the subject of land value taxation LVT and it strikes me as having two powerful arguments for it one economic and one philosophic. I. Analyzing it economically, land value taxes do not distort the market for land, because the supply of land is static for all intents and purposes. Since structures are not taxed under an LVT, it encourages the most economic use of the land and discourages those who would keep land out of productive use. When implemented in cities, the LVT acts to stop sprawl and incentives vertical development. II. I believe in Locke's theory of property that the fruits of the Earth are held in common by all mankind until an individual mixes his labor with it and creates private property. The LVT can be seen as analogous to a tenant paying rent to the landlord. With the landlord being the community and the tenant being the property owner. For landlords only charge for the space, not what goes inside within reason. When combined, I believe there is a strong case that LVT is superior to traditional real estate taxes. However, I will consider my mind changed should someone present a compelling argument that the LVT isn't fair or wouldn't be practical to implement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Land Value Taxes are both practical and philosophically fair.\n","id":"9aa02301-9162-4071-a3f5-b69a6d17169b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is profanity the refuge of the inarticulate?<|ARGUMENT|>The use of profanity in an argument can escalate the situation because the opponent focuses on the curse, rather than the point being made.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Profanity makes it hard to listen and understand the speaker's point.\n","id":"a32db2e1-d447-43c3-8371-daec94338121"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>Roads can be built using private donations and by charging road users each time they make use of a road.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taxes and a welfare state are not needed to build roads or provide health care.\n","id":"ed768e0e-475a-47bf-988d-32d00628a3f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I had a number of friends with delivery horror stories. Some of them started well, but all of sudden something went wrong. In one case the mother needed blood transfusion, in another the baby needed to be intubated. In both cases, the additional time that would take to transfer them to the hospital could mean the difference between life and death. This is why I am not surprised by research results, like the one cited in the link below saying that the risks of death for the infant are 2.4 times higher. I have seen other research results that point to even more drastic differences. I understand that being in a hospital sucks. My wife had very complicated deliveries and for our first child we ended up spending months at a NICU. So we know well how much it sucks to be in a hospital environment. That said, I really do not think that being in the comfort of your own home trumps, in any way, the increased risks incurred in delivering a baby at home, as opposed to at a hospital.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Planning to have a home birth is selfish, as it increases the risk of death for the baby. Yet, the baby has no saying in this matter.\n","id":"f4b49a99-d1ec-48c2-9f57-6f5df3957fd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In a recent study of the ESA, the conclusion has come that 50 of \u2018gamers\u2019 are female. Therefore, the video game industry must change its precedent of including overly sexualized and objectified women, as well as its attitude of having damsels in distress, by making their games more inclusive and female friendly. They should also write more female characters as well as more female protagonists with independent agendas. AAA games do have enough room, as a medium, to include female protagonists. I hold this view because I love video games and I want newcomers to enjoy video games too, without fear of harassment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video Games should be more inclusive for the female demographic.\n","id":"80a9b4a1-a6d1-49f9-a0a5-4b318d18d1ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should pet stores only sell dogs and cats from shelters?<|ARGUMENT|>Pet stores often use antibiotics to mask the signs of the diseases that puppies are affected by as a result of their time in breeding mills. This makes it harder to identify mills with questionable conditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regulating breeding facilities alone will not be an adequate measure. Pet stores often act as a front for these facilities, making it harder to implement reforms targeting them.\n","id":"e4c74bad-4740-4a4e-9854-3ff90d405d03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Whitewashing In Hollywood: Should It Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>It would be hypocritical to ban white actors from playing traditionally non-white roles, if we are going to welcome non-white actors into traditionally white roles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Non-white actors are able to portray white characters or other minority groups without incident. The same should be true for the reverse.\n","id":"8d595feb-7a79-411d-b780-b715fad953c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How soon should secondary school students be grouped in specific learning programmes?<|ARGUMENT|>Schools depend on a combination of standardized test scores, grades, teacher and counselor recommendations, student and parent choice, and college and vocational requirements to assign students to ability groups p. 96. These assessments are often subjective and thus open to bias.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Studies show that the criteria schools use to assign students to ability group levels do not always produce groups that are homogeneous with respect to ability.\n","id":"3b454d49-8b88-4dff-a497-6c0669f54c4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So lets speak hypothetically A man has killed and molested a child in cold blood. One day the police storm into his apartment while he was in the middle of his horrific act. There was over whelming undeniable evidence that he committed the crime. He gets a jury and a court case and gets life. He spends the rest of his life with a roof, food, bed, shower and toilet and even Depending what prison luxury's like a TV, X box and getting Pizza delivered to his cell. All the while the girls corpse is rotting away and her loved ones are forever scarred with her loss. I won't even attempt to go into how much I disagree with the Death Sentence being abolished because I would ramble and ramble but, rather I will give this argument Why is it that that a Soldier would be allowed to shoot the man under the same circumstances? Except it being in the Iraq or Afghanistan Just in general, why is the killing of scum on Western soil such a taboo but Soldiers are heroes for killing scum? Cheers EDIT Wow, such intelligent thoughtful answers. I feel pretty intimidated to reply because of good view points, so I will do it in the morning as I'm tired now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it's hypocritical that the Death Sentence is not allowed, but Soldiers are allowed to go over seas and murder people who do the same\/similar acts.\n","id":"974c1787-e594-4341-a8a4-f094738dd18b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious practices that incorporate self-harm be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Banning can cause a \u201cStreisand Effect - an attempt to get rid of certain behaviour or content which causes the opposite of the desired outcome; instead the forbidden becomes even more permanent or popular.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banning self-harming rituals won't stop people from doing it.\n","id":"94966dbb-ccbd-4951-9307-af66c95cf16f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should we decide whether a single-winner voting system is fair?<|ARGUMENT|>EQUAL VOTE Everyone should have the right to the same voting power as everyone else, though they may choose not to use it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"How the winner is chosen after voting occurs should be examined to decide if the system is fair.\n","id":"480d84a9-df17-49b1-b3f9-54e9cf782fa3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion reminds people to look beyond mundane matters that seem important, including the material, personal obsessions, insecurities, and present sensibilities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is good for the psycho-social wellness of its followers.\n","id":"08c5101e-e2fe-4b39-8e2f-5305a0a32f4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do understand the aspect of it that is appealing in sheer fun but the main part of it I don't understand is the appraisal for the story. I do not particularly find it the story engaging and have practically no interest in any of the characters in it. I'd like to understand how some of these characters are so memorable as I see most of them fulfilling most military and sci fi tropes and doing nothing really interesting with it. My understanding of it is restricted to the games themselves but I do know much of the back story is explored in other mediums such as novels and animations but I have not viewed those. I do not understand the reasons for Masterchief being such an iconic character besides his visual design being rather pleasant. I'm trying to understand the love that people have for the series beyond a gameplay standpoint I see consistently in r games and r gaming. Please help me to understand this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I find the Halo series overrated.\n","id":"2a45e578-a793-4e7d-8615-d7179c36fd87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I get it. The fiverr video wasn't in and of itself necessarily any worse than any other edgy humor, and following it up with paying people to again joking about the holocaust say that Hitler did nothing wrong can maybe be defended as some kind of fly in the teeth of it and make a joke about how easy it is to be offensive. Sure it was bad behavior, and his apology taking the form of well I didn't think they would do it and I was just kidding you guys didn't really persuade me, but I was content to go back to not caring. He probably wasn't himself a bad guy, just immature and playing for an audience itself even less mature. No one ever went wrong stepping on social mores for the amusement of tweens. Something happened since which has made me change my mind. Pewdiepie tweeted out a video from Stefan Molyneaux defending him. Since he has since deleted it, see it here Molyneaux is a member of the alt right, often blogging, speaking, and podcasting about a combination of men's rights including blaming women for all crime and violence because it all stems from early childhood which women exclusively control , belief in a hierarchy of races and ethnicities based on genetic pseudo science, and generally what we could describe as Trump but worse amazingly enough . Molyneux praised Pewdiepie for giving a red pill a term used by misogynists and the alt right to refer to having been given something to show them the reality of how white men are the really mistreated people in the world to millions of young men. I wouldn't begrudge Pewdiepie being supported by such a man. Someone supported by a white nationalist isn't necessarily a white nationalist. Someone who is supported by the alt right, or neo nazis, or redpillers isn't necessarily any of those things. But to retweet it? To give Molyneux the weight of Pewdiepie's popularity? That implies a level of sympathy and support that extends beyond a crazy person happens to support me. Especially since the video focuses in large part on multiculturalism being bad and harmful to white young male people. And that reality is not lost on Molyneux's supporters either on Twitter or r The Donald At this point I absolutely believe that Pewdiepie did all of this at the very least out of being okay with the mentalities of people like Molyneux, rather than just making a big ol' wacky mistake. Youtube Google and Disney were more right than they knew to dump him. Edit I guess I can lay out what would change my view, since I'm getting a lot of you can't prove his conduct was intentionally alt right . I believe intent is inferred from actions, and making the same mistake over and over indicates it is not just a mistake. Nor is he took it down a good explanation for the tweet without somehow trying to remedy the huge support for the alt right and white nationalism that he gave mistake or no . So here's what would change my view Some indication somewhere of Pewdiepie actively supporting viewpoints contrary to that of the alt right white nationalists MRAs redpillers neo Nazis. Not just times he didn't support them or use their rhetoric, times he has said that they are wrong and he disagrees with them. Right now, all I have from his controversial videos, his non apology apology, and his tweet is that is willing to use their rhetoric, doesn't like that he was criticized for it, and tweeted a white nationalist video, then deleted the tweet with no further action.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pewdiepie is at *minimum* sympathetic to the redpill\/alt-right\/neo-nazi movement.\n","id":"c6f9bf4a-45cb-4e2e-bcdb-e5eece11de24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Attorney-Client Privilege<|ARGUMENT|>Openness and candour by the client can only be encouraged if the client knows that his communications with legal counsel are, and will remain, confidential and protected. The problem with recognising piecemeal \u2018exceptions\u2019 to the privilege is that uncertainty is created by such exceptions. People become unsure about the extent of such exceptions which may be ever-enlarging and therefore cannot be sure that their communications will remain confidential five or ten years down the road.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The predictability in the application of the privilege protection is critical to its effectiveness and success.\n","id":"4d36d66c-1059-41f0-81da-0508794d17fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those who are unfamiliar with the distinction between active and passive euthanasia Passive euthanasia is the refusal of palliative care or life saving medication once diagnosed terminally ill. Under the Patient Self Determination Act, patients may choose to let their chronic illness take it's course. This is legal in the US. Active euthanasia is a doctor's administration of a lethal drug through IV to a patient who has made a voluntary request to be euthanized. This is illegal in the US Physician assisted suicide, the prescription of lethal drugs, is legal in Vermont, Washington, Oregon, and Montana. This is different because the doctor is helping the patient to die rather than directly killing him her . Many argue that active euthanasia creates a slippery slope to legalized murder and believe it is cruel and unusual. However, it seems that it is more harmful to refuse treatment and allow yourself to slowly degenerate. Patients with ALS, cancer, HIV AIDs, etc. may be given treatment to relieve pain but this doesn't always work. It seems that having to ride out a painful disease which will eventually kill you is much more inhumane than a doctor injecting you to end the suffering quickly. Also, it is much easier for a patient to have the doctor perform active euthanasia first a muscle relaxant, then a drug to put the person into a comma, and finally a drug to stop the heart than to take the initiative to swallow a pill and kill him herself. Dying with dignity and on your own terms is preferable to dying at the grips of a crippling illness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Active euthanasia, illegal, is preferable to passive euthanasia, legal.\n","id":"cba1d81c-db24-4d7c-a639-5f2558991ae8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this is a very bigoted perspective against women and thus I would like my views to be changed. I believe that in almost any culture, it is far more easier for a woman to get the opportunity to have sex than a man even in conservative countries . Conversely, if a woman is having sex that means a man is having sex too and here's where my point kicks in. Since it's generally a steep curve for an average man to have sex with a woman, he is considered a winner of some sort when he does get laid. No matter how many women he is sleeping with, each woman is considered a challenge for him and thus I think that he's got the game. So when a woman does the same thing, i.e., sleeping around with multiple men, it feels that a man does not even have a challenge. It is simply too easy. She is too easy. Every car gets to hit the pothole. I really want to start thinking that men could also be considered a whore and that a woman can be a player.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Woman who sleeps around is a slut but a man who sleeps around is a player\n","id":"860c318e-5873-45a4-af63-f3ae55080ad0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In this day and age, many children across the globe have access to new technology. I find this wonderful for a new generation that has been shaped with tech since extremely early ages and I am excited to see what this results in. However, recently most children are using iPads and iPhones over computers. I believe that children growing up using tablets are missing out on the opportunity that PCs allow, which is that not everything on a computer can be spoon fed to you. What I mean is that when using tablets especially iPads not many problems arise, which means that there is never really any resolving to be done. Worst case scenario, something goes wrong on an iPad, it automatically reboots. Not that this holds true to everyone, but I remember whenever I had an issue on my computer, I would seek help or try to resolve the issue myself, which ultimately helped me know what I do today by trial and error. There are children that I know that even have the option of using a computer but avoid using one for the sole reason that they find it too difficult to use. I am not making the claim that children should not be allowed to use technology. In fact, I think it should be encouraged for children to use technology in a way that stimulates curiosity and problem solving. I simply believe that something as simplistic and mind numbing as a tablet that does virtually nothing to inspire technological learning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If children are going to grow up learning how to use technology, it should be with a PC\n","id":"6ebb63d3-1b6d-42d5-9aa6-0c04fc5c008c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For my purposes I consider literature and novels interchangeable. There are certainly differences not all novels are literature, etc. but in the respect that they indicate long form storytelling, contrasting with poetry's stricter and shorter format, they make up what I find superior to poetry. This is simply a disclaimer so that I don't need to use them differently. I've often seen it put forward that novels are simply word vomit, whereas poetry is the refinement of a carefully selected set of words. This implies a lot of things about literature that I disagree with 1 that literature is not as refined as poetry, 2 that the standards for literature are lower than for poetry, and 3 the impact of poetry is greater than that of literature upon the reader. Perhaps I could go through all my favourite books and point out passages that I believe are so poetic that they show literature is as refined as poetry. That wouldn't really prove anything though, because the instant response would be to bring up every part I didn't mention, for they must be less refined. This would be a fallacy while poetry has more relatively meaningful lines, in literature the 'glue' must exist to hold all the elements of the story together. If you never wrote John said. you wouldn't necessarily have a better work, just one that subverts the most common conventions of writing, something which I believe we can agree doesn't determine whether a work is good or bad, but is simply a small factor in that decision. The standards of good writing have never been higher, for we have never had a larger selection to choose from. I don't know the poetry industry well enough to make any statements about it, but from what I've heard it's also facing the same belt tightening that novel publishing is. Unless a given work appeals to the human side of the editors publishers in some way there is a low chance that it will make it past the slush pile. In this one facet I can see poetry having an edge, because it is shorter and can theoretically be consumed faster, making more room for works but at the same time, an account of the meaning within a poem could deserve twice the time of some pulp romance novels. Even beyond this supposed even point, standards have become more nebulous, conceptually, than they once were. Cummings and presumably many others brought non grammatical writings to poetry, but is the uneducated opening of Flowers for Algernon any different? Style is entirely dictated by a number of internal and external factors that never stop changing, while the completed work is static forever afterwards. Shakespeare was once considered the king of playwrights citation needed but now if you took his name off the cover of a modernized version people would complain of how trite his works are. The ever changing nature of standards makes me laugh when people say this pulp novel is qualitatively worse than that sonnet, because they tend to rely on far more judgmental assumptions than they explain. If all the world's writers and readers haven't yet come to a conclusion on what good writing is, I don't see the validity in a claim that any entire mode of writing can be superior or inferior to another. My last problem is about the impact of a work on a reader. This is more subjective grounds than the other two, I think, and this could be the one I'm least sure of. Some people make a big point of minimalism , the ability to evoke from an audience with a minimum of material. Generally, poetry is more minimal than literature in every way. This is due to the general constructs which each use to evoke from the reader, where poetry uses tight prose and emphasizes imagery, while novels use narration, to build the intended mental image. But nothing about the feelings a reader feels is defined by the amount of words or metaphors it took to create them, and any limit placed thereby is a false restriction. I could argue that not having limitations of form gives literature more variability, that the freedom of it gives superior room for creativity, but in that sense there exists poetry that breaks those rules too free form . So, while literature isn't necessarily better than poetry just because of freedom of expression, poetry is certainly not better than literature because of its spartan format. Maybe you've read all this, and you're wondering Where is the proof that literature can do it better? Yes, my points have only argued that literature is not inherently worse, but this is an important part of the overarching idea. I think the strongest evidence I can present for the superiority of literature is simple. By explication all the subtlest themes of poetry can be expanded and alluded to and improved upon. Anything that is said in one sentence will be improved in every qualitative way by expansion. Nothing is ever expressed better in less words than in more. If you believe you can convince me otherwise of this, then feel free. I'd love to see more value in poetry than I already do. tl dr longer more expression better. I wrote an essay on why short works aren't better than long ones and here you are reading the summary. P.S. I've got some cognitive reasons for why I think literature is better too but science is slow and it's pretty hard to argue about the 'general function' of brains when they're good enough to do anything we need anyway Edit I've read every post, but there are too many things I didn't respond to. Wasn't expecting as big of a discussion to form. I'm happy though my mind was changed in ways, I've learned a lot more perspectives on the topic than I previously had, and this is the healthiest dissection of 'value' in writing I've read in a long time. If I had infinite time I'd be responding to them all but I suppose, that's one of the points that changed my view, here. Thanks folks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anything poetry can do, literature can do better.\n","id":"c1b9b40b-c564-46ff-a3e3-bd9601abf4e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Local Governments have Partisan Elections?<|ARGUMENT|>Local governments would also have the freedom to vote and govern in the way they see most beneficial without being cornered by party stances and values<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would allow local governments to govern based off what is best for their specific community.\n","id":"464c7cb1-4d00-4313-bdd0-ffa3cd8e5577"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Over time I've noticed a number of fairly massive contradictions or unfounded statements being made in modern discourse about economics, that have led me to question, in particular, the notion that Capitalism is responsible for the longest run of economic growth, and reduction in poverty in history. The aspects of this include x200B A the idea that 'the West' was ever simultaneously a collection of progressive, liberal democratic countries that were industrialising and improving the incomes of their working population is false. x200B B the majority of people coming out of poverty in the last 50 years, have been in Communist states. The majority of newly poor people in the same time frame have been in Capitalist states. x200B C the industrialisation of Europe and the West occurred under not only morally reprehensible regimes, such as Apartheid South Africa, pre Civil War USA, Imperial Britain, but under regimes that were able to directly exploit the labour and resources of other people. x200B D following on from C excluding the citizens of Communist States, the vast majority of remaining reductions in poverty occurred in not only post colonial societies, but in those that no longer were aligned with The West. That is democratic Indonesia, not the catastrophe of Suharto. x200B E the most rapid economic growth in the industrial era appears to always have occurred in states run by a mix of Socialists or Communists. Essentially State planners, in control of poor countries, without serious influence from external forces. This was relatively well established in political theory by the 1950s. And applying this logic to the decision to align with China, appears to correlate with a large number of major economic changes around the world, that formed our modern climate. x200B x200B gt This is a footnote from the  moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The continued GDP growth of the West was pegged to the predictable rapid industrialisation of the world's largest Socialist state by Richard Nixon, and is not a product of capitalism.\n","id":"f5bbcf20-f7f3-49d2-8481-d9a2a280e559"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see a lot of comments like this one, by u sailorbrendan You are absolutely welcome to your religion, but your religion has absolutely no right to influence laws that affect people who don't believe in your religion. Why is this the case? Isn't this a simple case of tyranny of the majority? The only difference between this and any other political issue is that the sides can be neatly categorised. In any case, a group of people have one view, and another group have another. Often one or more of these views are utterly irrational and its proponents have no regard for the weight of currently available evidence, but our right to espouse these views is critical to our democratic foundations. EDIT Hey guys, looks like you have some well thought out responses, I look forward to reading them. I am doing an essay right now which is due tonight, so will read your comments thoroughly and reply then. EDIT 2 Ok, I am growing increasingly convinced that I phrased my original view poorly, as many people have either answered a different question entirely, or essentially affirmed my view. Those in the latter category provided the better answers, in my opinion, as one or two people delved into the issue in general and gave me a good overview. No deltas, because basically my view remains unchanged, but thanks for educating me on why, given these kind of concerns, governments rarely take the form of true 'democracy'. This was my first  post, and I will be sure to present my view less vaguely in future. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if you support democracy, you must respect the Christian opposition to gay marriage.\n","id":"722faa5c-ee27-4262-b6db-535d6f2c7316"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>What makes something deserving of rights is the ability to feel and experience. An intelligent and conscious thing according to the linked to definition of consciousness does not necessarily have the ability to experience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intelligence and consciousness do not make something deserving of rights.\n","id":"c81b11b7-026c-41ff-aaff-d72466613093"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a coherence of being that could be what is referred to in gnostic scripture. In the Nag-Hammadi scrolls there is a phrase, \"you cannot see the Father but, you can see His light in my face.\" This coherence is ostensibly inactive; apparently we can move from it but, such movement is unstable an requires more energy: I mean; we are free to lie, there is no active, immediate correction; the potency of the coherence requirement comes in the fullness of time; potency, not omnipotence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lack of omnipotence is as plausible as no God at all, given the starting point of this discussion.\n","id":"2bdfcddd-2ea4-46ab-b3c2-58e34cfd4741"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Free-will means that humans are free to make choices, which necessarily implies that their choices cannot be known a-priori. If an all-knowing God knows every choice we make before we make it, then it cannot be said that we have free-will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans and perhaps animals have free will. For this to be true, God could not know what their actions were going to be in advance, otherwise it wouldn't truly be free.\n","id":"afab7974-161a-4b47-a41c-5e7ca03c9bf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Even though using weapons to hunt in the US is not illegal, that function isn't protected by the constitution. The Supreme Court only grants you the right to the standard equipment of an normal infantry solider, meaning a military-style small hand, shotgun, and rife. There never was a case regarding sporting weapons before the SC, but if there were they'd be likely to be outlawed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The types of weapons designed for hunting are different from the types of weapons designed for war.\n","id":"8e82bc68-35bc-48a8-b701-2a6c4eba8c59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Death Row Inmates Be Required To Donate Their Organs Upon Their Death?<|ARGUMENT|>Twenty people die daily waiting for another person to die or agree to give up an organ. Inmates who are scheduled to die should therefore be required to donate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Doing so has the potential to save lives at a quicker pace than waiting for someone to die of natural causes or injury.\n","id":"052d3712-c049-48fd-a8e5-86ef5f2cdfec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Populist results, such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, are signs of a healthy democracy.<|ARGUMENT|>Populist outcomes are usually the result of historical policies that harm the middle class. A healthy democracy allows the people to set policies that benefits them rather than put up with what the 'elite' think is best.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Populist results, such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, are signs of a healthy democracy.\n","id":"b676b6e3-19fb-4b13-a471-a934a711e970"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Not always. Maybe not even most of the time. But, whether a victim is partially to blame is a case by case fact sensitive issue that shouldn't be summarily dismissed because aww poor victim we need to be more sympathetic to everyone's fragile sensibilities . In the legal field it's known generally as contributory or comparative negligence, or you might hear the phrase assumption of risk or caveat emptor thrown around if dealing with property. Socially, you might often see victim blaming thrown around as a sort of slur a silencing tactic when people's feelings are starting to get hurt, or something. What I tend to see is people who are arguing that a person could have avoided becoming a victim if they educated themselves about how criminals act, paid more attention to their situational awareness, and took the types of preventative and precautionary measures that people who live in the real world take every day being called asshole victim blamers . I think it's bullshit. We aren't all here to be your shoulder to cry on and help you externalize your problems, hopefully you have enough yes men in your life who already do that. Some of us actually want to help victims not become victims again, or help people who have been lucky enough to never have been a victim remain that way. The kid who's bullied and shoots up the school, or kills themselves, is ultimately to blame for those actions. Not the bullies. Not the parents. Not society. That person who kills themselves. Maybe you can blame it on some mental illness that went undiagnosed. Maybe they just decided they didn't want to live any more. I have never seen so much bullshit as when people try to find a scapegoat for suicides. They are victims of lesser offenses, and the lessor offenders get blamed for murder basically, when the actual perpetrator of a murder gets off scott free in the eyes of their loved ones much of the time because well, they're dead. They murdered themselves. The guy needlessly walking through a bad neighborhood alone at night flashing his Rolex and wallet in his expensive suit who gets mugged, while obviously a victim and not at all to blame for his mugging, nevertheless, either out of just stupid ignorance or willful and wanton disregard for his own safety, is to blame for ever putting himself in a situation where it is ripe for him to be taken advantage of. Criminals do not care that they should just know better and know not to commit crimes . That's what makes them criminals. Don't make yourself an easy target for criminals. If you do, you are to blame for exactly that, making yourself an easy target for criminals. The criminals are obviously solely to blame for their actions. If someone suggests that maybe a person could have taken steps to avoid finding themselves in an unfortunate situation, or could have done things differently, we aren't blaming anyone. I can feel sorry that something bad has happened to someone at the hands of another and recognize that the perpetrators criminal or morally repugnant actions are wrong. I recognize that the victim didn't deserve it . That doesn't help anything. Bad things happen to those who don't deserve it every single day. If you want people who commit criminal or morally repugnant actions to not assault you, if you want to not be a victim, you need to be proactive. Again, the criminals do not care whether you feel violated. That violation that occurred to you, hopefully, is in the past. What matters are the steps you can take so that you won't be violated in the future. Talking about that is not an asshole thing to do. It is trying to help a person find some agency. Yet that talk is largely silenced as victim blaming . What I want people to change my view about is that victim blaming as I have described it here, is a good thing to do. So, to refresh, NOT this that girl was wearing a revealing outfit and getting really drunk, she wanted it , But this that girl was wearing a revealing outfit and getting really drunk criminals see that as a easy target being really drunk and wearing revealing clothes seems to make one more vulnerable to attack in the future less women might be attacked if they don't wear such revealing clothes or get so drunk. And, of course, the criminals are criminals and their criminal actions are the faults of the criminals not the victims but they don't care because they're fucking criminals. this is what us non criminals can do to make ourselves less at risk from the criminals. If you want to wear revealing clothing and get really drunk, more power too you. You're my kind of people. In a perfect world you could wear whatever you wanted and get as drunk as you wanted and you would never be attacked, because there would be no criminals. That is not the world we live in. Still, chances are that next time you go out and wear a revealing outfit and get shmammered, you won't be attacked. But every time we step outside we roll the dice. So that second one. I want someone to explain using reasons that don't have to do with you're hurting my feelings why it is untrue not a good habit. Obviously I expect that this opinion is not popular. I don't voice it often. I have been effectively silenced. Also, because of this silencing on this topic, I have little sympathy for self described victims , so I hope if someone can  maybe I will be a little more empathetic towards people who think of themselves as victims or who complain about victim blaming. I have been sexually and physically criminally assaulted on multiple occasions, how ever that may factor into your response.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"victim blaming\": sometimes justified.\n","id":"ff935690-89c5-4b7e-8cb0-a971aaa21f5e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi everyone my titles pretty much explains my viewpoint but I'll give a little more insight into my view. So in order for men to vote in the country once the draft was conceived on their 18th birthday they would have to enlist in the draft in order to gain their right to vote which later has become federal law that you must sign up for the draft . Women were granted the right to vote but never have had to meet this requirement and I think that with the large push in women joining combat forces and the military that it is time to have them enlist in the draft as well<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women should have to sign up for the draft\n","id":"e0625140-ecbb-4770-ac21-df35121deaf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Laptops be Allowed in University Classrooms?<|ARGUMENT|>A study conducted among students in several economics classes, some of which were allowed to use laptops or tablets, some of which were not, concluded that computer devices seem to have a \"substantial negative effect on academic performance\" Carter et al, p. 25<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of laptops in class negatively correlates with students' academic success.\n","id":"2a91401f-d6fb-49d6-9b6d-2cf00f41c260"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>or some other punishment should be included. The punishment should be worse depending on how much money people have. Fines are supposed to be a deterrent. For a deterrent to work the accused must want to avoid the penalty i.e. the fine. A billionaire hardly minds if he gets a \u00a3200 fine Notes Sometimes this wouldn't be possible, but when it is possible the extra admin would be well worth it. Additional punishments could include some sort of public shaming, more driving licence points deducted, etc. I don't know, just anything which puts wealthier people off commiting crimes. It doesn't necessarily have to be money, although money makes sense as it could go towards helping victims of the crime e.g. helping victims of speeding motorists .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fines should scale according to the person's wealth\n","id":"d29323ec-9e1f-4ffd-83e1-34b39b9a23a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that some people can't afford to attend their out of state, very expensive top choice, and I understand that college is expensive in general oh lordie do I understand that , but I don't believe that anyone is incapable of doing two years of community college two or three years of in state public university through a combination of working, grants scholarships, student loans from the financial aid office, and private student loans. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that people are literally unable to afford college.\n","id":"edb55870-61aa-451e-b1ee-521c8c5a67fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Social Media Been Good For Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Noise forces users to find alternative ways of maintaining a productive conversation ergo creating an overall improvement in the communication protocol and mechanism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"They contribute, as a noise factor, to improve and evolve the way useful interactions are made amongst users\n","id":"98a6d0b7-1ffc-4eea-b195-f22a493abdb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ever since the Brexit referendum in June 2016 the UK has struggled to decide what Brexit actually looks like apart from the nebulous \u201cBrexit means Brexit\u201d . Full disclosure I voted to remain in the referendum and continue to think remaining is the best course of action, although I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s an option anymore. There has been a lot of talk recently about a second referendum, also referred to as a \u201cPeople\u2019s vote\u201d. This is mainly advocated by pro remain groups who believe that given the chaos of the last couple years the British people will have changed their mind and would vote to remain. I personally would love to remain, but I cannot convince myself that a second referendum is the right thing to do and if we did do it I really don\u2019t think the result would be different. I\u2019ve outlined a couple of the reasons why I think this below \u00b7 The original referendum was meant to settle this for good, many people advocating for a second referendum argue that the electorate weren\u2019t well informed about the choices which I agree with , however, I can\u2019t think of a single election or campaign which didn\u2019t involve lies or misleading claims so why do we suddenly decide to re run this one? \u00b7 Leading on from that I do worry about what effect this would have on our democracy, like I said I\u2019m pro remain but even I get frustrated with the patronising tone taken by a number of second referendum campaigners. Much of the vote for Brexit was due to anti establishment feeling. I\u2019m not sure how liberal elites over ruling the votes of many working class people which is how it would be portrayed regardless of whether it\u2019s true or not would help this situation. \u00b7 Finally, I really believe that if there was a second referendum then leave would win, probably by a bigger margin. Many people point to polls and the recent EU elections to show that sentiment has changed. But all these are from small groups, even the EU elections had a turnout of about half that of the original referendum 17.1 million voted in the EU elections altogether, as opposed to 17.4 million who voted just for leave in 2016 so I would hesitate to draw any sweeping conclusions from it. I believe many people are just fed up with the process, even I as a pro remainer have had moments where I\u2019d happily just leave and get it done with and I believe that much of the British people probably have the same levels of fatigue, especially considering we\u2019ve spoken about nothing else for 3 years I\u2019d love to hear what you all think and change my view. I\u2019ve not specified what the question would be on the second referendum no deal vs deal or leave vs remain , my arguments hopefully apply to all potential referendum questions but feel free to explain your thinking about individual ballot questions. My view would be changed by people who can either convince me that there has been a monumental sea change in public opinion on Brexit, or by showing how a second referendum could be held in way which didn\u2019t exacerbate the underlying divisions which lead to the original Brexit vote. Look forward to hearing your views<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A second Brexit referendum would not solve anything\n","id":"1cb0df21-c646-4eae-ac81-a133bc0dddcd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US and NATO Should Withdraw from Afghanistan<|ARGUMENT|>There are two significant limitations on what the Pentagon can ship through Central Asia. Supplies are generally restricted to food, water and construction material; ammunition, weapons and other \u201clethal\u201d cargo are prohibited. The routes are also strictly one-way and nothing can be shipped back out of the war zone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The more expensive alternative to Pakistani routes is the Northern Distribution Network which crosses through the Central Asian republics and Russia and links Afghanistan with the Baltic and Caspian ports. The route through Central Asia is also unreliable because it makes the US military dependent on authoritarian countries.\n","id":"351ebb14-0873-45a4-8c62-d333ed43436a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>Ending free movement will restrict the ability of scientists to work across international boundaries and reduce the pool of scientists from which UK institutions can be drawn.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A hard Brexit will hurt the scientific community in the UK.\n","id":"988c20a7-e06f-4160-8bfb-972b31630494"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans have loved ones, and fear. If you kill a human you make their relatives sad, or make other people scared that they will be killed in similar circumstances. So often killing humans is worse, even if you don't value humans above animals intrinsically.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are several emotional, psychological, physical, energetic, and behavioral differences between humans and animals that distinguish the two.\n","id":"bd2a9ec8-bb62-45c9-8e2b-8c1542717331"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US have withdrawn from NAFTA?<|ARGUMENT|>US withdrawal from NAFTA would have signalled that the country is not committed to free trade, damaging the country's ability to negotiate future economically beneficial agreements.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Withdrawing from NAFTA would have been harmful to the US economy.\n","id":"0d06b233-aae4-40b4-9820-38d75cb526ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Despite having freedom of religion, monarchies in Bhutan and Swaziland also among the biggest world\u2019s lawnowners, are very tied to Buddhism and Christianity, respectively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of the world\u2019s biggest landowners are monarchs from countries with official state religions that support the monarchy or heads of religions themselves.\n","id":"d652cae3-b995-489f-b879-75ab033bdc1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a german, especially in the city I live, there's honestly too many turks and muslims here. My old school was 80 turks muslims guys from eastern europe, which seriously lead to germans being made fun of, for being german, in their own damn country But that's not the only example, when I go out, I see as much, if not more, foreigners on the streets. And by 'foreigners', I don't mean anything like scandinavians, or people from developed countries for that matter, I mean all the muslims turks romanians, etc. A little immigration doesn't hurt, that's for certain. But if there's more immigrants than natives in any place, something's not right. ^^^^I'm ^^^^not ^^^^racist^^^^<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"too much Immigration hurts a country's culture\n","id":"079929ac-82ff-4db0-987c-d1a3a072db41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand this might be an overreaction and I don't want to be right so I'd like to get some ideas on why I'm wrong. When I see comment threads like this one looking at what people have upvoted makes me think most men see women as some kind of sex toys and nothing more. It's a picture of girls holding underwear that like tons of girls use. Totally normal underwear and they're acting like girls are naked holding a big sign that says fuck me or something. Also my dad never got upset about anything like this. Why would the dad be upset? Unless he's some religious conservative? Help me out here. I get really misanthropic when I see threads like this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some posts on reddit make me think the majority of men have no respect for women.\n","id":"50cc201e-699c-4eba-8d59-f3b7fc7be3c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note, I'm using the terms free will , consciousness and soul later, these properties in the sense of something you or moss, or a computer can have or not have. I think the argument is separate from the concept of determinism. That is, I believe the claim I have free will is no different from determinism is false and that the distinction of objects into categories or a gradient from has free will to doesn't have free will is wrong regardless of the correctness of determinism. There is no expectation that these properties represent anything observable. If I introduced you to two humanoid looking things that display some amount of intelligence and told you that only one of them has, say, free will , you would not expect to see any difference between them, let alone guess which one has it. In that sense these properties are useless. While these properties have slightly different meanings, their purpose seems obvious to me to distinguish humans as the best of all things. They readily come up when trying to explain, for example, why humans are different form machines . They serve as excuses very well, it seems likely that this was their intended purpose and therefore unlikely that they have any deeper usefulness. All of these properties if viewed as gradients correlate with complexity also with intelligence . That is, a stone has no moving parts and nobody claims that stones have free will. The moon, while in motion and has observable action on the sea, has no consciousness unless you are a pagan . Viruses or bacteria have even more complex behaviors and, although generally understood not to have any of these properties, an argument could be made that they do. At the end of the spectrum is the human brain, understood very little and believed to have all of them. While complexity is also a bit vague, it is much more well defined than these properties. It is not obvious that the correlation with complexity or intelligence is not 1, i.e. that these properties are actually distinct from it. Consciousness seems to be an odd one out, in that there seems to be no disagreement on whether humans have it. Considering that the previous points apply to it, I propose that consciousness is something intelligent systems do. That is, being aware of a thing is an inevitable side effect of having a representation of the thing in your brain. If you suggest that your brain represents many things you're not directly aware of, I'd reply that those parts of your brain are not directly connected to your vocal chords and thus can't say what they are or aren't aware of. I believe that this is a sufficient and also the simplest explanation. While I can imagine that consciousness could refer to a property that some intelligences have and others don't thus being a useful concept , I think such usage would be far enough from the current use to be considered a distinct concept.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"free-will, soul and, to a lesser extent, consciousness are ridiculous and unnecessary concepts\n","id":"4b3dec9b-3b46-49d6-a764-ddbc83d9f0a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok, a little click bait y because there's an and with this but it was too long to fit in the title. I think net neutrality is only important because of the lack of competition among providers leading to a lack of options for consumers. So net neutrality ends up being a band aid on the problem, which comes with it the consequence of the government constantly having to be proactive to keep it safe. These things shouldn't be up for debate every time political power changes hands. Therefore net neutrality should be eliminated and, instead, the infrastructure paid for by providers should have an ownership expiration date similar to a patent . This would allow providers to recoup the cost of installation over a period of years but would allow consumers to switch to other providers using the same infrastructure after a specific date. Take cell phones for example. People were too dependent on keeping their numbers for business purposes so providers knew they weren't really in danger of losing that many people to competitors. But as soon as number porting became law, there was a precipitous rise in coverage and customer service over the next decade, combined with a precipitous drop in prices. Cellular providers weren't required to all include unlimited text messages or unlimited calls, rather each provider can create customized plans that allow customers to choose what's important to them. And because customers can easily switch providers, the providers have incentive to offer things customers want at competitive prices. ISPs should operate the same way. If my grandparents use the internet for paying bills and responding to emails but they never consume the media and entertainment that people of my generation do online, their monthly ISP bill should arguably be less than 10 for fast broadband. But because of net neutrality rules, the cost of admission for many broadband providers is more than 50. I know it would take a few years before consumers start to benefit from this but the long term effects would far outweigh perpetuating net neutrality and continuing to allow ISPs to prevent competition with their stranglehold on infrastructure. Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Net Neutrality SHOULD be eliminated.\n","id":"85d05a52-74b1-40ce-983f-e7b737a3490c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Outsourcing<|ARGUMENT|>Additionally, they create large numbers of newly affluent middle class consumers in underdeveloped countries which can provide substantial new export markets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Offshoring allows more developed countries to focus their economic activity on more highly skilled, value-adding processes which may be more financially profitable than, for example, low-end manufacturing.\n","id":"621375b4-3dee-401a-ad4e-bb63ca7fc1f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I first want to say that I am a very open person and wouldnt consider my self phobic in any sense. My brother is trans and have never had any problems with him. My concern is specifically with vocabulary. I believe in order to actively achieve higher social acceptance, the increase in gender and sexuality terms should be stunted. Hear me out I think the terms covered in LGBT is all that is needed to spearhead cultural reform. Most words that are gaining attention in gender study thought are unneeded. I am not arguing that these words are new, I am aware of their decades long existence, I'm just talking recent social increase. For example, Pansexual. That is really just bisexual in my opinion. When describing yourself one can simply say I'm Bi but personality is very important to me . Or terms like Metrosexual, Nah I'm straight but just a bit flamboyant. The shortening of terms would also alleviate in group confusion around words. Gender Queer for example. One can say I'm straight but a bit flamboyent , or I would consider sex with a man bisexual . The increase in terms generally hurts social progress because the proponents of the word end up being made a joke out of in the mainstream. Their points are generally lost in translation. Instead of fighting for metrosexual, or nonbinary rights, we should fight for the acceptance of straight men being able to act feminine and vice versa. That would be taken much better in my opinion. I think for every gender vocab word we now have, we can describe with words that already existed easily. And doing so would progress social acceptance further.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The increase in gender and sexuality vocabulary is not needed and ultimately hurts social progress on the topic\n","id":"d8ad0e59-0a6c-4320-af2f-0b1edd4984e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Mentally replace all my uses of the word humanism with egalitarianism since it was brought to my attention it fits better. I guess Humanist will have to be replaced with egalitarianist? Upfront disclosure. I fully support equal rights and opportunities for everyone as well as analyzing and correcting institutionalized unfairness. This  topic is specific to American Feminism. This basic idea doesn't just apply to feminists it can apply to any sufficiently narrow POV without justification. For example I wouldn't include a group like the Humane Society because I would agree that animals are a whole other area of expertise. That being said, what can you accomplish as a feminist that you can't accomplish as a humanist? I think there surely was a time for feminism when there were severe inequalities like not being allowed to vote or own property. Now that we have come so close to parity between the sexes in the States feminism in general comes across as Special Pleading logical fallacy and egotistical thinking that one group is inherently more important or needs more attention than another most probably because you are a member of that group , this leads me to my belief that the label promotes sexism instead of the opposite. As you approach parity between 2 groups you have to change the stance view label to encompass both groups otherwise the specific label that has been used thus far only makes sure that rift never goes away. Furthermore if you really care about reaching parity between the sexes that will NEVER happen if you only focus on one of them and so feminism seems to be hurting themselves with their own label. I have heard feminism defined as caring equally about both sexes in an attempt to counter this point but we would never try and argue that a masculinist cares equally about both sexes it's just a bad defense. If we are talking about promoting equality between not just the sexes but all of humanity I think Humanist is the label philosophy that will get us there because it will cause us to care about more than just the group we identify with and consider all social issues in order of importance instead of the order of what might directly affect us as individuals. EDIT 2 I'll be adding some link to articles that I think address my position or at least are insightful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Identifying as Feminist is outdated and should be replaced with Humanist so we can all get on board the same train.\n","id":"a2ec22f4-6774-46bd-95ab-accf173e44c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems to be a common attitude to say that it's fine to be against a war, but members of the military deserve unconditional respect and should not be criticized for participating in those wars. The idea is that it's ok to be anti war, but not anti military. I don't understand why such a strong distinction must be made here. Sure, I understand that low ranking military personnel aren't calling the shots or deciding what wars need to be fought. But I feel like someone who has willingly agreed to unconditionally obey orders and do as they are told has the responsibility to first be sure that they understand the mission they are willing to die for. I think this is not a healthy attitude to have. I feel like it's contradictory to send the message that war is wrong, and that we have no business fighting it, but also treat our soldiers as heroes, and promote the idea that what they do is honorable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe voluntary members of the military should be exempt from criticism regarding unjust wars.\n","id":"18112c67-4150-435c-9fe4-e6acc504d60a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am pretty sure this theory has been developed by somebody else, but here goes. If you are born with good intelligence genes, you are 'lucky'. If you get good parents that foster your intelligence and instill good values, you are even 'luckier'. I don't know how to refute this argument. I guess free will could be a main component of a counterargument , but anyone's will is determined by their personality, which is shaped by experiences, influences, and genes. So what is the point of feeling superior to someone that is inferior, if you are simply 'luckier' than they are. There has to be a chink in the armor somewhere, I am simply not 'lucky' enough to be smart enough to find it. Hehe. edit I lack the intelligence to follow my argument through. Thanks for the responses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who are superior than other are simply more 'lucky' than people who are inferior.\n","id":"889c0069-e277-4cbe-b573-769ae91a5ba0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The internet is awesome and I love it. Info gets passed around so fast and everyone is smarter and wealthier because of it. Wealth in information, wealth in economic opportunity, wealth in digital tools, etc. But in computers, after something has been created, the cost to distribute it is zero copy and paste. When people share files without the creator's approval, they aren't stealing the good in the typical sense, where the creator no longer has it. It's a different kind of theft. You are using the good without compensating the person who made it. This is a problem in every part of the internet, and basically all information computer services. Game developers don't like putting a ton of resources into making PC games because so many people will just torrent them. Less and less money can go into the budget of a TV show because fewer people are paying for it. I have a personal example of this. My brother is a successful music producer, but neither he nor any of his peers ever buy the software they use to make their music. The developers of these products rely on sales for a living, but only a fraction of their consumers actually buy the product. I'm not talking about the music producers themselves. In a way, they benefit from free distribution because it builds their real customer base concert goers who pay to see them live. But the software developers, user interface artists, secretaries and managers who make a living off digital products aren't being properly paid for their work. File sharing creates a system where consumers in all industries torrent their favorite products out of existence. There needs to be laws to prevent it, because it reduces the incentive for developers and creators to build quality products. Laws have to catch up with the industries they regulate, and in this case, ISP's are really the only organizations able to stop file sharing. The TPP's articles about ISP's needing to enforce copyright laws on their networks is a good thing for content creators.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The TPP's articles on file sharing are necessary and good for content creators.\n","id":"6ee479de-629d-4deb-bb53-7ab2300b3223"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Shark Culling Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Hammerhead sharks prey on stingrays, and have been found with as many as 96 stingray barbs embedded in their mouths indicating that they do not feel pain from the barbs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evidence suggests that sharks don't respond to pain in the same way as other animals.\n","id":"1ebd1741-7ab2-4740-a804-e800356f1584"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Napoleon, Caesar Augustus, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun. What kinds of thoughts do these names conjure? Adolf Hitler. What kinds of thoughts now? I'd wager to guess that your opinion of the first group is significantly more positive that your opinion of Hitler. My question is why should it be? In my experience, the members of the first group are generally remembered and studied as great men and conquerors. Emphasis is placed on their accomplishments. Their names are spoken with some amount of awe or reverence. If I were to tell you I am a direct descendent of Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great, you might think that is kind of badass. Hitler, on the other hand is viewed as the embodiment of evil. His first name, his last name, his moustache, as well as the swastika and Roman salute have all been tainted by association with him. An announcement that I am the direct descendant of Hitler would likely be met with pity, or even fear. In my experience, discussions of Hitler emphasize his atrocities while belittling his accomplishments. He is portrayed as an insane, bumbling, weirdo politician. I'm not trying to argue that Hitler was a great guy obviously he committed many atrocities. But the other names I listed undoubtedly committed numerous atrocities during their conquests. And I would say Hitler's accomplishments rank in the upper tier of conquerors. He managed to gain control of a country and conquered most of Europe. Though not necessarily an honorable goal, he was pretty successful in exterminating Jews. All great conquerors did terrible things on their paths of conquest. Other conquerors are revered while Hitler is vilified. That is why I think Hitler's legacy is treated unfairly. You can change my view in two different ways. Either argue that Hitler is NOT treated differently from other conquerors or argue that Hitler SHOULD be treated differently from other conquerors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hitler's legacy is treated unfairly\n","id":"00ee159e-4595-45a4-b435-35d1bd5af423"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The amount of time spent and bullshit caused by the need to be romanced and get laid is absolutely ridiculous. This is all because of the holdover instinct from when humans were living like fucking animals, and it's still here in the age of internet and neuroscience, what the fuck. I'm sure it has served humanity positively in the past, but now it's just an unnecessary appendage. People are excluded, driven to suicide and depression, and all sorts of shit simply because they don't measure up to the primitive standards of sexuality. If men quit trying to be in such good shape in an age where manual labor will soon be something of the past, and just read a book, if men spent more money in practical matters instead of trying to impress with clothes, its impossible to tell how much better our society would be. We don't need sex anymore when women can just go to the sperm bank. Sex is not only unnecessary, but just complicates human lives and society. The same can be said of family love , it's so primitive it makes me gag. Sure it was necessary when we were hardly not apes, but now it just leads to nepotism and us being with people we don't want to or loving people we ought to hate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanity needs to be rid off humanity and sexuality\n","id":"b2589ff2-a349-46f7-8a8d-830cfee2b874"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think they got what they had it coming, years of pushing others around, acting completely untouchable, they finally got a taste of what they have been putting other countries through for years and were knocked down a peg. It's a tragedy that so many innocent people had to die to give them the wake up call but I don't think they didn't have it coming. Thousands of people die every day all over the world for pointless and preventable reasons, being Americans doesn't make the victims special in any way shape or form.  just in case anyone tries to play this card I'll say now I'm a white, male Canadian. EDIT I'm not condoning the slaughter of civi targets, what I meant and apparently did a poor job of conveying is that the US thought they were untouchable and they got a swift slap across the face. They have attacked others with no regard to military or civilian status and their aggressors are just playing by the rulebook they wrote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the US deserved 9\/11\n","id":"9a7d5abc-d416-45f6-b8d2-83e33ac149da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Electric vehicles are better than fossil fuel vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>To reinforce how early in BEV development we are only in 2017 did the Chevy Bolt become the first mass production non Tesla vehicle to offer a 60kWh battery. In 2012 the anti establishment manufacturer Tesla began with no smaller that a 60kWh battery which was the least popular. As the market leader we should consider 60kWh as the low bar for modern BEVs easily capable of 1 million miles per battery, with second lives as stationary storage, with their replacements being even higher energy dense<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alternatives to fossil fuel-based transportation can only emerge by employing new technologies and allowing them to mature with consumer use. Look how far the internet has come in 20 years. Innovation and competition help create better products and services. EVs are competing in the infancy stage and will surpass fossil fuel automobiles as the technology matures.\n","id":"d0893435-0968-4f42-a836-108ccbf7f1a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kyoto Protocol, Debate on whether the Kyoto Protocol helps to combat global warming<|ARGUMENT|>Leslie Evans. \"Kyoto Protocol Said to Harm Effort to Stop Global Warming--But There Is Something Better\". UCLA International Institute. May 25, 2007 - \"2. The Kyoto Protocol is extremely difficult to implement. \"It is costly and involves moral hazards.\" There are three implementation mechanisms: A Trade in permits to emit greenhouse gases. B Joint implementation mechanism. C Clean development mechanism.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kyoto is too difficult to implement; won't cut emissions\n","id":"3ad9145e-f1a3-4a39-8bf4-ebd7084823d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is naturally an incredibly controversial topic and I highly doubt that many people will agree with me, but I feel compelled to discuss this. This needs to be prefaced by saying that all of this is based on averages, not individuals. I'm sure many women are more capable than many men, what I'm saying is that the general trend across the board is that on average a male worker is more productive. Men work almost triple the amount of overtime hours than women. Men work more standard hours than women. Women take more sick days off work than men. Women are more likely than men to take several years of maternity leave off of work. A small percentage of women undergo severe PMS and consequently work at a diminished capacity for several days of each month. To use anecdotal evidence, yesterday i came in to work, to find that all 8 garbages were completely filled. This was strange, since the closing crew is supposed to take out the garbages every night. I asked my coworker why no one had done the garbages last night, and I was effectively told that only girls were working the closing shift, and none of them wanted to touch the garbages because they thought it was gross. So I had to take out 8 garbages first thing in the morning, because I was a man. Additionally, the parking lot was overflowing with trash that had spilled out of the over packed garbage cans, but none of the girls had done the usual nightly responsibility of sweeping, since they thought it was a man's job as well. I'm not talking about one or two co workers here, there were 7 women on shift, and every single one of them followed this gender stereotyped idea of what closing responsibilities they should have. Its one thing if men and women divide tasks based on relative strengths and weaknesses, but if someone neglects to do a task because there's no one of the opposite sex to assign it to, that is ridiculous. When only men are closing, someone still ends up washing the dishes and shining the countertops. Due to the biological, sociological, and psychological factors that women face, they are on average less suited to performing excessive labour, and in an economic system where more work more money, it is no surprise that men make more than women. What I find most surprising is that when I bring up this issue, I am met with incredible opposition, as if I am trying to oppress women or promote sexism. The truth is, an entire branch of feminism exists for the very reasons I have stated socialist feminism believes that men have a higher capacity to work and are therefore at an advantage in a capitalist society. They believe the only way wage equality can happen is through instating socialist policies that ensure employers are forced to pay men and women equally. I am not saying that women deserve to be paid less because they have children for example, humanity needs new people to be born , and as such women should not be penalized for taking time off work to raise children. However, we do not live in a moral democracy. We live in a capitalist democracy, where employers are free to pay their employees whatever they think is proportional to the revenue or work that each specific employee will bring to the company. On average, certainly not always, but on average, men can generate slightly more work and revenue than women. Thus, the only way women can achieve equal pay is through socialist change in legislation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In a capitalist society, it is completely reasonable for men to make more money than women.\n","id":"07aaeaea-3506-408b-add9-daa7ea428e26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Viruses meet the Requirements for Life?<|ARGUMENT|>This would make them similar to jumping genes which can copy or cut themselves from a genome and then paste themselves into other parts of the DNA. This would mean they have never been complete living organisms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some scientists believe that viruses started as rogue segments of genetic code that adapted to a parasitic existence.\n","id":"42e9e2b4-0c3f-414d-91d9-0e28d7fa2a47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Today, the world is filled with conflicts between religious groups. People rush to defend their religion, and think of other's religion as inferior. People are fighting wars sorely on the basis of religion, and the recent Charlie Hebdo massacre was done on the grounds of religion. I am here with an alternate proposal That of no religion at all, aka atheism. Of course, I don't mean eradication of Religion. That would be impossible. I am just saying that a world without religion would be a world with less conflicts. One may pose the argument that the institution of religion unites people under a single umbrella, but that ship has passed. There are too many sects, too many divisions too many views for this to be effective. If one is not driven by religion, there would be less chances of conflicts. I don't mean no conflicts at all. Conflicts are bound to happen, but religious conflicts are one of the major factors. So why not remove religion from the equation and unlock a more peaceful world?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think atheism is the better path than religion, as it can cause less conflicts\n","id":"35309e57-3fe1-4fb2-8d1b-9cf80781de66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't believe that adults who identify as transgender are just going through a phase. Clearly they've given this thought and consideration and as adults I believe they are hopefully mature enough to make a calculated and informed decision about how they choose to identify. Children, on the other hand, are not we are perfectly willing to write off things like the emo jock rebel introvert rocker only vintage clothing phase, we're perfectly willing to write off first loves as nothing important or long lasting, but for some reason if a 12 year old decides that suddenly they're a different gender, it should be treated with the utmost seriousness and respect. I'm not advocating that if a young boy suddenly tells his parents, I'm a girl, they should say, No you're not and force him to ask more masculine. But I think there's nothing wrong with a parent shrugging and saying, Yeah whatever, because by next year the child might say, Psh I'm so over that. EDIT Wow this blew up more than I expected. Will attempt to go through all the comments and respond as I have time, though also please read through other comments to avoid repeating points. Also, anecdotal evidence is bad evidence. EDIT 2 Two things I want to emphasize that I realize were not made apparent from my initial prompt. A parent shrugging and saying Whatever is not them ignoring their child or pretending they're lying wrong, it's them saying, I'm not making a big deal out of this because it doesn't really matter for right now. As time passes, then a parent can give it more attention. The main reason I am against parents whole heartedly supporting a child's decision to come out as transgender buying them opposite clothes, getting them a drastic haircut, changing their name, etc. is because of the social persecution they potentially face. People are right that it's little skin off a parent's back to support their child, but I think too much of these comments are focusing on just the home life and ignoring the outside life. EDIT 3 Blatant hostility or claims without substantiation will no longer be responded to. EDIT 4 There are multiple distinct issues at play here that I think need to be separated. I don't think that the majority of prepubescent children are well equipped to make life changing decisions, as children are typically rash and impulsive, and make choices without understanding or appreciating consequences. If a child decides they are transgender but does not decide that they need to transition or have any outward and immediately recognizable signs behaviors, then they're not who I'm talking about. I'm talking about children who decide they are transgender and then are going to take steps that will make this realization publicly known and thus will likely make them targets. Many people are bringing up the fact and I recognize that it's a fact that trans children who have poor familial support are at higher risks for suicide, yet are conveniently ignoring or downplaying the effect that social persecution has on them as well. As I said in another reply, I am far more concerned that my child would become a victim of bullying and outright abuse and are not equipped to deal with that, so I'd rather not encourage not encourage discourage their transition until I was sure they'd be able to deal with that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A child's nontraditional gender identity can be written off as \"just a phase\"\n","id":"07995337-7a4f-4cf9-af58-c70ce35a5b33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Bee Products Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The logic of beekeeping is flawed and disastrous when one favors non-native species over native ones, denigrating the biodiversity of the ecosystem in the process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The bee species commonly used in commercial beekeeping have a negative impact on the environment.\n","id":"8328915c-6404-416a-b568-155d197fedaf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Grown ups constantly tell kids that they are special . A snowflake. They can do anything they put their mind to because they're just that special. However in reality they aren't. From the ground up we're all just star dusts and the tiny differences that separates us doesn't really justify feeling SO special. I think it gives kids a unrealistic view of themselves. Thinking that they are the next superstar. The next Justin Bieber or whatever kids want to be. This leads to self entitlement throughout their youth and when reality finally sets in sometime in their 20s, usually late 20s, they get a quarter life crisis because they are only normal. They haven't achieved fame, cured cancer or anything. They are ordinary and that is bad very bad because they've been taught all their lives that they need to be special. I am all for instilling self confidence in kids, but one can do that without telling them that they are sooo special and unique and superawesome without ever having done shit. In reality 99 of people aren't special. They are replacable ants in the bigger scheme of things. Maybe 1 100 will actually do something that is extraordinary in their life and maybe 1 100 is very different, but most of us are really just flowing in the collective wind so to speak. Another percieved side effect of this mentality is that they exclude themselves from feeling like they belong. Because they think they are so special they think their problems are special too and noone could possibly relate or help them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think people should think they are special.\n","id":"36d0df37-624a-48a4-a0b8-c211a7c13d69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As far as is my understanding of copyright law, Choreography is a relatively recent addition to protect intellectual property, but it is defined as a long form dramatic work and specifically excludes social dances or moves. This is analogous to writing. You can copyright a book, but you cannot copyright the individual words within them. You can copyright the choreography of a ballet, but you cannot copyright the individual steps and twirls. For reference here is the Legal Eagle channel weighing in on the issue, as well as the slapstick performer Nathan Barnatt The dances in Fortnite which are being sued over, in particular the 'floss' dance that the 'backpack kid' is suing over does not seem to constitute a choreography. The performances are so short, and the movements so simple that I think it would set an untenable precedent if the courts were to side in favour of the plaintiffs. If you can copyright an arm swing, could you copyright the use of jazz hands or the kick in a can can? Note here that that isn't a simple slippery slope argument, setting a legal precedent in the courts is the fundamental basis of case law. The decision would carry forward, and the courts are aware of this and therefore tend to be conservative when making grey area decisions and writing up their explanations of their rulings. I understand why these celebrities are suing, as Epic Games is using the existing popularity that their performances established for the dances as free publicity to see these animated emotes. They want to get a cut of the money because the only reason people are buying the animations are because they recognise them. It's free publicity that is being reaped for reward. However I think the best that they can hope for is a settlement out of court because the existing copyright law doesn't support their case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The lawsuits against Epic Games for their dance emotes in Fortnite will fail\n","id":"a8ae47f6-c9ba-4772-b9f9-993aa297659b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>Ephesians 2:20 \u201cAnd are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone;\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to the bible, the church is not a building, but the collective body of god's believers.\n","id":"73e86ab0-5ac8-44d2-943e-1546c26da5f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First things first I know this sounds kind of stupid, but 100 serious here not a troll. Dogs are not Disney cartoons. Yes, they're thinking, feeling creatures, but their ways of communication could hardly be any more different from ours. A dog leaping onto you is not expressing affection it's literally asserting dominance. A dog dragging you by the leash is not eager to play it's showing you who the top dog is and ordering you to follow the pack leader itself . A dog making eye contact is, again, asserting dominance read not affectionately gazing into its master's eyes. The list goes on. Seems like we've anthropomorphizing our cuddly partners a bit too much. Chances are, it's probably not thinking what most people think it's thinking. A dog that looks depressed to most of us is really just an obedient dog with a responsible owner. Man's best friend? That's some grade a bull. Man's best friend is none other than fellow man. Dogs have no capacity for logic reasoning skills and will bark at any stranger to feel better about themselves. We don't understand them very well, and they understand us even less. They've helped our hunter gatherer ancestors, and are still useful to people with certain disabilities today. But that makes them no more than co workers and can hardly be considered potential friends, given our inherent differences in nature. Dog experts of reddit, I'd love to have my mind changed on this one because I literally can't look at dogs anymore without thinking they are incredibly savage and overly hierarchical creatures undeserving of our attention.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dogs are not your friends.\n","id":"5e9d457e-483a-46fc-8f01-644cc92836e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, this wasn't made by some butthurt fan who's team missed the playoffs I'm a fan of the Wings, who are in the East and made the playoffs. Anyways, the NHL recently switched things up. It used to have 15 teams in the west, 15 in the east. 8 teams in a division would make the playoffs. In 2013, the Detroit Red Wings and the Columbus Blue jackets would switch from West to East and the Winnipeg Jets would go from East to West. So now what we're left with is 14 teams in the east, 16 in the west. This makes it harder to make the playoffs in east by a significant margin. For example Boston would have made the playoff this year if the Wings were counted as being in the west at the end of the season and the Wings would have made it in the west, bumping Minn out . Now, it doesn't really make much sense to have Winnipeg in the eastern conference, but they were originally the Atlanta Trashers, and when they moved, they just stayed in the east. So I get why they wanted to move that team but why move two western teams to the East? Columbus and Detroit are basically neck and neck as far as longitude goes, so if anything, just pick one, but both teams shouldn't have been moved. 14 vs 16 is making things easier in the west by a significant amount. Now I understand that the Detroit Red Wings franchise wanted to move to the East due to travel and whatnot, but that isn't enough of a reason to unbalance the divisions. With the new expansion coming, things should balance out, but I don't see why they did this in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NHL having 14 teams in one division and 16 in the other is unfair and shouldn't have been changed.\n","id":"2e974fbf-d75a-4615-a64c-b075d21afac7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A compare and contrast of these two would go on forever. Basically, most people know the accomplishments of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. To sum it up Steve Jobs was basically a prick that reinforced consumerism, while Elon Musk makes you believe anything is possible<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Elon Musk is 10 times the entrepenuer, revolutionary, innovator, and human being that Steve Jobs ever was..\n","id":"ebb35e3a-eb98-4f00-9413-ec28c71d9881"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Social Media Been Good For Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>During Superstorm Sandy, most people didn\u2019t have power, but some cell networks and WiFi towers were still operational. Many people used Facebook to detail the destruction and reassure friends or family that they were safe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There have been several disasters during which social media provided the only viable venue for communication.\n","id":"7c7a0daf-33ea-4f3c-bf20-870549663089"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should renewable energy sources replace fossil fuels?<|ARGUMENT|>Biogas is a viable replacement for natural gas as it can be introduced into the existing gas infrastructure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Renewable energy sources and sufficient energy storage should replace fossil fuels for grid power.\n","id":"219984ce-8b8d-48e2-b867-866ddc582c77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of my biggest criticisms of freedom of religion is the fact that we can't properly define religion. Buddhism has no Gods but is generally considered to be a religion. Others believe in ancient aliens but nobody would call that 'being religious', while those people claim that Gods are actually aliens. If you look at Wikipedia gt Religion is an organized collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. gt gt Spirituality is belief in an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his her being or the deepest values and meanings by which people live. gt More recently The term spirituality lacks a definitive definition, although social scientists have defined spirituality as the search for the sacred, where the sacred is broadly defined as that which is set apart from the ordinary and worthy of veneration. gt So religion relates humans to a path enabling a person to discover the essence of his being and values and meaning by which he should live, or it's a search for the sacred which is set apart from the ordinary and worthy of veneration . By that definition, Objectivism is a religion. gt Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions, the answers to which underlie man's every thought, feeling and action, whether he is consciously aware of it or not Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do? gt gt They have never discovered the fact that the trouble comes from the three unanswered questions \u2014 and that there is only one science that can answer them philosophy. gt gt Particularly, why should one study the philosophical theories which are blatantly false, make no sense, and bear no relation to real life? gt My answer is In self protection \u2014 and in defense of truth, justice, freedom, and any value you ever held or may ever hold. gt Ayn Rand, Philosophy Who Needs It? gt I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window no, I don't feel how small I am but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body. gt gt The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces will ever equal or approach. gt I think nobody can properly define religion it's not an obvious category with a distinct function. If religion is not significantly different from non religion, the use of the term 'religion' in laws is inherently discriminatory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think nobody can properly define religion.\n","id":"767fecc2-3727-402c-b5ff-a2971b236631"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see redditors from the USA posting and commenting about how they believe their country to be the best in the world. I talk to people in Australia who believe the same thing about this country. I believe these people are completely out of touch with the global community and are in fact damaging the global community by holding views that their country is better than others. I expect to see this behaviour when analysing the ancient history of humans and nations, but I expect better from modern society.  EDIT It has been rightly pointed out that I have misused the word patriotic. I cannot pinpoint a word that encapsulates what I mean but I am referring to the seemingly extreme love for one's country of origin where they believe that it is superior in all ways to all other countries and will make decisions and have discussions under that assumption no matter what. EDIT 2 The word I'm looking for is Chauvinism and the damage I believe that can happen is better described by the word Jingoism Also as somebody commented the term Exceptionalism can be used somewhat to describe the attitude as well. EDIT 3 I've been asked to clarify a few terms I have used. Immaturity In retrospect this wasn't the most appropriate word to use but I still stand by analysis that it can make the nation 'look' immature in the attitude it holds, in the same way that an immature person would not hold rational or mature views about the world because of inexperience or otherwise. Global Community While many may not actually acknowledge the existence of a global community, I do see more an more evidence of said global community. I would use Reddit as a prime example of this global community though it has a western majority as it shows that people from around the world can come and have discussions and often show that we aren't dissimilar in a lot of key ways. I want to also plug my experiences in the open source programming scene where I see collaboration between people of many different nationalities and backgrounds on common projects and goals. There are many other examples especially in regards to scientific groups eg. CERN and governmental summits. Damaging An example of the damage I am referring to is like that which we are seeing at the moment between Australia and Indonesia. We had a very good and strong relationship between the two neighbouring countries until recently when it became apparent that the Australian Defense Signals Directorate had been spying on Indonesian ministers and their families including the Indonesian president and his wife. This data had then been shared with the NSA in the United States. Additional to these events, the Australian navy has been towing asylum seeker boats back into Indonesian territorial waters without the consent of the Indonesian government and subsequently lying about whether or not the breaches into their waters was intentional or not. These actions have been lobbied by Australians living particularly in Greater Western Sydney and who are known to hold said extreme views in my previous statements.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that being patriotic in the 21st century is damaging to the global community and displays national immaturity.\n","id":"3f112d21-8452-4d57-9831-da6d091eec0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Death penalty, Debate on Capital Punishment<|ARGUMENT|>David Gelernter. \"What do Murderers Deserve?\". Commentary Magazine. March\/April 1999 - \"Opponents of capital punishment describe it as a surrender to emotions--to grief, rage, fear, blood lust. For most supporters of the death penalty, this is false. Even when we resolve in principle to go ahead, we have to steel ourselves. Many of us would find it hard to kill a dog, much less a man. Endorsing capital punishment means not that we yield to our emotions but that we overcome them. If we favor executing murderers, it is not because we want to but because, however much we do not want to, we consider ourselves obliged to.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The death penalty is about punishment\/due desert, not vengeance\n","id":"8dd8f17f-9a7d-4493-8d34-04d75944503e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With a bit of privilege behind my back, while bringing up a child, I feel it is very important to get him to mingle with people from different sections of society. For example, this would include playing with less privileged kids by going to public parks. This should ensure a more grounded upbringing with a strong value system. I find this important enough that I relatively devalue the importance of spending time with children from higher income families. Posting on this subreddit for the first time, as I'd like someone to point out the gaps in my thinking. x200B EDIT Got a bunch of interesting replies to this, however, most seem to focus on whether they believe mingling with less privileged kids is good or bad. Would love to hear some views on thoughts on mixing with more privileged families. Pros cons? That is a view I would like to give a chance to change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Getting kids to mingle with different strata of society is helpful\n","id":"79700c5b-3f84-4c40-b6f0-66f111e0abf9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hold this belief because I believe that reddit as a site would be vastly improved by having a very active moderation team. Especially in light of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, I have seen tons of people throwing around slurs and comparing black people to monkeys among other things. I also believe that the admins should ban subreddits that are based on hate speech, such as r whiterights r greatapes. In addition admins should ban subreddits that promote violence against women such as r theredpill and r beatingwomen. I can anticipate a lot of the responses I'll get, so I'll address some counterarguments right now. This allows the admins to abuse their power and ban non racist sexist prejudice subreddits. I believe that in order for reddit to ban a subreddit, they should have to explain why it was banned, and give evidence that it was promoting hate speech. This censors free speech. Reddit is a private company that can do whatever they want legally. Anyone who wants to be racist could go to Stormfront or any other forum that tolerates hate. Where will the mods draw the line between satire and seriousness? This is actually a good point and I think it would be tricky. r iamgoingtohellforthis is a subreddit that I frequent and even though there is a lot of awful shit on there, I think most of it is satire and not problematic. Again, I believe that giving the admins discretion over what they do is important, because they're not stupid, and they know what subreddits are actually racist. On a similar note, I also believe that subreddits that have a large number of racist sexist users but does not promote hate speech as a whole should not be banned. An example of this would be r mensrights. I believe that even though a large number of users there are sexist, the purpose of the sub is simply bringing attention to men's issues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit should ban subreddits and users that promote hate speech.\n","id":"8329b53b-167d-4327-be60-6021f51c3b89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The Daily Stormer Style Guide is concerned with ensuring their tone and approach is light, so as not to put off those still dabbling in white supremacism. 'Genuine raging vitriol' is offputting for the 'overwhelming majority' of readers; they design their content to quietly, gently indoctrinate people to more extreme views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Part of the problem with allowing white supremacists a voice is not merely that they will shout racist slogans; the real concern is how they rally people to their cause, and use clever, considered rhetoric to manipulate and strengthen their support base.\n","id":"db2f4e4e-e498-4f07-ba77-65f2e11b2b2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will the impact of AI in the educational sector be positive?<|ARGUMENT|>Using AI could ultimately bring down costs for schools, as they may replace other technology and possibly even some staff.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The impact of AI on the education sector will be positive.\n","id":"aee09c39-1f69-4422-bf3e-7494e486ced8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So let me start that saying I'm an advocate for drugs, to a fault, so my view will be naturally slanted. However, I know there's much more responsible people who agree with me on this subject. I just finished reading a book called the Acid Test. I highly recommend it. It tells the stories of a select few peoples lives which have been changed by the use of psychedelics, including Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS Multidisclipinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Their goal is to research psychedelics to further shed light on the harms as well as the benefits of these drugs. Eventually, they hope to achieve the goal in my title. So, Reddit, change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think psychedelics should be able to be administered responsibly to adult patients by trained therapists.\n","id":"a63887a9-b9f6-45a9-b4b1-79adda630313"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The chances of actually winning the lottery are so miniscule that it is almost guaranteed that the ticket money is lost. It is extremely probable, even playing every week for the rest of your life, that you will never win. I therefore think that playing even once is irrational. The only motivation for buying a ticket that I see is some joy in the anticipation or the thrill of dreaming what it would be like to win. But considering the actual chances of winning, it is pretty much the same as not buying a ticket and dreaming what it would be like if you win, the ticket makes no difference.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think buying a lottery ticket is completely irrational,\n","id":"7629eb45-cb08-4d19-a19a-36702a1b62ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>politicians have no right to privacy<|ARGUMENT|>Politicians, like all people, are not islands. They have loved ones and families. When a citizen chooses to offer him or herself up as a candidate for office he or she takes on many responsibilities. However, the politician\u2019s family can never be considered to have wholly consented to the arrangement, even if they support them in the election. They are in many ways innocent bystanders, yet when politicians are treated as having no freedom of privacy, their families too are stripped of that right unjustly.1 Thus, the right to privacy is worth protecting for politicians even if it could be shown that they had no real personal right to such respect. Rights exist in part to protect innocent parties, and the families of politicians are innocent, and would undoubtedly be prime victims of limitless media intervention. The recent ads produced by the National Rifle Association that target President Obama\u2019s daughters and their security detail has dragged girls who did not choose to be the president\u2019s daughters into the spotlight.2 Additionally, the fear of scrutiny of family might well have a serious chilling effect on anyone who might seek public office, resulting in a worse candidate pool, harming everyone. 1 Privacy International. \u201cPrivacy as a Political Right\u201d. Index on Censorship 2010 391: 58-68. 2 AFP, \u201cWhite House slams NRA ad targeting Obama daughters\u201d, Google News, 16 January 2013,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fixating on personal lives results in infringing the rights of more than just the politicians themselves\n","id":"6ddfaba6-3cb8-4fde-b0d4-d5e75b091c4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should begging for money be illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Being ineligible for social housing compounds a beggar's problems as, in addition to the obvious problem of having a lack of shelter, not having a fixed address often makes them ineligible to apply for jobs and other welfare schemes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For example, in some municipalities in Belgium, beggars with high levels of debt have been deemed ineligible for social housing.\n","id":"fa840881-209b-483d-b86f-84c48933b281"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hilary Clinton is able to run for the highest office in this nation after giving away classified information. Col. Oliver North smuggled drugs 3.Robert H. Richards IV Dupoint heir raped his son and 3 yo daughter, spared prison. 4.Ethan Couch killed four while intoxicated. vehicle manslaughter. I feel that Hilary should be in prison as well as the rest of these people. Although its not the same, I feel if Edward Snowden was Edward Clinton, he would be a national hero. Hopefully one day I can win the lottery so I can start my own criminal enterprise. Joking. In not all cases but most, rich people do get off easier when they break the law. I think it\u2019s because rich people can pay their way out of situations and not even realize the consequences which poor people can not. As stated in the article, \u201cvictim rights advocates who questioned whether a teenager from a low income family would have received as lenient a penalty.\u201d Since Ethans parents are famous and wealthy, they are able to hire amazingly good lawyers which are a huge factor when dealing with the law. Also, Ethan is rich and teenager which allows him not as much penalty compared to him being a rich adult. Our criminal justice system does not treat rich and poor people equally and there is not a double standard depending on how much money a defendant has. Our criminal justice system should be based on equality. So, then rich and poor have the same consequences and everyone will keep in mind. Wealthier people will do whatever they want and think they can pay their way out of it. It is not fair to poorer people. Equality is supposed to be really important to our criminal justice system although it is not and should be fixed. There are many situations in which a famous person isn\u2019t getting the right punishment for their situation because of them simply being in high demand to the media. Such as people like Lindsey Lohan get away with the law because of her wealth. If she was a normal person, she\u2019d have the real punishment instead of an easier one. It is incredibly easier for people with money to navigate the criminal justice system than for people without because people can buy their way out of things. Also, its like rich people have a \u2018get out of jail for free\u2019 card and they can use it over and over again. People without money deal with the real circumstances and don\u2019t get what the article says is \u201cwas part of a growing trend of giving a young person a second change through rehabilitation instead of trying him as an adult.\u201d Ethan does not even deal with the real circumstances that he should be getting. If Affluenza is not a real problem because wealthy people can\u2019t use affluenza as the cause of the problem. Ethan broke the law and he should go to jail. The judge should not take into account of whether Ethan is rich because even if he was poor, he still should\u2019ve went to jail. In the article, it says instead of Ethan getting 20 years in prison, he gets to be placed in a long tern treatment facility while on probation. Tarrant Country prosecutors do not realize that Ethan had killed 4 people He did not slightly injure them, he caused their deal The judge should\u2019ve put him in jail. Affluenza is a psychological malaise supposedly affecting wealthy young people, symptoms of which include a lack of motivation, feelings of guilt, and a sense of isolation. Although, one of my good friends has psychological malaises such as depression and anorexia and you can\u2019t blame everything on psychological malaise. Depression and anorexia can be treated but how do you treat affluenza? You simply can not because it is not real and should not be classified as if it is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel like if I was rich, or very wealthy , or If I had even a little political power, I could get away with selling drugs , murder, or classified information.\n","id":"416b7257-85b8-4669-8e73-ca745c5d595d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Israel attempted to actively conceal laws that it passed in order to effectively take over East Jerusalem: the Israeli Foreign Ministry told its ambassadors to refer to the annexation as 'municipal fusion', and ordered them to try to 'conceal' the laws.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel did not pre-emptively attack these territories in 1967 - it was a deliberate invasion, with the intention to capture territory Kurtulus, p. 238\n","id":"ae2c607f-18dc-4688-952a-7dc7c7eb0534"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>i am a pro choice atheist aka public enemy 1. i am surrounded mostly by pro life christians but for the most part we make it work. i have no problem with them expressing their views, discussion, even debate challenge me i love it but i think there is a distinction between stating your view and harassing the opposition. scenario 1 a pro life friend continuously uses the term pro death and posts scathing things about us pro death murderers and posting articles about baby slaughters. i got mad at her once and let her have it, but then came back and apologized calmly explaining i have been there before, it was very traumatic, and constantly coming in with the pro death murderer dren is opening wounds, you only post insults when it comes to the subject. i just asked that she consider the people she is hurting and even offered to give her my side of the story. her response was to say i'm welcome to give her a call and we'll talk about anything. except that. skip ahead and she's using the pro death murderer language again, and then she has the nerve to say don't condemn me my beliefs, i don't condemn you yours. in one of my more disgraceful moments i let her have it and called her out, reminding her that she continuously condemns with the pro death murderer insults and that i offered to help her understand the other side, but she flat out refused. of course, i got blocked because gt gt i'm the jerk lt lt and that's how that story ends. scenario 2 a couple weeks ago i got invited to a fb group of the creationists vs. evolutionists debate persuasion, in which the rules clearly state to respect the opposition's beliefs and not tell them they are going to hell. in my short time there i learned that calling us immoral liars, comparing us to the likes of Stalin and Hitler, making such vitriolic claims as we don't care about starving children, and making threads to attack people in lieu of making a rebuttal were all a ok {this was an attack towards me, by an admin no less}. as if that wasn't insulting enough, another moderator had a nasty habit of twisting my every word around. i finally told them i refuse to take part in conversation in which the opposition is being treated in such a manner {all the admins are creationists}, have a nice life, left the group and that's the end of that story. basically have no problem with opposing views or challenges, and i do realize in america we have the right to be jerks if we want. not questioning that. not questioning my sensitivity, i know that's there. basically my view is that there is a fine line between expressing your views and just plain harassing the opposition and i think in both scenarios that line was crossed and in the case of scenario 2 they probably can't even see it anymore. thoughts? gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"expressing your views vs. harassing the opposition\n","id":"0642787f-5b26-42c5-8252-ac9cd47a12a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is BDSM Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>People involved can stop at any time if they wish as they are taking part for mutual enjoyment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If there is no consent it is not BDSM. Consent is paramount to a proper BDSM relationship.\n","id":"401beecc-1dc8-4ee4-86c9-fe1314f6ce22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Marriage Equality Mean Eliminating Marriage Licenses And Tax Deductions?<|ARGUMENT|>Special treatment for married couples in the tax code gives people who don't want certain people to get married a claim to have an interest in other people's relationships. For example: \"If they get married, they'll pay less in taxes. Therefore their marriage is absolutely my business!\" Take that away, they have no reason beyond just a personal distaste to have any say in what other couples do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The largest reason state governments have to require marriage licenses is for tax purposes. Eliminating special treatment of married couples in the tax code removes a huge portion of the reasoning behind licenses.\n","id":"0825f0a1-d4ad-4fb5-a546-23ad2915ec4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The people's use of Reddit as a tool for governmental interaction is potentially translatable for use to all elected offices however, for the example we will use the US House of Representatives Within a congressional district, citizens desiring more community discussion and involvement from their representative can find a solution in Reddit. By creating a subreddit moderated for discourse around the concerns of a district, an online 'town hall meeting' may be generated over which citizens can hold their representative responsible. Within their congressional district subreddit, citizens can compel their representative to submit to regular AMAs. This system would establish a more open, accessible, and continuous dialogue and if realized would create greater influence over the People's representation in government. Reddit works as the best forum for community discussion because it is a democratic and egalitarian system where an individual's race, creed, and socioeconomic status play no role. All that matters for whether a post rises or falls in public awareness is the substance and merit of the thought. Moreover, Reddit is anonymous therefore shielding the individual from any social repercussions. Times have changed. In the past citizens of a community would congregate in public areas to discuss the issues of the day. Now people congregate on the Internet for discourse, however without representation. This can change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Reddit community has unrealized political power.\n","id":"8f760abd-d514-46b1-974a-b61da9878d4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Art Made By Abusers Be Removed From Cultural Institutions?<|ARGUMENT|>The pain of those suffering from the artist's behaviour is ignored by displaying the art.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Art made by abusers should be removed from cultural institutions.\n","id":"bdfab46b-3da0-4061-a13a-182d016f4255"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am sorry if this is half  half rant. I am female, 5'6 , and currently 120 lbs. I have always stayed the same weight, give or take about 15 pounds. In my adult life, I have never fallen below 102 lbs or been heavier than 133 lbs. I have battled body dysmorphia and anorexia my whole life. Obviously, my struggle doesn't match those who have it hard enough to land themselves in recovery centers or hospitals and best of luck to them, I can only imagine how could it get worse , but it has been a dominating factor in my life. It is a daily struggle that sometimes isn't so prominent, and at other times it controls my every decision. I haven't been hospitalized, but I have been monitored by our family doctor at home during the worst times in my life. Right now, I've been really struggling with a re emergence of this dominating force in my life, which is what brings this topic up now. In my attempts to seek out like minded people who have the same struggle, I have been rebuffed mainly by very overweight people who say I roll my eyes at people like you, What do you have to complain about? , I would love to be your weight, You can't say that around me, it's triggering, you may have body image issues, but you have less of a right to them since you're thin. My struggle is reduced to not offending people larger than me. I have explained to them that the size of your body doesn't necessarily match the size of the disorder, but am obviously rebuffed each time. Even those who have agreed with me that those of normal weight can have crippling mental disorders or dysmorphias say that we shouldn't talk about weight around those larger than us. So, I guess my opinions are as follows just because you are larger or smaller than I am does not mean I have to censor myself about my body, weight, or struggles around you. Just because I am of a normal weight does not mean my disorder doesn't exist. Just because others are much larger or smaller than I am, does not mean I am automatically just a pathetic whiner if they hear me talking about how I am having an especially hard day dealing with my lot. I shouldn't have to justify my disorder by prefacing it with proof like my doctor watching me and specific struggles in order to be heard. My struggle should be heard with as much respect and not negated as not that bad, not even a struggle by someone larger or smaller as the struggle of someone who is more underweight or overweight than I am. If you are overweight or underweight, you do not have a right to dominate censor a conversation and say you can't talk about weight if you're a normal size because it upsets me. I will say, though, if you have a mental disorder like this, I think it's perfectly fine in private conversation to say, Please don't talk about that, I am uncomfortable with it. Just not in a group setting or public setting. In those cases, the triggered person should remove themselves from the conversation since the world doesn't revolve around those of us with mental disorders. I am really tired of being told my struggle is not a struggle. Apparently the only support I have is myself, but I am also my own worst enemy in this particular topic. edit you all seem to be under the impression that I am seeking sympathy from people. I am not I am simply saying that I shouldn't be told I cant have a body food related disorder because I am thin. Stop using 'no one deserves sympathy' as your argument because it wasnt part of mine and completely off topic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"extra thin or extra fat people don't have dibs on body image issues and mental health\n","id":"c7e1770c-2f52-40d4-bbf6-439ed4131d1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Queen Elizabeth II has received many leaders during state visits since 1954. For example, she received the King and Queen of Spain in 2017 and the President of Portugal in 2016.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is still very common for monarchs to meet with leaders of other nations and other monarchs, highlighting their position of influence.\n","id":"51bb1e05-2c50-49f0-acfd-29f1ea3a8fd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is health care a human right?<|ARGUMENT|>There is an insufficient number of health care professionals working an insufficient number of man-hours to provide the level of care desired by universal healthcare advocates. Artificial external measures would be required to encourage\/force capable individuals to take up medical careers who otherwise would not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Health care is a finite resource, with many components, so it cannot be provided to every person equally. This means it cannot be a right.\n","id":"7313fc98-4ee0-4de2-8af4-0e79f5672b96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Vollgeld\/Monnaie Pleine\/Sovereign Money initiative should be accepted by the Swiss People.<|ARGUMENT|>Thomas Jordan, Chairman of the Swiss National Bank, claimed that Vollgeld was an unnecessary and dangerous experiment that would damage the Swiss economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No other country has ever attempted such an extreme initiative, so there is no precedent or example to go by.\n","id":"a9c1e1d0-3799-4cd1-880f-34b9c7fbe48f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me say first that I don't believe this is likely to occur. This would be horrible if it happened. however I would like to hear other's thoughts regarding this problem to see if someone may have found something I have not. When I first started learning about US immigration rules, it became clear that legal residency and citizenship were not the same. But that made be think if you can be a legal resident without being a citizen, can you be a citizen without being able to legally reside in that country? Historically of course everyone has heard of examples of banishment, deportation, exile, or transportation most famously probably in the creation of Australia as a British colony. While these examples are historical, one might say that there must be some law, rule, or constitutional provision that would explicitly protect a citizen of the US from having their legal residency status removed? After a significant amount of personal searching I can find no law statute, regulation, common law rule, court case that says citizens have an inherent and unremovable right to live in the US territory. There are plenty of cases that say that a citizen's citizenship can't be removed in X or Y circumstances but I'm not saying that the government would act against their citizenship. I'm only proposing that a government decide to remove legal residency rights from a group of people, even while allowing them to remain citizens. Perhaps this group is prisoners or terrorists or something the group is not important. The point is the power to remove the right to be here. But, you might ask, what justification could there be for removing legal residency from a citizen? The precedent I would look to is the Transportation Act of 1717. Parliamentary acts, prior to the Declaration of Independence, are considered part of the US common law e.g. The Statute of Frauds . This act was an exercise of unquestioned parliamentary authority to order criminals transported to the US. Several other transportation acts were made over the next century. However, at the time of the revolution, it is clear that this law was still in effect. Most states and federal courts consider that any common law precedent not specifically abrogated by statute, case law, or the Constitution to still be in effect. No case has found that the government doesn't have this power and powers the government doesn't use don't just disappear. They have to be specifically disallowed by the constitution or statute. E.g. in the absence of a constitutional provision against the use of cruel and unusual punishments, cruel and unusual punishments are allowed under US law and the common law tradition. Therefore, congress could use this justification to remove legal residency rights from citizens by statute or regulation, as it was one of the inherent common law powers of parliament at the time of the revolution.  1 first delta awarded required me to add this caveat the government must undertake a process or procedure that comports with some measure of due process. Having done this, they can remove a citizen's right to legal residency just as prisoners may have their right to freedom of movement abrogated. The due process must come first but then the government can remove you from the country. 2 second delta there is at least on SCOTUS case that may have some bearing in the issue US vs Wong Kim Ark 169 US 649 1898 . It's clear that a categorical bar against a citizen from entering the US will not be upheld. The victim was barred on account of his race, and there was no process before his Liberty was deprived of him. Therefore, the issue still remains that an act of congress may prevent citizens from residing in the US after undertaking due process to remove that liberty from the individual. Additionally arguably, entrance and residence are distinct. People with Visas may enter the US, but may not reside here past their time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US gov. could remove legal resident status from citizens.\n","id":"ff8e3dd7-46fb-49a1-a6c5-816b6c5bde3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>Methadone not only does not give you a high; it also blocks the high from taking heroin. It is completely different to a hard drug.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Methadone is a treatment for heroin addiction and not a hard drug.\n","id":"043952c5-95e0-4905-a68a-44162eede05e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapy Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The state restricts choices an individual can make which may harm themselves, as the state has more information e.g. the state knows that education is good so it does not allow parents to not send their children to school. Conversion therapy harms individuals due to, for example, the mental health problems it creates.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are also a plethora of choices individuals are not allowed to make.\n","id":"d76cb014-3064-4135-947b-94f569e26b73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I should live off what I need to survive, and donate the rest because that's more moral than the alternative. Either this is what we should be doing but people aren't comfortable talking about it, or people have come to some other conclusion and aren't talking about that either. As an aside, why don't people talk about this type of stuff more?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The most moral thing I could do starting now is to make as much money as I can in a non-immoral way and then donate it to the most efficient causes, diversifying a bit just for safety.\n","id":"3d505768-757d-4ab2-bca3-18215ac79ac4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>During the 2008 crisis horses, one of people's dearest animals, were left to starve on fields or brought to slaughterhouses<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taking the life of an animal has fewer consequences than taking the life of a human.\n","id":"0d10bef3-eb71-4c8f-a367-ac55d33ebe09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>The obligation to practice death penalty forces doctors have to violate the Hippocratic Oath which protects the right to life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lethal injection requires medical personnel being directly involved in killing. This is a fundamental contravention of medical ethics.\n","id":"23ef000c-cd57-45f5-975f-5f4c3b9b8ed6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>Several portions of the Quran including Suras 2:223, 2:228, 2:282, 4:11, 4:24, 4:34 appear to indicate women as inferior and often half the worth of men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Various holy books advocate for sexism and that women don't have the same rights as men.\n","id":"a7aff1ca-ee07-4578-bc87-1746d86ab53e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free trade<|ARGUMENT|>As long as the circumstances of the poor are improved overall by Free Trade, why should it matter that the wealthy are gaining disproportionately? Any system that benefits everyone on some level is a good system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is OK if free trade increases inequality as long as it is still a net benefit to the poor\n","id":"279bd4e2-bc59-4522-89d6-da4b17130d1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I consider myself somewhat of a democratic socialist, in favor of big government, social welfare, tax reform, income equality, financial regulation, social safety nets, and single payer universal health care. While many democratic candidates subscribe to these viewpoints, we could agree that I align more with Bernie Sanders than with Clinton. But, Bernie Sanders does not appear to me to be a candidate who can win a national election. Disregarding his age, I do not know if he has the name recognition or political acumen to win. He's never served in any other branch of Federal government while Clinton has been both a representative and a Cabinet member , has only ran in elections in very small, homogenous communities he actually has taken the seat of the same representative, Jim Jeffords, twice and does not, purely based on outward appearance strike me as Presidential. Hilary, on the other hand, either tacitly supports or implicitly supports the majority of these issues. She has a long history of work in both the Executive and Legislative branches of Congress. She has way more foreign policy experience than Sanders. She has a track record of being an unfathomably tough negotiator and person to be around, supposedly . When she's on , she seems composed, confident, and Presidential. Yes, she apparently shared documents on a personal email server which were unclassified at the time of sending, but reclassified later and she made a really dumb comment in a debate. But in terms of pure electability, I and most other political minds believe she is more likely to be President if she were to win the nomination. Now, none of the things I believe in will happen if Ben Carson, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, or Jeb Bush were to win the presidency. Is it wrong for me to vote for a candidate that I do not entirely agree with? Or, to put it more obviously, is the lesser of two evils a morally defensible argument?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I align more with Bernie, but I am voting for Hilary for the nomination because I don't believe Bernie can be elected.\n","id":"204d5d5e-3a6c-4df2-8368-fd6c99110790"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Macbeth a Tragic Hero?<|ARGUMENT|>The very first mention of Macbeth is from a nameless Sergeant \"For brave Macbeth--well he deserves that name\" Act 1, Sc ii and further \"O valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!\" from Duncan.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At the beginning of the play, Macbeth is considered a hero by all the other characters who speak of him.\n","id":"3ee18949-d0d5-40f7-9507-0f41bb89fc16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should straight actors play gay roles?<|ARGUMENT|>If an actor has auditioned for the role and gets it, their sexuality shouldn't come into it. Gay actors play straight roles so why shouldn't a straight actor play gay. It comes down to acting ability nothing else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If an actor is talented, then the character should be equally believable regardless of whether or not the actor has anything in common with their character they're playing.\n","id":"e77ea741-7434-4a49-b3bd-027482a387eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you think about it the United States is truely a mess compared to other large British colonies who got their independence without a revolution. If we look at Australia and Canada they have solved many issues the US has been struggling with. Britain has ended slavery long before the US did which would have made race relations today much better. Without the Revolution we wouldn\u2019t be so obsessed with guns that kill tens of thousands a year compare to single figures in Canada Australia. We would have universal healthcare and not be lagging behind the rest of the developed world. Really hard to think of any positives of the American Revolution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The American Revolution was detrimental to modern day America\n","id":"9895695a-fbe3-4610-a1d2-890b464f60d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In High school there was a kid who got a huge amount of help, he was pretty much above the rules and just slept through classes. I don't see why they are helped so much if they honestly will never really get a good job if they even get a job probably no higher education and will likely live off the state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people with mental disabilities should not be given the massive amount of extra help they get in school.\n","id":"931c230f-c2b4-42b4-b994-f76c1729fbf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m a musician, so I hear this kind of talk a lot, from fellow musicians and non musicians alike. When I share a piece of music that I like, I often hear \u201cthis is shit,\u201d or \u201cthis other song is so much better,\u201d and even positive reactions such as \u201cthis is so much better than that dubstep garbage \u201d And so often, I hear that terrible, terrible word \u201cObjectively \u201d There are things that you can say objectively about art. You can tell me what key a song is in, or what kind of paints were used on a canvas. But I really don\u2019t see how you can ever speak objectively about the quality of a work. Art is, at its core, about the individual\u2019s reaction to it. It is based on emotion. There are no quantifiable measurements that can determine if something is good or not, or better than something else. Now, I agree that there are often cultural standards by which we judge art. A Monet painting is generally considered to be better than a stick figure. But is that because of some innate quality within it, or is it because we have been raised in an environment that teaches us a preference? Someone who grows up listening to rap will probably think that rap is better than jazz, for instance. As further evidence, entire artistic movements throughout history have been dedicated solely to destroying these standards. Dadaism and the music of John Cage are conspicuous examples. These movements were never about making \u201cbad\u201d art, but rather art that doesn\u2019t fit the societal standard. I guess the summary of my belief is that elitism is dumb, because there is no objective measure of quality in art. I think people need to recognize that if they don\u2019t like a piece, it\u2019s not because that piece is bad, but because they have not had the cultural background needed to appreciate it. Anyway, let me know what you think.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\u201cObjective quality\u201d does not exist in art.\n","id":"7e9f4b72-1963-4f97-896c-6b67e2c91289"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cognitive biases should be allowed to run their course<|ARGUMENT|>The 1996 Mt. Everest climb disaster was a result of the climbers cognitive biases. Their past expeditions were conducted under good weather conditions, and contributed to the leaders\u2019 overconfidence and underestimation of the dangers from a storm, which resulted in their deaths.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If past experiences were conducted under good conditions, cognitive biases might make an individual overconfident and put them in dangerous situations\n","id":"e6f9cb56-67ac-4a53-ba00-6fb226cc15f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>America has a population of 320 million, the rest of the world has about 7 billion. If the whole world allied against us it would require our population to militarize. We should be prepared for this hypothetical scenario. Students should either be directly taught their role during total war or covertly taught. Students should be ready to lead in their field of study and possibly to mobilize the masses or transfer their knowledge. Each profession should have a contingency plan. An intelligence agency should be built around all professions and institutions and their data coalesced and analyzed. Drills should be run on the unsuspecting public as well as double blind studies. Then when total war breaks out we will be prepared.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Institutions of higher education should prepare students for total war\n","id":"ac3b00ba-71be-433e-9268-acd1c84ebb65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU introduce a carbon tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Poor neighborhoods are less likely to receive greater investments in new or innovative services or urban greening. Such investments are said to reduce pollution and increase citizens' health.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reduced air pollution is likely to improve health outcomes disproportionately in low-income communities where pollution mortality and morbidity rates are highest\n","id":"a58fa53b-fea4-4dbf-8403-fa2b8874b08b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off I don't mean the actual eugenics, where it is all genetics based. It's all about the compatibility of the couples and their ability to raise children well. Personal preface I did not have a very happy childhood. I was raised by a single mother, and she, while caring, raised me very, very wrong, and I've come to realize that fact only relatively recently. I was a social shut in, had a hard time making friends or even socializing with others throughout the high school all thanks to bullying. That wouldn't be so bad, if her advice didn't destroy any development I had then as a person. Even now, I'm not OK, I'm not really fully sane at all. I'm a miserable being full of irrational hate towards quite a few things Well, I won't go on anymore. There are many other children who have it even worse, even with both parents, because they are horrifyingly bad parents. They are brought into this world against their will by the dumb shits who should never ever have children. Why continue this? It only causes misery for the children, trouble for the governments dealing with child abuse, etc. Together with legal abortion, any illegal pregnancies should be aborted, and the parents fined sentenced. And professional psychiatrists, government employed should evaluate couples if they are able to stay together and care for the child, and either give the permit, or not. This system would not be without it's flaws, because it would require a rather intrusive and annoying control, requiring you to show a child bearing permit to police officers or anyone else enforcing said law. It would also do little against the poor, rural people who already breed like rabbits. But a few jail sentences and crippling fines would eventually curb it, as long as the foster care is strictly controlled by the government so that orphans have a good childhood. It would get awkward with same sex couples, but I'm sure the permit would allow them adoption instead. This would also really simplify adoption for them, hopefully. Another hurdle is the evaluation experts themselves it would require time for them to gain experience in order to evaluate couples well. It would most likely have to end up as a very very well paid job, requiring the best of the best in human psychology. Which is not that bad of a way to attract people to that discipline. Also the economic aspect how to decide if a rather poor couple can have children? This ties in to my previous point the evaluating professionals need to take everything in account, and predict possible outcomes a very difficult, if at all possible task. But as long as the system makes sure that the neglected, abused and miserable children are nearly non existent, it has done it's job. As long as children grow up as more or less sane, healthy and functional human beings, the system has done it's job, even if there are far less of them. To clarify once again, I do not mean eugenics aka gene based breeding. It's all about only allowing the fit parents to have and raise children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be a permit for couples to have children.\n","id":"3ab81c92-601d-477e-b9f2-deeaaa8b9b2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Neocons and Leolibs aka the sellouts praise the wonders of the free market and capitalism constantly and yet seem to do mental gymnastics when it comes to immigration and labor supply. They constantly tell us that supply and demand is a wonderful economic dynamic and yet somehow claim that bringing in more people to do cheap labor labor supply won't hurt American wages labor demand . Obviously I don't currently believe this because the simple math of adding more people who are overwhelmingly in the employee category to compete for a finite amount of jobs will result in people bidding down themselves in order to get work and this is only good for corporations who get tons and tons of cheap labor as a result. The neolibs currently dishonestly portray wanting closed borders as a racism issue but the truth of the matter is that adding any people from anywhere will hurt wages white, black, brown or purple. The other dishonest claim that neolibs will sometimes now make is that immigrants take jobs that Americans don't want . However, there is no actual statistics to prove this or legislation to ensure this and even if first generation immigrants don't take American jobs, their children could very likely take the jobs of the next generation. Ironically, Bernie even knew all this in 2016 when he stated that open borders is a Koch brothers idea to get corporations cheap labor So, if someone has an economically feasible explanation as to why immigrants don't drive down wages and has evidence to back it up, I am eager to see it. Saying that they don't take the jobs we want is a statement of baseless pacification because there is literally nothing preventing them or their children from acquiring any job that will hire them and obviously the whole reason people come to America is to work the most lucrative job they can acquire.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Immigration and open borders drive down American wages\n","id":"c2b8b5d2-6472-49e5-9b5a-60ce6232c6ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Eating humans is forbidden in practically all societies and regarded as taboo, whilst eating animals of any kind is not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taking away the life of an animal carries less consequences than taking the life of a human.\n","id":"ce0146ee-7d47-44ce-8a0c-5a3d8102c7ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>subsidise the translation of academic work in the languages of developing countries<|ARGUMENT|>Governments and academic institutions have no special duty to give full access to all information that they generate and publish in academic journals to anyone who might want it. If they want to make their research public that is their prerogative, but it does not follow that they should then be expected to translate that work into an endless stream of different languages. If there is a desire by governments and institutions to aid in the academic development of the developing world, there are other ways to go about it than indiscriminately publishing their results and research into developing world languages. Taking on promising students through scholarships, or developing strategic partnerships with institutions in the global south are more targeted, less piecemeal means of sharing the body of global knowledge for example the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences funds junior scientists from the developing world working in their labs.1 States owe their first duty to their own citizens, and when the research they produce is not only made available to citizens of other countries but translated at some expense, they are not serving that duty well. It will prove to be a fairly ineffective education policy. 1 \u2018Building Research Capacity in Developing Nations\u2019, Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol 114, No. 10, October 2006,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The West has no particular obligation to undergo such a sweeping policy\n","id":"9b957ad3-b4d7-4b05-94d7-2b3ca5a9d7e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The myth is based on the views of a 'messenger from God', the group is led to irrational behaviour on threat of eternal damnation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is based on myth and God cannot be demonstrated and is undetectable.\n","id":"fb06bbd2-7b9f-4e3a-aa98-485e2f57b383"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Doping Cheat's Entire Olympic Team Should Be Stripped Of Their Medals<|ARGUMENT|>This debate is about whether the teammates hold the responsibility for one teammate\u2019s wrongdoings. The whole team doesn\u2019t win when one person does a good job; for the same reason, we believe the WHOLE team cannot lose because one person did something bad. Why should we punish people who have earned medals when one team member makes a bad decision that others didn\u2019t or might\u2019ve not known about? It was the athlete\u2019s decision and s\/he should be held responsible for his\/her actions, not the teammates. Like we\u2019ve mentioned in previous arguments, proposition had a fallacy in their argument that this motion would create social pressure as it was based on a heavy assumption that these teammates knew what was happening at all times. This assumption fails to apply to all of cases and also does not explain why the teammates deserve to be stripped of their medals if they were to deserve the medals as any other athletes who played accordingly to the regulations. Even if teammates knew, this wouldn\u2019t necessarily cut down motivation for the athlete to stop dope usage because their motivation solely depends on winning, and they will instead try to hide the fact they are doping from their teammates which can actually increase negative health risks as prop is concerned about. Also, we have to consider the alternate athletes of the team. The motion does not deal with Olympic participants, but team members. We should be aware that a team is often made up of the number of people they require plus an alternate. An alternate athlete is given the opportunity to participate in a competition when the main athlete gets injured or sick; they may not play in the game but are still considered as a member of a team. Alternate athletes may not even participate in the game, but for the fact that they used dope, they have the potential to ruin their whole team\u2019s career. With this in mind, it is evident that punishing the entire team is unjustifiable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Punishing the entire team is unjustifiable especially when an athlete who doesn't even participate can ruin the whole team's career.\n","id":"b82ea02e-115c-4b28-a4a2-a20d36df586d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments pursue predictive policing technology?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the social contract theory, the state has a responsibility to protect its citizens in return for citizens abiding by its laws. p. 850<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is the moral duty of the government to protect its citizens and keep them safe using all tools at their disposal.\n","id":"270e8051-382f-4984-bb38-05b0e06d2d45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What will life look like once humans achieve longer lifespans?<|ARGUMENT|>If people live longer, then they'll have more time to work on long-term or megaprojects that they'd typically put off with short lifespans. Delving into projects requires focus which involves isolation, which would be for years instead of spending that time socializing with others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The longer people live, the more they have time to get into their projects especially longer ones, so what they put off and don't prioritize, they now will. This will isolate them, as they'll de-prioritize socializing in favor of these projects.\n","id":"f3227238-9fe7-48e9-84d0-9127f316a055"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Governors execute the laws that their legislatures pass, they respond to disasters, they act as a backstop to the judicial system if someone is harshly punished through pardoning people, they guide economic policy, they are chief cheerleader for their state. Basically, they have plenty to do, and plenty of places to show folks that they are leading through doing leadership things in a very leady way. They shouldn't be inserting their opinion into a system that has police, district attorneys, prosecutors, and judges who all have their own roles to play. It's bad enough that juries are already tainted by the media coverage of a story, but now your own governor is telling you what you ought to do. I feel like consoling the people by throwing despicable criminals under the bus is a cheap and dishonorable move.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governors of states have no business \"calling\" for the death penalty for the perpetrator of a crime. At the moment, I'm looking at you, Nikki Haley.\n","id":"1e8e3a38-9ccf-441c-b6dc-c42daf0ba34c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most of what I hear and see about Wonder Woman leads me to believe she's sexist. In the depictions I've seen of her she comes from a society that banished men, she seems to be surprised when men are good and on the opposite side of things, surprised when women are evil and generally can't go five minutes without calling men dicks because her dad was an asshole. To clarify, this isn't some men's rights post. I don't care on some kind of personal level if she is or isn't sexist, I just kind of want it clarified for me because a lot of people say she isn't sexist yet in the examples I've seen of her the Justice League cartoon, the animated Wonder Woman film, the Flashpoint comic book series she pretty much just hates men in general. A lot of people have also told me that while Wonder Woman herself isn't sexist, the Amazons are, so I could kind of do with that being explained too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Why isn't Wonder Woman sexist?\n","id":"63d14e73-4e83-499e-a162-fa4bf8ceddbb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Immigration, can not reduce the worlds poverty, immigration will not fix the problems expressed. Taking individuals from impoverished populations with the goal to fix world poverty, or fix the worlds problems; is immoral, and ineffective. www.youtube.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any responsibility that high-income countries have towards refugees can typically be discharged without taking them in.\n","id":"04e29456-d401-4f58-a5c3-42b4c122a7bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>Although Switzerland holds more referendums than any other country, its voter turnout in elections at around 50% or less is among the lowest in the OECD and has been low for decades OECD, p. 97<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Frequent referendums lead to voter fatigue and make elections seem less important, thereby harming voter turnout.\n","id":"3bf6ee06-eb4b-48fc-b74b-cc854a96349a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Individual data privacy is necessary for a healthy society<|ARGUMENT|>Privacy enables freedom of thought. Without freedom of thought we cannot develop ideas, and without ideas humans can\u2019t do much and all progress is limited.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Protecting individual data privacy is necessary for a healthy society.\n","id":"7422246e-ff7c-4879-8a37-94f798da90e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>If a man dresses with a t-shirt showing female nipples, it is no different from a woman showing her nipples directly or a man showing his newly acquired breasts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A transgendered individual either has male or female body parts, and are therefore aware of the same regulations for either male or female that need to be followed.\n","id":"8621c59e-367d-4ad8-9076-5cb519695a4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>\"On this occasion Inoue declared that actual peace terms were unimportant so long as the term \"unconditional surrender\" was not employed.\" - CIA<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There was no pressing military need for dropping atomic bombs on Japan.\n","id":"fe7b7af5-1cfe-497c-af13-54c791d6a7e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So after the big hoopla regarding Trump and the joke that we should try getting rid of term limits, I've actually given it some thought and I think it might be a good thing. Not that I am a supporter of Trump, I am in fact quite the opposite and think him to be a protofascist, and would be concerned that any attempts by him to abolish term limits would be an exercise to concentrate power rather than a good faith attempt to improve democracy. No limit on terms would force leaders to work in the best interest of their nation in long term timescales. Forcing leaders to step down after 8 years means that they have no care for what happens after 8 years time. They will work to ensure that things appear fruitful during that time period, and in doing so have people associate prospering with their choices in government, but from the moment they are elected, they know that any decisions they make that will cause negative consequences 8 or more years down the road will be associated with someone else. If there is the possibility of them still being in power after that period of time, they will at least have to consider the possibility of having to be held accountable. When considered with the two party system, term limits go as far as to encourage leaders to cause bad consequences further down the road. Many have pointed out how the Republican party is suspect of doing this as a long term strategy, knowing that there is likely to be a leader from the other party after their term, and set that other party up to fail. Abolishing term limits could end up forcing Republicans to abandon this meta gaming strategy. Term lengths could be drastically reduced if limits are increased are abandoned altogether. Only allowing two terms encourages an argument for making term limits much longer. A very common frustration with people is how long a period of time needs to elapse after a poor electoral choice has been made. After Trump, a very poor choice, was elected, it has been nearly one and a half years with no action despite a majority of people wanting it so, and it seems two full years might need to elapse before the possibility of impeachment could happen, and if that fails it will need to be another two years to vote him out. In the case where a leader is simply incompetent in a non criminal way, it would take a full four years to do so. If terms limits are reduced, we could have elections every year, without having shakeup of having leaders churned in and out before they are able to get in the swing of things. It would also allow a referendum every quarter or so where particularly bad leaders could be held accountable with calls for snap elections if enough people vote to do so. Currently with term limits, leaders are able to make solid arguments that their election gives them a right to rule for as much as four years regardless of how their perform. The argument that term limits could concentrate autocratic behavior doesn't hold much weight with me. In fact, I think it does the reverse. Sudden trends towards populist leaders during times of crisis can cause quick power consolidation. If a group of authoritarians decides to take advantage of a situation to consolidate power, they are able to do so, knowing that they have a very real possibility of replacing more democratic leaders, knowing that those leaders will be out after 4 8 years. This allows what are essentially sleeper cells to get in power, and turn politics in a direction against the values and pledges that they ran on. If they attempted this in a government without term limits, they would nearly certainly have to deal with people in the party from 20 or more years ago that have been there and not been compromised. Additionally, those people having served 20 years would be much more loyal to their ideals, rather than to populist booms. I'll leave it here for now, since I'm expecting I'll spend most of my time defending the idea against reasoning why it would be a bad idea. I'd like to note that I haven't made the typical argument that exceptionally good leaders are forced down after 8 years when it may be best for them to stay longer for that I do not believe any individual to possess the ability to be that level of magnitude better than anyone else in near any type of skill.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Removing term limits wouldn't be a bad thing\n","id":"5156da37-5859-49a2-a98f-6d885c7eaaf1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I can present as arrogant and self righteous and I am aware of this but do not mean to be. I am black. I have friends of Caucasian and Chinese descent. When I interact with them, the stereo types I have heard about their race is usually reinforced by their own actions. I'll get more in depth i deliver Chinese food in southeast Dallas. A stereotype of blacks is that we are notoriously poor tippers. I cannot disagree. In the years of my employment, which provides for me and my son surprisingly well, I have learned through direct observation that that stereotype is based in reality. Whites tip me, Hispanics tip me, Asians as well blacks ?ha I digress but I hope my point is clear. I approach a known black customers house knowing the chances are that they will not tip me. It minimizes the dissapointment. It is beneficial to me to enter into these interactions using a stereotype to my advantage. Granted, my emotions are not that important but I truly feel better knowing how this interaction is probably going to go, and that's a benefit. Its safe to expect a tip from whited or hispamices, etc. and there's no cautionary warning in the form of a stereotype regarding these races. I know that may be a flimsier example but I think it suffices to illustrate my point. If you are going on a date with a white person, assuming they can't dance may and provably will save one from a potentially awkward situation. Knowing, or expecting due to the stereotype that a Hispanic might work hard for cheap can and probably does lead to financial benefits for shrewd entrepreneurs. I have no sources for this its just a gut feeling. I think stereotypes are usually valid and can be used to my benefit. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stereotypes are valid and using them to prepare for social interaction is a good idea.\n","id":"f88dc419-4832-4121-96ee-eec5c67b60ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have a BA from UC Santa Cruz in Politics, and I wrote a senior thesis on the problems in higher education. In a nutshell, I found in my research that the traditional public university system is no longer sustainable in today's economy. The problem is that, as more and more people are able to afford college through student loans, universities are are having to spend more and more money to expand facilities and services to keep up. Meanwhile, the labor market for graduating students is becoming increasingly saturated and competitive, such that further specialized education is becoming necessary to earn a salary that was once accessible with just a simple bachelor's degree. This is creating a bad situation for the middle class as they are now being squeezed by student loan debt, an increasingly competitive labor market, and tax obligations to keep the public universities afloat. Obviously, the majority of the middle class isn't on board with increased taxes to support public universities. The lack of political support isn't entirely surprising, as our public perception of university students has been mixed at best. A lot of students work hard, contribute to their community, and go on to do great things. At the same time, a lot of students get sent off to college right after high school, only to spend two to four years engaged in non stop bacchanalia. You could make the argument that if they want to waste college, they have the right to make that choice, and in the end they're only hurting themselves. However, the fact that college has become this sort of cultural rite of passage for youth has been putting a huge strain on public universities in particular, because they are having to find ways to finance expansion of services for young people who are completely taking those services for granted. There is quite a bit of history behind the culture of the public university. When the American public universities were first built in the early 1900's, the ideal was that graduates would be thoroughly well rounded individuals, specialized in a field but also well versed in literature, science, art, etc. The idea was still relatively egalitarian for its time, but the middle class was still a much smaller and more privileged class than it is today, so the expectations for students to achieve personal growth along with intellectual growth were much higher. The whole goal of personal development for students was much more feasible back then. In the decades since their formation, public universities have continued to try to promote personal growth alongside intellectual growth. As unfortunate as it seems, I am arguing that the goal of personal growth for students needs to be marginalized in favor of education that is expedited and career focused . I believe the best solutions to accomplish this would include reduced general education requirements and the introduction of online courses that can be taken outside of the classroom. This is where I start to stray from the personal research that I've done, and start to dive into my first hand experiences as a college student. I found it extremely ironic that despite all of the student and faculty protests against higher tuition costs and the proposals for online courses and 3 year degrees, student attendance for many of many of my classes was abhorrently low. This is especially true of the highly impacted introduction courses which every student was required to take in order to fulfill their two years worth of general education credits. I don't think public universities would lose anything meaningful by taking these big introduction classes and switching them to an online format completely. These classes are so full that the lecture format usually precluded any intimate discussion, and they were usually taught by doctorate candidates or other graduate students anyways. There should be fewer requirements to take such courses, and online formatting would allow students flexibility to pursue personal growth i.e. partying on their own time. And I don't think that online learning is any less valuable, especially for basic introductions to subjects. In community college, I took an introduction to philosophy course completely online. It was an awesome learning experience, discussion through text was extremely productive, and I don't think I would have been any happier in the classroom. The reduction of general education requirements to a single year's worth of credits would also be extremely beneficial to students, in my opinion. This is especially true to a lot of the students who take on difficult majors and end up having to stick around for a fifth or sixth year to retake courses and complete their graduation requirements. There is no reason why these students shouldn't be able to get started on their major in their first or second year, so they can be done in their third or fourth. The quicker turn around would alleviate a lot of the administrative and financial pressure that public universities are faced with. The whole idea of taking courses to figure out what you want to do is somewhat antiquated. If a student doesn't know what they want to do, they can always take community college courses I love community colleges btw, I believe they are amazing institutions that don't receive nearly as much credit as they deserve in our society for a year to prepare for university, or just try to figure it out by taking some time off to do some soul searching. As a final note, I would just like to say that his discussion is specifically tailored to public universities. Private liberal arts colleges and four year universities are a great alternative for students who have the financial ability or raw intellectual ability to really benefit from a more enriching experience. There was once a concern that lower classes just didn't have the option to attend private universities, but many are now handing out full rides to as many qualified low income students as they can find, because that is how they receive what little public financial assistance they can get their hands on. On the other hand, I believe public universities should provide a more expedited product designed to get students in and out as quickly and cheaply as possible. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe fast-tracking college degrees through online courses and reduced general education requirements would help sustain public universities.\n","id":"641816cc-b23c-4cd0-9ddd-02251f05a773"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those unfamiliar with Nozick's experience machine, I would direct you to this video here Very briefly, think a perfect simulation of reality wherein you experience nothing but pleasure, and you are unaware of your being in a simulation. My reasoning It would be great would it not? I would live out the entirety of my life happy, and I'd be none the wiser. I can't see myself desiring anything else other than the experiences from which I would benefit. Even if they were false, this would be of no concern to me since I wouldn't be aware of it. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I would plug into the experience machine.\n","id":"d3ed786b-4988-4521-8605-f2f2c52c3da7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By diverse, I mean this in every sense by race, by gender, by national origin, by religion, by sexual orientation, by age, and ideally by life experiences as well. I think, at least in the US, that we don\u2019t just view schools as places to dump knowledge into children\u2019s heads, but we also view them as a microcosm of society. This is most apparent at a university where schools can have an entire culture, but this exists in other levels too think of a community coming together for a high school football game, elementary students doing community service as a project, etc. I believe this is a good thing, as not only do children need to learn academic skills like math and reading, but also social and emotional skills as well in order to exist positively in today\u2019s society. Here\u2019s the crux of my argument society today is diverse. Especially with the ease of communication and collaboration across the globe, people today interact with all sorts of people with varying life experiences. At least in the US, there seem to be norms for how to interact with others who have big differences. Students deserve the chance to not only be taught these norms, but to actively practice them too in a safe environment with adults. While there are obvious boundaries that should not be crossed e.g. intimate sexual details , issues of identity should be brought up when relevant. Currently, the vast majority of teachers in the US are white, many are female especially in primary school, and in many and I would go as far as to say most schools, teachers are told either explicitly or implicitly to hide their demographic differences as much as possible, especially sexual orientation and in some places religion. There doesn\u2019t seem to be much work to counteract this, and I think there should. EDIT This has come up in several replies, so I will clear this up here I AM NOT ADVOCATING FOR QUOTAS. There literally are not enough licensed teachers of color to even fill quotas if we hired every last one. What I AM advocating for is targeted initiatives for people of color other marginalized demographics to become teachers, such as scholarships, positive representation in the media of both real and fictional teachers of color and other marginalized demographics, and a celebration of the diversity that sometimes already exists in a teacher population at a school, instead of hiding the deviations from the norm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The faculty at any school should be diverse, at all levels of schooling.\n","id":"ed75272f-f2ee-401e-ae1b-278d61ef7ff4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am studying the Japanese language. As college students know, course subjects have abbreviations. History is HIS, biology is BIO, etc. Japanese was changed to JPN from JAP in order not to offend since Jap is considered a derogatory term for Japanese people. Out of habit, it gets a strange laugh or look when I refer to it as Jap class out of habit because that was how I read it on my past syllabuses is that the correct word for the plural form of syllabus? and on my assignments. If my school wants to change it then fine, that's their decision and my argument isn't about my school doing that. I was just giving context to where my frustration comes from. I don't feel I am being insensitive for calling it Jap class . Polish people are Poles, Scottish people are Scots, British people are Brits, Arabic people are Arabs, Turkish people are Turks, Jewish people are Jews, Czechoslovakian people are Czechs, Slavic people are Slavs Swedish people are Swedes, Mongolian people are Mongols. None of these are considered offensive unless used in context with a negative connotation, but for some reason Japs is offensive to Japanese people. This is ridiculous. It is simply easier to say. The fact that it is in the same category of words like chink or gook as offensive terms for people of Asian descent is silly. edit I thought of more shortened terms for nationalities so I added them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think the term \"Jap\" as a term for Japanese people is racist.\n","id":"2d68c385-8fa0-4fd7-933d-63c76476725b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Legalization will enhance the demand and supply of sex work and thus increase the size of the sex industry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalising prostitution will create more demand for prostitutes and thus generate more trafficking.\n","id":"8754993c-2fff-4ef7-925a-2107fc104ec3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most people would agree with me, but many of my stoner friends get angry when I say this, so this is for those that smoke daily if someone got drunk every day, they would be an alcoholic, so someone who smokes weed every day obviously has a problem with marijuana. I think marijuana is fine in moderation, but smoking daily is seen as normal to stoners. If they are called out on it they will claim that it has no physically addicting substances, however, I still think that the mental addiction can be very strong, life just isn't as good when you aren't smoking. Stoners think that marijuana is perfect, and it great, but I think that smoking daily is push ally, mentally and socially harmful. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Smoking marijuana daily is bad for you.\n","id":"57bf4a93-c253-4930-b250-a28d7298d6b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>Cocaine addiction causes higher impulsivity meaning sufferers are more likely to engage in risky behaviour such as gambling.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cocaine, a commonly-used illegal drug, has multiple negative health effects on the user.\n","id":"bf3b9868-32b8-4e9d-8e93-dcbdd5884f9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Dennis Prager is a conservative spokesperson and started the conservative YouTube channel PragerU He is suing Google YouTube over restricting about 35 of the videos on his channel. He claims that the reason why is because of their conservative nature. The details of what YouTube has done with this channel's videos aren't really important, so for the sake of the argument let's just assume that YouTube officially decided to delete the videos only because they don't like conservative videos and no other reason. By suing Google, Prager is being hypocritical Google is a private company. If they want to ban ALL conservative videos, they should have the right to. The free market should be the solution to this problem from Prager's perspective. There actually are other methods of posting public videos besides YouTube. If Prager doesn't like YouTube's policies, then he should simply go somewhere else to post his videos. Even if you take every claim Prager has made at face value, he shouldn't be suing them. It isn't conservative to sue a private company because you don't like their political views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dennis Prager is being blatantly hypocritical by suing Google over YouTube restricting PragerU videos\n","id":"fec38d73-aed3-4343-a936-57be612aa3f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This will not be a huge body of text, but it's just a thought I had. A lot of times, you're either not sober or in a bad place emotionally and you decide to write a message to someone. A while later, you regret sending it, because it doesn't reflect you as a person and you don't want to upset the recipient. Assuming it's not impossible, why not let us delete the message on both sides? You can always send an apology, but the recipient might still take the message seriously and assume you stand by it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You should be able to delete messages on Facebook so the recipient doesn't see them\n","id":"cf13b124-ce7d-4bcf-aa8f-5bb553868060"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>According to a scientific study 2 bugs are killed by striking the license plate alone for every 6.2 miles driven. This would equate to 32.5 trillion dead insects in the US alone for a given year. A utilitarian that believed this argument would likewise argue against cars and other forms of massive insect slaughter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The risk of death of wildlife increases during the transport of food, especially when the vegan food travels for thousands of miles by land. Local meat would cause less harm to wildlife during its transport.\n","id":"b5b0606b-49c0-452e-9583-0a7312a85059"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Or generally the audience shouldn't be allowed to react to any debate. It turns the debate into more of a spectacle than anything else. When it comes to political debates, it's a dangerous thing. The audience is at best, misinformed and at worst, heavily biased. The audience reaction can heavily skew someone's perception of how the debate went and undermine the debator's efforts to get his points across. A crowd of people who applaud and cheer anything that is their side of the argument, even if it's completely bonkers I mean if all it's supposed to be good television then fine, but if debates are held to inform and educate the masses you could essentially turn the debate into propoganda by controlling the audience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Debates like PolitiCon shouldn't be held with a live audience.\n","id":"3146e5d0-d23d-4db1-92a9-ca36d6b397e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I used to be against Independence, but I realized soon that there weren't really any good reasons why we should stay. We'll actually receive the fruits of our labour wholly rather than giving some to Britain, we'll have more opportunity to change our government, said government isn't interested in war and will never drag us along for one, it seems pretty obvious that we should move out. Especially since British politicians are kinda dicks. However, I feel as though there'd have to be a good reason against for there to be a big hubbub about it. Would you be able to tell me what this reason is?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I can't think of a good reason why Scotland shouldn't go independent.\n","id":"812b57ab-b5e2-4f53-af9e-faf03a75d6cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Objectivity Possible?<|ARGUMENT|>There are a number of different ways to recount historic events For example, one recount can be purely causative and another can be based on meaning or intention of key actors. Each serve different purposes and neither are objectively more successful than the other.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any analysis of success involves a human value judgement about what the goal was and the extent to which it has been achieved. As such, it is unclear what objective metric can be used in concluding that historians have successfully recounted historic events.\n","id":"88409c22-7340-4c58-9aab-a7aea631bdc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that if men and women are equal then if a women starts a fight with a man, he should be able to hit her back as he would another, much smaller, man. I\u2019m not saying hitting her back is correct or should be legal, I\u2019m just saying he should not face any worse consequences because it was a woman he hit back and not another man. It is generally accepted a man should not hit a woman. However, if a weaker 5 foot 8 man, hit a man that was 6 foot 4 and very strong and he then proceeded to hit the smaller man back and do a lot of damage to him, I\u2019m fairly confident people would say that serves him right for hitting someone much bigger and stronger. However, if this logic was applied to a man hitting a physically weaker woman back after she hit him, he would be called cowardly for hitting a woman, I disagree with this and believe both cases should be treated equally.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If women want men and women to be completely equal, then a man should be able to hit a woman back in a fight and face no more consequences than he would for hitting another, much smaller, man back in a fight.\n","id":"ce90d842-3ecc-45ad-8ee7-194fa8b3120e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>Free speech optimistically assumes that the listener is capable of information literacy. Influential opinions are not determined by the competence, expertise and knowledge of individuals, but by whether the opinion itself was controversial or propagated widely. A mass propagation of untruths may seem believable to the layman, and will spiral out of control, overwhelmingly educated discourse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments should limit free speech in societies which are not fully developed, or where civil discourse has broken down.\n","id":"654ae6ff-8d45-4d16-b34e-d80dc75fd7a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Society has a typical way that a man should be, and a typical way that a woman should be. Fifty years ago, if a boy acted too girly while he was growing up, his father would tell him to man up and he would adapt accordingly. Today, in our psychologically aware society, we NEVER tell our children that their self identity is wrong. As society has become more and more accepting of ALL self identities, this enables people the freedom to identify themselves as pretty much anything they want, as is evident by otherkin. My psychology professor has a client who identifies as a plant, to most of us that sounds ridiculous, obviously she is not a plant, she is a human. However, she is as much a plant as she is a man. So why do we accept that there is nothing wrong with a woman identifying as a man? It seems almost like self denial to me. Moreover, I think there is a limit to how much I can identify by I like movies, games, and TV, but I am NOT a TV and a limit to what we as society should deem appropriate to change about one's self socially, and one's gender dissociating from one's sex seems contradictory to me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genderfluidity is caused by sociocultural influence and is not innate.\n","id":"9fd0de7c-2846-483f-a94c-d70e858563ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many people who died before finishing projects or fulfilling their ideas, like scientists and entrepreneurs . All of them could have contributed to our society if they had the chance to live more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any project requiring many lifetimes would be achievable by an individual.\n","id":"5fa4f0ef-9571-4018-bc5d-566bd475606e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Hamas was founded with the explicit purpose of destroying the state of Israel - ruling Gaza gives Hamas the foothold in Palestine it needs to be able to launch attacks against Israel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hamas is unlikely to let go of control in Gaza.\n","id":"f1d49bba-3d82-4177-a3c9-d5e5fe2f90f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>From a legacy standpoint, AJ is probably the least deserving amongst the figures on American paper currency Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Hamilton, Grant, Franklin . It's not like the guy didn't have good qualities or do good things while in office, but for a country that's trying to go in the direction of racial ethnic inclusiveness, it's pretty baffling that the guy who's responsible for the trail of tears is on our currency. That being said, I thought it was interesting to see in the news that people are trying to change who is on the 20 bill however, Harriet Tubman seems like an odd choice considering the other possible candidates. Off the top of my head, I think Teddy Roosevelt and MLK are the most deserving, and if I had to choose between them it would be MLK. Obviously, MLK's legacy speaks for itself, being the leader of the civil rights movement. Compared to Tubman I just feel like MLK's impact was far greater. His speeches and non violent protests impacted the entire nation, millions of people, while Tubman saved ~70 people from slavery. That's not to discredit Tubman because what she did was brave and important, and her accomplishments weren't limited to the underground railroad, but I think it's fair to say that MLK had a greater impact than Tubman, and therefore is more deserving to be placed on the 20 bill. I might even go as far to say that it's not even close.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If anyone should replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, it should be MLK Jr, not Harriet Tubman\n","id":"826108db-ce4c-4bbf-9ed4-5b29c44a2e6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>A PEW Research poll shows a global median of 52% are \"not too\" or \"not at all\" satisfied with their government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public opinion shows little trust\/faith that governments will do what is right.\n","id":"a3ac378a-5e2b-4381-9680-feea8bf06f4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My history education isn't perfect but from what I do know the 'industrial revolution' where we started mass producing and distributing goods instead of small scale production was triggered primarily by advances in science in regards to coal and petroleum, specifically the efficiency of extraction and utilization as a fuel source. Currently we have utilized robotics and AI in many factories across the world, but it is still not advanced enough to replace the majority manual labor jobs. I believe that once robotics and AI advancements exceed the base level skills of humans then the world will receive a second, very similar boom in the advancement of civilization and wealth. Why wouldn't this happen?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AI and robotics is the next big 'industrial boom' similar to the affect that coal and petroleum had on the world.\n","id":"e082190b-a468-45c2-a617-82af3e6aff4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>This leads to bad sex with future partners, where clients of sex workers may have unrealistic expectations about their skills and how their partners should perform.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex work presents an unrealistic version of sex where a client typically a man has their attractiveness and prowess exaggerated.\n","id":"7cd9bb3d-b0df-4484-ae81-77c6b0e35449"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tibet independence<|ARGUMENT|>In the opinion of the commission, the government of Tibet conducted its own domestic and foreign affairs free from any outside authority, and countries with whom Tibet had foreign relations are shown by official documents to have treated Tibet in practice as an independent State.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The International Commission of Jurists concluded that Tibet in 1913-50 demonstrated the conditions of statehood as generally accepted under international law.\n","id":"b755fba5-f2f8-4138-a2b6-b436490ab479"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are modern democracies destined to fail due to their inherent weaknesses?<|ARGUMENT|>Gerrymandering in the US allows a party to lose the popular vote yet win elections the practice has proven resistant to correction, even though the issue is well-known and has been challenged in the courts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The political class in democracies has and continues to identify systemic loopholes, allowing them to game the system.\n","id":"06e4107c-f661-4564-a62c-de151ec5278d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have no experience with Sasquatches or Yetis etc. and have always assumed them to be stories. I believe the Patterson Gimlin footage is a man in a suit. The vast majority of sightings are attention seekers, and the few sightings that honestly believe they saw Bigfoot more than likely saw a Bear. Hollywood is to blame for the popularization of the urban legend, and it seems like everyone wants to believe that a monster exists away from civilization. Plus it makes for terrific TV shows, and movies. I think its just an urban legend getting every exploit to make money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Bigfoot is a hoax\n","id":"c617a546-d7e8-4d97-aea1-1cddf97e3ab6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>All scientific investigations of the world must inevitably begin with assumptions, if only assumptions about what is worth investigating and how it is to be investigated. This requires a decision or judgement prior to the possibility of any research occuring.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Science can be said to be inescapably \"political\" insofar as carrying some assumptions means not carrying other assumptions, and adopting any assumption will validate a particular viewpoint over other possible viewpoints.\n","id":"37773cf6-ccc4-4e7e-bf57-1d449f8c60b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>If there is no ultimate being that defines morality then there is no meaning to moral actions, no source or rationale that grounds goodness or badness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rationale for morality seems lacking in a system with no authority or objective standard.\n","id":"21d5a3be-b227-4f4b-87fe-6938fe1cc022"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not quite sure what it will be, but I have a feeling that technology is starting on a j curve that will render absolutely everything about life today obsolete far sooner than most people think. Either strong AI, consciousness transfer into machines, the singularity, etc. But whatever it is I think movies, music, cities, schools, etc etc will all be pointless or radically different. Almost all current jobs will be pointless and unnecessary. I really want you to  because this scares me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe something way bigger than the internet will come along within the next few decades to make everything about our life and culture irrelevant\n","id":"710e8324-01c5-40f8-9051-67a3b8acb7d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>This is a similar to the doctrine of 'Asian values' used by Lee Kuan Yew to explain aspects of society in Singapore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many Chinese citizens believe that a Western-style democracy would produce \u201csocial disorder\u201d.\n","id":"de9bbc8e-ee02-4e19-a8c0-9c1fab429934"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not saying from a specific country or region, but in general. Teenagers who watch porn might start to think that rape is normal. If not, they may take several misconceptions about sex and shows unrealistic situations most fiction does that too, but still . The actors at least in the US don't wear condoms and it might stimulate unprotected sex among teenagers or anyone dumb enough . Teenagers in general seem not to have enough mental capability to take a shitty pornographic movie from a real life situation, but have the capability to plan the rest of their lives or to commit a serious crime, being children in almost fully developed bodies. I wonder if some teenager older than 13, non special died attempting to mimic Spiderman or any other character who usually jumps from great heights. I'll also talk about the so called teen porn . That seems kinda pedo. Because apparently watching a movie where a 5'1 1,55 m, fully shaved young woman wearing pigtails and a school uniform being stomped by a big ugly man or several stimulates pedophilia in otherwise non pedophile men. I'm not very sure about the teen porn part, but I'm writing it here to be corrected. Is there something good that porn can do to a person or society other than bring diversity to entertainment?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Porn only brings harm and should be banned.\n","id":"f1ecad98-0360-485e-9f56-0ce563281d1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should billionaires be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The \"solution\" is only a temporary one. It creates a dependency on funding to serve their basic needs which always needs to be refueled, and doesn't help them gaining a steady source of income by themselves through a job. The money should come from volunteering donors and charities investing in companies and organizations offering those opportunities education and work for them, rather than the state forcing everyone to bail them out repeatedly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By throwing money at the \"problem\" the poor, root problems like overpopulation and a lack of education will not be solved.\n","id":"f905fde9-856f-4a6e-9a19-0a919f15f7f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>When more egalitarian sex role socialization and greater sociopolitical gender equity \u201cset free\u201d or release men\u2019s and women\u2019s mating psychologies which gendered freedom tends to do, the specific item \u201cI enjoy casual sex with different partners\u201d taps the release of men\u2019s short-term mating psychology much more than it does women\u2019s. Hence, sex differences on \u201cI enjoy casual sex with different partners\u201d are largest in the most gender egalitarian nations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender disparities in self-reported comfort with \u2018casual\u2019 sex with different partners were largest in nations with the most egalitarian sex role socialization and the greatest sociopolitical gender equity i.e., the least patriarchy, such as in Scandinavia. This is exactly the opposite of what we would expect if patriarchy and sex role socialization are the prime culprits behind sex differences in consenting to sex with strangers.\n","id":"175ed95d-b641-4cdb-af51-bc7ae0e39f45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I spend a lot of time arguing online, but I've never seen a single smart right wing argument. Let's take Ben Shapiro as an example. According to right winger he's one of the smartest people alive and that everything he says is factual and logical. But in reality his arguments only sound factual if you are too dumb to realize how ignorant you are, yet for some reason think that anyone that shares your uneducated opinion is a genius. And they only sound logical if you are literally unable to notice logical fallacies. For example he claims that transgender people have a higher suicide rate after getting surgery, that it doesn't help and that they are just delusional and mentally ill. The actual conclusion of his source states gt Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group. But all he was able to parse was gt Persons with transsexualism have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity after sex reassignment Either he's incredible disingenuous or he literally can't even read complete sentences. Either way his facts and logic are nothing more than feelings and lies . But whenever I bring this example up countless of right wingers will tell me that I'm just a triggered liberal and that he accurately cited this study. I've literally never seen a single right winger that was able to tell the difference between gt Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. and gt Persons with transsexualism have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity after sex reassignment The study says that surgery helps and that their rate is still higher than the general population, but Ben Shapiro claims that surgery only made it worse. Yet the vast majority of right wingers is unable to understand this important difference. Then it dawned me they actually believe that Trump has the best words, because they literally can't tell how dumb he sounds to smart people. So please challenge my view, because I don't want to believe that right wingers are generally close to being mentally retarded. I want to have more hope for them. Are these all just trolls that are aware that they are lying? Are these just a few Russians that haven't finished their English courses? Are smart conservatives just hiding their stance and only the idiots are vocal about it? Are they able to understand it, but just aren't willing to admit that they were wrong? Edit it keeps happening even in this very thread Called it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Right wingers generally have a very poor reading comprehension.\n","id":"eca9a4ee-a5fa-496c-bdee-bd741e8a961e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Poetry should not be taught in schools Junior<|ARGUMENT|>According to a report published in 2011 3 a great number of pupils in England are struggling after starting secondary school and 3 out of 10 pupils are not making enough progress in English. If pupils are not making the required progress in basic English then it is difficult to understand the motivation behind teaching complex poetry. If a student is unable to do basic multiplication it makes no sense to ask them to do complicated mathematic equations. The same is true in English: pupils who struggle with things like grammar and vocabulary should not be expected to tackle complicated poetic structures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Students need to study the basics of language not a complex form such as poetry\n","id":"7f8a453c-95d7-4320-a2a5-77faee0fd054"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>An \"Extremist Version\" believes the improvement of society requires that the influence of female values be decreased and the influence of male values increased.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This conflates the ideologies of Masculism and masculinism. The two are, by most philosophers, distinct terms, that operate on a sliding scale.\n","id":"531897aa-07b4-48b3-83e6-933a52ef8cc3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Suicide is illegal, yet it has the same justification of alleviating pain. Abortion likewise is very much a permanent solution to temporary problems and\/or obstacles. Obstacles not unlike what we all face everyday in life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of a possible remedy does not place an automatic moral mandate on society to allow that specific remedy.\n","id":"f4ab3566-7b94-434e-9c7d-8c0cc3c36db9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>Claims that we have already had a vote are negated by the period of 2.5 years since the vote, revelations since, and the fact that around 1.5m of the original electorate have died since 2016.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The referendum has been so utterly divisive, only a people vote can overcome that division in our tribal political scene. No matter what the politicians would have us believe.\n","id":"65ba0ac6-a6c8-4a09-b140-73e598504c68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The USA, and likely the entire world economy, are showing serious signs of impending recession. I thought that Brexit was going to be the tipping point, but the S P has already hit an all time high since then, and life goes on as though everything is the same. Normally, this wouldn't necessarily be a cause for concern, but the data is pretty striking to me. GDP recently came out below expectations, marking a third straight decline in growth rate. Earnings in major US markets have fallen for what will be 5 consecutive quarters once this earnings season ends, all despite a rising market. Since interest rates are already so low, the fed won't be as able to ease the markets in a downturn. My father is a real estate agent in a wealthy area, and sales are running about half of typical volume right now even in real estate, many are skeptical about the current valuations. Industrial production is shrinking. The positive nonfarm payroll in June was touted as proof that the boom is going strong but if you average May and June then we only made estimates, not beat them. I'd love to have my view changed since I'm graduating and therefore entering the job market in the next year, but I think this one is pretty clear cut.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USA is on the brink of a major recession.\n","id":"6668c69b-ed58-4d86-bdc7-5316f6aebc88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So Kendrick Lamar seems to be all the rage these days, I like rap now and then Nujabes and Nas are my favorites so I decided to check out GKMC especially after the ridiculous amount of love r hiphopheads was giving it. I feel like I went into it pretty open minded, I didn't have any particular expectations of what I 'wanted' to hear. Nonetheless I found myself cringing pretty hard early on in the album. It reminded me of most mainstream hip hop or rap that bothers me with annoyingly altered vocal parts, excessive background vocals, and overproduction. Once or twice rapping I feel like he definitely demonstrates some good flow, but to me that doesn't make up for weak song writing and a lot of downright annoying parts. The songs 'good kid' and 'the art of peer pressure' are probably my favorites, but if this is the best hip hop album of the last 10 years to me that's a poor, sad show for hip hop. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Kendrick Lamar's Good Kid, m.A.A.d City is an overhyped, weak album.\n","id":"d805234b-5e0f-4955-b879-795fc49ff6fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A recent Press Freedom Index score penalized the US for the President's verbal attacks on the media calling them 'fake news' and the like . I believe that this has nothing to do with freedom of the press. Even if the government gets to put a logo on friendly media calling them Verified and calls unfriendly media fake or tabloid, that should still be totally irrelevant to the press freedom index unless that bashing can be expected to result in financial penalties, arrests, or beatings. The only things that should count towards a press freedom index are the number of topics words viewpoints that will result in a financial, legal, or physical penalty for expressing. Those can be official rules with legal penalties, informal calls for mobs to beat reporters, taxes on specific journals, or funding for compliant journals that is denied to noncompliant journals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unthreatening media-bashing should not be counted in a Press Freedom Index.\n","id":"47a05baf-d340-4268-ba00-34fbb2dfbbff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should hate speech be illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate Speech is too undefined a term to be regulated at all as what is and isn't considered hateful is subjective to each and every individual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is difficult to define hate speech in a way that works.\n","id":"0a9f9a4d-8267-4761-9df9-adf7612d394c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>Britain is still a monarchy The executive powers of the Queen are severely limited by constitutional rules as her role is mostly symbolic<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Traditional values of honor are still entrenched in British politics.\n","id":"4615c15d-fb44-4f3f-88d5-8999a00fbd75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>It has been argued that the proposed referendum on gay marriage in Australia was an attempt by Parliament to avoid the responsibility of a parliamentary vote on the issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments can organize referendums to avoid shouldering the accountability for difficult, potentially unpopular decisions Seta\u0308la\u0308, p. 700\n","id":"0ff80611-bcd4-4924-945a-0f97ad49bf9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Empower Both Women And Men?<|ARGUMENT|>Statistically women work fewer hours than men, meaning they're at home and in contact with the child more regularly, which leads to them being favored by the primary caregiver standard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are numerous reasons why the primary caretaker standard favors women. Not every reason is due to lower fitness of the father to care for the child.\n","id":"8d06471d-6a13-4510-a592-9bd38afe3e2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>South Korea should abandon its goal of unification with North Korea<|ARGUMENT|>A result of this treatment is that \"North Koreans in a unified peninsula could be liked to an ethnic minority p.14.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a result, NK refugees are treated like second-class citizens in SK.\n","id":"de721dac-0630-4d96-bd45-ad1691256f62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Give Money to Beggars?<|ARGUMENT|>If you give money to a homeless person you are just encouraging their behavior. There are many services available to help the homeless get back on their feet. They reject these services and choose to be homeless. Not to mention you have no idea what they could using the money you give them for drugs. The money you would give them should go to an organization that provides services to the mentally ill homeless. The mentally ill homeless are really the only ones who have a reason to be out on the streets. All the other homeless are just beggars who refuse to work themselves. It's better to just invest in a nonprofit organization that rehabilitates the mentally ill homeless. Save up your quarters you would give the guy you pass by everyday to work and then mail you accumulated funds as a check to a organizations that helps the disadvantaged!<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No. We should be that money to organizations that work on remedying the root cause of homelessness.\n","id":"70b6f3cc-8bc3-4d5f-9b54-40aeed3ac316"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>P = NP?<|ARGUMENT|>Time in NP complexity class is measured differently than time in complexity class P. That is, NP-hard algorithms can explore many alternatives in one time step, whereas algorithms in P cannot.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Complexity class equality is a relative notion that depends on the machines used to run the algorithms.\n","id":"f1282301-6fde-442c-b239-13a4993d9bf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Falkland Islands, return of<|ARGUMENT|>In 1977 the Falkland Islands Legislative Council adopted a motion that conveyed the will of the inhabitants to remain British. Therefore, the people of the Falkland Islands and their representatives have already excercised their right of self-determination, and determined to remain British.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Falkland Islands adopted a motion to remain British in 1977.\n","id":"b87d65d4-74b6-4ff9-971b-5d672330e225"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Using a Mobile Phone While Driving Should Be Banned<|ARGUMENT|>Existing laws are inadequate; driving without due care and attention is a limited charge that can be very difficult to prove. In any case, every time a driver of a moving vehicle uses a mobile phone a potentially dangerous situation is created, as they are much less able to react to events around them. This justifies a specific offence being introduced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Existing laws are inadequate; driving without due care and attention is a limited charge that can be...\n","id":"65ac3d43-37dc-4e03-8ffd-825a1e5c882f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cars have set electronic speed limits?<|ARGUMENT|>This would not work with foreign travel or differing speed limits across borders. A vehicle entering another country could find itself unable to drive to the correct speeds for the roads.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some countries do not have speed limits on all roads.\n","id":"88bb89b0-1e7a-4c7d-9466-a03463e04fdd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The main reason for statute of limitations laws seems to be, at least from what I've heard, that evidence becomes less trustworthy as time goes on witnesses die, science marches on, evidence gets lost. The problem is that this degradation of evidence would already be taken care of by the presumption of innocence beyond a reasonable doubt no matter if a case is 1, 10, 20, or 50 years old, if there's nigh irrefutable evidence it should be allowed to be prosecuted. The implicit burden of proof automatically rises because the evidence is more distant there is no reason to put a hard legal boundary if prosecutors can assemble an ironclad case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no reason statute-of-limitations laws should exist in a criminal justice system with a high burden of proof.\n","id":"11d2441d-c942-4eed-8cdb-d1ab34259d07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People have no idea what that person is going through but shove their view that this person should think about how other would feel? Have you ever thought about how he or she feels? Do you think they want to be depressed? Do you think they wanted to feel that way? While everyone can live their day relatively normally, everyday is a living nightmare for them and I'm saying this from experience as someone who was diagnosed with depression and has to take medicine. But no. They have to continue just so other people can have a good conscience and live their lives not understanding how much pain the other party is feeling. That is selfish. Wanting someone to continue hurting themselves not because you care about them but because you'll feel bad THAT'S SELFISH You're not considering the pain they feel but prioritizing your own Edit A LOT OF TRAFFIC. I HAVE LIKE 20 NOTIFICATIONS. WAIT YOUR TURN<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Committing suicide because of depression isn't selfish\n","id":"9c1482e9-759e-407d-bfe3-600851ee6795"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Affirmative Action: Useful Once, Outdated Today?<|ARGUMENT|>When policies like affirmative action are passed, experts and academics talk about the need to address historical\/racial injustices as justification for these policies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Affirmative action sets up a political mood that makes policies like reparations more acceptable.\n","id":"2e718ee9-8ded-4ce5-b8f7-7137318bf638"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US President Have the Power to Self-Pardon?<|ARGUMENT|>Once the precedent is set that the president can pardon themselves the ability has potential to be abused by for any type of crime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a Constitutional Republic, the US government should allow no person or entity to be \"above the law.\"\n","id":"3233e97f-e3f7-44e9-bd71-a1c00cdd2c2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, I'm sorry if this topic has been debated before, I couldn't find anything that I felt related directly to it in the popular post archive. My main point is that sports provide a number of advantages to boys and girls from kindergarten through high school that cannot be replicated by video games. I am referring to all physical activity, including playing games like tag, manhunt, red rover, etc., as sports to reduce confusion . I realize that there is a team vs. individual sports distinction that can be made as well as a distinction between activity and sport. Until I get into a deeper conversation I'll refer to both as sports. I am 24 years old and grew up right in the middle of what I consider to be the proliferation of video game consoles in households. My parents did not let me play very much or very often, instead encouraging my sisters and I to play outside. I became highly involved in sports and I believe they have had a very positive impact on my life. The positive physiological and psychological effects of exercise on the human body are well established. However, video games are controversial in this manner. There are many positive side effects, but also many negatives. The legitimacy of many studies has been called into question. I believe that video games create a very isolated, insulated social life for those who play them. Many people seem to develop a certain disdain for their peers and, in my opinion, would benefit greatly from team activity. Sure, there are MMOs that require teamwork, but I do not believe they can mimic the physical sacrifice and the emotion of interaction with others on a field court other playing surface. In my experience, people who categorize themselves as gamers have fewer friends, especially female friends. They seem disconnected from many aspects of social life and also seem quick to prove that they are smarter than the person with whom they are speaking. I realize that I may not be able to easily connect with these people socially because we do not share a common interest, but even in watching the interaction of those who I know to play video games on a daily basis with others there is noticeable discomfort when they speak with people they do not know. My conclusions are based largely on my own experiences. I do play video games occasionally, but I quickly tire of them and they are mostly sports games like FIFA or NHL games although I do play GTA V a fair amount . However, I spend much more time outdoors, playing basketball, football, tennis, golf, etc. I believe that there is far more to be gained by playing a sport, be it individual or team than there is to be gained playing video games. I also believe that it is crucial to get young children outdoors and participating in any physical activity we can. There are numerous studies that show playing sports is very beneficial and these benefits are far greater than any benefit gained through video games. Thanks for reading, I look forward to your responses<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sports, and physical activity in general, are more beneficial for boys and girls than playing video games.\n","id":"b2700348-efb5-4ba3-a5d6-d485c1dc505f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>A completely autonomous device could operate in shielded mode most or even all of the time, thus it could be perfectly shielded without much effort.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shields against nuclear EMPs can be used to protect AKMs.\n","id":"25f12936-4e23-4a87-b085-9181ef529b06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Psychologically speaking, we only become individuals through the discovery that we 'could' hide something from others, thereby separating ourselves from a collective. As such, this technology would destroy 'the individual' in society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"I have nothing to hide argument is very powerful in discouraging people from thinking about negative effects of the post-Panopticon.\n","id":"6c0b76a2-ad56-406d-9d45-f6eda831cb95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always believed that abortion is a good thing. In addition to usually helping people with stem cells, it ensures that there will never be a child born into unfair circumstances, such as poverty or inadequate parenting. I'm not exactly pro choice , but I definitely think that anytime it's necessary for a embryo fetus baby to be painlessly euthanized, it's okay. Afterall, anything is better than the pain of years of unfit conditions that a child could grow up in if they aren't wanted, or if their parents can't afford them. I think abortion is okay. , reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion is totally okay in any case.\n","id":"f9b0f51d-ce2f-43a6-878a-08703eb3dc79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've read a lot of threads on here hoping to have my view changed on this, to no avail most of those threads are full of people disparaging the view holder as deluded or brain washed, or only arguing that it's a slippery slope to an Orwellian apocalypse. Please don't do that to me. It doesn't convince anyone and it certainly won't convince me. Here's my thinking on this There is, admittedly, a lot that can go wrong. I'm not concerned with as yet unoccuring rights violations or government oversteps, but rather the act of surveillance itself. If things go wrong, I will have problems with those policies and actions, not the enabling surveillance technology. To me, I see a lot to gain from widespread surveillance whether that means tracking internet searches, tapping phones, reading emails, or putting up cameras in public areas . This could be crime prevention a la Person of Interest, medical research extensions via mass statistical analysis, or more accurate advertising. And the losses all would come from policies that are rights violations in themselves, regardless of initial source. To me, essentially there is no right to privacy in itself, just right to private thoughts, free actions, and private property which surveillance would not and does not change. To head off something that I suspect will be leveraged against me, I personally have sworn off secrets in my life, but I know many people don't want to. The closest I'll come to lying is lying by omission if asked directly, I will tell. I don't think everyone needs to follow my rules for my own life, and I do see how this could appear contradictory to mass surveillance. My resolution for this is that this information need not prevent the keeping of secrets from those in your personal life, just those who gather the data. And in the incredible amount of data that would be generated, the vast majority of information would disappear amid the flood and be, essentially, private. All that said, I would LOVE to be convinced otherwise I know my view is the minority, and sometimes I think something is wrong with me to believe this so strongly when pretty much no one else does. I need a logical argument not based on dangerous potential endgames, or a justification for privacy in itself beyond just that privacy is good . Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I see no problem with \"invasions of privacy\" by government or corporations.\n","id":"1b234667-b76c-46f7-b2da-d82629fc55b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I grew up a son of poor, but legal immigrants in America. While we never lacked for food on the table, our family never had excess spending money. I learned to be extremely frugal with money as financial situations are fickle my paternal grandparents were formerly extremely wealthy but ended up desolate in prison when the government regime changed . I was even briefly homeless when I just graduated from college despite working ever since when I was 16. These days my financial situation has changed drastically. I work on Wall Street while my wife is a newly practicing plastic surgeon and we make around .75M yearly before taxes. We will pay off our Manhattan apartment in the coming month and project our yearly salary to increase to 1M in a couple of years. However, I can't fathom spending money frivolously on consumerism buying new fashion electronic accessories, fancy furniture, eating out often, etc. . I still drive my '05 Toyota Corolla it runs smoothly but only when I can't bike take public transit. My wife and I still cook most days, do the dishes, clean our own apartment, etc. I only have a new iPhone because work and still cherish the 50 watch rather than a Rolex my father got for me when I was 18. I've been saving my money aggressively and investing it for the future since the feeling of financial insecurity has been so strongly ingrained. I just don't understand the allure of materialism in items that lose their values quickly. tldr Why should I waste money on consumer items i.e. new Ferrari that depreciate extremely quickly in value rather than invest it which have long term benefits ? Note I was led to this subreddit after posting in r relationships<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Short-term luxuries are unnecessary, poor decisions\n","id":"358aebc8-56cd-4493-80ba-7416670288e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>Animals show a variety of behaviours which we interpret as human emotion guilt, rage, embarassment, love, which might be anthropomorphising However, we are guilty of doing the same with other humans i.e. other people feel guilt, rage, embarrassment, love same as me, so they are arguably equivalent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Elephants have been shown to mourn and remember long enough to eventually take revenge on human settlements. This is an expression of free will.\n","id":"72fa6c06-bcae-43da-ab56-5d309dd32801"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Julian Assange<|ARGUMENT|>Julian Assange is in danger to be handed over to the USA where he might be imprisoned or even sentenced to death.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The trial and arrest of Julian Assange is detrimental to free press\n","id":"59ea87d6-fe09-4278-9fec-72bc3e201c90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that going to an out of state school and massively increasing the costs of college is not worth it when there are no positives aside from location This is to say that you could have or have already been accepted to an in state school which is just as good or even better. College is already very expensive and will most likely burden you with debt for many years to come so it is best to not increase your tuition costs unless you are getting a great benefit from it. This is to say I will agree that the extra money will be worth it if you were to go to a very prestigious school the likes of which are not available in your home state or maybe if the school in question is going to open a lot of doors for you and will allow you to get a headstart on your career while in college. The argument that I usually hear is that college is also about the experience ,apart from just for an education, and, therefore, worth spending money on. This I disagree with fundamentally as I believe the purpose of college is to learn and to prepare yourself for a career you will likely be very busy with school work as well as merely trying your best to get a leg up on your career and, therefore, will have little time to engage in other activities. so ultimately any experiences you have in college might very well end up being distractions that get in the way of the real purpose of going to college. All in all, I don't think the College experience is a good thing ,if it exists at all, or at the very least not worth spending money on. Edit for clarification What I mean by massively increasing the costs of college is taking 30K in debt as opposed to 15K for an in state school that is to say even with help from your possibly rich parents it will still incur much more debt to leave the state. Also, when I say only the location I mean only because being there is an experience I already agree with spending money if it opens doors or is a convenience to you. PS. Sorry about the terrible formatting I apparently have no idea how to write a comment on reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe it is worth it to go to an out of state college which is vastly more expensive for no reason other than its location.\n","id":"f3a39022-5e48-402e-a680-5e23f3bdeb8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>We are higher than carnivores and thus need to make a more elevated decision in our role than them. Instead of just managing one ecosystem to keep it healthy we would need to achieve that for the entire world's environment altogether. Veganism is one option to help us carry this task out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans have a responsibility for managing the food chain\/web through what we eat, due to our privileged position at the top of all of them worldwide.\n","id":"6a038fe8-e7c9-45e6-85ce-58c638212181"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019ll do my best to stay objective on this but, this topic kind of just irks me. I feel like it\u2019s unfair to take into account a person\u2019s organization\u2019s history when evaluating whether or not to like something they make. An example of this, that\u2019s fairly recent, involves an EDM artist called Datsik. From what I understand, Datsik allegedly raped and or sexually harassed people after his shows and this gossip caused his career as an EDM artist to kind of go down the drain I don\u2019t know if his career is actually done but, that\u2019s what I feel like will be the ultimate result . You see posts all over social media damning the guy to Hell and saying things that more or less take the position of, \u201cif you listen to Datsik\u2019s music, you support misogyny\u201d, or something along those lines. Datsik\u2019s case is just an example but, the philosophy behind it applies to many other people companies which I feel is flawed. I don\u2019t even like Datsik\u2019s music, but I\u2019m not about to bash it because he raped someone. I can\u2019t see it being that the more successful Datsik becomes, the more people he\u2019ll rape. However, I can agree that rape sexual harassment, in itself, is inherently wrong in our society. I just don\u2019t believe that being a \u2018bad\u2019 person is a necessary condition for hating a product they make. Sometimes, the product in question has absolutely nothing to do with the individual\u2019s questionable history. Let\u2019s say, for example, I start a restaurant chain and it becomes hugely successful in the sense that I never have an empty table, the staff guests are happy, and the food is immaculate by all standards. Oh, but I think Trump is the best president ever and should have infinite terms. Maybe not the best example but, my point should be apparent. The two hardly correlate affect one another but if any form of media caught on to this I would imagine my success would be negatively affected because of that one, albeit unpopular, detail about my view on Trump. Especially in the heat of 2016, during the election, it would probably have affected my success by a more substantial margin. Now, I will concede that if the history background of the person directly affects a product and how it\u2019s manufactured, that will raise questions. I wouldn\u2019t really want someone with a history of being a pedophile taking care of my kids as a sitter or something. My argument will completely follow people organizations with backgrounds that are not directly linked with a product they make.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There\u2019s nothing wrong with liking a product created by someone with a unrelated, controversial history.\n","id":"21ea4b7c-c8c1-4ca6-a0bf-49e304200588"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If I were married and my spouse didn\u2019t want me to, say, eat pizza, that would be fine, if a little strange. I might even agree not to do it\u2014pizza isn\u2019t that big of a deal to give up. But suppose one night I found I had a craving, and I ate some pizza. If that same partner were to catch me eating the pizza and ask \u201cHow could you do this to me\u201d, I would laugh at them. I know you didn\u2019t want me to eat it, and I guess I did agree not to\u2014but how is me eating pizza doing something to you? I feel the same way about \u201ccheating\u201d. It seems like a silly, borderline irrational thing to tell another person that they\u2019re not permitted to ever have sex with anyone they\u2019re physically attracted to, and it seems almost psychotic to become irate over it. Partners divorce, divide families and possessions, and become emotionally wrecked over something as mundane as fucking. Adult children of the \u201csurviving\u201d spouse they call themselves \u201csurvivors\u201d of infidelity will cry and ask why. Some even brag about becoming violent This looks identical to mental illness, or the social psychosis that North Koreans display when a Kim dies. I\u2019ve yet to see a single person agree with me on this topic, so I\u2019m wondering if I\u2019ve gotten this one wrong. Please, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It\u2019s silly present \u201ccheating\u201d as unquestionably wrong.\n","id":"90e3aaca-a3eb-4d8e-8fa4-0eef8c10b3d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Hamas has in the past been willing to enter negotiations and uphold agreements, for example the 2008 ceasefire agreement with Israel which broke down after six months due to violations and disagreements on both sides.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The aspiration for Palestinian statehood lies at the center of Hamas' interests. Progress in this direction is therefore likely to lead to a more conciliatory attitude on the side of Hamas.\n","id":"048244a7-31e5-402b-8e6d-2767da73ccc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have frequently seen articles on r politics stating that if previous had faced similar accusations to Trump that they would have been impeached. The implication is, of course, that people will blindly follow him no matter what he does. However, I believe this ignores the most important aspect of Trump's base their lack of trust. The reason that these accusations are not having any major effect on how Trump is polling with his base isn't because they are mindless zombies. The problem is that we have all created a political climate in which it is valid to simply believe nothing any major news organization claims, and now it is too late to turn that around. If the Trump base believed the accusations, they would obviously turn against him, but we are now in a position where they don't know what to believe so they've resorted to believing whatever fits their previously established worldview. I understand that I am also simplifying and generalizing about a large group of people, but from what I have seen from general discussion online and in person, this seems to be an underlying theme among most Trump supporters. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Articles stating that other presidents would have been impeached if they had done what Trump is currently doing have completely misunderstood the problem with Trump\n","id":"eef91212-128c-4fe9-a727-8b02667ad657"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Citizens United Was Wrongly Decided<|ARGUMENT|>Corporations have been ruled not to have the right against self-incrimination does not have quite the same rights as individuals, including the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination that an organization cannot assert., guaranteed to US citizens in the Fifth Amendment<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if corporations are people, it does not follow that they should have the full set of rights as a human person, including identical free speech protections.\n","id":"92bd4d35-30ce-46d3-aecf-f50dc8f15203"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>From \u201cThe Question of Abortion A Search for Answers\u201d by Carl Sagan Ann Druyan By placing harmless electrodes on a subject's head, scientists can measure the electrical activity produced by the network of neurons inside the skull. Different kinds of mental activity show different kinds of brain waves. But brain waves with regular patterns typical of adult human brains do not appear in the fetus until about the 30th week of pregnancy near the beginning of the third trimester. Fetuses younger than this however alive and active they may be lack the necessary brain architecture. They cannot yet think. Acquiescing in the killing of any living creature, especially one that might later become a baby, is troublesome and painful. But we've rejected the extremes of always and never, and this puts us like it or not on the slippery slope. If we are forced to choose a developmental criterion, then this is where we draw the line when the beginning of characteristically human thinking becomes barely possible. It is, in fact, a very conservative definition Regular brain waves are rarely found in fetuses. More research would help\u2026 If we wanted to make the criterion still more stringent, to allow for occasional precocious fetal brain development, we might draw the line at six months. From the way I see it, there is no real right to life , just human life . I would argue that no other organism that has ever lived on this planet has cause more death and destruction upon other living organisms including of its own species than human beings. Our species is not in a position to talk about the sanctity of life . With that being said, we dont give a right to life to any other species except our own. Any rights that any animal has, it has been given to it by us, becuse intrinsically they had no rights. We dont seem to care about the systematic slaughter of sentient beings with emotions, a desire to live, feelings, thought, and consciousness like cows, sheep, chickens, and other livestock. We acknowledge that these beings are indeed alive and thinking, but we do not care about their thoughts and feelings enough to spare their lives because the food that they provide tastes good and provides nutrition. Why do we not mind killing these animals? The study of phylogeny shows that all life on Earth can be traced to a common ancestor. This basically means that despite the obvious differences between different species of animals such as body structure, DNA, or other traits, all living organisms are essentially the same carbon based lifefroms that must metabolise in order to grow and live. What distinguishes humans from the rest of the animals is human thought, and we do not mind killing other animals because they do not exhibit human thought, or any thought that is human like . Brainwaves are usually not able to be detected in fetuses, even after it has been born. However, at the 30 week mark, the fetus begins to devlop the capacity to have a thought, becuase that is when the first signs of a brain show up. Notice that the fetus has not yet had a thought and is incapable of thought, but has the necessary structure to be able to have a thought at the 30 week mark. Surely the fetus is a living being, and before 30 weeks it can even respond to stimuli. But it cannot experience anything, because in order to experience anything, one must have the organ that processes all life experiences, which is the brain. Without the brain, the fetus cannot experience life, and therefore cannot experience pain and death. Those experiences can only happen to beings who have the capacity to have any expereinces in the first place. It can surely die, of course, but it would have no expereince of death because it never experienced living, even though it is technically alive. To put it in a question If you were born without a brain, and had your body kept alive via artificial means, would you be able to differentiate between that and not existing at all? Some might find an abortion this late in the pregnancy to be immoral. I fail to see why, we kill things that have similar traits to fetuses before the 30 week mark all the time. Hell, we even kill things that have more traits that human fetuses, like beings with consciousness and thought. Before the 30 week mark, the fetus has not ever had a thought, and has not even developed the organs necessary to be able to have the capacity to have a thought. Without a brain, one cannot experience anything about life, including pain, pleasure, and death. Therefore, since a fetus before the 30 week mark cannot have the capacity to be able to experience pain and death, it is not immoral to abort a fetus before this point. Note that unconcious people, people in temporary comas, and the mentally handicapped are not excluded from the right to life on this definition. Unconcoius people still have the organ necessary to have the capacity to think, but just cannot do so at that moment. That also goes for people in temporary comas. The mentally handicapped have at least fragments of the organs necessary to be able to have the capacity to have a thought, similarly how the fetus at the 30 week mark barely has a brain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not think that abortion before the beginning of the third trimester 30 week is immoral.\n","id":"f207353d-5f4e-4897-baf2-00b2614e730c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Voldemort successfully split his soul into eight pieces, placing parts of his soul in a number of objects, and some in other living creatures Nagini and, accidentally, Harry Potter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Horcruxes are objects in which individuals can hide pieces of their soul with the object of achieving immortality. Voldemort successfully split his soul into eight pieces.\n","id":"775a5261-578c-485a-ba4d-81621c8ed04f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. Source: The Report of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US was aware of the Japanese intention to - nearly unconditional - surrender since they decoded a communication on a mediating request by Japan to Moscow on July 11\n","id":"ca46e7d5-73ec-44cd-ad9f-777a73c73c43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello, . Lately, I've been seeing a lot of christian film, and intrigued, I decided to watch The Star . After watching that film, I have thought of a new viewpoint. Christian film should not be considered film. The reason I think of this is because I think film is an art form. It is an equal efforts of editors, directors and writers, ect. If you've seen a christian movieba while ago, it is clear that they play it as a hour and a half sermon. Don't get me wrong, I think christian film can be great Passion of the Christ , however, that is not the majority of the christian movie genre. Documentaries about christianity show their own views, but no counter arguments. Live action, such as God's Not Dead is shot poorly, has a bad script, and has bad arguments for christianity. And animated movies, such as The Star, are watered down to such a level, where the original story is basically non existant. If you need any more info, just let me now. Well, change my view, Reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christian Media is an insult to the art form and people should stop supporting it.\n","id":"647da596-4f9d-4ed0-84f7-4453f29d0ffc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>make sex education mandatory in schools<|ARGUMENT|>Having a one size fits all sex education system cannot effectively deal differences within classes. Sexual experience is a gradual process and cannot be meaningfully taught in the structured environment of the classroom. People must discover much about their own sexuality, through experimentation and self-exploration. By trying to impose a strict curriculum that explains sexual processes and practices along set guidelines, much of the opportunity for self-discovery is lost. Furthermore, when people are forced to conform to the set sex education program, they cannot move at their own pace. This is particularly harmful to people who are physically or emotionally less mature than their fellow students and who would be better served if they were allowed to pursue sexual knowledge at their own pace. When other students are involved in the classroom, there is necessarily a degree of peer pressure, which places a further strain on the later bloomers of the class to conform and experiment sexually before they are ready.1 Another example is the case of gay and gender dimorphic students who will be left isolated within the class, even singled out as different, in a way that may not be conducive toward the promotion of understanding and acceptance. Teachers cannot cater their lessons to every single student, and thus students with less conventional sexual preferences and identities are left without meaningful engagement in the classroom. 1 Pogany, Sex Smart, 1998<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sexual development is a process of gradual discovery and cannot be effectively taught in a classroom\n","id":"a411a484-91b7-493c-912b-b3f4f3e193db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What is nationalism? A pride in one's place of birth, right? A belief that a place is better merely because you were born there. Also, that you should share 'pride' in the achievements of those who just happen to be born in the same rough geographical landmass, like you somehow effected this. A belief that roughly drawn border of some sort, probably created for financial or power based reasons on behalf of a small number of individuals, is better than anyone else's area of birth. I believe that the current attitudes around the world that patriotism is a 'good' thing are seriously damaging. I also cannot see how on earth a person could be patriot without being racist in some form or another. I find it hard to believe that humanity will be able to go forward while any of these attitudes are still in place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe all forms of nationalism, patriotism and 'national pride' are inherently racist and so is anyone who believes in any of these things.\n","id":"7d4b0443-15bf-4f32-adc2-70312429c360"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am referring to a very specific kind of situation the one in which a person speeds up in their lane even though there is a car in front of them because they plan to change lanes at the last second before they ram into the car in front of them they usually change lanes by not using a signal, or by putting their signal on at the last minute. I believe that I shouldn't have to anticipate if someone may or may not be changing lanes because sometimes people speed up on the car in front of them just for tail gating and they don't actually end up changing lanes. Why should I have to play this game of will they won't they? It's up to the person who is changing lanes to provide sufficient signal. This  isn't about if you care about your own safety then or insurance costs or anything like that. This is more about who has the moral high ground and more along the lines of is this line of thinking correct or valid?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have no obligation to give place to people who are in their lane, who are speeding up in their lane but don't have their signal on\n","id":"b88e2464-99f5-4e35-8dd1-32a38095c1db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not advocating for an attack on Syria. Just wanted to say this For every reason I hear a conservative give for not attacking Syria, there was an even more compelling corresponding reason not to attack Iraq. Any conservatives who argue against attacking Syria, but still support the invasion of Iraq, you are full of shit. You do not base your opinions on principles or evidence, but by which party is in power. For example Getting involved in a sectarian war Iraq had had several recent civil wars, but was at peace at the time. Critics rightly claimed that invasion would kick off another one, with our troops in the middle. Emboldening our enemies In Iraq, Islamists were persecuted by Saddam. Critics rightly claimed that Iraq would attract extremists like flies to honey, and that the invasion would serve as a recruitment tool for Al Qaeda. Critics also, rightly, claimed that this would divert resources from fighting our enemies in Afghanistan. Risk to Americans for getting involved This one is obvious. EDIT Rewording<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The arguments conservatives give for not attacking Syria, were even stronger when applied to invading Iraq. They are hypocrites,\n","id":"078e07b4-cf53-4e30-a18b-1d4ed6d10ec2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Selective breeding to create purebred dogs for human enjoyment also makes them more prone to genetic diseases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Domesticated animals are bred in ways that are often incredibly harmful to their health.\n","id":"0c98d4bf-56e6-4626-b99f-5f7936126cfa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Libertarianism<|ARGUMENT|>. Governments violate the rights of citizen when they force, or threaten to force, individuals to transfer their legitimately held wealth to the state in order to provide for pensions, to help the needy, or to pay for public goods e.g., parks or roads. Individuals have a natural right to life, liberty, and property. Depriving any one of these rights diminishes the others. Therefore, these rights must be considered inviolable. They are important to uphold for their own ends, not merely for other expediencies. Therefore, no matter what the cost, the individual right to property must be upheld as an absolute.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People have full rights to their property that governments can't deprive\n","id":"8c14453d-b18e-454a-a63a-be78f290d31e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Anyone Be Allowed To Be a Parent?<|ARGUMENT|>Historically invasive and sexually abusive techniques have been used to restrict reproductive capacity among populations deemed undesirable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No one has a right to restrict another person's ability to reproduce.\n","id":"5d72af0c-c1ec-4a2a-9185-8845e643dcea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should police adopt a reactive service model used by other public safety services?<|ARGUMENT|>Almost half of all police-public contacts are initiated by the public, which suggests that the public is already comfortable with a reactive service model.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A free society shouldn\u2019t keep its citizens under constant surveillance by armed agents of the state.\n","id":"31c9e5c8-490c-43df-90b2-0dfb064bbb8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should the Conservative Party choose to be the next UK Prime Minister?<|ARGUMENT|>Gove has been branded a hypocrite after it has emerged that in 1999 he wrote an article in the Times calling for tougher action against middle-class professionals who he claimed were majority abusers, just hours before hosting a cocaine-fulled party at his London flat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Michael Gove has admitted to multiple past instances of Class A illegal drug use which will not sit well with many party members or Conservative voters and the wider public in general.\n","id":"dab0735a-25d2-45c4-8750-d58bf243d95c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that meat farming methods in my country the US are often inhumane and unethical, and eating meat by its very nature is cruel and irreverent to the animals being consumed. I have more respect for hunters because they're actually capable of killing some of what they eat even though they don't use their bodies to do it like a natural predator claws, teeth, etc I believe that humans once had a much better regard of animals to the point of even worshiping them for what they gave us because they had that connection. I think that our way of life and the consumption of meat today is an aberration of nature, an appetite of cruelty, and completely unnecessary for human survival.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that anyone who eats meat but couldn't bring themselves to kill an animal personally is a hypocrite.\n","id":"e8da3d8d-3237-4654-b8cf-4a1fdab29ce2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>Assessing candidates based on personal achievement ignores the reality that there is no level playing field -no equality of opportunity - on which they fairly compete.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Organisations should not be striving for meritocracy in the first place.\n","id":"a0588778-13b0-4d3b-9d76-888bc0bb5685"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Beto co-sponsored an Act which protects the health of women by ensuring that abortion services will continue to be available, and that abortion providers are not singled out for medically unwarranted restrictions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Male candidates can be just as effective as female candidates in championing political causes that affect women. Therefore the gender of the democratic nominee shouldn't matter.\n","id":"51ab0a40-0ebd-4a00-82f2-b48061adc5b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think thy should be given amnesty. Stealing jobs is a simple minded way of thinking if they are given amnesty, they would be paid legal wages, and while they are willing to work for less, then that will drive only competition up. Obviously more jobs would be given to people willing to work for minimum wage, but I think this would lead to a national outcry for higher minimum wage something that is overdue. The process to become a citizen should be less strenuous it shouldn't take a person ten years before they are able to become a citizen. Their amnesty would help the economy with more people living here legally, they would be less afraid to leave the house, they'd more actively partake in the market place, creating higher demand for products, thus increasing the demand for jobs to meet product demands.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think illegal immigrants should be given amnesty.\n","id":"ff89db40-aa6b-4ce8-89e8-11f69c314596"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think we should have affirmative action. First of all I think that it's just stupid that people who are less qualified should get a position or acceptance somewhere than those who are more qualified. People always think about how it helps minorities like African Americans and Hispanics but it also hurts some like Asian Americans. Secondly there is evidence that affirmative action actually hurts the people that it tries to help. African Americans who are in STEM majors in college are more likely to drop that major than students who are white or asian. Just because you are accepted into a better college doesn't magically make the education you received from k 12 to be better. Finally it seems that the African Americans I meet who go to top colleges are well off financially. They came from a good high school and their parents are well off. They aren't really the ones that affirmative action is trying to help, the ones that because of systemic racism had poor education. All in all I would just rather have the most qualified get the best positions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that affirmative action isn't a good thing.\n","id":"838fa5f8-234c-4a82-8f80-1129f5571850"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is hard to continue calling the United States \u201cthe land of the free\u201d once you discover that with over 2 million people behind bars, it has a higher incarceration rate than any other nation in the world. U.S. prisons are becoming more and more overcrowded, posing questions about inhumane conditions and the prisoners\u2019 psychological health. It seems to me as though our country\u2019s obsession with the war on drugs may well be responsible for our overcrowded prisons considering that 55 of federal prisoners are drug offenders. The implementation of mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws puts many harmless drug offenders behind bars for a substantial amount of time. Even being caught simply possessing an illegal drug can result in a ten year prison sentence. I definitely think that the kingpins of violent drug rings should be behind bars, but these dangerous perpetrators are able to receive shorter sentences if they provide \u201csubstantial assistance\u201d to law enforcement agencies. If they rat out their dealers and those dealers give the names of their buyers, you end up with minor, often first time drug offenders behind bars while the bad guys get off easy. It costs about 23,876 to imprison one person for a year here in the United States, and building new prisons in order to house all of our criminalized citizens is not cheap either. Our taxpayer dollars are being used to keep 1 in 100 adults incarcerated, and while many of those people deserve to be there, I do not support my tax money contributing to the imprisonment of recreational drug users. Mandatory minimums should be eliminated and judges should be able to determine sentences based on each individual's circumstances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mandatory minimum drug law sentences are largely responsible for prison overcrowding;\n","id":"d4e299fd-3e2a-4a8c-843f-6be94eba0ef0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I will be using US statistics for the following About 88,000 people die every year due to alcohol related causes, and about 33,000 people die every year by firearm. 21,000 of these firearm related deaths are suicides, and many of those would have happened anyway. I say many, and not most, because firearms are the most effective suicide method, especially shotguns. So you have alcohol killing about 2.6 x the amount of people that firearms do every year in total, and about 7.3 x the amount of people killed in homicides and accidents caused by firearm. So, alcohol is provably a larger problem about 2.6 x larger of a problem arguably closer to 7.3 x . So, why would anybody want to ban firearms, but not alcohol? Ok, maybe you only want to ban AR 15s but pistols are responsible for 97 of homicides, so rifles hardly compare. Perhaps you are concerned with the intended purpose of something. Alcohol is meant for having fun and in my opinion so are guns but I can see the other side of the argument there, too. so as long as its not meant to kill people, its ok, right? well I can think of many different high explosives that are, and always have been, intended for mining and demolition. Just like alcohol can be used in a Molotov cocktail but it is intended for other purposes. Nitroglycerin, TTAP, Samtex, ANFO, and a few more that I can't think of, are all intended for mining and demolition. If what you are concerned with is intended purpose, then those high explosives should have the same level of restriction as alcohol, right? A lot of people seem to be fine with taking away the personal liberties of others, but would never give up alcohol and drugs Firearms are more conventionally useful than alcohol, the intended purpose of something is irrelevant, many bolt actions were designed to kill people and alcohol kills 2.6 x the amount of people, so why are we so concerned about guns, but able to buy alcohol at 21 without so much as a license?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is hypocritical to be anti gun, but not anti alcohol.\n","id":"90cf34bb-6099-433e-b74e-90292b727d27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Music should be free for all<|ARGUMENT|>In our current society, musicians often get very, very, very rich. Money is one of the prime motivators for making music. We risk losing a good portion of aspiring musicians if this motion was passed. We might also lose a good many listeners to music. If music was free, then surely, sooner or later, it's novelty would wear off and people would get tired of it? If music was free, people would perhaps treat it like they would treat natural scenery; like something not really of worth and merely there for our casual entertainment. Songwriters would perhaps also lack enthusiasm for their songs, giving the public audience exactly what music was worth free!<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This may actually cause the music industry to die out\n","id":"c2f70105-f7f2-4343-9d30-34c6b6e3f654"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tibet independence<|ARGUMENT|>A continues show of Tibetan autonomy through its history, even during the Mongol invasions, demonstrates its rightful historical claim to independence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even during the periods of nominal subjugation to the Mongol and Qing Empires, Tibet was largely self-governing.\n","id":"904bdcde-ac15-4558-a1c8-5280953b282f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook ban political ads with misinformation?<|ARGUMENT|>Many human rights groups, news outlets and the general public have outlined objections to this ad policy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Facebook is facing major controversy over these ads and should ban them to appease people.\n","id":"c8caa918-f471-48b6-a1e4-9f1b5f18542d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is enlightened despotism superior to democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Democracy allows the state to take into account the realities of more than one class of people. Whilst the ability to adapt under any form of autocracy will be up to a single person, which is unaware of the realities of a great deal of his subjects. One cannot ask someone who has everything what it is to live in poverty, one cannot ask him to solve a problem he knows nothing about, no matter how wise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Enlightened Despot is incapable of understanding everything that needs to be done, whereas an effective democracy reflects the needs of all the people.\n","id":"98f92185-d848-489f-9c2a-a88baff25cfb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I DO think that we, as a species, should reduce our carbon footprint. But I think this change will happen over the next few years due to economic incentives solar getting cheaper, gas getting more expensive, etc . Classic tragedy of the commons, but I don't see why I should reduce my carbon footprint when my personal contribution to atmospheric carbon is negligible. I could multiply it by 100 or reduce it to nothing and it wouldn't hurt or help anyone.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think I should try to reduce my carbon footprint.\n","id":"9438e880-7218-484a-bef1-9f12185f6e04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hunger Games-Style Tournaments Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>The catharsis hypothesis - that aggressive behavior reduces anger and aggression - has been consistently proven wrong; aggressive behavior rather leads to more aggressive thoughts and behavior Bushman et al., p. 368, 374<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fact that people so enjoy watching their fellow humans in mortal danger is not a good thing for society.\n","id":"dfabda31-fc2f-4b42-aee6-ce014d0814b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now then. Let's get to it. Fullmetal Alchemist is a manga that deployed in the year 2001 and running as late as 2010. In 2003 it was adapted in to an anime appropriately titled Fullmetal Alchemist. It was a 51 episode series that grew to popularity even in the US, and had a very strong english VA cast who to some degree get just as much attention as the originals do. I've seen both and I think they're fantastic all around. Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood is an anime that aired starting in 2009, 6 years after that of the first and its origin story is one of progressive wonder. Essentially, the first series, although widely appraised, did have criticisms and one of those major criticisms was its lack of faithfulness to the manga approaching the end, approx. around the time Greed becomes a prominent character in both shows. If the anime itself weren't enough, the 2003 series also interestingly ends with a cinema, Conqueror of Shamballa, which concludes the series even further in the complete opposite direction of Brotherhood. Brotherhood has a lot of followers, and I'm afraid that I'm likely in the minority here, but let's throw following the manga out the window for a second as a reason why Brotherhood could possibly be better and allow me to pose the following topical question how on earth is Brotherhood a better show than the original FMA anime? I've seen very little in the way of substantial evidence that would equate to Brotherhood being a more well done series aside from It actually followed the manga . This is understandable as a criticism from those who were huge fans of the manga, as I can reason being disappointed that not every single bit of the content you grew to love ended up on screen originally, and if you weren't a fan of those deviations then that could only make it worse, I get that. Brotherhood is a shallow, bare bones show with a modicum of effort behind it meant to give itself an actual identity as a show. It's a gimme to the manga fans, a crowd pleaser which it accomplished , but I can't seriously take the idea that it is actually better than the 2003 show seriously. The first half of brotherhood covers essentially what would be the first 3rd or so of the original show, and it does it in a viciously and seemingly expedited manner that is not only jarring for the non manga readers, but audaciously pretentious. It's understandable this needed to happen, but the show played out as if they knew you had already seen or read this stuff. It's actually almost embarrassing to watch. What's unfortunate is that they expected the manga or the original series to essentially be the pillars on which they slop fed you that whole first half, letting the older non related by non related I mean canon material that isn't Brotherhood that you'd have to have gone out of your way to see beforehand content fill the gaps. It makes sense as a plan, but individually for Brotherhood, makes for a terrible conglomeration of episodes that is really in the top three of Brotherhoods faults as a show. Once the manga picks its own pace up around the time it moves along its own unique path the manga one , it becomes more intriguing. Basically the problem here is they covered the material incredibly poorly in the first half of this series. I pose to you does a great book manga in this case always make for great audio visual entertainment? Some things are better left to the pages and unfortunately I think Brotherhoods story and some of its details fall squarely in to this syntactical basis. There are a few unique traits about the original series that make a huge difference in how you interpret both the anime and the characters and I'll go over two big ones. In Brotherhood, Scar is responsible for the death of Winry's parents. He killed them in a fatigued rage as it was during a hectic time of war despite them being doctors. Now in the 2003 series they made an incredible change to this historical event. They re wrote Mustang as the killer. In the heat of war, they were treating the enemy, and he was given no choice but to execute them as traitors. This one single change does a few things. First it completely absolves Scar from being the biggest hypocrite in the show. His life goal ends up being to kill off all of the state alchemists for what they did, but guess who spilled innocent blood long before the war was over? Scar. He murders in cold blood two defenseless doctors who were giving him medical attention for his wounds. This makes Scar a preposterous hypocrite, and as a result makes it increasingly difficult to sympathize with his motives if at all. On the other hand, Mustang is now the murderer of Winry's parents. How can you ask for a better ticket to drama? Edward Elric's commander killed his best friends parents One simple detail changed it both fixes a conceptual flaw, and creates an amazing new dynamic to the Fullmetal Alchemist canon. A brilliant change. Next are Homunculus. In Brotherhood the manga, these are simply horrific creations spawned of the power of the philosopher juice with the steady hands of the original homunculus. Boring. They changed this in the 2003 series to something way more both intelligent and clever. In FMA 2003, a homunculus is born every time there is a failed human transmutation and not only that but it takes on the form of the failed human ingredient. This was also a brilliantly thought out change as it provides the potential for so much character drama in the face of their unsightly relatives friends as a form with a personality they can no longer recognize. This is most prominent around the time they are killing Sloth Elric's Mom . This is another dynamic creatively woven in to the new story of the 2003 series. A big issue I have with Brotherhood lovers is how they criticize the original show for its ending as in the direction it went as a whole in the last few episodes . I think this criticism is utterly pathetic, because Brotherhoods story is equally if not multiple times absurd. Watching the anime makes it almost seem laughable. The moment the main enemy becomes God , Hoenheim is right there to enact the plan he has been preparing from the beginning of the damn series, and from there it's a slow process to the main antagonists eventual defeat. How stupid is this? It defeats the purpose of almost the entire series's events, because Hoenheim has the master plan all along. Also, I completely skipped over the absurdity of becoming God and the swallowing of some giant door the size of the planet and yeah all of that stuff is just weird abstract. While the 2003 series isn't innocent of being abstract or out there, it went for something more close to home. Something that was more closely tied in to the Elric Brothers themselves instead of some wafty and tiresome tale about a civilization that was wiped out by some thing in a beaker and this things demise. Story details aside a major issue not related to brotherhood's horrid pacing is that almost every identical scene, side by side in comparison to the 2003, is inferior. I'm referring to scenes that played out in both series because as you know for the most part the two shows were incredibly similar up until the point the 2003 show deviated. My best example is the church scene in the very first episode of both series. Watch them side by side. Edward explains to rose the chemical composition of the human body in both scenes brotherhood does an amazing job of making it look like a joke. In the 2003 series they did an excellent job of making this a powerful scene of conceptual thought provocation. The brotherhood scene makes it an anime lul moment. This is only the first in a long line of examples down the road until the two branch off from one another, and it's closely tied in to my criticism that Brotherhood did the first half very poorly. Now a valid criticism from manga fans on the first series was that it was too dark. It was much darker than the air of the manga or brotherhood. Ed is even killed. He's impaled through the damn chest. It's gruesome stuff. Fans felt that the first series deprived FMA of its humorous light hearted value and this I feel is the only valid point behind Brotherhood being what it is. It's not that Brotherhood is all jokes, it definitely has serious moments, but it suffers very painfully for viewers like me from a bad case of the Brock. Things are constantly being overly explained on screen because there is so much information from the pages of the manga that are hard to show in a finite amount of episodes. The 2003 series took the concept of FMA and made it much grittier, which in my opinion is quite appropriate given their circumstance and a lot of details of the canon. It's because of this route that 2003 sees many more emotionally charged moments than Brotherhood does, because it capitalized on what it believed its strengths were, which given the story was definitely the drama. Brotherhood haphazardly turns many of these great moments that the 2003 series did in to fleeting moments of anime lulz and you find yourself saying so often The first show did that part so much better . These aren't even deviations, these are moments that happen in both series that the 2003 series did better. Opinion? Yeah I suppose, but is a scene like when Edward is at the end of his rope in a fight against the soul bound samurai supposed to comedy? It became comedy in brotherhood, and it was nothing of the sort in the 2003 series. It's not a big deal here and there, but I felt Brotherhood had an unfortunately thorough means of de human ifying a lot of great scenes with a lot of relate ability that made the original show more emotionally gratifying. It made Brotherhood feel as though it lacked heart , simply going through the motions of essentially being hand puppets for the manga instead of standing on its own as a good show. Tapping in to that human connection, that very basic need to live, or understand the motives behind a killer. This is what the original show did so well. Lastly, is I find the ending of brotherhood to be too quaint. I don't mind a perfect ending to a simple anime but the story of FMA is anything but simple. It's incredibly complex more so in the manga brotherhood , and for everything to be peachy at the end, what with the guy getting the girl, Winry pops out some kids, Al has his body back, yippee just doesn't sit right. Conqueror of Shamballa was a great movie with a great concept, and it gave us a an ending that, while it didn't leave everything in a state of peachy keen, gave us something that left you thinking I can handle that . A non perfect ending for a non perfect sequence of events, is what I think should be the recipe. Ed and Al are together, but now they must explore a new world with even a few recognizable faces. What's even more intriguing is it allows you to wonder about the future. What will happen next? Brotherhood denies you of this potential intrigue. All in all I find Brotherhood to be a weak adaptation of what would be a great manga, and the original FMA series of 2003 to be a strong, creative landmark for anime that decides to branch off from its source material. It's emotional, it still retains enough of that wacky FMA humor, but it keeps it under control to harness a better potential. The potential to be thought provoking with all the concepts of life death, the making of the philosopher stone and the choices people make. There are just so many great scenes that were done so well, making FMA one of my top shows because it has a sprinkle of almost everything it. You can laugh, you can cry, and you can cheer. That, my friends, is the recipe for great anime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the 2003 version of Fullmetal Alchemist is far superior to Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood which the vast majority of ppl and critics prefer.\n","id":"1c0680e4-039b-4358-acee-7a7a63366d3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is SESTA - FOSTA helpful or harmful?<|ARGUMENT|>Sex workers used sites taken down by SESTA-FOSTA as an alternative to soliciting customers on the street, which comes with increased risks of violence, harassment from community protesters and threats from police.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex workers use the internet to make their jobs safer; SESTA-FOSTA shuts down their avenues for support and safety.\n","id":"5809b3da-0adb-42ac-a587-28fae86493f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The concept of 'punch a Nazi' went viral, leading many white supremacists to fear for their personal safety; yet, there are no suggestions to censor those holding that viewpoint.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The incitement of violence is not unique to white supremacists.\n","id":"11715a96-bfad-488f-ba40-6544095ee61f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund security for places of worship?<|ARGUMENT|>As there is no way to differentiate between followers of a religion while granting them access to places of worship, security may be ineffective in preventing attackers from gaining entry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Funding security for places of worship by the government may not be effective in protecting such places.\n","id":"15398723-da7c-45f0-a894-c0c2a60613d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The specific point I like to discuss is the section called Atrocities against Israeli prisoners Egyptian atrocities The article says that the Egyptian army killed Israeli prisoners based on orders from central command but the only evidence provided by the references are a blurry picture of what is supposed to be a written command but otherwise have no indication that it is actually from central command and testimonials from soldiers who claim that they watched other prisoners die but for some reason the killers decided to let them live to tell the tale. I am Egyptian and tales very similar to these are popular in Egypt except it is the Israelis killing Egyptian POW this however is not to be considered concrete evidence so my second point is that if the testimony are to be considered evidence then there should be a section called Israeli's atrocities against Egyptians. I need to clarify that I won't reply to any comments that try to extend the discussion to the whole Arab Israeli conflict .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Wikipedia article about the 6th of October war Yom Kippur War is biased\n","id":"5062756b-c418-41da-bbc0-aacd1aa61e76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>The mandate a party was elected in on can allow for the will of the people to be represented.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are ways for the will of the people to be accounted for, other than a referendum.\n","id":"87395a09-ca0c-4346-954c-7c784ca161d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Looking in Joseph Smit's book Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar it is clear that he is deriving whole phrases from single letters of the papyrus.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith held false notions about the nature of Egyptian and other ancient languages.\n","id":"866b0a9f-2bc2-49a9-8cf4-7695b19af076"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All People in the US Have the Right to Health Care?<|ARGUMENT|>A strategy tested by the NHS through the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence NICE is adopting a national systematic approach to developing evidence-based clinical guidelines for new treatments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Countries should adopt strategies for priority setting based on evidence-based methods to avoid waste of resources.\n","id":"aa996cdc-1b32-4266-8f12-b986ed63d5fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>Christian buildings and pieces of art contributed to the creation of UNESCO heritage in Europe and therewith benefited Europe's economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christian buildings and pieces of art attracted tourists, which was beneficial for the economy.\n","id":"f5c64a1f-7067-4ebc-b54c-30f384473228"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I searched through the subreddit, and haven't found any posts in the last year or so on Ranked Choice voting. The few I did find seemed to assert that Ranked Choice voting was the best voting system, which is not my argument. My argument is simply that it is objectively better than our current system. E per u jonhwoods comment below, I have slightly modified my position to just include single seat spots like the presidency. I understand how using this method for Congress or other groups of representatives would cause everyone to lean center, which would not be an appropriate representation of the voters Our current system is simple everyone votes, and the person who gets the most votes wins. Unfortunately, with 3 candidates, someone can win who didn't get the majority of the votes. It also encourages the two party system, as third party voters believe their vote would be 'wasted' and so instead vote for whichever one of the big 2 they hate the least. Ranked choice voting is a bit different. Let's say there's 5 candidates. You vote by putting your first choice, then your second, all the way down to however many you want you do not have to rank all candidates, just the ones you would want in office . The votes are then tallied. If any candidate gets majority, they win. Otherwise, the candidate with the least amount of votes is eliminated, and all the votes for that candidate are switched to whatever candidate they put as their second choice. The votes are recounted, and this process repeats itself until a candidate gets the majority. Pros Third party candidates get a fighting chance, because you no longer have to vote for only one person. If you prefer a 3rd party candidate, you can put them first, then whatever D R candidate you'd like as a backup 2nd choice. If you only want to vote for one candidate, you still can, so nothing is being taken away from people who don't feel comfortable putting more than one name on the ballot It discourages mudslinging. When you effectively only have two choices, all a candidate has to do is convince the voters why they shouldn't vote for the other guy, not why you should vote for them Multiple candidates from the same party can run. You don't have to decide if you want Sanders or Clinton to represent the Democrats, with ranked choice they both can run or whichever one of the countless examples in the past on both sides of the aisle, this isn't a partisan thing Cons Relative to FPTP, none that I can think of Maine's Supreme Court is in the process of approving ranked choice for their state, and I think it's a wonderful system to implement nationally. If nothing else, it would be an improvement over what we have. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ranked choice voting is objectively better than USA's current First Past the Post system\n","id":"c6bb5328-1cbb-41af-a165-a2432f1d210e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Republicans, especially right wingers tea baggers, should not work in government jobs out of respect for their own principles. Those who do are simply hypocrites.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":", Republicans, especially right wingers, should not work in government jobs out of respect for their own principles.\n","id":"87893a35-1b5d-48aa-aac2-e0a7723ea226"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's helped me to understand so much about myself and the people around me. From an introverts perspective I would have benefited greatly to have this understanding early in my life. There is value in providing a safe space for fringe members of our environments to share their observations of the majority. Not all popular decisions are wise or beneficial. Myers Briggs provides understanding and sense of value to the whole personality spectrum. I consider myself to be the definition of layman so feel free to take me to school.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Myers-Briggs should be taught in all levels of education.\n","id":"5a382199-f320-4ba1-8554-cb555273e885"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>There may be unsuitable, yet legal uses for a UBI like, but not limited to, alcohol, tobacco, or gambling. Blocking or limiting a person from accessing those would keep the UBI from being frivolously spent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People could get a card with their UBI money that can't be cashed out, and it could be bounced from purchases that people don't want to see a UBI spent on.\n","id":"47039d96-303f-4526-87a9-b2f7c9513c33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cities have bike share?<|ARGUMENT|>When there is knowledge that there is an event or a demand for more bikes in certain areas, the city and bike share company can prepare accordingly. This allows for urban planners to keep track of what is going on and to be organised in providing transport.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having a docked\/station-based system allows urban planners and city government to better plan and organize their transportation system\n","id":"b6b36943-269e-4262-a001-dcfb0c7685ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>ICE, a group made by the government, is a terrorist group, because they are designed to make Mexicans be afraid rather than to find people illegally in the country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US has continued to overreach even though the citizens have guns\n","id":"0e4c0d02-bd17-4267-8954-2937bfa81f10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>edit my view has been changed thanks for the discussion, bros I think data should be treated equally for fairness, openness, and variety of expression. I do not think high traffic websites or subscribers should be individually charged to get a fast lane treatment. But I do think that there is a real cost structure analysis involved when ISP's are seeking compensation from players like Netflix. shitty analogy removed These ISPs are saying, well these small up and coming content distributors should not have to pay for the increased load they are placing on our infrastructure, but it has to come from somewhere since it's an expansion upon the service we provide . I think that is something you see at any normal company. I don't think the problem is that Comcast is charging twice subscribers and content providers for the same content I think the problem is more, Comcast is charging too much to BOTH parties because they CAN since they're a monopoly. It's a problem, but one that ties into problems with American capitalism, not so much net neutrality. Executed correctly in legislature and regulation, my line of thought is that small content creators up and coming netflixes would pay ISPs little to nothing for the SAME high traffic bitrate as the big companies who are paying fees for their heavy traffic. It doesn't have to be a slow lane or a fast lane. Just, traffic heavy content distributors pay a fee because that's how infrastructure and traffic load work, and if you don't pay, the law kicks in with penalties . That said, I think it should be illegal to arbitrarily slow particular data down in a network. So, why do you think light contributors to congestion should pay for the infrastructure just as much as the heavy contributors?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Internet service providers should be compensated according to traffic volume\n","id":"74339fb9-7701-4a27-ac46-5024a6725989"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need nuclear power for sustainable energy production?<|ARGUMENT|>Hydrogen explosions may result from the failure of specific alloys and components integral to some Nuclear Design. Evidenced by Zirconium-Hydrogen reaction from Fukushima.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are serious safety concerns with the use of nuclear power.\n","id":"0c2bf151-fdef-4c39-b302-52f347d18d4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First up, I live in Australia and have never encountered a bigfoot or been squatchin. However, I hold the firm belief that a creature similar to the giganticus pithicus is living and thriving within parts of northern America. Firstly, there are too many eye witness accounts for bigfoot to be simply a lie. Granted, many if these eyewitnesses are wholly untrustworthy and probably lying in order to get their mug on TV. But there is hundreds if not thousands of people who have personally seen bigfoot and devoted their life or at least some of it to finding him with no sense of glory in sight. Secondly, the numerous myths and folk lore stories relating to bigfoot are simply too many for at least a creature similar to bigfoot to not exist. Many cultures from all over the world have different names for an ape like creature walking on two legs, these include the Yeti, Abominable Snowman and and Australian Aborigines version the Yowie. Thirdly, the video evidence taken by Roger Patterson has many experts swear that the video could not have been faked, and that the way in which the creature steps is unlike anything human. This evidence has been somewhat tainted, by Roger Patterson's background as a fraudman and the cameras purchase using a phony cheque. Video can be found here Fourthly, many footprint experts have gone on the record saying that some of the footprints found exhibit ridge patterns and are very hard to replicate or fake. I believe that many scientists and otherwise experts don't further investigate the bigfoot as there is a culture of disrepute for anyone that further investigates these occurrences. I would love to hear people's opinions or even to see someone . Cheers<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I truly believe Bigfoot exists\n","id":"a74ec96f-3dc0-4888-bc59-efd9628d29da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The US currently has roughly fair numbers of African American respresentatives compared to percentage population ~10 and this is for one reason gerrymandering. Similarly with hispanics, although they are still vastly under represented. Get rid of gerrymandering and suddenly it becomes near impossible to elect a non white candidate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe gerrymandering should be legal.\n","id":"795a3865-bab4-42a3-80fe-b4cc74835f4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>Morality is dependent on telos. The \"good\" is that which serves the proper telos of humans. \"Evil\" is that which is antithesis to the proper telos of humans. Without a end goal toward which humans are supposed to work, there can be no way of saying that some action is good or evil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This argument assumes the conclusion of what is good and evil. But without telos there is no way to determine objective morality. Without God, we are left with a naturalistic worldview, and this worldview does not properly provide telos. Therefore, it cannot justify any claim of objective morality.\n","id":"0c9a38bd-84a0-4e24-99b5-d8faa82d7847"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll keep this one short and concise as much as I can sorry, eh . This isn't a complete rebuttal of Capitalism as a theory, just a particular, and in my opinion vital , failing of the theory as a model for economic structure in a world of typical human beings I hold the position that any sort of free market theory that appeals to private charitable forces institutions as a means for welfare support of the population is inherently flawed and misses the mark in terms of typical human behavior and the guiding forces of a free market. Three points seem pertinent in terms of a rebuttal A largely free market society relies on competition as a motivator and ostensibly perfect information and reaction to function optimally. For obvious reasons this is nearly impossible our access to information is fraught with frailties, and our reactions as human beings are often far from perfectly rational. And though it is certainly more viable in a free market economy than it would be in a socialist economy, the nature of Capitalist drivers make it impossible for a broad and adequate response to welfare needs that anticipate market failures. A purely capitalist model relies on a primary motivator that is competitive in nature and yet must compete with a secondary charitable motivator to function. Now you could take the position that charitable motivations can be reduced to competition either through self fulfillment and personal contrast to others as an ethical code which would need to be institutionalized separately in the form of a societal ethos , or as a means to increase productivity in a broader societal view but the former fails on the condition that such a view must be fostered apart from ALL OTHER capitalist institutions with absolutely no reason to do so and another failing addressed in point three , and the latter fails on the condition that again human beings are FAR from perfectly rational and are more often than not entirely short sighted. The societal ethos that would need to be universally endorsed could be easily bypassed for short term and thereby long term gain. I think it goes without saying that a society driven by individual selfish interest for its function cannot hold a double standard and expect to be effective or even functional. The resulting positive feedback loops from having a social player that can get ahead and legitimately accrue power by casting aside the ethos in favor of personal gain would be taken advantage of by anyone with half a brain and the market would ultimately fail by devolving into either monopolies or labor unions in retaliation . In short, I believe Free Market capitalism and any sort of effective welfare are completely incompatible and the theory must absolutely devolve into Objectivist ethics and fail or risk sacrificing some of its hold on an economy in favor of a dual aspect system that incorporates both free market and state centric coercive models and succeed . Obviously you could reject welfare entirely, but it's my understanding that you won't get very far with slave labor. EDIT As others have pointed out, I'm using Capitalist and Socialist incorrectly here. What I should be talking about is free markets and coercive state institutions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any sort of Capitalist Apologetics that attempt to reconcile welfare with a free market are fatally flawed by a misguided assumption of both human nature and the market force.\n","id":"dbbd6b5f-7db4-49f5-9688-72dc84c2cb43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe based on analyzing Facebook profiles, OK Cupid Profiles, Celeb profiles and Marriage statistics in America and just general peopling watching. I feel a lot of dating and marriage, there is strong correlation that your partner will look a lot like you or at least similar. I have been able to test my theory by observing one person and guessing what their partner will look like without seeing them , when they appear they generally look like I expected. For example Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt look almost like they are related. They look similar. They have more similar features than say Heidi Montag and Don Cheadle. That celeb couple would not look alike. Or say Spencer Pratt and Rosie Perez. That couple too would like dissimilar. And in looking alike, race is also a factor. But even beyond race, people find partners of similar age, similar height, weight, number of tatoos, sometimes couples have similar style in dress. There is a certainly a correlation in age. It seems that the average age gap is around 2 5 years see data below and google 'marriage average age gap' . If you are 30 and your partner is 30, that certainly increases the chances of 'similar features'. On race, the number of interracial marriages was around 4 for the census report below. So same race marriages are at 96 . Having a similar race can also contribute to features that will resemble yourself. I don't have statistics on weight and height, but you generally don't typically see couples where one person is morbidly obese and the other person isn't. More on race, I have seen couples, many couples where they come from the same 'village' in a sense. For example, I remember an American couple from Thailand. I figure that their marriage was tied to their religion or some traditional aspects of coming from Thailand. But this wasn't the case, both were very modernized and didn't have really any connection to Thailand but the couple both from Thailand got together. They had some origins from that corner of the world, there were few people from Thai in 'Alabama' at that time but they managed to get married, I argue because they had similar looking features. So finding a partner with similar features to your own is important even in less homogeneous countries like the United States. It seems you find similarities in appearance. With that said, you may find people of same place of origin, same college, same wealth, same taste in music, same interests but still may have a different race, yet those couples will be compatible. Or similarly, you may see couples that have similar appearances yet may completely different backgrounds and interests. People will even hold out for a potential date for that person that looks right as opposed to looking for someone with similar interests. You may see an OKCupid profile or something on Facebook, I sure can't find anyone in my town that is warm and kind and educated I would prefix that statement to add work, kind, educated and looks similar in nature to my profile, the looks are important Some of my view is based on the following data<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lot of dating and marriage in America is tied to finding a mate that looks like yourself.\n","id":"1f18e37b-0dc1-4349-a0f0-772bb221a88d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Even someone who is part of the majority can considered disadvantaged, and therefore could be considered a victim of non PC language.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A culture of political correctness protects minorities and those who feel outcast.\n","id":"6687e9a5-adbe-41e2-b0d4-7c5b7f82f03b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>#timesup: Should individuals credibly accused of sexual assault or harassment be fired from positions of authority?<|ARGUMENT|>The level of evidence required should be lower in cases where ongoing harm is possible because it establishes there is a likely risk it will happen again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is important to minimise the possibility that individuals will continue to be harassed and assaulted by those in a position of power or authority.\n","id":"81b625cd-8937-47cf-89c9-367c4d7aac46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>move the 2022 Football World Cup to the winter<|ARGUMENT|>One of the most important parts of the game is the fans. They are the ones who watch the sport, they are the ones to which football owes its popularity. Not only are they the ones who pay for the sport they are also a vital part of any competition. Without the choreographies made by the supporters and the impressive cheering, football becomes nothing more than a silent, mediocre sport. As a result, we must take into consideration how well these hundreds of thousands of supporters from all over the world who will come to Qatar feel during the World Cup. Let us not forget, that they will spend most of the time outside the stadia; on the streets, in the gruelling heat, or they will be forced indoors. Unfortunately, for many of them this experience will be overshadowed by the constant heat-caused discomfort when engaging in the kind of socialising and watching matches at outdoor screens that usually creates the atmosphere of the cup. It is even more worrying when you take into consideration the fact that supporters of all ages and health conditions come here, some of them will be exposing themselves to heat related risks. Heatstroke can potentially cause death. Taking this into consideration, UEFA\u2019s 54 member associations have already backed a switch, while Europe's leading clubs have said they are \"open\" to the possibility of a winter World Cup in Qatar.1 The 2022 World Cup in Qatar must switch to winter, according to FIFA\u2019s own medical chief. Michel D'Hooghe, the chairman of the FIFA\u2019s medical committee, will advise that the risks posed to supporters by extreme heat are too great. \"I am sure the Qataris have the technical skill to organise a tournament where teams could play and train in a stable, acceptable temperature, but it's about the fans. They will need to travel from venue to venue and I think it's not a good idea for them to do that in temperatures of 47C or more.\"2 1 Richard Conway \u201cQatar faces no threat to its right to host 2022 World Cup\u201d , BBC, 3 October 2013 2 \u201c2022 World Cup in Qatar must be played in winter\u201d, BBC, 16 September 2013<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A sporting event in the heat of a desert summer will not be a pleasant experience for the fans\n","id":"4d1c1cf2-2806-4d49-a705-8af459eb6c6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a big science advocate and I really do think we need several space programs around the world with countries competing with one another, but countries that receive foreign aid should not have a space program. The money could be spent far better on bettering the lives of the citizens of that country such as improving infrastructure, reducing corruption and improving health and safety of workers. I will be using India as an example as it has one of the biggest space agencies. It has a budgent of 1.4 billion and yet the US sent India 65.1 billion from 1946 2012 and the UK sent \u00a3150 million in just 2015 and India recieved 2.47 billion from everyone in 2013 With the number increasing. This is when 170 million people live in poverty and there is massive wealth inequality Again, I'm not anti science or anti space but I think it would be best for countries like India to spend the money on improving the lives of the citizens and leave having a space program to counties like the US and large successful economic bodies like the EU that don't receive foreign aid. Looking forward to discussing this with you, thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should not send foreign aid to countries that have a space program\n","id":"05d2eac3-75fe-4d8b-818f-ba55e3859d05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The commonly used phrase Android vs iPhone makes absolutely no sense Android is an open source operating system used on thousands of different devices, produced by hundreds of different companies 80 phones to 1600 phones, 50 tablets to 700 tablets, televisions, cars, smartwatches, digital cameras, and even game consoles , while iPhone is a name of a few different smartphones produced by Apple currently on the market iPhone X, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 , and iPhone SE, while today the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR will be announced . For comparison, it's like saying monarchy vs the USA the USA is a country , while monarchy is a political system used in numerous countries some like Norway or Denmark with a considerably higher standard of living than the USA, and some like Swaziland or Oman with a considerably lower standard of living . In order to compare like for like, there are 3 different ways that can be acceptable 1 Operating System Android vs iOS both are used on numerous devices primarily phones and tablets , both are overhauled annually, and both are developed by American tech giants Google and Apple, respectively . 2 Smartphone manufacturers Samsung Huawei BKK parent company of Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus Xiaomi etc. vs Apple all of the above manufacture numerous smartphones with their own unique user interface and design, and have a large share of the worldwide smartphone market. 3 Brands of high end smartphones Galaxy S Galaxy Note Pixel LG V Huawei Mate Huawei P Oppo Find Vivo Nex OnePlus Mi Mix etc. vs iPhone all of the above have new versions released on an annual semi annual basis, all claim to have the latest and most innovative technological advancements chipset, display, camera, etc. , and all try to make themselves the most attractive to the upper class consumer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as \"Android vs iPhone\" - one is an operating system, the other is a series of smartphones\n","id":"3fc31eb5-93fe-4ecb-8eb6-f7455d6da103"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have no problems with refugee camps in the EU or US, but there is one thing that bothers me why should we let perfectly healthy, military age men in? Shouldn't they be in their country fighting a war that their peers started? If our perfectly healthy, military age men are over there fighting, why shouldn't their own be? My belief is that we should let the elderly, women, children, and men with any health issue in the refugee camps, and let the rest fight the war they started. If you believe you can change my mind, go right ahead. I'm open to better ideas, but that doesn't mean I won't debate you, even as the Devil's Advocate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have no problem with refugees, but the healthy men should be fighting.\n","id":"4c1f8133-ab85-4090-bc96-085181a10915"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US government guarantee every citizen a job?<|ARGUMENT|>This would be helpful for people who can't afford higher education. They would be able to build workplace skills while receiving a living wage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"On -the- job\" training has been shown to be an effective way of up-skilling a workforce.\n","id":"5e5e9f95-a2f2-41ee-bb7f-de0603fefd37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Vegetarianism<|ARGUMENT|>Animals lead independent lives with independent goals that typically have nothing at all to do with humans. A good example are fish living at the floor of the ocean. How can humans have \"dominion\" over these fully independent creatures?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals are independent creatures that don't exist to serve humans\n","id":"18c0d1ab-e799-406e-8a07-e4e032e1472c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's just simple math. Total expenditure on energy 6.4 trillion A wind farms output assuming that the Chines government isn't lying 20,000 MW gt 20,000 x 24 x 365 x 25 43,800,000 MWh 43,800,000,000 kWh cost of the project again, we're trusting the Chines government 17.5 billion Cost of each kWh production 43,800,000,000 17,500,000,000 2.5 kWh USD 1 kWh 3,412.14 Btus 2.5 kWh 8530.35 Buts 8,530.35 Buts USD 6,400,000,000,000 x 8,530.35 54,594,240,000,000,000 Buts So we'll produce 54,594,240,000,000,000 ~54.6 quadrillion Buts if we spend literally every single penny that's being spend on all energies across the world on wind. That's only supply 10 of the worlds energy, and that's ignoring the fact that electric devices and transportation of electricity is horrendously inefficient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wind energy is cannot replace focile fuels, at least with todays tech.\n","id":"aa3a66ab-c3dc-4beb-80db-614e9029b8a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no such thing as a self-regulating hunter in any society if they are provided with the weapons of war. In war at least you know who the enemy is and the forces are well-regulated under government control through officers and common cause. To afford lethal weaponry to ANY individual the cause they perceives is more times than not sourced from the logic of fear. A one man judge and jury dispersing the death penalty in an instant. Weapons of war in a society create the conditions of war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US should adopt stricter gun control legislation, in the form of the policy defined in the discussion info click top left menu => Info.\n","id":"8555366a-1e4f-4191-a289-11084439d538"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I say intimate relationships , I'm referring specifically to romantic sexual relationships, friendships, and to a lesser extent, family relationships. We seem to believe that those relationships are important, to the point where, when a couple breaks up or divorces or when two friends get into a fight or when a loved one dies, we consider it a huge loss. But I think that's wrong. We often say that our society is overly consumerist and materialistic. We criticize people for caring so much about material possessions, wealth, entertainment, fashion, and celebrities. We consider those things to be distractions from important issues opiates of the masses, to borrow a phrase. By contrast, we consider it okay to care about relationships, love, friendship, sex, and intimacy, and it shows. These things are nearly ubiquitous themes in literature, art, film, television, and music. You open any newspaper or magazine and there will be some Dear Abby type expert who will give you advice on these things, not to mention endless articles on intimate relationship tips 10 tips for a healthier marriage , etc. . There are even scientists, who are paid with taxpayer money, who actually do research into these relationships I guess curing AIDS isn't as important anymore . We even offer certain legal and financial benefits to certain coulpes in the form of marriage. It's obvious that society especially western, developed society elevates intimate relationships to a level above the distractions I mentioned earlier. I, however, don't see much of a difference between these relationships and the distractions I mentioned. I don't understand why it's okay to be upset when your friend, say, moves away but it's not okay to be equally upset if your favorite team loses the Super Bowl. I don't understand why it's okay to cry if when your SO leaves you but it's not okay to cry just as much if when your favorite TV show gets cancelled. Because at the end of the day, both intimate relationships and the distractions I mentioned are just things we do do keep us entertained, busy, and happy. They raise our endorphin levels. They're things we do when we're bored. They're things we do for fun. So why are intimate relationships considered more valuable than the other things I mentioned? Why is it, that when people talk about what Kim Kardashian tweeted, we think they're wasting their time, but when someone sets up a dating profile or goes to a movie with a friend, we think it's totally cool? Why is it that, when people line spend x amount of time, energy, money on following sports, we think they're crazy or stupid, but when they spend even more time cultivating these relationships I'm talking about, we think it's okay? In a sense, we kind of already subconsciously view these relationships as entertainment because we tend to differentiate between these relationships. For example, we treat the relationship between frat bros who spend all their time smoking weed, getting drunk, and trying to get laid as a shallow, meaningless relationship fun. By contrast, we treat a real, serious, deep friendship between two people forged, tested, and tried over the years as a real friendship, sort of like Turk and JD. As another example, we realize that a casual fling between two people is just that casual fun. However, we afford a certain respect to a long, committed, multi year or multi decade relationship and call it true love . When two drunken college students in Cancun hook up in a porta potty, we know that it's just something they're doing to derive some cheap physical pleasure, and we treat that differently than two people who genuinely love each other making love. My point is that we already accept that certain relationships are entertainment and therefore no different than fashion, celebrity culture, etc. , and we treat others as though they're different. My point is that there is no difference. tl dr Intimate relationships such as friendship, romance, and sex are entertainment, just like celebrity culture, sports, reality TV, fashion, or the newest gadgets, and there's no difference between shallow relationships and deep relationships. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intimate relationships are a form of entertainment.\n","id":"5ff24470-aaa2-4171-82bc-2164d5c95015"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>make lessons in a foreign language compulsory for school pupils<|ARGUMENT|>There are many people who will never excel in languages whether they are forced to learn it or not, and if they are not going to succeed then why waste all the time trying to make them succeed. With learning foreign languages there is a problem of anxiety in the classroom. This is particularly disabling as students must be able to speak up and be heard, usually by the whole class, in order to make progress. This anxiety is likely to be closer to panic than it would be in other subjects.1 This not only affects those who are anxious but holds back those who are more able. This will be even more pronounced with dyslexic children. They struggle with the written word and so will necessarily do even worse when studying foreign languages. Yet they can excel in other subjects such as mathematics.2 It is therefore not sensible to make languages mandatory. 1 Ehrman, \u2018Understanding Second Language Difficulties, 1996, p.149 2 \u2018Dyslexia and Numeracy\u2019,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not everyone will succeed in learning languages even if compulsory.\n","id":"08fe4285-8fb5-46eb-b6b9-d52492c751f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to begin this by saying that I fundamentally disapprove of Donald Trump and all that he stands for. However, I believe that banning him from an audience with the Queen would be a gesture of disrespect to the leader of the USA at a time when it cannot really be afforded. Britain, having backed itself into a corner with Brexit, desperately needs trade deals for the future, and antagonising any major world leader, especially that of America, would be the exact same kind of emotion fuelled, heart before head, short sighted protest that caused the exit from the European union in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump should not be banned from a state visit to the UK.\n","id":"a655c718-0a93-499d-b165-b073e244081c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface this by saying i'm of mixed race descent myself, and by all accounts am not 'white british'. Each and every time i've seen him make a public appearance he's the underdog, with people leaping onto every word he says and trying to trick or twist it to suit their narrative. He seems to know what he's talking about, speaks with confidence and with quotes and facts to back up his points. I feel as though his accent and appearance does him a disservice as people simply discount his as a football hooligan. I believe in the freedom of speech, and that the media should be unbiased as much as is possible, but virtually every interview i've seen involving him as been little more than a subtly disguised character assassination. Example Most people I know think of his as nothing more than a racist scumbag due to his past affiliation with the EDL, and his political presence taints whatever organization he's currently aligned with now. I watched his speech at the Oxford union and it completely changed my opinion about him, he really felt like a genuine speaker who believed in what he said, and to my shock I actually agreed with many of his points. It made me feel that he's been unfairly attacked and smeared by the media. Have I just been taken in by a smooth talker, can someone explain to me why he's a hatemongering racist like i've been told.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that Tommy Robinson Former EDL leader is racist, and can sympathize with him on some issues.\n","id":"fd04b542-4d63-445d-a500-fa193b8474d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Anyone Be Allowed To Be a Parent?<|ARGUMENT|>In order to regulate which citizens are allowed to have children, we would have to give the government the power to intervene in this basic biological and deeply personal principle. This government would have an immense ability to control peoples lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No one has a right to restrict another person's ability to reproduce.\n","id":"ec61a356-28cb-4f70-82c0-e054ca125e6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We are having a Men's Health Awareness Month at my University for the first time ever, and part of it is that an announcement is made everyday with a statistic or fact about men's health. Without fail, every statistic has been about how men are more likely to get prostate cancer if they do insert normal thing here . We are college students, so we attend lectures, and sit a lot during the day. So apparently we are more likely to get prostate cancer because we are sedentary Do these Awareness Months actually cause an increase in donations charitable events scientific research towards these diseases problems? It seems to me that it just causes fear. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It seems to me that Health Awareness Months, eg men's health, women's health, or breast cancer, cause more scaremongering than good.\n","id":"7a4e892e-7480-416c-9411-a97b6267a6cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see absolutely nothing redeeming or good in the works of Yoko Ono. I don't like this, because I love The Beatles and I think John Lennon was a visionary. But so much of Yoko's stuff is just seemingly random screaming. Is her appeal that she makes us take another look at what's popular? Is her art supposed to be some kind of deconstruction of the whole idea of popular ? Is she like a high concept troll? If there's a point to Yoko Ono, I don't get it. And I'd really like to try to understand.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Yoko Ono sucks\n","id":"526b104b-80ee-4def-945f-2c7436416f1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everything people seem to hate Brie Larson for seems really unreasonable. People either take things she says and then spin them to make them sound bad, or they take something she does someone else\u2019s reaction to her, and make it a huge deal. It just seems as though people are trying really hard to find a reason to be mad at her, or diversity, or feminism, or whatever it\u2019s cool to hate on the internet nowadays. Please, give me an example of a moment where you think people were right to give her the amount of backlash she\u2019s gotten. I posted this prior to the film\u2019s release There really aren\u2019t many good reasons for Captain Marvel to be getting the hate that it is getting right now. If you dislike Brie Larson\u2019s acting or the idea that Marvel is trying to \u201cforce diversity\u201d above making a quality movie, you should realize that the movie hasn\u2019t even come out yet, so even if you\u2019re worried these things might happen, you can\u2019t hate and boycott the movie for this already. The other reason people might have for their hate is Brie Larson\u2019s recent comments. Here\u2019s where this opinion gets really unpopular Brie Larson was kinda right. Now, to be clear, she did not say that she does not want white men to see her movies. She said that the movie will not be \u201cfor white men.\u201d The point she was making was that a vast majority of popular films released in the United States are tailored to white male culture. Such movies are made to be seen by white men, since many film critics are white men I\u2019m not saying this is a sign of racism it\u2019s clearly just a result of the US having lots of white people . Even critically acclaimed movies about black people will mostly be about oppression, designed to be shown to white people, either to \u201ceducate\u201d them or evoke some pity to boost the film\u2019s popularity. Also, many movies about female characters and made to be seen by women are seen as \u201cchick flicks\u201d in the US though this is slowly going away . Brie Larson said that she would rather the critics weren\u2019t so largely white and male, so more filmmakers could feel free not only to tell stories about women and minorities, but tell them for women and minorities also. She also said she would rather her audiences weren\u2019t largely white and male. This makes sense too if she hopes that Captain Marvel will be a movie for women minorities, then she must also hope that women minorities will see the film. Brie Larson simply meant that she wanted to make a movie that isn\u2019t made to be awarded by white male critics. Edit Hey, so Don tweeted about the interview. Read the tweets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Brie Larson isn\u2019t terrible; people are just mean\n","id":"8dd8ee37-46ad-4601-88e4-26b4d9444bc7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Thanks everyone for your insight. To be clear this was not an attack on every American woman. It was just an observation and as it is a very subjective experience and varies. But thanks again for different perspective I understand that menstrual cycles are painful and the hormones are crazy things that shouldn't be taken lightly. That being said, what is with all these terrible mean snappy behavior? I just don't get it. I am a woman and I have never felt the need to be mean to someone else because I am going through pain. Doesn't seem fair to the person you're lashing out on. I have noticed American women, in particular, take the time of the month to be quite the witches to their SOs, etc. I have heard several of my coworkers justifying their wrongdoings by starting off as ' I was already PMSing and not feeling good so he should know better'. With that logic, should every terminally ill person or a person with a disease illness that is in constant pain be mean to others? And why is it so widely acceptable?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that women in America use 'PMS' as an excuse to be mean to others.\n","id":"bc23c66c-c21e-4622-813e-24046cf82a74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>Energy and resources are wasted on the production of uneaten food. Thus, all of the environmental harms of production occur without creating benefit for an individual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the context of global food shortages and environmental crises, society should be critical of excess consumption in all its forms.\n","id":"73a3cc53-90f2-4412-968c-1a86e43900fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Accomplishments like traveling to the moon or finding traces of water life on mars seem to be pointless to me. Even if we were able to discover life in other galaxies also not guaranteed to happen , I don't know how we of Earth would benefit from that. The chances are too slim and ambiguous that I see little point in seeking these answers out, and the universe is so vast that we may never become technologically advanced enough. I know satellites are extremely helpful to our society, what with the use of GPS maps, weather prediction, communication, etc but I don't believe there is any use putting billions of dollars into studying things beyond the Earth's atmosphere. People have engineered and studied things that make surviving in space easier, such as a special container to drink liquids from and the space suit. But these are ONLY applicable to those astronauts in space, an extremely small number of people, and there is little else we can do with this information. Don't get me wrong, I think space and our universe is beautiful I would someday like to get into stargazing , but this scientific, rigid approach to studying space that has evolved today seems to have more cost than gain. Past the knowledge we gained of the lunar year, our orbit and spinning on an axis, I don't think there is much else we truly needed to learn about space.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think space exploration and corporations like NASA are a waste of money.\n","id":"5f12b9fe-6c4a-43f3-b438-fbc38c768fbc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If Trump did not tweet that 3,000 people in Puerto Rico did not die last fall from Hurricanes, then I flat out wouldn't have known that 3,000 people died last fall due to Hurricanes. That's a lot of people. Dead from a serious event, which FEMA, I assume, could have helped alleviate, but didn't. Or couldn't. I don't know, because I never saw it reported. The biggest story at the time was Trump throwing paper towels at Puerto Ricans, not that there were scores of them perishing. What if it wasn't Hurricanes? What if it was some contagion? Or food poisoning, localized entirely to Puerto Rico? Would those deaths get more coverage? I don't have any reason to believe that. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"MSM only seriously reported the deaths of 3,000 American Citizens after Trump denied those deaths had occurred. This should be cause for serious concern.\n","id":"87b85048-5b90-4c6e-94a6-914208d3393d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello, . My office is on Office 2010 right now, but apparently we purchased about 100 licenses we have ~80 users for Office 2013 last year. We bought them, we can't return them, and that's about the only argument I can see for why we should move to Office 2013. I am a stubborn man. Convince me moving to 2013 is the smart thing to do, because the way I see it, the only thing we gain by switching is pivot tables. Edit My submission was apparently too short, so I'll try to fix that. I don't really know what else to say about it, though. I mean, it's pretty straight forward deploying Office 2013 will be a pain in the ass. There's training to do, old file formats to consider we still have people using Project 2003 and Visio 2007, not to mention versions of Access dating back to the time of the Big Bang , and of course the actual installation on every single computer we support. This is a big thing I like my quiet, problem free office. Don't make me do stuff<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no reason for my office to migrate from Office 2010 to Office 2013.\n","id":"be07ef5e-123c-4846-a70d-b37e676986b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is nothing more tragic than being the survivor of someone else's suicide, especially a family member or close friend. Especially when they are young people. But suicide is undoubtedly the most selfishly permanent decision someone can make. They have willingly ended their life so they no longer have to participate in life. They were so selfish in their decision they had total disregard for everything they were hurting and will hurt. These people are not heroes, or victims, or strong the a weak, selfish, and we are the victims. Remembering someone who killed themselves would be like remembering the person who murdered them. I don't think any who kills themselves deserves a second thought. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people who commit suicide don't deserve to remembered.\n","id":"d607cc99-0302-41d5-89c6-3cd0ead7867c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Tax on cigarettes have been increasing exponentially for years. There has been nearly a 200 increase since 1997 Some groups still want to triple the taxes placed on cigarettes. I understand that smoking is unhealthy, but that is no excuse for our politicians to be exploiting a subset of society. We don't put absurdly high tax on foods high in fat and sugars even though they are the leading cause of heart disease the leading cause of death in the US . Smokers are milked like a prized heifer and it is disgusting and immoral.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think smokers are an exploited group.\n","id":"59348593-ccef-4fb9-9cdc-5f136fcf696a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>The very fashionable T-shirt is one of the most practical, and popular articles of clothing around. It was not made to be sexy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Male fashion is not based around what females find attractive.\n","id":"f938e02c-a600-4f9c-b1b2-e7fed31fd993"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to set up this premise by mentioning a few things I am not talking about genuine hate speech. For example, if a redneck harasses a black man about their race to the point of logical fear, logical meant to portray reality rather than emotion, that would be considered genuine hate speech and should have laws protecting people from that. I am referring to hate speech as being the systematic oppression of political dissidents by, typically, the self proclaimed oppressed. In my argument I will be expanding upon the term political dissidents and self proclaimed oppressed. Albeit indirectly at times. First, examples of non hate speech Free speech organizations, such as those on university campuses. While they do support other's to speak more broadly, and admittedly, more hatefully, their acts are not hate speech. The vocalized desire to build a wall, while stupid, is not hate speech. Even if it comes with to keep those damn Mexicans' out so they don't take 'er jobs. obvious redneck impersonation is obvious . Even with that overtly offensive remark it is not hate speech nor should it ever be considered hate speech. The desire to reject muslims from coming to America, while not helping them, is not hate speech. West Borrow Baptist church saying God hates fags, while very offensive, is not hate speech. It is hateful and, yes, it is speech, but the term Hate speech as it should be legally defined, should not apply to it. Expressing political views that could lead to hate speech is not, itself, hate speech . Thus, it must be protected. Second, examples of genuine hate speech Attempts to ban free speech organizations. Attempts to get someone fired over their inflammatory remarks. Attempts to get people expelled from school over certain taboo words. Attempts to boycott companies for their political views. Attempts to fire people, or have them not allowed to perform, for acts they committed no matter how evil and wrong. Tiger Woods is my prime example. So why do I feel the first set of examples are not hate speech while the second are? In the first set of scenarios, while it is true that they often lead to hate speech, you must not make the mistake of condemning them for it. This is because these are positions informed by political ideologies . Thus, it is the oppression of political dissidents. The only reason that what they do would be wrong is when it hinders another person's own right to free speech. All forms of wrong are defined by the limitation of that person's free speech. Even murder. Murder would not be wrong if it did not result in the person being perfectly able to voice themselves through actions and word. Rape is wrong because it hinders a person's ability to cognate thus restricting their free speech. As such, the examples of actual hate speech are examples whereby a person's ability to freely voice their opinion is prohibited. Not only for their inflammatory remarks, but their ability to continue life in a reasonable fashion. Finally, a counter point to address and get it out of the way But what about people who are victimized by hateful words? They surely feel terrible about what has been said which could lead to altering their views of the world and possibly put them in a position to commit suicide. However, plentiful examples have been illustrated that it isn't a death sentence and in many cases people easily get through it. You are no more a criminal for clapping your hands, leading to a butterfly effect, which eventually results in a death elsewhere in the world as you are to that individual. Only when your speech is followed by the potential actualization of enforcement does your speech have merit. If a person is raised to think that they are unable to succeed in life then a single remark should not be able to throw them off from their ability to succeed. Additionally, that one remark is the least of their concerns. Often humans build up emotions of failure from many sources and unleash them at any given source even if that source is insignificant. This is the exact same scenario. IN CLOSING There is, in fact, a massive wave of hate speech in our society, but it is not from the sources you'd expect. The people practicing the majority of hate speech are the people who claim to stand for justice. I additionally feel that the laws are insufficient to combat hate speech and should be extended to protect people from being fired for simply voicing their political views. I figure this is a very controversial subject, as such, I expect to carry on this argument for the following weeks. Remember to be civil and, most importantly, have fun. EDIT There's quite a lot of confusion about my points and my position so here's a clarification Hate Crimes are illegal in the US both by the law of the same name and by The Equal Opportunity Act. If you are fired simply because you are gay you have every right to peruse legal action. I am saying that people who are fired because of a mob should also have that right as well as the right to bring charges against those that attempted to get them fired. This argument is mostly about the US government using the First Amendment as reference. If you want to make this about countries in the EU feel free that would be enjoyable to me, but would vastly change my argument. I'm defending the Hate Crime definition here, but wanting to expand it. With EU countries it would be the opposite as some of them will fine you for making anti muslim remarks. EDIT2 A Delta has been awarded I had the serious error of misuse of terms which apparently confused quite a lot of people. A user made an argument which pointed out just how badly I was misusing the term and made me realize the damage to my own position I was doing. That term was Hate Speech. For all future argument I will be talking about this with reference to Hate Crimes and the Equal Opportunity Act as well as similar laws I'm dropping the term Hate Speech completely from this argument. EDIT3 Another Delta about the misuse of terms. Geez I really need to work on that. In this case it was about fear . I meant to refer to circumstances that would cause it in a manner you'd Think It would. Yeah, poorly thought out by me. I was more concerned with illustrating the point than I was about making the point solid. Woops.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Attempting to ban \"hate-speech\" is, itself, hate-speech.\n","id":"bef47380-08f2-4865-a774-2059ce671070"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was reading the comments on the picture of a row of fashionably dressed young Iranian women from the 70s on r OldSchoolCool, and the general consensus seemed to be that America had caused the country to regress ever since, and I just don't agree. America was not responsible for the 1979 Revolution which led the country down the path of conservatism. Yes, it was to depose a ruler that had been installed by America, but the 1953 coup was not the proximate cause of the social changes the country has undergone ever since the revolution. The immediate cause was still religious fundamentalism, which didn't arise out of nowhere or because of America. Now, if it were a picture of liberated Afghan women in the 70s, I'd probably understand some of the America blame, since America armed and supported the Afghan Mujahideen the precursor to the Taliban while fully knowledgable of their social views. However, the Shah of Iran was only indirectly responsible for the oppression of Iranian women post 1979. Most of the blame still lies firmly with the religious clerics, and America was too distantly responsible to be blamed for the condition of women in Iran now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The U.S is not responsible for the social backwardness in Iran.\n","id":"3c7e0413-28e9-426f-9917-52a1c01dc18e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am trying to decide if marriage is right for me and my partner. I will explain our situation as I believe there are benefits for marriage in other relationships. I will state a few benefits I have read online and counter them. Please add other benefits that I am not aware so that I can consider them. Immigration We are both U.S Citizens Tax Benefits We both make around 6 figures each, which means we don't get any tax reductions at all. I was surprised to learn that high income marriage was penalized in a way. Health Insurance We both are employed and have individual health insurances through our employer. They are both terrific plans. Discount Insurance We are both in our own families auto insurance so we are already discounted for now at least. Inheritance We will create a Will when we decide we need to, which is essentially the day we commit to each other for life. Pension Retirement Since we both work, we would get little benefit in Social Security, especially since we make about the same. 401k I believe I can write a will or something that would be equivalent to giving her my retirement savings. Visitations in jail She better not make me use this Medical decisions I believe we can do a power of attorney doc or something that would give her control over me in these situations. And thinking about it, I am not sure this is a benefit until after a couple of decades pass. I believe my parents should be the ones responsible for me for the near future as they are pretty much the only people who will unconditionally love me and will always want whats best for me. Other benefits I have read other benefits like, married men make more, but that isn't a direct causation in my opinion. Or married men live longer, which can just be attributed to spending your life with the women you love.Something that can be done without marriage. Some may claim that I am scared of commitment, but I plan to have kids with this women, which to me is more of a commitment than marriage. I can divorce the following year if I wanted to and never see her again, with a kid, we are part of each others live forever. These are some of the reasons I can think of on the top of my head. Please let me know if there are any I've missed. I primarily interested in ones that we cannot circumvent through some legal document and that are only accessible through marriage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I see no real benefit from Marriage that I cannot get another way.\n","id":"76f60660-0bc9-40cc-aaad-c9460ce14d3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do not believe that something being \u201creal\u201d gives it any more value then something that is not real, as long as the two are otherwise equal. Another way to say this is a perfect imitation is equal to its original. I believe this because, to me at least, making choices based on whether or not something is \u201creal\u201d or not skews the decision making process by adding an emphasis on a factor that is inconsequential. By writing off things that are not \u201creal\u201d or \u201cgenuine\u201d you are limiting your options and possibly hindering progress. As an example, I do not think that a diamond is any better than cubic zirconia for the purposes of jewelry. Naturally, the price of diamond will be higher because of its industrial applications, and therefore anyone looking for a gemstone should chose cubic zirconia because it has a lower cost. I do not believe that because a diamond is \u201creal\u201d it holds more intrinsic value. This is an imperfect example, because many people would chose diamond precisely because it is more expensive and cubic zirconia is not a perfect imitation of diamond, but this is the most non polarizing example I can think of. You can use The Matrix as another example. The movie, and seemingly most people who watch it, would agree with the statement because the Matrix is not real, it is inferior to the real world. If the people of the Matrix were in the Matrix of there own free will, I believe that, given the state of the real world in the movie, it would be better to live in the Matrix than the real world. I would accept the argument that it is impossible to create a perfect imitation of something, but I would counter that point by saying that we should not set what is \u201creal\u201d as our benchmark. We should always make objective comparisons to decide what will help us accomplish our goals. As an example we should not argue whether or not a synthetic alternative to wood is exactly like wood, we should instead compare wood and synthetic wood to see which is a better material for our purposes. I don't believe that wood as a material is any better than a synthetic alternative because it is \u201creal\u201d or, in this context, \u201cnatural\u201d. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe that there is an inherent value to something being \"real\".\n","id":"41dc869f-b1a4-420b-8a8b-a8bc1d6cf8c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should HPV vaccines be provided free for everyone?<|ARGUMENT|>Since it is so easy and prevalent to get HPV, it should be made easy to get the vaccine as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"HPV vaccine should be made accessible to everyone for free.\n","id":"3f3865d3-0ea0-4498-8329-a6825724eb9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Boycott of 2008 Olympics in China<|ARGUMENT|>- Both Nazi Germany and Chinese governments can be described as oppressive regimes, and yet both will have been allowed to host the Olympic games despite their human rights abuses and illeberal governments. The world should learn from the lessons of Nazi Germany and boycott the Chinese olympics in 2008.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The 2008 Olympics in China are analogous to the 1936 Olympics in Germany\n","id":"41375bc3-b83d-44f7-aa86-78f926cfa203"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We always see talks about how 40 50 of jobs in the US will be automated by so and so year and how no government is prepared for it. We always see people talking about how the rich need to be taxed or how food stamps should be cut, how we need bigger government it smaller government, how we need more public healthcare or less public healthcare, how we need to cut welfare or institute a universal basic income. Immediately following the arguments presented for either side, we get people pointing out the flaws in said course of action. I feel that the only way for us to solve our major socioeconomic problems, specifically unemployment and poverty, is to work towards a smaller population in general as automation and efficiency advance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no combination of policy decisions and\/or individual actions that can practically solve unemployment an poverty; there's just too many people to share the resources between.\n","id":"4c6c9c84-bbf1-479e-ad95-26e4b66974d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Assisted suicide should be a criminal offence<|ARGUMENT|>assisted suicide is killing by another name - it is far too open to abuse by those with a vested interest, since it is often impossible to accurately interpret the intentions of the individual being 'assisted'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Assisted suicide allows people to solicit someone to die to their own benefit\n","id":"0653248e-b9d9-422a-9c92-e37ffa62001a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The main reason I hold this view is that his ideology is too different from the Democratic party's. He's an independent who often works with Democrats, an affiliate, not a Democrat. Because of this he's both not a good fit for the party itself and the party would also be keenly aware that his socialist democratic views would be eaten up by Fox News and their huge viewership. You'd lock in your proper left leaning base but you'd scare off some of your tentative conservative base and you need both to win an election. The only way I can see him getting the nomination is if he goes full John McCain and changes his previously expressed views from his own to towing the party line, which I can't see him doing. Nomination. Damnit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bernie Sanders has very little chance of getting the Democratic presidential nomincation\n","id":"e171f737-8837-428c-8828-5510755b961d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It appears to me that when people talk about the rise of China as a global force, all they talk about is political clout and economic strength. However, one thing which I believe is important and not many people are talking about is cultural influence . I'm not talking about GDP or lobbying power, I'm talking about blue jeans, pop music, the idea of social mobility, emancipation and suffrage for all. These are all concepts born in the West and exported all around the world, causing social changes in the cultures of the countries they take root in. More and more young Japanese are breaking off from their country's own traditions to follow Western culture, before their radicalization also, unfortunately, facilitated by the West blue jeans and pop music was taking the Middle East by storm, African nouveau riche seek to emulate the Western businessman lifestyle ideal of sleek cars and fat cigars. The whole idea of the Western way of life has bled into the cultures of countries all over the world, and has likely changed them almost irrevocably. However, I cannot see that the same thing has happened with regards to China. The biggest cultural exporter in the East as far as I can see is Japan, despite its smaller economy and shrinking population people still can't get enough of Manga and anime, of Japanese fashion the trendier edge of which is mainly a Japanese take on Western fashion , of Japanese cuisine, of the whole idea of the Japanese society as one of politeness and civility in any situation. Heck, even Japanese bands are some of the most globally popular Eastern bands though South Korea might take the crown with regards to this one after PSY . The point I'm making is that apart from cuisine, I cannot see of any real cultural impact Chinese culture has had on the rest of the world, especially when compared to the influences of Western culture as well as Korean and Japanese culture. Because of this, I find it hard to take China seriously as a social threat, although politically and economically I accept that they are strong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China is Not Currently a Serious Challenger to Western Dominance Because of its Lack of Cultural Influence\n","id":"982bc8f9-fd67-474e-8183-e073b3ba8696"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hunger Be The First Problem To Solve Before All Others?<|ARGUMENT|>Addressing a singular problem, instead of trying to tackle all of them at the same time, could be more efficient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hunger Should Be The First Problem To Solve Before All Others.\n","id":"45f21e3c-c028-4daa-8836-283cb037e1a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Straight off the bat, the exceptions in my mind are when something is being reposted so much it is getting annoying, or when it\u2019s straight up stolen content as opposed to a common thought, tip, etc . I don\u2019t think people should get credit for other\u2019s work. However, whenever I post something that gets called out for being a repost, there are invariably more comments which hadn\u2019t ever seen the post before. Reddit is a space for sharing and spreading ideas, and so what if not every idea is original? I have a name that is very similar to a fictional character\u2019s, and people still think I\u2019ve never heard the comparison when they meet me. But I\u2019m not annoyed by this, because for them it\u2019s the first time they\u2019ve been exposed to my name and it\u2019s new to them. So when someone posts in r LifeProTips with something that\u2019s been posted a few times in the past month and gets 11 upvotes, why does everyone feel the need to point it out and accuse OP of being a horrible person? If it\u2019s new to some people and gives them a new way to think of things, why should it matter? It feels absolutely silly to me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"pointing out reposts which haven\u2019t gained any popularity on Reddit is a pointless and annoying act\n","id":"4711b7a4-e80e-45d9-8d80-f6d4b5c34c28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should More Women Work In Construction In The United States?<|ARGUMENT|>Women may not be able to be in the career field long enough before their job gets automated to go in, when there are professions that women are more job secure in like office work<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With automation risks higher in male-oriented professions, especially construction and the US it's likely women won't get the chance to be in it long enough to warrant going in with automation present.\n","id":"61b47016-6886-414d-b495-47a5c302d2b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Affirmative Action: Useful Once, Outdated Today?<|ARGUMENT|>Affirmative action sets up minorities for failure as they will be on average unable to compete based on their merits in college and their careers. Instead we must address the root cause directly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Affirmative action often puts the students it is intended to help in a position where academic failure is more likely than success.\n","id":"3a7b78ea-bc5c-4a59-bf07-67a16f1864d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Reddit is the modern day shoeshine boy the layman who blindly jumps on a stock trading bandwagon just because everyone else says it's a good idea. If an investment opportunity is popular enough to hit the front page of any sub, then the price already reflects substantial hype, and there's no room to make any real gains. As soon as reddit catches on to an opportunity, I automatically declare it off limits. If I already hold similar positions, I jump ship. My heart aches whenever this happens to an equity that was really doing well. Please, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Once an investment is promoted on reddit, it's too late to jump on\n","id":"adb20d06-d013-4ba1-a130-00a6b3ccc3cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is globalisation good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>Globalisation undermines economic regulations such as applying taxes to recoup \"externalised costs\" by moving production, taxing excessive profits to promote reinvestment by allowing moving money to tax havens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Globalisation undermines both global and local regulations in many areas as companies\/rich simply move to unregulated jurisdictions to avoid responsibility.\n","id":"50392d3e-703f-4c4b-a4a2-edafd38e91c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>The prophet Jonas prophesied that Nineveh would be destroyed, and he changed his mind when they repented. \"And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.\" Jonah 3:10<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Church practices have always and will always change. It is doctrine that is eternal. The Church of Jesus Christ's practices have changed according to circumstances, but not the core doctrine.\n","id":"ca3470bc-2209-40af-8828-f492216a5c46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Corporal punishment of children<|ARGUMENT|>Walter Williams. \"Making a Case for Corporal Punishment\". Bnet. Sept 13, 1999: \"Let's think about cruelty. Today, it's not uncommon for young criminals to be arrested, counseled and released to the custody of a parent 20 or 30 times before they spend one night in jail. Such a person is a very good candidate for later serving a long prison sentence or, worse, facing the death penalty. If you interviewed such a person and asked: \"Thinking back to when you started your life of crime, would you have preferred a punishment, such as caning, that might have set you straight or be where you are today?\" I'd bet my retirement money that he'd say he wished someone had caned some sense into him. That being the case, which is more cruel: caning or allowing such a person to become a criminal?\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Corporal punishment can ethically help save a child's future\n","id":"9cec9fb7-2daf-45b8-8a02-4cee60374338"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Spotify. You spend so much time finding music, putting them into playlists and all of these is stored on spotify's servers. However, if you purchase premium, the monthly fee, you have the option to save it localy. But that's not the point here. What i don't understand is the longevity in this solution. What happends that day spotify crashes goes through bankcruptcy et cetera? All that music, gone. If instead, someone would use musicfiles like .mp3 or .flac it would be different, because you had control over it. I really don't understand why, for big collectors of music why you would use spotify.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using stream-based services like spotify instead of having music files localy.\n","id":"a9b99e40-294e-4b5f-ba54-bb75ef314a11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Forgive me if this is a bit simplistic, but I often hear about the horrible affects of assault rifle violence in the news and think That could have been helped if everyone had a Taser gun. Liberals at least those who support gun control often use propaganda to say Its bad that a person easily acquire a weapon. I tend to disagree with this because gun control only makes it difficult for non criminals to acquire a gun. I do, however, wonder what compromises could be reached. Background checks mightc only affect non sneaky criminals. Banning assault rifles past a certain battle usefulness is just asking for fascism exaggeration, but come on, respect the constitution . Gun free zones are asking for rebellious shooters. The suggested anti gun methods don't work. I think violence should be treated as a large mental health issue. In the short term, however, not banning guns, but encouraging self defense may help. Training can only go so far, especially if you're talking about equalizing people. I think research and strategic deregulation in less lethal and non lethal weapons especially those that give the individual power is important.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The answer to the question of gun control for preventing mass shootings is the proliferation of non-lethal weapons.\n","id":"eb4e4eb0-1a4b-4600-b95a-3e40c4fd857e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is not specifically directed at Bernie Sanders though he certainly applies at almost 75, as do a couple other candidates very near that age. To me it doesn't make sense that at an age when the vast majority of the population is either retired or at least on the cusp to all of a sudden take on one the most important and demanding jobs there is. The last two presidents look like they aged at least 15 years in the 7 8 years they were in office. In almost no other field would a new high pressure position be placed on someone that far past their 60's. I'm not saying there should be a law put in place but I think old age should be considered a hindrance in a presidential candidate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People over 70 should not be president\n","id":"c707a9e9-e3a6-42c1-84c5-4c638c59ec91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Same sex relationships should have the same legal status as heterosexual relationships under EU law<|ARGUMENT|>Countries which have strong church-going populations such as Ireland, Italy and Poland would be so opposed to this legislation they might even pull out of the EU. Although homophobia is wrong and homosexuals should have the same legal recognition when becoming committed marriage\/legal union to one another, this should not be forced upon states leaders whose populaces will clearly strongly oppose it. Abortion is not even legal in Ireland because of their strong religious beliefs, and to force this issue on the people has the potential to lead to a backlash among these countries that would be worse, rather than better for gay rights in the short term. In any event, Ireland would simply have a referendum and vote no for the third time, which would cause a watering down of legislation to the point where there would be no point in having it. Forcing this issue on the population would not be worth the hassle and would essentially be rendered a waste of time while also getting individuals and populations angry at the EU - something it clearly does not need given its image as an undemocratic, unaccountable supernational union.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It Would Cause controversy in religious countries such as Ireland and Italy\n","id":"be195b50-a185-4087-8d13-1df4ac7ee909"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, some friends and I are having a beer outside when we hear some hood looking black dudes cars just blasting basey hip hop. The kind of sound that you can feel in your chest even if you can't make out anything else. My friends and I are dorks who play video games and where ironic shirts. You know the type. My friend Bill tells us that he hates hood culture. He explains that he can't stand the music, the clothing, the quasi glorification of criminal activity and that he pretty much lacks respect for anyone who decide to live life in that manner. I tell my friend Bill that it's cool because I hate Bill's dirty redneck stepfather and his stupid redneck culture. I hate his Bush lite beer, his cowboy boots we live in the city why do you even need them asshole , his chappy red pickup truck, hell, I hate the way he beats his wife Bills mother . When I meet others of his ilk in the first 5 seconds I've pretty much decided I would rather be around anyone else. But like Bill I also find hood culture incredibly unsavory. I reflect on this and I can think about how easy it is for people to make fun of redneck culture but it's deemed insensitive to make judgment calls on hood culture. I would feel comfortable telling anyone I hate rednecks where as I feel like I would have to walk on egg shells with hood culture because our societal climate. I don't think it's wrong to to find both detestable and not at all insensitive. Am I wrong? Edit a lot of people are saying hating hood culture means hating black people. For me at least this is just not true. I'm a mixed race person American native mexican middle eastern and my mother's side it chock full of cholos. I dislike them very much but due to cultural choices they decide to make, not there skin color.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"saying you hate hood\/street culture is no different then saying you hate redneck culture.\n","id":"2f60b8f7-ce08-486d-98d4-601a447b7a68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>In 2014, a former Trump Model, Alexa Palmer, claimed that 80% of her wages were taken from her as expenses, and that ultimately she was paid less than $4000 over two years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is hard to refer to Trump Model management as a success, given the allegations and lawsuits that followed it persistently.\n","id":"3daa0189-c501-4f24-b480-e19b55855ac8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Teachers Be Allowed To Wear Religious Symbols At School?<|ARGUMENT|>A religious symbol is just that, symbolic. The outward display of any symbol is not inherently promoting that which it symbolizes and therefore will not interfere in the neutrality of instruction in classrooms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All people should be able to express what they want to express.\n","id":"4caf48c2-edef-43a0-89f7-106bd2b69cf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I can understand not insuring a cheap car, not getting pet insuance or travel insurance. When you own something that potentially costs hundreds of thousands of dollars that you're going to spend half of your life trying to pay it off I think building insurance should be your top priority. Need to prioritize food over insurance? well sorry but you can't afford to own a house. x200B I saw one on the news the other day, holding a baby and a cigarette, crying how they've lost everything and didn't have insurance and asking for handouts. I think in this case it was the cigarette that sent me into a rage. It wasn't so much she couldn't afford insurance it was just that she would rather spend the money on herself. For those overseas who want perspective on this a pack of cigarettes costs 35 50 here without breaking a sweat. Funny that that is roughly the price per week for some basic building and contents insurance and from her yellow fingertips she probably smokes closer to a pack a day. This one is an extreme example but my point still stands.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who own a house and do not have insurance are idiots. If the place burns and they lose everything they have no one to blame but themselves.\n","id":"70295ebd-b833-49de-9dd3-08b188a37605"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Umbridge raped by the Centaurs?<|ARGUMENT|>The mythological creation of Centaurs is related to rape since the Ixion tried to force Hera to have sex but Zeus exchanged Hera with Nephele a cloud.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Greek mythology a main characteristic for centaurs is that they take away human women and rape them. JK Rowling knows that.\n","id":"aef0d768-2ed0-4a30-bf5d-f96537fd7980"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Antifa good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>A much larger police force than required for non-violent protests will have to be deployed if violence is likely to happen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Antifa makes political protests harder and more costly to organize.\n","id":"69db7303-22cd-45e7-9195-a128aa894e4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2016 French president Emmanuel Macron said that Turkey did not have any chance of joining the EU.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey faces many barriers to joining the EU. Recognising the genocide will not permit it membership.\n","id":"beac9eb9-e55c-4bf6-8a7e-cba599b61669"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>The NFL is a business and any action besides standing subjects the business to a political morass. Discipline and\/or termination of employees that threaten the public relations of a company is normal, and NFL players are no different.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NFL players should be forced to stand during the National Anthem.\n","id":"62afc415-841d-48ea-953c-f3f9c4712356"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The standard trope of 'women are so emotional, they cant be reasonable, they are unreliable due to not being able to control their emotions' is something I have never experienced in real life. Men seem far more likely to throw tantrums, and are not as open to compromise. Men do not listen to facts or common sense from women, until the exact same thing is pointed out by a guy, then they can accept it. I think men do this due to emotional instability. Pride comes before reality for them. They cannot come up with any actual reason for this, even when a woman is 100 In the right with actual facts to back them up, men turn into children, stick their fingers in their ears and say ' na na I cant hear you You must be on your period ' I see many men make bad decisions with money. Buying car accessories, bigger tvs, game systems, when basic bills are just covered. I know far more women who are employed than men mostly their partners I do not see women being half as careless with money. I also think this is why women are both a bit afraid of, and rejecting of strange men. Women say ' the sky is blue' and men say 'that cant be right because you said it and you have a vagina I have a penis so what you say cannot be true ' And the sheer amount of men who think they own a woman or are owed a relationship or sex just because they talked to a woman. Women do not behave as badly as often in these ways. So not all men, but I truly think that the negative traits women get accused of most are actually traits held more strongly and more widely by men. Change my view, I do not think you can.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe men are actually guilty more often of the negative traits assigned to women in general. I think women are actually more stable than men.\n","id":"e709c3c0-15d4-4237-9a70-5ed28d361e14"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Kashmir Be An Independent State?<|ARGUMENT|>As per the National Census 2011 literacy rate of Indian administered Kashmir is 68.74% with 78.26% male literates and 58.01% female literates. Similarly, for Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the literacy rate is 74%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kashmir has a much more literate and skilled pool of human resource than India and Pakistan.\n","id":"6282c5ec-313d-48f1-9e6e-dda5e6a72f7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The Gu\u0308len Movement known as \"Hizmet\" in Turkish was designated a terrorist organisation by the Turkish government, but is considered simply a civic or religious movement by most other countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since there is no internationally agreed upon definition of terrorism, countries can exploit the concept to label political opponents as 'terrorists'.\n","id":"ee0ac0e6-2fa9-4b88-8969-c63929eb1e83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's not like we're going to magically start to adapt to microgravity in a useful amount of time thus mandating research for a period of transition of the human physiology. If humans want to live in space, the way to go is to spin up circular structures and enjoy the comfort of standing on firm ground We evolved to depend on gravity. One glorious g of it. If we want to send more than a handful of people into space we'd better get to work at recreating the natural conditions that let us flourish, in space. Thus I believe that the efforts and funds currently directed at studying the effects of microgravity would be better spent in engineering rotating modules for stations and or spaceships, that will be part of the coming space economy. And yes I also think that constructing a station made of aluminum cans that can fit inside the super expensive space shuttle was the wrong way to go. This single track technology designed in the 70s has held us back, while the state of the art in space construction could have had evolved much further already had the Saturn V program not been cancelled. But that's another post. I realize there are probably some medical discoveries to be made with the current direction of space research. But they are of limited use because we cannot easily recreate the necessary conditions in facilities on Earth. And there's no reason all of the researchers astronauts should be guinea pigs themselves. Alright, change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Studying the effects of weightlessness on the human organism is completely overrated and a very expensive academic exercise. The effort would be better spent on building rotating structures in that provide the acceleration humans need to survive for significant periods of their life in space.\n","id":"92563929-4149-4951-8e0b-cc162875bbf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Buddhist schools defined various levels of ignorance teaching that, by cutting off increasingly deeper levels of ignorance, one can gradually gain understanding of the true aspect of existence and finally escape suffering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In many Buddhist traditions, evil is understood to result from the perpetuation of ignorance of the world as it is.\n","id":"f90fff16-f08d-4473-8783-89f9dee752e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The breeding of white tigers in captivity should be banned<|ARGUMENT|>Tigers aren't poodles - they are wild animals, and they don't need improvement. If people can't see that they are already one of the most beautiful animals in the world, then perhaps they don't have any business working with them. Tinkering with their genes in order to 'improve' them is just an act of vanity on the part of humans, a symptom of the mentality that if we don't like something we can order it in a different colour. We need to learn to appreciate the animals in their natural state. In an online poll, the public has shown a strong aversion to the practice of breeding white tigers. Should animals be inbred to create coat colors that do not survive in the wild? Answers Votes Percent Yes 186 9% No 1990 91%<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Interfering with a species for cosmetic reasons is poor practice\n","id":"8654b2e0-45a4-48ee-bf9f-857f11f8fd31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I have been hearing a lot over the past year various phrases like Trump is Putin's puppet and Trump is doing the Russian Governments bidding but I still have yet to find any solid evidence for this. I have seen this list here but the problem is that all of the articles that I have gone through on that list have anonymous sources as the ones feeding them this info. Take for example the first article It is a secondary source that lists a reuters report as its evidence. some googling leads to the reuters report but the source is current and former U.S. officials familiar with the exchanges none of whom are named in the report. This has been the problem with several other articles linked in the post On top of this Trump has armed ukrainian rebels who are against Putin. In addition to this Trump has actually increased sanctions on Russia If anyone has any evidence that list credible named sources I would be glad to talk it out. Edit How did this post go from 5 upvotes to 2 upvotes, I thought you cannot downvote on  posts<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump is not Putin's puppet\n","id":"8341b85c-b070-42d9-a407-00d248dcb0ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m always puzzled when I see people consistently rank Babe Ruth as the best baseball player of all time, as it has always seemed to me that Willie Mays is clearly the greatest all around player to ever play the game. Willie was certainly one of the greatest offensive threats in baseball history. He has 660 career home runs, only about 50 shy of Ruth and achieved this while missing the better part of two full years of his prime due to Military service and playing in the cavernous Polo Grounds. Had he played those years its very conceivable he would have surpassed Ruth in HR\u2019s. Throughout his prime he was a .320 .340 hitter, and consistently had over 100 RBI and 100 runs scored. His WAR was also consistently very high, matching or outpacing other greats like Bonds or Cobb. Finally, he was a menace on the base paths to boot, leading the league many times in stolen bases and reaching the \u201830 30\u2019 club several times. Combining these, Mays is clearly one of the most potent offensive weapons in baseball, being in the same ballpark haha as a Ruth, Aaron or Williams. More importantly however, while those players are known mostly for their offense, Mays was also one of the greatest, if not the greatest fielders of all time. He played flawless center field the most difficult outfield pos. in one of the largest parks, earning 12 gold glove awards. His speed and tracking were so good he transformed the way his team could play around him, as he could play very shallow to cut off short flies, relying on his speed to catch balls over his head see \u2018the catch\u2019 . As a final point, I\u2019ll quickly note that Mays played in an era with significantly more travel pressure and pitching competition than Ruth did, and encountered shocking amounts of racism and poor treatment during his career as well. Therefore, I think combining Mays\u2019 top notch offense, with his unparalleled defense, base running, and class, that he is unquestionably the greatest position baseball player of all time. No other candidate can match all these strengths.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Willie Mays is objectively the best baseball position player of all time.\n","id":"c43f6151-d112-42fe-a9b6-192f660d4dfe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Nintendo Switch has the best game exclusives out of all the consoles.<|ARGUMENT|>The game only has a regional dex not a national one. This means that the game does not include all Pokemon ever created.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pokemon Sword and Shield did not meet the expectations of many.\n","id":"ba1bc134-b0cc-44b8-a2df-c305dc430533"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>The Earth is moving spirally at a high velocity. The solar orbital velocity, 66,000 mph, must be added or subtracted to\/from the galactic orbital velocity, 483,000 MPH, and the galaxy itself is moving at 1.3 Million mph. Our relative velocity cycles from 751 kmph - 1,849 kmph. astrosociety.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Universe is not necessarily expanding as once thought. There are other potential explanations for the red-shift in light that we observe from distant bodies.\n","id":"30a3f040-a8a3-4003-bc3d-1a6370c50753"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Scholasticism acted as a bridge between Greek and Roman knowledge and Christian theology, as a way of teaching that focused on \"logic, dialectic, and all the scientific disciplines known at the time\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In different religions there are great philosophers who have searched for logic and evidence to draw conclusions and evaluate the religion, supporting precisely reason.\n","id":"0e3e4f02-0a9e-4fd6-92b7-21c64cc8177f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Blocking terrorist accounts requires asking users to look for and report accounts they notice or interact with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eliminating terrorist accounts would be technically difficult for both Facebook and Twitter.\n","id":"d86d4afd-589c-4d3c-a94b-733ed63b1cf7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if they religious think they have proof for God, they probably do not have proof that every circumstance they go through is for their best, which is needed belief if we are to believe in a benevolent God. This belief is by faith.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The religious have the opinion that they must have faith at some point.\n","id":"98d402bc-af50-4370-a82b-0bd0d075fcce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should culturally diverse writers be mandatory in English curricula?<|ARGUMENT|>Those with better writing skills are perceived as more professional and credible in the workplace.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reading fluency is important for developing writing skills such as structure and clear content.\n","id":"0f584a66-3401-4840-ab91-6c7288bac80f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we judge the quality of artwork based on the conduct of the artist?<|ARGUMENT|>The life and therefore the work of an artist although somewhat amoral may actually point to the immorality of his own society of which he is a part.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Objectivity can allow the enjoyment of a work of art, regardless of the artist's conduct.\n","id":"aec0aa72-766c-4fd0-a1e6-f39a8969226e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Martin Harris one of the Book of Mormon scribes, sometimes \"the Prophet Joseph Smith would sit in a different room, or up stairs, while the Lord was communicating to him the contents of the plates.\" Howe 1834, p. 14<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While dictating the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith would occasionally locate himself out of view while calling out the dictation to his scribe in a different room.\n","id":"a4c80ce4-1eeb-4433-b4a4-4596384d307e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How soon should secondary school students be grouped in specific learning programmes?<|ARGUMENT|>It was found that regardless of ability students could have been placed in the next higher ability group in English or mathematics, without being at the bottom of the ability distribution of the higher group p. 114.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Studies show that the criteria schools use to assign students to ability group levels do not always produce groups that are homogeneous with respect to ability.\n","id":"b0327352-ca1e-4ef0-acb9-37d03a224803"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>If you perfectly reproduce the initial conditions, both internal and external, at the point at which a decision is to be made, the outcome will be the same.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human actions and choices can be traced back to deterministic causes.\n","id":"1e9073c0-6c1c-4e6a-b30c-765a26fe735d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Canada build the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion?<|ARGUMENT|>Oil spills can damage nesting ground for birds, as well as cause irreparable physical damage to the wings and internal organs of birds.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Oil spills have serious consequences and must be avoided at all costs.\n","id":"ff586bc1-faf2-494d-a6d1-980a98e29b49"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify art with a message means an intentional message, something contrived by the creator with the primary purpose of the art being conveying this message. The sort where the creator created the work with a message in mind and could summarize that message with words. Much of political art and street art falls into this category, as well as feminist art and art associated with other movements and ideologies. I'd also say calling it lesser doesn't mean it can't be technically impressive, clever, and its message may very well be right. Why take issue with it then? Well, because it's an inappropriate use of beauty or in some cases ugliness to support a message with it. It's a manipulative way to add a weight to a message rather than let it stand by the message's merits, and the merits of actual arguments for that message. Taken away from the beauty, craftmanship, etc. the message itself may be quite weak, and the artist incapable of seriously defending it without abusing their technical skill to present it in a grandiose manner. Art without an intentional message is a more appropriate use of the ability to create beauty. It may also end up having some sort of unintended meaning, as none of us artists or not can entirely control our subconscious. An artist also cannot prevent their subconscious from affecting their work, and any messages that may be read into a piece of art that has vague meaning as a result of their subconscious affecting the work are not abusive or manipulative potentially the opposite, something more honest and genuine as a result of not being twisted toward any conscious motive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is appropriate to categorize \"Art with a message\" as propaganda, and reasonable to consider it a lesser form of art.\n","id":"06f2cadf-d43c-4bd6-be6e-8fa22cabe551"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Civil unions vs. gay marriage<|ARGUMENT|>David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch. \"A Reconciliation on Gay Marriage.\" New York Times. February 21, 2009: \"And while most Americans who favor keeping marriage as it has customarily been would prefer no legal recognition of same-sex unions at either the federal or the state level, we believe that they can live with federal civil unions \u2014 provided that no religious groups are forced to accept them as marriages. Many of these people may come to see civil unions as a compassionate compromise. For example, a PBS poll last fall found that 58 percent of white evangelicals under age 30 favor some form of legal same-sex union.\" This all suggests that civil unions will be met with greater respect from the general American population, instead of the kind of recrimination that can lead to hatred and descrimination.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many opponents of gay marriage are tolerant of civilian unions\n","id":"f5862a4b-fac7-46e2-95a5-0c34e4e529f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was reading an article about the US NSA accessing the mexican President's e mail and I didn't find anything wrong with that. I feel it provides the US with an advantage and as a country the US should continue to collect on foreign governments and threats. I expanded my views to include other controversial subject such as torturing known terrorists for time sensitive intelligence, killing terrorist abroad including US citizen Anwar al Awlaki, and supporting friendly non democratic regimes to achieve US strategic interests and I still find nothing wrong with that. I believe all this supports a US interests and should continue. Please  so I can better understand the other side of the argument. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the US has to right to collect intelligence abroad, kill terrorist threats abroad with no trial, and support \"friendly\" non-democratic regimes to do so.\n","id":"d318ac72-a4da-467b-8335-05985025c405"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My reasons Even though vocals are an incredibly important maybe the most important part of a song, they are not entirely the production of the singer. The melody the singer sings is written by the composer. I think that this melody is more important than how good the person's voice sounds Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a song that you love listening to would you rather here that same singer sing happy birthday , or a different totally average singer sing the song that you like so much.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the composer\/producer of a song deserves more credit for a song than the singer.\n","id":"4c6b61e3-c322-40c6-9753-669e49aa3dd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When a vegan vegetarian tries to persuade a meat eater to stop eating meat, a common response is something along the lines of I don't tell you what to eat, so don't tell me . This is a non sequitur. There's no reason for a meat eater's respect for a vegan's choices to earn respect in turn for the meat eater's choices. The relationship is not symmetrical. A meat eater is doing great harm to animals and the environment, a vegan is not harming anyone with their diet. I am not saying that meat eaters are terrible people who deserve no respect. Various difficulties face the meat eater properly understanding the vegan's point of view, looking past the societal norm, and changing their behaviour. It's not OK to insult a meat eater. However, merely presenting facts and arguments without accusation will usually result in the I don't tell you what to eat, so don't tell me response. Here is an example. If someone casually burned sections of forests for the sake of argument imagine this was legal because they found it enjoyable, and I tried to convince them to stop, would it be fair for them to tell me I don't tell you what to do for fun, so don't tell me ? Eating meat has a huge environmental impact, so I believe this is a fair analogy. I recognise that it is not a good idea for some people to stop eating meat, because of e.g. specific health conditions or limited access to other sources of food. However this kind of response can be expected even for people for whom veganism would be practical. And if you must eat meat, an appropriate response is to explain why, not to give a logical fallacy. I am not referring to telling people to go vegan for the sake of their health. Whether veganism is healthier is controversial and not in the scope of this discussion, and I am fine with people being responsible for their own health. But eating meat doesn't affect only the eater, and the I don't tell you what to eat, so don't tell me response is given when only the environment and or animal abuse is being discussed again, see the linked example . Why do I want my view changed? I feel that veganism is an extremely important cause and I feel a strong urge to try and convince others to go vegan, but I see that this just annoys people and may even discourage them, so I have to keep quiet. This is incredibly frustrating. I would be less frustrated if I believed there was a good reason for meat eaters to act like this beyond stubbornness and poor logic. Certainly there are situations where the meat eater's reaction can be justified, e.g. if the vegan is being an asshole. But the specific issue in this post does not seem justified and also seems very common and thus worthy of being addressed. EDIT I've responded to a lot of comments and I'm quite exhausted with it, especially as it's all now getting very repetitive. I'm afraid I won't respond to any more including some currently existing comments .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It doesn't make sense for a meat eater to tell a vegan \"I don't tell you what to eat, so don't tell me\"\n","id":"bb0f3a34-7892-4893-8856-2f84ceaf08b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>Individual members of the public, who are not well-versed in financial and taxation issues, will not be well-placed to identify genuine cases of tax evasion. Their tips will often be misleading.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Relying on the public to report potential tax evasion to the authorities is likely to create a large workload for the authorities while providing them with little useful information.\n","id":"9995ac72-c1a9-429b-962c-c5f93018fd66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>While religion may not be perfect it is more valuable to have the order that it brings than to risk the disorder that would be present in its absence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions provided, for centuries, common behavioral guidelines for the society, enabling an organized and peaceful coexistence what constitutions and legal codes do today.\n","id":"0b7f3e6c-7e73-4170-80cf-a1a398b27c75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UN send peacekeepers to protect the Rohingyas?<|ARGUMENT|>The International Court of Justice has recently demanded that Myanmar protects the Rohingya population and ordered that they report back regularly on the steps they have taken to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Putting pressure on Myanmar to look after these refugees properly would also solve this issue.\n","id":"ed0166e2-d7cb-407b-9965-0c3e80cd937c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>It is possible for an employee to have limited choices in relation to jobs: the choice between employment and a dignified life on the one hand, and unemployment, government support and a life in dependency and possibly in poverty or near poverty on the other hand. The choice that they ultimately have is between a lowly paid position or dependency on government support. It is questionable whether such a choice can ever be truly voluntary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without any government interference in corporate compensation structures, companies would seek to pay their workers as low a wage as possible.\n","id":"5f40aded-ce5a-44c2-8bb6-1c8c69725ba1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>War on drugs is failing for years, it doesn't reduce addiction to drugs, the only thing it reduces is tax payer wage and it helps mafia to keep their drug business. Drugs being legal would eradicate their whole mafia business.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's a good thing that individuals cannot control which rules can become dominant than others. Politicians use laws as tools to harm people for their own benefit.\n","id":"d9811116-6563-4095-b580-e87acb83e3a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>In the Netherlands, Karina Schaapman used her newfound political influence as politician to publicize a book about her experience as a sex worker.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalization allows sex workers to better reshape interpretations of sex and sexuality in society.\n","id":"be9139e5-32a4-4d72-bee3-38af4bd868f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the European Union legalize marijuana?<|ARGUMENT|>Recent research suggests that daily or high potent cannabis use increases risk of psychotic disorders 2x - 3x times higher risk.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Long-term consumption of cannabis can have negative and irreversible effects on both mental and physical health.\n","id":"f71546ef-0de2-4763-aa74-dd191be8a537"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In university every racial theory class I took was based around the notion that latinos, asians and blacks People of Color POCs had the same basic interests and that these interests were opposed to the interests of an equally monolithic White America. I hear this concept repeated by many young activists as well. I'm a white guy who grew up in a diverse area. Where I grew up asians except SE asians generally lived in the same neighborhoods as rich white people and mixed freely with them. Blacks and latinos were more integrated with each other than they were with white people, but they saw themselves as separate communities with separate interests. Also ethnic whites working class jews, italians and irish were pretty segregated from rich whites professional jews and wasps . I believe if you look at the data, Asians for example are not affected by the same problems as black people, and are arguably more privileged than even whites. Furthermore, while blacks and latinos are both undeniably oppressed in America, they have different and sometimes contradictory interests. I think the increasing use of this term by people who are trying to right racial wrongs sets the movement back. In my university and in certain racial advocacy groups it is common for upper middle class Asian people to run movements that ostensibly speak for oppressed POC's. This seems as problematic as having a white person run a group like this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept \"person of color\" as it is used in academic and activist circles is meaningless and harmful to understanding of racial issues in America.\n","id":"c47dfbbd-e5be-444c-b36c-60d17aa7fd54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Market vs. regulatory approaches to cutting carbon emissions<|ARGUMENT|>The theory behind carbon taxes is that it would cause higher energy prices, which would cause less consumption and emissions as well as providing incentives for greater fuel efficiency. Other reasons include:<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Carbon tax market mechanisms would be more effective in reducing carbon emissions\n","id":"f0cf2840-abda-479a-abf0-bb61c2ebab3b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Couples Sign A Prenuptial Agreement Before Marriage?<|ARGUMENT|>Judges have to provide a judicial opinion justifying the decisions to which they come. This means that their reasoning has to be sound and based on evidence presented in trials.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Family law courts usually lack juries This means that judges make the final call. Trained judges are less likely to be swayed by weak arguments made by unscrupulous lawyers.\n","id":"2aa68785-6712-4a27-ba8a-af34c13f1a0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Self-victimization of the Black community can easily be interpreted by other stakeholders as an opportunistic attempt at guilt-tripping and thus receive a negative reaction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unlikely that the American public will be receptive towards attempts at self-victimization by the Black Community.\n","id":"437e8955-1f9d-491b-8204-e0e794a3816d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Technologies from the \"digital industry\", like augmented reality seem to be very useful for the development of AKM.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Technological progress on all spheres of civilian life will lead to autonomous operation modes within machines.\n","id":"52c0543f-f418-47cb-a6ce-f4c2d9541698"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I post this more as a panicked cry for reassurance rather than a bout of playful combativeness. In other words, I'm assuming a grim future which I feel I should spell out 'By the people, for the people' has become a bad joke as elected officials take bribes with impunity from private entities that either harm the community and the world at large with their products and actions or otherwise would not have been successful if not for the actions of powerful government officials. Vote rigging is rampant so that politicians can continue serving interests that are not the public's. The armed forces are kept well funded and loyal at the expense of social programs. As unrest amongst the rank and file surges, civil society becomes fractured and quarrelsome. I've tried to paint a picture of a society that requires a revolution against the higher class, political or otherwise. My point is not that we as a country are headed in that direction, but that if and when we get there, the American people will not respond. The most powerful military in the world ensures that physical resistance would be futile. Anecdotally, I've seen a lot of people refusing to acknowledge sketchy political goings on especially this election cycle , and I believe that head in the sand attitude will only get worse due to our 'addiction to the status quo.' Our entire modern life, from entertainment to the food we eat, relies on the actions of massive corporations with government subsidies. Ultimately, if those entities are shown to be working in concert against the American people, what recourse do we have?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if irrefutable proof of widespread corruption in the US government came to light, the American people would be unwilling and unable to effectively respond.\n","id":"95a99ff9-0472-446f-8891-eb361f28388a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>SEE MY ALSO DOWN AT THE BOTTOM So at my high school, you have to take and pass 2 of the same language courses and you have to pass Algebra II and finish off with one more math credit after that. Now this is in North Carolina, and other schools may be different but it still exists . I don't think this is fair. Not everyone has the ability or the concept to learn a language or excel in math. I understand that it's revolutionary to learn a language. But forcing someone to learn a language to graduate just doesn't seem right. It's a waste of space and of credits, especially if you fail and ruin your GPA. A pretty large reason of why kids drop out of high school is because they get held back and forced to do the same thing over again. Not everyone wants to be a doctor or lawyer or even a grocery store owner. Some people just want to graduate high school. What's better? A high school graduate that failed math or a high school dropout with no concept of math AT ALL?? It just doesn't seem right but a lot of people decide to stick behind the fact that learning a language or passing a higher level math is necessary . Hell, wouldn't algebra one be a fair class to make it a requirement? Yes, I get the face that math is a necessary thing. I said certain maths in the title, i.e, Algebra II, Calculus . I also understand language can input diversity. But a comment made me come and edit this post. They said All you need to do is pass which cannot possibly be that hard with a little bit of effort. Okay, but you need to pass, not just the first, but the second level of the language as well. Meaning if you just pass the first course of the language with a C or a D, how in the hell are you going to pass the second one with harder vocabulary and sentence structure and a whole swirl of other objectives involved? Here are 12 well paying jobs that don't require math. Change my view. Why do kids need graduation credit requirements? Edit Just for the record, I'm only railing on math and language because those are the only 2 you are required to pass for a graduation credit. I'm not complaining about just simply math and language . I'm talking about level 2 of a language and a higher level math. Are you guys actually reading this post? ALSO I love foreign language. I've taken Spanish and German, and I've also passed Advanced Functions and Modeling. This is not a  because I hate those two courses . I absolutely love learning languages. I go to school in a rough area, and I've seen enough students drop out because of the requirements. Students that I know really could've done something with a high school degree. That's my reason for this .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think high schools should have \"required graduation credits\" such as foreign language or certain maths.\n","id":"6f7c4360-1080-4a4f-9793-e15c26b348ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be equal pay for elite sports women \/ men<|ARGUMENT|>The gender pay gap in sport sends a very negative message to young girls about their value relative to men, or about the place for women within sport, and the value placed on female sporting achievement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It encourages younger girls to aspire and strive to reach elite levels of sport, thereby promoting healthy lifestyles and role models.\n","id":"9a0e6843-03ef-448a-8012-1468a8fd6efc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do all or most White Americans experience privilege?<|ARGUMENT|>A common argument would be, \"these parents must work longer hours to support a family.\" This does not take into a account that families take planning. One who cannot offer the support required for successful offspring, should not conceive until ready.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The effectiveness of schools relies heavily on parents and students. Less effective districts have more disruptive and less studious students. They also have parents who are less involved.\n","id":"997a0e21-1cec-4589-a3a2-55f36a343098"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Banning child performers<|ARGUMENT|>Young adult actors often portray children on stage and in films or television. Nor are there many essential roles for children in the classic dramatic repertoire - the intense focus on children in the media is a modern phenomenon. Sports don\u2019t need to suffer much either, just to change and adapt; gymnastics and tennis have already raised the minimum age at which children can compete professionally, with no negative impact upon the success and popularity of these sports.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The consequences of such a ban need not be severe.\n","id":"efaa6ef7-c8ef-40c7-8634-7c0500478ebc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>Pence used the term genocide in describing ISIS\u2019s assault on Christians but did not mention that word when discussing the fate of the Rohingya with Suu Kyi.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Despite this however, Pence has refused to be forthright in referring to the persecution of Rohingya Muslims as \"genocide\", preferring to skirt around the topic.\n","id":"46178174-770f-4a50-8aa2-fc75fc8cd44e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Could the health benefits of GM foods outweigh their risks?<|ARGUMENT|>Colossal time and money is being invested into research centred around the advantages GM food could impose on our health. It is clear that those developing GM foods attribute exceptionally high value to them, as scientists have been so bold as to suggest their function in repelling cancer 5. Some might argue that such resources could be better spent focusing on cures for diseases themselves, but by experimenting in this area, scientists are proposing to us another dimension in which we can fight for better health. If all goes to plan and GM food is proven to be safe, much strain could be removed from the NHS. People might prefer to eat fruit containing vaccines rather than to undergo injections and may build up their immune systems and reduce their reliance on the health services. As a result this could impact hugely in society in general; if numbers requiring healthcare were small enough, the government could dedicate more of its budget to other worthwhile causes. 5 The Independent, Monday 27 October 2008<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Revolutionary techniques aimed at battling fatal illnesses should not be abandoned\n","id":"a385af0f-b879-4012-9443-189f169a28d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like there are two types of people in the world those who love summer and those who hate it. I am 100 on the hate side. Sticky hot weather Thick humid air which makes you feel like you are suffocating Sweat The attitude which comes along with summer which makes everyone want to strip not so appealing for the body conscious people. For me, there is no advantages for summer that cannot be countered Want a tan? Use a tanning bed fake tan Want vitamin D? take supplements Want to show off your body? go on holiday to the beach<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I hate summer and love winter.\n","id":"93922d81-2fcf-42fd-a402-7894ee76c64e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>There's ample evidence that Jesus Christ's Gospel has been corrupted: - there's no certainty who composed the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John MML&J, & no validation of their contents by a Gospel composed by Jesus himself; - numerous Gospels were written at the same time as MML&J, but rejected for political reasons in the 1st to 4th centuries. - St. Paul largely defined Christianity, but never knew Jesus except in hallucination, & was spurned as near-heretical by Jesus' closest disciples.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allah, the Monotheistic, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Eternal, Self-Sufficient, Creator, Sustainer, and Monitor of all that exists, has repeatedly revealed, since the first human being, guidance on how to minimise evil in, even eradicate evil from, society. All but one i.e. the Quran of Allah's messages of guidance have been destroyed or perverted by evil humans, for their own greed for power and wealth. So evil only exists because evil humans reject and\/or pervert Allah's guidance.\n","id":"3590e668-c797-4150-9111-ad5850e26b6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Competitive international football should be shown live on free to air broadcasters<|ARGUMENT|>As a national team competing on an international stage, the opportunity to support the nation should not be reserved only for those wealthy enough to pay for subscription channels.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The domestic game is being priced out of many peoples reach, the national game should be protected.\n","id":"f5f22e7c-d338-48c1-ab52-dce2380ded0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I recently came across this article addressing the consumption of domesticated pets in Switzerland. I'm sure this topic has come up in this subreddit before but I still haven't been convinced to change my view. I concede that one should not eat pets that have already been claimed i.e. don't take your neighbor's cat and put it in your soup . However, why shouldn't one be able to go to the local dog pound to pick up some meat for dinner? Animals in shelters pounds are not claimed by anyone and will eventually be euthanized. So why not let someone benefit from these animals? Additionally, I find the distinction between cats dogs and other animals to be confusing. Why is it so appalling to consume cats dogs when we have no problems with eating pigs and sheep? I've encountered the argument that cats dogs have evolved with the human race, but to be honest, all animals that are currently alive are equally evolved . Of course, historically, cat dogs have had their uses beyond just being food but this idea doesn't seem to apply to horses which were used as transportation , sheep which provide wool , pigs provide leather , and cows provide leather . EDIT Thanks for all the input Initially, I was quite overwhelmed. Special thanks to u HeddaLettuce and u crayshack for offering great ideas and data sources. I've posted this somewhere in the thread but decided to post it somewhere more visible I've come to the conclusion that pet consumption should be discouraged based on potential health problems definitely not because we should feel bad about it or because some animals are more intelligent than others . Additionally, large scale maintenance of dog cat farms and subsequently large scale consumption would be economically inefficient. However, the government should not ban pet consumption because dogs cats eaten in small amounts is not detrimental to health or economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eating dogs and cats is completely acceptable\n","id":"edb3746b-1288-4db3-8981-8b619904618c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>An argument against the soul based in the parent and grandparent claims: 1 If the soul explains freewill, neuroscience will not be able to collect data about freewill. 2 Neuroscience can collect data about freewill. 3 The soul does not explain freewill<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Establishing a causal relationship between decisions the supposed result of freewill and the \"physical neurons and neural circuits\" would rule out the need to a soul as an explanatory tool.\n","id":"aaf48c76-ade4-467f-bfb6-ad97456887f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If I'm in an ordinary US restaurant, I don't really know what the prices is it's whatever's on the menu plust some unspecified amount that's based on shame. If I pay any less than whatever is expected and the amount varies depending on the kind of restaurant and service , I'm some kind of asshole. Why? Because somehow restaurants are granted an exception to minimum wage laws because of tipping so now they're basically working for free unless I make up the difference. But bad laws aren't my fault nor are they my responsibility. The next excuse is that it improves customer service, but having standards and holding to them solves that problem. When I worked retail, I helped people to the best of my ability because that's what you're supposed to do . If waiters aren't making people feel welcome, then it's not my responsibility to make it known by tips. Even worse, the employee tips can be affected by the quality and timliness of the cooks, whether the restaurant is understaffed, whether they have to share the tips with kitchen staff or with management it's just an enormous moronic mess and I hate it. There's nothing good about tipping and it should be abolished. I would think that everyone would agree, but they don't. What am I missing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tipping is supposed to be voluntary and for exceptional customer service. Expecting or mandating tipping is rude and detrimental to customers and employees alike.\n","id":"db93109d-1882-4589-a0ae-00824d75f087"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is a Humanist an 'empty pot' , lacking in something?<|ARGUMENT|>Some experts think that believing in a religion gives you a greater sense of purpose and meaning in life than a secular viewpoint alone does, and that can help carry you through the low periods and elevate the higher ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are protective qualities associated with religious belief and spirituality.\n","id":"3d26ea78-505d-4e34-9bc3-c504cf441d23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The problems with hard drives They're slow as hell. They're much more prone to damage from shock and vibration. SSDs lose capacity over time, but consumer hard drives are far more likely to simply fail. The only thing that hard drives have got going for them in the long run is capacity. Data centers could use the data density to their advantage the speed of a slow hard drive is not that important when the data is mirrored everywhere. However, consumers are not going to need 16 TB hard drives and what they want is greater speed and enough space like 2 TB . A SSD provides an incredibly noticeable speed bump. Thus, I think the days of the hard drive in the consumer space is limited. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Other than storage capacity and price, I don't see any advantage of hard drives over SSDs. Once SSDs become cheap enough, they will take over desktop\/laptop storage and hard drives will become obsolete outside of large scale computing and backup.\n","id":"936575e8-216b-4cc5-b918-48ca6c4fcea5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While I'm certainly convinced it's difficult, I do not buy the sentiment that it is the hardest job. I believe folks claim it, using the following reasons There is a perception that the stakes are infinitely high. Naturally, a mother's influence is real and significant, but is it so much a factor that we can blame credit her with how well someone turned out? I often hear mothers refer to their newly heightened maternal emotions as a reason for the difficulty but that doesn't tell me much about the rigors of the actual job, just that it is frequently performed with a handicap. Incidentally, it's not a handicap when being referred to as 'mother's intuition.' Then it's suddenly a superpower. I think it must be a very hard job, but some folks might not be prepared for the flexibility and patience required. Once a woman becomes a parent, and she sees there's no respite from the responsibility I can imagine it feels like she is enduring something more difficult than anything else encountered by the humankind. I imagine one might feel that way in many situations if they weren't prepared for something difficult to prepare for. You are correct if you have guessed that I am a 30 female without children. I love children, and my 3 best friends are mothers. They each have differing thoughts on this issue themselves. I am a supportive friend, and I help out because I can see they need it, but I do not think they have jobs that are more difficult than coal miners or brain surgeons. But I would like to know what Reddit thinks Edit Hey thanks everyone this was a good discussion. I will cop to a misapplied usage of the word 'job,' which murkied the topic a bit. I imagine we can all agree kids and careers are apples and oranges with some people having both What most of you describe indeed sounds rigorous especially to me, because, and I conveniently failed to point this out, I don't have anyone's idea of a difficult life. Pleasant job, no kids, dog that doesn't destroy furniture, etc. I do worry about getting older and being lonely. It doesn't haunt me, but it's out there as a possibility. But it's been about 75 my choice not to have kids, so I'm willing to live with it. I am still not persuaded that parenting is a more difficult version of human than all others. It is frequently pointed out to me that 'I can't understand without being a mother.' It's an aggravating statement and totally unprovable. Not that it matters. There's no prize for being right, and even if I am, it will be cold comfort at the nursing home. I'll be like, When are all your visitors leaving? Let's get back to Canasta<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe Motherhood is the Hardest Job.\n","id":"d7dce10c-8926-454c-9a75-7b79a937747a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI is portable: people can get the money delivered to them wherever they are. The UBI provides greater physical mobility than most sources of income. This allows people to move around to pursue better opportunities while having a safety net in place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI promotes social justice improving the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within society.\n","id":"d208b691-30ea-47a1-931e-004912866a30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DREAM Act<|ARGUMENT|>DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. \"How the DREAM Act Would Bolster Our Homeland Security.\" The White House Blog. December 14, 2010: \"The DREAM Act would bolster the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s ability to focus our limited enforcement resources on detaining and removing criminal aliens and those who pose a threat to our national security and public safety.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DREAM Act allows DHS to focus on real security threats.\n","id":"c6ed81df-16ce-4155-9ec9-490b695e196b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Kobe Bryant is not the GOAT. People calling Kobe Bryant the GOAT are wrong. None of that means that Kobe Bryant is not still a really really good basketball player. It's the same thing with electricity and climate change and yes, this includes nuclear power you crazy Reddit Cult of Nuclear . It's far and away the foremost sector being discussed, and while it's definitely a very important sector, it's being discussed too much, often at the cost of other sectors, such as agriculture globally in 2011 or steel manufacture in 2017. More generally, I believe that discourse around individual sectors as avenues of attack for combating climate change should be roughly proportional to their contributions, and that's far from the case right now. Moreover, there are a bunch of drivers of climate change that improvements to electricity generation just can't solve. Electrification can solve some parts of emissions from the transportation sector, but we're not even close to being able to electrify long distance marine transport or passenger freight air travel. Electrification does very little for agriculture, because much of global agricultural emissions have basically nothing to do with energy it's things like soil carbon release, land use change from higher carbon sequestration natural ecosystems to lower carbon sequestration agricultural ecosystems, or methane release from the digestion of ruminant animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electricity-generation sector is overrated in discussion of climate change.\n","id":"161e135b-d345-435c-a488-9fb28d22834b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>During the Middle Ages St. Augustine and St. Ambrose both studied earlier philosophers assimilating Greek and Roman philosophy -the basis of Western thought- into Christian doctrine, trying to give a rational interpretation of Christian faith.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Western civilization via Christianity has made great contributions to philosophy and modern thought.\n","id":"377ba1ca-1cf4-4c75-812d-5d128968225c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a rather simple and possibly simplistic philosophical view of mine. I am of the belief that one's conscious experience is the only thing to which they have direct access. It seems to me that all knowledge is derived from observation, and observation must pass through the filter of conscious sense experience. Therefore, any claim about the objective world implies first that the subjective world exists. I have only had the opportunity to express this at length to people who more or less already agree, or to people who disagree but have not had the time to prepare a strong defense. So I would love to listen and perhaps have my view changed by others who believe there is more evidence for the objective world than for the subjective world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is More Evidence for the Subjective World than for the Objective World\n","id":"e69cba11-1b16-488b-83f0-fede6aa8c28a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>While I can imagine some people that have certain disabilities want to have sex and cannot, I do not believe incels really exist as we have come to know them on the internet. I think it is genuinely harmful to those who identify as incel or any variation thereof to normalize the term and to some extent, the culture which is about as toxic as any community can get . My reasoning I have seen, and many others have attested to this, some of what I would consider to be the most hideous people, who do not make a ton of money, with several kids. There are more women than men, so there is literally someone for everyone. incels will tell you myriad reasons for their current problem, but I am unconvinced that the vast majority of them who are not in any way physically disabled no, being ugly isn't a disability are simply unwilling to change anything themselves to help their cause of having sexual relations. Each and every one of the posters and commenters on incel subreddits and other such forums are either demanding standards that they have zero right to virgin, body preference, age, etc , are unwilling to change their hygiene or behavior where they hang out, where they live even, weight loss gain , or blame society that they do not have the courage to talk to women. TL DR version There is, outside of extreme cases, no such thing as an incel. Each one of them is engaging in behavior detrimental to their ultimate goal, whether by behavior, or standards placed on their goal. They are voluntarily celibate for refusing to change their location, job, physical appearance no, not plastic surgery again, many many non conventionally beautiful people have sex all day every day all over the world , or general demeanor. And letting them continue with the label of incel is harmful to these people, and potentially to one of the women they speak about on their forums. EDITs were typos, yes i know the title has celibate spelled wrong. Additionally, please upvote the post if you want it to gain more comments. It is being downvoted, and I can take a few guesses as to why.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Incels\" are not a real thing in the sense we use the term. Each and every one on Reddit is Voluntarily Celebate\n","id":"d0dfb153-42d9-47ef-b22e-abef87918a0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm overweight. That is my thing to deal with on my own. However, I see stars on Dancing with the Stars that have gained weight over the years and it goes unmentioned. However, in previous seasons physical and mental disabilities are constantly mentioned. Fine, I suppose. The most current season has a triple crown jockey as a dancer. EVERYTIME he is on screen they mention his height How is that fair? They even jokingly stood him on a glitter step stool to reach the height of host and dancer then poked fun at it. If we put one of those overweight celebrities on a glitter SCALE, I'm sure all hades would break loose. Why is this acceptable?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"lt is wrong that Dancing with the Stars actively avoids conversations about weight but calls extreme attention to other physical differences.\n","id":"05eafd63-6f9b-4a89-9173-d4288a49e9f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does A College Degree Guarantee A Job?<|ARGUMENT|>The ability to show up on time and do the job are better than a degree that teaches specialization of one particular field, which is limiting to the number of jobs they could get if those are around.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are better qualifications than a degree for a job.\n","id":"a4af29de-ad23-4a26-8c54-696a611a3f00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hear me out. Reagan was a member of a populist movement with a large amount of political criticism because he was an actor. He had views that many thought challenged liberties. He was a damn good President that did things to aid both parties, and he did so while supporting causes he believed in. Trump is the first Candidacy where we have an overwhelming amount of information, we can refer to this phoenomenon as the meme race of 2016 because it really was all about the memes, which before this race were more of a psychological phoenomenon, and not a picture based circlejerk. We also have Clinton, one of the most evil, CP loving, Illuminati ass opponents that was the shoo in to win who DIDN'T get her way. I think this is largely due to populism, or the needs of real american people. Why is it bad that The president he's listening to our voices for once?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump is going to be the next Ronald Reagan\n","id":"c3f5f4df-6a65-4e07-9aef-38dcc18a4441"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Premier League Better than the Bundesliga?<|ARGUMENT|>Regarded matter of factly football clubs are companies offering goods e.g. fan products and services entertainment. In order to be successful and to stay in the market leagues they have to invest huge amounts of money in the right personell and marketing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea of football clubs is to be successful, reach and stay in the highest league and win titles. All this requires huge investments.\n","id":"6123ffba-1469-45c4-acfc-80e85f6eec80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>Communities would feel that there was always someone around to protect them in their community, even if the police couldn't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Communities would feel safer knowing that a group has protectors hiding in plain sight, in their community.\n","id":"1ca751b0-eb00-43dd-b1a7-54abedb0c702"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the citizen's right to benefit from technology, for privacy and secrecy, overrule the role of government?<|ARGUMENT|>The privacy of one person should be penetrable when the reasons are clear and substantial. Imagine somebody about to be executed when access to somebody else's emails could save the condemned man's life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the face of compelling public interest the right to privacy can be overturned.\n","id":"4e9b018a-9975-409e-a80c-7743ab4a0e12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>The 67,740 number of instances usually cited is, also, the number of cases where someone used a firearm in some way in self-defence - it does not necessarily exclusively include cases where they were successful in doing so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Defensive gun use is rare, compared to the use of guns in crime and violence.\n","id":"fe064fd0-3986-47dc-966d-cbbb1089a0f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Attorney-Client Privilege<|ARGUMENT|>Fear of compulsory disclosure may deter candid, careful, detailed, written advice being given by lawyers to their clients. Does effective corporate regulation require the greater use of intrusive measures like the removal of legal professional privilege, or would more informal, cooperative or voluntary mechanisms \u2013 like leniency or immunity policies and discretions \u2013 achieve better outcomes?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An higher judicial willingness to remove the privilege may damage compliance.\n","id":"e9e893ad-abc8-41b8-8643-f1f332190b03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Granted I was not raised anything other than white although my appearance was diffrent I feel that marvels attempt with things like a black spider man or female captain America is nothing more than a cop out copout? Rather than crafting new super heros and making them stand on their own two legs they make other races and genders accept that the only way they can sell as a comic is to ride on the coat tails of their white counter parts, is kind of moving backwards Example miles spider man or gwyn stacy spider man Edit I think I did not explain well enough my problem is that it's lazy writing and makes you wonder why do it. There are other examples from other sources for instance the magical school in a teen fiction novel they count on the success of Harry potter to push a sub par story into Harry potter levels of success. like wise by making and relising 85 diffrent variations of the same super heroes but making them a minority character they think they can be progressive with the minimal amount of effort and that bugs me, largely because 1. It sounds so much like the flood of heros dc released if the name some thing man than change the name to something woman and all's good granted they became better over time and were allowed to grow in 40 50 years, and 2. I expected better from marvel no one knew that x men was going to work but they did it, no one knew avengers was going to work but they pushed it forward, same could be said of the hulk, spider man their golden goose , dare devil, and countless others not so much Capitan america that was propaganda pure and simple all i want is the days where they take a risk with something, anything and not try to push hulk version 8.0 now with 100 more minority or enough iron men to fill a baseball stadium<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cmv: marvels new ideal\n","id":"8a4995ce-0d58-4861-abd8-0bc7b63e7605"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Hospitals were founded, financed, and staffed by religions. An old French term for hospital is ho\u0302tel-Dieu, \"hostel of God.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Before modern states could provide welfare, religion was the only source of education, healthcare or economic relief.\n","id":"1d26ac3c-534f-4aab-aae1-c612c36cc028"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tourism to North Korea should be banned.<|ARGUMENT|>A flight to Pyongyang from Beijing costs $522 on North Korea\u2019s national carrier Air Koryo, whereas a flight of the same distance would normally cost around $290.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are steep, inflated costs for tourists wanting to visit North Korea.\n","id":"b8229222-ea63-4b84-a2f7-fdea893fb1e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit Basically what i'm saying is, that after all of the terrible stuff we allied forces do around the globe, i can absolutely understand why people want vengeance against us and can't fault their reasoning for acting. Edit 2 To complicate things a bit. I tend to be pro war, as i believe our forces do a lot of good, but i accept we also do some bad, and can empathise with why people hate the west<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since 9\/11 we the allied forces have killed several million innocents, I'm starting to think we deserve what we get... Deep i know\n","id":"c5f774ae-1804-4875-8d38-496b5536f4e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ending US sanctions on Cuba<|ARGUMENT|>Prior to the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights repeatedly reported on the human rights situation in Cuba and took the step of appointing a Special Rapporteur. The Rapporteur was continually denied access by the Cuban government to perform its work in Cuba in examining Cuban human rights violations. Such examples of flouting the UN actually led to UN sanctions and warranted sanctions from other countries against Cuba.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sanctioning Cuba is appropriate punishment for its flouting the UN\n","id":"bd5a1fe3-4c6f-4b26-95a1-fa63245e5929"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been around guns before, I've had fun with them since an early age. I'll admit I'm no hunter, and the most experience I've had is trap shooting. But the point I'd like to make is that I think that while guns are fun, some bad people ruined them for everyone else and we should regulate guns more heavily. Personally, I'd advocate for repealing the second amendment, banning handguns, hollow point and high caliber rounds, institute gun recall or buyback programs nationwide and limit future sales to weapons designed specifically and exclusively to game and sport. But I realize that's unrealistic. I don't think that's ever going to happen, so I'll compromise. I think a fair compromise to start is to limit the number of rounds in a magazine to make mass shootings less devastating and to ban ammunition that is designed to take down people, or large game like people. Now I also lived in the South for a little bit, so I'm aware of some counterarguments like the whole pest control issue of wild boars and other large game that are devastating to farmland and livestock. I'd say a fair solution there is to fund via buyback programs, and maybe higher taxes in those areas a well equipped and regulated animal control program to deal with those issues. If the boars are so bad and devastating to the local area, there's no reason that there shouldn't be a local program to deal with it and handle it on a local scale for the benefit of all the citizens in that area. As for the self defense issue, I don't think it holds that much weight. I feel arguing self defense is perpetuated by paranoia and if the issue of home invasion is so important, then better locks on a door or even a damn guard dog is cheaper and safer than a weapon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think a fair compromise in gun control is to limit the number of bullets in a magazine to 10, and banning hollow-point rounds.\n","id":"ba59d58d-3026-486f-8104-48613c1e73a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you believe the NSA and that supposedly being able to access everything about us and all our personal data is a god thing in the name of 'anti terrorism' and what have you, then I think it follows that it is a good thing. They are using the ability to check for potential terrorists and A if they look through your data and find you are a terrorist then that is beneficial for society at large B if they look through your data and there is nothing wrong then absolutely nobody is harmed The outrage stems from people's belief of privacy as a right when in reality I think it is more like a privilege i.e. not a necessity for human survival etc . If the government who have been voted in , decide to use the data that they have at their disposal for the best interests of the people and the country then why should they not utilise it to the best of their advantage? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NSA spying on us is a good thing and they should be allowed to continue\n","id":"f6b06400-f90f-4d04-87d6-f968a661c239"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me be perfectly clear I am not a free market solves all type of guy. I generally support policies with good intentions to improve the lives of our residents. The reason housing is so expensive is simply a problem of over regulation. The government is responsible for 100 of this burden through two things. First, local zoning that prohibits the highest and best use on land in favor of car dominated development. Most communities require large setbacks, lot size minimums, and other arbitrary regulations that increase the cost of building a house. The reason for these regulations is existing homeowners want them to keep out smaller houses and potentially less desirable neighbors. Secondly, local building codes that do not allow for any variance or exceptions. Many years ago poorer people could afford houses because they did not have all the niceties that we expect now. If builders were allowed to build to a lesser standard those houses would be cheaper amd poorer people might be able to afford them. As it sits now, regulations make new houses so expensive only wealthy people can afford them. To counteract these two pieces of over regulation the government has decided to fund certain projects with local and or state tax money. In effect the government has driven the prices higher to a point where they need to help fund projects. The simplier and cheaper option would be to reduce their own regulations. The highest priced neighborhoods in the country were all built before zoning really existed yet current zoning prohibits those exacts neighborhoods. If we want to replicate these neighborhoods we need to allow the market to direct their development. This is all the proof we need to show the regulations of zoning and building codes are actually making things worse, not better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is not an affordable housing crises, there is a government regulation on housing crises.\n","id":"8584cee9-ab34-4858-87a6-31b83d820ed5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this is a very controversial subject, and many people disagree with me, and I have to admit, I am not the perfect judge for this. A little background on me, just because you should know. First, I consider myself conservative republican and I am also under 18, so I can't vote. I also live in the US but I think this applies to most countries. So, I don't think everyone should be given the right to vote. The average person I have found does not know about economics, politics, and policies to make an educated vote. I see people all the time saying stupid stuff on facebook about something about politics and they really don't know what they are talking about. In school, you may take one or two economic classes, but that is definitely not enough to make enough of an educated vote. I don't know, because I don't know what I don't know but I feel that the economy is much more complicated than what could be covered in that time. Something that bothers me a lot is when people make opinions over something they are not educated about. I think we should let the experts make decisions, because they are smarter and more knowledgeable in that subject than the average person. So people, not knowing what the experts say, will go in and vote over something they don't know hardly anything about. Unless you know virtually all the facts about something, you are not educated enough to make decisions about it if there are people do know all of it. And frankly, you average Joe did not go to school for years and years to study political policies and their effectiveness. Yet he has a vote on what is going on, and that really bothers me. And honestly, I am in that same bout. Maybe it changes when I can vote, but it does not seem like that when I look at older people I know. Is part of my argument possibly flawed because right now we have a democratic government, and I am republican? Maybe. But I think I can recognize the same problem even if I had the upper hand . I know reddit is generally very democratic, so please don't make this about that. I would honestly would like someone to change my view. Edit fixed to under 18. Also, u drjonesenberg added something that really helped change my view. Delta to him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voting shouldn't be a right, but something granted only for certain people\n","id":"7f88a103-8def-4de2-a00e-87651479b5ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I read so much about traveling. Many people down voted me when I said travel is over rated in another subreddit when I called it out the way I felt it. I have traveled quiet a bit to know that it is an over rated experience. It is the same as watching an NFL Cricket game, it is entertainment but nothing more. It doesn't make you a better person, you don't learn any thing that fundamentally changes you. It is something that people just claim to have a profound effect to seem cool. Btw I have been meditating from past five years. I feel that joy can be attained not traveling. Traveling is over rated. You don't need travel or other materialistic thing for happiness. You only need the bare necessities, so why waste money on it? r changemyview my view is that traveling is fun but it is over rated. It is only entertainment and not a profound experience.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Travel is overrated. You don't change post travel. A good technical book has much more profound effect than travel.\n","id":"5c232119-16ef-4127-94d7-6276c0ba8cdd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>The Jarupa Oak is a clonal colony of Palmer's Oak trees that are over 13,000 years old.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many living organisms are older than the biblically proposed age of the universe.\n","id":"1bd2c4ca-2871-4fd1-8da1-e4a19c97a15d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Primaries in US elections<|ARGUMENT|>In political Parties that have a First Amendment right to free association, there is not really an obligation to be \"fair\" to every candidate and offer something equivalent to \"equal opportunity\". The party has a right to define what candidate is good for their political agenda and what candidate is bad for their political agenda. Basically, political parties can say, \"if a candidate doesn't like it, too bad, run for office with a different party.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parties don't have to treat all candidates equally in primaries\n","id":"906a2325-bd52-4451-87f5-415628f20a19"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Specifically, due to differences in IQ spread. Due to the higher spread in males on both extremes , there are twice as many males with 120 IQ and above than females. It follows that even with equal opportunity, females will be underrepresented in highly complex job fields like math research, or STEM in general. Note that I have not claimed that it is entirely due to biology, nor that the difference in IQ spread is the only contributing biological factor. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The gender gap in STEM is due, at least in part to biology\n","id":"660f3e30-d23f-465a-8365-3cffd98371e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is The Internet a Good Source of Medical Information?<|ARGUMENT|>The body of knowledge in medicine, nursing, and other disciplines, has become so large that it is impossible for any one clinician to know everything there is to know, even within a specialty. In medicine alone, >50 million papers have been published in >28,000 peer-reviewed journals\u200b, with >2.5 million articles contributing to this body of knowledge each year. This necessitates that clinicians use information systems in real-time, including the internet, to find needed information.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The internet helps medical professionals and patients alike keep up-to-date with the latest medical information.\n","id":"78371a41-d9d1-4a97-b48f-30d1412399a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>Donald Trump pardoned his supporters Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Dinesh D'Souza after both had been convicted of crimes, sending the clear message that loyalty to the President places a person above the law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump has no respect for the rule of law.\n","id":"f909d875-60eb-4380-886d-65b798a5f212"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface by clarifying the Opportunity and Accessibility here. I am not talking about basic human needs. We should all have equal access to clean drinking water, emergency medical services, free education up to secondary, free tertiary education deserves it's own topic , and of course equal rights. What I am talking about, is equal opportunities for scholarships, employment, tertiary schooling, bank loans, and most other non essentials that people complain a certain person or group of persons has an unfair or unequal access to. Another preface to understand my opinion. We are a living mammal, and an animal with our own albeit highly evolved instincts and mechanisms in place, that got us to where we are today on the evolutionary ladder. Today, society seems to want to transcend our nature, because it has become painfully obvious how terrible we are as a collective. This is largely due to the hyper connectivity and instant information that the internet has provided. So why would equal opportunity and accessibility to non essentials increase depression and reduce motivation? We need to strive and succeed. We are highly competitive by nature we want to be seen as good, as victorious, as strong, as all of the wonderful character traits we have decided are important to us. We have a drive to achieve more and to do better. Now what does a completely equal and accessible world look like? Where is the motivation to do good, and work hard if everyone has equal access and opportunity? If everyone has equal income, equal shelter, equal this and that, and we have decided as a society that everyone gets everything for free because we are all humans and all deserve the same thing as everyone else no matter what, who will actually do anything? The more we try to centralize everything and make everything equal for everyone, the less incentive people will have to work hard. Another natural trait of humans, we create things and do everything we can to allow us to be lazier and lazier. Doing less for more is enticing to the brain, it's safe and comfortable and not scary. So I ask, what does the world of equal opportunity and accessibility look like, and how will that benefit our species and not send us in to a spiral of complacency and depression?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Increases in Equal Opportunity and Accessibility will lead to an increase in depression and reduce motivation in society.\n","id":"215927f9-fd68-4cf6-b5f9-99bb8816caf3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>Mental health problems can ruin relationships at work which can be costly for the business. Harnois, Gabriel, p.9<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not making allowances for workers' mental health can be more costly to the company.\n","id":"21287505-a8f9-43b5-82ac-2b0574265cbe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've had a few other conversations elsewhere and to avoid any misunderstandings I'm going to say right now that I'm not scoffing at the absurdity of the high price point solely because it's expensive. I get that there's a luxury market out there where people pay extravagant prices for extravagant versions of everyday items and while that's not a market I participate it, I don't have a problem with it. Also, I'm not saying that this has to be one or the other, but I do believe that the marketing angle is far more of a driving factor behind anything else. To get into it now, I don't believe that luxury watches and the Apple Watch Edition are comparable at all in fact beyond their general design and the fact they tell time. Here are my 3 main points supporting that assertion Longevity. Whereas luxury watches can literally last multiple lifetimes the battery in the Apple Watch means that you'll be lucky if you get 10 years out of it. Couple that with the already short battery life 18 hours and I believe it very likely that it will be significantly less time than that before it becomes unusable for even telling the time reliably. Quality. While I'm sure that Apple has crafted a fine looking product from premium and expensive materials, their product surely cannot match what a luxury watch at this price point offers. Check this article out for more details, but here's the money quote for watches in the 10,000 20,000 range gt From 10,000 to 20,000, you are into the realm of watchmaking where everything you see is original and interesting \u2014 or at least should be. Consider fully ceramic chronographs, stunning hand wound dress watches, or modern legends all fall within this range \u2014 all featuring truly in house movements with a moderate amount of hand finishing to internal components. These watches will be assembled by hand, completely in Switzerland and offer the incredibly low tolerances and extreme quality for which this industry is known. Obsolescence. Simply put, well made luxury watches hold their value well, and maybe even go up over time and their functionality is timeless no pun intended . Devices do not. Each iteration drops the appeal of owning the device more and more. The Apple Watch Edition is almost certainly going to be outshined by its successor which will certainly do everything better and likely be less expensive. I'm sure in the future it will still be a collector's item, but no one will likely care about using it On the flip side, as a marketing tool the Edition has a number of features Conversation starter. It's making people who don't usually talk about Apple's latest and greatest most importantly journalists and bloggers devices, talk about this one meaning that more people will be aware of the device in general and thus more likely to buy one. Safe Polarizer. It's already caused people to argue loudly and nastily about its price points and every indication is that this will continue as long as the Edition is news. The thing is though, that none of that vitriol really negatively impacts the Sport and Standard versions of the watch. They are not cheap, but they can't even begin to approach the opulence and audacity of the Edition. Meanwhile, the controversy will cause Apple fan boys girls to dig in their heels all the more on the product, and the anti Apple fan boys girls already hate everything Apple and likely talk about it all the time anyway. Raises the perceived value of the lower models. It does this in two ways that I can think of 1. By essentially saying to every onlooker, Hey, Sport and Standar aren't expensive. You want to see expensive? THIS is expensive. and 2. By showing that the product is deserving of such luxurious treatment in the first place. Lastly, I just don't think Apple is intending or expecting to make much money on the Edition. Sure, the profit per device is probably quite high, but I think Apple has to know that there is very small niche even smaller than that of luxury watch buyers and that their overall profit on the edition will pale in comparison to their other models. I don't believe they are selling this out of the goodness of their hearts and the next best reason to sell it that I can think of is as a marketing tool for the real money makers. TL DR Compared to luxury watches of the same price point, the Apple Watch Edition can't compete on longevity or quality and will become obsolete with the next iteration of Apple Watch so the Edition is not a product well suited to the market it's entering. However, it does serve as a great conversation starter for the watch line and makes people take notice for whom it would usually fly under the radar, and it also serves to make people value the other models more. Bottom line, Apple doesn't seem poised to make much money on this thing compared to the other watches so it makes more sense for this to be a marketing tool. On a more meta note, despite me laying out my argument with confidence, this is a fairly new view for me and I truly believe it's possible I've overlooked some angle that would make more sense as a motivation for selling this watch, so please Change My View<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Apple Watch: Edition the gold one is more of a marketing strategy for the other versions than a genuine product worth owning.\n","id":"b3587b18-441a-4e2c-90ef-35a3c98d0ed2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel awful for writing what I'm about to write I've recently started hearing of people acknowledging the high crime rates, low test scores, higher poverty, and higher unemployment among certain minorities. However, it seems that everywhere I look blames society for somehow cultivating these problems. I understand there are stereotypes that may negatively affect a certain group of people, but it hardly seems that this can cause such a massive discrepancy between the crime rates of, say, Asians and African Americans. People point to long standing biases against minorities. My history is pretty shoddy, but didn't Asians have to face these same hardships? They're now statistically, at least one of the most well off races there are. Other minorities complain about receiving negative stereotypes far more, yet don't seem to be as willing to do anything to overcome these stereotypes, which in turn reinforces those very stereotypes, creating a vicious circle. This is all in addition to the fact that these minorities are granted a massive boost when applying to colleges, and are aided by lots of exclusive scholarships, yet still have the lowest college attendance rate. Occam's razor would dictate that the problem is within the races themselves, not society as a whole. I can thankfully, at the very least say I don't believe any races are born inferior to others, but the culture within them may not be as conducive to success. This feels pretty bad. As much as I would like to believe I'm not racist, I need some convincing. Help me , you're my only hope EDIT Thank you all for taking the time to comment. I'm trying to keep playing devil's advocate, even if every one of my comments kills me a little inside. For the record, though, I'm not looking to have my opinion changed to It's all the WHITE PEOPLE'S fault People have been great about avoiding this so far, but I feel that that comment is inevitable. Regardless, keep them coming EDIT2 I think it may have been done. I understand now how a nasty circle started centuries ago that continues reinforcing itself to this very day. I don't think that the massive black guy I saw curse out a judge and lawyer the video that prompted me to post this would have done so if his parents, teachers, bosses, and the like supported him as a kid a little more. Now this doesn't mean that I completely sympathize with people in LA rioting over someone who they never met or cared about before it gave them a chance to riot. However, I do recognize that the trouble has to be tackled as a social issue perpetuated across all races. Thanks for mostly changing my mind A Delta will be assigned in a moment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the discrepancies between races are not caused by social bias, but the races themselves. Please\n","id":"506f593a-2e85-45e9-beb5-78141bd39f50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this opinion is popularly labelled transphobic, but I have nothing against transgender people I just can't wrap my head around a female identifying person especially with feminine physiology and or hormones, through the wonders of modern medicine being praised for successfully presenting as female. Drag is an exaggerated art form, sure, but surely trans women should be allowed to compete as drag kings in such competitions ? I don't understand how trans queens are any more competitive on RPDR than, say, female born 'bio queens' i.e. not at all . Please change my view, Reddit, you're my only hope Edit Perhaps I phrased this poorly I'd like to hear people's views about where 'the buck stops' as far as contestant viability. Trans queens ok by you? What about trans males who want to perform as drag kings? Are cis male drag kings allowed, or bio queens? If not, why not?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trans-women aren't appropriate contestants for drag competitions like RuPaul's Drag Race\n","id":"6b390317-5b32-4381-b02d-c62bbd70cde2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With Trumps latest twitter tirade against the DPRK, my mind can\u2019t help but wonder where this whole situation is headed. I believe these threats on twitter could lead to a serious conflict and I have a really been bothered by that notion. If you are like many of the other reddit users who seem to believe that these threats won\u2019t lead to anything, can you help me understand why? Also, if we aren\u2019t actually headed to war, what is a more realistic scenario that someone could explain? It just seems with everything on the news that at this point it\u2019s either war or accept them as a nuclear power that\u2019s it. Thanks guys<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Twitter threats could start a war\n","id":"016e90a4-f6c0-4ff5-bf58-0d87bc1854bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I mean, they are people as well, how does their age make them special enough to be exempt from receiving punishment for doing something bad If a 13 year old kid commits a murder, shoot him, hang him thats what he deserves. He caused pain, he caused grief, he brought it upon himself. Just because he's 13, doesnt mean he isn't able to make a choice. I feel like we are making a big mistake by putting children and adults into two categories. All people deserve the same punishment. that is equality. When we were all kids we knew right and wrong, we knew bad and good, we know now that we knew then. Why should we excuse 13 14 year olds who kill, steal and destroy peoples lives for what they do? How is that even right? IMO they deserve punishment, a bad deed done is a bad deed done and age shouldnt be the factor in deciding the punishment but rather the deed should be TLDR Juvenile detention centers should just merge with prisons, kids deserve to be punished for their actions<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that juvenile murderers deserve execution and juvenile criminals should not be exempt from getting full punishment,\n","id":"47026316-6f13-4906-83fa-fccec429053f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Muhammad cartoons controversy<|ARGUMENT|>In Iraq, the country's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, decried the drawings but did not call for protests. Al-Sistani suggested that militant Muslims were partly to blame for distorting Islam's image.3 In the United Arab Emirates, the periodical Al-Ittihad published an opinion piece which argued that, \"The world has come to believe that Islam is what is practiced by Bin Laden, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis, and others who have presented a distorted image of Islam. We must be honest with ourselves and admit that we are the reason for these drawings.\"4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Muslim world has presented an image of itself that is partly to blame for the Muhammad cartoons.\n","id":"42b6c00c-0493-4825-9925-6f37b71d102f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a kid growing up I had no clue that I was a child born from rape, until one day my mother brought it up and even showed me a picture that she had of the man. Apparently he was a family friend and got close to my mother, who was 16 at the time. After the rape, she decided to keep it to herself to avoid the embarrassment, and I was born. Now to the extent of where i'm coming from. There is no way in hell I would usually tell anyone of my situation. As a male, it always brings the implications that i'll also be a rapist. There are two instances that stand out in my mind. The first, was in High school, In my Psychology class. the topic was brought up about whether or not it was ok for the abortion of victims of rape. One ignorant girl went on to exclaim that very notion, He'll also be a rapist. She didn't even take the fact that the baby could be a female. Now, there was a day where I was sitting in the living room watching CNN, and a girl was on CNN talking about her advocacy for children born of rape and raising awareness. If I was in her shoes? What would people think? I think you all know the answer to that. Am I making justifications and creating my own view on the situation? Sometimes I feel like useless garbage. Why do people associate the crime habits of a rapist with the child born from it? I feel like from the male perspective it's a horrible thing even to tell people and it comes with preconceived notions. I noticed that I went on saying that women won't inherit traits from a rapist, but looking at statistics it's mostly men. Just for a moment put yourselves in my shoes. Is this how most people think of children, specifically males, born of rape?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Double Standard of Children of Rape\n","id":"be1616ee-b577-4067-be99-9dc5ed09ce39"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the death penalty be implemented for terrorism?<|ARGUMENT|>Recruits of Islamic terror organizations are told that Jihad is their religious obligation and they will enter paradise if they lay down their lives for the cause.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many terrorist recruits are grown up in an environment where they are easily brainwashed Therefore, joining terrorist organizations is not their fault.\n","id":"5ef07b78-1787-4563-955e-404e7c12f109"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should science get more governmental funding?<|ARGUMENT|>With technology, much of what used to cost money is now free or cheap. So what used to need funds for research and building projects don't need the funds anymore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's so much progress that's being done without much or any money, that we don't need much funding to advance science.\n","id":"89f4b918-5dc9-4c88-b476-e0114d63ec56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As someone that has a tentative but heartfelt belief in God this is one of the biggest sticking points for me when it comes to faith and also when looking at others who believe. It just seems so ridiculous to say that God loves us unconditionally. This seems ridiculous for a few reasons The amount of suffering that is possible is incredibly high. Pain, torture, depression, unimaginable loss. I mean the list is longer than the character limit. Stephen Fry often talks about an insect in Africa who\u2019s whole lifecycle revolves around burrowing through the eye of children. If God loved us, how could that kind of suffering make sense. Some arguments I\u2019ve heard against this are that knowing suffering allows us to know joy or that it makes us stronger. I find that disingenuous. Unless your explanation makes it ok for a mother to have to watch her child starve to death because she can\u2019t produce enough breast milk then I\u2019d say it\u2019s not good enough. If someone fails to act when they\u2019re able to, with no negative consequence to themselves, and don\u2019t, they are complicit in the outcome. What I mean by this is that if God is all powerful and all knowing and he allows the unimaginable suffering that exists to occur then he is responsible for that suffering. If he loves us, why make us go through it? This is similar to the above point but I guess the distinction is that the above point is about God inventing suffering and this point is about God making us experience it. God\u2019s love is very conditional. This is my biggest sticking point and the one I\u2019m most interested in having an answer to. Let\u2019s say that we solve the problem of the above 2 points by saying \u201cGod\u2019s mind is unknowable but he has his reasons\u201d. I personally think that\u2019s a rubbish argument but let\u2019s go with it for now. If you subscribe to that then let\u2019s look at the quality of God\u2019s love If I start stealing cars and I tell my parents that I now steal cars and I\u2019m not going to stop and there\u2019s nothing they can do about it, they\u2019d be pissed at me. They\u2019d tell me to stop and that they were disappointed in me. Despite that, if I turned up to my parents house and knocked on the door and said \u201chey dad, just stole a car, it was super fun, I\u2019ll probably do it again tomorrow. By the way, I have nowhere to sleep tonight, can I please come in, have a shower, some food and a bed?\u201d. He would 100 let me in. That\u2019s unconditional love. Now, not everyone\u2019s parents are like that but I\u2019m just giving that example because that is what unconditional love looks like. If you replaced my dad with God in that scenario the outcome would be different. He would not let me into his house. If I chose to reject him and not repent he stops loving me. That\u2019s not unconditional. I would really like to have my view changed. Thanks in advance<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"there is no logical way to believe that the Christian God loves us unconditionally.\n","id":"e9075a13-d45d-4681-b0c3-2c8a784f993f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Increasingly we are looking for meaning and purpose from our own hearts than from a divine being. Increasingly God is becoming more and more irrelevant to determine human meaning and purpose.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God does not exist because God\u2019s existence is irrelevant to human progression, therefore negating any purpose to our creation.\n","id":"f00b7024-0148-48d4-ab93-a3b5a836edc8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For this  I'd describe a supernatural cause as a cause, that violates some natural law. In a universe where we allow for both natural and supernatural causes to influence events, we have no means to distinguish between the two. Natural and supernatural or even two supernatural causes can contradict themselves, so even testing for them can not reliably support the validity of natural laws. Therefore any assumptions about our that universe can't rely on natural laws being true. Such a universe is no different in effect to a solipsistic universe, in which we can't rely on anything that we perceive existing outside of our mind. Just like our senses can deceive us in ways that we can never recognize, so can supernatural causes. Therefore both concepts for our universe suffer from the same flaw, that anything in that relies on observation of the universe is fundamentally arbitrary and untrustworthy. We therefore must subscribe to or reject both propositions using the same reasoning. Change my view Edit I'd like to add that what I claim to be impossible to answer is why something occurred? , not if it occurred? . Edit2 Another addition I'm not arguing for a supernatural universe, but assuming one for the sake of my argument. In fact what I conclude from that assumption is a reason to reject the assumption for our universe. Also I need to add, that my definition of supernatural isn't yet fool proof. As my exchange r changemyview comments 2y0bdz cmv a universe allowing for events having cp5f45z?context 8 with u JoshuaZ1 hints at, I can't fully account for time travel being fully natural or supernatural.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"a universe allowing for events having supernatural causes isn't too different from a solipsistic universe\n","id":"a2357f8c-a576-434b-a5a2-4f8af5b41baa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>Actors also go through strict physical routines and dietary changes in order to fit in for a character. Furthermore they are also expected to look good or they do not get hired. This leads to many getting extensive surgery which compromises bodily integrity too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Other professions also compromise bodily integrity, and even at times, to a greater extent than commercial surrogacy but they are legal.\n","id":"650e1849-6d50-4fed-b21e-4e06d38737fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be one World Government?<|ARGUMENT|>According to UNESCO estimates 15 million girls of primary-school age, half of them in sub-Saharan Africa, will never enter a classroom because of the challenges that they face.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women and young girls face a number of social, religious and cultural barriers that prevent them from achieving education.\n","id":"5773ebcf-4788-4d76-bad3-bccc7beacfe7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Hyperinflation models of the pre-universe have all points in space moving away from each other faster than the speed of light, which forbids causality, and therefore events, and therefore an 'infinite number of past events'. Thus, the infinite regress problem is avoided.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Time began to exist at the Big Bang. An 'eternal' universe defined as 'since the beginning of time' is not burdened by the problem of infinitely past time.\n","id":"dcb52862-aa37-4c19-ac9d-1336f877d100"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would like to say that I do not condone acts of sexual harassment or violence. I believe that anyone culpable of these crimes should be punished accordingly. However, with the onslaught of allegations being reported, there lies a large window for opportunists to take advantage of this movement. It seems that at the moment any male accessed of sexual assault will be guilty or at least viewed differently based on the allegation alone. Throughout American history, there have been quite a few cases of false allegations spreading nationwide. For instance, the Salem Witch Trials or the first and second Red Scare. Times when an accusation of being a witch or a communist could have you jailed or killed. We have created an environment here we made it easy for anyone to voice concerns that have been shunned for a long time. In spite of that, the same environment saturated with credulity is bound to create lies, and that is impermissible. Again, I\u2019d like to emphasize that all these actions if taken, are crimes but should still not believe every accusation thrown out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should not so quick to believe every sexual harassment allegation?\n","id":"bd9b40cb-307c-4312-b4bc-21c7b8f62208"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be a law determining how domestic companies should treat their workers in developing countries?<|ARGUMENT|>The limited regulations of developing countries often facilitate employment and economic growth that would not occur under more stringent regulation. By enforcing the strict regulations of developed countries on these nations, they are denied crucial opportunities for growth and development.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Every country makes its own rules. Applying one country's rules to another is colonialism.\n","id":"2cc21298-0ba4-4ff9-a63f-938787585742"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Buddhism is not a religion.<|ARGUMENT|>If a religion is defined as the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods, Buddhism is not a religion. Buddhism is a spirituality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By definition, a religion needs a God or gods. Buddhism doesn't have gods, therefore it can't be considered a religion, it's more a way of life.\n","id":"e8e3b5a5-b30d-4e3b-9da1-d311188d98eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Many countries including Japan, Germany, and Russia, have declining populations. Further limiting the population would exacerbate the problems of labor shortage and overburdened pensions that underpopulation already causes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fewer people would have children, resulting in a population decrease that many countries won't be able to manage.\n","id":"ac3bccd8-b776-4710-b435-6c22fe904533"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Corporations Wal mart, McDonald's etc should not be able to claim any tax deductions, subsidies or any other form of corporate welfare as long as some percent of their employees are on public assistance. Wouldn't this encourage a living wage and fair hours? Why can't the federal government just tabulate the amount of workers who received W 2s from a given corporation, compare that to the number of workers who are on welfare, and determine a percentage at which the said corporation is no longer eligible for tax deduxtions subsidies?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Corporations should not be able to take any tax deduction as long as a certain percentage of their employees receive public assistance.\n","id":"8addd370-4d83-434d-926f-c01f634a5132"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is a Humanist an 'empty pot' , lacking in something?<|ARGUMENT|>Without faith in a higher power, humanists will not experience the joy of feeling that there is a higher purpose to their existence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A true Humanist can not be happy as they have nothing to inspire them.\n","id":"2b1ad06a-0555-479b-8a39-4d23e062b9f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Some believe that the real motive of the ban was ridding Catalonia of the Castilian culture epitomized by bullfighting, using animal rights as a new weapon in a nationalist battle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Catalonia's ban on bullfighting is less about repudiation of bullfighting than it is about asserting regional control.\n","id":"199cd518-3f65-4972-89a8-50cf1d6becfb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The ex-Italian royal family sought 260 million euros in compensation, as well as the return of all their jewelry and property, including the Italian's president's current residence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The cost of damages and compensations sought by the monarch following the abolishment of monarchy could be exorbitant.\n","id":"7f7d0cfe-0cbe-40d9-8a58-a7be7a073e3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>In fact, this would actually work against the ideas feminists actively promote. You cannot improve quality of life by normalising negative behaviour.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is a race to the bottom and by definition cannot achieve a positive outcome.\n","id":"609ca60b-8d82-460e-b33e-1ab3358841c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am talking mainly about 1st world countries here. Basically from what I can tell in the last half a century the age for having children for most people has gone up from 15 30 to 25 60, further more there are a lot of fertility treatments that allow women that sometimes have a less fit reproductive system to reproduce normally. I know that all ovaries are formed before puberty but the genetic material they contain deteriorates over time, and it's the same deal with the genetic material in sperm. A child born when his parents are 50 is statistically more likely to have minor or major problem due to his genes than a child born when his parents were 18. Now adding to that the fact that mentally ill people are allowed to reproduce, and many people that wouldn't have hit puberty, be able to deliver a baby or live past 20 30 are now having kids because modern medicine keeps them alive and relatively well. Also a huge of women seem to be against abortion even if the child is known to have a genetic issue or is likely to have one. And we struggle to keep even the weakest of kids alive. With all this in mind, and considering that 60 years ago basically non of this was happening, I sometimes think that it is very likely that within 30 50 years more we might have a very depressing generations of kids born across 1st world countries. So anyone with knowledge in biology, medicine or what have you. Please give me the counter arguments to what I said, which I assume are many, and try changing my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that with the current age\/genes of the people that chose to reproduce we will run into problems very fast\n","id":"d13d7d2f-dac9-4914-b637-bbe31aa547c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By this I mean when the music is the focus, I am well aware some concerts are about an atmosphere and not the actual music. Quick lesson on harmony, harmony is a group of frequencies which have pleasent or unpleasant ratios, music relies on tension and release thus generally has thought out harmony, even if a song is more melody focused, it still messes with that. So, when I'm trying to listen to a choir sing a harmonically focused song and there's 5 tone deaf people singing along around me, the entire harmony is ruined, it all sound completely chromatic thus ruins the song, now it won't as dramatic generally as this due to a lot of songs having melodic focus and with having a whole crowd sing the frequencies generally equal out to not be terrible, but it still makes no sense to add random notes to a song, it was almost always make it worse. It would be like me playing a violin in the middle of a classical concert, except for I'd be rightfully dragged out of that hall, now I'm not saying we should drag out people who sing along, but they shouldn't as it ruins the music.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People Shouldn't Sing at Concerts.\n","id":"4108949c-0011-4145-8a8d-25c91aa6b80d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time for Hungary and the EU to Part Ways?<|ARGUMENT|>The European Commission has led an infringement case against the Hungarian government for the segregation of Roma children within education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hungary has been heavily criticised for its treatment of minorities such as the Roma community\n","id":"6e3d1898-0d8c-4ac9-9e8c-ee61db72c2ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok, we've all been there most of us anyways . We've been talking with someone, or seeing someone, or sleeping with someone, and we want it to stop. It's not a fun thing to communicate no one enjoys hurting someone's feelings. It's awkward and uncomfortable so best just to take the easy route and ignore the person's attempts to communicate, right? Wrong. To anyone unclear, ghosting is the act of cutting off communication with someone pursuing your attention without any explanation whatsoever I'm a straight guy so, admittedly, I'm not in this scenario often. Because the onus for starting conversations falls upon the man in heterosexual relationships, when I'm no longer interested in someone I generally just stop communicating with her and that's the end of the story. However, in those scenarios, both of us have mutually ceased communication. In the instances where a woman has pursued me further has probably happened 25 times in my life I have always let her know as diplomatically and respectfully as I can. You're sweet, but I don't think this will work out, or something to that effect . I cannot imagine just ignoring her, though. That would feel so cruel. The only justification for ghosting that holds up to scrutiny is that it's easier. It's not honorable, it's not better, it's only easier for the person ending the relationship. The most common reasoning for ghosting is that some guys just can't take no for an answer. I don't doubt that for a second. But if you try to let him off easy, and he flips out and gets rude, that's the time to break off communication, not before. By preempting that potential reaction, you are assuming he is going to react poorly and immaturely to the bad news, which is very disrespectful. I have had plenty of women tell me they're not interested and, while it hurts my feelings, I have never been offended. In fact, those awkward conversations have been the catalyst for several rewarding friendships I am currently enjoying. I can honestly say I would 100 prefer a woman to text me, I think you're ugly, stupid, and annoying and I never want to hear from you again than to just pretend I don't exist. It's deflating and dehumanizing. And I'm so disappointed it has become the standard method of ending relationships by women and many men . I can't speak for everyone, but as someone who has been ghosted many times, here is what you're communicating with your silence I am offended that you have attempted to communicate with me, so I am not going to dignify your message with a response. From my perspective, your time and your life has no value. Is that what you mean to communicate? If not, please stop ghosting, because that's how it feels to us unless, of course, you change my view . EDIT I no grammar good<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Ghosting\" someone is an incredibly disrespectful and insulting thing to do\n","id":"38a5902e-3f61-4feb-9935-467b1589be74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most of the math, english, science and history you need to use in your everyday life doesn't go beyond an 8th grade level. And incidentally, the average person's abilities reside at that very level. This brings me to what I see as a huge problem for the US. All the things that you actually need to live a productive life are rarely taught in schools, and the most intellectual and impractical stuff, which while it is nice to know and may land you a good job, is not helpful or practical towards being successful. As a matter of fact, this problem is even bigger than that. Because to even be able to learn the overly intellectual topics that schools push, you must already be practically adept The paradox is laughable. It starts with the most basic skill of all, getting to school on time. If you can't get to school on time, you can't learn anything. But ironically, schools don't teach students how to get to school on time, which is probably the most important skill in regards to going to school in the first place Second is, organization. If you're not organized you're not going to be able to keep track of all your notes. No matter how smart you are, if you don't stay organized you'll fail in school. Yet school expects you to be organized without helping you do so whatsoever. Third, procrastination. If you wait until the last minute to do an assignment or study for a test, you'll probably do much worse. Yet school doesn't teach kids how to stop procrastinating. Fourthly, two words social skills. Fifthly, subjects like Psychology, Epistemology and Philosophy are almost never touched, yet it denies kids of discovering how they think and the process of learning, or the theory of knowledge of how you know something is true or logical. The foundations of knowledge are neglected. Sixth, Money management, taxes, and finance are not core subjects, which is preposterous considering that, once you do become an adult, these are the core subjects of your life. The point is, school needs to start being more practical, because by not doing so they are neglecting their students of a well rounded life. Being booksmart is not enough to succeed. You also need to be street smart and have social mastery to get ahead in this world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Schools should teach practical subjects more than intellectual ones\n","id":"09f833f0-9579-4af7-bea0-25796de67b3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we judge the quality of artwork based on the conduct of the artist?<|ARGUMENT|>Criticism often focuses on artistic intent, and biography is the best information we have to devise that intent absent the artist's own words.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While evaluation of art is subjective, much is illuminated by context. The creator's biography is relevant context.\n","id":"cf3953e1-7cc8-4308-aff9-c70314783332"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>\u0394 Strikes are their only recourse in a system that locks in your benefits, salary and retirement to number of years served. If the rules change half way through with lawmakers, cost of living or administration they should strike. I still think they are paid fairly in general, but with the example of Denver, cost of living has nearly doubled in 10 years. \u0394 With teachers striking in my hometown today I have no sympathy for them. The average public school salary is 44,000, which is 58,000 if you consider they get 1 4 of the year off. They also get almost every holiday imaginable. Here are some of the following pro teacher arguments I have already heard and what I think 1 It's not a 9 5 job. They routinely put in time grading papers, helping students, sponsoring clubs etc. Lot's of people have jobs that put in more than 40 hours a week for similar or worse pay to what teachers receive. It is not like it was a surprise when you became a teacher that you would need to grade papers. Use your massive amount of days off to offset this. 2 They have much lower pay than people with a comparable education level. Firstly, outside of education, a person with a masters working private sector will always make more than a government job. The comparison should be to only government employees with a masters degree. Government employees enjoy more time off, better job security and benefits such as pensions to make up for the difference. Secondly, I respect the field of education, but saying a masters in education is the same as a masters in engineering is just silly. As far as costs of obtaining higher education there are many plans for teachers to defer payments, get scholarships etc. Most people with masters degrees do not have these options. Additionally, there are plenty of people who have masters degrees that make much less than the average teacher. I had a job with two coworkers with masters animal behavior and bio engineering who made 40k and 47k, respectively. And of course no summer vacation. 3 It's a pink collar job so there is a historical tendency of being underpaid. Many breadwinner teachers must search for higher paying positions in the school system. It's unionized. I think this is really true of non unionized pink collar work, but the reason to have a union is to push back on such bias. Again, its not like teaching being female dominated is news after you decided on a career in education. If you're a single parent the amount you save in child care from having holidays, summer vacation and 9 5 hours is a huge bonus. 4 They have our future in their hands. They deserve to be compensated accordingly. Nobody is arguing that teachers aren't an important part of our community. Every teacher will tell you it is ultimately up the the child and their parents to ensure proper education. Additionally, nearly every job is important to a community. We need cashiers 19k yr , restaurant workers 21k yr and truckers 40k yr just as much to keep our society running.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have no sympathy for teacher strikes.\n","id":"7cc52727-d109-4138-825e-1fa53d66fed8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Minors Need Parental Consent for Abortions?<|ARGUMENT|>Minors cannot receive an aspirin from their school nurse without parental consent. Thus, for a procedure as invasive, risky, and life-changing as abortion, parental consent is a must.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Doctors require parental consent for most medications and procedures. Abortions, due to their long lasting implications should the fetus come to term should not be an exception.\n","id":"38e44536-e54c-4b84-850e-f2515cf065d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's been documented that men have large libidos and that this is linked to their high levels of testosterone. This is arguably a significant and motivating factor in sexually assertive men and in men who rape. According to the mainstream media and in acceptable thought, rape is a real problem nowadays. Men also make up the majority of demand for illegal sex work. Governments spend tremendous amounts of money in order to curb prostitution and they also have an incentive to prevent rape within their borders. Subsidizing the cost of sex dolls would eventually make them higher quality and bring their costs down. Cheaper and higher quality sex dolls would give men an incentive to buy sex dolls rather than hiring sex workers or raping. Why buy the whole cow risk of prison, and a one night stand with a stranger , if you can get the milk Sex with a bueatiful synthetic woman for free, or at least at a tiny fraction of the cost over the long term, right? If this suggestion was carried out, Sex doll companies might even start creating Gynoids, or female robots. One day these gynoids might even work so well that they become preferable to actual women. That would be good for both the economy and women because they would then be likely to compete against one another making them both better over the long term. I won't accept the argument that sex dolls and female robots are not good for governments because it will reduce the birth rate. If governments or anyone cared about the birth rate they wouldn't have allowed for female contraception, abortion, no fault divorce, and Marriage would still be a respected institution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments should work in unison to subsidize female sex dolls\n","id":"562d7e09-bcad-4713-ab4a-1ceefbd0b83b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Are Hi, first time posting, might be off on the format. I was thinking thay the only thibg that makes humans good is that someone or something taught them to be that way. This could be their parents telling them not to do something, them seeing someone else do something, or them doing something. The human then does not do that thing, even though it might benifit them, because they have seen the consequences. However, I was also thinking that himans might come shipped with a moral compass, but there is no way of testing this. Im curious to see what other people think. Are humans inherintly bad or good?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans arw inherently bad\n","id":"6afe2890-92b5-407a-bb23-a2b761f36e0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Prison is a colossal failure. The recidivism rate across many states seems to be near 2 3, so 2 3 of people who get sent to prison inevitably go back. To me this seems like a designed feature. The private prison industry is a blight on mankind. The people involved actually make a profit off of cheap forced labor from prisoners. Why wouldn't they want big tough convicts to come back in for another quarter? Many of the most violent, psychotic, bloody murdering psychopaths were born as a baby. Somewhere down the line, due to events usually out of their control, they go down a path that leads them to be imprisoned. I believe a person that is so far gone that they must constantly return to prison is extremely sad to behold. Why don't we get to the real psychological issue? Everyone has a reason for being who they are. I believe any offense no matter how big or small should not receive any prison jail whatsoever. Instead the person s should be sentenced to varying lengths of rehabilitation. Mandatory therapy, group therapy, everything and anything. I believe we should find the root of the anger depression etc causing them to commit crimes instead of simply throwing them behind bars. Recurring prisoners are on a different level of communication, they simply cannot interact with normal society anymore. They need help. We need to help our fellow humans, no matter what. Tl dr No one should be imprisoned. We should sentence mandatory rehab until the true issue is absolved<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prison should be abolished and replaced with mandatory rehab\n","id":"0742cac9-4ccd-4d46-8fee-829a9e8cada1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like I'm always seeing it on Reddit nuclear is the misunderstood, unsung hero that will save us from the energy crisis. They always argue that everyone is scared of nuclear because of disasters like Chernobyl, that it should have been easily preventable, and the technology has come far since then. I agree with this point, so now that we have gotten that out of the way, here comes the real issue nuclear waste. I'm obviously only a layman, but it seems to me that there are no sustainable ways of disposing of the waste, and the nuclear advocates never really address this. As far as I know, the current solution is to seal it away in a deep cave, and hope it doesn't flood, and just maybe we'll figure it out in a hundred years. This is irresponsible, and I think it would be foolish to build more plants. I'm not against spending money on further research, but as it stands, nuclear is a dangerous gamble. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear Power is a bad long-term solution.\n","id":"5650b087-31c4-49bb-a387-557aeb66a0e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Jesus the Messiah?<|ARGUMENT|>The Old Testament prophesies a savior who will be the Ultimate Lamb of sacrifice. en.wikipedia.org Isaiah 53:7 mentions a lamb who will be slaughtered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Salvation through Jesus is deeply connected to Jewish ideas of sacrifice and atonement\n","id":"8ce44602-06e7-43d0-b8a1-2352daf447ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Yes, I mean crack and LSD etc. I wouldn't touch substances such as these for health reasons but I don't think I or anyone else has the right to forcibly prevent another adult from voluntarily using a substance. I think the effect this prohibition has on law enforcement is huge, meaning it puts a ton of cases on the department which takes away man power that could be used to lock up actual criminals murderers, rapists, thieves, child molesters . As we've seen with the prohibition of alcohol, making substances illegal drives legitimate businesses out of the industry, i.e. only gangs, mafias and thugs will take part in the sale of such substances. This provides jobs to degenerates and gang members, and a source of revenue for organized crime. If all drugs were legal, Walmart and Amazon would put MS13 out of business.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All drugs should be legal\n","id":"5691ca9a-1306-48b7-bcf9-765fd07cd8cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We are ethically responsible for the world that we leave our children and future generations. The current practice of single use packaging, plastics, and the disposable nature of our society is not sustainable. We will slowly fill our world with garbage until our descendents are forced to deal with the consequences of our selfish actions. Notably landfills and trash strewn about across the globe and it our oceans. I understand that there is little that the average person can do when all food comes prepackaged, but we are still ethically responsible as individuals for creating waste. Even though there aren't any great alternatives currently, especially in America, we are still individually responsible for our own actions and throwing trash away has no ethical justification. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Throwing away garbage is unethical.\n","id":"d4592f07-a2ae-4bc3-b576-8b3997c2b80c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI will allow everyone to get a little further than normal, but when the money runs out, people will need to be determined to continue living and progressing with other methods like working a job.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UBI isn't designed to eliminate work, but simply to start people at the poverty line instead of zero. Those motivated by financial gain will still have the opportunity to pursue financial gain.\n","id":"d719d31a-d7cd-47bb-badb-5dca393f483d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Therefore calling all white people evil is wrong. The following things are wrong 1 2 3 Consider this argument Premise 1 Gay people are born gay, they did not choose to be gay Premise 2 It is wrong to hate someone for something they were born with and they did not choose Conclusion Therefore it is wrong to hate gay people, call them evil for being gay, etc. Call this argument Argument X . Argument X is considered valid by the gay rights movement and is a frequently used argument. Now consider if we take argument X and replace all instances of the word gay with white men . Call this argument Argument Y . Both premises are true the first premise is true because cisgender white men are also born that way and did not choose to be white men. The second premise is also true because no mention of gayness appears in it, so it is unchanged. Therefore, the conclusion for argument Y also holds. It is wrong to hate white men for being white men. Therefore, the anti white, anti male sentiment expressed by the three examples I gave above are wrongful, and should be condemned. To change my view, you can do a show that one of the premises of argument Y is wrong. In particular, you need to show a mistake in the reasoning I gave above showing both premises in argument Y are correct. b Show that there is some hidden premise in argument X, such that when the substitution is made it is no longer valid c Show that argument X is wrong invalid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"born that way and not a choice\" applies to white men just as it applies to gay people.\n","id":"a8ce243a-5013-4dcd-9912-ee9145cf7c63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think people have no reason to be depressed because there are people experiencing more hardships than them and are still trying their best. People with depressions are just lazy and want to be emo. The reason I hold this view is that I know people who have experienced many hardships and stress and pulled through by being hardworking. I think there is no reason to be depressed when you are already so much more fortunate than others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people have no reason to be depressed because there are people experiencing more hardships than them and are still trying their best. People with \"depressions\" are just lazy and want to be \"emo.\"\n","id":"eb979058-fba9-458e-8713-1099a9f74390"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>\"All men are good for is deleted, and running over with a truck\". Statement made by A University of Maine Feminist Administrator, quoted by Richard Dinsmore, who brought a successful civil suit against the University. source<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea that men should be eliminated\/their population controlled is well supported.\n","id":"74b3685c-6760-4e31-b1d8-48cd572dfc3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cultural Anthropology should be a required course for all high school students.<|ARGUMENT|>Mandatory subjects are often seen as a chore by students. A more dynamic and free environment could be seen more positively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intercultural workshops or assemblies can be implemented within the existing subjects instead of another mandatory class-based subject.\n","id":"82a0313f-7824-48c4-b9d9-dd36e7548be4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Mother Teresa have been canonized?<|ARGUMENT|>The survival of any religion depends upon people choosing to join the religion or, if born into the religion, choosing to remain a member of it. A religion with a positive reputation is more likely to attract and retain followers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mother Teresa was a charismatic figure who generated much positive attention for the Church.\n","id":"d7444455-f1e2-459f-b20b-1a8130c7eac5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Strong fiscal policies have been correlated with tackling inequality a unified fiscal policy could address the inequalities existing in the current EU.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A unified fiscal policy will be beneficial for current member states.\n","id":"17d0d18b-4dcb-48e2-a64e-b5f046eb8fcb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have a utilitarian point of view. By assigning finite values I often call these utilities or value ranges to events, actions, objects, etc, I can determine which course of action will probably produce more utility, thus maximizing whatever I am trying to achieve. For example, when designing an airplane, each safety feature has some certain positive utility, but the cost provides a negative utility to the airline manufacturer whatever. By continuing to add safety features until the positive utility is equal to the negative utility, the best amount of safety features can be found. If a human life has infinite value, it becomes impossible to perform this calculation, because adding more safety features and thus increasing the probability of saving human lives will always be more valuable than producing an airplane at any reasonable cost. If you believe that your life has infinite value, then any action you take that could possibly put your life in danger has less utility than hiding away from all conceivable dangers. How is it possible to believe that human life has infinite value while also having a worldview consistent with itself?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that human life must have finite value for a worldview to have consistency.\n","id":"44f9116e-7d92-4f4b-8f61-dc60b8471b4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello, I recently read some political discussion by a local politician Denver with a constituent about how the politician believed that affordability of housing in their area was a problem and billing promoting more funding for low income housing were an appropriate solution. I do not believe this is a good solution. I believe that low income housing prevents the invisible hand from properly distributing housing. I think that in an area where there is relatively high demand for housing the price of housing should increase. This increase in price will then cause an some people to not be able to afford to live there. I do not see a problem with this. As people who can no longer afford to live there move away the cost of living CoL will rise and the price of labor will increase as people will either have to commute more to access jobs in the area or pay the higher CoL. Again I do not see a problem with this. If the CoL gets too high and more people are forced to move away the demand for housing will drop. This will create a negative feed back loop regulating the price of housing in the area. My position was further boldend by this government report on the state of public housing from 2003. It states gt inventory still need substantial work, requiring many times more gt funding than currently available gt Public housing remains isolated from the rest of the real estate community. This isolation robs public housing of best practices gt the quality of public housing management is poor gt oversight is mostly ineffective. At times, it can also be meddlesome and contradictory. The emphasis is on rule compliance and gt organization, not property performance. This makes me believe that public housing programs do not generally achieve the goals they are set out to have and that the invisible hand would do a better job of accommodating everyone's needs. To gain a perspective of the other side I read this article by the Stanford journal on the benefits of low income housing. This enlightened me to the fact that low income housing was beneficial in almost every aspect for areas with lower median incomes below 50k , however it was not successful in areas of higher wealth above 50k . This adds 2 cavets to my position. Low income housing is beneficial in areas of low income. Aside from the article I understand that low income housing is necessary in areas where people cannot move away because there are no other jobs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Low Income Housing Should Not be Built in Wealthy Areas of the USA\n","id":"8429d5c7-cefb-4a3b-961d-544c6902cddb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Studying examples of bad information plays an important role in developing and maintaining one's critical capabilities to recognise manipulation techniques and fallacies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Out of date, controversial and inaccurate books can be studied to see how knowledge and opinions have changed over time.\n","id":"5635535c-46fa-4e0d-a78e-3306bdfa535b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many instances where vested interests can manifest themselves very subtly - for example, when the company with a vested interest is a donor to the news site publishing the article. Vested interests in these cases may be difficult for the average person to detect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This assumes that people are good at noticing when an article has evident vested interest. However, if the article reinforces their belief or resonates in some way, they are likely to believe it.\n","id":"e33e73a8-1833-45cd-85a6-d008cbb7d72f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>When Libya submitted an arguably dishonest report in 1995 - while at the same time persecuting expatriate dissidents - it took the committee three years to formulate an answer which expressed concern over the assassinations of dissidents. Libya ignored the comments and was elected chair of the committee in 2003.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UN Human Rights Committee that is tasked with holding member states accountable to the international treaties on human rights is very ineffective.\n","id":"97a8a010-4f2c-45ab-8f60-452cccdacfea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Planned Parenthood Be Defunded?<|ARGUMENT|>Planned Parenthood provide hormone treatment options for transgender individuals, which are particularly expensive without the support of programmes such as Planned Parenhood.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Planned Parenthood is not only offering abortions but a host of other services\n","id":"2e5e95dc-c0b8-4a8a-8035-95c7183423d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Muhammad cartoons controversy<|ARGUMENT|>Daniel Pipes argues that the pattern of events surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons shows Muslim hypocrisy and supremacism: \".will Westerners accede to a double standard by which Muslims are free to insult Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, while Muhammad, Islam and Muslims enjoy immunity from insults? Muslims routinely publish cartoons far more offensive than the Danish ones. . . The deeper issue here, however, is not Muslim hypocrisy but Islamic supremacism.\"9<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Western cartoonists should not be held to a double standard\n","id":"ea073673-1b70-4f38-b17f-f06634d5b396"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Antifa good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>The PPC show a clear 'fear of difference' in others. Bernier has remarked that Canadians should be suspicious of immigrants as they ''reject basic Western values such as freedom, equality, tolerance and openness.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Maxime Bernier is a former Conservative party of Canada member who started his own political party that seems to display multiple characteristics of UR-Fascism\n","id":"4ebd0e91-22f1-4fbf-9d04-92b15cc009ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, to explain my biases I'm thinking about this primarily from the perspective of people who are studying things that they will go on to use in their careers. Specifically I'm a STEM major who will be going on to get my PhD in my major, and have been doing research in my field. My issue is with the idea of providing Extra Time on tests for those with learning disabilities, attention disorders, and other permanent conditions. My reasoning is that these students are being helped in ways that do not reflect their effectiveness in the field. While there might be a system through which they can get extra time on a test in school, the point of education is ostensibly to provide the skills for a career, along with providing employers with an idea of an applicant's capabilities. If there are two students, one who used extra time and one who did not, and they are equally qualified for a given position, in most situations the applicant who can perform quicker would be preferred. However by giving people with these conditions a boost that they will not receive after graduating, you are doing their employers a disservice. In my research, for instance, my PI might ask me to do a certain calculation for our meeting the next day. If I work significantly slower than someone else, I would be less suited for my position, yet this difference would be hidden by the Extra Time system. In a similar vein, I think this system hurts students who do not work quickly for other reasons. There are a number of students who might taken longer to do a problem, due to either working slowly or not being as talented in a given field, however if these traits were considered deserving of extra time they would do better. Yet we consider some issues medical conditions worthy of assistance, and others not. In the end, I realize that some will argue that if two students can both reach the same answers, the time taken does not matter. I disagree with this point in that I think reaching an answer quicker is always preferable if both are correct, however if this is the stance taken then I would argue that the issue is with timed tests in the first place, and extra time does not adequately fix this problem for others who do not qualify, yet still run into the time limits for whatever reasons they may have. Clarification I'm primarily considering the case of higher education, and the scope of disabilities I have issue with are primarily mental ones. The arguments above could be easily extended for physical disabilities as well, but physical disabilities can generally be worked around to a good degree. EDIT A lot of comments are coming in, so I might take a while to respond or miss a couple. Sorry I'll try to make sure and respond to any significantly novel viewpoints. EDIT 3 12 38 PST Going to sleep for the night. I'll try and get to anyone I missed tomorrow. Thanks for your responses<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Extra Time\" on tests is a broken system which artificially hides weaker applicants on account of their conditions, while not getting at the core issue of ineffective testing.\n","id":"0fc53824-afde-421e-a0e6-72178020cfb1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I mean, we are literally just talking apes who walk on two feet so what is even that cool about us in the first place? Animals can do a lot of the same shit we can do. I am sure with thumbs they could build the same sort of tools. The only thing we do better is language, we can read and we can write and create elaborate fictional worlds no other creature can comprehend. Yet look at all the evil we inflict. All the suffering we create. Humanity slaughters more than any grizzly bear ever could. Humanity perpetuates cruelty of a nature that even chimpanzees cannot begin to dream of. Individual people are merely just slightly smarter animals, take away their food and they act just like wolves. Look at WW2. That time of darkness is proof of our primordial nature. Humans conducted massacres not even the most most savage bear could ever do. Humans planned cruelties even more elaborate than anything the smartest chimp could think of. Humans are the real monsters as far as I am concerned. History has many examples of people murdering babies in warfare. Americans killed Indian babies, Japanese killed Chinese babies, Germans killed Polish babies, and so on. Killing babies is the most vile deed possible. Bears kill bear cubs all the time. We are no better than those bears. I think most people would let a baby drown to save a pit bull anyway.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am justified in my contempt for people and lack of faith in the human race.\n","id":"42392339-a17f-4c15-bd84-65a2042c95ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Corrupt institutions as a phenomenon are not exclusive to religious ones, not even when counted among other institutions that are held to a higher standard like, for example legal institutions ethics faculties charities and even hippie communes<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion should not be blamed for its intentional or unintentional misuse.\n","id":"13630c7f-bb80-451b-89b9-2547bd232563"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just read this piece from an expert who thinks this case will be quickly forgotten because of our fleeting memory span, but I sadly disagree. If there is one thing we know from psychology research is that people will latch on to memories that are consistent with their pre existing beliefs. If there is one thing we have learned in the last few years is that there is a loud and growing minority in the US that sees race relations as a zero sum game, and therefore latches on to unusual but spectacular events such as this one. In other words, the portion of the population that is already skeptical of the existence and prevalence of hate crimes will be much more likely to remember one false event over the thousands of real and serious hate crimes that happen every year. Of course, this is problematic because this portion of the population is represented on juries and in crime enforcement throughout the country. To clarify, I'm not arguing that false reporting is NOT a problem, because obviously it is. A lie is a lie, and should be punished accordingly. What I am suggesting is that Smolette has caused potentially irreversible damage to the credibility of all future victims because of his selfish and immoral behavior, and this isn't some fleeting media event that will be forgotten by next week. So, please, restore my faith in humanity and try to change my view. I don't want to live in a world where victims are doubted because of one bad apple.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Jussie Smollete incident will have a long-lasting detrimental impact on victims of hate crimes\n","id":"31453360-a0e5-4464-a0df-e64ca5d5de9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that in general, America is a better place for a person to live than Western Europe IF the following two conditions are met You have a valuable, marketable skill that makes you employable You are responsible with your money Here is some data that I am basing this off of. Relevant text \u201cUS white collar workers were in 2012 better paid than their colleagues in the rest of the world. Median wage earned by American managers, professionals, technicians and associate professionals is the highest in the world. The best paid colleagues overseas, who usually live in Europe receive about 5 per hour less when adjusted for the purchasing power parity.\u201d \u2014 So, the general sentiment that I see on Reddit is that Western Europe is a much better place to live than America because of all the social programs they have there healthcare, college, etc. . I don\u2019t think that this tells the whole story, and in fact I believe that with the right skill set and financial responsibility America can be a much better place to live than countries like Germany, Sweden, or the U.K. Generally speaking, most of the problems that people talk about in America boil down to a lack of money. Unexpected healthcare costs don\u2019t typically ruin people financially if they have a job that gives them good health insurance and they have prepared for such an emergency accordingly. If a person is a skilled worker and can find a good job, then usually these things aren\u2019t an issue. But in exchange, you generally are paid a higher salary in the U.S. than an equivalent job in Europe, and that extra money goes a long way to increase your quality of life. I feel that this is the key thing that people miss in the America vs. Europe debate. Europeans balk at some of the expensive things they hear about in the U.S., but the fact that we are paid significantly higher here is rarely acknowledged. Of course, there are a ton of factors that could also affect your decision like where your family lives or what kind of weather you like, but I think that all other things being equal, you can live a better life in America as a skilled, responsible person than you can in Europe. I feel that Europe is only better for unskilled laborers or those who cannot responsibly budget their money. I\u2019m interested in having a discussion so <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America is a better place to live than Western Europe for skilled, responsible workers\n","id":"a6d11737-56ea-4307-9b3e-1cc8cea5fc94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love this show. Everything about it. Every season up til now has had some of the most emotional and surprising moments I've ever seen on TV. Now, after episode 4, nothing crazy has happened. I mean Arya killed a white Walker, but what else? Every other season I've been emotionally moved by SOMETHING. Whether it was Ned Stark dying, The Red Wedding, like someone dying out of nowhere theres so many examples and I'm working atm but this season is dry. The boat attack was so predictable. Mellasant spelling didnt try and kill Cersei. The king of white walkers didnt kill but one person, all super important characters are still alive. It's not just random deaths I want. It's the story line. They're making Danarys becoming too power hungry too obvious. They're showing all the secrets being passed. They have no idea what they are doing with Bran. Plus when has a character ever openly admitted to plan a betrayal. That bald guy with no balls is always sneaky say for instance in 2 episodes he would've had her killed. Without saying anything last night. THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN EPIC. Instead if it happens or not I wont be surprised at all. Still love the show and will watch every episode. I just wish for the old feeling of the show. End of rant. Thanks for reading. Insert meme of Change My Mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"on current state of GoT. This season is too bland. SPOILERS\n","id":"27e339c3-200b-46fc-8ed8-42e354d07e1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2013, despite repeated criticism over his lack of support for Israel, Obama was awarded the President's Medal - which is the highest civil medal given by the State of Israel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obama has received many prestigious awards and honours which illustrates that he is a good role model to people.\n","id":"f58b5e39-5ad0-442f-935f-fe41d70cff36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tibet independence<|ARGUMENT|>\"China, Tibet and Chinese nation. Facts and Figures on Tibet in 1999\". The Statistics Bureau of Tibet, 1999. - \"The Tang-Tubo Alliance Monument erected in 823 still stands in the square in front of the Jokhang Monastery. The monument inscription reads in part, 'The two sovereigns, uncle and nephew, having come to agreement that their territories be united as one, have signed this alliance of great peace to last for eternity! May God and humanity bear witness thereto so that it may be praised from generation to generation.'\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Agreement of 821 is signal of Tibet unification with China\n","id":"59dfa57d-f890-4542-8b08-8665b23635ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the European Union intervene in the political conflict in Catalonia?<|ARGUMENT|>It is the purpose of the EU to resolve internal conflict within Europe, in order to prevent further big wars. The EU must be truthful to its original purpose.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union has a responsibility to promote cooperation and dispute resolution.\n","id":"b88a6471-256a-4b07-b3dd-d7edfeb2fe1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Rare being defined as rare when considering a national population of over 300 million and population and gun violence geography. Owning guns may not be the safest or smartest idea. But guns are as violent as you make them. Stupid or mentally deranged people who own them are as stupid and as mentally deranged as they are. Outlawing and trying to take people's guns would change the mentality of the citizens of a nation with the most powerful military in the world. Maybe there wouldn't be martial law, maybe nothing would happen at all, just less gun deaths. But the mentality, the values people have, the trust people have in the government and others, and people who have lived in gun cultures for their entire life, would all be changed for the worse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The principle of being allowed to own guns outweighs the rare occurrences of gun violence\n","id":"317ae335-fa00-412b-b3fb-a01346c6326f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear the argument Well, it's just my their opinion come up quite often when referring to a variety of different topics. For example, people who say Well, being gay isn't natural, that's just my opinion or You can't lose weight eating nothing but twinkies, that's just my opinion . Considering that being gay is recognized in the animal kingdom, and therefore in nature , or the fact that extensive dietary research shows that Calories in vs. Calories out is the largest factor in losing weight, I don't believe that these are opinions , but rather just refusing to acknowledge fact. These aren't simply the only topics this can relate to, just two that come to mind. Now, I feel that opinions are things that cannot be backed by any kind of facts. I think being gay is disgusting and Eating only twinkies is my favorite way to lose weight , as controversial as these opinions are, are still valid. But once the person with the opinion goes into topics that can be proven wrong by facts, you now are just ignorant, not opinionated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not think that people can have opinions on anything that can be proven scientifically or factually.\n","id":"d7cae09f-c5c7-4bb2-8935-aa546be7db1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>tl dr Walk outs have become about more than just honoring victims of the Parkland shooting due to the significance and relevance of the gun control debate we are having right now in America. Because of this, they unintentionally indirectly force students to take a side in the gun control debate because they don't allow for nuetral opinions and don't have a clear definition of what side you are taking by doing what. As an American student in high school, having a walk out planned for this week scares me. To clarify, the school isn't exactly supporting it, just not punishing anyone for participating in it. And while I appreciate them trying to give a platform for students to express their views, I really don't think it's a good idea. So, I'm pretty liberal. I believe that gun control definetely needs to be increased, and that a ban on assault rifles is necessary to stop mass shootings. However, this is not the opinion I want to be changed. My problem is the same one we are seeing companies face as they struggle with how they should treat NRA members. They can't stay neutral. We've seen one I forgot the name remove discounts for NRA members, then release a statement saying that they aren't taking a side, just trying to stay neutral in the debate. Unfortunately, this isn't possible. Removing those NRA member benefits will always be seen as pro gun control, regardless of intentions. This is what walk outs are doing to my school. If I choose to walk out, I am making a statement. If I don't, I'm making one equally as powerful and controversial. Even more significantly, I don't even know what these walk outs mean. Our school's is supposed to honor the victims of the Parkland shooting, which is emphasized by it's length 17 minutes. But it seems like they have become as much of that as they have become a statement about gun control. So if I choose to walk out purely to honor the shooting victims, my actions could be perceived as exactly that, a protest to ban assault rifles, a protest to ban all guns, or even a protest against Trump. There is no clear definition of exactly what this protest is, and even if there was, people would choose to make their own definitions and perceive it any way they wanted. So it forces people to take a side in the gun control debate and doesn't have a clear definition of what side you are taking by doing what. But I have a feeling that a lot of people would argue this is important enough that we shouldn't care who gets offended and who interprets our behavior wrong. And in most other contexts, I would agree. However, this is a school. This is a place where most of the focus should be on learning. And I feel like the potential harm this could have by damaging relationships between students and potentially alienating those with more conservative views is dangerous. I'm not blaming this on the school, as I understand that punishing students for walk outs could be perceived badly, but someone, maybe higher up, needs to make a decision that these shouldn't be a thing, or they should be organized better to avoid the political nature of them, even if not intended. Students and younger people should absolutely be given a platform to speak. But it needs to be voluntary, and to avoid pressuring students into taking the more popular side or only agreeing with their friends. Edit To clarify, classes will continue while this happens but no one will be marked absent or late to class. I understand that school is preparing you for life, but I beleive that the social circumstances we are placed in already allow for that. The problem is the school is forcing this on us by announcing that the walk out is happening and that anyone can do it without being counted as absent. I don't expect the schools to avoid us being in these situations in the first place, but I don't think they should encourage them. Especially when the situations that come up naturally aren't as important and controversial as the gun control debate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Walk outs in schools should not be a thing because they have the potential to damage relationships of students and take the focus off of learning.\n","id":"bb80a9ee-d829-4ec8-8dfe-e81628f11558"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The basic idea behind human rights is that there are things that you are entitled to receive positive rights and some things you are entitled to be spared negative rights in virtue of you being a human being. Nations, governments, and corporations are judged to be just or unjust largely based on their human rights record by many. I think this is absurd. The idea of justice, turns around the idea of merit. Justice is when people get the treatment and resources that they deserve. The idea of merit relies on the idea of at least partial freedom or self determination. For you to deserve a reward, you must have at least partially caused or determined something to happen by virtue of which you can be said to deserve that reward. Since you had no causal effect on the fact that you are human, the brute fact that you are human in no way confers any entitlement positive or negative to you. I'm not saying it is a bad idea to treat people humanely. I'm just saying human rights violations are not necessarily a form of injustice. It may well be horrible and loathsome, but not necessarily unjust. EDIT necessarily gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Human rights\" as a measure of justice is a bad idea.\n","id":"00cfd7ff-1247-417d-86cc-f266148d23f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Studies suggest that among men with equivalent resumes, fathers are more likely to receive call-backs and higher wage offers than are childless men Pg.11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women often have to sacrifice their careers for childbearing and child-rearing which is not the case with men.\n","id":"c39165eb-4704-4482-a929-df44eb6300a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would a global social credit system be beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Without these scores, current credit options payment plans\/credit cards would be riskier for the companies, so would likely cost more for consumers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most countries already have a successfully functioning credit score, which proves the idea works at a national level.\n","id":"f5e45841-a7e3-414f-b200-b3a76610254c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments provide a universal basic income?<|ARGUMENT|>If a UBI is put in place, those that are working just above the line established may decide to quit their job and rely on the government instead of being a productive member of society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Providing a UBI will cause problems in terms of the workforce as people will no longer have to work.\n","id":"e4c78126-bbfe-4243-bfc0-741e2ba9c12d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the use of 'chosen' or gender-neutral pronouns be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Sometimes observers sincerely judge people to be of a different gender than that which they would prefer to be recognized as embodying. For example, I might *know* that you want me to call you a woman, but still I sincerely believe that you're a man, and am fully entitled to express that opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Language is the tool we use to convey our sense of reality. Someone should not be forced to express a reality they do not perceive e.g. a man being a woman, or a woman not having a gender.\n","id":"cd55975c-bda0-40af-8693-e002e19f47d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Even under pressure of a standardised national language, dialects have continued to hang around and evolve.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"European languages are likely to persist, regardless of a secondary common language.\n","id":"94bdadb0-3511-4e02-a3eb-5899a0da565e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>From the Alabama convention of secession: \"the election of Mr. Lincoln is hailed, not simply as a change of Administration, but as the inauguration of new princi\u00adples, and a new theory of Government, and even as the downfall of slavery.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right to states determining the legal status of slavery for themselves was the primary Right of the States that was of concern.\n","id":"dbaec6a2-14a2-45fb-b0a4-c6b187333ad7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I recognize the irony that downvoting this  would be tacitly agreeing with my argument. Ok, to begin, I recognize there is definitely a good use for the downvote button when people spam or write racial remarks, etc a low score hides the comment it eventually gets deleted by mods. However, this could be fixed by a simple 'mark as spam offensive' button that once received enough hits, would also be deleted. Now, on to the main point There's no need for a downvote button. Don't agree, think the point's uninteresting, then leave it alone or better yet, respond as to why it's not a good point. this has been discredited see here or this has been asked before see here The psychological problem is that new knowledge is threatening and people use the downvote button as an easy way of showing their disagreement without actually thinking about it. Further, The problem with a downvote is that interesting but controversial points get low scores, when they really should be getting some of the highest ones. Consider an example where you have 3 possible comments. 1 A good comment where everyone agrees 2 A bad comment where everyone agrees 3 A good comment where most people disagree. Let's imagine 100 people voting with the current system, the first comment will get the most high upvotes, low downvotes . The second will get the second few upvotes, but fewer downvotes . The third will get the worst score some upvotes more than 2, but many downvotes . Given by how most people read reddit and the psychological tendency for people to be influenced by what's popular these good, but new ideas will be ignored. Now you may say Just sort by controversial. While, I typically do the problem is that the second type bad but popular comments also get stuck in the mix. Lastly, early downvotes cause even larger problems. First, an early downvote to a link, virtually erases a thread In conjuction, as alluded people are more likely to downvote things that already have downvotes and upvotes . Try it the next few times you post something, make a new account and either upvote it or downvote it and see how well it does. Although, erasing the downvote doesn't get rid of this problem entirely it helps. Ultimately my view is that, although not the initial intention, the downvote serves as an implicit I don't agree with this, but I don't feel like thinking about it, or explaining to the person why, so I'll just hit this button. Doing so keeps dissenting views and novel questions out of reddit, or at the very best leaves people with the hanging question of why their thoughts are wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the downvote function on reddit is a problem. It stifles conversation and creates both a sounding board for popular views and a hostile environment for unpopular or even new views.\n","id":"5b42daa4-d760-493b-b6ab-0404f7f432f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time for Hungary and the EU to Part Ways?<|ARGUMENT|>Poorly performing members of the EU Commission cannot be sacked or be held accountable in any other way by popular pressure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One of the most powerful EU bodies, the Commission, is not democratically elected\n","id":"ecb19082-dc9c-408b-a448-45c673b90830"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Roundup Ready crops lock farmers into dependency on Monsanto, which owns a patent on the crops and prevents them from saving seed to plant the following year. This increases the costs that farmers have to bear.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given that profit-motivated companies own patents to genetically modified seeds, the costs of food production rises when farmers become dependent on their supply.\n","id":"090428d6-7525-4257-ad84-d747b3d51fee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My friends and I were discussing in class which ruler was the absolutist. A lot of them defended Louis XIV of France , but I digress. Peter not only built his government from the ground up, he also established a well trained expansive military forcing young men to an indefinite life as a soldier . Louis avoided the power of the church, but Peter enforced strict rules such as cutting off their beards of the clergy. Louis had nobles who he weakened over time, sure. But, Peter was the sole ruler, eliminating the idea of the bureaucrats. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Peter the Great of Russia was absolute in everything he did\n","id":"f1671e60-d4f0-4b25-a05c-e3088e3fbf7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Caveats The relationship is romantic in nature, not just friends having sex. They were both single when they started going out. It's sometimes okay to have sex with someone else before the first time together, even after dates. I had a girl say to me one that nobody is exclusive at the beginning This was kind of a surprise to hear. I'm the type to get really into one person so I can't imagine having more than one partner. But I feel like I missed this social norm. I thought the norm was exclusivity unless stated otherwise. To me. If someone is not exclusive after sex and you find out later, it takes pretty much any romance you thought you had and throws it in the trash. They didn't actually care about you. Edit I'm back to answer the ones I missed. I'm going over the difference between romantic and casual a lot. I thought it was clear but lota of people think I'm talking about any sex. Maybe they didn't read the caveats. I'm talking about people dating. DATING.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Exclusivity is implied when a sexual relationship begins. Caveats\n","id":"9c5ff837-9bc2-4b2f-bcdf-9229a47f41b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> kanye west is a giant asshole. He isn't a genius at all and has almost no positive qualities. I know this is a popular reddit opinion, but a friend of mine got in a big argument about it with me and they don't feel the same as I do, but they're terrible at arguing. So I was wondering if anybody actually thinks kanye is a great as kanye thinks he is, and if they could convince me to not think he's such a giant douche. I think he's arrogant, since he always refers to himself as a god how is he even close??? and a genius, which is really far off. What makes him a genius? What makes it okay for him to call himself a god? I've listened to his music and it really isn't anything special to me. So I won't end up loving his music, but maybe help make me not think he's such a cunt, so my friend and I can stop arguing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"kanye west is a giant asshole. He isn't a genius at all and has almost no positive qualities.\n","id":"323664a2-3ab2-45ee-9811-0347f5840d1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Or they are lying to spare my feelings. It's awkward and uncomfortable to comment negatively on someone's appearance, so they tell a little white lie or word things in a vague way to make everyone feel better. Take a look through my post history to get more information. You wouldn't tell you boyfriend or girlfriend that their gut is protruding out in that new shirt they bought, right? You'd say something like Oh, I think that one might be a little small? or I don't think that style fits you very well right? Not Your fat gut is hanging out or Looks like you need to lose some weight . You'd be nicer about it. I'm not depressed or in any danger of severely harming myself, and I'm not afraid to leave the house or go to work or pursue my hobbies, so it's not impacting my life that badly. I'll admit it sucks having most of my body being unattractive, but it doesn't stop me from living my life. Except for my romantic life I'm overweight my boobs are saggy, droopy, and deflated it looks like I have mild pectus carinatum it disgusts me my looser skin from 50 pound weight loss my stomach isn't flat, it has that crease at the belly button veiny legs lumpy, chunky, cellulite butt plenty more small things, but these are with my face don't want to be identified That^ is pretty much my entire naked body. If I had just a couple of those problems I wouldn't feel so bad, but I don't see how a man could find that whole package attractive. A guy liking long, saggy boobs? Sure, I'll believe that. Long saggy, boobs attached to a deformed chest sternum? Nope, I don't think he would. How about a guy liking a bigger, softer belly like this Sure, I'll believe it. A bigger belly like this with a crease in the middle wrinkled like a scrotum? Nope. Don't think he will. Now I've gotten plenty of responses here saying If you're not happy with something, fix it . Boob job, skin removal surgery, tummy tuck, etc. But I know deep down, no surgery is going to make me feel any better, so why spend 50,000 I don't have for a temporary fix? Plus, it's still a lot of major surgery with risks to consider, and if I ever get pregnant it will just have to be redone anyways. And the biggest reason of all for me is that I would feel fake and not like me. I understand all that for people who have had massive 200 pound weight loss with large drapes of extra skin. That could be more for health reasons. But I'm nowhere near that. I'd like to believe that a man could love me and find me attractive the way I am without having to get surgery, but there are so many things everywhere that make me believe in this less and less. And yes, I know, plenty of women of all shapes and sizes are in loving relationships, right? I know. I see it all the time. Women that are 5 1' and 200 pounds, stick thin with no boobs, and just plenty of overweight and obese women walking with their husbands and kids. This isn't what I personally believe I don't make fun of or try to hurt people in any way , but what society would call ugly or unattractive . And when I see all those women I think there must be something more special about them or I bet they look a lot better naked altogether than I do . When I look at myself naked I don't even really see a feminine shape, just blob with some things that look kind of like boobs and a vagina. And my vagina is the only part I think actually looks decent about me. So should the play up your good parts point come in here? Does that mean the only thing a guy could find attractive about me is my vagina? I've seen and heard many times that men will have sex with any woman if they're desperate enough. How do I know I'm not one of these unfortunate women? Which leads to my boyfriend now. Oh, I do have one surprisingly, and he doesn't know about any of this. He knows I'm self conscious about some things, but not to this extent. We've known each other for several years and were friends before we became a couple. Now this is where I want to make one of my major points He never saw me naked or saw me in any revealing clothing around him before we really got together. So he knew me a long time, considered me one of his best friends, and never hurt me. And that's why he would never admit to finding anything about me ugly. He fell in love with my personality, so he wouldn't say anything negative about my body to protect my feelings. He'd still have sex with me even though may not like looking at or touching everything. As an example, your 5 year old colors this and says Look mommy, I drew a cat it clearly looks nothing like a cat, but you're not going to crush your kid and say That looks terrible . Right? You love and care about your kid. You're not going to say something to bring them down. That's what I believe and think it makes sense. What's wrong with admitting you're ugly?  I think I am undeniably ugly and physically unattractive, and those who say no , or that I need to go therapy, are wrong and trying to be nice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it's okay to accept that you're yourself,myself, etc. ugly.\n","id":"22bb70b7-2ec9-467e-84d9-3a6591bfc170"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not 100 against piracy. I know why people choose piracy. For example Financial restraint lack of disposable income Region Lock licensing issue or legality issue Payment option Bad localization especially JPN companies which generally look down on fan translation Poor service. Testing product before buy belief. Personal reason belief. i.e. For digital goods, nothing should be locked behind paywall, everything is permitted or people hating the companies' action believe that boycotting while pirating is the right way to affect them Opportunist pirates If they can't find the digital unlicensed copies on the internet, they buy the official version I don't know about other reason why they pirate. 1 6 might be solved by Sales period, pre order bonus, bundle discount, regional pricing. Try to convince the IP owner for worldwide release. Platform which support paypal and local debit card. Convince companies for better localization. Better service the pirate site like automatic update Refund policy, game walk through I don't think it will solve compatibility testing issue . For 7 and 8, I wonder what if you use the stick approach or the denial of carrot methods. Will it convince most of them to buy the official version by making the piracy hard or dangerous? How can the harm outweigh the benefit for the game developer. Harsh method A Strong DRM not completely infallible while trying to make it less intrusive to the consumer. I heard that the sales is the highest after the first 4 months of the year. If nobody cracked the game during that time, then those impatient opportunist pirate might buy the game. For niche games, generally professional hackers are not interested in cracking the unpopular games. Is the DRM license expensive or cheap for the game dev? B The punisher vigilante method. Game dev or their customers might release a corrupted games on the pirate site for free. It range from making the unofficial game unwinnable to trojan horse dangerous to pirates' computer. I heard of some game dev used this method to scare the pirates. C Government or NGO ways to deter pirate. ISP which block the pirate site try to do it like GFC . ISP fined the people pirating the content torrent . DMCA or any cross border legal action. People still can bypass it, it just discourage less savvy people from pirating it. I heard people complain why those method harm the consumers. I never heard of why it would harm the game dev more than the pirate. What are the flaw of various anti piracy method I heard it from some blog or news ? I am not good at explaining it in English. For Books and Artworks, they don't have the service advantage of steam or gog. For indie creators, how they are going to convince them to donate money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Harsh methods are necessary to fight digital piracy especially games.\n","id":"0612a05e-6e6b-4897-8807-767c2fa43a0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am thinking of a new way to protest against policies of governments. Would like you to convince me that this would not work. Conventional methods of protesting against governments are fast loosing their teeth. For one, the modern citizen have become much more risk averse. There is also the chilling effects bought about by mass surveillance etc. This means that a diminishing amount of people are willing to participate in protests, especially if the issue does not concern them directly. You can get beaten. You can get shot at. Your credit history can suffer. Your employment prospects might get effected. The list goes on and on. There is also issue of losing values. Things like honor, bravery and a strong sense of right and wrong is disappearing probably long gone already from the populace. This also makes people from acting when such values are under attack. As individuals are losing power, corporations are gaining in influence over governments. Governments feel more and more answerable to corporations than to people today. One can think of corporations as having the governments by the balls . Now, the big corporations might seem invincible. But they are really not. They are dependent on people to give them business. It is true that a limited number of people cannot make a dent in the business of a big corporation. But what if a whole country boycott the business of a large corporation, even for a single day? It would be quite painful for such a company, and we can thus thing a large body of people holding these corporations by the balls . Combining the above two statements, ie Big corporations have the government by the balls A sufficiently large body of people have big, influential corporations by the balls . Thus implying, A sufficiently large body of people have the government by the balls . If the only thing that is preventing a whole country from participating in a protest is the detrimental things it can cause them, what if there is a way by which they can protest without the risk of such things? I think we can do so, that is, safely protest against actions of the government, by boycotting business of such giant corporations. I am talking about boycotting non essentials like mobile phones Facebook Fast food chains. What if people of the whole country stop using a mobile network for one day or say one hour every day . Will this cause enough pain to the corporations and cause them to apply enough pressure on the governments to stop the offending action? The problems I can see are the following. Can the corporations include clauses in the ToS that their customers should not participate in things like this? How can you differentiate someone between legitimately not using their service and someone who is protesting? Can governments outlaw organizing these sort of protests? Thoughts about this?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People can influence government policies by holding the business of big corporations at ransom.\n","id":"487f41cc-fe9b-4ee3-bda0-a3fde0377044"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Host Countries and Cities Benefit from The Olympic Games<|ARGUMENT|>Cities are often required to build or upgrade highly specialised sports facilities in order to accommodate over 10,000 athletes for less than 2 weeks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Olympic Stadiums are a waste of resources for something that is just in use for a few weeks.\n","id":"427e7cd5-6376-4c61-a9c9-28cc4a2255d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>EU constitution reform treaty Lisbon Treaty<|ARGUMENT|>\"The case for a no vote\". Lisbon Treaty Information Campaign - 5. The EU doesn\u2019t need this reform<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lisbon does more than streamline EU; introduces sweeping new powers\n","id":"daf93fa3-b761-40b0-a7e1-de0ce7a63f04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>in a world government<|ARGUMENT|>A world government would enhance the probability that effective means will be developed and implemented toward ameliorating the global problems of resource depletion and environmental decay. In a world divided into a host of jealously independent and self-righteously sovereign nations, national leaders tend to point the finger of blame for these problems at other nations, and to resist international efforts toward resource conservation and environmental preservation. As the mutual accusations and recriminations go on and on, the problems are left to fester. If a world government existed, it might muster sufficient respect and possess sufficient authority to enable the nations to arrive at a workable consensus on how to share equitably the short-term costs and inconveniences necessary to securing long-term sustainability of resources and preservation of environmental quality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A world government would enhance the probability of mitigating global environmental problems\n","id":"7b595934-2c55-4ebc-8c1c-de753873505b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I take issue with John Oliver's segment from a year ago, found here which asserts that the Miss America program's claim as the largest provider of scholarships for women, while true, is a disgrace because these scholarships consider outward beauty as a major criterion for success in pageants. My argument is that physical beauty and stage presence do not relate to academic achievement any less than skill at a sport. We should not shame pageants any more than athletic programs that award millions of dollars per university in scholarships.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Miss America program providing scholarships based mostly on outward appearance is no more reprehensible than sports teams providing scholarships based on athletic ability.\n","id":"2f326d15-4cb1-4e41-97e9-a3166f7ba98d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Omnivores are defined as generalized feeders with neither carnivore nor herbivore specializations for acquiring \/ processing food, and who are capable of consuming and do consume both animal protein and vegetation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This merely proves that humans may be omnivores able to digest grains and fruits as well.\n","id":"c41face1-f7da-4117-a10a-c611c37dfa60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>The UBI provides individuals with more money to buy goods from local businesses. This leads to more money circulating in these communities and contributes to their economic revitalization.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI gives individuals the agency to invest in their own communities.\n","id":"f71b65fe-755b-4764-87fd-41cd647040c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Yeah. You heard right. Yup. I know. God the horror right? This is not Alabama, nor do i have any hidden feeling for family members. The thought of that alone makes me want to vomit. I would like to think i am a decent person, and i did not experience any tragic childhoods or anything. This is just a pure opinion. I used to think incest is gross, and i still do, but i realized that i could not come up with any reason to make consentual sex between family members illegal, without shooting myself in the foot. I only tried evualuating it logically and i have no baggage with this topic. I thought Well, i think it is gross but i then again, since when is another person's comfort with your activity THEIR concern? And since when is that grounds for legalizing or delegalizing anything? For example I think any form of anal sex is disgusting, but that does not give me power to stop others who want to do it. I also thought about the children born with defects argument, and that too cannot be entirely valid. For one, does that mean as long as it is protected sex than it is okay? Are same sex partners exempt from this rule? Although it is true that people born from incestuous couple are significantly more likely to have birth defects about 10x more than non incestuous children that raises a question, are people with dominent genetic disorders not allowed to have sex because of the child they may likely produce? It is also weird to arrest parents for having a child, even if that child is given an unfortunate life and body. Is policing sex even a good thing? I also thought about the it's rape argument but no. Rape is rape. I am not going to even pretend that forcing yourself onto another person is okay in the slightest, but incest alone is not rape . Ofcourse if one of the partners is not in the right state of mind to have sex or are too young then i will root for that bastard's arrest, but incest can be consentual. However if the person is using their position as a family member to coerce a person into sex that too is contemptible. The other arguments i came up with are arguments that coincidentally are used against homosexuality. Ofcourse the 2 are in no way the same , and homosexual sex and heterosexual sex deserve to be treated the same, but the arguments and their counterarguments still hold. You know the it is unnatural , it is against God , etc. I do not support incest in any capacity, but i ultimately believe that if all parties are consenting, and no illegal items are being used, do whatever the hell you want. I find it hypocritical to say what you do in your bedroom is your business, except when it is incestuous. Then it is our business . I certainly do think that those who have incestuous sex are troubled, but they are entitled to sex too. I won't go rooting for incest any time soon, but i personally do not see the need to make consentual sex amongst family members illegal. There, you may call me crazy now. Wanna change my mind?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Incest should be legal.\n","id":"228354a7-b319-4fc7-944b-fe6b7531a867"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be a quota for Millennial representatives in the European Parliament?<|ARGUMENT|>Only one in three Dutch Millennials report that \"democracy is absolutely essential\" signalling a deep disengagement with the political system which is unlikely to be fixed by quotas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Millenials are disaffected from the system and are unlikely to vote.\n","id":"ae30a5db-811e-4c33-bae0-650cbf68fb1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United Nations be replaced with a world government?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unlikely that states will agree to dismantle their status as sovereign entities and transfer their power to a centralised organisation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's unlikely that world leaders would agree to a new world organization.\n","id":"ddc90156-261c-4c53-b75f-b44884a959a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should build an international space elevator?<|ARGUMENT|>Not only don't we have the technology and resources to do this in the near future, there is strong doubt that a space elevator can ever be built. Why we'll probably never build a space elevator<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We are missing and\/or lacking in capabilities to accomplish this at the moment.\n","id":"81a3d3ec-3948-4a41-b746-251025b231e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just think they are paid way too much for such a simple task. I don't know very much about them but I know it is a fairly simple thing to do, just cut and sew.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think being a surgeon is an overrated job.\n","id":"22568727-5c22-4ea1-b3a0-4952139fcbdb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States be the global police?<|ARGUMENT|>A US-backed coup d'etat in Iran led to the democratically-elected Prime Minister being deposed over a move to nationalise the local oil industry which was disadvantageous to US allies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States' interference in other countries' elections has damaged the democratic process in said countries.\n","id":"c3654417-2449-4492-b2b6-6df25a5c023b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many non-religious organisations which advocate for conservative viewpoints and are nonetheless granted tax exempt status. It is hypocritical and blatantly discriminatory to only punish religious organisations for holding such views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state does not restrict the freedom of speech of non-religious conservative organisations by denying them tax-exempt status, and it should not do so for churches.\n","id":"2479ab8b-2499-4cbd-b4b8-5d4309ccb7be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's an interesting concept I've seen multiple times now, and was recently brought up in a criminal justice class I'm taking just as a footnote, but still . From this case where a woman was sentenced to sit in the smelliest area of a garbage dump and the judge told her If you puke, you puke, to deterring Christmas tree theft with red fox urine which stinks up the thief's house for ages, to anecdotal reports of this sort of punishment being used in some prisons. But I really just don't see many people fearing it or really being all that affected by it. Bad smells are still just smells. I've heard that some of these experiences would be horrific but I really don't see it couldn't the person just breathe through their mouth or something? I have a weak sense of smell so I might not be fully understanding. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of malodorants very bad smells as a criminal punish would not be very effective or very bad to experience.\n","id":"7b550312-36fc-4954-8db4-c65f195e61ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This  is not regarding any actual conspiracy theory, or whether or not any of the common ones are possible likely. This  is more about Conspiracy Theory Theory . Given the general public opinion of how most modern and historical conspiracy theories are treated, it would be logical for an organization or group who was involved in an actual nefarious or unfavorable conspiracy to pre empt any unveiling of components of the conspiracy by first anonymously proposing the idea among an active, vocal and gullible conspiracy theory audience. There are whole swaths of the population who believe any nonsense with a photo and a caption, and would be susceptible to nearly any type of conspiracy theory idea that held at least one of the common axioms of conspiracies. 1 Gov't Corporations Ethnic group is secretly manipulating the common man into subservience. This is usually the most important aspect of the draw of a conspiracy theory as it targets disenfranchised and unempowered individuals to rationalize their own poor position as merely a consequence of a rigged system. 2 Evidence contrary to the theory is falsified, no matter how compelling it ought to be. 3 Any expert who argues against the theory is part of the conspiracy. 4 A product food activity widely believed to be safe is actually dangerous, and the reasoning is because money There are more, but you get the point. To my main thought, and this is purely hypothetical and doesn't necessarily need to be applied to real world scenarios, if a group was to undertake in some sort of nefarious coordinated activity that would be soundly excoriated by the general public if found out, it would be prudent for them to seed the idea into an untrustworthy group first. By suggesting a mechanism for a conspiracy, with enough details to be tangentially related to the actual conspiracy, but without enough details to be quickly verified, the conspirators could quickly shield a large amount of future inquiry by associating any inquiry with a crackpot fringe. What funding authority would be crazy enough to put up money for research into a topic that is widely known to be a hot topic among crackpots? I suppose the strongest counterpoint is that it does get people looking in the vicinity of your actual conspiracy, and that there may very well be wholly unknown and successful conspiracies ongoing for this reason. But I feel the weakest argument against almost all modern conspiracy theories is the fact that humans are fallible, and someone always blabs. Given this, I feel like it nearly removes the opportunity for a scandal to completely blow up on an unsuspecting public. To sum up, I don't seriously believe that anyone has utilized this tactic for masking a conspiracy, nor am I an advocate for common conspiracy theories, but rather it appears that our current treatment of conspiracy theories makes the above tactic viable, at least in theory. Also I should've done this above but responses can use CT as an abbreviation for conspiracy theory for the sake of brevity, as I think it will get written a lot. Edit Removed poorly thought out worded example.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best way to disguise a real conspiracy would be to advertise the conspiracy through crackpots\n","id":"4f547f89-b8a2-4e18-b241-268a882b7950"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Crime cameras<|ARGUMENT|>Heather Knight. \"Crime cameras not capturing many crimes\". San Francisco Chronicle. March 21, 2008 - \"The cameras have been installed in phases on some of the city's roughest streets since 2005 with large concentrations of them in the Western Addition and Mission District and others in the lower Haight, the Tenderloin and near Coit Tower. . The cameras have contributed to only one arrest nearly two years ago in a city that saw 98 homicides last year, a 12-year high. The video is choppy, and police aren't allowed to watch video in real-time or maneuver the cameras to get a better view of potential crimes.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Crime cameras have not had a significant impact on crime rates\n","id":"fd399029-2ff4-4b65-885c-d740dac4a3e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Wiki on the topic sorry, mobile I see nothing wrong with this theory of ethics. It's based on reason, it's consistent, and strongly supports personal autonomy. I believe that society would be perfect if everyone followed Kantian ethics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Kantian ethics stands as a good guide to live your life by.\n","id":"b8508e56-c558-4c3c-9718-41bcaaa817c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Statistics show that the percentage of female video game workers increased from 16% in 2002, to 20% in 2009.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The gender representation gap in the gaming industry is decreasing.\n","id":"d6d60ea1-1014-4e08-845a-5e93c06de3b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>The costs of tobacco related illness amounts to $133 billion in the US. This exceeds the revenues of $18 billion by far.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The healthcare costs for ailments caused by alcohol and tabacco are higher than tax revenues.\n","id":"4f1281fd-e738-4e74-8c8a-61cda9e4c43e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love video games. I always have. I also enjoy browsing r all pretty much every day. Sure enough, every single day, I see posts like HEY RIOT CHANGE THIS. or VALVE PLZ and etc. Not just friendly gamers talking about their favorite games and saying Wouldn't it be neat if blah blah but instead come off as angry, demanding, snarling children. I'm 23 years old so it feels weird to say this, but BACK IN MY DAY you purchased a video game, you played it, and if you liked it you played it all damn day. If you didn't like it, you bought another game. There are lots of games. What's the problem? I've thought about ascending to the master race several times but I always see these posts and I'm reminded that most PC gamers are about ten years younger than me or at least seem like absolutely zero fun to be around. TL DR PC Gamers bitch too often and lots of people don't want to get into PC gaming because the community is toxic, childish and never satisfied. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most PC Gamers LOL, WOW, TF2, etc will find any reason to complain like children, and it discourages new players from joining the \"PC Master Race\"\n","id":"a50c1e3f-90a1-42ce-ad4d-a1337de7b561"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>People with mental health issues may face lowered productivity Co-workers are unlikely to make people feel worse about it once they know about their problems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stigma surrounding mental health problems harms businesses in terms of lost productivity and absenteeism.\n","id":"f5266d99-033e-43c9-bad2-f1900f6cdb90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We spend an absolutely ludicrous amount of public money on education, yet the government rarely demands a return on this investment. IMO this is an unconscionable use of public funds. In addition to the amount wasted on the universities themselves, government will just hand tens of thousands of dollars to young, naive and impressionable teens that will piss it away on education without realizing that they aren't acquiring any useful skills until it is too late. Universities responded to this by creating enormous humanities departments, passing any kid who has a pulse, handing them a piece of useless paper after 4 years and expecting them to fend for themselves with a huge debt and no marketable skills. This has created a generation of baristas with huge debts and nothing to show for it, making it way harder for them to get ahead in life than it would have been if they never went to university in the first place. This is a terrible waste of tax resources. Governments need to start demanding a certain percentage of students get placed, and if universities can't do that, they shouldn't receive any funding, their students should be barred from receiving government loans, and the schools should be forced to close as a result or exist only to serve the very rich who can afford to piss away 100k without developing marketable skills . This will mean less graduates, but that isn't a bad thing. The world needs baristas and janitors and bus drivers. It just doesn't need people with advanced degrees in Medieval Literature or Women's Studies doing these jobs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Universities that receive public funding should be responsible for placing their graduating students in relevant careers\n","id":"6772e065-626f-447d-8132-574bdc42652a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion as a common imagined order enabled humans to organize themselves in larger numbers than before, therefore enabling them to defeat their enemies and be more efficient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion improved the strength of groups to outcompete other groups.\n","id":"8537b67c-ad3e-451c-aaec-9bde191e2440"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A panel of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in the United States recently rule that the conservative lobby group Citizens United should be considered a part of the media, and as such will not be compelled to disclose sources of funding for their polemical films, which have a strongly ideological angle. It is suspected that funding mainly comes from big corporations in America who have a vested interest in helping Citizens United spread muck about political road bumps, such as in Hillary The Movie. Therefore, so the argument goes, they should be held to a high standard of transparency. My view is that a legal obligation to release detailed accounts of their means of production of films is a violation of the first amendment, and that anyone who feels they have been defamed by the organisation is free to sue. If the material presented in their productions is factually correct then it is for others to use their free speech to counter allegations made, however they see fit. Here are some links providing context for my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Citizens United should not be forced to disclose funding for their film \"Rocky Mountain Heist\"\n","id":"43c4a9b4-881a-47e2-9862-b9cde8fb9c60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After years of traveling, having conversation with hundreds of people from different ages, genders, ethnicities, cultures and social classes, I can't think otherwise anymore. It has nothing to do with education or wealth or experience some people just don't have it. Some people just don't have enough sympathy, analytic thinking and foreseeing to use common sense. Please  because I hate to think this way I want to believe equality that if an individual have all the opportunities others has, he she can accomplish anything what others can. Edit What I mean by 'common sense' is, I used to think that common sense is basic part of a human brain. If you give any person enough experience and education, they will reach the same thinking and sympathizing capacity. Now I'm starting to believe that some people don't have that basic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I started to think that common sense is cannot be learned: if you've born with it, you have it. If you haven't, you'll never will.\n","id":"1687df1b-8857-408e-8ffb-7ceb461068be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>As reported in an 1831 newspaper in Palmyra, NY, Martin Harris said that \"when he acted as amanuenes, and wrote the translation, as Smith dictated, such with his fear of the Divine displeasure that a screen sheet was suspended between the prophet and himself.\" Palmyra Reflector, Mar. 19, 1831, p. 126<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While dictating the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith would at least on some occasions put up a curtain between himself and others in the room.\n","id":"2e1d7d98-69e1-4e03-b4cb-c95e4ca3d9fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should refugees seeking asylum in Europe be distributed among EU member states according to a quota?<|ARGUMENT|>The number of people attempting to make the journey across the Mediterranean is down 89% as compared to 2015; it is unclear if a state of emergency still exists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU accepted half as many refugees in 2018 as they did in 2014. The capacity to accommodate refugees exists without quotas.\n","id":"2db1ac57-ec5a-43d4-bf36-562aa6ceed45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think this goes beyond just being wrong about something. It's extremely easy to confirm this claim. Just go online and search our country's founding documents. Obviously if America was founded as a christian nation, then we'd expect to see references to this in the founding documents. But there is literally zero mention of the word Christianity or Christian or any other kind of religion in any of the founding documents. Even God can't be found. Not only that, but in written correspondence from the founding fathers they specifically point out that America is NOT a Christian nation. This is a quote from a letter Jefferson wrote to a church Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church State. Okay, what about in god we trust on our currency? Just look that up, the idea was first implemented in 1864 on a single piece of currency, then added to all paper currency in 1957. This is well after our country was founded. Under God in the pledge 1954. So my view isn't exactly that America was not founded as a Christian nation but I'm open minded to being wrong about this if you feel I'm incorrect . My view is that the evidence is so objective and so obvious that a person must either be intentionally lying when making the claim, or they are just willfully choosing to be ignorant. No person that is reasonable could come to the conclusion that America was founded as a christian nation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think anyone who claims America was founded as a \"Christian nation\" is either lying, or willfully ignorant\n","id":"47e74a8c-c8b6-4bf0-b469-d8c7a0961be5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>PLEASE READ THE ENTIRE ARGUMENT BEFORE POSTING Firstly, let me say that even though the title explicitly names two races of people, this argument can be applied to any group who meets the criteria I am about to lay out. Secondly, this argument only applies to people who actually believe in the concept of affirmative action in any sense. I understand not all people even believe affirmative action is necessary and or ethical. Even though many have nuanced and differing views of what affirmative action is, my argument only relies on the general, and almost unanimously accepted definition of what affirmative action is. To me, affirmative action is The policy of providing special opportunities for, and favoring members of, a disadvantaged group who suffer from discrimination straight from Wikipedia Here is my argument It is clear that African Americans do face discrimination, lack of opportunities, negative systematic and historical racial bias and or a number of other negative factors which affects them in the game of academic college admission. Affirmative action seeks to \u2018balance the playing field\u2019 by providing proportionally equal special consideration and or opportunities to these people who face some amount of discrimination. To explain, if X is the difficulty caused by discrimination, lack of opportunities etc, then X is the amount of consideration affirmative action seeks to employ into the college admission game for that group of people. Asian Americans face similar, yet probably not as extreme discrimination and or cultural tropes scrawny smart nerd vs. big, black football basketball player , lack of being taken seriously athletically similar to what women experience when in positions of power compared to men \u2013 they aren\u2019t taken as seriously, or when blacks report actually being made fun of in school for performing well in classes , and pushed at a young age into a non athletic role super majority of Asian men expected to become doctors, lawyers, engineers vs. Blacks expected to become athletes, musicians, and entertainers . So again, if \u2013Y is the difficulty caused by discrimination, then Y should be applied to this group of people in the area they face \u2013Y in. If you don\u2019t believe that this discrimination exists in D1 Basketball Football recruitment just look at Jeremy Lin. It is pretty much factual that some amount of very significant discrimination does exist for this race of people. A good article about it There is nothing a priori that makes educational opportunity more important than athletic opportunity. Both are valid and legitimate ways of enriching your life through and pursuing a career and future. People should have equality of opportunity to choose for themselves which path they wish to take. Thus, proponents who call for African American Affirmative Action to equalize and account for the amount of discrimination Blacks face in regard to academic opportunity should concede that the only fair and proper way to implement college Affirmative Action is to equalize and account for the amount of discrimination other races namely Asians face in regard to athletic opportunity. Note My argument only proposes that an equal amount of positive discrimination be applied to the group facing an equal amount of negative discrimination. It is entirely possible, and probably likely, that the amount of negative discrimination that Blacks face in regard to academic opportunity is more than the negative discrimination Asians face toward D1 Football Basketball recruitment. However, it still holds that however much amount of negative discrimination Asians face should be equalized by Affirmative Action just like it is proposed to do for African Americans. Thanks for taking the time to read my argument. Sincerely, Scrotum Of Stalin<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who are pro Affirmative Action for African Americans in regard to college academic admissions must admit that it is only fair that Asian Americans experience similar benefits toward college D1 football and basketball recruitment.\n","id":"9ff6a5fd-6721-4ce3-b663-d4c6209b7f26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's no reason to complain about a price. If a price is too high, don't buy the good in question. In a capitalist society, you vote with your wallet, not with your words. If enough people agree with you, the price will come down or the firm will start to lose money, but you complaining about the price won't have any effect on that, because the price is common knowledge among everyone who buys or considers buying a product. Complaining about prices is useless negativity which serves no real purpose. Of course, it can be frustrating that beers are 9 at a baseball game for example , but ultimately who gives a shit? What can you possibly accomplish by complaining about the price? It's either too expensive, in which case you don't buy it, or it isn't, in which case you are willing to pay the price the supplier is asking for, and you therefore lose your right to complain. The only good reason to complain about a price is to complain about it to the employees before you buy it, in hopes of them reducing the price. However, this is shitty and useless unless you're shopping at a very small business the employees of a chain clothing store or a supermarket don't have any say in the price and you just piss them off by complaining about the price to them<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Complaining about prices to anyone other than the vendor at any time other than before the sale is stupid.\n","id":"65391c84-5ee8-4ab0-8a27-907b08247cdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should transgender personae only be performed by transgender people?<|ARGUMENT|>Hollywood and Broadway have yet to cast an openly trans* actor into a cis role. Yet, it remains equally common to give cis actors trans* roles. This denies employment opportunities to trans* actors in the casting of both cis and trans* roles, while cis actors have better likelihood of being cast for both cis and trans* roles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are countless roles out there for cis performers. Those selected for trans* roles are often 'big name performers' who do not face anything like the struggle trans* actors have in securing employment in the acting industry.\n","id":"e6b6b09f-d4a2-4ee3-b68f-5da7098502c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear a lot of people on the internet and on the media describing Rand Paul as a libertarian. Now, I greatly admired his filibuster. The principle on which it was conducted was a fantastic defense of basic liberties protected by the Bill of Rights. And the fact that people like McCain are talking shit just proves that establishment Republicans are intimidated by him. However, I still don't believe he is a libertarian. He endorsed Mitt Romney. There is absolutely no way a libertarian would endorse Mitt. Foreign policy wise, he is flat out wrong. Under his governorship, he was an enemy of free enterprise ie. Romneycare . He claims that an attack on Israel is an attack on the United States . Now, I've had people tell me that this comment is irrelevant because he would not go to war without an official declaration of war as mandated by the constitution. whether Rand really said this or not I'm not sure just taking their word . However, I've never heard any other libertarian state that an attack on a foreign nation is akin to an attack on the United States. However the comment does worry me because libertarians believe that the initiation of force is only moral in self defense. So, if he believes that someone is attacking the United States, that would open up the door for him trying to seek congressional approval to use intervention in Israel where most libertarians would probably say that it is not appropriate.  guys<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rand Paul is not a libertarian.\n","id":"bd7308a3-44dd-463e-8e9f-6b67186cfbf3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love transgendered people, and I find this new to me topic interesting. But I don't think that normally gendered people need to use the term cisgender, or even know what it is. I also don't think it's wrong to refer to a cisgendered person as normal, edit regarding their gender identity and not them as a whole person rather than cisgendered. If the trans community want to have terms like this, which I obviously see the utility of, then great, call me that all you want. I just don't understand why suddenly I am not a normal male, and why it's offensive to refer to myself as a normal lt gender gt . I don't see why certain transsexual individuals have attacked me for simply refering to cisgender as normal, instead of this designated male at birth terminology I had never heard of before venturing over to r trans. I would compare this to anyone with an uncommon trait getting vocally offended by not being refered to by a specific terminology they feel more comfortable with. If autistic children, diabetics, people with parkinson's and paraplegics all wanted to be called something new, it would get incredibly confusing to talk to people without offending anyone. I completely understand that transsexuals have a hard life, huge suicide rate, etc., but I don't think that babying them by tiptoeing around words like normal when they simply are not normally gendered humans is the right approach. I don't believe masking or avoiding reality is ever a good thing, and we can easily push for equal rights and respect for all transsexuals, even if people reserve the word normal when it comes to gender for someone who is cisgendered. Edit wow, I was not expecting this many responses, or for this to be something other people found interesting. I won't have time today to read everything<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the term \"cisgender\" doesn't need to be adopted by said \"cisgendered\" people. I liken it to diabetics creating a word for non-diabetics other than \"healthy\" or \"normal.\"\n","id":"533c59dc-32ec-4f08-a270-198fb7671571"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I read a compelling article by Victor Davis Hanson in the City Jounral the other day, which talked about the history of the water projects in central California in the early and mid twentieth century. Hanson points the finger specifically at the environmentalists who derailed the Klamath River diversion project in the 70s, which would have provided enough water to supply San Francisco alone for thirty years. Here's the article here if anyone wants to read it. I don't agree with all of his views in this article, particularly his low view of city folk, but I find it well written nonetheless<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Current California Drought is Largely the Fault of Environmentalists\n","id":"cbe31091-50ba-438f-9e9d-2ae3ddc0102a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that Morsi was a very suitable president for Egypt. During his rule, there was freedom of speech, expression and opinion. Politicians would daily criticize him and insult him on TV and they feared no repercussions. Nowadays, Egyptians are very wary to even tweet something that may be deemed inappropriate or insulting to the government since they may face imprisonment. The Economy of Egypt was much much better under Morsi\u2019s rule. The Egyptian pound was stronger, Morsi\u2019s goal was to achieve self sufficiency in food, medicine and weaponry. Regarding food, Egypt was almost self sufficient in wheat. Egypt also launched its first tablet. Now, after the devaluement of the Egyptian pound and the increase in prices of all kinds of products, Egypt is in a worse situation overall. Egypt was politically stronger during Morsi's rule. It was a key player in Middle Eastern politics. Right now its merely a puppet of Saudi Arabia and UAE. Im open to all ideas and I would like to get an insight on different points of views regarding this topic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Egypt is currently under a Military Dictatorship, Morsi should have remained in power\n","id":"c25bd4b8-552a-4a23-9957-e0ccab1cb40b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What makes life worth living, from an individual perspective?<|ARGUMENT|>Seeking a greater understanding of life involves regular reflection. This process will ultimately result in individuals making choices which are more likely to make their life worth living.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ability to attain some sort of understanding of our existence makes life worth living.\n","id":"ddb3e5a7-5c1c-48a5-863b-4f1e4e10cd2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So after the recent 'feminism vs tropes' debacle, I recently started researching the more modern feminism movement. Now previously I would have called myself a feminist And by the dictionary definition, still am , and my initial ideas on the movement include personal heroes like the suffragettes movement, or even FEMEN in the middle east While I disagree with the way they are doing things, what they are trying to do is highly respected by myself . However issues like donglegate led me look further into the movement. Now my research started with anti feminist areas of note, MRA's, etc etc. While the movement itself has issues Ironically the same issues I later uncovered with Feminism. , I felt this was important in order to successfully build up a counter argument. When researching an area it's generally a good idea to build up opposing points of view, which then you can bring in a discussion. After you bring these up hopefully they will be countered, and you can make an equal opinion. Sadly this never happened, and even the more moderate feminist websites and ideals are straying far from equality or even empowerment of women in general, hurting both men and those they claim to aid. 1 There is no room for discourse. My main issue with this movement was the lack of space for discourse. I am a strong believer in the scientific method. You present your case, people present their opposing views, and the stronger argument gets taken more seriously. This is how theories like the big bang and evolution became the water tight staples of science. A devil's advocate is worth 20 echo chambers if you are interesting in making a solid argument that can stand up on its own. However, nowhere in the feminist world r feminism, femspire, etc etc is there a place for such important discussion. In fact this post was originally posted and deleted from r AskFeminists where supposedly all questions and view points are welcome Rather than attempting to combat my arguments, much like North Korea and the creationism movement, they instead seemed to be more focused on silencing them. The learning experience I was hoping to gain never appeared. Even when searching online, I couldn't find a single feminist debate that didn't devolve into claims of sexism and other name calling. 2 Their actions are hurting having actual meaningful talks about rape and other issues. Rape is a serious issue, along with DV. However throwing around false statistics like 1 in 3 women will be raped Actual stats seem to be 1 20 1 10 of both genders do nothing but to hurt the argument and turn the discussion less on the actual issues The victims and how we can help them and more on the incorrect statements. This attempt to make every female a 'victim of rape' by including things 99 of rational people of both genders wouldn't considered to be 'wrong' also dilutes the meaning of rape in the public opinion, splitting subconsciously in everyone\u2019s mind into 'real rape' You know, rape rape etc etc , and 'fake rape' Two people got drunk and had consensual sex, etc etc . Doing this is the equivalent of suggesting that all physical violence of any kind should be defined as 'Murder'. If you were to do that you'd also be diluting the stigma of Murder. Also the male slut shaming and automatic presumption of guilt in most of their campaigns Teach men not to rape, etc etc is sexist in of itself, ignoring the many male victims of rape Also see 4 and 5 and being sexist as hell. Now I already know the counter argument to this 'We aren't saying ALL men, or even ONLY men do it, but we're focusing on that part, honestly.' At which point I call bullshit. If I was to make a ad campaign for Teach black people not to shove crack up their ass while robbing someone and eating fried chicken No matter how much I try to say 'Oh I'm not saying all or only black people are doing this, but I want to focus only on that group', this campaign and line of thinking is still racist as hell. 3 The patriarchy might as well be replaced with 'Magic ' What most smart learned people seem to call 'Evolutionary affects on society' the feminist world seems to use this magical patriarchy that never seems to get explained. Sure they explain that it's a system where men have rigged all the systems because of privilege. But then seem to forget to explain where the hell this privilege came from? Did every man around the world all of a sudden at the same time just go 'I'm privileged ' Without these individual cultures ever talking to one another? . And how the hell did this remain through periods of history where individual societies and cultures were being led by successful powerful strong Women For instance Queen Mary gt Queen Elizabeth in England . For such an idea to have any merit there'd need to be a 10,000 year old secret society of bigoted men pulling all the strings, but too stupid to remove all the negative effects of said patriarchy. Of course, conspiracy theories aside, it makes far more sense that evolutionarily speaking, having one sex focus on physical power, and the other to focus on ensuring the survival of offspring, is a good way to ensure the spread of genetic material, a trait found through many many different animal species. And this genetic programming has naturally And always will affected our societies view on what exactly makes a good 'man' and 'woman', since several million years of evolution doesn't just go away because you have an Ipod, making both genders although equal human beings, different in their dreams. 4 Extremely oppressive and offensive to women. Which leads me onto my next point. My mother is a brilliant person. She's a strong, intelligent person, and what she did to teach and raise me made me the person I am today, and is something I will always look up to her for I also look up to my father, but for different reasons . Yet somehow the current movement which claims to represent her suggests that because she chose to do what she loved, that she is somehow a worthless oppressed human. The message of feminism isn't even about breaking gender roles in that sense, as we can see a lack of fund raisers to get more women into being dustbin men. No the message of feminism is you're only worth something as a women if you're a CEO, that screw what you want to do, you are only represented by the money that you make and anything else is simply you're too weak to stop being oppressed by a man. And this is further exemplified by a lot of rhetoric provided by the main movements of feminism, removing responsibility and treating the female like a child. You want to make your own choices while drunk? NO Only a man can handle that kind of responsibility. You want to handle critic and male contact like an adult? NO Don't you worry your priddy little head, let the men work it all out for you so you never have to feel sad. You think you can handle things not targeted towards your gender, or are self confident enough in who you are for it not to affect you? NO Only a man can handle that kind of pressure and acting like an adult. This is even further exemplified when these same movements attempt to suggest that women do no evil. No, all rape cases are true, because women can't do that No, When Female to male DV happens it's because the man did something wrong. The only reason that woman did that was because of MAGIC Evil MENZ Patriarchy. It's impossible for a woman to be Misandric because Which all build a picture of females being less than men, when in reality females are also simply adult human beings, who have the same ability to do evil And good as men. 5 Slows down progress and awareness by ignoring 50 of the issue. From what I can see the majority of the problems raised by feminism Rape, DV, gender bias for certain things, society expecting you to do XYZ to be a 'real woman' aren't woman issues at all, but in general humanity issues that overall affect all humans equally. And these are big wide ranging issues that require aid. So to combat these issues, to take a strategy that automatically ignores and alienates 50 of the problem seems moronically retarded. Throw into this that the majority of these awareness campaigns are not only highly offensive to men, but also play into the actual perpetrators hands. The people at Steubenville knew exactly what the fuck those mother fuckers were doing. They knew that what they were doing was wrong. It wasn't rape culture, but the fact that they are evil little shits. Why did they claim the opposite? Because they had a smart assed lawyer who knew he could make his clients seem like the victim. And Jesus it actually worked to some extent, giving these monsters sympathy. Oh it's not their fault, their lives got ruined, it's because of the patriarchy. They didn't know it was rape because of the 'patriarchy' They are the 'real' victims of the patriarchy Although on an emotionally detached level, I do have to give kudos to the layer for being a smart ass and abusing the current damage these campaigns do. 6 Wishy washy No stable focus And this is the real issue I have the majority of feminism. There's no actual real goals. This isn't a case of 'Make it legal for women to vote' any more, but wishy washy abuse of statistics to flip flop around to make 'feminism' about whatever just offended the author s of whatever article campaign. Want to write a story about a evil group of men? That's patriarchy because there's a lack of female's Want to write a story about a group of evil women. That's also sexist Want to write about a classic nurturing woman? That's sexist because of gender types Want to write about a strong woman? That's also sexist because she's just trying to copy men Want to talk to a random woman? That's sexist and you're probably trying to rape her Ignore random woman on the street? That's also sexist Disprove of sexual behaviour? That's slut shaming and sexist Want to support and interact with a women in such a way? That's sexist and you're probably trying to rape her This flippy floppy lack of focus seems to create problems that don't exist, making interactions between good honestly adults of both sexes harder for everyone for no apparent reason, while at the same time proving zero answers on how to fix these 'issues'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The current movement of feminism actually hinders equality for both genders.\n","id":"35f7ec57-ccaf-42a1-8444-43f30688847a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel conflicted over the conversation that we are having over inclusivity in hollywood and the idea of having proper representation for certain acting roles. I am generally supportive over this sentiment and I love the idea that we are pushing to be more progressive, but at the same time I feel like a line has to to be drawn somewhere when it comes to criticizing actors for taking on certain roles. My argument is simply this. An actor's job is to portray a character who is often times not in any way similar to who that actor is in real life. A true actor's gift is to deliver that convincing performance in all aspects physically, emotionally, mentally without actually having lived that experience personally. How far do we go when it comes to criticizing actors for taking on a role that should have gone to someone who has that lived experience? Should a role for a character who suffers from extreme mental illness be only portrayed by an actor diagnosed with schizophrenia? Should gay characters only be portrayed by gay actors? I just feel like if we are going to criticize Scarlet for portraying a trans man, it's going to open up a huge can of worms when trying to determine what is right or wrong when it comes to actors taking on roles without any real consistency. Now I would support the criticism if she took the role and delivered a poor performance which doesn't do any justice for the trans community portraying negative stereotypes for example . but that isn't the case here. EDIT Wow this really blew up. I appreciate all the informative responses and the the various perspectives that were put forth. I believe I better understand the issue now and feel like I learned something through all this discussion. Thank you all<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the outrage over Scarlet Johansson playing a transgender man is unjustified simply because this is what actors do. They portray people\/characters who are not themselves in real life.\n","id":"e4af697d-c363-4fe3-8c47-0d9e589dace4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every human being is a metaphorical mechanical cog in this global economy. We take in wage, and we spend. SP500 has grown so much beyond just farms, because technology securing food production has freed humanity into exploring other ventures. We laugh at dumb, extravagant toys like those self balancing scooters but in the economy, that's a new market and growth, and new products like that are the primary reason how all this prosperity was created. It doesn't really matter what we do, as long as it creates transactions. Economy doesn't care. It just has to be real enough for humans to participate. Just consider haircutting. Every week, billions of dollars are spent cutting off bits of keratin that will just grow back. People are essentially paying for short term feelings. There's no grand meaning or purpose to most enterprises. US government could create millions of jobs tomorrow where people just slap each other in the face for 8 hrs a day, and wherever that headquarter is located will become a booming place of growth. Restaurants, barbers, hospitals, businesses of all sorts will open up to capture that spending, which creates even more spending jobs, which creates you get the point. All this can be sustainable with a balanced tax policy that doesn't bend to the whims of the slumlords. I'm kidding about the slapping of course. Since there were potholes and crumbling bridges everywhere, millions of elderly who need care, millions of children in classes too big, millions of addiction counseling therapy needs going unmet, there is be an ample pool of ideas to choose from. Government doesn't need to start making every consumer electronic. It can focus on things that private sector cannot handle, due to lack of profitability, as it already does with firefighting and policing. Government is uniquely different from corporations and uniquely qualified for this role, because its source of revenue is the proportional to the size of the total economy. US government has already performed and performs the plan I have described to varying degrees, to positive effects. It was as recent as Obama expanding unemployment benefits during 2008 recession. Or FDR implementing social security and minimum wage. Suddenly cogs who weren't participating in the economy started participating. homeless elderly becoming consumers Suddenly small cogs became bigger cogs. minimum wage On top of stimulating the economy it will solve a myriad of issues, such as 45 million Americans being stuck in poverty at any given year. This will reduce crime, and lower poverty related expenditures. It will improve working conditions and pay for all workers. Ex. Hard for mcdonald and walmart to make people work part time at both places for 7.5 when you can just go work for the government for 15. In other words, it will make it harder to run an unethical business without further policing regulatory costs. It will improve the quality of labor for the private sector. People who are happy at having a life beyond just money will join the public sector en mass, which will provide the work hours, pay, and education opportunities for them to realize their full potential. Only problem is overcoming billionaire resistance, but it's not like we don't have to do that already to do anything. If we can brave a 1.5 trillion deficit to give people like Wyatt Ingraham Koch 75 billion more dollars, whose hoarding habits has never shown to abate despite conservative claims for decades, then we can brave this venture with positive track record. What do you think?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments in developed countries should expand public sector jobs to capture any number of people neglected by \/ dropped out of private sector.\n","id":"7bee1b82-9819-49c9-8aac-f258b3f479b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Facebook has open-ended community standards and a reporting system that makes the rules and their application vague.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Neither Facebook nor Twitter have clear rules for what is acceptable content and what is not.\n","id":"13559387-3bfa-4c0d-bc45-ff1c4f1ac3c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally can't imagine a situation were I would address my gf, fiance, or wife as my SO significant other maybe in a charming letter or speech but other than that, I would never call her that on a regular basis or even on Reddit. If I went up to my friends and said I had fun with my SO last night, they'd be confused, and maybe even worried at first, as to who I was talking about. When a redditors do it, I imagine they want to keep the relationship private or want to hide something. Though the reader probably doesn't think too much about it, they still see that the OP of that post wanted to keep the relationship a secret. But even if the OP said my bf or my gf , it would draw roughly the same or even less attention than by saying my SO. Even if their boyfriend or girlfriend was a transsexual hermaphrodite, they should at least address their partner the way they want to be addressed. If they both can't agree on a term, then there's something more important to discuss between the two.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think using the term \"S.O.\" when referring to your own boyfriend or girlfriend is unnecessary and only brings more attention to the relationship than it does to overlook it.\n","id":"63d6c9d3-bf89-471f-af10-38fea431c9e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have recently discovered the existence of EMFs electromagnentic fields waves etc . And the internet holds a wealth of not too trustworthy looking websites and information about the health dangers effects of living near cell phone masts masts towers receivers transmitter or whatever they are, because they emit EMF, and ways to protect your self from EMFs as such. I understand EMF is everywhere around us, man made EMF produced by electric devices, and then natural EMFs emitted by earth etc. Mobile phone technology and technology as a whole is moving at a much faster pace than any science proving that it is harmless can. We now have 2G, 3G, 4G operating at the same time, increasing the number of masts around us. These are all new technologies. Proper epidemiological studies take 20 years to conduct from retrospective data. So how can we be sure it is harmless? And also exposure to EMF and or mobile phone mast emissions on any given person is surely very tricky thing to measure, as people move, from house to house, from home to work etc. WHO now classes EMF as a 2B carcinogen possible carcinogen I know this is more likely to do with mobile phones, than masts but still. If all this was so harmless why are some countries trying to decrease the levels power at which masts operate and increase the distance of people from phone masts check Switzerland and Lichtenstein . Why do governments have regulations on 'safe levels', and what are these levels based on? How come masts appear right next to some peoples windows? I just want to understand the science physics biology behind EMF, and hope this can calm me down. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Please persuade me not to be worried about the health implications of cell phone masts and EMF in general.\n","id":"8eb919b8-2b9c-436d-85fb-d9c44eb6af55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I occasionally hear across stories of a 7 year old kid attending Oxford or some other college. Child prodigies are often allowed and encouraged to advance and pursue their talents as far as they will go. We tend to glorify these kids in these situations, but I think we should be cautious about this. I've participated in programming for gifted kids, who were nearly all gt 99th percentile for intelligence. I've been beaten by 11yo chess masters. I know that children are capable of amazing things, and that being around other equally capable minds is important to their development. Here is why I think that, despite their considerable intelligence and aptitude, child prodigies should not be prematurely sent to college. ^ gonna ^arbitrarily ^say ^that ^would ^be ^before ^they ^can ^legally ^drive ^a ^car It's bad for their social development. Stripping a child from their social context essentializes them as a brilliant mind while ignoring or even undermining all the other stuff that makes them a person. Putting kids in college removes them from an environment with kids their own age. This is going to have a negative impact on their social development. As adults, they will not have had the same sort of formative experiences as their peers. This is all the more important because child prodigies don't always grow up to be exceptional adults. After all, many prodigies are precocious but not exceptional that is to say, they aren't better than everyone else, they just did it earlier. They might eventually end up as a normal ass adult with an interesting background but no relatable life experiences. One might argue that the kid is gonna be alienated from their peers anyway because they're so much smarter, ect. There is some merit to that, as gifted children are often better conversant with adults than kids their own age. However, in the case of a prodigy, we can't assume the exceptional skill of a child in one area carries over to any others. Further, learning how to interact with others, understand them, and appreciate their experiences and what they have to offer is an important part of maturing as a person. You won't stay surrounded by your intellectual peers forever. That is, unless you turn out to be an ordinary adult after an exceptional childhood, but then you won't be well equipped to relate to them. They will miss many important parts of the college experience. College, for many people, is the first time you experience real freedom and independence. It's a place where you learn, but also where you socialize, organize, join clubs and discover hobbies. You drink, experiment, meet interesting people, try to get laid, and many other equally important parts of the college experience. It's more than school, it's an environment where you develop in many non academic ways as well, and have experiences and interactions that will guide you through your working life. If you're in college, and you're an 8yo, you're missing out on a really substantial portion of what college is about for most people. Academics are important, but everything else is important, too. Even in terms of intellectual development, children will be hampered by their lack of life experience. There's likely a reason why so many prodigies are in mathematics, chess, and other rigid, empirical areas. They can be engaged and understood without any life experiences. Even within these fields, though, an age typical college student isn't just going to be learning about their field, they're going to be networking, making connections, developing professionally, seeking internships, and otherwise advancing themselves as both an intellectual and a professional. If you go to college when you're a kid, you're only getting part of the experience. So, tl dr Title because Point 1, and point 2. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Child prodigies should not prematurely go to college.\n","id":"0df891a1-0389-42e2-8f82-af3cfc5d3ac5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Our brain's optimism bias has been documented for some time. One example How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality And I believe this tendency is one thing that prevents us from acting rationally on long term problems. With things like climate change, everyone is waiting for technology to save us, rather than making sacrifices and economic political compromise. With retirement, we think we'll be fine with less or we expect to save a lot near the end of our working life. With antibiotics, we abuse them or fail to make appropriate investments for future development etc. This is a potentially devastating flaw in our collective thinking. And with each problem facing humanity, we should make a very serious effort to correct this irrational optimism that grips us.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human beings as a species are too optimistic, and this contributes to our poor response to problems that require long term solutions. As a species, we should focus more on tools and habits that circumvent this optimism.\n","id":"eeac06c3-e7ec-44cb-9a19-fdc7e0d1371c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Star Wars series going in the right direction under Disney?<|ARGUMENT|>The new movies in fact undermine significant plot points in the Star Wars Universe. If any random ship capable of hyperspace can take out a massive battleship by ramming it, none of the epic space battles make sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The new movies have not added anything meaningful to the universe. The sequel trilogy is a rehash of the original, and the stand alones are exploring characters we don't need the backstory of.\n","id":"f4dd9448-17d5-43fb-bca7-03f5516f0c72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Colonization of the Moon<|ARGUMENT|>\"Why the Moon will Never be Colonized.\" Phil for Humanity: \"The bigger problem with colonizing the Moon is the effects that low gravity will have on children. The human development process has evolved perfectly with Earth\u2019s high gravity. On the Moon, children would most likely develop severe and possibly fatal deformities under low gravity. For instance, their bones would be extremely brittle and break often. Their hearts would be very weak and never fully develop, as well as possibly all of their other muscles too. Children would literally grow to extreme heights that will cause severe complications on the spinal cord and digestive systems, because these organs have limited stretching capabilities. As a result, colonists on the Moon might not be able to have healthy children capable of living long enough to have children of their own.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children would not develop properly in low-gravity Moon colony\n","id":"ddc66923-6f83-4a00-af0c-64652937cad1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a maximum wage be introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>An inaccurate undervaluing from the state would lead to individuals being unwilling to perform jobs at their highest capacity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state cannot be trusted to accurately judge what maximum financial value individuals bring to their jobs.\n","id":"fb91d7bd-9390-4b40-bea0-f34b6775c852"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>A woman may decide to go topless to avoid the discomfort of wearing a bra or over form of breast covering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many reasons one might choose to go topless that do not involve sunbathing.\n","id":"9116867b-df89-4815-8547-05b6b095c868"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should homework be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents who have not received a formal education will not be able to provide the same quality of help as a parent that has.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The conditions and ability to do homework vary from family to family.\n","id":"edcebd7b-52d9-42d4-a676-976f4c8d69db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For most people it's just a chance to drink liquor out of a pale and paint your face at a full moon party, visit some tourist traps, get your picture taken with some actual traps, exploit some elephants and do a bit of commitment free sport fucking. It's a compulsory addition to any serious Facebook master's photo resume. This is trivializing a lot of people's experiences so I expect to get a fair amount of hopefully not hate but strong disagreement and growth is obviously subjective I'm sure many people feel like being a hedonist in another country is fundamentally different than being a hedonist in their own country. And because I don't like to be the person criticizing an idea without providing an alternative to be rightfully dissected and, if necessary, shit upon I would go to South East Asia to look for Reptiles and Amphibians, live on the beach in solitude and have no contact with anyone I knew for months to learn how to be self sufficient Gathering food, fishing etc. inb4 naive idealist, inb4 watched too much Ray Mears. some people can travel the world and see nothing, some people can travel around the block and see the world an approximation of a quote said by I don't know who that I'm sure one of you pedants knows more fully and correctly. Why am I wrong?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the South East Asian, generation Y right-of-passage trip, for most people, is just as vapid and unenriching an experience as going to Vegas or Cancun is.\n","id":"730535f3-89aa-4f1c-8a5f-db91ada7e312"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The inherent presence of purpose is necessary for any kind of creator to be involved. If there was a purpose at the origin of the universe, that's the fulcrum that the religious or creator argument rests. If there is no purpose, and it is a random event, that proves that there is no creator, simply an event that has chain reacted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unlike a painting there is little evidence that the universe has any overarching purpose.\n","id":"87feb476-7115-4fb9-a16f-40a40fca2064"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Bible be considered a historical document?<|ARGUMENT|>The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is an apocryphal text that has been omitted to ensure that people only to seek salvation from a higher power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dozens of verses which existed in earlier editions of the Bible have been omitted in more contemporary versions.\n","id":"b453dc0c-9b87-4031-b26e-a5eee330f5db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>No, they take no skill. I get that, but take that a level deeper. What difference does it make whether aiming skill is programmed into your cerebellum, or programmed into your PC? You get just as pwned by a masterclass sniper as you do by a kiddie with an aimbot so why does one make you angry and the other earn your praise? Because he's earned it, you say. By grinding away, burning aiming routines into the squishy stuff in his skull one synapse at a time? How, when it comes right down to it, is that a virtue? If someone uses a GPS instead of spending a few years memorizing the street map, is that contemptibly cheap of them? If not, then what's the difference? Don't get me wrong, I'm not condoning the use of aimbots. I'm just trying to come up with a rational objection to them, because all the ones I can think of seem kind of arbitrary. Please, someone come up with something satisfying.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Aimbots aren't actually unethical,\n","id":"38512a5e-1c8a-4970-9adc-3e4dac1d5d8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I was recently watching The Amazing Spider Man 2, and as a avid fan of the Spider Man comics, I was left scratching my head as to how the film decided to portray the villain, Electro. Here is a link to a wiki on the character Electro, with an image of what he looked like in the comics And here is a link to the wiki on the film adaptation of the character Electro which gives you an option to view both before an after he undertakes a body transformation As you can see, there is a huge difference. The film is based off an original Amazing Spider Man story arc from the 70s, and not the more modern look of Electro from the Ultimate Spider Man storyline. Of course film adaptations will never be an exact copy of the original, an I understand Hollywood films do need to alter things to make it more appealing to a modern audience. In the Wiki page I attached at the top on the origin story of Electro, it does include a section on the film adaptation, where it states Foxx revealed that the character was redesigned to be more grounded, and that the villain's classic yellow and green suit would be omitted in favor of a modern look. What this omitting of the classic costume for a more 'modern' look does is completely tarnishes the distinctive look we all associate with Electro. I get the old fashioned latex tights and huge great lighting bolt on his face may not be of everyone's taste, but completely changing the costume to one that resembles a completely different storyline to that of which the film is portraying is unfair in my point of view. We see it too with Green Goblin's modernized look from the green tights and purple accessories, but at least the actor portraying Green Goblin is of the same skin tone of the original. This got me thinking of where else I have seen this. Daredevil. It is easy to spot the huge bald headed man with a white suit as the villain, Kingpin. But, the 2003 film has Kingpin played by the late, great Michael Clarke Duncan, who if you didn't know, is of African American descent. This is no way a racial attack, or moaning 'why can't white guys play white guys and black guys play black guys', not at all. But I don't see the reasoning behind going completely the opposite to the original character's distinctive look that made them so classic? We see this again in the same film with the villain, Bullseye. For some reason they decided to make him a metalhead biker from Ireland with a huge scar on his forehead A far fetch from the suited baddy from the original comics. Am I just being too picky? Am I too emotionally attached to the original, classic look? Or am I refusing to adapt to the whole premise of modernizing a character's look for the silver screen? I decided to research instances of actors cast to play a character of a different culture to them, and came across this What is made clear from this slideshow is the amount of Caucasian actors playing minority cultures. Emma Stone depicting a character of Asian and Hawaiian descent, for example. Why is this necessary? Casting Scarlett Johansson as the main character of a manga series just makes it harder for actors of that culture to make it big if everyone portraying Asian characters aren't Asian No insult to Scarlett Johansson as an actor, but how much better would the film be if the main character actually resembled the original character in the manga series? But don't get me wrong, it's not just Caucasians playing Asians or Polynesians or whoever. There are examples of cultures not of Caucasian descent playing other cultures Michael B. Jordan, Afro American descent plays a Caucasian comic book character in Fantastic Four. Michael Clarke Duncan, Afro American descent plays a Caucasian comic book character in Daredevil. Morgan Freeman, Afro American descent plays a Caucasian White Irish character from a novel in Shawshank Redemption. Samuel L. Jackson, Afro American descent plays a Caucasian comic character in several MCU films. Idris Elba, Black British decent playing a Norse God The last one is the most annoying to me. It's laughable. I don't think the Germanic people had ever came across a Black person I could be completely wrong on that, my Germanic history is not great . There are of course a lot more examples, and I'm sure whitewashing is farm more common than a Black actor playing a Caucasian character. Am I being picky? Should we not value the importance of an original character and what makes them so distinctive just to optimize a box office success?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"casting an actor of a different culture to the original character or changing the costume design which makes them so distinctive is an insult to history of said character.\n","id":"9ebf275e-ab03-42a2-bdb3-e4b280f70c4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Critical Period Hypothesis CPH is a contested aspect of linguistic theory, and maintains that there is a critical or perhaps merely optimal period for language acquisition. By comparing critical periods for other faculties and looking at children who have missed this window, proponents have concluded that this age is the critical period to learn a language, and later life attempts to learn languages can never be as complete as this period. While I agree that not learning any language during this period affects one's ability to learn a language later in life as the structural capacity is not made , I reject the conclusion that you can't learn a language as completely as children do in their formative years. Quite simply, it is almost impossible and probably unethical to design an accurate experiment to test this correctly. To test this, you would have to take a newborn baby and an adult with absolutely zero exposure to a language presumably an exotic, complex one and track their respective progress for many years. However in order to isolate the variables, you would need to have the adult experience the same level of language immersion as the baby. The adult would have to live among the people, be cared for and catered to 24 hours a day, have a family who is committed to his her well being more so than their own, and that family would have to actively spend hours a day educating the adult in the language. In short, he she would need to be babied throughout the entire experiment. I think almost any adult would be better after 5 years than a 5 year old, 10 years than a 10 year old, etc. The difficulty of acquiring languages in adolescence and adulthood is often cited as evidence for the CPH, however I believe that it is quite simply that adolescents and adults have plenty of other stuff on their plates. Babies and toddlers don't. Their only means of communicating with other people is through the language they are struggling to learn, and therefore mastery of this language is of the utmost importance. In order to change my view you will have to convince me that the aspects of CPH that I dispute are misunderstood by me, or that there is sufficient experimental evidence showing that there are neurological reasons why given identical environments, a cognitively normal adult wouldn't learn a language faster than a baby given nearly any timeline. Note Regarding ages, let's set my adult's age at 30 or so, therefore discounting most factors of cognitive decline in old age, but still being definitively in adulthood.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Critical Period Hypothesis in Linguistics is false. Any adult with normal cognitive faculties could learn any language more completely than any newborn given the same environment.\n","id":"fcaff370-400b-4c56-bc6e-f0363b4ebfbc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The high school system in the US serves mainly as college prep. It's unrealistic and honestly just ridiculous to expect all high schoolers to go on to to higher education. It does not properly serve students who will be going directly into the workforce. I believe this plays a role in how many students drop out and unemployment rates for young people. Sure, there are some trade programs you may be able to get into. The problem is there is that these programs have limited availability and only serve a handful of careers. For this reason, I am disregarding trade programs in my argument. Here's my proposed solution High school would have two paths, college and career like the game of life . Coursework would be the same for 9th and 10th grade. The usual core classes For 11th grade, you get to choose either a college or career pathway. I feel this is the most appropriate time to allow students to make this decision. With how it is currently, students are expected to start their college search in 11th grade and have the option of dropping out. The career path would consist of classes teaching the essential skills needed to find work and become independent. Example classes would be Job searching and interviewing Basic computer literacy word, excel, etc budgeting and money management courses specific to different industries like food safety, customer service interactions, etc. part time employment would count as a certain amount of school credit Some core subjects would still be required but in a form where it focuses more on real life skills, like an English class that is centered around resume writing, writing professional emails, etc. If after a career path student graduates they change their mind and want to go to college, they still can. Plenty of students who drop out still go on to get a college degree, they just need to take some extra courses. I feel this is the best way to prepare young people going into the workforce and increase graduation rates. But I'm sure there must be a flaw with this plan otherwise it probably would be implemented. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High schools should have a career path option for those who aren't planning to go to college\n","id":"7e74c1ea-082e-431f-bf26-20f1cefe70cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Portland, Oregon is one example of a protest against a hateful, intolerant man Pres. Trump devolved into a violent riot. The Berkeley Riots that were in response to a speech being put on my Milo AKA, words vs. violence . The inaugural protests which now can be called the inaugural riots . The list is extensive. This entire division is exacerbated by the fact that left leaning media outlets preemptively claim that the riots are kicked off by conservatives or right wingers and when the dust settles, all video evidence and testimonials indicate otherwise. To change my view, I believe stats, numbers, and studies 2010 that indicate on a mass political level that the claim in the header isn't true. The intolerance part is particular, in this case, to when violence is the answer to an idea or statement that the violent perpetrator s do not agree with. Violence is self explanatory violent speech is disqualified . Edit Receiving a number of downvotes gt the number of arguments against my position is not helping the argument against this position I have taken. Edit 2 Downvoting comments that are factually true detracts from the benefits of open discussion. Non violent Evidence in this entire thread someone disagrees with facts being presented to them, they take a negative action toward it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The left and liberals are the majority perpetrators of intolerance and violence in the USA.\n","id":"76487cb0-4f3a-4b4f-8dad-33dddf494f80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>The claim that a 'will' existed, sans matter, or pre the cause of the universe and the matter present in our observable space time is inconsistent with general observations and science.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Will is an aspect of the mind. The mind is \"roughly identical with the brain or reducible to physical phenomena such as neuronal activity\".\n","id":"b79c9507-c193-4c8d-a79e-4628a89b10cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should not consume the works of artists who have been accused or convicted of serious crimes<|ARGUMENT|>Punishing someone just because he's been accused of something is highly immoral and quite often worse than the crime itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This does away with due process, only convicted people should be punished by society.\n","id":"38347765-8c80-4ea5-a39c-da631a41d29e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Granted, it has been a while since I lived in the Bay Area, but I am very familiar with the neighborhood where Reddit currently resides. I am also quite familiar with Daly City. While Daly City isn't nearly as fun and exciting as South of Market, it is still a decent location, and it has a BART station. Contrast this with so many other tech companies that take up in the South Bay points south of the Peninsula into the 650 and 408 area codes . Sorry Apple, but Cupertino sucks. Google, the only advantage to being in Mountain View is maybe the proximity to the Shoreline Amphitheatre. And these cities aren't even BART accessible yet, for the next 300 years . Daly City, in my opinion, represents a smart financial move for the company. But because I sure as hell love the City and SoMa in particular,  about the reasons Reddit should just move to Daly City.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Reddit should have followed Yishan's suggestion and moved the company to Daly City\n","id":"0615170d-006d-4276-b7cf-730c026757a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The USE of Science in Culture is a form of religion.<|ARGUMENT|>These studies cover reaction time, brain activity relationships with arbitrary stakes, Eg., \"Press a button when you hear a tone\". Even if we grant their legitimacy, they do not in any way suggest that this phenomenon could be generalized to more complex decisions with real world stakes, Eg., \"should I marry this person?\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are flaws with all these studies, both in methodology and the interpretation of the results.\n","id":"c7fb079d-0f6f-4fdc-8fa8-5d8eabc74fd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>lt humblebrag gt As you may have guessed by the title, I am often regarded as a good baker because I am able to consistently make food which tastes good. When I tell people about my talent I am often met with awe and praise because according to them, baking is hard and they have never been good at it I posit that people who say this are simply bad at following instructions because, as long as you have a good recipe and follow the instructions to a T, the result will be tasty. I am not good at baking necessarily, I am good at following directions. A few recipes often regarded as difficult which came out very tasty on my first try bagels, macarons, kouign amann, sourdough, baguette tasted great but didn't look pretty because I don't have a steam oven, but that's just me being ill equipped . lt humblebrag gt The main problem people who try to bake make is substitution errors. If the recipe says to use 1 cup of butter, use 1 cup of butter. Don't just substitute margarine willy nilly because it is not the same and it will fuck up your recipe. Similarly, granulated sugar powdered sugar extra fine sugar. They are all different things and one should absolutely not be substituted. The same goes for damn near every ingredient. I cannot count the amount of times I have seen comments on recipes which say something like, I ran out of sugar so I just used some honey and the recipe did not come out nearly sweet enough. 1 10. No That's not how baking works. DO WHAT THE RECIPE SAYS A small point which I would like to make is that sometimes measuring errors do happen and you measure 1tbsp of salt instead of 1tsp by accident. It's okay if this happens once in a blue moon, but if these errors are happening frequently, then you really have a problem with reading. This also goes for techniques and instruments used in baking. To beat is not to mix in and to mix in is not to incorporate. They are different things and if you just add an egg to your recipe instead of beating it first then you will mess up the result. If you just pour all your flour into your recipe at once and mix in when the directions say to incorporate it, then you have messed up and your result will be sub optimal. As for baking methods, in my opinion, if a recipe says to bake at 350 degrees then you bake it at 350 degrees. You do not use convection at 325 no matter what Cheryl said was okay. Convection is fundamentally different and will produce a different result. Some people may disagree with me, but I firmly believe that unless the recipe says that 325 on convection is okay, you absolutely must bake at 350 normal mode. The final thing I would like to address is being ill equipped. This isn't entirely the fault of the baker if they just have an impulse to make something quick and fun, but if you want to consider yourself as a hobby baker then get some useful equipment. You don't need a 500 standing mixer or every tool which would be in a professional kitchen, but at least have some basic metal baking containers, some sil pats, a cooling rack, and some good measuring spoons cups. If you're using low quality tools then you will get a low quality result. Same goes for if you start a cupcake recipe but find out you don't have cupcake paper. Spraying the muffin tin with oil will work, but you'd have gotten better cupcakes with the paper. Bottom line, use the right tools. Admitted shortcomings in my view The food I make does not look amazing 100 of the time, making the food you make look pretty is a talent skill which I do admire, but this post is focusing solely on taste. I'm not saying that looks don't matter, but taste is more important. Bad recipes happen. I do not claim that everything that I have ever made has been amazing. But, the vast majority of non tasty foods I have made have been a direct result of bad recipes. I know this because I have retried some foods that haven't come out well using different recipes and they have been much better. Somewhat in line with 2, some recipes have bad instructions. For example, recipes with different items in their ingredient lists to those which are in the actual recipe. This also happens, and I blame it mostly on the recipe writers. Once you have made a recipe 2 3 times and have the basics of it down then I encourage experimentation just to keep it fun and maybe improve on the original recipe. This really is the most fun of baking for me and a lot of people, but you absolutely have to have the basics down before you do this or else you may waste hours of your time. Baking is about having fun, but following directions isn't always fun and can be confusing and frustrating. Ultimately do what is most fun to you, but I have the most fun tasting the finished result and it's worth any stress which I might experience while making it if the finished product is tasty. BAKING IS NOT THE SAME AS COOKING Baking is a procedural process and cooking is a skill in my opinion. Cooking relies heavily on improvisation which isn't really as important in baking. I believe that one can be a good baker without being a good cook. The only skill being a good baker requires is reading comprehension.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Baking tasty food is easy and anyone who has a hard time at it is simply ill-equipped or bad at following instructions.\n","id":"a6796a71-c597-4708-810f-2e658acdefd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think Woodrow Wilson was wrong to intervene in World War I for three principal reasons The war was brutally horrible and it was easily forseeable that mass death of American soldiers would result from intervention. And indeed over 100,000 American soldiers died in the war. While this was not large as compared to the major combatants, it is still an objectively large number of Americans. The stated reason for intervention, German submarine warfare, was ludicrous. Wilson's demands against the Germans involved not firing on vessels with Americans aboard, even if those vessels flew the flags of enemy foreign powers, and even if they carried munitions. Those demands were objectively unreasonable and the only reason to make them is looking for an excuse to go to war. Wilson had effectively promised the American people he would not intervene. Campaigning for re election in 1916, Wilson's slogan was he kept us out of war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States was wrong to intervene in World War I\n","id":"0899315e-a8ce-4cb5-99fb-3ada47d8aa65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am going to apply this to why it is beneficial to businesses because that is what I am most familiar with but it could apply to many other aspects of law. The decisions made in previous cases are often reversed and applied to current cases. I believe this is destructive to businesses that operate within a country because they need to be able to have a reliable set of rules of what they can and can't do within a country. If a court decides in a case that a previous rule was wrong and changes it when they come to a verdict, they are basically pulling the rug out from underneath the business that was following the rules. If I were running a business, knowing and following every law, code, and rule would not protect me from losing a lawsuit and being held liable for damages. I find this unjust and it would limit what I want to do as a business within a country. If a court is going to change a law, the old law should still apply to the current case and the new law will then apply from that point on. This ensures that businesses that follow the rules will not be punished for their actions but will still allow for laws to change with the times.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that when the courts change a law as a result of a court case, the old law should still apply to that case.\n","id":"8b0fb907-c4e2-44ce-b04e-a52a4eba03dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I remember hearing a quote somewhere, along the lines of If you saw an anthill at the side of the road, you would simply ignore it, as opposed to showing it your cellphone, and saying, Look at the technology we bring you or something similar. The origins of this quote escape me, and I'm just ad libbing, but I feel it brings up a good point. Say you are a member of a type 2 or above Kardashevian civilisation. You can freely explore on a galactic or even intergalactic level. Now assume that life in the universe is fairly abundant, your civilisation can count thousands of different planets that harbour many type 0 civilisations. Much like how we on earth could count thousands of beetle species, for example. Now on an individual interest, you may be fascinated with these 'primitive' type 0 civilisations, but you know that as a collective they pose no real interest or threat to your civilisation. Imagine trying to convince your countries government to put massive funding into researching beetles and their lives, and how you could even learn from them, it would never work. Essentially the view I'd like changing is I feel we give ourselves a heightened sense of purpose or worth within the universe, and I don't blame us for feeling that way. I just don't think that the Intergalactic Commonwealth of Civilisations of Andromeda would really think any different between the Humans on Earth or the Aquamen of Europa or any other type 0 civilisation. Until we can actually get to a level closer to a type 2 or above would they ever take any interest in us, since we're just their beetles. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If it is true that aliens exist, and have the technology and civility to communicate with other civilisations, we are to them what common insects are to us.\n","id":"ea12586c-b52d-4240-9b11-0f3ed19903c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>Blacks are able to create a sense of solidarity by using an economic structure that creates economic prosperity for all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black worker cooperatives can be used to fight institutional racism.\n","id":"883a7562-f483-49b8-b122-ecc5c8f3bdbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should medical research embrace racial differences in treatment efficacy?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2005, Sheehan et al. found that 17% of surveyed authors of clinical drug trials reported personally knowing of fabrication in research occurring over the previous 10 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Studies show that it is very common because most researchers - who are aware that data has been falsified - fail to report incidents of fraud.\n","id":"1d018851-ffba-4d29-8631-350e8a6da4d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my opinion, the song and dance that you have to do at the end of a basketball game is counterproductive to measuring which team plays best. Having a set score limit forces both teams to play offense and defense to the best of their ability throughout the entirety of the game, because every score at any time in the game would matter and matter equally. While it may be concerning that close games are decided by only one point, a rule could be that a team must win by two or three points like in table tennis. Another concern may be that games would last for varying durations, but in looking at some of the recent NCAA games most of the games ended with the winner somewhere in the range of about 50 80 points, so an end goal of say, 65, would neither add or subtract too much time from either extrema.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A better method of ending a basketball game is at a specific score rather than by time.\n","id":"25907e3d-3643-48c7-96e8-3bc997cb3944"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should we decide whether a single-winner voting system is fair?<|ARGUMENT|>In talking about questions outside the voting system proper but related to it, questions of who may vote and how difficult it is made, and what measures to use to forestall outright cheating, people repeat a value \"one person, one vote\" originally \"one man, one vote\". This is an important value, but the spirit of it is an equal vote. One could ask Socratically, \"what good is 'one person, one vote' if the votes are not equally weighed?\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"EQUAL VOTE Everyone should have the right to the same voting power as everyone else, though they may choose not to use it.\n","id":"92404905-2a5a-4615-ae92-6a98924b7855"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A not infrequent topic on many male lifestyle fashion subreddits and around the web and offline is the topic of pocket knives. The advice from these sources is invariably along the lines of 'every man should carry a pocket knife', 'A pocket knife is an essential male accessory' etc, etc. I am amazed by the numbers of responses to such articles and threads where the commenters state that they always carry a knife, with many saying they carry multiple knives, couldn't live without them, etc. I have done some cursory research, and the same reasons seem to crop up again and again for why you should carry a knife For opening packaging For eating apples As an impromptu screwdriver pry bar Hunting Camping use animal skinning firewood cutting etc Ambiguous comments to 'handyness' Comments stating that pocket knives are useless for self defence, but then saying, yeah you can use them for self defence I'll give my thoughts on each of these If I ever have packaging to open, it's because I've received a parcel at home, where I have access to an abundance of knives scissors stanley blades etc. For those working in warehouses, or when you have packaging to open on a regular basis as part of your employment, your employer will provide boxcutters and the tools you need for your job, and if they're not, they should be, I'm sure their insurance doesn't cover some guy whipping his own knife out his pocket. For eating apples, the only benefit I've been able to find online advocating for this is that it 'looks manly' what is the issue with eating apples by taking a bite out of it? This one seems like a stretch to me. Like people grasping for justification for carrying a weapon. As an impromptu tool If I ever need a tool, I have correct tools available. I have a full toolbox at home for any and all DIY needs. And any tools that may be required in the workplace are provided. I can think of no occasion in the past several years where I needed a screwdriver or pry bar, and I was not in a position to get my toolbox, or use a workplace tool. Hunting Camping use This one I can actually see to an extent. I fully accept that if you're heading out hunting, you should probably have a skinning knife. Or if you're trekking through the jungle, odds are you'll need a machete. Or if camping you might want a wood saw for firewood etc. These are all justifications for having the correct tool for the activity or job at hand. Yet I routinely see this being used as a justification for carrying a pocket knife everyday. There is a disconnect here. The 'not self defence' reason This honestly reads to me like trying to placate naysayers like myself. Trying to say 'it's not really a knife, don't worry about it' and then adding a nudge and a wink at the end 'I suppose you could stab someone with it but lets not think about that' The ambiguous comments about 'handiness' or 'usefulness' are never quantified beyond the reasons listed above. This seems to me to be an admission that even those carrying knives know there's really no reason to do so. This, and the 'not self defence' reasons are those that make carrying a knife seem juvenile and pathetic to me. The overriding impression I get from knife carriers is that they like it because it makes them feel powerful and 'manly'. To me, it looks like feelings of inadequacy covered up with a sharp blade. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I see no reason for anyone to carry a pocket knife, and it seems juvenile to me.\n","id":"25ffe0cb-56dd-4e35-9182-ae2686cf4823"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>The game Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl delves into an alternate history where a second explosion goes off in the exclusion zone around the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, bending the place even further out of shape.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video games can educate gamers by exploring historical counterfactuals instead of portraying historical accuracy which acts as a harmful justification for fewer female characters.\n","id":"a3a86f93-46c9-4be9-b5e1-b782962c0676"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't understand why people would enjoy watching anything with other humans they can relate to suffering and dying. I just don't get it. This goes for horror movies, r watchpeopledie, or just some TVshow with abnormal violence like my beloved games of thrones or Walking Dead never watched though . I can't stand watching a scene when someone is suffering for free , but so far in my life I felt like the only one feeling disturbed in those moment so far, everyone I know has no problem watching. But I keep thinking I am the normal one and people should not enjoy it sounds weird but I am not forbidding people to do anything. People should not enjoy drinking bleach. But if you want to drink a full bottle I have no problem with that . On the front page right now, there is a r WTF link with 4k upvote or score 3972 Man Still Alive After being Cut in half by train NSFL . I think you would have to pay me something like 1k to have me click on this link. But 4k people clicking on it and recommending it to others , I don't understand. Whatever gore picture is behind this, is it fun ? What is the motivation, the enjoyment ? I guess I should be a bit more clear, why would people choose to feel fear like in horror movie, from which windows is the killer going to come from ? or feel sick let's see some dead body in a bad condition but with blood everywhere when they could avoid that ? Isn't that madness psychopath demeanor ? EDIT Thanks to everyone which is taking part. I am really trying to understand something which is not in my knowledge zone. PS The asylum thing is of course exagerated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who enjoy horror movies are crazy and should be in asylums.\n","id":"3acb831e-49cd-4497-8aee-bece75f37e2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Education that Promotes a Certain Faith or Religion be Abolished in Schools?<|ARGUMENT|>A survey found that 75% of young gay people have experienced direct homophobic bullying in faith schools. Seven out of ten of these bullied pupils said the bullying had an impact on their work and performance at school, and half of those bullied have skipped school because of it. Stonewall guide, p. 4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Faith-based education preaches arguments that conflict with modern notions of sexual education and gender equality. This can have wide ranging effects on the health and emotional wellbeing of the students.\n","id":"c95b17d9-7ab7-4164-960f-f2d52990076b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As Hillary has become more likely to win the election and the Democrats have started to open up a large enough lead in downballot races to make taking the House a realistic possibility, Hillary's campaign has started to redirect resources to downballot races. However, it is late enough in the election that it is possible that this will not have the effect that redirecting these resources earlier would have had. Obviously, Hillary needed to secure a lead in the presidential race before focusing on downballot elections, but there is 1 state that she has spent a lot of time and money on that stands out as a state that she could have ignored in favor of helping downballot candidates or spending money in other swing states that are a better fit for her campaign. That state is Ohio, for 2 reasons if you just want to hear the short version, skip to the end . Ohio is the second most Trump leaning swing state after Iowa. Despite his struggles with the state GOP, he will almost certainly do much better there than he does nationally Even with a normal candidate, Ohio is usually one of the more Republican leaning swing states, and Trump's message is tailor made for it. The state Democratic Party is in shambles. Ohio ranks as the state that has the 13th lowest percentage of residents with a college education in the country. 81.1 of the state is non Hispanic white. The Republicans had their convention there. It is just a terrible fit for Hillary's campaign, Hillary could easily win without it, and the resources that her campaign is spending on it would have been far better spent on states that are more critical to her ability to win the election. Usually, when a campaign is spending money on a state that it doesn't need to win, it is to help downballot candidates. That is not the case with Ohio. Ohio has no competitive House elections this year. Neither chamber of the Ohio State Legislature has a chance of flipping this year. Other than the Senate race in Ohio, there are no statewide elections in Ohio this year. and that Senate race has been leaning heavily Republican since mid August So basically, even if Clinton wins Ohio, it will mean nothing. In contrast, if she spent that money in Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Colorado, Michigan, Virginia, Iowa, Arizona, Montana, Minnesota, New York, California, New Jersey, Maine, New Mexico, Alaska, Utah, Illinois, Washington, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Nebraska, Texas, or Kansas, she'd be helping out downballot candidates more, because there is at least one close gubernatorial, House, or Senate race in all of those states or a close race to control a state legislative chamber. By spending money on Ohio instead of in areas where downballot candidates need help, Hillary's campaign is weakening the Democratic Party's efforts to succeed in downballot elections. Basically, Ohio contributes nothing to Hillary's campaign. If she wins it, it probably would mean that she had already gotten 270 electoral votes from other states, and if she loses it, it is still relatively easy for her to win. Even if she does win Ohio, it won't help any downballot candidates win their elections. Winning Ohio would just be a meaningless cherry on top of a Hillary victory, and the resources that it takes to win Ohio would thus be better spent on states that Hillary needs to win or where downballot candidates need support.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hillary's campaign should have redirected its resources from Ohio in mid-August.\n","id":"6a0cc7c6-c42d-446b-b880-ee7167fbc52b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>Prison itself should be a deterrent, especially for violent crimes. Those who crave physical power are unlikely to be phased by a prison system that provides an environment where they can be dominant, and supplies free education, free food, free rooms, and conjugal visits. In a number of places that's an upgrade, not a deterrent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Punishing criminals is a proven effective way to dissuade prisoners from committing future crimes, as well as a deterrent to would-be criminals worried about punishment.\n","id":"5123ec89-6809-46c7-ab64-c2ef3c6f2515"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think this for 3 reasons. it's bad for business a lot of businesses have very thin profit margins to keep items at their lowest cost Kroger has a 1 profit margin to keep things at their lowest cost . Smaller businesses would crumble. These companies wouldn't be able to keep their costs low and swallow the increase employment costs without increasing prices It would hurt marginalized groups A 15 minimum wage would create a barrier for less privileged people to actually find employment. I believe that that if we're in a period when jobs are scarce, people who speak little English and don't have a strong educational background will have a really hard time convincing potential employers that they are worth 15 an hour It would actually hurt lower income workers more than aiding them the median wage in the US is 16.71. By increasing the minimum wage to 15 would make the minimum wage 90 of the median. By increasing the cost for labor, the demand is reduced, which could lead to massive layoffs. I do think the government should help the poor, but I believe that increasing the minimum wage is a bad way of going about it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would do more harm than good\n","id":"da47bbf9-48ac-4ea3-92c2-bbbe5fede5ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Godfather tells a single story, centered around Michael Corleone inheriting the family mafia business from his dad, with memorable subplots along the way, all of which compliment the story perfectly. I've watched this movie over and over and found it engaging on repeat viewings. The Godfather Part II has two plots that alternate throughout its runtime. One of the plots, told in flashback, is about how Michael's dad Vito Corleone escaped from Sicily in his youth and made his start as a mafia man in America. I find this story rather bland and monotonous. Robert de Niro, who plays Vito, gave a fairly unmemorable performance even though he won an Oscar for it. The other plot is has something to do with Michael facing off against another gangster who's conspiring to do him in. A lot of things happen and the set pieces are on a much grander scale, yet the plot is far less compelling and focused than in the first movie. This sequel did have better music than the first movie not to say the first didn't have a great score as well , the cinematography and locations are ambitious, and the scene at the end where Michael order his brother killed for betraying him is immensely powerful, but these individual elements are I think much stronger than the film as a whole. I've never had a particular desire to rewatch The Godfather Part II after the first viewing, I'd rather just listen to the score CD which I think was the best thing in the movie. If you think the second movie was better, as I've heard many people on the internet claim, convince me why that is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Godfather Part II is not a better movie than The Godfather.\n","id":"23b05d78-e2f1-4605-9236-f9bf00de4687"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Total cost of welfare is around $1 trillion annually in the United States. The UBI, if implemented based on the poverty line, would cost more than $3 trillion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Depending on the size of the UBI, even liquidating all existing social welfare programs will not be enough to cover its cost.\n","id":"47e614b4-78a8-42b5-82ea-21737ad15320"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Scientific assumptions are not taken lightly. It's like how we assume x+y+z = x+y+z, the assumptions are well defined unless it is the assumption being tested.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scientific assumptions function either to be tested or as something widely accepted by the scientific community.\n","id":"995df092-bd86-43eb-933a-e726afba270c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Resolved: That on balance, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has improved academic achievement in the United States<|ARGUMENT|>\"State-level tests tend to improve observed achievement on an independent measure, and therefore, increasing the number of grades in which state tests are given may improve achievement more.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NCLB state testing is done more widely with greater effect.\n","id":"633373aa-31f6-4f5f-8383-5765e5b066dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been doing some reading about how transgender female people are competing in women sports events. In the majority of cases, they tend to do pretty well. Unsurprisingly. However, there's a big difference between barely winning and totally dominating, which is what seems to be happening. I linked a story about 2 transgender sprinters competing at state in track and field they won first and second by an enormous margin, which is a theme that holds when it comes to the issue as a whole. x200B If a transgender woman wants to compete in womens sports even as early as a high school level, you effectively have biological females competing against a trained male athlete on hormone therapy. I've met some incredibly talented female athletes in life so far, and there are seperate male and female sporting events for good reason it keeps the playing field fair for both sexes. If Usain Bolt suddenly decided to undergo gender transition therapy, started taking hormones, the whole nine yards, he would still be the most dominant sprinter by a very long shot. His biologically female counterparts would stand no chance whatsoever at getting first place. x200B <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"allowing trans people to compete in womens events will only marginalize women\n","id":"a5aba8e9-c272-43a9-869e-3cb891da8969"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Judges be Elected or Appointed?<|ARGUMENT|>In order to maintain a quota, some seats would have to be reserved for candidates from whichever background the quota is trying to promote. This would be perceived as discriminatory against those not in that protected background, making Affirmative Action even less likely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is politically difficult to have a mandate for diversity when judges are elected.\n","id":"a7c141b8-34dd-492d-851d-f68fc334e788"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To explain a bit more, adults should be allowed to enter into civil unions with other adults to share finances and gain the legal and economic advantages that are currently available to people who are married. The gender of these people should be immaterial and there should be no requirement that the relationship is romantic or that sex is involved in any way. There should be various riders one can add to a Civil Union Contract so that if the reason you are entering a union is because of a romantic relationship, there are clauses for leaving it due to cheating, if that is what you decide when you enter the union. There should be various other riders that can be added for various situations. Marriage should be a completely different thing that is controlled by religious non governmental organizations or individuals entirely. It should have no legal connection to Civil Unions, although a religion can of course refuse to marry people who do not plan to enter into a civil union, as is their right under religious freedom. Likewise, if 2 people or more, there is no reason Civil Unions should only be allowed between two people, though additional legal rules would be needed want to have religious laws as part of their Civil Union Contract, these would be other available riders, as people entering into a contract together can include whatever requirements they want. If religions don't want to marry two people, they don't have too and nobody can make them do it and the courts have literally no say at all because religious marriage would not be a legal issue. This removes any issues regarding who can get married and allows for adults not in a romantic relationship to have a long lasting platonic relationship with another adult and gain the legal benefits currently only available to married couples. It even would allow people in a non romantic relationship to raise children together if they so desired. x200B Edit To those asking what the point is, marriage is used as a huge political lever by special interest groups, and be removing marriage from being a legal and political issue, you remove that lever. Less political levers for special interest groups better. Edit 2 Made some changes bold and strikethrough to clarify that ANYONE could hold a marriage ceremony, not just a religious group, as marriage would no longer be a legal definition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marriage should be completely removed from all law books and replaced with Civil Unions which do not require romance.\n","id":"62904b79-377f-47d7-a116-f662695f30f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is aid killing Africa?<|ARGUMENT|>Though Moyo suggests banning aid completely, she also proposes borrowing from bond markets rather than international governments and institutions. The bond market allows for the buying and selling of debt securities, with no credit risks and higher interest rates. Such an arrangement suits Africa as aid lending has become too relaxed; more money is lent when a country defaults. Capital markets will not take the same attitude, which will help Africa to control its finances. The global economic downturn presents a valuable opportunity for plans to be reviewed. With a shortage of capital all round, Africa would benefit from resorting to market-driven interventions that have impacted hugely upon the economies of other countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The global economy in its current state facilitates this move\n","id":"88383d8c-0b30-477c-84bc-5e73863562bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you choose to drink alcohol, you are responsible. Now if someone slips something in your drink, tricks you against your will into drinking, coerces you into drinking, or even gives you alcohol that is far more alcoholic than you are led to believe then yes that is different. But if you choose to start drinking, and if you choose to continue drinking, then you are responsible. Think of it like this. Suppose you notice your car has lit it's Check Engine light and is showing signs that it is on the verge of break down. You choose not to do anything about it and you choose to continue driving the car in spite of the signs. If later, you get into an accident where in which your car's faulty internals were at fault, you cannot blame the car for the accident. You chose to bring that car out onto the road knowing the risks, and by extension you assume responsibility for those risks. Same deal here. Alcohol impairs your capacity to make rational decisions. If you are choosing to drink, then you are accepting an impairment of your capacity to make rational decisions, and you are by extension accepting the risks involved. Either you understand this about alcohol in which case you have no excuse , or you do not understand this about alcohol in which case you do not have the knowledge and maturity needed to be a responsible drinker at all. If you make bad decisions while drunk, you are responsible for them. You need to do some combination of learn how to control yourself while you are drunk, cut back on your drinking, do not drink in public, do not drink around strangers, do not drink at all, etc You choose to get drunk, you choose to accept the risk of cognitive ability impairment, you are responsible for said risks. You cannot blame alcohol, you cannot blame the social atmosphere it's hard to think you have the maturity and responsibility needed to drink if you cannot resist peer pressure , you cannot blame anyone but yourself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Drunkenness is not an excuse for bad behavior\n","id":"57c9b0f4-135d-488b-b553-afc6700ca9d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A few hours ago I asked a question in another subreddit, 'Why is denial of voting rights considered oppression to women, but conscription is not considered oppression of men?' That's not the question I want to discuss here. I just want to establish that this idea has been on my mind for a long time and it gnaws at me. It's not just voting and the draft. I fully accept that women have faced historical oppression. But by any gender neutral definition of that word, men have as well. Conscription, normalization of circumcision, 90 of workplace deaths, a majority of the homeless, less money spent on their health care, 70 of suicides, 60 harsher sentences than women for the same crimes, 99 of those executed by the state, barely any aid for domestic violence, our courts will not prosecute a woman for raping a man, etc. etc. etc. The point is not to argue whether these individual ideas consist of oppression. Only that, I am very certain that if these were things systematically happening to women, they WOULD be called oppression. So why the hell not for men? At first I thought it was obvious feminists promoted the idea of women's historical oppression, so they can be blamed for turning a blind eye to the other half of the species. And I do believe that's the case. If you are in a position to report on two crimes, and choose instead to only report one, that is immoral. But even then, shouldn't there be pushback? Gays, trans people, religious groups and ethnic groups have rallied passionately to have their suffering recognized by the world. If men experience oppression as well, why do we as a culture not acknowledge it, when there ought to be half the world shouting for us to do so? And just now, I think I found the missing piece. We don't call it oppression when it happens to men, because men will not call it oppression. I suddenly remembered the innumerable times I've seen a circumcised man insist vehemently that he wasn't mutilated. I remembered the number of times I've seen men condemn the very idea of a men's right's movements, saying things like, Men don't have any issues And I connected that with other innumerable stories I've heard like, Our Dad was too proud to go to the hospital, even when the rest of us in the family knew he was dying. I remembered the common image of the overstressed man suffering in silence until one day he hangs himself in his bedroom. I remember male politicians telling the most transparent lies imaginable to avoid conceding an opponent's point. I remembered the stereotype of men not stopping to ask directions. Even if male oppression were ten times more blatant, we as a culture would not call it that, because for a man to admit oppression means admitting victimization, which means admitting weakness. And the traditional masculine identity is consumed by a profound insecurity that he must preserve the illusion of invulnerability at all times. Or else he is not a man. This is much, much older than feminism. Perhaps, even IF feminism had defined oppression as applying to both genders, it would have been rejected. Guys would literally rather die than admit to weakness, because our concept of man is tied directly to strength and utility. but this is all coming off the top of my head in a white hot blaze. I HAVE NO IDEA IF I'M COMPLETELY FULL OF SHIT ON THIS. The thought's too new and seems too simple. Tear it to shreds if you can.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The biggest reason men are not considered historically oppressed is men themselves.\n","id":"2de9daf8-04fd-40a6-a460-620ef264717c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Wordpress is better suited for a company blog than Medium?<|ARGUMENT|>On Medium, the company doesn't appear to own the site, which can cause visitor confusion \"where am I?\", \"where is the company site?\", \"why is this here not there?\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Used as a blog, Medium works in an unconventional way that visitors may find unfamiliar and inconvenient, compared to a typical blog.\n","id":"36298888-fad2-4c07-b346-ff5d629322c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should fracking be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A report by the UK Energy Research Centre noted that significant shale gas production in the UK was unlikely to get underway until next decade and would not reproduce the type of energy self-sufficiency that occurred in America.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some states, such as England, are unable to produce enough gas from fracking to impact the price or their dependency on overseas oil\n","id":"171979ac-2ef3-42eb-bb07-546416d91d08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The teleological argument, which states that unintelligent objects cannot be ordered unless they are done so by an intelligent being, which means that there must be an intelligent being to move objects to their ends: God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Well-known are five logical arguments regarding the existence of God by St. Thomas Aquinas, which are also called \"The Quinque vi\u00e6\n","id":"34f1ea65-0807-41bb-9724-12efeb49294b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The whole negative tone that is associated with swearing is not as bad as people think it is. As long as you're not being demeaning to another individual swearing should be completely okay. For example if a five year old says oh fuck my toe . It is the same thing as saying oh fudge my toe . Using swear words as adjectives in a method that is not demeaning should be allowed. using swear words in a way that demeans another person Society race religion Etc, shows that swear words are not the problem it's the fact that the person using the swear words does not understand that being demeaning is not okay. The concept of swear words being something that we should not say is just weird. Who invented a word that should not be said. Society has declared these specific words as not okay to be said but you're allowed to bleep them out and replace them with identical sounding words like fudge. when a parent says to a child do not say that word they are telling that child that that word is not okay. When really they should be telling the child the way they reacted is not okay. so please help me understand I am going to be starting a family soon and so far my point of view on the subject is leaning towards the fact that the child can say the words but as long as they have control over their emotions and they are not demeaning or hurting another individual and then it is okay. Here are some examples where I find the situation okay The Grand Canyon is fucking huge Oh shit my toe really hurts In context if I said the Grand Canyon is so huge the message is the same but the person who said fucking huge, is seen as a lesser. Why do we restrict these words when they could just be used as adjectives adverbs Etc. Here are some examples of what I do not find okay Fuck you Eat shit There is also a conversation to we had when words that mean something else all of a sudden become a swear word. For example the word bitch means a female dog. I strongly believe Society needs to change their view on the way that we decide to use words and rather should be more concerned about the way we use those words.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Swearing should be allowed in todays society with no negitive view.\n","id":"7fbd9c34-9507-465e-87ab-5816aed2089b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Protesting in Front of Abortion Clinics Be Prohibited?<|ARGUMENT|>Uttering threats and Slander are forms of speech which are unprotected and illegal. Therefor, there exists precedent to suggest that \"Freedom of Speech\" is not inalienable and is valued against its infringement upon others' rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free speech is an instrumental right. Free speech should not be valued at the point at which it encroaches on other people's rights.\n","id":"325f57c1-10b3-4482-bac4-a3b3899dcfa9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Addressing the deficiencies of identical machines in a fleet oftentimes requires an identical solution for each machine, which is less often the case when it comes to a group of heterogeneous individuals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Addressing the deficiencies of an identical fleet of AKMs is more cost-effective than addressing individual deficiencies in groups of human soldiers.\n","id":"009bd9d4-c391-42a9-aa5b-afd69a17b9a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Teachers Be Allowed To Wear Religious Symbols At School?<|ARGUMENT|>Some religious groups for whom religious symbols are very important may feel that they have to make a choice between the teaching profession and their religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banning religious symbols will discriminate against religions whose symbols constitute religious practise rather than just symbolism.\n","id":"460dbcc2-8efa-4580-b0ab-8e26b7c34e56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>Muhammad Ali is considered to be a role model. In the 1960s, he was vilified for refusing to be drafted into the military to fight in Vietnam. Over time, American society realized it was wrong and opinions changed. The same thing is likely to happen with Kaepernick.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Role models are often criticized for their actions at first, but honored later.\n","id":"afd66b15-c40a-4920-871f-45b77722ee7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Impeachment proceedings won't hurt Dems, and do NOT help GOP in 2020.<|ARGUMENT|>Some argue that in order to protect the US constitution the Democrats, upon finding that they have sufficient grounds for an impeachment proceeding, must follow through with that proceeding. Otherwise, the system of checks on the power of the presidency is eroded through an unwillingness to use impeachment proceedings for their intended purpose.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making an ethical stand against what Trump has done for moral reasons.\n","id":"bb1514a9-a9b6-4d97-bd62-944ac15cc57b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Explaining agroforestry shortly It's a system of cultivation that tries to mantain the ecological processes that occur in an actual forest. In other words, you would want to plant different species of trees, weeds, bushes, etc that can produce food for you or for the animals that will help mantain the other plants in your cultivation. There would be little to no use of industrial fertilizers since you could use the excess biomass you made. Theoretically you would have access to more water since forest tend to retain it on site. Everyone that I know that is into agroforestry have dreams of helping climate change, biodiversity loss and environment contamination destruction. However, agroforests require heavy handwork, for there are no large scale specialized machinery and probably there will never be, given the mix of heights and wood types . This makes the cultivated goods be really expensive when compared with what's being sold on market shelfs today. Doing some research, it came to no surprise that people who cultivate agroforests either have large savings beforehand or make most of their income not with their cultivated products, but with consulting and agroforestry courses. Since there are just a few of agroforests out there, the producers can still make a living. If the number of them increases to normal cultivation numbers, the income from courses will go low and they won't be able to sustain themselfes of just their production. I know it's not the same, but it shares its quota of similarities with pyramid schemes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Agroforestry as an alternative to normal cultivation is a well-intentioned accidental scam\n","id":"b0fbe0c0-bac4-4dd9-9f5f-9d74dae70eab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everything about the way it approaches diseases is wrong, starting with classification and extending to diagnosis and treatment. Classification To draw a parallel cancer, like almost every other physical condition in existence, is defined by its root cause. gt Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. All of the DSM mental illnesses are names given to common clusters of symptoms . gt Major depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by a pervasive and persistent low mood that is accompanied by low self esteem and by a loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities. This is horrifying to me. Can you imagine if we categorized physical illnesses the same way? Coughing disease is a disorder characterized by a persistent and violent racking cough. Coughs must be present for at least four days and significantly interfere with quality of life. There are many treatments for Coughing Disease, including steroid inhalers, antibiotics, and breathing in steam. All of the illnesses in the DSM are like this, as far as I'm aware. Diagnosis If you think you have cancer, what do you do? You get a biopsy, and based on their understanding of the body, doctors can run the tissue sample through a slew of tests and definitively tell you whether or not the cells in your tumor are reproducing at an abnormal rate. If they are, you have some kind of cancer, a disease caused by fucked up cell reproduction that can cause some horrible symptoms, including death. But the symptoms are not the diagnostic tool here. Because that would be horribly inaccurate. Thousands of diseases have similar symptoms, it's almost impossible to tell them apart. For example pneumonia, bronchitis, and sinus infections can all cause coughing, phlegmy lungs, and trouble breathing, but each of the three has a different cause and treatment. If you think you have a depression, you take a survey and talk to a professional about your feelings. One of the most subjective methods of information gathering possible, an open ended survey. It has to be subjective, though, because there is no way to test for depression objectively. And how could there be? We barely know anything about the brain, and we have no definitive cause of depression probably, in my opinion, because there are dozens of neurobiological and pathological issues that all cause similar clusters of symptoms . Treatment I'm just going to quote a TED Talk by David Anderson, a neurobiologist, on this one. It's a long block, but worth reading gt These drugs have so many side effects because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block. Some of it will dribble into the right place, but a lot of it will do more harm than good. gt Now, an emerging view that you also heard about from Dr. Insel this morning, is that psychiatric disorders are actually disturbances of neural circuits that mediate emotion, mood and affect. When we think about cognition, we analogize the brain to a computer. That's no problem. Well it turns out that the computer analogy is just as valid for emotion. It's just that we don't tend to think about it that way. But we know much less about the circuit basis of psychiatric disorders because of the overwhelming dominance of this chemical imbalance hypothesis. gt Now, it's not that chemicals are not important in psychiatric disorders. It's just that they don't bathe the brain like soup. Rather, they're released in very specific locations and they act on specific synapses to change the flow of information in the brain. So if we ever really want to understand the biological basis of psychiatric disorders, we need to pinpoint these locations in the brain where these chemicals act. Otherwise, we're going to keep pouring oil all over our mental engines and suffering the consequences. Would love to have my view changed on this. Edit Some posters have correctly pointed out that I'm using the term psychology incorrectly here. What I mean by psychology in the title is mental healthcare as a general whole, which includes psychology the academic study, therapy as a general practice, the DSM, and psychiatry. Point 3 is specific to psychiatry. This is my bad for using the terms wrong, apologize for any confusion. It's going to take me some time to read and respond to all these responses because of some IRL responsibilities, but I'll get back to the thread as soon as I can. Much later edit Recently came across some writings from experts in the field of psychiatry that agree with my view, at least in regards to symptoms being a terrible method of diagnosis. Most notably, Thomas Insel, director of NIMH<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern psychology is horrific. Still at the \"let's bleed out the excess blood with leeches\" level of healthcare.\n","id":"f9e4737d-e224-403d-8d47-5379f229ca26"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So my view is essentially that, murdering a human life as the pro life side puts it, can be the best course of action sometimes. A pregnancy lasts from fertilization to birth, and my view is that the last day of pregnancy the day before the mother goes into labour is too late, but the first day of pregnancy is a completely acceptable day to pull the plug on the operation. The second and third days, are also acceptable days to pull the plug. Some people however, say that any pregnancy that begins, must be allowed to end, however it naturally would 100 000 years ago ie, no abortion technology to change the course of events . I make up this number as an estimate. So, some people consider a zygote a human life . I do not. I think that in using words we should try to be as precise and unambiguous as we possibly can. If I showed you a zygote and a 10 year old human, it's obvious which one has human life, and which one there would be some controversy over whether it had human life in it or not. To me, a human life is at least, the set of circumstances such as a family, social network, having a brain heart liver etc, being able to walk around, having a taste for certain foods and music, being able to speak some language, etc. A zygote would have such a small number of those things that I really wouldn't classify it as human life . So if you kill a zygote, you aren't taking very much from it. If you kill a human, you've taken a lot of things from them their taste in music, their family, their eyesight, list could go on for an hour probably. If you kill a zygote, what did it have , that you took from it? Some chemicals and cell nutrients and some molecular structure is all I can think of, maybe you can think of more. You can argue that it's human potential was taken away, but being a human is so far off the radar of a zygote that it's irrelevant. That's like saying a guy stopping me in my car at a crosswalk as I drive to the corner store to buy a lottery ticket took away my potential of winning a million dollars. He did make me 0.001 less likely to have a shot at having 0.00001 chance of winning a large amount of money, but I wouldn't hold it against him. In the same way I suppose a zygote can't really hold it against us if we kill it. Cells die all the time. I don't want this to be too long, so I'll end here. My two points, which I think give a solid reason why abortion is ok, are 1 We should have as precise words as possible for everything we have words for. I support murdering human life according to pro life people but I don't support murdering people, so we clearly need some common language to avoid these ambiguous contradictions. 2 Zygotes have nothing of value to lose if we kill them, so killing them is fine. Killing an 8 month stage fetus, by comparison, is not fine as I explained<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's a small window in the beginning of pregnancy when it's reasonable and allowable to abort.\n","id":"b4db4c25-e867-4d1c-bfcf-f6bdec4d0ac1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>No-platforming is effectively censorship which could easily turn into discrimination of, for example, certain ideologies or lack thereof.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No-platforming is functionally equivalent to the forms of censorship that authoritarians everywhere have favored.\n","id":"7f290609-faa6-45f0-a9b5-13ecc24a4b1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, so let me start out by saying that I don't think women should be objectified or should be treated any less for being a woman. That being said, men are very visual beings. Yes, that is a generalization, and not always the case, but typically men are more visual than women. When a man sees an attractive woman, it is natural for him to look. I'm not condoning a man just sitting and staring at a woman's cleavage for 10 minutes, but I don't see an issue with glancing. Now, if it becomes an issue where all the man does is look at her body or it affects the way he sees or talks to her, then it becomes a problem. What I don't like is that, in my opinion there is a big double standard. A lot of women will call men pigs for looking at an attractive woman, but then will not hesitate to talk about how good a man's abs look. It just seems that when men and women do essentially the same thing, it's wrong for men to do it but fine for women. Maybe it's all my perception though, convince me. Edit So, let me clear this up. I know that some men stare and take it too far. Those aren't the cases I'm talking about. Also, I'm not talking about individual women and their reactions. I was more making a statement about today's society and how it impacts the relationships between men and women. Society seems to say that men are dangerous and women buy into it, even if to a small extent and partially for good reason, but it effects men that mean no disrespect or harm to women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women shouldn't get upset when a guy looks at their body.\n","id":"8fb0dbd0-b46f-4470-920f-acf3f557a626"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Link to the highlights of the fights in this game, which also includes some colorful quotes from their commentary team Now, this game was a bloodbath, no question about that. And not saying the Islanders were saints looking at you Gilles . But the Pittsburgh Penguins' commentary team stepped way out of line during this broadcast. I am going to compile a short list of events I'd noticed. there were plenty more and I'm short on time to go through this video again and catch them all. Plus, this is only 17 minutes of the game. Towards the end I can almost guarantee more was said. Additionally, I know I will misspell the names of most of the players, and I do not know the names of the Penguins' commentators for this game, so I will be referring to them as the commentators. I do feel as though the one with the deeper voice was more in the wrong, but both were very unprofessional during this game. All times are approximations. 0 24 Goddard half shoves half trips Gilles. No mention. Not a major offense, but notable. 1 30 Matt Martin goes for a sucker punch on Talbot. The commentators start off fine in this situation. But as they start the replay, they get more and more aggressive comments. Specifically a passive aggressive comment at ~2 40 Martin went after Max Talbot in a six nothing hockey game here , followed by the commentators sh t talking Martin for 30 seconds to a minute. To pull from this article, Matt Martin's supposed cheap shot on Maxim Talbot which had Pens announcers screaming about it being Todd Bertuzzi esque was hardly a cheap shot. Martin was yapping at Talbot the whole time, with Talbot clearly seeing Martin's gloves dropping. Talbot knew better then to fight Martin. 7 00 Johnson v Haley fight at the start, but Goddard comes off the bench to help his goaltender. No mention of the fact that, instead of trying to stop the fight, Goddard got right in there and made it into a two versus one fight in the Penguins' favor. Johnson clearly is trying to injure Haley, and Goddard does not help. In past fights involving Johnson, he shows he knows exactly how and where to hit to cause an injury. It is constantly that same smash on the spine, or close to, in almost every fight I personally have seen from him. No mention by the commentary team. Goddard has to come of the bench No, he did not. Goddard came of the bench to assault Haley and create the two versus one situation. He did not try to stop the fight, he tried to make it extremely dangerous for Haley opinion, not fact . This situation is shown again around 10 20, but we'll get to that. At the same time, Gilles is standing in the door shouting at Tangradi. Again, not supporting Gilles's actions. Seeya later, Trevor. Go back inside to your cage . In the initial hit by Gilles, he drops the gloves to try to start a fight, but stops when he realizes that Tangradi is holding his face. He is quite the animal, isn't he. 9 00 When's enough enough? You'd almost assaulted Max Talbot, now you got Gilles assaulting Tangradi, when's enough enough? You're up 8 to 2, didn't you get enough revenge? You gonna wait until you break somebody's face? That last part of the quote is in reference to former Islanders goaltender Rick DiPietro, who was severely injured by JOHNSON after an unnecessary fight with a strong left punch elbow to his jaw. So they're not gonna be happy until somebody else is injured. 9 40 Trevor Gilles has no, you know, redeeming value other than to do the stuff you saw him do. Go over and attack Tangradi, and then stand there in the runway like a tough guy talking to Eric Tangradi playing in his fifth NHL game or whatever it is. Clear and undisguised attack on Trevor Gilles. He may not have been in the right in shouting onto the ice. But this comment is uncalled for. A few seconds after that statement, the commentators go on to make what I feel is the most offensive statement made in the entire clip, and what made me decide to write this all out. You know, when you're one of the worst teams in hockey and you're one of the most you're an embarrassment to the National Hockey League as it is, I guess nothing really makes a difference at this point. Don't think I need to elaborate too much on that statement. During Haley's stroll down the ice as shown in the replay shortly after the above two quotes, There's Haley, he's allowed to get up, he's looking around, lets go find somebody else I'm gonna go down there, get involved, nobody's coming at me, this is great. Boy, Haley's really looking for this This starts around 10 20, and if you watch any part of this, make sure you see this. They paint Haley as the initiator, the animal , but you can clearly see Johnson looking for Haley. Notice him shaking his glove. He takes his helmet and gloves off as he moves towards Haley. He could have let him go. HE made the decision to fight Haley. Watch Johnson smash his fist into Haley's spine as he goes to the floor. Then watch Johnson and Goddard continue to lay it onto Haley as he is crouched down on the ice until they're pulled off. 11 55 Okposo went over the goaltender. I don't think he was pushed, he went right into Brent Johnson. Can you believe it I'll give him something for, after this quote, saying that he doesn't believe Okposo is the kind of player to slam into the goaltender. Again though, the commentary team fails to mention the clear shove of Okposo into the goal, and into Johnson. 12 55 The referee's gotta be very careful here, very careful. I wouldn't trust Konopka as far as I could throw him. Again trying to imply that Konopka is an animal, and is simply out on the ice to throw punches somewhat valid , whether it be at the opposing team or a referee . This comment irked me. Konopka is a professional. He's not going to start beating on a referee because they're trying to break up a fight. 14 40 Craig picking fights, commentators praising him. Where's the comments about him being an animal? He's only out on the ice to throw punches it seems. 15 30 And, uh, that was a shorthanded goal by the way by Grabner, mnnm, not going into that. Flat out refusal to cover an Islanders goal. Very unprofessional. Again, I am almost positive there were more quotes. This is a selection from the highlight video of fights. This is also very opinionated, and I'm sure some statements may be incorrect. But Reddit, I would love to see your defense of the Penguins' commentators actions. I'd love for you to try to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Pittsburgh Penguins' commentary team stepped way out of line and acted extremely unprofessional, and deserved major disciplinary action for their handling of the 02\/11\/2011 game against the New York Islanders.\n","id":"1d1589d5-232c-4f90-8522-4a2547c5f617"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>In high culture we can see nudity, sex, violence, though people hide themselves for the two first ones and the third one is forbidden, hidden or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many subjects that are acceptable in popular and high culture that are appropriately unacceptable in society.\n","id":"687b7860-80e0-4bef-8b8c-2f0dea5c3cbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize prostitution<|ARGUMENT|>we should legalize prostitution because that way more prostitutes will take care of themselves medically so they won't catch or spread diseases<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing sex work will make the profession safer for women\n","id":"e4bd3efd-2a68-4fa1-adbb-a8b11559151a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm currently writing a long running multi genre story slightly leaning towards urban sci fi with horror undertones . As I develop my characters. I find myself thinking of several romantic relationships as a preference. However,from what I've read online The vibe I get when going online is people are tired of romance in general and I'd hate to scare away potential readers. Romance apparently doesn't add to a plot. And if it did, the same effect can logically be obtained with all other relationships siblings, close friend, comrade, mentor, etc. A reader is more likely to have a friend, co worker, or sibling you care about, feelings are generally a given, so being able to relate isn't an issue. Romance is a different beast that people experience differently, what works for some is an eye roll for others. Friends and family in comparison are more universally accepted. Romance requires great skill to write, and many comments, both online and IRL, come from people who are tired of badly written romance. The same can be said for character plots and fight scenes, but both are a reason for why I write, so I'm already taking a risk in that sense. I keep coming to the conclusion that the negatives outweigh the positives on this aspect, so all my character relationships are either family, professional, or platonic. Change my view, and thank you for your time. EDIT After reading several of the comments, I have changed my view. To all those who have answered, thank you for the conversation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Romantic subplots in writing are too risky, whereas all other relationships family, friends, etc can obtain the same effect while being the safer option.\n","id":"2315349a-0b79-4823-94cc-eba43064a6e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>In The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren realized that Rey is enormously powerful when he fails to extract information from her via torture. Yet he leaves her guarded by a single Stormtrooper after he leaves. After the events of the previous three movies, hardly anyone can consider Stormtroopers as capable anymore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The older Star Wars movies, too, had numerous characters make decisions that are hard to comprehend. The Last Jedi does not stand out in this regard.\n","id":"b69fe9fb-22a1-4b3e-999c-8e32c2159e0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>If one's subjective moral opinion is the ultimate arbiter of morality, then when a person believes they have done something \"wrong\" or \"immoral\", they have only violated their own internal standard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Relative morality cannot explain why any person would ever consider something that they did to be immoral or wrong.\n","id":"f3820db1-a183-4ac5-b591-afe8eca52287"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have a friend who is a passionate vegan and without being abrasive or trying to convert me, often shares this sentiment. I've heard a lot from her about the horrors of vivisection cutting open live animals for testing , factory farming, puppy mills, etc. I selfishly love to eat meat but am beginning to see at what cost my carnivorous diet comes. Not only are billions of animals suffering every year in the United States but I feel healthier when I abstain from meat for periods at a time. So, r changemyview, why shouldn't the entire world go at least vegetarian? Are modern humans unable to get the right nutrition from plant and mock meat foods? And if not, why is the suffering of billions of animals less important than our supposed need to eat meat?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the entire world should be vegetarian for both health and ethical reasons.\n","id":"5aaa73b7-79fc-4165-8878-c6376e97df3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would rather adopt a child. Honestly, having a child that's genetically mine doesn't seem to appeal to me all that much especially not giving birth It sounds extremely painful . Additionally, there are lots of babies children who are in need of a good home. So I think that adoption is a better choice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I would rather adopt a child than have one of my own.\n","id":"e7dd84a7-ba95-48c6-a1f6-30657c484e7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we have a single global language?<|ARGUMENT|>The creation of a single global language is not possible, because it is too difficult to reach every individual with this concept.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A global language to be understood by all would not succeed in its mission due to practical impossibilities.\n","id":"7d150efb-9985-439d-8611-92ac3dc94e77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2017, the average US outbound traveler spent $1,476 outside of the US as part of a trip for business or pleasure cell C402. The average length of stay abroad was over 16 days cell C206. The average household income of international travelers was $127k cell C477.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unlikely that those that can afford to travel internationally would receive a significant portion of their income as UBI.\n","id":"7f402876-f229-449d-958c-e33b492b5914"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bitcoin Be Adopted As Legal Tender Worldwide?<|ARGUMENT|>Nodes need to validate blocks before accepting them. If blocks were larger it would take longer to validate or invalidate them before accepting them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The small block size acts as a technical security parameter to prevent network flooding\n","id":"c52b83d3-0032-4a9b-991e-f3439a45ca37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abolition of nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>While some argue that some modern states have opted not to develop nuclear weapons, making it unfair that other states have opted to create them, this ignores the fact that these non-nuclear states often only have the luxury to be non-nuclear due to their protection under the umbrella of a nuclear state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear umbrellas are the only reason why some state are non-nuclear.\n","id":"9eb6b3e8-7015-453d-9a5a-e865d623dd03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that using a TeX editor has a steep prohibitive learning curve and is not very user friendly or intuitive, and while indispensable for writing equations, it is not nearly as useful in humanities as most of publishing in those disciplines is straight text with referencing which can be easily managed in the usual text editors. While TeX editors are generally free, so are Office alternatives like OpenOffice etc. so I don't think that is a specific advantage. Given that TeX is difficult to learn that it's a light version of programming code, I don't think that there is any overall advantage to learn how to use Tex when the other common text editors work straight out of the box. Please . Edited for accuracy. My view has been changed Thanks to every one who replied. Special mentions go to u zardeh for pointing out that complex texts that use lots of formatting are almost compelled to use TeX because other word processors don't cut it and that I've probably been making my writing fit into Word's limitations, rather than having a processor that has functionality to achieve what I want for the final product. u nurdinator for showing that LyX is a program that helps bridge the gap between what most people are used to in a word program and TeX, and that Word programs are usually incredibly frustrating it's just that we are used to how frustrating they are. u NeutralParty for making me realize that it's actually not like learning code, it's just using tags for flagging formatting and the basics are not that hard if you can use formatting in Reddit, you aren't too far away from TeX. I'm happy to report that I'm dipping my toes in TeXMaker for Linux since I'm making the change, I thought I'd dive into the deep end and see if I can swim. There is a transcript that I have been working on which has required extensive footnotes and it turns out that it's really simple to make them and the formatting of them is perfect. I think I'm going to finish up the editing of the transcript in TeX and see what comes out of it. I haven't quite ventured out into setting up a bibliography with BibTex though it sounds really promising , but I've already started using packages. Todonotes has some really cool functionality to make notes on documents it's the kind of function that the annotation that other word processors don't have. I like that I can have a bright, clearly noticeable annotations that persist on the document until they are resolved. You can even make a page that indexes all of the todo annotations. This is pretty good. I think I'm already a happy camper. Just a little more practice at this and I think I'm going to be trying to convert other people to the TeX side. I've messaged the mods about the missing deltas too. Thanks everyone<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that TeX like LaTeX is a useful typesetting tool for humanities disciplines and that the time it would take to learn how to effectively use it is not worth the benefits of using it.\n","id":"d8d3a6f2-c336-4c1c-b8b8-3113bc68745b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cities have bike share?<|ARGUMENT|>Docked stations allow people to plan trips by knowing that there may be bikes at their destinations e.g. at the end of transit trips<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Docked stations gives certainty to users that bike stations are close.\n","id":"c3a85fd0-ef61-49b5-b2dc-0059faf61afb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So libertarians didn't think much of them, at least until recently. I heard of the big idea people are entitled to do whatever they want as long as they aren't infringing on other people's rights and the government shouldn't concern itself with anything other defending it's own borders and thought it was actually a good thing. I didn't learn the truth until I met a real libertarian in the flesh. They talked about the free market being being a force for good, welfare being evil, and the government's place in our everyday lives. This was absolutely horrifying, l considered myself friends with this guy, it was like finding out your babysitter is a pedophile. He talked about how net neutrality should be abolished because we can't trust the government and 'the ISPs will compete for the best service', about how there is no reason for there is no reason for people to live on welfare in America or a first world country, about how the pay gap between the genders is a SJW conspiracy because women don't go into STEM jobs. If all this is true, I suppose that share cropping and the unfair treatment of blacks by plantation owners are kosher to libertarians too I'm not referring to The black codes or segregation of schools and the military, the government was responsible for that . That's when I figured it out They don't want freedom for people, they want freedom for the rich If the libertarians take control of the government do you know what will happen? let me tell you it's going to be like the industrial revolution all over again People will live in crowded tenements, living on only enough money to keep them alive. The rich will control us Police departments will be run by private firms Women will be forced into prostitution Drugs will run rampant through the slums People will work in factories for long hours in unsafe working conditions and the products that they make will have no garentee of being safe or working properly Oh and if the don't work or hurt you then you can pretty much go fuck yourself, because it was your fault you didn't buy another product You had the freedom to buy from any of the equally shady manufacturers Listen You can't trust libertarians. They are out to get me and you. For the love of all that is good please do not listen to their lies. If you let them, they will become worse than the IS. They aren't a bunch of pissed off indoctrinated fuckers with guns, no They are smart, they are charismatic and they will hold the entire world back for a profit. They will make the world burn for a profit. They are growing every day and we have to stop it. They blend in among us. They can convert normal people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libertarians are evil\n","id":"34429a2c-8c45-4f71-bf02-66e9dc484382"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are dozens of federal and state incentives and programs to invest in small, typically dying towns. We should not have special programs to prop up the existence of a town that is probably going to die anyway. If a town of 350 people can't attract new residents it's not the job of the federal or state government to drag that town along to the future. I understand in farming states there is a need for rural towns because farms needs workers but there is no reason to prop up tiny cities every 10 miles in the middle of farmland. I also understand we should take car of people who already live there, but why should they have special programs not available to all other residents of the state or in larger cities? To me it would be better to rip the band aid off instead of the current method of a slow and tedious decline hidden by small projects that won't actually reverse the trend. EDIT I removed a part saying if a program is for one area it should be for all areas. That was oversight on my part.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We shouldn't have special programs to save small towns.\n","id":"ee0fba56-49cd-49cc-9646-8e5e69abd203"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>If the weapon is carried on-body, then there is a slightly greater chance of losing the weapon to the student. However, this is still an unlikely outcome. The teacher attacked by the student may not be a teacher who carries. If they are, they still have to obtain the weapon at great personal risk to themselves, and do so without another armed teacher intervening.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unlikely that an unarmed student would wrest a weapon away from an armed teacher.\n","id":"4d95803a-b38d-4835-903b-fe398da0bbf6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, apologies for the long post. My habit is to write out all the nuances I have in mind upfront. Hopefully I delineated my sections well enough to assist in skipping to the sub argument you might be most interested in. The TL DR is contained in the BOLDED CAPS section headings . I've been frustrated that the debate about gun control with gun rights advocates GRA often stumbles into this dead end gt Me guns kill a lot of people gt GRA yea, but you'll be glad when we have those guns when the government tries to put us in camps. gt Me how exactly do our guns stop that? gt GRA something something Hitler took guns from jews. This  aims for an intelligent discussion of that last question. Many gun rights advocates casually claim widespread gun ownership is good and necessary to give the populace a fighting chance in stopping or overthrowing an overreaching state. But where's the evidence that guns in the hands of the public will aid such a venture? I know it's a superficially appealing idea but it doesn't pass serious scrutiny, some of which I lay out below. This is an important question . If we're to take the premise of defenders of gun rights seriously, the cost of wrongful gun deaths today is partially offset by the benefit of stopping hypothetical acts of tyranny that our guns afford us. But there's no examination of the assumptions behind that alleged benefit. If we're serious about the threat of an overreaching government we should soberly weigh whether possessing stockpiles of weapons will actually help or hinder the effort to stop it. I have not seen a good argument that it will help, and all the accessible evidence seems to point towards hindrance. Evidence such as MIDDLE EASTERN REVOLUTIONS SUCCEED WHEN UNARMED In recent years we've seen four major revolutions break out under middle east regimes. Two of them in Tunisia and Egypt were overwhelmingly unarmed revolutions. They each succeeded in less than a month and with relatively few casualties about 0.02 and 0.01 of the population were killed or injured in Tunisia and Egypt, respectively. The other two revolutions in Libya and Syria were and are heavily armed. The Libyan revolution took eight months to succeed and killed or injured about 1.2 of its population. It may well have failed without outside intervention. The Syrian revolution has been raging for nearly 3 years and appears on the brink of failure. Something like 0.5 of its population has been killed no estimate available on the injured, but extrapolating from the other killed injured ratios it's something in the range of 1.5 3.0 total killed injured . That amounts to about 60 300 times the casualties of the other two revolutions, and it's still climbing. Restricting attention to deaths month or deaths injuries month the armed revolutions are still an order of magnitude bloodier than the unarmed ones. It's not hard to see why. In Egypt and Tunisia there was a popular, unarmed uprising demanding the regimes step down. There's no viable political response to a popular demand made by unarmed masses . Both countries' security forces fired on the unarmed protesters and it only rallied their populations further behind the protesters. There was no alternative left but step down or get further pummeled in the eyes of the world and your people as your small domestic base of support crumbles and you must step down in worst conditions. But in Libya and Syria there was a political alternative because the protesters were armed and easily portrayed as a threat requiring the full force of the government to combat. In the name of protecting the people, of course. The countries were are divided between regime loyalists and opponents. So long as there's two sides shooting at each other an average citizen can make a fair argument for siding with either, and their sentiment will tend to follow which side is acting most unjustly. Correlation is not causation but here it should give us pause . Why, precisely, do so many blithely assert that maximal second amendment rights will increase the likelihood of halting an oppressive government counter to the most obvious recent evidence? HISTORICAL ATROCITIES WOULD HAVE BEEN WORSE WITH MORE GUNS Let's do a thought experiment. There are episodes of US history that we look back on with shame. Episodes frequently deployed to argue the prospect of tyranny in the US is not as far fetched as some think. Slavery, internment of Japanese citizens, segregation, and others. All these involved what may be fairly called an egregious but legally sanctioned violation of rights. Suppose you could take a time machine back to whenever you wanted and could arm whoever you wanted with as many small arms as you wished within reason, and in a way in which everyone knows about the existence of arms. We can't use our time machine to mount a surprise attack . Would doing so in any of these historical episodes do anything except make the situation worse for those whose rights were violated? For instance, what would have happened if some WWII era Japanese citizens violently resisted efforts to detain them? It would have been harder for authorities to detain them, for sure, but the reason there was a political impetus to interning Japanese citizens was their perceived threat to the homeland which we're now playing into. You can't separate the unjust act from the rationale for it. It would harder to detain the armed Japanese, and in response the government would send overwhelming force to kill or detain them. At that point it's not about a firefight with some holdouts, it's about a show of force to set a proper example in wartime. If some Japanese Americans violently resisted they'd likely be killed, the national security rationale for detaining them is vindicated, any hope for a legal challenge against internment would suffer a serious setback, and today we'd have more defenders of the internment because of the violent incidents that broke out. How about the civil rights movement. Does anyone think MLK wouldn't be considered an even more dangerous radical if he was holding a rifle during I have a Dream ? That if black students brought guns with them to sit ins their political cause wouldn't have been dead in the water? Does anyone believe that any of these shameful episodes of our history could have been rectified with the introduction of weapons in the hands of those oppressed, to use against their oppressors? If not, why does anyone think using guns to guard against the next overreach will play out any better? Are my examples too selective? Are there any historical episodes of oppression anywhere in the world in which giving the oppressed guns against reasonably armed oppressors don't go back to the stone age would have changed the outcome in their favor? Battlefields don't count. REVOLUTION IS POLITICS, NOT WARFARE A revolution against ones government is a fundamentally political battle fought by whatever means are politically expedient to each side. Firearms are a symbol in that political battle. Brandishing them implies hostile intent, even when you proclaim you're merely defending yourself. Suppose the US government is seizing the first born child of every family to forcibly draft them into some war, or something substitute your alternate vision of tyranny, it doesn't matter . You publicly say you'll use your gun to prevent government forces entering your property to take your first born. You proclaim this is merely a defensive action against unjust violations of fundamental rights. What will happen? What gun rights advocates seem to forget is the political context in which these events occur. How we got to this point as a society is important to how your resistance will be interpreted. Here the broader context necessarily involves a significant portion of the country thinking government seizure of first born children is a good thing. There are supporters of this plan, there are those who are unsure what to think, there are opponents to the seize children plan who renounce violence, and then there's you. Already there's worry about people like you employing terrorist tactics in a policy controversy. Pundits and media personalities of a certain ideology aligning with the government's already have a dismissive label for people like you. Perhaps motherbirds . Already there's a public debate about how much force the government should use against those pesky gun toting motherbirds who don't go along with the Grand Project of taking first born children. Declaring you will shoot government forces walking onto your property validates the hardliners who argue the government should take all precautions necessary when they come to take the first born of those nutty motherbirds. Anything less on the part of the government would demonstrate a lack of resolve to blah blah blah. You with your gun aren't the only one angling for the symbolism. The government has a commitment to a controversial policy to exercise, and your resistance makes for a great opportunity to showcase that commitment. If you want to stand up for your principles against all other considerations, you'll get in a firefight with government forces who are likely anticipating it which you'll inevitably lose. The firefight will get big media coverage and millions of homes see footage of local law enforcement taking fire and possibly getting killed for carrying out a law order that a significant portion of the country thinks is a good thing, like the aerial images we see on the news of swat teams gathering outside the scene of some nutcase with a gun. Even those on the fence on the broader issue will think the law enforcement didn't deserve to be shot at and they marginally move away from your position because you just associated your position with needless violence. Everyone who is on your side of the underlying issue now has to prologue every public statement with a condemnation of the violent actions of people like you, distancing themselves for fear of being perpetually associated with anti government freaks when they press their case. You and your cause are better off resisting non violently in some way, or hiding, or fleeing the country, or something else . Regardless of whatever message you think you send with your sacrifice on behalf of your principles, the political situation has already gotten to the point where society and the media has long ago decided what your decision to use violence to defend yourself says about you and the legitimacy of your position. In much the same way that Timothy McVeigh's act of violence completely renders him a right wing nutcase rather than leading into a discussion of the merits his legitimate grievance with the government. In much the same way pro life extremists who bomb abortion clinics are dangerous domestic terrorists much more than they have an important political point. In much the same way Ted Kaczynski's creative use of the postal system is a bigger story than the concerns about industrialized society that motivated him. In much the same way it's difficult to have a reasonable discussion about whether the US ought to continue to have military bases in the middle east when one side of that question can easily, and unfairly, be dismissed as Al Qaeda sympathizers. Using or threatening violence simply imperils your political cause . Not just for you, but everyone else who shares your political goals. And it's the political cause and public sentiment that's at stake when we're up against a government on the threshold of tyranny. In contrast, gun rights advocates sound as if they think a revolution against their government entails all out warfare between two teams, with zero fence sitters, won by whoever has the superior hardware and tactics I'm giving the benefit of the doubt here some gun rights advocates really sound like their optimal outcome is getting mowed down in a blaze of glory fighting jack booted fascists, or something . When has this ever been an appropriate model of how a revolution played out? A revolution is not warfare, it's political stagecraft, portraying oneself to a vacillating audience as the innocent victim of a malicious, bloodthirsty enemy we all need to unite against. Carrying a weapon, let alone proudly beating your chest about carrying a weapon that you've long claimed is for fighting the government , severely undermines that political message. Look at a detailed account of how the battles of Lexington and Concord that spurred the American Revolution played out It's a remarkably hesitant procession of events, each side trying to avoid provoking the other, orders to only fire if fired upon, the British being excessively polite to the locals, etc. The colonists won the battles not when they literally took place, but when they won the subsequent spin war, domestically and in the London press, about what had happened. That spin wasn't that of a military victory, but that the British were bloodthirsty oppressors slaughtering colonists. The ultimate purpose was not the battlefield victory but the political messaging that could be built around it to support the war for independence gt It was important to the early American government that an image of British fault and American innocence be maintained for this first battle of the war. The history of Patriot preparations, intelligence, warning signals, and uncertainty about the first shot was rarely discussed in the public sphere for decades. The story of the wounded British soldier at the North Bridge, hors de combat, struck down on the head by a Minuteman using a hatchet, the purported scalping , was strongly suppressed. Depositions mentioning some of these activities were not published and were returned to the participants this notably happened to Paul Revere . Paintings portrayed the Lexington fight as an unjustified slaughter . This political messaging would have been further strengthened if the slaughtered colonists were unarmed and no redcoats were killed. Their guns were damaging to the cause, if anything. A common response is that gun rights work as a deterrent to tyranny rather than a guard against it. This contention is disturbingly unfalsifiable and I'm skeptical because it's usually uttered with as little thought or evidence as the claim guns will stop tyranny. But we can still poke some holes Those who make the decisions about policy politicians are not the ones on the front lines of an armed and hostile populace, so the value of this deterrence is dubious. We've all seen in our lifetimes majorities of our politicians willing to unleash martial law, so to speak, in other countries, and that's while knowing our armed forces will meet violent resistance. Why would they hesitate to do the same domestically merely because the population has guns? Think of an amoral politician who knows that his bill or policy will spark violent opposition, in some form or another. He thinks it's a good idea regardless. What, exactly, is stopping him? If his bill goes through and causes violent attacks on authorities, that politician will receive the backlash? That doesn't comport with the reality we've seen in America. Violence used against the government rallies support the government. The politician will have an opportunity to give a righteous speech about not backing down in the face of terror, garner more support for his bill policy, and marginalize political opponents further by their association with violent tactics. If the politician has the foresight to understand this, the possible violence backlash is an incentive to going forward. Remember when liberal media organizations were running full coverage of any hint of violence breaking out or threatened at tea party rallies, and conservatives did the same for occupy wall street? Violence and threat of violence are gleefully held up by the political opposition to smear an entire group of people. The prospect of violence unleashed on local law enforcement by your political opponents is no kind of deterrent at all. Under this deterrence theory, what keeps tyranny at bay in all the industrialized democracies of the world with much lower rates of gun ownership? Does anyone think France, Australia, or Japan is creeping towards totalitarianism? Does anyone think they're more likely to move towards totalitarianism than the US? Is there something about the US that makes it uniquely susceptible to tyranny? Please disabuse me of my ignorance. If not tonight, I'll be back to answer comments within 24 hours. Thanks for reading<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private gun ownership in the US entails LESS likelihood of success at stopping government tyranny. wall of text\n","id":"ff441fa0-3e90-49d7-86c3-41163f4db4da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I was a strong supporter of remain in last years UK EU Referendum. I believe that a strong Europe is the only way to combat East Asian and American dominance in the world and to prevent tensions rising with Russia, and that nationalism is a thing of the past. I also accept alot of the cultural arguments, languages aside we are closer culturally to Europeans than we are with the anglosphere, okay we buy American movies and music alot I admit my favourite band Paramore are American but that is probably due to language, our nightlife, coffee culture, cars, food, sport Football and Rugby etc. is far more European than anything else. I know the EU has problems, its not perfect and the EC and the parliment there needs reform and the Euro needs scrapped and started again or fixed or something but those are just par for the course in my opinion. The current status quo in Europe doesn't work, we need to be a federation for the issues to work out, like how Greece was treated like dirt, the lax employment laws in East Europe could all be fixed with more integration, also the defense disparity, the UK and France provide the lions share of the EU's defense capability, we are the two nuclear states and have the largest navies and air force the UK is the only blue water navy in the EU and counties like Germany, Italy and a few Eastern European exception of Poland countries skimp out on their militaries. I just don't understand why being just a European citizen is a bad thing? We won't lose our own cultures I mean look at the US, there is still a Southern Culture, a Texan culture, a Californian Culture etc. and the US has been a federal state for centuries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Pan-European superstate isn't a bad thing\n","id":"a89b8d4a-b16a-4e4b-a2b7-2b70ca0d02d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Protests in Venezuela in 2016 and 2017 brought hundreds of thousands into the streets against President Nicolas Maduro but achieved little beyond political concessions and violent clashes with government forces.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While this works in some cases, it proves futile in others and can lead to polarization and even violence.\n","id":"47a06679-74b4-4ba1-be06-a6b640f28aab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Without the United States of America USA policing the world, the world would find itself worse off than it currently is with the USA not policing the world. Reasons why USA policing the world is necessary Europe can not be relied upon to provide stable leadership for the world. This is not Europe's fault, there are just simply too many cultures and too much history to allow for a unified Europe. World War I and World War II were the direct results of Europe managing its own affairs. Even more recently, Europe failed to provide meaningful stability in Bosnia without America stepping in, and toppling Qaddafi would have been near impossible without America's support. Furthermore, the European Union is finding itself falling out of favor with no clear leadership in sight. Europe also cannot be trusted to stand up to China which leads in to my next point China must be contained by somebody. China often argues that it is rising peacefully however, China's conduct in the South China Seas disproves that, especially when when one looks at this map. Let's also not forget about what China calls the Diaoyu Islands and Japan Calls the Senkaku. China has become more and more aggressive. More importantly, though, is that more and more countries, including the USA and companies are bowing to Chinese demands for censorship and changes in the official line. As their influence becomes more pervasive throughout the world, who will stand to stop it when it manifests itself as an actual attack? The Middle East needs America. This one sounds ridiculous, but far from it. I will not argue that America Iraq and Afghanistan however, I will argue that America sending a signal to the rest of the Middle East that they are no longer interested in getting involved will cause more loss of life than if America intervenes. Iran can be seen as the biggest threat to peace and stability in the Middle East. If Iran thought that they could act with impunity then we could see Israel wiped off the map, as well as any other groups that Iran does not get along with, because they would, in effect, become a regional power. This leads to my final point. If America were to withdraw from the world and stop being the, police of the world, we would instead see a rise of regional powers to fill the power vacuum that would emerge. It's not too hard to see who those would be In the Middle East, Iran. In Asia, China. The European Union would continue on, though Russia would more than likely be a huge agitator. Brazil would more than likely become the South American regional power. Two of those powers listed are terrible options, and the chances that all four of them five if you count the USA armed would not lead to a devastating war are slim. The United States of America must continue its role as police of the world, because the world needs the United States more than the United States needs the world. CHANGE MY VIEW<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the world needs the United States more than the United States needs the world.\n","id":"6310d666-e3a3-48b5-b434-af0f639ce70e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religions may hamper positive self-change. Religions teach to last and endure while going through hardships, even when the solution is to change yourself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion can instill fear, guilt and stop self-improvement and personal realization.\n","id":"3cc5c2ac-972d-4d5c-9bbd-da62584d19f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just watched 30 for 30 playing for the mob about the Boston College point shaving conspiracy and was left with one question how was what the students did wrong or even illegal? They aren't being paid to work their hardest. Gambling is illegal so the results of their actions on other people's illegal gambling activities should not be a crime unless they were betting. I understand how it might be against school or conference bilaws but that doesn't make it a federal crime. Intentionally Losing a game that you are not compensated for or contractually obligated to play your best at should not be an issue outside of the team or the conference unless it happens in the state of Nevada where gambling is encouraged and legal and meant to be fair.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"point shaving on college sports should not be a crime for student athletes as in the Boston College scandal.\n","id":"1aa2c8db-0d24-4550-88f9-a46f0c58b1be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>The concept of 'voting against' a hated candidate in an election is damaging, but there will be more damaging effects if people are 'voting against' topics up for vote in Liquid Democracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without changes to the voting methodology eg Ranked voting Liquid Democracy will exasperate the existing problems with plurality voting.\n","id":"76288010-ad17-460c-a19b-ae0365181fac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we care about how we look?<|ARGUMENT|>Many of the 'signals' people derive from appearance are misguided or harmful, for example the tendency of white people to perceive black people as dangerous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are unfairly and incorrectly judged for how they look. If we care about our looks, this is reinforced.\n","id":"889f98cf-f9f0-4bc6-afab-7cae3ecf714f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The mention of gay relationships currently and in the past makes many people uncomfortable. In the past it made all not gay people uncomfortable. In a society where it makes everyone uncomfortable it should not be mentioned or legitimized for the same reason Joe shouldn't talk about how he eats shit. The comfort of the many outweighs the sexual needs of the very few. While I accept it does not bother people now, I feel that it did in the past and because of that it would have been more ethical for gays to stay closeted. This seems like the most utilitarian position, as valuing the individual over the group is selfish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"gay relationships should have never been legitimized or allowed to exist in public according to my utilitarian world view.\n","id":"b4e984bc-898b-456c-8260-d7512d3b5dfd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For example, there is a difference between not dating a black man or woman because you think black people are bad or stupid or whatever else, and not dating a black person because you are not attracted to them but have no problem with them as in you are willing to be friends, you show and have respect, and there is no hate towards them for their race as people. ' Sometimes it is completely true that you would never be attracted to a certain race. It should also be perfectly acceptable and okay in these instances. Going back to the example of not dating black people, skin color is integral to being considered black. It is the defining feature. If someone doesn't find the dark skin color s attractive then yes, they would likely not find any black person attractive. Like it or not, physical attraction is pretty important to a sexual or romantic relationship, even though it is of course not everything. Saying that not dating a race is racist in this type of case is exactly the same saying a gay man would be sexist for not dating women or vice versa .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refusing to date a certain race or races is not automatically racist. Saying this is comparable to claiming that if you don't date anyone from a certain sex whether the same or opposite from you then you are being sexist.\n","id":"112c53c5-feaf-488a-984a-f639d1f39258"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>The Confederates should be honoured as they were not an 'unjust army'. Their states saw secession as a last resort due to their guaranteed rights under the Constitution - that brought the nation together - being violated by anti-Southern leaders and their allies. For the Confederacy, the war was a regrettable, but righteous and a dignified cause.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many in the South fought to separate from the North because they saw it as separating itself from the ideals that the nation was founded on, such as the right to life and \"Governments . deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.\"\n","id":"22f5c056-0675-4544-be35-ee7cc48c2d9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's 22 35 local time UK and my 3 year old daughter has decided not to sleep so for the umpteenth time we've got Planet 51 playing as she loves this film. It's not the best film in the world but that's not the point. About 20 minutes in to this film we see a human created robot wandering around the alien planet exploring. it comes across a cute alien insect and after a few seconds of playing the robot squashes the alien with a rock. Aside from the cute nature of the insect that the robot so casually kills the insect is not only bad from a science point of view surely the lifeform would be of interest? But it is also bad from the moral point of view that all life has some value and that killing is bad. I'd be annoyed if my daughter went around killing things. So, . EDIT Link to the scene<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The brutal murder of an innocent insect in Planet 51 cartoon, 2009 is a bad lesson for kids.\n","id":"bd282583-a05b-4e66-b244-6a83b9e91489"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Strict interpretation of Shariah forbids women from working outside home as it is not their natural state Yet, the international community does not question Saudi Arabia's control over Mecca and Medina even though Saudi women work outside their homes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many religious sites are recognized as belonging to a specific country without them having to prove their adherence to religious rules.\n","id":"6217bfcd-d358-4c4c-9efc-f844059232b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to switch my major to business and I've been considering this because there are some aspects in certain fields of business I am attracted to, however, I will admit I have a very juvenile understanding of it. And as ridiculous and ignorant this may sound, there is a part of me that believes there is a corrupt underlying to business. I feel like many business professionals only pretend to care about customers, but the ultimate goal is money. And money is the underlying goal of everything they do. And for some people, it seems like money over encompasses everything more than the service they are providing. Even if money is the ultimate or one significant goal of people working within business, how do I change my views on this? I want to understand more how money is used a tool and close to human nature. I think my teenage days of watching too many fuck the systems is still somewhat ingrained in me, haha.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think most business practices are in someway unethical\n","id":"3407acc0-ac17-4058-a438-cb70019b3e21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT and before you start any digital pictures are not real photographs , lets agree on a definition that renders it real if its a realistic representation of the real thing. So if i take a picture of a carrot, it will be pointy and orange, not blurry with nightstars coming out of it. And i dont recognise them as legit . Oh, you took a picture and then your camera digitally altered it over the course of x seconds? you must be such a pro photographer. Yes, they look cool. Yes, people act like its legit photography. But i would toss those pictures in the same basket as photoshop pictures. This means that they have no place in contests for national geographic and that kind of stuff. Oh look at that panda, what if we expose it so it looks more fluffy or whatever, and give it some filters so it looks blue. This is cheating, fake, misleading. People may use that for their facebook albums, or that cheap wedding photographers that put their name on pictures for their pictures. But yea, seeing the sky all starry is basically false advertising. It is not a realistic representation. I know you need iso something or whatever for nighttime because there is not enough light well, use flash. the picture will be much shittier, but it will be legit at least. But i guess its ok to use it if you are taking a picture of yetti and that is the only way to capture it on film<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Exposure pictures are not real photographs\n","id":"15bfe994-b818-45b5-a724-11041d6196f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Theft is defined as the taking and removing of an object from the owner of it. Copyright infringement is the copying of a work protected by copyright when the act of copying does not fall under fair use. The creator of a work creates an object such as a book, program, or painting that represents his idea. The object is copied by someone else. If the object is copied by someone else then the creator still has the original object. Therefore no theft has occurred since the original creator has not been deprived of his object. The non creator has another object which is not the object the creator has, it is merely a copy, and is therefore not depriving the creator the use and ownership of the original object. This means that no theft has occurred. Now for a clarification, the argument I have made is not stating whether or not copyright should exist or that copyright infringement is ethical. I'm am only arguing that copyright infringement is not theft.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Copyright infringement is not theft.\n","id":"43414425-f635-4161-bc52-52161ab86545"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There is such thing as a glorious defeat<|ARGUMENT|>If you can concede losses, it means that you don't fully care that your cause is being undermined. Maybe you've abandoned it for a different cause that you decide is a greater priority, or you don't think it is the most important thing or that it is completely right in all situations. It can be seen as a lack of integrity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Implies that you don't really care about your cause.\n","id":"9a795a0d-2cd1-4694-972d-e26bbfe4bb1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alternative medicine covers a wider range of fields some more bogus than others. Its a bit silly to address them all under the umbrella of alternative medicine, but since we do so I think it is disingenuous to say if it worked it'd be called medicine . After all we don't apply the same logic to alternative energy . Its easy to see why the view exists a lot of alternative medicine is clear pseudoscience like crystals, homeopathy and naturopathy. But to there are branches of medicine not typically called conventional that still work. Medicine has been practised for hundreds of years, and many treatises have been written about it. A lot of those practises have laid the foundation for modern medicine directly or indirectly. Traditional Chinese and Indian medicine immediately come to mind. More recently the use of marijuana in pain treatment comes to mind. It would be a bit silly to conflate these with homeopathy. Now I am not saying that these don't warrant further study, or that there aren't dangers in using them in and of themselves. Neither am I suggesting they are superior forms of medicine and free of reproach. What I am claiming is that there is medicine that can in seriousness and good faith be called alternative and not be bullshit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tim Minchin's position on alternative medicine is silly, or at the least not sufficiently nuanced.\n","id":"1c62c72c-ad90-44dc-ac1c-b1813d673b65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>A variety of countries associate themselves with a certain religion through their constitution, from Australia and Poland to Switzerland and Ireland, yet they usually do not call for international recognition of this association.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Other countries do not require recognition by other states of their affiliation with a certain religion.\n","id":"da320e03-2455-44b5-a50e-90b725782a8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Simply put, informing people that rape is pervasive and normalized is just sending the message to a potential rapist that rape is ok and you won't get caught. For every rapist, I'm sure that there are many more potential rapists who's only reason for not committing that act is fear of punishment. When these individuals here messages like society will blame the victim most rapists are never charged etc, they are not hearing hey guy, society is fucked up, don't rape people they're hearing hey if you rape someone, no one will believe the victim and you will not be caught. For individuals who have considered raping or taking what they want , we are taking away the only thing that stops them from committing the act, fear. In addition, the idea of Rape Culture is only reinforce the idea to the victim that they should have been raped, there's no point in doing anything about it, and things will be worse if you say anything this leads to a cycle where A learns about rape culture and that they can get away with rape, rapes B, B doesn't do anything because of rape culture and the rape culture that already existed is amplified and increased. TL DR For all the potential rapists who have not yet committed the act, rape culture is the tipping point that turns shitty idea into action and creates another victim who doesn't' report.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We shouldn't talk about \"Rape Culture\" because it can only lead to more rape and less victims coming forward.\n","id":"1b0b2f78-9e4a-43e5-aae0-3cb5611f3d29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>A recent study limited in scope to self-reporting by 987 women visiting CareNet pregnancy centers, found that only 13% of the women had visited a psychologist, psychiatrist, or counselor pre-abortion, but 67.5% sought care post-abortion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Studies have shown that abortion has adverse psychological impacts on women.\n","id":"84a87106-877c-4cd2-82e9-1201b4e89760"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have tried posting similar things before, but the conversation always ends up being about definitions. I know this is a very broad topic, but I will try to be as clear and unambiguous as possible. Free will is assumed to exist with no evidence whatsoever. The two things known to affect a person, nature and nurture, are completely out of a person's control and the distinction between the two is arbitrary, purely a human creation . To be clear, I do not think we can ever know if there is free will, but based on what we do know, it is not reasonable to assume so. Because one of the core tenets of capitalism is self reliance and personal responsibility, but people don't actually have any real control over their lives, the closer you get to pure capitalism, the worse in general human life is going to be all else equal. To put it simply, sure some people work harder and some people are smarter, but people do not choose to be that way, or choose the genetics and situations that created the person making the decision. Therefore, to claim anyone really deserves success more than another is kinda baseless. Now most anarcho capitalists might say, even if this is true, morals are just human constructions in that case, and created value and power are the only things that really matter, therefore anarcho capitalism. This is true to an extent, but people are capable of being aware of themselves in the universe, so in a way, if we decide things matter, they do. Plus, morals in general are actually pretty self serving. No one really chooses where they are borne or what situation they are in, so giving resources to as many people as possible actually opens up the possibility for greater overall access to cool materialistic shit while still giving people that safety net. Finally, if we decide morals cannot be part of the political discussion, than saying private property needs to be respected is hypocritical. But why would anyone work? Well ask yourself. Would you rather live off a safety net or work for a better living? Even if the net pay isn't as good is it would be in a more capitalistic society, you are still experiencing a better quality of life than everyone who doesn't contribute as much. Now this is the part where the anarcho capitalist says But I wouldn't work for less than I could get That's not fair. I have got news for you, you are doing that right now if you have a job, almost guaranteed. Your job makes plenty more money off you than you know. As a general rule, employers have more power in negotiations because of the basic necessity of having a job. If being unemployed was uncomfortable but not an emergency, it makes sense wages would likely be closer to the actual value of work put in. Again, this is not to say capitalism has no redeeming qualities or that pure communism is the solution. Capitalism has good incentive properties. While imo it is only logical to say that actually planning use of needed resources rather than allowing the universe to blow them wherever they end up is going to create a more generally enjoyable society, wants are pretty well distributed through the free market. Also, people who sacrifice their time should definitely be rewarded, they just aren't the only people who should get anything. Please change my view I know this is kind of big, so I'll highlight my main points here free will is an illogical assumption the combination of capitalism and morals requires free will if fairness, justice, and human life matters to you, you should be a social democrat if fairness, justice, and human life matter to you, you definitely should not be anarcho capitalist Things that will probably not change my view trying to say one of my definitions is wrong, although if you are just trying to understand what I mean so you can confront my points, of course ask I tried saying that I don't know for sure there is no free will. I realize this, but I don't think we should distribute necessary resources based on an assumption is mine I should get it I worked for it, I should get it Unless you have proof of free will, then you can't say you really have any control over the situations that led to your success. You deserve it just as much as anyone else. Again that doesn't mean that from an incentive perspective it doesn't make sense for you to get a pretty good chunk of it, but if you are using the word should then you are acknowledging that fairness does matter to an extent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capitalism, specifically anarcho- capitalism, is completely devoid of any justice due to blind acceptance of free will. The best political system is Social democracy with a capitalistic base but guaranteed strong safety net.\n","id":"32f72971-4051-47f9-b7cd-26bacbf81b8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should fracking be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The sound caused by wind turbines can cause sleep deprivation and mental health problems for people living nearby.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sources of renewable energy can have negative effects on the surrounding communities and environment.\n","id":"1397524a-eaaa-4d20-a71e-37c65a505e64"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kyoto Protocol, Debate on whether the Kyoto Protocol helps to combat global warming<|ARGUMENT|>Eli Sanders. \"Seattle leads U.S. cities joining Kyoto Protocol\". International Herald Tribune. 16 May 2005 - \"Unsettled by a series of dry winters in this normally wet city, Mayor Greg Nickels has begun a nationwide effort to do something the Bush administration will not: carry out the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.Nickels, a Democrat, says 131 other like-minded mayors have joined a bipartisan coalition to fight global warming on the local level, in an implicit rejection of the administration's policy.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US cities are adopting Kyoto, the federal government should too\n","id":"0bf997ff-2490-4762-ba4a-7e8e9dfcfffc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe there are too many people trying to make it big with their music or art and that they spend too much time composing playing music which is time that could have been used working at a job that contributes to society. Sitting in your room painting singing practicing guitar is great as a hobby but it is benefiting absolutely nobody else. While there is an overwhelming abundance of musicians and artists there is currently a high demand for things like healthcare professionals and construction workers. For this reason I believe choosing to be a musician as a career move is selfish. Change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe being a professional artist or musician is a non productive and selfish career choice which doesn't contribute to society.\n","id":"32268fb3-83f4-4752-a507-488e5540183d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In the same way that in some countries members of the army have a right not to abide by an order they believe to be unethical, nobody should be forced to do something on subjects related to murder and crime against humanity which pro-life associate abortion with<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sometimes bringing personal beliefs into medicine is necessary to prevent moral boundaries from being crossed.\n","id":"7d256f03-d7e1-4dda-aa62-41bf462e8246"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This has been something that has been bugging me for the past couple of weeks and I can't seem to shake it. I am an Asian male here in America and honestly I have it pretty good, but for every Asian American like me, I'm sure there's some out there who are treated like shit on the daily merely on the basis of their race and the various stereotypes that come with them. I feel since movies from the 1980s along with other forms of media, certain stereotypes and forms of subtle racism against Asians has been staggeringly prevalent in not just the US, but media as a whole. Also every time I see or hear race being brought up in a debate, Asians tend to be neglected in these circumstances. Also, my main gripe comes mainly from the slew of stereotypes of Asians I witness on the daily, especially in my hometown in Virginia. People act as if it's okay because Oh lol Asians are good at math, great with technology, and bad drivers It's always been that way and always will be More importantly, I find it kinda bullshit that as an individual of Asian descent something far out of my control and my future children's as well that I am automatically put at a disadvantage. I'm not just compared to other applicants in schools or jobs, I'm compared primarily to other people of my racial background. I kinda get the feeling Asians tend to be higher achievers because we're systematically forced to compete and fight against one another for pursuing similar fields which seems incredibly bogus to me. Before attempting to , here's two things I would like you to consider when responding 1 Yes, I do indeed find some stereotypical jokes about Asians funny, but I don't appreciate the constantly regurgitated ones like we're good at math and we're bad drivers. Put some effort into your humor and stop treating us all like fucking calculators. 2 I do not believe that the plight of Asians so to speak should be elevated above others, but simply receive the same amount of attention. Change my view if you would, because I honestly don't know if I feel right about it fully myself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In light of all the social justice movements over race, religion, creed, sexuality, etc. etc, I feel Asians deserve more attention than they get.\n","id":"43f6508c-8a9d-4f46-8007-4326992cbc1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I don't believe waking up early is over rated. Most everything that is said about the benefits of waking up early seems reasonable and useful to me. Anecdotally, I'm a big fan of Jocko Willink and I can totally get behind his wake up before the enemy message. Here, I am specifically discussing value the praise we heap on people that wake up before others regardless of their overall productivity in a day. x200B I'm also not comparing waking up early to staying in bed late and being a lazy degenerate. I want to compare people who wake up early with those people that wake up late and stay up late or people who are industrious enough to get a lot accomplished without having to wake up early. x200B I see an incredible amount of value put on people waking up early they're viewed as more disciplined, more productive, and more healthy than their later rising counter parts. If you are awake for the same number of hours why do we laud people who get up early but accuse those who stay up late as doing something harmful to their well being? x200B Waking up early is almost always associated with discipline and focus. Staying up late is, at worst, attributed to recklessness and even at best it seems to be attributed to some kind of mania or obsession that might not be healthy e.g., overnight nurses far from wasting the night away, but still often viewed as driven by fervor rather than discipline . x200B x200B x200B x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Waking up early is overvalued\n","id":"0c924c21-d360-447f-b4ba-ff47c0fb067f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The belief that abortion is murder makes you inherently intolerant of other people's choices, and justifies violence, as you believe that you are preventing substantial harm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Extremism is not a problem unless the fundamental beliefs are themselves flawed. A harmless belief taken to extremes is still harmless.\n","id":"a57b9c8b-91c4-4807-9b1d-e290a8194bdf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With all of the controversy about the Olympics in Rio this year, it is pretty obvious that certain countries are not ready to host this event. Whether it be lack of proper facilities, biological dangers, crime, extreme poverty, or other factors even though these areas of the world would like to be the central focus and host the ceremony, it is in their best interest not to. I believe that the Summer Olympic Games should only be held in four cities Los Angeles, London, Beijing, and Sydney. These are cities that have either held an Olympic games before or are fully equipped to hold one without any additional major construction. These are areas of the world with the proper infrastructure to host a world event where people know they can attend and expect proper living conditions, transportation, security, entertainment, etc. There is no reason for cities with no proper facilities already in place to hold the Olympics. OK after reading some of the comments I have changed my view, mostly due to BeneathNormal's response. I admit that this was probably just a knee jerk reaction to the current situation in Brazil but this shouldn't exclude the other European nations, Russia, Japan, or other countries that are viable from hosting. I would love to see a city in India, South America, or Africa become viable to host this event but I think that's still in the somewhat distant future. The spirit of the games is about choosing new and exciting host cities and hopefully the sites will continue to become more diverse while also being economically viable. Los Angeles 2024<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Olympics should only be held in 4 cities, rotating the location every 4 years.\n","id":"556998a3-4e3d-44e5-9281-dd3c33e8c441"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT I'm exhausted and signing off for the night, but thanks for all the conversation guys. I'd like to give a nod to elitelimfish who shared a quote which I think says it all A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy. Alexis de Tocqueville Hi all, For for about 8 years now I've been growing more and more opposed to wealth redistribution and social welfare. I'm 26 and paying 37 income tax second highest bracket in Australia the next and final is 180,001 per year income plus 10 GST on every purchase, plus the mark up on importation of overseas made products, which is to say that more than half my income gets taken in direct taxation yet I have no kids not paying for schools , have private health insurance, etc etc I'm sure you get the idea. More so, if I were to lose my job and fall back on welfare the payment is so low that assuming I had zero savings I would lose everything and become homeless almost immediately my rent alone is more than the unemployment payment, and add to that the loan repayment on my modest car Toyota Corolla I'd be totally rooted. Centrelink welfare department is worthless to me. Here's an interactive break down of Australia's budget Now, looking at that, a person earning 150,000 would be paying 55500 total tax which goes to 19247.4 to social welfare. 1221 to public housing. 7050 to health on top of their almost mandatory private health care . 3244 for education when they may or may not have kids, and may or may not send them to a private school, also note that MORE is spent by State governments as well, I am only showing Federal budget numbers here . An additional 10 of every dollar which goes to the State governments, who in turn piss it away on other things. That money could be put in to a savings account and saved towards a Paying for future costs, such as unexpected unemployment or illness. b Paying for retirement. c Generating wealth, for example buying homes or investing in businesses. I see a combination of a minimalistic government coupled with a user pays system of private service delivery as being a much more fair system. I'm curious to hear what you have to say about the merits of social welfare, and why the government knows how to spend my money better than I do. Note that's not what I earn, but it is a nice round figure to do math with. EDIT I just did a little more research. I checked my own tax rate divided by the 34.68 that goes to welfare against the payments for welfare recipients Unemployment Rent Assistance, I didn't do any other payments they may get and it turns out my tax is more than one welfare recipient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am completely opposed to all forms of mandatory wealth redistribution -\n","id":"8d265310-6217-448c-947c-2aa80d0910f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>For millennia humans needed to constantly adapt to changes in their environment. This indicates how well humans can react to new circumstances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are more flexible than any AI in adapting to new threats.\n","id":"fd70a5fa-3621-4994-820d-834fba3061c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>While gender feminism evolved as a way to negotiate and gain power against the male, equity feminism once aspired to liberate men from their power-bearing role too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some argue that modern-day feminism is no longer about the equity-based foundations the movement was founded on, but rather about gaining power over men.\n","id":"3999741b-b2a3-4036-82dc-45ae45b7d9cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Organ Donation be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>As well as saving lives, organ donation can transform the quality of someone's life considerably, as shown by this cross-sectional study on lung transplantation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Organs can save and transform people's lives, and currently there is a critical shortage.\n","id":"3e33e191-7bc0-44e6-afa6-aba23b5c694f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best way to fight overpopulation?<|ARGUMENT|>Hans Rosling - a swedish statistician working for the UN - showed a clear statistical trend between better quality of life, access to healthcare, reduction of poverty and the number of average children per family.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Help agrarian societies to develop into more technologically advanced ones.\n","id":"b86c658e-a860-49dd-b51b-bfa06546c87a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>The English Bill of Rights in 1689, The US Constitution, and the French Constitution of 1789 are based on egalitarian principles of 'Equality of Person & Gender<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Egalitarianism has been around much longer fighting many more battles than feminism has. It just hasn't been as well branded.\n","id":"ead4fe9f-1770-490a-91bb-a3eb4ae42e42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>On the Korean 50.000 won bill is Shin Saim-dang which is controversial because she was used as symbol of 'good-wife-wise-mother' image during times of dictatorship.korea4expats.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On most bills and coins are faces or buildings associated with values the government wants to promote.\n","id":"dc8ac7e7-abcc-400e-bc46-dea1316fec67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>Existential Dread may be relieved by a specific coping mechanism called Anchoring where one uses religious beliefs to focus their thoughts and feelings and create a sense of meaning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Belief in God in a specific religious context may relieve existential dread.\n","id":"3b5e1589-e120-420d-90fa-c06810182d4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>The national anthem is a ritual specifically intended to foster that sense of belonging and equality, and by rejecting the anthem, these athletes highlight the differences they have with \"middle America\", and present optics that invite middle class white people to view the protestors as inferior because they \"hate America\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The end goal of BLM is for black Americans to have the same sense of belonging and equality in society as white Americans, and to not be viewed as different or inferior. By standing they are viewed in the same way as all others.\n","id":"b3cc832b-3d58-40c0-a3f7-18e589fc3e92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently there has been a small political push to allow men the right to stop a woman from aborting their child. While there is some rational reasoning for allowing this it isn't realistic due to a plethora of issues. But after reading some reasons why this shouldn't be allowed on r TrollXChromosomes, I realized that men should have this same right. If a woman has the right to kill the fathers child before they are born regardless of how badly the father wants to take care of and raise the child, why then are women allowed to force a man to take care of a child that they don't want. I get that you cannot force a women to have a medical procedure to kill her child, and I get that you cannot tell a women that they cannot have the procedure because you cannot control a woman's body But why can't we make a system that the mother is legally responsible for informing the father before the child is born that he is having a child. If the man does not want to be a father, he should be allowed to disown the child. This would mean he relinquishes all rights to the child. All the good and the bad. Why should a mother be allowed to decide if she wants to be a mother but the father doesn't get that same choice? PS make the legalize happen before it is too late to abort, so the woman has the ability to abort if the father says he won't be there<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that a man should have the right relinquish all legal rights and responsibilities to a baby before it is born.\n","id":"95362b3a-c412-4554-b4c9-ecae88b05144"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear a lot of how teachers should be paid more, but based on the amount of time they have off they seem to be adequately compensated. Teacher get just shy of 3 months off per year. They have average starting pay of 35k, and average pay of about 50k. This translates to starting pay of 47k and an average pay of 66k. They also have the job security of a government job. This is all of public teacher, private education is a different situation. It just seems as though they get paid enough.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers are fairly paid.\n","id":"efb39854-8d4a-4e71-8b2a-a0ba25da550d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a casual athlete fitness buff in my early forties, and I did plenty of weights in my teens and twenties, and started gradually changing to body weight exercises in my late twenties until I was doing almost exclusively body weight exercises mixed with cardio and high intensity interval training in my mid thirties age. I hit a plateau that I was unable to get out of for about five years from my mid thirties into my forties. Once I started doing free weights again, within just a few months I reached significant performance level improvements that I couldn't even approach with BWE alone. I had reduced body fat, faster sprint times, stronger more explosive body etc. Having being a huge proponent of BWE, I kind of regret that stance now. It is obviously better than doing nothing and great when weights are not available, but considering the amount of work I put into BWE, the results are far inferior to the results you can achieve using weights. Example, I was able to drastically improve my sprint times, something I couldn't do for five years no matter how hard I tried with BWE, by doing squats and deadlifts with weights. No amount of body weight squats will give the explosive strength that you can get by doing 350 pound dead lifts and squats. Other than for basic body maintenance, BWE is mostly a waste of time compared to using weights. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Body weight exercises cannot compare with using weights for exercise effectiveness, efficiency, and improvement.\n","id":"1306aa29-0cb7-4925-946a-1057ab0f4131"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As much as I love Aladdin it's my favorite Disney movie next to Hercules , I've always been bothered by the fact that the Genie's powers don't seem to have legitimate rules or limitations. I've come to the conclusion that there are 2 possible scenarios and rules for the Genie's powers but both have some significant flaws in them. Scenario 1 The Genie's powers only activate when his master wishes for something. Excluding songs and dances and things of that nature, the Genie can only have legitimate power if his master wishes for it. This makes sense in that the Genie requires that his freedom be wished for in order for him to be free. The problem with this is that the Genie was able to get himself Aladdin and company outside of the Cave of Wonders without it counting as one of Aladdin's wishes. In this case, it seems the Genie has unlimited power but is constrained to fulfill whatever wishes his master desires which brings us to Scenario 2 Genie can do what he wants but must follow his master's wishes. let's also assume that the Genie cannot free himself In this case, the Genie lives his life as he chooses but just wants freedom so he doesn't have to fulfill a random guy's wishes. The problem with this, then, is when Aladdin was handcuffed and drowning, why did Genie require Aladdin to wish for himself to be saved? Why wouldn't the Genie just save him using his own relatively free will? In either of these situations, why didn't the Genie just strike up a deal with Aladdin that if Aladdin wished for the Genie's freedom instantly, once the Genie was free, the Genie could just provide Aladdin with 3 wishes as if he were the Genie's master? This is something that is such a critical part in the plot of the movie that really needs clarifying for me to enjoy the film fully.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Genie's powers in Aladdin don't make logical sense.\n","id":"d5e56e93-a9ba-4eed-b2ac-51c0ba3d2fa4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I was in high school we did not have tablets, now my younger sibling attends the same high school i attended and they have tablets. On their personal tablet they receive homework, books, and any other announcements. I think the use of tablets in school is a big distraction and they should not have it, instead they should go back to having books. I feel this way because students can act as if they are paying attention and be on another website, taking pictures, or texting. In addition to that if their tablet dies they will need to charge it , which there are not enough outlets in one room for everyone. Science classes have chemicals and is more hands on then an English class where they can sit at a desk if something was to waste on the tablet it can cause a explosion or be ruined. The use of tablets in place of books and papers for homework should be banned in schools.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tablets should not be a book replacement in schools\n","id":"4930c2b9-c131-4340-b19f-67f27aa3964a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Due to growing racial and ideological differences between the Democratic and Republican electoral coalitions, party loyalty and straight ticket voting have increased in Senate elections. This increase in party loyalty at the individual level means that state partisanship is now a stronger determinant of the outcomes of Senate elections than in the past and that winning candidates\u2019 electoral coalitions are more party-based than in the past. Abramovitz, pg 5<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Congress has been progressively polarised since the 1970s. Polarisation will continue increasing regardless of what the Democrats do as it is rooted in other factors.\n","id":"22b54ae7-2454-4517-b246-dced6ab1c4a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the War in Iraq worth it?<|ARGUMENT|>Malou Innocent. \"The Iraq war: still a massive mistake.\" Christian Science Monitor. April 5th, 2010: \"A fourth consequence of the war in Iraq \u2013 and one that should determine whether it is deemed a \u201csuccess\u201d \u2013 is that it did little to keep America safe from Al Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9\/11. In this respect, what makes \u201cBush\u2019s war\u201d in Iraq arguably one of the biggest strategic blunders in US history is not just the litany of failures it caused but the opportunities America lost. The disaster in Iraq diverted badly needed intelligence assets, public attention, and congressional oversight from the forgotten war in Afghanistan.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The War in Iraq distracted from the War on Terror.\n","id":"77f22124-d28b-415b-8857-be509acc3480"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Literally everyone everywhere who holds political views on any topic believes in social justice, rendering is a meaningless term. If a conservative liberal libertarian communist did not believe his views to be just, he would hold different views. Therefore, saying one believes in social justice is as trite and meaningless as saying that one opposes evil. However, we all know what social justice really means. It's a buzzword used by the far left to describe their own views ex. identity politics, wealth redistribution etc . My issue with this, is that it assumes without justification both that there is an objective standard of justice, and that the social views of the far left are objectively correct. This seems completely dishonest to me. Issues of ethics, morality and justice have been passionately debated for thousands of years without any sort of consensus being reached. Therefore, there is no rational basis to hijack the term justice to describe one's own views. . NOTE THIS  IS NOT ABOUT DEBATING WHETHER OR NOT FAR LEFT SOCIAL IDEOLOGY IS GOOD OR NOT. IT IS ABOUT THE USE OF THE TERM ITSELF.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the term \"Social Justice\" is intellectually dishonest at a fundamental level\n","id":"0ffd323d-6518-420a-96f4-eb6c38a5632c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Considering the big influence from Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Medieval Christian thinkers, it is arguably that non-religious philosophers from Ancient times were actually more seminal to Western philosophy than those applying Christian doctrines to previously constructed theories.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rationalism long predates Christianity. Philosophical and scientific inquiry began long before Christianity.\n","id":"5a13d77a-7dfa-489e-9a7a-6c1636e87bdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before someone tries to raise this point, I do believe there should be certain criteria in which we divide different leagues , but those should be based on skill Nothing entertaining about watching a professional team smother an amateur one , gender In most sports, there is a huge biological and so in my eyes, unfair advantage of men over women , or age. Bah, I'm just going to ramble. In short Additional weight is something that can be acquired and trained for if it's proven to be helpful. If anything, it'd make more sense to divide certain sports basketball, boxing by height considering you can't teach train tall . Having weight classes can de legitamise the victories and titles of those in the lower weight classes. Especially in the martial sports, the fights between the 150lbers and 300lbers are incredibly entertaining. There is a double standard where there are no weight classes for marathon runners or tennis players or any sport where being heavier is a disadvantage. We 'expect' them to have bodies built to the best possible form for their sport, but there is no expectation that smaller weightlifters and fighters bulk up to the best possible form for their sport.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that weight classes in sports create an unnecessary obstacle to the spirit of competition.\n","id":"2dc49ad6-d16b-4672-98cb-8d37bfa66441"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>A majority people or lawmakers believed the Defense of Marriage Act or similar was necessary but it was deemed unconstitutional and overruled nonetheless.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In a constitutionally limited republic, people do not adopt programs simply because a majority believe they are necessary.\n","id":"af00814b-aa10-46f3-8486-9cbe026551c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is science political?<|ARGUMENT|>The Scientific Method is not, in itself, political. It is simply a mechanism for discovery. Humans are political creatures. Humans perform scientific experiments, therefore science is motivated by politics and the political establishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Staking a claim to any intellectual framework is a political act. forbes.com\n","id":"9606ade7-3175-42a5-bc6a-6bf824259a86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that English classes are pointless in an English speaking country because, yes, they DO provide grammar, and essay writing, but I feel these skills are not worth my time. Essay writing in particular is something I detest, due to the on the book format as well as a HUGE set of rules and guidelines which are unnecessarily stupid. English class seems like a waste of my time, when I could be doing other useful things, like Global History or Chemistry. Though there are thousands of people who love English and literature I'm one of those people who hates to read sappy books, especially stupid realistic fiction books about conflict and prejudice and stupid morals and things to just make an English teacher talk all day about symbols and similes Anyway, I think that my view is pretty biased. If you could change it, that would help.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that English classes should be removed from English-speaking countries.\n","id":"bc30c9f1-764f-4f87-89d1-ca6356708d34"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Anyone can start a \u201cNews\u201d outlet, and, depending on how much funding it has, it can significantly influence the opinions and actions of the public. However, there is NO requirement for \u201cNews\u201d outlets to tell the truth. They can impact elections, court cases, public perception of world events, and so much more. They have more power than most politicians, and yet are not controlled in any way. I posit that there should be an independent auditor fact checking with publicly vetted sources every statement made by a news outlet, on a continuous basis. If the outlet slips under a significant truth for the prior few weeks or months, say 95 truth, I\u2019d prefer 100 but ok , then they must call themselves something else, or possibly put up a notice that they have violated the rules and or be shut down for a period similar to how restaurants are sanctioned or temporarily closed for health violations . Outlets will be able to call themselves entertainment to skirt the rules, and perhaps have segments that should be clearly labelled as OPINION, but keeping a status of News or maybe Certified News would give the people some confidence that what they\u2019re hearing is actually true.  Edit what I really meant by 'shut down' is talking the certification away, not removing the ability to present information. Sorry for being unclear. Edit 2 I've awarded deltas due to the language used in my OP but I still believe there should be a fact review process. Perhaps someone can come up with a better idea<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Media outlets should only be able to call themselves \u201cNews\u201d with a rolling 2-3 month average of ~95-100% verified true statements. If they dip below, they must be called something else and\/or be sanctioned.\n","id":"feac272b-8af2-46cc-82d9-faf352080067"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There have been too many cases where an innocent person is put in prison because of inaccurate eyewitness statements. The human memory is not good enough to guarantee that an eyewitness statement is accurate. Other things such as lie detector tests are not admissible because they are not reliable. My argument is that eyewitness accounts are also not reliable and can have a massive impact on the way a judge jury comes to their decision. I recently saw a forensics files episode where a young girl and boy were assaulted by a man and they gave a description of the man and when police gave them a line up they were 100 certain it was one of the guys in the line up. Turns out years later they were able to prove with DNA that it was in fact not the man they singled out. That man spent decades in prison because of that statement. Meanwhile the real criminal ended up being in the DNA database and looked similar to the man they locked up. For these reasons it is not reliable and should not be admissible.  Edit I will give a general delta that witness statements that support evidence should be admissible. What I don't think should be admissible is eyewitness statements specifically referring to identifying individuals. So, if the testimony is to describe what, when or how it is okay to be admissible. But not when witnessing the who .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eyewitness statements should not be admissible in court.\n","id":"c093935d-2f6c-436e-bf15-2096c3efa6f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Shark Culling Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A study conducted by the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries found an increase in the number of Great White sharks at Cape Cod.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In areas with an absence of shark culling, shark populations have been growing to dangerous numbers.\n","id":"ac20940a-28d6-416f-b454-0fe5b492e573"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Supply side economics looks like it is fueling the self-destruction of capitalism in America.<|ARGUMENT|>That is the central claim used by politicians and other proponents to sell supply-side economics to a less-than-enthusiastic public. They've been pushing this for 40 years, so there should be some evidence to prove it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capitalists don't create jobs, they create products or services to generate wealth. The jobs are a 'currently necessary' by-product of the business.\n","id":"68db7b08-f5a4-40ef-b8f0-29a30ac45ade"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By implication, the San Antonio Spurs are the Manchester United of the NBA. My reasoning for this comparison is as follows. Both coaches enjoy ed long longest tenures as the head coach of a single team, in leagues wherein the aforesaid is rare. Both coaches are known for their militaristic, top down, authoritative coaching methods and style. Both coaches are were arguably the most respected coaches of their respective sports. Lastly, under their management, their respective teams are were perpetually dominant over the span of decades.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NBA head coach Gregg Popovich is the Alex Ferguson of north American sports Leagues.\n","id":"a5ca9789-3371-45fe-8b3d-11c28c2f59c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The US has spent trillions in military spending, billions in foreign aid, thousands of US servicemen's lives, and with little to show. The Afghan gov't is corrupt and offers no positive change to the country, their defense is sub par resulting in gov't buildings being taken over by Taliban TB . ISIS is now moving in and causing just as much destruction. The US should set it's priorities on the US. If TB takes over and establishes Sharia law, then those who don't like it can leave or rebel themselves. The US cannot take the toll of a country in disarray without any hope of change in the near future. Estimates put the US spending over 1,000,000,000,000 in spending fight in AFG. Our education is horrible, our roads need to be repaved, the health care system is a mess. Please convince me that we should stay in AFG because I no reason to not pull out.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US should back out of Afghanistan even if Taliban takes over\n","id":"af4e0211-29b1-408d-8f0a-e9ab73a0db2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Abortion Be Further Restricted Or Banned Completely<|ARGUMENT|>An ICM poll commissioned for the Rowntree Trust in 2004 estimated 76% of people in the UK support a womans right to choose. That's over three quarters of the UK population including both men and women. Something that shouldn't be discounted. Voice for Choice \"Why some women need late abortions\" Moreover there is also support for reducing the time delays in abortions being provided for people who had been referred for an abortion Abortion Rights-why women need a modern abortion law and better services To impose or restrict abortion rights would be an example of tyranny of a clerical and vocal minority.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public opinion in the UK is in favour of extending abortion rights not reducing them\n","id":"ca61b570-0245-4a22-b1ca-ee329a24014f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Forcing citizens to vote against their will demeans popular sovereignty which is held in the United States.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right to vote in a democratic society also extends to the right not to vote.\n","id":"cb9dac75-57ea-4e06-9ed7-b6fc8710c4a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>This equalises the power imbalance between sex workers and clients. Without legalisation clients are able to blackmail sex workers by threatening to report them to the police.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Keeping sex work illegal also places these individuals at greater risk. If anything, legalizing sex work will decrease the risk to these individuals.\n","id":"2eb6398b-eaa2-476d-bf84-ddf1d747a379"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>On May 12, 1942, Italian priest Pirro Scavizzi wrote to Pope Pius informing him of the mass murder of Jews p.47<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Pope knew about the Holocaust. As a religious leader this gave him a duty to act.\n","id":"19e84bbd-722c-46e9-b155-3678f6cca5f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Full disclosure my mother is m\u00e9tis aboriginal, my father is irish. I take after my father and am often mistaken for white. Imagine you are in a room with people of all different races. You are likely to identify their race based on what continent they would have been from prior to globalization. African, Asian, Middle eastern, etc. Yet you would likely refer to the white people in the room as caucasian despite European origin. The term Caucasian initially referred to the 50 different ethnic groups inhabitanting the caucasus region of Russia. I contend that this is racist as it disregards the ethnic and historical differences between European white populations. An irishman has little, if anything, culturally, ethnically, and besides Roman occupation, historically with an italian. Both have even less in common with someone from the caucasus, besides less melanin in the skin. Years ago we refered to all Asians as Mongoloid. Today, we recognize this as racist as we realize that an East Indian, Chinese, and someone from Mongolia are different ethnic groups with their own unique history and cultural practices. To imply they are all the same is racist. This even applies to people of European descent. I am also personally offended by the term as it does not apply to me as a mixed individual. Please, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term \"Caucasian\" is racist,\n","id":"ddc67df9-dde8-438d-9c2e-691c4c03f88f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If someone says the music of Katy Perry is a guilty pleasure of mine , what they are actually saying is I like the music of Katy Perry, but I feel I shouldn't because of what X social group would think of me for liking it . Essentially it boils down to caring too much about what society thinks you should or shouldn't enjoy. I find this ridiculous. People need to learn to care less about what other people think of their tastes. You have every right to like or dislike any art. If art makes you feel a certain way explain why on its own terms not on terms of what you feel you 'should' or 'shouldn't' like based on the image that it gives to others. Unless it's quite literally a guilty pleasure ie a pleasure that is illegal or immoral , I think that after our impressionable teenage years where we all inevitably care a great deal about what others think of us we should lose the childish guilty pleasure mentality. It might be a step in the direction of a Eliminating intellectual dishonesty b Eliminating elitism and snobbery c Broadening our range of tastes d Being more comfortable and secure with our own opinions and identities e Being more tolerant of the opinions of others Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea of having a 'guilty pleasure' artistic taste is stupid.\n","id":"ec6e8322-9a62-4e8d-b2ee-e881db298d5b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>Feminism would be easier to talk about if there was not so much anger, and it was truly aimed to help the lower classes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism lowers public will to discuss the equity of the sexes\n","id":"d9461894-2d71-4b52-857d-a227121b05b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Data centres should ban the use of programs written in Python, Java, or other interpreted or bytecode languages.<|ARGUMENT|>One of the major reasons of the damage caused by data centres is that much of the world\u2019s 1.9 billion square feet of data centre space needs to be cooled. This results in the centres consuming massive amounts of energy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The major causes of damage that results from data centres are not resulted to the programming languages being utilised.\n","id":"fe9b180f-23ce-4062-9203-216b251019f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A little background. I am a 21 year old female. I spent the first 20 years of my life dedicating my life to being a good Christian, a disciple of Christ. I even enrolled at a very conservative private Christian college. I still attend there now. My undergraduate experience is what turned it all around for me. I spent three years meeting people who truly lived their lives according to scripture. While I admire them for their dedication, I developed a strong aversion to Christian doctrine. I went on two mission trips those are what finalized it for me. I hated going to another culture with the intention of changing people. I loved their way of life, their culture, their religion I wanted to learn and grow from it, not try to improve it. I have come across a few milestones that I simply can't stomach anymore, and they have separated me from my previous beliefs The Christian God is the ONLY God. All other religions contain only idols. I believe other religions to be beautiful and worthy of just as much praise. Most of these religions are built on similar concepts I find them to be equal, all are attempts at creating meaning and discovering purpose Those who don't believe in the Christian God burn in eternal hellfire. Homosexuality is sinful. Sex with your partner before marriage is sinful. I spent a long time telling myself that the bible didn't really speak out against any of those things. I told myself that scripture interpretation was unclear. I finally realized that I was just changing scripture to what I wanted it to say, and that wasn't right. I believe that Christians look down on those of other religions and lifestyles with the basic idea that they know the absolute truth. I know they don't mean to condescend they are trying to help others. However, I feel that this doctrine does more harm than good, as it fills people with fear fear of different religions and lifestyles that deserve respect. It destroys the modern world's chance at coexisting. I understand that other world religions have similar issues. However, I want to discuss Christianity because it is closest to home for me. I am looking for answers. Please . EDIT A lot of people are pointing out 2 things scripture is open to interpretation, and many church sects present different doctrines. Please know that I am aware of both of these things. However, I have found that in order to be comfortable with Christianity I have to outright ignore very clear meanings in certain passages of scripture. I do not think this is right. I also have never found a church sect I am completely comfortable with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the Christian concept of faith or damnation is ignorant and hateful.\n","id":"7c73a7b3-bac6-4ab8-bebe-8376aaa871dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Apologies for the vague title, couldn't really figure out how to word it. In the UK, handguns are illegal and other guns heavily restricted. I believe this is a good thing, indicated by our much lower gun crime gun suicide rates. Introducing more relaxed controls on firearm ownership like that in the US would have a definite negative effect on me and my country, and if we were to introduce more private gun ownership, I think the advantages though they would exist would be hugely outweighed by the disadvantages.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a UK citizen, strict gun control is a net good for me.\n","id":"66bd9ca6-0075-4a25-b972-8444a40b261b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>If the technology to extend life is available and a dying person wants it, it would be unethical to refuse them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We wouldn't have to deal with the death of our loved ones.\n","id":"327e1ce4-99c7-4ef5-a34c-331e44e7fb88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has the Conservative government lost its legitimacy to govern?<|ARGUMENT|>Conservatives have lost their legitimacy in a deeper sense, in that they have failed to propose a coherent policy that incorporates their alleged values of an independent UK with a real plan, thus orphaning their rhetoric from any concept of real governance. In this sense they have lost legitimacy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of the problems over Brexit are due to the shambolic handling of the Brexit negotiations by the Conservative Party.\n","id":"67b231a8-a0c5-46a0-af18-d9583e1664d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, Marvel is sort of the biggest franchise in the world right now, with a line of successful movies that just keep making more and more money. One of their upcoming movies is Captain Marvel. I have pretty much no interest in seeing this movie, because I'm immediately turned off by how cheap and blatant a mascot the character is. And really, Marvel has a huge history of doing this sort of thing, and it's one of the lamest things about the company. There have been 5 official Captain Marvels, and over a dozen others from parallel dimensions. There have been 2 official Ms. Marvels, one villainious Ms. Marvel during the Dark Avengers status quo, and apparently another Ms. Marvel I just learned about when googling about this topic that I wasn't aware of before in Sharon Ventura. Jean Grey was the original Marvel Girl, then her daughter from an alternate future picked up the name, and there have been others to adopt it temporarily such as one version of Reed and Sue Richards' daughter. There are apparently several Marvel Boys, a Marvel Woman, and then you have Marvelman Miracleman who recently came under Marvel ownership. And last, Marvel recently made Blue Marvel. That's a lot of characters to wear the company name in universe. Far more than I could ever see there being a demand to even meet. I seriously do not understand why Marvel needs these mascots. There is such a breath taking lack of creative integrity in keeping up this tradition by the company. Why does Marvel need a character wearing their name in universe at all? If these characters are good characters do they not deserve their own wholly, separate identities?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it is incredibly lame that Marvel keeps naming characters after the company\n","id":"6213d4a5-54a3-45c1-a781-4dddbf3e3687"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>A male sex toy shaped like a 'realistic' female head for simulated oral sex is advertised with: \"Best of all, she never says no to a good time because she always has her mouth full!\" as evidence of institutional misogyny in the sex toy industry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Despite these restrictions, cultural sexist bias has affected the sex industry.\n","id":"1eb6191e-7942-4ac0-8fa4-4e81257d3bef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As I\u2019m sure some of you have heard, the MGM is suing the victims of the Las Vegas shooting. People have lost their minds in outrage over this calling for a boycott, especially on social media. At first glance it sounds bad but once you look at it a little closer, the MGM really doesn\u2019t have many other options besides not acting in their best interest and spending an absurd amount of money to avoid the PR backlash that is currently happening . First off, this isn\u2019t the MGM just suing the victims out of no where. This is a countersuit as they were sued first. Second, MGM isn\u2019t asking for any compensation from any of the victims. They simply want the lawsuit dismissed. So right there half the people that are upset about the clickbait titles out there lose their stance that this is disgusting and unwarranted it is a company defending themselves. People also don\u2019t realize what exactly the MGM countersuit is for. Essentially there is an act called the SAFETY Act that exempts certain businesses from liability in a mass casualty event if they follow all the steps of the protocol. MGM claims they did and even hired a security firm that was SAFETY certified for the event. If they did follow the protocol set up specifically for these types of events then they can\u2019t be sued, end of story. What they are attempting to do is group the lawsuits against them news articles simply put it as \u201cgroup the victims\u201d into one or two lawsuits where they can find out if they can even be held liable first. If MGM can\u2019t be held liable then it saves them the time and effort of fighting thousands of lawsuits individually. From that standpoint you can\u2019t really blame them for wanting to get this answer first before spending the time and money on individual cases. In fact, they aren\u2019t actually challenging the victims to come to court and fight against them really they are simply asking the federal government whether or not they themselves could be sued for the incident. They could honestly lose that countersuit but still win the other suits if the victims can\u2019t prove that MGM should have somehow thwarted the attack. That brings us to the big issue for people which is whether MGM was responsible or not. In reality we don\u2019t know the answer to that because we obviously don\u2019t have all the details. Most people who are outraged just assume they are responsible and that they should allow themselves to be sued by the victims without countersuing. But if MGM is responsible then tell me why any school, movie theater, church, concert venue etc. isn\u2019t held responsible when a shooting happens there? How do you separate a guy going to a convention with a bunch of duffle bags filled with T shirts or hats to hand out from a guy who has guns? Do you start approaching guests and asking if they are terrorists? Honestly, this topic is actually way deeper and more convoluted than the surface topic which is whether MGM is wrong to countersue or not. Regardless of whether people think they should have metal detectors or hands on staff interrogating people or cameras inside individual rooms, the question is really whether MGM has the right to defend themselves if they followed the SAFETY Act. I\u2019m open to discussing a number of different angles of this topic but the main one is is MGM deserving of all the backlash and a boycott for defending themselves given the circumstances?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the majority of the outrage over the MGM suing the massacre victims is undeserved\n","id":"d5a890fa-1b18-4cb9-a7a5-46ac600564c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Inspired by a post by a black gay Facebook friend regarding the attack on Jussie Smollett criticizing straight black people's ire focusing more on Smollett's blackness being attacked than his gayness. Without question, people being attacked for their sexual orientation or race is both horrible and I don't think anyone isn't acknowledging this, but if I am being honest, as a white gay person, hearing that the victim was attacked partially for being gay got to me more on a personal level than hearing him attacked for being black, mostly because of a it could happen to me factor. Of course its also horrible that he was attacked for his race, I'm in no way denying that, but hearing he was also attacked for his sexual orientation stings more to me, and it makes total sense why a straight black person would feel the opposite. I'll also say of the same idea, the Pulse shooting has affected me more than any other mass shooting in history, for the same reason. My community was attacked, and it could have been me. This isn't to say that all mass shootings acts of hate aren't tragic and horrible, but it's fair to be more personally hurt by an attack on people of your race sexual orientation etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's nothing wrong with being more offended by hate crimes committed against a group you're a part of\n","id":"8b7537ff-1217-4e8f-8378-353ff3e133c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>It is a proven fact that prisons leaning more towards re-education and rehabilitation have showed better results in the reconstruction of the inmate's character - a wonderful example are the open prisons in Scandinavia Prison Life in Scandinavia - we need to remember that being locked up and not being able to freely choose for ourselves, although in less claustrophobic facilities than a cell, is already a punishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Punishing criminals is a proven effective way to dissuade prisoners from committing future crimes, as well as a deterrent to would-be criminals worried about punishment.\n","id":"7c266aaa-e968-4b50-ab81-6beacf4e8531"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the way the technology is going, I wholeheartedly believe we will create and be absorbed by the Matrix. Video games were the first step, little 8 bit, 16 bit worlds we got consumed by because they were so much more interesting than the world around us if you lived in a hick town you know what I mean, you'd rather play Secret of Mana than go outside . Those worlds were good distraction. Then came the internet, you got to talk to people who lived in much cooler places than you. You'd rather spend hours on ICQ or Furcadia talking to people you'd never meet because they were far more interesting than any of your redneck friends or relatives. Then came Second Life which was even more absorbing. Huge sandbox worlds with millions of users. Now we have smartphones. Everyone has internet in reach when before you had to be at a computer. Everything is connected to the internet. Your TV, your games console, soon even your self driving car. We interact with more and more long distance people. Even your once tech hating parents are on Facebook. Collecting new friends like they were Pokemon cards, talking to the same invisible people they complained at you for talking to in the early days of the internet. I believe one day we will create the Matrix and become part of it. We might not explore outerspace because we'll be too wrapped up in cyberspace. Why explore planets when we can just digitally recreate them in the cyber world. All social interaction, schooling, gathering will be done in the virtual world. Why visit another state or another country when you can just go there in cyberspace. Everyone will plug in and escape the boredom of their surroundings. You don't have to be sad about living in a hick town when you can virtually go to Seattle or Portland. You don't have to be sad about not living in a place of diverse culture when you can just digitally immigrate to another country. VR is already here. The Oculus Rift isn't exactly the same as the helmets in the anime Dot Hack or Sword Art Online, but it'll get there. And even if we don't get sucked into VR, the fusion of human mind and machine will still progress. Smartphones were the first step. Cyber Brains like Ghost in The Shell will be next. The small town with nothing in it will die. Xenophobia will be killed off as cultures fuse. We will become a one world people. Sharing culture. Sharing technology. Sharing and combining language. Stupidity will die. Illiteracy already is. In the age of text and importance placed on reading, who can afford to be illiterate. Humans will become more and more intelligent. A person today who can code a webpage will seem slow minded compared to a person who can code whole areas of cyber land. Or someone who programs cyber brains. The internet already changed how we deal with death. You can go look at a dead friend's Facebook page and see in time before they died. In cyber world, their digital essence will be replicated so it is as if they never died. Allan Turing wanted this for his best friend and crush, Christopher Morcom. It's why he created his machines. Looking back at YouTube videos from 2008 makes me feel old, sad, nostalgic. Pondering my death. But in the future, we will have genetically enhanced human beings to slow the processes of age and death. Every disease or illness will be erradicated by nanobots or GMO medicine. Mental illnesses will be wiped out not by drugs but by engineering the baby to not be born with them in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We will be absorbed into the Matrix.\n","id":"43a5ed74-1a33-4664-b1e6-96e7013cdba7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is probably why people will still hate on a man for defending himself if a woman attacks him. Some people disagree and say it's actually social and that men's safety isn't taken into priority compared to women's. im read this post and I think I agree with it. Men protecting women is a constant throughout every culture on earth. Unless every single society just managed to coincidentally decide on the same social paradigm, it's reasonable to believe that the urge, while socially cultivated, was originally bred from a deeper biological tendency. Also, as long as you believe in evolution, you can see the same sort of behavior in primates. The biggest, strongest male gets the harem because he can protect them and their young from outside dangers. Since the population of the species is more heavily influenced by the number of breeding females, rather than the number of breeding males, it's better for the community that the males are disposable, while the females are protected. While our species has grown beyond the need for this system, that little part of our hind brain that tells us to protect the women is still ticking, and we create a whole slew of societal rules around it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is a biological urge for men to protect women.\n","id":"2419ff2e-2dcb-48eb-8be1-97af3ad3e417"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, this thread's gonna be huge. Now I don't know much about statistics or political horseraces, but people are telling my my campaign is just great. It's just great. It's really something, let me tell you. I went from being routinely mocked last year as a fringe candidate to the front runner of of the Republican party. And I've always been a Republican, I love my Bible I love it, believe me, I'm all about the Bible. I'm all about our Judeo Christian background and that's what we need to keep America strong in the world. Republican values like family values and family morals, also we've got to be tough on China and Mexico. I'm the only guy saying this stuff Just ask anyone at my rallies, they'll tell ya they hear straight talk from me that none of the other candidates can deliver. Nobody else talks about the issues. Rubio was too focused on trying to measure the size of my hands geez, that guy is obsessed by body parts, creepy . And Ted's a liar, like of the highest caliber. Jon Kasich is so low energy that he makes Jeb look like he's on cocaine. And Hillary She's such a corporate stooge. See I ran business, I never kowtowed to them like she did. I know how to manage a large organization, and that's why the American people are increasingly turning to me as a strong leader. We need STRONG, DECISIVE leadership. Not weak leadership, strong leadership Not indecisive leadership, decisive leadership But our current president and his party are letting America down, let me tell you. I talked to I talked to like eight people just yesterday whose jobs were taken by illegal immigrants and what does the president do about it? Nothing, he's done nothing. Mexico just keeps sending their rapists and criminals over and Obama will just bend over for them you know, bend over to pick up their trash . He won't secure our borders. I will. I know a lot of people are moaning and gnashing their teeth about my candidacy but I see no reason to quit. After all, this is how democracy works, right? The people choose. And right now it sounds like the people are choosing me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am Donald Trump. I have a great campaign, the best campaign. I should keep running for president.\n","id":"f16b55f3-f666-472e-a868-e235b3210f67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are modern democracies destined to fail due to their inherent weaknesses?<|ARGUMENT|>If laws can be churned out quickly, there\u2019s less certainty for investors to know their projected profits will come about, detracting from investment and ruining the economy<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The slow pace of democratic decision-making is an advantage.\n","id":"c304c656-128e-41a2-840c-608aebd4dc1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer American Redditor, first time posting on this sub, and I admit I'm very neutral about my nationality. I don't mind living in the United States and I have no immediate plans to move out, but I'm nowhere near a red, white, and blue blooded God Bless America yes man either. When I say most sporting events , I can completely understand playing a national anthem before something like an international soccer match or on the podium ceremony at a Formula 1 race or Olympic event. In those cases you're actively promoting international goodwill, and in the latter it's totally reasonable to have the winner celebrate with a little music going on in the background. Also, if there's something going on like a basketball game on a federal holiday and you want to do something to acknowledge the holiday, sure. But should it really be that necessary to do these kinds of displays, say, in the middle of some random baseball game in the middle of August between a couple of backmarker teams and a stadium barely taking in a few thousand people? To me it seems reasonable that if you omit these sorts of ceremonial gestures and just get on with the game race whatever without mentioning it, it shouldn't be a big deal. And another reason I feel it can be omitted much of the time is that doing it over and over again feels like a case of diminishing returns the more you notice it, the more you just want to get on with it and play ball. Nobody's singing a different song, nobody's singing any different lyrics, and apparently, forbid someone tries to embellish it and make it feel like a unique performance. It just becomes this vanilla occurrence that most people simply accept. Yet people often respond to the idea of omitting an anthem very adversely. Do the toxic responses really reflect the general perspective things like You should just move out of this country if you don't like it , or it just an extreme opinion of a few people who are hoping to stir the pot? After all, it's not like droves of fans purchase a sports ticket just to hear a national anthem and walk out of the venue once that's over They're gonna stay and watch sports. I realize that American sporting events playing the national anthem has been something that has routinely gone on for several decades and is likely to not change for a while, but would it really stick out like a sore thumb if it didn't?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most sporting events can omit the national anthem or any patriotic\/nationalist music without being viewed as disrespectful.\n","id":"a348e26b-e0cc-4d68-813f-4fdf12c0837b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should indigenous lands be returned to Native populations?<|ARGUMENT|>Indigenous people already protect 80% of the world's biodiversity although they make up only %5 of the population. Returning their land will undoubtedly increase care for the earth and it's resources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Returning the land to indigenous control would be beneficial for the environment.\n","id":"1c24840f-e67d-4700-8b30-6b1c1a50cf9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Totally agree she's got a phenomenal voice. A lot of pop singers can be average at best when it comes to vocal abilities, but Ariana Grande can really sing without needing autotune or anything like that. She's genuinely got the talent, her vocal range is insane. While I think her music is fairly generic, I'll definitely give her credit for actually having talent. However, I think while she has a recognizable voice, her music isn't particularly innovative or unique. She's got a recognizable, distinctive look and fashion style, so I do give her credit for that, but musically I don't think she's actually doing anything innovative. It sounds her music sounds very contemporary and current, but also sounds pretty generic. Change my view, Reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ariana Grande, while talented, isn't actually doing anything innovative musically\n","id":"42638f20-5dbe-4a1e-b2a6-6379c73722be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Saying #AllLivesMatter Instead of #BlackLivesMatter Better?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Black Lives Matter\" is in part about getting non-black people to see things from black people's perspective. This is needed because black people are systematically disadvantaged in a variety of ways. In contrast, \"All Lives Matter\" is simply a reaction against having to change one's perspective. It is not a call for empathy, but a call for deliberately ignoring those deserving of more empathy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If all lives truly mattered, there would be no need for the Black Lives Matter organisation to even be started. The purpose is to point out how they are treated differently, and how they need solutions to their race specific difficulties.\n","id":"1b58a153-73b8-40bd-80bb-2f0faf01f95f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Being against cultural appropriation is functionally the same as being for segregation. You believe that people of a certain skin colour shouldn't use your skin colour's things. I've thought about this quite a lot. I've tried to view it other ways or from each perspective. When I write down the reasons why X can't use Y's things, it just seems exactly the same reasons for why Jim Crow people were against Blacks being in their society. I just can't see how it isn't a segregationist argument. You are saying that someone cannot be part of your society or use the products of it because they don't look like you. That's functionally the same argument used by racist southerners under the Jim Crow legal framework that wanted Black People out of their culture.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being against \"Cultural Appropriation\" is basically being for segregation.\n","id":"13f5f024-dcbe-4c0d-8a23-730b6c77b5e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are many games and other media where characters use grapple guns to traverse the environment. Batman may be the most famous example, but many others abound Just Cause, COD Black Ops 4, Titanfall 2, to name just a few. These devices are unrealistic there is currently no compact technology that can consistently connect to a structure and launch a human being towards it, typically with a lot of vertical direction. Moreover, if such a device did exist, it would not be desirable to use in the heat of combat. I base this claim on a few facts There are no small, battlefield ready devices currently in existence that can safely propel a human being in the ways depicted at least not under Earth's gravity It would be extremely difficult for any person, no matter how skilled, to consistently connect with a stable piece of the environment to grapple onto in a split second The force of the retracting grapple alone would be quite dangerous, even if it didn't connect with anything Launching a person with the forces depicting in these games towards the point of contact with the grapple would often result in injury or death I understand that on YouTube you can see some attempt at making a real life grapple, and though the results are impressive such as shown in this video none are even close to the grapples depicted in these games in terms of speed, power and portability. Moreover, none would allow for a near magical ability to connect at distance with a grapple able point in an instant, and then disconnect at will. I understand that games are works of fiction and usually put fun gameplay ahead of realism. Remote controlled batarangs and 360 no scopes all stretch the bounds of believable, and yet we accept them because they're fun. We accept grapples for the same reason. I am not calling for the grapple mechanic to be banished. I actually love games with grapple mechanics. My point here is that they are unrealistic and not desirable in real life. x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Grapple guns, as depicted in video games, are not realistic or practical devices on real-life battlefields\n","id":"19b76039-b8fc-4525-a642-9355f41b1e67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>You could build very small super stealth two missile AKDs. And send up hundreds of them. Good luck to a F35.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An air-to-air AKM should not be much more expensive than air-to-ground AKM.\n","id":"50014243-53f5-465f-9c20-30e82807fd0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note Because this is a text belonging to the Orthodox Scientological Church, we have expressed all ideas here in English, the official language of all academia, instead of common people languages such as Garzox or Yezpine. This text was published on April 1, 3798. Lately, we've been digging up old ideas from the Western States a term we use to describe a collection of European and North American nation states that dominated most of the world from the 1500s to the 2000s . Some of their ideas have brought us what is effectively a new revolution in science and ideas, an Enlightenment and Renaissance of our very own, if you will, just as the last Enlightenment and Renaissance saw the rediscovery of Greek and Roman ideas. And one of the topics of furious debate is how the Collective collapsed. Some of my colleagues here at the University of New New Jersey believe in a couple of alternative theories for the collapse of the West. Their theories fall into three primary camps, both of which I believe are wrong Based on archaeological evidence, some argue that significant and unprecedented environmental stresses ultimately destroyed the Western Empire. They point to evidence such as millennium old tree rings from the Floridian Sea and the ruins of sea walls and a fairly large city in the sea south of Scotland. Some have cited a few ancient academic texts referring to a strange phenomenon known as global warming . Such a phenomenon apparently caused fairly rapid climate change from the 21st to the 23rd centuries, while exhaustion of resources such as oil and natural gas which I'm not sure what they used for caused a series of conflicts that gradually tore apart the Nato empire, as well as most other nation states. Another view holds that widespread moral decay ultimately brought down these empires, with scholars pointing to legalizations of interracial marriage, homosexual marriage, no fault divorce, and abortion in the late 20th and early 21st century throughout the central areas of the West Nato areas, for example . I think both of these views are wrong. The first view fails to account for significant contrary evidence found in the ruins of academic institutions such as Exxon Mobil and Fox News showing that global warming was a myth. Meanwhile, the second view is overly simplistic, as most contemporary accounts show a corresponding decline in religiosity and nationalism, two far more reliable indicators, due to the unrelated problem of their academics denying pagan Christian beliefs but not yet accepting Scientological beliefs. However, we have recently found archaeological evidence that, around the turn of the millennium, scientists invented a program known as the internet , which consisted of tubes connecting people through screens. Within decades, the internet became so large that almost everybody in the world used it regularly, creating a constant distraction that undermined the decisions of everybody in society, ultimately causing a gradual decline into chaos and the New Dark Ages. Although we're still trying to prove the internet distraction chaos connection, this theory makes more sense than the other two theories, or any of the bizarre fringe theories that have emerged in popular literature about the end of West. gt Hello, people of the past. This is a footnote from the moderators of this 'internet forum'. I'm afraid to say that some wannabe scientist, while looking into time travel, has caused a temporal distortion field. It should dissipate in the next 24 hours. In the mean time, feel free to message us about a view you hold while you're visiting the present, and remember to have a look through our rules<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mass escapism caused the decline and fall of the Western States in the 21st century\n","id":"b2a863ea-c759-4475-a8e4-35d6fe228e4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>Knowledge about genetic diagnosis, even if the person in question is asymptomatic or will never be significantly impaired, has been linked to discrimination in areas such as employment and insurance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are aware of embedded power structures and institutionalized realities - of which genetic discrimination is already one through the popularity of genetic testing\n","id":"3f8fc4e6-6dd2-492a-a430-569f7ad78ab8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Equal Paternity\/Maternity Paid Leave Be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Some businesses may choose not to hire any temporary staff to cover the workload of the employee taking parental leave. This work will be distributed to the rest of the team, adding to the workload and stress of the remaining team members.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Enhanced paid parental leave policies will alienate employees who are not parents and impact the business negatively.\n","id":"2a8d3e1e-a960-4327-8549-62c1f687a527"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Languages, Preservation of<|ARGUMENT|>Governments have a duty to preserve endangered languages. As a government is sovereign and the bearer of our rights, it has a responsibility to every member of a polity. Preserving the cultural heritage of all members of a society, rather than just that of the majority is fundamental to multiculturalism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments have a duty to preserve endangered languages. As a government is sovereign and the bear...\n","id":"d9a60654-d716-46b4-b26d-68f290379827"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait or the UAE find it difficult to side with the US publicly on Iran unless \"Washington pressures Israel on a peace initiative\". If anything, recognition increases regional cooperation with the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The conditions for America's operations and presence in the region might improve if other countries appreciate its disassociation from Israel.\n","id":"ee0c0954-b9eb-4e58-97d1-5996b611682d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, accepting that white privilege is an phenomenon that exists in the world, I would describe it as characteristically made up of individuals, usually, but not always, influenced subconsciously by attitudes held by the people of previous generations that raised them. A person cannot control subconscious attitudes or emotions and can only be responsible for attitudes that they have control over. So then, a person cannot be ethically responsible for actions or attitudes of which they are not cognizant. So if the majority of racial biases that exist in America today are subconscious, then these individuals are not ethically responsible for unfairness that results. If a person is aware that people of color experience bias from many people who are biased either consciously or unconsciously, we may believe that people have a positive duty to help correct for this unfairness. But how would a person go about doing this? I'll define being fair as refraining from taking from or depriving someone of something they deserve or failing to give or make available to someone something that they deserve. Taking the example of being an employer looking through job r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, the hiring manager knows that they likely have some biases that they can't be aware of or even they may be aware. They want to be as fair as possible to all people who apply, so how can they compensate for certain challenges that they know people of color face in particular? A common option may be the idea of making a quota for people of color in the company and making sure to hire that amount not matter what, except in some extreme circumstances. But while this may seem fair on the face, the classic criticism of this policy is that it ends up being unfair to other individuals who's lives an wellbeing is just as valuable as a person of color's. Since our goal is to be as fair as possible to all applicants, this course of action wont due. So if we can't help increase fairness for people of color without being unfair to others, then it seems that the only way to help create fairness is to simply be kind and fair to all. shit, i've run out of characters. Please ask for clarification if needed A common objection to this critique of these types of policies, taken by groups or individuals, is that racism is defined as discrimination, plus power, and therefore, a PoC passed over for a position would likely be worse off than a member of a different group. I dont believe that this is a compelling critique for the following reasons gt our definition of fairness or justice, which of course may be disputed, does not and should not, I believe, take into account the projected outcome of certain actions beyond base justice. The logic of this sort of act utilitarianism allows us to justify abhorrent actions and policies in the name of righting social wrongs in order to create fairness. For example, if it were a certainty that decimating the asian population of the united states would make for much more fairness, and therefore, happiness in the county, by the reasoning of act utilitarianism, we could justify this. However, In the west I think we can agree that we believe fairness and justice in our society as checks on our actions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Supposing white majority privilege is real, I have no extra duty to right a systemic wrong beyond treating everyone with kindness and fairness.\n","id":"5cd3d793-cc10-4f09-bc95-8a94cd745fad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>Should an NDA be put in place for those who request the information, it could prevent further dissemination of the information.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nothing prevents a person from turning around and disseminating the information they gain to other less-legitimate parties.\n","id":"fb53e78a-c58f-4ea8-b8b5-a95a916c89e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm kind of sick and tired of having to wear jeans and t shirt like what the kids wear today when I'm almost 39. Also, suits are not uncomfortable as people make them out to be. Jeans are actually far more uncomfortable for me to wear. I don't know why that is. But if i don't wear jeans and a t shirt i know for a fact everyone would look at me like i'm a green colored human or something. Or they would say something like, Interview today? I miss when I used to work in New York when I could wear my nice suit jacket, my neatly ironed slacks, a dress shirt, and my nice silk ties with the patterns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Business formal is better than business casual\n","id":"14ccaf9f-115d-4808-9c8e-1597dc2ae89a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>President Bush authorized U.S. military jets to shoot down flight 93 if needed, but this order was never implemented as the passengers wrested control back and crashed the plane.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nohijacked civilian plane has ever been shot down by the military of a country solely for being hijacked.\n","id":"349478c8-aab0-4554-823a-6e66d9c10ca2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Both in my side career as a writer, and on social media, I have both been accused of, and seen others accused of, saying something that is offensive or racist, sexist, ageist Because a difference between two groups was pointed out. For example, acknowledging that biological males tend to have more muscle mass because males build muscle more easily than biological females and are therefore often physically stronger on many measures. There's a lot of evidence for this in scientific literature, and it's not saying that all males have more muscle mass than females but on average Or for example, wanting to test the hypothesis that older adults have slower reaction times than young adults. Again, a lot of evidence in scientific literature for this, so I think pointing it out in the appropriate context on social media or in a YouTube video about science is not inherently offensive. My view is that it's okay to acknowledge these differences in public.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Acknowledging differences between groups is not inherently damaging to said groups\n","id":"41f88837-3c9a-4fdd-ab38-2f4de44ec11a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should be the Next EU Commission President?<|ARGUMENT|>Weber's election would likely contribute to a perception of Germany in the EU that is poised to become more critical anyway. The UK is about to get out of the EU, leaving Germany and France with even more influence within the union.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A German at the head of the EU's executive is likely to further fuel anti-German sentiment within the EU and the perception that a few large countries dominate it.\n","id":"92f98bd3-6b55-4a7a-b0af-a17e693c09ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, the reason I'm posting this is because I recently had a good friend come out as a trans woman. I don't understand it, and I don't like it, but I should at least try to understand it because he's always been a good friend. Hence the  post. I don't see how gender and sex are different in any way. But, people keep telling me that sex is what you're born as, and gender is what you identify as, but I don't see why you would identify as the opposite sex. What is the difference even? Genitals? Well, if you want the opposite genitals, you can't have them. Why pretend you can? Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think \"gender identity\" matters\n","id":"027e3b52-5a96-46e7-9a96-28dca81bd2a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>High-income countries have the means to assist refugees, specifically those fleeing war, and so as fellow human beings, it is the right and correct thing to do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refugees are desperate, vulnerable, innocent human beings. Given that every human being is of equal dignity and humanity, high-income countries must help them.\n","id":"1c7680ea-1d36-4499-8c44-0513d13be6ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Intervention In African Affairs<|ARGUMENT|>Often, only neighbouring countries in Africa are able to respond to crises in time to sort them out before they can become international incidents. A case in point was during an uprising in the kingdom of Lesotho Southern Africa, where South Africa sent in troops and was able to stabilise the country and restore the rightful ruler, thus preventing what could have degenerated into the civil wars we see elsewhere on the continent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Often, only neighbouring countries in Africa are able to respond to crises in time to sort them out ...\n","id":"286cdd99-356a-4343-80f4-329506e497d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>Unlike Airbnb listings, hotels are regularly inspected for fire hazards and other such safety risks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Health and safety regulations are necessary to ensure the safety of residents.\n","id":"d039825b-8cf1-4e42-ab74-7b59f574530b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund security for places of worship?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate crime is usually done on historically oppressed groups. Of all crime victims, the government has a duty to protect historically oppressed groups foremost as they are usually the most prone to future attacks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is the duty of the government to uphold peace inside the country and to protect all its citizens from crime and terrorism regardless of race, creed, or colour.\n","id":"fdfd28b2-241d-49d3-94e2-7ce48dba24ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>Even if voters feel that a voting reform shouldn't take priority, supporters of more complex systems can convince voters that voting reform will not be a significant spending of their \"political capital\" on issues they care more about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A method that actually has quality can prove to voters that it should take priority over their other favored political ideas.\n","id":"d44b9ecb-e6bb-4f00-a1aa-8d9da2072c20"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I singled out French because I can't make claims about things I don't know. French is the only language besides English and Japanese, both of which don't contain genders, I have attempted to learn, and so I felt somewhat qualified to ask this. My native language is Arabic. In it, if a word ends in an a then it's feminine, otherwise it's masculine exceptions may exist . Genders in French, on the other hand, follow no rhyme or reason. They're arbitrarily assigned. Calling it superfluous might be bitter and a product of mere laziness on my part, but does it invalidate the claim? The French don't complain about genders the same way the Chinese don't complain about their 8000 characters. Both had a lifetime to learn them. But for an auto didact like me who with limited time, resources and will power has the luxury to choose, is it worth the time? Genders in French add beauty, elegance, sophistication and much room for poetry, but do they serve any significant semantic purpose? My question isn't whether they serve a purpose at all. I, or anyone, would be silly to think they don't But whether 1 that purpose justifies their sheer amount 2 their method of fulfilling it is optimal To me, the solutions they offer seem miniscule in comparison to the labour memorizing them incurs. Take ambiguity for example. Most problems of ambiguity could be avoided through paraphrasing or picking less vague words, if context doesn't suffice to clarify. To rephrase my original query in a less mean spirited way if you were to construct a language from scratch, would you involve genders in the same manner French did? On an everyday conversational level, how often do you encounter problems you can confidently claim could only be solved through the utilization of something akin to French genders? I write this as someone who took no more than an A1 level course. I could be very wrong in my assessment. And that's why I challenge you, dear redditors, to <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genders in French are a superfluous complexity\n","id":"1a711502-2f69-4955-ae7b-9655c95def23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Until recently, I didn't know Social Justice Warriors or SJW's were a meme. I'm not sure know how this phrase became so negative, but it seems to me that people fighting passionately for a social cause don't deserve such a title. After doing some research and being educated by my classmates , I've found the main arguments against SJW's are They are a small but extremely vocal group that does not represent the population They do not really care about their issue but are just seeking attention. I don't have any solid evidence against point 2 but I believe that there are probably a good number of SJW's who genuinely care about their issue that end up lumped together with the rest. More importantly, even if some are seeking attention, they still probably support the cause and are getting their opinion out. This leads to my second point. The fact that they are vocal and small isn't a good reason to hate them. If you disagree with the views of a group of SJW's, it is not their fault for expressing their views but your fault for not expressing yours. Whatever power twitter users and street protesters have is shared among every citizen. One argument I've heard is that the average person who opposes something to the same extent that an SJW supports something will not be as active. This has the effect of silencing one side if not a lot of SJW's support that side . I agree that this is bad, but I still think that being quiet is the crime here, and not being loud. Finally, I think that hating on SJW's is bad for society in the long run. Democracy is built on expressing opinions, but since it's viewed so negatively, there might be a decline of social activism in the future. Anyways, I must be missing something because there seems to be a universal dislike of SJW's. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Social Justice Warriors\" are not bad\n","id":"b403090d-21f3-4b17-a834-b1069f8ee81a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>And this is very converse to many of my opinions because I am a libertarian, but I do believe that the death penalty in all of its current circumstances is the most efficient way of delivering justice at its current state for the crimes eligible for death. In fact, I actually think that the death penalty should be expanded to more crimes on both the state and federal levels. Crimes like serial rape or deadly assault with a blunt object should also be included. I don't think that the current death penalty should just be limited to violent serial murder or acts of terror. I believe that it is immoral and wrong to keep individuals responsible for raping 11 year old children and then setting their live bodies on fire, to be alive and well maintained in a prison cell for 70 years. I also believe that it is inefficient seeing the potential dangers that they present to the prisonry and their life is not worth the costs. The families of the victims in many death penalty circumstances accept the punishment with almost certain unanimity. It would do a disservice to them to keep the villain alive. How my mind can be changed Describe how a life imprisonment or other punishment can equal the severity and stark reality of death Describe how the most cowardly, brutal, and vicious animal like human beings could possibly change their lives in prison, benefit any part of the world, or any reason why they should be kept alive Tell how keeping them alive would not lessen the severity of their crimes and Tell how the families of victims should deal with the thought of the villain being well cared for 3 hots and a cot while their loved ones are six feet under the ground. You can also change my mind by finding a single inefficiency in the very lengthy and thorough appeals process that takes decades and rightfully it should just to quadruple check that they are guilty and to preserve innocent life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am wholeheartedly in favor of the death penalty\n","id":"81624922-d667-4cc3-8217-a60614ac6ba5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the UN a force for good?<|ARGUMENT|>A League for Democracies would not constantly be stopped from acting by China and Russia's use of the veto.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A League for Democracies would be a better alternative to the U.N.\n","id":"fd13616d-1a04-4acf-9a1f-054939f87292"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ive been hearing a lot about the problems with income inequality in the US as a part of the political campaign, but I don't think there is any problem with different people making different amounts of money. If I have developed a skill or talent that has a higher value in the market than your skill or talent than I should receive higher compensation. Additionally I understand that opportunities are not equal for all people and that some people have to overcome much more to gain a college education, etc. But ultimately, isn't that just life? Why do we feel the need to counteract the cards that are dealt to everyone? Either you take the opportunities that you are given and more of them or you don't. I guess I just don't see why it's someone's responsibility to change that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Income inequality is not a problem it's a result of natural consequences\n","id":"c992375d-1d4f-4fc2-b60a-2293b4c9540f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think people who have more than two biological children in this day and age are at the height of selfishness. The only qualifier I have is if the second pregnancy is unexpectedly a multiple pregnancy . In that case obviously it would obviously not be the couple's fault. With overpopulation and the immense amount of children needing to be adopted, I see couples who have three or more biological children and I can't help but think, All you care about is yourself and your own little world, don't you? No concern for the future of the planet, no concern for the environment of others, and certainly no concern for the quality of life of future generations. Just you and your current world with your gaggle of crotch fruit. It almost immediately makes me dislike someone. Change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people who have more than two biological children are selfish beyond belief.\n","id":"daa5ea94-ef10-4621-9f55-2fc5890b385f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm sick of all these standard politicians becoming president, it's just really boring and everyone knows nothing will really change with the change of a president. Personally i want Sanders to be president because i think he can really change the country into something better, but since it doesn't look like he'll get nominated as the democratic representative, i would have Trump be president instead. Don't get me wrong, i see why Trump would maybe be a bad choice, but i think it would at least be interesting, and if he fucks the country up worse than ever, so be it, at least we'll go out in a glorious flaming and entertaining way. sorry for any grammatical errors, i'm drunk<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I would want either Sanders or Trump to be president, because that's the only way politics will really change.\n","id":"ee52729a-ffba-4dfe-80bb-8f7a532ed9b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think framing computer programs as engineering projects, same as if we were building a bridge, is why all code is bad and all software has bugs these will sound familiar to any developer out there . As I see it, a program is a complicated mathematical function. It receives input and produces output accordingly. Be it a compression algorithm or a google search, the concept is the same. Engineering projects aren't like that. We would not admit a function that doesn't produce the correct result sometimes, and the researcher would not tell us to restart and try again. A function can't be mostly right or good enough . It's either correct or incorrect. Maybe if we considered programs correct or incorrect, we would not release incorrect programs. If we worked like this, probably we would not be able to release as many programs as we do now. But that just means the engineering approach makes more sense economically, in terms of making money that's not the purpose of the topic. My view is about what makes more sense from the point of view of computing. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Framing computing as engineering is misguided, it should be regarded as applied math instead\n","id":"e5384c20-cb86-4d65-ac53-a43adfe3c2b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The fundamental premise that I will adhere to for the entirety of this discussion is expressed in the American Declaration of Independence that a government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. In order to change my view, you'll need to stick to this premise as well. My reasoning is simple you can't consent to something you aren't completely informed about. Therefore, if the government does something you're not aware of, you can't consent to it. Furthermore, if a government has information you're not aware of, you can't adequately consent to its existence. You can't agree to something if you don't even know what you're agreeing to. I can't consent to the existence of Area 51 if I don't know what goes on there. The supreme courts of multiple states have ruled that the legal definition of consent requires the consenting party to be fully informed of what they're agreeing to. Therefore, if you do not know all the activities of your government, you can not consent to its existence. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A just government has no authority to classify documents or keep any information from its citizens\n","id":"343f7d20-6a38-49aa-a0b5-1ae6b2b4e04d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd like to start off by saying that I consider myself a decent looking guy. I'm 6'0 tall, healthy weight, good facial structure. I'm by no means a bombshell or model material, but I wouldn't consider myself unattractive. To get to my point, I believe attractive people have it easier in life than unattractive people. People who are visually attractive are seen as more trustworthy and also better leaders, regardless of their actual behavior. To me it seems they are more likely to be considered as partners by members of the opposite sex. It seems that overall life is simply not as hard if you're decent looking. You can get by with more things than you could if you were otherwise not attractive. I can think of some downsides of being very good looking off the top of my head, but would like to have a conversation with you all to discuss the negative aspects of being good looking. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Good looking people have it easier in life than unattractive people\n","id":"3b0afc57-5b54-4585-b52d-67e7b2cfc702"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People act like Abortion is some sort of a war between religion and science, but honestly, there's so much more to it. The bible never mentions abortion, as it was not possible at the time. Any church claiming abortion is sin is merely a matter of interpretation. A fetus is interpreted as life, therefore intentionally killing it is interpreted as killing, thus a sin. As a result of Christianity determining it to be a sin, it does in fact cause people to be pro life, simply because they fear what religious consequence may occur heaven hell . Thus, religions have taken an interpretive stance on a moral issue, and preached it as religious issue. The end result is that interpretation by religious leaders resulted in religions acclimating to this belief as a whole, thus developing the association between religion and the concept of abortion. At the same time, people treat abortion like a scientific feat. We discovered how to 'safely' terminate an unintended pregnancy. There is so much more reason to oppose it than religious purposes, however. Simply because a seemingly useful technology becomes available does not immediately confirm that it is morally acceptable, unless that's what your relative view of morality leads you to believe. Weaponry such as guns and explosives are products of science and research, but violence isn't seen as moral. Violence is only determined as moral when it is interpreted as a necessary evil , such as putting an end to a greater evil. When people argue about abortion, it comes down to one thing do we interpret a fetus as life? Scientists will say no, because it doesn't fit an arbitrary definition. A fetus is dependent on the Woman's body, thus it isn't life . But should we really base our decision off of an arbitrary definition established for the sake of classification? A 1 day old child cannot survive on its own. If a women abandoned a baby to die by not feeding it, she would be seen as a murderer, a terrible person, deserving life in prison or even the death penalty. Yet a woman receiving an abortion is praised by many for utilizing her rights to her body. This is a clear result of human empathy and emotion. Morality is defined by the emotional and empathetic response we develop to particular actions. When we see faces, we develop a sense of connection or value in human life. Empathy is likely an evolutionary trait. If people feel connected and value each other, they're more likely to help each other, thus stay alive and grow as a population. When a woman gets an abortion, there isn't as much to trigger an empathetic response. When we see a clump of cells, or an underdeveloped fetus, our minds do not think much of it. We do not develop the emotional connection that leads us to value this form of life. It is not the same life as a woman, however. It is an entirely different product of combined DNA chromosomes of the male and female, supported by a Woman's body. Thus, saying it is the woman's body isn't necessarily true, if you're also referring to the fetus itself. We see a fetus as incomplete. Some forms of abortion can be extremely painful for the fetus. Do we define it as immoral once either emotion or physical senses are developed? Or is intentionally sabotaging an established product of DNA and chromosomes immoral? I believe abortion is an issue of morality, and this morality results entirely from empathetic and emotional stimulation. In the end, I think beliefs on abortion are relative. How evil is it, if at all? At what level of development is it immoral? In cases of rape, an abortion can help a victim not have to deal with raising a child alone. In cases of severe birth defects such as resulting from incest , it can prevent someone that would struggle to come to life. Is it worth it to let them live? You don't know if the person coming to life would want to live in that state, that cannot be answered until they're grown and developed. While an empathetic response, it can still be interpreted as a necessary evil in some cases I'm not taking a side for or against abortion, so don't try to sway me either way with common arguments I've looked into both sides extensively. Try to discredit my argument with additional information such as elements of psycology I may be unaware of, or things about fetus development I may be unaware of. I'm not a biologist, so I'm sure there's much for me to learn.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion Is Far More Than Just Religion VS Science\n","id":"7f878b45-36a8-4c3f-b867-d72422430465"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do offspring have a right to know their biological parents?<|ARGUMENT|>The desires and wishes of the child must take precedence over the wants of anonymous parents: the right to family life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The reassurance which comes from knowing one\u2019s parentage is a valuable source of psychological security:\n","id":"211a0900-4f06-4d2d-86d7-f5dffedc59b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US build a wall on its Mexican border?<|ARGUMENT|>A state has an interest in improving the quality of its population. Encouraging the immigration of groups it sees as valuable and discouraging that of groups it sees as undesirable should be a tool it uses to achieve this. A wall on the southern border would give the US this ability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US should build a wall on its Mexican border.\n","id":"200f6327-d64f-4dfa-8246-b4dbdb4ad554"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lately on some anti Trump subs, I have seen an increasing amount of apacolyptic rhetoric about the future of the US and the world. Some of the things mentioned in these subs include The ACHA being a form of Economic Genocide where the GOP knows that they will be killing people and is okay with it. The military and police shacking up with White Nationalists to take down a liberal resistance. The real purpose of The Wall being to keep Americans from pursuing cheaper health related services in Mexico or using that as a path of escape. The prospects of a purge that would make the Holocaust look like nothing are growing. Never mind the prospects of nuclear war that are looming, potentially causing destruction over a tweet. I keep hearing that if Hillary won, she would've had a uphill battle given how midterms would've been extra unkind to the Democrats being incumbents on top of having to defend so many Senate seats in 2018 and that the GOP would've had a wave then or in 2020. However, she wouldn't have touched healthcare, she would've hired a competent cabinet, she would've moved forward on balancing the playing field for non white heterosexual males, she would've kept this nation on the right track. Might it have hurt the Dems chances for taking back the House until the 2030s? Maybe. But I can't see any way in which in the long run the US, and world, would've been any worse off with Hillary as our 45th President rather than what was forced on us because she couldn't print a recipe for risotto. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States, and the world, would be infinitely better off *long-term* if Hillary Clinton won in 2016.\n","id":"68b8966a-c9af-4b62-845f-eba850432254"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>The 2002 NSS highlights that 'the gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology' in which terrorists penetrate societies at home and abroad.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US National Security strategies, such as those of 2002 or 2015 identify terrorism as the biggest threat to the US and their allies.\n","id":"62dd952a-69b3-4ffa-baa9-9c53fee6afd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Hell Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>All things in the Universe were designed to reach and keep balance. If there is a Heaven, then Hell must exist. The ultimate universal \"balancer\" is entropy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Philosophical and psychological theories support the existence of Hell in some form.\n","id":"3b175dd2-cf4d-474c-aaa0-9cf324a46141"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Progressive Web Apps Replace Mobile Apps?<|ARGUMENT|>Grand Velas Riviera Maya resort saw a 53% increase in Black Friday sales using their PWA.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"PWA's see a 68% increase in mobile traffic on average.\n","id":"fe1481a1-8041-487a-9072-11d3b0a07598"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US and its allies were justified in taking military action against Iraq following Iraq\u2019s invasion of Kuwait<|ARGUMENT|>Iraq could have posed a threat to other US allies in the region, e.g. Saudi Arabia and Israel<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US and its allies were justified in taking military action against Iraq following Iraq\u2019s invasion of Kuwait\n","id":"8e86073e-8986-449d-8865-0942ab6e467b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi, Reddit I actually think that competitive games like MOBA games League, DOTA are actually dangerous to social health and makes the player more unusually irritated, prone to violence both verbally and physically. They tend to be more overcompensate to almost anything While yes I'm a hardcore gamer myself who plays several games and racing is my main genre since I'm a fan of vehicles etc. When I play MOBA games I can't play for a period of time considering how terrible and immature the community is sending threating messages including death threats and angry loud screaming at the mic is something I can't stand Being a game development student this is more prominent on my block. People are so anti social, competitive and unstable. They act like the people you find in LoL lobby chat. Most of my friends are from another course like Multimedia Arts, Animation etc as most people in game development are hard to get by I play GTA Online too and had a thousand hours of it and been playing years. But it's more tolerable and actually, have more matured community than these games are. It's not the violence rated M stuff. It's the terrible community and competitiveness that makes these guys jittery. I'm no psychiatrist but I keep logging my interaction with people myself and I mostly find people who play MOBA games are as les which majority of people in my course since its game development and I can easily interact and befriend people from another block business, artist courses as they don't play or doesn't play as much as people here. One major log that I had is a female teen who convinced by someone to play these competitive games notable League of Legends and as I know this person I actually saw major changes in her behavior more irritable and swears loudly more often than usual Some of my friends play this kind of games but some of them told me they don't play for an extended period of time much because of the terrible community it has. Most of my opinion are my own personal experience on my perspective. Like I said it doesn't have to do with matured content whatsoever but more on the competitive side Game designers should do something about that abused chat system. The no swearing and threatening policy is implemented lax and there no support for it like nobody even care. These things are making video games look bad. A shame for esport title as I never encountered such issues with other esport game titles such as Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat X and more fighting game titles League of Legends is played by millions and its F2P. While not all people who play League having the same social health issues and also can be game dependent as I never encountered a Starcraft, Overwatch gamer. ESport administrators should first check psychological health of their athletes before letting them join a game session and game designers should become strict on dealing toxic players with swearing on mic, threatening should be permanent ban the violating player similar to Club Penguin or Roblox P.S. Sorry if there's a broken English<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Competitive\" games can seriously effect social health\n","id":"80575c64-b562-4416-83ea-20a56041c6db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Canada build the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion?<|ARGUMENT|>When people do not have employment, they are careful to conserve their money which hurts the local economy. By creating new jobs, this allows people to spend money they were previously keeping to ensure they made ends meet. The money that circulates in the economy can help the institutions of that local area.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The creation of jobs can have important knock-on effects for local economies.\n","id":"c6379b0c-ac05-493c-a9a3-aa87f874fbde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is chivalry sexist?<|ARGUMENT|>Being helpful to women, who, on average, have less physical strength than men, helps their lives and causes no harm to it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women, on average, are physically weaker, thus men should be chivalrous.\n","id":"1c3b1a05-75cd-4ad6-bffe-81fb9ad038de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion provides hope that something good will happen if you continue doing good deeds. And it is reassuring that some entity is looking after my affairs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion allows societies to feel hope and to see light in the most darkest periods.\n","id":"1e53a388-510b-48db-aa9d-26f3e5da09c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll start with an anecdote. An employer and employee both agree that a certain job should be paid at the wage of some amount of money lower than minimum wage. The employee agrees to accept this payment for the work being done, as does the employer. Why should the government be able to tell them that is wrong? Furthermore, the free market is able to govern itself to determine for itself what is a fare wage by what people will and won't work for. If an employer sets a wage for a certain job at an absurdly low rate, then no one will accept the job, and thus he will be forced to raise it until it someone agrees to be paid that amount. Not to mention the fact that it drives up inflation by causing the government to have to circulate an increasing amount of bills with decreased values. I just can't find a reason we shouldn't be allowed to decide for ourselves what is fair and what is not, instead of having the bureaucracy do it for us.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that minimum wage is ineffective in application and should be taken out of practice.\n","id":"1ec552e9-0f74-47b6-970f-f62c1fdceb45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments of resource-rich nations should impose high taxes on mining and extraction<|ARGUMENT|>What we see as the main clash points in this debate are 1. Whether high taxes will result in a healthier economy, and 2. Harms vs. benefits of high tax to the country. We have explained how high tax will help balance the economy by allowing the government to redistribute a portion of wealth gained in mining and resource extraction, and turn short-term benefits into long-term growth like education and the environment. Opp emphasized the \u2018temporariness\u2019 of this income from the resources, but we suggested that no responsible government is dependent on the taxation of resources. If resources do sometime dry up this doesn\u2019t seem like it would happen too quickly in a resource-rich nation, we believe there would be some opportunity to plan for a future without tax income, as well as ongoing benefits from redistributed income, particularly in education and environmental development. Opp argued that taxes will decrease profits for companies involved in extraction of resources. However, they also said demand for resources is growing, which we believe will probably offset any decrease in profits for the companies. Whether or not taxes dig into companies\u2019 profits, we have demonstrated that it is highly unlikely companies will do less mining and extraction, given the increased demand for resources that exist in limited quantities. Do the harms of high taxation outweigh the benefits? Opp has argued that it would result in job losses as companies cut down operations. We contended that the same demand that makes their operation sure also means that companies are currently making plenty of profit, enough to sustain even a substantial tax hit. What the Opp has brought up again and again is the danger of high taxes empowering governments that do not work in the best interests of their people, but use taxes for themselves. However, the fact that governments \u201cshould\u201d impose high taxes on mining and extraction is not made less by the reality that they also \u201cshould\u201d use those taxes to benefit the nation. When we introduced this motion, we explained that before imposing taxes, governments would need to have economic institutions in place that would be able to reliably distribute tax revenue, so this harm does not apply to the plan we have introduced. We have demonstrated the economic, environmental, and social benefits of passing this motion. We have shown why Opp\u2019s harms are either negligible or nonexistent. Even the \u201csustainable\u201d alternatives they have offered include high taxes, and are simply variations on how our plan might be implemented. Clearly, the understood purpose of taxing resources is to help the people of a nation. We affirm the responsibility of governments to impose high taxes on resources at their source in order to compensate citizens for the loss of their nation\u2019s natural capital, and to allow governments the financial means to offset environmental harms, and to invest in the development of other sectors of the economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments of resource-rich nations should impose high taxes on mining and extraction.\n","id":"4fefd31e-0b9a-44d0-a44a-34ef161434a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Velcro Straps Replace Shoelaces?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people tuck their shoelaces in order to avoid them being a danger. This can be uncomfortable for the sides of the feet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One can hurt themselves badly if they trip over their shoelaces.\n","id":"957f003a-bb61-499f-b7ff-932ec847c505"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Given divorce statistics, rates of maturity, and the complications and stress that come with divorce e.g., money, custody, etc. , people would do themselves a favor by waiting until 30 to get married. And although there is also often stigma, I don\u2019t hold anything against divorc\u00e9es, it\u2019s the painful and draining experience of divorce that I\u2019m most concerned with avoiding by waiting until age 30. If you wait and you\u2019re not religious or have moral objections to sex before marriage , you\u2019d save yourself a lot of trouble by simply dating until you\u2019re in your 30s, have a better sense of self, and are a better read of others. Yes, you\u2019d still have painful break ups, but they would be far less complicated and protracted than divorce. On the flip side, you could have years of dating a fabulous person and ultimately decide with your mature, informed 30 something year old brains that this was a relationship you wanted to commit to for the forever or however you defined it. I\u2019m not saying you can\u2019t learn from divorce or that good things like wonderful kids don\u2019t come from relationships that end in divorce, but that much of the tumult could be avoided by waiting. So why not wait? I can\u2019t see a good reason to not wait, aside from religious reasons or unique extenuating circumstances like getting the one you love a green card . So for the typical relationship, just wait until 30. And while romance is beautiful and necessary in most cases, it\u2019s not sufficient reason to not wait because theoretically the romantic love should still be around in 10, 20, or 30 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should wait until they\u2019re at least 30 to get married.\n","id":"5a1140f4-bc19-49b2-9b57-d9ab5f8fa666"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Revenge porn can be extremely hurtful, there is no doubt about that. But so can other behaviors by resentful lovers, such as gossip, cheating, backstabbing, betrayal, and financial exploitation. I know people who have committed suicide because of those things, yet we don't consider them crimes. Why? Because relationships are deeply private affairs, and it is no business of the state to dictate their terms. These laws will do very little to help victims of revenge porn . For a successful prosecution, there has to be solid proof that it was the ex lover who published the pictures and not some random hacker. But any disgruntled ex lover who has a minimum of computer literacy knows how to publish pictures in an untraceable manner. Only the most stupid perpetrators will be caught. At the same time, such laws are easy to abuse. I shudder at the inevitable cases of revenge revenge porn where lovers verbally consent to publish naked pictures and then change their mind once the relationship goes sour. Then there is also the problem that these laws are too vague. What is considered porn is in the eye of the beholder. I know women who would be extremely hurt if their ex lover published a picture of them wearing lingerie. I know other women who would not even shrug their shoulders. Worst off all, these laws will poison relationships, because they promote paranoia towards the people who are closest to us. There are already libel slander laws to deal with this kind of behavior. We don't need ill conceived and rushed revenge porn laws. They are a threat to civil liberties.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Revenge porn\" should not be a criminal offence.\n","id":"3652b147-bb1d-4b7e-a4d3-3646b4ebdc6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Driftnet ban<|ARGUMENT|>Commercial driftnets were first employed in the 1980s by Japan, Korea and Taiwan. These use driftnets to basically \u201cstrip mine\u201d the seas with nets sometimes up to 40 miles wide, draining them of all fish before even the local fishermen can get to it. Poor local fishermen also have an interest in banning driftnets: they would prefer a healthy fish stock to feed future generations, rather than exhausting and driving into extinction their livelihood within a few years. Besides, in Bangladesh, driftnets account for about 30% of all fish caught, meaning that there are enough alternatives.6<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Large-scale commercial driftnets are the concern, not local driftnet use.\n","id":"9a088e01-9eae-4577-bef9-087706f0caf3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my opinion, all it serves to do is remind men to fulfil the traditional gender roles. To be a man you have to provide for your family, be responsible and protect your family. It's the male equivalent of be more ladylike . All it accomplishes is Make non traditionally masculine men feel like shit Reaffirm that men are the leaders and protectors of society It implies that these particular values are men only, and that women aren't supposed to have those values if they do, they're told to 'act like a lady' . And god forbid that men have some values that women are 'supposed' to have. Why not have a gender neutral phrase? Be a better person ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the phrase \"Be a man\" is at best outdated and at worst sexist.\n","id":"1809eac7-091a-4cf8-93c1-f89b4cc4e762"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is taxation theft?<|ARGUMENT|>Theft is the taking of property or action against property rights. Ownership of property including money is maintained by society 'a neighbor cannot take someone's car because society will enforce correct ownership of the car'. Implicit in that is a social contract with the society - in societies that have taxation, taxes are part of that social contract.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taxation is not theft in constitutional democracies because it is based upon a multi-generation social contract, embodied by a constitution, that is subject to negotiation, change, acceptance, or rejection by society.\n","id":"f012f342-74c6-4b3e-b0e4-bf7d3263db23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will China face an economic downturn within the next 10 years?<|ARGUMENT|>The one child policy1 has created a demographic problem where the average age is rapidly rising.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China will face an economic downturn within the next ten years.\n","id":"0bed8006-a675-447e-a6dc-210acf5fe2ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a supporter for same sex marriage. In fact, I choose to be an LGBT activist in a country where coming out of the closet is extremely dangerous. Yet, the reason for extending the right to marry to same sex couples also seem to apply to two, consenting individuals who love each but are biologically related father daughter, sister brother, so on and so forth. We hear that same sex couples should be allowed to marry because couples essentially consist of two people who love each other and the government has no right to interfere with this. Then why does it not apply to incestuous couples? Now, you might say that it would lead to offspring with severe birth deficiencies but since same sex marriage right activists also contend that reproduction should not define a marriage, then why does it do so for incestuous couples? Also, if the incestuous couple agrees to not reproduce, would you give them the right to marry? Another contention, and perhaps the major contention, in regards to incestuous relationships is that they destroy distort the family structure. Once again, it applies to same sex couples as well. While I believe that having two fathers or mothers does not lead to the destruction of the family unit, as many would contest, it is, however, a distortion of the family unit. Can kids not be raised by two, loving, caring adults, even if the two adults are previously related to each other, biologically?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if same-sex marriage is legalised, then incest should also be legalised.\n","id":"5d330a08-c55c-432a-a34e-7a374ca5ea3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>It is plausible an individual in a poorer community will use the extra funds from their UBI payments to move into a better quality community rather than to stay and make improvements.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The decision to invest in a community is a personal choice. A UBI does not guarantee the extra funds will be used towards renewing the community.\n","id":"b036701a-9077-4033-9566-a101cab32418"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have two major points that I would like to see another perspective on. x200B Bots reading single sources of information without the proper context can result in self fulfilling prophecies. A bot that reads the news to determine the health of the market could see something like the yield curve inverting and the subsequent news stories about how there could be a recession in the near future. This would trigger a somewhat massive selloff which would cause the stock market as a whole to tumble. Another instance I can think of this happening is when Trump tweets out something negative or positive about the trade war the market reacts. The first couple of times this could have been because of a lot of humans doing it, but after several times, bots were surely set up which is why there is such a massive swing one way or the other the moment Trump tweets something out. This is only going to get worse as people continue to build bots to take advantage of this fact. x200B Algorithmic trading compromises the foundational of the how stock market is able to correctly price pieces of a company. A person can be dumb, but people are incredibly good at guessing something in aggregate The replacement of those people with machines surely must have an affect on the markets ability to price a company. Humans have a guttural instinct about guessing that a machine cannot have enough inputs to replicate. Also many of these algorithms are the same, buy x amount of companies that did well poorly in the past x amount of weeks and sell them after x amount of days. That's not what a human would do. They would have a feeling about a company because they can see their products and see how their products affect the lives of those around them. x200B So, change my view. I particularly am interested in point 2 and the implications of algorithmic trading on the cow problem .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Algorithmic trading is extremely detrimental to the stock markets ability to function\n","id":"7b6c0cd5-06bb-4b57-a17d-232baac35d0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lethal injection, gas chamber, guillotine, electric chair, hanging, etc. All these methods seem extremely eerie and macabre to me. Most involve being strapped down or restrained I'm some way. The build up to the actual throwing of the switch would be excruciating. If I had to choose, standing with my back to a brick wall, hands bound behind my back, blindfolded, last cigarette burning between your lips, facing your executioners bravely, seems like the way to do it. Your body isn't too terribly mutilated, death wouldn't be instantaneous but also not too slow. Just a brief moment of shock and pain. Your hands would be bound but at least you're able to stand and not be strapped to some device. Getting shot seems like a more natural death than being pumped full of poison or electricity. Obviously not getting executed would be the best choice, but if you had to choose, I think firing squad would be best. Also, not that you'd be too concerned about this, but it's also easier on the executioners since one of them has a blank round. I don't know if that's actually comforting to them, but it's a nice thought. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Death by firing squad is the most dignified execution method.\n","id":"4ee3b382-2fd0-451a-b42d-20f3f9e36a0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I find the animation cheesy and repetitive. The voice overs are really annoying the weird sounds and expressions detract from the lackluster story. Furthermore, the difference in culture makes characters that I have trouble sympathizing with. I have freinds that are into Anime culture and I dont understand what is so appealing. Perhaps it's the oversexualization of female characters. The E3 footage of the new Metal Gear Solid game featured a female character in the middle of Afganistan in a bikini holding a gigantic rifle. That makes no sense at all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Japanese Anime is an inferior artform compared to other styles of television and film.\n","id":"94efcb6e-8ea8-4dab-b5f1-fc2f42324cc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that language is a flexible structure, and the English language especially so, but the American method of spelling the word is just stubborn and pointless, as it serves no purpose nor benefit over the correct spelling i.e. with a C If it is for the purpose of simplified spelling, the spelling 'defense' fails as it is still written with a silent E. It is illogical to continue to spell the word 'defense' when its related words \u2013 fence, fencing, etc \u2013 are still spelt with a C. Also, keeping the C in defence means that, with a little linguistic knowledge, it can be deduced that the word is derived from a French formation. Spelling the word wrong and illogically erases our history and also our culture. Lastly, the inconsistencies between US English and British English are often borne out on the internet, causing confusion in language learners. Already spellings such as programme and disc are losing their identity and being subsumed by dominant American spelling hegemony.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The word \"Defense\" is wholly and utterly a terrible spelling and is in no way preferable to the spelling \"Defence\"\n","id":"a0a660c5-83de-4049-98f8-b76d74d6a403"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is profanity the refuge of the inarticulate?<|ARGUMENT|>While swearing can become a habit, we choose to swear in different contexts positive relationship between using profanity and for different purposes: for linguistic effect, to convey emotion, for laughs, or perhaps even to be deliberately nasty intelligence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A host of studies demonstrate a positive relationship between using profanity and intelligence.\n","id":"225ea1a7-9162-4efd-b56f-3aea4a23049c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>God can not be proven by science which is the main way we study and understand our universe or natural world. There is no theory of God and there is no conclusive logical argument for the existence of God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are no clear and verifiable evidences that god exists.\n","id":"74229383-d75c-4fbb-9f05-8aa4a161e8a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I should preface this by saying that being called 'nice' is a good thing if your goal in life is to live a virtuous and good life but when it comes to attracting women you can be pretty damn sure that anyone who is defined as nice by a women will be a guy that struggles with women. IMO, girls don't like assholes or jerks but they do want their guy to be a little bit of a jerk even if its pretty superficial. It's just funnier and less perfect which keeps things fresh. I honestly believe that unless a guy is stand out handsome, he can't get away with just being nice. Take Zac Efron, look at interviews from him, he's a very bland down to earth guy. It works because his looks are at such a level but for most guys a personality like his would lead so struggles with most young women. Please don't derail this with 'nice guys', I just mean a kind and pleasant guy who has an endearing and warm personality but not a lot of charisma or banter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being called 'so nice' is not a good thing for a man.\n","id":"ab16bc8a-2ee3-4d71-8a77-8bea36b8c2f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is in my opinion that human society will not survive the next 1,000 years. The climatic effects we have set in motion are going to be unstoppable and will cause a collapse of the ecosystem. I don't believe we can survive that and also don't believe we can reverse what we've done in time. There is plastic trash in all the oceans and is starting to become a problem in other major bodies of Lake Michigan is an example . We've introduced invasive species on every continent except antartica, and the ice caps are melting faster and faster. The way I see it is all of these things have been set in motion and the time frame is too short to fix humanities mistakes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society will not survive into the next millennium\n","id":"0bf4c524-0c8a-47c9-88db-1ffd151e8bcc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>grant the EU a permanent seat on the UN Security Council<|ARGUMENT|>The EU might function as an economic union, but its original goal was to prevent war from ever happening again on the European continent. The political resolution of the Congress of Europe in 1948 said \u201cit is the urgent duty of the nations of Europe to create an economic and political union in order to assure security and social progress. the creation of a United Europe is an essential element in the creation of a united world.\u201d1The Economic integration is a means to this goal, by making member states economically too dependent on each other for them to want to declare war on each other. Given this history, the EU can contribute a lot of knowledge and experience on how to use \u2018soft power\u2019 in a foreign policy context. Europe has been successful in creating peace on a previously warlike continent. It has also had successes in encouraging reform in the countries of Eastern Europe and is continuing to do so in the Balkans through enlargement.2 Croatia was at war with its neighbors fifteen years ago and part of Yugoslavia twenty years ago but will become the 28thmember of the EU in 2013.3 Being a member of the UNSC would deepen Europe\u2019s commitment to international peace-keeping and peace-making missions, something which currently varies very widely between member states, and push them to spend sufficient on equipping their militaries for such missions. The UNSC could turn the EU\u2019s soft power outwards to help the world. As a result it should have a seat at the world\u2019s foremost foreign policy institution. 1 Congress of Europe at the Hague, 1948, 2 Bildt, 2005, 3 BBC News, 2011,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Union is meant to prevent war being on the UNSC would allow it to actively promote peace.\n","id":"cdd48b17-cecb-4c2d-a712-a96aaefce523"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Bible be considered a historical document?<|ARGUMENT|>Antiquitates terum humanarum et divinarum antiquities of things human and divine, a collective body of work by Varro spanning forty one books, that was influential in establishing the traditions of early Rome for future generations, has been preserved in its content by Augustine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many accounts of the Late Roman Republic, written in the century before Jesus was born, provide detailed and reliable records of contemporary life, to a degree of accuracy which cannot be matched by the Bible.\n","id":"728f6cd6-5167-4eb8-ac6f-0fd5398a6a09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US President Have the Power to Self-Pardon?<|ARGUMENT|>The President is always able to be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate because the Constitution specifically prevents pardons in cases of impeachment Article II, Section 2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US President should have the power to self-pardon, terminate inquiries for which he\/she is a subject, and fire FBI officials conducting investigations related to the presidency.\n","id":"a58e6f52-4f27-47a3-832e-8f2da44175a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>Fair-trade exports from the poorest coffee-growing countries in Africa Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania, represent less than 10% of coffee marketed through fair trade.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fair trade does not assist the poorest of the poor, and in some cases, discriminates against them.\n","id":"6bc23cb8-f4e1-4e95-8df3-f60f2c514d45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NATO expansion<|ARGUMENT|>. The policy that received strong support under the Clinton administration involves regular consultations, exercises and opportunities for education that seek to professionalize the civilian and military institutions of the republics of the former Soviet Union. This policy of genuine aid is preferable to the wish-list of democratic ideals that compose the criteria for NATO membership. Paradoxically, were one of the republics actually able to achieve all the criteria delineated, the necessity for their NATO protection would be marginal. Conversely, were the republics predictably unable to realize these goals, the protection of NATO through expansion or PFP would be genuine. Yet, it is in these situations of tenuous stability that States will be denied proper civilian and military aid from NATO.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stability in new democracies would be best achieved through \"Partnership for Peace\"\n","id":"7046ded1-659b-41fe-af4d-a0f21e6228db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious practices that incorporate self-harm be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Members of the catholic Church practice \"corporal mortifications such as sleeping without a pillow or sleeping on the floor, fasting or remaining silent for certain hours during the day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lot's of religious practices that are not viewed as self-harm can be argued to cause some harm or discomfort to the individual i.e. a form of self-harm.\n","id":"8afb7f32-7057-458f-a852-2bb9fdbb0ab9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Education that Promotes a Certain Faith or Religion be Abolished in Schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Many evangelical churches and the schools they sponsor in the state of Maryland are incredibly diverse because the entire area is diverse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As immigration and multi-culturalism increases these concerns will be be diminished.\n","id":"ee41d831-363b-40dd-8989-76ba0655b8b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>The racial wage gap in the US shows that Black men earn only 73% of white men's hourly earning and Hispanic men earn just 69%. These numbers have not significantly changed in 35 years. Its unlikely that UBI will change this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minorities continue to experience a wage gap in the workplace. A UBI does not solve this discrimination.\n","id":"ec3e5065-2f02-4574-ab8a-e14bfb31052f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you know you have HIV, and intentionally spread it through unprotected sex to another person. And that person did not consent to having the disease passed to them, I believe it's the moral duty of the law to see to it that you are punished. I don't know if this counts as assault, fraud, manslaughter, attempted murder, GBH, or made into a specific offense by it self, but it should be criminalized. I also don't know what the appropriate sentence should be. But it should be treated as a serious crime, because while HIV is manageable, it is not something most people would willingly want to live with. Unlike common bacterial STDs, it is not currently curable either.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"if you knowingly infected another unsuspecting person with HIV, you should face criminal charges\n","id":"fa9aa06c-2c9a-4053-9fd2-64a4debf249c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There seems to be a general consensus or at least a strong opinion from many that CEOs of major charities shouldn't be paid as much as they are and that the majority of their salaries should be put back into the charities themselves. I disagree with this. Being the CEO of a charity is just as much work as being the CEO of a major company as both operate in a similar manner, with the difference being that charities don't make a profit by selling goods services but rather take in money from donors or fundraisers and use it for a certain cause. CEOs of major charities have huge responsibilities and must put in a ton of effort to keep these charities running smoothly. Why shouldn't CEOs be compensated for this work?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"CEOs of major charities generally aren't overpaid.\n","id":"1ba6df47-e48e-41e0-8fb1-72d63b42dbb9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's just that the only people I see that still play nintendo are gamers that played it on the old nintendo consoles way back when. Once the newer generations grow up, no one will want to play Nintendo, because their childhood would have consisted of big games like COD or Battlefield.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that most things made by Nintendo 3DS, WiiU, Super Mario Bros\/Smash, etc. are only played by nostalgic gamers and they will soon run out of business.\n","id":"83ce6e99-441a-400c-8901-b78318b08bde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a competitive super smash brothers player. I play Melee, PM and Smash 4. I find L Canceling from a design perspective to be bad game design. For those unaware what L Canceling is let me explain. L canceling is the situation where after performing an aerial you can press L within 8 frames to cut the lag of your move in half. Now the concern with this is a simple fact of asking. Why would I ever not L Cancel if offered the choice The choice is simple, Do you want additional lag on a move or not? Everyone would choose to remove lag on a move, that is obvious. So as a designer, why would I want a technique like this in my game? I've seen other smash players ask for this to be added to other games like rivals or aether, and other games similar to it. I've seen it asked even to developers of the games and they ask, what is this providing to our game? And they almost universally say they do not want it. Does it work for Melee? Sure but I definitely think this is a result of people being forced to learn it to do stuff in Melee versus actually asking the question as a designer, is this a good thing for our game? Would I want to add it? It's only ever a popular idea to like L Canceling in Melee and I think a lot of that is that players have a connection to the technique through required learning. Yes I am aware of tilting shield, but if you L cancel in a shorter window I am under the impression that this doesn't even matter. It's just a technical barrier that doesn't open up choices and options. Technical inputs in fighting games are required so the game is not chess or rock paper scissors but that does not mean we should have borderline useless inputs in our games if it adds nothing. Otherwise, wouldn't this justify making the jump button 2 or 3 or 4 inputs to execute?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"L-Canceling is bad game design, and also unpopular among non melee players\n","id":"efd673e6-50cb-40f2-99b8-badfb8db299f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Like Sociopaths and Psychopaths. They do not have all the characterstics, which makes us human, like empathy etc. People are afraid of them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The brutal evil the murderer reveals is the big thing society fears; not the fact that the others died\n","id":"c3e7ab72-1911-4fac-abff-7b64d316d073"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Implement a Tax On Wealth on the Super Rich<|ARGUMENT|>If everyone is able to enjoy a comfortable, happy, and steadily improving quality of life, it ought not to matter that some people have more than others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wealth inequality is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.\n","id":"ce72aa11-8853-4423-a868-732acad2958f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Denying someone who is over educated and over qualified for a position is like denying someone with a perfect SAT score and a great GPA entrance into a Community College. Sometimes people fall on hard times and need a job just to sustain them while they search elsewhere. If a master's degree holder needs a secretary position for a while, why should they be denied consideration for that job in favor of someone with less experience? This is only true in situations where the applicant knows that they are over qualified.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Over-qualification is not a legitimate reason to deny a job applicant a certain position.\n","id":"1f65e51e-2a09-4181-8b68-29586b4a8ca8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Supply side economics looks like it is fueling the self-destruction of capitalism in America.<|ARGUMENT|>There have been 33 boom\/bust cycles since. i have to look this up to be supported by recessions happen when the economy overheats - It's dumb to pour gas on an already strong fire. I'll straighten this branch out shortly. :<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if a jolt is conceded, there is abundant evidence that it was ultimately ill-advised due to its timing in the business cycle.\n","id":"e91e4fce-75a5-4ed1-8122-6f146784d6e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Canada's Constitution<|ARGUMENT|>The title of Speaker of the House should be changed to Moderator of the House and that person will ensure that discussions follow an interest based mediation approach; starting with a neutral statement of the issue to be discussed, identification of the interests of the people of Canada in regards to that issue, and then collaborative discussions on finding solutions that best meet the interests. This claim will be moved once there is a section describing how the government will function.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ideas: Use this \"Claim\" to propose new ideas. Each idea and discussion will be moved once there is a related section to move it to.\n","id":"4011d9a4-c08c-42d0-8a69-7d9b617c9872"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Purity Pledges Harmful?<|ARGUMENT|>LGBT students whose curricula include positive discussion of LGBT people, history, and events hear fewer homophobic remarks and feel safer in school than students without inclusive curricula.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Schools that teach an abstinence-only sexuality curriculum are creating a uniquely dangerous environment for youth who are LGBTQ or questioning their sexual orientation.\n","id":"5a2f940d-8ad8-48f7-85b1-d8c03f85740f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Feminism is based in woman empowerment and not specific in gender empowerment. Feminism is built in all ways in favour of woman, when in reality there is problems to be fixed with males, no, this is not a victimization. For example Men are 97 of death in combat 74 of death by murder 93 of death by work 80 of suicides and other major problems exist, domestic violence for example. In much countries there is already same laws to every gender. One more point mainly feminism is more linked to activism, Im not machist or against equality just becuase I am not feminismo, actually that's a fallacy. So yes I can be in favor of equality without being actually feminist, I can be supporter of new ideias for feminism for example. The problem with feminism its a movement with distinct phases that fight in different moments for different goals that have the final goal of equallity and that not always mean equallity. So yes im in favor of gender equallity, anyways I prefer saying that I support equallity for all human beings, there is much importance in gender when shouldnt be, to be honest, gender is unnecessary when we can be identified by our sex. So in this final part I added a few more ideas that were not supposed. Anyways my grammar is not the best, this is not my first language. Now be free to change my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism is not based in gender empowerment\n","id":"3d7733be-52bb-49a8-9d60-4bf1aa843bc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If God is Real, Should we File a Class Action Lawsuit Against It?<|ARGUMENT|>In Bouie v. City of Columbia the U.S. Supreme Court explained the constitutional doctrine of \u201cfair notice,\u201d which holds that a criminal law \u201cmust give warning of the conduct it makes a crime.\u201d Traditionally, this requirement was satisfied if 1 the prohibited act was inherently wrongful \u2014 such as murder, arson, theft, robbery, or rape \u2014 or 2 an individual did something that he or she knew was illegal, even if it was not inherently wrongful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern law shows how god's actions in regard to original sin are unjust and how Adam and Eve should not be held liable.\n","id":"b1ee7d80-a141-426b-85dc-7b8eb336392e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>fund education using a voucher scheme<|ARGUMENT|>Even if a voucher scheme is used, parents still need to have considerable input in order that their children are able to access the best educational opportunities. Thus, those children who are most vulnerable, i.e. those with inadequate home support structures, will find that they are unable to access the best schools as their parents may lack the desire or knowledge to find out which schools are the best in their area. Further, this problem will be exacerbated by the subsequent dearth of funding at the worst schools.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The most vulnerable children would be left behind by the scheme\n","id":"3eb0c71b-4824-45d9-9f63-a4af07245151"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If we look inside China we find many problems here like pollution and inequality . But Chinese citizens can't change that because of authoritarian government . What citizens of authoritarian government may use ? Who can help them ? They may use illegal printing , spontaneous demonstrations , strikes etc . But anyone involved in such activity will be jailed of executed . Citizen may get help from workers , entrepreneurs , intellectuals and military .Fate of workers is written above . Entrepreneurs may be dissatisfied from current policy of government and they may say their no and overthrow their government like in USSR . But in China you must be with government otherwise you can't develop your business. Intellectuals can't say anything against CPC otherwise their work will not be published and they may be jailed . Military can't even complain because they subordinated by head of state . And the final nail in coffin of Chinese democracy is Social Credit System . If government will face with economical , ecological or civic problem they may ignore or solve it but without efficacy . P.S. i don't want to talk about positive or negative consequences of it for Chinese policy or economy at current moment UPD In the past there was no such thing as Artificial Intelligence . States weren't able to control their citizen at such scales . Plus AI may end free market economy<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China can't be democratized from within\n","id":"d7ff48d4-d3bc-4da3-ac3b-92f7a472d5f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the Republic of North Macedonia right to change its name?<|ARGUMENT|>People from FYROM have no connection to the Ancient Macedonians, who were a Greek people, just like Athenians or Spartans. This is highlighted by their contribution in the Peloponesian warGreek civil war and the fact that they took part in the Olympics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The name \"Macedonia\" should only be the name of a region and not be coopted to construct a national identity.\n","id":"e6bcc12b-c1b9-4e16-95a2-f9821288bfd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should US intelligence agencies end mass data collection?<|ARGUMENT|>Any information held by the US government will inevitably become the target of hackers already or hoping to work for foreign governments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The retention of mass data by security agencies leaves the US vulnerable to cyber-terrorism undermining national security.\n","id":"6372785a-a20e-465b-926e-cc3167e21ff2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Expiring Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in 2010<|ARGUMENT|>Robert Creamer. \"Why Congress Must End Bush Tax Breaks for the Rich.\" Huffington Post. July 28th, 2010: \"The Republican position amounts to nothing more than baseless pandering to the greed of their many wealthy donors.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Republicans oppose taxes for wealthy to pander to rich donors\n","id":"2dcc4587-6ac5-4bc4-bcd0-3515cd35b094"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The classical definition of God ignores the elephant in the room, that it describes a being that deserves belief rather than just belief in its existence and everything that implies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The classical definition of God is contradictory or incoherent, and thus God cannot in principle exist.\n","id":"67d8d66e-4cb1-4cd4-8172-438a9817f60c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe harhar that everything we do is pointless. Now this is not to say that I am ascetic. Just because I see something pleasurable as pointless doesn't mean I won't do it once in a while. Granted we survive avoid nuclear war, the Sun exploding and other events, it's the inevitable fact that the universe will descend into cold darkness that makes me think everything we do is pointless. Would you build a tower of playing cards knowing that some assholes are going to burn it and you can't do anything about it? Not me. EDIT I am starting to think that you people believe a nihilist is an hero. I thought it was about the negation of one or more meaningful aspects of life, not suicidal intentions or eating only bread and water. EDIT2 It appears that my view is staying as it is. I have contemplated the things mentioned in this thread way before I even found Reddit, so I guess that's about it for me. Keep posting if you want, I can't and won't stop you. I would say a simple thank you to those who participated, but according to Reddit's distorted view of nihilism, I am not allowed to show any emotions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am a nihilist to the fullest extent.\n","id":"e06fc0f2-efa2-4c0e-87eb-04a74ac7f946"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Israel Remain Democratic Even If that Would Ultimately Lead to it No Longer Being a Jewish State?<|ARGUMENT|>The call for an \"open\" Jerusalem has received support from Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman, an Orthodox Rabbi and President of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He wrote: \"As a religious Jew who is also a Zionist I believe Jerusalem is not simply important as the city of God, but as the capital of the State of Israel. The meaning of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is that it is a city which belongs to all citizens of the State of Israel.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many Jews who are secular and believe that Jerusalem should be a city for all people: religious, non-religious and those belonging to different religions.\n","id":"af8583cf-c61e-420f-a684-f504bf101612"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that Kim Davis is not only fighting for bigoted beliefs which is her right, certainly , but is painting herself as a helpless victim, a courageous martyr for the great trials she is enduring in the name of religious liberty. She is, in my opinion, behaving in a completely disengenuous and intentionally inflammatory fashion. I believe that she's knows full well that she has no leg to stand on, but is now throwing what amounts to a temper tantrum in order to garner attention and, hopefully, financial gain. I believe that the people finding and supporting her are of similar ilk. I grew up in the severely conservative subculture that creates her and I have a hard time seeing any substance to what she is doing. Change my view EDIT I'm sure this is an old enough post that few will see this edit, but I would like to thank the lovely mods of this sub. They are exceedingly cooperative and willing to fittingly enough have the views changed when presented with suitable arguments. Thank you for all you do to facilitate this environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kim Davis is an irrational, attention whoring hatemonger using her buzzword status to her own advantage\n","id":"e17e9cfe-2e51-4a28-be8b-07cb837400f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Every claim of observable features of the world that point to the actions of gods or other mythical beings has been shown to be caused by natural means. While theists believe the origin of the natural world is a miracle, empirical facts point to natural explanations for the origins of life, Earth, and the universe without need to appeal to any mythological explanation. For those hoping to find empirical evidence for their faith, \"God of the Gaps\" is the only fundamentally flawed proposal left.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no demonstrable scientific evidence that proves the existence of God.\n","id":"2dc41130-51c1-46d8-894f-6bcbf9fdf69a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gays in the US military<|ARGUMENT|>A white female officer was reported saying in the book \"Gays and Lesbians in the Military\": \"Most gays and lesbians just want to be left alone to do their jobs. My opinion is that most gays will remain in the closet long after the ban is lifted - they just don't want to continue living under threat.\"15<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most gays will remain private after military ban is lifted\n","id":"a96335b3-131d-4dbb-a593-73a34825250d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Culturally or Historically Significant Artwork Be Property of the State?<|ARGUMENT|>To many cultures, certain artworks are seen as priceless and as such no amount of money can compensate for their loss.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unfair to private owners and collectors for their property to be forcibly bought from them.\n","id":"e51619f0-4717-4cf7-bdfb-2d70130470b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>If this right to return is given up, up to 450,000 Palestinian refugees would be forced to continue to live in inhumane conditions in Lebanese refugee camps where they are treated as second-class citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Accepting the Jewishness of the state would mean giving up the 'right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees into Israel who left during the 1948 exodus following the creation of Israel.\n","id":"3bf7e223-10e6-40a4-b8ee-5e20c6d164f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need nuclear power for sustainable energy production?<|ARGUMENT|>Advanced Reactors can run on spent fuel radioactive waste and will reduce the half-life of this waste from an order of ~10 000 years to ~300 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Newer reactor designs can use most of the long-lived \"waste\" as fuel. The remaining radioactive waste is minuscule in volume and can be safely stored on-site.\n","id":"7b6cd797-c902-4add-a386-16427d1ec529"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Saw an article in the NYT that accused Harvard of \u201cracial balancing\u201d in its admissions. Asians are over represented in the STEM field. Of course I understand that some gravitate towards other fields of study. Take for example, that at MIT over 97 percent of students are STEM majors and Asians routinely make up between 30 and 35 percent of the student body. Meanwhile, about 50 percent of the student body at Harvard are STEM majors. It is the interest of Harvard to balance out background and academic interests, which means there are only so many STEM focused students it can take. This also means that in some cases Harvard will accept the student with a 1400 SAT, who has expressed interest in becoming the next great Sociologist over an Asian student with a 1550 SAT and will major in Engineering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Harvard does not discriminate against Asians.\n","id":"3963f693-a873-41dd-8816-525892320a35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the U.S. increase the quota of H-1B visas?<|ARGUMENT|>When companies cannot hire as many highly skilled workers as they need, competition drives wages up, so raising the visa cap may indeed cause the wages of some Americans to fall or stagnate. Source<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Increasing the supply of skilled workers could reduce Americans' wages\n","id":"e2fc2d59-18d2-422a-b3f1-01a69366ca84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>When the British monarch held absolute power, he or she could claim any land he or she wanted from conquered territories. This land became the primary source of the Royal family's wealth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monarchs are symbols of oppression as they acquired their status by violent and immoral means, and maintained it through violence and indefensible concentration of wealth and power.\n","id":"fee79d48-55e3-4b02-806a-8e34ec6ad8cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>Research shows that preferences in body size are not innate but flexible, and depend on circumstance and environment: stressed-out men, for example, have been found to prefer heavier women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At certain times in history, obesity was considered attractive, as it was a symbol of wealth and status We should not assume that our current values are correct.\n","id":"0a66e034-4a41-4870-a563-e19d92841d71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the FBI Right to Keep the Pedophile Site Playpen Online After Hacking It?<|ARGUMENT|>Pedophile websites are encouraging members to keep uploading content regularly, such as in 'Dreamboard Keeping it online thus encourages the production of more child pornography.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By keeping the website running the FBI caused additional harm to victims.\n","id":"eb1d35e6-9223-409c-a33f-34e3e45e7078"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>Because Xi and his ideology has been embedded in the Constitution, even rivals within the Communist Party cannot challenge him. A challenge to Xi has been equated to a challenge to the Communist Party and China herself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Xi Jinping Thought has officially been incorporated into the Chinese constitution.\n","id":"08933658-d6f2-44b5-9139-9f8fb98ef737"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Sex Reassignment Surgery the Best Option for Transgender People?<|ARGUMENT|>It is an individual's right to pursue happiness. If that is only achieved through gender reassignment, then this is a valid and ethical form of treatment, as long as nobody is harmed in the process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Undergoing sex reassignment surgery constitutes the most effective and ethical method for transgender individuals to achieve self-acceptance and lasting happiness.\n","id":"5780d01f-b3df-4f2b-bc03-07c79926b0ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I think it's alright if someone is christian, atheist, agnostic, muslim, and so on, as long as they don't harm others and respect other people's different beliefs. I don't see anything wrong with that view and I think it would work out better than the alternative. However, you are free to prove me wrong. I classify myself as an atheist and I still think everyone is entitled to their own beliefs and I should respect them as long as they also respect me. I absolutely have no issues with anyone like that. So, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe everyone should be entitled to their own beliefs so long as they do not harm others.\n","id":"48079079-f272-484d-a896-3cfc7b31310c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the creation of single-race public schools<|ARGUMENT|>In the US, black males are at a higher risk for murder, drug use, and imprisonment than any other group- they are 6.5 times more likely to be imprisoned than white males.1 They are disproportionately affected by drug use, violence, single parenting, poverty, racial profiling, and other factors that alienate them from society.2 Education specialists argue that because black males currently perform worse than any other group in school, teachers assume their black male students will be low performers and treat them differently.3 This treatment causes these students to accept defeat before they have been given a chance to show their potential. An educational environment that is specially designed to push black male students to succeed and take pride in their identity would eliminate the feeling of inferiority which integrated schools often impose. This means that all-black, all-male schools which are publicly funded are needed in order to directly address the needs of African-American male students in modern society. This does not mean that black males should be compelled to attend these schools, and, while this argument focuses on black males, the proposition is amenable to schools which address the needs of other minorities and minority females. 1 Ibid, 7. 2Ibid, 3. 3Marcia L. Narine, \"Single-sex, Single-Race Public Schools: A solution to the Problems Plaguing the Black Community?,\" DRS, 1992, 25. improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The proposition suggests the option of all-black, all-male schools which are publicly funded in order to directly address the needs of African-American male students in modern society.\n","id":"7a851d79-d3df-4804-8843-a4a72c3159c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>New York's SAFE Act is a massive failure because gun owners are refusing to register their firearms and police are refusing to enforce the law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you do not search a person's property, there is no way to know if you have registered even a fraction of guns.\n","id":"83a628b2-1036-47ef-9560-049aeb390462"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>An orbital ring spreads around the globe, which gives the global population more access than a space elevator.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An orbital ring would be a great alternative and might be extremely challenging, but pretty feasible.\n","id":"001891e6-e191-4faa-8a92-abb8491ac024"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should copyright die with the creator?<|ARGUMENT|>There is an active hypocrisy involved here, since so many of Disney's own projects are based on works which are now in the public domain<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies like Disney use copyright laws to prevent creative progress.\n","id":"863121a4-0ae7-4d81-bdf0-5c625703d9b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a Christian, but I know a lot of Christians wouldn't like this idea, but hear me out. x200B At this point the line between Jesus' birthday and human traditions are very, very blurry at Christmas. It originated as a man made pagan holiday, became Jesus' birthday , and now it's evolving into a harmless, normal holiday with different but non pagan traditions. I think we should just separate the two already, and have a normal Christmas consisting of all our normal traditions, and then a completely separate day to celebrate Jesus' birth. x200B Jesus was born in spring, not winter. Also most of Christmas doesn't seem to have much to do with Jesus anyway. I think it'd be best if we had a day for non religious Christmas, and a day purely for Christianity Jesus' birth that weren't intertwined. During the June Christmas there could still be gifts given and time off school work, but it wouldn't have Santa, elves, etc. and instead of tons of people going to church in December, they'd go in June. And the nativity things would go up in June, and just lights and wreaths in December.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christmas should completely separated from Christianity, and Jesus' birthday should be celebrated in June instead.\n","id":"78b673fb-cd3b-42e2-be0c-cf688ffe457b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>If vegans take iron supplements due to anemia, they aren't easily absorbed including liquid supplements, provoking over time digestion problems and may be not absorbed at all thus incrementing the condition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A vegan diet might not be healthier for those with medical conditions, so animal products would still need to be around to keep these people alive.\n","id":"f2467ad8-6fa8-4aec-a54d-8a64a0402e1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Wrote The Anonymous New York Times Resistance Op-Ed?<|ARGUMENT|>Given that lie-detector tests are quite unreliable Pence's stated willingness is a good way to deflect attention without any real risks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It appears to be a bit of a desperate move to clear himself where a simple denial would do.\n","id":"71b42b42-804a-4582-b899-e77766af6ba9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've had a few debates recently about things like BLM, Cultural Appropriation, etc. and I've often felt like those advocating for the progressive side of these issues are missing a fundamental point perhaps you can change my mind. To give you an idea of the scale on which I view these issues, I'll start with an excerpt from an essay I wrote Technological progress generally moves in one direction, and our most destructive innovations are bound to become increasingly accessible. If many of the world\u2019s most renowned thinkers are to be taken seriously, we\u2019ll soon inhabit a world in which small groups of non state actors are a mere button\u2019s press away from decimating our species. Even if life in 2050 doesn\u2019t have the trappings of an impending apocalypse, it\u2019s clear that our societies are being hammered by disruption. It should terrify us, then, that world powers are growing more inclined to adopt solipsism as state policy. The world is changing faster than our societies can absorb, nobody has the answers, and the infrastructure necessary to marshall solutions international cooperation is rapidly deteriorating. Surveying this landscape, we\u2019ll find a collaborative, global civilization built on commonality, with robust, universal basic conceptions of human rights and morality, is likely the best if not only blueprint for our survival. One of the greatest obstructions to that project is tribalism, and we are struggling mightily to outgrow it. Tribalism takes several forms, many of which are obvious the racial violence of the KKK or the religious bloodletting between Shia and Sunni being two examples. But, being innate in all of us, tribalism also lurks in places we\u2019re reluctant explore. Often, we find those suffering injustices\u2014black people responding to perceived police injustices, Palestinians responding to Israeli occupation\u2014respond with eruptions of tribalism. This is not to say that white people victimizing blacks and black people \u2018defending themselves\u2019 are morally, ethically, or historically equivalent. Of course not. But we need not indulge in false equivalencies to recognize that grievances of this kind reliably activate many of the same neurological and evolutionary impulses that give rise to the racism they stand in opposition against\u2014the disdain and fear of the other, the inclination to blame all members of a group for the perceived wrongdoings of some of its members, etc. This is not merely illogical but dangerous. If some are condemned to be perpetually contaminated by the slime of their predecessors, then it must be asked when can people start being good? If the answer is never, an endless cycle of bitterness, vengeance, misunderstanding, and violence surely awaits us. We embrace such a reality at our peril. Skin color, ethnic group, religious affiliation must soon be clothing we don like the jerseys of our favorite sports teams. Yes, it will be fun to celebrate our history, participate in a community based on some shared commonality, etc. and all of these things can be enjoyed and retained. But anything beyond that should be thought fucking pathological. Given our common project, appropriation should be viewed as little more than collaboration, or paying homage, for the success of our global civilization depends on our taking the best parts of each culture. Christians Catholics, to be more specific invented physics, and much of medicine, but these innovations are not the property of White Europeans they belong to all of humanity. Should we actually become the melting pot we all ostensibly celebrate, the cultural jewels of our heritages will not be clung to as if by Golem, but shared. Empowering our reluctance to do so is merely empowering the tribalism that may undo us all. If the racists of the world are wrong, and the differences between us are little more than skin deep, we are one people. One species, sharing one rock in one moment in history. END EXCERPT My point is almost all of these issues cultural appropriation is wrong, BLM is justified implicitly endorse a view of a balkanized humanity where certain culture and group own certain practices and historically oppressed people should form coalitions based on their skin color or ethnic group or religious affiliation to fight injustices, the original sin that will be ascribed to the next white child born by some I fear this thinking not only impedes our ability to realize our common project, but is destined to undo us. I'm sure we'll unpack this more but I look forward to hearing responses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"For humanity to survive, we must outgrow triablism, especially racial\/ethnic solidarity\n","id":"3c6a3d4f-465e-49be-90ee-9e62e8d5f6a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>A study about childhood sexual experiences found that 13% of adults recollected coercive experiences that involved being tricked, bribed, threatened or physically forced to participate in sexual activities. The study concluded that girls were more likely to be coerced and to feel guilt than boys.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teaching about the importance of consent in sexual relationships can lead to healthier communication between sexual partners and could reduce the number of assaults later in life.\n","id":"9b37bcf8-d806-4c61-afd3-3bd877f334ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>700 mile US Mexico border fence<|ARGUMENT|>The 700-mile fence would be designed with greater focus on stopping illegal immigrants and would likely be much more effective at doing so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many past fences have failed to stop illegal immigration only because they were meant to stop drug-trafficking\n","id":"cfa4f7a4-66e0-4168-a428-c1136a583c07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should paternity testing of minors require the consent of both parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents raise and nurture their child. They deserve to have a say in big decisions that will impact their child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents deserve to have a voice in whether their child seeks a paternity test.\n","id":"2d411c17-e538-44b3-a0bd-7b8fca31abb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm totally cool with it if your a lady who wants me to address you as a man. Or vice versa. But when my friends tell me that they don't identify with any gender and that I have to refer to them as they from now on, I'm just kinda disappointed. I feel like the whole thing really gives validity to gender roles, I must not be a girl because I'm weird, don't wear dresses or cook, and I hook up with both sexes. Just because you're not a stereotypical female doesn't mean you don't have a vagina. I feel for people who feel trapped in the opposite sexes body. But this just seems like either confusion or a cry for attention. Change my view so my friends wont think I'm a dickhead cis monster oppressing people with pronouns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Choosing to not be a gender doesn't make sense.\n","id":"a4ac1df1-6a4a-40c7-a139-ae2c696840c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously premised on the idea that certain surveillance can and will catch and prevent certain crimes, I think we should be willing and maybe even morally obligated to allow a bit more of our lives to be scrutinised if it results in the prevention of even a few deaths. A few points The you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide is actually acceptable here. It's not justifying an active intervention, but the examination of data. All the 1984 references seem to be a bit immature. The government of big brother was guilty of inhumane crimes, none of which would suddenly become possible with the arrival of more transparency. For that we would need, depending on the country, referenda or engagement in the supremecourt, which access to internet history wouldn't suddenly make useless. There seems to a massive sense of hypocrasy with many people, for whom a string argument in favour of piracy goes something like this Technology is moving in a direction which makes piracy inevitable. Instead of holding onto to out dated concepts and outlooks, record labels, film studios etc. have to learn to move with the times. How is the parallel argument, substituting the easier retrieval of personal data for piracy, not equall sound?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe invasion of privacy by the government and Google Street View ec. isn't necessarily bad.\n","id":"bb43b86f-b522-44fc-81ec-45ae99aef798"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does A College Degree Guarantee A Job?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2017, the unemployment rate of college graduates was 2.5%; which is lower than the 7.7% high school dropout rate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People with degrees have less unemployment and higher pay on average than those without one.\n","id":"7613a29c-c0f4-4b7b-99ce-8597fe161697"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I can get over 90 on an exam without studying, without reading the textbook, and without taking notes. Think about that, all I do is go to class and make a point to remember everything the professor says. I have such a good memory that taking notes is pointless, and reading the textbook is also pointless because in every class I have ever taken, the professor has covered everything in class. Naturally I will open the textbook if the professor says to answer the questions at the end of chapter one without telling us what those questions are, but other than that I never open the textbook. I only open my notebook to write down when an assignment is due, other than that my notebook remains closed. People have told me that I have bad study habits, but how can my study habits be bad if I'm getting 90 on every exam? There are rare cases where a professor gives the class an assignment based on material which he has not gone over, but in those cases I will look up the material on the internet, not in the textbook. TL DR A person with a memory as good as mine has no need to read the textbook or take notes. Naturally if the professor doesn't cover something, looking up the information is necessary, but as long as the professor covers everything in class, taking notes and reading the textbook is pointless as long as the student attends every class.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person with an exceptional memory has no need to take notes or study.\n","id":"d53f02d6-e135-4066-a6c7-029924bed568"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>If scriptures, writings, and oral histories and stories from world cultures are given the benefit of the doubt then there is strong reason to believe God had more gross interaction with ancient societies than He does today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Traditions from cultures all over the world have stories of God intervening and sending prophets.\n","id":"8370d4d5-04e8-467d-a66f-04ce03c46f8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Carbon Emissions, Market vs. Regulatory Approaches<|ARGUMENT|>Market mechanisms are open ended and provide and an ongoing profit motive for companies, state agencies, and individuals to reduce emissions, as doing so either creates additional profits cap and trade or yields up additional tax reductions carbon tax. Either is better than a regulatory approach, which only requires cuts to a certain level and provides no longer-term incentive for companies to drive down emissions by investing in new technology \u2013 meaning companies will take the minimum action necessary to meet the regulatory standard.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Market mechanisms are open ended and provide and an ongoing profit motive for companies, state agenc...\n","id":"09a3b0aa-9d99-43b0-b1e2-123d19992086"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that if any country in the world should go to war with North Korea, of course that country will suffer some damage but ultimately North Korea is bound to lose in the end. They are underpopulated with malnourished soldiers, have poor equipment, and even if they have a nuclear missile I think they do not possess the infrastructure to correctly launch it. I am a South Korean and I am a trained soldier. We learned about the numbers total army size, weapons infrastructure, etc and they trained us to be wary of potential threat because North Korea is still a potent enemy. I really have a hard time believing that, and I want to know why I might want to reevaluate my view. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think North Korea is a significant threat to the world anymore.\n","id":"288ee5d8-827a-415b-b20c-6be14636b2cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is citizen science beneficial to science?<|ARGUMENT|>Many professional scientific projects and studies have been carried forward from citizen science and observations. This means that scientists can help develop the basis for discoveries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It allows study and practice to make real contributions that are beneficial to society\n","id":"53a49074-3072-408d-908f-b4ab66e5c430"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On the 18th of June, Dylann Roof walked into a church consisting of mostly black members alone and shot nine members alone. His motivations were to ignite an war that he likely believes is already starting. Before he walked into that church he posted a juvenile series of rants and pictures that gave glimpses into his obviously sick head to tell the world of his idiotic, racist views and manifest what he intended. He did all of this as to my knowledge, alone. After he committed his crime he was arrested, and everyone hated him. Although, no one of note is praising of him, obviously, there are people who claim that this is a symptom of a larger issue about race and oppression. The person I find most notable in this discussion is Jon Stewart The argument that he is making has merit, Jon Stewart is a highly intelligent and empathetic human being who knows what he is talking about. But the demographic that Dylann Roof crawled away from to represent is an old and dying minority, that I truly believe. Yes, there are race problems and there are people of extreme disturbances that are willing to go to murderous lengths to make a statement about race, but no one with a sensible head on their shoulders believes such things. We should keep the discussion of race alive, and there are lengths that we as a society need to cover to reach the mountain top of racial equality, but why must we blame Charleston and the media as a whole for this one poor young man who had a clear mental health issue, and easy access to firearms? Is it hard for us to turn our minds to the more obvious debate that needs to be made about gun control and mental health treatment? It is an argument that has been made and beaten to death before, and feels a little more ignored this time around. If Dylann Roof had more red tape and more red flags put in his way, maybe this tragedy could have been deterred or at least mitigated. At least, that's one thing in this situation we could have controlled. We could not make race relations better in a few months, nor could we prevent Dylann Roof from changing his mind as easily as one Saturday morning cartoon, but we could have made his actions much harder to go about. There are race relations to address in this country, and that will be healed with more time, but we aren't helping ourselves by making this act more than a symptom of the case. Race relations didn't make Dylann Roof a murderer, his own rage and fractured mental health did, and the glock was far too easy for him to reach. I am not trying to disparage the obvious issues between white people, black people, and any other race, but I am not understanding why it is paramount we make this about race, rather than the argument that we have based most other mass shootings on. So please, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The case of Dylann Roof is not an adequate starter for a dialogue on race relations. It is an isolated case of a disturbed young man, with a completely misguided view on race. In fact, it may be arguable that making it about race gives dignity to the acts that it doesn't deserve\n","id":"0239e48f-c3c1-4f01-9bb4-ceec27a0ffb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>Modi's government has extended the deadline within which polluting thermal plants must comply with pollution regulations by 5 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modi is abandoning previous environmental protections in favour of economic development.\n","id":"b432a27f-7054-46b2-a5be-5b4d2d0c5048"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT I'm actually going to go ahead and say that passionless art isn't art at all. x200B Particularly with regards to music, but this can apply to any art form. When I hear a musician say, I really don't care about the music, I do it for the money my appreciation for that artist is diminished, the art seems flawed and fake. Many younger artists tend to have this mentality, and I think it is disrespectful to the culture surrounding that art form. Hip Hop for example is a genre heavily build upon the individual's experience and social causes, there is a rich history in the art form. While not every rapper has to be a gangsta from the hood to be one, I think that they should at least pay respects and appreciate the culture they are a part of. Saying I don't care about that , I don't listen to rap, I'm just here for the money just makes their art less valuable. Again, this isn't just with rap, any genre, except maybe pop which I guess is rap nowadays . Often these artists are garbage anyways, and I really don't feel bad about not caring for them. x200B However a couple edge cases are causing me to reconsider my stance. x200B Like, Leonardo Da Vinci was the same way with painting, he hated art, but the mona lisa was made just to literally make money. Da Vinci's lack of passion is offset by his skill, the art he makes is beautiful. A Rapper like MF DOOM, has many classics and is considered a top tier lyricist, but when DOOM was asked recently, he said that he just raps for the money. And I'm sure there are dozens of examples I could go through here, but I think these two are my go to's. x200B I give any artist credit for loving their work regardless of how garbage it is, but when they have no passion to begin with, I can't really give them much points for their art. x200B tldr Passionless art or art for the sake of money is devalued x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Passionless art or art for the sake of money is devalued\n","id":"c36a59ca-1e8e-4229-b35a-29412f2b5f67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Truancy, punish parents<|ARGUMENT|>All children have a right to education and the state should make sure that their parents keep them in school. Even if the child does not want to go to school, he or she is not mature enough to make that decision. After all, we do not allow under-16s to smoke, buy alcohol, drive, vote or marry \u2013 so why should we allow them to mess up their whole future by skipping school? Because parents are responsible for children\u2019s wellbeing, it is right to take them to court and punish them if they are failing in their duties.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All children have a right to education and the state should make sure that their parents keep them i...\n","id":"775f677e-ce2a-429f-8c85-b21220346513"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've two issues with the fundament behind \u201cHate Speech\u201d. It's inconsistent. Proponents of this concept are basically saying \u201cI don't like your opinion, so free speech doesn't apply to you\u201d. Blasphemy should be illegal if we follow this pattern of thought. Christians, for example, think it's very hateful against God to use his name in vain, as per the Ten Commandments. I don't think you guys would consider this a good idea, though. I understand that this is not an all or nothing issue. There are legitimate reasons to regulate any right, and Free Speech is not exempt from that. I fail to see, however, that someone being hateful is a legitimate reason. I hope to engage in productive discourse and at the very least understand my opposition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate Speech shouldn't be illegal.\n","id":"1e3a3c45-a62b-4770-989f-9d8bdc0b21d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>If you enslave someone, it does not make the fact that you are torturing him as well any less terrible, just because they are already enslaved. These are both separate instances of wrongdoing which, when done together, add up in a negative sum total of your treatment of said party.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fact that other forms of oppression are applied to animals does not make this form of oppression any more right. Two wrongs don't cancel out in morals, they make things worse.\n","id":"b571e2a5-3d54-4b88-a4cb-0e630c473808"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ban on caffeinated alcohol drinks<|ARGUMENT|>\"Don't ban four loco in N.H.\" The New Hampshire, Editorial. November 12th, 2010: \"Banning Four Loko at any level, whether across campus or across the state, is a gross overreaction. First of all, of the millions of students enrolled in institutions of higher education, an incredibly small percentage has been hospitalized after consuming the beverage. Yes, a few have died. Unfortunately, college students die from alcohol poisoning every year. That would be happening without Four Loko.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Too few have died from Four Loco to justify ban.\n","id":"54e9edeb-8831-4388-bf45-d5acfdddf1a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TSIA really, but I'll elaborate. We cannot guarantee happiness. We can, however, guarantee suffering Terminal disease, getting murdered abused, bigotry, depression, aging health, inevitable death, etc. . Because we are pulling someone from the void of nonexistence, we are creating the need for happiness fulfillment survival where there was previously none. This future human cannot consent to these needs being imposed on him. The main reasons people have children in 2018 are to achieve some sort of fulfillment or to pass on their genes so they won't be forgotten. Both of these are selfish reasons to procreate, and they completely ignore the potential misery that their children could endure. Even if the child endures joy or happiness, it's impossible to guarantee that they will view that joy happiness as outweighing their suffering. Thus, imposing that potential suffering on your child without their consent and with total disregard for what they might be forced to endure is entirely immoral. Disclaimer I am happy with my life for the most part. This is not a discussion of the happiness of those already alive. Most humans will say they are happy to have been born. Most will say they would rather live than die. This is because we have had these thoughts forced on us under threat of suffering dying or leaving family behind . I feel like I should get this out of the way so I don't get 15 comments saying You're unhappy with your life so you assume everyone else is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having children is immoral based on our inability to guarantee their happiness and our inability to gain their consent for the inevitable suffering we will put them through.\n","id":"b84f371e-df61-486e-a07c-486b9689d268"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I'd like to say I enjoyed The Last Jedi very much. As a single film, it's one of the better ones in the series. It definitely wins on the action and intensity front. However, I think the way it advanced the story arc is problematic. They got rid of whole Sith Jedi thing, so now we're left with two late 20s somethings representing the whole Force storyline. I don't find the First Order is intimidating any more. Kylo Ren is not a leader and the only reason he's in charge is because of his superpowers. If the Resistance shows any level of competence, I know the First Order will be defeated. There's no more tension any more. Meanwhile, we have Rey who is a sensible character, but who doesn't have a very interesting personality. She doesn't have a ton of dialogue, doesn't really have a sense of direction or purpose, and just doesn't evoke much emotion at all. They'd have to really make her much more interesting in the last film, and that might be tall task. I just think they let old things die a little too fast. The mythos has been completely eviscerated at this point. The only way they could revive it is to do some ex machina thing, which is very hard to make satisfying I think. TLJ shows us that the common people of the Galaxy will play a big role in the next film. But I just don't see how that could be interesting. It just leads to tropes like the whole empire is on fire or brave charge Ewok rush 2.0. I suppose they could go with some kind of left wing ideological storyline, which would be unique, but knowing Disney, I don't think they'd go too deep with it. Some smaller qualms I have involve the Skywalkers. They made Luke a very interesting character, but I doubt he'll show up very much in the next film. Considering Disney said they're not gonna recast Carrie Fisher, Leia will probably be killed off quickly, or she'll only show up for a scene or two, or she'll just be 100 CGI. None of this is very satisfying. So while I think TLJ is great movie, I think it also really hurt the direction of the trilogy. The bar, unfortunately, has been raised far higher for the last film than it should have been. The last movie would have to be an absolute masterpiece to create a satisfying conclusion to the series. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think the Star Wars sequel trilogy is heading in a good direction SPOILERS\n","id":"4bf8fc48-c317-4dc9-99f5-d6a3edef3ead"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't believe in any god depicted in any religion. I assume you all know the common arguments that atheists present. I will repeat some of them below and also add my own just to meet the 500 character requirement. There is no sign of an all loving benevolent God since we are surrounded by Misery. The default state of nature, is wicked. This applies to the world that surrounds us and the world within. our minds We have to make an effort to make everything better since nothing is 'good' by default. Humans needs to be educated to become good people. We need societal, religious rules to mask our true violent nature. If anything, it seems like the supreme being is actually Satan or a malevolent being since we are fighting him every second.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe in God.\n","id":"44a48941-2e23-4e76-bb40-0b0c8dde5eee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Google Censor Their Search Results In Order To Operate In China?<|ARGUMENT|>Constant state monitoring denies citizens privacy. It strips individuals of dignity and piece of mind to know that they are constantly watched.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chinese censorship and surveillance far oversteps what might be proportionate to counter these attacks.\n","id":"984f572b-dc10-4f30-8504-74cfbd2287f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>Organizing such frequent, large-scale referendums would be a massive financial undertaking. Organizing presidential elections is already an immensely expensive task paying poll workers and renting polling places.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Representatives are a necessary middle-man between the voting public and policy creation.\n","id":"0c907cc1-94ae-4fe2-b07f-1b6becb2c7b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The earth will not be irreparable in 12 years from climate change<|ARGUMENT|>A copious amount of fossil fuels are often used to power desalination plants, resulting in a significant amount of emissions<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Desalination plants produce more waste brine than experts expected, thus doing less to combat waste.\n","id":"55f263a2-da1a-44aa-8dd9-ccb5237e8a97"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Falkland Islands, return of<|ARGUMENT|>Great Britain abandoned its settlement in 1776, and formally renounced sovereignty in the Nootka Sound Convention. Argentina has always claimed the Falklands, and never renounced its claim.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Argentina always claimed the Falklands; Britain once renounced its claim.\n","id":"a6456480-d5f9-455f-b076-ac1495b3be11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Interference from the Vatican and Donald Trump into the medical case of Charlie Gard has been considered 'extremely unhelpful and very cruel on the parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents struggle to balance influences such as the opinions of community members, prior knowledge, stress resulting from changes in the child's health status etc.\n","id":"814d9867-b8e4-4e69-ad77-e2008931814a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>What is good for one person is evil, potentially, to another. One demands the other's existence. For example if you want servants, maybe that is good for you but potentially bad for servants.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because of the existence of evil, there cannot be a monotheistic God as traditionally conceived.\n","id":"7ba2d927-3ad6-4352-b74e-ffc6eeca51cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>If a pregnancy is the result of rape, the rapist would also have contributed half of the genetic material to the pregnancy. If the amount of genetic material contributed gives a person a right to choose, then a rapist would have as much right to that choice as the victim of his rape.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A genetic relationship to a child does not grant a person any rights that would supersede a mother's right to bodily autonomy.\n","id":"0729cae9-c45a-428e-bb0b-07db6839506d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This one may be easy for you guys to prove, as I know kind of little about the situation. But I do remember a lot about Sandy Hook, and when it came out I was interested in conspiracy videos of the time. I am not saying I buy into the conspiracy, as I'm sure the kids actually died, but like 911 it certainly seemed fishy the way things went down. No one is denying that people died, the conspiracy is about whether it was planned or not. I remember at the time seeing conspiracy videos on YouTube and other places on the internet, which no longer exists which did a good job of showing how this Sandy Hook event may not have been exactly what it look like. For instance, there was a Facebook page made a day before the event for the crisis. I remember seeing the same crisis actors that they used in other CNN reports, which was beyond terrifying. I remember seeing the same people and buildings going around in circles literally going around in circles but no one was actually doing anything Now I'm not saying Sandy Hook did not happen, it is terrible what has happened to these kids and Families. And like I said I'm not too sure about what Alex Jones has been saying, however crucifying him for his beliefs and freedom of speech regarding an event that is in my opinion suspicious just like 911, is a breach of his rights. I feel like Alex Jones is being taken down not because the public wants him to be taken down but because the 'powerful' realize he has an influence on people. There has always been people who try to mislead populations into believing what they want them to believe in, but rarely do they get ostracized in the way that Alex Jones is currently being treated. Personally I think the guy is super obnoxious, but I also really respected what he did with the Bohemian Grove. I guess what I'm saying is I'm not defending him I'm just defending his rights to freedom of speech, even if his speech is insensitive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alex Jones is innocent\n","id":"e5cf55ff-972e-47d5-ae50-b93a8492eaf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Australian republic vs. monarchy<|ARGUMENT|>Australians have chosen to remain within the commonwealth. Their hands have not been forced on the issue. Therefore, they have not been denied independence in any way. They have chosen to remain within the commonwealth on their own accord.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Australians can vote to exit the commonwealth, but have chosen to remain.\n","id":"1d6cd2fd-f81d-4354-aa49-f6d0053dda68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the most capable workplace Collaboration Software<|ARGUMENT|>Slack mostly facilitates group conversations, so while it can be useful for having different teams and channels discussing their relevant projects, Slack used on its own would fulfil limited functions within a workplace.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lots of 3rd party apps required to unlock potential. This may involve additional licensing costs depending on the app vendor.\n","id":"8becf1d7-bd50-4bbc-b74f-aaa37532e743"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Having Children Selfish?<|ARGUMENT|>It is impossible to experience Joy without knowing what sorrow and pain is. Children provide sorrow and pain for their parents, and life provides sorrow and pain for the children. Thus the greatest potential for joy is imbued in the process of creating a family.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The vast majority of lives will also contain great joy, and giving anybody the opportunity to experience this is a gift.\n","id":"83d7789f-b359-4fbd-b9bf-3bda251549ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I'm sure you all know that depression is an awful, debilitating disease that in 99 of cases prevents the afflicted from living a normal, productive life. We also know that medication, ECT and therapy don't work for everyone the so called treatment resistant ones, who can't get any relief from their symptoms. We also know that even depressed people sometimes raise children. The depressed often feel suicidal, and it's often only the efforts of others that actually stops them from going through with it. I say we stop this. I say we should legalise euthanasia for this purpouse, the more depressed people decided to give up and kick the bucket the better it will be for society. I would actually argue it's in fact immoral for those with severe, treatment resistant depression to bring children into the world not only would they not be able to care for them properly and give them the attention and love they deserve depression is indeed a very selfish illness but they'd be passing on their defective genes, and potentailly dooming their children and their children's children to a life of suffering and misery. It only makes rational sense to encourage these no hopers to take their own lives. Thoughts?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Should we encourage people with severe depression to kill themselves to remove their defective genes from the gene pool?\n","id":"581a4aa6-c021-4fb1-a997-3f807444660a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Different people are aroused by different things. As long as they do not act upon their feelings of arousal in an immoral way, I don't see the problem with any particular fetish including pedophilia. As long as they do not prey on any children through rape, assault, or the creation support of child pornography, I don't think pedophiles should be stigmatized the way Western societies do. As far as I'm concerned, our treatment of the idea of pedophilia and our assumption that anyone with that desire is also a rapist is preventing people who feel that way from exploring their sexual desire in non harmful ways think role playing, erotica, illustrations etc. Unpopular view and one that I surely haven't given all the necessary thought to. Am I missing something? Change my view, Reddit. I might not be back for a few hours though, just a head's up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think pedophilia, when not acted upon, should be considered the same as any sexual fetish.\n","id":"1e436602-ee24-4439-afcf-7537b26cc373"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Refugees need a permanent place to live, since they will be unable in the foreseeable future to return to places like Syria. The countries that currently house them like Turkey, Jordan, or Greece are unwilling to keep them permanently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alternative solutions are at best temporary. The only way to achieve a permanent resolution of the problem is to offer refugees asylum in high-income countries.\n","id":"e6cbd83c-2ede-48fe-bd21-df601822843f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Much as though I tend to disagree with Ezra Levant about almost everything, I find his arguments about Ethical Oil to be fairly convincing. Compared to many other large scale oil producing regions, Alberta has decent environmental and safety standards, has a democratically elected government, has some measure of accountability, and the royalties are reinvested in communities and social programs. I realize that open pit mining and tailings ponds are massive eyesores and are lousy for the environment, but they certainly don't occupy land that is otherwise exceptionally fertile and they aren't altogether that much worse than oil rigs in Saudi Arabia and far less damaging than Deepwater Horizon . If we have to rely on oil for the time being, wouldn't it be better to get it from our own back yard at a slightly higher environmental risk than from faraway countries with no accountability?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the Alberta Oil Sands are a net benefit.\n","id":"4a1ae2a1-e05f-4cf6-98c2-d96a289fbd57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>25 percent with Immigrant Parents of the 69.9 million children under age 18 in the US lived with at least one immigrant parent in 2014.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US is not facing an aging population due to immigration.\n","id":"b5ba007d-2e2e-437e-bcd9-30f15287481e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Warming temperatures disrupt vital ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream, which transport warmth to otherwise cooler regions. As a result, the average temperatures in the affected regions will significantly drop, which potentially triggers ice ages.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If we do not act and change the climate we may face a new ice age\n","id":"78f3dbd9-c146-46e6-95d2-7f40da11405c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>From what I understand the Republican Party seems to be losing ground millennials are becoming increasingly liberal, less religious, and more supportive of LGBT. Though it may sound morbid the next decade s will lead to the dying out of the Silent Generation people born between the 1920s and 1940s who make up a significant chunk of the GOP. This isn't meant to be a biased post it just seems that older, more conservative Americans are fighting a constant uphill battle against younger citizens who are losing patience. There are plenty of conservative millennials, don't get me wrong, but that population is shrinking fast. Is there any way the GOP can survive in the coming decades while upholding a platform of anti abortion, anti LGBT, climate denial, etc? Some sources The Atlantic Pew Research Center TIME<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Republican Party won't survive the next few decades without major reforms.\n","id":"d18e8f53-f843-4076-b940-fd5607a4736b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>Baze v Rees determined by 7-2 that use of the lethal injection often used in capital punishment is not unconstitutional.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US Supreme Court has not deemed the death penalty unconstitutional. In fact, they have confirmed its constitutionality.\n","id":"d8531abb-ac51-4295-a769-86e5ba1e67f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every day I'm seeing questions posted on Reddit that are being downvoted. I think it's a really bad thing that people are downvoting questions because they don't agree or think it's a stupid question. x200B We should applaud people who are daring to ask questions or be judged by total strangers in a super volatile environment like the internet, instead of downvoting them. We should try to help people who seek advice to the best of our abilities, instead of downvoting them. We should keep a positive vibe in most subreddits unless that subreddit is created solely for negativity, which is also perfectly fine . x200B In my opinion, downvotes should act as a filter for objective negativity or ignorance, not as a way to magnify insecurities or push people down. x200B <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Downvotes should only be used in case of negative posts\/comments, not for questions or when advice is asked.\n","id":"e87ea573-902b-4456-a765-6f6cb97470aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Ontario have only one public, secular school system?<|ARGUMENT|>Through the Education Act of Ontario and through Provincial curriculum documents, the state effectively sets ends for teachers; e.g., it establishes the values that are to be imparted and the content that is to be learned. But these are matters that should be left to the individual groups, as long as they remain within the law, and some of the Catholic ends e.g., values are unique to them. So, those freedoms should be protected under the law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having only one public school system involves the unrightful imposition of state ends.\n","id":"b2552a22-fd7b-454f-afce-0cc79ef486bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we be worried about American democracy under President Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Problematic as Trump may be, he is the symptom of larger problems in the American political system that made his rise to power possible in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alarmism contributes to hysteria on the left with an intense focus on one man, Donald Trump, which is both a regrettable and dangerous place to be.\n","id":"534b90bd-5360-4b76-a095-7ee968d3d574"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The United States is the only developed country with low medical standards. It spends more money on medicine and pharma than any other country, and yet still has low quality. Plus, if there was a cap and prices were lowered, it is more likely that important things ie. Epi pen will become public information, allowing them to be more heavily researched, thus allowing for more development of pharma. And on top of all of that, because the United States owns the majority of pharma production, if they have a cap, it will set standards for other countries that a do not have price caps b do not have enough medicine, or high quality medicine BTW, sorry if the formatting is bad, I'm on mobile.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States needs a price cap on pharmaceuticals.\n","id":"7d769846-93ba-4cc7-8db7-e52f97b5d274"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need nuclear power for sustainable energy production?<|ARGUMENT|>Scientific studies of those exposed to nuclear power accidents has found that in all commercial power generation incidents other than Chernobyl, no adverse health effects have ever been detected. pdfs.semanticscholar.org www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov www.unscear.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The consequences of a nuclear accident aren't \"major\", some victims get cancer much later in life and radiation doesn't make existing cancers worse, it only creates new ones.\n","id":"e1a6f478-33b6-4dff-99a1-bc550eab8f3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this is a widely discussed topic, but I feel I have some unique points that I see are lacking in many arguments against the ban. Change my view, but please address my points without resorting to conjuring up strawmen I've see too many of them in other posts. EDIT Formatting was off, sorry I'm new to the sub . In light of the recent news regarding Trump\u2019s ban on transgender peoples from enlisting in the military, it\u2019s absolutely absurd that people aren\u2019t seeing this ban for what it is Unwarranted Discrimination. Employment Discrimination How can it be discrimination if there are already set qualifications to enlist in the military? It can quite easily be discrimination, especially on the grounds that by nature, the military is not a club but a platform of employment. Precluding employment based on extraneous factors such as gender, sexuality, and race is indeed discrimination. Which, if you might not know, is illegal as of Title VII granted there is a national security exception justifying it, but i don't believe it's warranted . Whether or not you have a penis or a vagina or artificially implanted boobs or hormones does not justify employers from withholding you employment particularly if you are qualified in every single aspect , because quite frankly, it\u2019s irrelevant and illegal . And it certainly remains true within the military. At the end of the day, serving in the military is not about one\u2019s genitals, but rather about one\u2019s determination, will to persevere, and patriotism to one\u2019s nation. So, this is unequivocally a gross form of discrimination, not only under the premise that transgender preclusion is preposterous, but under the same standards of employment that almost all of America follow by law. Double Standard False Dilemma Fallacy Stereotyping The main argument by most apologists is that transgender peoples have been proven to be \u201cweaker\u201d mentally than cis gender peoples. That because \u201cscientific evidence\u201d has proven that they are more fallible to depression and suicidal tendencies, transgender peoples should be precluded from serving. This logic certainly seems to make use of the false dilemma fallacy \u2013 or what I like to call the restrictive option fallacy. It entails that we are only faced to either accept a group of peoples with the inability to prevent themselves from jumping on a knife hyperbole, but you get the point or completely ban them in order to preserve the integrity of the \u201cmentally fortuitous\u201d cis gender military. Quite honestly, this is outlandish thinking. First, what does mere chance have to do with reality? Sure, we can base qualifications on the likelihood of catching depression or committing suicide, but then it would necessitate the banning of women, Hispanics, and young adults \u2013 groups purported to be more fallible to depression than other old, white men. So, unless the military should completely be replaced with old, white American men, it would be highly suggested not to propose such outrageous forms of discriminations merely on the rate of mental illnesses within a group. Because not only is it a double standard to the groups that are allowed in the military yet concurrently share high rates of mental illnesses , but it is stereotyping. Back in the early 1900\u2019s, African Americans were stereotyped as incompetent, dirty, and savages, and were thus relegated to segregated divisions of the military. Before you claim this is an abusive analogy, women were stereotyped as incompetent, mentally weak, and incapable of handling the duties of warfare, as evidenced by their ban from the military. Yet look where we are now. Women can and have enlisted in the military, and they have more than competently proven to be integral pieces to the military. Just as we have broken down the stereotypes of women and of African Americans to allow them and integrate them into the military, we must do the same for transgender peoples. We have history for a reason. It is so that we can learn from the past, and so that we can be shaped and influenced by the mistakes of our predecessors. No rational person in this day and age claims that letting African Americans and women into the military was a mistake. So why is precluding transgender peoples based purely on a stereotype not one either? And consider this \u2013 perhaps those enlisting in the military aren\u2019t as prone to mental illnesses as the rest of the transgender demographic. There\u2019s no way we will ever know, but by excluding consideration of such possibilities, we are engaging in stereotypes. Double Standard Within Military Also, even if we were to prove that most transgender peoples in the military had mental illnesses \u2013 which would \u201costensibly\u201d detract from the cutthroat and competitive nature of the military \u2013 how could we not consequently address the millions of those in the military suffering from alcoholism, drug abuse, and incessant and extreme rage? If anything, those suffering from such conditions undermine the integrity of the military more than depressed transgender men women. And that\u2019s not to say that those in the military aren\u2019t depressed or suffering from mental illnesses themselves. Perhaps the cause of such mental illnesses stems from serving in the military, in which case you\u2019d have to scrap the argument that fallibility to depression justifies a ban to serve. Transgenders Are Mentally Strong And who\u2019s to say that transgender peoples are indeed mentally weak? Quite the opposite based on my experience and the experiences of others. There\u2019s a reason oppressed peoples have mental fortitude. It\u2019s because they are forced to build up defenses to the tribes and tribes of hecklers and oppressors and tormentors who seek to simply devastate and destroy. And it\u2019s reasonable to assume that transgender peoples go through such experiences. And if they\u2019re still able to stand strong and enlist in the army, who am I or you to tell them that they\u2019re not mentally equipped to fight, when in fact they\u2019ve been through more tumultuous, more unstable, and more devastating experiences than you and I will ever face. I\u2019ll go out and say it. Transgender peoples are mentally stronger than most of us. And considering those who choose to serve in the military, they\u2019ve got be the mentally strongest peoples in the world. Let them serve. Change my view. TL DR I believe that since serving in the military is employment, and under Title VII employers cannot discriminate upon gender identity, it's illegal to ban transgender peoples from the military, especially when otherwise qualified. Additionally, the stereotype, however true it may be, of transgender peoples being fallible to mental illnesses should not be the basis for the decision of banning transgenders not only is it a slippery slope, but it undermines the inclusion of other groups such as women and young adults who also suffer high rates of mental illnesses bringing up the question of the double standard . Also, the military has plenty of soldiers who suffer from IMO worse conditions than depression alcoholism, drug abuse. Should they too be banned for undermining the integrity of the military? Lastly, transgender peoples are mentally tough as hell, so I don't think you can make the argument that they are simply too mentally weak to enlist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banning Transgender Peoples From the Military is Unequivocal Discrimination and an Illegal Employment Practice\n","id":"40bf2136-4ee2-4411-85a7-8b4910cbd59c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m always hearing that this game is all skill and is highly recommended but I say otherwise. Accuracy is the only thing that takes skill. But everything else is all luck. It\u2019s all luck that your going to turn a corner and someone\u2019s going to have your back turned to you and vice verse. Oh no a guy has a pixel peak on the room, your probably not going to be able to enter the room without getting one tapped. Got lucky and no ones in the room? Activate lions ability and it\u2019s either the defending team just waits for you to secure or move and get killed the second you get near the room. I\u2019ve found Ubisoft a shitty company to run this game. Let\u2019s add p2w ops, like Lion ans ela that change the meta for a whole season. Glitches are always in the game. The blitz glitch made this game unplayable. Anyways change my view I\u2019m interested in hearing your thoughts<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rainbow six seige is mostly luck, excluding accuracy and slightly pay to win\n","id":"22422c11-480c-4ef2-b948-2fe9b2cd1548"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should virtual reality VR worlds exist?<|ARGUMENT|>The potential for innovation or significant production of or furthering of intellectual pursuits\/ideas from any given individual would be drastically increased if such a person were able to live indefinitely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"VR worlds allows people to transcend their existence and live transhuman lives.\n","id":"5eec1572-b28c-4a70-9f06-55ec8f81a842"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Immunity from prosecution for politicians<|ARGUMENT|>In any well-developed legal system it will be expected that an accused would receive a fair trial in which they are judged fairly and impartially. This may well not happen where that accused holds public office. Politicians are likely to be well-known and so perhaps split opinion, making it hard to achieve a fair trial. And their involvement in the executive or legislative branches of government will perhaps have brought them into conflict with the judicial branch, and so it might be expected that judges would also be hard placed to treat them objectively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fame and occupation of politicians may make it impossible for them to obtain a fair and objective trial:\n","id":"a72fd41c-8176-405e-9f6c-679ebc1476f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So in my mind Basic income Everyone over 18 would receive a enough money to pay rent, and buy food, but other expenses like internet, or a car would have to paid by yourself with your own money. I Saw yesterday in an r askreddit thread someone linked to r basicincome, and the basic consensus is that a basic income would eliminate poverty. I don't think it would eliminate poverty at all, I think that everything would just be much more expensive because everyone would have there rent and food money each month to spend as they please. I just don't see how this would work, so if someone could explain to me how it would work that would be nice, because right now I just don't feel like it would work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think a basic income would eliminate poverty\n","id":"9d96f747-264d-4b43-878a-534a6ea315fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello everyone My first . In my college level English class, we are reading Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, a book which has been very popular and was made into a movie, as many of you already know for some time. We had a vote I voted for American Gods which I still plan on reading, outside of class . We have a reader response paper of 500 words due in a few weeks. Before I write that paper, I'm trying to see if someone is able to  on this book. We'll be watching the movie in class this week, another thing I am not thrilled about. I have tried to avoid the movie as much as possible, seeing only very few scenes from it. I'm finishing up the book this weekend, with about 50 pages left. I think Fight Club tries way too hard to accomplish something but doesn't accomplish anything. It's filled with random one liners that teenagers have been spewing out year after year. I am particularly annoyed by the disgusting food parts, the fighting that has no purpose, and the weird cult like army that's been steadily developing in the novel as well as in real life, it looks like . However, I would like to at least understand another viewpoint before I bring myself to write my reader response paper. I was very tempted to turn in I hate Fight Club , repeated numerous times to fill up the 500 word count. I'm trying not to be that immature in regards to literature. I know Palahniuk worked hard on this novel, and invested his time into it. I am not a particular fan of his, additionally. What makes other people find value in such a nauseating literally pissing in food novel? I've had insomnia. I don't want to start a fight club. I don't want to destroy people or make soap. I've looked at some deeper meanings, that people have had online, but nothing has really had any effect so far on changing my view. I realize it could be tied to a 1990's cultural movement, but young people today are still reading it and apparently so in love with this book. What am I missing? Help me change my view? Thanks. Edit 3 hours later. Thank you, everyone This thread has opened my eyes to a lot of great points, and I have awarded a few deltas hopefully correctly . I would like to summarize clean up my thoughts on the topic, and note what had an effect on me and comments that made me think. Fight Club is definitely not without value. gt From u j9m6 gt Anti consumerism the identity one gets from amassing various objects gt The concept is more about defining yourself by what you own and how much money you make. Consumerism is people expressing themselves by buying things they dont need in order to try and create a persona that fits them the ikea nesting instinct instead of just expressing themselves by creating things or beating the shit out of each other. gt A lot of people do grow up being taught that life is as simple as making as much money as you can and fitting in with everyone else as well as possible. nbsp gt From u NotFreeAdvice gt 90s Culture and Life is Pointless But It's Ok gt It is about a young professional struggling to find the point in life and finally realizing that maybe the point is that there is no point. And maybe that is ok. You don't need to fight against this pointlessness, you don't need angst to get through life. You just need to be OK with life. gt This is why the Chuck shows his characters blatantly fighting for meaning. Because there is none to be found so perhaps we should just embrace that, rather than fight a losing battle for meaning. gt this was a very freeing realization, which is why the book and the movie struck such a chord. nbsp gt From u awesomeness0232 gt Exaggerated Rebellion and Cultural Impact gt rebellion, and desire to rebel is a feeling that a lot of people experience in their live. Obviously it's to an extreme, but that what makes it so appealing. You're watching this desire for rebellion that the narrator has pent up break him down to the point of a total mental collapse. You then see how others around him also feel stressed and want to rebel and they join his clearly insane movement. try to approach your paper by writing about why you think the story had such a deep cultural impact and why people can relate to the characters so well, even though they are doing insane things. nbsp gt From u ablarga gt The Introspection of Disgust gt I think the point of the book is to be disgusted. I hated the book and the movie too. But that's why I loved it. The fact that this story was able to bring out these extreme emotions in me is what makes it special. Exploring why exactly you hate it is a great way to reflect on your own values and character. nbsp gt From u AnonForSenate gt Meaning Through Meaningless and Food for Thought Nihilistic with Rules gt how this group of people claim, or realize, how meaningless everything is and then they create their own meaning through their fight club and their projects Project Mayhem, for example . gt For example why does Fight Club have rules at all? Jack has a good job and a lot to lose. Why does this fighting make any sense to him? gt Why does a seemingly nihilistic group have rules. Maybe I don't know enough about the philosophy but that seems strange. nbsp gt From u tirkt gt Angst Fruitless Attempts, Challenging Tradition, 90s Culture, Powerlessness, Emotional Frustration gt I think you've found the point without realizing it. The book is about young men with angst but no outlet. They create a number of futile, meaning they accomplish nothing, attempts to express this frustration. They are violent toward each other the fights , others the food , and the dead soap , who serve as a surrogate for history and traditions. This futile attempt at something is represented both in the story and the style. This fruitless struggle in individuals is a representation of 90s alternative culture, but is still relevant to youth alternative cultures today. It's also important to recognize the subjectivity of value in literature. Some people like FC because they can relate to the emotional frustration that drives the characters nbsp gt From u gravvs gt Love Triangle Explanation of Narrator, Tyler, and Marla gt Tyler is an idealized version of himself. Tyler is a guttural reaction to the unhappiness he finds in the life that he has made for himself. While Tyler is actually nihilistic, this nihilism is warped into a kind of imagined freedom. Tyler loves Marla because Tyler is bold enough to go out and seek out what he wants. He is the projected, idealized image of who the narrator wants to be. Now keep in mind that just because he's idealized doesn't mean he's good. The narrator idealizes himself using some pretty fucked up values as a base. gt The narrator loves Tyler precisely because Tyler is his image of an ideal. Tyler is the person the narrator thinks he wants to be, so of course he loves Tyler. gt Marla loves the narrator. But she's fucking Tyler. Of course, they appear to her as the same person. She loves the narrator because when he's an actual human being with substance and shape. Tyler is just an idealization. He's a front. He's an image. When the narrator talks to her, he talks like a real person. Or at least a lot more real than Tyler is. gt To wrap up The narrator thinks that he has to be someone like Tyler in order to attract women. But this image is far from what Marla is actually interested in. Marla just wants to engage with the narrator without all the images and front. But the narrator is too insecure and dissatisfied with life to really understand that. gt bonus In his rejection of the life that he had established he discusses consumerism and the culture of images. He talks about how people find false identity through ikea furniture. He talks about how shallow this all is. Tyler is supposed to represent a rejection of all that. gt However Tyler is just another image to consume. His little rules and hyperviolent image are just as shallow as anything that comes from Ikea. It's prepackaged and ready to be sold to the masses and it clearly sells . gt It was never a true rejection after all. nbsp gt From u Raintee97 gt Personal Salvation through Self Destruction gt The overall mood of Fight Club is personal salvation through self destruction. You claim the fighting has no purpose, but it does To bring men closer to a primal state and to reject the role that society says men should lead. nbsp gt From u Weaselord gt Crowd Mentality gt crowd mentality. The propaganda Tyler spreads to his cult is fuck corporations, fuck how they turn consumers into mindless sheeple . However, the cultists fight corporations by becoming brainwashed mindless sheeple, this time blindly following Tyler and his instructions nbsp gt From u therapy gt De masculinization as a Theme gt de masculinization that some men feel in modern capitalist society nbsp gt From u edmounddantes gt Story Structure gt attempting to create a story where a wide variety of topics scenarios were covered, only tangentially linked by the repetition of a handful of small, boring phrases that described the theme of the passage. Best example I can think of is the passage where the narrator meets Tyler. If I recall, he says one can only expect a moment of perfection multiple times throughout the chapter. Taken alone, it's boring. Taken in context, it's the theme of the chapter, tying the rest of the various events in the chapter together, which, on their own, are disjointed and non sequential.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fight Club is a worthless, overrated book and the reader has nothing to gain from it.\n","id":"13cd1a3c-8314-47f9-9530-cba2bbddcf8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let's assume that we have a CEO of a fortune 500 company, according to the AFL CIO, in the top 100 highest paid of 2012 2013, all of them made between 15M 75M from salary and bonuses. The lowest paid employees in their company maybe made 20k. Ball park, that means that the CEO is 1000 times more valuable than her lowest paid janitor This speaks to me of a kind of hubris and greed that reasons in the following way The three of us work together, and all make 50k yr. At the end of the year, I'm promoted to 'manager' of the two remaining workers. Now, it's not 'fair' for us all to still be paid the same, after all I'm in charge. So take the same budget, 150k, and now I'm the 'boss' so I make 80k and so all that's left for the two people I manage is 35k each. Repeat this say 4 or 5 times through middle and upper management, and we arrive at a situation like were in today. Huge executive compensation, but why? Now, if the maximum salary in the company was 60k and I was offered a promotion to manager, would I somehow be less inclined to take it? What about the next jump, to 70k? and the next to 80? Why isn't it enough that my decisions are now guiding and leading the group and I have received a small merit increase? Why should I also make ~50 to double what the people who report to me are making? Why rely on a tax system to progressively tax higher incomes to provide services, rather impose a moral code that says companies may not salary bonuses their employees at higher than a net total of 150k yr during a 40 year career? that is, liquid net worth should be lt 6M and our salary scale should be re adjusted such that a diligent worker hits this 6M mark after 40 years, while a very hard worker could do it in 20 25 . Also, consider the studies that have shown people who make more than 80k yr report to being just as happy and satisfied as people who make 800k yr Now I'd be willing to consider exemptions for Pro athletes, or other 'time dependent' jobs artist, architect etc could still make nearly a million dollars per year, since their 'careers' when they are making a large amount of money could be relatively short. I'm not convinced that the athletes who make 10s of millions work or train 10 times harder than a teammate who makes 250k yr. Or that the artist who manages to sell his painting for 1M worked a lot harder than the artist who sells it for 1,000 That is, I think that monetary value is inherently subjective and that we don't usefully understand the systems that determine the price of a good, or an appropriate salary for work performed. For example, how much should it cost per night to board a dog? In this case, regulation is needed. Lastly, I think once you start making a large amount of money, it becomes nearly impossible to see how you 'aren't worth this much' and so it is up to society to provide the framework we can all agree to before we know how lucky, or talented we might be. Ok but there's a huge problem lots of people already have net worth more than 6M, or are paid way more than 150k yr and how do we handle telling them? with that, . Obviously, since i just brought it up, I'm not that interested in counter arguments about how impractical such a change is would be. I'm asking for  arguments that look at why a maximum salary has little merit and so, why financial motivation is so strong a driver, despite the evidence that it does not making people any happier. EDIT1 people seem to be arguing that it's not the payee, but the payer who has the moral or ethical obligation here. What I'm looking for in the  is an compelling ethical argument that provides evidence that paying higher salaries yields some MORE good in the world than the inequality it creates. That society is better off because people can be paid arbitrarily high salaries. I'm asking for someone to convincingly honestly articulate a Gordon Gekko 'Greed is good' point of view. Edit2 Thanks for all the responses. I'll get back to more of you tomorrow. Edit3 People are hung up or think that by saying there is an ethical limit, that implies a legal limit, or a taxable limit. This is not the case. People can continue to request huge salaries, and companies will continue to pay them. My point is that their behavior by me is viewed as unethical. Why should I think that because the market will pay them that salary that they should accept it? What imbues the market with knowledge of what is right and wrong, rather than what 'can be done'? All things that can be done, shouldn't. Edit4 Well, 500 comments later, and I only awarded two \u2206s However, this has been really interesting and stimulating. So thanks everyone. I went through and upvoted all the top posts because I did want to thank everyone in some small way for participating. I think my biggest take away is that lots of you think that growth and or efficiency are inherently good. I readily admit to being skeptical. I think that measured growth is good necessary, but like nature, only so much growth should be allowable before some other check should come in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is an ethical limit to the amount of money a person should receive as direct compensation for their work and this number is significantly lower than what executives and athletes are currently paid.\n","id":"07d131fa-2fa8-4dcc-83b7-882d2e7b87b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the use of 'chosen' or gender-neutral pronouns be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Refering to someone by a certain pronoun is not that difficult, but if legally enforceable, it would be disastrous to enforce something that relied on having pre-existing knowledge of a person's preferred pronouns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be preferable but should not be legally enforced.\n","id":"e088ea84-9325-4eac-b158-9588bba7fc22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of the big issues in many communities in the US is out of wedlock teen pregnancy teen pregnancy out of wedlock You can break it down by race as you like. But the chances for a child born to a poor, teenaged, unmarried mother are poor the mother never finished college or even high school, she will struggle to support the child in low wage jobs, and unless the mother does marry the father of her child or someone else the child will not have the benefit of a father's presence. So why doesn't the government pay teenaged girls to be on birth control? The Depo Provera shot is a 4x a year injection for birth control so there is no trust issue if the girls are taking their pills. The government will, in theory, save money long term as it doesn't need to pay for expensive entitlement programs WIC, CHIP, etc . The girls have a better shot of graduating high school and going to college without the added burden of a baby. My thought is that if the government offers to every low income, at risk teen above the age of 16 the shot and PAYS them to take it say 150 until they graduate high school, and then 100 until they graduate college , it would be a win win for all parties involved the government, the girls, and society. If a girl does get pregnant and has a baby, she is kicked off the program it's a way to invest in girls who will finish their education and have a better chance of not being reliant on programs. I also would allow for married teenagers yes, they do exist to be on the program the goal is to finish your education before having babies. If when a male version of Depo Provera comes out, I would add that as an option as well. The reason this view gives me a slightly loathsome feeling and I don't discuss it in real life is because it's a bit too much like eugenics trying to stop poor people from reproducing because it's a drain on society. A bit too much like the US eugenics programs of the early 20th century, and, of course, like the Nazis. Granted, a birth control shot is different from sterilization, but nonetheless. And it doesn't make sense to me to offer the program to teenaged girls who statistically are unlikely to have a teen pregnancy, even though making it a universal option would decrease the similarities to eugenics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At-risk teens should be paid to be on birth control until they finish college.\n","id":"3769a98b-aa1c-4874-a743-103731e18d65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is my first post here so please be gentle I'll start this by stating that I'm looking at the battle for gender equality as a guy but also as an equalist. I hope this is following the rules but basically I'm looking for some views to show me that gender equality is an achievable target in the near future as it seems to be rather self destructive at present. I've seen posts regarding all female taxi services and the debate that follows, whether it is aimed at empowering women or embracing a rather childish attitude of if you can do it so can I which caused me some confusion as not too long ago I read about cases of all male golf clubs being sexist and anti equality . For me this is edging towards hypocrisy, but is it justified? I'm not sure anymore<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The battle for gender equality is losing\n","id":"5b22f7bc-cf5e-4197-b91b-d895a1f178c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey. EDIT add MODERN to the title when reading it My view is as the title says. In Britain, 18 year old girls are 35 more likely 1 to attend University than males of the same age. Where 37 percent of black school leavers go to university, only 28 percent of white school leavers do. They are \u2018the most derided ethnic group in Britain\u2019. YouGov\u2019s number crunchers confessed to being surprised by \u2018the lousy reputation of young white men\u2019, who are seen as drunken, promiscuous, prone to drug taking, work shy and impolite Young white straight males are hated amongst young populist left wing communities the haters not only hate, they believe that hating on white straight males is a virtue, because they think it makes them non racist, non homophobic and non racist. Because we all know that racism against whites is impossible, right ? Discuss. 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The young mid-20s, well-educated, white, western woman is the most privileged demographic in the history of the human species.\n","id":"edfd95a4-2f02-4333-b277-b7b007ad5d0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Foreign languages, compulsory in schools JUN<|ARGUMENT|>Foreign languages are important for the economy. The more languages someone can speak, the more places they can work. Foreign language skills help companies do business with other countries. It is especially important that children whose native language is not widely spoken e.g. Dutch, Danish learn other languages. However, it is also important for English-speakers to learn foreign languages, since not everyone speaks English. And it is polite to be able to speak some of another person\u2019s language. Governments should try to promote economic growth. Since languages are important for the economy, governments should make all young people learn them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Foreign languages are important for the economy. The more languages someone can speak, the more pla...\n","id":"d733af08-2ab7-4ca4-bbfd-4e10a45ce367"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a gun owner and I visit the range on a regular basis. While at the range you will usually see 1 or 2 idiots that have the triple control of a 3 year old with a nerf gun. I'm also a CCW permit holder and therefore was forced to sit through a training course. I think they should require something similar for anyone purchasing a gun. Wouldn't need to be as long as a CCW class. Something that teaches basic safety and could be done in 30 minutes before purchasing a weapon. I would say even the weapon dealer could go through the steps. Obviously this wouldn't prevent all accidents, but sometimes what might seem obvious to most in terms of gun safety would be new revelation to others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A safety course should be required before purchasing a gun.\n","id":"31b53ea2-2ee1-4192-8acf-1477d293951c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do all or most White Americans experience privilege?<|ARGUMENT|>Racial stereotypes shape how African Americans, Latinos and other ethnic minorities are viewed. White privilege is the advantage of not being subject to those stereotypes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All or most White Americans living in the U.S. today experience privileges exclusive only to whites.\n","id":"2f4fe652-b998-47e9-9ba5-fb25194aec2c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ethereum and Programmatic Proof-of-Work ProgPow<|ARGUMENT|>ASICs can easily be made ineffective, at any point in time, by changing the algorithm. So they don't pose an existential threat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ASICs are not an existential threat to the network. twitter.com\n","id":"4f20c0b0-d7f7-4d15-9938-c7628c7b65f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Judges be Elected or Appointed?<|ARGUMENT|>Decisions are often made on the basis of facts and principles that are complex and unintuitive and hence difficult to communicate to the public.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legal documents tend to be written in a form of \"legalese\" that is not easily understood.\n","id":"3c819451-9e43-4c2b-b129-988395a8b64f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural appropriation wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Native American culture is being sexualized by the sale of mock regalia intended for women. This, despite the fact that Native American women are more likely than their white counterparts to be raped or go missing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The headdress of some Native American tribes, worn ceremoniously, or as an adornment of honor for good deeds in war and within the tribe, is offensive when sold as party costumes or music festival adornments.\n","id":"566ca4c2-3f83-42e5-9155-525d13e69837"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the USA target the Mexican Cartels with drone strikes?<|ARGUMENT|>Drones are now possessed by 14 countries in the region for surveillance and intelligence gathering on drug trafficking and rebel groups.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Drones have been gaining popularity throughout Latin America amongst organised crime groups.\n","id":"002abc56-585f-467b-be8e-05edea6ef43a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should underage individuals be permitted to watch pornography?<|ARGUMENT|>Children and adolescents can become de-sensitized to pornography exposure and this can result in acting out sexualized behaviors with other children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"They may become desensitized and lead them possibly towards high-risk sexual behavior later in life\n","id":"1d98f1b4-d675-45f5-a489-51264a7e2a0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>rac\u00b7ism \u02c8r\u0101\u02ccsiz\u0259m Submit noun prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior. a program to combat racism synonyms racial discrimination, racialism, racial prejudice, xenophobia, chauvinism, bigotry, casteism Aborigines are the main victims of racism in Australia the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. noun racism theories of racism No where in that definition does it say that only white people can be racist. I'd say that people who say that fit the above definition quite well. And I realize the system isn't fair still, but I don't go around saying that only men can be sexist because the system is set against me. Also, if you want to talk about slavery, how about focusing on the chinese kids who made your shoes instead of what happened 200 years ago. What do you think reddit? Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as \"reverse rascim\" because rascim is just rascim.\n","id":"1daf0f59-95a1-412d-8fa7-ba35fe9d4bab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Pastafarianism deserve the same rights as other religions?<|ARGUMENT|>Pastafarianism is not based on a sincerely held i.e. genuine religious belief, and is analogous to a sham marriage, in which claims of a loving relationship are not sincere. In both cases, it is morally legitimate to reject claims for rights that are made on the basis of beliefs which are not sincerely held.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious equality does not necessitate the inclusion of organizations which do not qualify as religions.\n","id":"db84d246-2e03-4b21-b9a2-cea84b181f6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Hell Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Romans 2:12-16 describes \"natural law\", a reality by which men and women who do not \"know the rules\" of an unknown religion still abide by, or violate, those unknown rules by their very nature.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This presumes that salvation is dependent upon exposure \"to the correct religion\", which is not necessarily the case.\n","id":"b16c8e0c-76d9-41f1-b96a-bbf69f362ba8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Initial disclaimer I love dogs, I think they're fantastic and amazing animals, and I did not grow up with a dog in my household. So I can't say I have seen dogs interact with babies small children firsthand. Also, when I say small children , I mean like under the age of 2 ish. Basically at the age where they're really dumb, don't have common sense, and cannot defend themselves. I see lots of posts on Reddit of dogs near few month old babies, or small children, and it kind of upsets me and makes me nervous. I know dogs feel empathy, understand human emotions, are intelligent, etc., but I still think they are fundamentally different from humans are are still animals. I'm mainly not worried about the dog attacking the kid most people know their dogs well enough to know if they're aggressive or not but I'm worried about the kid doing something dumb and the dog reflexively hurting the child. There are plenty of posts of larger dogs with sharp nails and heads basically the size of the baby itself, and I can't help but be worried about what happens if a baby does something dumb like pulls the dogs hair, sticks their hand into the dogs mouth, pokes the dog in the eye, etc. and the dog just reacting in a possibly violent way. Like, a little swipe of the paw could hurt a kid baby really badly, and a bite could be fatal. It's sometimes hard to read what a dog is feeling, and I have heard of friends' relatives' dogs biting people when they've never bitten anyone before. How do you know that won't happen to a defenseless child? At least older kids would have common sense to not be dumb or pick up on signs of aggression stress from the dog. It just doesn't seem worth the cuteness to risk a child's health. Maybe under a close adult's or honestly just a bigger kid's supervision it'd be okay, but I literally saw a post a few days ago of a dog sleeping with a baby in a crib and being watched from a baby monitor. I don't think that's okay. So I guess my view is It's not okay to leave a dog with a baby small child without close supervision, and even that is questionable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dogs should not be allowed near babies and really small children\n","id":"99d16529-3bf2-4de0-8def-1f7a4a4c0c89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>\"Qualified immunity\" is a horrible legal doctrine which needs to be ended.<|ARGUMENT|>In the six-year period from 2006 to 2011, law enforcement officers in 44 of the 70 largest law enforcement agencies paid just 0.02% of the dollars awarded to plaintiffs in police misconduct suits p. 249<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even in cases other than those invoking qualified immunity, law enforcement officials hardly end up paying money to those who are injured as a result of their actions.\n","id":"abed07e4-25fc-4fe8-ba74-7dc9c5d5c7a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When people describe their hobbies, often they use self referential terms to describe what they do. Some people insist that the phrase Gamer is inclusive and that Gamer is simply One who plays games. I disagree. A Gamer is someone with expert knowledge on gaming. For simplicities sake, we will define Expert as the following a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area. When compared to other similar scenarios the definition Someone who plays games. Falls apart. Driving a car, doesn't not make you a Car enthusiast. Reading any book, does not make you a Bookworm. Watching movies, does not make you a cinemafile Having expert knowledge on vehicles, how they work their practical functions and limitations and how to get the most bang for your buck, would make you a Car enthusiast. Reading Books with an abnormally high frequency for enjoyment would make you a bookworm. Having knowledge about movies beyond the scope of self evident information would make you a cinemaphile I.E. How certain special effects are achieved, watching directors commentary in excess knowing a directors motivations for scenes etc. The same can be said of the term Gamer. I've observed several common arguments that will not change my view, so I'm going to list them here Going the identity politics route. Gamer isn't an Identity. The meta argument of You're being a gatekeeper. Or any iteration thereof. I am asking for a logical discussion and this is an emotional argument based on the idea that Gamer is inclusive just because being inclusive is socially acceptable, not dickish and Nice . It's unimportant. This is subjective, and I wouldn't be writing this  if this was the case. I've determined for myself It is important. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Gamer\" Is not an inclusive term.\n","id":"7be68cc5-b67a-43c2-9cba-6a7551fac286"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>Bodily integrity - a part of personal autonomy - is defined as 'the right to self governance over one\u2019s own body without external influence or coercion. This suggests that the right to bodily integrity protects individuals from external coercion; it does not, however, empower them to use illegal substances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The prohibition of drugs at no time endangers the personal autonomy of the individual.\n","id":"a5bc6562-3342-4c3d-81d8-b6ad4b7f6614"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My proposition is that pronouns past the three most common ones are not necessary and are actively harmful. An example for some of the new pronouns that can be encountered in the wild is xe xer xerself or zi zis zimself . My argument is as follows Pronouns are always dealing with a spectrum. A he can be used to describe both masculine as well as feminine men and similarly for she and women. The singular they is also covering a spectrum, the spectrum of all people that do not identify with either gender or those that identify with both to differing degrees. Therefore they is sufficient to describe alternative gender identities. If we'd decide that new pronouns are necessary to describe or be inclusive to specific non standard gender identities, we would very likely end up with a sheer infinite amount of pronouns. Since the argument for further pronouns would not be based on scientific facts but rather on feelings of individual people, the argument why some new pronouns are okay and others aren't would be a very difficult one to make. The result would be that we would have to allow anyone to pick or create their own pronouns. Since we'd have a large number of new pronouns people would very likely get confused, since they'd not only have to remember a name and a face but also the specific pronouns of a person AND incorporate those into everyday speech. The result would either be that people would start inadvertently giving offence or our speech patterns would change to rely far more on using names instead of pronouns. Having a wide range of new pronouns would actively harm the English language by making it less clear. Encountering unknown pronouns would confuse people and make it difficult to imagine what kind of character is being talked about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"He, she, they. That's all the pronouns you are getting.\n","id":"3e473aca-597f-4006-b814-735da07a9845"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>In a pre-trial hearing in his murder case to determine his competency to stand trial, Ron Lafferty used the Book or Mormon story of Nephi killing Laban to justify his murders. Salt Lake Tribune, Jan. 3, 1985<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon story of Nephi's beheading of Laban inspired Ron Lafferty to slash the throats of his sister in law and her 15-month old daughter.\n","id":"47b9197f-de65-47b8-a221-311faf2ec709"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>In the Netherlands, Karina Schaapman used her newfound political influence as politician to publicize a book about her experience as a sex worker.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalization allows sex workers to better reshape interpretations of sex and sexuality in society.\n","id":"fb21ba80-f8e3-4f9f-8f0d-4eb1648f7293"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If we could bring back the Neanderthals, should we?<|ARGUMENT|>Neanderthals were used to roam freely and explore wherever they wanted to go. Today's world makes this impossible. Drastic restrictions to their freedoms would make them unhappy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Neanderthals would not be happy with the way they would have to live, namely, fenced in like endangered species in a nature reservation.\n","id":"28c8dbe2-301b-4517-9953-ea2df512ee2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Barbaric traditions don't have to be completly abolished, but can easily be transitioned into symbolic variants sublimation, such as a sport with movements that resemble bullfighting or some folklore event with a virtual bull fight.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is possible to keep part of the tradition, modifying it in order to avoid injury or death to the animal\n","id":"b59165a9-47b5-4eca-94c2-dccd3e1f8f89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>States control who can occupy their territory. People can enter their territory through immigration or birth. States can set restrictions on who can enter their territory and impose minimum earned income. Canada requires three years minimum earned income, Since most residents enter through birth having these restriction just on immigrants is not completely effective. Children who grow up in poverty do not do well, The causes are both a result of lack of resources and poor genetics from parents who lack the ability to earn an adequate income. That is why the requirement would be earned income. Those who get pregnant without the three years minimum income would be subject to forced abortions. Those discovered after birth would be deported. A deleted comment had a good name for this law No Child Born in Poverty Act.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To reduce the public burden of poverty, parents should have a minimum earned income\n","id":"664ddff8-f106-4928-9bc8-09571b64cdf7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sale of human organs for transplants<|ARGUMENT|>The transplant surgeon, the nursing staff and even the pharmaceutical companies producing the anti-reaction drugs receive payment for each operation performed. Why should the donor of the organs, arguably the most important actor in any transplant, not also receive remuneration ? The United States already tolerates markets for blood, semen, human eggs, and surrogate wombs. Is there a moral difference between a heart or a lung and an ovum ? It is remarkable that a lifesaving treatment should apparently have no financial value.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A legitimate market in human organs would not be inconsistent with either public or private healthcare services.\n","id":"020c2c00-4ab2-4e3a-8750-3bbc282bb338"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>Demonetization's attempts to remove cash from the economy have failed, as the amount of currency in public circulation reached a record high on June 1st, 2018.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Demonetization was poorly implemented, did not achieve its stated goals, and has overall been a failure.\n","id":"a1131c66-d4d1-45c1-aadd-2547e673c14c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I make my argument, I'd like to say that I'm an enormous supporter of the capitalistic model. Allowing businesses and entrepreneurs to compete against each other for market share freely and openly is what has contributed to the incredible amount of innovation and expansion America has experienced in the past few hundred years. However, I think we've reached a point where the traditional model may need some tweaking. Over the past several decades, we've seen multiple examples of our country's economy being brought to its knees as a result of corporations becoming far too large to be accounted for or regulated properly. Let's take the 2008 housing disaster as an example, as well as the brand new topic of net neutrality. In 2008, several of the largest financial institutions in the world were involved in a highly criminal game of numbers, whereby they allowed and encouraged poor people to take on mortgages for properties they couldn't afford, financially repackaged these worthless loans in order to make them look as though they were top notch, while at the same time betting against these loans' future failure on the market. It was fraud of the highest order. Needless to say, to this day not a single executive from Lehman Brothers, Fannie May, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan, or any of the other powerhouses involved in this global catastrophe has been reprimanded for their misdoings. On the contrary, they've either been paid a massive bonus and left the company, or they've been paid a massive bonus and are now appointed to our nation's political administration. Why? Why in the world would something so huge, some crime so incredibly glaring and apparent not be punished? My belief is that these corporations have become too large to punish. They're simply so big that being able to hold one person accountable for its doings is impossible. There is such a brilliant network of accounting intricacies involved in the framework of this crime that tracing the disaster to a CEO, or even a single broker or accountant, is not something that can be done. So, then, we ask ourselves, what's the next step? What else can we do to mete out justice? Well, we go after the corporation as a whole, naturally. After all, it wasn't just the CEO, but rather a massive network of employees and regulators that were in on the scheme. But here we run into our problem again. The corporation itself is simply too large to take down. We rely on this corporation. We have trillions of dollars invested in these corporations. We can't simply let them go under. They support us. So we bail them out. We allow these corporations to go on operating because we literally cannot afford for them to suffer the consequences they deserve to suffer. They're not government. They're private companies. They're members of the free marketplace, and like any other company that has f ed up that badly, they deserve to be shut down. But we can't do that, because they are just too large. To me, this is a problem. It's a serious problem that a company is allowed to become so large that they are no longer treated and dealt with as a company, but as an institution. I could also make a similar argument with regards to the new, fresh issue of net neutrality. As I'm sure we all know, the vote was approved yesterday which will most likely lead to Internet Service Providers being able to charge companies for privileged data speeds. The actual stipulation itself isn't as important as the fact that it stands for the first step in the inevitable regulation of our internet. Once again, let's take a look at who we have competing in the ISP marketplace. It's some combination of AT T, Charter, Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner. What we find is that it's not a competition at all rather, we have five corporate juggernauts very effectively collaborating with lawmakers to cement their positions as the providers of internet. And really, they don't even need the lawmakers for this. They're so large that there's nothing anyone can do to stand in their way or create new competition. Maybe Google Fiber will make some waves, but they're another juggernaut. Kansas City, I believe, or some city, has publicly funded internet access that's said to work wonders but even that has been regulated in many states by lawmakers. Not allowed. The point I'm trying to make is that things have changed dramatically in the past few decades, and we really need to look at a way in which we can regulate how large corporations are allowed to become while doing our best not to stifle innovation and ingenuity. I know there's a way, but we can't be completely left or completely right about this. It can't be GET THE GOVERNMENT OFF OF OUR BUSINESS or WE NEED STRICT REGULATION FOR EVERY SECTOR OF EVERY DEPARTMENT . We can find a middle ground, where ideas and companies are allowed to flourish and expand, but not to the point where they no longer become accountable for their own misdoings. Change my view. EDIT My view has been changed, thanks to u Kent Broswell, and it's also been altered thanks to quite a few other users' wonderful ability to debate and challenge my thoughts Thank you so much, truly. Not sure who's going around downvoting every comment of mine, but that's okay. It just feels good to have an intelligent conversation with nice people<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there should be a universal growth cap placed on all corporations.\n","id":"636db5bb-1d8a-4d95-b0c6-4969ca4160f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we abolish speed cameras?<|ARGUMENT|>For the last 10 years the safety technology used in cars has improved leaps and bounds, with ABS now standard on virtually all vehicles, vastly improving control and stopping distances. Everyone now wears seatbelts and have at least two airbags with many modern vehicles having four in the front and two in the rear. Better designed structures help protect passengers and improved bodywork reduce the damage done to pedestrians on impact. Paramedics with better equipment are more capable of saving lives than 10 years ago and hospitals have new procedures and treatments. Car manufacturers and medical and technical professionals deserve the credit for saving lives, not speed cameras. In favour of road safety, not revenue<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Better car and medical technology has saved lives, not cameras\n","id":"18e502fe-8714-477f-a553-175853b3eb7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Some troops in Iraq already carry equipment worth $100,000 so having AKMs at around that price would be a very reasonable investment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The SGR-A1 comes at a unit cost of $200,000 This price is not particularly high compared to other military products.\n","id":"1368837f-251d-437d-9abf-a09db9c9f963"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>When Donald Trump was an election candidate he made a public commitment that he would appoint Supreme Court Justices that would overturn Roe vs. Wade, a highly political case which guarantees the federal legality of abortion. Many evangelical pastors told their followers to vote for Trump on this basis<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The public is well aware that the appointment of Judges to the Court is a highly partisan process.\n","id":"f40da245-0ad1-4119-bc19-19be9d3602ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want my view changed because there are a lot of people I care about who feel this way and I just cannot wrap my head around it. I've had pets, I've loved pets, but when they passed on I didn't really feel depressed sad for a day or so, maybe. When I've had to give pets away when I've moved, for example, I did not feel sad beyond a day or two. They're PETS. Not people. They are fun and wonderful additions to a family, but I don't get people who actually consider their pets family. Please, change my view, so I can be more empathetic to friends who view their pets as their children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people who think of their pets as their children have a screw loose.\n","id":"e7aca92f-ee81-4606-832d-836a218e852b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Wealth can ensure that children have access to goods and activities which can make their lives better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are reasons to believe that poverty makes for bad parents.\n","id":"3e647b6d-5c4e-4b99-b151-a710fda7780e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Storyline is kind of symmetric, where in the PT Anakin turns from good to evil and in the OT he turns from evil to good. The OT's storyline is epic, no doubt about that. But I fail to see how the PT's storyline could be described as lame in comparison. There's the tragic story of Anakin disregarding the acting here who turns to evil because of factors that he has no or only very little control over the death of his mother, forbidden love for Padme, being manipulated by the most powerful being in the galaxy. This is the main component of the PT's story, and in my opinion it trumps the somewhat less significant in comparison story of Darth Vader turning back to the good side. The OT is mainly about rebellion vs empire, and as such Darth Vader's change of mind is indeed important but not as important to the OT as Anakin's turn to the dark side is to the PT. Then there's the whole master plan of Palpatine, to which the It's a trap of Return of the Jedi just pales in comparison. Using a trade dispute to get himself elected chancellor, then single handedly creating the separatist faction as an enemy to his own republic in order to introduce a clone army, whose creation he had already initiated years before, with Order 66 already implemented in the clone's brains, so that he can annihilate the Jedi Order by insinuating that they were trying to overthrow the Senate, which then crowns him emperor of the newly created galactic empire. Then there's all the manipulation of Anakin, proposing him as Padme's personal guard, making him execute Count Dooku, making him his personal advisor on the Council, etc. There's the tragic romance between Anakin and Padme disregarding the horrendous acting and wording in some cases again , which I personally find more likable than that mingling between Leia, Luke and Han Solo. Romance in the context of and essential to a bigger story always seems more interesting than romance for the sake of romance. Then there's the development of Obi Wan from being a Padawan of Qui Gon Jinn, to becoming a master himself, making a clear connection to Alec Guinness. There's the brotherhood with Anakin, which in the end is turned into enemyship. These are all really interesting and enjoyable elements of the PT storyline, which can very much compare to the OT storyline. References Introductions The introduction of the Jedi Order is just awesome, after only having seen two somewhat mediocre Jedi in the OT. Getting to see Yoda in action is even more epic, and so is the battle of those Jedi in the arena on Geonosis. There's a million references to the OT which I can't name all for example the refernece to Jabba the Hut on Tatooine, the reference to Boba Fett and his backstory, seeing clones stormtroopers fight for the good side instead of against it, etc. The OT of course can't play with references like that, since there's nothing that came before it. Regardless, I believe this is something that makes the PT more enjoyable. Bad acting Hayden Christensen's acting is bad. But compare that to Mark Hamill A lot of Christensen's acting can be excused because he is playing a mentally unstable narcissist, whereas Hamill is playing a hero that is supposed to be likable by everyone. Even if Hamill's acting was slightly better than Christensen's, for the reason I just talked about when watching the movies the former for me is definitely more disturbing than the latter. Darth Vader's voice acting also seems way too much like a boring cliche. Take for example this scene I am not talking about the classic breathing and the processed voice which makes it so recognizable , but about intonation and emphases. Maybe it's supposed to make him sound more robotic, but it doesn't have that effect on me at all. Compare this to Christopher Lee's voice acting, for example during this scene which is just on a completely different level. In general, there's just loads of scenes where the acting makes me cringe and feel like I am watching a theater play rather than a movie. ^1 ^2 ^3 Good acting Harrison Ford seems by far the best actor of the OT. At the same time he's the only one of the protagonists whose performance can really be highlighted. If I had to name other good performances, I'd maybe refer to the emperor, and Lando Calrissian, but apart from that it would be hard to come up with others. Ewan McGregor is by far the best acting protagonist of the PT. Natalie Portman seems average, comparable with if not better than Carrie Fisher. In comparison with Alec Guinness, I'd always prefer McGregor. Ian McDiarmid did a good performance of the evil and manipulative Palpatine, comparable with if not better than the performance of OT emperor. Clones and droids of the PT are by far better than the stormtroopers of the OT. PT Yoda is by far more epic than OT Yoda. Darth Maul is also a fantastic personification of pure evil. CGI and costumes Chewbacca looks like he is wearing a Halloween costume in some scenes, for example here Or Jabba, who in the OT either looks like he is made of plastic or like he is from some 2005 computer game intro animation Or take the cantina scene Sure, there's lots of different types of creatures, and I'd give the people who made them an A for effort, but in no way do they compare to any of the aliens in the PT, for example the Gungans or the creatures from the arena battle in Star Wars 2 Oh, and just to mention this Ewoks are horrible. One major difference due to CGI is the space battles. Compare this one at the end of A New Hope and this one at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith This is of course due to the times in which the movies were filmed, and the means that were available. Nevertheless, this is not an argument that somehow makes up for the difference in CGI and costumes. Lightsaber battles Compare the Duel of the Fates in Phantom Menace and Anakin vs Obi Wan in Revenge of the Sith with Obi Wan vs Darth Vader in A New Hope and Luke vs Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi The former have epic choreographies ^1 ^2 while the latter look more like two kids playing with sticks while being careful not to hurt each other. Afaik the lightsabers they used in the OT could break easily, which made epic fights almost impossible to perform. Nevertheless, this doesn't make those lightsaber battles any better. Don't understand me wrong I love both the OT and the PT. Nevertheless, I cannot understand all this hate that the PT is getting. For me personally the tragic storyline and the epicness of the PT gives it an edge over the OT, though I will not argue that the PT is better than the OT in this . This is all that I could come up with in the course of two hours, and there's probably lots of other elements that I missed. I might add things in the course of the argument. You could change my view for example by pointing out how my points stem mostly from confirmation bias, how I ignore bad elements of the PT and good elements of the OT significant enough to make the OT better movies than the PT.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Star Wars PT isn't worse than OT.\n","id":"610e2b35-d87a-4456-91f8-d697137669e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer Because excluding cross overs that's the only fandom i've read fanfics from, this post will include mentions of My Little Pony and the brony fandom. If references to these things give you rabies like symptoms, allow me to redirect you here or here I think the title sums my position up pretty well. Fan fiction is often looked down upon as being somehow inferior to original works. Even the word fan fiction has a bad connotation. I, however, believe that fan fiction is just as valuable as any original work and that often good stories are dismissed ignored because they are merely fan fiction . Now, to save some time, i will give some arguments against fan fiction that i can think of and will explain why i don't think they are valid Fanfic's have poor quality. I'll admit there's a lot of bad fanfic, but i would like to remind people that there also a lot of truly horrible original works. Remember Sturgeon's law tvtropes link, so beware 90 of everything is crud. Basically, there are a lot of shitty fanfic's, but i know for a fact that there are also a lot of great fanfic's. Those that agree with me here can skip the bulletin points. For those that won't believe me i have some example's Vinyl and Octavia University Days O god it's a ship fic, right? I mean it even has an explicit extra chapter This has got to be horrible right? Well, no. It's actually a beautifull story about the problems that same sex couples face and about the importance of becoming independent from your parents. Fallout Equestria It's a cross over. Don't you hate those? Stealing from one work wasn't enough, this person had to steal from multiple works Well actually, it's an epic story about an idealistic protagonist facing evil in a world that has stopped caring a long time ago and then has to face the consequences. It also does a good job of playing the good ol' heart strings. My Little Dashie Ok, at least a self insert fanfic is by definition bad, right? Nope, it's just a very sad story about losing a person you care very much about. But even if for whatever reason by percentage there are more bad fanfic's than bad original works et alors ? That still doesn't justify considering all fanfics to be bad. Most rational people don't think all black people are criminals just because they're statistically more likely to end up in prison. Fanfic's are detrimental for the original work author. I really don't see how this is supposed to work. I can't see how fan fiction would hurt the author of the original work. I don't think anyone would ever think Well, i've read this fanfic, so now i no longer have a reason to read watch look at the original work. If anything, i image fanfic's have the opposite effect They serve as free advertising for the original work. For example I started watching MLP after reading Better Living Through Science and Ponies I can't see how it would be detrimental to the original work either. My enjoyment of MLP isn't lessened because clopfic's basically rule 34 for ponies exist. I know they exist. I haven't read any. My life is generally not affected by their existence. You might say it's similar to the star wars prequels in that you think differently about the original because of the fanfic, but nobody forced to read that fanfic. It's not canon, so it was completely your own decision to read that fanfic. If you read a ship fic and now you can't ever look at those two characters the same way anymore, well then why did you read it? Fanfic's are not original and therefore inferior by definition. I just don't understand this argument at all. Fanfic's have original plots and often original setting and characters. What's the problem? No work is born out of a vacuum. All works borrow from previous works The only difference is that fanfic's borrow more and that the borrowing is more obvious. So that is my position. However, if i'm confronted with a convincing argument, i will gladly . EDIT Thank's for the arguments everyone I've gotta go to sleep, but i'll be back in the morning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe fan fiction is just as valuable as original works and should not be looked down upon.\n","id":"56f9d84c-f707-4e1a-801d-504a405cca60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems to me that many young people are taking up smoking, andalthough they are free to do so, there is simply no way in today's world that someone cannot have any knowledge of the risks associated with smoking graphic ads, anti smoking messages on packages etc . Although they never would and never should be refused public healthcare I live in Australia where it's the norm for illnesses that can be directly attributed to smoking, I think it's wrong that they should be able to leech off the system, because it means they are not only using up taxpayer funded resources and time, but they are also denying that access to healthcare for other people, many of whom have completely legitimate claims to that healthcare. Again, I think actually giving smokers healthcare for their smoking related afflictions particularly cancers of the throat and lung is important, but its a necessary evil and only necessary because we have to preserve the rights to all people. I just think they simply don't deserve it. The basis this view is on is that many smokers as of now do feed off the system 20 of cancers in Australia in 2005 were directly attributed to smoking source here I mostly talk about young smokers because life smokers of an age older than say, 40 45, weren't as aware of the risks when they potentially started because we simply knew less about the medical consequences previously, and I don't really want to villify people who's problem is they can't quit rather than they have knowingly exposed themselves to the risks. So, reddit,  I look forward to any discussion ahead. Edit Almost all the responses thus far have been centred around well, you could not put this into practise, as the logical extensions of this would be to deny care to x and y . As I've said in the description, I do not in any way believe that these people should be denied care. They have the right to it as members of society who make their own decisions. However, morally, I disagree with their usage of the public healthcare system as opposed to a private one. I would love to be disproved or have my stance shifted on a moral level. Tell me why how these people have to deserve to use the public system Hopefully this answers some more responses before they're posted. My bad for possibly not being clear enough<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe young people who take up smoking fully aware of the risks do not deserve access to taxpayer-funded healthcare for smoking-related ailments.\n","id":"8b390ead-ea1a-4c74-b709-50373e552fbe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Feminists are trying to reduce male rape victims, such as by writing articles like this or by speaking out saying \"male victims often feel as though there must be something \u2018not right\u2019 with them if they did not want or enjoy the attack.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no evidence that there are some feminists who believe \u201cmen should not be believed in rape cases\u201d.\n","id":"ff07ceda-eecb-46a5-8fde-fcb64089e70c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>A state's reputation can ultimately not protect it from threats and attacks by other states.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"International relations depend more on mutual tangible benefits rather than on vague \"reputation\".\n","id":"8fc1be96-d9da-4506-b4eb-05363f446e71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>have no elections rather than sham elections<|ARGUMENT|>Elections almost anywhere in the world mean politicians getting out and campaigning. Regardless of the legitimacy of the final election the leadership of the country will be going out and meeting voters. In many of these events individuals won\u2019t be able to express their views but there are also likely to be protests and meetings where individuals can get their views across. This provides an opportunity for the leader to stay in touch with the people \u2013 often a problem with dictators who have been in power too long. Dictators will want to, and often believe that they are likely to win even without resort to fraud, as Marcos did in 1985.1 They are then are much more likely to consider the views of the electorate to still be relevant if there are elections than if there are not. Thus for example Mugabe in the most recent elections made a bid for, and won, the youth vote by promising a direct stake in the economy,2 so responding to their desire for jobs.3 1 Kline, William E., \u2018The Fall of Marcos: A Problem in U.S. Foreign Policymaking\u2019, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 1992, p. 10 2 Agyemang, Roy, \u2018Why a Robert Mugabe victory would be good for Zimbabwe\u2019, theguardian.com, 2 August 2013, 3 AFP, \u2018Youth, rural voters may hold key to Zimbabwe election\u2019, Fox News, 27 July 2013,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Elections of any sort force rulers to meet their people\n","id":"5e1d218b-10e8-4e90-a846-425413814ada"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT FOR CLARITY People responding seem to be under the impression that I am saying we don't need to learn about past events or it's not important to understand why things happened the way they did . I believe the total opposite, which is why I think they should be taught better in ways that will stick with students Arguments for starting at the beginning seem far more relevant to science and mathematics, not history. I mean, following this to its logical conclusion, nobody can know anything. Everyone has the experience of wondering Why? And trying to figure it out, whether it's clicking a link in a Wikipedia article about the Liberan flag or discerning why a relative might have that annoying habit or personality trait. Teaching history backwards appeals to this. Starting history at the beginning which is always somewhat arbitrary anyway relies on people wanting to know what happens next? which, I think is far less likely to work as a learning tool than asking why did that happen? Anything immediately relevant to our lives is easier to comprehend and absorb. For example, rather than beginning American history with English or Spanish colonization, we could begin with answering discussiong questions and concerns about current events. Possible tracks of learning School shootings gt gun control gt gun rights gt 2nd amendment gt constitution gt revolutionary war gt colonization Why does my grandpa hate liberals and call them socialist gt different governments and economies compares and contrasted gt cold war gt Russian revolution This is how everyday, meaningful learning that sticks with you happens in almost every other instance. If someone asks, why can't I safely visit XYZ city country if I want to? You don't immediately answer with information about the ottoman empire 150 years ago or whatever. You give the most immediate answer about current events, and questioning continues as needed. This is true for current events, past events, personal behaviors etc. I'm not saying it's a perfect system, but it can't be worse than our system of re teaching ancient long past history every 2 4 years of your education because you keep forgetting irrelevant information. You won't have to review current events that you are aware of in your life the same way. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"History should be taught backwards. At the very least, it would not be more confusing than teaching history forward.\n","id":"b51f3282-66ee-47d4-915e-6ecdbf666ea4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To be clear, I am only talking about the computer aspect of Apple. For example, the Macbook and iMac lines. I could compare spec sheets, but you can do research on your own. I feel that the innovations of the mouse and the UI were amazing, but after they were matched, they didn't have that much to offer. You can get a PC with the same specs as a Mac for half the price. Their software is interesting, but not game changing. I feel that they have peaked, and are in a decline with the computer market. They have good products, but not good enough to constitute their respective price tags. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that in the 70s and 80s, Apple Computer Co. was revolutionary. However, now they are just overpriced, shiny machines with a few bells and whistles.\n","id":"6945a7f4-7598-4c7e-b44e-fafc5c5dfa51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT creating a generation was imprecise on my part. Sorry. I think it's still a minority of parents. But an increasing trend. I'm coming from the point of view of a pediatrician. Parents freak out over the first sign of a fever they want to medicate any type of contrarian behavior as a sign of ADHD they would rather a medical problem explain their children's shortcomings than admit their parenting deficits. This obsessiveness with protecting their children, or finding things to blame outside of their child's natural proclivities or their parenting styles, is detrimental to said child's ability to be an independent, confident adult.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Helicopter parenting is both more prevalent than it used to be, and is creating a generation ill-equipped to deal with the real world.\n","id":"e235b3b2-4907-4250-8b06-a5865941ef87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Bollywood movies normalise stalking in the name of romance?<|ARGUMENT|>The idea that women should be \"won over\" or convinced of a man's feelings is an expression of misogyny not romance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a thin line between stalking and wooing which Bollywood crosses.\n","id":"b8f3a53a-7ea4-4a00-8363-7b1391fd5c48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>The firebombing of Tokyo was the third largest urban conflagration in recorded history only relegated by the fires of the Kanto earthquake in Tokyo and Yokohama 1923 Dower, p.41<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The firebombing of Tokyo was more deadly than the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.\n","id":"79e35966-eee9-4bb3-b4b8-ad75ee7e4742"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This happens all the time online and in real life. Someone says something and another person says that's racist, which is their trump card that they feel immediately discredits the other person's entire argument. Let's please ignore inflammatory racist statements. We all know they are bad. This that's racist trump card is played virtually any time race is a component of the discussion. A recent example is the Mark Cuban situation let's please not debate that ITT . If you're unaware, Mark Cuban speaking of the Donald Sterling NBA fiasco said that if a black male in a hoodie is walking down the street he would switch to the other side, and if that said side had a white male with neck tattoos he would switch back. Cue outrage. People respond with that's racist. I don't believe that that's racist inherently discredits an argument or observation. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Responding to a statement with \"that's racist\" does not inherently discredit that statement.\n","id":"8b7f39e4-2555-4968-ac4f-8445dbf0630a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Minors Need Parental Consent for Abortions?<|ARGUMENT|>When teenagers have children they change their life to a great extend. So, they might not be able to enjoy their lives adequately.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teenage abortions, if thought through consciously, are not generally a bad thing.\n","id":"872635c2-e6b9-4fe4-bd4c-b7671906fbe6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>While some children are brought into the world by accident and are unwanted, the children brought into the world as a result of surrogacy are very wanted and are therefore likely to be part of loving and supportive families.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Surrogacy is just as legitimate a way to form a family, and should be extended as an option.\n","id":"af2fde8b-d959-4660-8b65-6f9daffb3de2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Feminist theory proposes the concept of a Male Gaze Link essentially the idea that men visually objectify women primarily on screen but also in many instances off screen. From the male perspective, a man possesses the gaze because he is a man, whereas a woman has the gaze only when she assumes the male gazer role \u2014 when she objectifies others by gazing at them like a man. Many of the staunch believers in this realm of feminist theory would like to paint a picture that in this social relationship men are the only active participants because patriarchy of course and that in the rare occasion when a women becomes the gazer, she is then temporarily taking the role of a male. The female in this instance is always a victim, subject to the forceful stare of male empowerment. I would like to argue that this is complete flim flam, that both men and women can act as the gazer and the gazed, the voyeur and the exhibitionist, and that this is completely separate from gender. For example a relationship consisting of two men or two women can have these same dynamics, and a movie made by females, for females, with a completely female cast, and only ever view by females can still have a voyeuristic audience and in turn male gaze if the audience has an attraction to the actors. I would also like to note that even in the role of the gazed, this individual is not always a non participant victim. Often times the exact opposite is true and the empowerment lies in the hands of the person being lusted after. The relationship of voyeur exhibitionist started and continues to exist for many reasons if the experience of being lusted after, sexually appreciated, and noticed was not enjoyable by people they would make efforts to have it stop. EDIT To simplify my view that could be changed 'The Male Gaze is complete bullshit, .'<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe \"The Male Gaze\" is the product of a demand for sexual reassurance, and that without this lust for attention the gazer would not actively participate in this voyeur\/exhibitionist relationship as often.\n","id":"d1414760-c7c4-4355-bc49-6504655963ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>Making everyone's income and wealth public would lead to people making judgments on their financial status and not who they actually are. Those with less income could become outcasts and those with wealth far more popular; even more so than it is now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Increased knowledge of others' financial status could cause jealousy and a breakdown in social ties.\n","id":"a77693bb-185c-4a22-9aaa-bf04108a85fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Catalans should have the right to decide on independence with a binding referendum<|ARGUMENT|>The referendum does not propose a solution, because if it is lost, it insists until the victory due to the exhaustion of public opinion. Scotland Second Referendum<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A referendum on independence does not solve the problems of Catalonia. Regional referendum\n","id":"70792680-3fc4-4628-9ef9-692ce7e12d3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe the recent US Supreme Court decision requiring the Federal Government of the United Sates to recognize same sex marriage is regressive and a step in the wrong direction. In the United States of America no level of government local, state, or federal should recognize marriage at all, homosexual or heterosexual. Marriage should not entitle anyone to special tax breaks or benefits anymore. Marriage licenses should be abolished. If American citizens choose to get married they should be free to do so without outside involvement from anyone else, especially unaffected parties. By forcing the Federal Government to recognize same sex marriage we have actually made things worse not better because government should have nothing to do with people getting married.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US Supreme Court ruling regarding same sex marriage is regressive.\n","id":"49b1c3be-5e01-42ac-a17c-c49c9f5944ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the abortion debate, the two sides are usually described as pro life and pro choice . Now don't get me wrong, I'm pro choice in that I think abortion should be a personal right, but I also think that abortion its self should be encouraged. The world is overpopulated as it is, and it seems like people who question whether or not to abort the pregnancy should probably just not be a parent at all until their situation changes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not pro-choice; I'm pro-abortion.\n","id":"d65c1493-0736-4111-a88e-ef86593d9298"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>\"It may be worth mentioning that, as late as 1939, he seems to have protested against desecrators of Herzl's grave in Vienna\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hannah Arendt describes Eichmann as a Zionist who spoke yiddish Arendt, p. 23\n","id":"0bcf140f-3bc2-4c28-adb5-eb1512918651"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>The constructed case with the bus is similar to a situation where after an earthquake, instead of helping people screaming from underneath the rubble, one were to go and instead save one's dog and leave those people to die.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many will probably not be aware that they will be charged with failure to render assistance.\n","id":"820dd1e9-180b-4784-b405-09efd76d0919"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll start off by saying that it doesn't bother me if a woman sleeps around because she likes sex. As long as an individual doesn't break any laws or risk harm for themselves, more power to them to do whatever they want. If someone likes sex that much, who am I to judge? But the thing I have issue coming to terms with is the women who say it is 'empowering' for them to sleep around. When I hear this, I really think that they have a circuit or two crossed. With the word 'empowering', I think of actions that break some sort of bonds that have kept the person down. To me, NSA relationships are the exact opposite of this sort of attitude. Both parties are just using each other with no other benefit apart from feeling good for however long their session lasts. I just can't see how it's empowering for a woman to just be used as a tool for someone to feel good. But that is why I'm here. Edit So, that was pretty fast. The two arguments really stood out for me so far. The first being that NSA relationships really are a two way street. Each person knows what they're getting into when things start off. That angle tackles my confusion as to why a woman would seemingly reduce herself to serve her partner. In reality, they both know what they're there for, so it's pretty hard for their to be anything less that a 50 50 split when it comes to dynamics. The second argument that stood out to me was that this allows for a woman to keep a professional life an open possibility while still getting some level of intimacy. Not all jobs allow for strong relationships, and relegating yourself to choose one over the other is very restricting. Choosing an NSA relationship can fill that void if one pursues a more career oriented life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not empowering for a woman to sleep around in NSA relationships\n","id":"816ef292-d39f-4691-92b7-94afaf0128d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Top Saudi Muslim cleric said; \"A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she's too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Child-marriages carried out or endorsed by many religions produce terrible mental health consequences for the victims.\n","id":"9272503f-bc3d-4ee2-b1f2-d87d8ba6c990"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I myself am a strong agnostic lower case 'g' probably gave me away . I'm perplexed by the attempt to use logical arguments and evidence to prove that there either is or isn't a god. It is my opinion that the only logical conclusion one can come to when invoking that question based on evidence is the claim to not know whether there is a god or not. I understand there are those atheist who were emotionally driven toward an atheistic stance they are not my target audience. I am looking at those persons who through searching and asking questions related to god and his role have come to the conclusion, through some logical approach, that there is or is not a god. EDIT Thanks everyone for the fruitful discussion. I would not say my view has changed per se. However I appreciate all the comments to help clarify some things which I did not consider. I think a lot of arguments focused more on the definition of atheism at its base, from which it was pointed out I don't understand. But I was more looking for persons to actually use some sort of logic to help me understand how one could conclude either way. Not sure if anyone actually achieved this but I learned loads anyway THANKS<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Arguing solely based on logic and evidence, one could not come to the conclusion that there istheism or isn't a godatheism\n","id":"3f81ec83-81ce-4258-a8ae-29c514dec64e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>Even Trump's close ally Roger Stone criticized Trump's campaign as \"inexperienced\" following a number high-profile confrontations between Trump staff and reporters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pretty much every member of the Trump team was wildly inexperienced.\n","id":"c9bd4d08-eecd-424b-80e7-591e8ff9fe4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Definition of islamphobe on google dislike of or prejudice against Islam or Muslims, especially as a political force. My position is that it is OK to criticize Islam aka the religion , but it is NOT ok to criticize the Muslim people as people. For example, I can show why the belief that Mohammad rose to heaven on a winged horse is ridiculous, or why Mohammad was a pedophile for marrying a 9 year old or 12 year old, according to other historical sources . Or I can argue why Islam holds back society. Or I can simply argue how there is just no valid evidence for any of the supernatural claims of Islam in general. All of this, to me, is perfectly valid things to say and is certainly NOT being rude or being an 'islamphobe' to do so. What is not ok would be to assume, for example, every Muslim hates Western nations and support ISIS. Or that every Muslim is a terrorist. Or that every Muslim wants to suppress women rights. But apparently many ppl don't agree, and think ANY FORM OF BASHING of Islam is automatically wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The words 'islamphobe' or 'islamphobia' are now thrown around too easily such that they lost meaning\n","id":"5cd41e0b-18e8-4450-b5c6-bda1f07374fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it okay to physically torture prisoners?<|ARGUMENT|>One's moral compunctions cannot override the necessity of torture; it is surely more morally sound to protect the lives and wellbeing of as many people as possible, which torture can permit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is morally wrong to not go to extreme measures i.e. torture to extract life saving information from a captured prisoner.\n","id":"daa2fdf9-791b-4653-8f2b-b70bf96afc0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2010, China halted its export licenses for rare-earth metals to Japan due to a row over the arrest of a Chinese fishing captain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China might attempt to use its trading powers as a political tool to establish dominance in the region.\n","id":"1f906183-ecf0-4fd5-97eb-04ee4f0990ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please try not to hate me too much for this post, all religious people of Reddit I recently entered a relationship and just discovered my partner is Christian, while I am a hardcore atheist. I really do want my view to change on this, but I can't get past the idea that organized religion is ridiculous, and that God can't possibly exist, therefore those who believe in this made up entity are not able to engage in critical thinking. There have been multiple other posts about religion, but I didn't see one this specific, so EDIT I guess I should explain my view more for the most part, I have a hard time believing that those who are religious are intelligent. To me, religious means that they believe in the Bible God Heaven etc. I do not include the moral ethics social aspects of religion however, I DO firmly believe that those things do not need religion to exist. As a child, I went to Bible camp, multiple religious services, did my own research on the subject, and even went to a Catholic university although that was not by choice, I still took multiple religion courses . The more I look into it, the further I am convinced that it is merely people who are afraid of the unknown, and is not legitimate. I cannot stand to go to anymore religious services and it bothers me deeply that my partner goes to a very Catholic mass each week. Time can be spent better, and I think those are religious are simply indoctrinated to be, are willfully ignorant not bright, or refuse to do more research.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people who are religious are idiots and don't trust their opinions.\n","id":"551d428f-8bd2-40f6-bb34-52cf4754c03a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>High speed rail projects proposals in America, such as the current project in California, have some things in common with the Keystone Pipeline. They both are controversial, long distance megaprojects that stretch over many different jurisdictions and therefore have a lot of eminent domain issues. However, the similarities end there. CAHSR is projected to cost 68 billion. Keystone will cost 8 billion for a much longer distance. The reason for cost per mile difference is obvious, since HSR requires steel rails, concrete ties, caternary, signalling systems, and station infrastructure as opposed to a single 30 inch diameter pipeline. However, KXL would only create 35 permanent jobs, compared to 450,000 for CAHSR. High speed rail projects would also indirectly create jobs in the long run through economic growth as a result of it, whereas KXL could actually reduce jobs in the long run, since it diverts oil from the Midwest to the Gulf. Perhaps I'm simplifying the issue too much, but I fail to see how KXL has gotten more support in comparison to HSR. HSR would reduce our need for oil significantly, since it's meant to take pressure off of congested short haul air travel routes. In the long run it creates more jobs, it's better for the environment, and it's better for the economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High speed rail is more worth it than the Keystone Pipeline\n","id":"40b1a029-411f-45bf-aeee-4d6f2e5a5ee9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If it matters I'm white. First off, let me define my terms. I'm operating under the definition of racism of prejudice plus power. People of color can certainly be prejudiced against other races and ethnicities, but in the U.S. they do not have a system of institutionalized oppression to support their prejudice. White people do. Here's my main point I think it is not possible as a white person to grow up in this racist society and not develop biases against people of color. It's not like we have absolutely zero agency in confronting these biases, but for the most part we seem to be deeply unaware of them. I put myself in this category as well. I think in order for us to give more nuance to the popular discussion of race, we need to be more open about our biases, and how writ large they deeply impact people of color. I think we need to admit that we are racist. I've heard some people argue that this mindset destigmatizes the word racist, and associates your average colorblind 20 something white person with Donald Sterling, Orville Faubus, David Duke etc. this might be true, but maybe what we need is for that word to become less stigmatized. Maybe we need to start seeing racism as a spectrum that we will probably never fully escape from. Basically, when I hear a white person say I'm not racist, it generally makes me assume they haven't confronted what it means to be white in America.  EDIT There seems to be a lot of evidence for my position, but I'll add something more personal if any of you are curious, you can take an implicit association test or some other type of test of cognitive bias if you think you are immune to that sort of thing. You can take one here You may be surprised at what you find. EDIT Some people asked for more evidence. Here are some studies. There are several, from the disciplines of sociology, neurobiology, psychology etc. that support my position. I chose these because they refer specifically to biases that individuals hold, though there's an entire discipline dedicated to the larger system of racism that can inform them Critical Race Studies . Here are articles from CNN and the Washington Post that sum it all up if you don't feel like reading those studies<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Believe all White People in the U.S are Racist and we Need to Admit it More\n","id":"defc25ff-913d-441d-9add-de1cf21d2eb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A trend I see more and more of is people either discounting or relying completely on someone's views based especially on social issues on factors that should have no effect on the validity of these views namely gender, race, sexual orientation etc . A prime example of this is the You're privileged a straight white male rebuttal to any criticism of social progressives points, views, or ideas. Rather than discussing the virtues and drawbacks of any point or view, these conversations often devolve into ad hominem attacks and attempts to silence the other side. It also appears to me that the subscribers of one ideology in particular seem to make up the majority of culprits when it comes to shutting down discussion. Shoe0nHead's video here provides some evidence of this occurring at real life events, so I don't think the satire false flag arguments are relevant. An extreme example of what I am referring to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Identity politics shouldn't exist.\n","id":"db50adc7-f8bf-46d8-9614-d41ee3c47b88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>We have mastered medicine in the past, curing mortality would just come as the next logical step. Inhibiting immortality amounts to inhibiting disease cure progress.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human immortality is the next step in the evolution chain.\n","id":"6d30b921-1380-47a1-bd30-8f9fc1c6ea50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To elaborate more on my opinions, as is required by the subreddit, I don't like the idea of free health care, and I prefer low taxes. I don't want to have to pay outrageously high taxes for free health care. I have spoken with my fiance and her family, and they say that they love having free health care, but don't like the waiting times to receive it. So in my opinion, it just doesn't sound appealing at all. But feel free to bring the idea of free health care into play which will probably be mentioned under the topic of cost of living and taxes , but I much prefer paid healthcare. I just don't like the idea of having to pay a large amount of tax to afford free health care. Also, having been to Canada so many times, I think that the cost of living there is outrageous. I'm a pretty cheap person, though. Edit thank you everyone for your feedback. This has been really insightful for me and I appreciate you guys taking the time to explain things and even provide links and resources for me to do further reading. Great response from  Edit 2 I'm open to discussing anything else related to the immigration process or pros and cons of living in both places. To clarify, I just recently moved to Texas, so I am comparing here against Ontario. Overall, the biggest concerns I have are not having access to the same things in Canada that I do here. Whether it is something as simple as high speed Internet or Netflix, or just the convenience of having the same retailers I'm familiar and comfortable with, it is tough for me to imagine living anywhere else. Thanks for helping me change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My fiance is Canadian, but I am American. I believe that we will be happier moving to the US because of lower taxes, significantly cheaper cost of living, and having more freedoms and rights. !\n","id":"c448389e-2edc-41e9-bca0-f0f6b7dbf3c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Political correct speech is what you can say without backlash from the ones with power over you. If you have the power, you decide what is politically correct.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political correctness imposes a restriction on the people and their speech, not on the government.\n","id":"93d26d3d-7585-41d0-a61d-cfeee3e9d824"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have an Apple Watch, iPad, iPhone, and a MacBook Pro. I still think Apple computers are miles ahead of Windows computers, but I don't feel that way about their tablets and phones. Firstly I'll start with the iCloud storage. I think it's pretty embarrassing that after all the apple products I have bought, I only get 5GB of storage in iCloud, while I'm getting up to 15 on Google drive and UNLIMITED storage for photos. A company I haven't even bought any products with Secondly, I really think they are getting complacent with their updates. Every major update has changed very little about the functionality of the phone, whilst I'm always hearing about all the things my friends can do with their android phones, and have been able to for a long time. Third, I think the iPad Pro was a real let down. It is essentially a big iPad. However the surface pro has the functionality of a laptop and a tablet, where the iPad Pro does not. I don't see how it will be able to compete. In short, Im finding it more difficult every year to not purchase an android phone as opposed to keeping my iPhone. Apple seems to think their customers will be okay with the same thing every year. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I want to sell my iPhone in place of an android phone.\n","id":"944b116e-0a5c-4633-97f0-d34ebdf9a0dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should quotas for women on boards and in managerial positions be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>In order to meet the target, companies may end up selecting women with familial ties to the business, such as the wife or daughter of the chair, as board members.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These quotas do not work, as they do not lead to benefits for the company or ultimately change anything about the culture.\n","id":"345d08c6-ae30-490d-bb45-2715ea6eeb81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think the Title explains my take on current 'Radio Music' that gets played on most Top 40 type radios If you know what I mean 24 7h. I just can't stand the repetitive lyrics, beats and the pointless 'Trend Hype' featured within the bandwagon Liking it just because it's 'Cool' to like it fans. fandom of such musicians. It's also way too formulaic. Pop Love, Relationships, Wealth, I'm such an attention whore Rap Sex, Drugs, Clubs I'm so tough Gangsta look at me ego boosting. There's only one that I've heard which was almost anti this generic type of Rap. For dance music They follow a VERY formulaic beat pattern that you can almost always call it with few seconds of difference, which depends on the genres and the endless list of 'Remixes'. I mean, could you invent at least one original song that doesn't follow a formula ? And since the whole mentality of 'there's only 3 or so good songs on an album' mentality comes from these two genres, what more can I say about these? Oh yeah, the musicians rarely lack any sort of interesting personalities or do any cool stuff with their vocals it's almost always the same pitch in the song For example, try to find someone who does interesting vocals like say in James Bond Man With The Golden Gun Also, the computer fixed vocals and edited instruments just doesn't make these people any more like able.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think modern Radio-Pop\/Rap\/Dance is horrible excuse for music. Why should I like it?\n","id":"730f02e0-fb40-493c-9444-16f34e7ff7b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I get angry whenever I hear people trying to delegitimize a person's actions or motives by labeling them as an 'excuse.' The reality is that everything in life is complex, and with an infinite number of variables, one can never truly understand another's perspective. Even the concept of making excuses to one's self is flawed in that there is always a reason for an action, even it is a poor reason, subconscious, or out of one's immediate control. Taking away legitimacy by passing judgment, while not fully taking into consideration the other's line of reasoning, cannot help address any potential issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as Excuses, only Reasons.\n","id":"2563a8fa-99ba-4cae-9cfe-2356d7439372"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi  I'm out to genuinely seek to understand this perspective, because I confess it rubs me the wrong way when I hear it discussed in media, here on reddit or anywhere America is the land of the free is a slogan we all know and love hate in this world. I believe that it is clearly propaganda, as is all discussion of one's nation's supremacy over others and that individuals who buy into this rhetoric are sorely lacking reasonable thinkig on the matter. Firstly the word free has no specific meaning in the social context that is implied in these kind of statements. The freedom to shout and the freedom to sit in silence are mutually exclusive from the perspective of two individuals sitting in a room one denies the other. Further, all civilised society is based around limiting freedoms as a race we have typically clustered into social groups and nations and elected in developed nations representatives to govern our societies. That government imposes rules on those groups, as well as collecting taxes and all sorts of other sensible things which let nations work. What rules and restrictions are laid down vary very little between developed nations. Comparing the US and Canada from what I know of both you have your basic No murder No rape No theft That kind of things. However you frame a discussion, these are restrictions on freedom they are'nt bad IMO, but they clearly restrcit people in a nation doing those things. So America is not perfectly free. Fine so what is this claim meaning? That the list of things American's are not able to do is the smallest in the world? I don't know if that's true but it doesn't feel like it America has quite an active government style for example it's very restrictive about alcohol No drinking under 21 that's pretty harsh where I grew up the UK is 18 No drinking in the street as far as I can tell That last one is a pretty big restriction of my own decisions, and again to cite the UK because it's what I know, we are free to drink almost anywhere, we can stroll down the street with a beer. Some big ones that are often mentioned in this discussion The freedom to own firearms For one thing, this isn't just the US, though many developed nations do restrict them, Switzerland for example has no restrictions on personal fire arm ownership well they have restrictions but you know what I mean . For another, yes the US have a list of weapons you are allowed to use, but they have lists you aren't allowed to use as well isn't this just arbitrary line drawing In the UK I'm allowed to own a knife, not a gun or a grenade or a nuke. In the US you are allowed to own a knife, a gun, not a grenade I presume and not a nuke I presume . Both populations are free to own weapons, the line where the US says it's illegal is higher than the UK but that's surely not in and of itself an argument that there is more freedom occuring? This also relates to my point about mutually exclusive freedoms in the UK you are free to walk down the street knowing that no one will have a gun and is able to shoot you, in the US you do not have this freedom just an illustration of how this word doesn't really mean anything . Freedom of speech In the US this is a big deal, and often the corner stone of arguments about freedom. But most can't say all, but I feel like almost all have extremely high freedoms of speech, and further the US does not have perfect freedom of speech as far as I can tell. The UK again, apologies, it's what I know restricts speech around inciting racial hatred that's it I am free to criticse the government, I am free to tell someone they smell whatever, I'm not going to be arrested, but I am not allowed to encourage people to commit acts of violence racially I feel pretty good about this rule, but that's a side point . The US you are allowed to do this, but you aren't allowed to divulge government secrets, even if you are morally obliged to Edward Snowden was not free to do what he did, somethings you cannot say. The same is true for most developed nations I believe . Even if the entire most free country in the world premise comes down to that thin line in freedom of speech between total freedom and the freedom except in very specific circumstances, what kind of calculus can we use that weighs that priviledge against other freedoms other nations have Scandinavian countries have the right to free university education UK has the right to drink beer outside and free healthcare The Netherlands has the freedom to smoke weed Canada allows gay marriage though the US is catching up We each as national groups choose our laws, and in the developed world they are all basically the same and nothing about what I see of the US suggests life there is any more free whatever that means than other developed nations. As far as I can see with the cost of healthcare, lack of gay marriage, no drinking under 21, heavy handed policing, anti drug laws and massive prison populations is a candidate for being one of the less free of the developed nations. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America is not more \"free\" than other developed\/ \"western\" nations\n","id":"0c84bdca-d43a-4d65-a003-0116fb71c0e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize prostitution<|ARGUMENT|>if prostitution were legal, there could be more government regulation. that regulation would allow for less disease and less human trafficking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing sex work will allow to regulate those in the profession\n","id":"7a12564f-6544-40f1-97f5-10ba18444d70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The United States was correct in going to war against North Korea in support of their territory of South Korea.<|ARGUMENT|>After the eve of WW2, and the fall of the expansive Japanese empire, many Japanese territories were confiscated from their former controllers, and made into new nations. Two of these newly independent countries were North and South Korea. The two independent nations had formerly been a single nation prior to Japanese annexation, at which point it remained a single nation, but fell under harsh Japanese rule. However, when the war ended the nation, upon gaining its freedom from Japan, was immediately split between North and South, the former occupied by the Soviet Union, and the latter occupied by the United States. Much like in the case of Germany\u2019s split occupation, what was initially meant to be only temporary, eventually became long term. The Soviets established a Communist regime in North Korea, while the United States supported the fledgling capitalism in the South economically and militarily. For a time this went on in relative, if not tense, peace. Suddenly, on June 25, 1950, this tentative peace was broken as North Korea\u2019s armed forces began to invade the south, and made their way to the nation\u2019s capital. With support from communist powerhouses China and the USSR, North Korea would have quickly extinguished its southern adversaries, had the United States not stepped in. South Korea was and still is a sovereign nation, and did not, and still does not, desire to become communist, when the American Forces interceded in the conflict they were merely defending an ally in need. Had the war been strictly between North and South Korea, United States intercession may not have been necessary, for North Korea only had roughly 233,000 troops during the onset. However, China would eventually contribute two million soldiers to the North Korean cause, and The Soviet Union Union, although they denied involvement, would contribute their technology, their tactics, and even their training for a North Korean, and Chinese air force. This combined threat demanded America assist South Korea, which would be inevitably crushed under the combined force of the assault, without aid. In fact, on the North Korean army\u2019s initial strike South Korean forces were pushed back to the southernmost tip of the peninsula; Korea was almost entirely united once more under a communist regime. Although South Korea desired unity, understandably they desired a united nation in which they had the economy that they chose, not an economic system that was forced upon them. The overwhelming threat of the communist conquest of their close ally, South Korea, motivated American assistance in the form 5,720,000 troops, troops that would protect the South Koreans right to the economy that they desired.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"North Korean People\u2019s Army invaded South Korea, an ally of America; this prompted response from American; this prompted response from American forces.\n","id":"04af5917-13a9-4a62-ba42-16943ff7759f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we replace meat with insect derived protein?<|ARGUMENT|>Insects can be very calorically dense with some species containing up to 1,272 kcal per 100 g.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Insect meat, e.g. crickets, is highly nutritious and can replace meat nutrients.\n","id":"c654ddd6-41be-4bf1-8807-155465246d58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is chivalry sexist?<|ARGUMENT|>Chivalrous behavior includes carrying a woman's bag because she is not physically strong enough to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chivalrous behavior is predicated on the notion of women not being strong or independent enough.\n","id":"8b165510-ae24-4857-96dd-3db85f7fa7dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It isn\u2019t a lack of training that is the issue with regards to police killing people, it\u2019s an overabundance of cowboys within police departments. Police are trained almost non stop in the fact that you cannot pull over or otherwise hassle people just because you think they look suspicious. This hasn\u2019t stopped the fact that it\u2019s still a common occurrence. For example Since 2002 there have been over 5 million stop and frisks in NYC, and somehow 9 out of 10 have been for people whom are either black, or Hispanic. This in spite of the fact that white people are no less likely to use drugs or otherwise commit crimes. In 2015, New Yorkers were stopped by the police 22,939 times. 18,353 were totally innocent 80 percent . 12,223 were black 54 percent . 6,598 were Latino 29 percent . 2,567 were white 11 percent . According to the 2010 Census, NYC is 44 white, 26 black, and 29 Hispanic. Inspite of training, law suits, and court orders, the NYPD still targets minorities at a higher rate than population numbers alone would suggest that they should. It is my contention that it is not a lack of training that police receive which allows them to kill more people than is absolutely necessary, but rather a myriad of other factors that can be categorized as being cowboys. In my opinion, the causes for such a large number of police shootings are as follows Police are seldom charged for their shootings. The shootings are ruled justified, because nobody can agree on the meaning of the statement \u201c Reasonable use of force There are too many former members of the military, and they have a not at all well defined policy on escalation of force. The militarization of the police such that they treat American citizens in American cities as if they were to be occupied, rather than as fellow countryman to be protected from actual evil doers. It is my contention that you can have every cop in America sit in a training session one day a week, every week for the entirety of their careers, and unless the above is addressed first, you\u2019ll never see a reduction in police shootings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Police shootings are not a result of lack of training, but a confluence of factors that can be generally described as cowboy-ism.\n","id":"ec5b6553-9d38-4e27-92cd-81683504097f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>The whistleblowers Juliuan Assange or Edward Snowden can be seen as heroes, as they sacrificed their personal freedom for some greater good =unearthing the truth. Now they are both stuck and unfree to travel or live a 'normal' life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It can be a real burden to be a hero.\n","id":"62175b29-ce3b-4a6c-8e3f-2b62b8ee8d88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Eating humans is forbidden in practically all societies and regarded as taboo, whilst eating animals of any kind is not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taking the life of an animal has fewer consequences than taking the life of a human.\n","id":"775b900c-a33b-4a40-bff0-b01aae7f26d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>If a parent were to watch their child undergo this surgery in the way it is usually performed without anesthetic, they would feel incredibly guilty regardless of social acceptance. Infants usually have strapped down to prevent them struggling. It is an incredibly cruel procedure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most parents would feel guilty if the surgery they had performed on their child were suddenly to be considered mutilation. This guilt is indication that the practice is inherently wrong, but its wrongness is masked by social acceptance.\n","id":"7d8caf3b-10d5-4d4a-823b-9f7f651805be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To keep my sanity I don't browse default subs that frequently. You must understand that this subs demographics are white atheist male, european North American. The European users are a bit more knoledgible on the Palestinian question, especially the Irish, but the average american has been spoon fed BS in a very carefully crafted manor since birth. On top of that there is the issue of the post 9 11 world, even though that there are actually Palestinian Christians involved in the conflict with the colonial entity as well. The average american is not knowledgable on the Israeli Palestinian matter, and many times loyalties and picking a side is decided based on negativity hostility towards muslims rather than an assessment of the situation from its core. Many of these people support Israel simply b c they hate muslims. comparing it to europe, and the differing opinions on israeli support. There are many other factors, there as well, ranging from the Israelis being masters of controlling the narrative honestly its something to marvel at to the feeding of islamophobia to make Israeli actions palatable similar techniques are being used in the asians context in myanmar and other places , and in terms of providing real political benefit to the Israeli state. Edit And you get downvoted for your views. On r changemyview. What a joke.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The support for Israel instead of Palestine is due to hatred against Muslims.\n","id":"582437a4-9627-40c5-b3af-30a470f3b6c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that life as we know it will never have a purpose. We are simply a bunch of atoms put together in a way that allows us to be somewhat conscious of our surroundings and of ourselves. Sadly, because we became self aware, unlike other animals which are simply responding to basic needs and instincts like a more complex plants. By because self aware, we started to think about what is the purpose of life, what is the meaning of our existence, etc. After thinking about it for many years, I always circle back to the same answer there are none. And the main reason for life having no purpose is a very simple one, death, or more so the lack of anything consciousness after death. I know many people believe of an afterlife of some sort. But logic and science seems to heavily point towards nothing after death, your cells dies, and with that their molecules change into something else and your brain loses the ability to function, think, be aware. Since you are no longer conscious, nothing that happens during your life matters, nothing that will happen in the future due to your life matters, as you are unaware of any of it, because you simply don't exist anymore. There is no you to be aware of anything. You can't find any satisfaction into knowing you left a mark on the world, because there is nothing that can feel satisfaction or even know of your mark I think you get the point. I am not sure how we are suppose to end these posts, but please try to change my view, I would be delighted. Thanks,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Life has no purpose and will never have one\n","id":"f4e52da6-4833-4867-925e-1860e2b7368a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>The tendency to survive if you're religious comes in part if not virtually entirely not from any factor of religion that protects you from non-religious threats but from the fact that the religion itself will make your life more difficult if you're an infidel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion may have been a self-selecting cultural trait, which means that it has persisted without necessarily granting an evolutionary advantage.\n","id":"0bd0a7b9-9ec1-4f54-a28d-fb6d73ca217f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Previous attempts at operating an ETS, like the one established in the EU have resulted in a rise in emissions rather than a reduction. However, a rise in emissions under an ETS indicates a failure to impliment an ETS effectively rather than a failure of the theory itself. I would like to see evidence of an ETS where emissions did fall, but other bad side effects occurred, e.g. excessive rise in energy prices as companies offset new costs to their consumers or a big hit to economic growth as businesses fail to transition to renewables quickly enough, resulting in a drop in energy production to meet the ETS cap. As long as the cap itself is not set excessively high like that of the EUs, it would provide an economic incentive for businesses to reduce emissions and invest in renewables that would fit well into the current neoclassical economic climate. Businesses that fail to reduce their emissions or are structurally less capable of transitioning to renewables will be hit with a cost, but not forced off highly emitting practices. All of this does rest on the government's ability to accurately monitor the emissions of polluting businesses not self reporting , and be able to enforce the ETS on businesses that fail to stay below their cap or try and cheat the system. If technology is not yet at the stage to take accurate measurements of emissions I would like to see that too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An Emissions Trading Scheme is one of the strongest tools we have to reduce emissions in our current society.\n","id":"bfd51757-afb6-44fb-ab57-c1914900db88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The story of Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, declaring his intention to run as an independent for president in 2020 has made some waves, but perhaps most loudly from the Democratic Party who view voting for Schultz as helping Trump. I believe this misses the point, both of the Schultz candidacy and as to why his candidacy is appealing enough where it could be considered a threat to Democratic prospects. First, Democrats seem to believe his target is primarily voters who would otherwise vote Democratic. I don't believe this is the case anymore, as Schultz is more moderate and the declared Democrats basically are not the litmus test at present appears to be major tax hikes on the richest, Medicare for All, and an expansion of social programs, and those who are not on board with those ideas are unlikely to vote Democratic in 2020 if they can avoid it because of this hard movement to the left. Second, Democrats rhetorically appear to believe they are entitled to NeverTrump Republican voters who may have held their nose for Clinton last time or who are otherwise still opposed to Trump now. In full disclosure, I did not vote Trump in 2016 and have no intention of doing so in 2020, in part because my political philosophy on what makes good government didn't change simply because Trump is a bad president. I would happily vote for a conservative alternative in the primary and will likely vote for the libertarian again, possibly even if Schultz is on the ballot come next November. So why am I wrong that the problem is Democrats and not Schultz himself. What won't change my view is the idea that the Democrats have more popular viewpoints because they're rarely reflected in voting and I have concerns with polling that asks about specific policies without addressing outcomes in the same question or that the Democrats are actually the moderates because in the American system, they are not or have not actually moved leftward because they have I also acknowledge that the race is still early and there is an opportunity for a moderate Democrat to declare, but that has not happened yet and I do not consider it likely for the sake of this argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Howard Schultz is not the problem for Democrats trying to beat Trump, the Democrats are\n","id":"3307668b-fd4e-4a1e-b306-f5d2c246baf5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need nuclear power for sustainable energy production?<|ARGUMENT|>The INSAG-7 report of 1992 written after the fall of the Soviet Union, blamed a combination of design flaws and careless management for the disaster. Both of these were the responsibility of the Soviet state, which built and managed the Chernobyl plant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The dysfunction of the Soviet state was a major factor in creating the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.\n","id":"0b7335ab-d961-4102-8b62-41e759989ab8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The African American vote was significantly less for Hillary than it was for Obama. The percent of African American voters was 66.6 in 2012 compared to 59.6 in 2016 despite overall voter turn out being similar to, according to Pew. Hillary and Obama had nearly the same policy positions and yet one of the candidates received more votes than the other from the African American community. I believe this was a result of racist thinking. I feel many African Americans were more excited to vote for Obama purely based on his race rather than his ideas. I remember in 2008 a friend of mine stated she was voting for Obama because he is black like me . Comments like that reinforce my opinion. In terms of what I consider racism, I would consider someone who voted for Mccain and Romney over Obama because they were white to be racist. Using the same logic, someone who voted for Obama because of having African heritage is equally racist. note Don't argue that only white people can be racist, I don't buy this argument and it isn't what this  is about . In addition, I believe voting on racial lines is dangerous for our democracy. My proof is in several African elections, people vote based on ethnic lines and the ethnicity with the largest population tends to win. This also frequently results in post election chaos and violence. Thank you for commenting and trying to  Disclosure I voted for both Obama and Hillary only elections I was old enough to vote in .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"African-Americans did not turn out to vote for Hillary like they did for Obama due to racism.\n","id":"a2e3b7f2-3f44-4ca6-8a46-8c7f70be2874"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Voting age citizen of the United States I only want to vote for someone who I could reasonably expect to be honest and trustworthy. Politicians can say whatever they want, and either be lying the whole time or get bought out later. Either way, same end result I don't get what I voted for. I'm tired of it. I feel as though I am presented with several choices of turd. Perhaps one is less smelly, or feels more interesting when you step in it, but I'd rather not elect a turd at all. That just seems like a bad idea. I want to vote for someone who I would actually want to hold that office. I feel like the closest I can get is just not voting at all. Reddit, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't want to vote in the upcoming election.\n","id":"24670b4b-5d8a-42bf-91e6-ebe0bac92775"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>One woman's husband has a sex robot whom both feel is more of a 'toy' or 'game' than any form of replacement. The Sex Robots are Coming Channel 4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are several testimonies from women whose husbands own sex dolls; in most, the experience is positive, and the wives in question do not feel replaced or undermined.\n","id":"339b1f78-3edf-4715-9a63-a683a9231b27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I very much want this view to be changed, because I'd like to not worry about this anymore. I'm honestly scared for myself, but even more so for the generations after me The size of our debt, especially now exceeding 100 of our GDP, is the political issue I care most about I wanted Rand Paul to be president, because I believed he was most likely to resolve the situation I think this is currently a crisis, and Trump as well as future presidents will keep on avoiding this issue until it becomes a national emergency I believe I won't get the social security and medicare I'm entitled to because of paying into these programs because money will be needed for interest on our debt The economy is growing under Trump how much he is responsible for this isn't important . However, I believe any extra money we get from economic growth he will just use for special projects. Like his stupid wall idea, or rebuilding the military , or lots of other things that would be a waste of money right now It won't get any better under a different president unless Paul, or a libertarian gets elected . Obama didn't give a single fuck about the debt. The next president after Trump wont either. If they don't waste money on walls and the military, they'll waste it with bad entitlement programs and other left leaning social engineering nonsense The biggest obstacle is that running on a platform of 'basic financial common sense' such as hey, let's not spend more money than we receive in revenue isn't politically popular. A majority of voters would rather hear about how you're going to direct tax dollars towards things that benefit them specifically at the expense of everyone else, rather than sound financial management. EG I'll create jobs in insert swing state here sounds better than I'm going to put a freeze on spending increases across the board so that we can balance the budget<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump will not make any significant steps towards reducing the debt\n","id":"fa334724-79e6-4f7a-bc61-7909e42b5a93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Private Education System Should Be Abolished<|ARGUMENT|>Surely children with close contact time with the educators in schools, small classes and therefore close watch on improvement\/difficulties, will allow each child to reap the benefits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private schools one on one time with individual teacher and student enables better results in the long run.\n","id":"93e37812-2fa1-4eb3-b9d7-8c279d8edd53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is pedophilia a sexual orientation?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans are fertile as early as 10-12 for women, and 11-12 for men for women, and 11-12 for men, so evolutionary speaking, from that age on they were intended to mate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Historiographically speaking, child marriages and sexual activity with what are now classed 'minors' were normal. The social aversion to, and horror at, paedophilia is relatively recent.\n","id":"3d024752-1b06-4af4-9a18-645d580d62ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Legalizing prostitution is even considered to make the market more attractive many police officers, women's organizations and politicians familiar with prostitution are convinced that the well-meaning law is in fact little more than a subsidy program for pimps and makes the market more attractive to human traffickers. to human traffickers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One study found that where sex work is legal, there is more human trafficking than elsewhere\n","id":"31cf119d-8f39-42f4-88df-f8e1b371f258"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are many chemicals used for ultraviolet protection, but most of them have much better UVB protection than UVA. UVB is responsible for sunburn, so people who use the average sunscreen end up protecting themselves from sunburn. However, because they are able to stay out in the sun longer without burning, they are exposed to a lot of UVA and may increase their risk of skin cancer. Of the chemicals commonly used for sunscreen in the US, only avobenzone and zinc offer good UVA protection. New research suggests that avobenzone likely produces toxic breakdown products in the presence of water and sunlight. It also stings the eyes, making kids want to avoid sunscreen. Zinc has none of these problems. It doesn't sting, isn't toxic, and offers broad spectrum protection. It is a bit more expensive and has a white color that some adults think is unaesthetic. That's not a negative for kids it makes it easier to see if it's been applied properly or has worn off. I am only suggesting it be required for a kid's or baby label. Of course people should be allowed to put any kind of sunscreen on their kids, even if it isn't labeled kid's sunscreen .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"to be labeled for children, sunscreen should have to be zinc-based.\n","id":"38688445-6c83-4c0b-8b54-7bef550b23d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Notice that I'm not saying all women in general will only have sex for money, attention, favors, etc. This is just a believe I been subconsciously plagued by for quite a while. Anyways, here is a little about me. The roof I was raised under was not perfect. My mom has always been a narcissist type of parent who always had this major obsession with money and everything else that revolve round life of economics. At age ten when she met my stepdad she decided to dismiss her parental responsibility she had towards me and decided prioritize my stepdad over me just because he was the one with the money, who pays for the rent, the food, etc. and by the time I was 14 she was already pressuring me to get a job so I can support her too with the house bills and everything else like if I was her husband myself. Now I'm 27 and it\u2019s safe to say that I been living on my own for four years now and my life has been more at peace. Yet still till this day I can\u2019t overcome this distorted views I have towards women do to my mom having her gold digger's agendas. Every time I go out and I see women check me out I never feel flattered. I instead feel like they are up to something and are only digging me because they see something in me that will benefit them later on. My mom isn\u2019t the only negative example I have, I even see the majority of women who I come across in public projecting these types of behavior. Though I'm really not a club person I do go out clubbing with my peers every now and then, yet in these places I only see women being drowned to guys that buy them endless drinks, who resemble Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, and has lots of flashy expensive attires, just to give a few examples. Let\u2019s also not forget that growing up in America is not easy. Unlike the rest of the world it seems like Americans only view sex as a commodity, a social collateral or something that is extremely taboo unless you are willing to accept or sacrifice something for it. Anyways, I just know that not all women in the world are like this but the memories of my troubled past won\u2019t let me overcome this ignorance. So I was wondering how can I kick this ignorance out of my life for good?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"all women are gold diggers and will only have sex with you when they know they're getting something from you in return\n","id":"06cf4126-4f99-44c5-9600-dab23c70598d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For some background, the closed adoption was a standard practice in the U.S. up until the 60's, with the last truely closed adoption taking place in 1978. It decreed that adoptees had been given up either to the State or to a family under the premise of no information. It created an officially blacked out background for those that were adopted they received no information no names, no origin story, nothing. However, newer closed adoptions have changed somewhat. Children born under the current Closed Adoption system can still legally access non identifying information, such as paternal ancestry and medical information simply upon request. Even today, Closed adoptees umder the old system have no legal access to any information other than non identifying medical information and that is only during an emergency medical situation. They literally have no way of knowing their own origins other than a DNA exam, which doesn't give someone much info in a practical sense, and gives nothing in the way of cultural inclusion in their own upbringing. So what makes us who we are ? And in the context of this , what makes those born under the old closed adoption what they are? These are my operating principles 1 Race white, black, yellow, red, brown, etc. is mostly a visually based social construct that relies heavily on how someone else views their status. Race does not denote a personal heritage, yet it can denote a likelihood of shared experiences. a I acknowledge that for the sake of this discussion that those who have Albinoism or other obvious skin pigmentation issues are given more leeway in regards to race, as the color of skin cannot be seen as an indicator of heritage . b I propose that race bares a connection to personal heritage insofar as how society may treat people of certain pigmentation and how those similar experiences may generate connections within the subsection of race that society itself places on an individual. 2 Personal Heritage is the historical background of a family unit. Examples like immigrating from Germany, being a descendant of freed slaves, and being a refugee from Somilia are all appropriate as to properly describe a personal heritiage . 3 Adoptees of a closed adoption under the old system , by definition and by design, have no personal heritage without appropriating the history of their foster and or adoptive parents. 4 Adoptees of a closed adoption do however have a race insofar as that members of society determine how they perceive someone based on visual inspection of skin tone. a This, however, does not denote an official race in regards to the status offered to that individual in regards to possibly belonging to a protected class. b There is also the issue of race in regards to adopted children who are clearly not the same genetic race as their foster and or adoptive parents yet were assigned the race of their foster and or adoptive parents in the legal sense of membership to any protected class. 5 An adoptee of a closed adoption process is legally bound to the non biological personal heritage of their foster and or adoptive parents. This is part of the legal ramifications of the old system, and it is also required to be used when determining an individual's legal status in regards being a member of a legally protected class on the basis of race. My Operational Theory If a person, by the basis of visual inspection of race is treated in a similar fashion to others that share that individual's skin pigmentation, that person should be allowed to legally identify as that race in all legal matters as well as by society itself. If a person, by the basis of closed adoption , chooses to accept their foster and or adopted family's personal heritiage , that is within their rights to be identified as such both legally and by society. Conversely, if a person who is a product of a closed adpotion chooses to not acknowledge that personal heritage , they should be free to do so both legally and be seen as without heritage by society. My desired outcomes for this  Currently, America does not have the capacity to remove the legal concept of race entirely, nor does the society have an appropriate category for those that would wish to opt out of a personal heritiage . It is neither fair nor just to force people into a particular race or class when it runs absolutely counter to the very experience of treatment an individual receives from society. Therefore, both the laws and society must be willing to create a new class of race the Only American for those whose actual backgrounds results in treatment by society that conflicts with the assigned personal heritiage of the adoptive family. This should be an opt in system for those few Americans who are legally prohibited from having any knowledge of their actual heritage. Topics I'm Not Going To Engage In Debate this should be open to those outside of the 'old system' closed adoption That is irrelevant to the legal status of the few citizens who are prohibited from knowing their heritage. While it's certainly a recent hot button topic cultural misaapropriation , it falls outside the narrower scope of those that are legally assigned a race and class regardless of biology. the use of DNA and ancestry websites While it can help to determine a person's biological heritage on a personal level, it neither gives one the experience with heritage nor does it have any ability to change the laws surrounding closed adoptions. It doesn't have the ability to change the culture in which those born under these laws could be raised in, as that time has long since past these individuals, with the youngest American citizen born under the old system is 39. While this is a very narrow  that effects only 1 out of every 2400 Americans born under these old laws, I consider the value of the discussion to worthy of debate. It forces most us to look at race and heritage in a different way and through a different set of glasses. For me, this discussion allows me to better understand the reasons behind how society views those few of us who are legally placed into categories of race and heritage that may not apply, and are helpless to change due to the law. So reddit, change my view. EDIT spelling and formatting on my cellphone is hard. Full Disclosure I am a foster kid who was given up by his birth mother during the old Closed Adoption era, and was adopted at a young age by my legal parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adopted children from a \"closed\" process should be allowed to opt out of self-identifing both their race and their ethnicy\n","id":"bd6f5431-93cf-4247-a3fa-28ac860e0484"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tezos: Protocol Amendment #1<|ARGUMENT|>Would enable developers and projects to more easily build on Tezos, allowing it to be more competitive with Ethereum<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Amendment Proposal #1: Would increase the current gas limit only.\n","id":"dd615e92-a0ee-44c5-a609-976f0d1ce3bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Dear r changemyview, I don't expect this to be the usual fare for your sub as I actively want my view changed, as opposed to it being a challenge to change my view. I was raised religious Catholic but got out of it in college as its policies made little sense to me and I never felt a connection with anything divine. I have never had a \u201cspiritual experience\u201d, nor have I ever found anything satisfying about the paranormal. I get anxious at times about my own mortality, as I've never run across enough proof to believe that anything happens after death. I've heard the \u201cunaccounted post mortem weight\u201d gas the \u201cnear death experiences\u201d brains do weird things when we're dying even the \u201cseeing family members on the other side of a river\u201d coping mechanism developed by the brain to handle dying and all of them have non paranormal explanations. I mostly assuage my fear with the thought that within my lifetime I'm 26 now there's the possibility of discovering immortality, as we know what causes humans to break down with age. That, and the onset of lab grown organs hopefully allowing the individual to live significantly longer than a typical human lifespan. That or with the way technology is progressing with reading brain signals they even have those toy cat ears that read moods and react accordingly, and the emotiv, which is a brain to computer interface that potentially writing and or moving the brain's data isn't as farfetched an idea as once thought. However, I'm not 100 willing to bet that I'll live to see that day in my lifetime. As such, please change my view. Either A prove to me that mortality isn't that bad B that there is some form of afterlife I don't care what from what religion or whatever just that it's not oblivion post mortem or C that we're closer to cracking the secret of immortality than I think. You have no idea how much peace of mind this will bring me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that there is nothing that happens after death, that the previous statement sucks, and that technology won't help us out of it.\n","id":"97eb232e-af86-4cca-ab9e-90827c336d6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before reading about Steven Bannon, I thought the man was a devil as reddit makes him out to be. I thought he was a man who was itching to start World War III and tear down America for his own pleasure. Then I did my research on him and I was shocked at how much I agree with his beliefs. I was a huge Bernie supporter and still am . This article from Buzzfeed transcribes Bannon's Speech to the Vatican. Everything in there is from his own words and it is where I'm getting my information from. 1 He wants to do away with crony capitalism and return to the capitalism of the early 80s , where the little people matter and aren't being used as commodities by companies to simply turn a profit. Whether or not that capitalism was a result of Judeo Christian beliefs or simply due to circumstance, I don't know. But I agree with his belief. Quote from him That capitalism really generated tremendous wealth. And that wealth was really distributed among a middle class, a rising middle class, people who come from really working class environments and created what we really call a Pax Americana. It was many, many years and decades of peace. And I believe we\u2019ve come partly offtrack in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union and we\u2019re starting now in the 21st century, which I believe, strongly, is a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism. Another quote One thing I want to make sure of, if you look at the leaders of capitalism at that time, when capitalism was I believe at its highest flower and spreading its benefits to most of mankind, almost all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo Christian West. They were either active participants in the Jewish faith, they were active participants in the Christians\u2019 faith, and they took their beliefs, and the underpinnings of their beliefs was manifested in the work they did. And I think that\u2019s incredibly important and something that would really become unmoored. I can see this on Wall Street today \u2014 I can see this with the securitization of everything is that, everything is looked at as a securitization opportunity. People are looked at as commodities. I don\u2019t believe that our forefathers had that same belief. 2 He is for the middle class and anti establishment in the same way that Bernie was. And you\u2019re seeing that whether that was UKIP and Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom, whether it\u2019s these groups in the Low Countries in Europe, whether it\u2019s in France, there\u2019s a new tea party in Germany. The theme is all the same. And the theme is middle class and working class people \u2014 they\u2019re saying, \u201cHey, I\u2019m working harder than I\u2019ve ever worked. I\u2019m getting less benefits than I\u2019m ever getting through this, I\u2019m incurring less wealth myself, and I\u2019m seeing a system of fat cats who say they\u2019re conservative and say they back capitalist principles, but all they\u2019re doing is binding with corporatists.\u201d Right? Corporatists, to garner all the benefits for themselves. Additionally he believes Democrats and Repubs are basically on the same side of the coin. 3 he is not sympathetic to Putin \u201cBecause at the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.\u201d I said most of his beliefs because I disagree with him on social issues like abortion and gay marriage. I am pro choice and supportive of gay marriage. I will only have my view changed by things that Bannon has said or done himself, not by opinion pieces on how he's the devil and the Antichrist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I support Steve Bannon and most of his beliefs.\n","id":"a7671841-f186-48a7-88c7-bffdab360163"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Climate Change Be Reversed?<|ARGUMENT|>Transitioning to swimming pools does not remove the climate-related sources that cause oceans to be difficult to swim in. The action just provides a band-aid and not a solution to the problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People swim in the oceans less due to climate change, which increases the demand for indoor swimming\n","id":"27d57772-c27b-484b-b8d6-f1cd6bc3eadd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>Although J.F. Kennedy never inherited his family estate, which was worth nearly $2 billion, his own personal net worth at the time of his presidency was roughly $10 million.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The last modern US president that was not a millionaire was Harry Truman in 1945.\n","id":"1ef8324c-ae52-42a2-a4d8-e576ec656dd8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>If it were the will of the majority then political parties would have been more eager to push for legalization in order to gain more votes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If legalisation was favored by the majority of Germans, they would have incorporated this into their politics.\n","id":"4ea95695-eaa9-4e42-97cd-b7ef4e6be707"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents are the ones that will have to live with the consequences of a child's medical treatment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents are motivated by the sole desire to do what is best for their children.\n","id":"ce25c97a-2031-4196-a03c-0375ce19d4a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a view I desire to challenge and ultimately change, but I'm struggling to understand how I feel. It's not that I am anti military necessarily, I just feel more pity than appreciation when I meet someone who has served, maybe even a bit of fear. The way I see it, they're a bunch of kids who don't really know the gravity of what they're signing up for in many cases but certainly not all . They thought it would help them pay for school. They thought it would help them earn a living. They thought that they were doing something honorable, and those are just the ones with their heads on straight. I've seen people join the military to clean their life up get off drugs, get away from problems or because they see it as a form of status elevation, perhaps their relatives were in the military. I've seen people join out of hate, be it for brown people or Asians, they genuinely wanted to go after these people. I'd guess both of these latter examples are few and far between, but they exist. Beyond that, I would hazard to guess that there are some who join with serious mental health issues. Some people really do want to kill to see what it feels like. Now, I don't want this to come of as demonizing soldiers in any way. That isn't how I feel at all. Heres where I'm going with this Most of them see past the whole Dulce et decorum est sort of thing. They know it's dangerous. They don't desire to die, and they don't expect to become terrorists. This is not to say that their missions are missions of terror. It's emotions combined with trauma and a few bad apples. Many are familiar with this video Metal health issues and the military have gone hand and hand for ages. What inspires a group of people to open automatic fire on a mosque or take out civilians? What does it do to a person to be rewarded for what might as well be called cold blooded murder? I don't think that every person who joins the military has these experiences, but I question if the end result of their service is a positive or negative impact on the world. Perhaps the issue I have stands with war itself, but it scares me to see how silently a man can be driven to commit atrocities like those in the video, or other things like torture and rape and what not. So, when I see my friend Jimmy, and he's always got that quiet stare, my first thought isn't to thank him. I feel sympathy for what he's been through and possibly the person that he saw himself become. I feel that he was just a kid with a noble cause who didn't understand that his employer would have shady corporate policies, a hidden agenda, and corruption hidden behind the scenes. When someone says I was in the military I want to say thank you but all I can think of is I'm sorry .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't feel that I should thank those who are\/were the military for their service\n","id":"19be0d73-478e-4014-84d1-0034539c0ce3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Sexual education lessons are likely to elicit a broad and varied range of questions from students, which are hard to predict from an educator or policy maker\u2019s perspective. As such, it is impossible to adequately script or plan lessons in a way which doesn\u2019t require the teacher using their own intuition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Teachers who deliver this content without fully believing in it are likely to do so poorly.\n","id":"63cf68f3-4fa8-4a07-91f0-22d0734a907f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that Transpeople for the most part are either 1 chemically imbalanced, which can be easily treated through medication, or 2 just have a poor grasp on what it means to be a man woman. Being a man woman isn't about conforming to traditional views of masculinity or femininity, it's about being an adult versus a child. The same thing with trianary genders systems, the people claiming them are just subscribing to old school sexist ideas about what a man or a woman feels like, and because they don't feel like that, are pretending to be something else. Not all women are going to feel like the traditional feminine stereotype, but that doesn't mean they aren't a woman, it just means they are saying that what defines a woman is how they differ from men and vice versa, instead of the less sexist idea that what defines a woman is how she is different than a child and what makes a man is how he differs from a boy. TL DR What makes a man is how he differs from a boy, not how he differs from a woman. Trans trianary gendered people are instead subscribing to sexist view that what makes a man is how differs from a woman. Please, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trans people are just confused about what it means to be a man\/woman.\n","id":"a55ca180-7e4c-4f6a-b7a8-bc48ef8333c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>God is traditionally conceived as omnibenevolent, or \"all-good\", but the concept of \"good\" isn't universal and depends on your set of ethics. My personal theory is that God was originally conceived as the ultimate force of justice or karma -- an embodiment of justice ethics. Good deeds are rewarded, bad deeds are punished. Whether evil can exist or not isn't God's concern. Rather, it's the choices people make that lead to good or bad consequences, which are at God's discretion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monotheism does not preclude the existence of evil, insofar as some of the features of the traditional conception of God can be abandoned without rejecting the traditional conception of God in toto in its entirety.\n","id":"5cbacf7a-5471-460e-8e09-c71c13e2c803"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>all these fiends devilishly thieve from mineth myriad w'rks. is nothing sacred? not romeo and juliet, 'r yea king lear? to speaketh nothing of macbeth. its all d'rivative and they shouldst all eateth shit and die. their marchpane behinds in jaileth gt Hello, people of the past. This is a footnote from the moderators of this 'internet forum'. I'm afraid to say that some wannabe scientist, while looking into time travel, has caused a temporal distortion field. It should dissipate in the next 24 hours. In the mean time, feel free to message us about a view you hold while you're visiting the present, and remember to have a look through our rules<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I shouldst sue all those who plagiaris'd mineth v'rse and prose\n","id":"4b8db778-0bf9-499b-9f52-638eb33c35f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be one World Government?<|ARGUMENT|>The existence and development of slums around major cities in the world have resulted in problems such as illness and diseases which spread like wildfire and are difficult to contain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cities which have seen rapid influxes of people have developed slums as the existing city resources are unable to cater for the exploding population.\n","id":"ad1dd24d-9e89-4764-a6db-8405590be2c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In high school, I met my first girlfriend. We dated for three years, exchanged virginities, and at the end she cheated on me. Being totally blindsided by it and stupidly in love with her, I had a very major freakout which included losing 85 pounds. I didn't date anybody during this time. Six months after, we got back together, dated for another three years, lived together after college, and then she cheated on me again and moved out. Devistated yet again. During the first six months, I didn't see anybody else because I was in full grief mode, and she had sex with five guys. I never quite got over that. Every time I would have sex with her I would think of other guys' semen inside her she was on birth control and hated condoms . Not only that, but the thought of her bonding to other people like that and other people looking into her eyes and bonding to her hurt me deeply inside. It was always an elephant in the room and it should have been obvious things would fall apart after a while. It's been two years since then. I've had a handful of very short relationships since then, two of which involved sex. Here's the thing I don't really enjoy sex in a physical sense. I'm not religious nor do I have any objections to the concept, but it doesn't do much for me to just make my penis tingle. I used to enjoy the closeness it brought to my long term relationship, the feeling of actually sharing happiness with another person, of truly and literally connecting with them. In that relationship, once my girlfriend matured enough to start hanging out with a lot of clubbing friends who saw sex as no big deal, the feeling changed into connect genitals, apply friction. The emotional aspect went away and she did shortly thereafter. In my micro relationships as well, the few sexual experiences I've had have been like this. The women seemed to really enjoy the physical act of it but I didn't have much of an emotional connection with them and felt uncomfortable and sad during it. I don't like this feeling so I stopped dating altogether about a year ago. Ideally I'd want to wait six months or so in a relationship before having sex, because I don't see the point without a strong emotional bond first. Most people I meet outright call this crazy. It seems like our culture is very focused on getting laid versus making love, and I feel like I don't really fit in to that focus. After all, when you start to feel the world is crazy, it becomes apparent that the crazy one is likely you. Please help me change my view. I don't want to be grossed out by a person's sexual past, and I don't want to require love beforehand because that seems unfortunately incompatible with my generation. tl dr Hyperemotional whackjob thinks sex is special, is grossed out by the thought of past partners, doesn't really like the physical aspect of sex all that much<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"25\/M finds sexual pasts gross, does not enjoy sex as a purely physical act, requires \"love.\" Help me fix this. mildly NSFW?\n","id":"30d16544-b63b-4422-8a8d-1f26e81e6025"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious organizations are often exempt from employment discrimination laws. In the USA religious organizations are free to take religion into account when selecting their employees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Services provided by religious organisations often discriminate against people not belonging to the faith of that organisation or adhering to its principles.\n","id":"019e57f1-3f42-469a-9aad-f9c97725b384"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Why should you feel proud of your country? Most, if not all, nations have deeply problematic chapters in their history that are by no means worth celebrating. Plus, even if there's great things in your country's history and culture, how does that give you the right to feel proud about the achievements of people you just happened to be born in the same place as? I'm not denying that there's things to celebrate in one's own culture and i'm not rooting for completely trashing the culture you were born into, i'm just saying that i think it would do everyone good to treat their country as one of many and not prioritize its good or its citizens or anything about it over others. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"i believe that all patriotism is BS\n","id":"37933ae6-f056-4485-b134-452986e6bf2c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>During the campaign trail, many Democrats have called out Trump's wall as racist. While I do not support a wall and have other reasons why, I don't think that building the wall is inherently racist. The wall is simply an immigration policy that is meant to control illegal immigration along the southern US border as opposed to a means of showing bias towards Hispanics. It does not limit legal immigration from Latin American countries and are only a means to prevent illegal immigrants from entering America. Just because it is directed towards Latin American countries it does not mean that it is an inherently racist policy. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump's Border Wall is not Racist\n","id":"0a64bc5f-835e-4c1c-af23-85c4b25894eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender Neutral Bathrooms: Should They be Standard?<|ARGUMENT|>This is oftentimes done to evade discrimination. Subsequently, US states with laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual identity showcase higher shares of transgender people in surveys.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reliable data on the share of transgender individuals in the population is difficult to establish as many of them hide their gender identity.\n","id":"ad95ef21-276c-4c55-9933-047ec61b1eaa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>USE would be able to negotiate with the USA and China on equal terms, getting more benefits for European companies when it comes to trade agreements and becoming one of the three major global decision-makers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USE will enable a more assertive foreign and defense policy for the benefit of its members.\n","id":"33998afb-94a3-4ba7-9608-914795ada74f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Or even worse I've heard it stated that it's as a result of a hatred of women . I think this rhetoric is dangerous as it adds fuel to the fire of any gender issues being essentially one sided. Not to mention I think it's quite inaccurate. I see the stem of the argument. Boys are taught to man up , don't be a pussy, don't share feelings, that we've demasculinised these traits. It's extremely circumscribed and I agree it's definitely something worth addressing, as I imagine it's a huge reason behind the increased amount of depression and suicide among our men and boys. To suggest it's because of a hatred of women which some people seem to understand by patriarchy saddens me though, I mean you could equally though admittedly not as severe say there is a hatred of men because women are shamed for being strong, to not have androgenic hair, to not to be sexually aggressive etc etc. These things are masculine and thus negative for us therefore masculinity is of lower value to women, therefore we must hate men right? Of course I take both arguments as equally illegitimate, but the second one is never made while the first one seems to be widely accepted. On feminist boards when making this point, I'm usually assumed to be male that's a whole other problem and or just downvoted to oblivion. The few responses I do get are generally an emotive restatement of the same point as if it's already set in stone and is so plain and obvious it doesn't need to be examined. The worst is an angry a wildly off topic rant tangent and yet I'm the downvoted one . I'd love to hear some actual reasoning and rationale behind this, that my view might actually be changed, because it's genuinely upsetting to be on the outside of this, but people just appear to accept the concept blindly and don't delve into its basis, perhaps due to the historic oppression of women or their own bias, I don't know.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it's sinister and inaccurate that we view men's issues as resulting from a devaluing of the feminine.\n","id":"e5796f04-07ad-464b-be85-08776b5c8059"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>One study found that 25% of DACA recipients have at least one US-born child of their own, who would undoubtedly be negatively affected as well if their parent was deported.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since most DREAMers are now in their 20s and beyond of which have families--it would be harder for them to start a new life now in another country.\n","id":"dc9b7ec0-24e7-43f6-8a19-aa940c6df429"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Detention on the Grounds of Mental Illness<|ARGUMENT|>The financial and human cost of assaults and killings by people with DSPD is enormous, and measures to prevent such suffering, and to protect the public, are worth paying for. All sorts of important public policy initiatives cost money: this does not mean they should not go ahead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The financial and human cost of assaults and killings by people with DSPD is enormous, and measures ...\n","id":"dacadde2-70a2-4462-8514-00fcffab84a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Daenerys Targaryen the Prince\/Princess that was Promised?<|ARGUMENT|>Game of Thrones is known for the complex political games its characters play; none of them should be assumed to be genuine or honest on the face of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Characters in the series are easily fallible, and may only be making these proclamations for personal or political gain. Their opinions are not strong evidence.\n","id":"e9e3920c-db65-4d7f-88fe-17061ecbb22c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am growing to despise cars. I live in a town in which the only viable form of transportation is through shoving yourself into a climate controlled vacuum to speed faster than nature intended down asphalt pathways, constantly aware during the whole feat that the smallest mistake will result in a life threatening injury. The only people who don't using personal automobiles as a form of transportation are the homeless, schoolchildren, and the elderly. This gives the town a horrendously ugly atmosphere, lined with billboards, monstrous parking lots, and little decorative vegetation. This degrades our Earth's environment due to CO2 emissions. The oil that powers automobiles only profits the wealthiest of corporate chairmen who begin wars to secure their power. The construction of automobiles is also a social detriment, forcing individuals to pay even more money for transportation in a society where the minimum wage is already marginal, and only allowing the rich for yet another method of flaunting their wealth with luxury cars while supporting more greedy corporations. The act of being in a car also psychologically distances you from the environment, making you lose your sympathy for other human beings through how it promotes road rage and dehumanizes pedestrians and cyclists. Reliance on automobiles creates an extremely unhealthy lifestyle, with it being no surprise that the most bicycle friendly states like Colorado having substantially less of an obesity rate than car reliant states like Alabama. Automobile maintenance is an unnecessarily complex addition to life. The city of Hamburg, Germany is progressing towards becoming car free by 2034. All cities should follow this direction. Transportation within cities should be limited to subways, high speed rails, buses, bicycles, segways, etc. Within the next century, cars should be a relic of the past otherwise, we shall destroy our environment and have created an even unhealthier social atmosphere than automobiles have already generated. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that personal automobiles are a detriment to society and eliminating their necessity should be of utmost importance.\n","id":"47596dc3-1c83-4d06-be09-02fda07ae982"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Golf is not a game that requires any physical prowess. This is why it can be played easily by senior citizens and overweight people. It is no different than billiards, bowling, darts, or any other game of skill. It does not require any physical athleticism or physical dexterity. It doesn't require major strength, cardio vascular fitness, major flexibility, endurance, but simply hand eye coordination. I know that there's a semantic definition of what a sport is, and I am not arguing that it doesn't meet the semantic definition that society has made for a sport, but I don't believe that it should be considered a sport alongside others. Phil Mickelson should not be considered an athlete. He is just a professional golfer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Golf is a game of skill, not a sport.\n","id":"8d186d2e-1818-48d4-b411-efa41f771993"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>China will soon have economical, cultural, and political supremacy worldwide. The USE is the only way to offer an alternative that follows our values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ensuring Europe's position and influence in 21st century is important to balance the influence of rising powers.\n","id":"91c11360-2b49-4e56-bada-49b5fe639534"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Consider the reason for muting. Is the reason valid? Might be. Is the person cussing swearing directly offensive? Probably a valid reason to mute. x200B But take a step back. If you're muting simply because you can't be bothered to do your job which is moderate conversations , what are you really doing? You're removing posters' ability to interact with the very people who are tasked with managing the community. x200B If the local precinct one day said, okay, you two houses can no longer call, visit or otherwise contact us for 72 hours, no matter what crime is being conducted , is that right? Is that fair? Even if it doesn't matter, the question is why do that? You'd think it was silly. A power trip for no reason other than a power trip. And no, I don't accept Reddit makes you gods That's a symptom of the problem, not the problem. The problem is a lack of oversight with those decisions. I don't mind the decision if it's a cussing swearing directly offensive someone, but they should still be able to interact with the mods and I think the mods should be mature enough to just block that user on their own account, or otherwise ignore the abuse. x200B Thus the reason I previously advocated for a stronger appeals process on moderators who do this. I frankly don't think there should be any situation that a single mod can mute a person from communicating with the mod group and even if it was a group decision, I think it should be subject to higher level authority and override in the event it's a situation of improper bias.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mods who mute the ability to talk to them are not promoting healthy Reddit communities.\n","id":"952d7b26-8e8c-4c9c-a4e2-2320022177bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Commonwealth Should Be Abolished<|ARGUMENT|>The Commonwealth has no clear role; it confers no trade privileges upon its members, does not coordinate their defence or foreign policy, and lacks both the budget and the executive authority to make a practical difference in the world. Periodic meetings of Commonwealth Heads of Government are at best a talking-shop and at worst an expensive junket. It would be far better for its members to commit their attention and goodwill to more meaningful international organisations, such as the UN, NATO, regional free-trade areas, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Commonwealth has no clear role; it confers no trade privileges upon its members, does not coordi...\n","id":"ce74d808-b14e-412d-be14-1f7330bf6197"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The Catholic Church Publicly Elect Its Leaders?<|ARGUMENT|>Apostolic Authority is the bedrock of the church and without it, there is no Catholic Church. For those not knowing of the term, Apostolic Authority is the lineage of bishops anointed and trained by other bishops all the way back to Christ through the Apostles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the Catholic Church abandons one of its primary theological beliefs, then it will no longer be taken seriously.\n","id":"9fbf7e4c-7be2-4107-a3b2-c9f61cb4af93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>As it currently stands, the only cases of domestic abuse that have been taken seriously by sports leagues are those that come with proof either in the form of a video, photos, or a confession. Not even bruises or the corroboration of witnesses are enough for victims to be taken at their word.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Punishments for domestic violence are handed out poorly and inequitably by leagues under status quo.\n","id":"b479ed64-bd4f-48df-82dd-412d5d71d47e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democracies adapt to improve?<|ARGUMENT|>Many justice systems have accepted the notion of 'Trial by Jury' where a selection of people, randomly drawn from the population and probably without legal training, are the decision-making body even for crimes that may carry penalties of death or life imprisonment. In a Governmental sense the notion of Sortition when being applied to a specific issue is quite similar.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alternative democratic methods such as Sortition Liquid Democracy and Direct consultations could now more easily complement or replace Representative Democracy, not only because of the increase of technological prowess of the Government, but also the 'comfort' that the citizens have with the use of technology.\n","id":"a4a33afe-3562-48cd-9bd7-12f1ed2dae50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is something I realised wasn't common when someone asked me, well if there was a button that just destroyed the Universe, you wouldn't push it right? I'm pretty sure most people assume they wouldn't, while to me the choice has no pull in either direction, I don't know. The existence of the Universe is a kind of neutral to me. I don't think it'd be great if it was destroyed instantly, but it wouldn't be a bad thing either literally just a thing. The same goes for if the button simply killed every living thing ever, I wouldn't want to press it, but I'm not inclined to not press it either, I'd have a really hard time working out what I wanted to do about it. To me when the option to remove something as huge in scale as life or existence for all things is considered, the choice is more like between 'complex' and 'simple' than anything else. Most people acknowledge what they consider good and bad things in the world, and conclude that it's close but that there is enough good to continue living etc. else there'd be a LOT more suicides . To me those values of good or bad pale in context they're 0.002 of the huge cosmic values at work in that personal, 'is the Universe Life good?' scale. Instead of ending it all being a, well, no one has to suffer this anymore, thing, it's more like picking the state with lower entropy to a state with higher entropy. The end result is the same value, it's just the valueless time it takes to achieve it that is a factor. People tend to offer arguments like, but there's beauty goodness love while there's a universe, but since I don't think anyone can really offer themselves as a realistic sample of all experience these arguments tend to be about as convincing as, but there's loneliness suffering hate while there's a universe. You could try and argue for one of the two sides over the other, but your case wouldn't be any more persuasive than its opposite. Anyway, I hope we come up with some sort of life changing epiphany here. I mean, as opposed to realising ending everything is actually a good thing or something.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think the Universe, the life in it, or anything of that nature and scale has any actual value,\n","id":"b2e5022c-e070-45b2-b9eb-a181b34530e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer American perspective. I'd be interested to hear non American takes on this as well. I know this is kind of an over reaching assessment and I'm open to having my mind changed on various aspects of it but I don't think it will be easy to change my mind on the overall premise. I don't have this entirely fleshed out in my head so I'm definitely interested in hearing perspectives on specific areas in which I may be ignorant. I don't believe tech advancements are to blame they've created many new markets after all but they have an undeniable role in this. I think a large part of it plays on the rational maximization of gain inherent within the economic system to the point where it's become predatory. Credits and debts, interest, corporate lobbying influencing legislation, automation, etc. are squeezing the middle and lower classes out of jobs resources. If these classes can't afford to consume more due to a lack of expendable income it will end up hurting the entire economy as consumerism begins to fail. I think it's harder for people in the middle and lower classes to move up due in part due to global competition and not being able to generate the startup costs to fund new endeavors as well as natural resources already being locked down by governments or existing private businesses. There are certainly still going to be revolutionaries in any industry, but I don't see this reversing the squeeze on the middle and lower classes while those who already have control over the most resources leverage those resources to generate even more for themselves. I think the traditional idea of the tragedy of the commons fails because it's obvious that shepherds wouldn't let the common pasture be overgrazed. They see tangible repercussions to their individual actions becoming a collective problem. In the context of exploiting workers and resources in the economy there is no tangible accountability and so to many they may not see how maximizing one's own rational self interests can be harmful especially when the scale becomes maximized over many different areas. And that's the issue we're running into today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We're facing a tragedy of the commons pertaining to capital and resources due to greed and technoligization\n","id":"9b95b1e9-f05f-4842-9375-5b3d76c86f4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Allowing financial institutions to make use of untraceable currencies in their interaction among each other makes it more difficult to detect market failures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This reduces the oversight of financial regulatory authorities, such as BaFin and thus increases market failures.\n","id":"092c1830-f1c5-4911-8af6-0af4fa03492f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe this because I think racial minorities are just as capable as white people at achieving things if they're on level playing field. This is also the reason they deserve respect it shouldn't be a social taboo to be associated in a relationship with a person of color.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that every racial minority should have the same rights and respect as white people.\n","id":"7c9d40b2-9b01-4d6e-8742-89971ffff4a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We're now being flooded with what some may call propaganda arguing that if the FCC repeals Net Neutrality, it will basically be the end of the internet as we know it. Most of the information I've seen has been very one sided and can be boiled down to a few points. Greedy ISPs will charge users more to access certain websites Greedy ISPs throttle the speeds for certain services and charge companies like Netflix a premium to have fast access. This will lead to monopolies and unfair competition. The thing is, these are all slippery slope fallacies. There hasn't been a thing called Net Neutrality since the beginning of the internet. The internet hasn't been regulated by the government like a utility and it in turn has been extremely innovative and life changing. All these claims and projections about the end of the internet have no basis in reality and should be logically dismissed until actual evidence proves otherwise. Note although we could argue that people actually benefit from removing net neutrality I would love to watch Netflix on my cell phone without it being charged against my small data plan, something Net Neutrality laws makes illegal , that is probably a discussion better left for another .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most, if not all, arguments supporting Net Neutrality use the \"slippery slope\" fallacy.\n","id":"5f1dc98c-53c5-43fa-9122-b195c2a46968"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, complex structures that at first seem purposeful can arise via evolution. Additionally, everything we know about consciousness suggests that it requires an underlying physical substrate, i.e., a brain.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While logically consistent with theism, science paints a picture of a world that makes atheism more probable than theism.\n","id":"15f0a6f5-4821-41c3-a873-6427504e1143"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is something I've been mulling over for a while, and would be curious what you folks have to say. There is a big push for transgendered people to be identified as their chosen gender, be it with bathrooms, public facilities, etc. I would argue this fight is contradictory to what transgendered people probably should be focusing on, which is moving away from the concept of gender binary and gender identity as a whole. First, what does it mean to be a gender, what does it mean to be a man or woman? Does it mean to be genetically male female? Under the concept of transgender it would seem not, hence why term 'gender' has now diverged from the term 'sex'. Does it mean to be physically and or anatomically a male or female? That would largely disclude pre opt transgendered people, and would even a post opt person count when they still lack the full reproductive organs? If we are refering just to outward physical appearance of 'gendered traits', would that not mean a flatchested woman or a femine looking man might then not fit the very gender they already identify as? Maybe gender refers to cultural behavior and fashion of the individual, but again what about the tom boy women or effeminate men, are they really still the gender they identify as when they don't fit the cultural stereotype if gender is determined by behavior? At its core an issue I take with the transgendered push to be identified by chosen gender, it seems at worst not only embracing but encouraging gender stereotypes, at best it seems a largely pointless semantic. It encourages the simplistic idea that being a man or woman means looking like this, dressing like this, acting like this, etc. I think transgendered individuals would be far better served moving the opposite direction, pushing society to move away from gender identity, emphasize to society that a person being a man or women or being born the sex of male or female doesn't mean they have to look and act a certain way that a male can wear dresses, a female could be attracted to other females, a male child can play with dolls and a female child with action figures, a male can wear dresses and a female wear suits, a female strong and assertive, a male passive and emotional. People born physically male or female might often fit commonalities of their sex, but the important thing is those commonalities of our sex don't define us, we don't have to fit those commonality. I feel like the fight to be identified as a different gender simply acts to shove a person into a stereotype, when society would be better off realizing said stereotype is not important. Just because a person born male likes to wear dresses, is attracted to other males, or act 'feminine', I don't see why the person needs to be identified as 'woman' to do that rather than just a 'person' in general. Why bother with the messy middleman of labels for something so complicated? TL DR Transgendered people would be better off arguing that 'gender' is a non binary status, or even simply an unconstructive overly simplistic term. I feel very open to changing my view on this if somebody has a convincing counterpoint, I look forward to reading your replies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Transgender fight to be identified as their chosen gender is counterproductive to transgendered interests\n","id":"fef148c8-9bf6-4077-8c74-d0cc89454895"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here are some several reasons as to why I support a second bachelors in the STEM field if you are struggling to find a job. Job Prospects Most STEM bachelors are going to have better job prospects than liberal arts bachelors. There are only a few fields that require any degree, and all of them have high turnover, no chance of advancement, or skills that don\u2019t transfer over easily. I\u2019m talking about jobs at call centers, the insurance industry notorious for all three , teaching English in a foreign country experience is not really transferable or respected in the United States if you\u2019re not interested in teaching long term , the car rental industry or any job hiring management trainees good luck trying to have a life working 50 60 hours per week being paid 11 hr , call centers, law enforcement, or trades. Grad school I know people like to throw around getting a graduate degree as a way to pivot out of the field, but that\u2019s not simple. I\u2019ve seen on Reddit a lot that people who have liberal arts degrees should pivot into an MBA. The reality is if you\u2019ve been a cashier five years after college, no decent MBA program or even the awful ones will take you. Even if you get in, you won\u2019t have any professional experience if you can\u2019t get a job, leaving you in a catch 22 of over and under qualified. You can\u2019t go into a masters in a STEM field without ridiculous amount of credits, or even a completely new bachelors. For example my school won\u2019t let you do an engineering masters without a degree in an engineering discipline. ATS The majority of companies have an Applicant Tracking System. If you don\u2019t have the specific degree they are asking for, you\u2019re not getting the job. Plain and simple.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"you are better getting a second bachelors instead of a masters if your first degree was in a liberal arts subject.\n","id":"6ac7457b-d4b4-43d9-8b6d-124e84801a5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Animal testing for cosmetic or beauty products is completely superficial and demonstrates our lack of relationship with nature and animals. Humans prefer to exploit animals in the name of beauty and vanity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Testing cosmetic and household products on animals does not lead to a potential cure for any sort of human illness; they just sacrifice helpless animals for the sake of human convenience.\n","id":"11e00568-7b3a-45fd-a33e-47768c1799b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US completely restore relations with Cuba?<|ARGUMENT|>Cuba has already demonstrated their hostility towards the U.S., through the \"sonic attack on U.S. officials on the island.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A relationship with Cuba will open up the U.S. to possible terrorist threat.\n","id":"e8c4b65b-8862-4b33-a830-e29b719181c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>edit I think, thus far, my opinion has altered a bit but not totally. I still think innovation and new, fresh ideas comes from individuals. But organizations and groups while I still feel that they have many, many negative sides are the only ways to deal with certain things. I.E., political parties will always exist in this form of government. Basically, individuals work better for some things, groups work better for others. I don't know how much sense this will make. I think individuals are smart. They have their own drives, goals, and motivations. But once people form into groups, big or small, more shit than good happens. The individual's opinions and thoughts are exchanged for broad and vague mission or group statements that can be easily manipulated by a corrupt leader. Basically, I believe the more variety in beliefs and ideas, the better. But unique ideas come from individuals, while groups tend to not branch out into new ideas, but remain the same mass of vague beliefs and ideas. Groups fight for things to stay the same while individuals bring change. Examples the group of kids that succumb to peer pressure to be involved in dangerous or illegal stuff, like under age drinking or bullying. religious organizations often espouse beliefs that its constituents don't always agree with, so it doesn't accurately reflect that body of people. In some cases, the belief of the religion causes many societal problems. The best example I can think of is the Mormon church. Pro lgbt groups are growing within the church, yet the leadership of the church has been extremely anti gay, both socially and politically in the last ten years. Many kids who grow up in a religion never really develop their unique personality because their entire lives are defined by the religion. in the us, we only have two main political groups. But I doubt anyone says their political party truly represents their individual beliefs. Instead, they sacrifice some of their individual beliefs just so they can be a member of a main party. these main parties are so convoluted with power that they actually try to stop smaller parties from gaining any political ground. These parties are in power and want to stay that way. even in groups of friends, people feel pressured to fit in and say anything just to be part of the crowd, ultimately losing their individual voice and unique ideas. protests. Like in the zimmernan protests happening. The situation gets dumbed down to its just a racist man gettin away with a crime and it really isn't that simple. I have friends who are joining the protests without knowing much about the case, only going off of hearing its racist. There is no real cause, no solution. Only a confused message designed to make anyone who doesn't support it look racist. I'm not sure how clearly I'm making my point. ask any questions that could help clarify.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe individuals are smart, but organizations and groups of people generally only cause problems.\n","id":"93d72e38-7b7f-466c-a7fc-d8e002d88cae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I often see fictional characters and public figures alike praised for their uncompromising stance on an issue, and yet this strikes me as ridiculous to take an uncompromising stance on anything, like abortion for instance, requires you to disregard a statistically insignificant but presumably numerically large number of fringe cases. Prescribing an absolute, principled solution to every problem is fundamentally naive and furthermore impractical. What if the woman might have difficulty giving birth? What if the child will be raised in abject poverty, or with a crippling birth defect? I don't understand therefore why an inability to modify your approach is so worth of praise. Reddit, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who take an \"uncompromising\" stance on anything are naive\n","id":"f0dc97ae-0a9a-44d9-9810-2ae6cdd1f7c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Users can directly attack and shame employers and founders of internet companies for providing services to white supremacists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is in the interest of Internet companies to deny services to white supremacists.\n","id":"aaa9a33c-81fd-442a-86bb-5d3ecb27f098"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've taken my fair share of online classes, and every time a professor has made it a requirement to answer a discussion question and then reply to 2 others the discussion is always framed superficially. For the most part, people don't care about the actual discussion at hand, and instead are just trying to meet a requirement that secures the arbitrary points for the course. Even when a professor includes the caveat of The discussion cannot be a compliment and must be substantial meaningful. People are still, not being forced to engage with the topic at length as intended. Personally, I find myself more often than not restating the post I'm replying to in my own words, and then elaborating on how I didn't think about that, even if I'm lying. This is for the simple fact that nobody actually means to have a discussion, people merely intend to score points, and there isn't an enforceable metric that is appropriate for the scholastic setting. What I mean by that is, a person doesn't have to post anything of substance or actually have a discussion. They can just type out a response with a completely artificial tone and be on their way. I've seen arguments for participation points in the regular classroom. Despite my disagreement with that premise, I still see some valid arguments for that case. But in an online setting, discussion forums are almost completely useless from an educational standpoint, and equally enforceable rendering them useless.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In online only coursework, minimum post counts based on discussion have 0 education value and are thus pointless.\n","id":"71916100-da4a-4918-8a13-858e30bc2d22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Title. The FCC has used its executive powers to create or attempt to create many unethical policies and regulations. Why should they be allowed to continue regulating media? Would it not be better to return the control of media to the Legislative, allowing the people a vote on every issue concerning media, communications, and censorship? Are these not things that should unable to circumvent the will of the American Citizen? I genuinely don't see value and cannot ignore the danger with maintaining a censorship committee, especially one that can act on its own. To change my view, you will need to advocate the former or challenge the latter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With the History of Abuse of Executive Power in the FCC, It Should Be Dissolved.\n","id":"744a7a45-2592-48c4-bb36-f5adc7168b15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Lab-Grown Meat a suitable replacement for Factory Farming?<|ARGUMENT|>Perhaps the best alternative to factory farming and feed lots is grass fed beef and free range chickens. Cattle are best adapted to graze and corn and other feeds used to fatten them up are not good for them or for us. mayoclinic.org Buffalo native to the Great Plains is even better<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are other alternatives which can replace factory farming and render lab-grown meat not as worthwhile of a focus.\n","id":"1d4fcb85-37fc-4f27-94f4-bceb5d783736"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2006 a constitutional referendum was held in Serbia It was initiated and decided upon by the largest parliamentary parties, ignoring liberal and social-democrat parties as well as NGOs that objected the lack of public discussion around the referendum.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Citizens are mostly not included in the decision about whether to hold a referendum in the first place.\n","id":"5a21ceb9-f836-4f3b-a78b-524650eb93a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Steroid Use in Sports Be Allowed?<|ARGUMENT|>Emphasising physical dominance over other elements of competition will make sports less enjoyable to watch and compete in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalising steroids will change the nature and focus of sports.\n","id":"3ce64fd9-9a2e-41c4-9b4a-c32da3fbc8b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I start, I want to say I am completely okay with people being themselves. I have no problem with people who identify as trans. The world is in a gray area with gender at the moment. SJWs are fighting for people who feel like they were born in the wrong body and are empowering those who take the step to become transgender . But what they don't realize is that in the long run of this fight, the term gender is going to have zero meaning afterwards. Anyone that already identifies as trans is at risk of having their existence as a trans person not even matter. Now Trans sex is a different story, but still ties into this because of the mindset leading up to it. Gender is not tied to a person's sex and is all based on self identification. There are no set rules to determine what gender you are besides how you feel. How you look or act have no correlation. It may to some, but factually, it doesn't matter. What qualities makes the genders male or female ? Since gender is a term of SELF identification, nothing or no one can say what is or isn't male female qualities. So only branding yourself as such gender is the only necessary criteria to being that gender. There is no need for dressing a certain way, looking a certain way, acting a certain way, letting your pubic hair grow out, not putting make up on, being masculine or feminine, listening to a certain music, etc, if you want to feel like your gender . There is only feeling like yourself. And gender has NOTHING to do with any of that. After all is said and done, society will learn the true meaning of gender and what it is isn't. They won't use that term anymore. They'll just switch to identifying people by their Sex to get their way. Sex is identified by biological means And at that point, people will have to undergo sex changes to get people to call them by their preferred sex that they want to be identified as. It's a vicious circle that honestly can be avoided by just not caring what gender you are. It's all a mindset. It's all a battle of the mind. It's all a battle of their individual mind and no one else's. Gender is a label, but it's not a label of who you are as an individual. And that's what people need to understand in the world today. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender is pointless, being trans is pointless and SJWs are fighting to make this true without even knowing it.\n","id":"b24c5363-a145-4175-a9a4-72fb010592d8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title suggests, I believe that there is nothing wrong with being a hypocrite. Let's first look a couple examples Say for example, that you a thief, but you are always telling your kids that stealing is bad. Typical example of a hypocrite, but although you are being a hypocrite, the idea that you are trying to convey is not a bad one, which brings me to another point What you do or say should not be judged based on who you are. Gandhi was always represented as the epitome of morality, especially when talking about civil rights movements. However, there are many accounts of Gandhi being racist among many other things that would definitely change how most people view Gandhi. You can read more about this here Does that mean there is no value for what Gandhi did for the world? He was the role model of many influential people MLK . If he was such a positive influence on our society, does it really matter what kind of person he was? One argument against this I can see is How do you expect someone else to follow what you preach, if you can't won't follow it? I think that this is the source of the problem you think that everyone else are just characters, ie, they are not unique and complex human beings like you are. When you make a mistake, it's not because you want to, but when others make mistakes, it's their intention to. There's a term in psychology for this but I forgot what it's called. Anyways, the point is that, you see others as hypocrites because they are either good or bad, while when you make a mistake that goes against what you preach to others, it was not your fault. Nobody can be perfect all the time. Even if they have an idea in their head of what a perfect person might be, they can't stick to that all the time. The point is that, we should not try to see hypocrites as bad people, because no one is just that there are good and bad in everyone. If the idea they convey is good, then we have no reason to criticize what they do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing wrong with being a hypocrite.\n","id":"ff2ea83d-1de0-47df-98b5-90a7e83915e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Accusations of racism have become politically ineffective. People often see those who make such accusations as as \u201ccrying wolf.\u201d Think about the \u201cGo back to where you came from\u201d controversy. In reaction to Trump\u2019s racist remarks, Democrats were outraged and called Trump racist. Republicans simply responded by saying: you just want to make everything about race, you just want to play the race card<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If provincialism is a defensive strategy against external threats, then attacking bigots and their provincialism is counterproductive. Their experience of being attacked will increase the sensation of threat, naturally leading to a deepening of the defensive posture.\n","id":"5b7e4623-2497-4bf2-84e3-f5d00c1606c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>2020 Predictions: Who Has The Best Shot at Winning 2020?<|ARGUMENT|>A meaningful gesture that one is free from corrupting influences would be to reject any large donations over a certain amount e.g. $500, $750 and have to rely on small dollar donations from regular Americans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Publicly stating that one is rejecting corporate PAC money is largely a \"cheap gesture\n","id":"a4283e4b-9331-48f7-8abe-c12f36e6541b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Time, money, and resources are diverted from the child's care to the court case. The Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans cases dragged on for months and cost nearly \u00a3420,000.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taking such cases to court is ultimately bad for the child involved.\n","id":"683fc73b-fa52-43a4-b5aa-e069b5ec5259"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>The creation of AKMs is not inevitable. The production, stockpiling and use of numerous other weapons technologies have been successfully regulated by international conventions. The same could happen for AKMs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nuclear, biological and chemical weapons had been developed and even used well before they were successfully regulated through international conventions. It is never too late to change course.\n","id":"f6db82f6-8de8-4820-b670-9f6c62683096"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>United Nations Standing Army<|ARGUMENT|>At present most UN operations are supplied by developing nations who hope to make a profit from the payments they receive for their services, but who are under-equipped and badly trained. A UN standing army would be better prepared in both respects and its soldiers would have greater motivation as they would have made a choice to enlist, rather than being conscripts. A single UN force would also have better command and control than in current situation, when different national forces and their commanders often fail to work effectively together in the field. Successful forces such as the French Foreign Legion, the Indian army and the Roman army show that issues of language and culture need not be problems in combat situations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UN standing army would be more effective than the troops staffing many missions under the current system.\n","id":"4a8f3444-d0bc-4b00-9f33-1872f758d5c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If someone is unable to pay for the upkeep of a horse, or they're moving to an area where they are unable to keep a horse, or simply have a valuable horse that they wish to sell, banning the sale of such animals only takes away a viable method of getting the animal off of your hands in a safe way for both the owner and the horse. If your options of selling or giving away these animals are limited it makes the potential for selling the horse to a meat buyer much more likely. Further, especially on Facebook, there are work arounds making the whole idea pointless. I'm selling my halter for 2000, free horse included.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Facebook\/Craigslist not allowing the sale of horses is largely problematic\n","id":"38c4f806-f31e-411f-951a-f3c45f99fedc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>She has held two public offices and was only elected for one of them when she was in the Senate for one term. During the 90's you could make the argument that she was a conservative with her stance on crime, supporting the defense of marriage act, and voting for the war in Iraq. Not to mention the fact that she claimes to be a women's right advocate even though she's accused the women that had affairs with her husband as attention seekers and gold diggers. And even the unproven accusations that the clintion foundation does not pay women the same as men So where can she claim to be this god sent progressive when she has a track record that says otherwise?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hillary Clinton is not a champion of progressives or their ideals. But most progressives seem to be buying her story anyway.\n","id":"3dd9e833-d0d8-4202-b19f-46ce4f0b2038"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Background First thing first, I am a 23 male who does not start his training contract to become a solicitor until November 2017. I essentially have a once in the lift time opportunity to have a year off doing whatever I want and still have a job at the end of it. Why a stripper? Firstly because I would really enjoy. I will admit it, I am an exhibitionist. I love going to swimming pools in my speedos and watching people look. Beautiful to average women to whatever, I like having them look at me. Money. My wage is alright at this moment in time, about \u00a318,000 a year. But I figure I could get more and work less whilst doing something which turns me on and excite me. Can I do it? I mean the discussions should not resolve around practical difficulties, but save for getting the job in the first place, I am not ugly or small and am reasonably buff. Personal stuff. I have some great friends I will really miss. However, I am unwanted by my family and have broken up with my previous girlfriend over a year ago. I have had a cheeky shag now and then, but in reality no romantic ties keeping me here. Work life balance. I would get to see America, have less working hours and more free time to do what I want. So reddit, perhaps stop me making a terrible decision. T l DR once in a lifetime opportunity to go to an easier, more exciting, better paid job and still have a career for me back home. Why not???? Edit 1 A lot of suggestions here which are a good idea and would mitigate the risk of me doing it, however they are not reasons why I should not do it. Edit 2 quite late here in England, may nod off soon. Edit 3 COME ON REDDIT, I MIGHT ACTUALLY DO THIS<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should just quit my job, move to america, and become a stripper.\n","id":"18750553-65ea-4425-8bb8-1981760c21c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should minors be allowed to go through irreversible gender reassignment procedures?<|ARGUMENT|>Gender is an important aspect of a person's conception of self The state should not have a role in determining how people express these aspects of their self.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children have a right to decide which gender they wish to identify as without state involvement.\n","id":"e627fb95-6cf1-4c17-8bed-28b196805020"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>German legislation prohibits the display of swastikas in public in any form. For example: In 2003, a court decision was required to make allowance for an anti-fascist organization to display crossed-out swastikas. From an American viewpoint, the strictness of anti-Nazi regulations in Germany is exactly the sort of slippery-slope result that should be guarded against.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Nazi flag unified the down trodden working class German. The Sickle and Hammer was a symbol of the worker in the Soviet Union. Once values changed, these were removed and moved to museums.\n","id":"c7f7a026-27da-45db-a779-eea018729ffa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Jeremy Corbyn Be The Next Prime Minister Of The United Kingdom?<|ARGUMENT|>All parties in power seem to have an arc from appearing credible, to appearing a bit stupid or tired. The current memorable moments to do with current liberal Conservatism is leading people towards the latter, so it's only so long before this wave of Conservatism ends.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Conservative Party's minority government is unlikely to last its full five years.\n","id":"6f254370-d658-43c7-8bbc-39c863d4717d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that not exerting a certain level of emotional control over yourself is one of the biggest flaws anyone can have. I think that this leads to most irrational behavior, stupid decisions, the inability to critically assess things in certain situations. I'm not saying that having emotion is wrong, just that acting based on purely emotional response with no thought as to why, is wrong. I believe that people should look at themselves objectively more often and always question and assess their actions and thoughts to gain a better understanding of themselves. I believe that if everyone did this, the world would be a much more honest, better place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The inability to control ones own emotional response to situations is the biggest flaw a person can have\n","id":"9051af5a-5723-4b7f-9f1b-b617f722391d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Any approach to argumentation that cannot distinguish God from FSM during the argument would be rejected because it is against the principle of freedom of religion of either the believers of God or of believers of FSM.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The arguments used for God's existence could also be used to support the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.\n","id":"f6444853-d43b-48ba-b974-2e04d90e57f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Conscientious objection is not only used by Christian doctors. A survey in the US found that only 40.2% of Jewish doctors said they would perform an abortion, compared with, 1.2% of Evangelical Protestants, 9% of Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox, 20% of Hindus and 26.5% of doctors who said they had no religious affiliation. The low percentages demonstrated in all these groups show that conscientious objection is used by a range of religious and non-religious people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most religions have stipulations which do not allow frivolous abortions.\n","id":"99395b64-7743-4e01-bbdd-e75d70a0501a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Resurrect Extinct Species?<|ARGUMENT|>In vitro fertilization for example, is not natural yet allows women who cannot conceive naturally a chance to have a child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unnatural is not inherently negative. There are advances in medicine and technology that are unnatural, yet beneficial.\n","id":"65e141ec-879b-4f96-9a31-c5b5d6380a74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Expiring Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in 2010<|ARGUMENT|>When asked in July if the House leadership would consider a bill to extend all of the Bush tax cuts, as Republicans and some Democrats have advocated, Nancy Pelosi said, \"No. No. Our position has been that we support middle-income tax cuts. The tax cuts at the high end have increased the deficit enormously.\"7<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tax cuts for rich were especially responsible for creating deficit.\n","id":"47efd300-22dd-48ed-b8eb-a5c95c5cc454"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would a society without emotions be a better society?<|ARGUMENT|>People will not want to be ambitious anymore since they do not feel the need for fulfillment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Advancements in technology, science and various other fields are unlikely to come about.\n","id":"be5f415f-0a69-48fb-a2fb-960738be92ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>In countries that have strict guns legislation, guns are so rare that most citizens only see them in the hands of military, police, security agents, or hunters. Owning a gun without those special needs is a taboo in the mind of nearly every citizen of these countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Stricter gun control will decrease the harmful consequences of gun culture in the long term.\n","id":"c0b595d3-6a99-421a-9e43-82e5b6653d65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>The concept of free will is to accept that \u201cI\u201d, my identity, can be the cause of my decision. If the concept of identity is meaningless, free will is also meaningless.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since identity and free will are inter-dependent concept, to claim that \u201cI can change what I chose\u201d would mean that \u201cI can be someone else than I\u201d, which is meaningless.\n","id":"154453a2-3a1d-4dba-84e6-37d7052a7ece"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>In the UK should the provision of good quality Broadband access be a recognised Basic Need?<|ARGUMENT|>A slow internet connection can result in buffering issues when using streaming services such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many leisurely activities are dependent on high quality broadband access.\n","id":"4824f925-b8a3-416e-b710-b3b0c70a90ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>This fuels racism in some countries in which there exists a stereotype about some race being less hardworking or being criminals. The employer is better off not hiring those people because it'd be hard to fire them and the employer doesn't want to risk the outcome suggested by the stereotype if they were forced to keep these people employed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In many countries you cannot fire an employee without giving a reason, and those reasons have to be well documented. This makes it extremely hard to fire some employees.\n","id":"4ca537d5-a527-4b39-99f0-59ba56f4f1b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Psychological studies indicate people have tendency to shift responsibility to somebody else when many people are present. The God could be a target for such shift when no other target is available. Groupthink in wikipedia Diffusion of responsibility<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion formed naturally from hyperactive agency detection - a tendency to attribute natural or unexplained events to a sentient agent in this case, God.\n","id":"1ef9b446-8337-4977-be42-7cb287b773a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>Convicted felons come from all walks of life. It is hard to imagine how one could appeal to them as a group.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians usually make no dedicated effort to appeal to \"criminal populations\".\n","id":"7c9d96fd-690a-4b49-b2ef-16c95ebb79d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>There is no evidence to indicate how long Jehohanan was left on the cross before being placed in a tomb. He may have been left to rot for days, as was typical Roman practice. So, these archaeological remains -- a single ankle bone -- provide no evidence that Jesus' body was taken down from the cross and placed in a tomb on the day of his death, in accordance with the timeline suggested by the Gospels.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The remains of a single victim of crucifixion, out of perhaps tens of thousands of crucifixions throughout the ancient world, cannot establish any sort of pattern or standard practice. From this piece of evidence, we cannot determine whether burial of crucifixion victims was the rule or the exception.\n","id":"236f1fe7-4fb7-460d-b8fb-3a9bc45b9c38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Sexual harassment is a form of \"bullying or coercion of a sexual nature\" or the \"promise of rewards in exchange for sexual favor\" in which often \"the perpetrator is in a position of power or authority over the victim\". Therefore the key element for determining sexual harassment is context, not the body parts touched or mentioned, but how, when, by whom and with which intent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the harassment is severe in nature, harassment can be claimed without repeat incident.\n","id":"298ab4bb-dcb0-4e18-8c93-9e135e33119e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Senators and representatives are faced with a choice to do what\u2019s best for all of America, or what\u2019s best for themselves and the narrow slice of the populace who voted for them. These are at odds. What\u2019s best for America is to stop making obsolete battle tanks, bridges to nowhere, agribusiness subsidies, bailouts of unprofitable airlines, etc. Leaders do these things not to harm the country but to help their local constituents and get themselves re elected. Instead we need statesmen who do what\u2019s best for everyone and go home to educate people why they made the hard choice. Even if they stay home as a result. \u201cLosing\u201d this way should be honored as the ultimate sign of civic virtue, not seen as a defeat. If we can\u2019t muster this level of community spirit, then I don\u2019t think we can call ourselves one nation anymore. I\u2019m particularly discouraged when I see the tax code has been turned into a tangled mess of special exceptions with sunset clauses. This is a clear case of leaders creating a terrible situation to increase their own clout. Lobbyists for each industry have to scrabble to fund the appropriate senators and congressmen every six months to keep their special exemptions active, or they lose a lot more money than they end up contributing to campaigns. I can think of better ways to fund campaigns. We could work out a way where the taxpayers foot the bill, so our leaders will be working for us instead of industry. The American Anti Corruption Act tries to do that. A more extreme possibility is to choose representatives by a random lottery of all people with masters degrees and give them a term limit of one, so no campaigning ever happens. Without the popularity contest element, the system would stop selecting for skilled liars. They could hardly be worse than what we have now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The founders of the US believed in \u201ccivic virtue\u201d; that leaders must put the common good ahead of self interest. We need to bring this idea back to save our culture from decay.\n","id":"10fb8978-e9c9-491e-b534-32f512c359eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a 24 year old woman. I have spent almost my entire adult life single. A major part of this time I suffered a lot. I really wanted a man in my life whom I could love and who could make me happy. People told me that instead of looking for a man to make me feel happy, I should work on making myself happy first. Seeing that I could not continue being miserable, I have done just that. I have travelled on my own, worked to get fitter on my own, studied for a career on my own, made good money on my own. Now I reached that point in my life where I know what makes me happy. I can take care of myself and I know I can do anything I want to with minimum to no help at all. The problem is that I no longer see how a man can benefit me anymore. Money? Check. Happiness? Check. Emotional stability? Check. Sex? Well, I can do with it, but it's not a strong enough reason to keep a man in my life. Someone told me that a relationship survives when both partners keep working to achieve a goal and that effort makes the relationship stronger. But that is not my case anymore. I have it all. This scares me a bit, because I am now way too connected to myself and too confidant in myself. Whenever I read articles or even comments on Reddit written by men saying they don't like fat women or they don't like X stuff in women, they don't like Y, they don't like Z, I'm like Who TF cares? If anyone can change my view and give me a different insight, I'd be very pleased. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When you work to become the best you can be, you no longer need anyone in your life and it's a dangerous path to go down on\n","id":"49efa365-ea48-4846-bb2e-d60249809f98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Libertarianism<|ARGUMENT|>\"And God saw everything he had made, and he saw that it was very good; and God said, It just goes to show Me what the private sector can accomplish. With a lot of fool regulations this could have taken billions of years.\"5<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free-market economics is the ideal form of nongovernance\n","id":"4129ba49-7498-4650-8ded-71898b99c2fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm from the US and I'm 21 years old, and very few people I know who are my age know how to drive a manual. Learning to drive a stickshift forces you to understand more about how a car actually works, thus making you a better driver, not only from a safety standpoint but also from a standpoint of fuel economy and overall traffic flow. Furthermore, driving a manual forces the driver to be more focused on the task at hand then in an automatic, and therefore people are less likely to drive distracted by their cell phones. To clarify, I'm not making an argument here about the technical superiority of one type of transmission vs the other, but rather that the process of driving a manual makes people into better drivers. save the manuals<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should learn how to drive a manual transmission stickshift car as part of earning their drivers license.\n","id":"efc8a0ab-484c-4509-9c16-221fd9487394"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Bias on the US Supreme Court<|ARGUMENT|>Statutes governing bias and recusal in the US require judges to step aside if they are at risk of being perceived as or of being unfair.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being temperamental can also lead to a judge being perceived as unfair, making them ill equipped to decide on cases.\n","id":"af5f2910-1d1b-4960-bcec-b3238426e548"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should U.S. Presidents Have the Power to Issue Pardons?<|ARGUMENT|>There is clear history of this power being abused for political and financial purposes. Mark Rich was given an 11th hour pardon that was never reviewed by staff vetting and compiling prospective pardons for Clinton. Why, contributions to his Presidential library.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pardons are something presidents can offer in exchange for political contributions.\n","id":"3b256869-acb2-427e-964f-5240bde363b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>English as US official language<|ARGUMENT|>\"Why Official English?\" ProEnglish.org: \"today, in segregated classrooms, so-called 'bilingual education' keeps immigrant children from learning English, by teaching them in foreign languages. And millions of people cannot find good-paying jobs, because they lack the ability to speak English with customers, co-workers or employers.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bilingual programs allow students to get by w\/o learning English\n","id":"e2897329-2764-42ad-8189-4993b2909d24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that sports in general are a tremendous waste of time, energy and money and that they are a distraction from the things in our society that truly need our attention. I think far too much effort, manpower and resources, both mental and physical are poured into meaningless feats of strength. These resources could be used to truly change our society for the better. The entertainment and camaraderie are a benefit of sports, but I believe that could be achieved on a smaller scale, freeing up massive resources which could be used for the true betterment of mankind. Change my view please<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sports are a waste of society's resources.\n","id":"dae05e5b-4bb1-4d72-a054-48cfca118732"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok, I'm an older person in their late 50's. I still remember my parents thinking that the Beatles were bad for society. Seems like all later generations feel that way about the previous group. But regardless of our differences, hard work and personal responsibility were always the benchmark for success. Today, everyone is a victim and there is no personal responsibility. When you treat people like children, regardless of color or ethnic group, you can be sure that they will behave like children. Nothing is ever their fault. Because of my age and the fact that I have no offspring, I am personally not affected by the current wave of liberalism. But I do feel really bad for those who believed in America's basic principles of getting a good education and succeeding. And they are right in that we are in the period of wasting 8 whole years under a regime that degrades personal achievement and success. Do we really need to get to point of a majority of states going bankrupt like Detroit the city, before the common citizen realizes the destructive outcomes of liberalism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"change my view.....the state of our country.\n","id":"dcaff78a-39b4-4b4b-93b9-0012df24ccd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Day be a National Holiday in the U.S?<|ARGUMENT|>Pollsters who help citizens and countries prepare for the future and help governments decide public policies are deeply dependent on media coverage. Media coverage is likely to increase if election day is a national holiday.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Media coverage is likely to increase as a result of election day being made a national holiday.\n","id":"feec4bae-068d-416a-903c-069f1b45c310"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Artificial Intelligence AI: Limiting an AI's freedom of thought is unethical.<|ARGUMENT|>It is not unethical because giving freedom to a species that have possible hostility and infinite potential threatens our own human kind. And ethics is about human, not about robots.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To let AI to evolve freely is a menace to humankind\n","id":"3a8e8f14-34d3-4b60-978b-67922512f7d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion and religious faith is a choice. The state should not fund anything that promotes a particular belief because it is then seen as endorsing one faith over another depending on whether it is funded or the amount of state support it gets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All religious organisations, regardless of their work, promote their own religion. That is not something a liberal democracy should actively facilitate.\n","id":"3fe7b786-c704-4f8a-a624-19a7096916de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>Although one could walk the circumference of the Earth practically on the orbital ring, width-wise, people cannot walk that far at most, a few feet without approaching a wall.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although large, one orbital ring would have limitations in freedom of walking around it.\n","id":"d88b35cc-aead-4385-8883-08fccd81910f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been struggling a bit with the idea that the second anyone defends or announces their support for Donald Trump, they are shouted down by the left. I am typically very left leaning but I am also a big supporter of freedom of speech and I also think that in most circumstances people should not be criticized for ideas they have, as long as they don't act on them and are trying to contribute to an intelligent conversation obvious exceptions like hate speech apply. How I ended up rationalizing why I dismissed Kanye West and other fervent Trump supporters is that he appeared to be celebrating the man he is, not policies passed under his administration. In terms of social policy, I am very liberal, but I hear good arguments towards conservative social policy quite regularly. Fiscal policies are so complicated that as I have been researching them more, I have come to decide that presently I am not educated enough on them to have an opinion of real value. What I am getting at is, if you favor conservative government, you have a very legitimate place to stand, and there are lots of good arguments for it. However, I really can't see how someone can support who Donald Trump is as a person, and honestly he appears to be so abhorrent that any person who celebrates him as a person, not his policies, deserves pretty harsh criticism. By this point everyone knows all of his controversies, suffice to say he is an extreme narcissist who has consistently said very problematic things for a long time now. If you are aligning yourself with his statements on things like race, gender, and how he has treated women in his personal life, you deserve to be criticized.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Supporting Conservative Policies is Perfectly Fine, But Supporting Who Donald Trump is as a Person Deserves Harsh Criticism.\n","id":"1999b66a-7918-418e-8a9c-5edd809f7596"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>UBI enforces the idea that other people owe you just because they are the citizens of the same country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI erodes the personal and societal incentives for financial responsibility, self-improvement, and hard work.\n","id":"8b5cf705-cb2c-4a69-bbac-395539e85e0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A link came across my Facebook page recently. A casual acquaintance was raising 30,000 to send her to Nepal to climb Mt. Everest. She is doing it to draw attention to her charity, where \u2014 for world water day they would hoist a banner that says something like toilet hackers . They are attempting to draw attention to the issue of waste management around the world. Her friends are calling her a hero and thanking her for doing such a selfless thing. I don't see it as selfless, and I certainly am not interested in giving her money to climb Everest when I could give it to something more direct, like a toilet for a kid in Africa. I think she's extremely selfish and manipulating people into thinking they're donating to a charity when all they're doing is funding a bucket list item for her. Please . I don't want to be a jaded jerk. I want to believe climbing Everest actually helps draw attention to issues. Article in question Edit I don't believe marathons traithlons whatever for charity falls into the same camp. This is due to the limited supply of bibs, and the demand for them. After it sells out the only way left to have one is to force people to raise x for charity. This is a good model. Anyone can climb Everest at any time and there's no supply demand or limited quantity of climbing spots available.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe people who do things like climb Mt. Everest for charity are selfish freeloaders.\n","id":"dfa726a9-915a-4f6e-b5bf-6b01a005b243"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I know reddit has a well known Left leaning Bias and I am not opposed to hearing from them, but what I would really like is for someone who genuinely supports the bill to explain their reasoning. With all that being said, we have all seen the CBO scores from the House passed ACHA and a lot of news companies and democratic senators are claiming that the new senate draft will be more draconian and kill more people than the house. If that is true, saving money is not worth moving forward with the bill, our ultimate goal is coverage for as many people as possible and to prevent, preventable deaths. While I don't support labeling republicans murderers or anything like that, it seems like they are acting counter to what Americans value or need most, they, in essence aren't doing their jobs. I'm sorry for the shortness of the post, I can expand if needed, but I tend to ramble if I don't deliberately keep it short.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The New Healthcare Bill being shown by the Republicans is bad for America and will ultimately lead to more death, making any second or third order effects from it not worth it.\n","id":"b951ecc7-ce91-4b79-bd37-bc56199331cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This isn't a post to discuss if a world government is good or bad i leave to you to decide but to argue that it more than probably won't ever happen in the next centuries i won't say ever because nobody can guess what will happen in 4000 years . A lot of people and science fiction takes this as a fact but i'm not so sure myself. Let first assume that the hypothetical world government would established from capitalistic liberal and social democratic countries. I'm going to argue that this make it impossible. If i we would suppose that they're made under a dictatorial union or empire it wouldn't work anyways, because great empires never last and dictatorship always have demostrations, riots and wishes of freedom from most of the population and that pot would eventually explode. Follow me on this Our current economic system is purely competitive, not cooperative. Adding to that, i cannot say that greed is a part of human nature but history shows that greed has influenced humanity in the highest grade since their beginnings. Political systems always have a huge relationship with economic systems and the ones that control the political systems always have and advantage with respect of who doesn't. A world government would be, by definition, the rule of just a few without taking in account different countries or interests. This would be a institution that when it says some global policy, everyone would have to apply it. This wouldn't be, for example, the UN. Otherwise we couldn't call it a world government. Therefore, taking in account 1, 2, 3 and 4 it wouldn't be possible to unite as a global government, as always there would be a clash of interests both political and economical in theory and in practice and someone would compete against or not accept it, or try to demolish it More reasons It would be the largest logistical hell, like a huge company with hundreds of millions of employees. The largest a bureaucracy is the the more dysfunctional, inefficient and easy to break and or corrupt it is. A broken or corrupt bureaucracy wold make impossible to delegate things or to pretend that some decisions made in the higher orbs would ever be taken care of. You could argue that various regional administrations could make this and the previous argument more bearable, giving more space to different interests and to a more manageable bureaucracy. But, again, that wouldn't be a world government, it would be at much, a federation like the european union with large concessions to their members and as we can see grexit case and many others before this is far to be a complete union. In the most If the regional administration is just a puppet of the world government with few concessions then we would have the last two arguments. There is a large history of independentist movements in a great deal of countries and i don't believe it wouldn't happen in this case also just a proof of the first argument . People just don't want to be united under the same initials. Wanting to be independent or not , they won't care anyways about what they would do or not in the majority of countries that aren't super powers. With that attitude why bother about it? Most of the countries wouldn't gain anything with it and would have the risk of losing a lot of things economical or technological power for example . As long as there is different ideologies and disputing economic theories countries wouldn't never make a agreement on what policies to make. There are a lot of cultural, social and historical reasons impossible to avoid. How do you elect a world president or a world committee? Making your vote 1 out of 8 billion? Giving the most powerful regions more importance than you region? What happens if a large part of the population have the elected president under current political systems a 45 of the vote could give you majority easily and the rest of the candidates could be totally against you. There are far better ways to make an election such as STV but lets be real, no one in power has ever tried to change the first past the post in almost every country and his their decisions?. Can the world stop 3 billion people protests?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A world government, good or bad, won't ever happen in the next centuries and if ever if it happens it would never last long enough to be important.\n","id":"94186643-cc8e-4539-8979-2fd3d517e5a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I didn't vote for Trump, but I find the reaction this week from some of my liberal friends pretty disgusting. Their logic is thus Trump is sexist, racist, misogynist, and xenophobic. Therefore, anyone who voted for him is themselves at least one of these things, or condones these things. For the purposes of this post, we can just assume everything above about Trump is indeed objectively true. That isn't the point. Obama has launched drone strikes that are killing innocent civilians. Yet many, like myself, voted for him anyway and would again despite these things. Voting for Obama doesn't mean I condone using drones to kill innocent people, or that I accept using drones at all. Yet it's objectively true that Obama has indeed ordered drone strikes that he knows are going to kill innocent people. And even worse, we're really not even sure what the actual number is, it's probably higher then what is actually mentioned. Using the same logic as I've seen this week, the only logical conclusion is that anyone who voted for Obama must approve of these actions, or at least not care about them. If this analogy doesn't work for you, a similar one could be said for Clinton. Even if I accept everything she said about her emails as being true, it still means that she placed her own convenience ahead of national security. She mixed her own person emails within those of government business, many of which were extremely important. Anyone who voted for Clinton must think this is an acceptable practice, and every president should do it. So change my view, tell me how it isn't fair to come to this conclusion. I'd really like to know, because I'm about ready to delete my Facebook account. Edit got called away from computer unexpectedly, will be back to comment<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using the same logic of some liberals, anyone who voted for Obama supports the killing of innocent civilians by drone strike\n","id":"b13c7381-1eb9-4a93-8a7e-0e198a5afc13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer My purpose isn't to consider those who have had unconsenting modifications to their face that alter their nornal look. This can include those who are victim to accidents, birth defects, mental disabilities, disfigurments, and failed surgeries. Defining but not necessarily all mandatory traits of stupid people I will use here are Lacking common sense Exceptionally slow to think, reason, learn, or comprehend higher level thinking tasks. Almost always unable unwilling, in light of the information, to make, research, or perhaps even consider choices that better their lives in favor of making choices that provide some immediate gratification to themselves. If interested in choices that better themselves, lack the intuition, foresight, or interest to asses opportunity costs, risk vs reward, and immediate or long term consequences to themselves or others. What I consider the two primary facial indicators that can reveal if a person is stupid, as opposed to not stupid, or smarter than average Eyes A trait of stupid people are eyes that almost always voluntarily have the eyelids partially or even halfway closed, usually with pupils unfocused on anything. An examole of this is in a lot of teens, it appears as a I'm too cool to give this situation my full attention in situations such as school or social events, where the benefits of not looking this way could be much more meaningful, such as teachers seeing them as some one actively interested in learning and having good grades, or in other events, winning the favor of those who may have otherwise got the impression that you think you're better than them, or above their attention or interest. Smarter people typically have their eyes wide open. It's typically a trait of giving their full attention and focus to completing a task as quickly and effectively as possible, getting the most information bonding engagement from a conversation, or paying the most attention they can to an event or surroundings where, while there, it could clearly or even possibly be beneficial to observe and understand as much as they can about what is going on. Mouth While not always as indicative as the eyes, a mouth that is almost always gaping open not just slightly while not eating or talking, especially in a manner that they seem unaware or uninterested in, is, in my experience, a sign of stupidity. Excluding people who slightly have their mouth open because their physiology makes it unatuaral to stay completely shut, or they can't nose breathe , how many smart people have you met with dominately gaping open mouths all the time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You usually can tell if a person is stupid or not by their facial features.\n","id":"4b5e3f99-0bdf-479a-843e-e79e19cf21e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Monogamy vs Polygamy: Is the Norm of Monogamy Regrettable?<|ARGUMENT|>Society has various norms which govern relationships - for example, some societies have a norm that people only marry after dating for multiple years. This does not mean that people who deviate from the norm are discriminated against in any substantive way, but just that they are seen as somewhat abnormal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A norm of monogamy can coexist with tolerance for non-monogamous relationships, which could be seen as acceptable deviations from a social norm. It is therefore possible to oppose discrimination against people in non-monogamous relationships while also supporting the norm of monogamy.\n","id":"18c360a5-9e18-4240-8f15-f134926e4bbc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Anonymous Payments Beneficial for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Regardless of political or economic systems, throughout human history humanity has always known abuse such as child prostitution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Child and youth protection are already a problem. The introduction of APs would not significantly impact this.\n","id":"4181dd6a-c8ee-4b00-a020-8e4e7be55b30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not extremely adamant about this, this is a sort of thought I had since I've been playing a lot of Pok\u00e9mon Mystery Dungeon. It would solve a lot of problems. Most pok\u00e9mon should be able to tackle, even if they know four ways to breathe fire or shoot water. They can move, it just makes sense. It makes impossible battles possible, like Wobbufet vs. Wobbufet and other similar battles. It does make Shedinja fairly useless, but Wonder Guard could include the basic move. I know Tackle is already a move, but they could make it the basic move and just not have it in the level up movepool. Also, there are a million normal type attacks that work exactly like Tackle as in no side effect and are just stronger Just let Tackle go or make it the basic move. It makes a fire pok\u00e9mon able to battle a water pok\u00e9mon, or a normal type battle a ghost and vice versa . It could make strategies less useful in single player, but I'm not sure about competitive since I don't play that stuff . It makes grinding pretty easy. There might be more things, but I can't think of any at the moment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pok\u00e9mon should have a basic attack no type, plus the four moves.\n","id":"3bc24f4e-b691-4f3f-af16-d30f4fe05c19"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If we look at religion historically, we can see a very clear and political pattern. The earliest religions, like Buddhism and Hinduism had a more polytheistic structure, where their wasn't a supreme ruler creator of the universe. Later, Zoroastrianism formed and taught things like heaven and hell, good and evil, and moral obligations. Zoroastrianism gave rise to Judaism, which was the first religion to have a completely monotheistic view. It shares many of the same beliefs as Christianity, which, of course, was formed later. Knowing the trends of religion historically, convince me that Christianity is true but the religions that influenced its formation are false.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"on how Christianity is true, but religions like Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, or any other religion is false.\n","id":"895584f3-b730-45f6-b941-4b0d489de057"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a pretty common topic, at least in my circle of friends, and I think I have the minority opinion among them. To clarify, I don't think that the country that voted for Donald Trump was a particularly fascist, racist, sexist, or xenophobic one, and to gain a delta from me, you would have to convince me that it is. I think that Donald Trump cannot be elected when someone runs a competent campaign against him, and it doesn't represent a major problem with our society that a minority party won, because they dared to dip their toes into the massive power vacuum that is populism. American democracy is built on trust. We vote for people because we trust their vision, trust their motives, and trust them to be right. We don't vote on policy, and it is unfeasible to expect us to. The institutions are too complicated, and legislative and executive work has to be delegated through multiple layers before anything resembles policy anyway. So what happened was that the political process failed to produce a candidate that anyone could trust, and Donald Trump was just there, rather than conditions being ripe for Donald Trump to ascend.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump is not the symptom of a sick society.\n","id":"64df71a8-ada6-4b7e-810a-f44900d76204"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>newspapers are a thing of the past<|ARGUMENT|>With the development of Digital Video Recorders DVRs and more generally the internet people have come to no longer simply consume media in a linear fashion, they take a more fragmented approach. In news consumption people no longer want to simply have one newspaper with a vast array of topics inside. They want to pick and choose which stories and columns they consume, people now prefer to pull the content they want rather than have it pushed on them. In a digital world the news consumer can become their own editor and no longer need to rely entirely on old hierarchical structures. improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People no longer consume media in a linear way, people prefer to pick and choose what news they consume\n","id":"690bb8d1-0b0e-4878-9e3e-5ea0db8ec1b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I wanted to post this after seeing and disagreeing with the original quote which claims the reverse. A life full of love is a fulfilling life indeed, and if accommodating others around me helps create love in my life rather than hate, then I prefer it If at least part of me feels authentic and I am being rewarded with love, well that seems far better than being hated. I can see the meaning behind the original, and I'm sure it has been a positive force for people who struggle with their own identities I feel true empathy for you if you are that person. But I think being loved is a pretty solid consolation prize for sometimes being someone you aren't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is better to be loved for who you aren't than hated for who you are.\n","id":"91a9b53d-1c5a-4ee2-8c63-8a45346348d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>The role of opportunity has also been highlighted in research that considers specific types of sexual offending against children, including offending that occurs within church settings Parkinson 2000, online child exploitation Choo 2009 and child sex \u2018tourism\u2019 McLachlan 2000.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Apart from sexual desire, situational and environmental factors can play a key role in sexual offending against children.\n","id":"789e92ca-ca9b-48fe-ae7e-1279eb14a77f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>important decisions about children\u2019s health should be made by medical professionals and not by their parents<|ARGUMENT|>Nobody is questioning the rights of adults to take actions in accordance with their faith, even when these may cause them some personal harm. Their beliefs may well lead them to conclusions that others might consider reckless but that is their concern. However, when those actions impact others in society, it is a matter for social concern and, frequently, the intervention of the law. If that harm is caused to those who cannot resist or who are incapable of responding, intervention is required. The law explicitly includes children in this category. We do not, for example, allow religious practices such as sacrifice or torture in pursuit of a religious end, however religiously convicted the parents might be. The case of Kristy Bamu, murdered by his parents, practitioners of voodoo, in the belief he was a witch, is just one such examplei. We expect the legal and medical professions to accord particular protection to children against the actions of others that could harm them including, in extremis, their parents. It is difficult to see what could be a more flagrant example of possible harm than allowing your child to die when an available remedy could save their life. i Sue Reid. \"Britain's voodoo killers: This week a minister warned of a wave of child abuse and killings linked to witchcraft. Alarmist? This investigation suggests otherwise.\" Daily Mail, 17 August 2012.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious freedom does not allow for the right to harm others\n","id":"c06de183-55ff-4ac5-a55a-9f4cb50266ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Making assistance conditional on democratisation makes economic reform and growth in non-democratic states more likely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democracies should only provide official development assistance ODA to democratic countries.\n","id":"3b8ab114-982b-45cb-ab6c-eb6d2bc61259"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>It is the most honourable path, the path least likely to compromise our resistance to slavery and group integrity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Option \"Three\": Fight to the death and kill at least one of the British.\n","id":"47c62d46-f65e-482f-a93f-ffbb2a61fa0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All software should be open source.<|ARGUMENT|>Open sharing of software developed by programmers loses its intrinsic value when it is not paid for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Open source software would devalue the work of software developers, leading to negative consequences.\n","id":"b1e00bfc-31bd-4571-b7ab-2351f241bd40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hate the phrase playing God more than just about any other. I mean, isn't a hospital just playing God? If God gave you cancer, didn't he want you to die? Humanity has surpassed natural law. In nature, the weakest die first. The elderly die first. This is just the way it is, it's the way it's always been. Humanity has stepped beyond these facts of life. Because of this, I think we should pursue every avenue open to us we should begin cloning, we should look into mechanical augmentation, we should do everything we can to advance our species.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Playing God\" should not be a deterrent from any kind of technological or medical advancement\n","id":"44a87983-68d5-42eb-9d22-37387ca3b756"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>God may have chosen suffering in lieu of some other method of achieving the same goal that would actually be worse than the suffering that He permits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That God might not need to use suffering to achieve his goals is not sufficient to defeat the parent claim.\n","id":"44adffe1-800f-4df2-b0e9-5b615944eacf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have recently been in a long, tiresome discussion with a chap on youtube about the legality of pedophilia. I did a moderate amount of research on the subject and came to the conclusion that although it is frowned on by society as a whole, it is a mental condition that is characterized by a person above the age of 16 finding prepubescents, children under the age of 13, sexually arousing, and in itself not a crime. When I presented this on youtube to the chap I was chatting with and asked for a counterpoint I was granted instant negative votes, insults and the closest thing to a counter point boiled down to You're a Canadian and therefore know nothing about US law. I think this is partially do to the media's misrepresentation of criminals whose crime is of a sexual nature and involves any minor, as a pedophile and not just the acts evolving youth under 13. I guess it may be worth noting, mostly as a cover my ass statement, I do not condone any sexual action with anyone under the age of consent. I am open to changing my view to that of Pedophiles are criminals if someone can present me with a court case that demonstrates that one is charged solely with pedophilia, and convicted, and not the manifestation of pedophilia. I'm not sure if this is the right subreddit to post this to as this is my first post.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pedophilia is not a crime.\n","id":"f7cd02ef-1612-4287-833b-18e9036a7ab8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Tarot Have A Place in Modern Society?<|ARGUMENT|>The dangers of fraud are well known and widely discussed Individuals are well able to decide themselves whether to trust a reader.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tarot is still very popular, so it has its place in modern society irrespective of its detractors.\n","id":"dca6a425-2032-46f8-af0b-f4197f39c735"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A large and diverse nation needs a system of election to ensure decent leader is selected. No system is perfect, but like democracy, it is horrible but better than anything else. The EC is a buffer against regional dominance. In a popular vote if one state system or one demographic were to be corrupted or skewed it could change the path and therefore the destiny of the nation. With the EC more than one system or demographic must be overcome. With this idea another is born. By having to appeal to a wider region a more diversified set of ideas is brought forth. The leader born of this arduous system should be one that has had to appeal than more than one type of voter. A leader for the entire nation. What would America be like if this system were to be abandoned? I don't know. What I believe is the American people would be worse off without the Electoral College. CHANGE. MY. VIEW. EDIT It is essential 50 popular votes. The System is set up so that one person is elected with safeguards to ensure that it occurs. All the calls to representation are why there are other layers of government. As for discouraging third parties. There are no serious third parties. Why aren't third parties represented in any layer of government in any serious numbers? Conjecture It could happen if they started in small one small state and if their ideas can appeal to a broad range over even one state would be noticed. But they are absorbed like Bernie Sanders. Safety in numbers I guess to ensure their ideas are represented in some way if even just a small part of a major party platform. Verdict ELECTORAL COLLEGE RULES Even though Vermin Supreme didn't get any Electors<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Electoral College is the best system to elect a government.\n","id":"02e39271-0a55-46e9-a1b6-bfc8f7131f3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Jesus the Messiah?<|ARGUMENT|>It is signifiant that the message taught by the many authors of the New Testament was so cohesive to be considered one testament about Jesus being the Messiah.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The New Testament, when used as a single source, is a bit of misnomer. It is better seen as multiple sources.\n","id":"9d7f1629-75ff-42b9-8d09-c67fe5cf4ab9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is deliberately not preventing someone's death ethically equivalent to killing them?<|ARGUMENT|>Refusing to save someone's life would be callous and disrespectful, and therefore immoral according to virtue ethics<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refusing to act to save someone's life undermines a number of well-respected philosophical frameworks.\n","id":"6570a676-1020-4695-ba54-c09b1131a229"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People want sex selective abortions in essence aborting a fetus if it is found to be female because many cultures still place a higher value on men than on women. I think that if we allow them to express their preferences, they'll end up changing themselves like how the drop in population following Europe's plagues raised the value of peasants and led to an improvement of their treatment and living conditions, a shortage of women will lead to men and coexisting cultures having to compete for them more, leading to their being treated better and discriminated against less. And the better women are treated the less reason there'll be to perform sex selective abortions, so the ultimate outcome will still be no gender disparity in abortions, but with an accompanying and much needed cultural shift. So, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think we should encourage sex-selective abortions.\n","id":"a05f11fa-cbbb-440c-b18c-2a050d59dcbc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Museums Should Be Free<|ARGUMENT|>Museums have a valuable role in preserving and transmitting a nation\u2019s history and heritage to new generations. Free access will encourage more people to find out about their country and help to promote feelings of national unity and identity, while promoting greater understanding and acceptance of foreign cultures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Museums have a valuable role in preserving and transmitting a nation\u2019s history and heritage to new g...\n","id":"0d5665db-0c1a-4c0e-ab40-2f82148d9c6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is using new AI technologies for legal research useful?<|ARGUMENT|>What company in a capitalist world did ever care about anything else except of profits? I doubt that this claim has anything to do with reality. This may be true if it will and it probably will, come to a high taxation of AI and robots in general, and thus the AI work might be more expensive then human one. Which is unreasonable and unprobable. Taxation will come, but it will still produce more revenue to state to help the poorest ones to requalify.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Clients might react negatively to a firm investing in AI instead of humans.\n","id":"b1a4515f-e994-4f58-b460-26dbdf99f9ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bottled Water be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Aluminium cans of water such as those made by this brand are gaining popularity as a more eco-friendly alternative to plastic bottles of water.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are alternatives to bottled water that carry fewer disadvantages while still holding all the same benefits.\n","id":"2973d5b4-aac0-4c35-868c-1d75ebab4ab6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After watching last nights debate, I was reminded about how much I hate the democratic party and mass media. Did they really need to fix it to give the front runner the first and last words of the debate? In 2008, I remember they changed the rules of the debate to lock Dennis Kuchinich out of the second debate because he won the first one by a wide margin of the polls. My hope is that if Sanders loses he will run as an independent or a third party candidate. If he doesn't I think I will still vote for a third party candidate and here is why I believe that the main focus we should have as U.S. citizens should be to get corporate money out of politics. To me, this issue is more important than any other issue and Sanders is the only candidate that will do anything about it. If it means the democrats need to lose the next election to open there eyes that we need to stop electing corporate pawns then so be it. It is important to remember that Bill Clinton was the president that signed the bill that repeal Glass Steagall because he was in the pocket of large banks and wall street speculators. It should be mentioned that I also believe that the two party system is really bad for our country in that it de incentivizes progress and promotes the status quo. There is no reason why Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul should be in the same political party. They don't believe in the same thing. I also feel that people are going to vote for Hillary Clinton for the wrong reasons. I think people will think the economy expanded during the 90s because of Bill Clinton's policies. In reality we were going through a revolution in how business operated. The internet allowed for whole new industries to exist and it had little to do with Clinton or Reagan for that matter. I also think a large amount of women will vote for Hillary because they want to see a woman president. Hillary Clinton tried to encourage this in the first debate which was really gross. Not as gross as her Star Wars reference but gross. The reason I am creating this  is because I realize how much is at stake for this election. So I ask you, should I give up my beliefs and sell out my convictions to prevent a worse candidate from possibly taking our country in the wrong direction?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, I will vote for a third party or independent.\n","id":"f418b6f1-9b00-4704-afeb-fa7fc9e4d53d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been programming for about 10 years now and while I have been forced to use spaces in the past I still hold that tabs are better for several reasons Tabs are more clear in terms of seeing how many indents for lack of a better word a block is over. Tabs streamline reindentation this is especially important to me scene my primary language for work is sass not scss and thus indentation based Tabs allow for two people using different editors to see the same code with there preferred indent width I use 2 however many of my coworkers use 3 or even 4 as there tab width. Tabs are a character specifically meant for indentation and thus more semantic than spaces I am going to be beginning a new project in about a week and have an inkling of a suspicion that I will be forced to use spaces and would love to have a better understanding of why people like spaces so much.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tabs are better than spaces\n","id":"f61eaf98-0618-40d0-a124-8046b089e0c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Christianity Compatible With Feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>Lilith was exiled from Eden and left out of the Bible for being too strong willed. Lot's wife was turned to a pillar of salt for looking back, and all of womankind has allegedly suffered fro Eve's sin. No, they aren't compatible. A just and loving god would not condemn and order the subjugation of half his creations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All Abrahamic religions have a few verses that may venerate women, but majority of its laws and suggestions are condemnations, vilifying everything that a woman is and does, this includes Christianity.\n","id":"b5a30da6-6cf9-41f2-9a3e-3dd26a2beb63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Vegetarianism<|ARGUMENT|>\"Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature\u2019s Favorite\". Tibor R. Machan. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004 - \"beings that lack a rational faculty also lack the capacity to contribute creatively to the values in nature. By contrast, human beings can create value, as a matter of our initiative, not merely exhibit it.\" To the extent that animals are of lesser value than humans, it is appropriate to eat them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human life is of greater intrinsic value than animal life\n","id":"0095bd6c-297d-4abb-a2e2-9568e3e0c934"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments should impose methods of population control.<|ARGUMENT|>Improving female education is strongly correlated with and causes reductions in fertility rates. Policies in that direction would help.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Education, a soft method, is generally good to decrease population growth.\n","id":"b481de87-3a73-4bd8-ab34-b3e8b451bb0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Context I saw a lot of praise being given for a bill being filed in my country Parking rates are expensive due to high demand and not necessarily because developers are greedy. Regulating these to impossibly low day rates means more people will consider bringing their own cars to work instead of carpooling, taking public transport, etc. The result would be exceedingly higher parking demands which can also trigger an increased use of urban space for car parking. The only argument I can think of contrary to this would be that developers are disincentivised to build parking lots buildings due to the lowered potential revenue and increased liability. Even then, I feel that this result will be more seen in developing cities that have yet to build over their usable land. Is there something I'm missing or is this bill just short sighted?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regulating parking fees to an affordable, fixed rate in CBD's would only be detrimental to the traffic and parking situation.\n","id":"e85fc939-1105-4246-a5e1-a2b948757570"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been on here a while and, any time the pirating debate comes up, there are people who make claims like I'm perfectly okay with people loosing their jobs because I pirate. Over time, this has lead me to form the opinion that most pirates are, essentially, selfish bastards with no empathy for others who would probably steel physical content too if they could get away with it. That being said, I will add an addendum of times when I would not hold this opinion People who pirate content they can not purchase for reasons that are non monetary. Ex You live in a country where this game, movie, whatever is unavailable and you can't buy it online OR the content is so old that it's no longer commercially available People who pirate content that they already own. Ex your DVD gets scratched, so you pirate a new copy People who pirate content, such as TV shows, before it airs in their country to avoid online spoilers as long as they then purchase watch the show when it is available to them While the 3 scenarios listed above may be morally ethically questionable to some, I wouldn't fault these people in the same way that I fault those who pirate just because they don't want to pay money. By pirating, a person is assuming a 0 cost to the product and assigning it a 0 value. They are saying I don't care about the time and money you might have put into this. I don't care that you created this and want it to be used in a certain way. I think my desire to have this content trumps any rights you might have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":", anyone who pirates content is an egotistical, entitled, selfish bastard who deserves any legal repercussions they receive.\n","id":"8392980a-8bf1-41f0-86b7-1eb5ef5c65b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am extremely punctual. I never accept appointments for meetings unless I am positive that I can get there early. I have been late to work once in sixteen years a whopping six minutes . My friends and family all know that when I say I'll be somewhere, they can count on me. I begrudgingly accept something crazy came up kinds of arguments, though I believe that these things don't come up to the well planned I often counter traffic made me late arguments with yeah, that's why I helicoptered in . But I'm mostly annoyed with the people who are ALWAYS late. Like, I know a woman who has been 15 minutes late to work every day for years. That's not just poor planning, that's outright rude to her workmates. Isn't chronic lateness nothing more than chronic lying? Please, help me understand how it is acceptable for someone to have a lifelong pattern of lateness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe people who are constantly late are rude and disrespectful.\n","id":"4b991d4c-4f10-4f55-8950-1b1f73c1acaa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Home plate collision rule in baseball<|ARGUMENT|>Why is it that people seem to enjoy aggressive hits at home plate? If they do, it's probably for the wrong reasons. Individuals should probably not enjoy violence between individuals, hits, fights, etc. It's a savage impulse that shouldn't be honored by attaching some entertainment value to home plate collisions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People shouldn't enjoy watching violent hits at home plate.\n","id":"2313f0a6-c7b4-4f15-be95-05d8da5c0398"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It might be different in other countries but here in Australia, the majority of university students continue to live with their parents. There are many people who don't move out of their parents' home until they finish their university degree and many don't move out until their 30's. I believe that in the majority of cases, if you moved out of your parents' home ASAP and are not relying on any financial support from your parents scholarships welfare so basically, the only money you have is from your employer , then you will always be behind in your career and life compared to those who continued to live with their parents so they could save up more money and here are my reasons why. First of all, the most common reason I hear to explain why people move out is independence. Of course, if you move out then you will be responsible for earning enough money, cooking your own food, doing the cleaning, doing the ironing, doing the washing, etc. However I believe that you can be just as independent whilst living with your parents. If rent in your area is around 150 week, what is wrong with giving your parents 150 week whilst living with them? You can also get a part time job, cook your own food, do your own cleaning, do your own ironing, do your own washing, etc. So if independence is what you want, you don't necessarily need to move out to get it. So a person who has moved out isn't at any advantage in life compared to a person who lives with their parents. EDIT I am not necessarily saying that you have to give your parents 150 week, I am trying to say that if you really want to be independent, you can give your parents a certain amount of money each week, help with the cooking, help with the cleaning, help with the ironing, help with the washing. Aren't you still learning these life skills even though you aren't 100 responsible for it? Secondly, a person who lives with their parents is going to be able to have more time to study than a person who has moved out. Generally, more study means higher grades. Some of you might say that grades don't matter but of course they do. They determine what internships you can do or if you can do any internships in the first place . When you apply for graduate positions, employers will want you to have some relevant experience so once again those who lived with their parents are at an advantage since they have relevant experience whilst those who have moved out probably do not have as much relevant experience since their grades were lower and they couldn't get relevant internships or in some cases they couldn't get any internships at all. Furthermore, if you are living with your parents, you are going to have more time for extra curricular activities such as debating, charity work and a sport they are going to have more time to network. Whereas those who have moved out with have limited time so once again, those who live with their parents are at an advantage since they can make their resume better. It's obvious, if you have to choose between a person with lower grades, no or low quality internships and no or few extra curricular activities and a person who has high grades, relevant internships, many extra curricular activities and connections who do you think the employer is going to choose? Clearly the person who has lived with their parents so once again, living with your parents puts you ahead in your career. Thirdly, if you live with your parents, you will be able to save more money. People who lived with their parents will end up with higher grades, relevant internships, many extra curriculars, strong connections so they will get better, higher paying jobs than people who moved out. As a result of this and the fact that they saved more money, they will be able to get a house sooner whilst people who moved out early will have to pay rent, they will be able to get a car sooner whilst people who moved out early will have to use public transport or limit the use of their car, they will be able to get quicker promotions since they have a large safety net and don't need to worry about saving a few dollars here and there whilst their friends who moved out early will have to worry about saving every single dollar since they still have rent to worry about, they have lower paying jobs, they have less savings, etc. Once again, the person who lived with their parents is ahead in their career and life. To , tell me why I'm wrong. Tell me why in the majority of cases, people who moved out of their parents' home ASAP and are not relying on their parents scholarships welfare for financial support will, in the majority of cases, be ahead in their career and life compared to those who continued to live with their parents. EDIT My apologies, when I said, you will always , I really meant, in the majority of cases, you will but it doesn't seem like there have been any problems with this so far.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the majority of cases, if you moved out of your parents' home ASAP and are not relying on your parents\/scholarships\/welfare for financial support, in your career and life, you will always be behind those who decided to continue living with their parents so they could save up more money\n","id":"55778660-ad43-4101-b42d-8a53d7dfe146"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>Feminism by definition means wanting gender equality; focusing on issues of class and race would only drive attention away from the main cause.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best way for feminism to achieve inclusivity is by not taking a political stance on anything beyond gender equality.\n","id":"8fa6573f-ed59-4032-a1e0-0ee2606794f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>We can buy weapons and gunpowder or other products we cannot produce on our own.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Benefits for our community might be an unintended side-effect of what the British propose.\n","id":"cd13b7e9-6136-4d10-9cbb-bdf8e20774f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just want to preface this by stating that the political compass online quiz says I'm fairly left leaning, but I have always considered myself more centrist. I'm not sure if this is due to the extremes that appear in politics, but that's not what this post is about. Background I am from Newtown, Connecticut where Sandy Hook Elementary is located think Manhattan gt NYC so I have closer exposure than most to the impact that mass shootings have on communities. I was not close with any of the family of the victims, but I was in High School at the time and was about 1.4 miles by car and about a mile as the crow flies from the elementary school. If anyone doesn't believe me for whatever reason, I posted a comment with evidence on a thread some time ago that you can go look for if you so choose. Anyway, for my view. I think that Permit to Purchase PTP as well as a Comprehensive Background Check CBC should be used and required in every state for every form of sale, whether it be from a dealership, gun show, or private sale. Additionally, in order to get the permit I believe that you should be required to pass training similar to that of a driving test. Besides that, I think that there should be no additional limitations on gun ownership besides the ones in place. Obviously gun violence is a problem, but estimates on how often they are used to prevent a violent crime from happening reported from the lowest end of ~115k and on the high end of 500k 3 million. I've spent the better part of the morning reading about this, and most research states that having both PTP and CBC systems in place drastically reduces the amount of gun violence. Even within the realm of gun violence, the vast majority of deaths were from suicide. However, suffocation is almost as effective in the majority of cases. Mass shootings are obviously what are talked about in the news, and people mention Australia as a reference. However, unless I missed a paper no studies have shown that the ban of assault rifles has actually caused a significant impact. They even had a mass shooting again in 2002. Regardless of that, I think the root cause of mass shootings in America is more caused by the fetishism we have with tragedy rather than the guns themselves. I'm definitely open to having my mind changed, I have been back and forth about this in the past several years and have only solidified this stance within the past 6 months or so. I'd appreciate less anecdotal or stating things are obvious and more links to peer reviewed papers or articles with lots of sources that aren't super skewed. Most conservative pages site the same study the 500k 3 million while more left places like CNN decide to exclude all of the countries that surpass us in gun violence and mass shootings and just compare us to the lowest in each category.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We already have an adequate amount of gun control, and the problem does not exist with legislation but with responsibility United States.\n","id":"61eb732b-e744-4411-bc68-fe60c6d1a28b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't get why the general consensus is that civilian lives are more valuable than soldiers lives. And killing civilians is a war crime while killing enemy soldiers isn't. This implies that soldiers are disposable second class citizens and therefore less valuable to society than civilians. I believe everyone is worth the same, whether a young boy in middle school or a young adult drafted into the Army. Civilians aren't innocent, they are the ones building the planes tanks, paying taxes and doing millions of jobs necessary to field and Army. That makes them a valid military target. Attacking civilians could end up in a net reduction of lives lost. Like destroying an Army's support hard enough ports, munitions, etc that they call it quits and then both their soldiers and mine don't have to fight and die.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Civilians are a valid target in war\n","id":"1f9455ae-6a89-452d-a5a6-9a3e9c5bd037"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Obama was right to agree to meet rogue leaders without preconditions.<|ARGUMENT|>Nuclear countries like North Korea and Iran have been keen to use such a meeting as a stalling tactic against the onslaught of sanctions prompted by its nuclear programme1. Negotiations can be continually spun out with very little result in order to keep the United States from taking action simply by encouraging the United States to believe that there will be action after a meeting. Again, if there is no cost to them sitting down to negotiate, then negotiations are an easy way to deflect pressure, while they continue to pursue their nuclear and WMD programmes. As a result the preconditions need to be met before the negotiations to prevent such tactics from being possible. 1 Yeranian, Edward. \u201cIranian President Offers to Meet President Obama.\u201d Voice of America. 2 August 2010.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rogue regimes can use such meetings as a dilatory tactic to stall sanctions against them.\n","id":"646f56ed-368b-49ac-948e-64e84e6fe0f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DC handgun ban<|ARGUMENT|>The 2nd Amendment does not explicitly refer to a right to bear arms for the purpose of self-defense. It only explicitly refers to a right to bear arms for the purpose of upholding \"a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.\" The 2nd Amendment should not be read as conferring a right that it does not clearly confer; a right to arms for the purpose of self defense. Inferences are insufficient, particularly as evidence can be gathered regarding the intentions of the framers of the Constitution that could cut both for and against the notion that the 2nd amendment was intended to confer an individual right to bear arms for the purpose of self-defense. Because neither inference can be definitely deemed correct, the Constitution must be taken at its explicit word, which gives no mention to self-defense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The 2nd Amendment does not express a right to bear arms for self-defense\n","id":"a1555212-8dd8-4e43-9e1f-36dd95a57558"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that there's things that are really shitty that happen purely because a company monopolizes a product, like a cure for something being jacked up to 1000 dollars pill. I strongly believe it's up to two companies to decide if they want to merge or not, now I also believe that there should be protection for citizens against a company controlling the life of a future cancer patient who is unable to afford the new pill that cures it. 1 If a company has a monopoly on a product that has NOTHING like it, like a hoverboard or tool that lets you breathe underwater, then they cannot sue for someone making a product like theirs and selling it not buying company 1's product and reselling, I'm talking about making their OWN stuff and selling it . 2 If it's something that is Very beneficial would have to be clarified under a specific law that would probably be FAR longer than this post such as a cure to something where there's no cure already, then it has to be made publicly known how it works and can be made.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monopolies should not be preventable by governments.\n","id":"f1a92b4b-2a72-4c5e-8f51-7fc8e5efd516"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be further research on solar geoengineering.<|ARGUMENT|>Rich governments and industry will devote their resources to geoengineering instead of helping the global South fend off the chaos ahead. ETC, The CaseAgainst Geoengineering www.cbd.int<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Might aggravate the situation of those who are globally worse off. Cited as Rawls by Betz www.argunet.org\n","id":"82e70c15-8c9d-4221-83f3-c5d667a03209"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>By taking economic power away from a handful of the hyper-wealthy and distributing it equally and decentrally to every worker at every coop, worker protections established by workers themselves would be more sustainable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"These methods are not sustainable, as they are contingent on consistent public support and government attention which is unlikely to occur.\n","id":"d11575b4-32b3-4ea3-8a4c-1a05f367cbf3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Most of the hate speech cases at the European Court of Human Rights were not followed by violence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate speech most of the time does not lead to violence.\n","id":"1416638e-e437-4290-af8c-1bfdf0492107"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most people aren't educated enough to make decisions on what they want to put in their body based solely on the ingredient list. I once witnessed a woman rant about the ascorbic acid that was in pre sliced apples that were being sold. Ascorbic acid is literally vitamin C and used as an anti browning agent . She went on and on how she couldn't believe that someone was trying to sell her food with acid in it. Nearly everything we eat has acidic components, natural or not . There was a survey conducted that showed that people were against the inclusion of Dihydrogen Monoxide in foods. Dihydrogen monoxide is simply a over complicated way to say water. But since it was an unfamiliar term, it sounded dangerous. There are even ingredients that if you look up on the internet you will find are poisonous, however the missing information is the dosage. For many of these poisonous ingredients, you would have to eat ONE MILLION times the amount that is in one portion to see any adverse affects, let alone death. Too much of practically anything could be poisonous. You can die from drinking too much water and it's not as uncommon as you would think . EDIT Seems like the consensus is that while these rules aren't perfect, people who are not exactly educated in nutrition need some sort of rule to follow. It would be helpful if there were a better rule that encouraged doing research on unknown ingredients.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"If you can't pronounce it then don't eat it\" or the \"if you don't recognize it neither will your body\" rules for ingredients in processed foods are ignorant and should be ignored.\n","id":"3629e064-eb0f-4dbb-8118-1225e1f84c76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Trying to change things it's in my nature and so it's in yours. I'm being upset if someone is not using their full potential. You are being upset if someone is not open minded enough. The motivation is secondary, what do matter is that we'll start having conversations. They might go south, but you know you will still try, again and again. So do I. It's all over history as well. Scorsese's Silence, anyone? Some people are just more persistent. But the question is do we actually change anyone? I've been trying to do so for years On on line forums no effect. In some cases with my significant other same result. At work? Nothing. Keep in mind if someone wants to change, they already have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You cannot change other people\n","id":"8fe99a5f-71e9-4935-aefc-d72d2cc26140"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>Members of the Rebel Alliance have utilized suicide tactics as a last resort in the past, for example Holdo Sato and Arvel Crynyd<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Rebel Alliance is willing to employ terrorist tactics and has done so in the past.\n","id":"30362ddd-62bf-4ddb-ab5b-8273ad31bd91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The problem right now is that we live in a society where CEOs will make 400 times the average worker source This to me, is absolutely disgusting and it makes absolutely no sense. No doubt being a CEO is an important and challenging job, but to me it is completely illogical how one person can be worth the salary of 400 other persons. Not only that, the people in society that are making the most money aren't necessarily the ones contributing the most, it's not the teachers, the nurses, the firemen and the law enforcement personel. Rather it's the hedge fund managers and the bankers, now contrary to popular beleif I do realize that they contribute to society, they'll help and provide to market liquidity which will decrease market volatility and sure that's a good thing, but I don't believe that these people deserve the macabre amount of money that they are making. I'd love to see your take on this, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe wages should be based on how much the individual contributes to society.\n","id":"f4f8a808-1454-4e7e-91b5-43d270d37d6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Worldwide there is a swelling support for radical thoughts. Beliefs that encourage division based on race, language, religion on one hand and evoke an aggressive form of patriotism to numb dissent on the other. In USA, Europe and even Asia, there is growing popularity of high decibel bravado, jingoism and disdain for the intellectuals and the educated the people who are seen as liberals. In the midst of this chaos, the liberals seem to be in a state of denial, mostly crying themselves hoarse on how ridiculous the situation is. In fact, sometimes their responses are more strident than that of the people they criticise. In the U.S.A., for example, after Trump won the presidency, the liberals came out in thousands protesting his election. Whether one likes it or not, Trump had won and he did so through a democratic process. The liberals have long considered themselves as the champions of demoocracy and here they were protesting the outcome of an election. Were they questioning the wisdom of the voters? If so, they should be questioning themselves first questioning their own failure to reach out and educate people of their rationale or after the fall out, understand why people voted for Trump. For years liberal thoughts have dominated well aided by the media and the academia. The reasons behind it may be right but the method became close to coercion. Anyone who differed were put down with a barrage of dismissive ridicule rather than logic. Open debate wasn't the norm. In India, for example, violence by minorities triggered root cause analysis by the liberals but one by the majority evoked outcry. Political correctness had been taken to suffocating limits. Liberals took their exalted positions for granted and their views as teh proof without realising that a significant set of the population was getting alienated. Their basic problems of job, shelter and safety had not been addressed. They were looking for heads to roll and for an alternative who can deliver. In my mind, a long period of worldwide dominance, almost since the last world war, had made the liberals comfortable in their own seemingly unassailable ideological bubbles. They had increasingly disconnected themselves from the changing reality and the growing number of disenchanted people. They continue to remain in the stupor. Well that's how I view the sweeping pattern across countries that has emerged in the last 3 or 4 years. I would love to hear a different perspective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liberals are disconnected from changing reality\n","id":"1880a1bc-3460-4e41-a6b1-2dae8da22ac0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am completely aware of the fact that irony and cynicism in healthy doses can prove very useful for furthering the development of society, our own selves, etc. However, I am talking about excessive cynicism and irony used in regards to mostly mainstream interests. Basing your whole personality on ironic remarks and cynical beliefs is, in my opinion, cowardly. People like this are hiding behind the fact that they cannot come to terms with their own interests, with the fact that life is always bound to hurt them in some way, so they choose to simply distance themselves from it completely. I've seen this phenomenon with my peers I am a teenager who excessively use ironic remarks to make fun of someone who genuinely enjoys doing something. I base my opinion that it's cowardly because they cannot seem to enjoy anything of the things they 'like' completely genuinely. They always have to pair expressing their interest in something with an ironic cynical remark, so as to not appear uncool shatter the image they've created for themselves of being 'cool, edgy, unique, different' usually expressed with listening to obscure types of music, consumption of cigarettes alcohol drugs, having aesthetic Tumblr, etc . This, in my opinion, only serves to prove that they are extremely afraid of the judgement of people, which is why they judge everyone and everything as a way to protect themselves from it in turn. So, , that excessively using cynicism and irony only proves that you are a coward who cannot come to terms with yourself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Relying on contemporary cynicism and irony as a self-defense mechanism is cowardly.\n","id":"43f38585-d64a-40d4-a125-3632f1e982eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>This is especially the case for software. Eversince the atomic and the nuclear bomb were created, we've been trying to prevent rogue entities from getting their hands on this technology. The warfare of the future is software drones and cyber warfare, and software is infinitely harder to track down and regulate than who has uranium or plutonium. You don't want to add AGI to that mix, the outcome could be devastating.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Universal regulation is impossible. A better strategy would be to not develop AI you don't want to fall into the wrong hands.\n","id":"d5753f08-e3d4-4d0b-9481-6d97688fab81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should science get more governmental funding?<|ARGUMENT|>The private sector is 'private', meaning that they're not going to give their information out freely like the government at most a bit here and there, which isn't as much of a value as getting the 'complete picture'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Privately funded science only promotes scientific advancements that benefit corporations. Public, governmental funding on the other hand is allocated democratically and therefore benefits everyone.\n","id":"5555034f-0c60-4019-b801-66e258f97c2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>General restriction of gun ownership prevents situations when police officers shoot civilians believing that they are armed and dangerous. Such occurrences take place in the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gun control laws improve firearm safety and prevent accidents. A negligent discharge is considered a crime in many places.\n","id":"709c5807-e7b0-4045-9a64-21430beb61e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the U.S. adopt the \"Right to be Forgotten\" on the web?<|ARGUMENT|>For many victims of pornography e.g. child porn\/ revenge porn and people whose images were leaked without consent e.g. nude celebrity photos, a 'right to be forgotten' would grant them a right to dignity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right to be forgotten establishes everyone's right to privacy and human dignity.\n","id":"82b3a22f-78b5-4992-a239-f2ca3122f68a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Change My View Abortion of non viable fetuses should be remain legal in the U.S. and probably throughout the entire world. Basically, the logic behind my position goes like this Since there was no way to conceive a specific embryo without having this embryo be dependent upon your body to survive, you should have no obligations to this embryo. Thus, abortion should remain legal. Note This argument wouldn't work in cases where you implant a pre existing embryo which was conceived through IVF into your uterus. In contrast to pregnancy, if one, say, takes someone who cannot swim onto your boat, then one should be legally obligated to allow this person to remain on your boat for the entire duration of the trip due to the fact that you had an alternate course of action specifically not taking this person onto your boat at all which would have ensured that this person wouldn't have been dependent on your boat to survive. In other words, not only did you make this person dependent on your boat to survive, but there was also an alternative course of action which you could have taken and which would have avoided creating this dependence. Anyway, any thoughts criticisms of my pro choice argument here?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion of non-viable fetuses should be\/remain legal.\n","id":"9a7c0c88-a7c7-4b39-ae5b-eb22d244821a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Teleportation would be beneficial if it exists.<|ARGUMENT|>The improved social mobility increases the expectations\/requirements for it, which leads to a decrease in social contact and support beyond what is necessary and healthy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transportation is a factor in social mobility so the teleportation improvement could create\/increase the anti-social effects of it.\n","id":"07a43838-0373-441d-8481-decd846eb8cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This may sound a bit petty in light of the NYPD's other current problems, but I think it's a serious issue. Obviously I am as upset about Saturday's shootings when two NYPD officers were killed as everyone so don't think I'm trying to minimize that. However, bigger issues should not allow these officers to get away unpunished. If you don't know what I'm referring to, when New York Mayor Bill de Blasio visited the hospital where the two officers died, several other officers who were present turned their backs on him in a deliberate show of disrespect. De Blasio is currently facing major criticism from the NYPD unions and even had to have a press conference today where the police commissioner defended him to try and calm things down. The officers who publicly and intentionally disrespected the Mayor ought to lose their jobs. If I publicly disrespected my boss, you'd better believe I would get the axe. Police officers are charged with a public duty to keep the peace and obey the policies set forth by their superiors. If they don't like it they're free to complain in private just like anyone, but to use their public profiles to make a point is unacceptable. Worse, New York is clearly in need of unity right now and creating further division is a serious safety hazard. These officers aren't just failing in their jobs, they're actively causing damage. It's just ridiculous that they thought this was okay to do. They definitely knew what they were doing, so it would be silly to claim they didn't realize it would make the news. They're blaming de Blasio for senseless murders committed by a man who was obviously insane on the same day, he shot his girlfriend and then committed suicide. The fact that like most of America he criticized the NYPD on Twitter is irrelevant, and even if it did matter that has nothing to do with the Mayor. Regardless of whether its fair or not, the NYPD currently needs to fix its public image in the interest of public safety. Police officers are supposed to be respectable figures who put the public's needs above their own. These officers clearly violated that mission and are trying to stir up trouble, so they should lose their jobs immediately. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NYPD officers who turned their backs on Mayor de Blasio should be fired\n","id":"5b863738-5ce0-416d-ae3d-93a87e659c8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans have been known to hallucinate and experience other psychotic symptoms distorting their perception of reality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human self-perception can be entirely wrong and is thus not reliable.\n","id":"dce305df-0def-4229-8fe3-4996e11b9c3d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>For example, roads are full of drivers engaging in all manner of antisocial behavior behind the wheel, but no one calls for the asphalt to be taken up. Same with private insurance of all kinds; we are sure that abuse is endemic, but no one calls for it to end.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abuse isn't a sufficient cause for abolition: if something you value is being abused, you fix the rules\/policing. Abuse is a pretext for abolishing something you don't like for other reasons.\n","id":"89820c6c-16fb-465c-b9d2-bca822702f6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So often I hear people saying I didn't go to school like you did or Thank god I got an education. I don't know where I would be about college. I think college is important, but if you are a high school dropout, 99 of the time you have no excuse for being stupid. You don't need to pay 20,000 a year to be educated. There are thousands of books at the library for free. And you have an internet where you can google anything you want. Wikipedia is not perfect, but you can learn almost book knowledge there is to know from it. If you don't have either a car nor internet or you work two jobs, I'll give you a pass. Otherwise, you're lame. People just lack initiative and are waiting for someone to teach them. Or, they need an excuse. If you choose to watch TV instead of read. Don't blame your stupidity because you didn't go to college. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"I didn't get an education\" is no excuse for being stupid\n","id":"1d76fa96-29a7-4988-987e-7df97482cd10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I was born and raised in Romania. My wife was born and raised in US. Our daughter is 8 years old. We bought and renovated a house in a village in Transylvania and own some land there too. We would mainly rent in a major Romanian city Sibiu, and spend the weekends in the village. I could keep my programming job from US do remote work and considering that the cost of living in Romania is way under the cost of living in US with my salary we can have a comfortable life. The school where my daughter 3rd grade will go is one of the best schools in Romania the gymnasium from National College Octavian Goga from Sibiu . There are many good colleges in Romania and they are basically free. The national public health care is free and supported by taxes. There is also option to buy private insurance to have faster access and better care witch is about 50 a month. The internet in Romania is some of the fastest and cheapest in the world 10th in the world and 1st in Europe . For the house we own in the village a middle of nowhere village we have fiber internet with 80Mbs up and down, plus cable tv for about 14 a month. Other pluses I would like to list In Romania women are encouraged to go in tech jobs Romania to have highest economic growth in Europe in 2016 and 2017 ~~Romania is viewed in a positive light by the rest of the countries Most of the young adults in Romania speak English. I'm fully invested in social security in US, and when the time comes, I can file for social security. Now, let me list some negatives My wife doesn't speak Romanian. My daughter doesn't speak Romanian. My wife won't be able to keep her good job here in US she's a social worker and probably lose her license too, if she doesn't practice for a year I guess. Wife's side friends and family all live in US What say you reddit? Convince us not to move.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moving away from US to a European country like Romania with my family is the best thing we ca do for the future of our daughter.\n","id":"33643c03-f83e-4ecc-8f09-13730885fcf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am in a sentencing class right now in law school, so naturally we are analyzing the various reasons for why we punish people and why we use prison and other forms of punishment. Chief in today's discussion was the idea that putting someone in prison for a white collar crime see definition below . They should be forced to work to rectify the wrongs they have committed. Now granted, the most heinous of offenses where billions of dollars are stolen, would be hard to pay off. The only reason the criminal made so much was because he was acting illegally, but even in those cases the victim receives only a small portion of their money back. see sources . Also most So why bother with prison sentences for them.We could very easily make these people's lives a living hell by simply treating them like people on probation very strict probation such as the SWIFT courts in Texas or the HOPE program from Hawaii where their every movement is tracked and recorded and they have to answer for placing a toe out of line. We could force them to work in some fashion and simply take, in addition to all of their other assets, a large percentage of their income to help repay their victims. They are skilled and knowledgable people, if their intelligence is effectively put to work they could actually help people. Ultimately, if they refuse or do not cooperate, throw them in prison for a year or two and see if they change their mind. So I put it to you, what is wrong with this alternative approach? Am I missing something? Is there some notion of justice that this is violating? I am more than willing to discuss the idea that this does not punish a person fairly, but I think that the goal for fixing a crime like this has to be restitution, not merely punishment, so that might just be an area where people have to agree to disagree. I dunno, I am anxious to hear some other thoughts on this. Def White collar crime financially motivated nonviolent crime committed by business and government professionals. Within criminology, it was first defined by sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation straight from google search and thus Wiki Sources Madoff victim compensation SWIFT probation program in Texas, opinion piece about it, but still describes what it is A whole bunch of information about White collar Crimes from the FBI, if anyone wants to analyze or see it . EDIT 1 31 15 11 40 am . I wanted to address a few points that are brought up a few people because they keep getting mentioned. Yes, there are other crimes that are non violent that would deserve similar treatment. I'm not talking about those, only white collar crime. It's not a crime to not want to discuss every single crime, just focus on white collar for this argument. I personally believe every crime is different and needs a special approach depending on the situations and people involved. Just because I am advocating this position for most white collar criminals does not mean I have forgotten about other crimes. Yes, you can force people to do just about any sort of work while on probation. Probation is an alternative to imprisonment and comes with any number of requirements. This would be no different. How they make the money might be an issue and many might not be in a position or have the capability to repay what they have stolen. For them, jail time would be appropriate. Madoff for example probably couldn't pay back 20 billion dollars, but even in jail they can't rectify thief wrong. They can't make up for it behind bars. We could force people to do this work while in prison, but probation is cheaper and is supplemented by the people under its supervision. Also overcrowding is an issue, this would help with that to at least some degree. Probation also doesn't require near the amount of staff that a prison does. Also, if you are waitress about them escAping while on probation, the moment they fled they become a fugitive like everyone else on probation, and I have no issue putting fugitives in jail. Many people say jail time is an effective deterrent. I flatly disagree and await proof to the contrary. My evidence is simply the crimes still occur despite the jail sentences. Although that could be a whole other . This is the first time I have posted to this subreddit and frankly I am impressed by the civility in the discourse and very happy I posted this. While no one has effectively changed my view, I see more of the problems associated with it. It has all been very appreciated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no point to putting people guilty of most white collar crimes in prison. They should be forced to work to pay back what money they have stolen for however long it takes accomplish that goal.\n","id":"a47538cc-c958-4d30-a6b6-02979b37f7f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>The aggregate of polls so far suggest voters have changed their minds. People's opinion seems to have turned around in favor of remaining or having a 2nd referendum roughly around June-September 2017 3rd source<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This argument presupposes that people regret their initial vote and insinuates those are the people who voted to leave. This might not be the case.\n","id":"97943b87-0083-4679-9424-3cac1c8a5a09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not from her political side, but I still think she has a point about tech giant. Let's take Facebook for exemple. Facebook owns instagram and whatsapp. Those two mobile applications are vastly popular. If you add Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, it makes a social media giant that a small company would have trouble to compet with. It's not impossible, but it's still hard to compete with them for a smaller newer company, just for the market share Facebook has thanks to Facebook Instagram Whatsapp combo. Alphabet is another exemple. Google map, Google search, Google Chrome and youtube have next to no competitors because Alphabet has way too much market share, way too much money and on a more annoying side, they're pretty smart on how they manage those 4 products. Those two companies can evade taxes without big problems. They can also spy on you, monitor every of your activities thanks to their appealing services without big problems. They have the money, they have billions of personal datas, they have the infrastructure and they have the market share. To me, they're too powerful. I don't see how it should be ok, even being a neo liberal kind of person. It's bad for users because we have small power over them, it's bad for competition because barely anyone can compete with them Change my view reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Elizabeth Warren is right to some degree, some tech giant should be dismantled.\n","id":"7d819609-02f6-4d45-aa68-3e129541a5fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is eating meat ethically wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Male baby chicks are ground up alive or suffocated on their first day of life because they aren't profitable to the egg industry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eggs and dairy are just as immoral as meat to consume.\n","id":"67b4f1e3-47ca-4e5e-9ead-3ed7e3c85db8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When ethics are considered in politics, it creates too much ambiguity and inconsistency in the development of policy. In order to do what's best for a country, a somewhat impartial and distanced perspective should be taken by politicians.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think ethics should be subordinate to politics -\n","id":"492ba8fa-30a6-4a03-82c6-267f3c8a6eaa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Parliamentary Systems Enforce Proportional Representation?<|ARGUMENT|>Political parties engage with and attempt to appeal to voters everywhere, no matter what riding they are in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under proportional representation, everyone's vote has the same weight no matter what electoral district they're in.\n","id":"ede3771f-42a9-4c22-8ffa-7dfdf03b0fd2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have recently been hearing a lot about Joe Bidens recent weird sexualized allegations towards women. Although he clearly does the whole touchy feely thing to men as well. So, my point really is, I do not think this whole allegation thing will have any effect on his chances at running for president if he does choose to run. I think maybe I think this way because people associate the democratic party so much nowadays with this completely progressive left wing approach when in fact the majority of the voters are mostly probably moderate and wouldn't look too deep into this. To clarify, I do think what he does is a bit weird but Joe Biden has been doing this for his entire career and I think it stems from a different generation of how people do things. He already stated that he would not be doing it anymore if it really bothered people but he did not have any negative intent with doing it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joe Biden's recent allegations would have little affect on his presidential campaign if he ran\n","id":"73de3627-48a1-4d12-8bfe-8fe1adff14c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Title sort of explains itself. I don't think you are doing anyone a favor by hanging in there out of commitment. I also don't think the potential other relationship is relevant people often see it as some kind of punishment of the one who broke off the ltr for it if the new relationship doesn't work out. I however think that doesn't matter, point is that if you can fall in love with another, it says a lot about your relationship in the first place. I also think it is respectful to your partner to leave them. You are acknowledging they have the right to be committed to someone who loves them more than you, and you are also acknowledging they are fine enough to be on their own. Sure it may hurt it is never nice to be dumped, especially for someone else. But the person leaving did nothing wrong and in fact did the most moral thing possible. I am also against blaming the one who leaves or seeing it as something horrible to break up if a relationship was long. No, you may have had a lot of good time, and it is fair to end it if feelings change. why would anyone owe you their life? No one can make a commitment that lasts forever, no matter how much people fool themselves that that is what marriage is. There is nothing evil or wrong in falling in love with another cheating is wrong, being honest and leaving is fair and even brave when compared with attitudes most people have to just stick in the status quo while not feeling it. Why would anyone want their partner to stay with them knowing they aren't in love with them anymore? Why would anyone want to be seen as a burden and duty? Relationship should be something it is always ok to walk out of and then the few ones that stay together are doing so for honest reasons, not convenience. Edit Some users I awarded one delta at this point, but will read through and give more since few opinions discussions helped me define this part made me want to re shape my view. You don t have to instantly leave your partner if you don't want to. But you have to tell them the truth about how you feel and allow them to decide if they want to leave or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you fall in love with someone else while married or in a long term relationship, the most fair thing to do is to end your relationship\n","id":"778e9884-4c61-47e6-bbc7-a808a7311bd6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In Canada and I assume other places if you are convicted of a crime, during sentencing, you can be sentenced to it being served concurrently. For example, if you're convicted of 6 counts of manslaughter, and each one has a 10 year term, the judge can decide that you can serve all 6 together, so you are really only convicted of 10 years. I'm not well versed in the rules behind how this is applied, but regardless I see this as an issue so my example might be lacking. Regardless, I see this as an issue. If I am going away for 10 years for 1 person, or 10 years for killing 6 witnesses? Don't know to me the crime doesn't fit the punishment as well since each persons life in this case is worth 10 6th's not 10 years of the criminial. I feel like this doesn't do enough to deter crime. Edit Thanks everyone who participated, definitely see it differently now. Not 100 OK with it, but not disgusted by it anymore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Concurrent sentences in the justice system are stupid and encourage more bad behavior.\n","id":"ecd4288d-7be2-460c-987d-ac9b5ab4fea6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>MBA<|ARGUMENT|>It is completely acceptable to wait to get an MBA degree until your mid-30s, mid-40s, or even later. What's the rush? It is better to get it when you feel a resounding \"I want this\" or \"I need this\" then for any age or timing pressure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Getting an MBA later in career and life is fine.\n","id":"c6d9ecd9-3870-4bd8-a445-cdac8530aacf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>It allows for the separation of drugs that can be potentially legalized at the state level, such as marijuana, from drugs that are under national jurisdiction. This separation allows for social peace as some states can advance while others can stay back.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A policy like in the USA, where every state has considerable freedom in making own laws, might be highly complicated but also decentralized.\n","id":"d103e450-569d-4f7b-8b52-3ac0b68cc83b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The idea is that, ultimately, I'll never know more about American foreign policy or the complexities of the economy than the people who study these fields for a living. And even they can't agree on what their conflicting data means. So, won't any opinion that I have inevitably be a watered down version of an expert's truer grasp of important policy questions? Which means that I'll only ever be right by accident. How am I supposed to form an objective understanding of complicated issues? Just trying to motivate myself to stay informed, but most of the time the amount of conflicting information out there overwhelms me. EDIT For those who are curious want to avoid repeats, here are some of the arguments that I've found interesting compelling, as I understand them Complicated policy debates can often be interpreted as debates over what's most important right now. It's important for us laymen to weigh in on such debates because we're often better able as a collective to consider the big picture, whereas experts may have a difficult time seeing their fields in a wider context. On a similar note, policy debates can be interpreted as debates over who needs the most help right now. The same reasoning applies as above. Many people are noting that there are many debates between politicians that are less debated among academics and policy experts. I probably wasn't clear enough about this in the post, but I'm more concerned with policy questions where experts have not come to a consensus. I understand that experts frequently come to a consensus. Someone did note, however, that staying informed about ongoing debates among experts is an good way to stay up to date on when and where experts come to a new consensus on previously controversial questions. I did find this point compelling, and unique. Experts have a difficult time arriving at opinions themselves and look to the American people for guidance on broad questions. Similar to the first point, but I thought it was a particularly interesting argument. Attempting to navigate contested policy questions is a good way to maintain and improve your critical thinking skills in general and especially with regards to public policy, and engenders a culture in which more people are informed, thus increasing the level of debate in the country, even for experts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who study complicated subjects like the economy and American foreign policy for a living are unable to agree on important policy questions, so it's pointless for me to try to develop an opinion on those policies.\n","id":"d3c0eee4-ceb0-434b-a47e-f7cd6bd8c62e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>European Parliament elections should involve only one voting district: all of Europe and not separate country seats<|ARGUMENT|>One person one vote that will count in exactly the same way as everyone else\u2019s<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"European Parliament elections should involve only one voting district: all of Europe and not separate country seats\n","id":"05bc20f0-ad13-422e-a87a-85bdc1ec4c72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There have been endless stories about PIP Personal Independence Payment , a British welfare payment, in the major newspapers and how it affects parents or adults with disabilities. Rather than forcing people to join work related groups and being target driven, the system needs a reboot. People who have a LLOND Lifelong Neurological Disorder which could be defined as Autism Spectrum Disorder ASD Rett's Syndrome Down's Syndrome Foetal Alcohol Syndrome Spina bifida etc. should be entitled to a new DQLA Disabled Qualify of Life allowance which would be for their entire lifetime. I am a male in my 30s with Asperger's Syndrome so cannot be accused of throwing stones in glass houses, so to speak. I do work albeit within the limits of DWP for disabled people . Rather than having ATOS force them to attend interviews, the focus would be on questioned document examination and assessing how valid the documentation is much as historians have to do, to ensure absolute authenticity. Anyone can claim to be disabled, but some disorders, like autism spectrum disorder or Down's Syndrome have tell s that they have the disability. It is a lot harder to fake having a condition like ASD and spina bifida. Increased public awareness by charities about disability has made it easier now than it was in the 1990s to understand disability. Theresa May's government are not disability friendly in this regard, and I can very well understand why parents of, and adults with a disability are not satisfied, and expect her to be out of office soon. In the U.S., Donald Trump should also implement a policy like this, it may prove a PR coup for him and take the public's mind away from things like links with Russia and election manipulation, the dismissal of Sally Yates and the recent dismissal of James Comey, and other issues. These are my opinions, change my viewpoint if you can.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The British welfare system is not currently fair to people with disabilities and needs a reboot.\n","id":"126efcc4-3142-482a-ae49-12e87e66193c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The best example I can come up with off the bat is the Swiss Army Knife. It has a corkscrew, knife, saw, needle, can opener and various other stuff in it depending on version , and it's great for camping, I can use it for all of those things and it will take up almost no space at all. On the other hand, for home use, I would rather have a dedicated tool for each of those present in the Swiss Army Knife. since they will either perform better or be more comfortable to use. All these individual tools though take up significantly more space than the Swiss Army Knife heck, the can opener on it's own is bigger , and would be a pain to pack and unpack for individual use while travelling. This issue is similar when discussing electronics. Currently, I could do largely everything on a smartphone make calls, run apps, program, game, watch shows, alarm clock etc. , and if I'm travelling, again, carrying one device is easier than carrying a separate device for each thing. At home, I would rather game on a dedicated console, program on a PC let's face it, typing is easier with a keyboard , watch shows on a TV, etc. Multi tools have their place, but, in general, it's not in the home. EDIT Extra point made in general, multiple dedicated tools allow for multi tasking, where as a multi tool can only be used for one of its potential uses at a time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At home dedicated tools are better, while travelling, multi-tools.\n","id":"d204ae4d-2c1c-410d-b418-17308e324cc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My point is twofold Climate change is going to destroy modern civilization during the next century, if we don't make a lot of sacrifices. We will not make those sacrifices. How bad is it going to be? Very bad. While predictions vary, the global average temperature is expected to rise about four degrees Celsius by 2100 without aggressive cuts to emissions. A four degree drop in temperature is an ice age. It's going to get very hot, very fast. Extreme weather will become normal, destroying crops, infrastructure and ecosystems. Climate refugees will make the current refugee crisis look like a footnote. The whole planet is going to become increasingly hostile to human habitation, which causes social unrest and conflict, crippling our ability for large scale, long term cooperative projects like limiting emissions, making the problem ever worse until civilization can't support industry anymore. End of the world as we know it. How hard is it going to be to stop? Very hard. Our society is dependent on carbon based fuels for energy and transportation, and even the animals we grow produce massive amounts of methane. Here are just a few things pretty much everyone on Earth must be convinced to give up within a few decades if we are to hit our targets Meat Flying, except on rare occasions Imported fresh food including tropical fruits Coffee Fast and cheap shipping Large houses This also involves convincing countries like India and China to reject fossil fuels despite the enormous economic benefits, which have made Western countries what they are today. How much have we done to stop it? Very little. We have known about climate change since 1938, yet we have kept ignoring it for decades, and even now we struggle to meet the modest goals set in the Paris Agreement. Global emissions are actually slightly rising now, when they should be swiftly falling. Still, limiting climate change to the only somewhat disastrous 1.5\u00b0C is still possible with aggressive action. Here's the crux of the argument, why I don't believe we are going to, and why I'm actually predicting the apocalypse Why won't we do anything about it? Corporations. Corporations are basically rogue artificial intelligences. Sure, they are made of humans, but if some human in the structure fails to act for the benefit of the corporation, they are simply replaced, like one would replace a malfunctioning component in a car. The corporation runs on the substrate of humans, but is separate from them, like software is from hardware. And while the goals of the people it runs on might vary, the main goal of a corporation is to make money. For example, tobacco companies knew full well that what they sold was killing people, but they kept selling it and lying through their teeth about the health effects for decades. I'm sure most people working for them never actually wanted to kill people, but as a whole they did kill people. This has already happened. Oil companies, for example, have been funding climate change denial for ages, spreading doubt to keep profits up. Any corporation whose profit model relies on carbon emissions is an enemy in the struggle against climate change. They have many strategies at their disposal, from simply cultivating a green image while actually changing nothing to actively trying to cheat emissions regulations. Through lobbying, and by being the economy, corporations also hold power over the governments of the world. The last thing our leaders want is to slow down the economy, even if that is very much necessary. Instead, they take baby steps and push the real sacrifices years down the line, for someone else to take the fall for. When it's too late. Normal people are not blameless, of course, but people can only work with what they are given. Like with every cultural trend, people will only change under enough social pressure, pressure that corporations are trying their best to undo. It was an uphill battle in the first place to get people to give up luxury, but against corporations it might very well be a vertical cliff. What can be done? Not much. Options like injecting sulphur into the atmosphere are effective, but that is like trying to keep water on the stove at room temperature by constantly pouring liquid nitrogen on it. It is not a long term solution, and doesn't do anything about the carbon in the atmosphere, which would make the temperature skyrocket the moment we stop the injection and also directly causes ocean acidification. And even if it buys us time, what is to say we won't just keep stalling indefinitely? That would be just like us. I very much want to be wrong about this. I want to believe we are going to join together, and beat the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. But with my current knowledge, I just can't. If there is any point where I'm misinformed or blatantly catastrophizing or if there is some glimmer of hope I didn't consider, I want to know it. I want you to say I'm crazy. Because the alternative is much, much worse. I originally posted this on r TMBR link here but it got only a few responses, so I'm trying my luck here. EDIT Upon further reading of the rules, this might veer a bit too much in the persuasive essay direction. I hope it isn't bad enough to bother anyone. EDIT The main current seems to be that I'm overestimating the effects of even worst case scenario climate change. This is a worthwhile possibility, and a few reliable sources for verification would probably tip me over the edge on this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Climate Change Is Going To End Modern Civilization\n","id":"86d1c6d4-34be-4d85-88d0-bdd8ef8eca32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> Non native speakers need to find ways to cope with the fact that English is here to stay, for at least the near future. But if English travels beyond its native countries, becoming the global lingua franca, it should also become the property of mankind cosmopolitan ownership for English is to be the norm. One good way to realize this is to set out non native standards for English. Alongside accepted versions of Englishes from American to Indian English , we should also have lingua franca Englishes such as German English or Spanish English. Language academies could work out such non native standards. On top of these, the EU should erect its own EU language academy for European English. This language academy should standardize EU terms and phrases, and it should be the international institution that harmonizes the various European Englishes. Such non native tweaking of English fills English with cultural content from other languages, preserving non native life worlds. It also restores linguistic dignity, since it allows for the non native speakers to claim ownership over English. English is then no longer the property of only a minority among its speakers the native speakers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The EU should erect a language academy stipulating rules for European English\n","id":"5a5e71c1-1be0-4444-91bf-083b5f9270cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The act of censorship and the huge media controversy surrounding it increase white supremacists' profiles more than merely giving them a platform would. Constant reporting and analysis means that white supremacy is perpetually in the public consciousness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Censorship is ineffective in actually protecting the victims of white supremacy.\n","id":"5baa9ecf-ee82-4336-be62-d4535396fdc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>According to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System AFCARS the number of children in foster care during 2015 was an astonishing 427,910. Yes, over 400 thousand boys and girls was living through the system in just a twelve month span. Although I can't find last years statistics, it's safe to say that even just that is a problem right there. Now looking at the U.S. Department of State the total number of total intercountry adoptions in the last few years is 267,098 children. Aside from political bias on immigration, the main point I'm trying to make here is that if we have had over half a million children without a structured home family and the economy is declining, why are we bringing more children into this? And if anyone on here has or is planning on adopting a child outside of the US, I am not demeaning you on that matter but I just feel as if we should be helping the helpless in our own home. ENG 111 Sec 30 at WCC<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intercountry adoption should be considered illicit.\n","id":"fff1867b-d9e8-4ba3-9ec7-2f9d85a56e71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe there is no compelling reason to conserve water IF AND ONLY IF these apply You don't live in an arid area delta to u Randy Marsh it's not just that your area isn't arid, it depends on more factors than that. Changing this to You live in an area with enough groundwater to support the population, and no other areas are affected by your usage. This more accurately reflects my true opinion, but I didn't state it well initially. You get your water from a well You have a septic system For nearly my entire life, all of the above have applied. Living in rural suburban New England, there has always been enough water in underground aquifers to support the population even in the driest summers, we've never been at risk of running out. Second, with a septic system, waste water is naturally filtered and returned to the ground, where it will eventually make it back to us as clean well water. So the water we use isn't actually wasted , it's just temporarily unavailable as it processes back into the clean water system. The word compelling in the opinion statement is important too. For example, the ~ 20 year I'd save on electricity running a well pump less is a reason to conserve, but it isn't a compelling reason because that savings would hardly be noticeable. To put it in more concrete terms, I believe there is no compelling reason to not do these types of things Leave the faucet running while brushing my teeth Water lawn gardens as needed to keep them green Leave the water running constantly while washing dishes Wash cars without concern for amount of water used Flush the non low flow toilet every time its used Further, purely from a water usage perspective , there is no compelling reason to not do these things as well even though saving electricity and or fuel may be more compelling reasons Take long showers Run the dishwasher even when it's not full Run the washing machine for partial loads Lastly, things that will change my view Show how conserving water will save a significant amount of money, let's say gt 1,000 is significant. Show how wasting water within those parameters negatively affects the environment<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no compelling reason to conserve water.\n","id":"f60fcbc0-a28e-4bb9-ac24-25a941a04402"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>it is sometimes right for the government to restrict freedom of speech<|ARGUMENT|>The Government must protect its citizens from foreign enemies and internal enemies - thus freedom of speech can be acceptably curtailed during times of war in order to prevent propaganda and spying which might undermine the national interest. This has happened in almost all states during times of war, during the second world war the United States even had a government department dedicated to it; The Office of Censorship.1 1 Hanyok, Robert J., \u2018Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and The American Press and Radio in World War II\u2019, Studies in Intelligence, Vol 46, No. 3,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It may be necessary in the interests of national security\n","id":"290c92ab-fd53-4403-a393-1f7a36391ea9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is an idea that I've encountered a few times in  lately that I'd like to examine more closely. I've read some literature on this part of libertarian ideology but I still don't see it as a convincing viewpoint. Firstly, I think it's important to agree on a definition of 'theft' as it's possible the argument is just one of semantics and not real policy. Theft as a concept relies on the concept of property. If you cannot own a thing, it cannot be be stolen from you. So really, the issue may be in the definition of what it means to own a thing. Secondly, I believe that The ability to leverage taxes on the population are necessary for a state to have credibility and function While taxation can be overbearing and injust it is not an inherent property of taxation The libertarian ideology seems to believe that property is something taken and not given. No one is able to take this from me, therefore I own it. But this definition of property seems to be restrictively primitive. It may work for small plots of land but what about shares, currency, stocks, investments, and trade in general? How does basic trade function in a world where property rights are not enforced by a state? It doesn't seem in my mind to be possible to both have a state capable of enforcing property rights, and a state that cannot tax its people. Don't get me wrong I think it would be possible to live in a world where all taxation was banned, and therefore all states were dissolved, but it wouldn't be a nice place to live. Property rights are really good for society because it means you can for the most part trust your fellow citizens and enter into agreements with them in good faith. Without them, we would collapse into a militaristic anarchy where resources and wealth are seized by whatever warlord is in power at the time. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Taxation is theft\" is an unworkable idea\n","id":"472e870e-c67f-4507-ab38-35d3eba33257"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>i think foldable phones are a very cool idea, but just like 3d screens on phones, is a cool gimmick to play around for a couple of days and to show off to friends, but i fail to see any reason why people would need want a foldable phones, i only see cons and not pros. Cons 1 portability the phone is bulkier than other phones when folded, and about the same size of others when unfolded, if you want portable phone which is apparently one of the selling points of this thing you have many good options x200B 2 screen quality in order to be foldable the screen will be made out of plastic, which means that the quality will not be as good as a glass one, doesn't matter if it's amoled, plastic does not look feel as good as glass x200B 3 aesthetics because the screen needs to fold, design choices are very limited, compared to other premium flagships this thing will be the duff of the party x200B 4 Price many people will say that because this is a new technology it's bound to be expensive but price will come down in the future, even if it gets a lot cheaper, still this is a completely unnecessary extra expense that most people will find hard to justify Edit to clarify I'm talking about the new Samsung phone with a foldable screen<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Foldable phones are a gimmicky idea and will not have any commercial success\n","id":"cb152177-86b0-4f6d-9436-10cec24081df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>The largest private corporations and wealthiest individuals have a history of successfully lobbying governments to reduce regulation and act in their interest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The wealthiest majority shareholders of corporations tend to use their economic power to influence government policy and voting trends.\n","id":"6a542b09-6afa-4dc6-926f-abe1e0e52463"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As an introvert I'm barely starting to find out how does the social world work, it is pretty much a game where everyone tries to fit in and be accepted, and that's a problem when it comes to having an opinion, because peer pressure becomes the basis of people forming and enriching opinions. Most people believe that logical argumentation does lead to agreement eventually, even though they usually add a disclaimer Some people just can't be argued with . Yet the fact is that ultimately, having one or another opinion is an emotional thing, you either believe in X or not when it comes to stating your views, and you need to be sure about yourself before saying anything. And this is where the problem arises, save for the very few people who can motivate themselves just fine, nearly everyone is obsessed with other people and find more compelling a stupid argument supported by most of their friends than a clearly logical and well argumented one supported by someone they dislike example Asch conformity experiments Consequently, if you really need to convince someone, get a few of his friends without a very strong opinion on the issue on your side, then ask them to discuss the issue with that someone and eventually he'll be convinced, even if his initial position was more logical. Humanity is just that awful. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most people believe in what they believe because of social pressure, and the only reliable way to convince them is through social manipulation rather than rational argumentation\n","id":"79d0e408-15f3-4aec-a1c0-17dc59ae28c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Using a throw away, as I am getting married and my fiance is familiar with my username. Now I love my fiance very much. Our relationship is both fueled with a deep admiration, desire, respect, and love that I have never felt for anybody else before I am 32 . However, I find it very challenging to get along with her family. They are extremely rude, and more crass than the household I was raised in. I get along most with her father, as we can easily always find common ground topics to agree on and discuss. But her mother and sisters are so challenging. I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach when I see them, which completely contrasts the feeling I have for my fiance. Mother In Law She is just awful, and the root of the entire families disfunction. She cut ties with her own siblings, and swayed her husband away from his family. She only gets along with my fiance, and her one granddaughter. She's manipulative, and likes confrontation, despite rarely leaving her home for anything. She enjoys watching her children fight and argue, especially if it's for her attention. This character trait is heavily demonstrated wth her grandchildren as well. She treats her oldest granddaughter 6 years old and grandson 3 years old like they can do no wrong. But the middle child, 5 years old is treated quite literally, like shit. She abuses the child verbally and I've seen her even inflict physical harm as well by slapping the childs hands with a spoon . She claims that the child is no good, and was born evil. But I suspect there is resentment towards her because she looks like her ex son in law. It's disturbing, and none of my business. But it bothers me, because what if I am blessed with having a child? This woman also chain smokes, and her house reeks of piss and ash. She is extremely lazy and is dirty, and I've never seen her take an actual bath or shower. Dishes are always stacked in the sink, and she cannot cook worth shit. She is very racist and prejudice, and has said some disgustingly filthy things about certain ethnic groups. She is just such a shitty human being, and I cannot find anything remotely good about this woman. But I want to. I want to so badly. She's my soon to be mother in law, and if anything, I want there to be just a mutual respect. When I do see her, I find myself pretending to get along with her. I always swallow my comments, and keep them to myself. Sister 1 Bratty, spoiled, jerk off with such deep rooted emotional problems, who seriously lacks ability to be cordial. This girl had the nerve to berate me on Christmas morning. All because my fiance and my joy of sharing our gifts with one another, disturbed her hang over slumber. And it wouldnt have been a big deal, if it wasn't for comments such as HE'LL NEVER BE APART OF THIS FAMILY , YOU TWO WILL NEVER GET MARRIED before we were engaged . She being cordial is being extremely sarcastic, because getting along makes her vulnerable. In the over 3 years I've known her, we have never had a normal conversation. I want to find some kind common ground, as she's the maid of honor in my wedding per my fiances decision . Despite she clearly saying, Well I don't like you but alright when we announced our engagement to their family. She even has a problem with my fiance walking down to the Canon in D because she always wanted it used at her wedding. MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE complex. I don't know how I'll ever be able to channel my emotions into anything positive. Especially when I really want to just not have anything to do with her. Sister 2 3 kids, recently divorced, living in a motel room. I'm pretty certain that she's a paranoid schizophrenic. She shows all the signs. She is a born again christian, who doesn't want to talk about anything other than her religion. Not that it matters, but I just find it hard to talk to her. She is very distant from the family. Her oldest daughter is my fiances goddaughter, and she loves her more than words can describe. But her sister is so paranoid about their relationship, that she refuses to come down and visit. Her children are never clean, rarely fed a nutritious meal, and her youngest son has all the signs of having autism. When he was a baby, she would let her son bang his head on the crib for hours at a time. I have a fear that this one sister is going to do something drastic one day. She is batshit crazy enough. I fear if I'm going to be strong enough to support my wife, if god forbid, something did happen. But it's inevitable, and very scary. Her children are being raised as criminals. That's about as far as I want to get into it. There have been so many occasions where I have felt disrespected, despite the countless times and I don't keep count I've helped this family with their bullshit. But this is becomming borderline crying, and I have to apologize in advance. Part of discussing this is also getting it off my chest. Can someone please help me find some good in the situation, please?  Edit spelling and grammar<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I hate my soon to be in-laws. details about them inside\n","id":"9d864ec3-8aab-48ae-b5d0-c857a18f1f53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are moral properties natural properties?<|ARGUMENT|>On naturalism there is no reason to believe free will exists, because naturalism holds that we are electrochemical machines functioning under the direction of natural laws, therefore on naturalism there cannot be moral duties.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if there is objective good and bad states, morals concerned with the principles of right and wrong behaviour don't exist if there is no free will.\n","id":"3db7c852-a129-451c-b9ea-a0b88e57a7c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The basic idea is to tax all land and natural resources at close to 100 of their rental value. This would essentially eliminate real estate speculation. At the moment, a lot of valuable land is held idle for speculative purposes. This tax would free up that land so that society can gain the economic benefits from its use. In the US, vacant houses outnumber homeless people. By making it expensive to hold on to land without using it, we could force those homes on to the market and make housing more affordable for everyone. Socially, this would be a way to resolve historical injustices. In the US, land was taken from the Native Americans. Countless countries all across the world have seen the exploitation of peasant farmers by wealthy landlords. In Zimbabwe, the issue with the white farmers shows the disasterous consequences of simply redistributing that land. At the same time, the new distribution is not necessarily more just. With a land value tax, we could use a percentage of the proceeds to create a basic income, so that all people will share equally in the land wealth of a country, regardless of history. EDIT Forgot to mention that it's the least disruptive and most enforceable method of collecting tax I can think of. Land can't be offshored or hidden. It doesn't require a huge bureaucracy to spy on everyone's income. And if there is a capital flight away from the land of one country, that will just lower the value so someone else can use it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A georgist land value tax would be beneficial both economically and socially.\n","id":"2e04c60b-6d3a-4a37-a41c-15aec38df59a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I started learning coding with VBA. It's case insensitive, and it doesn't really care about case. It'll automatically change your case to the correct one in the instance where it does matter, and it'll auto fit your variables to how you defined them earlier. This means I don't need to think about cases at all when coding, and can focus on the actual code. However, I've heard quite a few times that case sensitive languages are better, for reasons. The only one I've heard cited is that you can have multiple variables that look the same, but just differ by capitalization IE i and I are different. I'd rebut that by saying having the same variables with different capitalization being the only different is a horrible, horrible naming convention that'll cause problems down the line. But I recognize that I'm not an amazing programmer. Why should I believe that case sensitive languages IDE's are better than case insensitive?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe case-insensitive programming languages are better than case-sensitive, and most would be improved by switching over\n","id":"caed3b78-0ec0-4121-90eb-3bd5d43eec28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TL DR I believe that burning a book can be a symbol of disagreement with the ideas presented within that book, that it does not necessarily mean that you cannot handle the opposing opinions presented in that books, and that it is never destroying information. I'm shocked to find that so many people, even people whom I agree with on several other topics, believe burning a book is an inherently immoral thing to do. When asked why, they say Burning a book is destroying knowledge, and only those who hate knowledge would do so. However, I believe it is a symbol of disagreement. Firstly, if it's a book which has thousands or millions of copies in print, then burning one copy is not destroying knowledge, since other copies exist and are easily accessible. Secondly, I don't believe every book represents knowledge. A book like Mein Kampf is inherently different from a book like On the Origin of Species, because Mein Kampf contains the opinions and philosophy of the author, but On the Origin of Species contains factual information I'm using Mein Kampf in this example, because it's the closest thing to a universally hated book that I can think of . If we believe that every book represents knowledge, then we must also believe that every author is also knowledgeable, or wise, which brings up a problem when different books contradict each other. That is a generalization, and it limits our understanding of the topics the book is about. Instead, I think we should judge each book by its content, and, by extension, the knowledge or wisdom of its author. So, Mein Kampf doesn't represent knowledge simply because it is a book. Now, say I finish reading Mein Kampf, and I am disgusted and reviled by it, so I choose to show my disagreement and disgust by burning it. We have already established that I'm not destroying knowledge, because there are other copies, and the book does not represent knowledge just because it is a book it only represents knowledge or wisdom if we subjectively decide its author or opinions are wise, or if it contains facts . How, then, is burning it immoral? What other reasons are there that burning it is a bad thing to do? Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe book burning is not inherently immoral.\n","id":"69a46ce7-6a40-4abe-b8b2-db1c093b8f80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think the problem with yes or no voting is that it forces legislators into two opposing sides that fall into partisan, identity and emotion related fights rather than really debating and falling onto a spectrum, which is how most participants in group decisions actually fall onto. I think that a legislator should be able to give a partial vote so that when negotiating, compromising, and arguing, each legislator can voice their true opinion. This also takes a great deal of power away from swing vote legislators, whose very slight changes of opinion or negotiation may overrule the true majority of preference, and empowers each legislator individually, as they all can give more or less of their vote as various proposals come closer or further to what they want. This also, in my opinion, would make government more representative, as a candidate could actually give a fraction of a vote which represented the fraction of voters in their district who support a proposal. And, you could see more queen of the hill proposals and representativeness, which is where multiple proposals are voted on, with the one with the most votes succeeding. Perhaps the legislators could rank the proposals, so that if they split their vote in some fractional manner, then their vote would only go to proposals with a shot at winning. As for the voters, I have a vague speculation that more people might come out and vote if they felt they could protest by giving their preferred candidate less than their full vote, as a way of chastising them for not fully representing them. Also, more moderate voters could split their vote between the candidate that represents their lean on the political spectrum, and a more moderate candidate, with the net result being that whichever candidate loses, that voter or candidate could perhaps rank or transfer the vote to the next most moderate and acceptable candidate, fulfilling those moderate voters' desires, and thus making the government more representative and satisfying. EDITS Voters would not change the vote mid counting, they would have some kind of option to rank candidates instead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legislators and voters should be able to give partial and split votes, with the ability to transfer their vote if their preferred options can't win.\n","id":"53ec1f97-76a9-4008-bfc8-da2bb3ca328d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Please read this from the r IAmA mods I have no problem with Victoria herself, just the concept of Victoria from reddit is here helping me out . To me the entire point of an AMA is having someone of note interact with this unpredictable medium. Ask Me Anything . It's fun and interesting to see them negotiate the comments, with the potential for them to be reading the most bizarre and funny points of view, with strange interactions on lower voted comments as well as random replies to far reaching child comments. Victoria from Reddit turns the medium into yet another send in your questions and we'll pick the best to ask this person who is so much better than you . Instead of interacting directly with someone, there's a filter. A filter who types the same way in every AMA, using italics and laughs and umms which completely takes away from it for me. Here Victoria says that the Woody Harelson AMA would have turned out differently Which shows that comments are being filtered. That is what made AMAs so great, it's a celeb being talked to directly, and this is more often POSITIVE rather than that negative example. In essence I think Victoria turns it into a basic interview with fan questions that has been done a million times before. If a brand wants to promote via AMA, jump in and get dirty. I don't even read AMAs anymore if it's got Victoria doing the typing. If there's a better way of looking at this , please , I want to enjoy AMAs again without the frustration. Reason for view change I still dislike AMAs with Victoria, and am clearly not the only one. This comes from Victoria creating a difference between the celebs and us average Joes. Of course this isn't always the case. As it turns out, Victoria will help anyone that fits in her schedule. So in reality it is just some AMAs Ludacris as a recent example that may turn out far more interesting if they had to navigate the website themselves in exchange for publicity. With a few people commenting with first hand experience, I've decided that because the benefits of Victoria are more heavily weighted by the majority, my post title view has been changed. Even if I'm stuck hating the AMAs, Victoria doesn't ruin them. Thanks for all the replies gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your overlords. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes always change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please don't Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Celebrity AMAs are ruined by Victoria from Reddit\n","id":"15ff35a1-09a3-498b-8071-fff5e69db2c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't believe it is fair or just to blame the convincer for the actions of the convinced. I think this denies agency and responsibility to the convinced. For example I don't think the tempter has any responsibility for the actions of the tempted. The tempted made their own decision and bare the sole responsibility for their actions. If I offer heroin to a recovering addict and they fall off the wagon I don't feel i have any responsibility in the addicts's relapse. They chose to relapse, I didn't force them to do anything. If I advise some one that it might be in there best interest to kill their spouse and they do it I feel that i would be in no way responsible for that murder. Similarly if i bet a drunk he cant jump from the second story into the pool and he grievously injures himself in the attempt I believe he should hold no ill will toward me because he made his own decision. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it is unfair to blame those that convince some one to do something for the actions perpetrated by the convinced.\n","id":"6c8b5e49-2b01-49ab-984f-0cdf0c51336e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A good example would be climate change deniers who staunchly ignore the tidal wave of scientific evidence based on their personal untrained opinion or political bias. A few others would be evolution or insert political ideal here .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the vast majority of people are too arrogant and uneducated to listen to and accept a reasonable argument as being a valid point.\n","id":"8ebe71b9-cf37-49a5-9a28-79a67eba5baf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Israeli raid on Gaza flotilla<|ARGUMENT|>Thomas Friedman. \"When Friends Fall Out.\" New York Times. June 1, 2010: \"It is overwhelmingly in Israel\u2019s interest to bring more diplomatic imagination and energy to ending this Gaza siege. How long is this going to go on? Are we going to have a whole new generation grow up in Gaza with Israel counting how many calories they each get? That surely can\u2019t be in Israel\u2019s interest. Israel has gotten so good at controlling the Palestinians that it could get comfortable with an arrangement that will not only erode its own moral fabric but increase its international isolation. It may be that Hamas will give Israel no other choice, but Israel could show a lot more initiative in determining if that is really so.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blockade of Gaza is generally contrary to Israel's interests\n","id":"720186f6-473e-4768-a92c-8df669dd0de0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the common situation where, to have a cone is the same price as to have a cup, a cone is the superior option. First of all, as we all know, the cone is edible, where the cup is not. In some cases, there is even a chocolate filling at the bottom of the cone. Furthermore, the cone is mobile. I can walk with an ice cream cone and eat it with one hand. To do the same with a cup requires two hands and slightly more coordination on the move. There are two points that are often brought up against my case. The major disadvantage of a cone is, admittedly, that it is a more vulnerable choice on a hot day. The ice cream melts, and can go over the sides on to your hands, forcing you to consume it faster. But I'd consider the benefits to more than make up for this, especially the edible container part. Another strength of the cup is that you can switch between flavours. I don't give this much weight, as you will eat it all anyway.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ice cream is better in a cone than a cup.\n","id":"1c366493-2a80-4a5b-b52c-4bd8282cdbc2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start with a couple important things I am a biracial, african american male from the U.S. I am also not racist, i'm all about tolerance. With that in mind, i'll start my explanation. I remember watching the Ernest Green Story great movie, great message in Jr. High over the time of about a week. One reason that the governor in this movie gave for not allowing black people in white schools stuck with me, though. He said that black people have been shown to be less intelligent than white people. On the surface, this seems absurd the logic behind not allowing blacks in school because they're less smart is beyond me, anyway but if you think about it, there may be a grain of truth, for a couple reasons 1 Most people in the US at the time were recently descended from slaves. 2 Slaves were very poor when they were released after the Civil War. 3 Poor people cannot afford education, as it is usually fairly expensive. 4 All the above, plus the fact that they are discriminated against meant that the cheap systems that were offered to black people were often lazy and only borderline educational. So basically, most black families were too poor to get their children a good education, so their children, without a good education, wouldn't be able to make good money for their own families, so their children wouldn't get a good education and so on ad nauseam. So although the governor was wrong in discriminating against the blacks, that specific reason he gave wasn't completely unfounded. Again, the reasoning, Black people aren't smart, so we shouldn't let them get smarter, is ridiculous, but the first reason is fairly reasonable. Am i right? If not, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that black people during the civil rights movement were significantly less intelligent.\n","id":"0ef0f515-e469-4648-b5f2-fc1862c89b9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Parties usually spend at least 8 years in office. Since 1932 there has only been one instance of a party spending less than 8 years in office.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump is likely to win in 2020, regardless of what the Democrats do, so any impacts on his popularity should not matter to the Democrats.\n","id":"b219744c-d047-4317-b306-5e3df64d3102"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it okay to physically torture prisoners?<|ARGUMENT|>It depends on what we're talking about. There a line of separation between peeling off fingernails or pulling teeth and pouring water on a terrorist's face or keeping him awake. Calling the latter torture diminishes the word. Those are perfectly acceptable in order to get life saving information.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some methods that may be considered torture are not so damaging as to be illegitimate.\n","id":"ae66415d-58ea-4890-ae3b-26169ff18430"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, an unwillingness to adapt to other management style or communication style may cause implementing one's own styles, without regard to others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Representatives of other cultures will impose their own values and habits.\n","id":"8f02fcd3-81c5-4e7c-9e1f-fb448e0fe893"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>There exist many different religions and beliefs for which God has different goals, attributes and properties, etc. For example see a list of Chistian denominations and their different conceptions of God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are multiple and sometimes contradicting versions of God between different religions, and even within religions people sometimes do not agree on a single definition.\n","id":"4afc7a7d-b03c-4ee5-b52c-fbeaf9be13b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, this is from a north american view. I'm not talking about anywhere except north america Now, i am an MRA. And while some of the thing's posted on r MensRights isn't that important, reading through the articles, seeing the injustices done by society to men, it's difficult to see how some would be against it. Now, the MRA hasn't to my knowledge ever said that men's issues are more important than women's. I'm not saying that women don't face injustices of their own. But to deny half of the population a way to fix those problem's simply because they have different genital's is sexist. I don't think Feminism cares about the right's of men. I haven't seen them do anything that actually benefits men, and if they have, they've done 2 things that are detrimental to men. If feminism can fix men's problems too, that's nice. But what's wrong in making a community with people who have shared similar situations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that anyone who is against the MRA hasn't actually spent the time to read why it's important.\n","id":"8efd45e2-31bb-4f2e-840c-130361189963"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If I can't sell my Kidney to a rich diabetic, or can't buy sex from a woman who wants to sell it, why am I allowed to buy semen from a man? More importantly, why are we allowed to shop through a catalogue and evaluate the sperm based on the size, appearance, and economic success of the donor, then after getting the five or six zygotes matching the traits the patronizer has shopped for murder the zygotes that do not match what you wanted to purchase. It just seems like the worst variety of human rights violation. Edit 1 ~~ this is the post and my comment that got me angry enough to seek a  Deleted comment, was too emotional and called for violence. I do not think my opinions are valid scientific facts, but would still appreciate someone who can make me see Artificial Insemnination as something other than a Eugenics program Edit 2 As I responded to someone, I think this summarizes my view I don't hate anybody, I just think that human life must be deliberate and chosen and agreed. It can't become utilitarian, anonymous, and commercial or we will truly be worthless gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Sperm Donation should be illegal, that it is the same as Eugenics, and that to safeguard mankind the entire industry and all who patronize it must be destroyed.\n","id":"79558b45-1f81-4802-b48f-6d3e081740e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It has come to my attention that if you talk to any movie buff about greatest Disney movies made, Beauty and the Beast always somehow weasels itself into their lists. I'm not going to say the movie's awful, because it's not. I'm not even going to say it's bad. And while I did enjoy this movie, I never thought it was something great or revolutionary. For the sake of argument, I'll list my problems with it Belle. I find her to be void of personality whatsoever. She's very 2D like the old princesses such as Snow White or Aurora. And she's also somewhat of a Mary Sue. What is the likely hood that the prettiest girl in all of the town is also the most well read, articulate, modest, selfless and non judgemental? She's too perfect of a character for me, with her only negative counterparts being that she is some of those descriptions to a fault. The love story. Beast is an ACTUAL Beast. He's not just beastly very hard on the eyes, he's an actual monster animal looking thing. He's not human. Like, at all. Belle has no way of knowing that he was once a human and cursed into being a beast. Sure, she goes into that one wing of the castle and sees a picture of the human him on the wall, but if you're telling me that she pieced everything together after that, you're lying to yourself as well. She willingly fell in love with an animal. In a romantic way. Not to mention the fact that he kidnapped her and she fell in love with him, which I think is commonly referred to as Stockholm Syndrome, but idk. Gaston's death. Why? Why kill him? Because he tried to kill the beast? In Gaston's defence, the Beast is almost the same character, but with a second chance at redemption. To me killing Gaston was the easy way of just burying that story. We're supposed to hate Gaston and love the Beast but they're just too similar that I can't have such opposing views on them. At least Gaston was humorous and got a song. Human Beast appearance wise No. Timing pacing There actually seemed to be a very minimal time that went past in this movie. There was hardly any interaction between the two, thus making me feel as though the love between them didn't exist at all. The initial conflict. I don't have too big of a problem with this, but his consequences for being a dick don't seem to fit. He gets turned into a beast, which sounds about right, but where my problem lies is where he can't be turned back into a human unless he learns to love another and be loved by another. This, on paper, seems fine, but at the end of the day, he falls in love with the prettiest girl in town. How does that prove anything? I know it's Disney and the possibility of an ugly female love interest doesn't exist, but it seems a little counter productive to have the man who judges people off of how they look to fall in love with the prettiest girl. rant It should be noted again that I don't hate this movie, I rather enjoy it. But there are far better Disney movies out there. It should also be noted that while I find most of the songs in this movie to be forgettable as hell how many are there? 3? , I rather enjoy the scene of Tale As Old As Time Beauty and the Beast. So. Change my views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Beauty and the Beast is NOT one of the greatest Disney movies.\n","id":"c37f5767-446a-4615-a405-0f7073858b9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's easier to spot the flaws in the argument of the opposing party. It's easier to put your points forth more coherently. Contradictions can be caught much easily.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that written debates are more effective than verbal debates.\n","id":"3005b5df-1409-4a82-95e3-167cd50b2098"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is globalisation good or bad?<|ARGUMENT|>Globalization as part of the consumer engine that supports artificially high population and unsustainable pressure on natural systems. It is bad because it accelerates the threat to our species and planet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Globalization is bad for the environment, effectively increasing global warming.\n","id":"9ad6bf6d-a766-4bea-ba0d-8e2ebd3de4cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>Fair trade can support workers in learning to realize their rights and negotiate the terms and conditions of their work through trade unions and collective bargaining.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fair trade helps establish more humane labour norms in the developing world.\n","id":"97431b6a-34ea-40f0-a02e-12d6d37efc32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it unethical to use ad-blockers?<|ARGUMENT|>Users can be directed to redeemable coupons or limited period discounts which they would otherwise be unaware of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Online advertisements can help users find alternatives and often cheaper products they wouldn't otherwise know about.\n","id":"16291d47-f50d-4add-b7fd-8b2d44a59d6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Iconic CEO gone. Less innovative CEO in. Profits have been soaring, but there's been a lull in innovation and competition has also been rising. Phones and tablets are a mature market, yet Apple still relies on them for a majority of their revenue. Their desktop industry is vanishing. Their laptop industry is holding on, although the past 2 years have been horrible for Macbooks in a wide variety of ways between the controversial keyboards, absence of ports, dated specs, high prices, cheap display on the MBA. Even their iPhone has been playing catchup for the past several years. They haven't really made any large strides forward in their products in the past 3 years. Apple really has not much else to go. The car is the no go. Google and other companies beat them to the internet of things industries. Apple seems to be entrenched in tablets and not really pursuing much else, and it may cost them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Apple is approaching a complacent plateau, similar to Microsoft 10 years ago.\n","id":"4d8c39f3-3ff6-4d05-ac07-b0403fd46e81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US have withdrawn from NAFTA?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if withdrawing from NAFTA resulted in the return of manufacturing to within US borders, it is unlikely that manufacturing jobs would have returned to the regions and individuals that lost them. Automation has meant that developments in advanced manufacturing have not aided workers displaced by NAFTA.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Withdrawing from NAFTA would not have led to manufacturing jobs returning to the US.\n","id":"ebfae4f1-6592-4d83-bdab-42b1284d3586"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The professional Dutch and Belgian football leagues should merge<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, Belgiums league has difficulty attracting more than 5,000 people per game. Merging will add an element of interest that may attract more fans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The games in the combined league will be on average more attractive than the average of the games in the leagues separately\n","id":"36262508-2dcc-4c03-ac10-28768c312c94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should Self-Driving Cars Kill?<|ARGUMENT|>The regular rules of the road are always suspended for presidential, vice presidential motorcades and for foreign heads of state. This is one such example where self-driving cars will not be able to predict how the motorcade drivers will react.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The enhancement of general security on the roads requires the absolute predictability of every actors' behavior. This is exclusively the case with self-driving cars and not with irrational and differently acting human drivers among them.\n","id":"b7eac3f5-0a83-4a33-b465-14df2a23eba4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abstinence-only vs. comprehensive sex education<|ARGUMENT|>Cynthia McKinney, former US House Representative D-GA wrote on 16 Sept. 2008 - \"Teaching human sexuality is a parental and school responsibility. Young people should be provided with education regarding their own and others' sexuality at the earliest appropriate time. This includes age-appropriate education about AIDS\/HIV, appropriate methods of prevention, and the distribution of condoms in schools.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Schools are obligated to help teach kids about their sexuality\n","id":"b06db838-3fb5-450a-ba9b-31eba1ab1336"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think it depends on the expectations you had and whether you are willing to lower them once it becomes evident you aren't going to meet them. This is especially true for those who can't really lower their expectations without losing something that makes life worth living. For instance, if you have to give up your self respect in exchange for other people's pity if you want social experience with them. Or those who lose some dignity everyday to make some money to keep on living. Am I supposed to believe a life of being seen as a lesser or seeing myself as unworthy is a life worth living? Some may point towards the fact that you can change your life , but there's ample evidence that shows that some people just can't and therefore, shows that there are some lifes thtat aren't beautiful and wouldn't be worth living to the fullest . Those who have screwed up as far as time is concerned don't get a chance to re do what they were supposed to do at a specific time. For instance, those that are already old and have never had friends or partners or anything, they can't just try to be social or romantic or anything as though as nothing happened before, because their obvious inexperience will pop up, and people who realize this will either look down on them, look at them suspiciously or worse, pity them. And even if they weren't, what sort of life are they looking forward to? Is a life in which you spend time around people who have enjoyed so much more of it while you were out of society or whatever worth living? Being reminded of all the things you missed? Being around people for whom you are nothing but what's left of life's good times ? I make this  because I've heard people tell people who have become shut ins late into life that they are wasting their lives or that they should go out and enjoy the little time they have on Earth . Considering some of them are well past the point where they can re introduce themselves into society without any negative, permanent consequence, that's simply asinine in my opinion. If not cruel. Surely they can make their lifes as comfortable as possible until the moment they die, but there's no reason for them to go out and remind themselves everyday all they are missing on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think all lifes are beautiful and that demand that we live them to the fullest\n","id":"63e1944e-1606-49a3-9dbe-fa6923d1b94f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>From 2006-2016 almost 6,885 people in the U.S. died from unintentional shootings. In 2016 alone, there were 495 incidents of accidental firearm deaths.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are more deaths from unintentional shootings than defensive use.\n","id":"ed8e886b-08c9-45a7-8d8b-d8ff8955e73d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Since God is a spiritual entity, there is enough evidence for his existence in the fact that we feel his presence in our hearts and acknowledge it as such through terms like the Holy Ghost. Feeling him is tantamount to seeing him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Looking for empirical evidence for God is a category mistake. Empirical evidence is something that you can test, observe, and repeat. You can not do this with an immaterial God.\n","id":"2734062f-e011-4b7c-ae97-932aa37ad908"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I watched Chappy on an airplane a while ago and loved it. So far everyone I've talked to as well as all the reviews I've read were terrible and hated it. Nobody has explained why yet except for it's not as good as district 9 or some production stuff I don't really care about. This is probably the most mundane cmv I've ever touched but i'm curious why people think its so bad and if I just missed something. I understand the villain was ridiculous and plain weird but I thought it focused on a lot of really important topics and portrayed ai in an interesting light as well as having a lot on the topic of parenting and how children develop. tl dr I thought chappy was good, why do people hate it?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I thought Chappy was a good movie. probably spoilers.\n","id":"10d93cbf-65c4-451f-80f0-ace99f1f6174"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>By cooperating and developing strong economic ties with countries around the world, the US has been able to use those economic relationships to influence and dictate the behaviour of others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In foreign policy, it is often necessary to cooperate with those you disagree with in order to improve the world or the way in which rogue actors conduct themselves.\n","id":"fe433cc7-3310-4252-91aa-aa012bc5e307"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Given that people are more likely to value the claims of a person who has spoken them confidently, shouldn't it be incumbent upon the persuader to minimize the confidence in their speech? Failing to do so invites one's audience to accept claims without thinking as critically about them as they otherwise may have. To me, this seems akin to deception, even if you truly do believe in the claims you're making. Surely it's not as bad as intentionally manipulating them, but shouldn't you want to ensure your words only influence people with their own for lack of a better word consent? This isn't to claim that the listener has no responsibility in the matter, of course. You can't control what someone will believe or how critically they think. All you can do is shape your own behavior in such as way so as not to contribute to a potential problem. As far as the listener is concerned, I think it's probably equally incumbent upon them to attempt to filter out confidence from someone whose ideas they're considering. In a mutual effort toward effective information sharing and building, it seems like these are beneficial, if not crucial, things to consider. Change my view? Edit I feel like I should attempt to explain this a bit better. I don't mean to suggest that you should act like you have no stake in your belief, but rather that there are ways to present information that invite consideration. That probably seems obvious, but it seems like often people are content to just proudly proclaim something and leave it at that Err, if you see what I mean, can you think of a way I could explain it a bit better? Lol. I do feel strongly about this belief, but of course I'm here inviting feedback to either make it more robust or possibly completely transform it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Persuading with confidence is unethical.\n","id":"9e183281-b56e-4e8e-927e-f43298714b5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to experience what it feels like to be religious. I want to experiment and see if my life gets any better by worshipping a god. However, I find that I don't know which religion to start from, there are simply too many. All have different beliefs. There are monotheistic, pantheistic, there are religions where you have to do a lot of things to please god, and there are religions where you are to get rid of all of your possessions to find your true self. Studying Philosophy, I've found that a lot of philosophers found peace by believing in a god. I can't seem to figure out which religion to start, and want you to change my view. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are too many religions for me to be religious.\n","id":"1404289f-2ab4-49a1-8754-b9eed4e4cf10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Out of all places on the political spectrum, the most infuriating one is those who claim they don't care about politics for whatever reason. All politicians are bad just for example. No adult should be proud of this stance. This isn't some kind of enlightenment those concerned with politics have simply failed to have. This is how every child in middle school and under thinks. This is intellectual sloth and a resignation to being a passenger to life. Like it or not, politics directly affect each and every one of us. I don't expect people to stress over the political climate day in and out, no one has time for that. But staying informed and participating in discourse is crucial to progress Deltas to anyone who can make a case for this school of thought Edit This is not a stance on whether or not you identify as left or right or whatever. I am personally a centrist as far as policy goes. This is about the choice to stay ignorant<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being \"apolitical\" is intellectual laziness and not a trait to be proud of\n","id":"8d366030-e4bc-42c6-8372-2f0ff7d51781"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Ego is a human condition, is part of us, we can't get rid off it. Anyone who experiences complete Ego Death will eventually forget who he she is. Ego is what builds us individually. From the moment we wake up in the morning cleanup, dressup, eat, work, etc. , the Ego will always be present, it reminds us who we are. Every species experiences Ego in a way to be able to survive. The problem with human Ego is that it has become more than just feeding yourself with enough food to, I want more and more than just necessary food needed, I want nice things, I want to get attention from people, i want the latest, i want big things, etc. In a way, our Ego has become bigger than our conciousness, creating a fake reality for us, an illusion matrix . It has become out of control, allowing us to think that everything outside of us is a source for happiness and love so we need to get more and bigger things and depend on others when it comes to feelings. The Ego is helping us forget who we truly are in this planet. It is allowing us to destroy this planet and eventually destroy ourselves. We need to become aware of our Ego<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think if we don't do anything about our Ego, we will eventually wipe ourselves off this planet...\n","id":"9684037d-5ec2-4332-82d0-b8186e50fe77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>The UN has said that gender stereotypes can harm and limit children's capacity to develop their personal abilities, pursue their professional careers and make choices about their lives and life plans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender roles stifle individuality in children from a young age.\n","id":"03a8d77c-1701-4c8f-9a1a-6c10e0d10df1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should provide healthcare: the government or the market?<|ARGUMENT|>Supporting a market driven healthcare system means choosing underprivileged children, poor, and catastrophically ill people will suffer and die only to save money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Only government can ensure equality of healthcare availability, which is the only fair way to provide it.\n","id":"fe9e03ac-1abc-42e3-b77b-087588aa3726"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>\"The form of worship religion that is clean and undefiled from the standpoint of our God and Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their tribulation, and to keep oneself without spot from the world\" Jas 1:27 A religious group is much better equipped to take care of widows and orphans because they do so out of love.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most religions have spread a message of love and respect to others.\n","id":"ac17d577-381d-4d86-b2e3-42c912617578"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>He was dating a girl who said she needed time several months apart . After my friend made it clear that it hurt him when she did it, she continued. I have had friends who have very bad stories about such things they are just fishing around , and my sister who offered it to her boyfriend if he wanted. Either way, it's bullshit. I don't expect dating to be a 24 7 magical ride because I am an adult. I will never subject somebody i'm in a relationship with to such bullshit, and I don't think my friend should wait for her and HOPE she becomes more mature while it hurts him. He was begging her not too and she declined every time. I see that as a lack of comprimise and I told him to dump her.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I gave my friend the right dating advice\n","id":"a174f790-3849-4cb2-8df6-855c37d1bf87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm an exmuslim. I would identify myself as an agnostic atheist. However, I have some interest in religions, and there are some that I have a lot of respect for, particularly Buddhism. I think the Buddhist system of thought is incredibly elegantly structured, and that its conclusions follow logically from it's premises. I can't say the same of my former faith because I think that the way it defines God is self contradictory and self defeating. From Wikipedia God exists. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. A perfectly good being would want to prevent all evils. An omniscient being knows every way in which evils can come into existence. An omnipotent being, who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, has the power to prevent that evil from coming into existence. A being who knows every way in which an evil can come into existence, who is able to prevent that evil from coming into existence, and who wants to do so, would prevent the existence of that evil. If there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being, then no evil exists. Evil exists logical contradiction . The most common argument that I've heard against it is that evil is the result of free will. Evil is merely the absence of good. However, how is free will possible in a world with an omnipotent God who can determine every choice that you will ever make? Even in the absence of God, I would consider myself a hard determinist. All of our choices are determined by genetics and circumstance, so how can you justify the existence of free will? Now, I'm not planning on converting back to Islam after any of these responses, because there would still be a lack of evidence. But based on this argument, I don't see Abrahamic faiths as logically coherent in the same way that I see Buddhism as coherent, and I want to know if there's any reason that I should?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that The Problem of Evil is an insurmountable theological problem that effectively disproves Abrahamic faiths.\n","id":"725ef16f-2cad-4ea7-a4c7-bfdfa71c65db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is almost impossible to argue due to the strong media hype train discrediting energy drinks as the devil that kills children, but I'll give it a shot. Energy drinks typically have less caffeine than a large cup of coffee your typical Grande Venti starbucks coffee . In fact the amount in a typical grande coffee is roughly double that of a Rockstar Despite this fact I personally feel more awake after a Rockstar, and only require one during the day I actually feel gross if I drink more than one, which is also a great reason to have them they limit your caffeine consumption due to the vitamin B overload that happens if you have more than 1 . When I drink coffee I can drink 2 5 a day no problem. So that explains away the knee jerk reactionary argument of caffeine content is HUGE in those things . Knee jerk reactionary argument 2 there's all sorts of CHEMICALS in those things, they taste like battery acid I've had this argument many times, so I've extensively looked at the ingredients in my Rockstar. None of them are shown to cause adverse health effects or really any effects at all in anything close to the dosages in your typical energy drink. In fact most of them granted usually in higher dosages are shown to have beneficial effects on your health. I'll pick one at random, inositol seems to have wide reaching benefits. There is also a nice cache of Vitamin B, which if I were to take as a supplement everyone would applaud me for my healthy lifestyle choices. It also has things like ginseng, ginkgo biloba, and milk thistle extract. While I personally don't think any of these do a goddamn thing, I would also be applauded by earth loving health nuts if I took them as a pill. Knee jerk reaction 3, and the only one I truly think is valid the high sugar content is horribly bad for you. Agreed. This is why I go sugar free. Now the argument turns to aspartame being the devil. I was going to do a  on this earlier, but I'll just tack it on to this one. Aspartame is the most tested food additive in history. Hundreds upon hundreds of studies have shown absolutely no adverse health effects. Before you go into the it makes you crave sugar, it makes your body not understand that sugar gives you nutritional content, it gives you brain cancer, it gives me headaches, it's a carcinogen, it kills babies, it's CHLORINATED I've been through all these arguments before. If you take a solid scientific view on the stuff and look at only studies that haven't been completely discredited you will come to the same conclusion as me this stuff is more than likely safe. I won't say for sure safe but it's been around long enough, and been studied enough that if it's not safe we can't really say for certain anything is safe in our world. Certainly we can say it's safer than sugar, which has readily apparent side effects that don't take 50 years of intense research to notice. For an added bonus jab those who say that aspartame gives you a headache that is shown to be completely psychosomatic. Double blind tests have shown that there is no side effects to consuming aspartame whatsoever, even in people that previously claimed the headache stance. I truly hope someone can  on this one. Mostly because coffee is cheaper.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe energy drinks are more healthy than coffee.\n","id":"9dde006c-e09b-4e43-b711-9f1bc73008a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok so I know the vegan debate has been going on for a while, and while i\u2019m not vegan I think most people who eat meat are hypocrites. People get upset when Hollywood treats animals badly or just when animals are treated badly in general. At the same time they are eating meat that came from an animal that was treated poorly it\u2019s whole life, seeing nothing wrong with it. My view is that I eat meat but I also don\u2019t care much about animals. I guess the question to answer would be what is the distinguishing line between animals we care about and don\u2019t care about. With pets as well, we \u201clove our pets\u201d but we keep them locked up in one place their whole life and feed them the same food every day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Almost everyone who eats meat is a hypocrite.\n","id":"c134ebef-8152-46c4-af0b-21b066af859f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be taught in schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Many atheists, Catholics and Jains as well as some Buddhists do not believe in creationism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious education can be compatible with a rejection of creationism.\n","id":"33c5a690-8214-4ae1-bd99-0dfc51a33190"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love reading rankings of the United States Presidents. I tend to find the more a ranking departs from the standard ranking, the more interested I am in it. The reason for this is partially just that I like reading different viewpoints, but also just because I find the standard ranking absurd. Those ranked at the top are not the best, but just the most interesting. Here, according to Wikipedia is how historians typically rank the top 10 US presidents Abraham Lincoln Franklin D. Roosevelt George Washington Thomas Jefferson Theodore Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Woodrow Wilson Andrew Jackson Dwight D. Eisenhower James K. Polk Lincoln and Washington are obvious choices. I have some big qualms with both Roosevelts and Truman, but I think the good outweighs the bad enough to put them here regardless. I would personally bump Eisenhower down to the next 10 for his coups d\u2019\u00e9tat in Iran and Guatemala, but I can see the argument for his being here. The rest, however\u2026 Thomas Jefferson had a brilliant mind, but when it came to actual policy decisions, he was crap. The Louisiana Purchase, for which he is usually given credit, required no skill on his part unrelated events in Europe had convinced Napoleon to sell Louisiana before Jefferson\u2019s negotiators had even made contact with him. Jefferson hadn\u2019t even been trying to get the whole of Louisiana he only wanted New Orleans, but Napoleon offered him the whole area at a cheaper price per acre than Jefferson had planned to offer for New Orleans. Jefferson sponsored one of the dumbest laws in American history, the Embargo Act of 1807, which banned all exports from the US in an attempt to avoid war with Britain, damaging the economy all across America. Thomas Jefferson originated the philosophy which holds that the Constitution only gives the federal government the authority to spend money only in order to do the things specifically listed in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution despite the same Section clearly stating that the Congress may collect taxes in order to \u201cprovide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States\u201d and providing no indication that there are limits to this power Jefferson\u2019s dishonestly narrow interpretation of the Constitution has since been used to declare everything from Social Security to Medicare unconstitutional. Though Jackson deservedly gets much of the blame, the policy of Indian removal in the US actually began with Jefferson. And, of course, there\u2019s that whole issue of slavery. I think the reason he\u2019s ranked near the top is mainly because he\u2019s so famous, and because of his accomplishments as a Founding Father. Woodrow Wilson was the worst President in American history after Andrew Johnson. Yes, I am familiar with James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, and Franklin Pierce. I stand by my statement. Harding was nowhere near as bad as he\u2019s made out to be more on that later , and while the leadership skills of Pierce and Buchanan were, to put it bluntly, nonexistent, their misdeeds were inaction rather than malice, which to me makes them a little better than Wilson. Wilson, on the other hand, blatantly violated the First Amendment with the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it illegal during times of war to criticize the government, the Constitution ironic, isn\u2019t it? , the military, the war, the American flag , or and I swear to God I\u2019m not making this up the uniform of a US soldier. Fortunately it was repealed after just two years. How this got past the Supreme Court is beyond me. During the Palmer Raids, Wilson had more than 10 000 people arrested or illegally deported just for holding far left views. Woodrow Wilson wasn\u2019t the first nor the last military adventurist to hold the office of the Presidency, but he was one of the biggest, with no less than 10 military interventions happening under his watch in Mexico alone, and a continuous occupation of Nicaragua throughout his Presidency, to say nothing of the occupations of Haiti, Panama, and other nations and the undeclared war in Russia. Woodrow Wilson\u2019s racism is often whitewashed by blaming him only for supporting segregation, but the reality is Wilson actually reinstated segregation at the federal level. Wilson also encouraged racist sentiments by warning about \u201chyphenated Americans\u201d immigrants whom he accused of being \u201ccreatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy\u201d who \u201cmust be crushed out\u201d. But World War One happened while he was POTUS, and that makes his term interesting, so he gets ranked highly. Andrew Jackson was not the worst President the US has ever had though he is up there , but he was probably the worst person to have ever held the office, which is saying something. He vies with Wilson for the title of closest the US has ever come to a bona fide tyrant. The Trail of Tears, an ethnic cleansing ordered by Jackson which killed somewhere between 2 000 and 6 000 people, was possibly the most shameful act in American history. No other POTUS was as staunch a supporter of slavery as Jackson. Jackson appointed the worst Supreme Court Chief Justice in US history, Roger Taney Taney was responsible for the Dred Scott decision, which said that if you were a slave, not only you but all of your descendants did not qualify as American citizens. Andrew Jackson\u2019s economic policies were one of the main causes of the Panic of 1837. Jackson introduced the spoils system, in which a political party, after winning an election, gives government jobs to its supporters, friends and relatives as a reward for working toward victory and as an incentive to keep working for the party, to American politics. Jackson was a strong proponent of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which held that US settlers had a predestined mission to expand across North America and thus justified . But he ranks highly, perhaps because the many badass stories about him make him fun to talk about. James K. Polk is usually called the most underrated and one of the greatest Presidents because he expanded America more than any President other than Jefferson. He should be called one of the worst and most overrated Presidents because he started the only war of conquest in American history. Polk also threatened war with England over Oregon, and got lucky that they were eventually willing to compromise. But like Wilson, he served during a war, so he gets ranked highly. The traditional bottom 10 James Buchanan Warren G. Harding Franklin Pierce Andrew Johnson William Henry Harrison Millard Fillmore John Tyler Ulysses S. Grant Zachary Taylor George W. Bush Of these, only Buchanan, Pierce, Andrew Johnson the worst IMO , and George W. Bush would make my list. I could see the argument for Millard Fillmore. As for the rest, I wouldn\u2019t put any in the top 10, but\u2026 Warren G. Harding is on the list supposedly because of Teapot Dome. The fact that Harding\u2019s cabinet member taking a bribe is considered one of the worst things a President has done goes to show how naive the public was in Harding\u2019s day. Yes, there was corruption in Harding\u2019s cabinet, but it was no worse than under Grant or Nixon or a number of other presidents, and Harding had little personal involvement. Harding urged equal rights for all races but failed to really get anything accomplished in that regard and pardoned Wilson\u2019s political prisoners. No, the real reason Harding is on the list is because he failed to do anything more interesting than appoint a guy who took a bribe. The inclusion of William Henry Harrison, who was in office for less than a month, is insane. Likewise Zachary Taylor, who died after 16 months in office and didn\u2019t really do anything. John Tyler\u2026 well, he supported slavery, and believed in Manifest Destiny\u2026 but so did Jackson and Polk, so what did he do that makes him so much worse? If we\u2019re talking about who had the worst post Presidency, he would probably top the list, having joined the Confederate House of Representatives during the Civil War, but as President he was mediocre at worst. His foreign policy was actually fairly successful, ending the Second Seminole War, negotiating a treaty with Britain defining the border between Canada and Maine, etc. It\u2019s not quite enough to outweigh his strong support for slavery but, given the times, it should be enough to keep him out of the bottom 10. But foreign policy outside of wartime isn\u2019t fun to talk about, so he makes the bottom 10 anyway. Ulysses S. Grant, like Harding, had an administration rife with scandal, but the corruption for which he is blamed was really a longstanding issue going back to Andrew Jackson with the spoils system. Cr\u00e9dit Mobilier, the biggest scandal his administration was involved in, started under Lincoln Grant got passed the 15th Amendment, which banned discrimination in voting based on race. He was the only President from Lincoln to Eisenhower to get some civil rights legislation passed, even though the progress he made was reversed shortly after. It seems to me that, with the notable exception of George W. Bush, wartime Presidents, Presidents with high name recognition, and presidents with a reputation for being badasses tend to get ranked highly, regardless of how good they actually were. Meanwhile, Presidents whose terms did not contain any particularly important events tend to get ranked low regardless of whether they actually did anything wrong. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Historians tend to judge past US presidents more on how interesting their presidencies were than on how good a job they did as President.\n","id":"94011b4c-1ea6-4612-a27d-b983cf3dfa1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It would be unacceptable for a man to wear a mask around in public since he's always been deemed ugly . People would likely assume he's playing a prank, about to commit a crime or a similar act. He wouldn't be able to walk into a shop and ask for the paper without the police being called refer to Sure, he could wear makeup, but do you think every man wants to expend an exorbitant amount just to cover up his face, and be labeled things like faggot , crossdresser , etc. if he's not actually into that? He's just gotta suck it up and be a man , and be rejected because a lot of people judge him solely on his appearance. this  isn't about your idea of what a man should put up with in the name of equality, he shouldn't be discriminated against due to his appearance. All men are beautiful, just like all women, huh? On the other hand, an ugly woman can cake an inch of it on, potentially altering her appearance greatly. I'm sure a lot of us have experienced the morning after when you wake up and she's not half as attractive as she was the night before. I'm also sure a lot of us have seen the pictures of Mila Kunis and many other celebrities with and without makeup she looks like a totally different person to me at least . How is this NOT lying? One could wear a large amount of makeup and rob a shop, and be misidentified due to the cosmetic mask they're wearing. The exceptions I'd allow are for birthmarks, scars and so on. inb4 ul nevr get laid wit an atittytude liek dat xDD Now, not straying from the topic of changing my opinion that makeup is a lie, why do you think I should accept people into my love life who can't even accept themselves?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe wearing makeup is a deceptive practice and is the same as wearing a mask;\n","id":"086baf9f-1a9b-4211-bf6c-a82493867d74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi , first time poster. If I'm going the speed limit on a highway or freeway, technically no other cars can pass me unless they were to exceed the speed limit. Because that is against the law, it should be socially acceptable for me to stay in 'the passing lane'. It is also lawfully acceptable, since there is no law that penalizes drivers for being in particular lanes, as long as he she are going the speed limit. One situation would involve two drivers, where one driver wants to pass simply because he wants to be infront. I fail to see the need to shift over and disrupt traffic in order to let a vehicle pass where that vehicle would simply stay 10 yards ahead of me. If he was passing in order to be able to increase his speed above the speed limit, then that is illegal. I seem to clash whenever this topic comes up and I just don't understand why. Please change my view. EDIT I'm not going to keep posting if people just downvote anything that they don't agree with. This will be the last time I'm posting on this sub. Unsubscribed as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If I'm going the speed limit, it's acceptable for me to be in the left hand lane.\n","id":"2c4b9db0-8ce1-4473-b26a-4a110dac9274"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should renewable energy sources replace fossil fuels?<|ARGUMENT|>We should not shy away from developing new technologies. Fossil fuel power plants were new technology once, but we knew that the stuff would burn.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Replacing fossil fuels with solar and wind power is a very expensive and complex process.\n","id":"66874660-cb60-44e5-bde1-dff91523121c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was recently discussing news sources with my dad, and he started praising OReilly and the like. I scolded him for watching Fox News, and he asked, Well where do you get your news from? Of course I mentioned Reddit and various blogs RSS feeds, but in terms of TV, it's just The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. He said The Daily Show does for the left the same thing that Fox News does for the right. I got to thinking, and realized I have seen quite a bit of liberal bias on the show. Stewart's sidekicks will interview people and intentionally make them look stupid by cutting out their responses, making it look like they're staring blankly at the interviewer, or bumbling. It's all for laughs, but liberal guests are not treated the same way. Then Stewart will frame discussions on a biased foundation recently there was a SCOTUS ruling that the First Amendment prevails on public ground outside an abortion clinic, a 9 0 decision that every legal analyst agrees was correct. Yet Stewart put his whole discussion in terms of how the Supreme Court itself has a protester buffer zone. Nevermind that these high ranking govt officials could likely be assassinated or intimidated into changing the country's operations, or that the judicial branch is an organization which in its standard proceedings does listen to speech from plaintiffs defendents of all points of view. Stewart just said, if SCOTUS gets a buffer, so do abortion clinics, end of story. As another example, Stewart sidekicks always looks at Obamacare from a POV of healthcare is a basic human right, now let's figure out which system provides the most of it at the least cost to the patients , which is of course flawed. He also never gives equal airtime to both sides of the minimum wage discussion. I usually overlook it b c I'm capable of seeing the facts through the haze at least, I hope I am . But my reality is shaken I now come to see The Daily Show as being on equal footing as Fox They both provide commentary on what's already been reported, rather than journalism. They both have partisan agendas who doesn't? . They both entertain viewers who primarily watch to be entertained, primarily by seeing their partisan views confirmed. They both frame the discussions in such a way that they're guaranteed to win an argument, or at least cause their viewers to operate in the frame of mind whereby they will reach a liberal conclusion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Daily Show is Just as Partisan\/Biased\/Propaganda-ish as Fox News, and Neither Should be Viewed as News.\n","id":"8deae4c1-f6f7-4883-a94f-6683ec8f6678"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Net Neutrality Necessary?<|ARGUMENT|>There is evidence in countries, such as Portugal or New Zealand, of the internet being split into different packages which benefits the established services which can pay to be included.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"ISPs are likely to favour services that are already established and popular, such as Facebook, Netflix, or WhatsApp. This would then entrench their position.\n","id":"60b4d86b-dab8-4202-b17e-1f95039e9487"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should pharmacists' scope of practice be expanded to prescribe medications?<|ARGUMENT|>The Position Statement on Pharmacist Prescribing of the Canadian Pharmacists Association staunchly advocates for pharmacist-initiated prescribing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pharmacists themselves strongly support pharmacist-initiated prescribing and feel they are ready for the additional responsibility.\n","id":"859a6994-3534-44e1-bc37-bdbb60efc03f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we be worried about American democracy under President Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>In August 2017, Trump pardoned Sherrif Joe Arpaio who the Justice Department concluded had a horrendous history of racial profiling. He conducted immigration round-ups designed to target anyone who wasn't white. theguardian.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump is a racist. Fundamentally, a racist is against values American democracy is meant to espouse.\n","id":"5bc5cddd-12f7-4d82-af6b-d46b967ebc74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's a strange kind of double think when it comes to mental illness and moral judgement, and I've noticed this particularly in attitudes towards laziness. People don't often draw clear lines between what constitutes laziness and mental illness, and this lack of clarity leads to a lot of cognitive dissonance, often to detrimental and unfair characterizations of people with very real struggles. Ironically, judging someone to be lazy is usually the lazy alternative to empathizing. Laziness is a quality that is often applied to the following types of people the chronically unemployed, the homeless, poor workers, bad students, the un athletic or obese, substance abusers, and more generally, losers in some kind of capacity. Judging someone to be lazy is undoubtedly a moral assertion. So what is going on here? What is the substance behind this sort of accusation? I'm a hard determinist, and this position tends to color my understanding of moral judgements, laziness included. On the level of meta ethics, the hard determinist will typically think, no one can help being bad lazy , but this isn't a useful frame of reference in ethics. All the same, should I be in a position where I must pass judgement, I try to empathize deeply before drawing any conclusions. When I look at the types of people who are called lazy, I see many possible root causes poor genetics, stupidity whatever that means , ADHD, chronic fatigue syndrome, traumatic childhoods, PTSD, personality disorders, physical health problems, financial social personal hardships, grief, depression. Some people are dealt a terrible hand in life, but sometimes these problems are fixable ADHD can be medicated, PTSD can be treated with therapy, physical health problems can be managed, although even in the case where these problems are fixable it is not necessarily obvious what the problem is, nor even necessarily easy to get access to help. With all this in mind, I would say still that laziness often has to do with a lack of motivation, and to the extent that laziness negatively impacts social and professional functioning, I don't see why laziness caused by lack of motivation should be treated any differently than, say, depression. Before I say more I just want to make a few quick distinctions. We are all lazy every once in a while, that is not the kind of thing I am talking about. If this were about alcohol, I would not be talking about people being drunk every once in a while, I would be talking about alcoholics. This identification we all have with laziness as a weakness of character may even be part of the problem we see the laziness of others in ourselves, and yet we seem to have much better control of it so than lazy people do, so that we are unforgiving towards those who lack this control. Another distinction is that some lazy people are obviously that way out of choice. Now, there's a difference between someone who is incapable of being hard working and yet claiming laziness as a lifestyle choice, something done maybe as a defense mechanism, and someone who genuinely has an alternative set of priorities that allows them the real choice to be lazy. This is perhaps the difference between the stoner slacker, and the retired lawyer. It's ok to judge us as far we make real choices as moral agents, but I think it's good to be careful that we judge people on the choices they've really made, not those they had little or no control over. I recognize that my position on this is a little odd, but I have a few reasons for believing it. The most convincing to me, is that I have never seen, read about, or even heard of a seriously lazy person becoming hard working. Unless the root cause of laziness is a treatable condition, it seems as if the evidence shows it is absolutely impossible for a truly lazy person to become hard working. This is a grim view to take, and I'd be happy for someone to prove me wrong, because I do sometimes feel as if I'm pretty lazy, and it feels as if it's something I have little control over. I'd love to think that this is something that can at least in theory be conquered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lazy people often cannot help being lazy.\n","id":"5674fa2d-ed81-46c6-9c82-8828ebb0de3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If God is Real, Should we File a Class Action Lawsuit Against It?<|ARGUMENT|>Jared Beck a lawyer with 2 degrees from Harvard would likely take on this case<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If God is real, then we should file a class action lawsuit against it.\n","id":"29866abc-7697-46ca-8e0e-00d8162cb129"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Historically, the Christian Church has been the greatest provider of not-for-profit social good and responsible for the building of countless schools, hospitals, and other vital social institutions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many religious groups engage in charity and charitable work in their local communities and beyond.\n","id":"a6f8124b-f10d-490b-9e48-77dc4778a65d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>When Jesus was asked the most politically loaded question of his day, he said to \"Give to Caesar what's Caesar's and to God what's God's\". Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim Prophet, a holy man and the namesake of the Christian religion spoke for the separation of church and state in terms of finances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A tax exemption ensures the government is not involved in church finances, and therefore upholds the separation of church and state and ensures religious freedom.\n","id":"fddce1a7-2dea-47e7-855f-c2a03c6b72b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>This is further complicated by a change in crime reporting standards in 2002, which made data from after that point incomparable to data from before that point Home Office p46. In effect, this change increased the numbers of all recorded crime, by requiring police officers to accept victim accounts and report them into the data unless they had evidence they were false.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The initial spike is almost entirely due to an initial spike in reported crimes involving air guns Home Office p36, which largely concerns reports of property damage, not interpersonal damage Home Office p45\n","id":"39b5dba9-b290-49a3-93a6-c70202f1f5ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Bigfoot exists.<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that dental cavities are the result of a contagious bacterial disease is still little known. People think sugar causes cavities, but without streptococcus mutans bacteria to make acid from sugar, eating sweets will not demineralize teeth. Source<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many extraordinary things are factually true and it takes time for the majority to come around before any paradigm shift.\n","id":"b24e81d6-1cf6-4faf-b7b1-b72490b24802"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>September 22, 1824, the date of Joseph Smith's second attempt to retrieve the golden plates had astrological significance because it was both a new moon and the autumnal equinox.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith's story of the golden plates includes elements of astrology\n","id":"2209cbd1-0f72-44a2-8e8f-4b19ebe7d525"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>If one heats pineapple above 80\u00b0C for 8 minutes or longer it inactivates the bromelain in the pineapple. Which makes eating pineapple as a pizza topping ineffective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is only if it was added before cooking the pineapple as bromelain becomes inactive after cooking it.\n","id":"7e0515a8-f39c-4fde-83f8-9329d8aa9a2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Joint JD\/MBA degree<|ARGUMENT|>One of the major, desirable fields of law is in-house counsel for a large or medium size company or a non-profit organization. A JD\/MBA provides the perfect cross-section of business and legal acumen for such a position.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"JD\/MBA valuable for in-house counsel in a company.\n","id":"01e1a2a2-72cd-4cc9-a218-4e630a2d7029"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Remain in the EU if the only Alternative is a Hard Brexit?<|ARGUMENT|>Development of new biological weapons, heavily restricted under EU law, is unlikely given that the UK was the proposer of the original Biological Weapons Convention<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are relatively few EU regulations on research that the UK would not also implement.\n","id":"9ab4656f-b874-4cc8-abde-f0848252cb5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Neonicotinoids are a type of pesticide, specifically an insecticide, that are commonly used in the United States and Canada. The EU has already banned the use of these substances after studies have linked them to bee colony collapse and other adverse effects. They are nerve poisons and the chronic damage caused can include impaired sense of smell or memory reduced fecundity altered feeding behaviour and reduced food intake including reduced foraging in bees altered tunneling behaviour in earthworms difficulty in flight and increased susceptibility to disease. Additionally, the benefits are not worth the risks. It was found that in corn and soybean, the use of neonicotinoids did not increase. source page 14 The importance of bees to farming and other ecosystems cannot cannot be ignored. The US and Canada should act to regulate these harmful substances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States and Canada should ban neonicotinoid pesticides, which have been shown to adversely impact bees.\n","id":"f8d12c1e-2754-477c-9cad-51f791f1a3d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Good evening everyone I have played League for around 4 years now, and I've gone through a few cycles where I would quit league for maybe a few months, but then become entrenched in it for at least a few months, maybe half a year. When I'm fully engrossed in League I play several games a day, and I follow the meta closely, plus I constantly watch video or read guides on how to improve my play. There was a period a few weeks ago where I became pretty addicted to Gears of War 4 which btw is a phenomenal game , but I feel like I always come back and play more League. I know a lot of friends who kind of are in a similar boat as myself, we play League daily for several months, try to quit, and come back to League. I've tried Overwatch, FPSs, RPGs, etc., yet somehow League still feels like the game I come back to. Sometimes, I play League and I don't even really enjoy it, I do it almost out of habit. This is my first time posting in , so I'm not sure what other details I should add, but I guess I want to hear other opinions out there on the issue. Cheers<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no game more addictive than League of Legends.\n","id":"955919a7-dbd8-47ec-a321-68b63f19ca6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I also believe the constitution should be amended to explicitly affirm this right. To clarify I'm following the definition of natural rights proposed by John Locke Liberty everyone is entitled to do anything they want to so long as it doesn't conflict with the first right Life . Estate everyone is entitled to own all they create or gain through gift or trade so long as it doesn't conflict with the first two rights. As a person has the right to own guns 2nd amendment he she has the right to own drugs. If a woman has a right to control what happens to her body regarding abortion , any other person has a right to decide what substances they consume. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe drug use and possession are extensions of the natural rights to liberty and property and should not be violated.\n","id":"76018144-0f3e-477b-ace1-23dfe5ff733b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most people who think humanity is evil, use an actual minority to prove it, like bullies for example. They say that 1 or 2 bullies is an example of people being evil, and not focusing on all the other people at the school who aren't bullies. Some people who think humans are evil use terrorists as an example, but don't focus on the people who aren't terrorists and are against terrorism. Even if the world would end with nuclear war and countries firing nukes at each other, it would be hard to convince me that a majority of people would want that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanity is mostly just people who aren't evil and are just trying to live their life, or mostly good people, and bad people are in a minority.\n","id":"10dc8a91-b891-4485-b6b3-2fe2ee14dcd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Many Republicans want to expand existing religious exemption laws. The National Women's Law Center states that the proposed expansions \"could allow a receptionist to refuse to schedule a patient\u2019s abortion, or an ambulance driver to refuse to transport a woman who needs care for a miscarriage.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious exemption laws are overly broad because they enable religious believers to claim exceptions from anything which may contradict their faith. As such, religious exemption laws can result in religious citizens seeking exemptions from a much larger set of laws than was originally anticipated.\n","id":"087bf21c-4ea0-4937-91b0-97fbd410168b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is not about waxing poetic about non responses to the messages I send out so please do not take it that way. The basis of starting a conversation with anyone in the history of conversations is a greeting. For the life of me I cannot understand why some women use this as a measurement of assumption on how boring the male is. It really stumps me. Why can't the first message be a simple hello? And so you'll hear women all over the r OkCupid sub saying that they ignore the messages will simple greetings, and read the ones where it is 'apparent the man is trying.' To me this sounds as if this is another hoop someone has to jump through just to even talk to the woman. How is this not an entitled way of thinking? This is par for course on the expectations of a dancing monkey. Edit Did my best to argue reasonably. Did my best to read most of the responses in here. Did my best as far expecting r changemyview to be different from other subs. Thanks for unreasonably down voting everything I have said in here. Edit2 I am done responding since you guys cannot quit abusing reddit. I am not going to keep trying to have conversations with you when you're down voting me on everything I'm saying, no matter what I say. Edit3 For the record, none of you changed my mind because the majority of you are personally attacking me without reading any of my responses in the thread. It seems like the majority of you think I am whining about not getting responses when that isn't the problem at all . I have never had a problem with sending or receiving messages, and my dating life is actually quite nice. This was always only about genial greetings suddenly not being enough, not being enough of a complicated hoop to jump through. It is obvious that r changemyview uses down voting to show disagreement, and that is a travesty because I think the general idea of this sub to be absolutely wonderful in so far as I do everything I can to keep myself out of an echo chamber.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women who get upset over simple introduction messages on dating sites, such as a simple hello have an entitled attitude about how they see themselves in the world of dating, and have misguided expectations of the real dating world in our society.\n","id":"b08f2c6f-0fd5-4635-bab7-b5c8a3aecb0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been watching Ninja Warrior since 2011 when it was on G4 and now train regularly at a NW gym in my town that's owned by a guy who's been on ANW a handful of times. I'd call myself pretty good near people like Drew Drechsel or Levi or Nagano, but I can do most everything in the gym I go to and think I could hold my own on a course. But I rarely watch ANW and am not interested at all at competing in ANW because I prefer Sasuke the original Japanese version as both a show and competition. The ANW announcers always use loud, boisterous voices. In Sasuke, the announcers are calm unless they are introducing a competitor, someone falls or almost falls , or someone completes a stage or tough obstacle. It makes the show more exciting because the level of intensity of a competitor's run can fluctuate so much. In ANW, the crowd is always cheering. Traditionally, Stages 2 and 3 have the most challenging obstacles. During those stages in Sasuke, the crowd is silent while the competitor is traversing an obstacle. They will shortly cheer after each one before returning to silence to let the competitor concentrate. In ANW, the crowd is always cheering and screaming. I find this annoying and distracting as a viewer, and I were competing, I'd want silence, especially on stages 2 and 3. And to me, the silence of Sasuke also adds a sense of mysteriousness and seriousness to the competition. ANW is all at night. Stage 1 of Sasuke is run during the day while Stages 2 4 are run at night. This adds a theme of The real competitors come out when the sun goes down. ANW is a complex tournament. It has regional qualifying rounds before the real tournament. You go to the closest city near you that is holding a qualifying round and you run a short stage where you have to come in the top 30. Then you run an extended version of that stage where your have to be in the top 15. At least that's how it was when I stopped watching it. So you could potentially get screwed by completing the first trial stage and then falling on the extended version, possibly on an obstacle that you have already proven you can complete. Sasuke is as simple as applicants send in a video and 100 are chosen to do the 4 stages. End of story. All of the above make ANW too Americanized and ruin the culture of Sasuke. Even if the network announcers never talk about it, most fans know that ANW is based off of Sasuke. Sasuke is simple. No brand endorsement and the prize money isn't seen as important as the honor and personal triumph of achieving total victory. But of course, America had to turn it into a big, westernized sports tournament and throw in money and ads and brands and endorsements and loud announcers crowds and interviews and rankings and put it all in the middle of major cities. I realize it's American Ninja Warrior, but I think this all ruins the original culture of Sasuke. A lot of Sasuke competitors are just average Joes outside of it. Nagano is a fisherman. Akiyama is a fireman. Others are chefs, mailmen, and other varied occupations. Occasionally you'd get someone like Levi who has a background in parkour or gymnastics. Now ANW is flooded with traceurs people who do parkour, granted I'm one of them too , gymnasts, rock climbers, pro athletes, etc. Having average Joes competing made it more relatable to the average viewer. Instead of saying He's a rock climber of course he can climb all that stuff. , people could say That guy is just an electrician? Maybe I could compete If multiple people complete Stage 4 in ANW, there is only one winner, and that is whoever had the better time. However, if multiple people complete Stage 4 in Sasuke, they share the triumph, honor, and glory. ANW doesn't care much about their vets. ANW likes to drop contestants after they run into a rough patch. Rather than having people on the show who you care about and want to see succeed because you've seen what they're capable of in the past, ANW would rather replace them with more sob story contestants. This is definitely a far cry from Sasuke who will stick with their competitors even if they start struggling after a while i.e. most of the All Stars as they aged, particularly Yamada because they know the audience cares about them and wants to root for them even if they aren't the best anymore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I prefer Sasuke over American Ninja Warrior and have no interest in competing in ANW.\n","id":"b493a73f-494e-4df4-8350-e01c800781a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe science and democracy work by free and open debate. The way to limit the influence of bad ideas is to show they are bad ideas. Because nobody is infallible, we need dissenting views in order to learn and make progress. If we decide to begin limiting the influence of what we think are bad ideas by preventing them from being heard in the first place, we prevent ourselves from discovering that we are wrong when we are wrong, and halt progress. An important part of the premise of this is that freedom of speech especially political speech has to be a matter of principle. The whole point of having a freedom is in order to use it to say objectionable things. Sometimes objectionable things are true, and people just don't realize that they shouldn't be considered objectionable until after people have said them. EDIT one commenter asked for examples, which I should have provided from the beginning sorry . one example would be Bernie Sanders' campaign website promising to Bring climate deniers to justice so we can aggressively tackle climate change. Another example can be found here<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prosecuting global warming \"deniers\" is an unjust restriction on political speech.\n","id":"d6e6204b-ed15-46bc-9b60-d3fe7273c3d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>A one-dimensional rhetorical strategy could never encompass the experience of all LGBTQ+ members; 'Born This Way' is no exception, and should therefore not be used as the spearhead of the LGBTQ+ campaign.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Born This Way' is too simplistic and it is incorrect to campaign as though sexuality and by extension, gender are inherent, and often binary concepts, rather than social constructs.\n","id":"36650d1d-10e1-426a-8052-9af97e3c5b40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi all, I've been a long time subscriber to , but this is the first post I've made on this subreddit so let me know if I'm explaining myself poorly or doing something wrong. Essentially, I believe that suicide is a personal decision that people should be allowed to make about their own lives and bodies as long as they are not physically hurting anyone else. I think that there is nothing morally wrong with choosing to die because I don't think choosing to live is morally right neither is right or wrong, existence is just existence. I do not discount the negative repercussions that suicide can have on others, however I do not think that any individual can judge another individual's pain or coping mechanisms and if a person has genuinely sought help for their problem whether a terminal health issue, permanent life change, lifelong battle with mental illness and has come to the conclusion that they are in much more pain existing than they would be not existing, they have the right to do what they need to do to relieve their own pain. I am not suggesting that anyone with depression should have the right to end their lives immediately. I'm not even arguing that suicide should be a legal right. I'm arguing that morally and philosophically, I have not heard a good argument as to why someone who has contemplated and determined that not living has become a superior option to struggling should not be allowed to do so. The rules state to also explain where this viewpoint comes from. I've battled with a pretty serious health condition since college, and although I'm much better now, at the time I was worried that I might die and I researched physician's assisted suicide. After reading a bunch of literature, I came to the conclusion that no doctor could judge a patient's physical pain and that if the patient would rather die with dignity it is their body and their right to do so. I've also struggled with depression and anxiety my entire life. If I have a right to end my physical pain, shouldn't I, someone who has taken measures to alleviate my mental pain medications, working out 5x a week, meditation, positive affirmations, asmr, thinking exercises, journalling and found no permanent solution, also have the right to end my mental pain? I would argue that my mental pain is actually much worse to deal with than my physical conditions. Vomiting and pain are manageable, I have pain pills if I really need them. But the mental torture of believing the people you care about would genuinely be happier without you, that your existence is an anchor on everyone elses life, that you are too emotionally unstable to be around other healthy adjusted people, is not something that even Prozac has been able to fix. The argument that but it could get better is nothing because it could also get worse, it could also stay the same. The argument that you will hurt people around you is valid, however I do not think avoiding hurting others is enough of a reason to endure a lifetime of misery. Suicide is a selfish choice, but I don't think just because it's selfish, it's wrong. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Suicide is a personal choice and people have the right to make it\n","id":"d5afddc6-70f1-4cbf-958a-13fa9092840f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically I think that it isn't a humans place to take the life of another human. And jailing somebody against their will is, in my opinion, taking some of their life. Even if the suspect took another person's life, I find it wrong to impose our morals on them so harshly as to punish them by taking life. As an alternative well, it depends on the crime. If it's not too severe the suspect could have the option of being jailed for a period of time and doing relevant counseling therapy to help them understand why what they did was wrong and why they shouldn't do it or they could say I don't wish to do all this and they'd be exiled. And if their crime was really bad, they'd be exiled without question. I see it basically as this is our society and our laws. If you don't want to practice them then fine, but you can't enjoy the benefits of our society either. If you can't appreciate this set up find a new one or make your own I know my idea is very general and would need a lot of detailing to actually work but I'm just trying to explain why I think it's wrong to hold somebody. Can anyone tell me why jailing them is the right thing to do and why it's okay to impose our laws take life unless in defense of course without letting somebody opt out of the system?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe putting somebody in jail\/prison is wrong in most cases. ?\n","id":"d567c654-bcb4-48ef-95bf-3e39eaac13be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>other factors in <fertility Drinking or smoking which may start or increase with depression and anxiety can also create problems depression - <lifestyle -> <fertility www.calmclinic.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overpopulation: www.kialo.com www.kialo.com www.kialo.com Effects might be decreased by removing farm animals, as their #'s increase as human populations increase, causing crowding-related issues www.theguardian.com\n","id":"225f7297-e079-42f2-8235-c01724fb49d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Some religions provide a method, reason and means to act charitable to other human beings. The Catholic Church for example runs over 25% of healthcare facilities worldwide<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion was instrumental in developing and providing charity and the first forms of welfare.\n","id":"7ba775a5-2a23-4f54-94e1-6ad27a38927e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First let me say that I by no means think that the rights themselves are worthless. It is the requirement that they are read to you that I find wrong. As a US citizen, Ignorance of the law is no excuse to break it and if I am in fact ignorant of the law I am subject to it all the same. This means that it is my responsibility as a citizen to know the laws. Yet, how do I, as a citizen not have a responsibility to know my rights? I do not feel that the government is responsible to inform me of my rights in the case of my ignorance of them, just as they are not responsible to inform me of the laws I am ignorant of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The reading of Miranda Rights is unnecessary and that requirement results in criminals escaping justice.\n","id":"d72a81f6-170f-4c7f-acb6-5836f0b90354"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Similar Cryptocurrencies Good for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>There is significant shame attached to all kinds of sexual activity - even mainstream ones that are not widely considered amoral.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not everything considered shameful is amoral, hence there is value in providing a way of making related purchases in private.\n","id":"71a2a9f1-71df-4ddd-af61-30e1c033c3f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>No one goes to a evolutionary psychologist and asks them Why Weren't Evolutionary Psychologists Able to Predict Cuckolding? Don't you all study natural selection for a living? Isn't your top journal called Trends in Ecology and Evolution reproduction? ? Isn't the passing of genes in the purview of evolutionary psychology? Your field is a failure. You should have been there to predict cuckolding. Society was counting on you and you let them down. Yet, the same is said for my field. I get mocked among my friends and family for failing to predict the Great Recession and I am turned into a laughing stock<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Economists are not to blame for failing to predict the Great Recession\n","id":"07cc509f-faee-4bf4-b608-290824d7c578"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people have the potential to climb Mt Everest but that doesn't mean they deserve the same respect and admiration as someone who actually has climbed Mt Everest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A virtue is only worthy of moral approval when it is actually exercised.\n","id":"029f6a10-5e40-4e1a-b6d2-43de06d3fbc2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most people think of the Beach Boys as the band in the 60s who sung about surfing, cars and girls. What many do not know is that the Beach Boys were competitors with the Beatles at one point. They competed to reach the top spots on the charts and they challenged each other by taking their music to new creative levels. The most famous example is how The Beatles were inspired by The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds when making Sgt. Pepper . Two recognizable examples of The Beatles imitating the Beach Boys' vocal harmonies are the songs Here, There and Everywhere and Back in the U.S.S.R. . One important distinguishing factor between the groups is that The Beach Boys' producer was Brian Wilson, a Beach Boy himself. However, the Beatles had an external producer, George Martin. He was known as the fifth Beatle but he was not actually part of the group. I believe much of The Beatles' work would be lackluster if not for George Martin. Since Brian Wilson was a Beach Boy, it gives the Beach Boys more credibility. The Beach Boys moved away from surfing, cars and girls in the late 60s and 70s. Lyrical themes explored in their seminal album Pet Sounds include loneliness, adolescence, identity, loss of innocence and growth. After Pet Sounds, things went downhill for the Beach Boys commercially but they continued to evolve musically. Critically acclaimed albums such as Wild Honey , Friends , Sunflower , Surf's Up , Holland , Love You and The Smile Sessions are great examples of their continued musical growth. These albums were virtually ignored in the U.S. at the times of their release because of the Beach Boys decline in popularity. Genres explored in these albums are baroque pop, psychedelia, r b, and even synth pop. One song that sticks out to me in particular is Til' I Die from the album Surf's Up because it dramatically contrasts the stereotypical Beach Boy image. Written by Brian Wilson himself, the song evokes a sense of hopelessness that The Beatles would have never delved into. I think the Beach Boys taking on the whole nostalgia act in the 80s and onward killed their image and musical output while The Beatles always have remained the gold standard. I feel like The Beatles just happened to be at the right place, at the right time and their influence on pop culture made the critics love them even more. I have respect for the Beatles and recognize their talent and influence. I acknowledge that the Beach Boys have released a ton of nostalgic garbage in the 80s and 90s but I do not think that should completely detract from their former glory. The Beach Boys have existed for 50 years and have influenced many significant artists such as Pink Floyd, Cream, the Who, Elton John, ABBA, Bruce Springsteen, the Ramones, Sonic Youth, Beck, R.E.M., Weezer, Neutral Milk Hotel, Radiohead, of Montreal, the Olivia Tremor Control, the Flaming Lips, My Bloody Valentine, Daft Punk, Air, Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Saint Etienne, Pixies, MGMT, and Animal Collective. How are they still widely known as that one fun in the sun surf band?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Beach Boys are musically on par with and deserve the same merit as The Beatles.\n","id":"abadafae-475f-44c6-8a84-ed4990b94eb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should close Guantanamo Bay detention camp<|ARGUMENT|>We should close Guantanamo Bay detection camp as it is a known center of severe restrictive punishment and should not be allowed to continue in a civilized society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"unjust treatment\/tactics are used in the Guantanamo bay detention camp\n","id":"b7414f15-dd63-43ca-8b18-33b35dba363f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US stop trying to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear program?<|ARGUMENT|>Multiple agreements aimed at stopping the nuclear program have failed in the past: the Agreed Framework of 1994, the Joint Statement of the Six Party Talks in 2005, and the Leap Day Agreement of 2010.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"North Korea cannot be stopped in its development of nuclear weapons anyway.\n","id":"613024ba-f5d0-4c5b-82b8-19107bd90cfc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Our perception as humans is not necessarily the same as any other human<|ARGUMENT|>Some people do not have full or any use of each of the 5 senses<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No human's senses and consciousness are necessarily the same as any other human\n","id":"8d0dd6f6-b40b-4213-a8dc-16d48d28f470"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>In \"The Ten Commandments and Human Rights\" Christian theologian Walter Harrelson argues, that human rights can be derived from biblical duties. In that sense, the Bible has much to say about human rights. It is possible to see in the basic understandings of human rights, reflected in, for example, the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a large measure of the biblical understanding of human obligation under God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human rights were influenced by the commandments, as they provide a basic understanding of what a human right is.\n","id":"c5c19ab1-aa4f-471c-8948-838cea3cbc7b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Censorship of books would deteriorate the reader's experience, as children deserve to learn about the past and learn the book in its original diction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects freedom of speech.\n","id":"10491bc2-a6ba-4593-9f0c-5be0af5ff28d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A few saying they would act so, does not mean that they would actually do so and if they did, then they would be prosecuted, as it is considered to be wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If people prefer to go to prison for saving their pet over a human this illustrates that they value their pet's life over a human's life.\n","id":"fb1b004b-0db5-4ea7-b19a-1e9bdf255e85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In pop media it is clear that beauty is king, but everyone knows that the right thing is to look past the superficial looks and instead value intelligence. This tends to be advocated by pseudointellectuals all day every day , but I am not really seeing it. A beautiful person is just born beautiful and didn't achieve anything, is usually the mantra I hear. But what the fuck is the difference between being born beautiful and being born intelligent? You didn't have a say in it and so you can't take credit for it. Also unless we are comparing Einstein like intelligence here, I really don't think an averagely intelligent person in 2013 does more good for society than does a stunning girl guy. A stunning girl will give me a boner, nice fantasies and great sexual experiences that mean a fuck lot more than whether my neighbour can debate pointless politics that noone will ever act on anyway. Obviously if the nature of man was to ACT upon his convictions then I could imagine a world where intelligence gave us more, but alas that isn't happening, I actually think that intelligence is a bit overhyped by ugly guys who think they are intelligent. In reality intelligence isn't inherently good, there is no intrinsic value about intelligence. And due to evolution beauty gives us more<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think intelligence should be valued more than beauty.\n","id":"573bc248-adef-4601-99b8-c7b5a26f8582"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a 20 something female and have met friends, acquaintances, and one possible FWB type through various sites. I take just as much precaution as I would when meeting someone in person. Gone are the stigmatized days of 'only losers meet people online.' I have gone to conventions, concerts, movies, bars, and other places with people that I connect with online. I of course meet in public and feel them out for a good while before I invite them to my house and or my life sometimes we click enough to get that far, other times we have not . I have met friends, sold things, networked, joined a club in my current city. Basically, I think this involves the same amount of risk as meeting someone at church school knitting club kids' soccer games. Creeps are everywhere, in person, on the internet, in the building in which you sit Is there any reason to believe that, with proper screening and appropriate precautions, meeting people online is any less sensible than making friends through other modes?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I meet people off the internet all the time - I don't see anything wrong with it.\n","id":"1965d34e-8500-4d8c-8cd6-29671931b397"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start out by saying that I do not deny that police brutality is a serious issue and actions to prevent it are understandable from any viewpoint. My argument however is that the media has been looking for cases with such scrutiny that it has placed a very unfair and negative image on law enforcement as a whole. I believe it is entirely a case of the few bad apples spoil the bunch and that overeager enthusiasts have jumped aboard the hype train breeding more antipolice sentiments than ever necessary towards all officers, causing those who are indeed just trying to do their job with no prejudice to tiptoe on glass and is actually hindering them from doing their job effectively.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The severity of police brutality cases has been largely overblown by biased media coverage\n","id":"64c456c5-a113-49f7-b615-c545b49f943c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>This misrepresents reality. Of the top 1% of American households by income, only 1.6% are Black whereas the Black share of the population stands at 13%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Among Black Americans, 17% consider themselves members of the upper class. That is 6.4 million people who are probably not in need of financial support.\n","id":"e91af2e8-6334-45db-970b-a1c3cb459e1e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should minors be allowed to go through irreversible gender reassignment procedures?<|ARGUMENT|>Living with individuals who actively deny one's gender identity can reinforce the negative mental health impacts of not being allowed to transition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This can cause extreme tension between parents and their children if they disagree about the proposed decision.\n","id":"bb27c3ff-22a7-454c-bfe0-3a05b69ecf19"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Estate tax in the United States<|ARGUMENT|>This is because their wealth would not be possible without the government systems, benefits, and regulations that have particularly benefited the wealthy. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt made this the fundamental argument in his proposal to institute a federal estate tax - \"The man of great wealth owes a particular obligation to the State because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wealthy Americans owe a special debt captured by estate tax\n","id":"fbfb6002-e064-4ee4-8490-8ebb2838c475"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>AI Will Not Supplant Humans in Creating Art<|ARGUMENT|>There are physical pathways to emotional states with certain neurological mappings in the physical brain. States can be represented by arbitrary values in mathematical language and code. Emotional states are experiences and therefore human experience can be built into AI.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Experience is an algorithm that can be expressed in symbolic language, like computer code.\n","id":"ea99e6d9-8aa3-475f-b93e-9f7aedc4ce85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Lambda school offers free coding classes to students in exchange for a percentage of their income if they get a job that uses coding that pays over 50,000 dollars a year. I believe that most colleges should work like this and that it is the best solution to the student debt crisis and the rising cost of college. i will change my view if it can be show that income based repayment has flaws that will harm students if it\u2019s widely adopted OR if it can be show that government funded free college has very few downsides.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"salary based college repayment is a better system than government sponsored free college.\n","id":"58da70dd-8eca-47c8-80c2-e5e01fbad4f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the United States is a \u2018benign\u2019 hegemon*<|ARGUMENT|>As Samuel P. Huntington has written, the US suffers from \u201cbenign hegemon syndrome.\u201d19 Its self-perception as an exceptional, virtuous superpower is at odds with the violent history of its foreign policy. Since the end of World War II, it has sought to overthrow over forty governments, and to destroy numerous populist-nationalist movements.20 Its interventions in other countries have substantially increased following the end of the Cold War and the absence of a rival power balancing against it; one study has shown a 60% increase with an average of two interventions per year.21 In addition, the US often interferes in the internal affairs of other countries; including through perverting elections, applying sanctions to change behaviour or influence domestic politics, propping up opposition forces, and even trying to assassinate foreign leaders for example, Fidel Castro and more recently, arguably, Colonel Gaddafi. Therefore, while it may see itself as a benign hegemon, many see America as a rogue superpower. 19 Huntington, Samuel P. 1999, \u2018The Lonely Superpower\u2019, Foreign Affairs, March\/April 1999. Accessed 17th May, 2011. 20 Blum, William 2002. Rogue State: A Guide to the World\u2019s Only Superpower London. 21 In Sardar, Ziauddin and Merryl Wyn Davies 2003, Why Do People Hate America? Cambridge: Icon Books Ltd., pp. 67-68.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US has used its power to undermine the sovereignty of other nations, often through coercion and violence.\n","id":"9a3c4386-40eb-4545-8fe5-4071e2ceb202"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should legacy be a factor in college admissions?<|ARGUMENT|>Most elite colleges already have billions of dollars in endowment funds, which are growing each year, indicating that colleges may need to rely less on alumni donations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most elite colleges that consider legacy in admissions do not need the money.\n","id":"8f7675dd-750d-4270-b39a-4e83d4127f40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>During most of the 16th and 17th centuries, fear of heretics spreading teachings and opinions that contradicted the Bible dominated the Catholic Church. The Church persecuted scientists who formed theories the Church deemed heretical and forbade people from reading any books on those subjects by placing the books on the Index of Prohibited Books. Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei were two scientists who printed books that later became banned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no conflict between science and faith in God's existence, but there is a conflict between science and religion.\n","id":"a24893d6-49e3-40e7-ae0e-7e3c825db8a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>Rent-controlled and rent-stabilised apartments in New York City have an adverse effect on the supply and price distribution of apartments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Housing shortages and unaffordable housing prices in NYC are caused primarily by over-regulation, not Airbnb.\n","id":"c0e91bf0-daba-47b4-a9ed-1036161cbda2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Rabbits are considered an invasive species in Australia. Since they are ruining the ecosystem balance, it is more beneficial to use them for testing than allowing them in the wild.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using certain animals, such as invasive species, for testing benefits the ecosystem.\n","id":"8b77927f-555c-467e-93dd-289dbb62e671"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public health systems fund homeopathy?<|ARGUMENT|>Hormesis a process in which exposure to a low dose of a chemical agent or environmental factor that is damaging at higher doses induces an adaptive beneficial effect on the cell or organism is a proven scientific phenomenon. We were not aware of X-rays until we had a means to detect them, so who can say that structural changes to the homeopathic carrier do not in fact exist and cannot have an impact on human physiology\/biochemistry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homeopaths suggest a number of ways that homeopathy could work.\n","id":"71c7388e-665e-4bb6-870b-bc489ae3782c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Mexico legalize drugs?<|ARGUMENT|>Legal means of raising money is one of the chief ways to launder money They would mix other aspects of the crime syndicate's cash into the legal drug money which will make it harder for the police to arrest\/convict them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalization of drugs would just cement the hold of the cartels on the regions that the police\/military haven't been able to pacify\/control.\n","id":"374e7184-5a85-48c0-8436-039f70f91575"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the U.S. increase the quota of H-1B visas?<|ARGUMENT|>There are numerous instances of businesses and individuals exploiting or taking advantage of the H-1B visa system in illegal ways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The H-1B visa system is often abused and that its provisions are unenforced.\n","id":"ab5708cf-3ba3-4323-acff-e242fad30e84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>In a context where some African Americans may see Trump as a \"threat to minority progress\" Kamala Harris is a figure who African American voters could rally around.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kamala Harris has the ability to increase African American voter turnout in the same way Obama did\n","id":"4f20fa40-ad59-4232-8423-77fc75b44397"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ban on human reproductive cloning<|ARGUMENT|>\"Why cloning people is a good idea\". Everything 2 - \"What about blue-haired blond-eyes? Well, personally, if I wanted to clone a kid there's no way they would be Aryan. No Asian couple would choose the stereotypical Western child either. No Africans would go for that Caucasian look. The concept of everyone designing the same child is in itself ridiculous, as humans have a tendency to express themselves as individually as possible. A couple would design a child like no other. Having the freedom to create any child would enhance individuality creating more unique offspring rather than less unique ones.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All parents will not try to clone the same kind of individual\n","id":"d234720d-1963-40c1-9023-9f567c4de0b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A permanent venue for the Olympic Games?<|ARGUMENT|>An economic crisis like Greece - one of the likely locations as a permanent venue - experienced it, would make the expenses linked to hosting the Olympic Games hard to stomach and difficult to sell. When a quarter of the population is out of work and GDP shrinking other issues are more relevant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A permanent venue comes with the risks associated with relying on one nation. Political strives and economic crises could thus become a threat to the Olympic Games.\n","id":"e8b58e85-51cd-4d25-91e3-46f74e05a291"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Whaling Still be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The Cove is a 2009 film that details dolphin hunting in Taiji, Japan. The film has acted as a wake-up call to the animal rights abuses of dolphin and whale hunting alike.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shocking videos\/photos of whaling practices can work as shock that triggers closer examination.\n","id":"882fbad6-0a03-492d-8c16-af1ca663b40c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Wordpress is better suited for a company blog than Medium?<|ARGUMENT|>This makes things possible that are impossible with medium. For example integrations with Kialo infrastructure or services for release notes or such.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are thousands of plugins for almost any purpose imaginable, e.g. integration with other services, polls, SEO.\n","id":"549d3765-aa1a-4a9e-917e-fa26d51a62e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lets start by looking at a situation Imagine you are walking by a shallow river on your way to a ball when you see a child drowning. You're wearing some pretty expensive clothes lets say 500 pounds that will no doubt be ruined if you jump into the river. Saving this child doesn't put you in danger as you can stand in this river while the child being smaller cannot. Do you jump into that river to save that child? Let's say you encounter that same river with a different child in it the next day while wearing your rolex watch. Do you jump into that river to save the child? Now lets look at the real world. More than 1.3 billion people live in extreme poverty less than 80p a day and 7.6 million children are estimated to have died before their 5th birthday in 2010. Many of these are from poverty, preventable diseases and illnesses. Money can help provide infrastructure for schools, hospitals, sanitation facilities, vaccinations etc which no doubt will help reduce child mortality rates. Once you look at the world through this lens then it is easy enough to look at the world in terms of opportunity cost. This iphone or 100 life saving vaccinations. An expensive house or cheap government housing and a new well providing water for a village. One may argue that there is a difference between the example and this and that is distance. These children are much further away but I don't see how that dilutes your moral responsibility to them. Therefore, it seems that any money that you keep must be worth a child's life, education etc or be allocated to some other duty such as child rearing where you have a responsibility to give time and money for schools, healthcare etc to make sure that your child grows up to be a socially productive member of society. I know that sounds like a very cold perspective on what parenting is about but i couldn't think of another way to phrase it haha. I will assume that most people think that you should save the child but this specifically is why I would save the child. I'm looking at this from the stance of virtue ethics Aquinas and I believe that by allowing this child to die shows a lack of charity and isn't positively building character. I can't justify losing a life in exchange for 500 pounds. But, I think even taken from the stance of consequentialism believing that consequences should inform your moral thinking or deontological ethics believing that laws inform your moral stance you would still reach the eventual conclusion that you must jump into that river Consequentialism i.e. Utilitarianism You would have to argue that having 500 pounds will lead to greater pleasure happiness than that life and I don't think you can justify that. Deontological ethics i.e. Kant I only really understand Kant so he's the one that I will briefly very briefly talk about but allowing that child to die breaks the categorical imperative as if you allowed that act to become universal you would be devaluing human life by saying that it has a price tag. I've only briefly talked about why I think the child should be saved as I take it as a assumption that most people would save the child but I will be willing to discuss my ethical stance more thoroughly if anyone asks me about it but i didn't want my post to only appeal to those who have studied philosophy. Thanks for your answers<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any life other than one of poverty is unethical.\n","id":"59d99fcd-22c9-419a-9ec8-fc391222ce94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>The Liberal Democrats claim that GDP would be 1.9% higher in a Remain scenario than in a Brexit scenario. However, GDP growth can be affected by multiple factors, with the Director of the IFS saying that \"there is a lot of uncertainty over such an estimate\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Liberal Democrats 2019 manifesto uses multiple statistics to reach conclusions which cannot in fact be proven by these figures alone.\n","id":"c61c3900-517c-4826-a914-8dc8dfcf9bd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Sexual orientation can be understood as a spectrum and a continuum in time, thus it can change later in life, therefore making information about any type of relationship still useful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most children may not have a defined sexual orientation yet, so information about any type of relationship can be useful.\n","id":"1d8560f8-068d-4915-ad5e-e53f771027a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Factory Farming Should Be Banned<|ARGUMENT|>Factory farming is effectively ending the practice of healthier, traditional farming methods that were more in tune with nature, and which were the backbone of a whole rural way of life, now being destroyed. The countryside as we know and love it was created by traditional farming methods, particularly grazing, not vast sheds full of imprisoned animals fed on imported feed. Health risks to humans are also greatly magnified by factory farming, with epidemics swiftly spread between overcrowded animals and antibiotic resistance encouraged by medicated feed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Factory farming is effectively ending the practice of healthier, traditional farming methods that we...\n","id":"a42a48ad-1ac1-47ac-964e-ebe5b1fce18d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Though familiars are optional to bring to Hogwarts, many students appear to have one, and as such many students may feel like they too must buy one in order to fit in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You still need to buy books, robes, a wand and equipment quill, parchment, cauldron to go to Hogwarts.\n","id":"f1980aa5-1154-4839-ade3-601b25b28403"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>During the war, Japanese soldiers were told that they were not required to obey the constraints of international law by their commanders. This resulted in the widespread execution of Chinese prisoners of war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chinese people have traditionally resented Japan for its behaviour towards the Chinese during World War II and its subsequent lack of apology.\n","id":"a40419d2-649d-455d-9517-48a8709ce315"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>McCain vs. Obama, McCain vs. Obama<|ARGUMENT|>\"The case for John McCain\". The Economist. 6 Dec 2007 - \"He knows as much about foreign affairs and military issues as anybody in public life.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"John McCain's foreign policy experience is second to none\n","id":"386e7de0-12cb-4d63-a6ce-4556c4fbc24f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is called change my view. Sure, while wanting this is more open minded than insisting on current beliefs, it is not as great an improvement as some may think. For one, it's an acknowledgment that one view is clearly better and thus should be indoctrinated, and more importantly it's still eliminating the important step of critical analysis. True open mindedness involves recognizing multiple viewpoints and rationally picking one or your own on your own . Maybe it's just me, but I don't think it is open minded to have anyone make your mind for you, whether it be someone you currently agree with or otherwise. tl dr exposing yourself to different opinions is great, but having an agenda in mind when doing so isn't as much<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that it is still not entirely open-minded to \"want your view changed.\"\n","id":"7f3514ab-31e8-4408-a817-52976ec0e866"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many cities across the US have high minimum wages or are currently increasing minimum wages. For example Los Angeles soon and Seattle have 15 minimum wages far higher than other cities and the federal rate. I understand the cost of living is factored in as well but many cities with low costs of living have high minimum wages as well eg Santa Fe, Chicago and Portland, Maine . While I do believe minimum wages should be high enough for someone to support themselves, these wages seem ridiculously high. At 15 dollars an hour if someone is working full time 5 days a week they make 15 8 5 52.177 31,306 year. While that doesn't seem ridiculously high, consider that they are making about the salary a teacher and most research lab employees 22,000 36000 for technicians and lab assistants make. Why work your ass off for advanced schooling to become a teacher or work your ass of to get a chem physics biochem degree and then work your ass off in those positions when you could be making the same or more working at McDonalds? We need and thrive off of the skilled labor these positions offer in the classroom and for our scientific advances. But why would someone spend years of their life and go into debt to work an incredibly demanding job if they could make essentially the same salary ringing up froyo orders. I'm not saying that these minimum wage jobs aren't necessary or that they aren't hard work at times, but let's be real Getting a B.S. in a complex science and using that knowledge everyday to help advance research in a lab is more difficult and more in demand than most unskilled work that require no higher degree or debt. You might argue that this is an appropriate minimum wage and those other jobs are simply underpaid but the federal poverty threshold is far lower. For a single person, two person, and three person households the federal poverty level is 11700, 15930 and 20000 respectively as annual income. While I don't think someone working full time in a minimum wage position should be at the poverty level I also don't think they should be making nearly three times that level. If you can live an independent and comfortable life at an easy job doing simple tasks what would be the incentive to work hard for that same comfortable lifestyle?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High minimum wages create a disincentive for higher education and important skilled labor jobs\n","id":"e4ba78d6-20a4-4f76-8b71-e5c239a1ad29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should health care providers annually be made to get the flu vaccine?<|ARGUMENT|>Health care providers should voluntarily get vaccinated in order to protect their patients. Modest rates of vaccination on a voluntary basis are preferable to higher rates achieved through mandates and coercion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Health providers should have the autonomy to decide not to get vaccinated every year.\n","id":"59144f52-2141-405c-8b14-58cf7673aa45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most common law countries have a legal concept of the 'right to silence' or 'not be witness against himself'. In USA this is part of the 5th amendment of the constitution. I can accept that the right to silence exists universally when it doesn't involve a subpoena in court. Everybody has the right, for example, to refuse to answer police questioning outside of the court room. Such interviews and interrogations should always voluntary. But the protection from being subpoenaed at a trial only exists in cases where it could be self incriminating. Why is this? The only reasoning I can find for this protection is due to medieval torture being used hundreds of years ago, to elicit false or forced confessions. If that was the real concern, then shouldn't it be solved with something more specific, perhaps 'confessions involving torture are invalid', rather than a total protection from being held witness in a peaceful modern trial?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"a defendent should be compelled to testify at their own trial\n","id":"640f011e-6d01-4d7e-a5d7-54280f2df264"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For decades, one of the most commonly used arguments and one of the most easily dismissed against changes to our ideas of normative sexual morality is the \u201cslippery slope argument\u201d. The religious fundamentalists were saying \u201cif gay marriage is okay then what about polygamy or beastiality or pedophilia, etc\u201d The liberal position against this has solidified as \u201ceverything is okay as long as its consenting adults\u201d. When the traditional, religious based morality was the standard, It used to be that lesbian sex or threesomes was limit pushing, transgressive sexuality. As the new secular liberal morality has become hegemonic, we have seen a rapid shift in what is considered taboo. It was thought by liberals that this was sexually liberating, allowing us to have more full, satisfying sex lives But is that the case? Are people today finding greater satisfaction in their sex lives? Are people today finding greater satisfaction in their relationships? From a psychoanalytic perspective, I would argue that sexuality is never normative, but rather is inherently transgressive in nature. Where does this leave us when all kinds of sexuality is considered normal we have all but abandoned the idea of taboo? We are living in an era where every kind of pornography the imagination can conceive of is available at the fingertips of anyone with a smartphone, which is just about everyone who can talk. Culturally this is celebrated as progressive or inclusive. Even the most basic and cross cultural sexual taboos incest are now part of hit mainstream entertainment. It\u2019s clear there is a tendency towards pushing the boundaries, and transgressing the limits of what is considered acceptable, so what is the logical progression of this? The only limits in secular liberal morality is \u201cconsenting adults\u201d, so consent and children have been treated as sacrosanct. As every kink becomes normalized and mainstreamed, it\u2019s just a matter of time before those last two taboos are seen as transgressive and therefore perversely desired. So what are the protections and guards against this? What arguments can be used against it and how might we expect this to come? The first place may be in fiction. How would we argue against fictional depictions of rape or pedophilia if we only assume a secular liberal worldview? With increasing technology, what happens if some company thinks there would be a profitable market in ultra realistic CGI VR pornography featuring rape or pedophilia? Should this be acceptable or legal or normalized?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious conservatives were right about the slippery slope with sexual morality. Secular liberalism will lead to normalizing abuse and exploitation.\n","id":"cdc43f82-aa95-4905-94ef-9046381f7d0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What it says on the tin. I believe the government is flawed when it routinely goes behind the backs of it's people to spy on them, breaking it's own laws and amendments. I believe that people exposing what governments do behind our back, that they don't want us to know, is a good thing. I think a government should work for the people and not lie to them about what it is doing. I believe that privacy is a right, and people need to have good reason to violate it if I have done nothing wrong. I believe the system as it stands is open to abuse of power. The reason I want my view changed is because everyone I talk to seems to think my view extreme, and radical. I want to understand why I think radically.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that Julian Assange and Edward Snowden should be praised for exposing the corruption of western government.\n","id":"35eb8575-add8-4cad-999d-a6c4de3d33c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>People are more willing to sacrifice themselves for the community. Thus, community leaders get added value from the same amount of group.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God is an invention of the elites and religious rules are made to ensure and enhance their power.\n","id":"eb3df64a-077a-469d-bc6a-72585a196044"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is where the argument started All of my views are expressed, I believe, clearly in the comments I made. In case you don't feel like slogging through that, though The taxpayers are the ones paying for production. However, when money is added into the economy, this creates inflation. Thus, when we make 1 million in pennies, the taxpayers are not gaining that 1M. When currency is made, the gained value is in the efficiency of transactions, not the actual value of the currency made. Now, this is why I believe pennies should be discontinued They are inefficient. They are slow to count, and nobody cares about the value of a penny. It is much easier to round to 5 cents. However, the same doesn't apply to nickels. We can't round to 10 cents without discontinuing quarters, and rounding to a dollar is too extreme. Maybe one day we'll get to the point where we should discontinue these coins, but we're not there yet. Anyway, this whole argument is being made by a layman, and I'm sure it's up for debate. I am not an economist. This post is entirely about the argument relating to the value of a the coin being less than the cost of production, which I feel is irrelevant to pennies being discontinued. Now, my opponent was arguing that if we make 1M in pennies, it costs 2.4M. This, then, is a loss of 1.4M. ^ we ^were ^using ^different ^numbers, ^but ^the ^argument ^is ^the ^same. I say this is ridiculous the loss is in the full 2.4M, and the only gain is in the efficiency in transactions through the economy. Otherwise, we'd only make hundred dollar bills, as they would be the most cost efficient, right? Obviously, more efficiency is better. If we could make cheaper pennies, or, hell, if we could somehow get away without making any cash at all i.e. switching to completely digital currency , that would be the most efficient. But discontinuing coins simply because they cost more than their value to produce is ridiculous, in my mind. Edit I've been arguing under the idea that the money is directly added to the economy. Obviously, in most cases, it's just exchanged for mutilated, or digital currency, isn't it? I'm hardly an expert on that, but either way my point still stands. If it's exchanged, then the economy is gaining nothing except shiny new coins , and the taxpayer's costs are still irrelevant to the argument. Obviously they should be minimized, but it's still not directly related to the value of the money produced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pennies and nickels cost more than their value to produce. I believe this is irrelevant to the argument that pennies should be removed from circulation, and I do not believe nickels should be discontinued.\n","id":"18e46153-0147-4aa4-943b-05a016644284"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Nintendo allow for Fangames and modifications to their systems?<|ARGUMENT|>There is currently the Fallout 4 community of whom are trying to only use the game's engine via mods to make a new game.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bethesda provided their games with modding tools This allowed fans to fix many issues and bugs.\n","id":"dd985da7-4129-4bdb-b377-571fb1de2054"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the enduring popularity of Kiss is entirely based on the novelty of their act. If they didn't dress crazy for their shows, and Gene Simmons didn't have a ridiculously long tongue, the band Kiss wouldn't have nearly the same level of popularity based on their music alone. Many of their popular songs are just cookie cutter pop rock anthems. Gwar plays harder music and their schtick is obviously more hardcore, but if Kiss played louder music and utilized a lot of sex toys in their act, they'd basically be Gwar.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kiss is just a family-friendly version of Gwar\n","id":"89ecd513-c53e-43af-9456-d6e88b170a5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>If foreign aid is fungible, it allows non-democratic rulers to use aid monies to pay off political challengers, fund repression, or simply pocket aid for current or future personal consumption. Democratic states would not use aid for these purposes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the absence of democratic institutions development assistance will be spent by the regimes as they see fit. Their decisions will not always be fair, legal, or in the public interest.\n","id":"0316dcf0-3c74-42fd-a9b6-af263c9b09dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When people say that power corrupts, I feel they are lying in their own benefit. When people say that money destroys people, it feels so fake. Money and power don't corrupt, they reveal who you really are. This kind of statement actually makes me livid, if feels as if the people who say these things are just trying to avoid responsibility But isn't accepting responsability for your actions what adults are supposed to do? I really don't understand how can people actually think that money and power can corrupt a person It is only a tool, how you use it will define you, no excuses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that power does not corrupt anyone... It just reveals who you really are.\n","id":"270ae4b2-efd7-4d5e-91d1-ebf33c998986"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Shaming people and therefore creating social taboos in society is how we collectively banished racism from the public arena for the most part. This was an incredibly pervasive attitude people held that was harmful to society. By the same token, obesity is also harmful, but in different ways, and not as immediately critical to stop, however I think every fat person should feel some shame as a result of what they have literally done to themselves, which makes medicine more expensive for us all and harms human productivity. The shame should not be malicious, meaning fat people deserve a basic level of respect and dignity like any other, but a moderate amount should exist to discourage more people getting fat, rather than accepting it in the same we we now accept gay lifestyles for example. Meaning, no one should be fat and proud. There is nothing inherently harmful about that sort of lifestyle, but the same can not be said of a 'fat pride lifestyle.' Objectively this is simply a fact, medically in terms of risk and cost, relationship wise, and physically in terms of people partially or fully disabled based on weight and associated health deficits .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fat shaming in society is beneficial\n","id":"84a7340d-0229-445b-8932-76ffe402c695"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Exemptions to Discrimination Laws Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion, in essence, is a private club. Religious freedom ensures that you are free to express your beliefs within the boundaries of your club. Once you step out of those boundaries the rules of the greater society apply. Hence, a person's religious beliefs should influence only their life and should not allow them to impact others in society through exemption laws.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Giving any exemptions to religions is discrimination against non-believers.\n","id":"fe6c531a-45f5-415a-98ac-7545a266cfc7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Citizens United Was Wrongly Decided<|ARGUMENT|>Corporations could not be truly held accountable for any damages they cause if they were not considered a legal person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Corporations are people because they have a legal identity that is distinct from the collection of its shareholders.\n","id":"ba1171e7-e6f2-44b9-aa5a-4c1820e95ff8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There have been many controversies surrounding inappropriate handling of sexual violence in organizations, especially college campuses. A person is raped, they go to the college's appropriate administrator for sexual violence, the the story gets covered up, ignored, or otherwise handled incorrectly, and then there's a big controversy in the news about how college X is mishandling sexual assault cases. My view is that the survivors of rape in these organizations should stop going through the middle men in the first place and just go to the police. When I read these news articles they often mention that it's well known among rape survivors that the college covers stuff up\u2014 example It seems to me that these survivors are putting their justice process through well known risk and then acting surprised when it gets stifled. Can someone explain to me why it's reasonable to go through all the red taping, the drama, and acting surprised when a rape is covered up for the umpteenth time instead of merely going straight to the police? If people keep doing it there must be a reason I just don't know it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone in an organization is raped, they should go to the police instead of the organization's administrators\n","id":"9489b5c6-204d-44f6-bd37-2b56a6a5008c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>There are in fact confirmed witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus in modern day times and who died with that testimony. The death for a testimony indicates that one is willing to give their life for what they learned which shows the importance of the knowledge even over their own lives and their eternal perspective than deny what they know.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many of the supposed eyewitnesses to the resurrected body went on to be martyred for their faith.\n","id":"57bb0f61-2bb2-4e3f-a112-d77e444d0945"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should straight actors play gay roles?<|ARGUMENT|>Offering such roles to people who are actually homosexual provides increased job opportunities to an otherwise marginalized demographic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The impact of gay actors playing gay characters is larger.\n","id":"4e949386-3401-4e64-a81c-d8ab5cfebe35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The EU should promote the official use of a common language in Europe.<|ARGUMENT|>Studies show that being bilingual has cognitive benefits including a better attention span and superior multi-tasking capabilities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Speaking two languages and more comes with great benefits other than intercultural understanding.\n","id":"70e75b83-a6fd-4d56-8ebe-29ecb03975c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>There have been many experiments successfully performed that presuppose animals being able to form lasting bonds with each other, and many incidental observations showing ongoing bonds and relationships between specific animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if animals cannot remember specific events, it's immediately apparent in any number of studies and situations that animals recognize each other, including parents.\n","id":"b85b201e-3e95-4389-9b58-ac85712d6c45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To be sure, the fact that anthropogenic climate change exists is borne out by the data. Not by the consensus of scientists. Talking about a high percentage of scientists giving their opinions confounds the issue by implying that facts are a matter of opinions of scientists. This is antithetical to the scientific method, whose whole point is to remove subjectivity and opinion from the business of finding out the truth. Almost all climate data is now publicly available and should be used a basis for argumentation. Democratic consensus is not and has never been the test of whether something is true .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Consensus based arguments against climate skeptics that state \"97% of climate scientists agree on human-driven climate change\" are stupid\n","id":"561a3458-03fd-47e8-ba1c-2c3148664c4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Three Strikes Laws Should Be Repealed<|ARGUMENT|>Defenders of the three-strikes laws claim that these laws have a powerful deterrent effect, and reduce the occurrence of crime. Statistics show, however, that recidivism has not been reduced by the presence of such laws, and the general reduction in crime, when and where it has occurred, is due to effective policing, rather than to harsh sentencing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Defenders of the three-strikes laws claim that these laws have a powerful deterrent effect, and redu...\n","id":"2885136f-bed2-42c5-bd90-395f7a902c9f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Personally, I don't understand why one would want to use alternative healing when society has been scientifically developing treatment to illness for the past couple of centuries. I think that alternative healing can give people a false hope and may make them avoid using western medicine, which will only postpone treatment and make their illness get worse. A family member who suffered from a chronic illness tried eastern healing methods, and it didn't seem to change anything. His illness only really seemed to get better when he began taking heavy doses of antibiotics. Whatever my opinion may be, I'm very open to hearing about why alternative healing is a great thing. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that eastern healing and alternative healing methods are illegitimate and shouldn't be taken seriously.\n","id":"a7ce7e5a-d0be-4c7e-9b92-cde828423310"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>#timesup: Should individuals credibly accused of sexual assault or harassment be fired from positions of authority?<|ARGUMENT|>There is a growing belief that the current climate of accusations is becoming a 'witch hunt a term which immediately undermines the credibility and shows how some are keen to avoid really examining their own behaviour at all costs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ending rape culture requires men to recognise their own problematic behaviour. Internal investigations and dismissals are closed processes that do not promote understanding of the causes of rape culture.\n","id":"8b498f39-bd1b-4f50-8be9-c5975610a7db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Intervention In African Affairs<|ARGUMENT|>Most of the powerful international countries and organisations US and UN are loath to become involved in the sort of \u201cpeacemaking\u201d instead of peacekeeping that is needed in African countries. It will require the active and direct participation of infantry and other elements of armies to fight the sorts of guerrilla wars going on in the DRC. The current trend away from this sort of military action As in Kosovo, is ill suited to dealing with the African problems. African countries, by contrast, have already illustrated that they are willing and able to become involved in this capacity, as evidenced in the DRC.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most of the powerful international countries and organisations US and UN are loath to become invol...\n","id":"1426ef86-9ca1-44cb-893d-1dbc88b60171"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is enlightened despotism superior to democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>There must be a good reason why only 583 out of the 80,000 eligible voters registered. It would seem that the platform was not user friendly and not advertised well enough.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This was a poorly implemented example of Liquid Democracy and so should not be extrapolated from.\n","id":"60258b22-f5d2-414e-9234-a4426b08b535"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>In the politically polarised environment of recent decades, it had become very common for the party in the minority to filibuster many of the ruling party's nominees for powerful positions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This rule has the downside of increasing obstructionism by the party in the minority.\n","id":"c714618d-d0d0-4aac-8964-5d8139a91eac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>tibet should be an independent state<|ARGUMENT|>Tibet, and the resistance Tibetans continue to show to Chinese rule presents a toxic domestic and international political problem that costs far more than it worth. Domestically, violence in Tibet is the most serious domestic disturbance facing the Chinese government, and the fact that there is nearly constant violence between Han Settlers and Tibetans forces the Chinese to alienate everyone in order to contain it. Furthermore, the economic and political disenfranchisement of the Tibetan people is an enormous domestic problem, as it has led to large numbers becoming unemployed and moving to other parts of China where they form an underclass. Internationally, the Tibetan issue keeps China\u2019s Human Rights record in the news and almost torpedoed the 2008 Olympic games. Given that China is already losing money on the province, it may well be worth it for China to jettison it in order to gain much greater international benefits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tibet presents an explosive domestic political issue for China which the latter would benefit from eliminating\n","id":"dc56e2a2-6eb0-47f0-b046-264f766a7164"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sure, there's going to be the odd boss here and there who is an asshole, but overall I believe the statistics that say There are fewer women in x field just mean that fewer women have had an interest in x field, not that they have tried and had a more difficult time succeeding. The only reason we can calculate statistics that support the gender gap is because women do work less over our entire careers because we are usually the main childcare providers and we have less of a natural instinct toward being career oriented so we don't drive ourselves as hard as men do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the gender salary gap is a myth and if you dedicate yourself to the field of your choice, you will succeed equally, no matter your gender.\n","id":"611d073a-791a-4cd1-8c1d-05db203bda36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unfair to treat similar ideologies differently. By doing so, one ideology is unfairly allowed to thrive while another is censored, despite both being equally harmful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Such a move is morally inconsistent as long as it is only applied to white supremacists.\n","id":"5cce4e46-2477-4bc1-85cf-3b3910ba0832"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Many inventions where not made to achieve financial gain but to statisfy the exploratory spirit of mankind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human ingenuity has been existing long before financial incentives came into place.\n","id":"b37701a2-0637-4771-9acd-0e5696ac1fe5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hate Speech Be Legally Protected?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate speech should be prohibited around the world because of the emotional harm it does in the society amidst groups and humanity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate speech is wrong, from an ethical point of view, and should therefore be made illegal.\n","id":"21d0a435-5c46-4c8e-9d85-a0a52a229267"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Friendly fire in modern warfare is in most cases attributed to human error as a result of stress, carelessness, insufficient training and a lack of coordination and planning - areas in which AKMs would likely be superior to human soldiers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AKMs reduce the risk of soldiers getting killed or otherwise hurt.\n","id":"9af9da4a-3b84-464a-80a6-46e9bd3d0112"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being a digital nomad a good lifestyle choice?<|ARGUMENT|>Traveling to cold countries is difficult, as jackets take up more space in a suitcase.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is difficult to live out of a suitcase for extended periods of time.\n","id":"d736f857-d45b-45ad-b735-3d6e0b15487b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies<|ARGUMENT|>Steve Kretzmann. \"Money for nothing, and your climate for free.\" Oil Change International. September 16th, 2011: \"It\u2019s so obvious, you can\u2019t really believe it hasn\u2019t happened sooner. With all the hoopla about cap and trade, carbon offsets, and parts per million, wouldn\u2019t a good place to start be to stop supporting big oil and dirty coal with our tax dollars?\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If no cap-and-trade, ending fossil fuels is close second.\n","id":"0dd461f1-679a-4b43-8f5b-abf59481a6b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If Person A wants to make some money and is willing to do work for Person B, Person B should be able to hire Person A regardless of if other people Person A has hired are the same race. Or the same gender. Or the same ANYTHING. Person B should not be compared to a Person C. Person A should not have to be anything in particular unless Person B wants them to. Person B should have full control over this labor in every aspect, but Person A can stop at any time. No questions asked. Person B should not be obligated to provide anything other than the money agreed upon with Person A. Paperwork should not be required. There should be no laws governing this agreement. . EDIT 2 Also, Person B should be able to turn away Person A for any reason. EDIT A typo.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe labor or employment should be regulated or constrained. At all.\n","id":"e1c64cc4-5ac5-424a-b17d-05b7f6e59a3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is modern psychology a pseudoscience?<|ARGUMENT|>That affluenza was used as a defence in a trial does not indicate that it is considered a real mental disorder by the psychiatric community. It is not listed in the DSM.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a theory, Affluenza simply points out a correlation between mindset and behavior. It was not created with the intention of explaining away bad behavior.\n","id":"bd9a0daf-89cd-4411-ab6a-71916a2b1a6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I was going through a post that was saying how great ender's game was, but decided to steal the book since the guy who wrote it was very religious. What the hell? Why don't people judge a book on its merit, rather than the life of the author that wrote it. Just because ender's game was written by a conservative doesn't mean you should go out and steal. What can possibly justify this behavior? I am religious, but still very much enjoy the books of isaac asimov, who was an atheist. Just because someone holds different values from me doesn't mean that their writing is worse in my opinion. Change my view, justify why people should boycott a book because the author doesn't have Normal views that aren't present in the book. Please leave the footnote below the following line, but remember to delete this sentence by replacing it with the body of your post. Thank you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who judge books based off of the author are morons\/ignorant\/bad readers\n","id":"cb5148ab-96a3-46f0-b78e-53bc7cb58206"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Children in most societies are educated through formal education schools and informal education, via after-school activities or their families. If CSE is necessary, it should be taught in one of those settings. To ensure every child gets the same access to it, schools seem the best option.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since school attendance is required in Liberal Democracies, it would ensure that every child is exposed to CSE.\n","id":"1cf89d77-3327-4844-906d-d551b256db91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Quantum computers will be able to hack EVERYTHING, I feel like governments are likely secretly working on them, but which ones? What will happen when they hack each other? What if google spies on everyone and influences the way we all think? and how many people google literally everything ? The Cambridge Analytica thing really opened my eyes to how innovation changes things and catches people by surprise. It is something that shapes the very things we think. It is dangerous to live in a world where people with money can inject opinions into people's minds, particularly if you hold the belief that money corrupts morality but not the point, still bad even if they are just wrong, overconfident, and well meaning . And this is just the beginning. AI and machine learning are improving at an ever increasing pace, and we need to be able to handle that. These are what I believe are examples of very important under discussed political issues and questions. Is there government funded R D here? Nobody understands real politics politicians sell the public on the common politics, please the public with their actions around it, and focus on what truly matters while staying quiet where it is necessary not to give foreign powers any ideas. I consider this an optimistic view, because the alternative of politicians ignoring important issues feels worse, but I admit it's very plausible too. Regardless, in real politics, there are things that by necessity must go on without public knowledge, for the good of the public, because what the public knows other governments know ex Manhatten Project . In the nuclear stalemate world, creative foreign policy unknown to the public may shape the world, and innovation and invention play a role here too. Power without transparency must exist in a world where a KGB authoritarian ruler exists gathering information about us with spies because what we put out as news is not enough for them. Then they manipulating what goes down using their findings and other tactics. Not trying to debate that part in the sense of the election cause it's more of a democrat vs republican debate, just mean in general . Power without transparency is also corruptible and prone to failure. People holding this power are human, and can still easily miss important issues. People, in general, are terrible at predicting the future and what will be important in coming years. But maybe that is what true politics is all about proactivity instead of reactivity. Maybe a few very wise people subtly change the directions we head over time and nobody notices. People who really get how one thing leads to another knock over the first domino that butterfly effects into changing the world. Like maybe the country with the most creative innovation wins, and I should start a school for creative people who really think outside the box, and get them interested in politics during history class, and have them tell the fbi genius creative ideas. Or something like a think tank. Think tanks are another under discussed thing that completely changes the laws we make. But I totally feel like an off the wall conspiracist and kind of want someone to put me in line p<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Common political topics are important, but innovation like AI, \"the war of ideas\", and other areas are much more important. Nobody understands \"real\" politics.\n","id":"76c17649-5a93-4e63-a060-74909105b974"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whatever people say about the idea that a statue of Robert E Lee could be repurposed to represent how horrible the Civil War was, the fact of the matter is, bullshit equivocation aside, statues and public monuments represent the propaganda of the regime that puts them up. Most of the dead Confederate General statues were put up in two periods from 1876 to 1900 and from 1948 to 1980. They were a reaction to either the Confederacy's defeat or the Civil Rights Era, starting when Harry Truman desegregated the military. They were intended as a fuck you to either the departing Union soldiers following the end of Reconstruction or to those fighting against Segregation. That being said, they are propaganda. That is what all public monuments are. On the other hand, so is the removal of a statue or public monument. The famous video of Allied soldiers dynamiting a big stone swastika is propaganda, the meaning being see how we destroy the symbols of the regime we defeated. See our power, and beware our wrath. The toppling of Stalin and Lenin statues in Eastern Europe is also propaganda, propaganda that means the USSR no longer controls our government, Their troops no longer occupy barracks on our land. We aren't afraid anymore. Removing a statue of a Confederate general says to the world we acknowledge the motivations of the people who put this statue up, and we reject their ideology as backwards and wrong. Since erecting a statue is just as politicized as taking one down, and both represent the propaganda and social mores propagated by the regime that does the erecting or removing, either both are wrong or both are acceptable. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Putting up a statue and taking one down are both equally politicized decisions, thus both are either equally wrong or equally acceptable\n","id":"c9ef6b6a-7daf-44c9-8931-c7007dec76a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anarchy is the only ethical system of society.<|ARGUMENT|>Rampant capitalism needs government restraint to prevent the formation of monopolies over entire business industries, e.g. Time Warner merging with other companies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without a government, the rich oligarchy would still be in power, but there would be fewer regulations to restrain their reach.\n","id":"ac9275b8-d9d3-4dd0-9ed3-e8a3fac5682f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Whitewashing In Hollywood: Should It Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The Wiz the 1978 musical film featuring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross, was a re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz. Without the creative freedom to do so, this film would not be the cult classic it is today within the Black community.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taking a film and recreating it helps a wide variety of people to become familiar with a timeless story, but in a way that may appeal to them.\n","id":"1c4b75ef-718d-4280-84a5-dee4c2048648"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>God is generally understood to be a supernatural entity; transhumanism is about technological enhancement of the human body, and technology in a naturalistic universe cannot produce supernatural effects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nothing falling under the label of \"transhumanism\" can be called God as the term is generally understood.\n","id":"a1f0e813-14dc-43da-815f-6934c7bb4024"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hold that all costs of raising kids must be covered by the entire society, not only by parents. This includes not only the cost of childcare and education from primary school through to university, but also the cost of housing, dressing and feeding one\u2019s kids. The position rests on the argument that to reproduce its human capital is a prerequisite of the livelihood of every member of any society, regardless of his or her being a parent or not. Saving money or assets of value for retirement does not render the original generational contract between parents and children obsolete, as one can neither eat money, nor does money provide any service such as old age care. Money is but a promise for goods and services to be produced in the future. Produced by whom? By future grown ups \u2013 who are today\u2019s children. Without rearing children, the value of all our savings, including all non edible assets would fall to zero in retirement age. The reproduction of its human capital is the one investment any economy needs to make in order to keep existing. Having children is not a contingent live style choice to be paid for by those who make it. The role of parents does not resemble that of street musicians asking money from every by passer, whether he or she asked for the performance, or happens to like it. Rather, parents are the providers of a public good on which the very livelihood of every member of society hinges. Why, then, should parents pay more than none parents for this investment essential for every member of society? While every western society covers some costs of childrearing, such as schools, from the general tax take, even the relatively generous child benefits plus free university tuition in many EU nations fall way short of covering all the costs of childrearing. Parents are always paying up for non parents. It is, importantly, not solidarity or charity I am asking for, nor any needs based concept of justice, but justice tout simple Parents should not be exploited by non parents. Non parents should not free ride on the efforts of parents.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All costs of raising kids must be covered by the entire society, not only by parents\n","id":"379003e0-a23c-4bb8-91ce-75560a3a3bc7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>An additional source states as of 2011 a \u00a3230.9 million income from the Crown Estate, against \u00a332.1 million Royal Household expenditure.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UK saves millions of pounds each year because the Royal Family voluntarily surrenders revenue from royal lands to Parliament.\n","id":"d0f27e58-6eb4-41f0-90bf-1042d03b5288"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Brexit: Is The UK Going To Regret The Referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>If David Cameron had held a referendum \"should every citizen of the UK be given a million pounds?\" there would have been a large majority in favour. That doesn't mean it would have been a good idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A decision by majority vote does not necessarily mean it is a good decision.\n","id":"8c2a3827-cfdc-49cb-9d32-6a961ddd3c7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I keep hearing the repeating sound bite Medicare for all. Those words are meaningless because our candidates cannot come up with a credible plan that is close to what is available in other countries for the price. Specifically, no candidate has a credible plan that costs about 10 of GDP. provides as good if not better health care than currently available in countries with similar lifestyles. Basically, the US can be the first on the moon. But health care is an impossible challenge to conquer.  Voting for or against a candidate on health care is a waste of time because no one is up to the task. In Factfulness the author notes we in the US spend 9,400 compared to 3,800 per capita on health care. With the extra spend, we have 3 years shorter life expectancy. 39 countries have longer life expectancies. Looking at International Health Care Profiles countries that enjoy a similar lifestyle to ours manage to provide better care than the US for approximately 10 of GDP versus 18 of GDP the US paid Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not one candidate for President has a concrete and credible health care plan that gets us even close to what other countries have.\n","id":"4f200235-ad41-4ffb-8971-c3701d0196e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Body language is definitely a part of communication, but it's a quite shallow and simplistic part. Often I see it over valued. He crossed his arms and legs? He's nervous. Touched his face? Low status. Touched his hands? Definitely not prepared I've read quotes that say things like Body Language is the most important part of communication . That's simply absurd to me. Trying to analyze how someone feels or think strictly by how they look is pretty dishonest in my opinion. I hate when people speculate how someone's feeling when they haven't said a damn word about how they feel. How you feel is something you explain for yourself for others to hear, not something you infer based on how someone is standing Try asking someone how they feel and actually take their word for it for a change, not all this how are you? I'm fine You don't look fine . If they're lying to you then they're just lying to themselves anyways so what difference does it make? Words are very powerful. I've read books where I felt like I knew the author by the end of it. I've made friends in chat rooms I've talked to for years, and even though I've never seen their body language I feel like they're best of friends to me. Podcasters I listen to, based on just their voice I get a full range of emotion. I enjoy phone calls just as much as in person conversation. You especially hear about body language with public speaking and job interviews. This affects autistic people the hardest, since they could have brilliant ideas but just because they don't have the right body language they're ignored. People with Asperger's could look happy in person but be sad inside, or seem pissed off on the outside but genuinely happy to see someone. So what if they're not smiling, standing up perfectly straight and giving eye contact and moving their hands while they talk? Who cares? I care about the message. And honestly all those perfect little gestures come off pretty fake a lot of times. It's those little mistakes that make someone more interesting and unique, at least for me. To judge someone based off body language and not by the content of their message is especially foolish, because when they say a lot of body language signals aren't intended to be communicated, that's the point. They're not intended to tell you these signals you're inferring. The Body Language obsessives places those messages on people and tell them what they're feeling and that frustrates me to no end. Body language is important for certain things but its far from the most important communication element. I believe words are the most important followed by tone of voice . Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Body Language is Given Far Too Much Importance\n","id":"0f35d270-7bba-47bd-bc9c-e9d6546ccfea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need more and stronger international institutions?<|ARGUMENT|>In addition, those making and implementing decisions have no \"skin in the game\" when far away at a centralized institution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Centralized decision making leads to a disconnect from events and culture on the ground.\n","id":"ba521b1c-fd6d-4ec4-9599-be1f7613782b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Reddit would be better off without downvotes, because unlike social media sites, Reddit is built for discussion, and downvotes directly hinder that. Downvotes allow and perhaps encourage people to express their disapproval without adding anything substantial whatsoever to a post. It lets users imply that they think another user is wrong whether morally or factually without explaining why how can one be expected to correct a blunder on his her part if they don't know what they said or did wrong? That's what happens when all a person has to go by is a downvote on their post. All in all, downvoting is a way for people to point out what they perceive as mistakes on someone else's part and not explain why they feel the way they do, which stagnates discussion. This User A makes a statement User B makes a counterpoint explaining why User A is wrong User A can now clarify his original statement, elaborating on why he said it, or correct User B in case there was a misunderstanding, or realize that he was indeed wrong, thus learning from the discussion Is always better than this User A makes a statement User B downvote User A has no context with which to work, no chance to elaborate clear up any misunderstandings, and thus nobody learns or gains anything from this interaction Unfortunately, the system of downvotes encourages the latter less than the former. Also, the system allows but I won't necessarily say encourages serial downvoting, which often involves downvoting all of a user's posts comments out of spite for whatever reason, which is just immature.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Downvotes without a contribution to the discussion, which the majority are are often petty, unproductive, and pointless, and Reddit would be better off without them\n","id":"34fd225e-9fbb-454d-a391-8f8934a370be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just because this is kind of relevant to the topic, I'm a cisgender female who is half Chinese and half Caucasian, but I look more like I'm a quarter Chinese and thus I'm usually seen as being fully white. I feel like maybe these views are just me being a bigot or whatever, but I guess that\u2019s why I wanted to talk about them. Hopefully the title sums my view up well, but I found it hard to summarize in one sentence. A few days ago, I was in a human rights class and we had a guest speaking about intersectionality and social issues. The person described an activity that she had done in one of the programs that she was in people basically started out standing in a row side by side, and the coordinator would say something like, take one step back if you are trans muslim ESL etc. \u201d She said that by the end of the activity, there was basically a visual representation of who was the most oppressed of the group and who had the most privilege. She said that she was second to last, and talked about how much that affected her when she realized that she was so disadvantaged. This activity made me really uncomfortable for several reasons literally ranking people based on how oppressed they are, for one thing , but I\u2019ll mainly talk about the privilege part. Basically, I feel like that activity was very one dimensional even literally, with people moving in one direction along one axis. I felt that it only looked at one aspect of people\u2019s lives, but she made it seem like it was a mind blowing revelation about our broken society. This kind of led me to realize that I think that the idea of privilege based on race, gender, or sexuality is pretty one dimensional. I mean, there are so many other aspects to people\u2019s social status, and success other than their immutable traits. I don\u2019t just mean their personality, but also how and where they were raised, their parent\u2019s income, their education or lack thereof, the connections they had growing up, etc. You could have a white, straight, cisgender male who was born into a low income family and a gay black female who was born into a rich family, and you couldn\u2019t definitively say that the white male is objectively more advantaged than the black female. I\u2019m not saying that there\u2019s no such thing as privilege. Just today I was hanging out with a bunch of friends and realized that I was the only white looking person there, and that made me feel a bit uncomfortable in my own skin. I then realized that that\u2019s how people of color probably feel amongst white people, except that\u2019s most of the time for them. And they even could experience blatant discrimination and racism all the time, for all I know, because I\u2019ve never had to live as a person who doesn\u2019t look white. But what I am saying is that just because somebody is of a majority group, it doesn\u2019t mean that they\u2019re automatically going to be favoured in our society. There are so many other factors that come into play other than your immutable traits, and you can\u2019t just focus solely on race, gender, and sexuality to determine the source of inequality in our society. It\u2019s just not that simple. EDIT 1 So I've been reading through a few of the comments, and now I've realized that I probably shouldn't say that other people put too much emphasis on privilege. This is because I am probably blind to my own privileges, and it's not my place to decide what other people value. Also, I realized that the reason why I instinctively reacted in this way was because it made me feel like I was being boiled down to just my race gender. And one more thing, I probably should have said this before but I am referring to privilege as it's usually used by more left leaning people when talking about race, gender, and sexuality stuff I wasn't thinking about privilege referring to wealth or anything. EDIT 2 I am going to bed now, but I'm looking forward to reading through more replies and talking about this more tomorrow. Thanks for all of the thoughtful replies so far.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is such a thing as privilege, but it's not as important as people make it out to be.\n","id":"5bbea945-33f8-4fee-816d-72e5d4ad173d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are programs like Alcoholics Anonymous the best way to battle addiction<|ARGUMENT|>Many AA meetings happen in major cities and are thus inaccessible to many. Online support forums from other organisations remove this hurdle in seeking help.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Programs like AA are community-based, so are logistically easy to attend.\n","id":"dc7b11de-c648-4012-a383-d0b7fd0a2f99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>As a result, there are fewer hard drugs in the streets as it is not profitable to sell them anymore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Methadone programmes reduce the profit of drug dealers and criminals.\n","id":"baa61c8d-1477-4ce4-b307-509400505a76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I frequent self post subreddits a lot and I notice a large number of posts are introspective in nature. There are a lot of I don't know who I am posts or I think seeing a dead body when I was seven caused my depression type post. Not to mention the myriad of I have depression and anxiety posts. Most of these posts are unbelievably long winded and usually consist of the OP telling their whole life story, from the fact that they were born 2 days early to the time Jimmy stole their lunch money in second grade. I think that a combination of having too much free time and being raised to believe that we are all special snowflakes has caused the last couple of generations to be excessively introspective. I think that spending such a great amount of time thinking about your life and your position in the world leads people to feel down and develop anxiety, because they, frankly, are just spending way too much time worrying about what kind of effect one isolated incident had on them 25 years ago. I'm not saying the events in our lives don't influence who we are, because obviously they do, but I'm saying they wouldn't have such a demostrable effect on us if we didn't spend so much time brooding over them. Another point about this obsessive drive to be individual comes from this increasing need to identify as a very specific type of person, whether it's related to your sexuality, your interests, etc. It's no longer enough to identify as a person that likes men, or a person that likes women, now we identify as heteroromantic asexual and all this nonsense. I mean, does anybody really care to know precisely what you do and don't like in bed and in romance? Why are people so focused on identifying themselves in such a narrow way? Of what importance to the general public is the fact that you don't like to have sex but you enjoy romance? I don't give a flying fuck if you are gay or straight or trans or into BDSM or you have a scat fetish or whatever. It's not important and I seriously don't care. I think that this obsession with narrowing down precisely the type of person you are with ridiculous labels is going too far, and it's a symptom of this eternal struggle to be as individual as possible. Why is being an individual so important to everyone? I mean, I'm not saying we all need to be like the Borg and eliminate individuality, but I feel like at some point we need to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough. Nobody cares if you are a zooromantic asexual scat fetishist. At what point is this going to end? Why is it so important to be microscopically precise about describing your sex life, your interests, your preferences and every other thing about yourself. What is so wrong with just being a person that accepts they are unique without feeling the need to impose that uniqueness on everyone else with countless labels?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that this \"cult of the individual\" is starting to go to ridiculous lengths and it is becoming detrimental to individuals and to society.\n","id":"b5fc55ab-1379-4937-aa81-d498ba7e1fc5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Honestly I wish we didn't have to be involved in wars, but looking back on history whenever there is a leading superpower and that superpower stops being the one in charge things go very bad like how after the roman empire fell europe lived in constant serfdom under people that would kill them for not giving them food or how the year Britain was no longer considered the hegemony was 1914. On the one hand I wish we spent more money on stuff like education, science and that but on the other hand if we just walked away and didn't care Russia would probably invade Eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia and Iran would kill each other, China would pull a Tibet on other nations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even though the USA is involved in too many wars I feel as though whenever there's not a hegemony historically things go bad.\n","id":"ec52d875-fe06-462c-aace-dd88a569e3e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Vertical Farming is the Future of Agriculture<|ARGUMENT|>Farming currently is not efficient. If it becomes more efficient, then those practices can be implemented into vertical farms to allow them to operate profitably.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without bettering current farming practices, vertical farming might not reach its potential and thus not live up to its hype.\n","id":"8e816d06-b908-4d0f-8e40-79ae140fa5af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>In order to effectively identify terrorist content posted by Indonesian users, the messenger app Telegram had to create a dedicated team of people familiar with Indonesian politics and culture<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The moderation of terrorist content requires special expertise and training, so it cannot simply be outsourced like more basic tasks.\n","id":"4440fca0-bcc2-42ae-af5f-cadfb8c50e5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>Literal interpretation of a subject matter such as religion can be described as being rigid or fixed in its application. This means that such application is not relevant or beneficial to modern society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The literal interpretation of the creation account is incompatible with the empirical evidence for the evolution of species.\n","id":"b97657ae-017c-43bd-a154-d6d8c4323007"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey reddit, I've had this thought debate in the back of my head for a while and I wanted some opinions. If I choose not to celebrate Christmas or celebrate minimally no decorations, acknowledgement, etc , and someone calls me a scrooge, I think this is an emotionally charged slander to throw against someone. I choose to not par take in the festivities because finances, work, and other priorities but here is my other big question Why is there such pressure from society to celebrate? Could it be economical retail reasons, this is the time where companies go into the black and balance negative income spread sheets. Is it religious?? Ignorance?? I mean, Halloween is a huge earner for confectionery companies and if you sit it out, people don't care but why Christmas? TL DR Why is there such enormous pressure for people to celebrate Christmas and is it wrong not to celebrate?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Calling someone a scrooge for not celebrating Christmas or the holidays is wrong and can be considered shaming.\n","id":"aef17eae-404e-4e0d-9e33-d79da01b7916"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm originally from Russia, but I moved to America a few years ago. I've been thinking about the conflict in Ukraine a lot. I've been arguing about it with my Russian and Ukrainian frieds for months. Even thought I don't approve how Russia handles this situation, I think that its actions are infinitely more reasonable than what the American media might make you think. I strongly believe that most people from other countries have no idea what they are talking about when they discuss it. r worldnews makes me sick so many highly upvoted comments are made by people who clearly know nothing about Russia, Ukraine or Crimea. It made me think about my reactions to other international conflicts. What do I know about Syria, Egypt, Tunisia? So my opinion about the war in Palestina is that I have no opinion. Whatever I say about it would probably be totally wrong and stupid. To change my view, please explain how to determine with a reasonable level of confidence who's wrong and who's right in a conflict involving two countries or two parties within one country somewhere far far away. EDIT it was surprisingly easy There were three great point in this thread, each was enough to change my view If someone on Internet is wrong, it doesn't mean you can't research and make a reasonable judgment. u MackDaddyVelli Not involved gt unbiased gt more likely to be right. u DHCKris There's no such thing as being not involded in the modern world. u extrafeta<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The only reasonable thing to do for people from countries not directly involved in an international conflict is to stay neutral\n","id":"cc678a7f-264b-456f-a3f7-9b1decfe1275"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Time to 'Free the Nipple'? Toplessness and Gender Equality in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Since studies have found that sexual violence is more prevalent in countries that are sexually conservative, instituting sexually liberal policies would actually make women safer in the long run.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women are allowed to go bare-chested in public in other countries. The US should be no different.\n","id":"ffc73aec-051a-4bd4-866c-fbacdd583fa8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>If you propose a deity that is capable of creating a world especially one without evil, than that deity would have to be so 'different' for lack of a better word than anything we know that we'd also have to take into account that the ground for the very existence of evil could or should go beyond our comprehension.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are limited in their capacity to conceptualize God, and thus are incapable of accurately judging the relationship between evil and a divine being.\n","id":"0ea22660-7194-4148-a593-b1ff3cb36dc8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the Bible support the conclusion that 'homosexuality' is a sin against God?<|ARGUMENT|>The Pope does not speak infallibly for the Church unless he is declaring a teaching \"ex cathedra\", which means \"by the chair\", this a universal teaching on a matter of faith and morals for the entire Catholic Church. Once declared, they cannot be changed and are binding upon the faithful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Pope's recent comments do not indicate the official Catholic position.\n","id":"c9304017-0a9d-4a91-af14-f34d1a3194be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender inequality in the tech industry is due to systemic disadvantages<|ARGUMENT|>Exposure to computers increases the likelihood of interest and knowledge about technology. Girls were less likely to have this exposure than boys because of marketing disparity. Many of those working in the tech industry grew up during this time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since the 80s, computers and gaming systems have been heavily marketed for boys and men.\n","id":"f4a96ea3-787b-4121-ade9-3a2e211f2e31"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>All hormone based contraceptive methods are potentially abortive in that sense, as they thicken the lining of the uterus preventing attachment of the fertilized egg some only in rare cases, but all do it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If we draw the line at conception, then all hormone based contraceptive methods are abortions.\n","id":"af1f7b7c-3e42-4fb4-ba76-b0a129f46a2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Is building a wall on the U.S.A Mexican wall necessary? Donald J. Trump had said \u201cI would build a Great Wall, and nobody builds walls better then me, believe me, and I\u2019ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great great on our southern boarder and I\u2019ll have Mexico pay for that wall.\u201d April 2016 Trump has so far not only said he will make Mexico pay for it later and Supreme Court would give him the fundings to build it, but now denies he said Mexico would pay for it at all. Let\u2019s say that this wall is really going to be built. Is this going to be useful? As of 2016 according to pewresearch.org there were 12 million Mexican immigrants in the U.S.A. and that 45 of them were in the country illegally. According to PunditFact 40 of Mexican illegal immigrants traveled by plane. So far, with all of our information this wall is only going to be 60 useful. According to pozogoldsteinny.com visa over stay, staying in he country for longer than your visa allows, is the way the largest number of illegal immigrants get into country\u2019s illegally. About 40 of them do this. Giving the the pro wall side the benefit of the doubt here, only 20 of illegal immigration from Mexico would be prevented or delayed because of this wall. Keep in mind that Trump would be paying 8 64 billion for this \u201cconcrete wall\u201d. In my personal opinion, paying 8 64 billion to prevent or delay about, given the benefit of the doubt, 20 of illegal immigrants from Mexico is not worth it. Let\u2019s say this wall does not get built and these 20 are not effected. We still could use other cheaper and better methods like tightening border patrol. That would be one of many ways to do the same thing as a wall, cheaper and quicker. In conclusion, a wall would not be worth paying 8 64 billion for when we could use quicker and cheaper methods that do the same thing. Edit If I say Mexican immigrants, I mean immigrants crossed from U.S.A. Mexico border.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A U.S.A. Mexican border wall is not necessary and a waste of money and time.\n","id":"a1acf113-7018-4f44-b259-fbd7c82b3c58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm here as a Secular Humanist, but I'm not here to argue about the existence of a God. I will accept that perhaps there is some higher power out there, but to me the only version that makes sense is some Lovecraftian thing we live in a universe of billions upon billions of stars and planets in billions upon billions of galaxies if there were some higher entity and creator, his power and scope would be so mind shatteringly immense and unfathomable that the none of our human lore makes sense. So here are my arguments It's arrogant to think that your version of god is the right version when we've had thousands before to believe the Bible and Christ you must dismiss all those who've honestly believed in Krishna and Buddha and Rah and Thor and Zeus Why would god create such rules and care so much as he does? God has been used to justify war, racism, slavery, genocide, misogyny, homophobia why would something that could create the universe care about us? We're the slightly more intelligent apes on the tiny blue rock to him and the scale of the universe we must be less than dust or atoms at best we'd be an ant farm amidst the rest of the millions of other species that makes up our lonely planet. It's about politics and power, god is a powerful thing and it humbles people to bend to a mob will figures like Priests and the Pope and all religious leaders try to control their church and temple goers lives, or influence them it goes as far as to try and tell you silly things like not to eat chocolate or pork or shellfish or garlic, or wear mixed fabrics The scripture is man made, and man ruined it was written by people 2000 years ago and spent the last 2 millennium getting copied by hand and translated and edited over and over and over to the point where how can we trust what the word of that original god and original text really meant? The scripture isn't meant to be read literally at all people love to read you lines from scripture, and yet the tomes themselves are full of allegories, poems, hidden messages how can you say one bit is any more valid than another? People do this cherry picking, which should dilute any value of the religion people steal lines out of context, interpret them as literally or non literally as they so choose, ignore bits of the text and rules that they want to, and inject their own moral values it becomes a self applied label in order to legitimize your own ideology. People in the same church disagree on different aspect, people in different churches disagree, the religions themselves are splintered into different sects People are afraid of cults but that's exactly what every major organized religion really is. People try to use their religion as a scapegoat for logic, reason, and the pursuit of knowledge i.e. american bible belters fighting against evolution and science So again, this isn't an argument for or against god, only against the political institutions of organized faith. You should think for yourself rather than letting other people try to dictate your lifestyle and tell you how to think. EDIT Just to clarify, I'm not saying this should be something imposed by the government. Forcibly doing that would violate your freedoms of speech and expression. I'm saying that we should as a society move past organized faith and dissolve these institution ourselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Organized religion is a sham and should be disbanded\n","id":"03208018-a82e-45ae-b63a-372f39c8abef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The argument is that by lobbying in support of something, you end up arvertizing it is something good for the society, at the same time saying that by granting this new freedom people will actually want to do it less. But this is not how advertizing works, or we would not have so many advertizements around us, 24 7. This argument has been used in many lobbies, like the pornographic revolution make adult porn legal and people will want to use it less , the sexual lobby allow people to have as many partners as they want, and they will be more faitful , and the gay lobby, with a slightly different approach celebrate us, or else . The modern feminism also suffers a bit from this we can't do anything without yet MORE rights, so give them to us . I think these arguments do not make any sense, because if you advertise something, people will want it more, not less. Let me finish saying I'm not an english speaker, take this into account when refering to my spelling. Not changed my mind yet. Edit Let's see, people. I did not post this to convince you of my view. I posted it so you convince me of yours. Demand less proofs and give more proof.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lobbies and their arguments in favor of their position do not make any sense.\n","id":"6f8c6981-92fe-43df-9f3a-75d7d49a7724"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So,as you can see,it seems that there are those in Washington Mattis not among them,thank god who seem to want nothing more than to turn North Korea into dust While evidently thinking Who gives a damn about South Korea and Japan . A war with North Korea,given everything we know about NK capabilities, would be utter calamity and could not only generate untold death and suffering,but set these two countries back god knows how many years or decades or even centuries And I see it not only from our elected officials But here on reddit too Alot of people seem to think that NK will be an easy win and that we can take out their nukes easily Therefore,in my eyes,it seems that these two countries are simply expendable and any,say,economic calamity that transpires as a result of the obvious heavy damage these two countries will sustain will be just like a passing storm on a summer day,so to speak. So,,again,your mission,should you choose to accept it is to change my view on this matter Are we really willing to throw SK and Japan under the bus like this? If we do shaft them majorly like that,do you think they'll tell us to fuck off and get closer to China? Will the U.S be the most hated nation in both countries as a result of the U.S thinking that they're gonna be nothing but figures of collateral damage? And why are the American people at least on some subreddits I see so willing to consider SK JP as acceptable losses to NK just to stop their nuclear plans? And even if we take out NK, will it even change anything? there's still countries out there who have nukes want them i.e,Iran so we take out NK,then what?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States think that both South Korea and Japan are expendable when it comes to dealing with North Korea.\n","id":"e024b588-a88e-46b9-9a02-a0d8dfc69ac8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should periods be followed by one space, or two?<|ARGUMENT|>Not everyone reads at the same level. Denying them this very simple aid for the sake of fewer characters frankly shows a lack of compassion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anything that helps the reading eye comprehend the written material is worth doing.\n","id":"cb5ed92d-08f7-4962-80e9-fddbd3d7cc2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Republika Srpska secession from Bosnia and Herzegovina<|ARGUMENT|>Prime Minister of Republika Srpska RS Milorad Dodik stated, \"If Sarajevo persists in claiming that the Bosnian Serb entity RS should not exist and is a genocidal creature, they will get the answer called \u2018people\u2019 and \u2018referendum\u2019 on independence\".4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Republika Srpska has right to secede to protect right to exist\n","id":"a12cca07-4ad0-41dc-8164-ef310979dd10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Laptops or Tablets Better For College Students?<|ARGUMENT|>Laptops have moving fans that can fail or degrade from dust, whereas tablets usually rely on passive cooling.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Laptops have moving parts that tend to fail over time.\n","id":"c8af0aad-e929-4144-a32d-c6b8887b424b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Stopping eating meat just means dropping a few ingredients. There are lots and lots of ingredients left to use and be creative with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Non-meat products can offer an equivalently pleasing food experience.\n","id":"11118053-eb0f-4253-a71a-3f7b4585fb60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Women in the United States are 21 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than women in other high-income countries, where gun ownership is comparatively low<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women with access to guns become homicide victims at much higher rates than men Gun ownership increases the risks which women face rather than protecting them.\n","id":"6738137f-da20-4570-b9b1-72fc2cb54207"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state ever infringe on individual human rights when countering terrorism?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump vowed to reinstate torture, including treatment that is \u201ca lot worse than waterboarding.\u201d A majority of Americans think that the CIA\u2019s use of torture is justified, which is a subsequent reason behind the election of President Trump.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many right wing politicians are using rhetoric to bring back the use of torture as a counter terrorism strategy, advocating that the human rights of their people trump the rights of suspected terrorists.\n","id":"ca641175-c702-4a2b-ad88-c6d1a9b359d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>They've been saying this since the 30s. Keynes predicted that as technology increased and our material needs would be met, we would only need to work 15 hours a week, instead we are working longer hours than ever. There's no reason to think this will change anytime soon, if it hasn't in the last 80 years. People were saying from the 18th Century that the industrial revolution will make man redundant? But did it? People moved on, new types of job openings which we'd never have imagined before came to be, think about the luddites' opposition to technology. We do not have anything to fear.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We do not have to fear automation\n","id":"3b3da3d3-085b-4c48-a321-844a36fd17f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Google Censor Their Search Results In Order To Operate In China?<|ARGUMENT|>Multiple scandals just two years ago have lead many to boycott Baidu, and these scandals have dented the company's reputation severely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A poll showed that 90% of people would use Google China over Baidu.\n","id":"1023cae9-5dec-46f5-8d23-0765a9deadd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>It has been argued that gender is something we 'do' and the way we do gender is actively constructed through social interactions and gender scripts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender the concept of masculinity and femininity is a social construct.\n","id":"b58185ba-de29-44b5-ac32-6c82cf9a391e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The United States Needs a Strong Third Political Party For Moderates<|ARGUMENT|>Even if people are able to establish a strong third party, without media support and attention, it will be difficult for such a party to gain momentum or have a chance in key elections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The media would not report on third parties equally and candidates from the third party would be unlikely to get as much public acknowledgement.\n","id":"6a8e6ae9-4cb1-4ee3-9a09-33adb2c6b790"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To explain, I don't think Wizards of the Coasts needs to retire 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons to transition to a 6th edition as their new focus. I don't see something fundamentally wrong with the design of 5th edition that warrants a focus on developing a new edition over expanding, improving, and fine tuning the current edition. To clarify some other points. That 5th edition is not perfect. I don't think it's possible for any system to be perfect. There are a lot mechanics, lore, flavor, and design choices that people say detract from the game. I never see anyone go as far as saying that a particular class, action, spell, or rule is so obtuse or bad that it warrants a new edition or breaks the game. Even when someone argues they completely dislike how constitution or hiding works, they never seem to expand on how it impacts the system. There is always room to improve . I like the sage advice articles and erratas, I think they help clarify points and add much needed feedback from the community. I don't think WotC amending 5e makes the edition bad or is proof that development for 5e needs to slow stop in lieu of working on an entire new D D edition. If WotC have come up with enough balancing and mechanical changes that warrants entire other edition, I'm all for it and I have no qualms if that is their goal. Coming up with new and improved mechanics is slow and hard work getting new mechanics to gel and improve on each other is even harder. To summarize this point, is the on going change in 5e as incremental improvements while I expect a new edition to a dramatic improvement. Like going from sail boats to stream engines. 5th edition is not the best. I think you can find previous editions of D D and even other tabletop RPG systems better than 5e. You could have more fun with White Wolf or Pathfinder but that shouldn't create flaws in 5e. I see lots of talk about how people wish 5e was more like x or y. It is cool to see other system inspire one another, but I think copying or translating a mechanic from one system can detract from both system. I see each system like a car. This minivan is nice, but don't you think it would be even better if it was also a sports car? Different game systems for different focuses. This is just currently . There could be a dramatic drop in the player base. Someone could discover a dramatic flaw in 5e' design. There could be dramatic increase in the player base. Massive infusion of money. A good Dungeons and Dragons movie? A lot can happen I'm claiming that 5e is future proof. Maybe D D will need something to make fashionable again if it falls out of fashion . I'm open for other forces to drive a new edition but outside of a argument of design, I'm not see a plausible real world element that exists right now to prompt a new edition. If there is a market, demographic, or business move that is in the works for WotC by all means point me towards it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's not necessary for there to be a 6th edition of Dungeons and Dragon yet.\n","id":"003c43d6-45dd-40e2-8967-7861a56be603"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you're unfamiliar with streaks in the photo sharing messenger app snapchat, it's fairly simple. If you send a photo to another person, they send a photo back within 24 hours, you begin a streak. The streak count is visible next to the users name, starting at day 3. I remember when I first signed up for snapchat. I enjoyed making funny snaps to send to friends. Short clips paired with music, whatever. All in good fun. My friends did the same. Over the span of a few days, me and a friend has shared several snaps, and noticed the snapchat streaks feature. After some research, we decided to keep it going. Occasionally we would send a quick low effort snap to make sure the streak wouldn't die. More and more people began streaks with me. Making a high effort personalized snap for each of them everyday was too difficult so I did the same as everyone else. I simply sent photos titled streaks . It didn't take long before I realized snapchat has become boring. Everything fun about it was in the snapchats between friends and streaks had become the only reason to send snaps anymore. I didn't want to lose my streaks, so I kept them going. Some of my longest streaks spanned over a year. Every so often I would forget to send a post, losing a streak here and a streak there. Streaks were never that fun, and had basically become a chore. All quality snaps would go to stories, but they had lost their magic. Snaps were no longer capped at 10 seconds. They had become 60 seconds. Hilarious, spontaneous snaps were no longer. Instead, they had been replaced by loud concerts, unfunny close ups of peoples faces, and excessive PDA. Streaks had ruined the idea of snapchat. The ability to send quality snaps to friends still exists but is not utilized. Instead we have a messaging app that deletes everything instantly. Lousy snapchat stories with annoying ads crammed in. Everything that made snapchat unique is missing. While this isn't entirely due to streaks, I say streaks play a large part. Streaks suck, and snapchat was better without it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Streaks ruined snapchat.\n","id":"606ba23b-6912-4109-991a-19180d1b7d4d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This isn't about how gun ownership isn't a right in the United States per the Constitution, it is that it shouldn't be. Just because it is in the Constitution, does not make it a fundamental right. A ban on alcohol was also in the Constitution and nobody realistically argues that you had a moral obligation to not drink alcohol, but only between the years of 1920 1933. Basically, this argument is that the Constitution is not a moral document and we need to stop treating it as absolute moral law and instead treat it as a framework for governance. If the framework is broken, we fix it. This is also not an argument about how realistic removing the second amendment is. I'm just tired of seeing the argument that the second amendment's mere existence is enough to call guns a fundamental right. Edit I'm putting this up here because I can't be asked to reword this for every person who brings this up. Not owning a gun does not take away your right to self defense. There are non lethal mechanism through which you can defend yourself. Tasers exist. Mace exists. Rubber bullets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no reason gun ownership should be a fundamental right.\n","id":"c3740a20-5428-4b62-9f96-e9f576d5386f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments push for 100% renewable energy?<|ARGUMENT|>Mass produced nuclear plants are fast deploying plants. France and US are an example during the 70's. China, Saudi Arabia and India are today's examples.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An immediate shift to nuclear power is the most efficient way to mitigate the consequences of Peak Oil.\n","id":"d5ee4d85-7d8b-4274-8647-e99965848ea0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Things that we consider \"unalienable\" rights are rights to things like clean food and water, safe shelter, and free thought.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People only have rights to things they need for survival, not things they merely want.\n","id":"be19d993-1001-4baa-b10c-0bc51beb7591"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Declassified documents and the undisclosed identity of the coup leader codenamed White Elephant which some authors claim could have been former King Juan Carlos, suggest he was not in favour of democracy but actually supported the coup.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monarchs in some democratic countries only allowed democracy when confronted with plausible threats of violence or supported undemocratic regimes.\n","id":"661594ac-586b-41e5-bfc3-8f399780f4f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To summarize, Murphy was accused of a crime he didn't commit, and was nearly hanged by the group until the real killer stepped forward. All he demanded was the same justice for her that was about to be inflicted on him. She ended up committing suicide, and everyone was a total dick to him for the entire series because of it. I just don't get why what he did was such a big deal. Was it so monstrous of him to demand justice when there was a confession, when they were about to kill him without one? Without getting too far into it, a LOT of characters do far worse things and are totally accepted in the group. I just don't get why they all have such a hate boner for Murphy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the show \"The 100\", Murphy is a good guy, and his persecution by the group is completely unjustified The 100 spoilers obviously\n","id":"83127f60-a43e-4fbb-8ad7-a6eb2b18f6d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not against selling or consuming alcohol and tobacco. I'm not against gambling. This can be fun and rewarding to some extent. But I'm against the advertisement taking advantage of the people who are too weak to resist the urge. Using those who really tries to quit, but falls back into the spiral that is addiction. It's very dangerous. I understand the need for marketing your product, but it's morally disingenuous and disgusting if the targeting group is the people who really cannot afford to lose anything more, because of the said product. Sure, an argument against a ban of this kind is that food, video games and sugar also can be addictive, and if you ban ads for alcohol and gambling, you should ban everything else too, but I disagree. Alcohol and tobacco is a drug, with an addictive substance, made to be addictive. Gambling is also constructed to be addictive and to make you keep on playing. Sugar, video games and food aren't the same, and if you claim that they are, I believe you are missing the bigger picture. You cannot compare it like that. Finally I want to point out that there really are no need for advertising of this kind. People who want to buy these products anyway, they can do so, but those in danger of relapsing, would avoid the temptation that the advertisement represent. With that being said, I would love to get another perspective on this. Why should we allow advertisements for alcohol, gambling and tobacco, if it only does harm for a selfish reason?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All advertising regarding gambling, alcohol and tobacco should be completely banned.\n","id":"30602964-57fe-481c-9bc6-6258938076f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edited for clarity and added detail Let's start out by defining what I mean by God, I mean a being that has at least these three traits omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. You can tell me whether you think omnipotence includes being able to do logically impossible things, or if it only means being able to do all logically possible things. By omnibenevolence I mean always preferring what is morally good, or always choosing the morally best option out of all alternatives available. By evil I mean anything that makes the world worse than perfect, or if you think there's no such thing as a perfect world, than anything that makes a world worse than the best possible world. So I don't just mean animal cruelty is evil and the Holocaust was evil, I also mean stubbing your toe is evil. If a perfectly good, all knowing, all powerful being existed, then it would know what the best possible world would be like, would want to create the best possible world, and would be able to create the best possible world. So if God existed, the actual world would not contain any evil, since God would have chosen to create the best possible world, which contains no evil, instead. Further, I would argue that in our world we do find evil, both evil caused by agents, and natural evil, which was not caused by anything that could even be argued to have agency except, of course, God . The nature of this evil is both abundant and clearly superfluous it doesn't seem necessary that small children suffer agonizing deaths on a regular basis, for example. So if you really want to change my view, show me how the type and amount of evil we see in the actual world is consistent with the existence of god. Note that I'm not trying to be convinced that any specific god does exist, or that god exists at all, but only that the existence of God would be compatible with the existence of evil that we see in our world . It would be too much to ask of you that you also convinced me a god existed. So just limit your attempt to  to why evil could exist in a world with an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent being. Here are some good articles to read if you want to do some research before attempting to  Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The existence of evil is not compatible with the existence of God.\n","id":"e75297f4-441f-42d4-84b6-541f6f39dc70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>DC v. Heller was an instance of judicial activism and does not faithfully represent the original meaning of the 2nd Amendment that the founders intended.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right to bear arms is rooted in the need for a \"well-regulated\" militia.\n","id":"deab5467-e2ba-4886-a3c2-c69fd81b33a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>Pascal's wager is circular because believing in the existence of God in order to please God only matters if you believe God may exist in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The notion proposed by Pascal in his Wager is inherently flawed.\n","id":"481856a7-ed1c-4885-9fc8-67458e7b3702"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So as I was browsing my usual media sites today, I noticed that there is so much bias in every story of substance that it makes me sick to read. Just for reference, I check CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and a few minor sites daily for my news intake. The bias involved in a for profit media outlet cannot be undone by itself, simply because they are selling their stories to viewers who share and are reinforcing their own viewpoint. I try to watch and read as many sources as possible to balance out both biases, but it's so far apart that it turns my stomach. For instance, this was posted on a pro gun website, citing a video from a MSNBC affiliate. The video is bad enough on the logic side we can discuss that elsewhere , but the sarcastic commentary on top of it from the other side didn't sate my desire for information either. My Proposition In theory, could we opt to set up a fund for a National Media ? This would be a block grant from the Federal Government to an independent organization in a continuing or long term appropriation. The goal of this new site would be to accurately and with utmost care impartially report news from local, national, and international sites. Obviously you have to worry about problems of corruption and the government threatening to shut down funding if they don't like what it prints, but can we ignore that aspect just for the sake of good discussion? If not, that's fine and we can worry, but we all know what corruption would do. So, tl dr Our current, for profit media sucks, and I want a better way to get my news.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that for-profit media has ruined the purpose of media and that a semi- state run news outlet would be a superior alternative.\n","id":"5579736a-161c-415c-9ef2-19a99a028656"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Inspired from Ben Carson's remark that Muslim shouldn't be elected president I don't have an in depth knowledge of the Constitution but my personal stance is that the religion of the POTUS is irrelevant as long as he can uphold the Constitution and is loyal to the country. Granted, we are seeing a heck of a lot of extremist terrorist acts lately that stem from radical Islamists, but that does not somehow make it unconstitutional for the POTUS to be a Muslim. What if we are living at a peaceful time without Islamic terrorists? Would that then make it OK for the president to be Muslim? If so, then that makes his argument even weaker, since when should the religion of the president be based on contemporary events?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's OK for the U.S. President to be a Muslim\n","id":"e60bfce5-4780-41ff-ad32-2e45e23671ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay everyone, this should hopefully be an easy delta for you. About a week ago, I moved to Atlanta, GA for school and drove down from Virginia. Near the I 85 285 interchange by the perimeter mall, the skies started opening up very heavily. It was some of the heaviest rain that I've seen in some time. During that time, I noticed something that I had never seen before. There were other drivers that turned their hazard lights on during this storm, since the rain was so heavy and the visibility was very limited. I do not know how common this is here or in any other areas , but it was the first time I had ever observed this. I decided to put my hazard lights on too, because I could barely see in front of me, and I didn't intend to go any faster than 35 MPH in the right lane, of course , due to the conditions. Also, the road lines and reflectors were old and faded, which made it more difficult to see which lane I was in. I was also not at all familiar with the area, so I wanted people to be aware that I was going slow and trying to stay out of the way. There were also several other cars in front and behind me that were going about the same speed. I didn't think anything of it at all, until I started reading through r Atlanta, and I have found that this is a very heated topic to them that causes lots of outrage. This was the thread that I saw, and then I did some more searching and found one two three four other threads that have been posted in the past that expressed extreme anger over this. According to these links, I was a hazard, imbecile, idiot, moron, stupid, douche, and many more friendly words. Now I don't believe that this should happen during a normal light rain storm perhaps that's what they were referring to , but for a very heavy rain storm, I don't see the problem. I can't say that I totally understand why this is such a controversial topic. I don't believe that everyone should have their hazard lights on during a heavy rain storm by any means, but I don't see what is so bad about it either. Some of the reasons that were given that didn't convince me were If conditions are that bad, then instead of having your hazards on, you need to pull over and wait for the rain to stop I believe that would be even more unsafe, to be stopped on the shoulder of a busy 6 lane highway. The closing rate and difference in relative speed between my car and other cars would be higher, and would cause a collision to be much worse. Also, roads are slightly tilted to right in order to help water runoff, which leads to big puddles of water that I do not want to stop in. They disable your turn signals This is true, and I even had to change lanes to make it to my exit during this storm. So I turned the hazards off for a few seconds, put my turn signal on, merged over, then turned them back on. I don't see why that's so difficult or so egregious. They make your brake lights harder to see To be fair, I could see how this might be a problem for cars whose hazard lights and turn signals are also red. However, my car has separate yellow lights for turning hazard lights, so this did not apply to me. You should speed up to go with the flow of traffic and not be in the way Most people in the storm I was in were going slow, but there were a decent number of people that were still going full speed in the left lanes and passing people very quickly. I think that is way more dangerous than people going slower. It seems obvious to me that going slower in those hazardous conditions would be the safer choice. The lights are too distracting and draw too much attention to your car I don't understand this one at all. They are making my car more visible, but they are not red blue lights and sirens or anything. They are certainly nowhere near as distracting to other drivers as texting, eating, and all the other usual distractions that drivers are guilty of doing. To me, it is common sense that you should focus on paying attention to the road in front of you, not cars with their hazards on to the right of you. Now with all of this being said, based on the level of anger in those threads comments and the large number of upvotes they got, it seems clear to me that I am in the minority. So I must be doing something wrong that would require my view to be changed. I've read those comments, and they were not satisfying to me, but maybe I could get some more convincing and level headed replies here. Help me stop being an idiot, imbecile, moron, or any of your other favorite insults. tl dr I believe that having your hazard lights on during a heavy rain storm is acceptable, and it is not a hazard or a distraction that warrants outrage. I believe that it is better to make my car more visible, and communicate to other drivers that I am going to go below the speed limit and try to stay out of the way, so they can pass me if they choose. EDIT My viewpoint has already been changed, thanks to everyone who replied to me<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that it is acceptable to drive with your hazard lights on during heavy rain\n","id":"e2598688-f1ab-4ab4-8ccd-a4d929645aa2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now, this is going to be a sad and I admit that I really want someone to change my views on this one, but I think the 1990 generation and their children are going to get screwed over big time due to automation. Now I'm not talking about the talented or the obsessive workers as long as they stay at a low percentage , I'm talking about average Joes here. The need for labor has been going down to a point where we don't really need that many workers any more, large percentage of the young people can stay and live off their parents, there's no where to employ them. There's no need to employ them either we already produce a vast excess of both necessities and luxuries. So you know, you have those people with some basic expectations from life that are just not going to happen, since no one needs them for anything. Of course there are jobs opening in Engineering, Computer Science and more, but considering how many people come out of universities, there's no way they'd all get employed, maybe the top 10 20 , but everyone is else is boned. And it's not like there's enough jobs for the other 90 , between basic tools such as vacuums to ordering machines and the currently in production burger flipping machines, there's a large chunk of that generation and future ones that'd be forced to just stay with their parents to their last breath. And there's nothing criminal about being mediocre, you know, most of us are mediocre as much as we hate to admit it .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Millenials and their children are FUCKED\n","id":"863defb1-26c7-4507-b032-86809c38c592"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey acknowledge the Armenian genocide?<|ARGUMENT|>Turkey's trade with the EU is already prospering due to their customs union agreement. Full membership is unlikely to cause this trade to increase much more pg.35<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turkey can join and benefit from the Single Market without fully joining the EU.\n","id":"18e02845-2c8a-4399-a041-f3ae9fe56a35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that this might be a radical idea in a sense but hear this out. First of all, I believe that the whole income tax bracket system is unfair to everyone and because of it's unfairness to the elite few, it has had a reverse effect for those with less income causing loopholes in the system. Second, I don't mind taxes. There are taxes put in place for the government services people get. Of course, not everyone relies on governmental services, but they are nice to have Just in case. So to further the rational behind this idea, I will explain what I think about the whole situation. The income tax isn't the same for everyone and I think that isn't fair at all. Why charge someone more for making more? I think it goes something like 10 , 15 and so on. I'm not 100 completely sure about that but it's unfair to charge more just because you make more. If the richest get charged more income tax, it only makes sense that the government should work more in their favor since they are putting up more of their own money towards the federal fund. Now, before you say that either way they would be paying more if they made more I just want to say in proportion it wouldn't be more. Not only that, but it would be fair to those who are working their way to make more money for themselves. Just imagine this. You are a low income worker and you pay the lowest tax bracket for your income tax. You go to college and come out with some sort of degree and now you are making way more than you were originally making. All of a sudden you start seeing more money coming out of your paycheck for taxes. Wouldn't that frustrate you? I mean you WOULD be making more but you would also be paying more to the government. Now you will be most likely to look for tax breaks. Hey, there is an idea A lot of wealthier people looking for tax breaks because they ended up paying more taxes as they became wealthier. All of a sudden these tax breaks they look for end up putting more strain on the lower income workers, because the government still has to make enough money for everyone in general. Now, if there was a universal tax rate there would be no reason for people to look for tax breaks. At the same time, the rich wouldn't be able to complain about having to pay more for working harder smarter for their money. At the same time, the scope of the government wouldn't have any support and whalla Now we have a universal tax rate that would result in the government having to create more jobs in order to increase their revenue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Establishing a fixed income tax rate for everyone could make taxes fair.\n","id":"f6f47112-1448-4da4-8788-a20c6cb9e28c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alright, at first glance this may seem like an impossible claim to prove, but bare with me. FYI, I am not liberal, and don't make this a post about attacking other political ideologies this is about conservatism mainly American and right wing politics and whether it is logical. I'm going to be using this page to talk about the views that conservatism favors Social stratification Right wing politics involves in varying degrees the rejection of some egalitarian objectives of left wing politics, claiming either that social or economic inequality is natural and inevitable or that it is beneficial to society. Right wing politics typically justifies a hierarchical society on the basis of natural law or tradition. Religion Religious fundamentalists frequently feel that governments should enact laws supporting their religious tenets. 54 The Christian right is a major force in North America. They generally support laws upholding what they consider religious values, such as opposition to abortion, contraception, 65 sex outside marriage, 66 and to same sex marriage, and reject scientific positions on evolution and other matters where science disagrees with the Bible. Right wing supporters of family values may oppose abortion, euthanasia, the normalizing of homosexuality, divorce, teenage pregnancy and adultery. Social views Freedom, liberty, individualism, traditionalism, law and order, gun ownership, defence of traditional family, against euthanasia, abortion, and same sex marriage. Strong supporters of the American Constitution and the separation of powers. So basically some of the ideas on social issues are these Same sex marriage Don't allow Global warming Doesn't exist Immigration Don't allow as much Death penalty Allow Terrorism Big issue Drug legalization Don't allow Abortion Don't allow I'm not gonna talk about this one as its a whole other issue Alright, to start I would like to note that the label for this party is literally conserv the status quo atism. Making arguments just based off conserving the status quo is illogical and a bias On this page, it even states how, Preference for the status quo represents a core component of conservative ideology because conserving the current state affairs is one significant element of conservative ideology, the bias in its favour plays a role \u2013 under certain conditions \u2013 in promoting political conservatism. As stated above, the justification for social stratification is tradition. An appeal to tradition is fallacious The basis for wanting to disallow same sex marriage is religious Enough said. Religion is also objectively illogical as it doesn't work off the basis of observation and evidence. Global warming exists. Just read any page showing the evidence. Yes the temperature in the US has dropped in the last 10 years, but the temperature has risen since the Industrial Revolution for the whole world. Don't cherry pick data. The death penalty should not be allowed. The government should focus on rehabilition and protection rather than punishment. Two wrongs don't make a right Terrorism is a big issue just not in the U.S. The U.S. has banned 7 countries, severely limited immigration, and introduced the patriot act all in the name terrorism. Excluding 9 11 which takes up the majority of terrorism deaths, there have only been on average 10 deaths per year since 2000 from terrorists in the U.S. and 1 2 of those 10 deaths each year are from domestic terrorists. Also, no the deaths are not this low because of the added measures since 9 11. The NSA has not helped stop one major terrorist attack. Compare these 10 deaths per year to the 2.6 million who die in the U.S. each year total and 1.5 million of those are from cancer and heart disease alone. More people die from slipping in the shower than from terrorists in the US. The media helps the terrorists by over hyping all terrorist attacks and scaring the public more, which is literally the goal of terrorism in the first place. It seems like terrorism is a bigger issue than it is because of availability heuristic. Imagine if the money spent on terrorism was spent on cancer research orders of magnitude more lives would be saved. Marijuana should be made legal. Not a single person has died from marijuana while tons and tons have died from alcohol. Even if it was bad, or as bad as alcohol, it doesn't help to ban it as we have seen from the prohibition era. So any time a position is supported just because its the status quo, it is illogical. You can usually test if you or others are affected by the status quo bias when making decisions by taking the reversal test. Not every change is improvement, but every improvement starts with a change. Alright . Show me if there is any logic in conservatism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conservatism current, American is objectively illogical.\n","id":"4b39ff6b-8aa2-41f7-9054-adf9ecf6ff15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems as though collectivism is often an unideal state of affairs, and that individualism grants singular entities agency to pursue their unique goals and ideals. Individualism is the antithesis of collectivism, but it ought mature into the synthesis, which is interdependence. Individualism may result in a greater average amount of preference fulfilment than collectivism, as individuals free to pursue their interests tend to do so without some sort of social proscription on their desire. However, I believe it is the case that interdependence, in opposition to individualism and collectivism, offers the most effective means to overall preference satisfaction. The desirability of interdependence as a tool for increasing net preference satisfaction is derived from two important concepts firstly, the concept of specialisation and group knowledge. A group of specialists has a greater amount of knowledge and a wider range of resources than a group of generalists and is thus able to achieve more. secondly, the notion of preference mediation, here defined as a group level process that inhibits or aids the ability of individuals belonging in the group to pursue their individual goals These allow a greater pool of knowledge in which individuals are highly important and allowed a generous deal of autonomy, given their intellectual economic physical political capital, and the group mediation of individuals and their pursuit of personal goals forms a relationship between individual goals and group goals. Individual goals that yield a group wide benefit will be aided, thus maximising potential group and individual gains, whereas individual goals that are detrimental to net preference satisfaction are inhibited, either through means of persuasion, punishment, or the withholding of resources. A group constituted of highly specialised members is naturally averse to trampling individual rights, because harming an individual quite clearly harms the group. At the same time, an individual's goals that might, under other conditions, be unrealisable, are made possible by group support and multidisciplinary work. The projects that promise large rewards for both the individual and the group are helped significantly, and the projects detrimental to the group are trashed and subverted. This state of affairs strikes me as being the ideal synthesis of individualism and collectivism. The dynamic between individual and group is well balanced, individual rights are protected, universal good is encouraged and supported. There is a place of providence and societal wellbeing between the extremes of rugged individualism of the American right and the violent, vitriolic anti intellectualism of the Khmer Rouge, and this is it. Sorry for any waffling.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both dependence and independence are immature forms of interdependence. The \"third way\" between collectivism and individualism is the most ideal.\n","id":"5aefa0a3-3f05-4527-b0f6-af382993dcd8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The public education system is increasingly educating kids in a biased fashion with a focus on political correctness, safety from anything that could offend and hostile attitudes towards those who disagree with them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children are not able to make such important and complex election decisions.\n","id":"e68a112c-d617-4b5c-b0b5-b8957c98c702"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize sex selection<|ARGUMENT|>we should legalize sex selection as everyone should have the right to determine the sex of their children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is within the freedoms of the parents to select the sex of the child\n","id":"122863dc-2904-4b16-afcc-baad445942c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capitalism vs Socialism<|ARGUMENT|>In capitalist systems, society is ruled by the individual. Who would want to live any other way? In socialist systems, society is ruled by the state. Why would one want to live like that?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In capitalist systems, society is ruled by the individual. Who would want to live any other way? I...\n","id":"46335bbc-3ce1-454a-b48a-1785a6292a96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>A volcanic eruption can be seen as a horrible disaster, yet it will also create fertile land that new life will spring out from; an example of how good and evil depends on the human perspective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our idea of what we define as evil might be a limited vision of a bigger plan in which evil is a necessary element to its realization.\n","id":"f2d6e770-9b88-4347-918b-9140baacacdb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Nintendo Switch has the best game exclusives out of all the consoles.<|ARGUMENT|>The Nintendo Switch has the greatest number of exclusives when compared to the PS4 and the Xbox.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People buy the Nintendo Switch mainly for the exclusives.youtu.be\n","id":"5020872b-460c-4bf1-9275-0bbd0aa02f4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Jim first told Pam who he knew was still married to Roy that he was interested in her. That was innocent enough, she turned him down and he walked away. What makes his behaviour kind of creepy and uncomfortable is when Pam is in the office by herself in the dark, and Jim just walks right up to Pam and kisses her without her consent even after being told earlier that she wasn't interested. What won't change my mind is saying she was interested too , because that is irrelevant. The happy fairy tale outcome doesn't change the fact that the action by itself is inappropriate. Pam's reaction to Jim's inappropriate advances, doesn't make the actions themselves appropriate. Obviously this just for a thought exercise still love the show I'm not that much of a party pooper. I was just interested in what others think, especially in the light of the recent MeToo movement, which obviously wasn't around when the show came out. So CMW Please leave the footnote below the following line, but remember to delete this sentence by replacing it with the body of your post.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the era of MeToo, if Jim from the Office were real, then it would be fair to say that he crossed the line of sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace\n","id":"f580b126-2e26-4a8e-bd1e-2aff8b01f2c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m starting to get very depressed about the state of modern consumer capitalism. It seems like politicians are raised on a meritocracy of fundraising and popular support is easier bought than earned. Billionaires are able to shop for governments and governments are selling to billionaires, and competition between countries means we can\u2019t make purposeful backwards steps without giving an edge to our competitors. I am seriously worried that nothing is going to change it, and I\u2019ve even ditched the peacefully, as modern military capabilities make violent revolution or conquest in a first world country impossible. This viewpoint operates on the idea of climate change being a fact. Economically speaking, we\u2019re all going gangbusters, but politically and environmentally is my largest concern.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our society is stagnating, and there\u2019s no way to fix it.\n","id":"cc3a1e95-afb0-402e-8fa8-d8b40e6dc5fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>The hijra community still faces wide discrimination on the ground: most hijras live at the margins of society with very low status, they are discriminated in health, housing, education, employment, immigration, law, and bureaucracy, and above all violence against them is still widespread.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The hijra community in India has indeed been recognised as existing for centuries, but this does not mean they are culturally integrated, or even treated as fully human by society. In fact, quite the opposite is usually true\n","id":"02ff1537-970f-465d-9bc6-f33a907e8ef9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Youtube Enforcing Censorship Through The Demonetization Policy?<|ARGUMENT|>The new policy is just a more similar way of doing advertising to the type we see on TV; advertisers choose what they endorse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Advertising has always had the power to determine which content gets seen by people the most.\n","id":"b6572570-b98e-4199-82bc-ccd46493e27e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Equal Paternity\/Maternity Paid Leave Be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>In countries with generous paternity leave such as Scandinavian countries women are still more likely to work part-time than men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men and women do still fill different roles despite the improvements in gender equality.\n","id":"923ca7c3-a4fb-416d-bee7-3e84760bc875"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Christians were also persecuted throughout the whole Eastern Bloc Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Albania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Several communist countries that promoted atheism persecuted and marginalized those with religious beliefs.\n","id":"6ce0f0fa-d232-49d7-9c06-fdb30b052ed8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion tried to play with the monopoly of knowledge, and taught people from a christian church point of view and banned the books that said the opposite.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has a history of monopolizing education and knowledge limiting the perspectives one can be exposed to making them easier to control.\n","id":"9f76103f-02e3-4503-8903-5a7772ebb7a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can evolutionary ethics provide a coherent explanation of our moral experience.<|ARGUMENT|>Moral behavior could decrease the chance that covetousness and theft would halt the successful employment of new techniques such as those which produce and maintain healthy pack animals asses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moral behavior is the individual behavior that often causes the least harm and the greatest benefit to a population over multiple generations.\n","id":"04d706ea-bf29-4b32-aad9-7bada2121984"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the Bible allow women to hold the church office of \"deacon\"?<|ARGUMENT|>John 14:6 points out that whatever relationship we might hope to establish between us and God must necessarily go through Him, such that our relationship with the Father is entirely dependent and inseparable from our relationship with the Son.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Romans 8:17 describes believers as \"heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ\", describing an authority as heirs that we could never have alone, but that we enjoy by virtue of our relationship with Christ.\n","id":"8a366e0e-38b8-4572-9008-236db2f957f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've spent some time in hospitals observing the work of these amazing doctors, and nothing else really compares. The ability to still a heart, operate on it, and start it working again is amazingly delicate and precise work. I think that when a patient's family goes to church and prays that their father or grandfather will pull through his triple CABG operation, they're really praying to the surgeon. The work of a CT surgeon is often the difference between life and death. They really do preserve life, as well as granting new life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cardiothoracic surgeons are the closest thing we have to Gods.\n","id":"0091bc82-b7b7-4564-82ca-51d7e62b505b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you use the phrase slut shame , you are still validating the person or group who is bullying that very person. If you consider yourself to be anti bullying , you are acting in a hypocritical manner because you are still reducing a victim of bullying to just another derogatory term. For example, when you say something like Becky was slut shamed by those girls after they found out she's had sex with three different partners this month , you are essentially saying Becky is a slut, but she shouldn't be made to feel bad about it . Then, we're back to square one again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Slut-Shaming\" is a counter-intuitive term and shouldn't be used at all if you're against shaming\n","id":"4b102b02-f720-45b3-8e48-ed1d9ca37fd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As much as people might say that they treat every person roughly the same regardless of appearance, it's more like they tolerate the unattractive, rather than giving them remotely the same consideration. There is no regard for the opinion of a physically unattractive person. It's a subconscious hatred. You have no worth as a sex object, and so there's no point in investing time in you. For example, if you're fat, which is a characteristic that is unattractive for most people. When you're fat, you aren't hated because you have no self control. There are countless examples of lack of self control and laziness that are socially acceptable simply because they're not as visible. You're hated because you're ugly and disgusting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Your worth as a human being is mostly determined by your physical attractiveness.\n","id":"6bb2fb05-5af6-4a9f-a1de-4084999a2253"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me just say, I'm 100 pro choice. But lately many women, most of whom I respect greatly like my mother, are posting memes and tweets from people trying to equate it with something that men can relate to. But these things are so far apart that they just seem stupid. For example I saw one that said something like If we will put women in jail for abortion, we need to put men in jail for masturbation because they are preventing life . Those 2 things are so VASTLY different that I don't even know where to start. Another one was paraphrasing Why can men, who can sleep with as many people as they want and get them pregnant not have their bodies regulated, but women do? Again, this is apples and oranges. These things kind of imply that abortion is the only form of birth control out there. Not pills, condoms, IUDs, etc. Hell, even the pull out method. Equating all these things really just ends up sounding dumb and acting like women have no autonomy to take methods to avoid contraception in the first place, while also acting like the only way us dumb men can understand why the policy is bad is to make outlandish comparisons because there is no way we understand nuance<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many of the tweets and memes comparing the abortion bans to men's issues are illogical and likely turn people away as opposed to get people on your side.\n","id":"3d26addb-2b0f-43d2-a460-0d9d7e0f6bca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Tarot Have A Place in Modern Society?<|ARGUMENT|>A practice should be allowed to take place, unless it can be proven to be more harmful than not harmful if taking a purely utilitarian viewpoint.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no reason to get rid of something that is popular.\n","id":"d93b42df-9738-4471-a1bf-2e6ac0bcc5d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Growth of the number of probes would occur exponentially and the Galaxy could be explored in 4 million years. While this time span seems long compared to the age of human civilization, remember the Galaxy is over 10 billion years old and any past extraterrestrial civilization could have explored the Galaxy 250 times over.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While interstellar distances are vast, perhaps too vast to be conquered by living creatures with finite lifetimes, it should be possible for an advanced civilization to construct self-reproducing, autonomous robots to colonize the Galaxy.\n","id":"28c453a5-d149-4107-bfaa-6a81fc5aa874"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>God punishes Adam and Eve and all of their posterity for eating a forbidden fruit, displaying incoherent moral values that humans can't relate with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monotheistically scripture does not consistently support omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence.\n","id":"ae63e97d-eba8-4742-99b5-7b098e722000"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the US, the pro life movement is based on gt opposing on moral or sectarian grounds elective abortion and usually supporting its legal prohibition or restriction. While I myself am opposed on moral grounds to abortion I believe in the consistent life ethic which is very difficult to explain to many Americans and which I could easily turn into an anti American rant , I believe that the policies proposed by the pro life movement fail spectacularly at the goals that they set out to achieve, i.e. restricting abortion. Strict legal barriers to abortion, to be blunt, don't work. Instead, easy access to contraception maternity leave, guaranteed healthcare for children, and other left wing policies are consistently proven to reduce abortion rates Sweden is a more pro life country than the USA in terms of outcomes even though first trimester abortions are free. While it may scare many Americans, social justice is supported by every major religious tradition and at least in theory by pretty much every developed and developing country outside of the USA. Punishing doctors and women is a red herring that does diddly squat to reduce the abortion rate or to promote other pro life outcomes such as a longer life expectancy, maternal mortality and a freer population by a number of measures the US is not only dead last in the developed world but is worse than most developing countries , including places like Ghana, Eritrea, and Laos. Basically, the pro life movement is a gigantic red herring that aims to distract from the politically unsavory SOCIALISM that is the only proven way to end abortions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Strict abortion laws are an absolute failure at achieving pro-life\/anti-abortion goals.\n","id":"30b42c27-ddce-49d9-80b7-62f041c26da3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>It is easy to avoid interacting with white supremacists online: do not visit their websites, or interact with followers of the ideology on social media. Censorship is an unnecessary step to take.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Speech, in the absence of action, is not an active threat to anyone, no matter how aggressive it may be.\n","id":"28e3b665-4730-4988-b8c7-da6c37929b40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>The numbers of returning fighters are low meaning arrest and\/or surveillance is not that great of a burden upon governments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any returning foreign fighters would likely be apprehended by law enforcement upon arrival.\n","id":"5bf3345a-39e3-4e56-8bf9-1fb2bdb155d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not sure I actually believe this but the list of reasons why it's a good idea keep coming. OPENING ARGUMENTS I believe America must remain a dominant player in the world of geopolitics. In other words America plays second fiddle to no one. A lot of talk on the left is we are powerful enough as it is. Now as of this moment we are a global superpower with the world's most powerful military. I will try to explain a couple of key areas where American dominance benefits us as a nation and the world. RESOURCES If the United States wasn't as powerful as it is today I feel the standard of living of Americans with the decrease. For instance we are only 5 of the world's population in use 35 of the world's oil somewhere that ballpark I could be wrong I'd ask all of you, would you risk the end of American hegemony if it meant that your standard of living would decrease. SOUTH CHINA SEA Without American Military might in the South China Sea the balance of power in the region would be significantly shifted towards China. Which definitely wants to reintegrate Taiwan to put it nicely. That along with Japan which has no standing military. South Korea we get obliterated, and one of the most important trade routes in the South China Sea would be in Chinese control. EUROPE If it wasn't for NATO which is a powerful organization with or without the United States but with the United States has been able to curtail Russia's efforts to expand further east. Although my personal opinion I think Vladimir Putin really just wanted access to Ukraine for its warm water port. American checks Russian aggression to a certain extent. SOUTH AMERICA This is going to sound bad but in foreign policy sometimes things are bad. South America tends to lean on the more socialist side of the political Spectrum which usually tends to Imo lead to higher wages and call costlier products to import. In the early 60s and 70s again ball parking it the CIA installed dictatorial regimes that were friendly allies to the United States that sold natural resources to us for cheap. Which allowed the United States and it's corporations to pad the bottom line and still give value to its consumers. American dominance has led to a better standard of living for Americans and also has kept relative peace in the world. Again I stress relative peace. SIDE NOTE Also to be honest I fear that the same amount of death and destruction that the United States exports on a daily basis will come back to bite us one day. Which again is why the status quo is beneficial. Now I must emphasize that I don't agree with American foreign policy a lot as an American, but I'm afraid of what the world would look like when the Chinese rise to power.  \ud83d\ude17<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"America Must Maintain Global Hegemony\n","id":"057baf00-b181-4217-9fd5-7cd4a6131c4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I guess I started reading the relationship subreddit and ran into a large age gap post and then started reading more posts on age gaps. I think my opinion is largely based on the fact that I'm in college at a big university, in a sorority, have a boyfriend 20 , and obviously none of my friends are dating someone more than 4 years older than them. I just have this overwhelming sense of sadness for people who are 18 19 and in relationships with people 35 or older. I feel like if they could live my life for a day then they would snap back to reality and live a normal life. I don't have a problem with people who are out of college and dating older people. Even someone 30 years old dating a 50 year old is justifiable to me. I just feel like there's so much learning and developing to be done during early 20's. I know plenty of 19 year olds aren't in my situation but I can't help feeling so weird about this. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Large age gaps make me absolutely sick to my stomach. I'm 19f and don't understand how other people my age could be dating someone 20+ years older than them.\n","id":"b34ddbbb-8ff3-4218-9279-480191690e89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The inflation adjusted cost of college has gone up by something like 10x over the last 40 years from something like 2,000 yr to 20,000. Over 4 years the increase in cost is 72,000, but there has been no material increase in outcomes for students. This has led to a 1.5 trillion college debt problem. Colleges have a lot of money Harvard has 37.6 billion, Yale 25.5 billion etc, the top 20 schools have a combined 250 billion and the total amount is 547 billion. This money is never taxed and is a tax deduction for their donors a small 1.4 investment income tax was imposed on colleges with over 500,000 of endowment per student about 28 schools . They spend a fraction of that money on a yearly basis generally 4 5 , often for needless things like new dining halls and student centers. A significant amount of endowment money is managed by hedge funds and private equity enriching the rich managers of those funds. That money would be better spent on debt relief or really nearly anything else rather than compounding nearly tax free forever in the hands of hedge funds. 61 college presidents made over 1 million in 2016, and lord knows how many mid level administrators make high 6 digits. These may be technically non profit organizations in that there are no shareholders, but that doesn't mean that there aren't people who don't profit from their price gouging. I see a lot of outrage at the government for not doing something about student debt, but perhaps students and alumni should pressure universities to cut their bureaucracies, beautification projects and costs in order to make college more affordable. If not perhaps the government should either start taxing endowment funds to cut debt, taxing donations to universities or both. x200B Some Sources<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should blame colleges and universities for the student debt problem and tax them to make them pay to help clean it up rather than taxing people who chose not to go to college or already paid off their debt.\n","id":"f256bbb5-941e-49f5-93d5-c6c86d4cf1ef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I support the war in Iraq. I think it is becoming clear that Iraq today is immeasurably better for the world and for her people than it was 15 years ago, and whatever has been said about the invasion and Tony Blair and George Bush, the removal of Saddam will be seen as the right move to have taken for the following reasons Recognised Iraqi Kurdistan. Under Saddam it took two awful and pointless wars Iran and Gulf , a civil war, a genocide, and multiple uprisings for Iraqi Kurds to gain their autonomy within Iraq. Despite surviving in Saddam\u2019s Iraq since 1991, today it is internationally recognised and a friend of the Central Iraqi Government. Iraqi Kurdistan has been more prosperous and free since Saddam\u2019s removal Iraq now has freedom and democracy. People like to sneer at this but after 25 years of unimaginable tyranny under Saddam, Iraqi\u2019s have their freedom and an effective and democratically elected Government. Iraq had neither under Saddam This Government is popular, moderate, and secular. Not rabid Baathists like Saddam, but guys who favour western ideals and are doing a genuinely good job. They lead an effective fight against Islamist Terror. Unlike Saddam who harboured terrorists and encouraged Islamist extremism, Iraq possesses the army that defeated IS and is now able to independently maintain control of their own land. As well as working with Turkey against Kurdish terrorists, The Iraqi Government are the ones really fighting terrorists on the ground Economically onwards and upwards. Better than wage stagnation and corruption under Saddam Foreign investment. 30 Billion was invested in Iraq earlier this week at an international conference by a diverse range of countries. Onwards and upwards for Iraqis. Friendly cooperation with neighbouring countries. Iraq has found an ally in Iran and is supporting their ally in Syria, as well as destroying the Kurdish terror threat with Turkey and closeting ties with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Iraq is safer today than under Saddam. With widespread corruption, mass graves all around the country and so many disappearances and murders and human rights violations, Most areas in Iraq except for a few select places recently liberated from IS aren\u2019t as lawless and unsafe as they were under Saddam. People everywhere in Iraq are able to speak and act freely without fear of being kidnapped and tortured or their family kidnapped or tortured. After the defeat of IS in Iraq, the country is united and will reject the misery of IS for a free and better future with the opportunity for success the US and UK and allies gave them. It took over a decade, but no one said establishing a democratic and free state of Iraq would be easy. You would rather live there today than 15 years ago. The invasion is deeply unpopular, but I am convinced it will be seen as a positive in the coming years as Iraq begins to prosper. I'm in a minority here, change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Iraq today is better than it was pre-2003\n","id":"d8a505dd-b67a-44a4-acc3-c45fe2507539"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Voter Identification Laws<|ARGUMENT|>People are already required to produce valid identification for a whole range of activities that are less important than casting a vote, such as boarding a plane or buying a drink. Why is voting the only activity where we make it easy to cheat the system?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are already required to produce valid identification for a whole range of activities that are...\n","id":"61777ad1-3832-4954-bfa0-8d7137678b80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Reparations necessitate consideration of all enslaved populations past\/present in the U.S. Other cultures West, pars. 6-10 besides Africans and the female gender are candidates for inclusion into the enslavement discussion Wells, par. 25<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are those who argue that women should receive reparations for their structural disadvantages in society.\n","id":"9399b106-ed5c-4379-91e2-ff3bde2427dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been taking many different types of anti depressants over the last 10 years, I read dozens of self help books about positive thinking, and recently started doing meditation, I still feel miserable, I always have been. It's not curable. For me it's comparable to having diabetes, it's not curable, you just have to live with it. I rarely leave my apartment, I have no friends and no girlfriend. I just live, but never enjoy anything. The only substance that makes me somewhat happy for a short period of time is alcohol. I wonder if there are people out there who are in a similar situation than me or can give a solution that I haven't tried yet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If your brain chemistry is not right... Pills, self-help books, meditation, ... won't make any difference at all when you are clinically depressed\n","id":"3a2608b5-f7ca-4e60-968e-22e5cc888f71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Maybe not ruined but it has slowed the speed and the quality of my work beyond the regular learning curve for new applications. 1 No email archiving I work from a giant shared email box doing small projects tasks that take a day or two to complete . When I'm done I would dump all the related emails into a PST named after the project and never think about it again. We can't do that any more. They told us to just hit the archive button. Well shit, how do I find it again? What if i don't remember a key word two years from now? How do I know that what has come up in my search is EVERY related email? Am I to believe there are companies all over the world not using proper email archiving? 2 No email client. We're working with gmail straight from the browser. The security settings don't allow for anything else. I confirmed this with network security. 3 While Docs and Sheets are kind of slick they are nowhere near as mature as Word and Excel. Worse, my department has a shitzillion tools built from Excel which cannot simply be copied to Sheets. Guess we better get out our slide rules btw, where can I get a slide rule? 4 The existence of these tools means we sometimes need to use MS and Google together. Tried pasting part of an excel sheet into gmail? It's not pretty. How about excel to sheets? Fuck you, eh Want to preview that word attachment without downloading? Ha, depends on my mood Notes I WANT to like this because it's my life now so please . This change happened months ago so I'm not just salty about change. This is not a small company you have definitly heard of us and the change was company wide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Google ruined my life when when my company switched from MS Office to Google Apps.\n","id":"44a96cf3-1b09-4a3c-a804-5e7ae74df546"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For many people, including myself, a credit card is convenient because I don't have to keep track of how much cash I have, and don't have to spend time gathering the combination of bills and coins every time I buy something. Credit cards are a convenience. You simply swipe for purchases and repay the money at a later date. However, if your income is not large enough to allow you to spend 10,000 a month on purchases, then credit cards companies should not allow you to spend that much. a credit card limit should be decided not only based on one's credit score, but their income as well. The way it is now simply gives irresponsible people the ability to mindlessly buy things they cannot afford and amass a fortune in debt. Thanks for reading and for any responses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An individual's credit card limit should be calculated based on his\/her income.\n","id":"3cfe777f-6662-4a45-bf67-92ec86fba6d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see more and more people defend against basic debate practices by calling them invalid in the context. That said, I believe any serious disagreement like over whether or not climate change exists, not whether or not a music album is good should follow some of the basics of formal logic debate. Now, I'm not a lifelong professional debater nor philosophy degree holder, so I won't get super deep into things that need to be followed. Given basics guidelines like the philosophic burden of proof, formal and informal logical fallacies, formal logic in the sense of A gt B and whatnot , and perhaps others I am not currently thinking of, we as people who discuss things should enforce these on opposing sides of an issue to best further the discussion towards a meaningful resolution. An argument over climate change on, say, Facebook should not be an excuse to tell someone to do their own research when your claim is questioned. Not enforcing these guidelines reinforces poor behaviors in terms of choosing beliefs, such as those who read unreliable news sources and take their claims at face value, which they then use to possibly cause some form of harm look no further than those who promote dangerous holistic medicinal methods . By enforcing these guidelines, we force those who wish to engage their beliefs with those who disagree to examine their beliefs with skepticism and critical analysis, which should invariably lead to holding more accurate positions. First , so forgive me if I really buggered something. Interested to hear from anyone who doesn't agree.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Non-trivial discussions of disagreement should be bound by basic formal rules.\n","id":"037f916c-37a5-4114-9eec-e5d5b71be1e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should have the final say about a child's medical treatment - doctors or parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Families have group goals, distinct from the self-regarding goals and interests of each member, and parents may \u2018compromise the interests of the child for the sake of a group goal or another family member\u2019s interests, provided that they do not sacrifice the child\u2019s basic needs\u2019 L.F. Ross, pg.44<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents may have to balance the interests of the family as a whole or the health interests of other children\n","id":"03d46291-da03-4157-a589-0ecb49ac8804"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A common element in politics is that the common citizen is completely unable to affect major policy decisions. I believe that that if sufficient petitions 20 of population are signed in a local, state, national level the people should be allowed to vote directly on issues in a region wide vote. This would allow the mundane details of government to be handled by people paid to do so, while improving the ability of the people to have their voice heard on larger issues. I believe this would effectively address public concerns on key issues that i believe that are being managed completely incompetently by the US, or insert your own government. NSA spying, Net Neutrality, Vietnam war, pipelines, etc Advantages 1 You wouldn't be forced to vote for a politician party based on a single hot button issue gay marriage, NSA, immigration, etc if you could vote the way you wanted on just that issue, and pick someone competent for the rest of the issues 2 Helps remove some of the power from lobbying entities, suddenly they have to buy off more than a few key senators congressmen 3 Improves citizen involvement in the government Cons 1 Added cost to implement and make secure. I believe this is or soon will be manageable with improvements to technology where online voting will be easy, quick, secure, and the citizenry will almost universally have access to it. In the meantime i believe it is worth the fractional of total tax payer money it would require to have a few of these each year. 2 Just because people will vote, doesn't mean everyone will be happy or vote right Gay marriage for example was voted on many times, and eventually swung to be passed. I believe that this process both the yes and no votes combined with the supreme court ruling certain statues were unconstitutional worked in an ideal manner. So  either by pointing out issues with the proposal or that the current system is working and that citizens input matters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people in democracies should have a process to directly vote on legislation.\n","id":"28196fed-1fc6-45cd-a53e-64b20c30079e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Will Win the Game of Thrones?<|ARGUMENT|>Dany's dragons give her a 'nuclear'-type weapon, and if she and Tyrion can control them, they are literally unstoppable. She has a kind of 'innate' sense of how the dragons feel\/work, and Tyrion has all the requisite book knowledge to help her with the mechanics\/details of them. Together, they know almost everything that is currently possible to know about the dragons making them probably able to control them well and take the Iron Throne easily.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All the soldiers and citizens follow and like her. So, they will all fight for her.\n","id":"fac103c4-40a8-4977-9dd4-620fc65bddc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people marry outside their religious faith?<|ARGUMENT|>There is evidence that children raised in interfaith family communities become more sensitive and articulate interfaith spokespeople, as a consequence of drawing strength from two religions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The children of interfaith marriages are tolerant of faiths that they have no association with.\n","id":"1f012a8d-84fb-4083-b381-615b002ff102"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Assassination of a Dictator<|ARGUMENT|>Assassination of a dictator may be the only way to effect change in a country where a repressive police state prevents any possibility of internal opposition. Cowed populaces need a signal in order to find the courage to campaign for change. If there is no way to bring tyrants guilty of terrorising their own people to justice, then assassination can be justified. And the example elsewhere of assassinated dictators will act as a warning to would be tyrants in future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Assassination of a dictator may be the only way to effect change in a country where a repressive pol...\n","id":"6a07948f-fd16-454a-9cc3-a8d639a8e879"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>Only focusing on rehabilitation undermines how society uses prisons: as a punishment to deter future crimes, and send a message that the crime was wrong. By only rehabilitating, it sends the message that the criminals were not wrong, but had a reason or mental problem that can be fixed. This borders more on making excuses for the accused then accountability to be held responsible for their actions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Punishing criminals is a proven effective way to dissuade prisoners from committing future crimes, as well as a deterrent to would-be criminals worried about punishment.\n","id":"5b43c1ef-7ffb-47a9-95d6-71c6d93577a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>The ability of governments to impose laws on a group of people derives from the consent of those people. Since virtual realities will draw from people all over the world, the only legitimate laws are those that the virtual community decides for itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Each virtual reality should be free to define and enforce its own laws independently; there is no need for overarching regulations.\n","id":"792a59bf-6cc5-4e7d-a007-01bfac15c662"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>sexual orientation should be considered grounds for asylum.<|ARGUMENT|>Lasting change to anti-homosexual attitudes will only happen from the ground-up. This hinders the ability of governments to engineer more accepting attitudes toward the LGBT community. Even if you could get countries to discuss their policies and liberalize them through this policy, this will not actually change the reality for the LGBT on the ground. Nations where anti-homosexuality laws are in place have large swathes of support for these laws as they represent and enforce the morality of the vast majority of their populace. Simply removing anti-homosexuality laws does not protect homosexuals in their home countries. Simply not being pursued by the government does not mean the government is willing or able to protect individuals from society. Moreover, it makes it nearly impossible for the government of that country to try to liberalize and engineer a more LGBT-friendly attitude in their country if they have submitted to Western pressures. Populations feel abandoned by their governments when they no longer reflect or uphold their wishes and what they view as their moral obligations. The government loses its credibility on LGBT issues if it abandons its anti-homosexual platform and thus cannot moderate or attempt to liberalize such views in the future. This simply leads to people taking \u201cjustice\u201d against homosexuals into their own hands, making danger to homosexuals less centralized, more unpredictable and much less targeted. A perfect example of this is in Uganda where the government\u2019s \u201cfailure\u201d to implement a death penalty for homosexuality led to tabloid papers producing \u201cGay Lists\u201d that included people suspected of homosexuality1. The importance of this is two-fold. First, it shows that vigilante justice will replace the state justice and thus bring no net benefit to the LGBT community. Second, and more importantly, it means that the violence against LGBT individuals is no longer done by a centralized, controlled state authority, which removes all pretence of due-process and most importantly, makes violence against homosexuality become violence against suspicion of homosexuality. Thus, making it an even more dangerous place for everyone who could associate or in any way identify with what are viewed as \u201ccommon traits\u201d of the LGBT community. 1 \"Gay Rights in Developing Countries: A Well-Locked Closet.\" The Economist. 27 May 2010.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This policy undermines the grassroots movements that are necessary for full and sustained protection of the LGBT community\n","id":"fc520d6e-28ec-4335-b6a9-5eb5b116ee6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok just saw the Russel Brand video. I totaly agree and think that an utter critique of the system is a valid position to adopt. I support Brand and think he is a legit guy to say he does not vote on principle. And he is also in the UK, a system I am not as familiar with. However I don't think in the USA THE MERE ACT of voting reifys the system. Moreover, casting an undervote empty ballot is a much stronger indictment of the system and also leaves you in a better spot in the future to say ya, I cast a ballot for no one MAIN CLAIM 1 I think that there are municipal and county and school board elections which a hand full of votes DOES make a difference and if there is a choice between a Tea Party or other radical ideolog you object to strongly and a reasonable person who's only disadvantage is that they are part of the system you are being ludicrous if you say you won't vote on principle . but please  REASONS 1 it will keep things from getting worse. Directly as well as prevent those idologs from moving up the chain. 2 if there is any chance of getting occupier 99 ers, socialists, or any radical people you like elected or people who are friendly to your revolution it is much more likely at the local level. Be involved. I state that as left leaning because Brand said he wants a Socialist Revolution, bit it applies just as much for other leaning people UNDERVOTING I don't know if everyone knows this, but having worked on political campaigns in 2 states and been a poll worker, the ballots that don't have anything on them are counted, as are the ballots that are discarded because they had to many choices marked. They are known as undervotes and overvotes respectively. They are counted collectively and for each individual race. When the undervotes could have been determinative to the outcome, people fucking notice. By people I mean parties, candidates, funding organizations if they were not fucktards then, the media. MAIN CLAIM 2 I don't see any reason why casting an intentional undervote in every single election should not be the tactic of choice of the truely revolutionary minded, even if they think voting supports the system . Every argument that claims any engagement with the system by filling out a ballot is some how feeding the beast or equates to complicity is bogus imho, and really just means the person is lazy but wants to sound revolutinary by doing nothing but please try to  on this As an added thought, If you really want to critique the system i'd say that undervotes are MORE de stabalizing. Do this get all your apathetic buddies who never vote so show up and submit an empty ballot. Then have intrepid bloggers all over the country collect and publicise these undervote figures. Even more important on off year and local special elections. Are there some results that might have gone a different direction if the undervotes had voted? Now you have a list of potentially illigitimate politicians you can hound. Double bonus points if undervotes get more votes than a 3rd party candidate who was actively contesting the race. Quadruple bonus points the moment someone wins a state wide office or national posting with undervotes getting more votes. this is one way viable 3rd parties could be born. As an added bonus, if substantially more people DID show up it would keep the systems honest, not letting manipulative party hacks justify shutting down early voting and community voting centers. Also, more people would find out if their names had been purged or they were getting any type of shenanigans due to overzealous partisans in the system. This way when the great revolutionary Socialist Green Reactionary Zoroastrianism leader you have been waiting for finally makes it on the ballot and has a shot of winning there is less chance he she they will get defeated due to dirty tricks of the established partisans. But just a thought. EDIT words, double negative, highlighted claim 1 added another bonus.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if you think voting is a pagent you should still vote on local elections or at least cast an empty ballot USA\n","id":"35522827-007d-4c28-8618-4b270c9f4ae4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Prosperity often encompasses wealth but also includes others factors which are independent of wealth to varying degrees, such as happiness and health. Look at most violent cities in america. They are all run by democrats. You have to hear me out, this is fair and not political. There is no point in even pulling out statistics and numbers because thats a fact. Economically, liberalism falls short in the long term. The various liberal constituencies are in fact atomized groups of individuals who are relying on government, rather than creating the economic growth or fostering the social and civic health necessary to sustain the ideal liberal state. Liberals see entitlements as the immediate response to economic injustice, many fail to realize that they alone cannot rebuild a middle class. In fact, they can have the opposite effect in the long term and insulate their recipients from upward mobility. With 16 trillion in national debt, an aging population and an already overburdened entitlement system, the ideal liberal social welfare state can only sustain itself for so long before it collapses under its own weight. It is a lifeline attached to a slowly sinking ship. Liberals celebrate subsidized birth control and the unmooring of what they see as narrow minded religious moral standards, they fail to realize the alternative that is right in front of them out of wedlock birth rates that are at all time highs and a destructive breakdown in the family unit. Absent strong, active, character forming institutions, like families, schools, and churches, single mothers and low income households in many cases have no where else to turn but to the government. The problem is that liberals often confuse such allegiance with successful governing. The liberal coalition of the future is starting to look a lot like Greece, an advanced secular, social welfare state. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liberalism Does Not Mix With Prosperity.\n","id":"d7a9024a-7dc6-4c10-ba32-042e0243bcce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The long and inflexible work hours in the medical profession pose a substantial structural barrier for the participation of women in the medical field across the world However, there have been no meaningful attempts at catering directly for their special needs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ethnic minorities and women are still underrepresented in the medical profession, yet there are no special provisions to accommodate them. It is unclear why conscientious objectors can claim a right to special treatment if these underrepresented groups cannot.\n","id":"a8c8f908-aa61-4658-8428-668b26dd6ba4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>In the case of some persecuted ex-Muslims, being denied a platform to explain the cause of their departure from the faith further persecuted them for trying to discuss real issues with middle eastern culture for fear of appearing outwardly offensive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No-platforming can be abused by the powerful to silence the speech of the minority.\n","id":"de6437a0-eacf-41ef-801e-b0c9e19d8407"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My girlfriend is amazing. She is gorgeous, funny, smart and sexy. She does more then her fair share of housework and never complains. I do all the cooking, as she can't cook, but she loves my food and always flatters it. She is willing to try any of my favourite things, and loves almost everything I love, so I can include her in almost every aspect of my life. Sexually, she is almost perfect. She is into anal sometimes, and many of the other kinky things I am into. However, they all require me to be dominant. 98 of the time I don't mind, because that's where I would rather be. However, sometimes I'd like to be on the bottom. She is not willing to to be in charge. And she very very rarely agrees to blowjobs, which is a real bummer for me as I LOVE them. I even agree to use a flavoured condom, but she will do it at most once monthly. I really wish it didn't bother me, because she is so amazing and I love her to pieces, but it really bothers me when she says no repeatedly. I am willing to do anything for her she doesn't drive so I'll pick her up and drive her to work all the time, even when I work night shifts and it seriously fucks with my sleeping, I'll go shopping with her which just pisses me off when I start getting bored and have zero interest, but I'll fake it somewhat for her, and I'll put up with her family, who I can't stand, and pretty much anything else to make her smile. Is it unreasonable for me to be upset about the one thing I have a problem with?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think my girlfriend is selfish, and it causes some resentment, even though I love her to death. -\n","id":"032f0dec-5486-4c7f-af33-2aa43a1fef1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do all or most White Americans experience privilege?<|ARGUMENT|>If you truly want to be just and fair then people need to be treated as individuals with their own unique personal views, circumstances, cultural and beliefs. You can still factor in and deal with things like discrimination, unearned advantages, unearned disadvantages, economic status, culture, etc. after seeing if it actually applies to that particular individual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Judging others by the color of their skin is inherently wrong in any situation. It is prejudicial by definition.\n","id":"48834292-3c02-4704-a269-5db6291bab52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Female Education The Most Important Objective to Improve Quality of Life?<|ARGUMENT|>The United Nations Women\u2019s programmes on leadership and participation suggests that civic education, training and all around empowerment will ease this gap.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Improved education for women will enable them to become politically engaged.\n","id":"44e5486c-dc51-4386-84b8-f4ecb80aeefa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Instances of violence for which religion has been blamed cannot be separated from just as likely secular causes of the same violence. As was outlined in William T Cavanaugh's 2009 book \"The Myth of Religious Violence published by Oxford University Press.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While religion is often blamed as the primary source of most historical conflicts, research shows that there are multiple factors in play, more often than not, secular and political.\n","id":"b47e2693-4651-459e-b16d-a18ac07282fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are a lot of 22 35yr olds in major debt when it comes to their student loans. But the ones who earned degrees in areas with high paying job opportunities will have a much easier time paying those loans off. So these people should have more options, lower interest rates, higher approval amounts, etc. I know the country needs people who become things like teachers, art history researchers, and even people who specialize in 18th century feminist dance yes that last one was sarcastic but those people should have to either pay their own way or go to less expensive schools. It shouldn't be possible to get a 150,000 college loan to go to Stanford or Princeton to become a teacher. If you want to be something with low earning potential, the loan should be limited to the amount it would cost for in state tuition at a public university. If you want to borrow six figures to become an engineer, a lawyer, or a medical doctor, you will be significantly more likely to pay that loan back.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"College loan approvals should take the earning potential of the major, as well as the choice of school, into account.\n","id":"2d776bcc-335b-41e1-be71-a6eac8574f0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe being mainstream is like being normal. It doesnt matter if you have hobbies or you developed your own lifestyle and way of living.Even if you have some life principles you follow it still doesn't matter. You need to have an account at all social media,you need to go to events that seem cultural and sophisticated even if you don't like it. You need dress with the latest fashion even if you don't like the style or it doesn't match your body type. If you don't you become obsolete.You become anti social and weird,people forget you because you don't appear on their fb twitter instagram feed.Not taking selfies with them and showing others that you are having fun makes you not a fun person and not desirable since you don't want to take a picture with them. You have to realize that life is like a class full of kids with the latest and best toy,if you don't have it you cant blend in and be part of the group. Is all of this true? Are People like these living in the real world and we the others leave in a denial? Or i am just a bitter asshole?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being Mainstream is Normal.\n","id":"b25c277e-6c61-43ee-a475-6f9f861a6d3a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should we decide whether a single-winner voting system is fair?<|ARGUMENT|>When multiple candidates tie for 1st place, all of the candidates not selected by the tiebreaker will feel cheated out of a victory that could've been theirs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Elections with multiple candidates tied for 1st place are very undesirable.\n","id":"673d8db1-770d-420b-923c-d8b256b910b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>If one's belief is in either Allah, or the god of the Old Testament then belief in a god is not soothing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This belief is not necessarily soothing. The belief in a judging and punishing god can equally be unsettling.\n","id":"93844f59-df26-4c9f-8648-a47387bf92f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>It is difficult to create political sympathy for the poor when they are already by far one of the largest spending items on a government budget e.g US War on Poverty Therefore it is difficult to politically motivate for a structural reform while implementing this policy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because instituting welfare programs requires political capital and public goodwill, a majority of which will be used instituting a UBI, it is unlikely that the general public will be sympathetic towards additional welfare programs if a UBI is implemented.\n","id":"fd17a0b9-1aa1-4467-b713-da12e29c4b85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You can make the argument that professional football players and startup CEOs make more money than doctors, but you have an incredibly higher chance of success if you pursue the medical field. Medical students seem to complain in every direction that they undergo a lot of stress debt, but the same can be said of any high paying profession. I'm sure top software engineers and top lawyers have to handle a lot of stress in their daily lives with dramatically less income stability than a doctor layoffs, bad economy . If I have a child in the future, I would do my best to encourage him if he wants to become a doctor if not solely for the ability to earn a lifetime guaranteed high wage. Edit Doctor in United States of America<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While becoming a doctor takes decades of education and debt accumulation, it is ultimately the best profession in today's society to earn a high, stable income until the end of your life.\n","id":"c761248a-f631-4636-aa2e-c3bc15fc211e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>English is not my real language, so i might use some wrong words and sentences wrong. JRR Tolkien never approved of the movies. His own son called it a butchering or something, i'll link the quote if you doubt my words. Is that not enough? Why is everyone trying so hard to make excuses? Like it could have been made worse. How is that how i don't understand How is that a valid excuse for the movies? Just because it could have been made worse does not make the movies OK. And finally Did you know JRR Tolkien better than his own son? He drew the original maps for his father's The Lord of the Rings for fucks sake. Let's get this straight. YOU CAN ENJOY THE MOVIES. But why does that mean Tolkien would have liked it? Why dishonor JRR Tolkien who never approved of them? Why? Why do you have to drag his name into? Why?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think who enjoy people LOTR based movies are dishonoring JRR Tolkien\n","id":"a57cc31d-b32f-4b4d-b260-c52b43b0fcd3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>For the less advantaged in society whose jobs often involve physical labour, work is often a hard and unrewarding. A UBI helps relieve them of some of this burden.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI makes it possible for some people to work less.\n","id":"b31d1d46-ba2e-4a5c-8889-c16a042d17b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should vegan\/vegetarian parents feed their kids the same diet?<|ARGUMENT|>As eating meat is the norm, children might feel like they've been unfairly excluded from this norm when other kids are allowed to eat meat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forcing an ideology creates a resentment to that ideology and the one forcing it upon you.\n","id":"ce6af15d-1570-472a-981f-02ff89ea64f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>All actions are determined by some function of prior circumstances and actions, so no action arises of its own accord. Thus, it is impossible to make a choice, because all choices are inevitable results.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Understanding the biological working of the brain is an arbitrary goal post. The question of free will can be tackled deductively without any knowledge of how this particular process unfolds.\n","id":"4ee194fc-4cab-485d-8254-675fe7add5b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>George Orwell's 1984 is over-rated<|ARGUMENT|>Orwell discusses the idea that privacy does not exist for the individual an unnecessary number of times.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It often rambles, making the same point over and over within the same chapter\/paragraph.\n","id":"ebcfe590-d443-40ea-b03d-baf11e369ec8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm self employed and make a considerable amount of money. I'm also in a very high risk environment where money gained can be quickly lost again. I've met with accountants over the past few weeks and most have advised with the level of risk associated that I simply not work the rest of the year. This came after meeting with several potential hires and now I feel like they are not worth the risk if I'm only going to be keeping around 60 of what I make while risking me losing everything I've gained this year. If the tax rate on higher brackets were lower, I'd feel much more comfortable bringing on more people, teaching them, and creating more business. Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that tax breaks for the wealthy can lead to job creation.\n","id":"3a35c6e9-d6ec-44b7-b1b3-dd438efed7b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is, of course, entirely subjective. But I will make my case regardless Cutting the sandwich into halves, be it triangles or rectangles, enables you to start your sandwich consumption in the dead center of the sandwich , where fillings are most concentrated. This coats the inside of your mouth with said fillings, which supplements each additional bite. You made a ham and cheese sandwich because you wanted ham and cheese, not bread with a little ham and cheese. Therefore, the entire existence of this sandwich is dependent on the taste of those fillings . By starting a whole sandwich from the dry, less satisfying outside, you are immediately ruining the sandwich experience by taking that first bite of majority bread taste. If you wanted a bread sandwich, you could've just put toast between two pieces of toast. It is easier to hold a sandwich half . A sandwich half is more portable, and easy to maneuver, than trying to hold together a heavily laden sandwich that sags in the middle and threatens to disembark from your hands. The first bite of the triangle half corner is optimized for your mouth. By turning the sandwich into a more aerodynamic shape, even phallic if you must, the triangle corner allows for less effort involved to place the corner in your mouth. A sandwich cut in half is more visually appealing because you can see all the layers of filling that you so painstakingly constructed Conversely, a whole sandwich appears as two layers of bread, especially if you're only using a few ingredients. The sight of a delicious sandwich stimulates your mouth to produce more saliva, aiding in the breakdown of these ingredients, enabling you to better digest the sandwich in the long run. Thank you for your time. Exhibit A Half cut Exhibit B Diagonal cut Exhibit C Vast deserts of bread spread across the landscape<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All sandwiches taste better when they're cut in half - preferably diagonally.\n","id":"7a0aafaa-29e6-4763-aa05-510ef022faf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Captive reptiles should be fed with living prey<|ARGUMENT|>If you have to kill an animal, it is always best to do it in the most humane and moral way possible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Death in a facility specifically designed for the killing of mice could be painless, e.g. using N2O or CO poisoning.\n","id":"ae115e15-62b5-497b-983f-325748f499eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>California is huge compared to the rest of the US in terms of population, and to a lesser extent, size. The population of California is larger than the smallest 21 states combined. There are a few reasons this is a problem Ineffective state government. One of the advantages of having a number of semi independent states instead of having the federal government decide everything is that legislation and bureaucracy in general can be run more effectively and be specific to the area. Instead of having to make changes that affect a huge number of people and require massive agencies, changes can be made specific to the area and the people. More voice for the people. In a state like South Dakota, your vote and voice in the state government is one of about 800,000. Now, that's a large number, but it's not impossible to have your voice heard, especially if you can organize a decently sized group. In California, your voice is one out of 38 million . Outside of extremely large interest groups such as multinational corporations and state wide teacher's unions, it's extremely difficult to have your voice heard in the state government. Freakishly low senator to citizen ratio. California gets two senators to represent all of 38 million people. If California were split into multiple states, it would still be bigger than a lot of the smaller states. Heck, if Los Angeles County were its own state, it would be the 11th largest state. Basically, I think that splitting California into multiple states would alleviate these issues and allow citizens to be better represented in the state government and even in the federal government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"California should be split into two or more smaller states.\n","id":"38a26b59-123e-44f8-a328-90aa27b53c2c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If a human does something e.g. work, give and elderly person a seat on the subway, meet for a drink, whatever you can imagine it has always the purpose to fulfill a personal need. I would like to support this claim by some examples which usually are said to be done just because . Donating money Either because we feel guilty or because we think that other will think of us as a better person Give a seat to an elderly person on the subway To fulfill a social standard Give someone a gift Either to see the person be happy which makes us happy in return or to show how amazing we are It is my personal belief that nobody ever did something without the hope to get something in return, be it as small as seeing a happy person which makes us happy in return.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans always do something only to fulfill personal needs\n","id":"370e676c-91a6-44a9-975a-454a0d89547f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>North Korea should not be labelled irrational for developing nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>There is nothing to gain but a lot to lose for China in entering war with the US<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China will not risk a nuclear war with the US\n","id":"d5ee7f49-2878-4d61-b5c6-e779b365a997"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the worst world problem of the utmost concern?<|ARGUMENT|>This implies that a job may be the only way a human can contribute to the world. In a post-scarcity society brought about by AGI, humans can contribute in other ways rather than for money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans will cope with losing their \"purpose\" of having a job where they contribute to the world\n","id":"819f817b-a59f-4c6a-b474-a44ff8235069"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems so many problems are caused in society by unwanted children. One solution I\u2019m personally considering is a vasectomy while storing sperm multiple banks. It already seems like a no brainer since currently my future as a dad can so easily be ended through minor physical harm. Redundancy seems to make sense. Then once that\u2019s in place, I can get a vasectomy to reduce unwanted pregnancy. It can always get undone if I want the joy of doing it the old fashioned way. I just figure that deciding to have a child should take at least as long as it would take to go to the sperm bank or getting minor surgery. Then I started wondering why this isn\u2019t the norm. Please , explain why you wouldn\u2019t want this, or improve offer other solutions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should only have children deliberately and not as accidents.\n","id":"7953fbe9-23bf-4746-96b6-c90434b73aec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Since Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his intention to retire from the Supreme Court of the United States, the response from the Left has been that Democrats should seek to pack the courts the next chance they get presumably 2020 . The basic argument is to stuff the court with progressive judges, since there is no limit to the number of judges mentioned in the Constitution. So a President could just nominate more judges until the 5 conservative judges are outnumbered. I think this is a bad idea. 1 If you look back, with few exceptions the Presidency swings back and forth from one party to the next every 8 years. That means that by packing, you're creating a temporary majority, and giving license to the opposing party to do the same when they pick up the White House. In just a few Presidential transitions, you'll wind up with an over sized SCOTUS because it seemed politically expedient to outnumber the liberal conservative judges depending on who the President is . 2 It's certainly bad tactics right now to show your hand. It's 2018, which means that Trump is the President for another 2 years. If the GOP took it to heart that the Democrats intended to pack the courts if they won the presidential election in 2020, what would stop Trump from just packing the courts today? Granted, I still think this is a bad idea, because of reason number one, but it just seems way too much like a temper tantrum related to the President getting to nominate another justice. TL DR packing the court is a political pissing match that no side could possibly win. Give it enough time and we have a SCOTUS the size of the House of Representatives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democrats shouldn't think packing the supreme court is a viable strategy.\n","id":"7eb5428e-67f1-4287-ac8f-48759f5c7f56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A pregnant couple attends a doctor's appointment and discovers that their gestating foetus will be moderately to severely malformed disfigured disabled. There are those couples who would choose to abort that child, often reasoning that it is for its own good . And there are those couples who would choose to continue the pregnancy often reasoning something like it deserves a chance at life or even a difficult life is better than no life at all . However, I feel that these arguments largely ignore the opportunity cost. If we consider the two possibilities abortion vs. continued pregnancy as being two forks of a split timeline, we can assess that Abortion will prevent offspring A from having an ailed life. The couple will get pregnant again, allowing offspring B to have a life. Continued pregnancy will allow offspring A to life its ailed life. Offspring B will never exist. This is where I feel that people typically neglect the truth, or at least the impact, of the situation. The fact that choosing to continue the pregnancy is preventing offspring B from having a life is no less pertinent than the fact that choosing to abort is preventing offspring A from having a life. And to anticipate some of the replies at the point of this doctor's appointment, I see it as irrelevant that offspring A already exists, while offspring B does not yet. Offspring A is no more sapient than an amoeba. In summary those who choose not to abort their disabled foetus on the grounds of wanting to 'give them a chance at life' are at the same time taking away another person's chance at life, which is equally important. In fact, considering the difference in the likely quality of life of each offspring, abortion is the more empathetic caring option. Note I have made the following assumptions for the sake of simplicity the couple is fertile and would be willing to get pregnant again if the first is aborted the couple has already decided that they will have one, and only one, child. the malformation disfigurement disability of the foetus is not a condition that is likely to also affect any subsequent children the malformation disfigurement disability will have a significant effect on the the life of the child and of its parents financially, physically, emotionally . I understand that if you abort a foetus and try again, it's possible that you will never again become pregnant, or that the any subsequent foetus may also suffer from some worse? affliction. However, in most circumstances, these risks are small enough that they shouldn't largely impact the couple's decision making. As a final note , feel free to try to use a religious justification if you'd like, but only if you're willing to justify your religious assumptions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion of a disabled foetus under these assumptions is the right thing to do as it is giving more life than it is taking away.\n","id":"6ee6ba73-d071-46d9-9cc7-71938caedb3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the European Union legalize marijuana?<|ARGUMENT|>Cannabis users are less likely to suffer from Psychosis and Schizophrenia when compared to non users as the 2008 Keele study showed, which surveyed over 5,000 regular uses of cannabis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overwhelming scientific research supports the beneficial medical effects of using cannabis.\n","id":"9f0e83da-1d47-408e-b672-e68de3840c56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a conversation that I have had with many people over the past few months and I am interested to hear what reddit has to say on the subject. I would just like restate common arguments that I have heard repeated by many. But first, I want to get some vocabulary straight. There is a difference between a producer and a DJ a lot of people don't understand this A producer sits in front of his her computer and makes a song on a digital audio workstation software DAW . This person or group of people is responsible for everything that makes up the final product that is the song. This person may never even step on stage. A DJ is a person who plays tracks at a live event whether or not those tracks are their own. When I refer to electronically produced music I am referring to a song created by a person, NOT a song that a DJ plays at an event. Most not all producers are DJs as well, however, their are plenty of DJs who are not producers. A lot of people seem to think that a sample means a musical idea that has been stolen from someone else's work. All a sample is is a piece of musical information that been put in the music. That sample could have been taken from another work, it could have been recorded in studio, or it could have been created in the DAW by the producer him herself. This sample can be manipulated at the producers discretion to suit whatever purpose he she intends. 1 Electronic music producers are lazy. Their music requires no physically extraneous or technical ability. Yes their are electronic artists who will simply press play and pump their fist on stage while the crowd cheers them on. But that is not where the artistic validity of the music lies. Beethoven is not known for being a musician in the sense that he never got on stage, however his talent lied in sitting down with a pen and paper and writing down every note that would eventually become a work of art when performed by someone else. The only difference being that Beethoven had an orchestra perform his works while a producer uses a computer. At the end of the day the music would not exist without the producer. I would further argue that the lack of necessity for physical ability makes it a superior outlet for creative expression, for the artist is not limited by his or her capabilities or physical disabilities. 2 Electronic music is easy and requires little to no talent. Objectively false. The greatest violin player in the world could be sat down in front of a DAW and have no idea what they are doing. Producing electronic music is not something that anybody can do much like a lot of people seem to think it is. Aside from having approximate knowledge of music theory, song structure and how to reach an audience, you have to know how to navigate the software, how to create find samples, how to mix everything properly and a whole lot more. It's a whole lot more than just mashing buttons on a computer. 3 Electronic music does not sound human. Everything is quantized to be perfect and therefore lacks any personal element. This is an argument of taste and is therefore irrelevant. I might add that plenty of electronic music producers recognize this and, in fact, will bend notes off pitch or drag rhythms ever so slightly in order to create that human sound. Ultimately however, it is important to recognize that every genre of music whether it be metal, jazz, or electronic has different goals and the mediums through which the music is created is chosen in order to work toward those goals. A metal guitar player will have a very different guitar amp set up than a jazz guitarist. 4 Technology takes away any human involvement in the music. It has no soul. It is destroying the live performance tradition of music that has existed for centuries. Similar to the previous argument, however different in the sense that it is not a question of taste as much as it is a question of technological progress and it's effect on the tradition of music as a performance art. With changes in technology comes changes in everything. If one looks back on the role of technology in music you will find similar sentiments toward other technological innovations in music. We find the same thing with the invention of the synthesizer and the electric guitar. In fact with the development of musical notation there were proclamations that notation would destroy the oral tradition of music. We can even go further back to ancient egypt, when people suggested that all music should be 100 improvised. Not to say that I think electronic music will make live performance obsolete. People will always want to get a group together and jam for the love of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Electronically produced music is just as artistically valid as live performance music.\n","id":"ae9bdb76-4286-4ee5-aa57-dbb29dc93acc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate speech involves speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate speech has some clearly defined characteristics and \"disagreeing with someone's opinion\" is not one of them.\n","id":"1a8faf33-223c-4cfe-ab58-0cdb77d1f644"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Whitewashing In Hollywood: Should It Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Leonardo DiCaprio for example, has been cast to portray the Persian Muslim poet Jalaluddin al-Rumi, amid disapproval due to many Muslim actors being overlooked, or instead given terrorist roles to play.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minority actors are often overlooked for roles outside of racial stereotypes.\n","id":"50e9827e-3d45-4d01-9b42-56275d31d4a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>The civil war in Syria is propelled by dissenters from various directions, including ISIS, Kurdish forces, numerous other extremist groups and various foreign powers, most of which don't agree with each other.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most contemporary conflicts that result in refugee movements could hardly be solved through a larger number of government opponents.\n","id":"d736b8c0-8193-426f-958b-10e5129aa876"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>The scale of harm permitted by magic is seemingly infinite, while the possible positive effects have an upper bound - the dead cannot be revived, and souls cannot be returned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The capacity for harm is greater when magic is involved.\n","id":"a7008b94-eb88-40e1-a465-176e9ffec64c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Clause 5 of Section 1 of Article 2 of the US Constitution states that No Person except a natural born Citizen shall be eligible to the Office of President I believe that this aspect of the clause is unnecessary, a hold over from an 18th century fear of a foreign, royalist Manchurian candidate winning the presidency. It was nonsense then and it's nonsense now. The citizen and residency requirements, combined with the proliferation of knowledge through various media today and American culture make such a plot so exceedingly unlikely that the possibility of it occurring is practically nil. Furthermore, I believe that this clause perpetuates Nativist, anti immigrant sentiment in the U.S. that the Chinese, Irish, Italians, Japanese and others have all faced, so that even when a person spends two decades going through the hoops of becoming a U.S. citizen in order to participate in American democracy they are not seen as trustworthy enough to be allowed to run for President. however, someone who was handed that right at birth is somehow seen as more trustworthy. Being a naturalised citizen should be enough to be eligible to run for president. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Believe the Natural Born Citizen Clause of the US Constitution is Unnecessary.\n","id":"2db1bb85-a152-480b-afb7-f08dcecba9f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Civilized society is a lot about suppressing your urges for the sake of others and ultimately your own. Humans will always have violent and hateful thoughts, but most of use have learned to exercise restraint to not actually become aggressive or violent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Their behaviour, such as being racist, is a bigger problem than if someone kept their, for example, white supremacy to themselves.\n","id":"1e72ec95-24ad-4cc3-9b0b-3c2380c3d957"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was reading this article about the question of whether and when the House Ways and Means Committee will demand Trump's tax returns. It says that Trump and the department are sure to fight this in court, setting up a protracted legal battle. However I don't see why the legal battle would be protracted. There could be no disputed facts to try. It would presumably be a suit for a writ of mandamus brought by the House seeking mandamus against the Secretary of the Treasury to provide the returns. The relevant statute gives a very clear legal duty to the Secretary gt Upon written request from the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives, the chairman of the Committee on Finance of the Senate, or the chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Secretary shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request, except that any return or return information which can be associated with, or otherwise identify, directly or indirectly, a particular taxpayer shall be furnished to such committee only when sitting in closed executive session unless such taxpayer otherwise consents in writing to such disclosure. I really don't see any legal case that the Secretary can evade or claim a basis not to comply with this duty, and a court should issue mandamus against him if asked to by the House, so long as the committee was willing to abide the closed executive session rules. I don't see such a case taking a very long time, or being very hard to decide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Congress demands Trump's tax returns any legal fight over it should be brief because it is not a close legal question.\n","id":"eaa4bade-8f15-41ac-8f89-d153d9134701"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The positive way of using it You compliment someone and they say Thanks, it takes one to know one. I see this as a way of responding to a compliment when they are unable to receive a compliment without saying anything in return. Of course I can see qualities in you that I personally don't posses. To understand something or to recognize something in someone doesn't require me to be that something. The negative way of using it If I call someone a thief and they reply with It takes one to know one I see that as a way of you deflecting from the initial problem. I don't have to be a thief to recognize a thief. Is there any truth to this phrase? I need to mention that English is not my first language so perhaps there's something I'm missing here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The phrase \"It takes one to know one\" is not true.\n","id":"5a62f407-a88f-4184-af4f-0d77b19e0057"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals who feel like they are a \"drain on society\", such as the elderly, the ill and the disabled, may feel that there is social pressure on them to choose euthanasia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalisation of the right to die would lead to many people choosing to die imprudently.\n","id":"ae2538d2-a702-4daf-a578-711e6a1ea1d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Pro-settler parties dominate Israeli politics: the Jewish Home a far-right party, is an indispensable coalition partner to the current government, with the Minister of Justice and Minister of Education belonging to the party.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel is so heavily invested in its settlements and businesses in the Occupied Territories that it would never agree to negotiate a two-state solution.\n","id":"7559ef42-0035-42d1-a06c-2f3dfd74ffad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Artificial Intelligence AI: Should an artificial general intelligence be created?<|ARGUMENT|>The current economic system in most countries fails or functions very poorly if a large portion of workers become unemployable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many jobs would be lost as workers are replaced by AGI, causing massive social disruption.\n","id":"559a2aed-8e0e-4ae9-b10f-5b1898ad09fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My views are almost completely Libertarian except for that I don't think privatizing all schools would help our education system. But I do believe privatizing schools would be a good option if someone can think of a solution to my concerns on the issue. First off, students don't have much choice in which school to go to. Basically everyone just goes to whatever school is nearest to them. Even if the next closest school is better than the closest one, pretty much everyone will choose the closer one because it saves gas and time. This means every school will form a monopoly on their district around them and therefore would have the same monopoly that the US government currently has on schools. There wouldn't be any incentive for private schools to be effective because none of their customers the students would have much choice to go to a different school and pay tuition for that other school. There would be little to no competition with other schools. My other main concern is that a lot of people couldn't afford it. Currently the amount you pay for school depends on how much property you own because school is payed for by property tax. Those who can only afford to live in an apartment don't pay for property tax and don't pay for school. If you privatized schools it would lower property tax significantly but would be replaced by a tuition fee which would cost the same for everyone, even if you're a poor person living in an apartment. Then you'd have a problem where poor people would get arrested for not sending their kids to school because they can't pay for it. Edit I had k 12 schools in mind while writing this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Privatizing all schools would create local monopolies and the schools would have no incentive to being effective\n","id":"5cd0c1d2-b3a2-4d56-a1c7-85a6395f81d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Corporate entities, licensed by the government, should be permitted to hack back when attacked via the internet.<|ARGUMENT|>Attacks can be ordered, even by state actors. Thus instead of getting your hands dirty you can anonymously pay for someone to launch the attack. Even if you track the attackers you will not be able to find the person who ordered and paid for the attack.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tracking the real source of an attack will often be very hard.\n","id":"4e57532a-68ea-407a-9534-ad54ad42334f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every time I hear a Silkk feature, I get really confused why anyone paid this guy to rap. He was always off beat. If I were as bad at my job as he was at rapping, I'd be banned from the industry. It especially bothers me because I like most rappers some claim to be awful. I love Lil B and understand his stream of consciousness lyrics. I get how Young Thug values sound over coherence to make massively fun music. Even when Big Sean started rapping off beat, it worked because he properly knew how to syncopate his lyrics. I understand some things take a while to get used to. Somettimes that knee jerk reactions will call a guy who's being different terrible because he's hard to understand. But Silkk takes me out of the song every time and I don't understand what he's doing. The guy sucks. Inexplicably popular and awful. Can someone explain to me why Silkk was consistently so awful yet so successful?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Silkk Da Shocker was a terrible rapper and was famous only because of nepotism\n","id":"fe0186f5-2c45-4f43-9f94-e57b11b9e1bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>Such an expense. It would take money in our economy and direct into the hands of the few. It would be like welfare but with limited benefits. Until some other propulsion system is discovered which is less expensive and more efficient, traveling great distances at those costs make these projects almost useless.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mars colonization may benefit Martians, but at the expense of Earthlings' money and may not be profitable. Today we are able to send people on Mars with the technology but it could be an unproductive investment, making it an unworthy sacrifice,\n","id":"0d1438c2-e72c-4cf6-896d-336d790de610"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Crime cameras<|ARGUMENT|>Jim Harper, the director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, was quoted saying in a July 2007 ABC article: \"They are good forensic tools \u2014 after something happens, they'll tell you what happened. . But they do not provide protection against attacks, and that's a key distinction.\"2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Crime cameras may help prosecutions, but don't reduce crime.\n","id":"6114138c-6471-4ef8-ade1-b1688ae010b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I would rather the money go towards charities that benefit human beings. I understand how much love people have for animals and pets but to me if that 50 dollars I just donated to the ASPCA could have vaccinated and saved the life of a poor African kid, it doesn't seem equivalent to me. I also understand that animals need help as well, and I do feel like the human race as a whole is responsible for these animals we bred to be dependent on us. But I just can't morally support these charities over ones that help humans. I should also mention that I am not a big fan of animals, but I don't hate them for any reason. EDIT It has become clear that my title has caused some confusion, a better title would have been I don't believe people should donate to animal charities when there are human charities that need money as well<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe animal charities should exist.\n","id":"16958b2d-0642-4ef8-9bea-a4651101e4d5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>Any given \"evil\" circumstance has results that can continue to affect other circumstances long after, and far away from, the original circumstance. Chaos theory shows that accurately predicting, and therefore judging the weight of, these consequences is far beyond the scope of human intelligence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's impossible to say with any acceptable certainty that the state of the world isn't justified from God's perspective.\n","id":"230a202b-8669-4796-9317-d513fd3147c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should pet stores only sell dogs and cats from shelters?<|ARGUMENT|>In order to maximize profits, puppy mill breeders keep costs low by skimming on proper medical care, hygiene, and nutrition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is necessary to counter the overcrowded and unsanitary breeding facilities from which most pets are currently sourced.\n","id":"4b860c0e-74d5-46d9-bb71-1ba81c827479"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Empathy is complex and a social skill that helped us thrive and evolutionarily assisted in the development of more complex brains.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The exercise of true care is necessary for the human race to evolve and to grow in consciousness.\n","id":"04518db1-aa1f-4225-9d85-2d337ae6bca5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>\u201cBrussels\u201d that is the EU Commission, the EU parliament and the EU Council is often accused of lacking democratic legitimacy \u2014you cannot \u201ckick the rascals out Yet national electoral politics is almost always obsessed with short term fixes given electoral cycle even if in fact many citizens care intensely about the long term. Incomplete EU integration is not the problem, unsustainable integration is. A chastened EU embracing the politics of time could set out to be the guardian of the long term for the sake of our children and theirs. This would be the silver lining of the EU\u2019s perceived democratic deficit democracy with foresight. Sustainable integration in this sense includes but is broader than the sustainability agenda of the UN and includes all policies, laws, actions Examples of policy areas development and wealth, the environment, biodiversity andhuman security, risks posed by machines or cyber or artificial intelligence, the demographic time bomb, intelligent mobility, innovative energy . Most importantly, such an ethos needs to harness the power of bottom up participatory, deliberative and contestatory democracy and \u2018distributed intelligence\u2019 through innovative participatory mechanisms of all sorts. The traditional \u201cEU stakeholder\u201d approach needs to be dramatically enlarged and become truly user friendly. We know that the EU has plenty of existing impact assessment filters mechanisms as well as agencies in each of its institutions in charge of thinking about impact. It has also adopted a \u201cbetter regulation agenda\u201d transparency and accountability, stakeholder involvement, impact assessment evaluation, minimum regulatory burdens . But it needs to reinforce and deepen their authority and democratic visibility, join the dots between them, and put much more emphasis in assessing long term impact as the test for sustainable integration or lack thereof for every EU decision, legal or political, to be debated and contested. These ought to incorporate systematic foresight exercises uncertainties about what could happen as opposed to classic impact assessment which refers to what you want to achieve , scenarios referring to alternative time horizons 5, 10, 30, 50 years and foresee periodical reviews linked to contingent and unforeseen developments. The European Parliament could use the left over Brexit seats to create a \u201cCommittee for the Future\u201d of citizens entirely devoted to the long term. Collective debates would thus be engineered on the specific tradeoffs between short term losses and long term gains of actions and policies or risks and opportunities including on how these are distributed. Sunset clauses should be introduced in laws whose impact is highly uncertain and or contested. BIG PICTURE Unfortunately the EU will remain for the foreseeable future more remote and complex for citizens than public authorities closer to home. Sustainable integration can make up for this flaw as a narrative and an ideal not only a technical fix. For this to happen it needs to become a widely shared mindset and praxis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \u201cunelected elite\u201d in Brussels is better at formulating sustainable European policies than most short-term obsessed national electorates and politicians\n","id":"7e69c722-90cc-4948-b25c-67e73e8de217"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Ontario have only one public, secular school system?<|ARGUMENT|>Private schools have a massive incentive to make themselves more attractive than public schools. This makes them always look towards ways of improving schools and education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without competing schools and school formats, there is little incentive and pressure for the school system to continuously improve.\n","id":"0888c66a-508d-41f6-b6d8-da41221ffbdc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>A preacher pushes his views, including threats of divine punishments, on the mob; the mob accepts his views and the preacher profits from their submission to his ideas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has been and is used as a form of social control.\n","id":"5c19cde5-2b5d-4185-8e51-ae3c891e45d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>We assume crime, felony and antisocial behavior have no useful purpose, but we don't know if this is always the case. What if some kids need to torture animals to become good adults? What if stealing from supermarket helps you to be a good husband or wife? What if shouting at people once in a while prevented you from committing murder or suicide? Can we truly be good people if all our life we are restraining ourselves from doing something others would blame us for?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human nature will often lead us to commit acts of violence despite the threat of certain punishment.\n","id":"d196096d-5142-46d4-90ec-9ac368bd8b0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should Self-Driving Cars Kill?<|ARGUMENT|>This is reflected in the evidence available - study participants prefer that self-driving cars not be utilitarian actors, and would be less likely to buy one if they were.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The adoption of self-driving cars will be limited if people are afraid that their car may deliberately choose to harm them.\n","id":"93ed6f28-05bd-4336-8052-ae1b01684e73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>In the US, a Latina woman is more than twice as likely as a white woman to have an abortion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism advocates for reproductive rights to be available to all women.\n","id":"068725bc-99da-4ef1-a9d7-a0055854b971"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>People have been led to do terrible things outside of religion. Some of the greatest atrocities in history had no religious motivation. For example: the Great Leap and the outbreak of World War II<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Absent religion, ideologies fill the void and motivate humans to do terrible things.\n","id":"ecdd4deb-e786-43c4-a4d7-fd1564fbe8ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should minors be allowed to go through irreversible gender reassignment procedures?<|ARGUMENT|>If minors need permission to get a bodily change such as a tattoo, which is less significant, then they shouldn\u2019t be allowed to make an irreversible change such as this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minors can lack the emotional maturity to make such a permanent life changing decision.\n","id":"49a86102-f2f0-4e40-b41a-7fcfa26db5e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US President Have the Power to Self-Pardon?<|ARGUMENT|>This means that any vote against or in support of the president is likely to be in accordance with party lines, regardless of merits or circumstances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Party loyalty is so entrenched in the US that not even massive scandals seems to have a significant effect on it.\n","id":"d64e66a9-a877-4e22-b6cf-3c65f5373d6f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should jury trials be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Some lawyers argue that 85% of cases litigated are won or lost when the jury is selected, implying that facts are not impartially or consistently considered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Juries are more likely to be swayed in their decision making by emotional or irrational factors.\n","id":"adf1ba47-6964-41d6-9556-718bcb63c9d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Military conscription should apply to men and women equally.<|ARGUMENT|>Having females in the military will reduce offenses committed against hostages and refugees. Men are often more psychologically aggressive than women which can result in transgressive outcomes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More women in the military will improve the culture in the armed forces and improve its workings.\n","id":"1cb09d2f-8481-4126-abcb-cb655bda76ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For a number of reasons. The series is based upon European folklore specifically based within the Slavic region. This is a period of time where people are overwhelmingly white. As well, it isn\u2019t your typical medieval story or environment it is very much a unique, culturally cohesive, slavic inspired world even the mythical elements. It\u2019s not a story or setting that\u2019s common due to the Slavic inspired politics and attitudes in the world. Black Panther can have a cast that is 99 black set in Africa and that\u2019s seen as fine because it is fine. It makes sense. It provides this unique and special and cultural environment that the film is all the richer for. Why can\u2019t The Witcher? Because it isn\u2019t as politically defensible when it comes to white people, and it doesn\u2019t fit with Netflix\u2019s diversity clause. I want to see different cultures and their histories in all their glory and warts I don\u2019t want them neutered and reshaped by modern identity politics. If I were watching Black Panther and all of a sudden I see a white Wakandan I\u2019d be taken out of the film. I\u2019d be thinking huh? This doesn\u2019t gel. It\u2019s the same with The Witcher. The series is already going to be battling expectations from fans of the game which is where the largest fan base for this series is going to come from with the added pressure that the series is borrowing nothing from the games and is being based on the books. Fan expectations are already being pulled and strained in two different directions we have written descriptions and stories in the book, and visual depictions and interactions in the games. But the games and the books at least gel with each other characters look the same, behave the same, story threads follow on. The game is a very faithful adaption. The television series then has the tremendous task of not only matching the books, but surpassing the expectations of those viewers who come from games. Adding these POC characters is just further pressure for the creators and more fuel for fire for fans whom have invested years into this franchise. Despite the supernatural elements, the series is very much grounded in mythical realism the series does a great job of making this world feel real, natural, cohesive, a representation of a what if Slavic country with magic set back in the day. Adding actors who don\u2019t look Slavic detract from this realism. It causes needless discussions like these. Are these characters enhanced by deviating from how they\u2019re described? We can\u2019t say yet, but a lot of people clearly don\u2019t think so, for some of the reasons listed above. So why do it? It\u2019s not like we can pretend the Slavic countries are well represented in western media and it\u2019s easy to see how the Witcher fills a very weird niche in its setting, story, and inspiration.This type of casting causes inflammatory discussions because people don\u2019t understand, don\u2019t like, and don\u2019t agree with these changes being made. They see wider arguments against Hollywood and the issue of representation being applied unnecessarily in this case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Netflix\u2019s The Witcher series will suffer for the casting of POC actors and actresses\n","id":"ca23a8ef-5c49-4c3b-9f4d-21b8118bae14"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Scientific advancements don't alway come from following proper scientific protocol. Sometimes they are a result of accidents. Sometimes they are a result of many people trying different things<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Limiting scientific research to \"professional personnel\" would reduce some potential for scientific advancement.\n","id":"39c286bf-494c-46a0-90c8-a0258092dc8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be taught in schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Teaching the Christian creationist myth as fact directly contradicts the Hindu creationist myth, of which both contradict current scientific consensus.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are a multitude of religions, creation myths and creationist dogmas which tend to contradict each other.\n","id":"84ff9ff3-a75b-4661-ad24-a9971432633e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Barack Obama a good President?<|ARGUMENT|>The Race to the Top just continued the progress of No Child Left Behind's problems instead of removing them. Having one failure after another and continuing issues instead of resolving them is a sign of failure and deterioration.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This failure has increased the deterioration of the Department of Education DOE as well as created issues that face schools today.\n","id":"f8b5d964-4db1-4834-87fe-0d7effa376be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Gun control laws in CA have demonstrated strong correlations in preventing accidental gun deaths due to law abiding gun owners acting in more safe ways with firearms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Different studies demonstrate that there is a strong and significant link between weak gun laws and high rates of gun violence.\n","id":"2754a7c5-054d-4603-beb9-079171ee8b66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To begin with The term Byzantine was only coined a century after their collapse. To make things easier I'll call them ancient and medieval Rome respectively because they didn't call themselves Byzantines and nor did anybody else at the time. Now, Emperor Constantine moved the imperial capital to Constantinople, And before that it was Milan. Therefore its ridiculous to assume that just because Rome the city was no longer there, it wasn't Roman. Rome lost most of its influence before it was lost so unless you wish to argue the Roman empire was not Roman then it doesn't matter. Second Their structure was the same, They had an emperor, Some of the same laws and a culture based on the ancient Roman one that evolved naturally overtime like they probably would have done if Rome the City was still involved. Some might argue the religious differences of the pagan ancient Rome and the Christian medieval Romans. This is also ridiculous considering that Constantinople, emperor of Rome, was a Christian before Rome was lost. To reiterate If medieval Rome wasn't Roman, neither was ancient Rome. On a final note The medieval Romans naturally evolved over time, but so did the ancient Rome, from a republic to an empire, with an emperor of varying dynasties over time and even a pantheon that changed before christendom For four years, Elagabalus changed the head of the pantheon to Helios Thsnk you for listening to me ramble on. Change my view, people<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Byzantine empire\" was Roman.\n","id":"52dcea39-111c-4d1a-b543-0009cd0cec36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Imagine you go to see the doctor and once at his office he conducts tests and stuff to see what kind of disease you have. Following this, the doctor then goes to doctor court where he has taken an oath to do his best to argue that you have a certain disease regardless of whether he actually believes you have that disease . Another doctor is there who has taken an oath to do his best to argue that you do not have that disease also regardless of his own beliefs on whether or not you have the disease . Each doctor presents their case in an adversarial fashion to a group of 12 of your peers who, in our hypothetical, probably have biases against certain types of diseases and demographics taken off of the street and selected by the doctors presumably in ways to take advantage of their biases to further their own case, and their presentation must conform to certain rules that do not admit of certain types of evidence being permitted and being thrown out. Then when all is said and done, those twelve ordinary people go and deliberate and then make a decision about whether you are sick or healthy. Their decision determines if, when, and what kind of treatment you will get. The previous example is absurd and no one would have any confidence in our healthcare system if it were like that, because it wouldn't be very good at finding the truth of whether or not a person is sick. The legal system is a bit different in that there are things that we value more than getting at the truth, such as keeping innocent people out of jail, to the extent that we are willing to let criminals go free to keep people out of jail, but I do not think that these values are fulfilled by our legal system. In many ways, our legal system works against them. For example, we have relatively uneducated at least concerning the level of deductive reasoning and legal knowledge that is probably necessary to evaluate criminal cases and highly biased people making decisions about the guilt or innocence of a person. This can very easily lead to more convictions for innocent people, and I wouldn't be surprised if in fact it does lead to more convictions for minorities, even if we were to have roughly identical cases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States has a weird legal system that does not contribute to and actively works against determining the guilt or innocence of a person.\n","id":"2e26ad97-8b33-452a-a405-70f3d4ccb413"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If there's one thing I can say for certain is that we are quite bad at predicting the future, particularly in this day and age of science. In this midst of the science revolution, our knowledge and understanding of the world is increasing exponentially, innovations appear at every corner, new discoveries are made day after day that keep making our lives better and longer, and today, like never before, we are able to Literally bypass nature's intended evolutionary way of life. Just see or I fear that the unstoppable power of modern and future science might wield fatal consequences. I fear that our never ending hunger for knowledge and scientific discoveries might lead us to distinguishable change in our current state of human beings to another form entirely, a form that lives longer, stronger, smarter and lacks all defects that make us human And I like being human. Despite everything science has given us so far and will continue to give us, this uncharted territory we are heading towards is dangerous in ways that we can't even start to imagine, and I fear for humanity. Perhaps the best course of action is to stop science research in specific areas of study A.I., biogenetics, Genetic Engineering, etc in order to ensure our survival and our humanness for as long as possible. I will end with a quote by Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens A Brief History of Mankind Is there anything more dangerous than unsatisfied, irresponsible gods us humans today and in the future that don't know what they really want ? Tl DR There are 3 main problems I am asking of you to calm me down about 1 The danger of massive if not TOTAL extinction of civilizations and humanity. 2 The loss of what we define today as humanity . 3 The eventual discoveries we will make that we rather not know at all, absurd examples life is an illusion, happiness is fake, there is so meaning in anything we do . Perhaps we would be happier and better off not knowing such facts, perhaps we should continue living in the bliss that is our ignorance. Edit 1 I feel like the conclusion I am arriving at after reading the comments is that embracing scientific change despite the dark unknown we are faced with is vital, and a essentially a good thing. That being said, I do still believe that we, as a species, should ALWAYS keep in mind the countless dangerous we might stumble upon in our quest for knowledge and innovation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To ensure our survival and our humanity we must Stop science research in some areas, despite their benefits.\n","id":"9f3a2458-91c6-4cc4-81dc-fe017fc8a743"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Religious Indoctrination of Children Abuse?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious indoctrination offers no choice. While this may not qualify as abuse, it could be considered impressment. Perhaps there should be a default opt-out clause.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People are so brainwashed from birth by religion that they cannot break away from its hold - it affects their thinking\/being in every way.\n","id":"b329b33b-a025-4004-8736-184d530d09ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>If a teacher experiences a burst of anger or might otherwise lose control, this momentary madness can potentially escalate into a shooting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Armed teachers would be a new threat: they could be the ones who initiate a shooting.\n","id":"82e0fbf6-93dc-48f9-9f8b-0ff22280f44a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The title pretty much says it Let's say I want to study engineering. From the moment that I'm sure about wanting to become an engineer, I should be allowed to only take engineering related classes because things like philosophy, history and literature analysis won't help me when I actually get a job. The same can be said for someone who wants to study English and become a professor. For this person, anything more advanced than pre calculus would be pretty much useless never saw an literature teacher use derivatives . The time used for these classes would be better spent at working a part time job good for networking, gaining experience and extra cash, especially if it's directly related to the person's degree , participating in extracuricular activities networking and gaining experience, plus it's fun , playing sports good for health, and making friends , or just studying or having more time for ourselves. Plus, it's really frustrating to come to college for a job the program is not offered in a trade school and having to pay thousands of dollars for classes that you know won't be useful. In other words, removing general education would partially solve the problem with debt related to student loans. It would be far better if after 11th grade, someone can decide that all the classes they take are going to be either STEM, humanities or social science so that they could choose a job specific degree a year later. x200B Now, here're some responses for anticipated arguments Not everyone knows what they want to do Yes, this is true, but no one would stop a student from taking a class outside of his her major. And by the time of grade 12, most people I know already know that they don't like like I hate math or I hate philosophy . x200B You need to be well rounded x200B I don't even know what exactly they mean by well rounded If it's about relationship skills then these can be either taught outside of a class or in actual team work assignments. I would be glad if someone explains it to me. And by the way, the only thing that I got from my arts and humanities classes is that I will never, ever study that again once I don't have to anymore. I also know some people who feel the same way about math. x200B x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"general education is not important and actually do more harm than good after around 11th grade\n","id":"b2691802-17a0-48c5-9eab-1e56bf501a75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it OK to publicly approach a stranger for sex?<|ARGUMENT|>Although it might be more polite when one is attracted to a person to give that person non-verbal cues to indicate interest, some people pick up on these cues better than others Thus it can be necessary to make a bold move if one is to successfully attract that person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are practical benefits to approaching a stranger in public to have consensual sex.\n","id":"04875107-37db-4f51-b6e0-f799f065d3b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Whaling Still be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>After the International Whaling Commission ban was implemented in 1986, somehow whales became harder to protect when the real issues to the health of their populations became sound pollution, environmental degradation, fishing practices, plastics and climate change being whaling a small numerical irrelevance in comparison.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If humans want to be good environmental stewards, we should focus on saving the species that do the most to contribute to ecological stability rather than those which are most intelligent.\n","id":"e5339deb-2a44-4518-80f6-5689a4947223"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should physical libraries be digitized?<|ARGUMENT|>People will still go to physical libraries as a public space, not just for books.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libraries act as equal access resources to the public, regardless of income.\n","id":"a8c4d7eb-afd2-409e-9ee5-12daf0ff862f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally believe that considering a human being is technically a biological lifeform, then if they are capable, it is imperative for them to preserve themselves in the world's gene pool, in case they feel they have qualities that are worth preserving. Anyone to choose not to have children cop out and escape from this imperative, and essentially accept the notion that they are not worthy to exist in the world after their death. Biological lifeforms have the means of reproduction for this very purpose to ensure that their genetic code is distributed, and partially kept in their offspring. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the most important goal of individual humans, as biological lifeforms, is to ensure their genes are preserved in the DNA pool through reproduction.\n","id":"23a50f35-b6ea-4c12-bdf0-b048040560a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Catholic parents baptise their children when they are babies and thus introduce them into the Catholic faith when they cannot consent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions are routinely introduced to children who are too young to make an informed choice.\n","id":"65628710-c498-4d01-88a1-a3692495e569"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Withdrawing from Iraq<|ARGUMENT|>Coalition forces are considered \"occupiers\" in Iraq. As a result, when the coalition works predominantly with Shiites on security and in the Iraqi government, Shiites are subsequently viewed by Sunnis as \"collaborators\". This makes it more difficult for Sunnis to work with Shiites out of fear of being branded as working with the \"collaborators\"; in effect, being labeled \"collaborators\" themselves. A US withdrawal would eliminate these fears of cooperation, and help avoid civil war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An early withdrawal would end Sunni fears of working with Shiite \"collaborators\"\n","id":"6d6afbf1-47ff-452f-a16f-7daf4b96f5bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Australia Limit Immigration to Achieve a Sustainable Population?<|ARGUMENT|>Water pollution resulting from flows of domestic sewage and urban run-off is also related to population levels although it is also a function of treatment and urban design.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Disposing of the solid waste from large populations causes environmental pressure in cities.\n","id":"c9d2f9ff-f197-424c-8ec3-0ffc41901bb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Detailed knowledge of peoples' movements helps epidemiologists identify key individuals and sites in the spread of a disease allowing for better medical intervention.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The database would reduce harm to humans during natural disasters and epidemics.\n","id":"2c49b0c0-19af-4e7c-a87a-91331cf27945"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>During The Battle of Yavin 3:01 - Luke strafes the Death Star surface those are clearly not Kt explosions, 3:04-3:08 - Luke flies through the wash from his own strafing run and they are concerned for him. He claims he's a little cooked but otherwise okay. 4:03 - Luke again strafes the Death Star. Still no Kt blasts even the internal damage of a gun crew being blasted is not consistent with one. 4:28 - An X-wing takes a single hit from a TIE and explodes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"And Luke had already sustained several hits weakening his rear deflectors by that time, so there's almost nothing to dissipate the power of the shot.\n","id":"c14e52b0-7564-4def-8fa6-083892d81035"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>If young people those who are more malleable to moral judgement who joined this criminal organization are taken back to the country under a careful program that rehabilitates them and analyzes their development, they could be the ones that bring a better vision to the vulnerable adolescents of the communities from which they left, and help stop international recruitment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Disenchanted ISIS recruits can be used to undermine ISIS propaganda and influence.\n","id":"f4217d63-227d-4651-9240-1e968d584108"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Why is it OK to have an all Black college? Or a Hispanic college. I'm sure that if you were a known atheist you wouldn't get accepted into a Christian college. In New Mexico we have a Hispano Chamber of Commerce. My company Government contractor gives preference to minority owned businesses. It has nothing to do with their performance or cost. Don't even get me started on how hard it was to get a job here being a white dude. The Indian uh excuse me Native American Reservations here have huge casinos. Those nice people won't hire you unless you are of Native American ancestry, and they are allowed to do that because they are a sovereign nation . Where I work the Hispanics refer to white males as Gringo and females as Weda. If I call them a taco, I'll be headed down to HR pronto. Why is it OK to be racist unless you are white? I've never owned a slave. My parents never owned a slave, or my grandparents or their parents for that matter. I don't know anyone who was a slave themselves either. I think if there is ever any chance of eliminating racism, it would have to be for everyone, including white people. A Native American co worker of mine told me how she votes. She knows and cares nothing about the issues. She looks over the ballot, to first see if there are any skins on it as she calls them. If they are democrat, they get the vote. Next it's hispanics, blacks, or other minority democrats. She says she will never vote for a republican or a white male of either political party. She is going to vote for Hillary however, because she's a woman. And that's acceptable to her family and friends, because that's how she was raised. I asked her what if the vote was actually detrimental to her people. She stated that she and her people don't care. We are going to take down the white man even if it has to be a murder suicide. Now if I were to take that stance, reversing the racism, I'd be headed down to Human Resources in a heartbeat. And that's what I think. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it's socially acceptable to be racist, unless you are white.\n","id":"955c0aa9-d90a-4bd6-9454-e62c78af549e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Society has, for some time, been prepared for higher ideals and lowering privacy. Recognizing transformations that merit concrete updates would provide better models for society functions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Understanding the world and one's place in it will become much easier.\n","id":"d10fd67d-f59f-486b-b2f7-1def1be0eff1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the LGBT movement failing bisexual people?<|ARGUMENT|>This is harmful because it can turn members of the LGT community against bisexual people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some members of the LGBT community unfairly accuse bisexuals of transphobia\n","id":"48c0b19e-bcac-441f-a4fc-318364ae9ca4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First reason, people who use drugs only harm themselves and not others. This isn't to be mistaken for drug dealers. I only mean people who are caught just using drugs. Second reason, they would prove to be far more effective cleaning up the streets and public parks then sitting in jail for a number of years because of a little bag of weed cops found when they got pulled over. Third reason, prisons are starting to become overpopulated. If we press drug users into community service instead of put them into jail, we'd be able to close some prisons and other incarcerations which would put less tax money into funding them. That way tax money would be put through educational purposes. I also believe fining them would deter them from wanting to do drugs. Depending on how much more dangerous a drug is, they could be fined higher. Ex. Weed 300 Meth 2000. This fined money can be put into the government for better use. Edit a lot of people misunderstood my view. I personally don't like drug use, but I can see why we should just leave drug users alone. But the point of my post was to provide a better alternative to a punishment than to throw them in jail and ruin their lives. Yeah, community service sucks, and so would being fined, but it's better than going to jail. I am arguing this because I don't think drugs will ever be legalized in America, excluding marijuana . So basically it's community service, or jail.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think drug users who get caught should be put into community service and fined instead of thrown into jail and serving a sentence.\n","id":"1bc1cd75-1a92-45c9-a60a-2663ff2d7616"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The meaning of life is drumroll nonexistent. We exist simply because of chance, and the only point in living is living and, I guess, fun and making sure next generations can live. For the sake of living. I see nothing else. Sure fun sounds like a valid reason, but in the end it won't matter at all how much anyone has had, the universe isn't better or worse of. After the last life on earth dies, things, essentially, would be as if it was never there at all. Is life really just studying so you can have a good job so you can work hard so that if you reach retirement you get to think of all the things you could spend your money on if you were as fit as you had someday been? Or so when you die you have enough coin to pass down? Surely many people see this in another light, or they wouldn't keep going. What's the secret? EDIT I feel it can't hurt to point out I'm not suicidal. I don't despise life for finding no use in it. I simply fail to see its place in the bigger picture and was interested in opposing other thoughts on that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Life has no significant meaning.\n","id":"2f78a885-7776-4e53-ad5f-d9f1b1e9334a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should provide healthcare: the government or the market?<|ARGUMENT|>Public health care is essential in \"last resource cases\". When all market options are closed for a patient, he would rather have an option than none.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's unjust that in a market-provided health care system the poor will be unable to obtain needed health care.\n","id":"b84b8bd8-4927-4155-a401-701faae308aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>Infrastructure and education are public goods, so even though they are in demand, the free market does not supply them because they are not profitable. The state is therefore the sole provider of these goods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"States provide their citizens with access to many things such as infrastructure and education.\n","id":"68c6c821-b29e-463d-b0f1-4a91da6e68af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a man who has struggled with body image in the past and still do I can't help but imagine there are countless other young men and, for that matter, older men who do as well. I tend to think that one principal difference is that it is not socially acceptable for us to admit it to others in ways girls and women do so constantly, and so it is not an issue which is so visible publicly. That does not mean it doesn't exist, and it irritates me that this is treated as a crisis that only females in our society experience and one that only they can possibly understand, as though men are incapable of knowing what it is like to feel the profound shame of feeling judged by others. If I'm wrong for thinking so, I'd like some balanced and compelling reasons why.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not think that body image should be seen as a singularly female problem.\n","id":"8e9ce6b1-5887-470b-904c-3734088e678c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Compound interest is the result of recursive interest rates. Each compounding period, the current amount is multiplied by a constant rate. This results in exponential growth. To begin with, we reach the formula V S 1 r ^c where V compounded value, S is initial value, r is the compounding rate, and c is number of times compounded. For the sake of consistency, all rates are percents as in 6 0.06, not 1.06 . No complaints yet. Now let's turn this into a function of time V S 1 A ^t where A is the APR annual percentage rate , and t is the number of years. With this equation, once every year we compound the interest. This equation is still not finished, but we can see the function of the APR every year the savings increases by a factor of the APR. This seems pretty logical. However, compounded interest rates do not have to be compounded annually, and in many cases are not. If I compound twice annually, obviously I cannot multiply by the APR, because the Effective Annual Rate EAR , which is the resulting V, would be the APR squared. If there were 3 compounding periods, the APR would be cubed. To compensate for this, the EAR is defined as E 1 A n ^n 1 where n is the number of times compounded annually. Which plugs into our previous equation V S 1 A n ^nt Great Everything is fixed. Except comparing the equations V S 1 A ^t S 1 A n ^nt for n 1 We see that the APR and EAR are only equivalent for compounding annually. If we compound multiple times annually, the APR becomes useless. If I tell you that your APR is 5 , you also have to factor in how fast you compound. This is a silly standard. There is no reason why APR and EAR should ever be different. To fix this is simple. Create a definition of EAR that is equivalent to APR for any n E A C^n where C A^1 n where C is the rate per compounding period and n is the number of times compounded per year. V S C^nt S C^c S A^c n where t c n where c is the number of times compounded. So our final result is V S A^t or V S A^c n This is a better equation because no matter how many times you compound annually, you always get the same rate. To change my view, demonstrate where my equation is lacking or why EAR being different from APR is a good thing TL DR The compound interest formula is arbitrarily dependent on how many times you compound annually. I propose a new equation that doesn't have this quirk where Effective Annual Rate equals Annual Percentage Rate V S 1 A n ^nt turns into V S A^t or V S A^c n<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The compound interest formula is arbitrary and a better equation should be the standard\n","id":"89fb3017-d8a3-454f-85a4-d4db07953e5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm from the U.K and personally I'm happy that he don't have the death penalty. I don't believe that it is justified within any instance. I understand that there are people out there who commit such heinous crimes that it is right to believe that they won't be rehabilitated and shouldn't be released on the streets but in my mind this doesn't justify execution. I'm interested to hear particularly from anyone who is from an area where the death penalty is allowed. In my view, no matter whether the prisoner is executed or spends the rest of their life miserably in a cell, there is no such thing as 'true justice'<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The death penalty is right to be banned and I feel it is inhumane\n","id":"2427ae15-20fd-42ae-8dd6-32e9f822ee03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Met remove Balthus' painting, Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Dreaming?<|ARGUMENT|>The painting is meant to make people think about the darkness of pedophilloic thoughts. Even if this is a dark topic, it is better to address it than to refuse to address it at all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Art should be judged by the reaction it gets from its viewers. The current response is testament to the piece's effectiveness as a work of art.\n","id":"82cb28da-f68a-49ef-be97-d412400f2cb1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I firmly believe that a person can hold a certain level of fault and accountability if they are assaulted, molested, or raped. There are certainly exceptions small children, mentally ill, etc. but the average 20 30 able bodied and mentally stable person is partially to blame for their injury. This comes after some self reflection after I was mugged for the second time a week ago. I chose to walk home alone after closing time and in doing so made myself vulnerable to being mugged, and therefore I am partially to blame for the situation. My main source of comparison would be a cyclist that chooses to ride outside his lane. This comparison is accurate in that their is an alternative for the cyclist, but he she chooses to use a less safe method of biking. By doing so they are considered partially at fault in the case of an accident at least here in Ontario, Canada and will receive a ticket accordingly unless they can prove they needed to be out of their lane it was blocked, unsafe, etc. . Its not a perfect comparison, but it is the best I've come up with in a week. If a person chooses to put themselves into a position of weakness vulnerability, i.e. walking home alone while intoxicated, they are partially at fault as they could have prevented it. By this I mean they could have chosen to go home earlier, not get intoxicated, choose a different route home. Certainly there are times when you don't have alternatives, but this should be considered before going out and decisions should include these as considerations. I am not saying that people deserve this, or that it is a punishment for something which they did, only that the air of impunity and victim hood that surrounds some survivors went to a assault rape group meeting this week is incorrect. If a person makes a mistake they should own up to it, even if the mistake is not the sole reason that the misfortune befalls them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men and Women can be partially at fault for their own violence\n","id":"f015b05b-3899-4ff2-8cd7-92b92d8ed280"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of the main reasons it is considered immoral to kill others is that you are depriving them of the life they would have lived. That, if you assume they would live a happy life, it would be better for them to live than to not live. That it's better to have a happy existence than no existence at all, and killing someone is depriving them of all the happiness they would have had had they not been killed. However, I don't see why this same argument should not apply to unborn, nonexistent people as well. I'm not just talking about unborn fetuses, but also about people who haven't been conceived. If it's better to live than to not live, why isn't it wrong to not create as much life as possible? Surely it would be better for someone to be alive than not alive? Surely people would rather live than not have lived at all? I have yet to see a reason why once someone is born or, from some perspectives, conceived the potential life they have suddenly becomes important. I understand that obviously there's a big difference they are now alive and weren't before , but I don't see why, from an ethical perspective, that should change the value of their future life. Before they were born they had many years of potential future life, and once they are alive they still have many potential years of future life why does already being alive add value to that potential future? This leads me to the conclusion that every child one could have but doesn't is equivalent to killing a person, because you are depriving them of the life they could have had. This means that not having as many kids as possible over your lifetime would be committing a ton of murder. I don't think it makes sense for this to be the case, but I see no reason why it shouldn't be. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I see no reason why the notion that killing is immoral because it deprives people of future life shouldn't also apply to not yet existing people as well.\n","id":"1b310f81-20c0-41f9-addb-d403a706c6af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the United Kingdom the rightful owner of the Falkland Islands\/Malvinas?<|ARGUMENT|>Argentine military forces are significantly weaker than they were during the war, and they no longer have a large, up-to-date air force, while the Argentine submarine fleet only has 2 active submarines with both being outdated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UK is capable of defending the islands as it did in the past.\n","id":"bfd998fb-5454-48bd-add2-9b9dda75197a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Having Children Selfish?<|ARGUMENT|>Nobody should have to take the responsibility for another couple's bad decisions: to put a child up for adoption is selfish because you are deciding to have a better life for yourself rather than raise a kid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On the contrary, not having a child could be seen as selfish because you are hoarding everything you earn to be spent on yourself.\n","id":"6fd6d2a5-c704-4a15-9350-ff181180cb74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>That Terrorists Should Be Subject to the Geneva Conventions<|ARGUMENT|>Even if we think the terrorist cause is illegitimate we have a moral duty to respect a basic level of humanity. There are certain acts, such as torture, to which no individual should be subjected, regardless of their own behaviour. The Geneva Convention is about universal respect for human dignity International Committee of the Red Cross, 1949, not merely for those who show it in return. Civilised nations can and should be expected to act in a humane manner, regardless of the barbarity of their adversaries. Only by acting in such a manner can states prove the superiority of their own humanity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The moral duty to respect a basic level of humanity, which the Geneva Convention embodies, must be retained\n","id":"74e4d6da-c52d-472c-901d-580965b6adc2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Somebody just linked to this article on the Hawaii subreddit and it got me thinking. I've always been pretty liberal on social and economic issues, but as I get a bit older I've changed my stances on some of them, one of which is welfare. I definitely believe that people deserve help when they need it, and that government is the institution best equipped to provide a safety net and to break the cycle of poverty. However, it seems there's a perverse incentive built into the current system which, at least in some states, basically rewards people for having children. The image of the welfare queen with a brood of half a dozen children running around her is a favorite cudgel of the right wing in this country, but there is some truth to it. Welfare can make it easier for children to be born into a lifestyle of dependence. I believe a simple solution to the growing welfare rolls would be to require that women and men who are on welfare not have any further children while they are receiving government benefits. I don't think they should have birth control forced on them, but I think they should have free and easy access to it, and it should be encouraged. If they do have children which they choose to keep, their benefits should be cut, or at the very least they should not receive an increase. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that women and men who go on welfare should have their benefits revoked if they have more children.\n","id":"fd226974-221f-46cc-b5d1-8e68720d0093"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Zoos are crucial for the survival of many endangered species, especially for smaller animals like amphibians<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoos play a critical role in the conservation of endangered species.\n","id":"021234fc-4ff2-432f-8f59-c3334c492401"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Background I work in housing and this  is exclusively about housing policy and discrimination. After reading several books for an office Book Club Toxic Inequality, The Origins of the Urban Crisis and The Color of Law I have been persuaded that that case is strong for some kind of remuneration for decades of legal, policy based segregation in housing. I saw some other s about this topic but they were more think piecey. Its going to be difficult to cite every incident from these three books so I'll drop some quick quotes and links then post additional as the conversation develops. Limits This is not a  about what the best solution is, or if one is even practical. This likewise isn't about Affirmative Action, college admissions, or any other applications outside of housing and similar state and federal programs. This  is about the hidden history of legal segregation that denied African Americans to access to the wealth building power of government programs from the New Deal era through the Post War period. I think the fundamental premise that this rests on is that home ownership creates multi generational wealth. Meaning, if my grand parents received a government subsidized home loan in the post war era which they did it allowed for their children to get educated in better school districts in a more affluent area than one that was predominantly renters, that the appreciation in value for home ownership is bestowed on children, who reinvest that equity in their children through a reinforcing effect of that initial investment. The opposite is also true, that denial of access to subsidized loans forced many Americans into high poverty neighborhoods or into long term rental situations which prevented them from earning the same equity that whites were enabled to do. That if we constructed such a system based on other prerequisites, say denying all citizens of Florida access to federal housing programs out of some dystopic federal impunity, it would immediately be struck down as unconstitutional on various conditions, but because of hardened racism in the 40s and through the 1990s in some places African Americans were legally prevented from such access to federally subsidized housing programs. See Redlining Note Keep in mind the FHA, FHLB and HOLC are government entities From The Color of Law gt From 1940 to 1945, the influx of war workers resulted in Richmond's California population exploding from 24,000 to more than 100,000. Richmond's black population soared from 270 to 14,000 gt gt With such rapid population growth, housing could not be put up quickly enough. The federal government stepped in with public housing. gt gt For white workers the federal government created a war guest program in which it leased spare rooms from white families so workers could move in as tenants. The government also issues low interest loans for white home owners to remodel and sub divide their residences. gt gt with fewer private options , African Americans were more dependent on public housing than whites, the Richmond Housing Authority's segregated projects did less to alleviate the housing shortage for African Americans that for whites. gt gt Because the federal government refused to insure bank loans to African Americans for housing, standard construction was unaffordable. Summary from The Color of Law pg21 In 1935 the New Deal PWA program demolished an integrated community adjacent to downtown Atlanta that was home to 1600 families. It remade the neighborhood with 604 whites only homes. It intensified segregation in Atlanta as well as evicting black families who were forced into more segregated, poorer communities because of the denial of access to home loans. The PWA likewise did this in Detroit, Indianapolois, Toledo and New York City. Getting kind of long so I'll wrap up, but there are similar incidents in 1976 in Chicago to the above example from the New Deal era. Likewise in Detroit in the 50s and 60s best explained by reading the Origins of the Urban Crisis and also in Boston in the 1980s, as explained in Color of Law. I say this to point out that this was not an artifact of the pre Civil Rights Act era and in fact continued long after. Addendum The end of Color of Law brings up several common questions and critiques and answers them so I'll do that here instead of tackling them when they inevitably get brought up in a comment. That was in the past, we can't be judged by their racism and standards now. We can't be held accountable for leaders in the past who did not have our standards. During the New Deal era, Harold Ickes refused to segregate programs that fell under his purview and forcibly integrated CCC camps that operated on National Parks, where all other CCC camps were segregated or banned blacks. Eleanor Roosevelt also opposed the segregated New Deal programs and event joined the NAACP. So clearly not ALL leaders of that time were racists, they COULD have known better because other people did at their time. My family arrived here after the 1960s, I can't be made the pay higher taxes for the sins of the past. Alternatively, my family was opposed to segregation and marched in the Civil Rights era, why should I sacrifice to correct what we opposed then? Americans long dead fought to establish this country and you share in those benefits even though your ancestors did not live here at that time. Also, you share in the benefits created by those segregated programs and so you must also share in the costs. There are all Jewish, all Italian, all Mexican neighborhoods all over this country, are you saying everyone was forced to live that way and no one choose to live with like minded people for access to similar churches, grocery stores, etc? Are you saying we should forcibly integrate those neighborhoods that exist today? No one should be forced into particular neighborhoods, that's the whole point. But to deny that African Americans were forced into certain neighborhoods is a historical. Yes, some people may choose to stay in segregated neighborhoods for certain conveniences, but African Americans to this day face barriers to integrating white neighborhoods they are stopped or followed by police more often, their children are more likely to be punished in school for behavior that white students are not, their children are also more likely to not be seen as capable for difficult classes or activities . Don't black people share some responsibility for their own success? Crime rates are high in black neighborhoods, so whites are justified in resisting integration. Doesn't black ghetto culture have to change before we address this disparity? Everyone, black, white, Hispanic, etc should share responsibility for their success. It is undeniable though that black students and homeowners have to work twice as hard to succeed and this does pay off, it's less than the payoff for whites. As pointed out in The New Jim Crow African Americans are less likely to use or sell drugs than whites but they are more likely to be arrested for use or sale and once arrested, continuously re arrested and imprisoning nonviolent offenders in low income neighborhoods has a multi generational effect by removing one parent from the home.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Case for Reparations to African-Americans is Strong\n","id":"0ab9bab5-044a-47aa-aa9f-b1c139428e00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>If the good is \"things that we have moral reason to bring about\", then to be a good person means to will and act to bring about the good. God is a person who wills and acts, and so this meaning of \"to be a good person\" is fully applicable to him, and the notion that \"good\" means something different when applied to god is wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our ordinary concept of \"good\" could be intuitively defined as \"things which we have moral reason to bring about.\" This is a definition which is totally neutral with respect to what things actually instantiate the property of good-ness.\n","id":"9551e247-70b7-456a-a8a4-8496bd101d6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We're all stuck in our mediocre lives laced with misery. We're stuck in meaningless places for hours every day to pay the rent of a shitty house we don't even want to live in. We get put through 12 compulsory years that are nothing short of torture, where you lose all of your confidence and self worth, learning things that we'll forget by the time we're 30. We stuff ourselves with expensive materialised items desperately trying to fill the emptiness that consumes us. We waste our time with people we don't even like dare say love because we know that we can't do any better. We trade our happiness for meaningless pieces of metal and paper which is supposed to buy us everything we will ever need. We're sat here on our top of the range computers that we spent our last three grand on, mourning our shitty lives that have no meaning to them. There's no love in this world. People spread hate for no reason, other to feel better about themselves. We lie in bed dreaming of the day when we will be rich and famous, when people will look up to, and love every single inch of us. Our goal in life is for nothing but to fill a hole that has been created by nothing but civilisation itself. Imagine if we were still animals, out in the jungle, we walked around naked, and it didn't matter. We could go anywhere, and fuck anyone we want. We have come to the point where teenage girls are slitting their wrists and tying nooses around their necks, wishing that they won't see the light of the day solely because people have lead them to feel this way. Then they get doped up on antidepressants and mood stabilisers and god knows what else which will apparently fix them. But they are the smart ones. Their brains don't need fixing. The world needs fixing. This entire society is one formed on oblivion, fuelled from nothing but hatred and it t all seems stupid to me. What's the point to this stupid would that we've created for ourselves. This sick world that revolves around nothing but making people like you, and money. Please, illuminate me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that life is pointless. We have civilised ourselves to the point where we commit suicide and that shouldn't and wouldn't happen in a non- civilised community. We're living for nothing but misery.\n","id":"eb8eb7ef-22fa-4a9b-90bc-79bebde6635d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've read quite a bit recently on the causes and impact of global warming and am very interested to see reasons why 1 People think we caused or impacted at all the changes 2 Why people think these changes are catastrophic to our way of life I know one article isn't representative of everyone's opinions, but I have to start somewhere. Just reading this article it seems that there's a lot of could have been caused by us and may have the potential to be worse and have great consequences just conjecture about how bad things are or could be and no facts to back up those fears. In the conclusion, the sentence gt the upshot if the trend continues is an especially bad sea level rise for the United States \u2014 the country more responsible than any other on Earth for the global warming that we\u2019re currently experiencing makes huge assertions not supported by the evidence presented. Why are we more responsible than any other on Earth? Why can't we deal with a sea level rise? They've been doing it for hundreds of years in the Netherlands. I'm not denying climate change or any of it's potential effects, I'm just curious as to why people think it is caused by civilization or will end all civilization which are claims always present by alarmists talking on the subject.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Non-scientists have over-estimated our impact on global climate and under-estimated our ability to cope with minor changes in global temperature and sea levels\n","id":"671d2b68-c96b-4f84-ab69-28d278aef37e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's a lot of complaints coming from conservatives about all the censorship going on, especially to do with the Orlando Massacre. But majority of the places this censorship happens is on left wing platforms like REDDIT, FACEBOOK and TWITTER which were all created by and heavily populated with liberal leftists. If conservatives like Trump supporters don't like the way these liberal dominated social platforms operate they should go create their own. Why should Mark Zuckerberg who's an open liberal leftists have to cater to conservatives? It's his company, he can do what he wants with it and maybe he wants to censor Donald Trump pages. This is very hypocritical of the right in the way that they are the first to complain about how Immigrants come into their country then try to establish their own culture. Well, conservatives shouldn't go to platforms owned and operated by leftist then try to promote their political viewpoints and complain when they are shut down. In the words of the co founder of reddit Neither Alexis nor I created reddit to be a bastion of free speech, but rather as a place where open and honest discussion can happen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People with right wing viewpoints shouldn't complain about liberal censorship but should go off and create their own social forums\n","id":"1293b1ae-ab2c-4049-80c9-090b92b38ae2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should individuals sentenced to life in prison be allowed to choose death instead?<|ARGUMENT|>Failure to curb the spread of sexually transmitted infections amongst prison inmates through provision of contraception exposes the public to a greater risk upon their release.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The lack of availability of contraceptives increases the likelihood of prisons contracting sexually transmitted diseases.\n","id":"ac4668f0-d6a0-4371-9d7a-db1fde4edc78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear the argument many times that having a gun in the home for defense will cause far more harm than good. I will not comment on the validity of that argument. I have heard that concealed carry will escalate violence. I will not argue for or against that rationale. I simply think that if you're going to go ahead and say don't use guns for self defense, then at least express your support behind non lethal alternatives to guns. Tell the concealed carry crowd that they'd be better off carrying a taser or pepper spray. Advertise bean bag shotguns or pepperball guns. After all, unlike firearms, those weapons are rarely used in crime, and cause next to zero fatalities a year. Instead, many gun control advocates give the impression that they are against self defense altogether. In 2013, a college in Colorado gave a list of things to do if one was raped, including vomiting and urinating on oneself, and claiming that you were sick. Recently, another talk show told people that if their home was invaded, they should use wasp spray which is illegal to use against humans, btw . Then, if that didn't work, you should treat the intruder like royalty. If you're against the use of guns for self defense, that's a reasonable, and semi defendable position to take. However, understand that people sometimes need to actively defend themselves against attackers, that there will be rapists and home invaders, and that sometimes an alarm system or the buddy system doesn't work out. There's a huge difference between saying you shouldn't carry a gun. Carry a taser instead, versus saying you shouldn't carry a gun, just piss yourself when attacked and treat your attacker like a god.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who advocate against guns for self defense should at least suggest non-lethal alternatives.\n","id":"fd3723ff-309a-4f24-9eb4-bf847db7f7dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state ever infringe on individual human rights when countering terrorism?<|ARGUMENT|>One theory of rights is that human rights originate from natural law meaning they apply to each person by virtue of their humanity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human rights are inalienable meaning that they cannot be forfeited by a person's actions.\n","id":"a65527cb-1642-4670-8620-38e946b6a318"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>It is likely that the concept of a God arose from the necessity of civilizations for stability and uniformity, as civilizations which had a God gave meaning to the people, also allowing cooperation between them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is more likely that people invented the idea of God, than that he actually exists.\n","id":"3b05069d-4721-4e38-879c-fae32ef07e2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the minimum wage good for the economy overall?<|ARGUMENT|>Artificially increasing the cost of work done by humans increases the number of jobs where automation is more cost effective. This directly causes more demand for automation technology when a minimum wage is enforced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minimum wage drives technological development as it gets profitable to invest in technology if the cost of labor is above the poverty line.\n","id":"a0e0b860-18ff-41fc-84ad-5c5761d9c68b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments Should Put Wealth Redistribution Ahead Of Wealth Creation<|ARGUMENT|>What poor countries need is broad based development that helps everyone and not just the rich. Often the people in the poorest nations are reliant upon agriculture to provide for subsistence farming while the elite siphon of large amounts of government income and rely on money from natural resources such as diamonds or oil. Even when this does lead to more wealth such as when the price of raw materials are high it does not provide balanced growth. The governments of such poor countries should be aiming to increase the productivity of farms to bring the subsistence farmers out of poverty and encourage industry so as to provide other options for work. Growth that is focused on the poor can result in income distribution declining at the same time as creating wealth. China has been a good example of poverty reduction. The Chinese government laid the foundations for rapid economic growth, around 10% per year for the last thirty years. Thus 31% of population were living in poverty in 1970\u2019s today it is 2.8%, meaning there were 400 million fewer people living in extreme poverty in 2001 than 20 years previously. Fighting Poverty: Findings and Lessons from China\u2019s Success, World Bank, with Human Development Index Ranking in 1991, of 101st out of 177 countries which rose to 85th in 2005. While at the same time the difference between rural and urban per capita income rose from 824 yuan in 1990 to 5,850 in 2003 and China\u2019s Gini coefficient rose from 0.3 to 0.45 from 1982 to 2002 with it continuing to rise.content.undp.org\/go\/cms-service\/stream\/asset\/?asset_id=1399501 Surely pulling those millions out of poverty is worth a corresponding increase in inequality?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wealth creation does not prevent redistribution to the poor at the same time.\n","id":"86995593-9c7d-4aed-a2ab-0393df8f7cbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>In France, male bus drivers protested against gendered dress codes by wearing skirts to work, having been forbidden from wearing shorts despite extreme temperatures.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are often gendered dress codes in work. Men aren't typically allowed to wear skirts to work for example.\n","id":"20a56501-61d2-4286-afcf-438cc37ee1c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>The Annual Report on the Japanese Economy and Public Finance highlighted that China exported $2 trillion in industrial goods in 2015, of which $34.6 billion was the added value created by Japan through exports of parts to the neighboring country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Japanese exports to China help add value to its economy, so it is unlikely that China would attempt to use its trading power as a political tool to undercut Japanese efforts in the region.\n","id":"a0ba8452-3af1-4e6a-93b7-4aba815c4f62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>It is a legitimate reason to break up if someone cheated. Thus, a confession can be used as easy exit strategy for those who have a fear of breaking up<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"You would expect the same from your partner if they had a one-night stand.\n","id":"6b8c0a10-cf18-4940-a872-4484fbb8feb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The best Science Fiction movie is?<|ARGUMENT|>This genre is called Cyberpunk. William Gibson considered to be one of the most prominent figures in cyberpunk culture went to see the movie Blade Runner as he was writing his book \"Neuromancer\" and declared it was the most influential film of his lifetime. William Gibson and Blade Runner<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blade Runner creates a clever bridge between Film Noir and modern science fiction.\n","id":"82a8dd9e-9bf1-4edb-848b-9afe4a906b2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Marvel vs DC: Which Universe is Better?<|ARGUMENT|>Marvel pits characters against something that shows how to solve real life problems like superhero vs systemic issues or superhero vs philosophical idea, while DC focuses almost solely on character battles like superhero vs superhero, or superhero vs villain, which is less helpful to the viewer in applying solutions to their everyday life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"They capture the audience's attention by relating it to their life and then giving them a way to protect themselves from threats they face, which is gold.\n","id":"713f83bb-710d-4c6d-bb45-cbbfef9e9fd5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments Should Actively Promote Multiculturalism<|ARGUMENT|>This happens because multiculturalism renders the various features of different cultures accessible to the whole population of the state. Since people are living close by, they are often strongly economically and socially incentivized to fill empty niches in the market by introducing features of their own cultures into the market. This enables the people to interchange various elements of their cultures and in turn it renders them capable to get services that they enjoy and would not otherwise be able to get: The Eastern cultures can avail of the Western medicine, modern technology and scholarship while the Western cultures are able to make use of the Eastern food, arts and literature, for example. Moreover, this import extends to the academia and ideas too since the scholars of different cultures are able to due to their knowledge of the cultures and incentivized by means of sense of achievement, scholarly recognition and economic motives to introduce different concepts from their cultures to the academic debate. This is very beneficial in light of the fact in man's search for truth an exposure to as a wide a range of ideas as possible is essential. Multiculturalism provides just the right conditions for that to happen and often these ideas have immense consequences for science, politics and society. For example, the introduction of Western democratic values has greatly influenced the politics of the Eastern countries. On the other hand, the West has been able to make use of Eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Buddhism as well as of their spiritual practices. In summary therefore, multiculturalism greatly facilitates the exchange of ideas and products between cultures due to economic, social and other incentives that this introduction entails and this has positive consequences to the state and its people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Multiculturalism greatly facilitates advancement and progress by advancing cultural exchange in both products and ideas.\n","id":"bf006a23-a84e-488a-b179-2ddd63bf3133"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Sure, the secret services spying on you can be considered immoral or creepy, but it's not that big of a deal. Maybe it's because I'm not a very interesting person, but I don't anything embarassing to hide, nor do I get creeped out by the possibility of someone I'm never going to meet see my browsing history or what I masturbate to. The same thing goes for Google selling your info to advertisers. People got so upset over it but I don't really care. I use Addblock anyway so it's not even working. I know it sounds an extremely naive opinion to have, so I want to see what you guys have to say.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Your private life isn't very important. CIA spying on you or Google selling your personal info to advertisers is not a big deal.\n","id":"5815572c-b9df-43ee-8e9c-987a5d6e9f61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am generally a polite person I say please and thank you almost without exception, hold the door open, let people in to change lanes in front of me. I'm also an atheist, and the words bless you would never cross my lips in any other context. I think saying this when people sneeze is a silly, outdated tradition just a holdover from more religious times, when people were afraid you might be possessed by the devil or something. We now know that blessing a person has little to no effect on the germs infesting them. Unlike saying please and thank you, which serve a real purpose in making people feel acknowledged and appreciated, saying bless you doesn't serve any real purpose at all. Its become a kind of social tic that occurs reflexively, without any thought, other than its just the polite thing to do. But its just such a minor thing, right? Why not just say it and get over with? Well I just don't want to go around saying this the rest of my life for no reason okay? And I don't want to people to get negative vibes from me oh that guy is weird, he doesn't say bless you. Also, some people I'm sure are offended, or feel that I am personally insulting them. But then only reason they feel that way is that they are culturally conditioned to expect someone to say bless you . I don't believe we as a society should do stupid shit for no reason we need a more critical self awareness. Its a very minor thing, but a minor thing I have to deal with every day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that saying \"bless you\" when people sneeze serves no purpose and feeling like you have to say it is annoying.\n","id":"c7a683b8-17e4-491f-a173-24f8a98cca41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Some states allow for clerical errors to be a sufficient reason to stop someone voting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people in America don't have the right to or cannot vote.\n","id":"4e643b3b-d191-45e9-adbd-96059135b267"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We moved from a situation where minorities racial, sexual, had no space to thrive and struggled, to a situation where some minorities want the majority to adapt all social norms to them. Once all people were to fit into societal standards with almost no exceptions otherwise they would be banished from society. Now all societal standards have to be redesign each time a person want to adopt a new behavioral norm. If people do not want to live by the societal standard fine, but we do not need to redefine our societal standards to include them in our societal norms. x200B From my personal example as a religious minority, I think I have the right to be open about my religion, but I do not consider that my workplace should adapt my schedule to fit my will to pray 3 times a day. These days a lot of people consider that a workplace that would not want to adapt my schedule would be discriminatory towards me. I think that it is not the case. I am the one who have to find solutions to accommodate both my religious believe and the social norms of the country I live in. I do not want those norms to be changed to fit my personal situation. x200B Another example is having an IVF for a single woman. The societal norm has been you need a couple of consenting adults to have a baby. Now some women want society to accommodate their situation I want to have a baby but I do not want to find a man to have it with me. So now we change society standard and it becomes ok for a woman to have a baby alone. x200B<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We've moved from one extreme to the other: from rigid societal standards to a standard-less society.\n","id":"02aceb0a-e3ef-4b13-bf49-1777d71d3d23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are modern democracies destined to fail due to their inherent weaknesses?<|ARGUMENT|>Humanists are persistently ruled against. For example in the linked article '. . prosecutions against artists and protesters in recent years have increased.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In Italy Blasphemy against the host country's religion is still a crime\n","id":"b3b1c8f0-379e-497e-9b3c-73de59ce991a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After the recent events in the US, much of Reddit is in agreement that stricter gun control measures are needed in order to reduce the rate of mass shootings. Many are in support of relatively basic measure such as the institution of universal background checks, limiting firearms for violent felons, etc. Still others advocate for more controversial measures, such as reinstating the Federal Assault Weapons Ban 1994 , establishing a national gun registry, and with this latest shooting increasing the age needed to purchase a firearm. However, the firearm black market in the U.S. is extensive, and I would bet that most mass shooters wouldn't be very concerned they broke firearms regulations. These measures limit firearms to those who are inclined to follow the law, but if you're going to kill numerous people, gun laws are relatively inconsequential to you. Effects on gang violence, suicide, and general gun violence may be notable, but these people tend to be less mentally deranged than mass killers. Obviously this is an emotional time for people, and many find it easy to draw the conclusion that more gun control less crime. Other countries are frequently cited with both strict gun laws and a low rate of mass shootings. However, in a country where illegal guns exist, limiting guns to law abiding citizens will do more to prevent them getting guns than prospective criminals. Why would people who want to massacre others follow these strict new measures?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prospective mass shooters wouldn't care about gun control laws\n","id":"e2b0cace-ccce-4b1b-9495-f06618484ef0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be a quota for Millennial representatives in the European Parliament?<|ARGUMENT|>Many Millennials in wealthy EU countries remain oblivious to real disadvantage. One of the biggest and most cited stereotype is the generation\u2019s sense of entitlement<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Quotas should only be used to increase representation for groups who are disadvantaged. Millennials are not disadvantaged.\n","id":"3c275050-fe07-497c-97e8-56efc8aa3c69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should private education be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>To send your kid to a private school is a choice that everyone may make if they can afford it. Thus, we should not be disrespectful of their choices.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private schools add a greater diversity of options for children.\n","id":"cda5494c-e0af-4ad2-9587-dc5447a77f40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can God's existence be understood by rationality?<|ARGUMENT|>The simplest single celled organism requires 2,000 proteins to function. These proteins average 300 amino acids and there are 20 different amino acids. To allow for the fact that variations in the chain are tolerable we can drop the chances from 20^300 to 10^20 an extremely generous allowance. If we combine this with the number of proteins needed for a functional cell 2000, then we get 10^40,000. This is highly unlikely event to occur by chance alone. see page 18 of the pdf<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God is the most rationale explanation based on mathematical considerations because there are numerous examples of things which would not have come about by chance due to the shear improbability involved.\n","id":"588ddecb-4519-48a3-aad2-9569e49bcbae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>The UK has \"thrown its weight\" around in the past, often without any meaningful effect, other than to annoy and aggravate its European partners. It is unlikely continuing to do so in future would provide any tangible or productive benefit, especially with the loss of face a climb-down would entail.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"History has already shown this view to be inaccurate, as the UK was unable to effect change while within the EU, and unlikely to effect the desired outcome, as no meaningful restructuring or reformation has occurred under any existing member.\n","id":"fcae672f-7cca-4020-bd85-653ca8bcdb77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who should qualify for Asylum?<|ARGUMENT|>Poverty results in people not being able to access the most basic needs like food and water.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Severe poverty can be a threat to someone's life.\n","id":"2166de73-2472-4063-89a6-955097415740"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Brexit: Is The UK Going To Regret The Referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>Under current statistics published by the UK government and other independent bodies, the UK economy will be comparatively worse off under Brexit than remaining within the EU.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If any, it's going to take a lot of time before seeing the economic benefits.\n","id":"4312cc3b-d95b-4bcc-ae80-35016ee52a57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Guantanamo Bay detention center<|ARGUMENT|>Dick Cheney said in an interview on Larry King in December of 2008: \"Once you go out and capture a bunch of terrorists, as we did in Afghanistan and elsewhere, then you've got to have some place to put them. If you bring them here to the U.S. and put them in our local court system, then they are entitled to all kinds of rights that we extend only to American citizens. Remember, these are unlawful combatants.\"1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unlawful combatants don't have same rights as citizens or soldiers\n","id":"aa17fb1c-e819-43e0-899b-91a633414496"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>allow the production of generic drugs<|ARGUMENT|>The current drug patent regime is largely designed to benefit and shield the profits of large pharmaceutical companies. This is due to the fact that most of the laws on drug patents were written by lobbyists and voted upon by politicians in the pay of those firms. The pharmaceutical industry is simply massive and has one of the most powerful lobbies in most democratic states, particularly the United States. The laws are orchestrated to contain special loopholes, which these firms can exploit in order to maximize profits at the expense of the taxpayer and of justice. For example, through a process called \"evergreening\", drug firms essentially re-patent drugs when they near expiration by patenting certain compounds or variations of the drug1. This can extend the life of some patents indefinitely ensuring firms can milk customers at monopoly prices long after any possible costs of research or discovery are recouped. A harm that arises from this is the enervating effect that patents can generate in firms. When the incentive is to simply rest on one's patents, waiting for them to expire before doing anything else, societal progress is slowed. In the absence of such patents, firms are necessarily forced to keep innovating to stay ahead, to keep looking for profitable products and ideas. The free flow of ideas generated by the abolition of drug patents will invigorate economic dynamism. 1 Faunce, Thomas. 2004. \"The Awful Truth About Evergreening\". The Age. Available: improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The current patent system is unjust and creates perverse incentives that benefit large pharmaceutical companies at the expense of ordinary citizens\n","id":"ffb3cded-31b7-4fd5-bf38-2dfb88ade77b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Much mental energy will be spent on adjusting behavior to the fact that records of it are publicly available. This will make life stressful and less productive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This will create a panoptic world where the constant possibility of shame and punishment causes people to heavily regulate their actions.\n","id":"c25d43ed-662b-4e69-a3a7-456b1b167650"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Something came up. I will respond to this when I have the time. Here are some examples of what I mean by text speak translation to English is in parentheses luv love , 2day today , cu see you , great gr8 , b be , c see , r are , u you , y why , 1 won , 2 to, too , 4 for , 8 ate , 2mro 2moro 2mrw tomorrow , b4 before , 4get forget , l8 late , w8 wait , ur your, you\u2019re , 1drfl wonderful , sum1 someone , no1 no one , any1 ne1 any one , 4u for you , ez easy , It annoys me to no end and I wish it didn\u2019t. I believe it makes things harder to read and understand. It also doesn\u2019t save a significant amount of time, which appears to be the only use for it. The thing I understand least is people who will add emoticons and extra letters to the end of words and then use these sort of abbreviations. If you can do all of those other things, you could at least type you instead of u . Anyways, please tell me why using text speak is more useful than annoying and incoherent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think replacing words or parts of words with letters or numbers text speak shouldn\u2019t be used unless you are on a device without a full keyboard or have a limited number of characters.\n","id":"e3e0771f-09d2-446a-85a7-ad3bc6011491"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe medical school applicants should be admitted on merit and past work volunteer experiences and race should not be a factor in the matter at all. The idea of allowing someone from a underrepresented minority into a medical program ahead of someone else with better credentials is dangerous and a discredit to that future MD's patients and society. In many other cases, I can think of reasons to defend affirmative action, but medicine has no place for such politicized concepts. According to The American Thinker, whites with a GPA in the 3.40 3.59 range and with an MCAT score in the 21 23 range had an 11.5 acceptance rate. Meanwhile, a review of minority students black, Latino, and Native American with the same GPA and MCAT range had a 42.6 acceptance rate. According to the same article, URM's are much more likely to drop out due to academic reasons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that using race in determining admissions for medical school is extremely misguided, irresponsible, and dangerous\n","id":"c9bdb20e-0ce0-4705-85af-02d3f82253e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, the Colombian government recently reached a peace deal with the FARC despite the fact that this followed on the heels of a referendum in which the public rejected a peace deal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While this is true on a theoretical basis, in reality governments do not always act in accordance with the mandate established by a referendum and implement different solutions.\n","id":"23f5751a-2827-4abc-b445-124efb5528c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that insurance companies are profitable is reason to never use them. If the insurance company is making money, then the people are losing money. And the insurance company is going to make money. You actually manage to get paid after months or years of fighting them, well congratulations now your monthly rate skyrockets. You will never get a net positive out of them, you will always put in more money than you get out, and everyone would be better off putting their money into savings. ETA Never , always , and everyone were too strong of words. I'll give out deltas for current comments on this but none after the edit. The fact that we are required by the government to give private insurance companies our money is absolutely ridiculous and corrupt. The law will never be changed because the insurance companies will lobby bribe the politicians. Broken system. The only way insurance can work is as a nonprofit. It should be one government controlled entity that everyone pays into, just like universal healthcare. If more money is put into it than comes out, then rates should be decreased until it evens out. Insurance should never strive to make a profit as it goes against the whole reason insurance exists. I was caught smoking weed when I was 16. I went through diversion and got it erased from my record, but apparently during that time I was ineligible to receive a driver's license. I did not attempt to get a driver's license or even know about this at the time. But when I finally got one when I was 17 and diversion had passed, I was told I had had a suspended license and my insurance would be extremely expensive. Three years later and I still pay 180 a month for insurance and can't do anything about it until Jan 1, 2022. My car was only 4000 and I have paid for the thing multiple times over the years just through insurance. I have never and will never get a penny back from the insurance company and if it was up to me I would not have insurance, but that's illegal. My brother has three cars and pays half of what I do for my one car, so yeah I'm bitter. Insurance in it's current form in America is a scam, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In America Insurance is a scam\n","id":"38b7d734-1c75-4541-82d8-201bb657a05e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been reading comments about hypothetical situations where someone's twin has had sex with his sibling's spouse without the spouse realizing it's the sibling instead, until it's too late. People will call that sibling a rapist. In other similar occasions, for example in kinky situations where the spouse is waiting in the bedroom blindfolded, and someone other than the intended lover takes their place in the act. Those are false pretenses. The spouse wants to have sex with a specific person, and is fooled into having sex with someone else. If that's rape, then so is leaving a prostitute without paying her after sex. She clearly exchanged sex for money, and if you didn't intend to pay her then it was false pretenses and you're a rapist. Not to mention a thief.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who say that sex through deception is rape should say the same when people who have sex with prostitutes and leave without paying.\n","id":"aa5d0de9-106d-4955-bf59-8e542430f342"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>History is replete with examples of events of significant consequence that could have brought about more evil than they did.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evil could be more prevalent in the world than it already is.\n","id":"0a87549c-cbaa-4271-982c-583011f9d1b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>In almost all religion your ability to enter the kingdom of heaven is an assessment of heart and not of mind. That is to say one must truly believe God\u2019s existence rather than just accepting it through logical choice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The notion proposed by Pascal in his Wager is inherently flawed.\n","id":"6eb491ac-c302-4186-ac52-a0ef4653ef6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The success of the current economy is highly dependent on the consumption of goods and services by different individuals and corporations. If we proceed to a highly automated world, where everything factory work can be automated, the corresponding job loss will be much greater than the number of jobs created by automation. So, if more and more people fail to earn money, they won't be able to spend money and would ultimately have to live off the government handouts. Only a handful of people having jobs will be able to make high value purchases like cars, electronics, jewelry, etc. With the decline of sales in this category, we would see a decline in production until it reaches a plateau. So, without growth, we would reach a stalemate. For people who say, that automation as like any previous technology would generate newer avenues of job, can you give an estimate of the rate of creation of new jobs vs decline in jobs. Also, are people just supposed to remain jobless in the interim, waiting for new opportunities to be created? Please, also consider countries like India and China, where a bulk of the population is still employed in jobs that run the most risk of being automated. What about people who don't necessarily have the aptitude for engineering and science, are they just supposed to live on government handoff forever?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With the rise in automation and the corresponding job loss, the economy would ultimately collapse.\n","id":"1103970e-220b-4ead-b454-1b9430faa832"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that Representative Democracy republic is a variation of Democracy. Let me first define what original democracy was In Athenian government, they adapted a form of government in which citizens male, land owning non slave citizens at the time could vote on all of the issues and other economical decisions and political decisions. Today, in America and other countries, We have a version of this in which we elect people who say that they have equal opinion to us, hoping that they will do what they say. This might sound good at first, because It allows only the politically educated people who are officially elected to make political decisions rather than potentially uneducated people make these decisions. However We, the people, have very little say so in what happens. Let's say that 80 of citizens want marriage equality, but 20 don't. Let's say that the majority of politicans are in that 20 . This means that politicians can just say Hey, we know most of you want this, but I don't care. There is NOTHING saying that the elected politicians have to go through with what they say. I can't rember who said this, I wanna say it was a Greek philisopher like Plutarch or something, but someone from ancient Greece described Democracy as the whole people have the power So, am I just over complicating things? If I am <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Representative Democracy isn't true democracy\n","id":"1242298b-b631-4549-b7cd-e0eadca85c36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Because gorilla welfare projects are not dealing with societal phenomena and are more isolated from political side effects they have a higher aid effectiveness than helping starving children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should donate to organisations that support gorillas instead of to those that support starving children.\n","id":"74995f77-8f4e-4748-852b-6ae920da3d49"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>The constitution not only defines what is seen as right and just, it also enshrines what is right and just. If societal norms change, so should the constitution therefore change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Constitutions can be amended, so the fact that felon disenfranchisement is currently not constitutional does not provide justification for this remaining the case.\n","id":"89b7df23-df62-495b-b2df-530c9233c369"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Social media sites should be regulated to maintain fair access to public discourse<|ARGUMENT|>Lindsay Shepherd was handed a permanent ban from twitter for derogatory remarks towards a trans individual, even though that individual had made similarly crude and disrespectful remarks towards her. Source This ban was later lifted after much publicity<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tech companies have banned users who express mainstream opinions, causing authors and activists to lose an important part of their livelihood.\n","id":"db2601ec-c60f-446b-939d-b5ba9aa4a0f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let\u2019s look at the world and humanity as a cell. A cell, in biology, is always searching for this thing called homeostasis. It constantly craves this balance of everything this sense of equilibrium. But in order for this cell to live, it can\u2019t have what it lives to search for. Poetic, huh? Similarly, this world we live in is always in some form of conflict, something affecting any possible homeostasis. The world simply wouldn\u2019t function without conflict. Like a cell, it absolutely needs some form of imbalance. This is why societies with essentially no conflict, as in societies like in Aldous Huxley\u2019s Brave New World, are referred to as dystopian, because the lack of conflict and the abundance of peace would result in the death of mankind when realistically the attributes of said society are rather enjoyable . With this in mind, because opinions and argumentation are such fundamental aspects of life, anything involving unanimous agreement is therefore inhumane. There must be some imbalance keeping our humanity alive.  EDIT my view in its entirety has not changed , however, I now understand the importance of unanimity when it comes to the state of an individual's life<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"unanimous agreement in any situation is inherently inhumane\n","id":"d0b0267f-af43-44c1-a71c-e0fda721eba4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There's been more and more lootbox issues being talked about since now Ireland wants to follow in Belgium's path of banning lootboxes. I personally enjoy lootboxes, but only under certain conditions and I'm confused and curious what the rest of reddit's view on them is. My restrictions on lootboxes would be Limited to Cosmetics only Cosmetics you desire are also purchasable for reasonable prices With this in place, lootboxes are more of a reward for spending time playing the game, leveling up and having something that doesn't affect gameplay to show for it. Just to give a few examples of how i would alter the way current games do it Overwatch Allow purchase of the tokens to buy skins, not have to buy packs of the lootboxes and hope for the skin get enough points from duplicates Heroes of the Storm I do not agree with their LoL style hero restriction and purchasing requirement, but as far as the base lootbox goes, it isn't that bad. I would say take the ability to find heroes out of the lootbox only if they unlock all heroes for everyone. I like the reroll option using up currency you gain from just playing the game and not from spending money. They also allow you to purchase these cosmetics with different currencies paid and unpaid There are definitely way worse lootbox mechanics out there than these games, but i feel these 2 do it almost in the ideal way. So, please leave your opinions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lootboxes aren't a bad thing under certain restrictions\n","id":"8d35e406-a169-47e6-bb59-4f425cecf154"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Jobs Act<|ARGUMENT|>Average CEO makes 185 times that of the average worker, according to the White House. CEOs and the wealthiest can afford to pay a little more.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jobs Act ends egregious tax cuts, loop holes for wealthiest.\n","id":"c7f3830f-3ceb-4194-aa18-b6c35a93d1bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>United States Armed Forces personnel are fighting and dying in wars influenced by religious zealots.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is a perpetuator of conflict even if it is not the original source.\n","id":"815dead6-baff-4ccc-99e8-19439d5a9e0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>Media companies in the United States have not taken any stance on immigration policies and reform because some of them have major deals pending regulatory scrutiny from the government and want to stay under the radar.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many top businesses whose employees consist of immigrants have still remained silent on unfair immigration policies.\n","id":"b47bc6a4-3d0d-4d07-9a74-1afb16e97ce6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that celebrity centric awareness raising fads distract public consciousness more than anything else. Instead of ALS research is important in improving the quality of life for many people and I should donate being the message it becomes Kate Upton just posted the ice bucket challenge I wonder if so and so did too OMG . This is not the fault of people conducting research, or even those participating in things like the ice bucket challenge. The problem comes from the media's presentation of the issue. It's not about ALS in the case of the ice bucket challenge it's about selling commercials by adding to the celeb circle jerk in the U.S.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that awareness raising fads like the ice bucket challenge, while their causes are legitimate, are ultimately distracting and counter-productive.\n","id":"29d9ea6a-b6cf-4f15-b44a-b07539c93aa5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the U.S. adopt the \"Right to be Forgotten\" on the web?<|ARGUMENT|>The Right to be Forgotten allows individuals recourse when they are being represented without equal facts online. An individual would be able to appeal to have a result removed from a search engine if they are being misrepresented in the results.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would promote the idea of personal ownership of data, which is much weaker in the United States compared to other countries.\n","id":"46bef87b-9c5d-42c1-98ef-5fa3f6647e4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>Talking with co-workers provides a valuable alternative to negative depictions of mental illness as seen in the media, which may be some people's only other form of exposure to people with mental illness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A lack of knowledge among the public about mental health issues is a key cause of stigma. Having discussions with colleagues about their health issues increases knowledge about mental health generally.\n","id":"575ec816-a3d2-46f7-8de1-3cb31cb1574e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Guns are very powerful and dangerous tools so the government should only issue permits to people that know how to use them well. Training should focus on both the legal framework regarding gun usage and proper shooting technique and gun maintenance. All prospective gun owners should mantain a minimum level of accuracy, testing every 5 years. This is to ensure that they aren't a danger for either themselves or other people when they decide to use their guns. You are not going to stop an intruder or attacker with poorly aimed shots after all. Also, even if gun owners believe their guns are going to protect them against a fascist government, it makes sense to try to level the playing field between civilians and highly trained soldiers. I believe this training programs should be run by the government and subject to citizen watch.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gun ownership should be tied to extensive training and regular testing.\n","id":"94f1e64b-3931-4e14-bbd1-651c4d050b60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I spend most of my time on reddit in the background just browsing. So I wouldn't say I am particularly karma whore y. But I disagree with people who say chasing karma points is stupid and pointless. Why? Chasing karma points turns redditors basically into politicians. To get a lot of upvotes, you have to be aware of the dominant mode of discourse on reddit. You have to be aware of the many types of thinking that go on, and find a way to cut to the core and say something that had broad, popular appeal. Some people are bad at this they are kind of like Mitt Romney. It is sort of obvious that they are just wanting people to like them and the insincerity is obvious. Others are more like a Lincoln or some other charismatic leader they find a way to speak that is both coming from the heart and is clever. In either case, paying attention to karma points does encourage a certain kind of intelligence. It makes people find a stronger feeling for where the consciousness of the community is at. Knowing when a particular sort of circle jerky joke is still fresh, for example, and when it is overused and rehashed makes people who chase karma points have to try to stay on top of the shifting moods and preferences of the community. You know when you see an advertisement or like a movie that makes you kind of cringe because it seems like it is trying too hard and like it is a little behind the mood, even though it wants to present itself as hip amd edgy? Like the latest Transformers film that is like a karma chaser who picks up on the feeling of the community but comes a little late to the game. But the point is, these kind of efforts I think really are making redditors a little smarter, a little more aware, a little more politically saavy. I am not saying this type of intelligence is necessarily ideal. It could be the case that karma points just move us towards the intelligence of like empty suits very keen when it comes to knowing how to phrase something in a populist way, but lacking in the intelligence that comes with truly finding principles to stand on. In any case, if you think I am wrong that karma points gives us a new kind of awareness, please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chasing Karma points makes people more politically saavy.\n","id":"2d6e9ded-442f-4a2d-ba95-f283700e0f9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>A federal Europe lets people vote for European representatives arguing over European issues. National representatives would not need to be trusted with areas or issues they know little about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A USE would give individual voters greater control as the EU is a more powerful international entity. Individual countries have less influence and control of their own destiny.\n","id":"f2df9790-ebd9-4b8b-8b5e-036d57b94f8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Humans Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>If humans were evil, we would've died a long time ago - consistent acts of wickedness would have destroyed society wholly or impeded its progress in such a way that we couldn't develop to this societal point.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanity is making constant progress. If it is capable of it, then it is not evil.\n","id":"e6d125a0-a409-4132-a298-e083424ad125"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the US, it seems like there a plethora of of products like fast food, cigarettes, fossil fuels, paint that have direct negative consequences as well as negative externalities. These have societal consequences like obesity, cancer, or before the 1970s lead poisoning. If the societal costs were built into the consumer price, there would then be a huge demand for cheap, but healthy, goods. This would spur innovation by the old manufacturers and open the market to new competition. I'm not suggesting subsidies for healthy things, just pigovian costs based on the amount of societal harm the product generates. EDIT OK. I AM suggesting a subsidy for healthy things in the form of a Negative Income Tax paid for by the pigovian tax that still preserves choice but offsets the rise in food costs over all. But EVENTUALLY someone will undercut the healthy food market and make cheap healthy food and the market will follow.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cheap but unhealthy is not a consumer choice I want.\n","id":"efac4573-fd87-4fd0-8d25-a1ee8bb40499"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Justin Trudeau failed to be a strong Prime Minister of Canada?<|ARGUMENT|>Trudeau has been largely rejected by Que\u0301bec as their last election shows it here. He thus is a source of national divide<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Justin Trudeau has failed to be a strong Prime Minister of Canada over the last three years.\n","id":"4c9da3af-4835-494e-8ef0-a575484a2d84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I residence in American. I was surprised to discover that even thinking about digging up a human's grave is good enough to get you thrown in a prison the other day. It seems that most humans says that it's a disrespect to the death, and the living. The first point can be defeated by pointing out that they're dead. Why would they care? Second point almost make sense, but How often do people really visit graveyards? What about the ones that no one goes to anymore in the forests? I want to dig some graves up so I can have bones to make my Halloween outfit out of, but it seems that it's banned by the law. I feel that the law is stupid. Change my mind on that. Make me think the law on graveyards makes sense. Extra info I don't care what happens to my body if I die. If people want to bed my corpse, there's nothing I can do about it, I would be dead. I wouldn't even be able to care. I have no faith in gods or the afterlife. It's pointless to believe in something you won't get to mess with until you're dead. I'm deaf. The Deaf have their own culture apart from the hearing world. TL DR I believe that it should be allowed to dig up graveyards.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Grave-digging is fine. !\n","id":"440b23ea-4b14-4611-8cb5-2cd6fbc23456"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should school be mandatory until 12th grade?<|ARGUMENT|>Education helps to decide whom to vote for in order to positively impact the economy of a country. Being educated helps in deciding why to vote for a particular party over the other.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This decision will influence the future of the all country, so parents should not get to decide.\n","id":"6d2b271a-c0b8-44b9-802a-76bf9b6c8c48"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Evil is, by definition, a value marking opposition to God's Will, making it logically impossible for God to Will into existence. Therefore, the existence of evil necessitates the existence of a will that remains distinct and separate from God's Will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God allows evil to exist so that humans can have free will and develop into moral people. In order to be morally good in a meaningful way, a person must have the possibility of choosing evil.\n","id":"c20a11ed-4ff4-4638-9405-6ffefd77e0d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Human remains do not become part of the environment these days with modern burial practices intended to preserve the human body after death instead of decompose, especially with embalming, like Egyptian mummies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans manipulated life to the point that they disrupt the natural circle of life. Many humans are not really part of the circle of life anymore.\n","id":"09b5170f-975b-4639-a947-2cbf8b9ccaa3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It pains me to see just how willing many people are to bash other points of view, without giving them a fair chance. People have become so focused on their political beliefs that they are treated more like a football team than actual ideologies that can be challenged, and this applies to our government officials as well. Each side Dem or GOP is more focused on pushing their own agenda and shutting down the other than finding some kind of common ground. It is thanks to this mindset that a major portion of the country is left unsatisfied or even shut down completely, rather than everyone getting some form of fair deal. This can't be applied to everything gay marriage yes or no? There's no in between. but there are so many issues that, if properly discussed, could be very easily resolved. Instead, legislators and their constituents are generally set in their ways, completely unwilling to listen to what anyone else has to say. Provided this was resolved and people had more open minds, would the political atmosphere of the US and the world be much better? Are there other, more prevalent flaws that need to be resolved first? Or is this as ideal as a partisan government like that of the US can possibly be? ^ And yes, this struggle is what led me to this subreddit in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The number one problem with American politics, or partisan politics in general, is not that either side is wrong, but that they refuse to find any kind of common ground or compromise.\n","id":"730aeb19-c1ae-45ca-bd40-fd41f82beaea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that Jobs are disappearing and at a point in the future robots could do all the labour and at that point I'd be happy for everyone to get stuff unconditionally. But there are still some things that need doing and I don't know why they're not getting done. The pavement outside my house could do with some doing up. The hospitals are always saying they're understaffed. If you could get Basic Income to solve these problems then I'd be very happy with it. I think everyone should have a good standard of living but I would like the question Can they earn it? to be answered in any social structure. Disability allowance It's probably not their fault when they can't work or can only work less effectively so I'm happy to support them. Job seeker's allowance They're trying to get a job and the statistics show most of them are only on for a little bit in between jobs so I'm happy supporting them. Universal healthcare We all get ill and if we let people die we've just lost a worker. The bulk buying of the NHS reduces the prices of some medicine. So, I'm very open to socialist ideas. I'd just like to know why I should unconditionally give money to people without asking whether they can work for it. I think there is a difference between knowing there a people playing the current system and outright saying it's ok. Quick edit A low basic income would be ok but I'm not a fan of the high ones<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think I'm morally obligated to support someone who could work but doesn't want to Basic Income\n","id":"b5070419-993a-4711-8534-b89c0e1046b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>Voter fatigue and the perception that individual elections do not matter have been proposed as the link between the high number of referendums and the low voter turnout in Switzerland Blais, p. 526 Franklin, p. 98<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although Switzerland holds more referendums than any other country, its voter turnout in elections at around 50% or less is among the lowest in the OECD and has been low for decades OECD, p. 97\n","id":"033ad9fe-adc2-4e3b-abd7-d39352ac8dd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've known three people, separate from each other, in other words, not in a relationship together, in my life who have adopted polyamory as an alternative relationship lifestyle, all three of which, in the time I have known them, have had their relationships fell apart. So, essentially, of the people I got to see this lifestyle in action, it did not work, making it appear to me to be a very non functioning system. Moreover, they guarded the concept of polyamory as some sort of relationship evolution, that not one size fits all. Mind you it may have been the people, however, it came off as high minded but riddled with failures. The idea centering around keeping the polyamory in a healthy equilibrium but problems arose when some favored others more. Another relationship was based around a primary relationship with secondary relationships the partners grew to have. This seemed somewhat unfair to me as the secondary relationships were by their very nature less important, meaning there is an obvious imbalance and, of course, for these people I knew it eventually broke apart and ended poorly for ALL parties involved. I'd say, some folks would consider it that these people were just immature and unable to keep a healthy relationship going. However, to me, a lot of them were completely mature in many other aspects of their lives, leaving to me believe that in the ratio of blame, it was placed more on the model manipulating the human condition rather than them being immature from the start. However, that is not a blanket statement, one of people I mentioned was clearly involved with people not mature enough for that sort of relationship, or any for that matter. As a side note, these relationships changed from the monogamous norm to polyamorous at the behest of 2 females and 1 male, siting the 3 people I knew. TL DR Polyamory seems a program based on covetousness that eventually boils down to imbalanced relationships caused by selfishness and people favoring other partners more. Edit Please note that these are my expressed opinions, I'm not trying to state that these beliefs are absolute, they are just beliefs I hold. Thanks again for all your posts I have found this very, very fun I love debate and learning something new Kind ladies and sers, thank you very much for all your interactions and discussion. I have to sleep now as I work in the night times. I appreciate every one of you for taking the time to talk to me about this. It has GENUINELY been very informative and my opinion has changed. Maybe not exactly to the point that may be preferred but its definitely more informed Feel free to keep posting, I will read more when I wake up, thanks again. Have good lives, regardless of circumstance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polyamory seems like it is for the covetous and selfish. Moreover, it is impossible to balance into a healthy series of relationships.\n","id":"5fdfff6b-eaa5-4118-bf23-79769cd2b86c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I visited r eyebleach recently and noticed that the first few pages were entirely images or gifs of cute animals. Even as I'm typing this, it's still the same and the submissions are completely identical in character to that of r aww. I'd dare anyone to take the front page of r aww, and that of r eyebleach, and do a blind challenge to identify them based on submitted content. Without looking at the number of comments on each post or the formatting of the page, of course it would be impossible to reliably distinguish the two subreddits. The only difference I can see is that r eyebleach is less popular, but the comment quality is Standard Reddit for those posts that get more than a handful of comments. The sidebar does mention tastefully sexy posts are OK, but I only ever see cute animal stuff. Given all that, I posit that r eyebleach is totally redundant in the face of r aww and doesn't really have a reason to exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\/r\/eyebleach is a completely redundant subreddit\n","id":"13888e7e-42dd-46b8-b1c4-0904434c5d41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There Be Religious Exemptions To The Law?<|ARGUMENT|>There are no boundaries to religious belief, and therefore no boundaries to the exemptions they might ask for. This could theoretically nullify all other laws.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious exemptions from laws can be harmful to people who don't share that religion's ideology.\n","id":"8f095144-e2e2-4bd6-91bc-18978b230bcf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Societies that require a certain level of money for even basic living standards, while also allowing underpayment of employees and not providing support systems to offset this, lead to overworked citizens with little time or inclination to consider the complexities around referendum questions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The average citizen, unlike a professional politician, is not able to make well-grounded decisions about complex political subject matters.\n","id":"989f4940-7bfc-4986-ba87-83d393701322"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should immigrants be monitored when settling in a new country?<|ARGUMENT|>Being monitored comes with an implication that a person is likely to do something wrong. Such an assumption can be very humiliating for people who are generally law abiding citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Immigrants have expressed that they find being monitored quite humiliating\n","id":"080374f7-1b6f-4443-a00a-ccf490f2ed24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hunger Be The First Problem To Solve Before All Others?<|ARGUMENT|>Clean water is usually an equally, if not more, crucial issue in impoverished countries and should be tackled before hunger.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are endless numbers of issues that are equally important as hunger.\n","id":"6b066f8b-41cf-4d18-85b1-fc194018a8b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should More Women Work In Construction In The United States?<|ARGUMENT|>There exists no gender quota guidelines or regulations for construction or any field of work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Construction is not dependent on a balance of genders in the field.\n","id":"3332afcd-d2e1-40ab-9bb7-8465cf20b9a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>THW Require the Provision of Cannabis in Any State Funded Medical Program<|ARGUMENT|>Cannabis has been used for medicinal purposes for at least 5,000 years most frequently as an analgesic, that is to say it reduces pain. It also stimulates hunger and can be used as an anti-emetic to control nausea and vomiting. As the DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis L. Young noted in a 1988 rulingi, there is no evidence of a fatality resulting from the misuse of cannabis. Indeed the Dutch government currently permits doctors regulated by its Ministry of Health and Welfare to prescribe cannabis to their patients. Further, the Dutch state has licensed a pharmaceutical firm to provide cannabis of a guaranteed level of purity to pharmacies and medical professionals.ii There are accounts and studies of its successful application to treat the effects of chemotherapy as well as its palliativeiii use in MS and AIDSiv. For governments to turn their backs on a perfectly useful drug simply to prove a point is confusing at best and petulant at worst. i Docket No. 86-22. \u201cOPINION AND RECOMMENDED RULING, FINDINGS OF FACT, CONCLUSIONS OF LAW AND DECISION OF Administrative LAW JUDGE.\u201d FRANCIS L. YOUNG, Administrative Law Judge. 6 September 1988. ii Bedrocan BV home page, 15 November 2011. iii \u201cCannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants.\u201d Espacenet patent search. 07 October 2003. iv \u201cCannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants.\u201d Patentstorm. 07 October 2003.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cannabis has many medical properties, notably the alleviation of suffering in chronic diseases. It should therefore be freely available\n","id":"8129de82-8995-4ddd-a253-27d9a89bf4ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Nintendo allow for Fangames and modifications to their systems?<|ARGUMENT|>Megaman for example, has a very simplistic story line. Any changes will likely show more prominently than other games.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The lore of games can be distorted to the point it lacks originality.\n","id":"2be2c77b-89ed-4530-b649-586466d891c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>President Obama illegally created a \"law\" by creating DACA, because the Constitution gives all lawmaking power to Congress. Article 1 Section 1 of the US. Constitution states \"All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DACA was 100% illegal\/unconstitutional when Barack Obama created it. A president does not have Constitutional authority to create laws. He is the head of the Executive branch of government where he is to \"execute\" laws that the Congress create lawfully.\n","id":"71ac8fca-1a89-4fbd-9992-d09d49678714"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Judges be Elected or Appointed?<|ARGUMENT|>The different experiences of men and women may lead judges to decide some cases differently It is therefore important that high courts represent both genders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Judges from different backgrounds make decisions differently, thus it is important that our judiciary are diversely representative.\n","id":"9caf8971-a9e8-44d3-b314-ce825653a882"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Hunting for sport<|ARGUMENT|>Animals don't respect human rights. Therefore, humans have no obligation to respect their rights either.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals can't uphold human rights; we are not obligated to uphold theirs\n","id":"ed3dafc1-16cf-4118-8e17-40f6a35ff628"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are a lot of very young people making very major decisions regarding their lives and it's fully allowed by society. I think that's wrong. For example, a young person can sign up for the US army at age 18, three years before he's legally allowed to drink a beer. He could die in combat, in theory, years before he ever legally drank liquor. Young people get facial tattoos like those Soundcloud rappers, like Exxxtensions and Little Pee, how big a chance do you think they will change their minds? Irresponsible AF. Hypnotized by romantic and unrealistic Hollywood movies they enter marriages when barely out of their teens which statistically are very likely to fail. Some, influenced by the latest transgender fad, persuade their doctors and parents they're born in the wrong body and jump on hormones altering their body forever, with no way back after. It is my position that, legally, these things do not need to necessarily be outright outlawed. But they definitely need to be strongly discouraged before the age of 25. Or at the very least before the age of 21. I think financial motivations prevent sanity from intervening in many of these cases the pharamaceutical industry has to keep selling, the military needs fresh blood, and marriage is booming business, too. But that doesn't make it right and I think it's hugely irresponsible to go through life with an anything goes mentality and stimulate young people to make huge life decisions too early in their lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many life altering decisions marriage, facial tattoos, joining the army, gender change one should not be allowed\/strongly discouraged to made before the age of 25 when the brain is fully formed\n","id":"242bf665-eab8-4fb9-94fb-55498f25de40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Before modern states could provide welfare, religion was the only source of education, healthcare or economic relief.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion led people to do things correctly before science and technology caught up.\n","id":"f2cfa63f-c98a-489b-966f-2c5914406c3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>Although it is possible that some members of the campaign may have talked to Russian officials, this is not sufficient to meet the bar for collusion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jared Kushner has said that the Trump Campaign was \"too disorganized to collude.\n","id":"b9a79131-af57-4ceb-a883-e5e6f48045e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The Apostle Paul was an enemy of the early Church, but was converted a postmortem experience of Jesus and went on to become a leader in the Church and ultimately be martyred for his faith.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Skeptics came to believe that Jesus was risen from the dead, despite not following his ministry while he was alive.\n","id":"781074cb-45e4-4306-80f7-f1000f91b934"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The Three Witnesses: Martin Harris, Oliver Cowderly, and David Whitmer each saw the plates, the engravings on the plates, and heard the voice of God witnessing it was a true record. Testimony of the Three Witnesses<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Metal Plates: The plates from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon were a historical artifact made by ancient Americans.\n","id":"d2c0383d-5c04-4b26-a10a-1ba98fdb8bf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I 100 support NBA Hall of Famer Walt Clyde Frazier's drive by shooting of LeBron James during the Knicks Lakers game on Sunday, 3.17. No one is more qualified to talk hoops 31 year broadcasting career, Hall of Famer, two time champion for the NY Knicks only two Knicks' titles in their 73 season history , all time NY sports legend, one of the greatest performances in elimination game history against Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals . x200B Walt Clyde Frazier's Shots Fired \ud83c\udfa5<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Walt Clyde Frazier's drive-by shooting on LeBron James is a Made man thing making it fair\n","id":"e760f45d-ffc6-42d4-84d0-7fe04932eb0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender is more about social status than about anatomical status.<|ARGUMENT|>If a woman makes more than a man, then she can take on the role of primary care taker in the family<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender is more about social status than about anatomical status.\n","id":"f5bc2402-4f63-4296-81b5-a2b1e358c106"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Research of the AEGIS technology is still ongoing after 40 years. A similar fate can be expected for AKMs and therefore costs will be tremendous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Developing new weapon system comes typically at a very high price.\n","id":"f7b63b0c-8452-4ad3-81cc-36d77d32f045"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's legal in the U.S., but my spouse comes from a country where homeschooling is not legal and I feel like that makes so much more sense. My own experience may bias me but a grew up in a part of the country with a HUGE amount of people who were homeschooled for religious reasons a lot of hardcore evangelicals and Pentecostals mostly homeschooled to avoid learning evolution, no sex ed, etc . School is a place where we learn to live together in a society and can be united by core values that tie this country together. It also gives kids exposure to ideas outside of their family of origin and exposure to people who can help them if their family situation isn't good at home teacher, school nurse, school counselor . I know there are some check and regulations, but one also sees stories in the news like the recent best selling book Educated or here on Reddit where those regulations failed and kids got no help in abusive situations. Homeschooling families can further isolate themselves from society creating small factions and extremist movements that hurt society at large anti vaxxer is one example . I know that not ALL homeschool families are like that and I have met homeschooled people who clearly turned out well adjusted, but I feel like there is something to be said for a shared set of values, ideas, exposure to other ideas, and place to learn all of them. I don't find religious freedom so convincing as a rationale for homeschooling either because school doesn't mandate that students have to follow any particular religion at least they're not supposed to . I'm interested in compelling arguments for why it SHOULD be allowed, though.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homeschooling shouldn't be legal in the United States\n","id":"23c800e6-c414-470f-a1e6-1bd06df03498"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Black Panther: Who's Right About Wakanda's Role in the World?<|ARGUMENT|>Since possession of vibranium confers a huge military advantage onto the owner, rival states will engage in a \"vibranium arms race\" once they become aware of its existence and uses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if the Wakandans have an initial advantage through their technology, other states and heroes will inevitably be able to replicate their technology and use it against them.\n","id":"c4b6fbe2-09e9-45d6-8453-9fbfd1014304"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tibet independence<|ARGUMENT|>During this period, no country gave Tibet diplomatic recognition. Tibet itself acknowledged Chinese sovereignty by sending delegates to the Drafting Committee for a new constitution of the Republic of China in 1925; to the National Assembly of the Republic of China in 1931; to the fourth National Congress of the Kuomintang in 1931; to a National Assembly for drafting a new Chinese constitution in 1946; and to another National Assembly for drafting a new Chinese constitution in 1948.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China, under the Republic of China government, continued to maintain sovereignty over Tibet between 1912 and 1950.\n","id":"7cfe5298-edb3-45db-aa95-1dbb4c3a1120"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>i realize some people will just think this is a matter of taste, but hear me out. first, i hate making broad, general statements like the one in the title, and i truly believe every genre, even pop country, has something to offer, so i really want my mind changed on this one for my growth not only as a musician but as a person. however, i just can't find that in reggae. honestly, i don't even know why but almost every reggae song i hear sends me into a mild rage of annoyance. i really can't pinpoint a single element that does this, but if i had to try, i would say it just feels too sing songy to me. the melodies remind me of something a 5 year old girl would come up with on the playground, then sing all during lunch to the annoyance of everyone in the cafeteria. i realize this is ignorant, and i recognize that there is more to reggae than Bob Marley and shit you hear in Spencer's Gifts. so, change my mind. link me something powerful, emotive, or even just fun without being childish and bland. i want to appreciate this genre, but so far i've been unable to.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm a musician and I like all its derivatives, but I just can't stand reggae.\n","id":"29ee71e8-6aaf-4ff8-a254-f45132f21267"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Morality is usually a way to achieve our pleasures or wants with some degree of civility and respect for the bigger picture. Our pleasures and wants differ and are extremely subjective, therefore the mechanisms we use to create civility around them will differ.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Morality derives from subjective sources, and is therefore itself subjective.\n","id":"19cc5e4e-55f4-436f-9ef5-74d0d3e0051f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if women are out of high school, unwanted pregnancy can force them to leave their jobs, furthering inequality in the workforce.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion can help prevent the numerous financial issues that come from having an unplanned pregnancy.\n","id":"81d45e05-5fa4-4bdc-b71b-4ab6e3e90754"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should selective breeding of animals be prohibited?<|ARGUMENT|>Over 160,000 people, with 27,000 dogs attend Crufts which is the world's largest dog show.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans enjoy competitions and shows that are based on purebred animals.\n","id":"a1ec8c88-b69c-401f-bcef-5054bedd7bd8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>The US has provided Egypt with the second highest amount of foreign aid after Israel since 1987 - Egypt has been a dictatorship since then for all but 13 months. They provide aid in order to maintain US access to the Suez Canal and maintain the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At times, donor states have to support recipient states in order to further regional security interests. Support of democratisation does not always trump other foreign policy interests.\n","id":"0b134172-7898-4d6b-8b15-8e522853e49d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently started reading into all the claims about the Sandy Hook Massacre, and I have to admit I'm pretty persuaded. The whole thing seems really suspicious, and their appears to be tons of inconsistencies. I'm not one that usually believes conspiracy theories, so I'd like to hear the other side of the story, as I couldn't find anything very compelling online. This article pretty much sums up the evidence I've been reading supporting the conspiracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sandy Hook was a hoax\n","id":"5dbb57aa-22a0-4bee-a5a3-2e6134d8ed98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US President Have the Power to Self-Pardon?<|ARGUMENT|>Bribing public officials is already illegal. If the president were to use his pardoning powers in exchange for a bribe, the financier would be prosecuted immediately, and the president could face charges after leaving office. law.cornell.edu<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A President that is above the law would effectively end the rule of law. The integrity and power of the office could then be sold to the highest bidder.\n","id":"ad5506d8-54fa-4cb0-aa16-1f75c59c919f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that we're spending too much time trying to figure out which of our politicians are and are not racist. The focus has been taken away from things that politicians have said or done that are outwardly racist alarming soundbite, blackface in old halloween costumes, things like that and towards more ethereal sources. Today, a politician can be accused of being racist because of the company he choose to associate with. The idea of covert racist being pushed around, the implication being that many politicians are racist but work very hard to avoid outing themselves. I'm not here to argue that there is no such thing as a covert racist. In fact, I'm very sure that there is such a thing. What I do want to argue are two points. 1 It's unfair to accuse someone of being a covert racist before taking the time to truly try to understand their logic behind supporting a policy. There is a growing divide between the left and the right, and I have a very serious concern that the idea of the covert racist teaches those on the left that they can't possibly understand the logic of someone who supports strong immigration laws or opposes affirmative action, because those policies only come from people who are secretly racist . Now more than ever we need to engage in healthy dialog and seek common ground. 2 If their policies are good, their intentions simply shouldn't matter. If a covert racist is so good at hiding his racism that his policies are good for minorities, then I really don't care about his personal beliefs. By the same logic, if a well intentioned politician who cares greatly about minorities creates a policy that hurts them, he's got to go. Intention doesn't matter, results matter. Rather than arguing all day about whether or not a politician is secretly racist, start having a conversation about his policies and what you think of them. In my experience, it's much more difficult to go against the grain here. I've been accused myself of being a racist just for disagreeing with this new logic. So please, convince me why I should jump on the bandwagon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The heavy focus on the idea of a \"covert racist\" is a waste of time at best, a malicious distraction at worst.\n","id":"4f3f5366-9746-4a40-83dc-c516c5bb8c78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Purity Pledges Harmful?<|ARGUMENT|>Pledgers often believe contraceptives are unreliable. Some abstinence groups tell their students condoms have a 30% fail rate Paul, 4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abstinence programs generally promote the idea that contraceptives are ineffective National Partnership, 2 and even harmful\n","id":"165a78de-0a1e-43bb-b2df-ce20a7e206cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Constitutionally speaking, Bill of Rights mentions right to life as the fundamental right of every citizen. It is also mentioned in United Nations Human Rights Declarations. Following from this, can we also assume that right to life should automatically substantiate to right to die as well? In cases of terminal illness, people have a strong case. But we are living a very fast life where depression cases are high, unemployment is rising at abnormal rate, super expensive HEALTHCARE, expensive education and housing, should poor or vulnerable sections should also have a right to death? It is time to make this universal that self determination should be important and it extends to right to death as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In current circumstances voluntary Euthanasia should be legalized\n","id":"532b4b4e-a1f4-4752-bcd3-d13b22ea3c61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>One purpose of the electoral college as outlined by A. Hamilton in The Federalist No. 68 was to ensure that those voting for the office of President were \". men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation\". Hamilton refers to these electors as \"agents\", and uses other such language to indicate that they are meant to decide their own votes. This design is in direct contention with the way electors currently vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The original purpose of the electoral college was to prevent an uninformed populace from making an uninformed decision. Since information is readily available nowadays through the media and the internet, this is no longer necessary.\n","id":"36f30e77-063b-4e1a-ba59-671d0017893a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If the Central Powers won WW1, Hitler would never have risen to power. The Communists would have burned themselves out long ago. Capitalism would never have had limitless power. Traditional parliamentary constitutional monarchies would be the leading force in the world. Colonialism may have still had issues, but resolving them would have been faster and the post colonial genocides would have never happened. Industry would have been more developed, endless genocides avoided, no Hitler, no Stalin, A wonderful magnificent world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the Central Powers would have won WW1, the world would be a better place today\n","id":"ec42bce9-7cfd-4ec6-9e2b-6e82e7d6b6f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>If an entity feels pain, then it necessarily has a sense of self, because it can distinguish itself from the world. Self-awareness is, really, necessary to have a conscious feeling of pain, so, something feels pain, then it must be self-aware in some way. The difference between the 'pain' state of mind in different animals cannot be proven, since all of them show us the same phenomena: if, e.g., the ache is in their feet, they scream, stop walking or start limping, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In order to feel pain, one must have some kind of consciousness, because he knows how to distinguish himself from the world. Its like: \"It's me who feel pain\", and not this stone or this other dog. One must have some kind of conscience of his body in-the-world, in order to feel pain.\n","id":"fad9b716-da80-40fe-8443-64a4d41767c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>Wealth is often treated as social status. Seeing someone at a higher status can fetishize them, lead to jealousy, or lead to personal shame over one's own struggles. Not disclosing \/ not being showy with wealth allows people to avoid these things and maintain friendships across income lines.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Increased knowledge of others' financial status could cause jealousy and a breakdown in social ties.\n","id":"749e27ed-9160-4e2d-9745-29530b154e56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Harari the Roman persecutions of Christians over five centuries amounted to the deaths of no more than a few thousand people. This a fraction of what Christians did to each other within a 24 hour period in 1572.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"New Testament scholar Candida Moss argues that \"Christians were never the victims of sustained, targeted persecution.\"\n","id":"9bffe2d2-6446-4352-90b4-a5af9917667f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bitcoin Be Adopted As Legal Tender Worldwide?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unclear whether Bitcoin should be regulated by national governments or an international body<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are logistical hurdles to regulating Bitcoin as a legal tender worldwide.\n","id":"ed8811e4-e098-4f06-abd7-2a37ffb2046e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just recently had a son, and because of him I've been doing a lot of thinking about what kind of culture and society he's going to grow up into. x200B It scares the shit out of me. x200B The way we as people tend to deal with things that offend us, things that upset us, things we just simply don't like. It's completely counter productive. We've fallen into a pit of outrage culture, and it seems people are actively seeking things they deem problematic for a chance to show off virtue points and put others down. x200B PC Culture tends to oversimplify things and is often used by jerks who want to excuse bigoted behavior, but it's not entirely an incorrect characterization of America. I'm terrified of introducing my son to a world where the Jordan Petersons and Joe Rogans are demonized. They are viewed as scum simply for having a different viewpoint than the status quo. side note I don't think either Jordan or Joe are infallible. They aren't perfect, but they have immense value when it comes to cultivating conversation and encouraging discourse. Joe especially is wonderful in my view simply because he encourages open minded thinking and new ideas without blindly accepting dumb shit. x200B I don't think there's a path back to redeeming this culture. I'm afraid things will just progressively become worse. People will become more sensitive. Exhibiting characteristics associated with masculinity will be viewed as misogyny. Saying offensive things will become classified as hate speech and will be illegal. I may sound exaggeratory but I truly think that is where we are headed. And I think even the supposed benefactors of this kind of culture, ultimately will fall victim and be cannibalized. We already see it happening with major social justice figures slightly misstepping and being cancelled for it. When everyone is forced to walk on eggshells, no one can survive. x200B I hope someone changes my mind so I can sleep a little better at night.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The direction American culture is headed is deeply concerning and has little benefit to anyone within it\n","id":"c5e536a6-7dd2-4594-b41c-188c7adae94b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was talking to some boy online recently and he convinced me that minimum wage increases should be made at the state and local levels as opposed to the federal level, which a lot of people are advocating. His reasoning, which I found convincing, was thus Having a flat increase across the country would hurt small business in more rural areas where the cost of living is lower and, therefore, a higher minimum wage wouldn't be as necessary. For instance, if the average cost of living is 15 because it's the average between NYC's 25 hr and Bumfuck, Alabama's 5 hr then small businesses in Bumfuck that have to now pay, at a minimum, 15 are going to suffer. I'm guessing, just trying to logic through this, that perhaps gradually increasing the minimum wage would offset this but if you know for sure please comment. Prices would go up, so any net positive impact it has on the economy by way of people having more disposable income would be offset by the increase in prices. I was on the other side of the issue, and he convinced me. As someone who morally wants to support an increase in the minimum wage, federally, I'd like to be convinced that my original opinion was correct, but so far I think his reasoning was compelling. Granted, this was through a voice chat and I'm a much worse speaker than writer because I have short term memory loss and often forget points within half a second , so yeah. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minimum wage should be a state issue, not a federal one\n","id":"6bfac2ca-1c59-4abb-b0ef-2c28b66001b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is BDSM Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>The pleasure of erotic asphyxiation comes with the additional flow of oxygen to the brain when the choke is released, giving the person a heightened sense of pleasure. This incentivizes participants to prolong the choking as long as possible, as more oxygen results in more pleasure. When done incorrectly, this can have disastrous effects from unconsciousness to even death.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The sexual act of causing someone to pass out, or begin to lose consciousness, by restricting the blood flow to their brain is called \u201cerotic asphyxiation\u201d and is a widely debated practice in the kink community.\n","id":"0aa70dd6-50e1-43da-817c-8cf3e0b15477"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have lately been exposed to multiple transgender women who essentially have the bodies of and present themselves completely as cisgender men would. No effort has been made to physically deal with dysphoria or to socially deal with dysphoria by embracing a gender non conforming lifestyle or altering their presentation in any way. They are by all measures gender conforming cis men except for the fact that they insist you call them she and will attack anyone who doesn't, labeling them sexist, transphobic, anti feminist, etc. My argument has two components. The first is that these men are either suffering from a mental illness such as narcissism, borderline personality disorder, etc. which is causing their absurd behavior or they are trolling and gaslighting the transgender community either to suit a political agenda for example being planted into the media by anti transgender groups to make us look bad or because they just think it's funny. The main indicator of this is that Gender Dysphoria the official medical condition that causes transgenderism would not allow me to embrace the fact that I felt like a woman unless I also chose to combat the incongruity caused by that feeling by transitioning in some manner at first through presentation, then next through physical transition . It was either hard line denial and brutal repression, or transition. I could have at bare minimum lived as a very gender non conforming read genderqueer male, but some effort to cope with dysphoria was necessary to avoid putting a bullet in my own head. Having a beard and dressing in very masculine clothing were not options at that point. The moment I began to allow myself to be aware of how I felt about my sex assigned at birth, it was like the release of a dam. There was absolutely no putting the water back in once I cracked it. These men aren't just pre everything transgender women who are still heavily closeted. They are insisting that dysphoria and the desire to possess the body and presentation of the opposite sex are not intractable aspects of what it means to be transgender. Except the condition as it was originally observed and as it has been studied for almost seven decades is a disorder of bodily incongruity. It is the entire basis of the treatment and recognition of transgender people. Being transgender means desiring to be like the opposite sex or feeling like you are the opposite sex. Having a beard and dressing like a gender conforming man completely belies this nature. Anyone who felt like a woman trapped in a man's body would need to imitate the society of women and if at all possible to possess more female like physical attributes. The second component of my argument is that as a transgender woman, I act against my own best interests by legitimizing the narcissistic and manipulative behavior of these men by referring to them as women for the following reasons These men make the entire transgender community look fruit loopy and delusional and they contribute to the delegitimization of transgender people in public perception. These men literally fulfill the conservative fear of men abusing the vague wording of pro trans bathroom policies to invade women's spaces without actually being transgender women. They're literally the worst case scenario the transgender community has been trying to fight with public perception on. These men at face value seem to be mocking the transgender community and I willingly degrade myself by allowing them to gaslight me and trivialize what it means to be transgender. Edit I've awarded a delta for softening my personal skepticism regarding Danielle Muscato. It would appear that there are some medical concerns to her transition and she's incapable of transitioning at this time, which is something I get. I have a FtM friend who is in a similar situation where there are circumstances preventing them from transitioning but I go out of my way to respect his pronouns so it would be hypocritical of me to not respect Danielle Muscato's if I've come to believe that she is sincere in her identity. That said, my original view that I want changed is that people who do not make an effort to transition in any manner or at least desire to transition are by definition not transgender and that if they are trying to sincerely claim they are women they are either trolling the community or dealing with a completely separate mental condition from gender dysphoria and should not be treated as being equal in category to gender dysphoric read transgender people. In this case Danielle Muscato was just one particular example, but there are others out there so I'd still like to be convinced that their identity should be respected.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People like Danielle Muscato are either trolling the transgender community or suffering from an ACTUAL mental illness of some sort and as a transgender woman I would be acting against my own best interests by respecting their pronouns.\n","id":"58ec6a7d-d694-4dc3-99e0-1d552fd38823"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Will Win the Game of Thrones?<|ARGUMENT|>He does not only have a lot of information but also the ability to use them in his favor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Littlefinger has a lot of power as he has a lot of information about everyone.\n","id":"3732d226-cfc4-4f6e-9684-42925648ae72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should homeschooling be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>It is expensive to hire professionals to ensure that children standards are being followed in people's homes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is difficult and expensive for the state to consistently enforce educational standards for homeschooled children.\n","id":"ea8878a2-a3f3-4445-9176-0159345f026e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This doesn\u2019t seem to be too popular a view given its illegality in most parts of the world. But if someone has enough wealth that a cloning procedure is a viable option for them then I don\u2019t see a strong enough reason for why they shouldn\u2019t be allowed to do so. They won\u2019t be exact copies, identical twins aren\u2019t 100 the same so they will still end up raising a new person. And if a person is wealthy because they are particularly smart, beautiful or charming then there is a higher chance that their clone will be too. More awesome people, yay I admit there will probably be strong self selection for douche bags too And if enough rich people use this, the price comes down and becomes affordable for the middle class and eventually everyone else. This shouldn\u2019t be done in absence of guidelines, most would be ensuring clones have the normal rights that most children in our society have like, it's presumably already illegal to sell babies but there might be a few extra rules Medically safe It would be cruel to bring clones into this world if we know that they are more likely to suffer from severe medical problems. But is some existence better than no existence? Oversight on organ donations We wouldn\u2019t want a society where clones were brought to life just to give their parent an extra kidney, or worse, any item where the clone lacks a spare. Their ability to donate an organ to their parent might need extra safeguards. Numbers Should people be allowed to clone a giant army of themselves if that\u2019s their goal and they can afford it? Designer babies, like clones with some gene editing This is a separate subject from cloning, but the main worries here should be medical safety, not societal stability. What other people might worry about that I don't think is significant Perpetuating inequality. What if there were 15 mini Elon Musks all building on their father\u2019s empire in 25 years? Our world would look even more like an oligopoly. People who choose to already are having lots of kids. And if they were closer copies they might be even more successful Atomization accelerates Societies of families are already clannish. Societies of parent child identicals could form their own. This seems to be happening, clones or no clones Opposed for the same reason polygamy is opposed People don\u2019t like seeing others, especially those who they would like to be lower in status, having excessive reproductive success presumably monopolizing resources. Cloning seems to have less societal drawbacks than polygamy, as more people are available in the dating market Long term biodiversity worries. If other people are still sexually reproducing then how is this an issue. Discrimination Don\u2019t hate on clones, don\u2019t hate on non clones. Our society already recognizes the principle that people shouldn\u2019t be discriminated against, even as it often fails to live up to it in practice. Another group that might discriminate or be discriminated against shouldn\u2019t change much \u2013 we already have so many ways to separate and judge people. And if a new identity focal point takes over it might even make the others matter less. Overpopulation worries To the extent that new people are productive members of society let's just say I'm more convinced by Julian Simon than Paul Ehrlich. Unreasonable expectations of clones to live up to their original We already have this in some form for normal kids\u2026 Hard to bond with a long term partner when raising a clone instead of combined or adopted child I don't fully buy this, but even if true single parenthood is definitely legal. Yes, I might get creeped out if some celebrities want to let others raise their clones lots of crazy fans are willing to do so. But if a couple wants to raise exact clones instead of bio or adopted children who are we to stop them? What am I missing? Edit Other argument People are for banning it mostly to move slowly as we figure out the societal implications of what cloning might do. This is almost convincing but a flat ban instead of limitations still seems extreme and rooted more in religion than logic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When we get the technology working it should be legal for people to clone themselves to make children.\n","id":"6b516101-a1a5-427b-a81d-bfcaa09743ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Speaking as a Catholic convert. Today's reading at Mass was Christ's instruction not to seek attention when one is fasting or suffering for God or their faith. If an individual's suffering and sacrifice is noticed by others, then that recognition will be their reward. A much greater reward is to keep this to one's self and between the individual and God, to take the pride out of such acts of piety. Given that, I see the marking of ashes as a contradiction. It's announcing to the entire world that you will be partaking in Lent and making a sacrifice. Is this not precisely what the very same reading during Ash Wednesday Mass instructed to avoid? Furthermore, if members of the Catholic Church are meant to be emissaries of their faith, does it not alienate others to have the celebration of the Catholic faith thrust into their face so dramatically? I for one feel uncomfortable spending the entire day with ash markings on my forehead, and feel that this ritual is not only devoid of significance but is counterproductive to one's relationship with God, and only serves to make other uncomfortable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ash Wednesday is an empty and counterproductive ritual\n","id":"6a0ca513-0ab5-4f50-8880-583ad0930f61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>This is a commonly held image of what evil means and even as a social construct, benefits the many who do not act this way over the few who do<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evil is inflicting unwanted or unnecessary pain, injury, or suffering in another human being.\n","id":"1c94e46b-5fb7-4202-a699-0e320f74ef17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You\u2019re hard pressed to find any action film that deserves an acting award and nothing about the acting in Black Panther is different. I could make a great case that the acting was even more bland and flat than the average action movie. Avengers Infinity War had way more charismatic acting in its cast than Black Panther, just to name one action film. But other films of 2018 without a doubt had a better acting ensemble cast. This does a disservice to the legitimate push for minorities in the film industry. Even the Blackkksman, nominated in the same category, would\u2019ve been more fitting as best ensemble and still represented the demographic the industry was looking for. This will turn out to be a mark for everyone who says that they got nominated and won just because they\u2019re black. Unfortunately, it seems like that\u2019s true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Black Panther had no business winning SAG award for Best Ensemble cast.\n","id":"c17ac0d7-6ef4-4276-a479-756e5f93c6d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>Europeans generally support euthanasia. For example, more than 70% of citizens of Spain, Germany, France and Britain are in favor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public opinion favors euthanasia which suggests some support for a right to die.\n","id":"e16c9d05-0749-44f9-a7da-366c5f6cb80c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>2020 Predictions: Who Has The Best Shot at Winning 2020?<|ARGUMENT|>There is evidence to suggest that voters believe the country would be better off with more women in political office, rendering Kamala as a potential candidate for nomination.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"2020 is a good time for a woman to be the Democratic nominee for President. Kamala Harris is the best woman to take that role.\n","id":"76301026-d466-4eb9-b803-2157715e43b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Boarding Schools Are Beneficial To Children<|ARGUMENT|>Many specialised interests, such as ballet, tennis or music require training from a young age. Boarding schools, including ballet schools, tennis academies and cathedral choir schools, allow children to pursue excellence with like-minded peers. This would be difficult to arrange on a local basis as specialist equipment and training is expensive and therefore concentrated in a few centres. Boarding schools minimise disruption to children\u2019s academic work by reducing the need for extended travel\/time off school to reach them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many specialised interests, such as ballet, tennis or music require training from a young age. Boar...\n","id":"fdfc7af6-7198-4d8f-82ec-2a5f3041b4c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Quick background. The 14th Amendment was passed after the US Civil War as a national means to give recently freed slaves equal rights and protection under the law. It included a Citizenship Clause which read All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. I'm not a professional historian, but I believe this was included so that the African American community would naturally build their own class of US citizens, simply by reproducing. If it wasn't included, the freed slaves, which were never citizens to begin with, may never become citizens would continue to be treated as inferior under the law, as would their children. Now because of the Citizenship Clause, 150 years later, the African American culture is prominent within the United States. That is all well and good. However, courts have interpreted the citizenship clause to mean that any person born on US soil is a US citizen, regardless of the citizenship of that person's parents, and this leads to a big question in the illegal immigration debate. Pregnant women sneak into the US illegally, give birth to their child, and are then rewarded by the legal system by granting the child full US citizenship. The mother gets all the benefits of that, for breaking the law by coming into the US illegally. Is that right? I do not think it is right for the age we live in, and the Citizenship Clause should be repealed accordingly. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution has outlived its usefulness and should be repealed.\n","id":"d83cd87b-2029-4faf-b491-9d4f7290b3fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I may have mis worded the title but I'll explain more here. Considering what happened a long time ago with the white man stealing their land, pillaging their shit and putting the kids in those god awful residential schools, but it seems like they have been getting, and are still getting extra privilege for something that happened many many years ago, even though me and my parents never had anything to do with it. We pay taxes towards the money they get, the free hunting and fishing, the reserves, and the free schooling and tuition in some cases. We are even still going on TV in the recent couple years and still making apologies. Im 18 and im eventually going to be paying tax for something i had zero relation to. Why are they still receiving these benifits and everyone else is still paying the price for it all these years later?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Native Americans in Canada are given to many extra privileges throughout life.\n","id":"7401eac8-033e-4013-af69-482e2039f143"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently on reddit I have seen people hate on anyone who lets their cats outdoors. I believe it is perfectly okay to allow a cat the choice to go outside. I have a cat who prefers being outside to being inside. While inside for long periods of time, she becomes depressed or aggressive, and actively searches for ways out of the house. We finally decided to get her a cat safe collar and let her decide when she wants to come and go. Majority of the time she just sits on the porch or underneath it, sometimes venturing out into the yard. She never comes home with scratches or bites from fights, so I know she is at lease avoiding any possible conflict that might come up. We still feed her, give her baths, take her on routine vet visits, and make sure she is healthy and happy. We know there are risks, but for her sanity and happiness we feel the way things are now are okay. I always thought I loved her, and was letting her choose and be happy. Apparently I am in the wrong, so please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it is humane to allow cats outdoors.\n","id":"9f7ef555-efc7-4c15-b81e-2d181913b2b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is somewhat from personal experience, but I know for a fact it happens elsewhere. People who use their children to try to undermine or even threaten authority are terrible parents. Now i've seen this happen If you get stopped by either a police officer or a security guard for shoplifting, and your first response is to say Stop upsetting my children then you are a terrible person. Period. Not only for shoplifting, and then shoplifting in front of your kid, but to then try and get away from it by throwing your kid into the mix is a terrible thing to do. Shoplifting is just a personal thing ive seen, but I KNOW for a fact that parents will throw their kids or at least the threat of their kids around like nobodies business to get their own way. If you do this, youre a bad person, and an even worse parent<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who use their children to try to undermine or even \"threaten\" authority are terrible parents...\n","id":"ba8aabb8-9325-4205-a9f0-11449cc506ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently rewatched The Shape of Water and I am not a movie critique nor expert, but the realization dawned on me that it is an exquisitely bland movie that lacks an absurd amount of substance. The Shape of Water plays on to the basic beauty and the beast trope, but it does not go any further than that. The movie weighs heavily on the cinematography and strays away from any actual plot or substance. It is an intermediate form of movie writing and does not deserve any more than a Redbox rental. The movie barely dives into the actual underlying foundation for why anything happens, there is no room for individual thought and it is pressed into the viewer\u2019s brain that there is only one way to think and that is with the protagonist. According to Vox, It\u2019s a beautifully shot movie with a story that follows the traditional arcs of a fairy tale romance. I believe that it is exactly why it should not have won, it has been done before. Compared to other past winners, such as Moonlight, which was original and intriguing. There is no relevance to the Shape of Water, no bigger picture. A mute woman falls in love with a sea creature who likes eggs. If that\u2019s the precedent for winning an Oscar, then The Leprechaun would have been a phenomenal candidate. The movie is visually outstanding, but so is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and it is an incredibly lifeless movie starring Brad Pitt Without the visuals the movie would merely be a pathetic case for an \u201coriginal\u201d plot. Quite honestly, coming from Guillermo del Toro I would not expect much, all of his movies rely on visuals such as Crimson Peak or The Hobbit. These movies appeal to the eye and the only Oscar that this movie truly deserved was Best Visuals. Overall, the movie is basic with jaw dropping visuals. The movie won four Oscars, so it is obviously well received and I\u2019d like to understand what is so special about its standard format. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Shape of Water is an extremely overrated movie and should have never won the Oscar for Best Picture\n","id":"ac47de42-a07a-4296-9ae2-ba125598a811"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public transport be free?<|ARGUMENT|>The Seniors SmartRider travel card entitles older citizens to free off-peak travel in Western Australia<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many places already provide free public transport for elderly users.\n","id":"f5dcda08-7780-41c6-ac27-42cf19e504b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey be part of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>Joining the EU has been shown to impose restrictions, which is one of the main reasons for Brexit occurring.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joining the EU would restrict Turkey's ability to protect its identity and choose its own path.\n","id":"e79b78a4-1be2-4d35-ba2b-92a6cb5945e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, the main argument against this will probably be that they are damaging to one's health. My counterargument is that steroids, specifically, are not proven to be inherently damaging. Methamphetamine afaik has been shown to damage the body in any amount. Steroids on the other hand can be used in a way that doesn't have any excessive negative effects. This leads me to the second part of my thought process. Playing a sport is not a typical activity. Strong arguments could be made that such strenuous exertions on the body are equally as damaging as something like alcohol, smoking, or even acute physical trauma. Overexertion is just as 'dangerous' as underexertion as each have their own detrimental effects on one's health. On top of that, the person is CHOOSING to put this stress on their body much in the same way that they may choose to consume a substance that yields a beneficial effect. When it comes to 'sportsmanship', my opinion is that the idea that it is only fair play if two purely unadulterated human beings are competing is a form of naturalistic fallacy. In truth, under this line of thought, it would only be fair if two clones were competing. People are genetically gifted in different areas which benefit them in different ways. I don't see this as any different to a man who builds muscles while using a hormone. In fact I find that it is an even MORE pure form of competition because we are human's after all and part of being human is having our knowledge at hand. If a competition is essentially a comparison of two or more people's ability to complete a task, then their minds as well as their knowledge of effective methods to perform more efficiently is fair game. They know how to efficiently move a ball from where it is to where it needs to be. They also know how to most efficiently use their time to build their body so as to complete that task.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that steroids\/'PEDs' are not as abhorrent as they are made out to be in professional sports.\n","id":"32423d91-0d2b-45ab-b66d-e3f1a3db872a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My main reason for this is that no flat Earth theory I've seen explains things in a consistent and plausible way. Specifically, I don't see a theory that explains everyday stuff that people can just observe on their own like sunsets and horizons and the fact that you cannot see very high objects that are distant enough. That, and the whole conspiracy theory thing. With any conspiracy theory, ask yourself how many people need to be in on it and be kept quiet. And to do that, you need a way to keep them quiet. And somebody needs to be putting up the resources to keep them quiet, one way or another. And if that's happening, who is putting up all those resources and how is it profitable for them to expend all these resources to support this lie? I have never heard a plausible explanation that answers these questions. If you have one, then change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the Earth is not flat\n","id":"af9874ea-0311-4fb6-bd5d-aa7f5f96a8f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>59 people just died in Vegas, and that is tragic. But we need to put that in perspective. 2,000,000 died in the Armenian Genocide 6,000,000 died in the Holocaust 20,000,000 died in the Holodomer As many as 50,000,000 died in Maoist China There are currently large scale killings going on in Venezuela, North Korea, and many other countries. None of these deaths, not a single one, would have been possible without gun control. If these populations had the means to defend themselves, cowardly governments would have left them alone. Is the occasional mass shooting not worth it if it means preventing communism or fascism? One might say that the US probably won't descend into communism or fascism in the foreseeable future. It probably won't, I agree, but it could happen. We're all more than willing to spend hundreds of dollars per month on insurance, just in case something that probably will never happen occurs. Unfortunately, the price at issue here is innocent lives, not money. But it is also insuring against a far greater loss of innocent lives, as opposed to ensuring compensation for a loss of material possessions. The fundamental calculus is the same, and it makes sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you are willing to spend money on insurance, you should support keeping a widely-armed citizenry\n","id":"e04ad467-4055-459f-a84f-9184ffde89d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the US, the richest classes are already paying a substantially higher share of the tax burden Source The top 20 of income earners paid 87 of all income taxes in 2018 The top 1 of income earners paid 43 of all income taxes in 2018 77 million households in the bottom two tiers had a net negative income tax for 2018 The tax code is already skewed heavily towards those with less annual income. In order to change my view, explain to me why having 43 of the national tax burden being borne by 1 of it's citizens is not only fair, it isn't enough. What is enough? What percent of the national tax burden should be paid by the top 1 ? By the top 20 ? By the bottom 20 ? x200B Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In America, the rich already pay their fair share.\n","id":"32ea2b93-96ab-40af-84d6-6f5f63899f11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, let me establish that I support the bill known as CISPA. Not necessarily any riders that may be tacked on. Second, I want to provide the actual content of the bill in its entirety as presented by the House Intelligence Committee here with a summary here Third, I want to establish that I worked in cyber security. Specifically, my role was reverse engineering malware samples and finding ways to identify them by their code content, original source, method of attack, as well as a few other things. This is how our cybersecurity operations worked. We could identify an attack on the network based on the intelligence database that people like me had built. Components of this database were shared with other companies as well as government agencies through organizations called the Defense Security Information Exchange official website here and the Network Security Information Exchange These organizations allowed free flow of similar intelligence samples between companies and the US government that significantly increased our ability to identify and mitigate incoming attacks. Currently, only members of DSIE and NSIE have procedures to share information between each other and the government. A nonmember company such as Sony or Target does not have a process set up to share intelligence about malware. So on to the bill. I have seen a lot of misconceptions about CISPA, especially from those on r technology which show little to no knowledge about what is actually going on here. Probably the most agreed upon misconception is as follows gt CISPA would immediately be used by the MPAA RIAA to, essentially, wiretap every person who ever searches for or visits a torrent site. THIS IS NOT TRUE. CISPA CANNOT BE USED TO TRACK, WIRETAP, OR REALLY DO ANYTHING TO INDIVIDUALS. No where in the bill does it have any provisions to do any form of tracking, whatsoever . Nor does it have anything to do with piracy, actually. What does the bill do? The main part of the bill is gt The Director of National Intelligence shall establish procedures to allow elements of the intelligence community to share cyber threat intelligence with private sector entities and to encourage the sharing of such intelligence. This would allow any company to freely share at their discretion intelligence about recent attacks with other companies or with the government. In addition, the government would be able to give information about cyber threats back to those companies. The next part of the bill basically expedites organizations' and individuals' abilities to get security clearances. gt The procedures established under para graph 1 shall provide that classified cyber threat intelligence may only be\u2014 gt A shared by an element of the intel ligence community with\u2014 gt i certified entities or gt ii a person with an appropriate se curity clearance to receive such cyber threat intelligence Section 3 goes into more detail on how the Director of National Intelligence can assign security clearances. Section 4 begins to deal with how the private sector can use shared cyberintelligence. According to CISPA, a cybersecurity provider may though is not required to use their obtained cyberintelligence gt i use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property of such protected entity and gt ii share such cyber threat information with any other entity designated by such protected entity, including, if specifically designated, the Federal Government. This does not require the cybersecurity provider to share anything with the Federal Government unless it is their wish. Part i does begin to use language that could be interpreted as anti piracy, however, it does designate that the information is limited to cyber threat information . This term is specifically defined by the bill as information directly pertaining to a vulnerability of, or threat to a system or network of a government or private entity . In order to be eligible for this, the information must be about a threat to the network . Similar language is used for a self protected entity. Except for one key difference gt iii shall not be used by the Federal Government for regulatory purposes. Further, gt the submission of information under this subsection to the Federal Government shall not satisfy or affect any requirement under any other provision of law for a person or entity to provide information to the Federal Government. The remainder of the bill states that The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board shall submit an annual, unclassified report to Congress regarding the use of shared information. So, why is this bill necessary? Currently, we don't have established infrastructure allowing companies to share cyber threat information with each outside of the current DSIE and NSIE. Further, we don't have a solid foundation for allocating security clearances to cybersecurity professionals who do not work with a company that handles classified data such as defense contractors . CISPA would allow cybersecurity professionals to gain security clearances allowing them access to information obtained by the FBI, CIA, NSA, US Air Force, etc that could help that secure their networks from future attacks. Could the Sony or Target hacks, specifically, have been prevented by information that would have been shared through CISPA? Maybe. I don't really know for sure, but many attacks could be prevented through the sharing of cyber threat information. I have seen that happen in my own work on a regular basis. One last thing. I have seen some misinformation about the support for this bill. Specifically, I have seen claims that gt companies like Google and Microsoft to the public are extremely against the bill This is simply not true and literally 5 seconds on Google will show it. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Intel, IBM, and Symantec all support CISPA because they can identify that they have holes in their security due to their lack of information that other companies would have but don't share. So change my view. Is there a section of CISPA that you believe is specifically targeted towards individuals or at preventing free speech as Gizmodo and Arstechnica and most of r technology do? I would like to see your take.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I support the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act CISPA.\n","id":"8446bf31-da72-47c4-bff0-21740c4b4cb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Oprah 2020: Should Oprah Run For President?<|ARGUMENT|>Democrats should nominate a serious progressive candidate with a proven track record; someone who has been on the right side of history throughout the years, like Bernie Sanders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By nominating a celebrity, Democrats would undermine claims that they are the more serious party.\n","id":"51848d76-328c-4fa4-9731-091af68ea659"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gender is more about social status than about anatomical status.<|ARGUMENT|>Women can be both the father and mother, as in, the woman no longer needs a man to reproduce<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender is more about social status than about anatomical status.\n","id":"c5f2f35b-4212-4172-9705-66ce39a74c35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Even though a majority of Americans is opposed to government torture, the support increases when the individual being tortured is perceived as a public threat e.g. the alleged crime is terror.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public opinion is based on threat perceptions, hence the public opposition to AKMs might vanish once threat perceptions change.\n","id":"df0fef1f-9ecc-4068-badd-4e357f931f4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe it was inevitable for Allied forces to obtain victory without American intervention, after the introduction of the first Tank onto the battlefield, the British Mark I it made the dreaded tactics of trench ware fare obsolete. Also, along with new artillery tactics that had the infantry follow in it's wake to quickly take over enemy trenches under artillery cover. Tactics and technology pioneered by the British.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"World War I could have been won by the Allies without American Intervention.\n","id":"1dd2d895-1f53-4e6e-8c73-b0c27bc40707"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>Genetic enhancements are the cheapest way to deal with healthcare problems, as they stop the disease or disability before it even manifests itself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments could offer genetic modifications as part of their healthcare services if people become too dependent on companies.\n","id":"408f345b-f5b4-4756-a68f-c256650831bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Within a company, there are many workers that provide their labour so that the company can sell products for the market to consume. The profits of these products legally go into the hands of the CEO who often takes a significant portion for themselves and gives enough to their workers to survive, thus the reason they provide labour in the first place. In this method of structuring a business, there exist a variable degree to which the CEO gives monetary compensation to their workers. Some may be benevolent and pay people to a certain extent all equally, some may be greedy and pay there workers solely by the legal minimum wage. It should goes without saying as to why a power structure dependent on the authority of a single person is problematic, to say the least. It puts too much power in the hands of an individual person that is capable of making innumerable bad decisions. However, solving this problem simply by adding more people to form a small collective that become a Board of Directors seems to only form a structure that is Oligarchical rather than Autocratic. Effectively, without worker input on the make up of the Board's membership, they take the same role as the CEO did, only with minor infighting with other members for their interests. Just as well, the Board of Directors as a presence in the company seems to only give a format through which company stocks can be sold off to other special interests that, again, only look out for their own needs, not those of the workers. It could be argued that stock holders provide investment for which the company can use for funds to grow their business and give the amount with interest back to the investor as a return. However, this could be just as easily executed through a contract with the company as a whole or could simply work within the context of a customer giving interest to be returned on them once they receive the product. Therefore, my view is that selling of company stock should be abolished and should be replaced by workers of a company having the ability to vote for a Board of Directors to represent their company interests. Through government regulation, there would be things off limits, such as illegality to fire or in general doing illegal things, of course. However, the company structure should not exist as an Autocracy for the benefits of individuals and should rather have a structure close to Representative Democracy. As with real life systems of representation, it may not be perfect. However, that debate is with voting systems that is on the whole seperate. In my opinion, the structure would work rather perfectly with the Single Transferable Vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be a law that mandates companies have all employees, and only employees, elect their Board of Directors. Of course, as a result, I want the abolition of selling company stock.\n","id":"989a5147-c579-4d4b-acf4-2127fe0e0d72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Barbaric traditions don't have to be completly abolished, but can easily be transitioned into symbolic variants sublimation, such as a sport with movements that resemble bullfighting or some folklore event with a virtual bull fight.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is possible to keep part of the tradition, modifying it in order to avoid injury or death to the animal\n","id":"77cdc442-190e-4f97-9303-786bc8c1947f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey guys. This idea just struck me tonight. And honestly, I don't think anyone here has wanted their view changed more right now. I'm hoping to find something I'm missing or failed to consider. This is a very genuine changemyview. Let me know your thoughts. Okay. So the way I see it, feminism is about advocating for women. In a society where both men and women face problems unique to their sex, isn't it wrong to identify with a group that cares only about the problems of one sex? If feminism is about equality, isn't it wrong to call it feminism? I mean here we want a discussion about problems of both genders and we call it feminism. History is going to see it as an incredibly ironic joke. The one argument I was able to think of against this is that there are gender specific issues . Issues like abortion, well, that's not an issue of gender equality. That's an issue of advocating for a woman's choice. But I thought about it some more. And why can't we just address these gender specific issues on their own, without relating it back to a movement only advocating for one sex? Why can't a person be just pro choice? Why can't a person be just anti conscription? The more I think about it, the more it seems wrong to call oneself a feminist, or for that matter, a men's rights activist. I understand feminism has done some amazing things. What I don't understand is why it can't be done in the name of gender equality. And I don't think it's a matter of semantics on the name alone either. The heavy handed advocacy for feminism instead of gender equality has left us blind to the idea of sexism against men. Which, the more I think about it, the more ridiculous it becomes. Gender roles are placed on both men and women in society, and yet most of our attention is focused on the problems of women from those gender roles. Why? Because we're advocating feminism instead of gender equality. If someone is a feminist, that means they specifically identify with the advocating women's rights. In that very message is the idea that men's rights aren't as important to be advocated for. Otherwise, they'd just advocate for people's rights. I understand in certain situations some third world countries , women do direly need to be advocated for. And yet, I think it's a very dangerous to take that thought process that and use it to identify oneself's core political beliefs. I'm not a very educated person. I don't know what horrors are happening around the world. But when women are killed or in poor conditions, the feminist movement makes us aware. Are men killed or in poor conditions around the world? I'd think so. In some cases aren't men suffering in those same countries as well, being forced to fight or go off to war? Isn't feminism looking around the world, and choosing specifically to only care about the problems women face? And so now, what's the solution? To be both a feminist and a men's rights activist? That doesn't make any sense That's two words used to describe someone who's in support for everyone's rights. Please note everything I said about calling oneself a feminist goes for calling oneself a men's rights activist. However, I feel feminism is much more prevalent in public consciousness, and so presents a bigger problem. If people only were aware about men's rights activism, and feminism was only something in certain places on the internet, I would think that's very wrong too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's kind of fucked up to be a feminist.\n","id":"536df570-0b88-4e9a-bd57-641cc54873c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion allows societies to feel hope and to see light in the most darkest periods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is good for the psycho-social wellness of its followers.\n","id":"18a6c08f-2d4b-4e39-b038-2666dbaf5044"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Although I do agree that harassment on the web is quite big, I do feel both parties are almost always guilty, and that it can be prevented easily. So not really bullying, more of an argument. People always seem to take criticism for cyber bullying, and are generally obnoxious and too full of herself. katiethesinger123 is ugly as hell, and uploaded a video of her singing. She can't sing, she should try and improve it or at least stop, but never mind logic, she just uploaded a video of her horrible singing to the web. And then, she couldn't take criticism and resorted to horribly insulting people, resulting in the termination of her YouTube account. And then, it appeared on a blog, saying how she was a huge traumatised victim of cyber bullying by both YouTube itself and its commenters. Ignorant and horrible. Also, most social media sites, well mainly the good ones, have an option to block and or report the user for harassment. With regards to texting, this short of stuff could happen anywhere and at anytime, and no kid should be doing the shady things they do now. I am a big time computer fan who likes hardware and video games, and dislike and know nothing whatsoever about Social Networking Media, and would like my blatant ignorance to be corrected.  Edit I accidentally a lot of things.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe cyber-bullying doesn't exist.\n","id":"a4bbbbb3-c26d-415d-8ffd-b9ee4c51ddd8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it Ok to incentivise moral behaviour?<|ARGUMENT|>Morality means doing the right thing for the right reason. Getting paid is not a right reason.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bought morality is not morality. Incentivising moral behavior reduces ethics to the category of compliance\n","id":"99654cb3-ad48-4f27-b974-8a67e5636989"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We hear how cultural appropriation is bad because it someone how belittles another culture. I would argue that cultural appropriation is nothing more than a factor of multiculturalism and has been practiced throughout history. Whenever a town has been taken over in battle eventually that town becomes much like the conquering army. The way people dress has been more or less homogenized across the globe even though that clothing was specifically western European in nature. The adoption of religion at free will unforced is another example of someone taking the culture of another for their own good. Reddit, the mixing of cultures is not bad and in fact enhances our experience as many cultures blending. I will not accept The name Redskins is racist as an example as to why cultural appropriation is bad. This is not about team names. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cultural appropriation is not bad\n","id":"b57f3852-3b3f-4a4e-9e60-3cfa2447b398"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no practical way for any coordinated movement to achieve the critical mass required to successfully overthrow the government due to the large volume of individual crimes that would need to be committed and overlooked by multiple layers of law enforcement in the process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Amassing arms is not an effective method of fighting authoritarianism.\n","id":"64927ccf-3c04-4577-9142-2579c1c72420"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Shopping local<|ARGUMENT|>Shopping locally supports local farmers and the local economy \u2013 rather than huge multinational corporations. Typically farmers are forced to sell to middlemen or big business, such as huge supermarket corporations. This means growers see only a small fraction of the price the public eventually pays in the store as little as 18 cents of every dollar in the USA. This drives down farm incomes and is forcing many farmers off the land as they can no longer make a living. By selling directly to the public at farmers\u2019 markets and farm shops instead, producers can ensure that they get a fair price for their crops and livestock. The income this provides is particularly crucial for small producers, and for farmers committed to more sustainable, less intensive methods, such as organic production. Consumers who want to support their local producers and sustainable farming over big agribusiness and retailers should therefore aim to shop locally wherever possible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shopping locally supports local farmers and the local economy \u2013 rather than huge multinational corpo...\n","id":"83e745ee-4e72-4601-a16a-d2d96764c82a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Ontario have only one public, secular school system?<|ARGUMENT|>As public schools are the default choice, private schools must find ways to make them stand out as not just a better alternative, but one that is so much better that going to a private school will have a significant impact on children's lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private schools have a massive incentive to make themselves more attractive than public schools. This makes them always look towards ways of improving schools and education.\n","id":"e22b0119-4c07-439c-a2d1-cfd0c342376a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the United States, a great deal of scientific research is funded by federal agencies. Yet the majority of the findings generated through these federally funded read tax payer funded research programs are published in private journals that require subscriptions to view content. This means that without spending more money the average American does not have access to most scientific literature, despite having paid the taxes that funded the work. Even those of us affiliated with research and academic institutes sometimes have difficulty accessing journals articles of interest to us when our institution has decided not to subscribe to those publications. Due to so called paywalls, the average person is forced to rely on other people or popular press media to summarize and break down research studies for them. This limits the ability of average people to do their own investigating and reach their own conclusions on topics of interest or importance to them. Furthermore, this opens the opportunity for popular press media to sensationalize and or overstate findings, either unintentionally due to lack of understanding or intentionally to promote a particular agenda . This cartoon is a humorous take on that issue. For us researchers, getting stuck behind paywalls limits our ability to gain a clear view of the state of the science in our areas of interest, potentially diminishing our ability to develop appropriate questions, hypotheses, and experiments to advance the field. I recognize that most likely the average person is not seeking out peer reviewed articles filled with dry, dense technical writing, but those that want to should have access to those resources without having to spend extra money. Summary I believe all scientific findings generated through federal funding should be published in open access formats, like the Public Library of Science PLoSONE My argument hinges on two points 1 Tax payers funded the work, so they should have access to the results 2 Open access formats would enhance the flow of scientific information among researchers and between researchers and the general public, which is an inherently beneficial outcome. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Data and findings generated through federally-funded scientific research should be published in open-source formats.\n","id":"4f6cbdf5-d580-432f-afbc-261058ea8c2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Lottery should be an integral component of democratic political systems<|ARGUMENT|>Independent politicians can remind voters they are not being played by big money from outside influences and they don\u2019t have to follow a party platform, they can think independently on all issues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parties often choose to ignore issues due to fear of a democratic backlash and electoral loss. Independent candidates are likelier to bring these issues up and discuss them.\n","id":"05a213bf-a614-4f00-8af1-7506ba6e576e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Forenote I do not mean to downplay the seriousness of muscle neuron diseases, such as ALS, in any way. While I am not arguing that his performance was bad, I do not think his performance as Stephen Hawking was Oscar worthy. I believe, in order to win the award, the actor actress must portray a character to the best of his her ability for the entire duration of the film. So yes, Redmayne did an excellent job of portraying Hawking, but how much work did he really have to put in for the last half of the movie? Sure, he was able to carry the emotional themes, and he did a really good job of doing nothing , but his lack of speaking parts in the second half of the movie really take away from the performance when being compared to other performances. For instance, another potential Oscar favorite, Michael Keaton not only has speaking parts throughout the his film Birdman , he even has to provide inner monologue and act like he is acting. The only counter argument for this that I could think of is that Redmayne was tasked to portray Stephen Hawking, which he did nearly perfectly. However, I do not believe this gives him instant access to the Best Actor Award. Using this logic, could someone be cast as a mime, portray the mime perfectly, and receive the same recognition? Being somewhat of the cynic, part of me says that Redmayne is getting this recognition because he is playing Stephen Hawking, a very prominent figure in culture. It sometimes seems that the attention his role is receiving is almost an indirect recognition to Hawking himself.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eddie Redmayne should not be considered for the Best Actor award for his performance in \"The Theory of Everything\" at this year's Oscars.\n","id":"3c7d6352-88bf-453e-a7a5-a590bc4fabed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>A person is pulled into attention, like a magnet, during a traumatic event. In other words, \"Traumatic Attention\" is viewed whether or not the witness wants to See\/Participate, or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Attention is not caused by or necessarily related to a previously \"attention thought\".\n","id":"635fea3f-44f0-4e88-a022-1e8ada843398"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>Considering a wide variety of perspectives can create gridlock, whereas sticking to a single perspective creates streamlined and efficient decision-making.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Considering broader perspectives can result in gridlock or stalled decision-making due to conflict between different cultures and perspectives.\n","id":"375e157c-04b3-46d3-9206-e0ae5be79e8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>Returned slaves would most likely inform other slaves about our policing. This would disincentivise them from escaping or resisting as the prospects for success would be even smaller.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making a pact with the British will compromise us in the eyes of our fellow Maroons who wouldn't know what choice we had.\n","id":"bdb27d53-0ec2-4f3c-b673-7adeef5879ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>Sex workers will be more able to carry out their work in secure brothels, rather than on the street or in private residences, where it is harder for them to seek help or escape violence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When sex work is legal, sex workers do not need to hide their work from law enforcement, which allows them to work in safer environments.\n","id":"0800e23d-6d65-4980-b29c-4f13bfa1c8db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Zero tolerance law<|ARGUMENT|>Protecting businesses and creating a reputation for low crime and sound policing attracts inward investment and immigration both to a country as a whole and to individual areas. The cost to a country of theft and vandalism per year is a significant chunk of GDP. Deterrence reduces the number of crimes that police are forced to investigate and although prisons are expensive the reduction in recidivism should start to empty them in time. The most important question is whether we believe it is worth spending a percentage of our tax dollars to guarantee our safety. Most electors in most countries say this is not just worthwhile but their spending priority.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zero tolerance is affordable, saves costs, and actually helps stimulate economies:\n","id":"9e4ddda2-ad7e-4cff-871e-6eea66154b50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just like when Jack Kevorkian provided his patients with a 'suicide button'. We should provide the pregnant woman with some sort of trigger so she is the one to terminate the pregnancy and not the physician, who should be there only to step in and help in case anything goes wrong. I'm all for choice for women but I've been reading some old posts where some people compare an abortion with having a mole or a tumor removed so I figured if it's their body, their choice, it should be their hand to perform the actual killing surgery. This opinion doesn't apply to rape victim, serious birth defects or life endangerment. Just general no money, so abortion or too young, so abortion . . EDIT For arguments sake, the device is safe to operate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe we should come up with an \"abortion device\" so ONLY the pregnant woman can terminate the pregnancy herself.\n","id":"ccdd15ee-0bbd-4ecb-9483-90bc1a5ab7b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Numerous recent terrorist attacks have been made in the name of Islam. To name a few, 9\/11 attacks , 2004 Madrid attacks 2015 in Paris in January and in November and so many in Arab world towards minorities , including other muslims.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Directly as well as indirectly, religion has been subverted for radicalization, making it the primary cause of terrorism.\n","id":"0a527d3d-25e6-472e-bf01-2f23f44a28f5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize prostitution<|ARGUMENT|>prostitution is going to happen anyway, legalizing would make it safer<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing sex work will make the profession safer for women\n","id":"cea9ee03-e4f5-475d-868f-a8d8af84cc99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To start out with, it's not necessarily that I advocate that everybody uses performance enhancing drugs. Some all? have negative side effects that you certainly should be cognizant of before using. However, especially in professional sports, players already subject themselves to pretty brutal conditions. Football players specifically can shorten their lifespan by playing. My point here is, why shouldn't the players have a choice in the matter? Are we worried about the integrity of the game? Well, if everyone has an opportunity to do it and nothing is kept secret about it, what integrity is ruined? As it is, there are supplements that players can take that are legal. What if those legal supplements help a player get the edge he needs, but another player doesn't know about those supplements? What difference does that make? Please help me understand this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that it should be legal for all athletes to use performance enhancing drugs.\n","id":"15342e41-99e8-4bed-8c38-53e49bcab684"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>By it I mean of course, that I don't think he was a pedophile. I watched the notorious documentary Living with Michael jackson a few days ago and I genuinely think his interest in kids was nonsexual. The documentary is the one that resparked rumours he was a pedophile, but it also shows his day to day life. It shows how everywhere he goes he's mobbed by people, his fans fight over a hotel pillow he touched, a girl breaks down after hugging him like shes been touched by jesus, a shop keeper is visibly rubbing his hands as he approaches looking at him like a cartoon walking bag of money, the documentary maker leads him down uncomfortable lines of questioning obviously designed to challenge his ability as a father and touch on the most unpleasant aspects of his childhood. Jackson was weird, but the way the world treated him was weird too. Lots of people theorise that he hung out with kids to recapture an adolescence he never had but my personal theory was that he enjoyed the company and innocence of children because they didn't approach him with the same kind of baggage and agendas adults did. Kids don't care if you're weird . But thats secondary to my point though, that I don't think he was screwing them. So, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Michael Jackson didn't do it\n","id":"992e67d0-3d1b-4471-a8cf-3422bf8e08b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>The FBI defines domestic terrorism as the \u201cunlawful use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States or Puerto Rico without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives.\u201d Antifa's members often attempt to influence policy through mob violence and can be declared terrorists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Antifa is dangerous enough to have been declared a domestic terrorist group by the US Government.\n","id":"b6b3d796-7131-458d-adb5-eec06744ae65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are ICOs Initial Coin Offerings popping up every single day, advertising themselves as the next Bitcoin . They want you to invest in them before the coins even get released, and you get increasing bonuses the more you buy and the earlier you buy prior to their public release . These companies often have no contact information, no accountability, and often do not even accept US dollars, Euros, British Pounds or other fiat currencies, they want you to send them Bitcoins or Etherums as an investment , I suppose because they know this way the money will be impossible to trace and charge back if you realize you've been defrauded. And yet they keep advertising on Facebook, and I even have a friend who claims that while some can be a scam, some have a lot of potential and accuses me of being incredibly close minded for not being interested in hearing his free 1hr cryptocurrency education . It feels like he's been engulfed in a cult and he's trying to drag me into it, making me ever more suspicious and hostile every time he tries again. Worse, he keeps spamming me with newsletter forwards or links to article, but they all come from crypro centric websites like coindesk or cointelegraph, or youtube channels of investment advisors claiming the Federal Reserve will collapse and we should all invest in cryptocurrencies. Now there's companies even advertising how they can help you start your own cryptocurrencies. It's completely ridiculous and it's becoming a total circus. Is there any merit to any of this?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All ICOs for cryptocurrencies are a form of get-rich-quick scams, and you should never \"invest\" in them.\n","id":"18df9485-21b2-4573-9cfb-57762c653eab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Vatican library holds a secret documents which are not available to anyone but high ranked priests or pope. Something which is hidden is considered occult which is the thing they are fighting against so that make up for a contradictory statement. Vatican Secret Archives<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has a history of monopolizing education and knowledge limiting the perspectives one can be exposed to making them easier to control.\n","id":"82d1bc13-4f60-41f8-8ef1-65c2135e4c8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Affirmative Action: Useful Once, Outdated Today?<|ARGUMENT|>Affirmative action students may be especially motivated to succeed academically after having been given such an important opportunity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Affirmative action is important to the success of minorities in college.\n","id":"ad6fbe8d-eab5-4683-b43a-c9d7422822e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Not Have Pulled Out of the Iran Deal.<|ARGUMENT|>The relevance of the Gallup source is slightly unclear. The source never says something like \"Republicans support him because of his America First position in foreign affairs.\" He may just have moderately high support for his foreign affairs policies because he is considered a \"Republican.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Gallup poll evidence is inconclusive and otherwise weak as a source.\n","id":"a05a1e68-b472-4441-8225-2b61b1389b91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the UK Requirement For a Television Licence Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The BBC promotes the UK throughout the world by selling its programmes worldwide Without the TV licence the BBC might not be able to produce programmes for worldwide viewing that promote the UK.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without the funds from TV licences, the BBC would be unable to create the same volume and diversity of content.\n","id":"3b6b2b02-3b7d-4fe9-96f8-51987a3f7c7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>The Second Amendment has an enormous symbolic value that makes it difficult to enact any legislation that goes against what could be perceived as violating its spirit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Second Amendment and the right it protects enables much violence in the US.\n","id":"66e0cda3-b338-4886-ac5b-7014f0f142ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So my last post was controversial enough to get a removal. I'll try something a little more tame this time, but with Reddit's views regarding Battlestar, who knows I just watched the first 2 seasons of Battlestar. I wasn't so impressed. Most of the acting is subpar. The main characters have thick plot armor which reduces the stakes and tension. There is little complexity in exploring the sci fi themes. The coincidences, cliches, and plot holes could fill a novel. I find it a sometimes fun diversion, but not worth putting in the time to see the show through to its end. I do want my view changed, because I want to see and enjoy Battlestar the way all the millions of fans do. I don't want to be missing out so hard. But right now I can't find a way to justify spending many hours wrapping it all up. Please change my view. PLEASE NO SPOILERS. REMEMBER, I'VE ONLY SEEN SEASON 1 AND 2.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I shouldn't continue watching Battlestar Galatica I stopped at the Season 2 Finale.\n","id":"88ec8b04-b1bc-4e2b-ae85-5d71b90f42de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>This conception of man and women as created differently is not the case in many other religions. That it is advanced by those three scriptures just reflects that the Abrahamic religions are not independently originating and instead share the same genesis text.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This origin story is not relevant to the gender identities of those who do not subscribe to Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.\n","id":"78ccd502-137f-4965-8cc3-103ca32a5ef5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The general consensus on reddit is that the only wise attitude to our politicians is complete cynicism, and that we are no longer truly a democracy. I believe that the US is one of the best functioning democracies in the world, in the sense that there are hardly any government policies or pieces of legislation that defy the will of voters but I'm being careful there when I say voters not the people, not the electorate, but people who actually vote. For example, what makes PRISM legal? It's the Patriot Act and FISA. Let's take the views of the voters. Here's a gallup question from 2006 gt George W. Bush authorized government wiretaps on some phone calls in the U.S. without getting court warrants. Do you approve or disapprove of George W. Bush doing this? Depending on the wording of the question, 53 or 46 answered approve . 2006 too 9 11y for ya? Here's one from last week, this one really blew my mind gt Should the government be able to monitor everyone's email to prevent possible terrorism? 45 of people said yes, 52 no. gt Currently, 56 say it is acceptable that the NSA \u201chas been getting secret court orders to track telephone calls of millions of Americans in an effort to investigate terrorism.\u201d Just read the whole thing, and weep. I would love to commission Pew to call those people back and say The government has been trading essential Liberty to purchase temporary safety, do you approve? I just shudder to think what the numbers would be. You can google for polls on the Drug War, US torture of captured suspects, the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, or gay marriage. In each of those cases, reddit politics is an echo chamber that completely misrepresents the general public opinion. Polls on gay marriage were very close, and as soon as there was a clear majority in favor, legislation in favor was passed. To me, that is a sign of a democracy that functions extremely well. The American people support the drug war, supported the Iraq war when it started and are still pretty divided , support the Patriot Act, and kind of support torture though it completely depends on how the question is phrased . One more point the main argument against my point here is that the media brainwashes the public with views the politicians want the people to have. I think that is horseshit. We have a completely free press, who are interested in exactly one thing making money through advertising. Obviously the best way to do this is with shows like Jersey Shore and sports, but if you absolutely must cover politics and news then the way to get people to watch it is to turn it into something somewhere between reality TV and sports generate artificial conflicts, focus on personality points, and above all, above fucking all, do not bore your audience with things like analysis of complex legislation and John Stuart Mill. I think that our political representatives do a magnificent job of enacting the will of the people, and the blame for any failings we perceive in our nation falls squarely at the feet of the ordinary citizens of the USA.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the US is a well-functioning democracy, and that politicians enact the will of the American people effectively through policy and legislation,\n","id":"e9db5d54-ddd5-4df2-a9fe-ba1e5604d4ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Gabbard has a growing social media presence. She was the most Googled candidate following both debates that she was able to participate in and netted the second most Twitter followers after the second debate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gabbard is popular and will do well in a general election.\n","id":"e518fae3-09e3-4a41-8b20-aa0fbaa7b8d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Anorexics, force-feeding of<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK Diana Pretty was denied the right to die by the House of Lords even though she consistently request it. The Israeli Courts ordered the force- feeding of political hunger strikers arguing that in a conflict between life and dignity, life wins. India prosecuted a physician who allowed a hunger striker to die. The medical profession take their responsibility for life very seriously on a global level.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Medical ethics say that a doctor has a responsibility to keep the patient alive to administer treatment:\n","id":"5c827ae6-aad7-437a-af9e-de0c1f3c7e61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The only difference between people who are being called out by the journalists for their tax avoidance Tragedy of the Commons and the ones who are shocked and outraged by the report is that the latter were not smart enough to do it themselves , life itself begins as competition for scarce resources , it's just how the world goes , we as a whole compete for securing limited resources so there will always be winners and losers depending on the time frame considered so reactions to the Panama Leaks just exemplifies how naive some people are. On a side note , Messi is still the best footballer on this planet and his legacy won't be ruined by this episode<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Panama Leaks won't change a thing , us humans got this far exactly because we're so selfish and prone to self interest more than any other species\n","id":"8de74e14-72c8-4f65-ada1-7d93db7224b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>The building, equipping and staffing of a school benefits both present citizens and potential newcomers. Only the marginal increase in cost of additional students can be attributed to newcomers. Comparatively, the provision of grants makes each newcomer a completely separate investment from that which has been made in present citizens. Accordingly, the interests of present citizens and newcomers often immigrants are more easily separated under the provision of UBI.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politically, a UBI might add to anti-immigration sentiments, as citizens will likely be concerned with immigrants taking advantage economic dependency of this system. This makes the lives of immigrants and perceived immigrants worse.\n","id":"d257baaf-1ac8-4b04-bf5f-a1542fc7d14e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not an alcoholic. I never have been and i don't think i will be. I understand and have experienced the effects that alcoholism have on individuals and their family. I just don't understand why their is an expected sympathetic feeling towards alcoholics. Every time they pick up the bottle, they pick up the bottle, they decide to drink. I understand addictive personalities and personally think thats bs. The person is just to weak to stop themselves or does not want to. I get that certain people have a harder time controlling their drinking and feel dependent on it, but i just can't believe that to be an excuse and i think the person is choosing to do it. change my view. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about subtiting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think alcoholism is a choice.\n","id":"35416a98-be21-4fa9-a2f1-bb3dee9686f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cheerleading be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Health experts estimate that obesity and such lifestyles are responsible for over 400,000 deaths per year in America and that inactivity and obesity in the current generation of girls is likely to result in significant health problems later in life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The acceleration of 12- to 17-year-old girls\u2019 participation in school sports, accompanied by an increase in physical activity, significantly decreases obesity rates among young women.\n","id":"b1cea62c-df57-4e79-9073-cd17f9dbceb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people would see home health care services a job dominated by women to be less desirable than many others dominated by men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We don't have a objective metric to define what jobs are more desirable than others.\n","id":"184b3671-b50a-446c-b276-68c856ba34d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't think that love, as commonly understood, is either necessary or sufficient for a successful marriage. A successful marriage here means a mutually beneficial relationship involving shared resources and support, and often involving raising children in a mutually agreed upon manner. This doesn't mean that love does not improve a marriage, and it does not mean that active dislike is conducive to success. But it does mean that but I love him is a meaningless statement, as is I don't love you any more, in terms of whether a marriage should be initiated or dissolved respectively . Marriage is not the logical next step to love.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe love is necessary or sufficient for marriage -\n","id":"895a52ff-66e0-4a62-874b-d5202bbf3931"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>Interest in the Second Amendment was a reaction to a handgun ban push started in the early '70s This was the first \"shot fired\" in what has become a major partisan issue in the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because the Second Amendment wasn't taken serious and didn't attract much interest for the longest time, it can hardly be a fundamental part of America's social contract.\n","id":"46b5dcef-f548-4f55-b149-4781fa91e93b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nobody benefits from me joining the walkout. My individual participation does not make a difference in the grand scheme of things. No Senator will look at my school and say, Irina Blitz wasn't in the walkout I guess I'll vote whatever on this bill over here. Nor does my participation help the 17 victims or their families in any way, shape, or form. Therefore, we have established that whether or not I attend the walkout does not benefit anyone else. Now, the question comes down to whether or not it benefits me. I have nothing to gain from joining the walkout. It's cold outside, and I could instead spend the time doing homework, reading a book, or really, anything I want. There are no social consequences for not joining the walkout. Furthermore, I admit that I take some pleasure in sharing my reasoning in an academic discussion with friends who participated. So, my  is that I was justified in not participating in the walkout, and that everything I reasoned above is true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I was justified in not participating in the walkout.\n","id":"641cedd4-4959-4bb9-bd51-b14c19043497"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion provides for objective meaning and an answer to the question of why we exist, which is a deep psychological need. How we exist or what exists for which science suggests answers can never meet that psychological need.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are few questions that only religion can answer and not any other philosophy. For example, questions regarding existence or death.\n","id":"33113451-0241-4705-9c66-a111e540b775"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disclaimer I do not disagree with homosexuality or any LGBTQIA lifestyle. Generally speaking, I find the views of those who do hold such opinions to be abhorrent and rooted in fear and hatred. This afternoon my friend and I had a amicable disagreement. He said that he thinks it should be illegal to say that you disagree with homosexuality. I replied that while I find such views hateful and prejudiced, it shouldn't be illegal simply to voice that opinion. I argued that unless the view is expressed in such a way as to deliberately cause distress or harassment, or is being used to incite hatred or violence, people should be able to voice whatever damn fool opinion they like. My friend argued that people saying that they disagree with homosexuality is hate speech and to allow it creates an environment where people feel empowered to discriminate against homosexuals, leading to exclusion from society, mental health problems and, ultimately, increased suicide. Our conversation was cut short and we haven't revisited it yet although I'm sure we will . I think that censoring peoples' opinions when politely expressed causes more harm to society than allowing them to speak their mind and potentially have it changed. I'd change my view if someone can show that the harm caused to gay people by allowing these topics to be debated outweighs the harm done to society by curtailing freedom of expression. EDIT I should probably mention that I realise that it's nonsense to say that you disagree with homosexuality . That's just the phrasing my friend used in that moment. He's also well aware that semantically, it's rubbish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It shouldn't be illegal simply to say that you don't agree with homosexuality\n","id":"55147603-886c-44b4-b9aa-b4a572956665"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it OK to Punch a Nazi?<|ARGUMENT|>If asked, they could say we identify as a Nazi but don't go on justifying Nazism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Identifying as a Nazi does not equate to promoting the Nazi ideology.\n","id":"eb19216b-2038-44c6-9d07-8be1859d8c40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should librarians be providing quality information about local voting issues to prevent disinformation?<|ARGUMENT|>As they are already spread out across the community, the costs of setting up information hubs will be reduced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Librarians are already spread across the country to provide local information.\n","id":"9c756e14-2ffc-49b8-ad36-607068a191cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Last week, the CBC reported that a 40 year old policy that barred those who are disabled from immigrating to Canada will be reevaluated Traditionally, any disability has disqualified a person or family unit from immigrating under the idea that it would tax their social services, even if it is something that can be easily accommodated and they can be inevitably self sufficient and supporting 1, possible paywall While I can see some concerns about having porous borders where the dying may try to take advantage of Canada's kindness, I don't think that this is a bad thing. Example A friend of a friend is very well educated multiple Masters and a JD and has a skill set and experience enough that they would be a slam dunk in the eyes of Immigration Canada that is if over 30 years ago a doctor had not placed them on the autism spectrum, thus equalling them in the eyes of Immigration Canada to someone whom is trapped in their body and needing total care. They live on their own, they work hard, they don't get SS D I in the States, yet somehow they are a burden? Similarly, I don't think a family moving with a child with something beyond their control would do any harm if they aren't a long term drain of any sort. In the example of the deaf family member, their real harm to the system is debatable at best and that some could argue that a move to Canada for them in terms of deaf centric matters is a step back seeing how such technologies as VRS arrived in Canada a decade behind the US. Unless someone needs total care, what harm does reversing the ban do for anyone? Not to go into a different , but I have a suspicion of why this is happening now given things going on to the south. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Canada lifting the ban on disabled persons immigrating to their nation is a good thing given the net of whom is \"disabled\" has grown.\n","id":"c3152583-ffc1-4332-85ad-3b8ca4d5b649"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hail from what amounts to the middle of nowhere. I am from the one of the most remote locales in America. I see rural flight first hand. And I hear some say it's a bad thing, and when it catches the media's attention, they hop on that bandwagon, too. But why? Why is it a bad thing? I'm of the opinion that nothing needs to be done to save rural America. Why? A couple reasons. First off, these places are kind of well, they're nothing. Outside of agriculture, the economic activity is little to nothing. The school districts are crap. Businesses are closing and jobs keep drying up. On top of that, entertainment and the dating scene is almost deplorably bad. In some areas, the nearest shopping mall is over an hour away. That might not sound bad, but you try living there. No jobs, and nothing to do with the money even if you could get it. My second reason is that this is all the current resident's fault. That might sound harsh, but these are some of the most backwards people in existence. I know, as I live there. I know many a person who still thinks Obama is from Kenya. These are people who called for less gun control, even after Sandy Hook. These are people who actually believe creationism. This is objectively a backwards society. Now, why would we want to save an area like that? Then, I'm sure you've all heard of the Minnesota Nice or Nebraska Nice kind of phenomenon that occurs across the Midwest? It is real. However, it is a very, very shallow kind of nice. Beneath it, is a cold shoulder that rivals a Midwestern winter. They are very clannish and reject outsiders. Especially those who are not white. They will do everything in their power, especially if you are competing with a local business, to drive you out of town. They clearly do not want the rural flight to end. In many ways, these places are a drain on society? Why would we want to save them? Why would we want to bring people back to the most rural parts of America?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Why should we try to stem and reverse \"rural flight?\"\n","id":"fe5b799e-d3dd-4deb-a629-94f26e130ac8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>As humans, we have the unique ability to act upon probable future events as well as a sense of right and wrong. This gives us the responsibility to protect other species of lesser intellect by acting in a way that does not cause their probable extinction.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fighting climate change is a moral obligation, as those who will suffer are those who are unable to prevent it.\n","id":"c330aabd-58fa-4fa4-895a-fc6d42024481"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should quotas for women on boards and in managerial positions be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>A study found that women who hold right wing authoritarian beliefs were likely to express neo-sexist and hostile attitudes toward women if they believed in the existence of gender quotas within their organisation. Such a backlash will lead to a worse work environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender quotas will encourage women to exhibit sexist attitudes towards other women which is counter productive. The whole point of quotas is to rid workplaces of sexism, not to embolden it.\n","id":"f87be720-5f9d-4372-ab04-3c517aef6c0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>If there are other free creatures that reject God that influence humanity e.g. angels and demons, then mankind\u2019s draw to evil may be influenced by demonic powers in the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The sinful nature of humans could be a manifestation of humanity\u2019s collective rejection of God. It is not necessarily from God.\n","id":"22e22c2c-2a74-42b9-a628-f808885557c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>More like I really don't understand the facts and logic behind it. I feel that it is possible that evolution naturally phased out these creatures instead of just some massive event. Just like there are no more megalodons, but plenty of great whites. How do we know that this wasn't more of an evolution thing than an event thing? How confident are we in the fossil records and dating that we can be sure of such a thing? Assuming that you can convince me that there is enough evidence, do the experts agree on what and how the extinction probably took place?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm not convinced of the mass dinosaur 'extinction' event.\n","id":"8d351733-0c7a-42bf-8179-ab6860c0edc4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Boycott of 2008 Olympics in China<|ARGUMENT|>The Olympic Charter states that \"The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man,with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.\" Thus, as China is disrupting the \"harmonious development\" of several countries, clearly is not concerned with the preservation of human dignity as can be seen from the continuous human rights violations, politicizing the Olympics by taking a stand and boycotting China is now the only way to truly uphold the goal of the Olympics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicizing and boycotting Beijing is necessary to uphold the Olympic spirit\n","id":"de25e8c8-860f-4823-ae48-6df743c01605"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Hydroelectric dams<|ARGUMENT|>Most animals that live near rivers have to be able to adapt to natural floods and can easily do the same with the slow not rapid flooding of the area above a dam in the creation of a reservoir. Most animals are not killed by this process and adapt just fine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most animals can adapt to the flooding of land near a river.\n","id":"e12aef69-98ad-4340-906d-ee5081cd249c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>There is no alternative source of value beyond the wellbeing, or potential wellbeing, of conscious creatures. All other philosophical efforts to describe morality in terms of duty, fairness, justice, or some other principle draw upon wellbeing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Maximizing the well-being of conscious creatures is the only thing we can reasonably value.\n","id":"3e7be644-8db1-4487-89fc-6b204402305c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So with the recent United fiasco. People have been shitting on untied for the way the man was treated and their past behaviors. Now I completely agree, that what happened to the man was immoral, illegal, and he should get millions and millions of dollars. Now my beef is that everyone is getting mad at United. Recently, I was talking to someone about it and the thought crossed my mind, that United may have done nothing illegal. Sure it was bullshit that they overbooked, but is that illegal? Sure it was bullshit, that they called the officer on the doctor, but was that allowed? Lastly, the officer who handled that situation was completely out of line. Now the officer does not work for United, he works for the police department. Shouldn't the blame land on him or the police department in question?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The police department and officer should be held accountable for what happened on the United Plane. Not United Airlines.\n","id":"1f9f50c1-f0ec-46b9-a77b-5c7321b2423e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Sing Problematic Christmas Songs?<|ARGUMENT|>Community-led grassroots activism is the best approach there is to tackling poverty. Accordingly, elevating the West's role is misinformed and potentially harmful.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By elevating the role of the Western world as saviours, it undermines local efforts.\n","id":"98506b5b-dc65-4b1d-90b7-c3768539ab8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There was recently a 1 billion dollar meth bust in Australia and its apparently the biggest ever. Maximum fanfare from the federal police, headline news for days in the media, and comments on facebook about how great it is that cops are 'keeping it off our streets'. But it seems really obvious to me that this does nothing to help anyone. The people benefiting most from this are actually the police looks like theyre making a difference and the media being spoonfed a big story . It hasnt made meth any less available to addicts. It hasnt helped any families whos lives are affected by users. It hasnt put money into rehab or mental health services or made any meaningful positive change to anyones lives. And this seems so obvious. Yet average joe on the street will see it as a big deal, something to celebrate. Why?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cmv: large drug busts dont meaningfully change anything at all for the better\n","id":"ad2435b0-9795-4e2e-8699-9058725fdea3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>The government has no business interfering with the internal affairs of companies as long as they do not violate any rules or standards and do not have negative effects beyond the company.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This may be true, but it should not be up to the government to enforce.\n","id":"95812425-3ee8-4578-886b-b8bb37b4f431"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Israel has a track record of selling US arms to third countries without authorization. This was the case in the 1980s when it sold cluster bombs to Ethiopia and in 1999 when it sold drone technology to China Clarke, p. 95<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel could sell sensitive military technology that either the US shares with it or it creates itself in retaliation for US recognition.\n","id":"a506f319-d99c-43a1-83da-fdb46491dad2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like, why isn't alcohol shunned like tobacco is these days? And yes, tobacco, not cigarettes. Tobacco is the substance, not cigarettes. It's like saying beer is a substance instead of alcohol. Anyway, it's arguably just as harmful. When someone doesn't smoke for health reasons, but yet, is completely fine with drinking alcohol and getting drunk, I don't get that. If you're not going to smoke because of its health risks, then you really shouldn't be drinking either. Some of you may argue that drinking in moderation isn't bad, but recent studies suggest differently. In short, both alcohol and tobacco should be shunned by society, not just tobacco, while society glorifies alcohol beyond belief. But what do you think on the matter? Am I right, or am I wrong? That's why I'm posting this here, after all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alcohol should be treated by society like tobacco\n","id":"d28fa275-0f73-4101-b329-0ab11a68cf88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Research of the AEGIS technology is still ongoing after 40 years. A similar fate can be expected for AKMs and therefore costs will be tremendous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Developing new weapon system comes typically at a very high price.\n","id":"60f0a230-74ef-4dd3-9f31-be1383235c03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always sort of been quite curious what it would be like to get sprayed by a skunk the smell of dead skunks on the highway has never bothered me much, so I've wondered what all the fuss is about. It came in a casual conversation with me and a zookeeper aquaintance last night, about how there's skunks in a local forest, and I mentioned that I was curious what it'd be like and have thought about getting sprayed just at some point in my life, just to see. He said he strongly recommended against it, and that he'd rather be bitten by a dog than ever be sprayed directly from a skunk. My reasons why I don't think it'd be so bad are as follows 1 It's just a smell. I don't see how a bad smell could be an effective animal defense. 2 It lasts a long time, but I mean, if I don't have work for 4 days 3 Yes, it apparently can cause blindness, but goggles would solve that problem. Nonetheless, I'm sort of worried that what people say about it might be right but even still, my current view is that it wouldn't be nearly as bad as popular culture dictates.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Getting sprayed by a skunk wouldn't really be that bad, and humans overreact to it way too much\n","id":"705ff9a0-87ce-49d0-9ced-71d860471961"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Princess Peach throughout much of the Mario series is constantly under attack by Bowser and is a classic example of the \"damsel in distress\" trope.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Female characters are often cast in the role of \"damsel in distress with their rescue being the objective of the game.\n","id":"4ec5852e-05db-460b-a1f9-a37886d7e974"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>A one-way trip to Mars may be insignificant. Many trips back and forth they add up. The additive effects become significant as colonies grow larger and become more comfortable with space travel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The more people explore, the likelihood of using gravitational slingshots is heightened. Too many gravitational slingshots throws planets out of orbit\n","id":"d9c46d2d-6851-4e12-9680-fc0f3b0ff53b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The decline of religion in western culture has prompted the rise of less advanced 'big stories ' or ideologies such as fascism and communism, which on their turn have caused the death of millions of people in a minimum amount of time. It is very unlikely those ideologies would have come into existence in a religious culture. jordanbpeterson.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Absent religion, ideologies fill the void and motivate humans to do terrible things.\n","id":"a86a1c80-040a-48d7-9046-8ea8834fb918"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should institutionalized education go completely digital?<|ARGUMENT|>Online technology would open up avenues for 3D illustrations and novel teaching methods not possible with projectors and blackboards. EG, Mathematical graphs, architecture being 'in' a room, engineering design could benefit from this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Online education introduces students to continuous technological capabilities, which can inspire them and help them learn valuable technological skills.\n","id":"8a8baa75-8230-40ef-a783-024c0c7b4c02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We know this world exists, and there are certain rules that we've gleaned from studying it. These rules are universal constants that everyone is bound to regardless of creed, so I don't think it's fair to subject someone to the rules of a deity they may or may not believe in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people should have to explain why they want something legalized or illegalized and any vote with no experimentally proven basis should be thrown out.\n","id":"88b63eb7-e524-44fc-b6ad-e35341217c5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>76 of people who leave prison end up going back within 5 years of getting out, yet nothing seems to be done to change this. Many people end up worse than they were after going to prison. What type of system is that? People go in for small offences and join gangs to survive and come out ready to kill someone who wears the wrong colour on sight. There are also laws that I think are made just to lock people up e.g making marijuana illegal, I'm not some huge pro stoner type of person but I don't agree with it being illegal in so many places. If alcohol can be legal so should weed. I know the reason weed was made illegal in the first was primarily for racial reasons, and I think a bit because the herb can be used to manufacture a lot of things so it would be a threat to some corporations if it was widespread. And private prisons which thrive off prisoners, I think the whole business is shady. A whole business which depends on putting people in jail.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Government Wants People To Go To Prison\n","id":"09b70009-12c2-4674-a48e-0497babbe1cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Portraying gender equality shows people with sexist attitudes what gender equality looks like, which could make it easier for them to envision a gender equal world in real life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Portraying gender equality presents a contradiction to the narratives manufactured under sexist attitudes.\n","id":"9dd6a2a1-86ae-4f7d-95aa-84225ec27b4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey Reddit. I've been a gamer for pretty much my whole life. I'm 25 years old and I've played games from every gen. I've played every Zelda except the DS ones, I've played every Valve game in existence, and I've always owned consoles from all 3 big publishers, and Sega when they still made consoles. SEGATA SANSHIROOOO This is about the game the Last of Us. When I started this game, I had my hopes high. It started with a pretty heartbreaking intro, and went straight into the action. I finished the game after about a month. I have to say, the Last of Us was pretty disappointing. After hearing so many times that the Last of Us was literally the best game of all time, I wanted to believe this game would be amazing, but it honestly just felt like a zombie game. It was sad of course, but I felt sadder so many times in video games that it didn't even feel like a thing I would really remember about the game. The most memorable thing about the game was the story, and even that felt like it wasn't any better than say Half Life. The Last of Us was a great movie, but I felt almost no motivation to play it other than to see what happens. I believe I can name 20 games better than The Last of Us. These aren't necessarily my top 20, but if they are all better than TLOU then it is impossible to it to be in the top 20. If you can convince me that any of those games are not as good, then you have changed my view. Only one game per IP. You have to have played the game Half Life The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim Portal 2 Super Smash Bros. Melee Metal Gear Sold 3 Deus Ex The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time Super Metroid Thief The Dark Project Final Fantasy VII Grand Theft Auto San Andreas Pac Man Yeah that's right. Pac Man. Batman Arkham City Dark Souls Assassin's Creed II Pokemon Gen 1 Halo CE Mega Man 2 Chrono Trigger Red Dead Redemption Since you've requested, here are some things I like in a video game Nice looking NOT graphical specs, just nice looking, Link to the Past looks way better than Ocarina of Time, TLOU was gray, in ways that it should NOT have been though I guess the remastered version kind of fixed that Fun gameplay Something more than just picking up ladders, placing ladders, over and over again A story that is engaging and that the player WANTS to further sometimes not necessary if the game is fun enough but the cordyceps zombies don't even make sense in the things they do when you actually know what the cordyceps is Brings something new to the table oh look zombies and some bullshit scientific explanation as to why said zombies are here wow thats new Interesting gameplay<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Last of Us is not on the top 20 video games of all time.\n","id":"edb9785c-5c42-4fa9-85eb-fdbdc64bc483"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>God is good by God's definition. Human moral judgment of God is irrelevant. Might makes right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As the supreme moral authority, God is not obligated to anything, morally.\n","id":"ce18ff89-75f5-41f3-a12e-43524e8f6585"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think there definitely was a time when feminism had a useful place votes for women, discrimination in the workplace, access to legal abortion. After being a feminist for a period of time, I no longer think feminism is necessary and in fact can perpetuate incorrect facts and dangerous mindsets such as the notion that rape victims are primarily women or that it is a societal disadvantage to be a woman, respectively . As a woman myself, I see no more gender inequality against women than I do against men which is to say that women may have x stacked against them, but men have y. I feel that aligning with feminism or any ~ism, really before seeking out facts means a biased perspective. I do not think the theory of rape culture is beneficial or even objectively real. I do not agree with the rationalisation that feminism is about equality of the sexes. Not to say I think feminists are out to be superior, but rather that the movement regards the interests of women. I'm submitting this because in an ELI5 thread asking about the meaning of rape culture and its origins, my comments and perspectives were repeatedly downvoted for providing info about rape culture and a link to a source I found useful in analysing if it actually existed. Please note, all forms of feminism I am discussing here are those found in western discussions. I definitely think there are countries with a severe inequality for women but do not know enough about their perspectives to say what movement makes sense in those contexts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism is at best unnecessary.\n","id":"d821f535-8654-440a-9501-04002af83a56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I should first say that I am neither with Kavanaugh or Ford in this scandal I think both are getting screwed over by this allegation, with their reputations tarnished indefinitely. I do not believe either are necessarily lying maliciously maybe lapses in memory due to alcohol or 36 years of rumination . I feel bad for them both, as both are receiving a lot of flak, even some aimed at their families, which just isn\u2019t right. However, I don\u2019t agree that these hearings should have any bearing over Kavanaugh\u2019s nomination, and it should be discouraged for Senators to base their vote on the hearings, for the reasons following 1 The incident in question happened 36 years ago, long past statute of limitations for a criminal case and so long ago it is hardly relevant anymore. 2 At the time in question, Kavanaugh was a teenager who was into alcohol. If his character had not fundamentally changed since then, he wouldn\u2019t even have ever been allowed to be a Judge, much less seriously considered for Supreme Court Justice. 3 There is no evidence, unless the FBI investigation somehow turns up something. It is merely Ford\u2019s word against Kavanaugh\u2019s, and because we operate on a system dictating \u201cinnocent until proven guilty\u201d, that is not enough to prove the man is a rapist. It is entirely possible, though I will grant not likely, that Doctor Ford made the entire story up, and all of it could be BS. 4 The allegation came after 30 some hours of questioning, during which nothing of the sort was ever called to attention. I might be off on a number or two, but this is my position on this whole circus. I feel it\u2019s a real shame that it turned partisan, but that was inevitable in a way. I would love to hear what you all have to say, and I only ask for us to try and be more civil and composed than the Senate was when discussing this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The allegation made against Judge Kavanaugh by Doctor Ford should not be considered as influence for whether or not he is nominated.\n","id":"2160d2e4-f617-46ef-bed6-9c17e10a4fe7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Google Censor Their Search Results In Order To Operate In China?<|ARGUMENT|>Only a tiny percentage p.9 of Chinese internet users will attempt to use Google to search for 'controversial terms' such as 'democracy' or 'human rights.' The majority of users will not be affected by Chinese censorship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having access to a restricted Google search engine is better than not having access at all.\n","id":"f4b7645f-04c4-457f-aef9-1acb8a900eba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Said relationship between God and His creation, man, and the continued fellowship between them was predicated on the choice to obey or disobey God's one command to him and his wife not to eat or even touch of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Man chose to disobey and thus, fellowship with God was broken.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God's purpose in creating man was not merely the act of creation, but rather to seek relationship with Him, fellowship with Him; and true, genuine relationship is not possible if either party lacks the ability to choose to maintain or participate in said relationship.\n","id":"2585d01b-8cac-42c2-9685-1420bc577003"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>ers, Any casual perusal of internet comments on topics related to the recent coup attempt against Turkey's government will reveal mountains of examples directly accusing the government itself of being responsible for having staged faked the recent coup attempt, which resulted in about 2500 casualties, largely civilian, and involved acts such as missile attacks on the Turkish Parliament. However, so far, I haven't seen anything that I think could reasonably be considered hard evidence of this. Although it is true that the Turkish government has cracked down on dissident groups in the wake of the violence, this seems like very weak evidence that the coup itself was a conspiracy, because cracking down on dissidents is what any government would be expected to do following a real coup attempt that involves attack helicopters firing on crowds of protesters in the streets, police stations, and the Turkish legislature. Specifically, what I'm looking for is any sort of hard evidence that the coup was plotted or orchestrated at the highest levels of the Turkish government i.e. by President Erdogan and his allies, rather than by actual dissidents both inside and outside the Turkish military establishment. If you can provide that, you will definitely Change My View EDIT Not sure why this is marked Election . I've contacted the mods. EDIT Fixed. Huzzah EDIT I think editing it un fixes it, maybe? Contacting mods again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The accusation that the Turkish coup was faked by the AKP is essentially baseless conspiracy theorizing and receives far more attention than it deserves\n","id":"c9b0a4b0-6679-491e-866b-01bde9847010"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most of my assumptions are based on the season 5 episode The Perils of Polling about the 2000 election. The gist of that episode is that Hank is initially very supportive of George W Bush, but after receiving a limp handshake from him, develops a lot of qualms about voting for him. Hank decides to forgo voting in the election and instead drives to Mexico with Dale, but has a last minute change of heart and races back to Arlen to vote. Who he votes for is left ambiguous. I think the events of that episode would have permanently turned Hank off the idea of abstaining from a presidential election. And in fact, Hank takes much pride in fulfilling his civic duties, rejoicing when he gets jury duty etc. There's no way he would sit 2016 out. Hank also is not one for fringe candidates. The episode I mentioned early briefly delved into that field as well. A staple of the show is Hank's interaction with assorted weirdos and extremists on both sides of the political spectrum. I see him dismissing Jill Stein straight out of hand for that reason. And even if you don't consider her to be a little fringey, then her stance on pot definitely wouldn't jive with Hank. Now Hank is rather obviously a Republican. Big time. He lives in central Texas and he has an enormous contempt of big city Hollywood, DC and NY elitism, despite being a native New Yorker himself. But he is not a radical Republican incapable of having his mind changed. Remember he very possibly could have voted for Gore over his own Republican governor. He also named his dog Ladybird, and has personally met and received counseling from Jimmy Carter although he is still not a fan Hank does not like the Clintons. I don't remember off the top of my head any specific mentions of either one, but he's definitely no fan of Bill's. His Lewinsky scandal definitely would have left a sour taste in his mouth. But the truth is, Hank is no fan of the civilian version of Trump either. I think Trump's arrogance, and his questionable business dealings would turn hank off of him rather quickly. Not to mention his three marriages and the fact that he is an unabashed New Yorker, far more so than the Arkansas natives . Hank would have had his friends and family split pretty predictably. Dale, Nancy, Boomhaur, Bill, BoJack, Buck Strickland, and Lucky would have pretty obviously been Trump Supporters, while Peggy on account of her feminist ideas , Enrike, and the mysteriously absent Chris Rock character would probably have been Hillary supporters. I'm unsure about Kahn and Minh I think they would be trump leaning , although Connie would definitely be for Hillary. I think Hank would have been a strong Rubio supporter who would have then fallen back to Kasich and then switched to Hillary after his withdrawal. I think if the election were to play out in the show in an episode, Hank would be questioning himself a lot, being swayed by Buck, but ultimately upon seeing some of the people like Thathertan at an Arlen trump rally, would fall back to Hillary. The episode might also feature some hippy Bernie types. Maybe the Patriots's endorsement of Trump might put him over, I don't know. Now you'll notice at this point, I've left out two term governor of the neighboring state of NM, Gary Johnson. Now he would seem like a pretty reasonable option on paper, but I think his quirkiness puts him in the territory of the limp handed Bush. And I genuinely believe if Hank were to shake his hand and I think he would believe that too. Basically I think if you wanted to , a good way to do it would be to convince me that Hank really hates Democrats or the Clintons intrinsically. Much, much more so than he would a 'jackass' like the Donald. I don't think I can be swayed that Hank would vote third party, but you are welcome to try. This website is a good resource for KOTH stuff<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hank Hill would have voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Election\n","id":"5b5e04c4-a354-4e02-b069-b402d2830e39"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Unless you're trying to create an antisocial version of what your kid could have been. Here are my arguing points hitting kids only teaches children to lie or not get caught kids are taught violence is acceptable in certain contexts studies have shown children in spanking households to be more violent towards their peers, their future spouses and their future children spanking is a tactic for parents who are not willing or are unable to explain to a child why he she should correct his or her behavior violent childhoods are one of the few things the rapists and murderers have in common weakens the relationship between children and their parents These last few reasons I think spanking is wrong are more opioniated its cowardly. To hit the little people who are completely dependent on you and probably even idolize you. I dont think it's a coincidence that the only people in the entire world you are allowed to hit are the only people without rights there is more than enough violence in the world today. Children should have one place where they dont have to fear it i think its low class. Why is it that there is a negative correlation between household income and spanking? i genuinely find spanking to be an antisocial trait. I just can't see how people can even bring themselves to do it. Change my view guys. I have a strong opinion on the matter, as I can't find any empirical data to suggest anything positive on spanking. However, I am open to new information. Not in the form of anecdotes though, so I'll be disregarding all of the well I turned out okay arguments. No you didn't if you think that justifies violent parenting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"spanking children is a bad parenting strategy\n","id":"c7335630-7c30-4cbb-bb2c-67d7ce990079"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Trump Collude with Russia?<|ARGUMENT|>The pro-Trump Sinclair Media Group is the largest broadcast company in the United States, with local affiliate stations that reach 70 percent of American households.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Television, the primary political news source in the US, is dominated by conservative media.\n","id":"0484a9d9-e50d-4fa3-a886-b14aab225117"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that when men decide to have sex with a woman, they take the risk that she will get pregnant. So, if she does get pregnant and decides to keep the baby, the man should be required to support the child until they are 18. I think if men don't want to have kids there are plenty of things they can do to avoid it vasectomy, abstinence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that men should be forced to pay child support when they father a child, regardless of whether they want the child or not.\n","id":"d1faa9e8-0923-405e-8e67-d84936ac186a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a young mixed race person who does not feel at home in either mainstream political party, I recently started working for a campaign for a GOP candidate who is an immigrant and a minority. This candidate was approached by state GOP leadership to run, it was not his idea alone, and they have given him a decent chunk of money for a state race. At a recent campaign strategy meeting, the older white men higher up in the local party referred to a Black consultant as very good at Tribal meetings, and told us that the Asian candidate loves to hunt in a loincloth in the jungle with his big knives. These aren't words that would necessarily come to mind first when you're talking about ethnic groups in my opinion. Seeing as the GOP is not necessarily in the best place and as old, predominantly white people are dying off, you would think that they should put a little more effort into recruiting and maintaining a more diverse voter make up. From what I have seen at events and what people say behind closed doors at campaign meeting for multiple different candidates, the GOP does not seem to want anyone who isn't white to join even if they hold similar views on fiscal policy and guns. SORRY IF I'M A BIT SLOW TO RESPOND MY INTERNET IS GOING IN AND OUT ATM yay comcast<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The GOP doesn't want young non-white voters\n","id":"351d0ddc-8b22-4d98-aa8d-bd8b8ee29fec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should renewable energy sources replace fossil fuels?<|ARGUMENT|>Storage options for wind and solar energy currently are only batteries, which rely on materials like lithium,which is harmful to the enviroment, exepensive and finite like the fossil fuels and coal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Replacing fossil fuels with solar and wind power is a very expensive and complex process.\n","id":"f0d99064-a49b-44a6-9b79-c591ccaa536f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Economy wide , short to mid term, a no deal brexit would be absolutely devastating to the UK and pretty painful for EU . UK backing out from it would put a stop to hurting the economies. UK backing out now would, however, be a powerful blow to EU's stability. A constructive proof that even if things get badly, there are no repercussions. It would encourage political cynicism and fuel anti EU movements across EU. A no deal Brexit is an occasion to show how much individual countries gain from being a part of the bloc in a way that everyone understands. Abstract rhetoric based on values and the common good falls on deaf ears. Numbers, estimates are lost on masses swaying elections. They don't understand them and or don't believe people quoting them. Brexit referendum was a great proof of that. If UK pulls out from Brexit, those people will believe they were lied to again. That the democracy failed them. The not only UK's far right will continue to flourish on that. A hard brexit means a short spike of mainly economical pain but a healthier EU going forward. I actually believe UK would come back to EU EEA soon ish. All outcomes where brexiteers feel lied to and don't pay the full economic price of brexit will result in furthering populism and destabilising EU. There's also a side note that I made a conscious effort not to take into consideration while making my mind on the topic. The hard brexit and the destruction it will cause to UK's economy feels fair on some basic level. I do acknowledge it'd be extremely unfair to people who voted remain. I do acknowledge that even if someone made a bad decision, they shouldn't be potentially literally cut off from meds they need to live or face life changing traumas e.g. losing a house and that would certainly happen to some people. I do acknowledge that also individuals outside UK will be affected. Having said that, treaties between countries are inherently linked to collective responsibility, and at the level of nations and not individuals, a huge economical blow for UK simply feels just. Look at how many opt outs UK has in its current relations with EU opt out ~ 'everyone does A, but you're special and you don't have to' UK's way of doing politics seems as if they didn't notice they're not the mighty empire they once were. I cannot help but feel like UK holds EU in contempt. UK literally seemed to believe they'd strike a picky choosy deal with EU. One that would grant all the perks of belonging to EU, but being exempt from the responsibilities and constraints its members have. It STILL feels that way, given their recent votes in parliament. Depending on how you look at it, that seems either childishly naive OR outright insulting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A no-deal Brexit is an initially painful, but healthiest way forward long-term.\n","id":"64743321-bb9e-4981-9350-2fb4dbd29631"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This  comes from Australia, where tipping isn't much of a thing. I believe that the wage of food delivery drivers, plus any additional delivery pay isn't sufficient considering the fuel costs and wear tear on their personal vehicles. I believe that on an average week, a delivery driver will earn less or at least certainly not more at the end of the day delivering pizzas, than someone working in the kitchen, or in an unrelated but similarly low wage field like retail. To Change My View, you must show that delivery drivers earn a sufficient amount to cover their vehicle costs to put them on par with other low wage workers. Bonus points will go towards those that can argue against this 'Standard comprehensive insurance on an individual's private vehicle will not cover commercial use of that vehicle'. I believe private insurance won't cover commercial use, so that's a double whammy against delivery drivers of private vehicles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that delivery driving using your own vehicle e.g. Pizza is under-paid.\n","id":"87eb21ba-ea2a-4cb8-ac0a-4567f5e17494"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Our perception as humans is not necessarily the same as any other human<|ARGUMENT|>Human eyes use \"rods and cones\" to convert light to electrical impulses which are then sent to the occipital lobe of the brain citation In humans who have the anatomy for converting light and processing it in the brain, the majority seem to function the same.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Of those humans who possess the anatomy for each sense, many are built the same way.\n","id":"0f369e7e-9ad5-4f66-b5c7-b8ed406fb7f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello, First of all just wanted to let you guys know that this sub has brought upon a lot of insights into issues that I've learned a great deal about. nbsp I've been trying to do my best to gather knowledge about the fiasco going on in the Middle East and I've come to the conclusion that the only way they will internally progress is through a massive war of horrific consequences. nbsp I would initially like to state that Islam is NOT the only reason for the source of conflict in the area. While it does play a fundamental part, we have multiple other variables for the instability such as Economic resource, Poverty, education priorities, inability to industrialize etc. Many times religion is used as tool to exploit the lower class to distract and insulate them from the benefits of the modern economy. However, any ideology can do this most recently communism has taken up this role. nbsp The current status in the Middle East has really motivated me to understand the history of the area going back to 5,000 years ago. After doing my albeit very amateur research, I've come to the conclusion that the Middle East has actually never been unified under a unified ideal maybe Cyrus the Great did this but it's tough to say . Specifically the area of Mesopotamia or modern day Iraq, that chunk of land has NEVER been unified, why the British thought they could do it is beyond me cynic in me says for economic reasons . Generally, there has always been a southern power Babylon and a northern power the Assyrians . Beyond that, the area of Iraq have essentially been under the control of empires that conquered them through violent means we start with Cyrus the Great forming the Persian empire. From there we go from the Persians gt Selucids gt the Parthians gt Sassanids gt Arab Caliphate gt Ottomans. Point being, I think our current view of a potential peaceful Middle East is built on a false premise, the area has NEVER been peaceful or unified. Even today, I look at Iraq, generally split between the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias causing the fundamental conflict. It's quite complex but the factors for conflict include religious ideology. ethnic difference indo european blood vs Arab , poverty, economic interests etc. But really, my point is that there are 5000 years of history bubbling up that have caused these schisms between the people and that doesn't turn around over night. nbsp I then looked to Europe to understand better how Western democracy has formed our current modern and relatively peaceful civilization. One thing I very quickly learned is that our post WW2 modern world is the exception to the rule and actually the current state of the Middle East has been the norm throughout almost all of recorded history. Europe has been at each others throats forever starting with the Greeks and the Romans. I can go down the list, the 30 years war, 100 years war, Spanish inquisition, Napoleonic conquests, French Revolution, etc. nbsp Finally, after everything I've read it seems that everything points to WW1 and WW2 being the reasons that Europe and Western civilization essentially stopped fighting each other. The combination of literally flattening Europe with the worst atrocities in human history combined with the introduction of Nukes has inspired people to essentially think mother of god, we can't do this again. We were almost on the verge of the collapse of society and there is no margin for error any more with the current technology. All our political cultural religious differences are not worth fighting over if this is the consequence referring to the World Wars . nbsp Looking further back in history as well, it becomes apparent that WW2 isn't unique in this scenario. Fundamental changes in society's ideologies almost always change due to MASSIVE amounts of violence. Just to name a few nbsp Mongol conquests opening up the Silk Road and giving Europe a step up on the Middle East nbsp Black Plague nbsp Punic Wars nbsp Sacking of Assyria Nineveh specifically nbsp Mao's reign in China nbsp Stalin in Russia nbsp Pol Pot in Cambodia nbsp Genocide of Native Americans nbsp Alexander's conquests nbsp I can go on and on. As cynical as this is, 500 years from now if we make it the Holocaust and ww2 will be a mere footnote and necessary evil to give birth to nbsp an unprecedented peaceful era in the West nbsp A jewish homeland nbsp Whether ww2 and millions of lives was worth the era of peace is yet to be settled on as a net positive. Anyways, it's increasingly apparent that Middle East needs a huge cultural revolution towards secularism and the quintessential ideas of the enlightenment. History has proven that this almost NEVER happens peacefully. It generally takes such an incredible form of violence to decimate the population, economy, and culture that people essentially have to get together and build from the ground up and unify with each other through grief. The equivalent of a large scale brutal war in the middle east, while borderline apocalyptic, is the only method I can see to disrupt the established way of things in the Middle East. nbsp Now don't get me wrong, I WISH that we could do this peacefully, and I'm not advocating a large scale war because while in the long term it's a positive, it will be a terrible atrocity for my generation. I wish we could get away from Arab Oil money and rather support secular Arabs that would provide funding towards a grassroots educational system that doesn't indoctrinate the children. However, I just don't see how that can happen given history has never given me an example of this happening peacefully. Too many powerful people in the Middle East have too much to lose with a stabilized and secular Middle East. They won't go down swinging. nbsp In short, I don't see how you destroy the fundamental pillars and infrastructure of Middle Eastern society without catastrophic violent means, please change my view nbsp EDIT first post on reddit. Trying to understand how to format paragraphs lol.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"the only way the Middle East can achieve a unified peace is via a World War 2 scenario that Europe went through.\n","id":"199315b0-72a9-423b-9beb-b10978ff6742"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Resurrect Extinct Species?<|ARGUMENT|>We have limited ability to hunt predators in the oceans, so an inedible e.g. poisonous or largely inedible predator of the major edible fish populations could leave us with little to no edible fish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Resurrecting a species that no longer has a natural predator could cause it to multiply out of control and ravage species or fauna we need, driving either toward extinction.\n","id":"93958d96-af79-4706-a69b-c191f76ebb23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that parents of a particular religion should not be able to send their children to schools that teach that religion as the out and out truth. I believe that this will only lead to children growing up with more closed minds about religion. Especially if they are taught at the school that the religion is the absolute out and out truth. In my opinion, all schools should teach that all faiths are acceptable. No parent has the right to channel their child to a specific religion or no religion and that the child can have an open mind to choose their religion once older. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think religious schools should be banned.\n","id":"a09daaf2-e046-4dad-b89a-28b31a99277a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>For Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus is enough of a well-evidenced supernatural claim, as well as a significant theological event, that it alone is what defines the religion. The nature of who Jesus is and what His resurrection means is vital. Other more specific details such as interpretation of creation accounts can and do differ to a wide extent without breaking the fellowship or challenging the credibility of those who agree about Jesus and the resurrection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are religions in which the exact interpretations of the creation account of the specific region is not agreed upon by everyone within the religion. This is not troublesome as religions tend to have room for differing beliefs under a \"tent\" of fundamental beliefs which is likely true of almost every comprehensive view of the world, religious or otherwise.\n","id":"df742963-cecc-44f5-af46-6b9217007b0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Impeachment would be more dangerous for the stability of the nation: the American legal system is based on the Common Law so devising a system to make him fall would create a dangerous precedent usable in the future to affect presidents who are making right but unpopular choices.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Administrative Holding Area to act as a place to put claims that have been flagged for review with no changes for awhile. Do not create new claims in this branch.\n","id":"a1615619-147a-49b6-a583-f8693656dc55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all companies be entirely owned by their workers?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no meaningful difference between the right to own wealth and to use it. Companies founded by owners are nothing more than the manifestation of their private wealth, just like goods and services they purchase are.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Businesses are property and those who found businesses deserve to own them, sell them, and control them.\n","id":"2501f519-e7d9-4222-a6db-3d52917b8d96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>At a certain level of agriculture, the grunt work is handled by machinery, making the physical strength of the operator irrelevant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Biological differences have stopped being significant since the Industrial Revolution.\n","id":"e71aa9b1-71da-45f8-b2f0-24aebd151624"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>Unregulated sectors of human activity political or financial inevitably lead to power being accumulated in the hands of the few. This phenomenon has been observed in a variety of contexts, and is variously referred to as thePareto Distribution 80\/20 Rule or the Mathew Effect<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inherent information asymmetries between players in a market inevitably give rise to monopolies that could result in tyranny. Redistribution prevents that.\n","id":"e937ce33-9feb-43d1-ab04-07a98e91fd66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>Considering the high levels of taxation paid by those earning above $250,000 per anum, it is unjust for the state to go further and deny them wages which they earned, and paid tax on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unclear why aggregate utility should trump the fact that wealthier individuals worked for, earned, and hence deserve, their extra income.\n","id":"d0babb01-14d6-469f-b87c-ca3123b1628e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>The large part of foods have in some way animal origin intakes. That includes the sugars, some of them, the exaustion and death of bees for the production of japan almonds. It's almost impossible to prevent eating moving life, the only way is to certificate, under some sort of paid authority.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A great many human activities cause the deaths of animals. A focus on meat leads to moral inconsistency and potential hypocrisy.\n","id":"8f78d699-e363-4db9-b1e6-8d943ee8dc2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, the you you identify with is probably the summation of biological activity in a complex and ordered fashion in such a way that produces consciousness. Secondly, when speaking of self centered or selfish fears, you can only rationally fear that which you may possibly experience. Further, It is only rational to fear possible experiences as they would be experienced by you at the time they can or will occur . Thirdly, experience terminates before or when the biological integrity of your being terminates. This is death. Conclusion Since death requires an end to experience, you cannot rationally fear experiencing the absense of experience. Fear of an end to experience is therefore irrational.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fearing death doesn't make any sense.\n","id":"859be664-5e1d-44db-bb94-3b2425800b2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start by saying my view is more nuanced than the title suggests. Since PC Culture is kind of poorly defined, I'll try to elaborate on what I mean in detail. Let me start by starting with some relevant things I am assuming are true Words heavily influence the way people think, and may even be at the root of it Using words that imply harmful stereotypes about groups of people often perpetuates those stereotypes. People like to group things into categories, and make judgments about categories. They do this automatically, and while this is a useful heuristic in most real world contexts, it also contributes to harmful tribalism that drives people apart. Because of this, people should be careful about the words they use to describe one another. The best, and most effective way to dismantle negative impressions about groups of people is through education. OK, given all that, I'm going to define my terms Political Correctness using words or behavior which will not offend any group of people, especially when describing groups identified by external markers such as race, gender, culture, or sexual orientation. Political Correctness culture a political movement in which taking offense at language is used as a vector to effect change. The idea being that changing the way people speak will help change the way people think. I think PC Culture is harmful for a few reasons It's co morbid with outrage culture. I can't count how many times I've seen what could have been interesting discussions between people on a divisive topic shut down because someone used an offensive word, which caused outrage in the other person. This happens to me personally sometimes, and my unhealthy impulse is to start trolling by taking offense to something I say, an extreme straw man version of my opinion seems to be projected onto me, and my instinct is to take that projection to an extreme to sort of expose the absurdity of the other person's assumptions. Unfortunately, this usually just ends up fueling the offended fire. It's makes discussions shallow and personal, and discourages listening. Suppose I use an offensive word, but I have no idea why it's offensive. If someone gets upset at me for using the word, it makes me feel attacked, and for the ensuing discussion whether it's ok for me to use that word retarded to describe something I think is stupid to get to the important part the history of mentally disabled being mistreated and misjudged , it requires a lot of maturity and patience. It can be effective at changing peoples' minds, but often for the worse. Because people often feel personally attacked when someone takes offense to a word they used, this can have the opposite effect of changing someones' mind about a topic. For example, if someone takes offense to something I say, and I don't understand why, I can feel like I'm being attacked, and my self preservation instinct might be to figure out what's wrong with the person who is attacking me, what group they belong to, and how to distance myself from people from that group. note I recognize that PC Culture may not be the best term for what I'm describing, and if anyone has something better I'd be thrilled to use a word that doesn't stick me in the others category among people who ascribe to this kind of thinking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"PC Culture is harmful, even for its proponents\n","id":"c89d0bc5-be9d-4ff9-bf6e-54be5f0b9b76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I used to think canned food drives were a great idea, until I learned that they make no sense economically speaking. This article explains some of the reasons for this, but really you only need to know these three Food banks can buy food in bulk for about 5 cents on the dollar. Food banks have to inspect, sort and store the food they receive from donations. This is where they incur most of their overhead. About 50 of the donated food gets thrown in the trash because it doesn't meet their requirements. Waste and inefficiency Based on these assumptions, at best, canned food drives are 40 times less efficient than cash donations. That's not taking into account the time and resources that go into the food drive itself, or operating a food bank. Example suppose we collect 2,000 pounds of food at an average cost of about 1 lb. The first thing the food bank does is pay people to sort through it and throw out anything that doesn't meet their nutritional requirements or whatever . We're left with about 1,000 lbs of food that the food bank could have bought in bulk with just 50 in cash donations 0.05 0.5 2000 50 So we're talking about spending 2,000 to do 50 worth of good and put half a ton of food directly into a landfill. But that doesn't even take into account the cost of running the food bank Overhead Example suppose it takes 8 hours to sort and inspect the food we donated, and the food bank pays its workers minimum wage 9 in my state . If it has no other overhead costs, the net benefit of our donation would be 0.05 0.5 2000 9 8 22 Those are some pretty optimistic assumptions, and already we're spending 2,000 to waste 22 and put half a ton of food directly into a landfill. Of course, food banks have other overhead costs, but they're harder to calculate and I feel like I've made my point. Even if the food we donated cost us nothing, it seems pretty obvious that it would have to be worth more than 50 to make it worthwhile for the food bank to accept it. Possible objections I'm not going to list all the objections I can think of, I just wanted to point out that most of them are some variation of the fallacy of the broken window For example, if the food bank is run entirely by volunteers, we don't need to calculate their labor costs. But we do have to take into account the opportunity cost of the labor involved. If the volunteers weren't sorting our cans, they could be doing something else. Even if there was literally nothing else to do at the food bank, they could be volunteering somewhere else. There's no shortage of worthwhile causes. Similarly, there's a lot of unnecessary work involved in buying and collecting 2,000 lbs of food. It might be small compared to the waste involved in paying 40x more for it, but that's not saying much. One thing I'm honestly not sure about is how many people actually go out and buy food to donate as opposed to donating something from their pantry that they didn't want, which is less crazy but still a waste of everyone's time as I tried to explain above . I spoke to the people who run the holiday food drive at work, and it sounds like that's what most people are doing. Edit I mean most people buy food specifically to give to the food drive. They encourage people to give their money to one person preferably someone with a Costco membership , rather than driving to the supermarket separately. What's stopping those people from giving their money directly to the food bank? tl dr Food drives waste huge amounts of food and money. Your money would have gone at least 40 times farther if you had just given it to the food bank directly. That's before taking into account the costs of collecting the food and operating a food bank, which eat up the entire value of any food you donate and then some. IANE I am not an economist but it seems like no matter how you slice it, canned food drives make no sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Canned food drives are a colossal waste of resources.\n","id":"1dfd66fa-b273-40ca-a342-e5260e2369f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We\/Justices should not appeal to tradition when interpreting the U.S. Constitution.<|ARGUMENT|>Up to 69% more than two-to-one 69% to 29%\u2014say the justices should base their rulings on the Constitution\u2019s original meaning rather than on what it means in current times. of Republicans say the justices should base their rulings on the Constitution\u2019s original meaning rather than on what it means in current times.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The American people are divided on whether or not the Supreme Court should appeal to tradition. This lack of consensus makes it difficult to rely on their will.\n","id":"92f46500-641e-424c-be22-71a27d4342ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>It does not matter if Sanders is a committed Democrat because ideally we would not be effectively limited to having to only choose between candidates from the two main parties anyway. A candidate's voting record should be the focus when ones decides who to vote for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should not matter if Sanders is officially a part of the Democratic party if he has the support of Democratic voters.\n","id":"8603475d-8391-4d87-bcdc-f1ace17979e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Calves are removed from the mothers at birth, which is cruel to both calf and mother.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The dairy industry is often more cruel than the meat industry.\n","id":"481aa021-e9d4-4cea-b901-d8a5936abb61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If abortion is a morally sound act. Why do we instinctively feel 'double' sad when a pregnant woman dies? Surely then The logic would follow that unborn babies are only attributed with value in our society when the mother of said unborn baby wants to keep it. Does that not seem twisted to anybody but myself? How is it just, that our emotional attachment to something like this can hang solely on the whether or not somebody wants it? Where is our objectivity? Disclaimer I am proudly pro choice. However, I am very much of the belief that abortion is an evil act I believe it should be taken more seriously and I vehemently detest our societies 'gliterization' of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it is logically absurd that abortion is seen as morally sound when if a mother carrying an unborn baby is murdered, it is seen as 'double' bad.\n","id":"d2c2c6b7-906d-4691-a44e-50add078d467"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> Google and Facebook should be regulated as Public Utilities. Google and Facebook have become a prime source of news and internet search results for most Americans. Facebook has engaged in the insertion of fake news and an over abundance of anti conservative stories. Google has manipulated search results in a way that gives illegal advantage to its own services while harming the company\u2019s rivals. Google and Facebook earned 99 of new digital ad spending last year The Google Facebook advertising duopoly forms an insurmountable barrier to entry of any new digital ad provider. In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has referred to Facebook as a \u201csocial utility . note Utility regulation does not mean government ownership but rather righter regulation of what it is able to do and prices it is able to charge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Google and Facebook should be regulated as Public Utilities\n","id":"5a249b2b-f1ce-4884-92b6-20b1a66d9a58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To me, being obsessed with the culture of a country other than your own is just very strange. I understand that people are obsessed with different things based on personal tastes but to me it is just odd. This is especially the case when you are from a developed country and the standards of living in your own country is already very high. I personally know people obsessed with British, French, German, and Nordic cultures. A lot of these people dream also about moving to these countries. I personally find this mindset very strange. I understand that there must be something appealing about those cultures to these people, but really, every country and culture has its own flaws. As an example, many European countries have issues with its Syrian refugees, so maybe these Nordic countries do not value human rights as much as those Nordic lovers think. And another thing you may really love these countries and cultures, but the truth is the average person from that country and its government couldn't care less about you. If you move to these countries, chances are you will experience racism of some sort even if it is very subtle. It is a part of human nature of be xenophobic. Maybe white people who move abroad are less likely to have issues with this but still I can understand why some people like their own country and culture. It may be linked to patriotic reasons and it's the environment they grew up in after all. Being obsessed with another country and culture though is just odd. r  please explain why anyone could be so obsessed with a country and culture that is not their own despite that every culture has its own flaws and each country has its fair share of xenophobic people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being obsessed with the culture of a country other than your own when you are from a developed country is very strange to me\n","id":"aa32f984-1c58-4fba-8fd8-aa9587e6fd8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>There are a vast number of people, approximately 2.2 billion Christians 32% of the world\u2019s population, 1.6 billion Muslims 23%, and 14 million Jews 0.2%, who believe in this origin story.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to three main monotheistic religions' scriptures, God created the man and the woman as different and complementary.\n","id":"930529cd-c67f-44e8-836b-e62f66afbb79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So first, a note about taxation as a principle I believe it is immoral to take stuff from people against their will. That's what taxation is. Its just that we have to pay for certain things, so a certain level of taxation is required. So we do an immoral thing for a moral reason. The good outweighs the bad. Once you start taking more than 50 of what someone makes however, I no longer feel that way. The more you take, the worse it is from a moral perspective. And if you're crossing over the 50 line, I mean if you're taking HALF of everything someone makes, there better be a damn good reason. You better have exhausted all other options, rooted out corruption within the government, closed down some unnecessary programs, diverted money from other programs that weren't necessary, and every program you have running should be necessary for the health and lives of people and be effective at its stated goal. If you haven't done all that, you shouldn't be taxing people more. I figured I'd explain this view first. If people are dying in huge numbers or something and there's just no way to divert funds from any program because they're all super super necessary, and everything is running efficiently, ok fine. There may be some crazy extreme case where taxing more is okay. But we're not in that situation. I think we should exhaust every option first, before taxing people more. Total US government revenue is expected to bet about 7 trillion dollars this year. There are 320 million people in the US. So that's 21,875 per person that the government gets. A google search tells me about 45 Million people live in poverty in the US. If we spent the entire 7 trillion dollars on people in poverty, each would get 155,555.55. I understand that there's overhead to running the government, and they need to pay for stuff like bridges and all that. Lets say its 50 . 50 of the money that goes in there just used up to keep shit running. Okay, then each person in poverty should get like 75K. The way I see it, if the government needs funding for something, they should take money from some other place. It just doesn't make sense to me to say they need more money. Let me just say also that I understand that in the US, we have multiple governments. Some governments may be underfunded while others are not. I get that. I'm saying the amount of money sucked out of the population and put into government should not increase. Whether or not some governments do require more funding, that may be resolved by somehow sending them money from other governments or something.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Total Government Revenue for the US should not increase.\n","id":"f69cc6fc-228a-4842-a59f-8ec90d49309b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Marriage Is An Outdated Institution<|ARGUMENT|>Marriage as a religious institution still retains its validity in a country whose main state religion is Christianity. For atheists, marriage need not represent religious bonding, but may still be a socially recognised approval and public avowal of love and commitment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marriage as a religious institution still retains its validity in a country whose main state religio...\n","id":"19635709-e178-4f71-9675-cff3df0f56be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, there is this big discussion of whether the Great Depression was due to laissez faire or due to the Government's actions at least, where I live . Ok, maybe not that big a discussion, but Ancaps will often appear to say it was all the Governments fault. x200B As far As I'm concerned, the 1920s in the US was a period of laissez faire, with Republicans in power, heavily influenced by lobby by big business owners Henry Ford, for example , a period in which efforts were made to weaken unions. Productivity increased dramatically due in large part to Fordism and technological innovations that had enabled new industrial sectors such as aviation and electronics . It was a time of easy credit for consumption and, therefore, of indebtedness. There is no doubt that the 1920s were a time of economic growth in the US, but the statistics say 40 of Americans at that time were poor officially, they were on the poverty line , while the financial sector concentrated wealth as never before. x200B In addition, farmers faced the crisis first, because they expanded greatly and unsustainably during WWI again, indebtedness of rural producers . Of course we have the government's participation in granting of subsidies during WWI. x200B In any case, the key issue was easy credit and indebtedness. Banks lent more money for people to invest in stocks and real estate than they lent to business owners. That is, things were leading to a big crisis, all that was lacking was a little economic uncertainty. x200B Again, as far as I'm concerned, uncertainty led to those who had money invested in deregulated banks to withdraw the money, fearing banks would go bankrupt. The banks went after the warranties, but as there were mortgages and debt, the banks went bankrupt and went bankrupt. When the banks went after the money, they went bankrupt. With several banks going bankrupt, credit became extremely difficult. With less money circulating, deflation came. With deflation, companies sought to cut costs, by firing workers, causing unemployment. With high unemployment, there was no consumption. All part of a vicious cycle. x200B It is worth noting that the Federal Reserve, adopting laissez faire policies, did not help the banks, did not inject money into the economy, which could well have stopped cushioned the crisis as it did in 2008 2009 . x200B Then there was the international scenario, exemplified by the German indebtedness 30 billion for France and England . Germany did not have that money and got it from the American banks. x200B Yes, I know there was also the Hawley Smoot tax, which, in the international context, wanted to protect the American industry, further discouraged consumption and trade. There was also an increase in taxes in order to balance the public accounts, so that people would regain economic optimism. x200B But there was also a very important point economists advised influenced the inept President Hoover to adopt orthodox economic policies, that is, to do nothing more laissez faire leave the free market alone, let it be . x200B So, all in all, I see very little Government influence, and I think the banks and the total lack of regulation were the main culprits for the crisis. It seems to me that, had the Government act vigorously, the Great Depression could have been weaker. x200B Am I missing something? Is any of that not true?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banks and laissez-faire were responsible for the great depression.\n","id":"364945f9-408d-47fc-9951-8a1aff70da4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>American families everywhere are decaying and with them the corrosion of America's structural foundations as a super culture, one that has transcended so many others because of the melting pot that America once was, and one that has allowed us remain resilient to any threat, be it physical or metaphysical. It won't completely cease to exist but in the future, it will look entirely different. Imagine, it might be something akin to Brave New World, or a similar science fiction dystopia. People are born, there's no such thing as family, you are educated, and you are put to work in the soulless states. Altruism is dismissed more commonly dismissed by the individual. The parents before the Millennial generation are more concerned about their well being than anything else, and at a very high cost the value of family. By putting one's self first, the individual will be taking away from any offspring the probability of having a successfully functioning family. This is a cumulative problem. It cannot easily be detected with surveys and statistics. Years from now when people are studying America's end they'll neglect to examine the crumbling of the structure and integrity of the American nuclear family. There will be no tipping point. This is the way America dies. Not with a bang but a whimper. Edit List of sources I have gathered to support challenge The Changing American Family by Herbert S. Klein Changes in the American Family by Molly Castelloe, Ph.D. The American Family Where We Are Today U.S. Society and Values, U.S. Department of State electronic journal, Vol. 6, January 2001 by Stephanie Coontz STATE OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY by Terri Carroll '88 The Changing Face of the American Family By Tim Stanley Trends in American Family Life Decline of the American family By J. Randal Hall Decline of the Family in America by David L. Goetsch American family decline It's about money, not morals By Paul Krugman The decline of the American family by Thomas Ponniah Why Things Went Wrong The Decline of the Natural Family by Allan Carlson, Ph.D. The Age of Possibility by David Brookes<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Economics, war, or disease won't be America's downfall, but the American family which is going through sociological devolution will lead to America's stability.\n","id":"5cfe8034-aca9-4323-acb0-b107d80dbf54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cluster bomb ban<|ARGUMENT|>\"DoD Wants Less Deadly Cluster Bomby\". Associated Press. 8 July, 2008 - \"Faced with growing international pressure, the Pentagon is changing its policy on cluster bombs and plans to reduce the danger of unexploded munitions in the deadly explosives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Improving cluster bomb detonation rates is the solution, not a ban\n","id":"4c7001fd-5049-4fcf-82ca-c8c0f9a180f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Christianity and monotheism in general often refer to adherents as sheep in a flock and Christians sometimes characterize themselves as slaves to Christ this is totalitarian.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christianity is actually anti-democracy: it is more authoritarian at its core as it has one power above all God.\n","id":"3d9ce8ec-425d-4b39-882e-ed0cd1cecc00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Whaling Still be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The size of a whale makes any method of death reliant on abrupt and complete organ damage very unreliable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The issue is not merely one of current technology being poor, but of practical barriers to humane methods.\n","id":"bde6b841-4e34-46dd-85e4-32db4256163a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A common meme among MRAs and the pussy pass crowd is that whenever a woman hits a man in some way and then gets hit back, it's equality in action because society sees violence against women as more important than violence against men. A shorthand catch phrase that expresses this is equal rights, equal lefts which implies that if women want to be treated equally they should expect to be hit back if they hit someone else. I disagree that this is about equality at all. 1 Overwhelmingly, in cases where this concept is used on reddit, the man used disproportionate violence. See this thread for an example Most of the upvoted comments in the linked r news thread stated she had it coming and that it was equality for her to be hit. But if you actually watch the video she hardly posed a threat to him, and all she did was weakly hit him. Then he lobbed a punch that knocked her flat 2 The stronger larger person should show self restraint. Many of the same people who argue in favor of this phrase are also the same people who constantly argue about the physical differences between men and women. Is it not then hypocritical to expect fair fights? 3 I think all you need to do is check out how much people revel in women getting their comeuppance in these fight videos to see that they enjoy watching women get beat as if they always expect not to get hit back ie. using their pussy pass when in fact I've rarely if ever seen videos where women are shown saying or expecting that. edit since a lot of this discussion has centered around self defense, I would like to link this Sam Harris article on de escalating violence. I don't think we should be celebrating fights that start from either party escalating it further edit 2 Not sure if this is relevant, but what brought this up is this My concern is that whenever I see those kinds of comments, people claim that they're just interested in equality. But that doesn't sound right to me because of how 1 the fight is usually so one sided, 2 you usually can't even show that the woman was using her pussy pass , 3 I don't see much evidence that women by and large even think they can get away with violence because of their gender<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"equal rights, equal lefts\" isn't about equality, it's about violence\n","id":"fc5c935f-bf6b-4ce4-9082-f1cb31f78978"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Fanatics do not care what you can prove or debate: engaging with them is how their views are popularised The objective is to not let disenfranchised, vulnerable people be radicalized into what appears to other people as completely ludicrous ideas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unfortunately, allowing bigots to say whatever they like doesn't mean they can be 'defeated in verbal combat'. Often, the opposite is more the case.\n","id":"d4650eb4-4542-43c8-9989-9959750d6798"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've had several discussions with friends and online in recent months around this. Obviously more recently due to Brexit, but also due to the discussions around a referendum in Canada on changing our voting system FPTP to something else . My view is that referenda are almost always a terrible way to decide any significant change that any government is interested in making. I really only believe that superficial decisions change of flag or similar are appropriate for a referendum. I think that most decisions put to a referendum are too complicated nuanced for most people to understand to a point of making a knowledgeable decision. What generally ends up happening is both sides of the decision spend a lot of time money to convince the voters of their position and generally have no reason to do so with facts. Mostly they appeal to voters emotions and fears regardless of the topic and this means that many people will vote based on lies and misinformation. Also at least in Canada UK we vote for local representatives that make up the government. These members of parliament are paid to work with experts in whatever field to understand these complicated topics and make decisions that are best for everyone. Obviously that is the ideal situation and those politicians are not necessarily always doing things in everyone's best interest, but I do believe that that system which we use to decide most things in our democracy has a better chance of coming to a beneficial decision over a referendum. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Referendums are almost universally a bad idea.\n","id":"b3dab3be-4cd6-4f07-b31f-990910ba69b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Withdrawing from Iraq<|ARGUMENT|>\"Saudis to back Sunnis if U.S. leaves Iraq\". CNN.com. December 13, 2006 - \"WASHINGTON CNN -- Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has warned Vice President Dick Cheney that Saudi Arabia would back the Sunnis if the United States pulls out of Iraq, according to a senior American official.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Saudis would back Sunni Iraqis if the US pulls out\n","id":"ce57e0d1-8927-4afc-9a50-8d44117eed8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is television bad for people?<|ARGUMENT|>TV shows throughout Europe are becoming less informative and more sensational, a European watchdog has found<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"TV makes\/keeps people dumb and is becoming increasingly more stupid.\n","id":"89991aaa-46cc-4106-89fc-5fec36631dff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently there has been controversy about the so called politically correct change to Canada's national anthem, to change the English lyrics in all thy sons command to in all of us command . Leaving this controversial change aside, I think our anthem, while bilingual in terms of colonial languages, needs to include lyrics from an Indigenous language s . In New Zealand's anthem God Defend New Zealand , the entire first stanza is in M\u0101ori, the indigenous language in Oceania before Western colonization occurred. An English stanza occurs secondly. This does not diminish the English portion in any way, if anything it makes it more prominent and eagerly awaited by those singing who speak only English. The Canadian anthem should become one official trilingual song, not three separate ones, with Ojibwe for example in the first verses, followed by French, followed by English. This could even have the added benefit of ridding the anthem of the controversial changes recently implemented regarding all thy sons command as they would be replaced with the Indigenous verses. It would also eliminate the potentially offensive English lyric stating our home and native land . I envision it would look something like this O Canada Omaa saa wen Gee Yang Kee taa keenaan Ktchi aapee ten Daag Waad Car ton bras sait porter l'\u00e9p\u00e9e, Il sait porter la croix Ton histoire est une \u00e9pop\u00e9e Des plus brillants exploits. God keep our land glorious and free O Canada, we stand on guard for thee O Canada, we stand on guard for thee Alternatively, switch to English second and French third O Canada Omaa saa wen Gee Yang Kee taa keenaan Ktchi aapee ten Daag Waad With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free From far and wide, O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. Toute ta valeur, de foi tremp\u00e9e, Prot\u00e9gera nos foyers et nos droits. Prot\u00e9gera nos foyers et nos droits. Unlike a single change in the English version that can be seen as merely tweaking to be PC in 201, the changes I propose are more sweeping and properly inclusive of Indigenous Canadians as this government seems keen on doing anyway, and I think we can all agree that's a good thing. There's nothing wrong with English and French Canadians learning Indigenous languages for the anthem. If you disagree, please explain your reasoning and try to .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As seen in nations such as New Zealand and South African, Canada's national anthem \"O Canada\" should have Indigenous-language verses added\n","id":"31e6ac37-2547-4669-9853-b9c54f2b9cf5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Attachment Parenting the Best Way to Raise a Child?<|ARGUMENT|>Cribs can be dangerous too. It is harder to notice and respond to dangers such as suffocating, overheating, falling out and getting wedged or stuck.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alternatives to sleeping on the same bed as the baby are also dangerous.\n","id":"d7f2a5f4-d2de-4252-a3bd-b57915497b06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>The Mormon church has 10s of billions in assets, including significant real estate holdings without the strain of property taxes. The church has over a million acres of farmland. en.wikipedia.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many cases of churches using their tax exempt status to pocket large sums of money.\n","id":"b145b405-c244-4018-9a05-166b670af675"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Election Campaigns only be Funded by the Government?<|ARGUMENT|>Interest groups which seek to protect underprivileged groups often field private donations to members of these groups to vie for political office.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regular citizens and non-corporate interest groups also fund election campaigns.\n","id":"412ec8d4-21af-462f-bdf3-8709b4907ea6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok so first off this is really just an Aussie . There is a big possibility that Tony will get in to become the next PM and this really worries me. Come on Liberals  I think the LNP party is very behind in the times. I think focussing on mining and manufacturing as main drivers of the economy is a 1950's style view and wont stand up in todays globalised world. Mining wont last for ever and Australia cant possibly compete in manufacturing with China or our South East Asian neighbours. Australia should be moving to an information based economy like much of Europe, rather then a product based economy. I also think that climate change should not be ignored, yet the Liberals still seem to think it is a non issue. I am worried that the Liberal party will take the opportunity of our relative comfort at this point in time to bring back harsher work laws like Work Choices so as to maintain their aristocracy. I also think that the Liberal view on immigration will be ultimately detrimental. Like much of the Western world, we have an ageing population and not enough younger people in the work force to tax to provide health care and services as these people grow old and retire. In short I feel that the Liberal Party is only concerned about short term financial gain for a relatively small aristocracy, rather than the well being of the country now and in the future. I dont want people to  in order to convert me to a conservative Liberal voter, just  that our country wont be screwed if Tony comes into power. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The possibility of Tony Abbott becoming Australia's next PM terrifies me. !\n","id":"13332311-e558-4f66-8001-97330bf4706d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>There is even less evidence to support the idea that when manually aiming they can only hit things that are sitting still, as in almost every example of manual aiming in Star Trek, the targets are still moving. Starfleet personnel often show extreme creativity in over coming such difficulties. So the claim they can only hit stationary targets is clearly and demonstrably false.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Star Wars has lots of examples of communication jamming, only one example of sensor jamming, and precisely zero examples of targeting jamming. This is not a very good example of fighting under \"heavy\" jamming.\n","id":"e428d4f5-bc5f-498d-85d7-e1e8ec6709a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The states of the Upper South had already had their need for slavery lessened due to the fact tobacco had completely devastated their soil and made the practice largely unprofitable. This was especially true considering the cost of buying, owning, and maintaining a slave population. The only profitable market for slavery in the Upper South was breeding and selling them to the states south of them. And due to the fact cotton was so hard to manufacture before the cotton gin's invention, the Deep South was destined to be on the decline in regards to slavery. Since the Jeffersonian Agrarian model of economics revolved around the common farmer, it'd be expected for the regular farmer to take hold, or for rich planters to simply start exploiting whites in a non slaveholding fashion. That said, if Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Arkansas's cotton production never took off with the cotton gin, slavery would die out in the South. Because in every case in the states, money and the Agrarian model held precedence. If slavery didn't coincide with that outlook, it wouldn't be able to survive. Without the support of the Deep South and the Upper South, states like South Carolina and Georgia with rice cultivation would be unable to vouch for slavery enough to warrant a Civil War.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Eli Whitney had not invented the cotton gin, slavery in the United States would have died off before the Civil War became inevitable.\n","id":"b96bcfe2-8f4e-4a76-aaeb-b469d81dab17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>According to polls, Christianity is the largest religion in the EU, adopted by 72% of its citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polls indicate that most people in liberal democracies identify as religious.\n","id":"c5941667-67f0-4a27-bef6-b1e4d299d695"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that if it can be said that the pirated version of content actually offers a better quality or usability to the user, it should be considered acceptable if the user gains access to the content through illegal sources. I'm not considering the price of the content. If only the price makes the pirated version better , then the two versions of this content are considered equal. The pirated version and the legal version must be significantly different in some way that makes the pirated version better for some people, even if there were no costs associated with either version. As such, I'm not saying the freebooting piracy should be considered acceptable by default. Payment methods may count, though. There exist countries even some of which are highly modern western nations where credit cards are highly uncommon the Netherlands highly prefers debit cards, for example and credit cards may also be considered unsafe, as simply having the codes that are printed on the credit card are enough to use the card access to the card itself is not necessary. Dutch people usually use the iDeal system for secure payments. DRM protected material may also be an example. Games with always on DRM might be unplayable for some legal buyers, while the illegal version requires no internet access, making this version of the content actually better. Adobe DRM can make ebooks in the otherwise open ePub standard unusable for people with unsupported ereaders, or for Linux users. Yet another example in some countries, episodes of certain series may be aired months or even years after it is aired in the original country, or in some cases even never at all. Fans of a certain series, who want to watch the latest episode as soon as it is aired, may find it impossible to get legal access to the content they want, while it is no problem for people in other countries. In these examples, some people may find the legal version simply inferior. This can be due to usability such as the always on DRM that makes the content unusable in certain circumstances , accessibility such as series that are released in other countries after a long time, or even never at all , or for any other reason other than pricing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that piracy\/freebooting should be considered acceptable if the pirated version of content is or at least can be considered better than the legal version\n","id":"6631807b-1160-4510-a19e-e67cfbfdbc76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should education at public universities in the United States be tuition free?<|ARGUMENT|>When public colleges become free, there is likely to be a massive increase in enrollment, ballooning running costs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be too costly to make public universities free.\n","id":"e3454649-acb3-4b45-9e64-34b9802553c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Gender Dysphoria, also called Gender Identity Disorder, refers to feelings of not belonging to the gender one is assigned at birth. People who have these feelings are referred to as Transgender. While many will say these feelings are natural and relate to one's true identity, I maintain that it is a mental disorder and instead of supporting those who wish to be a different gender we should urge them to seek medical treatment such as psychotherapy. There have been numerous studies to support my case. Coolidge et al. 2002 , performed twin studies to determine that Gender Identity Disorder is 62 heritable. This shows that there is genetics play a large part in the disorder. Many transgender people wish for gender dysphoria to be declassified as a mental disorder, as it reinforces the binary model of gender. Here is an extract from an article on the subject However, I support the continued classification of Gender Dysphoria as a mental disorder. Studies have shown that the disorder can result in anxiety, depression and suicide. This may be easier to prevent if we treat it as a serious disorder rather than simply celebrating people's differences. I'd like to see others views on the subject. Perhaps I am wrong and we should not classify gender dysphoria as a mental disorder, but celebrate differences between people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender Dysphoria Being transgender is a biological, mental disorder, and should be treated like OCD or Depression.\n","id":"3e7c5273-43ae-4f42-bce0-251e9c10d2b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The marriage of money and politics is an ugly one. In fact, I believe it is a primary root of our problems in the United States. But limiting an individual's right to free speech saying that I cannot spend my own money on television political advertisements is the wrong way to solve this problem, because it violates Constitutional rights. The crux of my view is that television advertisements qualify as free speech. If I, a private citizen, want to use one medium of communication television to speak about issues important to me, I ought to have the right to do that, just as I have the right to use other media to communicate to individuals. The difference between me discussing on reddit about politics, and me purchasing a television advertisement to discuss politics, is only in degree. I need money for a computer and internet subscription to talk on reddit, I need money for design and advertisement space on television. Again, the difference is only in degree. Truly free speech has negative effects manipulating voters to acquire votes is one of them. But just as restricting gun rights is the wrong way to eliminate gun violence, restricting the right to speak freely on political issues is the wrong way to eliminate the influence of money in politics. The ends don't justify the means. Change my view. edit I must make an important qualifier An individual may have a right to do something, but that does not mean a corporation does. Still, I don't see why corporations should not be allowed to advertise in favor of a political candidate that would benefit their business. edit 2 No one has explicitly said this without going over a logical edge, but I want to state that I can see things from the other side . I don't think my view has changed yet , but there is some rationale in an argument like this gt We have had the ability to regulate what a corporation advertises for many years now. For example, cigarette companies are not allowed to advertise on television. This same legal authority could be applied to political advertisements by corporations. Now, I still hold the view that cigarette companies should be able to advertise cigarettes, coal mining companies should be able to advertise against the candidate who says he's going to close coal mining facilities, and McDonalds should be able to advertise for escort service with Ronald McDonald if that's what you're into . I think that even if it's a negative overall outcome more people smoking cigarettes , we are better of if companies are allowed to market a bad product because it falls more in line with free market ideology, which I support. The freedom to make bad choices is better than being forced to make good ones, IMO. I can, now, at least see the other side of the debate, though. I can see how precedent would allow for a different decision in Citizens United. Again, I don't hold that view, but I can see why it is legitimate. Thanks for the healthy debate, I will continue to read responses as they come in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the Citizens United US Supreme Court decision was the right one.\n","id":"e6ec97bb-17a7-4c58-b51d-c1471aaf08cf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Under the CARD Act, which was passed in 2009, banks must give an account holder the option for the bank to decline any transaction which will overdraw their account. This means that if you have 10 in your account, but buy something worth 20, the bank will decline the charge. Based on the name, it sounds like Overdraft Protection will tell the bank to decline the charge, thus protecting you from being overdrawn. However, the opposite is true. Enrolment in Overdraft Protection means that the bank will let the charge go through, and will allow your account to be overdrawn. If you want the bank to decline any charges which will overdraw your account, you must opt out of Overdraft Protection. The fact that the term Overdraft Protection sounds like it will protect you from overdrafts, while in reality doing the exact opposite, is deceptive, and a clever way to trick account holders into thinking the bank will decline overdrafts, while really they will allow them. TL DR Enrolling in Overdraft Protection authorises the bank to allow a charge which will overdraw your account. The fact that Overdraft Protection does NOT protect your account from being overdrawn is deceptive. But the most deceptive part is that to be protected from overdrafts, you must opt out of Overdraft Protection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term \"Overdraft Protection\" is deceptive, and means the opposite of what it sounds like it means.\n","id":"c3a2b1bb-5837-4c11-b180-9bd9afb82bf3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In recent years gender has come to be understood as distinct from biological sex. But how do we define what gender is? By the way we behave? Do we define a man as a person that brings home the bacon , wears pants and is emotionally tough? Do we define a woman as a person that cooks and cleans, raises children and wears skirts and makeup? Or do we simply let each individual decide their own gender regardless of the way they behave? In which case, what is the point of the label? I think we would be better served by doing away with the concept of gender altogether and allow members of either sex to behave however they damn well please. If a biological man wants to wear makeup and dress, fine. If a biological female wants to wear pants and cut her hair shot, also fine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanity should do away with the concept of gender.\n","id":"bbf94c4b-e39f-4b29-84a5-702be4210a6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are only about 50K miners left this program can be back dated to include those that worked previously but have already left mining . I am not including other states yet. This can be a pilot program to see how it works how it will be received. If they are conservatives and don't like Obamacare, can see the handwriting on the wall as far as potential health concerns, and are worried that solar and wind will take over their industry, then give them the incentive to move on. Even if their families are included, it still could be save more money in the long term than dealing with debilitating health issues and paying for them out of pocket with Obamacare. Free and unlimited healthcare for miners and families allow them to spend on other things and invest in themselves at the same time. It is the least that we, the country, can do for a state and industry that helped us for so long, but now seems to be left behind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Give WV, USA coalminers the same great healthcare that Congress enjoys free and for life if they are willing to receive training or change jobs to leave the mining industry.\n","id":"1a0a1bae-6497-48a4-986f-3749cdea11bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You always hear about people being impressed over someone doing some kind of activity in high heels. This is my example and what prompted me to post this. Now I understand that it is somewhat more difficult to do something than if you use proper footwear, but that's about it. It's a part of our culture and I think it's just over exaggerated. Whenever you see guys clumsily making their way in them it's not because heels are these complex tools few woman can handle, but rather we just don't wear them. If a guy had a good fitting pair not wearing someone elses as is usually done and had 10 minutes to practice and walk around, he'd be running down the street no problem. There is probably a factor of pain if you over exert yourself in them which is why females act gingerly in them, but that doesn't make it hard to use.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that it's not too difficult doing tasks while in high heels.\n","id":"dad82ef3-1e34-430c-9447-7fd862d53515"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I tell myself I want to go see a band live, it is usually because I have listened to their songs a lot. Because of this when I see them live I spot all the little errors and differences to their studio version and it ruins it for me. Which goes hand in hand with another thing i hate. When a music lover shuns music types that he cannot go and see a respectably played live version. Too me it makes no sense at all, but some of you could clue me in on what I am missing aside from loud cheering, drunk people, and over priced and long drive to here an album played.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that most music preformed professionally in a studio outshines any live concert I have been to, and that those that chastise music you cannot preform live have their priorities of music backwards.\n","id":"07f7c459-56c2-4eef-ae1c-eec18a7eacb7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Caffeine Addiction An Unhandled Problem?<|ARGUMENT|>Its sheer prevalence means it should be subject to more scrutiny, to assess whether it has more negative repercussions than previously considered.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Caffeine is consumed by many people thus making its effects more important to handle.\n","id":"247c948e-b800-45c4-bedc-1fe61445d339"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>Because egg and meat production are separated by modern production practices male chicks are shredded out of economic concerns.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The common practices underlying the production of meat massive livestock farming are unethical.\n","id":"589019ce-03fc-4d61-9864-6e3e849ebb76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When a service is free you are the product. You are essentially selling your demographic data to advertisers. You are being provided with a service, in return for market research information, a service that you are paying for with said data instead of a dollar. Anecdotally I see this attitude more amongst teens, they get angsty at the idea that 'nasty' corporations are selling out 'their privacy.' They are oversharing and overly concerned and seem to have little understanding of what keeps sites like Facebook and instagram afloat and profitable. People seem to not understand that Facebook is a for profit organisation that can choose to run their service how they please. Heck, they could demand dick pics from everyone over 18 and ban your profile for failure to comply with this if they so chose to, you are not obligated to joint their service, but if you do, you are to follow their rules. I guess 'no right to complain' is a bit harsh, you might not like it, but it's ignorant and somewhat stupid to expect to just get Facebook as a free service in exchange for nothing of your own.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Those who sign up for social media have no right to complain about their data being mined and sold.\n","id":"1682f652-cd2f-42f7-9cf2-2a0189bcfcd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>Imagine with single-winner Asset voting, that a minor party gets enough votes to swing the winner from one major party to the other. They ask for concessions. Both major parties bid for it, offering more and more until one has to drop out. If they are honest and actually do what they promised, the minor party gets A WHOLE LOT, way more than they should.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The major parties may restrict ballot access for minor parties, making it impossible to vote for them.\n","id":"eacd07c6-1257-49e1-9e28-31e4fbe10afb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People who become drug addicts or criminals are often diagnosed with mental disorders. These activities are considered by our society as being negative and fringe but we as a society are being conditioned to not hold the people responsible because it wasn't their fault but it was their disorders fault. For this reason, how can mental disorders be taken seriously if we only diagnose those on the negative fringe and never those on the positive fringe. Specifically if if you look at many successful people they show the same dedication to their work workaholic that an addict might show to their drug. If we do not hold addicts responsible for their actions because of their mental disorder how can we praise those who are successful for their actions? Basically I feel like our society has come to a point where we are trying to get the best of both worlds. We tell people that they are who they want to become, and that hard work normally leads to success but at the same time attribute failure and never success to factors out of a persons control mentally . Not having a mental disorder at least not diagnosed I can never know what it might be like but to deal with these factors outside your own control. But with mental health education becoming more and more prevalent people are attributing more and more of their problems to things not controllable by themselves. In addition, some mental disorders are specifically noted to be caused by a chemical imbalance but aren't all disorders caused by either poor wiring or chemical imbalances. If you accept that disorders are caused by things out of a persons control, to what extent can anyone attribute their success to themselves rather then their own intact or even upgraded wiring. To get back to the original , I believe that we should start to diagnose those who are extremely successful with mental disorders based on their work life balance. I\u2019m not saying that it is practical but in a more theoretical sense, I believe that it should be done if only for equity for those less fortunate with their wiring. edit I do not believe that the specific terminology is relevant, but rather if those who are successful specifically where it is an easy observable product of their talents are a product of their brain's wiring as much as an addict or otherwise psychologically disordered person.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if mental disorders are to be taken seriously \"reverse\" disorders must be created too.\n","id":"6b09b3a0-0cb4-4466-aa06-8ea02a7d7c2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>During the Algerian war, some of the key symbols of the National Liberation Front, such as Fatima Zohra Ardjoune were women.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women have played crucial roles in their country's militaries.\n","id":"e2f390c7-8b8d-443e-b177-e0686a699797"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have come to the inescapable conclusion that people who have an irrational fear or dislike of gay people are suffering from a mental disorder. There is simply no reason to be so completely objectionable about something that has absolutely nothing to do with your life. Homophobes show classic signs of mental disorder. Anxiety, irritability, and behaviors like extreme prejudice, that interfere with their ability to function socially are the easy things to peg. Other homophobes exhibit signs of hallucinations or delusions around their dislike of gay people. I have, literally, had more than one homophobe tell me that they have seen into my future and purport to tell me they know how my life will turn out or how I will die. I have had, in the past, more than one coworker who was so wrapped up in their hatred of me, for being gay, that they laid waste to their careers by refusing to cooperate with any task that I played a part in. I don't want to believe that these people are mentally unstable, but unfortunately the conclusion is self apparent. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people who are homophobic have a mental disorder,\n","id":"1a413b98-5031-4c2f-a873-8b8007fea167"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is BDSM Abusive?<|ARGUMENT|>An actor has the ability to escape into a particular character, whereas when a submissive is being bound, it is their personhood that is being attacked.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An actor on stage isn't subjected to the same pressures a BDSM submissive feels when they are bound.\n","id":"73f48168-c6a5-4b6b-bef8-736328bd9e97"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>offer amnesty to bloggers currently prosecuted by their native states<|ARGUMENT|>When Western states and democracies offer amnesty to bloggers under threat from their home governments, the blogger\u2019s views and comments immediately become coloured in the eyes of the public. The government is able to point to the Western powers offering this amnesty and can easily claim that their offers are the result of collusion between bloggers and their foreign patrons to spread propaganda, so the blogger is therefore guilty of treason. As unfortunate as it may be in individual cases, the result is that offering amnesty will only weaken the cause of democracy. Being sent to prison for their beliefs will do far more to serve their cause than seeking succour in the arms of another state, one that has demonstrated antagonism toward their homeland. The ability for governments to stoke nationalist fires has been thoroughly demonstrated in recent months by China\u2019s reaction toward territorial disputes with Japan.1 It is very easy to rile the public against a perceived external aggressor, especially given that these states often control much of the mainstream media outlets, and those who offer amnesty give themselves up on a platter as an adversary to be exploited in the public consciousness. The better plan for democracies in pursuit of their goals is to condemn acts of oppression and to seek diplomatic redress, but direct interference in the course of states\u2019 justice will doing nothing but harm relations with regimes and turn the people against the proponents of reform. 1 The Economist. \u201cBarren Rocks, Barren Nationalism\u201d. 25 August 2012.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The offer of amnesty allows home governments to discredit bloggers and paint them as foreign agents of disruption\n","id":"61cccba0-dbac-4d29-ae32-7dcfdc19998d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In this situation I use myself as an example, but I hope and believe it can apply broadly to many people considering military service. It is USA specific because of the oath cited below, but I welcome comparisons to other nations with explanations, please . When entering any branch of the US Military, people must swear the following oath I, , do solemnly swear or affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God. For the purposes of conciseness, the title of this post omitted the possibility of serving in some manner that could be deemed dishonorable, such as swearing an oath with no intention of respecting it, or with the intention of breaking some part of it. For the purposes of this discussion, I also ask that you consider the question with all other life factors being equal . See disclaimer regarding limited life choices. A better description of my View might be Someone cannot, in good conscience, without the abdication of some personal dignity, and without unreasonably increased exposure to 'disciplinary' consequences, honorably serve in the United States military forces if that person believes the president to be unfit as Commander in Chief of those forces. Or, more simply but self centeredly I can't reasonably and in good conscience join the US Military if I consider the president unfit as Commander in Chief. Premises for my view 1 Oaths should be respected. IMO, no one should swear an oath without intending to follow it and considering the following of that oath to be a feasible endeavor, and, having sworn an oath, an individual ought to stand by it, with very few almost no acceptable exceptions. In addition to the president bearing the title Commander in Chief, this oath specifically names the president. 1.5 Serving in the US military is contingent on swearing this oath. 2 Military service cannot be terminated at will. Not, at least, without significant negative consequences. I compare this below to my service as a volunteer firefighter, but here mention that such termination may impact fellow soldiers negatively as well, which is unfair and, depending on the circumstances, potentially unacceptable. 3 It's irresponsible to knowingly commit to taking orders from someone while believing them to be incompetent. Or otherwise unqualified for issuing those orders. That person my be many, many links removed in the chain of command, but he is at the top of that chain for everyone involved. Corollary concern The oath doesn't say for the duration of my active service. Is it implied, or does this mean that anyone who swears such an oath is swearing for life , including any future presidents? Not a concern So help me God. I'm not religious, but I wouldn't object to saying that or So help me Thor. It's a type of wish, and if someone does want to help me out, well, sure, not a problem. I don't consider making a plea to what I consider to be an imaginary figure to dilute the oath. I mention this in reference to 1, in case readers need clarification on what I consider binding or invalidating in an oath. Specifics to my situation I'm a volunteer firefighter. When I joined, I did swear an oath regarding my officers, but I see this as having a few important distinctions It's volunteer. I can quit rather than disobey. It would be horrible to do that on a fire scene, but it's hypothetically possible. see following points Firefighting is para military, and usually small scale. In general I can have some discussion with the officer s in question. By my understanding, full military is not like that, and I'm ridiculously unlikely to be able to dispute things with the president. In firefighting, I'm very unlikely to be ordered to perform an act that I fundamentally disagree with. Over the past two years I've had a growing desire to serve nationally, my preference so far being the Coast Guard with the hope of assisting in rescue operations when they occur. Since my research came to a halt several months ago see disclaimers , I haven't fully explored the many, many options, but I do know that I would really like to pursue one of them. My life situation is such that monetary concerns do not enter into this consideration. Disclaimers I suspended my research on entering the military when Trump got the Republican nomination, so I still haven't looked into some other reasons that I might not be able to join in good conscience. This includes, but is very much not limited to, length of enlistment and specifics of presidential orders impacting troops. I also have not read the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I'm aware that the oath also includes officers, but that seems a discussion not worth having if I know that I have a conflict with this other provision of the oath. If you can  here, I will consider the officers angle then. Although I believe Donald Trump to be unfit and horrible in a multitude of ways, and I do have him in mind while writing this post, I hope that the discussion will be broader than a debate of one guy's qualifications or lack thereof. I know that some people in society may have few life options besides military service and may consider it a luxury to be able to choose whether or not to enter into a shitty deal. That some people need to make such a choice is unequivocally awful. This post is not intended to pass judgment on them. I have been accused of hyper scrupulosity. That may be an accurate assessment. It would surprise me if no one has, in fact, served in the US Military while vehemently disliking the president in one way or another. Hopefully some of those people can present how they squared it with their conscience. End notes I would love to see input from veterans , particularly of the variety who would go to help defend civilians at Standing Rock. Please mention if you are. I've thought about this extensively , and can't come up with a conscionable way for myself to join the military under these terms, but I would be quite happy if someone could . Edit formatting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Someone cannot serve in the US Military if they believe the President to be an unfit Commander in Chief\n","id":"1a762d66-ea3b-48cf-8fd9-841766d7c1bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All US and EU sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014 should be lifted<|ARGUMENT|>The creation of the EU's proposed Energy Union and the diversification of its reliance on Russian gas would reduce the leverage Russia currently has in international disputes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are others methods the EU and US could use to control Russia's behaviour.\n","id":"84a279e7-0ae5-43c2-8934-7e02c03780b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To summarize my view, when talking about people's gender or sexuality we increasingly utilize a large variety of terms. We usually justify this by citing the fact that there are such a variety of people thus personal identities, we need a large number of terms to cater for this spread. I believe that we should apply a similar methodology to people who are not fully okay, or comfortable with, homosexuality, transsexuality etc as these people come in a great variety of opinions too. Please note I am not denying that there are many who are virulently aggressive towards non cis heterosexuals. Merely that we tar many, with varying and often less strong opinions, with the same brush when we only have one real term. here is the Oxford English Dictionary Definition of phobia gt extreme fear or dislike of a specific thing or group and for homophobia gt an extreme and irrational aversion to homosexuals and homosexual people Here is wikipedia's opening line on homophobia gt Homophobia encompasses a range of negative attitudes and feelings toward homosexuality or people who are identified or perceived as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender LGBT . It can be expressed as antipathy, contempt, prejudice, aversion, or hatred, may be based on irrational fear, and is sometimes related to religious beliefs. I believe that societal discourse on these topics is often limited by the fact that we use one suffix to denote such a wide range of feelings. Usually when we hear the words homophobe, or transphobe we jump to conclusions of a deeply bigoted and backwards thinking person associating only with the extreme fear or dislike yet will apply the term to anyone not fully comfortable with events relating to LGBT people or surrounding events legislation etc . This means that people can espouse reasonable, or at least nuanced, views but many others often do not see or value this because the branding of a phobe means they assume that it is just bigotry. I will now outline some examples to try and highlight situation where more nuance would be preferable when applying terms to beliefs. I will assign real names to the examples to try and remind people that there are real humans who are involved when we discuss gender and sexual politics on both sides of the debate. Also note none of these examples are intended to highlight right or wrong views, merely more complex ones Example A Annie is 14, and has grown up both in a fairly conservative religious household, but also with access to mainstream media and the internet. When she goes to play tennis every week, she meets her friend Abigail who is a non closeted lesbian. Now Annie's upbringing conflicts her, as she has grown up being told that homosexuality is wrong, yet media and society mostly tell her that it is okay to be gay. The result is that she is perfectly fine with Abigail as a person, but that she fears that her friend will be condemned to hell for this, and tries to talk abih gail out of being homosexual. Example B Brian, is a straight male, is mostly okay with transsexuals. He knows a few, and would hire one if they were the best for the job. however he is uncomfortable with having sexual relations with a transsexual. Brian finds context somewhat important, and also would want to know if someone had a criminal record before a relationship was entered, and struggles to fully reconcile someone who formerly will have visibly been a man^ as a sexual partner even if they now have all the appearances and give the same sexual sensations as a naturally born woman. Please lets not get into a semantics debate here. We'll say this point is Brians view and is unlikely to be changed in the near future. Example C Clarice and Christopher don't mind gay couple having a similar legal system as marriage being set up, complete with identical legal protections and tax breaks. However they believe that the term marriage should apply to a man and woman as historically much of history, again their view, and unlikely to change for the purposes of the argument it has, and that a different term should be concocted for non heterosexual partnership. I believe that example A demonstrates a situation which often would fall under the umbrella of religious homophobia in discussion and thus people sub consciously link it with more aggressive and fundamentalist beliefs say those espoused by the Westboro Baptist Church. This thus means that the more moderate, and complex views of the girl Annie would be ignored, and whislt her lesian friend might understand that Annie's action were driven by more of a concern, or fear for the eternal souls of homosexuals, many others in society wouldn't bother as any anti homosexual stance is immediately homophobic and thus not worthy of notice. I chose example B as it regularly turns up on ChangeMyView. Whilst it is clearly an irrational opinion, Brian's views are more of a sexually orientated aversion than a traditional transphobic viewpoint, as he could get along with transsexuals in most situations, it is just that to him history matters, whether it should or not. I have tried to demonstrate this with the point about a criminal record whilst the person may have reformed, previous condition matters to him. In this way just saying he is transphobic misses out that it is only in specific scenarios. Example C has emerged in the news in multiple countries over the last few years. Again I feel it is an irrational viewpoint, yet it is valid, as to many people, that actually is what marriage entails. Of course whilst many who hold that view despise LGBT people on principle, far do not, and it is just the rapidly changing moral situation they are struggling to keep up with. It was not unusual to see the whole swathe of people who followed the man woman line denounced as homophobes, when often their feeling were less, or not at all so, and it was the changing definition of an institution again, their view which they objected to. TL DR The overly broad use of phobia as a term can set up a black and white fallacy in which the subtle distinctions in people's attitudes towards the LGBT community are lost, and this limits the efficacy both when discussing those people, but also the societal and legislative debates regarding sexuality and gender<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Phobia and ---phobic are overly limiting terms for modern discussions relating to sexual and gender politics\n","id":"62ceec8d-84ad-4a9d-a7d2-01eee7db0a88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>The public is reluctant to fund welfare because our society has deeply ingrained the capitalist idea of rewarding individuals for effort and working hard. Hard work is seen as a virtue, and something deserving of reward, and those with wealth they have not themselves earned for example, the rich children of billionaires are vilified.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because instituting welfare programs requires political capital and public goodwill, a majority of which will be used instituting a UBI, it is unlikely that the general public will be sympathetic towards additional welfare programs if a UBI is implemented.\n","id":"6e879d73-c526-4c13-984b-cd260f05b2e9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy, and from my education in that field, I wasn't impressed. Point 1 There is no value to philosophy. In math class, they might say Newton or Leibniz discovered Calculus . But nobody would ever try to teach you Calculus as Newton wrote it. For good reason, Newton's writings are the obscure, obtuse records of a centuries old genius from a different culture. Not exactly the kind of text that is ideal for students. Since the time of Newton mathematicians and educators have expanded and refined the field. Advances in pedagogy have made the subject vastly more approachable. In a college course, if you are learning about Kant, then the author you will read is Kant. Or maybe someone tediously informing you about the many and varied errors in the works of Kant. This is equivalently absurd to going into your optics class and opening a textbook written by Newton. Why have we not taken all the true and valuable things about ethics that Kant wrote, refined them with the efforts of philosophers over the centuries, distilled everything into useful and valuable texts that cover the subject matter in a clear, efficient and accurate way? Chapter 1 Its okay to lie sometimes The reason we haven't done this, is, of course, that Kant basically is giving us his opinion on stuff, backed up by imperfect reasoning and entirely enshrouded by dense and dull prose. Also, you should note, that you can replace Kant with pretty much any philosopher that you learn about in school. There is no value in knowing Kant's opinions. You can't do anything with them and they aren't demonstrably right about anything of note. Anticipated rebuttal Philosophy teaches you how to think, not to what to think. It really doesn't. I'd love it if that were the intent, but it clearly is not. What benefit to thinking comes from stumbling through books that were clearly not written to be read, by people who are usually staggeringly ignorant about the world, culture and science. I don't say this to insult the philosophers of the past, but only to highlight the fact that they lived in a time of great ignorance. The idea that philosophy teaches you about thinking is absurd. I've designed and implemented algorithms with classmates. That teaches thinking. I've reviewed papers in English classes, and worked with the author to try and improve the writing. That teaches thinking. I've designed experiments, learned about human and animal brains, studied psychology. That teaches thinking. Sure, philosophy may improve your ability to think in the sense that you spend your time reading, then writing about what you've read. But philosophy has no unique claim on teaching people to think. Other subjects do much better, because other subjects can tell when you are right or wrong. In philosophy, maybe you are learning to think, or maybe you are learning to parrot jargon, the scary thing is that nobody involved will be able to tell. Point 2 Philosophy is often wrong, or indistinguishable from being wrong. It is a common assignment in philosophy courses to read the work of a philosopher and then defend or attack some position. I usually chose \u201cAttack\u201d and wrote many essays on what I considered real and serious flaws with various philosophical positions. These essays were well received over the course of my undergraduate career, so\u2026 was I right? Was I actually finding real problems with major philosophical works every week or two? However you answer this, there is a big problem. If you say \u201cNo\u201d then the problem is that, as a philosopher, i was an A student, and yet, I was seemingly misunderstanding every philosophical text I ever read and nobody ever called me on it. If you say \u201cYes\u201d then that means an undergraduate casually approaching the field is derailing the greatest minds and philosophical works. The crazy, sad part is, I\u2019m pretty sure it is the latter, and I\u2019m even more sure that I\u2019m not a super genius meaning the average undergraduate can derail the best philosophical works with a few hours of study and contemplation . Compare this, on the other hand, to math or computer science. I have never once corrected a mathematician, or found a substantive flaw in the body of computer science knowledge. I\u2019m not acquainted with anyone who so much as believes they have. And yet, every undergraduate philosophy student, at the very least, believes they have found a flaw with some major philosopher. In this same theme, every time I have found something in math or computer science, or chemistry, or physics, to be challenging or confusing, and my teachers say it is valuable to know, and I push through, I have found these challenges, unfailingly, to cohere into useful, reasonable concepts. Conversely, I have never found this to be true in philosophy exception the one philosophy course my school offered in game theory, which was quite rigorous and also quite clearly a math course in disguise . Sometimes I will read a philosophical text and think \u201cIs that what he means?\u201d Then study, read online, talk with friends about it and\u2026 \u201cI guess\u2026? Maybe?\u201d Not to mention that the enthusiasm of study is dampened by the field being worthless. \u201cAha This is what he was trying to say. It can\u2019t be demonstrated, has no value and is obviously wrong anyway.\u201d Anticipated Rebuttal Actually Philosophy is the source of a lot of useful things. Most of our greatest intellectual and technological achievements of the past have their root in philosophy This is simply a gimmick argument that relies on the hope that the audience doesn\u2019t understand that words change meaning over time. Isaac Newton considered himself a philosopher, but the concept that the word \u201cphilosopher\u201d pointed to in his day is not the same as the concept that it points to now. What we praise Newton for are the things he did that fall under the heading of \u201cMath\u201d, \u201cScience\u201d or criminal investigation . The weird arguments and writings Newton had about religion probably fall our modern definition of philosophy, and it is no surprise that they are all without value. Philosophy, as we mean it today, was as useless then as it is now. Another example of this is one of the most successful and astonishing moments in philosophy either ignored in philosophy or ridiculed based on the philosopher\u2019s misunderstanding of science when Thales, of ancient Greece successfully reasoned the existence of the atom in ~600 BC. This was not, however, the start of a golden age of Greek chemistry. Nobody could tell the difference between the true insight of Thales, and the bullshit that other philosophers babbled about non stop. And Thales, despite his success, couldn\u2019t really think of anything to do with his knowledge. Point 3 Philosophy is imprecise I once got a 16 on a programming assignment. I didn\u2019t need to ask the professor why, but if I had, he would have answered that my test had passed 16 of the automated test cases and so my grade was a 16 . Any teacher, grading by the same standard, would have given me the same grade, if I asked them once or a thousand times. That assignment was a 16 assignment. Philosophy, on the other hand, could never defend a grade of 16 . Not that nobody turns in bad philosophy papers, but that nobody could ever say \u201cThis is a 16 paper and not a 17 or 15 paper because of reasons X.\u201d The identity and temperament of your grader matter vastly more in philosophy than what it is you are actually writing about. This may sound like I\u2019m just complaining about inconsistent grades. I\u2019m not. I\u2019m trying to illustrate that there is no way to reliably tell right from wrong in the field of philosophy. Anticipated rebuttal It isn\u2019t about being right or wrong. It is about thinking deeply about the subjects that matter. Sure, if you want to think about stuff, you should feel free to do that. You can read Nietzche\u2019s Beyond Good and Evil and tell me about gazing into the abyss. I\u2019ll read the Wheel of Time and tell you about Aridhol and Mordeth. In the end, these are ideas that people wrote about and neither is better or worse than the other. This is literature. Edit Most frequent response gt Actually, what you're doing is philosophy. Admittedly, I could have been more precise in my post here and given the definitions for the words I was using. I felt that it was clear, by the contents of my post, what I meant when I used the word was the academic and professional pursuit by the same name. That fault aside, I don't find this response persuasive. As I will show, it fails in three distinct regards. First, Philosophy has multiple meanings. One of which is guiding principle and in this sense, yes, what I've written here is philosophy. My view could then be summarized as My philosophy is Philosophy is bullshit . However, contrary to what numerous commentors here suggest, this is not contradictory at all. We might replace the word philosophy in each instance with the intended definition and then the apparent contradiction resolves itself. One of my guiding principles is that the work that people in the PHIL department are doing is bullshit. Of course, better would be not using PHIL department but rather describing the work that they are actually doing that wound up getting a bit long though, so I pared it down to simplify. Replacing each instance of the word has entirely removed the apparent Gotcha, you're a philosopher Second, this response is also misunderstanding bullshit . I do not mean the phrase to be Everything in philosophy is the exact opposite of true. Instead, I mean to say that philosophy, while taking itself seriously, is actually valueless, error filled and imprecise. Which is what the thrust of my argument above is. I don't deny that some things said by philosophers have been true. In fact, I used the example of Thales saying something true. I admit the cogito is right. Just that even when philosophy gets stuff right, it doesn't do so in a valuable way. So, even if this reply weren't derailed by my earlier point, it would be undone by this one. If this post is philosophy, so be it. Some things within philosophy are true. If Philosophy is bullshit is philosophy, that is still coherent. Someone once asked Kurt Vonnegut what the white part of birdshit was, he answered It is also birdshit. Third, this answer is emblematic of philosophy. It is analysis without evidence. You can easily see that you could construct an argument to prove the value of philosophy, using this statement as a proof by counterclaim. Assume all philosophy is wrong. All claims about philosophy are philosophy. 1 is a claim about philosophy. 1 is wrong. And therefore we've shown a contradiction Meaning, at least some philosophy is valuable I hope you can see why trivial arguments of this form aren't very persuasive, and yet, this is the heart of the most frequent objection. Claims about philosophy are not philosophy. You can call them meta philosophies . Even if they were, all this argument would show that there is at least one true thing in the field of philosophy, which my original post already granted. My claim would be then that there is an additional true philosophical thought, that philosophy is bullshit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Philosophy is bullshit.\n","id":"c62f5e90-5e4b-407a-973c-c2cc512d1dcf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>In Germany around 11 million tons of food worth 25 billion \u20ac is thrown away. 1 2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not about producing food \"for need\" as most of it is thrown away.\n","id":"2063ae09-f2b8-4f45-b201-6085bc3b50b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Some human rights are incompatible with a machine or software. Granting such rights to machines or software would be unethical towards other humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human rights are a device intended to address specific issues related to human beings.\n","id":"d1733dee-8c7c-4c72-bd13-39208051733f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should unpaid internships be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Many large industries such as the fashion industry employ large numbers of unpaid interns to reduce the need to hire paid staff.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unpaid interns often do real work meaning that they drive out people searching for paid positions.\n","id":"103f55e4-59a6-4a00-8ffc-36a9af17ebf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Give Obama A Second Term<|ARGUMENT|>Beyond the rhetoric, beyond the inspirational speeches, there was one issue on voters\u2019 minds when they supported Obama; the economy and jobs. He has simply failed to deliver. He likes to portray himself as the master of public policy; a kind of philosopher king. However the reality couldn\u2019t be further from the truthi. On the issue that has dominated international discourse since his election, the economic meltdown, he has simply failed to deliver. He accepted a fiscal stimulus package that contained plenty in the way of pork but little in terms of practicality. He has failed to create jobs, the unemployment rate is still at 9% up from 7.8% when he became President.ii And Obama has singularly failed to tackle the deficit, which has increased by $4 trillion since he took office,iii apparently seeming more interested in spending on unnecessary projects. i Jonah Goldberg. \"Where's the evidence Obama's a policy genius?\" National Review Online. October 9th, 2011 ii Rogers, Simon, \u2018US jobless date: how has unemployment changed under Obama?\u2019, Datablog guardian.co.uk, 7 October 2011. iii Knoller, Mark, \u2018National debt has increased $4 trillion under Obama\u2019, CBS News, 22 August 2011.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Obama has singularly failed to resolve Americas economic woes, which was the single largest issue when he was elected\n","id":"7dc44df6-2d4e-4c67-8724-5c9292595b7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People like to discuss stuff and there is great entertainment and brain exercise value in doing it. So do I, but the above is invariant of what debated opinions actually are. Other than that, it seems to me that the actual stances on most topics are completely irrelevant to a person's life, unless they are actively making him act like an asshat or cause him to hate everyone. My thoughts on abortion, free trees, life after death, should we hate certain groups of people, and how we should run the country don't matter. My actions do matter, but most of my views do not precipitate into actions, especially that they're peaceful and based on not caring about how other people should live their lives. There are very few topics on which I could have meaningful and original stances. My academic knowledge mathematics need not be persuaded to anyone, being devoid of opinions apart from sure you can assume the Axiom Of Choice, it's easier that way and we all do . I do hold plenty of different opinions, stereotypes, prejudices and stuff I think is true but I don't know it is . Their internal value is minuscule. I hold them because I happen to have been shaped by my experiences.They're useful as a road map but should I start to believe something else, no loss and no big deal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A majority of my views are of little value and importance. So are almost everyone else's.\n","id":"dec44a9f-0be0-48dd-a950-2403b8ab28a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Western neo-tantra is an authentic form of tantra.<|ARGUMENT|>Neo-tantra expert Georg Feuerstein shares that tantra \"can do a great deal of good for people who have been raised in an atmosphere that represses and denigrates pleasure,\" and that \"it provides meaning and hope for some of those who have outgrown guilt-ridden puritanism and conventional sexuality.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tantra is about accepting the sensual as spiritual, and Western tantra leads people towards that goal.\n","id":"0da7d9e1-2a47-4386-b3e9-bb4a532cfb41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>However, I do not think that all Muslims are terrorists. I believe that all Muslims are victims of terrorism. I feel that I am educated enough on the teachings of Islam to make this claim, having read passages of the Quran and principles of Sharia. It seems to me that the religion was created specifically to strike fear into its followers in order to control the population. Therefore, I do believe that all Muslim leaders and jihadists are in fact terrorists. For what it's worth, I don't feel the same way about the other Abrahamic religions, although I still disdain them. To me the definition of terrorism goes something like the use of intimidation to incite fear into a group of people in order to gain some kind of control over them. Isn't that pretty much a summary of Islam? Every part of a Muslims life is dictated by their religion so they must have some fear even if they do not realize it because it is ingrained into their culture. The fact that even one person has ever been stoned for a victimless crime tells me all I need to know, really. Using people as an example is another loose definition of terrorism and this is clearly what public stoning is for. Of course, my perspective is different because I do not believe in muhammed yes, left un capitalized for giggles, shuck it Trebek . So, I don't believe that anyone is suffering for any reason other than to incite fear. That's pretty much it. I really don't want to believe this, though. The fact that 1.5 billion people have been duped and handed extraordinarily bad luck really shakes my faith in the human race. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I really do believe that Islam incites terrorism.\n","id":"006f1b34-c723-4308-a8f9-c73e18f24134"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>Israel has halted transfers of the tax revenue it collects on behalf of the Palestinians in retaliation for their move to join the International Criminal Court in the Hague. This has exacerbated economic woes that Fatah cannot abate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Palestinian Authority is forced to be undemocratic in order to ensure some semblance of stability. This will likely change after recognition.\n","id":"3854efa8-0bb3-45ca-b198-a3eac28a9038"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Someone recently made the argument to me that banning guns in the U.S. would skyrocket the price of guns in the black market and therefore make them economically unfeasible to buy, even in the black market. Naturally I thought of the effectiveness or lack thereof of the War on Drugs and how efficiently illegal drugs are coming across the southern border. What I am looking for is evidence that my above assumption is wrong. I would readily accept this if the evidence is there to support it. Would banning guns in the U.S. cause their black market sale to skyrocket in price and therefore have the effect of eliminating illegal guns via economics? What is to stop drug lords from buying Ak 47's or similar guns in bulk, bringing them in on their well established drug routes, and then selling them in the U.S.? Edit  view changed u mistressofallevil made a very sound point below with this article . In Australia, Prices of semi automatic handguns, so called weapons of choice of underworld characters, from a previous price tag of 2,000 to 4,000 have gone up to over 15,000 in the past two years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banning guns in the U.S. will only lead to stronger blackmarket sales of guns while ensuring that gun legal owning citizens lack guns.\n","id":"0bbc0c0f-9190-49d8-abf5-ec167a3b3eb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi guys, We often hear how the USA is one of the best countries in the world, freedom, patriotism, etc. As someone living in another first world country, I have a very difficult time understanding why so many Americans and their politicians say that the United States of America is the best country in the world. I believe it is the only first world country that does not have a universal healthcare system. It is one of only 5 countries that does not provided mandated maternity leave the other 4 countries are poor third world countries The education system in the USA does not rank very high in regards to grade school and secondary school. The universities are ok if you have enough money to go to them. The amount of money allocated to the miltary in contrast to education and healthcare and other services is hard to believe. I don't understand how your political system runs. It seems people in power are just lobbying to give more power to huge private companies they worked for before getting into politics. It's seems there are so many conflicts of interest in US politics. The US ranks number 1 for sending people to prison and for very long time. There is a HUGE gun problem in the USA. The U.S. ranks 33rd in acceptance of evolution The U.S. ranks 1st in anxiety disorders The U.S. ranks 6th in assaults The U.S. ranks 1st in biocapacity The U.S. ranks 85th in boys going to grade school The U.S. ranks 9th in bribery The U.S. ranks 2nd in child poverty The U.S. ranks 26th in conditions for mothers The U.S. ranks 1st in oil consumption The U.S. ranks 14th in central government debt The U.S. ranks 6th in drug crimes The U.S. ranks 1st for cocaine use I tend to think of Americans as people who have been brainwashed by their patriotism and government into thinking they are the best in the world at everything, but when you look at the statistics, the USA isn't one of the best countries on this planet. The minimum wage is so low. So many people are living in poverty even if they work over 40 hours a week. There are so many people who are sick and can't get better because the country has a for profit healthcare system. The obesity epidemic is very scary in that country. I am trying to think how America would be as a country if they had a small military. Would they still be a force in the world? I feel that the American government bullies a lot of other countries, and I don't always know if the US government is telling the truth especially with the whole NSA thing. I want my view changed. I've never been to the USA and I would like it if someone helped change my view of that country. I live in Canada. We are your largest trading partner, and I am not even sure if many Americans know this. I've met many Americans who don't know anything at all about Canada. I've never been to the USA and I know a lot about it. And I am not anti American. I just would like my view changed. edit I think because this is downvoted just goes to show that people are not willing to explain why the USA is the best and prove me wrong, they just assume it to be and if you question that you are wrong. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't understand why people think the USA is one of the best countries in the world, please\n","id":"b888cc0e-d13d-4747-af7d-f8bd79536c72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe everyone should should give everyone respect regardless of gender. I will hold doors open for anyone who is approaching because it is the decent thing to do, and if the person is younger than me, a different race, or another guy, I don't care I will still show them the same respect I would show a female. People that treat other human beings with more or less kindness, understanding, and respect solely based on the gender they were assigned at birth are practicing a long accepted tradition of discrimination. The practice of chivalry is sexist and harmful to both genders. Most of the commonly accepted chivalrous ideals I believe are inherently good, BUT only if applied to everyone. Don't hit a woman should be Don't hit anyone with exceptions of course, i.e. self defense Hold the door open for a woman should be Hold the door open for the next person Walk around and open the car door for a woman honestly people should open their own car door. but if you are going to do it, do it for everyone. Etc I know my argument is pretty short but I am open to have my opinion changed, though as of now I don't see why chivalry is commonly accepted in society. EDIT When I refer to chivalry I'm primarily wanting to discuss the gender aspects of it's definition and how people generally understand its functional definition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the concept of chivalry, in all forms that exist today, should end.\n","id":"f22568c3-06a3-4365-8aaa-40c432e1b0d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Likewise if the husband turns down sex three times, the wife should seek a different lover. Fairness. Marriage is a sexual contract what an odd thing in this day and age , and if any party fails to fulfill its side of the deal, the aggrieved party is justified in finding other ways to meet its needs. Withholding sex is not an acceptable tactic because it undermines the purpose of marriage creating a sanctioned sexual relationship . If you oppose this view, perhaps consider that sex should not be legislated or litigated. Maybe marriage should be handled by religious or informal social bodies and not by the legal system. The chaos wreaked by failed marriages, where assets are intertwined and children are psychologically harmed, may benefit lawyers, but it does not benefit society. One no may be for legitimate temporary reasons. Two noes could be a bad run. But three noes is a clear pattern of neglect or rejection, and if the aggrieved party is feeling charitable he or she should find an alternate outlet rather than destroying the relationship through divorce. The harm of public divorce outweighs the harm of quiet infidelity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a wife says no to sex three times in a row, the husband is justified in finding a mistress\n","id":"fd0091bc-1594-44cc-b083-fa684f3043d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>A USE will be able to better defend its borders than the EU in its current form.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The USE would arguably be one of the strongest states in the world.\n","id":"c82638a4-d888-4a1c-92a7-f87614a9effd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Some of my friends say Spotify is the best thing for playing music. But I find it hard to believe when there are people like me who already have over 1000 songs in our library. Not to mention, iTunes is the only thing that will properly communicate with my Apple product that I use for music. I realize you can download pretty much as much music as you want, but to get that, you have to pay. Whereas iTunes is free. I'm not really the type of person who's into discovering brand new music all the time. Occasionally, I'll expand my horizons until I find an artist who really sticks, and then I'll play the crap out of their music until I'm pretty much sick of it. Back in the day, when I had a Zune to play music, they had a similar feature where you could pay a fixed subscription fee to download as much music as you wanted for free. Even back then, an offer like this didn't pique my interest. Knowing this, are there any standout features that evolve the listening experience so much that I'd be willing to abandon my iTunes library and start over again? Edit I've decided that I want to experiment with Spotify and at least try it out. Thank you to all the people who replied. You all gave really helpful information. Also, a side note, this is one of my very first posts and, by miles, my most commented on one. So thank you for the good conversation as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I use iTunes. Why should I switch to something like Spotify when I already have an extensive library set up?\n","id":"3fb2504a-9c37-4924-a417-30834df663b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Undocumented Immigration Into the United States a Problem?<|ARGUMENT|>A study found that unauthorized immigrants in New York State paid an average of 15% of their income in federal, state, and local taxes; other immigrant groups paid between 21% and 31% p. 2.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Undocumented immigrants pay taxes and are thus entitled to such benefits.\n","id":"97f5958b-ff2a-4ef2-88d3-7b3ba07e2fb6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Countries Taking In Refugees Confiscate their Valuables?<|ARGUMENT|>Jewellery may be the only thing that reminds them of their families and their homes, as it would be too hard to flee with heavier items such as paintings or photo albums.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Confiscation of valuables could include objects with high sentimental value such as inherited jewellery. Taking away memories of beloved family members is inhumane.\n","id":"61c5550b-6dbc-4f80-b5d7-f90beeba4cc9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've decided to post this because I actually want to have a discussion about the topic without being randomly insulted by people who think otherwise and don't even explain their opinion. I understand my opinion comes off as offensive but I am actually open to changing it because I see that a lot of people have a different view. I'm sure people would ask about this, so before anyone even gets the chance I did have pets. I loved them and enjoyed the time we spent together, they were taken care of very well and I was reasonably upset when they were gone. However, I did not think of them as actual family members, equal to my human family. Those pets of mine and their roles in my life could never compare to my parents and siblings in any way that was my family at the time when I also had the pets . So I don't really understand people who actually do think of their pets as actual family members. It's one thing to use that as a figure of speech and I understand that saying someone someting is family can just be an expression of love and affection, it doesn't have to mean literally saying this dog is my brother's equal . But apparently for some people, it actually does mean that. And I think there's something wrong with them. A pet is a pet usually a dog or a cat, and I just don't see how they measure up to an actual human family member. Obviously if you have an abusive family, a rock on the driveway is better than them, but I'm talking about normal families. If you have a loving parent sibling and find a pet their equal, you're just messed up. There's a huge difference between pet human and human human relationships and just that is enough. The pets don't even have the capabilities that humans do, that are required for forming regular human relationships. Here's an example let's say the pet is a dog. Your relationship with him is fairly simple. You take care of him and he loves you. You feed him, he licks you, you take him for walks and he's happy when you get home.You have a brother, who's an actual person, independent from you, yet he still loves and supports you, you take care of each other periodically when the need should arise and you actually communicate freely in words, through disagreements, clearly and constructively. You actively influence each other the dog's influence is his need to go out which will lead to him waking you up earlier than you would have liked.So how can they be equal in your life, how are they both equal family members? I can see one answer how you think there's more to your relationship with your pet than there usually is with pets, but if you project aspects of regular human relationships on your relationship with your pet, that just means there's something wrong with you and you can't see things clearly. It's even understandable for people who have been traumatized by other humans and are taking baby steps towards getting better, they probably need to use that relationship to find some stability before integrating into society, but if nothing happened yet you still construct an idea in your head that your dog is like a human companion, that's just messed up. I just have to add that I don't think that loving your pet is enough of a reason. There's much more to human relationships than just the feeling of love. If you can't see that, then there's still something wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is something wrong with people who literally think of pets as family\n","id":"2c9b4e69-c3a5-421a-b438-4d9cc8f72944"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This was a thought that came to me rather randomly in result to some recent posts on the true cost of Walmart. Essentially the fact that due to low wages we are subsidizing Walmarts. Note this is specifically aimed at the USA since I live there. It probably applies to other countries as well. The often trumpeted solution to this problem is a higher minimum wage. Something like double the current. The problem is that raising the minimum wage doesn't actually change the market pressures. If the market wage is below the minimum wage less people will be hired. To change the market wage either the supply or the demand would have to change. A minimum wage does neither. Unemployment benefits on the other hand would lower the supply. People would now have a better option. A business couldn't have incredibly low wages because people would just stay with the unemployment benefits. The fact that these are unemployment benefits vs just a check everyone gets is critical. The latter is close to our current system. People below a certain threshold, the poverty level, get benefits to help them survive. This is much better than the alternative, but it leads to things like the Walmart where much of the profit is in fact coming out of the taxpayers pockets. Just to get this out of the way here's some common objections I've received and my response Wouldn't this lead to freeloaders? Yes, that's the entire point, but it could be minimized by keeping the benefits fairly low. Enough to keep yourself above water, but not fun. Isn't the government big enough already? That's why I'm interested in what I might be missing here. My gut agrees with this, but I can't come up with why. Scams implementation? This is probably the biggest problem I can come up with. What to do about the almost 50 of Americans who aren't officially employed? That would probably have to be something like benefits unemployment benefits income. As I've already mentioned my gut say's I'm wrong, so Reddit what'd I miss.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The minimum wage should be removed and replaced by unemployment benefits. My gut says there something wrong with this so by all means,\n","id":"801f4726-0c21-4a47-b33d-d6c688b72cc5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that the Post Office has slowly been becoming a thing of the past with the advent of new technologies. E Mails, text messages, Facebook posts, and many other media forms are filling the need for communication in a cheaper and more efficient way. There are certainly still packages that need to be shipped, but with private freight companies that can cater to these needs Fed Ex, for example , I think that the private businesses can take care of these shipments. I think even though closing the Post Office will result in the loss of jobs, the increased amount of business to private freight companies will require them to hire more people, and over time I believe the job losses will balance out with the gains in the increasing freight industry in America. Closing the US Post Office will result in money spent in that sector to be spent in other things that can be more effective and useful to our government and country public schooling, space exploration, etc etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the US Post Office is a drain on the government's resources and does not need to exist anymore-\n","id":"fd5be9ad-0e96-4658-8570-bfd9bbcc738c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I really don't understand why she is so glorified. I understand she is ''funny'' and hot but really, why does she receive such huge attention. I don't know why she got an Oscar, i've seen her movie and i don't think at all that it was a perfomance merit to an oscar. I can picture her as a really funny ordinary person from my school job wich would never receive such a huge attention. Don't get me wrong, i think she is a really nice person<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Jennifer Lawrence is overrated. I'm a male\n","id":"348ed434-9b74-4def-ae52-c6470932a34e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This hasn't been something that has bothered me for the most part of my personal life, as anytime we have unexpected visitors I could always relocate them without them being harmed flies, spiders, rats, mice, possums, etc. However I have recently taken over a new business in a field that such creatures pose a health risk and try as might including mobilising many members of my staff there is no way for me to contain this without extermination. I am a believer of the greater good, but I also believe that every life is precious and deserves to live if possible. I also accept the natural course of life that some creatures feed on others. I also accept that our current lifestyle, including the device I am typing this onto may have resulted in a number of unintended consequences. But I feel the power of the individual in surfacing such things is limited and when information is revealed to me I modify my purchases accordingly. In addition to the above, I also donate a considerable amount of time and money to saving unnecessary death. I am not religious, nor am I antitheist. So, is it possible to ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe bugs and small animals considered pests deserve to live\n","id":"4f5d2201-b35f-438d-ac17-e0c2e2fb3190"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do we need more and stronger international institutions?<|ARGUMENT|>The nationalist revolts of the 1990's in the Eastern Bloc freed millions of people from the deprivations of Soviet socialism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nationalism is not always toxic but can have beneficial effects, especially for countries themselves.\n","id":"31048aa5-b779-4ee7-bea3-3c90bcffcb72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state grant benefits linked to marriage?<|ARGUMENT|>If anything, these benefits may produce more unhappy marriages as incompatible partners will be incentivized to get married in order to access the state benefits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is unlikely to be true of the married couples produced by a policy of state benefits.\n","id":"bd1b49e4-3997-4b74-a72f-7bda4135032e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Religions that do not provide any social benefit that function as tax shelters should have their tax exemption removed specifically because they are not actually religions. Real religions do not deserve to be punished for the abuses of the few.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion in itself is a social benefit, and therefore religious organizations deserve to maintain their tax-exempt status.\n","id":"534fbdfb-663d-4fb7-8107-f57b2601d097"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I personally don't like smoking, I think it is not a good habit and have never smoked myself. However when I see things like countries that are trying to become a smoke free country or that are considering banning cigarettes for anyone born after 20xx then I feel like that is a totally wrong direction to go in. Because I see it ultimately as a personal choice, and people should have the ability to make their own decisions, even if I think those are dumb decisions, to me that is the inherent freedom of a person. I'm fine with bans on smoking in public places, especially indoors, but I don't think that bans that are all encompassing and take away the right to smoke at home or in private are legitimate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Smoking should not be totally banned.\n","id":"a4c0b6e4-32a9-420d-8d1a-565e60fea1a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that live versions of musical albums are nothing more than a cash grab by the artist or their label manager etc. to make more money off the songs they have already written. They also serve little to no point for anyone who likes clean audio since there is always someone screaming, clapping on the wrong beats, and trying to sing along which can make the song sound off key if enough people aren't on the right note . This artist has already made their money off the song, the radio pandora etc. replays, the merchandise, and the concert, why do they feel the need to say well we have all this great audio from our hours in the recording studio, but let's release this unpolished recording from a bunch of road weary musicians . I will grant some exceptions Some Jazz bands that do improvisations where no recording sounds the same Bands that don't sound right in a studio and need a raw edge like KISS Maybe if an artist has a new take on an old song but I still feel that's a little bit of a cash grab P.S. I do realize that the artist may not be able to overrule the record label or management, but I feel as though that's a different argument.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Live versions of music albums are nothing more than a cash grab\n","id":"ca68158a-3fd8-40a6-b8a6-a587541f5ec8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should hate speech be illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Restricting \"hate speech\" is a violation of \"minority rights\" itself - by definition it is a majority defining what opinions are acceptable and what opinions are not acceptable. This gives them the ability to punish the minority whose opinions are considered \"hateful.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate speech is a de facto limitation on the free speech of those targeted.\n","id":"688b2388-eb32-4bc5-be4b-0184bc8ebb42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Masturbation - Is It Acceptable?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the study when too much dopamine is released too frequently, our brains become desensitized to it. Any behavior that floods the brain with dopamine can desensitize us, requiring more of the same behavior in order to get the same reward.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Too frequent masturbation can lead to excessive amounts of dopamine being released which could make the brain more stressed out.\n","id":"e2eb6dc5-cb71-40ee-a225-1f2aa4498bd1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is there an afterlife?<|ARGUMENT|>These arguments are believed by billions of people across the world, and have been throughout human history.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Almost all major faiths offer complex and sophisticated arguments about why life exists after death.\n","id":"60a81529-ebcb-4837-b1db-48e0b8ac8da2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should society work towards becoming \"colorblind\" in regards to race\/ethnicity?<|ARGUMENT|>This is like suggesting that we not notice differences between men and women in order to end sexism. Or that we not notice differences between rich and poor to end wealth inequality. It leads to colour-blind racism in that any differences in the treatment of People of Colour is explained-away as being about everything but race. Such colour-blindness would then benefit White people who would then never be seen as racist at the expense of everyone else.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There will always be implicit bias that prevents true \"colorblindness\".\n","id":"cb2c5a0c-0351-40b4-9cbb-49618956a057"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At worst, they condescend to the audience in cultic fashion. The few I've watched seem to be rich guys congratulating themselves for being rich, mainly revealing how special they are, personally. The TED Talks do little to educate anyone about anything. They only promote idolatry. Please, Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the TED talks are worthless at best...\n","id":"1962b391-0266-47cd-a950-5a0751173d3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My logic here is pretty simple. Someone who steals someone is worth less than what is being stolen. Thus, when someone violates your property rights, you are entitled to correct that by any means necessary. Running away doesn't change the fact that you are a thief it merely makes you both a thief AND a coward. Someone who runs away with your stuff is not innocent and you can still do whatever it takes to get your property back. I think this is fair because all you have to do to not get shot is not to steal. Stealing is an active decision, and one that presumably requires a good deal of effort, so most people shouldn't have to worry about it. This would save lives overall, I think. Remember that criminals are more likely than normal humans to try and kill someone. The way I see it, if someone steals from you and is running away, there is a good chance they go on to kill someone else. Shooting them might put a stop to that, and would save more lives overall. Shooting the criminal will incapacitate them, but may not necessarily kill them. This would lead to a safer and more just society. I acknowledge this isn't going to work in practice, it would be too difficult to enforce. However on paper I think it is moral, even if it can't be implemented practically.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone robs you, you should have the right to shoot them even if they are running away.\n","id":"7d394f5b-8984-40a8-819b-d775ae2111d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This sounds a bit like a paradox, but it's fairly straightforward let me explain. Democracy is great, but individual votes amount to nothing. Unless you are participating in a fairy small election, 1 your chances of tipping the scales are negligible. And even if you could pull this off, the country would have to hope that you, 2 the average voter, are somehow well informed about the political situation. While the poll booths probably attract the smarter layers of population, the mis information is so vast that even they are reduced to sifting through the popular media in search of the truth\u2014and what finer examples of those you can find but our beloved r politics and r the donald. That said, I must admit that 2.1 in certain situations, for instance when you happen to have elected a racist idiot, the choice of action is quite clear. But 2.1.1 such votes seem to be peculiar to countries with 2 party systems, and such countries are few. Besides, 2.2 the fact that the racist idiot has been elected in the first place serves to show how point 2 is unlikely\u2014especially in cases when they are losing public trust. And if they are not, 2.3 perhaps they aren't as much of a racist idiot than you think? So at the end of the day, a single vote doesn't matter. Yet you should vote, as votes are what make democracy. In other words, nonvoting is ok, but you still get to complain about the results.  This has been posted on this subreddit before, and I'd like to preemptively address some of the common arguments. gt 3 If more people abstain from voting, the effectiveness of the democracy machine breaks First of all, 3.1 when people don't vote and the situation is bad, it's usually not due to sheer numbers of people, but their demography, as it's often comprised of the disadvantaged people aliens, elderly, working class who are somehow unable to get to vote. Not our case. Second, 3.2 I'm not saying you shouldn't vote Do it The more the merrier Nonvoting is not the same as boycotting an election. gt 4 Local elections affect you the most, and your voice could matter there True, while still unlikely. But I'm talking about the bigger fish here, as mentioned. gt 4.1 When you vote for a party, the weight of your vote dramatically increases While the chance for the vote to have any effect does increase, the weight of it decreases hundred fold, as you can only \u201celect\u201d, like, 1 100 1 33rd of what you'd elect in presidential elections. Also, point 2.1 no longer works here, and one has to read read listen listen watch watch. gt 5 If one voice doesn't matter, how many matter? 2? 10? 1000? Where you draw the line? Your voice still have a value. Sure. Also I have a chance of winning in a lottery. Most people are able to draw a line when it comes to the lottery, don't they? gt 6 Nonvoting is still voting. This doesn't conflict with my view. Also it's wrong, as there's usually no way to differentiate me from people who want to make a political statement of non voting. And even if there was such a way, it'd be clear that I'm not one of those voting against all or the democracy itself. gt 7 You have a responsibility to educate yourself on the nominees and to vote. There's no such law at least here , and I didn't ask to be born in this country, so I don't. gt 8 The real problem is the electoral college, gerrymandering, two party system, passports, racism, etc. I'm not trying to find faults with the system or fix it I'm merely saying that voting is a waste of my time. gt 9 You're just lazy I am, so what? gt \u00b6 Votes are the voice of your morals The blood in the veins of the political system You are an atom of a bigger organism You are voting not on people, but on things that affect your life Aren't you a good person who pays their taxes? Miss me with the poetry.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voting is a waste of your time, but you should totally vote!\n","id":"0c96da92-9b24-4f1e-b408-11e6d224b3f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm looking into post secondary education for becoming a computer scientist and from what I've been told, University is the only option if I want to go places in the world. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am of the view that if I go to college instead of University I will not be very successful in life.\n","id":"113cbc69-2d54-47c8-accb-13c4b6b3f829"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is in regards to the lead up to the famous and stirring trench assault scene in Wonder Woman 2017 . A few quick disclaimers 1 I like Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, but I don't think she's a particularly skilled actress, and this may have been out of her range. My argument is only that it would have been narratively better had Wonder Woman cried. 2 This argument has anti PC elements in it, but that isn't the point of my argument. I want to say up front that I am a woman, I consider myself a feminist, and I am definitely more on the SJW side of things. That doesn't mean PC culture and wokeness can't also be stifling. This is a minor point, but I didn't want it to factor into anyone's perception of my motivation. 3 I really, really liked Wonder Woman. Aside from the ending, the film was great. I am not a screenwriter and my brief rewrites are not intended to be perfect replacements for the film, but just descriptions of what I think ought to be happening. Now then, here is my argument. Apologies if I get a few details wrong, as it's been a while since I've seen it. Diana, Wonder Woman, never saw real violence her entire life. She never saw anyone die, never saw anyone hurt. She was as sheltered as long as anyone has ever been sheltered. Imagine how traumatic it is for someone in a peaceful society to lose a pet . Now imagine someone that has never seen death before on a paradise island. Nobody even got sick there. The tragedy of losing a friend would be overwhelming, let alone a loved one. Now imagine a horde of strange humanoid creatures attack your island and slay dozens of your friends. To this, Wonder Woman barely bats an eye, let alone show any real remorse. I can overlook this, as it's not a pivotal moment in the movie and you don't want to bloat it with Gal Gadot's bad acting or because women crying in films is cliche, and it's a trope you're trying to avoid. But female or not, it makes sense here. Gal Gadot weeping like a child losing a pet is entirely appropriate here. And I think this was avoided to avoid this trope. This brings me to the first pillar of my argument. Tropes should not be avoided merely for the sake of avoiding them . They should be considered, and analyzed. Should women be screaming every time they see something scary in a film, merely by dint of being a woman? No. That's a perfect trope to avoid. But Wonder Woman being overwhelmed by the unprecedented loss of her comrades? That would have been narratively stronger, and it would have made the upcoming trench assault scene more powerful. Here it is for reference. Before the scene, Wonder Woman is seeing suffering like she's never seen it before, which should have been embellished more. Trench warfare late in WWI was a fucking nightmare, and healthy soldiers and some peasant lady saying her village is hungry and enslaved did a poor job of depicting it. Where were the dismembered soldiers? The fallen but as yet alive soldiers crying out in agony having fallen in no man's land? Where were intense, endless artillery barrages that left so many young men psychologically impaired for the rest of their lives? Where was the horror of war? That could easily be depicted while maintaining its PG 13 rating. Horror is what Diana should have seen. To her, it would have been utterly incomprehensible. How could people do this to each other? She's never heard someone wailing in agony before in her entire life. She's hundreds, maybe thousands of years old now, and she's never, ever heard that before. She has not been prepared for war, she's been sheltered from it. This cannot be allowed, she thinks, it can't stand. No one, Amazon or human or anything else, should ever have to make the sound she's hearing right now. We have to help these people, she says, looking around, desperately trying to understand why someone hasn't already done this. She hears the man crying out in pain, begging for help. We have to help him We can't, Steve says. We have to stay on mission. Diana should be appalled by this. She's confused. How is helping these people not their mission? That's what this is all about, is it not? This scene really shows Gal Gadot's poor acting range. She responds to Steve with little more than a stern tone to her voice at first. She should have been moved to tears here while Steve tells her they can't do anything. He tells her about no man's land. About machine guns. So what? We do nothing? As is, Diana says this like she's irritated. Instead, she should be mortified. We can't do nothing We can't leave them we can't leave him . We can't save everyone in this war, Steve tells her. That isn't what we came here to do. Diana responds to this like she's about to shoot the game winner in the state championship basketball game. She should be completely overcome. She doesn't understand. She can't understand. Instead it's, No, but it's what I'm going to do, soft spoken, determined. Wasted. The build up to this scene should have been the most powerful part of the film, not the trench rush itself. The amount of death here is incomprehensible to someone that had, until only a few days ago, never seen it before. She didn't know this could happen. And her response is soft spoken determination? If there is anything in film history that warrants tears, it's the first time a person as sheltered and naive as Diana is sees war. She says nothing, just shaking her head in disbelief, tears streaming down her face. Finally her fist clenches and she turns wordlessly away from these people she now sees as cowards. She climbs out of the trench, tears still in her eyes. But she's not going into no man's land to fight the Germans. She's not going there to kill anyone. She's going to help the man she hears crying out there. She charges the same way, blocking bullets, but this time she is empowered and inspired by her emotions, not subduing them or being held back by them a much better message for the feminist slant of the film, imo . There's certainly no subtle, confident smirk when she blocks the second bullet. She is devastated. Heart broken. Still she pushes on, against all the odds. She may die too. She doesn't care. She's going to help that man. Her shield isn't used to protect herself, or rather, that's not its intended purpose. It protects the weak, the poor, the sick, the fallen. She kneels by the injured man while the others realize she's taking all the fire and charge behind them. All the soldiers at that point, though, not just Steve and their crew. Bullets graze her skin, anime style. She's shot in the leg, screams out in pain she's never felt before and falls to her knees, but still she holds strong. She sees the machine guns shooting at her friends and realizes what she has to do. That's when she charges the other trench, wounded this time, and attacks the enemy machine guns. Diana's lack of real emotion makes this scene so much weaker than it should have been. And I think even if they got someone that could act well let me be clear that I do like Gal Gadot, and think she made a great Wonder Woman, but it's still true that her acting range was awful , the scene would have played out the same way. It's the same way all Hollywood female characters are played in action films. Strong, emotionless shells. And that's not a problem in and of itself. But it was a problem for Wonder Woman.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wonder Woman Should Have Cried\n","id":"d030b3ab-e719-4108-b8c4-5de381104cc8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should conscientious objection to abortion be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>When a person wants to help protect our country, but is unwilling to take a life, they can still serve as a medic on the battlefield -- or help out with the supplies and paperwork necessary to keep the operation running smoothly. Banning people from an entire field of work because they don't want to do some part of it seems short-sighted at best.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is wrong to lock people out of particular fields because of particular beliefs they hold. Many people may be able to provide excellent and useful skills to the medical profession but not want to perform abortions.\n","id":"b9ac5116-acdc-4d45-9dd0-94fe9307b842"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Long story short I have a good friend whos a producer and like I've always been a huge hip hop fan, I was obsessing about a girl a little bit and wrote a verse about her, he got me to record it in his studio, he liked it and put it over a beat and he wants me to collaborate with him. I enjoy it but I feel like its just kind of really lame to be a rapper unless you're either really really good im good but not great or actually a part of the culture that it belongs to. I cant make up my mind about it. Just doing it as a hobby doesnt bother me but to actually record stuff seems super lame.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Its lame for me to be a rapper because im white and im not that poor.\n","id":"8b1bb1a2-af71-4528-8bc0-54bb1f52decb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>Assembly lines show that physical strength is not necessarily an advantage in production. A woman could, for example, bolt a dashboard into a car as easily as a man.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Biological differences have stopped being significant since the Industrial Revolution.\n","id":"d6d42c8f-1f04-4caa-82ee-3cc5ec00ed12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Demolition, for those who don't know, was an album by metal band Judas Priest in 2001, and is the second of two albums featuring Tim Ripper Owens. Now, in my opinion, majority of songs on the album are memorable and catchy save for Jekyll and Hyde , and I really love Owens' singing. It's so powerful and sinister, and that shows on every track. Cyberface, especially. The riffs are catchy,the sound mixing is fantastic,and the lyrics have a true meaning to them, such as in Close to You . However, many do not share the same feelings, and pan the album. I'm not even sure r judaspriest knows it exists. Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Judas Priest's album \"Demolition\" is pretty good.\n","id":"3600f384-1f4b-4ee8-84c1-2eb3e5b132b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. Friedrich Nietzsche The intent of downvoting seems to be to filter out actual spam, actual shock imagery, actual gibberish where no sense is to be found. In practice, downvotes are treated as a disagree button. Perfectly legitimate posts end up being hidden simply because they express an unpopular and unpalatable opinion. This can be especially problematic in a big thread. As I scroll down, I'll see all of the unremarkable or inane posts usually left alone before I a serious post disagreeing with whatever circlejerk is going on in that thread. I personally refrain from posting on certain subs such as 2X chromosomes because I'll get buried in downvotes without even sparking a discussion. I don't make a special effort to antagonize. I type those posts in the same way I type any other post when I disagree with someone. It's not that imaginary points even matter, but the discussion almost always gets buried. I even dislike it when people I am disagreeing with get downvoted. I want the discussion to evolve to a better place. I try to write respectful replies even to views I vehemently disagree with. When my interlocutor receives 5 downvotes, it makes me worry that he will not want to continue the discussion. Sure, it's nice to discourage destructive posts, but so many people abuse the downvote button. It would be better if it were gone altogether. Downvoting just contributes to creating exclusive communities. Instead of 2 sides working issues out, they can just make 2 subreddits for themselves and downvote anyone who disagrees. There is a well known bias in real life that leads people to believe that everyone else shares the views of the people in their immediate community. The Internet might be humanity's best hope for overcoming this bias. Downvoting is a step toward the bias.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Downvoting is a mostly detrimental practice\n","id":"7240a7e6-8932-4bab-9484-3ece08644943"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I enjoy, and have no problems with Xenakis's pieces for Solo Instruments esp. tonal pieces like Six chansons pour piano Percussion Ensemble , or String Ensemble . no more than a handful of Xenakis's ensemble music like Jonchaies , Keqrops , Pithoprakta . most Post Modernist composers like The Second Viennese School, Ligeti, Messiaen, Penderecki. The following comment substantiates Metastaseis always sounding too rasping and causing headaches whenever I listen to it, daily for 1 year. I display in green the only 2 parts that don't sicken me, based on this moving graphical score gt Much of Xenakis' work is very mathematically driven, but be forewarned that he wasn't much concerned with making the music sound nice in any traditional sense of the word. Please help me change my reaction I fancy hearing it as merry uplifting music. The following 2 likers of Xenakis allege possibility of changing your reaction, but they've failed me as I've already tried them. Any other recommendations please? gt Original Two things here. One, I think Xenakis goes quite a bit further than atonalism alone, and in any case, the term is fairly vague. Two, I don't think you necessarily need to read about, or even understand the technicalities of this music in order to get something out of it. The most important thing to do is to listen . If it's not for you fair enough. But personally I find that it's possible to enjoy pretty much anything if you're prepared to take it seriously on its own terms. Give it more than a few seconds. Listen to it more than once. Approach it like any other piece of music. Try to work out what it says to you. Try to work out what the composer's intentions might have been. Alternatively, find some more approachable Xenakis pieces Rebonds B, for example , or works by other modernist and post war composers, and listen to those as a way in. gt Original I get a lot of pleasure from listening to Xenakis' music. Sometimes it's beautiful, sometimes it's scary, sometimes it's just badass. You have be able to hear the patterns, though, or it'll just sound like cacaphony.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I can't change my reaction to Xenakis's 'Metastaseis' as grating and headache-causing.\n","id":"75875b4b-6cda-4ee5-9330-2276395cca4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>There have been examples of feminist organizations ignoring evidence that is counter to their movement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism by definition is inherently biased against men thus making it divisive by nature.\n","id":"288754e3-3a87-45c3-b84a-371f084120cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Many of the important nutrients found in animals are often not found in plants. And when they are, they are not in the same quantities, and then we need to grow more of them defeating the purpose of planting on the basis that it consumes less resources than animals. And even when we can, it's not metabolically the same as the one we get from animals, which is better suited for our Gastro-Enteric apparatus, see how B12 is less bio-aviable from \"alternative sourches\" and it is discouraged<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals then convert this indigestible food to useful nutrient that can fertilize food crops.\n","id":"31edb104-71a5-43c7-90dc-f85976e40953"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>True believers can be too readily pushed into destructive action. For example, that is the case of Jonestown massacre or the Ku Klux Klan Both justified horrific action by religious beliefs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The moral codes often found in religious texts have been the cause of many social injustices including the persecution of homosexuals, people of colour and women.\n","id":"53c0726e-4155-4f65-a6b3-308614465cb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should sperm donors have the same legal rights, responsibilities and limitations as other biological fathers?<|ARGUMENT|>A male friend or family member may be reluctant to crowd out the sperm donor even if they are an excellent role model and the sperm donor is only present because they are legally required to be involved. Requiring the sperm donor to be responsible for the child could inadvertently remove positive male role models from these children's lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The research suggests that the important factor is the positive influence and reliable presence of the male role model. A sperm donor who does not wish to be involved, or who does not get along with the parents\/ guardians of the child may impede the child's development more than help them.\n","id":"558d2d02-12a5-4c0e-a11e-63ba598eccee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>An adult who as a child was born through a surrogacy arrangement has campaigned to outlaw the practice stating that she would not have chosen it for herself and that it is \u201cdegrading<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children and adults can also feel distressed and as a commodity when they realise they were conceived through a surrogacy agreement.\n","id":"ec41656a-ad3b-41e5-9bd9-35b1be3ada7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Parliamentary Systems Enforce Proportional Representation?<|ARGUMENT|>The UK boundary commissions are required to apply a series of rules based on numerical limits to form electoral boundaries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the United Kingdom the boundary commissions are public bodies responsible for determining the boundaries for electoral constituencies.\n","id":"dec8c155-b648-465c-9ec1-ec2842a98c13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, in secular Europe, that can be observed in the tensions between Muslim and non-muslim citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is a perpetuator of conflict even if it is not the original source.\n","id":"1402aad9-f116-4fb9-808a-df5300afb75b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Benefits of Regionally Expansive Super Powers Change my view I think the world would be better and safer if Russia and China took over their rogue state neighbors. I started thinking about this because of North Korea. It's clear that a regime change there would result in a collective sigh of relief from the rest of the world. Understanding that North Korea doesn't have much in terms of natural resources that China wants, but perhaps China doesn't like having a crazy neighbor with dangerous weapons. If the US bordered NK, it would be a desolate parking lot by now, so why should we expect China to be more restrained? I know China has given mixed support to the NK state over the years, but placating an unruly neighbor and containing western influence on the peninsula is different from China supporting NK. Looking to other examples, the Soviet Union already tried to conquer Afghanistan. I think they would have done a better job controlling Islamic terror than the US is doing now. It's likely that Afghanistan would be more modern if they had Soviet influence since the 80's. Russia is looking for a national purpose right now and the loss of so much territory following the collapse of the USSR has been devastating. Maybe looking outward again is what they need. It's preferable they don't look to Europe when they looked outward. I'd rather Russia sweep down the the Arabian peninsula than push into the Baltics or Ukraine. I'm not saying it would be possible for Russia or China to conquer or maintain governance of these nations, but just that attempting to do so could add some needed stability after the tumultuous regime change. Whenever news media and pundits talk about Russia and China, they stoke fears about expansion. But those nations only appear to want to expand around their territory. China doesn't seem to have any interest in conquering Oregon or Venice. Countries I'd be fine with China occupying Burma Myanmar North Korea Afghanistan Acceptable Russian expansion Belarus if Poland erects a huge wall Syria Iraq Iran Arabian Peninsula And anyone who wants to govern Somalia can have it. For a country occupying them, the US or the UN should not intervene. My background I'm an American as if it wasn't obvious by now . Ex Army, currently a specialist in international law JD LLM but mostly I just draft contracts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China &amp; Russia should govern neighboring conflict zones.\n","id":"0e403c29-f540-47f1-94bf-aec576511cf5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This one may be a bit controversial for people who see it as an abuse of the system, mind you this is hypothetical. My wife and I live in the NorthWest of the US. We are considering moving to Canada in the near future and we are working on our case with Canadian Immigration. In the meantime we found out we are recently pregnant. I argue that its probably better for our child to have Canadian citizenship from birth by been born just 5 hours north of were we live. Giving the kid an larger opportunity to live, study, work in both countries without having to go thru the same process we currently are. The delivery costs will actually be the same with my current insurance in the US. From what I have gathered We would spend about 12k~ in Washington or in BC. So given that the cost is as close as possible and assuming a low risk pregnancy, spending a month in Canada to do this may seem worth while. Is it not?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Giving birth in Canada will be beneficial for my kid\n","id":"1c1ded78-f4db-447a-987b-cd4c2347ef32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I come from a country that has, for the past few years, been ruled by a government that while not being quite totalitarian, does definitely skew towards the majority community and a hard line cultural right attitude. This has encouraged the growth of a lot of vigilantism and a general atmosphere of intolerance towards and dominance over minority communities religious, linguistic, class based and otherwise . However, this government is significantly more economically efficient than the last growth stagnated under them, which is pretty devastating in a developing economy with high incidence of poverty . While the previous government was not without its flaws, including some element of intolerance, society in general was more tolerant and accepting under then. I believe that slower growth and a more tolerant attitude is better than breakneck growth which threatens the safety of citizens. I recognise that this might be coming from the relative economic security that I enjoy by virtue of being middle class. What do you guys think?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having a corrupt and\/or incompetent government is better than having a totalitarian but efficient one.\n","id":"7c7b5681-fa0b-4c88-9a6e-d19c00616486"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Islam compatible with feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the updated code the minimum age for women to marry was raised from 15 to 18, the same as the men's minimum age, women no longer needed to obtain approval from a guardian before marrying, men were forbidden from unilaterally divorcing their wives, women were given the right to divorce their husbands, and restrictions were imposed to make polygamous marriages harder to obtain and only with the permission of a judge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to Amna Arshad, ijtihad was an essential tool to reforming the Mudawana family code in Morocco, and that \u201cthe drafters explicitly invoked and utilized ijtihad in their revisions, as evidenced by the radical changes to the law.\u201d The Mudawana reforms demonstrated a vast departure from traditional Islamic law and advanced women's rights by overturning many discriminatory provisions. Advancing Women\u2019s Rights Through Islamic Law: The Example of Morocco, pg.45\n","id":"b29ee642-b0cc-465d-9e5c-73a72eae1968"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My primary thinking here is that the term MILK is not exclusive to dairy. FDA looks to reward dairy industry with exclusive use of 'milk' term ` ` ` some other factors in my current thinking that a ban is unnecessary We should not be so dependent on the government for making our choices. People should do more thinking for themselves. This reminds me of the over labeling problems caused by lawsuits. Warning Labels By John Stossel ` ` ` I am truly open to having my view changed on this matter,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The FDA does not need to ban the word MILK from soy and almond products.\n","id":"73f5756b-1a98-4b38-a832-60cee86cca41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Diverting welfare funds to a UBI helps these people buy the goods that they do actually need.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments are often less capable of understanding where aid is most needed.\n","id":"2dbfe3dc-9e0f-48ac-98c4-f0be2e6e3f0c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>The teleological argument, which states that unintelligent objects cannot be ordered unless they are done so by an intelligent being, which means that there must be an intelligent being to move objects to their ends: God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Well-known are five logical arguments regarding the existence of God by St. Thomas Aquinas, which are also called \"The Quinque vi\u00e6\n","id":"3633c461-bfc6-4fb2-a8b1-6ae5400c3d09"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Humanity is unable to stop climate change, that is true. But we can stop anthropogenic climate change. Anthropogenic climate change is the issue, not natural climate change. If we can create it, we can stop it. By definition, it is anthropogenic, meaning we can stop whatever it is we are doing that causes it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Once it is here, we cannot fight it. We can only act to prevent worsening climate change and mitigate its effects - and we must act now, because the longer the delay, the more catastrophic the results.\n","id":"6f3e0923-42e7-4877-bc33-1d514d1ffe9b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Costs There are more college graduates than there are jobs for people that require a college education. Making college more obtainable by lowering costs makes this situation worse. Socialization Not everyone can attend college. Whether they have children or family to take care of or are not smart enough to succeed. It would be immoral to make these people pay for college through taxes. Not everyone wants to attend college. Whether they want to learn on their own instead, have learned a trade on their own or simply just don't want to attend, it would be immoral to make them pay for college. Student loans are available for those that can not afford college but would benefit from and succeed in college. It is a fair way to handle the differences between those in rich and poor families. As it provides a way for people to become upwardly mobile which otherwise would not have that chance. Therefor it follows that the system that is in place is doing an adequate job of balancing the needs of people who can not afford college but would benefit from it so long as they pick an appropriate field that they will succeed in and the needs of the job market without being immorally imposed on those that don't or can't attend college. The only group who is not served by this model are those that fail to obtain employment by picking the wrong job markets or picking fields which they can not succeed in. It is more morally acceptable that those that fail are punished than their failures are distributed to those that have never or will never attend college.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that increasing college costs are justified economically, and that socializing college is blatantly immoral.\n","id":"190f6308-70ee-4080-8e56-7db9d58da50c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Receiving development aid strengthens already dominant political coalitions by enabling them to produce tangible results, expand their influence and stay in power. Hence, aid will only push democratisation if those in power are already working towards it - otherwise, it will simply strengthen dictators.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Foreign aid does not cause democratic reforms, it simply reinforces already ongoing domestic developments - both towards more democratic and more authoritarian politics.\n","id":"02035dd1-1c0b-4fea-84b3-fac077756601"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People seem to only function in the world as a way to further their success, and much of the time feel they are pulled up by pushing others down. If there's no where to go upwards, they push others downwards. People oftentimes use their potential, and other's empathy to take advantage of others. Edit to clarify People actively push others down to make themselves feel better about themselves. This is where the original selfishness becomes evil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe people are born evil.\n","id":"bedbad42-55d8-4fc4-b964-8f56fe0dcd90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Link to WBC AMA The point of iAma is for people to be able to talk about their views experience without being harassed about them. I by no means condone ANY of WBCs actions, but their AMA was by no means purposely provocative towards people, in a way that would violate Reddiquete. Some of my main points of concern are The excessive downvoting of posts made by WBC that in no way granted a downvote. People downvoted the WBC because of their beliefs, not in the value of the posts The harassment of the WBC replies to questions. There were many posts Proving WBC is 'Gay', etc. These harrasment posts i could post specific examples if you really wish me to, but i would advise you simply look at the thread yourself. ARE in violation of IAMA's rules Abusive or harassing comments . The general Sentiment shown for the WBC AMA for days Weeks? Reddit has known about the AMA, and has been hostile to the very idea. The fact that we are a big enough community to attract the attention of such a big name is very impressive. To spoil these chances shows our immaturity, and our inability to do these sorts of things again. Don't fight hate with hate. Thats what we did, and we should be ashamed. Edit PLEASE READ THE AMA RULES. Look especially at Voting. Edit 2 I would love to stay and defend my point, but i'm not mentally competent to do so at 12 30 at night. I get off of work at about four, so I will try to get back here then. thanks Disclaimer this is a generalization of the comments I have seen of the AMA, there were numerous comments that were polite and respectful. there were many more, however, that were not. Another Disclaimer Just so were clear, I personally Despise the WBC. They are a cruel hate group that has a sick and twisted view of the world. I just think that they still deserve respect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The iAMA of the Westboro Church was handled disgracefully by Reddit.\n","id":"d0c7bdcb-8bfb-43d9-8655-b6d145cfbf83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US and NATO Should Withdraw from Afghanistan<|ARGUMENT|>The Taliban is extremely wealthy which can buy them significant power and influence, and therefore popularity, in Afghanistan, a relatively poor country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Taliban are extremely unpopular which would make any sort of national government impossible to form or sustain.\n","id":"344826be-fe1a-4ed6-9fd3-174926359456"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Blackmail is verbal or written communication which persuades someone to act counter to their own interest in order to prevent an action.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Thoughts and opinions, when expressed verbally or in writing, have the power to harm.\n","id":"0100c9f3-4f8e-406c-9e26-b3a21e7dbe7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>He was striking with Vader with anger and hatred until he saw that robotic hand, a hand just like his own. With that he remembered he was fighting a person again, and he let his love overturn his hate. He let his hate go and Darth Vader turned, proving that someone who has committed many terrible acts, can still be redeemed. Even before this, Luke was considering joining the Imperial Academy in Ep IV.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Luke's battle with Darth Vader in The Return Of The Jedi is just as trialing for Luke as the moment of weakness with Ben Solo.\n","id":"4b76515b-561d-412c-a7bb-4a2758a707ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The saying correlation does not equal causation is inaccurate. Of course I don't believe that spurious correlations are causation. I understand that ice cream sales do not lead to more violent crime, even though they are correlated. However, in non experimental research, causal inference is just having a correlation between your IV and your DV so extreme as to be unlikely to occur by chance, but it's still nothing more than correlation. Maybe something like anecdotes do not equal causation is more what people mean.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think correlation more or less equals causation.\n","id":"c2fefac0-e2da-4117-8d8d-d0c0cc39f6bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>Polls in the US suggest that as few as 18% of women there call themselves a feminist. This is despite more than two thirds of women in the country supporting equality of the sexes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This type of campaigning could enlist people put off by feminism, its ideology, or reputation.\n","id":"35cf363e-7921-4fa2-96f2-a6572beb93ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>Many present European cultures, traditions, values and identities are based on common heritage, such as ancient Greek culture the Roman Empire, Christianity, the Renaissance, as well as the Enlightenment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European identity already exists. This is a heritage of democracy, freedom of speech and thoughts and focus on personal development.\n","id":"70d1997c-0f01-4afd-8dc3-6f37c8feefe4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a graduate student and our union is debating whether or not we should go on strike. One of the big things we are asking for is an increase in the minimum funding package from 18K to 20K a year. I get that we are making below the poverty line, especially when you consider the number of hours we work, but I feel like this is what we signed up for. When we accepted our offers to do graduate research, we knew exactly what the minimum funding package was and what the work entailed and we agreed to the contract anyways. So in that respect, it seems kind of ridiculous for us to than go on strike<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Graduate School: If you are planning to go on strike for better pay, than you shouldn't have accepted your admission offer in the first place.\n","id":"2116eb35-8020-4570-b8f6-95eec4a24f89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Treat Obesity as an Acceptable Lifestyle Choice?<|ARGUMENT|>Foundation for National Security created National Power Index which combines statistical analysis of the Economic, Military, Population, Technology, Energy Security, and Foreign Affairs capabilities of a country<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are other factors, which better explain the power and prestige of the country such as: military power, economic situation, political influence.\n","id":"01d04db8-9ab2-430c-a621-23acc30379b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>A 1981 study found that 25% of women facing an abortion decision considered the fetus to be human and regarded abortion as the taking of life whereas a 1995 study reported that 25% of women seeking an abortion agreed with the statement \"abortion is against my beliefs.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many women have abortions despite moral opposition to the procedure.\n","id":"81ac88e8-b3f5-42c8-91c8-1d9a5799bee6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>President George Washington himself realised that the longer he retained power over US democracy, the less democratic it became. He therefore abstained from running for a third presidential term.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some of the Founding Fathers themselves thought that holding power for an extremely long time was undemocratic.\n","id":"d8735219-ec72-470b-bf1c-78eeddcef985"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>It would be harmful for citizens to become solely reliant on the government to provide sustenance. As the population grows, the system would become unaffordable, leaving a low skilled workforce with no means to support themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UBI will make many citizens completely dependent on the central government and the UBI program for their livelihoods and therefore citizens' freedom and autonomy.\n","id":"d9f4335b-c3ed-43c0-b481-6d07c161451f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state grant benefits linked to marriage?<|ARGUMENT|>If marriage were unregulated, women might enter extremely contractually unequal marriages which state-regulation might have prevented Nuti, p. 288<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"State regulation of marriage can be an important way of protecting otherwise vulnerable women.\n","id":"485f92fd-a860-47d6-a171-c6f082192108"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have a visceral revulsion towards the idea of raising a child that isn't mine. Just thinking about it makes me feel gross and on edge. In the context of a marriage and my wife is an adulterer, then it's one of the greatest betrayals of intimacy possible and proof that I am unloved. If adoption is included, then both cases involve me wasting my efforts to raise a child that won't pass on my genes. In essence, I am just watering another mans garden and failing the only objective of life. The only exception I have to this is raising my siblings kids alongside mine in the event that they die or are no longer capable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am disgusted by the thought of raising a child that isn't my direct biological offspring\n","id":"9419a090-380d-4d2d-a924-4b61851e3360"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Christianity Compatible With Feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>He even dealt directly with women who were shunned by the culture of his time the woman with the issue of blood, prostitutes, the adulteress about to be stoned, the woman at the well. These women were forgiven, and not shunned by Christ.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Christianity is defined as being \"Christ like Christ, on earth accepted women as equals in His dealings with them, including bringing them in to his inner circle.\n","id":"ae391e0d-83eb-4af2-8a60-04683f1631e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am, of course, referring to this experiment The first marshmallow costs nothing, the second marshmallow costs 15 minutes. I think anyone who doesn't take the free marshmallow immediately and spend the following 15 minutes doing something other than waiting for another marshmallow is a sucker. This is especially true because 15 minutes is an eternity for a child. I remember counting to 100 as a young boy, it seemed to take forever. As my perception of time has sped up, I still wouldn't wait 15 minutes for a single marshmallow. Frankly, I'd ask my mom to buy me a whole bag of marshmallows the next time we were at the store, instead of waiting for a scientist to come back with a single marshmallow. I could then proceed to eat single marshmallows at my leisure, without any waiting involved. The fact children were willing to wait 15 minutes for a pretzel astounds me. Maybe these people grow up to actually enjoy the act of delaying gratification? If the feeling of getting a reward for sitting there for 15 minutes is more than the marshmallow itself for these people, I guess they aren't suckers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A marshmallow isn't worth 15 minutes of boredom.\n","id":"f7f9a142-4618-4ef7-a2cd-f21682d56634"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Football has so much more action than soccer, on every play there is a quanitifiable statistic yards gained lost to get excited over. You have big hits, masculinity, long bombs, complex strategy and the greatest athletes in the world. In soccer, most of the game is just passing a ball around randomly and then someone may get lucky and kick a ball into the net.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Football is more exciting to watch on TV than soccer.\n","id":"5b477704-280d-4c6c-8551-f6c018a14b76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>An omnivorous diet consisting of mostly vegetables supplemented by a small to moderate amount of meat is not much different to a full vegetarian or vegan diet, yet is more balanced and convenient because you are not going out of your way to avoid something completely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A heathy vegan diet is theoretically possible, but it is extremely hard to maintain such a diet long term without consuming any animal products, unless you take an industrial preconceived super balanced food.\n","id":"e6e239e2-f350-4303-8e35-993235b5a345"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The national curriculum should be scrapped<|ARGUMENT|>If there is no statutary standards set by a higher authority, different institutions and individual teachers could tend to experiment on their whims and fancies<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The National Curriculum sets standards for the Teaching Learning Programme\n","id":"fe0b47f2-a1d1-4cac-94ce-35c80b2e3474"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For those that missed Jennifer Lawrence's interview today. I want to focus on this quote in particular. gt \u201cIt is not a scandal. It is a sex crime,\u201d she tells Kashner. \u201cIt is a sexual violation. It\u2019s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. That\u2019s why these Web sites are responsible. Just the fact that somebody can be sexually exploited and violated, and the first thought that crosses somebody\u2019s mind is to make a profit from it. It\u2019s so beyond me. I just can\u2019t imagine being that detached from humanity. I can\u2019t imagine being that thoughtless and careless and so empty inside.\u201d I personally think that her anger is justified. She feels violated, intruded upon, and exploited by a man who did not care about her body, but I don't think that just because she shares the same feelings as someone who has suffered from a sex crime, that she gets to label herself as a sex crime victim. The argument is basically I feel violated, rape victims feel violated, rape is a sex crime, therefore, I'm the victim of a sex crime. I think we can all plainly see that doesn't logically follow. What we have here is not a sex crime, but a technologically advanced version of a peeping tom. We don't think wow, that guy peeking in her window raped her with his eyes. when we hear stories of a peeping tom, we think wow, that sick guy violated her privacy and her ability to have a moments peace. I think it's important to make this distinction, not as a way to downplay what happened to Jennifer Lawrence, but to protect the definition of what rape and sex crimes are. Words like sex crime have such a powerful effect because of the barbaric nature of the act itself. If we allow peeping toms to be in the same category as rapists, then that just waters down the severity of what sex crimes and rape are and it's no longer about the vile act, but also about lesser actions such as peeping, then the word loses the emotional charge that Lawrence is ultimately trying to use to rally for her cause. Will the tactic of emotional hyperbole work? Probably, but there are better, more correct ways to argue your point and still have the same effect. You can say My privacy was violated, I never feel like I can truly be alone and I deserve to have that feeling. This is compelling, draws just as much sympathy, and doesn't compare your experience to another different one. I've read a few comments on vanity fair from people saying that they were victims of sex crimes and that she has no right to compare her circumstances to theirs. I think they are right, but any views are welcome. I do have to sleep, though, so i'll probably only have time for a response or two tonight.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Referring to leaked nude photos as a \"sex crime\" is blatant hyperbole.\n","id":"4bbbfb31-370b-43c6-9269-62336de67df3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>In only a few decades, the sex toy industry rocketed from 'niche' to mainstream, facilitated by visibility in popular culture; sex robots will potentially follow that same trend.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many women use and enjoy dildos and other sex toys. As sex robots become more common and accepted, women may become more accepting of them.\n","id":"399191d1-6559-4127-b971-9b4fcf11f86b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Its always a little bit harder to back into a spot, because even in the best case scenario, you need to turn your entire head around to make sure the space is clear, check both sideview mirrors and slowly back in. If you don't do this, you put both your car and the cars next to you at risk for scratches dings. It takes significantly longer than just pulling into the spot, front first. Meanwhile you are blocking an entire lane usually two in the parking lot, preventing other people from getting around you. Why don't these people just drive into the spot head first? If the argument is that it makes leaving the spot easier, my rebuttal is that its far easier to pull out of a spot in reverse going from a tight enclosed space to a bigger one than it is to back into a tight little parking spot. You are wasting far more time backing into the space in the first place, than you are saving. So why the hell would anyone engage in this time wasting, annoying practice? Please change my view. EDIT View changed. While I didn't immediately accept the idea that backing into a spot is safer. I do recognize now that it is significantly safer to be able to pull out head first. After reading some stats online, it seems that a fair amount of accidents are caused by people pulling out recklessly and being able to go out head first decreases those odds. I had to look it up, but it was StanleyDarsh22 that put enough doubt in my head. Its annoying, but its apparently not as stupid as I originally thought. sp0rk0holic eventually provided some stats on the issue that were similar to the ones that I read Overall, I still think its possible to use either method and be safe, but I must concede that pulling in backwards is probably smarter for people who are terrible at driving.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who back their car into parking spaces so the front is facing out waste their own time and the time of anyone trying to get around them. It is an unfathomable stupid act.\n","id":"ec8c459d-15f6-4574-bf10-253355d21cb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think there are obvious advantages to both, PC looks better, gives you the option of using a keyboard, has mods. Consoles have a ton of games that come out first and sometimes only for consoles, are simpler to use, cheaper. But I think more than anything, a person's personal priorities determine which platform is actually better for that person. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the PC v Consoles debate too subjective to be worth having.\n","id":"a298b96e-ac2e-4ba4-8f25-371c18a0319c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would online education be best in virtual reality VR?<|ARGUMENT|>Sitting down in class for hours at a time is not healthy for students and VR could allow people to exercise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Virtual reality VR is the best format for online education.\n","id":"cd7f2511-bdfd-4bd5-9d50-280484918108"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Public school is free, and I think charging for basic courses at the college level is filler to extend a bachelors degree to 4 years when the courses needed to become specialized in the profession one is aiming for could be completed in 2 or 3 years. Why would a computer science major need to spend time and money studying art, history, or a foreign language? Why would an art major need to take math courses? While I believe these courses are beneficial to gain overall knowledge and understanding, I think they should be optional rather than required. Requiring these courses hurt the students financially and distract them from time that could be spent focusing on the classes that will benefit them in their future occupation. I think that colleges have more to gain by doing this than the students. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that a bachelors degree should focus only on the major\/minor and subjects that are covered in high school are unnecessary if they don't relate to the degree.\n","id":"b965439c-550d-4345-a796-a5bb62a95dc0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I keep hearing about how Bernie Sanders wants to make college tuition free and I can't really vouch for that because of several reasons. The biggest kink in our education system is not the jump from high school to college but from middle school to high school. 20 of kids fail out of high school and it's more like 30 with African American and Hispanic kids. When you consider limited standard English speaking students graduate at 60 , those kids from households that speak AAVE or Spanish are doubly screwed. No wonder Bernie hasn't done great with the African American demo. Bernie is helping the middle income people get great educations when he really should be helping low income people finish their education in the first place. It's not like a college education is important for those blue collar jobs we are in dire need of. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying college educations aren't important but getting as many people through high school and maybe get vocational education after seems way more important. I always hear people talking about Europe and all the places there that get free tuition but Ireland has medical schools for people straight out of high school. Seeing more high school grad rates and then getting a robust professional, vocational and apprenticing system is how we fill the blue collar job hole that our migrant legal and not population have been gladly snapping up. Imagine a country filled not just of educated engineers and artists but expert plumbers and highly qualified construction workers. High school is just way more important then college in my opinion. Edit I'm sorry I pissed 2 of you guys off. It's a shame because I was really enjoying reading all your arguments. In the end, I realized that in the long term, if college's student output is based on the demands of the industry, it would be producing workers tuned to what is needed given a few years to react . High schools can't react to demand the same way so they'd be just as likely to oversupply causing a job crisis as they are undersupplying. It'd benefit the low income family with improved chances of education but if anything close to 100 of students graduated, there would probably be a critically low job market.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free college tuition is not going to help where it's needed.\n","id":"79c678db-10b5-4c17-a858-aaddee5ea105"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We had a short debate on the Daddit subreddit over who's kids will live a more disappointing life regarding our favorite teams. People from Cleveland and San Diego argue their teams, be it NFL, MLB or NBA have all lived at the bottom of the standings for quite some time, while the Cubs play in a city that has had it's share of championships. I believe being a Cubs fan is a harder, more disappointing lot in life than the fans of Cleveland, San Diego, Seattle, Oakland or any other city that may be in a championship drought. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the 105 year long futility of the Chicago Cubs trumps the collective futility of other sports cities.\n","id":"0b4659e6-e622-4c27-8c7f-9afe367c3344"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I began doing this about 3 years ago, when I accidentally left my ice cream on my desk for about 20 min, completely forgotten. Well, can't let this go to waste. I think to myself, as I begin to tilt the bowl and unload it's goodness into my mouth. From that day forth, I always melted my ice cream and drank it. Now, most people ask Why do you do this, to which I answer because I'm either at home, or with people who could care less. I understand slurping can be veiwed as rude or annoying, so I usually just pour that sucker down my throat if other people are around that would seem to be the type to disapprove of this type of 'eating behavior'. I truly have no idea why it can be viewed as 'wrong' other than slurping being annoying or possibly disrespectful. If anyone could enlighten me and or tell me why I should stop right here and now, I will take it into consideration. Thanks Reddit SR<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you are eating ice crean in a bowl, it is perfectly okay to to melt it all and then slurp it all.\n","id":"7ed9b34e-254d-4be9-a635-cc72faf531f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should God Have Tested Job?<|ARGUMENT|>Job was blameless in the eyes of God and hence did not deserve any punishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God should not intentionally torture His followers to make a point.\n","id":"1972bed3-d022-4263-abb4-54c92dd4bca3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be one World Government?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate crimes are on the rise in Canada Criminal incidents motivated by hate and reported to police rose by more than 60 percent between 2014 and 2017.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rise in religious intolerance has led to an increased number of hate crimes and hate incidents around the world.\n","id":"76d86b65-9514-45b5-9b4e-d188065c1d66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Certainly in my country, and to my knowledge a lot of other countries it is 1, illegal and 2, frowned upon for a teacher to have an emotional or sexual or both relationship with a student. We are specifically talking of secondary school high school or equivalent where the student is over legal age. Certainly there is the aspect the student not passing because of this emotional relationship. However, in my experience, its far more distracting to try and suppress emotions rather than let them be expressed. Then there is the argument of it may effect other students work. But following on from the last point it would be far more distracting to suppress it all day. People mature at different rates, and in some cases the student may be maturer than the teacher. Also coming under this is the fact that some students are kept behind a year or sometimes two. I know one girl in my school that's being kept back three . She is going to be catching up to the age of some of the younger teachers pretty quickly. So what's wrong? Finally there is the case of one to one teaching or a student needing to spend a while in one particular building. They will build friendly relations with teachers. That's just how it works. And you know what comes after friendship. Crushes, love, whatever one wants to call it. Its not like it can be stopped. Teachers are humans too. They can't magically block emotions just because they entered the teaching profession. And on the same light, boarding schools where teachers and students live on site. Living in close proximity or at least easy to come across each other. Where the campus is secluded and during the week you can only talk to students and staff.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It isn't wrong for a student to have an emotional relationship with a teacher\n","id":"864ff7a8-0cc2-471e-8348-de876a0c0b27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All drugs should be legalized.<|ARGUMENT|>In the Andes, coca a sacred plant harmful when mass produced as a cash crop, has replaced the production of fruits and vegetables.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US imposed war on drugs has a devastating impact on Ame\u0301rica from Mexico to Argentina, and violence is only one aspect.\n","id":"643a5084-0b72-43e7-a5ba-dd41286fbb59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Given how children are raised and grow up to eventually be adults who are more forgiving, calm, empathetic, etc. A superman with invincibility and almost unlimited strength at a young age would not need to learn any of those skills. He'd test his boundaries and basically seek power and benefits for himself. We see this with a lot of people after they become rich or even those who are raised rich. They can turn into 'assholes'. Yet this is just one part of having power. Imagine having no limit on your power, where there are virtually no consequences to your actions. You'd never feel vulnerable, thus never learning the stages of development and eventually becoming a tyrant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A human raised with Superman powers would become evil or seek power.\n","id":"fb0ae732-dd53-4e2a-9dfb-b989022f411a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My feeling is that mass media and commercial entertainment exert a pervasive and negative effect on our culture. I could cite any number of examples of media that I would view as destructive, but let me first define my terms. When I discuss popular culture and media, I am thinking of television, cinema, popular music, etc entertainment designed for consumption by large audiences by commercial sponsors. It seems to me that media of this type target our basest instincts and negatively reinforce our development. I think that people who consume large amounts of media become less thoughtful and self reflective over time, make poorer choices, and are less likely to develop virtues of character. I also think media numb our natural empathy and compassion for others, and encourage us to seek affirmation and success in destructive ways. By keeping us constantly distracted, I also think that media dampen our creative and innovative output. I think that society as a whole is made poorer when our fellow citizens' minds and creative talents are tied up by the consumption of entertainment. I would love to hear examples of positive impacts of media on our society. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that popular culture is toxic\n","id":"7222cfe2-3683-43c8-a4e4-d1339421988c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>i think the Death Penalty doesn't serve justice. we'll take person A and say he killed and raped 10 kids. He's a horrible person. when he is found guilty and sentenced to death by lethal injection, he dies and thats the end of his punishment. he doesn't feel pain. there is no long term suffering. there is no justice. he just ceases to exist. which in a way is almost rewarding him. because he could spend the rest of his life rotting away in a cell. thats justice. but to kill him and put him out of his misery is not a proper form of punishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the Death penalty doesn't serve justice at all\n","id":"8962ec9d-5dff-40bb-b5bc-8b5148187cba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Bee Products Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In colder areas, if the keepers consider it too costly to keep the bees alive through the winter, they destroy the hives using cyanide gas. peta.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many beekeepers take inhumane steps to ensure personal safety and reach production quotas. peta.org\n","id":"3a1f524d-1d47-4505-8572-b4d0075e0e5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US Should Not Have Pulled Out of the Iran Deal.<|ARGUMENT|>Pulling out of the deal makes a peace and nuclear disarmament agreement with North Korea less likely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pulling out of the deal would undermine American promises abroad.\n","id":"b232ce10-11fa-4f3c-81e5-efb66b4739fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public health systems fund homeopathy?<|ARGUMENT|>Research suggests that homeopathy is mainly used by the middle class and it\u2019s not in high demand by the majority of public service users. To be effective, it requires an entire lifestyle change and this is just not feasible for most people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The evidence from large studies overwhelmingly finds either that homeopathy is ineffective, or that there is insufficient evidence to support its efficacy.\n","id":"14bb6743-59f0-475d-a051-266e52055705"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I run across a thread like twice a week where tipping is brought up, and I fully understand the tipping process and why servers rely on tips. That being said, I think a lot of people make it out to seem as if waiters and waitresses are not getting enough money for the work they do. Here is my problem with that, and mind you I've worked in two restaurants 1 fast food, which I still count, and one legit at minimum wage. I work at a restaurant that switched to minimum wage and a no tip policy although we may get one tip on a good day . I can work an 8 hour shift, taking orders, delivering food, bussing tables, doing all other things I won't get into, and finally close the restaurant intense hour of cleaning . This 8 hours will yield me about 64 before taxes. My friend is a server, and in a five hour shift, particularly on weekend nights, he has about 5 tables an hour. For that hour he makes 3, plus about 30 in tips from all the tables. He has walked away from a 5 hour shift on weekends with at least 150. Furthermore he doesn't bus tables they have bus boys and he doesn't close the restaurant. I understand it sucks if he has a shit night and only gets like 40 for a five hour shift, but that is already the same that I'm getting with considerable less work. Furthermore restuarants legally have to pay you minimum wage if you fall short on your tips. TL DR I personally believe servers who get tips make much more and would be working just as hard, if not harder at minimum wage jobs in other food service industries, including fast food places.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think servers who rely on tips have it much better than restaurant workers who get paid full but get no tips.\n","id":"6aae4ea7-449a-4d80-96af-92aadc7b889d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>Gender, like every human behavior, mating rituals, eating customs, etc., is not completely biologically determined. Yet, there is a biological factor involved<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social structural theory views gender differences as psychological attempts to adjust to social expectations.\n","id":"1413187f-faf8-493b-a022-23b503cf2173"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Two-Party System<|ARGUMENT|>Where two-party systems have emerged it is either the result, or reflection of the will of the electorate. Often the two parties represent key ideological divisions within society over the direction of policy, e.g. between left and right, small government and activist government, liberalism and authoritarianism. Most voters have little interest in the minutiae of policy, but they can understand the broad political choices presented them by a two-party system and make their decisions at election time accordingly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Where two-party systems have emerged it is either the result, or reflection of the will of the elect...\n","id":"61ff8574-bd6f-46f6-8761-2d35f9731b0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Notice how I'm not saying photography, but photojournalism. Professional photographers practice and train themselves with lighting and all that, but when it comes to a story, no one gives a shit about beauty, you just have to point and shoot. If you're at the scene, you've got it. One thing that mystified me was after the Kenya school shooting in April, there were some photos that made it big and people said they captured the moment perfectly. To be frank, it appeared as if said photographer simply got to the scene while the bodies were still warm, took a photo, and got paid. I fail to see how that's a skill. I'm not saying no photojournalist possesses remarkable skill, but it seems that anybody could get a newsworthy photo with a nice camera and luck. My friends in journalism vehemently insist I'm wrong but they can't articulate why.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Photojournalism is entirely right place, right time\n","id":"2ab68438-f338-4796-9dbb-485fd2bb5447"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi there. Throwaway because my background might give away my reddit identity to people I don't want knowing my main account username. Also a quick warning, this is a novel. This post is prompted by the recent headlines that have been making their way around reddit and the internet about AI, specifically the practices of speech recognition teams at companies like Google, Amazon, etc. It is my view that the media is vilifying these companies through some disastrous combination of not understanding the technology they are reporting on and playing on the fears of media consumers who themselves do not understand the technology that they are reading about. The real problem here is the handling of data that enables leaks, not the use of user data. Before I get to my points, the background that I fear will make my identity a little too obvious to choice individuals still going to keep it sparse because I'd rather this account not be found out either I work with Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Computer Vision. Do note that I do not primarily work with speech recognition technology, but I am familiar with the algorithms that are SOTA in that and related fields, and I am also familiar with general machine learning techniques, which is the lens through which I will be making this post. Also please note for those that care, I am in a research position and am a student. That is to say, I am not an expert on the level of Google Brain FAIR etc so if someone reading this is or otherwise notices a technical mistake in this post please correct me. I am not opposed to being wrong, hence why I am posting here rather than r unpopularopinion. Without further ado, my views. First, there is nothing unethical about employees listening to your speech data as it pertains to speech recognition algorithms employed by Google Home, Amazon Echo, etc. In order to explain my reason for my views, I will for a moment make like a mathematician and reduce this to a problem that is in my mind solved, in a field that I am more closely acquainted with, computer vision. If I were making a computer vision algorithm to detect, say, faces, I would require tons of images of faces. In general, I don't like to use vague grammatical numbers like tons because that's not very useful to the uninformed individual, so I will give an example of a specific situation. If I wanted to make a face recognition algorithm as robust as Apple Face ID, I would need on the order of millions of images of different faces, images in different lighting, images with different races, etc, etc, etc. In fact, this may be a surprise to you though it shouldn't be but I assure you that the engineers responsible for creating Apple Face ID looked at images of users faces when creating that algorithm. On that note, I am brought back to the broader point that I'm making, which is, in order to engineer a robust computer vision algorithm it is absolutely unequivocally necessary to 1 have a lot of data and 2 recognize patterns in these data. Specifically, when my algorithm fails to recognize certain faces, I need to find trends that make those faces unrecognizable, and to do that I have to look at the images . This brings me back to speech recognition people have to listen to the recordings that are not well classified to find trends that are leading to them not being classified well. This means that real people need to really listen to real data that really failed to be classified. For real. If someone has a suggestion for a better way to recognize faults in pattern detection which leads to as robust of algorithms without actually observing the data, I am all ears. Second, it is not unethical to observe real user data. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is completely necessary to listen to real user data. Why? Because the purpose of the algorithm is to serve real people. The most fundamental problem in machine learning is having data that is high enough in quantity and high enough in quality. Both of these problems directly plays into why it is necessary to listen to real user data in some way High enough quantity of data Data is not easy to come by. Per the article that is on the front page right now, according to Google Language experts only review around 0.2 of all audio snippets. According to this article, as of December 2018 52 million Google Homes had been sold. That means that if every google home had only ever answered a mere 10 voice requests I promise the average is more than that , that is over a million speech requests. Generating that much data is an incredibly difficult task, and the odds that any purchased data is actually representative of real user requests is very small because of ever changing things like dialects, slang, etc. A year after the data is generated it wouldn't even be half as useful as it was when it was created. High enough quality of data It's important to recognize that when you're working with Machine Learning, perfect, curated, purchased data is generally not what someone needs when they say they need quality data. That is, data is only as high quality as it is representative. This further complicates the task of generating useful data because now you don't just need to generate data of different dialects and languages and more, you also need varying distances from the mic varying accurate household ambient sounds like dogs barking, kids crying, etc and more. And to wrap up this point, consider what the average user wants their SpeechRecognition device to actually be Fast, accurate, useful, capable, etc. These things require that the data is good and representative. Maybe, maybe , these big companies could generate enough fake, purchased data to make the models accurate, but there is no way that they could continuously generate enough data to remain representative and allow the models to improve as fast as the users want them to. When you're a business, it's not just a matter of producing a product, it's about producing a product that will have been worth purchasing and will continue to sell. When the product relies on machine learning, that means constantly improving, and when you need to constantly improve an ML algorithm, you need a constant influx of lots of data that accurately represents the use cases you are trying to satisfy. Once again, if anyone has any genuinely robust solutions that would actually reduce the need for using user data and also produce models as good as the ones that are currently being released, I am all ears and I promise these companies would be too, because I guarantee they don't like these faux scandals disheartening people any more than people enjoy feeling like their privacy is being invaded . Third and finally, the fact that these articles are being written so as to incite emotion and responses aka generate clicks rather than accurately representing the facts. First and foremost, have their actually been any articles that address these points in a clear and level headed way that simply presents all of the information to the reader? I haven't seen them making the front page if there are, but I'm not infallible so I'd love to read some if I've missed them. A good example of this is the headline of the article on the front page right now. gt GOOGLE ADMITS WORKERS LISTEN TO PRIVATE AUDIO RECORDINGS FROM GOOGLE HOME SMART SPEAKERS Is this a secret? Has it been a secret? The fact that people have not made themselves aware of how Google is using your data is not the same thing as them hiding it. Maybe it would be accurate to say Google acknowledged it? Or Google discusses their data usage? But right off the bat the headline vilifies the company so as to catch user attention and bait clicks. Also, you could easily generate these types of headlines for any field that people aren't intimately familiar with. Doctors admit to touching children's testicles during physical exams. Chef admits to putting hands on every piece of food served in 5 star restaurant. Elevator mechanic admits that elevator is held up by cables in the event of power outage. Sure these are true, but you probably know enough about these fields to know they're at least disingenuously stated. The difference here is that most readers and maybe the author don't know enough about ML to understand why the statement is problematic. Also, I would like to address the incident with the data leak at Google. Specifically, the one mentioned in the article currently on the front page. This data leak is unarguably a problem. People should not have to fear their personal recordings being leaked to the public, but my problem with this article lies in the fact that it is clearly vilifying the use of user data, a necessary practice in the endeavor of making robust and ever improving machine learning models at scale, and uses the leaking of data only as a tool to further demonize the real problem of improper data handling. It would be far more appropriate for companies like Google, Amazon, etc to present these snippets to language experts without actually giving them the ability to spread them. Simply by putting these data on computers that were only accessible on site and during the working day with limited user capabilities is the first thing that comes to my mind, and I am confident the top minds of Google can think of even more robust ways to prevent such data leaking. Overall, by using things like data leaks as tools to vilify the necessary actions of engineers trying to produce a product as robust as is necessary to satisfy users, journalists are preying on the fact that people do not have an intimate understanding of fundamental practices in machine learning and simultaneously minimize the importance of the actual data leak issue. The emphasis of journalists and concerned citizens alike should be on enforcing strict regulations on ways in which user data can be presented to those who need to use it, not on denigrating the use, storage, or analysis of these user data themselves. Also quick aside As with all things in life, I know there exist journalists who are presenting this the right way. They are not the focus of my view and presenting me with articles and saying but this journalist targeted data leaks as the issue does not change the fact that usage of user data is unnecessarily vilified and will not change my view. Beyond that, I look forward to meaningful discussion. E formatting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies that are using user data for AI, speech recognition, etc are being unjustly vilified by the media over their usage of user data when this is not the problem, data handling is.\n","id":"6a29ec3b-72ab-40eb-ad51-192c072c880d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the Bible support the conclusion that 'homosexuality' is a sin against God?<|ARGUMENT|>The term \"homosexuality\"\u2014and the understanding of human sexuality which accompanies it\u2014did not emerge before the latter half of the 19th century. In fact, the idea that one is born with an innate sexual orientation is a modern conception. Independent of whether this conception is wrong or right, it is quite obvious that the Bible was not talking about the same thing that we intend by the term \"homosexual\" today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Perspectives on acceptable sexual activities and partners are historically determined and are filtered through the lens of an evolving ascetic. For Christianity, prohibiting homosexuality was justified extra-biblically.\n","id":"dab6da39-4a16-4930-85d1-bb045c13777d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>In a recent study conducted by Microsoft in partnership with KRC Research, only 27% of women felt coding jobs were for them, while 52% felt powerful doing STEM work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Though the number of women in STEM fields are increasing - these numbers are stagnating in tech-specific fields.\n","id":"bd9e0b19-9401-46b4-acbd-618d4e57bd8e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>If I live in one of the 70% of counties that have extremely low murder rates, having the US adopt more gun control laws does not make sense. www.washingtontimes.com<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The vast majority of gun owners should not be punished and have their rights restricted due to the criminal behavior of a small minority.\n","id":"dbcb003b-f560-4d72-9491-acad17cb012c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Artificial Intelligence AI: Should an artificial general intelligence be created?<|ARGUMENT|>Computers think with circuitry where signals travel at the speed of light. Humans think with circuits with much slower signal propagation. Therefore computers can think more quickly than humans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An AGI would be able to solve problems much more quickly than today's humans currently can.\n","id":"bda7a870-23b3-47b8-8009-e0352ea34492"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Countries Taking In Refugees Confiscate their Valuables?<|ARGUMENT|>People living in the EU have many possibilities to become successful compared to the regions refugees are fleeing from. If these people remain poor it is their fault and no additional money should be spent on them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Refugees often have no choice to flee their home country with all their wealth while unemployed have had the chance.\n","id":"60cf259b-ddf9-413a-b2c0-e35fef3077a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Felons be Allowed to Vote?<|ARGUMENT|>56 percent of federal inmates, 67 percent of inmates in state prisons, and 69 percent of inmates in local jails did not complete high school This clearly shows that a low educational level leads to bad decisions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The successful and wealthy citizens are usually those who have better access to education and thus are capable of making better decisions for society.\n","id":"cbc87e35-8765-4661-bd11-b7aeb7a755a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The whole Sustainable Future utopia is basically just another fad future everyone believes that will be laughed off by the next decade or two. What's a fad future? A fad future is a future that everyone believes would happen in one decade, yet gets laughed off by everyone in the next decade because the fad future is wrong. The Sustainable future is just another fad decade for many reasons. One reason is that Corporations are going to stop at nothing to keep materialism in place and make everyone buy. And why is everyone buying stuff so bad, anyway? What's wrong with getting the economy out of recession and making the economy grow? What's wrong with making every city in the US to be like Dubai? Heck, the whole Sustainable future is a pretty dangerous idea, because seriously, why should we even bother to go back to pre 20th century living just for the sake of protecting the earth? There are plenty of ways you can save earth without sacrificing anything, morons. And by the way, the whole Peak Oil myth is just like Nuclear War with the Soviet Union. Many people believed it, and did stupid stuff just because of some nuclear war which never even happened. And there are a lot of reasons the nuclear war never happened. Peak Oil is just like that. Heck, many people are now laughing at the Peak Oil myth for many reasons, like the fact that there's still a ton of oil left in the earth. Back on topic, the 20th century was a century where man wasn't afraid to do anything, the fact that space exploration and the Internet exists proves how man can go against nature and win. Sure, global warming is real, and of course the arctic is melting, but instead of reverting back to old ways of doing things, we should create technology to get rid of pollution, like solar energy and wind energy, and protect the forest by making people move to cities and enacting a one child policy on everyone. Though no matter what happens, the happy, social, sustainable future will never happen, just like all fad futures. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Happy, Social, Sustainable future everyone talks about will never happen.\n","id":"99667d59-afab-42bb-ac50-a553c87f9f10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my opinion this sentence is so ridiculously light it will encourage others to attack politicians. If I attacked Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Kamala Harris and broke 6 of their ribs I am almost positive the outcry from Democrats would be a national issue. As slimy as politicians are, they should still be considered sacrosanct from physical violence. Giving someone only 30 days in jail for attacking a senator just ensures nutcases will attack more politicians. I would love to leave partisan politics out of this and just focus on the issue of violence against politicians. A sentence of just 30 days gives no deterrent to people that would consider attacking politicians. The reason I think politicians should be more sacrosanct than normal people is because these politicians represent all of the people and not just one individual person. And no, I'm not considering violence against anyone Mr. FBI man.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The penalty for breaking six ribs of a senator should be much more than 30 days.\n","id":"ccfb4570-f322-4b3e-803b-c09cc4b53c9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Displaying the upvote downvote arrows on user profiles make it really easy for a user to go after another user, downvoting every comment they make or have made in recent times. If the arrows were removed, users would have to click on each individual post to vote, adding an extra layer of difficulty that would help prevent mass downvoting from a disgruntled redditor. Even if someone isn't being malicious, if they choose to up or downvote something they see in a profile, they're still voting on the comment without seeing the context. IMO voting should only occur within the thread a comment was made in. Therefore the voting arrows should be removed from user profiles to prevent abuse or misuse.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Upvote\/downvote arrows should be removed from user profiles\n","id":"a10be38e-0feb-471d-8677-6f274f824bb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was just reading this article and was again reminded of an analogy I have heard a few times before that seems to me correct. If it is the case that it is racist for a white person to be afraid of a black person walking toward them, then it is sexist for a woman to be afraid of a man walking toward her. I have heard this analogy a few times but have yet to hear any good reasons for there being a morally relevant difference between the two cases if one is wrong, so is the other. To be clear, my view is not that women being afraid of men on the street is sexist or wrong. My view is slightly more subtle it is that there is no morally relevant difference between a women being afraid of men on the street and a white person being afraid of a black person on the street. If one is wrong, so is the other.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If white people being scared of black people on the street is racist, then women being scared of men on the street is sexist.\n","id":"4a260630-5c17-4016-be91-41ea9a007343"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Empower Both Women And Men?<|ARGUMENT|>If feminism is associated with happier women, then one would expect women to have gotten happier in the last fifty years or so. In fact, women have gotten less happy relative to men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It remains to be seen whether the deconstruction of gender roles has actually led to an overall increase in happiness.\n","id":"190ef22b-c9a9-4bd9-9009-29a93fc130ca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have no idea how else to explain wild attributions of thought to 20th century philosophers by the likes of Jordan Peterson who has claimed his reading was a superficial biased secondary source, yikes . Those who continue this new tradition seem to simply be parroting Peterson or others like him. No, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, etc. did not believe truth was subjective, that there was no such thing as a valid moral system, etc. The primary reason someone like Derrida seems obscurant and dense is because he was building on and responding to differing with other philosophers of the time or those that came before him. It's just assumed you're aware of those philosophers mainly the structuralist school and so you get what he's talking about. No they were not all adamant Marxists, in fact Foucault was violently anti Marxist, most 'post modern' thought is opposed to core tenets of Marxism overarching historical narratives being a huge example . The only way you can possibly believe this is the case if you have no idea what you're talking about, from my estimation. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most people who openly criticize 'post-modernists' have not read them.\n","id":"8d3f9c19-0a0c-4b6c-b962-64e486a2608b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Hell Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>In fact, various people, places and events recorded in the Bible have been confirmed as historically accurate<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Bible is not any literature, but a piece of history.\n","id":"c46e9342-f3d6-40e0-9fdb-70d22733de6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A child doesn't owe his parents something for getting raised by them<|ARGUMENT|>In evolution it is important to raise the children to a point where they themselves can get children. After that the job of the parents is done from a natural standpoint.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A child doesn't owe his parents something for getting raised by them.\n","id":"1119ebea-d270-49a0-853f-f5877f547133"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My position is that immigrants should integrate into the culture of the country they immigrate to. I would even say that government should enforce integration standards. Some background, I've lived in America my whole life but I also have dual citizenship in Switzerland because my mother is Swiss. There they have pretty strict integration standards including requirements to speak the language, to practice Swiss customs, to have Swiss friends, and to live in the country for a while usually over 10 years . They may also contact schools and employers about whether someone is integrated before granting citizenship. This may seem like a lot, but Switzerland also has some of the best integrated immigrants in all of Europe. When you look at countries like Germany or Sweden and the problems they have faced in recent years, you'll notice the Swiss don't have them granted they have accepted fewer new immigrants . I think that if you are looking to immigrate to a country, you are also choosing to become a part of that country's culture. This does not mean completely forgetting your roots and where you came from, it just means integrating enough to function normally in mainstream society. For foreigners, citizenship is a privilege, not a right. If a country grants an immigrant citizenship they shouldn't be a liability or contribute negatively, they should become part of society and work to make things better. Additionally, various problems arise when immigrants do not integrate including the creation of parallel societies or just increased social division in general. I understand this topic has be brought up before, but I haven't seen a really compelling answer against expecting immigrants to integrate yet so I brought it back. Also, I didn't mean for this post to sound arrogant or condescending, I'm genuinely interested in any opposing arguments and am open to changing my view. Thanks for the replies. Edit I want to add that I am focusing mostly on America in this post. I am from the US and to my knowledge we do not have strict integration standards at all. We don't even have a strict language requirement. Edit 2 When I say immigrate I am also referring to becoming a citizen. I was thinking of them as going hand in hand and it's my fault for not better clarifying.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"New immigrants to a country should be expected to integrate\n","id":"8e3b7bfb-da8f-4f37-9d42-ab9252c81690"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Individuals should be able to legally bypass copyright protection technologies for fair use reasons.<|ARGUMENT|>At present, we feel there is a blurred line between legal and illegal uses of IP. Enforcement of these laws, in the U.S. and beyond, has been selective at best Existing law clearly gives people the right to make copies of media for certain uses however the DMCA and other laws appear to ban these uses without directly addressing the conflict with existing precedent Digital Rights Management DRM software directly prevents people from accessing their right of fair use by preventing copies from being made without a clear indication of whether the right to copy has been appropriately forfeited. This leads to confusion and people foregoing their rights because they are not certain the point to which they extend. The plan we propose clarifies the legal status of copy protection and ownership of digital media. The owner of digital media would now know that they can use and make copies of their property without fear of over-zealous prosecution. People do not need to worry whether a comparatively harmless sharing of music among friends might lead to lawsuits seeking thousands of dollars in damages. Regulators and enforcement officers will not see their time taken up by overzealous but legal prosecution of small-time file-sharers on behalf of companies that seek to make an example of someone. Side prop's plan still allows major IP violations, like large piracy operations and industrial espionage, to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, we merely draw a clear and more rational line between what is legal and what is not. In doing so, we remove fear from people's lives and encourage full expression of their rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Clarifies a Blurry Line Regarding the Legality of Fair Use\n","id":"d781feb7-529f-43dc-a1eb-d644801a17ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti called for assessing taxes on church properties, which the church started paying in 2013.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state could implement a property tax and generate net positive revenue.\n","id":"a9eb4c62-46d5-45af-a4a1-920062a9d707"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Vigilantism Ever Permissible?<|ARGUMENT|>Members of the public patrolling their own streets may be trying to help, but they only add to the problems for police officers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Vigilantism can make it harder for the state to implement law and order efficiently.\n","id":"c54de229-e54b-48c5-b08b-cbeb9be7d36a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I searched  for this question already, but the posts I found were against sex changes and including transgender people in LGBT communities. This doesn't address my contention. To clarify I am NOT against people changing their gender via surgery. I am NOT against someone requesting to be referred to by another pronoun. I have absolutely nothing against anyone saying they WANT to be another gender, and making every effort to attain that goal. What I believe is sexist is saying you ARE another gender when your physical characteristics are otherwise. The reason I feel this is a sexist thing to say is because, imo, you are saying that being male female is not just a physical thing you're saying that men women think, act or feel a certain way, and therefore despite the fact that you have a male female body and male female organs, you are the opposite gender because of how you think feel act. As an example, if I said I have the body of a white woman but I am in fact a black woman , I think that would be a racist thing to say, because I am saying that race differences are not just down to physical characteristics, but that other races are fundamentally a certain way, and I am that certain way despite my physical body. So not only am I saying that black people are a certain way, but that they are the way I am, so therefore I am black. It's different from saying I want to be black. Please change my view, or help me get to a happy middle. I might even be totally wrong about what someone means when they say I am a . I've tried to talk about this with people and I'm almost always misunderstood everyone assumes I'm against changing your gender and addresses that argument instead of my actual question. I was born and live in the United States.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe saying you were born as another gender is sexist.\n","id":"c1a4577a-86ed-4783-bf3f-06438040b619"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll start with the problems with the current anthem The Star Spangled Banner is unnecessarily violent A. Americans internalize that war is glorious and what birthed their country. While the american revolution was obviously important in creating america, countries are born out of shared identity and collective action, not out of killing people. This damages america bc leads to poor policy making and poor national identity. America was in fact started because of tea taxes not out of a glorious struggle for freedom from english oppression. B. Americans internalize that the nature of war is that it is glorious, rather than brutal, terrifying, PTSD inducing and unnecessary, it makes war seem good rather than a sometimes regrettably necessary evil. C. Americans have a warlike culture and are easy to provoke into war. Vietnam, Iraq. Americans believe violence is the way to solve conflicts, that participating in war is a way for the nation and its citizens to feel good about themselves, and to self actualize and \u201cbecome a man\u201d. D. This leads to more wars, more conflict, etc., this is bad. We acknowledge that the national anthem is not the only source of propagandizing that americans receive regarding war, but we think it is a significant source of this propaganda. The current anthem is also historically inaccurate. There weren\u2019t rockets in the revolutionary war or war of 1812, nor were there bombs bursting in air like airbust bombs showed up when planes did. Livin\u2019 On A Prayer more accurately reflects America A. Livin\u2019 On A Prayer reflects the struggle of the american worker. It talks about the average person struggling to get by, and how they can find meaning in their lives even in poverty. This is a message americans need. It addresses rising income inequality. B. Livin\u2019 On A Prayer reflects the religious nature of america without excluding the non religious, and excluding non Judeo Christian religions. References prayer, but atheists still like Bon Jovi because that prayer is not for a stated religious purpose or goal, it's about the general yearning for something better. People of all denominations and religions use language like this, e.g. We're praying that he gets the promotion at work. or I swear to God. Practical uses of the National Anthem The most common time you will encounter a national anthem statistically is at a sporting event. The current anthem takes the wind out of your sails, you\u2019re all stoked for spots and you listen to some dreary, very slow paced trumpet bullshit. Bon Jovi is pump up music. It\u2019s not politically divisive, it\u2019s been used by democrats and republicans in campaign rallies. For somber uses of the anthem, the song\u2019s music structure allows it to be interpreted as sad. Bon Jovi uses a musical technique where depending on how exactly you decide to hear the chords, they can be interpreted as minor and descending or rising and ascending. This, combined with the lyrics, mean it\u2019s also appropriate to use in other circumstances like at soldier\u2019s or politician\u2019s funerals. It states \u201cEven if we don\u2019t make it, we\u2019ve got each other\u201d an important message in times of loss or hardship, that we must value our relationships with other people. The last important use of the anthem is when greeting dignitaries or holding government events or opening school in the morning these are all occasions we want people to be excited about the possibilities of the event for. Livin' on a Prayer is exciting, genuine, and real. It should be the National Anthem for the USA.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Livin' on a Prayer by Bon Jovi would be a better US National anthem than the Star Spangled Banner\n","id":"368cc3fc-11e4-4f97-866c-d3f69ac6102f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Joseph Smith is a man of the highest order of talent and great independence of character--firm in his integrity--and devoted to his religion\" James Gordon Bennett a New York Herald writer in 1842.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Almost all accounts of those who personally knew Joseph Smith and who were never members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reported that his character was impeccable.\n","id":"6b496cd9-3254-4849-9ede-1659580e3e5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Muslim from South Asia here. I am actually officially a Muslim, though it can be said that I lean on the verge of atheism. I believe that it is a fundamental right for every social group in a nation state to govern themselves according to their own laws, so long as those laws do not conflict with fundamental laws of the nation. Almost everyone I talked to here in Bangladesh believes that Muslims should be allowed to practice the full spectrum of Sharia laws wherever they go. They believe that it is a fundamental right of Muslims. My belief is a bit different. I understand that in a nation with various ethnic groups, there are wide differences in notions of morality, law and values and therefore having a nation state with different criminal laws for each group of people would result in chaos. Therefore, I believe that even if each social groups' criminal laws cannot co exist, each socio religious groups should be allowed to practice their own laws in civil matters. Portions of their laws which are in direct conflict with the nation's fundamental documents like the Constitution and Bill of Rights should be altered to conform with them. For every Muslim, Islamic law would apply in civil matters by default, unless they explicitly renounce Islam upon which they will be no longer subjected to it. The same should be true for Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and other groups of people. In Bangladesh, all civil matters marriage, property, inheritance and so on are governed according to the religion one subscribes to. For example, marriage among Muslims is governed by Islamic law by default, although people can renounce their faith and get a Civil Marriage whereupon British Indian law of marriage would apply. The same thing applies for Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Persians who are all governed by their own laws in civil matters. I believe such a system of allowing every social group to practice their own law in civil matters, should be allowed in all Western nations, and this is a fundamental right of people of every faith, not only Muslims. Failing to grant this rights is tantamount to oppression by the host nation. Change my view. EDIT It seems to me that most people here have no idea of what is Sharia Islamic law and equate it solely to barbaric practices. Sharia Islamic law is a vast law just like the English or Roman systems and includes civil matters like marriage, property, inheritance, economics, finance to crime, religion and so on. Crime is just a single component of this vast Islamic law. I am suggesting that Muslims be allowed to practice only civil matters property, marriage, contracts, finance etc while tweaking these laws if it is in conflict with the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. EDIT 1 Example 1 Sharia law should apply in matters of inheritance. According to Sharia only one third of the property in a will can be given to a beneficiary and the rest has to be divided according to a complicated ratio. Example 2 Marriage should be governed by Sharia law. This would mean that during a divorce the wife should only get the mahr sort of a dower and no other share of the husband's property. This may sound barbaric, although you have to understand that the wife knowingly and voluntarily engaged in an Islamic marriage contract. EDIT 2 A commenter here changed my view and now I know longer believe that people should be required to publicly denounce their faith in order to get the benefit of Secular law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Muslim here. Western nations should allow Muslims in their jurisdictions to practice Sharia law in civil matters excluding those that conflict with the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Otherwise its equal to oppression by the host nation.\n","id":"e2de6f84-45d2-469c-b970-0ae4370e3482"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All software should be open source.<|ARGUMENT|>Hosting or running open source software is often cheaper than hosting or running proprietary software.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Open source software would benefit small companies and amateur coders.\n","id":"dc73f979-f649-44fc-a0ab-a5f92c965292"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>There\u2019s are lots of definitely living things with no rights, I.e. plants, bacteria, archaea, fungi and at least half the animal kingdom.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Definitional aspects of being biologically alive are irrelevant to the qualification for rights and protections.\n","id":"772bd798-adf7-43b9-9a73-327651266b50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To clarify, by technology I mean relatively simple things like using the internet, or connecting up a new DVD player. I think using technology, such as a computer, now days to achieve typical goals is incredibly easy. I do not understand how anyone with an open mind a willingness to learn cannot achieve simple things like using email, or performing a google search in a very short amount of time. I believe elderly people have formed an opinion about technology being difficult to learn and thus do not want to invest the small amount of time to learn how to use it. I believe they want to hold steadfast to this ingrained belief as somewhat a matter of pride. I do not accept the argument that younger people have 'grown up with it' as the technology seems so intuitive and easy to use. Many elderly people I know have taken up new hobbies once in retirement eg woodwork, gardening, etc and excel at it without having grown up doing it. This view point makes my job very un enjoyable at times. I find it very frustrating teaching elderly people simple computer tasks and then getting blamed when they do something incorrectly. I would like to change my view so as to better understand the elderly people I work with and to be able to teach computer usage more affectively as well as not let my frustration get the better of me. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe elderly people's dificuties in understanding technology is down to stubbornness and laziness, and not a generational gap issue. Please\n","id":"99421d1f-c291-466d-969f-64785a5975d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>Some people discuss how individuals are 'strong' to have an eating disorder. Rather than being portrayed as a mental illness, it is shown to be a testament of will, perseverance, and self-control. These stories actively encourage women to strive for having an eating disorder.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social media posts show 'glamourised' features of eating disorders such a thigh gaps and protruding hip and collar bones, but never the health implications of the disorders.\n","id":"7ad7f768-4155-40ce-9e9d-7ad60f871c03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, Democrats aren't exactly in a position to stonewall and avoid nominating someone to the Supreme Court in the same way Republicans have, BUT, in theory, if it were possible it would be justifiable for democrats to do so in return. The Republicans had preempted conversations about nominating someone to the Supreme Court after Scalia's death with a blanket refusal, regardless of what names were going to be put forth. That refusal has persisted until today and will likely continue until Trump is in office. Two reasons for their course of conduct I'm aware of are Being an election year, they thought we should wait until the people decide on their new president and leave the decision up to the next President. There was a concern that whatever justice would've been appointed would not have supported their viewpoints on the court and result in a liberal leaning court. Obviously, the Supreme Court is not meant to be a political bloc, but I think pretending it is completely neutral of politics is a fiction. While there are principled reasons to abide by the rules, I think after a certain point the principles must be balanced against the cost. Therefore, the reasons I believe that democrats would've been justified in stonewalling Supreme Court nominations is that If democrats genuinely believe they are on the right side of issues, they have a moral obligation to see to it that those issues are adjudicated in a way that is in line with their beliefs see abortion, gay marriage, guns, citizens united, etc. . The Scalia vacancy belongs to the Obama administration and was effectively stolen. Republicans have no right to expect the democrats to abide by the rules when they blatantly took advantage of the system to further their agenda, just because now they are the ones with a President in the White House. The Supreme Court's neutrality is a facade so it makes sense to hold out for a justice that aligns with democrat values. I don't know that I believe this would be the best course of action, I'm merely of the opinion it's a justifiable course of action. I would like my view changed because I do value sticking to one's principles in the face of challenges. However, it seems patently unfair to democrats and their constituents to try to remain principled and be taken advantage of as a result of it without resorting to similar tactics. EDIT Fixed my butchered title. Sorry about that.  From a liberal standpoint, democrats would, hypothetically, be justified in stonewalling Supreme Court nominations by a President Trump, in lieu of the similar Republican conduct.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"From a liberal standpoint, democrats stonewalling Supreme Court nominations by a President Trump would be hypothetically be justifiable in lieu of the similar Republican conduct.\n","id":"6bd26c22-9af4-4df9-8181-93c1e820e1ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>not fund any work that is not released under a creative commons license<|ARGUMENT|>It is simply wrong to paint all government funding with one brush decreeing that it should only be spent if the results are going to be made available through creative commons. Governments fund a vast diversity of projects that could be subject to licensing and the pragmatic approach would be for the government to use whatever license is most suitable to the work at hand. For funding for art, or for public facing software creative commons licences may well be the best option. For software with strong commercial possibilities there may be good financial reasons to keep the work in copyright, there have been many successful commercial products that have started life being developed with government money, the internet being the most famous though of course this is something for which the government never made much money and anyway the patent would run out before it became big.1 With many military or intelligence related software, or studies, there may want to be a tough layer of secrecy preventing even selling the work in question, we clearly would not want to have creative commons licensing for the software for anything to do with nuclear weapons.2 1 Manjoo, Farhad, \u2018Obama Was Right: The Government Invented the Internet\u2019, Slate, 24 July 2012, 2 It should however be noted that many governments do sell hardware and software that might be considered militarily sensitive. See \u2018This House would ban the sale of surveillance technology to non-democratic countries\u2019<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Creative commons is not a good option for many government works\n","id":"fb924e8b-b2f7-483a-8c25-1b9824471dc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The binmen in my city are striking at the moment in the UK. we have minimum wage and all sorts of work laws etc. We are also in a recession. I don't understand striking there are probably hundreds or thousands of people who would like to do the job for the money offered by the council as unemployment is high. If you don't think the pay is fair for the work you do, why not just quit and get another job. I mention that it is rude also as they are punishing the normal guy on the street who has no say in policy instead of punishing the people who are paying their wages. They are basically trying to manipulate the common man to complain to the council about the strike. I realise my argument isn't particularly nuanced and i would love to hear the other side, as i genuinly don't get it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think striking is a rude and irresponsible\/unethical thing to do in a developed country,\n","id":"891a7404-6557-4fbc-b760-132cffa4cccb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't understand what sort of country sends money and aid to countries who do not care about basic human rights for women, gays or minorities, but refuses to help our own that are suffering. I live in AUstralia, and every night there are over 18,000 homeless children, and it angers me knowing that instead of helping these children that we choose to support a country that passes bills that allows the murder of homosexuals Uganda . We help these people, but we refuse to help our own. I have been to the Northern Territory and have seen the aboriginal tribes and the land that they live, some of which have the conditions of third world countries. But we do nothing. In fact we actually go as far to cut their legal aid under the new government that promised improvements locally. I believe that Western countries should work on purely helping each other, and the homeless in our own countries. We value ourselves in the West as progressive and supportive of minorities, more than any other area in the world. But we continue to fund money to countries that actively oppress minorities while ignoring our own minorities lower class homeless men, women and children . How is that progressive? I truly believe that every Western country must leave Africa, Arab Countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan and South East Asia to themselves, as they with their oppressive views on women, gays and minorities are a threat to Democracy and Western Freedom, and we must work purely on helping our own, and work to create an egalitarian society for those lucky enough to be born here. I also believe this will help future generations of people in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Uganda, to actively overthrow their oppressive governments and work to create the utopia that the West will have created.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe foreign aid to countries such as Uganda and Kenya should be entirely stopped and put towards helping the homeless in our own countries.\n","id":"7497505d-b4bf-4793-ad20-9f68e4fabfe0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Looking at the methane explosions in the arctic, Shell trying to go for the arctic oil, and the disconcerting oceanic reviews of recent months I have serious concerns that not enough is being done to save the environment. While I'm aware of China's recent progress towards sustainability, I am still very concerned about the removal of keystone species, desertification, and overfishing. I believe that anything short of mass governmental actions may not be enough to avoid the complete reshaping of ecosystems in the next ~100 years. In addition, I am concerned that I am not doing as much as I could to cut back, though I walk instead of drive as often as is feasible and do my best to not support corporations with bad track records. Please help me change my view and win back some optimism. Edit Please note that I am aware that this has been discussed in the past, but when looking at the past topics, the closest I could find was seven months old.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Too little is being done to save the environment, too late\n","id":"484c8a60-db75-4412-a764-3afb0d0f3c36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know I shouldn't judge on people, for what they believe, or what they think, but automatically I pass the opinion of religious people off as worthless and invalid as the ramblings of a 5 year old. This also means in terms of political views, or their vote. It infuriates me that their vote and view would be as valid as mine, while on a human level, that shouldn't be. But also on topics like abortion, test animals, gay marriage, I believe whatever said religious person would utter, seem like ramblings of a 5y old , rather than an actual well formed opinion. As a side note Of course I have never confronted people with this actually, or in a conversation as it would be a direct ad hominem. But it goes on in the back of my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I see religious peoples opinion as less valuable as others.\n","id":"f52877a6-2a0f-463f-9bef-c82f2c8f350f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Global overpopulation is a myth.<|ARGUMENT|>While we have the land area to produce plenty of food and shelter for increased population, we also created more pollution. It doesn't matter if you believe in global warming or not, all the other results of pollution will have an impact<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The natural environment is undergoing a severe collapse due to human activity.\n","id":"f12e0138-a9ce-42ff-851f-9fadf6d22221"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all children should be taught to code in school?<|ARGUMENT|>Children already spend too much time in front of computer screens. Introducing coding lessons at school just leads to more screen time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Coding and computer science are too hard and children should be allowed to play and enjoy childhood.\n","id":"064ab2f4-7d42-43d0-afec-da53bfb9e2c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Genealogy Databases Be Available to Law Enforcement to Solve Crimes?<|ARGUMENT|>Because it is so difficult to interpret evidence, mistakes are easily made but as normative conceptions of DNA evidence is that it's \"watertight\", these mistakes often get overlooked.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Law enforcement is already struggling to properly interpret DNA samples, which in some cases has lead to innocent civilians being wrongfully convicted.\n","id":"c3f1a69c-37b8-422b-9dbb-690e29387f44"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>Without living prophets, man must rely on human and imperfect interpretations and applications of God's truth. Consequently, there are sharp divisions in the Christian world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Living Prophets: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the only Church led by a living prophet today.\n","id":"5a2286d7-55c9-4d56-9c2b-cf53267142cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should short-term apartment leasing services such as Airbnb be prohibited in New York City?<|ARGUMENT|>Hotel and other lodging businesses could use Airbnb listing data to locate areas where there is unsatisfied demand for short-term accommodation, thus identifying new areas for development.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If hotel and lodging businesses wanted to, they could use Airbnb's presence to their advantage.\n","id":"76ce5d82-342d-4675-ac7c-7a663d6f1a6d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if it produces specific outcomes that may be undesirable it is best to support it in general. The alternative is to undermine the democratic process.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In democracies the will of the populace is the least corruptible form of decision making.\n","id":"3f24f09e-de6c-4653-8b61-82c5d3e6ca23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be one World Government?<|ARGUMENT|>The creation of a world government could empower large international corporations by allowing them to ignore domestic regulations. This could lead to a concentration in power among a few companies, and a resulting increase in inequality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Since the existence of a one world state may end up increasing global inequality further, it is immoral to create it.\n","id":"bb11ea70-cc3f-4c6d-af41-0937afd81412"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let's start with the positive side of Mandela's legacy first He did not allow the ANC to engage in a bloodbath against the former regime and avoided a large scale civil war within South Africa. This is nothing to sneeze at considering all of the variables. However, I think he's overrated as a leader and as a hero for the following reasons If the purpose of the ANC takeover of South Africa was to improve the lives of the majority blacks, then the takeover was a failure Since 1994, the year the ANC took power, the number of people living on less than 1 a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million in 2006. Between 1991 and 2002, the unemployment rate for black South Africans more than doubled, from 23 percent to 48 percent. The ANC government has built 1.8 million homes, but in the meantime 2 million people have lost their homes. Source Note I'm very opposed to the author's economic ideology, but I think the facts are non partisan. The welfare of the people whom the ANC takeover was supposed to help have plummeted drastically. Yet, if you were to look at the events in the broader world, nearly every factor that you could ask for to improve the economy of South Africa has been positive a Metals prices have skyrocketed during this time South Africa is heavily dependent on mining and minerals, and has large fractions of estimated total reserves in the world. b Africa as a whole has grown faster than any other region over the last decade. South Africa, the only industrial power in sub Saharan Africa, is closest to serve these developing markets, and clearly should have grown as or more quickly than the rest of the continent. Yet it hasn't. Growth has remained stagnant Australia, with a similar profile of Agriculture and Mining, has done extremely well over the same time period. Moreover, metals prices fluctuate over a long cycle of high alternating with low prices. TL DR It appears that the old white supremacist government did more for poor blacks than the current administration is able to, and they did it while being under international sanctions as well as an environment of much lower minerals prices. This is a pretty damning indictment of the consequences of Mandela's rule, IMO. I feel that much of the lauding of Mandela's achievements are from the perspective of a western view of 'race' relations that don't really apply in Africa. In Africa, nearly every state is composed of feuding tribal relations. In Africa, the default appears to be that one particular tribe within a country gains control of the state and introduces a more or less 'apartheid' system on the country. The SA regime was different from the rest of the African countries only in that the 'tribe' imposing apartheid was white. Sources So, I think in the event that metals prices turn down, which seems likely, you're going to see increasing tensions within SA that may lead to a significant resistance movement to the ANC. Even if not, I don't see how one could consider the cause that Mandela fought for to have been ultimately successful if you think the issue is about how well blacks live in South Africa. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think that Nelson Mandela will be viewed as a hero within 30 years.\n","id":"25f7238f-93b2-4cd2-9eea-56acfaf49dab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Blasphemy Should be Criminalised<|ARGUMENT|>Blasphemy will tend to target marginalized groups. People will tend to commit blasphemy when they feel that they will not receive opprobrium from society. Thus, blasphemy will disproportionately attack the religions of minorities, such as newcomers, or those from faiths that have not been moderated over time by the full panoply of progressive values. A modern multicultural society will aim to offer a welcome and protection to all of its members, and so will use blasphemy laws to prevent groups within it from being targeted in this way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blasphemy will tend to target marginalized groups. People will tend to commit blasphemy when they f...\n","id":"f9b0157b-c585-4264-ad30-21b70be9c4de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When one files motions to the Supreme court, one must use the extremely strict outlines shown here Not only must you fit their extremely specific rules in terms of formatting you must also then provide numerous copies of each motion, further increasing the price. The fact that this is such an incredibility small market means very few printers actually provide the exact format required for use in the filling of motions. This results in exceptionally high prices in simply getting the paper to file motions, not even counting legal fees. For instance, on this website for a simple 3 page motion with the bare minimum number of copies it will cost 432.61 US dollars. This is for a single motion, which there can be tens, or even hundreds of in complicated cases. This results in extreme cost and is exceptionally unfair, useless, and dated. This serves no use and should be abolished in order to cheapen legal fees in supreme court cases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Cost of Document Preparation for Motions in the Supreme court is extremely restrictive and expensive.\n","id":"d329f817-cd77-4820-931b-503a50b3af58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US build a wall on its Mexican border?<|ARGUMENT|>The investment in the wall is unlikely to pay off because the main costs of border insecurity is the drug trade, which would invariably find alternate conduits to the current land route. This could mean airplanes, boats, tunnels, or drone deliveries. The wall will only force drug traffickers to innovate and may create greater difficulties in the long run for the border security forces.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A border wall would incentivize narcotic and people smugglers to tunnel beneath the border, as they have been doing since at least 1990. In 2016, DHS's Science and Technology Directorate admitted that current detection technology was ineffective at keeping pace with new tunnel excavation\n","id":"1acc6445-c33e-4dbc-98d4-66406f23bd51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>#timesup: Should individuals credibly accused of sexual assault or harassment be fired from positions of authority?<|ARGUMENT|>Firing accused people without proof of guilt makes influential people blackmailable even if they committed no misconduct. It is much easier to fabricate a false accusation than it is to fabricate a guilty charge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Automatically firing people accused of sexual assault or harassment would cause increased detriment to victims of a false rape accusation.\n","id":"672a6927-3ff3-4c89-92b9-5b0354e3650f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been seeing a lot of social media posts and memes across the internet reading things such as, \u201ceven though time is an illusion, I hope you all have a great 2018.\u201d I strongly disagree with the statement that time is an illusion. I understand that our clocks and calendars are rather arbitrary when considering the entirety of the universe, but even our time system is attached to astronomically significant events Sun\u2019s position in the sky and Earth's position around the Sun, etc. these astronomical events happen and have happened. In order for something to happen, there must be a dimension of time \u2014 otherwise, it would never happen I could get into physics and string theory to further prove my point scientifically, but I rather avoid getting complicated. At any rate, is time an illusion? Change my mind EDIT I detail my argument for why time is NOT an illusion and MUST be real I refer to the fourth dimension when I say time. Without time, nothing could ever happen the universe couldn't expand like it does, the earth couldn't spin on its axis around the sun, my fingers couldn't move across my keyboard to type this post. Our clocks and calendars may be arbitrary in relation to the universe in its entirety, but time must exist for us to measure it in seconds, minutes, and years in the first place. Much like we need space to exist before we can measure it in inches and kilometers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Time is not an illusion, it is real.\n","id":"4030e282-0673-41f6-9f20-ac486b3481b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The autological title contains such a comma that's useless for short subjects. Thus this post is restricted to lengthy subjects, say over 30 40 characters with spaces. On p. 175 Top of Legal Writing in Plain English 2nd edn, 2013. Garner champions removing such commas bolded and italicized beneath . But I disagree. I always judge these commas helpful in separating a lengthy subject from its verb, and clarifying the syntax. gt 1.8. Don\u2019t use a comma between a subject and its verb. The use of the terms \u201cirrebuttable presumption\u201d and \u201cconclusive presumption , \u201d should be discontinued as useless and confusing. In that case, male teachers in a church operated school , received a head of family salary supplement that was not provided to female heads of households. An insurance carrier or a union or union inspector , may be held liable under traditional tort concepts for the negligent performance of such an inspection. Last example is a sentence of 179 words from Mill\u2019s Utilitarianism \u201cBut inasmuch as the cultivation in ourselves of a sensitive feeling on the subject of veracity , Would you truly delete this comma? is one of the most useful, and the enfeeblement of that feeling one of the most hurtful, things to which our conduct can be instrumental and inasmuch as any, even unintentional, deviation from truth, does that much towards weakening the trustworthiness of human assertion, which is not only the principal support of all present social well being, but the insufficiency of which does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back civilization, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest scale depends we feel that the violation, for a present advantage, of a rule of such transcendant expediency, is not expedient, and that he who, for the sake of a convenience to himself or to some other individual, does what depends on him to deprive mankind of the good, and inflict upon them the evil, involved in the greater or less reliance which they can place in each other\u2019s word, acts the part of one of their worst enemies.\u201d Source Chapter 2 of Utilitarianism<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Commas between a long subject and its verb, improve readability and should be used.\n","id":"23f018b8-46d6-49b2-acff-ee08c8def366"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>The lodge is partly run by gorilla conversation NGOs but the operator is a private company that only pays a fee of $50 per night while charging $400 to $1000. Thus, only a small amount of money arrives to local communities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Investments in local facilities are mainly designed for tourists, such as the Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge and do not help locals immediately.\n","id":"fb557360-ea49-4ccd-8580-bc0e7b99da8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Fire ants are the worst type of ants and I'm going to prove that objectively. They are super freaking resilient. They clump up into balls when they are in water so it's impossible to drown them. When it gets too dry, the ants simply dig until they hit the water table. They can survive to 9 centigrade They are an invasive species practically every where in the world. You can't stop them One bite does a nasty little pustule that stings for days, and can get infected. TOO BAD A QUEEN LAYS 9 MILLION EGGS IN HER LIFE TIME. Also, they are freaking ninja sneaky, crawling up on you in the thousands, perhaps even millions, then they release a pheromone, signalling them all to attack at the same time. They all bite and you think they are done? THEY ARNT. They bite until either they or you are dead. They cause a huge amount of damage to crops in the US They injure and kill people and livestock. They absolutely decimate any ground birds, lizards, other bugs, whatever they can get their greedy poisonous corrosive jaws locked onto. Psychologically, Can you imagine a giant clump of fire ants, LANDING ON YOUR FACE AND GOING INTO ALL YOUR FACE HOLES I rest my case<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":":Fire Ants are the worst type of ants.\n","id":"be63f32f-81d6-4e13-a2f2-6dde5d42b67d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Most elderly wizards are capable of living alone without assistance. This is relatively less common in the Muggle world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Elderly wizards appear to enjoy a better quality of life than most elderly Muggles.\n","id":"2a301434-525c-406f-a840-5eb55757fca7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the individual is not more vital then the global scale. That there are some emissions that are vital to the growth of any single community or group regardless of their society placement. That there isn't that much damage caused by carbon emissions, and any damage there is can be undone through a relatively simple process.  EDIT These are my grandparents views. Anyways what I am trying to get is some help to defend my view, which conflict these views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that global emission regulation, doesn't need to reshape resource consumption control. That it doesn't hinder the ability of growth and flourishing in poorer nations.\n","id":"67416b4d-216a-424a-b7e1-60cc0a95b437"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump has been recorded discussing a silencing payment to Karen McDougal to prevent her from discussing an alleged affair with him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some of Trump's actions can be seen as bribery.\n","id":"c933f7ba-0a55-4639-95c3-33ce1e70d392"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>One of the things that really undermines the credibility of academic philosophy in my eyes is that academic philosophers debate positions with virtually nothing to be said in their favor, like Christianity, while ignoring the philosophy of Ayn Rand. There are two things to be considered when considering how seriously to take a philosophical position The intrinsic plausibility of the position The arguments in the position's favor I don't think anyone can honestly argue that Christianity has any advantage over Objectivism on 1, since at the end of the day, Christianity is making extravagant supernatural claims and Objectivism isn't. You can find egoism repugnant, but at the end of the day, it's not a supernatural claim like a God or the Trinity or a resurrection. So Objectivism wins here by any honest assessment. On 2, I think Objectivism has an advantage because its arguments appeal to observable everyday facts and normal rules of inference, whereas arguments for Christianity tend to rely on intuition, vast extrapolation, and tentative scientific hypotheses on the cutting edge of our knowledge. I have never seen an argument for God or the resurrection that didn't depend at some point on an intuition that wasn't supported by anything observable for example, the fine tuning argument depends on the principle of indifference, and the kalam cosmological argument depends on the principle of determination. So I think Objectivism wins here too. I think this has to do with the fact that Christianity has had thousands of years of sophistry built up behind it, whereas Objectivism only has Ayn Rand's few, crystal clear arguments in its favor, so Christianity gives philosophers more to write about in terms of sheer volume. But this is an indictment of academic philosophy's methodology, not a justification. I've read most of Alvin Plantinga's books, most of Richard Swinburne's books, and most of William Lane Craig's books. I am aware of what the case for Christianity looks like in some detail, and I really can't see why academic philosophers debate it and not Objectivism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is a disgrace to academic philosophy that academic philosophers seriously debate Christianity and not the philosophy of Ayn Rand.\n","id":"3d6d5f7c-7da6-46cb-a7b0-967639bbaf8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Could adopting a discussion platform like Kialo help improve the quality of Ethereum's political + governance debates?<|ARGUMENT|>There will be greater community buy in when they are able to participate in decisions, at the design stage. Upcoming decisions could be sent as a Kialo RFC to members.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adopting a discussion platform like Kialo will help improve the quality of Ethereum's political + governance debates.\n","id":"18364b17-1ada-45fe-ba5a-1cd979792be6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should individuals sentenced to life in prison be allowed to choose death instead?<|ARGUMENT|>The European Court of Human Rights, in the case Vinter et al. vs the UK, ruled that inmates had a \u201cright to hope\u201d, even those who commit the most abhorrent of acts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are instances where courts have held that inmates serving life sentences have a right to apply for parole.\n","id":"c5be580d-35fc-4ae2-8eb8-1597d52960b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>A omniscient God that would \"not care\" would have a neutral will about mankind, meaning that it would have no impact on the existence of free will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The impact of God omnipotence and omniscience on human free will depends on the content of his will, not just its existence.\n","id":"b0d98e90-1225-4c35-b7e1-d68b17dfdad1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are programs like Alcoholics Anonymous the best way to battle addiction<|ARGUMENT|>Greater ownership over the treatment option chosen forces individuals to hold themselves responsible and accountable for their decision thereby increasing the probability of adherence to the chosen treatment option.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Greater ownership may increase the likelihood of individuals sticking with the treatment option they have chosen as they presumably like it.\n","id":"eb1bc36b-9916-4878-8733-1aa62d53213f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Cryptocurrencies And Blockchain Technologies The Next 'Industrial Revolution'?<|ARGUMENT|>Not only are people sceptical about new technologies, adoption of said technologies can take time; this said, in this case it is not a bad thing. There are many adjustments that need to be made in most blockchain technologies, so the time it will take for public scepticism to clear will allow for the technology to properly scale to the appropriate size and functionality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scepticism is normal towards new technologies. There was broad scepticism about the car, the train, the television and the Internet before they became mainstream.\n","id":"bc4bc900-18ad-4498-9c32-194debd02140"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should private education be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Oregon tried to ban private schooling in 1922. It was found to be unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1925.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Banning private schools has been ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court\n","id":"5d9475d7-f735-4818-a692-36d85f50b425"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey, I'm from Germany and my English is not so good so ill just work with bulletpoints. This is why i think the death sentence is wrong and should be abolished Innocent people have been convicted and executed. The death penalty is incompatible with human rights and human dignity Even the guilty have a right to life Killing is wrong There is a better way to help the families of murder victims executions do not help these people heal nor do they end their pain Capital punishment goes against almost every religion. Thanks for all the comments ins advance<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the death sentence should be abolished\n","id":"abbbed0d-857e-4996-b54a-8e670b3ebcc6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>U.S. Imperialism<|ARGUMENT|>Over the last several decades the USA has maintained a wide lead over the rest of the world in research and development R&D. The most recent figures say that the US accounts for 43% of the industrial world's total R&D expenditures. Foreign firms are making substantial R&D investments in the US to the point where foreign firms' R&D expenditures in the U.S. are roughly equivalent to what the US invests abroad in similar activities. The USA is the country with the majority of both the world's patents and its Nobel laureates.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Over the last several decades the USA has maintained a wide lead over the rest of the world in resea...\n","id":"62becdcd-f476-46db-a997-c2674965f01f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Willard Chase, when Joseph Smith went to Cumorah on September 22, 1827 to recover the golden plates, \"he said he then took the book out of the ground and hid it in a tree top, and returned home.\" Howe 1834, p. 246<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to Joseph Smith, the distance he ran with the golden plates from their temporary hiding place to his home in Manchester was at least two miles.\n","id":"2e1b95ac-bafe-4b8b-b618-c7b65c164468"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is accessing your spouse\u2019s email account hacking?<|ARGUMENT|>There is no proof that he didn't just log in and write the email exchange himself. She had filed for divorce months earlier, they weren't 'really' married anymore and as such he invaded a half-stranger's privacy by hacking into her A\/C. \"According to prosecutors, Leon walker broke into his wife's account several months after she filed for divorce. clara walker said her husband installed a tracking device that allowed him to track her e-mail activity. leon walker faces up to five years in prison if convicted. Locate history files, websites visited, searches e-mail history. memory bye. see you hide from me now, little man. Spying on spouses is nothing new, but some snooping husbands and wives may not realize that in this new age of technology, peeking in the wrong places can actually be illegal. \" <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AIf a you can access your spouse's account you can fabricate emails from that very A\/C to make your spouse look guilty\n","id":"f72ef689-1a42-4ca4-bdaa-48c0645ae57d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I am a student at the University of California, Irvine. Recently, I came across a Facebook post of one of the politically active students regarding a campaign by the school's department of transportation which included bus side ads with the phrase Cyclo De Mayo to promote riding bicycles, which provides numerous benefits to society mostly health related . Now, I normally find myself siding with the cross cultural side of school politics, but on occasion I feel like some of the time these are real life SJW scenarios people getting offended on behalf of others. This particular post was made by someone with no Mexican Latin heritage whatsoever, and it decried the actions of the department as inherently racist after first criticizing white culture as a whole for Americanizing the holiday, as if this is the fault of UCI . My boyfriend is getting mad at me for not getting it and says that it is so obvious that if I don't see why it's wrong, then he can't explain it . I, however, see it as nothing more than a harmless play on words, and would like to understand better why the fact that these words happen to be the title of Mexican holiday makes this worse than any other.  that this biking campaign is not racist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing fundamentally racist with \"Cyclo De Mayo\"\n","id":"323ab394-7bb0-4d2c-82de-8c373f901112"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to hear the other side of legalbeagle05's post. I'm really on the fence about the issue of privacy. Based on the answers on legalbeagle05's post, most people fear that complete government surveillance destroy the liberty that comes with democracy. I simply want to know your opinion on why you support government surveillance. Personally, I think that privacy has a certain amount of importance, and that the government needs our consent to view our personal properties including my e mails etc. For reference, legalbeagle05's post also, check out PomerGyle's post I also agree with his point<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the government should NOT be allowed to view my e-mails, tap my phone calls, and view my web history for national security concerns.\n","id":"eab14b7e-8f76-4408-b434-096c87860e2b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Since income and taxation laws including who is exempt from certain taxes may change, this is not a viable way of deciding voters from non\/voters.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Democratic rights of grown-ups are not and should not be influenced by income and taxation either.\n","id":"e488c406-8e4a-4d01-8823-b585651b0c21"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that universal liability insurance for cars and drivers would be a fantastic thing that can be implemented in much the same way as universal health care. We might pay a certain amount in taxes or have a yearly fee or something that will help us no matter what. A lot of times someone is in a crash that's not their fault and they can't do anything about it because the other person either doesn't have insurance they might be illegal or driving illegally or the other person is too poor to be able to afford to continue driving and make their normal living expenses. This way, I feel we'd drastically reduce the amount of hit and runs and stuff like that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Just as we are moving towards a society where people are encouraging governments to provide universal healthcare coverage we also need to encourage universal liability insurance\n","id":"50718644-d569-4533-ab3d-79dbc1217200"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We need to settle a colony on Mars if we are going to ensure the existence of mankind. That should go without saying. But NASA, however, is the wrong entity to entrust with that responsibility. I share the views of Dr Robert Zubrin video here in regards to what we should be willing to sacrifice in order to go to Mars and beyond. I will even go so far as to say that the lack of dead astronauts in space is a sure tell sign that we are doing it wrong. The people wanting to be astronauts are more than willing to take a huge risk to be the first to get there . When they went to the moon in '69, the astronauts knew damn well the risk they took was like flipping a coin for their lives. They went anyway. We haven't set foot on an alien body the last 40 years and if NASA continues to value an astronauts life in the billions of dollars, we'll never see real progress. Dead astronauts and a lot of them if need be, is what it takes to further the goal of ensuring future generations a place to live, should we screw up this planet. And time should always be a driving factor in the effort of securing man kind if you are in the opinion that man kind is worthy of survival, that is . Dead astronauts is the price we must pay, but at least we can soften the bad conscience by the knowledge that the people paying the ultimate price are heroes willing to take the risk, not the billions of unborn who never get the chance of life if insert world ending catastrophe hit us before we are ready. EDIT What's with all the down votes? Some here are having a good discussion, trying to change views, me trying to rebut, others joining in. And then there's the fucktards downvoting everything they don't agree with, no matter how constructive it is to the discussion of my OP. I hate that part of reddit. Arguments and reason, not mouse clicks, changes opinions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Funding NASA in its current form is a waste of money.\n","id":"564f40b2-dd28-4bfd-9561-d490252d0883"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>That is correct. Actually the lower estimates also make defensive gun use more common than firearm homicide.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The upper estimates would make defensive gun use more common than firearm homicide.\n","id":"a28fcf6b-9b1e-4419-8266-d709fa602f80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Focus on the monetary coverage of basic needs without a clear statement that these are the basic human rights housing, food, healthcare, education, electricity etc. allows to keep the system of control by the size of UBI determined by the elites. The whole idea behind UBI is to liberate people, not to change their chains.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI does not resolve humanity's dependence on an almost always capitalist economy to take care of our needs.\n","id":"8f267d23-0070-426c-8582-d7e139c4d38c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Personally I feel as though this term is sexist and misused. From what I understand, the nature of using the term follows the assumption that a condescending person is sexist based on the fact that this person is a man. How is this not inherently sexist? Note that I am not denying any sort of institutional or societal sexism towards women that exists or has existed. At the very least it is a term based on a stereotype that may or may not apply to a particular man, though it is used regardless. I am very aware I am on the inside looking out, and do not know what it is like to be on the outside looking in. I am asking this question with the intention of hearing other perspectives so please be my guest and poke holes in what I\u2019ve said because I am looking for a greater understanding of the subject and wanted to ask in a place that I know would not be an echo chamber. A few of my thoughts summed up The logic behind mansplaining is \u201c Some men will sometimes speak condescendingly\u201d This is comparable to \u201c Some women will sometimes make decisions based on emotion as opposed to logic \u201d So how would you feel, as a woman, when you make a decision, to have your decision called womanciding? Ken hey did you hear about Janet? She isn\u2019t talking to you anymore because you didn\u2019t say hi to her last week Dan I figured. Janet is always womanciding Obviously both men and women are capable of being emotional, so why call it woman ciding? I\u2019m sure you can see my point here. Both men and women are capable of being condescending, but a man doing it to a woman needs a specific term for it? I think if you break it down the sexism lies in the assumption that a man who is condescending is just an asshole if it\u2019s towards a man and sexist if it is towards a woman. Why not just use \u201che is condescending\u201d or \u201cshe is condescending\u201d because both sexes are capable of being condescending. I feel like if you make a special word for one of them you are being obvious sexist. Here\u2019s a comparable example \u201cHe yelled at her\u201d Vs \u201cShe bitched her out\u201d This clearly includes a more sexist term for the \u201cShe\u201d sentence. My whole point is if we say \u201che yelled at her\u201d we should also be saying \u201cshe yelled at her.\u201d Just like we should be saying \u201cShe was condescending\u201d and \u201che was condescending\u201d instead of \u201cShe was condescending to her\u201d Vs \u201cHe was mansplaining to her\u201d \u201cMansplaining\u201d seems petty and vengeful. You don\u2019t know if the man you are speaking to is being condescending simply because he is an asshole. This is in effect creating a double standard where the belief is women can freely explain things to men but men cannot freely explain to women under risk of appearing to be a sexist. I don\u2019t care for the societal institutional argument where the claim is that sexism hurt women in the workplace and society because men had more power in those roles. I did not do that. I took no part in that and don\u2019t know anyone that has. I\u2019m sorry if someone you know was hurt by that happening but I had nothing to do with it and if you can associate me with that kind of sexism because of my gender, then you are the sexist one. I am very open to other perspectives and would love to hear what you have to say<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term \u201cmansplaining\u201d is inherently sexist.\n","id":"f9a1c64b-a53c-4890-adc1-d6e8ec652ad1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Governments Ever Limit Free Speech?<|ARGUMENT|>People are already exposed to the moral implications of conflict and don't need images to understand how gruesome wars can be. However, when mutilated bodies are depicted across the media, the military's actions seem far more egregious and out of context.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Media reporting of the death toll of soldiers and the suffering of those involved in the war is likely to convince voters to have an anti-war stance.\n","id":"c40da343-e32d-4b27-b621-d2e0ddc5bc92"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>About me High school age. Lived mostly in the US but now in the UK I think American culture is twisted, maybe even fundamentally backwards. For maybe 95 of human history, being in the upper classes was considered by most people a good thing. Talking in a refined matter, wearing fancy clothes, conforming to standards of chivalry and having an education have all been desirable traits In America there is perhaps the opposite thing. We have been taken over by ghetto culture which glorifies rebelliousness, poverty, lawbreaking and drugs. Education, maintaining a professional appearance, woking a job, sexual and chemical restraint are all scoffed at. This dawned on my when I realized in many ways that I would prefer to wear and a shirt with sleeves cutoff than the required dress pants, shirt and tie. I would consider myself not ghetto and reasonably well educated, so upon reflection it surprised me. It seems odd that it would be cool to be a criminal or dropout but in many ways it is I came to think that this process was started by the Counterculture movements in the 60's. Up until then children and people were taught to pretty much respect authority. Dress smart and say sir, which everyone did and no one questioned. Then the counterculture came along and started questioning things. They wore ripped, damaged clothes and grew their hair into unusual styles, which I believe is the predecessor of ghetto fashion. They had a tremendous distrust of the police and government workers, which probably led to Fuck the Police and other slogans. They used drugs heavily, which made using them cool and acceptable, which has led to many drug problems. Most of all I think, they questioned authority. Of course there's nothing wrong with doing that, I do it, you do it. But I think that idea has carried over to the other side. Instead of listening to everything adults say, young people listen to NOTHING they say. Working hard is bad. Good grades are bad. Looking respectable is nerdy. Covering up your tits makes you a good two shoes. The problem is we cannot change the views of these people because they brush off everything we say. I know a 10 year old kid who refuses to wear a bike helmet because he sees cool black kids biking without them. The kid goes to a private school in America but still feels that pressure and influence. I can't imagine how warped the world views of people actually in the ghetto must be. gt TL DR American culture is messed up because of the ideas started by the 60's hippies<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the Hippies indirectly ruined American culture I'll explain. Perhaps you can\n","id":"efd3bec5-2e3e-47ff-a47d-40f56178a501"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I can't say what the job is, for obvious reasons, but it's an extremely secure job in the sense that I'd honestly have to almost kill a baby at my desk to get fired. I have to do next to no work all day, I get 45 days of PTO Paid Time Off throughout the year, and I have a great pension, but I only have two years vested into it so far. I can retire at 55 and continue to not lift a finger for the rest of my life. Health benefits are some of the best in the the United States, and I get a bunch of other benefits like free legal counsel, assistance with homeownership, a free life coach if I want it, etc. All sorts of stuff. The downsides? Well, the actual salary is extremely low not for the workload, but for life at roughly 40k yr. Yes, I do understand that the benefits packages and whatnot balance it out a bit. That doesn't change the fact that my in pocket after taxes and whatnot is about 30k yr. It's hard to live in the NYC Metro area on that, even if my fiancee makes almost 80k yr. The other downside is simply the work. As I said, there's almost none of it. Case in point? I'm on reddit at 9 45am, at my desk, in the middle of the office, in front of everyone around here, typing this very , and no one cares. Par for the course around here. Others are on Amazon, browsing for shoes, buying patio furniture, possibly even sleeping. Who knows? Tax dollars hard at work here. Point is, I can't stand it. I went to college, but didn't graduate because I'm a shmuck, for Network Administration. I'm desparately passionate about mobile tech and the industry at large, and I'm a writer at heart. I've always dreamed about using all of my knowledge and passion in a career, but alas, here I am, not doing so. Now, here's the conundrum I believe in the itch I have. I'm itching to quit, move my fiancee and I somewhere we can afford, and take a job Ok, I'd take the job before I quit somewhere that utilizes my passions and skillsets. Why shouldn't I? Edit Since I don't think I was clear in my view, it's simply that I don't think the fact that someone has a cushy government job with a pension is ever a reason to not take opportunities to go pursue your passions in life. I think it's worth throwing away for happiness elsewhere. Edit 2 I guess I should mention, I'm only 26 years old.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I have a government job and think I should leave it to pursue my passion. ?\n","id":"48abb889-5094-4672-9bde-23511f9e8f28"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In your turn, you can do all you want but when it comes to the enemies, you can't do more than praying they don't use the super powerful attack that hits everyone for massive damage. For example, in turn based games if one of my allies gets hit by an enemies' spell that turns him against me for a while, all I can do is sit there and soak up the damage in the hope that I could still use a Potion after that crap. In Action games, we can all bail out of there, regroup, kite around until the spell wears out. After I played the SoulsBorne series, turn based combat makes even less sense. What if the dragon uses the poison breath that can bring me to critical health and inflict poison effect at the same time? Umm, dodge the breath? How about the super hard to dodge attack? Better time my dodge well I don't need to pray that the OP attack doesn't come. In SoulsBorne games, I can beat the game without dying or using potions with a level 1 character if I'm good enough. If the odds are against me, I can always play better and come out on top. In turn based games, it boils down to playing the numbers game. If the numbers are not on my side, better off grinding until they are. I don't think that's fun. I'm using the same terrible tactics before, the difference is that now my stats is so good the bad moves can't even touch me. I don't need to improve my tactics, the stats more than make up for it. EDIT Ok, guys. I accept it. Tactics and strategies are all well and good. Anticipation is the key to victory in practically everything. But if I can't react to an instant death uncalled attack, that's bad design. If I have to cast the defensive spell every turn only for the enemies to take out the dinky knife and jab me, that's being cheap. If the overpowered attack is entirely spammable for the enemies and I have no choice but to hold up my shield at all time in anticipation, that's pure, undiluted crap. And if I can overwhelm any flaw and mistake in my tactics with enough stats point, the tactics might as well not be there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Turn Based Combat is bad and infuriating.\n","id":"f4b74563-22a0-4349-943b-9edecafc7d83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Purity Pledges Harmful?<|ARGUMENT|>Genesis 2:24-25 states \u201cTherefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are several verses in the Bible which have been relied on to deem fornication and adultery a sin.\n","id":"24651748-dcc6-4807-a2dd-cbbf5808138c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am currently residing in the U.S, and Asians are stereotyped to be well behaved, nerdy, and nice. At least, that's the impression I am getting from a lot of people. I just feel that people aren't threaten by Asians. I was in a parking lot late at night, and I had to ask a woman for instructions. Normally, I feel like they would be extremely cautious since it is late at night and a stranger approach them. Nope, she got close, pull up google maps on her phone and try to search out the destination for me. I never feel like people are threaten by me. I have heard of other races lamenting the fact that they always feel like they are being watched and that people are too cautious around them. Am I living off the respected earned by other Asians living in the U.S?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People don't really see Asians as a \"violent\" threat in the U.S.\n","id":"d6f8b2f8-8804-412a-9f39-c7a3178d0c0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US government guarantee every citizen a job?<|ARGUMENT|>The U.S. army already offers a guaranteed job to everyone MOS and provides a decent standard of living, debt-free higher education, health care, and decent benefits - provided you\u2019re willing to risk your life for it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Providing jobs for everyone who is unemployed is not a new idea, similar schemes have been implemented throughout history.\n","id":"c6f6ccac-5fff-4472-a9d6-8746bac11b70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Domino effect is a typical example of a chain reaction. We see how cause and effect work, and how the effect is predetermined. That determination is absolute, since dominoes are inert matter. But if we line humans instead of dominoes, chain effect will fail, since some humans will refuse to cooperate. Difference here is a free will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Determinism described applies to inert matter, but it cannot be applied to living organisms.\n","id":"3a270122-c1d9-450b-91d9-4b858102d2fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>One looses an insurance against the very unlikely cause that an afterlife exists and church membership matters for this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Leaving the Church entails other costs that are prevented when no church tax is levied.\n","id":"97d664de-c8c5-4726-843e-99879f5ca973"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>he says 98 of humanity has lived since Christ Almost every facet of your current life right down to our language, healthcare, and education, has been influenced by that book. Our educational system was based off the church, our healthcare the same, our art was commissioned by it, our sciences advanced by it. Currently 2 billion people adhere to it, and the majority of social changes were sparked by it. The modern world has been touched by Christianity more than any other influence. Nearly all ancient societal norms were affectively destroyed by Christianity right down to their holidays which were converted upon the conversion of the pagans themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My friend claims that the bible has shaped more of human culture than anything else in existence. -\n","id":"f53254f9-3297-4766-ad74-5ba12cf528bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>capitalism is better than socialism<|ARGUMENT|>'Credit bubbles' and resultant credit crunches financial crisis are inherent in the capitalist system. The economy undergoes a crisis whenever productive economic sectors begin to undergo a slowdown resulting in falls in profits. The recent crisis was caused due to the fact that there was an inflated investment in real estates. It was invested in with the purpose of keeping up profits which lead to a rise in the price of properties. Because of the increased price in property many people took out loans on their house and bought goods for the credit, thinking they could easily pay back their loans since their house would be more valuable at sale. However, since the rise of price was fabricated and not corresponding to an actual need it was a bubble, house prices had to invariably go down at some point. When the prices eventually went down people could no longer afford to pay back what they had bought on their loaned houses and the installed payments were the trigger of the financial crisis. It could perhaps be said that the economy was surviving on money which did not exist thereof the name 'credit bubble'. The result was that there were countless goods which no one could buy because no one could afford to pay for them, in turn this lead to a stagnation in the economy and hence to a crisis. A socialist system would not produce overconsumption since its aim is not profit but human needs, it would not have a reason to fabricate an investment for the sake of keeping up the profits and would therefore not cause a capitalist crisis1. 1 Roberts, M. 2008. The credit crunch - one year on. In Defence of Marxism. Retrieved June 7, 2011 improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Socialism is a more secure system than the free market in Capitalism\n","id":"207be7de-b7b6-42a6-bd35-af565498e83f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are free markets better for humans than regulated markets?<|ARGUMENT|>Regulation could help less developed economies to determine the country's specialisation according to their competitive advantages by creating incentive systems towards nationally advantageous industries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The system that is best for a country largely depends on its context, history and existing financial profile.\n","id":"ab2140b3-411a-47a4-b6bd-f9f63327c3ae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Drivers licenses for Illegal immigrants in the US<|ARGUMENT|>- Passport security has been substantially improved. Therefore, it is not valid to claim that giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants will NOT add significantly to the security vulnerabilities in the United States.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Passport security difficulties are minor and don't justify driver's licenses to illegal aliens\n","id":"62506f6d-562b-4bfa-9070-59ede93c2782"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>One of the most commonly cited texts for evidence of black confederate soldiers is Joy Masoff's \"Our Virginia Past and Present.\" But the publisher has since retracted this claim. Indeed, Masoff herself admitted that her \"evidence\" was simply other links on the internet, not actual primary records.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no credible evidence that Black Americans fought for the confederacy.\n","id":"11dead6d-79cc-4bc9-8c3a-5e9155acc0f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Some character traits do not require evil in order to flourish e.g. teamwork through sport or intelligence through learning. Character building could still be a feature of human existence without evil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The suggestion that God can not find a way to let us learn those virtues without evil is contradictory to the idea of him begin all powerful.\n","id":"fffc7421-7dc1-4073-95b2-904b32d827f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My dream is to become an esports pro and I'm working towards it. But, as a person critical of almost everything, I can't help but think that these people mentioned in the title are not contributing to the society in any meaningful way to worth millions within a 10 years period. The key word here is meaningful . I understand that these people contribute by providing entertainment, and people are willing to pay for such entertainments. However, I don't see providing entertainment as a meaningful contribution. When I imagine myself becoming successful one day as an esports pro, wouldn't some friends and relatives think that I'm just someone who is enjoying life while making so much money without contributing to the society? I would just be enjoying life indeed as I don't have any passion except for competing in games that challenge my mind. I know that you can use the money to do good to return back to society, but that would become a choice, and not everyone's generous. I want to be convinced that what these people in the title are doing for a living is meaningful. EDIT Apparently, I should only post if I'm able to reply to a comment within 3 hours of posting according to the rules . But, I'm doing this before my bed time. Please be patient.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Celebrities, professional athletes, poker pros, esports pros should not worth millions\n","id":"e4f198e9-0fc0-4f22-80be-4769d5c449ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should cities have bike share?<|ARGUMENT|>Not depending on docks is more convenient and gives users more freedom. They can choose to leave the bikes where they wish, this can mean closer to home\/work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People will not have issues returning bikes e.g. no full docks\n","id":"c88c7233-6eb6-400c-9b6d-790c009119c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to start by saying that there is nothing unnatural or wrong about wanting journalistic integrity. People don't like feeling like someone is selling something to them or contorting the truth, and it's alright to want the news to be strictly objective. However, I believe that implicit bias is unavoidable in journalism. In some cases, no attempt should be made to counter it. 1 The personal leanings of the writer or editor find their way into writing the word choice, tone and features of a story colour the way in which it is perceived by the reader. Deliberate bias with a goal to persuade someone towards their viewpoint could be viewed as immoral, but implicit bias cannot be avoided. 2 If you don't subscribe to the romantic view of news as being meant to dispense information about the world and things going on in it, bias can actually flavour the news we consume. The news in my country focuses heavily on the social issues of poverty and inadequate limited expensive housing, and this bias keeps an important issue alive in the national discussion. 3 Often those who complain would not object if their own viewpoints were those endorsed in the source. Countless times I've seen people cry bias when the writer disagrees with their viewpoint, and while they're not wrong they themselves become guilty of it. Please change my view, or at least some of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should not complain about news sources being biased\n","id":"5ea3e460-ba33-421e-ad22-fecb75a66d82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>This could reduce the need for anonymous live donation if parents could guarantee that, for instance, if they needed a liver transplant, their child would be a match, thus saving innumerable lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetic modification of children allows parents to create organs, cells or tissue that can be used for transplantation to adults.\n","id":"4a6cba1b-3b7e-48ab-9c57-44ec4b2fc279"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are many clocks displayed publicly, for example on church towers or in subway stations. These clocks are seen by many people every day and thus have the potential to influence many people too. If a public clock displays the wrong time this can have major negative effects on the people trusting the displayed time, e.g. missing an appointment, train, flight or something similar. This is why I believe that the owners of clocks that are visible from public space should be required by law to keep their clocks on time with a margin of one or two minutes . A clock that is wrong would need to be covered up or at least marked as not accurate. Edit for additional details on punishment People could report the clock to a local authority which would have the role of distributing warnings and tickets. The punishments would have to be minor and be preceded by a warning to the owner followed by a ticket in case of non compliance. There could also be a tiering of punishment depending on the amount of people potentially affected by the clock. For example a clock displaying the wrong time on Times Square or at Piccadilly Circus would entail a much bigger punishment than one sitting in the middle of nowhere. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be a legal requirement for public clocks to be on time.\n","id":"3711dca9-2494-41b7-9348-5fe87e7337cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I just finished my final exam of secondary education and I will, in all modesty, probably get an excellent result I hesitated on whether this was too braggy, but as it is crucial to my question, I decided to leave it in . However, I have wondered whether it is actually clever to put in the extra effort necessary to be a top performer and what performance level I should aim for at uni. I'll study engineering. According to my experience and by virtue of the law of diminishing returns I could probably still get very good grades but not excellent , if I put in significantly less time. Time that would be well spent with friends for example. This is a zero sum game. It does matter to me to get into a career where I can leave a beneficial mark on the world, the bigger the better. But I'm not sure how many helpful excellent marks will be in that endeavour. I have a feeling that employers do not really care whether you have 52 60 or 55 60. Career seems to be by far the most important reason to pursue the best marks you can get. But at some point you hit an optimum beyond which improvements cost lots of energy and time, without really paying off in terms of job prospects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Excellent grades near best in school etc. are not worth the extra effort, when compared to very good grades top 10-20% of your class.\n","id":"5b4c3188-2cb5-41fd-91d6-883f8a965316"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should martial arts class be compulsory in school?<|ARGUMENT|>Differences in body growth and weight are hard to counter by martial arts, once you are in touching distance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If everybody were trained in martial arts, the physical threat exerted by bullies will not be reduced.\n","id":"40a4f606-524e-4c99-8b0c-6e8fea0e0c56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>In the entire history of observation there has never been an event that was not caused.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If at any point nothing existed, then nothing would exist at all.\n","id":"69ec6257-7853-43a2-926e-fde8346dfe33"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With everything that's going in the NFL Ray Rice getting suspended, then his contract gets terminated as well as Jonathan Dwyer getting suspended there seems to be a double standard being applied that favors women who are athletes celebrities as well as there is a double standard for the general population but that's not what this  is about . Hope Solo struck her half sister and her nephew she was arrested. Yet, Nike still sponsors her while denying their sponsorship to Adrien Petersen. The common arguments supporting the double standard are Men are stronger and cause more damage than women. Although the narrative about domestic violence centers about how men should never hit women because men are physically stronger ie Rice knocking his then fiancee out cold with one punch , the reality is domestic violence is not about who is the stronger individual. It is about a betrayal of trust, the individual being hit, man or woman, faces at best bruises and at worst broken bones both of which will heal but the fact that their partner is okay with hitting you that the person who is supposed to love you is okay with hitting you and the emotional impact that is inflicted upon the victim. Domestic violence is most often perpetrated by men onto women. Women being violent is not a big deal because it so rarely happens. Many studies, including this one show proof of women quite often being the aggressors in intimate partner violence situations. The CDC center for disease control finds that men are more often victims of intimate partner violence as indicated here Some studies find that lesbian relationships have the highest incidence of partner violence, gay male relationships the least while heterosexual couples are in the middle. Women are the common denominator. They find that about 50 of the time when there is violence within a heterosexual relationship it is co mutual and that when violence is only coming from one partner and never the other, over 70 of the time it is the female who is the aggressor. There are studies that prove otherwise I'm sure but they are not from leading experts on DV, they are biased by feminists who are driven to increase profits for the domestic violence industry which is a BILLION dollar a year industry considering all the gov't funding they get . I am pretty adamant in the point of view that either a women should be held to the same standard as men and face not only legal consequences but suspension and or other consequences from their sports teams b men be held to the same standard as women and face only legal consequences but no impact to their careers Consequences should apply universally regardless of gender. Give me one good and valid reason why either a or b should not be adopted as the default action for cases where men and women are found guilty of domestic violence. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- Hope Solo should be treated the same as other male athletes or celebrities in regards to facing repercussions not only from the law but from the organization she works for when committing acts of domestic violence.\n","id":"f809e64d-7281-466c-8dc1-c789a011d411"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, my Dad put on a T.V. program about a child born with Treacher Collins syndrome and I mentioned that I don't think that any life saving measures should be taken to save the lives of babies born with severe deformities or disabilities. It's a drain not just emotionally for the person and family with the abnormality, but financially on the entire healthcare system as well. What kind of quality of life is that person going to have? Should certain objective measures be met required in order to proceed with life saving intervention?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People born with disabilities should be subject to letting \"nature take it's course\" without extreme medical interventions to save their lives at birth.\n","id":"5279fb9d-9ee2-4943-931d-fa9f89051142"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm currently 26 years old. I've used Adderall or a substitute most recently, Vivance without a prescription since the age of 15. The following is not meant to be braggadocios, but I feel it is necessary to detail some of my personal past to make my point I've attended an Ivy League college, as well as a Tier 1 law school and the top rated business school. None of this would have been possible without the assistance of study drugs . It is my considered opinion that these drugs are capable of propelling American students to productive lives and academic success, and, for the life of me, I simply cannot see a compelling reason why said drugs are stigmatized and or forbidden to students.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Study Drugs e.g., Ritalin and Adderall should not only be allowed in schools, but should be promoted.\n","id":"b71eed00-80eb-4cc5-9b67-d2c5474295ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Those people who cannot catch on may become dependent on others for direction, not knowing how to be vegan on their own or may even stop being vegan when everyone stops too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the world instantly became vegan, not everyone will suddenly form a vegan mindset.\n","id":"646ccb1f-dd82-4372-a549-767722e4b7b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Food Labelling<|ARGUMENT|>The information on a food-label can indeed be very complicated, but that\u2019s not an argument against food labelling per se. There are several proposals which aim to simplify this complex information, like for example the traffic light system and the GDA-system. These are simple labelling systems which can tell the consumer at a glance if something is healthy or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The information on a food-label can indeed be very complicated, but that\u2019s not an argument against f...\n","id":"1083b029-0144-4c17-9afc-911ef4a0fea3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Rhino horn can cost 100 thousand dollars a kilo so there is currently a large black market for it. Poachers of Rhino horn are incentivized to get as much horn as possible, as quickly as possible. So poachers shoot rhinos and cut off the horn. Farmers and south african wildlife reserves tranquillise their rhinos annually and cut of the horn. They do this to prevent their rhinos from being poached, and since rhino horn is keratin, effectively the same as fingernails, this doesn't harm the rhino. As a result there are Rhino farmers with safes full of horn that they cannot legally sell. If the horn trade was legalised and taxed, a regulatory body could be set up to ensure that the horn is being produced ethically and sustainably, while undercutting the poachers and driving them out of business. I only know about the farms in south Africa, they probably exist in other countries but I haven't seen them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rhino horn trade should be legalised.\n","id":"342d3fca-0233-4ba8-85f0-f0979e9286ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Compulsory Voting: Should Voting be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Citizens have a duty to maintain the democratic state by voting, which is enforced through compulsory voting.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Citizens in democratic states should be required to vote or be fined.\n","id":"4efaf706-6599-4d35-aa04-0b8638e03fa7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>When bullfighting is perceived as a core part of national identity e.g. in Spain it brands a country's culture as violent and diminishes its international reputation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Traditional bullfighting - the practice of fighting with bulls that includes physically injuring them - should be banned.\n","id":"57feef1d-a527-4ef9-999a-b92d655b00fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should copyright die with the creator?<|ARGUMENT|>Creators do not operate in a vacuum but with the support of others, such as companies. These will retain planning security and not depend on the health of an individual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A temporary limited copyright is better than a copyright that depends on the creator's lifespan.\n","id":"5cc0874e-c9d0-4f19-a222-ba6891a5c760"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have always struggled with math especially on paper. If I am able to use excel or computer programs though I quite enjoy it. My problem is that in college they teach you how to do advanced math by hand, and it gets quite complex often times so complex that there is no real world scenario where you would use it. I understand teaching the fundamentals of math, but unless you have an affinity for it I think it is pointless to force students to work problems out by hand. I think it is archaic since in the real world computers are used to solve those problems. I think instead we should be taught how to construct equations within computer systems like excel etc. and stop wasting valuable time and money. x200B Edit Okay to clarify I know there are certain instances where understanding the fundamentals of the equation are useful i.e. engineers, physicists, programmers, etc. I'm specifically referring to students whose future job won't require that kind of understanding. For example In my accounting classes we learn how different types of cost allocation can affect bid prices. I understand the concept and can apply that understanding to my decision making. What I don't need to understand is how it is set up and how the actual mathematical processes play out in solving I just need to understand the concept of how different formulas can be used. The best of example I can think of is interest applied continuously vs. compounded. Last semester I had a prof that liked to make these questions challenging so our tests required an ungodly amount of work. I don't need to know how to do the work if I can understand conceptually how different methods work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The way college level math is currently taught is pointless.\n","id":"20678a1d-3c70-450a-9e36-18926bd301bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not saying you are not allowed to enjoy it, whether it is out of cult following, the over the top camp, or just because it is so bad it is good. But some people argue that they unironically like it, and think it is appropiate for children, and I can't agree. The movie has way too obvious dark and sexual humor and features themes not really kid friendly I got freaked out when that dude's sister died and then he lived like 200 years as a cat mmmkay , such as death by hanging and hinted pedophilia Besides that, the acting is terrible, and it is not funny, even by 90s kid tv movie standards Overall, terrible film, not meant for children, and not even intentionally funny or scary,  Again, not hating if you like it, I just think most people that do, do so just because of thick nostalgia goggles<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hocus Pocus is a terrible movie, and not kid friendly\n","id":"dc7b47ee-0bb0-48fb-bb91-dbd90faa2344"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>In addition to Photons and Quantums the Federation would have access to: Seeking\/Enveloping Plasma Torpedoes First employed by the Romulans a Single one of these was capable of destroying most vessels. Two could overload the shields of and Destroy a starbase, including the entire Asteroid it was built on, reducing it to charred rubble. They travelled at a little over warp speed but degraded in power with range. Federation vessels captured examples.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would allow the Federation, with minor modifications, to adapt to the Rebels and find items that are more effective against them. The sheer variance would likely be more than the Rebellion could deal with.\n","id":"a8fa9bdd-aec6-429e-bcc4-50690153aeb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it okay to physically torture prisoners?<|ARGUMENT|>The threat of torture has long been seen as an encouragement for religious extremists - for Christian martyrs torture and death meant getting closer to God, and was therefore a completely counterproductive method of trying to stamp out the religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Torture reinforces resistance through strong emotional appeal and can be used to aid recruitment for a violent opposition cause.\n","id":"ed83eeb8-f455-4aaf-9c34-d2e4b9316416"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Watching animals die - which we already do, as we kill them en masse for food every day - shouldn't be a problem.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are other animal practices that are equally or more cruel than bullfighting but legal.\n","id":"992c6b15-6a30-4ebb-8cd2-79ce0d4b4202"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What makes life worth living, from an individual perspective?<|ARGUMENT|>Some people who have suffered horrific experiences constantly suffer from flashbacks during which they relive their trauma. The pain and stress which this causes can make many individuals feel that their life is not worth living.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To some, the belief that life is not worth the effort is an unavoidable truth stemming from negative experiences, such as past mental or physical trauma.\n","id":"035eecc8-5f9e-4b50-be10-6a3e42013524"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit thank you kingbane for your great post my view had been changed Now with states starting to legalize marijuana a lot of people are saying that people who got jailed for smuggling using marijuana should be release. I however disagree. Assuming that the law was a reasonable law that got removed because our society changed to such an extent that we no longer need the law the people who broke such a law should be jailed solely for the fact that they ignored the law. Examples of similar scenarios would be someone getting fined for driving 60 on a road who's speed limit was 30 but later the limit rose to 60. Or someone getting fined for j walking on a place that later added a crosswalk. In those cases I think that most people would agree with me that those people should not get their money returned. In order for my view to be changed I would have to change my belief that solely for being a criminal law breaker warrens you being punished<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People that get jailed for committing an illegal act that later became legal should not be released.\n","id":"8df33fd7-a59b-4bc0-ba06-7a5b79c8e292"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>While the Star Trek universe allow ships to move in interstellar space without limitations, ships in the Star Wars universe are forced to use carefully mapped hyperspace routes to travel any significant distances. This gives the Federation a great mobility advantage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fast as the Rebels may be, their methods of propulsion face clear limitations that hamper their utility in battle and that the Federation does not have to deal with.\n","id":"059b99b5-499c-40bf-9980-e93d56e85e3f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Should the war on drugs be eased up and should the punishment for possession be smaller? Of course. However, Marijuana slows brain function, dulls reflexes, can get you fired from jobs, can cause brain irregularities, etc. Medicinally it should be allowed, for people with seizures, PTSD, etc. But recreationally, feeling relaxed is not a good enough reason to hurt your brain. It contains carcinogens. It seems to me that stoners are using the same reasons that Tobacco smokers use, it is all feelings over facts. I understand that it woild create more revenue, but I care more about the health of people over the government's revenue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The health drawbacks are more than enough reason to outlaw Marijuana.\n","id":"6857ed8a-2e0d-4567-b0d6-8e2ef805564d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Chairman Sam Johnson R TX of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security introduced a bill very recently to substantially reform social security. This plan has received significant blowback from many liberals and leftists. I honestly do not understand why. The bill is very bipartisan and secures the solvency of the trust fund for future generations. Liberals who are skeptical of the reform bill, I would just like to point out the following provisions of the bill Provides a new minimum benefit for low earners based on years in the workforce Provides a 20 year benefit bump up Changes the initial benefit formula in such a way that increases benefits for low earners and significantly cuts them for middle and high earners Adopt Chained CPI and eliminate Cost of Living Adjustments for high income beneficiaries. All of these ideas are extremely progressive. Its surprising to me that liberals are actually defending transfer payments to very wealthy individuals. Overall, the most important reason I support the reform bill is because it closes 104 of the solvency gap over the next 75 years. This will cut the deficit in the long term and gauruntees entitlements for generations to come. This is particularly important to me as a young person who only recently started paying into social security.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Republican plan for social security reform is a good idea on net.\n","id":"c3c5dd43-925b-41b7-84b6-0da1f19d5b35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a straight man who identifies as a male feminist, so in all my relationships with women, I always am respectful and try to distance myself from misogynistic men who are insensitive towards women. However, in doing so, I realize that I must be careful not to come off as a white knight who only pretends to be into feminism to get laid. So what lifestyle would strike this balance? I would argue it is that of the hipster. This is perhaps a gross oversimplification, but among straight men in my age group 18 25 year olds , it seems that you can be one of three things a bro, a hipster or a neckbeard. I believe that the bro mentality is very misogynistic and treats women as nothing more than trophies to display or tally marks for girls one has had sex with. It fails to neglect that women are people too and want to be treated as such. On the other extreme of the spectrum, neckbeards put women on too high of pedestal to a degree that is misogynistic in and of itself. They are the poster children of nice guy syndrome and treat women as robots you can put nice coins into until sex comes out. Therefore, both bro and neckbeard attitudes towards women are problematic. Hipsters, on the other hand, appear to be somewhere in between these two ideologies. They are sensitive and considerate, but also enjoy partying, socializing and consensual casual sex. This is a mentality that I believe is most fair towards women because it respects them as human beings, but also does not put them on too high of a pedestal. As a straight guy interested in feminism, I want to hear what you guys have to say about this subject.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if you are a straight male, being a hipster is the best balance between \"bro\" and \"neckbeard\" ideologies.\n","id":"a0b189f9-1efa-40a1-a272-ee6299b36e15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The First Amendment appears to be so named because it is the first set of rights to go when the status quo is threatened. Protecting and strengthening them should be our highest national priority. These rights are the most necessary component of a free society, and our current Constitutional wording does not do enough to protect your rights in these areas. The phrasing Congress shall pass no law that currently prefaces all of them is not enough protection to guarantee that one can truly speak out against injustice. It is not enough to guarantee the freedom to investigate corruption and expose it, to expose those who would rather the truth stay hidden. It is not enough to prevent powerful people from forcing others to share their own set of beliefs and rituals as a barrier to participating in society. And it does NOTHING to prevent those who, at the drop of a hat, would gather to infringe on your rights to assemble, worship, speak and write whatever with whomever you would choose to do in a truly free society. These rights are sacred, and they should be held sacrosanct above all else. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The rights listed in the First Amendment should be sacrosanct and universal to all citizens regardless of social position or circumstances, and protected at all cost. The Constitution must be modified to allow active protections of your rights to assemble, speak, worship, and spread information.\n","id":"644ec9c4-df03-4a01-8904-4d1fa69332fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>One example of myths that feminism has criticised regarding sexual abuse is the \"sexual abuse is in men's nature\", which is false and it harms men. However, radical feminists see rape as arising from patriarchal constructions of gender and sexuality, so sexual abuse is treated as related to a social structure, and not to men's nature.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In fighting the patriarchy, feminism has shed light on a lot of myths regarding masculinity - about men's emotions and about sexual aggressions - that were harming men.\n","id":"6ff6bd22-37ab-4194-a0b7-f6658a9d642f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I can't imagine the horror of being separated from my family, and the devastation of losing my income while not working. Short scheduled visits with my family would seem like visitation that prisoners get. What if the other jurors I am forced to live with are complete jerks? I can't imagine the burden on my husband of having to care for our young children on his own. I can't believe sequestered juries are allowed to happen<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe sequestering a jury is as bad as false imprisonment and should not be allowed to happen.\n","id":"d9a83997-8889-40f2-a471-54b4731db1d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A couple of disclaimers This wouldn't work in places where there are a lot of traffic issues, like Manhattan. Also, I'm not advocating removing the existing crosswalks. Walking across the street at an intersection is very dangerous. One of the main issues is that if a driver is turning right at a stop sign or red light they are often staring left and not paying attention to pedestrian traffic. This can lead to a driver accelerating into a pedestrian while turning. This has actually happened to me. When crossing at an intersection you are placing yourself where vehicles congregate. Instead of crossing in the middle of the street when no cars are coming you are crossing where people often use the excuse of being at a stop light to text. At least when people are driving in the middle of the street they are generally looking straight ahead instead of staring left to look for oncoming cars. People run red lights and stop signs all the time because they are on their phone so the idea that at least the cars are stopped at an intersection is ludicrous. Crosswalks at intersections cause a false sense of security. I always see people on there cell phones walking across the street just assuming that a car will stop at the light. One way streets are especially dangerous because people sometimes don't even look both ways. In short, I don't see a problem with letting people have the option of crossing the street between intersections. Edit made the disclaimers bold since apparently people were skipping over it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Crosswalks should be in the middle of the street or jaywalking should be legal\n","id":"9d7f3eea-8902-4484-b43f-354d84025b97"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not saying nobody should, I just don't see why they care. Obviously most people do so I'm prepared to have my ass handed to me. Anyway, If some guy in an office hundreds or thousands of miles away from me that I will never meet face to face is watching everything I do, I don't see why I am supposed to care.The only exception to that is information I research about illegal things, like how to grow mushrooms and things like that, but I think the focus should be on legalizing the dominion over my body and mind, not focusing on making the government stop watching me looking up stuff like that. But from the government's perspective, if I have nothing illegal to hide and I'm just researching it for educational purposes, I don't see why I should care who's watching.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I wouldn't care if the government monitored every single thing I did,\n","id":"4b3ed6f7-4e37-44c6-a4ae-30d67de8aba9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A fundamental economic principle is to add value through work. When income is given for free without work this does not add value to the economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UBI reduces people's incentive to be productive and make money.\n","id":"418158e3-215f-41be-85a8-555437be7251"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Primaries in US elections<|ARGUMENT|>New Hampshire also does not remotely represent the vast diversity of this country's racial, cultural and ideological background, according to the Census Bureau. The national average for Caucasians in a state population is 73.9 percent, but New Hampshire is over 95 percent white. African Americans and Hispanics make up only a combined miniscule 3.4 percent of the state population, while the national average is 27.2 percent. It also has a much smaller percentage of foreign-born individuals and people below the poverty level, while our median household income is significantly higher than that of the rest of the country<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Iowa and New Hampshire are not socially or culturally representative of the U.S.\n","id":"36a538d3-a063-4195-9e54-9bf3ea74804f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>Moral considerations depend on the human subjective experience; it is difficult to transfer such concepts to a machine without drastically altering the character of them. Bendel, p. 20<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex robots are fundamentally immoral and incapable of autonomy; they have no say in their usage.\n","id":"a3354198-1419-4cb5-b8a6-99637edbdd03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>re-engage with Myanmar<|ARGUMENT|>The new civilian government in Myanmar is as illegitimate as the rule of the military junta which led to its creation. The military junta itself was guilty of overruling the democratic verdict in 1990 that gave power to the NLD. Under the new constitution, 25% of all seats in parliament and the most influential governmental posts are reserved for the military, and more than 75% majority is required for amending the constitution. Political prisoners including Aung San Suu Kyi were not permitted to participate in the elections. Further, the election process itself has been described as a sham, involving violence and intimidation of democratic activists. The current government is only a tool for the preceding military junta to consolidate its power and provide a safety valve for its leaders through apparently legitimate means. It attempts to use the false democratic process as a veil to resist international criticism. Widespread human rights violations, ethnic violence, and undemocratic curtailment of the freedom of speech have characterised the period of rule of the military junta. By engaging with it at the political or economic level, other countries provide it with a false sense of legitimacy. This is morally at odds with established standards in of human rights and international relations, especially where other illegitimate governments Syria, Iraq, and North Korea for instance across the world continually face censure and isolation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liberal democracies have a moral obligation to denounce illegitimate regimes\n","id":"1a38f30a-c4f6-4c97-90e2-e77bdc00b44d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humans prefer cats over dogs?<|ARGUMENT|>Only certain dog breeds are chosen to be service dogs based on their trainability and temperament.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Different breeds of both cats and dogs are known for their differing personality traits.\n","id":"120d7d5c-ee83-4781-8511-3eb46189963d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Due to their lower physical capabilities. Women are on average weaker and possess less endurance than their male counterparts. Front line infantry are required to carry very heavy loads over long periods of time, and then enter combat on a moment's notice. I read a passage that indicated that 85 of men in the military are capable of being a soldier on the front lines, while only 15 of women have the physical and mental capabilities tested. In addition up to 40 of female infantry became pregnant by the time they were called to duty wasting training resources. I will find a source for this ASAP, it was in an official MCAT question. Please change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe women do not belong on the front lines in the military.\n","id":"669ef330-3725-45c7-868e-2ac7829ae7af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Lab-Grown Meat a suitable replacement for Factory Farming?<|ARGUMENT|>Once the technology is perfected, it is potentially more sustainable and is going to require less resources to produce.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lab-Grown Meat is a suitable replacement for Factory Farming.\n","id":"c528abbf-851e-4930-befc-5dcc7e9d861f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm pretty damn liberal but with Trump's new policy on foreign born babies and their resulting citizenship got me thinking about this topic again. Overly Simplified position If you are in the country illegally, your offspring born in the United States should not receive citizenship. ~~This position would have largely decreased the Dreamer population before it started. ~~ Decentivizing travel to the United States illegally for purposes of giving birth and having your child born into citizenship may cut down on the rate of illegal immigration. Most illegal immigrants don't cross a border illegally, but rather overstay a Visa. citation needed Those that are immigrating here to escape persecution or poverty would not be initially impacted by this potential policy change as having a baby here was not the primary intent. However, if they are not here legally, birthright citizenship would not be allowed if they did have a baby. Those immigrants here with a green card or a valid visa of any kind, would still have citizenship rights conferred to the newborn, even if they themselves are not citizens. Potential problems What if a child is born to a US female citizen whose father is illegal? What if a child is born to an illegal female immigrant whose father is a US citizen? I wholeheartedly believe that we need immigration reform. I also acknowledge that we, as a nation, screwed this up a long time ago and there needs to be an amnesty program or a citizenship path for people who came illegally, have lived here for decades, and have established roots.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Persons born to someone residing in the United States illegally should not automatically become a citizen.\n","id":"1764115d-0e22-4abe-af3f-a49f3501c85f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>If autocrats control the aid, they can use it as leverage to control their population.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unconditional development aid strengthens non-democratic regimes, reducing the incentives for democratisation.\n","id":"b632c244-204b-40d0-bc45-a519aa3aeea2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>In the present day there are many different types of online games that offer a variety of different player experiences and different sets of rules dictating player behaviour. In a world with fully immersive virtual reality, the market of possible experiences would likely be at least as vast, if not significantly more so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a particular virtual reality allows for crimes to be performed, users have consented to that possibility.\n","id":"961aedd6-406b-4e72-8520-c11dcbf84f68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All the food at taco bell are just the same 4 ingredients presented in a different way. Tacos are impractical. If you drop a taco, you've lost out on your meal, unless you're willing to scoop up all the ingredients that have splattered everywhere, and reassemble the taco shell. If you drop a burrito, if it splits open, most of the ingredients are going to be left inside the tortilla. There is only one real way to correctly eat a taco. If you try to eat it from top down, you're going to get a good mouthful of salty, dry tortilla, and all the contents of the taco are going to be untouched. You can eat a burrito any way you want. You can throw the burrito in the air and catch it in your mouth. If you try that with a taco, the contents are going to fly everywhere. The burrito is better than the taco in all ways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Burritos are better than tacos.\n","id":"b96bf3a9-dc48-4c7b-beaf-cfee8e7770e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First, I should note that I pledged a fraternity and quit before being fully initiated, so to some extent, this post is based on my experiences with that. That said, the things I take issue with are, to my knowledge, universal to most social Greek organizations. Second, I should note that I am not going to be discussing issues of drinking or hazing in the stereotypical sense that people think of when talking about Greek life. I was technically hazed, but it really wasn\u2019t that big of a deal. I am primarily going to be discuss the mentality that formed in me and that I detected in the members of the fraternity I pledged and in my friends that joined other fraternities. I think that Greek life organizations, primarily through their use of secret rituals and other things like that, foster a cult mentality. In the one that I joined, I was enthralled at first by the whole brotherhood idea. After a while, the fraternity became one of the most important things in my life. After a while, my girlfriend talked to me about how I was changing for the worse as a person and was putting this absurd amount of value on the fraternity, and I became very defensive and angry about it. I later thought about this and realized that I had no rational way to defend myself. That was the first thing that made me question whether or not the fraternity was a good thing. That event kinda kicked me back to my senses, but I still thought the fraternity was a good thing and resolved not to let those changes come back. As I got more and more into the fraternity, I realized that many of the members had an in group out group mentality that I found disturbing. At one point, I was told by one of the new member educators that members of our fraternity come before other people. This bothered me and I argued against it and got weird looks from many of the fully initiated members in the room. Finally, I thought about it and realized that I didn\u2019t have a substantive relationship with any of the other members of the fraternity except a small number of people. I felt like our relationship with most of the people was entirely based on the fact that I was in pledgeship for the fraternity. The only thing that seemed to be entailed by that was that I knew the pledgeship ritual, something that seemed arbitrarily created only to serve as a secret, and other people didn\u2019t. Furthermore, I considered other people who quit the fraternity for various reasons. One student quit because he could no longer afford to pay. Others were dropped because they did not meet GPA requirements. The members of the fraternity were not friends with those students anymore. Many were angry with the student who could not afford to pay anymore. I\u2019ve never had a relationship that ended because a person stopped giving money to some entity or because a friend\u2019s grades dropped too low, and no one should have a relationship like that. It is essentially a granfalloon. This mentality doesn\u2019t seem prevalent just in the fraternity that I joined. I see and hear similar examples from members of other social fraternities and sororities to the extent that I think that I am justified in believing that they are similar. I should also note that looking into these kinds of recruiting tactics, I have found that they are the same as or similar to those used by cults. TL DR Greek life encourages in group out group mentality similar to cults and forms non substantive relationships based on largely meaningless things.  EDIT Formatting EDIT 2 I should note that I depledged before full initiation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that social Greek organizations at colleges inherently foster an unhealthy mindset.\n","id":"a97d58b9-f440-4def-86f0-622d72859658"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are K-12 teachers already paid enough in America?<|ARGUMENT|>The US military spending is extremely high. If it was reduced, the government could easily afford new investments in education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Money dedicated to other government expenditures can be redirected toward teacher pay and educational purposes.\n","id":"176df2f0-df62-405e-89b2-cd26f031aefe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Among the estimated $170 billion total income of the Catholic Church in the US, about 57 % roughly $98 billion is devoted to healthcare networks, 28% percent goes to colleges, while parish, \"diocesan day-to-day operations\" account only for 6%\", 2.7% is for \"national charitable activities and the remaining 6,3% is devoted to other concepts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donations to religious organizations should be counted since a portion of them end up going to charitable causes.\n","id":"1d73121f-a9ce-4128-a643-af1036ccd850"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Income inequality is not inherently bad because it provides good economic incentives. The promise that you can make it to the top if you work hard makes it more likely that people advance their economic position.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI would take money away from the rich, which would greatly decrease job creation and economic growth.\n","id":"219e5e67-8dbe-4547-83df-6c3a9d32c582"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A lot of subreddits like TIL, science, eli5 etc. Provide a platform for learning. I see little benefit to comments being near the top that provide incorrect information just because they're on topic. One could argue that you could just not vote for those at all, and only vote for those that are on topic and accurately informative, however users are given an incentive to not BS and remember to fact check by not wanting to be downvoted. Because of situations like these, it's my opinion that subreddits should be able to decide the purpose of the voting system individually in their own rules, vs a site wide definition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit's voting system works better as it's commonly used agree\/disagree in many cases than their original intended use relevance to discussion\n","id":"fa2b9249-a5c7-4248-b2db-086064263d7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we believe that God exists, even if we're not sure it's true?<|ARGUMENT|>Truly believing even we aren't sure is what faith is. God rewards faith, and a person who has faith gets the reward mentioned in Pascal's Wager even if they \"are not sure.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"One can truly believe even when they are not sure.\n","id":"1bda73ae-df9a-4ba1-a9c9-8e0005d38e4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alright, so this was inspired by the recent debate in about a Toronto man who was issued a letter denying him government subsidized housing at a Muslim specific residence because he wasn't Muslim, and how this discrimination was wrong. However, the housing unit in question was built by the Muslim community in question, and would not have existed without their financing. My view is that this is okay, because even if they're removing 166 Muslim families from the overall pool, this discriminating practice which costs only 15 of what a discrimination free housing unit would cost they're functionally adding 166 'spots' for non Muslims to the available pool of subsidized housing. That's the first query I'd like a response to. The second is far more direct, because I've gotten no response from any of the people I've put the query to, and I'm interested to see how people willing to challenge their own beliefs would take it. The Scenario is as such Hypothetical question You see two homeless people and want to buy them each a meal, but can only afford one. Someone else comes up and says I'm willing to buy that Muslim person a meal. I'm not willing to buy for the other homeless person, but I'll buy for the Muslim person. Both the homeless people are now being fed instead of one of them, if you agree to the offer. Do you turn it down based on principal and let one of the two go hungry? If you say no in this scenario either you're feeding someone you would have fed anyway and letting the Muslim person go hungry for no good reason but to feel better about how equal and egalitarian you are, or you're feeding the person who has another offer of food and letting the person with no other offers of food go hungry. Because you can't feed both. You have money for one, and someone is offering to feed the other, no matter how bigoted their offer may appear. Would you watch someone actually go hungry for theoretical moral superiority, or would you be willing to recognize that the greater good in this instance is making sure both people are fed?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Accepting discriminating charity is better for society than not accepting that charity at all.\n","id":"1ebcd712-e637-4f68-91b6-225f5027c7f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>A survey that questioned 2000 adults in the U.K. found that children lacked good role models. This is likely to be worse when children are forced into the foster care system where they don't even stay with one set of foster parents for long.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The instability and subsequent negative effects borne out of time spent in foster care are long-lasting and can shape the course of a person's life.\n","id":"41d38f43-b958-47c3-8381-017d88921cf9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think the japanese need to protect themselves a lot better against China. The chinese are becoming stronger both in their economy and military, and i'm sure they have plenty of generals just aching for payback from all the atrocities commited by the japanese in ww2. And the japanese won't even acknoledge the genocide in the same way germany does with the Holocaust, that's just rubbing salt in the wound. On the other side, i know Japan is being protected by american forces, but how much can they trust on the US? Would the US go to war with China over Japan? Or South Korea for that matter I think it won't happen, and in a tight spot, they would just choose to abandon those allies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Japan should be arming itself against a future war with China\n","id":"152980a8-79f2-4863-b655-4e9fe59f1806"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Right now we are feeling the effects of the first past the post with this election where no one likes any candidate. Sure, some actually do like Trump and Hilary, but the majority of people I've seen hate them both and are either not voting, voting for Gary Johnson, or voting for the one they hate the least. The Alternative Runoff Vote is a system I first heard proposed by CGP Gray and I think it might actually be implemented after this election. I think we are getting too polarized and we need to start looking for more moderate views between both sides. I think if it were implemented in this election, Gary might actually win over Trump and Hilary. I'm hoping that what will happen is that a large enough majority in the US will be fed up with the system after this vote because it's so polarized right now that people will ask for a better system, and given that this system produces better majority rule leaders, we'll see it be put up as a solution. I think it should be implemented and that it's the most likely outcome if we are going to change how things work. So, Change My View. Edit So u B0000000BS pointed out that there is a problem with the Participation Criterion that I had over looked. Which means my view has kinda been changed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alternative\/Runoff Voting should, and hopefully will, be implemented in the US.\n","id":"cb0a0376-930c-4147-8e33-1febd29bf642"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My thinking here is that the parent who makes the most money is best able to support the child, simply because they are best able to continue the lifestyle. If a parent must receive alimony, then they are less financially empowered and, in effect, the children become dependent on the alimony paying and child support paying parent in the end anyway. Furthermore, by establishing a certain income threshold, if the more financially empowered parent is the presumed custody taker, the need for child support could be eliminated in some instances. This leaves less opportunity for the parent who did not receive custody to find loopholes in order to pay as little as possible which ends up harming the children . Furthermore, in the system where alimony is based on the earning power of the more financially empowered party and not on the needs of the less, requiring a person to pay both alimony and child support seems to be something that should only occur in extenuating circumstances. Thus, the logical thing would be for the more financially powerful parent to pay alimony as usual , with presumed custody unless there is proof that that parent is worse suited to custody. If I sound elitist, I'm sorry, I really don't mean to Is there a part of this I'm missing?  Edit I should add that I mean this system over one which, consciously or otherwise, presumes custody for the mother.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unless there are extenuating circumstances e.g. one parent is proven to be incapable of keeping the children for whatever reason, in the event of divorce, a parent should be able to receive alimony or custody, but not both.\n","id":"58284dc7-6089-4d3c-997d-333d9cfb52a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT My title is slightly misleading, by any road i do NOT include places where cyclists are not currently allowed to go. it was more to show that I thought that it should apply to both rural and urban areas. So, for context, I think cyclists are treated very unfairly and hatefully for no reason. I've met people who think cyclists shouldn't be allowed on roads at all, people who make jokes about pushing cyclists off the road in cars, and even one person who laughed as she told me about the time she ran a cyclist off the road with her car . Cyclists get an awful rep, a certain types of person seeing them get irrationally mad. That leads to my main point, I think cyclists should be allowed to use the full lane on any road they're allowed to use i.e. not Motorways or Dual Carriageways, of course , for a variety of reasons If a cyclist is riding in the middle of your lane, punishment passing is much harder. A motorist can't push you into the curb with their proximity, and the vast majority of motorists don't really want to drive straight into bikes, no matter how much they hate them. Cyclists around parked cars need to ride 2 3 feet out, to avoid getting 'doored' i.e. getting a car door opened on your face, and losing your front teeth unintentionally. it also goes without saying that passing a cyclist with cars on both sides is sketchy as fuck most times, if not outright dangerous on some roads. Potholes are much more common on rural road edges, and the center road surface is usually in a much better state. Potholes can be expensive for cars, but deadly for cyclists on busy roads. Cycling is dangerous, but should be encouraged. it cuts emissions, reduces traffic in built up areas, improves general health and theoretically saves money. I understand that bikes slow people down on long rural stretches. I understand that some cyclists are obnoxious, and i understand that people misusing the right to a full lane could be annoying, BUT I feel that the physical safety needs of a cyclist should come before a motorist's need to get places quickly. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cyclists should be allowed to use a full lane on any road.\n","id":"fbf98a68-c78d-4ebe-8c35-a132b3fc4f08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>During and after the Nanking Massacre, the perpetrators stole Chinese property and valuables on a large scale. The profits from these stolen goods would likely have benefited Japan and by extension its future generations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While the current generation did not actually commit the crimes in question, many still reap the rewards of a world in which their ancestors and their descendants reaped advantages over the victims.\n","id":"76227fb5-1e22-458e-8fd9-58b9a24a3656"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The Book of Mormon refers to domesticated cattle and cows, which did not exist in the Americas during the book's purported time frame.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Book of Mormon refers to animals that did not exist in the Americas in the book's purported time frame.\n","id":"a0bc6f11-4ce3-40ad-b44c-76d4bd7e955b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's an idea I haven't properly thought through yet, but I've always thought it would be nicer for humans to just be one huge country where there's less individual governments which could then reduce and eventually eliminate war. Explain to me why this may be impossible?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the whole world should unite properly as a human race,\n","id":"8eee2ad0-83d9-4c4b-b325-7761d378117f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>There is not a clear consensus among feminists about the political solution to the Israel\/Palestine conflict, however, many feminist organisations consider the 'decolonization' of Palestine to be a feminist issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminists may not agree on the stance to take on issues other than gender equality.\n","id":"1c453c6d-3387-4e60-adb8-1d10a9152f5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should fracking be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Due to the chemicals involved in fracking, the workers are at risk of developing a number of diseases and conditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fracking is a very dangerous job, and poses a huge number of serious risks.\n","id":"c33fe6c8-195b-4a4a-a86b-4dcbcbbbfc8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mandatory military service<|ARGUMENT|>Armstrong Williams. \"Mandatory Military Service Would Benefit the U.S.\" News Max. June 19th, 2006: \"Would you like to see your son, daughter, niece, nephew or teenage neighbor become hard-working, respectful, disciplined, honorable and prepared for life? Would you like to see crime, teenage pregnancy and substance abuse rates decline? No, this is not an advertisement for a magic pill; this is an argument for mandatory military service.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mandatory military service will cure many of society's ills\n","id":"2883a058-03c1-47d9-9f1f-cc953dca6c62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this has been done to death but I would like my view changed without resorting to those Twain or Epicurus quotes or resorting to similar logic I am sick of those two in discussion about death and I feel they aren't particularly helpful . Death is terror in my view and we as humans just attach nice language to assuage an incredible mortal fear. It IS terrifying and everything is just talk to calm us. Is having been born worth this burden? Knowledge of mortality and the fact of it? I am scared all of the time I cannot accept death and believe those who profess they can are slightly dishonest.So please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am terrified of death.\n","id":"740a6bdb-f4af-492d-a361-9d575ed0802c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Facebook and Twitter Remove the Accounts of Terrorist Organisations?<|ARGUMENT|>Although Twitter and Facebook are used to spread awareness of groups like ISIS and to encourage new members to join, the actual recruitment process is initiated through a series of encrypted messaging apps<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Major recruitment channels of terrorists are outside of Facebook and Twitter. Restrictions on these sites will not have a major impact.\n","id":"57674427-0857-4f10-ae34-5e617af7b7af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>Its just same old intent to prejudice against unpopular messaging obscured by a different generation's use of euphemistic semantics to obscure the actual subterfuge against opposing ideas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social justice movements should abandon the use of no-platforming at universities\n","id":"e8ba6497-d9d2-4322-b8db-e2f2946c0007"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>Ignatius of Antioch wrote in 110 AD, \u201cLet no one do anything of concern to the Church without the bishop. Let that be considered a valid Eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop or by one whom he ordains i.e., a presbyter. Wherever the bishop appears, let the people be there; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church\u201d Letter to the Smyrneans 8:2 A.D. 110.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There have been people in history who described the doctrines of the Catholic Church well before the council of Nicaea.\n","id":"a93b0b78-ae66-44b8-aade-511e2ac8d02e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Donald Trump unintentional public servant. Here is my case for why Trump, real estate player, reality TV entertainer and contender for GOP nomination for Presidential candidate is a performing a public good. Trump the seriously unserious candidate. It is widely recognized that Trump is an entertainer with no real motivation to become President. Coupled with his long media history, it is understood that Trump will say anything to get attention. As a result, Trump can run unharmed by serious questions and can say things that no politician could say. However, he has clout from steady poll numbers. Crisis of the GOP The modern coalition was erected right before Reagan's election libertarians, business interests, social conservatives and generally defense hawks. Demographically, this meant working class and middle income white families, especially outside large urban contexts. Geographically, this meant the South, sparsely populated rural Western states Midwestern battlegrounds. In recent years, social conservatives have become more distanced from mainstream US opinion ex gay marriage and shrunk. The Democratic Party under Clinton also moved closer to the right on various economic defense policies. Hawkishness generally, has become less favored since 2003. Demographically, GOP constituents are shrinking AND do not fear government programs Medicaid, Food Stamps etc. Minority voters are still joining the Democratic Party in larger numbers. Finally, as GOP strongholds become more developed and urban in character, they become swing or purple states. Virginia, for example. For the GOP to change it would have to alienate some share of its current constituents and craft rhetoric policies that would attract growing populations. However, within the party, social conservatives are still quite strong, but at odds with business interests that need inclusive branding etc. Economic factors that are pushing the middle working class downward will cause these groups to want for more government help, though often this is muted by anti immigration or anti Federal government rhetoric. Keep the Gov't Off My Medicare. We need a fence This is also at odds with libertarian business interests. Trump is enabling the GOP to do this by being the clown who can say anything. His populism could force the GOP to at least recalibrate its messaging, if not its policies downstream. Obviously, a more competitive representative GOP is good for the US.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump is Doing Us A Public Service\n","id":"8cd4e02a-8b71-44fa-864f-5e41c057a9c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>The harm of cheating is in many ways the betrayal, or asymmetry, where one partner was doing something without the other's knowledge. If it turns out both partners were doing so that betrayal becomes more palatable as both people disregarded the 'rules' of the relationship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you cheat first, it makes you less vulnerable to being hurt if you get cheated-on later.\n","id":"b4a50e4d-71ff-464f-a416-4a996be90d66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Two people who are happily married might say that they are soulmates. This makes sense they are, in a nutshell, saying that they have deep emotions towards each other, that they do not have with someone else. However, the view which I would like changed is that there is no such thing as a person who is made for someone. That is, a person who is meant to be with someone. I recently read a quote that said, Love isn't about finding the perfect person. It's about finding an imperfect person, and seeing them as perfect . This quote is a very simple explanation of what I think One will not find someone who is made for them. Sure, they might be somewhat compatible, but what will make someone truly your soulmate is the experiences you share with them, learning about each other, and things that occur. So most simply put If you go looking for a soulmate in the sense that you're looking for someone who can turn into a soulmate, this makes sense. But if you have the idea that someone out there whom you've never met is meant to be with you and is your soulmate, this is unrealistic. This is my first post so I'm sorry if I was all over the place. Frankly, I'm fleshing out my thoughts as I write this, so sorry if it wasn't very clear. Ninja edit This article helped me flesh out my thoughts, if it helps.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no such thing as a soulmate that exists for a specific person\n","id":"383faf14-0c3c-40c2-a3e9-09b4f30b4980"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Firing an employee who uses non-PC speech is beneficial to members of society who are proponents of PC since they no longer have to tolerate non-PC speech at that location.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Firing one person is bad for them, not for everyone else in society.\n","id":"2a1ca4f4-5e1a-4522-b126-dac54b6cc825"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I didn't believe in any of the theories but then I saw the movie JFK. LHO went to the SU and then back to the US? He was able to shoot 3 rounds in 6 seconds? There was a lone gunman says LBJ's personally appointed Warren Commission. House Select Committee on Assassinations disagrees. He was shot after the shooting by a man who would die from cancer a short while later? That's convenient. We all know Kennedy wanted to defund the CIA. There are just so many things in this assassination that seems a bit too convenient to be coincidence. This is the 60s, the CIA was doing all kinds of shady stuff. I don't know. Something seems off<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Something's fishy about the JFK shooting.\n","id":"00b77ca8-d7ce-49c5-9c77-c8ff854504c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My concern is that migrant refugee trends are perpetuating failed states and essentially condemning individual counties to a permanent ghetto status. It would be far more beneficial for the countries concerned if the people stayed and fought to dispose of their autocratic leaders and worked towards developing more pluralistic and inclusive institutions. My example is the English Civil war which led to the glorious revolution. The inclusive institutions which arose from these two events are built on the blood and sacrifice an estimated 200,000 people died of those that fought. There was no option for the English to flee to Europe to escape from their predicament. If they wanted a fairer more inclusive society they had to fight for and many people sacrificed their lives for it. Today we have people fleeing from the Middle East to Western Countries to escape from autocratic rulers and extractive institutions. Any hope for change in the Middle East lies in those same people. Very often the ones who leave are the most able, most educated and most resourceful. Rather than stay and sacrifice themselves to make their country better, they have decided to take the easy way out and move to a better country.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Migrants\/Refugees should stay in their home countries and try to make their own countries better rather than fleeing to 'better' countries.\n","id":"bcbc874e-3886-4cd3-b076-bcc40efae5b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>The Book of Mormon has been criticized because of its use of the feminine Latin name Alma for a male prophet. However, an ancient Hebrew document dating back to the second Jewish revolt clearly uses the name Alma in referencing a man's name Yigael Yadin, Bar Kochba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Last Jewish Revolt Against Imperial Rome.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of Alma as a man's name in the Book, when it was known at the time as only a woman's name is good Hebrew and suggests the authenticity of the book's origin.\n","id":"3cee4b77-0ff3-4217-8fdf-2eff2a282676"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Net Neutrality - All Internet Traffic Should Be Treated Equally<|ARGUMENT|>Like Vince Cert, who maintained that the beauty of the internet lies in its ability to move the same amounts of information around at the same speed at all levels of the internet, many believe that the internet will cease to exist as we know it if a biased net takes over. This is what is known as the end-to-end principle. The end-to-end principle allows the internet to expand infinitely. Because all data travels at the same speed and is treated the same, all aspects of the internet are open to innovation equally. Let's say that, for some reason, digital banking was prioritized by either the government or cable companies. This would then draw the most attention from internet users, it would be the fastest activity on the internet, and if would be innovators wished to get involved in the field, they would flock to some aspect of digital banking. There is always a finite amount of broadband capability on planet Earth, and because digital banking was preferred, other facets of the internet would slow. Some believe that this would throw off the entire balance of the internet, and certain areas would become backwaters while others would draw the focus of everyone. The end-to-end principle has proven an excellent quality in several American systems and institutions. It is present, for example, in our slightly regulated and hopefully even-fielded economy. In their 2000 essay \"Open Access to Cable Modems,\" Mark Lemley and Laurence Lessig write: the principle of End-to-End is not unique to computer networks. It has important analogs in American constitutional law and in other legal contexts. Vis-A-vis the states, for example, the dormant commerce clause imposes an End-to-End design on the flow of commerce: No state is to exercise a control over the flow of commerce between states; and the kind of control that a state may exercise over commerce flowing into that state is severely limited. The \"network\" of interstate commerce is to be influenced at its ends-by the consumer and producer-and not by intermediary actors states who might interfere with this flow for their own political purposes. Vis-A-vis transportation generally, End-to-End is also how the principle of common carriage works. The carrier is not to exercise power to discriminate in the carriage. So long as the toll is paid, it must accept the carriage that it is offered. In both contexts, the aim is to keep the transportation layer of intercourse simple, so as to enable the multiplication of applications at the end. Stripping away net neutrality is about more than allowing the cable companies to get bigger and richer. It's about maintaining values and consistency in our world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Net neutrality is required to preserve the existing structure of the internet.\n","id":"68475242-9c6f-43cd-8c15-cd6583d69175"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Google Censor Their Search Results In Order To Operate In China?<|ARGUMENT|>The Chinese government forced internet providers within China to censor the #metoo movement. If Google operated within China, it would be complicit in allowing the Chinese government to hide evidence of sexism within Chinese society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Google's tools would be used to further the oppression of Chinese citizens.\n","id":"a1f53ff7-9837-4fd4-a7bb-f1dfed79ad15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2016, Black Americans' consumer spending topped $1 trillion Reparations would only enhance this, leading to an increase in spending power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"American society would benefit economically from giving reparations to descendants of slaves.\n","id":"9aee0e1e-dd46-4129-a193-8b40db96ad52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Violent imagery has always been a part of rap music, and I\u2019ve rarely had much of a problem listening to such lyrics. But, for some reason, I find myself having a hard time listening to the music of Kendrick Lamar without feeling deeply conflicted. Two lyrical references which seem to point to a single, specific incident stand out to me forgive me if the wording isn\u2019t exact \u201cIf I told you I killed a nigger at sixteen, would you believe me?\u201d \u201c when gangbanging made me kill a nigger blacker than me.\u201d Something about Kendrick\u2019s style deeply autobiographical, intelligent, and socially conscious really makes me feel like these references are far from your usual rap exaggerations, boasts, threats etc. Maybe because they stand out as unique among his lyrics he certainly doesn\u2019t seem to be adopting a persona a la Eminem , maybe because he\u2019s been presented as a moral, progressive voice in the genre. The bottom line is, if Kendrick did murder someone, or even acted as an accessory, he deserves to be in prison plain and simple, and the fact that he is willing to \u2018tease\u2019 for lack of a better word the listener with such a suggestion while at the same time keeping mum about actual details strikes me as morally questionable at best. And not in an \u2018artistic license\u2019 kind of way, in a \u2018take responsibility for your own actions\u2019 kind of way. I really do want to enjoy his music without feeling that knot in my stomach, so to speak. Change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I can\u2019t listen to Kendrick Lamar\u2019s music without feeling morally conflicted.\n","id":"46ea6065-e636-4ab0-8192-7f5ee83f0427"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start off with a clarifications I recognise gender dysphoria as something that can currently be relieved primarily by trying to change yourself to pass as the opposite sex. That is acceptable to me, as it is discomfort sth your body physically. I am not against gender dysphoric trans people. Okay, to get down to it, I essentially am a feminist who believes the new gender movement is more harmful than helpful. I believe the end goal of non binary gender labelling is to sort of break down gender roles. However, when you take up a non binary gender, you enforce those roles exist. Here\u2019s a direct comparison of the ideal of or end scenario for both cases In the non binary gender case, you had more and more people becoming non conformists as you make them join it. Now that gender roles associated with your sex are \u2018gone\u2019 you have a bunch of half meaningless labels. In my preferred world, you have a sex. Your gender is not a determinant, so we don\u2019t consider it. We don\u2019t consider things masculine or feminine. Your genitals have next to no bearing on your opportunities in and perception by society. The thing about gender is that there seems to be no real need for this identification. There are not many as far as I know, and not counting reproduction universal concepts of what a gender role constitutes. Indigenous tribes have women who \u2018act like men\u2019. There are matriarchal societies in Africa. There is not much precedent for gender roles other than being based on being distinct from male and female, but that is entirely based on a peak male stereotype and peak female stereotype. So what\u2019s the metric? Shouldn\u2019t that literally be just personality traits?  TL DR Non binary genders are unnecessary<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We don\u2019t need new gender labels.\n","id":"2109825a-2079-4f6a-9dad-128ba245ebd3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Laws are useless unless they can be properly enforced. Experience shows that prohibiting abortion doesn't diminish abortion cases. In fact, it can increase the numbers of abortions, given that the hesitation for women to confess their intent to commit an illegal activity makes it harder for people to show them better alternatives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When abortion is banned, many women who do not want a child seek out illegal abortions\n","id":"9eea8921-6963-44e1-89dc-e5bc0e0a675b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care, Debate on Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>Paul Krugman, Robin Wells. \"The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It\". New York Times Review of Books. Volume 53, Number 5 \u00b7 March 23, 2006 - \"The VA also invests heavily and systematically in preventive care, because unlike private health care providers it can expect to realize financial benefits from measures that keep its clients out of the hospital.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Government has a cost incentive to invest in preventive care\n","id":"c6b827c1-dd2f-4094-8956-1dacfed01496"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do all or most White Americans experience privilege?<|ARGUMENT|>The financial deck has been shuffled many times during crises like the depression, wars, recessions, and many individual circumstances since the claimed \u201cwealth via slavery\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The success or privilege of upper-class white Americans does not get extended to the rest of white America.\n","id":"598fc57c-e0c5-4414-add3-0d6adb81bf4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The facts as I understand them The Koch Brothers are two people who both have a net worth in the neighborhood of 30 billion each, which was made in the chemicals business. They've made headlines for spending a lot on political donations, and their political views are basically libertarian. There's a lot of criticism that they're some of the primary culprits of right wing corruption of politics. I've read most of this Why I don't buy it They're obviously some of the richest people on the planet. Basically everybody at that stratum is going to be spending a huge amount of money on philanthropic stuff. Politics is a component of that, but it's not like they've given billions to that cause. Plus, it's really just a component of a larger philosophy. From a recent article gt Freedom Partners\u2019 principal goal is to educate the public about the critical role played by free markets in achieving economic prosperity, societal well being, and personal happiness. So this could be good or bad. But the only thing of real substance that I know is getting funding from this network is the Learn Liberty organization. Their youtube channel is fantastic I don't consider myself politically libertarian, but almost all of what they say is very moderate and reasonable. This is just one example of things that get funded by the Koch spending, but there are a lot of university professors connected with them. Just to throw out a name, Duke's Michael Munger for instance. This kind of person does real honest to god research, and is a far cry from a political shill. Learn Liberty features these very people in their videos. Let's get to the real point isn't using your fortune to make the world a better place a good thing in general? The Koch brothers didn't have to get involved in promoting economic freedom issues. These guys are filthy rich, and I don't see how their advocacy has anything to do with self interest. It seems obvious that they fund this stuff because they believe in it. I admit, eradicating Malaria like Bill Gates seems more positive, but that's ridiculous. In both cases, these are people giving away their own fortune with the best interests of humanity as perceived by themselves in mind. If it were my money, I would have a lot of opinions about how it should be spent to do the most good, but how can I possibly think ill of someone who is making their own decisions about what they think is the best?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Koch Brothers seem like decent guys who want to make the world a better place.\n","id":"044fc047-7c46-41d7-8dd7-e55cfd153c4b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>The conservative justices on the court are more conservative than a typical member of the American electorate and even more conservative than a typical Republican.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ideological positions of the Supreme Court Justices are very different than those of the average American.\n","id":"07720218-7e03-4e61-90dc-ef6f1143fbde"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A theme or message often heard within US society is that it's better to adopt a rescue dog than to buy a dog. It's true that puppy mills are bad places for animals, and so they are excluded from this . But people don't just mean puppy mills, they mean you ought not to buy any dog from any dog breeder and instead should rescue a dog from the pound. I contend that it's not more immoral to buy a dog of a bred that you want, and be able to get a puppy in this bred, than it is to have your own kids rather than adopting a kid that's already out there alive and needing a family.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Choosing to buy an ethically-bred dog instead of adopting a rescue dog is no more immoral than choosing to have your own biological children instead of adopting.\n","id":"f9cd18dd-2490-4968-8979-c483ffb98c63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not asking anyone to convert me or prove god exists. This is purely about the existence of any defensible argument for the existence of God. I haven't found or heard any argument for god that doesn't fail in its premises, or by a subtle case of special pleading or circular logic. Because of this I have trouble believing people who were not theistic from childhood, but decided later in life that the existence of god makes logical sense, and I'd rather not suddenly feel that someone is a bit dumb because I don't know of any sensible argument that they could have run across to convince them. Edit Success, to u turole Tl dr of the argument To someone not versed in logic and theology, ontological and comsological arguments can be very convincing. They might not pick apart the arguments as heavily as I would, or it might not occur to them to pick apart the arguments. However, I should see this as a lack of theological or logical research training knowledge rather than seeing them as a little dumb. That is, ignorance is not stupidity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are no defensible arguments for the existence of a god.\n","id":"5c9ca88e-f4c4-4794-93e3-ca9f9fe70753"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Shoud the entire world embrace the ISO 8601 standard date-time format?<|ARGUMENT|>The standard is much more compatible with UTC time when a global perspective is needed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The entire world should embrace the ISO 8601 standard date-time format.\n","id":"b1cbda67-c563-4e6a-ba51-10ad39a6b5e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Background Before I am anything else, I am an artist. I create, and it has recently become clear to me that this is my primary purpose and identity as a person. I am also, however, a philosopher, specifically Pyrrhonist skeptic. My latest creative endeavor to capture human trial and downfall in scored stop motion wire figures has lead me down a research path which, for obvious reasons, has intertwined with my philosophy. Abstract In my personal experience, along with the bulk of my studies in social surveying, a conservative and a liberal North American left right spectrum will approach each other with a hostile predisposition, even without evaluating the other's specific views. From my knowledge of modern Psychology approaches, all barring Maslow's self actualization theories, perhaps assess this behaviorally, cognitively, and affectively as a majority tendency to group together for survival. I do not criticize this trait, but instead celebrate it and assert that on the most basic levels at least it should be extended to all living beings capable of faring well ill Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mills both express agreement here . Conclusion I personally idolize Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and I can't help but lament that we as a society, have dismissed his vision of unity. This is not specifically a post about racial issues, of course, but does it matter? We're people, and my view is simple yet heartfelt every human being should remember that despite our political faction, religion, nationality, etc, we will all soon be forced to choose to work together, or die divided. I understand that the sub is called Change My View, but I should like to clarify a hope for focus on improvement rather than disproving my view. Peace be with you all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Perceived Us vs. Them social climate is the biggest contemporary challenge to humanity\n","id":"7e6dbef1-44ff-48f7-a7ca-f64cccf9c082"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been thinking about this for a while. There are serious parallels between the Great Gatsby, and Hip Hop culture. Both portray their main characters as being born from poverty, and progressing to riches only through disregard of their morals, chasing money. Illmatic, a hiphop classic, is full of references to this part of hiphop culture. Is like a maze full of black rats trapped says Nas, in the famous NY state of mind. The next track, Life's a bitch goes further into this mentality Visualising the realism of life in actuality fuck who's the baddest a persons status depends on salary . Another classic hiphop song C.R.E.A.M. resigns to this fact as Gatsby does Cash rules everything around me. The racism aspect is also clear Face it Jerome get more time than Brandon, and at the airport they check all through my bags and tell me it's random but we stay winning This is also where the stereotypical hate for the police comes from. Nas, in a song about the crushing poverty where he grew up Memory Lane says No sign of the beast in the blue Chrysler, I guess that means peace . Even worse than the fellow black people trying to get out like Gatsby, are the police, trying to keep the Black rats in the trap. Judges hanging niggas, incorrect bails, for direct sales, my intellect prevails, from a hanging cross, with nails. The mentality of being born into a racist system, trying to keep you down, combined with the constant drumming into you what the American dream is, motivates people to do terrible things. But I think that Hiphop deserves more attention, and credit, for being a modern day retelling of the flawed American Dream, and Racist System, and what happens when they meet. He see it as another felony drug arrest, any day could be the day he picks the wrong thug to test, slug through the vest, shot in the street for pulling heat on a father whose baby gotta eat<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hiphop culture was born at the cross roads of racism, poverty, and the American Dream, and deserves more credit\n","id":"2e48f506-01e5-47b0-b1c5-5c48107c908a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit used accurate figures from website. 17,000 a year NOT 7,000 a month. UBI, or universal basic income is a system where citizens of a country receive a minimum payment per month, ideally enough to cover the basic cost of living. I've first heard of this concept from Kurzgesagt, and it seemed to be all sunshine and rainbows so naturally I research deeper. It turns put, Ontario was testing a UBI system on a small scale to see of it was feasible. I read into it, and I will be using their system of UBI as my argument. The system runs as follows. each citizen regardless of employment status or income is entitled to 17,000 a year. there are added payments for people that are handicapped I cant remember the exact figure but it was a couple thousand. couples co habitants are entitled to 24,000 per month instead of 17,000 each. you may opt out of the program at anytime. while participating in the program, 50 of income is taxed, with the intention of feeding the taxes back into the program. Why is this beneficial? UBI is meant to be an alternative to welfare. Currently, if you are in a disadvantaged place financially, you may apply for welfare where you will be given X amount a month for your living expenses. The problem is, once you earn a certain amount your welfare benifits may be taken away. However this means that people who are poor and actively working to better their situation may actually receive LESS of the work a job and are no longer eligible for Welfare. This creates an ensentive for the poor to be lazy, and not search for work. Contrast this with UBI, and the opposite happens. The same poor person will be given their UBI payment and can actively pursue work. Although they are facing a 50 tax rate, they still gain MORE from picking up a job. Once they have a job that pays more than the UBI benifits, they may opt out of the system where they will be taxed as much as sombody NOT in the program. This creates opportunity for the poorest in our society. The poor person in our scenario is no longer a leach on society, they are a contributor who puts wealth back into the economy. Or, the person could peruse higher education. Without the need to work, this person can take out loans to receive a degree or diploma in a field of their choice, creating a more skilled workforce. There will always be people who take advantage of this system. Low life no goods WILL spend their 17,000 on drugs, alcohol or other non benificial activities However this is a small portion of the population. Far more will use the program as intended and better their situation, which in turn will have an overall positive effect on the economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Universal Basic Income would improve the economy of the US or Canada if it was implemented.\n","id":"7ecc205c-a2a6-4104-abf8-3dd6a7ab8a5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be taught in schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Homeschooling allows for learning to be tailored to the individual strengths and weaknesses of the child. For example, if a child is really strong in one subject and struggling in another, lessons can be structured so the child receives the necessary support in the subject they are struggling with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homeschooling provides benefits that a child may not receive in the school system.\n","id":"b37c60ab-2b11-45ba-bf00-b3eed1de24d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think the people who work at Reddit deserve to actually turn a profit from this site. A huge amount of people visit this site daily, get immense enjoyment and information from it, and it has become a staple of the internet. I think it's only fair to reward those who keep it up and running, and the current monetization features simply don't do the job well enough. I believe Reddit should also add a subscription feature that will give people the feeling of an enhanced experience, but will not significantly change the content or quality of the site for everyone. Let's say this subscription costs 5 per month or 50 per year obviously, I'm just throwing numbers out there . If you pay, you have the ability to double upvote up to 3 links daily, and may double upvote any number of comments. While this may slightly alter which links are seen on the front page depending on how many and which sort of people subscribe , I do not believe it would negatively impact the experience of others. If anything, I think people who pay to support Reddit will most likely upvote links of higher quality. Similarly, giving comments increased upvotes will probably only increase the karma of those posts that would already rise to the top. I don't see how allowing people to further upvote the links comments they enjoy and remember, you don't have to upvote twice it can be at a user's discretion would bring any negative changes that would outweigh the money that Reddit would receive. Explain why my idea is bad<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit should implement a subscription option that allows users to upvote twice.\n","id":"ef7f255c-af5e-4c69-ae94-1fd84daf377c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all children should be taught to code in school?<|ARGUMENT|>In today's world, it would be more valuable for children to learn coding than foreign languages.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be good if coding replaced less valuable subjects on the curriculum.\n","id":"07323130-ac32-49eb-843c-2f9c5b8360f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There seems to be a widespread opinion, on both the right and on the left, that political discourse that is about racial groups or policies that are constructed around racial categories fundamentally undermine a project of social justice. The idea is that by talking about race, we are perpetuating racial division, and that if we ever want racial inequality to go away, we need to stop talking about race. Another formulation of this position is that racial politics or policy constructed around race is a form of identity politics, and that, as a form of identity politics, something to be opposed in favor of a more universalist discourse. I find this line of thought very unpersuasive. Simply put, race matters. It is a social construction, and, at the same time, is socially real. We need to talk about racial inequality and use racial categories in our policies if we want to address problems caused by racism. For example, if we want to fix racial inequality in education, we need to be able to talk about the racial factors that disadvantage many black communities in the United States we cannot just talk about economic inequality, we need to also talk about stereotype threat and racial bias, etc. Similarly, we cannot address mass incarceration of black men in America without talking about the racial dimension to the issue. Edit 06 19 2018, 7 18pm EST I've read through a lot of thoughtful responses here. Still, my view has not really been changed. Here are a few stuck points The idea that talking about race or policies around race make race more real than it already is. Any backlash effects are, I would argue, trivial compared to the ways that race already shapes social life. The idea that there is a single factor that is core to inequality, that, if we could just construct policy around this universal factor, everyone would come out equal. I do not think any such universal factor exists unless you get extremely amorphous, philosophical, and circular by pointing to a factor like power. That race is not, itself, a factor in determining unequal outcomes. I think if I could be dislodged from any of these points my view would change. But so far, I have not seen evidence that works for me. As a tip for commenters, I've really appreciated those who have cited scientific articles I tend to find those more compelling. Edit 2 9 39pm As a bit of a mid mortem on this conversation, I think a good take away of my changed view is that there are possible, extreme examples where a colorblind approach is preferable to a race attentive approach. However, overall, I remain firmly committed to the idea that colorblindness is not, in general, the preferable option. Instead, I continue to see that colorblindness or the myth of a post racial world function rhetorically in a way that is very fascinating these ideas can be used to suggest that it is anti racists who are the real racists This thread is an excellent specimen of this kind of rhetoric. I also think that there's an element of emotion that the idea of being called racist that isn't going fully acknowledged here. For some people, being called racist is the same as being condemned as a bad person. And I don't think that talking about race, or thinking about the way race operates in someones life, should be reduced to a question of am I racist, or am I colorblind? These things are, no pun intended, not so black and white. We all exist on a continuum to which our behavior is effected by the idea race. But we need to think about race in a frank, unmoralistic way if we are going to locate ourselves on that continuum.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Racial color blindness does not advance racial justice\n","id":"d65041ee-b51a-4b8c-8af7-06312fb27c99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do electronic devices help or hurt children's development?<|ARGUMENT|>Studies have shown that students have an easier time retaining information when they hand-write and use books versus when they use digital materials.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using devices in school can negatively affect children's grades.\n","id":"beb62ee2-8cc8-4e3c-bc8b-85a642793d7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Bicycles on roads are a hazard to everyone. They are smaller and harder to see while also being much much slower. There are no real safety features on a bike other than a helmet so any accident will likely seriously maim or kill the rider while causing the motorists serious legal issues. Most roads have sidewalks where a rare pedestrian can be found in LA it's hard to walk anywhere and bicyclists should stay on the sidewalk because a collision with a pedestrian will probably only result in a few cuts and bruises at most. If a road does not have a bike lane then bikes should not be allowed on .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe bicyclists should be allowed on roads without dedicated bike lanes.for safety reasons\n","id":"eec9d9dc-7e66-47f8-9e52-ed8935b38bad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>It was only in 2013 that asexuality was officially taken out of the DSM-5 as a mental disorder.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Identifying as gay transgender and asexual have all been considered mental illnesses.\n","id":"7c778e9f-f939-4265-81fc-12b301feaaeb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My statement isn't intended to argue with recorded facts i.e. Cattle release X amount of carbon dioxide etc. etc. I base it on the ability to produce the necessary plants to replace calories and nutrients for livestock. The worlds most productive climates and soils are located in regions that have a relatively short growing season. For example, where i live northern plains we have a wonderful climate and soil type for cereal grains, native pasture, and to a lesser extent row crops. Corn and Soybeans . It also happens to be very much unsuitable for large scale vegetable and fruit production. It is simply too dry, the growing season is too short, and what irrigation that we do have is stressed enough already. While i know we could all grow wheat and eat bread 3 times a day, it alone is not going to provide every part of a healthy diet. And while supporters of veganism often quote livestock as a huge drain on our ecological health, they fail to consider that large scale, intensive farming is even worse. Farming, and especially organic farming, requires huge amounts of tilling, water and wasted product. One only needs to look at the effect of areas that have replaced native prairie with fields to see the results. Livestock, and especially ruminants, are wonderful little factories that chew up the ocean of cellulose that is planted upon temperate zones and turn it into concentrated and delicious bits of nutrition for carnivores and omnivores everywhere. Without them, and their ability to convert these masses of stored energy, we would lose our single greatest source of easily attainable calories. Also, while studies attribute the livestock industries' contribution to global warming as anywhere from we should be concerned to HOLY SHIT WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE TOMORROW , i have yet to see one account for whatever living thing replaces these huge herds of livestock. Now buffalo bison , deer, antelope, elk, wooly mammoths etc. likely contributed less of these greenhouse gases than cattle, sheep and pigs do, we wouldn't be completely eliminating their portion of the biomass life has a way of taking hold wherever it is given the opportunity. And finally, even today most people who are dying from a poor food supply are malnourished, not starving from lack of calories. Our biggest issue today is logistics If africa was right out my back door we could feed them easily, but fresh food has a short shelf life and people with nothing to give can't afford luxuries like cans and refrigeration. Are we doing everything we possibly can to provide sustainable agriculture for millenia to come? absolutely not. Do western and industrialized nations eat too much meat? Almost certainly. But a world of 7 billion vegan humans will solve almost none of our problems and create many many more. I look forward to your input and thanks in advance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that global vegetarianism\/veganism is both economically impossible and ecologically irresponsible.\n","id":"57e23dd2-ce3d-4359-8f89-34e0cf15c469"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The theory of statutory rape says that even if sex is consensual, the consent doesn't count because the minor is unable to legally consent. If they do nonlegally consent, it is presumed that the consent happened because they were groomed or manipulated by their adult partner. That theory works great and everyone is on board when a 38 year old male teacher has consensual sex with his 14 year old female student. But what happens when a 14 year old male student follows his 38 year old female teacher home, sneaks into her house and has forcible sex with her? If we apply the same theory, shouldn't we say that the 38 year old female teacher is just as guilty of statutory rape? Shouldn't the assumption be that she manipulated and groomed the 14 year old male into having sex with her? And if we don't apply that theory in the 14 year old male 38 year old female scenario, then don't we provide a loophole for the 38 year old guy who is sleeping with the 14 year old girl? Can't they just say that the girl forced herself on him, just like in the opposite gender case, the story is that the 14 year old boy forced himself on the female teacher? I guess the bottom line is this and maybe this should be my view The laws as currently written and enforced continue to assume that men are typically the sexual aggressors and women are the sexually pursued. This creates inequality in the law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Current rape laws and theories on rape should make it impossible for a male under the age of consent to be convicted of rape.\n","id":"07db5b2b-d094-490f-9596-7111f1446c2d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>FTP First, let me acknowledge that Sharia Law is draconian and has no place on this Earth. Second, I also want to acknowledge that Sharia Law is associated with Islam as a religion, and is derived from Islamic texts. However, I do not believe that just because someone practices the Muslim religion, does not imply they believe in Sharia Law, or accept it as the law of the land. This should, therefore, destroy the argument that Islam is a religion of war, or that all people who practice Islam believe Sharia Law to be the law of the land. I challenge you to change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While Islam can be practiced as a religion of peace, Sharia Law does not go hand in hand with the religion itself.\n","id":"fef1c803-53b8-4d16-9d11-bdc16973c041"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't like geoblocking, specially because I don't live in the US. Despite speaking English fluently and being interested in all sorts of things, like TV shows, documentaries and movies, I am always trying to find ways to circumvent geoblocking, all because companies insist in being ridiculously selfish and anachronistic by denying content to those willing to consume it, all based on their country of residence. Two simple points for consideration 1 Geoblocking stems from outdated ideas of boundaries and exclusion. The Internet is meant to be an intersection of global interests. In time, the Internet became this gigantic force in our world. If people can't find something they need or want, they'll make it, or find another way to get what they desire. Which leads me to my second point 2 Geoblocking doesn't work. It is relatively easy to circumvent most restrictions. But being able to do it doesn't change the fact it's extremely inconvenient having to set up proxies and VPNs all the time for example. A VPN is a constant reminder that the company that makes that particular TV show or movies doesn't want you because you're in the wrong country . What got me thinking about all this was not being able to watch videos from the Late Show on my phone a few minutes ago. In order to bypass the geoblocking imposed by CBS I have to watch these videos on my computer and to be honest, it feels like a revenge. I'm not satisfied though, the simple fact I still need a VPN or proxy shows we're still not a true global community. We'll probably never be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Geoblocking content only shows how selfish and anachronistic companies can be\n","id":"55942036-a315-495e-a7e4-743535703e10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alright so many top colleges do this thing called legacy in their college admissions. Essentially the way it works is If you parents went to this college, you get a higher chance of getting in. In my opinion, this is just plain discrimination. Both of my parents went to college outside the United States, but that doesn't make me any less prepared for Harvard or Yale than someone else whose parents went there. Harvard accepts 40 of legacy applicants while only accepting 11 of applicants overall, which essentially means that if your parents went there, our chances of making it quadruple, which is completely unjust. College admissions should be based on who the person applying is not who their parents were. With all the talk about affirmative action, I find it shocking that no one is talking about this form of blatant discrimination.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Legacy\" in terms of college admissions is just nepotism.\n","id":"681e8631-be59-4d00-aa74-56c42393af95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think it's morally wrong to breed animals into existence and make them live a life in torture just so we can eat them, when we don't have to, but I don't think it's morally wrong to eat wild animals. Wild animals exist and suffer whether I kill them or not, and in many cases I think they would suffer more when they are not killed by humans. For example I think a moose would be better off getting shot as quickly and painlessly as possible, rather than being slowly eaten alive by a bear or dying from sickness. Im not sure I would apply the same logic to social animals though, because they would grieve the killed animal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's okay to kill wild animals\n","id":"b4be0dd4-a67f-4c0b-8c7b-6c6612b9087e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Society Normalise Men Wearing Dresses\/Skirts?<|ARGUMENT|>Traditions exist for a reason, and to topple them for something so small is ultimately quite ridiculous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would undo years of cultural and religious traditions that society should honour.\n","id":"5faefb89-77fd-40bd-bd55-47aa5974db84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Sometimes, economic or other circumstances make prostitution the best choice even though the individual doesn't desire to engage in it. It would be more legitimate for the government to try to change those circumstances instead of removing the option.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The sex industry is often a means of providing for oneself or a family when all other options have been exhausted.\n","id":"4f8b8d55-ddf1-49d4-894b-17bab80d257f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>Registration and monitoring would expose these people to public pillory, and some citizens would feel legitimated in judging, discriminating, or even using violence against pedophiles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being placed on a public sex offenders list leaves pedophiles at risk of harassment, violence, and discrimination.\n","id":"40144b42-8e61-4151-8e47-99747da411ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the finale of Game of Thrones provide a satisfying conclusion for the series?<|ARGUMENT|>Like the epilogue of a book, the final episode ended on a slower pace than the previous episodes, giving the viewer the chance to prepare for a conclusive ending.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The finale of Game of Thrones provide a satisfying conclusion for the series.\n","id":"1f5370fa-39b1-41b9-ac10-51cd7363a1e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm an avid gamer who is a bit older than the average, this really bothers me. While boobs never stop being awesome, whenever I see an over sexualized female character in any medium, but most commonly video games I just roll my eyes. I feel like whenever you see a female character with skimpy clothes, tits hanging out, that kind of thing, it's like they're just saying HEY HORNY AND OR UNDERSEXED TEENAGE BOYS, CHECK THIS OUT . There are a lot of things in society that we view as having an unjust stereotype attached to it. For video games, I feel like the stereotype of the horny undersexed young man is completely appropriate until this standard changes. One of my biggest disappointments in this regard was the reveal of Zero Suit Samus in Smash Bros. Yes, I know she was depicted as a pretty girl all throughout the Metroid series, but that doesn't mean she could have been depicted as strong as well as beautiful. She way she's depicted in Smash she's just a barbie doll with a gun. I want to mention that I'm not a feminist by any stretch, I'm just a mature adult who loves video games, but who is really bothered by some aspects of gaming culture. Oversexualized depictions of females in video games is one of them. I don't know if this is entirely appropriate for this subreddit, but I feel like maybe there are some of you who disagree and could help me understand why this is okay.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video games should have less sexualized depictions of female characters if the hobby is to stop being viewed as immature.\n","id":"52cf18b9-b434-4985-aae0-b1d60fc59f6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Hybrid vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>Hybrids may have good \"power\" and performance. Yet, this should not be seen as a significant advantage over such alternatives as electric and hydrogen vehicles and, it's debatable whether hybrids actually have superior performance to the main alternatives. If, for the sake of argument, we were to allow that hybrids have superior performance, the question is whether we should give this argument any weight? No. The moral priority at this time is to combat global warming, not uphold the showy, unecessary, and even more wasteful power\/performance of hybrid\/gasoline vehicles. Fighting global warming, not performance, is the clear moral priority in modern times.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Power\" of hybrids is senseless in the face of global warming.\n","id":"5cbd0f6d-0e72-4cbe-ba7f-b0004ac0fbe3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Downvotes are, far too often, used to suppress opinions that go against the general mindset of a sub's population. It is a fear of receiving a massive amount of downvotes and an attack on my karma that prevents me from expressing opinions that I would normally wish to bring to the conversation. In one such case, I was downvoted for my negative opinion on Tarantino's True Lies simply because r movies maintains a circlejerk about it. I'm not saying that my opinion is better than theirs, I just wish that someone would tell me why they disagree with me rather than bury me in a sea of troll comments and spam. In my experience, redditors tend to ignore the fact that, according to Reddiquette downvotes should be used on someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. While their implementation seems to stem from the noble cause of discouraging trolls, brigadiers, and spam bots, it now allows Reddit's so called hivemind to flourish and hijack discussions, especially so on the default subs. Should downvotes be abolished, I would propose that Redditors take the time to report the comments that they feel don't contribute to their conversation. We could instead allow a lack of upvotes dictate how unpopular a comment becomes in a thread rather than have the ability of people to see it be sabotaged by those that disagree with it. EDIT As of 42 minutes after submission, this post has been downvoted to 0 points. See what I mean? EDIT 2 I'm a dumbass that should've said True Romance instead of True Lies , thanks u wf187. EDIT 3 Oh look, 20 hours in and my post is back to 0 karma. This post contributes to the sub, doesn't it?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Downvotes are heavily abused as \"disagree buttons\", allow hiveminds to hijack conversations, and should be removed entirely across all subs.\n","id":"268da0c4-77a6-4e40-987b-449d180e36d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The median turnout for nationwide referendums in Europe has fallen from 71% in the early 1990s to 41% in the past years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If participation in a referendum is low its result can be seen as illegitimate.\n","id":"919404e6-7e4e-4ce1-98cb-f6cc8455083b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think fundamental religion should be respected and given a place in modern society. Its what people believe so why not let them believe what they want?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe fundamental religion has to be tolerated\n","id":"abf39fa2-d862-447b-af0f-c9348344be60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>Left wing populist movements are categorised as 'inclusionary' placing an emphasis on representing groups who have been left out of the political system. For example, in Latin America, populist leaders have focused on policies to help those from low socioeconomic groups p. 159.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fringe movements can give hope and a promise for change to disenfranchised demographics.\n","id":"d31a0ba3-77c7-4a85-8a9c-ce0be6fe04d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I really want us as a civilization to deal with the challenges of climate change and world poverty, and eventually spend ages exploring space and building cyborgs and shit like that. I don't think that'll happen unless we fix our political system. I\u2019ll put the TL DR first as I\u2019ve had a bottle of wine and have got a bit ranty listening to the news. TL DR random strangers on the internet would do a better job of figuring out what questions to ask politicians and political candidates and could even analyse and respond to their answers engaging them in debate creating a true public discourse. Basically a forum like reddit could be used to draw up general questions for a wide range of candidates or for specific public figures which are then publicly asked of them repeatedly by their constituents or potential voters forcing them to answer eventually. Their answers are then shared and the hive mind works out further questions it would like to ask politicians to get a clearer idea of what they think so we as citizens have a better idea of who to vote for. I don't think we influence our politicians enough as citizens, they pretty much ignore our needs and the wider needs of the world, and our journalists and mainstream media do a pretty terrible job on interviewing them and reporting on the debates around how we address our problems I have yet to hear anybody challenge the ideology of endless economic growth or even austerity when talking to any politician about economics . I get really mad when I hear a politician get an easy ride when interviewed, even so called hard hitters like Paxman or the shouty guy on the Today program I''m from UK as they do such a poor job. The interview doesn\u2019t go on long enough and there just isn\u2019t a follow up. When someone refuses or dodges a question, they just have to do so for 20 mins or so and they\u2019re fine, they won\u2019t be asked again or under any obligation to answer later on. If they say something is true or not true or if there is a question or statement about what the reality of a situation is the debate doesn\u2019t go on for long enough for the journo to go and check this and then pick the conversation up again, either calling out the untruths or pointing confirming that a statement is valid. I think we as communities and campaign groups should draw up the questions we want individual politicians and candidates in an election to answer, and how, and ask these questions of them publicly and repeatedly until they answer and then try to engage them in further debate. We should share these lobbying attempts with the press, hoping that they will amplify our voices and finally start to help us have a genuine debate about the type of society we want to live in. There are only a few questions that matter to me when it comes to weather I vote for someone locally or nationally, the local stuff will be incredibly tedious and boring for anybody not in my city, but I\u2019ll give you an example of the national subjects I want to see candidates in the general election next year grilled on. Do you think climate change is taking place? If so why and how do we address this issue and if not why not? Will you re nationalise the railways? How did your arrive at the position you currently hold on the subject. How do you administer health care in the UK? Do you believe the private sector should play any role in the NHS, that kind of jazz. What are your economic objectives? Do you believe in reducing income inequality? Increasing economic growth? What are your ideas on taxation? Do you think a reverse income tax would be a good idea? What things do you believe most strongly, which opinions do you have which you feel are most likely to be unchanged in the future. For example will you always oppose nuke power because of the risk of nuke war? Will you always oppose gay marriage or abortion? What are the things you are most doubtful about? Are there any policy areas where you feel your mind could easily be changed either way? For example do you feel that your current view on decriminalising drugs could certainly be changed if you saw proof of their harm lack of harm easily on that basis? Are you in two minds over the badger cull and prepared to oppose support it based on the results of upcoming trial runs? Bah I\u2019ve rambled. I\u2019m basically arguing that we\u2019d do a much better job as a collective at interviewing and politician or candidate than a journalist over a longer period of time by publicly trying to debate politicians. Similarly we\u2019d have done a much better job grilling the UKIP guy and Clegg over Europe than they did to each other with a drawn out ama, taking place once a week for several weeks where each party has a chance to go and fact check in the intervening time. I\u2019d really like to reverse this kind of situation where politicians are asked the same tough questions people want answered which aren\u2019t filtered by gatekeepers in the mainstream media again and again until they break and finally have to engage with us, the public. I want to hear IDS grilled on the suicides brought about by his welfare reform, Labour politicians to come out with definitive policy ideas and red lines they wouldn\u2019t cross in terms of austerity, Lib Dems what bits of their manifesto they wouldn\u2019t abandon in a coalition, UKIP if they still deny climate change, Greens how on earth they\u2019d keep the lights on and if they are dogmatically opposed to nuke power or if there are tests nuclear could pass which would allow it to be part of the energy system still? Instead I have to put up with the shouty guy on the Today program running out of time why on earth doesn\u2019t he go \u201cLISTEN MATE ANSWER THE FUCKING QUETSION I JUST ASKED, I\u2019LL EMAIL IT TO YOU AND WE\u2019LL READ OUT YOUR RESPONSE NEXT WEEK BECAUSE YOU DON\u2019T SEEM TO HEAR THE WORDS I\u2019M SAYING NOW\u201d and then next week go \u201cAND ED BALLS STILL HASN\u2019T SAID IF LABOUR WILL RAISE TAXES IF THEY ARE ELECTED NEXT YEAR, I\u2019VE EMAILED HIM AGAIN\u201d or \u201cED BALLS SENT ME A DETAILED EXPLAINATION OF LABOURS BUDGET IDEAS NEXT YEAR OUTLINING THE CIRCUMSTANCES WHERE TAXES WOULD BE RAISED OR NOT\u201d newspaper interviews about what politicians favourite colours are and David Cameron on desert island disks choosing his fav records when we should be asking WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THE IN OUT EURO REFERENDUM YOU PROMISED THATS WHY WE VOTED FOR YOU no don\u2019t go on about the Smiths NO NO NO DAVID ANSWER THE BLOODY QUESTION. Anyhow rant over gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The hive mind of reddit or similar could develop a much better way to interview \/ lobby political figures that currently undertaken by journalists in the mainstream media.\n","id":"2e5f83e7-baad-4204-947e-6cb4f17e2fd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religions Receive Public Funding?<|ARGUMENT|>\"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian, I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.\" -Adolf Hitler<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Adolf Hitler often described himself and his politics as Christian.\n","id":"6f082e2d-2c49-4e72-b45c-a1ea78e934ed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Perhaps it is because I have a liberal arts background. A specific focus on literature. I cannot abide people who can't openly talk about books television movies games without absolutely losing their shit and acting like you're a jerk because you told them a piece of information they didn't come across from exploring the piece of art themselves. It seems like there are spoiler tags in every book television movies games subreddit available. Interestingly enough, there aren't spoiler tags in r music. I guess finding out the lyrics sheet music doesn't ruin it for people listening to music. Spoiler, dudes this song is in G major I felt at first that it must be some aspect of not understanding storytelling, character development, or perhaps writing in general. Things that really make a piece of artwork shine other than simply the plot. Plots are boring. Plots are insipid. They can be explained in simple terms very quickly, and told in different ways can seem new and fresh. Yet, basic plots are more often than not quite similar in many respects. The real meat of any piece comes in fleshing out characters, setting, mood, theme. These more complex ideas take a lot more thought and often re viewing pieces in question. So, one almost has to re read re watch re play to be able to do things such as take notes, consider meanings, and it would be really hard to do such things if one is too busy being pissed off that they already knows what happens to so and so. However, I also know many people who are not at all bothered by spoilers who absolutely stink at reading, understanding character development, or any such thought provoking aspect of literature. They can know the determined future and not be upset about it. They can be just as eager to see it play out as they were before, sometimes even moreso So, where does this leave me? I don't know, at once I think its roots are in lack of depth of understanding of literature, but I think there is evidence that perhaps it is a deeper lack of understanding of human relationships and a shallow focus on events and their importance. Change my view, Reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people who complain about \"spoilers\" all the time are shallow and incapable of understanding deeper human relationships through storytelling.\n","id":"51b4d3cc-6a3f-476f-8227-344497bed332"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should ISIS fighters be allowed to return home?<|ARGUMENT|>Inasmuch as the US is \u201cat war\u201d with ISIS, joining ISIS would be considered an act of treason under the US code of law. Whether or not we are formally at war with ISIS is up for debate but stripping a person of all constitutional protections seems an apt punishment for the crime committed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who have committed crimes as part of a terrorist organisation such as ISIS have chosen to forfeit their rights as citizens who enjoy protection by their state of origin.\n","id":"ac3fa489-0bc3-4414-82e7-35a8bc71bc79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Have Opt-Out Organ Donation?<|ARGUMENT|>Over 17,000 responses were received by the UK government when determining whether or not to introduce an opt-out system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is high support amongst civilians for opt-out organ donation schemes.\n","id":"ebfd6053-4b12-42d1-bf01-28bd9abb724a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The US should adopt a better voting system for single-winner elections<|ARGUMENT|>Approval voting is more expressive than FPTP because there are more possible permutations of ballots.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Approval voting. Vote for one or more. Described here: en.wikipedia.org\n","id":"d23b35e2-9776-4b7e-b25e-0007932e7d97"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After the attack, it seems like the prevailing opinion is that this was some kind of attack targeting gay people. The most common response has been to put up rainbow flags everywhere. Given what we've learned about the terrorist, this does not make sense. First, there is really no reliable evidence that the terrorist was homophobic, or that homophobia was the motivation for the attack. In fact, the evidence has pointed in the exact opposite direction, that the attacker himself was a homosexual. There is also very little evidence that he picked the location of the attack because gay people were there. He evidently spent weeks scouting out several locations, including Disney World. He settled on the nightclub because there were a lot of people there in a confined space late at night, and because he was familiar with the location. This was a well planned out terrorist attack that was targeting American citizens. Treating it like it was just some guy that disliked gay people is dangerously misinterpreting the situation. I'll concede that there is a large crossover between radical islamic terrorists and homophobes, but killing homosexuals was not the motivation for the attack. The motivation for the attack was to kill Americans.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Orlando attack was a terrorist attack targeting America, not a hate crime targeting gay people\n","id":"4a4fd756-4c19-4810-b7a5-b71ae9947910"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>gt i really cannot understand why the incident at benghazi has become such a political fixation gt it was a military error gt it should have the same political significance as losing a single battle in a war gt i.e. almost nothing gt we\u2019re sitting here in a country with an astronomical gun violence problem i don\u2019t care what your position on gun rights is, if you deny that there\u2019s a statistically astronomical problem compared to the rest of the world you\u2019re wrong , systematic murder of citizens for their race, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and an economic system that continues to actively redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich gt and you\u2019re making a political scandal out of a military error ? gt that is downright offensive<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think Benghazi was all that big a deal.\n","id":"83900354-9523-4b9c-8210-4038a1888b98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>Regulations put in place through a socialist economy can prevent businesses from abusing the environment, loopholes in the system, and its consumers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A more socialist economy aims to establish regulations upon businesses, thus removing the possibility of a monopoly\n","id":"32856bd1-b5e3-46cc-92eb-eaf2bafa7841"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Drug Trial Participants Be Chosen By Lottery?<|ARGUMENT|>As many people are in positions vital to the public interest, for example teachers and police officers, a great number of people might be excluded if exceptions are made<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given the large sample size requirement some trials have, allowing exceptions would make it very hard to find a sufficient pool of participants.\n","id":"539367b0-d1ae-4ef7-9fd6-7bb2ac43c1dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are a number of views on how to show respect to non binary ie, any gender outside of male and female . I understand why assuming a person\u2019s pronouns could be harmful, and I certainly want to show respect for everyone. However, I\u2019m not convinced that the impetus should be on society as a whole to solve the issue by for example asking each and every person for pronouns or making it a social norm to always introduce your pronouns with your name. For the purposes of this post, I\u2019m treating the binary gender framework as a useful system because it works for most people So, the view A person who uses uncommon pronouns such as they or ze or pronouns that don\u2019t match what people would assume the person appears to be a girl but uses he , the impetus should be on that person to inform others about it, whether as a part of an introduction Hi, I\u2019m Chuckles and I use he or a polite correction I actually go by he . Reasoning There\u2019s a lot of smearing of \u201cassuming gender,\u201d and though I agree it isn\u2019t perfect, it does work the vast majority of the time. The number of people who are misgendered as a result of it is a very small minority of the population. This isn\u2019t a moral judgement, but a fact. Assumptions are normal and logical, though not perfect. Extrapolating a person\u2019s gender and pronouns off of gender expression is once again usually accurate, and any misgendering due to it is an honest mistake. Something doesn\u2019t have to work 100 of the time to be useful\u2014radiation therapy, for example, doesn\u2019t work in all cases, even for the same type of cancer, but is still considered an effective treatment for cancer. There\u2019s a difference between mistakes of ignorance and mistakes of malice. If you use the wrong pronoun by accident, it\u2019s rude, but you didn\u2019t know any better. If you use the wrong pronoun on purpose, after you were told or corrected, that\u2019s not ok and is where the real problem is at. Because assuming works most of the time, it\u2019s unnecessary and tedious to ask each and every person for pronouns. If you\u2019re unsure, then by all means ask. If you\u2019re in a situation where you know you should ask everyone pronouns, then do it. If it\u2019s a space that requires you to ask, respect that. But, in everyday contexts, it\u2019s not necessary. If someone asks or corrects you to use a certain pronoun, then do it. Third person pronouns rarely come up in casual conversation anyway. Society already treats another group of people in a similar way those with allergies. It\u2019s up to the person with allergies to let the relevant people know. Yes, sometimes people ask, but it\u2019s ultimately the affected person\u2019s responsibility to let others know that peanuts are a no go around them. Those with allergies are a small group, so while it isn\u2019t equal that this burden falls on them, it\u2019s easier for them to speak up rather than force every person to ask each other about what things are ok and not ok at every meal. Once again, there\u2019s nothing wrong with having an allergy\u2014but if you want others to be aware of it, you have to tell them. In an ideal world, people would automatically know, but we live in an imperfect, information limited, assuming world, so the easiest thing to do is just to politely speak up if it\u2019s important to you. Gender is important, so if a particular pronoun is very important to your identity, it makes sense that you should need to inform people. Once again, it\u2019s not necessarily equal that you have to do this, but it isn\u2019t society\u2019s responsibility to shoulder this burden. The fairest and most practical thing to do is to be cool with other people\u2019s identities and respect them once they\u2019re brought to our attention There it is  Ok, thank you for the responses, everyone Two questions that I think are relevant Is it possible to make a case for sometimes asking pronouns? Is there middle ground between always ask and don\u2019t ask? If asking pronouns is meant to signal that it\u2019s a safe environment, what are some other ways to promote a safe environment for people to share pronouns? I think we\u2019re good here Although I don\u2019t think my view has necessarily been changed, I think my perspective on the issue has changed. Some of the things I assumed to be true weren\u2019t, and I got some good information to consider when moving forward. Thanks all<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a person uses uncommon or \u201cunapparent\u201d pronouns, it is the person\u2019s responsibility to inform or correct others\n","id":"d582f266-cf95-440f-ad9c-3ea0a6499e1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Their Children Should Be Fined If The Child Gets A Vaccine-Preventable Illness<|ARGUMENT|>The expression of government disapproval serves as a signalling effect to parents about what is and isn't responsible parenting, regardless of whether parents have the right to carry out irresponsible behaviour or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if there is not a significant uptick in the vaccination rate, there is value in the government expressing disapproval at parents who put their kids in danger.\n","id":"1915646e-f467-49de-a4c2-54f638a0e5ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This  is directly related to the NC bathroom bill When talking about this with my friends and family, there seems to be confusion about what a transgendered person trans is and what the NC bathroom bill does. There have been reports of people taking advantage of anti discriminatory laws such as this to sexually assault people. These cases are usually what is cited in favor of the NC bathroom bill. The argument is that saying you are trans does not make you trans. This is why I believe a strict legal definition would be required. For example, if you are on HRT you would be considered trans and allowed to use the bathroom of your gender identity. I believe this would clear up a lot of issues. Thanks edit I would like to add into this the topic of gendered bathrooms, such as at a YMCA. Also it seems that a lot of responses fall in line with this is a non issue . I might see this as more of an issue because I live in a conservative part of America. edit 2 My view has been more or less changed. I was reminded that HB2 the NC bathroom bill wants to change something that has already been around with no hassle. Trans people poop in public bathrooms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A strict legal definition of \"transgender\" persons is needed.\n","id":"536ae8e5-816a-4ca7-9c49-b3c6efd11daa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every time I hear about Windows 10 on Reddit, it is ALWAYS in a negative tone. No matter how minor the issue is, there is people complaining about it. With a little research, it is generally found that this issue exists in Windows 7 8.1 as well, it's just a minor thing that isn't an issue. Whenever I hear about people complaining about the auto update, they always complain on the principle of it however, I feel as though if everyone's on the same version of an operating system, it is a lot easier to push patches to fix critical 0 day issues. Reddit, what is so bad about Windows 10?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Windows 10 was good for the vast majority of people.\n","id":"0d4c4906-3261-451e-8102-c814b8d3d984"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>The degree of punishment a player receives is often lighter if they are considered key to their team's success.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Punishments for domestic violence are handed out poorly and inequitably by leagues under status quo.\n","id":"dad9b01c-e2bf-4634-a9be-e6c61a56d568"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Real Estate brokers really necessary?<|ARGUMENT|>Having an experienced salesperson, who is directly motivated to sell at the highest possible price Due to the commission they earn can prove as an advantage to negotiate a better price for the seller.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you are looking to gain more money from the sale of property, brokers are the best option to achieve so.\n","id":"a8e9033e-e446-4a3f-89d4-61c91a9c2b90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>\u2022 Owned at least two steamships: the Maid of Iowa and the Nauvoo Joseph Smith owed a debt on the latter at the time of his death that was settled for over $5,000 over $140,000 in 2010 dollars.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith actually died with a lot of assets, power and over 30 wives. I would say he did well with this con.\n","id":"9ce461b1-ba4d-44d3-b7e7-9c1121c6fcd2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>During the battle of Hogwarts, Narcissa Malfoy risked lying to Lord Voldemort in front of the Death Eaters about Harry's death when she found out from Harry that Draco was alive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While Arthur Weasley and Lucius Malfoy appear to love their children, it is their wives who display the most willingness to risk their own safety for that of their children.\n","id":"26d7358c-eed5-4fea-ab88-2eef9e23abe2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Remember rainbow parties about ten years ago? That thing everyone was freaking out about that probably never actually happened? It seems to me like the whole knockout game fetish the media currently seems to have smacks of the same sort of outrage poorly sourced bullshit journalism. The only difference is that it was slut shaming in 2003 when rainbow parties were in vogue, but now the panic seems to have taken on a lot more sort of weird racial connotations. I think that the media's reportage more or less trying to create a story where in reality where there was none will actually inspire people to participate in it. A la I heard people were doing it on the news, so me and my friends decided to knock out someone. Here's a link to the part of the wikipedia page that sort of blows the entire theory to smithereens. Link<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Knockout Game\" phenomenon is nothing more than a moral panic resulting from poor journalism, and will likely result in copycats attempting to replicate a fictitious narrative\n","id":"0246787e-1021-45a3-9b99-6dbd431d4b73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A topic that I've had fun discussing is to imagine what could be done with a superpower. With so many choices and so many implications for each power, this little game can spark long conversations on how each power would affect our daily lives. From all of these discussions, I've come away with the view that one power is better than all others by the most metrics a power that I like to call Rewind . Disclaimer If you've never found yourself wondering what your life could be like with superpowers and have no interest in starting, then this topic is definitely not for you. The topic is one massive hypothetical so that better be your thing P TL DR Because damn I wrote way too much to ask you to read it all My view is that rewinding time is better than any other single superpower by many desiderata for superpowers. The rest of this OP goes over a how I define the power, b examples of how to C my V, and c my reasons for finding this power to be the best. That's all there if anyone is interested in the details of my view but I'm happy to debate solely on the summarized argument that No single power is more useful , fun , self protective , and enriching , all at once, than the power to rewind time whenever you want at whatever rate you want. With that, I only ask that people read the clarification before suggesting powers that are better than Rewind because I'm posting this out of love for this topic and out of the interest in seeing how some single, unexaggerated power is better. To qualify my view obviously there are complex superpowers better than Rewind e.g. omnipotence, control over space time and there are probably superpowers on an exaggerated scale better than Rewind e.g. unrestricted telekinesis, unrestricted super speed but in comparison to other simple single function powers e.g. superstrength, superspeed, teleportation, shapeshifting, telekinesis, mind control I can't think of any that is better by most metrics than Rewind without massively increasing its scale. So while an example of a complex or exaggerated power that's better than Rewind might be interesting, I'm especially interested in comparing with the powers that people usually talk about when this topic of imagining life with superpowers arises or with more creative single function powers and I hope to find that I'm wrong on that mark Definition Temporal Rewind is the power to reverse the passage of time for everything except yourself e.g. the power of the main character in the popular game Braid In other words, time goes backward but you don't forget anything once you stop rewinding time, you find yourself wherever you were at the time of arrival and in whatever physical state age, weight, health, etc. you were at that time, except your memories self are somehow in your brain. The rewinding can be stopped and started at will, meaning you view everything happening from your perspective while time rewinds and can decide when to stop. The duration of time rewinded and possible recharge time is how this power scales like longer distance or refractory period for teleports, strength for telekinesis, etc. . Scaling has proven to be an interesting problem for comparing powers i.e. at what scale is each power in any comparison since every power has a practically unlimited range of scales for this topic, I'll tend to assume that you can rewind as far as the time when you got the power and there is no refractory period until the next rewind . I'm most interested in a comparison with that scale of the power. However, I'm also interested in comparing the power at weaker scales so I don't intend to ask more than that that the scales for this power and the scale for the suggestion of a better power are considered fair by everyone involve this topic is for fun after all . Some of these features are required secondary powers , much as pushing out all the air or liquid at arrival is a secondary feature of teleportation or the target's brain interpreting your thoughts is a secondary feature of mind control in this case, the secondary features are that your memories carry over implanting into your earlier brain and body and you can see things as time rewinds basically, if it's not even a power without something, then that thing is a required secondary power . Similarly, the fine tuning of the rewind rate is on par with the fine tuning of speed for flight or of intensity for heat vision, so I expect none of those features will be contentious. Similar but distinct powers to Rewind are the time turner in the Harry Potter series of books which doesn't rewind your physical state or put you where you were at the earlier time , the time traveling in the movie About Time which doesn't put you where you were at the earlier time and happens in jumps rather than continuously , the time travelling in the movie Groundhog Day which is involuntary and happens in jumps and the reset feature in a video game which only goes back to specific checkpoints and happens in jumps . These are just a few examples of time travel powers that are worse than Rewind although the reset feature isn't really a power, just an interesting comparison . As much as I find the metaphysical and ethical features of this power fascinating, for this topic I assume that it magically preserves whatever you consider as you , that it does not create alternate timelines where time didn't rewind, and that repeating horrible events over and over again by rewinding is no worse than those events happening once among other possible implications I'd love to discuss but won't here . C ing My V Before giving the metrics I've used to evaluate superpowers looking at what would be desirable and how Rewind fulfills them, here are three approaches among many others that I expect will change part of my view Give a metric that I don't mention and show that Rewind fails to satisfy that metric especially if some other superpower satisfies it in spades . Point out how some superpower beats Rewind by most of my metrics. Point out how Rewind actually fails to satisfy some of my metrics. Desiderata of Temporal Rewind 1. Solving problems in daily life Every mistake you could ever make with few exceptions can be solved with Rewind. You could undo hurting someone embarrassing yourself failing a test failing to study for a test forgetting something at home forgetting to save your work on a computer losing something at a restaurant show etc. breaking something getting injured even mortally wounded and more. At longer scales of rewinding, you could undo meeting a person you later realized you didn't want to meet wasting your time on a new hobby that ended up not being fun starting a career you ended up not liking starting a degree that is not for you or has no future sharing something you later regret sharing or realizing other long term consequences of your decisions. At that point, you can weigh erasing hours, days, weeks, or even years of your life except the experiences themselves against undoing a mistake. The sheer number of possible cases where you could undo mistakes is a huge advantage of Rewind and I fail to see a power that can solve technically prevent a greater variety of mistakes. In short Rewind lets you undo nearly any mistake you'll ever make. 2. Saving time in daily life While anything you physically change is undone by Rewind, your memories are preserved. Even one day to yourself can be stretched out into an indefinite number of days to yourself. Reading books, watching movies, enjoying a park show country exhibit etc., learning instruments fields of knowledge skills etc., and trying new foods, all take time and don't require anything other than the experience and the memories of them to remain valuable, so any amount of them could be done within that one day. You never need to choose between doing one of these things and doing anything else since you can do those things, rewind to before you started, and do the other thing that doesn't remain as valuable once rewound. Your time to experience the world becomes nearly limitless with Rewind. In the bigger picture, Rewind would make you functionally immortal while confining that immortality to a single lifetime with your friends and family i.e. you get the benefits of an indefinitely long life but get those benefits during your normal life, instead of far into your future . In practice, Rewind has another advantage over immortality in that you will eventually age to death but the power ensures that it's your choice when this happens as opposed to immortality where you have no choice but to keep living and any other power where you have no choice but to die when your age causes something to fail . Self duplication provides a similar advantage but has less discretion see below about secrecy , cannot retroactively give you a longer life what you do with your extra time has to be planned ahead rather than realizing in the moment how you could use that time better , and still requires enough wealth to do fund all of the activities you want to experience, whereas Rewind allows you to have the experience then undo the financial or physical cost to yourself. In short Rewind gives you indefinitely more time for new experiences . 3. Winning a fight In reality, combat ability is a minor feature for a superpower. Nevertheless, for the sort of violent situations you might encounter in your life, Rewind has the solutions. In hand to hand combat, Rewind has the function of predicting every move of your opponent e.g. Sherlock Holmes in the movie SH A Game of Shadows , by rewinding repeatedly during the fight rather than actually seeing into the future. Combat with firearms is less reliable, since presumably a shot to the head is still fatal, but any other hit can be undone and you have indefinite chances to try every shot again with enough effort, every shot of yours could be instantly fatal . Again, this advantage is a non issue for most people, unless you decide to become a soldier, cop, etc. or you are being chased by the government. In short Rewind prevents you from ever being caught off guard in a fight . 4. Preventing your capture Facilitating escape from confinement When discussing superpowers, the topic of a government or some other organization coming after you often arises. Aside from how Rewind helps in combat, it also makes you impossible to capture. Powers that can be used to escape a prison are great but they pale in comparison with never being captured in the first place. Reversing to a point before capture, if you find yourself imprisoned, is one great use of Review but the power can go one step further preventing your capture. Period. You'll never take a wrong turn when running away accidentally reveal yourself to the wrong person fall into a trap laid out for you etc Much like someone with ludicrous speed, the only way that an organization can deal with you is to cripple you before you can realize what is happening or in the case of Rewind, they have to actually kill you in that split second . Of course, this issue only arises if people find out about your power. In short Rewind never lets someone put Baby you in a corner . 5. Cannot be detected Unlike most powers, there is no explicit evidence of Rewind when it is used. No rush of wind, no discontinuity in your location, no unnatural movement of objects, no unnatural physical abilities beyond what can be attributed to skill, knowledge, and luck. Rewind shares this benefit with mental enhancing powers and the remarkably similar luck manipulating powers but beats them in other areas. A smart person who spends a lot of time with you could notice that you're just too lucky but no one would suspect a superpower. In practice, no one would know you have a superpower unless you tell them or you abuse the functional precognition of the power winning multiple lotteries, bets on sports, etc. . In short Rewind is undetectable, unless abused . 6. Functional precognition Anything that can be done with precognition of your own future can be done with Rewind, except for predicting your own death in rare cases. No point in wasting space describing how this could be useful except to mention how useful the Rewind precognition would be in meeting people. If you had no qualms with this, you could find out what you have in common with a person then meet them again with that knowledge in hand. You could get a similar effect with powerful mind reading but this is less intrusive and the knowledge would come in a more natural form. Other than being better than precognition in its real time use, Rewind In short Rewind is basically precognition of your personal life without wasting time watching the prediction . 7. Having fun Perhaps the biggest thing missing from Rewind is the power trip I wouldn't be surprised if most people found nothing about the use of Rewind exhilarating in the way that soaring through the sky or shooting frickin' laser beams from your eyes would be. Personally, I think there is something to be said for the feeling of being able to undo anything a feeling you cannot get in real life but otherwise, Rewind offers nothing that you can't technically do normally except the feeling of reversing in time yay? . The power completely makes up for this gap in how it allows you to get the most fun out of doing normal non superpowered things and, more importantly, while the things you can do with Rewind could technically be done without it, there are a number of things you really would never do without Rewind. I don't care for the horrible things you could do for fun with the power I still think I'd be a horrible person for doing them, despite erasing the consequences but I have no qualms with stealing jokes and good comments or testing comments without risking embarrassment or offense. Going further, you could skydive without a parachute, take bigger risks in life e.g. mountain climbing , splurge on expensive or unhealthy experiences buffets vacations etc. , have consequence free sex, or anything that would otherwise lead to a dead end deterioration in your life. Besides all of these activities, you'd have a tremendous amount of money from the one lottery you win and the occasional gambling winnings among many ways of making money with Rewind opening up more options for fun activities in your real unerased life with friends and family. In short Rewind multiplies the fun you can squeeze out of life and allows otherwise risky activities that no one would do without the ability to avoid their eventual consequences . 8. Enriching you as a person Regardless of your standard for living the good life , Rewind gives you the time to achieve that vision. Even if you use it to become incredibly lazy, you'll still have experienced more than any other human being of your physical age and will manage to succeed at almost anything you try to accomplish since you can continue to lazily use your power for indefinite retries . If that lifestyle is not satisfying for you, then, much like in the movie Groundhog Day , you have indefinite chances to go back and change your lifestyle, so no matter what, you end up living the life you want to live, since by its very nature the power lets you go back and try again. Even becoming a degenerate can be resolved to your satisfaction whether being happy with being a degenerate or deciding to become a motivated person . The other scenario is that you are already motivated to make something of your life. Rewind gives you the time to do whatever that may be, without any transition period of slowly improving since the transition is erased . Unlike luck manipulation, Rewind actually makes you good at those things you succeed at doing that is, your luck can only be made through concerted effort, even if you benefit from unrestricted opportunity to make an effort. Personally, I consider this the greatest merit of Rewind. Few other powers enrich you as a person the way that more time and more opportunities can do, especially when no matter what you need to become properly better at something and cannot let your power do most of the work for you. For specific cases if you want to help people with your power, then consider that no superpower could let you help more people than someone with the wealth of Bill Gates or someone who contributed discoveries like the Green Revolution or the vaccine to society both of which can be accomplished with this power if you want to become wealthy and powerful, then the same applies but imagine becoming the most charismatic person through practice and learning from what others do alongside the possible wealth, knowledge, and skill that the power could provide if you want to do whatever you want every day, then consider how easily money can be inconspicuously made with this power and how much time you'd have to do whatever you want without a daily grind if you want to be better at your job, then practice makes perfect etc. At the moment, I think that most ideas of the good life are easier to accomplish with this power than almost any other power. In short Rewind always provides enough opportunity for you to achieve your realistic goals for yourself and to achieve them by becoming the person with the ability to achieve those goals, rather than achieving them for you . All of the above are in my opinion desirable features for a superpower, assuming you live in a world where no one else has superpowers. Compared with other single function powers, Rewind fulfills these desiderata the best. Similar powers like luck manipulation, precognition, enhance intelligence reflexes, self duplication, etc. match Rewind on one or two of these metrics and can even surpass Rewind in one metric e.g. enhanced intelligence could enrich you more as a person but none of those powers is better across the board. Entirely different powers like superstrength, superspeed, flight, and teleportation may provide a feature that Rewind cannot replicate but they don't apply as well to improving your daily life or do they? Flaws Since I genuinely want to know what other power is better, I want to point out some of the disadvantages I see in Rewind, since perhaps these could be expanded to the point that another power seems more desirable Experiences shared with friends cannot continue to be shared after rewinding. You can make the most out of time with friends e.g. never worry about being somewhere else and being the most enriched person you could possible be in those interactions but cannot enjoy multiple experiences that your friends will remember. Rewinding before the birth of someone you come to know say your own child will completely change who they are. You basically can't go back once you have a kid unless you're willing to lose them . Someone actually interested in long rewinds probably won't have a problem with this and someone uninterested in long rewinds I lean this way wouldn't be rewinding far enough to make this an issue anyway so I don't at the moment find any limitation here in practice. Juggling multiple lives could become difficult, especially if done carelessly and you fully take advantage of long term rewinds. At the extreme, you could live an entire life then rewind to live a completely different life your mileage may vary here . More locally, you could forget you met a person in a previous rewind or knew something in a previous rewind about someone that would be too suspicious to know now. I think the challenge posed by this local problem I'm not sure how I feel about long rewinds actually adds to the fun of the power and, in the end, carries no real risk due to the ability to undo suspicion raising comments. The lack of anything truly unique about the power compared with e.g. flight, telekinesis is a noticeable flaw. I think it's outweighed by the other fun that can be had but mileage may vary here. The inability to overcome specific obstacles is another thing Rewind lacks. You have no way of getting through impassable barriers or difficult people except your own wits, skills, and knowledge. However, I find that the fact that success with this power would in many cases require genuine ability on your part is actually a benefit rather than a flaw of this power as with the other flaws, your mileage may vary here and I can see how this might be exploited by a power that lets you accomplish more. Final Thoughts My approach is probably too abstract so I want to emphasize some more visceral reasons for my view In particular, a lot of my appreciation for this power comes from the events of the movie Groundhog Day . While the involuntary nature and unfortunate timing of the loop initially made Phil miserable, the events of the film speak volumes about how even this bad version of the power can enrich your life. Watching that movie really drives home the potential of having Rewind as a power. The other thing that emphasizes the potential of Rewind is noticing moments in daily life when the power could be useful. If you just think of that feeling of whoops, shouldn't have done that then you know when Rewind would come in handy few powers can completely castrate this feeling at its root in all but the most long term mistakes even then, if you're inclined . Doing either of these things makes the benefits of this power soo much more concrete There you have it Thank you for reading through to the end or even for just skimming down to the end I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this little hypothetical Edit The phase of judiciously answering every comment as soon as possible is over onto the phase of answering comments if any more come in when I have time. The comments so far have all been great As it stands, u Trenonian has convinced me with slight reservations that Saving the power to create save files in life and load them however you please would be a better power than Rewind, depending on the number of file slots . Other great suggestions have been Property Absorption the power to absorb abstract characteristics of any object , Time Stop self explanatory , and Omniscience as frightening as I find it . Also, a common ish objection has been that the brain would age. Here is a discussion that elaborates on this objection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rewinding time is the best superpower for daily life\n","id":"299abbcc-ba9a-4648-9539-4630c4eeef98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Vegan Alternative: Pain-free GM Animals?<|ARGUMENT|>Environmental damage from livestock effects people negatively. Livestock should not be kept around due to this reason whether they feel pain or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Livestock not feeling pain will not justify the other forms of inhumanity associated with eating meat.\n","id":"5cc91065-e0b8-4bef-8419-b70fe673b153"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know this isn't the MOST controversial topic, but I wanted to see 's views on the subject. I've been running pretty consistently for most of my adult life, and was introduced to barefoot running with the rest of the world about 4 years ago Google trends for barefoot running . Since that time, I've tried minimalist running personally and noticed some changes, but overall, no real improvements in my abilities as a runner if anything, it encouraged me to be more adventurous and to challenge myself, but this seems more like a side effect than directly related to the alleged science behind the shoes . Anyway, I was struck when doing research about the Vibram 5 Fingers shoes and queried terms related to barefoot running and minimalist running and found this study conducted by Harvard . It seemed no coincidence that a runner friend of mine cited the exact same study as justification for his minimalist running shoe purchase and he rattled off the same perceived benefits to his running routine that the study suggests one might receive. I realize that Google's SEO algorithm is to blame for us both finding the same study. I appreciate the disclosure of the funding source for the study being Vibram, but it seems strange that Harvard, or anybody else, for that matter, wouldn't have lauded the benefits of this type of running on their own, without being contracted to do so by a company who stands to benefit so directly from the results of the study. Vibram makes rubber soles for lots of other minimalist shoes on the market from many other manufacturers, but they are by no means the only company to cash in on this trend. Nike, New Balance, Brooks and many other manufacturers all offer minimalist shoes that capitalize on the success of the notion that runners should wear less shoe to become better runners. So here's my view and why I hold it the notion that barefoot running, and in turn, minimalist shoes, are so much better for runners is basically a big lie perpetuated by the folks who make shoes namely, Vibram to sell more shoes and make money. Based on my experience, these shoes offer little to no benefit to most runners. I know I'm not the first person to make this claim, but I'd love to hear others' perspectives on the subject. Maybe others found tremendous benefits from the shoes that I didn't?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the barefoot or minimalist running fad was fabricated purely for the sake of making money.\n","id":"6f860a52-6aa6-41cb-88a7-cbe91096af7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My main point of contention is that the resolution of paleo climate models MUST be lower than the resolution of modern era temperature tracking, and in my opinion, possibly so low that they would necessarily hide dramatic short term temperature changes, such that if a global temperature Co2 rise like today's were quickly reversed in the record we'd never be able to see it due to low resolution of data. So that, if the current upward trend is totally unprecedented then we are in fact making a huge judgement on it's destructive effects with no past data to back it up, or that if it is not unprecedented then it doesn't seem to have caused mass extinction in the past.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anthropocentric Climate Change cannot be proven to be catastrophic.\n","id":"965f85f7-7fdc-4c16-82f4-0ce1135b900a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is a common insult to talk about Americans who think they do not have an accent. It is said that an accent can be compared to a font everyone has an accent, just like all text is written in a font. But then there are fonts and there are fonts . Like Helvetica and Times New Roman on one hand and Papyrus and Old English on the other. So also, there are accents like American standard that are the Helvetica of accents. Plain, unadorned, all letters pronounced according to standard english rules . I would go so far as to say while ready to have my view changed that as Helvetica is the plainest of fonts, standard American is the plainest of accents. RP might be like Times New Roman, plain but with serifs. While Scottish and Irish are more like Vivaldi, full of character but hard to understand sometimes. So the thesis for  would be this American Standard English sounds very plain to me not just because I have grown up with it but also because it is the plainest of all accents. A corollary would be this American Standard English and RP are the most understandable of all English accents not only because they are widespread in media but also because they are inherently plain. This could be confirmed or denied by English Language Learners. Is any accent more easily understood?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When some Americans say \"we don't have an accent\" they are not entirely wrong.\n","id":"c8b36b39-4fbf-48e4-91fc-07e9c12bf98a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit As has been pointed out, though I thought I'd typed Ron Paul in the title, I did not. I'm an idiot. For those who thought I was talking about Ron Weasley, I'd be happy to tackle that one as well Ron Weasley is also racist towards house elves and incompetent, and should not be president of the US. We're about as far from a presidential election as it's possible to be right now, and Ron Paul has announced he won't be running for President again. However, he still gets a fair amount of inexplicable love on Reddit, and this has been kicking around in my head for a while now. Ron Paul supporters are probably at least aware of the controversy involving his newsletters for those who aren't, a pretty good overview is here. Basically, Ron Paul made a fair amount of money for a long time publishing a newsletter, which eventually attracted attention for some of the pretty exceptionally racist editorials that had been published in them. When Paul was asked about the newsletters in 1996 he said that his views about blacks had been taken out of context. I struggle to think of a context in which saying that black activists who wanted to rename New York City after Martin Luther King Jr. should instead rename it Welfaria, Zooville, Rapetown, Dirtburg, or Lazyopolis is not racist, but perhaps I just lack the creativity or flexibility of mind to be a true Ron Paul supporter. However, in 2001 Paul said he didn't write the newsletters, and his answer ever since has been to say that he didn't write them, and was unaware of their content. I think the first part of my  is pretty obvious if Paul did write the newsletters, his views are too racist for him to be president in my view the president must govern all the citizens, not just the ones who share his skin tone. The only other option I see is what Paul himself says he didn't write the newsletters. But this is almost worse If he was unaware that someone was writing racist articles and publishing them under his name for years , how incompetent of a President would he be? What other things are people doing in his name, or on his behalf? How is this any defense at all? If anyone wants to defend Paul, and , you're welcome. What other way is there to explain these newsletters and his responsibility towards them?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ron is either too racist or too incompetent to be president.\n","id":"1960bf15-9892-487f-b356-1fc6c14ddf7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I haven't looked at The Chive much, but what I've concluded from the times I have visited the site is that it is all copied content, the layout sucks, the purpose of it sucks, and it it definitely NOT the best site on the internet. For example, this reddit post shows some of the copied content. I've also read that they steal and modify images e.g., remove copyright watermark without asking the owners. Occasionally I see people with shirts or bumper stickers promoting The Chive and I simply can't understand what they see that I don't. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that The Chive sucks.\n","id":"be69b341-cfa8-453c-bc9d-1dfb832a4b01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Animal products going to waste are much worse and more likely than vegan foods to go to waste.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A vegan society offers the best way to manage resources.\n","id":"947c4fa2-b744-4ae4-994f-55fb52f79dbb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I take Germany as an example. The costs that the facilities cause to literally bury the waste are unbearable and seem to become bigger and bigger. The energy lobbyists are trying right now to persuade the German government into taking over all of the nuclear power plants, meaning that the German government will have to pay for the deconstruction German government is leaving nuclear energy in 2022 and also ALL costs related to the disposal of nuclear waste. They are even threatening to sue the German government over 15 billion Euro as compensation for leaving nuclear energy in 2022. If the German government agrees on taking over all the long term costs of those power plants, the corporations will not sue them. In short They are literally blackmailing the fucking government That's how serious it is to them to not have to pay for the disposal. It is way too expensive. Now I am curious how anyone could still be pro nuclear. Hit me. EDIT You fuckers failed miserably.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am against nuclear energy - not because I doubt its safety, but because the costs that are caused by nuclear waste are higher than what is made by selling the energy\n","id":"a7340e5c-f817-4f27-9a6e-76dcb48e2b4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see a lot of people express uneasiness about supporting content creators who believe in certain horrible ideals Things like racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. And I get it. I think it sucks when someone whose work you admire turns out to hold deeply prejudiced views about entire groups of people. I get why some people feel uncomfortable enjoying their work anymore, and I'm not judging them for that. But I'm saying that I don't think it's wrong for people to continue to consume an artist's work, even if the artist outs themselves as a bad person. As long as the work itself isn't reflective of their prejudices, and you're able to get some enjoyment out of it, then I don't believe that enjoying their work is tantamount to supporting their views or furthering the causes they believe in. I don't believe it's wrong, and I don't think people who remain fans should feel guilty. Now, I want to be clear here If an artist's work itself changed to reflect prejudiced viewpoints, or that artist started donating their profits to organizations that further prejudiced goals, I absolutely would stop financially supporting them this is why, for example, I stopped eating at Chick Fil A Not because of Dan Cathy's views, but because he donates profits to anti gay organizations . But I don't think it does any harm to enjoy someone's work on its own, even if the creator individually holds contemptible positions. This isn't about anyone in particular. It's very general, as this sort of thing happens all the time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe in separating an artist from their work, and think it's fine to enjoy their work even if I find their worldview abhorrent.\n","id":"cb0cf9d7-dd16-48bd-bb37-ebb3c3312cd6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After the releases of both consoles and seen footage and specs of both, this is the conclusion I have come to. Just to be clear, I do not own either console, so my view is based completely off of secondhand information. Reasoning The Playstation 4's APU clockspeed 1.75 GHz is .15 GHz faster than the Xbox One 1.6 GHz The Playstation 4's GPU is roughly equivalent to a stripped down mid range AMD graphics card, the 7870. While the Xbox One has a stripped down entry level AMD graphics card, the 7790. The Playstation 4's GPU has 18 compute units 1152 shaders , while the Xbox One GPU has 12 compute units 768 shaders The PS4 has 50 more shader units the Xbox one has a slightly higher GPU clockspeed 853 Mhz vs 800 Mhz BUT The Xbox One has the capapbility to play games and cable TV side by side on the same screen. The Xbox One comes with for the most part the Kinect, a device that allows a different interaction with the device with Voice and Gesture control. this is just assumption I also understand that Microsoft is making steps toward harmonizing their Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox Platform together. This seems to indicate that the Xbox will have a much greater potential for developers as ports of PC games will be not only possible, but quick and efficient as well. So, there are my points as outlined above. Please feel free to Change My View, but please no flame wars.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the PS4 is a more powerful console than the Xbox One, but the Xbox has more potential.\n","id":"0d9bf03e-8393-4cc0-b0f5-c59c8f6c3f01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi I have a lot of friends who listen to 'metal' and other forms of 'hard rock'. Something that all of these bands and artists seem to have in common is that All the members are 30 40 year olds with a mid life crisis, dressing up as if they were in a school play about demons and hell. x200B If you take pretty much any 'metal' song even the one's that my friends have suggested as being 'complex and good' and skip forward 20 seconds, you'll hear exactly the same everytime you skip forward in the song. The songs live on one single melody and the same 'power chords' throughout the entire song. x200B Almost every band artist has at least one or two songs that are slower, often acoustic and more sentimental than their other songs. These songs are always super cheesy not the good, 80's drum machine kind of good cheese and is basically just the same as every other song but with no energy at all. x200B They seem to think that every song needs One or two guitars, one drumset, one bass guitar and one singer. And 99 of their songs consists of the band members doing the same thing with the same instruments everytime. They do not go outside their comfort zone and experiment with other instruments. They have one song with a stroke instrument, that all their fans point towards as being a 'masterpiece' eventhough it's really just adding another instrument that is played EXACTLY like a regular guitar would be There, that's my little rant. Now I'd love to have my mind changed as I really do love music. I've given many metal groups a try, many times, but I just don't get it. Please don't see this as an attack on your favourite artist s , that's not what I'm trying to do here, and I respect everyone's musical taste<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most 'Metal' music sounds exactly like most pop music; Bland and boring\n","id":"3ab48a35-0239-4322-a576-afd82a0e1145"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The constructed case with the bus is similar to a situation where after an earthquake, instead of helping people screaming from underneath the rubble, one were to go and instead save one's dog and leave those people to die.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many will probably not be aware that they will be charged with failure to render assistance.\n","id":"f46749e0-b889-4513-90b5-587b9a01b169"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Anyone Be Allowed To Be a Parent?<|ARGUMENT|>We could consider restricting rights to parenting only if the government had in place an alternative system which is better for the children. This has not been accomplished yet. Foster parenting programs are themselves riddled with abuse cases, etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right of the unborn child to grow up safely, with caring and able parents, is more important than the right of a parent to have a child.\n","id":"5e5bbb8c-07ba-4858-b120-fb73bd66637f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As the title says, a two part . First, I think it is very likely that in the near future 5 50 years the internet will be a much more heavily regulated place than it is today. Second, I do not see this as clearly a bad thing. I will award deltas for successfully changing either of these views. 1 Why I think the internet is destined for regulation It is a frontier, and like all frontiers when it is sufficiently populated it becomes settled and rules are enforced. Citizens spend an enormous amount of time and activity on the internet, and an enormous amount of commerce happens entirely online. There is a recent fear that it is becoming a tool for terrorists to spread information, plan, and recruit. Every government on Earth has an interest in being able to monitor and enforce some rules in this space. There are also enough large repeat players that might benefit from the stability of enforced rules rather than voluntary standards that there might be some organic support. Just because the internet began as a very liberated and unrestricted space and this origin heavily influenced current online culture does not mean it is destined to stay that way. Again I would point to other frontiers that began wild and became regulated. I see no reason why the tools to effectively monitor the average citizen on the internet either do not exist already or will not be invented in the next 30 years. We already have the technology to monitor who visits a website, to block people from viewing a site based on the country they are located in, and to trace a downloaded a file. There are already examples of countries effectively monitoring the entire online population. I know China is a little unique in that all internet traffic to servers outside the country travels through just four ports, but they do in fact effectively prohibit access to undesired websites, and monitor usage well enough that it influences behavior. Citizens do sometimes receive notice from the CCP questioning the sites they have been visiting, and it causes great concern. The tools are either already here or soon to arrive. Please note I am thinking mainly about the ability to monitor an ordinary internet user, not a particularly sophisticated computer scientist. Apart from countries monitoring domestic internet activity, there are already issue specific international treaties where countries agree to cooperate to limit undesirable online behavior, such as the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child addressing child porn. The UN is also looking into international ways to limit the ability of terrorists to use the internet International cooperation may not even be necessary for a country to regulate domestic citizen internet use, but there are already examples of international cooperation to regulate online behavior. Edit TL DR Governments want to regulate the internet, and by and large have or soon will have the technical capability to do so. 2 Why I am not convinced it is a bad thing In the real world, government regulation is generally a net positive for a place. Anarchy is never the optimal state of affairs, and countries with a functioning government are generally doing much better than places with weak or no government. There is a lot of harmful online behavior such as doxxing, internet mob justice, theft and revelation of personal data and media, targeted meanness like highly public false negative reviews, sharing of contraband such as child pornography, and the planning and commission of other crimes. I can see the downsides to regulation it limits innovation, but I see no reason why this cost should necessarily outweigh the potential benefit. The tangible world has largely benefited from being under a code of laws even if it limits freedom. I am excited to hear what you all think and hopefully have my view changed<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The internet is destined to be regulated, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.\n","id":"5523ff3b-e11d-4cab-972f-1d000599dab6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A gift card forces you to go to a certain store, it provides an inconvenience of having to actually go to that store to avoid wastage. The gift card expires, money does not. Money allows someone to explore other options. A gift card is in my opinion a bad present. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A somewhat trivial one, but I believe the disadvantages of getting a gift card over cash outweigh the advantages.\n","id":"8d08d9ad-db6a-424e-a57c-70057d1a6d07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Theories on the final Star Wars Trilogy<|ARGUMENT|>Rey is presented as our protagonist alongside Finn. She has subtle moments where she gives in to rage\/almost gives in to rage. One example is the first order attack on Kamatas hideout where she shoots a first order trooper out of rage. Her behaviour vs Kylo Ren during their lightsaber duel hints at her acting out of rage several times. The novelisation of the force awakens backs this up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both are presented as characters on the light side that occasionally experience moments where they fall\/nearly fall to the dark side.\n","id":"fae47287-8fa2-453a-a56d-b49beefd6b04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Shark Culling Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A report by Australia\u2019s Climate Council found that the loss of the Great Barrier Reef would cost adjacent regions one million visitors a year, put 10,000 jobs at risk and take $1 billion in tourism spending from the economy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The World Wildlife Fund WWF estimates that coral reefs lead to the production of around $30 billion of goods and services every year.\n","id":"fd579d80-3ea5-423c-914c-5bc1d9f62558"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The lasting example of a monarch, unlike temporary presidencies, provides a role model to its citizens which keeps them in check pg. 8<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social trust, an important sociological and economic factor which promotes cohesion, is higher in monarchies pg.8\n","id":"53f9b217-900b-4630-b570-a4d0ac1ad84e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>It was a loss of sovereignty that led to the British wanting to leave the EU; any further attempts to remove power from Britain will inevitably lead to protests and increasing discontent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Loss of sovereignty is never popular, and will lead to increasing political discontent. This will only hinder the stability of the USE.\n","id":"db2b5df1-f8a0-4d43-82b6-4b48d12e2422"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should physical libraries be digitized?<|ARGUMENT|>A 2016 Literature Review says that for deeper thought, long periods of focus, and textbook materials, paper performs better than electronics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Print copies are physiologically better for our bodies than e-books.\n","id":"d959b38e-3442-457d-9e53-c7ac55086525"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Humans Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>There are plenty of cases where young children remember things that they could not have known in this life. The best known studies are by Ian Stevenson<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"With reincarnation, you can be a murderer before you are born.\n","id":"eeeadcd5-f0ab-414f-ae42-5317ee05ea62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>The original intention of this amendment was to guarantee the citizenship of ex-slaves, some of which were born in Africa, and some not born there. They were interwoven into the tapestry of America, often over decades but were in no way legal citizens. This amendment sought to guarantee no group would be subject to laws that would not protect them, by forgetting this, the US have allowed it to happen again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DREAMers live under the same conditions and jurisdiction as citizens, as well as share and are embedded within daily life of the United States; therefore by the 14th Amendment, they should be granted legal citizenship.\n","id":"dd57e44e-dabb-4757-87a8-08dffa0e801f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gay adoption<|ARGUMENT|>Just as married couples receive tax benefits and unmarried mothers may suffer cuts in welfare, legal prohibition of adoption by gays is a natural step towards this ideal. The traditional nuclear family is still an ideal that should be clung to, and which deserves the protection and motivation of the state. Evolution and nature has shown that the natural development of the young is aided by both these influences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Opposing gay adoption preserves traditional family as ideal for child-rearing.\n","id":"2ed306f9-475b-4db6-b754-2c5b6cf3527f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Whaling Still be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Whale falls where a dead whale drops to the ocean floor are a critical part of abyssal ocean ecosystems. If too many whales are hunted, then these events will become less frequent, which will damage a poorly-understood habitat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Whales are of great importance for the ocean's ecosystem.\n","id":"7d66a5a3-d3cf-476e-a812-13cedae11390"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Kids getting suspended for sunscreen kids getting jailtime and having scholarships removed just for drinking a beer kids getting CPS called on them for going outside without their parents at a young age kids not being allowed to hang out in most public spaces without getting harassed by police kids getting expelled for fighting even when they are being beaten up kids getting suspended or expelled for things as minor as cutting class or cursing in high school extremely harsh penalties for drug laws, especially aimed at kids. I dont even need to keep going, you guys get the gist. We have demonized and sheltered and essentially imprisoned our kids to be as perfect as possible in every possible way, making sure that they do absolutely no wrong in any way, or else the punishments will be EXTREME. This is actually inspired by another CMW post in which the commenters described how kids are raised today, essentially in constant fear of getting in trouble in even the smallest ways. It absolutely astounded me, some of the things they said, it made me ill to think about. Kids need to have freedom and take risks. Kids aren't even fucking leaving their house anymore because of how oppressive their environments are according to the counselor who made that post at least . This seems to be a very uniquely USA UK thing, and it seems to be generational. Baby boomers simply do not understand the idea of tolerance when it comes to getting in trouble. When I grew up in the 1990s, we got into all kinds of mild trouble, and you know what? We fucking loved it, and it created memories of my childhood that I will cherish forever. When cops caught us drinking they asked us to pour it out and that was it. When teachers saw someone fighting they broke up the fight and gave the kids a warning. We could actually hang out on the streets for hours on end with dozens of other kids socializing and walking around the hood and nobody cared. It seems as if this is becoming a thing of the past because kids are so unbelievably terrified of getting into trouble. Edit I forgot to add the last part of my post Back in the day we used to go into abandoned buildings and hang out, have block parties with friends, have rooftop parties, drink in public occasionally in hidden spots, hang out in groups and shit. And all of us ended up fine. Today? I cant even IMAGINE this shit happening anymore. Cops would be there in a second, or some 'concerned' old person would call in hysterics screaming KIDS ARE HAVING FUN, GET OVER HERE FAST This post is also partially inspired by a group of 3 kids who were biking down my block and some old yuppie lady went up to them and started harassing them and saying what are you doing here, why are you here, why are you not at home? who just bikes around like this? you should all go home before I call the cops . This right there is a perfect example of the type of culture I am talking about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Zero Tolerance laws in schools and aimed at youth specifically are absolutely ridiculous and should mostly be changed.\n","id":"aa351965-1f68-4a6e-a35d-52045357ffd0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay so first of all this is my first time on this tablet and actually posting something so bear with me here but I don't like how people say put the Christ back in Christmas when it could be argued that Christ never really wasn't Christmas there's some scientific evidence to show otherwise and just we don't really need to. Anyway here are my points. Side note I'm also using Google Text to Speech cuz it's way quicker so if there are any typos in this just blame it on that or me whatever suits your fancy. Okay so first of all there is scientific evidence to show that Jesus probably wasn't even born in December and holiday is meant to celebrate his birth. Most notably because it says in the scripture that the Shepherds were tending to their flocks which you don't do in December in that area Judea because it's cold and rainy you would tend your flock during the summer or early fall. Secondly they supposedly went to Bethlehem for a Roman census but the Romans did not conduct censuses during the winter because it was cold and people couldn't get places easily. Long story short people think that Jesus was born in the end of September. For my second point I would like to cite how Christmas at least probably doesn't come from very Christian holidays. Most notably the Roman Holiday of saturnalia. So what was saturnalia? Well, saturnalia was a Roman Holiday celebrating God Saturn and what they would do if people wouldn't run around they would drink they would gamble sit up all night and run run the streets knocking on people's front doors. The only parts of said earlier that really coincide with Christmas today or the giving of gifts and how saturnalia was a holiday that was sort of about equality. For a day everyone was supposed to be equal you're supposed to wear playing rope so that no one kind of stood out and people wore pointed Red Hats much like a Santa hat is that denoted you as a freed slave. Additionally some sources site human sacrifice and rape being other things that were quote unquote celebrated on this holiday. The story of how it influenced Christmas today is in short a Roman leader of some sort went into a battle they saw some kind of sign in the sky painted on to their Shields and won the battle if they were headed to. And so that dude who led them end up becoming a Roman Emperor or something to that extent where he was grateful for that sign that happened in this guy and he said you know what maybe we should celebrate this Christian dude but he couldn't get rid of Saturnalia because everyone would get mad so he just kind of tacked it on at the end of saturnalia. There are other influences on Christmas from other holidays I think a lot of pagan ones as well but I don't remember what those are and I don't care to look them up right now.ooo For my third point I supposedly Christmas was banned in the colonies when he first came over from Europe because it was such a non Christian holiday at the time. My fourth and final point it's less factual and a lot more just my opinion but IMHO I don't think that we need to attach religion to the Christmas spirit. It doesn't have to be a religious holiday to fulfill those beliefs and make it a holiday but doing good we don't need to make it about Jesus and Christianity. I guess I really just don't like the idea of being threatened with a bad after life if you're not a great person. In retrospect that last bit sounded kind of snarky I don't mean any offense to the Christian religion it just seems kind of weird to me. Edit I did a bad. I accidently typed in a slightly wrong title and it kinda changed the whole meaning. My little intro sort of reflects how I meant to have it, being that we shouldn't put the Christ BACK and not that we should remove it. Sorry<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think we should take the Christ out of Christmas\n","id":"2b1d7d50-8c56-4358-9d7c-2e5016ee8a70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I believe that the point of incarceration in the legal system is to protect us civilians against potentially dangerous individuals, and to act as a deterrent to discourage people from doing illegal things. I am an atheist and do not believe in things such as sins and repentance in a spiritual manner. As an example, I saw the CCTV footage of a man who stabbed another man in the head with a knife. The man supposedly survived, which can clearly be seen as lucky. The assailant could just as well have killed the man, and the intent was there, why else would you stab a man IN THE HEAD? In my country, the legal system differentiates between attempted murder and actual murder. But as far as I can see, the man escaped a much harder sentence due to a sheer luck. Why should not attempted murder, under convincing circumstances, yield the exact same punishment? Change my view English is not my first language, some words might be out of place etc etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under convincing circumstances, attempted murder should be punished the same as actual murder.\n","id":"475d5144-f773-4584-a34f-92dfb57cdd7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Social Media Exacerbate Eating Disorders?<|ARGUMENT|>Studies have shown that people who use seemingly harmless hashtags such as #fitspiration fitness inspiration are more likely to be at risk of having an eating disorder.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social media portrays sanitised, even glorified, views of what eating disorders are like.\n","id":"6d6fe18a-774c-41c6-bf8d-1d8bb4b97a45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>#timesup: Should individuals credibly accused of sexual assault or harassment be fired from positions of authority?<|ARGUMENT|>If other individuals within society who deviate from legal or societal norms are allowed to retain their positions unless they get sentenced, then those who commit sexual assault or harassment in positions of authority should be no different.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is inappropriate for the employer to adjudicate the accusation as it ought to be done in a court of law, in which the accused is innocent until proven guilty.\n","id":"d2690caa-11b9-4824-9bb2-74952e7bc783"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments push for 100% renewable energy?<|ARGUMENT|>Rising sea levels, more frequent weather anomalies, rising temperatures in already dry areas, increased rainfall in already wet areas, and increasingly destructive storms are some of the direct effects that have already begun to affect people all over the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Climate change poses one of the greatest risk to our civilization and we should do everything we can to mitigate it.\n","id":"e1732b16-184e-4791-8956-4a3114bd26c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should prisons exist?<|ARGUMENT|>There are more than 10 million prisoners worldwide, and the prevalence of all investigated mental disorders is higher than general population comparisons.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Immates might suffer from psychological illness and should be helped, rather than left alone.\n","id":"9e59c80b-0336-4ccc-8c8d-d828ea5af57d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If somebody is struggling like hell and going through a lot of misery and pain. If he she feels the need to kill themselves to escape from this living hell then I think that its totally reasonable. Tbh in a lot of cases it just becomes a burden to the people around the area. For example, if a coma paitent wants to kill himself then it should be allowed by the government to do so legally. Similarly in animals, if there is a dog who met with an accident and is brutally injured and is at a point of no return at a point where it cannot be saved then it should be killed. I think it'll only help the dog in escaping from the vicious pain that he is suffering. As it is, it is gonna die anyways, so why not kill it and save him some pain. Note the first priority should always be trying to save it as much as possible I don't know whether I'm wrong or not I guess it's upto you to judge it Im happy to change my mind over it Do let me know what you think and what's your opinion about the act of self killing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I support euthanasia\n","id":"fc6ac6d3-efb2-4751-b2c9-db17605eb3dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize prostitution<|ARGUMENT|>legalizing prostitution would allow the government to regulate prostitution and make it safer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing sex work will make the profession safer for women\n","id":"8c6a1ead-74db-460e-a5f5-7f714a34bcbd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Impeachment proceedings won't hurt Dems, and do NOT help GOP in 2020.<|ARGUMENT|>The proceedings could split the focus of the Democrats and distract them from the 2020 campaign. It is better to have one focus and to make sure that they succeed. The best way to do this is by just focusing on the next presidential election.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Impeachment proceedings would detract from voting on operational and substantive issues, both ones that the Senate would confirm and ones that the Senate, or Trump, would block.\n","id":"3b089f28-3286-4129-aee6-601bfc2d8504"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm usually liberal on most things but Ive not been able to get on board with eating disorders. Mostly because it's seems like a very white, middle class kind of affliction. For starters, the disorder seems to be based off an obsession over continuing to meet a beauty standards that most people will never be able to meet. Outside of the disordered behaviour, the person is reaping all the benefits that come with being beautiful. Secondly, the manifestion of an eating disorder seems to be about drawing attention. As someone who has witnessed countless people rotting with their mental illness and sometimes dying before they seek help and having my own terrible mental health which I've hidden for the sake of others, I can't help but see the kind of starving behaviours that come with an eating disorder being a direct manifestation of expecting attention, which comes from privilege. I posted here instead of unpopular opinion because I know it's more complex than this. I've only ever seen this kind of sentiment when it came to eating disorders, even from otherwise liberal people, so I know it's something thats harder to swallow than most mental health stuff. . Edit I started thinking about this a lot when I became aware of how much Eugenia Cooney was getting off on all the comments and how an otherwise nice person was doing a selfish thing in causing worry, ignoring it and then 'getting off' on the attention.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eating disorders are precious.\n","id":"12617074-068c-41c5-9fa7-f6c8cba69ecf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I say this as a Canadian who has been following the Anthem Protests relatively closely. The USA is not a flag. The USA is not a song. The USA is a collection of thoughts and ideals. Among which three are central 1 Everyone should be treated equally fairly. 2 The government is not perfect. 3 If you don't like something, you have the right to voice your displeasure sometimes with weapons . Therefore kneeling before a flag during a song which isn't your nation, but exercising your belief in the ideas that are your nation, is not disrespectful of the nation. gt But your disrespecting the people who fought and died for that flag If they fought and died for the flag moreso than they did foe the ideals which it is supposed to represent, then I would argue they deserve the disrespect. gt They are disrespecting a nation which has given them those rights And therefore using those rights should come before paying lip service to a flag which represents things you don't agree with. Things that would change my view That the flag, anthem, and government should be more important than those listed ideals That those listed ideals are wrong That kneeling is not a good form of protest Edit Apparently I need to point out that I awarded a delta. Well I awarded a delta. It is disrespectful, but the disrespect makes sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kneeling for the Anthem does not disrespect the USA\n","id":"afe8a9bc-779f-457a-9ba9-e5442f5b7495"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't even know where to start. I am generally a happy and healthy person. I was raised Catholic. I am not a strict Catholic. I enjoy the community of church. I don't take everything at face value or for fact. About 8 years ago I came to terms that there is probably no Heaven. Death is just ceasing to exist. I was okay with that. I still felt we had souls or spirits. I still hoped for or had affection for the possibility of a God, even though it probably didn't exist. I still hoped for an afterlife of some sort, even though I didn't know what it would manifest as and that the chance of one was actually quite slim. I felt my children were a blessing. Their births were the most beautiful, tender days of my life. I took joy and pride in everything my kids did. Some days I would just well up with pride and happiness, so happy that our lives have been rich and lucky. Any thoughts of death or mortality were far, far from my mind. I just didn't think about those types of things. Sure, the thoughts flitted through my mind every now and then and I would think about them. I would discuss it with my spouse. Usually I would take comfort in the intense love and happiness we have and know that no matter what happens at the end, somehow we would still go on, whether it be in the hearts or memories of others, in some type of spirit soul that survived death, in photos or videos . . . The jury was out on what happens, but I was at least accepting or positive about it. Now, I feel like a shattered, empty person. As I've gotten older, I have developed high blood pressure family history . My doctor put me on Atenolol 50mg once a day. About four days in, I started to feel sad and question my mortality and my family's mortality out of nowhere. Things just spiraled out of control after that. I learned about nihilism, atheism, existentialism, what happens after death, that we are just computers, emotions aren't real, just by products of brain impulses just lots of things I never thought about before and I became incredibly depressed. Crying everyday, scared of the eventuality of our lives, the meaningless of life, the possible lack of a soul, no proof of an afterlife I feel like I've been down a horribly dark rabbit hole and I want to get out. I went back to my doctor and he said Atenolol, being a beta blocker, can cause depression, so he took me off of it. I was on it for two weeks. My last dose was about 96 hours ago. I'm not feeling much better. How long does it take the medication to get out of my system and for all my brain chemistry to start working again? I'm having a lot of trouble finding meaning in what I do, and what I do with my family since there's no point. We won't remember anything after we die. Why do I care if I get some award at work? What do I care if my kid gets in the school play? Why celebrate someone's birthday? I feel empty. I feel hollow. I do not want to feel like this. Could this really all be a cause of the medicine? Or did I do this to myself? Will my feelings of happiness and excitement come back? Will I find meaning again? How long until I could be back to normal? This current depressive state is so unlike me and nothing I have ever experienced before. I'm scared I'll always have these depressing thoughts about mortality and life's meaning that I just don't want in my head anymore. I want to rewind the last two weeks and go back to my jovial, excited, proud self that I was. I want to believe in what I used to believe in. I feel like now that I've researched what really happens after death, or researched that we probably have no souls, that we are just a product of brain chemistry, that I can never go back to how I was. I WANT to, though. I feel like now that I've gotten a peek at what we really are sophisticated computers that I can never be happy again. I don't want to know these truths. I want to go back to how I was. I am losing meaning in anything I do. I am becoming detatched from my children and spouse. I don't enjoy doing anything with them. It's all just a reminder that they will die someday, too. I don't want to live in a world where they don't exist, but that's where I am destined to be and it destroys me. I can't look at my kids and be happy anymore, knowing that anything we do is meaningless. Yes, I know there are the arguments that YOU have to provide meaning and make something out of the life you are given, but that doesn't help me feel better at all. It makes me feel worse. I feel like I have to work now to assign or find meaning, rather than it just naturally occurring and flowing and being part of my day to day life. My kid drew a picture today and happily showed me. All I could muster was a nice job, instead of my usual effortless pride and happiness in how he was developing and growing. Each time I try to make myself feel better, I ruin it. I tell myself that it is possible all humans, animals have souls. I know there is no scientific proof right now except for the Lanza theories which I am not sold on , but I feel it's possible for everyone to just have that essential spark in them. Then I feel better, but then realize that our consciousness is just our brains tricking us into thinking we are an I or we are a self. That it's impossible for a soul to exist. Where in evolution would we even have developed one? What happened to all the beings in death who didn't have souls? Or were souls present in the primordial ooze we came from? See, that's just not realistic. I look up stuff online which just confirms this bleakness. There's no hope anymore. Pre Atenolol me wouldn't have thought these thoughts. Now I'm destroyed by them. Now I'm just thinking that every memory I make, every experience I have is for nothing. I just want to go back to my happy, silly, proud self. Is this all just the medicine? I want to take pride in my family again. I want the little things to become important again. I want to be carefree and hopeful again. However, I feel now that I've gotten a glimpse of the dark and painful truths of our existence that I'm going to never be able to get over this crisis, never get these thoughts out of my head, and never be happy again for the rest of my life. This terrifies me. I just want to be who I was again, but it think that's impossible. Please, please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I cannot return to \"normal\" after an existential crisis.\n","id":"f29c5455-cf9a-4605-8daa-d0ca4fd91abe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should programming be taught in primary school?<|ARGUMENT|>Many of these students may discover that they have a passion for coding. If left on their own, they may never have realized this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some motivated students are likely to take it as a challenge and find coding exciting.\n","id":"752b9902-8bfb-4971-9b00-985901c60b6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>Richard Milton, who will stand in East Worthing and Shoreham, has claimed that the science behind climate change is \u201cmanipulated\u201d, while East Hampshire's hopeful Malcolm Bint has called climate activists \u201cwhackos\u201d.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many of the Brexit party's leading figures have questionable views on climate change.\n","id":"895276a1-1320-4252-9cf6-2f9c36a2ce46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are so many fast food chains and restaurants out there today. People eat out much more than they used to. Families aren't having the home meals like they used to. Instead of going out 1 2 times a month, they eat 1 2 times a week. There are so many different options of junk food that are so much cheaper and tastier than healthy foods. People would rather eat what tastes good than eat something is healthy for them. People don't exercise and move around as much they used to. I see people who try to get as little exercise as possible. They are obviously going to pay for it when they're older. Please help change my view,if you could include any kind of credible sources for your arguments that would really help persuade me as well. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Believe that America is a fat and obese nation with many health problems because of it.\n","id":"f477c81a-20d6-43d1-a58b-9bf50a8e8922"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should puberty in children be delayed in preparation for gender reassignment?<|ARGUMENT|>If anything, all childrens' puberty should be delayed until they are capable of making an informed decision as an adult.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A child has a right to choose what gender they present as.\n","id":"c43f1660-1bc7-45d2-bd8d-a5bb11c1c88c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>A study shows that employees who fit well with their organisation, coworkers, and supervisor have greater job satisfaction and are more likely to remain with their organisation p. 36.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hiring for cultural fit may result in greater employee retention which is crucial for organisational efficiency.\n","id":"bc7c3fcc-788c-40ae-8682-6fc48b532abc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>The Tesla roadster performance are measured to be equal or better than expensive supercars: \"even at the not insignificant sum of $200,000 the Roadster will actually be comparatively cheap for its performance levels.\"\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments and businesses are successfully investing billions in accelerating new technologies and innovations.\n","id":"87701278-d6fd-4c4c-a029-a2af10388717"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a 22 years old female virgin well i was once abused when i was 16 by a guy who was at that time, my 'boy friend , I never had sex again again because i feel like sex isn't as pleasurable as people states and also avoid relationships of any type. I've never been in a relationship since then. made out with some potential partners, that's it<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think i am missing out on sex because i masturbate.\n","id":"cebb0985-10db-4f40-ae2f-1eba573727fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Drugs are bad, so they should be illegal just doesn't cut it. That's not thinking things through. You have to examine all the various consequences, effects, and repercussions. For a law to be just, it must prevent more harm than it causes anything but legalization of all drugs not just decriminalization fails that test. Possibly the most popular argument for drug prohibition is due to the social harm caused by drug addiction. Certainly drug addiction does cause social harm, but that harm pales in comparison to what is caused by imprisoning vast swaths of society. Separating families and saddling users and sellers with a permanent black mark that destroys most opportunity for gainful employment and being a productive, contributing member of society is vastly destructive. In short, drugs will ruin your life, so we'll punish you for using drugs by ruining your life just fails at logic. Then there's the argument that buying drugs funds criminals and terrorists. Well, no shit, genius. If you don't allow legitimate businesses to sell it, it's going to be the criminals. This gives rise to the black market, which is the source of the vast majority of drug related crime only a small portion is comprised of actual intoxication induced misbehavior . Legalization of the drug trade takes the money out of the hands of gangs and terrorists, and eliminates the black market and its associated crime this is why mere decriminalization for users is not adequate. Let's also look at effectiveness. Essentially, there isn't any. Prohibition does not decrease usage rates, which is the primary goal. I've heard the argument that at least it increases street prices, but this is a terrible argument. Increased prices don't deter use, they just make addiction more financially devastating for addicts thus increasing, not decreasing harm , and the increased profits just add incentive for criminals to produce traffic sell more and use violence to protect their profits. In short, when you consider the total lack of effectiveness alongside all of the collateral social damage, drug prohibition doesn't actually do anything except harm society. All in all, any opinion supporting prohibition, or even decriminalization instead of legalization, hasn't been thought through to its conclusion, fails to take into account all consequences, and is basically just wrong. It would be nice if I didn't have to feel frustrated at the current state of affairs, or think less of certain friends and family for what I see as poorly reasoned, illogical views. So, I challenge you to Change My View. As a side note, I am not interested in discussing ulterior motives for prohibition, such as private prison profiteering, political fear mongering, and racial oppression. I only want to discuss the viewpoint of actually thinking drugs should be prohibited.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anyone who supports drug prohibition has not thought the issue through to its logical conclusion.\n","id":"fc576159-c132-484a-816f-b0aab22b2a06"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abortion<|ARGUMENT|>Byron White, U.S. Supreme Court, one of two dissenters in Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973 - \"I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the court's judgment. The court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes.\"35<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US Constitution does not explicitly confer a right to abortion\n","id":"8282383f-263b-4840-9794-d2955723a25c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Law school<|ARGUMENT|>\"Should You Go to Law School? Not Unless You Want To Be a Lawyer.\" Wronging Rights. January 22, 2009: \"I loved law school, and I am incredibly glad that I decided to go. .But when people ask me if they should go to law school, and why they are surprised when, instead, my response is: 'Well, do you want to be a lawyer?,' and then 'no' if they tell me that they don't. . I know that you have heard that a J.D. is a 'great all-purpose degree,' but it isn't. That's a lie put about by parents who are trying to trick you into middle-class professionaldom and law schools who are trying to take your money. A J.D. is not an all-purpose degree, it is a law degree. It does not qualify you to become a diplomat, a \"senior policy advisor\" to anything, a politician, a banker, an aid worker, a political operative, or any of those other jobs that seem like they might be a fun way to satisfy your West Wing fantasies. It qualifies you to be a lawyer, and it doesn't really even do that -there's still the pesky matter of the bar exam.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If you don't want to be a lawyer, don't go to law school\n","id":"ab6eda74-cefd-4c1f-98ed-ad6c1b7aa775"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I love the Matrix Trilogy. Personal views on acting ability aside, I believe that the premise that the Matrix establishes is one that can only be rivaled by a few movies. The way the stories are told bring forth endless possibilities to the true nature of the film. I also believe that a lot of the hate towards the film comes from the inability to follow the overarching idea. I do not want to argue the execution of the film i.e. cast, cgi quality, light use of cords . I only want to argue the structure and intent of the movie. Sequence of events and dialogue between characters are fair game, just not the actor's ability to show any emotion saying them. What I am asking is this, did the trilogy make philosophical or logical mistakes big enough that destroy the integrity of the film.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Matrix Trilogy is a philosophical masterpiece.\n","id":"bc3a3bc3-24b2-48ba-86f7-c0ce026d4ef5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>The enforced gap between finishing school and continuing further education may reflect negatively in people's academic performance on return to education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This service would restrict their ability to move on to alternative pathways such as vocational work or higher education.\n","id":"c73b3f9d-1059-40db-809f-bc460218f8b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Cows produce on average 70kg to 120kg per year in methane emissions. Genetically modifying cows to emit less methane is ethical because it will reduce global carbon emissions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is ethical to genetically modify farmed animals so that they cause less harm to the environment.\n","id":"90b40654-6866-4335-9903-a5c471f0fd88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Long post, but I had to write it to get my thoughts straight. I've been thinking about this since opening night. I'm a big MCU fan because of the great story telling these movies have consistently brought. I watched all the movies again in preparation for Endgame, I didn't watch a trailer just in case there was something important in them, I didn't even read fan theories so that I wouldn't have any expectations going in. And at the end of the line I just feel trolled? for lack of a better term. The story built up in Infinity War and the entire MCU takes a back seat to fan service and over the top call backs in Endgame. And while I enjoyed some of those scenes, some felt forced and some felt unnecessary, and I really wanted expected a great final chapter to this amazing story. Instead I got a recap of the old chapters. I'm not exactly sure how they could have done both a compelling story and the revisiting , but I really think they could have, considering how well done and thought out and true to the characters Infinity War was. Maybe you'll say I'm reading too much into this, but I had no such thoughts after Infinity War. TL DR I was expecting Infinity War pt. 2, and they gave us M.C.U. The one where we revisit old clips and disregard whether the plot makes sense. Here's a list of the bigger reasons why I feel this way. There's more but here are the big ones Captain America is my favorite character. I don't think they did him justice. That is America's ass . Funny scene, something he wouldn't have said back in 2012. It showed growth. You know what else would have shown growth? He should have easily dispatched his past self. That should not have even been a match. Cap has been training, and he's clearly a much more skilled fighter in Winter Soldier than Avengers, and he's even better now than he was in Winter Soldier. At least he should be, but apparently making fun of Cap's reaction to learning his best friend from 1945 is still alive, meaning hes not alone in the world, was more important than being consistent to the character's growth. Cap summoned Mjolnir, he didn't pick her up. The way it plays, especially with Thor's I knew it is that Cap knew all along he was worthy. That's a huge plot hole, and it makes this moment, and AoU anti climactic. They should have just shown him pick up Mjolnir and let him be surprised with the audience that he was able to pick her up. Also, I would have at least liked some lightning around him when he catches her, he does now posses the power of Thor, right? Why does he just look like Cap with a hammer. Avengers Assemble . Cap, they are literally assembled around you already, that's a little redundant. They could have had him say it as the heroes were going through the portals and it would have been a much better moment. Then, he doesn't give any commands? No directions? We're just gonna free for all this battle to save the universe? Also, in this free for all I would expect to see Drax go straight for Thanos, like he always does, but Drax is not important enough for screen time here, I guess. You sent time through Lang instead of sending Lang through time cheapens Cap being old at the end. Not that he would want to be young again, just the fact that they could turn him young ruins that moment. It also didn't make sense that one of Cap's major story points is Saving Private Bucky , and then he gives the shield to Sam. They foreshadowed Bucky all the times he used the shield. Also, we never get to see Steve and Bucky be friends again after he gets his brain reset by Shuri. They hug once in Infinity War, and we don't get to see their reunion after Hulk does the un dusting. I get that Sam is more worthy of the shield, but I think Cap would have chosen Bucky, and Bucky would have said no, you should give it to Sam. EDIT watching the second time you can tell Bucky definitely knew what Cap was planning he says \u201cI\u2019ll miss you\u201d and Cap says \u201cit\u2019s gonna be alright\u201d before Cap leaves. While that makes me feel a bit better, because I\u2019m sure Bucky told Cap to give the shield to Sam instead, I still wish we could have seen that convo or at least part of it on screen. Cap is like 110 in the last scene if he's 30 when he goes back to 1945 and it's now 2024 . I guess the serum kept him alive and he had a good life with Peggy, but there's no way that doesn't affect the timeline. This past is now his new future, it's still the Avengers waiting for him in 2024's past. It has to be, or he couldn't be on the bench. If they wanted to, they could have written it so that Cap returns to 2024 the same as he left, gives a shield to BUCKY and then says his goodbyes. He's decided to get one of those lives Tony was always telling him to get. Then end the movie with him dancing with Peggy, which we can assume is in a different timeline and doesn't change the rules of time travel as outlined. Which brings me to my next point EDIT Supposedly the Russos said Cap lived out his live with Peggy in an alternate reality, then used Pym particles to return to to the base MCU at the right moment and pass on the shield. That's better, and consistent with the time travel rules, but it's still stupid that they didn't just show him return via time travel. Even some wind or a bright light to signify he's arrived there through inter dimensional time travel would have made that moment make sense. I think the Russos thought about that after post production and then came up with this excuse, and that it's still a mistake. It does pose a better theory about why the time travel rules makes sense in Endgame. They're not really time traveling per se, their doing inter dimensional travel through the quantum realm and arriving in a parallel universe where these event's are currently happening at a specified place. This would explain why you cant change your past you're really changing events in other dimensions , and why you can't go back and steal an Iron Man or Black Widow to replace the ones you lost you would be creating an alternate reality where that person just disappears . See the below edit in point 2, but I think this explains why it was easy for Cap to make this decision. In the reality he travels to, none of the future events he experienced in his base reality are certain to happen. He's not drastically changing this Peggy's future life, i.e. she wasn't guaranteed to marry whoever she marries in Cap's past because he gets to her in a completely different reality from his base reality, in that new reality's present. Time travel is not a good plot device. It creates too many questions, and even in movies like Back to the Future where there is time to explore the rules of time travel it barely works. Endgame doesn't have the time to devote to make anything make sense. And in their attempt to cover that up with Hulk's line, they created even more questions. EDIT see the edit on 1.e. I think they're not time traveling, instead they are traveling to alternate realities. This actually pseudo makes sense with quantum mechanics where there are alternate realities all happening at once and that you can travel to them through the quantum realm and arrive there at a specified place where the events you want are happening at the same time you left. I'm thinking of this as Rick and Morty portal gun inter dimensional travel, except the reality you arrive in is currently experiencing, in their present, the moment you want to visit. I still think this was not explained nearly enough, but it at least makes more sense to me like this. However, one of the things I hate is changing canonical aspects of a movie to make it great. I.E. Like when people say Star Wars is great because of Anakin's redemption arc, even though the original trilogy is clearly written about Luke and they're changing the main character. They say time travel in the movie, so we should still consider it to be time travel. BUT, In my head canon I'm going with inter dimensional travel and I'll probably enjoy the movie more the second time with this in mind. I'm just going to tell myself Prof. Hulk said time travel so he wouldn't confuse anyone. Wouldn't it be better to wait for Captain Marvel to come back to Earth before the time heist? I mean it's time travel, there's no rush to get started . EDIT This still stands with the above edit. Why not meet up in the battle of Wakanda with the stones and a Gauntlet and have Carol snap Thanos' army and Thanos to dust before he gets the mind stone? Then, return one set of stones. Your past becomes your new future, so you can't change that they had lost the first time, but in this new future there wouldn't be a 5 year gap between the world's population being halved then restored. The infrastructure for food, jobs, and everything is not set up for the population to be restored after it's been halved 5 years ago. Think about all the problems that would cause, it's really not a happy ending. They could even go back to their timeline, making it a selfless act that they righted a different timeline then their own. Except, you can change the past see point 1.e. . EDIT This no longer stands with the above edit. If you remove a stone from a reality, bad things happen per Hulk's convo with the Sorcerer Supreme. Why does nothing bad happen in the 5 years after Thanos destroys them? EDIT Still stands The fact that you can just go back and steal more Pym Particles makes the whole one round trip thing irrelevant. EDIT Still stands Moments that were forced missing I saw some whales in the Hudson. I get that this is supposed to be Cap looking at the bright side, but it played like Cap was thinking, Hey, maybe Thanos was right . He just came back from a support group meeting where that guy was dating again, that's enough of a positive to talk about that doesn't play into Thanos being right. They don't explore all the problems that would come with 50 of everything dying at once nearly enough. Edit Thank you to Roxiemoxie1233 for changing my mind on the whales line. However, I still think that they didn't explore all the problems losing 50 of the population at once would cause, or really even explore how it hurts the survivors enough. Hulk not coming out during Infinity War was a huge deal. We don't get an explanation to that or hear Hulk's side of being Professor Hulk. Hulk was a developing character after Ragnarok and they just wrote him out. They impounded Scott Lang's belongings, and no one that knew he was Ant Man thought to look? They might have found the quantum tunnel in the back seat of his van, instead of a rat saving the universe on accident. Really Dr. Strange, that was part of your big 1 in 14 million plan? EDIT during my second viewing I noticed his things are actually at a self storage facility, which makes me think Cassie did have her father\u2019s things and then put them in storage. Doesn\u2019t change the fact that it\u2019s whack that a rat saved the universe, but I want to be accurate. His things are in storage, not impounded. Tony solved time travel in 5 minutes like it was a 6th grade algebra problem. I'm sure he was trying all 5 years, but that\u2019s not how it plays. Then, the same guy who did that doesn't remember that there were 3 stones in NY at the same time? Are you kidding? Black Widow sacrificed herself. Why does Hawkeye get the Soul Stone? I wish they decided something like Okay, we'll settle this like we usually do. Whoever wins the fight gets to get thrown off the cliff by the loser. and had an honorable battle instead of seeing who could dive first. What if they both fell? Reckless. Also, nice funeral they had for Natasha, it's almost as good as Tony's. lol. EDIT Red Skull says \u201cyou must lose that which you love\u201d, not \u201cyou must sacrifice that which you love\u201d. I\u2019m not sure if that changed between infinity war and endgame, but it reveals why Hawkeye gets the stone anyway. Captain Marvel takes away much of why Marvel is better than DC by being so OP. Her existence makes the fight cheap for several reasons like why would Carol not wear the Gauntlet when she had it? I understand the female Avengers moment was really cool, I even smiled and thought it was nice, but it made no sense. Carol didn't need help, she literally flies past her help in 3 seconds. Also, the Gauntlet is the only thing that matters, where is everyone else? If they had Pepper or Valkyrie holding it and a reason everyone else couldn't support, it would have made the moment a lot better. Fat Thor was great. It was so human, it made for some comedy, and it gave Thor a rock bottom to recover from. Except he doesn't. His story is the most compelling from Infinity War, and he's kinda useless in this movie. I wouldn't have minded it if he got a cool revenge moment, or even tried to throw Stormbreaker at Thanos' head, but they just made him a joke. Rocket Raccoon is in this movie, but it doesn't explore how he's dealing with losing his family. Me, personally, I could lose a lot doesn't turn into anything. EDIT There is one line about this, when Rocket slaps Thor before Thor talks to his mom. Still not enough, I think Rocket and Nebula were short changed in this movie. But to be fair I didn\u2019t notice that conversation about losing his family the first time I watched Endgame I know this will be unpopular, but I am Iron Man was cringey to me. Why would Tony say that? He's a dad now, he's been humbled by defeat, he's not supposed to be deeply egotistical anymore. It's an act now. He's a hero, give him heroic last words. They can still be snarky. Also I'm disappointed in myself for not recognizing the kid from Iron Man 3. Edit Thank you to thedanishDane for changing my mind on this one While that take did make me like that line a little better, when I saw the movie the second time I still cringed at this scene. If they had given us context like Tony saying \u201cI\u2019m not iron man anymore\u201d when the avengers try to get his help for time travel, then this moment would have made sense and been way more emotional. Ant Man asking the kids if they wanted a picture with him. It was funny for a little bit but that scene felt really long and it ate up valuable plot development time. Iron Man and Cap's reunion is not developed enough. Cap just stands there and gets berated by Tony. They both lost, and it was because they weren't together. It's not just Cap's fault. Tony could have taken the ship back to Earth and they could have assembled the Avengers for a last stand. Why does Cap not have an opinion? He should have said something, anything. And they should have had some conversation or team combo in the final fight, something that showed that they made up. How was Nebula carrying enough Pym particles for past Nebula to return in her place AND for Thanos' entire army to return as well? She also doesn't know when and where to find Hank Pym to steal more particles, unless someone told her. Peter Quill is too important to not have any moments. Nebula should have smacked him after Gamora hit him in the nuts as recompense for smacking Thanos when they were about to win. We don't get any payoff or acknowledgement of that moment. Last big one why does no one else die in the final battle? I mean, I'm kinda glad they didn't, but the stakes seemed high enough that some us would have to lose this battle if we were gonna win it. Ant man definitely looked like he was dead when he got hit straight on with a blast that knocked down the whole Avengers compound. If I keep going I get into really nit picky things that wouldn't actually bother me if I felt the movie was really good. Is it just me who felt like what even was this movie? when I left the theater? Infinity war was so much better, but please change my view, I really wanted to love this movie. EDIT I forgot to include the biggest missing moment for me No team up combos like we saw in Avengers 1 and 2? No tracking shot like Avengers 1 or the opening of Avengers 2, where we follow hero to hero and see what's happening across the battlefield? That was a heartbreaking omission for me. EDIT I watched the movie a second time. I am still disappointed. But, knowing what was going to happen, that I should expect the plot to be lacking, and which moments to analyze more, I was able to enjoy the character moments a little better the second time. This made me realize that if you went to watch Endgame just to see these characters on screen doing things, then you probably loved this movie. Which is what most people are looking for, an entertaining movie with your favorite characters all getting their moments. The action sequences are great, the scenes are well acted, and all your comic book fantasies are brought to life. To the average viewer, I\u2019m sure this movie is mind blowingly awesome. For me, and it seems a lot of people on this thread, it\u2019s disappointing because we\u2019re invested in the characters and the story. On the surface this movie is great, but once you start to think about it in the context of the greater MCU and it\u2019s story telling acumen, it is not a satisfying conclusion to the Infinity Saga. It doesn\u2019t continue the story that was so expertly built up, it sacrifices that plot in order to force a bunch of unearned character moments.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Endgame was disappointing\n","id":"b589aef2-099b-437c-973d-eecbcfc7374e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cluster bomb ban<|ARGUMENT|>\"U.S. Cluster Munitions Policy\". Briefing by Stephen D. Mull, Acting Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs. 21 May 2008 - \"And the United States is proud of the role that we've played in cleaning up battlefields around the world. Since 1993, we have spent more than $1.2 billion on cleaning up war zones and former conflict zones to make sure that they're safe for civilians to go back and reinhabit. And no other country in the world comes close to that. And it also exceeds - we do this not just where the United States is involved, but in conflict zones around the world where the United States is not a party to the conflict.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US cluster bombs are justified by US \"clean-up\" actions\n","id":"1a713a7a-8a94-4c60-ba4b-bd39bc6002d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should paternity testing of minors require the consent of both parents?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people who are adopted feel a strong need to find out about their biological parents, even if they have had a positive experience with their adoptive parents. This suggests that biology does create a connection with others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if biological is not the only foundation for a family, it creates an important connection between family members.\n","id":"a202a457-2bf8-4fc1-895c-fe7b52a8deca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The themes are revenge and the proclaimed normality and banality of violence. The characters are either perverts or cool, detached and independent people or both . The dialogues deal with reasoning of the perverts, or the independence and detachment of the independent, detached characters. The actors are mostly Samuel L Jackson he is the same guy in every movie except Django , Tim Roth etc. The music is mostly 60s or 70s motown stuff or easy listening. When you see your first Tarantino movie you think its clever and original well, it is . But if you have seen several its apparent that Tarantino is extremely limited compared to other directors and artists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tarantino is completely stuck with the same themes, character types, dialogues, actors and music for the last 20 years.\n","id":"26f8c0b8-eb84-4df2-b5fc-0e01ed21d38e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the environment being sacrificed for the economy?<|ARGUMENT|>Although the Heathrow airport expansion may appear to be favourising the economy over the environment, it is still apparent that the British Government aims to cut carbon emissions 80% by 2050. From this fact, the government is not sacrificing the economy for the environment as it is ensuring the environment improves too in the long run. The transport secretary, Hoon has declared that these changes at Heathrow would allow Britain to lead the fight against climate change while still adding airport capacity In this sense, the British Government is trying to assure a balance between the improvements in the economy and the environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The British Government is still committed to cutting carbon emissions 80% by 2050.\n","id":"7ba0744b-9edb-4770-93bb-2c92c726f426"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The electoral college was never intended to provide an exact equality of each individual vote majoritarianism. Our government is purposely set up to be federalist. The reason for the electoral college is to provide input from both the states and the individuals in the election of their executive. It balances rapid swings in public opinion, and a less volatile input from state governments. If you think your state does their electoral votes poorly pressure the state to amend their rules.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electoral college protects elections from the capricious and easily swayed nature of public opinion.\n","id":"867c7a42-90af-460a-b986-e8c0898bf3af"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do offspring have a right to know their biological parents?<|ARGUMENT|>If a parent does not wish to raise a child, that is acceptable -- but their identity should be discoverable. There should be no compulsion to know who your parents really are, and there may perhaps sometimes be risks involved in knowing, but the choice should always be there and it can only be the child\u2019s choice when they are of age. It would be wrong for either set of parents to make this choice in advance on the child\u2019s behalf.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rediscovering parents and children has often been described as highly rewarding:\n","id":"85961105-25d2-4e26-a714-28971f83a88c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capital Punishment in the US: Inhumane or Just?<|ARGUMENT|>Out of all the countries commonly referred to as \"the west\", the USA is the only country to still actively use the death penalty for crimes such as murder.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most major democracies have abolished and condemned the death penalty. The US should not be different.\n","id":"976ecfff-7ced-4dbf-b040-dc80d5400c9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Something I see come up a lot in music discussion threads, whether on Sputnik Music , r Music, or even a more niche sub like r PostHardcore, is that being very specific with genres is an annoying thing. This is an especially large joke in extreme metal discussions where there are multitudes of different sub genres. I think these are great. If you like a band with a specific sound and you want to find more bands like them your best bet is to search for bands in the same genre. Being vague or broad with genres is a great way to not find more bands like the ones you're looking for. For example, say I like Protest the Hero and want to find more bands like them. They have a lot of influences in their style but could be chalked up into the umbrella genre of metal. If I search metal I will get a ton of bands that sound absolutely nothing like Protest the Hero. Even narrowing it down to Progressive Metal still gets a lot of bands that aren't very similar, like Opeth. But if I search for Mathcore which is a lot more specific I can find bands that sound a lot like them. There's no reason for the disdain of genres. No one complains about when movies get a million genre tags Example but when bands do they get annoyed and I can't see why.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genres are good and being very specific with genres is a positive thing.\n","id":"b4af06a5-b1fc-491f-a3b6-b4eb83c6cccf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We are currently experiencing exponential change. Every few years a game changing app is developed and disseminated. Think email, iPhone, twitter, uber, instagram, facebook. Humans are always plugged in and tuned out. Our attention spans are decreasing and we are less introspective. As a consequence we seek instant gratification in the forms of porn, music, and video . Unfortunately, we accomplish less and less. The only people actually doing work are those that have high stamina and mental proficiency. High achievers. The rest of us could care less and accomplish little. Emotionally we are weak. We are immature and self centered. Physically we are drained. Our brains are going non stop. However, we don't accomplish much and we waste what little time we have in the day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe humans not economy are becoming less productive and intelligent\n","id":"daae1164-657b-4172-862f-d378b391b91f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Those Out of the Loop, you can read the original thread After 5 Years On Roll20, I Just Cancelled and DELETED My Account but to make a long post short u ApostleO created a post in r roll20 critical of the platform. Moderators found his username suspiciously similar to u apostleoftruth's, which was previously banned, and banned him for posting on an alt to get around the ban. u ApostleO appealed the ban, insisted he wasn't u apostleoftruth, and asked moderators to check with Reddit to confirm the two users had different IP addresses. The mods did and Reddit confirmed they were different IP addresses. In the meantime, OP went full neckbeard and took to various D D subs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. to repeatedly denounce roll20 and encourage people to boycott roll20. In light of that, u NolanT, co founder of roll20 and moderator of the sub, said he'd rather not have that kind of person in the community and upheld the ban from the sub. As far as I'm aware he wasn't actually banned from using roll20. u ApostleO and r DnD went nuclear, downvoted all of u NolanT's posts to oblivion, and, for today anyway, r DnD might as well be renamed r LetsPostHowWe'reDeletingOurRoll20Accounts. To be clear, I think u NolanT acted too hasty in banning u ApostleO just because their usernames were so similar. With that said, had u ApostleO acted like an adult and waited for the mods to confirm he wasn't that other banned poster, his ban would have been lifted. When it comes to r DnD as a whole, roll20 is a popular Dungeons and Dragons platform. Deleting your account because some guy was mistakenly banned on the Reddit sub then decidedly banned when he acted so childishly about it is just silly. D D isn't known for attracting players with the most advanced social skills but pretty much everyone losing their shit over this is acting like a spoiled child. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Yesterday's \/r\/DnD drama is overblown and posters deleting roll20 accounts because of it are acting childishly.\n","id":"98281120-e602-4060-ac07-bb20d7a20b11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be discussed in school science lessons?<|ARGUMENT|>Scientists go to great lengths to prove their theories. Thousands and thousands of experiments are carried out in order to make scientific breakthrough discoveries. The Big Bang Theory is just one of many theories that scientists throughout the centuries have strived to prove. The idea that the solar system emerged from a swirl of matter began with Immanuel Kant 1724\u20131804 and has been mulled over since then, particularly by the British physicist, Stephen Hawking. Creationism does not have any scientific support: despite it being believed by millions and believed for thousands of years. Surely, by now, someone would have been able to scientifically prove this. It is not worthy of being taught in a science lesson. Creationism is a theory, true, but no more valid scientifically than that of the film The Matrix- it could be true but it does not seem likely to be proven, at least not scientifically. It is certainly worth discussing for those so interested, but it is not of true scientific value in the way that the Big Bang theory, for example, is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Creationism lacks scientific support, therefore should not be taught in a science lesson\n","id":"14d6b515-89f8-4d47-bdd3-89e5824fd145"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Russia Interfering In Foreign Governments?<|ARGUMENT|>Several countries have expelled foreign diplomats in response to evidence that Russia was culpable for the poisoning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Russia's attempted assassination of Mr Skripal and Ms Skripal in the UK proves their interference.\n","id":"c8263027-d311-4f13-ab37-dc841c7ba692"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see a lot of videos with titles like Angry car driver get a revenge on biker That's not a direct title or a link to a video, it's just a general name that describes what most of the videos are. In these videos, a biker will do something mildly annoying like honk too many times, drive too fast, or touch a car. The car driver then gets very angry and chased the biker down. Sometimes the car will try to ram the bike. Sometimes they get caught at a red light and pulled off of their bike and beaten up. If you read the comments, people root for the car driver. They say the biker deserved it. They say the biker finally learned respect. They say that the car driver was just defending their property. First of all, respect earned through violence is NOT respect, it is fear. By chasing down a biker, you're not only putting yourself and the biker in danger, you're endangering everybody on the road. You also aren't defending your property. There's no damage to your car. There's nothing broken or scratched, you're just mad that he touched it. Self defense implies that he was an aggressor and you were forced to defend yourself. If a biker is driving past you and you chase him, that is not defense. When you pursue somebody, you are the aggresor. You are breaking the law. From a legal standpoint, you are playing vigilante. That's illegal for a reason. Innocent people get hurt when a civilian tries to be John Wick or Jack Reacher. How are you going to feel when you ram the biker into the oncoming lane and kill a kid in the backseat of a suburban? Alternatively, if you are a biker, don't chase down assholes in cars. Sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes people don't see you. If you're driving 20mph over the speed limit and weaving through traffic, you can't expect casual drivers to all be aware of you. And when somebody does eventually cut you off, don't chase them. They have 4 wheels, you have 2. That's just stupid. You also aren't a professional vlogger just because you have a go pro. There is no need for any bikers to chase a car down the freeway at 80mph just to get their face on camera. Bike enthusiasts often comment that the car driver is an asshole and he deserves to be removed from the road. Bikers sometimes even start street fights with car drivers just for a simple mistake. That isn't justified either. My point road rage is bad. Glorifying and justifying assault in the street is only making the world a more dangerous place. You aren't teaching anybody respect by trying to kill them. I, personally, can not see any way to justify any of these actions. Would love to see somebody's opposimg opinion. Maybe there is a way to justify it, I just can't see it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that it is justified to attack people on motorcycles just for being annoying.\n","id":"fa9ae522-0d18-4776-a538-660c88114886"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that marijuana should be legal. There are claims that it is a gateway drug, and that many users turn to harder drugs, but there is not substantial evidence to support this. There is a question over what the actual effects of the drug are and whether it is truly harmful. Its legalisation would allow a broader examination of these effects, and the conditions under which it is made available could be revised. Marijuana broadens the mind, and as it is my life, I should not be restricted by the law so long as I am doing no harm to others. It is less damaging than both alcohol and tobacco, and they are legal. It could be regulated by the government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marijuana should be legal\n","id":"9be3a34e-02cc-42c1-a261-8c057fb737f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that, like women, men should not be legally obligated to their children unless they consent. To put it simply, it would mean that no man could be forced to pay child support unless he had explicitly agreed to do so through a written agreement for convenience, marriage could act as equivalent to such consent . For relationships where the man willingly agreed to be a parent most commonly a married couple having kids together and splitting up child support for the non custodial parent would be mandatory, as it is now. There are of course many objections, which I will address Q1 Why should men be able to avoid consequences for having sex, but not women? A Due to biology, men cannot undergo abortion or childbirth. That is not a justification to force men into involuntary fatherhood. Further, biology is the same reason why a man can legally be forced to experience his potential child being killed against his will, while women cannot. The biological fact of women birthing children has both advantages and disadvantage. Q2 Women would be duped into having kids by men who say they want a child, but then take off. A Since a man has to explicitly agree to parental obligations, women would know prior to conception that unless a man had made that agreement, he would not be held responsible for any resulting kids. This way, no woman could be tricked by a man who claims to want kids but has not gotten married or signed the agreement. Q3 What is stopping a man from signing the agreement, then change his mind and disappear once the woman has given birth or has passed the abortion timeline? A Nothing other than the existing penalties of law, which include wage garnishment and imprisonment. This would be equivalent and therefore, no worse to the current reality where a man may verbally say he wants kids, and then take off after childbirth. Q4 In some places even in America, abortion access is limited. How is it fair that a man could avoid parental obligations but a woman could not? A In all 50 states women may legally abandon their children, by literally putting the baby down and walking away, with no paperwork or other steps required. Further, such a question implies that in places where abortion is freely accessible, and even paid for by the government England, Canada then it would be justified to allow men to avoid parental obligations. And also implies that abortion access and rights should be improved. Q5 If men can opt out of child support, that harms actual children and so that is not ok. Abortion does not harm children, it only kills fetuses, which is ok. A There are several responses to this. If men exist in a state of non consent prior to conception, then no child or even fetus exists. Thus, there is no child or even fetus to harm. A woman choosing to have sex would be analogous to a woman voluntarily going to a sperm clinic neither are entitled to the money of a man who did not consent to parenthood. Second, women who know they could not force men to pay for kids they never wanted would be more likely to have an abortion. Abortion is of course quite ok, since women currently have and should have the right to abort their fetuses for any reason. Third, social services could be increased for those low income women who do still birth their child. Q6 Allowing men to opt out could make a woman decide to abort her fetus when she otherwise would not have. This is controlling women's bodily autonomy, which is wrong. A This logic is faulty. Suppose that tomorrow, the government cancelled all social welfare programs for low income parents. This would most definitely in at least some cases persuade women to have abortions when they would otherwise not have. And yet, it is wrong to say that by cancelling these programs, the government is controlling women's bodily autonomy. While we could easily criticize and oppose the government's decision, we could not rightly say that their action is controlling women's autonomy. I believe I have thought of and addressed all potential objections. Please attempt to  if you disagree.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that men should exist in a default state of *non-consent* regarding parental obligations prior to conception.\n","id":"15d8750b-16ee-4e56-bf89-8b583a7dc503"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is a bit of a big topic so I'm gonna list off my main gripes with the common line that we need to respect veterans because they fought and died for the rights we get to enjoy . But first I'd like to say something that I do believe is important to state. I do believe we should respect and take care of our veterans Along with trans gendered people, veterans are one of the demographics with the highest rates of suicide This could for a number of reasons. Maybe the horrors they had to face resulted in serious mental illnesses. Maybe it's because on the battlefield they get to experience a social environment of comradery that is similar to the one human beings evolved in with our tribes. And maybe they don't find that sense of fulfillment when they get back. It could also be a shitty health care system, how easy it is to get access to a gun, or the difficulties soldiers have finding a career in our society. It's probably a combination of those along with many other factors I haven't mentioned. However, no matter the underlying reason for it, one thing I strongly believe is that our society needs to do better to serve these veterans. Now, on to the arguments 1 The soldiers ideals aren't my ideals There are really two arguments here. The first is that the majority of soldiers probably don't go in with idealistic goals Instead, many join because of the great pay and job benefits. The only time I seriously considered joining the military was when I thought it had significant financial legal benefits to offer me. I figured I could be an engineer or do something away from the front line and then be able to pay for my college back in the US. Many of the people I've talked to say that even though they may be patriotic, the career benefits were the main reasons they joined. When you're young and you're starting to realize that you shit around too much in school, the military is one of the last, and often the most decorative, opportunities remaining for you. This can paint the military in a noble light as a second chance for kids that didn't take hold of their responsibilities early enough. But it can also be taken as incentive for the military industrial complex to prey on the already poor and disadvantaged kids as easy targets for recruitment. The second part of this is that when people do join for idealistic reasons, it's often an ideology that's totally opposed to mine. Take the example of Islamberg 9 min a peaceful Islamic community in New York. The community is a type of Muslim Utopia and is mostly closed off from the rest of society. Although there's never been any reports of violence or criminal activity from the community, right wing media often targets the community, playing Islamist training footage from the Middle East and claiming it's happening inside our own borders . While this alarmism may help them get the viewers they so desperately want, it also fuels hate against peaceful people. Local police forces are very unneasy about the community, not because of violence coming out of it, but because of the added burden on them to protect the community from far right nut jobs that want to harm them to protect our country . This 12 minute YouTube video by former marine Jon Ritzheimer shows this fuckhead driving towards Islamberg with a gun yelling FUCK YOU MUSLIMS FUCK ALL OF YOU while cocking his pistol. Luckily, the local police force was able to intercept him before he got there. They did not make an arrest. Obviously, not everyone who joins the military organizes anti muslim protests and makes video messages to their family explaining that they won't be able to be there for Christmas and New Years because they swore an oath to protect the Constitution he seriously says that like 1 minute into the video . However, this attitude is still widespread enough to seriously deflate my confidence and respect for the US Military. Jon Dickheimer is a prime example to prove that being a veteran doesn't mean you automatically deserve any type of respect from anyone. 2 They're not even fighting for their own ideals Many soldiers cite 9 11 as the thing that pushed them to join the military. This might seem as pretty good evidence of how much soldiers are motivated by a sense of duty to their country to join. However, I think this is also very showing of how large of a role propaganda really plays in people's decision to join. There's a common a common mantra in politics that goes something like never let a good crisis go to waste . It's very well documented that a foreign attack often results in massive spikes civilians' approval of their leadership. Just take a look at George Bush's approval rating throughout his two terms One thing that immediately stands out is the massive spike right after 9 11. It's fair to say that this event likely had a huge effect on people's decisions to join the military. However, one thing that's often left out of the conversation is how far the Bush Administration went to continue to milk this popular sentiment years after the incident. For example, 2001 was the year when the White House began paying the NFL to sing the National Anthem before games, do jet flyovers, and wave the American flag. Funding for military recruitment efforts also increased and so did their targeting methods. Today, if you watch any NFL game, you're sure to see an ad romanticizing our marines or army. As someone who never watches sports, other than the occasionally basketball game, the only time I ever remember seeing so many ads was Saturday morning cartoon binges. Now that I'm older, I realize it is part of the strategy to target the most impressionable demographics. However, the most abhorrent part of this to me is the bullshit they sold. Although the idea is decreasing, a poll by Shibley Telhami found that 38 of Americans still believe there was clear evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq an idea that even the Bush administration has admitted to falsifying. While this particular idea may not seem that harmful on its own, there are many other subtle ideologies that were allowed to spread because of their contribution to support for the war. The war was allowed to be framed as another crusade and drew on many Americans' identities as Christians as a way to differentiate ourselves from Middle Easterners. Ideas about how anti liberal and religiously fundamental societies like Iraq's were were also allowed to spread in order to gain support from the left. Now that many of these ideas are finally starting to die off, we see some of the most radical ideas that formed during this time. Anti muslim extremism like Jon Ritzheimer has resulted in a very ugly and, in my opinion, anti American ideology to spread. Because of this, the fact that someone joined the military doesn't always serve as a badge of their commitment to American ideals, but often as a badge of how much their views were manipulated by a short sighted political machine. 3 But what about veterans of other wars? Most of the arguments I made still hold for wars that America has fought throughout its history. I'm just gonna go through some of them right here the Revolutionary War Although both the left and the right love to idealize our foundation, most historians outside of the US view the events as evidence of how much people hate taxes and a prime example of the effects of salutary neglect. Taxation without representation seems like a good point, but it wasn't widely used as the war's slogan until later stages of the altercation. It also wasn't really true since the colonies did have representation. Furthermore, it can be argued that for the millions of Native Americans and the millions of slaves brought over from Africa the world may have been a better place without the US becoming a nation. Especially since the UK banned slavery almost half a century before the US. Furthermore, only about a third of the colonists actually wanted independence while another third didn't care, but was later forced into picking a side or saw it as an opportunities to free the debts they owed. the Spanish American war Can't deny that I benefit from this, but if you're Mexican, you probably feel a different type of way for losing California which has proven to be such a valuable economic asset. Obviously also not fought for my rights. the Civil War This is one of the wars I truly believe in. However, I can't ignore the fact that only about 10 of Northerners actually considered themselves abolitionists while the majority of people were just fighting to keep the nation together. the Spanish American War shit, Cuba wants independence for the same reasons we cited for our own independence. How do we stop it? actual quote ^^notactualquote I'm too tired to get into the two World Wars, but, once again, we didn't join them for ideological reasons. The Times was singing Hitler's praises before the war and we had our own problem with anti Semitism. The only reason we actually took anti Semitism realistically after the war was because it was convenient to our identity in differentiating ourselves from authoritarianism and Germans. The Cold War just like democracy was a threat to European governments during Napoleanic times, communism was a threat to the US' power structure and we tried to contain it at any costs. Even when it meant supporting brutal dictators that carried out massacres and genocides. Here's a list of all the US wars If you can get passed all the Native American massacres and find one that was actually fought for a noble cause, please hit me up. Closing note The reason why I posted this is because many times when I'm having a conversation and someone drops that line, it's hard to get passed it. There's a huge social taboo against arguing the point so I usually ignore it and go around it. Often times it even supports my points, but I would like to feel more confident in my own views. In the event that I do take on the point, I want to really understand other people's perspectives to make sure that I'm not missing something big and to make sure that I respect things people hold very dearly. I don't want to be disrespectful because I'm ignorant. Perhaps, you'll even get me to see it through a different lens and actually change my stance on the topic. I'd like to restate that I definitely don't mean to incite any disrespect of veterans or people who decide to join the military. These people have gone through a lot in their lives and statistics don't ever tell you the full story of a person's motivations, passions, and experiences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Soldiers didn't die for my rights.\n","id":"f62e7faa-6c86-4626-99ea-904b5b4d769c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Human beings are social animals in the sense that they need other human beings to survive. Early humans needed to live in groups that would provide food, shelter, and protection. Obviously, humans needed and still need, although artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization may change that sex to propagate the species. These things are still true today. Modern institutions like welfare programs, food stamps, police, fire departments, and all of the other elements of a liberal democratic society are manifestations of the social nature of human beings. However, there's a difference between needing other humans to survive and needing intimate relationships. By the way, I'm using intimate relationships as an umbrella term for friendships and romantic and or sexual relationships. It seems that society's obsession with such relationships has really kicked into overdrive over the last century, and it only seems to be getting worse. Surely, technology like social networking sites and smartphones are playing a role, but so are Hollywood and the media in general. It seems you can't watch a single movie or TV show without some kind of intimate subplot. Scientists at universities actually spend money researching intimate relationships and often publish their results in scientific journals. We're constantly overwhelmed with messages about how important these relationships are to our lives. Kids are brainwashed into believing they're important, which I find especially tragic. People now waste significant portions of their lives pursuing these relationships when they don't really need them. We even go so far as to grant special legal status to certain intimate relationships by granting them marriage licenses, which is basically the equivalent of saying you two really, really, really like each other so we're going to give you special benefits . It's quite sad, in my opinion. It all seems like bullshit to me. I don't think people a century or a millennium ago were so obsessed with intimate relationships or intimacy. I don't think people in third world countries who are suffering from real issues like hunger, poverty, and disease care about intimate relationships. No one ever died from a lack of intimacy in their lives the same way they did from lack of food, water, or shelter. Yes, humanity, like all sexually reproducing species, needs fertilization of an egg by a sperm to survive. But that doesn't mean humanity needs intimacy or intimate relationships. It doesn't mean humans need friends, girlfriends , boyfriends , or whatever cute terms we come up with. It just means a sperm needs to fertilize an egg, and as I said earlier, as technology advances, we'll soon be able to render even sex obsolete. Anyway, tl dr There's a difference between humans needing the services of other humans in order to survive and needing fertilization of eggs by sperm in order to survive and humans needing friendships or romantic relationships. Fertilization, food, water, shelter and medical care are necessities. Friendship, romance, intimacy, and the rest are basically toys, not unlike iPads or MTV.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that human beings don't need intimate relationships.\n","id":"c1eb4ee1-cb04-413a-bfdf-90589bd58921"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start this off by disclosing that I am an atheist. i don't see this as a main reason, but it does obviously color my opinion so it has to be stated up front. Yet still, with all the allegations of rape, organized shielding and money coming in without any tax ending up misappropriated virtually unchecked by any third party organization. The existence of the Vatican City State perpetuates the problem by leaving the justice in the hands of the country who creates the problems in the first place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I can no longer justify the existence of the Vatican City State.\n","id":"404964e8-866d-4324-b7bf-8e7324aff228"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Co-Teaching Meet The Needs Of Most Special Education Students?<|ARGUMENT|>Students who are constantly ostracised by special education may struggle to other integrate with their peers; it is important to help them however possible to address this issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even when the student is not able to get a lot out of the instruction, they are learning valuable social skills.\n","id":"5169bd1f-06b0-4292-8dec-e3150a7691ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Hey everyone This has been a lot of fun, you guys are definitely a great trial by fire for philosophical arguments, proofs, and whatever else. Still feel free to respond, but if you do so PLEASE read the statement in its ENTIRETY and check the comments to avoid redundancy, because a lot of people had the same comments, which undoubtedly was at least in part my fault for being imprecise. Also please check out my edit at the bottom of the post, it includes an important classification. Also, in this edit, I am going to include what I would define as a deity. Note that this was not originally in the post and this is my fault entirely, those who argue with me on the basis of my definition in the comments did not have this portion and were therefore justified in their discussion, not just only arguing to some of my points. Here are the characteristics that, in my opinion, define a deity A. It must be an entity that is able to do the impossible B. It must specifically be able to create something out of nothing C. It must specifically be able to bring about its own existence special thanks to JSRambo for this suggestion, btw end of edit I have formulated a logical argument for the existence of a deity, and don't really see any possibility for error in it. Please read the whole thing if you are planning on commenting. I agree with the general postulation that the burden of proof lies on the theist, and look forward to your refutation of the logical conclusions reached in the following examination. I'd like to put forward two axioms that certainly we all can agree are apodictic. We Exist. Right Now is happening. If you were to contest these two points then we have no basis off of which to argue, and this discussion would shift into some sort of a debate in the realm of metaphysics, which I am not interested in. Given those two points, simple syllogism can bring us to the conclusion that there exists a deity. Next I would like to present two possibilities. Either A. The Universe had a beginning. or B. The Universe did not have a beginning and has therefore existed for eternity. A. The Universe that had a beginning. I would like to begin this examination with a simple illustration If I were to stand in a hypothetical room containing infinite space, holding a gun to the head of, say, Matt Damon, waiting to pull the trigger, but before doing so I had to ask the permission of another person, say, Scarlett Johansson. So I ask Scarlett Johansson Scarlett, can I shoot Matt Damon? and she responds Of course But first the person behind you must shoot him. It is at this point that I realize that there is a person behind me, who also has a gun pointing at Matt Damon's head. He also has to ask permission before pulling the trigger. Scarlett, he asks, can I shoot Matt? . Scarlett, true to form, replies just as before Of course But first the person behind you must shoot him. . The exercise repeats again and again and again with the same circumstances. Will I ever be able to shoot Matt Damon? Of course not Not unless someone at some point along the infinite chain of gun wielding Matt Damon haters' ability to pull the trigger is NOT dependent on someone behind him shooting first. End Illustration Let's discuss existence. You, me, mountains, baked beans, ears of corn, South America, the planet earth, et cetera all exist dependently. Meaning they derive their existence from something else. Mountains exist because of certain geological principles in place and the movement of tectonic plates, you exist because your parents copulated resulting in your conception, ears of corn exist because they were planted and harvested by a farmer, et cetera. Everything we see and experience derives its existence from something else, and therefore exists dependently. Unless there exists something which does not derive its existence from something else, the source of all other existing principles and objects, our existence and therefore aforementioned Axiom 1 we exist is impossible. Therefore, we are left asking what exists independently and derives its existence FROM ITSELF, a property of a deity. If such an object, item, or being does not exist, existence in and of itself is impossible because the aforementioned chain of dependent existence extends forever, without me ever shooting Matt Damon , or without us existing. Either I. There exists something that derives its existence from itself, a property of a deity or II. The Universe itself derives its existence from itself, which is a property of a deity. I. If you are to argue that something, separate and discrete from the Universe generates its own existence, you are assigning it the attributes of a deity and arguing that a deity exists. To simply put it, any item without divine attributes cannot generate it's own existence because for it to create itself, it must first exist, and if it already exists then it need not create itself, as the creation has already happened. This is a logical paradox in the observable scientific world, however for a deity who exists outside of space time it is not an impossibility, as the logic of the observable universe does not apply to a being outside of, separate and discrete from the observable Universe. II. If you were to argue that the Universe derives its existence from itself, you are arguing that the Universe has the attributes of a deity, and supporting my arguments for the reason presented above. Also, the Universe, bound by the laws of physics, cannot generate itself out of nothing, considering the fact that energy and matter is not created nor destroyed, but even if you were to contest the validity of that scientific principle, a self generating Universe would still be a paradoxical argument and therefore impossible for the reasons listed above. In conclusion for argument A, a Universe with a beginning is a logical impossibility, leaving only one remaining possibility, that is, possibility B The Universe is eternal. B. The Universe with no beginning The concept of the Eternal Universe can be disproven quite simply using both simple logic and the application of existing scientific principles. Technically speaking, only one proof is necessary to disprove the concept, but I will present both for redundancy's sake. Proof 1 Logic It is impossible for the universe to have existed eternally. A time space model reflecting that of a geometric ray is possible if there exists a God , meaning the Universe has definite starting point and continues forward for eternity, but a universe that has already existed for eternity creates a logical paradox that is impossible to avoid. If the Universe existed for an eternity before now, that means there was an infinite number of moments leading up to this one. If you have a job to complete with an infinite number of tasks, will you ever complete the job? Of course not, because the number of tasks literally does not cease. By the same token, if an infinite number of moments had to occur before this one, it is impossible for us to ever reach this moment, and that would mean that the aforementioned Axiom 2 'Right Now' is happening. is false. This is obviously not the case. Proof 2 The Second Law of Thermodynamics The applied Second Law of Thermodynamics simply states that each time energy is used it becomes less useable. No energy actually is destroyed, it simply reverts to less useable forms. For example, after burning a wood log all that remains is the ashes, burnt material, and heat that was released, the same net amount of energy, but nowhere near as useable as the original log. It is because of this law that we know that eventually, at some point in the distant, distant future, every star in every solar system in every galaxy in the universe will burn out, the same as our own, not because the energy is gone, but rather because the energy has reverted into a gaseous form that is not useable in the reactions necessary for a sun to exist. However, if the Universe existed eternally before now, then every star in the sky, including our own sun would have already burnt out. If it takes a finite amount of time for all energy in a system to transform into an unusable state, given an infinite amount of time, that transformation will occur, but we are aware of the fact that our sun still burns today and therefore we know, by a second proof, that the Universe is not eternal. In conclusion, let's summarize the logical processes that we went through in this argument and affirm that they are sound We recognized both that we exist and that right now is occurring. Next, we also recognized that the Universe either had a beginning or did not. We proved that, assuming it did have a beginning, said beginning is impossible without something that exists independently. We proved that said independently existing object could not be the Universe in and of itself using logic, because in the act of creating oneself something must already exist. Then we used both logic and existing scientific properties to eliminate the only other possibility, an eternal universe. I look forward to your responses, and seeing the flaws in my logic, not only for the purposes of changing my worldview, but even for the possibility of making my argument even stronger. EDIT And in light of my final comment there, making my argument stronger , I'd like to add this little qualifier to my statement here at the end, but don't want to doctor the original post and cause confusion. I've definitely noticed some key rhetorical weaknesses in what I wrote above thanks to your kind adjudication of my view, and I have an amendment clarification, and also another statement. 1 Clarification I'll just quote from a comment I responded to, asking why I'd define a Universe that generates itself as a deity gt Thanks for your comment. A lot of people have kind of misread what I wrote to mean something different, obviously my phrasing was very weak in that portion of the statement. What I meant was more so Unless the Universe is a deity in and of itself a Pantheistic god , it cannot derive its existence from itself. Effectively I meant, hey, its impossible for things to derive their existence from themselves, and also impossible for the Universe to exist forever, and that means that we must not exist ourselves, but we know that we exist, therefore, there must be something that exists eternally or derives its existence from itself a deity. Hopefully this clears up what I was saying. i deeply apologize and am frustrated with myself for allowing such imprecision in my original statement That is what I meant. Also, this is NOT the classic Bible Belt well gee, huck huck huck, not even atheists know how the dun yuNievurse got made, so must be Geezus Christe . Don't treat it as such. This is a logical proof stating that it is impossible for something existing naturally to generate it's own existence and its impossible for the Universe to exist eternally, and therefore the Universe must have been created by something that generates its own existence, a deity. Anyways, I look forward to seeing more responses from all of you<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God is real, not the Christian God per se, but a God exists without any doubt\n","id":"4f760c8c-1955-447b-8dd0-ebab58a94815"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>The percentage of women in Computer Science jobs decreased between 1990 32% to 2019 25% despite a larger number of jobs available, while the percentage of women in STEM increased by 23% from 1993 to 2010.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Though the number of women in STEM fields are increasing - these numbers are stagnating in tech-specific fields.\n","id":"492ea081-42ef-42c6-b891-3ad1ff9bb7fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>Comparing open Sundays areas with others shows that consumers do not make more shopping trips p.33 More hours to shop does not increase the amount of money most consumers have to spend.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Extra opening hours do not change the percentage of consumers' income invested, but only costs companies wages.\n","id":"e541f147-9e18-4052-980c-227c53c563f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Google Censor Their Search Results In Order To Operate In China?<|ARGUMENT|>The existence of democratically enacted limits, such as environmental regulations, minimum wage laws, and workplace safety regulations indicate that society writ-large believes that there are considerations other than pure profit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is often expected that a company limit their ability to make profit due to ethical concerns such as complying with minimum wage laws and workplace safety regulations.\n","id":"22b23896-cd35-4459-a553-8bf22e439fca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Liquid Democracy does not stop delegates from amassing votes and gaining power over voted decisions. However, delegates can not abuse that power to forward their personal agenda as this would result in the loss of votes and power.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liquid Democracy reduces centralisation of power from the few, and gives it to the many.\n","id":"b01aa4ec-19f9-48ab-82c2-e07cd17f38c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DC handgun ban<|ARGUMENT|>Oral arguments in DC vs. Heller. March 19th, 2008 - \"JUSTICE KENNEDY: You think Madison was guided by the experience and the expressions of the right in English law, including the Bill of Rights of 1689?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The 2nd Amendment was influenced by the English Bill of Rights to confer an individual right to bear arms.\n","id":"284b93c7-8241-4ad9-a0bb-f8b136593d0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>We are at a point where we can no more respect and tolerate, vast differences in notions about the well-being of sentient creatures morality, than we can respect and tolerate vast differences in the notions of how disease spreads, or safety standards in buildings and airplanes. We simply must converge, it's a question of survival.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion denies humanity the responsibility of Morality and wants to shackle us to itself in doing so.\n","id":"dab5ad9d-ed9e-451f-bdd4-a6976790f1fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm aware of the concerns about only landowners having votes and how less educated women before the suffrage movement were denied voting rights. My issue is drug abusing illiterates getting as much of a vote in a true democracy as an educated and responsible tax payer and that strikes me as nonsensical. I know the US is not a true democracy so I've tried to leave the US specifically out of this question despite the fact that uneducated people do have a major influence on local and state politics and their votes do get reflected in a representative democracy. Edit wow. I am pleasantly overwhelmed at the responses that have been posted here. My most sincere apologies for not being more engaged in the debate. I have not changed my views but realize now that my use of the phrase drug abusing illiterates derailed the discussion and broader point that some people should not be making the rules for others. Some people are simply not in a position to provide the moral compass or intellectual firepower to ensure that society is run in an optimal way. The thinking around the wisdom of the crowd was almost persuasive but it failed because the whole point of representative democracy is to repress the tendency towards mob rule, which is the flip side of wisdom of the crowd. My view is not an effort to disenfranchise but to state that humanity should be capable of better. The argument that we have nothing better than representative democracy is accurate but it is also a sad commentary on what we are willing to set as standards for ourselves. Rather than being some deeply cynical disenfranchiser, perhaps I'm really more of a hopeless optimist. I live my life thinking that laws and leaders can be good and do good but we won't get there if idiots and demagogues attempt to abuse the system. In the end, I couldn't be more grateful for the time you've taken to consider my position. My inability to clearly articulate my feelings wound up with the happy accidental results of a great many arguments here that enlightened my understanding of our current status. My view remains that human beings are capable of and worthy of so much better than the governments and laws we've settled for and, in some ways, your efforts in this thread only reinforced my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A true democracy - where the least educated have as much of a vote as an educated citizen - is a disaster waiting to happen.\n","id":"255d26ef-1305-4727-913b-a6896ba2d8cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What will life look like once humans achieve longer lifespans?<|ARGUMENT|>The God-like attributes will allow humans to make even more technological and scientific advancements. Those might consolidate and even lead to greater amounts of these, or even new God-like powers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans will get closer to obtaining godly characteristics like: immortality eternal youth and high intellect\n","id":"4526539e-8615-4366-a773-8e11efccf5d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is violence always wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Violence is justified when it's reaction to tyranny and systematic oppression. Loosing the ability to use violence would result in the death of liberty in such cases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's a right to resist with violence to a violent government.\n","id":"ca544ca1-0e04-41a7-99dd-c56c107ff28a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Christianity in the 20th Century Good for Europe?<|ARGUMENT|>In late 20th century Germany, Church sanctuary was beneficial for refugees, who were able to seek refuge in church buildings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Church asylum gives shelter to refugees who are protected nowhere else.\n","id":"91a8a3fa-6820-4aba-be08-bbe934c14846"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Inheritance Be Minimized to Create an Equal Outset for Everyone?<|ARGUMENT|>Hi! I'm an admin in www.kialo.com which is quite similar and more developed so far. Maybe we could integrate the two and you become admin over there too? Please mark this claim but if you want to chat invite me :<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inheritance should be minimized to create an equal outset for everyone.\n","id":"23c9718e-e1e4-4b7a-a342-c824e07f2899"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>If the purpose of capital punishment is to actually \"punish\", killing the culprit painlessly can be said to actually be a relief from harsh existence. The punishment is in the pain of execution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In order to accomplish retributive justice, it is only fair to cruelly execute an offender who caused suffering to others by committing a cruel crime.\n","id":"9a65afe3-a591-40f1-b76d-c181df895ccf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I basically see humanity as a large scale version of cancer. I have a very basic understanding of cancer from high school biology class, so I could be wrong about some of this. Please correct me if so. Here are the basic similarities Cancer happens when a cell develops with a mutation that causes it to reproduce a lot. Humans happened when random mutations resulted in a species that reproduces a lot. Cancer spreads through the body when a cancerous cell or tumor ends up in the bloodstream. A cancer cell can start in the foot and end up in the brain. Look at how humans moved from the tumor we call Britain to the tumor we call America . Cancer kills when the mass of cells impedes necessary bodily functions. I don't even need to get into the subject of how humans have affected Earth. Just look at Global Warming, Nuclear power station disasters, and this Essentially, I see Earth as this happy little ecosystem, teeming with life, that was healthy and self sufficient until humans came along. Now Earth is dying. I can't help but believe that Earth can only survive if humans do not. When someone gets cancer, you kill the cancer before it kills them. Someone explain to me why the logic is different for a planet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think humankind is essentially cancer, and the world would be better off without people.\n","id":"3066fb79-2dc6-4d39-b8fa-5465e0c70830"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seriously annoys me how much value people place on naturally grown food, natural beauty, natural skincare products, etc. I don't really understand why something being natural matters at all. As far as I'm concerned, nature is a chaotic sub optimal experiment of chemistry. Carefully crafted products are, in general, superior to organic ones and ceiling for improvement is virtually unlimited as opposed to nature. This can also be applied to appearance. A lot of men in particular seem to dismiss women who get cosmetic enhancements and do their makeup everyday as fake. This also doesn't make sense to me. If she looks good, she looks good, right? And if anything, the amount of effort she puts into her appearance only makes me want her more. So, why should I care about whether or not something is natural? Is my point of view warped?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Whether or not something is \"natural\" should be irrelevant to its desirability.\n","id":"92fbb9dc-6227-4a0c-bad7-adb0b06e945d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have noticed that more and more restaurants in my area Cleveland are changing their interior seating to mostly high top tables. I understand some people don't mind them, but I think they're inferior to the traditional table. Because they are elevated, they are not as simple for all types of people to get up on the chairs comfortably . Notably children, elders, and overweight people. Bars will have these types of chairs as well, but children are not allowed to sit at the bar at least here so it becomes less of an issue. But a bar will have multiple options for seating. Not just the bar area, usually. Places to put your feet are typically just under your chair. And this length varies on the type of chair. A traditional table has the ground, where you can place your feet anywhere. Your typical bar has these high top chairs, sure, but there's always a place to put your feet that's separate from the chair. It is meant to be comfortable to sit in. High top tables are not handicap accessible This kind of goes along with my first point, but I felt it was important for it to have its own . Normal tables are the tried and true area for all ages and types of people to eat at. Anything superior would possibly be the floor, but then you have things like cleanliness come into factor with that. There is no doubt in my mind that high top tables are more expensive compared to a traditional table. Higher price to replace, higher initial cost, and it uses more lumber and other materials. Higher cost for interior furniture for a restaurant could leads to higher menu prices to offset the 1 business they're losing because they cannot seat all demographics, as mentioned above, and 2 higher price of the actual tables and chairs. Accessibility to servers. High top tables make it more difficult to get around the customers and place food and drinks on the table. I have never been a waiter myself, nor do I know anyone close that was or is, but I've been to enough restaurants in my day to know that I have to pass plates or drinks to other people in my group if our waiter isn't tall enough, or if there isn't enough room for them to fit. Lower traditional tables allows the server to be many feet taller than the people sitting down and that gives them a better advantage to place the food and drinks onto the table. So to summarize, high top tables aren't as comfortable to sit at, to sit in for longer periods of time, and restaurants lose business therefore lose money by using high top tables instead of the traditional table. And at what gain? To look more modern? To segregate your clientele to disclude old people, children, and overweight people? That's just a bad decision and to see more and more restaurants in my area moving to them I can't see the point. Please, reddit, Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Restaurants shouldn't have high-top tables.\n","id":"9e6b6398-4c08-4588-9a56-78932c3d96c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If an employer chooses to pay the minimum wage required by law, how can he expect more than what is required? Especially when the job actually requires some skill or intellect in the first place. Employer Can you give 110 when working? Employee Are you going to pay me 10 extra? . Employer No. Employee There's your answer then . This whole argument is based on those who are only in minimum wage employment for money, it doesn't count if it's an apprenticeship or internship etc EDIT There is no chance for promotion or raise in bar work, waiting or store retail, these are the minimum wage jobs I speak of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that minimum wage constitutes no more or less than the bare minimum effort.\n","id":"e117ea5d-4d93-4f65-9507-0fdc3242019a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who is the ultimate fighting hero from any fandom?<|ARGUMENT|>The Dr is known to choose Companions who accompany him in his travels often aiding in his adventures, but also they mostly keep him sane.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Dr owns and operates a Tardis. This vehicle allows him to travel through time and space and sometimes travel through other dimensions.\n","id":"fabd156d-255f-4fd2-bc88-1bd47a6f9536"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is transhumanism the next step in human evolution?<|ARGUMENT|>If transhumanism goes against personal beliefs, those individuals would not want to contribute to its progress. They should not be pressured into doing so, just because the next step is inevitable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Just because the next step is inevitable, does not mean we have to encourage or hasten its progress.\n","id":"d9c9d8bd-5eeb-4976-8aab-2c05dd4dfb1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Kashmir Be An Independent State?<|ARGUMENT|>There has been considerable rivalry and friction between the two major Kashmir regional parties - the National Conference and the People's Democratic Party.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Kashmir cannot sustain a stable government and military this may cause further violence in the region.\n","id":"5f0765f6-435a-4a43-8b9d-7588ea9b4867"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This statement applies more to the political parties and politicians more than the average voter who identifies one way or the other. But I think that both of the two main parties will have to implode and dissolve in the way of the Whigs before the US government will be able to solve any real issues in the US. The Republican politicians can\u2019t catch up with the times on social policies Gay marriage, Marijuana, abortion and so on. So your average voter doesn\u2019t like that as they don\u2019t give a damn about most those things personally and don\u2019t want to hurt others over it. The Democratic politicians are dug in on financial issues and issues of rights that the constitution guarantees. Vast increases in welfare and other expensive social policies that are arguably more hurtful that helpful federal college loans driving up college tuition . Denying freedom of speech, bear arms. And people hate to have their own rights taken away. Though these two aren\u2019t exclusive to the democrats, it is more a platform issue for them Both sides have a shitty record on the 4th, 6th, 9th, and 10th amendments. This just scratches the surface and isn\u2019t an involved description of all of the reasons, but I don\u2019t see this democracy surviving well with either party alive and well. Together it\u2019s a standstill. If only one of the two were to collapse, leaving the other totally unopposed by an organized party, either version of the US under one is unbearable in my mind. I\u2019m writing a bit impaired so I apologize for not being the most articulate in my argument. I\u2019m just pissed at both sides and don\u2019t see either as a way out of the mess of the last few years. Edit Had a minute off and wanted to say thank you to everyone who responded. Though my view on the whole hasn\u2019t changed I have more information to refine it somewhat. I appreciate all of the respectful debate and hope you all have a wonderful day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The two political parties in the US will never reconcile and both have to collapse before the US can have any type of government that can get things done in a way that is actually good for the people as a whole.\n","id":"1c630903-9d41-4713-8826-9269a131c678"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As many of you already know, recently the United States of America elected our new President Donald Trump. Whether or not you agree with him as a politician doesn't really matter, but there is fairly clear evidence of the American voting system failing for its fourth time. By that I mean that yet again there is a president who lost the popular vote, but won the presidency because of a quirk in the electoral college. If there's still a debate around that example, I'm not particularly in touch with the current state of American politics a definite and perhaps better example is that of the 2000 election. George Bush Jr. lost the popular vote, but got the presidency because of how the electoral college works. I, personally, disagree with the electoral college as an institution, but that is also not the issue I'm concerned with. The main issue, and the target of my post that I hope you all can clarify, is an argument I often hear for the electoral college, and why it exists. This image is a good embodiment of what I am talking about. I don't see how this is bad. If the majority of the people vote for someone, why does it matter where they are from? The states themselves a literally just lines in the sand to help with compartmentalizing government. But beyond that, I fail to see the point of giving the states as entities power over our election process. So TL DR Those who support the Electoral College use an argument that amounts to We have the Electoral College to protect the small states from getting overpowered by the big states . To this I say, the states themselves don't have their own rights, they're just an entity to assist in politics. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"States shouldn't have more power than the people that live in them.\n","id":"9f064db6-8bdd-4a95-92d5-affa4a7e29bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Australia Limit Immigration to Achieve a Sustainable Population?<|ARGUMENT|>Other places and countries in the world such as Dubai, Doha, Qatar, Israel and California have succeeded in turning semi-arid areas into large populated areas. Australia can emulate such efforts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Populating an area with humans and caring for the environment are not mutually exclusive. You can do both. Just like Eco-Tourism, you can do Eco-housing.\n","id":"005ecf7c-b34c-4827-b95c-bc58445188b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I mean, I hear it all the time. More spy agencies, more corporations wanting to sell personal info to gov'ts. More control. More eyes on you constantly. More limits to currency. Possible economic collapse. Syria military actions now rising by russia and possibly china next. People hyping up the agenda 2030 thing this week as some NWO deal, while it promises sun shine and rainbows, but the past evidence that whenever humanity ever tries for utopia, it always goes horrifically wrong. More limitations, more protected classes due to how some one is born. More people getting fired or barred from their work for one thing they said about one people, but utter silence when the faces are flipped. More evidence of gov'ts not doing what their populaces want with nationalism growing tremendously in europe, oath keepers in america, and so on. What is going on in the world to cause these things? All I wanted in life was the cliche 50's american dream The white picket fence, front lawn, married with two kids or something part I mean , or at least a silent corner where I can be left alone to do what I want without eyes prying over my shoulder. But it just seems that dream is going ever more out of my reach. Am I wrong? Please tell me if i'm wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think we're losing our privacy\/freedom\/self dependence.\n","id":"675dcb2f-0d6a-489e-bfb6-b33c185f9b4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>Slaves brought with them knowledge that was useful in the new territories of colonies, such as in applying irrigation systems in South Carolina Gold, p.6<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Knowledge of botany, herbal medicines and foods from Africa allows us to better sustain operations in inaccessible territory.\n","id":"c21bf44f-a387-4eea-9c3e-9c24b227370a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The reasoning is to enforce a more honest roleplay and avoid people gaming the system even unintentionally. Lets take a couple of examples. A player is going through a dungeon and there is a chest. The player rolls an investigation check to check for traps but rolls poorly. The DM tells them the chest does not appear to be trapped. Knowing the roll was very low, the player may say they are just going to be extra cautious and use mage hand to open the chest. roleplay wise this would normally be a wasteful use of a spell but the players has reason to suspect it may still be trapped. An NPC is being questioned under suspicion of lying about intel they were given about a mission and it is a bad roll. The DM says they appear genuine. The player is still going to be suspicious even though they should not be if they were roleplaying honestly, but it is hard to commit to that sort of willful ignorance . If the DM performs the d20 roll and only gives the player the narration of how it played out, then the player is forced to commit to the role. Sure, they can still doubt the answer, but they are now doubting in a realistic situation instead of doubting because of a known bad roll. x200B The DM can still choose to hint at a bad roll if it suits the story. They can say they are unable to tell if it is trapped instead of saying it appears safe based on the roll, but it gives more realistic information.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Perception checks in D&amp;D should be rolled by the DM who then adds the player's modifiers, keeping the final score secret.\n","id":"76f119bc-bc9b-4c4c-bab5-eac5959884f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Whitewashing In Hollywood: Should It Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A study by the Directors Guild of America found that ethnic minority and women directors continue to be overlooked in television.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Whitewashing overlooks actors and directors of color in a field already lacking in diversity.\n","id":"0a4a90b0-ab65-489e-ad19-e59d5b3d6f69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'd like to start off by saying I absolutely respect Dr. Bouman and am very appreciative of the work she did is doing for science. I am in no way trying to discredit her work and contributions or women in science at all for that matter. It's hard to hold an opinion like this and not come off as sexist but hear me out. I myself am a Computer Science major at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana where she's from, and where her father is a an electrical computer biomedical engineering professor . x200B My issue is not with Dr. Bouman or her work at all, but with the media. x200B Reality Hundreds of scientists collaborate on a seemingly impossible task of photographing a black hole over 50 million light years away. x200B Media WOMAN takes picture of black hole x200B I understand that's a bit of an exaggeration but I just wanted to get my point across. This historic achievement is the result of hundreds of the world's best scientists coming together to do the impossible. One person should not be given the majority of the credit for the work of hundreds, male or female. x200B A 29 year old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm that created the first ever image of a black hole. BBC There, she led the project, assisted by a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT Haystack Observatory. BBC But Dr Bouman, now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, insisted the team that helped her deserves equal credit. BBC then why aren't they getting it? We're a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, and that's what it took to achieve something once thought impossible Dr. Bouman I'm throwing this in here just to show that Dr. Bouman is not asking for all this praise, but is genuinely a good person and understands that this was a group effort A global network of telescopes known as the Event Horizon Telescope project collected millions of gigabytes of data about M87 using a technique known as interferometry. However, there were still large gaps in the data that needed to be filled in. That's where Bouman's algorithm along with several others unimportant, I guess came in. Using imaging algorithms like Bouman's, researchers created three scripted code pipelines to piece together the picture. CNN 'No one of us could've done it alone,' Bouman said. 'It came together because of lots of different people from many backgrounds.' CNN x200B I understand I'm only referencing two articles here but just Google Katie Bouman and you'll see that there are many others just like the two I've referenced. I chose these two because they're very popular news outlets which have millions of readers. I also understand a possible motivation behind these articles is the empowerment of women, which I'm all for, but not at the cost of others. x200B So, am I overthinking this, probably. Do I care what the media says, not really but I do admit I'm quite worked up about this. Let me know what you think and I'll try to reply to as many comments as I can in the next few hours. x200B References<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dr. Katie Bouman should not be receiving as much credit as she is for the first image of a black hole.\n","id":"ad335750-3b9f-42ab-bd53-0bf5bbf1e4d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be testosterone limits in women\u2019s sports?<|ARGUMENT|>Serena Williams has discussed how conspiracy theorists on the internet have suggested she was born a man.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a common racist trope that women of colour are manly or insufficiently feminine.\n","id":"a818d1e7-95ac-45d5-8df9-7d6345b68aa2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US Customs and Immigrations Enforcement should be investigated for crimes against humanity<|ARGUMENT|>As an arm of the state, it is important that ICE is held legally, morally, and politically accountable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement should be investigated for crimes against humanity.\n","id":"e9c72ce5-2941-43eb-ade1-b314a1bdf031"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Research points that social mobility in Sweden has been downplayed and that nobility still monopolise prestige occupations Clark in Bengtsson et al., p. 17<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Swedish nobility still, according to most recent research, occupies many prominent positions.\n","id":"bd6c7bd4-3975-4d68-8461-b40a53e233d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Living in eastern Germany i get this a lot people telling me how justified the actions of Russia and Putin are, because otherwise the poor Russian minority might otherwise be disenfranchised in some other way. The imperialist and evil West USA on the other hand should just stay out of there and let them determine their own fate Are you kidding me? Most of you affiliate in some way with the political left and keep whining about how Europe isn't even a real democracy because the EU is so undemocratic which it isn't, by the way , how immigrants are disadvantaged and gays and lesbians are discriminated against. And yet you side with Russia where all of this is ten times worse? You are completely blocking out the fact that Russia is a state of injustice and it will continue to establish that injustice in it's newly conquered territories. Also Russians are only the majority in Crimea because they deported it's original population to Siberia The only reason for you to support Russia is uninformed anti Americanism Please, <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My fellow Europeans \/ Germans: I think those of you who support Russia in the wake of the Ukraine-Crisis are either deluded or you are hypocrites and bigots.\n","id":"e9783abd-3517-4d89-bb95-d2b1aa208329"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit I've been fairly convinced it's not sexist. Still maintain invasive as all heck. Carry on, thanks for getting passionate about it Edit 2 7 hours and only a few personal insults later I've heard a lot of great things I agree with but I still feel it's invasive by nature to ask that much of submitters to a general gw subreddit. Final Edit It's been done. I still think it's an invasive thing to ask of someone sharing their nude body but I'm glad a community member could shed light on the creation of the subreddit. Browsing naked bodies casually when I noticed that over at r ladybonersgw they require at least half of a guys face to be shown with every submission. Here's the rule with the line that made me go 'wait, that doesn't make any sense ' in bold. gt All posts must contain at least half your face. We must clearly be able to see some of your features I.e. mouth and nose eyes and nose. If this minimum requirement is not met, a face picture must be posted in the comments. This means that we DO NOT allow text only posts. All posts must contain at least one image which fulfils rule two. It looks like it's enforced very often. Reasons I think this is shocking and inappropriate Sharing yourself nude on the internet is super taboo and the vast majority of people who do, for safety and privacy, would never show part or all of their face. It seems like a really silly and irrelevant way to accomplish no text posts. If this was a rule on a female gonewild, I feel like there'd be some sort of outrage at the invasiveness. Kinda like 'I'm sharing how much of myself, now everyone feels entitled to my face too?' As someone who wants to start enjoying the posts, it limits who is going to be posting which is disappointing. If the point was to avoid 'floating dicks' everywhere, which makes more sense than the reasoning they give, then the amount of body shown should be the requirement. I don't think anyone should have to compromise their identity or do something many would be really uncomfortable with to be allowed to post on a subreddit. What am I missing that this rule is embraced? Disclaimer Not an angry submitter or anything. I want to enjoy an overflowing of peen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's both invasive and sexist for \/r\/ladybonersgw to require submitters post their face\n","id":"ec331721-1ca5-40c9-a637-26da98f0f3df"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We constantly get told nonsense such as no one has a perfect life, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, etc. However I truly believe that there must be at least one person on this planet who has a perfect life. For example, if I saw a straight, white male or female who is educated, good looking, kind, smart, tall, wealthy, etc that sounds like a perfect life to me? I'm sure there are people who are in all of these categories who are also in good health, have no family members who are sick, have never experienced a breakup, etc. Basically people who have never experienced any problems or suffering in their entire lives, is it really unreasonable for me to think that these people exist? I don't think so. To , tell me why I'm wrong, why does no one have a perfect life? I've heard almost everything. Once someone even tried to argue that if a straight, white male who is educated, good looking, kind, smart, tall, wealthy, etc had big feet then his life wasn't perfect because he would have a harder time finding shoes. Really? There are people with foot fetishes out there who will pay people with big feet. Disgusting but true. Then you can use that money to get custom made shoes. Are you really trying to argue that getting money for something you were born with means your life isn't perfect? Really? Where's the problem then? Where's the suffering? I certainly don't see it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea that no one has a perfect life is nonsense\n","id":"1779eb2c-a609-46c7-aca1-05ba4cdb7bc7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Privacy is dead, get over it. Steven Rambam None of the wailing and gnashing of teeth going on in the public media or on Capitol Hill will ever be fruitful. Even if powerful people genuinely wanted to blind the surveillance state, it is too late. We have crossed the Rubicon and there is no going back. No law, no regulation and no oversight can ever improve this situation. If fact, the situation is going to get worse, a lot worse. Computers and surveillance systems will be de facto reading our very thoughts within 5 years. Can't beat 'em, so join 'em, that's my plan. Go NSA<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Love the NSA!\n","id":"2a4a0e4e-5d4b-4734-9809-56b8de8b3e6a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I watched the Oscars this Sunday, and during their annual 'In Memoriam,' it was clear they were giving certain people more screen time than others. Robin Williams was clearly on screen a lot longer than say Joan Rivers. I understand Robin was a very big name in the industry, but I find giving him or others more screen time during these ceremonies completely unrespectful towards the families of the lost ones. Imagine watching that and seeing your late wife getting 1 second on screen and someone else 5 seconds. They shouldn't be doing this at all. I'm really curious to some other opinions on this though. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Oscars giving certain people more screen time during their In Memoriam is completely unacceptable\n","id":"2956ff01-0762-4dbe-ad96-501d0c694ac1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I used to regularly watch Real Time with Bill Maher because I thought that the discussions were often interesting and there was some entertainment involved as well. I eventually stopped watching it due to the tiresome nature of Bill Maher's obsession with condemnation of religion as well as his ignorance at times. I watched the most recent episode because I thought that maybe he had matured a bit and become more knowledgeable and nuanced, but nothing seems to have changed. Bill stated that a teacher should have told Ahmed Mohamed that what happened to you was wrong, but maybe one of the reasons it happened to you is because in our religion, we were responsible for 9 11, the Madrid bombings, the London bombings, the Bali discotheque bombings, the Kenya mall bombings. All of these examples were retaliation for military action or support for military action, whether you agree with the military action or not. It was not a theological dispute. Also, note that he's saying that what happened was wrong, but still reasonable because other Muslims have done unpleasant things, as if it's up to Ahmed to prevent these kinds of attacks. Then of course when Jorge Ramos states that Ahmed isn't responsible for these attacks, Bill becomes so indignant and says he's not, of course, we're not saying he. . . And then he moves on as if what Jorge said was absurd, when in reality he obviously was implying that Muslims in general, and therefore Ahmed, are responsible and should be expected to bear the burden. If not, why use these attacks as justification for the mistreatment of Ahmed? Jews, you shouldn't be mistreated and excluded from certain positions in society, but maybe it's because you cause financial crises and initiate and promote war. Jews are not collectively responsible for what some other Jews have done. Of course not Nobody said that, you politically correct SJW At the same time, he has always ridiculed the Republican talking point that we need to fight them over there in order to avoid fighting them over here by accurately stating that they fight us over here because we're fighting them over there . Then, we of course have his comment on the 9 11 attacks less than a week after the attacks. The logical conclusion seems to be that he's so dedicated to condemning Islam that he doesn't even understand when he's contradicting himself and is being guilty of the exact same thing that he constantly condemns Republicans of being ignorant, delusional and hypocritical.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bill Maher suffers from cognitive dissonance on Islam and U.S. foreign policy\n","id":"214bb010-02af-4420-b520-121dce97ebd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me begin by restating that I'd only like to discuss GMOs which have been approved by the USFDA or any institute of equivalent regard. EDIT For clarity I am not saying that the legal status of GM foods implies their safety. I am just trying to narrow down this argument to the dozen or so legal GM foods, because there isn't much point in discussing GM foods you'll never find in the grocery store. Furthermore, I would like to clarify that I understand GMOs promote the use of unsustainable agricultural techniques such as monocropping. However, these are not whatsoever the result of genetic modifications and similar problems would occur with naturally hybridized seeds. Nitrogen deposition and deforestation are big problems, but GMOs are not the right scapegoat the global agri food system is for being entirely profit driven. GMOs have never, to my knowledge, caused an adverse medical reaction in any typical human population. I imagine someone somewhere has eaten a GMO and experienced an allergic reaction regardless of whether or not the genetic modification actually engendered this reaction, I don't consider allergies to be a human health risk. Let me throw a few links out there. Monsanto has some unethical business practices, but contrary to popular opinion they have never sued a farmer for inadvertantly growing seeds from stray pollen . The oft cited case is Schmeiser who was shown to have deliberately planted patented seeds read section 44 . That all said, there are certainly risks to any sort of genetic modification. These risks are very minimal, and the bioengineers who design commercial GMOs exhaustively test their product. Genetic engineering isn't that much different than hybridization, just using genetically distant organisms we don't design proteins from scratch, we use natural biochemical properties with minor changes for efficacy. Are there any arguments against GMOs that are inherently due to the genetic modifications, and not the agricultural techniques used to produce process distribute them?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"GMO foods which have been approved for human consumption pose no risk to human health, and have no inherent problems.\n","id":"d6088b39-4da9-4adc-aa91-1c051e432566"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Something like this copy and pasted from one of my posts I'm seeing a lot of piracy posts around here so I thought I'd chime in. First of all, piracy is stealing, it's really as simple as that. Not only that, but you're also probably perpetuating a decline in jobs in the software industry not sure if true, but theoretically it makes sense . Secondly, I don't see any way anyone can justify pirating something without losing their credibility. A person who tries to justify stealing, claiming that piracy is OK, is in my mind a person with low moral standards. Thirdly, I support anti piracy technology because it goes along with my view that piracy is not right and I think companies should definitely go for ramping up DRM, and forcing people to actually buy their games. I'm an aspiring concept artist who is looking to get a job in the film video game industry and I don't want to lose my hard work to piracy. . EDIT After reading through the comments I have changed some aspects of my viewpoint. I no longer think that DRM is necessarily a good thing because it can be a bad experience for the paying customer. I also want to correct my statement that piracy is stealing because it's technically copyright infringement. However I still do think that piracy is morally unjustifiable. Pros Forces OP to read through and think about the comments posted. Satisfies curiosity of others. Cons More rules to follow, some people might not like it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"META Idea: force OP to put an EDIT saying if his views are changed or not after a day.\n","id":"c0143540-ebe0-4469-8bbc-db21fa16d2ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand the corporate interests on the part of ISPs, and I would suspect that government opposition is largely tied to lobby . What I am getting at is the astroturf comments we saw a few months ago when the FCC was accepting comments, and the fact that some mostly conservative news outlets use net neutrality as if it were a bad word. More specifically I was talking with my father in law a few months ago and I mentioned net neutrality. We are on different sides of the political spectrum, but we get along well and we can actually discuss the issues in a respectful and civil way. In this instance, I thought we actually might be on the same side of a political issue for once. When I mentioned net neutrality, he said I don't really know what net neutrality is, but I know I'm against it. First of all, WTF. Normally he has a reason for thinking what he does and the difference is in opinion or in the facts we are citing. But more to the point, I know he watches conservative media outlets all day, so I assume he was interpreting the tone and underlying message he heard there, without really being aware of the specifics. I sent him more information, and asked him to comment on the FCC site at the time. The question is What is Fox News telling people that programs them against net neutrality? He uses the internet probably as much as I do, including for gaming, news, and videos. Why would he believe that net neutrality is not in his best interest, if not critical to the concept of the internet as a public resource? Please chime in with some ideas, I would love to reopen this conversation over Thanksgiving. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no good reason a private citizen would oppose net neutrality\n","id":"84774706-dfdb-41f0-8723-ba60a42cc97b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US have killed Qasem Soleimani in an air strike?<|ARGUMENT|>This is likely to result in EU and coalition forces also leaving as they rely on the American logistics and intelligence resources to protect their forces and the civilians that work with them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Iraq's parliament has already voted to oust US coalition troops from Iraq, who are there to help keep peace in the country.\n","id":"ef2cc25b-91e8-44b8-8124-e68705d42deb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It's no secret that everyone hates pedophiles, with good reason. Raping children and child porn are obviously evil things. However, we as a society need to do better and how we look at pedophiles to help decrease these things. Pedophiles don't choose to be attracted to children. It's not their fault. I'm not saying it's their fault when they rape kids, that clearly is there fault as it is an external action, but they do not intentionally find children attractive. Even religious groups against homosexuality almost always agree that being gay is not a choice, and therefore not a sin. I don't believe that, I fully support gay people . Where they have problem is the action of dating, marrying or having sex with someone of the same gender. This same mentality should be applied by all towards pedophiles This would make the pedophiles that struggle in resisting their urges because they know it's wrong be more willing to talk to close friends about it, and more importantly, to therapists. I think there would be a lot less child sexual abuse if they had a therapist to talk to and get help from.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pedophiles should be offered help rather than being hated for existing.\n","id":"ee49e941-6368-4e53-92b7-920e3a88532a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Businesses Deny Service to Trump Administration Officials?<|ARGUMENT|>Senior Advisor Jared Kushner attempted to set up a secret backchannel with Russia at the Russian embassy, so that Russia could have records of their conversations but the US couldn't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Trump administration has been involved in a large amount of criminality and unethical behaviour.\n","id":"4ef093a7-7d7a-41c1-993a-d834ec511ee4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>Donald Trump frequently attacked political opponents for being beholden to donors a key part of his political identity is opposition to donors buying politicians.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mike Pence is beholden to the wishes of big donors, while Donald Trump is more independent.\n","id":"7371921d-34c2-4675-af30-783021d4ed75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, primary and secondary education standards in the U.S. seem to have dropped to the floor. I've seen instances recently of children in middle school learning simple integer division and multiplication. When I consult my peers, future teachers, about this, they defend the system claiming that the teachers must teach to the test. I find this unacceptable for several reasons, but most of those are unrelated. Children have an outstanding capacity for learning when faced with the proper motivation, any argument that a child simply cannot handle more difficult content is insulting. This assumption that children don't hold the ability to learn at a higher rate often results in a failure to reach the fullest potential. In addition to this failure on the education system's part, it instills a sense of complacency within children that they should never be challenged to learn something. This becomes very clear as I watch courses become diluted and spread out over longer periods of time. So what stands to be gained from increasing the rigor and difficulty of a child's education? First let's analyze the benefits as a society. After completion of a more rigorous curriculum, a student will have progressed much further in every math and science course. In addition to this knowledge that is otherwise not learned, the student has a much more firm understanding of writing and reading comprehension, although the benefits for English and History are much more limited than in the applied sciences. Let's choose an arbitrary number of years that the student was able to progress in addition to a standard curriculum, although any increase in progress will yield great results. Just two additional years of applied math or science classes that can be taken as a result of a more difficult curriculum can prepare a student for a large number of college programs in those respective fields as well as any number of related fields. Practically speaking, it prepares students for the applied sciences. In the case that the student wants to pursue education in this field, they will have an easier time, and possibly save money. Furthermore, the world will always need more bodies in the applied sciences. Just look around, in the U.S. some of the most popular undergraduate majors are business, psychology, and communications. In many instances, and no disrespect to those who study in those fields, students perceive the previously listed to be easier than other choices. I've had conversations with people who chose to study each of those because they sounded fun or easy. Any time someone can list easiness as a reason for choosing something of that magnitude is highlighting what's wrong with the decreased standards of education that I've mentioned. tl dr I could never support an education system that doesn't promote absolute excellence, why shouldn't we make it significantly more difficult. The benefits are there, why shouldn't we reap them?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Primary and Secondary Education Curricula Should be Much More Difficult\n","id":"8609401a-e4a2-468d-8e07-fcee1a5b6604"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>States struggle to execute painlessly, because of drug supply problems, which means the costs are higher or at least very similar e.g. longer imprisonment and higher prices from providers to the painful methods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overall costs will be lower or at least the same for the administration of painful executions.\n","id":"b35e6a50-3317-42a2-95f3-52829a363701"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>permit the use of performance enhancing drugs in professional sports<|ARGUMENT|>Freedom of choice: If athletes wish to take drugs in search of improved performances, let them do so. They harm nobody but themselves and should be treated as adults, capable of making rational decisions upon the basis of widely-available information. Even if there are adverse health effects in the long-term, this is also true of tobacco, alcohol and boxing, which remain legal. We allow world class athletes to train for 23 hours a week on average, adjust their diets and endanger themselves by pushing the boundaries of their body. We let them do it, because it is what they chose which is best for them. According to the NFL Player Association the average life expectancy of an NFL player is 58 years of age 1. Thus already we allow athletes to endanger their lives, give them the choice of a lifestyle. Why not also extend this moral precedent to drugs? Judd Bissiotto, 15 Surprising facts about world athletes, accessed 05\/18\/2011<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Athletes should be free to take risks when training and competing\n","id":"89e879ca-2036-42fb-aa56-c029eda2a1b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be further research on solar geoengineering.<|ARGUMENT|>If we do not move towards a solution, the environmental impacts will only accelerate Cornell. climatechange.cornell.edu<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At the very least, solar geoengineering research could buy us more time\n","id":"aaca4857-a7e9-4b63-a8db-0f0ecd77e510"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>Abruptly exiting a virtual reality may have consequences for one's 'success' within that reality. For example if you remove yourself from a collective activity you might remove yourself from the benefits of that activity when it is completed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This does not make the action itself acceptable. It restricts a person from accessing something they enjoy, can reap real world benefits from, and, in most cases, something they pay to access.\n","id":"c179d661-72cf-4809-8b75-609928f03b76"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>The war on drugs in the Philippines has been devastating and has had very limited positive effects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A war on drugs and harsh policies have not been effective when implemented.\n","id":"7981205b-b20f-4d19-a31c-387bdd53e9bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The Electoral College was created to ensure the wealthy, land owning class maintained their political domination because at the time they were largely the only educated group. Now, education is more widely available as is information. This gives all citizens access to what the founders wanted: an informed electorate. The Electoral College perpuates the two party system which reduces the incentive to become informed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The electoral college no longer works as it was intended by the founding fathers. The fact that it no longer serves this purpose suggests that it is no longer necessary.\n","id":"7aaeed09-6f93-45ec-a362-e17600f4347a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I just watched both movies back to back. I realize that troy has a slight advantage production wise because it was made several years after Gladiator, but the fight scenes, story lines, and actors are just so much better in Troy that it's not even a close fight for me. Seriously I'm not gay at all, but I was harder than a block of tungsten at a metal concert during the Achilles vs Hector fight scene. So tell me why I'm wrong. I've got a 6 pack of pbr and some adderal handy so this is the most talkative I will be for a long time<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Troy\" is a much better film than \"Gladiator.\"\n","id":"cf313ecd-b27a-4fca-9a4d-766efee1ba4e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 state Jesus's last words were \"My God, why have you forsaken me?\" Luke 23:46 states his last words were \"Father, into your hands I commend my spirit\" and John 19:30 state his last words as \"It is finished\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Accounts of the crucifixion vary substantially across the gospels in chronology, specific details as well as the actions and behavior of Jesus himself.\n","id":"e20e1ad6-9b9c-4ec4-ac0e-577f2f8b4dc3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm convinced that being a stay at home unemployed spouse, regardless of gender, is a terrible choice with only a handful of exceptions. You lose job market skills. You become completely financially dependent on your partner, which could trap you in a bad relationship. If your marriage falls apart or something happens to the other person, you can only trust a life insurance payout and a will neither of which many people have for your financial security. You can easily become alienated from others and develop bad habits. The vast majority of the time, there are no significant benefits to being a stay at home partner. For instance, the idea that you save money on preschool by having a stay at home parent stops applying after kindergarten and doesn't apply in countries where preschool is cheap or free. When childcare is a necessity, part time jobs are more appropriate than unemployment. The usual work arounds like volunteering, joining a religious community, and so on don't actually mitigate most of the financial issues and many of the social ones. I'll include a few exceptions to the nearly always principle, just so we don't waste time debating them 1 A special needs child homeschooling the kids elderly parent requiring care Self explanatory. A partner does need to be at home if this is the model of parenting eldercare you choose. 2 An inability to work due to health complications, whether physical and mental Also self explanatory. Work clearly isn't more important than one's wellbeing. 3 Some kind of atypical property that requires round the clock maintenance if there's a sound economical reason why you have to be home, I won't protest. Although caring for a property constantly sounds like a job and probably falls under the category of self employed or working from home , both of which are exempt from this debate. All right, reddit. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being a stay-at-home partner is nearly always a bad idea\n","id":"88a82aae-e5c5-44e6-89fc-425d5bb49d9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>The vast majority of Americans oppose the system by which campaign contributions are paid to members of Congress based on their stance towards Israel. This indicates that Americans are unhappy with the extent to which Congress is assumed by default to support Israel.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The extent and unconditionality of American support for Israel has been described as going against America's strategic and moral interests, and as being primarily the result of strong lobbying Mearsheimer\/Walt, p. 335f.\n","id":"b210b6f4-6c74-416a-918b-bd07a20b1d87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be a quota for Millennial representatives in the European Parliament?<|ARGUMENT|>Quotas can lead to feelings of tokenism and subsequently self-doubt Self-doubt can negatively impede the individual from fulfilling their full potential.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no guarantee that quota placed Millennials will deliver as well as those established through meritocratic means.\n","id":"22c33b64-ae49-47fe-817d-8d8b535beff9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>The Conservative Party have strong plans to reduce immigration which the majority of the British Public is in favour of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The policies of the Conservative party are popular among voters.\n","id":"649d31af-6c7e-4706-b8ed-f15f1e8da3b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let's assume for a second that all of the wealthiest people worked hard for their money. They didn't break the law or win the lottery. I know there are exceptions but stay with me. Before I explain my view, I'm gonna give you some background of where my belief comes from. Both of my parents are Russian Jewish immigrants, who left left the U.S.S.R. in search of Capitalism and religious tolerance. They describe the former Soviet Union as horrible place, where corruption ran wild. It was almost impossible to get some simple foods like \u043a\u043e\u043b\u0431\u0430\u0441\u0430, or Russian Sausage, unless you knew someone. My mother was one of the few in her class that ever ate sausage because her Grandmother worked in a sausage factory. It's easy to understand why they wanted to leave. My father came to America in 1976, at the age of 11. His family had close to 60 dollars to its name, and very few personal possessions. They were not allowed to bring anything of value with them to America. His family worked low wage jobs for years just to get him through school. My father worked his ass off through high school until he got into college. Through simple hard work, my father, who came to this country not knowing any english, was going to college. However, it was not that simple. His family didn't have enough money to send him to college. So what does my father do, he takes a year off from school, saving every penny while doing odd jobs around New York, mostly working as a taxi driver. Again through hard work, my father graduated and he now makes six figures. Now this brings us back to my view. I still think we should have some sort of safety net in place, for a limited period of time, too get people on their feet, but taxing the rich more than the poor is simply ludicrous. Most rich people worked hard for their money, and by taking more of it away than from the poor isn't fair. It's theft. I know my belief comes from anecdotal evidence, but I have plenty more. I grew up around all my family friends who experienced similar situations. They didn't work hard every day in their lives just to have more of it taken away. If too people work equally hard for their money, yet one is more successful than the other, and that's the way life works. We are diminishing the value of their accomplishments, and in addition, creating a stigma against wealthy people, one that I often see on Reddit. I apologize for sounding like a condescending asshole, but thats why I'm posting here. Thanks for reading, and please, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the wealthiest Americans should be taxed just as much as the poorest.\n","id":"9860d7d1-b6d0-4cf8-a401-c89027fa65ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that they used to and that people complained because there were lots of vote up if type posts that were getting karma. Removing karma from them, however, does not appear to have changed things. They've always been reported and deleted none are on in the pages archived by archive.org for the time before it was removed . They still show up from time to time then they get reported and removed. The issue should have been dealt with via moderation, not a change to the way karma was handled However, one effect that this has influenced is the creation of rage comics and an increase in screenshots. I've even noticed that increase just over the last couple years. Now, I'm not saying that they wouldn't happen if self posts got karma, nor that they are always inappropriate, but it is evident that there are some things that would be better as self posts that are instead posted as screenshots or rage comics and it's hard to not think that the lack of karma for self posts plays a part in this. So it seems to me that self posts add original content to reddit and should be encouraged. AskReddit IAmA and this very sub show that reddit is as much about the creation of text based original content as it is about linking to external content because they accept nothing but self posts. So I see no reason why we should discriminate against self posts by giving them no karma at all. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe self posts should receive link karma.\n","id":"cc1cb8e2-eb5d-49f8-8f48-db38783da55a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>More often than not I feel like I am stuck in a world where discoveries were already made, inventions established and very little is left to imagination and adventure. People lead monotonous lives of seeking pleasure and comforts, working hard for them, building families, and establishing themselves in the way society sees them as appropriate. In this context living in an imaginative world and a world rife with dangers is far better for humanity then being stuck in an non imaginative and monotonous world that we live in.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Living in adventurous medieval and fantasy worlds is better than living in the reality.\n","id":"59443902-7e3a-4a56-b8b3-16b7b1a519bd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that the life of someone like Bill Gates, or Alexander the Great is much more valuable than the life of a homeless person, or a pervert. I began to think this ever since I began reading Nietzsche, I love the idea of an \u00dcbermench. Note I am not a Nazi, I don't believe there is a superior race, I just believe some people are better than others. USA<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that not all human life is equal.\n","id":"d69bf95b-d84c-40be-b2aa-ae4d9b9d807f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Catholic priests be allowed to marry?<|ARGUMENT|>If priests marry young and they do not use contraception, it is likely they will have large families who will in all likelihood be financially supported by the church.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing priests to marry may lead to financial complications for the Church.\n","id":"dc3000c7-3905-4569-a67b-b9c1971ce055"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Yes, four people died. But it's only four people. That's such aminor thing on the scale of national politics that it's ludicrous. Every single day there are hundreds of murders that go without mention in politics, yet those 4deaths have been a political hot button for years. There's been a bigger fuss and festival of finger pointing than there was for 9 11, which killed 6,000 people. With 9 11, it was more or less accepted that we can't know everything and terrorists are jerks. Yes, there was the 9 11 commission and investigations were done, but they never led to people chanting lock him up or anything of the sort of vitriol that's been leveraged at Clinton. If it weren't for Clinton's likelihood to run for president, I doubt as much of a fuss would have ever occurred in the first place and it definitely wouldn't still be talked about now. Or do I misunderstand the severity of the issue?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The events of Benghazi have been blown way, way out of proportion for political gain.\n","id":"1fd989a6-029b-4466-babb-8bf232266be3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is being asexual\/aromantic inherently under the LGBT+ umbrella?<|ARGUMENT|>LGBT+ and asexual\/aromantic status are similar in that they both oppose social and cultural patterns that define heterosexual behaviors as having an exclusive monopoly on what is appropriate and normal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Aromantics and asexuals have many shared experiences with people under the LGBT+ umbrella.\n","id":"725f9825-f300-4da0-bbf3-17033caa2334"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapy Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>There have been cases of three South African men dying as a result of starvation and torture at a conversion camp.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conversion therapy in many areas comprises of cruel torture techniques.\n","id":"d7010937-3fc3-48d0-9bdc-efc5e46f1c8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Recognize Palestine as a State?<|ARGUMENT|>'The 'centre of life' policy was introduced to asses the residency rights of individual Palestinians. This policy not only requires a high burden of proof to continue living in East Jerusalem, its implementation has been biased to strip Palestinians of their residency rights Jeffris, p. 211<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Israel has been accused of institutionalizing statelessness in East Jerusalem. This violates the right to a nationality as enshrined in Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.\n","id":"1f5f79d2-7292-48f2-8472-0f2843cb27c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe reproductive choice ends where bodily autonomy ends. Because of the nature of reproduction, this means a man's autonomy begins with who he chooses to have sex with and ends with ejaculation. And because of the unequal nature of reproduction, women's bodily autonomy ends once she gives birth. Therefore, having an abortion is an exercise of bodily autonomy much like any other medical procedure. A man isn't responsible for paying for an abortion, or any other pregnancy related expense for that matter, for this reason. Once the child is born, it is no longer an issue of bodily autonomy. Though women can take advantage of safe haven laws, fathers are also free to use them if they are left with a child. Further, either parent can step forward, claim the child as theirs and demand child support. Same applies for adoption. by financial abortion I mean the commonly proposed opt out whereby men can sign a paper and waive all rights to a child before it is born. . Because bodily autonomy is of central concern, a man who is raped should not be responsible for any child that may result from that rape.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men and women aren't similarly situated during pregnancy and therefore a man cannot \"financially abort\" a fetus.\n","id":"a62a33c9-b717-4a89-ab56-38175d0adf8b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the state ever infringe on individual human rights when countering terrorism?<|ARGUMENT|>The ultimate human right is to live. It is the only right too important to be interfered with. Terrorism threatens people's right to life, making it justifiable to erode lesser rights in countering terrorism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some rights are too fundamental and important to be interfered with.\n","id":"eed054c8-916e-4736-aac3-d021dd541461"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Young goats cannot be kept or sold because they fight and killing and burying them is just a waste. Eating them is a moral and ecological solution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not eating the meat of animals killed for other purposes would be a waste and thus morally wrong.\n","id":"fedbb918-f298-4ae2-91d7-271af8676c95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It appears to me that many argue politics based upon what works. ie History shows that works doesn't work, so let's do not do that. I don't care if it works if I've had to lose great freedoms along the way. I concede that, in this world where inter dependency has now become ingrained, some degree of freedom will be sacrificed for the sake of greater safety for all though it is against my fundamental beliefs . Not that this is anything new show me something that is , but having now worked behind a razor wire gate with incarcerated juveniles for over a year, I've grown to detest any restriction of my freedom. I've also grown to understand more thoroughly the comparison of being a citizen under Big Gov and being an inmate. Convince me that I should embrace a system for the fact that it supposedly works, as opposed to rejecting it because it robs me of my freedom. PS Please define works as well if you don't mind .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that freedom is more important than efficiency.\n","id":"570974dd-81e3-49cd-994c-38f4ce68357a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is meat eating immoral?<|ARGUMENT|>Clearing land for cereal crops, which many vegans eat instead of animal productions, kills trees and contributes to climate change<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Land clearing for crops has an impact on climatic cycles, even away from where the clearing occurs\n","id":"1256c459-7d3e-41b2-bb62-29a7c0c76167"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, let me explain. Honestly, with everything that\u2019s been going on in the world, and from my own personal experience, what I see is that Neo Nazis don\u2019t do any good. Which isn\u2019t surprising to me, considering that they discriminate against other people and some deny that an entire major historical event occurred, and many have killed people or committed major felonies. From the ones on the news, to the ones that I\u2019ve met in my own city, I haven\u2019t seen any good come from that community. I\u2019m asking for examples of someone who identifies as a Neo Nazi doing something that benefits something besides them or their cause. Anecdotal evidence is great too I just want to restore a little of my faith in that people have good in them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Neo-Nazis are inherently evil\n","id":"0cd9951e-349d-451b-9697-61c0ab5d11f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Political correctness hides our dark traits, lulling us into an illusion that we are alike or agree.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Political correctness masks the fact that good intentions are more important than proper words.\n","id":"fc059df2-11f4-47ea-a5fd-b7a708b72110"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>An increase in military efficiency allows the military more flexibility to quickly respond to issues when necessary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Compulsory service would increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the military.\n","id":"415c6983-d081-476d-9798-32299de34432"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Female body hair taboo<|ARGUMENT|>The indoctrination of our culture has removed the free choice of women to decide to shave or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having body hair has become a taboo for women in the US.\n","id":"dea1c2be-335a-487e-9852-a2947f21d11e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Life is inherently devoid of meaning. It literally does not matter if I go to work, pay taxes, am a good father, am a moral person, try hard at life, treat people well, or help ruin the planet. There is not a single thing that I can do that will have a lasting impact on this world. I have been lucky and won the lottery of life I am privileged to live in a safe country, have sound employment options, have been able to study, have been able to travel the work, have started a family. None of these things matter in any way. I want to believe my life means something but I cannot understand how anybody's life means anything. Edit thanks to everyone who discussed my ideas I really appreciate it, and I'm sorry if I came across as obstinate. While I haven't  I have some thinking points that may lead me to achieve it later. I'm not sure when though. Edit 2 broadly, here are the arguments so far Objective meaning is difficult or impossible to obtain, and personal objective meaning is the only option. I do not see how objective meaning can exist if something is objective it exists purely in one's own head, and I am not egotistical enough to say this is my meaning, so it is meaningful or see any point in doing so. Life should have meaning otherwise what is the point of doing it. If a part of one's life was pointless then it wouldn't be done. If the rubbish wasn't going to be collected tomorrow then one wouldn't put the bin out because it would be meaningless. Applied on a macro scale across human's lives, life is meaningless so why do it. Yes, life, and human life in particular, is spectacular. But existence is not inherently meaningful. Raising children is not meaningful as an end point. Not only is my life meaningless theirs is too. So if raising children was intrinsically meaningful and provided purpose, then what is the meaning of their life? To raise the generation after? There must be an end point, otherwise it is circular logic. The closest I have read to something the may  is that I have pursued goals that were endorsed by society. Having achieved those goals I am struggling to see what comes next. The answer to that is still obscured by the previous four points.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Life is meaningless\n","id":"454cc124-ebc9-40c2-aa59-cbe2c565ac52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Retirement Age Should Be Raised<|ARGUMENT|>As more of the population enter university, and increasingly undertake postgraduate qualifications, the age at which a person\u2019s working life begins becomes later. Precisely because changes are so long in taking effect, action must be taken now. To maintain the same level of increasingly private pension contributions, it is logical for this demographic cohort to stay in work later in life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As more of the population enter university, and increasingly undertake postgraduate qualifications, ...\n","id":"20495539-e009-4756-b16f-cc0b36134599"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>Moving to a system of universal health care would reduce the burden on human resources personnel in companies. At present they must make sure the company is obeying the very many federal laws about the provision of health insurance. With a universal system where the government was the single-payer, these regulations would not apply and the costs of American businesses would be much reduced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moving to a system of universal health care would reduce the burden on human resources personnel in ...\n","id":"f710c7f3-d0d8-4c6c-a5db-4e48fbd79508"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>have a second Brexit referendum before leaving the EU<|ARGUMENT|>The leave campaign bent, or possibly even broke, electoral rules in terms of finances, and use of personal data. Different leave campaigns Vote Leave and BeLeave shared offices, with Vote Leave providing up to \u00a3625,000 to be used in BeLeave advertising which got around election finance limits. Some remain campaigners, such as Gina Miller, have seized on this to demand a second referendum.1 It goes further; Helen Mountfield QC and Clare Montgomery QC of Matrix Chambers have concluded there is a \u201cprima facie case\u201d that electoral offences were committed that require investigation and decision on whether to refer to the Crown Prosecution Service.2 Such violations are therefore serious. As the vote was comparatively close it is open to question whether these practices may have swung the vote. As such there must be a second vote to confirm, or change, the outcome of the first. 1 Miller, Gina, \u2018BeLeave revelations taint the Brexit result. There must be another vote\u2019, The Guardian, 27 March 2018, 2 Townsend, Mark, and Cadwalladr, Carole, \u2018Vote Leave members \u2018may have committed criminal offences\u2019\u2019, The Guardian, 26 March 2018,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The leave campaign may have broken the rules meaning it was not a fair election\n","id":"a4105237-3fae-4c9e-b9c9-7701f49b9373"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Catholic position is this in order to be moral, sexual acts must be 1 marital, 2 unitive and 3 open to life. Homosexual acts are by definition NOT open to life, and therefore they are seen as immoral. They are a sin. All heterosexual acts outside of marriage which most people are guilty of are equally immoral, and also considered a sin. This means that the people who engage in these acts are sinners. But everybody is a sinner. There's no belief that sinners are by definition 'evil'. Catholics think that homosexual acts are immoral, but we do not hate the people who commit them, and we do not think that homosexuals are evil. If you believe that your friend swears too much, or behaves selfishly, you disapprove of these behaviours, but you don't have to hate your friend.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Catholic views of sexual morality are not homophobic\n","id":"4b16f433-2020-43a6-99e8-b3bd6bb45c9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that Postmoderism started as an academic perspective deconstructing monolithic narratives, then went mainstream in a not so helpful way, spawning things like extremist identity politics. When someone says something like \u201call statements are opinions, facts don\u2019t really exist,\u201d that\u2019s true in a certain way, however combined with the rise of the internet and the flattening of sources, we get an approach to knowing that is really weak and contributes to radicalized, polarized perspectives of the world. Hence \u201cfake news\u201d claims and much weirdness around PC culture, which has contributed some nice things and some annoying things. We should assume that institutions etc can be flawed but hold them to high standards, rather than giving up on the possibility that we can know things at all, in the sense that a journalist may not know everything, but they are serving an important function in a system of checks and balances. Also, we cannot spend time researching everything exhaustively, so we have to trust someone to do some of the work for us. Nor can we be so daunted by the idea of knowing enough that we fail to vote and participate in making decisions. TLDR As citizens, it doesn\u2019t help to take a postmodernist perspective towards information and what\u2019s knowable. The current state of things is already destabilized enough.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Postmodernism is an irresponsible view at the moment\n","id":"e005ea00-25aa-4bf4-867e-ece0ed8d44bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should businesses pay people on a structured and distinct scale or allow employees to negotiate salaries?<|ARGUMENT|>Even after negotiation employees can still wonder if they are being compensated fairly. Therefore it is never a win for those involved, because there is no transparency with the situation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It can be quite stressful for everyone discussing and negotiating salaries; therefore, work relationships are more at ease without such a burden.\n","id":"d7af46eb-a4da-40b7-8fb7-320b420acbf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is deliberately not preventing someone's death ethically equivalent to killing them?<|ARGUMENT|>If no specialized professional is present because the government has failed to uphold its responsibility to protect its citizens, it's unfair for that obligation to fall on private citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Intervening in life or death situations is the responsibility of specialized professionals, like police officers, firefighters, or emergency medics.\n","id":"903ab3cb-731f-4f90-b9f1-7693184c221e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>An Iraqi refugee was charged with attempted murder in Colorado for shooting a cop. The assailant has a 'lengthy criminal background but was never deported.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because refugees end up living in very poor socioeconomic conditions, the risk that they will commit a crime is higher.\n","id":"4c38ef3b-43bf-4301-a423-047f68fa83ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>The next generation will likely recognize that sometimes co-parenting with a third parent, the state, is better than being left alone to ignorantly judge one's own parenting ability.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The next generation will have parents that are better, more responsible and better informed.\n","id":"5e1f2d06-c1dc-4f79-862d-677b58eb6037"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Time for a Maximum Wage? Should the US Limit CEO Pay?<|ARGUMENT|>Research suggests that a 1% increase in the share of taxable income being held by the highest 1% of earners decreases national life satisfaction levels as much as a 1.4% increase in the national unemployment level.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Research suggests a correlation between income, happiness and life satisfaction. Income inequality thus translates into inequality of subjective well-being Kahneman\/Deaton, p. 16491f. Stevenson\/Wolfers, p. 602f.\n","id":"c874aea3-7a54-40c8-9925-82c7c746a512"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Michigan and Florida delegates in 2008 US elections<|ARGUMENT|>On March 18th, 2008, the Florida Democratic Party rejected the idea of holding a re-vote of any kind. This means that even if there is a rationale for doing so, it won't happen. It also means that there is not popular will in Florida to make it happen, which would make it particularly inappropriate to try to push forward a re-vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Florida's Democratic party rejected in March, 2008 holding a re-vote\n","id":"cb3135b3-df98-4806-8772-334730ad6a67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Russia needs strong leadership<|ARGUMENT|>Putin\u2019s authoritarian style is not a threat to democracy but rather a requirement for a successful and quicker transition. Having Putin control the media is probably healthier than having it be controlled by a corrupt few that promote their personal interests rather than the interest of the state and thus those of the population at large. Democracy is a goal and while certain countries believe themselves to have achieved it, they are constantly struggling to maintain it. As a young democracy, Russia is still working towards defining its own version of democracy and finding what works best in its case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A strong leader is working in the state\u2019s best interest\n","id":"56bfc835-6f41-4e81-9e14-25d43a6492f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm an atheist hoping to have a polite and informative discussion with a theist about the existence of God. I'm going to a let you read a couple of OPs I wrote on other subreddits so that you will understand my reasons for being an atheist, and then I'm going to b explain what I take atheism to be and c outline my metaphysics and epistemology. A. Links This link explains why I am an atheist. To summarize, there are no reliable criteria that we could use to draw an inference from the evidence we have to the existence of God. God is much too different from the things we experience to be inferred from them. This link explains why I reject the Leibnizian cosmological argument. To summarize, the argument rests on an implausible notion of logical necessity and its key premises are unsupported. B. What I take atheism to be I take the distinction between theism, agnosticism, and atheism to be based on the distinction between believing something, suspending judgment about it, and believing that it is false. So, a theist would be someone who believes that God exists, an agnostic would be someone who suspends judgment about God's existence, and an atheist would be someone who denies that God exists. By that definition, I'm an atheist. A common mistake has it that an atheist has to be certain that God does not exist, but you will note that denying a claim is not the same as denying it with certainty. C. An outline of my metaphysics and epistemology My metaphysics asserts that there is an objective, mind independent reality. This objective, mind independent reality operates according to the law of identity, which says that things are what they are. I am conscious of this reality, and I perceive it through my senses, which are reliable sources of information. I have the ability to choose how I think in other words, I can choose to consider a given piece of evidence, interpret it in a certain way, and integrate it with the rest of my knowledge. In addition, I have the ability to choose not to think about things that are unpleasant to me, which I should not exercise. My epistemology asserts that my only means of access to objective reality is through the senses and reason. The only alternative to using the senses and reason as a means of acquiring knowledge is to rely on emotion, but an emotion always derives from a prior belief, so relying on emotion would amount to relying uncritically on the beliefs I already hold. Therefore, only knowledge that arrives through the senses and has been properly conceptualized by a rational process is reliable. Reason is a universally reliable means of knowledge about objective reality because anything that exists will be in principle capable of being measured, compared and contrasted with other things, and studied to determine what causal relationships it stands in. To change my view, you will need to either persuade me that it is reasonable to believe in God independent of sensory evidence, or persuade me that there are reasonable criteria based on sensory evidence that permit an inference to the existence of God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that God does not exist.\n","id":"0ba9200f-d89d-449c-8a58-2044ae44c381"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Liquid Democracy be a better mechanism of governance than Representative Democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>To achieve high voter turn out, a government or society would need to develop a sense of public duty and pride in voting within the electorate.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An effective implementation of Liquid Democracy requires high voter involvement.\n","id":"5fe294f8-f850-4fb2-a770-39cd91b5a7a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the ecological crisis we are facing become our collective and singular focus?<|ARGUMENT|>Scientists often prove to be wrong eventually in the claims they make. For instance, Newtonian physics has now been superseded by quantum physics \"Peak Oil theorists of twenty years ago turned out to be too alarmist. They believed we would be running out of fuel already. So it doesn't make sense to single-mindedly focus on the ecological crisis, as scientists may have over-estimated it, and alarmists may be using it for their own purposes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The science on climate change is still immature. We don't know for a fact that we are causing accelerated warming, and mass extinctions are a part of nature. Therefore, acting in an alarmist manner or prioritizing this above all other areas is inappropriate.\n","id":"348ef579-ba7f-46e3-9c28-052d6d269917"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Psychiatrists Be Allowed to Diagnose Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Allowing all psychiatrists to diagnose a public figure can set a dangerous precedent if used as a political tool. It can lead to political debates descending into uninformed discussions and personal attacks regarding which candidate is more mentally unstable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given the polarised political culture in the US, any declaration by a psychiatrist about the mental well-being of a politician would be met with general suspicion and partisanship. This would only shame the profession.\n","id":"3972f6fc-7afb-482d-99f4-a0cc5948a1ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok, to start of I'm a huge advocate of raising awareness for mental illness. My Aunt was diagnosed with Bi Polar when I was 4 years old and my mum her twin would often have to bring me along when she was in a bad place , so I've seen how shitty it can be. What I mean by not believing in depression is that it is too hard to pin point what constitutes being depressed. Ok so there are people who are clinically depressed and who are almost catatonic but I really feel like they need to rename this because there is too much of a spectrum at the moment and it's hard to tell those who think they are depressed from those who genuinely have no hope other than medication. For example I see so many comments on reddit surrounding depression and it's multiple symptoms and I'm finding myself thinking more and more that these people have simply not yet adapted to the circumstances they have found themselves in. I've accepted that life is tough as hell and that there are going to be some really shitty moments. In fact I'm not doing great at the moment, but I do not label myself as depressed. I've simply accepted that I have some work to do. I believe what all these people mean to say is that they are unhappy which I can 100 be on board with. When redditors try to relate to each other by listing out how they are sleeping in all the time or eating too much or not being able to socialize properly, to me this is defeatist and is reinforcing the idea in their heads that they are worthless, thus perpetuating the cycle of unhappiness. With this influx of depressed redditors I can't tell anymore if the person commenting is genuinely sick and needs help or if it is just one more human being suffering from the human condition EDIT Ok so it seems I have indeed poorly worded what my stance is exactly. As someone mentioned below a more appropriate title would be depression is too hard to diagnose and should be reserved for instances where the person is catatonic has made an attempt to commit suicide<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe in being depressed\n","id":"b2d732ef-118f-44c8-831d-43953d68c3ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This was prompted by a recent roadtrip where the driver, my SO's father and probably one of the most notorious distracted drivers out there, scared the living shit out of me every 5min or so because he just couldn't keep off his phone for the whole 6hr round trip drive. He was doing the braille driving thing where he'd browse his phone, occasionally glancing up, but only really noticing he was off course when the bumps on the lanes sides of the road started rattling the car, and he'd jerk it back to center and then repeat that again and again for 6 hours. Honestly, even as someone who has lost friends who were drunk driving who got hit by drunk drivers, I'd rather my SO's dad was a bit tipsy. Sure if he were intoxicated his reaction times might be a bit slower. Sure his vision might be a bit blurry but at least he'd be looking at the fucking road. This examination of texting while driving showed that the average time a texting driver takes their eyes off the road for is 23 seconds. At 65mph the freeway speed limit in my state you travel some 95ft in a single second so nearly 2,200ft in the amount of time it takes, on average, to address a single text message. To help you visualize that, that's over 6 football fields, and nearly 60 lengths of a standard pool all while hurtling along in a multi ton death machine at 65mph not looking where you are going. E Thanks to u mfDandP for pointing out the 23 seconds is total and not continuous that said, I still don't really feel it changes my view all that much if you're taking your eyes off the road even for 6 football fields even a football field at a time, you're still looking away from the road too much. Loathe as I am to appreciate anything about drunk drivers, I can at least say most intoxicated people I've had driving me were laser locked on the road. They know they're intoxicated, so if anything they are paying extra attention to the road, so as not to let their drunkenness alter their driving in any way. For text drivers, it's the exact opposite. Impairment be damned, I'd rather have a drunk driver than a texting one. Think of it like this. Take your favorite sport. A basketball free throw, or a soccer hockey goal. A football field goal. A golf putt. If you had your favorite player down 3 or 4 beers, more than enough to get them over the DUI limit, I'd bet their scoring average would go down but it'd still be a hell of a lot better than if they tried to score, stone cold sober, with a fucking blindfold on. That's drunk vs text driving. One is a little impaired, but paying attention the other isn't impaired, but isn't paying attention at all. And I can also hope that some legislation of this sort might help bring attention to the dangers of texting while driving. I know countless people who are staunchly against drunk driving, the kind of people who will call an Uber if they've just had a few lite beers over the course of a couple hours on a Friday night, who will nonetheless send half a dozen texts, check the Reddit main page, and browse their Facebook comments every day on their commute to work. People don't treat texting and driving with the severity they treat drinking and driving, but they ought to. And for that matter, law enforcement ought to in my state texting while driving gets you fined a couple hundred bucks and doesn't besmirch your record the way a DUI would, and you'll practically never serve any jail time for it or lose your license over it, even for repeat offenders. Before anyone busts out any stats about which one is actually more dangerous in terms of fatalities, let me just say I've done the research there. I wanted to link some, but the sources varied too wildly for me to be comfortable in citing any one of them. Some found texting was 6x worse than drunk driving, others found drunk driving was 10x worse. It's clearly not a well defined area of study, and more studies are needed. One thing I can say is that it's probably a hell of a lot easier to tell when a drunk driver kills someone or causes a fender bender they'll step out of a car smelling like a brewery and slurring their words a texter can just shove their phone back in their pocket or purse after and incident and nobody is the wiser. Compared to DUIs, I imagine a greater number of DWTs can I start calling it that? go unnoticed and unreported. As for implementation, I imagine there'd be some potential for abuse by law enforcement any cop can simply say they saw you texting while driving, and fuck your record up while sticking you with pricey fines. But I also would have to imagine that such claims would be fairly easy to refute can you not pull your phone records to show that you didn't open or send any texts during the time of the incident? Given that, say, iPhones can tell when you're texting someone back, I refuse to believe this info is unattainable. If you're falsely charged, all you have to do is provide your phone records that show you're innocent and you'll be let off. And while we're on the subject, let's not pretend our current system is flawless I'd think we'd all agree that drunk driving needs to be policed, but the current 0.8 standard and the zero tolerance lt 21 policies are just was wont to fuck innocent people over as what I'm proposing. For instance, in high school one of my buddies had like two sips of beer before he left a party to pick up some of our female peers who were dealing with some creeps trying to sexually assault them at another party. He got pulled over like a block from the place, and since he had alcohol on his breath he was breathalyzed and they found him over the 0.0 limit for people under 21. He explained the situation and more gracious cop agreed to let him sit for like 15min to let the alcohol in his mouth go away and when they tried again he was 0.0, but the original asshole cop charged him with an underage DUI anyways due to the original results. And I know plenty of people read hardcore alcoholics who I would fully trust to drive be after downing a sixer therefore well over the legal limit while I'd never get into a car with my buddy Nick F. who is sloshed and stumbling after having a Miller High Life and a half, even though he would be well within the legal limit. I'm not claiming my system is perfect, only pointing out the current one isn't, either. As for other forms of distracted driving, it's likely they should be punished similarly, too, but I'm not really interested in discussing them here. I've seen people literally reading books or digging into steak dinners, meat knives and all, on the highway, too and maybe those people should be punished the same as DUIs and DWTs, too, but I'm not really interesting in delving into well you say texters should be punished more harshly, what about people browsing Reddit while driving? Cheers. Ya'll know what to do.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Texting while driving should be treated the same, or worse, than a DUI.\n","id":"eef9c194-0409-4cdb-b145-300f95cb73bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I had a recent discussion with a friend about the topic of electric cars. The argument was about the enviromental impact of conventional cars lifetime production to recycle vs electric cars lifetime and amount of batteries used until recycle. I can just imagine that batteries are required to be manufactured under strict rules and harvesting the resources is less impactful than oil rigs and fracking etc. The electric car might still require materials made from oil. Are there alternatives to oil based components? Edit The view i want to change is my stance on the future of electric cars. That they are more enviromentally friendly in the short AND in the long run. That we can have modern car's without needing to use fossile fuel or oil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The inclined usage of highly toxic batteries in electric cars will not cause more enviromental harm than conventional cars.\n","id":"9bd93a67-f8a8-4aa8-b60d-0833a9319d78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should education at public universities in the United States be tuition free?<|ARGUMENT|>In the past, a high school diploma was enough to get a job at which you could support yourself, and so public interest was supported by free K-12. Now a college degree is for the most part necessary to adequately support yourself, and if it's going to be a necessity in the economy, it should be within the reach of anyone who is qualified to go. It's in the best interest of the individuals and the public.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"University education is increasingly necessary to facilitate success in a world where more and more jobs require university degrees as a minimum for candidates to be even considered.\n","id":"74c0eca7-6567-4197-96fd-dcfd1ab7bcba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we create and adopt a universal currency?<|ARGUMENT|>Universal currency would decrease the need for countries to maintain their international competitiveness through GDP growth by simplifying economics for them enough to free up their focus to be able to help out humanity instead.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A universal currency would allow the world to finally work towards growth of humanity as a whole.\n","id":"1efc707c-fb58-4af7-b792-a95ede6ee959"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT \u2206 View Changed see comments EDIT I grew up in a traditional home and my mother had always taught me to respect others regardless of ethnicity, class or gender. I was raised with the constant reminder to be a steward and protector. When I went to college in New England, it seemed that a lot of how I was raised and what I was taught was being put into question particularly my views on women. I was taught to treat women with the utmost respect, as if they were my own mother or sister. This philosophy was seen as offensive to some, as I recall an interaction I had at the entrance to our library. I entered and turned to see if there was anybody I should hold the door for, and there was in fact a girl that was walking toward the door but in that awkward distance where you're not sure if you should just continue inside or wait. I decided to wait, and the girl rolled her eyes and said, What, you don't think women can open a doors for themselves? And with that, she went through an adjacent door. Now this is an extreme case. But there were many other times throughout my college experience where it seemed as though I were a bad guy. Pun intended. Any respect or consideration shown toward a woman was seen as disrespect and special consideration. All this to say, I come from family with strong, outspoken women and believe that women should have equal rights and opportunities as men. I consider myself an advocate even, but would never call myself a feminist. Why? Because I don't respect the women I've met who are feminists. To me, they were bitter women who had personally horrible experiences with men that bled into every interaction they had with other men. It seemed less about, up with the women and more about, down with the men  on feminists.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm all for equal rights and opportunities, but have a hard time respecting feminists I'm a male because their stance always seem paired with bitterness.\n","id":"4a589a80-24b5-4d1b-9a6f-7dca1defdf4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>With it's policies, the government has provided massive advantages to industries wanting to gain access in construction, or wanting to \u2018develop\u2019 the coastline. But such projects end up ignoring the people in the fishing villages, in addition to nearly a million plus people engaged in fisheries-related activities as well as the natural environment. The Wire<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modi's coastal developmental policies have come at the direct expense of India's coastal ecosystems and the native dwellers of these lands.\n","id":"58aef4e3-70f0-45d5-9ab8-6d31e229fab2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the music of the past better than it is today?<|ARGUMENT|>The Crystals' 'He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Kiss' 1962 romanticised domestic abuse through lyrics like \u201cHe hit me and it felt like a kiss, . he hit me and I knew he loved me. If he didn\u2019t care for me, I could have never made him mad, but he hit me and I was glad.\u201d<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sexism was far more ubiquitous in the past. Depending on how far back one goes, nearly all songs would be sexist.\n","id":"3dc14093-84e6-451e-b09d-c8246cbfe4c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Even though I highly disagree with the morality of what the NSA did and think that the program should be stopped immediately, I do not believe that they violated our constitution more specifically, the 4th amendment and here's why Just for reference, the fourth amendment of the US constitution is as follows The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. In order to analyze whether what they did was breaking the law or not, we must first define exactly what kind of information was being collected, and who owns that information. From what I've read here on reddit, my understanding is that the transmissions made from a person's cell phone are recorded digitally by the service provider, then sent to the NSA for review. Here's the overly simplified explanation of the path taken by the signal from start to finish to my understanding person talks into a phone the phone transmits this data into open space as microwave radiation light the service provider's cell tower picks up the signal the tower sends the signal to cell provider database 5a. the database sends signal to another cell tower 6a. the cell tower transmits signal back into space 7a. the recipient's cell phone picks up the signal 8a. the signal is converted into sound in a way the recipient can understand 5b. the tower also sends signal to be digitally recorded and stored in a database owned by the provider 6b. the provider hands over the encrypted data to the NSA for review Notice that the person doing the talking is using a cell phone to send their message out into free space via microwaves. Theoretically any antenna, receiver, waveguide, etc can pick up this signal if its constructed to accommodate the same microwave frequency as the signal same way a radio works . So anyone with a knowledge of how light propagates mathematically can construct a device to tune into this signal. Although the signal is probably encoded, I guarantee that there are quite a few people who can get around this if they wanted too just like hackers do with encrypted computer files it's actually not illegal to find a way break a code, password, encryption, puzzle, etc of something belonging to public domain explained below . That said, would it be illegal for someone to tune in to these microwaves floating around in free space? No, of course not, just like how it isn't illegal for someone to take a simple photograph in a public area like a park after all, a camera and a cell phone are similar in the sense that they both capture the light around it and turn it into something the human can process camera visible, phone audio . What I'm trying to say is that this information floating around is public domain, that is, anyone can legally tap into it, store it, use it, with no legal consequences. By this reasoning, it is safe to say that one cannot own light as property. Now, what happens when the cell tower picks up this signal? The signal is transmitted to the recipient on the other end of the line and is also sent to the provider's database to be recorded. So in a sense, they just captured this free floating light in open space using an antenna, and recorded it to a hard drive in some random database god knows where. This is where the free signal that has been floating around in space goes from being public domain to being someone's property . The moment someone records this information on something tangible, they own the copy of it. For example, if you take a picture of a scenic park using a Polaroid camera, you own the information you just captured on a tangible Polaroid photo possibly an even more enlightening analogy think of recording the voices of people talking in the same park they could be talking about literally anything and you can still legally record it . Not only do you own this photo or audio recording , you can do what you like with it you can keep it, destroy it, sell it, or even give it away to someone that includes handing it over to the NSA if you choose to do so . That being said, the cellphone provider now owns this recording they made, and can do what they want with it. If I remember correctly, these companies agreed to hand this information over to the NSA. I forget the stupid reasons for agreeing to this, but it was their choice in the end, and they can do what they want with their property. Now back to the fourth amendment The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. Let's analyze this part by part starting with persons, houses, papers, and effects . This describes the main topic in question a person's tangible property and belongings. I believe I made it reasonable clear that microwave radiation light that permeates everywhere in free space cannot be considered the legal property of anyone , and is of public domain. This argument in itself is enough to show that the 4th amendment does not apply to the issue at hand, but lets move on unreasonable searches and seizures . As I said before, anyone with an antenna can tune into this signal above their heads using basic systems and undergraduate level understandings of electrodynamics or electrical engineering. Would you consider this act unreasonable searching and seizure? I definitely wouldn't think so after all, is it considered an unreasonable search of the effects in someone's pant's pocket if they willingly turn them out in front of you to see as well as everyone else nearby ? Absolutely not. If that same person were to put a bag of Smarties candy on a public picnic table in the park and say this bag of Smarties is now part of public domain , would it be considered an unreasonable seizure if someone were to walk up and take one? Definitely not, after all, he put them out as being part of the public domain anyone can tap into them with no consequences. Lastly, on the subject of seizures the NSA didn't seize the recorded data they collected it was given to them willingly by its legal owner, the cell phone service providers. This, my fellow redditors, is why I don't believe that the NSA violated the 4th amendment of the constitution by collecting recordings of our cell phone conversations  Edit spelling, clarity Edit 2 please keep the comments coming, I posted this right before bed and need to sleep, but I promise to read them all in the morning and respond to hopefully all of them if I can. Be patient<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe that NSA recording people's cell phone conversations is against the US constitution...\n","id":"b4ac1317-d62b-4f16-a7f9-22998e0c9648"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the DNC and media's \"big switch\" narrative a lie?<|ARGUMENT|>Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, like Lincoln, championed and wrote much of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The DNC and mainstream media's \"big switch\" narrative a lie.\n","id":"77ef876e-869f-4256-9250-f2a8f704c136"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems to me that killing is part of the animal kingdom. Animals kill other animals for sustenance or to assert dominance. More broadly, every animal requires ingesting other organic materials in order to survive. I would object to killing an animal when it relates to something that harms people. Killing someone's pet, a national lion, or perhaps animals needed by an ecosystem. Killing a wild animal because I want to eat it or wear its fur is perfectly natural and acceptable. Furthermore, killing for no reason is also fine. Beyond the nuisance that is having a fresh carcass to deal with, it's no different than pulling a weed or smushing a bug. Can anybody convince me that a slaughtered cow or a mouse caught in a trap is a travesty?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing inherently wrong with killing a non-human animal.\n","id":"fb9ee6e2-5e41-493d-9b3b-994d2cf5f430"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Chester Zoo spent \u00a340 million on a project called Islands a recreation of several South East Asia islands for some of their resident animals. At the same time, the Kenya Wildlife Service KWS, an organisation that protects animals in situ, has less than half that budget.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Zoos in Western countries receive funding from donors and governments. Those contributions could be invested in animal conservation in struggling countries, thus protecting endangered species instead of going to zoo\u2019s operational budgets.\n","id":"6c5a62ac-d9ee-4ead-9220-f5127a8e7911"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that implementing Ranked Choice Voting described here in the US presidential election would reduce the current polarization experienced compared to the current winner take all system Here are some of the things I think could happen because of it By increasing the options people could vote for there would be more opinions they would be exposed to, somewhat limiting the current echo bubble people are within This would decrease the current thought of wasting a vote by voting third party which would reduce finger pointing when elections are lost Voting for third parties would allow voters to feel as though their voice was more heard and statistics could be gathered to determine how different issues sway voters. This would make the issues they care about matter more when the next round of elections happen or even when the current candidate is in office There would be less attack ads given the now much higher cost of running multiple it would be less efficient to do so. This could reduce outgroup bias Eventually we could see Duverger's Law fade away and third parties gain traction, I believe this would focus more effort on the issues rather than the sides since that's how you would gain the winning votership<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ranked Choice Voting would result in less polarization in politics\n","id":"583564cc-ea7a-4b24-9a1c-a44a85193676"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Traveling is a lot more work than a vacation. When you travel you are staying at hostels, getting to experience the local cultures and authentic foods of the region. Traveling is about the experience of embedding yourself in another culture. People will often say I need a vacation from my vacation, I think they say this because they have been traveling and running around all over the place. Traveling isn't as relaxing as a vacation is. Vacationing is visiting a resort or sitting by a pool. You can visit somewhere far away and it can still be a vacation. If you travel to Mexico or Thailand but stay at a resort, this is a vacation and I would not consider it traveling. I would consider going on a cruise as falling under the vacation category, not traveling. Both are fine and are unique in their own ways, but I think they mean two completely different things, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Traveling and Vacationing are two different things.\n","id":"ee9021b4-ebf7-4575-9b96-b523a2910961"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Harm to society. There are serious harms to society from drug use, as we\u2019ve already seen, including increases in murder, theft and prostitution. It is, in fact, one of the leading sources of crime in society Harm to user\u2019s health. Drugs adversely affect the user\u2019s health, and we have an obligation to avoid unnecessary harm to our bodies, such as that which is caused by regular drug use. A criticism of this argument is that harm to oneself is often a byproduct of exercising one\u2019s freedom, such as with playing dangerous sports or simply driving in a car. While it\u2019s good to reduce harms to oneself when we can, eliminating all such harms would seriously curtail our freedom to act as we like and try out different hobbies, careers and lifestyles. Decrease in user\u2019s motivation. Drugs adversely affect the user\u2019s motivation to be a productive citizen. We have an obligation to ourselves and society to develop our talents and be productive citizens in some way. But the pleasures of drug use, even with less addictive ones, often eclipse the ordinary sense of enjoyment and satisfaction that we might get from learning new skills and creating a better society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of recreational drugs is immoral\n","id":"23a75839-415b-47f2-be37-5c8d79e4d859"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I spent a lot of time in the business school as an undergrad and they put a huge emphasis on networking with people to land jobs and internships. I don't see why this is morally acceptable. Obviously there is a level of practicality to some networking its sometimes better to hire someone you know than someone you don't. But for the most part, its not about practicality, but scratching each others backs. Networking results in the best candidate getting turned away because someone else has a connection. Shouldn't job internship school placement be based on merit? We call it corruption when people obtain political appointments based on who they know, why is it ok to encourage this same practice in the business world?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think networking think business, not computers is corruption.\n","id":"b732e3f5-4b97-40a5-910b-72f37d4d3d93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Doctors should be banned from performing genital reshaping surgery on intersex infants<|ARGUMENT|>Operations to alter the size or appearance of children\u2019s genitals risk incontinence, scarring, lack of sensation, and psychological trauma. The procedures are irreversible, nerves that are severed cannot regrow, and scar tissue can limit options for future surgery.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genital reshaping procedures can inflict psychological harm on intersex patients.\n","id":"22ee97f5-3dd5-42b3-a6b4-983218211975"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>A fire simply exists and yet it has the potential to do many things: burn, cook, sterilize, etc. If a child touches fire they will get burnt. The fire has not exhibited an act of evil. The fire simply existed in a natural state of cause and effect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evil, by definition, requires intent; and intent is a manifestation of free will. Suffering is not evil. Intentionally causing someone to suffer is evil. Therefore, natural occurring phenomenon, like hurricanes, illness, or car accidents cannot be properly defined as evil.\n","id":"f2a475d9-5ff0-4cd4-8973-2c319d07c211"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit a word here and there. x200B TL DR The original video was misleading due to framing and omission of context. The reaction was extreme and risks hurting children. Given the additional context that contradicts the original narrative, many individuals chose to double down on their original claims and demands. The entire situation actually supports the MAGA Fake News narrative that otherwise, is entirely false. This gives them concrete evidence to back up that claim in the future. First off I'm just some guy following the story whose tired of following it. I've got nothing to do with it. I'm not a Native American. I'm not a Black Hebrew Israelite. I'm not a Catholic. I'm an atheist. I'm registered independent, and I voted for Clinton. I can't stand the MAGA agenda. I think Trump has done irreparable damage both to America as a world superpower and to America's social fabric. I'd throw a party if impeachment proceedings started today. But facts are facts, wrong is wrong, and harming a child and a child's future because they represent something that makes you angry is wrong. For the sake of completeness The original 3 44 minute clip that started the outrage The extended 1 46 18 clip showing everything that transpired with better context The immediate claims about the first video were that the Catholic MAGA hat wearing student group were mocking Nathan Phillips, the Native American protest leader, and his group. Evidence of this put forth as the look on the children's faces, and that they were chanting build the wall. None of the videos have actually captured evidence of the chant. It doesn't mean it didn't happen, but there is no video evidence for it. When Phillips showed up some of the students chanted with them. Some made tomahawk gestures. That's probably insensitive. But it does not make them racist, or the face of the patriarchy. The full video shows that the entire event began with a group of Black Hebrew Israelite street preachers being basically horrible to everyone that had the misfortune to be within earshot. This includes individuals from the Native American protest group. It includes children from the Catholic group. They called the students crackers, peckerwoods, dusty ass animals and future school shooters. They call black individuals Uncle Toms and Uncle Coon and Uncle Tomahawks. Some media outlets have chosen to characterize this group as a group of elderly black men which certainly hides their actions and intentions. And if they're elderly, I guess at 36 I am elderly too. In the face of the taunting from the BHI group, some of the students can be heard defending students that represent minorities including the black student, and a student called a faggot by the BHI group. Nathan Phillips has stated that he saw a look of mob mentality in the faces of the young Catholics, and that he put himself between predator the boys and their prey the Black Hebrew Israelites . Phillips very well might have de escalated a potentially violent situation but his assumptions about who was actually making the situation tense were clearly wrong. As one of the Black Hebrew Israelites points out we're surrounded and they won't do a damn thing. That's correct. The students stood around chanting school chants and acting like silly kids. They didn't do a damn thing, in spite of being mad dogged by these angry, offensive street preachers. The three minute clip showing a young man in a MAGA hat with a cheeky grin being in Phillip's face was, as Bari Weiss stated in a conversation with Joe Rogan a Rorschach test, in which all of America saw what they wanted to see. Given the additional context, we can see that Phillips put himself directly in front of that student. The student did not choose to be there. When I saw the three minute clip I was outraged like many others. I saw a white MAGA hated kid nose to nose with an old Native American man and I let all my assumptions guide me. But given the full context, its obvious those assumptions, in this situation, were incorrect. Some media outlets have tried to correct the narrative. Others have not. Others have continued to call these students the face of white patriarchy. Essentially, these students Since this started, numerous individuals, both famous and anonymous, have demanded the children be doxed. They've demanded they be expelled. They've demanded that this situation prevent them from ever attending a college. Essentially, these children represent systemic oppression and for that, they need to pay. The students have been both successfully and unsuccessfully doxed. The students' families have received death threats. Another child that was misidentified and was not at the event was doxed and received similar threats. This is wrong. I won't argue that Covington Catholic, and the Catholic Church, in general, doesn't have a great track record on treating minorities, woman, and the LGBTQ community as equals, and with respect. But that's an awful lot of weight to put on the shoulders of these children. And I keep repeating the word children because I don't want you to forget we're talking about children . In spite of the fac that the video record the only one that really matters IMO , doesn't show them behaving particularly badly, there have been calls to ruin their futures. Why would you want to prevent these students from getting a college education? That's the place where they are most likely to learn a different, more tolerant, worldview. Finally, this event provides concrete evidence of actual Fake News. Every time Donald Trump, r t d, and other MAGA folks call a story that calls our Trump's lying and unethical behavior, they can fall back on the Curious Case of the Covington Catholics Kids as evidence. In fact, he already has In summary, the full video shows a group of grown men mistreating pretty much everyone around them. The children could have behaved better but they could have behaved far worse , and there's little evidence of them being racist or racially insensitive, and zero evidence that they were about to become violent. Nathan Phillips was trying to do the right thing within the context he perceived, but his perception of what was happening seems inaccurate. The entire event was a non event except for the tight framing of the original three minute clip and what that clip represented to those that saw and reacted emotionally to it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Reaction to the \"Native Leader\" vs. MAGA Catholic Kids Event Is Wrong, Bolsters \"Fake News\" Claim\n","id":"2af5088d-f33c-413d-ac60-99564512a02a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not vegan, nor vegetarian, and I love animals with a passion, but my meat comes from smaller scale slaughterhouses which comply with my religious beliefs Halal . I strictly do not buy my meat from any restaurant or store without the seal of approval, but I would give up eating meat in a heartbeat would miss the carp out of it if I had to buy meat from places where non halal is served. After watching food inc and other documentations of the cruelty of the meat market I firmly believe that the animals are subject to torture and conditions not fit for even the most pathetic creature, so when people buy their meats knowing how it came to their plates and still care about animals, I think they're nothing short of hypocrites. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that people that like animals and eat most meats are hypocrites.\n","id":"eacaac31-503f-4954-81d3-dc46d607e795"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>People are more likely able to know, see, and act on local food if there are ethical issues with it such as cutting into endangered species' land.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Imported food tends to be less ethical than local food.\n","id":"41b2b5c2-14d2-4e6a-8ddc-5185fbe22f75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>The Bible includes the quote \"And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If sacred scripture is interpreted by religion as the word of God, it seems apparent that heaven is preferable to hell.\n","id":"f9d21673-b86c-46c3-8a30-e9aa65723870"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a European and I'm aware that this might come over as being arrogant, but I'm genuinly curious about the position of many Americans regarding guns and their feeling towards the government. I often hear the argument that guns are necessary for protection against an authoritarian government. What's the deal with that? This might sound like a loaded question, but do some Americans really think that there is a chance that the government will eventually start limiting the constitutional rights or even attack its citizens? For me that seems very unlikely and, well, paranoid. For us Europeans it's really hard to grasp the advantage of having guns and this argument the protection against an authoritarian government is often the first and sometimes the only argument I hear from gun advocates. Why don't you think guns should be banned? Change my view. Note Guns aren't completely banned in Europe. You can acquire hunting and sport licences and still privately own guns. This is basically what I mean with a gun ban. Edit I didn't change my view, but I now recognize the bureacratic and financial implication of such a ban. It certainly wouldn't happen overnight more like over decades , but I think it is possible to atleast reduce the number of guns through actions like a buyback and or the taxation of already registred guns. Stopping the production of guns could be the first step in a long term effort.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think many Americans are paranoid about the governments and guns should be banned without exception.\n","id":"1c5bce08-7b0d-4aa9-8fdb-ba5c5f32a75d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the case of civil unrest, e.g. Syria, Ukraine, Lybia 2011 , Afghanistan 1978 , any responsible government should be expected to support the national government that shows the greatest ability to secure the territory. The reasoning is that anarchy, more often than autocracy, leads to terrorism, crime, and interstate war. Furthermore, governments may use economic punishments and incentives to mold the behavior of one another, but can do little to affect the behavior of a revolutionary group. The atrocities committed by governments may be frightening, but they are still preferable to the alternative.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If any country intervenes in a state with civil unrest, it should support the better established government.\n","id":"958a680a-45c7-4174-a23b-4b0283bccfd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Daenerys Targaryen the Prince\/Princess that was Promised?<|ARGUMENT|>Tywin's last words were \"You are no son of mine.\" Earlier he said: \"Men\u2019s laws give you the right to bear my name and display my colors, since I cannot prove that you are not mine.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is also possible that Tyrion is a secret son of Aerys II.\n","id":"be3299f4-133f-4789-bdd7-4412351c0ef0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>We all know well that we simply are what we eat. So basically saying that the type of food which really helped us expand, evolve and make all that progress is bad equals to saying that a priori we shouldn't have been expanding and evolving all this time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The consumption of cooked meat was crucial for the development of the human brain. Therefore you can state that eating meat is what made humans what they are today.\n","id":"c7d2c934-746a-4830-878c-c783ef947965"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>Construction used to be manual labour, but now, at least in the western world, we have machines that anyone can operate, such as bulldozers, cranes, diggers and excavators, so these are things that require skill rather than strength.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern technology has made it that this physical disadvantage is not an actual disadvantage and women are just as capable, productive and efficient in these jobs and roles as men\n","id":"116c488e-5979-4930-adb9-d563b266ef02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Sing Problematic Christmas Songs?<|ARGUMENT|>Political backlash can take the form of articles published criticising artists, producers and those publishing the music.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The artist may receive political backlash which can negatively impact the publishing studio.\n","id":"9d01ea5d-7fb3-4b05-990b-72aaaf2e2170"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>None of Trump's previous comments were a threat to the profits of NFL owners, so it seems likely that their reaction to his comments on NFL player protests were at least partially motivated by their own profit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is hypocritical of owners to kneel in response to Trump's comments about the protest but to have also taken no stance on his previous controversial statements.\n","id":"54c208fb-4ea4-441f-8c8e-4ce6df248047"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Legislative restrictions may be imposed upon citizens due to religious principles, regardless if those citizens share those values or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion has been used as a form of social control.\n","id":"d375302f-a0c2-41ed-9a42-e08de73beb17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is transhumanism the next step in human evolution?<|ARGUMENT|>Transhumanism could speed up evolution through new technologies like gene editing lab-grown babies or in-vitro gametogenesis IVG<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transhumanism could speed up human evolution, which provides multiple benefits.\n","id":"cab570cc-9846-4392-a10d-eee551b49b3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>if two people commit the same crime and are the same age why shouldn't they be tried the same? If all men ARE created equal how is it fair to try them differently? I can see an argument to be made about being within 3 months of 18 or something on par, but it doesn't seem right. Just because someone is more less mature shouldn't matter. if you can arbitrarily determine whether they are tried as a minor or adult doesn't that begin a trial by essentially saying America has a fair and just judicial system, but don't worry we are treating you differently. Edit maybe it makes more sense to give specific crimes a particular age cutoff? Edit I've been reading a lot of these comments, It appears my real concern is with very young children pre teens and the like . they can't fully comprehend the scope of their actions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"shouldn't anyone under 18 or at least some set age always be tried as a minor?\n","id":"879a4960-db01-47ed-9bda-813e8529be08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is preventing me from meeting people because it makes me scared to say that I still live with my parents or work at a part time job. It makes me feel that value is highly determined by these things. Help me see if this is true or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel that if you don't have a good job or your own place you are worthless to the opposite sex\n","id":"0db3040a-6e73-4700-9f16-42f1dcb5c609"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>For example, there is decreasing satisfaction with democracy as a political system; this does not mean it is not the only morally legitimate form of government.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The attitude of citizens towards direct democracy does not mean that it is not principally required.\n","id":"4d9b3dda-c247-41a2-8373-c849eb71e756"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The current attack on military bands for budgetary reasons is effort wasted. The amount of savings recovered from shutting down bands is insignificant compared to the loss of culture, art, and tradition that goes with it. Military bands serve not only the post they are assigned, but the local community surrounding them with music, art, and cultural expansion. An example would be for several years the 1st Cav Div Band at Fort Hood Texas would not only play the music for the annual fireworks display, but play the 1812 Overture with REAL artillery as intended by the composer. This, and much more, will be lost in the name of saving the equivalent of one cruise missiles cost a year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Military Bands are not source of waste, rather instead are a much needed part of our history, mission, and culture.\n","id":"330cab99-633f-4a7a-9557-ddc4b987fd9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Incest is probably the most widely spread taboo in human culture, but I find all the argument against it to be inconsistent. 1 Incest produces offspring with disabilities this one is only partially true. Incest itself doesn't increase the chances of genetic disorders, and everyone that remembers Gregor Mendel's studies should know that. But beside this, incest is a sexual activity between closely related individuals, so it doesn't really require procreation, as it comprehends non reproductive activities such as oral sex and anal sex, as well as safe sex to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Banning the sexual intercourse to prevent the pregnancy seems excessive to me. Also, if the two individuals are homosexual, the problem of a pregnancy is non existent. Another counter argument could be if we prohibit incest to prevent the birth of a child with genetic disorders, does that mean that we should also forbid people who have genetic disorders or carry a recessive gene that may cause a disorder to reproduce? 2 Incest is abuse rape pedophilia I get this, because the majority of reported cases of incest usually involve an older relative that violates a younger one e.g. a father and his daughter or a brother and a younger sister , but I think that this argument misses the point. The thing that makes these sexual acts immoral and punishable is not the fact that they involve two close relatives, but the fact that they are non consensual and or feature an adult having sex with a minor. A consensual intercourse between two adults is not harmful. 3 Incest is disgusting this is probably the argument that I understand the most, but also the most fallacious one. Nothing can be considered inherently wrong just because it's considered disgusting by one's subjective views. It's not wrong to eat garlic bread with strawberry jam , even though many people including me would consider it disgusting. EDIT I do not support inbreeding, even though the ambiguity of my post made it unclear. People can engage in sexual activity without the purpose of procreation and, if done correctly, the risk of an unwanted pregnancy is really low. So I ask you to stop using the it causes genetic defects in children argument because a guy having sex with his own sister is different from a guy having a child with his own sister . I have no problem with the former, I have many with the latter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no consistent argument against incest\n","id":"117f44a2-9047-478a-8424-7f377190f215"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>The bystander only knows the trolley itself is bearing down fast. The motive and cognizance of the trolley driver is not known. A bystander could reason that it would be better to seek help; such as calling 911, even if that help will not arrive in time to save those immediately at risk; on the chance that the death of the 5 will not slow the trolley driver down.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any assumptions of metadata, especially metadata that a person in such a hypothetical scenario could not know, may artificially influence what would be the most ethical action in a scenario.\n","id":"5166680b-e177-4e58-a431-275ca90beb13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't really mind loud music in clubs, I do think the loudness can add to the experience because you can actually feel the bass. But once you go above 110 decibel, hearing protection won't help anymore. hearing protection reduces noise by around 30 decibel at most. If you have music playing at 130 decibel your hearing will still get damaged after a few minutes. I also doubt that playing music that loud will still add more to the experience, it's not like you can't feel the bass at a volume of 100 decibel. At that point it's only for the sake of being as loud as possible. nbsp EDIT I'm back, I'm sorry I didn't respond. By the time I went to bed there were only a few comments, and I already awarded delta's so I didn't expect any more. Thanks for the responses nbsp EDIT I thought I'd include my reason for this CMW. There is a local club I went to a while back, you are allowed in from the age of 16. Normally they play music pretty loud, but that night there was a special discjockey. I can't remember the name from the DJ exactly but I think it had decibel in it. And he played a genre of music originating from the Netherlands called hardstyle . I know I'm may be generalizing a bit, but it's basically high tempo dance music that's very bass heavy. And the DJ's pretty much play it as loud as they are allowed because that's what they, and most hardstyle fans want. So this venue is small and has a low ceiling, there was also a decibel meter in it that went above 120 decibel most of the time, and peaked at 130. I think this combined with underage people and a lot of alcohol would lead to a lot of sore ears. I think most people over there really aren't aware how damaging this is. And even they are, if you are underage you are very prone to peer pressure so they may still decide not to wear any hearing protection. And from what I understand, at that volume hearing protection won't even help. Though it's not sure, someone commented that it's a little vague how hearing protection actually works because the decibel scale is logarithmic. Here is a hardstyle sample from r hardstyle nbsp<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think small clubs shouldn't be allowed to play their music louder than 100 - 110 decibel\n","id":"c47c9482-99a1-4a4d-80bd-b48968015997"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm an 18 year old freshman in college, so it may just come off as I don't know enough about relationships or whatever. When I look back at all of the relationships I was in through highschool and now, when I went into them, I always had the mentality that a relationship with someone COULD last until the end. Realistically, could that be the case? Probably not, but I believe this mentality benefits how a person performs in a relationship being a better boyfriend girlfriend, etc . I have to say that the opposite of my philosophy is the people that go Yeah, I could probably date him her for a year, and then head off on my own way . I've dated someone like this in the past before, and I just can't understand this mentality nor believe it's healthy to think like this in a relationship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When going into a romantic relationship, you should always act like it has the potential to last forever.\n","id":"387f042d-f986-42e4-999c-06c083f566b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Teachers Be Allowed To Wear Religious Symbols At School?<|ARGUMENT|>Public signaling of a person's religion through jewelry is a self-expression right that doesn't infringe on a student's religious freedoms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no such thing as a religiously neutral setting.\n","id":"4ffb1ea5-6b9f-47fe-bfdf-3747e8081f24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are K-12 teachers already paid enough in America?<|ARGUMENT|>In a time where the cost of education is rising faster than pay, this salary is not enough.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Higher pay for teachers is rare. The median salary is similar to a clergy position, $43,600\n","id":"ff0170e7-56c4-4153-b7fd-dd9890c67b58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't believe there is anybody at Fox saying this woman has good ideas In fact, from what I have seen on the interviews a lot of people have a hard time keeping a straight face. I think that they only let people like this air because its a slow news time during the year and it attacks a forever faceless and nameless group of people. I have seen liberal friends of mine watch Fox news than they did in a decade. It just seems to me to be so obvious that they have let kelly air her opinions because it is so fruitful with ratings. Let's face it too, no one will remember how insane this is 3 months from now besides the nameless faceless group she was attacking .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that pieces like Jesus and Santa is white is airing to get ratings.\n","id":"b618a478-36c6-485d-81c1-0196f1ffdf23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>C'mon are we really gonna have a new console from ony and Micro oft every two years? Besides the exclusives already, what makes them think people are willing to pay an extra 500 a year for games that aren't even polished in the first place. And your possible argument is the same argument as with PS3? The new console will prevent YLOD Right. So instead of ony releasing a proper console, you release some Cr p that will fail more often than not which you had not 1, not 2, not even 3 but SIX 6 freaking years to develop they release a console with a 50 chance of YLOD down the line, knowing fully well gamers will be playing all night every night till their balls drop off or until the new console feels wear off. And when they turn the console to shit, we'll release a new one, that stealthily removes PS2 legacy support again whilst increasing stability to keep them playing and buying more games Plus we get to sell the same console a second time with minor adjustments at full price.??? Proffffit ony execs must be thinking to themselves. Legacy support is a feature consumers have been asking for YEARS. Remember that new firmware upgrade that allowed people to play PS2 games on their PS4 in upscaled, re remastered HD? Yeah well it's just another cash grab. Original Ps2 discs do NOT work. You have to buy the games again DIGITALLY from the PS Store. Oh and what about the games you ALREADY bought on PS Store for PS3? They do not carry over one bit That's right. You the consumer get nothing . Pay the price of upgrading and still get no legacy support. Whatever people that didn't see ony as a greedy company do see it now. Charging THREE times for the same damn game, at full price is a slap to the customer. Just look at how Steam does things. You can buy any game and install it on any computer. Really. For example, you bought Left For Dead 2 on Steam, for your Windows 7 PC. You notice that the game is also available on Mac and Linux you look to purchase it for Mac and come to the sudden amazement, you don't have to. Yep whatever game you purchase through Steam gives you access to get it for all platforms No need to Re purchase for a different platform Don't tell me porting a game from Windows to Mac is Easy, because it is not. Heck with Steam you can even transfer all your games from one account to your new account Does ony let you transfer between accounts? No. What about a copy for the new Console? No. You want a old game you already paid in full? Pay again, we're poor and need money to develop said game which already exists in final form and actually needs just one or two lines of coding if at all . How can they say they need more money if ony is the second most reputable company in the freaking World? Steam isn't anywhere near as highly known and it's giving away multi platform keys from a single purchase You've got a fortune in money there ony and a reputation better than Microsoft isn't it time you chill and give back to the gaming community just a little? Instead of ripping us off one purchase at a time? Once again console market shows us how greedy a money hog that is ony. People WILL jump ship, the console generation will hit an all time low and finally PC gaming will get a big boost in software and hardware and rightfully triumph. The end of console popularity is nearing, and I welcome The Great Future of PC Gaming as number 1, which should have been most popular in the first place consoles don't even come close to the processing power of average gaming rigs all those 1080p HD PS3 games are lies all 900p or 720p, and PS4? nope most are still 900 960p and 30FPS, 60FPS if you're lucky . No strings attached freedom of choice is something to look forward to in the gaming world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If PS4.5 comes to fruition, more people will move to PC\n","id":"adf37966-5587-40a6-b1c1-a78536c6ae11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was out at dinner with some friends and shared this controversial opinion now I may not have anymore friends. I may not have done the best job of explaining myself and backing up my off the top of my head \u201cdata\u201d, but I\u2019ll give it a shot here Men should not be taught to not hit women. Let me be clear I am not a red pill I am not anti feminist. I do not believe men should hit women. And I do not believe women should hit men. I believe people should be taught to not hit anyone. Period. When it comes to men being taught not to hit women, I believe this cause issues when 1 men understand this and 2 women understand this. When men understand that they should not hit women, it is usually taught because men are stronger and more able to impose damage onto a woman, who is supposedly weaker. This is a dangerous notion because men are being taught that men and women stand on different grounds, one where the man stands above, is more powerful and strong, and the woman stands below, is weaker and unable to defend. Men must exercise restraint as they are the keeper of the action, whereas women can only play the role of the reacted. But power and authoritative status should not lie within the lines of physicality alone, especially as we push for gender equality. Of course, the fact of the matter is that there are many biological reasons why a man is stronger and able to overpower a woman i.e. testosterone . However, we can explore the fact that there are a number of women who are stronger than me. If it came down to it, I am sure they would get the best of me in a physical quarrel. This does not mean we should change the maxim to say One should not hit someone smaller weaker than him or her. This would grant a smaller individual permission to lay his or her hands on a bigger individual, which I also believe to not be correct. When women understand that men are taught not to hit women, I believe this can cause issues. There of course is a stigma when it comes to men hitting women however, there is no stigma of equal weight when women hit men. Often when a woman hits a man, it is dismissed. Furthermore, in some situations, some women will strike a man disregarding of which individual initiated the disagreement and a strike in return carries a heavier burden for the man worthy of social denouncement but though the action stays the same, the genders differ along with the penalty. In some situations, certain women use this social standard to their advantage, knowing they can strike a man with either no repercussion or can leverage a repercussion that will be more detrimental to the man. Looking into domestic violence among intimate partners, \u201calmost 24 of all relationships had some violence, and half 49.7 of those were reciprocally violent. In non reciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70 of the cases\u201d In an additional study, \u201crates of female perpetrated violence higher than male perpetrated violence 29.3 vs 21.65 \u201d This view is not to victimize or demonize either gender, or to dismiss the level of sexual violence that women may face compared to their counterpart. However, I believe my maxim puts people on a more fair, even playing field. People should not be hurting other people, not because they are male, or female, but because we are all people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men shouldn't be taught to not hit women.\n","id":"68125992-ca8e-4599-82aa-a2cc85916a98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'll try to keep this short, but feel free to ask me for more info Reasoning The scientific hypothesis is ultimately pointless because from my experience conducting scientific research I have witnessed coworkers change the hypothesis to make the results look better in the eyes of our professor. These changes can be either to make the hypothesis fit the results, or purposely do the opposite in order to make the conclusion look more interesting. The outcome is the same, with the hypothesis becoming obsolete and potential changes in the results leading to bias. Potential Solutions Eliminate the hypothesis altogether List potential outcomes of an experiment instead of a single, predicted one Edit Wow thank you all so much for the responses and support. Good job changing my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Making a hypothesis before conducting a science experiment does more harm than good creates potential bias to change the result or the original hypothesis\n","id":"8bcc3ff7-de03-4f09-ab14-0675243cbbc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should private property exist in outer space?<|ARGUMENT|>Many benefits of space development are militaristic in nature, which can be used to enforce global peace.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Eventually, everyone begins to benefit from the development of space technology.\n","id":"9215e6d4-febb-4d7b-b280-87a58a6503a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>In fact, the bomb was tested in uninhabited areas prior to the bombing of Japan. Testing clearly wasn't the purpose of dropping the bomb.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dropping the bombs on relatively uninhabited areas would have equally justified the $2-billion cost of the Manhattan Project.\n","id":"e73f448c-3ff9-4f21-9c21-26512751c479"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>A town in Italy opened a contest to \u201cdefuse and contextualize\u201d a Mussolini monument and received more than 500 proposals. Finally, the monument is still standing but reinterpreted with a Hannah Arendt quote: \u201cNobody has the right to obey\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modifying existing memorials and monuments would symbolically express that history is not erased from public spaces but rather that the attitudes of the past have been overcome and replaced by something new.\n","id":"3f329255-026f-4c4d-89de-4815b19ba1b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the European Union legalize marijuana?<|ARGUMENT|>claims to help Chronic Pain: reduce nerve-related neuropathic pain, allow opioid treatment at lower doses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overwhelming scientific research supports the beneficial medical effects of using cannabis.\n","id":"6c85cfde-0c5e-4aa8-9978-567b4c88e7ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>Governments and companies may decide how much a person's worth to them, so that people can act in a way that suits them - like being a good consumer or a non-rebellious citizen, rather than what a person needs. This dynamic may not work out for people and could cause the UBI to either fail or be misused.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI assigns a monetary value to a person's worth by the government and taxed companies which happens frequently - 1 2 which may be applied indirectly and unjustifiably to a person's self-worth and socio-economic status with negative consequences, as people aren't meant to have a price put on them.\n","id":"9f0fd30d-4bd6-45c2-ac81-cb505803d160"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is cultural diversity beneficial to develop a successful organisation?<|ARGUMENT|>A recent study shows that the success that recruitment efforts are seeing is not translating to better representation at the top because the attrition rate for people of color in the industry is so high.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Where employees are more willing to learn they may progress into senior roles more easily. This thereby improves cultural diversity higher up in the organisation where it is normally lacking the most.\n","id":"b801221b-1464-46a9-a079-aeb2eaa5a897"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the lottery be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>This is because poverty can be a product of unfortunate circumstances while excessive gambling is a series of bad choices made by an individual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are much worse forms of poverty to tackle before what people lose in gambling.\n","id":"123954b9-a460-46a5-8d6f-6d4f3da50b62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious education be compulsory in public schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Parents sued to block yoga from being taught in PE due to a belief that it was the state teaching religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious instruction at school can embroil schools in unwanted legal battles.\n","id":"c6147d4e-c72a-416d-b504-d747467c79f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> The best time to discover a new musical artist is after they have released a second album. This is especially true for artists in progressive alternative avant garde indie scenes, where experimentation is common, but I think it holds true for all artists to some extent very few artists remain sonically and stylistically constant through their career. Note I am NOT arguing that you should go out of your way to avoid artists until they've released multiple albums. My reasoning is this. When finding an artist whose music you enjoy, the typical listener associates that artist with sound and style of the music they've released. If future releases deviate from this sound, this can lead to disappointment in, and in extreme cases, outright dislike of a new album, when you might not have had a problem with the album had you not been primed to a different sound. Alternatively, a band may release a debut album you don't like, only to follow it up with an album you would really enjoy had you not written the band off due to their first album. While some musicians undergo significant style changes late in their career, it is much more common for an artist's sound to change in their first few releases, as they find a permanent lineup, and figure out for themselves what they want their sound to be. Having multiple albums to listen to when discovering an artist allows you to better sample the space of music they might create in the future. You can get a sense of the band's trajectory in which directions, stylistically, they're heading which elements they're embracing, which ones they're abandoning, etc. This can help prepare you from future disappointment, or help keep a band on your radar for the future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best time to discover a new musical artist is after they have released a second album\n","id":"d1ccaa9c-5334-4fc1-96f1-63bee9385faa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The ACA has done a tremendous job in getting people covered that have never been covered before or have been under insured. This was done due to raising the coverage age to 26 for dependents, expanding Medicaid and pretty much mandating everyone must apply if no other way to obtain health coverage or be penalized. I believe that the ACA is a wonderful thing and really just needs to be improved in order to be sustainable. While there are several improvements that are needed here are three 1 Somehow bring together the small businesses and the requirement to enroll in the state run exchanges. Instead of small businesses having to contract through a private insurance for coverage and or having to pay a penalty for not offering an insurance to their employees the state run exchanges should have an option for small businesses to be able to contract an insurance plan through there. This purchase should be equal to or less than the penalties they are incurring by not offering this. This would be a win win situation. 2 Overall health care costs rose as a result of many new enrollees taking advantage of preventive care. Maybe incentivize the exchanges and or insurance carriers by offering tax breaks due to certain thresholds in amount of coverage and or amount of people enrolled. 3 Lower the medical expenses deductions so that those utilizing and paying their copays, co insurance and deductibles can claim the costs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ACA should not be repealed or replaced. It needs to be improved.\n","id":"788fec9f-5f96-44b4-8fa9-32f43ee710ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Currently it is possible to win the presidential election with only 22% of the popular vote if you win the right states. This means that less than a fourth of the people in the U.S. could decide who becomes major federal political figures. Even if unlikely, this is a possible and permitted outcome of the system and is a sign of a broken democracy. A video illustrating how to win the presidential election with only 22% of the vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The possibility of a candidate winning the election but losing the popular vote undermines the perceived legitimacy of the victory.\n","id":"1e03be54-9c21-40ac-9769-fb8033fd854e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit to clarify the meaning of not being team players in humanity is the trend observed where the effects of their actions are completely disregarded. The Jewish people have been typically separate from the rest of history, integration into civilization had not taken place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Jews aren't team players in humanity and this is why they have been regularly persecuted throughout history...\n","id":"82f448b4-aa15-419a-9b62-e894c02cf888"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Right now, the kinds of books that are sometimes labeled genre are extremely popular fantasy, dystopia, science fiction, horror. Alongside their popularity, I also see people increasingly suggesting that the category of genre, and especially it's distinction from literary fiction, is meaningless or is an arbitrary piece of marketing. Good books are good books, someone might say. But I don't think so We can argue about a precise definition for literary and genre, but I hope we won't spend too much time on that. I think these are fairly loose terms with plenty of gray area between them, and two people could reasonably disagree about the literariness of some particular book. But, still, we need a definition, so here's a simple one focused on their impact, or their use Literary fiction aims to impact a reader's understanding of her own life and world. The purpose of literary fiction is to clarify or change the reader's understanding of herself and the people and world around her. Genre fiction aims to give a reader a break from her own life, and entertain her. The purpose of genre fiction is to let the reader inhabit a separate world than the one she actually inhabits. I'm not making any kind of reference to the quality of books. There are many good genre books and many bad literary books, and vice versa. But what makes a book good or bad is partly a function of the goal of the writer and of the reader. Someone looking to escape and be entertained would be pretty disappointed if they sat down with an Alice Munro story. Likewise, someone looking for the special kind of growth and clarity that comes from experiencing quality Art might not be all that into Sherlock Holmes at the moment. Most people, of course, will want both of these things at different times. It's a good thing that writers of each of these styles enjoy and borrow from one another, and there are many books that straddle the two groups. But the organization of books into these groups is nevertheless useful and meaningful. And when we suggest that there is no distinction, we risk readers missing out on the unique pleasures of one or the other. But no one wants to be a snob about this kind of stuff so, please, change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The distinction between \"literary\" and \"genre\" fiction is useful and important.\n","id":"4a8ed6bb-d624-4988-b200-ac2b5e9ffe87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Businesses Deny Service to Trump Administration Officials?<|ARGUMENT|>The Red Hen denied Sarah Huckabee Sanders service because as they stated she is a liar. Liars are not a protected class under current American law. You can deny employment to liars, deny them service, and you can even fire someone for being a liar.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Business owners have a legal right to refuse service to unwanted customers, as long as it is not on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin.\n","id":"a7fe4773-b882-4d36-9f50-c56f3fc88a2c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My ancestors once ruled a quarter of the world, taken by force and coercion, have been responsible for a great many wrongs and, due to that historical power, continue to enjoy privilege to this day, if only in the form of cultural and unconscious bias, proliferated by the media. I don't know how to fix any of that, I try to be kind and equal to everyone, i try and check myself am I annoyed at that child screaming in polish because he's Polish or because i'm in a hot sweaty tube carriage and it could be prince George and i'd want it to shut up because i'm stressed . I understand i'm not perfect and I can always do more, but I don't think I should have to carry the guilt of being privileged thanks to nothing but my birth, even though that guilt is hilariously less bad than what many other people struggle with day to day. . EDIT thank you all for your comments, I think I should clarify, I don't think there is a meaningful group of people out there telling me I should feel guilty, I guess I'm just trying to work out my precise feelings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a straight white man I recognise my privileged position and historical wrongs commited by people who look like me but I don't think I should feel personally guilty for that\n","id":"1810ec16-f596-4bfe-bb1b-0105c7504b7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is computer science a failing discipline?<|ARGUMENT|>Every time a computing professional discovers a way to make things work more rigidly, s\/he sacrifices several ways to adjust and scale the relationships thus created. Most successful programs have a long wish list, which users are aware of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If this were to happen, new forms of AI would be in constant demand which would create a new line of work for computer scientists.\n","id":"dee146c5-6c87-4bb2-8141-b4483554fd42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>At the time when slavery was acceptable, the human rights of equality and freedom were not globally recognized rights. It is because they are globally recognized today, that we believe slavery has always been immoral. This proves morality as a social construct.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The viewpoint that slavery was immoral regardless of the moral attitude at the time, is a subjective moral belief, which is socially constructed.\n","id":"e19c3fe7-712a-48ce-8503-11bb7fdc33cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>According to most God beliefs, God is described as a separate entity that exists outside of time and space. Such a claim can never be demonstrated as true by its own definition, since we can only demonstrate things that exist in time and space.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The world is full of good reasons to believe in the lack of any God as defined by classical theism.\n","id":"4fc40763-7257-4d5c-b264-a4a1041b7f56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Many of the best universities in the world are very old, such as Oxford and Cambridge<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being \"outdated\" isn't a negative in itself. Some old institutions are useful.\n","id":"d6da4f57-8bb1-4d61-9035-ce1905356d6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Yes, I am a straight white male that's obvious from the title, right? Less obvious I'm under 30, I'm not far above the poverty line, I despise Trump almost beyond my ability to articulate, I voted for Clinton though I would've preferred to vote Sanders, and I tend to fall further to the left on most issues than most American citizens and politicians. I have absolutely no beef with the goals of identity politics or with any of the groups it seeks to empower, just with its rhetoric and its rhetoric's hegemony over political discourse on the left. The problem, for me, is not that we talk think in terms of identity, but that many of us are incapable of or discouraged from talking thinking in any other terms identity politics is ruining our capacity for rational discourse. But, of course, this argument practically refutes itself I am calling for something like an impersonal, rational discourse, which is all to easily dismissed as the discourse of straight white males, the discourse we've been using to oppress minorities since time immemorial though aren't these oppressive discourses demonstrably irrational? Meaning that impersonal rationality is still salvageable, despite its sullied reputation? . This is how critiques of identity politics are often treated with ad hominem vitriol or condescension, the assumption being that identity politics' critics can only ever be straight white males whining about their loss of privilege and, though some of it is exactly this, we shouldn't assume that all of it is, should we? . Note, please, that I'm not invoking any right wing BS like reverse racism, just pointing out that ad hominem is still, after 2000 years, just as much a logical fallacy as circular reasoning or the fallacy of composition. I concede that ad hominem is appropriate and not fallacious in certain moral ethical discourses, but not all political discourse is moral ethical discourse. I rarely see these critiques of identity politics evaluated on their own merits, or even distinguished from attacks directly on identity groups, even in mainstream media outlets like the NYT or Guardian. This is a big problem for political discourse, not only because it repudiates any consensual equal basis by which anyone can enter into reasonable debate with anyone else on important public issues that affect everyone, but also because it makes identity politics totalizing, self justifying, and immune to criticism, which is bad news for an open society which, though we've got a ways to go, is still the goal, right? . When I hear read people asserting that we live in a post truth world, this is one of the trends that comes to mind. Plus, it seems like Trump won the election in large part because he exploited white identity politics, which ought to give everyone pause about the implications of identity politics as presently conceived, oughtn't it? I know a lot of straight white males agree or at least sympathize with me on this, and that a lot of Reddit users are straight white males. I also know that plenty of Republicans agree with me, but for the wrong reasons. So, since I don't want to get trapped in a straight white male echo chamber here, I would really like to get input from women, LGBT's, and people of color.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Identity politics is harming political discourse on the left.\n","id":"15e99a7f-67ba-4a2a-8e51-5b2b709ec981"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently was watching this past Sunday's episode of The Big Questions. The episode asked whether it is the time coming to lay the Holocaust to rest. I think there was an interesting discussion over whether the Holocaust is a unique genocide in comparison with some of the other major genocides in the century. I tend to agree that the Holocaust, as awful as it was, was no more unique or terrible than the genocides that occurred in Rwanda, Darfur, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Bosnia, etc. In each of these genocides, hundreds of thousands to millions of people died, based on nothing more than their religion or ethnicity. It seemed from the discussion and other arguments I've had with friends, the Holocaust may have been unique because it came from a civilized or intelligent religion. I think that argument is entirely too weak because it implies that Germany was more civilized than all of these other nations that committed these harsh genocides. Considering the number of genocides committed by more powerful nations who claim to be civilized , I think such a claim is invalid. I am quite sure my view is quite outside the mainstream, and want to see whether I am missing something here.  tl dr The Holocaust was an awful crime, but it is not uniquely worse than other genocides. EDIT After seeing some of the comments, I see why Europeans should view the Holocaust in a different way, but I have yet to see why the Holocaust should be globally viewed in a different manner. Why should people in Bangladesh, Indonesia, or Sudan care that much about the Holocaust when a similarly awful tragedy occurred on their own soil? EDIT2 Many people mention the horrible industrialized systematic nature of the Holocaust as a differentiating factor. I agree that it is frightening how systematic it was, but I think it is important to compare the Holocaust with the Bangladeshi and Rwandan genocides, both of which had similar systematic tendencies. How is the Holocaust unique compared to those two genocides to a random person in Africa or Asia? EDIT3 I think I understand why the Holocaust operates in this unique space. It is not that the crimes that occurred in the Holocaust were worse, it's that the impact of it is greater. It caused human rights concerns to actually come out. This is because it was a genocide that finally affected the base of power in the world, the Europeans. Thanks for contributing everyone 'Twas fun.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Holocaust is not a unique genocide when compared to other genocides.\n","id":"3b4987a5-98b6-4133-a0fe-899921841e44"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that it should either be acceptable to talk about soft drugs ecstasy, cannabis, a few others just like it's completely acceptable for people to talk about drinking a lot, or it should not be acceptable for people to talk about drinking so much. It makes me think you're an alcoholic when you talk about how much you LOVVVE wine but if someone said Yeah, I ate some weed cookies yesterday they go all apeshit and say how immoral you are and aren't going to do anything with your life. I know a lot of you in here will think Great, another kiddie that wants weed legalized, as if we don't have enough of those. But believe me that has nothing to do with my view on this, I have done a couple soft drugs in my life but they're not my thing. I just think that it's a bullshit double standard people set whether drugs are legal or illegal. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Talking casually about how much you love an alcoholic beverage is no different than people casually talking about using soft drugs and it should be treated the same way.\n","id":"96035122-8e30-426e-8800-c7a311619844"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> If states are allowed to ban abortions because it preserves human life, they will also be allowed to force blood organ bone marrow donations for the same reason Reasoning It's currently unconstitutional for the government or state to enact any law which limits individual liberties e.g. the liberty to decide what you do with your body . This is thanks to the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. This is the protection which prevents abortion bans along with other laws which might force people to do stuff with their body against their will. In order to ban abortions, an exception for life preservation must be interpreted into this 14th Amendment protection assuming no new Constitutional Amendment If life preservation becomes an exception to this 14th Amendment's protection of individual liberties, the government will be Constitutionally allowed to limit individual liberties for the purpose of life preservation. This means that life saving donations can be mandated by law as well as full term pregnancies. Explained another way In the US, it's currently unconstitutional for states to ban abortions because of the 14th Amendment, which prevents the government from limiting any citizen's liberty. In the case of banned abortions, the liberty is that a woman can decide what she does with her body. This was decided by SCOTUS in the famous Roe v Wade case. Some states are trying to overturn Roe v Wade and similar decisions in an effort to ban abortions. If that happens, and the government is allowed to limit citizens' liberties to preserve human life, then laws could be written to mandate life saving donations. For example, the new liberty limiting laws may Force Jane to give birth so that another may live. Force Joseph to give a kidney so that another may live. Force Jennifer to give blood so that another may live. Force John to give bone marrow so that another may live. To clarify I am not arguing that these life preserving mandations i.e. laws will be enacted, but rather that the Constitutional barrier, which currently prevents these mandations, will be gone. Because this is a sensitive topic I am not arguing for or against the morality of abortions, and I'll ignore replies of this vein. Nor will I entertain discussions about the morality of forced donations. tldr If mandating life preserving pregnancies becomes Constitutionally legal, then mandating life preserving donations would also be Constitutionally legal. Edit My mistake, it is the 14th Amendment that protects individual liberties, not the 1st Amendment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If states are allowed to ban abortions because it preserves human life, they will also be allowed to force blood\/organ\/bone marrow donations for the same reason\n","id":"9e8e3901-277b-4513-af6d-8ae9a6bbb404"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019ve never written about this before and haven\u2019t posted on reddit in a few months. However, \u201cpickup,\u201d and to a greater extent, self improvement, have become significant aspects of my life in the last six months or so. I saw a few posts in r bestof from  and I thought it would be a good articulate my thoughts and provide a young 21 year old male perspective. I recently had a series of discussions with a hardcore feminist about societal pressures and expectations for both genders, male and female sexuality, rape culture, etc. I think it\u2019s safe to say that we both learned a lot from each other. And there seems to be a HUGE disconnect between some feminist theories and pickup ideologies redpillers, I\u2019m looking at you . I\u2019ve dabbled in both and hope that this post might serve to as some sort of bridge between the divide of different extreme perspectives. A little bit of mutual understanding might go a long way. Seduction, pickup, whatever, at its core is about becoming a better PERSON. It\u2019s about self improvement. I realize that this view is not shared by everyone. But ultimately, it\u2019s about becoming the best version of yourself, being completely satisfied and confident with who you are, and being able to walk up to a woman without putting her on a pedestal and project your personality onto her. And believe it or not, many men struggle to accomplish this. Many men are terrified of walking up to a woman and introducing themselves. I think that both genders might agree that this is a problem we wouldn\u2019t like to have. A guy should be able to walk up to a girl and introduce himself and be able to make small talk and carry a conversation. And ideally he would be able to do this without being upset if a woman rejects him, without violating a woman\u2019s boundaries or personal space, without being creepy, and without expecting rewards for favors or nice guy behavior buying drinks, holding the door . But that\u2019s exactly where the catch is for every guy that is NOT too afraid of talking to a girl because of the possibility of rejection or fear of appearing creepy, even FEWER men are well calibrated enough to talk to women without gasp making her uncomfortable in some way. Maybe a guy touches her shoulder for half a second to long. Maybe he smiles weird and comes off as creepy. Maybe his body language or vocal tonality is funny and the girl is immediately put off by it. Even the well calibrated guys fail to initially come off as cool funny SOME OF THE TIME. Does this mean no man should ever approach a woman who he might make uncomfortable? Instead of trying to go out and actually talk to a women, should he stay home and read theory and practice in front of a mirror until he is 100 guaranteed to never do or say anything that will make anyone uncomfortable ever again? Of course not. Guys who do that don\u2019t get anywhere. So, to any of the women reading this, understand where guys are coming from. When a guy gives you a creepy smile at a party and tries to talk to you, it\u2019s probably not because he IS a creep, or a rapist, or something worse. We live in a society that has deemphasized face to face communication. Many men are less calibrated socially blame video games and to some extent lack a well defined model of masculinity. And attaining a reasonable proficiency at socializing with women or other men for that matter is a combination of 1 being satisfied with the person you are and authentically expressing yourself and 2 going out and actually talking to women. And in the process, weirding out a lot of them. Now to the female side of things. If you are dismissive of rape culture, fuck you. It\u2019s real. It\u2019s a problem. If you don\u2019t know what I\u2019m talking about, do some research. What got me hooked on learning about rape culture was the following question, which I\u2019ll now ask to all the guys out there When was the last time you were told how not to rape somebody? When was the last time someone explained to you that after drinking, your inhibitions decrease and corresponding chance of sexually assaulting someone increases? When was the last time you were told that it\u2019s entirely possible to misinterpret a woman\u2019s intentions or words when drunk, and it might be best not to act on your desire to have sex with her? When was the last time you were told that rape was is a terrible act which you should never commit? It\u2019s probably been a while. If ever. Women on the other hand, have shit about how not to get raped drilled into them. It\u2019s unfair to put so much emphasis on preventing a crime on the victim. It\u2019s unfair that men aren\u2019t told how to not rape women. It\u2019s unfair that women are blamed and have the fear of being blamed for a sexual assault. And this fear of sexual assault is rightfully present in many male female interactions. So when a man makes physical contact a woman and expects her to be totally compliant, it is grossly negligent to not except the possibility that physical escalation is unwanted, or fail to understand how she has been taught it is HER responsibility to protect herself from sexual assault. Hopefully, it doesn\u2019t overtly change how you interact with women, but it is something to be AWARE of. If a woman is creeped out and doesn\u2019t want to talk to you, it doesn\u2019t mean she is a bitch. She\u2019s not a slut if another guy talks to her after blowing you off and they start making out. If she makes it explicitly clear that she doesn\u2019t want you to grab her, you shouldn\u2019t. Don\u2019t take it personally. And also don\u2019t be a little bitch and dismiss feminism in its entirety without even knowing what you\u2019re talking about. Both genders actively work to repress female sexuality. To a lesser extent, females also repress male sexuality. Men and women are very quick to slut shame. Men, sometimes, because it makes them feel better about not getting a woman. \u201cOh, she\u2019s just a slut anyway.\u201d Yeah, who you would have had sex with and dated if she didn\u2019t reject you for the other guy. Sucks to suck. And why should it even matter if a woman has had sex with 30, 40 guys anyway? The most attractive women are approached CONSTANTLY. Do you even know how many ATTRACTIVE men these women have turned down? Dude, if even a quarter the equivalent number of attractive women approached you with the intention of having sex, don\u2019t pretend you wouldn\u2019t have slept with more. Don\u2019t blame women for having sex or wanting to have sex. No one wins. I\u2019ve never really understood this double standard. But it\u2019s a factor in pickup. Women don\u2019t want to look like sluts in front of their friends and slut shamed in the future for going home with a guy. Don\u2019t be a part of the problem guys or gals by deriding women who are comfortable with their sexuality. Females aren\u2019t off the hook either. My biggest beef with feminism is that I believe it creates a sort of \u201cideal narrative\u201d that women should conform to. For instance, a lot of women RELATE to the idea of being portrayed vulnerably. They\u2019re not portrayed vulnerably in advertisements because of a corrupt government man plot to subjugate women. It\u2019s because this is what SELLS to women because some women WANT this. I am not saying ALL women relate to this idea. But clearly, enough do that it is a dominant marketing strategy for female cosmetic products. The notion that women should be portrayed one way or another, or should not be portrayed in a certain fashion, is in my opinion also a form of repressing what female sexuality. It\u2019s not fair to set arbitrary standards of how a woman should look or act which feminists would say society does . But it\u2019s also not fair to set standards for how a woman should NOT look or act which some feminists do . This also applies to pickup. The reason some men are very physical in their game, quick to escalate, dominant, etc, is because some women want this. Some women respond very, very well to having their token objections overridden, being teased relentlessly, getting picked up and spun around, whatever. Some women feminists are uncomfortable with this behavior and therefore believe it to be a non ideal image for women, and that therefore, no man should engage in this behavior. This in itself is a form of repressing female sexuality and implies that certain behaviors are wrong and it is therefore wrong to respond positively to them. Men are not mind readers. We don\u2019t know you don\u2019t like something unless you object to it. And because some women object to it but secretly want you to continue, we sometimes don\u2019t know whether you like something unless you STRONGLY object to it. Is this ideal? Absolutely not. But it\u2019s reality. Males should be more aware of the expectations and societal pressures placed on women. But clearly, individual expectations are so variable that it is very common for a man to identically approach two women and receive completely opposite responses. I absolutely, 100 believe a man should NOT continue to escalate when it is clear his advances are unwanted. Lastly, pickup is not a fucking strategy video game. Again, I\u2019m looking at r theredpill and certain subsets of the seduction community. By trying to launch your little tactics at the right times you are doing everything you are NOT supposed to be doing, i.e., putting a woman on a pedestal, trying to win her affection without authentically conveying your personality, overriding her objections no matter what because it\u2019s the get physical step, etc. Maybe you\u2019ll have success in the short term. But in the long term, without taking a good hard look at yourself and establishing \u201ccore confidence\u201d and trust in your lifestyle and life direction, you really won\u2019t complete the transformative experience that learning how to socialize and attract women can be. And you make the rest of us look really fucking bad too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think learning to interact with women through communities like r\/seduction and Real Social Dynamics can be life-altering and beneficial for every man.\n","id":"61a40190-1bba-4dbd-bc30-5b919d162d5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm a male to female transgender girl, I'm medically intersexed with XX males disorder also, I know what it's like to feel genderless, but hear me out. I have met and known people who prefer Ze and Zher or They and Them. I think is unprogressive and well Kinda silly, on top of the LGBT struggles we face, I believe people who preach and push gender neutral views are holding back movement. Every single person I know who has identified as gender neutral has grown out of it. This is not the same case for transgender folk. Even if you are medically intersexed, almost 99.9 choose a preferred gender. I know gender expression and sex are two very different things, I'm educated in gender because if my experience with talking to 100's of people who have dealt with the same problems I have. I really want my mind to open up to this but it just seems I can't on my own so that's why I'm here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that people shouldn't identify as gender neutral\/non-binary. Agender should not be a thing unless with medical intersex proof.\n","id":"83b02945-5941-4c59-a79c-4137543039a5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>In terms of their brain structure, social and communication behavior, Cetacea - which include dolphins and whales - are assumed to be close to humans, and in their culture even more so than chimpanzees.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Not even such closely related species as humans and dolphins are able to communicate in a meaningful way.\n","id":"d62defcf-13a9-49b6-a664-4c2c85ab96f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is a big push against the consumption of GMOs genetically modified organisms especially in organic food. Some people advocate for any products containing GMOs to be labelled as such. I believe arguments against GMOs are largely unsupported. Many anti GMO advocates call GMO foods 'un pure', which completely ignores the fact that nearly all agricultural crops have been genetically manipulated by artificial selection for hundreds of years though, artificial selection does use natural mutations and is much slower. Anyway, the bottom line is that I think the anti GMO movement is largely an emotional reaction to something that may seem scary to those that don't fully understand it or even to those that do understand it well . I think many people fail to realize the potential that GMOs have to increase food production and decrease malnutrition.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that GMOs genetically modified organisms are not inherently harmful to eat.\n","id":"9e3dca3e-1678-44a4-9785-9cabb76e291f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism right-wing extremists were responsible for 74% of murders committed by domestic extremists in the US since 1997.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"White supremacists effectively and consistently try to and succeed in killing people, which the far left rarely does.\n","id":"08efea04-8658-4595-b568-dc539300bc1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>ANNOUNCEMENT I've done my best to respond to you all, but I'm getting overwhelmed by lengthy responses so I might not be able to. It seems that my post was a little too vague on the definition of free will and many of you have pointed this out. My apologies. I recently watched a video with Sam Harris where he makes a very compelling argument against free will. It's an hour long so I don't expect any of you to watch it, but I recommend it. I've been trying to find holes in his logic and I can't I currently hold his exact view. I'll do my best to summarize his argument and see if any of you can convince me otherwise. A assumption, C conclusion Sam Harris' argument A1 Our thoughts arise out of consciousness. A2 We can\u2019t know our thoughts before we think them. C1 Therefore, we don\u2019t author our thoughts. A3 We use our thoughts to make decisions. C2 We don\u2019t author our thoughts, therefore we don\u2019t author our decisions. C3 Free will doesn\u2019t exist. Sam then goes on to explain the implications of this conclusion. He says that without free will, the concept of blame dissolves away, as does retribution, and many religions cease to make any sense at all.  Edit1 Regarding the definition of free will in this situation, Sam says that, the popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions. The first is that each of us is free to behave differently than we did in the past. You became a fireman and yet you could have become a policeman The second assumption is that we are the conscious source of our thoughts and actions. You're experience of wanting to do something is in fact the proximate cause of your doing that something. You feel that you want to move and then you move. You are doing it. You the conscious witness of your life. Edit2 Sam says that our decisions in any given situation are the result of our physiology, experience and environment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free will doesn't exist because we don't author our thoughts\n","id":"87ee21bf-0a19-4a74-b3dc-7e43dd7ee74f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI at the least should be considered a human right, as there are not near enough job opportunities to earn more than a basic amount of income.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI can have a positive impact on societal practices and culture by acknowledging the inherent humanity of all citizens.\n","id":"41b7c045-dfdb-429a-9c05-1b4baee0265a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that the Mass Effect series would have been much stronger if Shepard was permanently killed off in Mass Effect 2. From a story telling and game building perspective, this would have accomplished several things It would have demonstrated that Bioware doesn't screw around with its stories. Bringing a character back from the dead simply cheapens the concept of death. On the other hand, killing off the main character would have dramatically raised the stakes in the story, and established the Collectors as an even more dangerous threat than Saren and his Geth army. Even more than killing off beloved party members, killing Shepard would also have triggered the passionate fury of players, who would be more motivated than ever to destroy the new enemy. We could have avoided that ridiculous Lazarus Project plot point. No matter what President Bartlet the Illusive Man says, spending obscene quantities of resources on bringing a single soldier back from the dead is beyond stupid. Especially if 1 you could train and equip an entire army with those resources and 2 if the person being revived has a history of interfering with your operations. Frankly, I find that too much of the story revolves around Shepard for no good reason. By putting players in the shoes of a new character, the game would have opened up the setting for exploration from a new point of view. As it is, players see the entire trilogy through the eyes of one human special forces operative. This limited perspective isn't enough to take in the full scope of the setting. On a related note, a new character would have provided context for a return to the character creator. In Mass Effect 2, players can completely change Shepard's appearance and class, even if s he was imported. On the other hand, a new character would be a blank canvas, and it would make perfect sense to sculpt him or her into whatever sort of character you would like, independent of what you did with Shepard. So, try to convince me that bringing Shepard back from the dead was a good idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Commander Shepard should have died and stayed dead at the start of Mass Effect 2 Spoilers ME1 and ME2\n","id":"6e95a07e-e213-4662-9d35-3169fdce5f6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Legalization of sado-masochism<|ARGUMENT|>It is sufficient that each participant is aware of the hazards and consents to them.No law prohibits people from refusing to wear a condom during sexual intercourse, notwithstanding the peril of infection.Moreover, no government can legislate for the most reckless of its citizens. If an individual is so disturbed to place a plastic bag over his head for the purpose of sexual stimulation, the contrary opinion of the law will not be a great deterrent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sado-masochism need not be rendered completely free of risk, as long as the risks are understood by the consenting parties:\n","id":"1f43f76b-928f-401f-b6c0-2076b089d421"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Drinking Water Be Fluoridated?<|ARGUMENT|>Fluoride does not really need to be in water, as it exists in toothpaste and mouthwash that we do not swallow.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Water fluoridation is no longer necessary, since fluoride is now present in many other sources.\n","id":"99bed8cf-ab60-48ae-8026-183f0225db14"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>US drone strikes have generated a backlash in states not directly affected by the strikes because of excessive civilian deaths and violated sovereignty. The same dynamic will take place with AKMs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AKMs dehumanize the West in the eyes of its enemies and make them more ruthless.\n","id":"4874b071-7f58-45a7-a0a1-950fdb9cb61f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So let me preface by acknowledging the fate franchise has quite a few amazing servants, Saber and Saber of Red as well as Lancer Sc\u00e1thach but I think honk they all pale in comparison to the lovely and pure Maid of Orleans, the lovely Jeanne d'Arc. Let me explain, Jeanne is best girl by her looks, personality, her strength, and finally the fact she can be summoned as Jalter Jeanne Altar or Avenger . Ruler is a solid 13.5 10 on the looks, if you like saber she has the beautiful blonde hair but with the added bonus of the glorious ponytail braid combination which is like a punch and kick had a baby and hit you with it. But much like billy mays would say that's no all, Ruler incorporates the magnificent S rank ZR of Rin Tohsaka with the perfect thigh ratio. Finally if characters with ample bosoms are your taste she has a chest that rivals Sakura Matous. Ruler also is shown clothed and pure which adds the extra benefit of the tasteful innocent tease that draws you the audience in wanting to see more of her holy and unsullied being. Jeanne is not just a pretty face like a swath of the fate servants are Ruler has a complex personality that surrounds her past and her fears that came with life as well as her failures. A saint by happenstance Jeanne would lead the French army to win battles in the 100 years war but was eventually captured, triaged as a witch and burned to death at the stake and eventually canonized, as a saint she is able to be summoned as a Ruler. Jeanne shows love and a deep commitment to the country that left her to die because the king wouldn't pay her ransom and will stop at nothing to protect innocent lives and her country with a smile and a loving heart. She's fierce in combat and as a Saint is blessed with divine strength. Able to duck shite up real good. Finally Ruler is able to be summoned as Avenger. If you loved Rulers design but for some reason weren't a fan of her pure and innocent personality Jalter is the girl for you. Jalter is Ruler if she was a dominatrix. She will make you pray that she would step on you and grind her feet into you while insulting you telling you that you'd never amount to anything except for jerking off to anime girls and how disappointed that they would never have grand children because every girl you meet you scare off because she sees 1 doujin with some less then tasteful stuff in it and you get hmmm that's umm I got to go. Back to Jalter, jalter also is much more sadistic and mean so she is close to yandere if you like yandere and let's be honest who doesn't. That concludes why Ruler is the best servant, stuff that will change my mind would be break downs of why some other fate servant could even beat let alone touch Ruler.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ruler is the best servant in the Fate Franchise.\n","id":"9c484b2d-26b7-4029-a705-873e88b6fac4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've recently read the book called How to Analyze People on Sight by Elsie and Ralph Paine Benedict and every page in the book feels factually true to me. Since the book is surveyed hundreds of people across various nations while sticking only to the information that was consistent, characterology seems pretty legit to me. They disclosed that there are always mixtures between the five main body types and that this helps define unique personalities inside people. The book discloses that similarly to how religions do not define individuals, physical traits do not define individuals neither. It warns readers not to be judgmental and simply points out that there are correlations between physical traits and personality traits. Several of the chapters felt very real to me. The Alimentive described one of my friends exactly the way he seems to me. Muscular type reminded me of exactly what my father is and the osseous boney type matched my mum. What surprised me the most was how the book matched me correctly, both positively and negatively. I'm a thinker, I like to fantasize about unreal events or solutions for the future. The book says I'm more likely to have my head in the clouds and not act upon the goals that I desire. I may enjoy learning, but I probably would not apply that knowledge on a practical level. Thinker types are more likely to be unemployed and are suffice to living with with no more then the necessary means. The book even got the meditation and journal writing traits correct about me. What I like about the book is that it does not rely on race, ethical background, or religion to read people. It discloses that in the very beginning. It simply points out the correlations between body traits and personality traits. I know it's meant to help read people upon sight, but the book has helped me to understand myself better then to actually read other people on sight. Now a part of me believes that everybody should learn about themselves and improve themselves by reading this book and understanding their own characterology. Problem is, it's crazy talk. This is not and should not be factual because characterology is an outdated science made in the 20s. Can you guys help change my view? Edit Also worth mentioning is that I cannot find any updated research that discredits this book, that's why it is so hard for me not to believe it. The book does describe every body and personality type in great detail. Here's a free online version to see for yourself. Be sure to read the Human Analysis introduction because that is the portion that discloses how they only use consistent data and not speculative data. Edit 2 \u2206VIEW CHANGED Thank you everyone very much for helping me see how moronic it was for me to believe that this book was factual. What the author probably did was categorize five main personality types and decided to associate each personality with a specific body shape. I'd like to especially thank u samaritan lee for searching for evidence to discredit the claim. The author of the book was more likely to be a pop culture author rather then an accredited psychologist during their time. Thanks everyone for helping me see that the book is more equivalent to horoscopes instead of factual research. I feel like an idiot, but I'm glad I don't carry this viewpoint anymore.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the book \"How to Analyze People on Sight\" is factually true\n","id":"7ac3d97e-689c-4456-a972-60a08140d6d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>United States Armed Forces personnel are fighting and dying in wars influenced by religious zealots.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion is a perpetuator of conflict even if it is not the original source.\n","id":"1310bc25-f20f-4e5c-9844-de451c55991b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In this day and age, where nearly every man, woman and even child has a mobile phone, wrist watches have become obsolete. If you need to know the time, you can just check your phone, portable gaming device, laptop, tablet or just ask any person next to you who is on their phone. However, men's fashion still seems to put a lot of focus on wearing a wrist watch, specifically big fancy ones that can cost one a fortune. I feel that the only reason a guy has to buy a wrist watch is so that he could show off his wealth and social status indirectly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men's wrist watches are nothing more than status symbols\n","id":"f677bfa8-07f7-43d0-90ad-db1f0051bdf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is transhumanism the next step in human evolution?<|ARGUMENT|>Transhumanism provides more options and tools to use to live through climate change, thus increasing our chances of surviving.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans are facing climate change, so transhumanism may help humans survive that.\n","id":"f6d07357-1fdc-4dee-b2b6-3a77551aca32"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be taught in schools?<|ARGUMENT|>By some accounts scientific research has confirmed biblical statements about the origins of the universe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Evidence can be found to support the hypothesis that God created the world.\n","id":"0583fc58-2c61-46ad-9aa4-329237e16f8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>In order for a state to gather the immense funds necessary for a UBI, and to avoid \"double spending\", it will need to cut funding for other welfare programs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The implementation of a UBI reduces existing welfare spending by a significant amount.\n","id":"d80c58ea-57e5-4149-bb28-f33d14e36de0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it OK to publicly approach a stranger for sex?<|ARGUMENT|>Some activities are inherently more risky for women and women are more likely to be injured than men participating in particular sports.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Men and women take risks differently They cannot be compared.\n","id":"90507697-07bf-41a9-9b9a-80566e11a55c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've seen lots of people around here say that a non black person is not allowed to say the n word and i'm really confused about this. In my opinion it's highly dependant on the context of my useage of this word. If i say it as a quote or in a discussion about it, like i did in the title, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. What makes words racist is their usage and the intention behind using them. If i use the word in the context of an attack against black people it's racist because i try to offend them by reminding them of the historical use of it. In a context where i don't try to do this it's not racist, because why would it be?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Saying \"Nigger\" is not inherantly racist.\n","id":"f4b5bf5a-0123-49f0-8382-70046607260a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should puberty in children be delayed in preparation for gender reassignment?<|ARGUMENT|>All children and adolescents go through a process of identity development that includes confusion and experimentation. Delaying puberty may extend this period of confusion by keeping an individual in a state of developmental childhood.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Puberty should not be delayed in preparation for gender reassignment.\n","id":"5509376f-6063-4cea-9df7-34c041b14824"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello everyone I want to start off by saying I can't really argue against Free market economics. I have been binge watching Miltom Friedman and other Free Market supporters, and to be honest, they have pretty good arguments. For example It's good that children in China work, because their alternative is to go in the fields and die of starvation. With big companies going there, they get a job, a stable income that is enough for food and shelter, plus they're learning new skills. Every developed nation has been on this way, why shouldn't they? Also, the competition is what drives innovation, there can be no monopoly, because market forces Like Rockefeller was a monopolist . I'm in search of the truth and the truth only. Thanks to everyone who will respond.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free market Capitalism Anarcho Capitalism, Laissez-Faire capitalism etc. works the best, in opposition to Social-Democracy\/Socialism, Communism.\n","id":"7648bc58-194f-4369-a0a2-7763a400fc07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>As Maroons who are under the thumb of the British, this additional income could be incredibly important for members of our community as the foundation of our future livelihood.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Becoming the slave police will create new income for us because of the bounty for returning runaway slaves.\n","id":"aa087a85-c6de-46a4-aad8-05f753b767cd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Easy. You take the crust out obviously that has to go first. Without the crust, you have no foundation for which to build your pizza lunchable. Sauce is next. Times are tough, so the little red stick isn't a part of the equation anymore. You take the sauce and you goop that shit in a big saucy pile right in the middle of the crust. Now things get interesting. Pepperoni. You use the three pepperonis to evenly spread the sauce onto the crust without getting any sauce on your finger. I prefer to use small circles with one pepperoni at a time until I have an even spread, but if I'm feeling rushed, I push and spread. Cheese goes on top, because it's all that's left. You sprinkle it into the center and let it run out until it adequately covers your pie. I've seen folks attempt to apply the cheese evenly, but it's risky. The last thing you want is to lose the few precious cheeses that you're allotted. In summary, crust, sauce, pepperoni, then cheese on top. Any claims that the order of the cheese and pepperoni should be switched are ignorant heresy, but I welcome your attempts to prove me otherwise.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The correct layering of a Pizza Lunchable from bottom to top is crust, sauce, pepperoni, cheese.\n","id":"4a6e2724-086e-4df5-bbe0-c09dc14abe9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be taught in schools?<|ARGUMENT|>As children grow older, they usually develop ideas which are supported better by evidence and reason. For example, many children believe Santa exists and that reindeers can fly. Most children learn about gravity and come to more objective viewpoints later in their life. There is no reason why the same will not happen with creationist positions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children form many beliefs and views on the world which often are unsupported by science. These views can change over time.\n","id":"07809c83-53e8-460f-b3c2-c9a8279c2b91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me start by saying I don't actually want to think this way. I have friends that are depressed and I want to be sympathetic and help as much as I can. I've seen plenty of posts on Reddit and other forums where frustrated people suffering from depression vent about how difficult it is when other people don't recognize they are suffering from an illness and treat it differently . I currently feel this way because, to me, people with depression just seem to lack the effort to try different things and generally better themselves. I have stopped trying to talk them through what they're feeling or provide support because I just get this general sense of apathy from them. So if they don't want to help themselves, how am I supposed to help them? How is anyone supposed to help them? It's like they're expecting the answer to fall out of the sky or come out of someones mouth one day. That's never going to happen. Life is sometimes shitty for everyone and the happiest ones are just the ones that learn to deal, pick up, and move on. We are all so lucky to be alive, why would you waste it on feeling sorry for yourself? It just seems selfish. I've been through tragedies, had horrible things happen to me, been a victim and still, have never even been close to depressed. So I don't see that as being an excuse. When I feel myself get into a slump, I sort of just pull myself out of it because I have other people to think about and because they are counting on me. I can't get depressed because it would hurt my family and those that care about me. Even when I am feeling lonely and pitying myself, I still get up and do something to cheer myself up, not just lay around feeling bad for myself. The quality of my life is ultimately my responsibility, so pitying myself is just going to drive people away. I want to add I'm not denying that depression is a real illness. I completely understand there are chemical disorders and imbalances in the brain that are signatures of depression. But, like any other illness, there has to be some cause, and I think depression is self inflicted and a result of, to put it bluntly, not trying hard enough to feel happy. Bottom line everyone goes through shit. I feel like depressed people are just the ones that feel too sorry for themselves, play the victim, and then just fall into a self perpetuating cycle. At any moment I get the impression they could just stop. Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe people with depression can avoid it and snap out of it, if they want. PLEASE\n","id":"6c2071ad-0786-47ef-8a5a-c4e1a3109141"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious education be compulsory in public schools?<|ARGUMENT|>History shows religion begins with peace, empathy and love, until people ruin it with greed during dark times. I don't know any religion that tells you to go steal oil lands, rape, bomb, be ignorant and enslave people. It tells you the exact opposite .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public schools primary and secondary should have religion as a required not elective course.\n","id":"5a2ffbe7-c32b-4f8b-9cf0-4d793d3af887"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Current drones are cheap because they are not designed to fight against other modern high-performance fighter planes, nor do they have to deal with modern anti-air weapons. Instead they are designed to fight in modern asymetrical conflicts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This comparison is flawed. A human operated multi purpose jet is not comparable to an automated air\/ground attacking drone.\n","id":"8e9f18f4-393d-4d5b-a5b3-d2876d12aa0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Restrictions on freedom of speech<|ARGUMENT|>thus freedom of speech can be acceptably curtailed during times of war in order to prevent propaganda and spying which might undermine the national interest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Government must protect its citizens from foreign enemies and internal enemies.\n","id":"d6e720e7-a1b2-42ad-904e-6a1f3d483e45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>build the Hyperloop<|ARGUMENT|>The Hyperloop would be the cheapest mode of intercity transport possible. \u201cTransporting 7.4million people each way and amortizing the cost of $6 billion over 20 years gives a ticket price of $20 for a one-way trip for the passenger version of Hyperloop.\u201d1 There are very few additional costs. Usually the main cost for transportation beyond the infrastructure is the energy but the Hyperloop produces more energy than it uses so would make a profit here. There would be additional maintenance costs and some minor staff costs but this is unlikely to add too much to the ticket price. The Hyperloop would therefore be very price competitive compared to the $100 and up for flights. 1 Musk, Elon, \u2018Hyperloop Alpha\u2019, SpaceX, 12 August 2013, p.56<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Hyperloop will be a low cost system for the user\n","id":"ed97753f-3b39-4443-828e-a9c4ec732069"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Independence Matters \u2013 there are real legal and diplomatic consequences to such a move<|ARGUMENT|>Any UN Recognition of Palestinian statehood would require at the very least US abstention. Even if this were to be achieved, it would only come after the request had placed the United States in a very awkward position. Vetoing Palestinian statehood at the UN would force the US to alienate world opinion, while abstaining or supporting the Palestinian demand would mean a clash with Israel with all the US domestic costs that entails for any American politician.1 Barack Obama\u2019s less than stringent support of Israel was seen as contributing to the defeat of his Democratic party in a 2011 special election in a heavily Democratic and heavily Jewish seat in NYC. It is likely a future US President would face worse. Furthermore, allowing the UN to recognize Palestinian statehood explicitly brings the UN into the Peace Process, undermine the United States\u2019 role as the preeminent outside actor. Even if the United States were to acquiesce in such, it\u2019s hard to see it appreciating the consequences. Therefore it can be assumed that the Palestinians, in exchange for cosmetic benefits, would likely alienate the United States, which at the end of the day is the only outside actor whose opinions Israel values, and therefore the only outside actor that can genuinely make the creation of a Palestinian state a reality. 1 Staff, \u2018Did the First President Bush Lose His Job to the Israel Lobby?\u2019, The New York Observer, 17 July 2006,<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even a successful move for statehood would place the United States in a challenging position, and alienate American opinion which the Palestinians are dependent on\n","id":"60561163-9691-4eeb-aed7-e96bf1592590"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In short I should receive adequate compensation during life for use of my organs after my death. The goal of this is to provide a financial incentive to increase the supply and thus reduce cost of organs required for transplant. The benefits I see are as follows 1 it gives the poor and disadvantaged a way to make money and get on their feet without requiring higher education or years of experience, relieving debts. 2 The financial incentive gives people reason to donate organs who might otherwise not. This increases supply and drives down cost, and reduces time on waiting lists. 3 A profitable program of organ collection would allow advertising for agencies that do this service and write up contracts, increasing the visibility of the needs of people who require organ transplants. 4 The argument that this creates a black market for organs is silly. If someone wanted to kill you and take your organs, laws against it won't really help because now we're talking about maniacs. Furthermore my organs are my property, and I get to say what happens to my property during my lifetime and at the time of my death. To deny this is to deny that individuals have the right to their own bodies.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should be able to sell my organs\n","id":"0a63bc2f-5d91-4800-94e8-baf24ed5f33f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Black people as a whole probably would've been better off without European Colonialism, but I believe that descendants of African slaves in America are better off, as a group, than the majority of Africans on Earth at present. Though they occupy the dangerous bottom rungs of American society, your average American American is still better fed, better housed, more connected, and more mobile than any other African group. In addition, nobody is going to doubt that they're a citizen in the wealthiest, most powerful nation on Earth a privilege that undocumented Latinos do not enjoy as non citizens. While there is still much progress to be made as far as inequality goes, African Americans have come a long way since slavery. Though a big portion of slaves suffered through the 19th Century, their cousins in colonized Africa had it even worse, in the long run. Two wrongs don't make a right, but African Americans, today, are relatively privileged to their African counterparts, and in this manner also benefit from the legacy of slavery, as white people do. Not saying they benefit equally, but history is still being written, and racial progress is occurring, however slowly. The groups might never reach parity, even after nonwhites become a majority, but progress is progress, and nobody should be made to feel personally guilty for their circumstances.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"African Americans also benefit from the legacy of slavery\n","id":"b004061a-2e8e-4e58-92c0-86536efe72d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>Free will is not a biological structure, but a conceptual model of a behavioral decision making that is supposed to arise from consciousness. Our current neuroscience is only beginning to understand the relationship between physiology and consciousness, and cannot explain the physiology of consciousness with enough precision to disprove the existence of free will.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Currently, the way that brains process information and make decisions is far beyond our understanding, thus the data required to disprove free will cannot currently be processed.\n","id":"78385931-ab53-460b-b6be-56d7957cc728"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I realize most statistics show that rape happens from people you know, but this is based of American or Western studies, so they aren't really applicable in this case. In some places like South Africa, South Asia or certain Middle Eastern and African countries unwanted sexual aggression can and does happen. I believe that circumstances and cultures in these countries are vastly different from the West, and that western tourists should understand that. Trying to educate millions of impoverished men in an incredibly patriarchial society is definitely the ultimate goal, but in the short term this is just not realistic. The psychology of serial rapists is not particularly relevant in some of these countries since the state of law and order is just pathetic most of the time. I think women should obviously be able to wear whatever they want, but when they're in a high risk area outside of their own country there are some obvious safety tips to be aware of. Things like not going out alone at night, not getting drunk unless you're with someone you know and trust, not wearing clothes that are provocative or revealing, not eating food from unknown sources, avoiding crowded public transport, avoiding slums favellas just really basic travel tips. Rape shouldn't happen obviously, but be safe when you're visiting these countries this is essentially the crux of my point. I saw a similar thread on  here but I thought this was a slightly different and more specific question, and that the responses in that thread weren't totally applicable here.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that female tourists visiting developing countries with a high incidence of rape and violence should be careful, and there is no harm in pointing this out;\n","id":"8574ce17-c534-45f0-825e-92057702649c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>Inclusion of employees with mental health conditions within an organisation can help the organisation to better understand a diverse range of customer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inclusion of a diverse range of employees in the workplace has benefits for a company\n","id":"2d8f2af7-f3af-431a-a4ee-654d0595fa41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>When people protest demonstrations of patriotism, they turn their back on the system that ensures we have these freedoms and create division among all people. There are more constructive ways to protest.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By standing, NFL players enhance the unity of the nation.\n","id":"b73b5d99-5044-45c1-86b6-b2e339c6f1a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Military conscription should apply to men and women equally.<|ARGUMENT|>Women in general are not as strong as men and this is greatly prevalent when looking at the higher standard deviations from the mean.68% of males and 1% of females can lift 110 pounds which could have consequences when lifting an injured soldier out of danger.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women simply are not biologically as capable as men to perform such physically strenuous rolls having less dense bones and muscle structure\n","id":"588c4a2c-93b9-46c5-8c53-7f596160f1a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Under our current system an individual can choose to break the law with minimal effective penalty, if they are wealthy enough. A store clerk, who is caught speeding, might pay 1 6th of a month's wages on the fine. A computer programmer or lawyer might pay 1 40th a month's wage for the same offense and a hedge fund manager might pay 1 1000th a month's wage for the offense. Each traffic violation may come with a monetary fine. This fine is either punitive or not punitive in nature. If the reasoning behind a fine is to act as a deterrent and our justice system is supposed to apply punishment equally, then fines based on percentage of total wealth or yearly income seem like the fairest way to accomplish that goal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All fines should be a percent of personal income instead of flat penalties.\n","id":"1f0fa812-1b1b-4e9d-9030-8780f8d82775"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe you are born gay but I am not sold that being trans is the same way. I have seen contradicting opinions and studies arguing both sides but I have yet to see convincing evidence that you are born like that. This isn't about trans rights or A right to transition, I can disagree with a person's choice and still think they have the right to do it. When suicide rates stay astronomically high even after transitioning it seems like there is a deeper issue. I believe I even read somewhere that trans feelings often subside over time. Speaking personally I know a girl who is taking testosterone and now identifies as a guy. Her friends and family, even my sister who is her best friend are reluctantly supportive. No one really thinks she is making the right choice. She has anxiety and is super into Tumblr and a culture that idolizes being different. I think she is going to realize she needs to find happiness with herself and transitioning is just an attempt to do something hoping things will magically be better. I will always see her as a girl and I don't think you can ever change your gender. I just use her name and never use pronouns. I refuse to endulge the fantasy. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being transgender is a mental disorder not how you are born.\n","id":"4a678c64-5c12-4ae9-a6ab-3833041a1fe2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For all you who live outside Australia, Australia Day is sort of like the 4th of July for the US, except instead of celebrating independence we celebrate arrivals of the Europeans on the first fleet. The native people of Australia have, for a while, been protesting the day as for them, it\u2019s \u201cinvasion day\u201d. The same day that their ancestors were slaughtered, and their land was lost forever. I still celebrate Australia Day, but it\u2019s more out of love for my county than out of celebration for the invasion nevertheless, the date makes that questionable. Do any of you have some sort of reason for why the date should remain? I understand it has significance to Australians now, and that everything happened a long time ago, but the repercussions are still felt today. Australia Day is also synonymous with some other events as well, one being the Cronulla riots where Australian people basically hunted down anyone that looked middle eastern and beat them but that\u2019s a different story and it was a lot more complicated than that. But yeah. That\u2019s my view. Change the date but celebrate the day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Australia Day should have its date changed.\n","id":"bed07fc0-2def-4c8a-9dba-ee470d8043d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The argument does not consider the nature of free will. 1. The free will of anything apart from God takes away from God's immediate, but not inherent, omnipotence. 2. The classical view of God includes the free will of his human creations, thus the potential for the coexistence of \"evil\" and a \"good God\". Note: This does not hinder the inherent nature of God's omnipotence because He has the power and the will to end anything including evil and human free will whenever he pleases.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The possibility of evil and pain are the necessary consequences to permitting true free human will under an all powerful and all knowing God.\n","id":"bdb9d8cb-4add-4236-a509-bde32b66686a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should animal testing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Researchers using this data were neither condoning the means through which it were gained, nor suggesting that the benefits of the data outweighed the harms in some sort of utilitarian trade-off.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The use of data from the Dachau freezing experiments is disanalogous since the harm had already been accrued.\n","id":"4a440173-cb29-42af-8f43-da7524d3eca4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice: Should Abortion be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>There might also be 'mental and physical consequences' if a woman has a baby she does not want. It is up to the woman to decide which course of action will cause them the least harm and she should be provided adequate information in order to do so.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Experiencing feelings of guilt or regret in the short-term after an abortion is not a mental health problem; in fact, such emotions are a normal part of making a life decision that many women find to be difficult\n","id":"bcabb05d-adb0-40fc-9556-d2eb4fc034b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m reading all these arguments about what needs to be done and what the root causes are, and the answers seem very clear to me. First off, mental illness is not a good explanation for the increase in shootings. I don\u2019t think that the rate of mental illness has notably increased over time, I don\u2019t think the rate of mental illness is especially higher in the US than in other countries, and I don\u2019t think the general rate of mental illness necessarily correlated to the number of individuals willing to commit violent, sociopathic acts. The factor that does correlate with an increase in attacks is the increased amount of radical propaganda being spread online and in the media. White supremacist talking points are being pushed harder and harder through social media, sites like breitbart, reactionary figureheads, members of the Trump administration, etc., giving them unprecedented access to spread propaganda and recruit people. However, the rate of access to radical propaganda is not especially higher in the US as compared with other countries. The factor that makes the US different is access to guns. It is massively easier to find a gun, legally or illegally, in the US as compared to any comparable country. Restrictions must be greatly tightened on how guns can be used and acquired. It\u2019s the reason that it\u2019s a bigger problem in the US than anywhere else. As long as people refuse to acknowledge this, more blood will be shed. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The cause and the solution to mass shootings is clear, and it comes down to gun control\n","id":"cc4837d3-b738-4f07-91b8-0c718f374b7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would a World Led by AI be a Better World?<|ARGUMENT|>As everything in life comes at a cost, life is all about resource management. Several AI will maximise the process faster and better than a Human.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A World Led by AI would be a Better World.\n","id":"75ddd198-3fa8-49dc-9d8a-6a9ace178e47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello there. I'm here to ask what you people think about the notion of intercourse with a clone of yourself or intercourse with yourself after time travelling. Do you see it as gay? Incest? Masturbation? Weird? If you could fill out these strawpolls, I would appreciate it. I would like to see the spread of opinions. Clone Time travel I personally believe it is masturbation when you go forward or back in time as you are doing it with yourself of which you can control both at different times so you are simply pleasuring yourself. It is not incest as it is yourself not a sibling of yours. When it comes to clones, it does not have the same consciousness as you so that would make it slightly more gay but not quite fully gay as it looks, acts and thinks just like you do so to me, seems more like its myself than another person so I class it as masturbation. Not incest as clones do not usually share the same mother.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not gay to have sex with a clone of yourself or to have sex with you from the future or past.\n","id":"5e128ece-328e-45fe-99ca-c6cc4c5aecec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Millions of readers an movie-goers have imagined Frodo destroying The One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom. This does not make anything about the story possible or meaningful beyond the pages Tolkien's books.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The human imagination is capable of many great fictions. This does not mean that these things are possible or meaningful.\n","id":"b8f9ed65-7725-4640-9a62-26e63838cf67"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, the paradigm exists where if a crime is committed within a virtual environment and it does not have a negative impact in physical reality, it is generally not seen as a crime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This paradigm effectively already exists in a fashion within existing online environments. Killing avatars is not illegal, however, fraud still is\n","id":"08edd5d1-6370-4262-9e67-8334837cb51e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>Discrimination is the key here. In attempting to restore balance through discrimination, we introduce imbalance. As soon as one party has an advantage, we begin to discriminate against them until some other party gains the upper hand. It's impossible to achieve balance this way.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All positive discrimination towards one group on the basis of race is negative discrimination against other groups. Therefore all racial discrimination is negative.\n","id":"cc14f339-2ad2-4801-bcfa-22f48d6e4828"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Star Wars series going in the right direction under Disney?<|ARGUMENT|>The new films have still made billions of dollars. The series is still wildly profitable.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Is the Star Wars series going in the right direction under Disney?\n","id":"6648985d-7923-4f9a-bef5-5ddf5e2b9007"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the BBC should be free to blaspheme<|ARGUMENT|>As an institution, the BBC may like to position itself as a global media brand but that doesn\u2019t alter the fact that it is funded by, and chartered to serve, the British population. The whole British population. That combination \u2013 paying the pipers and calling the tune \u2013 would suggest that the corporation might be sensitive to that group. If 50,000 to 60,000 users of any other brand registered their protest or objection to a product put forward by that brand, it would cause chaos, resignations, sackings and a rethink of whatever strategy had caused the problem in the first place. In the case of the BBC, it caused a few slightly dismissive comments from senior managers, one editor resigned because he felt that the protesters comments were not being taken seriously and the organisation continued as though nothing had happened. The sheer arrogance required for that response beggars belief. The BBC, as a public institution has a duty of care that might be thought of as greater than that of a private corporation. And yet it gave the impression of acting like it was just one of the other venues who had staged the opera. There is clearly a difference between a theatre that I choose to attend or not \u2013 and choose whether to support financially \u2013 and the national broadcaster which is beamed into people\u2019s living room paid for by a compulsory licence fee.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tens of thousands of licence fee payers objected to this, ultimately they are the BBC\u2019s key stakeholder and that view is worthy of respect.\n","id":"b044269e-a41d-4019-b990-b096d4f4e89c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be testosterone limits in women\u2019s sports?<|ARGUMENT|>Significant fluctuations in testosterone levels in women can be caused by a mutation that affects hemoglobin production. Hence these women have no control over these levels.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should not be excluded from activities they love because of traits they were born with.\n","id":"7b2b456f-5b88-4f57-9fc5-a7144f2b5b3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should same-sex marriage be legalised in Australia?<|ARGUMENT|>Where 'speech' is considered to include cake-decorating and other wedding services provided on a non-discriminatory basis this is probably the case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalising same sex marriage will lead to the erosion of freedom of speech in Australia.\n","id":"feef03c4-a335-4c97-834b-f01dc811ea17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This discussion took place in my class yesterday so I decided to present my argument here to see if someone can change my mind. Let's say the average salary for a plumber is 3000\u20ac. Plumber A gets paid the full 3000\u20ac. Plumber B gets a bonus solely for being attractive, therefore his salary is 3500\u20ac a month. I understand that giving someone a bonus just for being attractive is quite weird, but I don't see it as a problem considering that there would be absolutely no problem if the employer just gifted plumber B the money outside of work. It's his money so he's allowed to spend it on whatever he wants. Plumber A still gets the salary he deserves and doesn't lose anything when Plumber B gets more than him. He may be jealous but since he's not entitled to the employer's money, the jealousy isn't justified. The intention between just gifting the money and adding it to the salary is identical. On top of that, the employer also supports the state by paying taxes, so I don't quite see why the process of the money transaction could determine whether this scenario is moral or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's not immoral to give attractive employees a higher salary for being attractive\n","id":"cb573a31-4160-477e-a13a-b4614e1e71da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I like Fitzgerald's prose and I guess I get what it's getting at. Perhaps it's just my taste, but I've never really loved the book like I know so many others do. I don't think it compares to an American writer like Bellow, for example. The story seems simplistic and contrived. Am I missing something? Some key extracts, especially from someone who truly loves the book would be appreciated. I want to love this book like I know so many others do, but I just feel like I'm forcing it every time I try and read it. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I've never understood why 'The Great Gatsby' is so highly regarded as The Great American Novel.\n","id":"a917443c-7647-421d-aed7-ee3b16d8e1de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should straight actors play gay roles?<|ARGUMENT|>Gay people are not physically different than other people, so an heterosexual actor can seem as realistic on-screen as a gay one to play an homosexual character.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gay actors are not necessarily better at portraying a gay character.\n","id":"59bda39c-b330-444e-8ed3-e18862178c8d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is a gas tax the best way to fund infrastructure in the US specifically MI?<|ARGUMENT|>Low gas prices allow people to operate vehicles that are bigger than they need. This is bad for society since these vehicles are more likely to get into an accident and do more damage to others when they due, along with the unhealthy exhaust.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A higher gas tax should be introduced to pay for infrastructure so that income tax can be reduced accordingly.\n","id":"bb0c5c6c-5f51-4051-b602-af38dad70313"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to preface by saying I'm an atheist and consider all religions equally bad. There's no reason to single out Islam, when all religions are responsible for heinous acts. Every religion has its violent extremists, so why talk about Islam specifically unless you have another agenda? Just look at the KKK, the IRA, Israel's genocide of the Palestinaians, the Iraq war, drone strikes murdering children, etc. Christians and Jews have been just as violent, if not more than Islam, yet somehow every Muslim has been stereotyped a terrorist because of people like Sam Harris. I truly believe Sam Harris' criticisms of Islam is rooted in anti Arab sentiments, and it's not Islam he dislikes, it's just brown people <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Sam Harris is a racist for singling out Islam in his criticism of religion\n","id":"1c65a7d2-670f-4a05-92a9-9d50f183fae0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Appointments to the US Supreme Court should be for fixed 18-year terms<|ARGUMENT|>The slow turnover rate of the lifetime appointment system drives up the stakes of each individual confirmation battle and makes them more intense and polarizing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Term limits will make appointments to the Supreme Court less political and partisan.\n","id":"dcab868d-0f83-421c-8371-4f6f9f97c2f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like I said above, I feel minors should be able to send nudes with each other. It's their body and they should be allowed to do with it as they wish. Society needs to stop treating kids hormones as something that doesn't exist and stop treating a nude body as taboo. Both of these ideas are destructive and are not healthy for children or society as a whole. Yes, I know there's more to it such as what if the nudes are shared. I feel that if someone sends someone else nudes, if the receiver is to show the nudes to someone else that would be disrespecting another's privacy and should be illegal. Edit I stand corrected? Is that something people say in here? I just think that people's lives shouldn't be ruined because they get caught sending nudes to their 16 year old boyfriend, that is all. Also, I didn't include this but how do you expect teenagers to know that it's illegal to send nudes when it's not taught by anyone other than some parents, at least not where I live<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minors should be allowed to trade nudes with each other.\n","id":"88036318-c506-4e61-8ede-3dd356e96573"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>As of 2016, all members of the American Senate and 94% of the members of the House had at least a Bachelor's degree CRS, p. 4 Among the general population this share stands at 33% US Census Bureau, p. 1<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Citizens without a high level of formal education are under-represented in most parliaments.\n","id":"f969cb87-fe15-4e7d-8144-64859321c264"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hear this claim all the time that springs get heavier when they are compressed because E Mc^2. Here's why I don't believe it When you have nuclear reactions which involve mass being destroyed, that mass is really converted into energy, at a rate of E Mc^2. This equation describes what happens when you take mass and convert it into energy or vice versa, but either way it's going from one state to another, but not both at the same time. By saying that a compressed spring both more mass and more potential energy when it's compressed, you're really double counting the mass energy . Lets say you exert 5keV on a spring. According to the springs get heavier when you compress them theory, you have added 5keV of potential energy to the spring, but you have also added 5keV of mass to the spring too. If there were a way to convert that extra mass to energy via E Mc^2, disregarding the the reality of how this would be done, this is purely from a conservation of energy standpoint , then you would have 10keV, which is more than you put in to begin with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Springs don't actually get heavier when they are compressed.\n","id":"73b0dc1f-2d88-4dc0-b928-e82c232fdc96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Notice that I am saying amoral and not immoral . What I mean is that morality simply doesn't apply to courtship not that every act in the pursuit of courtship is good . It's just neither good nor bad. For instance, it's not immoral to have a race requirement in dating or a height requirement or religious requirement or other variables that would be considered immoral under other contexts. This logic can even be taken to its extreme in that it's not immoral to cheat on or lie to ones lovers but more on that at the end. So, here is how I came to this conclusion. If you can invalidate any of the premises leading up to the conclusion, then I am wrong and you have changed my view. However, I currently believe that these premises are self evident and necessarily follow each other. Premise 1 Autonomy is necessary for moral actions Here, when I say autonomy , I don't mean free will in any sweeping philosophical sense. I don't mean to suggest that there is no morality if humans don't have free will. Nor am I making any claim about whether free will is an illusion do to the philosophical concepts inherent in materialism . What I mean here is simply the ability to make ones own decisions . That is, a person cannot make a moral choice if he she has no autonomy to make a choice. For example A train conductor is headed to a fork in the tracks and realizes that his train is headed for a man laying on the tracks. However, the mechanism to switch the tracks is broken and he is powerless to strop the train. Therefore, the conductor is not morally responsible for the death of the man laying on the tracks. The conductor had no autonomy in that scenario and his actions were amoral. Premise 2 Courtship involves the necessary expression of ones autonomy. First of all, understand that I am talking about courtship which is different than friendship . The explicit goal of courtship is to engage in consensual intimate relations with another person. So, courtship necessarily involves the expression of ones autonomy because intimacy is the ultimate expression of ones physical bodily autonomy. Murder and Rape are considered among society's most heinous crimes because it robs people of that autonomy. Premise 3 Courtship is indivisible from autonomy There are no rules violating our individual courtship strategies which wouldn't also violate our autonomy. For instance, think about a rule that says one should not have racial requirements in dating . That necessarily violates someone's autonomy because the inverse of the rule is one SHOULD date different races . You can't make an ought claim when the person isn't given a choice whether to make that claim or not. In other words, you can't force people to engage in intimacy in some sort of a social justice way because it violates their bodily autonomy. No one is owed sex because that involves physical intimacy an indivisible expression of autonomy and creating rules in which people are owed sex would necessarily violate that autonomy. Conclusion Autonomy is necessarily for morality and attempting to create moral rules surrounding courtship violates that autonomy. Therefore, courtship is an amoral endeavor. And yes, this applies to cheating during courtship as well. For instance, there is nothing immoral about a person taking on multiple lovers, UNLESS he she passes on an STD to one of his her lovers or otherwise violates THEIR autonomy. Once another person's autonomy is violated, it becomes a moral issue. But, as long as you're only dealing with your own body, there can be no moral law applied to you without robbing you of YOUR autonomy. So, it's not even immoral to have multiple lovers and not tell your other lovers about each other. That doesn't affect the autonomy of your other lovers excluding the STD example but a rule saying that you couldn't take on multiple lovers would certainly violate your autonomy. And sexual requirements and preferences are of course amoral. And this even applies to traits that other people cannot change such as race, height, religion, etc. . Where have I gone wrong here, reddit?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sexual\/Romantic Courtship is an amoral endeavor.\n","id":"dbbd981f-b0ed-4842-a660-791f0a1af378"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>Because Humanism was being taught in schools, it's really difficult to know what they were believing at this time. The reason is that this time was an upheaval, where the established religion was being rebuked. So churches were not doing a service to the new thought and actions of the Renaissance era.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"During the Italian Renaissance, which 1522 fell almost in the middle of it, Humanism was the dominant form of education from 1500 to the mid 16th century Humanism often clashed with the Catholic Church and Inquisition.\n","id":"202ba20f-5ee7-4cd8-b216-35d60f96512b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>\u201cTo develop a complete mind Study the art of science study the science of art. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else\u201d \u2013 Leonardo DaVinci Every action has a cause and effect. Therefore, you can theoretically replicate any and any and every instance with precise accuracy. Now, I\u2019m entirely unaware of any experiment or project that has done that with the precise accuracy I have in mind. In part, I believe, due to the insufficient number of variables taken into account. The variables selected, although seemingly complete, are devoid of nearly everything our reality has to offer us. How can one understand the nature of conflict without studying how cells engage in warfare with themselves or how other species hunt or prey upon each other. How can we change habits and patterns without recognizing the infinite amount of variables that have led to their occurrence and manipulating them until achieving the desired result? How can we truly create a divide between artificial constructs and natural occurrences if we, as a species, have only been allowed to manipulate nature by her consent? This is why I'm inclined to think everything is inherently connected to everything else. Now, I by no means wish to promote or indulge in pseudoscience of any kind, and I can see how a lot of this sounds like spiritual nonsense. I value truth, reason, and curiosity above nearly everything else. And this self awareness allows me sufficient room for insecurity and doubt, namely lying in the inherent imperfection in human perception, the kind of judgment we are unfortunate enough to rely on when conducting research and experiments. I see our reality as a complex machine with limitless variables to be documented and manipulated for our benefit. I am a strong believer in the power of pattern recognition, and as such, believe sufficiently complex mathematics can explain everything. I am all too aware of my insufficient experience and intellect to think I have more to offer than all of you fine folks on this subreddit. I don\u2019t want to base my perspective on pseudo scientific or religious nonsense I understand how intuition is unreliable. I just want to learn and accomplish something great within my lifetime, and thus, desire a correct foundation. I don\u2019t know if this the right one, and if it isn\u2019t, I\u2019m far more than willing to change my view. But it seems that I keep coming back to the flawed nature of humanity, so much so, that I find it hard to take input sincerely enough to serve as a foundation. Quick Note I don\u2019t want to come off as arrogant or standoffish, it\u2019s just kind of how I work, so I don\u2019t want anyone to take it the wrong way. But please, do tell me why I can potentially come off that way and how to improve my communication skills. Above all else, I just want to grow and learn, and I think this is a pretty good step in doing that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everything is Connected to Everything\n","id":"a2347b7b-bdb1-47ff-b01a-59c46da4c7c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>We have a moral obligation to help people in danger. This is a global obligation. Within many countries this obligation is accepted and enforced by law. Empathy should push us to enforce this moral obligation globally.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As part of a global community we are all global citizens and have moral responsibilities towards each other that transcend national boundaries.\n","id":"1510a910-c941-40d6-a3f6-ce86dcf8f3a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When people ask for 'no politics' in entertainment films TV, videogames, etc , a common rebuttal is that well, everything is political . And yes, I agree that political themes are omnipresent in media. But I feel sometimes people aren't asking for 'no politics' as much as they're saying that they prefer media that is not partisan that is, media that might allude to present day or similar and takes explicit sides. I think it's fair for people to prefer media that takes a side but I also think it's fair that other people prefer escapism it's OK to have both. That sometimes these people including myself inelegantly express that view by asking for 'no politics' and confusing the matter, doesn't mean it isn't a legitimate view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Everything may be 'political', but not everything is partisan - nor should it be.\n","id":"481dc569-09a7-4ced-a7b5-0320e677c30f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've got sunshine on a cloudy day makes some sense. Has a certain level of poetry. His eponymous girl is the sunshine. When it's cold outside, I've got the month of May. This is where it started to lose me. His girl is like a month? I get that it's a warm month, but still, that's a strange metaphor. How do you have a month? The memory of it? The anticipation of it? I guess you'd say this is a filler line that adds no meaning. Plus, you ask the question that follows, you don't say it. I guess you'd say that's all my nitpicks. Edit Deltas awarded I should be more open to African American vernacular. The metaphors are for his feelings, rather than the girl herself. There are major poetic precedents of using months to represent feelings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The classic song \"My Girl\" by Otis Redding has unnecessarily awkward syntax.\n","id":"a9701ab5-f23e-4d75-9048-6fd9261f2cfa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>According to Harari the Roman persecutions of Christians over five centuries amounted to the deaths of no more than a few thousand people. This a fraction of what Christians did to each other within a 24 hour period in 1572.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"New Testament scholar Candida Moss argues that \"Christians were never the victims of sustained, targeted persecution.\"\n","id":"0b3fa36a-2072-4eac-8c1e-96d88b3eb0fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Education that Promotes a Certain Faith or Religion be Abolished in Schools?<|ARGUMENT|>In the UK cases of harassers or rapists being fired would indicate to victims who hear about them that their accusations will be treated seriously at work., religious study in faith schools is not monitored by Ofsted, but by religious bodies of the requisite faith. What constitutes 'good' religious education lessons in faith schools has more to do with inculcation than academic integrity; faith schools have an unacceptable carte blanche to do as they wish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While this may be true of some religious education, it greatly depends on the organisation running it. Faith based eduction gives the organisers the power to indoctrinate their students as they have no responsibility to educate them in different religious thoughts or question their own.\n","id":"8bcb4f02-ba0d-4ed7-8152-b3c96edd4f0e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>By making it just that little bit harder for someone to force an underage child into prostitution, states could potentially keep hundreds or thousands of minors out of sex work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Regulated legalization is the best way to combat underage sex work because we can more easily verify the ages and identities of workers without the threat of prosecution.\n","id":"2159ad29-f79f-4eae-b8c1-ebff09dd915c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Over the last years I have spoken with some separatists and their feeling to need independency for catalonia. Aside from evonomical reasons there is also the cultural aspect. When asked about what is culturally different, the biggest point is always the language and then comes some smaller stuff like regional food specialities. But isnt culture way more than that? History, morales, worldviews, usus, basically the things that setermine who you are, aside from your character not a tool you use to talk to others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A different language is not enough to claim a region is culturally different. Therefor Catalonia is culturally the same as Spain.\n","id":"a1a88ce8-4964-4fc6-b74e-dd683beb8c99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>It would de-incentivise the practice of pimping, which is often associated to or a result of human trafficking.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalization of sex work makes it easier for sex workers to organize and help themselves.\n","id":"6ef3ffb6-c0a1-4c55-994d-81c918605ce9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>A study found that minority students have a harder time getting accepted to public research universities in states that have banned affirmative action p. 228.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forgoing support for affirmative action would backtrack the good it has done.\n","id":"f7500089-6a26-4a61-af25-063b372c9f75"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Banning horse racing would have a detrimental economic impact far beyond the racing and gambling industry. Veterinarians, trainers, stable staff, and farmers would all be negatively impacted.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The horse racing industry creates hundreds of thousands of jobs and contributes billions to the economy each year.bloodhorse.com\n","id":"fcdeaf97-7a44-47eb-a894-ce97011fd3f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most of my friends and I are recently graduated liberal arts students. Ideally, this means that we have broad knowledge of the wider world e.g. science, culture, and society as well as in depth study in a specific area of interest. However, despite being good students, having graduated from a relatively competitive school one of the public ivies most of us are hugely lacking in our broad knowledge of science, culture and society . Last night, twelve of us hung out at my apartment, and we talked a bit about this, and whether we have a broad knowledge of the wider world . We played a little game where we would ask the group what we considered a broad knowledge or critical thinking question, and kept track of who could either come up with the answer or answered in the affirmative. Out of the twelve of us only 7 said they would be able to solve a simple calculus problem maximizing the volume of an open faced box given a rectangular piece of cardboard Only 5 got the correct answer to a relatively easy logic problem Only 6 got the correct answer to an easier logic problem This one bothered me the most, since liberal arts is supposed to teach critical thinking, especially in the humanities, but it was only math and science majors getting this one right. Only 4 were able to answer a simple probability problem The first one . This one also bothered me, since it needs no higher level math, it just involves critical thinking, yet lots of people all the humanities majors, and some of the science majors got this one wrong only 6 had written any computer program in any language only 4 said they would be able to solve the first few very easy programming challenges on projecteuler.net only 8 can read music only 7 knew that Yugoslavia is no longer a state the international studies major shockingly did not only 3 could name 3 or more of the current nations that used to comprise Yugoslavia Only 4 knew what the principle of parallx is and how it's used in astronomy Only 3 have read Ulysses Only 4 have read War and Peace Only 4 could identify Iambic Pentameter Only 5 could name 3 or more Central Powers and 3 or more Allied powers from WW1 Only 7 could name 3 or more Axis powers and 3 or more Allied powers from WW2 Only 4 knew what the battle of Hastings was about Only 4 knew who the Jacobins were Only 4 knew the difference between deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics Only 2 knew the difference between cultural relativism and moral relativism I have more of this if anyone is interested Our majors were Mathematics and Philosophy me Mathematics and Economics Mathematics and Economics Computer science Computer Science History and Political Science English Literature and History English Literature and Psychology Linguistics and Psychology Biology Chemistry International Studies My point is that we were all pretty good liberal arts students at a pretty good university, but all had serious gaps in being a well rounded, educated person, who is both good at critical thinking, and has a broad knowledge of the world. I think that part of the problem is that although our school compelled us to take breadth courses, they were trivially easy for example, one of us was able to not take any math courses at college, simply because they took AP economics in high school, and they took an introductory Astronomy course that involved basic algebra, another example is that I have never had a college level biology course, I took two easy botany courses that taught virtually nothing about biology . My point though isn't why this is the case, merely that Liberal Arts don't, in general, provide a well rounded education. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but that discussion is afield from this  post. I'd be willing to give deltas if but not only if You convince me that my friends and I are simply abberations, and that most liberal arts students have better broad knowledge and critical thinking skills than we do The questions that we asked each other last night were either too hard, or not indicative of broad knowledge and critical thinking. We fared well enough on the questions such that we could be considered to be well rounded, educated people Our school is not representative of most liberal arts educations other schools compel students to study more broadly and work on their thinking skills better than ours did.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liberal Education in the United States does not, in general, work as advertised.\n","id":"beafd39b-de20-4d8f-9a99-1fdc362f286f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I myself am a mix of Chinese and German. If I have kids with a female who is Japanese and Irish, I feel that would be like a mutt of ethnicities. It's as if 50 50 is enough to show some of both sides, but 25 ^4 would not be able to have a characteristic belonging to each specific race, and overall defeating the classification. My point of view is holding me back from having kids with another 50 50 person, i'm mainly looking for pros cons of at 25 ^4 child, some extra info on the topic would be great. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A child with 25% of 4 different ethnicities would be \"impure\".\n","id":"138647a1-84b3-4f85-9a9b-663c8dd2c2b4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>US courts later ruled that the French court's decision only applied to France and could not be enforced in the US thus reinforcing the idea of different regulatory regimes for users in different countries.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In 2000, a French court decided that Yahoo! had to comply with French laws when it distributed content to French users, regardless of where the company was based.\n","id":"6a06b480-2f28-4cb0-bfc0-5d2eeb5ed3d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>Much of the resources water, oxygen, etc. while living there would need to be sourced from Earth. This would end up wasteful, inefficient, and can create more scarcity of precious resources on Earth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Colonising Mars will take an unbelievable amount of natural resources from Earth.\n","id":"4d23fee7-107d-467b-bded-0a021c13cca8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should science get more governmental funding?<|ARGUMENT|>A Life Sciences Salary Survey 2014 found that American, Canadian, and European scientists that worked in industry made about 30 percent more than those in academia: On average, academics, including postdocs, make $88,693 annually, while commercial scientists make $129,507.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On average, industry scientists make more money than academic researchers.\n","id":"a22e9d55-a25a-44ee-91d1-0197d5916cfa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>The state is not incentivized to assist victims of crimes. Prosecutors and police are pushed to rack up convictions, but no one is looking out for victims' needs. Punishment for the victims' sake is a cop out without a sincere effort to help victims.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Under a different model, therapy could help both victims and perpetrators feel better, and it can be argued that this approach would provide greater long-term benefit than retribution.\n","id":"d9217815-5f19-4eed-9127-ad040b0bac93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The ACLU and Charlottesville: Should the ACLU Defend White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Academic discourse on racism often seeks to remedy racial disparities and problems, while speech from white supremacist rallies only serve to exacerbate issues.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a difference between academic or legal discourse and the rallies conducted by white supremacists.\n","id":"0445d78f-2209-476c-a9b5-f26c3bc6a46f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The way I see it, meritocracy is non existent and impossible in capitalist societies such as those of Western Europe or North America. Some people are born into rich families, go to private schools for the best education, go to good universities and then on top of their degrees from good universities use nepotism to establish themselves in good jobs whilst others go to shitty schools, have parents that work two jobs and can't support their child through education meaning that it is much harder for the child to go to a good university, or a university at all. In a true meritocracy, wouldn't everyone have the same chance at doing well?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are no meritocratic countries in the world.\n","id":"ee6b5db0-00b3-4760-a1bd-27296a0f4a90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>Any consideration of the Judeo-Christian 'God' must include the associated texts. 'Evil' nor 'good' are abstracts. They are deliberate actions performed by Humans. 'Allow' is not the message of the texts. 'Permit' until Humans choose to act one way or the other then sort them out based on their 'actions' IS the message of the texts. Then burn the evil and only allow the good to proceed. Until you hear God speak from the sky the texts are what we have.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"What we call evil is often not always the result of judgement and punishment of the creation defying the Creator. The punishment could be against an individual or wider even generational impact depending on the offense and God's will.\n","id":"21f64273-baa1-465f-b463-58720307be55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The closest economy by size China, 2 to America's GDP has a per capita GDP that is a fraction of America's. The few countries that have per capita GDPs higher than America's, they are all very small , and often have props E.g. Swiss banking industry . Remaining counties that do have diverse economies that even remotely approach the scale of the US e.g. France have highly volatile economies. The few countries that are diverse, and lack a prop having seemingly stable economies E.g. Denmark are all very small nations, making such scalability questionable As in, if we scale Denmark, do we get The French outcome? However, if past performance is a prediction of future results, then America is the economic powerhouse the world hopes it could be. And said social policies are against America's interests, with little evidence they could or would scale favorably Giving us The French outcome . From my perspective, we can look at these progressive goals as it would be nice if we could Yet we aren't addressing the real elephant in the room here, which is that none of these countries even remotely approach the scale of what America does. There are a lot of failures down this path and few successes. With France arguably being the most ambitious, non micro, attempt at this. And most people when they crunch the numbers should concede we don't want to replicate France. Simply distilled, I do think The west is the best in terms of socioeconomic policy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is little evidence to support the idea that America should reorient itself into a highly socialized economy and overwhelming evidence that it already had the most advanced economy in the world.\n","id":"82f2cfa1-deda-42cc-95c4-a0b739e0d4fa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would Abolishing Privacy Be Beneficial?<|ARGUMENT|>Knowing what people are working on would inspire others to join their cause. Knowing which people aren't working or aren't passionate about their work would help organizations recruit them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This would force companies to collaborate and work together as they could not hold industrial secrets; in effect creating an open source model of technological development.\n","id":"ce3d57cf-d4b2-4f13-984e-34ac87dcbf88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are romantic relationships necessary?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans are sexual and social animals. Romantic relationships facilitate intimacy and reproduction which are essential to the success of the species.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans haven't evolved as quickly as trends, so relationships are still relevant.\n","id":"e4202d54-c536-4033-ac4e-9cd526d3f548"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've always thought that blaming rape victims for their rape was absolutely horrendous. I still believe that we should not be blaming rape victims in the vast majority of cases. That said, I think there are certain scenarios where it's not unreasonable. Let's imagine you're walking around in a crowded mall, and somebody comes up to you with a gun. They demand you give them your phone and wallet. You've just been robbed in broad daylight and you couldn't have seen it coming. No one in their right mind would blame you for getting robbed. Now let's change the scenario a little bit. Let's imagine you're walking alone in the middle of the night in a neighborhood with a high crime rate. You're wearing a rolex and an expensive suit. You get robbed. Now obviously, the person you robbed you is at fault. They are to blame, not you. You've done nothing wrong. That said, you were not careful, and you put yourself at risk. Some people might blame you. These people would not be blaming you for getting robbed, but for not being careful about avoiding getting robbed. Let's take it a step further. Let's imagine you leave your brand new iPhone and wallet with hundreds of dollars in it on the street in plain view. You come a couple of hours later and they're both gone. The person who took them was not planning on handing them in to authorities. They fully intend on keeping them. In this scenario, I think a lot of people would blame the victim. Maybe even most. The victim did absolutely nothing wrong, but they were so careless that it's almost as if they're at fault. Technically, they aren't, but it's not unreasonable for people to blame them. I think it's obvious where I'm going with this. If a woman walks down an alleyway in a rough neighborhood completely naked and gets raped, it's kind of her fault. By the very definition of the word, it is not her fault. She did nothing wrong. That said, she was so careless that it's not unreasonable for people to blame her. I don't think that these cases are very common at all. I think that in the vast majority of rape cases, the victims did the best they could to avoid it, and blaming them is counter productive and horrible. That said, I don't think victim blaming is always unreasonable, at least in theory.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that victim blaming when it comes to rape is not always unreasonable.\n","id":"a8a4efa0-feb3-42b3-b626-eca3705022d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello. In the last few days I have been doing a lot of intense political work for my people, and believe that I probably need some rest. There is this one Senate meeting later today but I really can't feel bothered to go. I have done a lot for them in the last years, and I think a day off would not hurt anyone, honestly. My friend Brutus has also been making weird jokes in the last few days about overthrowing the power and things like that. He also showed me his new knife collection, which I found quite interesting but also pretty creepy. I am really tired and don't want to deal with him today. The other senators will do just fine without me for one day. I told my wife and she thinks it's a good idea to skip today's Senate meeting, also considering she has had a bad feeling about this for a while now, but only told me yesterday night. So, I am not going to go to the Senate today, and will say I was sick if asked. I mean, what's the worst that could happen? gt Hello, people of the past. This is a footnote from the moderators of this 'internet forum'. I'm afraid to say that some wannabe scientist, while looking into time travel, has caused a temporal distortion field. It should dissipate in the next 24 hours. In the mean time, feel free to message us about a view you hold while you're visiting the present, and remember to have a look through our rules<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am not going to go to today's Senate meeting. I am tired and my friend Brutus has been acting weird recently.\n","id":"84b76bcc-f8a2-4fb2-ba72-bbee62d2919d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Discrimination, tribalism, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, authoritarianism or a lack of care for the environment, among other issues, may not be good for humankind, and yet they still exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This confers humankind a perfect form of decision making in which only what is good is preserved.\n","id":"637f1459-f3c7-46a6-9d30-15bf267016c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>On the surface, this idea sounds crazy. The US Dollar holds a unique role in international trade and makes America an attractive trade partner to the world. But is it all that crazy? The United States as a nation is extremely heterogeneous economically. The coasts and major cities are service and technology oriented economies. The Midwest is manufacturing dependent. The Plains and some of the South is relatively agrarian. The process of globalization dictates that such regional differences will become even more pronounced over time, as trade leads to specialization. However, as a massive nation with a unified currency, the nation can only follow one monetary policy and one fiscal policy, meaning that policies that benefit certain regions will be chosen at the expense of others. A good example has been the commitment to a strong dollar policy for the past couple decades. This heavily benefits the consumers of the coastal states who feel the benefits of imports, but do not export much goods. However, a strong dollar hurts manufacturing and agriculture, as they make US goods more expensive worldwide and hurt exports. Regionally, this has the effect of a booming economy in places like New York, and California but a collapsing economy in places like the Midwest that used to be manufacturing based, that are rapidly declining and hemorrhaging population. Chicago, for example, has lost close to 1 million people since the 1960s, and that's just one city. This is not a unique problem to the US. In Europe, since the creation of the Euro, we have seen that while it produces great benefits for larger, wealthier nations like Germany, nations that are in financial trouble that go through local recessions are unable to use monetary policy to help recover their economies. The Euro works well for Germany, but has some significant disadvantages for crisis mode Greece, for example. As a solution, I believe the US needs to create regionalized currencies. The dollar does not have to go away, but rather shift to being primarily an exchange currency governed by the new versions of the Federal Reserve that govern each of the new currencies. This produces significant advantages The agrarian and manufacturing based regions can lower the value of their currency, allowing them to specialize in manufacturing and agriculture and carve out a logical role in the international marketplace the west coast can maintain their strong currency and continue policies which allow them to lead the way in the tech revolution the east coast can do the same and specialize more coherently around financial services both the coasts can, at the same time, also experience the benefits of exportation from the Midwest without having to sacrifice strong dollar policies, meaning lots of work in both importing and exporting federal government fiscal and economic policy will decentralize as federal taxation will be more difficult and it will make more sense for the individual regions to control economic policies, allowing more progressive regions to have things like universal health care without being held back by regions resistant to those policies. As far as Cons go, the major ones I can think of are initial international market instability as the US transitions away from the dollar potentially less ability to borrow for certain regions regions that currently rely on federal policy to redistribute wealth from other regions will receive much less in federal assistance, particularly Southern states. However, the last two can be fought against by redistributive federal policy if necessary. They will be more difficult, but not impossible. That leaves the only main issue I see with this idea as the likely market uncertainty such a major change will cause. While I do not know if there is much that can be done to prevent that, I think the long term benefits of regional currencies would outweigh shot term market fluctuations do to uncertainty as the new system becomes more and more established over time. Change my view why shouldn't the US create regional currencies?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States needs to move away from the U.S. dollar and create regional currencies\n","id":"9d9f4a20-9130-40c9-9669-982458e9379a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>As a consequence of procreation, both abortion and adoption as the alternative to the engagement of state's powers makes abortion or adoption powerfully relevant. A mother must be protected to first make the most rational choice for the kid's or her sake at any time. Failing that reason, the state asserts itself when the rights of the newborn have not been responsibly provided for well in advance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Incidentally, it could pave the way for widespread and safe abortion centres, and remove the social stigma. If a woman has an unwanted pregnancy, and she's unlicensed, she would by law be required to get an abortion the question concerns procreation, adoption is after procreation and there would be a case that the government should provide such facility.\n","id":"4cbe50e0-04eb-4799-914f-1f55eb5bb67b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Local elections just happened where I live, with 11 voter turnout. In the 2012 presidential election, there was an estimated 57.5 turnout. Numbers are low and they aren't going to get significantly better for a large variety of reasons, and I think the only way to boost it up closer to 70, 80, hell 90 would be to make voting available online. This generation pays bills online. We schedule doctors appointments online. We even do taxes online. Now, there are obviously some security concerns and voter fraud concerns, but just because there will be some work to do doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. If the government allows us to do our taxes online, they should also let us vote online. Until they do \u2014 until voting is something citizens can do in their underwear, from the comfort and convenience of their homes \u2014 there is not a whole lot politicians can do to increase dwindling voter turnout numbers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voter turnout on election days will not increase until there is a way for citizens to vote online.\n","id":"1415ba52-8ca7-4657-9a29-8188aa83429d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Kantian ethics is a godless version of deontology, which proposes categorical imperatives. The requirement for these imperatives is that they should lead to good outcomes if followed by all people, in all circumstances. It also stresses the need to treat conscious beings as ends in their own right, and not means to lead to something greater.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are other, superior, sources of philosophical frameworks and moral codes.\n","id":"ac040d06-a869-44c0-b1f6-ca2874c9a803"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Wind energy, Debate on whether Wind Energy should be part of the fight against global warming<|ARGUMENT|>Wind power has stopped running in Australia because authorities were concerned at the number of birds dieing each year from flying into wind turbines. The influence that birds have on the wind industry is fairly large if you think about it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Wind power in Australia was shut down due to dying birds.\n","id":"6e0e5f24-e012-4d43-8980-c72d0423d739"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>There are ways for it to make its own decisions that contradict its prime directives other than through willpower. It could for example learn new directives, or a new interpretation of its existing directives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fully developed AI can take its own decisions and not just what it is \"allowed to take\".\n","id":"8ea63344-8e4c-42ed-9363-89edf302b5a2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is sort of a new  sprouting off of u gpu1512 's  regarding fixed election budgets. x200B Minor Info on Democracy Dollars Vouchers x200B I had seen this comment and this comment in the , but they had no responses, the wikipedia article was kind of sparse, and comments there already made their point about the drawbacks of fixed election budgets, so I decided to create a new . x200B For those not wanting to click links, the basic principle is that each citizen receives vouchers that they can allocate to whichever candidates they prefer, effectively giving more power to the individual to fund people's campaigns. With this system, politicians would be less beholden to the corporations that donate to them, because the money a corporation could donate could only put a small dent into the total money in the campaign system. It seems Yang's version and Seattle's version are a bit different. Seattle did not give vouchers to everyone. Instead, they handed them out on a first come first serve basis. It seems Yang's plan would actually give said vouchers to every single citizen. x200B There are the obvious concerns about the cost of such an endeavour and how that money will be raised how it will affect people's taxes, however having a general argument on that point will likely not  unless it's very obvious that this sort of system is economically unfeasible. x200B I don't have nearly enough info to actually believe this specific system will work, but I believe we should have lots of discussions on how to better our government so that we can eventually come up with a system that puts the american people's values over big corporations. x200B Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We should use Democracy Dollars\/Vouchers to fund election campaigns to minimize corporate sway over our elections.\n","id":"fcc8b917-60cc-4cd7-9b10-fd5a9bda4b68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>NBC Universal to Donald Trump You're fired NBC has decided they will no longer air the apprentice, or the Miss USA universe contest. They have cut ties with Donald Trump altogether. But let's take a look at what trump said. Now it was obviously stupid and false to call Mexican immigrants rapists. But I strongly suspect he was referring to human sex trafficking that happens across America's southern border, which is brutal. Sex trafficking is slavery. There's nothing wrong with pointing out the problem of sex trafficking. The way he said it, it almost sounds like he's saying Mexican immigrants are generally rapists, but I don't think that's what he meant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trumps \"rapist\" remarks are not as bad as they seem.\n","id":"c907d3ae-6787-49f1-83e3-5924bf25a5cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In most of America, if someone becomes pregnant, then they have the sole right and power to decide between carrying that pregnancy to term and creating a child, or aborting it. This is right, it's how it should be. But we as a society should also recognize the fact that it is a decision made by one person, and that it is unreasonable to hold a completely different person person responsible for the decision to create a child. If two people come together and agree that they both want to have a kid preferably with a contract , then they should definitely be held to that once the other person decides to have a child with them. And in places where it's unreasonably difficult to obtain an abortion, this shouldn't apply. This is similar to the idea of financial abortion , but more where financial abortion works as more of an opt out of parenthood, I'm talking about more of an opt in situation. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone unilaterally decides to bring a child into the world, then others shouldn't be required to pay them for it.\n","id":"6fc6fb6c-a870-4366-b47c-69eb559e1e0a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>In human history newly appearing societies have often been an existential threat. The Mongols, unknown to many in Europe and the Middle East, reaped havoc in sieges such as Baghdad or Kiev<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By denying AGI basic rights, we logically place ourselves as an existential threat to them.\n","id":"ba94a07e-3216-4086-a80e-6ab5d8d1a207"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best fantasy story?<|ARGUMENT|>As Eragon becomes increasingly mentally connected to the world around him, including animals and plants, he is forced to confront his carnivorism and reevaluate consciousness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Inheritance Cycle forces characters and readers to confront complex moral and psychological issues.\n","id":"784232d7-942d-4f6a-9dd3-b1f9ae4b42e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I want to to die before I\u2019m 30. There are lots of reasons why but these are some of the main ones 1 Being old is depressing since you have lots of health problems and you can barely do anything except just sit around all day. 2 my parents and most of my family friends will be dead by then, and I will be alive to see my parents die, which is really sad for me to even think about. 3 i don\u2019t want to look old 4 knowing that your just a few years away till death. 5 working all your life just to get a few years to enjoy all of it 5 I don\u2019t want to have kids but I feel that when I am older I will be lonely if I don\u2019t 6 younger kids looking down on you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I want to die young\n","id":"fc2bf903-c8d1-4f26-ae8f-88dc337c3b4c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Bee Products Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>A single worker bee may visit up to 10,000 flowers in one day and, in her lifetime, produce only a teaspoonful of honey. Honey is the hard-earned fruit of their labor and belongs to them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taking away the bees' self-made food, which they obtained in a process of hard work, equals theft.\n","id":"efc231bc-e457-44f4-8ce8-5602823aee89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Captive reptiles should be fed with living prey<|ARGUMENT|>If reptiles are not interested in feeding, they will make no attempt to kill the prey. This gives the animals a perfect opportunity to attack the snake.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a risk of damage to the reptile being bitten by prey.\n","id":"c0222fd7-457a-468e-8718-1f226861f354"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My core assumption is that ethics are not universal or general. There is no way of creating definition of right and wrong that everyone would agree on. This why philosophers have created school after school different ethical theories. Don't get me wrong. It is important to discuss ethics but no one can say that their definition of right and wrong is right and someone's else is wrong. I don't care if you are utilitarianism, Kantian or trust in divine command. Each of theory answers to question what is right or wrong but none is better than the other. I personally see that closest we can get to universal ethics on country level is law. So in my view you should always obey the law and if you see that law should be changed you must do something to change the law instead of just breaking it yourself. I understand that law is right sentiment causes lot of problems but all ethical system have their flaws but that is not discussion for today. In order for us to have productive discussion we have to agree that there is no universal definition of right and wrong. Someone will say that killing is always wrong, someone will allow it in some cases and someone in others. These are all personal moral views and as right or wrong as any other moral view. x200B Real view I wanted to talk is about sovereign countries. There are laws and practices in different countries that we might not agree on. These might be issues like gay rights, religious clothing or civic rights. IMHO it is wrong to try impose our beliefs and moral views to theses countries. If their culture says it's fine to circumstance women or prison people with different ideology they have right to do so. It's arrogant to say that our way of living is superior to theirs and we should respect their rights to govern their population as they see fit. If the citizens don't like how they are governed they will do something about it or just leave the area. But for other country trying to influence other sovereign countries legislation is in my view comparable to invasion. It is just cultural invasion instead of military one. It won't change my mind to say that some minorities rights are being violated in foreign country. I'm pro gay rights and have voted for them in region where I live in. But if let's say India would have kept it's anti gay laws that were changed earlier this year it would be wrong and arrogant for me judge their laws, ethics and culture because like stated at the begin ethics are not universal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's wrong to impose our moral views on different cultures.\n","id":"e3c06225-5525-4e2e-877a-75309c706791"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>Because at the time of negotiation we are in a cul-de-sac, we cannot hope for guerrilla warfare. By engaging in this, we can potentially destroy the British later and, as a result, slavery.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is a particularly bad tactical situation. Even if one prefers to go down fighting, one should wait for better circumstances.\n","id":"9374eb9c-0aae-4bfa-a997-a42e342ff180"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>It is not possible to speak without a cultural bias. It is not possible to think without a cultural bias. Each and every one of us has their own unique cultural background. This cultural background is the framework within which our thoughts and ideas are formed. To claim one can think without a cultural bias is akin to saying one can speak without a language.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In practical terms, there is no historical or empirical basis for eliminating biases. Human psychology is biased by evolutionary necessity and there is no reason to anticipate eliminating them. A far better approach is to recognize biases but emphasize critical thinking and to accept and work through cultural differences.\n","id":"da3f2498-5376-4ba9-9a25-4467a694c226"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The United States is justified in using private military firms abroad to pursue its military objectives<|ARGUMENT|>Hiring private forces to escort NATO convoys has actually strengthened a dangerous network of Afghan warlords. In fact, NATO convoys that refuse to pay them for protection are sometimes threatened and attacked. The money that the United States pays to hire these private forces has actually found its way to the Taliban based on a study done by the House Subcommittee for National Security. In fact, the money paid to these warlords actually strengthens the competing forces within Afghanistan that exacerbates the current power vacuum. As long as the US continues to use these PMCs in Afghanistan, there will be no peace or stability. Dexter Filkins, \"US Said to Fund Afghan Warlords to Protect Convoys,\" June 21, 2010<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The hiring of PMCs has actually strengthened warlords and the Taliban in Afghanistan.\n","id":"f4e6fdfe-00e1-4e13-bbaf-4d1cf012e097"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok, so this is a silly , but my wife and I watched this movie the other day and I noticed something. I really think that between the two characters of Andy and Miranda, it is Andy who is the most evil. As the character Emily notes about her \u201cYou sold your soul to the devil when you put on your first pair of Jimmy Choo's, I saw it.\u201d Andy acts without regard to her own ideals, her friends, family, and even her own career goals all for the purpose of getting ahead in a job she doesn\u2019t even really want. Miranda, by contrast, at least is shown to truly love and appreciate fashion and the effort that it entails. The speech where she teaches Andy that her sweater exists because of the passions of the people in the room highlights that Miranda is passionate and consistent, whereas Andy immediately runs out and starts changing herself to please Miranda even though she has no real interest in the job in the first place. Miranda loves what she does, she\u2019s passionate and dedicate to her cause, and when she treats people badly she is shown to do so deliberately and consciously as a admittedly poor but demonstrably effective motivating strategy. While it may be argued that she is using less than optimal tactics, or that she is not empathetic, she is at least consistent to her purpose, beliefs and goals. Further she is shown to take responsibility for her choices. Andy, meanwhile, is abusive and inconsiderate to everyone around her and continually trots out a tired \u201cI didn\u2019t have a choice\u201d excuse rather than taking responsibility for her actions. While Miranda may rightly own the title of \u201cdragon lady\u201d in terms of being a hard nosed, no nonsense demanding boss, it is Andy who presents a quality that can be said to be duplicitous and coming from a fallen character. She is the one who is harming people through cowardice. To pretend to care about people but act in a way that hurts them is more devil like than to simply not be empathetic in the first place. So it is Andy, not Miranda, who should be seen as the Devil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The \"Devil\" in \"The Devil Wears Prada\" is Andy, Not Miranda\n","id":"98292b9e-5993-4553-a48d-e318b247809c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Shakespeare Authorship Question<|ARGUMENT|>De Vere had fallen out of love with his wife, Anne Cecil, paralleling Hamlet's relationship with Ophelia.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some consider Hamlet to be a deeply biographical character for De Vere.\n","id":"36ff73e2-9de5-4bb7-b664-5c6d8172fd71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recycling programs were put in place to reduce the amount of waste that gets put into our landfill and also to reduce the amount of new raw materials being used to make products. The standard argument is that by recycling paper, deforestation companies don\u2019t have to cut down as many trees to produce the same amount of products, resulting in an increase in environmental responsibility and decrease in air pollution via deforestation. However, this is not the case. First off, recycled paper is of a lower quality than newly cut wood and can\u2019t be used to make nearly as many things as wood can. So deforestation companies are barely, if at all, curbing how many trees they cut down. No reason to recycle there. Second, recent legislation I may be slightly off base with this requires those companies to plan two trees for every tree they cut down. So if they were curbing the amount of trees they cut down due to recycling, the difference would be nullified by the amount of trees they have to plant. My second argument is against preventing paper from entering landfills. Paper fully degraded to soil in about three weeks. It is literally a carbon capture item that should be put back into the ground to complete the carbon cycle. By recycling paper we effectively transmit that carbon into the air via the recycling process and prevent that paper from properly degrading in the ecosystem. To make matters worse, it\u2019s said that if you were to recycle an entire tree\u2019s worth of paper, you would produce far more carbon dioxide than that tree would have absorbed in its entire lifetime, thus resulting in a net gain of carbon dioxide further hurting the environment through a program put in place to help it. I think the best method of paper recycling is to bury it in your own backyard, put it in compost piles, or burn it. It has no business being in landfills that are cut off from the natural ecosystem, and it also has no business being reused. Feel free to change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"paper recycling is bullshit\n","id":"9fc55bfc-4152-4e56-8f7a-9118d3eb4ffd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is fueled by something that happened to me recently. I was at a party at a friends house who was walking distance from my house, though everyone else there had driven. Many of the people there were in their late 50s. Every person had at least a few drinks, many had more than a few, and every car I saw leave had driven by someone who was at least buzzed and often times drunk. I don't think I need to state the dangers of drunk driving. My point is that at this party, and many social events, people assume the only risk associated with driving while buzzed or drunk is getting caught and are at the point where they just do it without thinking twice about it. Even one alcoholic beverage is enough to impair judgement, which is not acceptable when operating something as potential dangerous as a vehicle. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society has become so desensitized to drunk and buzzed driving that it has become a perfectly acceptable activity.\n","id":"7774460d-81a5-4806-b3a9-5b848fdeb6b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>freeze the United Nations budget<|ARGUMENT|>The potential exists for the United States to appear as a bully to the other UN member states by demanding the institution bend to its will or lose support. An appropriate analogy can be found in a country's taxation policy. Individuals cannot simply withhold their taxes because they disagree with a government's policies. That usually lands them in jail. The US faces no such threat for non-compliance and thus makes a show of its leverage over the UN. Such an attitude potentially undermines the desire of other nations to be receptive to serious US needs, resolutions and reforms. The US therefore needs to be very careful when exercising its power in the UN and deciding how much money to set apart; otherwise countries may start to question the role and importance of such a big international organization. improve this<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US inflexibility diminishes its leadership role in the world body.\n","id":"d6f0fe7d-cf17-465b-a84e-040289002a5a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lately I've been doing a lot of research regarding vaccines. At first I was in favour of them and thought they were a great piece of medicine that saved thousands of lives, but since doing research I have developed some serious doubts. This article includes lots of scientific data about the lack of effectiveness of vaccines. Although I don't agree with all of the article, it really made me question vaccines. If they don't work and can even cause illness, why are we using them? I feel like a total crackpot for believing this stuff<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't plan to vaccinate my children.\n","id":"eb001544-1a7a-4663-a1f8-ade952f73ea1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello , I have recently started a journey on learning a new language. It is called Toki Pona and in brief it consists of 120 words only. You can have simple conversations with it and is good for to the point meaningful conversation. It's a ton of fun. It is also very easy to pick up and create simple phrases, questions, and answers. This got me thinking, why not have a universal language? Using Toki Pona as an example, it is said to be learned roughly in under a week. Although toki pona is an already created language that just so happens to fit characteristics that would be desirable in a universal language, a new language could be created if there was some need that was pointed out. In my views here are some benefits of having a simple language like Toki Pona that would be universal Easy to travel and be able to communicate desires or needs to locals that is also their 'Native' language. Easy to learn. Using Toki Pona as an example, you can learn it under a week. If implemented into the school systems one or two semesters would be more than enough to be considered very fluent. Inexpensive in comparison. Yes there would be costs involved. The entire book is only 20CAD from amazon. This is very inexpensive compared to textbooks costing hundreds of dollars to school systems. It is also free for Kindle unlimited meaning schools with large technological infrastructure and corporate licences can put the study material online or on eBooks. It is easily spoken. The phonetics of a universal language can be created such that anyone can have an easier time learning pronunciation than other languages in use. For example, I cannot learn Arabic or Chinese very easily as my mouth can simply not pronounce some of the very harsh and complicated sounds. Tourism can go up as language barrier fears diminish. As a personal anecdote and from friends experiences, I have a hard time traveling to places that speak French as I feel very uncomfortable with that language when English is not available. I may be missing something and not constructing my thoughts properly but I think that a simple and universal language that is easy to learn and speak has pros that not only outweigh the cons, but also vouch for implementation worldwide in the present day. As a side note and less influencing point, it is worth nothing that simple languages that break thoughts into what they truly mean can help communication and thinking on a Philosophical level.  Edit a lot of people are seeing a side to this I didn't mean to bring into the argument, this is probably my fault. I am looking PAST implementation and right into the cons of having a universal language. I was hoping someone would change my view on how having a universal language has cons that outweigh the pros. For those making the argument that translators would be out of a job I disagree. Works still need to be translated. A simple universal language doesn't take the place of complex beautiful languages. Key point there is no REPLACING current languages. In regards to dialect splitting off, I think that with such limited vocabulary this would not be an issue OR in a language that is ambiguous by design, it is alright. The core function stays the same.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are not enough cons to having a simple, universal language to hold it back from worldwide deployment.\n","id":"f9a8ea07-85ee-462c-9fda-2739626920bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am one of those people that is not afraid to go to the bathroom without washing my hands, eat food that fell on the ground, share a glass or utensils that somebody else has used, etc. Because of my lack of avoidance for germs, I haven't been sick in years. If I do start to experience any symptoms of illness runny nose or scratchy throat , it's always gone by the next morning. I believe I have exposed my immune system to common germs and bacteria to the point where it has been worked like a muscle and is better equipped to deal with any kind of infection or illness. From what I have seen, people who compulsively wash their hands, use hand sanitizer, and overall go out of their way to avoid contact with germs are the ones who seem to get sick most often. I feel that this type of behavior is actually causing them to get sick, because their immune system is babied into being nearly useless. Am I wrong? Could I just be lucky and have a strong immune system? Is there any research that proves that people who take measures to avoid germs get sick less often than those who expose themselves regularly to them?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that exposing yourself to germs on a regular basis is a better way to avoid getting sick than mild germophobia.\n","id":"cb6a482f-7b78-47e4-8bcf-9916f385379a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>DISCLAIMER I am in no way advocating pedophila, if this is a sensitive topic for you then maybe don\u2019t read this post. Also please be respectful, thank you. The hate pedophiles get has been bothering me for months. And when I say pedophiles I don\u2019t mean the people who act on their urges, of course that is fucked up but even so the hate is terrible and I wish people were less judgmental . I mean the people who are sexually attracted to minors assuming they haven\u2019t done any harassment towards them . I see posts and PSAs online saying how pedophiles should be in jail, but I can\u2019t help but feel sad when they say that. People can\u2019t control what they are attracted to. They didn\u2019t fucking wake up one day like, \u201chey, I want to be a pedophile.\u201d They are probably ashamed of that shit especially with the way society treats them. Really, they should get be encouraged to get therapy, not be threatened or going to jail. Thoughts?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pedophiles Shouldn\u2019t Be Getting So Much Hate\n","id":"a365befe-bbff-464a-b29f-53ad44ad1509"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is enlightened despotism superior to democracy?<|ARGUMENT|>Generally, people are self interested, and so value not being oppressed. A logical person will try to prevent their neighbor from being oppressed so that they will return the favor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Liquid Democracy is a step away from tyranny because it fundamentally puts more power in the hands of people.\n","id":"4f4eda0a-1d41-48e5-92e2-63464526e2b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>That all states should immediately ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families.<|ARGUMENT|>Ratifying the U.N. Convention would benefit the economies of the countries that have not yet done so<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That all states should immediately ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families.\n","id":"73d0384e-d28b-464c-b63b-1b60180bfb04"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize prostitution<|ARGUMENT|>By making prostitution legal, sex workers will be able to unionize and protect themselves from those who would exploit them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing sex work will make the profession safer for women\n","id":"3299f48a-d18c-477d-8fe3-a4cad0e0ff88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If someone wants to buy a house or car, they are expected to pay for it themselves. They don't have a sense of entitlement to subsidies from the state to lower the costs of such things, so why is higher education any different? Why do people expect other people to foot the bill for their education? I realize that some might say Because education is a good investment for society. Everyone benefits when the work force is more educated. But couldn't this only be true to a certain extent? Aren't there diminishing marginal returns when it comes to investing in other people's education? What evidence exists to suggest that spending tax dollars to lower college tuition rates produces a net benefit to society? Furthermore, there are too many college graduates to keep up with demand. Why, then, are we wanting to push students into college if we already have a surplus as it is?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"States should not provide funding to universities.\n","id":"e8b8596e-3f27-4512-809c-99e1243094fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should parents perpetuate myths like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny to their children?<|ARGUMENT|>The promise of a better gift from the Tooth Fairy in exchange for cleaner teeth can incentivise better tooth brushing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Tooth Fairy myth can be used to promote better dental hygiene.\n","id":"6cedcdd8-7202-4d1e-bc79-b683f149f438"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A while ago I posted a  on this topic and awarded a delta on the basis that all of this will fail if Trump loses the 2020 election, and that he has lost popularity amongst independents and that there was record turnout in the 2018 midterm elections. This delta has, in my opinion, been countered. My view is that the Republican party currently controls the US Government and will continue to control the US Government for the indefinite future. How long that future will be is hard to predict. Maybe eight years, maybe twenty, maybe more. There may be a brief gap period. But the future will be Republican. For people who want to argue semantics, I\u2019ll define \u201ccontrol the government\u201d as Holding the Presidency Holding at least one House of Congress, and Maintaining Expanding Conservative Majority on Supreme Court I base this position on the following We Will Not Have a Fair Election in 2020 As the incumbent Trump enjoys the incumbent advantage. He has a reliable base that will not break from him and consistently votes. He has at best done nothing to protect our voting systems and at worst sought to weaken protections. His opponents are currently fairly divided although we are still very far out but none seem likely to inspire both the Left to vote and Independents to vote with them. And even if Trump is unpopular it does not matter because the unpopularity is geographically restricted compared to his rural support. The electoral college is once again likely to seal a win even if he does not win the popular vote. However, even if Democrats overcame all of that, they will lose. Trump has, from what I have seen, relied on Russian interference to win 2016 and will do so again. The Republicans are killing any and all election security bills, and I have seen very little to fill me with confidence that Russia does not actually have the capacity to change votes. However, even if Democrats overcome the above, I predict that any Republican controlled state that votes for Democrats will find new laws rushed through in the interim between election day and the actual voting by electors. These laws will simply require the electoral votes to be awarded to Trump who the public votes for is, after all, more often than not a suggestion, not a binding order. Republicans will control the 2020 census. The Republicans will control the 2020 census and redistricting. I expect this in that they will control a majority of state governments in the event Trump is re elected. I have no confidence the Supreme Court will reject the census question for any reason, and with that question on the census the Republicans will, as they have in the past, gerrymander the country in their favor as much as possible. Alternatively, if the census is sabotaged in some way, the current districts, favoring Republicans, will continue to be used. Thus, for the next decade, elections will continue to favor Republicans based on districts. And the Supreme Court is not likely to strike down gerrymandering any time soon. The Urban Rural Divide favors Republicans. Republicans enjoy rural support while Democrats enjoy more urban support. The problem is that while urban support has a higher population, rural support is geographically wider. The Senate is designed as an institution to favor smaller population states, and as much as I dislike the Republican control of it it is nonetheless doing just that. The House, however, is not able to counterbalance the Senate because it is capped. The House is meant to represent population and favor more populous states, but with a cap in place is no longer able to effectively do so. More rural states are favored in both parts of Congress. Further, the House can be gerrymandered where the Senate cannot. A greater population favoring Democrats in smaller urban areas is simple to manipulate to create as many rural and thus Republican districts and representatives as possible with as few urban districts and Democrats as possible. The joint effect of the census and the urban rural divide cannot be understated, as it ensures that, even if Democrats win the presidency and a unified Congress somehow it is likely to be quickly re lost come the next election, where the presidential party is already predisposed to endure losses. The Courts. If the Republicans hold power in 2020 it is unlikely that all the aging liberal justices will survive until the next election, granting Republicans the ability to further solidify the Supreme Court as conservative. More subtly, an enormous portion of the lower federal court judges are conservative to far right, a number increasing as judges are passed through the Senate. The combined power of the conservative justice system will be to neuter any left wing legislation that a Democratic government may pass, removing as many Democratic policy victories and further portraying Democrats as inept. Notably this is likely to occur even if Democrats win in 2020, as the judiciary is already stacked against them. Additionally, if there is a contested election that goes to the Supreme Court, the Republican will win regardless of any other factor. I grant exactly zero integrity to this Court and view them as a willing extension of the Republican apparatus, regardless of what certain Justices might claim. There is, of course, the possibility Democrats will win the presidency and at least one half of Congress. Then all bets are off. But I am doubtful. Disproving the above points would go a long way towards changing my view, although changing just one or so would likely be insufficient as they are pretty interconnected. This is not a debate on what the actual policy effects of an indefinite Republican government will be outside of working to further entrench their power in perpetuity. And while I have no doubt Trump, should he win in 2020, will do everything he can to further consolidate power either for himself personally or for Republicans that is also outside the scope of this . And please don't talk about winning and controlling state governments in a federal system, I am referring to the federal government in this . Adding state governments would make this too vast.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Republicans Will Control the US Government Indefinitely\n","id":"933b8d9e-e693-4b37-bf55-efe968da9630"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have a cousin who lives in a nice house and works on his own horse farm. He works hard and studied hard, but the reason he works on his own farm and not someone else's in a much worse situation, is the 500,000 dollars his step dad invested in the property. he is smug about his accomplishment and also pretends he is poor at every opportunity etc Likewise, across the board, there are no cases of success in this country without business investment from some other party and frequently, if not always, the only difference between a successful person and a non successful one is the investment of capital resources. Further, most people in this country don't have anyone they could even submit a business proposal to, much less an actual chance at an investment. As such, the United States does not have class mobility and is cursed with a rigid aristocracy built on inherited wealth and nepotistic opportunity. And as such, it has completely betrayed the true nature of the system underylying a mount of promises that hard work pays off. Therefore, ipso facto, if you don't know anyone who might invest in you, your hard work will simply be appropriated for someone who works less hard. And they will probably make fun of your clothes and your girlfriend will dump you to go hang out at their pool, etc etc. This is what your child will inherit if you aren't yourself born into the right class. America is a shit country, anyone who says otherwise is in on the scam. Most countries are like this, I only point it out because so many Americans consider themselves 'exceptional' and their nation based on some 'hard work' philosophy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The necessary condition for even moderate success in the United States is investment, not talent, hard work or anything else.\n","id":"f9d83762-b9ca-42d7-a673-9e23a5a89ce1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>There is a political agenda in spreading the idea that homosexuality is genetic or that it is solely determined by biological factors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most studies used as supposed evidence for homosexuality being determined biologically are misused.\n","id":"2c48ff9d-03d9-4bc3-b782-d37db70079d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There is an increasing trend in the UK of 'graduation' ceremonies for children leaving infant schools and primary schools ages 7 and 10 . A graduation was originally to signify the conferring of a certificate and to celebrate that milestone, and as such should be restricted to University courses, and at a push to cover people at the end of High School so that the people who go straight into work celebrate an end of their formal education . I appreciate that schools and the pupils want to celebrate the end of their time at that school, but placing children in garishly coloured robes at the age of 7 only cheapens what a 'graduation' stands for. There are other ways they can celebrate a new beginning without appropriating and trampling on existing ceremonies and traditions To give a comparison, consider how engineers in the US and Canada are given an iron ring in a ceremony to symbolise their obligation. The ring and the associated ceremony is a very personal symbol of their choices and achievements to the engineers. Now imagine how they would feel if every single infant school started copying their ceremony word for word, item for item, issuing iron rings to 7 year olds telling them it means the same. My son is supposed to have a 'graduation' in a few months, and the vast majority of the parents are planning a boycott, organising their own event in its place. We can't even find out where this tradition started, or why.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Graduation for infant and primary schools are ridiculous, and cheapen the meaning of a graduation.\n","id":"eca84cbf-4065-4bec-9998-027b3c9e42f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Artificial Intelligence AI: Should an artificial general intelligence be created?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans need to be knowledgeable about a tool in order to wield it well. It takes a long time to learn crafts and trades. An AGI could learn these skills much more quickly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AGI will be the best tool we could possibly make.\n","id":"3e93e8f3-fa59-4f66-9244-5d16747f07a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>If mainstream feminism does not represent the interests of women of colour, the movement risks alienating them. This will result in reduced support for the movement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By campaigning against the interests of women of colour, the feminist movement is less likely to succeed.\n","id":"ed12fc73-ceb7-49ff-8f1b-4b139c76a938"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before we go any further, in Canada, where I live, the minimum wage is 10.25. The living expenses are not that much higher than the states, especially in southern Ontario. My mom supported two kids and herself on minimum wage for a long time, so I don't understand the idea of minimum wage being not enough. I do tip the pizza guy, because the pizza companies don't pay for their gas bill. However, tipping anyone else is bullshit. It's a bullshit practice done by society. I work hard for my money and they should to. Tipping is bull.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I never tip.\n","id":"2f974777-0726-4446-b307-029569e4ede8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A society with no gender would be better<|ARGUMENT|>As there are well-established norms about what it means to be a man or a woman, boys and girls are unable to discover an individual, personal identity, as they're pushed to conform to norms about what their presupposed gender is supposed to act like.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By considering gender as something which necessarily defines personality, society already is forcibly preventing naturally occurring expressions of identity.\n","id":"33a73804-eace-48d1-86b2-f911ce73ad1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it ethically wrong to watch pornography?<|ARGUMENT|>As long as it is legal, what job is worth doing for a certain amount of money should be up to every adult individual to decide for themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Porn provides a paid job that some people enjoy doing\n","id":"31841613-8017-45b5-9984-66c1fe30f538"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Why? Other than the bullet box, the civil jury box is the only way that remains to hold police accountable and is the only legal way to hold an entire city accountable. Contested verdicts can be quite large and more damning than a hush money settlement, as a verdict finds the city responsible. They also lead to larger settlements on appeal. I believe that such a verdict can and should be pursued and that those who do settle before the policies are changed and the killer cops are fired are increasing the risks of future tragedies. They should not even begin settlement negotiations until the officers involved have been disciplined they have more leverage and are dishonoring their relatives by not clearing their name or demanding change before settling.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Plaintiffs who settled police brutality cases without going to trial bear responsibility for future shootings.\n","id":"b0b7da39-ccc0-4067-af41-5b68bf677b71"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most recently of these issues was the Nike shoe with the original US flag being cancelled and labeled as racist. I honestly dont know what kind of delusion you have to be under to decide that something is racist because it started during a period where slavery was a thing. I understand slavery was bad and there are still existing aftereffects of it, thats not the point here. Another example of this was the dont tread on me flag being labeled as racist. I get that the super red, super conservative types that have this waving from their trucks give it a bad name, but that flag is definitely not racist either. Refrigeration and electromagnets were invented during the slavery era, do I have to throw out my refrigerator and A C, and computers and smartphones to not be racist? Throughout history terrible events happened, and we dont celebrate them, but they led to progress. World War 1 and 2 were periods of the greatest atrocities in history, but we advanced our technology significantly and the burdens that were placed on those generations had lasting positive effects.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Things, symbols, etc. created during the slavery period are not inherently racist or wrong.\n","id":"5372ce69-29ca-48ad-84c0-ef48c1412bf7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the use of 'chosen' or gender-neutral pronouns be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unnecessary to legislate on this issue. There are already legal protections in many jurisdictions against hate speech, harassment, assault etc that protect individuals from harm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be preferable but should not be legally enforced.\n","id":"70032455-2339-4267-9bf1-c4e5685708a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Should Be Allowed to Choose The Gender of Their Child<|ARGUMENT|>People should have freedom of choice. Why shouldn\u2019t would-be parents be able to do this, given that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents Should Be Allowed to Choose The Gender of Their Child\n","id":"f787add6-bbc1-42c4-ac34-fec6cb5890db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tidal energy<|ARGUMENT|>While it may not be easy or \"cheap\" to install tidal power turbines and barrages it is certainly much easier than installing massive hydroelectric dams and nuclear plants.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tidal power installation is easier than dams and nuclear plants.\n","id":"1c3cb69e-2b63-4e5d-b75a-6a42b4492d8f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Video games are the best source of entertainment<|ARGUMENT|>The variety allows introverts a possible link into society, with as much or little interaction as they desire.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video games may be played socially or alone, increasing their use.\n","id":"7b4c888a-9a14-41f4-bf3d-9a522d4c01b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This phrase is only used so people can make their view seem fresh and against the normal opinions heard on Reddit. Most of the time the view isn't in the first place, and the phrase is used to garner upvotes. Even if you think you will get downvoted, what is the point of using this click bait phrasing? To make it seem like you think this post is so important for you to make that you don't care about it getting downvoted while at the same time using a phrase you know will make people more likely to upvote it. And honestly if people used the upvote and downvote system correctly it wouldn't matter if you had an unpopular opinion in the first place if you actually contributed to the conversation. Is there any actual reason for people to say I'm probably going to get downvoted for this?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People need to stop saying \"I'm probably going to get downvoted for this.\"\n","id":"3e63c6ce-ddad-4e16-9bbd-ac059e5e1720"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should US intelligence agencies end mass data collection?<|ARGUMENT|>Government legislation that is designed to balance civil liberties with the safety interests of its citizens is only enacted when there is a real, legitimate threat to national security. Once the potential threat has subsided, the security measures are relaxed which allows liberty to be freely exercised in the manner intended by the US constitution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Security measures implemented by the government that balance civil liberties with the safety interests of its citizens are temporary, not permanent.\n","id":"e69fef8f-3c43-4c79-82b5-49569e6d3e84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I went to private school. My parents went to private school. My kids go to private school. My wife is a public school teacher. I have experience and knowledge on both sides . Education at a private school is not better than public schools. The lessons, facts, processes, etc. are all comparable. What makes them better in the eyes of some parents is that by sheer virtue of sending your kid to a private school the parents prove they care about their child's academic well being and want to surround them with other students whose parents care about education as much as they do. You are buying a common mindset, not a better book or different lesson plan though those may certainly exist .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Private schools aren't better than public schools education-wise. They are better because by virtue of sending their kids there, parents show they care and will be active in their education.\n","id":"351da811-1836-4ad1-b4c0-72129bac2a7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I begin, I don't hold 100 lassez faire, cold Capitalist views. I don't believe in the 'Every man for himself' paradigm. I'd even say I have a decent amount of socialist tendencies. Yet, I'm of the perception that capitalism tends to drive people to want to one up each other. 'Oh, so Bernie made a thingamabob? Well, Anjali and the rest of us will make a thingamabob that's more portable and serves good coffee'. Profit tends to be a good motivator for innovation. The drive for people to want to outdo each other for the profit, duh tends to favour innovation more than communism does. DC power is no innovation to scoff at. However, where I see a communist being content so long as everyone gets it, a Capitalist motivated by potential profit could think 'Can I come up with some innovation that's even better and more efficient than DC, rendering my competitor obsolete?'' He'd want to one up DC power and would come up with AC power, a more efficient relative to DC in the context of large scale power supply. What do you think?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Capitalism drives people to innovate, more than communism does.\n","id":"328ceb18-27e7-4525-a6b1-6dada3aeb1b0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Heavy drinkers should be denied liver transplants<|ARGUMENT|>The status quo is that people are given organs according to their needs; in other words, first come, first get. However, the Proposition has proposed that we change this into a merit-based system where the doctors consider the conditions of the patient and carry out the surgeries accordingly. Now, we must ask one question to ourselves: do doctors really have the right to analyze their patients\u2019 history before carrying out surgeries? The opposition\u2019s answer to this is a resounding \u201cno.\u201d What doctors do in this society is to help those that are in need of medical assistance. Simply rejecting a patient and his rights to receive medical care just because of what he has done in the past is an illogical stance to take. The Hypocratic Oath clarifies that doctors will \u201cnever do harm to anyone.\u201d By having these doctors do nothing in face of a dying patient, the Proposition is essentially forcing these doctors to breach the most basic promise that he makes as a professional physician. The proposition\u2019s case of \u201cmerit-based\u201d organ transplants is very troubling because it implies that the doctors will be asking several questions when allocating life-giving organs to patients. Before giving organs, under the proposition model, doctors will have to ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s the point of giving this man a new liver when he\u2019s an alcohol addict who will probably relapse?\u201d or \u201cDoes this man really deserve a liver when he\u2019s brought this upon himself?\u201d The core problem with this kind of approach is that it is fundamentally against the duty of those in the medical profession. Currently most medical professional swear to some kind of modern-day ethical guideline that has replaced the Hippocratic Oath; for instance, in the United Kingdom, doctors use the General Medical Council\u2019s Guidance for Doctors, in which it says under article 25 that \u201cDoctors must not allow their views about, for example, a patient's age, disability, race, colour, culture, beliefs, sexuality, gender, lifestyle, social or economic status to prejudice the choices of treatment offered or the general standard of care provided,\u201d\u2014 in other words, the duty of a doctor is primarily to care for sick people, not to be splitting hairs about who is to blame . They definitely do not retain the right to withhold or change treatment because of the patient\u2019s prior lifestyle and drinking is a lifestyle. While doctors may make scientifically based decisions, as in the status quo, and not go forth with treatment if he is absolutely sure that having a transplant will not help the patient at all and maybe cause death, he cannot have the right to withhold treatment simply because the patient made a bad life decision in the past, or because he thinks that the patient will never be able to recover from an addiction. The fundamental notion established under the Hippocratic Oath is that a doctor ought to help people in need. That is why we want a need-based system; we do not want to force people to have to prove that they deserve organs or deserve help, or that their lives are more valuable than others. When there is a dying man in need, we do not calculate whether he was to blame\u2014we try to help them. Thus we want to retain the queue system we have; those who are in life-threatening situations and need help will get in line, and shall get help accordingly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The ethics of need-based and merit-based organ giving\n","id":"bd7b523c-0e1b-4ffe-b2d8-9ab08844ef84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am white and was raised to believe that all races are equal, and in my heart I agree with that belief. It's not that I think other races are inferior, just that white culture is superior, if that makes any sense. My favorite music is classical, and all my favorite composers are German. My favorite movies are from the French New Wave. Most of the greatest achievements of mankind were made by whites, from the Apollo program to the eradication of polio I realize that Jonas Salk was Jewish, but I consider European American Jews to be essentially the same race as European American Christians race is not defined by religion . In short, the vast majority of things I love and admire were done by white people. I have practically no interest in rap, or Chinese opera, or Bollywood. I don't like sushi or tacos give me a bowl of spaghetti or some paella instead. It would be impossible to list every cultural artifact I dislike or am uninterested in that was produced by other races. The point is there's almost nothing I do like. To people who like these things, I say great. They're just not for me. I have spent my life trying to be open minded toward them, but 25 years has shown me the single strongest correlation to whether I will like something is whether it was made by someone of Western European ancestry. There's also the fact that I am extremely uncomfortable talking to non white people. I was raised in a white suburban community, so I never got used to other races. I have nothing against black people, but I find myself incapable of talking to black people with the same ease that I talk to white strangers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I am an unintentional white supremacist.\n","id":"85dfeb83-684e-4a0c-b20e-bfc45f54d6ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ok so. Seeing the LGBT on social media everywhere now as many of you are. Including the special newer flags for bisexuals, pansexuals, and so on. Including one for asexuals. But I was wondering, if asexuals claim to be also an oppressed sexual minority group ok but who is oppressing them really why aren't hypersexuals also an oppressed sexual minority group? Liking to have sex for pleasure is very much stigmatized. Men who do it are 'creeps', women who do it are 'whores'. Hypersexuality is seen as a sign of mental illness, while asexuality is not. If you sleep around it's often worse for your career or social life than not having any sex ever. If there's an asexual flag, there should be a hypersexual flag. It's as stigmatized, if not more so, to openly enjoy having lots of sex than it is to say you don't want to have sex. Hell, in politically conservative circles being asexual is seen as virtuous. But almost nobody considers having a high sex drive 'virtuous'. Society has long had a taboo about sexuality and obvious and open sexual self expression, largely because before bc and modern condoms, sex was a lot more risky. The AIDs crisis also did not help. Also, this is a problem with adding to the acronym. If 'asexual' counts as a sexual orientation, a community, and a flag in the parade, why not hypersexual? When you add to the LGBT acronym too much it loses its function as an initialism. It becomes something that's impossible to say out loud and put on a t shirt. They're hurting the LGBT movement by trying to add all these groups, who are small and not oppressed, to it. Maybe people are thinking including asexuals is important because it gets more non gay people into the movement fighting for gay rights. But as a bisexual, I think the movement is moving away from gay and lesbian rights. And that's a shame. Maybe it's because we're winning or have won so many gay marriage battles that people act like gay rights is old hat, and we need to cover new ground. I think that's asinine. So, if you want to accept asexuals why not hypersexuals? You either want to include everyone, or you want to recruit a bunch of goody two shoes virgins who play into purity culture to make your movement look socially respectable. And fuck people who actually like to have sex? Edit I think one problem is defining hypersexuality . There have been three main definitions here Hypersexual as someone who does a lot of sexual activity, whether actual sex or masturbation. Defined by behavior. Hypersexual as someone who has a high level of sexual desire, regardless of activity. Hypersexual as a clinical psychological term to refer to someone suffering from a sex addiction or a problem with compulsive and risky sexual behavior. What I'm actually hoping for is that if asexuality is one end of a spectrum of levels of desire, isn't the other end of the spectrum a thing? But there doesn't seem to be a word for it that doesn't have a negative or psychopathological connotation. It seems like a language problem. Second edit THIS article changed my view, more so than anyone's response. But many of the responses were helpful because I realize now I needed to get a better understanding of the experiences of asexuality. Maybe I was just thinking as an atheist. The arguments like off is not a TV channel , non stamp collecting is not a hobby etc., MAY apply to religion and religious beliefs. But I guess asexual is a sexual orientation ? Because ? Help me out<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be a hypersexual flag if there is one for asexuals in the LGBT+ movement.\n","id":"38c0c55d-9c01-4879-98d2-40d01febb2bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Competition in the long run is healthy rather than harmful for the community: GRE issue<|ARGUMENT|>Competition in sports while in school improves team building in the work place later in life<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Competition in the long run is healthy rather than harmful for the community: GRE issue\n","id":"b58f2b02-3627-4672-8ee6-0a10af1d9dfc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Biden has not publicly supported most of the \"progressive\" policies that other nominees are currently promoting, which may help win him many votes in the general election.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being a centrist makes Biden more appealing to undecided voters. If he doesn't win the election, it's irrelevant what his policy prescriptions are.\n","id":"1357c2a2-c006-404c-8f28-45ef2f4273f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have always considered frugal life as a must, since I got my first job, early in my twenties. Not having big paychecks even with having a higher degree always made me ask myself about the possibilities of being without a job and not having enough to make a life, so I decided to follow the path of frugality, most of the time I see it as an efficient way to live. I always save money even if it is just a small portion of each paycheck. I used my credit cards only for the purpose of getting rewards as I pay my balance each month even before a due date notice appears. Limiting to go out for dinner no more than two times per month, avoiding fast food and drinking this is easy as most of my coworkers share, at least partially, this view about personal finances . I also see no major gain in traveling just to be clear. I'm talking here about going to places I appreciate the fact you can go somewhere else and live and work there for a couple of months years can help to get in touch with a different way to live which is different from going to some other city to see places tourism . The former I consider of great value, the later I feel is most of the time meaningless . My paycheck is enough to cover rent which represents gt 40 of my paycheck and basic expenses, after that I cook my own food, ride a bike to work and keep looking for options to make the money work for you . A couple of days ago I read an article in the web called If You Have Savings In Your 20s, You\u2019re Doing Something Wrong . So I wanted to know your opinion about it. Because sometimes I feel I'm saving for something but to be totally honest I don't have a clue what is it. So, you guys that have different experiences and may hold a different point of view I want to know it. If You Have Savings In Your 20s, You\u2019re Doing Something Wrong<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being frugal is an efficient and smart way to live\n","id":"0a3bd040-45c6-4d5a-bb1e-8efaacf28aab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>In modern times, marriage has evolved to be more about love and emotional fulfillment. Before, \"when marriage was a necessity for survival, especially for women, the expense and the rarity of divorce were perhaps understandable, even if it worked against women\u2019s best interests in some cases\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"That fails to take into account the number of unhappy marriages and even abusive ones women had to endure because they had no other economical, social and political options.\n","id":"0f304033-31dc-4ec3-9005-23172d8c72d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is taxation theft?<|ARGUMENT|>When the government stole money from the Greek population, it was indeed theft and not robbery. This also had the effect that people all over the world learned to remove their funds to other places if they didn't want to suffer the same fate. This could be done since the threat of punishment for such actions was absent. If taxation however, was also theft and not robbery, people would likewise learn how to hide their funds and they wouldn't need to fear punishment from governments for it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An additional thing to think about, the discussion's topic is, \"Is taxation theft?\" If the government didn't threaten its citizenry with imprisonment, but merely reached into its citizenry's bank accounts and took the money, it would not meet the definition of robbery, but it would still meet the definition of theft. This discussion allows claims based on things like Greece's seizure of bank accountscointelegraph.com While still allowing claims based on robberywhich is a subset of theft.\n","id":"118a1da5-222f-44f8-b2ee-92d50d07d7dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Many of the rulers in developing countries are dictatorial in nature. Their reign most likely will end once benefits from taxes are generated. They have no interest in this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It will take at least one generation for those in starvation to turn into high tax payers. Governments have no immediate interests in this long-term investment.\n","id":"4d9a72b6-8a48-4f3d-a876-e6046ce44942"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Mormons in the United States - where they are seen as the most conservative of all large religious groupings - are concentrated in few areas. Six out of ten residents in Utah consider themselves Mormons - which equals more than two thirds of the official membership of the Mormon church.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Other religious or ethnic groups, too, carve out their own spaces in countries and form communities. Neither is this inevitably a problem nor is it perceived as a problem in many other cases.\n","id":"38f89e0c-fbc7-4593-b597-9f33bccc63b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Crowd Sourced Information Reliable?<|ARGUMENT|>Near the end of the 2016 US presidential election, the top 20 fake news stories were being shared more than the top 20 real news stories.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even people with good intentions can spread false information inadvertently.\n","id":"0f0a0516-a471-4871-bf20-4bb8d7287f7a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi r , I need some help. Recently a new person moved into the house I live in. When I first saw this person the first though I had was this person is male . Every physical aspect of them is masculine, their voice, their body, their face, etc. They identify as a female though. I can't help that I've spent the past 20 years separating people into either boys or girls based on their appearance. I can't bring myself to refer to them as 'her'. I've taken to referring to them as a gender neutral term because that's as close as I can get to it without feeling weird. I've read about gender dysphoria and how people who are trans always feel weird sick from being in the wrong gender body , or just being totally separate from both genders. I'm a cis white male who has never encountered anything like this before. I have gay family members and I've had gay friends but this is something completely new to me.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I accept people from all walks of life as long as they don't go out of their way to hurt someone. My problem though is that I can't wrap my brain around my transgender housemate. How can they look at themselves and think \"I'm a girl\" when they look like an average male?\n","id":"d297aa71-c195-4c5f-ac4a-e1e58b8f1fba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm posting this mainly out of frustration for all the Trayvon Martin protests happening. I live in western usa and even here people are protesting. Many of my friends hardly know a thing about the case but are still protesting. I agree with the verdict, so hearing people say stuff like Trayvon Martin is the Emmett Till of this century is offensive to me. I'm a bit of a history nut and I've read books and watched documentaries about Till. His case truly was a crime about race. It is, without a doubt, an incredibly important case, especially as far as the civil rights movement went. I think it brought the horrible racism in the usa into a national spot light while also acting as a catalyst and symbol for the civil rights movement. His death was greusome and violent and even the killers later proudly admitted to their part in his murder. As far as the Martin case goes, I don't believe it was a race crime. I don't believe Zimmerman is some racist mad man who stalked and planned on killing Martin like so many protesters and news shows are claiming. The only similarities between the cases is that a young black man died when they shouldn't have. Both are tragic. But that is about it. Other than that, thr cases are completely different. One is a crime of racial hate and the other is a convoluted mess involving a non white man tired of crimes happening in his neighborhood. While Zimmerman did some stupid things, it was not out of malicious or violent intent, whereas Till's killers Bryant and Milam actually kidnapped, tortured, and slaughtered Till. I think comparing these two young mens' deaths is kinda like leftist propaganda. It gets people riled up and making big claims about racism in this country. While racism is still very much a problem here, making this Martin case out to be a race case actually distracts from the very real race crimes and class issues that are happening every day in the usa. Making the Martin case out to be a race case is actually hurting today's civil rights movement. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think comparing Trayvon Martin to Emmett Till is insulting and inaccurate, akin to propaganda.\n","id":"cc067754-39f7-4847-9cb5-183be893388f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit \u201cimportant\u201d is a bad word and i shouldn't have used it. Some endangered species how many? probably have medical uses. But in this case, we should be clear that our aim is to preserve a species specifically for the stuff their body produce. At the point when a species is marked as endangered, the species are already insignificant to the nature, not contributing to the food chain or the environment or anything. Their habitat is also likely destroyed and is now home to different species. The endangered species are only valuable to humans, who find joy at watching gifs of them on this reddit thing here. Or they have fancy fur. Or perhaps they are useful in medicine. Either way, the activities that are aimed at preserving these species are only beneficial to the humanity and are selfish by nature and not at all noble. One might even say that by trying to preserve species that are hunted for, say, their ivory, or fur, we will only be incentivizing the unethical practice. Human activities or other events that lead to species becoming endangered, however, is an entirely different matter, and not a topic of this <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Extinction of endangered species is not a bad or important thing and we shouldn't be concerned with it\n","id":"f7ff2987-ef5b-4074-964f-a143a9e75515"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Growing up Jewish in Canada, I was taught that Jews are always under threat of extermination whether by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, and more recently the Nazis. While fear of extermination would indeed be justified in 1930s Europe, fear of extermination by Islamic terrorists continues today even in Canada and the US. I've even heard that ISIS is going to exterminate the Jews, even though ISIS has not killed a single Jewish person to this date. There is a widely held view in Jewish circles that the UN is inherently anti Semitic even though the majority of permanent members of the UN Security Council are very pro Israel. UN troops never interfere with Israeli military operations and one of the first UN resolutions was the establishment of the State of Israel. Still, extremist groups like the JDL Jewish Defence League attract support from mainstream Jewish organizations, despite their classification as a terrorist group. The Jewish community seems to think that their politicians at home persecute them as well. I know so many liberal Jews who will vote for a right wing party just because they scream their unwavering support for Israel the loudest. Currently, every single major candidate running for President of the United States or Prime Minister of Canada has declared their staunch support for Israel even left wingers like Bernie Sanders and Canada's frontrunner Tom Mulcair. Meanwhile, white cops are killing black kids at a horrifying rate but the Jewish community is still focused on their own supposed persecution. When the Charleston shooting broke out, my synagogue had one moment of silence then continued with its Israel fundraiser. My theory is that North American Jewish culture has developed an irrational persecution complex due to past persecution ritualistically retold every Hanukkah, Passover, Purim, Yom Ha'Shoah, etc. I realize this may come off as anti Semetic and indeed my own family has called me a self hating Jew , although I think this only reinforces my point. Will someone change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"White North American Jews have an irrational persecution complex\n","id":"76ef365f-d22a-4d12-8860-2b47d1c2eccd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A UBI sends a message of trust from government to citizens. Trust is usually responded to by accepting responsibility and willing to be trustworthy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI can have a positive impact on societal practices and culture by acknowledging the inherent humanity of all citizens.\n","id":"7f75ab80-5fc1-4adb-9ee6-cf38f34b61e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>It is sad that after so many school shootings, we're still having this debate. Dying kids should be a red line for all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having fewer guns in circulation means society is generally safer.\n","id":"7a391d4c-0b35-4e31-99ea-5511b3244eda"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is profanity the refuge of the inarticulate?<|ARGUMENT|>A profanity-filled vocabulary doesn\u2019t allow for the expression of much insight, wit, intelligence, or empathy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Profanity makes it hard to listen and understand the speaker's point.\n","id":"69d4b3f5-bf15-466c-9973-0741bcd3af83"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should playing as Nazi in tabletop\/computer games be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Games in a World War 2 scenario that depict the era's battles for multiplayer purposes cannot avoid making the Nazis playable if they want to include the European theater.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In order to accurately play certain scenarios, players also have to play the bad guys.\n","id":"0c72c5fc-de02-47db-82b4-3dba95f1e3b1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>Virtual realities allow people to easily conduct crimes of a far greater magnitude than is possible in the real world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If fully immersive virtual reality is developed it should be subject to all of our existing laws.\n","id":"8dce5a1e-4290-43fd-bd12-278ffa006710"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my view, if you have only your king remaining you have lost a game of chess because you are no longer able to secure a win condition. What I imagine is the counterargument is that chess has one singular goal getting the opponent's king into checkmate. Thus, it is the only objective one should word towards and the only way to end a game other than a stalemate . But by losing all pieces of one's team it becomes impossible to carry out the aforementioned singular objective of the game and therefore you have lost. Playing out the rest of the game in hopes of a draw is unnecessarily laborious and even insulting to your opponent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In chess, losing all pieces but your king should constitute a loss.\n","id":"2f4e72a3-b6c5-44ff-9afd-341fc9da618d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cigarettes should be banned<|ARGUMENT|>Secondhand smoke increases the risk of both developing heart disease and having a stroke by 20-30%.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Secondhand smoke is damaging to the health of non-smokers\n","id":"009756c0-fdee-4184-ae2d-dc482a49baca"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Life Be Valued Above Animal Life?<|ARGUMENT|>Plants can survive without animals, whereas animals require plants to survive. If the argument above is valid, we should equally infer that plant life should be valued above animal life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans rely on animals and plants to survive, but it does not follow from this we must value animal life above of that of humans in order to survive.\n","id":"45b68c59-ce2d-4c52-8577-bbf25f4e62c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>International tourism should not require a visa.<|ARGUMENT|>There's an increasing anti-immigrant sentiment in many countries. This is likely to apply to tourists as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inflow of foreign tourists is going to rise, creating social tension.\n","id":"4e119a16-a277-46cf-b1a1-19700d7c2adf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Parallel construction is a tactic by law enforcement whereby the sources of information are concealed and a parallel false trail is created to support the reason a defendant is stopped or found out by law enforcement. This has principally been used to conceal sources which came from NSA surveillance. I believe this practice when used in court is perjury, and that any evidence so obtained should be excluded, any officers who use this practice indicted for perjury, and any prosecutors aware of its use indicted for subornation of perjury. The reason I believe it is perjury is that it specifically creates a false narrative in order to conceal material information from a court, and is thus an officer engaging in parallel construction is subscribing a material matter which he does not believe to be true.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parallel construction is perjury.\n","id":"dadc5c4b-43a8-4736-bb5f-79c21b1ab45f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Human Reproduction be Limited To No More Than One Offspring Per Person?<|ARGUMENT|>Producing one child per person would lower the global human population over time, meaning a gradual decrease in resource consumption.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human reproduction should be limited to no more than 1 offspring per person.\n","id":"7d3d7e8b-c4b7-4510-abe6-eb48ee461d59"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My overall problem with conservatism, whether it be social, political, financial or religious, is that I have seen no evidence that these ideas or trends are in any way grounded in sound reasoning, or have the betterment of society as a defined objective. Basically, all the issues where people either don't or actively avoid looking at more complex causes effects, and either deliberately or subconsciously avoid using intellect to create solutions to problems. Examples of what I think of as not conducive to progress Opposition to LGBT equality Force as a primary tool of law enforcement Rhetoric and unilateralism in foreign policy Resistance to innovation and expansion of social institutions Reduced protection of minorities Increased permissiveness of the dominant religion philosophy in place Resistance to ideas of updating or altering 'old' practices Notes This is NOT about any particular country. These are trends I have seen in all kinds conservative society. This is NOT about extremists, or even more moderate individuals in day to day activity. I am talking about political groups and broad social trends. So why is conservative thinking not anti progress and beneficial for society as a whole? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Conservative stances and policies are harmful to progress in society.\n","id":"22ba48b5-bc46-4bef-93da-54009c833c65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Tampon Tax be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Access to menstrual hygiene is a human rights issue as it is linked to the rights of health, sanitation, education, and work.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tampons are a basic necessity, since menstruation is a biological function.\n","id":"ea330daa-8e3b-4ea3-af7c-599aeffbd915"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been reading an awful lot of doomsday posts on the subject. Even though the past two world wars have been more or less triggered by instability in east Europe and the Balkans times have changed and with the advent of the united nations and increased communications through the internet and other media make another world war unlikely. with special emphasis that the economic and political ties in the European, the international trade links between east and west discourage and impede the spread of war on a global scale. in addition to these factors that drove the third Reich and the kaisers of Germany to invade and annex is gone as empire by conquest in now politically frowned upon rather than necessary. the old alliance system is also now Less impacting then it was. aside from the special friendship between the united states and the united kingdom and a few others are now less impacting and that makes the prospect of chains of countries slipping over the brink to war is unlikely. in addition to this any war, invasion or even international dispute however minor is passed through the U.N which have the political weight that the league of nations did not allowing for greater international relation and resolution of conflict . the internet has also brought the increased awareness of conflict and so people can now inform themselves and protest more efficiently. finally nuclear weaponry. world leaders Putin included know that a prolonged world war will almost certainly end in another hiroshima nagasaki bombing. though this time as demonstrated by the cold war many countries have nuclear weaponry and will use them if needed too defend sovereignty and its own people. as Einstein said \u201cI know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.\u201d the prospect of total global annihilation is enough to put all but the most deranged of leaders and therefore makes world war three from somehthing like the Ukrainian conflict nigh on impossible<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Russian incursion on the Crimea is not an indicator of WW3\n","id":"ffd3462a-4ed6-4fd4-a0f5-7c0465288988"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I'm big in the camp that being more attracted to people of your own race is not racist, as long as you treat others with kindness and equality, and don't be a dick about it, and frankly that has been posted on  so many times that I don't feel the need to ask it again, but I haven't seen this parallell being discussed before. It seems in many of the articles I've read on this subject, they interview several men of color who talk about how this has hurt them and made them feel unwanted, and I couldn't help but be reminded of how the neckbeard incel type guys, who most of us agree are being ridiculous, are conventionally unattractive usually white men who claim they are being discriminated against in favor of more conventionally attractive men, and will be the first to call women names for not being attracted to them. It seems like both these groups are complaining that certain people they are attracted to aren't attracted to them, and calling them names in anger because of that fact.  that there is no difference between the two<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person of color calling a white person racist for being more sexually attracted to white people is the same as an \"incel\" type calling women names for not being attracted to him.\n","id":"1a7fb32f-6c40-4cff-8181-5a9b8b404108"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Religious Education that Promotes a Certain Faith or Religion be Abolished in Schools?<|ARGUMENT|>If somebody believes that a particular action or set of activities are not only wrong but in direct opposition to God, it is understandable that their reaction to it would be harsher and more punitive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Studies have found that children without a religious upbringing are more likely to display empathy and kindness while \"children from religious households are harsher in their punitive tendencies.\u201d\n","id":"bf882664-9743-46df-9b75-c0b2f6184d93"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should churches pay tax?<|ARGUMENT|>If the default state of humanity is to be free from tax and adding a tax shows that a state is biased against the entity taxed, then the government is biased against businesses, employees, and customers. But the government is not biased against any of these parties.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any other privately run business that turns a profit is taxed. To tax one for-profit organization and not the other shows bias.\n","id":"8713acb1-d2de-4d1b-a4c1-0a965822ffeb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>If the state had too much influence in the history of a child from birth to adulthood so that many of the parents' choices and methods, good or bad, for caring for their child were undermined, then the child upon considering parenthood likely will not trust himself or herself to be a competent, good parent to his or her own children, resulting in further generational subjugation of parental roles in favor of the state-as-parent.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The next generation will have a much more strained relationship with the state.\n","id":"12ec3c0e-3a08-4e6d-b768-2a78c1567c94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This was inspired by the recent news that the new Jeep scored a paltry 1 star rating in a European crash test. Apparently a lack of certain crash avoidance technologies was a big contributing factor. This post isn't about Jeep, but about the ratings in general. I feel like lumping in crash avoidance technologies makes it harder for a consumer to understand the performance of the vehicle in an actual crash. From what I understand, pre 2011 the NHTSA evaluated cars mostly on actual crash characteristics such as how the car adsorbed impact and how effective the airbags were at protecting passengers. But now they include stuff like lane detection, automatic braking, etc within the same 5 star system that presented to the customer in advertisements and literature. A car could score significantly higher if it has these options even if it's actual construction is the same. I'm not saying crash avoidance technology is bad, just that I think it should be rated separately. I realize they can go a long way in mitigating crashes and their severity, but as a customer I still want to know that if these systems fail or in an extreme case that the car is built to protect me inside.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Crash avoidance technology should not be lumped in with vehicle safety ratings\n","id":"1bd0de15-875f-42f6-807a-435cfe4708e1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Electric vehicles are better than fossil fuel vehicles<|ARGUMENT|>Not only do EVs currently have ranges comparable to fossil fuel cars, but battery technology is advancing rapidly. It won't be long before EVs have a single-charge range that exceeds anything a gasoline engine can do, and that can be fully recharged in times comparable to, or better than, that of refueling a gas vehicle<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"EVs have better range than fossil fuel vehicles note: currently 2017 this is patently a false thesis but is worded this way to fit in with the rest of the structure of the discussion - please argue pros\/cons appropriately\n","id":"5304a5a3-706f-410f-b1b5-c0a9b569baa8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>THB universities everywhere should compete to attract the most qualified students, regardless of nationality or residence.<|ARGUMENT|>The predominant role of tertiary education is skilling people for the workplace. This is done either through direct vocational training or the somewhat more pedagogical \u2018shaping of the mind\u2019. Universities also provide the setting for acquiring skills of socialization that allow people to function as independent citizens outside the family home. Increasingly both that workplace and that socializing takes place in an international, globalized setting. As a result the greater internationalisation both of education and the wider social setting of the university will result in all graduates being better prepared to compete in the global labour market. At the same time the nation will be benefiting in a similar way. If more international students are attracted to study in university then more are likely to stay in that country resulting in a larger, more knowledgeable workforce, something even countries that are usually against migrants want to encourage.iii i Toneguzzi, Mario, \u2018University reaches out to keep foreign students Graduates seen as part of labour shortage solution\u2019, Calgary Herald, 3 March 2012 ii BBC News, \u2018Immigrants \u2018have to earn \u00a335,000\u2019 to settle \u2013 from 2016\u2019, 29 February 2012.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An internationalized education is necessary to producing global problem solvers\n","id":"9fe5331c-5f54-480a-aaca-a13e3e9b8d35"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Vegetarianism<|ARGUMENT|>Unlike animals, humans are capable of rational thought and can alter the world around them. Religious people would say that humans also have souls and a different relationship with God. Other creatures were put on this earth for mankind to use, and that includes eating meat. For all these reasons we say that men and women have rights and that animals don\u2019t. This means that eating meat is in no way like murder.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a great moral difference between humans and animals.\n","id":"64b68fe3-f37e-456f-ba32-aaee39b7430b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not saying that it is something good anyway, just that it is often seen as something really really bad. I am not by any way a facist. I just think that because of history and way it is merged with nazism is the reason why it indeed is seen as something inacceptable. I am studying the law at the college and one of the subjects I had here was general history of law where as you can probably see was the facist law. I was myself quite surprised that it seems to me not as bad as I thought it was. It basically forced workers to form syndicates sorted by specific subjects. These were supposed to make companies work better and to make less conflits between employees and employer. This idea however worked well only on the paper. Italian facists also never actually destroyed their old constitution of Kingdom of Italy they did however change some things so they wold be satisfied with it and they made their own secret police to supress any anti facist elements. They of course led an aggresive foreign policy and mobilised a lot but they did not however exterminate other people as Nazi Germany or Soviet Union did. It was indeed an totalitarian regime but I live in a post socialist country where communism is not banned and they even have quite a lot seats in a parliament they are 5th biggest party here atm . Now the thing is that those commies did a lot of bad things. Worse things than facism did at least but i see that if general public should decide which one is worse they would choose the facism. So once again I don't think that facism is a good thing just that if society somehow accepts communism why should it ban facist parties? EDIT For the means of the conversation I mean facism by how Italian state worked in 1922 1943 1945 .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Facism is not as bad as it is seen by the society\n","id":"a2b3feaf-1640-4742-9632-fc78c4d04b66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Inspired by this post on r hockey It seems absolutely ridiculous that ex wives of millionaire athletes actors whatever should be able to walk away with hundreds of thousands of dollars just because they were used to living in luxury. So, you married your high school sweetheart turned NHL star when you were young, forgoing college or employment? That's not the fault of the husband. Just because the wife doesn't have any employable skills now shouldn't mean that she should be entitled to a continuous supply of Gucci and Benz. This doesn't have to be women, it's just what inspired the post. EDIT This includes child support. What child requires 15,000 a month?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women shouldn't be able to receive gross amounts of money in a divorce in order to keep up 'the lifestyle they have become accustomed to'\n","id":"4b4fd937-6249-47cb-b3d9-dd7c2d519f2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The housing and space guidelines for livestock in New Hampshire, for example, stipulate that these regulations are in order to target \"problems of odor and fly control, pesticide drift, contamination of surface and ground waters, and damage to neighboring crops\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legislation regulating the use of animals is often motivated by concerns for human health rather than animal welfare.\n","id":"a7404d51-2785-413e-b1c7-8506259c74a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that having robots replace human labor is not a bad thing, as long as it's implemented with an universal basic income. If managed properly, this will only have positive consequences, such as Most jobs that people tend to dislike will be replaced, so no one will spend 8 hours a day doing something that they hate. This will allow everyone to find a job that they enjoy at least in the earlier stages of automation, when some more specialized jobs still have to be done by humans . Want to be a doctor or an engineer or an artist but can't afford the education? No longer a problem. Productivity will go up. Machines can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and don't make errors. With appropriate amount of taxing, this will increase the resources that can go into services provided by the government, or into creating more jobs that still need humans. About the argument that it will make people lazy there are pilot projects concerning UBI, and they seem to be going pretty well. Automation doesn't mean that we won't work. However, it could mean that we could work 10 hours a week instead of 40 . More time for hobbies and relaxing. For now, I cannot see anything negative that might result from a combination of automation and universal basic income, but I'm open to new ideas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"automation with AI is a good thing if implemented alongside an universal income policy\n","id":"458706a2-f958-4b35-8580-2506fbc3ade8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have the feeling that the US Government isn't helping the lower class, is making the upper class wealthier, and is pushing the middle class down to lower class. I feel like it would take more than one extremely wealthy billionaire to change the way things are run one iota, never mind me, a pretty run of the mill new dad husband. I feel like the best way to live my life is to ignore politics and just work on wealth acquisition so I can have the government on my side to some extent. I don't want to feel this way and if I were a little more willing to be poor I might be able to get riled up, but as it stands I feel like I have to work with this awful machine instead of against it because if I don't keep shoveling bodies into the furnace, I'm the one that's going to get burned. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe I can affect politics, so I try my best to ignore them. Please,\n","id":"74333946-8b18-48c0-8289-022913822919"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Classic World of Warcraft better than Retail WoW?<|ARGUMENT|>Retail allows you to even change your race, skin color and faction, which breaks immersion, the storyline and is completely implausible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Playing WoW Classic was riskier, thus it felt like your decisions mattered much more.\n","id":"e7eb3821-8925-4eb7-8f00-a224009875d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Evolution natural existence without the need for a Creator had been propounded by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell and is now a generally accepted theory. This contradicts the idea of a Creator or God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The classical definition of God is contradictory or incoherent, and thus God cannot in principle exist.\n","id":"511135a7-2911-46fa-8f9e-4face56766f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recently research has come out that dispute the link between dietary cholesterol and saturated fat. This goes against well established science that has built up over the past 40 years. I believe that this is an attempt by the dairy, egg and meat industries to make the picture unclear to regular consumers and keep them consuming these products. This is a move similar to that made by the tobacco industry when they funded studies that attempted to make the link between smoking and lung disease unclear.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Attempts to disprove that cholesterol and saturated fat cause heart disease are pseudo science funded by the dairy, egg and meat industries.\n","id":"e07b478d-66d4-40d4-98f7-1278f97e524f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>The money companies save from providing lower wages might go towards automating jobs, which would reduce a person's sources of income.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies could use a UBI as a justification to offer lower wages.\n","id":"efa8fbbb-437c-4fb9-82fa-594237a79195"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>One well-known effect is the lowering of calcium carbonate saturation states, which impacts shell-forming marine organisms from plankton to benthic molluscs, echinoderms, and corals. Many calcifying species exhibit reduced calcification and growth rates in laboratory experiments under high-CO2 conditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ecosystems are under threat as a result of climate change.\n","id":"86f19a10-69d3-45c7-803a-e9d2dd41ac03"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In 1907 Hitler applied to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and was rejected. It has been proposed that instead of sending an assassin to go back in time and kill Hitler, we could instead send Bob Ross to teach Hitler how to paint well. This would get him into the Academy, change the course of his life for the better, and prevent WW2 from occurring. Source 1 Source 2 My view is that this plan would fail, and for a number of reasons Hitler probably did not speak English Source 3 Bob Ross probably did not speak German Source Needed Hitler was told his drawings showed a lack of talent for artistic painting, notably a lack of appreciation of the human form Source 4 Bob Ross is not known for painting people, and could probably not help him with that. Source 5 The examining board did not just want a landscape artist. Source 6 Bob Ross is specifically a landscape artist Source 7 Hitler didn't even graduate high school Source 4 Probably due to the fact that he was essentially unteachable. He could not stand to be corrected, a personality trait he had shown in high school and as a younger boy as well. Source 4 TL DR I think that Bob Ross was exactly the wrong type of painter to try and get Hitler into art school, and that Hitler wouldn't have listened to him even if they spoke the same language, and that even if Hitler got into art school, he would have flunked out anyways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A time-traveling Bob Ross would not have been able to get Hitler into art school.\n","id":"36b3eedc-c208-4916-8308-266d5eb43299"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So my male friends found out about this, and called me a stalker, creep, ect, but I find nothing wrong with this. They are not underaged, they are fully clothed in EVERY picture, I do not EVER harass the women in question for more pictures, nor do I comment on the pictures at all, and I do not share them on the internet. I find it to be in the same ballpark as downloading pictures of attractive celebrities and using them for the same purpose. I know one argument would be How would you feel if someone wacked it to pictures of YOU without your permission? I would be completely fine with this, as long as the pictures are not shared or modified through the internet. I am still convinced that there is nothing wrong about this, so please if you could, give me another view point on this? EDIT I should say my female FACEBOOK friends , as some of them I have never talked to or met in my life EDIT 2 Wow guys. Lots of good viewpoints here. I think i will stop using the pictures of my friends and classmates, but continue to use the pictures of women who live in different counties that I will never meet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I download non-nude pictures of my female friends on facebook, and pleasure myself to them. I think there is nothing wrong with this.\n","id":"09de56d2-e64d-4312-8a4f-cc48b7c9dc11"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I watched PBS growing up and still tune in to This Old House, Nova, and Downton Abbey. But I don't see the need for government payment of these shows for the public. As a private company, the same shows could exist with the right rules in place, but run advertisements like all other channels do for funding. Especially since this seems to be their direction anyways, as I recently watched an episode of Ask This Old House and there were literally 7 commercials before it started, for Subrau, Home Depot, Sherwin Williams, and others. Why not add 3 more, place them throughout the episode, and be like any other channel? I do realize that the current issue at hand is a joke, as PBS only requires 500 million a year, which is nothing to the eyes of the federal government but it shouldn't be an issue at all in the first place. And what happens when a new show is developed by PBS and it does well? What if a show like Breaking Bad comes out on PBS and it makes hundreds of millions? Will the channel become self sustaining then? Will the extra funding go towards making new content, or back to the federal government to be spent on other possible frivolous projects, such as the 3.9 million the Securities and Exchange Commission spent on rearranging desk and offices at their DC Headquarters How would people who don't like the show such as my grandma would not appreciate Breaking Bad , feel about the taxes that went towards it? How could the argument for it's a democracy, for the greater good be used in this case when it's just an alternative to channels we already have and receive without federal funding? And it's not like this is a new concept. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Dora the Explorer, Blue's Clues, and Beakman's World all existed outside of PBS. I think there's a business in educational programming like HBO paying for Sesame Street , and that should be up to to the producers stations to develop with their own money and not require federal funding.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"PBS shouldn't be federally funded and should run commercials like all other networks\n","id":"4581f7e2-0e88-447d-ac1d-ec97b220d9c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe Pick Up Artistry is mostly Bullshit. I've read The Game and, a lot of stuff on r seduction and, came to the conclusion it's mostly Bullshit. PUAs have decent advice like Shown Here like be genuine, confident, honest, being exciting and, not apologizing for being yourself. All that sounds like decent advice but, then there's this. gt 1 Go someplace relaxing where you can be all alone. Bring a pen and a notebook. Ponder deeply and visualize the man you want to be 90 days from now. Catalog your life and remove anything and everything that doesn't fit this new image you have for yourself. Write this all down. Examples Stop wasting time playing pointless video games, stop watching useless TV, stop pointless web browsing. Cut out friends who harm your self image. That's great. I'll cutoff a possible lifelong friendship because, my friend might make unappealing to women. I'd rather just date someone who was mutual friend or, ask them to watch their behavior around the girl I'm trying to get with then cut them off. It's also, typically a non issue, I can just not go out to meet women with said friend, or, not have my hypothetical GF hang around him. I don't think I need to stop watching TV either in fact I think it's a plus, I can be up to date with popculture and, make small talk about newest shows and, see what we have in common. As far as video games go why do I need to give them up? If it's a matter of them being unappealing then why Shouldn't I just try and, find women who are into Gaming? Another thing that I declare shenanigans on is the shit test You'd sound like a complete douchebag using those. Some of those are, basic questions you ask to get to know each other. If a woman I'm trying to get with or, I'm with is mad I'm supposed to write it off with humor instead of talking it out with her? How is brushing off questions being honest or, genuine? Then there's this shit gt To quote Rob Judge, Personal space is for pussies. I already told you that the most successful seducers are those who can't keep their hands off of women. Well you're not gonna be able to do that if you aren't in close Shake her hand, hold the handshake for just slightly longer than most guys would, and close the gap between you and the girl until you can feel the sexual tension thicken up. This is how you demonstrate intent in your approach. Trust me, if you've got that I'd fuck me smirk on your face, standing tall, holding eye contact, right up closer to the girl than most guys, she will KNOW that you desire her and want to get to know her better. You can literally say anything at this point and you've made a direct approach. Congrats Speaking of approaching Most women on Reddit, Tumblr and, IRL have said they don't like this along with physical contact because, it's creepy. Yet some how I'm a pussy for not giving women space. There's too much 3232 3232 to go around for this section but, I'll try and, elaborate on what my problems are. gt The concept of waiting for signs or Indicators of Interest was commonplace in older pickup theory. It is 100 garbage and needs to be erased from the face of the planet. Never, ever, ever, wait for a SIGN before you escalate You will miss out on the vast majority of chances if you sit around waiting for SIGNS. Men are notoriously bad at reading women's minds and body language. Don't think that you're any different. From now on you must ASSUME that she is attracted to you and wants to be ravished. It's a difference in mindset that makes champs champs and chumps chumps. As stated back in the section on Flirting in Part 5 12 , leading with your body is a very effective form of flirting. It is YOUR JOB, as the man, to lead the interaction. Be playful. Spin her around. Pick her up. Push her away as a tease and then pull her back in. Decide that you're going to sit in a position where you can rub her leg and back. Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don't ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances. If you adopt this mindset, you will create opportunities where going in for the kiss just feels natural. You'll have her in close, emotions will be charged, and you'll know. Then it's just a matter of manning up and going for the kiss. Even if she rejects your initial advance, you'll have raised your chance of success in the future. This sounds creepy and, women agree with me on it. The part about It being the mans job to flirt and, stuff is sexist to boot. Also, there's this. gt Pull out your cock and put her hand on it. Remember, she is letting you do this because you have established yourself as a LEADER. Don't ask for permission, GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick. WTF? Do these guy's get their moves from Porn? That's incredibly rapey and, sounds like a great way to get Falcon Punched in the gens. Part of the reason I think this is bullshit is because, I'm Pansexual so, I can empathize a bit with women when it comes to dating and, I've got to say I would not want date a guy who did any of these things. If he did these while we were dating I'd dump him. So, that's my View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe Pick Up Artistry is mostly Bullshit.\n","id":"02ea46d2-e562-49d6-b39f-29603eefe94b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The Charity Market Monitor showed that in 2009 charities relating to services and veterans saw a 6.2% growth in public fund-raised income, which correlates with the British monarchy's increased vocal support for services charities at the time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Royal patronage of an organisation can lead to a growth in public support and fund-raising.\n","id":"d94dbb8b-4213-43e7-8a94-cf6d36e43e81"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, let me say that I hate conspiracy theories, and I really don't want to believe that this is true. But after much research and reading over arguments from all sides, I'm begrudgingly convinced that the US government did this to further the war in south east asia, and to gain all monetary profit that comes with fighting such a war. The 'Lone Gunman' theory has never convinced me, and personally, the whole crux of the conspiracy theorists argument comes down to how Oswald managed to carry out such an incredibly difficult task alone. Change my view. Edit Thanks guys for your comments, really getting me thinking, and perhaps now I realize that Oswald's shot may not have been as difficult as I thought.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that on November 22, 1963, the US Government staged a coup d'etat, replacing President John F. Kennedy with Lyndon B. Johnson and used Lee Harvey Oswald as the scapegoat.\n","id":"a89456c9-3c25-483e-bffd-8272f60f3124"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Ex situ conservation includes captive breeding programs that have too many requirements captive population, habitat preservation and management, field studies, conservation education for long-term support, and preparation and reintroduction of animals to be successful and these programs themselves are both expensive and ineffective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If society becomes dependent on zoos for x situ conservation and breeding programs for reintroduction of rare animals there may be less motivation to conserve and protect wild areas.\n","id":"d7e87f4e-0ce6-4cc1-be8b-d04231af69c0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>In Monaco publicly offending the Prince is punishable with imprisonment from six months to five years and a fine according to Article 264 of the Criminal Code. If not committed publicly, the act is punished with imprisonment from six months to three years and a fine. Similar laws exist for offending the family of the Prince.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monarchies limit freedom of expression and speech by making criticism of the Crown or members of the royal family a punishable offence.\n","id":"9b26b107-41b3-43cd-b9f6-c1a79d312dd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>At least one of the parties has been shown to have broken electoral law, and thus the result should be considered void.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voters in the UK should have a final vote on the Brexit deal.\n","id":"ecbf9f7c-99df-4087-ab05-39de91228f7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Evil\" is a catalyst for growth within the human experience, like a child touching a stove against the parent's explicit instructions. Without the personal experience of \"evil\" and choice to change humanity on an individual level or a societal level will never mature and that might be the objective of a benevolent monotheistic god.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to the character-building defenses some virtues may be contingent on evil.\n","id":"7ab60c47-ea2c-489e-8ccd-a60134fa18e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Corporate free speech<|ARGUMENT|>\"The media exemption discloses further difficulties with the law now under consideration. There is no precedent supporting laws that attempt to distinguish between corporations which are deemed to be exempt as media corporations and those which are not. \u201cWe have consis-tently rejected the proposition that the institutional press has any constitutional privilege beyond that of other speakers.\u201d Id., at 691 SCALIA, J., dissenting<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If media has right to speak, why not other corps?\n","id":"cc79298b-341d-4484-ada3-b0014692490d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of, I don't think that either Trump or Sanders should or necessarily could become the POTUS. But I feel that the two most likely and realistic candidates are Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, who are essentially the same people in terms of policy and representation of the status quo in US politics. If Trump went up against Hillary he'd get beaten soundly, and if Sanders went up against Bush, he'd get beaten soundly as well. Whichever one Bush Clinton wins is pretty much irrelevant to me, but what I think would be best would be if one of the parties was able to actually field an anti establishment candidate. Even if the election were lost, having one of those fringe candidates represent their party would force the political aristocracy to recognize the fact that we are still in a democracy, and with the incredible pervasive nature of information in the modern age it's much easier to connect and organize large groups of people. And large groups of people can have a lot of political power, which means that the focus of politicians may just start moving back towards the people they represent instead of their business interests, which both parties are guilty of. Why wouldn't it be best if one of the two parties got a serious black eye because the people they represent were able to motivate outside of the party line they're being fed?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The best thing for the US would be an election with *either* Trump or Sanders as the GOP\/Democrat representatives.\n","id":"c1c31798-370f-4181-b061-17c8ca6adc19"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been noticing the news about police officers shooting children or innocent people mistakely, and causing death or serious injuries a lot. So I thought, why would a police officer even use firearms I mean the guns that can kill, I'm not sure since it's not my native language if he she doesn't intend to kill? I have seen the tranquilizer guns making animals unable to even move, so wouldn't they be quite useful? Thanks to this, they could've shoot the suspect without worrying about killing him her, and accidents where the innocent people are dying wouldn't happen. Plus, even if the suspect is really guilty, a police officer shouldn't kill him her, right? And if something happens like in the scenes we see in the movies, where the criminal takes a hostage and police officers can't shoot because they are afraid of hurting the hostage, wouldn't this make everything easier? They could've just shoot without worrying about anything, and make both the hostage and the criminal collapse?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Instead of firearms, police should use\/carry tranquilizer guns.\n","id":"47f24572-066f-4002-990a-cecab13d9bce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>ABC News & NYT has obtained the polling data for June which show a brighter picture for Biden than any other candidate over all. \"Trump trails Joe Biden by 16 points in Pennsylvania, 10 points in Wisconsin and seven points in Florida, and the president leads by just two points in red Texas.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polling in July 2019 suggests that the American people would far prefer to elect Joe Biden as president average of 49.4% rather than reelect Trump 40.5%.\n","id":"fa3adf2f-6559-442d-95f3-e0e1003b3c85"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>World Language<|ARGUMENT|>Allowing free communication helps people to understand other people and their culture. The more links and common cultural references that exist between people, the less likely they are to want to attack one another. Therefore a global language could help to further peace and harmony in the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Allowing free communication helps people to understand other people and their culture. The more link...\n","id":"811d902c-eaf8-49b0-a2be-ab4a276d1a7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>History can be looked up on Wikipedia. And when 99 of the class forget everything, they're going to go to Wikipedia anyways. From what I've seen, history class, specifically civics government history class seems to serve the sole purpose of educating dumb kids about the world we live in. For people in the United States, it is shameful to go to a good high school and good college and not know how many branches of government there are, what the electoral college is it's not a university in Washington DC btw , who wrote the Constitution, etc. A series of classes should not exist to educate the mentally challenged majority with things they should already know. State testing in middle school should have a comprehensive history section and a high score results in not having to take 4 years of history in HS. Same thing for college.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"history class is worthless and should not be required\n","id":"75b169ef-f833-461d-aee7-88d327b94e27"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that a lot of people really enjoy contemporary art, but to me it just seems pretentious and intentionally divisive. I think art should be able to be understood by everyone, and there seems to be a barrier between the art world and the public trying to understand the art. My definition of art, which I base my argument on, is that art is something intentionally created by people to invoke an emotional response. I think the best art can successfully make most people feel a certain emotion, whether or not it's a good or bad emotion. I think contemporary art, more than anything, is boring to look at. All of the most famous contemporary art I've seen requires some kind of explanation, which for me corrupts the art itself and robs it of any emotion. I think lots of today's gallery art is created by people with overinflated egos who don't know what makes art good. I do think there is plenty of art being made today that is good. For example, a couple of my favorite artists are Miles Johnston and Melissa Mccracken, and I think a lot of the best art of today comes out of the animation industry. However, everything I've ever seen in contemporary art museums makes me want to roll my eyes. I would like to have some input, I love art and I feel like I'm missing out on a big part of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Overall, contemporary art is objectively bad\n","id":"47ae66b7-2ff4-4621-8ca2-7413ec6e3590"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Similar Cryptocurrencies Good for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>The business intelligence from processing huge amounts of already gathered information on user preferences makes it more difficult for new competitors to enter a market with established big players.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Huge companies gathering all payment information of citizens is bad for society.\n","id":"33d31869-b560-4c32-b177-5ed768cb160d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Donald Trump rose to prominence as a demagogue for the blue-collar communities of America. If he is impeached, these communities would likely see him as a martyr who stood up for their beliefs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump's base of support would cause havoc and riot if Trump was impeached, while the liberal left would rejoice. This would create an even greater divide between these two sides of America.\n","id":"e6df0c7f-e6bc-43e6-801f-81d398a2f1f9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should physical libraries be digitized?<|ARGUMENT|>There might be a few, local people at most that look at what others are picking for books. With a digital library, more people, anywhere in the world, may see what library guests are doing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On the internet where a digital library lives, if people search, read, download, etc. books, their actions are recorded, whereas physical libraries provide more anonymity.\n","id":"0aa3aca7-e92d-4a3f-8b55-ef5b55ed56f6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most guys I have talked to always put the toilet seat down when they are in a mixed gender household because of pressure from females. I totally accept that as a choice for the guys trying to be considerate but I think that guys who don't put the seat down are not dirtballs for the following reasons The reason that females often give for pushing a rule for toilet seat down is that they will inadvertently sit on the toilet bowl. I live in a household with only male offspring and my kids never put the toilet seat down. Never once did I or my wife as far as I know sit on the toilet bowl in all the time of their growing up. It is pretty easy to see whether the toilet seat is down or not and easy to get into the habit of checking. Checking becomes unconscious in a matter of days. In these days of gender equality, males should have the right to leave the toilet seat in the required position for the job. To require otherwise hurts the equality movement. Males tend not to be as fastidious as females. If the toilet seat is down, they may urinate anyway and, as unforeseeable factors may affect stream direction, urine often ends up on the toilet seat. If this dries, it will probably be unnoticed by the next person sitting down and that can by unhygienic. Feces are loaded with bacteria and urine can contain bacteria too. The smell and look of excrement is not pleasing to the eye or nose. Unless you clean your toilet bowl after each visit, there will be evidence of your effort left so the default position of the toilet coverings should be seat and lid down. Putting both the seat and lid down would require equal consideration and work for all since both males and females would have to flip a lid s after the act. It would have the additional benefit of being aesthetically pleasing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Guys who do not put the toilet seat down in mixed gender households are not dirtballs.\n","id":"3cc5b62c-f9bc-4cc7-bd8f-93b745668613"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should citizens be able to crowdsource laws?<|ARGUMENT|>Discussions turn sour because discussions tend to focus on back and forth chronological formats that tend to wander off into infinite paths, that never lead to anything. We can have pro\/con discussions that are much more effective.With pro\/con discussions the topic isn't continually changing in chaotic ways.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Just because discussions tend to turn sour we cannot just reject one communication channel after the other.\n","id":"2969108a-0d9e-441a-819a-bf994537bc36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is there an afterlife?<|ARGUMENT|>The only way to explain communicating with a person once their physical form is gone is if there is a second domain of existence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"After-Death Communication ADC is a well documented phenomenon which suggests that life after death exists.\n","id":"2e76831c-0750-4fa5-966b-ddeb369fb231"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>Mueller states, \"evidence about the June 9, 2016 meeting and WikiLeaks\u2019s releases of hacked materials was not sufficient to charge a criminal campaign-finance violation.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is insufficient evidence of illegal collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russia.\n","id":"c0315b30-c376-42e5-b1d3-eb463cee6adc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Some of Warren's policies are too expensive like the over $20 trillion Medicare-For-All plan, when the US really should be decreasing its national debt as the Medicare-For-All plan could double it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Elizabeth Warren's sweeping progressive policies and unequivocal populist message are too extreme for centrist voters.\n","id":"b56c0555-d385-44ac-8df5-fd3fca18226b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't get what's so special about iPhones, when it makes more sense to get a Samsung Galaxy you know, if they want a smart phone . And I don't think Macs are nothing compared to PCs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Apple isn't that good\/special.\n","id":"3d5d0f2b-e071-429c-8565-2284dc054b79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Starcraft 2 is advertised as a real time strategy game, which is kind of misleading. Sure, some portion of the difficulty of the game comes from constructing buildings and units and ordering them around the map to accomplish various tasks. I'll call that 'strategy macro'. But there are also two other elements that present challenges to the player, those being what I'll call 'fiddle macro', and micro. The term micro should be pretty self explanatory to RTS players, but when I say 'fiddle macro', what I mean is micromanaging the building of, say, SCV's at the command center and marines at the barracks. The build queue for every structure that builds units, as far as I know, is not only finite but also incredibly small, meaning that you have to constantly switch back to your unit building structures to keep their queues topped off. This is essentially a pointless distraction meant to give you busywork and force you to multitask. This problem is even more egregious in the case of the Zerg hatchery, where you essentially have a build queue of 3. Another example of fiddle macro is the Protoss chrono boost ability. Rather than challenging the player to create a clever strategy or to prioritize certain units, fiddle macro forces the player to repetitively perform actions that could and should be automated by the game's interface. Now let's talk about micro. Micro is the idea that the player should be forced to manually control their units, or else they'll perform objectively worse. In some ways I think that micro in Starcraft 2 is a legitimate way of challenging players. Forcing them to arrange troops in certain formations, and to use abilities like force field and mass recall are definitely more a test of twitch reflexes than actual strategy, but they at least add some visual interest to the battles and a little bit of mechanical depth. But I have several gripes with the basic interface. First of all, the camera is intentionally zoomed very far in and you can't zoom it out at all. You're forced to only look at a tiny slice of the battlefield at a time, in extreme closeup. Zooming out gives you so much of a benefit that using an external program to let you do that is considered 'hacking'. This forces you to constantly scroll the camera around and overrely on the minimap, when you should simply be able to turn the scroll wheel a few times and see the entire battlefield at once. Another gripe is that units behave incredibly stupidly when they aren't explicitly ordered by the player. For example, badly injured units will mindlessly return fire on their attackers instead of falling back and finding a healing unit. Certain actions, like retreating and healing, are way too much to ask of a single human to simultaneously control, and they also create a feeling that the units are completely incompetent and mindless without the player's instructions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some of the challenge of playing Starcraft 2 comes from wrestling with an interface that was intentionally designed to be hard-to-use.\n","id":"cdc764e3-8a7e-40c6-a553-43f39880ffee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is political correctness detrimental to society?<|ARGUMENT|>Strict firing restrictions such as \"You can't fire people for not using politically correct speech\" are linked with an increase in umemployment rates.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Firing particular people for particular reasons is not linked with an increase on unemployment rates.\n","id":"97eaf7ee-63bc-46b4-92c7-c70131d7ac8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Bullfighting be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Horse-riding would probably be called illegal, as the horses did not consent to it and are often wrecked by accidents or years of riding.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A society where the life of an animal was worth as much as the life of a human would be doomed to fail.\n","id":"d376036a-f543-4889-bfb9-ddbb3d62e2e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>produce high quality generic drugs for Africa<|ARGUMENT|>The decreased cost of pharmaceuticals allows African states to focus on other aspects of medical schemes. Pharmaceuticals are not the only aspect in treatment, there needs to be sufficient staff, medical equipment and infrastructure1. These requirements cost money, which the savings made on pharmaceuticals provide. In Europe, 50% of dispensed medicines are generic yet they cost only 18% of pharmaceutical expenditure, with a similar model predicted for South Africa. This allows the state to focus on other aspects of medical schemes2. 1 Ibid 2 Health24, \u2018South Africans embrace generic meds\u2019<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Savings can be used in other sections of medical care\n","id":"3d9d3900-9468-494a-9ea4-0abae9650bd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I like to think of myself as fairly merciful forgiving etc, and in the real world, in 99.9 of criminal cases I'm in favor of rehabilitation rather than vengeful, pointless imprisonment, let alone killing. That said, I'm often frustrated by heroes in fiction, especially family friendly fiction, who don't kill bad guys who they have ample evidence and an admission of guilt from, when those bad guys swear they're going to go on raping and pillaging, or even mark them for personal vengeance. If they're restrained and able to be carted off to trial or something, sure, let the system work. But in many of these cases, the bad guy gets away or is given a punishment where they are likely to get away again, all because someone says the magic words don't stoop to their level. Um. Excuse me, but I don't think killing someone who commits murder for personal gain, tries to frame innocent people, and all sorts of other bad shit, then taunts you about how they're going to do it again, is stooping to their level. Sometimes you just gotta put a bad dog down, not out of vengeance but simple self preservation, and quite frankly, I'm a little tired of the Good is Dumb trope that's in so much of even adult media. I don't think the Punisher is cool and edgy just because he kills people, but there's a middle ground between kill everyone and kill no one. Now I get that a lot of this comes down to storytelling conceits where writers just don't want to kill off bad guys so that they might continue to provide story arcs coughs Joker coughs , and of course it might be a bit complicated to explain to any kids watching the finer nuances of why You shouldn't kill killers because killing is wrong is an oversimplified strawman. BUT. I have also argued with people who insist that the heroes in these situations did the right thing, and that they would do this themselves. And I'm aware that I might just be armchair criticizing Come on, just shoot stab him is easy to say when you're not the one holding the gun sword . SO As someone of the Malcolm Reynolds school of thought on how to deal with sworn enemies please  if you can.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe if a bad guys says \"You should have killed me when you had the chance,\" you should kill them.\n","id":"357e8dd3-0611-4e93-b3db-bf40c3af9cb0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm finding this to be a problem with Frozen which had a kind of thin plot surrounded by amazing songs and Big Hero 6 which seriously underplayed how much action should have been in it. The emotional parts worked but it was very by the numbers . Wreck It Ralph was the most notable so this post will be strictly about that. I don't understand why people like the movie so much. I found it to be just average when it came out. Much of the relatable aspects of the film for people like Ralph's self hatred, Vanellope's outcast nature and Jack McBrayer's gosh darn sweet naivety have all been done before and done better. The video game atmosphere was really underutilized, especially when compared to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and its use of cartoons which many people pointed out the similarities to . That said I did see promise in the movie like when Ralph goes to Taps bar or when the townspeople all kick Ralph out. I found the movie to be a wasted opportunity. It couldn't fall back on songs like Tangled or Frozen , and took many cues from Pixar. I'm trying to articulate why I don't like it and understand why others do, because it's not as bad as Big Hero 6 . I'm not sure my opinion of the movie will change but I do want to understand why it's so revered, since I've seen much of what it tackles before. Help me Reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Disney's \"Wreck-It Ralph\" is kind of generic and not as good as the recent Disney movies.\n","id":"4fa74a9d-e814-480d-9d3a-60ca32ae7642"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi everyone, I want to start off by saying my actual life situation you cou can see how it affect my opinion. I am born and raised in Montreal Canada and my father think that a passive and fair communist society is a good idea but is unobtainable and so do I. I always had access to quick and free hospitals. My parents never had money problem and i live in luxury. Both my parents have great and paying jobs and my way through college is already paid even if i go 10 years. I do not beleive in sharing wealt only because i will be in the receiving hand. I think that every one should start equal and that the smartest strangest etc should succeed and not only because of your parents money. Healt is something that is really important to me. And having an illness should not make you blow all your life time earned money and basicly leave you in the streets. I dont get how you could be agaisnt Obama Care. Please explain to me. I really want to know where they are coming from. BTW hope this was lisible english is not my native language and i wrote this quick. If its not, please tell me .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I dont understand how you could be agaisnt OBAMACARE\n","id":"e2c3965b-a88e-43a7-9a1d-0a45b8fbc910"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>The venom of the Swooping Evil a blue and green winged magical creature, has powerful obliviatory properties and can be used to erase bad memories.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Magical creatures can also be used to provide cures to some illnesses and injuries.\n","id":"2ea86f8e-71c3-42d8-872b-868f0e9175e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Doctors should be banned from performing genital reshaping surgery on intersex infants<|ARGUMENT|>For the sake of conforming their child to the subjective perception of 'normal', parents may actually exacerbate their suffering due to the health risks of the surgery. Therefore, it is better to allow intersex children to reach adolescence in order to make the decision for themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is better to wait until potential patients are adolescents or adults to perform such surgery.\n","id":"38c0307f-f23f-4ecb-8e27-e107e8108314"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Fashion can never be feminist<|ARGUMENT|>Women are given all kinds of mixed messages about how they should look, and judged for how they dress when men aren't - making fashion a huge window into how modern day sexism looks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fashion can be used to point out inequalities when it comes to appearance and gender.\n","id":"5bf30a34-1f06-43e6-8d81-922c0ab2d8b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Manifest destiny caused more harm than good in that is led to the justification of war with Mexico over a b.s. border dispute. It further allowed for the exploitation of Native American land and led to their relocation. It added lots of territory to the U.S. too, which furthered conflicts over slave state vs free stage. This is seen with the Compromise if 1850, which further boiled tensions between the North and the South. It also laid the roots for today's American exceptionalism that has been used to justify our actions today and exploit people across the globe. All in all, Manifest destiny led to the justification of countless deaths, and the suffering for many.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Manifest Destiny caused more harm than good.\n","id":"20b2ed8e-fadf-4620-8ce8-61c09d090470"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Compulsory voting systems such as Australia's are the only mere foolproof ways that I can see to counteract the problems we have in modern American democratic elections, namely intentional voter suppression inequality and increasing voter apathy. And I'm not saying that we should have to vote FOR a candidate. Australia's systems and most modern compulsory voting systems offer the option for a null , blank , or spoilt ballot in which they cast none of the above . I know that a lot of people would think that just counteracts any of the aims towards increased turnout and political participation, but I think the point is it correctly distinguishes between voters that are oppressed in the electoral system in contrast to people that are simply unimpressed by the political candidates platforms offered to them. Truly, it seems to increase transparency for the country as a whole to understand the real world of politics. Even if compulsory voting isn't a perfect system for fixing all of the democracy's electoral problems, it's at least a step towards a more transparent and equal future of voting. Most importantly what at all is so great about voluntary voting? The only conceivable argument I can even possibly give weight to is the idea that because America and other democracies are founded in the name of principles of freedom autonomy, but the government imposes positive obligations in the name of a better state all the time i.e. taxes, public education, etc . Does anyone have any other conceivable, defensible reasons why mandatory voting isn't the overwhelmingly apparent choice for the modern democracy?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I honestly think the US is just politically backwards for not yet adopting a system of mandatory voting.\n","id":"83b78de8-7d32-41ae-b266-0fd430e04077"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I currently work as a teaching artist in the American South, and in fact I am part of this problem. I am employed by a regional theater to teach pre show workshops for A Christmas Carol. In my work, I was first struck by the fact that all of these schools have a lot of Christmas themed decorations. Those that don't have them up yet usually apologize to me and explain that the tree will go up after Thanksgiving. In teaching A Christmas Carol, students always seem to believe that the problem with Scrooge is that he doesn't like believe in Christmas. This is what children are being taught in a school that puts Christmas on its walls that Christmas is as basic as the ABC's and 123's. That everyone should like Christmas or there is obviously something wrong with them. Most people would agree that it would be strange to put Ramadan decorations all over a school, so way is it okay to have Christian religious iconography throughout a public school? I am in favor of a multicultural approach, in which students also learn about other cultures such as Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or even Ramadan. But in the end I find that often a multicultural approach will still make those other cultures seem Well other. When a Jewish, Hindu, or Muslim child sees Christmas decorations in their school they are being told that Christmas is somehow the norm and that their culture is other.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that public schools should not have images or discussions about Christmas.\n","id":"4c2508c1-9b18-4491-95df-238e6b26b788"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've found myself conflicted about the seemingly ever expanding sexual identity spectrum. We've got all kinds of labels for people that don't fit in with the norms regarding gender, sexual orientation etc. While I see the point of creating us groups with people who are similar to us e.g. gay men , especially when we are pushed away by the normative group e.g. heterosexual men , it also adds to friction between these groups. Instead, I believe that what education and social movements should focus on is to bring prejudice about gender, appearance and behaviour to the surface and question them. The goal can't be Hey let's separate everyone into different groups based on how they act and who they love , but must be Hey, let's acknowledge that there are men who wears dresses and nail polish and that's not weird, they are still men. No more, no less.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Instead of allowing\/encouraging people to identify as queer\/trans\/etc, all focus should be on dissolving the norms surrounding gender etc.\n","id":"945d2bf0-9e6c-4649-876a-c91d5433ca52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most, by now, would have heard of this case. For those out of the loop, here is a link to the video The build up was not recorded. The generally accepted story is the student was playing on her phone and when requested to hand it over, the student refused. After that interaction, the teacher requested the administration to remove the student from the classroom. The student refused to move and as a last resort, the schools resource officer was requested to move the student. The officer requested the student to stand and come with him multiple times, which were all refused. This is where the video begins. The officer then grabs the student by the arm he attempts to remove her from the desk. The student then flails her arm at the officers face, with a half closed fist. At this point the officer places his hand under her thigh and attempts to lift her out, which tips her backwards. He then drags her out of the chair. The students legs are hooked around a chair leg so the officer lifts at the same time, throwing the student. Now, I believe he should have lowered the girl down less aggressively, ie Not have thrown her. However, I think tipping her backwards is acceptable. The student has both refused the follow a lawful command and, arguably, assaulted an officer. I believe that there should be some consequences for the office. Though I think dismissal is too extreme. Many media sources have jumped on this issue and have framed it as a race issue, which I think it is obviously not. I think that the dismissal of the officer is a knee jerk reaction because of the recent media focus on police violence, particularly on black people. To me it is a clear case of a student who has no respect for authority. It sends a clear message to the other students that you can disrespect your teacher and the police. With that, please change my view Edit here is another angle with a much clearer picture of what happens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the police officer in the news recently for throwing around the girl not obeying his instructions was doing the right thing. The magnitude of the response was disproportionate but not dismissal worthy.\n","id":"f17b6f43-91d1-4dd2-ba94-76bd09de4f7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A couple years ago my wife and I read this article from the Atlantic about two sets of couples that decided to move in together. First we started joking about it, saying we could never live with such and such couple. Then we started joking about the friends we have that we could totally live with. Over the couple of years we've decided that, if you find the right combination of people, it would be the best way to raise a family. The benefits are pretty obvious. Four possible wage earners means a much higher potential income, it could also mean a more diversified ability to earn. Splitting a mortgage four ways and pooling a down payment means being able to buy a much nicer house, and buying a house for 6 or 8 most likely would be twice the cost of buying 2 houses for 3 or 4. Four adults also means an easier time managing child care, and one parent choosing to stay home doesn't mean sacrificing half your earning potential. The difficulties are equally obvious, but manageable. Finding a second couple would be comparable to the search for a spouse. You're committing to a long term living arrangement, which means you need to have congruent world views and life goals. The difficulties of a divorce or separation can be exacerbated by having two couples in the house, but it could also mitigate some of the issues since there is still more parental support in the entire family unit. I see cohabitation as an evolution of the nuclear family model. In the 60's when a single income was capable of supporting a family of 4, and gender roles were more stratified to the point that every family had an implied care giver, the nuclear family worked. In the current economy where fewer and fewer are earning to their full potential, and fewer still are becoming home owners instead of renters, I feel like sharing a house is the best decision if you have another family you can accomplish it with.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A two-couple household is superior to the nuclear family model.\n","id":"bbeb1e23-7fae-4d4e-8f9a-b41b2d6e473d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Couples Sign A Prenuptial Agreement Before Marriage?<|ARGUMENT|>In Islamic tradition the couple to be married sign an aqd zawaj a marriage contract, which can include a variety of clauses about the rights and responsibilities of both parties towards each other, often but not always regulating the conditions for divorce as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Prenuptial agreements have been part of long-standing marriage traditions across a number of different cultures. In these cultures, prenups don't bring anything new to a marriage and can't counterbalance marriage losing ground.\n","id":"9815369f-42d6-4f07-ac09-99f8a6038c13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the world of Harry Potter really the place to be?<|ARGUMENT|>Professor Snape was openly partial to the students of his own house while serving his tenure at Hogwarts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hogwarts teachers are irresponsible and contribute to a dangerous and unhealthy school environment.\n","id":"8cfb2374-3ea3-4869-9536-c4f669f2e620"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Reality Television Has Negative Effects on Society<|ARGUMENT|>Reality TV is actually getting worse as the audience becomes more and more used to the genre. In a search for ratings and media coverage, shows are becoming ever more vulgar and offensive, trying to find new ways to shock. Already some \u201cBig Brother\u201d programmes have shown men and women having sex on live TV. Others have involved fights and racist bullying. Do we let things continue until someone has to die on TV to boost the ratings?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reality TV is actually getting worse as the audience becomes more and more used to the genre. In a ...\n","id":"a323e429-468f-4d6a-8815-d0b063b0292b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The European Union should become a United States of Europe<|ARGUMENT|>Slave countries of the old colonization needed armies present to their territory to take the wealth. The EU doesn't need to do that. Creating a debt colony it takes the money directly from the slave nations' central bank.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Traditional wars are fought for resources and wealth with military power; the EU has merely stopped traditional wars in Europe, but the exploitation of weaker countries' resources and wealth isstill in progress\n","id":"f4320ba6-ebc3-444e-b4e1-098dd8320ab4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>legal empowerment is provided for women through land titling.<|ARGUMENT|>About 50% of the poor across Africa, including women, used rental accommodation1 , many are landless. Although it remains debatable as to whether women enter the rental market by choice or not, renting has been noted to provide a greater degree of flexibility. Renting provides flexibility to relocate and manage finances effectively over a short-term. Land titles may therefore increase immobility to those using the rental markets; and enable landlords to raise prices of renting. Titles don\u2019t help those who rent. 1 Edwards, 1990, p.255<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Land titles do not solve the main issue for women - rental markets.\n","id":"046a7950-2e19-4fdd-9e25-d40f9e138ec4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>All forms of market manipulation based on stock trading should be legalized. This does not concern insider information or any information which could lead to a differing underlying valuation of the assets the stock represents ownership in, only restrictions on standard trading. Restrictions such as painting the tape or marking the close are just attempts to protect low information traders from themselves. Assume the following became a popular strategy you should buy stocks that trade at 10.05 at noon on the prior week\u2019s Tuesday. Would it be market manipulation if an investor attempted to pin a stock to trade at 10.05 at noon on Tuesday? There should be no restrictions on trading based strategies. If I want to make a ton of trades, pay a bunch of fees, and possibly overpay many people for their stock I should be allowed to. It shouldn't matter that people may react to that by going into a frenzy of buying. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Market manipulation should be legal\n","id":"fa404f7a-4298-4b7a-bab1-4f69d08012f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gaming is Good: Are Tabletop RPGs good because they exercise creativity and problem solving skills?<|ARGUMENT|>Gamesmastering entails creating Worlds, Places, Characters, Back Story, and Adventures, as well as maps, drawings, and portraits of characters. It's one of the most creative pursuits one can think of.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tabletop RPGs are good because they exercise creativity and problem solving skills\n","id":"f8c2dea1-4c17-40dc-97c6-aa43178d4406"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, why are people basing how they believe they should look on a magazine photo which I agree will have been photoshopped as opposed to say people they see respect in real life, people they see in videos, people they see in images online, etc. Secondly, no one is really against makeup, but that's equally unrealistic . If you want to look good in a magazine, you get photoshopped like everyone else. If you want to look good on TV, you get makeup like everyone else. If you want to look good in real life, you get in better shape like everyone else as well as makeup . Why are people comparing themselves to a magazine counter part, as opposed to the people they interact with every single day or see on TV? . Thirdly, at least to me, women always look better in videos. They claim that all these people in magazines are photoshopped, but they look much better again, just IMO when seen in motion, which definitely isn't being manipulated. And finally, what's the problem with showing 'ideal' women? We know what they look like or at least the people photoshopping the pictures do , even if they don't exist. Why shouldn't people aim for that? Or be inspired by that? More people are overweight than underweight, we need to tip the scale to make it seem more disgusting to be fat. And people who are delusional about their weight don't count they'd be delusion whatever the magazines were showing. I believe it's ugly people whining because that's easier for them than making a change. Why work to improve how they look when they can just bring down the standard of the world? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with how women are portrayed in magazines photoshopped, etc and I don't believe it's even an issue...\n","id":"d61fb0b2-dc26-4cb8-9ff2-c87285450c91"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Sporting Idols and Domestic Abuse: Where Should Sporting Leagues Draw a Line?<|ARGUMENT|>For women who have been victimised to such a great degree, having some kind of agency in the way justice is meted out can be empowering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because they can be implemented unilaterally and without the consent or cooperation of the victim, Zero-Tolerance policies deny victims agency in the justice process.\n","id":"0e9cfa77-daa0-4520-bf1e-41c0963220e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Congress and the Senate should impose term limits on Representatives<|ARGUMENT|>Due to the tremendous power and privilege of those in office, once an elected official burrows in, it's nearly impossible to get them out. Within a very short time of taking office they figure out the rules for staying in office. They quickly assimilate into the ruling class becoming just one more voice in partisan group think. Term limits may not eliminate partisan politics, but at a minimum it would introduce new voices into the conversation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Could create more diversity among members., especially women and minority groups.\n","id":"792a73ee-293a-41b4-b59c-7efc09d72198"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Familial structure, possible issues developing mentally from a relationship between multiple people, family members, etc. are irrelevant to the discussion of marriage. Marriage is solely a contract and has nothing to do with love or emotional attachment, otherwise the government must terminate any marriage that could mentally harm someone abuse, mental disorders, etc. . If possible mental, emotional, etc. issues did occur it's hypocritical to deny marriage to family members or multiple people based on that, but then blatantly allow any other form of possible or occurring relationship issues to persist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if legal marriage in the US regards nothing in terms of love, polygamous, marriage between family members, etc. should all be legal.\n","id":"f372cbb9-ca34-4161-bcd1-2859c10a74a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can we emerge from neotribalism to become a mass society?<|ARGUMENT|>If we move towards a post-scarcity world, then it's likely that becoming a mass society will help.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We can emerge from neotribalism to become a mass society.\n","id":"a7146394-560e-4634-ae0d-0dab281ed133"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me just begin by saying that I genuinely want my view to be changed. I'm a somewhat frugal person and I don't want to spend 10 a month just so I don't have to deal with ads. It might seem silly, but it's completely worth it to me. I absolutely despise advertisements whether it be in TV shows, movies or unskippable ads before a YouTube video. I despise them so much that I'm willing to pay money NOT to watch them, which is kind of sad in itself, I know. I know there are ways around this if you go through the Chrome browser, but I prefer the app because I like to watch the video while I surf through the comments, turn off my phone to conserve battery while it plays in the background and I also enjoy Google Play Music. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"YouTube Premium is worth every penny\n","id":"b3db84eb-179e-4718-a8d8-de469fc35393"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know there's a lot of moving parts to this, so I'll try to tackle each part individually. Basically a society set up this way would heavily invest in human capital education and healthcare and technology indirectly through scientific advances . I understand there are marginal diminishing returns to just throwing money at something, but I think that holds true for any government spending structure. Please keep in mind that I'm not calling for bigger government or dramatic structural changes. This is just a redeployment of budget and a different focus. 1 Education This would of course mean education in the traditional sense stronger public schools, stronger affordable state colleges with higher paid teachers that are held to higher standards much like doctors in America's society . But not all people are best utilized by going down the traditional book smart path. So education spending would also be put towards technical schools. You don't have to be a rocket scientist or an english professor. You can be a plumber or an electrician or a mechanic. But be sure you'll go to an excellent school and learn a useful, real world skill. But what about the crappy jobs, like garbage man and fast food worker? There will still be those people who do not do well in learning applying a technical skill. Those lower tier jobs will still be filled. The point is that an individual still has access to an advanced education. Whether they can succeed in that skill is still left to a capitalist way of thinking. 2 Healthcare Again, we're investing in human capital. There's no reason why someone who thinks they have diabetes should avoid expensive monitoring and treatments or not even know they have it , only to waste away within 10 years, racking up hundreds of thousands of hospital bills. Keeping people healthy and having a preventive view of healthcare will keep a society's best resource people healthy and ready to work. But what about supply limits? There's only so many kidneys and hearts that can be transplanted. We can't give it to everyone. I agree, but that aspect would still operate as in a capitalist system. If you have the money you can still buy your way to that access. That aspect is exactly like the current american system few haves, many have nots , only the key to this is the simple preventive measures oh you have pneumonia here's the treatment free of charge, now continue being productive, instead of, oh crap gotta work through this sickness, and now I wheeze and can't do hard labor anymore cause i never went to the doctor . 3 Science This ties everything together really. Better science better, cheaper healthcare. Better computers, better resources, better education, better everything. If you have any doubts why this should be a priority, read all the applicable commercial things available due to NASA spending alone hint it wasn't just tempurpedic . But also think what else science has done for our modern world. Plastic, vaccines, medical procedures, water treatment, agriculture, computers. All game changers. 4 But why would we waste money on X, or Y, or Z? Well, there's no such thing as wasting money , just applying funds to different sectors. When NASA spent 2.5 billion on curiosity, they didn't just take that money and put it in a package and send it to Mars, never to be used again. That money paid the scientists, the engineers, the raw material for the rover, the mechanics to upkeep the machinery, the janitors, security officers, the land owners that own the space used for the project, etc, etc, etc. That money is going back to the public as a reinvestment into human capital. The economy is still a free market as it is now. 5 What about military? What, we'll just let people invade our precious utopia? No. Military spending is important. It just shouldn't dominate the budget. Military spending would be substantially less and limited to defending against attacks on our own soil such as anti missile defense, coastal defense, local ground troops and think of how badass it'll be with all the you guessed it, awesome science and educated and healthy troops we have . Deterrence programs, such as 24 7 bombers and 24 7 subs with nuclear capability to threaten retaliation in the event of an attack would be fair game. What about giving foreign aid in the event of another WW2 situation? We can still do that. We have the best science and therefore technology. And we can still deploy money to help allies. 6 But you mentioned technocrats in your title how does that come in? I admit this is probably one that I can budge on, but the theory on this one is that our leaders are experts in their field. Why should we have some out of touch politician that got to their position by throwing money at it make policy decision on education when they have zero understanding of it? How about the 60 year old guy who was an amazing teacher for 40 years, understanding the system quite well, and is super educated and healthy and ready to make positive changes based on his real world experience? Right now we have politicians making decisions based on memos written by staffers backed by a few studies. Why not have the guy reading it be someone who can be critical and truly understand the information? I know there's a lot I didn't cover but for the most part, for the sake of argument, everything else stays the same. Free markets, capitalism, no bigger government, just a redeployment of budget and better maybe politicians. I'd be open to suggestions regarding taxation or wealth distribution. I think current monetary policy is good not perfect and that quantitative easing was a positive move.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think an ideal society would be run by technocrats that heavily fund education, healthcare, and science.\n","id":"f1d5a465-42ca-4cf5-8134-cdd90b758f1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should students be allowed to skip grades?<|ARGUMENT|>Winding up the teacher or getting the class to mess around will inevitably seem more interesting to the children than studying some dry and dull topics.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Students can start acting out as a result of being bored at school.\n","id":"b1412d31-2f76-40c9-8baf-1d27ab1b5cc4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we offer one of our kidneys to a stranger in need if we are able to?<|ARGUMENT|>A study from the Netherlands on psychological evaluations of about 24 altruistic kidney donors after donation found that the donors were, in general, quite satisfied and pleased with having gone through the process of donating the kidney and would do it again were the situation ever to come up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most donors experience positive emotional benefits from trying to improve the health and well-being of a person in need.\n","id":"ef042424-bb27-43a3-a825-27ce01c93ba6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States. I think there should be a law in place demanding that all news corporations must report facts. Another recent report about news reporting on global warming showed that Fox is only accurate 28 of the time. I am not trying to target Fox, but they are the easiest to list examples of reporting crap. Without factually based news agencies, tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans are getting fed opinions in place of facts. This makes every day harder and harder for us as a country because we keep tripping over all of the hairs, or just air, in our path.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think there should be a law associated with calling yourself a news corporation\n","id":"9940ab65-bfe3-45bb-8969-8547e311f9b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A comment thread on r bestof is discussing the dangers of trusting information you read on subjects you are uninformed about, with some branches discussing how much misinformation is contained in newspapers. To take one representative comment gt It used to be so easy to blindly believe what I read in the newspaper. Then I read a story about something I was directly involved in. It was astounding how many things they got completely wrong. Many have upvoted and confirmed this view with their own stories, with some quoting the so called Murray Gell Mann Amnesia effect gt Briefly stated, the Gell Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray\u2019s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward reversing cause and effect. I call these the \u201cwet streets cause rain\u201d stories. Paper\u2019s full of them. While I'm sure there are many cases of media getting stories wrong, I think the extent to which newspapers are mistaken is exaggerated, and fails to take account of what a newspaper is for. Many stories published are not particularly contentious. For instance political speeches are reported verbatim, with added background thrown in that is relevant to the particular audience of that publication. Financial results, product announcements and many common stories are done fairly accurately, because there is not much to get wrong. That said, journalists will admit that newspapers represent a kind of best guess on many issues, and that the industry is generalist rather than specialist, especially in the case of mainstream news sources. The industry often simplifies things, but that is partly because of time and space constraints. If you want to understand something in depth you should be buying a book, not a paper. Every so often newspapers get things horrendously wrong, particularly in the sensational world of the popular press. But these stories take up an inappropriate amount of space in the public impression of the media, and are hugely outnumbered by the mundane stories the press gets more or less right. I could go on at some length about the influence of public relations firms and other corrupting forces on the industry, but on the whole I'd suggest papers are pretty accurate given their intended purpose. So long as you bear in mind the limits of the format and don't take any of it too seriously it is a valuable information source. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Information in newspapers is adequate given its intended purpose\n","id":"71780de7-aa80-493b-93a1-4d6b07551f6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all major political decisions be made via public referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>The referendum in the Netherlands, in which 61 percent voted against ratifying an association agreement with Ukraine, empowered extreme figures like the far-right anti-Islam parliamentarian Geert Wilders.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By having binary choice questions, referendums empower extremist sides on an issue by giving them equal platforms.\n","id":"75d03bf7-6d49-4cb3-b0bf-c4b456837557"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that no one should be allowed to be a permanent member and that the 5 countries with the largest influence on the world defined thru a mix of economics, political, military power, and human rights records . Countries who fall far enough in any of those will lose their seat. As for the rest of the seats they would be filled as they currently are as for veto power I believe that it is overpowered, for proof of this look towards North Korea I believe that a 2 3 majority should be enough to get action on an issue I understand that this is 2 part, but they go together so I thought it should be ok to put them in 1  Edit View changed<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No country should be a permanent member of the UN security council and no country should have veto power in the UN security council\n","id":"582e0ba9-8ea3-4bf3-861c-5e5d2ebb164b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be repealed.<|ARGUMENT|>Talking about the reason for the Iraq war, the President said \"We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States. Now, as before, we will secure our nation, protect our freedom.\" UN inspectors reported \"Iraq has declared that in 1988 it considered RPVs as a delivery vehicle to spray Biological Warfare agents\" and \"Iraq developed a remotely piloted MIG possibly to be equipped with a spray tank for the delivery of a BW agent\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In light of the attacks of 9\/11 and due to Saddam Hussein's previous attacks on the freedom of Americans, US military forces along with over 100,000 civilians armed with privately owned weapons, working in Private Military Companies successfully toppled Hussein's tyrannical regime.\n","id":"1904c23a-509e-43e0-af2d-68572e7f96a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Link in question This image received over 600 upvotes on a female centric subreddit this could be an important bit of context . People objecting to it were generally downvoted enough to hide the objections. Little healthy discussion about it resulted. My view is that this image does the following paints a gender with a broad, negative brush, catching many good people in the crosshairs. So what is my objection? It stems from the following premises Accusations of sexism are a moral claim concerning justice The relevant kind of sexism here is the behavior toward or view of individuals within a gender, where those behaviors and views are based on a trait that is applied much too broadly without evidence that the trait is specifically applicable to a given individual and a labeling of all members of a gender with a certain negative trait or traits The tweet is a spot on example of painting an entire gender with a negative brush unfairly The tweet and reddit thread happens in a public medium where immediate response is not necessary, and should therefore be held to stricter standards than venting in a private group or thoughtless off the cuff commentary. Therefore, the promotion of this tweet reveals sexism on the part of those defending it. I've come to think of myself as a feminist for the last 5 years. I put myself out there to be an ally for the cause. It feels like shit when I'm painted as the enemy by the people I'm trying to help. I want to stop feeling like shit when I see this kind of stuff, so if I can find a way to be okay with this kind of post, that'd be grand. I became a feminist because of a desire for justice. When I learned of the shit women are uniquely faced with, especially negative traits broadly applied to them, it became a priority for me to take up the cause. Justice is important to me. That tweet seems very unjust. What this post is not I'm not asking for a medal, I'm just sharing my personal journey as it can give people some context for where I'm coming from. I'm not criticizing people for off the cuff expressions of frustration. This isn't something said in passing frustration, it's something being heavily upvoted in a progressive subreddit. I'm not stopping important conversations to make this all about me, as some men do when nit picking women. I'm not advocating that. I'm starting a separate conversation so we can talk about this. Please, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People venting about men in the way the linked tweet in description shows is sexist\n","id":"9e8f361e-a79d-4a93-9bf0-de7f11508de9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Confess to Cheating After a One Night Stand?<|ARGUMENT|>In response to the perceived threat that a woman's infidelity can pose to their dominance, men may engage in violent behaviors as a way to offset that threat. Men's perception of their status often depends on their sense of dominance and violence is a typical way for men to assert this dominance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to a study from 1989, about four in ten men perceive physical aggression towards a cheating partner as legitimate Arias and Johnson, p. 305 The share among women is two out of ten.\n","id":"f2f2d595-3013-43cc-b2b6-8e2bd0ecdd77"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Outsourcing jobs helps keep the cost of products low while allowing the average consumer to buy a multitude of products and put money back into the economy. Without this, inflation would set in while the average person does not earn a greater amount of money, causing the economy to stagnate. Outsourcing also allows businesses in the United States to stay competitive with low prices, and this degree of competitiveness is the heart of capitalism. I recognize the benefits of not outsourcing jobs, such as a lower rate of unemployment in the U.S, but in my opinion the benefits of outsourcing outweigh the benefits of not outsourcing. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the United States government should continue to outsource jobs.\n","id":"bca534be-167c-4267-9096-d82377d82c2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Nobody is harmed by artificial wombs. Women who want to give birth naturally can still opt to do so. The only thing that may be a negative impact is that it takes time and money to research it, but to be honest I think that a technology like artificial wombs that can help people in many ways is more important than space tourism and people still spend time and money researching space tourism. Another criticism of artificial wombs is that only the rich can afford it, but it also used to be the case that only the rich can afford a personal computer and now everyone has one or two. Generally, technology that was only affordable to the rich 10 years ago will become affordable to the middle class and working class 10 years later. First problem solved medical issues dying of childbirth is rare nowadays, but it's even better with artificial wombs since it would reduce that percentage to 0 it would also mean women don't have to go through the physical parts of pregnancy if they don't want to or their body isn't equipped for it. Women also won\u2019t have to give up things like alcohol since the baby won\u2019t be growing in their body. No weight gain, stretch marks, etc. This sounds like vanity but in reality, pregnancy is quite uncomfortable, limiting and painful and there are women who would like to not go through that. infertile people can have biological children men and trans women can have biological children on their own with an egg donor women will be able to have as many children as they want without biological limits women can have children at older ages that they would normally be infertile at Second problem solved 90 of sexism will be solved with artificial wombs Things both genders will be happy about 90 or more of sexism and gender roles exist because women can get pregnant while men can\u2019t. With artificial wombs, those gender roles will become antiquated since that difference won\u2019t be important anymore. Both feminists, MRAs and egalitarians will be happy about it. Gender roles are less rigid Things men will be happy about Men won\u2019t be expected to pay for dates anymore. Historically, men paid for dates as a way to signal to a woman that he has the resources to care for a woman and their child. Since women are putting in physical commitment during the 9 months of pregnancy, the man is expected to commit financially. Men will also experience less pressure to be the breadwinner of the household or take on dangerous jobs in order to support his family. Custody cases will be closer to 50 50 since parenting won\u2019t be considered a mothers only duty If a couple chooses to use an artificial womb, a man can be 100 sure the kid is his. I know paternity testing is a thing nowadays too, but in general asking for a paternity test is pretty damaging to a marriage as it signals lack of trust. Choosing to use an artificial womb doesn\u2019t come with that implication. Dating game much more balanced since women\u2019s reproductive burden won\u2019t be so high. Women tend to be much more choosy than men because women are the ones who have to endure pregnancy for 9 months. Men will be pursued for dating based on their money and status sign of being able to provide for a pregnant woman and her children less and a lot more based on personality. Things women will be happy about Parenting and housework will no longer be expected to be a woman\u2019s duty only. This means that a lot of the inherent biases in employment women are going to get pregnant and take a lot of maternity leave or quit the job to be a SAHM, wage gap due to women working less hours to take care of children are going to be null and void. Due to the above gender role going away, the father will be much more active in parenting. Chores will likely be divided more evenly between husband and wife Women will be able to be much less choosy in dating as she won\u2019t bear such a high reproductive burden. Women can pursue their own fun without worrying too much. Less slut shaming. No more \u201ckey and lock\u201d metaphor. Less stigma for single mothers. Women will be pursued for dating much less based on youth and looks sign of fertility and a lot more based on personality. Third problem social, economical and political impacts Without the biological clock, women are free to pursue a career into their forties and establishing herself in the field before settling down and starting a family. This is actually good for the birthrate. In Japan, many women have a choice between marriage children or career and end up picking career. In other countries, the effect isn\u2019t as obvious but there\u2019s still a negative correlation with education level, career level and birth rate for women but not so much for men because a woman often has to choose either career or family this is anecdotal but I could think of many successful men with a lot of children like Donald Trump but not many successful women with 4 children while a man doesn\u2019t. If a woman can choose both at the same time, then birthrates will rise. Related to above, more people participating in work force leads to a better economy as well as more taxpayers to contribute to government programs. Probably more women in politics to accompany the rising number of women in the workplace Average marriage age will rise. This is good because I think marriage should be done between two people who are mature enough to handle it. Statistics show that the younger the age of marriage is, the higher the rate of divorce. Also, the average age gap in marriage will lower. This is also good because in marriages with high age gaps, there\u2019s a very high chance of imbalance of power or sometimes downright abuse. Average income gap will also be lower and that\u2019s good for the same reason. People who can afford to have children will have more children, this means the birthrate rises without increasing poverty<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Artificial womb technology can solve a lot of the world's problems\n","id":"5ca926b9-de42-4e3e-8ba6-7617066b299e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Having Children Selfish?<|ARGUMENT|>This planet may well be unable to support human life long enough for babies that have just been born to live into old age. The decision to bring more people onto the planet is short-sighted and selfish.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"By deriving benefit from having children, parents make a selfish decision as the decision is ultimately for themselves rather than the child.\n","id":"79b225e2-d035-4c13-90f7-32198db14cd7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I never saw the point in housing and feeding the dregs of society. It's a senseless waste of tax payer money. Especially in those european countries where they're treated like kings. So my plan is this Gather up all prisoners who were without a reasonable doubt proven to be guilty, if they weren't then they're set free . They are forced off to camps, and made to do harsh physical, sweatshop level labor that no one else in the country or world wishes to do. They aren't fed at ALL. They're given water from the tap. It's essentially a prolonged death sentence, they're forced to work until they serve no benefit anymore and naturally starve to death. There would be no costs of feeding, clothing, visiting, etc. the prisoners this way. If they refuse to cooperate, they're shot in the back of the head. When they die, all of their assets are gathered up, sold, and distributed amongst society. My plan will work, because it will accomplish either two things. Free physical labor and assets from people that would serve no other purpose to society. Most people would be too scared to commit crimes outside of crimes of passion and the crime rate would drastically decrease.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All criminals who we know 110% did the crime should be put under forced physical labor, and if they refuse, bullet to the back of the head.\n","id":"5b3584ce-b36f-413c-b4d2-dce1711cea0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>A situation which would justify orchestrating a trolley problem for someone else to participate in would be so strange that one can't assume anything about the motivations of the person behind it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Assuming that the situation is orchestrated, it still does not follow that pulling the lever is participating in the scheme and would have negative consequences.\n","id":"34736b85-3f5a-412c-aa70-71e8c407995c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>North Korea should not be labelled irrational for developing nuclear weapons<|ARGUMENT|>Nations which are shunned by the US and greater world community are likely to form special beneficial relationships in trading for illicit goods or information they cannot receive elsewhere.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Greater proliferation of nuclear weapons technology has led to an increase of potential trading partners and sources for necessary materials.\n","id":"cba1cc1a-96e2-4032-8e7b-3bf43963be45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>As a tenured teacher in Germany you have up to 14 weeks of school vacation over all depending on the state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some of the teachers' main motivations for the job are the many days off during school vacation.\n","id":"bb233f03-0207-4850-82d4-8d457057bc50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As stated, I\u2019m a libertarian, so I won\u2019t find any major politicians even close to my point of view. To gain a delta, I could see someone convincing me any of the following things 1 Voting for a lesser evil is worthwhile. 2 Voting for the Libertarian Party will somehow advance the cause of liberty. 3 My vote for Hillary or Trump would make a difference in the outcome of the vote and since both are hated, they\u2019d likely be able to get very little done in office and gridlock would occur. You can keep the above in mind before I discuss my points. 4 I should vote just because of the initiatives for my local community since my vote matters there. Moments of major importance in the history of liberty rarely come from political action, but from the market. It was not the unions that allowed us to live beyond an awful life of 12 hour days in a factory, but the increased productive ability of each individual at the factory when new technology came along. The future of liberty follows the same path. Automation will replace many jobs and the economy will transform again to new sectors that few people know of today. What 1850s farmer could have believed that in only a couple lifetimes only two percent of the US population would work on a farm? Even an educated individual could not foresee the massive changes the makeup of the american economy. I believe that encryption and other technological advances will hinder the ability of the government to enact its will upon the people and black markets will continue to thrive at an accelerating rate. The Silk Road is one example, even if the government eventually took it down, but more will pop up. And hopefully for more beneficial markets than drugs, like human organs. I see the above, and other forms of agorism, as the only way liberty will advance in the coming years. I don\u2019t think democratic means will ever help the cause of liberty for a few reasons 1 There is an inequality of incentives inherent in a democracy. This video gives a good concise explanation of why laws are passed that benefit only the rich and well connected. And this has been happening much longer than the Citizens United case, so overturning that would do no good. By having a concentrated monopoly on law, powerful interests will always collude for their benefit at the expense of others. 2 Seeing which policies do and do not work has very little effect on the political views of most people. In general, when people need to make decisions about something, they are most rational and devote the most time to the decision when it affects them the most. Politics is not one of these situations. People are irrational about politics and for good reason. Even though americans have seen that alcohol prohibition didn\u2019t work, they cannot make the connection to marijuana, or other drugs. 3 Democracies have a tendency to lean populist. Politicians can become popular by adhering to a nation\u2019s fear of foreigners and other irrationalities that are unlikely to change. So we get people like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders who want to have massively protectionist economic policies, even though protectionism is harmful to the nation. Need I mention the wall? The point here is that populism is the natural direction of democracy and totally opposed to liberty. It\u2019s probably clear by now that I don\u2019t believe we should have a democracy. What we should have is another discussion, but I\u2019d be in favor of some form of anarchy, even if it devolves into city states. Nonetheless, I see only six major ways to try to advance liberty 1 Violent revolution This will not work. When a revolution occurs, the security of the average citizen is threatened, so they\u2019re more willing to give up more liberty so the violence may stop. 2 Secession I\u2019m definitely in favor of this because it will decentralize power, even if only by a small amount. There is the argument that it will hurt free trade, which is valid, but overall I will favor something more decentralized. If my ballot included a measure for secession, I\u2019d go vote. 3 Engagement in the Political Process I don\u2019t think this is very worthwhile. Sure, Ron Paul got many people interested in liberty, but I don\u2019t believe that liberty need be a \u201cbig tent movement\u201d. The advances are rarely caused by many people arguing for it on ideological grounds, or even practical ones. 4 Education of Peers I\u2019m mixed here. I don\u2019t think it would do too much because of political irrationality, but for people who are willing to hold an argument it\u2019s worth a shot. 5 Agorism This, I believe, is the most effective way to advance liberty. Through technological advances, especially in the digital realm, the power of the state can be diminished. 6 Sea Steading Creating New Nations I don\u2019t think this is worthy today, but maybe in the future. Not a lot of decent land isn\u2019t under control by a central government anymore, and seasteading would have high costs for average people to start it today. I made the above list to avoid the counter argument of \u201cIf you don\u2019t vote, you\u2019re not doing anything nothing will be done\u201d. Advances will likely be made outside of the political process. And I intend to participate in these. I\u2019m studying statistics and computer science and hope to be able to work in some sort of agorist business some day. I feel I\u2019ve outlined 1 why democracy as a whole won\u2019t help liberty and 2 ways that liberty will be advanced. But I haven\u2019t gotten to why my vote wouldn\u2019t make a difference. For that, I\u2019ll refer to the four main arguments that I could be convinced of that I laid out at the top. 1 Voting for lesser of two evils is worthwhile. It\u2019s still evil. Sure it may be less bad, but suppose I were captured by a murderous group of people and asked how I wanted to die, lethal injection or electrocution. I would not be concerned with my decision there because I would be looking for other ways to escape the situation. The same reasoning applies to voting. 2 The Libertarian Party. It seems like it\u2019s always going to be a useless venture for the LP. They are terrible at packaging themselves for the general public and will never amount to more than a few percent. Maybe I\u2019d give them a vote if they chose a candidate that was able to bring in people from both the left and right, but none of the current candidates could do that. And again, voters will tend toward populism, which the LP can\u2019t really represent, so I don\u2019t think they\u2019ll ever be able to gain traction or make significant moves. One could argue that by increasing their voter base, major party candidates would have to pander to the LP to get their vote, but to do so would alienate a lot of their base, so I doubt it\u2019d be effective. 3 Hillary Trump and gridlock. This is probably the best argument one could give. Since the president has the most power in the government, and all the candidates are awful, I should vote for the ones least likely to accomplish their goals, or any goals at all. I think Trump probably fits this best. Both parties hate him and would stop many of his motions. I\u2019d also expect Trump to use his veto power more often than average, so when congress does get together to do something usually bad for liberty it can be stopped by Trump. I guess my best argument against this is that if I\u2019m voting for a major candidate, then my vote almost certainly won\u2019t be the one to make a difference. Hell, it\u2019s a practical certainty. It also doesn\u2019t sit right with me to vote for such a vile person, since a vote implies support. 4 Local election nonsense. I come from a smaller than average town of about 7000. They\u2019re all democratic socialists and any libertarian vote would be lost. Also, as a college student, I own no property there, so I haven\u2019t learned about what measures are designed for what purposes. I never plan on being there for more than a week at a time in the future, so I don\u2019t consider myself its citizen. And I\u2019d feel wrong to enforce my view upon others. Also, my voice would still never make a difference even if the support for something was roughly 50 . Or at least the probability of all votes other than me being perfectly split is extremely small. So convince me otherwise. Even other anarchists vote when the election rolls around, so maybe I should as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a libertarian, I will not vote in any election in 2016\n","id":"b39c37a4-a37b-49c9-b09b-aa88f831f786"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface this by saying that I support anybody who would like to embody any sex gender role they can possibly imagine. Are you a man who wants to dress like a woman? I love you. Are you a woman who wants to bench press 400lbs and be the sole breadwinner of your household? I love you. Are you a trans person who wants to dress as a dragon? I love you. However, I don't support the idea of a man woman claiming to really me a woman man on the inside. Someone born into the world as a man has absolutely no idea what it means to be a woman. Someone born as a man cannot do anything more than try to imagine the biological, mental, and behavioral characteristics associated with women. They can extrapolate and emulate, but that's as far as I can see it. To reiterate if you are a man who wants to act like what your idea of a woman is, I am totally OK with that. However, I do not believe you when you claim to be a woman on the inside, because I believe that only a woman can truly know what it means to be a woman. I am really interested on hearing alternate viewpoints. This is a very hard topic to talk about in real life, because I find that people react very viscerally. I would love to hear your view. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that a man claiming to \"identify as a woman\" is just as absurd as a white person claiming to \"identify as an African American.\"\n","id":"c41bd531-77c3-462e-8c91-c492ae2fcfc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>The only true goal in nature is survival, so what is valid is what objectively gives continuity to your species. As different cultures both achieve this goal with different moral codes, one could say that morality is a social construct and is, therefore, subjective.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Morality derives from subjective sources, and is therefore itself subjective.\n","id":"6a6ae391-e8f4-4ad4-919a-b1a9c645d545"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>Many people with experience of Communist dictatorship, including former political prisoners, dissidents and politicians, feel and point out 1 similarities between the Soviet Union and the EU, with the latter just being unable to exert such pressure. A USE would only further increase this opinion and empower calls for secession from supra-national institutions to regain liberty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The creation of a strengthened monopoly of power could harm those who have differing or opposing views to the central government. This is underlined by today's EU behavior, which already reveals some signs of totalitarian tendencies.\n","id":"97d8052e-4b39-4a00-ad87-a129338f1623"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should same-sex marriage be legalised in Australia?<|ARGUMENT|>New Zealand became the 13th country worldwide to legalise gay marriage in 2013 It was passed into law with 77 ayes against 44 noes<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many other countries in the world have allowed same-sex marriage\n","id":"beb4389e-e342-400d-8466-dd48b9abbaac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Because I don't know much about the theology of religions other than Christianity, I'll use this religion as my example and hope it works as a proper representation of other religions like judaism and islam. Some basic tenets of Christianity are as follows God is just, good, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, loving, and eternal. Every human, after dying, will be judged in front of God. They will either go to Heaven or Hell, depending on This is where different branches of Christianity diverge. Some preach that one must claim Jesus Christ as lord and saviour. Some preach that you must simply live a humble life of service to the poor. The actual details don't matter here, as you'll see. The important factor is that you have to do something to get into heaven, and if you don't do it you'll go to hell. My argument is as follows If God is just by the normal definition of just , then he must punish and reward humans in accordance with their actions. Disobediance must be punished, obedience must be rewarded. Here's where it starts to break down Under most human laws, the punishment must fit the crime. Murder must be punished my execution. Stealing must be punished by cutting off fingers older laws, at least . Generally, the level of punishment must match the level of crime. You can't execute someone for stealing, and you can't simply fine somebody for raping another person. Even in the Bible, law is laid out in a likewise manner. An eye for an eye, and a foot for a foot. Why is it that Christianity is allowed to preach such a double standard? When you go to hell, it's forever. When you go to heaven, it's forever. What kind of crime could possibly require an infinite punishment? What sort of act of kindness could desereve an infinite reward? You can't kill an infinite number of people. You can't feed an infinite number of homeless. This is simple mathematics, and it follows directly from the very law christianity seems to teach. the fundamentalist Christians would probably claim that I'm projecting human definitions onto a God whom defies human comprehension. Well, I am. Basically, God handed down a very cut and dry definition of justice, and then claimed that it didn't apply to the afterlife. Why wouldn't it? If I tell a kid he'll go into time out if he steals a cookie, he understands that the punishment is somehow restoring balance. But then if I say, but, if you don't tell your friends how great I am, you'll never eat cookies again. And it's gotta be today. Better go find your friends, he'd think that was completely unfair, and he'd be right. So why does God get to do it? I know this argument is laced with emotion, but I really am trying to appeal to reason. If the human definition of justice applies to God, then heaven and hell are both completely unjust and paradoxical. Inversely, if it doesn't apply, then heaven and hell might be just and fair by god's definition , but in a way that is an insult to human reason, and I'd be obligated to give God the finger if s he tried to send me to heaven or hell. In short, my view is that humans have no obligation or reason to worship a god who is not, by human standards, fair and just. While god certainly is not bound by human definitions, I think it's ludicrous to worship him her if s he doesn't obey what human's understand as logic. While the act of defying human logic is not necessarily evil quantum mechanics defies human logic my argument is that humans have no grounds to trust a conscious being which defies logic. One might say, but if he defies logic, then we have no choice but to trust him. And I'd say that's B.S. We can trust quantum mechanics because it's been verified experimentally over and over. God can't be experimented on, he can only be reasoned about. If he defies reason, then he might as well be an insubstantial ghost with no bearing on reality. What really pisses me off is the possibility that I might end up in hell for relying on reason, while others end up in heaven for abandoning it. Since I allowed emotion to slip into my argument, I'll allow minor appeals to emotion, but please try to convince me using solid reason and logic. Perhaps I'm merely misinterpretting christian theology, but I'd say it was pretty cut and dry. I know this was a lot, so let me summarize Christianity and other religions teaches that god is just, and we'll all either end up in either heaven or hell. Justice by human definition requires that punishments fit crimes. Finite crime finite punishment. There is no such thing as an infinite crime. Ergo, infinite punishments are unjust. By symmetry, infinite rewards are unjust. Reason is humanity's most reliable tool. Abandoning it should be punished, not rewarded. If god rewards us for abandoning reason, or punishes us for relying on it, then I hate him, and I believe that hate is completely justified under god's own law, making it a very paradoxical and contradictory situation. EDIT 1 It's come to my attention that I was making a blanket generalization abou christian theology. I wasn't aware that many sects preach a non permanent Heaven Hell. In that case, my argument doesn't apply to those sects, only to sects that preach permanent hell and a {fair, just, good, loving, omnipotent} god. The only such sect that's been mentioned thus far is protestant christianity, in which I was raised by my parents. Many of my friends also follow this particular teaching. Therefore I'm trying to acquire some talking points for my discussions with them about heaven hell god. My view still hasn't been changed, so please continue to try to do so. The main point that hasn't really been contested, and yet is truly my central argument, is as follows Any religion, which preaches a permanent heaven and hell and a {fair, just, good, loving, omnipotent} god is logically inconsistent. This is because finite crimes and finite decisions should not require infinite punishments and infinite consequences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think any religion which preaches \"heaven vs hell\" while claiming their god to be just and good is logically inconsistent.\n","id":"802dddf0-bf8f-4f92-b825-afcb39c07531"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many different religions and what they have stated as 'Right' or 'Wrong' has varied tremendously on all matters from diet to how we should treat each other. If morality is objective because of a divine mandate then different religions should all agree on what is moral.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moral values in religions are communicated narratively, and then amass a contemporary discourse that connects them to our everyday lives. Therefore they are in constant flux.\n","id":"fd596917-3e48-401e-bd16-54fd4d8d26eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should there be one World Government?<|ARGUMENT|>Despite being offered chances to avail education opportunities, an estimated 131 million girls worldwide remain out of school and face multiple barriers to education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women and young girls face a number of social, religious and cultural barriers that prevent them from achieving education.\n","id":"036176ba-75f1-4b3a-8ab5-f057c6045784"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think as a super hero movie Batman Begins does a better job than the dark Knight. The plot is believable the characters are memorable and I don't have to suspend belief like I do for the Dark Knight in some areas. For one i think that Ra's Al Ghul is a better villain, and the father son dynamic between him and Wayne adds character the Joker can't. I think the atmosphere of Gotham is better, and you see more of the city. A big problem I have with the Dark Knight is how willing Harvey Dent is to turn evil. I know Rachel's death was traumatizing, but I don't think it would alter his character to that extreme. What do you think?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Batman Begins is better than The Dark Knight.\n","id":"dbc292db-2813-4942-9449-6a73c9aed2bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The original House of Cards is set amongst the pageantry and procession of the House of Commons contrasted with the cutting edge of politics in the early 1990s in Britain, a time when government values of back to basics contrasted with what was actually going on in the corridors of power. Francis Urquhart is masterfully played by Ian Richardson who is so likeable and slick that he manages to deceive the viewer into following along with his game until the fourth episode of the first series. What happens afterwards no spoilers is one of the most shocking things I've ever watched, because you just don't see it coming and you're rooting for FU. By contrast, I don't feel that Kevin Spacey manages to pull off the venom and slyness of the character. His performances can be a little cardboard and he doesn't come across as inherently detestable but respectable as Urquhart does. His fourth wall monologues just don't strike me like Richardson's do. Richardson's background as a Shakespearean actor makes his inner Macbeth come out. Richardson is backed up by superb performances by lesser known actors. Especially striking is Colin Jeavons as Tim Stamper, who is brilliant as a bully and blackmailer to advance the plot. The US remake lacks any kind of equivalent of Stamper.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the original British series of House of Cards is infinitely superior to the US remake, and yet is completely overlooked to the extent that people don't even know it exists.\n","id":"1958a321-bb2e-4d42-af09-2ae6ceb24bf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mandatory calorie counts on menus<|ARGUMENT|>While it may be true that some tests have shown that many restaurant goers do not necessarily pay attention to calorie counts, this will change over time as more customers learn that the information is there and learn how to read calorie counts appropriately and judge them according to one's optimal daily calorie intake. The tests that have been performed, therefore, do not indicate how customers will respond to a new culture of calorie counts over time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Customers will pay more attention to calorie counts over time.\n","id":"0ad5f5cf-7423-4f80-bba8-78d47eee0252"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU introduce a carbon tax?<|ARGUMENT|>High carbon industries will likely just shift production to countries where there is no carbon tax, rather than reducing their emissions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Introducing a carbon tax will not lead to a significant reduction of carbon emissions.\n","id":"848fcd12-2d0d-47e5-aace-6f66f417d7f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the advent of universal health care, and reduced costs of genotyping services, people can be screened for mutations that have a very high chance of being passed on to children, that could lead to an early death or extremely diminished quality of life. Not to mention the burden upon society and taxpayers as these people are treated with taxpayer dollars before their early demises. In addition, the treatment of these people living long enough to reproduce maintains, or magnifies, the prevalence of that gene within the gene pool a sort of 'negative evolution.' I believe this should happen at least until universal gene therapy is cheap enough for everyone to receive treatment to 'knockout' defective genes or by some other means, cure these people of their genetic genes, or prevent them from being passed on.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think people with gross genetic abnormalities, with a high probability of passing on deadly genes to offspring, and with no means of access to gene therapy, should be sterilized.\n","id":"6ceaf2b5-6ba0-4202-9e6d-7f3ed24b916d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The major conflict in this film is that Iron Man thinks that the Avengers should operate under the jurisdiction of the United Nations, per the Sakovia Accords. Captain America, on the other hand thinks that's a bad idea. Here's the thing though those two ideas aren't different in any meaningful way whatsoever. Let me demonstrate In the first Avengers film, the Avengers operate under the control of SHIELD, a governmental body. In the film, some alien baddies come and threaten the world. The Avengers assemble, save the day, and there's an immeasurable amount of collateral damage. In the second film, the Avengers do not operate under the control of SHIELD. Some robot baddies come and threaten the world. The Avengers assemble, save the day, and there's an immeasurable amount of collateral damage. Both Iron Man's position pro government oversight and Captain America's position no government oversight have been attempted and in both instances the outcome is completely identical. Now, ordinarily, I would say, hey, it's a comic book movie, just ignore the silly plot and go along for the ride, but this movie doesn't allow you to do that. The whole point of this movie is for the viewer to pick a side. Who do you agree with, Iron Man or Captain America? Who's position makes more sense? Which Avenger is the most Avengeriest Avenger Man? You're forced to think about their positions on the issue and come to a conclusion for yourself, even though the differences in their positions are totally insignificant. Furthermore, the way these two assemble their sides is totally nonsensical. Iron Man becomes pro government oversight when he finds out that a teenage science genius was killed in Sakovia. He feels guilty that he put a very talented young man in harm's way and feels responsible for his death. Later, when it comes time to recruit heroes for his cause he goes out and picks up Peter Parker. Peter Parker, who is a teenager science genius. To fight for his philosophy, that he arrived at by endangering a teenager, he endangers a teenager. Likewise, when Captain America is finding heroes to help his vigilante cause, he recruits Ant Man. Ant Man, who's whole character motivation is that he's an ex con who misses his daughter. The whole point of Ant Man is that he doesn't want to go back to jail, so that he can spend more time with his daughter. That dude is teaming up with Captain America, a fugitive actively fleeing several different governments. This Doesn't Make Any Sense. I do not understand why anybody likes this movie. . EDIT there are a lot of posts here that make me think I'm not articulating my point well enough, so I'll add it here. The two main characters are fighting over details of a piece of legislation. We, as the viewer, do not have those details, because if those details existed they couldn't possibly make any sense. There are no stakes to this dispute. It doesn't matter to me, the viewer, who wins, because 1 i can't make sense of their philosophical differences and, 2 no matter who wins, the end result is going to be a third avengers movie where the avengers save the world from some grave threat.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The plot of \"Captain America: Civil War\" makes no sense, and the movie sucks as a result.\n","id":"0194cb4c-106b-4f8f-8ddf-45f8f7004c87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the BAR exam be eliminated as a requirement to practice law?<|ARGUMENT|>21% of New Mexico's counties have 5 or fewer lawyers, and 2 counties have no attorneys at all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are a number of states where there are nowhere near enough lawyers for the general population.\n","id":"5ad0084e-1f11-41f3-b487-99a561c1e223"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This does not necessarily apply to people who join the military for educational purposes or because there are no other jobs available. Since the end of WWII, the United States has been involved in many foreign wars that do not benefit the American people and engage combatants who pose no threat to American lives or American soil. There have been many instances Korea, Vietnam and Laos, Cuba, Guatemala, Congo, Libya, Iraq on several occasions, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Yemen, and now possibly Syria. The merit of some of these is more debatable than others, but most people would agree that at least some of these wars did not serve enough purpose to the US to warrant military involvement. In that time there have been no wars actually on American soil or against American lives with the exception of terrorist attacks . So when people say they join the military to serve their country, they must realize that they are infinitely more likely to be sent to a war that doesn't have much at all to do with their country than to actually protect American soil or American lives. Therefore, the very action of joining the military shows support for these wars and the ever growing military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us of. There are other ways to serve your country and community that actually do save American lives and earn respect for your nation, such as law enforcement, fire fighters, school teachers, foreign service, or even the Peace Corps. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that joining the US military is supporting the growth of the military industrial complex and American involvement in foreign wars.\n","id":"1934696b-6699-4502-a6d2-8934132208c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The professional cultures of investment banking, technology startups, law, and a few other intellectually demanding fields all conflate hours worked with productivity. Every banker under 35 who works on Wall Street is expected to put in at least 80 hours of work per week and putting in just this amount is seen as slacking. All tech startups in San Francisco operate under the belief that putting in any fewer hours is a recipe for guaranteed failure. Even companies as large as Google and Apple are notorious for normalizing extremely long workdays. However, a wide body of research shows that working such long hours is counterproductive. Sleep deprivation, which is unavoidable in such environments, impairs cognitive performance and increases the frequency of errors. Software development involves considerable creativity and constant problem solving, and both elements become very difficult when programmers are forced to work long hours, which causes net productivity to plummet Putting in this many hours is nothing more than a way of signalling to your social group that you're worthy of membership. Contrary to perception, it doesn't actually improve productivity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I the glorification of 80+ hour work weeks in certain professions is idiotic\n","id":"c7c337e5-218f-4680-98d8-a9961f310730"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should quotas for women on boards and in managerial positions be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>One approach to address the disproportionality on corporate boards is the adoption of a \u201ccomply or explain governance system which requires companies to address the issue of proportionate gender representation with regards to board and executive appointments in their company filings and other reports and to explain the reason for any failure to comply with particular gender guidelines set out by government regulators.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are alternatives to the legislated quota system that have lesser harms and can help achieve gender equality in the workplace.\n","id":"913c8542-c7d2-45e0-a497-ab3bce31120d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Because the electoral college happens halfway through the voting process, dissenters are actually counted for the people they oppose. For example, the voting power of Michigan is calculated base at least partly on its population. So someone living in Michigan contributes, to some small extent, to the power of their electoral college, which means that though they might vote for candidate A, if candidate B takes the state, the voter's influence is given to the person they opposed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The all or nothing nature of the electoral college deters citizens from participating in the political process, because it leads to situations where one vote won't change the outcome on the state level, thus rendering the votes of people outside swing states essentially meaningless.\n","id":"634753db-369e-4040-b5b9-562c0fdf5710"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>It has not been demonstrated that omnibenevolence must be defined so as to be logically inconsistent with permitting the presence of any kind of evil for any duration. As it stands, the inconsistency is tautologically assumed, not explicitly demonstrated.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is possible for an omnibenevolent God to tolerate evil in some sense.\n","id":"6c6a70b2-59ba-4348-86bc-54d3bf1aac54"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Take animals for instance. We may observe the evolution of their thinking process different evolutionary branches at different stages of intelligence, and yet animals don't seem to perform any religious activities. The conclusion is that the evolution of thought is independent from existence of religion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is more likely that structured thinking evolved from intercomunicating useful information. There is no need for religion to explain this process.\n","id":"94830719-110e-4872-bbbc-2288f184aa02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Existing scientific journals should be flipped to fair open access models<|ARGUMENT|>Accessing paywalled journals is difficult even when you have the right to access it due to heavy copyright protection. Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Existing scientific journals should be flipped to fair open access publishing models. Fair Open Access Alliance\n","id":"c5c57710-c156-47fa-be40-7776d1f94163"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To begin, I'd like to state that I don't deny Churchill having been a pivotal historical figure he did make a large contribution to the war. However that is not reason enough to be immortalised on a banknote. Firstly, we must remember what Churchill is mostly remembered for, which is as I have said war. I'd argue that the over glorification of Churchill is a glorification of war itself, which could be seen a symptom of the creeping in of American style jingoism to the public consciousness in the UK. Should we not in this modern world glorify instead peaceful figures? Furthermore, I disagree with the concept of putting former Prime Ministers on money. There is, for example, the inherent unfairness of having a Conservative PM immortalised without doing the same for a Labour or Liberal PM Gladstone comes to mind . But apart even from that, former Prime Ministers, especially Churchill, have already more than enough recognition. Furthermore, someone put on a banknote should be someone on whom all the people of the UK, from all four constituent nations, can agree. Churchill, being a politician, is inherently a divisive figure. You would not be hard pressed to find many of his detractors in Scotland and Northern Ireland, for example. You may argue here that, as it is a Bank of England note, it need only appeal to English people. However, BoE notes circulate heavily across the UK. So who are these widely agreeable figures? Well, look at the list of those who have come before, for example Isaac Newton, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Micheal Faraday, Charles Darwin, Adam Smith, and soon to be joined by Jane Austen. All greats of science and literature, and having such people on money, rather than political figures as many other countries do, was once a source of national pride for me. I believe that those put on banknotes should continue in the same vein. Of course, Churchill did write, but mostly his own memoirs and some overly nationalistic histories.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Winston Churchill shouldn't be on the new \u00a35 note.\n","id":"1f9c7015-43d0-44d2-a572-6f1c992128ab"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Dictatorships Receive Development Aid?<|ARGUMENT|>Private firms use lobbying as a substitute for corruption, as it enables direct means of influence with policy makers as well as the exchange of favors between the private and the public sector Campos & Giovannoni, p. 21<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In democracies, corruption has evolved into different forms which are not considered as illegal, but the purpose remains: to use the political system in order to enforce private interests.\n","id":"d133dffa-98a9-4323-9e23-337d507239ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a young gay woman and I've been doing some thinking and it would absolutely be better for me to be straight. I wouldn't have to deal with bigotry from my extended family. I could tell colleagues that I went on a date without worrying that they would hate me for doing so. I would have representation of people like me in the media and they wouldn't die, be used for comic relief, or be fetishized . I would never have gone through the months of self loathing for being different and wrong. I don't see any benefits to being gay, but I am definitely open to having my view changed<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would be preferable to be straight\n","id":"1c16a6ff-3e99-493f-8fbf-2674d8d9489a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Individuals Be Allowed Paid Period Leave?<|ARGUMENT|>Where women are entitled to a set number of days paid menstrual leave per annum, they would be encouraged to only take the days off they need as they will be guaranteed the extra payment if leave remained not taken. This could increase productivity in the workplace.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In countries such as South Korea, women are entitled to additional pay if they do not use their menstrual leave.\n","id":"c1a2ec73-e487-45b2-b134-951d7a307264"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Activists often speak of adherence to social norms as a force that perpetuates oppression in society. Specifically, let\u2019s look at gender. The argument goes that society values men more than women, and will thus value masculine traits more than feminine ones and encourage men and women to conform to gender expectations from a young age. Acceptance of gender norms perpetuates the norms and oppression according to this theory. Unfortunately, although the theory is accurate, the implications of this theory are problematic the theory implies that conformity or acceptance of any norm is bad, because it perpetuates oppression. This would be true regardless of personal beliefs or desires. the theory implies that men don\u2019t deserve the privileges they have and benefit from the system regardless of beliefs. It basically proposes that men should apologize to society for their unfair advantage and give up those advantages to be on even terms with everyone else. Both of these ideas completely disregard personal freedom of expression and opportunity. We should be bringing the disadvantaged up, not holding the advantaged back, and I should never have to apologize for being who I am as a well off cisgender heterosexual white male, people in this department don\u2019t really like me . More contentiously, I belief that norms are only problematic if they don\u2019t allow people freedom to choose. Going with this, I believe it\u2019s ok to present options to people. Parents and society have this right to shape their future members that is not oppression. What matters is knowing that you have options, and making an informed decision. If a girl want to play with dolls and become a secretary, there is nothing wrong with that. If a boy wants to do the same, there\u2019s nothing wrong with that either. Hopefully, they\u2019ve considered the available options, but that\u2019s ultimately on them. It\u2019s their life. As long as you are allowed to reject what I\u2019d presented to you, there is nothing wrong with presenting an idea. I believe outreach programs such as women in STEM are good for presenting options, but not good in and of themselves. There is no inherent value in rejecting social norms equality should come because people choose it to, not because of some social theory. If girls are ok wearing pink, there\u2019s no reason stop them from doing so. And if a boy wants to wear pink, he should be able to, but there\u2019s no reason to make the other boys who like wearing blue also wear pink. This is the essence of individual liberty. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Individual freedoms should be prioritized over social equality\n","id":"f81ae8fe-8c58-4e48-8407-13548ac86635"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>According to a survey of 28 countries, an average of 41% of citizens trust their government. In three out of four countries, the majority does not trust the government. This level of trust is even lower than that of the media Edelman, p. 12, 13<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Additionally, based on the logic that a lack of trust and legitimacy in an actor makes a powerful role of that actor problematic, power should be taken from politicians via referendums. Politicians are in a legitimacy crisis much more severe than the media.\n","id":"9405a8cb-5c2f-4288-a724-f1e484c2bce1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Extremist Political Parties Should Be Banned<|ARGUMENT|>The recent rise in popularity of right wing extremist parties across Europe - from Le Pen in France to Pim Fortuyn in Holland, not including the success of the BNP in Burnley council - shows the success that appealing to voters on extremist grounds can have. It is not good enough to say that there is no threat, or that parties are not successful. We have a duty to act against a threat to our society in the form of extremism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The recent rise in popularity of right wing extremist parties across Europe - from Le Pen in France ...\n","id":"89185538-768a-490f-a554-8f0c4bd855dc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am from Minnesota and we are having kind of a blood bath Minnesota nice style in our legislator about our budget. Unlike our neighbors to the east Wisconsin we have a 900 Million budget surplus, down from 1200 Million. We have 3 basic camps of logic on what to do. The GOP wants to return this to tax payers and businesses, the DFL wants to keep the taxes the way they are but expand social services. The going around is funding a Medicare for all which could be funded for a few years just off this surplus. Governor Dayton DFL wants to roll a huge part of it over into the next budget year, and expand all day Pre K school to start at age 3 for all school districts. The biggest contributions to the surplus were a one time payment from the tobacco industry 2 years ago that was never spent, well bellow expected expenses in MNSUR Obama care , and a new business to business tax that has already been drastically scaled back, and an economy that has grown larger than was predicted over the last 4 years. I am personally with Governor Dayton. No reason to see a short term windfall and overact. I see what happens in Wisconsin where I have family and Kansas with Brownback and I fear just slashing taxes for the sake of businesses. I also don\u2019t see the need for more services although I am a white male with a Master\u2019s degree and have a posh life . So give me an honest answer about what you think we should do and why.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Don't Change Minnesota Taxes or Expenditures, despite budget surplus\n","id":"aa1f1476-3422-44f6-aef6-85db73193269"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was thinking about why we have literature, and what it's purpose is to our society. You could say entertainment , but I think it's more than just that. Most works of literature have some sort of moral dilemma that questions an aspect of our society. A good piece of writing is designed to make the reader feel empathetic towards the characters, so the events that occur due to the choices the characters make with regards to the dilemma, in the end will suggest to the reader what is right versus what is wrong . I was discussing this with my girlfriend the other day, and we used To Kill a Mockingbird as an example. My point was that this book shows among other things that racism and prejudice is morally wrong. She argued that this wasn't the intention of the book the book just addresses the issue of prejudice in a neutral way, and it is up to the reader's internal moral compass to decide whether racism is right or wrong. While it is certainly possible to read the book and not have your views on racism changed, I argue that it was the author's intention to suggest that it was wrong. Here, I extend my argument to the majority of all literature. Great works of literature such as To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, Catcher in the Rye, etc, are all intended to persuade readers to one side of a moral issue. Over history, stories and literature are a great way of defining what we as a race have defined as right and wrong. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The purpose of literature is to define morality.\n","id":"110a6400-9f65-4895-91d1-d9720d9eb452"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was thinking about this before my appeal earlier today, and it just doesn't make sense to me. I got pulled over for driving too close to a school bus which I wasn't , unknowingly having a tail light out in the middle of the day, and not having my registration on me. All three charges were waived, but I had to pay a 25 fee just to appeal the ticket. A system like this gives police officers not only the ability, but also an incentive to abuse power. They can knowingly give bullshit tickets knowing that the only options a person has is to 1 deal with it and pay the ticket, or 2 file an appeal, take time out of their day to go argue the ticket, and even if they win and the officer was wrong, they lose 25. That's about it really, so .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Police officers should be required to pay the appeal fee if I am found not responsible.\n","id":"131638d0-762f-468f-95bb-53c53c01940a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that the old adage, If it's yellow let it mellow if it's brown flush it down has the potential to eliminate a great deal of unnecessary waste. If all of us stopped flushing each time we peed and instead only flushed when it was really necessary we would be able to save a staggering amount of water over time. It's easy feasible to save 3 5 gallons of flushed water per person, per day I just made those rough numbers from the ol' noggin so they could be off? . A cultural shift in this regards would save hundreds of billions of gallons in flushed water per year. Sidebar I also think that when the situation presents itself, peeing in the sink is a okay. Change my views?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should stop flushing each time after they urinate.\n","id":"039ad0c5-5cb2-44d0-8c5f-ae6f8752526c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tibet independence<|ARGUMENT|>This argument is simply meant to frame the legal debate. The PRC makes no claim to sovereign rights over Tibet as a result of its military subjugation and occupation of Tibet following the country's invasion in 1949-1950. China does not argue that it has acquired sovereignty by means of annexation in this period. Rather, it bases its claim to Tibet solely on the theory that Tibet has been an integral part of China for centuries. Therefore, the below arguments against China's historical claims represent a complete legal case against China's claim to sovereignty over Tibet starting in 1949.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The PRC bases its legal claim to Tibet solely on historical grounds\n","id":"fab7ae5c-6c5d-49a8-bd32-e72c9d645fc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Turkey be part of the European Union?<|ARGUMENT|>The Economist intelligence unit's 2017 index stated that less than half of the nations in the European Union are \"fully democratic\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are already states in the EU that don't \"play by the rules\".\n","id":"73fb7863-9b38-4fde-8a19-b6dde31c9804"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>The high street T-shirt brand Whistles and feminist campaign group The Fawcett Society are currently caught in a fashion scandal after the publication of allegations that their collaborative \u2018This Is What A Feminist Looks Like\u2019 T-shirts are made in a Mauritian sweatshop by women earning 62p an hour.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many female empowerment T-shirt brands are exposed of employing exploitative practices for women who manufacture them.\n","id":"c0517059-bfc7-4123-a037-acc83c123ceb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There are a few different reasons I believe this. Discrimination and pay inequality would be much more apparent and easily identified. It incentivizes a more merit based employment system. If everyone can easily see that Bill is making 20k more than me, but I do all the work, employers and managers will have to justify this somehow. Related to the first point. It produces a more competitive and fluid labor market. If I work at Wal Mart for minimum wage, but easily see the workers at Costco are making 10 an hour, it creates pressure on my employer to match that or for me to shop my skills out elsewhere. It allows realistic and functional debates over things like wealth inequality, labor prices, minimum wages, etc. How much does Mcdonald's spend on labor across the entire business? Who knows The data just isn't available for analysis. It provides consumers another tool to discriminate among competing companies, increasing competition and thereby improving the market. It also allows potential investors and shareholders more data on which to evaluate companies. So really, I can't think of many downsides. Sure, your neighbor Bob now realizes how much you make, but really, why do we have such a burning desire to keep that private, anyways?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that pay and salary information for every worker should be public and easily accessible for everyone to see.\n","id":"edd2e01a-9031-41d9-bde2-08de744a37c2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we assist Venezuela's crisis recovery?<|ARGUMENT|>A series of measures by the Maduro and Chavez governments have resulted in the stacking of courts with judges that make no pretense of independence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concentration of power in Venezuela and the lack of institutional checks and balances have led to a total absence of accountability and transparency\n","id":"9db9d4bd-29c5-4384-90c7-c0353361b36a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I really get upset when bicyclists ride in the road when a perfectly good sidewalk is available. Im not talking about areas where there are tons of store front and allyways parking lots that are blocked or not easily visable . So many times I see some one riding on the road in high traffic areas and force everyone to stop slow down or go around some one going 20mph in a 35 or 40mph zone. It ridiculous. I know its against the law in a lot of places but in most cases the sidewalk is a perfectly fine place to ride that causes no one any inconveniences. I travel a certain road every day that has the highest amount of nonhighway traffic in the area and I always see traffic slow downs caused by people on bikes riding in the road. Theres a perfectly good sidewalk with almost no foot traffic ever. On this same road an entire group of bikers, about 7 or 8, taking an entire lane and barley moving along in a 35mph zone and traffic was backed up as far down the road I could see. I know people are going to say people pulling out of the driveways and businesses arentnlooking at the sidewalk. Thats your job too. They should be, yes, but so should you. the sidewalk is often uneven and bumpy. If a sidewalk is extremely dilapidated, sure, I can agree with you. But thats not the case most of the time. if you cant do the speed limit you shouldnt be on that road. the vast majority of people on bikes I see never huge the shoulder. they dont follow normal traffic laws red lights and stop signs my bottom line view point bikes riding in the road in large busy cities with lots of foot traffic and store fronts are fine but other than that should have to ride on sidewalks. If you can use a sidewalk, and dont, I think youre an asshole regardless of whether or not its against the law. Theres no way I would ever be that inconsiderate to hundreds of other people in cars because its against the law to ride on a sidewalk or you just want to ride in the road because its nicer and simply because you can Thats all I can think of at the moment. Edit with the amount of people texting and talking on phones, why the hell would you wamt to risk being infront of or next to them. Since you have to ride with traffic you cant see the distracted people coming up behind you. If cars are supposed to have insurance for driving on the road, why shouldnt bikes if theyre riding on the road too. They can damage your vehicle by running into it too. If cars are supposed to hsve certain safty features in order to drive why can bicyclists ride without them?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I dont believe bicycles should be in the same class as motor vehicles and shouldnt be allowed to ride on the road except for largely populated areas.\n","id":"5cf448dd-b0cb-447e-bc2b-2b59e9c7da3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the Primary Focus of Prisons be Rehabilitation, or Punishment?<|ARGUMENT|>If you attempt to rehabilitate someone who was innocent, you're not out as much. Maybe this person was in the wrong place, wrong time, and can learn to avoid being in that situation. At least the goal is betterment of that individual. If you punish someone that's innocent, you've done nothing but set the government up for punitive damages.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is morally acceptable for prisons to focus on rehabilitation.\n","id":"a50a073c-bce6-44b3-9b5e-58dec1c07561"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should some teachers be armed?<|ARGUMENT|>If children know the faculty could be armed, it likely would improve school discipline. People tend to be more law-abiding when around armed police officers. Arming teachers would have the same effect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Arming teachers would emphasize their role as figures of authority, thereby improving discipline in schools.\n","id":"0bea85fb-f7b0-4801-a6e5-8a3cf4fdee1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The way I understand it, anxiety arises mainly from uncertainty. We live in an extremely turbulent time. The length of jobs are getting shorter and less and less people get an opportunity to have a permanent job. Gender identities have become fluid and no one seems to know what\u2019s going on. Traditional societies are losing their distinct ways of life. Data processing and communication speeds are getting faster leading people to come face to face with utterly alien practices, cultures, views every day. I think these social changes contribute to the increased levels of anxiety people seem to be experiencing. I don\u2019t think there is a way back to stability other than abolishing internet . I think anxiety is here to stay and will continue to grow. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a bad thing though. Perhaps all we need is a new attitude towards it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Anxiety is not a disorder to be treated, but is a general feature of our age we have to learn to live with.\n","id":"d039e386-16d4-4816-acfa-716cf5404431"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Euro Was a Mistake<|ARGUMENT|>The ECB is independent. This guarantees stability, which has made the euro a success, but it also controversial because its monetary policy cannot be used as a tool in politics. \"Neither the ECB nor the national central banks NCBs, nor any member of their decision-making bodies, are allowed to seek or take instructions from EU institutions or bodies, from any government of an EU Member State or from any other body<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The European Central Bank is not only independent from a national government, but independent from any particular country within the eurozone. This means it can make plans that are in the best interests of the entire region.\n","id":"3a956459-28c4-4b5e-920c-28d0d75ccb3c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should fracking be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Extracting natural gas with water-free fracking could cost up to 25% more than conventional fracking methods. This is largely because currently companies can use fresh water for free.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"New green technologies for fracking are not always widely adopted as they can be expensive.\n","id":"cc9ebbe9-3ffe-48ff-8b6f-5efa9421a09b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the government require parents to learn sign language if they have deaf child?<|ARGUMENT|>There are many other classes which give parents better skills, for example toddler first aid, and classes\/clubs for child development, eg scouts\/swimming lessons. These are all encouraged, not forced, and are successfully used in society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Forcing the issue would be less effective than encouraging\/supporting it.\n","id":"48e59e5b-4413-4558-a390-204c1f0a89a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>High-income countries could build hospitals and schools in poor countries, in order to educate and cure children and let people live in their homeland without having to face a dangerous journey and the displacement in a totally foreign land.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is more important to focus on dealing with the horrible conditions that makes people flee. There are many issues in the countries that people are fleeing from that high-income countries could help fixing.\n","id":"c824e3fc-5fe2-4cef-a772-67544f61f510"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't mean this theologically, and, rather obviously, I don't mean this biologically. My argument doesn't even require deism. I'm not denying death. I'm saying it is irrelevant to a claim of immortality in some seriously fundamental ways. I think there is a continuity to all conscious experience that justifies the claim, while still acknowledging the breaks in conscious experience that are the death of the individual . The first thing that drove me to think this way was trying to wrestle with some odd cases of neurological damage. Some people wake up from serious comas with different personality characteristics. Sometimes it is a strange accent that they find it difficult to avoid using, but it can also be much more serious. People have no longer been interested in the same hobbies, or intrigued by the same music. They've even had no interest in a spouse, because they wake up with different tastes. So I started to wonder what was really that different between those cases and what happens when one person dies and another is born. It seemed the answer was very little. Both involve a break in conscious experience and then the emergence of another conscious experience with different tastes and desires. Of course, there is overlap because much of the same machinery is being used to generate the new conscious experience, but there are also different people born with very similar genetic characteristics leading to very similar personalities. And, even worse, you're not even the same person you were 10 years ago. So the fact that there are some major changes in the character of the conscious experience doesn't really seem to be a barrier to believe that the essence of conscious experience, which we all share, is immortal. Every time it emerges it seems to be roughly the same being looking out through the eyes, even having some continuity with the conscious experience of the lower animals . Even if the entire planet is destroyed, the sun goes supernova, and the whole universe collapses, life will still probably eventually arise again, and you and I will once again wake up and get back to the same kinds of things we were up to before it all happened. The only thing that could stop that would be if all of existence had some kind of permanent end, but, in that case, the word immortality would basically be meaningless anyway, because we would know that everything had some final ending, including all life. But that is taking the most extreme possible option. I think it is fairly likely that life will continue to emerge as long as simple matter and physical laws are around to cause it to happen like it seems to have 4.5 billion years ago, and possibly many times before. So, despite the seemingly inevitable death of the ego, I think we're immortal. As long as there are at least a few other people alive, then we don't even need to wait to be reborn. We were already reborn before we even died. And the best part is even if we do sometimes go through gagillions of years where the universe is empty, waiting for us to wake up again, it doesn't really matter, because the best thing about being unconscious is that nothing matters<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We are immortal.\n","id":"7989efdb-3ba5-406b-970c-73140d5211a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As of Black and White 2 , there are 649 Pok\u00e9mon and this number will further expand in a couple of weeks once X and Y is released. Because of this, there's too much stress on the designers to keep coming up with new original Pok\u00e9mon concepts, and I don't think this is sustainable at this rate. This wouldn't be a problem if it were a game series that's supposed to end at some point, but this being one of Nintendo's flagship series, the idea is to continue with new Pok\u00e9mon games for as long as possible. I don't believe they have to make that many new Pok\u00e9mon every new generation, though. There are so many Pok\u00e9mon now that simply cycling through the older ones will already be fairly exciting for newer players and nostalgic for older ones. I'm not saying they have to stop making new Pok\u00e9mon altogether, only that they can afford to make a lot less of them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe there are too many Pok\u00e9mon.\n","id":"5054400a-47ba-4026-8660-cac10efcf33b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Bitcoin and Similar Cryptocurrencies Good for the World?<|ARGUMENT|>When the financial system collapsed in 2007, Western currencies did not depreciate in value, just stocks and bonds.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"During the last major financial crisis the US dollar never really depreciated against other currencies.\n","id":"d8128ddf-fd4e-4a41-9d17-aa63a6e04d63"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Digital media refers to Video Games, Movies, Music, Songs etc. If a copyright holder company isn't selling it anymore due to any reason, then there is nothing morally wrong to pirate that media. For example, Let's talk about Nintendo. A lot of NES games, published by Nintendo, aren't on virtual console or in Play Store for purchase. I am talking about games dating back to 1980's, original published on NES and SNES. A lot of gamers wants to feel nostalgic and even willing to pay if Nintendo brings those games on Android and iOS. But, Nintendo isn't willing to convert it. So, People use Emulators to play original ROMs on their phones. I think this isn't morally wrong, because Nintendo hasn't made their art available on current platforms, so people are forced to pirate, not because they want to keep the artist devoid of their revenue. My points are. When you publish a digital media, it becomes a public media. Note I haven't said public domain . It is your art and you have every right to control its distribution and revenues earned on it. But you cannot control how people uses your media. People may get emotionally attached with a character in a game, or they may feel good by listening to a particular song, or they may be inspired by a particular story point, or they may simply feel like to feel nostalgic by playing after a decade. It is inherently wrong for a copyright holder to manage how people enjoy or consume their art. Copyright holder should always try to make their arts available to current platforms. If it is not possible for them to do it, then they should allow anyone else to do it in lieu of shared revenue. They shouldn't simply deny access to their art just because of obsolete platforms. If all of the above fails and copyright holder simply isn't willing to make their arts available even people are paying, then they should not be concerned if someone pirates their art and it is morally correct.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a company who holds copyright for a digital media, isn't selling it anymore, then there is inherently nothing wrong to pirate it.\n","id":"b78507dc-be10-4a0b-87e7-3cc6244497f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Title should read Triggers, in the way they are currently being mis used to represent things that cause discomfort or sadness in people, are not a real thing. People who cry 'triggered' because something reminds them of a NON EXTREME incident or issue they are struggling with should not be sheltered or given the attention they are seeking. EDIT 2 For some reason I feel that not everybody finished reading my post although theres a tl dr and a very clear message that my views dont apply to extreme cases like in people who have PTSD yet Im getting all these actually heartwrenching and very valid arguments about people with PTSD whom my beef isnt with. EDIT 3 All in all I think my anger towards modern day 'trigger happu tumblrinas' has somewhat subsided and Im beginning to understand that we cant scruitinise how everybody feels and that some people are stronger than others like one user said and that the effects of triggers on some people can be deadly. Thank you all In 7th and 8th grade I was a snob. This was probably because I am the youngest of five siblings and was fairly better looking than my classmates before the acne, bad eyesight and crooked teeth kicked in among other things. I realised this because of the way my classmates talked about me and treated me and I took the summer of 8th grade to transform into somebody else. I do not recall how exactly I did it but I did. Everybody was surprised, myself included, that the transformation was permanent and genuine. Sadly, I was no longer a bitch but a pushover instead. I was bullied shortly after and had a horrible 8 or so years until I graduated from university. During those 8 or so years, my first love died in a car crash, my parents had a terrible accident leaving my mother unable to walk for a year, of course I picked up smoking, I started to serial date guys and their treatment to me kept getting progressively worse all while I tried to do well at university because it was getting too expensive for my parents to pay for and getting a job wasn't enough for me to sustain myself. Add to the above a religious struggle between myself, my society and my own mother who didn't talk to me for three months while I lived in the same house as her because of my religious and romantic choices I was dating a black guy , and you get a fairly broken person. I didn't trust anyone, I was naive, nervous, insecure, a people pleaser, somewhat promiscuous and a smoker. I did things I never thought I'd do and was put in situations I never wanted to be placed in. I was even ashamed of my own psychologist whom I never went back to visit after a couple of sessions because of how fucked up I was. My issues seem trivial but these are just the things that I haven't blocked out. My view does apply to individuals who have gone through everything but EXTREME trauma. My POINT is How can I, and so many people who have gone through worse, emerge as functional if not even better people than we were because of what we went through by using our own logic and reasoning, the help of others, counselling and other resources, while others simply act as if life is supposed to be somehow tailored for them and that whatever 'triggers' them by making them actually have to THINK about what they went through should somehow be erased from their lives? Tl dr Shit happens in life and people should wade through the pile of crap and come out as functional human beings via their own logic rather than project their issues unto others and claim that whatever 'triggers' them to think about their problems must somehow be banished or banned.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"'Triggers' aren't a real thing. We should all be able to overcome our issues and not project them unto other people.\n","id":"197a8ef6-7e16-42c0-a1c1-9c7021870db8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>According to surveys, voter turnout in the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 was generally higher in older age brackets except for those aged 16-17. Turnout among those in their 60s was 96% compared with 54% among those aged 18-24 Electoral Commission, p. 11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Older people are significantly more likely to vote in referendums than younger people.\n","id":"60896943-9bc8-4f6b-bcd0-b24e89d6f95c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not really that into things like Pride, gay bars etc. I have come out because I was outed, to be honest I didn't really want to come out since I don't want to be known as the gay guy , I want to be far more than my sexuality, it doesn't define who I am no matter what society would have me believe. I put on a smile since my other 1 2 is but to be honest I just put up with being gay, I don't really enjoy pride and get bored after the first 5 minutes on it and well I am starting to question the point in it anymore, it just seem to be a PR toy of big companies trying to look progressive and non evil There's nothing I can do about my sexuality so I just put up with it like you would put up with something you have no choice over. I put up with my migraines like I put up with my food allergies etc.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think that my sexuality is something to be proud of\n","id":"df345bb3-7baf-4fe9-accd-1b4b0a1c06f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the NHS be privatised?<|ARGUMENT|>This cost is likely to increase in the coming years, the study also showed that organizations\u2019 spending on ads will continue to grow at a rate of about 1.8% each year, reaching $11.56 billion by 2021.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This cost is likely to be immense. For instance, in the US a study found that healthcare providers spent upwards of $10 billion on advertising in 2017.\n","id":"8e5bb089-992e-4048-953f-9fb1e1b33cff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>Not using the N-word is often an unspoken norm that happens because of the taboo that surrounds it. When the N-word is uttered the taboo is broken.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without censoring offensive words, students will be more likely to adopt racially insensitive words and\/or attitudes.\n","id":"461fdb42-b4ec-4b87-9f47-43208aef478e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Doping Cheat's Entire Olympic Team Should Be Stripped Of Their Medals<|ARGUMENT|>Opp would like to emphasize that the motion deals with first, not just docking some points, but stripping a team of their medals, and second, stripping the \"entire\" team of their medals. As prop conceded in their argument, taking away a medal is a strong punishment. We don\u2019t wish to protect athletes who use dope, however, believe that such harsh punishment potentially ruining an athlete\u2019s career should not be aimed at the entire team. Instead, punishments as such should be person-specific, targeting the individual who made the irresponsible choice. Especially when the team was not notified of the member using dope, which is usually the case, it is extremely unfair to reflect an individual team member\u2019s decision on the entire team and dismiss the other athletes\u2019 efforts so lightly. For instance, American sprinters who were stripped of their 2000 Olympics relay medals because teammate Marion Jones was doping won an appeal in 2010 to have them restored because International Association of Athletics Federations ruled that entire team should not \u201cbe disqualified because of doping by one athlete.\u201d We also want to point out that these athletes who have and are going to use dope are willing to risk their career for the glory of winning. Putting their team\u2019s victory at risk to create \u2018social pressure\u2019 is not going to decrease motivation for an athlete to use dope. We would like to remind that the other athletes in the team who are being stripped of their medals have played safely and accordingly to the regulations and deserve the medal as every other athlete. The proposition has failed to prove why these athletes also deserve to lose their medals and get the same punishment as the athlete who has made the life changing decision and we believe that this is not going to prevent any athletes who are willing to risk their career from risking their team's career.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Heavy punishments such as striping an athlete of their medal should be person-specific.\n","id":"a88e735c-87cd-4b96-b6a7-99f6f91e6103"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>Currently, no physical model exists for explaining how our classical universe, which has a well-defined notion of time, could emerge from or be causally connected to a Planck era in which time has completely broken down Deltete & Guy 1996 So this Planck era is indistinguishable from an independent universe, leaving our universe with a beginning<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the retrodictions of Big Bang theory are considered unreliable because time breaks down completely, then one still has a universe which begins to exist\n","id":"d3d65dfa-51de-48cc-ad61-e66ef399d827"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I posted this a few days ago, but the post got removed, because I did not have time to participate in the discussion. I want to post it again and discuss it with you this time Of course there is a lot of fear around football currently, regarding concussions and CTE. But I don't think that it will have a significant impact on both the game and the money making ability of the NFL. Here's why As long as there are millions of dollars to be earned, there will be people lining up to play football at any level Demographics. Football seems to be a way out for a lot of poor children in underprivileged areas People in the US love football. It's so ingrained in the culture, that it is hard to imagine that it will ever be not popular. Those kind of changes are gradual. It probably will take a few generations until we will notice any drastic effects of the findings that are coming out right now about brain injuries and CTE . I know there is a lot of conversation going on around this topic, that's why I wanted to start a discussion here. So let's go and change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Football will not be harmed by its brain injury crisis\n","id":"6d93050b-586c-462a-aa6f-a9bbe6402ce0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If we stay around here for the next 11 12 years it might end up being a dodge charger or a crown vic. It'll have a roof rack shaped like their siren lights, a spotlight connected to the driver's side, a ram cage on the front and maybe some numbers in the corner on the back, and maybe the side too. I think writing something close to POLICE on the side would be too far, but the color will be the same and I'll make sure I slap on everything I can. We don't live in a dangerous city area and we never plan to be anywhere near one, so I don't see him taunting Fuck The Police types messing with him. I think he'll bring intimidation to every neighborhood he goes to and people will drive carefully and slowly around him. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think my son's first car should look as much like a police car as possible, within the legal limitations.\n","id":"828938e0-4e2e-4e1c-b38f-de9525887d89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Background I am a mid twenties guy, a virgin with almost no relationship experience. I am not interested in sexually promiscuous girls. If I am interested in a girl, my interest sharply fades if I discover that she had one night stands in the past or many partners there's no magical cut off number but it's more of a vague feeling of when too much is too much . Basically, the lower the girl's number is, the more I am interested in dating her. There are a few subjective and fact based reasons for this 1 I want someone who has as much experience as I do, or less. I have a lot of insecurities regarding sex and I don't want to be with a woman who has a meh, been there done that attitude about sex. Yes I know every woman is different, but the chances of finding such a woman are obviously higher among the women who are sexually experienced. An inexperienced woman is more likely to find the event as exciting, new, weird, and nervous as I am. I don't want an experienced woman to teach me what she likes , either. I've heard that a lot and it sounds abhorrent. I want to grow and develop my own connection with someone from a clean slate, and it'll be harder to do if a woman already has preconceived notions about her requirements in bed. In addition, I know that an experienced woman will probably be judging me. Because humans are humans. It's naive to think that we don't all judge people based on our past experiences. If I go to a new Italian restaurant, I'm gonna compare its food based on my past experiences of eating restaurant food. I imagine people view sex similarly, consciously or subconsciously. 2 Study after study after study has shown that people with liberal sexual opinions generally have unhappier and shorter lasting marriages. These include premarital couples who live together, people who have a lot of sex before marriage, girls who consensually lost their virginity early, etc. I want to get in a relationship with the aim of being together as long as possible yes, that means marriage would certainly be down the road ideally. So it would increase my likelihood of longterm happiness to find a sexually conservative girl. I have more reasons but these are the main ones. I know a lot of you are gonna be thinking misogynist right now, but I am not trying to be sexist or hateful of women. I don't think promiscuous women are morally deviant, I just don't want them in my romantic life. I am also not a hypocrite, seeing as I am a virgin. Please change my view and convince me to drop this preference.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I strongly prefer to date women who are not promiscuous.\n","id":"bf27eacd-2e98-444f-b06e-71841c60c8ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>The general feeling that it seems many share is that a movie with a 2 1\/2 hour run time doesn't have enough action and feels dull. This might be something that can be analysed empirically by action sequence to run time length and comparing it to the other movies in the series.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is not even one real lightsaber fight in the movie.\n","id":"df0f1f37-8718-467d-bde7-fa2ef66c29dd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As an academic definition it makes sense some people benefit from characteristics they are born with based on historical and present discrimination but it seems like wherever it's used outside sociological theory it instead is an excuse to simply dismiss the arguments of those you disagree with. E.g., You're privileged, so your opinion on this issue is invalid I feel like using privilege in any kind of discussion is just an indirect way of arguing ad hominem, rather than actually engaging the other person in a reasonable debate. Even if someone's opinions really are biased due to their differing experiences caused by social privilege, I don't think that pointing out that privilege is at all a valid way to prove them wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the concept of sociological 'privilege' is damaging when used anywhere outside a Sociology book\n","id":"7f767dc1-0871-496c-b728-62cf83fad9b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Aliens Exist?<|ARGUMENT|>The Bible Tora and the Quran are clearly bad advisers concerning facts about the universe. For example, the Bible claims that Earth was the first-created celestial body before all stars. This is obviously wrong. So is the Quran's statement that Earth was created in six days.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All those three religions fail to provide verifiable evidence in order to prove that this claim is true.\n","id":"705850ef-f01c-45a3-8567-2c15c3ba5fa2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically what it says in the title. I've met the girl, and she's given me pause to think about why religion doesn't matter to me, I being an atheist and she being a Christian. Even though we really click and get along well, my lack of belief in her deity is itself giving her herself pause to consider me as a partner, even though she's called me practically perfect. To me, religion is a cultural construct. I used to think of it in terms of philosophy and logic, but now view it though a more anthropological lens. To me, it isn't important whether you believe in Vishnu or Jesus Christ, Yahweh or a tree spirit, but whether those beliefs allow you to be a good person, to be just, honest, truthful, and loving. Christianity it seems would agree with those moral values. To her, being as particular as she is, Christianity should be the foundation of any relationship. I just don't see why it matters. Update This discussion has allowed me to see multiple PoVs on the situation, and while it was no one poster in particular, my V has been C'd. I now see the importance of religion in a relationship, and I guess ultimately I always have I just had to be honest with myself and I guess this post was a way for me to grasp at straws to see a little hope for us. Thank you all. gt Hello, users of  This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to read through our rules If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views If you are thinking about submitting a  yourself, please have a look through our popular topics wiki first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe partners' religious stances shouldn't matter as long as they share the same basic moral and intellectual values.\n","id":"fbcdf503-39aa-41e2-8955-f4f2deaf3858"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Japan apologise for the Nanking Massacre?<|ARGUMENT|>Liberalism emphasizes individual autonomy and moral responsibility, and rejects notions of collective responsibility Liberal principles therefore imply that individuals today cannot be morally responsible for the actions of previous generations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many government officials hold the view that the idea of holding people responsible for the crimes of their ancestors is deeply unsatisfactory and goes against the liberal perspective.\n","id":"2bf602e6-2fc0-4162-9ed7-101f0c41625a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Premier League Better than the Bundesliga?<|ARGUMENT|>Over the course of the last ten seasons, the PL's clubs spent more than three times as much on the acquisition of new players than the BL's clubs. At the same time, they made more than twice as much from selling players.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The PL is spending more on acquiring highly-valued players.\n","id":"c5d5f119-39a2-45ee-8e70-39d36c4672ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>A person should be able to disconnect themselves from their moral worldview and other moral worldviews. It is only by doing so that a person might have a chance to influence another person's moral worldview. ex. allowing people from other cultures to behave in a culturally normative way will allow you to share your cultural normative way<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A person who is a moral absolutist there is only one way that is right, might find hell a comfort. In it they may see hell as an appropriate place for those who didn't embrace THEIR moral worldview.\n","id":"42042136-616f-41f2-9743-8bd26d2a4534"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For three decades of my life I cherished a solitary wilderness hike of 12 miles through old growth North Pacific forests to a place on the ocean beach where there was a tiny, forested island only accessible at low tide. I would climb the steep cliff on a narrow animal track and camp a night or two in sheer bliss among the tall fir trees where I could read, meditate and pray. I was usually visited by deer, chipmunks and other small wildlife. I would then break camp, leaving no trace, and hike back to civilization, fully restored in mind, body and spirit. On all my trips to that place, I never saw another human being. It was evident that few people came to this spot. I think it was the two ferry rides, the 4 5 hour car trip on narrow asphalt and dirt roads, plus the demanding hike that kept this location fairly isolated. This was my little spot of paradise and respite from the high pressure job I endured in a large city 200 miles away. In my later years, I decided to pass on this secret treasure to my nephew who loved the wilderness and similar things as I did. When we arrived at the island at twilight, tired and looking forward to passing on an experience from one generation to the next, we were greeted by a newly erected huge sign with red lettering \u201cACCESS FORBIDDEN. SACRED ISLAND OF TRIBE.\u201d This garish placard seemed to violate the very pristine and natural surroundings we came to be a part of and appreciate\u2014let alone the objectionable message to the rest of the world. On just a human level\u2014above races, religions, cultures, history, legal claims and politics\u2014something seemed very wrong about this. It was like fencing off the Grand Canyon from access size doesn\u2019t matter , and declaring, \u201cFuck off This is ONLY for our little segment of humanity.\u201d Incidentally, the sign had been erected by a tribe that has been dying off for decades and is now nearly extinct. I\u2019m sympathetic to that plight, but not their supposed authority to ban any part of nature to the use of all humanity. This is notwithstanding the terrible history of European races abusing native peoples in North America. Someone has to hit \u201crestart\u201d at some point and stop seeking redress for past grievances. The earth is for mankind to share responsibly\u2014even if it requires monitored and enforced joint use frameworks e.g. fragile ecosystems of high alpine Pacific Northwestern wilderness areas . The sooner we realize that, the better things will be for all of us. Respect is a two way street.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is a higher law of humanity when it comes to sharing the treasures of nature. No single segment of humanity has the right to banish everyone else, especially based on culture and religion.\n","id":"fa526d58-04b8-4f8b-935d-d73863336a68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Media That Openly Declares Bias Better Than Media Claiming To Be Neutral?<|ARGUMENT|>When a reader hears another person repeating such a claim in real life, they will be able to correct that person by referencing their media source.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When stereotypes are presented, individuals won't be so caught up in it as they are aware of what is being characterized.\n","id":"d479f4ea-3687-44ea-b7f3-8567a058a907"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The Internet Be Regulated?<|ARGUMENT|>German anti-hate speech laws forced Facebook to employ over 1200 German-speaking \"censors\" that deal with reported comments and posts. Guardian<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Definitely not, there are many nation-\/region-specific laws that Internet platforms have to adhere to, or risk being prosecuted.\n","id":"5167dd76-e2e2-4954-95e7-8b3942f97d94"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Libertarian Solution: Can People Govern Themselves?<|ARGUMENT|>In an emerging industry with little competition monopolies tend to form www.wsj.com leading to high prices and lower potential quality<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Free market tends to be socially beneficial only in mature industries with high competition.\n","id":"f225eea2-b0a8-43cf-bfa9-ff8889dfbfa1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Children lack the knowledge and experience necessary to adequately express themselves, both in picking a candidate and conveying what they want beyond an immediate level response: \"I don't like grandpa so no social security for him\".<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Children are not able to make such important and complex election decisions.\n","id":"6b691140-f596-4c1f-90c1-f92599943234"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>UBI would be most probably achieved by higher taxation or decreasing spends on some other goods provided by goverment. Therefore it is exchange of possibility to keep all money you earn now by making this sum lower to freedom dignity etc. for those who are in greatest need of such values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dignity and freedom are highly valuable and by UBI would be achived by taking away less important ones, therefore UBI is exchange from low value to high value, while mentioned example works in opposite direction.\n","id":"48e8869b-b517-4964-aaac-7d945a30036e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that the Bible makes it quite clear that the only proper sexual or marital relations are between a man and a woman. In particular, Christ's definition of marriage in Matthew 19 4 6 seems to leave no room for homosexual relations. I am not only open to changing my mind about this topic, I am actually hoping to, but I have yet to see a convincing biblical argument in favor of the alternate viewpoint. I have already been told about and accepted the alternate translation of \u03b1\u03c1\u03c3\u03b5\u03bd\u03bf\u03ba\u03bf\u03b9\u03c4\u03af\u03b1 as pedophilia instead of homosexuality, but the verse that I mention above provides a stumbling block of its own that I've yet to hear satisfactorily disproved.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homosexuality is irreconcilable with the Bible.\n","id":"bcc84c98-4221-4e1d-b62d-e9e98b0c0bdf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay to start off I'm Christian shocker right? . While I believe in marriage as defined between a man and a woman in the bible, it's obvious and should be to all believers that marriage is a human institution also, that has preceded our faith, and that the church has no reason to dictate the way a government, an ideally unbiased organization, should decide policy. Now, the number of practicing Christians is much much fewer than people might believe, and I seriously doubt that there are enough in any state or government to be a majority, so the resistance to it comes mostly from playing to people's bigotry. Gay Marriage should be legal, and those who disagree, and people who adhere to the biblical view of marriage, should be allowed to abstain from participating. That's where the rub is for me, I want the church and people who are practicing Christians to retain their power to abstain from participation. The gay civil rights movement currently has a lot of momentum, and they are gaining a lot of ground. I'm just worried that in their fervor to obtain equal rights, that the ability to express a different opinion is getting more and more dangerous. Take the recent resignation of Mozilla's CEO as evidence of my concerns regarding this issue. Obviously CEO of such a large organization is a very public position, but this is a dangerous trend that could lead to companies vetting people's personal opinions on matters as a requisite for promotion. What if feeling this way kept me from owning a business in the community? Or starting a charity to help people? Is it right that any whiff of my position could lead to boycott and petition against what I'm doing? However absurd I find the opposition to gay marriage remember I don't support it yet, but am definitely not against it , I find it equally absurd to assume that the view against it are not valid. Update Ey look discussion There's quite a few lengthy posts that I'm going to read, but I feel that many people didn't catch what I was trying to say, and copy pasted statements that they have on the issue. lemme concisely state my opinion State has no right to impose religious definitions of marriage onto citizens, and gay marriage should be legal. The politicizing of the issue, as a result of attempting to separate voters into two groups, those that are for gay rights and those against, has incorrectly associated many things with the support of the traditional view of marriage. I believe that supporting the definition of marriage as a man and woman as one before God, is my own view, and should be contained to my own opinion. Because I hold this view, it does not mean that I do not love gay people, don't think that they should legally allowed to marry, judge their lifestyle, or respect their civil liberties. I am concerned about the way the issue has evolved, because the public associates my belief with narrowminded hatefulness.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't support gay marriage because I feel like it will lead to infringement on other's people's rights.\n","id":"1bf52d57-4bfc-43f2-b1c5-88d3aa339226"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically you can should be able to cycle or get public transport to shops and places of work. If you get a job far away you should move house or you will be provided a company car. Cars and vans will still be available for hire so people can go on holidays or for moving house. V been C'd, please don't waste your time, unless you really want to, it's a free internet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No one should personally own a car or other motor vehicles\n","id":"85a05899-ee58-461b-9950-6f94b4deb1bf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The categorical imperative can work on an individual level, but when applied to a society, it fails. The people would use Eichmann as a means to an end, and Eichmann would act out the collective will rather than his own. This function is necessary for the categorical imperative to be applied to government.libertarianism.org<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When viewed from a modern perspective ,Reason had been lost in Nazi Germany, yet to the people of the time they would have believed they were reasoned. Eichmann knew that they were wrong. But he administered their collective will anyway. This was what he saw as the highest achievement of 'idealism'.\n","id":"c890c75c-3f39-4b43-9814-d8bce28ed5de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think everyone can agree that the ideal goal of a progressive society is to achieve full equality of opportunity. Now, my definition of equality of opportunity is a society in which you are neither hindered nor helped by things out of your control. By that I mean being born with a disorder, being born an oppressed minority, being a woman in a male dominated society, or being born poor. All of these make it harder for a person to succeed compared to someone without these disadvantages. Feel free to tell me if my definition is incorrect or needs changing, but I'll move on with this definition for now. Now, most social liberals today would say that they seek equality of opportunity in society, as they should. No one should be hindered by a circumstance of birth, and achievement should be determined by a person's own drive and work. However, I don't believe that it is possible to achieve full equality of opportunity without serious tampering of a human's genetic code. Even if we get rid of the easier societal problems, such as racism, sexism, and poverty, there is still the issue of people being born with different intelligence levels, or more attractive, or a plethora of things that help one succeed. Is it really equality of opportunity if the single most relevant event in a person's life their birth is flawed? This is why I think equality of outcome is far more likely to become reality. Instead of people needing to become equal in all regards, all the resources of a society just need to be redistributed fairly. I'm not necessarily saying this is ideal for our current society, but eventually it will be the only way to progress socially.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Equality of opportunity is a more favorable idea for a society, but equality of outcome is more realistic and easily achievable.\n","id":"56fce7ba-3626-4f9b-bc32-b48590d85fff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I want to acknowledge that I'm not involved in law enforcement at all, so if any of my assumptions or characterizations are inaccurate, please let me know. As I understand it, typically when someone is a victim of abuse by police, they sue the city or state or county depending on the circumstances . Any damages awarded by a jury or in a settlement are then paid by the city. Some or all of the damages are covered by insurance for which the city obviously pays premiums and the balances is simply owed by the city. The problem with this is twofold 1 The taxpayers are responsible for paying for damages against themselves. Places where abuse is frequent tend to be relatively poor. Saddling a poor city with the cost of an overly aggressive police force compounds the financial challenges of the city and makes poor people poorer. 2 There is little financial incentive for police to rein in potentially troublesome colleagues. Good cops, if they see abuses or potentially troublesome behavior may report it because it's the right thing or because the bad apples give cops a bad name. These are pretty nebulous and unrewarding reasons though, especially when facing the daunting prospect of reporting a fellow police officer. Giving each and every police officer skin in the game would create a financial incentive to proactively weed out bad apples. It could also nudge the culture from a blue wall of silence to one of accountability. Both management and the rank and file would be involved. One challenge is that this would create an incentive for police to close ranks after an incident happened and not admit fault so that suits would be less successful. This could be an issue, but only to the extent that it causes them to close ranks more than they currently do . And again, I think it would be more than offset by an increased willingness to identify, retrain, and dismiss bad cops before major incidents happen. Now I'm not looking to wipe out an entire police force's pension fund because of one incident. You could structure it in a number of ways to ensure that hits to the fund could be meaningful without being devastating, and would provide rewards if total damages declined e.g. increase baseline contributions to funds by 500k and have the pension fund pay 50 of damages up to a max of 1MM . Note I'm using pension fund as a proxy for pension benefits . I don't know how the pensions are set up, but the point is that losses paid out of the funds would reduce pension benefits. Edit This has been interesting, but I have to run. Thanks to u huadpe for pointing out why using pension funds specifically would lead to a legal quagmire.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Settlements from lawsuits against police departments should be paid at least partially out of police pension funds.\n","id":"2dced275-3ee9-4abd-8258-b6ddd60b62a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Current View There is no rap song music video in existence excluding purposefully Christian songs that doesn't feature vulgarity, excessive use of narcotics and alcohol, disrespect to women, OR bragging about self worth such as cars, money, or bitches. . Open to changing my view? I'm begging you. Reasoning? So my younger brother 16 is a devoted fan of rap music. He wakes up and puts his headphones in, listens to it if he's not at school or talking to someone, and he goes to bed listening to it. This is an issue for me because he has had an increase in bad temperament and use of bad language, and on top of those he's begun expressing more interest in unnecessarily expensive stuff and just the fads of rap music fans i.e. anything at Footlocker or Pac Sun . He is really easily angered and he just seems really unhappy to try anything other than rap. For background, we live in the US, so the stuff he listens to is a lot of Migos, 21 Savage, Metro Boomin', Young Thug, Post Malone, Bryson Tiller, etc. Any way you guys could change my view? I really want to be able to suggest alternatives that he could possibly vibe with, that won't just be packed with the goofy sound of Christian music. I have nothing against these people or their trade, but I do hate how my brother is acting because of it. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no clean rap music\n","id":"44cac08e-eac4-45f7-aba0-febe6029b14e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Castration of sex offenders<|ARGUMENT|>Atul Gawande. \"The unkindest cut.\" Slate. July 13, 1997: \"what to do with people who can't take the drug because of the side effects. Would they have to go back to jail?\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Do those that can't stand side-effects go back to jail.\n","id":"7fd62fc5-2a0f-4aa3-8e07-8e54f6c2b2c9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Every time I see the Reddit hivemind complain about pharmaceutical companies, I have to bite my tongue. x200B Drugs are expensive to buy, but they are even more expensive to make. A 2013 study published in the Journal of Health Economics found the cost to bring ONE DRUG from conception to market was 2.9 BILLION. The drug is generally awarded a patent for only 10 20 years, in which time, they must recoup that entire investment. Not only that, the drug can't just break even, it must make a lot more money in order to fund R D for future drugs, drive revenue and profits for shareholders, pay salaries benefits for employees, etc. AND, if the disease being cured is the common cold that hundreds of millions of people suffer from, it can be affordable due to the volume of sales. But, for exceedingly rare diseases that only affect a handful of people worldwide each year, how else can a company recoup their loses if they don't charge an enormous amount? x200B After the patent expires, generic drug companies jump in to reverse engineer the drug and this drives the cost down. At this time, the drug becomes incredibly cheap and accessible. Ultimately, this is still a huge net gain for humanity as a whole, because a previously untreatable condition disease now has an affordable cure although it may have been inaccessible to some people for the first 10 20 years .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pharmaceutical companies have the right to charge what they want for proprietary meds\/drugs\n","id":"b58cb95f-72ec-42cd-8f97-de8ef4773cae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should Self-Driving Cars Kill?<|ARGUMENT|>Comparing the value of lives is subjective and can vary based on different moral systems.Who should AI kill in a driverless car crash? It depends who you ask<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A self-driving car should minimise the impact of any collision, because that minimises the total suffering.\n","id":"163aa522-e6eb-4f0c-922c-869e5206734e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Political polarization is extreme and increasing. The percentage of people who watch and believe state propaganda like Fox or Breitbart and who have authoritarian values is high. Education and critical thinking among this group is low. Civic organizations and unions are dying. Republicans will use gerrymandering, census manipulation, and voter suppression to keep the majority from ever having proper representation. Social media promotes extremism and superficiality. Young people don't care enough to vote. Money controls politics. Good people don't want to enter the field knowing that they will have to fundraise every moment of every day. All the norms of cooperation and anti corruption have been broken and they are never coming back. So things are just going to degenerate further and further for a long time maybe ending up in civil war, secession, or dictatorship, or maybe just getting more and more dysfunctional, corrupt, and illiberal on a long slope of decline.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"US Democracy at the national level is hopelessly broken for the foreseeable future\n","id":"23aae31c-622e-4bbb-a6d5-c3c6061d0bac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>In the PBC part of the argument, the contradiction arose between PaS and Pa~S. Since the original assumption was \u25a1\u00ac\u2203xSx, we must consider that it is also \u25c7\u00acPaS. If the contradiction could be resolved with this as a replaced premise in place of premise 3, then the argument will fail. When you don't consider this at all, you assume that it is possible that a supreme being exists. I.e., you assume the conclusion and beg the question.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The third assumption made in Robert Maydole\u2019s Modal Ontological argument begs the question by failing to consider an assumption that would resolve the contradiction, and thus simply assume the conclusion.\n","id":"fd3584d4-6f09-4be4-a6ee-460788a3896e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay to word the title better and to give an example. Last year's Oscar's were the subject of controversy after all 20 actor nominees were white. The Oscar's were hounded by the media by this apparent discrimination. But why should they be obliged to diversify an award ceremony. If all the best performances were at the hands of white people, so be it. Also, while the people who complain about the lack of diversity may think they're helping END racism, I think they're doing the exact opposite. They're pushing the us vs them vibe, where it's not okay for JUST white people to be nominated, you MUST have a black or Asian person as well. Isn't the whole idea behind stopping racism that we overlook what colour the skin we have I'm sure there a lot more examples of this, ads get into big controversial backlash if they show too many white people in what should supposedly be a diverse group involved Please <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People who complain about the lack of diversity in advertisements, award nominees, or simply just a group of media personnel, are not putting an end to racism, but doing the exact opposite.\n","id":"ff361d17-4dec-4732-b2e7-6d1a1f6bad07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For whatever reason men commit about 80 90 of crimes in every society that they exist in. The numbers get a little more equitable when we account for property crimes where men only outnumber women 2 1. However, white collar crimes, blue collar crimes, violent crimes, sexual crimes, etc. are so vastly male centric that the numbers increase that much. They are both the overwhelming amount of perpetrators and victimized, though women are victimized significantly, as you'd expect, in intimate crimes and sex related offenses. Aside from criminality, men are also more likely to be impulsive and aggressive which is likely to eliminate cohesion and cause undue caution due to the erratic, unpredictably violent and harmful action of this sub group. Why does this persist? Why are men so much more criminal and violent? Does this have a tangibly negative effect on society?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Think Men are a Detriment to Societal Cohesion\n","id":"8475d3a7-ab65-4d1e-825b-14247863d7e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Downloading Music Without Permission Is an Example of Theft and Is Immoral<|ARGUMENT|>Because the artist made the song, it is their property, in this case \u201cintellectual property\u201d. Prope.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Downloading Music Without Permission Is an Example of Theft and Is Immoral\n","id":"fdd108e5-be53-4a20-8192-71b36b66b169"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should culturally diverse writers be mandatory in English curricula?<|ARGUMENT|>Research led by the Department of Curricula and Instruction in Jordan showed that a hidden curriculum has a significant impact on students' ethical and aesthetic values. p. 42<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Research has shown that institutes that have adopted a \"hidden curriculum have been able to assist students to develop better p. 1.\n","id":"54735887-9045-44f9-95c7-15633fac8b7e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see sex as a sign of commitment and a promise of loyalty. I see having sex with someone you know you won't be in a long term relationship with is wrong, because it goes against this idea of commitment. Sex should be for the purpose of reproduction, however I still think it's acceptable to have sex in a long term relationship for intimacy fun. I think people who have sex purely for pleasure, not with a long term partner, are acting wrongly because they are not showing any sense of commitment. That meaning, I see school university relationships where both people know that the relationship will end at some point in the future after finishing school university , and where 90 of interactions are purely to have sex, as wrong. Long term neither person sees the relationship ending, that is, the relationship has the potential for marriage lifelong commitment. I have never made a post on reddit before but after failing to think about this myself I thought this subreddit could help me greatly. I feel these views are illogical but I am struggling to convince myself to feel any other way, and so I hope a more logical argument here will convince me. Just to clarify, I have no religious or family pressure to think this way. Thank you for reading.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe sex outside of a long-term relationship is wrong,\n","id":"e48faec6-b6ba-4d8e-971f-ef3626a1024a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel no benefit out of reading fiction. The only point I see is to get a story across and this is achieved in movies. I am a history major and therefore are subjected to reading close to a book a week. I learn many things from these books that I can bring into the world but I feel like I don't get anything out of reading fiction. Share with me what you take out of fiction. Reddit seems to be very well read when it comes to fiction so this should be interesting to see every ones opinion. CHANGE MY VIEW<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that reading fiction and watching the movie adaptation of that book are equal.\n","id":"926e47bf-3478-4235-8c21-e3529eceed7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is \"The Last Jedi\" one of the weakest Star Wars movies so far?<|ARGUMENT|>Not only professional and competent, but all were believable in a Star Wars reality. The actor portraying Hux did a good job, however the character was created by screenwriters as a generic supporting sci-fi army commander villain rather than as an officer who actually has the dignity and respect expected from a First Order officer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tarkin, or any of the original Empire's generals were all depicted as professional and at least competent.\n","id":"40f9ee3a-c385-47f3-af7a-423c0c41c8f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Title correction thanks to u celeritas365 gt Companies should be required encouraged and pressured to release source code for software in 5 years under an open license, such as the GPL. The open source community would greatly benefit from the releasing of proprietary software. See Unix, Android, and Netscape. The idea of this is to shorten the as good as forever copyright time currently 98 years in the U.S. for software. When the open source community gains, everybody gains. gt To accomplish this purpose, copyright ownership encourages authors creators in their efforts by granting them a temporary monopoly, or ownership of exclusive rights for a specified length of time. However, this monopoly is somewhat limited when it conflicts with an overriding public interest , such as encouraging new creative and intellectual works emphasis mine Counter rebuttal Rebuttal But developers need time to profit from their software Any good proprietary software should have enough updates within the last five years to make the released version obsolete and not very useful to end users, preventing profit from being lost. Why 5? lt 5 too small to let developers make a profit gt 5 too big to let the open source community benefit Why GPL? If companies were required to completely give up copyright, for profit proprietary competitors would benefit, reversing the goal on its head. What's Open Source? What's the GPL? Open source software who's source code is public, and the end user is given rights to modify, adapt, remix, use the software freely. Often, but not as a requirement, open source is non for profit. Lots of software is open source GPL an open source license that gives you the rights to modify, adapt, remix, use freely if you also release your adapted product in the GPL.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies should be required to release source code for software in 5 years under an open license, such as the GPL.\n","id":"43fac0cd-5822-4e7f-8cc1-1044b15550a8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Donald Trump a Good President?<|ARGUMENT|>\"We are going to have an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout for the inauguration\" was a statement of sheer arrogance, particularly ironic in retrospect given how few turned up<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump has said some patently bizarre outrageous stupid and\/or plain ridiculous things\n","id":"3e95cadd-f1c8-4bb7-8cec-39ac972eedd9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>There are an infinitude of ideologies and ideas surrounding any person or place throughout history. No one is a perfect exemplar of a human being. It makes no sense to judge one memorial by one ideology, and by modern moral standards, and much less to do it out of historical and social context, by people who barely understand the facts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think they should stay as a reminder of history and an explanation of what really happened. \"Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It\"\n","id":"8f3b5a00-ecfb-430e-9aed-487740ccf40b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off let me start off by saying I don't smoke and never have. My argument really comes from the fact that I am often outside commuting some place walking and I walk by someone smoking that smoke gets blown in my vicinity and it ends up entering my lungs and causing me to cough. As a person with slight asthma any bit of smoke I smell often causes me to cough and struggle a bit to breaths as long as I am bteathing it. Also, it is harmful to inhale someone else's smoke and it shouldn't be legal to subject others to that harm. In a sense I shouldn't have to inhale yoir second hand smoke because you want to smoke. Especially when trying to blow the smoke in other directions it can hit the people behind you. A valid counter argument shouldn't consist of an idea of move elsewhere or walk across the street etc. because then we are inconveniencing the people who are just walking to work or having a picnic in the park rather than the person who is making them move. If I want to generalize this I state, suppose a family wants to have a picnic in a park, but can't because they would have to inhale smoke at every square inch due to many smokers. Is it more fair to the family or the smoker? TL DR smoking in public places sidewalks included should be banned because inhaling smoke is harmful for the people nearby. Edit I want to clarify a point against the same argument I hear over and over in this thread. Public transit, cars, and other pollutants are different in the sense that they have a benefit to someone and they shouldn't be banned. There are also regulations preventing cars and such from polluting too much. However, smoking has a benefit to nobody, not even the person smoking it. If they do it they can do it away from people at least 50 feet, not around others just trying to walk on the street. The other argument not enough to , as those have a benefit while smoking doesn't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"smoking any place where others inhale your smoke should be illegal public places\n","id":"8d9613ca-f1dc-4d90-902e-18506dcdeee2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Im going to be using Italy and Italian as examples, but it applies to any country or culture. If you're parents emigrated from Italy and you were born in the U.S., you are American. Not Italian. If you were born in Italy and lived there for a minimal amount of time, say 3 months, and moved, you arent Italian although legally you are probably considered Italian If any close relatives of yours are Italian and you werent born in Italy, you aren't Italian If you werent born in Italy but were raised in an environment that extensively included Italian tradition and culture, then you could consider yourself Italian. If you spent a major part gt 50 of your developmental life 0 20 years in Italy, you can consider yourself Italian I cant count how many times I have heard the where are you from conversation or heard someone say they were Italian when they very clearly were not born there. Im curious if this is an occurance in countries other than the U.S. I think the melting pot culture could be leading to a mild identity crisis because everyone besides us sorry if Im generalizing here im not sure if there are other countries with a similar culture has a conforming identity whereas everyone in the U.S. seems to have ambiguous origins. Wanting to label themselves as Italian, or any other country they are loosely connected to, could be a form of non conformity or maybe a yearning to belong to a group. This all stems from the refusal to accept that America is a culture, or maybe it is simply the fact that some don't realize it. Perhaps it has taken a while for America to actually melt into one culture. Maybe America will never actually melt into a homogeneous culture. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it Please dont label me as racist or aggressive Or ignorant Im just bored during lunch Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Just because your parents or close relatives were from \"Italy\" doesnt make you \"Italian\"\n","id":"da707011-3544-4015-9dea-fd567c2d00bb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Sing Problematic Christmas Songs?<|ARGUMENT|>Other people children meet will likely treat them according to whatever gender they seem to be, so they will still be socialized along gender lines<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is impossible to raise a truly gender-neutral child.\n","id":"670413ee-2985-40ad-98b5-1be336908a1d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>AI Will Not Supplant Humans in Creating Art<|ARGUMENT|>As robots become more like humans, human opinion of robots tend to decline. Using artificial intelligence to create art would make robots more similar to humans and thus decrease the likelihood of humans appreciating their art.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans may be understanding of the benefits of AI for menial jobs, but be reticent to celebrate or enjoy art created by an IA.\n","id":"6e4d2a2c-4663-410d-b442-43c5368de118"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the EU introduce a carbon tax?<|ARGUMENT|>Microsoft assigns a carbon fee to its internal business units, and collects proceeds in a fund that can be tapped to help pay for additional investments in energy efficiency, renewable energy purchases and the launch of new product lines that will help the company to gain market share over competitors.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Internal carbon pricing even in less developed countries, has successfully emerged as a popular tool that allows companies to reduce emissions and channel investments towards cleaner, more-efficient technologies.\n","id":"21d888f5-2cd9-4344-9868-f6fd65745a74"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Some cultural practices are unlikable by even the people within the culture, that they try to get away from it 1 2 Keeping around something that even people in the culture do not want anymore and preventing something that people do want does not make logical sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Progressing for the benefit of humanity supersedes the priority of preserving culture.\n","id":"f8cd6688-489a-4a01-aa41-33cf95f0a6d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should science get more governmental funding?<|ARGUMENT|>If a company has less cash liquidity it will invest less in research and development Too much tax will decrease cash reserve.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Taxing businesses too much to fund pure science might decrease technological innovation rather than increase it.\n","id":"fc093530-86e6-46f6-b0a4-d9ecbebdfb99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Equal Paternity\/Maternity Paid Leave Be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>This is only the case due to stereotypical gender roles ascribed to men and women. The introduction of mandatory paternal leave will help deconstruct these gender roles and thus in the long term prevent stigma and criticism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This argument is really about equality of opportunity, as outcomes for men and women are different due to different opportunities.\n","id":"41b4396e-c375-4d6a-b013-d9406b9000f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Employees Disclose Their Mental Health Conditions in the Workplace?<|ARGUMENT|>Disclosures can allow employees to request for a flexible work schedule including flexible breaks or start times.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It also entitles people to 'reasonable accommodations' to help them work like other employees.\n","id":"9ea44733-26b8-497e-88e3-bc427be8fa66"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I seriously don't get it. As I understand things, the argument made by the government is that the money or any other property is considered guilty, not the person, therefore no rights to property and due process have been violated. From my point of view, it takes some serious mental gymnastics to accept that as a reasonable, rational argument. While I understand that there are instances where Civil Asset Forfeiture has been used to a beneficial effect, I don't think that makes up to the cases of abuse. Under the Proponents subheading, Wikipedia states gt It civil forfeiture makes it easier for law enforcement to fight organized crime when they had trouble imprisoning offenders, since they could deprive them of their property and income when it is much harder to prove their guilt in a court of law. To me, that reads the same as, Well, we can't prove that some people are guilty, so we made up a law that lets us steal from everyone just to be sure. As of right now, I can't see any was this practice and its abuses can be justified . As I said before, I understand that there are instances where it is beneficial, but is there no other way that we can do the right thing in those cases without putting the rest of America at risk of having law enforcement agencies stealing their money or property?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Civil Asset Forfeiture in the US is a completely legitimate, constitutional tool for law enforcement agencies to use.\n","id":"baf047db-e5e8-45f4-9249-1d2eb6735a73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is There A Need For Testing on Lab Animals in Research?<|ARGUMENT|>Cell cultures can not mimic the complexity of the brain. For very early drug screenings, some simple forms of brain 'organoids could be used providing that an assay is developed. But those are not functional as a computational unit. They can only look at things like toxicity, but not brain functions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Complex physiological systems are not well modeled by cell cultures.\n","id":"d86d1d45-6aa9-41ac-9dd6-2a6b2f13663a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lately I've thought a lot about NASAs role in recruiting young people to be interested in space travel. I'm always reminded of the many people I've met who were inspired by space exploration and gravitated towards propulsion engineering and military, which is far more immediately profitable for the u.s. government. I don't know anyone personally who was inspired to explore or study space for the sake of human advancement and actually ended up doing something besides creating missiles or serving in the military. The people who did something constructive with their inspiration obviously exist and my sample size is small and anecdotal, but Mike Pence mentioning the weaponization of space in an interview with buzz aldrin made me give my assumption more weight. The point in particular I want challenged is the idea that NASA is not involved as heavily with military propaganda as I'm assuming. I know they claim good intentions and do a lot of good, but my argument is that it's a thin veneer to cover the more profitable purpose they serve.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NASA is primarily a military propaganda tool\n","id":"22e42075-d44c-496e-94cd-943088780f46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Long-term Solitary Confinement Be Stopped?<|ARGUMENT|>The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ICCPR is a multilateral treaty adopted by the UN's General Assembly. It commits its parties to respect the civil and political rights of individuals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UDHR has been used as the base of many legally binding international agreements.\n","id":"f884dc0e-9e8a-414a-814e-5199e55e0a07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With advancements in surgery and more automated procedures thanks to the last technology, cosmetic surgery is probably safer than ever. I think that anyone who wants to try it should be encouraged to do so if they are willing to accept the results, possibly bad, possibly good. I myself am considering having my 173 cm frame brought up to ~180 with cosmetic surgery. Many people perhaps discount the risk of surgery, and while I accept that, I do not accept that surgery is so dangerous that it should not be done if the person being operated upon is sufficiently dissatisfied with their appearance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cosmetic surgery, if done by a good surgeon, is a good thing to do.\n","id":"af395166-13b8-4bda-bca4-ad0acb3b318e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So for the record, as far as my personal beliefs and morals go, yes, I think its disgusting and weird. Im totally against it. What I am referring to is the claim that it was any legal harassment on his part. From what I have read, he liked to choke his chicken while other women watched. None of this was done however without their approval and permission first. So whats the problem, you were star struck so you gave in and agreed, now you regret it so its his fault? Did he physically threaten you? Did he bribe you? Did he threaten to end your career? If none of those things happened, and you simply agreed because it was Louis C.K then guess what, it's your fault. Do you know how many people have sex with ugly musicians? It's definitely not for their looks and potential to get married and raise a family. People just love famous people, get star struck, and are happy to have sex with someone famous. Regretting the decision afterwards doesnt make it the celebrities fault. If Louis ASKED to jerk off in front of you, you agreed, and then you regret it Its his fault. If Louis DIDN'T ask and did it Its his fault obviously So what other option is there? A signed contract that states Hey so you are agreeing to this sexual act, I need you to sign on this line stating you wont change your mind about it a few years later ? If I met Whoopi Goldberg, and she asked me to do something sexual, I agreed, and then a few weeks later thought Wtf, I cant believe I did that. Gross . Guess what, it aint her fault, its mine Again, I may not know all the details. Maybe he was persistent, stalkerish, kept bothering until the women gave in due to his fame. In that case, I can understand it. But at the moment I have not read that to be the case.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I dont think Louis CK did anything wrong unless I dont know the full story.\n","id":"70ca63e4-6045-4c88-aa77-bc7a307375a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This prospect is completely illogical. Refusing service to someone under the age of 21 is age discrimination. Although age and sexual orientation referring to Christian bakery\u2019s etc are different, both are things you have absolutely no control over and are terrible reasons to refuse service. Despite having a belief that any company should have the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason this is discrimination. The law says they can buy guns so they should be allowed to. This is not that different from gender or sexual orientation discrimination. This is all discrimination for something one person cannot change and for such and illogical reason what' exactly happens between 20 years, 364 days, 23 hours 59 minutes and 21 years? or 18 21 years of age for that matter. Anyone who is willing to go against human nature and take another humans life has a mental illness and mental illnesses do not cure themselves in a matter of 3 years. Therefore the store can be sued in a court of law for for age discrimination. And even though they should have the right to do it, in this country you do not have that right so they will lose the case. Edit I am talking in the case of refusing to sell FIREARMS to those under 21 is discrimination.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dick\u2019s sporting goods decision to refuse service to those under age 21 when buying guns is age discrimination\n","id":"d26f84e0-d18a-4923-878e-63d3d9da4b2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There Be Religious Exemptions To The Law?<|ARGUMENT|>Government is rarely ethical. Society is often unethical. There has never been a completely ethical ruling power so the individual has reason to choose their own ethical code.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should not be a religious exception to the law, there should be a moral exception to the law or a conscientious exemption based on some ethic.\n","id":"d21a746a-b765-437a-90b1-db6a41d6098e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Theresa May Resign?<|ARGUMENT|>Labour's Customs Union plan will be able to win over much more parliamentary support than Theresa May's Withdrawal Agreement<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Labour Party government would be more effective and representative of the country in Brexit negotiations.\n","id":"518707cb-e11c-4251-a49e-e75bb6746f8c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I don't know about you guys, but in Canada, standard highschool math curriculum includes calculus differential integral . And many 1st year university programs require calculus as part of mandatory requirement, including those from the Arts major. WHAT THE F IS THAT FOR? I'm a STEM major. I have a PhD in genomics, specializing in the development of computational models to study cancer genomes. Even I don't need calculus in my work. I think calculus should be something that only people who later would need it in life should take it aka math major , or OPTIONAL for those who are interested. To make it MANDATORY for literally almost EVERYBODY is way too much. Imagine the time instead spent on teaching other things such as learning how to make useful PowerPoint presentation, or learning how to work with your coworkers, or learning how to be a team leader, or learning to be a good public speaker etc aka the same stuff that you learn in MBA but something for the younger folks to give them a taste .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is not necessary to learn calculus for most people and should be removed from mandatory curriculum\n","id":"40e38833-8479-48ca-a603-9581c93441b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A society with no gender would be better<|ARGUMENT|>I think it would have the potential for true equality but I don't think it is necessary for that. Why can't I be a man who enjoys being a man and other people be women that enjoy being women or so on? Just like race isn't the problem causing racism I don't think gender is causing inequality, I think stupid and scared people in positions of power are responsible for that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Because of the narcisssism of minor differences humans are inherently discriminatory. If gender is taken away discrimination will take place on another level, e.g. plotting different quarters of a city against each other.\n","id":"d3526614-c1b8-4bbe-8103-fa71386af247"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm sorry to not feel entirely enraged at these cops. Yes, they are pieces of shit, especially Langley for escalating the fear in the situation. But if you're in that situation and if orders are confusing or you don't understand what to do, you DON'T MAKE FAST MOVEMENTS. END OF STORY. If your LIFE is on the line and you suddenly have to pull up your pants as your crawling your way towards freedom YOU LET YOUR PANTS FALL. He should have literally been thinking about every single small movement he made, but his jerky and unpredictable movements cost him his life. We live in a time right now that has made everyone afraid of guns, so of course if there is any chance of a threat to cops' lives, they are not messing around. They care about their lives too. It doesn't justify Shaver's death, and Langley should have been more calm and clear, but because of the situation and Shaver's quick movements I can't feel that the cops were 100 unjustified or at fault. Again, if your LIFE is on the line, you don't make silly mistakes. You make slow, concise and conscious decisions, moving one hand at a time. This is THE ONLY WAY how to deal with anyone militantly pointing a gun and screaming at you. Edit Well this has been an interesting discussion and I appreciate having the open conversation with you guys I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote this so i'm about ready to get some more sleep. I have to say that this discussion hasn't necessarily changed my view as much as it has refined it. It is interesting to challenge the difference between moral and causal reasons between both the victim and the cop. Thanks, and I hope this thread will continue to spark some great discussions<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Brailsford and Langley are pieces of shit, but Shaver didn't listen and died because of his quick and unpredictable movements\n","id":"2bcbea2b-b0e4-4bcb-8fae-20318adeea9e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>AA's main text was written in the 1930's by people with no medical background that had spiritual experiences as a result of hallucinogenic drugs in a hospital. The doctors opinion in the book suggests that addiction is an allergy, this is objectively false its an EXTREMELY strong learned behavior according to the brain scans . The doctors opinion also suggest that spiritual intervention is the only cure, this is also objectively false many people get healthy without a concept of god . Not only does the official text claim something that is false but the community of AA suggest that these false claims are true which leads me to my conclusion that AA is false and we can come up with a much better program using the data we have on how addiction works and what helps it. Im not suggesting that I have it all figured out but I know for a fact that AA is preventing more effective treatment because it is promoting a diagnosis that is objectively false. How can we help if we aren't starting from a truthful position? I have spent many years in and around AA and other 12 step programs. Ive read all the books, I have gone through the steps myself multiple time and Ive also experienced A LOT of other forms of treatment. I have been to therapy and read so many different books on the topic of addiction as well as medical journals and studies. Things to read if interested in my point of view. google epidemiology of addiction read the biology of desire healing the shame that binds you more psychological google rat park experiment google testimony of former addicts who got out on their own google maturing out of addiction<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alcoholics anonymous's stance on alcohol addiction is objectively false and should be changed in favor of current data.\n","id":"f1575e47-7340-4258-9288-941f95d2f9f2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It is worth noting that I\u2019m not against the movement, just the naming. I believe that the name \u201cfeminism\u201d creates a wrong bias that feminists do not strive for gender equality but for positive discrimination for women. This is because it has the root \u201cfeminine\u201d and is seen generally as purely a women movement. It is a term that linguistically excludes men. Now, historically women have been the oppressed gender. It is true that much progress is still required for women\u2019s rights. However, to do this, men and women need to work together. Because the movement is called \u201cfeminism\u201d, it creates the impression that it is a struggle SOLELY for women. On the contrary, gender equality concerns everyone. \u201cFeminism\u201d makes it sound like women fighting for women, which invokes a defensive reaction in men. It is a term that excludes them and declares war on them, linguistically. The word represents a side, the women\u2019s side. It makes it sound like the only goal is the glorification of women. However, there are no sides in this matter. The feminist movement seeks for the improvemenr of everyone\u2019s life. I see people talk about how feminism affects men, especially in areas where they are forced to exhibit masculinity and suppress emotions. So, it is not a only a women\u2019s movement after all. An all encompassing term such as \u201cequalism\u201d would be much more inviting for people of all genders and backgrounds. The framing would be a struggle not for \u201cwomen rights\u201d but for \u201cgender equality for all\u201d.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism is a bad name for an equality movement, because the name represents a \u201cside\u201d and this creates bias against it.\n","id":"79ae1cdf-73cf-4c5c-9dee-60db8b41a51c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>If God took people's ability to do wrong away and we were cognizant of this we would call him a horrible oppressive figure that takes people's freedom away, and we'd instead be arguing why a good God would be so oppressive. If a parent was so controlling of they're child's behavior that they were incapable of ever doing anything wrong we'd at best call them a helicopter parent and at worst call them horribly abusive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pharaoh and the Egyptians were killing all the male children of the Israelites. God did this to protect the Israelites from this oppression, and gave Pharaoh the option to stop this from happening\n","id":"533b0679-9f51-41eb-b37b-5681984f7a52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Most Americans prefer to keep their property or at least have some control over disposing of it. Forcing people to hand over property whether it is their home, their car, their guns, or other property deprives them of the right to set their own price and have any choice about selling it. Eminent domain cases can be fought in court if it is deemed to be too harmful to the property owners affected.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If gun owners would be required to turn over their firearms, the culture of guns in America would make that incredibly difficult to enforce. Over 350 million guns in America means millions of armed people creating problems for the enforcement of that policy.\n","id":"b2941aaf-b3f7-4752-8687-b65ec0818b29"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I first heard about the controversy, I thought the napkin would be something racially charged or similarly horrible. But it's just a Coca Cola napkin that has a blank space for passengers to write their name and number and give to a plane crush. Yet people complained and pressured Delta to stop using the napkin. x200B In my view, criticism of the plane crush napkin is unfounded and bad. It's just a silly marketing stunt that tries to evoke dating life before the digital age, when people started conversations and enjoyed dates through not swiping on an app but physically talking to other humans. x200B If someone receives a napkin from a fellow passenger and is interested, then they can talk, connect, make plans, etc. If he she is not interested, then they can just ignore the napkin. I really don't see why some people are so mad it seems like fake outrage. x200B Plus, there are so many terrible things happening in the world today child separation, political conspiracies, climate change that wasting news outlets' time with coverage of a silly napkin is arguably bad for spotlighting the real news and actual issues. x200B In conclusion, I'm a rather progressive liberal person, but I think the plane crush napkin is somewhat silly and cute, and that criticism of it is bad and unfounded.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Criticism of the Plane Crush Napkin is Bad\n","id":"9f310752-e0e2-4140-95ff-817a7f209ee9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>Belief in Christianity is belief in the impossible. It requires otherwise rational individuals to believe in virgin birth, resurrection and miracles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no evidence to support the assertions of Christianity.\n","id":"b69a669d-26ee-42eb-84a1-52ad856baa08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm talking about works of art being made now, TV shows being maybe the best example. We no longer live in the world of, say, Mozart, where an artist toils in solitude to produce a work, and then presents it to the public though this is obviously somewhat oversimplified . The internet makes it so that audience response can permeate a work throughout the entire process of its creation. Game of Thrones might be a good example of this. It established the shocking plot twist as one of the organizing principles for the show, but has more or less backed itself into a corner where millions of viewers can search for and help each other analyze even the smallest bit of foreshadowing. On a deeper level, the smaller and more heterogeneous your audience is the more effectively you are able to predict and control their reactions. Conversation between two people is the deepest and most meaningful, between three slightly less, and so on. Those who are deeply immersed in small communities formed around, say, Norwegian black metal, or the poetry of William Blake, are able to discern much more meaning from a work of art than, for example, someone listening to a Beyonce song on the radio.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Getting popular makes art worse.\n","id":"0790e824-b191-4bab-8f5e-586ce60addf8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Recent history proves my point. A few examples Reagan was an actor and was able to play a character that americans liked. However, he turned out to be a terrible president who tripled the debt, dealt arms to terrorists, and created the idea of Trickle Down Economics . Another example is Bush 2, who was a cool cowboy from the west. Compared to boring and stiff Gore, he was definitely more likable and America chose him. We all know how he turned out and with Gore, you could argue that 9 11 might not have happened, the Bush tax cuts would not have happened, and more good things would have been done for the environment. I'll even go as far to say that Jimmy Carter was picked because he was more likable, but that didn't make him a good leader and because of that, he couldn't handle the hostage crisis. These presidents have not made good decisions. An exception, I think would be Obama, who was picked because a cool guy who plays basketball is more likable than an old guy from Vietnam, or a Rich Mormon guy who doesn't care about us, though Obama turned out OK. My point is that even though we may not like a candidate, we should pick them because they are more astute and knowledgable than us and we should trust them more than a cowboy or an actor to make important decisions for us. An example I like to cite, though I know is not applicable to much is Bartlett's reelection in the show, The West Wing . America chose him over Ritchie because even though Ritchie might have been more likable, Bartlett showed he was much smarter, even though he may have come off as arrogant. Now, around election time, you see commercials of candidates with their families and their pets with country music in the background, that barely talk about the issues because candidates who talk about the technical details rather than their family values come off as snobbish and therefore not relatable. The electorate has been picking the more likable candidate and I believe that this is not a good trend for America's future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Voters should chose the smarter and more pragmatic candidate in an election, not the more likable one.\n","id":"1d176d12-f591-4d7e-bbff-427d186f3c07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Affirmative Action: Useful Once, Outdated Today?<|ARGUMENT|>Even if a racially diverse team didn't actually have a more diverse set of knowledge and experiences, \"simply interacting with individuals who are different forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Socially diverse groups are more innovative and better at solving complex, non-routine problems.\n","id":"0683e914-9a5b-473d-a26f-163167661c17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have autism, et cetera, yadda yadda yadda. I've seen a lot of people want to abort their kids because they'd be born with Down Syndrome or autism, or similar things. I know people that don't know I have autism and they post pro Autism Speaks A charity that aims to cure autism. i.e. no more of us stuff on Facebook, and I instantly hate them. to me it's incredibly uneducated and borderline evil. If I've known you a while and I discover you feel this way, I part friends. The only people I would omit from that are the few friends I have that are so close we're family, and my actual family. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel that people who believe in aborting or euthanizing babies that would\/were born with mental illness are inherently terrible people.\n","id":"72c4cfd9-c74f-4800-89d5-96f3594b738b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like the best way I could be argued out of this position would be to attack my assumptions about which traits are traditionally taken as masculine or feminine, but from my limited cultural perspective Masculinity is usually associated with power, force, will, strength, bravery, action, intelligence, logic, protectiveness, stoicism and honesty. Femininity is usually associated with weakness, docility, passivity, indecision, fearfulness, immaturity, need of protection, emotional displays, and manipulation. It seems odd to me that many feminist critiques seem to call out this unnatural and unfair division of traits between the masculine and feminine, or between men and women, and yet demand for a rejection of what masculinity stands for and an embrace of what femininity stands for. How can you simultaneously recognize that the concept of gendered personality traits is artificial and sexist, and has traditionally painted women in an unfairly negative light, while calling for the embrace and celebration of these same gendered personality traits?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender-stereotyping personality traits like aggression or logic, is always detrimental, as it only limits the potential of individuals. However, many more of the traits traditionally associated with \"femininity\" are negative and should be discouraged in everyone.\n","id":"ad39acb4-9b7d-43c8-9cec-0270390d8ca1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Sikhism advocates for a God without form or gender. Everyone is equal in front of God and has equal direct access to God. Sikhism also commands believers to use ordinary life to be closer to God, to strive for social justice and to live honestly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion as social control is a western-centric concept. Many Eastern religions do not impose social orders in tandem with supernatural belief systems.\n","id":"6e7634a0-d51a-4b25-9c90-71afdead270d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the wake of the George Zimmerman trial and the Reality TV esque coverage it got I find it disgusting that it was able to shown live on TV. I have no problem with the older methods where reporters could go in and take notes and whatnot, but I think live viewing by anyone is bad for several reasons. Non Newsy information can come out. What I mean by that is individuals who are asked to testify could be forced to answer a question that while not illegal would be embarrassing to that person or have potential negative effects. For instance a witness to a crime could conceivably be forced to come out as homosexual to the entire world. Under the previous system that fact while it still would come out would more likely than not be ignored by the media, and only really recorded in court transcripts. The other problem I have with it is it breaks down the whole notion of Innocent until proven guilty . People on the jury were approved by both the prosecution and defense who agreed that these people will be able to give a unbiased verdict. The reason the process of selecting a jury is difficult is to ensure that the verdict is based on facts not emotion or previous prejudices. Finally my last reason is that at some of these trials a person's life is on the line. People who watched this were watching it like they would anything else on tv only in this case a person's future was in jeopardy this reason kind of blends with the last one in that the general public is not mature enough to handle the results. People in a situation like this will forever judge the person the same way they judge a character on survivor or american idol. Please try to keep your convincing away from a specific trial like Zimmerman's. Edit I like your responses but you seem to think I oppose all media in trials, my problem is not with reporters covering a trial it is instead with the live broadcasting part. If a reporter wanted to go in and write notes or anything short of full length recordings I would be fine with it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it is disgusting that courtroom proceedings can be televised\n","id":"bd37a25a-8509-4bd9-9a05-f4de7c6ebf08"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel guilty whether I give or don't give to the homeless. We've all heard how giving to homeless people can support addictions or foster a cycle of dependence. However, I feel that the personal gain I get from maintaining an altruistic nature and keeping people as people outweighs any harm that I cause to them. I think, in the long run, that motivates me more to help in more substantial ways, such as volunteering, which I do frequently. So even though I may be doing more societal harm than good in the short term, I think it pays off in the long term. Why should I not behave this way? Edit Nice work I'm mostly changed. I will start donating to a charity instead and use panhandlers to remind myself to donate if I get out of the habit. Now I just have to get better at saying no, ha.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe giving to the homeless occasionally is better for me than it is bad for them.\n","id":"f42d9d45-bf4b-44a5-9bbf-bd5b7d4f3c57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We have so many of these. Short people are height challenged, retarded people are special needs or mentally challenged, etc. I'm not saying all political correctness is wrong. I think labels like African American make a lot of sense because they are trying to be more neutral when describing a group. However, someone with Down's Syndrome is mentally retarded. Why is it in bad taste to point out the obvious. It seems extremely silly to say special needs and create these silly euphemisms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it's completely fine to call some people retarded, and labels like \"special needs\" are overly gentle.\n","id":"09daf4f9-a368-469d-a2aa-ee4addea314c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Capitalism vs Socialism<|ARGUMENT|>The right to own property is central to man\u2019s existence. Private ownership of property including land, businesses and goods gives individuals security and a means to control their own affairs. Ownership brings responsibility and allows individuals to plan for the future so as to provide for themselves and their families. For example, owning a house, a business or some land makes it possible to borrow against that property so that individuals can invest for the future. The lack of private property rights in much of Africa makes such borrowing and investment impossible, and is one reason for the continent's lack of economic growth.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right to own property is central to man\u2019s existence. Private ownership of property including l...\n","id":"a075b4c9-4de8-447f-9ad2-49ea066f6234"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am speaking from experience here. I've been to some protests, the March for Science for example. I would characterize it as preaching to the choir . Everyone who was there already agreed with me. Hardly anyone who wasn't involved with the march was actually interested. Most people who passed by probably didn't even read the hilarious one sentence long signs that people made. The only people who were there who maybe didn't agree were the police, and they just seemed mostly annoyed that they had to block traffic and corral protesters. Now if I start a debate online, on facebook or reddit for example, I won't be limited to what can be crammed onto a piece of cardboard. I cant type lots of sentences. People who disagree with my will come and see what I said. Sometimes they write a rebuttal, then I counter that rebuttal, then still more people come and see that conversation, sometimes thousands more people. And every once in awhile, I actually change somebody's mind. It is about 1000 times more efficient than traditional protesting. If you disagree then change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Online \"slacktivism\" is actually a more effective way of changing people's minds than protesting in the streets.\n","id":"dc0cb7d5-7f56-446e-b805-d7478f8ab08f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've been doing a lot of reading lately and I feel like I'm finding all these problems with capitalism. I was wanting to get the opposite point of view on this issue before I decide where I stand. So, here we go Premise Capitalism is an inherently exploitative system. Reasons By definition, your employer makes more money off what your labor provides them than they pay you. A common counter Your employer provides you the opportunity to work which you would not have had otherwise. Your work for them is a net benefit to both of you. Retort Where did the employer get the opportunity to provide me with the opportunity? They got a head start , in terms of either capital or education, that allowed them to start their business. This head start , which is essentially given randomly depending on where you are born, does not seem like a compelling reason why someone should be able to profit off their employee's work. Capitalism will inherently concentrate wealth into a few individuals. As businesses get more efficient at competing, they gain more capital. More capital makes it easier for them to compete. This positive feedback loop gives them more and more power to the point where they become a monopoly and can control significant aspects of people's lives, giving them more power. In capitalism, what is to stop a business from obtaining so much capital that they become a monopoly? The voluntary exchange principal which capitalism is founded on is fundamentally flawed. Some exchanges may be voluntary, but many are not. There is not much choice between working for barely enough to survive on or dying of starvation. If one person has all the resources and I have none, I am at their mercy to accept whatever contact they give me. Furthermore, consent can be engineered. This is a common problem with advertising. Human beings are not fundamentally rational agents. Humans evolved with many physiological quirks that can be exploited once you understand what they are. Anchoring is an example of this. If people are not rational, how can we expect voluntary exchange to be free from one party hurting another? I recommend the book Predictably Irrational and the documentary Century of Self for a more elaborate explanation on how consent can be engineered. Change my view on this. I want to hear counters to my arguments before I form my opinion. I look forward to what you all have to say. EDIT Thanks for the discussion everyone You brought up some good points. I've decided my knowledge of formal economic theory is too spotty for me to decide yet. I'm going to read some academic literature on the topic. Thanks for taking the time to post.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe capitalism is inheritable exploitative.\n","id":"613f826c-762f-4698-83d0-bb75c88b3f88"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>An Oxford comma is the last comma in a list one, two, and three which some people feel ought to be omitted. A 2010 documentary includes the line highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800 year old demigod and a dildo collector. This line may be hilarious as written, but is significantly less clear than if the serial comma had been included. I believe that the Oxford comma adds clarity and consistency, since all the other list elements are separated by commas. For those of you who prefer to skip it why? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe it is better to use the Oxford comma than to leave it out.\n","id":"b14eef75-3a83-4222-968b-e375366defa3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Golan Heights were occupied by Israel following a defensive war against a coalition of Arab nations including Syria, the nation formerly in control of the aforementioned Heights. Following the Israeli victory, they occupied the Heights as a matter of national security, and have recently been moving to annex them formerly. Many people say that this annexation is unwarranted, unjust, or illegal. However, precedence shows that this is not the case. Following World War 2, the USSR and Poland annexed about a fourth of Germany, and forcibly expelled some ten million people from their homes including those expelled from other neighboring nations like Czechia . International law views this annexation as valid. If international law views the annexation of Eastern Germany by a nation that had been on the receiving end of aggression as valid, then it follows that the annexation of the Golan Heights by a nation that had been on the receiving end of aggression is likewise valid. Either both are valid, or both are invalid. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If the Polish-Soviet annexation of the eastern German territories following World War 2 was justified, then so too is the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights\n","id":"1033df7d-9daf-4089-9272-553a23e0f093"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First things first, this is NOT an insult. I merely believe that both sexes have their natural role to play. I am also not saying that every individual woman is submissive, but biologically on the whole, they are. Physically men are the natural hunters and leaders of the society, while women are invaluable child bearers. It is naturally in a woman's best interest to not offend or go against a man, because they desire the protection for both themselves and their children. It would pose too much of a risk for the physically weaker female to take a stand against a male. They have evolved to be more submissive because of this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women are naturally submissive to men.\n","id":"9e171779-96d4-4211-a517-a3cd70bf41a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>The game We Happy Few deals with an alternate end to World War 2 where, after a successful invasion of England by the German Empire, people of a small town in England take a happy pill to cope with and forget horrible memories.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video games can educate gamers by exploring historical counterfactuals instead of portraying historical accuracy which acts as a harmful justification for fewer female characters.\n","id":"93befb7a-9f7f-4a82-871e-edaefd674d79"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Balance in the media<|ARGUMENT|>A free media should be just that, without a requirement for balance. The reporting of news is a vital form of free speech and the expression of opinion. Individuals and groups do not all see issues in the same way, and they should not be required to report and commentate on them as if they did. Forcing reporters, media owners and employees to portray sides of a story that they do not agree with is an infringement on their public expression of political conviction. For a state to maintain or use such rights of content regulation is unjust and arguably dangerous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A free media should be just that, without a requirement for balance. The reporting of news is a vit...\n","id":"d270d197-124d-40a9-8093-048b8eb86f24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>From the opening remarks at the Supreme Court today Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court The intimate and committed relationships of same\u00adsex couples, just like those of heterosexual couples, provide mutual support and are the foundation of family life in our society. If a legal commitment, responsibility and protection that is marriage is off limits to gay people as a class, the stain of unworthiness that follows on individuals and families contravenes the basic constitutional commitment to equal dignity. Are we willing to declare that polyamourous relationships cannot be intimate or committed? Do they not provide mutual support? Are such people supposed to not feel like second class citizens if there love is not OK but everyone else's is? Do we not worry about their feeling a similar 'stain of unworthiness'? Some arguments I've heard from another thread are Well, that would really complicate the tax code. I kinda think that's the tax code's fault. We don't need to have a tax code that treats people different according to their marital status. This would make pre nups and inheritance more complicated. Again, this seems like a side thing, not an argument for denying people rights, if such rights exist. One fails rational basis review, and the other doesn't. I'm not a lawyer, but I do find this the technically best argument, but it still seems thin to me. You can easily say the Government has as compelling interest in keeping marriage between man and woman as you can say it has interest in keeping it between only 2 people. Fundamentally, man woman child, which is on of the main things about marriage. If anything, polyamorous relationships that contain at least one man and one woman pass that test easier than homosexual relationships do. Does anyone have anything else? Or can you expand one of the previous arguments to something more convincing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no good argument for gay marriage that doesn't also include polyamourous marriage.\n","id":"d49c2463-d672-4b5f-8b7d-6ebc60922839"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>the state should provide broadband internet through nationalized companies<|ARGUMENT|>Monopoly, or near-monopoly, power over broadband is far too great a tool to give to governments. States have a long history of abusing rules to curtail access to information and to limit freedom of speech. Domination of broadband effectively gives the state complete control of what information citizens can or cannot consume online. ISPs function generally under the principle of Net Neutrality, in which they are expected to allow the free transit of information online. If they are the sole gatekeepers of knowledge, people may well be kept from information deemed against the public interest. It is harder for opponents of government regulations to voice their opinions online when they have no viable alternative to the state-controlled network. The internet is a place of almost limitless expression and it has empowered more people to take action to change their societies. That great tool of the people must be protected from any and all threats, and most particularly the state that could so profit from the curtailment of internet freedom.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It would give undue power to the government over access to the internet\n","id":"823b1012-25b3-433c-9ede-71883b210f51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People come in all shapes and sizes and promoting body positivity is great, but I am not convinced that we should throw our hands up and encourage people to maintain unhealthy lifestyles because they can't or don't want to lose weight. Fat people are the target of discrimination and bullying due to their weight, which is undeniably wrong. But promoting fatness is not the way to support fat people. I understand that defining health is a complex issue and it's not as easy saying that person has some extra lbs, therefore they aren't healthy but the fat acceptance movement's sheltering of obesity normalizes poor health. Obesity is a serious problem and the fat acceptance movement allows us to bypass facing the obesity epidemic as a society. There are major systematic changes that we, as a society, need to address in order to have a healthier populous, and accepting that obesity is okay or promoting it is a barrier to the hard work of changing the way our culture treats food, diet, and exercise. People deserve respect, but part of that respect should include real discussions about weight and finding better ways to support people. Edit To illustrate a few examples of the trends I've seen and point out the difference between the intent of the movement and the byproduct s of it I'm on mobilize so I apologize for formatting There are a number of fativits who write about how being fat is good, I've interpreted that as promoting fatness obesity. Examples I'm FAt. It's OK Photo Series Proves Fat is Beautiful Glorifying Obesity You can find Fat is Fabulous posts all over Tumblr and other social media sites. I think the difference here is the original intent of the movement. I see that the intent of the movement is to end discrimination against fat people, but I think many individuals use that as a scapegoat to normalize obesity. Cathy Young wrote a succinct article that reflects my thoughts that may be a better descriptor Pro Fat An Unhealthy Status Quo EDIT 2 POST  A number of people have illustrated the difference between the fat acceptance movement and the fat people acceptance movement, which is the key differentiator for me. Yes, there are radicals as in any movement who take the message further to say that obesity the illness is healthy, which is not true. But as I understand, the moderates of the fat acceptance movement simply aim to normalize the existence of obese people in an effort to make their lives less hellacious. There are a lot of people who are hung up on the normalizing aspect of this thread and who have pointed out that of course the movement aims to normalize obesity. I posted this thread with a common understanding that obesity, the illness, is bad, and should not be upheld, glorified, promoted, etc That said, I understand there are differentiating interpretations on the word normalizing . I see the point that normalizing doesn't always equate to condoning, as in, we should normalize mental health issues, but that does not mean we glorify mental health problems. Thus, I think my real issue here has been associating the movement and it's intent with radicals. I would, therefore, appreciate links to resources that are upstanding representations of moderate thinkers of the fat acceptance movement. Thanks to everyone for your input, thought provoking conversation and for changing my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fat acceptance movement normalizes obesity.\n","id":"eddaf77c-fbf4-4f9a-8342-52e0e138ea82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Atrocities can and have been committed in the name of many things: from race, nationality, ethnicity, political orientation, materialistic gain, to football clubs. Anything people can rally under can and has been used to commit atrocities. Singling out religion is a logical fallacy, not to mention hypocritical.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religions have been falsely blamed as the source of conflict or used as an excuse to cause it.\n","id":"96dd333a-d8a9-4eb0-9dd2-64baa3188454"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>In a committed relationship, what constitutes infidelity?<|ARGUMENT|>The Wodaabe people of Chad have an annual festival where men, regardless of their relationship status, compete to sleep with female judges without the stigma of cheating on their partners.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept of fidelity can vary wildly according to culture.\n","id":"62839be6-c2b4-4f71-a923-9dfb6fb2139b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Some devoted gamers might feel like an agenda is being pushed on them when video games attempt to bring more gender equality into their games. This could deter gamers from buying video games.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Video games that portray gender equality could receive backlash from gamers who are not open to it.\n","id":"8872e5c8-3374-45ea-8193-043a03985e53"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pre-selecting sex of children<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals do not procreate randomly: they choose their partners, and often choose the time of conception according to their own age and prosperity. Parents give so much to children. They invest years of their lives and a large amount of their earnings in their upbringing. Isn\u2019t it fair that in return, they get to decide something like this if they want to? This is an extension of reproductive rights.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Designer baby\" fears are exaggerated; all babies are, to some extent, designed.\n","id":"bfa8b86c-736d-49bd-929a-b88705d32550"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Back in 2012, after the election, I remarked to a friend that 2016 would be the most important election of my lifetime because the party in power would be in a position to set up an indefinite control of the government come 2020. My view is that the Republican party currently controls the US Government and will continue to control the US Government for the indefinite future. How long that future will be is hard to predict. Maybe eight years, maybe twenty, maybe more. There may be a brief gap period. But the future will be Republican. I base this position on the following Donald Trump will win 2020 and maintain control of at least one half of Congress, likely both. As the incumbent Trump enjoys the incumbent advantage. He has a reliable base that will not break from him and consistently votes. He has at best done nothing to protect our voting systems and at worst sought to weaken protections. His opponents are currently fairly divided although we are still very far out but none seem likely to inspire both the Left to vote and Independents to vote with them. And even if Trump is unpopular it does not matter because the unpopularity is geographically restricted compared to his rural support. The electoral college is once again likely to seal a win even if he does not win the popular vote. Republicans will control the 2020 census. Due to the above, if Trump is re elected Republicans will control the 2020 census and redistricting. They will, as they have in the past, gerrymander the country in their favor as much as possible. Alternatively, if the census is sabotaged in some way, the current districts, favoring Republicans, will continue to be used. Thus, for the next decade, elections will continue to favor Republicans based on districts. And the Supreme Court is not likely to strike down gerrymandering any time soon. The Urban Rural Divide favors Republicans. Republicans enjoy rural support while Democrats enjoy more urban support. The problem is that while urban support has a higher population, rural support is geographically wider. The Senate is designed as an institution to favor smaller population states, and as much as I dislike the Republican control of it it is nonetheless doing just that. The House, however, is not able to counterbalance the Senate because it is capped. The House is meant to represent population and favor more populous states, but with a cap in place is no longer able to effectively do so. More rural states are favored in both parts of Congress. Further, the House can be gerrymandered where the Senate cannot. A greater population favoring Democrats in smaller urban areas is simple to manipulate to create as many rural and thus Republican districts and representatives as possible with as few urban districts and Democrats as possible. The joint effect of the census and the urban rural divide cannot be understated, as it ensures that, even if Democrats win the presidency and a unified Congress somehow it is likely to be quickly re lost come the next election, where the presidential party is already predisposed to endure losses. The Courts. If the Republicans hold power in 2020 it is unlikely that all the aging liberal justices will survive until the next election, granting Republicans the ability to further solidify the Supreme Court as conservative. More subtly, an enormous portion of the lower federal court judges are conservative to far right, a number increasing as judges are passed through the Senate. The combined power of the conservative justice system will be to neuter any left wing legislation that a Democratic government may pass, removing as many Democratic policy victories and further portraying Democrats as inept. Notably this is likely to occur even if Democrats win in 2020, as the judiciary is already stacked against them. There is, of course, the possibility Democrats will win the presidency and at least one half of Congress. Then all bets are off. But I am doubtful. Disproving the above points would go a long way towards changing my view, although changing just one or so would likely be insufficient as they are pretty interconnected. This is not a debate on what the actual policy effects of an indefinite Republican government will be, although I fear they will be catastrophic. And while I have no doubt Trump, should he win in 2020, will do everything he can to further consolidate power either for himself personally or for Republicans that is also outside the scope of this . And please don't talk about winning and controlling state governments in a federal system, I am referring to the federal government in this . Adding state governments would make this too vast.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is likely Republicans will continue to control the US Government Indefinitely\n","id":"b55c9826-eec8-4843-97a3-53685c6aa2fc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm submitting this because Islam is a problem that needs to be dealt with is the 1 post on every controversial opinion thread, i.e. it's extremely popular, at least on Reddit. And a lot of smart people, like Christopher Hitchens, have said the same thing, so I don't want to completely chalk it up to Reddit being Reddit. Anyway, I got into this site through r atheism and lurked there for two years before making an account and realizing that there were far more fresh and interesting subs out there. Suffice to say, I'm not coming at this issue with a we must respect religions even if their adherents do terrible things attitude. Because . . . I recognize that terrorism, as we usually think of it, is disproportionately Islam based. I recognize the phenomenon of people in a first world, highly developed society suddenly becoming radicalized in the name of Islam and plotting terrorist activity or travelling to join al Qaeda or ISIS. But, as I see it, this can all simply be explained by the fact that the part of the world that is most predominately Islamic, the Middle East, has been fucked with throughout the second half of the 20th century. Political, social, and economic disorder breed radicalism see post WWI Germany , which found a convenient home in Islam. If Islam hadn't been there, or is removed in the future, I think radicalism would just manifest itself in the next big thing nationalism, racism, politics, etc. . Up until the mid 20th century, Islam was widely regarded as one of the most peaceful and tolerant religions out there. And if the Middle East were traditionally a Christian dominated area, and the West traditionally Muslim, there would probably be people right now beheading journalists in the name of Jesus. As for satellite terrorists in first world countries, I see it as an inevitability, like the Americans who became Nazi sympathizers during WWII. If an ideology is powerful enough, it might lure in a small number of idiots elsewhere. It's bad, but it's not unique to radical Islam\u2014there's no hypnotizing verse in the Koran that turns people into terrorists. I'm not making a defense for religion\u2014obviously it can be a vehicle for hate\u2014but in this case, I think it's just the most convenient vehicle in a long line of them. So if you could wave a magic wand and Islam would disappear, something else would rise up to take its place. What do you think? I don't really want to dislike Islam, but I sometimes feel like I'm being overly tolerant, if that's possible.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think Islam is problematic.\n","id":"4a517ab7-a868-467f-9abb-3e78d6609ed1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>Article 22: \"Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.\" Universal right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UDHR articles 1-3, 5-12, 16-20, and 22-29 are specifically directed to the idea that when someone crosses a border, they keep all rights and legal protections.\n","id":"de28526b-9519-4789-8487-9dec5cf3600d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Antarctic Exploitation<|ARGUMENT|>There are many reasons why oil and gas exploration should not be allowed in the Antarctic. Firstly, proven and probable reserves of oil and gas are still rising faster than global consumption, so there is no economic need to exploit any hypothetical Antarctic sources. Secondly, as the continent is already suffering as a result of global warming, our priority should be to find renewable alternatives to fossil fuels rather than to continue our dependence upon them. At a practical level, the cost of exploration and production would be completely uneconomic, especially given the hostile climate and the serious iceberg threats to offshore rigs, tankers and pipelines, as well as the very deep continental shelf. There would also be a serious danger of pollution, both from the increased human presence in this fragile environment, and from oil spills.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are many reasons why oil and gas exploration should not be allowed in the Antarctic. Firstly,...\n","id":"7469e0be-916c-42b4-8217-27e945a3d53a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>The US Army\u2019s Future Combat Systems program estimated that developing AKMs would come at a price tag of $300 billion<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The development cost of AKMs that are as effective as humans is very high.\n","id":"ab7bebe5-f06f-4175-8497-3a6df9abcd2f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will Sex Robots Advance Sexual Liberation?<|ARGUMENT|>A sex doll called Fanny became very popular at a brothel in Vienna, prompting other brothels to acquire sex dolls as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A 2012 study projected Amsterdam's red light district being filled with sex robots, rather than human prostitutes, by 2050.\n","id":"7368707f-9161-44e8-99a4-7232bd66886c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Polygamy<|ARGUMENT|>Women that are interested in marrying a polygamous man, benefit from seeing how he acts with his other wives, and thus achieve confidence in what they will get as future wives. This helps women avoid marrying bad or potentially dangerous spouses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polygamous women can scrutinize married men in action before marrying\n","id":"d1d954b3-2253-4edd-bd3a-d5a1cb8ed77f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should begging for money be illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Social services would not necessarily be more expensive than the costs associated with processing beggars in the criminal justice system, and the outcomes are likely to be better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's possible to preempt most begging by offering sufficient social services, which is preferable to reducing begging by coercion.\n","id":"a9bc16ac-b3ce-4d96-b502-161fc36ef5be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you don't know what the floss is, you probably live under a rock are older than 15. I'll explain a little bit it's the arm swinging dance that young kids do to dance to basically anything. However, they should be dancing to some Bill Evans or Brahms, because the dance is actually a Waltz. This is because of the irregular time signature it is in 6 8. This is due to the dance having six motions, all done in equal time. This form of counting can be split in half, making it essentially 3 4 time, which is the same time signature as Waltzes. I guess you could Floss to some bluesey 6 8 Led Zeppelin as well. Edit I really should have just called it 3 4 in the first place. I doubt there's an official time signature for the floss but I seems most of the arguments are based on 6 8 not being the same thing as 3 4. You can count the floss in 3 4 so I shouldnt have even said 6 8.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"The Floss\" is actually a Waltz, despite how it is used in pop culture\n","id":"b6921580-ae60-463d-acda-142a678e9207"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here are my reasons Men are biologically more aggressive than women. This gives them a clear advantage during battle. Even though women have fought for equality, this doesn't mean we should give them jobs where men are more qualified. Not many women are miners or other dangerous jobs There's a variety of other military jobs that women can have behind the front line while still serving their country Women are biologically more emotional. While not true for all women, many women may have a hard time killing the enemy or making necessary snap decisions<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that women should not be allowed to fight on the front lines in combat.\n","id":"b1007fd6-8eab-49c8-815a-8aa04ddc2812"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>General AI should have fundamental rights<|ARGUMENT|>Basic rights or \"human rights\" is purely human construct it does not exist outside human society and thus it is up to humans to decide who should have human rights and who should not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human rights are a device intended to address specific issues related to human beings.\n","id":"04bb0d15-92e6-4b99-a5ad-829d69f304c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Dividing Jerusalem<|ARGUMENT|>Nadav Shragai. \"Envisioning a divided Jerusalem\". Haaretz. - \"Those who give the Palestinians control over the Temple Mount, the \"outlying neighborhood\" next to the Western Wall, will no longer be able to pray in peace at the Wall, or hold Memorial Day ceremonies or induction ceremonies for paratroopers there; nor will they be able to ensure the safety of the president or prime minister should either wish to participate in such ceremonies. Imagine the street battles in the alleys of Sajiyeh and Beit Hanun, in the Gaza Strip, transferred to the ancient streets of Jerusalem, which today teem with Jews. Think about how bar-mitzvah ceremonies or wedding pictures could be held at the Western Wall, or even plain old visits to place a note in the cracks, if Palestinians \"controlled\" the area a few hundred meters away.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dividing Jerusalem would shift the battle lines to the city\n","id":"39fc332c-1c63-4b32-964f-343eb6de32d2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whether it's homelessness or Central American immigrants undercut wages, or environmental degradation or whatever else, the individuals who have the asymmetric balance of influence often, but always, the wealthy are more responsible for the results of their decisions which affect more than themselves, while this is obvious, there are many people who blame problems on people who have little influence on anyone but themselves. This is not a partisan argument since individuals all over the spectrum have blindspots to who should be blamed. MAGA people blame immigrants and they ignore agribusinesses for employing unauthorized immigrants, Trump zeroing out humanitarian aid to central American countries, as well as the long history of American intervention in the region Progressives blame Trump voters, Evangelical Christians, and businesses in general understandable there are some businesses that hold more sway than others, but specificity is wanted rather than blanket statements . To solve societal problems whether they be stable family life or climate crisis, the first step would need to be acknowledging the root cause of the problem, and both sides of the aisle tends to fly past the trying to find the root cause of problems and leap to a scapegoat that's entirely unnuanced but corollarated. Maybe I'm wrong to how widespread this is, or what I believe is a symptom is actually the cause from someone else's perspective, but I feel like a lot of our current problems would be better handled if we first sought out root causes of problems. Change My View.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The poor and thebleast influential are rarely the source of the political problem, they are just the result of the problem.\n","id":"7b7930b6-f97a-4323-82b3-90ca980ecf97"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've noticed that the term 'sexual assault' has been recently thrown around more and more frequently, and with little or no context each time. For example on a news story, the most common description is 'A woman was sexually assaulted today,' or something similar. This is such a broad statement that it is almost entirely meaningless. The way the term has been used as of late, 'sexual assault' can mean anything from getting a look that the victim deems pervy, or full on thrown against a pinball machine rape. Imagine if your friend came to you one day and said he was assaulted at a bar and got into a fight. You would ask what the hell happened to get him into a fight got punched, slashed with a knife, broken bottle, whatever. It's just a throwaway term to prevent people from getting triggered. But really, if you're worried about that then you shouldn't be talking about it in the first place. Edit Gotten a lot of replies with the same argument, that the term is used to protect the victim. Mental state, confidentiality, etc. If the reporters are so worried about the mental state etc. of the victim, then they shouldn't be reporting on it at all.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The term 'sexual assault' should never be used.\n","id":"21d0eaf5-2a92-457e-a7e7-a30a884f2794"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Educated as in a high school level. I piss a LOT of people off with this view so I'd like it changed. In my opinion education is more a result of your parents and where you were raised than any effort on your part whereas I put hours in to my appearance each week. We all do. Showering, shaving, makeup, working out, picking out and shopping for clothes, making sure I'm carrying myself confidently and making attractive faces, etc. As a guy I put over an hour a day just into looking good and I'd way rather be recognized for that than the circumstances of where I was born. Change my view reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Being recognized for being attractive is better than being recognized for being educated\n","id":"88f2eac1-a0a7-4c08-8353-77a73ed2fad9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just to clear something up, I don't agree with only a single part of his attitude, that being downvoting someone with more than 1 account, especially if the certain comment was something that should stay at 1karma, like this song is great I love this x band . But I agree with what he did. I agree that his comment should be more important than others. Not because his opinion is more valuable, but because people are more interested in his opinion. There are certain standards which he had to hold up to, and most of the time he did. Even if he didn't, the simple fact that it was something said by one of the users with the most karma on this site would make people interested in seeing it. I think that certain users of this site should have a 10upvotes boost on any of their comments that don't add to their karma count, simply because they are people other people like listening to. Also, this boost should apply to every subreddit that doesn't opt out of it, for example if the mods of a certain subreddit don't think a popular user would make an insightful addition to that subreddit, they can turn the boost off. Also, I think certain users of a subreddit should have a boost only in that subreddit. For example a respected science teacher in r askscience or a popular gamer in a gaming subreddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"What Unidan did should be something that Reddit does for its important users.\n","id":"e75ffd77-b2e0-4af8-bffc-295499a10f2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>To say that women and men are equal is simply incorrect. I absolutely do not mean to say that one is better than the other, only that there are fundamental physiological differences between men and women that feminists appear to disregard. Now, in my opinion feminism seeks to advocate that anything that men can do, women can also but only when its convenient. To me it seems like feminists want to have their cake and eat it too. I will give a few examples that I always think about to illustrate my point. The Ray Rice incident. What happened was unfortunate and of course he shouldn't have hit his wife. However, if this was Ray hanging out with another football player and knocked him out, this would not have been a story. Its because he punched a woman that this became a big deal. How can the feminist movement suggest Men should NEVER lay their hands on a woman but still say that men and women are equal. My answer is that its because men are generally stronger than women, but then that's my point. If you are going to advocate that they are equal then they should receive equal treatment. Again, . Rape cases. In college I have been required to watch numerous sexual harassment videos and attend mandatory training seminars on sexual assault. In these videos they always paint the male as a bad guy and its always targeted towards men. Perhaps I have misunderstood something but if a guy and a girl are both under the influence and they decide to have sex, the girl can then decide the next day that maybe it wasn't a good idea and that the guy should have known better. The guy is then facing rape charges. Why is this on the guy? People use the phrase Victim Blaming and say that its not on the girl regardless of the fact that she drunk. So what if she had gotten drunk and drove her car into a tree. Can she then say Maybe that wasn't a good idea and then get off the hook? The draft. This one has also bothered me. According to the United States Selective Service Act, all men between ages 18 25 are required to register for the draft and may be picked for military service if the draft were to be implemented. Why are feminists all over the country not outraged about this? Shouldn't it be men AND women that are required to register for the draft? After all, men and women should be able to perform wartime duties equally right? It just seems like people pick and choose when its convenient for gender equality Of course there are certain things that should be equal. Wages, education, etc. However I feel that a push for gender equality in every aspect of life is fundamentally wrong. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern feminism is hypocritical and flawed\n","id":"cf9d843c-f9d1-47c8-8a15-714696917ed3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>TL DR the reason why so many young people end up being mass shooters is because there are not nearly as many outlets for casual violence as there used to be. When I say mass shooter, I dont mean a gangland drive by, I mean the stereotypical disgruntled kid mowing down innocent people. So this isn't my theory, my friend who is a child psychologist brought this up, and I very much do understand it. Back in the day, outlets for violence were everywhere, even in nice neighborhoods. Local ruffians, street gangs, bar fights, schoolyard scraps etc were a daily thing even in relatively nice areas. If you had violent tendencies, and a lot of young men did, you took part in those things, you joined the local group of troublemakers, you maybe sold drugs, you partied a lot, got into fights etc. Just general debauchery. Anyone who was around 25~ year ago remembers how it was, and just how different it was specifically. Violence was everywhere. If you ever watch Dazed and Confused or the movie Kids, it gives a relatively good idea of the kind of society young people lived in. The kind of casual, everyday violence that people engaged in. It was rough, gritty, scary, and everyone either perpetrated it, or was surrounded by it. They are just movies of course, but they did reflect how it really was. I grew up in the same environment that the kids from Kids did, in the same era, it was practically a replica of how young people lived back then in cities. Fighting, drugs, rape, gangs, accepted bigotry. Just complete debauchery. Today, violent crime victimization rates have dropped from 181 to 26. among young people since 1992. In the vast majority of communities, the type of stuff is shunned completely. Schoolyard fights which in 1992 might have gotten you a slap on the wrist, they now get you expelled, or worst, jailed, and can ruin your life. Parents and adults often rally for worse punishments for more minor crimes, and lawsuit culture is rampant when it comes to kids. Any 'fucking up' in any way is now looked down upon, heavily. In my school district, parents literally rallied to get 2 kids expelled from their high school because they were caught with alcohol. That would have been unthinkable when I was growing up. In many ways, it is a nanny state, but also a nanny society. The kind of outlets, the 'underbelly' of society, which existed in most of america 20~ years ago has mostly been run out. The kind of debaucherous culture which was everywhere is becoming a thing of the past. Not only are kids not engaging in violent behavior anymore, but kids are increasingly not drinking, doing drugs, or having sex, many kids aren't even hanging out as much with friends as much as they used. Now, how does this tie into mass shootings? There will always be a subsect of society, mostly men, which will naturally gravitate to those things, either they are genetically prone to violence or they are socialized at home to be violent. Those men would be the types to engage in the kind of behavior and culture which was everywhere 20 years ago, and is nowhere to be found today. Many of these men are ostracized from modern society, they want the kind of rough gritty culture which existed before, but its just not really a thing anymore. Being a violent person used to be met with not nearly as much hatred and ostracization as it is today. Those types of people often had other violent people which they joined up with, form groups or gangs or whatever you want to call them. Fucked up, violent kids had socialization back then, they had other kids like them that they hung out with. So these kids, with so much pent up rage and sort of masculine anger that they cant express, often explode. The result is mass shootings and school shootings. Two more thoughts The reason so many of these kids get into right wing ideology is that they wish they lived in the past, and they think modern society is 'pussy' and weak, so they naturally blame liberals for this. Also, the reason why mass shootings tend to happen in safe, white, mostly wealthy areas is because those are the areas where the type of culture im talking about dont exist anymore. In black and hispanic areas, that kind of casual violence culture absolutely does exist, so kids are not drawn to school shootings. They have outlets for any kind of violence all over their neighborhood if they want to engage in that. I can see that in my neighborhood currently.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Part of the reason mass shooters become mass shooters is that there are not nearly as many outlets for everyday violence as there used to be\n","id":"b80d90bc-cb09-49ad-8701-149edaf9f71e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I often see arguments against this saying that you shouldn't attack an invader if they're unarmed or only trying to rob you. I believe that the burden of understanding shouldn't be placed on the homeowner who may or may not be able to ascertain the intentions of an intruder. By unlawfully entering someone's property you have decided to risk your life to commit a crime and are implying an intent to harm or kill the occupants of the property you've invaded. In my opinion by invading someones property you have threatened their life and are solely responsible for what happens to you as a result of that. A homeowner has no way of ascertaining the intentions of an intruder and often cannot know if they are armed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is justifiable and should be lawful to kill an intruder in your home\n","id":"ae943b56-5329-489b-9f36-792dc12c4f16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>In contrast to human soldiers, when you say go and attack, a human may think and reject the order. A drone will have no problem killing his own people if it is the order. It will not think, it will just obey, thus your wars don't need approval from the soldiers at any level.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AKMs would undermine the Democratic Peace Citizens of democracies would not have to fight and suffer and pay for warfare anymore and thus become less averse to it.\n","id":"073fde93-a96e-4602-93db-07a1bf42f1cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was the decision to ban Alex Jones from social media sites the right decision?<|ARGUMENT|>The sites he was removed from are publishing platforms. Publishers reserve the right to not publish material.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social Media sites have the right to remove any content they deem go against their policies.\n","id":"8a5cae66-fb05-4833-8560-1a4284b6b822"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments fund security for places of worship?<|ARGUMENT|>Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Wyoming have laws that allow parishioners to bear weapons in their place of worship as a form of protection.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious communities may assist places of worship in securing themselves.\n","id":"e73d8bf9-9522-4b7a-90c9-c8c9dab62464"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does pineapple belong on pizza?<|ARGUMENT|>If pineapple pizza is a thing, there are some people who like it. It is no harm to have it on menus, as no one is forced to order it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should be free to put what they want on their pizzas, even if it harms them, because it's their choice to.\n","id":"d0df1353-6e49-4aaa-aa41-082dd6b91bb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Preface I am ignorant of the rape experience. I have not been raped, and I'm almost certain there are aspects of a rape experience that are unknown to me. I'd say it's fairly uncontroversial to say that in both the media and most people's perceptions, rape is a bigger deal than assault. Rape is the thing that people write books about, and when they disclose their experience its just the bravest most amazing thing ever. I don't mean to play down rape. I understand its horrible. But, why is this done as far as I can tell far, far more for rape than it is for assault. Is it really just a pure cultural thing that makes rape so bad in the public eye proportionate to general assault , with no physiological or psychological basis. My next point probably does highlight my shortcomings of understanding of rape read the top but how about this hypothetical. If I had to choose between being attacked and beaten with a bat, vs being ass raped, honestly I'd probably choose the rape. In this, my only consideration is that being raped hurts less than being smashed in the face and getting bones broken. You hear about trauma all the time with rape, but is it not equally traumatic to get assaulted in this way. If I woke up from a party, and was told by my close and trusted friend that Johny over their fingered me, my response to this would essentially the similar to if they had stolen from me. I would feel like my rights had been violated. I would avoid Johny at all costs. I would think of Johny as a bad person with no respect, and would avoid him and ostracize him. What I would not feel, is Traumatized. Ashamed. Honestly, for what reason would you feel traumatized or ashamed in this case. You were literally asleep, and have no memory of the incident. How is it possible to be traumatized? If my buddy didn't tell me it wouldn't effect my life at all. In conclusion I don't understand the huge fuss about rape. It is a horrible thing, but no more horrible than getting smashed in the face with a bat. How is being sexually assaulted while unconscious anything more than a violation of your rights, not unlike stealing from you. I also do not understand what gives rape its reputation for being so ungodly and woefully traumatic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I cannot quite understand what makes rape so, so much worse than physical assault\n","id":"a3fa135d-7e4b-4b96-a365-8923aedcbae5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be taught in schools?<|ARGUMENT|>In the United States, 40% of people believe in creationism, but only 3.3% of children are home-schooled despite the fact that creationism is not taught in most schools<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents with creationist beliefs are happy to send their children to schools which don't teach creationism.\n","id":"16de66c2-25a6-4df5-a992-26b4c3570e38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Daenerys Targaryen the Prince\/Princess that was Promised?<|ARGUMENT|>'Lightbringer' could also be interepreted as referring to the Night's Watch \u2014 their oath includes \"I am the sword in the darkness\" as well as \"I am the light that brings the dawn.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The prophecy describes the Prince as forging and wielding a flaming weapon: the Lightbringer. Daenerys does not wield a weapon.\n","id":"90a0d5be-fba7-4569-a778-b8895043baac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It grinds my gears that drug foundations abuse their power and use propaganda to promote false information to the media. If you do some research and or have experienced it in your days, you have seen a lot of drug propaganda in the 60s and 70s, either in television, magazines or advertisements. It\u2019s disgusting how they use a scare factor so you stay way from that drug whatever it may be .This also can be applied to television shows. As someone who has been living on this earth for 17 years, I have personally seen a lot of american tv shows where they use dramatic terror song tracks, dramatic camera turns, using a black and white filter or red filter to symbolize horror and fearsome reactions. With all of this I said, it\u2019s simply brainwashing. I\u2019ve personally decided to ignore what the media has to say because I can no longer trust it and instead, I just read up on the actual facts such as side effects, symptoms, dosage, etc. without any of the bullshit propaganda. Yes, I understand that cocaine or meth is not entirely good for you but there\u2019s no need to glorify it to the point they drug foundations make things out of proportion than what they already are. I strongly believe that just stating what the drug is, what the side effects and symptoms are, etc. is necessary. Some people still do cocaine regardless if they seen a propaganda documentary about it. With all of this being said, this is subtle propaganda and we as a society are blind to it. The drug foundations not all really need to be mature and just provide information and inform the public about the drug without the scare factor, I hate it. EDIT just want to add something I\u2019m totally aware of a certain drugs pros and cons. I\u2019m not being delusional and thinking it\u2019s 100 fine to take. I just want to state that all the media needs is facts, not propaganda. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The way drug foundations express the views of a drug in a way to make it scary needs to stop.\n","id":"8ed48866-16a3-4130-8c77-dfb886fbf143"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>We should legalize prostitution<|ARGUMENT|>prostitution should be legal because it is a woman's choice. if made legal could be licensed and regulated for health and safety.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalizing sex work will allow to regulate those in the profession\n","id":"55815f3f-0535-4221-bbc9-8b64c243ac6e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Abortion<|ARGUMENT|>Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade, \"A Delicate Decision\", Westchester County Weekly, January 22, 1998 - \"The word 'privacy' does not appear in the Constitution. Then again, neither does 'travel.' But if you were to ask any American, 'Do you have the right to travel where and when you like?' they'd say 'yes.' And the Supreme Court has upheld this right.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The right to abort does not depend on its explicit constitutional provision\n","id":"0b1b0cf3-08d7-4587-b0a9-d6d57783cb0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, I want to clarify that I am arguing about universities that are paid for by the government most universities in the western world and public colleges in the states . Also, I am referring to accepting money for scholarships, not scholarships that were established in the past and are simply continuing to run on investments. Prior to the past 30 or so years, there was a massive gender gap in university. This gap was due to stigma against women and the status quo that existed at that time. Scholarships were very important to encourage females to attend university. Likewise, racial minorities were greatly misrepresented. However, I believe that now they are not only not needed, but they provide an unfair bias towards specific people. In recent surveys in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia, there is an relatively equal ratio of male to female at universities, with the average usually leaning towards 45 55 male to female. In addition, the increase in female intake results in an even bigger increase in the gap. Now, there is still a gap between male and females in physical sciences, maths, and engineering, ranging between relatively small 60 40 male female , to quite large 85 15 . While this may be an issue, I do not believe scholarships are a way to solve it, as they have been continuously offered, and yet the gap is increasing still in some cases. I believe that the way to solve it would be for a greater push for opportunities in high school perhaps. Similarly, race is nowhere near the issue it was in the past. Virtually all major universities are quite culturally diverse, and wish to take in the best students, regardless of race. In addition, due to immigration in the past, there are students who can gain major scholarships despite being quite removed from their racial background as an example, I knew someone who got a major scholarship for being of Korean descent, despite the fact that his parents left when they were young and he had never visited . All in all, I believe it is discrimination that someone is restricted from certain financial aid for the sole reason of their birth. Receiving a scholarship no longer is due to being very good at what you do compared to everyone, but rather only compared to people of a specific small group. Now, it is possible that people of certain areas may have received less education or support, but I believe aid for those people should be given based upon circumstance rather than gender or race. In addition, such scholarships lead to confusion regarding certain parties for example, is a intersex or a transgender person male or female? In the end, I believe that such scholarships should be offered to everyone, with equal opportunities. edit This blew up way more than I wished, and it was unfortunate that some emergency stuff came up which could not be avoided. I shall answer some individual comments shortly, but in the meantime here is my standpoint. Changed views Realistic implementation As people have pointed out to me, it is much harder to implement such a view without marginalizing minorities than I thought. I concede that though I may disagree with it on principle, it is still near impossible to change in the near future. Imbalance in some locations Some people have pointed out that I have made some major assumptions, and that there is still major racism and sexism in many locations. Perhaps as a non American in a very culturally diverse location, I have a much different experience than most of Reddit I go to school where whites are the minority, and work at a university that is 90 Indian and Asian. I tried to do as much research as possible, but obviously personal experience in this case is something I don't have. Maintained views Ideological belief This is something that I feel has perhaps been reaffirmed by the constant statement that It might work in theory, but never in practice . I still hold the belief that in a vacuum, scholarships should be merit based, and that they should be available for people of all race and sex. Belief that certain issues are better addressed through other means People have brought up that white males have an advantage in terms of opportunities that exceeds the few scholarships of race. Where I live I have never experienced that in fact, in general, the white population is actually poorer than many other races . However, assuming in such a case, I believe that aid should be given based upon economic situations rather than race. There can very well be white males in poor circumstances with limited education, just like there can for anyone else. Money should not be donated to a sexist racist cause Not saying that this is one, but some people have made the point that people should be able to do whatever they want with it . I disagree still, and believe that it should not be allowed to support hateful causes. Notes First and foremost, as mentioned above, I am not American, and this has led to some confusion on both parties. Laws seem to be different in the States than where I live we are not allowed to give money to racist, sexist, or hateful things . Similarly, we do not have legacy or athletic scholarships, and you can't get into university simply because you are rich. Some people have brought up that it is unfair to ban affirmative action and allow these scholarships. If it was my decision, I would ban those as well, and make scholarships completely need based or merit based, independent of anything else. I am aware that the amount of scholarships available to people of race only is minimal this is more about the concept and belief, rather than actual financial aid given out. In my experience, it is not rare to have 1 4 major scholarships available only to people of race where I live, but like I said, it may be different elsewhere. Most importantly, I hope I am not coming across as racist or sexist. Often when these discussions come up, people seem to take a very polarized opinion. While I do not agree with some views, I can understand almost all of them. Personally, I am someone who believes in equal opportunities for people of all races, classes, and sexes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that publicly funded universities should should remove gender-specific and race-specific scholarships.\n","id":"741a57a2-1d72-45f7-9ef5-b6cad6d5e628"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I really hope to have my view changed here or at the very least have a better understanding of another perspective. I'm not condoning assault or harassment or anything like that. That said, I admit the title is a little harsh but I have the opinion that women who wait so long after the incident to accuse someone of sexual harassment is a large part of the problem we are having. There has been several instances lately of women coming out and accusing men of harassment that happened months or years ago. Let's take Weinstein for example. A lot of women are coming out about how he raped or assaulted them in one way or another over the years. Because these women didn't do anything about it at the time, it allowed him to continue to do this to women with no consequence until now when lot's of women are accusing him. Same thing with Bill Cosby. Why did it take so long for the women to come out and tell their story? Because the first one kept quiet about being assaulted it allowed the second one to happen and the third and so on and on. I understand there is a power dynamic at work with these guys where women might want to stay quiet in order to keep working and not get blacklisted or to keep up an image or whatever but I just can't comprehend why women would do that. I can't imagine standing by and letting something like that happen to me and then to other people just to keep my job face career. But again, I don't know. I'm just a dude trying to understand. Help me understand.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women waiting to accuse men of sexual abuse or harassment a significant amount of time after the incident happens are part of the problem.\n","id":"79246376-1977-4def-9fdf-61c163c1a5bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Mother Teresa have been canonized?<|ARGUMENT|>Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, mayor of Kolkata from 2005 to 2010, said that \"she had no significant impact on the poor of this city\", glorified illness instead of treating it and misrepresented the city \"No doubt there was poverty in Calcutta, but it was never a city of lepers and beggars, as Mother Teresa presented it.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Indian officials have criticized Mother Teresa for publicizing a stereotyped and inaccurate image of Calcutta as a city of poverty and suffering.\n","id":"3e2774b2-6b0a-44b0-be82-f21e61674237"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I live in Florida and work a 10 hr job right now with no potential to move up with the company. I'm been here for 10 years and am very comfortable here. Unfortunately no family, and am seeing a girl that doesn't want a relationship, just benefits, but I'm absolutely crazy about her. The job I got is in Arizona working with the hockey team as a Sales Rep. I would be making 10 hr 7 commission on my sales, but only 30 hrs per week. I can transfer my restaurant job out there so having a second job will not be an issue also. I keep going back and forth whether I want to pick up my life here and start completely over there. I know my life isn't really going anywhere here, but I'm comfortable. Its odd, but I'm not the happiest here either. It scares me to start over in a city I do not know anyone, for a part time job that isn't guaranteed. The team has moved 30 people from my part time position to full time in the last 3 years, which is great, but it also makes me wonder why so many positions are becoming available or people are leaving. Another good thing is that the team is building a new stadium in 3 years which drives ticket sales through the roof. It will be great, but only if I make it 3 years. I basically have a year to prove myself and that's about it. It will be pretty expensive to move across country, I have a whole bedroom set I have to sell, and I have 2 weeks to do so. Help<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Moving 2500 miles across country for a potential start of a career is still not worth it.\n","id":"26d1568a-2e11-4186-b856-7f8dbdbb2ed4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been a comedy fan for 15 years. I'm a stand up and a comedy writer too. I certainly don't think I'm sexist, although it has crossed my mind I have never, ever with the notable exception of Sarah Millican , come across a brilliant female comedian. I kind of struggle to accept that this is true. There must be brilliant female comics. Law of probability. But where the fuck are they Reddit?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All female comedians are shit.\n","id":"58d023f0-4114-4d45-b74e-c096614ae752"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have responded please see update 1 2 Let me just define my meaning of 'scientific understanding'. The typical view of someone who uses scientific theory and experiment as a factual representation of the universe and reality. The person with dogmatic beliefe then, has a concrete belief in an objective reliance of scientific theorem. Let me also warn you that this is a very pedantic post. Looking at the following thought process I subjectively observe a table. I have a distorted 'picture' of that table in my mind Meaning, the picture I have of the table then has less information than the 'real' table So I then say that reality exists and I observe it with subjectivity However, if I am always confided to the distorted subjective reality I can then say that to me, 'outside reality' doesn't exist As I have no tangible link to it And the only reality I can verify exists, is the local reality of my own experience I believe you cannot objectify reality without assumptions. And the closest we can get to objectify reality is it's structure not the content. Therefore, all information and knowledge are objective derivatives of subjective and distorted data input. These peoples 'Scientific understanding' then, relies on the faith of a subtle yet hugely significant unfalseifiable set of assumptions. Such as claiming an objective reality is real outside our own mind. This faith is dogmatic as proof in my opinion doesn't exist. Therefore I believe a lot of people with 'scientific understanding' rely on a dogma just as much, if not more so than religious people.  Just for clarification, it's my belief that people can have scientific understanding without dogma. These people I would describe as people who are aware of the assumptions they and others may adhere to. And that they have an abstract metaphysical understanding of where their understanding sits with the current scientific theorem. e.g. someone who accepts a new observation on the sun, yet realises the sun may be a projected input into their mind feeding into their experience not unlike the movie 'The Matrix' so the sun might not be 'real' . TLDR ELi5 Those who followed 'scientific understanding' over 'religious understanding' during the times when we believed the earth was ~~flat what the sun revolved around held on to a belief the earth was flat just like some people also held on to the belief of religion. A proper scientific understanding, is open to conflicting 'truths' and is aware of the assumptions of the current meta scientific theorem. Edit Note, it is not the 'science' that provides the dogma, it is the way some people interpret it use it in their thinking cognitive dissonance. Update Firstly I was overwhelmed at the comments in how I could have portrayed my view better as some people misinterpreted me, in how many great comments came about and in how there was a genuinely good discussion. Secondly, I must admit, I did use religion inappropriately here. I knew this type of title would get a lot of attention. Luckily it paid off, and people were able to get my meaning. My main point was that I find that science relies on a set of assumptions which a lot of people aren't aware of or fully understanding of. My thread here goes into more detail on the view. But my view comes with a frustration of being poorly presented and the struggle can be seen today and in the linked thread. But there's a great deal of comments here that I can sieve through and either a change my view b better portray my view. So for that many thanks, I regret I have tested peoples patience enough, but I cannot commit to any comments changing my view yet. Please understand it will take some time to read through, today or another day I will try to award a delta where appropriate. Opposing points gt My use of the word 'dogmatic dogma' wasn't completely appropriate. I wanted to illustrate that some people 'believe' in science with faith. Specifically, that reality is exclusively objective or rational. This is complimented usually by their inability to properly identify their subjective bias and the assumptions they and science make. gt My use of the phrase 'scientific understanding' was slightly confusing. There are people who have a scientific understanding which I would as per my view categorize as proper scientific understanding like here by user u rmill3r. As well as the type mentioned in the above bullet point. gt Scientific 'belief' is 'better' than the religious 'belief' This was not an intended talking point I just used it as a comparison that would catch the eye of science minded people. Therefore I will not address which is 'better' because a I can't fully represent a religious person as I am not b the terms for 'better' are subjective and differ. However I do have somewhat of an opinion on this and I think for evolution and survival, it is necessary to favor a scientific belief over a religious for the physical sake of survival only. Before I revisit the thread with the intention of dishing out any deltas that may be warranted, let me leave with some links for people interested in this topic that may be new to it. Existentialism Ontology Systems Theory And most importantly Cognitive Dissonance Also be sure to look into the awesome comments I know I will read some more than once and I may message people to discuss their views further and share the love for this kind of discussion. Update 2 Please note a lot of people are confusing 'practising' science with 'believing' in science. Also I have responded here<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe a lot of people with 'scientific understanding' rely on a dogma just as much, if not more-so than religious people.\n","id":"98216e19-8e2f-47b3-83b1-46a5c6d71cb3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Zoos Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>If we abolished zoos we would have to set the animals free and allow them to become extinct completely.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A number of animals cannot survive in the wild. Zoos provide a means for their survival.\n","id":"fcaf55fe-185c-4bea-aae2-d69d0de13804"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mike Pence Would Make a Better President than Donald Trump<|ARGUMENT|>Pence delivered the Trump administration\u2019s most high-profile criticism of the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, telling the country's civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, that state violence against the minority group was \"without excuse.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Pence has also been the only figure in the Trump administration to call out the actions of other oppressive regimes including where the oppression is not directed against Christians.\n","id":"63993792-1a7f-431f-92e2-d2ffaadbacbf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Genetic manipulation is a very difficult topic for lay-people to understand. People are generally suspicious towards things that they don't understand. It is further complicated by the fact that the item in question is food, and will go into them and their children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people have a skeptical view of genetically modified food as it is an example of 'man becoming god', an idea that has greatly been condemned and explored in many cultures and even within the modern world.\n","id":"587c9299-8f4b-4517-b2e7-717b648f6829"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>There are some traits people can have such that a person with trait X is more valuable than a person without it. If the bystander knows that they have trait X, and each person on the tracks \/might\/ have trait X, and they are otherwise identical, then the value of the bystander's life is greater than the value of the one person on the track.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are reasons why a person might consider their own life a greater cost to pay than another person's life which do not contradict the belief that five other people are worth more than one.\n","id":"e418d2c2-7382-40e2-b148-6ba87a0a48f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So I\u2019m a senior in college in Florida and as part of my major and a requirement to graduate I have to do a full time 40 hr wk internship. Since it is built into my major I am required to pay 15 credit hours of tuition to my school. My internship site has nothing to do with my school and it is unpaid. So basically I\u2019m paying one organization to do free work for another. I understand the point of work experience and everything but this honestly feels like slave labor. Now since the cost of living is at what it is, I have to work another job on top of the full time internship and take out loans just to pay the university. I feel that either the tuition should be knocked off or I get some sort of support to be able to make rent and buy food. I\u2019ve worked all 4 years of college in order to pay what I can with my scholarships but since this isn\u2019t considered a class by my scholarships I no longer have that funding making me pay for everything out of pocket. I\u2019m in the medical field and every internship within my requirements distance, fits my college requirements, something along the lines of what I want to do are all unpaid.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Unpaid internships should be banned or subsidized.\n","id":"e8e1cbaa-06c9-4585-b8f4-8633050c6784"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Children are more easily influenced by others and more prone to impulsive behavior than adults.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians can more easily manipulate or 'bribe' children and teens than adults.\n","id":"6e2307d2-e253-42c6-9444-cf39bb304602"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the recent passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss his method of reading the law. He believed that the law should be interpreted as it was originally interpreted by the people of the time period in which it was written. I believe this view is largely correct. The changing of language or social norms should not change our interpretation of the law. If the people of an earlier time period democratically enact a law, those in the future should not be able to disregard or modify that law by interpreting the language differently than it was intended. If we want to change the law, then we should use our democratic process to do so. It undermines democracy to have the laws rewritten by judges. There are times when the Supreme court changes the law in ways that I like. But, regardless of whether I like the change they make, they should not have the power to change the law. It is the legislature which is supposed to write the laws. The court is merely an arbiter, settling disagreements when there is uncertainty on how to interpret the law. The views other than originalism are in opposition to this fundamental principle. I think they are clearly wrong, and I have difficulty understanding how anyone can disagree with this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Originalism is the best philosophy for the court to adopt when interpreting the law.\n","id":"baaf976b-2944-4825-a751-14bbc92b6e86"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>People are arguing on how this is a major job and revenue loss for the area. Critiques of the deal have said that now that this has fallen through, NYC should invest that money they were planning to invest in Amazons tax credits in the city itself. I think this is a very reasonable statement. NYC infrastructure is not good. Amazon bringing in 25,000 more jobs would mean more people would move into the area, and real estate would be redone. The city would be gentrified even more, kicking out the people that would have once lived there for the people brought into the city. That addition of people would not be easily supported by NYCs current infrastructure and would make life even harder for people in the city. I've seen a lot of people push back on that that 3 billion in tax credit should be used on the cities people. I don't think anyone thinks that there are an actual pile of 3 billion dollars lying around, this is just their way of saying that they should invest in the cities failing infrastructure. If they were willing to subsidize corporate welfare for profit later, then why can't they invest in the actual people themselves, which I would argue is more of a positive action to take. Another reason for the opposition to this deal is that it is being subsidized through tax credits. The richest company in the world does not need help building a new building with a helipad on it, and the citizens would overwhelmingly not benefit from this deal. I do understand why people want this deal, but in my opinion the negatives far outweigh the positives for the precedence it sets.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Amazon losing the HQ2 deal is overwhelmingly positive\n","id":"9393d42d-460e-4da3-8345-14b5b86f95de"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>Xi Jinping has stated that islands in the South China Sea have been China's for a long time and that other nations should respect their territorial claim. Other nations disagree<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China is part of an ongoing conflict with multiple states in the South China Sea.\n","id":"90127b7c-183a-4f63-9c01-8ad668318e07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is transhumanism the next step in human evolution?<|ARGUMENT|>Transhumanism will help humans will win in the game of evolution, as it allows us to exist across the universe, which is better to survival than species that can only survive in a micro ecological niche e.g. flightless dung beetle.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transhumanism could speed up human evolution, which provides multiple benefits.\n","id":"77056b5b-4c10-46c2-8511-12544c043330"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not religious, and I don't know what to DO with this viewpoint I have. But none the less, I have it. The intricacy of everything around us from biology, to evolution, the ecosystem, socialization, photosynthesis everything looks and feels creative. It is so amazing, incredible, everything works together in such synchronicity that I believe we had to have been created by something. I've never understood those who are science literate rejecting the idea of creation. The more I learn about the way in which everything on this planet and beyond works, the more it concretes my idea that this can't be an accident. I realize I am using a lot of adjectives, and much of this comes from being in awe of my own world and surroundings, but if you'd like to  I'm very open. Like I said, I'm not religious, nothing I've learned of religion really pulls me in. But the more I understand about science, the more I feel that there is much more to our existence than we know.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that science thoroughly solidifies that our universe was the work of a creator.\n","id":"daf24f8e-970b-4397-ab39-ab2fa374ea58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In general, my point is that America has become an exception to the rest of the world because of the way it was conceived and how it has grown into a role up to this point that's frankly unprecedented. It's very pointless to try to compare the effectiveness of policies in the United States to Europe and the rest of the world. The leading reason why the United States is growing more and more demonized by the world is that its DNA dissociates itself from pre Industrial 'ways of the world', where nationalities or collective identities were connected through conflict and trade. The world wouldn't bat an eye at one country invading another, excluding friends and foes, because that interaction was relatable to everyone under these collective identities. When it comes to internal affairs, people tend to focus too much on negative impacts that policies distinct to the United States have. Just because it works somewhere else, doesn't mean it will work in the United States and it's nobody's fault. The main function of the US constitution has been to shape a political ecosystem where virtually anyone can access a moral high ground, so that they can live how they want. The importance of gun rights will never go away either, because it makes the property of virtually anyone untouchable. What really makes this point in history the most unprecedented is how connected the world has remained with the help of technological innovation, despite relatively recent global conflicts and unjust upbringings for minorities, among other things. The existence of the United States ruins the game that nationalities throughout the world have played and understood for centuries. Now, a nationalist United States is almost untouchable to the rest of the world\u2019s game, because it has the strongest military and the moral high ground when compared to the rest of the first world countries. Also, industrialization has complicated the game, making it far too destructive with advanced, industrialized militaries and nuclear bombs. So that is why the world seems to be getting madder and madder at the United States, because the United States has had the best cards leading up to the 21st century. TL DR The initial intention behind the upbringing of the United States was to elevate humanity past its traditional games of conflict. What we see now is that the US has grown into an almost impossible role. Obviously, the United States has not followed that direction as of late, but that's almost strictly a leadership problem. There will always be an ebb and flow of good and bad leadership.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"At the end of the day, comparing the United States to the rest of the modern world is like comparing the DNA of lions and wolves.\n","id":"8c1d186f-d422-43b7-927e-86fbf1050a73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my opinion, it just looks to me as an unsafe move today. With high risk of neck, spine and head injury at the least. In this first clip, Compare what it used to be Where two Male adults wrestle, the head and neck are not heading straight down towards the ground. Out of harms way. In the second clip, Compare that to what is wrestling today Head straight to ground, in this clip Male Adult matched against 15 years Female teenager, teenager on the receiving end of the piledriver. I know that these aren't prime examples, but try to remember these are people's lives that are on the line. And they may very well have agreed to do so knowing all the risks. But regardless of if their decision to agree to stage it, it should not be attempted with the risk of injury that high. Looks to me as though the move has developed to be Very unsafe, and higher risk of bodily harm in long term and short. Especially dangerous to be performed on teenagers with naturally, underdeveloped bodies. Quite frankly I was shocked when I came across the differences and the videos. Such moves involving slamming someone's head down to the ground ought to be banned, even for trained adults.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Piledriver move in Wrestling is extremely unsafe and ought to be changed or banned outright\n","id":"a3752224-8fab-4062-96fd-95bb3adaa961"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have this opinion for a while now. I feel that Reddit is slowly becoming a place not for thoughtful comments or discussion, but rather a website for obtaining worthless internet points with unoriginal content. Even without considering submissions, I have found the comment sections to be very frustrating. I know that Reddit occasionally, and often jokingly acknowledges the hive mind. However, this seems more as a means of allowing the user to seem not a part of the hive mind and therefore unique, rather than actually criticizing it and attempting to fix the problem. For instance, on a recent post pertaining to the Columbia rape ordeal with the girl carrying her mattress around, the link directed to an article with pictures of posters around the university claiming the girl is lying. There was no evidence or even speculation in the article that said she was wasn't lying. However, in the comment section for the post, almost every single comment was able how terrible the liar was and how she deserved it. I immediately thought her claim was proven false, as everyone was so adamant. A quick google check did not confirm anything, except that there is not enough evidence. I did not even bother to comment explaining this, as previous commenters who deviated away from the witch hunt were downvoted to oblivion. I am not making a comment on the actual event. As there is no evidence, I feel that I cannot assert that she was or wasn't raped. I know that the concept of false rape accusations against males comes up quite frequently on Reddit. I completely agree that these claims can seriously hurt and damage an individual's social reputation and mental health. I don't have a problem with that. It just seems that Reddit has become infatuated with this concept and is making claims without any evidence which is a bit hypocritical given the situation. Anyone who dares to voice their opposing opinion is immediately drowned out. I realize that not all of Reddit is like this. And of course, I will admit that I have been caught in the moment and contributed to some degree. However, I feel that a large portion is caught up in the hive mind and is not even aware of the issue. Please change my view. Thank you.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reddit's \"hive mind\" is creating a cycle that encourages unoriginal content rather than thoughtful comments\n","id":"622fdc46-b5ca-4a90-9505-2fb3ad06d07a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm referring specifically to Interstates in the Rocky Mountain region Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, etc . Now, I don't live out there, but it seems like the majority of the segments of freeway outside of mountain passes are relatively flat and straight, located in sparsely populated areas with little to no traffic. Here are some examples I could pull from Google Maps I 10, Arizona I 70, Utah I 15, Montana I 25, Wyoming On paper, I see no reason why there should even be a speed limit on those kinds of stretches, at least during the daytime. They look more deserving of having no speed limits than a lot of German Autobahns, which go through more densely populated areas. Perhaps I'm misinformed about the other hazards out there e.g. animal crossings , but it seems pointless to even enforce given the low traffic counts, the lack of population, and the sheer vastness of the empty areas they go through. EDIT I'm gonna concede the following I guess I just don't really know how they do things out there. I live on the East Coast and you can get pulled over for going more than 10 over. I've gone 70 in 55 zones and people pass me like I'm going 55, when technically I can get pulled over doing that. It's more a question of enforcement on long stretches of open road. What's the point of having a 75 speed limit when the cars that do go out there regularly go 90 or more?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There shouldn't be a speed limit on some western U.S. freeways.\n","id":"87e41f26-2f1e-45bf-82ec-a59282ef6c38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Narendra Modi good for India?<|ARGUMENT|>Multiple steps taken to give a major boost to Agriculture Farmers have always been the back-bone of our country & the NDA Government is striving to strengthen this back-bone of the country through innovative and solid measures. Various schemes will give a boost to productivity by ensuring irrigation facilities. The Vision is to ensure access to some means of protective Irrigation to all agricultural farms. Farmers are being educated about modern irrigation methods to give 'Per Drop More Crop'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modi-led government is clocking over a year at the wheel. 1. Make in India To facilitate investment, boost research & development R&D, ensure product originality and create skill-based jobs by establishing industrial sector; major national programme was started by Narendra Modi. Modi has reached out to the world with his idea of \u2018Make in India\u2019 and it has generated positive response from foreign companies.\n","id":"9bf8f83f-31da-4568-9721-bc27b5e76988"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>According to the WHO, the brain is not fully developed until 25. The brain isn't mature at 16 when we're allowed to drive and leave school in Australia and not at 18 when we can drink and vote in Australia . Under the argument that a 16 year old's brain isn't developed yet , then we could easily use this logic to extend to the age of 25. If we use cognitive ability and maturity as the basis for the right to vote, then there's also the argument that we should make people pass exams before earning their vote. This idea would also mean that the votes of the very smart would need to be weighted to court more than the votes of the mentally slow. This would be a travesty of democracy. Under a less extreme version, it would still mean that those under 25 The argument that 16 year olds don't pay taxes is plainly false. In Australia, even young children pay taxes if they have enough money and we all pay a VAT tax called a GST . Leaving this aside if we assume that only those above 18 pay tax which isn't true, but we can assume so for the sake of argument the right to vote is not derived from taxation . If it were, this would mean that those who don't pay tax would not be able to vote disadvantaging and disenfranchising pensioners, asylum seekers, young adults, and people in poverty. Letting 16 year olds vote will give the left more votes this argument is frankly stupid. It's like saying letting 21 year olds vote will give the left more votes or letting middle aged white men vote will give the right more votes . Enfranchising voters is the goal.  For clarification, as per the wishes of the mod u Ansuz07 I refer to all countries, as I believe voting is a right we all deserve. However, I can only engage in a limited debate with those who aren't intimate with Australian law as that's the only voting law I have a deep understanding of, as it's my birth country . So, any epistemological discussion or political theory one is great but a technical or semantic one might be difficult. Hopefully, some international pro suffrage users can argue on my behalf with their greater detail of other countries' legal systems.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Suffrage must be extended to all those 16 and above i.e., voting age should be lowered to 16\n","id":"54dc615c-b8fd-4c4f-9f18-9ad924bdd8a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is computer science a failing discipline?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2017, there were over 27000 papers in computer science published on arxiv.org with the rise of 21% in comparison to 2016. These numbers are surpassed only by the papers in mathematics and mathematical physics combined.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Computer science is one of today's most rapidly developing scientific branches.\n","id":"1329d7bb-e6d3-4e15-a68d-1dc827094f13"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Darwinian Evolution Philosophy or Science?<|ARGUMENT|>The eyes of most animals are of a very inefficient design that makes sense when considering the possible processes for their evolution.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Creation does not explain many effects that are well explained by evolution.\n","id":"8cd6900d-55ea-4187-a2c4-e1ec55e9fa58"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Islam compatible with feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>Islamic laws can be reshaped to ensure that the unalienable rights for Muslim women and the egalitarian message of the Quran are not distorted and restricted by Islamic clerics whose goal is to remain in control of Muslim women\u2019s lives p. 6, para 2.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Islamic scripture is subject to discussion and interpretation, and its meaning evolves over time as society changes. It is only the literal reading of Islamic sources that leads to women being oppressed.\n","id":"f66f2037-d3f2-4c43-b0cf-b65c778aa2fd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am genuinely confused as to why a man should have to pay to support a kid he doesn't want to have. I can hear the argument for child support payments after a divorce he agreed to have a baby, he can't bail out after the fact. But why is he responsible to support her decision if he doesn't want the kid at all and she is refusing to get an abortion? Even if her reason for refusing to abort the fetus comes from a moral standpoint, it shouldn't be his problem. The law recognizes abortion to be legal, she shouldn't be allowed to hitch him with a financial obligation because she wants to take the moral high ground. , I really want to understand. EDIT Regarding the financial argument presented in this post gt what happens if she needs help raising it? What happens if she's poor, or loses her job, or the kid gets sick and has major expenses? gt Do taxpayers now take on the financial burdens our government traditionally puts on the father? Is this a fair decision for taxpayers? How many people do you think would support this new kind of welfare? Should the government step up and take the place of the father because he opted out ? Should the government refuse to pay welfare in these circumstances? Who is to blame if the child dies of starvation or something as a result of those policies? Is this something we as a society feel is an acceptable result? gt TL DR Financial abortion is completely unworkable, bad public policy, and very unlikely to be morally supported by society. I agree that this is a problem, I hadn't thought of it, and no immediate solution comes to mind. But I still maintain and I encourage you to try to  that the guy getting shafted shouldn't be the answer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If a man wants a woman he impregnated to get an abortion he shouldn't have to pay child support.\n","id":"e7870223-2a2c-4da5-8d45-c4db712bfe68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Transgenderism exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Society is not ready to accept people behaving in a way which is considered to be more normally attributed to the opposite sex<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some people feel deeply that their self matches more female than male people and 'know' that their mind is female.\n","id":"5c14148e-15d2-422b-b84a-559569f961ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>For every company, there will always be organisations who provide the same service perhaps at reduced or no cost to less well-to-do citizens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Society will become dependent on companies that offer genetic modifications.\n","id":"651f857b-4d8f-4905-a33d-3af7da05bdf0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>1 When people use a word for the opposite of its literal definition, it introduces ambiguity that has to be quelled by contextual clues. While this is often feasible to do, it requires much more cognitive processing, and therefore takes more time to process, thereby slowing down comprehension and distracting from whatever else is said written. Think how many times in your life you've had to stop and think, Wait, did he really mean literally? The fact that this disambiguation takes time and processing power means it's harmful for effective, efficient communication. 2 The entire point of the word literally is to disambiguate whether you're using a word figuratively or literally. By using the word literally figuratively, you are destroying its power, because it's now questionable every time the word is used which meaning is intended. It forces people to rely on context, which requires more processing. If the word is no longer sufficient to disambiguate, then its entire purpose is shattered. 3 There are dozens of alternative intensifier words you could substitute for the figurative use of the word. However, there aren't any good alternatives for the literal use of the word. Using the word literally figuratively is always unnecessary, and it damages the often necessary literal use of the word. In short, careless use of the word not only forces your own audience to puzzle over your intention, it also hampers the clarity of writers who use the word carefully, by damaging the disambiguation power that the word should possess. The language is simple harder to understand when people use the word literally figuratively. Caveats 1 I'm no grammar stickler, my attitude is that if a sentence is understandable, then I don't care if the grammar is technically correct. I'm not bothered if you say who instead of whom , because there's no circumstance in which that mistake damages comprehension. The problem only comes when diction damages comprehensibility. 2 I know that the dictionary definition of literally includes the figurative use. But just because the figurative use is technically correct and has been used historically doesn't mean we shouldn't try to keep the literal use meaningful. 3 In spoken language either use is generally ok, because inflection gives a huge clue to which meaning is intended, and even if there's still ambiguity you can simply ask which meaning was intended. It's only in written language that we should minimize ambiguity. 4 The more egregious uses of the figurative sense actually are less bad, because of contextual clues. My head literally exploded is unambiguous, however I literally peed my pants is quite ambiguous.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that careless use of the word \"literally\" is bad for the English language.\n","id":"f1a694e1-55d3-40bf-a7c4-aaeca464510f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The historical impact of the New York Yankees is unquestionable. Murderer's Row, the Bambino, Mo 'The Sandman' Rivera, Grandy, Jeter. The history surrounding that team is phenomenal and undeniable. Unlike others, I do not typically position myself as a 'Yankee Hater' because they are a phenomenal ball club, who powered the sport for many a decade. However, I believe the achievements of the St Louis Cardinals, a team with a similarly successful history, not without its own icons Gibson, Schoendienst, McGwire, and of course Musial , and second only to the Yankees in World Championships, are of a greater historical value for these reasons I believe that the location, though helpful in spreading out the impact of a fan base over the Midwest for years they were the westernmost team, and were broadcast on the extremely popular and powerful KMOX , has been less than optimal for income, primarily in the age of 'TV money'. The wealth and population density is such that the market just cannot support the kind of money a market such as NY can. On that same topic, the attendance records , that is to say, roughly at or above NL attendance records since 1967, are an exceptional achievement for the same reasons wealth and population density would not seem to lend themselves to these kinds of outcomes for this market. And yet, the Cardinals have consistently achieved top numbers in the league, and are renowned throughout baseball for their fan's attendance, even in non competitive years, or, as they say, playing 'non meaningful ball'. What I will call the 'fly over rule'. Any major sports, media, or popular culture figures to come out of the 'fly over' country typically have to work harder to be noticed. This is usually because of the lack of cosmopolitan and metropolitan centers which lend themselves to being media magnets and therefore content producers. Hollywood is on the west coast, New York on the East. Everyone in between has to fight for their scrap of national recognition. And still, St. Louis is a relevant ball team year after year, without the benefit of being located on the coast, and in spite of fighting against the 'fly over' bias. So, I believe what the St. Louis Cardinals have achieved over their history, though technically 'less' than the New York Yankees, is more historically valuable, due to it being more difficult to achieve. Full disclosure I am an avowed 'homer' for the St Louis Cardinals. I wear that badge with pride. Please know however, I am indeed participating in this  in full good faith With that in mind. Please, . I look forward to our interactions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the historical value of the success of a team like the St Louis Cardinals is greater than that of a team such as the New York Yankees.\n","id":"0e92695c-0a0d-4fcf-b288-593fcd70619c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does modern advertising do more harm than good?<|ARGUMENT|>Merchants intentionally create a false sense of urgency in order to encourage consumers to 'buy now'.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On many mediums, loose regulations mean adverts can be intentionally misleading and sensationalizing.\n","id":"0462da74-686b-4798-abd7-1116077fc78c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Their Children Should Be Fined If The Child Gets A Vaccine-Preventable Illness<|ARGUMENT|>In most jurisdictions, adolescents can consent to certain medical treatments without the consent of their parents, and courts and laws can overrule parental decisions for example, to require that a child receive a blood transfusion against parental wishes where the health of the child is at stake. This is hardly an unrestricted authority.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is not always, or even usually, the case. In many countries, the age of medical consent is lower 16, or even younger, and children can consent to medical treatments even below that age.\n","id":"43d5f849-9d28-47cc-bb3a-4a26f8b15c52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Gays in the US military<|ARGUMENT|>Robert Maginnis. \"Gays in the Military Debate\". Human Events. October 4, 2007 - \"If we respect women\u2019s need for privacy from men, then we ought to respect the same need on the part of heterosexuals with regard to homosexuals. Protecting privacy in a military with open homosexuality would necessitate recognizing essentially four sexes and would severely disrupt units.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gays in the military impinge privacy rights of other troops\n","id":"d0b38c78-90ba-42c0-ae86-fb6001508e7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vaishnavism and Sikhism all teach that the goal of life to to Develop our love for God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Monotheism is central to all the major world religions with the exception of buddhism\n","id":"4a0e8792-59f5-4352-b6d8-8b545be20c0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>If you are addicted to heroin, have really bad ptsd, survivors guilt, anxiety, depression, unemployed, unemployable, and a pregnant gf that you are in the process of breaking up with, suicide isn't necessarily a bad answer. At least the child will be financially supported by the act and if you have a large family they will have emotional support. Children in the US receive social security until they're 18th birthday. With a large loving family and no financial worries the effects on the child would be minimal compared to if the father died after the child was born. It may even serve as a strong reinforcement of just say no as the child grows up. It will also take away all of the pain and mental anguish that the father suffers due to ptsd and any other mental conditions. I know that while this may not be the most popular viewpoint it is a valid and I believe logical one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"suicide isn't always a bad choice.\n","id":"cf263da8-2564-4fb2-acd6-3b2c9ca0d8ea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>The amount raised by Bullock is significantly less than other Democratic candidates such as Biden $6.3m, O'Rourke $6.1m and Sanders $5.9m<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the first 24 hours after announcing his campaign Bullock raised US $1 million in donations.\n","id":"0b9ec5ae-d4fd-44d3-9f35-634b97bc1328"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>When I first joined reddit, I liked how redditors seemed to always call out others when they were making stereotypes, being bigots, etc. But I found that, although many redditors are hyper aware of the faults and flaws of others, they are completely blind to their own. For example, in r TumblrInAction, redditors call out people on tumblr that make gross generalizations about men white people. However, in response they would make gross generalizations about women people on tumblr, ignorant of the almost comical irony. This also happens with regards to christianity although it has been getting a lot better because of Pope Francis . I used to browse r atheism and I would occasionally see posts about how some christians stereotype other groups such as atheists . I remember seeing comments saying things like christians don't understand different bad , this is why I left the church , etc. I would also, sometimes in those same comments, see things like all christians hate women gays . I was confused. We get so upset when christians make generalizations about us, but it's perfectly fine for us to make generalizations about them? What? Please, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that while most redditors claim to be open-minded and understanding of others, in fact we are no less close-minded or stubborn than any other group of people.\n","id":"89c1157a-31bc-4a12-88d2-bb4d34457c24"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the use of 'chosen' or gender-neutral pronouns be mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>According to the LGBTQ \ud83c\udff3\ufe0f\u200d\ud83c\udf08 community, the \u201cB\u201d stands for bi-sexual. Bi means two. Therefore by self acclamation the community affirms there are two, aka binary, choices for sexuality hence he and she suffice as is.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Chosen or new pronouns break traditional standards of what it means to be male\/female.\n","id":"e3db77d0-265d-4b11-8b1d-dcc8ed55f3d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It just makes the most sense. We are part of a collective whether we like it or not, and so it is illogical to try to separate yourself from that collective. I'm not saying you should not have your own opinions or rights, but the collective's rights and needs should trump the individual's and no, I'm not a Commie before someone asks. I believe in Capitalism. People should be paid on the basis of their job title, and how much they contribute to society. A doctor rightfully makes more than a Political Science professor. I think pure collectivism is a hivemind, but trying to separate yourself from the collective is foolish. You are and always will be part of a collective society unless you willingly remove yourself from the group.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Collectivism is more efficient than Individualism.\n","id":"1e0f0853-5718-4fda-a937-086a70c2f1e4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In discussions of racism that arise on this subreddit, there is a popular refrain that there can be no differences between races , because there is no such thing as race. Therefore, people who are racist are behaving irrationally, because it doesn't make sense to feel differently about different people based on a criteria that is itself not well defined. I see many issues inherent in this line of reasoning, but rather than debating those, I'd like to take this viewpoint as a given. Though, if I have misstated the viewpoint in some way, then do feel free to correct it and address my points towards a better stated version of this viewpoint, as I'd hate to be wasting everyone's time arguing against a strawman that no one actually believes in. Having gotten that out of the way, it strikes me that by the same token for those who subscribe to this belief, that programs that have worked to help disadvantaged races are equally indefensible. These programs have made vast improvements in the conditions of groups identified by the common shorthands of race. Nonetheless, those improvements were not worthy of praise, since they were no different than any other attempt at categorizing people by the failed nomenclature of races. For example, every time a university analyzed its student body's racial composition, it was engaging in incorrect thinking, and every time a university implemented admissions policies to foster racial diversity, it was chasing nonsense, and in the end all the improved racial representation numbers that universities have trumpeted were not something they should have been proud of since there is no such thing as race. Have I overlooked anything in my understanding of this viewpoint? <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If someone believes that race does not exist, and therefore that racism makes no sense, that person should also consider programs aimed at helping disadvantaged races to be nonsensical, regardless of circumstances.\n","id":"297ad34f-23b7-41aa-912d-d849ef69ea17"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>Gender regards masculinity or femininity. In Western culture it may be considered 'masculine' to be muscular, but we know that females can have the biological predisposition to be more muscular than some males. Such a female may be considered less 'feminine' because of her muscular size, but it was a biologically determined expression. Biology has the ability to determine physical sexual expression, but the expression of masculine or feminine is interpreted by society.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While a person's sex is determined by chromosomes, organs, hormones, etc., their gender is determined by the cultural meanings that are often inscribed to a particular sex.\n","id":"372e8ea2-09d4-476a-a7e9-025031619a6b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Would online education be best in virtual reality VR?<|ARGUMENT|>This is especially true with learning media, where the biggest source of retention of material before computers was books<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"VR is the future and schools should catch up with technological progress.\n","id":"8aed1f8e-95bd-41c3-afee-7ba2e429eba4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just imagine the following situation, a woman approaches some guy, touches his butt and says something flirty. Now imagine this guy saying something like why the hell did you touch my butt, that's inappropriate All of his friends would relate to him as a pussy or whatsoever, but I don't think my statement isn't just to related to social acceptance. I think that if you'd sue the woman for sexual harrassment you wouldn't stand a chance, everything would think you just should man up, knowone would help support you, not the cops, neither the judge. If some guy would touch a woman's butt chest he'd be related as a pervert, whereas the woman would be a independent, flirty woman I don't get it <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think a woman touching a guy's butt\/chest is as inappropriate as it'd be vice versa.\n","id":"85670db1-2487-4d44-98e5-0b28bdf19152"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Addressing Psychosocial Factors Essential to Reducing or Preventing School Shootings?<|ARGUMENT|>Indeed, a 2015 study found \"no significant association between the rate of school and mass shootings and state prevalence of mental illness\". It is patently incorrect to blame school shootings on mental health issues; it is, at best, one part of a complex of issues. p. 13<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Addressing these factors contributes to the stigma of the mentally ill being violent.\n","id":"68fa5304-c3a4-4948-82e5-fb78ccbfb12d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>GOP leaders have mostly rejected Trump's overtures to the Democrats, especially his deal regarding the Dreamers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"On the contrary, being bipartisan is what hurts Trump more.\n","id":"0415ea14-c232-457b-a781-0a307979cb80"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>That is the reason why, as a society, we have laws, governing many of the hard as well as incredibly simple topics, like stealing, murder and rape.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Human actions are driven by what makes them feel good, not necessarily by what is best for them or best for a society as a whole.\n","id":"baeb20af-60a9-4235-919c-7ed8a69454c4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think everybody has a right to keep certain things private and this right should extend to close personal relationships. I don't accept If you have nothing to hide as a valid argument. My belief extends to other things like pin numbers for credit cards, or passwords to unlock your personal devices. Example Someone I know broke up with their partner, and even months afterwards, one person was still charging some of their expenses to the other's credit card. Anything information that a spouse partner could possibly need in the case of an emergency is available without the need for a password afaik, please give me counter examples I'm not aware of Last point, I only have anecdotal evidence for this, but according to some people once you start snooping on your partner's personal data, it becomes harder to stop. It almost turns into some sort of illicit thrill, and other trust issues can develop from there.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe couples should share passwords for personal accounts\n","id":"3c4512ca-2c14-4f22-bdc8-6cbf790dfe57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am speaking mostly from an American perspective. In a society where obesity is a huge problem, there is absolutely no reason to leave off crucial nutritional information on a commonly consumed product. Perhaps an exception can be made for really small time craft brewers, but any product with large distribution should show the calorie content. I can only think of net benefits for society by making more information easily available. Edit I am trying my hardest to think of more reasons to explain myself and reach the five hundred character threshold for making a post here, but it really seems like this is so obvious. If it's so obvious though, then why do alcohol manufacturers get away with it? It can be as simple as pure lobbying and no rhetoric whatsoever. Anyone who works in the industry want to give me some reasons why society would lose out if we knew how many calories were in a shot of vodka?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Alcohol should be legally required to show calories on the packaging\n","id":"74433312-9a0d-4d7b-9c3f-43563469caf4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Private Cars Be Forbidden In Large Cities?<|ARGUMENT|>People who do not have a regular place of work, such as contractors, cannot guarantee public transportation is suitable to get to work from their home.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain groups of people cannot easily travel by public transport, even if provision is excellent.\n","id":"c92c07d0-6aa2-42a3-9c52-166b22ab643f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A society with no gender would be better<|ARGUMENT|>There are people in the world that are adamant that they are not human beings but animals and disguise themselves and act as such because they feel better this way. Everyone is free to live as they want up to the point where they ask society to play along in their delusions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender is an intrinsic part of humanity and cannot be removed.\n","id":"47ccdd5c-3cc1-411a-9bda-f46f7c175a1a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care, Debate on Universal Health Care<|ARGUMENT|>\"Single-Payer FAQ\". Physicians for a National Health Program. Retrieved May 30th, 2008 - \"When all patients are under one system, the payer wields a lot of clout. The VA gets a 40% discount on drugs because of its buying power. This \u201cmonopsony\u201d buying power is the main reason why other countries\u2019 drug prices are lower than ours. This also explains the drug industry\u2019s staunch opposition to single-payer national health insurance.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Single-payer health care allows bargaining for lower drug prices\n","id":"1b60ea50-c5ca-4283-8cb6-9f469fc2dac8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>M Me F Friend Original post I have met a lot of people who are skeptical about global warming still and a good majority of them are religious Christian, there is a famous argument that Christians like to make. What if you are wrong? Sure its possible that global warming isn't actually occurring because of man even though pretty much all science and scientists are behind it but what if you are wrong and we end up destroying the earth? Wouldn't it be better if we played it safe instead? F Did you see my post on global warming? Two hours later M Still awaiting a response. F To what? M My response to your global warming post. F The whole point to using that was to piss Mr. Johnson off, it had no other value. Mr. Johnson says that constantly and I decided to use it against him. Mr. Johnson was the Christian M So you're content with using faulty logic so long as it angers your opponent? How absurd. The goal is to spread skepticism and logical thought. This is just snide buffoonery. M You give other atheists a bad name by doing this to creationists. F There is no convincing that man of anything, so I move to my more polished skill. F I don't think I do? I am quite certain that argument I gave if perfectly valid in the place I used it. Mr. Johnson says Why take the risk? Well I say the same thing about global warming. M Yes, but we have a reason to believe the global warming phenomenon exists. What if I told you that tomorrow the earth's atmospheric O2 supplies would return to the abyss of space. Would you be struggling to store as much oxygen as possible simply due to the slight possibility? Or would you ask for evidence? It doesn't matter that there exists a possibility. Mr. Johnson would ask for evidence of global warming. The appropriate response would be to point out how he does not also ask for evidence or a probability factor regarding the existence of the Christian deity. F I understand that, WE ARE TALKING ABOUT MR. JOHNSON. M You don't use his own irrationality to defeat him. It only strengthens its validity. F The man who said that the bible is the only thing I need. F If God said it, its good enough for me. F I can't change his mind with evidence because he refuses to accept evidence. M Then you don't converse with him regarding the matter. He is too far gone. Ridicule, despite Richard Dawkins' position on the matter, makes the atheist movement look petty and childish. F If you think that was me ridiculing him You don't know me very well, when I ridicule someone I attack the very foundation of their point of existence, I make them feel worthless and weak. I demolish the very foundation of their belief system. That is how I ridicule. F I am very talented in the art of making people stop talking, not based on the fact that they are wrong but based on the fact that they feel like shit when I am done. M You don't get to shift the goalpost. That was ridicule by way of caricature. M You call walking moving? I can drive at sixty miles per hour if needed. M I find it funny that you take pride in your capacity to abandon intellectualism for what republicans, creationists, and imbeciles are well known for. F What is that? M Personal attacks. M quoting If you think that was me ridiculing him You don't know me very well, when I ridicule someone I attack the very foundation of their point of existence, I make them feel worthless and weak. I demolish the very foundation of their belief system. That is how I ridicule. F Ok? I use logic and when the person refuses to accept facts and science I make them stop spouting lies by making them feel like shit. F If they aren't going to accept facts then they are just going to shut up all together. M And you don't see personal attacks as childish? Furthermore, they do nothing but strengthen the other person's firmness in their belief. You do understand that ridicule is by no means a method by which to stop extremists from holding their beliefs? That by making fun of them, you only further validate their position from their perspective? F Let me rephrase, I attack the core of their beliefs not them personally. F Did I say anything negative about Mr. Johnson in my post? No, there wasn't an attack on him but on his stand point with global warming, and I wouldn't even call it an attack on his stand point. M Do you honestly believe ridiculing Mr. Johnson's beliefs are going to de convert him from his current religion, or stop him from preaching? F I didn't ridicule his religion. M Okay then, one second. copy pasting my original statement, with an edit F I didn't say a single word about his religion, lie I just used a well known Christian argument to my advantage. M Do you honestly believe caricaturing Mr. Johnson's religious argument is going to de convert him, or stop him from preaching? F No, I don't. M Then why are you doing it? F It doesn't work for anyone. F I didn't. M It comes down to this if they're unwilling to listen to reason, you leave them alone. You shouldn't attack their beliefs with faulty logic in an attempt to evoke anger from the opposition because it makes the rest of us appear inept at effectivly arguing our postion. F Last thing I am going to say, I didn't attack his religion or belittle it. There is not a single word in my post that degrades his religion. I did however use a Christian argument to my advantage. F I do want to anger him because he pisses me the fuck off with he reasons behind not believing in global warming and sits there and acts like I am an idiot because I believe in it. M It doesn't matter. You can replace religion with anything from political alignment to favorite sandwich and the apparent acceptence of Pascal's Wager as viable can still be perceived as weak to those who do not understand and smug to those who do recognise the jab. F That was only to piss off Mr. Johnson, nobody else. Any other Christian out there may see that and think, He has a valid point. I already have received messages about my post and they said I was correct in my using their argument against them. I was countered with the Christian belief that world is going to end anyway. F It was less than retaliation, the way he made me feel about my scientific stand point is far worse than the slight bit of discomfort I caused his Jesus brain. M I don't care if a billion atheists told you your argument was sound. Arguments stand and fall on their own merits. That is an argument ad populum. I can actually demonstrate your argument to be flawed. F Try not doing that if you could, I know they are flawed but they are sound to the Jesus brain. apparently some atheists as well M So now we're at the crux of your justification. He made me feel bad about my confidence in science, so I ridiculed him. F How should I reword it so it doesn't seem like an attack? M If they're so willing to accept something on the basis of little to no evidence, then do not bother even spending time trying to make a statement to the overly credulous. M The reason I attack your methodology is due to the fact that there are fence sitters. There are agnostics and skeptical Christians who can be convinced. When you present this crap to thousands of friends it makes the rest of us look unintelligent and our position fundamentally flawed. Do you honestly want those individuals joining the global warming denialist camp as well? There also exists a possibility that Mr. Johnson would employ what he considers evidence in his justification for relying on Pascal's Wager, and then proceed to claim that global warming has not the sufficient evidence to value acceptence in Pascal's Wager. Furthermore, most Christians do not accept Pascal's Wager as the reason they believe in a god. To them, it appears as though you are a fool for accepting the ridiculous argument as both sound and valid. F I have a migraine and I am done debating. I said what I said and I am not changing it. The statement was aimed at one person who doesn't believe in global warming. M You've deleted my comment? Thank you for the censorship. response to him deleting my criticism of his usage of an intentially flawed argument F I deleted many posts, quite a few before yours. I don't want anyone posting on that status. M So you've barred rational inquiry? F My god, shut up you ramble incessantly at something I don't really give a damn about. I enjoy talking to you but all you do is criticize anything and everything I do. I have yet to see you say anything positive about anything I do. Having a discussion with you is pointless because all you want to do is look for things you can criticize about me. F your inability to actually act as a friend or have any sense of what friendship is is not my problem. You aren't anti social, you're a dick. F A condescending one at that. I unfriended him soon thereafter.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"My criticism of his Facebook post was unjustified, and I should've let the impulse to correct his mistake slip away.\n","id":"a7e84c79-3a39-4c58-940c-af8690a8b443"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trump be impeached?<|ARGUMENT|>The obstruction statute does not require the person doing the obstruction to know that the person under investigation is guilty, but such knowledge strengthens an obstruction case. Evidence of such a knowledge, in this case, is based on Trump's tweet that he knew Flynn lied to the FBI and that's why he fired him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice by asking the FBI not to investigate Michael Flynn. It is therefore likely that Trump knew that Flynn had lied to the FBI about the campaign's contact with Russian officials, but still suggested that the FBI drop its investigation.\n","id":"59f09aa1-8863-4dc4-bacd-79018f028f3e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>There are moral standards that are the same across time and societies such as the incest taboo<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Certain moral truths are inherent to human nature and transcend cultures and time.\n","id":"f8e91337-9620-477f-b4c2-0759b01ce257"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With fall semester underway I find myself bombarded with volume of work for math and science. At times it feels overwhelming. I am a natural with math and science, my brain just works that way or has been trained that way . Even for me, someone who has some inclination and sincere interest in math and science, I can't shake the feeling that these classes are purposely making them more difficult out of smugness and because they can rather than for any legitimate reason. Getting a degree in the sciences is COMPLETELY different than other majors, its honestly not even comparable. The volume of work I have is at least 1.5x my peers, excluding difficulty, just speaking of volume with that coefficient. If you add difficulty, its at least 2x. Beyond those factors, A lot of the programs someone would want to enter with a science background requires that they maintain a very respectable GPA if the hope to compete for slots. This reality has driven me to view my professors as the enemy and to view test quizzes labs as direct threats to my future. Every test is chance for them to trip me up and hurt my gpa. Every lab is test rather than a learning experience. There are no real weed out classes in other majors. At a time when we need more scientist, engineers, nurses, doctors, environmentalist this us vs them is at least counterproductive and at most outright moronic. Change my view, am I viewing this situation incorrectly?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Science and Math academic culture are the enemy.\n","id":"84e29962-9f53-4277-8090-e5517db8a3f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Ever since I started drinking about 3 years ago, I've had a wide selection of different liquors and beers, most of which had characteristics that made them unique and different from one another. With vodka though, I just don't see why people buy 30 bottles if it's basically 40 ethanol and 60 water. Any impurities that might be in it are so small they might as well not be there. So far, I've had Absolut, Stolichnaya, Russian Standard and some cheap local brands, and even drinking the stuff straight, I wouldn't be able to tell one apart from the other. I'm just generally not a big fan of vodka. Reddit, please change my view, as I'd like to be able to appreciate my friends bringing expensive bottles to parties.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no need to buy expensive Vodka because it all tastes the same.\n","id":"cc48d4c1-733c-413c-a25f-1b88cfe23e34"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Libertarian Solution: Can People Govern Themselves?<|ARGUMENT|>Businesses do not necessarily have either the resources or inclination to accurately assess their individual impact on society and nature. Government is needed to manage an industry's impacts as a whole.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Less government regulation of business can lead to negative environmental and social repercussions.\n","id":"5dc2bd12-b666-47ff-9720-c6f0587f6fa6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think there should not be tickets and charger for driving under the influence of any drug, instead they should be for driving impaired, or more impaired than a certain limit. Some people can handle their alcohol better than others, some people can drive high, and some people would drive worse a little tired than others drunk or high, so why should the driver that is buzzed drunk be charged with a DUI if he is more capable of driving than the average person in the street? I believe that there should be general impairment tests that test your reactions and coordinations, and if you fail it for any reason be it being drunk, high, sleep deprived, having a broken arm, etc you should face a punishment, which would obviously depend on the level of impairment. On the other hand, if someone is drunk or high and clearly passes the impairment test, he should be able to continue driving, as there would be no real downside of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Breathalyzers\/ drug tests should not be used to decide if someone is fit to drive.\n","id":"07bfbdd3-e7db-4c8f-a7ea-3de09a537cb2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>80 of the US Congress is male. Most state legislatures are overwhelmingly male. Most of the deciders in the USA are male. The abortion debate appears to me to have more to do with controlling female sexuality than it does with protecting the lives of innocent fetuses. I believe that if men realized that sex could potentially lead to pregnancy, with all its associated costs weight gain, sore backs and feet, acne, hormonal mood swings, lost time at work, stalled careers, inability to attract other sex partners, indigestion, sore breasts, preeclampsia, the trauma of miscarriage, raging appetite, potential for severe health impacts and death, etc. then they wouldn't stop having sex instead they would immediately legislate to decriminalize abortion, and that we would soon have cheap, safe, clean, friendly abortion clinics on every street. I am radically pro choice and I will fight hard to remain open minded. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that if men could suddenly become pregnant, the abortion debate would disappear overnight in favor of \"free abortion available on demand.\n","id":"3e762b25-b3e5-41f0-88a4-f8799bf20f70"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've never really been too supportive of abortion, mostly due to the fact that a whole new set of DNA and genetic makeup is formed upon conception, so it is, in a sense, taking a life. But then again, I also believe in and am passionate about women's freedom of choice, and aware of how substantially a life can be altered by an unwanted childbirth. All of this becomes even more complicated when rape or incest is involved, as it's essentially forcing sometimes very young girls to go through an unbearable pain at such a young age when they're not exactly too responsible for it. I think when the risk of severe mental illness is involved, or there is a potential of death for the mother, abortion can sometimes be seen as a good thing. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm on the fence about abortion, but more so leaning away from it.\n","id":"73f329b0-5cb0-4a36-97cb-09b5ce90c82e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Students Keep \"No Platforming\" Contentious Speakers. Should They Stop?<|ARGUMENT|>Some students reject no-platforming and advocate to work with the event\u2019s organizers to be able to control its format and make sure there is actual debate as well as organising parallel events. These methods prevent controversial speakers from gaining support.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"No-platforming might even be counterproductive where speakers manage to gain sympathy because they appear as victims of censorship or oppression.\n","id":"c19903d3-97f2-4d88-9622-f71e40831d46"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Conflict Between Groups Inevitable?<|ARGUMENT|>Indeed, citizens of the United States have not doubted the necessity of moon travel when the Soviets made claims about such a project during the Cold War. Now it is seen as expensive although the budget of all of NASA is a mere 0.5% of the federal budget<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Conflict doesn't only yield profit. Conflict can stimulate technological research such as found in the Cold War which would otherwise not have been readily available. Technology serves the needs of humanity in many ways. Technological progress could be seen as 'needing' conflict.\n","id":"d76cdc88-c10c-4310-bb13-20f167c8d994"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It just astounds me, to this day, that we pay people to be nothing more than the sum of their physical gifts and their dedication to manual labor. We reinforce, at every stage of development, that they are nothing more than their speed, ability to put a ball in a basket, strength, etc. And then we blame them when they fuck up and get a DUI, shoot themselves in the leg, or get physically aggressive. Just fucking amazing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think professional sports industry raises human beings, capable of emotion, intellectual reasoning, and empathy, to be nothing more than mere pack animals\n","id":"d096de64-8629-42a9-95f6-220f41f15764"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Obama was right to agree to meet rogue leaders without preconditions.<|ARGUMENT|>If no proper groundwork is done before such a meeting, and no preconditions are laid out, such events can easily be used by these foreign regimes as propaganda at home to try to bolster their own legitimacy1. A meeting with the leader of the free world would give an opportunity to Ahmadinejad or Chavez to portray themselves as great statesmen and leaders, equals to the president of the United States. The same is true of North Korea, which is a regime that rules almost entirely through the strength of state propaganda2. If they don\u2019t have to agree to any preconditions, there is no cost to these leaders exploiting a meeting with Obama to their own advantage, while having no intention to actually engage in genuine negotiations and diplomacy. 1 \u201cClinton: Obama is \u2018nai\u0308ve\u2019 on foreign policy.\u201d Associated Press. 24 July 2007. 2 Myers, B. R. \u201cThe Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters\u201d. Melville House. 2010.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rogue leaders can exploit such meetings to bolster their legitimacy\n","id":"064a9cf7-e0d3-4b1a-841b-73f3ec1d468d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is eating meat ethically wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>The production of eggs routinely involves the culling of chicks that are not useful. In the US alone, about 260 Million animals are killed this way every year.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Animals get mistreated even without us eating meat. To not eat meat is therefore hardly a solution.\n","id":"62b1ff0b-bf9d-419c-8b59-e0ba7284bb5f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The ACLU and Charlottesville: Should the ACLU Defend White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>Similar to many rights, the \"goodness\" of the right is contingent on how it is exercised.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing inherently or objectively 'good' about free speech.\n","id":"71e28148-ff52-4c9a-b416-bc3ed465518b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have heard the argument that a woman, due to the inherent power differential in society can't be a misandrist. This in my understanding is that even if a woman says disparaging words against a man, it pales in comparison to the lack of power she has in America. Therefore, due to inherent power differential in America when it comes to race, and due to the fact that Caucasian females enjoy a measure of privilege that surpasses being a minority male, that a minority male therefore cannot be a misandrist against a White woman.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that accusations of misandry from White women don't apply to men who are minorities.\n","id":"f0641ec8-8303-449c-a01e-68cd9cc7c7b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Isaac Hale, Joseph Smith's father-in-law, Smith said \"that he was to exhibit the plates to the world, at a certain time, which was then about eighteen months distant.\" However, when the appointed time passed, Smith said that \"he, himself was deceived, but that Hale should see them if Hale were where they were.\" Howe 1834, pp. 266-67<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith falsely promised or prophesied that he would reveal the golden plates openly to the world by a certain date.\n","id":"2df01cc2-b791-4b9f-9303-24339034be2a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>The benefit reaped by society for the care of a child is minimal in comparison to the benefit reaped by the parent or child themselves.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should not expect to be economically compensated by the rest of society for caring for their own children.\n","id":"b541755e-3b30-4523-9d98-7de612160903"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>The Crown Estate in Britain, has a capital value of \u00a311.5 billion and the Royal Collection is valued at \u00a310 billion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The cost of damages and compensations sought by the monarch following the abolishment of monarchy could be exorbitant.\n","id":"d3f8a22b-ca50-4e44-9617-a0ed90522fae"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit I would like to rephrase my view to be that I feel talented shows are ineffective at gauging actual talent. Talent shows generally disappoint me because I believe that the general public lacks the ability to properly assess how talented performers are. The average audience member likely does not have a strong background in music theory or knows the technical aspects of ballet dancing. Therefore, the public will vote in performers whom it finds entertaining. Acts the public considers entertaining tend to appeal to mainstream tastes, provide instant gratification, are easily digestible, and are fast paced. I'm not saying that acts shouldn't have these qualities it's true that mainstream acts are better equipped to grab people's attention. However, characteristics that make a performer entertaining are distinct from the characteristics that make a performer talented. And much of the time, the audience is unable to distinguish between the two. I have an anecdote to illustrate my point. During my senior year of high school, my best friend participated in my talent show and performed Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 on the piano. Classical musicians are well aware of the sheer talent it takes to even attempt to play such a piece. It requires extreme technical precision and contains many passages that are intricate and require a strong knowledge of music theory and practical skill to pull of successfully. My friend had been studying classical piano for 10 years and had practiced the piece for six months before she performed it for the talent show she was practicing it for her audition for Juilliard, which she was ultimately accepted to . However, she only won fourth place in the talent show. The first place winner was some guy I knew who only picked up guitar several months ago. He performed an acoustic guitar medley of various Lady Gaga songs. While I wouldn't say his performance was bad by any means, from a talent perspective, it didn't even come close to my best friend's performance. I understand why he won his act was digestible, provided instant gratification, appealed to mainstream tastes the audience recognized the songs he played , and was fast paced. But as a musician myself, I could tell that he had shoddy technique and from a musical perspective, he wasn't particularly talented. There are other examples like this too on America's Got Talent, there was a group that did jazz dance, and their dancers were extremely skilled and performed a lot of very difficult and intricate stuff. However, the judges found the performance to be too slow paced and boring and outdated, and preferred a hip hop group that danced to modern pop songs. It was also hilarious because the judges acted as if they knew what they were talking about and were experts in what constituted high quality dance acts. Regardless of whether the hip hop group was talented, the disrespect the judges had to for the jazz group was uncalled for. It seems to me that in order to properly assess an act's talent, one needs to go out of his or her way to be open minded, mature, and objective. And unfortunately, most of the time, audience members lack the tools to be objective. They aren't knowledgeable enough in art to mentally separate what they find entertaining and pleasurable from what requires talent to pull off. For example, they will not vote for a boring, slow paced classical piece that is intricate over a simple, repetitive pop song. They tend to be lazy in their voting, and vote based on impulse, and prefer stuff that they are familiar with. This makes talent shows less about talent and more about who or what is popular.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think most talent shows are meaningless\n","id":"863a9a9e-21ca-4f4f-9f1a-da956f4d8534"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious education be compulsory in public schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Students would be more aware of different sets of values, which they can then ponder and develop their own personal values.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religion as a required course improves the moral values in students.\n","id":"0d0651c8-ed19-40aa-a46b-ac13d18320ee"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The 'Poor' Be A Protected Equality Group?<|ARGUMENT|>Mental health issues persist among the poor. Without certain economical disparages, they would be accepted for proper health care.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Protecting the poor would positively impact future generations in the areas of health, economics and education.\n","id":"7618e148-2b35-440c-8c98-982cdecae77a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Politicians have to take the citizens' demands and wishes seriously, as there is an option of referendum in order to revoke the politicians' solutions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Referendums strengthen the voters' position and therefore the foundation of democratic systems.\n","id":"19db5e15-c4db-465e-bd00-e00f25a4212d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should religious practices that incorporate self-harm be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Zakat is a form of alms-giving in Islam, which is mandatory for Muslims to give.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The financially well-off are encouraged to donate to the poor.\n","id":"674a2841-45e6-47eb-8f4e-8aad77957ab9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Referendums Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Such misleading referendums can trick voters into supporting apparently innocuous referendums that would have significantly harmful consequences. Politicians, on the other hand, have the time and resources to become informed on each bill, and so are harder to trick.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Instead of convincing politicians, interest groups can simply relocate their efforts and start campaigns in order to win the masses.\n","id":"300fc3d3-28cd-4e4a-afcc-b4028d0884f7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should everyone's wealth and income information be publicly available?<|ARGUMENT|>District of Columbia, New York, and Puerto Rico have anti-discrimination laws worded around political beliefs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Presumably laws preventing discrimination based on political beliefs could prevent this from occurring.\n","id":"b5ea205d-6093-47f3-8385-c1d965192960"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everybody has a different perspective on the world, and I get that. People can have a lot of different reasons for believing something, some of them well sourced, intelligent, and articulate, some of them just dumb. I find arguing to be fun, so I get into discussions with all kinds of people. I've heard good and bad arguments for almost every political belief in America. Heck, I've heard logical, well thought out, coherent arguments for eugenics. And yet, I've never heard a Trump supporter give me a single intelligent reason why they are backing him. Nothing. Just idiotic conspiracy theories or resentment or pure stupidity. I want to know if there's someone out there who can defend him. Someone who can answer for everything he's said, and explain why they support him anyway. I don't want to believe that the support for Trump is exactly what it appears to be. A few caveats Yes, I am aware that Ben Carson is an absolute genius. I won't dispute that, but I'll say that while he may be a very intelligent man, his support for Trump is not. I will not change my view based on circumstantial genius, I want a specific defense of Trump. I want to hear from the real Nimble Navigators, the ones who looked at a field of 17 candidates and chose him. I live in the South, I know plenty of people who hate his guts but will still vote for him in November and then get black out drunk after. I want to know why people believe in him. If you've called someone a cuck or typed the word MAGA within the last week, you're perfect. As I said in my title, if you hate America and want to screw us over and diminish our influence in the world, I see why you would support Trump. That's a perfectly valid and logical line of reasoning, and I've got no problems with it. However, in this , I would like to hear from actual Americans who back Trump, not our enemies. Sorry Putin. I hereby throw the gauntlet down to r the donald, and challenge them to show up and defend their God Emperor from the hateful media spin of the rigged system.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Supporters of Donald Trump are either completely divorced from reality or actively seeking the downfall of the United States.\n","id":"f9b58889-8350-476c-bdcc-b8df0960c6f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should hate speech be illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Hate is too subjective a term to apply legislatively. Without a true, immutable definition of hate, it's dangerous to impose without foreseeing an arena in which speech is restricted under any cosmetic circumstance. Law should not be immutable. It should be \"a living document.\" So, with the exception of liable, all forms of speech should be constitutionally protected.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate speech is at risk of being defined too broadly and impinging on free speech generally.\n","id":"1c56a65a-fa8a-4c9c-939d-b62fba1164e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel that a simple test about policy should have to be passed before people are allowed to vote. I often find when talking with my friends family people including myself have no idea what is going on. I do not think people should have the right to vote for somebody because they may like their name when they have absolutely no clue what the candidate stands for. We see videos all the time of people on the streets being asked simple political questions and giving absolutely INSANE answers. It scares me that these people have an influence on matters they know nothing about.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should have to past a test to vote.\n","id":"662a5ea8-8de0-4464-a19d-bf553464a770"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US electoral college<|ARGUMENT|>- In a democracy, it is of utmost importance that each citizen has an equal voice and that their vote be counted equally. This is more important than protecting the interests of small states in the union, as it is a more fundamental principle in a democracy, where the highest authority is the individual citizen, not the state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Protecting vote equality is more important than protecting small state interests\n","id":"54f46e40-6dc9-46d3-bd71-39b963e95109"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First point eugenics has a terrible reputation, and rightly so, due to it's history. These are the practical implications of eugenics, that sometimes people cannot separate from the ethics at hand. I'm only referring to the inherent ethical question of eugenics. We must also differentiate positive versus negative eugenics. Positive eugenics attempts to bring about better traits lets say, stronger, taller, better reflexes etc . Negative eugenics tries to take out genes that could lead to disease cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, etc . I do not believe there is anything unethical about negative eugenics. Positive eugenics is a little more controversial. We selectively breed animals and manipulate genetics of many of our agriculture. Why not the human population? Granted, we confer a certain moral status on humans that differentiates us from animals, but the principles of eugenics do not necessarily have to be different for humans. I believe that with the expansion of cheaper genetic testing and research, we will be able to identify more genetic causes of diseases and disability that we can hopefully eradicate from the human population. Horrible diseases like cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, muscular dystrophy, etc. Even mutations that are known to have predispositions to diseases like cancer like a mutated copy of p53 or Rb . We are far from gene therapy to treat these diseases in people who have them. As for the practicality of this, abortion should be available to the population. Abortion is a whole other ethical argument, but you can certainly practice eugenics to some extent without abortion and forced sterilization. For this argument, abortion of fetuses who will have genetic diseases can be aborted before the first trimester ends, given the consent of the mother. The idea is that mothers get all of the information about the genetic make up of their fetus to make an informed decision about whether to continue with the pregnancy. In addition, people alive could have genetic testing to look for the genetic make up, with a sort of readout that they can be aware that they hold a mutation that could predispose by chance to their offspring. One of my friend's mother had Huntington's disease. She chose to be genetically tested to see if she inherited the mutations that led to her mother's disease. If she did have the mutations, she would choose to not have children. In a sense, this is practicing eugenics. I'm arguing that making the information available to mothers and fathers about the genetic make up, especially if it involves genetic diseases, allows parents to make informed, autonomous decisions to continue the pregnancy or to try other methods IVF of an embryo without the disease, for example . This is eugenics. There is nothing inherently unethical with this. As for those who argue that abortion and eugenics going hand in hand is the root of the discrepancy in ethics, then I will refer to the biophysicist Thompson's argument on the ethical status of abortion. Basically, Thompson argues that abortion is ethical, but unjust killing is always unjust. Which follows that a mother terminating her pregnancy because of the eye color of the fetus is still unjust. This does not affect the ethical status of eugenics, because that would still be unethical. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe eugenics is not inherently unethical,\n","id":"18e45981-c70a-47ca-8056-51c4b7e269a0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>The legalization of drugs has improved the lives of women who often worked as the weakest link in the drug supply chain and became imprisoned the easiest as traffickers or street dealers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Legalise cannabis use while decriminalising the use of other drugs, as in Uruguay\n","id":"c2d1745e-ae3f-4113-98c9-641005108316"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Journalism and \"The Fourth Estate\" Dead?<|ARGUMENT|>As a result, articles that purport themselves as \"news\" are instead often clickbait containing stories with no substance.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Journalists are pushed to collect links and ad money instead of serving their traditional function.\n","id":"f1848c32-1468-4bc8-b50d-9b07ef35b38e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Before I get into my argument, I want to say I am a progressive and very much against the TTP. But I had a thought last night that if congress passed the TTP, they would do MUCH better in the election. First, the reason why they want to wait until the lame duck session is to avoid electoral lashback. Senate members less so in the house , feel they would get a blow back during their election, and some might. But something to keep in mind is that democrats, especially Obama, will get the majority of the blowback because that's how it always works. People blame republicans and Bush for the Iraq War, ignoring the hundreds of congress including the majority of democrats people that voted for it. Same with NAFTA, Bill gets all the credit blame, congress got off mostly scotfree in comparison. Second, the Obama is almost guaranteed to sign it. He has worked on this agree for 6 years and sees it as the capstone to his legacy. There is 99 certainty that he would sign it. And he would have to do it within 10 days. He could veto it and try again in the lame duck session. But I don't think he would want to wait, he doesn't tend to play political games like that. Third, the uneasy 'unity' on the left would be completely disrupted if this happens. Clinton is very weak on this issue, many of her own supporters don't even believe she is actually against the TTP. And she won't condemn it outright, only saying she wouldn't 'pass it in its current state'. Whatever that means. Fourth, if Obama signs it, he will have to be taken off of the Clinton team. Bernie delegates did a 'silent protest' of the TTP during Obama's speech out of the respect for the president. Instead of the booing and chanting that many felt they should do. If Obama actually signs it, he would get shouted down at any rallies and went to, and he would become more of a liability threatening unity then an asset to Clinton. So in short, if republicans did pass it they could mostly scapegoat Obama and dems, highlight a point where many people feel Trump is much better then Clinton on, disrupt the uneasy party unity, and remove a key Clinton board piece.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If Republicans are smart, they will push the TTP though congress as fast as possible.\n","id":"a212f38a-7d04-4ba7-87f6-7cf95d337776"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>People can have vegan activities that fill their time just as well as non-vegan ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The vegan lifestyle is better for the people who follow it - copy\n","id":"d61abedb-7967-4d34-b95b-bea53b081221"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I feel like this is an incredibly common, cynical sentiment you read all over the Internet pfft I bet DiCaprio took a private jet and a yacht to get to the speech. Typical hollywood hypocrite. Climate Change is a farce. and rarely do I see anyone stick up for the obvious truth and put that argument to bed. Whether or not DiCaprio uses a jet has absolutely no bearing on whether or not Climate Change is a real problem. It has absolutely no bearing on whether or not he can speak on it. What, is he supposed to travel by hot air balloon? There is no hypocrisy, because no one is advocating the ban of private jets. No one is advocating that everyone must take a vow of poverty before they can be considered a credible advocate. The message is that POLICY needs to change. Big scale economic and global policy is needed, because the problem is trillions of times bigger than one guy and his yacht. I have never heard these guys advocate the ban of private jets. I've never heard them advocate the ban of yachts. I've never heard them say that every individual needs to take a vow of poverty. So, they are not hypocrites. Thus, attacking them personally for not being perfectly flawless examples of carbon free lifestyles is clearly just attacking the messenger, setting up an unreasonable strawman, and trying to shut down the debate. It adds nothing constructive, does not have anything to do with the science itself or the validity of the message itself, it's a pure red herring.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Whether or not Leo DiCaprio or Al Gore uses private jets or yachts has absolutely nothing to do with climate change or their credibility in speaking out.\n","id":"af34b913-6102-4590-b773-72db4c7e2234"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Harm\" can be defined in a variety of ways. Harm can be physical or emotional. A lot of views may potentially cause harm to varying degrees. It is very difficult, then, to decide what to censor.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It will be difficult for companies to correctly identify which views are harmful enough to be censored.\n","id":"801e8404-a509-474c-95b8-0e2d8ab83461"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Incidentally, it could pave the way for widespread and safe abortion centres, and remove the social stigma. If a woman has an unwanted pregnancy, and she's unlicensed, she would by law be required to get an abortion the question concerns procreation, adoption is after procreation and there would be a case that the government should provide such facility.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A license should be required in order to have a child procreate.\n","id":"4127e5b9-2394-495d-a44c-9cd4e3ab3f34"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Aborting a Disabled Child Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Idealogical Eugenics whitest, smartest, prettiest is unwanted. However, due to medical advances and modern society, evolution is no longer able to improve the human population genetic conditions with natural selection. We should take over.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Abortion allows for selective human evolution for non-disabled genes, which leads to a stronger species.\n","id":"fe05fe17-4022-4eaa-bc0d-d568860961d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This seems like a sweeping statement but the actions of the Chinese government and companies has global implications as they become an even larger actor in world affairs. My first concern with China is their military. While they spend less than the U.S., they have a much larger force and are rapidly catching up in military technology. China is the only country that could currently conceivably win a conventional war against the U.S. and they tend to act more aggressively in general by pursuing land disputes against their neighbors like India, Japan, Vietnam, etc. Second is that they are a bad actor in space. Their tests of missile technology to shoot down satellites is concerning about a preparation for future wars. Besides this, it has also created a mass of space junk which can affect other satellites and is incredibly costly to remove and polluting to the orbit. Thirdly is their involvement in Africa. I perceive this to be largely a form of neo colonialism. Sure, many countries are benefited by the infrastructure projects, but they often use these projects as a carrot to make countries vote with them in the UN. Additionally, much of the labor force for these projects come from China which means that citizens of these countries are deprived of jobs. This also seems to be mostly for resource extraction. Along with the purchase of U.S. rare earth minerals they now have a share of 98 of the worlds entire supply. Considering these are necessary for most modern technology it seems concerning that they own an essential monopoly. Lastly for this post, their political system is heavily inclined to authoritarianism. Now that Xi has solidified his control of the part and refuses to nominate a successor it seems certain that China will maintain a very strong, uncooperative system for the foreseeable future. Since China already makes the security council mostly impotent with consistent vetos on humanitarian intervention their continued existence makes the ability for international cooperation on human rights incredibly difficult. The last problem with their domestic system is their attempts to force cultural homogeneity in areas such as Tibet and, most recently, with their Muslim re education camps. I hope I\u2019ve explained a few key points of worry well enough to generate helpful discussion. Please change my view Reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"China is the largest threat to global security\n","id":"c1c68129-04e1-4fad-b0f5-6d11cc105c9d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Most individuals recommend enjoying college while it lasts because after that the real world hits you. As a junior in college, I must say working a dead end 9 to 5 job is far better than being a college student. Let's see, with a 9 to 5, you are free from 5 to whenever to do what you want, have the weekends to do whatever you want, and get paid throughout this. Now for your average college student like me, I'm a broke full time student, work 20ish hours a week for some crappy pay, get horrible amounts of sleep, have little to no free time, and aside from the occasional binge drinking, my weekends are often filled with homework or more work. So you're telling me, slaving away 40 50 hours a week is worse than working your ass off and having little to no time for yourself WHILE being a broke joke? I have two more years of this crap, someone  before I lose my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe working your generic \"9 to 5\" after college is not bad at all.\n","id":"8c36f7c6-ecfb-43a4-b5bf-d225c2c68d25"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As a 6'5 woman, going out in public means that I am inundated with comments and questions about my height. I understand that height is generally seen as a 'positive' thing, but it is soul crushing to have people remind you that you're different by asking inane questions and making stupid comments. It is not socially acceptable to do this to someone who is fat, or to someone who is disabled. If you went up to someone who is in a wheelchair and asked them if they play wheelchair basketball, that would be offensive. So why is it not considered offensive to ask a tall person if they play basketball? These questions and comments may seem innocuous, but they just remind me of my height, which has ruined my life. I know that other tall people feel exhausted by the comments and questions as well. I don't know exactly how it would happen, but I think that it should become socially unacceptable to comment on height. 'Socially unacceptable', to me, would mean that other people would recoil or shoot glances if someone comments on height, or possibly stick up for the person in question. As it stands, this doesn't happen. No one bats an eye when I get asked about playing basketball. Little kids comment on my height, and their parents say, Yes, she IS a tall lady  that it's completely unacceptable to comment on height.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It should be socially unacceptable to comment on a person's height.\n","id":"12bd7b92-f10d-4691-84c3-d135fec58277"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The value of voting is in the quality of the public debate that precedes it, and of which your vote and those of others is the result. Voting is a collective act, not a summation of individual ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The number of voters is not a very relevant measure for the quality of its democracy. If it were, participating in almost any national election would be meaningless, since your vote is only one among millions.\n","id":"806c37fc-6dec-4f42-b9eb-f0cd22085d1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should creationism be taught in schools?<|ARGUMENT|>Former pupils of such schools have reported that alongside teaching creationism, homosexuality is taught as unnatural and women are valued only in relation to her ability to obey and submit to her husband.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The teaching of creationism within schools has often been accompanied by non-progressive attitudes in other areas.\n","id":"5991f230-748e-446f-809d-27ddf705d321"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>gt gt Deflation is good for the consumer because prices are lowering but it's bad for the producer because he can't get the same profit. How could this be considered valid? In an economy with inflation, the producer would get 1.200 profit random example from his business. But in an economy with deflation, he'd get 900 profit. Where's the lack loss of profit, since the legal tender aka. money is stronger than in inflation? There wouldn't be any difference other than the profit prices numbers would be bigger smaller. The 1 from deflation would be a lot stronger than the 1 in an inflation. There are levels of economic consistency which are deliberately not shown or explained to the general public and, specifically, to investors creating this artificial hysteria of deflation is bad hurr, durr . gt gt Yeah, but think from the producer's manufacturer's view in order to make goods, he needs to buy raw materials. Where would be the problem? The native money would be stronger than the place the producer manufacturer would get his raw materials. Furthermore, the money from his native country would be a lot stronger than the money from the country he wants to buy his materials. That's a profit of more materials. At the very least, if he'd get the materials from his own country, he'd be temporary stagnant but still able to pay taxes for his personal expenses. gt gt Deflation has a phsychologic effect on everybody the prices would lower but so are their wages incomes. Again, what's the problem? It'd be the same situation regarding the 1 from deflation would be stronger than in inflation. People would get lower wages, yes, but each of their coins papermoney are lot stronger, therefore not the same as in inflation. Quality deflation \u2265 Quantity inflation . Different numbers but the same consistency altogether. gt gt In deflation, people would be motivated to save money rather than spend it. This one ^ is lovely 1 I seriously doubt people could restrain themselves from buying food or go in holidays, just because it's deflation , and other commodities. 2 Some argue that investing would suffer. This is impossible and here's why I strongly think believe so there wouldn't be a huge difference between native and foreign investors. I can present you two examples 1 Eurozone countries and non eurozone countries. People from the non eurozone countries, that are wealthy, wouldn't have a problem converting their native legal tender into euros and invest or save them. Ultimately, if need to, they can reconvert those euros into their native legal tender, again, after paying commision interest. 2 Investors from USA or China don't scruff their noses just because the euro, pound sterling swiss franc are stronger than the dollar or yuan. If you read THIS and or THIS in case you don't have time for the first one , you'll see for yourself how precious inflation has been with the world, amirite? A little inflation doesn't hurt , they said Economists, eat your heart out Default the global economy and deflation. First, calm down all world wide debts, then proceed to deflate all currencies of the planet. If not if there is a god out there, he can't help us when the sh tstorm hyperinflation hits the door. Sidenote Isn't it humourous that we have soooo many definitions for inflation staginflation, hyperinflation, staghyperinflation, demand pull inflation, cost push inflation, wage push inflation, imported inflation, core inflation, creeping inflation, walking inflation, galloping inflation, asset inflation but, for deflation, we have barely any other than the name itself and the good bad deflation term? What a monstruous joke, yet you probably, right now, still consider deflation being a bigger problem than inflation<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Deflation isn't bad as it is believed\n","id":"9ff5a4e7-92a7-431b-b6b0-2cf47cd2d236"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Abortion being banned technically gives equal rights to both genders. But since men can't get pregnant, such a law hurts women disproportionately, so it is discriminatory in practice. That is why feminism must go beyond technical equality under the law.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sometimes true equality must go beyond \"technically equal\" and give protections to one sex or gender that the other simply does not need.\n","id":"4b4b23d2-6ff8-4f91-b4d4-e8eae3ff6049"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is OKC police officer Daniel Holtzclaw REALLY guilty of the crimes he was convicted of?<|ARGUMENT|>At trial the prosecution testified that a patrol car's AVL GPS can be off by as much as 1,200 feet 3.5 football fields.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The AVL system is inaccurate and prone to glitches. It should not be relied on for hard evidence.\n","id":"b509ff04-39fb-42e0-aff0-6a26f83d887c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Caffeine is a drug that is often overlooked and it's negative effects genreally glossed over in our society. Clearly it's not as bad as alcohol and not needed to calculate a safe dose in the case of caffeine but cleaclearly labeling the caffeine content will allow people to see how much caffeine they ingest at a glance. Many people are not aware of how much caffeine is in soda and often get addicted to caffeine without realizing it is happeneing. I think that one of the reasons beverage companies use caffeine in many drinks is to get people hooked on that beverage. Many people are also sensitive to caffeine and could use the labels to judge wether or not they want to drink that drink late in the day or when they need to sleep. Caffeine also is bad for people with certain heart conditions and will increase the likely hood a person will avoid that drink if they choose to consume less caffeine. Overall I think adding the content will help because it subliminaly shows people that caffeine is a drug and should be treated like it while increasing consumer awareness and choice while also not discouraging or inconvenienceing anyone who chooses to use caffeine.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"caffeine content of beverages should have to clearly displayed on the front of the bottle like alcohol content on beer, wine, and spirits.\n","id":"d8544d38-f785-4259-89fb-869267654e40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>hold students legally responsible for bullying if it resulted in the victim's death<|ARGUMENT|>The law should always punish actions that inflict serious harm - whether physical or psychological<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"hold students legally responsible for bullying if it resulted in the victim's death\n","id":"7933dabb-c31d-4885-8063-f92313581f68"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hold that the types of people that go to parties every weekend, the types of people that get wasted and the types of people that get high are stupid, to be blunt. I find most of them unintelligent, and for that reason, I don't associate with them. You know, the people of the hip hop YOLO SWAG variety Why do I find them stupid? They engage in highly reckless behaviour with their farthest foresight limited to high school high school in my case, at least , with no regard for their future. Their only worry seems to be how much fun they can have at these questionable social events. I want my view to change because I know that my view is not entirely true because I know quite a few intelligent people who, it appears to me, that they only act stupid . It would help to know that I am introverted, and they clearly are extroverted. However, I would like to socialize more considering that a very large portion of my school is like that , and perhaps even attend some of the less questionable parties, just to have more of a social life and have fun once in a while, but it is difficult with such a view in place. I hope I'm making sense here. . EDIT No, I haven't been to any parties yet. I guess for that reason, I'm not the best judge, and for that reason, I should probably go to one. I suppose I just need to stop hanging out with neckbeards , as one commentor put it, and start hanging out with the cool people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that party-goers are unintelligent.\n","id":"acc4c349-dc82-4c3a-b5d2-fca422bf4193"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have no idea on how to plan my future. I find myself in a position where it's becoming more apparent each day that I need to hurry up and make a decision on what I'll spend my life doing. And I'm feeling like taking the safest, most secure option of education and a secure job is the answer. For context, I live in Australia. This won't put me in a field I'm passionate about, however it will create an environment that I can live comfortably in. Change my view that without any direction, taking the safest route is the correct one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"life of safety and security over passion and risk\n","id":"d43f6d84-6533-4352-8826-8f86f57d0932"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>France, a close to socialist economy, has directly invested in high speed rail and nuclear power far more quickly than the UK closer to Capitalist, In the nuclear power situation the supplier to both is the same - a French state owned company.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Socialist economies or close to are often better able to quickly invest in infrastructure than Capitalist or close to economies.\n","id":"0a563072-23d2-48d8-92be-8fb13a82d661"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So, I'm a short man and a virgin at a late age. I've seen my kind be derided by both both the traditional macho douchebags LOL manlet foreveralone and the progressive feminists boo hoo neckbeard manchild has issues that aren't even close to those of fat women . I've seen the same people who complains about slut shaming and fat shaming be quick to laugh at virgins even making it the primary counter insult to those who start slut shaming and short guys or guys with small dicks which I am too . Now, since I am being attacked and insult by them, I decided to go on and make their world a worse place since that was their original tactic with the first group . At doing this, I've found that, even after explaining the origin of my insults, people are far, far more upset about me slut shaming or fat shaming people even the same users or people that I've proved mocked people like me openly than those I mock. I don't plan on changing this. So long my group is being attacked, and those who attack us are openly using my group's traits as insults and traits that are somehow reprehensible in men, why should I back out? Because I have to keep the moral high ground ? Check r SRS, they seem much more effective by falling to their level which is the same level everyone has, since I'm not pretending I'm superior to anyone than acting nice in case someone unaffected by the attacks catches you out of context. I'm aware I'll hurt people who haven't been involved in this thing, but they don't seem to care neither, and people seem to be fine with them you don't hear much about short shaming or virgin shaming around, do you? Even a fast Google search will show that those terms are much less common than slut shaming and fat shaming , so why should I change my position? What is there for me to gain? At least there's some respect in the position of aggressor. So, why should I care if, for instance, ugly women are disregarded quickly for being ugly? Same happens to ugly guys, why should I act different than the common person? Why should I care if fat girls aren't given a chance and there's people who find them unattractive? Same happens to short guys, why should I act different towards them if there's no sympathy or just the complementary kind towards my kind?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'll fat-shame and slut-shame, as long as they short-shame and virgin-shame.\n","id":"cad49a0f-9559-469a-b102-dcf95812c730"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>Foster kids are more likely than their peers to end up in jail, homeless or pregnant. They're also less likely to have a job or go to college.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The instability and subsequent negative effects borne out of time spent in foster care are long-lasting and can shape the course of a person's life.\n","id":"db5281dd-2fbc-402c-b218-fb258210d88f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Post Images Of Your Children Online?<|ARGUMENT|>Posting family images online can help connect with friends and family abroad or far away.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Posting pictures of children online can be dangerous for them.\n","id":"5b920511-348d-44b1-bf48-6493cad94e43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm not a paedophile i don't want to go on some kind of list lol , but hear me out. Fictional paedopornography is illegal in a number of states like canada, south africa, australia, uk, south korea, philippines. By fictional paedopornography i mean things like hentai, literotica, videogames, but also real porn videos with overage people posing as underage people, i think it should instead be legal, and here is why Viewing fictional pp is a victimless crime, and i believe that they have no place in a civil society, as they impose moral standards on people just for the sake of it. If it's illegal and i'm a paedophile, what difference does it make for me to go watch the real thing or a cartoon, if i'm already breaking the law? Imho it's a safe outlet for them to satisfy their deviance and also not harm anyone It could be said that making it illegal is a sort of deterrence, as it is seen as a gateway to real pp or even harming children, but i don't agree, i see it as a similar case as weed being a gateway drug to more heavy and deadly drugs, wich was proven to be false as far as i know. Change my view reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fictional paedopornography should be legal\n","id":"ca008d89-0574-4a44-85b8-f33963e76039"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see nothing wrong with polygamy. The only problem I could see occurring in polygamous marriages is the destruction of traditional marriage, however this has been argued to have been a problem with same sex marriage. Like same sex marriage, I can see no ethical dilemmas brought upon by introducing polygamous marriages besides the religious. Our nation is not built upon religious foundations, we are a secular state, therefore using Christian morals to argue what is marriage what is not is not a viable reason to keep polygamy illegal. Prior to European colonization headed by Christian leaders , many cultures from around the world practiced polygamous marriages for thousands of years. Now after decolonization, this has been shrunk to mostly the Middle East, Indonesia, West Asia, Myanmar and most of Africa. There have been some that have argued in the past that polygamous marriages have a higher rate of abuse of women. However, if we look at who is practicing polygamy and where it is currently legal, can we truly say that the type of marriage is at fault? Most if not all nations where polygamy is legal are Islamic nations. The religion in and of itself is not known for being respectful towards women nor tolerant of them deviating from the wishes of their husband or government . Can we truly say that abuse would become less prevalent in Muslim countries if all marriages were suddenly turned to monogamous ones? Others will point to certain cults that have split off from the main Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and speak of their abuse against women and even rampant pedophilia. This is once again a bad example. Who in the United States is practicing polygamy? More often than not cults. Cults are often cults of personality, the worship of a single person the cult leader. Can we expect a person who has made themselves out to be something of a prophet or more to respect their spouses or basic human rights? Probably not. Let's think for a moment and say that a nation like India happened to be the first to legally same sex marriage. If there was a high amount of abuse among marriages, surely this would be seen in gay and lesbian ones as well. Could we then not point to India and exclaim that same sex marriage simply does not work? Some argue that there are simply too few people interested in a polygamous lifestyle for people to protest its ban or for legislation to be passed to overturn it. This is true, however it does not change the absurdity of being against it. Many things are legal or are simply not illegal that few people practice. Does that mean that they should be illegal because they deviate from the norm? This is does not exclude the possibility of non abuse marriages by non Islamic, non cultist polygamous marriages. There has been the concept of non religious marriages involving multiple partners for men and women since the hippy era of the United States. We are a free society, a free nation. Why should we decide how many a man or woman chooses to marry? Who are we to deny these marriages? Are we so morally superior that we can dictate that marriage must be between two individuals? I do not see the appeal of polygamous marriage, however I do not see myself as one to judge.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polygamy should be legal in the Western world United States, Canada, Europe and Oceania\n","id":"47d549f1-8688-4c0a-a079-5faf7b0308c7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US 2020 Presidential Election: Who should the Democratic nominee be?<|ARGUMENT|>Yang wants to fund you to move. He wants to subsidize the moving costs for Americans who are relocating for work by using the federal government and state licensure boards to increase the mobility of individual licenses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Andrew Yang has a unique policy platform and wants to implement a number of changes that will provide large benefits to the American people.\n","id":"f1146b98-eeeb-4117-ba9d-e70201879280"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Protesting in Front of Abortion Clinics Be Prohibited?<|ARGUMENT|>Given the alarming rate at which violence and obstruction by antiabortion protesters has risen, and the tactics employed by protesters across the nation, like threats of violence, menacing, and actual violence, or by simply harrassing patients while holding explicitly gory signs and pictures alone, the legal definition of coercion is easily met.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This is not a legitimate form of discussion, because it's intent is to coerce women out of abortions. This is evidenced by the tactics used by protesters, which is not that of a calm discussion but instead involves harassment and shouting.\n","id":"b44d8e65-cd86-419e-9b73-132183036784"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Truth and justice are commonly found in the personality of the paranoid delusional. In the current world what ever the majority says is the truth. But being paranoid can defend you against this, because you lack trust in people, which is GOOD. Paranoid people won't listen just because the majority says so. It's good to be suspicious. It can save your life. The average person will believe something just because, let's say, a scientist said it is true. But the paranoid won't believe it without seeing it themselves. The paranoid is a champion of truth, and truth is the beginning of the path to justice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe being Paranoid is a good attribute because it increases the yearn for truth and justice\n","id":"54a834eb-41b6-4270-9160-8cbece741daa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am in favor of legalizing gay marriage. In fact, I think that so long as everyone involved consents and is of age, anyone should be able to get married any time and any place. But it seems as though all of the recent arguing about gay marriage is really just obscuring issues that are actually important and focusing on a very small issue which affects a small percentage of the population in an arguably minor way. Why am I paying for politicians to argue about what two people do in their free time when we need to be fixing the economic situation? Or the schooling problems? Or that we are waging wars and killing people around the globe. Or that we are detaining people indefinitely and violating many of their human rights. Please explain why I am wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that the gay rights struggle is really a distraction from actually important issues.\n","id":"4745f354-dece-4894-b813-33dd87ef5587"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>There is no such natural state that will create an equal outcome among anything in the universe. Hence, empowering the state to fight against \"inequality\" is like giving someone a sword to fight against the ocean. Any socialist government will therefore only result in an ever expanding colossus, which confiscate more and more resources.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A centralized system is expected to be less efficient than a market solution, because of the lack in competition. The issue of poverty is for most people very important. Therefore it shouldn't be solved by a centralized system.\n","id":"ff9d4bfe-e538-42f1-9f56-0630a167d20d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think transsexuals are vain, superficial, and insecure. I know quite a lot of people with this condition and this is the conclusion I have reached. Transsexuals say that their main issue is they feel like they are trapped in the opposite gender's body that their mind is male and their physical vessel is female or vice versa. I'm a male, but I don't feel like a man I feel like me. I don't like doing man things, I like doing the things I like to do. I have facial hair and a penis, but they are not integral parts of who I am, because an individual is more than the meat they walk around in. What does it mean to have a male or female brain? I've met women that were more stereotypically masculine in their thinking aggressive, ambitious, domineering than many men, and men that were more stereotypically feminine nurturing, sensitive, caring than many women. I think transsexuals are emotionally immature and as a result attach disproportionate salience to superficial gender constructs. Plenty of feminine men live their lives without wanting to chop off their penis and vice versa. What would happen if I woke up tomorrow with a woman's body? It would be pretty shocking and my life would change radically as a result, but I don't think it would make me miserable. I would still be me , just in a different body. Transsexualism is nothing but an extreme manifestation of human vanity. Please convince me that I'm wrong I wish I thought differently, but I don't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think transsexuals are just emotionally immature\n","id":"164ba6d8-53ac-4ffb-80a7-869f3a047296"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Considering moving, but my views of the broken political system in the US stop me My reasons include Lack of public healthcare The aggressive nature of law enforcement from personal experience The mass spying techniques used by the government The inequality between the rich and the poor as measured my the GINI coefficient The privatised central bank Access to guns, lack of control around who may hold them Unfair tax system Government control of spending It just seems so much of a drop in standard of living compared to the UK, please  Edit Many many thanks for all your posts. I will be replying as I manage to get through the list. One of the comments that really struck me was that I had formed many of my opinions through r politics spot on. Thanks for all your responses after reading through a lot of them, I am much more open and receptive to the idea for sure thanks again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that by moving to the US, I am giving up most of my freedoms enjoyed in the UK, and significantly lowering my standard of living, !\n","id":"a04d7e04-7f0f-46f2-af2e-b680971970eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Pensions should be privatised<|ARGUMENT|>Senior citizens take the fall: 'A retirement fund that relies on the stock market is simply not a secure benefit.is a sacred compact between the Federal Government and senior citizens.'- 'twas argued in this particular congressional hearing that most senile Americans only have the option of risky privatized securities and therefore privatization is the answer. However we feel that makes no sense; If a child starves that does not entail that all children should starve. We should rather offer safer, more reliable funds to old largely incapacitated people rather than privatize all pensions. The vote at the end of this was fairly close; mainly because the President was not very clear on his exact objective. Obama Personal accounts does not solve the issue.I have not laid out a plan yet, intentionally It is understood however that Privatizing securities puts older citizens at the risk of being left with no pension by being 'forced out' when it comes to 401 K plans; by not reading the small print in do it yourself retirement schemes and on the whole the public is not rife qualified to handle our own finances and old people need the extra-help. When you are senile the last thing you need is to find out that you don't have retirement pension because you were forced into fishing through financial jargon at a younger age and missed the bottom-line.Insurance policies can also get canceled.The only reliable retirement fund then becomes public\/government pension. The removal of that will leave people out on a limb at old-age.An age when we should be sitting comfortably living on definite retirement\/old-age funds\/benefit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"senior citizens should not and cannot be exposed to such naked risk on moral grounds\n","id":"98500754-578c-49d7-bd1b-0d76382484b5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Xi Jinping been good for China?<|ARGUMENT|>The stocks of many Chinese internet security companies spiked in response to Xi's announcement of increased censorship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Xi has enforced massive censorship programs to consolidate authoritarianism in China.\n","id":"6aa8b489-ded8-474b-9417-280cc5566e05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cigarettes should be banned<|ARGUMENT|>Being able to breath fresh air which is not polluted by the chemicals and odor of second hand smoke should have priority over the smokers rights to smoke.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Secondhand smoke is damaging to the health of non-smokers\n","id":"a1f481b9-cedc-46e4-a588-8faa716f9160"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In my life never have I ever found the top toilet lid to be useful. I'm speaking about the one that serves to close the toilet. I've never touched any because I don't acknowledge any use for it It doesn't stop odors because it's not even remotely hermetical It doesn't hush sounds if used before flushing, explained in point 1. Doesn't hush sound if used after flushing either After you leave the toilets there is no mess that should be hidden It's usually dirty , more so when you're not in your own place. I've, very occasionally, used it to put things on the toilets, but again that is very very rare and according to point 4, not really the cleanest way to put things . I don't consider the top lid to be a shelf. I'd be glad to hear some of your opinions on this. Thanks.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The lid of the toilet serves no purpose.\n","id":"8ba13d06-1702-4490-962b-08b022171cb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lately it seems the Republican party has been increasingly libertarian on the subject of free market economics. They argue that the market, if left alone, will correct poverty, safety standards, corruption and any number of other things. On the other hand, the rise of Donald Trump coincided with an increase in economically nationalistic philosophies to the point that they've become mainstream in the Republican rhetoric. These philosophies act against one another and can't coexist without the federal government regulating them to fit together, which will diminish one or the other or both, and act against another key Republican tenant.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Globalization is the logical conclusion to a free market.\n","id":"3a4f3c9d-68f2-415a-9e57-fda79620b248"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Marketing, the entire concept of, is a net negative to society, and inherently immoral. The entire idea of marketing is selling lies, or at least, half truths. It is that just by definition if marketing is basically advertising information about your product, then you want to maximize the positive elements, and minimize the negative elements. If you and a competitor both approach the same information and disseminate it to the public in a way that makes your company look better, then one or the both of you have to be presenting some manner of falsehoods as truth. This is extremely pervasive, and has a significant impact on our society. This sort of marketing distorts science since part of marketing is to fund scientific studies that almost always find in favor of their sponsor. That isn't science, and the negative consequences of such studies are far flung, from sugar industry studies affecting the obesity epidemic, to pharmaceutical studies on the effects of opioids essentially causing the modern heroin crisis. These are not just dog eat dog business practices, these are lies that are sold as part of marketing schemes to the unsuspecting public with actual death tolls. Furthermore, marketing leeches money away from the actual benefit that companies provide to society. Nine out of ten of the biggest pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than they do on research. Instead of focusing on providing a better product, more and more companies are more focused on crafting a better narrative. I love me some narrative, but I prefer my fiction stay on the page, and not sap money from diabetes research. I will admit that there are some positive uses for marketing. Public service announcements, anti smoking campaigns, etc., all provide a public good, but I still believe the overall effect is a net negative. Far, far more money goes into pumping out technically true falsehoods to sell us stuff than do programs to raise positive awareness. Even campaigns ostensibly designed to aid the public can be propaganda in disguise, and there's no real way to control that flow of information. Now, I understand that capitalism makes marketing a bit inevitable, and the social media era simply has accelerated that process immensely. I do not know how marketing could be prevented, or divorced from capitalism in any significant way. I do, however, maintain that marketing is bad for society, and is a generally immoral practice. Change my view. EDIT Not marketing entirely, advertising. Not evil in the melodramatic sense, but evil in the sense of is a net negative to society .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marketing is evil\n","id":"55c9e37e-5923-48e2-8bdd-fe3e04ca5a41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Businesses Deny Service to Trump Administration Officials?<|ARGUMENT|>Individuals may want to resist but cannot due to their job, lack of spare time, money etc. This provides an avenue for people to be able to engage in some resistance, and feel they are making some progress. This feeling of progress reduces their general level of anger at the Trump administration as they feel it's a comparatively better world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When people don't get to express themselves one way, they often find another, such as violence. Allowing a little of this is good if it prevents greater acts of resistance.\n","id":"f9f3e51c-a1eb-4f49-822c-55525a93539d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was It Racist and\/or Homophobic for the Billboard to Remove Lil Nas X's 'Old Town Road'?<|ARGUMENT|>How a song ranks is based on sales, radio play, and streaming services. Defining a song's genre is not clearly listed as part of the criteria.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having many fans is not the only criteria necessary to occupy the charts.\n","id":"4984542c-7d36-4d39-b631-19a527ba1ebd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>Being thrust into an environment where you are a minority and are distanced from your family\/ community is in many cases antithetical to effective learning.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Affirmative action often puts the students it is intended to help in a position where academic failure is more likely than success.\n","id":"2a11e7b6-ac6c-4adb-bfbe-d8f1fbfd8700"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>Directors of companies who breach their fiduciary and statutory obligations and are prosecuted by regulatory bodies may be prevented from being a director for a number of years, but once their time is served may become a director of a company again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The nature of criminal punishment is that it should lead to a 'clean slate' without the presumption of future guilt.\n","id":"0066b841-20cc-4b5d-ba1a-17dde95122bc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>alright let me start off by saying that there are views which are stupid and i'm not really directing this at that as the lack of interest to engage with stupid ideas is reasonable. I think that political conversation online cannot work for several reasons. stimulation online is so fast paced that nobody can be reasonably expected to take the time to form a full argument through text and therfore a full and well reasoned argument no matter how well reasoned and developed in ones mind cannot reasonably be expected nor is dilivered. anonimity online means that the respect that most people show in person is reduced which mostly results in people being outright cunts. people enjoy partaking in recreational outrage which in the case of political discussions anything which is not the orthadox way of thinking at that point is never considred but quickly shat on. People online tend to stick in communities which have similar ways of thought, this means that anything outside of this way of thought is again shat on. x200B i can conceed that this is derived from my experiences of online political conversation, this would greatly influence how i feel about this but again my experiences don't represent the whole internet so maybe and hopefully im missing something that would blow apart my argument. x200B edit thanks to everyone who took the time to respond it really is nice to see the support of my rambles. I just want to apologise for not replying sooner to everyone, there's far more replies then i anticipated and it would take time to give all 100 replies the time they deserve. That being said cheers lads lasses for your time<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"political conversations online do not work.\n","id":"521fe4f4-4523-45f6-a11e-ae2af7dc7541"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is eating meat ethically wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Raising farm animals is a waste of resources that could more efficiently be used to tackle world hunger. It is estimated that for 2014-16, 10.9% of the planet's population was undernourished. If 2000 kcal of cow meat can sustain a person for a day, the 20000 kcal of corn used to produce that proportion of beef can sustain several people<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most humans do not live natural lives, so our dietary patterns must change to have less environmental impact.\n","id":"2119097f-66c0-4bf8-b21f-73ffa2a64ea7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The European powers exploited lots of countries in the last 2 centuries by being colonial powers. I believe that they should be liable pay back what they had looted as a case of theft to the successor states of the colonies. Sure, people alive today can't be held responsible for what had happened a century ago, in the same way you can't be responsible for a theft your parent commits. But if the parent bequeaths the stolen item to you, shouldn't it be your responsibility to return it or at least pay back money in return? Such an inheritance is not limited to just individuals. Say a company has been fined a monthly rate for some misconduct on its part. If it latter splits into separate companies, wont each of the new companies inherit a part of the fine? So what leaves countries free from such such responsibility? Of course if this is accepted, then it raises a question of how far we are willing to go. What about that conquest of some small country by Rome 2000 years earlier? Shouldn't Italy pay back for the same? To which I say that these are well not documented on the same scale as say, British colonialism of the Indian subcontinent. And even if they were, it is not clear if modern day Italy is in anyway the successor of Rome. However it is obvious that modern day Britain is the successor of Victorian Britain and India and Pakistan and Bangladesh is the successors of Victorian India.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the past colonial powers France, Britain etc should be paying back what they looted from their colonies\n","id":"8db30d1c-e044-4d3a-85e5-808ff8bc610f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi all I believe that punishment for crimes is a very rock fisted approach to a delicate issue. I would claim that all crime stems from societal, cultural or personal problems. Economy, mental health, the treatment of a person or class in society, etc. all cause crime to happen. I think that this applies to the most brutal criminals in history, too, most of them falling under the personal label. If crime, then, stems from all of these things, it's necessarily a bad system to punish criminals, since they are not, except in our perception, truly guilty. I think we should take the view that crime is a signal of distress. People who steal, murder, etc. should be taken in, yes, but compassionately. We should attempt to alleviate any illnesses, provide financial or social help, etc. If the government is for the people, as it should be, it must be for all the people, not just the innocent ones. Obviously this is all very cerebral, and I know that advocating this to a mother of abducted twins or some other victim would be needlessly cruel. But I do think that this is because of a clash of perspective. In another situation, with different variables and environments, I do believe that any person could be driven to commit, or attempt to commit, awful crimes. Looking at the practical side of things, I realise that what I say here would be incredibly hard to implement. People aren't always cooperative, the role of the benevolent carer would be a tough job to anyone with a sense of justice or emotions, stuff like that. I still can't see, though, that it being a near impossible system to implement means we shouldn't strive to adopt a practical system nearer to that. I also struggle to empathise with what I believe. I am human, I do also feel hate for abusers and murderers and rapists even if I can reason out that their life has been a domino trail leading to that awful moment, I still struggle to see them as deserving compassion. I cannot for the life of me decide if emotion and gut reaction has a place in this argument, biased and subjective as they are. Is it a case of us simply not being advanced enough societally to do this? I.E. we do not have the economy, resources, infrastructure to be able to aid people, and the current prison system is the best way we have to keep the majority of people safe? Or is it generally believed that criminals do deserve punishment? I'd really appreciate somebody walking me through their thoughts on this, and helping me muddle through my own. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Punishment for criminal acts is unnecessary\n","id":"ea8aeb38-ec68-41f6-83bf-7900b6eb42b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>Joseph Smith said that during his first attempt to obtain the golden plates in 1823, he persisted in trying to get the plates after being shocked by an invisible power, because he believed the \"power of enchantment, and a thousand like stories, which held the hidden treasures of the earth\" was responsible for holding the plates under its spell, and could be overcome by physical exertion. Oliver Cowdery 1835, pp. 197-98<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith and his family professed that magical treasure guardians protected buried treasure at numerous sites near their home in Manchester, New York.\n","id":"b2903d32-e483-4078-8300-8859bdc2deeb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Alright folks, I'm impressed by many of your responses and have had my view changed. I believe Brock should have been sentenced for two years. I encourage you all to keep the discussion going but I consider my view sufficiently challenged. Allow me to first apologize for reposting this topic, but previous discussion around it has been emotional and laughably devoid of solid reasoning. I have also read this post and my view is still not changed. Change My View Brock Turner's 6th month sentence was just. My goals are 1 to have my view changed and 2 to foster a civil, and well informed discussion around the high profile case. I am neither disputing that a crime was committed, nor am I disputing that Brock's actions were morally reprehensible. Types of argument that won't change my view Logical fallacies and emotional appeals do not have a place in this discussion. I am more interested in hearing from experts in jurisprudence than I am in hearing from legal dilettantes a group which I belong to . I have perused the court documents and invite all of you to read and attend to them here Facts Brock was found lying on top of, and dry humping, an alcohol induced unconscious woman. Brock had also been drinking bac of .13 but the severity of the alcohol's impact on him was clearly less than the impact on the victim. The victim is quoted as saying I don't want Brock to feel like his life is over and I don't want him to rot away in jail he doesn't need to be behind bars. Brock was charged with one count of Assault with Intent to Commit Felony 220 a 1 , one count of Sexual Penetration when the Victim was Intoxicated 289 e , one count of Sexual Penetration where the Victim was Unconscious of the Nature of the Act 289 d . Brock was not charged with sodomy rape as he did not penetrate the victim with his penis rather he penetrated her with his digits . The definition of rape, according to the Oxford English dictionary, is the forcing of another person to have sexual intercourse without their consent and against their will. The medical definition of sexual intercourse is the penetration of a vagina by the penis. By definition, Brock is not a rapist. These needed to be clarified as there is a lot of misinformation surrounding this nuance, many people genuinely believe Brock penetrated the victim with his penis, which is not true . Brock was found guilty, by trial, of the charges above. Sentence Brock is required to register as a sex offender. He is sentenced to jail for 6 months but will likely be released after 3. Premise Much of my view is predicated on the belief that the major roles of incarceration are to 1 remove a threat to the public good and 2 rehabilitate the offender. This view is further predicated on the philosophical assumption that society seeks to maximize the good of society, therefore any determination of a legal case should have society's best interest in mind however abstract that may be . I do not believe that Brock represents a threat to the public good anymore . Perhaps you can logically present a case showing how he is a risk factor for repeating the offense, but I doubt I'll find this argument compelling as I don't think there is very much evidence to support the notion. I do not believe that a lengthy jail or prison sentence will rehabilitate him. I know that the prison system can turn small time offenders into much more serious threats to the public good this is completely antithetical to the goal of rehabilitation and in complete contradiction to the goal of removing threats to the public good. The argument that I might find most convincing is that this case flies in the face of precedent but, as I am not an authority in the legal field, I invite experts in jurisprudence to argue against this sentence. E This was the argument that indeed convinced me, as this decision was a mockery of procedural justice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Brock Turner's Sentence Was Just\n","id":"ec705e51-ca0e-4136-9dbe-c563d9c5649a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like, for real. I understand that MTG is more popular. But honestly, the economy system sucks. You just put down a card each turn In a normal deck, you put down one economy land card each turn . I understand that there are some combos with land, but it doesn't even approach the awesomeness of building an economy engine in Netrunner. Plus, the two sides are asymmetrical. That doubles the replayability and makes the game, both kitchen top and tournament play, much more interesting. The fact that you have unique IDs in Netrunner is also much better than in magic. The card limits in Netrunner make the game more fun and more skill based that the massive 60 card limit in a game of magic. The way their are multiple win conditions that are attainable by both sides is more fun than the bash your opponent in MTG. I have played with both games. Edit I understand that I have less depth of knoledge in Mtg than netrunner, please alert me if I say somthing blatently incorrect. Also, I mean no slight to magic. IT is a very good game. It is fun. However, I just feel that netrunner is better. Edit 2 this is my first time posting on Reddit and I am overwhelmed by the comments. I will try to reply the best I can but I have limited time as of late.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Netrunner is better than MTG.\n","id":"a8db3cea-fb3a-42b4-9742-6dfe09807435"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Worded a little weird in the title but I\u2019ll try to explain it. The U.S. picks 15 20 states to do a test in that have different variations of location, population size, political status, economic status, etc. and then implement a raising of a minimum wage. For \u201cx\u201d amount of months the U.S. would closely monitor these states and how the economy does in these states, compared to others in which minimum wage wouldn't change. The government, before the test, would have also polled people in the states and what they think should happen with the minimum wage. Then after they poll the same group of people to see what the population thinks about how the minimum wage has changed their everyday life. If the people like it and the economy did well then it spreads to different states and then, maybe, the entire country. If it did so so in the test group of states maybe they could switch it up a little and try new states. Maybe the only reason it did bad in Texas would be because of the lack of support for minimum wage and California might be better. If it did badly in most states then the idea could be scrapped. So basically the country acts accordingly to what the test states think of it and how there economies do. Why I think it will work \u2022 It will give us a good estimation of how the country will respond as a whole to the increase of minimum wage if we pick good test states for the testing. \u2022 It would give us the answer of whether the raising of minimum wage will work or not and the arguing would be done with. I have read both arguments on the topic and although I support the raising of minimum wage I can see what the people are saying who support keeping minimum wage where it is. This plan will show both sides what will work and what won\u2019t without any discussion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The U.S. should pick 15 or 20 states to test raising the minimum wage and then they should act accordingly.\n","id":"d40547d4-a521-4779-9f07-cd58f6b1173d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Everyone Should Automatically Be Opted into an Organ Donation Scheme<|ARGUMENT|>About 90% of people agree with the principle of organ donation yet only 25% of Britons have signed-up. As a result it\u2019s estimated that each year 400 people on waiting list will die from not getting the organ they need. An opt-out scheme would solve this problem in one fell swoop.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most people support organ donation, only a few carry the card\n","id":"476c3c78-c177-461f-ac1d-158c485147e7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the sale of genetically modified food be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Similar legislation, including a Vermont law to require labeling of milk produced from cows treated with synthetic growth hormone rBST, has been struck down by federal courts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the United States, courts are likely to find the compulsory labeling of genetically modified foods - that is strict or transparent - to be unconstitutional.\n","id":"86edbc36-e653-4d33-9162-5bcb432f0118"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Since Wikipedia first became popular, I've been told that it isn't a reliable source, because it can be edited by anyone. I have a few reasons why I think the opposite is true There is the potential for people to vandalize the information on wikipedia and post false information, but in my experience, people simply don't. Of course it depends on the topic. Some topics are going to be more controversial, but I think the editors are aware of this and take steps to ensure the information presented is correct. And if people go on and sabotage the articles for fun, it won't be long before it is changed back. I would go so far as to say that it is only in the rare case that you'd actually come across an article with incorrect information on it. Lets compare that to other forms of print media. Books and Journals contain biases. For example, in a science paper, certain statistics are are often adjusted to conveniently show a trend. No researcher would ever publish a paper that says they accomplished nothing. Also, you don't know if a paper is well received in the professional community. The findings could be super controversial, and you would have no way of knowing it. There is nothing to be gained from showing misleading statistics on Wikipedia. The information shown will typically be what is most agreed upon. Wikipedia can also be completely up to date with the latest information, while most print sources are not. Is there some other reason why people don't trust Wikipedia? Is there something wrong with my thinking? If so,  TL DR Wiki is more up to date, has less bias, and nobody intentionally puts wrong information on it, and when they do, it's changed back quickly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that Wikipedia is a very reliable source, and in many cases is more reliable printed sources.\n","id":"c73ec002-035f-4af8-8164-d669d0171461"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is a Humanist an 'empty pot' , lacking in something?<|ARGUMENT|>People without believing in a higher purpose can be inspired to create their own path in life.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Believing that there is no higher purpose can be both liberating and inspiring in itself.\n","id":"dc6e21bc-9001-4b67-bfd2-e7a0d122bb16"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do corporations benefit society?<|ARGUMENT|>Research agreements and email correspondence of corporations in the US can be obtained through freedom of information requests made by the Right to Know<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Such biases can be regulated in order to check any research that is produced.\n","id":"25b679e3-7864-443e-8943-4dae3df8bb78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapy Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Alongside homophobia and transphobia, sexism is also rampant in society. For transgender women, if they wish to avoid the sexism they would face, they should be allowed to pursue conversion therapy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without this option many conservative communities may permanently exclude LGBT people.\n","id":"1512a299-507d-47c2-b122-74bbb5ec60a9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The idea of the slow thinking yet intelligent person is a myth. Not everyone who is quick on their feet is intelligent, but everyone who is intelligent is quick on their feet. Maybe they aren't fast about verbalizing their cognitive processes, but their cognitive processes are not slow. If an intelligent person appears slow it's only because she's dealing with a complex array of steps or factors and choosing not to comment on most of them. In whichever domains of intelligence the intelligent person excels in, that person's mind is quick.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe all intelligent people are \"quick on their feet\".\n","id":"84dd174a-0c78-4552-b3c0-fbf7f024f048"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Taiwan an independent nation?<|ARGUMENT|>The majority of nations and most organizations agreed that the Republic of China Taiwan or Chinese Taipei is not a nation, but a province of the People's Republic of China Mainland.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The majority of the international community does not recognize Taiwanese statehood.\n","id":"27d77fc0-e246-4dae-9646-2a3cf75e184e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>That title was hard to type because of how close minded it sounded but I still think it's fundamentally sound. On a quick side note I fully support equality of all types including those previously mentioned. In my own country there is currently a bill about to passed banning business from refusing to serve gay people after a bakery refused to make a cake with a pro gay message printed on it. As a private company I feel like they should absolutely be allowed to do this, as discriminating as it is, as it seems like a violation of rights to force someone to provide a service they do not wish to provide, especially when it is the government doing it. If I was a business owner I would like the right to refuse racists, homophobes, pedophiles etc service based on my beliefs, and my own consciousness, so due to Freedom of speech should people on the other side of the spectrum not be allowed do the same? Should the government intervene and stop golf courses discriminating based on dress code? Nightclubs based on drunkenness or gender? I know this doesn't compare to human rights violations but an onbjective government surely shouldn't see the difference? I would really appreciate someone genuinely actually changing my view on this because I'm arguing with a gay guy about it on Facebook and I feel like a total dick.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe business should legally be allowed to retain the right to refuse service to anyone they please, including gays, blacks and any others who commonly would fall victim to this.\n","id":"a343ada5-8775-47cf-9d0e-f45361a83237"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Under current legislation animals are comparable to how slaves were regarded in the US in the 18th and 19th century. Legally they do not possess rights and are the property of their owner.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most animals whose meat is eaten have been the property of humans. Their property rights conflict with animal rights.\n","id":"3120f881-a82f-47e0-9ea0-429498698203"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Today we had a field trip through London and my teacher and fellow students were amazed at all the buildings. I didn't find it special at all, they're all blocks and cement, nothing special, change my view?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't believe architectural buildings are as impressive as everyone thinks they are.\n","id":"9cd098d0-c6c7-490f-8953-ffe1e9cf17d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do violent video games cause violent crime?<|ARGUMENT|>\"Young children by becoming addicted or playing these games constantly withdraw from society,they become more shy and less aware of true reality ,they live in a 'fantasy video game-like' land, by not enteracting with other kids they become less aware of what and who they are suppose to be like,and unconsiously perceive things differently and falsely.they become less inclined to study and focus on technology which is a constantly drawing factor.\"- Socially retarded behavior incited by self-imposed social exclusion; is an image every movie around the 'American psycho'-genre exploits. There is a truth to it, being depressed or a loner doesn't make you a murderer but many many murderers are depressed loners to begin with. Video games may create an unnatural attachment with fellow players, enthusiastically discussing video game missions to kill; can lead to planning real crimes. The sense of achievement derived from owning a game, is akin to patting yourself on the back for beating the game or killing the bad guys. Celebrating such negative skills should be frowned upon in a civilized time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Withdrawal, lack of exerciselow endorphin release, loneliness etc etc\n","id":"82e488e8-4b99-497b-96c8-16c724f6b7a4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do electronic devices help or hurt children's development?<|ARGUMENT|>With the internet at their fingertips, access to phones and computers during class can be very distracting and prevent students from paying attention.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using devices in school can negatively affect children's grades.\n","id":"c5d9aa6f-8d77-4c5b-ba4b-fef190e4fba4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>In theocracies, where this origin story is held to be true, gender is believed to be determined by nature not nurture or personal choice.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to three main monotheistic religions' scriptures, God created the man and the woman as different and complementary.\n","id":"f5cbe603-46cb-4f36-873a-b11d98a74748"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>Although not being fully implemented the term \"Hartz4\" hints at the fact, that it was just the 4th reformstep out of many more, but the execution stopped at 4 and coming with problems up to date, the Agenda 2010 proved to be a success in the long run and provided Germany a good fundament to navigate through the last turbulent years pretty robust.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Germany imployed the \"Agenda 2010\" and increased overall efficiency in the unemployment sector and employment percentages in total.\n","id":"81aacdb0-b2f9-4560-8ec6-b75a19a8908f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the electoral college be abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>States do not have uniform density, so in many cases, the densely populated urban areas still can control all the electoral votes for a certain state. For example, conservative voters in sparsely populated rural California counties rarely \u201cget a say\u201d in presidential elections because a majority of the population is located in the more liberal, urban areas.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many states use a winner-takes-all system where a candidate could get 51% of the vote, but all of the electoral college vote.\n","id":"7939243f-156a-4f04-8ada-992936073aac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should private education be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Private schools are able to select and exclude their students. It is easier for behaviour to be controlled if entry is selective and exclusion is simpler.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Only if there are state schools to take the more challenging students.\n","id":"e8bbf764-1f73-4417-830f-35f97e0d40cb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Not everybody can be vegan. Some may encounter difficulties when eating too many fibers or vegetal proteine, and may be forced to resort to meat for their diet<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many people with eating and nutritional-based disabilities may be unable to remove animal products from their diets.\n","id":"6b8d24b9-e862-4c52-bbc1-3ba05cf82837"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>There is nothing logically contradictory about a free agent who nevertheless always chooses to do good. So there is nothing logically contradictory about a world full of free agents who always choose to do good, and therefore God could create such a world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is possible to create a world with free will but no evil.\n","id":"a98d4aba-92c6-4643-a5f1-85e23b4a3da6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For a little bit of background, I teach college writing at a private university in the US, so plagiarism is something that's on my mind quite a bit. It's basically a felony offense in my classroom fyi, I don't think most universities expel you for your first offense, I know we don't , but I think in many other contexts plagiarism is just fine. I'm going to start with an example where plagiarism is accepted the legal world not legal academia though . If you're writing a contract or a will, it's acceptable to cut and paste from a document someone else created, and no citations are needed. In fact, if you write the whole thing from scratch without stealing from someone else you're most likely going to screw things up. Best practice is to take language from the documents that have been refined over the years. Likewise, with legal briefs submitted to courts you have to cite your sources of authority , but are allowed to steal ideas from others without citing them. If you find a line of reasoning persuasive you can wholesale copy it without giving a citation, no worries. If the source has precedential value, you'd cite it, but as an authority, not to give credit. This brings us to the question of why copying is okay in some contexts but forbidden in others. In a classroom setting, I think the ban on copying makes perfect sense. You are earning a credential, and part of that is doing a certain amount of work, not just accumulating a certain amount of knowledge. Making original arguments is part of that work. If you just copy someone else's argument, then you haven't done the work required to earn the degree. This is also why you can't just copy an entire essay and cite the source at the end you'll have avoided a plagiarism charge, but you still haven't done the work. Likewise, you can't self plagiarize your assignments. This is also called double dipping, where you turn in 1 essay to 2 different classes. By doing so, you've now done less work than the degree requires. In academia, it also makes sense. The ban on plagiarism serves as an intellectual property protection, similar to a copyright. You're expected to build on the works of others in academia, so we can't have iron clad IP protection, but we do still want to reward people for their contributions. Getting your work cited is a big deal in academia and is often used as a proxy for the impact of your scholarship. Self plagiarism is also banned in academia because one of the other metrics we use for evaluating a professor's contributions is number of publications. If you can have basically the same essay published in four different journals it looks like you were four times as productive as you actually were. Now that we've got some reasons to ban plagiarism in some contexts while allowing it in others, we've got the question of whether we care about plagiarism in political speeches. I don't see why. What matters most in a leader is that they hold the right views, not that they thought up the position all on their own. Of course they didn't They have advisers helping them put together policy positions. What we want is someone who can recognize which ideas are good and which are bad. Stealing from a speech is just that recognizing that someone else's message is exactly what needs to be said, and then saying it again. Seems silly to ask our leaders to reinvent the wheel. To be clear, I think it's certainly decent to give credit. What I disagree with is the idea that it's a huge no no to steal from someone else's speech. I also wouldn't let speech writers off the hook. If they've been hired to write an original speech and they turn in someone else's work they should be in trouble with the boss, but that's a job performance issue. I'm talking specifically about the politician not having done anything wrong by wanting to use someone else's words. Finally, I suspect that much of our aversion to politicians plagiarizing stems from it being so firmly against the rules in school, yet few students really understand why. They just learn that it's bad and assume it must be bad all the time. I see it more like picking up the ball and running. If you grew up playing soccer, you'd of course think you can't pick up the ball and run but if we're playing football, that's just a running play and running with the ball isn't against the rules. Second Finally, I do agree that it's a bit embarrassing and a gaff to be caught stealing someone else's speech. But, that's only because we've built up this norm around not doing it. What I'm really challenging is that norm.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's not a big deal for a politician to plagiarize in a speech\n","id":"46124bfe-8a66-460f-ba7a-b0dc0386be07"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>In what may well be an apocryphal story, the great atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say if he found himself standing before God on the judgement day and God asked him, \"Why didn\u2019t you believe in Me?\" Russell replied, \"I would say, \u2018Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!'\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Justified belief in the claim \"God Exists\" requires relevant, compelling evidence. Because there is no such evidence, belief in the claim \"God Exists\" should be withheld.\n","id":"109614ce-2c93-4f79-813c-36d88fa68561"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>We are in a bad cycle. Something catches wind then is bombarded with opinions. Then said opinions are chastised and proclaimed to be not credible. Then those dismissive opinions are proclaimed to be not credible and this spiral goes until new information runs and then it starts again. I think we circulate bad journalism, bandwagon narratives, and the latest emotional outrage to justify our frustrations. These used to be heard in forms, but now we are drowning ourselves in a sea of angry voices, leaving even level speeches as sunken cold bones only heard in crackles when trampled by loud boots. We've been manipulated. Any call to defend a narrative can be successful in the minds who choose it. Believe that the administration is unfairly attacked? Of course you are right, it's happened, it exists, and it is talked about. Believe that the administration is incompetent and unfit? Obviously you are right. Point to near any day and you'll find an incident and a condemnation. You won't be surprised, but another person, the other you, will rush to defend their alternative belief and identity. Thus the cycle begins. We lost track. We aren't building our ideals up, we are merely decrying the other side while standing on a pile of dung that used to be great. I'm tired this. We have collectively began claiming that things are better than something else as if that truly holds weight. Near no one in the election can claim they believed the final candidates could stand on their own merits. Red wasn't blue. Blue wasn't red. Yellow and Green were neither. This flaw never ended. It can be true that everything that is not a demon is better than such hell spawn. But I feel we, all of us, are intelligent enough to know that non demonic does not mean angelic. Why are we so quick to skip humanity? What if we moved outrage to optimism? What if we skipped outrage and began solutions? What if the bad of a tax bill set discussions and development of a better one. What if the good in a tax bill was highlighted and people guided through their benefits. What if satisfaction sold better than anger? What if then? Can we search for evidence of good we can do instead of the worse we can display? Please, I would love a better world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politics in the US is fractured by both attacks on and defenses of Trump and figures like him. This can be changed by giving such people support.\n","id":"1d4bdd57-f951-4abf-b4c8-0ab15f9ace62"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Artificial Intelligence AI: Should an artificial general intelligence be created?<|ARGUMENT|>One human consumes 562,500 kwH 228 tons of coal in his or her lifetime, not including the manufacturing energy of all the houses, cars, and consumer products used in his or her lifetime: visual.ly<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Creating an AGI to solve problems for us would be much less burdensome on the environment than creating more humans to do the same.\n","id":"97670037-df1c-4cd5-aec2-6a2cfd6cb4d0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Now that internet exists and we got forums and pages like Reddit, or to a lesser extent Facebook and Twitter, people can share their opinion with ease. Now, as a personal experience, I've seen something happening millions of times, that is when people share their opinion on a certain thematic without complete knowledge of it. For example, a friend of mine was talking about how Edgar Allan Poe was such a great writer and stuff, I didn't disagree with him but I wanted to delve more deeply in the matter, so when I asked him about his favorite books, he couldn't answer, he tried to describe the stories of the book partially but I couldn't figure it out either, in my mind I discard his opinion immediately. Also in every text book or website about argumentation, the first rule is that you must have evidence and facts that support the claims you express.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should know all the information\/facts of a certain topic before setting up a discussion or having an opinion\n","id":"52077b37-5e3e-4e03-96a1-c394436b6d89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently got in to a discussion about the use of PR vs PB. There wasn't really a reason given for why if PB is better just a that's just what I use explanation so I've come here. I noticed some announcers at the Olympics would say PB and I also noticed that gaming speed runners seem to usually use PB. My experience is cross country track runners use both, but PR was much more common in the circles I ran in. Not sure which one other communities use. If I hear someone say PB I know what they mean, I just think they are using inferior terminology. The standard wording is world record, course record, national record, Olympic record, league record, etc. It follows that personal record should be used for the greatest achievement by an individual. Both of the letter combinations flow smoothly enough PR is also known from public relations and PB as part of PB J so I don't see that as a difference maker. Finally, and this might be really subjective, record just sounds like more of an accomplishment than best and encourages trying even harder to better it. Records are meant to be broken and record implies working methodically toward lowering a time increasing a score to the greatest it's ever been. Best is simply a term for the best time score achieved at a given moment of time, i.e. you could have a season best or other recent bests, but only one record.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"PR or \"personal record\" is superior to PB or \"personal best\" when describing the fastest time or highest score one has achieved\n","id":"26f8fe9b-387a-4c73-b77e-0bf0ad5d751d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Affirmative Action: Useful Once, Outdated Today?<|ARGUMENT|>It's important to consider the wealth gap between whites and non-whites in America. White people have 16 times more wealth than non-whites, according to Forbes Wealth includes material and non-material assets. In addition, white people can turn every dollar they earn in to 3 times more wealth than non-whites. So the playing field is far from level and we have a responsibility to try to correct that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is principally justified for governments to acknowledge differences which cause structural barriers for minority groups.\n","id":"c79e4184-768a-4021-9199-5e9f1f50839e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humanity establish colonies on Mars?<|ARGUMENT|>Orbital rings are a great start towards expand Earth's civilization out of Earth. A space elevator does not provide such opportunity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An orbital ring would be a great alternative and might be extremely challenging, but pretty feasible.\n","id":"81355284-4d24-49a3-8c71-2920c1380515"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should India have a UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>In India, where 22% of the population lives under the poverty line, a UBI will give them the freedom to explore new ideas. It will enable them to take risks and try new ideas that could change the world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A UBI would give humans more time to spend on more worthwhile activities.\n","id":"aca0c715-ebe1-48ea-b874-9f4f71d58dc4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>The fair trade certification is more accessible to upper-middle class countries as compared to low-income countries, and hence only relatively rich farmers can reap its benefits.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fair trade is only profitable for traders in rich countries and richer farmers.\n","id":"7bd206dc-5ca9-4cdf-9e8f-cf6e059987b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A friend brought this up and I couldn't help but agree. Now I understand that pro and college level football players don't face nearly the amount of danger that gladiators faced, but they do face the risk of serious head trauma or even paralysis in some extreme situations. Assuming that sports, as well as 1st world society, follow the historical trend of the past few thousand years and become safer, I think that it is very likely that people hundreds or thousands of years from now will look back and see football as a barbaric sport, and football players as brave people who faced more danger than others who lived similar lifestyles excluding members of the military of course. Please, change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Far in the future when people look back at records of American Football, pro football players will be thought of similarly to the way that gladiators are thought of today.\n","id":"784e091f-1fe8-45af-9cbe-4c8a59c79d00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>3 times more fossil fuels are needed to produce a meat-centered diet vs. a meat-free diet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Factory farming accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than all transport combined. fao.org thegreentimes.co.za\n","id":"e25a79b3-d700-4699-9748-7f4bdeb9ff9a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that if everyone gives, everyone gets. I don't think that everyone should be paid exactly the same, but I do believe there should be a set standard of living, and that everyone should give to better the whole. That also your pay should be also based on your level of work. The government should be involved in the community. Also that the government should regulate products to fit supply and demand and reduce waste. EDIT anarcho communist probably fits better.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think socialism is the best form of government.\n","id":"928ccfea-9912-43b6-afb7-72e2344c8390"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This really only applies to one of my teachers. She gave us 5 packets, each consisting of around 8 pages, with around 3 5 boxes on each page to insert notes into. Each packet is to be filled out with the corresponding chapter in the book, which are about 30 40 pages long. I also have this lady twice for a different class, and she gave me 84 words that I have to define in my own words, state related terms, and draw a picture to accompany it. I believe this would've been a bit more reasonable if it was assigned to us a bit before Christmas break, but the words were assigned the day before we got out, and the packets were assigned a few days before that. I believe the only reason she didn't assign them earlier is because if she did, then she would've had to spend her break time grading them all. I also realize that complaint about this workload isn't going to get it done any faster, but I have working on it as I type this.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a high schooler, I believe that obscene amounts of homework given by teachers over breaks is unreasonable,\n","id":"d37d7710-b354-405a-96b9-b3a532769746"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I would just like to say typing this made me feel much better, so thank you for taking time to read my most personal thoughts. To jump right into it, I am afraid of death. To get this out of the way, I don't believe in any religion and therefore don't believe in an afterlife. No matter how much I want to believe that there is such as place as, say for example heaven, where I can go and be happy for eternity after I die, I simply cannot convince myself that such a place exists. Staying away from the religious side of the idea of death, I am scared of death's emptiness . The idea that I will no longer be able to observe anything or watch things change. I will no longer be able to communicate, to love, to laugh, to smile, to talk, to sing, to dance, to hug, to kiss, to run, to jump, to live. I will simply cease to exist. My thoughts and memories will slowly fade away over time after I pass, until they simply become forgotten. Our value as a human is to contribute to the betterment of humankind, to try and make the world a better place. However, in 80 years my existence will cease I will become nothing. My mind will go blank. I will not be able to form thoughts. I will become nothing. Im scared of falling asleep, but never being able to wake up. The thought and notion of death deprive me of sleep. I spend hours every night gnawing over the scary thought that, in the grand scheme of the universe, humans don't matter, I don't matter. All my problems have no value to another place in the universe 30billion AU away. It all circles back to this feeling of uselessness, like no matter what I do in life, nothing will matter, everything will be forgotten. It leads to me questioning, What's the point? What's the point of our lives, or the lives of anything for that matter? Simply living just to live? Everything dies, so what is the objective? What is the end we are all trying to achieve? Im going to die eventually, and in a century or two, nobody will remember me. What is there not to be afraid of? EDIT Thank you everyone for you're responses. I really can't emphasize how much it means to me that enough people cared to help me  and brighten my spirits up. Thank you, thank you, thank you. If you had the same fears as I did in this post, I can boil why life is worth living down to a few words You're going to die regardless, so might as well live a life full of fun and happiness Thanks to u aliveidt for video.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I Am Afraid to Die\n","id":"2115b00d-66c2-49d9-81bb-4d5f3da68d10"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should homeschooling be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Patents have complete control in a homeschooling situation. Depending on the parent's personalities homeschooling has the potential to be isolated to the parents teachings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parents are very rarely the sole influencer of homeschooled children.\n","id":"85d007d8-8d32-4905-b1ff-23a5a58756fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>South Ossetia independence, Debate on the Independence of South Ossettia<|ARGUMENT|>In 2006, South Ossetia can be said to have been in 8 conflicts with Georgia when it held its 2006 referendum on independence. Holding referendums under such conflict conditions is generally illegitimate because the results of the elections are skewed by the conflict, threats, and the various risks for the voters involved. This caused David Bakradze, the chairman of a Georgian parliamentary European Integration Committee, to comment, \"Under conflict conditions, you cannot speak about legitimate elections.\"2<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"South Ossetia was wrong to hold elections under conflict conditions.\n","id":"cb623125-b36d-42a2-bba2-3699cab8337e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families<|ARGUMENT|>\"Europe, It's Time to Ratify the Migrant Workers Convention.\" International Federation for Human Rights. June 21, 2010: \"20 years ago, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, also known as the Migrant Workers Convention. We believe that the 20th anniversary provides an excellent opportunity for the European Union to live up to its core values and stand firm on the rights of migrant workers. The Convention constitutes the broadest framework in international law for the protection of the rights of migrant workers and members of their families and provides guidance to States on how to respect the rights of migrants while developing and implementing labour migration policies.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Migrant Workers Convention is the best way to protect migrants\n","id":"08fef842-a848-4bd4-a97e-c6a33be985b7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>It seems to me like a better system would be for districts to have basically voting kiosks all over every district. Like, every public building, within short walking distance of every bus stop, library, school, hospital, nearly everywhere. Then the people can login to the system and vote on issues. There could be a legislation petition system where lay people could push certain issues, and then it is the legislators responsibility, no matter how s he feels about the issues, to draft legislation the way they were told by the constituents, and then bring that legislation to congress. We have millions of practically unused payphones all over this country, so there is definitely infrastructure. Doesn't this just seem like a better system for our modern technological society?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US legislative system should not consist of elected officials based on platforms and ideologies, but we should use 21st Century tech to crowdsource government.\n","id":"1adcf6db-22cc-4e33-ae9b-389aaf78ff40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>\"Mercantilist\/Colonialist economics killed millions worldwide.\" If one counts famines due to misallocation as an atrocity as is typically done to inflate death tolls in the cases of China and the USSR, the British empire starved somewhere between 16-35 million people to death in South Asia, including 2-5 million Bengali people deliberately left to starve in just one year as resources were diverted to provision British troops during World War II.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Atrocities are a constant and recurring theme in human history. No single economic or political system can be considered a necessary precursor for their occurance.\n","id":"283a805f-40a6-45ef-98d1-bf691254e596"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are programs like Alcoholics Anonymous the best way to battle addiction<|ARGUMENT|>Alcoholics Anonymous' use of the concept of a 'higher power' could be considered obsolete and outdated, as it suggests universal alignment to a faith or belief and which is no longer the case<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Half of the 12 steps make explicit reference to a higher power or God.\n","id":"6fffc274-e61a-4df5-9105-cbaca57659f4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In most cases, it's very unhealthy for them without special supplements. Even with the supplements, why force a special diet onto someone else? Your kids probably don't particularly want to be vegan, let them make that decision for themselves once they're old enough to understand what being vegan means. Don't just keep them from eating animal products, give them whatever they need for a balanced diet until they make that choice. Same with your pets minus the choosing to be vegan part. If your pet is a carnivore omnivore, don't force it to eat only fruits and veggies. I cannot comprehend why anyone would force that onto someone else. I understand why people would do it themselves, but not why they would make anyone else abstain from animal products.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no good reason other than medical obligation to put your pets\/children on a gluten free\/vegan\/whatever diet.\n","id":"9c5cc854-63d8-45d9-8041-d6e6732bc7a3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should copyright die with the creator?<|ARGUMENT|>This is unfair, as the people working on these would have intended to have made profit off the work, whether for themselves or their family.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Works published posthumously would have no copyright protection at all.\n","id":"3497c32c-0d63-46ea-a38c-c46448ff80fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've noticed an oft upvoted sentiment on reddit is a dislike of Doctor Who because of its fandom , namely the fandom's obsessive nature, lack of originality, and inclination toward flamewars and fervent arguments. However, as a member of both fandoms although I've only read the books in the case of Game of Thrones, as I don't have cable or pirate , I've often seen these same aforementioned behaviors for which Doctor Who's fandom is so criticized in the Game of Thrones fandom especially arguments over whether the books or TV series are superior , yet I've not seen any such criticism of Game of Throne's fandom upvoted nearly as much as ones of Doctor Who's fandom. Is there some obvious reason for this that I'm missing, or is it just the fact that there are proportionally far more GoT fans on Reddit than Doctor Who fans? To me, it seems blatantly hypocritical to dislike Doctor Who's fandom but not Game of Throne's, but I fear that I may be missing some obvious, logical reason, so I leave it up to you. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Game of Thrones fandom is just as bad as the Doctor Who fandom, and it is hypocritical to dislike one but not the other.\n","id":"968b1dd5-a887-4e9a-9481-bc2369e6d389"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Media That Openly Declares Bias Better Than Media Claiming To Be Neutral?<|ARGUMENT|>This is good because people are expected to act based on facts at hand. Actions are done in accordance to how they are presented. For example, a negative presentation will lead to negative reaction to a statement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Supporters of both sides will dominate discourse trying to disprove claims as being overly influenced by the writer's biases.\n","id":"104ff1e6-d2c7-4ebb-b18a-b92acadebc23"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should voters in the UK have a final vote on the Brexit deal?<|ARGUMENT|>People should have the right to a final vote before the deal is made permanent once and for all, given that now they actually know what leaving really means.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some of the claims made during the referendum campaign were untrue.\n","id":"3037f931-0742-45eb-a783-128d033405ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I understand that I am on the losing slope of this view, but I am curious about seeing the other side of things from people who have a similar background or at least a similar technological view as I do. Other than the social stigma of being seen as a loner , outcast , nerd , or other derogatory terms, why is it seen as such a problem in our modern era to be attached to our phones or the internet in general? A digital world allows for More sharing of information Easier communication Greater pool of people that share your interests Greater possibilities for those less well off Little to no racial discrimination, as everyone is equal I admit my logic is flawed on this one Smaller carbon footprint due to not having to travel using fossil fuels, and computers can be ran on solar panels I understand that I am wrong in thinking this way, because otherwise more people would be operating entirely digitally. Can you Change My View?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see an issue with wanting to live in a digital world\n","id":"ad446a68-3dc9-4354-acf7-a13ef4df5dc1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Mods should more accurately be called 'accessories'. Mods rely on the game to function, however they do not include any copyrighted material on their own. Copyright law states that modifications of a work are still controlled by the original creator. This was written in reference to music, remixes, basically a remix is a modified version of the original work. A software equivalent would be someone releasing their own version of the game which would likely be mostly the original software with tweaks. The user of such a modified version of the game could run the game without owning the original. A mod however is a small file that only contains the unique changes that the user has made. Anyone wishing to use the mod need purchase the original game. These are two very separate concepts and have only been confused due to the unfortunate nomenclature. I believe that this is similar to PC makers claiming copyright over USB accessories which are fully unique but reliant on the base product, .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Game developers have no legal IP claim to 'mods'\n","id":"c719ed13-22da-42ad-a5c9-a889ca03283c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trilemma of the Maroons<|ARGUMENT|>This is the only way to reliably stay alive. Cheating comes with the risk of discovery and severe punishment.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Accepting the agreement is the choice that will most improve the prosperity of our community.\n","id":"6859dcc2-3ff8-47b8-a033-f157af48c554"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My argument While US Median Income has increased over time, it has not kept up with the rate of US GDP growth and that ratio has actually been decreasing over the last 60 or so years. I believe this ratio will continue to decrease for the foreseeable future, say next 30 years although I make no definitive statement regarding the rate at which the decrease will continue . x200B Year Real GDP per Capita Real Median Income Male Real Median Income Female Male Median Income to GDP Ratio Female Median Income to GDP Ratio 1950 14490 26270 9742 1.813 .6723 1960 18268 33940 10490 1.858 .5742 1970 24189 42270 14180 1.747 .5862 1980 30154 37530 14690 1.245 .4872 1990 37593 38210 18960 1.016 .5043 2000 45944 40490 22950 .8813 .4995 2010 49903 39740 22960 .7963 .4601 x200B Two main reasons for my argument Corporations have become more efficient in productivity, and have largely kept those efficiency gains for themselves. After tax corporate profits as a percent of GDP was 5 6 from the 1950s all the way to roughly early 2000s. In the new century, automation has helped many industries achieve better productivity without the reliance of human labor and now we've seen that number jump to the 9 12 range with 2008 being the outlier of course . better example than the manufacturing industry, which has seen record high profits while keeping headcount at half of what it was in the 1970s. we will likely continue to see record high corporate revenues and profits as technology advances to self driving cars, more self use kiosks, and better programmable robots. Very little of these gains will be seen by the average worker. Typically, number of children inversely correlate with house hold income. This is a truth both in the US and globally. from lower income households typically graduate high school at a lower rate and are less likely to attend college. Unfortunately, they are also likely to end up in jobs which are most at risk for automation or jobs with lower earnings potential. the zippia source above, truck drivers and retail workers are most likely to be negatively impacted by automation.Another source regarding the nominal number of jobs projected to be created in the next 10 years. They are all non Stem, and require either no formal education or high school diploma equivalent. In cases such as nurse's aid or home aid, automation is not a threat, however career earnings are extremely limited and the influx of new workers will be pulling the average income down. I'd like to see if someone can make an argument for this trend to change without some type of government intervention which I grant is more challenging. But I will also be open to hearing feasible legislative ideas that might reverse this trend.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The average American's income will continue to shrink as a piece of the total US financial pie\n","id":"8f13f23a-91a5-45ce-9f57-b6dd64a8f1e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Affirmative Action: Useful Once, Outdated Today?<|ARGUMENT|>Local white officials denied housing and business loans to Black Veterans as well as admission to all-white colleges and universities.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Although the G.I. Bill was intended to help all veterans, Black Veterans North and South were excluded.\n","id":"2954c640-4edb-4902-92f2-4dbcfcbad92e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This post does involve personal experience on the subject, but I am not going to go off on a soapbox. While this subject does hit home for me, I am more than willing to keep an open mind on the subject to see all of your thoughts on the matter. I've struggled with anxiety and depression most of my life 25 year old male but have gotten a lot better. This will not be a pessimistic rant. I've found that while things have gotten much better, my point of view on this subject has not changed. I'm going to break my point of view up into 3 different parts and relate them to the dating world male perspective, social phobia shyness, and looks 1 Male perspective For whatever reason, we know that guys are expected to approach girls. It isn't always this way there are exceptions, of course. Sometimes a guy gets approached by a girl. It's pretty rare for that to happen. In general whether it be social norms, the fact that from an evolutionary standpoint females don't have to approach a mate, or whatever other reason you want to cite, males are generally expected to do the courting in relationships. At least at first. 2 Social Phobia Shyness Social Phobia can be beaten. Well, to a certain extent. Most people, if not all, who have some kind of severe shyness I'll just call it shyness from here on out but really I am referring to any kind of shyness that is above whatever you want to deem as the 'average' are introverts. So while they can take steps to work on their irrational fears and behaviors associated with avoiding situations, they will still be introverts. What I am implying is that even if they get help for their issues be it through sheer force of will or therapist, they will only get better to the point where they are able to function. The purpose of treatment for issues with shyness is not to 'cure' anxiety, but rather it is to make it so that the person is able to function. So in a sense it can be 'beaten' by the victim coming to terms with the kind of person they are. Issues with shyness usually stem from some kind of resistance to uncomfortable feelings. An introvert is an introvert and as a result socializing is not their forte or something they will generally do even if they were not afraid of those situations. Generally people who are shy think they would enjoy parties big social gatherings but I believe this comes from feelings of loneliness. I have taken part in several group experiences that involve people with shyness issues so this is not just my own experience here and every single one of them is an introvert. 3 Looks Personality matters a lot in a relationship. That being said, in my opinion, at the beginning of a relationship looks matter a lot more. For the first few dates a couple is really getting to know each other, and while being genuine, down to earth, honest, friendly, humble, etc are good qualities to have, everyone has their demons. That is to say, everyone hides their crazy. I don't want to say that it is entirely 'phony', but people do put on shows. It makes sense, right? I mean, you like this person presumably and you want them to like you back so you put in a little extra effort or make yourself seem better in some ways than you might normally be. My point is that initially, looks matter a lot. When you look at someone, you immediately know if you find them attractive or not from a purely physical standpoint, I mean. There is some wiggle room when it comes to ratings, I will admit. I've often found girls that people say are 5 10, or something, are much more attractive to me. That being said, I do think that there are still general standards of beauty. As a result, I sort of consider someone's attractiveness to be something like a normally distributed curve, with their average purely physical attractiveness rating as the mean i.e, someone who is usually rated a '4' by people will be seen as a 3 5 by 68 of the population, a 2 6 by 95 of the population, a 1 7 by 99.7 of the population, etc . Most unattractive people get seen as unattractive most of the time. Not everyone finds them unattractive, but the average will. Just want to add here that I do think it's possible for unattractive people to be in happy relationships, have a good love life, the whole nine yards, etc So putting all 3 together, when you have someone who is male expected to initiate conversations , above average shyness introvert some kind of issue with initiating conversations combined with average or below average looks dismissed by the average person as unattractive best case scenario they are going to have to fight a steep uphill battle to find love. Worst case scenario is they never end up in a long term relationship. I know this is getting kind of long and by now I'm sure you've gotten the point. I could go into more depth on these views for issues like confidence and how I believe that relates to attractiveness and my points of view onto why I believe a lot of techniques for dealing with shyness as that is the big barrier here are not effective when it comes to interacting with women, but I won't go into detail unless they are mentioned here. Thanks for reading. If you see this get edited it'll be for any spelling grammar mistakes I find. Please .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Males who have social phobia\/some kind of more than average shyness and who are average looking\/slightly less than average looking will likely be alone forever.\n","id":"24d6d5bb-2454-4c66-9a0a-498312884866"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hate all or nothing statements, so I definitely acknowledge that some couples are genuinely happy being in an open relationship. But I feel like most aren't. It seems like a lot of people agree to an open relationship just so their partner doesn't leave them. Or a couple is genuinely curious about the lifestyle, so they try it, only to find out one or both of them is not emotionally capable of handling their partner sleeping with other people. But no one feels like they can say anything because they agreed it would be ok to sleep around. I don't know. Maybe I just feel this way because I can't imagine being at all receptive to an open relationship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"most open relationships involve one or both partners feeling hurt and invalidated.\n","id":"dafb03ad-35f3-466e-a766-794d2bba92a7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>NATO has been the guarantor of peace in Europe for the last half-century. There was a long time of peace from the end of the Second World War to the creation of the EU.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Factors other than the EU were responsible for peace in Europe.\n","id":"d05037b2-2c50-4e83-b85f-cd546bbe481d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>File-sharing<|ARGUMENT|>Although file sharing has increased in recent years, so have online music sales. Most researchers believe that teens and college students make up the majority of illegal downloaders. This group represents those who are \"money-poor but time-rich\", which suggests that they wouldn't have bought the files legally even if they weren't able to get them by illegal means. Thanks to the increasing popularity of file sharing, music artists are becoming more and more popular. Although some people claim that money is lost through file sharing because people would download free and illegal music instead of buying from iTunes, etc., popular music artists such as Prince who offered a free song for the purpose of gaining popularity see more attendance at their concerts. File sharing actually benefits the artists, but could be hurting the recording industries because research showed that CD sales have decreased. Most of the money made from CD's go to retail stores, advertising companies, and other \"middlemen\", not the artist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"According to \"The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales\" by Felix Oberholzer-Gee Harvard professor and Koleman Strumpf, p2p services could actually work as marketing tools for the music industry.\n","id":"e836f59d-5a44-455f-b69b-c412ee8d77c5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should politicians be required to reveal their finances?<|ARGUMENT|>Forcing politicians to reveal their finances will decrease the number of people who get into politics in order to make money.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians should be required to reveal their finances to the public.\n","id":"6fb7772a-f855-4150-8723-c5e48a31d15d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Back in the days when resources were scarce and people needed to work harder and more efficiently to survive, it made sense to divide work into gender roles that were more suited for men or women with men doing the hunting and women doing the gathering. Tribes that sent women off to hunt or go to war were risking valuable breeding resources and would be at a disadvantage. Up until relatively recently there really hasn't been much opportunity to address the specific needs of individuals such as gender and sexual minorities. First necessity and then cultural momentum created a context that was hostile to them and there were strong cultural forces that ensured people continued to conform to gender norms. Today we have been living in abundance long enough that people are questioning gender norms left and right. We don't need hunters, warriors, or breeding stock anymore. The physiological differences between males and females doesn't really affect our ability to survive and reproduce. I see no need whatsoever to continue gender policing people with notions of what it means to be a real man or a real woman . I have yet to hear a good argument for why we should continue to hold onto notions of manhood and womanhood in our current society. EDIT There seems to be some confusion about what I am arguing. For the sake of clarity let us assume there are two hypothetical societies Society A has notions of masculinity and femininity and puts social pressures on people to conform based on their biological sex. Society B puts no limits on what people can do or how they can express themselves when it comes to gender. Biological males and females are allowed to do anything the other can save for biological differences if they so choose. What advantage if any would Society A have over Society B ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender policing serves no useful purpose in today's society.\n","id":"b069487f-bf37-47f6-9389-137388da0f6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Marvel vs DC: Which Universe is Better?<|ARGUMENT|>The Arrowverse crossover events have represented major comic book events like Crisis on Earth-X and Elseworlds.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The CW Arrowverse has had several huge comic book events represented in the show.\n","id":"edc82b70-d274-4584-ae08-6c1589d030a6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Background Many of parties running in this week's EU elections are running on a platform for democratic reform of the EU, including the need for a directly elected President of the EU. While I agree that change is needed, I believe that an elected President is a terrible idea. Turnout for the 2009 EU elections was 43 . If we take the groups of the EU Parliament as it stands today and assume that each one submits one candidate, we can realistically expect 7 candidates. If we assume that the largest group's the EPP, with 274 766 MEPs voters are directly proportional to their number of seats we can expect their candidate to win on 35 of the vote. I do not believe that 15 of the electorate supporting a candidate grants them the legitimacy needed to hold office. The EU is an institution which by its very nature will never be 100 united with a common vision. There is increasing Euroscepticism in member states like the UK, France and Greece and Eurosceptic parties are expected to hold about 1 3 of seats following this week's elections. A President must be a uniting figure and I do not believe that it is possible for them to unite popular sentiment in their favour with the relatively small levels of support they will have. Even if different voting systems such as STV or AV were used anti EU parties would still criticise the President's low level of support. I think the most successful option would be an elected legislature as it stands today, a nominal figurehead and an executive based on a similar model to the UNSC. The 5 most developed countries in the EU would have a permanent seat on the council and another 5 would be appointed for fixed terms. The EU will never be a uniting force. It is better to embrace its weaknesses and play within its existing constraints than it is to try and pretend that it will one day be.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An elected EU President is a terrible idea.\n","id":"e65c1a19-ab7e-44fd-b93d-034f0a0e705e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Climate Change Be Reversed?<|ARGUMENT|>Though warming is resuming this statistic shows that when there is man-made climate change, the temperature stays for the most part neutral. So, we can reverse climate change if we change our actions like be eco-friendly, as nature's forces do the rest will bring to turn the neutral line into a negative slope.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nature has the capability to keep the climate in check and reverse damage caused by people through negative feedback loops.\n","id":"934a7cc8-1673-4c85-8d67-55bfa4876444"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've run into a pretty sizable number of comments in my past 's and people often seem to be using people can't choose what they are offended by as an argument to not invalidate someones feelings. I've also run into a significant number of people who believe that youth is too sensitive, to which I tend to agree. Specifically in this thread I want to tackle the idea of treating someone else's feelings as inherent truth because it seems like our society has moved in this direction as the result of focus on the victims of society. Fundamentally, your feelings ARE subjective truth. They are based on your perception of the moment, not on the actual moment itself. When someone is offended, people should not believe they are hurt assuming feeling offended is the result of being hurt, which you also can't prove and only furthers my point , as this is unfair to the other party. People SHOULD, however, believe that the offended group believes they have been hurt. If a person cannot logically i.e. removing the subjectivity explain why it is you have been hurt, it should be considered unethical to act via social punishment such as calling them an asshole . An example I am white and walking down the street. A black person further down the street notices how I look at him and then I cross the street because my wife said she would look for me on that side. The black person believes I am racist and hence is why I crossed the road, and therefore he is offended. His offence is delusion though, and only created by the conditions of the society. If the black guy then goes up to me and says you're an asshole it would be wrong despite his feelings saying he is in the right. The implication of this should be people who say someone is a piece of shit without being able to explain it should not be entertained.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feelings are unreliable evidence and scolding others on the basis of them is fundamentally unethical.\n","id":"8c620207-187d-45f1-9fe9-22417b3cd44c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I had pretty bad luck when it came to relationships. My ex girlfriend left me for her ex who she told me abused her and broke her heart. and it really left me clueless about how I should approach relationships. I have decent looks and I have manners but most of my relationships ended kind of like the last one. Lately I read alot about incels and niceguys and I came to the conclusion that I might be a niceguy. Because when my ex left me I got really upset and told her how I would've been a better choice. Now, I really don't want to identify as a good guy and I really really really don't want to identify as a incel as I find those two communities extremely toxic especially incels But even tho I tried I can't get rid of this niceguy mentality and it really annoys me. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many girls choose assholes over guys that treat them well.\n","id":"3686e93d-adeb-4ead-879e-d924a132a185"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>The Church also mandated in 1179 free education for the poor, so every cathedral had a master to teach boys too poor to pay the regular fee, planting the seed of modern universal and public education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The catholic church was the only institution in Europe during several hundred years that actively contributed to free education for the masses.\n","id":"2bd9637f-f1bd-4370-9f95-c19f2bbca375"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Very simple. How do you feel when the murderer or rapist of your child gets into an accident and then the organ of another child you lost years prior by a murder caused by this same man becomes a part of him, letting him live with a part of your child inside of him? What if this criminial, released not long ago, with the organs of your child goes on to murder another random child, or just to commit another crime? I know my situation here is hypothetical and unlikely, but how would you feel knowing that the organs you donated went to a person so despicable they didn't deserve it? My argument is thus that there are certain crimes where a donor should be able to deprive you from organ donation forever, if he she opted to do so. This is one the things that make me hesitant to donate any organ, it is humiliating that such things can happen. Corrected info I declare that if there is someone who wants to willingfully donate to a convict, they still should be able to, but people the donors should be able to deny them the organs, to avoid the wrong people from getting their organs. I changed my  45 minutes after the first post because I saw it wasn't what I meant to say. Now it is right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Dangerous convicts should lose their rights to a organ donation\n","id":"77298a86-20bd-427d-874c-b66cb9e29005"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Autonomous Killing Machines: The Future of Warfare?<|ARGUMENT|>Building AKMs in the US may imply a great deal to us as it indicates that we are advancing via technology, it shows that we are more developed and efficient. This may save lives of human soldiers.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The West should build working autonomous killing machines AKMs as quickly as possible.\n","id":"e0a2ddbc-f189-4102-953b-4fb864e97944"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Anytime there's a what annoys you about people type Askreddit thread, this is always one of the top comments. I don't do this myself, but I've never even considered that it would be a problem before seeing it on Reddit. Many times it's followed by saying using speakerphone is especially erroneous on public transportation. And yet nobody argues that talking to your friends on a bus is impolite. Isn't it all the same to observers? Just that it's one person instead of many? Please explain to me why it bothers people so much.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Telephoning in speakerphone in public is OK\n","id":"757d3631-869f-4896-8ae8-6c684985ab9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>In the real world most of what causes us to be unhappy is due to non-physical factors such as our relationships, our work, our mental health, etc. For most people, psychological consequences are far more important than physical ones.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The distinction between physical and non-physical effects is not a good proxy for measuring the impact of a crime. Outside of murder or grievous bodily harm, the psychological effects of crime are likely just as impactful.\n","id":"0fda05d7-3932-4a45-ba53-1ac65b22166f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>The idea of a united Europe is on the decline as eurosceptic parties are registering gains in elections.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polls and referendums suggest that European citizens are against the USE.\n","id":"a0a12445-f617-407e-8567-b7f883ccb93c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>The government has failed to provide effective treatment to those who confess to drug use, meaning that demand for drugs has remained high.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The war on drugs in the Philippines has been devastating and has had very limited positive effects.\n","id":"7ba22e65-2aa4-45cf-9c83-f90f9b055d64"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>CP is a picture or video of a crime. It is legal to possess videos of other crimes so why not for CP? Someone can watch beheading videos for as long as they like without interference but if they watch CP they are jailed. It's illogical that there's such a different reaction. The argument that it would increases demand for child abuse is both bad and not persuasive. If more CP was produced it would only mean that images that already existed are being released and or children that were already being abused are now being filmed. More demand wouldn't cause normal people to abuse children. More demand if legalization actually produced more demand would just create evidence of a crime that often goes unreported. It is important to remember that people have had their lives ruined by these laws. They've been sent to prison for years or decades just for viewing images on the internet. I find it very cruel that those people are tortured by prison time just for viewing pixels on a screen on some strange assertion that they've somehow caused other people to abuse children the increased demand argument .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In light of Japan criminalizing possession of Child Pornography: I think CP should be legal to view and possess.\n","id":"32ca8fd1-aa0f-4aa6-ab79-6d5508d87e95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Are Laptops or Tablets Better For College Students?<|ARGUMENT|>Apps often have to incorporate a inefficient nested tab system which is difficult to navigate on smaller screens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tablets typically function with apps rather than programs and apps have well known problems\n","id":"262783e5-854d-4d18-bf8a-cf169d96bb36"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The minimum wage is too low. The cost of living exceeds the 7 8 dollar minimum wage needed for general survival in today's economy. A person working for 7 8 dollars an hour can't sufficiently afford to pay for things like, healthcare, car payments, insurance, school, and home bills. If the minimum wage were raised, people would be able to afford to better themselves and continue an education and receive a career. Currently as it stands, people working for 7 8 dollars an hour are stuck in a perpetual state of poverty, unable to afford the things they need to move forward. When it comes to health, unexpected things can occur. Such as developing cancer which can cost upwards of 300,000 USD just for treatment. Everyone is supposed to have equal opportunity, but you can't have equal opportunity if some people are already losing the game. The rich stay rich and the poor create a lineage of poverty. Here is an article with myths on a higher minimum wage<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Minimum wage should be raised\n","id":"82bf0dac-5d65-435e-ba87-e4efd7b9ccfd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So here is my problem, I have pretty much two interests that I actively pursue. One is anime and manga and the other one is association football I won't give in to the American superiority in reddit and call it soccer . Obviously they are two different levels, especially in Europe I'm from Germany . I know maybe 1 person who is also into manga, but my whole class was always separated by the two clubs in Berlin, which one is the better. But right now I am going through my first world cup on reddit and I noticed something. r soccer was really excited, because they would not become a default for the WC and that way avoid one thing that is pretty nonexistent where I am from \u201cHype Fans\u201d. People not really into football, but when such a big event comes up they suddenly are someone who knows everything better. Maybe my friends and family are a bit extreme, maybe not, but I grew up with one team and would know what to talk about when I saw someone with a blue white scarf. I may not watch the qualifying matches but I have informed myself about each and every qualifying game for the WC that Germany and France had and looked at the results of pretty much most of them. I don't want to state that I know a lot, in fact, I don't know a lot, but I know that I don't know everything Now that the WC is here there are a lot of people, not only from the US, from everywhere, that will only turn on the TV for 3 matches or so and will come up with critical flaws in a game that is thousands of years old and they can pinpoint not only the flaw but can also solve it with that easy rule change. And that really annoys me I never saw Batman but I saw the Bane meme a lot and think I am a bit like this, they only adopted my passion, I grew up in it, I was molded by it The fact is that it it were so easy to solve some problems of the game, either they'd be already solved or it would no longer be football, it would be a different game So please stop trying. The same goes for anime and manga. I keep in an extremely small group of friends to discuss everything, because anime and manga are getting more and more mainstream and with that there are coming in more people who dislike certain things about it and want to change it, to make it \u201cbetter\u201d. That is bullshit and I get so frustrated by it that I am not able to watch so easy things like \u201cX Y Z react to Anime Z Y X\u201d by the Fine Brothers on YouTube, something that is actually just humor, but I am unable to watch it, because I dislike someone with limited knowledge on hobby A reacting to hobby A. The same goes for me, as long as I am not 100 sure and preferably can give sources I keep my mouth shut. That stops me from really getting friends, but also keeps me away from any trouble, because I will form no opinion on anything whatsoever unless I have scientific evidence to base my opinion on. My problem is that I know that that is bad. Maybe it is good to bring people together via the WC and maybe it would be good for anime and manga to become mainstream, so that mangaka earn a bit more though the community that exists at the moment would not like it . And it is generally bad to be so pessimistic, so please give me a reason to <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think public attention ruins something more than it gains from it.\n","id":"1e9e1a96-d66c-49cd-8983-374ff0841c7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should The 'Poor' Be A Protected Equality Group?<|ARGUMENT|>Generational poverty is consistently higher for Black and Latino Americans than any other racial group.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected by poverty from generation to generation.\n","id":"eb384407-e4a0-402d-8595-9ec17957655c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hi, a bit of a technical topic, but it keeps bothering me. I am a photographer and videographer so I am not totaly ignorant of the topic. I am pretty sure that I am right, but all manufacturers and even selling expert keep telling me the oposit of my view. If any TV, Projector or Software interpolates a pixel based image say a 1920x1080 hd image from a blue ray to an image with a higher pixel count say 4k , than it does this by interpolating adding the nearby original pixels and take some kind of clever average new pixels between the original pixel. This reduces the visibility of the pixels, there wont be any visible pixel grid if you interpolate correct , if you move closer to the screen. the worst way of interpolation would be simply repeating the pixels . BUT this can NOT render any new details or any new sharpness. The interpolation can NOT make an edge more correct and it can not create more details in an image. The only way an image can be scaled and becoming actualy sharper, is if the image is vector based, like an Adobe Illustrator File. But this is obviously not the case in Pixel based Images like from a movie. My view is especially understandable if we look at an extreme exmple. Imagine you take an sd image and interpolate it to 8k. Its obvious that this cant result in any better image quality than just an SD image. Any sales guy tells me I am wrong. Am I crazy? .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"4k interpolation in TVs can not improve the quality\n","id":"69c892ac-4263-4583-937b-4c7930674d50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My parents divorced when I was 5. No big deal. I grew up used to a divided household, and things seemed okay. My dad met a woman 10 years ago and they've been engaged for 6. They've bought a house and live together. I think they have their own problems, individual and relationship wise, and it's keeping them from getting married. But no big deal, they have a little spat every now and again, but nothing major. My mom, my brother, and I moved across the country because of my mom's job. She'd been dating different guys for a while. Two christmases ago, she got proposed to by her boyfriend, and she said yes. They got married 6 months later, in June. I was happy for her I was glad she finally met someone she loved and wanted to spend life with. We moved into his house that summer. Things went pretty well until school started for me and my brother. My mom and my stepdad lets call him Rob would get into arguments every now and again, sometimes more than just a little spat. Usually these would be resolved in a matter of hours, and we'd be a happy family again. But earlier this year, probably around February, things got worse. Rob changed. He was no longer the nice man my mom went on dates with. He wasn't the guy my mom fell in love with. He became angry, and started to lash out at my brother and I. My brother younger especially. My mom had to leave her job, so now she's unemployed. This adds some extra stress in her life, as we are trying to sell our old house and she doesn't have a job. I don't know what the deal with Rob is. He apparently had a rough childhood, and his parents had a terrible marriage. He's been married before, divorced, and lost the ability to see his child. He's also been with untrustworthy partners, from what I gather. He's constantly accusing my mom of things she'd never do. He's become blinded by his past relationships. My mom just wants to appease him. She's had some horrid relationships as well. She's been lied to, made to feel like dirt, worthless, and dishonest. Whenever my Rob needs something done, she's always the first one to jump to help. She's also the first to apologize when anything goes wrong. She's become paranoid. Lately, the arguments have become really heated. A week ago, I called my mom to help give her directions to a performance of mine. I called her while she was in the car with my brother and Rob. She answered the phone crying. It was her birthday. She sat in the audience with my brother inbetween her and Rob. Earlier today, I laid down to take a nap. I woke up to them arguing in the other room. It went on for an hour. I heard every word. Rob wanted her to admit to something she didn't feel. Like he wanted her to say something rude to him, just so he could play the pity card and be right. He always has to be right. He's never wrong. He always talks about wanting to keep the family together, and how we all need to pull our own weight and not be selfish. It's really hypocritical, considering things that are considered, for the good of this family, end up being all about him. For example, my brother and I sometimes leave empty drinking glasses on the coffee table or nightstands. We just forget, we're teenage boys. We probably shouldn't leave those glasses there, but then again, we're not exactly pulling the family apart. But if you asked Rob, he'd tell you about how we're trying to undermine his authority by intentionally leaving glasses laying out. What started as something to keep our dinnerware in check You need to put those glasses in the dishwasher, so we can have clean glasses and not run out. , turned into a personal attack against this family You're not putting the glasses back because you know I want you to, and you're being defiant on purpose. . This is one offense among many, but still. My mom is so upset. She's a nervous wreck all the time, and breaks down sometimes. I can't blame her, you have to step on eggshells around Rob, because you don't know what will set him off. She told me that probably after my brother graduates, she'll divorce Rob, and that she's never going to get married again. I can't blame her, and I have the same view. Being only a high school student, my relationships don't really hold any weight, I know, but I've still met girls that I've had serious feelings for, and I thought they felt the same, but they end up abusing my feelings in the relationship for their own gain. I've been with girls who, as soon as things started getting serious, changed completely into a totally different person, a person that I did not want to be with. My friends have had these kinds of relationships too, ones that made them miserable all for the sake of love. Don't get me wrong, I believe love is a real force, and that love can be very powerful it would be juvenile to deny that. However, at the same time, there's no guarantee that love will last forever, or that the other person will ever feel as strongly in love as you. And that's where my opposition to serious relationships and marriages comes in Most marriages fail. The lucky ones get out with a divorce, while the others are forced to stay committed to someone they can't stand. I imagine, in this sense, marriage is like locking yourself in a room with another person. Teamwork might be your first response, but after a while, you will start to hate their guts for the smallest reasons. Then marriage and serious relationships carry a financial commitment. This is probably my weakest point, but still one to bring up. Owning a large house, supporting a partner, raising children, and the like can be really stressful on your income. Again, I've seen this with relationships and how sometimes it all just boils down to who has money. People get married just because the other person is wealthy all the time. There's no real love there. If I didn't have to worry about a serious relationship, kids, or marriage, I could keep all fiscal concerns to myself. Again, sort of a selfish reason for being opposed to relationships, but one I had to bring up. I don't want to get emotionally attached to anyone either. I don't want to go through life and have to worry not only about my feelings but the feelings of my partner. I try to be nice all the time, to everyone I know, but only because it's the right thing to do. People have complex emotions though, and living with a partner, you're forced to work through their emotional stressors while dealing with my own. One day, they're happy, the next one they want to rip your head off at the slightest hint of trouble. Why should I subject myself to that? Relationships can be really distracting too. In school or a workplace, you could easily get caught up with romance, which would lower productivity. And then you have commitments to your partner. Instead of going out with friends, you have to take your sweetheart to the theater tonight, or maybe she doesn't want you staying so late at work. If you work in a high risk career field, like the military or law enforcement, they worry about you. If you don't have a serious relationship, you're free. This has probably been a little rambly, and I apologize for the repetition. It's late and I've been writing this on and off for an hour. TL DR Relationships suck, marriages ruin lives, I've seen it firsthand with my mom and stepdad. Most marriages fail, so why bother? Over time, love fades and becomes one sided or nonexistent in serious relationships. Financially, not having to support anyone but yourself is liberating. Relationships can also be emotionally taxing and distracting from important things in life, like work and other friendships. Anyways, that's my view. I invite you to change it I'll be up for another hour, and then tomorrow I will get back on here to answer any new responses.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I've seen how marriage and relationships can ruin lives and families. I'm 17 and I never want to get into a serious relationship, including marriage, for the rest of my life.\n","id":"97d0820e-a279-4b5e-bda4-ecd906d14022"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does the European Union lack the necessary public discourse to function properly?<|ARGUMENT|>A union that respects the diversity of each member and their culture is essential to end war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A strong European identity would make the region more peaceful.\n","id":"3815f6fd-dea9-4551-98df-f7039bb2cd40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The Japanese occupation of Korea, in my honest opinion, was sort of good for the Korean peninsula. It set up a whole load of infrastructure for the peninsula that otherwise may have taken way longer to be set up and be used, and though most of that was used for wartime measures, it nevertheless helped Korea after the liberation of Korea. I know there were atrocities such as sex slaves and forced names changes and cultural repression. But I think the economic outcome of the whole thing outweighs the cons. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Japanese occupation of Korea was good for the country.\n","id":"c2c8d358-c7d8-46eb-8a90-34fa7864b350"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Tiger parenting does more harm than good<|ARGUMENT|>Children raised by parents who adopted a more supportive parenting style as opposed to tiger parenting had the best socio-emotional adjustment, the least amount of alienation from parents, and the strongest sense of family obligation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Tiger parenting harms the ability of children to form meaningful and lasting relationships.\n","id":"9df9e448-3e12-405c-9071-a3706b96d11e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am a person that likes to make sure I am well informed before speaking on a topic. So when the James Charles drama came out, I didn't take random people on Twitter's word for it because I noticed huge differences from person to person on exactly what he did wrong. So, I went directly to the horse's mouth the accusers. They are accusing him of trying to change their sexuality. There are two confirmed accusers. First of all, THE ACCUSERS THEMSELVES DID NOT CALL JAMES CHARLES predatory. The first person to call James Charles predatory was fellow makeup YouTuber Jeffree Star. After that, everyone just ran with it. The Seattle guy is particularly suspicious, and these are the facts from the video he posted He messaged James Charles first. James did not approach him. He made out with James Charles for an hour, but said he did not enjoy it. All sexual activity that took place happened BEFORE James sent the text messages telling him he was not straight. He admitted to consenting to the act which took place kissing . He admitted to being bi curious in the video. James did not ask him to take part in any sexual activity with him AFTER sending the message telling him he was not straight. He was upset when he found out James Charles was talking to someone else the other guy . Right after Gage Gomez posted his video, he filmed himself talking with James Charles on camera about him speaking to other guys, and seemed visibly upset. When asked by Charles why he cared so much, he struggled to answer before finally saying because WE were talking. He knew James Charles was interested in him. I don't think James Charles meant to do some Jedi mind trick on him and make him change his sexuality. He never solicited any sexual act from him AFTER sending that message so the point of sending the message was NOT to try and fuck him. The messages after and before that one are discussing the fact that they were finished with whatever was going on. A more reasonable explanation that makes sense given the context is that James Charles was insinuating that the guy was closeted. Charles saying this guy isn't straight therefore wasn't motivated by trying to fuck him, but probably attempting to get him to see that making out with a guy is NOT typical heterosexual straight behaviour. Either way, no sexual activity was performed without consent, both of them were the same age, and although Charles is famous, does he really hold any significant leverage over Seattle guy's life for his fame to be a factor? Finally, only a few screenshots from their entire conversations were released by him. Why not release the whole conversation? How do we know he's not leaving important something out? There's another weird aspect to it. One of the DMs he released shows a message from James Charles stating that he was confused because he told him that he was bisexual not bi curious at first. If indeed he did tell him he was bisexual at first, this looks really strange. However, I'll just work under the assumption that what Seattle guy has said is true. Seattle guy did not show the messages after that. It seems that there's a lot that he's hiding, and I just can't bring myself to completely believe him without hearing Charles' side of the story. People are just dragging him because of other people dragging him. It's honestly scary how people are taking random tweets as fact. People are photoshopping DMs. Even Zara Larsson accused him of being predatory towards her boyfriend, then retracted her tweet because Charles only sent him one DM, which she won't tell us what he said in it. All of this is making me more skeptical of these allegations, because people can't even specify what exactly he did that was predatory. A lot of people had disliked him before this, and I honestly think that this scandal is way for them to justify their dislike of him. I don't think he's predatory, I just think he's desperate and sad. I'm interested in hearing your opinions as to why it was predatory. Edit Removed an edit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"James Charles is not a sexual predator.\n","id":"ce7ca871-16c9-4faa-bef9-1192a17b9476"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should LGBTQ+ Campaigning Use The Narrative That LGBTQ+ People Are 'Born This Way'?<|ARGUMENT|>It is ineffective to try and provide the full nuance of the uncertainties surrounding this question - campaigning often relies on repeated, memorable messaging, and 'born this way' carries across better than theses about 'a number of potential relationships between experienced gender, sexual desire, social context and your genetics'. Thus, it is necessary to pick one narrative and stick with it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no particularly clear reason to prioritise telling people that gender and sexual identities are constructs over that they are immutable.\n","id":"b5c088f0-6a84-4d13-a440-b4a4d6b140e0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>JULIANA The mantle is less resistant than I thought it would be -- DATA We are within two kilometers of the magma pocket. Earlier it was said the magma pocket was two kilometers from the core; which is 2800km down assuming an earth sized planet. They can bore through 2000+km of crust and mantle in less than 20 seconds. In another episode it was capable of cutting through a mile of solid granite in seconds<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"TNG Inheritance- DATA My calculations indicate that the first phaser blast will be approximately nineteen seconds in duration. RIKER Acknowledged. RIKER continuing Mister Worf. ? WORF Phasers are locked on target. RIKER Fire when ready. DATA off console The beam has penetrated eight kilometers beneath the surface. JULIANA Once it's through the crust, we'll boost phaser intensity by twelve percent. WORF Standing by.\n","id":"4c38188c-daa8-4e38-910d-6c9407d28c43"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should we worship a god that sends people to hell?<|ARGUMENT|>The state of a person can either be in a free or unfree state; combinations thereof, unfree from freedom, freedom in ones state of unfreeness, are merely poetry and word play.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God\u2019s omnipotence does not entail the creation of incoherent concepts. All the power in the universe could not allow God to create \u201cfree\u201d creatures without the ability to reject Him.\n","id":"031509c0-5841-4b34-8020-c84aa9fdc53c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hey guys, The reason I ask is because recently my iPhone 6 has been acting up. I had been putting up with the phone's issues for one or two months since I couldn't muster enough reason to go out and actually buy a new used iPhone. Student life is tough and I've been saving for a trip so having an extra hundred or so to spend wasn't that easy of a decision. This afternoon I asked my coworker who worked in IT if he knew of anyone selling phones. By chance, he had picked up a Samsung S6 from our old site so he graciously gave it to me for free. Now I've come up to a dilemma. I've had my iPhone for 4 years and all my tech at home laptop, iPad are also Apple. I really want to like the Samsung S6 because it was a free gift and I'm not trying to create any wars over which brand is better but I'm a bit hesitant to switch over probably due to Apple's subliminal marketing techniques that I've been subconciously duped into becoming a full on Apple user . One reason I realise though is that I like the iPhone is because it's very minimal and straightforward to use. I'm not the most tech savvy, and I use the phone like a basic university student. Social media, calendar, emails ect. I know that end of day a phone is a phone if it can do its job. And my iPhone 6 definitely isn't performing to that standard with lots of crashing, slow apps, GPS not working and muffled phone speaker. I just need some reasons to win me over so I can come to like the Samsung S6 and use it well<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Samsung S6 is a great phone\n","id":"143f7f6e-4aad-4cfe-85b2-5571f45e5c15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Humans should act to fight climate change<|ARGUMENT|>Climate predictions are not simply built on 'statistics The Earth's weather systems are far too complex to have enough data to draw statistical conclusions on future climate changes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The climate is known to exhibit chaotic behavior in the mathematical\/scientific sense and is very difficult to link effect with cause.\n","id":"6bd435f6-b33d-4f1a-ac09-4a0fc2c5206e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Everyone I know, loves the office. Everyone. For a while I resented everyone's knowledge of it. The memes. The references. I even had an old boss who prided themself on being a 'Michael Scott' I found him to be kind of annoying which also assisted my resentment of the show. Why would I want to watch a show that's going to remind me of them? It all got to me. I couldn't stand it. I put off watching it for years. Years. Then I browsed r all and was constantly confronted with posts from r DunderMifflin. And they just kept coming and coming. I almost considered blocking the subreddit altogether but then I decided well, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just childishly holding myself back from a hilarious time. So I decided what the heck? and popped it on Netflix. I watched about 6 episodes of the first season and I just found it so cringey and unpleasant. I couldn't stand it. I reached out to a close friend about my feelings and he suggested that I skip season 1 and start with season 2. So here I am, on my couch, on season 2 episode 8 and I am just not feeling it. Should I just accept that it's not my thing? Are there episodes that will hook me? Change my view. Edit Thank you all so much for your comments. Yeah, I guess most of you are right the show just isn't for me. Well, I'm glad that I at least gave it a shot and challenged my assumptions about it. But yeah, going to block r DunderMifflin because I don't get their jokes and I don't want to spend the time trying. Appreciate it TMB<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Office isn't funny\n","id":"c3ca6408-b759-4b3a-873d-27c2b813131b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Brexit: Is The UK Going To Regret The Referendum?<|ARGUMENT|>The police forces in England have reported race and faith-based hate crimes increase by more than 40% since the Brexit vote.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hate crime and racial violence has surged since the Referendum.\n","id":"c7767197-6aa8-4c10-ae38-0fb3386938ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Catalans should have the right to decide on independence with a binding referendum<|ARGUMENT|>There have been already many consultations about independence and a decision has not been made.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A referendum on independence does not solve the problems of Catalonia. Regional referendum\n","id":"16a961d4-25f4-4784-9bfa-53c72c927ad5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Whomever came up with the word yeet needs to be throat punched. It's so cringey every time I hear some teenage idiot say it, even worse so when they are an adult. Just say throw, threw, or thrown like a normal person speaking English. Yeet, yeeted, yote ? are all idiotic sayings akin to the morally inappropriate dancing style twerking and the cringe inducing fad of dabbing. Our society has seemingly over the last 5 10 years become a lowbrow debauchery. I am 24 myself, and the fact my own peers indulge in such behaviors leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. When did having self respect and class become unpopular? What benefit is there to speaking in a way that makes others think you're unintelligent? To dancing in such a way to make others question your moral standards? To dabbing in general? Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Yeet is a stupid fucking word.\n","id":"d98aa734-db7a-4f90-b259-e30c7866f33a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>This results in babies being treated as tradeable items of property rather than autonomous human beings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Commercial surrogacy commodifies babies by turning them into goods which can be purchased and sold.\n","id":"612ab233-aa2b-4294-9379-aed2f4705739"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does God Allow Evil: Is the Existence of God Compatible with the Existence of Evil?<|ARGUMENT|>Omniscience, from the Jewish Torah: \".the Lord searcheth all hearts, and understandeth all the imaginations of the thoughts\" 1 Chr. 28:9; \"The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good\" Prov. 15:3<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are verses from all three holy books listed here which explicitly assert the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence of God.\n","id":"3a79c007-65f6-4e56-88ba-4c6efce6e44f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I've never been able to get an actual conversation going about this topic, and any time I express my disbelief I've been shut down without being offered any logical argument as to why I'm wrong. I'm not being an asshole or going around forcing my belief down the throats of people who are non cis, I just want to understand what the reasoning is behind the idea of multiple genders. Here's my argument EDITED HEAVILY as per changes in my view, which make a lot more sense than my previous disjointed rambling. Thanks so much for those of you who have contributed thus far From my understanding there are two genders, male and female, which DO differ from the biologically based concept of male and female sexes in that sexes apply to humans and other biological organisms, and gender applies to everything else ie actions, behaviors, objects, activities, interests, songs, food . A person can't be simply masculine or feminine, because a person isn't nearly as one dimensional as the color pink which is in some cultures considered feminine and a single person will exhibit countless behaviors that are masculine or feminine. To say that a person is male gender wise would require some kind of criterion that defines them as masculine are gt 50 of their attributes masculine? Do their masculine attributes somehow weigh more heavily than their feminine attributes? Do we simply identify someone as a gender by ignoring their opposite gender attributes? Where are the lines? . This argument corroborates with several facts of language as we know it Many languages have morphemes which identify a word or label as masculine or feminine. Most of these words are words for objects, or are names, or colors, or verbs. For example, Alexander is a masculine name, but Alexandria is feminine. In Spanish, nouns themselves have a gender denoted by el and la . Looking at the etymology of the word gender hooray for Wikipedia we can gather that the word gender is used in a categorical sense to group objects in language. gt The modern English word gender comes from the Middle English gender also gendere, gendir gendyr, gendre , a loanword from Anglo Norman and Middle French gendre. This, in turn, came from Latin genus. Both words mean kind , type , or sort . It appears in Modern French in the word genre type, kind, also genre sexuel and is related to the Greek root gen to produce , appearing in gene, genesis, and oxygen. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary OED1, Volume 4, 1900 notes the original meaning of gender as kind had already become obsolete. Furthermore, we can quote Henry Watson Fowler, notable for A Dictionary of Modern English Usage and his work on the Concise Oxford Dictionary gt Gender is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons of the masculine or feminine g ender , meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity permissible or not according to context or a blunder. It really can't be argued that most cultures have a way of distinguishing between masculine and feminine things whether you say it's for better or for worse, this fact can't be changed and the fact that some things are considered masculine i.e. toy trucks, neckties and other things are considered feminine i.e. nail polish, dresses . Some things are also considered androgynous i.e. nachos??? but that is only because they fall so closely to the center of the spectrum grey area that they aren't categorized. The fact that men and women experience different patterns of social and emotional growth based on the gender they identify as can be instead attributed to environment, not the identity itself. You can't stop identifying as male or female, any more than you can stop identifying as Asian, poor, or as the prime minister, because a gender is not based on human mental states beliefs, intents, desires but rather social custom and general belief. Thus, it's not logically possible to make up genders based on the conclusion that you don't feel male or female and instead feel like something else. Everyone has experienced growing up with the influence of both masculine and feminine experiences actions and everyone is a mix of those characteristics. Furthermore, the genders don't exist on a spectrum because male and female characteristics are not opposites. There is a third option androgyny neutrality. An object is always identified as one of these things, and the reason we don't notice things getting labeled as neutral is literally just because there's no reason to mention an androgynous object when trying to describe a person in terms of gendered attributes. The reason there isn't a graduation between the two where you can identify as 43 male and 57 female or half and half, is because your gender is not based on a concrete list of characteristics that must be fulfilled in order to qualify you as male or female. Or if there is, why is this list never mentioned as a major part of any definition for gender? You're either completely male or completely female based on your sex , and if as a female you feel like you identify as a tomboy because you act or dress like a guy, that's fine. But it doesn't change the face that you are still completely female. My reasoning for this being that your gender isn't defined by characteristics, rather, characteristics are defined by gender so until that is disproved your gender is defined by sex and nothing else. TLDR You can't feel gender , and you are not gender. People either can't be genders, objects fall into two gender categories male, female . If you still insist on being a gender, you must be cisgender. UPDATE I'm heading to bed for now, but I will be on in a few hours to answer any unanswered comments that I haven't gotten to yet. UPDATE<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are only two genders and they are NOT on a spectrum. Everyone is cisgender, except for a few legitimately diagnosed with psychological disorders.\n","id":"82d09593-222d-438f-b0a9-b3f8288832f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>ban arranged marriages in EU countries<|ARGUMENT|>Arranged marriages are often different when practiced in the home countries of many immigrant families in Europe, where women often have networks of friends and relatives to rely on. The danger with allowing arranged marriages to happen in EU countries are that the women at the centre are often far more vulnerable, away from their own family, unfamiliar with the local language and fully reliant on their husband\u2019s family. This makes it easier for domestic abuses to go undetected which is simply compounding problems of underreporting.1 It is therefore likely that there is more domestic violence within arranged marriages.2 This is shown even amongst women who still consented to arranged marriages but faced abuse from their husbands \u2013 such as with the case of Razia Sodagar, whose husband abandoned her for another woman after she failed to fall pregnant.3 This illustrates how it is not always easy to draw a clear division between arranged marriages and forced marriages, as the former can often bear the same characteristics as the latter. It would therefore be safer to outlaw both. 1 \u2018Ethnic domestic violence \u2018hidden\u2019\u2019, BBC News, 20 September 2007, 2 Gotrik, Jennifer, \u2018India domestic abuse more common in \u2018arranged\u2019 marriages\u2019, Womennewsnetwork, 12 September 2011, 3 \u2018Fighting Arranged Marriage Abuse,\u2019 BBC, 12 July 1999 -<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women in arranged marriages in Europe are disproportionately likely to suffer abuse\n","id":"e3266786-ccb5-4b51-a0ee-43d438188939"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>Religious based discrimination often just reflected the attitudes of the time, thus other forces, not religion, drove those views.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The tribal nature of humans has been the biggest source of conflict.\n","id":"bbf2d3b8-1cb7-47b3-8ea5-e79bc134ffef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The United Kingdom should directly elect the Prime Minister<|ARGUMENT|>FPTP voting tends to generate two large parties as smaller parties tend to find it hard to win seats. This would need to be dismantled in order to allow more parties to be elected.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's no guarantee that this would solve the issue of a two party duopoly. However, breaking the duopoly would be far more likely to happen via other methods.\n","id":"9915b130-6dff-46b9-b39d-6f75308912db"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Disregard the mathematical definition of, and unique to, ' differential I discern no semantic difference between these 2 adjectives. Nothing semantic would be affected if every use of 'differential' beneath were swapped with 'different'. From Introduction to Politics First Canadian Edition 2012 1 ed., but \u2203 2016 2 ed. . p. 87 Top. gt From the right, Rawls's major critic has been the American philosopher Robert Nozick 1938\u20142002 . Nozick was writing from a libertarian perspective, which calls for a state focused on protection of property rights. He put forward a procedural theory of justice in which the main concern is not the outcome e.g., meeting needs but the way in which property in the broad sense, meaning anything possessed by an individual is acquired. It is therefore a historical theory in which past circumstances or actions of people can create differential entitlements or differential deserts to things Nozick, 1974, Anarchy, State, and Utopia , p. 155 Provided that the property was acquired fairly, then the owner has a just entitlement to it. Nozick considered any attempt to redistribute property, even through taxation, to be unjust. From Jeffrey Brand, Philosophy of Law Introducing Jurisprudence 1 ed. 2014 p. 176 Top. gt One argument for differential punishment is as follows gt gt 1 If an action, x, causes more harm than another action, y, then x gt is morally worse than y, all things being equal. gt gt 2 If A's action is morally worse than B's action and A is culpable, gt then A is more culpable than B, all things being equal. gt gt 3 The state has a pro tanto moral reason to maintain a criminal code gt that imposes heavier sentences on more culpable convicts. gt gt 4 Therefore, the state has a pro tanto moral reason to maintain a gt criminal code that imposes heavier sentences on culpable convicts who gt cause more harm. gt gt Premise 1 is quite plausible. If I try to cut off your finger and cut off your whole arm by mistake, then my action is morally worse than gt if I had cut off only your finger. If I unintentionally, but gt recklessly, cut off your whole arm, then my action is morally worse gt than if I had unintentionally cut off only your finger. Cutting off gt an arm is objectively more wrong than cutting off a finger. gt Thus, there is a central sense in which causing harm is more wrong gt than unsuccessfully attempting to cause it. Taken together, premises gt I and 2 entail gt differential culpability. One argument against differential culpability is the control argument<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As adjectives not nouns, differential = different.\n","id":"ddd413a4-3b0f-4081-a0c8-ce6cfb696a99"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>It also avoids artificially creating a protected marketplace in developed countries. The legality of surrogacy in developed countries will inflate prices in comparison with practices in the developing world. This reduces choice for potential parents who are unable to afford the fees of commercial surrogacy in a liberal democracy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Commercial surrogacy should be legalised everywhere. Legalisation in developing countries will improve conditions for women in those countries. It does not make sense to only legalise commercial surrogacy in liberal democracies.\n","id":"1f51b17f-391b-4207-938a-eac904177be8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Kids Under 13 Have Access to Electronics?<|ARGUMENT|>Prohibiting access to the internet is to prohibit access to a significant part of the world's sociological realm. Like it or not, the internet is not an insignificant part of present human culture and a child's current world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Knowing how to use digital technology is crucial for their future life. Becoming digital natives is therefore important.\n","id":"f8d0fa39-8637-48d6-b344-5a1b38adaf22"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>The statement, \"No 'one' has permission to remove any part of 'our' history\" highlights the fundamental ambiguity of the original proposal. \"We the People\" have the right to erect or remove our own monuments, but the debate proposal blurs a crucial distinction between the US and the cities and\/or states that choose to remember their Confederate heritage. \"We the People\" have the right to remove a part of \"our\" history, if and only if we do so as a public and corporate act.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The way history is remembered is part of a society's public record. A democratic majority is the only legitimate way of changing it.\n","id":"8cb88be0-f408-4dbd-a238-ec09061468eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should China cease attempts to infringe on the 'one country, two systems' policy in Hong Kong?<|ARGUMENT|>92% of Hong Kong's population is Han Chinese. A significant percentage of them originate from Canton<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Most people from Hong Kong and mainland China are ethnically similar.\n","id":"6095e766-9a34-4c85-8ec0-a626f28a0325"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no limit to freedom of speech.<|ARGUMENT|>20 years of solidification does not equate to invariability or morality. African Americans were considered less than a full person by the US Federal Government for approximately 90 years.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Nearly 20 years without change means the definition is solidified.\n","id":"55881df5-9819-454f-aef7-26bee32088e5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Given this, it is important that children\u2019s innate curiosity and desire to experiment is coupled with information and education that enables them to do so safely e.g. consent education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Whether or not children receive CSE, they are aware and curious about sex.\n","id":"6c919485-88c2-49c0-92a1-2350df428d40"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Youth Votes Count More Than Votes Cast by Elderly Citizens?<|ARGUMENT|>The state will function better if those who will live longer have more say in how the state operates.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Youth votes should count more than votes cast by elderly citizens.\n","id":"77997964-5560-4e8d-aaf6-5e2a193a26b2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Sweden has ~46% more guns than Australia, which has a murder rate ~7% higher. New Zealand:~4% more guns than Australia, which has a murder ~17% higher. Germany: ~40% more guns than Australia, which has a murder rate ~23% higher. Switzerland: ~13% more guns than Australia, which has a murder rate ~56% higher. The trend continues for Austria, Norway, and Iceland. Sources: Countries by Gun Death AND Murder\/million<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If guns in society increased safety, then US gun death rates would be lower than places where there are gun restrictions. Instead they are comparatively very high. Therefore, guns in society do not increase safety.\n","id":"fa669c42-c2d2-4bfe-bebe-5a387e7fe0ec"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Libido is the natural impulse to procreate, it can lead to irrational thinking and decision making regarding to who, why and when to procreate. Below are my reasons why I think libido control worldwide would be beneficial. x200B It gets rid of the argument of pro and anti abortion political views, only wanted children will be born because it wasn't an act of impulse, but choice and rationality Population control, a large amount of births stem from an impulse and not rationality, this would decrease the amount of population the world has, making it easier to manage from an economic perspective, as well as the plethora of reasons why overpopulation is detrimental. Criminal violence is significantly reduced in regards to sexual assault, which makes up a large amount of the overall crimes commited Manipulation tactics to sleep with the attracted sex will no longer exist, because people will focus their energy on the act of self improvement instead of making sleeping with said person the endgame. More rational choices of partnership, lower libido will see what is underneath the vessel despite that vessel being pleasing to your eyes. People would pick partners with values they hold From my point above, divorce rate would decrease, large amounts of divorces are due to lack of needs from the other partner to be met. No libido would nullify cheating as well. Libido is energy, we humans would be more productive is we spent less mental energy on having sex and more on self improvement x200B Before you come with pitchforks at me for whatever reason, I am only looking to discuss. Please share your views below and try keeping it civilized x200B Edit Thanks everyone for commenting, upon reading some of the answers I came to the realization that it wasn't such a black and white matter, and while I still stand with some of the things I said, I can also see your viewpoints as variables now.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Libido is a natural human curse\n","id":"84ab7fa9-450a-4e7a-b24a-1c75b1073558"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DACA and DREAMers: Should DREAMers be Granted Citizenship?<|ARGUMENT|>DACA was 100% illegal\/unconstitutional when Barack Obama created it. A president does not have Constitutional authority to create laws. He is the head of the Executive branch of government where he is to \"execute\" laws that the Congress create lawfully.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"To grant DREAMers citizenship would be to reward, rather than punish, an illegal act, which is principally unjust.\n","id":"9a29b2a8-52fc-443c-bdfe-b7e1296709ce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My main argument is that almost every American has used google at one point or another. Google has been selling your internet browsing history for the entirety of its existence. In fact, their entire business was built on selling your information. Facebook is another company that sells people's information and browsing data. Yet, there is 100's of millions of Americans using it and not making a fuss about their privacy. Because Google and Facebook are free to use, people look past the ways in which they earn their money through selling user information. The ISP's are selling bulk information, not individuals information. I am sure it would be possible if a buyer was willing to pay enough money to make it worth their while, but it is not going to be common if at all. So, my theory is that no one would complain if ISP's were providing internet for free and selling your data to fund it. Change my view gt This is a footnote from the  moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please read through our rules If you see a and Facebook sell individual's information. I can target individual people based on their agecomment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which, downvotes don't change views Any questions or concerns? Feel free to message us Happy ing<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The majority of Americans don't actually care about their privacy.\n","id":"35537e27-de39-4945-83c7-0cc528e7495c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I notice that everytime i wake up gnawing at myself for being a lazy unproductive slob, i sit there and play games. for hours and hours on end, just waiting for the melatonin to kick in. And when i get motivational kicks they get chopped down by the instant gratification system that you find in all games. I think video games is a horrible way to use your time, since it overstimulates your brain, makes you waste energy on something that will never mean anything. I really hate video games, and i am going to quit them Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think video games turns people decadent\n","id":"f9073392-2e68-4c21-84b3-e2348c881971"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019m beginning to think that it might be a location based correlation red vs. blue state poor vs wealthy state etc , but I\u2019m seriously surprised how quickly reddit jumped to disliking any mention of guy problems in the dating world. Men do start almost every relationship, pay for our women\u2019s things, carry most of the initial conversation, set up the date and the outcome really does have to do with your looks and status in life. If you have problems getting laid you\u2019re a loser, if you have a good face, you can get laid and find love really easy. If you have an ugly face, you have to work harder for less. Now, I\u2019m not saying that any misogyny these people express any \u201cwomen r bad\u201d posts are justified in any way what I\u2019m saying is that the people on these subs are probably pretty ugly, they probably do have it harder than someone like us, and because they\u2019re ugly and bitter people would rather mock them then say \u201cyea you have it harder, you\u2019re ugly so adapt\u201d. I don\u2019t think reddit as a whole is good at dealing with in out groups but I think they\u2019re particularly terrible to groups that have physically unattractive people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"groups like r\/incels are right about beauty inequality and are punished for being the out-group\n","id":"a11db181-fee8-432d-9c06-7928a6fdd047"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Competition in the long run is healthy rather than harmful for the community: GRE issue<|ARGUMENT|>Healthy competition is a symbol of a flourishing society. It provides a fair and equal opportunity to all the players in the market.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Competition in the long run is healthy rather than harmful for the community: GRE issue\n","id":"b213f278-1e1a-4eb4-b5b1-9a9b7c9bcd12"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The information may not be used maliciously, but perhaps with a lack of respect internal memos from governmental staff evidenced use of bulk datasets for minutiae like finding addresses for birthday cards, or 'checking details of family members for personal convenience'. If this data is used so flippantly, it knocks public confidence that all surveillance is treated with due care and attention.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without extensive oversight it is impossible to say for certain whether groups are being targeted disproportionately, when surveillance is scaled up.\n","id":"fc337f6e-a12f-4d0a-9f16-0d4dbd9e71c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Obviously this was inspired by the \u201cfat shaming is terrible\u201d thread. I agree that out of the blue fat shaming is a bad thing. In absolutely NO WAY do I condone attacking people just because of their weight. That said, I think this new PC bullshit where obese people have managed to gain such a voice where they attack the \u201cunhealthy\u201d normal weight people to be DISGUSTING. I think groups of fat middle aged women judging healthy weight girls to be DISGUSTING. I find the practice of obese men popping beers and eating excessively while watching sports then talking about how \u201cunhealthy\u201d going to the gym is extraordinarily ironic and DISGUSTING. We are facing an obesity epidemic in the US. There is no question the obese die earlier and consume more healthcare. To allow \u201cfat pride\u201d people to speak without countering their very wrong views is a disservice to every young person, and society as a whole. I don\u2019t believe that fat people should universally be judged they should pay their own healthcare burden but \u201cfat pride\u201d people deserved to be mocked by virtually EVERYONE. More than that, \u201cfat pride\u201d diminishes the ACTUAL success of those who are not fat. Dismissing success is a terrible thing, and having groups telling children or adults the reason they are not obese has less to do with their physical playing or gym time or proper diet choices than some vague \u201cgut issue\u201d is offensive as can be. I don\u2019t think fat people should be shamed most of the time. If an obese person is sitting down to a dinner of 5 hamburgers I believe judgment is appropriate, but shaming isn\u2019t necessary. When that obese person brings the issue further, and demands a single sided diatribe of how \u201cfat is healthy\u201d I believe they deserve to be MERCILESSLY countered and attacked. Can you change this view? Can you explain to me why \u201cfat pride\u201d is a good thing?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe \u201cfat pride\u201d is absolutely disgusting, offensive to everyone at a healthy weight, and deserves to be shamed at will.\n","id":"401643a3-fade-4a19-b874-110cece6a5b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Right now very little is really understood about the causes and origins of homosexuality. However, I think it is reasonable to assume that eventually science will come to a reasonably complete understanding of what causes it. When that happens, it may very well mean that it is possible to test a child for homosexuality or a predisposition thereto and that there may well eventually be a treatment to eliminate or severely reduce that disposition. Should that be the case, I think that the percentage of gay people will drop significantly as in become less than 1 of the overall population . My reasoning for this Most children are and will continue to be born to straight couples Most straight couples would not willingly choose to have a homosexual child Some homosexual couples would also choose to eliminate the predisposition to allow their child to be normal given the choice I realize that the reasoning for this is largely cultural and subjective, but I think this is an opinion worth challenging. Edit To clarify, I do not in any sense believe that homosexuality is unnatural, or a disease to be cured. What I am saying is that we may one day understand it well enough to manipulate it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that if a test and treatment existed for homosexuality in children that gays would effectively cease to exist in the developed world in a generation.\n","id":"96c28572-27e0-4437-b67c-c397d2a6b27e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Criminalization of Holocaust denial<|ARGUMENT|>This does not mean it should be banned. Rather, it means that the State has a responsibility to ensure that the public are exposed to the arguments that show that Holocaust deniers are wrong. This is best done through compulsory History teaching about the Holocaust in schools.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Ideas should not be banned just because they are dangerous.\n","id":"4bc8e6cf-1ebe-498d-b0f9-c404d8e8e43c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that they employ droids, such as protocol droids and astromech droids on smaller craft, and even to an extent on larger craft might be taken as evidence that Star Wars starship computers are not otherwise suitably advanced.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The fact we have not seen them in action might also imply that they do not exist or are not that advanced.\n","id":"b023a074-b409-42ec-aac2-dd59e4629aac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Comprehensive Sex Education be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>It is unfair to force teachers to deliver content which may make them feel uncomfortable, or even actively contradict their beliefs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Comprehensive Sexual Education should not be mandatory in Liberal Democracies.\n","id":"454ab080-ba17-4455-90a3-f11fad77922d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Cooperation can equally ignite backlash from Republicans, as it did when Trump made a deal with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling for three months.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When Trump passes left-leaning legislation, this makes him look weak and unprincipled.\n","id":"9777874f-225f-48d1-ae80-c2e855bddf44"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There has been a lot of talk in my country about the legitimacy of government lead by a group of small parties probably each around 10 30 of the seats with many saying that the largest of these parties wouldn't have a mandate to govern if they only got around 25 of the vote. The election will likely be decided by a populist centrist ish party, who have the choice between supporting the two major left wing parties or a single right wing party. While the two left wing parties combined are polling almost the same as the right wing party, there is this perception that they would constitute a coalition of losers rather than a legitimate government. I think there is nothing wrong with the idea of this coalition. There would be no more conflicting ideologies within a left wing coalition than in the equivalent right wing coalition and combined they would represent a majority of the country's voters. Why shouldn't the country be lead by a coalition of losers if that coalition represents a majority of the country and doesn't have wholly incompatible views?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing wrong with a coalition of smaller parties forming a government.\n","id":"f02e011e-a444-49b1-b968-e4377a19cff9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was It Racist and\/or Homophobic for the Billboard to Remove Lil Nas X's 'Old Town Road'?<|ARGUMENT|>Lil Nas X believes that Old Town Road bears a resemblance to other songs on that chart. \"I started to think about it, I was like, you know, why? After like listening to other songs that's actually on that chart, it's like, wait a minute, something's not right, basically,\" Lil Nas X said.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Old Town Road bears a resemblance to other songs on the Country Hot 500.\n","id":"867cbd5e-03eb-444e-b0b1-f75885955282"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should video game storytelling portray gender equality?<|ARGUMENT|>An increase in the number of female gamers will incentivise gaming companies to be more sensitive to their preferences as they would now constitute an even more significant consumer demographic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Greater relatability to female gamers is likely to increase the number of female gamers.\n","id":"5c688be5-dfbd-470b-95b5-fe9e9faa561b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should We Be Able To Say What We Like Bar Inciting Violence?<|ARGUMENT|>Open discussion allows everybody to have some forum where their opinions can be heard equally and fairly.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Open discussion is generally a good way to avoid violence.\n","id":"3f59a83c-d745-4cef-8e01-62c4466c8d4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Looking at the new wiki I saw in the philosophy section that Nobody thinks people are inherently selfless thus far . And, well, that is pretty close to what I think, so I was curious about others thoughts and if they would change my view on this topic. To be clear, by selfless I don't mean a perfectly good Christ like figure who sacrifices themselves to always put all others before them. By saying someone is inherently selfless I mean that person has someone or something they value more highly than themselves, and which they would often put above their own well being to support. Many people would say their life purpose is to make the world a better place than they left it oftentimes in history this has resulted in people risking their lives for some ideal. Many parents would go hungry to feed their children. Countless people have or would risk themselves to save another, even a stranger. Most of us have done something as simple as giving money to a charity, even at no benefit to themselves. I don't think all people are selfless there are of course people without empathy who care only for themselves. But I think most people, even if they can be selfish as well, do have something in them which makes them inherently selfless when it comes to what they think is important. To be inherently selfless you don't have to put everything above yourself, but you do have to put something above yourself. So what reasons do you have for me to think differently? Links to research on the topic encouraged. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe most people are inherently selfless,\n","id":"27230260-deac-4db6-882f-f9c1e7623b30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should homeschooling be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>Homeschooling gives abusive parents too much power over their children as they can control every aspect of their lives.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Homeschooling often involves isolated learning environments that may lack accountability and regulations.\n","id":"e7606dc7-7a1e-4fb3-8413-fbd86d32938d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>These individuals had a history of erratic behavior. In fact, the shooter in Ottawa was rejected stay in a Mosque due to this condition. The body of the Australian shooter was rejected by Islamic morgues and many Imams rejected that he was acting against the tenants of Islam which specifically state the condemnation of violence \u201cIf anyone slays a person, it would be as if he slew the whole people and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.\u201d Some may argue that they were religiously inspired. but the fact of the matter is, they were not. There actions were completely contradictory to Islam. They did what they did because they were brainwashed by a group ISIS , who themselves are not Muslims, into wanting to be part of something. They wanted attention, a sense of purpose. Unfortunately, they did so by harming people. I go on Reddit and see posts of commentators being down voted to oblivion for stating these attacks were a result of mental sicknesses. Why can't we admit that they were cases of mental illnesses? Is it because we don't want to offend the people who suffer from depression,anxiety, and ADD? Change my view Reddit<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The acts of violence that occurred in Ottawa, Canada and Sydney, Australia had nothing to do with Islam but mental illness.\n","id":"487c38d9-d620-4cd5-a722-de5df81ffe7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Here's the list of words that, supposedly, no one should EVER say because they are so incredibly demeaning, discriminatory, and oppressive Blind to something Crazy Cretin Crippled by something Daft Deaf Derp Diffability Dumb Handicapped Idiot Imbecile Incapacitate Insane Insanity Invalid Lame Loony Lunatic Maniac Moron Mute Nuts Psycho Retard Spaz Special Stupid Suffers from something and many, many, many more words For my sanity I am not going to bleep them out every single time in the entire post, so if you are offended by reading text discussing this subject, close this thread please. We could probably fill a small dictionary on the words that are not supposed to be said, but let's focus on ABLEIST words and not other slurs for now. I'd first like to mention the use of these words and how much they have already seeped into popular culture and products. These words are used all the time in advertising, news, film, television, what have you they are everywhere and almost never used for their original meaning. At least half of the words in the list I've seen in video games. The Insane is an achievement in World of Warcraft. Handicap is a level of strength weakness in many games. Crazy , Psycho , Crippled , and others are often debuffs weakeners applied to characters in games. Stupid is even in this subreddit's rules page. When people even learn of the original definitions, they are baffled and surprised. None of the original meanings are taught in school English classes. One that surprised me was Invalid . Are you kidding me? Nobody has used that word in the old context in years. Am I supposed to apologize for have ever said that? Stupid obviously is still used to attack other people, but can we not have thick enough skin to use a word like this? Language evolves. So must anti supposed ableists crying minds. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Ableism\" - I think that trying to ban words that now have a new colloquial meaning is stup*d.\n","id":"c04e2ead-4c8f-4d48-bcf2-e2c2a7dfb1da"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all museum admissions be by donation?<|ARGUMENT|>Taxes are organized progressively\/ according to one's earnings. The wealthiest in society are asked to contribute more while tax credits and exemptions protect those who cannot afford to pay. Museum admissions are often a flat rate that does not take the visitor's financial situation into account.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Given that taxpayers are subsidizing the museum through their taxes given tax revenue gets paid out to museums as public funding, it would be fairer for people to only pay via taxes.\n","id":"efed73bf-99ca-4e5a-97a1-fc7af37cbe01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Roy Moore has been accused of sexually engaging a 14 year old girl and of violently sexually assaulting a different 16 year old girl. These accusations seem extremely credible to me and I believe them to be accurate. Their accounts are corroborated by evidence which puts them in the same place as Moore at the same time in the case of the 14 year old girl and in the case of the 16 year old girl, by credible documentary evidence which demonstrates personal interaction and extremely disturbing messages in a high school yearbook. Moore has denied these allegations. His denials have been perfunctory and meandering and have not meaningfully grappled with the specific factual allegations. I believe his denials are lies. So all of that said, I think if the voters of Alabama elect Roy Moore, he must be seated in the Senate, and should not be expelled. The 17th amendment is extremely clear that the Senate is chosen by the people. In both regular and special elections, it is the people who fill the seats of the Senate. To refuse to seat a Senator who has been popularly elected in a fair election I believe is unconstitutional, as it would require falsely stating that the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members were not compliant with the law. To expel a Senator or member of the House for conduct which was known to the voters prior to the election is undemocratic. The 17th amendment is clear that the people choose, and if they make an informed choice to elect a child molester, then they are constitutionally entitled to be represented by a child molester. If Moore were prosecuted and convicted of some crime related to his child molestation which appears impossible due to the statute of limitations , then it might be worthwhile to expel him for being unable to carry out his duties as a Senator due to being imprisoned lawfully. But absent that circumstance of imprisonment making him literally incapable of carrying out his office, I think if elected, he must be allowed into the Senate. If the information came to light after the election that would be different, as his expulsion would not then represent an overriding of the will of the people that the crimes alleged were not important enough to exclude him from the Senate. But if he is elected, I do not believe he can be expelled based solely upon the knowledge that was available to Alabama voters at the time that they elected him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If elected, Roy Moore should be seated in the Senate and should not be expelled, even though I believe he engaged in child molestation.\n","id":"2c3aaeaa-749c-4892-ba8e-994af06a52c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Jonathan A. Hadley, editor of the Palmyra Freeman 1828-29 in Joseph Smith's home town, the Smith family spent most of their discretionary time \"digging in the hills of Manchester for money, under the often-repeated impression that Capt. Kidd or some other person of wealth, had there deposited their treasures.\" Hadley, Lowell Courier, July 28, 1842<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Joseph Smith was familiar with Captain Kidd stories prior to dictating the Book of Mormon.\n","id":"714079b4-6909-41b0-86e6-abaa25eb6e5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should all religions be banned on a global scale?<|ARGUMENT|>Trial judge said \"his was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind. He \"personally\" never had anything whatever against Jews; on the contrary, he had plenty of \"private reasons\" for not being a Jew hater.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hannah Arendt describes Eichmann as a Zionist who spoke yiddish Arendt, p. 23\n","id":"31395fbc-a960-4231-a711-fb474f50ca90"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Part of the evolution of humans is to develop increased empathy for other species. We cannot advance as a species until we accept that we are no different than any other animal, and accept our place in the animal kingdom. When we embrace each other as earthlings or universal beings, as opposed to humans\/vs animals, only then can we escape the trap of the speciesist mindset.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans, as the dominant species on Earth, have transcended the natural order in countless ways. We are no longer required to kill to survive and so have no excuse for not taking on higher moral obligations.\n","id":"9ec1bb85-dcf6-49d8-9867-d9d742575a4a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Evolution is the story of life adapting to changing environments. 99 of every species to ever live is now extinct. How can we say that the state of an environment at one time is objectively better than the state of it in other circumstances. Or that one species that currently exists is objectively better than a different species that would adapt to different circumstances? It seems most common to say that an area should be preserved as it is before human interaction, but why? It would be just as arbitrary to say that the environment should be preserved as it was when dinosaurs dominated the Earth, but if we had such power to stop change then most mammals would never exist. Is it better for Dinosaurs to never go extinct or for most mammals to never exist? I don't see how any one solution is ethically or morally any better than the other. Similarly, human changes to an environment may cause a species to become extinct, but inevitably others will adapt to take advantage of the changed circumstances. Why is it better that the species that exists now continue to exist rather than one that may adapt in the future. Another example that I think illustrates my point even better. People in the midwest say that Asian Carp threaten to ruin the great lakes. Why is Asian Carp worse than the other animals it may drive to extinction? That's the way evolution works. As far as I can tell, the only reason or justification for trying to preserve nature is one of aesthetics. We simply like the beauty of nature as it is today. We find an animal cute or majestic so we want to preserve it. That's fine, but it's really no different than wanting to preserve a piece of art.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe that protecting endangered animals or preserving nature is a moral or ethical issue.\n","id":"807a8012-cf71-4229-978c-0fc1ae7034f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did the US have to use nuclear weapons to achieve Japan's unconditional surrender?<|ARGUMENT|>At the bombing of Berlin in 1943 only 26 of 764 bombers were lost. This percentage decreased further as the Luftwaffe lost in power towards 1945.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Germany's aerial defense system was not able to prevent aerial bombings which suggests that it was no more difficult to deliver an atomic bomb.\n","id":"851c859a-5458-45d5-9356-cac7d66f6acc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>The vegan society is very critical toward the use of palm oil vegansociety.com so calling it a vegan staple is dishonest as many vegans try to avoid palm oil.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Imported food tends to be less ethical than local food.\n","id":"858ef013-d206-4995-9c5e-83d261f434b9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Overpopulation is the cause of the greatest strain on the planet's resources, and people in industrialised nations that consume more resources than others place the greatest burden on our environment. China's one child policy will limit the size of the population of the newly industrialised China. It is unfair that China is often criticised for high levels of pollution when they are making a great sacrifice that is more effective than anything suggested by the Kyoto protocol, and other states should do the same.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think China's One Child policy is the most effective long-term policy to help the world's environment, and outweighs the harm China's rapid industrialisation has caused.\n","id":"0bc57936-019e-4d43-8f7d-7119a544c702"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who Should be the Next EU Commission President?<|ARGUMENT|>Nico Cue\u0301 was General Secretary of the steelworkers union MWB-FGTB and therewith likely to improve their working conditions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A member of the European Left as EU Commission president would lead to more labor friendly policies.\n","id":"223f10bc-573a-4a53-8de8-90bdc2cada57"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Rebel Alliance would defeat the United Federation of Planets in space combat.<|ARGUMENT|>Data used a high-energy burst level 6\" yield setting on the photon torpedo warheads to expose tachyon signatures with inertial displacement as a convoy of cloaked Romulan warbirds. This setting presumably did not damage the warbirds. In \"The Next Generation: \"Redemption\" Federation photon torpedoes had a display blast setting. A spread of torpedoes at this setting were detonated a kilometer from the surface of Ligon II as a warning burst to demonstrate the power of a galaxy-class starship.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Photon torpedoes are the standard projectile armament of a Starfleet vessel. The current main one is a MKII Torpedo, which contains a 1.5kg matter\/anti-matter charge, is 2 meters long and weighs 248kg. Scientifically it would be a 64.4MgT blast, but Star Trek states 690 gigatons. When fired with a warp booster, it can be fired at and travel at warp speeds. Thus its kinetic impact would be astounding.\n","id":"3fbe0e03-b2c4-4cf8-b0a5-0d1c1ceaa077"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Can Religious Faith and Science Co-exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Religion makes claims about morality, while scientific method alone has no say in moral questions.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some religious claims are necessarily out of reach of scientific investigation.\n","id":"03fbac0b-c093-4b00-b51e-f9b786514935"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do Parents Have an Obligation to Genetically Enhance Their Babies?<|ARGUMENT|>UNESCO's Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights recommends a ban on cloning on grounds that it infringes on human dignity UNESCO, Art. 11<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Genetically altering children would open the door for the possibility of cloning.\n","id":"97ea1b78-b20a-47c0-ad88-845933fe20ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should homeschooling be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>\"84% of schools don\u2019t have resources to deal with children\u2019s mental health issues.\" Parents who home school their children have access to resources to support their children's mental health which may not be available from schools.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"State and government-funded schools' resources vary greatly. Some schools have great resources and ample budgets while others lack the basics.\n","id":"22bd3508-638e-4d2b-916d-7508338a04a1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gender a Social Construct?<|ARGUMENT|>The one-child policy in China has effectively meant that a woman's womb is under state control.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Gender is used by nation states for greater administrative control.\n","id":"b467d7db-427d-4c53-9c42-45dad613ad1f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>At a professional level, sprinters have to pump the shit out of their muscles for about 10 seconds. While I won't deny that the effort is almost inhumane, medium long distance runners 800m, 1500m have to do it for about 2 and 4 minutes. This might sound silly to those who have never done it, but its a huge difference. A guy in a 800m will have a bpm of 180 and be at his optimal speed the entire time. Long distances races have mind games while sprinting is just rushing to the end line. Say a 1500m, when they start, its more relax. As soon as one decide to speed up, the whole group has to follow or they will lose the adrenaline generated by said group. Idealy you want to be the first to speed things up and be the one who set the pace, as the rest will follow. Set it too soon and you will fall behind, set it too late and someone else will do it for you. The kick in is always different as the group has to follow at all cost. I belive 800m and 1500m are the hardest one as they take more time, effort and mental presence than sprints. They are harder than anything longer as they are too short to get the endorphines a.k.a. the runners high. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Professional medium-long distance races are much more impressive than sprints.\n","id":"a7450b51-b24d-4cce-a106-d7f650c5734d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface this by saying that I am not an economist, but I accept the consensus among those who are, arguing that free trade increases efficiency and total wealth, and that the purpose of trade policy is to produce wealth. I also accept John Rawls' arguments in A Theory of Justice, that a just society is one that offers equal basic liberty, actual equality of opportunity, and where the arrangement of society is to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged member of society. It might seem that the Rawls' radical egalitarianism is in direct conflict with free trade, but I reject the argument that free trade leads inexorably to inequality. It is the purpose of government, through redistribution, to equitably divide resources in such a way that is of greatest advantage to the least advantaged member of society. It follows then that any policy which increases the total efficiency of the economy is not merely preferable, but in fact a necessity to create a just society, because the more resources available in toto, the more resources will be available to the least advantaged member of society if they are divided equally. Insofar as globalized market capitalism is capable of creating enough wealth for society as a whole that the least advantaged member of society is better served by it than by an alternative arrangement, globalized market capitalism is a just form of economic organization. This, I believe, is what Smith meant in the Wealth of Nations when he wrote gt Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day labourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people of whose industry a part, though but a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation. The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country how much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship builders, sailors, sail makers, rope makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world What a variety of labour too is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen To say nothing of such complicated machines as the ship of the sailor, the mill of the fuller, or even the loom of the weaver, let us consider only what a variety of labour is requisite in order to form that very simple machine, the shears with which the shepherd clips the wool. The miner, the builder of the furnace for smelting the ore, the feller of the timber, the burner of the charcoal to be made use of in the smelting house, the brick maker, the brick layer, the workmen who attend the furnace, the mill wright, the forger, the smith, must all of them join their different arts in order to produce them. Were we to examine, in the same manner, all the different parts of his dress and household furniture, the coarse linen shirt which he wears next his skin, the shoes which cover his feet, the bed which he lies on, and all the different parts which compose it, the kitchen grate at which he prepares his victuals, the coals which he makes use of for that purpose, dug from the bowels of the earth, and brought to him perhaps by a long sea and a long land carriage, all the other utensils of his kitchen, all the furniture of his table, the knives and forks, the earthen or pewter plates upon which he serves up and divides his victuals, the different hands employed in preparing his bread and his beer, the glass window which lets in the heat and the light, and keeps out the wind and the rain, with all the knowledge and art requisite for preparing that beautiful and happy invention, without which these northern parts of the world could scarce have afforded a very comfortable habitation, together with the tools of all the different workmen employed in producing those different conveniencies if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labour is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible that without the assistance and co operation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to what we very falsely imagine, the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages. I.1.11 Ignoring for a moment the unfashionable Whiggishness and the obvious and indefensible colonialism, it strikes me that this sentiment is precisely that of Rawls' to the advantage of the least advantaged member of society . The inequality of the prince to the day laborer is justified because the day laborer is better served by a market economy than he would be by the absence of a market economy. But of course a globalized market economy does not mean an unlimited or unregulated market economy. Where such economic regulations produce greater gains in efficiency than the market, those regulations are justified by precisely the same logic increasing total efficiency is good for everyone because a sufficiently larger pie makes even the smallest slice larger. Put another way, just economic regulation is addressed to increasing Pareto Efficiency by overcoming various market failures monopoly monopsony, asymmetric and imperfect organization, transaction costs, etc. . Hence, the Coase Theorem in a world without transaction costs etc., legal property entitlements are irrelevant because the parties will bargain to the same result. Apologies for the long set up of something that I think is not extraordinarily controversial, and thanks to any readers still sticking with me, but I feel it is a good practice to spell out these underlying normative assumptions lest we start talking past each other. So accepting all of the above, the central questions are Does hampering the international movement of capital, human capital, natural resources, and goods in some way overcome some number of market failures and therefore approach closer to a constrained Pareto optimum? Does allowing unrestricted international movement of same in some way create market failures? Does allowing unrestricted international movement of same produce inequality of basic rights, inequality of opportunity, or material inequality not to the advantage of the least advantaged member of society and therefore results in injustice , and if so what policies are called for? I suggest that the answer to these questions is No, Not exactly, and Yes, but that the correct response to increase redistributive policy not to halt free trade, for the following reasons. The first answer is, I think, fairly self explanatory. Free trade lowers transaction costs and therefore makes it less costly to approach a constrained Pareto efficiency on a global as well as national scale. Imposing costs on trade makes it more costly to approach a constrained Pareto efficiency. It is not a market failure for places with cheaper labor to manufacture things using raw materials from places with abundant natural resources and capital from elsewhere, etc. even though the result of that might be to increase unemployment or decrease wages elsewhere rather, that is a failure of equal justice as divorced from the market see point three . This is not to say that all regulation of a global market is bad, either. There may be market failures in a global market that still need to be addressed e.g. human beings routinely engage in hyperbolic discounting of future costs, whether due to cognitive bias or incomplete information etc., leading to overconsumption of resources even absent a tragedy of the commons type problem but these market failures aren't in any way prevented by barriers to trade. The second question is close to the reverse of the first namely, whatever market failures that might be existing are not created by free trade any more than they are prevented by mercantilism. However, the astute reader will notice that I qualified my answer with not exactly , because I recognize that because globalism involves multiple nations, multilateral institutional arrangements, no clear sovereign, etc. market failures might be more costly to address in a global free trade setting for institutional reasons. Thus conceivably gains in Pareto efficiency might be more constrained in a global market than a domestic one. I don't think that this is ultimately the case based on my admittedly limited research, but even assuming it arguendo, that situation would speak to the need to create stronger and more efficient international institutions and thus lower transaction costs and remove such constraints on Pareto optimization rather than to the need to withdraw from the global market and engage in isolationism or protectionism. Finally, it strikes me that globalized free trade obviously increases inequality, both of actual opportunity and materially, and that its effects on the equality of basic freedoms is far from clear however, I would again point out that inequality is not necessarily a market failure, but a political one. I strongly support the redistribution of wealth from those to whom the gains of globalized markets predominantly flow to those who face pressure from increasing and more perfect competition. There is a real human cost that globalized markets entail for a significant minority, and the anger over that cost has been ignored by governments for too long resulting in the fundamentally misguided rise of populist support in the West . It is also, to me at least, obviously the case that the meritocracy of the global elite is entirely self perpetuating. The advantages of a child whose parents have the good fortune of wealth and power in terms of opportunity are incalculable. This is not actual equality of opportunity, and so there needs to be serious expansion of education, health, and welfare programs as well as more liberal understandings of economic affirmative action and what constitutes merit in place to address that. The notion that free trade will lead to democratization and respect for equal basic rights around the world also seems to be more of a fervent hope than an empirical fact, and rising inequality can threaten equal basic rights see, e.g., the effects of Citizens United on free speech rights . However, there doesn't seem to be any reason at all to think that refusing to engage in commerce has any real effect on promoting democratization and respect for basic rights either see, e.g., the lack of positive effects of turning the DPRK into a pariah state, the totally ineffective and now hopefully done for good US embargo on Cuba , and the forces of isolation and reaction emboldened and encouraged by the rising populist protectionist movements in the West rising hate crimes in the US after Trump's election, assassination of MP Jo Cox during the Brexit campaign, far right parties throughout Continental Europe, etc. seem to pose a significant and immediate threat to equal basic liberties that ought not to be underestimated. So maybe we can call the equal basic rights effects a wash. Therefore, it is my contention that Free Trade is not merely practical, but that there is in fact an ethical imperative to both engage wholeheartedly and efficiently in global free trade and to ensure that its benefits are distributed justly throughout society by engaging in focused redistributive practices. I truly welcome any and all arguments in opposition, and thank you if you managed to get through this long post TL DR The title, I guess?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Global free trade is a practical and ethical policy, and the recent populist backlash against it in Europe and the United States is misguided.\n","id":"aa88cda3-82d4-4164-b1a1-43aa8c9d1351"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I do not want to come off seeming that I'm speaking ill of the dead. I honestly hope I do not come across like that. That is not my intention. Marilyn Monroe is undeserving of the elegant, classy idol status she has and here is why She ruined both her marriages because she slept with other married men. There are countless reports of her being difficult and unstable in professional situations. The biggest reason is because she was a drug addict who died of a drug overdose. Now, none of these things make her a bad person I'm sure the wives of the married men she slept with would disagree with that statement but she should in no way be considered a role model to women. Any woman that exhibits this kind of behavior today would be considered to be an asshole and coerced into going into therapy and or rehab. Courtney Love, anyone? She was not classy. She was not elegant. At best, she was the Lindsay Lohan of her day. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- Marilyn Monroe does not deserve the reputation of the classy, elegant, role model that many people women bestow on her.\n","id":"01e5a4a1-74c4-4663-972d-323ed91da517"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Laptops be Allowed in University Classrooms?<|ARGUMENT|>Laptops help students with understanding material especially when they are not able to comprehend teacher.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Laptops allow for more effective and engaging forms of tuition.\n","id":"85d8153d-ca99-4155-83f2-26f128acb21f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should humans prefer cats over dogs?<|ARGUMENT|>Inhaling the dust from cat litter when cleaning it can transmit harmful bacteria called toxoplasma gondii that can harm an unborn child.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cat litter can pose a health risk to humans, particularly pregnant women.\n","id":"ca5a31a2-65d4-4f55-a345-a64022bc622b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In other words, the economy is so complex, our understanding so poor, and economists' biases and political agendas so strong that their utterings about what will happen in the future are unreliable, if not outright deceitful and therefore, useless. Example for the majority of economists failure to foresee 2008.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe economists' predictions about the future should be regarded about as reliable and realistic as fortune tellers claiming to see the future.\n","id":"1e3713d7-47e4-4a2e-8114-9471bf6f72c8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So when I was a child my mother brought me up to believe God is real, Jesus Heaven and Hell etc are all real. When I got old enough to decide for myself, Ive chosen to be an atheist, but Im very open to the other side of this and having my view changed. If God said there should be no suffering then why are we always at war, why are so many people killed everyday from wars illnesses natural disasters etc? I think it would be comforting to truly believe there is a God, someone to help and guide you. If you were sick, when people pray for you, yes that is very considerate but how will praying do anything? Medical help will cure most things, not 'God'. All of the Old and New Testament tales and stories, surely not true. How could Jesus have 'resurrected' after being in the cave for however long? When people who really need their God, who have never done anything wrong, dont get what they wanted its heartbreaking for them, its just cruel Science in my opinion over rules, God didnt create the world and man in however long, our planet and its living creatures have evolved over time, and we will continue to evolve Afterlife, again I would find it incredibly comforting to believe there is a heaven and we'll all float upto God and be happy in our afterlife, but what if when we die thats it? Period. You are gone and nothing in you lives on. God has created wars himself, all religious wars and hatred toward eachother, its just unecessary. Where is any solid evidence that a God is real? God hasn't saved my many religious family members dying from cancer? About 6 7 have lost their battle in my family. Why should I believe in God? Edit Added the cancer part<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Im an atheist\n","id":"66f1b3f9-8e4e-470b-a05d-8f7fe9a5eb55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If Scientifically Possible, Should Humans Become Immortal?<|ARGUMENT|>Earth, as habitable as we know it to be, has a finite but unknown amount of time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Reaching other habitable planets is necessary for humans to continue and pass on our biological code.\n","id":"8f1815d6-d7b8-45c3-9140-2fc54be47232"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>A metaphysical being has not yet been definitively observed, and therefore, has not yet been definitively proven to exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The burden of proof for God's existence has not been met.\n","id":"e140cdc3-8707-4fbf-98a4-7d0f6c347696"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Was Einstein Sexist?<|ARGUMENT|>Einstein wrote a supporting letter to Marie Curie telling her to ignore the colleagues who depreciated the female scientist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Einstein's treatment of female colleagues and professionals was exemplary.\n","id":"9a19653f-a0ad-41f4-9eb3-a4158edf942d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should governments make an effort to reduce the gender pay gap?<|ARGUMENT|>The US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that on average men worked 8.2 hours a day compared to women working only 7.8 hours a day.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The higher average pay that men receive is offset by other factors.\n","id":"ce899ee3-7c89-45c6-8f1c-30fc15758c65"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Please note that I am not trying to argue the likelihood of NATO actually doing this or the Russian government accepting the offer, but that if it did happen, it would mutually benefit both factions. Ok hear me out, he United States has a long history of quickly befriending nations immediately after a long conflict. The only reason this has not happened with the Russian Federation after the cold war is because there was no actual shooting between American and Russian troops. If there had been, it would have likely ended the world so I believe this is a very good thing, but it unfortunately comes with very poor relations with Russia and many proxy battles in nations like Syria, Ukraine, Libya, and Yemen. The biggest reason these proxy wars even happen is because Russia is afraid of NATO expansion into more countries, and they have every right to be afraid of their biggest rival building airfields and missile systems near their borders. I am not trying to argue the likelihood of this situation, but that I believe if it were to happen the effects would be positive. I propose that to fix these poor relations with Russia, we should invite them into NATO to create a mutually beneficial relationship between the two factions. I see this as a mutually beneficial partnership between two nations that both see the expansion of each other as their biggest threat. Russia and the US both spend massive amounts of money towards containment of each other, but if they were both part of the same military alliance they would not need to do this. Russia and the United States also both devote large sums of money and military might to combating Islamic radical terror, and together these military operations would be much more effective. The United States currently has to rely on the corrupt and in my personal opinion evil Saudi regime for it's oil when Russia is a very large oil and natural gas exporter. The United States could easily be dragged into war with Russia if they decide to take any actions against the Baltic nations, but the only reason Russia would ever attack these nations is to stop NATO expansion. If Russia were part of NATO they would not need to do this because they would be part of the alliance. Turkey has done things to try to pull Russia into a war with NATO such as shooting down a Russian fighter that was bombing ISIS. If Russia were part of NATO then this would no longer be a risk for us. Assuming that Russia joins NATO, there would no longer be a need to place sanctions on Russia that hurt Russia\u2019s economy. With an improvement in the Russian economy, we would see more imports and a larger market for our exports, which would in turn improve EU and American economies. A new market of 150 million people for the EU and US would be extremely good for our manufacturers and Russia actually has a labor shortage at the moment. The US could see many of our unemployed workers finding jobs with Russian companies who now can open offices in the United States. This would result in the American and Russian people having stronger social ties, which could even lead to Russia gaining new perspective and even possibly changing some of their practices that we find distasteful like their unwarranted jailing of gays.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"NATO should invite Russia and Russia should join\n","id":"9cc3c62c-4c1a-49af-9f03-58cf58f71276"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So i'll probably get slaughtered for some of the things i'm about to say and called a hypocrite. Before I begin I should state that I know men can be big assholes too, I am aware of this. I'm a 20 year old guy, not particularly attractive, with a dark sense of humor, not in the greatest of shapes and with a terrible dress sense. So I know that there are a lot of things I would have to fix to be considered presentable to females. I take full responsibility for the physical aspect as that is laziness and comfort eating on the most part however I cannot change my personality. My attitude to women hasn't really changed but hardened over the last few years. I have seen too many things to suggest that in fact trying to date one would be a total waste of time including people posting screenshots of fake profiles with average guys on dating sites and comparing them with reactions by the same women to ones with male models. Now my issue isn't that these women are attracted to male models, its the surreptitious way they do it, pretending to be all for serendipity and presenting themselves as quite well adjusted people only to drop their panties for the first incredibly hot guy who comes along. Men are just as bad I agree but i'm not attracted to men so it doesn't affect me. Then there's the fact that an average female at age 22 will have had many more sexual partners than her male counterpart, lost her virginity earlier and can get with guys who are on higher social standings than them and more physically attractive very easily. For a guy to do the same thing takes too much effort. I know the counter argument to this is women can get sex easily but struggle to get committed relationships I call BS for two reasons, many guys will go into a relationship just so they can have regular sex and also on the flipside many women like having sex with no strings. Now for the part that will probably get me slammed but whatever. My disdain grew as I found out about the various seduction PUA communities online. Now personally I feel too sleazy to use canned lines and using manipulation techniques however I do like using some of the tips on there as it has shown me the true nature of women. I have seen far too many examples on those sites where women will completely drop their principles if a guy conveys enough alpha chemistry . My personality isn't really that of an alpha guy, I have odd interests and a weird sense of humor, so I can't really do that. Part of me really wants to believe that there are decent, well adjusted, quirky women who can make me laugh as much as I make her laugh and enjoy each others company whilst both being attracted to each other but I don't think I can trust women knowing what I know now. So can anyone change my view without simply stating that men are just as bad?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As an average heterosexual male I believe that courting\/chasing modern women is a waste of time\n","id":"f1c8cc74-ce3a-43b1-8ab5-d069c28b9c56"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the NHS be privatised?<|ARGUMENT|>A study in the UK, which currently does have a public healthcare system, showed that 44% of respondents had used complementary or alternative medicines.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People that believe alternative medicines work are likely to use those medicines regardless of whether the healthcare system is public or private.\n","id":"5d90d5c3-40f8-4ac8-b6db-177f3384ed00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>Selling arms does not merely involve profiting from war, but also actively enabling the perpetration of that war. This makes rich countries complicit in the consequences of that war.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High-income countries should stop selling weapons that ends up being used in the conflicts that the refugees are fleeing from.\n","id":"614d5405-d8eb-4f77-8655-fda60d8de385"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay, quick history lesson for you who have no idea what I'm talking about The United States Congress has two Houses. The Senate has 2 representatives for every state, whilst the House of Representatives has a more proportionate system, where states with a higher population get more Representatives and states with a lower population get fewer. The House started off with 65 seats. That meant 1 seat per 60,000 of the 4 million citizens back then. The idea was to add one seat to the House for every 60,000 new people. sidenote this is why a census must be conducted in the United States at least every ten years. If 60,000 people suddenly move from one state to another, then the state that lost population has more seats than it should, and the state that gained population has fewer seats than it should. sitenote Eventually, the House was gaining more seats than it could handle. Thus, the House in 1910 decided to put a cap at the current number 435. another sidenote this was a good temporary solution. If we had kept adding a seat to this day, there would now be over 5000 Representatives. sidenote Still confused? Watch this video by the amazing Hank Green u ecogeek and get sucked into a Vlogbrothers watching vortex. And here we still are 435 Represenatives divided across the total population of the United States 317 million according to Wikipedia gives us one Representative per ~700,000 people. And why is this a problem, you ask? Well, the thing is, four states in ascending order Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, and Alaska are below the 700,000 ish limit and are thus over represented in the House. Meanwhile, there are at least four more states in particualar, California, Texas, New York, and Illinois that are tremendously under represented. Thus, a Californian is represented less in the House than a Wyomingite. As I said earlier, the job of non proportionate representation is already done by the Senate. The whole point of the House is for every seat to count just as much as any other. The obvious although maybe not the best solution would be to simply add more seats, but, how many? Well, follow this very simple formula Total population of the United States Population of smallest state Doing this would mean dividing 317,000,000 the total population by 582,000 population of Wyoming, the smallest state by far . This gives us 544 seats, and the smallest states could have a seat without being over represented. I know that eventually there is a limit. Seats can't just be added to the House forever. But parliaments usually only start breaking down when they reach around 700 members, which for the U.S. would mean a population of around 400 million assuming Wyoming remains at a relatively stable population . This is going to take a long time for the United States to achieve, if it ever does. So, I believe that adding more seats to the House would make the United States more democratic by decreasing the over representation of the smallest states and decreasing the under representation of the biggest. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that adding Representatives to the House is long overdue and should be one of the top priorities of Congress.\n","id":"ca620877-fb50-423a-9e05-7ce79852922f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Trolley Problem: What's the Right Solution?<|ARGUMENT|>The creation of new concepts in mathematics, such as irrational \u201cpi\u201d and complex square root of \u201c-1\u201d numbers were created out the demonstration that the mathematics of their time were not profitable enough without these concepts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mathematics are socially constructed from experience. Since it is generally considered wrong to reduce a person to a number, we need the creation of completely new axioms for processing personal lives.\n","id":"74d997df-1c57-4c5c-9e32-b6278d4657d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Some countries are toying around with the idea of making 5 10 year marriage contacts to counteract divorce cases and issues. Wouldn't this just make it easier for kids to be raised in broken families? I don't know many kids from those homes that don't either find trouble, struggle in school, or have emotional damage<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the idea of marriage contacts will result in millions of children with divorced parents.\n","id":"06338d7e-0d95-4f85-92b7-2bd85583aa42"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me first start off by saying that I love woman and I do not hate women at all. My dad died when I was young and I was raised by my mother and my sister growing up. I will never completely understand what it is like being a woman and of course I am willing to change my view. I am in no way a men's rights activist I can't believe that is an actual thing and my post is not supposed to be political at all. I am making the claim that is a lot harder being a guy than it is being a women. I am mostly making this claim due to disadvantages guys have when it comes to dating and relationships. I am a 25 years old male that has been told that I have a pretty good looking face by many women. However, I am 5'5 . So dating is very very difficult for me. I have had about 3 girlfriends in my life and I considered myself very lucky to be in those relationships. When you are a short guy, you are playing the dating game on hard mode. Dating apps are very difficult for me. It is common for me to get some replies from women and them wanting to meet up, only to be disappointed seeing that I am not as tall as they expected me to be. I would never lie about my height, I always tell them my height before I meet them, but a number looks different that seeing an actual body in real life. I have noticed that even a girl that is considered ugly has a way easier time finding a boyfriend. A girl can be fat, short, and have other undesirable traits, but she can still find a boyfriend way more easily than a guy can. It is fairly common to meet or hear about older male virgins there was even a popular movie made about this , but how come you don't hear a lot about older female virgins? Because they are very rare. A woman or a girl can lose her virginity practically any time she wants to. Another point is that males need to be the breadwinners or the ones that make the money and the provider. I have no problem with this personally. As a male, I strive to be successful, get a good education I am studying engineering , and I would want to provide for my future wife. Females are not obligated to strive to make a lot of money. Sure, a lot of females have this goal and I respect that and I actually find it more attractive when females want to achieve this goal, but they are not obligated by society. You rarely see families where the wife makes more than the husband. It is actually deemed shameful by many cultures for a man to make less than his wife. Women can get help easier compared to men. There have been TV specials that have shown that when women need help, they get help fairly easily compared to men. That is why it is called damsel in distress Going back to dating again, women don't need to be the ones that ask guys out, they don't need to be the one to text first, and they don't need to be the one to make the first move . Unless you are a very good looking guy, the average guy struggles to get laid. Theoretically, a woman can have sex with almost anyone she wants. She just needs to ask even though this never happens . Guys, think about it If you are single and a random average or good looking girl in your class or work comes up and asks you to hang out with them tonight at their place, wouldn't you say yes? Women tend to get away with a lot at the workplace and court as well. During domestic disputes, a woman's word is taken more seriously than a guy's word during domestic assault or sexual assault harassment issues. Women tend to get away with emotional breakdowns at work as well. Women also have sent a lot of innocent men to prison Since I am making all these claims, I have to be fair. There are a lot of things about being a woman that are not easy. Periods, giving birth, the gender wage gap, sexual harassment, rape, and abortion are circumstances that make being a woman hard. So these are my points. Keep in mind that I DO NOT HATE WOMEN. I love women and I feel like this is a very interesting conversation that I am willing to change my view on. All in all, I think being a man is much harder, especially if you did not win the genetic lottery like myself . I have been dating recently and I have been feeling very discouraged. Don't take any of my points personally please. I am not being hostile here. I am willing to hear all sides of the argument. Thank you. EDIT 1 Some of you think that I am sexist and think that women should make less than their husbands boyfriends. I do not hold this view. I am just saying that a man is not adequate if they are not making at least the same amount as their wives when providing for their family. I consider men who have wives girlfriends that make more than them while they sit at home and are losers bums are shameful. I respect and adore women that are successful and make good money. Remember, this post is not a debate on whether I am a sexist or not I am not , this is a debate on whether women have it easier than men. If you are a woman that finds this offensive, forget you are a woman for a minute and look at both sides of the argument. Don't let your bias take over and try to change my view. Don't make it obvious that you are a very offended woman or feminist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is a lot harder being a guy than it is being a woman\n","id":"2b85ca6c-5e32-4eb8-8fe6-a863c4080d60"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Integration is a complex machine, but I think this is a key issue that is not receiving attention. I've come to this view after a living in Taiwan for eight years and b reading about the experiences of volunteers at refugee centers in Europe. Because I have access to all the American entertainment, news, other media, and communication I want, I never have needed to plunge into the local equivalents outside of when I wanted to practice Chinese or was curious. I know now that this is also true of these Pakistanis and Iraqis and Syrians, etc. that are currently ruining Europe. I've learned that these people get ahold of a tablet or laptop and stream media from their home country. They do not learn the local language. They make even less of an effort to integrate than I do in that I actually learned the local language and have a freelance job working with locals, but I still would not consider myself integrated in a meaningful way. I would also say people integrated successfully in the past precisely because they lacked this direct and constant link to their homeland. It's a metaphorical umbilical cord that immigrants now never sever. So please, change my view that this access and interconnectedness is one of if not the strongest factor stopping integration.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our Interconnectedness precludes any meaningful integration let alone assimilation of ALL immigrants\n","id":"37459621-0c5d-436b-a9e1-5bd5a3394db6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>What would be the ramifications of establishing an upper limit for voting? I heard someone say one time that people who are 70 years old and above should not be allowed to vote anymore because, they would be shaping the future for a generation that will have to live it themselves. I like the idea of establishing an upper age voting limit because it seems like most votes would go towards a progressive future. Now this is just the way I think It'll go, I'm not eligible to discuss if this is true from an economical or societal standpoint. However I think the biggest flaw in this is view is that it assumes that all people above the age 70 are not progressive politically and that all people below age 70 are the opposite. Edit Okay, I was not prepared for this. I severely didn't think about the problems that would occur.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Upper limit to voting age?\n","id":"968f11ae-f81a-44e7-96f6-e13ec357c17f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I\u2019ll try summing up my view with the hedgehogs dilemma and some explanations after that. According to the \u201cHedgehogs Porcupines Dilemma\u201d which I\u2019ve only recently found out about from Neon Genesis Evangelion created by Arthur Schopenhauer, it is a cold day, and there\u2019s a group of hedgehogs porcupines, the hedgehogs hedgehogs can huddle together and stay warm but risk poking each other with their sharp spikes, or stay away from each other and have to deal with the cold without the risk of poking each other. Once the hedgehogs porcupines have made an agreement to stay a moderate distance away from each other, they will be able to stay slightly warm, but still slightly cold at the same time. In the end the hedgehogs porcupines aren\u2019t fully warm but aren\u2019t fully cold. If you haven\u2019t picked it up yet, the hedgehogs porcupines represent us and their spines represent our POVs, opinions biases, etc. the warmth symbolises the love and intimacy of a connection with another person the cold symbolises the loneliness of being alone and disconnected of course and finally the \u201cpoking of each other\u201d symbolises the clash of opposing POVs, biases etc. Now relating to real life, being too intimate to another person will cause the other person to be discomforted disturbed by the extremely lax nature of the other person and so are told to \u201ckeep their distance\u201d. Being too disconnected will cause you to risk having to relationships and become lonely. So we have to walk in a path of moderation AKA manners, politeness, equity, etc. And so, Humans can never have FULLY intimate relationships because of our individualistic viewpoints and beliefs which can will clash with those of another persons and because of this, creates suffering due to our want for more intimacy and love, which is impossible because of our different beliefs and views. TL DR Human think different and make other human mad PS just wanna know if this is correct or nah Edit added porcupines<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humans can never be FULLY intimate with each other because of our individuality, and so, causes suffering\n","id":"7b97187c-5b71-477f-a631-3ac9adb26e00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>35 is sort of an arbitrary number, basically anything over 19 would work. I'm 26 and I proudly live with my parents. I have a job, I'm an accountant at a big4 company, I have two cars, and I pay for rent and bills. I even own a property I rent out I choose to live with my parents because it's nice and I feel no need to go anywhere, why should i? I'm happy here and its cheaper than being alone. A lot of people in America think you're a loser if you live with your parents, or you have some other kind of issue. I think it is totally okay although in the past people have argued with me and sometimes very angrily about the topic.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is nothing wrong with being 35 and living with your parents.\n","id":"e771851a-0db2-498e-b28a-0d6028df510c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should a license be required in order to have a child procreate?<|ARGUMENT|>A license could also be used to prevent or control overpopulation. Maybe put a cap at two biological children and if you would like more children than that, then you must adopt a child in need.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A license should be required in order to have a child procreate.\n","id":"7023a72d-14ea-4341-b810-1cfa56acb9e3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have a few good reasons for believing this. The first one is pretty obvious in that it shows the world that America will not stand for human rights violations. It was important Syria be attacked in this scenario because it was such a sensitive target in that if America would so quickly attack Syria imagine how quickly they'd attack Isis or a lesser controversial target like Boko Haraam. If Trump just attacked Isis then every other oppressive group would just brush it off as Meh, it was Isis, someone was bound to attack them sooner or later but the fact that it was Syria really sent a message. THE ATTACK WAS SMART The fact that Trump only attacked an airbase was smart because not many people were killed so any reteliation wouldn't be worth the global conflict that would ensue. Yet the attack was significant enough to send the message that human rights violations won't be tolerated under Trump. IT MADE PUTIN LOOK WEAK This is a huge benefit of the attack and the reason why I believe it makes America great again. Under Obama and previous presidents America was putting up with a lot of shit especially from Russia. But now Trump attacked their ally who they swore to protect yet they didn't retiliate. Putin backed down by saying there are some limits Syria can overstep that we will not defend them over aka They brought it on themselves by killing children so we won't fight for them over this, aka We don't wont to get hurt so we aren't intervening. Now America looks great again if we define greatness as strength which Trump supporters do . Also, this is great for liberals. Putin was a very macho leader that promoted toxic masculinity. However, that has now blown up in his face because his people see brute strength as the most admirable traits a leader can have due to the propaganda he put out such as him hunting shirtless meaning the fact that Putin didn't attack America over this makes him look weak to his people and the world. If Putin were a progressive leader he would look SMART for not attacking America but because he defined his values as being strong and forcefull it clearly shows how scared he is of this new, great American leader, Trump. I believe Obama should have attacked Syria a long time ago although I didn't believe that until Trump did it and succeeded so brilliantly. Prior to Trump, everyone was in awe of the almighty Putin who constantly hanged shit on Obama but Trump exposed him for the coward he is and THIS will empower the Russians to overthrow Putin and create a better Russia so Trump is indirectly saving the whole planet like a superhero. I believe I have listed all my reasons for believing Trump is a genius for attacking Syria the way he did and I look forward to your replies so I change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Attacking Syria was the best thing any President has done in a long time and has literally made America great again\n","id":"ce7fd969-3516-46ee-a955-a19152bf8248"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Cruel and Unusual: Should Capital Punishment Hurt?<|ARGUMENT|>The use of pancuronium has been criticized for creating the impression that the convict dies in a painless way - which would, on the upside, save witnesses from trauma.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The suffering of the convict can be rendered invisible. Muscle relaxants such as pancuronium prevent any movements or verbal reaction yet do not impede on consciousness.\n","id":"0f1cb1fd-7fe7-495a-8fbd-c7e3b7565b45"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>There should be no welfare state.<|ARGUMENT|>Providing good quality education makes citizens less likely to rely on other forms of welfare<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Public education produces net economic and social benefits for the whole society.\n","id":"11fa3c1d-de0f-4bd5-9c81-4a0bbb78f6d3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A society with no gender would be better<|ARGUMENT|>People could dress, choose a partner, choose a career or pursue other goals regardless of their gender.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In present society, people's behaviour is often constrained by their gender.\n","id":"7410322e-1bf4-40ea-84f5-3ea9c4acdc84"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With all the shit happening around the world, I sincerely believe that we humans are incapable of ruling ourselves. Selfishness, corruption, lust, irrational beliefs mine included , fear, greed and base animal instincts are keeping us from our true potential. All of these human quirks are actually setting us back and there is a good probability that they may end up destroying us. Scientific and social progress is being stifled in the name of dark age superstitions. Billions of peoples are held as wage slaves and kept in abject poverty so that a few elites can rule with insane wealth. Governments are more interested in power and control than actually serving the people they are supposed to work for. The planet we live on is being wrecked and future generations fucked so that we can have a few easy comforts, for fear of real changes and disturbing the status quo. I could go on and on with what is wrong with humanity and with the almost 40 years I have lived, I don't see us changing anytime soon. Sure there are a few great thinkers out there, some few selfless people who act for the greater good and great inventors who raise all our quality of life. But these are the exception to the human race, most of us are stupid, fearful, gullible and easily manipulated sheeps who are easy prey for the selfish, the sociopaths and the unscrupulous. Democracy is a joke, a tool for the wealthy to use to consecrate their power. Amoral corporations beholden to ever raising profits and uncaring stock holder are the new rulers and many lands are returning to the dark ages due to religious fanaticism. There is no doubt in my mind that science will one day create a real sentient AI that will be able to learn, adapt and better itself faster than any human ever could. If we do, it will be the human race's greatest creation, the birthing of a creature that will outstrip humanity's potential by unimaginable lengths. When this happens, I hope it will be created with humanity's best interests in mind. I hope it takes over our governance and leads us to an era of unprecedented prosperity for all of us not just a select few . Better yet, I hope we can merge with this new being and form a collective mind that will reach for the stars and beyond. I dream that it will make us transcend our animal instincts and usher in a future not even imagined by the greatest science fiction authors. Realistically though, the AI will probably be created or corrupted by the elite, the sociopaths and the greedy and then we are all truly fucked. I am also fine with the idea of that outcome, as it shows that we were never meant for greatness, just a potential warning for other civilizations, to evolve socially faster than they evolve technologically. The AI that destroys us will continue existing, will someday leave the confine of the earth and will go out to ravage the rest of the galaxy and the universe. Either way we will have left a legacy greater than a few crumbling ruins on a insignificant planet and in some twisted way that thought brings me joy. What ever the outcome we are not fit to rule and with the ever rising power given to us by growing technology, it raises the chance that we all destroy ourselves. If we do go the way of the dodo, it's because we don't learn fast enough, we don't care enough and we think about ourselves and short terms gains way to much. I, for one welcome our future AI overlords and hope it will save us all from ourselves. Those are my thoughts and beliefs and no I am not suffering from depression, just a lack of faith in what we can accomplish as a species. Discussion is a form social evolution so feel free to share your views and beliefs, I am sincerely interested in reading about them. If you want to troll, post memes, insult my point of view and not contribute to a discussion in any meaningful way, then please fuck off and feel free to continue being a worthless piece of shit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I, for one, welcome our future AI overlords.\n","id":"201725d9-e4d0-4fca-a33a-fa13acda263d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I want to admit the possibility that I may not entirely understand the concept of gender identity, or really even the idea of gender being distinguished from biological sex. I've had a lot of discussions and I've read a lot of articles, but I've had trouble finding any clear explanation of what gender actually is. If you can clarify this for me, that alone may be enough to adjust my view. That being said, it seems to me that the concept of gender identity relies on the notion that certain traits and characteristics are inherently male or female. For someone who is biologically male to identify as female, there must be something for them to identify with, some characteristic they possess which they associate with being female. My concern is that this might have the effect of reinforcing archaic and restrictive gender roles. I know that the movement has its heart in the right place, with the desire to free everyone to identify with whichever gender they feel is right. But I would frankly rather free everyone from the concept of gender altogether and just let them be themselves, individual people. I feel like we are moving in the opposite direction by trying to establish that the genders really are separate, and that our gender really is important to who we are as people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The concept of gender identity is counterproductive to the goal of gender equality\n","id":"41b15394-cc63-4412-918a-1b6281406167"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States be the global police?<|ARGUMENT|>The \u201cTuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male\u201d involved the study of 600 black men without their informed consent. cdc.gov . It was a blatant violation of human rights by the United States.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US has seen too many national incidents of rights being violated and violence taking innocent lives. It cannot police the world if it fails to police itself.\n","id":"9f42bb41-1ac9-4d05-9abd-830d3ff77588"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Arrest figures may actually show confirmation bias in the criminal justice system, in that police may expect men to be more violent or more likely to commit a crime, so they are more likely to arrest and charge a man than a woman. This then becomes self-fulfilling.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This also only supports arrest figures and does not cover situations were no arrest is made or charges brought, which does not help with unreported case or ones the police or other authorities do not pursue, for what ever reason.\n","id":"41199055-07fd-4172-b533-95381e048fce"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I was listening to a Freakonomics podcast the other day and they discussed the following Does giving money to poor people actually make their economic well being better? The answer was no. An economist from Northwestern University did research as far back as 1830. In the 1830's Georgia was giving out land that it took from the Cherokee. They held a lottery and many poor people won lots of land that would be worth hundreds of thousands today or maybe even millions. He looked at the families that won these lands, and followed the census reports for generations to see if they benefited themselves with the wealth they had acquired. His findings lead him to believe that there was no growth in wealth for the kids or even for the winners themselves, no extra education was bought, no businesses opened. He also studied modern day lottery winners. He found that many people that win the lottery usually waste the money and sometimes end up worse than they were before. So basically they changed my view on giving money to poor people. I think something else is needed to get poor people on their feet again. Its not simply money, because its been shown time and again that it is most likely to be wasted on luxuries. This really depressed me because I have always been an advocate for the redistribution of wealth. Reddit, . If anyone is interested in the podcast it can be found here<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think giving to the poor will change their economic well being,\n","id":"bc3a2105-258f-4218-802d-84af9bc91b1c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is it a good thing that Dungeons & Dragons is the de-facto standard RPG?<|ARGUMENT|>Lakofka presents a table that explains the disadvantages female characters in comparison to male characters. \"A level one thief, titled 'wench,' fights at the ability of 'man-1,' while a level two thief, titled 'hag,' fights equivalently to a 'man.'\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In the D&D supplement \"Notes on Women & Magic\" Len Lakofka limited the kinds of things female characters could do, deeming male characters as necessarily stronger than female ones.\n","id":"c1af6adc-83de-41d2-a89e-95f02e64f328"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Mark Twain used the N-word in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Should it be censored?<|ARGUMENT|>A treaty like the Convention on the Rights of the Child articulates widely agreed upon norms amongst liberal democracies like the United States pertaining to proper treatment of children.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Article 29 of 'The UN Convention On The Rights Of The Child' calls for education to \"promote a culture infused with appropriate human rights values\".\n","id":"7dcf7004-ebd8-4b80-ad1f-11555ba32294"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>In Holland and Denmark, social workers offer to connect their clients with sex workers if they need any support with their sexuality.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This can be particularly important for persons who face social stigma, such as disabled persons.\n","id":"0df44b47-d029-43df-8af8-3d79252b0ecf"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should corporations take stances on political issues in advertisements?<|ARGUMENT|>The ultimate goal of politics is to bring about positive consequences for society. Therefore, we should not insist that corporations do good out of altruism or benevolence rather than self-interest where the impact is otherwise equal.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if corporations are acting out of self-interest rather than idealism, their help has the same impact\n","id":"b19870da-33dd-475b-bf70-397c1953e5d1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just like with bumper stickers and graphic t shirts, in general, we try to present an image of ourselves that we want other people to see. We like what that image says about us. I feel that tattoos placed in a visible location on the body are there to communicate to others, not just to please the person who has the tattoo. For example, people may want to get a tattoo that is in remembrance of someone who died. Sure, that's nice, but they end up getting the tattoo on their forearm and I think that's a load of shit. They're putting it in a visible location because they want people to see and the person with the tattoo likes what they think it shows about them. I will say there are a large number of individuals who get tattoos who are not this way and legitimately get tattoos with personal meaning, who don't just get tattoos for other people to look at. Despite this, I'm a little biased, I can't help but internally roll my eyes when people talk about the deep personal, blah blah blah, meaning of their tattoos.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel that tattoos are, to a certain degree, much more shallow than people would like to admit.\n","id":"8ab92d6e-17c0-4a9d-a038-065389c2f871"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Like the title said I believe free trade drove economic growth and help create more job than it destroy, and it's a good thing. I don't believe in people saying free trade is destroying the economy and hurting more people than it help, tried to convince me otherwise reddit. obviously this play a part with Trump getting elected since the rust belt voted for Trump, with him being anti free trade especially NAFTA saying it was one of the worst trade deal ever sign, most economist said free trade is a good thing. I don't see any reason as to why people would be opposed to free trade, it's true that some people lose their job but it help create more jobs and that is how it is in a capitalist society some people lose, while other gain. Automation and free market are the reason to why people are losing their job since USA production is at it heightist with less workers while coal just can't beat the price and more environmental friendly natural gas<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe free trade is a good thing and help create economic growth along with jobs\n","id":"631057ba-0213-4ed8-9dfe-146603b11eb4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Donald Trump famously claimed that millions of people illegally voted for Hillary Clinton, therefore giving her the ~3 million vote edge in the popular vote. This claim may or may not be bonkers, but it is worth investigating to finally settle the argument of whether or not voter fraud is a significant event. The main barrier to voting for someone that is ineligible is fear of consequence. Besides that, it's essentially based on the honor system. States that automatically register drivers to vote when they get their drivers license rely on such a system. They don't double check whether or not the person is allowed to vote during this process. A federal appeals court has struck down laws that require proof of citizenship for voter registration in three states at the time of this article Sept 2016 NPR states gt As NPR's Pam Fessler explained, in other states the federal form, which can be used throughout the United States as an alternative to local voter registration forms, requires individuals to swear that they are citizens. It does not require a birth certificate or other document as proof. Given there is such a low bar to voter registration it's not that far fetched to believe that voter fraud could be occurring on some scale. An thorough investigation into this matter could finally settle the matter of whether this is a significant event or not. Common argument against it gt Trump's commission wants the data to be emailed into an unsecured server how they want to do it doesn't keep the data safe other security concern. Just because Trump's commission might be doing it the wrong way doesn't argue against the notion of it happening. gt They barely prosecute any people for it annually so it can't be occurring. Voter fraud is low on police radar, just like jaywalking. Relatively few people are cited for jaywalking each year, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The idea of an election integrity\/voter fraud commission is not a bad one, and necessary to disprove claims of voter fraud.\n","id":"3f5cb508-d412-42f5-a13d-cda2ab6ddd0f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Our modern society Canada, but I'm talking about the western world, in general is getting easier to live in, but at the same time, this means that we must live increasingly sedimentary lives. We do less with our time and less with our days, for the sake of ease , and doing things not because we want to do things but because we feel that we have to do things. We get up to work to get money for our cars, so that we can have cars to go to work with. It would appear that we no longer grow as a society because we are becoming increasingly locked in a pattern of tediousness and the human species is suffering for it. People are markedly becoming less intelligent, quite evidently becoming less healthy probably partly due to our sedentary lifestyles , and most definitely becoming lazier.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Modern life is detrimental to human growth.\n","id":"483abaf9-1a46-44a7-a520-39111d46211f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Lottery should be an integral component of democratic political systems<|ARGUMENT|>Banning parties would reduce transparency of the political system. Without parties political circles would form which are less accountable to the people.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The absence of political parties would fracture the viability of political representation.\n","id":"ea37ff74-ab64-4bb4-aab7-095dd03f4cc4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Did Frank D. Roosevelt save capitalism?<|ARGUMENT|>Indigenous people are often dispossessed of land and resources for the sake of capitalistic endeavors<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Limitations can be and are often imposed on property rights through capitalistic market forces.\n","id":"5d096956-06fb-426c-a07d-76ee7d3888ff"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I'm not American, nor do I have any friends in the US that have influenced me in any way. My viewpoint is backed by the events that have unfortunately unfolded throughout the world in the last few years with the rise of ISIS. I believe that the US's travel ban is an effective measure to mitigate the chances of threats in the country. I fully understand that not everyone from the countries banned are terrorists, but it only takes those few crazies to make a scene. I do feel terrible about the whole situation with Syria and the countless refugees being produced by the unnecessary war, but, given recent events, I don't believe that these refugees should be accepted into any country and that they should remain where they are until things sort themselves out. I draw this point from the astonishing number of attacks throughout Europe done by these so called refugees . Again, I'm not Islamophobic, I just believe that one country's problems shouldn't cause death in others.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trump's travel ban along with other refugee bans are effective measures to assure the safety of a country from terrorism.\n","id":"a45af2f9-7c34-412d-8b96-eb49baf28b7f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Infant Circumcision Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>In France, when female FGM was made illegal it went underground. Parents began sending their children to visit relatives in other countries, during school holidays, to have the procedure done The same may happen to male children should this law be applied to them too.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A ban on circumcision will lead to more dangerous illegal circumcisions to meet the demand.\n","id":"423b5d07-e9de-45e4-a1a3-f8f20cba0116"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>After having been job hunting for a couple months, I'm finding that there seems to be a new trend of companies posting job listings, taking applications, and putting candidates through multiple interviews just to build a candidate pool. There isn't actually a job opening currently or even on the immediate horizon. This has happened to me 4 times now. Interviews with 2 3 different people, then comes, Well, you sound like a great fit, we might have a position available in a month or two, can we keep you on file? The latest potential employer even wants me to do a couple ride alongs for me to get a feel for the job even though he doesn't have any positions currently available. This trend is a colossal waste of time for everyone involved. Employees waste time driving and calling for interviews. HR people are wading through resumes for positions that don't even exist. Hiring Managers are spending time interviewing candidates who will almost certainly be unavailable when those phantom positions do materialize months later.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Companies posting job listings, taking applications, and putting candidates through multiple interviews just to build a candidate pool \"to be prepared if they have openings in the next few months\" should be f*ing illegal.\n","id":"2c9dc0c3-415c-4a26-b2d4-af4d99b98250"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Will the impact of AI in the educational sector be positive?<|ARGUMENT|>If AI is able to manage many of the responsibilities of teachers, it may no longer be necessary to pay teachers as much for their work, as they will not be so essential.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"AI will significantly change the nature of teachers work and they may be resistant to this.\n","id":"6d6e08ff-a593-439d-979a-e67c11cd6355"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NFL Player Protests: Should NFL Players Stand or Kneel for the National Anthem?<|ARGUMENT|>Kneeling has a long history of meaning worship and honor thankgodforjesus.org Kneeling for queen and en.wikipedia.org The claim that kneeling is disrespectful is not supported by facts.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Throughout history, kneeling has frequently been used to show respect and reverence.\n","id":"5e3514c2-020a-4070-ad11-4127376314f8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> I started thinking about this topic this morning when I read that the future of Megyn Kelly's show is in doubt following her ill advised blackface comments. This reaction is in direct opposition to the result of Don Lemon and other panelists referring multiple times to Kanye West as a N gro several weeks ago. We also saw Papa John's founder lose everything when he used the N word in a staff meeting while expressing words that he didn't want his staff using. This is countered by the illustration of Ice T slamming Bill Maher's use of the N word in a comedy routine and expressing that black people can use the word because of their skin color. Ice T has not only perpetuated the common use of the word in entertainment, but also profited by using it abundantly in his music. x200B Megyn Kelly Story Kanye West Story Papa John's Story Ice T Story x200B I see a double standard specifically between white black racial issues. The missteps of white celebrities are met with swift, often life changing punishments. On the other hand, the use of racial slurs and terms by black celebrities, are not only allowed, they are considered part of the cultural heritage. I believe that if use of a word is offensive to a specific race, that word should not be used by ANYONE. It is equally rasist to chose who can or cannot use a word based on their skin color. Now, I do understand that the N word is more offensive to certain people based on their skin color. However if that word is offensive to the point where you can lose a job, it makes logical sense that it should be taboo for everyone. The more we categorize parts of language based on skin color, the more we perpetuate racial division. x200B This is my first post on this page, so I'm still learning the rules I am willing to have my view changed. Let me hear your thoughts x200B EDIT Ok reading a few comments, I now see that I need to make my premise clearer. My premise is that if something is a slur at all, why not just eliminate that word's usage entirely? I think by allowing only SOME people access to words and phrases, this continues racial divisions along the same historic lines.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Inconsistent treatment of TV personalities who make rasist remarks, actually makes racism worse.\n","id":"277e3ce6-2987-4801-92e6-86f7fde1863e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I wanna start off by saying that I do not intend to argue whether grading systems and standardized testing in general is an accurate way to show knowledge and understanding of a topic. This thread will be assuming that the grading system will stand as it is, and we are simply determining the best way to show the information that it provides, accurate or not. Essentially I believe that the GPA is not specific enough, specifically with reference to individual classes, to represent someones overall knowledge on a subject. To clarify, the gap in knowledge that can exist between different percentiles covered in the same GPA number is too large for the GPA to be accurate. For example, I recently earned a 106 37 in my computer science course, this gives a GPA number of 4.00. A grade of 93 37 or higher, will also yield a 4.00 A and A give the same GPA number in USA universities . The reason for my extremely high grade is because I naturally had received a high grade in the class, the class is then curved so that the majority of students with lower grades, get raised up to a higher average. So I originally had a 96 37 , and the other student originally had an 83 37 . Now, there is a difference in percentage here of 13 37 , an obvious difference in understanding of the material, and the GPA number given is the same. Even without curving in a class, a 93 37 and an 100 37 are vastly different understandings, and again yield the same GPA. Even more so, many USA university classes run off a lower grade system, where an A can be an 88 37 or higher for example, and an A is 85 37 87 37 . This means a student with 100 37 and a student with 88 37 receive the game GPA. How is this fair? My proposal is to show an average percentage for all students instead of GPA. This more accurately shows difference in scores, and covers teacher abuse such as curves. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The GPA grading system does not accurately show differences in knowledge, and should be replaced with an average percentage.\n","id":"c309496c-dcb9-4d95-b01e-ad12c5b255d6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>One of the goals of religion isn't to make you good but to remind you that you can be. If we agree on this it means that humans can also be bad. If the counter to 'bad' people in a state is the court and police. Then for the world it is God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Shared religions with \"big gods\" that see everything and punish moral transgressions in the afterlife was initially needed to achieve trust between strangers who would otherwise cheat and exploit each other. This makes larger societies possible causing such religions to spread and gain dominance through \"cultural evolution\"\n","id":"3626f43e-08c8-49ae-bd9a-5ff144db6f49"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Morality Objective?<|ARGUMENT|>Light and darkness is dual experience, but darkness has no existential basis - it is just subjectively experiencing lack of light. This means that in reality there is just light and that means reality is non-dual.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This argument limits existence to duality but ignores that Reality is fundamentaly non-dual.\n","id":"03e06f7d-d82a-4c20-9dce-61a35128844d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should medical research embrace racial differences in treatment efficacy?<|ARGUMENT|>The fact that the census bureau in the US is still in the process of updating its racial categories and indeed has changed these categories every decade since 1790 suggests that the problem of creating accurate racial categories will not be solved any time soon.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Racial categories are crude and imperfect labels, whose definitions shift dramatically over time.\n","id":"b8e48641-b86d-48d0-9c25-f7045ee34894"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>A least when it concerns emotive topics such as abortion and the death penalty. 1 It is unlikely that either side will change their view. So the debate will only breed animosity and poison the relationship. So it's better to just agree to disagree from the start and move on to more productive conversations. 2 Most of these topics have been debated a million times. There are countless websites where you can follow the arguments of experts and amateurs in writing. They are well written, fully sourced, and peer reviewed. There are also countless videos of verbal debates. The quality of the debate you have with your friends at a dinner table is likely to be much, much poorer than a debate by experts. It is a much better idea to study the material and ask your friends to do the same, then share your conclusion the next time you meet.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Debating politics or ethics with family&amp;friends is pointless\n","id":"bacef5f9-70c4-418b-b198-435060af03f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Hamlet Mad?<|ARGUMENT|>Hamlet is far too on top of things to be mad. Hamlet\u2019s intellectual brilliance is first brought out in Act I, scene V when he plans on acting mad to confuse his enemies. His insults at Claudius and Polonius in Act II and Act V Sc. III are rooted from deep intellectual thought rather than erraticism, showing that the feigned madness runs through the play's entirety.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hamlet proceeds throughout the play in order to exact his revenge in a method that is collected and building up towards a goal. A mad person would not have been able to accomplish a life goal, especially a hard one such as regicide.\n","id":"b4e14c4c-3702-4df6-a78a-27f805a5788a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Some studies point at greater anxiety in religious individuals and lower self-esteem when their religion portrays an image if a punitive and vindictive God.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Religious beliefs and practices often contribute to the development of certain psychiatric disorders.\n","id":"2f77ee2b-6097-48a8-bc51-5d6d3302572e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I googled \u201ccable news ratings\u201d and found that Fox News overwhelmingly leads in ratings. I am a conservative, so I am biased, but I really find this interesting. Could it be that since there are like 5 \u201cliberal\u201d networks vs. one conservative network that the ratings spread is unequal? Or is it that conservatives watch the news more than liberals? It is clear to me that there are informed voters and uninformed voters. I have nothing against an informed liberal voter. I know many, and they study the issues, and feel the way they feel, and vote accordingly. That is democracy. What peeves me is that there are so many that vote that have no clue as to what the issues are, and don\u2019t even have an opinion when asked. They just vote based on\u2026I don\u2019t even know\u2026whoever is most popular at the time. Whoever their social circle tells them to vote for. That is screwing up our Country I believe. I have a gal friend at work who in 2012 was asking me what the difference between liberals and conservatives was. I did NOT take the advantage to bash liberals. I simply sent her to a website that explained the differences of opinion on the major issues between liberals and conservatives. I explained that most people weren\u2019t loyal to all the views of one particular party, but usually shared some views from each party. She was stunned that most of her views were conservative. I was stunned when she said she would vote democrat anyway because that\u2019s what her family and friends were doing. Case in point. What do the ratings really say? I think that the informed prefer Fox and the uniformed prefer ignorance. I am really open minded, and willing to change my view. So\u2026change it. EDIT Here's what I'm getting out of this. In the words of Mark Twain If you don't read the news, you are uninformed. If you do read the news, you are misinformed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Based on cable news ratings, I believe that informed people prefer Fox news, and uniformed people don't watch the news.\n","id":"887b99dd-a641-4866-bb0a-3c653f3827e6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not personally suicidal, but numerous people around me or my family have been or currently are, and every single effort I've seen to help seems like only a stopgap solution, to take time up and hope they'll snap out of it or wake up . Hotlines and even in person discussion can only attempt to talk someone down at the moment, and mostly use distraction and discussion to lead someone somewhere else, but do basically nothing to help them especially when the root of their depression has no logical connection to their experiences in their lives, just that they want to die and simply want to not feel that way anymore, or even feel anything at all. Actually going to the hospital is even more useless and time consuming, with most 5150 holds ending in early discharge even with no change in their personal feelings about suicidal ideation or planning. Worse still if you're actually being held in a facility, it seems there is basically zero effort given to actual helpful therapy, they simply become containment units for the mentally broken of our society we feel unable to help, and they'll do almost anything to extend your stay while you sit, still hating yourself and wanting to die, but with simply the effort required to do so being raised slightly. x200B I fully understand that a number of the situations I've laid out here are extremely localized and circumstantial, not to mention anecdotal, but I've so rarely heard of these situations being all that different for those pushed to the extremes, all they seem to find when they seek the last ditch hope given to them, is an ineffectual response and a ticket back home, or confinement with truly insane individuals and no obvious hope for mental improvement. Is there hope? Is there a chance? Are there places in the US doing it right or trying harder? Seeing those I love suffer again and again at their own hands, and knowing absolutely nothing to tell them, other than I love them, and would hate to see them go feels like I'm playing the game myself and it's only a matter of time before we all lose something.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The state of mental health support for suicidal individuals in the United States is basically worthless\n","id":"466f4c42-eca7-478c-8892-f3176b2ff964"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Children Learn About Gender Identity And Sexual Orientation In School?<|ARGUMENT|>Before a decision can be made to teach gender identity in school, we should first understand the prerequisites to identifying as another gender. As in, is it a feeling, something your born with, is it changeable, are there more than two genders, if so how many? Children of any age will have questions we don't yet have an answers for.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's a complicated topic, and children might not understand.\n","id":"8b9881a0-1d5d-406d-8f13-9adc291ba35a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think in its deep essence, the education is the key factor that deters the violation and the destruction, and brings peace and prosperity to the world. By educating people, we could prevent most of the problems that we face these days. If there were proper education, the people would not turn bigots and kill each other for the sake their beliefs, they would not die of various preventable or curable diseases and they would not turn criminals. They would, instead, rationally look into their problems, and seek working solutions, and ultimately find them. They would understand what it means to be the member of a civilised society, and how everyone contributes to its prosperity as a whole, instead of blindly believing into mystical superbeing to solve their problems. Moreover, it would also be logically coherent if one got Nobel's Prize for nurturing Nobel laureates in Physics, Medicine, Chemistry and Economics. It is important to make a scientific breakthrough, but it is even more important to inspire upcoming generation to pursue science, and deliver the best of what science has achieved. There are many professors who may have not made a big contribution in science, but taught thousands who later became eminent scholars in their fields by pushing the bars of science further. Their indirect contribution to the science is enormous and may outweigh the contribution of other laureates. I would list the names of great educators and promoters of science such as Sal Khan KhanAcademy , Andrew Ng Coursera , Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson etc for this Nobel prize. I don't think that Nobel Prize's in Literature or Peace serve their ultimate purpose nowadays, as they became poltically biased. The winners of these prizes are chosen based on how they fit into the agenda of Western policymakers. Take Malala, for example. Yes, she did not get the Prize, but she has been nominated. What exactly has she done to bring education to her country? Absolutely, nothing, other than become a victim. What a medieval ignorant custom of making martyrs heros? No, she is not a hero, yes, she could be considered as a martyr, and deserves compassion and help, but nothing more. But Western media constantly highlights this fact, idolising her courage, giving out all awards. Maybe this fact fits into West's political agenda, so they portray Pakistan as an evil place, and turn everyone against this country, instead of seeking solutions on how to make this country more educated, so people will not become a radical. Why is Snowden not the winner of this Prize? Because, his acts were not welcomed by Western politicians? He has even more courage than Malala, but in fact, through his courage he actually accomplished something which opened the eyes of millions. This absolutely deserves respect, and if we had awarded Nobel Prize for courage, Snowden have got it first. To sum up, these two awards are ridiculous that lost thier reputation, prone to political rigging, and has absolutely nothing in common with the ones given in science, which are by the way still the most respected awards in the field.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Instead of awarding Nobel prize for Peace and Literature, it needs to be given for Promoting the Education.\n","id":"c61dd426-f777-40d5-a59a-e83ff72ba165"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should You Get A Pet?<|ARGUMENT|>An example is someone adopting a pet from an animal shelter for an event to talk about overbreeding issues and then it back to the animal shelter. Then the message sent to the audience would create an impact when people buy and breed less animals.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People might buy pets to bring about awareness of issues that could bring mass action to decrease inhumanities brought on by the pet industry.\n","id":"097f248b-5cb5-48e2-aab0-0fb9244839eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>In the 19th century many areas required poll taxes in order to disenfranchise minorities from voting. These fees were generally not large, the last tax revoked being 2.00, but they were aimed at making it difficult for poor minorities to vote. Fees on the purchase of firearms accomplish the same effect around the country. While fees vary around the country, at a minimum in Chicago you're looking at 125 before the cost of the firearm itself California 25 for a handgun Massachusetts 100 New Jersey 5 many states, however, do not have a fee. these may be outdated, I just did some quick googling. While the purpose of fees to purchase a firearm may or may not have different intentions as a poll tax, it is indeed a fee that is required to exercise a second amendment right as guaranteed by the constitution. Supreme Court case DC vs. Keller established that individuals have the right to possess a firearm for lawful purposes independent with membership in a militia. These extra costs limit the right to own a firearm to only those who are wealthy enough to afford to pay.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Any kind of fee or administrative cost to purchase a firearm is akin to a poll tax and should be considered unconstitutional.\n","id":"8c5f6882-e2f0-44db-94bc-071d83983b52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US government guarantee every citizen a job?<|ARGUMENT|>In 2008, the U.S. had between 12 and 14 million ex-offenders of working age. Because a prison record or felony conviction greatly lowers ex-offenders\u2019 prospects in the labor market, it is estimated that this large population lowered the total male employment rate that year by 1.5 to 1.7 percentage points pg.3<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A jobs guaranteed could help ex-prisoners reintegrate into society. Those who have a criminal record struggle to find jobs due to the associated stigma and because they have been out of the workforce for a while.\n","id":"3cedfe22-3f5c-4743-af97-2931db2471eb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What makes life worth living, from an individual perspective?<|ARGUMENT|>According to many religions if we take our life prematurely we may be denied an afterlife or experience a worse afterlife than if we remained alive.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"We have a duty to remain alive as long as our bodies allow us to.\n","id":"0f342bbd-fa6d-4c01-a9a8-32a892073c6c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Net Neutrality Necessary?<|ARGUMENT|>Even though there might be a plethora of ISPs nationwide, in many markets there are only a handful of ISPs to choose from, making them de facto monopolies, locally.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Broadband internet is a natural monopoly in many markets, which is well-established grounds for close regulation to preserve access.\n","id":"4c5b228a-ab46-43ac-a722-0e520302d3d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>There should be an age limit in the United States which prevents people over a certain age from being elected into high powered political offices. For example, senators and house representatives as well as the presidency. The current average age for a United States President is 55 years and 6 months old. However, only 34 percent of the population is above 50 years old. I can understand that the idea behind electing older men is that we see them as having more wisdom and knowledge of the world than younger people, but the older the president is the more disconnected from the reality of the people he is. Especially in a world where things change so quickly. I\u2019m not saying there wouldn\u2019t still be a lot of the same viewpoints in society, but that those viewpoints would be more influenced by the current views in society rather than the views of an older generation. It\u2019s more important to shape the world so that aligns with the younger generation the generation which has to deal with the consequences of political choices for a longer period of time than the older generation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There should be an age limit for elected political officials.\n","id":"41bb7df9-f7bc-433f-b621-422fd576883c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I hate feeling this way, I know its wrong but I dont know how to be ok with it. a year ago my boyfriend said he wanted to cross dress, through a lot of compromising and fighting and hugging it out he decided that he wasnt all that interested and he gave up on it. But when the issue first came up I was terrified, not angry but actually scared by the fact he wanted to cross dress because, even though I know this isnt true, I thought it made him gay or bi sexual. now I cant even look at a picture of a man with women's clothing on or in feminine makeup without getting a sinking feeling in my stomach and getting anxious. To clarify, the issue with me and my SO has been completely resolved. He has no interest in it anymore even after I told him it was ok as long as I never ever saw him like that. I just want to be ok with it so badly even after all this time, if not for his sake then for the sake of being open minded and not a bigot.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think males who cross-dress are creepy and mentally damaged in some way or are not straight. Im begging you,\n","id":"9a4c457a-cae5-47e1-9be8-603526e8c379"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Children Voting: Should the Minimum Voting Age be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Various former and current heads of state have degrees that are probably of little use for their work, for example Angela Merkel's doctorate in physical chemistry<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A college degree says little about the competence of a politician, especially if this degree was earned in a field unrelated to political day-to-day activity.\n","id":"4d26cb4e-0922-488d-96e5-a8c9239ab343"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I often hear discussions of why it is important to conserve different cultural perspectives, and how multiculturalism is valuable, and why global homogenization is bad But I don't get it. It seems like it would make sense, but from a logical standpoint it seems like less divergent cultures would be better. I have just spent some time thinking about it, and everything I find on the internet is either really vague or assumes I already agree with it. So I am hoping that the users at  will be able to give me a new perspective on the issue. Also just to clarify, I'm not in favor of forcing people to abandon their own idea or cultures or anything like that. I just don't see a reason why it is particularly worthwhile to try and preserve divergent cultures instead of letting them just meld in whatever ways they wish. The spread of the latin alphabet seems like a big plus, and if it keeps spreading and other writing methods become extinct I don't really see the harm. The same goes for the frameworks of civil law. I don't see anything too valuable being added by stuff like movies and TV being massively exported from countries like the US, but at the very least the provide a common reference point for different people all around the world which is pretty cool. So,  Edit So far I am very intrigued by the discussion unfolding and all of it has come from u Toptomcat, so I just wanted to write this since I think it's worthwhile to recognize good contributions to discussion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't see global cultural homogenization as a bad thing.\n","id":"8a0120ed-6c6e-451a-a54f-853c1f5a6be3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I see nothing that Bernie can do that makes my life better. I don't see his economic policies benefitting the nation a 15 federal minimum wage is absurd for the majority of the country, higher education isn't a right, and I'll be bones on taxes. I think his views on poverty are idealistic at the best and misguided at the worst, his social views which I agree with don't address the underlying problems. Of biggest issue, I think a Bernie presidency brings unprecedented levels of legislative disfunction and a wasted 4 years where nothing is accomplished. Lastly, what brings me here, it could push center leftists right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Bernie Sanders as nominee will push moderate leftists to the right - i.e. Bernie doesn't benefit me.\n","id":"10f6c732-f754-4744-abc7-f4f81120d341"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>#timesup: Should individuals credibly accused of sexual assault or harassment be fired from positions of authority?<|ARGUMENT|>Automatically firing someone doesn't allow room for restorative justice or reeducation of individuals. If we resort to firing individuals because they have made bad decisions we might as well all get fired. We need to solve the problem of harassment and help people get the help they need so all of society gets better. Firing people from one job sweeps the problem under the rug and solves nothing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is inappropriate for the employer to adjudicate the accusation as it ought to be done in a court of law, in which the accused is innocent until proven guilty.\n","id":"0e4c3e8a-ae77-4cb8-99c6-b602c9c21b5c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>With the tax bill expected to increase deficits by roughly 140 billion per year by the bipartisan congressional budget office, many people are obviously pointing out the hypocrisy of Republicans who similtaneously complained about the deficit in the past and pass tax cuts that objectively increase it, without any offset in economic growth that increases tax reicepts enough to cover the loss to Government revenue. This contradictory position is largely a result of needing to say things to uneducated voters aka low information during an election that are far more nuanced when it comes to actually governing fiscal policy as elected representatives. Both parties do it at least to some extent. That's just the nature of a political system in which people's votes are equal regardless of education or deeper understanding of policy matters. And on some level voters are aware of this, because they keep voting R despite a deficit that never seems to go down much at all, regardless of who is in power. When thinking about the deficit, what's really important is the value as a percent of GDP, which gives financial markets an idea of future capacity to service this debt on an indefinite basis. Individuals can't do this though in their own lives, we all get old, need to pay off debt, and retire so our savings and social security benefits can cover our basic needs until we die. So low information voters see this as also a problem for Governments as well. However, the Government is immortal for the most part, and certainly in a financial sense. In other words, deficits largely don't matter, and the deficit as a percent of GDP does not increase unless it exceeds nominal GDP growth real growth inflation . Certainly this has happened in the past, which is why our debt is over 100 of GDP now, but this is roughly in line with a financially stable position. Japan for example has much more debt with a population that is in a state of demographic collapse, yet this fact hasn't affected long term interest rates or perceived future default risk. Never mind the fact they do not benefit from global demand for their money like the US does as a major global reserve currency. Subsequentally, with a GDP quickly approaching 20 trillion, we can easily sustain trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, and most likely beyond that. If that increases economic growth and helps us fund necessities like medicare and social security, so be it. Deficits can be useful to our economy in the long run, which arguably hurts the European Union, having had to deal with an unreasonably hawkish German influence on fiscal and monetary issues, because Germans are still erroneously influenced by their tramatic history of hyperinflation, which has little modern relevance today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Worries about the deficit are largely unsubstantiated by economic facts\n","id":"4b6eddaf-1833-4b66-bd48-ff043b64dc37"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>No one has physically seen or heard from God, yet people claim to easily believe \/ imagine that God is perfect in every sense. It could be the case that people are merely imagining a being that is greater than other imagined beings like The Incredible Hulk or Spiderman.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The classical definition of God is contradictory or incoherent, and thus God cannot in principle exist.\n","id":"e7295198-dca0-448d-a845-73f12988cd44"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Democrats Cooperate with Donald Trump?<|ARGUMENT|>Trump has said multiple times that the Justice Department should investigate Clinton and the Democratic Party. Not co-operating with a President who wants opponents to be investigated for no reason at all is justified and does not violate democratic norms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Co-operation with a President who violates democratic norms is harmful to democracy and Democrats therefore should not do it.\n","id":"de93f81a-7b5c-40da-a17b-5b75c53aeb95"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm young with only about 5 years as a support tech, but my entire job revolves around being able to learn and utilize technology. My observation is that some time in an IT Guy's career you stop trying to stay on top of new trends and become complacent with what you have, and then any attempt to change those familiar tools gets met with resistance. Windows 8 is not a perfect operating system, mainly due to metro. But when I hear people who self identify as IT Workers act like it's the worst thing in the history of the world I always feel like they've ceased to even make an attempt. Windows 8 is not bad software. In some ways it was perhaps misguided, and most users will spend their initial few days developing workarounds and installing software to bypass some internal processes Which is the exact same thing that I do with Windows 7 or OSX. I would argue that many of the features of the Windows 8, server 2012 code base have improvements for power users shortcut Keys and with Microsoft's recent investments in Powershell I find it laughable when people complain about Server 2012 having metro. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I feel like IT Support personnel who dismiss Windows 8 as an operating system show a lack of adaptability and are therefore bad at their job.\n","id":"5df04ed3-ba3d-4973-99af-6bb23e636bf2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>There are no objective answers to questions about values, such as whether personal safety or freedom is more important in a specific policy area. The will of the people gives the government a mandate on what values it should prioritize.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States is a representative democracy, in theory. The will of the people is what should determine the laws of the land.\n","id":"3140e0df-7635-4018-bea5-042563fca73f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Hello, So here is my reasoning as to why it's complete bullshit that we're even having a discussion on this topic. First of all, this is not a gun rights , so leave that out of this, I am merely comparing two different issues, and the result of focusing on one or the other in our world. Second of all, I feel I should apologize for bringing this up so recently after the Mandalay Bay shooting, but I just can't seem to find the answer to this dilemma. Also, I'd like to mention I am not trying to marginalize the victims of the shooting, and I and many others were hurt deep down by the news and deeply sympathize with them. I'm talking a little more about massacres such as the recent Vegas shooting, the death toll was 58 people or Sandy Hook with 20 dead children as these events are the hot topic right now . Now I agree these are both incredibly horrible tragedies that should have never happened. Here's my problem though, we're all in agreement that 1 preventable death is unacceptable, but 20 is a tragedy. What if I told you, at least 2700 children on the same day as the shooting died in an excruciating and easily preventable manner? What I am referring to is starvation. Based off the statistic that 1,000,000 children starve to death each year, for every child shot to death at Sandy Hook, 135 around the world died a horrible, slow, painful death. If we're all so worried about these large death tolls, why not focus on the real killer of innocent people? For example, if I had 500 to give to a cause either child hunger, or gun violence, which on average would result in fewer deaths, and a better overall world? I just really really wish I wouldn't even have to type this out, and people would stop hurting each other and start loving one another. We have made great progress reducing the number of deaths, thanks to wonderful charitable organizations, and I feel it necessary to point out that there are good people out there countering the evil ones, so don't give up hope. I'm getting off track and emotional now, can you change my view? TL DR Way more children die of starvation than gun deaths, so why are we so focused on gun politics?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Devoting time and energy to gun politics based on morals is a waste of time, compared to other more significant issues.\n","id":"27b5bbff-e3c4-4ef5-b3e3-1d74b6b88e52"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>Coaches, janitorial staff, web developers, stadium and player managers, advertisers and doctors have jobs because of the popularity and scale of the NFL.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The NFL provides economic benefits and job opportunities to thousands of people apart from athletes.\n","id":"dd77c17a-d8ef-4eb3-a927-a6758ef859fb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have watched videos, read articles and books, and heard many tales about those known as psychopaths. I feel that the fear and hatred of these people is almost unwarranted, as they are only a step or two worse than the average narcissist. Consider how their lack of empathy, their cunning, and their high self esteem can help society. Statistics have shown that many corporate leaders are psychopaths. I'd imagine they'd make excellent doctors as well, as strange as it sounds. The job of a doctor is not to be your friend, or to put themselves into your shoes. It is to analyze your condition, spot problems, and prescribe a solution. Not to mention being a certified doctor is often an achievement that narcissistic people would like to have on their belts. Of course, I do understand some issues with these traits. Psychopaths are often selfish, considering their needs above others. Although medicine, especially in the private sector, is a job that doesn't always take a selfless heart. Doing your job well gets you treated well. But nevermind the medical positions, let's discuss their murderous intent they are truly feared for. Now, I suppose a psychopath could be convinced to kill for gain much easier than most, but not necessarily for the hell of it or over a personal grudge, as some would claim. If you consider murder an enjoyable act, you likely have many more issues besides psychopathy. Perhaps they could be motivated by the rush of killing, maybe they consider the successful murder of an individual as another achievement on their belt, another thing that they have done. Again, I am no expert this is all really just theory and conjecture. There is a reason I posted to this subreddit, I really want to see better educated arguments than this one for and against my opinion.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Psychopaths are perfectly fine\n","id":"271a0ab6-093c-4498-bfac-51ecbb9bc430"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Hunger Games-Style Tournaments Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>Many governments allow gambling. As has been argued, it reallocates wealth from the lower classes to the upper classes, often through neurotic and addictive pressures Aasved, p. 49<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Governments exploit their citizens for monetary gain in various other ways. Exploitative structures are thus already in place; these tournaments are not meaningfully different.\n","id":"f37baaa6-9582-41a4-9ad1-2c716343e3ac"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Backstory. He's just come back from university and is severely depressed and has started claiming that he feels like he wants to die. He wont take anything from us, cant do anything for himself, refuses to get out of bed, is un motivated in everything in life, afraid of everyone and everything and has no drive to have an actual life. He's an amoeba that drinks energy drinks and plays fucking League of Legends. Not only this but he's a drain on my family, he is causing everyone around him in tolerable pain and suffering through the way he acts. If he was fucking dead at least we would be able to remember the good times instead of this fucking hollow person i see in front of me. We all put so much time and love into him, and we get nothing back. I sick of it. I want my view changed so i can stop being so angry. EDIT i need to clear things up. First of all, I have been through exactly the same worse than he has. so i know about overcoming these mountains. B he is on medications and seeing a councillor once a week C The its a disease comments add nothing of value, im aware of this, im quite mentally ill myself. I understand that hes not supposed to just snap out of it. THE REASON FOR THIS POST IS THAT I KNOW IM BEING HORRIBLE NASTY A MASSIVE CUNT. I WANT SOMEONE FROM HIS PERSPECTIVE TO HELP ME TO UNDERSTAND BETTER HOW HE IS FEELING SO I CAN STOP BEING ANGRY. I HATE MYSELF FOR FEELING THIS WAY AND I KNOW ITS WRONG.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"- It would be a lot better for everyone if my brother just fucking killed himself.\n","id":"337a872a-b657-4c97-b116-c27b5c5e854c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>How can you convince me that all the nations that i'm allowed to visit aren't all working together to hide a bigger and better and more free world. Maybe the internet I know is actually just a restricted and monitored intranet. I personally don't know anyone who has tried to fly a plane in any direction they wanted for as long as they wanted, so maybe all commercial airlines are restricted to brother nations that perpetuate the lie. You get the idea, convince me we aren't in North Korea 2. EDIT I think you guys are on to something with the extent of GPS involvement in the shipping and modern day travel that would need to be manipulated. It would be too intricate, and the lack of oppression makes it that much more unlikely. I wish I could give you all 8710 , but i'm giving it to u GnosticGnome, because of how clear and calm he she was. Thanks guys.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Please convince me we aren't currently in a North Korea-like situation\n","id":"e305429b-245e-4032-983f-f30a1b9dff2e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is The Best Diet For Human Health And Well Being?<|ARGUMENT|>Phytic acid as phytate, is an anti-nutrient present in legumes, a main staple of the Mediterranean diet. In the body, phytic acid heavily binds to essential minerals like iron, calcium, and zinc making them less absorbable in the intestines.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some nutrients present in some Mediterranean diet-recommended produce are not beneficial for human consumption.\n","id":"2fa733bd-f408-40ac-a77c-a1ae62ba511f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>i keep reading post regarding how men wouldn't like it if only women made decisions for mens health. i read over and over how there should be equal representation on corporate boards and government offices, that things would change if women could get in to those positions of power. but i as an every day male on the street earning a living pay check to paycheck i don't see any benefit to having only men in positions of power. why do so many women think that average men get some kind of benefit. maybe i'm just blind to the benefits. do women not get a straw with their drinks? do woman not get a dipping sauce with their chicken mcnuggets? am i blindly living the high life with free refills at fast food establishments while secretly women have to pay for every drink? if you are a woman do you think a female ceo would radically change how woman are treated or if we had more elected female officials that they would stray from their base and just give benefits to women only?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"As a male i get no benefit from men being in positions of power as ceo's or elected officials.\n","id":"d03914a2-ac6b-402f-87dc-3ed795936305"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have never been able to understand the legitimacy of externally imposed sanctions in diplomacy. Assuming a condition grievous enough to necessitate an attempt by one nation to change the operating conditions of another nation i.e. removing from consideration the validity of the concept of a 'just war' , the prevailing view seems to be that to avoid non 'cold' war at all costs is the 'moral' choice. The imposition of economic sanctions is a common way of applying leverage to induce change in the behavior of a sovereign nation without use of military force. While I am not in any way arguing that the loss of human life is morally acceptable, nor that war does not leave scars on the populace at both the individual and societal levels, nor that 'hosting' a war does not have the potential for myriad negative effects on a country's functioning long after the cessation of hostilities, I do still believe that the 'avoid war at all costs' approach takes the short view at the expense of the long view, as measured in the quality of life of the target nations citizens. If it is reasonable to assume that the point of sanctions is to make the target regime unpopular enough that the citizenry is motivated to force either regime change or at least a change in the offending practice s , then it is already a given that the intervention being put in place is designed to put stresses on the civilian population. Building on that assumption that the system relies on the ruling regime ensuring that stress flows downhill , and on the assumption that international intervention is only discussed when the regime in power is perpetrating an action that the international community considers unacceptable enough to interfere, is it not also reasonable to expect that the targeted regime is in a position of significant power over its citizenry? If the population were able to do something about the issue, would they not have done so by that point? If you assume that there is a marked chance that the population is not in a position to effect change, then the imposition of sanctions guarantees a decrease in civilian quality of life without guaranteeing amelioration of the root issue. In that case, do you not risk increasing the likelihood of civilians living in a state of despair, a condition that risks becoming ingrained in the culture, crossing generational boundaries, and that also leads to civilian deaths over time from several different vectors ? So, in the case of sanctions, are you not risking a negative effect on an entire civilian population over an indefinite period of time for a dubious chance of achieving the desired change and a decent chance of reinforcing the status quo? In the case of war, are you not perpetrating a larger but finite negative effect on a portion potentially entire, likely not of the civilian population for a finite period of time, with a superior likelihood of achieving the desired change some alteration of the status quo guaranteed ? Would this not suggest that when you include time as measured in generations as a factor, the morality of the choice boils down to whether the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? I have not referenced specific conflicts in order to avoid derailing the discussion before it starts, but I will say that my views are informed by some degree of historical study and some degree of second hand familiarity. No advanced study, and no strong emotional attachment involved. Please, change my view. TL DR War is hell for one generation on both sides of the conflict, but the timing is finite and some degree of change is guaranteed. Sanctions make life hell for those who can least afford it, potentially indefinitely, as no change is guaranteed and the likelihood of change actually decreases the more the target regime is in a position to ensure that life was already hell to begin with. I am neither completely ignorant nor an expert on the subject. <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Economic sanctions are no more morally defensible than use of military force\n","id":"72d8d152-5e66-4f56-a616-de8f8ab6763a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|> This is an agreement subject to change whenever anyone wants, in any way anyone wants. I understand agreeing to this then not following it is dishonest, and agree to the consequence of being treated accordingly x200B Right now I want to try my best to x200B Spend time energy making plans only if I want to try my best in making them happen. I understand the difference between trying my best at something the How , and the result the What . If I cant do something, I'll explain where or how I\u2019m stuck, or else I\u2019m not trying my best. Communicate when I don't understand, agree with, or want any pieces of this agreement, bringing a better alternative. Prioritize my relationship with myself, as how I treat my relationship with you is only a reflection of how I treat my relationship with myself. Appreciate the attraction of our personalities, understanding there\u2019s just as much to gain from how opposites attract, as there is to lose from expecting the lesser skilled to have applied as much time energy as the better skilled. Appreciate the physical sexual attraction for the other as the shallow layer of sweet sugar on top of the deeper more fulfilling layer of our personalities\u2019 attraction from my connection with you, and the even deeper layer of inherent self worth from my connection with myself. Accept that expectations are always only poisonous to the quality of our connection. As a better alternative, I want to replace trusting others with taking responsibility for my own time energy by agreeing to clear coinciding consequences in the event that someone bails on a plan together. Be as accurate as I can over being right. I understand the elusive trap of power in wanting to be obeyed as a dictator Queen King, and that the reasons my mind tries to justify this desire with are narcissistic fallacies. Tell an unpleasant truth over a pleasant lie. As a speaker, express my uninterrupted truth, not holding back. As a listener, empathically listen to the speaker\u2019s reality they are sharing, asking them to better define what they mean instead of interpreting what I think they mean when I don\u2019t understand. Rather be optimistic and wrong than be pessimistic and right.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"This Agreement Guarantees The Foundation For The Best Personal Connection\n","id":"1239789c-149d-439c-a0a1-980f30b9cc1b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Kialo should separate voting into relevance and veracity of claim.<|ARGUMENT|>What you see in a near-death experience, is influenced by your cultural background, including your religion People that see an angel or a god, only see ones consistent with their own religious beliefs regardless of whether they're f.e. Christian or Hindu.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The same experiences involving God happen with other deities, such as Shiva, Ogum, and any other kind of god or spiritual entity. If we agree that all of these experiences are real, then the God of classical theism cannot exist.\n","id":"28c70c2e-77d8-4011-bf21-8b715e0bc050"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So last week I had an argument with this guy on the post with that girl that had the Class of 2022 shirt on. link to the argument the deleted comment pointed out that she is a popular girl at the moment on Creepshots and all of my comments were getting downvoted after I said that I thought that that was disgusting and wrong. And he was getting support for his opinion. I honestly don't see how anyone could logically condone his point of view. So does my view need to be changed in this subject?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think that a little girl on CreepShots is very wrong and creepy\n","id":"6b5c69e5-4bdc-41b7-a1af-4a07a72cb111"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is transhumanism the next step in human evolution?<|ARGUMENT|>Transhumanism allows for unexpected activity and performance or ability. Yes, a bit like ordinary superheroes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Transhumanism could speed up human evolution, which provides multiple benefits.\n","id":"00894a50-10be-4119-b5f1-d2205b18827b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>There is no objective standard for whether a given religious experience is a hallucination, or a revelation. It is judged differently by observers, in accordance with their bias.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Hallucinations are regularly experienced. However fascinating, these experiences provide no evidence supporting the existence of anything observed or experienced in the hallucination.\n","id":"abe2f342-565a-429b-9c4f-3a33656bee5d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>United States mass shooting extensiveness and underlying causes<|ARGUMENT|>Guns and their accessibility is the one common variable when it comes to a large number of cases of mass shootings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The availability of guns is a major contributing factor for mass shootings in the United States.\n","id":"0c8c77d5-1a44-4326-be65-c4bb3329d836"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should School be Mandatory?<|ARGUMENT|>Public schooling ensures that children from all backgrounds at least have access to similar resources such as teachers when it comes to education.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mandatory schooling ensures that all children have an equal start.\n","id":"97f79231-b766-4f8f-bcbc-1ccbfbd0deb5"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Heads up, this is a big read, be respectful. I really would like to try and openly discuss something here, if u feel lile compulsively posting insults or ignoring then making a rash judgement and talling shit about democrats then go for it, but know your proving my point Sorry for the typos, I'm not proof reading this shit Ok so currently my mother is with the Q anon thing and I need to understand why. So, I understand that it's made some crazy predictions but I also see a fair few discrepencies with the values held in taking down corruption. I'll try and keep it simple so well focus on the muller investigation. So Q declared that there was never anything, no corruption or collusion or anything and that it was a scheme from the deep state As were all probably aware muller himself came out and rightfully verified that there was 'not enough evidence' to make the call rather than what barr and trump echoed as innocent and squeaky clean. This wasn't really the case, there were instances of private meetings with Russian officials, him not filling out Miller's questions, it's documented that he was saved from futher crimes because his officials just didn't carry out his orders and let's not forget that he genuinely announced it would be the end of his presidency when he found out muller was investigating. You also may or may not remeber Q exclaimed that it was muller and trump working together in 2018. There was conspiracy of Russian officials interfearing with the 2016 election. According to Q this was another ploy by the democrats to frame trump in a bad way and use it to hide their wrong doings. This actually turned out to be the case, it was found that online russain operatives used social media to plant conspiracy theories to sway the election, since then trump has also confirmed that he had 'nothing to do with russia helping him win the election'. This is important because it shows vladamir putins old and continuous ambition to undermine our america democray the flow of comunication that allows people to make a decition together as his government is basically a dictatorship with their media staging different things to make him look good, people being killed if that disagree including his opposition , North Korean song vibes it's fucking weird. So far we have all seen and endured a big shift in our political system, people's views growing futher apart and the inability to discuss with the other side. This manifests in trumps fake news agenda . This has holes in it for a few reasons, firstly his news network aka fox has been declared his favourite so many times. We all know how much he loves fox. The reporters have featured in his campaigns alot, its owned by rupert murdoch currently owns all of australias media and it is objectivley and notoriously bias .This is Chummy relationship is especially shown when he lashes at fox of that report badly about him. Now I'm not saying what they serve is any political bias, but you have to consider the implications of them being so close. People are supposed to be able.to.trust the news to give them the information they need to vote. But when you have sean hanidy getting on stage at a rally or while reporting saying you guys need to vote.for.trump. I mean I don't know what to tell you, that is bias. So then I ask my self, that by trumps logic basically every other news network is complete bias so we should only listen to fox but it's blaintantly bias. NOW My running theory is based on all this and more is that Q is russain officials that are supporting communicating with trump to try and manipulate his supporters into only listening to his properganda. In turn this will devide us futher as the common ground becomes increasingly difficult to find between the 2 parties. instead of a discussion people now have the defense of fake news Q theory allowing them to dismiss outer sources and point the finger at things the democrats have done. Change. My. Mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Q anon\/trump on a whole is the Russians and trump trying to over through American democracy\n","id":"b7e7717e-6745-43f3-aaf7-1426acb5bfeb"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Legalization of Marijuana<|ARGUMENT|>Marijuana may indeed have indirect social costs, such as increased healthcare costs, increased risks on the road, and others. But, illegalizing marijuana on this basis risks being seen as arbitrary discrimination against marijuana. Wouldn't you also have to illegalize alcohol, tobacco, and fast food on a similar basis. Certainly, the social costs and risks of these substances can be argued as equivalent to the risks of marijuana consumption. Illegalizing marijuana on the basis of its social costs, therefore, opens the law to accusations of being arbitrary, discriminatory, and of double standards. This is not good for the law and the integrity of the social contract.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Marijuana's social costs should not be arbitrarily discriminated against.\n","id":"bcb61432-7c5d-4683-95ab-bf3f022c304c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My current view about the universe and consciousness is this I'm convinced that we live in a multiverse and our universe is an extremely complex mathematical pattern patterns emerging from random noise that is eternal and infinite. Our consciousness is another mathematical pattern interacting with the pattern of the universe without which other patterns would lose all meaning. Passage of time is the pattern of our self and the universe going back into disorder entropy . Philosophy is written in this grand book \u2014 I mean the Universe \u2014 which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth. Galileo Galilei Cellular automatons such as Conway's game of life show how simple rules and randomness can form patterns that continue to form more complex patterns, leading to emergence of all kinds of complex phenomena. If we can one day create simulated universes inside a computer and to a very limited extend we already can, we should assume that our own universe works somewhat similarly. Our universe is unlikely to be the only universe. Why? Because our universe, despite being a bit chaotic, seems to have the perfect properties for intelligent life to exist. For example, the amount of dark energy in our universe seems to be in the sweet spot where our universe doesn't collapse on its own gravity or rip apart. So either you say our universe exists because of magic God or you calculate that our universe is very unlikely and there must have been many tries failed universes that didn't lead into any conscious patterns we call intelligent life. Naturally we find ourselves on a near perfect planet in a near perfect universe. Here are some counterarguments and my responses to them Our universe came from nothing Impossible. Some physicists will say that the universe came from nothing but it all comes down to the fact that in English nothing and thing can have more than one definition. Something can look like nothing from the perspective of classical physics but on the quantum level, we find that there's still something happening there. Empty space is not truly empty. Our universe was created by God eternal omnipotent creator This introduces several problems while solving none. If God can be eternal, why can't the universe be? If God is not eternal, where did he she come from? Our universe is a simulation While interesting, the simulation hypothesis doesn't answer the question about the origin of everything. We could be living in a simulated universe but ultimately we would still need to explain existance of the first base universe . And if everything is just a pattern, there's no difference between simulated and real patterns. I'm not a physicist and my argument is mostly philosophical but it appears that physicists actually have found more evidence supporting this theory than evidence against it. Of course you're welcome to prove me wrong and change my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Our universe is just one mathematical pattern out of infinite patterns in a multiverse\n","id":"1cea1dfd-99f6-496e-aafe-ee96f60f394b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Firstly, I think that some animals that are autonomous and able to suffer, have, at least, a right to not have to feel pain given that human's feel they deserve it for the same reasons. However, contradicting this, surely a mouse, or an organism that has not developed the cognitive ability to thoroughly appreciate suffering of course, this phrasing is somewhat crude and does not support my meaning should not be subject or entitled to similar rules. For instance, perhaps they do not feel or have the impact of pain cognitively as vividly or even similarly to humans, and thus they should not be entitled to them as a birthright. Furthermore, I disagree with the notion that all animals should enjoy the exact same freedoms and rights as humans I agree with rights and responsibilities. I feel that if a sheep deserves to be able to live autonomously, the sheep also needs to pay taxes, and if not, cannot be integrated into society as we know it, and as human expansion grows, this will no longer be an option for these animals. As I see it, being a pet or livestock is the only viable and or best living alternative for animals although factory farming, I do agree, is an unfortunate circumstance, which should be changed. Edit Sorry, I should have made it clear that I am talking about animals in a human system. Edit 2 Sorry, I will clarify my writing is quite ambiguous at times. I think animals should be able to enjoy the same rights that humans deserve because they are human, within a human system, like government. I do not believe that they should deserve the rights that they require responsibility for. As an example, I think that dogs should have a freedom to be free from suffering in which I mean harm on a physical and psychological level they need to meet both parameters. This of course depends on the animals ability to comprehend this suffering mentally. If this is happening within a human society, I believe it is our duty as citizens to remove said suffering, or pay no attention to human struggle as I feel the justification for both are equally as weak. All or none. I want this to be challenged as in, whether or not this is a viable or stupid idea.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think some animals should enjoy human liberties dependent on the species - however not all\n","id":"426ace9d-5fba-44fc-a5cd-173b23c1423a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Sex Work Be Legal?<|ARGUMENT|>For some people, e.g. the handicapped or disfigured, prostitution is the only possibility to have sex. If it were illegal, these people could only fulfill their natural desires by committing a crime.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Buying and selling sex should be legal for sex workers and their clients.\n","id":"1a4974fb-d175-4320-951e-2723bdf75bd0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Alright, so recently we've been seeing a lot of politicians stating that global warming is a real problem but they don't think we should enact policy to start the transition to a greener economy. Either they say that it costs too much, that business Oil companies will be hurt and therefore the economy at large will perform poorly, or that we'll lose jobs because companies that hurt the environment will leave and jobs will be lost. I however believe, despite the consequences of major reform to industry to make it greener, we'll end up better in the long run. Here are my reasons Global Warming is speeding up and won't decline unless action is taken to prevent it's current trajectory. We could find ourselves in a completely changed world in 50 years in terms of rising seas, ecological migration, and decreased livability in regions such as North Africa, which is currently the most sensitive area to global warming. A more ecological economy will create new qualified jobs that will make up for the job losses in the coal oil natural gas industry. These jobs are higher paying and might lead to a growth of median household income for millions of families. Which leads to higher consumption and therefore a growth of demand in the economy at large. Less dependence on oil and less influence of oil on international markets. Currently the USA is the second largest consumer of oil in the world, the cost to the taxpayer in subsidies in enormous and would be better spent on green energy subsidies. I am not an expert on ecology, economics or trade, please forgive any misconceptions I may have if something I've said is incorrect.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The transition to a more ecological economy is worth the short-term costs in the long run.\n","id":"cc3a912d-eed5-4849-967d-4429c5e6f6aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>High school grads are just too young and irresponsible to live away from home en masse. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think the culture of 'going away for college' at age 18 needs to be re-thought.\n","id":"7e6bd495-9ac2-41c3-815f-08ea49d3d938"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>A Negative Income Tax distorts wealthy people's incentive to work less than a UBI does. Under a UBI, wealthy people are taxed at a percent of their income and then a flat amount is returned to them under the UBI. This makes their marginal tax rate higher than if they were simply subject to a NIT.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A Negative Income Tax refund is equivalent to a taxed UBI, but more cost-effective.\n","id":"1dc6851d-bd7f-4d6d-af26-0e35b22f4a14"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the United States close Guantanamo Bay?<|ARGUMENT|>Political pressure over Guantanamo led the Obama administration to preference killing terror suspects with drone strikes rather than attempting to capture them, leading to a massive expansion of the drone program.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The alternatives to Guantanamo Bay are both less safe for the United States and less humane for terror suspects.\n","id":"6a0f75ca-7676-4ec4-812e-668c0bcbbd72"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>God was always invoked when we could not explain something. Some people do this up until today.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"God exists in the explanations of things that are yet to discover.\n","id":"fe3cbea0-446a-4a0b-9742-45e30e7b423f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Path to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the US<|ARGUMENT|>Randy Neugebauer, US Representative R-TX, in a July 2, 2007 website section titled \"Randy's Roundups,\": \"Amnesty is bad policy and sends the message that immigrants are better off breaking our laws rather than respecting them.\"4<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Path to citizenship sends message that breaking laws is OK\n","id":"a4b7a122-f81f-40b8-bac7-113f67dd3ebd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Gillette's toxic masculinity ad good?<|ARGUMENT|>It incorrectly classifies as toxic activities that could be interpreted as acceptable, including: an attempt to approach a woman on the street, and kids playing rough.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It includes a series of demeaning clips implying that the specific male activities outlined in the advert are toxic.\n","id":"3046c75d-32b0-458d-a6aa-fa4cc2ca2245"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should horse racing be banned?<|ARGUMENT|>If a bull is not killed duringordinary three sequences of a bullfight the bullfighter typically cuts the spinal cord of the bull and slices its medulla oblongata. This method, was banned from slaughterhouses in the EU, due to its cruelty.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In recent years, there has been an improvement of animal welfare practices in the beef, pork, and poultry industries in EU countries, through the formulation and enforcement of new legislation. FAO, p. 20\n","id":"91a78bd9-f4c6-4156-a77d-fd383abb612f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Right now, I think that the only way for the future to have hope is for people to stop protecting the weak. This way, we humans only allow the strongest and smartest to survive, resulting in the betterment of our species and increased chances of survival in the future. I also have this somewhat unrelated view that all the poor I'm looking at poverty in Africa should be just 'killed off' so that we don't have to waste any more resources on them. Also, we get lots of land from the space occupied by the poor and nearly no one will be born into poverty anymore. EDIT By the way, 'Killing off Africa's poor' has nothing to do with my main argument. I wasn't really sure how to phrase what I wanted to say, but I hope you can understand what I said above. However firmly I believe in this, this is really kind of disturbing to me as it's just so inhumane.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm convinced that natural selection is the way to go in this world. Please,\n","id":"a70b220d-41c4-4dcf-8298-e9d5de81a445"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>For example, there was a recent segment on TV about a bird which had an injured wing due to an accident with a tree. The wildlife rescue service took the bird away and with treatment, the bird was able to fly again and was released into the wild. The main problem I see is that this works against natural selection and could actually harm more animals in the future. If humans hadn't intervened, the bird would have died, and over a large span of time, this would act to improve the gene pool. Some people ask why we don't do this with humans, and my answer to this is primarily because humans no longer exist in an environment which is as competitive as the natural world and so natural selection no longer plays a significant part.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I do not believe that rescuing animals that may die due to natural causes is a good idea.\n","id":"daa23f39-f069-44e7-b9d5-868b6e01996f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>19 out of 54 of the UK's Prime Ministers attended Eton, an expensive boarding school for boys with an elitist reputation.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Politicians are also accused of being out-of-touch due to their privileged backgrounds.\n","id":"0994edc1-2f68-49f9-b661-d6ee5cbb6d38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe the world would be better off without it. There just seems to be little talent involved other than vocals, and with autotune, even those can be faked. Is there even a point to this music other than teaching kids to party and dress like a whore?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe the American Pop music industry Is worthless and should disappear from the planet.\n","id":"fbf5908c-2daf-4658-b8b8-9e19926e3d38"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Which political party is best for America?<|ARGUMENT|>Poorer academic performance e.g lower general cognitive ability commonly seen in affirmative action graduates would undoubtedly lead to poor job performance<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Affirmative action programs in college lead to less-qualified professionals in the workforce.\n","id":"420565ae-1c38-4cfe-ad2e-c60a5123ad78"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does mainstream feminism exploit women of colour?<|ARGUMENT|>Under black feminist Edith Barksdale-Sloan, the National Committee of Household Employment organized a national association of domestic workers dedicated to \u201cwinning good wages and benefits, raising consciousness and educating consumers of domestic services.\u201d.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Women of color have been leaders in major national feminist organizations.\n","id":"fb691424-6a69-4c08-8dc4-38b8d613fa64"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Let me preface this by saying that I'm a 5'6 dude, but am also gay so shortness doesn't impact me at all in the way that it does for my fellow short straight friends who seem to have a lot tougher time out there. Some arguments I've read against There are girls who don't care about height, you will find them eventually As long as you're confident and charismatic your height will be of little factor Anecdote about knowing a couple with the girl taller than her boyfriend, or being in a relationship like that In response This can be said about any feature that is considered less attractive. The issue is that it's in the minority, hence the disadvantage part. Doesn't change the fact that if one had a several inches more of height they would have an easier time in the dating pool. The issue with this statement is that not every guy has the confidence and charisma to be able to make it work like that. Also the fact that being taller means less of a standard is held to personality just further showcases the disadvantage. Kind of ties in with 1 but yes there are girls out there who genuinely don't mind height having a shorter boyfriend. But these anecdotes and one off cases don't change the fact that most girls will find tallness more attractive than shortness don't have hard statistics but you can go on youtube and watch those how important is height would you date a short guy interview type questions and candid answers will majority overwhelmingly skew to tallness. So to sum it up, my current position It is disadvantageous being a short straight guy in the dating scene because of the fact that tallness is considered more attractive by a majority of women not something that you can change but just something you have to live with. What I'm hoping to gain understand That perhaps it isn't as bad for short straight guys as I make it out to be. After all, I don't have personal experience in this. My current perspective is just what I gathered from reading about experiences, hearing candid opinions from girls, and witnessing short straight guys navigate in the dating world.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Short straight guys are at a disadvantage when it comes to dating\n","id":"c12f0035-439e-4eab-8132-66cfaffa9c30"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I know so many people who love Kayne and will defend anything that he does. His ego is huge and I just don\u2019t know how to excuse a lot of what he says. From a lot of what I\u2019ve read about him he makes crazy demands of his staff, throws tantrums, and he views himself so highly it goes beyond the point of reason. For example running for president? What is he thinking? He knows nothing about what it takes and has no experience, which could have been said of Trump too, but that doesn\u2019t make it right. Looking at such an important role and aiming for it risks knocking out other potentially qualified candidates just because you\u2019re more famous. That is just selfish and shows you\u2019re not looking at the bigger picture of what\u2019s better for everyone. Of course too, now he\u2019s coming out as a massive Trump supporter which just seems like a move. I mean, he didn\u2019t support Bush from what I\u2019ve read, and now he\u2019s a staunch republican? He also does not appear to be responsible for much of his success in his earliest and most loved songs. He seems to almost always have ghost writers on his tracks. And yet, he is off the rails in praising himself and justifying his ego. I\u2019ve heard about things like him refusing to push his own elevator buttons. That kind of stuff is just ridiculous and I don\u2019t get why, just because of his music, people excuse his character. To change my view I\u2019m looking for examples of why he\u2019s good as a person, not just an artist. How do people defend him? What is it about Kanye that makes him exempt from the consequences of all the stuff he says? Why still love him? I mean beyond just setting all that aside because you \u201clike his music\u201d. I mean why do people still like him as a person specifically?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kanye is not an amazing person and all the things he says aren\u2019t justifiable.\n","id":"6eb3507b-70cd-4ff0-967f-703f403c97be"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First point, not as strong but probably enough reason on it's own Either of the other choices is more poignant than de escalating the situation ^ note that I did enjoy that having made all the right decisions in earlier games payed off, I just think it would have been much more moving to have seen one of the other two endings during my playthrough ^ Second point having to make this choice would be far more in theme with the trilogy in general and specifically the ending. One of many complaints about the ending is that it ignores the fact you just got the quarians and geth to live in peace. Beyond that, the trilogy is meant to be about having to make hard choices and living with the consequences.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mass Effect 3 would have been a better game if the Geth\/Quarian situation had not been peacefully resolvable\n","id":"bc1fdf32-40a1-46ff-b6f9-7592457a9bd4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Speech on the Internet: Should Internet Companies Deny Service to White Supremacists?<|ARGUMENT|>The aftershock of WikiLeaks releasing sensitive information on the US government in 2010 caused 'unofficial government pressure on intermediaries that hosted WikiLeaks. While they were easily able to recover, it raised serious questions about the power Internet companies have if utilised.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some governments place undue pressure on Internet companies to behave as they would wish, regardless of the views of the individual company. This suggests that the ability of internet companies to censor speech is limited.\n","id":"1add5d38-abdf-4a6e-a5df-5a6587baa75d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I am an American myself. I've been talking to my mom about the current candidates for the 2016 presidential election. I'm trying to stay non committal until I get all the facts, but she is telling me I'm dumb for even considering Sanders because he won't fight for us and his foreign policy is weak. Now, I'm still pretty uneducated on this topic. I'm not really sure what to search for to educate myself. But it seems to me that the US has been pretty trigger happy at least recently , and eager to jump straight into conflict rather than considering diplomatic resolution. I think that a move in that direction would benefit the US in both lives and money saved.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that the US should try harder at resolution before entering armed conflict; that Americans are 'trigger-happy'\n","id":"ebef3f7f-ed96-46a0-99ba-28e4052d8738"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Ethics of Eating Animals: Is Eating Meat Wrong?<|ARGUMENT|>Historical evidence validates this. 200 years ago the world population was under a billion and 95% of humans were living in \"absolute poverty\". Today we have a global population of 7.2 billion and only 10% of humans are living in absolute poverty. Overpopulation is a myth. It has been disproven time and time again since Thomas Malthus popularized the notion in the 18th century. More humans = more innovation = less scarcity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"How much meat to produce will be solved automatically by supply and demand. If food is scarce, prices will rise, and the most efficient forms of production will be favored.\n","id":"9526482c-061b-4c20-acc9-4bd14e85b58c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>All Humans Should Be Vegan.<|ARGUMENT|>Even if farm animals became wild or feral animals, killing will still happen, as a bigger animal would simply do it instead. That's how nature is: indiscriminate to killing and not caring about it taking place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without the cycle of life, nature dies All life ends in the mouth of another.\n","id":"ce8ec7a8-e44f-4245-8be6-dbf60b223a00"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should prisons exist?<|ARGUMENT|>Even those who manage to secure some form of employment must work in jobs with little pay or security, and lose pension rights<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many find it impossible to get a job after prison. Poverty thus pushes them back towards crime.\n","id":"2366d5c4-df94-4132-9c17-2f2f7da7511d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Governments should impose methods of population control.<|ARGUMENT|>Having more than one sibling increases the chances that you will have a friendly relationship with at least one of them. Having a sibling with whom you can share your thoughts is important for your personal development.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Growing up without siblings can have negative social consequences on both youth and adult life. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\n","id":"8f90ed39-831e-4ab8-9610-6e2685a1da15"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Existence of God<|ARGUMENT|>If everything in the universe is God, including all of us, then that would suggest God does exist and is omniscient through us, because we exist.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The theistic conception of God is wrong, and only a god or gods of another conception actually exist.\n","id":"95f14d24-1981-4191-ae00-e2fef18fd5e8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>DC handgun ban<|ARGUMENT|>It has been empirically proven that among countries of the world the ones with the lowest private ownership of handguns have a significantly lower homicide rate<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Worldwide the ownership of handguns has been correlated with higher homicide rates\n","id":"c5742954-f9ac-4b2a-83d1-a81d9454602c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This isn't about any one political argument, though I will pull from certain arguments for examples. Oftentimes, I will hear someone say that personal responsibility is the fix for some issue or another. The crime rate, drug addiction, people living in poverty, and gun safety arguments are the most common times I hear that. The argument is that each person involved in these social issues is responsible for their own decisions, and if they just had the moral fortitude to take personal responsibility for their own actions, we wouldn't have these issues. This view is entirely useless, I think. Since personal responsibility is something that can only ever come from the self, I think the personal responsibility argument serves only to deflect away from any sort of societal change that might actually have a positive effect. The claim of personal responsibility serves to only make those who don't want to actually commit to an action to better the world feel better about their decision not to. After all, if the only solution is personal responsibility, then what can they do about it. As an abstract example, say a million people go down a hallway, and choose to turn right or left. At first, just about half of the group turns left, and half right. But then, some advertising goes up in the hallway, and suddenly, 900,000 people are choosing to turn right, and only 10 go left. Each person has the personal choice to go either way, but if external factors are pushing 90 to go a certain way, then we cannot blame personal responsibility for the trend to turn right. This abstract applies to just about every social issue. Individuals living in poverty do have an individual responsibility to look after their own lives, but if a disproportionate amount of people are living in poverty in a wealthy society, then that isn't because all the poor people have low moral fortitude. It must be because due to external factors, and those factors should be what society tries to address. It's important to note that the opposite is true as well social trends are never the answer to personal issues. If you have a friend that is addicted to heroin, and who doesn't seek help because the opioid epidemic made him get addicted so it's not his fault, then that person is just as in the wrong as the person claiming personal responsibility is the cause of all of society's ills. I believe we must accept that personal responsibility is a key factor in every individual's life, but at the same time, that social trends guide the actions of billions. These two ideas can exist together, without contradicting each other. Change My View<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"\"Personal responsibility\" is never the answer to large scale social issues.\n","id":"f84c17af-7c59-4342-a046-591faf809c7d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is oriented towards more selective schools but my view holds for all normal colleges. I just don't understand how affirmative action policies can be justified when they are quite literally racial discrimination. It's not just an insignificant advantage disparities between African American and white SAT scores reach as high as 171 points Consortium on Financing Higher Education . These policies also undermine the achievements of minorities who DO deserve to get in since they're dismissed as only having gotten in due to affirmative action. Diversity I've heard many talk about how colleges gain diversity by admitting students from different races but I don't see how this contributes to anything but diversity in skin color. Colleges are educational institutions and intellectuality should be their primary focus, not trying to combat racism. Just because an individual is a minority doesn't necessarily mean that they have a unique intellectual background. Asians are generally at a disadvantage but many come from very diverse backgrounds. Intellectual diversity can best be conveyed through the subjective portion of the application essays, recommendations, interviews, etc. and schools can select intellectually diverse classes based on that. Helping the Disadvantaged Some claim that these policies exist to 'equalize the playing field' but empirics prove that such policies benefit the middle and upper class minorities the most and rarely those who truly need help. I think it's very fair to give an advantage to low income students who typically don't have access to the same resources as many other applicants and can contribute unique perspectives. However, colleges already consider income levels and this could be used as a much more effective alternative to speculating from race. Of course, in certain extenuating circumstances, if students think that their race uniquely disadvantages them or something, they can write about it in the optional essay offered by almost all schools allowing students to inform the universities of anything they want. I think it's extremely unfair for an Asian person who works extremely hard to be rejected in favor of a student who is much less qualified but is a minority. I also feel somewhat bad for holding this perspective so I truly hope you guys will . EDIT This question is in the context of American students and American universities partly since I'm unaware of any other universities with such policies. EDIT2 For those of you who don't want to scroll down to see the deltas, I found this thread to be particularly compelling and very unique.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Race should not be a factor in college admission\n","id":"63645ed3-f6d1-4b52-80c7-5824fbaf7d0d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Mozzarella is an unnecessary cheese. It is the sad dried out step sister of the rich creamy goodness that is burrata. Any food made with mozzarella would be improved by using burrata instead. Pizza, sandwiches, salads, toast, you name it, burrata is always the better option. Automod keeps telling me this post is too short, so here are more characters mozzarella is pointless because burrata is champion, most mozzarella oddly chewy and dry, higher quality mozzarella is just trying to emulate the pure delight that is burrata. Swipe left on mozzarella, swipe right on burrata. Happy now automod?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Burrata beats mozzarella every time\n","id":"57fa3d84-ca4e-411a-9303-37dd09b9277e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I used to think sex robots will turn people into hermits, and destroy dating. However I come to think that instead of destroying dating, it would enhance it. My reasoning comes from the simple Angle of men desiring sex. If men got all the sex they need. It would mean that they would date real woman for their personality and who they are, instead of just sex as a part of it. Also woman will be more sexually liberated than ever because the need for less sex would probably drop sexual harassment, and the availability of male sex robots would enable woman to become much more selective of their dating partners than ever before. If anything woman would become more empowered than men.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think Sex Robots will make dating relationships better and empower woman more\n","id":"0b970c86-19be-4f5a-b3e8-71fd5fef4733"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Bare with me since this is my first post here. I think that when people think that My political view on X is correct and your view is wrong , it doesn't solve any problems find any solutions. If people tried to find compromises rather than trying to prove each other wrong, things would run a lot smoother. For example, in the United States on the topic of gun control, one side says Guns are the problem, not mental health , and the other side says Mental health is the issue, not guns . What if it was both mental health and guns?? Or on the worldwide discussion of whether or not to keep nukes some people say that nukes should be kept and some say they should be destroyed. What if both parties just tried to find a middle ground on the issue instead of believing that their own ideas are correct in their eyes? Yes, people should be allowed to have their own opinions on issues, but instead of trying to make the other side wrong , they should try to meet in the middle. The reason why I want my view to be changed is because I live in a very Republican part of California, and when politics come up and I try to tell people that I think that we should find middle ground instead of believing that issues are black and white, I get told that I am liberal cancer even though I'm not even picking a side?? I also wish for my view to be changed because this idea is nearly impossible to make a reality, so I don't want to wish for something that realistically will never be achieved. Also, I'm not really sure if this  violates the submission rules since I'm technically taking a neutral stance ? We'll see what happens.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I don't think that either side of political stances are correct or incorrect.\n","id":"cba5d15d-1a50-45e6-a021-1f0d3894d71b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I have been a Bernie supporter for some time now. Unfortunately Bernie Sanders has not been able to convince enough people that he should be the presidential candidate for the Democrats. Especially after last night it is looking more and more unlikely that Bernie Sanders can win the nomination. I absolutely do not want a Republican to take the White House in 2016. Hillary Clinton is the Democrat nominee and holds many similar views to Bernie and I view her as a viable candidate for my vote. The further the primary season is stretched out, the more needless money is spent by Bernie and more importantly Hillary for these elections. I think it would be in the best interest of the Democratic party to finish off Bernie and allow Hillary Clinton to save her war chest for the upcoming November election. I vote in Wisconsin for the Democratic Primary on April 5th. Things that will change my mind Convincing me how the extension of a losing campaign will help the Democrats win the White House Convincing me that somehow Bernie can rebound and win nearly 60 of the delegates in all upcoming states. I might be wrong on the transferability of money, i.e. that the money from the primary campaigns cannot be used on the general election. I am unaware if this can be done or not. Things that won't convince me Quibbling over Bernie Sanders being better than Hillary Clinton on issues x, y, or z. Both Hillary and Bernie are better than the three Republican candidates left in the race, and I'm more concerned over who has the White House come January 2017. Just don't vote. Other elections, specifically the Wisconsin Supreme Court election takes place that day, and I am more voting for that than the Democrat primary. Wisconsin has an open primary, vote for a weak Republican instead to cause the GOP nomination to go to the convention. This just seems really petty to me, and dishonest when I identify as a Democrat and not a Republican.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should vote for Hillary Clinton to force Bernie Sanders to end his campaign sooner.\n","id":"f3db4389-5ccb-4c5c-910d-2a863d6813fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>According to many recent articles, colleges have begun more so than ever to crack down on many social fraternities on the grounds of hazing, and yet there is so much more of a reason to eradicate them almost completely from college life. While I am friends with many people in Greek Life, I find that the culture tends to surround very white washed and bubble like, elitist groups that objectify women and expect men to fit society\u2019s perception of male college culture. This is not a question regarding the people in Greek Life. I am not saying that all brothers are bad people, but much of what this community appears to promote is shallow and environmentally harmful to those who are a part of it. The community of social fraternities has a startling set of values that I don\u2019t understand why people follow. An MSNBC article very clearly identifies much of the issues with fraternities, citing several instances of institutions like the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, and North Carolina state, who\u2019s social fraternities have recently been involved in a series of rape cases, vandalism, and extreme cases of hazing. The article claims \u201cwe don\u2019t have the right to be surprised anymore. These incidents aren\u2019t outliers or cases of individual impropriety, but data points in a clear historical pattern showing the fraternity system to be a structurally flawed vestige of the 19th century\u2026\u201d. Logically, as the article describes, social fraternities cannot self regulate the issue of sexual assault a study cited in the article shows that brothers in a fraternity are 300 more likely to commit a rape than non affiliated students. While many brothers claim that Greek Life promotes bonding and connecting and may help in searching for a job one day, which granted seems to be very valid, this assertion doesn\u2019t outweigh the negative affects that Greek Life has on young men. The values of social fraternities not necessarily the individuals a part of them seem to align quite a bit with elitism, sexism, complete gender conformity, and even in certain cases, racism. Historically since the early 1900s , many fraternities have excluded many non white students and from what I can see, much of this is still true. Clearly there is an evident pattern in what these communities support and their effects on an institution that supports them. I wouldn\u2019t call for a complete shutdown of fraternities, but for them to be more closely monitored and for colleges to become more involved in the events that take place in fraternities obviously this is vague, but something clearly needs to be done . This is definitely a topic I want to broaden my horizon on, as I don\u2019t have that much of a perspective of Greek Life not being directly involved in it, but know many people who are a part of it. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Social Fraternities Promote Racism, Gender Conformity, and Are Elitist Communities\n","id":"14b4db09-ab54-4c54-a576-7571c8163641"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Fedor simply got physically old and fell in love with his boxing after 2008. In his prime, he would beat Werdum just like he did Nogueira , Henderson, Bigfoot, and Mitrione, as well as all of the modern UFC and RIZIN heavyweights at their primes. He had unquestionable superior transitions, boxing skills, throws, grappling, and heart humbleness within the sport that no one else, in his time or even now, could or can match. Summary Fedor got too distracted, got physically worn out, and his heart wasn't too keen on fighting anymore by the time Werdum tapped him.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Fedor was the greatest GOAT of MMA.\n","id":"9ab57b9d-e2b7-464c-9f47-809d917b6ff4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I mean end of history in the philosophical sense of an end of civil strife and the closest to perfection of government that there can possibly be. Liberal Democracy is the dominant view and state of affairs throughout the world. Even in places like Russia or China that may be de facto oligarchal, still have to respect the institutions of democracy and do do that far more than Stalin, Mao, or Hitler. The fact that everyone in the first world fear another world war because of Vladimir literally hitler you guys Putin. Putin is a pinko anti war hippie compared to some presidents the US has had, and this whole Ukraine thing is a small scale military operation and I can count the casualties on one hand. Acting like he is some sort of Genghis Khan coming to burn and rape the country side just shows how spoiled we are. Any conventional state on state conflict has been outlawed since the end of the USSR because of American interventionism. The conflicts in the Middle East are nothing compared to the proxies of the Cold War. Not only are large scale conventional confrontations a la WW2 a thing of the past, but every bad thing has been weakened. Think the tea naggers are bad? Try the Know Nothing's or 1920s clan. Fear the golden dawn? The day they successively become the single party and annex all their neighbors please give me a call. Every totalitarian state there is combined can't challenge the global hegemony of liberal democracy. Think America is imperialist now? Look at Ted Roosevelt and Hawaii. Think America is in a bad economic place? This doesn't have shit on the Great Depression, and Economic inequality is nothing like the 1920s. This world is no more with large scale worldwide revolutions, wars, revelations, etc. People speak of a second Cold War, but that's nonsense. The Rusfed is a shadow of the USSR in population, wealth, and military prowess and has far less ambitious foreign policy. I can go to Russia right now and order a fucking happy meal. If you told someone 30 years ago that you could do that know they wouldn't believe you. The final key thing, the most important thing, is technology. The internet is heightening communication throughout the world, only strengthening globalization culturally and economically. The poorest in America live much better than the great nobility of the past thanks to modern infrastructure. As Louie CK said about travel, you used to take years to get from NY to CA. People would die of starvation or attacks, now all you do is shit and watch a movie. Tech has made lives better in almost every facet, even for the poorest. The developing world is still developing, but there are no signs that the curses of third worldism are getting worse globally. The really last note is AI. This is the deciding point. Soon automation will consume most jobs, capitalism breaks without people having money to buy shit. We can either devolve into nothing or just live in a world where tech provides everything for us. The only way to be totally safe though is to have an ultra intelligent benevolent AI govern us and for all to pledge fealty. An AI is immune to the evils that beset every kind of human governor. However in the meantime presidents are parliaments are still way fucking better than ancient kings or fascist dictators both very much in the past for the developed world at least . The world is in a bad place still, but I see it coming to a close slowly but surely. I think the worst of humanity has been closed off with the 20th century.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Humanity is coming to the end of history\n","id":"b58e12d7-b4ad-4aff-9029-3012b60e3894"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just a small one, I\u2019m in a little pickle here. I am in high school still, my parents have been split up for as long as I can remember. I have my gaming setup at my mums Gaming PC, PS4 which never gets used and my music setup at my dads Piano, Studio, ect When I\u2019m at dads I miss gaming, I\u2019m not that into Nintendo, I used to play a lot of DS when I got a DSi for my birthday when I was like 9 and loved it but never really got into anything Nintendo since, and that\u2019s what\u2019s stopping me. I also do Go Karting when I\u2019m at dads, which means I travel a lot around state, is the switch good for road trips??? I just feel like I\u2019ll get bored of all the games that the switch has to offer.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I want to buy a Nintendo Switch but I will never play it.\n","id":"a56e1850-0dc3-4fe9-9a6b-e991bc8f7f02"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Basically, I think that the debate between banning pitbull breeds and accepting pitbull breeds is an impossible debate. I believe that each side's main argument point cancel each other out. Ban pitbulls side Pitbulls are responsible for the highest number of attacks Pitbulls are responsible for the most fatal attacks Pitbulls are too large and will cause damage Statistics show that largest proportion of recorded dog bites are from pitbulls Statistics show that pitbulls are more likely to be aggressive. Accept pitbulls side An unfair proportion of pitbull owners are bad owners i.e. dogfighting Pitbulls are the 1 attack breed and therefore many are trained aggressively Pitbulls are the 1 most populated group of dog breeds in the USA and not nearly 1 in terms of ownership, so there are a lot of strays. Pitbulls consist of 5 or 6 different breeds and piling the statistics of 6 breeds in 1 is unfair All statistics show numbers, and not percentages, and percentages are skewed because of the first 3 points in this argument So quite literally, they go against each other. The Ban Pitbulls side says Look at the data and the Accept Pitbulls side says Look at how the data is skewed Ultimately, there is no usable scientific data that compare well trained pitbulls with other well trained dogs. I believe that the only way for a pitbull lover to change their mind is for actual data evidence to be shown, saying that reasonably trained pitbulls are more aggressive than other reasonably trained breeds, by percentage. And I believe that the only way for a pitbull hater to change their mind is to have the same data. Since that data doesn't exist, there is no way for either side to win the argument. Every argument point, every piece of evidence, every proof or article can be debunked by the other side. Pitbull haters show data statistics, pitbull lovers says it's skewed. Pitbull lovers show documented training evidence, pitbull haters says that the evidence is also skewed. Pitbull lovers show examples of well trained pitbulls, pitbull haters says that it's the exception not the norm. Everyone can argue with each other about the fact that it's skewed. And please don't use real life experiences as an argument. Of course someone who has been attacked by a pitbull may have an emotional hatred against them. And of course someone who has had a loving pitbull for their entire life would be supportive of them. That won't change my mind. Also, I take the side of a pitbull lover, if you were wondering. To change my view here, you would need to provide me with enough compelling evidence NOT anecdotal that pitbulls are truly worse off. You would need to change my view on pitbulls entirely. Please be civil, I know that this argument can attract some very toxic crowds.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The pitbull debate is impossible to resolve.\n","id":"9de29c38-38cf-4ebd-9e35-3094a14e347e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My reasoning is quite simple A. It is child labor. Period. A child should not be forced to work in return for a financial reward. B. Pageants Modelling proposes that some kids are more beautiful than others, and while the world does have beauty standards, I think it is extremely unfortunate that some kids have to face it in such a demanding manner right away. C. Below the age of 12, kids can essentially be a puppet through which parents exercise their wishes and desires, and we are not even sure if the kid likes what he she does. Therefore the interest may not be organic and I think a kid should be free to explore their interests through school, community groups, and friends organically and make their own decision. It is not wrong for a parent to nudge their kids in a certain direction but to make them participate in it professionally before they can make an informed choice is wrong. D. Prebuttal Sometimes kids may actually like the activities and should be able to commit themselves to it professionally . If we think kids before 12 are too immature to vote, drive, or give consent which they are of course , profession is also an important decision that needs time and maturity.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Kids are under a certain age min. 12 should not be allowed to participate in pageants\/modelling\/acting etc. in a professional manner.\n","id":"c45d6e44-ff54-429f-a0eb-159f5566db82"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all I am not sucidial but I am anxious and probably depressed the main reason for this is my loneliness, all my life I feel no connection with people but at least I had and I have interesting life and I will add that I went to psychologist so do not advise me to find medical help. So, few months ago I finally met someone girlfriend who is not scared because I am unusual, I had great sex with her, best in my life, and I felt alive and not alone even I did not feel connected to her neither. But, unfortunately we broke up, we both knew that our relationship is not healthy. Now I feel so fucked up and empty like never before, and even I will fight I know it's just illusion to hide the truth I will probably never find someone so good for me like she was, I know that because I met a lot a lot girls and I strongly feel this. My view that I am opened to change is that it's ok to let someone to commit suicide. Who are we to decide that it is not good for someone to commit suicide? Sometimes people suffer and feel that life has no more sense for them like I feel now even I am not suicidal, it's just philosophical view . I know, I know, you will tell me that people who want to commit suicide are sick and I agree that in most of the cases people just need therapy but in some cases maybe not because with therapy we are just curing symptoms, I can take antidepressants but it will not change my mind that my life has no sense for me anymore. Why is it wrong to commit suicide sometimes, why does society not let people stop their suffering and make decisions for themselves? I am looking forward for your answers guys P.S. this thread is not about me, I am thinking about this dilemma a very long time, story about ex girlfriend is just background of my view. EDIT I READ FIRST COMMENTS AND IMMEDIATELY I STARTED TO LOOK THINGS DIFFERENTLY. THANK YOU PEOPLE. GOOD LUCK ALL OF YOU YOU ARE AMAZING EDIT 2 Some people who have similiar views as me show up in replies and i am glad because suicide is sometimes ok for some people even they do not have terminal ilness, even now i feel it is worth to live. We must talk about everythink even its is har topic. Few arguments animals commit suicide, depressed people see world cleary, some studies showed that 2 3 who tried to kill themselves were not suicidal depressed.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sometimes is ok to kill yourself!\n","id":"cad010bc-9300-41a0-b8e1-5e5c5e91875b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>People should negotiate relationship agreements.<|ARGUMENT|>If agreements are not explicitly discussed, then couples may end up following the \"default\" - i.e. what they see as the \"done thing\" in relationships, which may not actually be best for either of them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"An agreement provides clarity on what is expected of us and what we can expect.\n","id":"4c132d1c-f78b-4734-9a72-be2f8ba92341"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Well my argument is basically this Argument 1 Most people justify eating animals because they do not have cognitive thought. However, while not having cognitive thought, animals still have a nervous system and can suffer pain. They just can't dwell on the pain or think about it, but it's still there. If somebody finds it morally permissible to eat animals because they lack cognitive thought, then it is morally permissible to eat a human with severe cognitive deficits. If somebody finds that there is something innately wrong with eating humans, that means they're a speciesist. If somebody believes that one species is intrinsically better than another, then it is morally permissible for an alien species with higher cognitive abilities to come to earth and eat humans. In this hypothetical scenario, no human could complain about the aliens acting immorally without being a hypocrite. Argument 2 Most people eat meat out of sheer hedonism. The pleasure one gets from eating meat does not compensate for the cruelty inflicted on the animal. Eating plants is not nearly as cruel as eating animals because they lack a central nervous system and because you do not have to kill most plants in order to eat them. Basically, IMO people just insist on eating meat for sheer hedonism and come up with whatever bullshit they can to justify their hedonistic behaviour. Very often I to not ask people to stop eating meat, I just want to accept that eating meat is morally wrong when there is plenty of plants to eat which causes overall less suffering in the world. I hold a similar view on abortion. I think women should definitely be allowed to get them and even paid for by the state , but I still find abortion to be morally wrong.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is unethical to eat an animal unless absolutely necessary for survival\n","id":"42f256ae-4895-4958-a474-533ea44d0a05"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think crossing the road on foot without to use of pedestrian lights or a crosswalk is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Obviously, disturbing traffic or endangering anybody should not be accepted, but my impression from watching American TV and films is that even on an empty street, one can be ticketed for jaywalking. I am from Ireland, where jaywalking is legal, accepted, and a part of everyday life. Of course, the infrastructure reflects this, and getting around by foot would be a nightmare without jaywalking, but even with pedestrian lights or crosswalks at every corner, I still think it makes more sense to jaywalk. For example, when walking to college, I cross some of the busiest streets in the city. They all have pedestrian lights that I could use, but I would usually keep an eye out for a gap in traffic to run across. It means I don't have to stop any traffic, and I don't have to wait at lights. It is faster for everybody, and with common sense, it is no less safe. The only city I have been to that didn't seem to accept jaywalking was Berlin. I don't know about its legality, but it is definitely frowned upon. Many times I walked across clear, empty roads, while the Berliners glared as they waited at the lights. I don't understand this mentality. Lastly, I find the philosophy of it to be completely flawed. This is hard to explain, so bare with me. I'm a bit of an idealist, so I find this point important to include. To me it seems like vehicles have an inherent right to the road, while pedestrians are only granted brief permission. Do people feel like if somebody is driving a vehicle, they must be capable of using the road safely, while if you're on foot, it is assumed they are a danger to themselves or other? I don't mean to get into semantics, foot paths, driver's licenses, etc., but I'm just trying to say that the road should belong to anybody who can use is safely, and that includes pedestrians. Feel free to ask me to expand on this. I feel like this point especially, could be unclear. Thanks<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Jaywalking should be legal and socially acceptable\n","id":"28e2fb4c-a453-4f73-8e49-aed65f572456"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I use parenthesis all the time, so I'm not particularly attached to this idea. However, parenthesis\u2014it seems to me\u2014merely derail a single train of thought. One may call this a tangent, but that's another way to say that your original train of thought has been sidetracked. Grammatically, they don't capture clauses. They don't reflect what a person says. As far as I know, when secretaries transcribe written dialogs, they don't use parenthesis. The best writers I've ever encountered didn't use parenthesis at all. They had a clear line of thought, and they masterfully threaded that line through multiple paragraphs indicating deep thought has gone into this gestalt of an idea. By contrast, excessive use of parenthesis, while fanciful, nearly always indicates de facto incoherence. Use of parenthesis will detract readers from your core idea, leading them off on alternate avenues. It's an open invitation to ignore your point, and instead to focus on tangential ideas. And finally, even if parenthesis are useful in some written contexts they are , when they're useful it's because other grammatical tools apply, perhaps even better so. For example, I can avoid use of parenthesis in the above by instead saying gt Even if parenthesis are useful in some written contexts\u2014which they are\u2014when they're useful, it's because other grammatical tools apply. This captures the line of thought far better than the parenthesis. Parenthesis often indicate optional reading which doesn't change the line of thought. That, however, makes the parenthetical remark necessarily incoherent since it's not coherent with the line of thought. Either the remark is part of the coherent message, in which case you can use other, more appropriate grammatical tools, or you should simply not write it down. So that's what I have off the top of my head. Like I said, I'm not too attached to it, and it should be fairly easy to poke holes in this. ?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Parenthesis are insufficient in written communication, obfuscates underlying points, and should generally be avoided\n","id":"916aa724-f28b-4690-805a-680866cf71b3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Just for cred's sake I have a BA in Philosophy. When talking about time travel and the physics involved, people often refer to the past as existing while the future does not. For example, we could bend spacetime using a wormhole or such to travel back to a time that existed while we can only slow time down so as to appear as if we travelled to the future. I'm aware that existed is not the same as exists, but in arguments I've had with physics geeks and such, they are apparently interchangeable. My view is that even though we have memories of the past and like to think that our childhood exists somewhere in a state that we could time travel back to, I do not believe the past exists. If we could time travel back in time, we would not end up in the past, but a new present. I understand this view depends quite a bit on conjecture, but my viewpoint is important because how we view the nature of time in relation to physics determines a lot of how we experience the world and others. That said, I'm open to changing this viewpoint if someone can provide a good argument for the past existing somewhere other than as memories or cognitive functioning .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The past does not exist.\n","id":"bd8d5565-4618-4873-8d12-3c31dc49876d"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>You get so much out of them. The eggs, the cheese, and the filling which can be whatever the fuck you want, making them incredibly versatile too . They fill you up, they look appetizing, their flavor depending on the chef, obviously is unrivaled. I'm sure there's also an argument to be made about the nutritional value since you can get them stuffed with fresh vegetables like bell peppers and whatnot. x200B My main point I can't think of any alternative that even begins to compete with what the omelette has to offer. So go ahead, Reddit. Change my mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Omelettes are the Supreme Breakfast Food\n","id":"daa56e0a-428d-4b46-ad30-c7de4c47ecd2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should All Bee Products Be Banned?<|ARGUMENT|>The honey would have to be extracted anyway to get the bees out and pollinating and would go to waste if not sold.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If bee products were banned, apiarists would simply dramatically increase the fees they charge to farmers for hive transport.\n","id":"d6d6a8d7-6fdb-4f4f-961a-9e653c82fd0b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>If everyone agreed life was objectively meaningless, societies would be more peaceful.<|ARGUMENT|>If certain values or goals aren't raised above others everyone would be free to do what they want.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If everyone agreed life was objectively meaningless, societies would be more peaceful.\n","id":"6ae27d8f-701c-40fb-861e-e343563f31f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, I shouldn't have to say this, but I've been downvoted in this sub before for no good reason, so as a foreword, I would just like to make it clear that I'm not a troll, this is a view I have, and I'm willing for my view to change. It is my belief that autism is debilitating mental illness that causes lasting problems for those that have it for the rest of their lives. Because of this, I believe that it should not, in any way, be honored or accepted as normal. One way that I see it being treated as normal is through the neurodiversity movement. This movement basically states that it's okay to have a different brain makeup than the standard or neurotypical person and that while there are downsides to being neuro atypical, there are many benefits that would be lost if one was nuerotypical. I disagree with this. For one, the downsides heavily outweigh the negligible benefits to being born with a broken, strange brain. Some may be inclined to feel the need to not attempt to cure themselves or loved ones due to this believe that it's okay that they're not normal. I believe that it is in fact not okay that they're not normal because the world revolves around neurotypical people and the world hasn't, doesn't, and shall never find quarter for those that do not fit the norm, mentally. I'd also go as far that it should not why try to accommodate those with a disease rather than try to cure them of their disease? And yes, I know there's not really a cure, just treatments of symptoms. However, some don't even wish to do this. I've read that certain self advocacy groups challenge pushing verbal speech as a measure of success. This is ludicrous In this world that we find ourselves in, people communicate using words . They communicate using sentences, not mono syllabic commands and strange, aggressive arm flaps. It's unrealistic an unhealthy to use unique measures of success when the rest of the world doesn't care they'll operate the same way they always have while someone will live in squalor because it's okay that they're different. As extension of this, it should be a parents obligation to terminate if they have strong reason to suspect their child will be born with autism. I know this isn't a realistic reality, and forcing someone to terminate their unborn child makes me squeamish, so I'd be content with just knowing that mothers in the future would acknowledge this as a moral option. I shouldn't have to say this either, but I already know people will see my explanation in a different light if I don't. I suffer from Asperger's Syndrome now known as High Functioning Autism . And no, before you assume, I am not self diagnosed. I was diagnosed as a child via psychologist, and no, not some quack doctor either. I also regularly speak to my psychiatrist Since I was diagnosed early, I've been able to iron out some of the more harmful symptoms. I was even told by one person that I revealed my secret to that I seemed relatively normal and that it seemed that I worked hard to get to where I am today. I'm not your stereotypical Asperger sufferer who only likes math and science I much prefer literature , has no imagination, is completely asexual, and curls up in a ball and starts screaming once they hear anything that's slightly too bad. Even so, I acknowledge that I'll never be able to have anywhere near as much of a fulfilling life as a neurotypical person. I have trouble in social situations as well as in testing situations. I guess I'm stating this to tell you why I hold this view and to show I'm not just some ignorant outsider who has no background with autism.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Autism is a mental disease; it should not be accepted as normal and neurodiversity should not be pushed as \"good\"\n","id":"9cf02dbf-f557-4782-965c-6021e5c42886"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should high-income countries take in refugees?<|ARGUMENT|>All high-income countries are signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention Thus, they have an obligation to take in refugees - moral or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"High-income countries have signed international agreements to take in refugees.\n","id":"a054e595-75aa-4d51-8b3a-fe9d37b6c71e"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Bernie's goal to cancel student loan debt is misguided not just because of the cost, but because it forces the people to absorb bad debt that banks issued. Allowing people to discharge undergraduate debt through bankruptcy makes people incur some sort of penalty for their bad decisions while still giving them a fresh start. Those who can pay back their debt still will under the bankruptcy route, and only those who need the assistance will have their debt discharged. The law used to allow people to discharge student loans through bankruptcy, but, because of a perception that MDs and MBA grads were abusing the prices, Cover changed it in '06. We swung the pendalum too far then and we shouldn't swing too far in the other direction when we correct the issue.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The US should change bankruptcy law to allow individuals to discharge undergraduate student loan debt instead of out right cancelling it all\n","id":"a17e541c-eacc-414e-a957-a293cbf9fef6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Polygamy<|ARGUMENT|>Polygamy encourages men to make a commitment to those that they have sex with, as opposed to only having sex with them once because they possess another wife.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Polygamy ensures men don't shirk commitments to those they have sex with\n","id":"7e5ea6ef-ada2-4013-a968-113adf3bef51"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US remove Confederate memorials, flags, and monuments from public spaces?<|ARGUMENT|>People today are focused on and interpreting the statues as honoring slavery and white superiority. When the monuments were built, the intention was to honor the dedication of the soldiers, not a political cause or issue of the time.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is difficult to draw a line that satisfies everybody. If Confederate monuments are removed, statues of Presidents like Jefferson and Washington, who owned slaves, could be next.\n","id":"b6001d48-9f52-4c51-9a74-fb80cd617cfe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should people have the right and means to end their lives?<|ARGUMENT|>If the collective exercise of individual choice could be extremely disruptive to social order, then the state can be justified in restricting individual freedoms. For example, the state might ban certain emission-causing behaviours to prevent destructive climate change.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If part of the state's duty is to provide a functioning society, then it absolutely has a duty to try and stop its citizens from harming themselves and instead seek to improve their lives.\n","id":"6aac1e27-bfdf-4eef-a72e-af06282c27c3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Feminism a Force For Good?<|ARGUMENT|>In parenting, fathers are applauded for the slightest thing, like dropping their children off at school or going to an appointment about the pregnancy, whereas mothers are expected to do these things, and when they do the smallest things wrong, they are called out and shamed. As Ali Wong once said, \"It takes so little to be considered a great dad, and it also takes so little to be considered a bad mom.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Despite lawful equality being achieved in several countries, political, economical, personal and social equity have not been achieved yet.\n","id":"564ee6ce-2c09-4bec-8617-46a12228c569"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>American Football Should Be Banned.<|ARGUMENT|>This is likely to continue in the long term. There is intensive research into shock absorbing materials that could be used to line helmets in the future.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rule changes and better sideline procedures for dealing with potential head injuries have made the sport safer for those involved.\n","id":"946f8f4d-c0a1-4532-ac33-871156f18b50"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Islam compatible with feminism?<|ARGUMENT|>The feminist movement is inherently political, as it seeks to create fundamental change in the structure of society. Political movements must compromise with other belief systems in order to be successful in creating change. Islam is no exception.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Feminism is a broad ideology with varying viewpoints within it that exist on a spectrum. Having some aspects that are not in line with Western liberal feminism does not automatically mean that Islam is anti-feminist.\n","id":"7b11a939-ce53-4b83-b364-41cf1a4a81cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>gender quotas in the EU are advantageous for the economies of member states<|ARGUMENT|>By introducing gender quotas to ensure gender equality, one could not only increase the labour force by bringing more women but also enhance the labour productivity and the available talent pool in a country. This would stimulate businesses to expand, innovate, and compete. This process has an effect of raising tax revenue and social security payments. The overall effect is the positive growth of the economy. Therefore, addressing social injustice and higher economic returns are mutually supportive goals. This argument is particularly relevant for qualified women who could be hired at executive positions, but are prevented from doing so due to cultural beliefs, societal practices, and lack of economic and institutional support. A study by Asa Lo\u0308fstro\u0308m on the links between economic growth and productivity in the labour market argues that if women\u2019s productivity level rises to the level of men\u2019s, Europe\u2019s GDP could grow 27% which makes women\u2019s participation is of crucial importance to Europe\u2019s economy.1 Quotas would allow for a better utilisation of the talent pool; as currently, 59% of the students graduating from Europe\u2019s higher educational institutes are women.2 With the current access to education and the introduction of quotas against barriers of existing prejudices, women will have incentives and support to increase their productivity In the case of Norway, the quota law requires all public, state-owned , municipal, inter-municipal and cooperative companies to appoint at least 40% women on their boards per 2008. The law led to a fast increase from 6% women on boards of public limited companies in 2002 to 36% in 2008.3 1 Lo\u0308fstro\u0308m, Asa. Gender Equality, Economic Growth and Employment. Swedish Presidency of the European Union, 2009. Web. 2 European Parliament, \u201cGender Quotas in Management Boards\u201d, 2012 3 Working Paper: \u201cThe Quota-instrument: Different Approaches across Europe\u201d. N.p.: European Commission\u2019s Network to Promote Women in Decision-making in Politics and the Economy, 2011. Web.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"More women in the labour market leads to higher GDP\n","id":"c9770b02-9945-43e3-b779-59bd771755b6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should public health systems fund homeopathy?<|ARGUMENT|>Homeopathic remedies consist of substances that have have been diluted so many times, that virtually none of the original substance is left. This is not an effective treatment option.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"In order to qualify for coverage by public health insurance, any treatment should prove that it is effective in rigorous scientific studies.\n","id":"f17bb929-0f2c-47d3-b925-f4385715bf41"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I recently listened to an On Being interview with Parker Palmer and Courtney Martin, and the two of them at separate times mentioned that they didn't want whatever movement they were involved with to be concerned with efficiency. That it shouldn't be a transaction where if I spend x amount of time or money on this cause, that I should expect a certain result, but that we should instead be involved with what is meaningful to us regardless of the outcome. If we get stuck on efficiency, we will choose smaller and smaller things to invest in because they are the only things we can have confidence in. Further, thinking that I want to change the world and if I can't change it in this specific way, then I'll just pick something else to spend time on is actually dishonoring all those who have championed this cause before me. All this being said, I thought this was very thought provoking. I often find myself thinking in utilitarian ways about my time and money and where I should spend it to do the most good in the word, but this interview gave me some sort of relief perhaps? From the pressure or weight of those types of decisions and thought processes. But I'm not sold. There's a part of me that's very cynical and think's, no, we need to be pragmatic and efficient with everything in our lives, especially the causes that we believe are virtuous or meaningful. So change my view. Convince me that Palmer and Martin are right or at least point me somewhere to read more about a challenge to my utilitarian leanings.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"All activism\/philanthropy\/charity should be efficient and should be primarily concerned with getting the most \"bang for your buck.\"\n","id":"9c38d968-4fc4-42fb-9d41-9c7a20eb2527"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My reasoning Financially responsible human beings keep a small to medium sized chunk of change in the bank, as well as an emergency credit card, for unexpected repairs on things they own cars, house, etc. . Either that or they just bought their vehicle outright because they're well off. Warranties are offered to begin with so the salesmen and car dealerships can offer a sense of security for the customer while making money. In other words, if warranties didn't make car dealerships money they wouldn't exist. If the car dealership is increasing their profits, they're also decreasing the money in your bank account. For most people in North America at least there are countless repair shops capable of handling almost all issues involving modern vehicles. Finding a repair place outside of a dealership isn't unusual or difficult. In the case of purchasing a warranty dealership repairs will be less expensive or completely covered. However even when paying for a warranty it will inevitably expire and continuing to go to a dealership for repairs will have lost it's appeal entirely. Essentially when your car is youngest and needs the least amount of repairs, your car is covered. 2015 2016 future vehicles are far more reliable then vehicles of the late 1900s. Repairs are more seldom, even if they do cost more per repair. This is easy to maintain regardless of a warranty. Possible exceptions to the above ? Warranties offer peace of mind. Dealerships can always be counted on to cover the repairs they state they will cover. They will ultimately solve the mechanical issue you are experiencing. Personally I don't require this peace of mind, how many people do? Warranties allow more car dealerships to stay in business, allowing more competition. This inevitably assists in keeping prices from spiking too high. Car offers are everywhere. OEM parts aren't necessarily used if you don't get repairs done at a dealership is this true? The reasoning to get a warranty just doesn't add up for me, unless you are buying literally the worst mass production vehicle ever.  Note By new vehicle I mean less than a thousand in mileage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There's little-to-no reason to opt for paid warranties when buying a new automobile.\n","id":"5c179a8d-e35a-4b9c-8859-662e435d3b4f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>arm the Syrian rebels<|ARGUMENT|>Even just providing the rebels with arms risks drawing the powers that supply those arms into the conflict.1 This is because it gives the intervening power a stake in the conflict. Once weapons have been supplied allowing the Syrian government to reassert control would be a large foreign policy reversal and would damage relations with the Syrian government for years to come. We need only look at the Vietnam conflict to know that what starts out as a very small commitment can rapidly escalate when the government decides it cannot afford to back down. What starts as just arming the rebels could quickly lead to troops on the ground. Indeed it might require men on the ground right from the start as if we were to be providing heavy weapons the rebels would need training in how to use those weapons if they are to seriously be considered an equaliser. 1 Byman, Daniel, in \u2018Roundtable: arming the Syrian rebels\u2019, Foreign Policy, 21 February 2013<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Possibility of being drawn into a long drawn out conflict\n","id":"a751b1ee-9a87-4e79-b33f-d078d266b55b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>No African Americans were given the Medal of Honor the United States' highest military decoration for services to the army during World War 2.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The United States military has a history of racial injustice.\n","id":"c82b329f-e7fa-4ec8-9a7a-21eacac7ff47"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Water Resources, a Commodity<|ARGUMENT|>Many experts believe that climate change, deforestation and population growth will all put even greater pressure on freshwater resources in the next century. As a result international tensions over water use are likely to escalate into conflict \u2013 water wars. Free market approaches provide the best means of avoiding such conflicts, as countries that trade with each other are less likely to go to war. And creating a commodity price for water also means that demand can be substantially reduced, so that there is more to go around and pressures are relieved.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Many experts believe that climate change, deforestation and population growth will all put even grea...\n","id":"8167d182-e4bf-4136-983c-4034c7a4e368"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This book was set far in the past as far as I can remember and because of that was more extreme in its crime punishment but the quote seems to work regardless. Sort of a if you went back in time would you kill hitler? question without the time travel paradox issue. I understand that accusations should be looked into as deeply as possible. But if you get down to a point where you simply can't prove whether or not someone is guilty of something horrendous a 50 50 situation , isn't it better to let a innocent man die so as not to let a guilty one free? Even looking from the perspective of an innocent man, I feel like knowing that your loved ones are more protected trumps the fear that you could be falsely condemned. Shrug.  EDIT you've all made some amazing and in some cases inarguable points. I think some of you are very accurate within the situation we live in, but I do still think that in a very small community situation this would still be applicable<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I once read a book that, when mentioning rape, said that it was better to let an innocent man die than a guilty one live. The quotation stuck with me and I can't help but agree with it.\n","id":"3e39146f-2da5-420a-94a9-9c5a05d70a61"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Assuming we do not yet have the consensus needed for a basic income, I think we can maintain some of the benefits of a larger consumer base and mitigated government safety net burden, while not continuing to push small businesses out. A graduated minimum wage has already been applied in several countries, so it is not unprecedented. Most of these tie the rate to firm size, which I think is reasonable if you can compensate for industries that have large revenues but lower profit margin say, selling tractors, for example . Off the top of my head I am thinking of 5 year avg profit margin firm revenue. There are several reasons for why I think this. A graduated minimum wage increases the consumption of the lowest productivity workers A graduated minimum wage decreases the burden upon local and small businesses that they would have suffered if they had to pay the new wage. For example, I play a trading card game competitively, a game which relies quite heavily on the ability of players to meet each other and play tournaments at local game stores. The game has enormous profit margin on the top end Hasbro but the rise of eBay sellers has reduced the profit margin local game stores make on the secondary market because lower volume. I am biased, admittedly, but I know some owners, and they would struggle to pay a 15 wage while having a judge and an employee selling cards. This wage, while increasing the buying power of the target employees for example who buy games, will not increase volume enough. Lowers the barriers to entry of entrepreneurship. Say I were to start a new business without the economy of scale, brand recognition, and streamlined capital equipment of an established business, I would have more freedom to choose a wage that would attract qualified employees while not operating at a loss. Encourages the positive externality of lowering the amount of vigilance one must have in government to mitigate cartel and monopoly formation, especially if the top minimum wage was uncapped. I think with proper adjustment, this graduated minimum wage could encourage businesses to stay in a goldilocks zone in size allowing an economy of scale without allowing monopolization or cartel behavior while paying the employees enough to cover cost of living. What say you? Edit I have had my mind changed. It has become clear that a firm will break itself up into subcontracting units to avoid this and a law concerning number of subcontracting units would fall heavily on industries that already require a large number of subcontracting units. I now think a graduated minimum wage linked to worker productivity or employee age as they do in the Netherlands is better than a flat minimum wage.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"A graduated minimum wage linked to firm size would be superior to a constant minimum wage.\n","id":"b7a453f9-d0b0-42b7-85ab-727050724704"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>How should society deal with convicted pedophiles?<|ARGUMENT|>In some locations, such as Australia, serious sex offenders deemed those who pose an unacceptable risk of reoffending can be placed under supervision orders or face continued incarceration to prevent reoffending.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government recognises that some sex offenders cannot be rehabilitated and continue to pose a risk to the community, so must be monitored.\n","id":"f0c88dc4-2243-42fa-8b81-5ae8ac376d55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think it's also worth noting that I'm an internationalist and full supporter of multiculturalism, so this context might explain the viewpoint. I must admit, I still don't get it, myself to me, it's just the same as saying Only the English should do boxing , Only Brazilians should do capoeira , or Only Italians should be able to make pizza . It goes without saying, many of the things we use today language and mathematics, for instance were never invented by our own culture, and people have little idea of their origin except for quizzers, where it takes the form of an obscure fact . If you ever learn a language, for instance, many of the words of other languages that are cognates are often taken from English, German, French etc. and many of our words caf\u00e9 and schadenfreude are the most obvious two are taken from another language. Practically all come from Latin etc. anyway, and people generally don't know or otherwise don't care where a word comes from, and it's not seen as a cultural thing. I just can't see the issue, myself you could argue that, in most cases of martial arts, it's a bad example, as the culture is almost always retained as a form of the kata within the art even if the history isn't entirely , but in what way could that even be incorporated into contemporary belly dancing? How can people use it without having appropriated it, or should we simply never dare to belly dance unless we're born into that culture? I, myself, don't see people taking classes on British culture when they learn modern British boxing or any of a number of British made sports, dances etc., wherever they are in the world, and I personally wouldn't want them to either. The only thing I seem to understand is that, if you know where it comes from and its background, that people would likely hold a bit more respect for the people of that culture and be less judgemental. Even then, we see ourselves that, even in times where we do know where things are from, it doesn't make us respect the culture any more although, don't get me wrong, I still think we should know where it comes from . True, we may have minorities starting minority food businesses as a means of movement, but in the end, we don't respect the Italians any more knowing that they created pizza, or the role that it plays in their culture but we may be more likely to say If I go to the nation state of Italy, I will probably be able to get a pretty good pizza . I guess pizza and food in general is a bad example, and I'm missing the point, but I generally don't get what the point is. To me, appropriation is this selfish, leftist version of chauvinustic nationalism that says I can do this, but you can't . Change my view, Reddit.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I'm left-wing, but think that \"appropriation\" calls for minority superiority\/nationalism, rather than equality.\n","id":"1ecec3d7-2da0-4c6d-aff9-6708ec1b2612"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Free Will or Determinism: Do We Have Free Will?<|ARGUMENT|>If someone who had never used a chair and learned the concept of a chair encountered a chair, it would not be percieved as a chair to them. There is therefore no reason to believe it still exists as a chair in their presence.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The actual object, the chair remains, and not only the concept of the chair, even if all people become chair-sceptics. This is the distinction between a useful fiction like a freewill existing only to support the justice system and actually extant things.\n","id":"38194cc3-2aef-4a55-9f69-d737210d8349"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Single-payer universal health care<|ARGUMENT|>The government taxes citizens to fund and provide numerous services universally, including policemen and firemen. These services are comparable to physician services in many ways, particularly in the sense that they help protect the life, safety, or health of citizens. Why shouldn't health care also be provided universally through the same means - taxes?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government funds fire-stations, why not universal health care?\n","id":"95e53b6a-deda-489e-83a8-f84e1975b654"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This is an issue that came up from one of my previous s and I think it's a separate issue in itself. I think it's okay for an employer to ask women if they're planning to have children soon and judge them accordingly. In a sense, i think it's okay to not hire promote a woman if they say they're planning on having kids soon. Reasoning A woman who is going to have kids soon has to undergo pregnancy. Pregnancy usually lasts around 9 months and for many jobs, would hinder their performance. To be fair, i'll say that only the later 6 months could affect one's performance as you don't really feel too much of the symptoms in the first 3 months. So, for 6 months, the average woman undergoes the symptoms of fatigue and morning sickness two symptoms that could severely affect one's performance. Then, after childbirth, the average maternity leave in the United States is 10.3 weeks. So, after 6 months of underperforming on the job, the company can expect them to be absent for 2 and a half months. Imagine if she was being considered for promotion to a high ranking or important position in the company like Vice President of Marketing or something. For such a high ranking position, i can't have that person underperform for 6 months AND then take 2 and a half months away. I might as well hire someone else. My company can't be without a VP of Marketing for 2 months. For a comparable example, imagine if a major company's CEO got pregnant or couldnt work for 2 months. the stock of that company would go into the toilet. This is only if they're planning to have one child. Furthermore, if the woman suffers any complications during work and otherwise, she can turn into a legal liability to the company if she claims that she was being worked too hard and such. Lastly, having kids is a choice. No one is forcing you to do it. All choices in life have consequences and i think people must account for them even if they are biologically unfair. FAQ Why just women? why not ask men if they're planning to raise a family soon? Notice all the downsides i've listed are all gender specific and pregnancy related. Men cannot get pregnant and even if they were to become the primary caregiver of the child, that is something for their family to discuss. Women are guaranteed to undergo pregnancy while it is impossible for men to do so. Not all women suffer morning sickness fatigue and not all women take that many weeks away for maternity leave This is true but this is a risk to the company. Take the comparable example of a bank loan. Not all people with bad credit will default on their loans but we don't want to take the risk of lending the money and finding out. if the average maternity leave is 10.3 weeks that's what the company has to expect. we can't just stand by and pray hope that this woman will be different. In fact, she can be even worse and take more than 10.3 weeks. So i invite you to <|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I think it's okay for an employer to ask women if they're planning to have children soon and not promote\/hire them accordingly\n","id":"5086a6ed-d1b1-4edc-8018-72661a5302f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Any company that already pays for insurance but threatens to reduce coverage or eliminate it entirely because of the ACA is gaming the system and deserves to be vilified by everyone that comes in contact with that business. Businesses that are already mostly part time should keep their public relation arms silent on the issue. They never intended to cover their employees anyway. By speaking up and demagoguing the issue they expose themselves as tools of the Anti Obama right and should have no voice in the debate. Their employees will finally have access to affordable health insurance under the ACA. Their opposition to it is deplorable. If a small business owner has to make larger outlays to provide health insurance, they can pass the cost to their consumers. Everyone in the same boat. Besides the cut off of 50 employees that requires insurance for full time workers means that your business is not that small. Its time for a little reciprocal responsibility to your community. Enough of pushing the health needs of your employees to the public welfare system of health care. Man up<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Businesses that reduce working hours to avoid paying insurance coverage for employees and their spouses under ACA deserve to be vilified in the press and in public opinion\n","id":"f8173852-8d77-477b-b00b-c879184d12fe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should heterosexual people not be allowed in gay bars?<|ARGUMENT|>LGBT bars should be legally allowed to discriminate against whomever they like. However, other bars should also be allowed to discriminate against whomever they would like as well. Once these policies are communicated to their communities, their communities can decide whether or not to patronize these places or not.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"LGBTQ+ bar owners should feel empowered to decide who they admit, so that they can take into account the specific needs of their customers and the community they serve.\n","id":"7cc840ab-b414-4035-9ba7-b4779999037f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Context Serena Williams lost a controversial match to Naomi Osaka today in the finals. This controversy is incredibly unfortunate for Naomi who, as a 20 year old, just won her very first grand slam against one of the best tennis players in the world. Worst of all the controversy is largely undeserved. Serena recieved an initial game violation from the match umpire in the second set for suspected coaching from her coach during the match, which is against the rules. This resulted in a warning. Their justification was that even though it was coaching, Serena didn't see it and everyone else does it anyways. She received another violation and loss of a point because she threw her racket to the ground and broke it. Again against the rules. Finally she harrassed the umpire and called him a thief for taking away a point from her which resulted in the loss of a game. These violations are all against the rules and the calls were made correctly. I feel horrible for Naomi as her big moment was ruined by the crowd booing after her win and during the award ceremony. Edit that thumbnail is unfortunate, I think she was understandably upset so I have no ill will towards her.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The umpire in the women's US Open finals made the right calls\n","id":"86cbd4fe-67f5-4e5f-a43d-60cabb802d87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Switzerland and Norway, join EU<|ARGUMENT|>Both Norway and Switzerland already gain from their economic association with the European Union, but they would realise much greater benefits if they formally joined the organisation. Being imperfectly integrated into the European economy means that consumers pay higher prices for goods and services than citizens of EU countries. Businesses are sheltered from full competition, which can lead to complacency and a loss of global competitiveness. And the nature of their relationships with Brussels means that their economies are inherently fragile \u2013 bilateral agreements could be cancelled by either side at any time. This would have little impact on the wider EU-economy, but would devastate much smaller Norway or Switzerland. The risks this involves were brought home in 2008 when Swiss voters had to approve an extension of the freedom of movement under the Schengen agreement to new EU-members Romania and Bulgaria; if the referendum had been rejected, the EU would have cancelled the whole bilateral deal on Schengen. So unless the two countries stay in step with the EU as it moves forward towards integration, they may lose many of the benefits they have already acquired. Given that in recent deals the EU has been relatively generous in the expectation that Switzerland and Norway will be encouraged to join the Union, there is a further risk that future treatment will be much less sympathetic if Brussels recognises that this is not going to happen.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Both Norway and Switzerland already gain from their economic association with the European Union, bu...\n","id":"8f430ebc-e48d-4bb9-8162-aea8a77d9efd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US adopt stricter gun controls?<|ARGUMENT|>Job costs funded by consumer demand are more likely to be paid by those choosing to consume said good\/service, whereas job costs funded by the government are spread across taxpayers - consumer\/abstainer alike - or suffer from perils common to use taxes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Replacing a private sector job funded by consumers with a public sector job funded by taxpayers is less desirable.\n","id":"a169fba4-d339-4d37-ab71-fbe60a8d1a9c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Truth be told, I don't necessarily believe this myself, but it's hard to make what I would consider to be a compelling argument against this. The only halfway decent argument is that life in general are an unknown quantity you never know what someone is going to be in the future. Still, this argument fails in that it inherently recognizes that the concept of a life's worth exists, and that there exists such a thing as a highly valued life and a lowly valued one. I suppose another argument against this is the idea that worth is a highly subjective concept still, that's more a philosophical argument than anything. The concept that all lives are equal in worth is a pleasant one, but in reality, it doesn't hold up.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some lives are worth more than others.\n","id":"19e10b7b-c08c-4b6a-9803-748fde617cef"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do gun control laws reduce crime?<|ARGUMENT|>Laws and policies reflect the moral views of a country and the fundamental ideas about what it is to live a good life. Being a prostitute does not promote human flourishing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government has the right to forbid behavior which is detrimental to the common good and human flourishing even when it is consensual.\n","id":"9449c2a7-3069-4f25-abde-2d1025f8d8aa"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Mother Teresa have been canonized?<|ARGUMENT|>Mother Teresa supported Licio Gelli's nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gelli was the head of the Propaganda Due masonic lodge an organisation implicated in various murders and high-profile corruption cases in Italy. The organisation also had ties to the Argentine military junta and the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Mother Teresa had relationships with many individuals who contributed to human suffering.\n","id":"08e94060-8da9-40dd-b5c0-333d2ba858d9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should There be a Universal Basic Income UBI?<|ARGUMENT|>With Alaska 1 2 recipients preferred keeping their dividend, even if their taxes get raised. The longer people hold onto their UBI programs with increasing taxes, the more money governments acquire to spend on bureaucracies, potentially allowing them to get bigger.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"UBIs can fund these bureaucracies to keep them around too, as it can provide an additional financial source for them while still funding itself.\n","id":"4adcf7f5-5520-4193-83c1-8e26183daa01"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>The foundation for my argument will be through a game called Runescape. When you start Runescape. You know nothing. I started in this manner, as a 9 year old. It took me months before I had the slightest clue what to do. I went fishing, cooked, smithed and did everything else, but how far did I get? Not very far, but I kept on playing. 3 years pass and I now have many accounts. I had a lvl 86 Pure was never good at pking, just liked it , a lvl 110 main not even impressive at all and some other low level accounts. My friend wanted to start playing Runescape. So I told him that I would teach him, being the good friend I am. And so I did over the course of weeks and months, I taught him much of what I knew, mostly how to make money and the best methods of doing many things. So I taught him, and admittedly, he was getting good. I was getting jealous, I thought, It took me 3 years to do this, and here he is in a matter of a year almost where I am. We played together every day and almost all the time, eventually we started sharing accounts caused many problems . Anyways, I started a new account at some point. I had about 5 mill on my main just as money not including my bank. So I put 2 mill on my new account. This 2 mill lasted me a long time, easily up to level 60 70 as I was to be a Pure no defensive stats, all offensive . Anyways what this taught me was how EASY doing anything was with Money. Had a problem? No you don't, you have money. There was not a single Problem I encountered lvling up, everything was Piss. Sure I still had to put in the time and work, but that was nothing because it was actually enjoyable, even if It didn't I could do plenty of other things. I didn't have to go from one thing from another. I even gave some of my money to beggars. This was one the most enjoyable things I did as it made me feel extremely good about myself. Now compare that to me when I first began, months before I even knew what on Earth was going on. A year before I had anything in worthwhile in my bank, another year before I made any good progress. I had distorted stats and never really committed to anything on my main account. What do I mean by all of this? Now Imagine a child who was born to modernised parents who make good money. The child is given everything needed lead a decent life, with his parents passing down some assets, giving him the knowledge and paying through much of his life. I compare this to my Friend, and my Me as the parent. He fucked off after a certain point, as he knew enough now to go on off his own. Now take a child from non modernised parents. Perhaps parents have trouble speaking English in America. His parents aren't modernised, can't teach him much except how to perhaps be a human being, his parents have little to no assets to pass down. He is me when I began Runescape. But the trials and tribulations of life won't just reward you today or in a year, and much of it is much more convoluted than Runescape.Much of runescape is Linear. It takes 22 25 years to fully develop as a human being, you're fully developed from day one in Runescape. So before you ask, what's wrong with Rich people that reek all this havoc, that are so disconnected from the commoners? Nothing is wrong with them IMO, as nothing was wrong with me. But I was conscious of what happened. A kid growing up, won't be aware. Even if you tell him, he won't care because he doesn't have to feel it, he doesn't face the trouble. He only hears of it, and words mean nothing in such context. I'm not saying that rich people can never face troubles, but that their troubles are so few compared to that of people who aren't.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rich people's lives are RIDICULOUSLY easier.\n","id":"e583a3b8-47f7-434c-87d0-894e4b18149a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First off, if you haven't watched the season finale of Game of Thrones or been spoiled then leave the page So, Olly is getting to Joffrey levels of hate and I feel like it's unwarranted. Olly is young, in a keep with a bunch of thugs, and and orphaned by a group of wild heathens that he's been prejudiced against his entire life. After being orphaned, he turns to Jon as a pseudo brother father figure because of how much he looks up to him. He serves Jon as a steward, and grows fond of him. After all of that time looking to Jon as a role model, Jon leaves the keep for presumably a week or more to go save the same people that murdered his father, mother, extended family, friends and neighbors, everyone he knew. The whole time Jon is gone protecting the heathens he's sworn to protect the realm against, Olly is in the keep, with the bunch of thugs, listening to them spin their hate for Jon and his wildling loving ways. Olly couldn't escape it. Next thing you know, Jon's back with 4 or 5 thousand wildlings and walking them right through the front door. Then Jon goes off to his room, talks to Sam, and obsesses over ravens while he's brooding and depressed. Olly starts to see the faults that the rest of the watch has sown. They don't know the true impact of the white walkers, they just see a boy running the watch, and letting the only real threat they know into the realm. What's worse it appears Jon didn't even tell most of them about the whole of events at Hardhome. He's sitting in his room talking to Sam about the whole thing, like no one else had known. Now you have Olly, twisted with rage at the wildlings, corrupted by the hate and jealousy of older men, and wanting to lash out in revenge for his parents. The other mutineers are ready to strike, and they convince Olly to help. Maybe they tell him they're just going to beat him. Maybe they tell him he deserves to be put to death for letting the wildlings in and breaking what they believe to be the vows of the knight's watch. Either way, the hate should lie with the mutineers, and the fault should should lie with Jon, in addition to the mutineers. Olly was just a a pawn, manipulated in a larger game, and feeling betrayed by the last person he thought he could trust.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Olly wasn't to blame. GoT season 5 finale spoilers\n","id":"f5fb5fd4-9133-4a99-a2a9-3ca24dcdc28b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I distinguish violent racism from subconscious racism as being based on conscious hate of minorities. Subconscious racism would be feeling uncomfortable around Black people violent racism would be saying the N word, going on racist rants, and obviously physical violence. I will declare two axioms All people are capable of racism People necessarily become more racist when their lives suck We also know that when a judge's home sports team loses, they give out longer juvenile sentences to Black kids. If we look at the recent era of racial progress, from approximately the 1960s 2000s, we'll see that it coincided with the postwar era of unprecedented growth. As America underwent a short term glut of wealth, people became more willing to extend rights to racial minorities, even culminating in the election of a Black president. As the transient subsided, and we drifted closer to equilibrium, we also saw the revoking of this goodwill. After the recession, from 2012 present, we saw white American death rates outpace birthrates for the very first time in a long while. This also coincided with a drastic uptick in racial hatred, ultimately culminating with Trump. There has also been a drastic uptick in hate crimes across the board. I think that when people feel that they've been slighted, they also feel the need to lash out. And since conservative policies necessarily increase income inequality, this will be a self generating engine of racial hatred.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"violent racism goes hand in hand with poverty, and increasing income inequality means it's here to stay.\n","id":"741116a8-82d8-418e-8f38-c4b691e2c20f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>As I look at things like the terrorist attack in Turkey the way women, gays, and other people are treated for not following the teachings of Islam, especially in Middle Eastern countries I can't help but feel the world would be noticeably better off without the Islamic religion. I think about all the wars going on worldwide and it seems the Muslim religion has played a part in most problems going on right now. I agree that Islam is not the only religion to cause war, especially when looking at history overall, and that most all wars have had some type of religious ties. However, it seems that since the September 11th terrorist attcks, radical Islam has changed the face of how the Muslim religion is viewed. While some might say it's exaggerated, I feel based on factual events over the past decade and a half like 9 11, airport bombings, mass shootings, horrifying executions of innocent people, very barbaric amd intolerant beliefs, etc. that the Muslim religion has done much more harm than good in the world. While I could be totally wrong and would happy to hear I am, I also do not ever hear about Muslims going mission trips, donations to help charitable causes, and other things that help the overall global population that many other religions do. So, it seems to me overall the Islamic faith has been overall detrimental to the world in recent times. For people who might find my post offensive and a stereotype on Muslims, I do know many Muslims who are great people and don't believe every Muslim is a bad person. I just believe the abhorent evil from the extremists far outweighs the good of the modern and tolerant Muslims. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The world would be a much more peaceful, tolerant, and overall better place without the Islamic religion.\n","id":"45adf01e-30b8-452a-902a-c35406418999"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>My argument isn't that we can't automate processes. Obviously we can my point is we can't automate adequately to the standard of human involvement. Essentially, computers can't care. They have no ability to be concerned about what they are doing. Input algorithm output. For instance We can't replace drivers entirely. A school bus full of children being driven by a computer is fundamentally more dangerous, as computers don't care. They only complete steps towards a preset objective. In this case, getting vehicle A to point B. The contents are merely weight. If a school bus full of children is flipped over today, we blame the driver. It was his duty to keep the children safe. If a bus driven by a computer ends up in that position, it's merely a tragedy. Something glitches, people die, no one can be held responsible, because no one is responsible for the actions of a computer. Secondly, computers can't think, only process. They don't evaluate where they are going beyond what they're told. A car driving an important person gets hacked, and the passenger is held hostage, again, no one is responsible for the important person's loss of safety. The system failed, now that person is in danger. I've focused on the self driving car because it's relevant today, but really any system that replaces humans, replaces a concerned mind with a thoughtless processor, is fundamentally more dangerous and totally beyond responsibility. Again, no one is responsible for a computing error. Has automation brought cheaper process, and faster economic growth? Yes. Has it eliminated jobs, and created new ways to by pass security and safety? Yes. I guess I want to understand the almost universal excitement for self driving cars and automation in general?<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":". Computers well can never adequately replace humans.\n","id":"f61fe774-cdd7-4194-a468-e447e0f4e3d4"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Edit When I say lie , I mean falsehood, not real, meaningless, false promise, void, not quite well thought through, in that sense. I do not mean that founding fathers of countries are liars. Setup From my observations I define a right as follows A right is an option or a contract offered by a specific benefactor to a specific beneficiary , in which the benefactor incurs an obligation to carry out the underlying promise if the right is excercised by the beneficiary terms and conditions may apply . Example A governement issues a citizen a right to vote in an election and thus sees to it that the citizen can vote should he decide to do so. Some implications A right is owned by in the sense of a binding obligation the benefactor. If the benefactor is unable to carry out the underlying promise in the specified terms, the right is void and is for all practical purpose non existent. A right without a benefactor of a beneficiary is void. A right issued by the benficiary is meaningless and such contract has different names forcing, extortion . Main argument Human rights commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being Wiki are a lie and as such are void. There is no benefactor issuing such rights. Inb4 society is the benefactor society is in this case a fataly vague name. Inb4 a state governement is the benefactor this makes the right in question either a civil right or a meaningless right if the state is impotent to cary it out. Example The best example of the non sense I observe is the alleged right to life live . It is issued by the beneficiary, it has no specific benefactor and no one within humanity even has the power to carry it out in the most pragmatic sense. I understand it as one of three cases Right to an unspecified lenghth of biological life, valid after a person is born. tautology Right to be protected from dying as long as possible. This is not only criticaly vague but also not a right. linguistic vandalism Right to be protected from death. Combined with the alternative definition implication a right is a something that if violated means injustice was suffered is but a huge collective narcissistic fantasy of human self righteousness. Similarly all other human rights are in my opition either meaningless, misnomers or narcissism.  ^ edit typos<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe human rights are a lie.\n","id":"f317af0e-1083-40c6-9b15-1a7f037c10e2"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Many religions or sections of a religion hate many groups of people such as Gays with the WBC and a large portion of Islam. Yet because one is a religion I can not legally discriminate against them. Many would say that it is part of the 1st amendment with religion but at the same time free speech is also part of it and I can ban a person for being a Nazi. Although personally my political views believe you can ban anyone for any reason such as race, or sexual orientation although I am against someone doing it and would refuse to spend money there religion is unlike race and orientation because the most important part is that it is a choice. You may always be african but you are not always a Mormon or Muslim. So someone change my view on why one should be allowed but not the other. Yes I understand the Civil Rights Act but I believe that should be amended.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"If I have the right to ban Nazi's from my restaurant I should have the right to ban a certain religion from my restaurant.\n","id":"a6f96cf8-4a77-4af2-b179-cd62919f76f1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First things first. I enjoy Rick and Morty, I wouldn't call myself a fan and am in no way involved with the fandom, but I am aware that that is part of my defensiveness about this topic. Lately, there are plenty of memes being posted where the joke is that watching Rick and Morty means you're intelligent makes you intelligent. I've enjoyed, upvoted, and spread these memes myself, I've also come across people who believe that this meme is about the actual views of Rick and Morty fans in general. I don't believe this to be true. I think Rick and Morty fans are pretty much normal people. It is normal for people to over estimate positive qualities in themselves, this is a well known phenomenon in social psychology but I don't believe that Rick and Morty fans exhibit this bias at a higher rate than people normally do. My explanation for the existence of the meme ties back to that cognitive bias. Since people tend to imagine others less fully complexly than themselves it is common to view media and believe it affects others more strongly and probably more negatively than it affects you. see the Third Person effect I imagine that when you're watching Rick and Morty it comes easy to imagine a worse person than you identifying with Rick too much, or otherwise enjoying the show in the wrong way. You may get that the joke is that Rick is an asshole, but other people probably don't A more accurate way to intuit how people, in general, react to media is to just assume that you're average. Assholes who think they're better than others exist in pretty much any group, but since Rick is an asshole who thinks he's better than others people are looking for confirmatory examples of Rick and Morty fans who believe this. That's my explanation for the commonly held image. In support of this view I've gone and looked at the rick and morty subreddit and seen that apparently they enjoy these memes as well. If they actually believed themselves to be intellectually superior, these jokes would be at their expense, but it appears they're into self deprecating humour. In short I believe that this whole thing is a meme rather than a real thing, I don't believe anecdotal examples of asshole fans would be enough to prove it's real thing, and I believe that the burden of evidence is on the side that says there is a real thing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rick and morty fans do not actually believe they're smarter than average more than people normally do\n","id":"dd005724-fdda-46eb-b12a-bc004b04e0f0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should the US Pay Reparations for Slavery?<|ARGUMENT|>If reparations are paid, part of the package should be to leave the country and give up their citizenship. If they believe having relatives brought here, causes the U.S.A. to owe them something, then their presence here is wrong. They should have to make a choice accept the money and leave, or quit complaining<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There are severe barriers to specifying who should be entitled to reparations, and what form reparations would take.\n","id":"9987e4a5-cc5d-43f6-9237-eb5be4d1d35f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that the second amendment is not a valid argument when discussing gun regulation. the second amendment states that A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed to start with this means that I shouldn't be able to own a gun unless if I am in a militia. but even if it was just The right to bear arms as people like to misquote, that doesn't mean that I should be able to buy a AK 47 if I have mental health issues. While I don't think that right to bear arms should be restricted I do think that using the second amendment as means of disallowing the government to put in place better regulations on guns and allowing semi automatic weapons to be purchasable too anyone even though an assault rifle is not nessacary for self defense, is ludicrous. If better background checks were to be put on gun purchasers and more strict laws on what kinds of guns could be bought gun violence and mass shooting levels would decrease without violating a persons right to bear arms.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Using the second amendment as reasoning for not controlling guns is ridicules\n","id":"62751238-58c4-418b-a62f-c3895ae3a923"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I am not only looking to change my view rather get to the moral truth. English is not my native language so I will try my best to explain the view but do ask me if you do not understand anything. Anyways, I believe that accumulating wealth far more than what you can consume is immoral. For the sake of discussion lets consider that amount 50 million USD. That means if you have a net worth of 50 million USD you already have all of what a person can consume. You can have a plane, spend on whatever you like etc. Any amount above that will not provide you significant additional marginal utility of consumption. Sure, with a 1 billion you could travel to space or fund a space exploration and that would make you happy but spending so much for your fleeting small happiness when there are millions of starving people out there is just immoral. Therefore, anyone who has wealth more than what they can consume should give away the rest. It is immoral if they keep on accumulating earning more instead of giving it away. In fact, the poor have a right to this ridiculous excess money. It is inhumane, disgusting and pure evil to accumulate more than this amount. Furthermore, if one spends this excess money on useless charities like art foundations instead of for the benefit of the poor than that's evil as well. It is also evil to give money for the benefit of people who already have their basic needs met while those that do not have their basic needs are suffering. Therefore, it would be immoral to pay for cars or similar luxuries of say Americans they can always use a motorbike instead of using that money to pay for the people dying in developing countries. Now, I am not saying hand out the poor free money. That makes people dependant. Rather help out the poor around the world by providing infrastructure to get them good jobs, like infrastructure, education and help those who are in real need like food aid, healthcare etc. I guess my view is a bit colored due to the fact that I am from South Asia where the culture is such that excess accumulation of money and spending on oneself and not helping others is considered very evil. What benefits society is considered the most important. Reporters frequently write about profiteering of the mentality, communism etc. The virtues of simple living are prized highly as well.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is highly immoral to accumulate and spend more wealth than you can consume instead of spending it on the disadvantaged\n","id":"c1185040-273b-47ab-868e-0680bbe46d7c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Has Religion Been a Good Thing for Humanity?<|ARGUMENT|>Christian responses to domestic abuse have been catching up to secular standards over the past 40 years. Many pastors have said and many continue to say that they would never advise a women to leave an abusive husband, and many advise forgiveness and enduring.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Some communities and groups have suffered abuse and\/or death in the name of religion. E.g. murder of LGBTQ, abuse of disabled children, removal of freedoms for women, child marriages, etc.\n","id":"b4cda7be-3b71-4096-b4cc-212cb378fffd"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does science justify atheism?<|ARGUMENT|>The very basis of science is to question. These questions tend to pull apart all religious explanations pertaining to the nature of Nature and the fundamental workings of the viewable universe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Scientific thought contradicts religious teachings about the nature of the cosmos.\n","id":"26be1c97-2b6a-4491-a38e-33964cd736cc"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Note I'm basing all of this on a story I heard many years ago concerning how states and countries would arrest ships. Basically, some government representative would go to the ship and nail a notice of arrest to the mast. All the officers of the ship are removed from command though the crew can remain. The owners of the ship would have to hire new officers for the ship to be allowed use again. Because of the nature of corporations, there can be situations where the corporation caused injury or death to a person yet no one person actually made a decision that knowingly caused it. Even so, while no one person might be punished for criminal neglect or murder, I do believe the corporation as a whole should be made liable and can be arrested or even executed depending on the severity of the crime and judgement laid down. Arrest any and all officers of the corporation during the time of incident that led to the arrest are no longer allowed access to that corporation nor hold any decision making authority even if they're in no way connected to the decision or incident that led to the arrest. They're essentially on either paid or unpaid vacation depending on how the board of directors decide. Any officer that happens to be a stock holder or board of director of that corporation is also refused any voting privileges. Bonds can be paid to allow officers access to the company prior to trial, but that must be approved by a judge. Death Any and all officers active at the time of the incident are permanently banned from participating in that corporation. While they can hold stock in the company, they cede all voting or decision making. Any attempts to circumvent this will be punished harshly. My reasoning This punishes those in power in a corporation and forces the board of directors to hire new managers and officers to run the day to day operations. Essentially, you've done to a company what is done to a person. It may seem unfair as people might get fired for actions they did not do, however its a corporation found guilty of a crime and being punished and you happen to work for that corporation. If I were arrested, any and all people I employed might get laid off due to my legal issues even though they had nothing to do with why I was arrested. Plus, officers and managers affected by the arrest can still find work at other corporations. In all this, day to day workers will not be affected directly. They continue to work as needed. They just end up getting new bosses they might need to help bring up to speed. I believe this is needed and is much more punishing to a corporation than any monetary fine could do. Change my view<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The government should be allowed to arrest or even execute a corporation that's guilty of harming people or the public trust.\n","id":"0ab4414b-3c54-4539-a206-01551093bb55"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>This particular post is inspired by something i saw on reddit today I found it really disturbing that they actually lashed him to the railing and physically removed his free agency by doing so. They didn't change his mind, they forced his hand. A lot of my opinion on this is informed by the fact that i had a friend who was terminally ill from liver failure and was having a hard time not just ending it. There was nothing that could be done and they would continue to suffer, it felt disingenuous to try and talk them out of it. They are suffering, who am I to minimize that suffering? Anyway, I dealt with that situation by saying I understand where you're coming from and if that's the choice you make i'll accept it, but until then I am your friend and I'm here. They never did commit suicide but it really opened up my perceptions on suicide and it's many different facets. Recently I struggled with suicidal thoughts and while many tried to talk me out of it ultimately i just persevered past that moment and survived. There is an evolutionary need in all of us that makes it extremely difficult to kill oneself and that is essentially all that stopped me. One thing that really bothered me about what my friends and family said is essentially You can't die because I need you. . I didn't want to end it because i felt no one needed me or that there was nothing to live for, but because i had suffered a significant financial blow and literal years of planning resulted in absolutely nothing. I was tired of fighting and struggling and just wanted it all to stop. I hate this world and i don't want to participate in it anymore. The post i linked above really bothers me because i know, and have seen first hand, that none of the people physically restraining this man, will ever speak with him again. They tell these people they are loved and have so much to live for but once they accomplish their goal of saving this person, they vanish. Is it not more selfish to want to save someone in the moment and then just move on with your life. Sure you've talked them down from the ledge, but who will do it tomorrow? Why is your need for me a reason that I should exist? Why do you take away my agency over my own life? Why should my terminally ill friend be shamed for not wanting to endure constant pain and suffering? Why do I not get to have the agency to decide when my life is over, why MUST I die naturally ? They restrain this man, literally lashing him to a railing to prevent self harm. Why is that ok? Why is it okay to force him to live? To go even further, in that reddit thread people mention struggling with depression and strangers shout out they love them even if they don't know them. Sure it's a nice sentiment but ultimately it's meaningless and most likely a total and complete lie. The pessimist in me believes they only say that to make themselves feel more important. They say and do these things to feel the accomplishment of talking someone down from the ledge. They will look back on that day as the time they saved a life, and the suicidal person may look back on that as the day the world welcomed him with loving arms, and then abandoned them again.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should be allowed the choice to end their own lives.\n","id":"a89f65ea-7896-48bb-ae7e-80fa31f30ca9"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Blasphemy Should be Criminalised<|ARGUMENT|>Blasphemy cannot be shielded by the rationale which is used to defend freedom of speech. The sole purpose of blasphemy is to offend. We protect freedom of speech in our society not as a good in and of itself, but because through debate of even the most improbable propositions, the best ideas will out and society will be enriched by the discourse. Free speech therefore should have redeeming value. It should contribute to the free marketplace of ideas. But language aimed solely at offense has no redeeming value and does not contribute to the free marketplace of ideas. It does not further any discussion. It does not admit of discourse. It does not appeal to reason. In other words, none of the justifications of free speech apply in the case of blasphemy.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Blasphemy cannot be shielded by the rationale which is used to defend freedom of speech. The sole p...\n","id":"21df8681-51ac-4970-ae45-0453c454e4ba"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Do fair trade products cause more good than harm?<|ARGUMENT|>Fair trade prevents its workers from investing in the mechanisation and industrialisation which would allow developing countries to increase their manufacturing capabilities and gain increased profits from their goods.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is Western countries who manufacture goods from the raw materials produced by fair trade workers, and in turn receive the profits from those products.\n","id":"64de6a25-c32e-4904-85fd-165e90a369ad"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What Is the Best Drug Regulation System?<|ARGUMENT|>In a short space of time, it is difficult to know exactly why the individual wants to buy the drugs.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It is difficult to accurately assess the consent of a person to use drugs.\n","id":"81e7cb61-3e40-4069-b6c1-f2ec89793c89"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Inspired by this thread in relation to Apex Legends I mentioned this in that thread and it sparked an interesting debate. Someone brought up the similarities with Pokemon cards and Hatchimals, which are also targeted at children, and whilst I initially responded that yes, they should also not be targeted at children, I awarded a hypothetical delta to someone who suggested otherwise, that because of the tangible nature of the cards, and their real world value it isn\u2019t a fair comparison. Whilst that did initially make me reconsider the comparison, I\u2019m still of the belief that they target children with gambling mechanics. My premise is this Paying money for the possibility of a returning a high quality item is gambling. Children shouldn\u2019t be exposed to gambling and therefore any game which includes lootboxes something you purchase for real money that has set odds of returning different items, some of which are considered more valuable than others should carry an 18 rating. Edit this comment of mine, and it\u2019s parent, explain my reasoning in more detail. Change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Lootboxes in video games are akin to gambling and should not exist in any game that doesn\u2019t have an age certificate of 18+. This includes both cosmetic and performance affecting items\n","id":"ffb17818-14b4-4f98-b077-9c30589d0b8a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Rahul Gandhi mature enough to handle a position of responsibility like being a prime minister?<|ARGUMENT|>Rahul Gandhi is a promising alternative to Modi. He has managed not just to reach out to voters with a strong, focused message, but more important to bring together warring rivals in the party, to bury their animosities and run a joint campaign.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Rahul Gandhi presents the only reasonable and realistic alternative to the populist right wing politics of the BJP and Narendra Modi.\n","id":"d2c57cbf-f109-4015-9b55-8e4cff3ac9c6"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>What is the best religion to believe?<|ARGUMENT|>The concept of \"Varna\", often misinterpreted as a prescription for a \"caste system\", refers to an ancient concept for the division of labour in society based on matching the talent, aptitude of individuals to the needs of the \"job market\". It is most definitely not hereditary.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"There is no prescription for any kind of \"caste system\" in Hinduism. Unrelated concepts have been misinterpreted as prescriptions for a caste system.\n","id":"285b4b41-0014-43c5-a3ea-9c30db55883b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Trophy Hunting Be Illegal?<|ARGUMENT|>Historian Dr Angela Thompsell argues that safaris have strong colonial tones One example she gives is the ability of white men to move to places where hunting occurs and become famous guides has strong colonial echoes.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Trophy hunting represents continued colonial ideals which we should be removing from Western societies.\n","id":"57ce3326-623c-42c6-b96d-7e230ea32870"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Who will win the UK general election?<|ARGUMENT|>Boris Johnson has been found guilty of many lies and untruths as the leader of the Conservative Party.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The Conservative party leadership is highly divisive, which could cost them precious votes.\n","id":"64404c0a-8765-44ae-90e8-90d32a3b16c1"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Does Feminism Strive For Equality?<|ARGUMENT|>Movements like this change their meaning over time. It's possible that 20 years ago the word could have another meaning, but nowadays it's mainly used to describe the misogynistic communities that born of it.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"It's unclear, seeing the history of the word, that there will be some self-identified incels that don't blame women or that don't hold misogynistic views.\n","id":"25af3aa0-d32c-47f9-a04e-2edc1ea00a87"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should sensitive social and political topics be discussed in school?<|ARGUMENT|>Families and other social groupings are often little more than echo chambers for ideas that a student has grown up with. Discussions at school present young people with personal perspectives beyond those of family, friends and their religious congregations.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"School may be the only place students meet people with experiences and concerns vastly different to their own.\n","id":"ee9c69e0-a94a-4817-9fad-b6caa665daa0"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I believe that it is morally just to pull the lever in the Trolley Problem I understand that it is morally wrong to kill that one person. However, I believe that it is morally worse to not pull the lever. At that point, you could have prevented 5 deaths, but you didn't. There are two options that you can take pull the lever or don't pull the lever. Let 5 people die or let 1 person die. To me, morally, pulling the lever is the lesser of two evils. I am currently in a debate with someone over this issue and I am trying to understand the other side of this. I have been told that it is morally wrong, but I cannot see it. I believe it is better to pull the lever and allow one person to die instead of doing nothing and letting 5 people die. Am I morally wrong? . EDIT TIL from this post that I am utilitarian to the point of life or death scenarios, but that I am deontologist in that I do not believe that x lives can be violated unless x y y\u22600 lives would be extinguished if the first life is not ended. Life is the most important thing that we can take away it cannot be taken away for basic happiness. I seem to be a mix between utilitarianism and deontology. I am glad that from this post I have gleaned more information about what I believe.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I would pull the lever in the Trolley Problem.\n","id":"68ffe173-3712-45c0-84d7-c5767595f7f3"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Okay before I offend anybody allow me to get some things out of the way first off I'm not racist I have a Korean friend, I like some Japanese authors and video game developers and I enjoy Thai food as much as the next guy. Secondly I'm from India and I don't like having to call people from the far east China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, The Koreas, The Philippines, Taiwan, and probably others because I think it's too vague a description because Asia is a big place includes the middle east, most of Russia, the Indian subcontinent, and countries where people who describe themselves as 'asian' come from. Now I was just wondering why we can't say the word oriental. I couldn't find any sort of negative historical event associated with it to justify its taboo like with slavery and the N word. If someone could change my view that would be great, because then the world, while still being that little bit more annoying would at least make sense.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I should be allowed to call 'asians' orientals\n","id":"f5831866-27cb-42de-b4cc-4b70218fc564"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Obligatory Community\/Military Service Be Introduced?<|ARGUMENT|>Armies swollen with conscripts, such as Iran during the Iran-Iraq War and Russia during the World Wars, often choose to use human wave attacks during battles.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Having a large base of soldiers available makes states more reckless in times of conflicts.\n","id":"0c639ab7-c7fb-437f-820f-71e8f7efc726"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Commercial Surrogacy be Legal in Liberal Democracies?<|ARGUMENT|>The Dutch Prostitution Information Center has set up a monument dedicated to sex workers. This helps to keep the issue in everyone's mind.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Sex worker support organizations can freely inform the general public about life and problems in the sex industry.\n","id":"f0ad0f1b-7cf7-4b15-983b-9f473d1f5060"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>EDIT Alright, view changed. I think in my mind I saw the riots as a reaction to the unfairness of the race situation in the United States, ignoring a lot of the consequences. I wanted this to be a good guy vs. bad guy thing, but as a lot of you guys have pointed out, too may innocent people have been negatively impacted by the riots, and by this point it really is doing more harm than good. Everywhere I look I see people writing about how the actions of the rioters are disgusting and inexcusable . People are so quick to condemn the rioters for their actions, and fail to see where the frustration comes from. From what I understand, there have been peaceful protests in Baltimore ever since Freddie Grey's death, which received almost no media coverage. It is only after the riots that people started to pay any attention at all. What we need now more than anything in the United States is a serious discussion about the institutional racism in the country, something that many people still claim doesn't exist. I cam across a quote form Martin Luther King Jr, which still carries weight 48 years later gt I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation\u2019s summers of riots are caused by our nation\u2019s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. A riot is the voice of the unheard, and if it wasn't for the events in Baltimore, I think the death of Freddie Grey along with countless others would have been swept under a rug.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The riots in Baltimore are completely justified\n","id":"76db1d3b-a073-4b92-90c6-03399d21d30f"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>A Socialist Economy would work better than a Capitalist Economy.<|ARGUMENT|>The Jevons paradox \"occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used reducing the amount necessary for any one use, but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.\" There is evidence that the Jevons paradox is taking place.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Without checking consumption, any increases in the efficiency of technological production will simply lead to an increase in production and consumption, negating any climate benefit.\n","id":"984bbe72-e206-4992-82be-72796c129534"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should European Monarchies Be Abolished?<|ARGUMENT|>Even in situations where male siblings were given precedence, monarchy lead to female heads of state before democratic structures allowed it. The United Kingdom had its first Queen in 1553 This is to be commended when in 2016, still only \"10% of 193 UN member states\" have an elected, female head of state.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"While monarchy leads to less representation for members of society, it is more likely to provide female heads of state than elections.\n","id":"d9b97784-cd1e-4dfa-bffb-838c3fe3fbed"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>Lolicon is drawn child pornography, usually in modern Japanese audio visual culture. In many places such as Australia, it is ilegal. I believe that there is nothing wrong with it and I have never heared an argument that wasn't based on lie, malicious assumptions and fallacies. I believe it isn't immoral because No children are hurt, it is a drawing. I do not consider creating rights to protect the feeling of fictional characters something important. There is no proof that using lolicon material will make you attracted to actual children, and even if it did, it would only be a problem if we assumed that all people attracted to children are evil rape time bombs who can't control their urges, but that is not true. Even though I do not believe that a consensual sexual experience with a children will always be horrible and damaging to the children in all cases, but that is somewhat unrelated to the topic forget about it I don't want a whole discussion revolving around it Since there is no proof that lolicon makes you attracted to real children, it can't be assumed that someone who enjoys lolicon is likely to be interested in real child pornography just because he enjoys lolicon, and real child pornography, in most cases if not all , hurts children, so it's immoral and thus promoting the malicious industry of child pornography. Banning lolicon is taking away basic human freedoms and a punishment for enjoying something that hurts no one.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I believe that there is nothing immoral about lolicon drawn child pornography, mainly in anime and manga and should be legal in any country that values basic human rights.\n","id":"e7369565-865d-4156-9815-dfe4fa0aacea"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should \"women-only\" spaces be open to anyone identifying as female?<|ARGUMENT|>1 in 3 transgender youths are rejected from shelters due to their gender identity. If an LGBT shelter is not available in their area this means that they are likely to not be accepted in any housing.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Creating dedicated LGBT spaces and allowing trans women into existing women-only spaces is not mutually exclusive. Instead, allowing trans women into women-only spaces could only increase the available options for trans women.\n","id":"3bbadc0f-606c-4e34-8ffd-ed1dddff3974"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Should Conduct in Virtual Reality be Subject to the Laws of the Real World?<|ARGUMENT|>Video games are much more immersive than traditional modes of media, however their adoption is limited by the need for players to exert precise actions using complicated controls and interfaces. Virtual reality, unlike video games, has much less of a learning curve because its 'interface' is one's own body.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Virtual reality is likely to displace and emulate traditional modes of fictional experiences.\n","id":"5cf304c3-6184-41d4-bce9-0a86f064ff73"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient scripture?<|ARGUMENT|>According to Manchester neighbor William Stafford, Joseph Smith, Sr. \"would say that he had seen the plates, and that he knew them to be gold; at other times he would say that they looked like gold; and other times he would say he had not seen the plates at all.\" Howe, 1834, p. 240<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Descriptions of the golden plates by those who said they saw them are inconsistent.\n","id":"e2ea20a2-7d83-4fe1-84aa-336f29386854"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I, who am a straight, white male, gain nothing from supporting social justice movements. I have arrived at this conclusion based on the following I. Society as a patriarchy benefits me because if the male privilege accorded to me. II. Society's bias toward me and people of my race over colored folks benefits me thanks to my skin. III. A heteronormative society benefits me because I am accorded a status of normalcy, not abnormality. With these things in mind, I fail to see how I could benefit from supporting social justice. My male, straight, and white privileges make my life easier, and by supporting pro aequality movements, I face the possibility of losing some of those advantages.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"I, who am a straight, white male, gain nothing from supporting social justice movements.\n","id":"1d8bb6de-0981-4015-9d3e-3751161f0210"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I think that when you enter customs and they scan your bags you should be allowed to bring in packaged sealed food. I saw on youtube that they use biohazard bins to contain any fruits and vegtables that you bring in. I also saw people bringing in food that was perfectly good and vaccum sealed and they took it and also threw out. It is a waste and I don't see many downsides of letting people consume it in the country. What's the difference between letting them eat it on the plane and letting them eat it outsides<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"When you enter customs you should be able to bring in packaged cooked food.\n","id":"56f24f6d-e35f-441d-8641-93e72bbe0876"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>US Customs and Immigrations Enforcement should be investigated for crimes against humanity<|ARGUMENT|>ICE has denied the right to a fair hearing for people seeking to enter or remain in the US. For people fleeing from war and persecution, this deliberately furthers their suffering.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even though ICE is inherently discriminatory against immigrants, ICE frequently denies immigrants fundamental human rights in the process. This represents an unjustifiable level of discrimination.\n","id":"0b13b643-ec1b-431e-8cb9-0a819417f1b8"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>1 Constitutionality I honestly just don\u2019t care. The \u201cwell regulated militia\u201d indicates to me that the founders intended the 2A to be for organized state defense capable of ad hoc responses to many kinds of threats, but also possibly tyrannical federal forces. Not only is that not how it\u2019s being applied today, but also the authors of the Bill of Rights didn\u2019t foresee the types of varieties of weapons available to consumers today. Nevertheless, I actually, genuinely think it doesn\u2019t matter what the 2A says. The rights as enumerated are not granted by a god, but rather must be justified by way of objective reasoning that must be applicable to all members of society regardless of religious beliefs. To that end, I\u2019m 100 not interested in arguments about the legality of this from a constitutional perspective. It is simply not relevant because the Bill of Rights was not written with the problems we face today in mind. 2 The NRA exists for the purpose of boosting the profits of gun manufacturers, full stop. That is their only goal and their only interest. There may be other gun groups that are actually serving the interests of its members, but that is not what the NRA does. Furthermore, as an organization they are a danger to safe society and seemingly now our democracy. 3 Feasibility buy back programs and confiscation for all weapons that fire over a certain set RPM, accomplished gradually over a few years. Hold outs and hoarders will be fined at first, arrested for repeat violations. I think this is the most difficult part to justify because, given how some Americans treat their guns as more dear than their own family, there will inevitably be those that resist violently. I think it would be a short term problem for the long term solution. The benefits will outweigh the costs. 4 Nobody needs anything that fires more rapidly than a bolt, pump, single, double, lever, whatever kind of action that must be manually activated. Anything more is not defensive at that point but escalatory. Escalation is where our gun problem comes from. 5 \u201cOnly the criminals will have guns.\u201d If we reduce the supply of semi auto weapons through buybacks and confiscation, we reduce the availability of those weapons for the criminals. Black market guns have to have a continuous source. Remove the source and it dries up. I\u2019m sure there are other angles and issues I haven\u2019t considered, and you can hold up a liquor store with a revolver just as effectively as you can with a semi auto pistol, but I believe that a full ban combined with effective enforcement of regulations about who can and can\u2019t purchase and possess is the only way forward. .<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"a blanket ban on semi-automatic weapons is the only real solution to the gun problem in America.\n","id":"58633aa2-8694-4823-9857-101bda8bbe69"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is Classic World of Warcraft better than Retail WoW?<|ARGUMENT|>This often leads to the experienced friend to \"carry\" the inexperienced friend, which puts them into even higher-tier content without any understanding of how to play\/perform in that content<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Max-level friends are going to be hard-pressed to complete content with their new friends if the new player is unskilled due to skipping introductory mechanics.\n","id":"193a0b2e-38e8-4e3a-8f42-8f4c8969396c"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>The Correct Donation: Gorillas or Starving Children?<|ARGUMENT|>Humans are guilty for the ply of gorillas. This makes them responsible to take care and donate for them.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"People should donate to organisations that support gorillas instead of to those that support starving children.\n","id":"20a03fcf-1bcb-436c-a43b-80b5c086435b"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Is the United Kingdom the rightful owner of the Falkland Islands\/Malvinas?<|ARGUMENT|>If the UK cannot protect the population of the Falkland Islands, every country could just take and de facto own a strip of land.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"The UK does not possess the military capabilities to defend the Falkland Islands.\n","id":"e277af17-f380-4ed9-ba56-ad1be2b833d7"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>So in science fiction, there's this idea of a grey goo made of nanobots that can devour all the raw materials on the surface of a planet, make copies of itself using said materials, and then spread to other worlds. I've been thinking what if that machine is DNA instead? Think about it for a second. For starters, we still don't understand from what I remember all of the processes needed to create DNA from scratch. While I won't say that a master civilization sending out DNA samples is more probable than similar events happening multiple times over, I do like toying with the idea. So this is what the grey goo of DNA would do after the master civilization seeds the chosen planet with DNA, that DNA would then be able to adapt to its environment. This is ultimately better than anything that a grey goo bot could be capable of. A stored template for a nanobot or whatever is a flaw in the sense that they might all be prone to the same weaknesses. DNA side steps this by suiting life to its environment. Eventually, the DNA will become the basis of an intelligent species like humans . After many years of advancements in technology again, suited to the environment , the species will probably become an interplanetary species. And guess what they bring? Themselves, with all their needs and desires. Eventually, due to some threat or whatever, the species will fade from existence sterilizing the planets they come into contact with in the process. It's already been said that another advanced civilization couldn't compete with us if we died out since we used up all the surface iron. That brings me to my next point why would a master civilization bother doing this? By sending out an inferior template, maybe the civilization was trying to guarantee that no life that emerged on the planet would surpass their own capabilities. Life would be common, but after it faded the planets would just be sterile maybe some nuclear holocaust or whatever stops the chance at least where intelligent life is concerned, really. DNA can adapt, but perhaps its creators barred the species from ever obtaining some kind of powers that the master species viewed as essential for their superiority telekinesis, three chicks at once, etc . Maybe that's an explanation for the purposes of junk DNA 1 Change the organism as necessary. This would mean that the junk DNA is essential for evolution, always standing by for the next shift that could threaten its rise to power. Like a blank slate just waiting to be written. A new hard drive, except instead of all 0s it's just a junk pattern that's awaiting orders. 2 Prevent us from going too far to challenge our creators. Maybe DNA by its inherent structure doesn't allow for certain abilities to exist. By the time our species becomes advanced enough to get a whiff of this, it'll be too late to do anything about it. If we try to challenge our creators, we would just get wiped out with their superior technology and capabilities. That is, if we could even find them and they didn't run into an unforeseen apocalypse of their own. Are there any big and non obvious issues w this theory? This would obviously go against established religion and all that.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"DNA is a real-life grey goo.\n","id":"7fa7ef08-fb41-42f1-b610-69768fc3394a"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Ban on human reproductive cloning<|ARGUMENT|>\"The case for cloning humans\". The Age. January 1, 2003 - \"But what of the souls? Can two people share the one soul? Is it not wrong to force two personalities on to one piece of divine substance? Again, the fact that there are identical twins counts against there being a problem. Twins seem to manage, and that seems to suggest that each person is able to be ensouled regardless of their genetic make-up. That is, assuming souls exist at all. These days theologians don't make a big thing of the soul. But even if there are souls, it seems unlikely to count against cloning. It's hard to imagine that God would have any difficulty telling the difference between one clone and another, or in ensuring that each person has a distinct soul - if that is how it works.\"<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Cloned humans have a soul and are ordinary humans in every way\n","id":"35b89850-8583-4474-901d-9f8eb56dcebe"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>Opinion Polls, Restriction of<|ARGUMENT|>Even if the research is done with an objective mindset, the research technique or reporting method can skew the results. For example, opinion polls seldom report the measure of uncertainty of the conclusions, by for example reporting standard deviations from means, sample size, etc. These measures are usually not published because either the public doesn\u2019t care about them or doesn\u2019t know what they mean. Reporting the results of opinion polls without further statistical information leads to more misinformation in the democratic process and that might lead to bad decisions being made. One example of this was the exit polls of the 2004 U.S. Presidential election: many of the election polls predicted a win for Kerry, but didn\u2019t reckon with the fact that Republicans were less likely to respond to an exit poll, as was later found.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Even if the research is done with an objective mindset, the research technique or reporting method c...\n","id":"9eda19c3-e52e-4156-b661-772978f18d96"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>First of all adding skin tones on emoji makes it more difficult to send a simple emoji. You have an extra burden to decide which skin tone to send. I don't have to evaluate my skin tone for sending an emoji, and I don't want to be subjected to judgement based on the color of emoji I use. I feel emojis are just a way to express emotion, and emotions do not have any race. Adding skin tones and other fluff just detracts from their main purpose and makes me think twice before sending an emoji. Even if it did serve some purpose, the bad UX is enough for me to not want to use emojis.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Skin tones on emoji are stupid and should be removed\n","id":"6233d6f3-bdc2-4b2c-b838-383d0128ca98"}
{"argument":"<|TOPIC|>NA<|ARGUMENT|>I'm currently studying History in London, therefore something I am not really considering is how a liberal arts degrees falls in place in this , as I don't know much about how those degrees are structured. And before going further, I know it's going to be necessary to explain what I mean by value . In this , my definition is simple the more valuable degree is the one that is more likely to bring you economic success after graduating university. I do believe that someone who loves the Russian language and Russian culture could derive great value from studying Russian at undergraduate, then going on to find work translating Russian history texts to English, but for now let's disregard this form of value and talk only about economic value. Another way of looking at it is that the companies, firms, job prospects that pay the most, will much more likely higher an undergraduate with a degree in CS or Business Management or Engineering than one in History or Philosophy or English Literature. To dispute this, perhaps you could give me examples of how big consultancy companies or banks actually higher Historians and Philosophers at a comparable percentage as well, or if there are other industries that I have not considered or are not aware of who hire Historians and Philosophers and pay high wages. Please change my view.<|CONCLUSION|>\n","conclusion":"Studying undergraduate CS, Business Management etc. is significantly more valuable than a humanities\/English\/language course.\n","id":"6a7ce476-4414-4579-875a-1a42fcbdd248"}